Part 3

Then we went to Grandma Bard’s. I did not in the least know why, but the little rag-carpeted sitting-room, the singing kettle on the back of the coal stove, the scarlet geraniums on the window, the fascinating picture on the clock door, all entertained me at once. Grandma Bard wore a black lace cap, and she bade me sit by her and instantly gave me a peppermint drop from the pocket of her black sateen apron. She asked me no questions, but while she talked with Mother, she laid together two rose-coloured--rose-coloured!--bits of her patchwork and quietly handed them to me to baste--none of your close stitches, only basting! Then she folded a newspaper and asked me to cut it and scallop it for her cupboard shelf. Then she found a handful of hickory nuts and brought me the tack-hammer and a flat-iron....

“Oh, Mother, let’s _not_ go yet,” I heard myself saying.

Going home--a delicate business, because stepping on any crack meant being poisoned forthwith--I tried to think it out: What was it that Mother and Grandma Bard knew that the rest didn’t know? I gave it up. All I could think of was that they seemed to know me.

“Isn’t Grandma Bard just grand?” I observed fervently.

“I’m afraid,” Mother said thoughtfully, “that sometimes she has rather a hard time to get on.”

I was still turning this in my mind as we passed the wood yard. The wood yard was a series of vacant lots where some mysterious person piled cords and cords of wood, which smelled sweet and green and gave out cool breaths. Sometimes the gasoline wood-cutter worked in there, and we would watch till it had gone, and then steal in and bring away a baking-powder can full of sawdust. We never knew quite what to do with this sawdust. It was not desirable for mud-pies, and there was nothing that we knew of to be stuffed with it. Yet when we could, we always saved it. Perhaps it gave us an excuse to go into the wood yard, at which we always peeped as we went by. This day, I lagged a few steps behind and looked in, expectant of the same vague thing that we always expected, and never defined--a bonfire, a robber, an open cave, some changed aspect, I did not know what. And over by the sawdust pile, I saw, stepping about, a little girl in a reddish dress--a little girl whom I had never seen before. She looked up and saw me stand staring at her; and her gaze was so clear and direct that I felt obliged to say something in defence of my intrusion.

“Hello,” I said.

Her face suddenly brightened. “Hello,” she replied, and after a moment she added: “I thought you was going to say ‘how de do.’”

A faint spark of understanding leapt between us. Dressed-up little girls usually did say “how de do.” It was only in a kind of unconscious deference to her own appearance that I had not done so. She was unkempt and ragged--her sleeve was torn from cuff to elbow.

“What you doing here?” I inquired, not averse to breaking the business of calling by a bit of gossip.

At this she did for the third time what I had been vaguely conscious of her having done: She glanced over her shoulder toward a corner of the yard which the piled wood concealed from me. I stepped forward and looked there.

On an end of wood-pile which we children had pulled down so as to make a slope to ascend its heights, a man was sitting. His head and shoulders were drooping, his legs were relaxed, and his hands were hanging loose, as if they were heavy. His eyes were closed and his lips were parted, yet about the face, with its fair hair and beard, there was something singularly attractive and gentle. He looked like a man who would tell you a story.

“Who’s he?” I asked, and involuntarily I whispered.

The girl began backing a little away from me, her eyes on my face, her finger on her lips.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s--resting.”

I had never heard of a man resting in the daytime. Save, perhaps, on Sunday afternoons, this was no true function of men. I longed to look at the man and understand better, but something in the little girl’s manner forbade me. I looked perplexedly after her. Then I peered round the fence post and saw my Mother standing under a tree, waiting for me. She beckoned. I took one more look inside the fence, and I saw the little girl sit down beside the sleeping man and fold her hands. The afternoon sun smote across the long wood yard, with its mysterious rooms made by the piling of the cords. It seemed impossible that this strange, still place, with its thick carpet of sawdust and its moist odours, should belong at all to the commonplace little street. And the two strange occupants gave the last touch to its enchantment.

I ran to overtake Mother, and I tried to tell her something of what I had seen. But some way my words gave nothing of the air of the place and of the two who waited there for something that I could not guess. Already I knew this about words--that they were all very well for _saying_ a thing, but seldom for letting anybody _taste_ what you were talking about.

I did not give up trying to tell it until we passed the Rodmans’. From the direction of their high-board fence I heard voices. Margaret Amelia and Betty and Delia and Calista were engaged in writing on the weathered boards of the fence with willows dipped in the clear-flowing gutter stream.

“Got it done?” I called mysteriously.

They turned, shaking their heads.

“It was all melted,” they replied. “We couldn’t find another bit.”

“Oh, well,” I cried, “you come on over after supper. I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Something to tell you” would, of course, bring anybody anywhere. After supper they all came “over.” It was that hour which only village children know--that last bright daylight of slanting sun and driven cows tinkling homeward; of front-doors standing open and neighbours calling to one another across the streets, and the sky warm in the quiet surface of some little water from whose bridge lads are tossing stones or hanging bare-footed from the timbers. We withdrew past the family, sitting on the side-porch, to the garden, where the sun was still golden on the tops of the maples.

“Mother says,” I began importantly, “that she thinks Grandma Bard has a hard time to get along. Well, you know our snow? Well, you know you said you couldn’t find any more to bury? Well, why don’t we dig up ours, right now, and sell it and give the money to Grandma Bard?”

I must have touched some answering chord. Looking back, I cannot believe that this was wholly Grandma Bard. Could it be that the others had wanted to dig it up, independent of my suggestion? For there was not one dissenting voice.

The occasion seemed to warrant the best dishes. I brought out six china plates and six spoons. These would be used for serving my own family, while the others took the two cans and ran home with them to their families.

We dug rapidly now, the earth being still soft. To our surprise, the tops of the tins were located much nearer to the surface than we had supposed after our efforts of the morning to reach a great depth. The snow in which we had packed the cans had disappeared, but we made nothing of that. We drew out the cans, had off their tops, and gazed distressfully down into clear water.

“It went and melted!” said Calista, resentfully.

In a way, she regarded it as her personal failure, since the ceremony had been her suggestion in the first place.

“Never mind, Calista,” we said, “you didn’t know.”

Calista freely summed up her impressions.

“How _mean_!” she said.

We gravely gathered up the china plates and turned toward the house--and now I was possessed of a really accountable desire to get the plates back in their places as quickly as possible.

On the way a thought struck us simultaneously. Poor Grandma Bard!

“Let’s all go to see her to-morrow anyhow,” I suggested--largely, I am afraid, because the memory of my entertainment there was still fresh in my mind.

When, after a little while, we came round the house where the older ones were sitting, and heard them discussing uninteresting affairs, we regarded them with real sympathy. They had so narrowly missed something so vastly, absorbingly interesting.

From Delia’s room a voice came calling as, at intervals, other voices were heard calling other names throughout the neighbourhood--they were at one with the tinkle of the bells and the far-off yodel of the boys.

“Delia!”

“Good night,” said Delia, briefly, and vanished without warning, as at the sound of any other taps. Soon after, the others also disappeared; and I crept up on the porch and lay down in the hammock.

“What’s she been doing _now_?” somebody instantly asked me.

For a moment I thought of telling; but not seriously.

Evidently they had not expected an answer, for they went on talking.

“... yes, I had looked forward to it for a long while. Of course we had all counted on it. It was a great disappointment.”

Somewhere in me the words echoed a familiar and recent emotion. So! They too had their disappointments ... even as we. Of course whatever this was could have been nothing like losing a fortune in melted snow. Still, I felt a new sympathy.

Mother turned to me.

“We are going to ask Grandma Bard to come to live with us,” she said. “Will you like that?”

I sat up in the hammock. “All the time?” I joyfully inquired.

“For the rest of the time,” Mother said soberly. “It seems as if one ought to take a child,” she added to the others, “when one takes anybody....”

“Still,” said father, “till we get in our heads something of what the state owes to old folks, there’s nobody but us to do its work....”

I hardly heard them. To make this come true at one stroke! Even to be able to adopt a child! How easily they could do things, these grown-up ones; and how magnificently they acted as if it were nothing at all ... like the giants planting city-seed and watching cities grow to the size and shape of giants’ flower beds....

They went on talking. Some of the things that they said we might have said ourselves. In some ways they were not so very different from us. Yet think what they could accomplish.

Watching them and listening, there in the April twilight, I began to understand. It was not only that they could have their own way. But for the sake of things that we had never yet so much as guessed or dreamed, it was desirable to be grown up.

IV

THE PICNIC

It was Delia Dart who had suggested our Arbour Day picnic. “Let’s have some fun Arbour Day,” she said.

We had never thought of Arbour Day in that light. Exercises, though they presented the open advantage of escape from the school grind, were no special fun. Fun was something much more intimate and intangible, definite and mysterious, casual and thrilling--and other anomalies.

“Doing what?” we demanded.

“Oh,” said Delia, restlessly, “go off somewheres. And eat things. And do something to tell about and make their eyes stick out.”

We were not old enough really to have observed this formula for adventure. Hitherto we had always gone merely because we went. Yet all three motives appealed to us. And events fostered our faint intention. At the opening of school that morning, Miss Messmore made an announcement.... I remember her grave way of smiling and silent waiting, so that we hung on what she was going to say.

“To-morrow,” she said, “is Arbour Day. All who wish will assemble here at the usual hour in the afternoon. We are to plant trees and shrubs and vines about the schoolhouse. There will be something for each one to plant. But this is not required. Any who do not wish to be present may remain away, and these will not be marked absent. Only those may plant trees who wish to plant trees. I hope that all children will take advantage of their opportunity. Classes will now pass to their places.”

Delia telegraphed triumphantly in several directions. We could hardly wait to confer. At recess we met immediately in the closet under the stairs, a closet intended primarily for chalk, erasers, brooms, and maps, but by virtue of its window and its privacy put to sub-uses of secret committee meetings.

“I told you,” said Delia. And such was Delia’s magnetism that we felt that she had told us. “Let’s take our lunch and start as soon as we get out.”

“Couldn’t we go after the exercises?” Calista Waters submitted waveringly.

“_After!_” said Delia, scornfully. “It’ll be three o’clock. _That’s_ no fun. We want to start by twelve, prompt, and stay till six.”

Margaret Amelia Rodman bore out Delia’s contention. She and Betty had a dozen eggs saved up from their pullets. They would boil them and bring them. “The pullets?” Calista demanded aghast and was laughed into subjection, and found herself agreeing and planning in order to get back into favour. Delia and the Rodmans were, I now perceive, born leaders of mediæval living.

“Why don’t you wait till Saturday?” I finally said, from out a silence that had tried to produce this earlier. “That’s only two days.”

“Saturday!” said Delia. “Anybody can have a picnic Saturday. This is most as good as running away.”

And of course it was. But....

“Who wants to plant a tree?” Delia continued. “They’ll plant all they’ve got whether we’re here or not, won’t they?”

That was true. They would do so. It was clearly a selfish wish to participate that was agitating Calista and me. In the end we were outvoted, and we went. Our families, it seemed, all took the same attitude: We need not plant trees if we did not wish to plant trees. Save in the case of Harold Rodman. He was ruled to be too small to walk to Prospect Hill, and he preferred going back to school to staying at home alone.

“I won’t plant no tree, though,” he announced resentfully, as we left him. “I’m goin’ dig ’em all up!” he shouted after us. “Every one in the world!”

It was when I was running round the house to get my lunch that I came for the second time face to face with Mary Elizabeth.

Mary Elizabeth was sitting flat on the ground, cleaning knives which I recognized as our kitchen knives. This she was doing by a simple process, not unknown to me and consisting of driving the knife into the ground up to its black handle and shoving it rapidly up and down. It struck me as very strange that she should be there, in _our_ back yard, cleaning _our_ knives, and I somewhat resented it. For it is curious how much of a savage a little girl in a white apron can really be. But then I did not at once recognize her as the girl whom I had seen in the wood yard.

I remember her sometimes as I saw her that day. She had straight brown hair the colour of my own, and her thick pig-tail, which had fallen over her shoulder as she worked, was tied with red yarn. Her face was a lovely, even cream colour, with no freckles such as diversified my own nose, and with no other colour in her cheek. Her hands were thin and veined, with long, agile fingers. The right sleeve of her reddish plaid dress was by now slit almost to the shoulder, and her bare arm showed, and it was nearly all wrist. She had on a boy’s heavy shoes, and these were nearly without buttons.

“What you doing?” I inquired, coming to a standstill.

She lifted her face and smiled, not a flash of a smile, but a slow smile of understanding me.

“This,” she replied, and went on with her task.

“What’s your name?” I demanded.

“Mary Elizabeth,” she answered, and did not ask me my name. This was her pathetic way of deference to me because my clothing and my “station” were other than hers.

I went on to the house, but I went, looking back.

“Mother,” I said, “who is she? The little girl out there.”

While she put up my lunch in the Indian basket, Mother told me how Mary Elizabeth had come that morning asking for something to do. She had set her to work, and meanwhile she was finding out who she was. “I gave her something to eat,” Mother said. “And I have never seen even you so hungry.” Hungry and having no food. I had never heard of such a thing at first hand--not nearer than in books and in Sunday school. But ... hungry that way, and in our yard!

It was chiefly this that accounted for my invitation to her--this, and the fact that, as she came to the door to tell my Mother good-bye and to take what she had earned, she gave me again that slow, understanding-me smile. Anyway, as we walked toward the gate, I overtook her with my Indian basket.

“Don’t you want to come to the picnic with us?” I said.

She stared at me. “What do you do?” she asked.

“Why,” I said, “a picnic? Eat in the woods and--and get things, and sit on the grass. Don’t you think they’re fun?”

“I never was to one,” she answered, but I saw how she was watching me almost breathlessly.

“Come on, then,” I insisted carelessly.

“Honest?” she said. “Me?”

When she understood, I remember how she walked beside me, looking at me as if she might at any moment find out her mistake.

Delia, waiting impatiently at our gate with her own basket,--somehow I never waited at the gates of others, but it was always they who waited at mine,--bade me hurry, stared at Mary Elizabeth, and serenely turned her back on her.

“This,” I said, “is Mary Elizabeth. I asked her to go to our picnic. She’s going. I’ve got enough lunch. This is Delia.”

I suppose that they looked at each other furtively--so much of the stupidity of being a knight with one’s visor lowered yet hangs upon us--and then Delia plucked me, visibly, by the sleeve and addressed me, audibly, in the ear.

“What’d you go and do that for?” said she. And I who, at an early age, resented being plucked by the sleeve as a bird resents being patted on the head, or the wall of any personality trembles away when it is tapped, took Mary Elizabeth by the hand and marched on to meet the Rodmans and Calista.

Calista was a vague little soul, with no sense of facts. She was always promising to walk with two girls at recess, which was equivalent to asking two to be her partners in a quadrille. It simply could not be done. So Calista was forever having to promise to run errands with someone after school to make amends for not having walked with her at recess. She seldom had a grievance of her own, but she easily fell in with the grievances of others. When I presented Mary Elizabeth to her, Calista received her serenely as a part of the course of human events; and so I think she would have continued to regard her, without great attention and certainly with no criticism, had she not received the somewhat powerful suggestion of Delia and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman. The three fell behind Mary Elizabeth and me as we trotted down the long street on which the April sun smote with Summer heat.

“--over across the railroad tracks and picks up tin cans and old rubbers and sells ’em and drinks just awful and got ten children and got arrested,” I heard Delia recounting.

“The idea. To our picnic,” said Margaret Amelia’s thin-edged voice.

“Without asking us,” Betty whispered, anxious to think of something of account to say.

Mary Elizabeth heard. I have seen that look of dumb, unresentful suffering in many a human face--in the faces of those who, by the Laws of sport or society or of jurisprudence, find no escape. She had no anger, and what she felt must have been long familiar. “I’d better go home,” she said to me briefly.

I still had her by the hand. And it was, I am bound to confess, as no errant but chiefly as antagonist to the others that I pulled her along. “You got to come,” I reminded her. “You said you would.”

It was cruel treatment, by way of kindness. The others, quickly adapting themselves, fell into the talk of expeditions, which is never quite the same as any other talk; and the only further notice that they took of Mary Elizabeth was painstakingly to leave her out. They never said anything to her, and when she ventured some faint word, they never answered or noticed or seemed to hear. In later years I have had occasion to observe, among the undeveloped, these same traces of tribal antagonisms.

As we went, I had time to digest the hints which I had overheard concerning Mary Elizabeth’s estate. I knew that a family having many children had lately come to live “across the tracks,” and that, because of our anxiety to classify, the father was said to be a drunkard. I looked stealthily at Mary Elizabeth, with a certain respect born of her having experience so transcending my own. Telling how many drunken men and how many dead persons, if any, we had seen was one of our modes of recreation when we foregathered. Technically Mary Elizabeth was, I perceived, one of the vague “poor children” for whom we had long packed baskets and whom we used to take for granted as barbarously as they used to take for granted the plague. Yet now that I knew one such, face to face, she seemed so much less a poor child than a little girl. And though she said so little, she had a priceless manner of knowing what I was driving at, which not even Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman had, and they were the daughters of an assemblyman, and had a furnace in their house, and had had gold watches for Christmas. It was very perplexing.

“First one finds a May-flower’s going to be a princess!” Delia shouted. Delia was singularly unimaginative; the idea of royalty was her single entrance to fields of fancy. The stories that I made up always began “Once there was a fairy”; Margaret and Betty started at gnomes and dwarfs; Calista usually selected a poor little match girl or a boot-black asleep in a piano box; but Delia invariably chose a royal family, with many sons.

We ran, shouting, across the stretch of scrub-oak which stretched where the town blocks of houses and streets gave it up and reverted to the open country. To reach this unprepossessing green place, usually occupied by a decrepit wagon and a pile of cord-wood, was like passing through a doorway into the open. We expressed our freedom by shouting and scrambling to be princesses--all, that is, save Mary Elizabeth. She went soberly about, a little apart, and I wished with all my heart that she might find the first May-flower; but she did not do so.

We hunted for wind-flowers. It was on Prospect Hill that these first flowers--wind-flowers, pasque flowers, May-flowers, however one has learned to say them--were found in Spring--the _anemone patens_ which, next to pussy-willows themselves, meant to us Spring. A week before Nellie Pitmouth had brought to school the first that we had seen. Nellie had our pity because she drove the cows to pasture before she came to school, but she had her reward, for it was always she who found the first spoils. I remember those mornings when I would reach school to find a little group about Nellie in whose hands would be pussy-willows, or the first violets, or our rarely found white violets. For a little while, in the light of real events like these, Nellie enjoyed distinction. Then she relapsed into her usual social obscurity and the stigma of her gingham apron which she wore even on half holidays. This day we pressed hard for her laurels, scrambling in the deep mould and dead leaves in search of the star faces on silvery, silken, furry stems. We hoped untiringly that we might some day find arbutus, which grew in abundance only eighteen miles away, on the hills. In Summer we patiently looked for wintergreen, which they were always finding farther up the river. And from the undoubted dearth of both we escaped with a pretence to the effect that we were under a spell, and that some day, the witch having died, we should walk on our hill and find the wintergreen come and the arbutus under the leaves.