Part 16

And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes--had she told us? Had we noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape.... All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it personality and to cherish it.

They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore, besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who, that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.

"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt less that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and me look back and know who it was for."

The cemetery had the dignity and serenity of a meadow, a meadow still somewhat amazed that it had been for a while distracted from its ancient uses, but, after all, perceiving no permanent difference in its function. I am never weary of walking down these grassy streets and of recounting their strangenesses. As that of the headstone of David Bibber's wives, one stone extending across the heads of the two graves and at either end of the stone two Gothic peaks from whose inner slopes reach two marble hands, clasped midway, and,

SACRED TO THE WIVES OF DAVID BIBBER

inscribed below, the wifely names not appearing in the epitaph. And that of Mark Sturgis who, the village said, had had the good luck to marry two women named Dora; so he had erected a low monument to "Dora, Beloved Wife of Mark Sturgis, Jr." ("But how mixin' it must be to the ghosts!" Calliope said.) And of the young girl of a former Friendship family of wealth, a girl who sleeps beneath a monument on which stands a great figure of a young woman in a white marble dress made with three flounces. ("Honest," Calliope had put it, "you can't hardly tell whether it's a tomb or a valentine.")

But these have for me an interest less of the bizarre than of the human, and nothing that is human was alien to that hour.

We waited for them by the new little grave, the disturbance--so slight!--in the earth where we would lay the stranger baby. Our hands were filled with garden flowers--Calliope had drawn a little hand cart laden with ferns and sweet-brier, and my dear Mis' Amanda Toplady had cut all the half-blown buds from her loved tea rose.

"It seems like a little baby wasn't real dead that I hadn't helped lay out," said that great Mis' Amanda, trying to find her handkerchief. "Oh, I wish't it was alive. It seems like such a little bit of comin' alive to ask the Lord!"

And as the afternoon shadows drew about us with fostering arms,

"Out-Here knows we feel bad more than Down Town, don't it?" said Little Child.

I have always thought very beautiful that village custom of which I have before spoken, which provides that the father and mother of a little baby who dies may take it with them in a closed carriage to the grave. It was so that my neighbour and her husband brought their baby to the cemetery from the station, with the little coffin on their knees.

On the box beside the driver Peter was riding. We learned afterward that he had appeared at the station and had himself taken that little coffin from the car. "So then it didn't have to be on the truck at all," my neighbour noted thankfully when she told me. I think that it must be this living with only a street or two between folk and the open country which gives these unconscious sharpenings of sensibility often, otherwhere, bred only by old niceties of habit.

So little Kenneth was buried, who never had the name save in unreality; whom my neighbour had never tended; who lived for her only in dream and on that broken post-card and here in the hidden dust. It made her grief so sad a thing that her arms did not miss him; nor had he slipped from any usage of the day; nor was any link broken with the past; only the plans that had hung in air had gone out, like flames which had kindled nothing. Because of this she sorrowed from within some closed place at which her husband could only guess, who stood patiently without in his embarrassed concern, his clumsy anxiety to do what there was to be done, his wondering distress at his wife's drooping grief. But her sorrow was rooted in the love of women for the "little young thing, runnin' round," for which she had long passioned.

"Oh, God, who lived in the spirit of the little Lord Jesus, live Thou in this child's spirit, and it in Thee, world without end," Doctor June prayed. And Little Child whispered to me and then went to let fall a pink in the grave. "So if the flower gets to be an angel flower, then they can go round together," she explained.

When I looked up there were in the west the first faint heraldings of rose. And against it stood Miggy and Peter, side by side, looking down this new way of each other's lives which took account of sorrow. He said something to her, and she nodded, and gave him her white hollyhocks to lay with the rest. And as they turned away together Little Child whispered to me, pulling herself, by my arm, to high tiptoe:--

"That little child we put in the sunset," she said, nodding to the west, "it's there now. It's there now!"

Perhaps it was that my heart was filled with the tragedy of the unfulfilled intention, perhaps it was that I thought that Little Child's whispering was true. In any case I hastened my steps, and as we passed out on the road I overtook Miggy and Peter.

"Peter," said I, "may Miggy and I come to pay you that visit now, on the way back?"

Miggy looked startled.

"It's supper time," she objected.

Who are we that we should interrupt a sunset, or a situation, or the stars in their courses, merely to sup? Neither Miggy nor I belong to those who do so. Besides, we had to pass Peter's very door. I said so, and all the time Peter's face was glowing.

"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will come in your house to call."

He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour, and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.

"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that makes sunset be!"

My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.

"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden, same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't it?"

But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband, go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one who goes busily quickening the day with a multitude, yes, even with a confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.

Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.

"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost _her_. You know ... that little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."

As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air, so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never again be wholly alien to me.

XVIII

AT PETER'S HOUSE

I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk, though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did. Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long, rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.

"Rap!" I said to Miggy.

She looked at me in surprise--I have not often commanded her like that. But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and naïveté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met Miggy's.

"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. _Come in._"

We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house. Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not know plus what--that is one of those good little in-between things which we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had Miggy go within Peter's house,--not as within doors, but as within arms.

We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour--the kind of man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it. There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner wall was occupied by a map of the state--why does a man so cherish a map of something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books--what is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to save putting it up in the fall--this business of getting a stove on rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.

"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."

"Why--" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it. Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were somebody to give it a touch or two.

Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he explained, would have been the dining room, only he had taken it for his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing than any lonely "I."

"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm not at the works. Come and let me show you."

So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls. There was a shelf of books--not many, but according to Peter's nature sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love us and not be worth while?"--bad enough logic, in all conscience, to please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With the linen table cover it was a little different--this Peter's mother had once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and looked at it.

"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken," she showed him.

"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."

At this she laughed out suddenly with, "_Needle kit!_ What a real regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"

"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for you" sticking from the sentence.

On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full page of weary little figures.

"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy demanded.

"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except when I come to see you."

Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.

"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"

"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as you have, Miggy--that's one thing."

"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in your head and you can't get it out."

"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly. "Sit down!" he repeated, when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."

She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat at the table--his table--he looked more than before.

"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and has no idea what to say about it.

Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his eyes.

"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked--oh, Peter, she looked like you!"

Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so glad."

"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy advanced suddenly.

Peter admitted it gravely. She had.

"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."

There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,--black, curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak, empty, but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed, saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated, especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she observed.

And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the village "card size," and gave it to her.

"Guess who," he said.

It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips, and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.

"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's _you_."

I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,

"Well, well, _well_," she said again. "I never thought about that before. I mean about you. _Then._"

"Would--would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have it if you do."

"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."

"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son he'll look something like that. He might, you know."

Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.

"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."

"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him to have it."

"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes, of course you'd want him--"

The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour. But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks, for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.

It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:--

"I like to stand in this great air And see the sun go down. It shows me a bright veil to wear And such a pretty gown. Oh, I can see a playmate there Far up in Splendour Town!"

"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window and let them go on alone.

He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes, she turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat--that I ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked. "Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is _that_ where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its corner--surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand, and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the garden.

"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover--may I?"

Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel needle-book--he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!--and, his face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.

"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."

"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.

"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.

He drew a breath long, and looked about him. I knew how he was seeing the bare room, lamp-lighted, and himself trying to work in spite of the longing that teased and possessed him and bade him give it up and lean back and think of her; or of tossing on the hard couch in the tyranny of living his last hour with her and of living, too, the hours that might never be. And here she was in this room--his room. Peter dropped his head on his hand and his eyes did not leave her face save to venture an occasional swift, ecstatic excursion to her fingers.

Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her blood. As for Peter--but these little housewifely things which enlighten a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.

Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it--needle, red book, and hand.

"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.

She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only for one reason does a man call a woman like that.

"What is it you want?" she said--and her voice was very sweet and very tired.

"I want more of _you_!" said Peter Cary.

She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.

"I thought it would be everything--your coming here to-day," Peter said. "I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing, except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to think of your leaving me here--shutting the door and being gone. If it was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something big--bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you--all of you--all the time, Miggy, all the time...."

I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And the singing of Little Child began again, like that of a little voice vagrant in the red west....

"Oh, I can see a playmate there, Far up in Splendour Town!"

Miggy heard her, and remembered.

"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't--I never could bring us two on you to support."

Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand years earlier in the world's history.

"You two!" he cried; "why, Miggy, when we marry do I want--or do you want--that it should stay just you and me? We want children. I want you for their mother as much as I want you for my wife."