He smiled then at the other children. “Think you can find something to
do with all these kids here?”
Leone looked up at him and her blue eyes pleaded brightly in her
eagerness. “I guess they’s plenty of them to look after her,” Mr.
Sieverson said shyly but still grinning. “They can entertain her,” Mrs.
Sieverson put in. She could do the baking without Leone this morning,
she thought rapidly, but feeling hurried and anxious.
“You going to play with them for a while, are you?” Mr. Lindsay felt
responsible for Patricia. All the same he wanted her off his mind for a
while until he had finished his business. “I don’t know whether----”
“Oh, Leone’ll look after her,” Mrs. Sieverson assured him, and Mr.
Sieverson repeated, “Sure! She’ll be all right with Leone.”
Leone came up now, smiling eagerly and with a sweetness that
transformed her thin freckled face. She shook back the wisps of uneven,
tow-coloured hair. She took the little girl’s hand protectingly and
confidingly in her hot palm that had a gleam of dusty perspiration
along the life line and the heart line. The tiny hand felt like a soft
warm bit of silk--or a flower.
“That’s right! Uncle Dave won’t be gone long. Don’t take her out where
it’s too hot, kids. You know she isn’t used to things the way you are.”
“No, you be careful,” Mrs. Sieverson warned them.
“Will you go with Leone?” The little girl did not say that she would or
wouldn’t, but she was courteous and did not draw back. “You’ll be all
right! _You’ll_ have a good time! Oh, I guess Uncle Dave didn’t tell
these kids who you were, did he? This is Patricia.”
“Can you say that?” Mrs. Sieverson asked--doubting if _she_ could.
Vila drew shyly back, with one shoulder higher than the other; but
Leone laughed in delight. “I can say it!” She nodded. She squeezed
Patricia’s hand.
“You can say it, can you? All right, then. Well, now, you kids can show
this little girl what good times you can have on the farm. That so? All
right then, Henry.”
Mrs. Sieverson went into the house to get back to her baking. She had a
lot to do to-day. She wasn’t at all worried about leaving their little
visitor so long as Leone was with her. But she turned to call back to
the children, who were still silently grouped about Patricia in the
driveway:
“You better stay in the yard with her. Mr. Lindsay won’t like it if she
gets her dress dirty. Leone! You hear me?”
“I heard. Do you want to come into the yard, Patricia? You do, don’t
you?” Leone asked coaxingly.
Patricia went soberly with her. Her eyes, gray with threads of violet
in the clear iris, were looking all about silently. Her little hand lay
quiet but with confidence in Leone’s. The other children followed, the
boys lagging behind, but coming all the same.
“There, now! Here’s just the nicest shady place, and Patricia can sit
here, can’t she, and just be so nice?” Leone placed Patricia in the
round patterned shade of an apple tree, and spread out her linen dress,
making it perfectly even all around, and carefully drew out her little
legs straight in front of her with the shiny black slippers close
together. “There!” she said proudly. “See?”
She sat down on one side of Patricia, and then Vila shyly and with a
sidelong confiding smile sat down on the other. The boys hung back
together.
“Leone!” Mrs. Sieverson called from the house. “Ain’t you got something
to entertain her with? Why don’t you get your dolls?”
“Do you want to see our dolls, Patricia?”
So far Patricia had been consenting but silent. “You go in and get
them, Vila,” Leone ordered, and when Vila whined, “I don’t want to!”
she said, “Yes, you have to. I can’t leave her. I have to take care
of her. Don’t I, Patricia?” But when Vila came back with the scanty
assortment of dolls Patricia looked at them and then reached out her
hand for the funny cloth boy doll in the knitted sweater suit. The boys
laughed proudly and looked at each other, the way they had done when
the swan in the park at Swea City took the piece of sandwich they put
on the water for it. “Isn’t that doll cute, Patricia?” Leone begged
eagerly.
Patricia touched its black-embroidered eyes, and its red-embroidered
lips--done in outline stitch--and then looked up at the eager, watching
children and smiled with that gleam of mischief.
The boys laughed again. They all came around closer. “That’s mine,”
Vila said softly. She reached over and touched the big stuffed cloth
doll, with the hair coloured yellow and the cheeks bright red, that was
smooth along the top and bottom sides like a fish but crisp along the
edges from the seams. Patricia took it and looked at it. She looked at
every one of their dolls--there were five, one of them was a six-inch
bisque doll from the ten-cent store--and then smiled again.
“I’ll bet you have nice dolls at home, haven’t you, Patricia?” Leone
said in generous worship. “I’ll bet you’ve got lots nicer dolls than we
have.”
Patricia spoke for the first time. The children listened, with bright
eager eyes wide open, to each soft little word.
“I have fifteen dolls.”
Marvin said, “Gee!”
“Have you got them named?” Vila leaned over the grass toward Patricia,
and then quickly hitched herself back, frightened at the sound of her
own voice asking the question.
“Oh, yes, I always name my dolls,” Patricia assured them. “My dolls
have beautiful names. They’re all the names of the great actresses and
singers.” And she began gravely to repeat them. “Geraldine Farrar, and
Maria Jeritza, and Eva LeGallienne, and Amelita Galli-Curci....”
While she was saying them, the boys looked at each other over her head,
their eyes glinting, their mouths stretched into grins of smothered
amusement, until Clyde broke into giggles.
Leone was indignant. “Those are _lovely_ names! I think Patricia was
just wonderful to think of them!”
Vila stretched across the grass again. She touched the cloth doll
and drew back her fingers as quickly as if it were hot. “Her name’s
Dor’thy,” she whispered.
After Patricia’s gracious acceptance of the dolls, the children wanted
to show her all the treasures they had--even those they had never told
anyone else about. Everything, they felt, would receive a kind of glory
from her approval. They liked to repeat her name now. “Patricia.” “She
wants to see the little pigs. Don’t you, Patricia?” “Aw, she does not!
Do you, Patricia? She wants to see what I’ve got to make a radio.”
Patricia looked from one to the other with her violet-gray eyes and
let the others answer for her. But after a while she said with a cool,
gentle, royal decision:
“No. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay right here in this
round shade.”
The children were highly delighted. They began to bring their treasures
to her. Vila had run off to the edge of the garden and dug up two
glass precious stones she had buried there, but when she came back to
Patricia she was too shy to show them and kept them hidden in her hot
little hand that got sticky and black from the earth clinging to them.
The boys were getting quite bold. Marvin said:
“I bet you never saw a mouse nest, Patricia.”
“Patricia doesn’t care anything about that,” Leone said impatiently.
“I wish you boys would go off somewhere anyway and let _us_ look after
Patricia.”
“I can show it to you, Patricia.”
“_She_ doesn’t want to see that!”
“Yes, I do,” Patricia assured them with an innocent courtesy that made
Clyde giggle again.
The boys ran off to the woodshed to get it. It was all made of
wound-about string and little bits of paper and a soft kind of woolly
down. Patricia examined it with her large grave eyes. She reached out
one finger toward it delicately, and drew the finger back. She looked
up at the boys.
“What is it?” she breathed.
“A mouse nest,” Marvin said nonchalantly.
He held it carefully in his brown sturdy hands, partly to keep it
together, but more because he liked to have Patricia’s soft little
fingers come near his. They were as smooth as silk, and rosy at the
tips as the pointed petals of the dog-tooth violets he had found near
the little creek in the woods, when he was out there one day last
April all alone. A happy shiver went over him at the thought of their
touching him, silvery and cool.
“Do the mouses--_mices_--live in it?”
“Sure! They did before we took it away.”
“Oh, but can’t they live in it any more? What will the mices do?”
“Gee! What can they do?” Marvin swaggered. Clyde giggled.
Her pink mouth opened into a distressed O. She looked from one to the
other for help, and the violet in her eyes deepened. “But they won’t
have anywhere to live! You must put it back.” She was very serious.
“Shoot! Why, they’ve run off somewheres else by this time!”
What did it matter about mice anyhow? Gee, they were something to get
rid of! Why did she suppose Pop kept all those cats and fed ’em, if it
wasn’t to get rid of the mice? But she looked so distressed that Leone,
with an angry glance at the boys, assured her hastily leaning over and
hugging her:
“No, they haven’t, Patricia! Boys just like to say things like that.”
“Aw, gee----!”
“But what will the mices _do_?”
“The boys’ll put the nest back, and then the mice’ll come there,” Leone
warmly promised her. She didn’t care if it wasn’t true.
The boys had never heard anything so funny in their lives. Gee whiz!
They despised her for such ignorance, and could hardly keep from
laughing, and yet they felt uneasily ashamed of themselves for they
didn’t quite know what. They had just wanted to bring her the mouse
nest to make her interested and then to show her, too, that they
weren’t afraid of things most people didn’t want to touch. But they
seemed to be out of favour. They hung around while the girls talked a
lot of silly talk, and laid all the dolls out in the grass in front of
them.
“I’ll bet you’ve got awful pretty clothes for your dolls, haven’t you,
Patricia?”
Patricia didn’t like to say, or to talk about her dolls because she
didn’t really think that these dolls’ dresses were one bit pretty.
Leone went on questioning her, with naïve admiration, and Vila listened
with her eyes glistening.
“I’ll bet you’ve been into lots of big stores, Patricia. Did this dress
you’ve got on come from a big store?”
They both bent and examined the creamy shining linen with its coarse
silky weave and the large roughened threads that Vila scarcely dared
to touch with her fingers all dirty from the precious stones. Patricia
graciously let them touch and see until, gently but with a final
dignity, she drew the cloth out of their fingers.
“Now you mustn’t touch me any more.”
The boys giggled again at this, admiring but feeling abashed.
A striped kitten came suddenly into sight at a little distance--became
motionless, saw them--and flattened and slid under the cover of the
plants in the garden. Patricia gave a little cry. Her face bloomed into
brightness.
“Oh! Do you have a kitty?”
“A cat! Gee!” They all laughed. “_One_ cat! I bet we got seventeen.”
“Really seventeen kitties? Did your father buy them all for you?”
“Buy them!” The boys shouted with laughter. “Gee, you don’t buy cats!”
“Oh, you do,” Patricia told them, shocked. “They cost twenty-five
dollars, the kitties that sit in the window in the shop.”
“Twenty-five dollars! Pay twenty-five dollars for a _cat_!” _Cats_,
when you had to drown half of ’em and couldn’t hardly give the others
away! The boys were hilarious with laughter over such ignorance.
Leone couldn’t help knowing that Patricia was ignorant, too. But she
gave the boys a hurt, indignant, silencing look--it was mean of them
to laugh at Patricia when she didn’t know! Anyway, she was so little.
Leone put her arm around Patricia, in warm protection.
“But they do!” Patricia’s eyes were large and tearful and her soft
little lips were quivering. It was dreadful to have these children
not believe her, and she couldn’t understand it. “Some of them cost a
hundred dollars!”
“Oh, gee!” the boys began.
“Maybe some of them _do_,” Leone said quickly. “You don’t know
everything in the world, Marvin Sieverson.” She knew, of course, that
cats couldn’t--but then, she wasn’t going to have the boys make fun of
Patricia. “Come on now, Patricia,” she pleaded. “We’ll go and see our
kitties. Shall we?”
The boys watched anxiously. They didn’t want Patricia to be mad at
them. They wanted to take her out to the barn and have her look at
everything.
She considered. Her eyes were still large and mournful and a very dark
violet. At last she nodded her head, held out her hands trustingly to
Leone to be helped from the grass, smoothed down her skirts--and the
whole tribe went running off together.
* * * * *
Patricia had to climb up the steep stairs into the haymow one step at a
time. She felt along the rough sides carefully with her little hands.
The boys would have liked to help her and were too bashful, but all
the time Leone was just behind her, telling her, “Don’t you be afraid.
Leone’s right here, Patricia. Leone won’t let you fall.” When they got
up into the haymow Patricia was almost frightened at first; it was so
big, and there were such shadows. A long beam of sunlight fell dimly
and dustily golden from the high window in the peak, across the great
beams and the piled hay, and widened over the great stretch of wooden
floor.
“Haven’t you ever been up in a haymow before?” Clyde demanded.
“Of course she hasn’t,” Leone answered indignantly.
Patricia looked around at them, and her face was pale with awed
excitement. “It’s like the church!” she breathed.
“Gee, a _hay_-mow!”
Still, it really was. Even their voices and the way they walked sounded
different up here. The boys were tickled and a little embarrassed that
Patricia had thought of that.
“Is this where the kitties live?”
“The little ones do. Where are the little bitty ones, Marvin?”
“_I_ know!” both the boys shouted. They leaped up into the sliding
mounds of hay, calling back, “Come on if you want to see, Patricia!”
“I’ll help you, Patricia,” Leone encouraged her.
She boosted and got Patricia up on to the hay pile and helped her
flounder along with her feet plunging into uncertain holes, and the
long spears of hay scratching at her bare legs above the half socks,
and the dust making her eyes smart. Then Patricia began to laugh. She
liked it!
“Here they are!” the boys shouted.
A bevy of half-grown cats suddenly fled down the hay like shadows. “No,
no!” Patricia screamed when the boys tried valiantly to catch a little
black cat by its tail. Leone was assuring her, “Never mind, they won’t
hurt the kitties, Patricia.”
“Look here! Come here!” the boys were calling.
Patricia was almost afraid to go. The boys had found the nest of little
kittens. They had got hold of the soft, mousy, wriggling things and
were holding them up for her to see. Fascinated, she went nearer. The
little kittens had pink skin fluffed over with the finest fur, big
round heads, and little snubby ears, and blue eyes barely open.
“Oh!...” She looked up at Leone with her pink lips pursed. She loved
the little kittens but she was afraid of them. “Oh, but they aren’t
kitties! They don’t look like kitties.”
The boys were highly amused. “What do they look like?” Marvin demanded.
“What do you think they are? Cows? Horses?”
She said tremulously, “No, I _know_ cows are big. But their heads look
the way little baby cow heads do in the pictures. They do.”
“I think they do, too,” Leone asserted stoutly. She coaxed, “Touch
them, Patricia. They won’t hurt you.”
The boys grinned at the way Patricia put out her fingers and drew them
back. How could these little bits of kittens hurt her? Didn’t she know
they couldn’t bite yet? Their little teeny teeth couldn’t do anything
but nibble. It was fun to feel them. Marvin caught up the white one and
held it out to her, and they all kept urging her. He hoped her fingers
would touch his. She cringed back, her mouth pursed in wonder.
“Oh, but they have such funny tails!”
“No, they ain’t. They got tails like all cats got.”
“Oh, no, Marvin. In the show the kitties have tails so big, and they
waved them--just like the big plumes on men’s hats riding on horses.”
The boys doubled up with laughter. “Who’d put cats in a show?”
“Oh, but they are!” Patricia looked at them in distress.
“Why shouldn’t they be?” Leone demanded.
Of course she knew why, as well as the boys did. Nobody would pay to
see a cat! Patricia had meant the tigers. She was so little she didn’t
know the difference. The boys were not to tease her though! Clyde was
giggling. Gee, if she didn’t have the funniest notions!
At last they got her to touch the kitten. She did it first with just
the pink tip of one finger--then it felt so soft, so little and fluffy,
with tiny whiskers like fine silk threads, that she reached out her
hands. Marvin felt the brush of her fingers, as if a cobweb had blown
across his hand, and a shiver of joy and pain went down his backbone.
Patricia laughed in delight, and looked from one to the other of the
children with her large shining eyes, to share her wonder.
“Take it!” Marvin urged.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t!”
“Why not? Go on and take it!”
She shook her head.
“She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to,” Leone said warmly.
“Yes, she does!” Marvin thrust the kitten into her hands. She gave a
little shriek and squeezed it by its soft belly, while the weak pinkish
legs wavered and clawed out of her grasp.
“I’m going to drop it!”
“No, you won’t!”
Its fluffiness filled her with ecstasy. “Oh, see its claws! They look
like little bits of shavings from mother’s pearl beads!” The boys
grinned in amusement and delight at each other. Vila laughed happily.
“Oh, and inside its little ears! Just the way shells look inside--only
these are _silk_ shells!” The boys grinned broadly. She caught the
kitten to her cheek and held it wildly wriggling. “Oh, kitty, I love
you! I want to have you to take home!”
“You can--you can have it,” the children all urged her eagerly. Marvin
said, “Gee, we got all kinds of cats, and that old gray one----” Clyde
pinched him. “Shut up!” He grinned and blushed. Patricia laid the
kitten gravely and reluctantly back in the rounded nest. She shook
her head until the fluffy bell of shining hair trembled. She said
solemnly, and as if she had forgotten that the others were there:
“No. I won’t. Because all its other little sisters and brothers would
be lonesome for it. And its mother would.”
The boys stood grinning but they said nothing.
What were the kittens’ names? Patricia asked. She was horrified that
they had none. “Gee, we call ’em kitty,” Marvin said; but Leone
hastened to add, “Well, we call that one we have Old Gray.”
Patricia said: “Oh, but they must have names! That’s wicked. Nobody
goes up to heaven to our Lord Jesus without a name!”
The boys just barely glanced at each other. They kept their red faces
straight with agony. Then Marvin went pawing and rolling through the
hay over to the other side of the pile, where he buried his flushed
face and snorted.
“I’m going to give every one a name,” Patricia asserted solemnly.
“What are you going to name ’em, Patricia?” Leone and Vila were
impressed.
“I’m going to give them jewel names. Because the cats make me think
about things like jewels. This is what I’m going to call them. I’m
going to name this one Pearl because it’s white, and this bluey one
Sapphire, and the other bluey one Turquoise, and this little pinky one
Coral, and this one ... Jade!”
“Aren’t you going to name one Di’mond, Patricia?” Leone asked eagerly.
Vila thought that, too.
“No.” Patricia was very decided. “Cats don’t look like diamonds. They
look like coloured jewels.”
The boys giggled. Besides that one she had named _Pearl_--gee, they had
already looked at these kittens and they knew very well that one was a
he-cat! If she wasn’t funny!
Vila was looking at Patricia so intently that she trembled. Now she
said, “Patricia’s eyes are jewel eyes, too. They’re--they’re----” She
didn’t know how to say it, and yet she felt what she meant and wanted
to say--felt it so that it hurt! The whites of Patricia’s eyes gleamed,
and a little blue spread out into them from the circles of the coloured
parts, and in these there were all sorts of threads of colour woven
together, the way they were inside the glass of marbles--bluish and
violet-coloured and gray, and a sort of golden! All just as clear....
Vila reached out and took Patricia’s wrist quickly and with shy ardour,
but then she only smiled and couldn’t think of anything to say ... she
would have been afraid to say it, anyway.
“Now she must see all our places!”
They went through the big barn. “Look here, Patricia!” “Patricia can’t.
She’s looking at this.” She looked at everything, but when they urged
her, “Touch it! Go ahead!” she wouldn’t quite do that. When they went
out of the barn they all took hands and ran pounding down the long
slope of heavy boards and out into the farmyard. Patricia was afraid at
first and then shrieked with laughter and wanted to do it over again.
“Now we mustn’t do it any more,” Leone said after the third time. “Her
little face is all red. Let go her hand, Marvin! Now, darling, stand
still, and Leone’ll wipe off her little face.”
They thought it was funny the way she ran when the chickens came near
her. “Oh, gee, if we had time we’d go down to the pond and show her the
geese. Wouldn’t she run if that old goose got after her!” Leone said,
“Marvin Sieverson! We shan’t go there.”
But the very best place was the orchard. Even the boys were not so wild
and noisy there. Their feet made only soft swishing sounds when they
went through the long grass. The boughs were loaded, some broken and
sweeping the ground, and the sky was patterned with leaves.
“Patricia!” Marvin hinted, tempting her, holding out a little green
apple.
Leone snatched it from his hand. “Why, Marvin Sieverson, shame on you!
Do you want to make little Patricia sick?”
“Aw, gee!” He had just wanted to see if she would take it. He and Clyde
had both been hunting through the grass for some apples that Patricia
could really eat.
Only the yellow transparents were ripe. The large apples had a clear
pale colour against the leaves that were only slightly darker--mellow
and clear at the same time, a light pure yellow-green through which
the August sunshine seemed to pass. Patricia took the big yellow apple
that Marvin picked for her and carried it all around with her. “_Eat_
it, Patricia, why don’t you?” But she wanted to hold it. “Oh, thank
you!” she said very earnestly for every single thing the children gave
her--the red dahlia, and the tiny bunch of sweet peas, the bluebird’s
feather. Whenever she saw a bird she stopped. She put her little silky
hand on Leone’s wrist. “Look!” “It’s just a bird.” She stood and
watched with fascinated eyes until the bird was lost in the sky and she
had to turn away dazzled with blue and gold.
“Do you wish you could stay here and belong to us, Patricia?” Leone
asked her wistfully. “We’d play you were my little girl, wouldn’t we?”
Patricia wished that she could stay. There were streaks of dust down
the shining linen dress and on the soft little arms, a damp parting in
the lovely wave of the bangs, and around her mouth there was a faint
stain of red from the juicy plums the boys had brought her to suck. Oh,
yes, the country, she said, was _nice_! She looked about with shining
innocent eyes of wonder. She loved the animals. In the city, she told
them, animals weren’t happy. There were the beautiful green birds in
the shop--just the colour, almost, of these apple-tree leaves!--but her
father wouldn’t buy them for her because he didn’t believe in keeping
things in cages, and he wouldn’t get her the big gray dog because it
wasn’t right to take dogs out on chains.
“Oh, if I lived in the country,” she cried, “do you know what I’d do?
I’d just run around and run around----”
“You’d play with _me_, wouldn’t you, Patricia?” Marvin cut in jealously.
“I’d play----”
“Children!”
The grown people were calling them. Disaster showed on the children’s
faces. “Oh, we don’t want Patricia to go home!” There were so many
things still that they hadn’t shown her. But Mr. Lindsay came into the
orchard calling out jovially:
“Well! Here she is! Ready to go home now with Uncle Dave?” He took it
for granted that she was. He took her reluctant little hand, and the
other children trailed after them. When they reached the farmyard, he
said, “See what’s going with us!”