Farm life -- Fiction; Love stories; New England -- Fiction
I took the pail and fetched obediently. Then, while she worked at the
windows, I began tugging things in from the shed, calling Joe from
the barn to help me with the desk and bookcases. The desk, obviously,
went by the west window, where the light would come from the left. My
five bookcases, which had been made for my college rooms, of uniform
size, were placed, four along the south wall, filling the spaces between
the central door and the two windows, and the two windows and the end
walls, with the fifth on the west wall between the window and the
south, where I could have my reference books close to my desk chair. My
piano, which had stood in the dining-room ever since the furniture had
arrived, we unboxed, wheeled in to fill the space between the small east
windows, and took the covers off.
I looked around. Already the place was assuming a homelike air, and the
long room had contracted into intimacy. The girl dropped her rag into the
pail, and stood looking about.
"Oh, the nice room!" she cried. "And oh, the dirty piano!"
I went out to begin on the books, and when I returned with the first
load (I used a wheelbarrow, and wheeled a big load covered with my
raincoat as far as the front door, and up into the hall on a plank),
Miss Goodwin was scrubbing the keys. As I began to wipe off the books
and set them into the cases, I could hear that peculiar dust-cloth
glissando which denotes domestic operations on the piano, and which
brings curiously home to a man memories of his mother. When I returned
with the next load, I brought the piano bench, as well. The girl was
busy with the east window, and I set the bench down in silence. She was
seated upon it, when I arrived with the third load, and through the
house were dancing the sounds of a Bach gavotte.
She stopped playing as I entered, and looked up with a little smile of
apology.
"Please go on!" I cried.
"But you play," she said, "and I just drum. It's too silly."
"I play with one finger only," said I, "the forefinger of the right
hand."
"Then why do you have the piano?"
"For you," I smiled. "Please play on. You can't guess how pleasant
it is, how--how--homelike."
She wheeled back and let her hands fall on the keys, rippling by a
natural suggestion into the old tune "Amaryllis." The logs were
crackling. The gay old measures flooded the room with sound. My head
nodded in time, as I stacked the books on the shelves.
Suddenly the music stopped, and with a rustle of skirts the girl was
beside me. "There! Now I must help you with the books!" she cried.
"What's this? Oh, you're not putting them up right at all! Here's
James's 'Pragmatism' hobnobbing with 'The Freedom of the Will.'
Oh, horrors, and 'Cranford' next to Guy de Maupassant! I'm sure that
isn't proper!"
"On the contrary," said I, "it ought to prove a fine thing for both of
them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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