BLUEBELL MAKES A POEM
In the night Bluebell was wakened by the cherry-boughs scraping her
window--and how they did scrape! The rain was tramping; it beat the
house and roared on the shingles; the pines were making a high,
thrilling noise which she did not know was like the voice of the sea.
All within was so dry and comfortable; all without so muddy and dark.
Yet off in the woods there were sweet smells, and birds’ nests tucked
in forked branches, and the May-apples were rank, and even old rotten
logs crumbling to yellow dust had a pungent odor of their own. What did
the birds do in a storm? Did they turn their tails down like chickens?
And how did the naked birds that were all furry bill and sprawling
limbs like the baby swallows under the shed-eaves, get along?
Father, on his night-ride, was the thread on which these thoughts were
strung. She thought of him first, and he ran through everything else.
Ballie’s firm, quick step was moving on distant roads; the pill-bags
were fastened behind the saddle; father whistled softly between his
teeth; and anxious people looked into the storm for him. It scarcely
occurred to Bluebell to wish him indoors. He and rough weather were
old acquaintances. She had seen him come to the open fire stamping,
the frost in his hair, or take off cloth leggings covered with mud, or
stiff-frozen from the ford. What did he care for summer rain, housed as
he was too, in rubber coat and boots, and on the most sensible horse
in the world! Bluebell decided to ask Liza if she might not put on her
very oldest dress and stand under the eaves where the water ran over in
a constant shower.
But in the morning everything looked so dreary and soaked that she did
not care to do it. Clouds scudded close to the earth; the hill above
the house showed black under its foliage; the elder-flowers by the rock
play-house were beaten to the ground; and hollyhocks in the garden
leaned down as if about to swoon. The cherry-leaves had a higher
polish and intenser green, but little unripe apples strewed the orchard.
Doctor Garde had not come home. Liza said she did not expect him before
night. In very bad weather she had known him to be gone two or three
days. Still, she kept some warm chicken in the old-fashioned Dutch oven
before the fire while she did her baking.
The air was oppressive. But Miss Melissa moved around wrapped in a
thick shawl. Liza took the roses out of her fireplace and started a
warmer color dancing over some sticks. The low-scudding clouds began to
pour again.
Bluebell spent the morning with Miss Calder making doll-clothes, and
wondering if Tildy’s mother let _her_ go to school. Only a few of the
children who lived nearest would be there, for so many had to cross the
numerous bends and turns of the Rocky Fork. They would have to play in
the house if it did not clear before noon, and the tracks of the boys’
bare feet would look so funny on the floor. To-day seemed years removed
from yesterday. This was a bit of dingy autumn thrust through a summer
day. Bluebell enjoyed the dress-making with zest, but she hoped it
would clear.
Rocco had her high chair drawn to the kitchen table, and helped Liza
with the baking. Her tow hair was braided back, the ends turned up and
tied with black thread, and her slim claws as clean as soap and water
could make them. She had Bluebell’s little rolling-pin and baking tins
and Liza’s thimble before her. Liza was making caraway seed-cake; she
watched the baby fondly, giving her dabs of dough which Rocco rolled
out, cut up and placed in her tins. As soon as they were baked she
divided them evenly on two saucers; for Rocco never ate any treat of
which Bluebell did not have exactly half. She had been known to keep a
mellow apple or pear from morning till dusk when Bluebell came home;
smelling it and turning it over wistfully, but waiting its division.
The rain poured while they ate dinner.
“It comes down by bucketfuls,” said Liza. “I do hope Abram will get
round and look after Liza-Robert’s stock. Lambs is so simple, and hers
are always gettin’ into the run.”
“Why doesn’t she let her farm to a tenant?” suggested Miss Calder.
“Well, that’s not the way around here. Abram, he’s her brother-in-law
and my first cousin; he lives about half a mile above us, and he ’tends
to things for her. Liza’s no manager.”
Soon after dinner Miss Melissa lay down for her daily nap. Georgiana
sat on the sitting-room mantel in an incomplete gingham dress, smiling
on the weather with unchanged serenity. Liza went up garret to do a
small “stent” of spinning. She always spun on dismal afternoons when
the needle would lag in sewing. She knit winter stockings for the
family. Bluebell and Rocco followed her, and the wheel could be heard
soon after the children’s feet ceased sounding on the stairs.
When the children’s feet ceased sounding on the stairs, they were in
the garret. It was one big dusky room, extending over the whole house,
with a chasm in the floor through which the stairs came up. At each
side the roof sloped so that even Rocco might knock her head. There
were windows in the gables; and from all the rafters hung dried
peppers, pennyroyal, ears of seed-corn, bags of seed, and sage, and
of dried raspberries, and blackberries, cherries, and peaches, for
in those days the art of canning fruit was not generally known to
housewifery. Liza’s special jams and preserves stood along a system
of shelves, in stone jars, broken-nosed tea-pots and flowered bowls
tied up closely with white cloths. The floor was clean and dustless. A
retired rocking-chair which had lost one rocker in the battle of life,
was settled in one corner where it lived on a pension of the children’s
favor. For right by it was their mother’s old trunk, the black and
white hair worn off it in patches, leaving a tough hide exposed.
In this casket Bluebell kept many of her play-things and all her most
precious books. She had “Emma and Caroline,” a paper-book some three
inches square, a diminutive Mother Goose, several histories, and a
work on geology suitable to advanced students which her father had
brought her, and her school prizes--notable among them a pink-backed
volume of Dr. Watts’s hymns which she had learned by heart. Here also
reposed her last Sunday-school book, which had rather harrowed her
mind; for it was the Memoir of Jane Ann Smith, who caught fire and
burned to death; the picture of Jane Ann running out of the mill door
all on fire, was put in as a lively frontispiece. There were almost no
books for children in those days. Hannah More’s tracts and memoirs of
very pious people constituted the library from which Bluebell and all
the other little Rocky Forkers chose; if it could be called choosing
when the librarian held the backs of an armload of books towards you,
and you might pick out only one at a hazard. Bluebell had found one
delicious story of a little girl whose uncle came and took her away to
India where she had no end of wonderful times. But most of the books
were grown-up, or very serious, or consisted of advice to young English
servants when starting out to service. So Bluebell unfolded from its
wrappings with tremulous delight that real fairy-book, “Tales from
Catland” which Aunt Melissa brought her. It was a book with some long
words in it, but even these were a sonorous pleasure; the Countess
Von Rustenfustenmustencrustenberg, Grandmagnificolowsky, the tall
page, Glumdalkin, the cross cat, Friskarina, the amiable cat. Bluebell
settled into the one-sided rocker, and lived in castles and woods and
palaces, while the rain beat the shingles directly overhead as if it
were playing thousands of small castanets, and Liza’s wheel sang high
or low.
Rocco sat down on the front of a small flax-wheel which worked with a
treadle, and afforded the baby just sitting-room, to watch Liza spin.
The great wheel stood in the centre of the garret; on its long bench
lay a pile of wool-rolls. Liza took hold of the end of a roll, attached
it to the spindle in some mysterious manner, and turned the wheel
around and around and around with a smooth stick which she called
her wheel-pin. The spokes seemed to approach each other, then melted
together into a transparency, the hum rose higher and higher until it
became a musical scream, and Liza stepped back drawing her roll off the
spindle into a long woolly thread. Back and forth she moved, from
the spindle to the gable window; now hurrying up the wheel, and now
letting it sing, as it seemed, away down in the sloping bench which
supported it.
[Illustration: LIZA STEPPED BACK, DRAWING HER ROLL OFF THE SPINDLE INTO
A LONG WOOLLY THREAD.--_Page 134._]
The rain rained on. Bluebell forgot her head-marks. When she had read
two stories and let the Cat-book sink to her knees, her imagination
was so stimulated that she craved half-unconsciously to make a story
herself. But Liza’s wheel put rhythm into her head, and Liza’s presence
mixed the practical with the purely ideal.
For a long time she sat and thought, constrained to form into shape
what she had in her mind; and if the thing itself was simple and the
shape grotesque, many an author since Bluebell will confess to having
given very poor expression to the finest inspiration.
“I believe it’s going to quit raining,” said Liza as a very pale ray
slanted through the window and shone on the point of the spindle.
She pulled out the last roll and stopped her wheel.
“What’s that noise?”
It seemed to be some one knocking perseveringly at the kitchen door.
Liza gave the wheel one more vigorous turn and finished her “stent”
before she started down.
“I expect it’s Abram,” she said. “Don’t let Rocco fall down the stairs,
Bluebell, and don’t play with my spinning.”
“No, ma’am, I won’t.”
Roused from the spell which wheel and book had cast, the children
turned to each other for a romp.
Bluebell paused impressively as she caught the little sister in her
arms, and proceeded to make a confidant of her.
“Honey-dew, sisser’s made a pretty piece!”
“Piece o’ what?”
“Poetry! Like ‘Poor Jane Ray’ and ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’”
Rocco heard these standards of literary excellence mentioned without
any emotion.
“I’ll say it to you.”
“Le’s p’ay,” suggested Rocco instead.
“It’s somethin’ pretty--about Liza,” urged the poet, tasting the first
difficulties of securing a public.
Rocco paused in the mad-career of a tumble and consented to listen.
“See that pretty maiden,”
(“That’s Liza, you know,” explained Bluebell,)
“Spinning in the rain.”
“’Tain’t wainin’,” said Rocco; “it’s twit.”
“It was, though. Now you just listen:
“See that pretty maiden,
Spinning in the rain:
The wheel goes round and round to make
Our stocking-yarn again.
“The wind goes roar and roar,
The wheel roars with its band;
The maiden turns it with a pin
For fear she might hurt her hand.”
“Isn’t that pretty?”
Rocco meditated. The subject of poetry had aroused other thoughts
within her; and the faculty of association carried her on from a hymn
Liza frequently sung to her--
“On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
And cast a wistful eye
On Canaan’s fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie--”
to the family who represented the idea to her. So without making any
comment on Bluebell’s poem, she said decidedly,
“I want to go to Jordan Stormy Banks’s house.”