[Illustration: 204]
AFTER breakfast Catherine! started off to the meadows with her little
brother Jean. When they set out, the day seemed as young and fresh as
they were. The sky was not altogether blue; it was grey rather, but of a
tenderer grey than any blue. Catherine’s eyes are just the same grey, as
if made out of a bit of morning sky.
Catherine and Jean wander all by themselves through the fields.
Their mother is a farmer’s wife and is at work at home. They have no
nurse-maid to take them, and they don’t need one. They know their way,
and all the woods and fields and hills. Catherine can tell the time by
looking at the sun, and she has guessed all sorts of pretty secrets of
Nature that town-bred children have no suspicion of. Little Jean himself
understands a great many things about the woods, the pools, and the
mountains, for his little soul is a country soul.
Catherine and Jean go roaming through the flowery meadows. As they go,
Catherine gathers a nosegay. She picks blue centauries, scarlet poppies,
cuckoo-flowers, and buttercups, which she also knows as _little chicks_.
She picks those pretty purple blossoms that grow in hedgerows and are
called Venus’ looking-glasses. She picks the dark ears of the milkwort,
and crane’s-bill and lily of the valley, whose tiny white bells shed
a delicious perfume at the least puff of wind. Catherine loves flowers
because they are beautiful; and she loves them too because they make
such pretty ornaments. She is very simply dressed, and her pretty hair
is hid under a brown linen cap. She wears a cotton check pinafore over
her plain frock, and goes in wooden shoes. She has never seen rich
dresses except on the Virgin Mary and the St. Catherine in the parish
church. But there are some things little girls know directly they are
born. Catherine knows that flowers are becoming to wear, and that pretty
ladies who pin nosegays in their bosoms look lovelier than ever. So she
has a notion she must be very fine indeed now, carrying a nosegay
bigger than her own head. Her thoughts are as bright and fragrant as her
flowers. They are thoughts that cannot be put into words; there are no
words pretty enough. It wants song tunes for that, the liveliest and
softest airs, the sweetest songs. So Catherine sings, as she gathers her
nosegay: “Away to the woods alone” and “My heart is for him, my heart is
for him.”
Little Jean is of another temper. He follows another line of ideas. He
is a broth of a boy, he is; Jean is not breeched yet, but his spirit is
beyond his years and there’s no more rollicking blade than he. While
he grips his sister’s pinafore with one hand, for fear of tumbling,
he shakes his whip in the other like a sturdy lad. His father’s head
stableman can hardly crack his any better when he meets his sweetheart,
bringing home the horses from watering at the river. Little Jean is
lulled by no soft reveries. He never heeds the field flowers. The
games he dreams of are stiff jobs of work. His thoughts dwell on wagons
stogged in the mire and big carthorses hauling at the collar at his
voice and under his lash.
Catherine and Jean have climbed above the meadows, up the hill, to a
high ground from which you can make out all the chimneys of the village
dotted among the trees and in the far distance the steeples of six
parishes. Then you see what a big place the world is. Then Catherine can
better understand the stories she has been taught,--the dove from the
Ark, the Israelites in the Promised Land, and Jesus going from city to
city.
“Let’s sit down there,” she says.
Down she sits, and, opening her hands, she sheds her flowery harvest
all over her. She is all fragrant with blossoms, and in a moment the
butterflies come fluttering round her. She picks and chooses and matches
her flowers; she weaves them into garlands and wreaths, and hangs
flower-bells in her ears; she is decked out now like the rustic image of
a Holy Virgin the shepherds venerate. Her little brother Jean, who has
been busy all this while driving a team of imaginary horses, sees her
in all this bravery. Instantly he is filled with admiration. A religious
awe penetrates all his childish soul. He stops, and the whip falls from
his fingers. He feels that she is beautiful and all smothered in lovely
flowers. He tries in vain to say all this in his soft, indistinct
speech. But she has guessed. Little Catherine is his big sister, and a
big sister is a little mother; she foresees, she guesses; she has the
sacred instinct.
“Yes, darling,” cries Catherine, “I am going to make you a beautiful
wreath, and you will look like a little king.”
And so she twines together the white flowers, the yellow flowers, and
the red flowers, into a chaplet. She puts it on little Jean’s head, and
he flushes with pride and pleasure. She kisses her little brother, lifts
him in her arms and plants him, all garlanded with blossoms, on a big
stone. Then she looks at him admiringly, because he is beautiful and
_she_ has made him so.
And standing there on his rustic pedestal, little Jean knows he is
beautiful, and the thought fills him with a deep respect for himself. He
feels he is something holy. Very upright and still, with round eyes and
tight-drawn lips, arms by his side with the palms open and the fingers
parted like the spokes of a wheel, he tastes a pious joy to be an
idol--he is sure he is an idol now. The sky is overhead, the woods
and fields lie at his feet. He is the hub of the universe. He alone is
great, he alone is beautiful.
But suddenly Catherine breaks into a laugh. She shouts:
“Oh! how funny you look, little Jean! how funny you do look!”
She runs up and throws her arms round him, she kisses him and shakes
him; the heavy wreath of flowers slips down over his nose. And she
laughs again:
“Oh! how funny he looks! how very funny!”
But it is no laughing matter for little Jean. He is sad and sorry,
wondering why it is all over and he has left off being beautiful. It
hurts to come down to earth again!
Now the wreath is unwound and tossed on the grass, and little Jean is
like anybody else once more. Yes, he has left off being beautiful. But
he is still a sturdy young scamp. He soon has his whip in hand again and
now he is hauling his team of six, the six big carthorses of his dreams,
out of that rut. Catherine is still playing with her flowers. But some
of them are dying. Others are closing in sleep. For the flowers go to
sleep like the animals, and look! the campanulas, plucked a few hours
ago, are shutting their purple bells and sinking asleep in the little
hands that have parted them from life.
A light breeze blows by, and Catherine shivers. It is night coming.
“I am hungry,” says little Jean.
But Catherine has not a bit of bread to give her little brother. She
says:
“Little brother, let ‘s go back to the house.”
And they both think of the cabbage soup steaming in the pot that hangs
from the hook right under the great chimney. Catherine gathers her
flowers in her arm and taking her little brother by the hand, she leads
him homewards.
The sun sank slowly down to the ruddy West. The swallows swooped past
the two children, almost touching them with their wings, that hardly
seemed to move. It was getting dark. Catherine and Jean pressed closer
together.
Catherine dropped her flowers one after the other by the way. They could
hear, in the wide silence, the untiring chirp-chirp of the crickets.
They were afraid, both of them, and they were sad; the melancholy of
nightfall had entered into their little hearts. All round them was
familiar ground, but the things they knew the best looked strange and
uncanny. The earth seemed suddenly to have grown too big and too old for
them. They were tired, and they began to think they would never reach
the house, where mother was making the soup for all the family. Jean’s
whip hung limp and still, and Catherine let the last of her flowers
slip from her tired fingers. She was dragging Jean along by the arm, and
neither said a word.
At last they saw a long way off the roof of their house and smoke rising
in the darkening sky. Then they stopped running, and clapping their
hands together, shouted for joy. Catherine kissed her little brother;
then they set off running again as fast as ever their weary legs would
carry them. When they reached the village, there were women coming back
from the fields who gave them good evening. They breathed again. Their
mother was on the door-step, in a white cap, soup-ladle in hand.
“Come along, little ones, come along!” she called to them. And they
threw themselves into her arms. When she reached the parlour where the
cabbage soup was smoking on the table, Catherine shivered again. She
had seen night come down over the earth. Jean, seated on the settle, his
chin on a level with the table, was already eating his soup.