the text.
“I ain’t dirt,” denied the New Boy, with some heat.
“I says, if you _was_ dirt--” I tried to tell him, in haste and some
discomfort.
He climbed down from the fence on which he had been socially
contriving to stick, though his was the “plain” side.
“There ain’t any girl,” he observed with dignity, “going to call me
dirt, nor call me if-I-was-dirt, either,” and stalked back into the
woodshed.
I looked after him in the utmost distress. I had been dealing in what I
had considered the amenities, and it had come to this. Already the New
Boy hated me.
I slipped to the ground and waited, watching through the cracks in the
fence. Ages passed. At length I heard him call his dog and go whistling
down the street. I climbed on the fence and sat looking over in the
deserted garden.
Round the corner of the house next door somebody came. I saw a long,
gray plaid shawl, with torn and flapping tassels, pinned about a small
figure, with long legs. As she put her hand on the latch, she flashed
me her smile, and it was Mary Elizabeth. She went immediately inside
the shed door, and left me staring. What was she doing there? What
unexpected places I was always seeing her. Why should she go in the
woodshed of the New Family whom we didn’t even know ourselves?
After due thought, I dropped to the other side of the fence, and
proceeded to the woodshed door myself. It was unlatched, and as I
peered in, I caught the sweet, moist smell of green wood, like the
cool breath of the wood yard, where I had first seen her. When my
eyes became used to the dimness, I perceived Mary Elizabeth standing
at the end of a pile of wood, of the sort which we used to denominate
“chunks,” which are what folk now call fireplace logs, though they are
not properly fireplace logs at all--only “chunks” for sitting-room
stoves--and trying to look meet to new estates. They were evenly piled,
and they presented a wonderful presence, much more human than a wall.
“See,” said Mary Elizabeth, absorbedly, “every end of one is pictures.
Here’s a wheel with a wing on, and here’s a griffin eating a lemon.”
I stared over her shoulder, fascinated. There they were. And there were
grapes and a chandelier and a crooked street....
Some moments later we were aware that the kitchen door had opened, and
that somebody was standing there. It was the woman of the New Family,
with a black veil wound round her head and the ends dangling. She shook
a huge purple dust-cloth, and I do not seem to recall that there was
anything else to her, save her face and veil and the cloth.
“Now then!” she said briskly, and in a tone of dreadful warning. “_Now_
then!”
Mary Elizabeth turned in the utmost eagerness and contrition.
“Oh,” she said, “I come to see about the work.”
The New Family Woman towered at us from the top of the three steps.
“How much work,” she inquired with majesty, “do you think I’d get out
of you, young miss, at this rate?”
Mary Elizabeth drew nearer to her and stood before her, down in the
chips, in the absurd shawl.
“If you’ll leave me come,” she said earnestly, “I’ll promise not to see
pictures. Well,” she added conscientiously, “I’ll promise not to stop
to look at ’em.”
How much weight this would have carried, I do not know; but at that
moment the woman chanced to touch with her foot a mouse-trap that
stood on the top step, and it “sprung” and shed its cheese. In an
instant Mary Elizabeth had deftly reset and restored it. This made an
impression on the arbiter.
“You’re kind of a handy little thing, I see,” she said. “And of course
you’re _all_ lazy, for that matter. And I do need somebody. Well, I’ve
got a woman coming for to-day. You can begin in the morning. Dishes,
vegetables, and general cleaning, and anything else I think you can do.
Board and clothes only, mind you--and _them_ only as long as you suit.”
“Yes’m. No’m. Yes’m.” Mary Elizabeth tried to agree right and left.
Outside I skipped in the sun.
“We’re going to be next-yard neighbours,” I cried, and that reminded
me of the New Boy. I told her about him as we went round by the gate,
there being no cross piece for a foothold on that side the fence.
“Oh,” said Mary Elizabeth, “I know him. He’s drove me home by my
braids. He doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well,” I said earnestly, “when you get a chance, you tell him that I
wasn’t calling him dirt. I says if he _was_ dirt, how could he tell to
be a potato or an apple.”
Mary Elizabeth nodded. “Lots of boys pretend mad,” she said
philosophically, “to get you to run after them.”
This was new to me. Could it be possible that you had to imagine
folks, and what they really meant, as well as tending to all the other
imagining?
“Can’t you stay over?” I extended hospitality to Mary Elizabeth.
She could “stay over,” it seemed, and without asking. This freedom of
hers used to fill me with longing. To “stay over” without asking, to go
down town, to eat unexpected offerings of food, to climb a new tree,
as Mary Elizabeth could do, and all without asking! It was almost like
being boys.
Now that Mary Elizabeth was to be a neighbour, a new footing was
established. This I did not reason about, nor did I wonder why this
footing might not be everybody’s footing. We merely set to work on the
accepted basis.
This comprised: Name, including middle name, if any, and for whom
named; age, and birthday, and particulars about the recent or
approaching birthday; brothers and sisters, together with their names,
ages, and birthdays; birthstones; grade; did we comb our own hair;
voluntary information concerning tastes in flowers, colours, and food;
and finally an examination and trying on of each other’s rings. The
stone had come out of Mary Elizabeth’s ring, and she had found a clear
pink pebble to insert in its place. She had, she said, grated the
pebble on a brick to make it fit and she herself thought that it looked
better than the one that she had lost, “but,” she added modestly, “I
s’pose it can’t be.”
Then came the revelation. To finish comparing notes we sat down
together in my swing. And partly because, when I made a new friend, I
was nervously eager to give her the best I had and at once, and partly
because I was always wanting to see if somebody _would_ understand,
and chiefly because I never could learn wisdom, I looked up in the
apple tree, now forsaken of all its pink, and fallen in a great green
stillness, and I told her about my lady in the tree. I told her,
expecting now no more than I had received from Delia and the Eversley
girls. But Mary Elizabeth looked up and nodded.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen lots of ’em. They’s a lady in the willow
out in our alley. I see her when I empty the ashes and I pour ’em so’s
they won’t blow on her.”
I looked at her speechlessly. To this day I can remember how the little
curls were caught up above Mary Elizabeth’s ear that morning. Struck by
my silence she turned and regarded me. I think I must have blushed and
stammered like a boy.
“Can _you_ see them too?” I asked. “In trees and places?”
“Why, yes,” she said in surprise. “Can’t everybody?”
Suddenly I was filled with a great sense of protection for Mary
Elizabeth. I felt incalculably older. She had not yet found out, and I
must never let her know, that everybody does not see all that there is
to be seen in the world!
One at a time I brought out my treasures that morning and shared them
with her, as treasures; and she brought out hers as matters of course.
I remember that I told her about the Theys that lived in our house.
They were very friendly and wistful. They never presumed or frightened
one or came in the room when anyone was there. But the minute folk
left the room--ah, then! They slipped out from everywhere and did
their living. I was always trying to catch them. I would leave a room
innocently, and then whirl and fling it open in the hope of surprising
them. But always They were too quick for me. In the times when the
family was in the rooms and They were waiting for us to go, They used
to watch us, still friendly and wistful, but also a little critical.
Sometimes a whole task, or a mood, could be got through pleasantly
because They were looking on.
[Illustration: “BUT THE MINUTE FOLK LEFT THE ROOM--AH THEN!”]
Mary Elizabeth nodded. “They like our parlour best,” she said. “They
ain’t any furniture in there. They don’t come much in the kitchen.”
It was the same at our house. They were always lurking in the curtained
parlour, but the cheery, busy kitchen seldom knew them--except when one
went out for a drink of water late at night. Then They barely escaped
one.
How she understood! Delia I loved with all the loyalties, but I could
not help remembering a brief conversation that I had once held with her.
“Do you have Theys at your house?” I had asked her, at the beginning of
our acquaintance.
“Yes,” she admitted readily. “Company all this week. From Oregon. They
do their hairs on kids.”
“I don’t mean them,” I explained. “I mean Theys, that live in between
your rooms.”
“We don’t let mice get in _our_ house,” she replied loftily. “Only
sometimes one gets in the woodshed. Do you use Choke-’em traps, or
Catch-’em-alive traps and have the cat there?”
“Catch-them-alive-and-let-them-out-in-the-alley traps,” I told her, and
gave up hope, I remember, and went on grating more sugar-stone for the
mud-pie icing.
Mary Elizabeth and I made mud pies that morning too, but all the time
we made them we pretended. Not House-keep, or Store, or Bakery, or
Church-sale--none of these pale pretendings to which I had chiefly
been bound, save when I played alone. But now every pie and cake
that we finished we two carried carefully and laid here and there,
under raspberry bushes, in the crotch of the apple tree, on the
wood-chopper’s block.
“For Them to get afterwards,” we said briefly. We did not explain--I
do not think that we could have explained. And we knew nothing of the
old nights in the motherland when from cottage supper tables scraps of
food were flung through open doors for One Waiting Without. But this
business made an even more excellent thing of mud-pie baking, always a
delectable pastime.
When the noon whistle was blowing up at the brick yard, a shadow
darkened our pine board. It was the New Boy. One of his cheeks
protruded extravagantly. Silently he held out to me a vast pink
substance of rock-like hardness, impaled on a stick. Then, with an
obvious effort, more spiritual than physical, he extracted from his
pocket a third of the kind, for Mary Elizabeth, on whose presence he
had not counted. We accepted gratefully, I in the full spirit of the
offer. Three minutes later he and I were at our respective dinner
tables, trying, I suppose, to discuss this surreptitious first course
simultaneously with our soup; and Mary Elizabeth, on her way home, was
blissfully partaking of her _hors d’œuvre_, unviolated by any soup.
“What are the new children like, I wonder?” said Somebody Grown. “I see
there are two. I don’t know a thing about the people, but we can’t
call till the woman at least gets her curtains up.”
I pondered this. “Why?” I ventured at last.
“Because she wouldn’t want to see us,” was the reply.
Were curtains, then, so important that one might neither call nor be
called on without them? What other possible explanation could there be?
Perhaps Mary Elizabeth’s mother had no curtains and that was why our
mothers did not know her.
“Mary Elizabeth is going to help do the work for the New Family, and
live there,” I said at last. “Won’t it be nice to have her to play
with?”
“You must be very kind to her,” somebody said.
“_Kind to her!_” It was my first horrified look into the depths of the
social condescensions. _Kind to her_--when I remembered what we shared!
I thought of saying hotly that she was my best friend. But I was
silent. There was, after all, no way to make anybody understand what
had opened to me that morning.
X
WHAT’S PROPER
Delia and Calista and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman I loved with
devotion. And Mary Elizabeth I likewise loved with devotion. Therefore,
the fact that my four friends would not, in the language of the
wise and grown world, “receive” Mary Elizabeth was to me bitter and
unbelievable.
This astounding situation, more than intimated on the day of the
picnic, had its confirmation a few days after the advent of Mary
Elizabeth in the New Family, when the six of us were seated on the
edge of the board walk before our house. It was the middle of a June
afternoon, a joyous, girlish day, with sun and wind in that feminine
mood which is the frequent inheritance of all created things.
“I could ’most spread this day on my bread like honey, and eat it
up, and not know the difference,” said Mary Elizabeth, idly. “The
queen’s honey--the queen’s honey--the queen’s honey,” she repeated
luxuriously, looking up into the leaves.
Delia leaned forward. It particularly annoyed her to have Mary
Elizabeth in this mood.
“One, two, three, four, five of us,” Delia said, deliberately omitting
Mary Elizabeth as, for no reason, she counted us.
Mary Elizabeth, released from tasks for an hour or two before time to
“help with the supper,” gave no sign that she understood, save that
delicate flush of hers which I knew.
“Yes,” she assented lazily, “one, two, three, four, five of us--” and
she so contrived that five was her own number, and no one could tell
whom of us she had omitted.
“Let’s play something,” I hurriedly intervened. “Let’s play Banquet.”
Action might have proved the solvent, but I had made an ill-starred
choice. For having selected the rectangle of lawn where the feast was
to be spread, Mary Elizabeth promptly announced that she had never
heard of a banquet for five people, and that we must have more.
“We’ve got six,” corrected Delia, unwarily.
“Five,” Mary Elizabeth persisted tranquilly, “and it’s not enough. We
ought to have thirty.”
“Where you going to get your thirty?” demanded the exasperated Delia.
“Why,” said Mary Elizabeth, “_that’s_ always easy!” And told us.
The king would sit at the head, with his prime minister and a
lord or two. At the foot would be the queen with her principal
ladies-in-waiting (at _this_ end, so as to leave room for their
trains). In between would be the fool, the discoverer of the new land,
the people from the other planets, us, and the animals.
“‘The animals!’” burst out Delia. “Whoever heard of animals at the
table?”
Oh, but it was the animals that the banquet was for. They were talking
animals, and everyone was scrambling to entertain them, and every place
in which they ate they changed their shapes and their skins.
“I never heard of such a game,” said Delia, outright, already
sufficiently grown-up to regard this as a reason.
“Let’s not play it,” said Margaret Amelia Rodman, languidly, and,
though Delia had the most emphasis among us, Margaret Amelia was our
leader, and we abandoned the game. I cannot recall why Margaret Amelia
was our leader, unless it was because she had so many hair-ribbons and,
when we had pin fairs, always came with a whole paper, whereas the rest
of us merely had some collected in a box, or else rows torn off. But I
suppose that we must have selected her for some potentiality; or else
it was that a talent for tyranny was hers, since this, like the habit
of creeping on all fours and other survivals of prehistoric man, will
often mark one of the early stages of individual growth.
This time Calista was peace-maker.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “We can do that before supper.”
“You’ll have to be back in time to help _get_ supper, won’t you?” Delia
asked Mary Elizabeth pointedly.
Again Mary Elizabeth was unperturbed, save for that faint flush.
“Yes,” she said, “I will. So let’s hurry.”
We ran toward the school ground, by common consent the destination for
short walks, with supper imminent, as Prospect Hill was dedicated to
real walks, with nothing pressing upon us.
“It says ‘Quick, quick, quick, quick,’” Mary Elizabeth cried, dragging
a stick on the pickets of, so to say, a passing fence.
“Why, that’s nothing but the stick noise hitting on the fence noise,”
Delia explained loftily.
“Which makes the loudest noise--the stick or the fence?” Mary Elizabeth
put it to her.
“Why--” said Delia, and Mary Elizabeth and I both laughed, like little
demons, and made our sticks say, “Quick, quick, quick, quick” as far as
the big post, that was so like a man standing there to stop us.
“See the poor tree. The walk’s stepping on its feet!” cried Mary
Elizabeth when we passed the Branchett’s great oak, that had forced
up the bricks of the walk. (They must already have been talking of
taking it down, that hundred-year oak, to preserve the dignity of the
side-walk, for they did so shortly after.)
This time it was Margaret Amelia who revolted.
“Trees can’t walk,” she said. “There aren’t any _feet_ there.”
I took a hand. “You don’t know sure,” I reminded her. “When it’s dark,
maybe they do walk. I’ll ask it.”
By the time I had done whispering to the bark, Delia said she was going
to tell her mother. “Such _lies_,” she put it bluntly. “You’ll never
write a book, I don’t care what you say. You got to tell the truth to
write books.”
“Everybody that tells the truth don’t write a book,” I contended--but
sobered. I wanted passionately to write a book. What if this business
of pretending, which Delia called lies should be in the way of truthful
book-writing? But the habit was too strong for me. In that very moment
we came upon a huge new ant-hill.
“Don’t step on that ant-hill. See all the ants--they say to step over
it!” I cried, and pushed Delia round it with some violence.
“Well--what makes you always so--_religious_!” she burst out, at the
end of her patience.
I was still hotly denying this implication when we entered the school
yard, and broke into running; for no reason, save that entrances and
beginnings always made us want to run and shout.
The school yard, quite an ordinary place during school hours, became
at the end of school a place no longer to be shunned, but wholly
desirable. Next to the wood yard, it was the most mysterious place
that we knew. In the school yard were great cords of wood, suitable
for hiding; a basement door, occasionally left open, from which at any
moment the janitor might appear to drive us away; a band-stand, covered
with names and lacking enough boards so that one might climb up without
use of the steps; a high-board fence on which one always longed to
walk at recess; a high platform from which one had unavailingly pined
to jump; outside banisters down which, in school-time, no one might
slide, trees which no one might climb, corner brick-work affording
excellent steps, which, then, none might scale; broad outside window
ledges on which none might sit, loose bricks in the walks ripe for
the prying-up, but penalty attended; a pump on whose iron handle the
lightest of us might ride save that, in school-time, this was forbidden
too. In school-time this yard, so rich in possibilities, was compact
of restrictions. None of these things might be done. Once a boy had
been expelled for climbing on the schoolhouse roof; and thereupon his
father, a painter by trade, had taken the boy to work with him, and
when we saw him in overalls wheeling his father’s cart, we were told
that _that_ was what came of disobedience, although this boy might,
easily no doubt, otherwise have become President of the United States.
But after school! Toward supper-time, or in vacation-time, we used to
love to linger about the yard and snatch at these forbidden pleasures.
That is, the girls loved it. The boys had long ago had them all, and
were off across the tracks on new adventures unguessed of us.
If anybody found us here--we were promptly driven off. The principal
did this as a matter of course, but the janitor had the same power
and much more emphasis. If one of the board was seen passing, we hid
behind everything and, as we were never clear just who belonged to the
board, we hid when nearly all grown-folk passed. That the building and
grounds were ours, paid for by our father’s taxes, and that the school
officials and even the tyrannical janitor were town servants to help us
to make good use of our own, no more occurred to us than it occurred
to us to find a ring in the ground, lift it, and descend steps. Nor
as much, for we were always looking for a ring to lift. To be sure,
we might easily fall into serious mischief in this stolen use of our
property; but that it was the function of one of these grown-ups, whom
we were forever dodging, to be there with us, paid by the town to play
with us, was as wild an expectation as that fairies should arrive with
golden hoops and balls and wings. Wilder, for we were always expecting
the fairies and, secretly, the wings.
That afternoon we did almost all these forbidden things--swings and
seesaws and rings would have done exactly as well, only these had
not been provided--and then we went to rest in the band-stand. Mary
Elizabeth and I were feeling somewhat subdued--neither of us shone much
in feats of skill, and here Delia and Margaret Amelia easily put us in
our proper places. Calista was not daring, but she was a swift runner,
and this entitled her to respect. Mary Elizabeth and I were usually
the first ones caught, and the others were not above explaining to us
frankly that this was why we preferred to play Pretend.
“Let’s tell a story--you start it, Mary Elizabeth,” I proposed, anxious
for us two to return to standing, for in collaborations of this kind
Mary Elizabeth and I frankly shone--and the wish to shine, like the
wish to cry out, is among the primitive phases of individual growth.
“Let Margaret Amelia start it,” Delia tried to say, but already the
story was started, Mary Elizabeth leaning far back, and beginning to
braid and unbraid her long hair--not right away to the top of the
braid, which was a serious matter and not to be lightly attempted with
heavy hair, but just near the curling end.
“Once,” she said, “a big gold sun was going along up in the sky,
wondering what in the world--no, what in All-of-it to do with himself.
For he was all made and done, nice and bright and shiny, and he wanted
a place to be. So he knocked at all the worlds and said, ‘Don’t you
want to hire a sun to do your urrants, take care of your garden, and
behave like a fire and like a lamp?’ But all the worlds didn’t want
him, because they all had engaged a sun first and they could only
use one apiece, account of the climate. So one morning--he _knew_ it
was morning because he was shining, and when it was night he never
shone--one morning....”
“Now leave somebody else,” Delia suggested restlessly. “Leave Margaret
Amelia tell.”
So we turned to her. Margaret Amelia considered solemnly--perhaps it
was her faculty for gravity that made us always look up to her--and
took up the tale:
“One morning he met a witch. And he said, ‘Witch, I wish you
would--would give me something to eat. I’m very hungry.’ So the witch
took him to her kitchen and gave him a bowl of porridge, and it was hot
and burned his mouth, and he asked for a drink of water, and--and--”
“What was the use of having her a witch if _that_ was all he was going
to ask her?” demanded Mary Elizabeth.
“They _always_ have witches in the best stories,” Margaret Amelia
contended, “and anyway, that’s all I’m going to tell.”
Delia took up the tale uninvited.
“And he got his drink of water, pumped up polite by the witch herself,
and she was going to put a portion in it. But while she was looking in
the top drawer for the portion, the sun went away. And--”
This time it was I who intervened.
“‘Portion!’” I said with superiority. “Who ever heard of anybody
drinking a _portion_? That word is _potient_.”
Delia was plainly taken aback.
“You’re thinking of long division,” she said feebly.
“I’m thinking of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” I responded with dignity. “They
had one, in the tomb, where Tybalt, all bloody--”
“Don’t say that one--don’t say it!” cried Margaret Amelia. “I can see
that one awful after the light is out. Go on, somebody, quick.”
To take up her share of the story, Betty Rodman refused, point-blank. I
think that her admission to our group must have been principally on the
credentials of sistership to one of us, a basis at once pathetic and
lovely.
“I never can think of anything to have happen,” Betty complained, “and
if I make something happen, then it ends up the story.”