FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE LOVE STORIES
BY
ZONA GALE
AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1909,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
November, 1909; April, 1912.
_Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
To
MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
WISCONSIN
Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _Everybody's_, _The
American Magazine_, _The Outlook_, _The Woman's Home Companion_, and
_The Delineator_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous
permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for
permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OPEN ARMS 1
II. INSIDE JUNE 15
III. MIGGY 33
IV. SPLENDOUR TOWN 43
V. DIFFERENT 62
VI. THE FOND FORENOON 81
VII. AFRAID 96
VIII. THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT 116
IX. THE COLD SHOULDER 136
X. EVENING DRESS 148
XI. UNDERN 176
XII. THE WAY THE WORLD IS 191
XIII. HOUSEHOLDRY 206
XIV. POSTMARKS 223
XV. PETER 248
XVI. THE NEW VILLAGE 258
XVII. ADOPTION 274
XVIII. AT PETER'S HOUSE 293
XIX. THE CUSTODIAN 309
Friendship Village Love Stories
I
OPEN ARMS
Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write
in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They
sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their
vase; and they are all white but one.
"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most
dead by mistake."
"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a
little shocked line troubled her forehead.
"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next
months how."
So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of
pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and
what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept
on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so
occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully
as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May,
and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the
essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my
letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems
come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the
great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is
the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely
"To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no
one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism
which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a
sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I
know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief
indulgence.
This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening
about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks
along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the
upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this
wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or
in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and
façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even
once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come,
they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We
too," they say, "have not been idle."
Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their
treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension
so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to
live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent
new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a
thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white
frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of
foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright
bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly
laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy
they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the
kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights.
("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our
front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could
just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these
obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals
of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be
signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow
marching line of little volunteers.
I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I
find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes
which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an
unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a
wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea
trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to
the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like
any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one
variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special
heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have
been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees
already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the
intruders and not they--and I own that for me the time has never wholly
passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns
with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur
to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are
beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a
tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not
yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a
straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the
walk--such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!--and in
return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of
our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the
already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished
standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an
elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to
have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some
inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine--an
isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say,
it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to
conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he
has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we
had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into
cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make
me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers
hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something
elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of
things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly
as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to
shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in
fellowship.
In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in
living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been
adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives,
striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to
one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere
civility; and I love them all--unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver
Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking
for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough
to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these
primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my
neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole
village has just given to Lyddy Ember:--
"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in,
though that was all elegant, but it was the _Togetherness_ of it. I
couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin'
anybody to neighbour with."
It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my
neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and
held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as
more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship,
comradeship, kinship--call it what you will. My neighbour and I will
understand.
"I heard you was here," my neighbour said--bless her, her voice
trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of
her voice.
I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was
all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing
which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the
wind--where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I
nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that--as is the custom
of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and
Meeting and Being Together.
I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village
to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and
this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in
many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a
sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you
that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one
morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept
house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might
for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that
since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to
music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we
were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it
is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat
that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on
his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet
about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this
loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save
for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell
our days to their end.
My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street,
and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out
for us as if he knew.
"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other
hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down
for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they
used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce
up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed
gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that
was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."
My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the
disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph.
But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my
telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care
almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would
rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.
"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be
up to talk to you in a day or two--I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can
spell like the minister."
I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of
that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour
impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!"
Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and
mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to
call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that
occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses
this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of--shall I
say?--brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical
emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself
by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I
have seldom known this divination to fail me--though I am chary of using
it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this
morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I _knew_ that
it would be Miggy.
"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the
imminent; "_why_ Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead
of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.
"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a
real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because
she _was_ a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about
Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's
name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy.
'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her
little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French
but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when
I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'--just
like I've said it to you."
It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be
uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June--that May was
helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return
so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually
do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I
could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a
personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of
embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a
chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do _you_ think of
your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very
badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had
effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste
in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless,
usually speechless, and always without curiosity--some one, save for the
tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence
to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the
idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have
one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part
of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a
showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time,
moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear
certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.
... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is
partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be
won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that
if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should
occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think,
because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit
this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence
seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the
fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the _idea_ of
something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has
just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the
seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her.
But I am never quick enough to let her know....
When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I
caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been
waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me
the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her
throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run
toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that
involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have
met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the
village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor
auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me
touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we
are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who
was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood
of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,
"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.
"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."
"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.
"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.
I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was
almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would
think that children would need to have things said out, but they are
evidently closer to a more excellent way.
So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of
premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we
are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one
had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we
are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is
not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found
unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is
wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade
company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and
Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces
of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very
herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this
which my neighbour called _Togetherness_.
II
INSIDE JUNE
_The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to
it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go
out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is
June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you
wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still
the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be
a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be
a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might
not one finally become a June day?..._
Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the
Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will
open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back
and read there and made a path right away through the page.
This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of
box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat
almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And
to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying
something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old
problem: _The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near
enough_.
I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the
matter--or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our
midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no
stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient
regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone
for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we
are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our
fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the
sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our
neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be
in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the
time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them
in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene
pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind
of spiritual taking up of a claim.
How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest
idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can
assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that _is_ the way it
seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one
says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those
fugitive moments when one almost _knows_ ... what it is all about. And
with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise
man; and, indeed, if one idles properly--or rather, if the proper person
idles--the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To
idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling
away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body
and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable
people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a
few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle
until the hour yields its full blessing.
I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I
went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which
another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter,
for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on
the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a
family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering
her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among
its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would
never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they
named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may
use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be
a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners
must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to
drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value
of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I
did, with the proper grounds.
To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with
feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still
woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her
flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her
life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain
travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over
all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she
has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy,
amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment,
and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what.
But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I
can do to resist saying to her, "How _did_ you get away?" It was so that
she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to
hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before
she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of
the spirit of the village.
There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the
Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and
semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:--
Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.
Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves
have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.
The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as
I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who
gossip back.
"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for
the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And
this was the best news that she could have given me.
It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the
village. She has gone to the city to nurse some distant kinswoman more
lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope.
But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the
village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom
the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.
I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to
give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It
would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary
society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.
"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but
honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality
meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned
out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if
we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship
Village."
My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a
corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing
books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is
only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is
a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free
night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious
duties and incident fatigue, is as impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is
club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church
suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is
invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are
remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.
"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour
admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have
to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like
the country?" she asked.
I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of
mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of
a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect
and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with
ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the
place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when
I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little
maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not
she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the
conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am
afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her
economic fitness than that she is so trim and still and wistful, with
such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told
my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or
not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes.
Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But
the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head.
How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her
this, either.
"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour
observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a
hired girl. They _will_ get married. But I say, let 'em."
At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my
neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For
I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and
establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying
where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the
flat pieces sent to the laundry."
"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"
"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.
"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas
Moor--that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him.
He'll be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to
the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from
the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he _has_ got a good
position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell.
Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."
"Signs?" I hazarded.
"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on
this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the
basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate
animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a
human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or
an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted,
love or a demon or whatever it be.
And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy
Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall,
to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a
kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the
subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused
with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes
to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that
pail becoming a person! And my neighbour tells me that the Qualifying
Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to
determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without
end.
"The young folks _will_ couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds,
in a manner of spontaneous impression, "_I_ think it's nice. And it's
nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever
have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the
angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole
town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it.
It kind o' binds the soil."
My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant
commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace
holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me
that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My
neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk--these
informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village
and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house
or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem
simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in
air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet,
burdened of no conventions or upholstery or perhaps even words, and
there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content
with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself
looking forward.
Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring
manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she
meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering
line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now
floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even
hear the absurd words.
"_My_ Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know.
You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"
the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.
To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I
waited, and,
"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like
something hurts you, ain't it?"
I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so,
but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the
village.
"He's come here in the year," she explained--and, save about the obvious
import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal
reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said, "he seems
to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame--for Peter's sake. Peter
Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in
_this_ town, say what you want."
On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the
canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to
leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works
hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally,"
she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not
to miss Peter Cary.
"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his
father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to
work--it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and
got up his lunch before I come out--I don't have my breakfast till the
men folks get out of the way."
I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare
breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all,
so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the
real business of life--to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or
conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind
of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they
arrive, lacking the cloud, it is true, but magnificently equipped to
settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot
pancake on a friend's ear with an Æsculapian _savoir faire_, for their
efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear
of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters
and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the
lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh--"_don't you wish you had_?"
What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of
immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be
entered upon it!
In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the
other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a
splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered
quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know
that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have
temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked
as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was
not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes
with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who
stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who
looked up from the foundation that he mortared; I have seen it often
and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to
know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for
that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the
ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that
celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,--run
under good conditions,--may not be a way out as well. At all events, the
look was still in Peter's face.
Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us
both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush,
and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.
"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband
don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."
There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me
in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or
mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I
would trust their reasons for either.
My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he
and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look
toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and
wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering
how it is in other places. Is it possible that men in general go away
to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going
forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are
so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it
in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the
back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves
her in the hope of a good kill.
And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves
making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my
neighbour looked at me with a smile--or, say, with two-thirds of a
smile--as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by
it to impart too much.
"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a
symptom.
"Miggy?" I said with interest--and found myself nodding to this new
relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with
the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great
people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any
amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it
beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?
"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come
here."
Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,
"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.
Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while
she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and
drooped.
"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and
laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and
especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me
with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.
"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in
the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.
_Now_ almost more than at night. Well--I don't know; both times."
I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting
vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.
"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.
Want a pink?"
Thus tacitly excused--how true her instinct was, courteously to put the
three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!--I have come
back to my house and my own breakfast.
"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the
country?"
My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.
"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened
into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.
But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness
and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am
near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the
street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening
windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal,
not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set
close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party,
on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue
between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens
were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant,
flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum
of the village talk--in every house the intimate, revealing confidences
of the Family, quick with hope or anxiety or humour or passion,
animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the
sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.
The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight,
something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet
me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get
near to June?
III
MIGGY
I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some
time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For
the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is
possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the
Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach
the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed,
it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter
hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the
quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for
the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it
swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something
else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear
the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet
incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles
within my sleep. I have the clock always with me. It is a little
voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind
and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race,
wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own
sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was
why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood
on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my
clock in its musical maximum of noon.
Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an
ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and
she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of
brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the
last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the
time.
"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had
stood, arms folded.
"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.
Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow
and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I
have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for
any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket;
but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become a kind of
apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a
rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a
friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice
which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking
tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that
one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the
other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to
avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent
Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know
to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that
we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.
Miggy stood regarding me intently.
"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the
door," she observed; "I thought it was you."
I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big
people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one
nature is never mistaken for the other.
"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.
"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always
bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning
to get the feeling."
"I beg your pardon. To get--what?" I asked.
"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always
sense your own breath better--like it was something alive inside you.
That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm
real glad I'm living."
As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of
weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the
truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a
surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have
the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.
"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be
my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is
still a hill.)
"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."
"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.
"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."
"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And
what made you think so?"
"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead.
And I think so because I generally think I can do anything--except
mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"
"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary
qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could
do that?"
"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions
you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back.
Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads
caved in on one side--same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd
be on the mathematics corner."
I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.
"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.
But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face
was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.
"Oh," she said, "I _forgot_. I meant to tell you first."
"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.
"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."
She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder--arms whose
slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their
extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind
of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.
"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.
"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all
laugh about us and act like it was a pity."
For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said
to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that
she was "in trouble." I own that,--save with my neighbour, and Calliope,
and a few more whom I love--here in the village I miss the simple good
breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and
the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking
it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do
the cities.
"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy.
Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by
not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the
extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.
Miggy nodded--three little nods which seemed to settle everything.
"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at
all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."
So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a
terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor
Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as
it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of
informing them.