head a little, Peter."
"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."
And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said
Miggy at the same time.
And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it
might concern.
"Kiss _me_?" said Little Child. "I won't be."
"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.
"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."
Peter looked up in Miggy's face.
"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."
He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his
shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink,
upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for
Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they
waited for the little sleepy voice.
It came with disconcerting promptness.
"Now--I--lay--me--down--to--sleep--for--Jesus'--sake--Amen," prayed
Little Child in one breath.
"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on
"sweet." "Say it right, dear."
"Now I lay me--is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.
"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy
coaxed.
"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might
die before morning."
So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth,
and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close
to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.
"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I
should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless
to-night?" said Little Child.
"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.
"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart
and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man
that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have
ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake,
Amen."
Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did
not move.
"And bless Peter," Miggy said.
"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."
Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was
glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he
said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the
quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow
that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.
"You lay her down," she said.
Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over
the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched
the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had
rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently
than he had ever done anything.
"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and
now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded
me, drowsily.
I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio?
But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for
the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy
had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something
that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:--
"I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down;
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town!"
Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought
that in the darkness were many gentle presences--Little Child's tender
breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that
other--"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.
Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but
Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and
on the porch--which seemed not yet to have escaped--she told us about
having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While
Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with
Miggy.
"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"
"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.
"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.
She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.
"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny
not to bless him?"
"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.
Miggy laughed once more--I had never seen her in so tender and feminine
a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I
cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.
"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said.
"He--couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him
when he got home? I never could--I never could...."
By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the
sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front
doors--as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home
and you are not."
Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.
"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their
prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty
Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade--they ain't good for a thing in
the cannery. And yet they know...."
XIV
POSTMARKS
Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so
many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.
"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church
chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word
about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."
To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As
when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to
send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be
read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of
first examining it, and so delivered aloud:--
"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.
"See Abigail about enough forks for her table.
"Look around for my rubbers.
"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the
agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis'
Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the
forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.
Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there
where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an'
no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for
some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not
certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a
returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of
familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.
It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August
Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday
night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with
her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the
pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste,
and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter,
superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had
asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me
about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.
"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one
o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has
ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw
collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is
Bombay, India."
At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed
deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said
to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin'
for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's,
an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")
"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here--the
kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account,
but Jem deserved it. He knew all there was _to_ know, an' yet he thought
we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he
kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many
of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went
off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an'
then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,--sincere, though no
crape,--an' missed him enormous.
"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's--that was when he was postmaster
first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem
Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he
didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the
spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three
years on end, till we got word Jem was dead--the very week o' the
Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though,
rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was
held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was
twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what
you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them
lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.
"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster
Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know
the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads,
an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I
sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it
without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody
in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an'
hankered--like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she
gets her new hat, sometimes, without a soul knowin' she's thinkin'
'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to
that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around,
an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it
an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you
ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from
November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about
'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would
have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the
equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis'
Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words
an' rilly gettin' to a landin':--
"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much
it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will
die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An'
one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands--big
spiky leaves pointin' into the blue sky _like fury_. 'Seems if I could
do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs
an' float me up an' off.'
"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all
felt the same way. I think most North folks do--like they was cocoanuts
an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis'
Toplady's idee when it come--which is the most any idee can expect:--
"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary
Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I
really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I
smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in
missions,' says she.
"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to
draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an'
do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the
president--that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend
on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister
that then was to ask him what to take up.
"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it
you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?'
he asks, bright.
"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him
frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country
where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'
"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep--I know it seemed to me as if he knew
more about what we wanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some
ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle
labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,'
an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't
labelled at all.
"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of
us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We
took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that
after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never
feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour
shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an'
smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most
always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When
All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an'
not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it
talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what
a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same
way, too--though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter--I always
did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that
I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the
minister give out a text that had geography in it, like the Red Sea, or
Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign
Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other,
without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just
what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at
places where you didn't know there was such a place.
"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign
Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent
Tropical Fête, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.
"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose
we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an'
spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An'
the winter is the time to give a tropic fête, when folks are thinkin'
about warm things natural.'
"We voted to hev the fête to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to
carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive--figs an' dates an'
bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for
souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an'
everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas
an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with
an elephant crocheted in the tidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always
crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the fête but a letter
from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead
almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should
sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for
'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.
"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't,
you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the
size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an'
then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true
interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical Fête was no
more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is
going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said
we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered
with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin'
would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant.
'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up.
An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes
at a time.'
"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things--the two
trunks an' the sealed box--unsight, unseen, on the day before the Fête
was to be. Only one thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen'
business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was
inside was all showin'.
"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was
to her house finishin' up the decorations for the Fête so's to leave the
last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to
the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two
trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'.
An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain
as plain, was _letters_. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters
laid in loose--they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin'
mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know
the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far
Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on,
appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.
"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the
store--travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was
hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to.
This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers
here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we
thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private
Friendship Village sale that didn't concern nobody else but one, an'
him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a
bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to
Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis'
Sykes says sharp to her husband:--
"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'
"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters
on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,'
Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't
been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No
differ'nce!'--Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get
him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm
goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the
things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was
snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she
kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for
any woman to face.
"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the
Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set
down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I
donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than
a wordin'. _Letters_--bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin' known
about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.
"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein'
postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I
know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free
Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public
Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,'
says she, grievin'.
"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady--I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a
big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet
an' sincere an' dreamy--'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live
in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think
these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the
mornin'--an' sometimes get one that same afternoon--_knows_ about
letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when
he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without
what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle
that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take
'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or
your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave
it--an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt, an' poke
your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the
post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there
in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up
in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'
"We all knew this is so--every one of us.
"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says
Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a
time--I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil
inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our
house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it
suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes
I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to
get it.'
"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has
been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters,
I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I
can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new
dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some,
when I didn't mean true--just to get the letters back. That don't seem
to me rill honest.'
"An' then I owned up.
"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the
clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But
he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love
letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.
"An' there was all that hundred letters or so--letters that somebody had
put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved
'em--there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read,
includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.
"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed
on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished
up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave
their work an' come down again next mornin'--men-folks can always get
along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.
"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are,
settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in
Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I
ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard
of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the
Tropical Fête to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'
"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' says Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it
strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places.
I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means
about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'