she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.
Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some
answer there.
"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.
"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."
And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.
"But if she _was_--that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely
be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"
"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.
Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.
"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of--her,
till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean _Margaret_."
It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to
Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was
reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which
would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I
think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of
what she felt that she was speaking of it.
"How does she look?" I asked.
"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her
to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the
house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."
"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it.
Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.
"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.
"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and
not much afraid of folks and real happy."
"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"No," she said; "if I do--I never can think him out real plain. Margaret
I can most see."
And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that
one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.
I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right
thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my
impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere
between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if
she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:--
"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can
see."
She was not an instant in deciding.
"Why, sunset," she said.
"Promise me," said I--said we!--"that you will remember _Now_. And that
after to-night, when you see a sunset--always, always, till she
comes--you will think about her. About Margaret."
Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we
lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a
fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always
selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will
remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand
in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance
which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset
should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny,
wandering spirit....
Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the
bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing
precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the
winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand
bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the
village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of
all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some
mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil
voice.
V
DIFFERENT
Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the
canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks
from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the
gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground
being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond
the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between
trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.
Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day
of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end
of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the
pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed
into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known
the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in
spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from
Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump
pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The
pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland
dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and
night-in-a-trundle-bed.
And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great
elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of
the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing--these gave
to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar
with more than one had suspected.
"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as
the glory of the scene burst upon him.
Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up
at his brown Adam's apple--she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as
her sweetheart's face--and rejoined:--
"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say _great_?"
"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."
He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest
fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look--without ever having met it
squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her
head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond
crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver
locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who
is unwillingly having second thoughts.
"My!" he said.
They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared
for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and
moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny
slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay,
partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills
were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it
was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very
perishable.
The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice
a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree,
making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending
not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she
wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared
look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that
she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes
precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and
locket. And then he was miserable.
It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials,
could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months
earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her
locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever
indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his
sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and
their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and
yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he
had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more
now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring
evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had
so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a
green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her
throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he
looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus
day, if the oracles seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose
picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a
banished man.
If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately
over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find
courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:--
"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.
"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd
think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it
differ'nt?"
"Did you count the elephants?"
"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages?
Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know
whether it's much of a circus or not--" with gloomy superiority--"they
not bein' any calliope, so."
"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would
have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied
in mere misery:--
"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the
kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell
way."
"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.
Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of
hesitation following a _faux pas_, save that this silence was longer,
and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize
how wholly delightful everything was.
"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump
pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."
"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."
It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been
until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.
While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their
basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and
gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and
the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of
lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went
back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a
collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the
locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were _her_
locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.
"Oh," cried Liva, "_Timmie_! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"
Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.
"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.
Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.
"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him
fleetingly.
Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.
"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over
it."
"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"
Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent.
They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and
the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were
sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:--
"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No,
Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo_graphs_ put
up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of
a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish,
refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you
see around you. And WHILE you wait."
Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:--
"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."
When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her
eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next
moment she was far more adorable.
"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."
He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a
throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his
pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much
as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But
that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he
thought--oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were
established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.
Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they
entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There
underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent
moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and
still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above,
foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and
spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with
generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright wings of
unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the
monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained
in a stately central line along the clover--it was certain, one would
have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the
companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the
mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its
influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and
Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent
of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of
the stuffy little phototype tent?
It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood
grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare
he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket--dare he--dare
he----
He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his
elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were
parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was
always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that
Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was
in his heart concerning the locket--the phototype--themselves. And Liva
herself was longing to say something about the sheer glory of the hour.
So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,
"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where
nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"
"I know it--I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it
could be the same place, does it?"
Liva barely lifted her eyes.
"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and
turned to hurry on.
"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But
all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and
a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.
Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of
mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass
alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the
nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which
the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so
pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown
creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues--it
was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more
wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped
forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with
shining eyes.
"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."
She was holding a blue violet.
"In front of the tigers; it was _growing_!"
"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.
She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.
"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My,
ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"
"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.
"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.
Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at
the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet--her
phototype and a violet.
But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:--
"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."
There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike"
about a circus--the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen
flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward,
which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man.
Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and
believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and
peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof,
for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with
their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and
music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with
Timothy. But all she said was:--
"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I
look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."
And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast,
answered only:--
"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice
performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"
When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons
from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place
of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the
slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning
against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on
the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a
hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment,
as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he
perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart
leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to
slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more
natural than to divine the reality of dreams?
His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then
he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming
crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his
heart:--
"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with
the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."
Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.
"I ain't sure," she said.
"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.
But Liva shook her head.
"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump
pasture'll _ever_ be the same again."
Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she _possibly_ mean
because....
Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now,
all right."
"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"
Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the
elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva
discovered that she had lost her locket.
"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his
striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence.
He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention
innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his
intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it
on when I left you under the cottonwood."
"You sure?" Liva demanded.
"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't--didn't you have it off while I
was gone?" he asked wistfully.
"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.
When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy
spoke tentatively.
"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive
back to the Pump pasture and look."
"Could we?" Liva hesitated.
It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank
Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was
yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the
warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the
first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too--as if he were
giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it
continually to antics of speech.
From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay
there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly
their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of
the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of
dreams.
He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open
place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft
and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled
by trees--locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky,
nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood
made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that
underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer
to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.
"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.
"That's funny, so do I," he cried.
Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little
banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on
red-tasselled sorrel, then--lying there as simply as if it belonged
there--on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little
cry.
"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."
He faced her for a moment.
"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.
"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of
course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie--thank you!"
"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.
She gave a little skipping step beside him.
"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where
the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."
His ill-humour was gone in a moment.
"That's what we _will_ do!" he cried joyously.
He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness
about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon,
of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the
length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned
for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they
stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the
grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to
dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds
of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and
where Strange Things had closed them round.
The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on
all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of
bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For
that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles,
expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known
strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and
colour and life and the beating of wild hearts--and was it not certain
that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the
grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the
semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark,
it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there,
something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps,
something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in
the blood.
Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her
cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her,
three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.
"Liva," he said, "all the time--every day--I've meant this. Did you
mean it, too?"