When I Was a Little Girl/Chapter 10
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:
“One morning he met a witch. And he said, ‘Witch, I wish you would—would give me something to eat. I'm very hungry.’ So the witch took him to her kitchen and gave him a bowl of porridge, and it was hot and burned his mouth, and he asked for a drink of water, and—and—”
“What was the use of having her a witch if that was all he was going to ask her?” demanded Mary Elizabeth.
“They always have witches in the best stories,” Margaret Amelia contended, “and anyway, that's all I'm going to tell.”
Delia took up the tale uninvited.
“And he got his drink of water, pumped up polite by the witch herself, and she was going to put a portion in it. But while she was looking in the top drawer for the portion, the sun went away. And—”
This time it was I who intervened.
“‘Portion!’” I said with superiority. “Who ever heard of anybody drinking a portion? That word is potient.”
Delia was plainly taken aback.
“You're thinking of long division,” she said feebly.
“I'm thinking of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” I responded with dignity. “They had one, in the tomb, where Tybalt, all bloody—”
“Don't say that one—don't say it!” cried Margaret Amelia. “I can see that one awful after the light is out. Go on, somebody, quick.”
To take up her share of the story, Betty Rodman refused, point-blank. I think that her admission to our group must have been principally on the credentials of sistership to one of us, a basis at once pathetic and lovely.
“I never can think of anything to have happen,” Betty complained, “and if I make something happen, then it ends up the story.”
Calista had a nail in her shoe, and was too much absorbed in pounding it down with a stone to be approached; so, when we had all minutely examined the damage which the nail had wrought, it was my turn to take up the tale. And then the thing happened which was always happening to me: I could think of nothing to have the story do. At night, and when I was alone, I could dream out the most fascinating adventures, but with expectant faces—or a clean pad—before me, I was dumb and powerless.
“I don't feel like telling one just now,” said I, the proposer of the game, and went on digging leaves out of a crevice in the rotting rail. So Mary Elizabeth serenely took up the tale where she had left it.
“One morning he looked over a high sky mountain—that's what suns like to do best because it is so becoming—and he shone in a room of the sky where a little black star was sleeping. And he thought he would ask it what to do. So he said to it, ‘Little Black Star, where shall I be, now that I am all done and finished, nice and shiny?’ And the Little Black Star said: ‘You're not done. What made you think you were done? Hardly anybody is ever done. I'll tell you what to be. Be like a carriage and take all us little dark stars in, and whirl and whirl for about a million years, and make us all get bright too, and then maybe you'll be a true sun—but not all done, even then.' So that's what he decided to do, and he’s up there now, only you can't see him, because he’s so far, and our sun is so bright, and he’s whirling and whirling, and lots more like him, getting to be made.”
Delia followed Mary Elizabeth’s look into the blue.
“I don't believe it,” said she. “The sun is biggest and the moon is next. How could there be any other sun? And it don't whirl. It don't even rise and set. It stands still. Miss Messmore said so.”
We looked at Mary Elizabeth, probably I alone having any impulse to defend her. And we became aware that she was quite white and trembling. In the same moment we understood that we were hearing something which we had been hearing without knowing that we heard. It was a thin, wavering strain of singing, in a man's voice. We scrambled up, and looked over the edge of the band-stand. Coming unevenly down the broken brick walk that cut the schoolhouse grounds was Mary Elizabeth’s father. His hat was gone. It was he who was singing. He looked as he had looked that first day that I had seen him in the wood yard. We knew what was the matter. And all of us unconsciously did the cruel thing of turning and staring at Mary Elizabeth.
In a moment she was over the side of the band-stand and running to him. She took him by the hand, and we saw that she meant to lead him home. Her little figure looked very tiny beside his gaunt frame, in its loosely hanging coat. I remember how the sun was pouring over them, and over the brilliant green beyond where blackbirds were walking. I have no knowledge of what made me do it—perhaps it was merely an attitude, created by the afternoon, of standing up for Mary Elizabeth no matter what befell; or it may have been a child’s crude will to challenge things; at any rate, without myself really deciding it, I suddenly took the way that she had taken, and caught up with the two.
“Mary Elizabeth,” I meant to say, “I’m going.”
But in fact I said nothing, and only kept along beside her. She looked at me mutely, and made a motion to me to turn back. When her father took our hands and stumblingly ran with us, I heartily wished that I had turned back. But nearly all the way he went peaceably enough. Long before we reached their home across the tracks, however, I heard the six o'clock whistles blow, and pictured the wrath of the mistress of the New Family when Mary Elizabeth had not returned in time to “help with the supper.” Very likely now they would not let her stay, and this new companionship of ours would have to end. Mary Elizabeth’s home was on the extreme edge of the town, and ordinarily I was not allowed to cross the tracks. Mary Elizabeth might even move away—that had happened to some of us, and the night had descended upon such as these and we had never heard of them again: Hattie Schenck, whom I had loved with unequalled devotion, where, for example, was she? Was it, then, to be the same with Mary Elizabeth?
Her mother saw us coming. She hurried down to the gateway—the gate was detached and lying in the weeds within—and even then I was struck by the way of maternity with which she led her husband to the house. I remember her as large-featured, with the two bones of her arms sharply defined by a hollow running from wrist to elbow, and she constantly held her face as if the sun were shining in her eyes, but there was no sun shining there. And somehow, at the gate she had a way of receiving him, and of taking him with her. Hardly anything was said. The worst of it was that no one had to explain anything. Two of the little children ran away and hid. Someone dodged behind an open door. The man's wife led him to the broken couch, and he lay down there like a little child. Standing in the doorway of that forlorn, disordered, ill-smelling room, I first dimly understood what I never have forgotten: That the man was not poor because he drank, as the village thought, but that he drank because he was poor. Instead of the horror at a drunken man which the village had laid it upon me to feel, I suddenly saw Mary Elizabeth’s father as her mother saw him when she folded her gingham apron and spread it across his shoulders and said:
“Poor lad.”
And when, in a few minutes, Mary Elizabeth and I were out on the street again, running silently, I remember feeling a great blind rage against the whole village and against the whole world that couldn't seem to think what to do any more than Mary Elizabeth and I could think.
The man of the New Family was watering the lawn, which meant that supper was done. We slipped in our back gate,—the New Family had none,—climbed the fence by my playhouse, dropped down into the New Family's garden, and entered their woodshed. In my own mind I had settled that I was of small account if I could not give the New Lady such a picture of what had happened that Mary Elizabeth should not lose her place, and I should not lose her.
The kitchen door was ajar. The dish-pan was in the sink, the kettle was steaming on the stove. And from out the dining-room abruptly appeared Calista and Delia, bearing plates.
“Girls!” I cried, but Mary Elizabeth was dumb.
Delia carefully set down her plate in the dish-pan and addressed me:
“Well, you needn't think you're the only one that knows what's proper, miss,” she said.
Calista was more simple.
“We wanted to get ’em all done before you got back,” she owned. “We would, if Margaret Amelia and Betty had of come. They wanted to, but they wouldn't let ’em.”
Back of Delia and Calista appeared the mistress of the house. She had on her afternoon dress, and her curl papers were out, and she actually smiled at Mary Elizabeth and me.
“Now then!” she said to us.
If I could have made a dream for that night, I think it would have been that ever and ever so many of us were sitting in rows, waiting to be counted. And a big sun came by, whirling and growing, to take us, and we thought we couldn’t all get in. But there was room, whether we had been counted or not.