Part 18

Mary Elizabeth and I took hold of hands and ran. We scrambled up the steps and escaped to the sultry welcome of bright day. Out there everything was as before. Little Harold was crossing the lawn carrying a flower-pot of water which was running steadily from the hole in the bottom. With the maternal importance of little girls, we got the jar from him and undertook to bring him more water. And when he led us to the source of supply, this was a faucet in the side of the house just beyond a narrow, dusty, cellar window. When he turned the faucet, we were, so to speak, face to face with that R-s-t-t-t-t-t.

Mary Elizabeth and I looked at each other and looked away. Then we looked back and braved it through.

“Anyway,” she said, “we were afraid of a truly thing, and not of a pretend thing.”

There seemed to us, I recall, a certain loyalty in this as to a creed.

Already Delia had returned from the library. The authorities refused the ink. One might come in there and write with it, but one must not take it from the table. Calista arrived from the dining-room. A waiting-woman to the queen, she reported, was engaged in dusting the sideboard and she herself had advanced no farther than the pantry door. It remained only for Margaret Amelia and Betty to come from their farther quest bearing a green handbill which they thought might take the place of Calista’s quarry if she returned empty-handed; but we were no nearer than before to blue and orange materials, or to any other.

We took counsel and came to a certain ancient conclusion that in union there is strength. We must, we thought we saw, act the aggressor. We moved on the stronghold together. Armed with a spoon and two bottles, we found a keeper of properties within who spooned us out the necessary ink; tea was promised to take the place of coffee if we would keep out of the house and not bother anybody any more, indefinitely; shoe-polish was conceded in a limited quantity, briefly, and under inspection; and we all descended into Aladdin’s cave and easily found baskets to which red mosquito-netting was clinging in sufficient measure. Then we sat in the shade of the side lawn and proceeded to colour many waters.

It was a delicate task to cloud the clear liquid to this tint and that, to watch it change expression under our hands, pale, deepen, vary to our touch; in its heart to set jewels and to light fires. We worked with deep deliberation, testing by old standards of taste set up by at least two or three previous experiences, consulting one another’s soberest judgment, occasionally inventing a new liquid. I remember that it was on that day that we first thought of bluing. Common washing bluing, the one substance really intended for colouring water, had so far escaped our notice.

“Somebody,” observed Margaret Amelia, as we worked, “ought to keep keeping a look-out to see if they’re coming back.”

Delia, who was our man of action, ran to the clothes-reel, which stood on the highest land of the castle grounds, and looked away over the valley.

“There’s a cloud of dust on the horizon,” she reported, “but I think it’s Mr. Wells getting home from Caledonia.”

“Wouldn’t they blare their horns before they got here?” Mary Elizabeth wanted to know.

“What was a knight _for_, anyway?” Delia demanded.

“_For?_” Margaret Amelia repeated, in a kind of personal indignation. “Why, to--to--to right wrongs, of course.”

Delia surveyed the surrounding scene through the diluted red ink in a glass-stoppered bottle.

“I guess I know that,” she said. “But I mean, what was his job?”

We had never thought of that. Did one, then, have to have a job other than righting wrongs?

Margaret Amelia undertook to explain.

“Why,” she said, “it was this way: Knights liberated damsels and razed down strongholds and took robber chieftains and got into adventures. And they lived off the king and off hermits.”

“But what was the end of ’em?” Delia wanted to know. “They never married and lived happily ever after. They married and just kept right on going.”

“That was on account of the Holy Grail,” said Mary Elizabeth. It was wonderful, as I look back, to remember how her face would light sometimes; as just then, and as when somebody came to school with the first violets.

“The what?” said Delia.

“They woke up in the night sometimes,” Mary Elizabeth recited softly, “and they saw it, in light, right there inside their dark cell. And they looked and looked, and it was all shiny and near-to. And when they saw it, they knew about all the principal things. And those that never woke up and saw it, always kept trying to, because they knew they weren’t _really_ ones till they saw. Most everybody wasn’t really, because only a few saw it. Most of them died and never saw it at all.”

“What did it look like?” demanded Delia.

“Hush!” said Calista, with a shocked glance, having somewhere picked up the impression that very sacred things, like very wicked things, must never be mentioned. But Mary Elizabeth did not heed her.

“It was all shining and near to,” she repeated. “It was in a great, dark sky, with great, bright worlds falling all around it, but it was in the centre and it didn’t fall. It was all still, and brighter than anything; and when you saw it, you never forgot.”

There was a moment’s pause, which Delia broke.

“How do you know?” she demanded.

Mary Elizabeth was clouding red mosquito-netting water by shaking soap in it, an effect much to be desired. She went on shaking the corked bottle, and looking away toward the sun slanting to late afternoon.

“I don’t know how I know,” she said in manifest surprise. “But I know.”

We sat silent for a minute.

“Well, I’m going back to see if they’re coming home from the hunt _now_,” said Delia, scrambling up.

“From the _chase_,” Margaret Amelia corrected her loftily, “and from the tourmey. I b’lieve,” she corrected herself conscientiously, “that had ought to be tourmament.”

This time Delia thought that she saw them coming, the king and his knights, with pennons and plumes, just entering Conant Street down by the Brices. As we must be ready by the time the party dismounted, there was need for the greatest haste. But we found that the clothes-reel, which was to be the fountain, must have a rug and should have flowing curtains if it were to grace a castle courtyard; so, matters having been further delayed by the discovery of Harold about to drink the vanilla water, we concluded that we had been mistaken about the approach of the knights; and that they were by now only on the bridge.

A journey to the attic for the rug and curtains resulted in delays, the sight of some cast-off garments imperatively suggesting the fitness of our dressing for the rôle we were to assume. This took some time and was accompanied by the selection of new names all around. At last, however, we were back in the yard with the rugs and the muslin curtains in place, and the array of coloured bottles set up in rows at the top of the carpeted steps. Then we arranged ourselves behind these delicacies, in our bravery of old veils and scarves and tattered sequins. Harold was below, as a page, in a red sash. “A little foot-page,” Margaret Amelia had wanted him called, but this he himself vetoed.

“Mine feet _big_ feet,” he defended himself.

Then we waited.

We waited, chatted amiably, as court ladies will. Occasionally we rose and scanned the street, and reported that they were almost here. Then we resumed our seats and waited. This business had distinctly palled on us all when Delia faced it.

“Let’s have them get here if they’re going to,” she said.

So we sat and told each other that they were entering the yard, that they were approaching the dais, that they were kneeling at our feet. But it was unconvincing. None of us really wanted them to kneel or knew what to do with them when they did kneel. The whole pretence was lacking in action, and very pale.

“It was lots more fun getting ready than this is,” said Calista, somewhat brutally.

We stared in one another’s faces, feeling guilty of a kind of disloyalty, yet compelled to acknowledge this great truth. In our hearts we remembered to have noticed this thing before: That getting ready for a thing was more fun than doing that thing.

“Why couldn’t we get a quest?” inquired Margaret Amelia. “Then it wouldn’t have to stop. It’d last every day.”

That was the obvious solution: We would get a quest.

“Girls can’t quest, can they?” Betty suggested doubtfully.

We looked in one another’s faces. Could it be true? Did the damsels sit at home? Was it only the knights who quested?

Delia was a free soul. Forthwith she made a precedent.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t know whether they did quest. But they can quest. So let’s do it.”

The reason in this appealed to us all. Immediately we confronted the problem: What should we quest for?

We stared off over the valley through which the little river ran shining and slipped beyond our horizon.

“I wonder,” said Mary Elizabeth, “if it would be wrong to quest for the Holy Grail _now_.”

We stood there against the west, where bright doors seemed opening in the pouring gold of the sun, thick with shining dust. The glory seemed very near. Why not do something beautiful? Why not--why not....

The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author, and new fiction

_By the Same Author_

Christmas

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Author of “Mothers to Men,” “The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre.” Illustrated in colors by LEON SOLON.

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Mothers to Men

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

Transcriber’s Note:

In the advertisements at the end of the book, the price of $0.00 is as published.

Variations in spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been retained as they appear in the original publication except as follows:

Page 145 “_We are all alike, all of us who live!_ _changed to_ _We are all alike, all of us who live!_

Page 229 resentfully “And now she’s in her _changed to_ resentfully. “And now she’s in her

Page 281 for this seemed a a good way _changed to_ for this seemed a good way

Page 286 I’ve fought everyone of _changed to_ I’ve fought every one of

Page 289 him and help him. _changed to_ him and help him.”

Page 396 London’s unforgetable big men _changed to_ London’s unforgettable big men