Chapter 6 A LITTLE GIRL AND HER MOTHER

An Afternoon in the Life of Elly Crittenden, aet. 8 Years

April 6.

Elly Crittenden had meant to go straight home from school as usual with the other children, Paul and Mark, and Addle and Ralph Powers. And as usual somehow she was ever so far behind them, so far that there wasn't any use trying to catch up. Paul was hurrying to go over and see that new old man next door, as usual. She might as well not try, and just give up, and get home ever so late, the way she always did. Oh well, Father wasn't at home, and Mother wouldn't scold, and it was nice to walk along just as slow as you wanted to, and feel your rubber boots squizzle into the mud. How good it did seem to have real mud, after the long winter of snow! And it was nice to hear the brooks everywhere, making that dear little noise and to see them flashing every-which-way in the sun, as they tumbled along downhill. And it was nice to smell that smell . . . what was that sort of smell that made you know the sugaring-off had begun? You couldn't smell the hot boiling sap all the way from the mountain-sides, but what you did smell made you think of the little bark-covered sap-houses up in the far woods, with smoke and white steam coming out from all their cracks, as though there was somebody inside magicking charms and making a great cloud to cover it, like Klingsor or the witch-ladies in the Arabian Nights. There was a piece of music Mother played, that was like that. You could almost see the white clouds begin to come streeling out between the piano-keys, and drift all around her. All but her face that always looked through.

The sun shone down so warm on her head, she thought she might take off her woolen cap. Why, yes, it was plenty warm enough. Oh, how good it felt! How good it did feel! Like somebody actually touching your hair with a warm, soft hand. And the air, that cool, cool air, all damp with the thousand little brooks, it felt just as good to be cool, when you tossed your hair and the wind could get into it. How good it did feel to be bare-headed, after all that long winter! Cool inside your hair at the roots, and warm outside where the sun pressed on it. Cool wind and warm sun, two different things that added up to make one lovely feel for a little girl. The way your hair tugged at its roots, all streaming away; every single little hair tied tight to your head at one end, and yet so wildly loose at the other; tight, strong, firm, and yet light and limber and flag-flapping . . . it was like being warm and cool at the same time, so different and yet the same.

And there, underneath all this fluttering and tossing and differences, there were your legs going on just as dumb and steady as ever, stodge, stodge, stodge! She looked down at them with interest and appreciation of their faithful, dutiful service, and with affection at the rubber boots. She owed those to Mother. Paul had scared her so, when he said, so stone-wally, the way Paul always spoke as if that settled everything, that none of the little girls at school wore rubber boots, and he thought Elly oughtn't to be allowed to look so queer. It made him almost ashamed of his sister, he said. But Mother had somehow . . . what had she said to fix it? . . . oh well, something or other that left her her rubber boots and yet Paul wasn't mad any more.

And what could she do without rubber boots, when she wanted to wade through a brook, like this one, and the brooks were as they were now, all running spang full to the very edge with snow-water, the way this one did? Oo . . . Ooh . . . Ooh! how queer it did feel, to be standing most up to your knees this way, with the current curling by, all cold and snaky, feeling the fast-going water making your boot-legs shake like Aunt Hetty's old cheeks when she laughed, and yet your feet as dry inside! How could they feel as cold as that, without being wet, as though they were magicked? That was a real difference, even more than the wind cool inside your hair and the sun warm on the outside; or your hair tied tight at one end and all wobbly loose at the other. But this wasn't a nice difference. It didn't add up to make a nice feeling, but a sort of queer one, and if she stood there another minute, staring down into that swirly, snatchy water, she'd fall right over into it . . . it seemed to be snatching at her! Oh gracious! This wasn't much better! on the squelchy dead grass of the meadow that looked like real ground and yet you sank right into it. Oh, it was horridly soft, like touching the hand of that new man that had come to live with the old gentleman next door. She must hurry as fast as she could . . . it felt as though it was sucking at her feet, trying to pull her down altogether like the girl with the red shoes, and she didn't have any loaves of bread to throw down to step on . . .

Well, there! this was better, as the ground started uphill. There was firm ground under her feet. Yes, not mud, nor soaked, flabby meadow-land, but solid earth, solid, solid! She stamped on it with delight. It was just as nice to have solid things very solid, as it was to have floaty things like clouds very floaty. What was horrid was to have a thing that looked solid, and yet was all soft, like gelatine pudding when you touched it.

Well, for goodness' sake, where was she? Where had she come to, without thinking a single thing about it? Right on the ridge overlooking Aunt Hetty's house to be sure, on those rocks that hang over it, so you could almost throw a stone down any one of the chimneys. She might just as well go down and make Aunt Hetty a visit now she was so near, and walk home by the side-road. Of course Paul would say, nothing could keep him from saying, that she had planned to do that very thing, right along, and when she left the school-house headed straight for Aunt Hetty's cookie-jar. Well, let him! She could just tell him, she'd never dreamed of such a thing, till she found herself on those rocks.

She walked more and more slowly, letting herself down cautiously from one ledge to another, and presently stopped altogether, facing a beech tree, its trunk slowly twisted into a spiral because it was so hard to keep alive on those rocks. She was straight in front of it, staring into its gray white-blotched bark. Now if Mother asked her, of course she'd have to say, yes, she had planned to, sort of but not quite. Mother would understand. There wasn't any use trying to tell things how they really were to Paul, because to him things weren't ever sort-of-but-not-quite. They either were or they weren't. But Mother always knew, both ways, hers and Paul's.

She stepped forward and downward now, lightened. Her legs stretched out to carry her from one mossed rock to another. "Striding," that was what she was doing. Now she knew just what "striding" meant. What fun it was to feel what a word meant! Then when you used it, you could feel it lie down flat in the sentence, and fit into the other words, like a piece in a jig-saw puzzle when you got it into the right place. Gracious! How fast you could "stride" down those rocks into Aunt Hetty's back yard!

Hello! Here at the bottom was some snow, a great big drift of it still left, all gray and shrunk and honey-combed with rain and wind, with a little trickle of water running away softly and quietly from underneath it, like a secret. Well, think of there being still snow left anywhere except on top of the mountains! She had just been thinking all the afternoon how good it seemed to have the snow all gone, and here she ran right into some, as if you'd been talking about a person, saying how sick and tired you were of everlastingly seeing him around, and there he was, right outside the window and hearing it all, and knowing it wasn't his fault he was still hanging on. You'd feel bad to know he'd heard. She felt bad now! After all, the fun the snow had given them, all that winter, sleighing and snow-shoeing and ski-running and sliding downhill. And when she remembered how glad she'd been to see the first snow, how she and little Mark had run to the window to see the first flakes, and had hollered, Oh goody, goody! And here was all there was left, just one poor old forgotten dirty drift, melting away as fast as it could, so's to get itself out of the way. She stood looking down on it compassionately, and presently, stooping over, gave it a friendly, comforting pat with one mittened hand.

Then she was pierced with an arrow of hunger, terrible, devouring starvation! Why was it she was always so much hungrier just as she got out of school, than ever at meal-times? She did hope this wouldn't be one of those awful days when Aunt Hetty's old Agnes had let the cookie-jar get empty!

She walked on fast, now, across the back yard where the hens, just as happy as she was to be on solid ground, pottered around dreamily, their eyes half-shut up. . . . Elly could just think how good the sun must feel on their feathers! She could imagine perfectly how it would be to have feathers instead of skin and hair. She went into the kitchen door. Nobody was there. She went through into the pantry. Nobody there! Nobody, that is, except the cookie-jar, larger than any other object in the room, looming up like a wash-tub. She lifted the old cracked plate kept on it for cover. Oh, it was full,-a fresh baking! And raisins in them! The water ran into her mouth in a little gush. Oh my, how good and cracklesome they looked! And how beautifully the sugar sprinkled on them would grit against your teeth as you ate it! Oh gracious!

She put her hand in and touched one. There was nothing that felt like a freshly baked cookie; even through your mitten you could know, with your eyes shut, it was a cookie. She took hold of one, and stood perfectly still. She could take that, just as easy! Nobody would miss it, with the jar so full. Aunt Hetty and Agnes were probably house-cleaning, like everybody else, upstairs. Nobody would ever know. The water of desire was at the very corners of her mouth now. She felt her insides surging up and down in longing. Nobody would know!

She opened her hand, put the cookie back, laid the plate on the top of the jar, and walked out of the pantry. Of course she couldn't do that. What had she been thinking of,-such a stealy, common thing, and she Mother's daughter!

But, oh! It was awful, having to be up to Mother! She sniffed forlornly and drew her mitten across her nose. She had wanted it so! And she was just dying, she was so hungry. And Mother wouldn't even let her ask people for things to eat. Suppose Aunt Hetty didn't think to ask her!

She went through the dining-room, into the hall, and called upstairs, "Aunt Hetty! Aunt Hetty!" She was almost crying she felt so sorry for herself.

"Yis," came back a faint voice, very thin and high, the way old people's voices sounded when they tried to call loud. "Up in the east-wing garret."

She mounted the stairs heavily, pulling herself along by those spindling old red balustrades, just like so many old laths, noticing that her rubber boots left big hunks of mud on the white-painted stairs, but too miserable to care.

The door to the east-wing garret was open. Aunt Hetty was there, bossing Agnes, and they were both "dudsing," as Elly called it to herself, leaning over trunks, disappearing in and out of closets, turning inside out old bags of truck, sorting over, and, for all Elly could see, putting the old duds back again, just where they had been before. Grown-ups did seem to run round in circles, so much of their time!

She sat down wearily on an ugly little old trunk near the door. Aunt Hetty shut up a drawer in a dresser, turned to Elly, and said, "Mercy, child, what's the matter? Has the teacher been scolding you?"

"No, Aunt Hetty," said Elly faintly, looking out of the window.

"Anybody sick at your house?" asked Aunt Hetty, coming towards the little girl.

"No," said Elly, shaking her head.

"Don't you feel well?" asked Aunt Hetty, laying one wrinkled, shaky old hand on her shoulder.

"No, Aunt Hetty," said Elly, her eyes large and sad.

"Maybe she's hungry," suggested Agnes, in a muffled voice from the depths of a closet.

"Are you?" asked Aunt Hetty.

"YES," cried Elly.

Aunt Hetty laughed. "Well, I don't know if there are any cookies in the house or not," she said, "we've been so busy house-cleaning. Agnes, did you bake any cookies this morning?"

Elly was struck into stupor at this. Think of not knowing if there were any cookies in the house!

Agnes appeared, tiny and old and stooped and wrinkled, like her mistress. She had a big, rolled-up woolen-covered comforter in her arms, over which she nodded. "Yes, I made some. You told me to make some every Wednesday," she said. She went on, looking anxiously at Aunt Hetty, "There ain't any moth-holes in this. Was this the comfortable you meant? I thought this was the one you told me to leave out of the camphor chest. I thought you told me . . ."

"You know where to find the cookies, don't you, Elly?" asked Aunt Hetty, over her shoulder, trotting rapidly like a little dry, wind-blown leaf, towards Agnes and the comforter.

"Oh yes, Aunt Hetty!" shouted Elly, halfway down the stairs.

Aunt Hetty called after her, "Take all you want . . . three or four. They won't hurt you. There's no egg in our recipe."

Elly was there again, in the empty pantry, before the cookie-jar. She lifted the cracked plate again. . . . But, oh! how differently she did feel now! . . . and she had a shock of pure, almost solemn, happiness at the sight of the cookies. She had not only been good and done as Mother would want her to, but she was going to have four of those cookies. Three or four, Aunt Hetty had said! As if anybody would take three if he was let to have four! Which ones had the most raisins? She knew of course it wasn't so very nice to pick and choose that way, but she knew Mother would let her, only just laugh a little and say it was a pity to be eight years old if you couldn't be a little greedy!

Oh, how happy she was! How light she felt! How she floated back up the stairs! What a perfectly sweet old thing Aunt Hetty was! And what a nice old house she had, though not so nice as home, of course. What pretty mahogany balusters, and nice white stairs! Too bad she had brought in that mud. But they were house-cleaning anyhow. A little bit more to clean up, that was all. And what luck that they were in the east-room garret, the one that had all the old things in it, the hoop-skirts and the shells and the old scoop-bonnets, and the four-poster bed and those fascinating old cretonne bags full of treasures.

She sat down near the door on the darling little old hair-covered trunk that had been Great-grandfather's, and watched the two old women at work. The first cookie had disappeared now, and the second was well on the way. She felt a great appeasement in her insides. She leaned back against the old dresses hung on the wall and drew a long breath.

"Well," said Aunt Hetty, "you've got neighbors up your way, so they tell me. Funny thing, a city man coming up here to live. He'll never stick it out. The summer maybe. But that's all. You just see, come autumn, if he don't light out for New York again."

Elly made no comment on this. She often heard her elders say that she was not a talkative child, and that it was hard to get anything out of her. That was because mostly they wanted to know about things she hadn't once thought of noticing, and weren't a bit interested when she tried to talk about what she had noticed. Just imagine trying to tell Aunt Hetty about that poor old gray snow-bank out in her woods, all lonely and scrumpled up! She went on eating her cookie.

"How does he like it, anyhow?" asked Aunt Hetty, bending the upper part of her out of the window to shake something. "And what kind of a critter is he?"

"Well, he's rather an old man," said Elly. She added conscientiously, trying to be chatty, "Paul's crazy about him. He goes over there all the time to visit. I like him all right. The old man seems to like it here all right. They both of them do."

"Both?" said Aunt Hetty, curving herself back into the room again.

"Oh, the other one isn't going to live here, like Mr. Welles. He's just come to get Mr. Welles settled, and to make him a visit. His name is Mr. Marsh."

"Well, what's he like?" asked Aunt Hetty, folding together the old wadded petticoat she had been shaking.

"Oh, he's all right too," said Elly. She wasn't going to say anything about that funny softness of his hands, she didn't like, because that would be like speaking about the snow-drift; something Aunt Hetty would just laugh at, and call one of her notions.

"Well, what do they do with themselves, two great hulking men set off by themselves?"

Elly tried seriously to remember what they did do. "I don't see them, of course, much in the morning before I go to school. I guess they get up and have their breakfast, the way anybody does."

Aunt Hetty snorted a little, "Gracious, child, a person needs a corkscrew to get anything out of you. I mean all day, with no chores, or farmin', or anything."

"I don't know," Elly confessed. "Mr. Clark, of course, he's busy cooking and washing dishes and keeping house, but . . ."

"Are there three of them?" Aunt Hetty stopped her dudsing in her astonishment. "I thought you said two."

"Oh well, Mr. Marsh sent down to the city and had this Mr. Clark come up to work for them. He doesn't call him 'Mr. Clark'-just 'Clark,' short like that. I guess he's Mr. Marsh's hired man in the city. Only he can do everything in the house, too. But I don't feel like calling him 'Clark' because he's grown-up, and so I call him 'Mr. Clark.'" She did not tell Aunt Hetty that she sort of wanted to make up to him for being somebody's servant and being called like one. It made her mad and she wanted to show he could be a mister as well as anybody. She began on the third cookie. What else could she say to Aunt Hetty, who always wanted to know the news so? She brought out, "Well, I tell you, in the afternoon, when I get home, mostly old Mr. Welles is out in his garden."

"Gardin!" cried Aunt Hetty. "Mercy on us, making garden the fore-part of April. Where does he think he's living? Florida?"

"I don't believe he's exactly making garden," said Elly. "He just sort of pokes around there, and looks at things. And sometimes he sits down on the bench and just sits there. He's pretty old, I guess, and he walks kind of tired, always."

"Does the other one?" asked Aunt Hetty.

This made Elly sit up, and say very loud, "No, indeedy!" She really hadn't thought before how very untired Mr. Marsh always seemed. She added, "No, the other one doesn't walk tired, nor he doesn't poke around in the garden. He takes long tramps way back of the mountains, over Burnham way."

"For goodness' sakes, what's he find up there?"

"He likes it. He comes over and borrows our maps and things to study, and he gets Mother to tell him all about everything. He gets Touclé to tell him about the back trails, too."

"Well, he's a smart one if he can get a word out of Touclé."

"Yes, he does. Everybody talks to him. You have to if he starts in. He's very lively."

"Does he get you to talk?" asked Aunt Hetty, laughing at the idea.

"Well, some," stated Elly soberly. She did not say that Mr. Marsh always seemed to her to be trying to get some secret out of her. She didn't have any secret that she knew of, but that was the way he made her feel. She dodged him mostly, when she could.

"What's the news from your father?"

"Oh, he's all right," said Elly. She fell to thinking of Father and wishing he would come back.

"When's he going to get through his business, up there?"

"Before long, I guess. Mother said maybe he'd be back here next month." Elly was aware that she was again not being talkative. She tried to think of something to add. "I'm very much obliged for these cookies," she said. "They are awfully good."

"They're the kind your mother always liked, when she was your age," said Aunt Hetty casually. "I remember how she used to sit right there on Father's hair-trunk and eat them and watch me just like you now."

At this statement Elly could feel her thoughts getting bigger and longer and higher, like something being opened out. "And the heaven was removed as a scroll when it is rolled up." That sentence she'd heard in church and never understood, and always wondered what was behind, what they had seen when the scroll was rolled up. . . . Something inside her now seemed to roll up as though she were going to see what was behind it. How much longer time was than you thought! Mother had sat there as a little girl . . . a little girl like her. Mother who was now grown-up and finished, knowing everything, never changing, never making any mistakes. Why, how could she have been a little girl! And such a short time ago that Aunt Hetty remembered her sitting there, right there, maybe come in from walking across that very meadow, and down those very rocks. What had she been thinking about, that other little girl who had been Mother? "Why" . . . Elly stopped eating, stopped breathing for a moment. "Why, she herself would stop being a little girl, and would grow up and be a Mother!" She had always known that, of course, but she had never felt it till that moment. It made her feel very sober; more than sober, rather holy. Yes, that was the word,-holy,-like the hymn. Perhaps some day another little girl would sit there, and be just as surprised to know that her mother had been really and truly a little girl too, and would feel queer and shy at the idea, and all the time her mother had been only Elly. But would she be Elly any more, when she was grown up? What would have happened to Elly? And after that little girl, another; and one before Mother; and back as far as you could see, and forwards as far as you could see. It was like a procession, all half in the dark, marching forward, one after another, little girls, mothers, mothers and little girls, and then more . . . what for . . . oh, what for?

She was a little scared. She wished she could get right up and go home to Mother. But the procession wouldn't stop . . . wouldn't stop. . . .

Aunt Hetty hung up the last bag. "There," she said, "that's all we can do here today. Elly, you'd better run along home. The sun'll be down behind the mountain now before you get there."

Elly snatched at the voice, at the words, at Aunt Hetty's wrinkled, shaking old hand. She jumped up from the trunk. Something in her face made Aunt Hetty say, "Well, you look as though you'd most dropped to sleep there in the sun. It does make a person feel lazy this first warm March sun. I declare this morning I didn't want to go to work house-cleaning. I wanted to go and spend the day with the hens, singing over that little dozy ca-a-a-a they do, in the sun, and stretch one leg and one wing till they most broke off, and ruffle up all my feathers and let 'em settle back very slow, and then just set."

They had started downstairs before Aunt Hetty had finished this, the little girl holding tightly to the wrinkled old hand. How peaceful Aunt Hetty was! Even the smell of her black woolen dresses always had a quiet smell. And she must see all those hunks of mud on the white stairs, but she never said a word. Elly squeezed her hand a little tighter.

What was it she had been thinking about on the hair-trunk that made her so glad to feel Aunt Hetty peaceful? Oh yes, that Mother had been there, where she was, when she was a little girl. Well, gracious! What of that? She'd always known that Mother had visited Aunt Hetty a lot and that Aunt Hetty had been awfully good to her, and that Mother loved Aunt Hetty like everything. What had made it seem so queer, all of a sudden?

"Well," said Aunt Hetty at the front door, "step along now. I don't want you should be late for supper." She tipped her head to look around the edge of the top of the door and said, "Well, I declare, just see that moon showing itself before ever the sun gets down."

She walked down the path a little way with Elly, who still held her hand. They stood together looking up at the mountain, very high and blue against the sky that was green . . . yes, it really was a pale, clear green, at the top of the mountain-line. People always said the sky was blue, except at sunset-time, like now, when it was filling the Notch right to the top with every color that could be.

"The lilacs will begin to swell soon," said Aunt Hetty.

"I saw some pussy-willows out, today," answered Elly.

The old woman and the little girl lifted their heads, threw them back, and looked up long into the sky, purely, palely high above them.

"It's quite a sightly place to live, Crittenden's is," said Aunt Hetty.

Elly said nothing, it being inconceivable to her that she could live anywhere else.

"Well, good-bye," said Aunt Hetty. It did not occur to her to kiss the little girl. It did not occur to Elly to want a kiss. They squeezed their hands together a little bit more, and then Elly went down the road, walking very carefully.

Why did she walk so carefully, she wondered? She felt as though she were carrying a cup, full up to the brim of something. And she mustn't let it spill. What was it so full of? Aunt Hetty's peacefulness, maybe.

Or maybe just because it was beginning to get twilight. That always made you feel as though something was being poured softly into you, that you mustn't spill. She was glad the side-road was so grass-grown. You could walk on it, so still, like this, and never make a sound.

She thought again of Father and wished he would come home. She liked Father. He was solid. He was solid like that solid earth she liked so much to walk on. It was just such a comfort to feel him. Father was like the solid ground and Mother was like the floaty clouds. Why, yes, they were every way like what she had been thinking about. . . . Father was the warm sun on the outside, and Mother was the cool wind on the inside. Father was the end that was tied tight and firm so you knew you couldn't lose it, and Mother was the end that streamed out like flags in the wind. But they weren't either of them like that slinky, swirly water, licking at you, in such a hurry to get on past you and get what it was scrambling to get, whatever that was.

Well, of all things! There was old Mr. Welles, coming towards her. He must be out taking a walk too. How slowly he went! And kept looking up the way she and Aunt Hetty had, at the sky and the mountains. He was quite close now. Why . . . why, he didn't know she was there. He had gone right by her and never even saw her and yet had been so close she could see his face plainly. He must have been looking very hard at the mountains. But it wasn't hard the way he was looking, it was soft. How soft his face had looked, almost quivery, almost. . . . But that was silly to think of . . . almost as though he felt like crying. And yet all shining and quiet, too, as if he'd been in church.

Well, it was a little bit like being in church, when you could see the twilight come down very slow like this, and settle on the tree-tops and then down through them towards you. You always felt as though it was going to do something to you when it got to you; something peaceful, like old Aunt Hetty.

She was at her own front path now, it was really almost dark. Mother was playing the piano. But not for either of the boys. It was grown-up music she was playing. Elly hesitated on the flagged stones. Maybe she was playing for Mr. Marsh again. She advanced slowly. Yes, there he was, sitting on the door-step, across the open door, leaning back his head, smoking, sometimes looking out at the sunset, and sometimes looking in towards the piano.

Elly made a wide circuit under the apple-trees, and went in the side-door. Touclé was only just setting the table. Elly would have plenty of time to get off her rubber boots, look up her old felt slippers, and put them on before supper time. Gracious! Her stockings were wet. She'd have to change them, too. She'd just stay upstairs till Mr. Marsh went away. She didn't feel to talk to him.

* * *

When out of her window she saw him step back across the grass to Mr. Welles' house, Elly came downstairs at once. The light in the living-room made her blink, after all that outdoor twilight and the indoor darkness of her room upstairs.

Mother was still at the piano, her hands on the keys, but not playing. At the sight of her, Elly's heart filled and brightened. Her busy, busy thoughts stopped for the first time that day. She felt as you do when you've been rowing a boat a long time and finally, almost where you want to go, you stop and let her slide in on her own movement, quiet and soft and smooth, and reach out your hand to take hold of the landing-place. Elly reached out her arm and put it around Mother's neck. She stood perfectly quiet. There wasn't any need to be anything but quiet now you'd got to where you were going.

She had been out on the rim of the wheel, all around and around it, and up and down the spokes. But now she was at the center where all the spokes ended.

She closed her eyes and laid her head on Mother's soft shoulder.

"Did you have a good walk, all by yourself, dear?" asked Mother.

"Oh yes, it was all right," said Elly.

"Your feet aren't wet, are they?"

"No," said Elly, "I took off my boots just as soon as I came in, and changed my stockings."

* * *