Part 8

“How funny,” said Margaret Amelia. “I like the trimming on, and the pretty buttons.”

“Let’s play,” I said hurriedly; for I had seen in her eyes that look which always comes into eyes whose owners have just called an idea “funny.”

“Very well. But,” said Betty, frankly, “I’m awful sick of playing Pretend. You always want to play that. We played that last time anyhow. Let’s play Store. Let’s play,” she said, with sudden zest, “Furniture Store, outdoors.”

The whole lawn became the ground floor for our shop. Forthwith we arranged the aisles of chairs, stopping to sit in this one and that “to taste the difference.” To sit in the patent upholstered rocker, close to the flowering currant bush fragrant with spicy, yellow buds was like being somewhere else.

“This looks like the pictures of greenhouses,” said Margaret Amelia, dragging a willow chair to the Bridal Wreath at the fork in the brick walk. She idled there for a moment.

“Emily Broom says that when they moved she rode right through town on their velvet lounge on the dray,” she volunteered.

We pictured it mutely. Something like that had been a dream of mine. Now and then, I had walked backward on the street to watch a furniture wagon delivering a new chair that rocked idle and unoccupied in the box. I always marvelled at the unimaginativeness of the driver which kept him on the wagon seat.

“We’ve never moved,” I confessed regretfully.

“We did,” said Betty, “but they piled everything up so good there wasn’t anything left to sit on. I rode with the driver--but his seat wasn’t very high,” she added, less in the interest of truth than with a lingering resentment.

“Stitchy Branchett told me,” contributed Margaret Amelia, “once he set on the top step of the step ladder on one of their dray loads.”

“I don’t believe it,” I announced flatly. “It’d tip and pitch him off.”

“He _said_ he did,” Margaret Amelia held. “Betty heard him. Didn’t he, Betty? Who I don’t believe is Joe Richmond. He says he went to sleep on a mattress on the dray when they moved. He couldn’t of.”

“Course he couldn’t of,” we all affirmed.

“Delia says they’ve moved six times that she can remember of and she’s rode on every load,” I repeated.

We all looked enviously across at Delia’s house. Then, moved by a common impulse, we scrambled back to make the most of our own advantages, such as they were.

At last the ground floor of the furniture store was all arranged, and the two show windows set with the choicest pieces to face the street. And when we were ready to open the place to the general public, we sat on the edge of the well curb and surveyed our results.

“Now let’s start,” said Margaret Amelia.

At that instant--the precision with which these things happen is almost conscious--Mary Gilbraith briefly put her head out the kitchen window.

“It’s just edgin’ on ’leven,” she announced. “You children keep your feet off them mattresses.”

We stared at one another. This was incredible. Margaret Amelia and Betty had just come. We had hardly tasted what the morning might have held. Our place of business was only at this moment ready for us. We had just meant to begin.

There was no appeal. We went down the garden path for Harold. He sat where we had left him, somewhat drowsy in the warm sun, patting an enormous mound of moist earth. Busy with our own wrongs, we picked him up and stood him on his feet without warning him. An indignant roar broke from him.

“Just goin’ frost my meat pie!” he wailed. “Wiv chocolate on!”

Some stirring of pity for our common plight may have animated us--I do not remember. But he was hurried off. I went with them to the fence, gave them last tag as became an hostess, stood on the gate as it swung shut, experienced the fine jar and bang of its closing, and then hung wistfully across it, looking for the unknown.

The elm and maple shadows moved pleasantly on the cream-coloured brick walk whose depths of tone were more uneven than the shadows. An oriole was calling, hanging back downward from a little bough. Somebody’s dog came by, looked up at me, wagged his tail, and hurried on about his business. Looking after him, I saw Mr. Britt coming slowly home with his mail. At our gate he stopped.

“Playing something?” he inquired.

Welcoming any sympathy, I told him how we had just got ready to play when it was time to stop. He nodded with some unexpected understanding, closing his eyes briefly.

“That’s it,” he said. “We all just get ready when it’s time to stop. Fine day of it,” he added, and sighed and went on.

I stared after him. Could it be possible that his life had not seemed long to him? That he felt as if he had hardly begun? I dismissed this as utterly improbable. Fifty years!

IX

NEXT DOOR

The house next door had been vacant for two months when the New Family moved in. We had looked forward with excitement, not unmodified by unconscious aversion, to the arrival of the New Family.

“Have they any girls?” we had inquired when the To Rent sign had come down.

They had, it appeared, one girl. We saw her, with wavy hair worn “let down” in the morning, though we ourselves wore let-down hair only for occasions, pig-tails denoting mornings. She had on new soles--we saw them showing clean as she was setting her feet daintily; and when we, who were walking the fence between the two houses, crossed glances with her, we all looked instantly away, and though it was with regret that we saw her put into the ’bus next day to go, we afterward learned, to spend the Spring with her grandmother in a dry climate, we still felt a certain satisfaction that our social habits were not to be disquieted.

Nothing at all had been suspected of a New Boy. Into that experience I came without warning.

I was sitting on the flat roof of my play-house in the fence corner, laboriously writing on the weathered boards with a bit of a picket, which, as everybody knows, will make very clear brown letters, when the woodshed door of the house next door opened, and the New Boy came out. He came straight up to the fence and looked up at me, the sun shining in his eyes beneath the rimless plush cap which he was still wearing. He was younger than I, so I was not too afraid of him.

“What you got?” he inquired.

I showed him my writing material.

“I wrote on a window with a diamond ring a’ready,” he submitted.

I had heard of this, but I had never wholly credited it and I said so. Besides, it would wear the ring out and who wanted to wear out a diamond ring to write on a window?

“It don’t wear it out,” the New Boy said. “It can keep right on writing forever and ever.”

“Nothing can keep right on forever,” I contended.

He cast about for an argument.

“Trees does,” he produced it.

I glanced up at them. They certainly seemed to bear him out. I decided to abandon the controversy, and I switched with some abruptness to a subject not unconnected with trees, and about which I had often wondered.

“If you was dirt,” I observed, “how could you decide to be into a potato when you could be into an apple just as well?”

The New Boy was plainly taken aback. Here he was, as I see now, doing his best to be friendly and to make conversation personal, to say nothing of his having condescended to parley with a girl at all, and I was rewarding him with an abstraction.

Said he: “Huh?”

“If you was dirt--” I began a little doubtfully, but still sticking to the text.

“I ain’t dirt,” denied the New Boy, with some heat.

“I says, if you _was_ dirt--” I tried to tell him, in haste and some discomfort.

He climbed down from the fence on which he had been socially contriving to stick, though his was the “plain” side.

“There ain’t any girl,” he observed with dignity, “going to call me dirt, nor call me if-I-was-dirt, either,” and stalked back into the woodshed.

I looked after him in the utmost distress. I had been dealing in what I had considered the amenities, and it had come to this. Already the New Boy hated me.

I slipped to the ground and waited, watching through the cracks in the fence. Ages passed. At length I heard him call his dog and go whistling down the street. I climbed on the fence and sat looking over in the deserted garden.

Round the corner of the house next door somebody came. I saw a long, gray plaid shawl, with torn and flapping tassels, pinned about a small figure, with long legs. As she put her hand on the latch, she flashed me her smile, and it was Mary Elizabeth. She went immediately inside the shed door, and left me staring. What was she doing there? What unexpected places I was always seeing her. Why should she go in the woodshed of the New Family whom we didn’t even know ourselves?

After due thought, I dropped to the other side of the fence, and proceeded to the woodshed door myself. It was unlatched, and as I peered in, I caught the sweet, moist smell of green wood, like the cool breath of the wood yard, where I had first seen her. When my eyes became used to the dimness, I perceived Mary Elizabeth standing at the end of a pile of wood, of the sort which we used to denominate “chunks,” which are what folk now call fireplace logs, though they are not properly fireplace logs at all--only “chunks” for sitting-room stoves--and trying to look meet to new estates. They were evenly piled, and they presented a wonderful presence, much more human than a wall.

“See,” said Mary Elizabeth, absorbedly, “every end of one is pictures. Here’s a wheel with a wing on, and here’s a griffin eating a lemon.”

I stared over her shoulder, fascinated. There they were. And there were grapes and a chandelier and a crooked street....

Some moments later we were aware that the kitchen door had opened, and that somebody was standing there. It was the woman of the New Family, with a black veil wound round her head and the ends dangling. She shook a huge purple dust-cloth, and I do not seem to recall that there was anything else to her, save her face and veil and the cloth.

“Now then!” she said briskly, and in a tone of dreadful warning. “_Now_ then!”

Mary Elizabeth turned in the utmost eagerness and contrition.

“Oh,” she said, “I come to see about the work.”

The New Family Woman towered at us from the top of the three steps.

“How much work,” she inquired with majesty, “do you think I’d get out of you, young miss, at this rate?”

Mary Elizabeth drew nearer to her and stood before her, down in the chips, in the absurd shawl.

“If you’ll leave me come,” she said earnestly, “I’ll promise not to see pictures. Well,” she added conscientiously, “I’ll promise not to stop to look at ’em.”

How much weight this would have carried, I do not know; but at that moment the woman chanced to touch with her foot a mouse-trap that stood on the top step, and it “sprung” and shed its cheese. In an instant Mary Elizabeth had deftly reset and restored it. This made an impression on the arbiter.

“You’re kind of a handy little thing, I see,” she said. “And of course you’re _all_ lazy, for that matter. And I do need somebody. Well, I’ve got a woman coming for to-day. You can begin in the morning. Dishes, vegetables, and general cleaning, and anything else I think you can do. Board and clothes only, mind you--and _them_ only as long as you suit.”

“Yes’m. No’m. Yes’m.” Mary Elizabeth tried to agree right and left.

Outside I skipped in the sun.

“We’re going to be next-yard neighbours,” I cried, and that reminded me of the New Boy. I told her about him as we went round by the gate, there being no cross piece for a foothold on that side the fence.

“Oh,” said Mary Elizabeth, “I know him. He’s drove me home by my braids. He doesn’t mean anything.”

“Well,” I said earnestly, “when you get a chance, you tell him that I wasn’t calling him dirt. I says if he _was_ dirt, how could he tell to be a potato or an apple.”

Mary Elizabeth nodded. “Lots of boys pretend mad,” she said philosophically, “to get you to run after them.”

This was new to me. Could it be possible that you had to imagine folks, and what they really meant, as well as tending to all the other imagining?

“Can’t you stay over?” I extended hospitality to Mary Elizabeth.

She could “stay over,” it seemed, and without asking. This freedom of hers used to fill me with longing. To “stay over” without asking, to go down town, to eat unexpected offerings of food, to climb a new tree, as Mary Elizabeth could do, and all without asking! It was almost like being boys.

Now that Mary Elizabeth was to be a neighbour, a new footing was established. This I did not reason about, nor did I wonder why this footing might not be everybody’s footing. We merely set to work on the accepted basis.

This comprised: Name, including middle name, if any, and for whom named; age, and birthday, and particulars about the recent or approaching birthday; brothers and sisters, together with their names, ages, and birthdays; birthstones; grade; did we comb our own hair; voluntary information concerning tastes in flowers, colours, and food; and finally an examination and trying on of each other’s rings. The stone had come out of Mary Elizabeth’s ring, and she had found a clear pink pebble to insert in its place. She had, she said, grated the pebble on a brick to make it fit and she herself thought that it looked better than the one that she had lost, “but,” she added modestly, “I s’pose it can’t be.”

Then came the revelation. To finish comparing notes we sat down together in my swing. And partly because, when I made a new friend, I was nervously eager to give her the best I had and at once, and partly because I was always wanting to see if somebody _would_ understand, and chiefly because I never could learn wisdom, I looked up in the apple tree, now forsaken of all its pink, and fallen in a great green stillness, and I told her about my lady in the tree. I told her, expecting now no more than I had received from Delia and the Eversley girls. But Mary Elizabeth looked up and nodded.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen lots of ’em. They’s a lady in the willow out in our alley. I see her when I empty the ashes and I pour ’em so’s they won’t blow on her.”

I looked at her speechlessly. To this day I can remember how the little curls were caught up above Mary Elizabeth’s ear that morning. Struck by my silence she turned and regarded me. I think I must have blushed and stammered like a boy.

“Can _you_ see them too?” I asked. “In trees and places?”

“Why, yes,” she said in surprise. “Can’t everybody?”

Suddenly I was filled with a great sense of protection for Mary Elizabeth. I felt incalculably older. She had not yet found out, and I must never let her know, that everybody does not see all that there is to be seen in the world!

One at a time I brought out my treasures that morning and shared them with her, as treasures; and she brought out hers as matters of course. I remember that I told her about the Theys that lived in our house. They were very friendly and wistful. They never presumed or frightened one or came in the room when anyone was there. But the minute folk left the room--ah, then! They slipped out from everywhere and did their living. I was always trying to catch them. I would leave a room innocently, and then whirl and fling it open in the hope of surprising them. But always They were too quick for me. In the times when the family was in the rooms and They were waiting for us to go, They used to watch us, still friendly and wistful, but also a little critical. Sometimes a whole task, or a mood, could be got through pleasantly because They were looking on.

Mary Elizabeth nodded. “They like our parlour best,” she said. “They ain’t any furniture in there. They don’t come much in the kitchen.”

It was the same at our house. They were always lurking in the curtained parlour, but the cheery, busy kitchen seldom knew them--except when one went out for a drink of water late at night. Then They barely escaped one.

How she understood! Delia I loved with all the loyalties, but I could not help remembering a brief conversation that I had once held with her.

“Do you have Theys at your house?” I had asked her, at the beginning of our acquaintance.

“Yes,” she admitted readily. “Company all this week. From Oregon. They do their hairs on kids.”

“I don’t mean them,” I explained. “I mean Theys, that live in between your rooms.”

“We don’t let mice get in _our_ house,” she replied loftily. “Only sometimes one gets in the woodshed. Do you use Choke-’em traps, or Catch-’em-alive traps and have the cat there?”

“Catch-them-alive-and-let-them-out-in-the-alley traps,” I told her, and gave up hope, I remember, and went on grating more sugar-stone for the mud-pie icing.

Mary Elizabeth and I made mud pies that morning too, but all the time we made them we pretended. Not House-keep, or Store, or Bakery, or Church-sale--none of these pale pretendings to which I had chiefly been bound, save when I played alone. But now every pie and cake that we finished we two carried carefully and laid here and there, under raspberry bushes, in the crotch of the apple tree, on the wood-chopper’s block.

“For Them to get afterwards,” we said briefly. We did not explain--I do not think that we could have explained. And we knew nothing of the old nights in the motherland when from cottage supper tables scraps of food were flung through open doors for One Waiting Without. But this business made an even more excellent thing of mud-pie baking, always a delectable pastime.

When the noon whistle was blowing up at the brick yard, a shadow darkened our pine board. It was the New Boy. One of his cheeks protruded extravagantly. Silently he held out to me a vast pink substance of rock-like hardness, impaled on a stick. Then, with an obvious effort, more spiritual than physical, he extracted from his pocket a third of the kind, for Mary Elizabeth, on whose presence he had not counted. We accepted gratefully, I in the full spirit of the offer. Three minutes later he and I were at our respective dinner tables, trying, I suppose, to discuss this surreptitious first course simultaneously with our soup; and Mary Elizabeth, on her way home, was blissfully partaking of her _hors d’œuvre_, unviolated by any soup.

“What are the new children like, I wonder?” said Somebody Grown. “I see there are two. I don’t know a thing about the people, but we can’t call till the woman at least gets her curtains up.”

I pondered this. “Why?” I ventured at last.

“Because she wouldn’t want to see us,” was the reply.

Were curtains, then, so important that one might neither call nor be called on without them? What other possible explanation could there be? Perhaps Mary Elizabeth’s mother had no curtains and that was why our mothers did not know her.

“Mary Elizabeth is going to help do the work for the New Family, and live there,” I said at last. “Won’t it be nice to have her to play with?”

“You must be very kind to her,” somebody said.

“_Kind to her!_” It was my first horrified look into the depths of the social condescensions. _Kind to her_--when I remembered what we shared! I thought of saying hotly that she was my best friend. But I was silent. There was, after all, no way to make anybody understand what had opened to me that morning.

X

WHAT’S PROPER

Delia and Calista and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman I loved with devotion. And Mary Elizabeth I likewise loved with devotion. Therefore, the fact that my four friends would not, in the language of the wise and grown world, “receive” Mary Elizabeth was to me bitter and unbelievable.

This astounding situation, more than intimated on the day of the picnic, had its confirmation a few days after the advent of Mary Elizabeth in the New Family, when the six of us were seated on the edge of the board walk before our house. It was the middle of a June afternoon, a joyous, girlish day, with sun and wind in that feminine mood which is the frequent inheritance of all created things.

“I could ’most spread this day on my bread like honey, and eat it up, and not know the difference,” said Mary Elizabeth, idly. “The queen’s honey--the queen’s honey--the queen’s honey,” she repeated luxuriously, looking up into the leaves.

Delia leaned forward. It particularly annoyed her to have Mary Elizabeth in this mood.

“One, two, three, four, five of us,” Delia said, deliberately omitting Mary Elizabeth as, for no reason, she counted us.

Mary Elizabeth, released from tasks for an hour or two before time to “help with the supper,” gave no sign that she understood, save that delicate flush of hers which I knew.

“Yes,” she assented lazily, “one, two, three, four, five of us--” and she so contrived that five was her own number, and no one could tell whom of us she had omitted.

“Let’s play something,” I hurriedly intervened. “Let’s play Banquet.”

Action might have proved the solvent, but I had made an ill-starred choice. For having selected the rectangle of lawn where the feast was to be spread, Mary Elizabeth promptly announced that she had never heard of a banquet for five people, and that we must have more.

“We’ve got six,” corrected Delia, unwarily.

“Five,” Mary Elizabeth persisted tranquilly, “and it’s not enough. We ought to have thirty.”

“Where you going to get your thirty?” demanded the exasperated Delia.

“Why,” said Mary Elizabeth, “_that’s_ always easy!” And told us.

The king would sit at the head, with his prime minister and a lord or two. At the foot would be the queen with her principal ladies-in-waiting (at _this_ end, so as to leave room for their trains). In between would be the fool, the discoverer of the new land, the people from the other planets, us, and the animals.

“‘The animals!’” burst out Delia. “Whoever heard of animals at the table?”

Oh, but it was the animals that the banquet was for. They were talking animals, and everyone was scrambling to entertain them, and every place in which they ate they changed their shapes and their skins.

“I never heard of such a game,” said Delia, outright, already sufficiently grown-up to regard this as a reason.

“Let’s not play it,” said Margaret Amelia Rodman, languidly, and, though Delia had the most emphasis among us, Margaret Amelia was our leader, and we abandoned the game. I cannot recall why Margaret Amelia was our leader, unless it was because she had so many hair-ribbons and, when we had pin fairs, always came with a whole paper, whereas the rest of us merely had some collected in a box, or else rows torn off. But I suppose that we must have selected her for some potentiality; or else it was that a talent for tyranny was hers, since this, like the habit of creeping on all fours and other survivals of prehistoric man, will often mark one of the early stages of individual growth.

This time Calista was peace-maker.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “We can do that before supper.”

“You’ll have to be back in time to help _get_ supper, won’t you?” Delia asked Mary Elizabeth pointedly.

Again Mary Elizabeth was unperturbed, save for that faint flush.

“Yes,” she said, “I will. So let’s hurry.”

We ran toward the school ground, by common consent the destination for short walks, with supper imminent, as Prospect Hill was dedicated to real walks, with nothing pressing upon us.

“It says ‘Quick, quick, quick, quick,’” Mary Elizabeth cried, dragging a stick on the pickets of, so to say, a passing fence.

“Why, that’s nothing but the stick noise hitting on the fence noise,” Delia explained loftily.

“Which makes the loudest noise--the stick or the fence?” Mary Elizabeth put it to her.

“Why--” said Delia, and Mary Elizabeth and I both laughed, like little demons, and made our sticks say, “Quick, quick, quick, quick” as far as the big post, that was so like a man standing there to stop us.