Chapter II: Part 2

Miggy nodded--three little nods which seemed to settle everything.

"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."

So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of informing them.

"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."

"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me that I wish sometime to meet Peter."

"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"

"My dear child!" I exclaimed.

"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being one."

I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her--not by now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.

"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh. "Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your best."

"But it is," I told her.

"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do just exactly what you're told. Your _best_ tells you how to do itself."

At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial utterance.

We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it often is, _my_ one and _my_ eleven and nobody else's. For, as between the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time and space were the only considerations.

When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of unconquerable timidity.

"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them done--would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em. But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just squirming and keeping still about 'em--but tell me?"

"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught her smile--that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to come as near as may be to the others.

I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea, who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another. Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long for one another to be near.

Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock, because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock, because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a clock--which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.

IV

SPLENDOUR TOWN

Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went with me to the other end of the bridge.

I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear: for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our "table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings believing itself to be alone.

These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an objective point--including the new iron bridge--to which to take guests. But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward, is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I know, I know. You see that we do not yet _live_ the river, as an ancient people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties, our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars, our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the Northmen were fellowed of the sea.

Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this fellowship and the fellowship of more.

"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away for a party"--in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a _roll_ and wait for a fairy, and be a society."

We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love best to hear her in these fancyings.

"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."

I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan, her parasol--a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a phalanx?

We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face, it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them--yes, and our drug stores, too.

The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes, these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar, Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand, ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the voice of the little child, singing in the garden.

"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I have finished this story.

"Yes," I tell her.

"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.

Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.

"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to housekeep that garden."

"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.

"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."

I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics, learning--there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow, flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.

I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little Child something of what I thought to do--breaking in upon the old woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say, one foot in the universe.

"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head, "I'm real glad you're going to be here. _I dread saying anything._"

Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.

The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little Child:--

"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if she lived here."

She looked everywhere and answered:--

"In the water tower in those woods."

"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.

"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.

"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.

She looked long out across the water.

"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:--

"I love to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down.
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town."

I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment almost always turned away.

Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings. It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.

If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.

Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this moment, and to that.

But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.

"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."

"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.

I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you." Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another milieu is taste.

"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or wise or not averse to becoming either.

I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply. Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.

"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.

"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she means more than she knows that she means.

"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go back this minute."

"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests, for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil their walk.

"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.

Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society? I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I think I get the first sign from you--and you--and you, about this table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what might it not have been?

"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."

"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.

Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.

"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."

Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official trysting-place for all sweethearts.

We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child running home.

"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."

"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with you."

She looked up with puzzled eyes.

"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."

"But it is _not_ easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."

"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."

"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed--I hope you are not sending regrets."

Miggy laughed out suddenly.

"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society. Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."

I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.

"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.

"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you live along and you find out 'most everything."

I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save by the companionship of the village--the village that has somehow taught Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?

My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.

"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of 'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."

"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.

"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much, and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."

"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter entirely."

She surprised me by her seriousness.

"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."

I wondered why not, but I said nothing.

"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You know about him?"

I did know--who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets, shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....

"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.

She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look questioned me.

"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...." Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.

This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces, taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is, like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the evolution of ages. To tame it--there is a task for all the servants of the new order.

Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of sunset in her face--the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant spirit signalled to me--and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.

"But you don't want to be free from Little Child. It is almost as if she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.

Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some answer there.

"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.

"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."

And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.

"But if she _was_--that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"

"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.

Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.

"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of--her, till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean _Margaret_."

It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of what she felt that she was speaking of it.

"How does she look?" I asked.

"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."

"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it. Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.

"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.

"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and not much afraid of folks and real happy."

"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"No," she said; "if I do--I never can think him out real plain. Margaret I can most see."

And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.

I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:--

"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can see."

She was not an instant in deciding.

"Why, sunset," she said.

"Promise me," said I--said we!--"that you will remember _Now_. And that after to-night, when you see a sunset--always, always, till she comes--you will think about her. About Margaret."

Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny, wandering spirit....

Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.

V

DIFFERENT

Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.

Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles, it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and night-in-a-trundle-bed.

And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing--these gave to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar with more than one had suspected.

"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as the glory of the scene burst upon him.

Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up at his brown Adam's apple--she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as her sweetheart's face--and rejoined:--

"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say _great_?"

"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."

He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look--without ever having met it squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who is unwillingly having second thoughts.

"My!" he said.

They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay, partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very perishable.

The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree, making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and locket. And then he was miserable.

It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials, could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus day, if the oracles seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a banished man.

If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:--

"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.

"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it differ'nt?"

"Did you count the elephants?"

"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages? Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know whether it's much of a circus or not--" with gloomy superiority--"they not bein' any calliope, so."

"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied in mere misery:--

"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell way."

"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.

Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of hesitation following a _faux pas_, save that this silence was longer, and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize how wholly delightful everything was.

"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."

"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."

It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.

While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were _her_ locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.

"Oh," cried Liva, "_Timmie_! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"

Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.

"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.

Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.

"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him fleetingly.

Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.

"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over it."

"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"

Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent. They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:--

"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No, Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photo_graphs_ put up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish, refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you see around you. And WHILE you wait."

Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:--

"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."

When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next moment she was far more adorable.

"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."

He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he thought--oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.

Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above, foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright wings of unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained in a stately central line along the clover--it was certain, one would have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of the stuffy little phototype tent?

It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket--dare he--dare he----

He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was in his heart concerning the locket--the phototype--themselves. And Liva herself was longing to say something about the sheer glory of the hour. So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,

"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"

"I know it--I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it could be the same place, does it?"

Liva barely lifted her eyes.

"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and turned to hurry on.

"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.

Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues--it was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with shining eyes.

"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."

She was holding a blue violet.

"In front of the tigers; it was _growing_!"

"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.

She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.

"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My, ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"

"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.

"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.

Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet--her phototype and a violet.

But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:--

"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."

There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike" about a circus--the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward, which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man. Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof, for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with Timothy. But all she said was:--

"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."

And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast, answered only:--

"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"

When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment, as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more natural than to divine the reality of dreams?

His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his heart:--

"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."

Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.

"I ain't sure," she said.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.

But Liva shook her head.

"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump pasture'll _ever_ be the same again."

Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she _possibly_ mean because....

Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now, all right."

"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"

Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva discovered that she had lost her locket.

"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence. He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it on when I left you under the cottonwood."

"You sure?" Liva demanded.

"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't--didn't you have it off while I was gone?" he asked wistfully.

"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.

When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy spoke tentatively.

"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive back to the Pump pasture and look."

"Could we?" Liva hesitated.

It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too--as if he were giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it continually to antics of speech.

From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of dreams.

He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled by trees--locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky, nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.

"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.

"That's funny, so do I," he cried.

Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on red-tasselled sorrel, then--lying there as simply as if it belonged there--on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little cry.

"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."

He faced her for a moment.

"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.

"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie--thank you!"

"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.

She gave a little skipping step beside him.

"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."

His ill-humour was gone in a moment.

"That's what we _will_ do!" he cried joyously.

He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon, of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and where Strange Things had closed them round.