XIII HOUSEHOLDRY

"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that. "In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to husk,[Pg 207] straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous Garde, or on the grounds of old chateaux where they embroidered or wound worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!

It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.

At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's very[Pg 208] being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me, and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little twist of mouth and lifting of brow.

"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he said.

The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the dooryard—these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched backward. The door stood ajar—no doubt for the completion of this transaction—and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.

"I'll be down in a minute," she said. "Go right in, both of you, and wait for me—will you?"

To take the cards of one's visitors from a butler[Pg 209] of detached expression or from a maid with inquisitive eyelashes is to know nothing of the charm of this custom of ours of peeping from behind an upper curtain where we happen to be dressing, and alone in the house, at the ringing of the doorbell, and of calling down to a back which we recognize an informal "Oh, go right in and wait for me a minute, will you?" In this habit there is survival of old tribal loyalties and hospitalities; for let the back divined below be the back of a stranger, that is to say, of a barbarian, and we stay behind our curtains, silent, till it goes away.

In the sitting room at Miggy's house a little hand lamp was burning, the fine yellow light making near disclosures of colour and form, and farther away formulating presences of shadow. Aunt Effie had been at her sewing, and there were yards of blue muslin billowing over a sunken arm-chair and a foam of white lining on the Brussels-covered couch. The long blue cotton spread made the big table look like a fat Delft sugar bowl, and the red curtains were robbed of crude colour and given an obscure rosy glow. A partly finished waist disguised the gingerbread of the what-not, one forgot the carpet, the pictures became to the neutral wall what words which nobody understands are to ministering music. And on the floor before the lounge lay Little Child and Bless-your-Heart, asleep.

[Pg 210]

At first I did not see the child. It was Peter who saw her. He stooped and lifted her, the kitten still in her arms, and instead of saying any of the things a woman might have said, Peter said "Well...." with a tenderness in his voice such as women can give and more. For a man's voice-to-a-child gets down deeper than happiness. I suppose it is that the woman has always stayed with the child in the cave or the tent or the house, while the man has gone out to kill or to conquer or to trade; and the ancient crooning safety is still in the woman's voice, and the ancient fear that he may not come back to them both is in the voice of the man. When Peter lifted Little Child in his arms, I wished that Miggy had been there to hear.

"What's it dreaming about?" Peter said.

"'Bout Miggy," said Little Child sleepily, and she snuggled in Peter's coat collar.

"Dream about Peter too!" Peter commanded.

"Well, I will," promised Little Child o' Dreams, and drifted off.

Peter sank awkwardly down to the floor and held her so, and he sat there stroking Bless-your-Heart and looking as if he had forgotten me, save that, "Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade that I was telling you about," he remarked once irrelevantly, "they've each got a kiddie or so."

Miggy came downstairs and, "I'm a surprise,"[Pg 211] she said in the doorway, and stood there in a sheer white frock—a frock which said nothing to make you look, but would not let you look away; and it had a little rhyme of lace on this end and on that. It was the frock that she had made herself—she told me so afterward, but she did not mention it before Peter, and I liked her the better for that. When I hear women boast of these things I always wonder why, then and there, I should not begin to recite a sonnet I have turned, so as to have a hand in things. To write an indifferent sonnet is much less than to make a frock which can be worn, but yet I should dislike infinitely to volunteer even so little as a sonnet or a quatrain. In any case, it would be amazing taste for me to do so; while "I made it myself" I hear everywhere in the village, especially in the presence of the Eligible. But I dare say that this criticism of mine is conditioned by the fact that my needle-craft cell got caught in the primal protozoan ooze and did not follow me.

"Miggy! Oh, Miggery!" said Peter, softly. He had made this name for a sort of superlative of her.

"Like me?" inquired Miggy. I wonder if even the female atom does not coquette when the sun strikes her to shining in the presence of her atom lord?

You know that low, emphatic, unspellable thing[Pg 212] which may be said by the throat when a thing is liked very much? When one makes it, it feels like a vocal dash in vocal italics. Peter did that, very softly.

"Well," said Miggy, "I feel that dressed-up that I might be cut out of paper. What are you doing down there, Peter?"

He glanced down mutely, and Miggy went round the table and saw what he held.

"Why," she said, "that great heavy girl, Peter. Give her to me."

Miggy bent over Peter, with her arms outstretched for the child. And Peter looked up at her and enjoyed the moment.

"She's too heavy for you to lift," he said, with his occasional quiet authority. "I'll put her where you want her."

"Well, it's so hot upstairs," Miggy hesitated. "It's past her bedtime, but I hate to take her up there."

"Undress her down here," said I. "The Delft sugar bowl shuts you off a fine dressing-room. And let her sleep for a while on the couch."

So Miggy went for the little nightgown, and Peter, with infinite pains, got to his feet, and detached Bless-your-Heart and deposited her on the table, where she yawned and humped her back and lay down on an unfinished sleeve and went to sleep[Pg 213] again. And when Miggy came down, she threw a light quilt and a pillow near the couch and sat behind the table and held out her arms.

"Now!" she said to Peter, and to me she said, "I thought maybe you'd spread her up a bed there on the couch."

"Let Peter," said I. "I've another letter I ought to have written. If I may, I'll write that here while you undress her."

"Well," said Miggy, "there's some sheets of letter-paper under the cover of the big Bible. And the ink—I guess there's some in the bottle—is on top of the organ. And the pen is there behind the clock. And you'd ought to find a clean envelope in that pile of newspapers. I think I saw one there the other day. You spread up her bed then, Peter."

I wrote my letter, and Peter went at the making up of the lounge, and Miggy sat behind the table to undress Little Child. And Little Child began waking up. It touched me infinitely that she who in matters of fairies and visionings is so wise and old should now, in her sleepyhood, be just a baby again.

"I—won't—go—bed," she said.

"Oh," said Miggy, "yes. Don't you feel all the little wingies on your face? They're little dream wings, and the dreams are getting in a hurry to be dreamed."

[Pg 214]

"I do' know those dreams," said Little Child, "I do' want those dreams. Where's Bless-your-Heart?"

"Dreaming," said Miggy, "all alone. Goodness, I believe you've got a little fever."

Peter stopped flopping the quilt aimlessly over the lounge and turned, and Miggy laid the back of her hand on Little Child's cheek and beneath her chin. The man watched her anxiously as, since the world began, millions of men have looked down at this mysterious pronouncement of the woman.

"She has?" he said. "She'd ought not to have any milk, then, had she?" he added vaguely. It seemed to me that Miggy must have paused for a moment to like Peter for this wholly youthful, masculine eagerness to show that he knew about such things.

"I'll fix her something to take," said Miggy, capably. "No, dear. The other arm. Straighten elbow."

"I want my shoes an' stockin's on in bed," Little Child observed. She was sitting up, her head drooping, her curls fastened high with a hairpin of Miggy's. "An' I want my shirtie on. An' all my clothes. I won't go bed if you don't."

Miggy laughed. "Bless-your-Heart hasn't got her clothes on," she parried.

"Ain't she got her furs on any more?" demanded[Pg 215] Little Child, opening her eyes. "She has, too. She has not, too, took a bath. An' I won't have no bath," she went on. "I'm too old for 'em."

At that she would have Bless-your-Heart in her arms, and there was some argument arising from her intention to take the kitten in one hand all the way through her nightgown sleeve. And by this time sleepyhood tears were near.

"Don't curl your toes under so," said Miggy, struggling with a shoe. "Peter, do go on. You'll never have it done."

Whereat Peter flapped the quilt again; and—

"I will curl my toes up. That's what I want to do. I want to curl 'em up!" said Little Child. And now the sleepyhood tears were very near.

"Goodness," said Miggy, suddenly, "to-morrow is Sunday. I'll have to do her hair up for curls. Peter!" she cried, "stop waving that quilt, and tear me off a strip of that white lining there."

"Yes, I'll have curls," said Little Child, unexpectedly, "because that is so becunning to me."

But she was very sleepy, and when Peter had been sent for the brush from the kitchen shelf, her head was on Miggy's shoulder, and Miggy looked at Peter helplessly.

"Give her to me," said Peter, and took the child and laid the kitten at large upon the floor; and then, holding Little Child's head in the hollow of[Pg 216] his arm, he sat down before Miggy, leaning toward her, and all the child's soft brown hair lay on his sleeve.

I should have liked to watch them then. And I should have liked Calliope and Mis' Toplady and my neighbour to see them—those three who of all the village best understood mystery. I know that Peter did not take his eyes from Miggy's face as she brushed and wound the curls. How could he?—and Miggy, "sweet as boughs of May" in that white frock, her look all motherly intent upon her task. She was very deft, and she had that fine mother-manner of caring for the child with her whole hand instead of tipsifingers. I would see a woman infinitely delicate in the touching of flowers or tea-cups or needlework, but when she is near a child, I want her to have more than delicacy. I was amazed at Miggy's gentleness and her pretty air of accustomedness. And when Little Child stirred, Miggy went off into some improvised song about a little black dog that got struck with a wagon and went Ki—yi—ki—yi—ad infinitum, and Miggy seemed to me to have quite the technical mother-air of tender abstraction.

"How dark her hair is growing," she said.

"It's just the colour of yours," said Peter, "and the little curls on the edges. They're like yours, too."

[Pg 217]

"My hair!" Miggy said deprecatingly. "You've got rather nice hair, Peter, if only it wouldn't stick up that way at the back."

"I know it sticks up," Peter said contritely. "I do every way to make it stay down. But it won't."

"It makes you look funny," observed Miggy, frankly.

"Well," he told her, "if you wouldn't ever make me go 'way from you, you wouldn't ever need to see the back of my head."

"That would be just what would turn your head," she put it positively. "Peter, doesn't your arm ache, holding her so?"

He looked down at his arm to see, and, "I wouldn't care if it did," he replied, in some surprise. "No. It feels good. Oh, Miggy—do you do this every night?"

"I don't always curl her hair," said Miggy, "but I always put her to bed. If ever Aunt Effie undresses her, she tells her she may die before morning, so she'd better say her prayer, pretty. Goodness, she hasn't said her prayer yet, either."

"Isn't she too sleepy?" asked Peter.

"Yes," Miggy answered; "but she feels bad in the morning if she doesn't say it. You know she thinks she says her prayer to mother, and that mother waits to hear her...."

[Pg 218]

Miggy looked up fleetingly at her mother's picture on the wall—one of those pale enlargements of a photograph which tell you definitely that the subject is dead.

"I do' want any other curls on me," announced Little Child, suddenly.

"Just one more, dear," Miggy told her, "and then we're through. Turn her head a little, Peter."

"No," said Little Child. "Now I'm all curly."

And, "Yes, Precious. Be still on Peter's arm just a minute more," said Miggy at the same time.

And, "If you say anything more, I'll kiss you," said Peter, to whom it might concern.

"Kiss me?" said Little Child. "I won't be."

"Somebody's got to be," said Peter, with decision.

"Now, our prayer," ruled Miggy suddenly, and rose. "Come, dear."

Peter looked up in Miggy's face.

"Let her be here," he said. "Let her be here."

He lifted Little Child so that she knelt, and her head drooped on his shoulder. He had one arm about her and the other hand on the pink, upturned soles of her feet. The child put out one hand blindly for Miggy's hand. So Miggy came and stood beside Peter, and together they waited for the little sleepy voice.

It came with disconcerting promptness.

"Now—I—lay—me—down—to—sleep—for[Pg 219]—Jesus'—sake—Amen," prayed Little Child in one breath.

"No, sweetheart," Miggy remonstrated, with her alluring emphasis on "sweet." "Say it right, dear."

"Now I lay me—is Bless-your-Heart sayin' hers?" demanded Little Child.

"Couldn't you get along without her, when you're so sleepy?" Miggy coaxed.

"Mustn't skip nights," Little Child told her. "Bless-your-Heart might die before morning."

So Miggy found Bless-your-Heart under the couch, and haled her forth, and laid her in Little Child's arms. And Peter put his face close, close to Little Child's, and shut his eyes.

"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take who'll I bless to-night?" said Little Child.

"Aunt Effie," Miggy prompted.

"Bless Aunt Effie," said Little Child, "and Miggy and Bless-your-Heart and New Auntie" (she meant me. Think of her meaning me!) "and the man that gave me the peanuts, and bless Stella's party and make 'em have ice-cream, and bless my new shoes and my sore finger. For Jesus' sake, Amen."

Little Child drew a long breath and stirred to get down, but Peter did not move.

[Pg 220]

"And bless Peter," Miggy said.

"No," said Little Child, "He needn't. Peter's nice 'nuff."

Peter got to his feet with Little Child in his arms, and his face was glowing, and he looked at Miggy as if she were what he meant whenever he said "universe." But Miggy had gone to the couch, and was smoothing the quilt that Peter had wrinkled in all directions, and patting the pillow that Peter had kneaded into a hard ball.

"You lay her down," she said.

Peter did so, setting the kitten on the floor, and then bending low over the couch, looking in the upturned face as the little dark head touched the pillow and sought its ease, and her hand fell from where it had rested on his shoulder. And he stooped and kissed her cheek more gently than he had ever done anything.

"I want my drink o' water," said Little Child, and opened her eyes; and now from the couch she could see me. "Tell me a story," she commanded me, drowsily.

I did not go to her, for who am I that I should have broken that trio? But when Miggy and Peter took the lamp and went away to the kitchen for the drink of water and for some simple remedy for the fever which Miggy had noted or fancied, I sat beside Little Child and said over something[Pg 221] that had been persistently in my mind as I had watched Miggy with her:—
"I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down;
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town!"

Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought that in the darkness were many gentle presences—Little Child's tender breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that other—"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.

Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and on the porch—which seemed not yet to have escaped—she told us about having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with Miggy.

"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"

"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.

"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.

She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.

[Pg 222]

"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny not to bless him?"

"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.

Miggy laughed once more—I had never seen her in so tender and feminine a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.

"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said. "He—couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him when he got home? I never could—I never could...."

By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front doors—as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home and you are not."

Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.

"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade—they ain't good for a thing in the cannery. And yet they know...."