'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."
That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because
he had taken her hand.
"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went
she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too--like it
was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks
outside much, only some that don't shake hands, 'count of seemin'
ashamed to."
"I know," said Nicholas.
"Sometimes," she went on, "folks come here an' walk in to see _her_ an'
they don't shake. Ain't it funny--when folks can an' don't? When they
come from the city to-morrow, the whole house'll shake hands, but me.
Once I went to prayer-meetin' an' I hung around waitin' to see if
somebody wouldn't. But they didn't--any of 'em. It was rainin' outside
an' I guess they thought I come with somebody's rubbers."
Nicholas looked at her a little fearfully. It had seemed to him that in
a great world of light he had always moved in a little hollow of
darkness and detachment. Were there, then, other hollows like that?
Places to which outstretched hands never penetrate? A great
understanding possessed him, and he burst out in an effort to express
it.
"You're a funny girl," he said.
She flushed, and suddenly lifted one hand and looked at it. Nicholas
watched her now intently. She studied the back of her hand, turned it,
and sat absorbedly examining her little thumb. And Nicholas felt a
sudden sense of understanding, of gladness that he understood. As he
felt when he was afraid and wretched, so Elfa was feeling now.
He leaned toward her.
"Don't feel afraid," he said gently.
She shook her head.
"I don't," she said; "I don't, truly. I guess that's why I stayed here
now. She won't be back till ten--I ought to have said so before.
You--you won't want to wait so long."
He rose at once. And now, being at his ease, his head was erect, his
arms naturally fallen, his face as confident and as occupied by his
spirit as when he lay alone in the meadows.
"Well, sir," he said, "let's shake hands again!"
She gave him her hand and, in their peculiarly winning upward look, her
eyes--blue, wide, watchful, with that brooding mother watchfulness of
some women, even in youth. And her hand met his in the clasp which is
born of the simple, human longing of kind for kind.
"Good-by," she answered his good-by, and they both laughed a little in a
shyness which was a way of delight.
In the days to follow there flowed in the boy's veins a tide of novel
sweetness. And now his thoughts eluded one another and made no chain, so
that when he tried to remember what, on that first evening, the New Lady
and he had talked about, there came only a kind of pleasure, but it had
no name. Everything that he had to do pressed upon him, and when he
could get time he was away to the meadow, looking down on the chimneys
of that house, and swept by a current that was like a singing. And
always, always it was as if some one were with him.
There came a night when he could no longer bear it, when his wish took
him to itself and carried him with it. Those summer dusks, warm yellow
with their moon and still odorous of spring, were hard to endure alone.
Since the evening with her, Nicholas had not seen the New Lady save
when, not seeing him, she had driven past in a phaëton. At the sight of
her, and once at the sight of Elfa from that house, a faintness had
seized him, so that he had wondered at himself for some one else, and
then with a poignancy that was new pain, new joy, the new life, had
rejoiced that he was himself. So, when he could no longer bear it, he
took his evening way toward the row of poplars, regretting the moonlight
lest by it they should see him coming. And to-night he had with him no
verses, but only his longing heart.
He had no intimation of the guests, for the windows at that house were
always brightly lighted, and until he was within the screened veranda
the sound of voices did not reach him. Then from the rooms there came a
babel of soft speech and laughter, and a touch of chords; and when he
would have incontinently retreated, the New Lady crossed the hall and
saw him.
She came to the doorway and greeted him, and Nicholas looked up in the
choking discomfort of sudden fear. She was in a gown that was like her
needlework, mysteriously fashioned and intricate with shining things
which made her infinitely remote. The incomparable little hands were
quite covered with jewels. It was as if he had come to see a spirit and
had met a woman.
"How good of you to come again," she said. "Come, I want my friends to
meet you."
Her friends! That quick crossing of words within there, then, meant the
presence of her friends from the city.
"I couldn't! I came for a book--I'll get it some other time. I've got to
go now!" Nicholas said.
Then, "Bettina--Bettina!" some one called from within, and a man
appeared in the hallway, smiled at sight of the New Lady, dropped his
glass at sight of Nicholas, bowed, turned away--oh, how should he know
that her name was Bettina when Nicholas had not known!
This time he did not say good night at all. This time he did not look at
his great hand, which was trembling, but he got away, mumbling
something, his retreat graciously covered by the New Lady's light words.
And, the sooner to be gone and out of the moonlight that would let them
see him go, he struck blindly into the path that led to the side gate of
the garden. The mortification that chains spirit to flesh and tortures
both held him and tortured him. For a breath he imagined himself up
there among them all, his hands holding his hat, imagined having to
shake hands with them: and somehow this way of fellowship, this meeting
of hands outstretched for hands, seemed, with them, the supreme ordeal,
the true symbol of his alien state from them and from the New Lady. No
doubt she understood him, but for the first time Nicholas saw that this
is not enough. For the first time he saw that she was as far away from
him as were the others. How easy, Nicholas thought piteously, those
people in her house all found it to act the way they wanted to! Their
hands must be like her hands....
He got through the garden and to the side gate. And now the old
loneliness was twofold upon him because he had known what it is to reach
from the dark toward the light; yet when he saw that at the gate some
one was standing, he halted in his old impulse to be on guard, hunted by
the fear that this would be somebody alien to him. Then he saw that it
was no one from another star, but Elfa.
"Oh...." he said, and that, too, was what she said, but he did not hear.
Not from another star she came, but from the deep of the world where
Nicholas felt himself alone.
"I--was just going away," he explained.
For assent she stepped a little back, saying nothing. But when Nicholas
would have passed her it was as if the immemorial loneliness and the
seeking of forgotten men innumerable stirred within him in the ache of
his heart, in the mere desperate wish to go to somebody, to be with
somebody, to have somebody by the hand.
He turned upon Elfa almost savagely.
"Shake hands!" he said.
Obediently she put out her hand, which of itself stayed ever so briefly,
within his. He held it, feeling himself crushing it, clinging to it,
being possessed by it. Her hand was, like his, rough from its work, and
it was something alive, something human, something that answered. And
instantly it was not Elfa alone who was there companioning him, but the
dark was quick with presences, besieging him, letting him know that no
one alive is alone, that he was somehow one of a comrade company,
within, without, encompassing. And the boy was caught up by the sweet
will outside his own will and he never knew how it was that he had Elfa
in his arms.
"Come here. Come here...." he said.
To Elfa, in her loneliness threaded by its own dream, the moment,
exquisite and welcome as it was, was yet as natural as her own single
being. But to the boy it was not yet the old miracle of one world built
from another. It was only the answer to the groping of hands for hands,
the mere human call to be companioned. And the need to reassure her came
upon him like the mantle of an elder time.
"Don't feel afraid," he said.
Her eyes gave him their winning upward look, and it was as if their
mother watchfulness answered him gravely:--
"I don't. I don't, truly."
And at this she laughed a little, so that he joined her; and their
laughter together was a new delight.
Across the adjoining lawn Nicholas could see in the moonlight the moving
figure of the big deacon, a Light Gown or two attending. A sudden
surprising sense of safety from them overswept the boy. What if they did
come that way! What, he even thought, if those people in the house were
to come by? Somehow, the little hollow of dark in which he had always
walked in the midst of light was as light as the rest of the world, and
he was not afraid. And all this because Elfa did not stir in his arms,
but was still, as if they were her harbour. And then Nicholas knew what
they both meant.
"Elfa!" he cried, "do you...?"
"I guess I must...." she said, and knew no way to finish that.
"Love me?" said Nicholas, bold as a lion.
"I meant that too," Elfa said.
Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy
stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world
is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another,
stretching out their hands....
"Why, it was _you_ I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.
XIII
HOUSEHOLDRY
"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these
summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or
we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in
excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that.
"In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the
hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces
outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call
across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down
Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional
evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the
Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of
over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted
by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the
tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the
open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to
husk, straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This
seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous
Garde, or on the grounds of old châteaux where they embroidered or wound
worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our
spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of
gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I
like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as
for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!
It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's
dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly
be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching
or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go
to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New
Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a
kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.
At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the
ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is
one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not
decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's
very being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me,
and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery
were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were
passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with
me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little
twist of mouth and lifting of brow.
"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he
said.
The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the
dooryard--these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at
their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another
no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something
that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched
backward. The door stood ajar--no doubt for the completion of this
transaction--and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push
was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For
a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.
"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and
wait for me--will you?"
To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler of detached
expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing
of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper
curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the
ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we
recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will
you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and
hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger,
that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent,
till it goes away.
In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the
fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and
farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her
sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken
arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The
long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar
bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an
obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of
the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral
wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And
on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart,
asleep.
At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped
and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any
of the things a woman might have said, Peter said _"Well...._" with a
tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's
voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that
the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or
the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade;
and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the
ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of
the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy
had been there to hear.
"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.
"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's
coat collar.
"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.
"Well, _I_ will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.
Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there
stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save
that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling
you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "_they've_ each got a kiddie
or so."
Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise," she said in the doorway,
and stood there in a sheer white frock--a frock which said nothing to
make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little
rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had
made herself--she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it
before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women
boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not
begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things.
To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which
can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so
little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste
for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the
village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that
this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft
cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.
"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a
sort of superlative of her.
"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not
coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom
lord?
You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing which may be said by the
throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like
a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.
"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of
paper. What _are_ you doing down there, Peter?"
He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he
held.
"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."
Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And
Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.
"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet
authority. "I'll put her where you want her."
"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime,
but I hate to take her up there."
"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a
fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."
So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains,
got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the
table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an
unfinished sleeve and went to sleep again. And when Miggy came down,
she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the
table and held out her arms.
"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd
spread her up a bed there on the couch."
"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I
may, I'll write that here while you undress her."
"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover
of the big Bible. And the ink--I guess there's some in the bottle--is on
top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought
to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one
there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."
I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and
Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child
began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of
fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood,
be just a baby again.
"I--_won't_--go--bed," she said.
"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your
face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry
to be dreamed."
"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' _want_ those
dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"
"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a
little fever."
Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned,
and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath
her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began,
millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the
woman.
"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?"
he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a
moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to
show that he knew about such things.
"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The
other arm. Straighten elbow."
"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She
was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a
hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' _all_ my clothes. I
won't go bed if you don't."
Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she
parried.
"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded Little Child, opening
her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have
no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."
At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some
argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all
the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears
were near.
"_Don't_ curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe.
"Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."
Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and--
"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I _want_ to curl 'em
up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.
"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do
her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and
tear me off a strip of that white lining there."
"Yes, _I'll_ have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that
is so becunning to me."
But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from
the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at
Peter helplessly.
"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at
large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the
hollow of his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and
all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.
I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope
and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them--those three who of all
the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his
eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could
he?--and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look
all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that
fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead
of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching
of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I
want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness
and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred,
Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that
got struck with a wagon and went Ki--yi--ki--yi--_ad infinitum_, and
Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender
abstraction.
"How dark her hair is growing," she said.
"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on
the edges. They're like yours, too."
"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair,
Peter, if _only_ it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."
"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it
stay down. But it won't."
"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.
"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you
wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."
"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively.
"Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"
He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he
replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy--do you do this
every night?"
"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to
bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she _may_ die
before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she
hasn't said her prayer yet, either."
"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.
"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't
say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that
mother waits to hear her...."
Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall--one of
those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that
the subject is dead.
"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.