Chapter II: Part 2

I was still turning this in my mind as we passed the wood yard. The wood yard was a series of vacant lots where some mysterious person piled cords and cords of wood, which smelled sweet and green and gave out cool breaths. Sometimes the gasoline wood-cutter worked in there, and we would watch till it had gone, and then steal in and bring away a baking-powder can full of sawdust. We never knew quite what to do with this sawdust. It was not desirable for mud-pies, and there was nothing that we knew of to be stuffed with it. Yet when we could, we always saved it. Perhaps it gave us an excuse to go into the wood yard, at which we always peeped as we went by. This day, I lagged a few steps behind and looked in, expectant of the same vague thing that we always expected, and never defined--a bonfire, a robber, an open cave, some changed aspect, I did not know what. And over by the sawdust pile, I saw, stepping about, a little girl in a reddish dress--a little girl whom I had never seen before. She looked up and saw me stand staring at her; and her gaze was so clear and direct that I felt obliged to say something in defence of my intrusion.

“Hello,” I said.

Her face suddenly brightened. “Hello,” she replied, and after a moment she added: “I thought you was going to say ‘how de do.’”

A faint spark of understanding leapt between us. Dressed-up little girls usually did say “how de do.” It was only in a kind of unconscious deference to her own appearance that I had not done so. She was unkempt and ragged--her sleeve was torn from cuff to elbow.

“What you doing here?” I inquired, not averse to breaking the business of calling by a bit of gossip.

At this she did for the third time what I had been vaguely conscious of her having done: She glanced over her shoulder toward a corner of the yard which the piled wood concealed from me. I stepped forward and looked there.

On an end of wood-pile which we children had pulled down so as to make a slope to ascend its heights, a man was sitting. His head and shoulders were drooping, his legs were relaxed, and his hands were hanging loose, as if they were heavy. His eyes were closed and his lips were parted, yet about the face, with its fair hair and beard, there was something singularly attractive and gentle. He looked like a man who would tell you a story.

“Who’s he?” I asked, and involuntarily I whispered.

The girl began backing a little away from me, her eyes on my face, her finger on her lips.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s--resting.”

I had never heard of a man resting in the daytime. Save, perhaps, on Sunday afternoons, this was no true function of men. I longed to look at the man and understand better, but something in the little girl’s manner forbade me. I looked perplexedly after her. Then I peered round the fence post and saw my Mother standing under a tree, waiting for me. She beckoned. I took one more look inside the fence, and I saw the little girl sit down beside the sleeping man and fold her hands. The afternoon sun smote across the long wood yard, with its mysterious rooms made by the piling of the cords. It seemed impossible that this strange, still place, with its thick carpet of sawdust and its moist odours, should belong at all to the commonplace little street. And the two strange occupants gave the last touch to its enchantment.

I ran to overtake Mother, and I tried to tell her something of what I had seen. But some way my words gave nothing of the air of the place and of the two who waited there for something that I could not guess. Already I knew this about words--that they were all very well for _saying_ a thing, but seldom for letting anybody _taste_ what you were talking about.

I did not give up trying to tell it until we passed the Rodmans’. From the direction of their high-board fence I heard voices. Margaret Amelia and Betty and Delia and Calista were engaged in writing on the weathered boards of the fence with willows dipped in the clear-flowing gutter stream.

“Got it done?” I called mysteriously.

They turned, shaking their heads.

“It was all melted,” they replied. “We couldn’t find another bit.”

“Oh, well,” I cried, “you come on over after supper. I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Something to tell you” would, of course, bring anybody anywhere. After supper they all came “over.” It was that hour which only village children know--that last bright daylight of slanting sun and driven cows tinkling homeward; of front-doors standing open and neighbours calling to one another across the streets, and the sky warm in the quiet surface of some little water from whose bridge lads are tossing stones or hanging bare-footed from the timbers. We withdrew past the family, sitting on the side-porch, to the garden, where the sun was still golden on the tops of the maples.

“Mother says,” I began importantly, “that she thinks Grandma Bard has a hard time to get along. Well, you know our snow? Well, you know you said you couldn’t find any more to bury? Well, why don’t we dig up ours, right now, and sell it and give the money to Grandma Bard?”

I must have touched some answering chord. Looking back, I cannot believe that this was wholly Grandma Bard. Could it be that the others had wanted to dig it up, independent of my suggestion? For there was not one dissenting voice.

The occasion seemed to warrant the best dishes. I brought out six china plates and six spoons. These would be used for serving my own family, while the others took the two cans and ran home with them to their families.

We dug rapidly now, the earth being still soft. To our surprise, the tops of the tins were located much nearer to the surface than we had supposed after our efforts of the morning to reach a great depth. The snow in which we had packed the cans had disappeared, but we made nothing of that. We drew out the cans, had off their tops, and gazed distressfully down into clear water.

“It went and melted!” said Calista, resentfully.

In a way, she regarded it as her personal failure, since the ceremony had been her suggestion in the first place.

“Never mind, Calista,” we said, “you didn’t know.”

Calista freely summed up her impressions.

“How _mean_!” she said.

We gravely gathered up the china plates and turned toward the house--and now I was possessed of a really accountable desire to get the plates back in their places as quickly as possible.

On the way a thought struck us simultaneously. Poor Grandma Bard!

“Let’s all go to see her to-morrow anyhow,” I suggested--largely, I am afraid, because the memory of my entertainment there was still fresh in my mind.

When, after a little while, we came round the house where the older ones were sitting, and heard them discussing uninteresting affairs, we regarded them with real sympathy. They had so narrowly missed something so vastly, absorbingly interesting.

From Delia’s room a voice came calling as, at intervals, other voices were heard calling other names throughout the neighbourhood--they were at one with the tinkle of the bells and the far-off yodel of the boys.

“Delia!”

“Good night,” said Delia, briefly, and vanished without warning, as at the sound of any other taps. Soon after, the others also disappeared; and I crept up on the porch and lay down in the hammock.

“What’s she been doing _now_?” somebody instantly asked me.

For a moment I thought of telling; but not seriously.

Evidently they had not expected an answer, for they went on talking.

“... yes, I had looked forward to it for a long while. Of course we had all counted on it. It was a great disappointment.”

Somewhere in me the words echoed a familiar and recent emotion. So! They too had their disappointments ... even as we. Of course whatever this was could have been nothing like losing a fortune in melted snow. Still, I felt a new sympathy.

Mother turned to me.

“We are going to ask Grandma Bard to come to live with us,” she said. “Will you like that?”

I sat up in the hammock. “All the time?” I joyfully inquired.

“For the rest of the time,” Mother said soberly. “It seems as if one ought to take a child,” she added to the others, “when one takes anybody....”

“Still,” said father, “till we get in our heads something of what the state owes to old folks, there’s nobody but us to do its work....”

I hardly heard them. To make this come true at one stroke! Even to be able to adopt a child! How easily they could do things, these grown-up ones; and how magnificently they acted as if it were nothing at all ... like the giants planting city-seed and watching cities grow to the size and shape of giants’ flower beds....

They went on talking. Some of the things that they said we might have said ourselves. In some ways they were not so very different from us. Yet think what they could accomplish.

Watching them and listening, there in the April twilight, I began to understand. It was not only that they could have their own way. But for the sake of things that we had never yet so much as guessed or dreamed, it was desirable to be grown up.

IV

THE PICNIC

It was Delia Dart who had suggested our Arbour Day picnic. “Let’s have some fun Arbour Day,” she said.

We had never thought of Arbour Day in that light. Exercises, though they presented the open advantage of escape from the school grind, were no special fun. Fun was something much more intimate and intangible, definite and mysterious, casual and thrilling--and other anomalies.

“Doing what?” we demanded.

“Oh,” said Delia, restlessly, “go off somewheres. And eat things. And do something to tell about and make their eyes stick out.”

We were not old enough really to have observed this formula for adventure. Hitherto we had always gone merely because we went. Yet all three motives appealed to us. And events fostered our faint intention. At the opening of school that morning, Miss Messmore made an announcement.... I remember her grave way of smiling and silent waiting, so that we hung on what she was going to say.

“To-morrow,” she said, “is Arbour Day. All who wish will assemble here at the usual hour in the afternoon. We are to plant trees and shrubs and vines about the schoolhouse. There will be something for each one to plant. But this is not required. Any who do not wish to be present may remain away, and these will not be marked absent. Only those may plant trees who wish to plant trees. I hope that all children will take advantage of their opportunity. Classes will now pass to their places.”

Delia telegraphed triumphantly in several directions. We could hardly wait to confer. At recess we met immediately in the closet under the stairs, a closet intended primarily for chalk, erasers, brooms, and maps, but by virtue of its window and its privacy put to sub-uses of secret committee meetings.

“I told you,” said Delia. And such was Delia’s magnetism that we felt that she had told us. “Let’s take our lunch and start as soon as we get out.”

“Couldn’t we go after the exercises?” Calista Waters submitted waveringly.

“_After!_” said Delia, scornfully. “It’ll be three o’clock. _That’s_ no fun. We want to start by twelve, prompt, and stay till six.”

Margaret Amelia Rodman bore out Delia’s contention. She and Betty had a dozen eggs saved up from their pullets. They would boil them and bring them. “The pullets?” Calista demanded aghast and was laughed into subjection, and found herself agreeing and planning in order to get back into favour. Delia and the Rodmans were, I now perceive, born leaders of mediæval living.

“Why don’t you wait till Saturday?” I finally said, from out a silence that had tried to produce this earlier. “That’s only two days.”

“Saturday!” said Delia. “Anybody can have a picnic Saturday. This is most as good as running away.”

And of course it was. But....

“Who wants to plant a tree?” Delia continued. “They’ll plant all they’ve got whether we’re here or not, won’t they?”

That was true. They would do so. It was clearly a selfish wish to participate that was agitating Calista and me. In the end we were outvoted, and we went. Our families, it seemed, all took the same attitude: We need not plant trees if we did not wish to plant trees. Save in the case of Harold Rodman. He was ruled to be too small to walk to Prospect Hill, and he preferred going back to school to staying at home alone.

“I won’t plant no tree, though,” he announced resentfully, as we left him. “I’m goin’ dig ’em all up!” he shouted after us. “Every one in the world!”

It was when I was running round the house to get my lunch that I came for the second time face to face with Mary Elizabeth.

Mary Elizabeth was sitting flat on the ground, cleaning knives which I recognized as our kitchen knives. This she was doing by a simple process, not unknown to me and consisting of driving the knife into the ground up to its black handle and shoving it rapidly up and down. It struck me as very strange that she should be there, in _our_ back yard, cleaning _our_ knives, and I somewhat resented it. For it is curious how much of a savage a little girl in a white apron can really be. But then I did not at once recognize her as the girl whom I had seen in the wood yard.

I remember her sometimes as I saw her that day. She had straight brown hair the colour of my own, and her thick pig-tail, which had fallen over her shoulder as she worked, was tied with red yarn. Her face was a lovely, even cream colour, with no freckles such as diversified my own nose, and with no other colour in her cheek. Her hands were thin and veined, with long, agile fingers. The right sleeve of her reddish plaid dress was by now slit almost to the shoulder, and her bare arm showed, and it was nearly all wrist. She had on a boy’s heavy shoes, and these were nearly without buttons.

“What you doing?” I inquired, coming to a standstill.

She lifted her face and smiled, not a flash of a smile, but a slow smile of understanding me.

“This,” she replied, and went on with her task.

“What’s your name?” I demanded.

“Mary Elizabeth,” she answered, and did not ask me my name. This was her pathetic way of deference to me because my clothing and my “station” were other than hers.

I went on to the house, but I went, looking back.

“Mother,” I said, “who is she? The little girl out there.”

While she put up my lunch in the Indian basket, Mother told me how Mary Elizabeth had come that morning asking for something to do. She had set her to work, and meanwhile she was finding out who she was. “I gave her something to eat,” Mother said. “And I have never seen even you so hungry.” Hungry and having no food. I had never heard of such a thing at first hand--not nearer than in books and in Sunday school. But ... hungry that way, and in our yard!

It was chiefly this that accounted for my invitation to her--this, and the fact that, as she came to the door to tell my Mother good-bye and to take what she had earned, she gave me again that slow, understanding-me smile. Anyway, as we walked toward the gate, I overtook her with my Indian basket.

“Don’t you want to come to the picnic with us?” I said.

She stared at me. “What do you do?” she asked.

“Why,” I said, “a picnic? Eat in the woods and--and get things, and sit on the grass. Don’t you think they’re fun?”

“I never was to one,” she answered, but I saw how she was watching me almost breathlessly.

“Come on, then,” I insisted carelessly.

“Honest?” she said. “Me?”

When she understood, I remember how she walked beside me, looking at me as if she might at any moment find out her mistake.

Delia, waiting impatiently at our gate with her own basket,--somehow I never waited at the gates of others, but it was always they who waited at mine,--bade me hurry, stared at Mary Elizabeth, and serenely turned her back on her.

“This,” I said, “is Mary Elizabeth. I asked her to go to our picnic. She’s going. I’ve got enough lunch. This is Delia.”

I suppose that they looked at each other furtively--so much of the stupidity of being a knight with one’s visor lowered yet hangs upon us--and then Delia plucked me, visibly, by the sleeve and addressed me, audibly, in the ear.

“What’d you go and do that for?” said she. And I who, at an early age, resented being plucked by the sleeve as a bird resents being patted on the head, or the wall of any personality trembles away when it is tapped, took Mary Elizabeth by the hand and marched on to meet the Rodmans and Calista.

Calista was a vague little soul, with no sense of facts. She was always promising to walk with two girls at recess, which was equivalent to asking two to be her partners in a quadrille. It simply could not be done. So Calista was forever having to promise to run errands with someone after school to make amends for not having walked with her at recess. She seldom had a grievance of her own, but she easily fell in with the grievances of others. When I presented Mary Elizabeth to her, Calista received her serenely as a part of the course of human events; and so I think she would have continued to regard her, without great attention and certainly with no criticism, had she not received the somewhat powerful suggestion of Delia and Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman. The three fell behind Mary Elizabeth and me as we trotted down the long street on which the April sun smote with Summer heat.

“--over across the railroad tracks and picks up tin cans and old rubbers and sells ’em and drinks just awful and got ten children and got arrested,” I heard Delia recounting.

“The idea. To our picnic,” said Margaret Amelia’s thin-edged voice.

“Without asking us,” Betty whispered, anxious to think of something of account to say.

Mary Elizabeth heard. I have seen that look of dumb, unresentful suffering in many a human face--in the faces of those who, by the Laws of sport or society or of jurisprudence, find no escape. She had no anger, and what she felt must have been long familiar. “I’d better go home,” she said to me briefly.

I still had her by the hand. And it was, I am bound to confess, as no errant but chiefly as antagonist to the others that I pulled her along. “You got to come,” I reminded her. “You said you would.”

It was cruel treatment, by way of kindness. The others, quickly adapting themselves, fell into the talk of expeditions, which is never quite the same as any other talk; and the only further notice that they took of Mary Elizabeth was painstakingly to leave her out. They never said anything to her, and when she ventured some faint word, they never answered or noticed or seemed to hear. In later years I have had occasion to observe, among the undeveloped, these same traces of tribal antagonisms.

As we went, I had time to digest the hints which I had overheard concerning Mary Elizabeth’s estate. I knew that a family having many children had lately come to live “across the tracks,” and that, because of our anxiety to classify, the father was said to be a drunkard. I looked stealthily at Mary Elizabeth, with a certain respect born of her having experience so transcending my own. Telling how many drunken men and how many dead persons, if any, we had seen was one of our modes of recreation when we foregathered. Technically Mary Elizabeth was, I perceived, one of the vague “poor children” for whom we had long packed baskets and whom we used to take for granted as barbarously as they used to take for granted the plague. Yet now that I knew one such, face to face, she seemed so much less a poor child than a little girl. And though she said so little, she had a priceless manner of knowing what I was driving at, which not even Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman had, and they were the daughters of an assemblyman, and had a furnace in their house, and had had gold watches for Christmas. It was very perplexing.

“First one finds a May-flower’s going to be a princess!” Delia shouted. Delia was singularly unimaginative; the idea of royalty was her single entrance to fields of fancy. The stories that I made up always began “Once there was a fairy”; Margaret and Betty started at gnomes and dwarfs; Calista usually selected a poor little match girl or a boot-black asleep in a piano box; but Delia invariably chose a royal family, with many sons.

We ran, shouting, across the stretch of scrub-oak which stretched where the town blocks of houses and streets gave it up and reverted to the open country. To reach this unprepossessing green place, usually occupied by a decrepit wagon and a pile of cord-wood, was like passing through a doorway into the open. We expressed our freedom by shouting and scrambling to be princesses--all, that is, save Mary Elizabeth. She went soberly about, a little apart, and I wished with all my heart that she might find the first May-flower; but she did not do so.

We hunted for wind-flowers. It was on Prospect Hill that these first flowers--wind-flowers, pasque flowers, May-flowers, however one has learned to say them--were found in Spring--the _anemone patens_ which, next to pussy-willows themselves, meant to us Spring. A week before Nellie Pitmouth had brought to school the first that we had seen. Nellie had our pity because she drove the cows to pasture before she came to school, but she had her reward, for it was always she who found the first spoils. I remember those mornings when I would reach school to find a little group about Nellie in whose hands would be pussy-willows, or the first violets, or our rarely found white violets. For a little while, in the light of real events like these, Nellie enjoyed distinction. Then she relapsed into her usual social obscurity and the stigma of her gingham apron which she wore even on half holidays. This day we pressed hard for her laurels, scrambling in the deep mould and dead leaves in search of the star faces on silvery, silken, furry stems. We hoped untiringly that we might some day find arbutus, which grew in abundance only eighteen miles away, on the hills. In Summer we patiently looked for wintergreen, which they were always finding farther up the river. And from the undoubted dearth of both we escaped with a pretence to the effect that we were under a spell, and that some day, the witch having died, we should walk on our hill and find the wintergreen come and the arbutus under the leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Elizabeth spoke with something like eagerness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, we never--” Calista began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

THE KING’S TRUMPETER

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then little Peter stood upright in the faint light.

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

The king stared down at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The beggar struck the ground with his staff.

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

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

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

“_Open, world, your trembling petals slowly,
Here one, there one, natal to its hour,
Toward the time when, holden in a vessel holy,
You shall be a flower._”

Though Peter did not know what the song might mean, yet it fell sweetly upon the night, and he liked to listen. And when it was done, he went and stood before the youth.

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

“I know, I know, little lad,” said the youth, and his voice was clear, like bird-notes that were turning into words. “I, too, tell the message, making it in a song.”

And these words made Peter glad, so that his strength was new, and he ran on with the poet’s gentle music in his ears.

I cannot tell you how far Peter went, but he went very far, and to many a lonely outpost, and away and away on a drear frontier. It was long to go and hard to do, but that is the way the world is made; and little Peter went on, now weary, now frightened, now blithe, now in good company, now alone and in the dark. I cannot tell you all the adventures he had and all the things he did--perhaps you will know these in some other way, sometime. And there were those to whom he told the message who listened, or set out in haste for the king’s palace; and some promised that they would go another day, and a few ran to tell others. But many and many were like the hundred heralds and the thousand trumpeters and the king’s High Council, and found many a reason why they might not set out. And some there were who mocked Peter, saying that the world indeed was doing very well without their help and would work itself out if only one would wait; and others would not even listen to the little lad.

At last, one morning when the whole world seemed glad that it was beginning and seemed to long to tell about it, little Peter entered a city, decorated for a festival. Everywhere were garlands of vines and of roses, bright rugs and fluttering pennons and gilded things, as if the world had been long enough begun so that already there were time to take holidays. The people were flooding the streets and crowding the windows, and through their holiday dress Peter could see how some minced and mocked a little like apes, and others peered about like giraffes, and others ravened for food and joy, like the beggar or the bear or the tiger, and others kept the best, like swine, or skulked like curs, or plodded like horses, or prattled like parrots. Animals ran about, dumb like the vegetables they had eaten. Vegetables were heaped in the stalls, mysterious as the earth which they had lately been. The buildings were piled up to resemble the hills from whose substance they had been created, and their pillars were fashioned like trees. Everywhere were the savage angles and wild lines of one thing turning into another. And Peter longed to help to fashion them all, as he fashioned his little balls of mould and loam.

“There is so much yet to do,” thought little Peter, “I wonder that they take so much time for holidays.”