Children -- Fiction; Fairy tales; Girls -- Fiction; Play -- Fiction
I had never heard of a man resting in the daytime. Save, perhaps, on
Sunday afternoons, this was no true function of men. I longed to look
at the man and understand better, but something in the little girl’s
manner forbade me. I looked perplexedly after her. Then I peered round
the fence post and saw my Mother standing under a tree, waiting for
me. She beckoned. I took one more look inside the fence, and I saw the
little girl sit down beside the sleeping man and fold her hands. The
afternoon sun smote across the long wood yard, with its mysterious
rooms made by the piling of the cords. It seemed impossible that this
strange, still place, with its thick carpet of sawdust and its moist
odours, should belong at all to the commonplace little street. And the
two strange occupants gave the last touch to its enchantment.
I ran to overtake Mother, and I tried to tell her something of what I
had seen. But some way my words gave nothing of the air of the place
and of the two who waited there for something that I could not guess.
Already I knew this about words--that they were all very well for
_saying_ a thing, but seldom for letting anybody _taste_ what you were
talking about.
I did not give up trying to tell it until we passed the Rodmans’.
From the direction of their high-board fence I heard voices. Margaret
Amelia and Betty and Delia and Calista were engaged in writing on the
weathered boards of the fence with willows dipped in the clear-flowing
gutter stream.
“Got it done?” I called mysteriously.
They turned, shaking their heads.
“It was all melted,” they replied. “We couldn’t find another bit.”
“Oh, well,” I cried, “you come on over after supper. I’ve got something
to tell you.”
“Something to tell you” would, of course, bring anybody anywhere.
After supper they all came “over.” It was that hour which only village
children know--that last bright daylight of slanting sun and driven
cows tinkling homeward; of front-doors standing open and neighbours
calling to one another across the streets, and the sky warm in the
quiet surface of some little water from whose bridge lads are tossing
stones or hanging bare-footed from the timbers. We withdrew past the
family, sitting on the side-porch, to the garden, where the sun was
still golden on the tops of the maples.
“Mother says,” I began importantly, “that she thinks Grandma Bard has
a hard time to get along. Well, you know our snow? Well, you know you
said you couldn’t find any more to bury? Well, why don’t we dig up
ours, right now, and sell it and give the money to Grandma Bard?”
I must have touched some answering chord. Looking back, I cannot
believe that this was wholly Grandma Bard. Could it be that the others
had wanted to dig it up, independent of my suggestion? For there was
not one dissenting voice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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