and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two
evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."
"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me
that I wish sometime to meet Peter."
"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my
being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"
"My dear child!" I exclaimed.
"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she
takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being
one."
I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her--not by
now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but
rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in
many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an
end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.
"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh.
"Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your
best."
"But it is," I told her.
"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do
just exactly what you're told. Your _best_ tells you how to do itself."
At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so
powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for
intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with
me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the
chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the
expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial
utterance.
We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal
indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the
time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never
understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it
often is, _my_ one and _my_ eleven and nobody else's. For, as between
the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine
and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who
would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their
courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be
in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time
and space were the only considerations.
When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint
of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am
permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of
unconquerable timidity.
"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them
done--would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em.
But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must
be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just
squirming and keeping still about 'em--but tell me?"
"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught
her smile--that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a
face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to
come as near as may be to the others.
I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that
infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only
with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea,
who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why
we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another.
Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss
and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from
whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of
orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be
gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am
sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure
in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long
for one another to be near.
Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and
o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who
is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not
Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock,
because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock,
because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a
clock--which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.
IV
SPLENDOUR TOWN
Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went
with me to the other end of the bridge.
I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter
and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear:
for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is
preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors
with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not
the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most
curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have
shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden
sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is
allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the
trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and
clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and
autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and
prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our
"table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have
little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this
and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a
lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what
we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in
Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of
poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand
abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings
believing itself to be alone.
These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so
long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to
fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an
objective point--including the new iron bridge--to which to take guests.
But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the
other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward,
is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of
little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to
the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here
not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant
hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature
can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an
emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I
know, I know. You see that we do not yet _live_ the river, as an ancient
people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties,
our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing
there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by
these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump
pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics
there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall
be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars,
our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the
Northmen were fellowed of the sea.
Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this
fellowship and the fellowship of more.
"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away
for a party"--in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd
kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods
she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a _roll_
and wait for a fairy, and be a society."
We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour
have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to
improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her
a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is
she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh
thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the
lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an
unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus
could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love
best to hear her in these fancyings.
"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."
I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's
cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her
crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan,
her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has
brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not
throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs
childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying
a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the
back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some
children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less
like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of
the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often
be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a
phalanx?
We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a
steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little
shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge
I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden
profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face,
it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the
weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky
and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the
village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white
pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And
there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in
snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a
parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug
stores, too.
The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism
which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the
coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing
has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair
thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the
garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there
something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes,
these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the
old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord
or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All
day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling
the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from
idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has
even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar,
Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for
one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden
many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even
leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand,
ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she
snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of
the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on
toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air
from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the
voice of the little child, singing in the garden.
"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I
have finished this story.
"Yes," I tell her.
"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.
Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon
roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.
"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to
housekeep that garden."
"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.
"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."
I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these
little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a
reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground
so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be
done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and
there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics,
learning--there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract
understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow,
flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.
I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little
Child something of what I thought to do--breaking in upon the old
woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say,
one foot in the universe.
"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head,
"I'm real glad you're going to be here. _I dread saying anything._"
Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for
parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities
shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison
botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less
vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.
The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the
south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little
Child:--
"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if
she lived here."
She looked everywhere and answered:--
"In the water tower in those woods."
"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.
"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.
"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.
She looked long out across the water.
"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she
said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:--
"I love to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down.
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town."
I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very
properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge
waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I
think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have
known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and
keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment
almost always turned away.
Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have
stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself
first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings.
It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and
shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as
if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real
business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of
the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a
living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one
moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the
Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to
moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human
heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.
If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on
their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and
Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.
Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have
expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an
old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a
sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this
moment, and to that.
But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.
"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."
"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.
I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have
been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you."
Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu
social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another
milieu is taste.
"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make
lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere
cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or
wise or not averse to becoming either.
I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply.
Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.
"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.
"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat
maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of
proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she
means more than she knows that she means.
"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go
back this minute."
"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow
he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go
on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same
anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests,
for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises
economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no
symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil
their walk.
"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to
go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with
less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.
Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his
hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I
could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage
of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and
trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for
some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society?
I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the
present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at
dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign
from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I
think I get the first sign from you--and you--and you, about this
table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what
might it not have been?
"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey
and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."
"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.
Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.
"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."
Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the
circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in
Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official
trysting-place for all sweethearts.
We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's
pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at
her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her
courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this
Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child
running home.
"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around
by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."
"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with
you."
She looked up with puzzled eyes.
"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."
"But it is _not_ easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young
fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."
"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."
"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed--I hope you are not sending
regrets."
Miggy laughed out suddenly.
"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society.
Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."
I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.
"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.
"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you
live along and you find out 'most everything."
I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the
Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne
Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked
that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said
that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and
sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save
by the companionship of the village--the village that has somehow taught
Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?
My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.
"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of
'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."
"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.
"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to
have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much,
and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about
somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is
married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."
"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter
entirely."
She surprised me by her seriousness.
"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie
hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."
I wondered why not, but I said nothing.
"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You
know about him?"
I did know--who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told
me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets,
shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....
"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.
She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look
questioned me.
"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she
said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...."
Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I
want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.
This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces,
taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is,
like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the
ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the
evolution of ages. To tame it--there is a task for all the servants of
the new order.
Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of
living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for
their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing
of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of
sunset in her face--the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that
a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant
spirit signalled to me--and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was
that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's
face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.