pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true
that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat
at the table--his table--he looked more than before.
"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and
has no idea what to say about it.
Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly
leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in
her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his
eyes.
"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked--oh, Peter, she looked
like you!"
Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so
glad."
"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy
advanced suddenly.
Peter admitted it gravely. She had.
"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."
There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,--black,
curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the
picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak,
empty, but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a
special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed,
saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was
almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me
pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers
aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated,
especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she
observed.
And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the
village "card size," and gave it to her.
"Guess who," he said.
It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat
dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips,
and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was
resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet
cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason
the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot
negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in
the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to
self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy
was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.
"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's _you_."
I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But
Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently
she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked
at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,
"Well, well, _well_," she said again. "I never thought about that
before. I mean about you. _Then._"
"Would--would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have
it if you do."
"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."
"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son
he'll look something like that. He might, you know."
Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up
at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.
"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."
"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him
to have it."
"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes,
of course you'd want him--"
The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's
face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with
its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.
But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,
for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held
captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by
sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our
sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.
It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began
to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet
clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:--
"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!"
"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window
and let them go on alone.
He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her
hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,
she turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt
about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat--that I
ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine
intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box
Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before
a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.
"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is _that_
where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its
corner--surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living
somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,
and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the
garden.
"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can
sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover--may I?"
Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel
needle-book--he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!--and, his
face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.
"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't
believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."
"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.
"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.
He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing
the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the
longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean
back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of
living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might
never be. And here she was in this room--his room. Peter dropped his
head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an
occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.
Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward
completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling
service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I
think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her
blood. As for Peter--but these little housewifely things which enlighten
a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for
all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.
Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it--needle, red book,
and hand.
"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it
was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.
She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only
for one reason does a man call a woman like that.
"What is it you want?" she said--and her voice was very sweet and very
tired.
"I want more of _you_!" said Peter Cary.
She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.
"I thought it would be everything--your coming here to-day," Peter said.
"I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing,
except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to
think of your leaving me here--shutting the door and being gone. If it
was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the
things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something
big--bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's
like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you
aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you--all of
you--all the time, Miggy, all the time...."
I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose
eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I
was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And
the singing of Little Child began again, like that of a little voice
vagrant in the red west....
"Oh, I can see a playmate there,
Far up in Splendour Town!"
Miggy heard her, and remembered.
"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't--I never could bring us two on
you to support."
Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I
think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand
years earlier in the world's history.
"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want--or do you
want--that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you
for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."
It was the voice of the paramount, compelling spirit, the sovereign
voice of the Family, calling through the wilderness. Peter knew,--this
fine, vital boy seeking his own happiness; he gropingly understood this
mighty thing, and he was trying his best to serve it. And, without
knowing that she knew, Miggy knew too ... and the seal that she knew was
in what was in the sunset. And as far removed from these things as the
sunset itself was all Miggy's cheap cynicism about love and all the
triviality of her criticism of Peter.
Miggy stood motionless, looking at Peter. And then, like an evil spell
which began to work, another presence was in the room....
Somewhile before I had begun to hear the sound, as a faint undercurrent
to consciousness; an unimportant, unpleasant, insisting sound that
somehow interfered. Gradually it had come nearer and had interfered more
and had mingled harshly with the tender treble of Little Child. Now,
from Peter's gate the sound besieged my ears and entered the room and
explained itself to us all--
"My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I _never_ know,
You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh--"
the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air....
I knew what it was, and they knew. At the sound of his father's voice,
drunken, piteous, Peter dropped Miggy's hands and his head went down and
he stood silent, like a smitten thing. My own heart sank, for I knew
what Miggy had felt, and I thought I knew what she would feel now. So
here was another unfulfilled intention, another plan gone astray in an
unperfected order.
Peter had turned somewhat away before he spoke.
"I'll have to go now," he said quietly, "I guess you'll excuse me."
He went toward the kitchen door ashamed, miserable, all the brightness
and vitality gone from him. I am sorry that he did not see Miggy's face
when she lifted it. I saw it, and I could have sung as I looked. Not for
Peter or for Miggy, but for the sake of something greater than they,
something that touched her hand, commanded "Look at me," bade her follow
with us all.
Before Peter reached the door she overtook him, stood before him, put
her hands together for a moment, and then laid one swiftly on his cheek.
"Peter," she said, "that don't make any difference. That don't make any
difference."
No doubt he understood her words, but I think what he understood best
was her hand on his cheek. He caught her shoulders and looked and
looked....
"Honest--honest, don't it?" he searched her.
You would not have said that her answer to that was wholly direct. She
only let fall her hand from his cheek to his shoulder, and,
"Peter," she said, "_is it like this_?"
"Yes," he said simply, "it's like this."
And then what she said was ever so slightly muffled, as if at last she
had dropped her head in that sweet confusion which she had never seemed
to know; as if at last she was looking at Peter as if he _was_ Peter.
"Then I don't ever want to be any place where you aren't," she told him.
"Miggy!" Peter cried, "take care what you say. Remember--he'd live with
us."
She made her three little nods.
"So he will," she answered, "so he will. He--and my little sister--and
all of us."
Peter's answer was a shout.
"Say it out!" he cried, "say you will. Miggy! I've _got_ to hear you say
it out!"
"Peter, Peter," she said, "I want to marry you."
He took her in his arms and in the room was the glory upon glory of the
west, a thing of wings and doors ajar. And strong as the light, there
prevailed about them the soul of the Family, that distributes burdens,
shares responsibilities, accepts what is and what is to come. Its voice
was in the voice of Little Child singing in the garden, and of old Cary
babbling at the gate. Its heart was the need of Peter and Miggy, each
for the other. I saw in their faces the fine freedoms of the sunset,
that sunset where Miggy and Little Child and I had agreed that a certain
spirit lives. And it did but tally with the momentous utterance of these
things and of the evening when Miggy spoke again.
"Go now--you go to him," she said, "we'll wait. And--Peter--when you
come back, I want to see everything in the room again."
XIX
THE CUSTODIAN
When the river is low, a broad, flat stone lying a little way from shore
at the foot of our lawn becomes an instrument of music. In the day it
plays now a rhapsody of sun, now a nocturne of cloud, now the last
concerto, Opus Eternal. In the night it becomes a little friendly
murmur, a cradle song, slumber spell, neighbour to the Dark, the alien
Dark who very likely grows lonely, being the silent sister, whereas the
Light goes on blithely companioned of us all. But if I were the Dark and
owned the stars, and the potion which quickens conscience, and the sense
of the great Spirit brooding, brooding, I do not know that I would
exchange and be the Light. Still, the Light has rainbows and toil and
the sun and laughter.... After all, it is best to be a human being and
to have both Light and Darkness for one's own. And it is concerning this
conclusion that the river plays on its instrument of music, this shallow
river
"--to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals."
I have heard our bank cat-birds in the willows sing madrigals to the
stone-music until I wanted to be one of them--cat-bird, madrigal,
shallows, or anything similar. But the human is perhaps what all these
are striving to express, and so I have been granted wish within wish,
and life is very good.
Life was very good this summer afternoon when half the village gathered
on our lawn above the singing stone, at Miggy's and Peter's
"Announcement Supper." To be sure, all Friendship Village had for
several days had the news and could even tell you when the betrothal
took place and where; but the two were not yet engaged, as Miggy would
have said, "out loud."
"What _is_ engaged?" asked Little Child, who was the first of my guests
to arrive, and came bringing an offering of infinitesimal flowers which
she finds in the grass where I think that they bloom for no one else.
"It means that people love each other very much--" I began, and got no
further.
"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To
everybody."
Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a
dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have
taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little
voice went among the charmed words, something happened which surely
must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an
accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly
concluded:--
"'She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and what's
The difference to me!'"
But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.
I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on
which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a
company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so
that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the
pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner
of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw
these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with
delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say,
partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There
came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she
carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming
stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office
hall supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I
donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you
know, that's the worst--knowin' that the little thing never saw me and
can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it
chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the
Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out
of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle
Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great
sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she
observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes
correct--especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I
always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or
whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and
upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true
mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief
an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not
returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all
been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour
'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and
all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what
she was doing and she knew that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one
after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped
the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.
We all had our sewing--even I have become pleasantly contaminated and
have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to
elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled
ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for
sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes
had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen
before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new
waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little
Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth
and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf
children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches
feign old womanhood.
"Aunt Effie is sick," Little Child was telling Mis' Toplady; "she is
sick from her hair to her slippers."
I had a plan for Little Child and for us all; that after supper she
should have leaves in her hair and on her shoulders and should dance on
the singing stone in the river. And Miggy, whose shy independence is now
become all shyness, was in the house, weaving the leaves, and had not
yet appeared at her party at all.
Then one of those charming things happened which surely have a kind of
life of their own and wake the hour to singing, as if an event were a
river stone, and more, round which all manner of faint music may be set
stirring.
"Havin' a party when I ain't lookin'!" cried somebody. "My, my. I don't
b'lieve a word of what's name--this evolution business. I bet you
anything heaven is just _gettin' back_."
And there was Calliope, in her round straw hat and tan ulster, who in
response to my card had hastened her imminent return.
"Yes," she said, when we had greeted her and put her in a chair under
the mulberry tree, "my relation got well. At least, she ain't sick
enough to be cross, so 'most anybody could take care of her now."
Calliope laughed and leaned back and shut her eyes.
"Land, land," she said, "I got so much to tell you about I don't know
where to begin. It's all about one thing, too--somethin' I've found
out."
Mis' Amanda Toplady drew a great breath and let fall her work and looked
round at us all.
"Goodness," she said, "ain't it comfortable--us all settin' here
together, nobody's leg broke, nobody's house on fire, nor none of us
dead?"
"'Us all settin' here together,'" Calliope repeated, suddenly grave
amid our laughter, "that's part of what I'm comin' to. I wonder," she
said to us, "how you folks have always thought of the City? Up till I
went there to stay this while I always thought of it as--well, as the
City an' not so much as folks at all. The City always meant to me big
crowds on the streets--hurryin', hurryin', eatin', eatin', and not
payin' much attention to anything. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
poor an' lookin' in bakery windows. One whole batch of 'em I knew was
rich an' sayin' there has to be these distinctions. And some more I knew
was good--I always see 'em, like a pretty lady, stoopin' over, givin'.
And some more I knew was wicked an' I always thought of them climbin' in
windows. And then there was the little bit o' batch that knows the
things I want to know an' talks like I'd like to talk an' that I'd
wanted an' wanted to go up to the City an' get with.
"Well, then I went. An' the first thing, I see my relative wa'n't rich
nor poor nor bad nor good nor--the way I mean. Nor her friends that come
to see her, they wan't either. The ones I took for rich talked economy,
an' the ones I thought was poor spent money, an' the good ones gossiped,
an' they all jabbered about music and pictures that I thought you
couldn't talk about unless you knew the 'way-inside-o'-things, like
they didn't know. The kinds seemed all mixed up, and all of 'em far away
an' formal, like--oh, like the books in a library when you can't think
up one to draw out. I couldn't seem to get near to anything.
"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars
an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I
had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of
anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at
'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed
black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an'
there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the
theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair
an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me
and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of
me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She
was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a
good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It
come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the
_otherest_ a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up.