When I Was a Little Girl/Chapter 4
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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 milk-weed 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.