girls usually did say “how de do.” It was only in a kind of
unconscious deference to her own appearance that I had not done so. She
was unkempt and ragged--her sleeve was torn from cuff to elbow.
“What you doing here?” I inquired, not averse to breaking the business
of calling by a bit of gossip.
At this she did for the third time what I had been vaguely conscious
of her having done: She glanced over her shoulder toward a corner of
the yard which the piled wood concealed from me. I stepped forward and
looked there.
On an end of wood-pile which we children had pulled down so as to
make a slope to ascend its heights, a man was sitting. His head and
shoulders were drooping, his legs were relaxed, and his hands were
hanging loose, as if they were heavy. His eyes were closed and his lips
were parted, yet about the face, with its fair hair and beard, there
was something singularly attractive and gentle. He looked like a man
who would tell you a story.
“Who’s he?” I asked, and involuntarily I whispered.
The girl began backing a little away from me, her eyes on my face, her
finger on her lips.
“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s--resting.”
I had never heard of a man resting in the daytime. Save, perhaps, on
Sunday afternoons, this was no true function of men. I longed to look
at the man and understand better, but something in the little girl’s
manner forbade me. I looked perplexedly after her. Then I peered round
the fence post and saw my Mother standing under a tree, waiting for
me. She beckoned. I took one more look inside the fence, and I saw the
little girl sit down beside the sleeping man and fold her hands. The
afternoon sun smote across the long wood yard, with its mysterious
rooms made by the piling of the cords. It seemed impossible that this
strange, still place, with its thick carpet of sawdust and its moist
odours, should belong at all to the commonplace little street. And the
two strange occupants gave the last touch to its enchantment.
I ran to overtake Mother, and I tried to tell her something of what I
had seen. But some way my words gave nothing of the air of the place
and of the two who waited there for something that I could not guess.
Already I knew this about words--that they were all very well for
_saying_ a thing, but seldom for letting anybody _taste_ what you were
talking about.
I did not give up trying to tell it until we passed the Rodmans’.
From the direction of their high-board fence I heard voices. Margaret
Amelia and Betty and Delia and Calista were engaged in writing on the
weathered boards of the fence with willows dipped in the clear-flowing
gutter stream.
“Got it done?” I called mysteriously.
They turned, shaking their heads.
“It was all melted,” they replied. “We couldn’t find another bit.”
“Oh, well,” I cried, “you come on over after supper. I’ve got something
to tell you.”
“Something to tell you” would, of course, bring anybody anywhere.
After supper they all came “over.” It was that hour which only village
children know--that last bright daylight of slanting sun and driven
cows tinkling homeward; of front-doors standing open and neighbours
calling to one another across the streets, and the sky warm in the
quiet surface of some little water from whose bridge lads are tossing
stones or hanging bare-footed from the timbers. We withdrew past the
family, sitting on the side-porch, to the garden, where the sun was
still golden on the tops of the maples.
“Mother says,” I began importantly, “that she thinks Grandma Bard has
a hard time to get along. Well, you know our snow? Well, you know you
said you couldn’t find any more to bury? Well, why don’t we dig up
ours, right now, and sell it and give the money to Grandma Bard?”
I must have touched some answering chord. Looking back, I cannot
believe that this was wholly Grandma Bard. Could it be that the others
had wanted to dig it up, independent of my suggestion? For there was
not one dissenting voice.
The occasion seemed to warrant the best dishes. I brought out six china
plates and six spoons. These would be used for serving my own family,
while the others took the two cans and ran home with them to their
families.
We dug rapidly now, the earth being still soft. To our surprise, the
tops of the tins were located much nearer to the surface than we had
supposed after our efforts of the morning to reach a great depth. The
snow in which we had packed the cans had disappeared, but we made
nothing of that. We drew out the cans, had off their tops, and gazed
distressfully down into clear water.
“It went and melted!” said Calista, resentfully.
In a way, she regarded it as her personal failure, since the ceremony
had been her suggestion in the first place.
“Never mind, Calista,” we said, “you didn’t know.”
Calista freely summed up her impressions.
“How _mean_!” she said.
We gravely gathered up the china plates and turned toward the
house--and now I was possessed of a really accountable desire to get
the plates back in their places as quickly as possible.
On the way a thought struck us simultaneously. Poor Grandma Bard!
“Let’s all go to see her to-morrow anyhow,” I suggested--largely, I am
afraid, because the memory of my entertainment there was still fresh in
my mind.
When, after a little while, we came round the house where the older
ones were sitting, and heard them discussing uninteresting affairs,
we regarded them with real sympathy. They had so narrowly missed
something so vastly, absorbingly interesting.
From Delia’s room a voice came calling as, at intervals, other voices
were heard calling other names throughout the neighbourhood--they were
at one with the tinkle of the bells and the far-off yodel of the boys.
“Delia!”
“Good night,” said Delia, briefly, and vanished without warning, as at
the sound of any other taps. Soon after, the others also disappeared;
and I crept up on the porch and lay down in the hammock.
“What’s she been doing _now_?” somebody instantly asked me.
For a moment I thought of telling; but not seriously.
Evidently they had not expected an answer, for they went on talking.
“... yes, I had looked forward to it for a long while. Of course we had
all counted on it. It was a great disappointment.”
Somewhere in me the words echoed a familiar and recent emotion. So!
They too had their disappointments ... even as we. Of course whatever
this was could have been nothing like losing a fortune in melted snow.
Still, I felt a new sympathy.
Mother turned to me.
“We are going to ask Grandma Bard to come to live with us,” she said.
“Will you like that?”
I sat up in the hammock. “All the time?” I joyfully inquired.
“For the rest of the time,” Mother said soberly. “It seems as if one
ought to take a child,” she added to the others, “when one takes
anybody....”
“Still,” said father, “till we get in our heads something of what the
state owes to old folks, there’s nobody but us to do its work....”
I hardly heard them. To make this come true at one stroke! Even to be
able to adopt a child! How easily they could do things, these grown-up
ones; and how magnificently they acted as if it were nothing at all ...
like the giants planting city-seed and watching cities grow to the size
and shape of giants’ flower beds....
They went on talking. Some of the things that they said we might have
said ourselves. In some ways they were not so very different from us.
Yet think what they could accomplish.
Watching them and listening, there in the April twilight, I began to
understand. It was not only that they could have their own way. But for
the sake of things that we had never yet so much as guessed or dreamed,
it was desirable to be grown up.
IV
THE PICNIC
It was Delia Dart who had suggested our Arbour Day picnic. “Let’s have
some fun Arbour Day,” she said.
We had never thought of Arbour Day in that light. Exercises, though
they presented the open advantage of escape from the school grind, were
no special fun. Fun was something much more intimate and intangible,
definite and mysterious, casual and thrilling--and other anomalies.
“Doing what?” we demanded.
“Oh,” said Delia, restlessly, “go off somewheres. And eat things. And
do something to tell about and make their eyes stick out.”
We were not old enough really to have observed this formula for
adventure. Hitherto we had always gone merely because we went. Yet
all three motives appealed to us. And events fostered our faint
intention. At the opening of school that morning, Miss Messmore made
an announcement.... I remember her grave way of smiling and silent
waiting, so that we hung on what she was going to say.
“To-morrow,” she said, “is Arbour Day. All who wish will assemble here
at the usual hour in the afternoon. We are to plant trees and shrubs
and vines about the schoolhouse. There will be something for each one
to plant. But this is not required. Any who do not wish to be present
may remain away, and these will not be marked absent. Only those may
plant trees who wish to plant trees. I hope that all children will take
advantage of their opportunity. Classes will now pass to their places.”
Delia telegraphed triumphantly in several directions. We could hardly
wait to confer. At recess we met immediately in the closet under the
stairs, a closet intended primarily for chalk, erasers, brooms, and
maps, but by virtue of its window and its privacy put to sub-uses of
secret committee meetings.
“I told you,” said Delia. And such was Delia’s magnetism that we felt
that she had told us. “Let’s take our lunch and start as soon as we get
out.”
“Couldn’t we go after the exercises?” Calista Waters submitted
waveringly.
“_After!_” said Delia, scornfully. “It’ll be three o’clock. _That’s_ no
fun. We want to start by twelve, prompt, and stay till six.”
Margaret Amelia Rodman bore out Delia’s contention. She and Betty had
a dozen eggs saved up from their pullets. They would boil them and
bring them. “The pullets?” Calista demanded aghast and was laughed
into subjection, and found herself agreeing and planning in order to
get back into favour. Delia and the Rodmans were, I now perceive, born
leaders of mediæval living.
“Why don’t you wait till Saturday?” I finally said, from out a silence
that had tried to produce this earlier. “That’s only two days.”
“Saturday!” said Delia. “Anybody can have a picnic Saturday. This is
most as good as running away.”
And of course it was. But....
“Who wants to plant a tree?” Delia continued. “They’ll plant all
they’ve got whether we’re here or not, won’t they?”
That was true. They would do so. It was clearly a selfish wish to
participate that was agitating Calista and me. In the end we were
outvoted, and we went. Our families, it seemed, all took the same
attitude: We need not plant trees if we did not wish to plant trees.
Save in the case of Harold Rodman. He was ruled to be too small to walk
to Prospect Hill, and he preferred going back to school to staying at
home alone.
“I won’t plant no tree, though,” he announced resentfully, as we left
him. “I’m goin’ dig ’em all up!” he shouted after us. “Every one in the
world!”
It was when I was running round the house to get my lunch that I came
for the second time face to face with Mary Elizabeth.
Mary Elizabeth was sitting flat on the ground, cleaning knives which
I recognized as our kitchen knives. This she was doing by a simple
process, not unknown to me and consisting of driving the knife into the
ground up to its black handle and shoving it rapidly up and down. It
struck me as very strange that she should be there, in _our_ back yard,
cleaning _our_ knives, and I somewhat resented it. For it is curious
how much of a savage a little girl in a white apron can really be. But
then I did not at once recognize her as the girl whom I had seen in
the wood yard.
I remember her sometimes as I saw her that day. She had straight brown
hair the colour of my own, and her thick pig-tail, which had fallen
over her shoulder as she worked, was tied with red yarn. Her face was a
lovely, even cream colour, with no freckles such as diversified my own
nose, and with no other colour in her cheek. Her hands were thin and
veined, with long, agile fingers. The right sleeve of her reddish plaid
dress was by now slit almost to the shoulder, and her bare arm showed,
and it was nearly all wrist. She had on a boy’s heavy shoes, and these
were nearly without buttons.
“What you doing?” I inquired, coming to a standstill.
She lifted her face and smiled, not a flash of a smile, but a slow
smile of understanding me.
“This,” she replied, and went on with her task.
“What’s your name?” I demanded.
“Mary Elizabeth,” she answered, and did not ask me my name. This
was her pathetic way of deference to me because my clothing and my
“station” were other than hers.
I went on to the house, but I went, looking back.
“Mother,” I said, “who is she? The little girl out there.”
While she put up my lunch in the Indian basket, Mother told me how Mary
Elizabeth had come that morning asking for something to do. She had set
her to work, and meanwhile she was finding out who she was. “I gave
her something to eat,” Mother said. “And I have never seen even you so
hungry.” Hungry and having no food. I had never heard of such a thing
at first hand--not nearer than in books and in Sunday school. But ...
hungry that way, and in our yard!
It was chiefly this that accounted for my invitation to her--this,
and the fact that, as she came to the door to tell my Mother good-bye
and to take what she had earned, she gave me again that slow,
understanding-me smile. Anyway, as we walked toward the gate, I
overtook her with my Indian basket.
“Don’t you want to come to the picnic with us?” I said.
She stared at me. “What do you do?” she asked.
“Why,” I said, “a picnic? Eat in the woods and--and get things, and sit
on the grass. Don’t you think they’re fun?”
“I never was to one,” she answered, but I saw how she was watching me
almost breathlessly.
“Come on, then,” I insisted carelessly.
“Honest?” she said. “Me?”
When she understood, I remember how she walked beside me, looking at me
as if she might at any moment find out her mistake.
Delia, waiting impatiently at our gate with her own basket,--somehow I
never waited at the gates of others, but it was always they who waited
at mine,--bade me hurry, stared at Mary Elizabeth, and serenely turned
her back on her.
“This,” I said, “is Mary Elizabeth. I asked her to go to our picnic.
She’s going. I’ve got enough lunch. This is Delia.”
I suppose that they looked at each other furtively--so much of the
stupidity of being a knight with one’s visor lowered yet hangs upon
us--and then Delia plucked me, visibly, by the sleeve and addressed me,
audibly, in the ear.
“What’d you go and do that for?” said she. And I who, at an early age,
resented being plucked by the sleeve as a bird resents being patted
on the head, or the wall of any personality trembles away when it is
tapped, took Mary Elizabeth by the hand and marched on to meet the
Rodmans and Calista.
Calista was a vague little soul, with no sense of facts. She was always
promising to walk with two girls at recess, which was equivalent to
asking two to be her partners in a quadrille. It simply could not be
done. So Calista was forever having to promise to run errands with
someone after school to make amends for not having walked with her at
recess. She seldom had a grievance of her own, but she easily fell in
with the grievances of others. When I presented Mary Elizabeth to her,
Calista received her serenely as a part of the course of human events;
and so I think she would have continued to regard her, without great
attention and certainly with no criticism, had she not received the
somewhat powerful suggestion of Delia and Margaret Amelia and Betty
Rodman. The three fell behind Mary Elizabeth and me as we trotted down
the long street on which the April sun smote with Summer heat.
“--over across the railroad tracks and picks up tin cans and old
rubbers and sells ’em and drinks just awful and got ten children and
got arrested,” I heard Delia recounting.
“The idea. To our picnic,” said Margaret Amelia’s thin-edged voice.
“Without asking us,” Betty whispered, anxious to think of something of
account to say.
Mary Elizabeth heard. I have seen that look of dumb, unresentful
suffering in many a human face--in the faces of those who, by the Laws
of sport or society or of jurisprudence, find no escape. She had no
anger, and what she felt must have been long familiar. “I’d better go
home,” she said to me briefly.
I still had her by the hand. And it was, I am bound to confess, as no
errant but chiefly as antagonist to the others that I pulled her along.
“You got to come,” I reminded her. “You said you would.”
It was cruel treatment, by way of kindness. The others, quickly
adapting themselves, fell into the talk of expeditions, which is never
quite the same as any other talk; and the only further notice that they
took of Mary Elizabeth was painstakingly to leave her out. They never
said anything to her, and when she ventured some faint word, they
never answered or noticed or seemed to hear. In later years I have had
occasion to observe, among the undeveloped, these same traces of tribal
antagonisms.
As we went, I had time to digest the hints which I had overheard
concerning Mary Elizabeth’s estate. I knew that a family having many
children had lately come to live “across the tracks,” and that, because
of our anxiety to classify, the father was said to be a drunkard. I
looked stealthily at Mary Elizabeth, with a certain respect born of her
having experience so transcending my own. Telling how many drunken men
and how many dead persons, if any, we had seen was one of our modes
of recreation when we foregathered. Technically Mary Elizabeth was, I
perceived, one of the vague “poor children” for whom we had long packed
baskets and whom we used to take for granted as barbarously as they
used to take for granted the plague. Yet now that I knew one such,
face to face, she seemed so much less a poor child than a little girl.
And though she said so little, she had a priceless manner of knowing
what I was driving at, which not even Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman
had, and they were the daughters of an assemblyman, and had a furnace
in their house, and had had gold watches for Christmas. It was very
perplexing.
“First one finds a May-flower’s going to be a princess!” Delia shouted.
Delia was singularly unimaginative; the idea of royalty was her
single entrance to fields of fancy. The stories that I made up always
began “Once there was a fairy”; Margaret and Betty started at gnomes
and dwarfs; Calista usually selected a poor little match girl or a
boot-black asleep in a piano box; but Delia invariably chose a royal
family, with many sons.
We ran, shouting, across the stretch of scrub-oak which stretched
where the town blocks of houses and streets gave it up and reverted to
the open country. To reach this unprepossessing green place, usually
occupied by a decrepit wagon and a pile of cord-wood, was like passing
through a doorway into the open. We expressed our freedom by shouting
and scrambling to be princesses--all, that is, save Mary Elizabeth. She
went soberly about, a little apart, and I wished with all my heart that
she might find the first May-flower; but she did not do so.
We hunted for wind-flowers. It was on Prospect Hill that these first
flowers--wind-flowers, pasque flowers, May-flowers, however one has
learned to say them--were found in Spring--the _anemone patens_ which,
next to pussy-willows themselves, meant to us Spring. A week before
Nellie Pitmouth had brought to school the first that we had seen.
Nellie had our pity because she drove the cows to pasture before
she came to school, but she had her reward, for it was always she
who found the first spoils. I remember those mornings when I would
reach school to find a little group about Nellie in whose hands would
be pussy-willows, or the first violets, or our rarely found white
violets. For a little while, in the light of real events like these,
Nellie enjoyed distinction. Then she relapsed into her usual social
obscurity and the stigma of her gingham apron which she wore even on
half holidays. This day we pressed hard for her laurels, scrambling in
the deep mould and dead leaves in search of the star faces on silvery,
silken, furry stems. We hoped untiringly that we might some day find
arbutus, which grew in abundance only eighteen miles away, on the
hills. In Summer we patiently looked for wintergreen, which they were
always finding farther up the river. And from the undoubted dearth
of both we escaped with a pretence to the effect that we were under a
spell, and that some day, the witch having died, we should walk on our
hill and find the wintergreen come and the arbutus under the leaves.
By five o’clock we had been hungry for two hours, and we spread our
lunch on the crest. Prospect Hill was the place to which we took our
guests when we had them. It was the wide west gateway of the town,
where through few ventured, for it opened out on the bend of the little
river, navigable only to rowboats and launches, and flowing toward us
from the west. You stood at the top of a sharp declivity, and it was
like seeing a river face to face to find it flowing straight toward
you, out of the sky, bearing little green islands and wet yellow
sandbars. It almost seemed as if these must come floating toward us
and bringing us everything.... For these were the little days, when we
still believed that everything was necessary.
We quickly despatched the process of “trading off,” a sandwich for an
apple, a cooky for a cake, and so on, occasionally trading back before
the bargain had been tasted. Mary Elizabeth sat at one side; even after
I had divided my lunch and given her my basket for a plate, she sat a
very little away from us--or it may be my remembrance of her aloofness
that makes this seem so. Each of the others gave her something from
her basket--but it was the kind of giving which makes one know what
a sad word is the word “bestow.” They “bestowed” these things. Since
that time, when I have seen folk administering charity, I have always
thought of the manner, ill-bred as is all condescension, in which we
must have shared our picnic food with Mary Elizabeth.
I believe that this is the first conversation that ever I can remember.
Up to this time, I had talked as naturally as the night secretes
dreams, with no sense of responsibility for either to mean anything.
But that day I became uncomfortably conscious of the trend of the talk.
“I have to have my new dress tried on before supper,” Delia announced,
her back to the river and her mouth filled with a jam sandwich. “It’s
blue plaid, with blue buttons and blue tassels on,” she volunteered.
“My new dress Aunt Harriet brought me from the City isn’t going to be
made up till last day of school,” Margaret Amelia informed us. “It’s
got pink flowers in and it cost sixty cents a yard.”
“Margaret and I are going to have white shoes before we go visiting,”
Betty remembered.
“I got two new dresses that ain’t made up yet. Mamma says I got so many
I don’t need them,” observed Calista, with an indifferent manner and a
soft, triumphant glance. Whereat we all sat silent.
I struggled with the moment, but it was too much for me.
“I got a white silk lining to my new dress,” I let it be known.
“It’s made, but I haven’t had it on yet. China silk,” I added
conscientiously. Then, moved perhaps by a common discomfort, we all
looked toward Mary Elizabeth. I think I loved her from that moment.
“None of you’s got the new style sleeves,” she said serenely, and held
aloft the arm whose sleeve was slit from wrist to shoulder.
We all laughed together, but Delia pounced upon the arm. She caught and
held it.
“What’s that on your arm?” she cried, and we all looked. From the elbow
up the skin was mottled a dull, ugly purple, as if rough hands had
been there.
Mary Elizabeth flushed. “Ain’t you ever had any bruises on you?” she
inquired in a tone so finely modulated that Delia actually hastened to
defend herself from the impeachment of inexperience.
“Sure,” she said heartily. “I counted ’em last night. I got seven.”
“I got five and a great long skin,” Betty competed hotly.
“Pooh,” said Calista, “I’ve got a scratch longer than my hand is.
Teacher said maybe I’d get an infect,” she added importantly.