Part 4

By five o’clock we had been hungry for two hours, and we spread our lunch on the crest. Prospect Hill was the place to which we took our guests when we had them. It was the wide west gateway of the town, where through few ventured, for it opened out on the bend of the little river, navigable only to rowboats and launches, and flowing toward us from the west. You stood at the top of a sharp declivity, and it was like seeing a river face to face to find it flowing straight toward you, out of the sky, bearing little green islands and wet yellow sandbars. It almost seemed as if these must come floating toward us and bringing us everything.... For these were the little days, when we still believed that everything was necessary.

We quickly despatched the process of “trading off,” a sandwich for an apple, a cooky for a cake, and so on, occasionally trading back before the bargain had been tasted. Mary Elizabeth sat at one side; even after I had divided my lunch and given her my basket for a plate, she sat a very little away from us--or it may be my remembrance of her aloofness that makes this seem so. Each of the others gave her something from her basket--but it was the kind of giving which makes one know what a sad word is the word “bestow.” They “bestowed” these things. Since that time, when I have seen folk administering charity, I have always thought of the manner, ill-bred as is all condescension, in which we must have shared our picnic food with Mary Elizabeth.

I believe that this is the first conversation that ever I can remember. Up to this time, I had talked as naturally as the night secretes dreams, with no sense of responsibility for either to mean anything. But that day I became uncomfortably conscious of the trend of the talk.

“I have to have my new dress tried on before supper,” Delia announced, her back to the river and her mouth filled with a jam sandwich. “It’s blue plaid, with blue buttons and blue tassels on,” she volunteered.

“My new dress Aunt Harriet brought me from the City isn’t going to be made up till last day of school,” Margaret Amelia informed us. “It’s got pink flowers in and it cost sixty cents a yard.”

“Margaret and I are going to have white shoes before we go visiting,” Betty remembered.

“I got two new dresses that ain’t made up yet. Mamma says I got so many I don’t need them,” observed Calista, with an indifferent manner and a soft, triumphant glance. Whereat we all sat silent.

I struggled with the moment, but it was too much for me.

“I got a white silk lining to my new dress,” I let it be known. “It’s made, but I haven’t had it on yet. China silk,” I added conscientiously. Then, moved perhaps by a common discomfort, we all looked toward Mary Elizabeth. I think I loved her from that moment.

“None of you’s got the new style sleeves,” she said serenely, and held aloft the arm whose sleeve was slit from wrist to shoulder.

We all laughed together, but Delia pounced upon the arm. She caught and held it.

“What’s that on your arm?” she cried, and we all looked. From the elbow up the skin was mottled a dull, ugly purple, as if rough hands had been there.

Mary Elizabeth flushed. “Ain’t you ever had any bruises on you?” she inquired in a tone so finely modulated that Delia actually hastened to defend herself from the impeachment of inexperience.

“Sure,” she said heartily. “I counted ’em last night. I got seven.”

“I got five and a great long skin,” Betty competed hotly.

“Pooh,” said Calista, “I’ve got a scratch longer than my hand is. Teacher said maybe I’d get an infect,” she added importantly.

Then we kept on neutral ground, such as blank-books and Fourth of July and planning to go bare-foot some day, until Calista attacked a pickled peach which she had brought.

“Our whole cellar’s full of pickled peaches,” I incautiously observed. “I could have brought some if I’d thought.”

“We got more than that,” said Delia, instantly. “We got a thousand glasses of jelly left over from last year.”

“A thousand!” repeated Margaret Amelia, in derision. “A hundred, you mean.”

“Well,” Delia said, “it’s a lot. And jars and jars and jars of preserves. And cans and cans and _cans_....”

The others took it up. Why we should have boasted of the quantity of fruit in our parents’ cellars, I have no notion, save that it was for the unidentified reason which impels all boasting. When I am in a very new bit of country, where generalizations and multiplications follow every fact, I am sometimes reminded of the fashion of our talk whose statements tried to exceed themselves, in a kind of pyrotechnic pattern bursting at last into nothing and the night. We might have been praising climate or crops or real estate.

Mary Elizabeth spoke with something like eagerness.

“We got a bottle of blackberry cordial my grandmother made before she died,” she said. “We keep it in the top bureau drawer.”

“What a funny place to keep it....” Delia began, and stopped of her own accord.

I remember that everybody was willing enough to let Mary Elizabeth help pick up the dishes. Then she took a tree for Pussy-wants-a-corner, which always follows the picnic part of a picnic. But hardly anyone would change trees with her, and by the design which masks as chance, everyone ran to another tree. At last she casually climbed her tree, agile as a cat, a feat which Delia alone was shabby enough to pretend not to see.

We started homeward when the red was flaming up in the west and falling deep in the heart of the river. By then Mary Elizabeth was almost at ease with us, but rather, I think, because of the soft evening, and perhaps in spite of our presence.

“Oh!” she cried. “Somebody grabbed the sun and pulled it down. I saw it go!”

Delia looked shocked. “You oughtn’t to tell such things,” she reproved her.

Mary Elizabeth flung up the arm with the torn sleeve and ran beside us, laughing with abandon. We were all running down the slope in the red light.

“We’re Indians, looking for roots for the medicine-man,” Delia called; “Yellow Thunder is sick. So is Red Bird. We’re hunting roots.”

She was ahead and we were following. We caught at the dead mullein stalks and milkweed pods and threw them away, and leaped up and pulled at the low branches with their tender buds. We were filled with the flow of the Spring and seeking to express it, as in the old barbaric days, by means of destruction.... At the foot of the slope a little maple tree was growing, tentative as a sunbeam and scarcely thicker, left by the Spring that had last been that way. When she reached it, Delia laid hold on it, and had it out by its slight root, and tossed it on the moss.

“W-h-e-e-e!” cried Delia, “I wish it was Arbour Day to-morrow too!”

Mary Elizabeth stopped laughing. “I turn here,” she said. “It’s the short cut. Good-bye--I had a grand time. The best time I ever had.”

Delia pretended not to hear. She said nothing. The others called casual good-byes over shoulder. Going home, they rebuked me soundly for having invited Mary Elizabeth. Delia rehearsed the array of reasons. If she came to school, we would have to _know_ her, she wound up. I remember feeling baffled and without argument. All that they said was true, and yet--

“I’m going to see her,” I announced stoutly, more, I dare say, because I was tired and a little cross than from real loyalty.

“You’ll catch some disease,” said Delia. “I know a girl that went to see some poor children and she caught the spinal appendicitis and died before she got back home.”

We went round by the schoolhouse, drawn there by a curiosity that had in it inevitable elements of regret. There they were, little dead-looking trees, standing in places of wet earth, and most of them set somewhat slanting. Everyone was gone, and in the late light the grounds looked solemn and different.

“Just think,” said Delia, “when we grow up and the trees grow up, we can tell our children how we planted ’em.”

“Why, we never--” Calista began.

“Our school did, didn’t it?” Delia contended. “And our school’s we, isn’t it?”

But we overruled her. No, to the end of time, the trees that stood in those grounds would have been planted by other hands than ours. We were probably the only ones in the school who hadn’t planted a tree. “I don’t care, do you?” we demanded of one another, and reiterated our denial.

“I planted a-a-a---Never-green!” Harold Rodman shouted, running to meet us.

“So did we!” we told him merrily, and separated, laughing. It had, it seemed, been a great day, in spite of Mary Elizabeth.

I went into the house, and hovered about the supper table. I perceived that I had missed hot waffles and honey, and these now held no charm. Grandmother Beers was talking.

“When I was eight years old,” she said, “I planted it by the well. And when Thomas went back to England fifty years after, he couldn’t reach both arms round the trunk. And there was a seat there--for travellers.”

I looked at her, and thought of that giant tree. Would those dead-looking little sticks, then, grow like that?

“If fifty thousand school children each planted a tree to-day,” said my mother, “that would be a forest. And planting a forest is next best to building a city.”

“Better,” said my father, “better. What kind of tree did you plant, daughter?” he inquired.

I hung my head. “I--we--there was a picnic,” I said. “We didn’t _have_ to plant ’em. So we had a picnic.”

My father looked at me in the way that I remember.

“That’s it,” he said. “For everyone who plants a tree, there are half a dozen that have a picnic. And two dozen that cut them down. At last we’ve got one in the family who belongs to the majority!”

When I could, I slipped out in the garden. It was darkening; the frogs in the Slough were chorussing, and down on the river-bank a cat-bird sang at intervals, was silent long enough to make you think that he had ceased, and then burst forth again. The town clock struck eight, as if eight were an ancient thing, full of dignity. Our kitchen clock answered briskly, as if eight were a proud and novel experience of its own. The ’bus rattled past for the Eight-twenty. And away down in the garden, I heard a step. Someone had come in the back gate and clicked the pail of stones that weighted its chain.

I thought that it would be one of the girls, who not infrequently chose this inobvious method of entrance. I ran toward her, and was amazed to find Mary Elizabeth kneeling quietly on the ground, as she had been when I came upon her at noon.

“What you doing?” I demanded, before I could see what she was doing.

“This,” she said.

I stooped. And she had a little maple tree, for which she was hollowing a home with a rusty fire-shovel that she had brought with her.

“It’s the one Delia Dart pulled out,” she said. “I thought it’d be kind of nice to put it here. In your yard. You could bring the water, if you want.”

I brought the water. Together we bent in the dusk, and we set out the little tree, near the back gate, close to my play-house.

“We’d ought to say a verse or something,” I said vaguely.

“I can’t think of any,” Mary Elizabeth objected.

Neither could I, but you had to say something when you planted a tree. And a line was as good as a verse.

“‘God is love’ ’s good enough,” said Mary Elizabeth, stamping down the earth. Then we dismissed the event, and hung briefly above the back gate. Somehow, I was feeling a great and welcome sense of relief.

“It was kind o’ nice to do that,” I observed, with some embarrassment.

“No, it wasn’t either,” rejoined Mary Elizabeth, modestly.

We stood kicking at the gravel for a moment. Then she went away.

I faced about to the quiet garden. And suddenly, for no reason that I knew, I found myself skipping on the path, in the dark, just as if the day were only beginning.

V

THE KING’S TRUMPETER

And so it is for that night long ago when Mary Elizabeth and I stood by the tree and tried to think of something to say, that after all these years I have made the story of Peter.

* * * * *

Long years ago, when the world was just beginning to be, there was a kingdom which was not yet finished. Of course when a world has just stopped being nothing and is beginning to be something, it takes a great while to set all the kingdoms going. And this one wasn’t done.

For example, in the palace garden where little Peter used to play, the strangest things were to be met. For the mineral kingdom was just beginning to be vegetable, and the vegetable was just beginning to be animal, and the animal was just beginning to be man,--and man was just, just beginning to know about his living spirit. Do you see what _that_ means? While you looked at a mound of earth it became a bush--or a very little time afterward, as time in these things is reckoned. While you looked at a beast-shaped bush--all bushes at night are shaped like beasts--it became a living animal--or, again, a _very_ little afterward. And men had by no means got over being apes, tigers, swine, and dogs, and sometimes you hardly knew which a man was, a real man or one of these animals. And spirits were growing in men as fast as this might be. Everything, you see, lay in savage angles and wild lines.

Little Peter was playing one morning in the palace garden, and such playing as it was! He would be moulding little balls of loam and fashioning them with seeds, when suddenly they would break into life as buds and then as flowers, almost as one now sees twigs of wood break into life, or as quiet cocoons become living butterflies--for the world is not so different. Or Peter would be playing with a spongy-looking mass on a rock in the brook, when it would break from its rock and go gayly swimming about, and be a fish-thing. Or he would push at a bit of ooze with a cat-tail, and a little flying life would mount abruptly and wing away. It was exciting playing in those days, and some of the things you can do in these days. Only then it was all new, so Peter could see just how wonderful it was.

Now, that morning the king was walking in his palace garden. And he was troubled, for everywhere that he looked there were loose ends and rough edges, and shapeless things waiting to be fashioned, and it was so all over his kingdom. There was such a great lot to do that he could not possibly do it all alone--no king, however industrious, could have done it all. And he longed for the help of all his subjects. So when the king came on little Peter, busily making living things where none had been before, he was mightily pleased, and he sat down with the little lad on a grassy platform in the midst of the garden.

“Lo, now, little lad,” said the king, “what do you play?”

Instead of playing at keeping store or keeping house or at acting or hunting or exploring, little Peter was playing another game.

“I’m playing it’s creation, your majesty,” he answered, “and I’m playing help the king.”

“Lo, now,” said the king, “I would that all my subjects would play as well as you.”

The king thought for a moment, looking out on all the savage angles and wild lines, while little Peter watched a bit of leaf mould becoming a green plant.

“Summon me my hundred heralds!” the king suddenly bade his servants.

So the servants summoned the hundred heralds, who hurried into their blue velvet and silver buckles and came marching, twenty abreast, across the grassy plateau, where the morning sun made patterns like wings, and among the wings they bowed themselves and asked the king his will.

“Hundred heralds,” said the king, “be it only that you do this willingly, I would that you go out into my kingdom, into its highways and even to its loneliest outposts, and take my people my message. Cry to them, until each one hears with his heart as well as his head: ‘The world is beginning. You must go and help the king.’”

Now, little Peter, when he heard the message, rose and stood beside the king, and in his breast something thrilled and trembled like a smitten chord. But as for the hundred heralds, they were troubled as one man--though he not yet wholly a man.

“O king,” they said, twenty at a time, “blue velvet and silver buckles are meet for the streets of cities and to call men to feasting and to honour the king. But as for the highways and the loneliest outposts--that is another matter.”

“But what of the message?” the king asked sadly, and this none of the heralds knew how to answer; and presently the king sent them away, for he would never have unwilling service in his palace or in his kingdom. And as they went, little Peter looked after them, and he saw, and the king saw, that for all their blue velvet and silver buckles, the hundred heralds, marching away twenty abreast, were not yet all men, but partly they were apes in manner and swine at heart. And little Peter wondered if he fashioned them as he did his bits of mould, whether they would burst from a sheath, _all_ men, as burst his little plants.

“Summon me my thousand trumpeters!” the king bade his servants next.

The thousand trumpeters hurried into their purple velvet and their lace collars and seized their silver trumpets, and came marching fifty abreast across the grassy plateau, where the noon sun made a blinding light, like the light of another sun; and they bowed themselves in the brightness and asked the king his will.

But when the king had told them his will and had repeated the message and asked them if they could go willingly, the thousand trumpeters were troubled as one man--and he not yet wholly a man.

“O king,” said they, in fifties and one hundreds, “lo, now, these silver trumpets. These are meet to sound up and down the streets of cities and to call men to feasting and to honour the king, and never are they meet to sound in the lonely outposts. Pray thee, O king, keep us near thee.”

“But what of the message?” the king asked, and none of his trumpeters could help him there, and he would have no unwilling service in his palace or in his kingdom, so he sent them all away. And as they went, little Peter looked after them, and he saw, and the king saw, that for all their purple velvet and lace collars, the thousand trumpeters, marching away fifty abreast, were not all men, but they were apes in manner and swine and hounds at heart. And little Peter almost wished that he could fashion them as he did his bits of mould and see if they would not change into something better.

So then the king called a meeting of his High Council, and his councillors hurried into their robes of state and appeared on the grassy plateau when the evening was lighting the place to be a glory.

“Lo, now,” said the king, “I needs must send a message to all my people. Let us devise or dream some way to take it.”

When they heard the message, the councillors nodded, with their hands over their mouths, looking at the ground.

Then the king said--there, in the beginning of the world:--

“I have a thought about a wire which shall reach round the earth and oversea and undersea, on which a man may send a message. And a thought I have about a wire which shall stretch across the land, and upon that wire a voice may travel alone. And a thought about messages that shall pierce the air with no wire and no voice. But none of these things is now.”

(“Nay,” said the council, murmuring among themselves, “or ever shall be.”)

“--and if they were,” said the king, “I would have one serve me even better than these, to reach the head and the heart of my people. How shall I do this thing? For I must have help in finishing my kingdom.”

The council, stepping about in the slanting light, disputed the matter, group by group, but there lay nowhere, it seemed, a conclusion.

“You yourselves,” the king cried at last, “who know well that the kingdom must be completed, you yourselves gather the people in multitudes together and tell them the message.”

But at this the High Council twitched their robes of state and would have none of it.

“Who would sit in the high places if we did _that_?” said they.

So the king sent them all away, and little Peter, standing beside the king, looked after them. And he saw, and the king saw, how, under their robes of state, the High Council had not entirely stopped being ape and swine and hound and tiger and, early in the world as it was, still there seemed no great excuse for that.

“Oh, sire,” said little Peter, “I wish I could play with them as I play with my bits of mould and loam and could turn them into something better and alive.”

“Well said, little Peter,” replied the king, smiling sadly.

And now the west, which had been like a vast, stained-glass window, streaming with warm light, fell into gray opaqueness, and the grassy plateau became a place of shadows in which night things were born gently. And the king looked away to the beast-shaped bushes and to all the striving land.

“Oh, my kingdom, my kingdom!” he cried, grieving. “Now, would that this little Peter here could help you in the making.”

And then little Peter stood upright in the faint light.

“May it please the king,” he said softly, “I will take the message to his people.”

The king stared down at him.

“You?” he said. “_You_, little man? And how, pray, would you take my message?”

“May it please the king,” said little Peter, “I would tell everyone in the kingdom till all should have been told.”

“Little man,” said the king, “you are no bigger than a trumpet.”

“Ay,” said the little lad, “I think that is what I am. I would that I be not Peter, but Trumpeter. So send me forth.”

At this the king laughed, and for the laughter his heart was the lighter. He touched the boy’s brow.

“See, then, I touch your brow, little Trumpeter,” he said. “Go forth--and do you know my message?”

“You had first touched my heart, your majesty,” said the little boy, “and the message is there.”

You would think, perhaps, that Peter would have waited till the morning, but he would not wait an hour. He made a little packet of linen and of food, and just as the folk within the palace were beginning their evening revelry, he stepped out on the highway and fared forth under the moon.

But fancy walking on such a highway as that! At first glance it looked like any other night road, stretching between mysterious green. But not anything there could be depended upon to stay as it was. A hillock, lying a little way ahead, became, as he reached it, a plumy shrub, trembling with amazement at its transformation from dead earth to living green. At a turn in the road, a low bush suddenly walked away into the wood, a four-footed animal. Everything changed as he looked at it, as if nothing were meant to be merely what it was. The world was beginning!

At the foot of a hill, where the shadows were thick, Peter met the first one to whom he could give his message. The man was twisted and ragged and a beggar, and he peered down in Peter’s face horribly.

“Sir,” said Peter, courteously, “the world is beginning. You must go and help the king.”

“Help the king!” cried the beggar, and his voice was uneven, like a bark or a whine that was turning into words. “I can’t help the king without my supper.”

“Supper is only supper,” said little Peter, who had never in his life been hungry. “One must help the king--that is more.”

The beggar struck the ground with his staff.

“I’m hungry,” he said like a bark. “I want some supper and some dinner and all the way back to breakfast before I help the king, world or no world!”

And suddenly little Peter understood what it is to be hungry, and that, if folk were hungry, they must first find means of feeding themselves before they could listen. So he gave the beggar all that he had of food in his packet, which was the least that he could do, and sent him on his way, charging him with the message.

At the top of the hill, Peter came on another man, sitting under a sycamore tree. The man was a youth, and very beautiful, and he was making a little song, which went like this:--