Chapter IV: Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sick man looked and smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the prince laughed out joyfully.

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

TWO FOR THE SHOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Moving?” he inquired.

“House-cleaning,” I explained with importance.

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

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

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

“Come on over! It’s house-cleaning.”

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

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

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

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

I glanced over my shoulder into the empty room.

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

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

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

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

“Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Playing something?” he inquired.

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

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

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

IX

NEXT DOOR

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

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

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

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

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

“What you got?” he inquired.

I showed him my writing material.

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

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

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

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

He cast about for an argument.

“Trees does,” he produced it.

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

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

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

Said he: “Huh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Elizabeth turned in the utmost eagerness and contrition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside I skipped in the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

WHAT’S PROPER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time Calista was peace-maker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See the poor tree. The walk’s stepping on its feet!” cried Mary Elizabeth when we passed the Branchett’s great oak, that had forced up the bricks of the walk. (They must already have been talking of taking it down, that hundred-year oak, to preserve the dignity of the side-walk, for they did so shortly after.)

This time it was Margaret Amelia who revolted.

“Trees can’t walk,” she said. “There aren’t any _feet_ there.”

I took a hand. “You don’t know sure,” I reminded her. “When it’s dark, maybe they do walk. I’ll ask it.”

By the time I had done whispering to the bark, Delia said she was going to tell her mother. “Such _lies_,” she put it bluntly. “You’ll never write a book, I don’t care what you say. You got to tell the truth to write books.”

“Everybody that tells the truth don’t write a book,” I contended--but sobered. I wanted passionately to write a book. What if this business of pretending, which Delia called lies should be in the way of truthful book-writing? But the habit was too strong for me. In that very moment we came upon a huge new ant-hill.

“Don’t step on that ant-hill. See all the ants--they say to step over it!” I cried, and pushed Delia round it with some violence.

“Well--what makes you always so--_religious_!” she burst out, at the end of her patience.

I was still hotly denying this implication when we entered the school yard, and broke into running; for no reason, save that entrances and beginnings always made us want to run and shout.

The school yard, quite an ordinary place during school hours, became at the end of school a place no longer to be shunned, but wholly desirable. Next to the wood yard, it was the most mysterious place that we knew. In the school yard were great cords of wood, suitable for hiding; a basement door, occasionally left open, from which at any moment the janitor might appear to drive us away; a band-stand, covered with names and lacking enough boards so that one might climb up without use of the steps; a high-board fence on which one always longed to walk at recess; a high platform from which one had unavailingly pined to jump; outside banisters down which, in school-time, no one might slide, trees which no one might climb, corner brick-work affording excellent steps, which, then, none might scale; broad outside window ledges on which none might sit, loose bricks in the walks ripe for the prying-up, but penalty attended; a pump on whose iron handle the lightest of us might ride save that, in school-time, this was forbidden too. In school-time this yard, so rich in possibilities, was compact of restrictions. None of these things might be done. Once a boy had been expelled for climbing on the schoolhouse roof; and thereupon his father, a painter by trade, had taken the boy to work with him, and when we saw him in overalls wheeling his father’s cart, we were told that _that_ was what came of disobedience, although this boy might, easily no doubt, otherwise have become President of the United States.

But after school! Toward supper-time, or in vacation-time, we used to love to linger about the yard and snatch at these forbidden pleasures. That is, the girls loved it. The boys had long ago had them all, and were off across the tracks on new adventures unguessed of us.

If anybody found us here--we were promptly driven off. The principal did this as a matter of course, but the janitor had the same power and much more emphasis. If one of the board was seen passing, we hid behind everything and, as we were never clear just who belonged to the board, we hid when nearly all grown-folk passed. That the building and grounds were ours, paid for by our father’s taxes, and that the school officials and even the tyrannical janitor were town servants to help us to make good use of our own, no more occurred to us than it occurred to us to find a ring in the ground, lift it, and descend steps. Nor as much, for we were always looking for a ring to lift. To be sure, we might easily fall into serious mischief in this stolen use of our property; but that it was the function of one of these grown-ups, whom we were forever dodging, to be there with us, paid by the town to play with us, was as wild an expectation as that fairies should arrive with golden hoops and balls and wings. Wilder, for we were always expecting the fairies and, secretly, the wings.

That afternoon we did almost all these forbidden things--swings and seesaws and rings would have done exactly as well, only these had not been provided--and then we went to rest in the band-stand. Mary Elizabeth and I were feeling somewhat subdued--neither of us shone much in feats of skill, and here Delia and Margaret Amelia easily put us in our proper places. Calista was not daring, but she was a swift runner, and this entitled her to respect. Mary Elizabeth and I were usually the first ones caught, and the others were not above explaining to us frankly that this was why we preferred to play Pretend.

“Let’s tell a story--you start it, Mary Elizabeth,” I proposed, anxious for us two to return to standing, for in collaborations of this kind Mary Elizabeth and I frankly shone--and the wish to shine, like the wish to cry out, is among the primitive phases of individual growth.

“Let Margaret Amelia start it,” Delia tried to say, but already the story was started, Mary Elizabeth leaning far back, and beginning to braid and unbraid her long hair--not right away to the top of the braid, which was a serious matter and not to be lightly attempted with heavy hair, but just near the curling end.

“Once,” she said, “a big gold sun was going along up in the sky, wondering what in the world--no, what in All-of-it to do with himself. For he was all made and done, nice and bright and shiny, and he wanted a place to be. So he knocked at all the worlds and said, ‘Don’t you want to hire a sun to do your urrants, take care of your garden, and behave like a fire and like a lamp?’ But all the worlds didn’t want him, because they all had engaged a sun first and they could only use one apiece, account of the climate. So one morning--he _knew_ it was morning because he was shining, and when it was night he never shone--one morning....”

“Now leave somebody else,” Delia suggested restlessly. “Leave Margaret Amelia tell.”

So we turned to her. Margaret Amelia considered solemnly--perhaps it was her faculty for gravity that made us always look up to her--and took up the tale: