hands. “She grows more different from us every moment of her life!”
“She seems to do so,” admitted the king; but he was very wise; and,
“Let her be,” he commanded everybody. “We may see what this all means,
and a great many other things as well.”
Meanwhile Prince Hesperus, journeying from land to land and from height
to valley, was seeking in vain for the one person who, as he thought,
could remove from the princess the curse of her difference from all the
rest of the world. And it was very strange how love had changed him;
for now, instead of his silly complaint that every fairy is like every
other fairy, and his silly longing for a different pattern in fairies,
he sought only for the charm which should make his beloved princess
like everybody else. Where should he find this terrible Human Being,
this uninvited one who held the key to the princess’s bracelet that was
so like a fetter?
He went first to the town nearest to fairyland. The people of the town,
having no idea how near to fairyland they really were, were going
prosaically about their occupations, and though they could have looked
up into the magic garden itself, they remained serenely indifferent.
There he found the very mother who had been at the christening of the
princess; and alighting close to a great task that she was doing
for the whole world, he tried to ask her who it was who makes folk
different from all the rest. But she could not hear his tiny, tiny
voice which came to her merely as a thought about something which could
not possibly be true. In a pleasant valley he came on that one who,
at the christening, had brought the lyre which played of itself, but
when the prince asked him his question, he fancied it to be merely
the wandering of his own melody, with a note about something new to
his thought. The poet by the stream singing of the brotherhood of
man, the prophet on a mountain foreseeing the brotherhood as in a
gazing crystal, the scientist weaving the brotherhood in a tapestry
of the universe--none of these knew anyone who can possibly make folk
different from everybody else, nor did any of the others on whom Prince
Hesperus chanced.
When one day he thought that he had found her, because he met one whose
face had the look of many cities and was like the painted cover of an
empty box, straightway he saw another and another and still others, men
and women both, who were like her, with only the meaning of those who
never look at the stars, or walk in gardens, or think about others
rather than themselves, or listen to hear what is right for them to do.
And then he saw that these are many and many, who believe themselves to
be different from everybody else and who try to make others so, and he
saw that it would be useless to look further among them for that one
who had the key for which he sought.
So at last Prince Hesperus turned sadly back toward the palace of the
princess.
“Alas,” said the prince, “it is for her own happiness that I seek to
have her like other people. For myself I would love her anyway. But
yet, what am I to do--for she seems so different that she will never
believe that I love her!”
It was already late at night when the prince found himself in the
neighbourhood of the palace, and being tired and travel-worn, he
resolved to take shelter in the cup of some flower and wait until the
palace revelries were done. Accordingly he entered the garden of an
humble cottage and crept within the petals of a wild lily growing in
the long, untended grass.
He had hardly settled himself to sleep when he heard from the cottage
the sound of bitter crying. Now this is a sound which no fairy will
ever pass by or ever so much as hear about without trying to comfort,
and at once Prince Hesperus rose and flew to the sill of an open
lattice.
He looked in on a poor room, with the meanest furnishings. On a
comfortless bed lay the father of the house, ill and helpless. His wife
sat by his side, and the children clung about her, crying with hunger
and mingling their tears with her own. The man turned and looked at
her, making a motion to speak, and Prince Hesperus flew into the room
and alighted on the handle of a great spade, covered with earth, which
stood in a corner.
“Wife,” the man said, “I’ve brought you little but sorrow and hunger.
I would have brought you more if I had had better. And now I see you
starve.”
“I am not _too_ hungry,” the wife said--but the children sobbed.
Prince Hesperus waited not a moment. He flew into the night and away
toward the palace, and missing the fairy ring where among old oaks the
fairies were dancing, he reached the palace by an unfrequented path and
entered a disused part of the palace garden. And there, in a corner
which he had never visited, Prince Hesperus saw a marvellous mass of
bloom and fruit--poppies and corn, beans and berries, green peas and
sweet peas, pinks and potatoes, celery and white phlox, melons and
cardinal flowers--all growing wonderfully together, as it were, hand in
hand. And above them, in a moon-flower clinging to the wall, sat the
Princess Romancia, rocking in the wind and brooding upon her garden.
“Come!” cried Prince Hesperus. “There is a thing to do!”
The princess looked at him a little fearfully, but he paid almost no
attention to her, so absorbed he was in what he wished to have done.
“Hard by is a family,” said the prince, “dying of hunger. Here is food.
Hale in these idlers dancing in the light of the moon, and let us carry
the family the means to stay alive.”
Without a word the princess went with him, and they appeared together
in the fairy ring and haled away the dancers. And when these understood
the need, they all joined together, fairies, goblin musicians and all,
and hurried away to the garden of the princess.
They wove a litter of sweet stems and into this they piled all the food
of the princess’s tending. And when the queen would have had them send
to the palace kitchen for supplies, the king, who was a wise fairy,
would not permit it and commanded that all should be done as the prince
wished. So when the garden was ravaged of its sweets, they all bore
them away, and trooped to the cottage, and cast them on the threshold.
And then they perched about the room, or hovered in the path of the
moonlight to hear what should be said. And Prince Hesperus and Princess
Romancia listened together upon the handle of the poor man’s spade.
At sight of the gifts the wife sprang up joyfully and cried out to her
husband, and the children wakened with happy shouts.
“Here is food--food!” they cried. “Oh, it must be from the fairies.”
The sick man looked and smiled.
“Ay,” he said, “the Little Folk have remembered us. They have brought
us rich store in return for my poor spadeful of earth.”
Then the prince and princess and all the court understood that this
poor man whom they had helped was that very day labourer who had
come to the christening of the princess. And swift as a moonbeam--and
not unlike one--Prince Hesperus darted from beside the princess and
alighted on the man’s pillow.
“Ah,” he cried, “can you not, then, tell me who it is who has the power
to make one different from everybody else in the world?”
In half delirium the day labourer heard the voice of the prince and
caught the question. But he did not know that it was the voice of the
prince, and he fancied it to be the voice of the whole world, as it
were throbbing with the prince’s question. And he cried out loudly in
answer:--
“No one has that power! No one is different! Those who seem different
hold no truth. We are all alike, all of us that live!”
Swiftly the prince turned to the king and the queen and the court.
“The uninvited Human Being,” he cried, “did she say that the princess
should _be_ different from all the world, or that she should merely
_seem_ different?”
The queen and the court could not remember, but the king, who was a
wise fairy, instantly remembered.
“She said that she should _seem_ different,” he said.
Then the prince laughed out joyfully.
“Ay,” he cried, “seem different, indeed! There are many and many who
may do that. But this man speaks truth and out of his spadeful of earth
we have learned it, _We are all alike, all of us who live!_”
With that he grasped his tiny sword and flew to the side of the
princess and lifted her hand in his. And with a swift, deft stroke he
cut from her wrist the bracelet that was like a fetter, and he took her
in his arms.
“Ah, my princess,” he cried. “You have seemed different from us all
only because you would have it so!”
The Princess Romancia looked round on the court, and suddenly she saw
only the friendliness which had always been there if she could have
believed. She looked on her father and mother, the king and the queen,
and she saw only tenderness. She looked on the day labourer and his
family and understood that, fairy and princess though she was, she was
like them and they were like her. Last, she looked in the face of the
prince--and she did not look away.
Invisibly, as the hours leave a dial, the fairies drifted from the
little room and back to the fairy ring among the old oaks to dance
for very joyousness. The labourer and his family, hearing them go,
were conscious of a faint lifting of the dark, as if morning were
coming, bringing a new day. And to the Princess Romancia, beside Prince
Hesperus, the world itself was a new world, where she did not walk
alone as she had thought, but where all folk who will have it so walk
together.
VIII
TWO FOR THE SHOW
First of all there was Every Day, with breakfast, lunch, outdoors,
dinner, and evenings.
Then there were Sundays, which were quite another kind of time,
as different as layer cake from sponge cake: With breakfast late,
and mustn’t-jump-rope, and the living-room somehow different, the
Out-of-doors moved farther off, our play-house not waiting for us
but acting busy at something else in which we had no part; the swing
hanging useless as it did when we were away from home and thought about
it in the night; bells ringing as if it were _their_ day; until we were
almost homesick to hear the grocer’s cart rattle behind the white horse.
There were school half holidays when the sun shone as it never shone
before, and we could not decide how to spend the time, and to look
ahead seemed a glorious year before dark.
There were the real holidays--Christmas and the Fourth and Birthdays,
which didn’t seem like days of time at all, but were like fairies of
time, not living in any clock.
And Company-time, when we were not to go in certain rooms, or sing in
the hall, and when all downstairs seemed unable to romp with us.
And Vacation-time, when 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock meant
nothing, and the face of the clock never warned or threatened and the
hands never dragged, and Saturday no longer stood out but sank into
insignificance, and the days ran like sands.
All these times there were when life grew different and either let us
in farther than ever before or else left us out altogether. But almost
the strangest and best of these was house-cleaning time.
Screens out, so that the windows looked like faces and not like masks!
The couch under the Cooking-apple tree! We used to lie on the couch and
look up in the boughs and wish that they would leave it there forever.
What was the rule that made them take it in? Mattresses in the backyard
to jump on and lie on and stare up from, so differently, into the blue.
Rugs like rooms, opening out into an adjoining pansy bed. Chairs set
about on the grass, as if at last people had come to understand, as we
had always understood, that the Outdoors is a real place to be in, and
not just a place to pass through to get somewhere else. If only, if
only some day they had brought the piano out on the lawn! To have done
one’s practising out there, just as if a piano were born, not made!
But they never did that, and we were thankful enough for the things
that they did do. When Saturday came, I found with relief that they had
still the parlour and one bedroom left to do. I had been afraid that by
then these would be restored to the usual dry and dustless order.
In the open window of the empty sitting-room I was sitting negligently
that morning, when I saw Mr. Britt going by. He was as old as anyone I
knew in the world--Mr. Britt must have been fifty. I never thought of
him as _folks_ at all. There were the other neighbours, all dark-haired
and quick and busy at the usual human errands; and then there was Mr.
Britt, leaving his fruit trees and his rose bushes to go down to his
office in the Court House. He had white hair, a long square white
beard, and he carried a stick with a crook in the handle. I watched
him pityingly. His life was all done, as tidy as a sewed seam, as
sure as a learned lesson. All lived out, a piece at a time, just as
I planned mine. How immeasurably long it had taken him; what a slow
business it must have seemed to him; how very old he was!
At our gate he stopped. Mr. Britt’s face was pink, and there were
pleasant wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and when he talked, he
seemed to think about you.
“Moving?” he inquired.
“House-cleaning,” I explained with importance.
“Fine day of it,” he commented and went on. He always sighed a little
when he spoke, not in sorrow; but in a certain weariness.
_In forty-two years I should be as old as that._ Forty-two years--more
than five life-times, as I knew them.
I was still looking after him, trying to think it through--a number as
vast as the sky of stars was vast--when round the corner, across the
street, the Rodman girls appeared. (“Margaret and Betty Rodman?” my
mother used to inquire pointedly when I said “the Rodman girls.”) In
their wake was their little brother, Harold. I hailed them joyously.
“Come on over! It’s house-cleaning.”
“We were,” admitted Betty, as they ran. “We saw the things out in the
yard, and we asked right off. We can stay a whole hour.”
“Can’t we get Mary Gilbraith to tell us when it’s an hour?” Margaret
Amelia suggested as they came in at the gate. “Then we won’t have to
remember.”
Mary Gilbraith stood beating a curtain, and we called to her. She
nodded her head, wound in a brown veil.
“Sure,” she said. “And don’t you children track up them clean floors
inside there.”
I glanced over my shoulder into the empty room.
“Shall I get down,” I inquired of my guests, “or will you get up?”
They would get up, and they did so. We three just fitted the sill, with
Harold looking wistfully upward.
“Go find a nice stick,” Margaret Amelia advised him maternally.
“What’ll we play?” I was pursuing politely. “Pretend?” I intimated.
Because of course there is nothing that is quite so much fun as
pretend. “Or real?” I conceded the alternative its second place.
“Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know.
“Well, what difference does that make?” I inquired scornfully. “We can
decide that after.”
However, we duly weighed the respective merits of Lost-in-the-Woods,
Cave-in-the Middle-of-the-World, and Invisible, a selection always
involving ceremony.
“Harold can’t play any of them,” Margaret Amelia remembered
regretfully. “He don’t stay lost nor invisible--he wriggles. And Cave
scares him.”
We considered what to do with Harold, and at last mine was the
inspiration--no doubt because I was on the home field. In a fence
corner I had a play-house, roofed level with the fence top. From my
sand-pile (sand boxes came later--mine was a corner of the garden
sacred to me) we brought tin pails of earth which we emptied about the
little boy, gradually covering his fat legs and nicely packing his
plaid skirt. Then we got him a baking-powder can cover for a cutter and
a handleless spoon, and we went away. He was infinitely content.
“Makin’ a meat pie,” he confided, as we left him.
Free, we were drawn irresistibly back to the out-of-doors furniture. We
jumped in the middle of the mattresses lying in the grass, we hung the
comforters and quilts in long overlapping rows on the clothes line and
ran from one end to the other within that tent-like enclosure. Margaret
Amelia arranged herself languidly on the Brussels couch that ordinarily
stood in the upstairs hall piled with leather-bound reports, but now,
scales falling from our eyes, we saw to be the bank of a stream whereon
Maid Marian reclined; but while Betty and I were trying to decide which
should be Robin Hood and which Alan-a-dale (alas, for our chivalry ...
we were both holding out to be Robin) Maid Marian settled it by dancing
down the stair carpet which made a hallway half across the lawn. We
followed her. The terminus brought us back to the parlour window. We
stepped on the coping and stared inside. This was our parlour! Yet
it looked no more like the formal room which we seldom entered than
a fairy looks like a mortal. Many and many a time an empty room is
so much more a suggestive, haunted, beckoning place than ever it
becomes after its furniture gets it into bondage. Rooms are often free,
beautiful creatures before they are saddled and bridled with alien
lives and with upholstery, and hitched for lumbering, permanent uses. I
felt this vaguely even then.
“It’s like the cloth in the store,” I observed, balancing on my stomach
on the sill. “It’s heaps prettier before it’s made up into clothes.”
“How funny,” said Margaret Amelia. “I like the trimming on, and the
pretty buttons.”
“Let’s play,” I said hurriedly; for I had seen in her eyes that look
which always comes into eyes whose owners have just called an idea
“funny.”
“Very well. But,” said Betty, frankly, “I’m awful sick of playing
Pretend. You always want to play that. We played that last time anyhow.
Let’s play Store. Let’s play,” she said, with sudden zest, “Furniture
Store, outdoors.”
The whole lawn became the ground floor for our shop. Forthwith we
arranged the aisles of chairs, stopping to sit in this one and that “to
taste the difference.” To sit in the patent upholstered rocker, close
to the flowering currant bush fragrant with spicy, yellow buds was like
being somewhere else.
“This looks like the pictures of greenhouses,” said Margaret Amelia,
dragging a willow chair to the Bridal Wreath at the fork in the brick
walk. She idled there for a moment.
“Emily Broom says that when they moved she rode right through town on
their velvet lounge on the dray,” she volunteered.
We pictured it mutely. Something like that had been a dream of mine.
Now and then, I had walked backward on the street to watch a furniture
wagon delivering a new chair that rocked idle and unoccupied in the
box. I always marvelled at the unimaginativeness of the driver which
kept him on the wagon seat.
“We’ve never moved,” I confessed regretfully.
“We did,” said Betty, “but they piled everything up so good there
wasn’t anything left to sit on. I rode with the driver--but his seat
wasn’t very high,” she added, less in the interest of truth than with a
lingering resentment.
“Stitchy Branchett told me,” contributed Margaret Amelia, “once he set
on the top step of the step ladder on one of their dray loads.”
“I don’t believe it,” I announced flatly. “It’d tip and pitch him off.”
“He _said_ he did,” Margaret Amelia held. “Betty heard him. Didn’t he,
Betty? Who I don’t believe is Joe Richmond. He says he went to sleep on
a mattress on the dray when they moved. He couldn’t of.”
“Course he couldn’t of,” we all affirmed.
“Delia says they’ve moved six times that she can remember of and she’s
rode on every load,” I repeated.
We all looked enviously across at Delia’s house. Then, moved by
a common impulse, we scrambled back to make the most of our own
advantages, such as they were.
At last the ground floor of the furniture store was all arranged, and
the two show windows set with the choicest pieces to face the street.
And when we were ready to open the place to the general public, we sat
on the edge of the well curb and surveyed our results.
“Now let’s start,” said Margaret Amelia.
At that instant--the precision with which these things happen is almost
conscious--Mary Gilbraith briefly put her head out the kitchen window.
“It’s just edgin’ on ’leven,” she announced. “You children keep your
feet off them mattresses.”
We stared at one another. This was incredible. Margaret Amelia and
Betty had just come. We had hardly tasted what the morning might have
held. Our place of business was only at this moment ready for us. We
had just meant to begin.
There was no appeal. We went down the garden path for Harold. He sat
where we had left him, somewhat drowsy in the warm sun, patting an
enormous mound of moist earth. Busy with our own wrongs, we picked him
up and stood him on his feet without warning him. An indignant roar
broke from him.
“Just goin’ frost my meat pie!” he wailed. “Wiv chocolate on!”
Some stirring of pity for our common plight may have animated us--I do
not remember. But he was hurried off. I went with them to the fence,
gave them last tag as became an hostess, stood on the gate as it swung
shut, experienced the fine jar and bang of its closing, and then hung
wistfully across it, looking for the unknown.
The elm and maple shadows moved pleasantly on the cream-coloured brick
walk whose depths of tone were more uneven than the shadows. An oriole
was calling, hanging back downward from a little bough. Somebody’s dog
came by, looked up at me, wagged his tail, and hurried on about his
business. Looking after him, I saw Mr. Britt coming slowly home with
his mail. At our gate he stopped.
“Playing something?” he inquired.
Welcoming any sympathy, I told him how we had just got ready to play
when it was time to stop. He nodded with some unexpected understanding,
closing his eyes briefly.
“That’s it,” he said. “We all just get ready when it’s time to stop.
Fine day of it,” he added, and sighed and went on.
I stared after him. Could it be possible that his life had not seemed
long to him? That he felt as if he had hardly begun? I dismissed this
as utterly improbable. Fifty years!
IX
NEXT DOOR
The house next door had been vacant for two months when the New Family
moved in. We had looked forward with excitement, not unmodified by
unconscious aversion, to the arrival of the New Family.
“Have they any girls?” we had inquired when the To Rent sign had come
down.
They had, it appeared, one girl. We saw her, with wavy hair worn “let
down” in the morning, though we ourselves wore let-down hair only for
occasions, pig-tails denoting mornings. She had on new soles--we saw
them showing clean as she was setting her feet daintily; and when we,
who were walking the fence between the two houses, crossed glances with
her, we all looked instantly away, and though it was with regret that
we saw her put into the ’bus next day to go, we afterward learned, to
spend the Spring with her grandmother in a dry climate, we still felt
a certain satisfaction that our social habits were not to be disquieted.
Nothing at all had been suspected of a New Boy. Into that experience I
came without warning.
I was sitting on the flat roof of my play-house in the fence corner,
laboriously writing on the weathered boards with a bit of a picket,
which, as everybody knows, will make very clear brown letters, when the
woodshed door of the house next door opened, and the New Boy came out.
He came straight up to the fence and looked up at me, the sun shining
in his eyes beneath the rimless plush cap which he was still wearing.
He was younger than I, so I was not too afraid of him.
“What you got?” he inquired.
I showed him my writing material.
“I wrote on a window with a diamond ring a’ready,” he submitted.
I had heard of this, but I had never wholly credited it and I said
so. Besides, it would wear the ring out and who wanted to wear out a
diamond ring to write on a window?
“It don’t wear it out,” the New Boy said. “It can keep right on writing
forever and ever.”
“Nothing can keep right on forever,” I contended.
He cast about for an argument.
“Trees does,” he produced it.
I glanced up at them. They certainly seemed to bear him out. I decided
to abandon the controversy, and I switched with some abruptness to
a subject not unconnected with trees, and about which I had often
wondered.
“If you was dirt,” I observed, “how could you decide to be into a
potato when you could be into an apple just as well?”
The New Boy was plainly taken aback. Here he was, as I see now, doing
his best to be friendly and to make conversation personal, to say
nothing of his having condescended to parley with a girl at all, and I
was rewarding him with an abstraction.
Said he: “Huh?”