Part 15

"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is so written."

On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes: the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.

"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."

"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and you will never find it written so."

"Friend," repeated Matthew, "_friend_...."

Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo, when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.

It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the boy's breast, but he did not even heed.

"Tell me!" he cried. "These--do they live here with you? Are they yours?"

"We are one another's," said the citizen.

Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks. They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while after she had spoken. ("So _she_ could answer," Matthew thought, "and better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the fourth wheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did the trick again.

And when he rose to take his leave:--

"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.

He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he answered.

They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.

"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.

"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the citizen. "Every house is filled with them."

Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being, and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too, was offspring of their Father, that for all this had he too been created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say was:--

"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the fourth wheel missing...."

On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."

With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to his lonely toil.

Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been done so.

"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other, advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour. _His neighbour._ Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made; a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the kingdom of God."

In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time began:--

"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."

"It is not seemly that we change...."

"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."

"Have you thought what will become of our business?"

And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old time."

And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly through the throng--of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)--to the edge of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.

"Come," he said.

She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have entered.

"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go about and the lamps that I light."

"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on living where you do not live."

He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she performed it.

"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this happiness and more."

But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.

"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house. Here we will live--and it may be there is a handful of others who understand. And here we will do what we can."

"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live--the things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the freeing of shrines."

"All that," she said, "we will do here."

"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do--the shell, the pretty stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel missing...."

"All that," she said, "is in my heart."

Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her beauty there was her power, and to that he bowed himself as to a far voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he knew what this would be.

So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every village--nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.

When I had done,

"Peter," I said--I nearly called him Matthew!--"these are the things that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."

He knew. He said nothing; but he knew how it is written.

"Peter," I said, "I suppose Miggy will never have been to your house?"

I knew that she could not have been there.

"Some day soon," I said--"before you go away--ask us to come there. I should like her to sit by your table and look from your window."

For how can one be sure that divine non-interference is always divine?

Peter drew his breath long.

"Would you?" he said; "would you? So many times I've thought maybe that would make her think of me as if I _was_ me."

Yes, that might help. If only Miggy knew how to shake hands as Elfa shook hands with Nicholas Moor, that might help, too. How did it begin, this pride of individualism in a race which does not know its own destiny save as the great relationships, human and divine, can reveal that destiny? But Peter knows! And the hope of the world is that so many do know.

Since he said his grateful good night and rushed away, I have been trying to readjust my impression of Peter. For I can no longer think of him in connection with Miggy and the cannery and my neighbour's lawn and the village. Now he is a figure ranging the ample intervals of a field fraternal to the night and to the day. Fraternal, too, to any little moon-washed area, won from the void, where it is easy to be in conference with the spirit without and within. Truly, it is as if the meaning of the universe were passioning for the comradeship of hearts that can understand.

XVII

ADOPTION

The big window of my sitting room is an isle of sirens on whose shore many of my bird neighbours are continually coming to grief. For, from without, the window makes a place of soft skies and seductive leaves where any bird might think to wing a way. And in that mirrored deep there is that curious atmosphere which makes In-a-looking-glass a better thing than the room which it reflects--an elusive sense which Little Child might call Isn't-any-such-placeness. I think that I might call it so too. And so, evidently, the birds would call it, for they are always trying to find there some path of flight.

A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air, so that the deeps of air could never again be wholly alien to me. And now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not enough; and while I looked the little life went out.

... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have understood....

"Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour.

She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the moment like the right word.

"It don't seem like anybody could _mean_ 'em to die before their time," she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow couldn't help it?"

It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my mind while I hollowed the little grave under the hedge. And when we had finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had noted.

"I guess we've found one now for sure," she said.

"Found one?" I puzzled.

"I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew--we've been looking for one so long. For a baby."

She never had told me and no one had told me, but I loved her for thinking that all the world knew. There are abroad a multitude of these sweet suspicions as well as the sad misgivings of the hunted. She had simply let me know, that early morning in the garden, her sorrow that there was "no little thing runnin' round." And now she told me for how long they had been trying to find one to adopt, consciously serving no social need, but simply hungering for a child whom they could "take to." It was a story of fruitless visits to the homes in the city, the news sent of this little waif or that, all proving too old or of too sad an inheritance. To me it would seem that the more tragic the inheritance the more poignantly sounds the cry for foster-folk. And this may be extreme, I know, but virtue, I find, does not lie exclusively in the mean, either. It lies partly in one's taste in extremes. However, this special extreme I find not generally believed in as I believe in it; and my neighbour, not sharing it, had waited on with empty arms.

And now, after all the long hoping, she had found a baby--a baby who filled all the requirements and more. First of all, he was a boy; second, he was of healthful Scotch parentage; third, he was six weeks old; and, fondest I could see in my neighbour's heart, he was good to look at. When she told me this she produced, from beneath her apron, a broken picture post-card. The baby was lying on a white blanket spread on the grass, and he was looking up with the intentness of some little soul not yet embodied; or as if, having been born, some shadow-thing, left over from his source of shadows, yet detained his attention. "William," it said beneath the picture.

"But I shall call him Kenneth," my neighbour said; "I've always meant to. I don't want he should be called after his father, being he isn't ours, you might say. But he is ours," she added in a kind of challenge. "_He's_ going after him to-morrow to the city"--and now "he" meant her husband, in that fine habit of use by these husbands and wives of the two third persons singular to mean only each other, in a splendid, ultimate, inevitable sense, authentic as the "we" of a sovereign, no more to be mistaken. "I'd go too," she added, "but we're adopting the baby with the egg money--we've saved it for years for when the time come. And one fare to the city and back is a lot of eggs. I thought I'd rather wait for him here and have the ticket money to spend on the clothes."

She was on her way, I thought I guessed, to carry her good news to our friends in the village, for she bore that same air which I have noted, of being impermanent and subject to flight. And as she left me she turned to give me one of those rare compliments which are priceless.

"You come over this afternoon," she said, "and I'll show you what little things I've made."

I remember another compliment. It was when, in town, a charming little woman, a woman all of physical curves and mental tangents, had been telling a group of us about a gay day in a four-in-hand. She had not looked at me because for that sort of woman, as well as for others, I lack all that which would make them take account of my presence; but when in the four-in-hand she came to some mention of the road where the accident had nearly occurred ("Oh, it was a beautiful road," she said, "the river on one side, and the highlands, and a whole _mob_ of trees,") she turned straight upon me through her description as consistently as she had neglected me when she described the elbow-bits of the leaders and the boots of the woman on the box-seat. It may have been a chance, but I have always hugged it to me.

My neighbour's house is small, and her little upstairs rooms are the half-story with sloping ceilings and windows which extend from the floor to the top of one's head. It gives me a curious sense of over-familiarity with a window to be as tall as it is. I feel that I have it at advantage and that I am using it with undue intimacy. When I was a little girl I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit there, looking up, transfixed at the difference. A new angle of material vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight, now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window should be sanctioned in its reticences.

Before a black walnut commode my neighbour knelt that afternoon, and I found that it was filled with the things which she had made for the baby, when they should find him. These she showed to me--they were simple and none too fine, and she had made them on her sewing-machine in the intervals of her busy life. For three years she had wrought at them, buying them from the egg money. I wondered if this secret pastime of garment-making might not account for my impression of her that she must always be off to engage in something other. Perhaps it was this occupation, always calling her, which would not let her appear fixed at garden-watering or festival. I think that it may be so of any who are "pressed in the spirit" to serve, to witness to any truth: that is their vocation and every other is an avocation, a calling away from the real business of life. For this reason it is my habit to think of the social workers in any division of the service, family or town or state or church, as Vocationists. It is they who are following the one great occupation. The rest of us are avocationists. In my neighbour I perceived one of the great comrade company of the Vocationists, unconscious of her banner, but because of some sweet, secret piping, following, following....

"I've always thought I'd get to do a little embroidering on a yoke or two," she said, "but so far I couldn't. Anyway I thought I could do the plain part and running the machine before he came. The other I could sit by the crib and do. Embroidery seems sort o' baby-watchin' work, don't it?"

When I left her I walked across the lawns to my home in a sense of security and peace. With increasing thousands consciously striving and passioning to help, and thousands helping because of the unconscious spirit within them, are there not many windows in the walls?

"He" was to go by the Accommodation early next morning to bring home the baby. Therefore when, just before seven o'clock, I observed my neighbour's husband leave his home and join Peter at his gate as usual, I went at once to see if something was amiss.

My neighbour was having breakfast as her custom was "after the men-folks were out of the way." At all events she was pretending to eat. I saw in her eyes that something was troubling her, but she greeted me cheerfully. I sat by the sewing-machine while she went on with her pretence at breakfast.

"The little thing's sick," she said. "Last night we got the despatch. 'Baby in hospital for day or two. Will advise often,' it had in it. I'm glad they put that in. I'll feel better to know they'll get good advice."

I sat with her for a long time, regardless of my work or that Miggy was waiting for me. I was struck by the charm of matter-of-fact hopefulness in my neighbour, not the deliberate forcing of hope, but the simple expectation that nothing tragic would occur. But for all that she ate no breakfast, and I knew well the faint, quite physical sickness that she must have endured since the message came.

"I'm going to get his basket ready to-day," she said. "I never did that, two reasons. One was, it seemed sort of taking too much for granted, like heating your spider before the meat wagon drives up. The other reason was I needed the basket for the clothes."

I stayed with her while she made ready the clothes-basket, lining it with an old muslin curtain, filling it with pillows, covering it with the afghan from the parlour couch. Then, in a shoe box edged with the curtain's broad ruffle, she put an array of little things: the brush from the spare-room bureau, the pincushion from her own work-basket, a sachet bag that had come with a last year's Christmas gift, a cake of "nice soap" which she had kept for years and never unwrapped because it was so expensive. And then she added a little glass-stoppered bottle of white pills.

"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there--so white and a glass cork--don't you think so?"

She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across her mouth, looking down at the disturbance--so slight!--in the grass where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.

"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms it seems as if I could help 'em."

I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best, waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing occupation. Why should she not be so?--with all that there is to be done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that I would cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things done.

"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."

My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too, she was really strange to me that day.

"My baby died," she said.

She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true, but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.

"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after him, but _he's_ gone."

"To go after him?" I repeated.

She nodded.

"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the potter's field and they wouldn't mark--it, and that I couldn't never tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here. _He_ didn't want I should go--he thought it'd be too much for me. But I was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would 'a' been any different?"

There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different. But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would have none of it.

"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."

It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:--

"My baby died."