stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?"
he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close,
close, and it was the sweeter for that.
"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I _did_. But
I do--now."
Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.
"An' be my wife?" he asked.
"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were
not greatly missed.
Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was
suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all
three saying something together.
When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden
turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured
and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his
hand.
"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.
"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles,
Timmie!"
"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it
was so. He folded it away with the violet Liva had gathered that
afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had
belonged to the pasture all the time.
"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture--my picture--in that
locket?"
"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap
in the city, and it don't open."
She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a
little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still,
looking back.
"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem
like another place?"
"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."
"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt.
It's _us_."
She laughed a little--softly, and very near his coat sleeve.
"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.
VI
THE FOND FORENOON
This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and
she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue
silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished
silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than
she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to
seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with
her fine directness.
"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got
any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of
the trunk. It was my mother's."
"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.
"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it--here," said Miggy, shyly.
"You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."
We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A
lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room
which one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me
no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the
day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things
that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.
While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of
the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I
had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me.
The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to
me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of
adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of
one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old
books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think
in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be
evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can
be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will
be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even
heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit
quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order
of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking
deep within for its essential life.
So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I
established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances
and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story,
barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this
Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French
Canadians. It is a simple story--you will find small mention made of
it--but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain
to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched
with the great loves of the world.
The morning sun--it was hardly more than eight o'clock--slanted across
the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her
breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet
cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship,
the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the
near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of
rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene
companionship?
I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning,
with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is
not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take?
Not recesses, but parentheses, which can flavour a whole day. I
remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily
observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they
were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a
ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was
seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up
a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find
if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with
impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to
tell her how much more important these things were than that our new
potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see
it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep
in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I
remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in
the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight
shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on
St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten
something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember
what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and
I maintain that these were the realities. Those days--and especially the
morning when we read through the "Ancient Mariner" between pasting in
two book plates!--taught me the precious lesson that the interruption
and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning
with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist
somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.
After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers
through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic,
stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment,
crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was
seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once
that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near
Miggy. It all made a charming sight,--Peter, bareheaded, in an
open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in
her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and
watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then,
for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.
Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long
yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never
been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that
they are these things. Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when
the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I
have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite
self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the
surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness
of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter.
What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like
boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But
you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast
unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost
more precious than awareness.
"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he
cutting grass."
She looked out briefly.
"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime.
This must be one of 'em. Have _you_ read these stories?"
"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to
have lunch with us at twelve?"
"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."
"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we
three at luncheon alone?"
She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set
me right.
"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter _that_ way at all. I just
know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter
never eats with me."
Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes
breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon
lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,
"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To
which Miggy made answer:--
"If you have read all these stories will you--wouldn't you--tell me
some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before
I know 'em!"
She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And
the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room,
unattended.
I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one
who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have
left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must
all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In
these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they
work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the pure
self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit--I say a _living_
spirit--who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder
if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I
see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am
sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if
they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.
I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its
sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in
which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I
might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old
tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my
self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy
figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never
leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some
hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to
be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one
must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for
one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen.
So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like
digging a moonstone out of the river bank.
What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra or Isolde or Heloise or
Guinevere, because--why, I think that you would not have told her of
these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her,
for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of
the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of
Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She
listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the
room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should
abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I
think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than
breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric
with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even
while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was
Peter, cutting the grass.
When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.
Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in
books many more like these.
"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy,
thoughtfully.
It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of
the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody
misses, nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving
hearts.
"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right
now," concluded Miggy.
Who am I that I should doubt this?
"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like
the Java entertainment is going to be."
She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.
"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's
crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be
here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had
stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about
things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she
thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"
Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and
a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have
been unlike Elaine.
"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music
teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass
corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't
even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale
Man?"
Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair,
that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.
"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any
word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on
the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his
tunes--isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all
alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't
think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em
the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."
And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed
gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like
a valkyr's.
"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house
for the family, and keep house, and _keep_ house. It seems as if she's
sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do--and her
life all mussed up."
Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion
has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is
something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her
own by the tasks of her hand.
"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said Miggy, "that gets drunk
and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his
meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at
her--she's just exactly like those two----"
"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis'
Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a
Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested
her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in
the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same
living hearts.
And these were not all.
"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count
them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy,
and I think that they have all understood meadows.
Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of
anything as did a generation or two past.
"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus
Liva told me--everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"
Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all
love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.
"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and
Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the
hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something,
if we only knew?"
I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and
wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and
long ago.
"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"
"_Peter?_" repeated Miggy.
Why not Peter?
She looked out the window at him.
"Why," she said, "but he's _now_. Peter's now. And he wears black
clothes. And he's cutting grass...."
True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day,
Aucassin was _now_, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and
that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should
not have loved him.
"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all
the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."
"_That_ way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.
"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.
Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.
"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she
caught her breath like a child. "_Honest?_" she said.
I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the
fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets,
and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been
searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who
was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those
hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow
followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave
herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.
I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it
happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able
to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.
"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like _that_?"
Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.
Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.
"My mother knew!" she said.
And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.
Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter!
I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite
twice--perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away
from Peter, and I thought--though perhaps after all it was merely the
faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I
had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might
possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever
it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine
non-interference.
My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes,
struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for
things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was
done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I
wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found
something--wings, or a light, or a singing--that was of the spirit of
the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a
scientist.
At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just
flattered me unconscionably.
"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."
VII
AFRAID
I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband
and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet
and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot
perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June.
Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so
different as we are alike.
On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the
dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to
throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached
from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a
proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed--the
carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the
room--the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following.
Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy
had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is
from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.
Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap
peremptory, confident.
"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door.
Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her
blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore
the mystery and authority of the hour.
"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."
"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth
and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again--a real,
weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."
Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.
"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said
to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I
should think you might--"
But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some
pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,--as if there
were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy
is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not
sufficiently simple to know it for herself.
Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after
all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.
"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the
parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you.
What do you think of that?"
"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use'
to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's
_me_. I feel afraid of you--Allen. You're--differ'nt."
He laughed tenderly, confidently.
"_Boo!_" he said. "Now are you?"
"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."
"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."
"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the
house--the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be
another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the
rug not tacked down."
Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the
snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.
"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's--just us two by ourselves," Allen
said. "_And_ the presents. My!"
"Well, and company," she reminded him, "that's what I want. The girls
in to tea in our own house."
"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.
"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and
things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily.
"They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll
take it to the City"--she gave a little bounce on the skirt box--"and
see a show, a really, truly show."