The heart of man is mysterious. Why a passionately expressed desire to
spit upon one should be alluring, God knows--I don't. It was fatal to
Alec. I see him now jumping up and down outside the fence, shouting
forth: "Ya ha! Ya ha! You can't get me!"--or wooing Ellen by the
subtle method of attaching a hard green apple to a supple stick and
flinging it at her. The relations of these two, as you can see, were
deep from the first.
Ellen, more than any of the rest of us, had sharp recrudescences back
to little girlhood just as she flamed further ahead on the shimmering
path of adolescence. Thus she covered a wide gamut of years in her
everyday life. I think it is this ability to roam up and down time
that makes life interesting, more than any other thing.
So when Janie Acres and Mildred Dilloway and Ellen and I would be
sitting under the trees discussing the important affairs of life,
Ellen would suddenly be moved to arise with her ear-rending "Yip!
Yip!" and "career" (I use Miss Sarah's word) across the landscape. Her
frocks, because of her mother's dislike to the dull work of letting
down tucks and hems, were shorter than those worn in my decorous young
days, and her thin little legs measured the distance like a pair of
dividers. There was an intensity to her flight that made one think of
a projectile.
From the excursions into tenderness that our little quartette of girls
was always making, from our sudden flashes of maturity, Ellen would
suddenly leap with both feet into full childhood. I remember sudden
jumps from high lofts and swinging from trees and the slipping off of
shoes and stockings for the purpose of wading in brooks. And these
impassioned returns to the golden age were always heightened by the
presence of Alec. Such "performances" were, of course, severely
criticized. New England at that time was staider than it is to-day; a
higher standard of what was named "decorum" was demanded of the young,
and yet smiles flickered around mouths while brows frowned when Ellen
played.
As I read Ellen's journal at this time, it is as though I could see
her growing up as the tide comes in; the receding wave toward
childhood meant Alec to her. He was a loosely built lad with a
humorous and smiling mouth. His shaggy mane of hair, which boys wore
longer in those days than they do now, gave him the appearance of a
lion's cub. His whimsical temperament and his easy disposition he got
from his mother. She was a placid woman who had spent her life in
adapting herself to the difficult temperament of Mr. Yorke, and it was
her boast that there was no other woman living who could have got on
with her husband without being fidgeted into an early grave. When Miss
Sarah opined that if she put her mind on that and on nothing else, she
could get on with any man living, Mrs. Yorke replied nothing, but said
afterwards to my grandmother:--
"Poor Miss Sarah! Ain't it queer about these unmarried women; no
matter how intellectual they be! It ain't puttin' your mind on it ever
made a woman get on with the man she's married to."
Whatever the knack was that made a woman accomplish this feat, Alec
had had imparted by his mother.
"Learnin' you to get on with your pa real easy an' smilin' is goin' to
help you a lot in life, Alec," the good woman had told her son. "Mebbe
it'll be worth more to you than as if we had money to leave you."
Understanding the virtues in a good but crotchety and trying man, had
bred in Alec a tolerant and humorous spirit of the kind that most
people don't ever acquire at all, and that Youth seldom knows. It made
him kind to boys younger than himself, and also made it easy for his
mother to make him play the part of nurse to smaller brothers and
sisters and also to nieces and nephews, for Mrs. Yorke's married
sister lived next door to her. It was the constant presence of a small
child in Alec's train that made Ellen discover the mystery about him.
"There's a deep mystery about Alec," Ellen told me. "Every day he
comes and leaves his baby with me at a certain time and runs off
rapidly toward the Butlers'."
Now I had seen Alec Yorke grow up; he was younger than I, and you
know the scorn that a girl of thirteen can have toward a boy a year
her junior and half a head shorter than she. At that time he fits into
no scheme of things; there is no being on earth who arouses one's
sentiment less. As a sweetheart he is impossible; equally impossible
is he as an object on which to lavish motherly feelings. For me, Alec
was a mere plague; he lured Ellen from me into skylarkings in which I
had no part, nor did I wish to have, having, by the New England
training of that day, already had my childhood taken from me. It was
not mystery that I had ever connected with Alec, but a baffling sense
of humor and an intensity in the way he could turn hand-springs. There
was a fire in his performance of cart-wheels that seemed to let loose
all that was foolish and gay, and, from the point of view of the
grown-ups of the time, reprehensible in Ellen. So it was obvious to me
that any mysterious doings of Alec's meant no good.
"We ought to find out," said I, "what he's about."
"Oh, Roberta!" pleaded Ellen; "then it wouldn't be a mystery any
more."
"We ought to find out what he's doing," I pursued, "and get him to
stop it. We should use our influence even if he is young."
We, therefore, stealthily made after Alec. He went out through a hole
in the fence of the Scudder place, circled a little wood, scaled some
outhouses of the Jones's, and in this circuitous method came back to
old Mrs. Butler's, next door, and there he lay on his stomach in the
woodshed, at a little distance. With a reappearance of guilty stealth,
he looked around and seeing no one he dove suddenly into Mrs. Butler's
house. Mrs. Butler was stricken with rheumatism and lived entirely on
the first floor, so by the simple method of flattening our noses
against the window-pane we might find out anything that was afoot. We
fathomed the mystery. There stood Alec, doing old Mrs. Butler's back
hair. He combed it out as best he might, while she punctuated the
performance with such remarks as these: "Lor! child, remember it's
hair in your hands, not a hank of yarn." Then she would groan, "Oh,
the day that I lost the use of my arms over my head and must go
through this!" All of which Alec bore with patience.
We made off a little shamefacedly while Ellen hissed in my ear, with
fine logic: "There, Roberta Hathaway, that's what you get by snooping
into people's business." We never mentioned Alec's mystery to him,
though from time to time Ellen would seem maddeningly knowing.