Chapter III: The Mountains (2)

The next morning the frost-feathers had almost disappeared underneath a new snowfall. The air was full of its fresh scent, as it came down gently in tremendous flakes. Here and there Eepersip saw one of the lovely blossoms of the talatuna, with those same ruby-red leaves. How beautiful they were, growing in great clusters, just peeping through the snow! Once in a while a pale cream-coloured mountain moth would flit before her. Occasional gusts brought swarms of tiny bottle-green, white-winged snow-beetles, and the air was a-buzz with them. Sometimes a blue or white insect like a firefly would hover past, a strange red light gleaming about its transparent body.

On and on Eepersip explored, seeing nothing but the wonderland about her--the fairy palaces of snow, the fluttering, hovering insects, and the beautiful mountain flowers. Following the icy river down, she came sometimes to a great cascade of the green water--a cascade coming over one of those great cliffs, washing down the snow, throwing up fountains and clouds of spray in its furious descent. Sometimes it cut under the banks, making a green cave hung with icicles gleaming strangely. One of these had been made when the river was in flood; now it was large enough for Eepersip to stand in, and, wading in water about up to her knees, she went back into its innermost recesses, where the roar of the stream was muffled. There were fish there--trout playing in the whirlpools and riding swiftly with the current. She found some odd bright stones and gleaming pebbles in this mysterious place, silent save for the deadened rush of water.

Sometimes, again, the rushing brook took such steep course that Eepersip was forced to make a detour into the woods for a little way, through clumps of the firs, now growing less stunted, but hung with icicles which clicked together in the wind, sounding to Eepersip like fairy castanets. Even at this high altitude, she saw occasionally a white pine, each cluster of pale green needles laden with snow--tufts of snow which seemed to make little faces peering out from the tree. Bursts of happiness would overwhelm her now and then, and she would leap high and dart like some frightened deer or mountain nymph.

Once she found beautiful little violet-shaped pink flowers with bowed heads and feathery leaves--snow-pinks blooming there, thrusting their buds from the snow itself. She tucked a spray of them into her dress of fluttering ferns.

And then she would return to the river and follow it again. When the moon came, dappling the foamy water with silver, she watched it as it dipped down its forehead in the stream and touched the treetops with magic. Then she would go on again through the moonlit night. Once she came to a place where the brook separated, and she had a difficulty choosing which branch to follow.

And when the russet dawn reappeared, tipping the mountains with apple-blossom and fire, she had followed it to its goal in the very meadow from where she had started--a pool hitherto unseen by her. About a hundred feet across it was, beached with clean white pebbles. In it bloomed water-lilies, fragrant and white, with centres of gold; strange red flowers, too, she saw on the bottom, growing between the pebbles. Dragonflies with crackling wings swept over it in circles. She saw, too, a shoal of tiny fishes of a brownish colour, striped with yellow. They would suddenly dart forward as if something had frightened them, and then poise themselves stock-still, mimicking so many sticks in the shadows of the abundant lily-pads.

She was wading about in the pool when suddenly--where there had been ground for her foot to rest on, nothing was there. The bottom of the pool under her foot had slid forward and collapsed! Suddenly "Clug-glug, clug-glug, chugarum, glug!" reached her, as a big bull-frog's nose appeared by the side of a lily-pad. A second later the frog diked up on the lily-pad and stared at Eepersip with his goggly eyes. She burst out laughing, he looked so ridiculous staring at her like that.

She stayed in the meadow, playing gaily among the leaves and flowers. Butterflies of all the colours of the rainbow swept over it in great flocks. Flowers bloomed so thickly that there was hardly any grass--white ones with waxen petals. striped and bordered with heavy golden bands; red ones with centres of dark green-gold; great blossoms of pink and purple, whose petals fluttered about in the breeze like butterflies.

One morning she was awakened early by "Peep, peep, twitter-itter-ee-e-e-e-e-e, twit chirup, twitter-ee-e-e, twit!" She looked up and saw a great flock of snow-white birds with long narrow wings. They were flying northward. The flock was much more gigantic than Eepersip had supposed, for it kept on until she began to think that it was going round and round. But no: after ten or fifteen minutes the sky cleared, and she heard faintly in the distance: "Twitter-itter-ee-e-e-e-e, _ee-e-per-s-sip!_ e-e-p, e-ep, chirup."

Day after day she danced here, playing, as on the first meadow, the butterflies, flowers, and swallows. And now, as she danced, she seemed to float through the air, her feet almost motionless. Sometimes she would leap high and come down--_float_ down--quite slowly. She seemed to have no weight at all, and a breeze would almost lift her off the ground and hold her up in the air. Indeed, when she ran with the wind behind her she would be _blown_ along--blown like a leaf just above the flowers.

One day she was dancing there--dancing and leaping in the long grass, amid the blossoms. Butterflies drifted over the sunny field--butterflies of red and yellow, blue and green, black and white, orange and purple. How gracefully they flew; how delicately they alighted on the flowers; how fairy-like they were, hovering for an instant over some blossom, then dipping their wings and starting off again! Eepersip felt as though--as though she were going to be one of them; as though she were so happy that she must fly about with them, sip the honey from the flowers with them.

As she was thinking happily she heard a few faint peeps, which became louder as she danced toward a certain part of the field. Then there was a desperate twitter right at her feet, and, looking down she saw a yellow fledgling hopping towards her. She picked him up carefully and saw that he had broken his left wing. She worked a moment with her hands and pulled the bone into place. Then she made him a comfortable nest of grass and set out to see where he had come from. Looking up, she saw a nest from which a bird was peering about anxiously. Straightway she took the little one from the nest _she_ had made, and climbed the tree with it to its own nest; upon which the mother-bird gave a twitter of joy.

After doing this Eepersip descended the tree and continued her happy dance with the butterflies until evening. Then they all found shelters under the leaves, and the stars came out, one by one. Presently Eepersip spied a flicker in the meadow--then another and still another, until the fireflies were out in full play. They gathered around Eepersip in one flaming mass, kissing her with their feathery wings. Making her way over to the pool, she saw her reflection, a shimmer of gold.

A light darted out toward her from the woods; then another and yet another, until there were hundreds of lights flickering and blinking at her from all corners of the great field--the lights of elves and gnomes, little fairies of the field. And she danced happily among them--danced until the dawn appeared on the horizon, sending away the darkness and making the stars fade into space. It flushed the whole sky with rose, sent arms of it even as far as the west; arms and streamers of colour which paled toward their tips. Little white clouds grew pink, too, and the colour was reflected on the distant mountain-tops. Again the snow-field seemed to become fire--fire which was soon quenched by the coolness of the snow. As the sun sent its first golden beams above the horizon, the colour faded, turned to yellow, and soon entirely disappeared. Then the sky was blue--deep, quivering blue, with the fluffy clouds like pearls in an azure setting.

Suddenly Eepersip saw that she was dressed in a flouncy array of spring crocuses and maidenhair ferns. Lovely flowers of pink and yellow were entwined in her hair, and butterflies fluttered around her. She danced happily and leaped high in the air. How free and light she felt in the lovely dress that had been given her!

That day Eepersip was even happier than usual. She floated about, visiting each flower, each bush and tree. She played games with the butterflies, the games she had played on the old meadow, that first summer of her life in the House without Windows. When she rested, she sat on top of a laurel-bush, and not a twig bent beneath her. The slightest breeze blew her about, changed the direction of her dance. Butterfly after butterfly flew to her, flock after flock, as if they had some message to tell her; and after each visit she was happier than before. Yes, they were messengers, these happy creatures; messengers who came to whisper her a secret--a secret from Nature, a secret of the beautiful meadow, a secret from the fairies.

And, when the sun again tinged the sky with colour, a flock of these butterflies, of purple and gold and green, came swooping and alighted on her head in a circle, the largest in front. Others came in myriads and covered her dress with delicate wing-touches. Eepersip held out her arms a moment. A gold-and-black one alighted on each wrist. And then--she rose into the air, and, hovering an instant over a great laurel-bush, vanished.

She was a fairy--a wood-nymph. She would be invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature--a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.

HISTORICAL NOTE _(By Another Hand)_

In the opening week of January, 1923, there appeared on the outside of a certain door within a dingy, sunless, and cramped apartment a slip of paper bearing the following typewritten notice:

Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. The person in the room if he agrees that one shall come in will say "come in," or something like that and if he does not agree to it he will say "Not yet, please," or something like that. The door may be shut if nobody is in the room but if a person wants to come in, knocks and hears no answer that means that there is no one in the room and he must not go in.

Reason. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone. The author of this odd manifesto (here reproduced with strict textual exactitude from the frayed original) was the author of the foregoing story, then just three months short of nine years old. The door on which it appeared was that of the room in which, on a small typewriter, she wrote down the adventures of Eepersip; and the week in which it appeared was that in which these adventures had their beginning.

She finished them, in the same room, three months later, early in the March of her ninth completed year and a few days after her birthday. One of her curious, slightly un-American inventions, I must here explain, was the concept of her own birthday as an annual occasion for handing out things to the other members of her family. She planned this story from the beginning as a gift for her mother on March 4. Would her mother "like" it, though? On that point there would have to be a disinterested opinion--as it happened, mine. With intense secrecy, behind the latched door of that room guarded by the constrained preparatory notice, she read me the instalments as they were produced.

My candid guess was that her mother would indeed "like" it. I liked it myself, if only as unconscious expression of a radiant physical vitality--so much I found in it of the mighty swimmer, the enjoyable young comrade of trail and river, always ready to swing a paddle tirelessly or carry ungrumbling a full fair share of pack. I liked it, too, as her answer to the one year which she had ever been called upon to spend in undeniably tawdry surroundings. But, alas, there came interruptions one of them in the shape of the only appreciable illness she has ever had--and these pulled down her average daily output. On her big days the small typist clicked off fresh copy to the extent of from four to five thousand words; but still the appointed morning caught her some pages short of the end. The tale came to Finis a few days later. Its length, in that first incarnation, was some 40,000 words, or not far from what it is now.

Up to that point there had been, of course, no thought of print. It was I who introduced the question of print; and it had at that time no connection whatever with publication. The author of the story never had (and never has) experienced any school system, public or private, her education having been exclusively the home-made one devised by her mother; and I was beginning to think it high time that print became a part of it. It was, in fine, my idea that we ought to have a piece of her work put into type in some small shop where she could set part of it herself, pull her own proofs, learn more about proof-reading by correcting them, and see the whole thing through to the binding of a small armful of copies for her friends.

But before anything of that sort was done I wanted her to have the practice of revising her first copy as carefully as possible and putting it into strictly printable condition--as, indeed, she was eager to do. Accordingly she took it away with her in the summer, worked on it from early July through September in the intervals of swimming, canoeing, mountain-climbing, and plain day-dreaming, and brought it back, on the 5th of October, 1923, ready for print. Twenty-four hours later we left it in a burning building from which nothing got out but the lucky human occupants.

From the point of view of an admittedly fond parent--for I can make no slightest pretension to the ability to contemplate all this with a stranger's or a critic's detachment--it was heart-rending to watch the nine-year-old author torture her memory to the end of reconstituting the tale in its first shape. There were, during the next weeks, a good many blank hours at the typewriter, and it was slowly and painfully that page followed page. At this rate, it was going to take about three years merely to salvage what had once been manufactured out of the void in three months.

Then, one day in December, everything was suddenly different. As an experiment of despair, Barbara had stopped trying to remember the shape of sentences, the precise order and phraseology of details, and had begun to let the material come back as it listed. And to her astonishment it came in a freshet, like northern rivers when the ice goes out. When, a few days later, we put work aside to organize our makeshift Christmas, she was still in a happy glow, the first third of the fantasy existed again, and the story was running over its banks.

There followed one interruption after another, and it was not until the autumn of 1924 that the second draft was completed. In the late winter of 1924-25, Barbara worked patiently through the first third, putting it in what she hoped would be final shape. The manuscript had to be laid away in May of 1925, and was not touched again for nine months. Then, in February and March, 1926, she did her revision of the second and third parts, made a few minor improvements in Part I, and typed out a fair copy of the whole--the copy from which this little book is set.

To what extent is this twelve-year-old manuscript identical with the nine-year-old story? To a far greater extent, I am sure, than seems compatible with the huge number of hours spent on it since it was completed; for it happens that a disproportionate number of those hours has gone into laborious, at times unconscious, recovery of the precise effects which were in the lost original. The differences are not where a stranger to the author would naturally look for them: that is, in the diction and the build of sentences. Barbara's vocabulary at nine was, of course, a stratified arrangement of deposits from Walter de la Mare[2][3][4] and Mark Twain, Shelley and Scott; that is to say, it was just what it is now except for the later addition of words which could not be in this story anyhow--the words of history, of science. And certainly the fundamental ideas and emotions of the story have undergone no change. The fact is, it was conceived and written at the end of a phase which could not return--that phase of normal childhood in which nature means nearly everything and civilization nearly nothing. The whole purport of Eepersip's existence is simply a healthy nine-year-old consciousness made articulate--something that an eleven-year-old could recover only by a feat of the memory, and an adult mind only by an improbable _tour de force_ of the imagination. Barbara, in short, designed this curious narrative at the last moment when to do so would have been at all open to her. By no human possibility could it have been in her head at eleven if she had not had it down on paper at nine.

[1][2][3] No books meant more to her, between the ages of six and ten, than The Three Mulla-Mulgars, _A Little Boy Lost_, and The Princess and the Goblin

The chief differences, then, between the printed and the destroyed versions represent the inevitable development of the author's taste in minor particulars, and they are these: (1) There is appreciably less of the pursuit-and-escape device, and correspondingly more of the sheer revelling in natural beauty; (2) a great many exact measurements, in the form of dates, distances, rates, heights, and depths, have been omitted as realistic and therefore trivializing; (3) there is a somewhat maturer attempt to keep the fauna and flora consistent with latitude, altitude, and season; and (4) the lapse of time is managed rather more consciously and coherently than it was in the first place. If, in the treatment of these and other details of the story, there seems to he a progressive increase in maturity, that is a consequence and a measure of the nine months' interval between the author's revision of Part I and her revision of Parts II and III.

It will be observed that the differences involve little or no addition. The one piece of addition is in the episode of Eepersip's young sister Fleuriss, which is considerably more developed. The obvious reason for this is that the author's own young sister, at the time of the first draft, existed only as an insistent demand on Barbara's part; whereas in the period of the revision she was a dream fulfilled, subject to adoring daily observation.

As to ordinary literacy, there is no perceptible difference, and has been none since the typewritten by-products of Barbara's sixth and seventh years. In short, what the reader is here given is an articulate eight and nine-year-old child's outpouring of her own dreams and longings in a fanciful tale, superficially revised by the hand of a twelve-year-old girl whose life on its more artificial side is made up principally of books and music.

It was the youthful author's idea, not mine, that her story should be accompanied by a word of explanation from her father. I do not know how, when, or exactly why she formulated such a requirement, any more than I can explain where she got many another of the ideas with which she has been known to startle or confound me. Long after the story had been completed and while it was undergoing revision, there arrived a day on which I was told that the requirement existed: that Barbara had secretly been counting on me, and with pleasure in the thought. Pleasure! If I could give that and so easily, and to her, it not mine to make a gesture of resistance. I insist only that what I have to say shall be placed where it can stand between no reader and the story.

It would be neither good manners nor good sense for me to attempt any sort of appraisal of this chronicle of Eepersip's adventures in the spacious rooms of her House without Windows. I have been too near to the whole thing, and am too near the chronicler. The most that I can now add without impropriety is a statement of why the first thought, a book to be manufactured but by no means published, gave way after all to a different idea.

It began to strike me that here was something representatively valuable--valuable, I mean, as a representation of something lovely in generalized childhood itself--and yet not so very likely to achieve frequent expression. The fact is that the impulses crystallized in this story mostly fade into the light of common day a year or two before the dawn of that amount of mechanical articulacy which is necessary for a tangible expression of them; and they are therefore almost never expressed. Actually, I do not happen to be acquainted with a single prose document of much scope which achieves the full expression, or any first-hand expression, of what in a normal, healthy child's mind and heart during that mysterious phase when butterflies, flowers, winging swallow, and white-tapped waves are twice as real as even a quite bearable parent, and incomparably more important--the phase before there is any unshakable Tyranny of Things.

What is probably unusual about Barbara is the conspiracy of the circumstances which have made these two things, the phase and the necessary articulacy, overlap. She is precocious, and the phase may have lasted a year or two longer than it does in many. She is not excessively gregarious and has not been regimented in schools and groups; therefore nothing has as yet standardized her, or ironed out her spontaneity, or made her particularly ashamed of it. She has been given plenty of time to know herself. And, almost above all, having used a typewriter as a plaything from a time that she can't remember, she was able to rattle off an easy 1200 words an hour, with any awareness of the physical process, years before penmanship could have developed half the proficiency, even with intense concentration on the physical process alone.