up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I
don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the
angels don't come back--because they know everything, and they know what
a lot of extra work they'd make us?"
In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity
of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has
no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the
love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of
that one who is "not quite her sister"--the little vague Margaret. And
this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven,
this consciousness.
I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in the afternoon. Sometimes
I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no
wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done
so, the word must have grown of its own will--perhaps it did come to
life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it
could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John
Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about
nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every
one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on
earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own.
Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,--all
these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder
"undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock
in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say
it over--undern, undern, undern,--to be heavenly drowsy with summer
afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word
where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden
Wing:--
"Undern cometh after noon,
Golden Wings will be here soon...."
One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to
go on with it all down the page.
I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet
the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself
aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment
of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up
and look the room in the face, one may catch its _other_ expression, the
expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this
look in the village and an air of
Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on
holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two
days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village
will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet
undern--though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I
am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings
now--Miggy being willing--I work, morning in the true democracy being
the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more
specialized forms of service _and_ a little rest; the evening for
delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village
accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming
on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a
kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in
the cool of the day. But usually my division of time is the general
division, save that--as in the true democracy--service is not always
recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet
rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar,
and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs,"
and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight
takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias
is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant
self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it
not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?
Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor--who rings the Catholic
bell and is interested in celluloid--and who my neighbour had told me
would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I
had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem
or two over his name--I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of
a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover
its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours.
My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the
pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where
two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do
and the boy seemed to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely
in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work
and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If
I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families
among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not
come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would
welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one
chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same
difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my
motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to
whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in
town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and
enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying
to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a
companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!
I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady
is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been
drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest
another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say
in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think the
people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like
May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the
crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have
never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she
should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone.
When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says
"_And back!_" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells
a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot
triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have
not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it
before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its
wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also,
she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the
sky--and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best.
There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like
to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the
station and I was rambling on about undern.
The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.
"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."
It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best
to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of
"Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream
puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children,
purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the
tea-room or the café or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any
chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out
poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe
idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded,
engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a
cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the
thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to
distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the
village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my
oriole--a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an
hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a
morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of
currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and
stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would
accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit
folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if they remembered
nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little
different.
"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven
straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."
That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives
them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture
and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks
and ten-inch high oak trees.
"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next
meadow. If it _is_ a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."
It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and
purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as
garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were
beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say,
but with finger on lip--as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be.
The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there
in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in
the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened--that one
day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and
become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret
was the spirit. But then the presence of the New Lady always sets me
wondering things like this.
"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that
happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it
is June."
"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that
we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.
"This way," she said--and added softly, as one who would not revive a
sadness, her own idea of the matter.
"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go
Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still
She moved among her emblems on the hill
Touching away their burden of old snow.
Was it on some great down where long winds flow
That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill
The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil
Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?
"Oh, not as other moments did she die,
That woman-season, outlined like a rose.
Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough
The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,
Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;
But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"
The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in
doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.
And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and
the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward
in the lush grass.
I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and
she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and,
as he looked up, at his pallor.
"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly
pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter
only to hear her.
Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed,
looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a
frame and left the rest of the picture behind.
"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.
The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more
captivating than had been her late alarm.
"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it,
_best_?"
I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so
simply, and he answered, chord for chord.
"I guess--I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is,"
he said.
"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so
do I."
We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for
the first time.
As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along
her own thought and shook her head.
"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But
most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"
We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the
outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by.
Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with
you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while
other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not
let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day
at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.
It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne
Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended
not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette
due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this
I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest
how friendly we all are. And some laid down the hose and came to the
sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.
Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
and my neighbour.
"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously
to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an'
then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"
And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:--
"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that
I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough
they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the
cemetery?"
I said that we had not been there yet, and,
"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis'
Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper,
would you?"
My neighbour--bless her!--had on a black wool dress to do honour to my
guest.
"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said
cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I
guess everybody likes extra work of _this_ kind."
And as we drove away:--
"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a
good breakfast."
When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.
"Spring didn't die," she said--as Little Child had said. "Spring knew
how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."
Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not
to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed
to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is
lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had
smiled at Peter's father or--at any one, or who did not see the village
as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me
that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.
XII
THE WAY THE WORLD IS
Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought
out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a
supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer
of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the
freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own
had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had
stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as
at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness
which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.
"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know
where I am staying?"
Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known
anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night,
arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he
was once under the poplars, he did not know what way to look. To seem
to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out
across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which
held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up
the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand--near, and then
a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly
studying his thumb.
From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table,
and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New
Lady came toward him.
"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."
With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and
gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her
hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own
hand.
"I hated to come like everything," he said.
At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and
motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.
"As much as that!" she observed.
"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded
it--like sixty. I--I can't explain...." he stumbled.
"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a
little bell.
She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to
her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her,
trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound
of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this,
wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as
within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver
bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.
He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He
heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and
capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which
his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool
tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of
suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the
table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own
glass, was talking to him.
"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood
grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands
the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when
they get there is it the country they want at all? No, it is the
country sports, the country home,--everything but the real country. They
play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time,
put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home
leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid
so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming
people out here who will do the same thing."
So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It
seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he,
too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the
self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him,
his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped
thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had
dared to bring.
Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his
need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands,
so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien
to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And
when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell
to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he
thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the
difference in their hands.
In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this
he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying,
because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not
interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she
said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she
said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him.
How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only
something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors,
and take his leave.
Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there
arrived those whose garden adjoined,--the big, obvious, self-important
deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came
showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village.
And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet
them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by,
and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter
among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her
hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three
Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering
minuet.
And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen
before--blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide--and a fresh, friendly little
face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And
the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably
held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the
New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its
strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment
like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the
need.
"Good night," she said, trembling.
"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.
"Oh, _good night_!" burst from the boy as he fled away.
It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was
once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had
the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if
potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.
The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little
heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the
chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable
that she should be away. To-night he had meant to have the courage to
leave with her his verses.
On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the
texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the
lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it
lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some
way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with
her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence.
When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he
stood before her--the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized
upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified
recollection, and looked away and up.
His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.
"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.
"Why?" she asked.
"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.
"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."
He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first
time.
"_Cried?_" he repeated.
"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.
He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands
idle on her apron.
"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think--"
But he had not thought of her at all.