and planning to go bare-foot some day, until Calista attacked a pickled
peach which she had brought.
“Our whole cellar’s full of pickled peaches,” I incautiously observed.
“I could have brought some if I’d thought.”
“We got more than that,” said Delia, instantly. “We got a thousand
glasses of jelly left over from last year.”
“A thousand!” repeated Margaret Amelia, in derision. “A hundred, you
mean.”
“Well,” Delia said, “it’s a lot. And jars and jars and jars of
preserves. And cans and cans and _cans_....”
The others took it up. Why we should have boasted of the quantity of
fruit in our parents’ cellars, I have no notion, save that it was
for the unidentified reason which impels all boasting. When I am in
a very new bit of country, where generalizations and multiplications
follow every fact, I am sometimes reminded of the fashion of our talk
whose statements tried to exceed themselves, in a kind of pyrotechnic
pattern bursting at last into nothing and the night. We might have been
praising climate or crops or real estate.
Mary Elizabeth spoke with something like eagerness.
“We got a bottle of blackberry cordial my grandmother made before she
died,” she said. “We keep it in the top bureau drawer.”
“What a funny place to keep it....” Delia began, and stopped of her own
accord.
I remember that everybody was willing enough to let Mary Elizabeth help
pick up the dishes. Then she took a tree for Pussy-wants-a-corner,
which always follows the picnic part of a picnic. But hardly anyone
would change trees with her, and by the design which masks as chance,
everyone ran to another tree. At last she casually climbed her tree,
agile as a cat, a feat which Delia alone was shabby enough to pretend
not to see.
We started homeward when the red was flaming up in the west and falling
deep in the heart of the river. By then Mary Elizabeth was almost at
ease with us, but rather, I think, because of the soft evening, and
perhaps in spite of our presence.
“Oh!” she cried. “Somebody grabbed the sun and pulled it down. I saw it
go!”
Delia looked shocked. “You oughtn’t to tell such things,” she reproved
her.
Mary Elizabeth flung up the arm with the torn sleeve and ran beside us,
laughing with abandon. We were all running down the slope in the red
light.
“We’re Indians, looking for roots for the medicine-man,” Delia called;
“Yellow Thunder is sick. So is Red Bird. We’re hunting roots.”
She was ahead and we were following. We caught at the dead mullein
stalks and milkweed pods and threw them away, and leaped up and pulled
at the low branches with their tender buds. We were filled with the
flow of the Spring and seeking to express it, as in the old barbaric
days, by means of destruction.... At the foot of the slope a little
maple tree was growing, tentative as a sunbeam and scarcely thicker,
left by the Spring that had last been that way. When she reached it,
Delia laid hold on it, and had it out by its slight root, and tossed it
on the moss.
“W-h-e-e-e!” cried Delia, “I wish it was Arbour Day to-morrow too!”
Mary Elizabeth stopped laughing. “I turn here,” she said. “It’s the
short cut. Good-bye--I had a grand time. The best time I ever had.”
Delia pretended not to hear. She said nothing. The others called casual
good-byes over shoulder. Going home, they rebuked me soundly for having
invited Mary Elizabeth. Delia rehearsed the array of reasons. If she
came to school, we would have to _know_ her, she wound up. I remember
feeling baffled and without argument. All that they said was true, and
yet--
“I’m going to see her,” I announced stoutly, more, I dare say, because
I was tired and a little cross than from real loyalty.
“You’ll catch some disease,” said Delia. “I know a girl that went to
see some poor children and she caught the spinal appendicitis and died
before she got back home.”
We went round by the schoolhouse, drawn there by a curiosity that
had in it inevitable elements of regret. There they were, little
dead-looking trees, standing in places of wet earth, and most of them
set somewhat slanting. Everyone was gone, and in the late light the
grounds looked solemn and different.
“Just think,” said Delia, “when we grow up and the trees grow up, we
can tell our children how we planted ’em.”
“Why, we never--” Calista began.
“Our school did, didn’t it?” Delia contended. “And our school’s we,
isn’t it?”
But we overruled her. No, to the end of time, the trees that stood in
those grounds would have been planted by other hands than ours. We
were probably the only ones in the school who hadn’t planted a tree.
“I don’t care, do you?” we demanded of one another, and reiterated our
denial.
“I planted a-a-a---Never-green!” Harold Rodman shouted, running to meet
us.
“So did we!” we told him merrily, and separated, laughing. It had, it
seemed, been a great day, in spite of Mary Elizabeth.
I went into the house, and hovered about the supper table. I perceived
that I had missed hot waffles and honey, and these now held no charm.
Grandmother Beers was talking.
“When I was eight years old,” she said, “I planted it by the well. And
when Thomas went back to England fifty years after, he couldn’t reach
both arms round the trunk. And there was a seat there--for travellers.”
I looked at her, and thought of that giant tree. Would those
dead-looking little sticks, then, grow like that?
“If fifty thousand school children each planted a tree to-day,” said my
mother, “that would be a forest. And planting a forest is next best to
building a city.”
“Better,” said my father, “better. What kind of tree did you plant,
daughter?” he inquired.
I hung my head. “I--we--there was a picnic,” I said. “We didn’t _have_
to plant ’em. So we had a picnic.”
My father looked at me in the way that I remember.
“That’s it,” he said. “For everyone who plants a tree, there are half
a dozen that have a picnic. And two dozen that cut them down. At last
we’ve got one in the family who belongs to the majority!”
When I could, I slipped out in the garden. It was darkening; the frogs
in the Slough were chorussing, and down on the river-bank a cat-bird
sang at intervals, was silent long enough to make you think that he
had ceased, and then burst forth again. The town clock struck eight,
as if eight were an ancient thing, full of dignity. Our kitchen clock
answered briskly, as if eight were a proud and novel experience of its
own. The ’bus rattled past for the Eight-twenty. And away down in the
garden, I heard a step. Someone had come in the back gate and clicked
the pail of stones that weighted its chain.
I thought that it would be one of the girls, who not infrequently chose
this inobvious method of entrance. I ran toward her, and was amazed to
find Mary Elizabeth kneeling quietly on the ground, as she had been
when I came upon her at noon.
“What you doing?” I demanded, before I could see what she was doing.
“This,” she said.
I stooped. And she had a little maple tree, for which she was hollowing
a home with a rusty fire-shovel that she had brought with her.
“It’s the one Delia Dart pulled out,” she said. “I thought it’d be kind
of nice to put it here. In your yard. You could bring the water, if you
want.”
I brought the water. Together we bent in the dusk, and we set out the
little tree, near the back gate, close to my play-house.
“We’d ought to say a verse or something,” I said vaguely.
“I can’t think of any,” Mary Elizabeth objected.
Neither could I, but you had to say something when you planted a tree.
And a line was as good as a verse.
“‘God is love’ ’s good enough,” said Mary Elizabeth, stamping down the
earth. Then we dismissed the event, and hung briefly above the back
gate. Somehow, I was feeling a great and welcome sense of relief.
“It was kind o’ nice to do that,” I observed, with some embarrassment.
“No, it wasn’t either,” rejoined Mary Elizabeth, modestly.
We stood kicking at the gravel for a moment. Then she went away.
I faced about to the quiet garden. And suddenly, for no reason that I
knew, I found myself skipping on the path, in the dark, just as if the
day were only beginning.
V
THE KING’S TRUMPETER
And so it is for that night long ago when Mary Elizabeth and I stood by
the tree and tried to think of something to say, that after all these
years I have made the story of Peter.
* * * * *
Long years ago, when the world was just beginning to be, there was a
kingdom which was not yet finished. Of course when a world has just
stopped being nothing and is beginning to be something, it takes a
great while to set all the kingdoms going. And this one wasn’t done.
For example, in the palace garden where little Peter used to play,
the strangest things were to be met. For the mineral kingdom was just
beginning to be vegetable, and the vegetable was just beginning to
be animal, and the animal was just beginning to be man,--and man was
just, just beginning to know about his living spirit. Do you see what
_that_ means? While you looked at a mound of earth it became a bush--or
a very little time afterward, as time in these things is reckoned.
While you looked at a beast-shaped bush--all bushes at night are shaped
like beasts--it became a living animal--or, again, a _very_ little
afterward. And men had by no means got over being apes, tigers, swine,
and dogs, and sometimes you hardly knew which a man was, a real man or
one of these animals. And spirits were growing in men as fast as this
might be. Everything, you see, lay in savage angles and wild lines.
Little Peter was playing one morning in the palace garden, and such
playing as it was! He would be moulding little balls of loam and
fashioning them with seeds, when suddenly they would break into life as
buds and then as flowers, almost as one now sees twigs of wood break
into life, or as quiet cocoons become living butterflies--for the world
is not so different. Or Peter would be playing with a spongy-looking
mass on a rock in the brook, when it would break from its rock and go
gayly swimming about, and be a fish-thing. Or he would push at a bit of
ooze with a cat-tail, and a little flying life would mount abruptly
and wing away. It was exciting playing in those days, and some of the
things you can do in these days. Only then it was all new, so Peter
could see just how wonderful it was.
Now, that morning the king was walking in his palace garden. And he was
troubled, for everywhere that he looked there were loose ends and rough
edges, and shapeless things waiting to be fashioned, and it was so all
over his kingdom. There was such a great lot to do that he could not
possibly do it all alone--no king, however industrious, could have done
it all. And he longed for the help of all his subjects. So when the
king came on little Peter, busily making living things where none had
been before, he was mightily pleased, and he sat down with the little
lad on a grassy platform in the midst of the garden.
“Lo, now, little lad,” said the king, “what do you play?”
Instead of playing at keeping store or keeping house or at acting or
hunting or exploring, little Peter was playing another game.
“I’m playing it’s creation, your majesty,” he answered, “and I’m
playing help the king.”
“Lo, now,” said the king, “I would that all my subjects would play as
well as you.”
The king thought for a moment, looking out on all the savage angles and
wild lines, while little Peter watched a bit of leaf mould becoming a
green plant.
“Summon me my hundred heralds!” the king suddenly bade his servants.
So the servants summoned the hundred heralds, who hurried into their
blue velvet and silver buckles and came marching, twenty abreast,
across the grassy plateau, where the morning sun made patterns like
wings, and among the wings they bowed themselves and asked the king his
will.
“Hundred heralds,” said the king, “be it only that you do this
willingly, I would that you go out into my kingdom, into its highways
and even to its loneliest outposts, and take my people my message. Cry
to them, until each one hears with his heart as well as his head: ‘The
world is beginning. You must go and help the king.’”
Now, little Peter, when he heard the message, rose and stood beside the
king, and in his breast something thrilled and trembled like a smitten
chord. But as for the hundred heralds, they were troubled as one
man--though he not yet wholly a man.
“O king,” they said, twenty at a time, “blue velvet and silver buckles
are meet for the streets of cities and to call men to feasting
and to honour the king. But as for the highways and the loneliest
outposts--that is another matter.”
“But what of the message?” the king asked sadly, and this none of the
heralds knew how to answer; and presently the king sent them away, for
he would never have unwilling service in his palace or in his kingdom.
And as they went, little Peter looked after them, and he saw, and
the king saw, that for all their blue velvet and silver buckles, the
hundred heralds, marching away twenty abreast, were not yet all men,
but partly they were apes in manner and swine at heart. And little
Peter wondered if he fashioned them as he did his bits of mould,
whether they would burst from a sheath, _all_ men, as burst his little
plants.
“Summon me my thousand trumpeters!” the king bade his servants next.
The thousand trumpeters hurried into their purple velvet and their lace
collars and seized their silver trumpets, and came marching fifty
abreast across the grassy plateau, where the noon sun made a blinding
light, like the light of another sun; and they bowed themselves in the
brightness and asked the king his will.
But when the king had told them his will and had repeated the message
and asked them if they could go willingly, the thousand trumpeters were
troubled as one man--and he not yet wholly a man.
“O king,” said they, in fifties and one hundreds, “lo, now, these
silver trumpets. These are meet to sound up and down the streets of
cities and to call men to feasting and to honour the king, and never
are they meet to sound in the lonely outposts. Pray thee, O king, keep
us near thee.”
“But what of the message?” the king asked, and none of his trumpeters
could help him there, and he would have no unwilling service in his
palace or in his kingdom, so he sent them all away. And as they went,
little Peter looked after them, and he saw, and the king saw, that for
all their purple velvet and lace collars, the thousand trumpeters,
marching away fifty abreast, were not all men, but they were apes in
manner and swine and hounds at heart. And little Peter almost wished
that he could fashion them as he did his bits of mould and see if they
would not change into something better.
So then the king called a meeting of his High Council, and his
councillors hurried into their robes of state and appeared on the
grassy plateau when the evening was lighting the place to be a glory.
“Lo, now,” said the king, “I needs must send a message to all my
people. Let us devise or dream some way to take it.”
When they heard the message, the councillors nodded, with their hands
over their mouths, looking at the ground.
Then the king said--there, in the beginning of the world:--
“I have a thought about a wire which shall reach round the earth and
oversea and undersea, on which a man may send a message. And a thought
I have about a wire which shall stretch across the land, and upon that
wire a voice may travel alone. And a thought about messages that shall
pierce the air with no wire and no voice. But none of these things is
now.”
(“Nay,” said the council, murmuring among themselves, “or ever shall
be.”)
“--and if they were,” said the king, “I would have one serve me even
better than these, to reach the head and the heart of my people. How
shall I do this thing? For I must have help in finishing my kingdom.”
The council, stepping about in the slanting light, disputed the matter,
group by group, but there lay nowhere, it seemed, a conclusion.
“You yourselves,” the king cried at last, “who know well that the
kingdom must be completed, you yourselves gather the people in
multitudes together and tell them the message.”
But at this the High Council twitched their robes of state and would
have none of it.
“Who would sit in the high places if we did _that_?” said they.
So the king sent them all away, and little Peter, standing beside the
king, looked after them. And he saw, and the king saw, how, under their
robes of state, the High Council had not entirely stopped being ape
and swine and hound and tiger and, early in the world as it was, still
there seemed no great excuse for that.
“Oh, sire,” said little Peter, “I wish I could play with them as I play
with my bits of mould and loam and could turn them into something
better and alive.”
“Well said, little Peter,” replied the king, smiling sadly.
And now the west, which had been like a vast, stained-glass window,
streaming with warm light, fell into gray opaqueness, and the grassy
plateau became a place of shadows in which night things were born
gently. And the king looked away to the beast-shaped bushes and to all
the striving land.
“Oh, my kingdom, my kingdom!” he cried, grieving. “Now, would that this
little Peter here could help you in the making.”
And then little Peter stood upright in the faint light.
“May it please the king,” he said softly, “I will take the message to
his people.”
The king stared down at him.
“You?” he said. “_You_, little man? And how, pray, would you take my
message?”
“May it please the king,” said little Peter, “I would tell everyone in
the kingdom till all should have been told.”
“Little man,” said the king, “you are no bigger than a trumpet.”
“Ay,” said the little lad, “I think that is what I am. I would that I
be not Peter, but Trumpeter. So send me forth.”
At this the king laughed, and for the laughter his heart was the
lighter. He touched the boy’s brow.
“See, then, I touch your brow, little Trumpeter,” he said. “Go
forth--and do you know my message?”
“You had first touched my heart, your majesty,” said the little boy,
“and the message is there.”
You would think, perhaps, that Peter would have waited till the
morning, but he would not wait an hour. He made a little packet
of linen and of food, and just as the folk within the palace were
beginning their evening revelry, he stepped out on the highway and
fared forth under the moon.
But fancy walking on such a highway as that! At first glance it looked
like any other night road, stretching between mysterious green. But not
anything there could be depended upon to stay as it was. A hillock,
lying a little way ahead, became, as he reached it, a plumy shrub,
trembling with amazement at its transformation from dead earth to
living green. At a turn in the road, a low bush suddenly walked away
into the wood, a four-footed animal. Everything changed as he looked at
it, as if nothing were meant to be merely what it was. The world was
beginning!
At the foot of a hill, where the shadows were thick, Peter met the
first one to whom he could give his message. The man was twisted and
ragged and a beggar, and he peered down in Peter’s face horribly.
“Sir,” said Peter, courteously, “the world is beginning. You must go
and help the king.”
“Help the king!” cried the beggar, and his voice was uneven, like a
bark or a whine that was turning into words. “I can’t help the king
without my supper.”
“Supper is only supper,” said little Peter, who had never in his life
been hungry. “One must help the king--that is more.”
The beggar struck the ground with his staff.
“I’m hungry,” he said like a bark. “I want some supper and some dinner
and all the way back to breakfast before I help the king, world or no
world!”
And suddenly little Peter understood what it is to be hungry, and
that, if folk were hungry, they must first find means of feeding
themselves before they could listen. So he gave the beggar all that he
had of food in his packet, which was the least that he could do, and
sent him on his way, charging him with the message.
At the top of the hill, Peter came on another man, sitting under a
sycamore tree. The man was a youth, and very beautiful, and he was
making a little song, which went like this:--
“_Open, world, your trembling petals slowly,
Here one, there one, natal to its hour,
Toward the time when, holden in a vessel holy,
You shall be a flower._”
Though Peter did not know what the song might mean, yet it fell sweetly
upon the night, and he liked to listen. And when it was done, he went
and stood before the youth.
“Sir,” he said, “the world is beginning. You must go and help the king.”
“I know, I know, little lad,” said the youth, and his voice was clear,
like bird-notes that were turning into words. “I, too, tell the
message, making it in a song.”
And these words made Peter glad, so that his strength was new, and he
ran on with the poet’s gentle music in his ears.
I cannot tell you how far Peter went, but he went very far, and to
many a lonely outpost, and away and away on a drear frontier. It was
long to go and hard to do, but that is the way the world is made; and
little Peter went on, now weary, now frightened, now blithe, now in
good company, now alone and in the dark. I cannot tell you all the
adventures he had and all the things he did--perhaps you will know
these in some other way, sometime. And there were those to whom he
told the message who listened, or set out in haste for the king’s
palace; and some promised that they would go another day, and a few ran
to tell others. But many and many were like the hundred heralds and
the thousand trumpeters and the king’s High Council, and found many
a reason why they might not set out. And some there were who mocked
Peter, saying that the world indeed was doing very well without their
help and would work itself out if only one would wait; and others would
not even listen to the little lad.
At last, one morning when the whole world seemed glad that it was
beginning and seemed to long to tell about it, little Peter entered a
city, decorated for a festival. Everywhere were garlands of vines and
of roses, bright rugs and fluttering pennons and gilded things, as if
the world had been long enough begun so that already there were time
to take holidays. The people were flooding the streets and crowding
the windows, and through their holiday dress Peter could see how some
minced and mocked a little like apes, and others peered about like
giraffes, and others ravened for food and joy, like the beggar or the
bear or the tiger, and others kept the best, like swine, or skulked
like curs, or plodded like horses, or prattled like parrots. Animals
ran about, dumb like the vegetables they had eaten. Vegetables were
heaped in the stalls, mysterious as the earth which they had lately
been. The buildings were piled up to resemble the hills from whose
substance they had been created, and their pillars were fashioned like
trees. Everywhere were the savage angles and wild lines of one thing
turning into another. And Peter longed to help to fashion them all, as
he fashioned his little balls of mould and loam.
“There is so much yet to do,” thought little Peter, “I wonder that
they take so much time for holidays.”
So he ran quickly to a high, white place in the midst of the town,
where they were making ready to erect the throne of the king of the
carnival, and on that he stood and cried:--
“Hear me--hear me! The world is beginning. You must go and help the
king.”
Now, if those about the carnival throne had only said: “What is that to
us? Go away!” Peter would have been warned. But they only nodded, and
they said kindly: “Yes, so it is--and we mean to help presently. Come
and help us first!” And one of the revellers, seeing Peter, how little
he was, picked him up and held him at arm’s length and cried:--
“Lo, now, this little lad. He is no bigger than a trumpet....”
(That was what the king had said, and it pleased Peter to hear it said
again.)
“... Let us take him,” the revellers went on, “and _have_ him for a
trumpet. And take him with us in our great procession. What think ye?”
“And may I cry out what message I please?” little Peter asked eagerly.
“Surely,” answered all the revellers, gayly. “What is that to us, so
that you come with us?”