CHAPTER V

KATE MAKES UP A FACE

As they neared their doors Elsie said, “Please tell Bertha if she’s in your room that I shall be in the sitting-room when she’s through helping you. I’m going right to bed then.”

She stopped with her hand on the knob. “Wouldn’t you like to see the sitting-room? It’s yours, too, now.”

Kate looked in as Elsie opened the door and stood back. Now she knew why Bertha had said that room was more “comfortable” than her bedroom. In contrast to it her bedroom was almost nun-like. There were deep chairs upholstered in gay cretonne, cretonne with parrots and poppies and birds of paradise glowing against its yellow background. There was even a little lounge, heaped with yellow pillows, drawn up under the windows. In the centre of the room stood a square cherry-wood reading table, and the walls were almost lined with bookshelves already about one third filled with books. On the table stood a glass bowl filled with red roses. A Japanese floor lamp cast a mellow light over everything. In one corner a practical old Governor Winthrop desk with many drawers and a wide writing leaf drew Kate’s eyes. Imagine having a desk like that just for one’s own!

But she did not show her appreciation of the room. She simply glanced about it, as Elsie seemed to expect her to, and then muttering a crusty “good-night” crossed the hall to her own room.

Bertha was waiting for her there. Evidently Aunt Katherine had instructed her that Kate would retire early. The opal lamp by the bed was shedding its delicate radiance through the room, the bed was turned down, Kate’s dressing gown and nightgown were spread across its foot, and her bedroom slippers stood near at hand. Her bag had long since been unpacked and put away. The “King of the Fairies” and the mystery story—Sam and Lee’s gift—lay on the bed table under the lamp.

Kate was very glad of her own cool, clear little room. She liked it better than all that colour and ease across the hall. And in any case she would never be able to share that other room with Elsie. She determined not to go into it at all—no, not even to look over the books!

“Miss Elsie is in the sitting-room,” she told Bertha. “She said to tell you that when you were ready she would go to bed. I don’t need any help, truly.”

“Sha’n’t I even brush your hair, Miss Kate? That is so restful.”

“You’ve unpacked for me. Thank you very much. My short hair doesn’t need much brushing.”

So, reluctantly, for Miss Frazier had requested her to attend to both girls equally, Bertha took her dismissal. In a minute Kate heard voices on the other side of Elsie’s door. Then Elsie opened the door and looked in through the bathroom.

“Aunt Katherine says we’re to leave these doors open,” she informed Kate, calmly. “That is so you won’t be lonely.”

Kate nodded an “all right.” But to herself she said, “I’d be a heap less lonely if you’d close the door and I’d never see your face again.”

She undressed well out of sight of Elsie’s room. When she was in nightgown, dressing robe, and slippers, she sat down on the three-legged ivory stool, before the hinged mirrors, brush in hand. She was surprised by the expression of her own face as it looked back at her grimly out of the glass. All its humour, its _charm_, was gone. She was just a rather plain young girl. And as she looked at this disenchanted reflection it suddenly went misty and blurred. She saw tears rising in its eyes.

With an angry hand she dashed them away and stuck out her tongue at the blurred face in the mirror. Then came her own laugh, the eyes crinkling to slits, the mouth freed from its set lines and lifting wings in a smile.

“Idiot,” she whispered. “To cry about her! She’s a stuck-up little pig, but you needn’t become a grouchy glum just for that. Be yourself in spite of her.”

But as she went toward the windows to push them a little farther back, for the night was a warm and beautiful one, she turned her head and looked through the open doors into Elsie’s room. Elsie was sitting before her own dressing table, a replica of Kate’s. She was in an exquisitely soft-looking pink dressing gown edged about the neck and the long flowing sleeves with swansdown. Bertha stood behind her, brushing her curls with long, even strokes. The eyes of the two girls met in Elsie’s glass. Flashingly, Kate was glad she had made up a face and got it over with; otherwise she would certainly have made up just the same face now, at Elsie, before thinking.

The pairs of eyes held each other in the glass for an instant. It must have been something deceiving in the twin lights glowing at either side of Elsie’s mirror, or in the glass itself, Kate decided afterward, but for that instant it seemed that a _comrade_ had looked questioningly out of the mirror at her! But the hidden comrade, if such it was, vanished even before Kate had time to turn away.

What a delicious bed Aunt Katherine had given her! She delighted in its scented linen and light covers. She punched the fluffy pillows up into a bolster, slipped out of her dressing gown and in between the smooth, lavender-scented sheets. Sitting there against the pillows she took “The King of the Fairies” on to her knee. She couldn’t sleep quite yet, she knew. Why, at home she seldom went to bed before her mother, and now it was not yet nine. The very sight, even the feeling of this book in her hands filled her with a happy stir deep in the far wells of imagination. She opened it casually. Any place would do since she already knew it practically by heart. The very sight of the smooth, clearly printed pages with their wide margins freed her. She was ready for space now and clear, disentangled adventurings into light.

Although the book was titled “The King of the Fairies” it was not at all a fairy story for children. Kate had only just reached the age when it could be cared about. It began with a girl and a boy quarrelling on a fence in a meadow. It was a real quarrel, a horrid quarrel with hot and sharp and bitter words. But it is interrupted by a tramp happening by. He asks them a direction and they stop their recriminations for the time to point him his way scornfully. Accepting their directions he still tarries a while to ask them if they themselves don’t want some pointing. Then the story, the marvellous story begins. He points to an elder bush and asks them what it is. They tell him glibly. Then he gets on to the fence between them and with his eyes level with theirs asks them to look again. Everything is changed for the girl and boy in that instant. They begin seeing as the tramp sees. They are in Paradise or Fairyland: the author himself makes no clear distinction. But the elder bush is now much more than an elder bush. And the meadow is full of a life the girl and boy had never suspected. There are other beings moving in it, fairy beings, perhaps. Not only is the invisible made visible to the girl and boy seeing as the tramp sees, but the, until then at least, partly visible—the brook, the trees, the very stones and the elder bush—are seen to have more _life_ than could be suspected. And all colours are changed, too. The boy and girl are seeing things in a new spectrum.

Finally the three get down from the fence and wander about in this Fairyland that has always been here truly but is only now seen. The book is their day in the meadow. And when you have turned the last page you do not remember it as a _book_. You remember it as a day in Fairyland or Paradise—or as a day on which you saw things clear. And you never doubt for a minute that the author himself is one who has certainly seen like that. Perhaps he only saw it in a flash, but he did see for himself and with his own eyes.

In the end the boy and girl return to the fence and the tramp departs on the way they had pointed out to him. But as he goes, he turns about when he gets to the elder bush and they realize in that last glance from his eyes that he is the King of the Fairies. Then as he turns again and walks on, as long as he is in their sight, he is simply a common tramp.

But their quarrel has dropped for ever dead between them. A boy and a girl who have actually walked in Fairyland together and seen things clear have nothing to quarrel about, and so long as they both shall live can have nothing to quarrel about again.

And though they had surely seen things clear for a whole day in the meadow—the sun had risen to the meridian and gone down into the west while they wandered—now when they look at each other there is no indication that a minute has passed. The sun is where it was at the height of their quarrel! And so it appears that the tramp’s arrival and stay and departure and their whole day in the meadow was squeezed into perhaps one straight meeting of their eyes as they quarrelled.

But they do not spend themselves in wonder. This boy and girl are Wisdom’s own children, in spite of the momentary silliness that had plunged them head-first into the darkness of an enmity; they accept the gods’ gifts. And for a boy and a girl who have spent a day in Fairyland together, or for that matter only spent a minute there together, the gods’ gift is marriage.

Katherine, when she had finished the book, had said that it was the most perfect love story she had ever read; she wished she were rich enough to give it to all the lovers she knew. And she said, too, that the author must be a very wonderful person, a great man in some field of life. Perhaps that was why he had not signed his name to the work.

As Kate read now, the conversation between Elsie and Bertha in the next room was a humming undertone to her thoughts. She could not have caught their words if she had listened. But she had no inclination to listen. She was moving in a world where quarrels and bitter feelings were an impossibility. She was seeing things through the eyes of the King of the Fairies. She was in the meadows that she knew at home, feeling the larger life there that the King of the Fairies had made known to her. She was standing, tall, in the body of an elm tree, spreading with its leaves to the sun, feeling with its roots into the vibrating ground.

Suddenly a voice came to her. It was a long way she rushed back to find the voice. Bertha was standing beside her bed.

“Shall I turn out your light, Miss Kate? Or do you wish to read?”

Kate did not know that Bertha had come into the room at all. Elsie’s light was out, and if the doors through must be left open, Kate’s light would disturb her. Of course she must put out her light and try to sleep. She was on the verge of saying, “I will put out my own light, thanks,” but the meadow from which she had rushed back had, oddly enough as some might think, put her into more perfect harmony with her own restricted four walls. So she said, “You may put the light out, thank you.” And she did not even smile to herself when Bertha bent over the table and pulled at the little chain that was much nearer Kate’s reach than hers. She accepted the service naturally, since such acceptance was Aunt Katherine’s wish and the purpose of Bertha’s presence here.

“Good-night,” Bertha spoke out of the sudden darkness.

“Good-night,” Kate answered. Then soft footfalls, and she was alone in the room.

But though “The King of the Fairies” had done a good deal for Kate it had not had time to do enough to make her call a “good-night” to Elsie. Suppose Aunt Katherine knew the two girls were going to sleep without a word to each other!

From her bed, now that the room was dark, Kate could see the dim apple orchard under starlight. She rose on her elbow and strained her eyes for the outlines of the little orchard house. She found it by hard looking. How mysterious, how lonely, still how alive out there it stood. And she _had_ heard a door close softly, just as though a door knob had turned as they stood below those open back windows. And why were those windows open? Elsie knew, Kate was sure. The little orchard house harboured some secret of Elsie’s.

But what was that! Kate sat up in bed and bent toward the window, her eyes straining. A light, flickering, was moving down through the house! Kate watched it as it went by several windows, breathless. Soon it disappeared altogether, and a second after Kate thought she heard the front door of the little orchard house softly closing, or opening; but that must have been fancy, for the orchard house was much too far away for a sound of that quality to carry to her.

As she curled down into bed again her eyes crinkled with her smile in the darkness. Well, here was mystery. She would write Sam and Lee that she would save their mystery story for duller times. Now she was living in one!