Part 7

Their formal meeting took place that evening in the Vasty Hall, where, years before, the princess had been christened. Prince Hesperus was filled with the most joyous anticipation and awaited his presentation to the princess with the feeling that fairyland was just beginning. But the princess, on the other hand, was no sooner back in the palace among her ladies than the curse of her terrible christening present descended upon her as she had never felt it before. How, the poor princess thought, could the prince possibly like her, who was so different from everybody in the world? While she was being dressed, every time that her ladies spoke in a low tone, she imagined that they were speaking of her; every time that one smiled and shook her head, the princess was certain that it was in pity of her. She fancied that they knew that her walk was awkward, her voice harsh, her robe in bad taste, and an old fear came upon her that the palace mirrors had all been changed to conceal from her that she was really very ugly. In short, by the time that she was expected to descend, poor Princess Romancia had made herself utterly miserable.

Therefore, when, in her gown of fresh cobweb, the princess entered the hall and the prince hastened eagerly forward, she hardly looked at him. And when, at the banquet that followed, he sat beside her and tried to continue their talk of the arbour and the walk, she barely replied at all.

“How beautiful you are,” he murmured.

“So is the night,” said the princess, “and you do not tell the night that it is beautiful.”

“Your eyes are like stars,” the prince said.

“There are real stars above,” said the princess.

“You are like no one else!” cried the prince.

“At least you need not charge me with that,” said the poor princess.

Nor would she dance with him or with anyone else. For she imagined that they did not wish to dance with her, and that her dancing was worse than anyone’s. And as soon as she was able, and long before cock-crow, she slipped away from them all and went to sleep in a handy crocus cup.

Now at all this the king and queen were nearly as distressed as the prince, and they were obliged to tell Prince Hesperus the whole story of the christening. When he heard about the uninvited Human Being who had given the baby princess this dreadful present and had kept the key to the bracelet which was its bond, he sprang up and grasped his tiny sword.

“I will go out in the world and find this Human Being,” he cried, “and I will bring back the bracelet key.”

Without again seeing the princess, Prince Hesperus left the palace and fared forth on his quest. And when she found that he was gone, she was more wretched than ever before. For in her life no one had ever talked to her as he had talked, speaking his inmost fancies, and when she had lost him, she wanted more than ever to talk with him. But the king, who was a very wise fairy, did not tell her where the prince had gone.

And now the Princess Romancia did not know what to do with herself. The court was unbearable; all her trivial occupations bored her; and the whole world seemed to have been made different from all other worlds. Worst to endure was the presence of her companions, who all seemed to love and to understand one another, while she only was alone and out of their sympathy.

“Oh,” she cried, “if only I had a game or a task to do with somebody or something that didn’t know I am different--that wouldn’t know who I am!”

And she thought longingly of the prince’s fancy about the leaf-shadow for a pet which should dance with one all day long.

“A leaf-shadow would not know that I am not like everybody else!” the poor princess thought.

One night, when a fairy ring had been formed in an open grassy space among old oaks, the princess could bear it all no longer. When the music was at its merriest and a band of strolling goblin musicians were playing their maddest, she slipped away and returned to the palace by an unfrequented path and entered a long-disused part of the garden. And there, in a corner where she had never before walked, she came on a great place of rich, black earth, which, in the sweet Spring air, lay ready for the sowing. It was the spadeful of earth which the day labourer had brought to her christening; and there, for all these years, the king had caused it to remain untouched, its own rank weed growth enriching its richness, until but a touch would now turn it to fruitage. And seeing it so, and being filled with her wish for something which should take her thought away from herself and from her difference from all the world, the Princess Romancia was instantly minded to make a garden.

Night being the work time and play time of the fairies, the princess went at once to the palace granaries and selected seeds of many kinds, flower and vegetable and fern seeds, and she brought them to this corner of rich earth, and there she planted them, under the moon. She would call no servants to help her, fearing lest they would smile among themselves at her strange doing. All night she worked at the planting, and when morning came, she fell asleep in a mandrake blossom, and woke hungry for a breakfast of honeydew and thinking of nothing save getting back to her new gardening.

The Wind helped her, and as the days passed, the Sun and the Rain helped her, and she used certain magic which she knew, so that presently her garden was a glory. Poppies and corn, beans and berries, green peas and sweet peas, pinks and potatoes, celery and white phlox, melons and cardinal flowers--all these grew wonderfully together, as it were, hand in hand, as they will grow for fairy folk, and in such great luxuriance that the princess wrought early and late to keep them ordered and watered. She would have no servants to help her, for she grew more and more to love her task. For here at last in her garden she had found those whom she could not imagine to be smiling among themselves at anything that she said or did; but all the green things responded to her hands like friends answering to a hand clasp, and when the flowers nodded to one another, this meant only that a company of little leaf-shadows were set dancing on the earth, almost as if they had been tamed to be her pets, according to the prince’s fancy.

Up at the palace the queen and the ladies-in-waiting to the queen and the princess regarded all this as but another sign of poor Romancia’s strangeness. From her tower window the queen peered anxiously down at her daughter toiling away at sunrise.

“Now she is raising carrots and beets,” cried the queen, wringing her hands. “She grows more different from us every moment of her life!”

“She seems to do so,” admitted the king; but he was very wise; and, “Let her be,” he commanded everybody. “We may see what this all means, and a great many other things as well.”

Meanwhile Prince Hesperus, journeying from land to land and from height to valley, was seeking in vain for the one person who, as he thought, could remove from the princess the curse of her difference from all the rest of the world. And it was very strange how love had changed him; for now, instead of his silly complaint that every fairy is like every other fairy, and his silly longing for a different pattern in fairies, he sought only for the charm which should make his beloved princess like everybody else. Where should he find this terrible Human Being, this uninvited one who held the key to the princess’s bracelet that was so like a fetter?

He went first to the town nearest to fairyland. The people of the town, having no idea how near to fairyland they really were, were going prosaically about their occupations, and though they could have looked up into the magic garden itself, they remained serenely indifferent. There he found the very mother who had been at the christening of the princess; and alighting close to a great task that she was doing for the whole world, he tried to ask her who it was who makes folk different from all the rest. But she could not hear his tiny, tiny voice which came to her merely as a thought about something which could not possibly be true. In a pleasant valley he came on that one who, at the christening, had brought the lyre which played of itself, but when the prince asked him his question, he fancied it to be merely the wandering of his own melody, with a note about something new to his thought. The poet by the stream singing of the brotherhood of man, the prophet on a mountain foreseeing the brotherhood as in a gazing crystal, the scientist weaving the brotherhood in a tapestry of the universe--none of these knew anyone who can possibly make folk different from everybody else, nor did any of the others on whom Prince Hesperus chanced.

When one day he thought that he had found her, because he met one whose face had the look of many cities and was like the painted cover of an empty box, straightway he saw another and another and still others, men and women both, who were like her, with only the meaning of those who never look at the stars, or walk in gardens, or think about others rather than themselves, or listen to hear what is right for them to do. And then he saw that these are many and many, who believe themselves to be different from everybody else and who try to make others so, and he saw that it would be useless to look further among them for that one who had the key for which he sought.

So at last Prince Hesperus turned sadly back toward the palace of the princess.

“Alas,” said the prince, “it is for her own happiness that I seek to have her like other people. For myself I would love her anyway. But yet, what am I to do--for she seems so different that she will never believe that I love her!”

It was already late at night when the prince found himself in the neighbourhood of the palace, and being tired and travel-worn, he resolved to take shelter in the cup of some flower and wait until the palace revelries were done. Accordingly he entered the garden of an humble cottage and crept within the petals of a wild lily growing in the long, untended grass.

He had hardly settled himself to sleep when he heard from the cottage the sound of bitter crying. Now this is a sound which no fairy will ever pass by or ever so much as hear about without trying to comfort, and at once Prince Hesperus rose and flew to the sill of an open lattice.

He looked in on a poor room, with the meanest furnishings. On a comfortless bed lay the father of the house, ill and helpless. His wife sat by his side, and the children clung about her, crying with hunger and mingling their tears with her own. The man turned and looked at her, making a motion to speak, and Prince Hesperus flew into the room and alighted on the handle of a great spade, covered with earth, which stood in a corner.

“Wife,” the man said, “I’ve brought you little but sorrow and hunger. I would have brought you more if I had had better. And now I see you starve.”

“I am not _too_ hungry,” the wife said--but the children sobbed.

Prince Hesperus waited not a moment. He flew into the night and away toward the palace, and missing the fairy ring where among old oaks the fairies were dancing, he reached the palace by an unfrequented path and entered a disused part of the palace garden. And there, in a corner which he had never visited, Prince Hesperus saw a marvellous mass of bloom and fruit--poppies and corn, beans and berries, green peas and sweet peas, pinks and potatoes, celery and white phlox, melons and cardinal flowers--all growing wonderfully together, as it were, hand in hand. And above them, in a moon-flower clinging to the wall, sat the Princess Romancia, rocking in the wind and brooding upon her garden.

“Come!” cried Prince Hesperus. “There is a thing to do!”

The princess looked at him a little fearfully, but he paid almost no attention to her, so absorbed he was in what he wished to have done.

“Hard by is a family,” said the prince, “dying of hunger. Here is food. Hale in these idlers dancing in the light of the moon, and let us carry the family the means to stay alive.”

Without a word the princess went with him, and they appeared together in the fairy ring and haled away the dancers. And when these understood the need, they all joined together, fairies, goblin musicians and all, and hurried away to the garden of the princess.

They wove a litter of sweet stems and into this they piled all the food of the princess’s tending. And when the queen would have had them send to the palace kitchen for supplies, the king, who was a wise fairy, would not permit it and commanded that all should be done as the prince wished. So when the garden was ravaged of its sweets, they all bore them away, and trooped to the cottage, and cast them on the threshold. And then they perched about the room, or hovered in the path of the moonlight to hear what should be said. And Prince Hesperus and Princess Romancia listened together upon the handle of the poor man’s spade.

At sight of the gifts the wife sprang up joyfully and cried out to her husband, and the children wakened with happy shouts.

“Here is food--food!” they cried. “Oh, it must be from the fairies.”

The sick man looked and smiled.

“Ay,” he said, “the Little Folk have remembered us. They have brought us rich store in return for my poor spadeful of earth.”

Then the prince and princess and all the court understood that this poor man whom they had helped was that very day labourer who had come to the christening of the princess. And swift as a moonbeam--and not unlike one--Prince Hesperus darted from beside the princess and alighted on the man’s pillow.

“Ah,” he cried, “can you not, then, tell me who it is who has the power to make one different from everybody else in the world?”

In half delirium the day labourer heard the voice of the prince and caught the question. But he did not know that it was the voice of the prince, and he fancied it to be the voice of the whole world, as it were throbbing with the prince’s question. And he cried out loudly in answer:--

“No one has that power! No one is different! Those who seem different hold no truth. We are all alike, all of us that live!”

Swiftly the prince turned to the king and the queen and the court.

“The uninvited Human Being,” he cried, “did she say that the princess should _be_ different from all the world, or that she should merely _seem_ different?”

The queen and the court could not remember, but the king, who was a wise fairy, instantly remembered.

“She said that she should _seem_ different,” he said.

Then the prince laughed out joyfully.

“Ay,” he cried, “seem different, indeed! There are many and many who may do that. But this man speaks truth and out of his spadeful of earth we have learned it, _We are all alike, all of us who live!_”

With that he grasped his tiny sword and flew to the side of the princess and lifted her hand in his. And with a swift, deft stroke he cut from her wrist the bracelet that was like a fetter, and he took her in his arms.

“Ah, my princess,” he cried. “You have seemed different from us all only because you would have it so!”

The Princess Romancia looked round on the court, and suddenly she saw only the friendliness which had always been there if she could have believed. She looked on her father and mother, the king and the queen, and she saw only tenderness. She looked on the day labourer and his family and understood that, fairy and princess though she was, she was like them and they were like her. Last, she looked in the face of the prince--and she did not look away.

Invisibly, as the hours leave a dial, the fairies drifted from the little room and back to the fairy ring among the old oaks to dance for very joyousness. The labourer and his family, hearing them go, were conscious of a faint lifting of the dark, as if morning were coming, bringing a new day. And to the Princess Romancia, beside Prince Hesperus, the world itself was a new world, where she did not walk alone as she had thought, but where all folk who will have it so walk together.

VIII

TWO FOR THE SHOW

First of all there was Every Day, with breakfast, lunch, outdoors, dinner, and evenings.

Then there were Sundays, which were quite another kind of time, as different as layer cake from sponge cake: With breakfast late, and mustn’t-jump-rope, and the living-room somehow different, the Out-of-doors moved farther off, our play-house not waiting for us but acting busy at something else in which we had no part; the swing hanging useless as it did when we were away from home and thought about it in the night; bells ringing as if it were _their_ day; until we were almost homesick to hear the grocer’s cart rattle behind the white horse.

There were school half holidays when the sun shone as it never shone before, and we could not decide how to spend the time, and to look ahead seemed a glorious year before dark.

There were the real holidays--Christmas and the Fourth and Birthdays, which didn’t seem like days of time at all, but were like fairies of time, not living in any clock.

And Company-time, when we were not to go in certain rooms, or sing in the hall, and when all downstairs seemed unable to romp with us.

And Vacation-time, when 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock meant nothing, and the face of the clock never warned or threatened and the hands never dragged, and Saturday no longer stood out but sank into insignificance, and the days ran like sands.

All these times there were when life grew different and either let us in farther than ever before or else left us out altogether. But almost the strangest and best of these was house-cleaning time.

Screens out, so that the windows looked like faces and not like masks! The couch under the Cooking-apple tree! We used to lie on the couch and look up in the boughs and wish that they would leave it there forever. What was the rule that made them take it in? Mattresses in the backyard to jump on and lie on and stare up from, so differently, into the blue. Rugs like rooms, opening out into an adjoining pansy bed. Chairs set about on the grass, as if at last people had come to understand, as we had always understood, that the Outdoors is a real place to be in, and not just a place to pass through to get somewhere else. If only, if only some day they had brought the piano out on the lawn! To have done one’s practising out there, just as if a piano were born, not made! But they never did that, and we were thankful enough for the things that they did do. When Saturday came, I found with relief that they had still the parlour and one bedroom left to do. I had been afraid that by then these would be restored to the usual dry and dustless order.

In the open window of the empty sitting-room I was sitting negligently that morning, when I saw Mr. Britt going by. He was as old as anyone I knew in the world--Mr. Britt must have been fifty. I never thought of him as _folks_ at all. There were the other neighbours, all dark-haired and quick and busy at the usual human errands; and then there was Mr. Britt, leaving his fruit trees and his rose bushes to go down to his office in the Court House. He had white hair, a long square white beard, and he carried a stick with a crook in the handle. I watched him pityingly. His life was all done, as tidy as a sewed seam, as sure as a learned lesson. All lived out, a piece at a time, just as I planned mine. How immeasurably long it had taken him; what a slow business it must have seemed to him; how very old he was!

At our gate he stopped. Mr. Britt’s face was pink, and there were pleasant wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and when he talked, he seemed to think about you.

“Moving?” he inquired.

“House-cleaning,” I explained with importance.

“Fine day of it,” he commented and went on. He always sighed a little when he spoke, not in sorrow; but in a certain weariness.

_In forty-two years I should be as old as that._ Forty-two years--more than five life-times, as I knew them.

I was still looking after him, trying to think it through--a number as vast as the sky of stars was vast--when round the corner, across the street, the Rodman girls appeared. (“Margaret and Betty Rodman?” my mother used to inquire pointedly when I said “the Rodman girls.”) In their wake was their little brother, Harold. I hailed them joyously.

“Come on over! It’s house-cleaning.”

“We were,” admitted Betty, as they ran. “We saw the things out in the yard, and we asked right off. We can stay a whole hour.”

“Can’t we get Mary Gilbraith to tell us when it’s an hour?” Margaret Amelia suggested as they came in at the gate. “Then we won’t have to remember.”

Mary Gilbraith stood beating a curtain, and we called to her. She nodded her head, wound in a brown veil.

“Sure,” she said. “And don’t you children track up them clean floors inside there.”

I glanced over my shoulder into the empty room.

“Shall I get down,” I inquired of my guests, “or will you get up?”

They would get up, and they did so. We three just fitted the sill, with Harold looking wistfully upward.

“Go find a nice stick,” Margaret Amelia advised him maternally.

“What’ll we play?” I was pursuing politely. “Pretend?” I intimated. Because of course there is nothing that is quite so much fun as pretend. “Or real?” I conceded the alternative its second place.

“Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know.

“Well, what difference does that make?” I inquired scornfully. “We can decide that after.”

However, we duly weighed the respective merits of Lost-in-the-Woods, Cave-in-the Middle-of-the-World, and Invisible, a selection always involving ceremony.

“Harold can’t play any of them,” Margaret Amelia remembered regretfully. “He don’t stay lost nor invisible--he wriggles. And Cave scares him.”

We considered what to do with Harold, and at last mine was the inspiration--no doubt because I was on the home field. In a fence corner I had a play-house, roofed level with the fence top. From my sand-pile (sand boxes came later--mine was a corner of the garden sacred to me) we brought tin pails of earth which we emptied about the little boy, gradually covering his fat legs and nicely packing his plaid skirt. Then we got him a baking-powder can cover for a cutter and a handleless spoon, and we went away. He was infinitely content.

“Makin’ a meat pie,” he confided, as we left him.

Free, we were drawn irresistibly back to the out-of-doors furniture. We jumped in the middle of the mattresses lying in the grass, we hung the comforters and quilts in long overlapping rows on the clothes line and ran from one end to the other within that tent-like enclosure. Margaret Amelia arranged herself languidly on the Brussels couch that ordinarily stood in the upstairs hall piled with leather-bound reports, but now, scales falling from our eyes, we saw to be the bank of a stream whereon Maid Marian reclined; but while Betty and I were trying to decide which should be Robin Hood and which Alan-a-dale (alas, for our chivalry ... we were both holding out to be Robin) Maid Marian settled it by dancing down the stair carpet which made a hallway half across the lawn. We followed her. The terminus brought us back to the parlour window. We stepped on the coping and stared inside. This was our parlour! Yet it looked no more like the formal room which we seldom entered than a fairy looks like a mortal. Many and many a time an empty room is so much more a suggestive, haunted, beckoning place than ever it becomes after its furniture gets it into bondage. Rooms are often free, beautiful creatures before they are saddled and bridled with alien lives and with upholstery, and hitched for lumbering, permanent uses. I felt this vaguely even then.

“It’s like the cloth in the store,” I observed, balancing on my stomach on the sill. “It’s heaps prettier before it’s made up into clothes.”