it down with a stone to be approached; so, when we had all minutely
examined the damage which the nail had wrought, it was my turn to take
up the tale. And then the thing happened which was always happening
to me: I could think of nothing to have the story do. At night, and
when I was alone, I could dream out the most fascinating adventures,
but with expectant faces--or a clean pad--before me, I was dumb and
powerless.
“I don’t feel like telling one just now,” said I, the proposer of the
game, and went on digging leaves out of a crevice in the rotting rail.
So Mary Elizabeth serenely took up the tale where she had left it.
“One morning he looked over a high sky mountain--that’s what suns like
to do best because it is so becoming--and he shone in a room of the sky
where a little black star was sleeping. And he thought he would ask it
what to do. So he said to it, ‘Little Black Star, where shall I be, now
that I am all done and finished, nice and shiny?’ And the Little Black
Star said: ‘You’re not done. What made you think you were done? Hardly
anybody is ever done. I’ll tell you what to be. Be like a carriage
and take all us little dark stars in, and whirl and whirl for about a
million years, and make us all get bright too, and _then_ maybe you’ll
be a true sun--but not all done, even then.’ So that’s what he decided
to do, and he’s up there now, only you can’t see him, because he’s so
far, and our sun is so bright, and he’s whirling and whirling, and lots
more like him, getting to be made.”
Delia followed Mary Elizabeth’s look into the blue.
“I don’t believe it,” said she. “The sun is biggest and the moon is
next. How could there be any other sun? And it don’t whirl. It don’t
even rise and set. It stands still. Miss Messmore said so.”
We looked at Mary Elizabeth, probably I alone having any impulse to
defend her. And we became aware that she was quite white and trembling.
In the same moment we understood that we were hearing something which
we had been hearing without knowing that we heard. It was a thin,
wavering strain of singing, in a man’s voice. We scrambled up, and
looked over the edge of the band-stand. Coming unevenly down the broken
brick walk that cut the schoolhouse grounds was Mary Elizabeth’s
father. His hat was gone. It was he who was singing. He looked as he
had looked that first day that I had seen him in the wood yard. We knew
what was the matter. And all of us unconsciously did the cruel thing of
turning and staring at Mary Elizabeth.
In a moment she was over the side of the band-stand and running to
him. She took him by the hand, and we saw that she meant to lead him
home. Her little figure looked very tiny beside his gaunt frame, in its
loosely hanging coat. I remember how the sun was pouring over them, and
over the brilliant green beyond where blackbirds were walking. I have
no knowledge of what made me do it--perhaps it was merely an attitude,
created by the afternoon, of standing up for Mary Elizabeth no matter
what befell; or it may have been a child’s crude will to challenge
things; at any rate, without myself really deciding it, I suddenly took
the way that she had taken, and caught up with the two.
“Mary Elizabeth,” I meant to say, “I’m going.”
But in fact I said nothing, and only kept along beside her. She looked
at me mutely, and made a motion to me to turn back. When her father
took our hands and stumblingly ran with us, I heartily wished that I
had turned back. But nearly all the way he went peaceably enough. Long
before we reached their home across the tracks, however, I heard the
six o’clock whistles blow, and pictured the wrath of the mistress of
the New Family when Mary Elizabeth had not returned in time to “help
with the supper.” Very likely now they would not let her stay, and this
new companionship of ours would have to end. Mary Elizabeth’s home
was on the extreme edge of the town, and ordinarily I was not allowed
to cross the tracks. Mary Elizabeth might even move away--that had
happened to some of us, and the night had descended upon such as these
and we had never heard of them again: Hattie Schenck, whom I had loved
with unequalled devotion, where, for example, was she? Was it, then, to
be the same with Mary Elizabeth?
Her mother saw us coming. She hurried down to the gateway--the gate
was detached and lying in the weeds within--and even then I was
struck by the way of maternity with which she led her husband to the
house. I remember her as large-featured, with the two bones of her
arms sharply defined by a hollow running from wrist to elbow, and she
constantly held her face as if the sun were shining in her eyes, but
there was no sun shining there. And somehow, at the gate she had a
way of receiving him, and of taking him with her. Hardly anything
was said. The worst of it was that no one had to explain anything.
Two of the little children ran away and hid. Someone dodged behind an
open door. The man’s wife led him to the broken couch, and he lay down
there like a little child. Standing in the doorway of that forlorn,
disordered, ill-smelling room, I first dimly understood what I never
have forgotten: That the man was not poor because he drank, as the
village thought, but that he drank because he was poor. Instead of the
horror at a drunken man which the village had laid it upon me to feel,
I suddenly saw Mary Elizabeth’s father as her mother saw him when she
folded her gingham apron and spread it across his shoulders and said:
“Poor lad.”
And when, in a few minutes, Mary Elizabeth and I were out on the street
again, running silently, I remember feeling a great blind rage against
the whole village and against the whole world that couldn’t seem to
think what to do any more than Mary Elizabeth and I could think.
The man of the New Family was watering the lawn, which meant that
supper was done. We slipped in our back gate,--the New Family had
none,--climbed the fence by my play-house, dropped down into the New
Family’s garden, and entered their woodshed. In my own mind I had
settled that I was of small account if I could not give the New Lady
such a picture of what had happened that Mary Elizabeth should not lose
her place, and I should not lose her.
The kitchen door was ajar. The dish-pan was in the sink, the kettle was
steaming on the stove. And from out the dining-room abruptly appeared
Calista and _Delia_, bearing plates.
“Girls!” I cried, but Mary Elizabeth was dumb.
Delia carefully set down her plate in the dish-pan and addressed me:
“Well, you needn’t think you’re the only one that knows what’s proper,
miss,” she said.
Calista was more simple.
“We wanted to get ’em all done before you got back,” she owned. “We
would, if Margaret Amelia and Betty had of come. They wanted to, but
they wouldn’t let ’em.”
Back of Delia and Calista appeared the mistress of the house. She had
on her afternoon dress, and her curl papers were out, and she actually
smiled at Mary Elizabeth and me.
“_Now_ then!” she said to us.
* * * * *
If I could have made a dream for that night, I think it would have been
that ever and ever so many of us were sitting in rows, waiting to be
counted. And a big sun came by, whirling and growing, to take us, and
we thought we couldn’t all get in. But there was room, whether we had
been counted or not.
XI
DOLLS
The advent of the New Boy changed the face of the neighbourhood.
Formerly I had been accustomed to peep through cracks in the fence
only to look into a field of corn that grew at the side; or, on the
other side, into raspberry bushes, where at any moment raspberries
might be gathered and dropped over the fence to me. Also, there was
one place in the deep green before those bushes where blue-eyed grass
grew, and I had to watch for that. Then there was a great spotted dog
that sometimes came, and when he had passed, I used to wait long by the
high boards lest he should return and leap at me to whom, so far, he
had never paid the slightest attention. As a child, my mother had once
jumped down into a manger where a great spotted dog was inadvertently
lying and, though from all accounts he was far more frightened than
she, yet I feared his kind more than any other.... The only real
excitement that we had been wont to know in the neighbourhood occurred
whenever there was a Loose Horse. Somebody would give the alarm, and
then we would all make sure that the gates were latched and we would
retire to watch him fearfully, where he was quietly cropping the
roadside grass. But sometimes, too, a Loose Horse would run--and then I
was terrified by the sound of his hoofs galloping on the sidewalk and
striking on the bricks and boards. I was always afraid that a Loose
Horse would see me, and nights, after one had disturbed our peace, I
would dream that he was trying to find me, and that he had come peering
between the dining-room blinds; and though I hid under the red cotton
spread that was used “between-meals,” it never came down far enough,
and he always stood there interminably waiting, and found me, through
the fringe.
But all these excitements were become as nothing. A new occupation
presented itself. A dozen times a day now I had to watch through the
fence-cracks, or through the knot-hole, or boldly between the pickets
of the front fence, at the fascinating performances of the New Boy
and his troops of friends. At any moment both Mary Elizabeth and I
would abandon what we were doing to go to stare at the unaccountable
activities which were forever agitating them. They were always
producing something from their pockets and examining it, with their
heads together, or manufacturing something or burying something, or
disputing about something unguessed and alluring. Their whole world
was filled with doing, doing, doing, whereas ours was made wholly of
watching things get done.
On an afternoon Mary Elizabeth and I were playing together in our side
yard. It was the day for Delia’s music lesson, and as she usually did
her whole week’s practising in the time immediately preceding that
event, the entire half day was virtually wasted. We could hear her
going drearily over and over the first and last movements of “At Home,”
which she had memorized and could play like lightning, while the entire
middle of the piece went with infinite deliberation. Calista was, we
understood (because of some matter pertaining to having filled the
bath-tub and waded in it and ruined the dining-room ceiling), spending
the day in her bed. And Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman were being
kept at home because the family had company; and such was the prestige
of the Rodmans that the two contrived to make this circumstance seem
enviable, and the day before had pictured to us their embroidered white
dresses and blue ribbons, and blue stockings, and the Charlotte Russe
for supper, until we felt left out, and not in the least as if their
company were of a kind with events of the sort familiar to us. Since I
have grown up, I have observed this variety of genius in others. There
is one family which, when it appears in afternoon gowns on occasions
when I have worn a street dress, has power to make me wonder how I
can have failed to do honour to the day; but who, when they wear
street gowns and I am dressed for afternoon, invariably cause me to
feel inexcusably overdressed. It is a kind of genius for the fit, and
we must believe that it actually designates the atmosphere which an
occasion shall breathe.
Mary Elizabeth and I were playing Dolls. We rarely did this on a
pleasant day in Summer, Dolls being an indoor game, matched with
carpets and furniture and sewing baskets rather than with blue sky and
with the soft brilliance of the grass. But that day we had brought
everything out in the side yard under the little catalpa tree, and my
eleven dolls (counting the one without any face, and Irene Helena, the
home-made one, and the two penny ones) were in a circle on chairs and
boxes and their backs, getting dressed for the tea-party. There was
always going to be a tea-party when you played Dolls--you of course had
to lead up to something, and what else was there to lead up to save
a tea-party? To be sure, there might be an occasional marriage, but
boy-dolls were never very practical; they were invariably smaller than
the bride-doll, and besides we had no mosquito-netting suitable for a
veil. Sometimes we had them go for a walk, and once or twice we had
tried playing that they were house-cleaning; but these operations were
not desirable, because in neither of them could the dolls dress up, and
the desirable part of playing dolls is, as everybody knows, to dress
them in their best. That is the game. That, and the tea-party.
“Blue or rose-pink?” Mary Elizabeth inquired, indicating the two best
gowns of the doll she was dressing.
It was a difficult question. We had never been able to decide which
of these two colours we preferred. There was the sky for precedent of
blue, but then rose-pink we loved so to say!
[Illustration: SHE SETTLED EVERYTHING IN THAT WAY; SHE COUNTED THE
PETALS OF FENNEL DAISIES AND BLEW THISTLE FROM DANDELIONS.]
“If they’s one cloud in the sky, we’ll put on the rose-pink one,” said
Mary Elizabeth. “And if there isn’t any, that’ll mean blue.”
She settled everything that way--she counted the petals of fennel
daisies, blew the thistle from dandelions, did one thing if she could
find twelve acorns and another if they were lacking. Even then Mary
Elizabeth seemed always to be watching for a guiding hand, to be
listening for a voice to tell her what to do, and trying to find these
in things of Nature.
We dressed the Eleven in their best frocks, weighing each choice long,
and seated them about a table made of a box covered with a towel. We
sliced a doughnut and with it filled two small baskets for each end of
the table, on which rested my toy castor and such of my dishes as had
survived the necessity which I had felt for going to bed with the full
set, on the night of the day, some years before, when I had acquired
them. We picked all the flowers suitable for doll decorations--clover,
sorrel, candytuft, sweet alyssum. We observed the unities by retiring
for a time sufficient to occupy the tea-party in disposing of the
feast; and then we came back and sat down and stared at them. Irene
Helena, I remember, had slipped under the table in a heap, a proceeding
which always irritated me, as nakedly uncovering the real depths of
our pretence--and I jerked her up and set her down, like some maternal
Nemesis.
In that moment a wild, I may almost say _thick_, shriek sounded through
our block, and there came that stimulating thud-thud of feet on earth
that accompanies all the best diversions, and also there came the
cracking of things,--whips, or pistols, or even a punch, which rapidly
operated will do almost as well. And down the yards of the block and
over the fences and over the roof of my play-house came tumbling and
shrieking the New Boy, and in his wake were ten of his kind.
Usually they raced by with a look in their eyes which we knew well,
though we never could distinguish whether it meant robbers or pirates
or dragons or the enemy. Usually they did not even see us. But that
day something in our elaborate preparation to receive somebody or to
welcome something, and our eternal moment of suspended animation at
which they found us, must have caught the fancy of the New Boy.
“Halt!” he roared with the force and effect of a steam whistle, and in
a moment they were all stamping and breathing about Mary Elizabeth and
me.
We sprang up in instant alarm and the vague, pathetic, immemorial
impulse to defence. We need not have feared. The game was still going
forward and we were merely pawns.
“Who is the lord of this castle?” demanded the New Boy.
“Bindyliggs,” replied Mary Elizabeth, without a moment’s hesitation, a
name which I believe neither of us to have heard before.
“Where is this Lord of Bindyliggs?” the New Boy pressed it.
Mary Elizabeth indicated the woodshed. “At meat,” she added gravely.
“Forward!” the New Boy instantly commanded, and the whole troop
disappeared in our shed. We heard wood fall, and the clash of meeting
weapons, and the troop reappeared, two by way of the low window.
“Enough!” cried the New Boy, grandly. “We have spared him, but there is
not a moment to lose. You must come with us _immediately_. What you
got to eat?”
Raptly, we gave them, from under the wistful noses of Irene Helena and
the doll without the face and the rest, the entire sliced doughnut, and
two more doughnuts, dipped in sugar, which we had been saving so as to
have something to look forward to.
“Come with us,” said the New Boy, graciously. “To horse! We may reach
the settlement by nightfall--_if_ we escape the Brigands in the Wood.
The Black Wood,” he added.
Even then, I recall, I was smitten with wonder that he who had shown
so little imagination in that matter of dirt and apples and potatoes
should here be teeming with fancy on his own familiar ground. It was
years before I understood that there are almost as many varieties of
imaginative as of religious experience.
Fascinated, we dropped everything and followed. The way led, it
appeared, to the Wells’s barn, a huge, red barn in the block, with
doors always invitingly open and chickens pecking about, and doves on a
little platform close to the pointed roof.
“Aw, say, you ain’t goin’ to take ’em along, are you?” demanded one
knight, below his voice. “They’ll spoil everythin’.”
“You’re _rescuin’_ ’em, you geezer,” the New Boy explained. “You got to
have ’em along till you get ’em rescued, ain’t you? Arrest that man!”
he added. “Put him in double irons with chains and balls on. And gag
him, to make sure.”
And it was done, with hardly a moment’s loss of time.
We went round by the walk--a course to which the arrested one had time
to refer in further support of his claim as to our undesirability.
But he was drowned in the important topics that were afoot: the new
cave to be explored where the Branchetts were putting a cellar under
the dining-room, mysterious boxes suspected to contain dynamite being
unloaded into the Wells’s cellar, and the Court of the Seven Kings, to
which, it seemed, we were being conveyed in the red barn.
“Shall we give ’em the password?” the New Boy asked, _sotto voce_, as
we approached the rendezvous. And Mary Elizabeth and I trembled as we
realized that he was thinking of sharing the password with us.
“_Naw!_” cried the Arrested One violently. “It’ll be all over town.”
The New Boy drew himself up--he must have been good to look at, for I
recall his compact little figure and his pink cheeks.
“Can’t you tell when you’re gagged?” he inquired with majesty. “You’re
playin’ like a girl yourself. I can give the password for ’em, though,”
he added reasonably. So we all filed in the red barn, to the Court of
the Seven Kings, and each boy whispered the password into the first
manger, but Mary Elizabeth and I had it whispered for us.
What the Court of the Seven Kings might have held for us we were never
to know. At that instant there appeared lumbering down the alley a load
of hay. Seated in the midst was a small figure whom we recognized as
Stitchy Branchett; and he rose and uttered a roar.
“Come on, fellows!” he said. “We dast ride over to the Glen. I was
lookin’ for you. Father said so.” And Stitchy threw himself on his
back, and lifted and waved his heels.
Already our liberators were swarming up the hay-rack, which had halted
for them. In a twinkling they were sunk in that fragrance, kicking
their heels even as their host. Already they had forgotten Mary
Elizabeth and me, nor did they give us good-bye.
We two turned and went through the Wells’s yard, back to the street.
Almost at once we were again within range of the sounds of Delia,
practising interminably on her “At Home.”
“I never rode on a load of hay,” said Mary Elizabeth at length.
Neither had I, though I almost always walked backward to watch one when
it passed me.
“What do you _s’pose_ the password was?” said Mary Elizabeth.
It was days before we gave over wondering. And sometimes in later years
I have caught myself speculating on that lost word.
“I wonder what we were rescued from,” said Mary Elizabeth when we
passed our woodshed door.
We stopped and peered within. No Lord of Bindyliggs, though we had
almost expected to see him stretched there, bound and helpless.
What were we rescued from? _We should never know._
We rounded the corner by the side yard. There sat our staring dolls,
drawn up about the tea-table, static all. As I looked at them I was
seized and possessed by an unreasoning fury. And I laid hold on Irene
Helena, and had her by the heels, and with all my strength I pounded
her head against the trunk of the catalpa tree.
Mary Elizabeth understood--when did she not understand?
“Which one can I--which one can I?” she cried excitedly.
“All of ’em!” I shouted, and one after another we picked up the Eleven
by their skirts, and we threw them far and wide in the grass, and the
penny dolls we hurled into the potato patch.
Then Mary Elizabeth looked at me aghast.
“Your dolls!” she said.
“I don’t care!” I cried savagely. “I’ll never play ’em again. I hate
’em!” And I turned to Mary Elizabeth with new eyes. “Let’s go down town
after supper,” I whispered.
“I could,” she said, “but you won’t be let.”
“I won’t ask,” I said. “I’ll go. When you get done, come on over.”
I scorned to gather up the dolls. They were in the angle below the
parlour windows, and no one saw them. As soon as supper was finished,
I went to my room and put on my best shoes, which I was not allowed to
wear for everyday. Then I tipped my birthday silver dollar out of my
bank and tied it in the corner of my handkerchief. Down in the garden I
waited for Mary Elizabeth.
It was hardly dusk when she came. We had seen nothing of Delia, and we
guessed that she was to stay in the house for the rest of the day as
penance for having, without doubt, played “At Home” too badly.
“You better not do it,” Mary Elizabeth whispered. “They might....”
“Come on,” I said only.
“Let’s try a June grass,” she begged. “If the seeds all come off in my
teeth, we’ll go. But if they don’t--”
“Come on,” said I, “I’m not going to monkey with signs any more.”
We climbed the back fence, partly so that the chain, weighted with a
pail of stones, might not creak, and partly because to do so seemed
more fitting to the business in hand. We ran crouching, thereby
arousing the attention of old Mr. Branchett, who was training a
Virginia creeper along his back fence.
“Hello, hello,” said he. “Pretty good runners for girls, seems to me.”
Neither of us replied. Our souls were suddenly sickened at this sort of
dealing.
Wisconsin Street was a blaze of light. The ’buses were on their way
from the “depots” to the hotels--nobody knew who might be in those
’buses. They were the nexus between us and the unguessed world.
Strangers were on the streets. Everything was in motion. Before
Morrison’s grocery they were burning rubbish, some boys from the other
end of town were running unconcernedly through the flames, and the
smell of the smoke set us tingling. At the corner a man was pasting
a circus bill--we stopped a moment to look down the throat of the
hippopotamus. Away up the street a band struck up, and we took hold of
hands again, and ran.
We crossed the big square by the City Bank, under the hissing arc lamp.
By the post-office a crowd of men and boys was standing, and between
the files young women whom we knew, wearing ribbons and feathers, were
passing in and out of the office and laughing. Bard’s jewellery store
was brilliant--it looked lighter than any other store with its window
of dazzling cut glass and its wonderful wall of clocks whose pendulums
never kept pace. In a saloon a piano was playing--we glanced in with a
kind of joyous fear at the green screen beyond the door. We saw Alma
Fremont, whose father kept a grocery store, standing in the store door
with a stick of pink candy thrust in a lemon, and we thought on the
joy of having a father who was a grocer. We longed to stare in the
barber-shop window, and looked away. But our instinctive destination
was the place before the Opera House, where the band was playing. We
reached it, and stood packed in the crowd, close to the blare of the
music, and shivered with delight.
“If only the fire-engine would come,” Mary Elizabeth breathed in my ear.