to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't
ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge.
"_He's_ going after him to-morrow to the city"--and now "he" meant her
husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the
two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid,
ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no
more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the
baby with the egg money--we've saved it for years for when the time
come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd
rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the
clothes."
She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our
friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted,
of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she
turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.
"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little
things I've made."
I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little
woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been
telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not
looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I
lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but
when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the
accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said,
"the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole _mob_ of trees,")
she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as
she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders
and the boots of the woman on the box-seat. It may have been a chance,
but I have always hugged it to me.
My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the
half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor
to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of
over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I
have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I
was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit
there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material
vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this
pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight,
now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain
revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them
otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window
should be sanctioned in its reticences.
Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I
found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the
baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me--they were
simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in
the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them,
buying them from the egg money. I wondered if this secret pastime of
garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must
always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this
occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at
garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are
"pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their
vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real
business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social
workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or
church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great
occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I
perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists,
unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping,
following, following....
"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or
two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the
plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit
by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't
it?"
When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of
security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and
passioning to help, and thousands helping because of the unconscious
spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?
"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the
baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my
neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual,
I went at once to see if something was amiss.
My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks
were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in
her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me
cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her
pretence at breakfast.
"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch.
'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm
glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good
advice."
I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was
waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness
in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple
expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no
breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she
must have endured since the message came.
"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that,
two reasons. One was, it seemed sort of taking too much for granted,
like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other
reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."
I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it
with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with
the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the
curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush
from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a
sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of
"nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it
was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of
white pills.
"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I
housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of
course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there--so white
and a glass cork--don't you think so?"
She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across
her mouth, looking down at the disturbance--so slight!--in the grass
where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each
time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.
"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing
what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they
know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms
it seems as if I could help 'em."
I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first
time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some
employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I
remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best,
waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I
wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost
aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a
funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the
tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like
an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my
neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing
occupation. Why should she not be so?--with all that there is to be
done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a
detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by
doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not
seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that
I would cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself
without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things
done.
"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very
well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born
anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."
My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to
me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her
awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too,
she was really strange to me that day.
"My baby died," she said.
She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true,
but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.
"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this
morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after
him, but _he's_ gone."
"To go after him?" I repeated.
She nodded.
"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the
potter's field and they wouldn't mark--it, and that I couldn't never
tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here.
_He_ didn't want I should go--he thought it'd be too much for me. But I
was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five
o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would
'a' been any different?"
There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different.
But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that
the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would
have none of it.
"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be
worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."
It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I
had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted
most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our
neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card
picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:--
"My baby died."
And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her
heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever
having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so
bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet
the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes--had she told us? Had we
noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape....
All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns
for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she
never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it
personality and to cherish it.
They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many
of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not
regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour
felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than
theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore,
besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who,
that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my
neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and
Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child
was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from
children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I
would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.
"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just
want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along
about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt
less that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and
me look back and know who it was for."
The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still
somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient
uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its
function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of
recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David
Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves
and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes
reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,
SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER
inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that
of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry
two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved
Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!"
Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of
wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great
figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three
flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it, "you can't hardly tell
whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")
But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human,
and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.
We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance--so
slight!--in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands
were filled with garden flowers--Calliope had drawn a little hand cart
laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had
cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.
"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay
out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh,
I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive
to ask the Lord!"
And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,
"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little
Child.
I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have
before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little
baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave.
It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the
cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.
On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward
that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little
coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all,"
my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be
this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country
which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often,
otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.
So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality;
whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and
on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief
so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from
any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the
plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled
nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at
which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his
embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done,
his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was
rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round,"
for which she had long passioned.
"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little Lord Jesus, live Thou
in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June
prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a
pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then
they can go round together," she explained.
When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of
rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down
this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said
something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to
lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child
whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:--
"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west,
"it's there now. It's there now!"
Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the
unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's
whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed
out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.
"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the
way back?"
Miggy looked startled.
"It's supper time," she objected.
Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or a situation, or the
stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to
those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so,
and all the time Peter's face was glowing.
"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will
come in your house to call."
He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour,
and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.
"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an
invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that
little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that
makes sunset be!"
My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might
have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.
"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden,
same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and
had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to
have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't
it?"
But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband,
go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was
fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one
who goes busily quickening the day with a multitude, yes, even with a
confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.
Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.
"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the
same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost _her_. You know ... that
little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."
As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air,
so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never
again be wholly alien to me.
XVIII
AT PETER'S HOUSE
I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch
us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk,
though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did.
Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long,
rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the
porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.
"Rap!" I said to Miggy.
She looked at me in surprise--I have not often commanded her like that.
But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And
I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not
come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face
when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to
remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of
mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and
naïveté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met
Miggy's.
"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. _Come in._"
We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in
that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house.
Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not
know plus what--that is one of those good little in-between things which
we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are
to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of
no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to
houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had
Miggy go within Peter's house,--not as within doors, but as within arms.
We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour--the kind of
man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it.
There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with
neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look
them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a
pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big
hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner wall
was occupied by a map of the state--why does a man so cherish a map of
something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books--what
is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the
floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to
save putting it up in the fall--this business of getting a stove on
rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the
pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice
to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was
nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or
hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.
"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in
summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like
he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."
"Why--" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not
important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it.
Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were
somebody to give it a touch or two.
Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he
explained, would have been the dining room, only he had taken it for
his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him
mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing
than any lonely "I."
"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm
not at the works. Come and let me show you."
So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do
not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of
floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls.
There was a shelf of books--not many, but according to Peter's nature
sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love
us and not be worth while?"--bad enough logic, in all conscience, to
please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so
exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in
general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But
Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments
and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table
Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All
men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With
the linen table cover it was a little different--this Peter's mother had
once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and
looked at it.
"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken,"
she showed him.
"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."
At this she laughed out suddenly with, "_Needle kit!_ What a real
regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"
"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for
you" sticking from the sentence.
On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full
page of weary little figures.
"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy
demanded.
"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except
when I come to see you."
Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.
"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative
surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"
"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as
you have, Miggy--that's one thing."
"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in
your head and you can't get it out."
"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly. "Sit down!" he repeated,
when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."