CHILD-LIFE, PAGAN FREE
Rose lived the life of the farm girls in the seven great Middle-West
States. In summer she patted away to school, clad only in a gingham
dress, white untrimmed cotton pantalets, and a straw hat that was made
feminine by a band of gay ribbon. Her body was as untrammeled as a
boy's. She went bare-foot and bare-headed at will, and she was part of
all the sports.
She helped the boys snare gophers, on the way to school, and played
house with the girls on the shady side of the school-house, and once,
while the teacher was absent at noon, Rose proposed that a fire be built
to heat the tea for the dolls.
She it was who constructed the stove out of thin bricks, and set a fire
going in it in the corner of the boy's entry-way, and only the passing
of a farmer saved the building from disaster.
She it was who found the ground-bird's nest and proposed to make a house
over it, and ended by teaching the bird to walk through a long hallway
made of sticks in order to get to its eggs again.
She despised hats and very seldom wore hers except hanging by the string
down her back. Her face was brown and red as leather, and her stout
little hands were always covered with warts and good brown earth, which
had no terrors for her.
Bugs and beetles did not scare her any more than they did the boys. She
watched the beetles bury a dead gopher without the slightest repugnance;
indeed, she turned to, after a long time, to help them, a kindness which
they very probably resented, to judge from their scrambling.
She always urged the other girls to go down to the creek and see the
boys go in swimming, and would have joined the fun had not the boys
beaten her back with hands full of mud, while they uttered opprobrious
cries. She saw no reason why boys should have all the fun.
When the days were hot they could go down there in the cool, nice creek,
strip and have a good time, but girls must primp around and try to keep
nice and clean. She looked longingly at the naked little savages running
about and splashing in the water. There was something so fine and joyous
in it, her childish heart rebelled at sex-distinction as she walked
slowly away. She, too, loved the feel of the water and the caress of the
wind.
She was a good student and developed early into a wonderful speller and
reader. She always listened to the classes in reading, and long before
she reached the pieces herself she knew them by heart, and said them to
herself in the silence of the lane or the loneliness of the garret. She
recited "The Battle of Waterloo" and "Locheil" long before she
understood the words. The roll of the verse excited her, and she thrust
her nut of a fist into the air like Miriam the Hebrew singer, feeling
vaguely the same passion.
She went from Primer to First Reader, then to the Second and Third
Readers, without effort. She read easily and dramatically. She caught at
the larger meanings, and uttered them in such wise that the older pupils
stopped their study to listen.
Scraps and fragments of her reading took curious lodgment in her mind.
New conceptions burst into her consciousness with a golden glory upon
reading these lines:
"Field of wheat so full and fair,
Shining with a sunny air;
Lightly swaying either way,
Graceful as the breezes sway."
They made her see the beauty of the grainfield as never before. It
seemed to be lit by some mysterious light.
"Cleon hath a million acres,
Ne'er a one have I,"
seemed to express something immemorial and grand. She seemed to see
hills stretching to vast distances, covered with cattle. "The pied
frog's orchestra" came to her with sudden conscious meaning as she sat
on the door-step one night eating her bowl of bread and milk, and
watching the stars come out. These fragments of literature expressed the
poetry of certain things about her, and helped her also to perceive
others.
She was a daring swinger, and used to swing furiously out under the
maple trees, hoping to some day touch the branches high up there, and,
when her companions gathered in little clumps in dismayed consultation,
she swung with wild hair floating free, a sort of intoxication of
delight in her heart.
Sometimes when alone she slipped off her clothes and ran amid the tall
corn-stalks like a wild thing. Her slim little brown body slipped among
the leaves like a weasel in the grass. Some secret, strange delight,
drawn from ancestral sources, bubbled over from her pounding heart, and
she ran and ran until wearied and sore with the rasping corn leaves,
then she sadly put on civilized dress once more.
Her feet were brown as toads, but graceful and small, and she washed
them (when the dew was heavy enough) by running in the wet grass just
before going in to bed, a trick the boys of the neighborhood had taught
her. She ran forward to clean the insteps and backward to clean the
heels. If the grass was not wet, she omitted the ceremony. Dust was
clean anyhow. Her night-gowns were of most sorry pattern till her aunt
came; thereafter they were clean, though it mattered little. They were a
nuisance anyway.
She wore a pink sun-bonnet, when she could find one; generally there
were two or three hanging on the fences at remote places. She sat down
in the middle of the road, because she had a lizard's liking for the
warm soft dust, and she paddled in every pool and plunged her hand into
every puddle after frogs and bugs and worms, with the action of a crane.
She ate everything that boys did. That is to say, she ate sheep sorrel,
Indian tobacco, roots of ferns, May apples, rose leaves, rose-buds, raw
turnips, choke-cherries, wild crab-apples, slippery elm bark, and the
green balls on young oak trees, as well as the bitter acorns. These
acorns she chewed into pats, and dried in the sun, to eat at other
times, like a savage.
She ate pinks and grass blades, and green watermelons, and ground
cherries, and black-haws, and dew-berries, and every other conceivable
thing in the woods and fields, not to mention the score of things which
she tried and spit out. She became inured to poison ivy like the boys
and walked the forest paths without fear of anything but snakes.
Summer was one continuous and busy play-spell for her in those days
before her lessons became a serious thing, for as she sat in school she
was experimenting in the same way. She chewed paper into balls and
snapped them like the boys. She carried slips of elm bark to chew also,
and slate pencils she crunched daily. She gnawed the corners of her
slate, tasted her ink and munched the cedar of her pencil.
And through it all she grew tall and straight and brown. She could run
like a partridge and fight like a wild-cat, at need. Her brown-black
eyes shone in her dark warm skin with an eager light, and her calloused
little claws of hands reached and took hold of all realities.
The boys respected her as a girl who wasn't afraid of bugs, and who
could run, and throw a ball. Above all she was strong and well.