THE old saying that "there are always two sides to a story" has worn a
deep rut into the popular mind. It has been handed down to us so often
with an air of virtuous rebuke, that we have come to regard the
individual who insists on his two-sided theory as the acme of all that
is broad-minded and tolerant. But in point of fact, if two sides is all
he sees, he is only one remove from the bigot whose mental myopia limits
him to a single narrow facet.
Even such a thing as a May-day picnic is polyhedral. The little
schoolmistress, who was the chief promoter of the one at the
Cross-Roads, would have called it a parallelopiped, if she had been
there that morning, to have seen the different expressions portrayed on
the faces of six people who were interested in it.
The business side of the picnic appealed to Bowser. As he bustled
around, dusting off cases of tinned goods that he had long doubted his
ability to dispose of, and climbed to the top shelves for last summer's
shop-worn cans of sardines and salmon, as he sliced cheese, and counted
out the little leathery lemons that time had shrivelled, his smile was
as bland as the May morning itself. One could plainly see that he
regarded this picnic as a special dispensation of Providence, to help
him work off his old stock.
There were no loungers in the store. Field and garden claimed even the
idlest, and only the old miller, who had long ago earned his holiday,
sat in the sun on the porch outside, with his chair tipped back against
the wall. At intervals a warm breath from the apple orchard, in bloom
across the road, touched his white hair in passing, and stirred his
memory until he sat oblivious of his surroundings. He was wholly
unmindful of the gala stir about him, save when Polly recalled his
wandering thoughts. She, keenly alive to every sensation of the present,
stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder, while she waited for her
picnic basket to be filled.
"Isn't it an ideal May-day, grandfather?" she exclaimed. "It gives me a
real Englishy feeling of skylarks and cuckoos and cowslips, of primroses
and village greens. I think it is dear of the little school-ma'am to
resurrect the old May-pole dance, and give the children some idea of
'Merrie old England' other than the dates and dust of its ancient
history." Unconsciously beating time with light fingertips on the old
man's shoulder, she began to hum half under her breath:
"'And then my heart with rapture thrills,
And dances with the daffodills-o-dills--
And dances with the daffodils!'"
Suddenly she broke off with a girlish giggle of enjoyment. "Listen,
grandfather. There's little Cora Bowser up-stairs, rehearsing her speech
while she dresses. Isn't it delicious to be behind the scenes!"
Through an open bedroom window, a high-pitched, affected little voice
came shrilly down to them: "'If you're _wa_-king, call me _early_! Call
me _early_, mother dear!'"
"Now, Cora," interrupted the maternal critic, "you went and forgot to
make your bow; and how many times have I told you about turning your
toes out? You'll have to begin all over again." Then followed several
beginnings, each brought to a stop by other impatient criticisms. There
were so many pauses in the rehearsal and reminders to pay attention to
manners, commas, and refractory ribbons, that when Cora was finally
allowed to proceed, it was in a tearful voice punctuated with sobs, that
she declared, "'To-morrow will be the ha-happiest day of all the g-glad
new year.'"
"'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,'" quoted the old miller
with a smile, as Mrs. Bowser's parting injunction reached their ears.
"Now, Cora, for goodness' sake, don't you forget for one minute this
whole enduring day, that them daisies on your crown came off your
teacher's best hat, and have to be put back on. If you move around much
to the picnic you might lose some of 'em. Best keep pretty quiet anyway,
or your sash will come unpinned, and the crimp will all get out of your
hair. Wish I'd thought to iron them plaits before I unbraided 'em.
They'd have been lots frizzier."
It was a very stiffly starched, precise little Queen o' the May who
came down the steep back stairs into the store. She stepped like a
careful peacock, fearing to ruffle a feather of her unrivalled
splendour. Her straight flaxen hair, usually as limp as a string, stood
out in much crimped profusion from under her gilt paper crown. Polly
could not decide whether the pucker on the little forehead came from
anxiety concerning the borrowed daisies which starred her crown, or the
fact that it was too tightly skewered to the royal head by a relentless
hat-pin.
One of the picnic wagons was waiting at the door, and as Bowser lifted
her in among her envious and admiring schoolmates, Polly saw with
sympathetic insight which of its many sides the picnic parallelopiped
was presenting to the child in that proud moment. The feeling of supreme
importance that it bestowed is a joy not permitted to all, and rarely
does it come to any mortal more than once in a lifetime.
But for every Haman, no matter how resplendent, sits an unmoved
Mordecai in the king's gate. So to this little Sheba of the Cross-Roads
there was one who bowed not down. Perkins's oldest, on the front seat
beside the driver, had no eyes for her. He scarcely looked in her
direction. His glances were all centred on the baskets which Bowser was
packing in around his feet. He smelled pickles and pies and ham
sandwiches. He knew of sundry tarts and dressed eggs in his own basket,
and wild rumours had reached his ears that Miss Polly intended to stand
treat to the extent of Bowser's entire stock of bananas and candy. Aside
from hopes of a surreptitious swim in the creek and a wild day in the
woods, his ideas of a picnic were purely prandial.
Across the road, Miss Anastasia Dill, peeping through the blinds,
watched the wagon rattle off with its merry load. Long after the
laughing voices had passed beyond her hearing, she still stood there,
one slender hand holding back the curtain, and the other shading her
faded blue eyes, as she gazed absently after them. It was the sunshine
of another May-day she was looking into. Presently with a little start
she realised that she was not out in the cool green woods with a
May-basket in her hands, brimming over with anemones. She was all alone
in her stuffy little parlour, with its hair-cloth furniture and
depressing crayon portraits. And the canary was chirping loudly for
water, and the breakfast cups were still unwashed. But for once,
heedless of her duties, even unmindful of the fact that she had left the
shutters open, and the hot sun was streaming across her cherished store
carpet, she drew a chair up to the marble-topped centre table, and
deliberately sat down. There was a pile of old-fashioned daguerreotypes
in front of her. She opened them one by one, and then took up another
that lay by itself on a blue beaded mat. So the face it dimly pictured
held a sacred place, apart, in her memory. When her eyes had grown misty
with long gazing, she lifted a book from its place beside the family
Bible. It was bound in red leather, and it had a quaint wreath of
embossed roses around the gilt letters of its title, "The Album of the
Heart." It was an autograph album, and as she slowly turned the pages
she remembered that every hand that had traced a sentiment or a
signature therein had once upon a time gathered anemones with her in
some one of those other May-days.
Then she turned through the pages again. Of all that circle of early
friends not one was left to give her a hand-clasp. She had friends in
plenty, but the old ones--the early ones--the roots of whose growth had
twined with hers in the intimacy known only to childhood, were all gone.
The May-day picnic brought only a throb of pain to gentle Miss
Anastasia, for to her it was but the lonely echo of a "voice that was
still."
Bud Hines watched the wagon drive away with far different emotions. He
had happened to come into the store for a new hoe, as the gay party
started. "It's all foolishness," he grumbled to the miller, "to lose a
whole day's schooling while they go gallivanting around the country for
nothing. They'll ride ten miles to find a place to eat their dinner in,
and pass by twenty on the way nicer than the one they finally pick out.
They'd better be doing sums in school, or grubbing weeds out of the
garden, instead of playing 'frog in the meadow' around a fool British
May-pole."
He looked around inquiringly as if he expected his practical listener
to agree with him. But all the sympathy he got from the old miller was
one of the innumerable proverbs he seemed to keep continually on tap.
"'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' Bud. Life is apt to be
little but sums and grubbing for the youngsters by and by, so let them
make the most of their May-days now."
* * * * *
The sequels of picnics are also polyhedral. Miss Anastasia, lingering
at her front gate in the early twilight, that she might enjoy to the
last moment the orchard odours that filled all the balcony outdoors,
heard the rattle of returning wheels. She had had a pleasant day,
despite the tearful retrospection of the morning, for she had attended
the great social function of the neighbourhood, the monthly missionary
tea. It had brought immeasurable cheer, and now she was returning with a
comfortable conviction that she was to be envied far above any of her
neighbours. The consciousness of having on her best gown, of being the
mistress of the trim little home to which she was going, of freedom from
a hundred harassing cares that she had heard discussed that afternoon,
all combined to make her supremely contented with her lot.
"Poor children," she sighed, as the tired, dirty little picnickers were
lifted from the wagon across the road. "They look as if the game hadn't
been worth the candle. I'm glad that I've outgrown such things."
Perkins's oldest, having soaked long in the cold creek, and sampled
every dinner-basket with reckless abandon till he could sample no more,
sat doubled up in the straw of the wagon-bed. He was white about the
mouth, and had he been called upon to debate the time-worn question,
"Resolved, that there is more pleasure in pursuit than in possession,"
the tarts and sandwiches of that day's picnic would have furnished
several dozen indisputable arguments for the affirmative.
The dishevelled little queen sat beside him, tired out by her day's wild
frolic, with starch and frizzes all gone.
As she was lifted over the wheel, and put down on the doorstep, a limp
little bunch of woe, Miss Anastasia heard her bewailing her fate. She
had lost the stars from her crown, the borrowed daisies that must be
reckoned for on the morrow. The amused listener smiled to herself under
cover of the twilight, as she heard Bowser's awkward attempts at
consolation, for all the comfort that he could muster was an old saw
learned from the miller: "Never mind, Cora, pa's mighty sorry for his
little girl. But you know:
"'When a man buys meat he buys bone,
And when he buys land he buys stone.
You must take the bad with the good.'"