Class ff] \ ii-A.. \1 ^ .T>^\]0 GopyiigMlv' ^ 17 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE BY MABEL HOTCHKISS ROBBINS Author of *'The Genius of Elizabeth Anne,'* etc. THE PILGRIM PRESS BOSTON CHICAGO ^-^,K' N*^ Copyright 1917 By frank M. SHELDON THE PILGRIM PRESS BOSTON SEP 19 1917 ^Gf.A473574 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Hopes and Fears 3 II. Lifted Curtains 17 III. Ups and Downs 25 IV. Behind the Scenes 39 V. Views Afield 51 VI. Heights and Depths 69 VII. Spring Smiles and Frowns .... 84 VIII. With the March of Things .... 97 IX. Still Pressing On 114 X. Fruition 138 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE CHAPTER I Hopes and Fears January 9. For days now — yes, and weeks — a ghost has been walking in my heart, a little Fear-ghost, or is it Hope? Tap-tap, tap-a-tap, it goes up and down. And sometimes 1 have pretended not to hear it, and sometimes, quickening to half courage, I have made only swift and shamed and futile catches at it. But at last, in a strangely bold moment I do not yet understand, I have stalked it in its lair. I am sitting here face to face with it, and I have the truth: by me and through me a new life, a fresh soul, is to take on flesh and appear humanwise on this age-worn and doubtful and still green and oft-taken world-trail — by me, who just a few short months ago was only a near old-maid school- ma'am whose worldly ways were so " gone to seed " that she'd fallen into the habit of THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE mentally tagging her joys: " Festivity oc- casions. Treat accordingly. Cherish if possible. Attempt at least a becoming spirit of levity." Oh, wonder to come, as old in the scheme of things as the ancient and benign and smiling cosmic morn, and at once as new as the fresh snow on these hills — eventual man or woman out of spacelessness into space, out of eternal serenity into this mad, atomic, earthly dance, life of my life, and heart of my own heart, how shall I hide from you my utter unworthiness to furnish you life-blood? See, see! You have every reason to look; it is just a little rabbity wisp of a brown woman who is going down into the Death Valley after you, a little brown woman, thin to austere leanness and as common as a huckleberry in a woodlot. Her skin and hair are the worse for chalk dust, Little Ego; her hands remind her of nothing so much as claws; her eyes are lined, as they've a perfect right to be after — need I tell you how many years? — enough so that, between you and me, I smile sceptically even now, dabbling in the River of Doubt as did Sarah, wife of Abraham, in her tent in the plains of Mamre, 4 HOPES AND FEARS with the promise of the angels she had en- tertained unawares. Is it surprising that I quiver under this — God's spotlight — quiver, yes, and hold up my head, too. Thank Him, I have never taken any gross liberties with my anatomy and I still de- light in my long, cross-country meanderings to scale Mercury-footed such split-rail fences as remain to modernity. I shall want my strength, every shred of it for you, I am told, Little Ego, in the hour of your coming. Your coming! I gasp and try to remember that the world holds it an ordinary event. (Just here I am reminded of a little girlish, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, soft-fleshed creature who came to me once in a Mothers' Meeting, with a shy, whispered confession. Looking back, I am ashamed to recall: " Little simpleton, it is the common portion," was my crass, un- spoken thought. A common portion, truly, and the quintessence of the uncommon with its primal tap at one's own door, offering its draught which is both nectar and aloes in the one sipping!) Would you fear for your welcome, little sleeping earth-bud, if you knew the solemn fears and expectations I must swallow alone 5 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE in the still night watches on my long via cruets? Of suffering, of any world-hurt, you cannot know in your coming, little mystery; you shall not know until — until — when would I be ready while the might of a woman's hands and will meant anything? And yet, what well-chosen ways would I lay for your feet if I had the power — trackless heights of might and daring, a clean, narrow path of duty, the clover- meadows of delight? He smiles, the Giver, shaking his head in reproof, and quietly taking the matter as from a greedy, clutch- ing child, out of my poor, ineffectual fingers. It is not for me to choose, and I sigh, but the sigh, after all, is largely of relief. How white the outlying fields are as I look from my window, watching for the long, empty, winding road to fill up with a man who (little as he guesses it) will be a father. The sun has gone down in a vast Chianti sea spanned by a bridge of Ruben's yellow thrown lightly over; some early stars come out in the westering sky, for- getting their sober-eyed vigil and shining like birthday candles. " Thou wilt light my candle." Yea, Lord, and amen! 6 HOPES AND FEARS I see the supple marsh-willows, softly red as with the sheen of mandarin silk, nodding on the broad bosom of the drift, though it is no ruthless wind that bends them so, only a gentle, insistent breath, a sort of universal sigh that might mean the longing of many women. Before they shall bend to the snows another winter, I shall know the cuddly feel of a downy head on my breast, God willing, the velvet touch of world-new, rose-petal cheeks. Oh, I have been sure of it for long, but I shall write it afresh on the still unyellowed leaves of the missal of my soul, and turn to it in the gold days and the dark (there are no " in-between " days, I find, in the first year of marriage): " God is good, yea, God is good, and His mercy endure th forever! " January 11. You would smile if you knew and could understand. Little Ego. I had not expected them to come to me so early in this history, the little " blue " demons of the situation. But there was something yesterday I came upon in a newspaper, a grisly bit of hospital lore — no, I shall not give the grim details to this Book of my 7 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Heart which is to be yours some day, only that I took the paper and scratched the nickel trimmings of my new kitchen stove with it diligently in vicarious revenge — to no effect. They stayed with me, the little " blue " demons, and camped around my pillow in battalions when I went to bed last night, so that I was obliged to fight as if I'd never heard of a Peace Com- mission, until I fell into a sort of light, rest- less sleep, I suppose, for the next thing I knew I seemed to be in a great, unlighted, empty-pewed church somewhere (a sort of feminine Robinson Crusoe on a spiritual desert island), and the minister was giving out the hymn. " Hymn number thirteen," I heard him say distinctly, with a certain deep, droning intonation familiar to my memory; " hymn number thirteen! " It rolled with sonorous effect through the dim aisles of that ghostly edifice. I stiffened intuitively. It was like a challenging sabre there in the dark. With dream-like agility, I slipped then into my lately doffed school- ma'am armor. " Thirteen," I piped aloud, eyeing my ministerial vis-a-vis with un- warranted severity from head to foot, "merely a number having no integral factors 8 HOPES AND FEARS except unity and itself; therefore prime! " Which pert and irrelevant finahty found me in a sitting posture, blinking vaguely into the unanswering gloom of the bedroom and clutching wildly at the unnecessary trous- seau fripperies at my throat. I was awake by this time, fully awake, I made sure of that, but — dire thought, fearful premonition, whipped into added activity by the insane iteration of a dead branch at the window creaking madly enough to inspire a second Beethoven's Symphony of Fate — what, oh what if Number Thirteen were a " funeral hymn " in the ancient hymnal out there under the " stand " in the sitting-room, along with the stuffed calico puppy and the abalone shell? I put one foot tentatively out of bed, at this, and the other was not long in follow- ing it, while I seized an old brown cloth shawl on the footboard (a certain deep- lying thrift has bade me bury my cream- colored cashmere one), and creaked forth in cautious pursuit of my doom. Cr-cr-ick! A match flared up crisply in the dark. Taut moment. Frantic search- ing. Relieved breath. " Antioch," a joy tune, as truly as I live! Spotty Sue, the 9 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE cat of this domicile, who has the brain of a benevolent old lady stored away in that mottled head of hers, is my witness, for she came out of her box behind the stove and rubbed my knees with her plump sides, and licked her whiskers, and looked on with lambent yellow eyes in sisterly solicitude for which I was duly grateful. For it's a long, long way to Tipperary — and to Motherhood, my dear, as I couldn't help remembering, while I gathered Spotty Sue in a corner of my shawl and squatted be- fore the still red-embered fire for a posi- tively luxurious delving into further gloom. Deep meditation. What was the most ex- citing thing I'd ever heard among the old wives' tales a-plenty I had stored up seem- ingly against a possible famine in them? There was Aunt Marietta's masterpiece, for example. Aunt Marietta is that anomaly, a tragic fat woman, with a chronic grudge against life, and a voice with the downward plaint of an oboe. She says her fat's dropsical, not healthy, and she's a " mili- tant Feminist if need arise," whatever that may be — her own interpretation being liberally, the watchful enemy of man, of which species she is married to one of the 10 HOPES AND FEARS most harmless and doting specimens im- aginable.- Such a heart story as she related shut up with me in the orris-scented bed- room of her apartment on the drizzly afternoon of the day preceding my marriage! (Aunt Idella, who brought me up in a neigh- boring flat — I have no distinct memory of mother or father — had shifted the maternal prerogative just here to abler shoulders.) And what I did not know of the Machiavel- lian wiles of man, concluded the story in true Cassandra spirit (never mind what went before), I could discover later when I belonged to one of them body and soul, out there where the loneliness would get me, yes, get me! Aunt Marietta's arctic glance and thick white forefinger here transfixed me, and the lump in my throat cried, "Mother, mother, mother," just in blind instinct. Of course I let the absurdities I had heard go in one ear and out of the other, but they came back to me just the same that first night, the night the Miracle Man (my name for the head of this house- hold, dear) and I came into The Cabin for the first time alone together as man and wife, and I heard the grating of his key in the lock on the inside. 11 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE I was all prepared to go minutely over the ground again, last night, when the bed creaked, and the Miracle Man came to life with an alarmed, "Phyllis"! (Phyllis of Lonesomehurst is his name for me); a chair upset somewhere in the dark in contact with a certain shin, I suspect; a word for which I once washed out Willy Beals* mouth popped out, and the next moment I was picked up bodily, much to the detriment of Spotty Sue, in masterly arms to which I still thrill in every fibre of me, and returned abruptly to my bed. The ways of women are strictly outside the seraglio of the wildest psychic journey- ings of this particular man, that's plain, and he makes no pretenses. But we have an understanding of our own, not to mention a language. ** Who cut the string and let you out of the package? " was his sole, sleepily muttered observation as he made his way back, implying that my degree of " loco " would hardly warrant my being at large. Is Aunt Marietta by any chance right about the proprietorial part of her indictment? . . . Interval for getting breakfast, at which function I of late appear minus a 12 HOPES AND FEARS lacey and much-labored-over cap, on the authority of a magazine sage who says that sensible men detest them. ... The Miracle Man searched my eye in mild hope of an explanation of last night's escapade, when he came in after chores (we have a horse, cow and twenty-five chickens)— and got none. Having a curios- ity all your own, or I am strangely mis- taken, you will want to know how he looked sitting there at the breakfast table op- posite me. Take him in a geographic way and call him the province of RoUin Barney (which should give you some little clew right there) : he is bounded on the north by a thick thatch of russet hair (color by courtesy), in which such weak-backed articles of a feeble civilization as combs and brushes merely lose themselves hopelessly; on the south by a pair of able feet that a police- man might covet; on the east and west re- spectively by a patently useful arm termi- nating in each case in a generous, hairy- backed, well-weathered hand (I never could have loved a white-handed man). Relief — Features rough enough to warrant a belief in their volcanic origin; mouth 13 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE that bespeaks the temperamental Irish- man; eyes deep gray, with an exquisite tinge of heHotrope, black-fringed and in- sisting " you don't mean it " to the pugna- cious set of the jaw. Climate — Hot, cold, mild and frigid, frequently in rapid succes- sion and with little or no warning. Area — large. Shape — All that could be desired, in spite of Aunt Idella's unflattering classifica- tion, raw-boned. Such is Rollin B. Barney of the hamlet of Next-to-Nowhere, plus a gray sweater and corduroys and a heart-fabric of cloth-of- gold weave in a body as clean as that of a pink cherub, newly descended. He's a caveman, farmer in a small way (we've ten acres with a four-room cabin perched in the middle), and village carpenter for the rest, though " building contractor " was what I stammered when I met June Crad- dock in the city at Christmas on a shopping trip, and she quizzed me. (June's a former Normal School girl, now a handsome woman with an " air " and a certain critical, surviving, oblique glance before which I used to cringe even in our school- days.) In my perturbation — I was distantly debating the advisability of reminding June 14 HOPES AND FEARS that the Man whose birthday we were cele- brating had been a village carpenter, too — I juggled so clumsily with the " contract " part of it that it's come to me since, that maybe that characteristic look of hers only meant in this instance that she was wonder- ing how I'd manage to shrink the man of my choice after so staunchly maintaining that he was " all wool." At this point in my cogitations this morning, the Miracle Man pushed back his chair, and came over and rumpled my hair, which he praises like a typical Mr. Younghusband, and began to sing an absurd little ditty about my eyes (really my most respectable feature, if that cracked and dimming little hand-glass of mine is to be trusted). But I know you, Mr. Rollin Barney, and what you can't achieve with a pensive or pleading look, you attempt with blandiloquence. Nevertheless, for all your blarney, you're an ideal partner with which to work out that little problem that is troubling so many heads: Love -j- love = ? You'd use that able body of yours to fight for me like an aborigine if you had to; and I — I — well, wait and see. June has promised to come to us with the spring- 15 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE time, and if she does, and turns the dogs of her superiority on you when you fall short of the requirements of the social decalogue that is her fetich, I foresee that you may be the first to need a defender. 16 CHAPTER II Lifted Curtains January 12. Today I have walked to the end of the village road, incidentally un- folding my viewpoint of it as unfold the withered shoots of the Resurrection Plant of the cedars of Palestine in a bowl of water. Viewed in the rough, Next-to- Nowhere is a broken, hillside village, a handful of dingy, mutely expectant chimney pots, with the grayness of a stone-quarry at one end and a wee, neglected, tipsy tombstoned cemetery at the other. Add to that, in a clump, a squat yellow blacksmith shop, the charred ruins of a creamery, a clattering, unpainted blank-looking grist mill, a blue mill-pond, bluer for the black crows stalking on the ice, and you have the picture complete, save for the neutral strips of pastel-shaded interspersing whiteness brooded over by an unearthly quiet, un- broken save for the occasional hollow yawping of a hound or the low, liquid gutturals of a flock of doves, " Asleep, 17 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE asleep, asleep, asleep/' True, little dun- and-purple feathered visionaries, true. Yet life, life, life, sweet, strangely sweet kernel of that dark, smooth, hard-shelled nut. Eternal Mystery, after all, are you any less agog in Next-to-Nowhere than in the wide, perfervid human haunts beyond? What matters it intrinsically to God's manifold reel picture-play if it be witnessed by a feathered audience or the elect of earth? These were the questions that met me today at Mary's — "Asking Mary's" — at the end of the road. " Asking Mary " somehow just escapes being a village character. Perhaps she is, as she is said to be, " queer." But she is a picture un- deniably in her own doorway, with the chuckling, circling pigeons over her head — a tall, straight white-birch of a woman, with snowy hair at fifty, and sloe-black eyes with the mirage of a thorn-crown in their velvet depths. " Where's Alice? " begins " Asking Mary," her long, slim, listless hands folded before her, a peculiar quiescence, a sort of mask- like passivity in her manner. She has put the same question to every soul in the shadow of her door for the 18 LIFTED CURTAINS past fifteen years, I am told; always with no answer. " Asking Mary " does not expect an answer evidently, for straight- way her sensitive lips curve slightly in a smile of greeting, and she is, to all intents and purposes, her normal, if somewhat puzzling, self again. I have pondered much over her in the little while I have known her. What a stretching of mental leg muscles it demands, to be sure, to see over the bounding line of one's own little garden- plat of existence. I have gone so far in callous days as to call her, to myself, a selfish woman, marring the life of the man whose name she bears, intruding an un- sightly grief-scar on every chance comer. Today it was different. A long shaft of sunshine lay across the little room I entered, touching alike her patrician features and the scarlet glory of the geraniums over which she puttered. And in a moment, as with a complementary flood of inner radiance, dear Mary, I knew, I knew! Real, warm, dimpled, living baby arms around your neck one day, and the next the cold- ness of clay and an empty chalice! It had been only a story, a common story, to me, before, the sudden loss of your one 19 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE babe, little Alice, so many years ago. But now I have the key, and I know. And on impulse I knelt where you sat, and whis- pered to you my secret, my precious secret that I have shared with no other human soul, so far, and that I would have thought to share least of all with you, " Asking Mary." And I know you understood, for there stole into your poor face a lovely softness, and your questioning eyes so shone with a sort of reflected light that I was put in mind of a little, long-deserted house over the way taking to itself the semblance of lighted windows with the last bright rays of day, while the more fortunate ones about it yellowed mellowly from within into pools of joyous human contentment. Whatever your vision, or whatever mine, for that moment we stood upon sacredly- flowering common ground, " Asking Mary," you and I. And the angel of the An- nunciation, bearing aloft her white lily, smiled. January 13. Behold Next- to-No where in Icelandic caprice, playing the ancient game of Drop-the-Mercury with John Frost and losing to him recklessly to the tune of 20 LIFTED CURTAINS innumerable small creakings swelled by oc- casional " booms " of The Cabin's protesting timbers. Envision The Cabin itself, a tiny, stranded raft in a polar waste, with its leaping wood-fire, its homely smells of homelier food, its friendly and over- familiar cat-genius, its cracked and chilled array of " handed-down " china. Yes, Little Heart o' Mine and Marrow of my Wifehood, I had not meant to lift crudely the curtain on my Lares and Penates just yet, but — to whom may I speak my heart, if not to you? And right here, since we are already growing cozily intimate, I want to say to you, forgive me if my ideas unfold them- selves with the erratic movements of fireflies in June; it is not an attempt to be " Browningesque " on my part, nor yet an effort to cudgel you into the belief that you are to own a brilliant mother. It is only a little harmless maternal light- headedness due to a diet with a decided salt pork and brown bread leaning, and trying to shut out a vision unbidden of beefsteak and hot-house grapes. Life, you see, has its buttered side — and another, which brings me to a delicate point: did you choose us, or did we choose you, or, 21 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE better still, did God choose the three of us? Happily the shoulders of Deity are broad — broad enough, I trust, to warrant us in leaving the matter there while we proceed with our intimate, worldly-minded trivial ties. It's just a low, white, gray-shuttered tiny-porched bit of house on a tree-clad slope you're coming to, dear (nobody has taught us to say "bungalow" out here), but it's ours, thank God, every stick and stone of it, work of the Miracle Man's own hands. Enter, guest of my fancy, this morning. Here's our parlor, reception room, living room in one, known in Next-to-Nowhere by the antiquated name of sitting-room — beam-ceiled, the rose-flowered chintz hang- ings and tall, pink-shaded candles on the mantel my fondest decorative hopes blos- somed into fruition. As for the other trap- pings of adornment and usefulness — don't smile — they mean well, but they are as yet a motley, unsifted assembly, staring strangely at each other in mutual concern — the Miracle Man's trophies of field and stream, the braided rugs and walnut 22 LIFTED CURTAINS " stand " and " what-not " that were his mother's (she, too, dear soul, Hke my own saint-mother, is a traveler to the Far Country, and her family widely scattered); the childish tokens of Susy Brown and Willy Beals of my teaching days; the hunting accoutrements and oddly assorted books, the red and white mitcheline spreads in the twin bedrooms adjoining, the generous scattering of fur-skins on the floors, so that sometimes I feel like an Indian bride; the shining new stove and singing aluminum teakettle of the wee kitchen. "My own kitchen" — words to conjure with! Did ever a woman die satisfied without having been able to say them? For me, I would rather hear the song of that kettle on the hearth, as a daily thing, than to have heard Sembrich sing the Casta Diva in Parisian grand opera. Not but that one's own kitchen imposes its peculiar trials. Exempli gratia j take this warm, brown, spicy, sodden thing on the table, which was originally intended for a ginger cake. It " fell," even as Kosciusko in the cause of freedom, and with the lumpy icing on its caving surface, now ap- pears, in fascinating ensemble, a marshy 23 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE graveyard in miniature. Strange, is it not, that with the effort I have been required to put forth in higher mathematics and several " ologies " for which I have no use nor aptitude, I have been left to my instincts in the fundamental needs of my calling? Listen! That's the crunching step of the Miracle Man on the porch, or I shall never believe my ears again. He's ruddy with the cold, and as hungry as a bear, I'll venture to say. A man, I am warned, has a devil that lives in his stomach. Adios, guest of my fancy, adios! I am fleeing like a squaw who has burned the venison. 24 CHAPTER III Ups and Downs January 14. Alone in The Cabin all day today with two resurrected magazines and Spotty Sue. (The Miracle Man is attend- ing an auction, the chief male diversion hereabouts, it appears.) Was it a day, or a thousand years? Every minute of it, this is the rock of Gibraltar against which I have been beating my head: the " inevita- bleness " of this thing that has come to me; I have bitten off a large chunk of life, and must chew and digest it somehow. As for you, Mrs. Spotty Sue, after all the years I have been your mistress, I have discovered at last the inmost desire of the cat-soul behind those opal-yellow eyes of yours; it is that I may one day turn prestidigitator and thereafter draw an end- less succession of fresh sausages out of a silk hat for you. Heigh-ho! with the magazines it was little better. What marvelous, fairy-tale- like stories, bubbling and flecking like new 25 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE wine in the cask of man's hope, reach us now and then in our cataclysmal men- tal darkness on the blue edge of Things- that-be! Twilight Sleep! Strange, iridescent, ver- milion-hued hope-bubble from over the seas! I reached out my arms to it this afternoon as a babe to the topmost bauble on the Christmas tree, and lo, even as I lifted them, the bauble eluded me and swayed into the shadow of alleged disre- pute! What was it the other magazine, contrary-minded, had to offer — Ribemont, Dessaigne and detoxicated morphine? Bub- bles both, or a little leaven somewhere which shall leaven the whole lump? Resignation! It cannot matter to us yet — to us who travel under the mystic spell that lays its hands on the souls of those on the Road to Motherhood in the fastnesses of the wilderness. Our country practitioner, from up among the hills, an aged, long-haired man of vast deeds and vaster simplicity, pulls down the corners of his mouth, and shakes his head. For him, " God smites his hands together, And strikes out a soul as a spark, 26 UPS AND DOWNS Into the organized glory of things, From the deeps of the dark." Is that the essence of it all, when all is told? Are there compensations perhaps in living beyond the touch of teeming haunts, and straining unaided at the meanings of life? Says the Koran: Nothing can befall us but what God hath destined for us. Hark to the hard, reiterated philosophy of my unsleeping, uncompromising kitchen clock which has been ticking it out for hours now: ''Whatever is to be, will be. Whatever is to be, will be." January i 5. 4 a.m.! I have just silenced that insistently ticking kitchen clock, philos- ophy and all. . . . The dusty bats of night are still astir in my brain. ... I am writing this to try to preserve my sanity. My Miracle Man has been sick, very, very sick, owing, so he thinks, to some probably tainted canned beef used in the luncheon sandwiches at the auction yester- day. I suppose I have " fussed " over him; Vm not sure but that I wailed, and made a 27 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE maudlin fool of myself when the attack was at its worst. At any rate, here is my punishment: he got up as soon as he was able, and retreated with cloistral dignity and wobbly and uncertain step into the spare bedroom, locking the door after him. Little Ego, ought I to batter that door down with my fists? That's the problem confronting me now — me who thought the problems of marriage were solved with a handful of fleecy frills and the continual smile of the Mona Lisa or the Shoe-Bill of the White Nile. I feel like a child who has strayed into the woods with a Teddy Bear in its arms and met the real article! January 16. Sunday. " Richard is himself again" — with an apology in his eye, not to mention Richard's wife with a frown on her brow, which says, in effect, I have married a man with a heart writ in Saxon, and the script has become hierophantic under my very gaze. I am defrauded. Tonight we have walked to church, a distance of three miles, holding hands most of the way and swinging them in the fash- ion commonly pictured in the Babes in the Wood, our old horse Chu-chu (named in 28 UPS AND DOWNS irony for Brete Harte's steed) being indis- posed. It was wonderfully light all the way, with a big, blonde, aloof Norse goddess moon and her retinue of stars, and our steady, even tread was marked by the creaking of the snow, our blood sang, and our shadows trotted with us on joyous, impalpable feet. (I have needed no teaching in the love of open spaces. Was it not Seneca who said, "The gods are naked and in the open"?) So silent were we for all that gloriously etheric atmosphere that we might have been a make-believe family out there under the unplumbed skies. What is the mysterious alchemy that weaves hearts together so closely as to bar the need of speech — shared thought, common emotion? Here was the road of our sublimated courtship in the days when I presided over a little school in an adjoining district, and the Miracle Man " kept bach " in The Cabin, only that then it was full of wild rose and honeysuckle surprises and the stream under the bridge was gurgling like a happy babe. Are there changes in us as vast, too? I admit that I could not again walk quite so absurdly upon air. I am not even sure 29 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE that I want to; and, as for him, there is no mistaking his deHght in the serene and solid jog which he has comfortably resumed, nor the thankful dexterity with which he has drawn his head out from under that burden- some thing, at best, to man — the lover's yoke. (You should see him here by the fire as I write, to make sure, his feet on the table, his beloved " Wild Woods and Water- ways " close under his nose, his pipe send- ing out blue wreaths that would do credit to a chimney.) In the tiny church the Christmas decora- tions were still in evidence, and the air was laden with the soothing smell of dying arbor-vitae. " Little Ego," I murmured, as I took my place, " this is none other than the House of God. How I want you sometime to know the comfort of it, the quiet peace, the unutterable blessing of His love, the staunch assurance, ' Lo, I am with you*! Without these things, what a frail, crackling, empty shell is this thing we call earthly existence! ' I am come that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly ' — that was the text of the sermon. Life more abundant, what can it mean to me now above one thing? " 30 UPS AND DOWNS Far, far away, I seemed to be listening to a little voice, and sometimes it laughed, and sometimes it wailed, and again it burst forth in the lilt of a childish song, so that desire took hold of me keen to painfulness, an Amfortas lance touching the core of my being. " Little, little part of me," as the Scotch say, " I canna get my breath for wan tin' ye." So does the grosser substance of the flesh lay its hands profanely on the finer clay of the spirit. I am brought to a full stop in my narra- tive. I ponder. I have cause to ponder. What were the various points in the ser- mon? I hang my head in shame. I have sensed it only as an atmosphere. However, " a verse," says George Herbert, " may catch him who a sermon flies." January 20, " Sweet, sweet, sweet," shrilly observes the fat, old, knowing, black-bibbed sparrow in his misty outlook on the world from the pear-tree this morn- ing. " Right-o, little old wiseacre! " I say as the flute-of-Pan sound rises above the merry clink of the Miracle Man's hammer in his workshop hard by. We're a narrow lot, 31 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE anyway, we folk of family, always ready to say Pippa's " God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world," when things are well with us and ours. " Right-o! Sweet, sweet, sweet! " I put behind me a picture conjured up by a pitilessly matter-of-fact war-scribe as I say it, of countless far-away babes in a war- torn world, who must learn someway to write their life-stories in de- vastated places, and close my ears to the clanking of the chains of human limitation. After all, the harshest adversity has never been strong enough to still the solemn, joy- ful, world-wide chorus of the unborn: " We want to be; we want to be! " It is the pitiful proof of their confidence in us who are, a confidence we futilely try to justify with the shining bars of fancy with which we hedge in their first, believing, dream-fringed years, and dazzle their new and trustful eyes. Meanwhile the crushing Juggernaut of Reality rolls on, with the sole injunction: "Stand out of the way, Dreamer! " That there is discretion in obedience who shall gainsay, yet stay — stay! I close my eyes and listen to the dripping of the winter rain upon the roof. To me it 32 UPS AND DOWNS becomes, with a single, yearning, eager dream-shift, the ecstatic patter of tender, pink-dyed baby feet, and I know a surfeit of happiness Hke a wee boy with his hands all over honey. I shall have to bear up under it, somehow; the reality, it is possible, may transcend the dream. Babes of war and war-babes (we learned to say it with a distinction on the dis- covery that '' Single men in barracks didn't turn out plaster saints"), you come very near to us in far-reaching fancy. Thank God, the elastic, infinite plan is big enough for every mother's chick of us in the universe, counting none of us low or contraband or nameless! Enfold us more closely, immaculate valance of the Eternal Trust that gives fresh life into our keeping. Sometime there shall dawn for us a larger day — too large, let us hope, for archaic prejudice and the fetter- ing or heaping of contumely on the in- nocent. Why remind the golden orchards of Pamona of their dung-hill origin or our violet -vales -to -be of the dun-hued, mothering leaf- mold? World in the mire of things that offend, come forth, come forth! 33 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE January 27. A week without a word to you, Book of My Heart, a blessed week of snowy isolation, quiet as an unruffled pool, with " A world of care without, A world of strife shut out, A world of love shut in," and its own special bit of upsetting history to finish it. Came a neighbor, Peter Ricketty, from the Hollow yesterday, a little crab of a man in ragged boots and a patchy 'coon- skin coat, gaunt, unshaven, considerably the worse for whiskey he had probably procured on a circuitous route, and with something clearly on his mind. He shifted from one foot to the other, with the pale, fleeting, fatuous smile of an infant ..with the colic, until finally it came forth ..with amazing reluctance. There's a new baby at his house (the ninth child in line!) "An' would somebody — hie — be pleased to do somethin' for the Missus, th' two oldes' girls bein' in Cull Prairie workin' out." I was pleased, since I was plainly elected to be so — and afraid. However, vigor- 34 UPS AND DOWNS ously calling upon that remnant of courage I keep in moral cold storage, I packed a basket, left a note for the Miracle Man asking him to meet me in the evening, when I expected him to return from a trip to town, and fared forth in the sled with the smilingly good-natured and unsteady Peter Ricketty behind that spavined, parrot- mouthed, maltreated, gray nag of his. And the runners whined painfully over the icy blueness of the hills and the driver and I in turn " blew " our aching fingers, and " we gaed and we gaed and we gaed," even as Gooseygander. My dear, my dear, of all the Augean abodes, Peter Ricketty 's, with the hollow- eyed, tubercular-looking cows sticking dirty heads out of the shed-like end of the ram- bling, tumble-down structure, must bear the palm! A half dozen youngsters, rough-haired and thin-necked as Hooligan's nephews of comic fame, and seemingly all of an age, flocked through the kitchen door at our arrival, together with an impertinently his- sing gander, and as suddenly slunk into oblivion at the sight of a stranger. Inside, festoons of long-dead flies, smoky 35 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE residue and various dingy spatterings hung upon the low and tottery walls like the shadows of a Rembrandt (my apologies to the master) ; a vile mop, hung on a nail beside the stove, oozed viler water; un- washed clothes and dishes grimaced at each other from every corner; the grim, despon- dent demon of dirt held the whole place by the throat. And there on a bed against the kitchen wall, under a covering of filthy rags, was the woman and her baby — the girl-baby who has made her d6but in life in a dirt-clogged shack that a self-respecting dog would shun, and must draw her sus- tenance from a slattern wretch who has forgotten the meaning of the word hope if she ever knew it and is now too ambition- less to shake the dead vermin from herself. All this in swift, hot judgment for which the next moment brought repentance. She was so white, so thin, this miserable storm- petrel with her big, pale, vacuous eyes and scant wisps of unkempt hair, and there — there it was, the one touch of Heaven and Gethsemane that makes the whole mother- world kin. I wanted to pray or cry or run away like a coward, I wasn't certain which. I was 36 UPS AND DOWNS sick, sick, with the nausea of sin at my stomach and the knowledge of my share in that sin and its immutable penalty. (Why do we sit and fold our hands, like sleepy children in the sun, with even one rum- steeped Peter Ricketty at our door?) The baby, though the merest midget, seemed well and likely to thrive. I noted a smile on the mother's face as she made mention of the fact — difficultly, for she has a painful impediment in her speech. Beyond that, she showed, for the greater part, only an impenetrable apathy, not entirely due to illness, I judge. Altogether, it was a fire-letter day in my calendar, and much of the time I did battle with my tears, and once I laughed hysterically when my host (who made frequent demands upon a bottle secreted about his person) drew his chair up to the table, on which I had managed to place some kind of a meal, and avidly attacked a boiled egg without removing the shell, to a shrill shout of amusement from the motley group of shyly approaching children. The Miracle Man was late in coming, as he is bound to be when driving Chu-chu, and already the shroudy, cold, slate-colored 37 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE light of early evening was settling over the Hollow when we said our adieus and set forth our plans for a future call. She actually clung to me in parting, that apathetic woman; I can feel the clutch of her fingers yet. The hysteria had left me, but my blood was still riotous enough so that now I feel shame at it in this cooler moment, and I prayed in fierce silence as if — was it as if holding up the Source of Things at the point of a gun? In the meantime, for a distance of two miles, the Miracle Man sat with mouth clamped mute. Finally, " It's a great country," he said, whimsically, as he always does, in the tension of a situation, when beggared for language, " Next-to-Nowhere's the capitol!" 3S CHAPTER IV Behind the Scenes February 1. In the parlance of Next-to- Nowhere, we " have the wood-sawers," as evinced by the pungent odor of gasoline in our back- yard and the intermittent "z-zip" of the engine, which spells for the feminine part of this household, in letters large enough to adorn the horizon, dinner today for six men — six, to employ the weighty repetition of a circus poster. Cissie Ricketty, who is nineteen and the eldest of the Ricketty children, and who " goes out by the day," has come to help me, offering her services gratuitously, a fact that has touched me greatly. With her young, plump figure, olive cast of skin, inscrutable expression and foreign-seeming slant of eye, she might be an Ibibio girl from the fatting-room, or a young Japanese woman freely wielding the broom out there in the kitchen. Her dress of anilin pink calico is grimy at the neckband, and the skirt, probably by an encounter with a wire 39 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE fence, a liberal interpretation of the deca- dent slit model. Also, the olfactory evi- dence of her presence is indubitable. But she moves with the sure directness of a Greek drama, and she isn't stupid, nor yet inefficient, in which she resembles neither parent. Responsibility has been hers from her ragged infancy, this young, straight dark-browed acolyte of life, and she has been obliged to meet it somehow. So nature adjusts her errors. However, her uncertain temper is reflected in the erratic movements of Spotty Sue, and she swears forgetfully in a voice of dulcet clarity when annoyed or puzzled. The vicissitudes of a varied career have added a piquancy, to say the least of it, to her vocabulary in other ways. In answer to an inquiry con- cerning her mother, she observed artlessly, " Oh, ma's all right, only " with a naive tapping of her forehead, *' nobody home; see? " For dinner we are to have mashed potatoes, salt pork a la every day (there is a fortune awaiting the woman who will make a really new dish of it), cold slaw, baked beans and pumpkin pie. (Sure and it might be worse, as Cissie consolingly re- 40 BEHIND THE SCENES marks.) And may the kindly if elusive genius that presides over good dinners abide with us for the nonce. 6 P.M. Little Ego, little Ego, how could I ever have imagined that this ridiculous little teacher-barque of mine was fit for the high seas of domesticity? Such a mess as I have made of this day! It began (whisper) it began with the harmless looking feat of slawing the cabbage, some- thing in which the veriest imbecile may be trusted ordinarily, but in which procedure I managed to give for scriptural measure a neat little portion of my forefinger. Did Mrs. Casablanca desert her post for a trifle like that? By no means. She stayed by and hid the aforesaid finger in her blouse as the Spartan youth concealed the fox — that is, till she saw the blood and fell off her chair like a miserable little cotton-wool woman in a foolish faint, and was rescued and resusci- tated by the gallant Cissie, and put on the couch perforce for two mortal hours, where only the mental vision of four yellow pies on the pantry shelf, passing before her mind's eye in comforting review, kept hope in her body. 41 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Cissie, the treasure, made small bones of the matter; said nothing, at my request, and served dinner, in which I joined her, promptly at noon. (By the by, how those men from the keen out-of-doors do bolt their food!) What should I have done without her, I ask myself as I lie here to- night with the Book of My Heart and a cup of cocoa for my consolation, and listen to her and the Miracle Man rattling the sup- per dishes, he chuckling deeply at some thrust from her and pretending to chase her about the kitchen with a tin pan. " Is he of any use to you, at all? " I asked her once when the glimmer of her pink appeared momentarily at the sitting- room door. " Of the same use is a rainbow in Tor- ment," was her laconic response, with a flirt of her dish-rag. February 2. They are taking our traditions away from us one by one, leaving only the skeptic's smile in their place. What will be left for you. Babe o* Mine, I wonder, to say nothing of your children and your children's children. As a wee girl, I used to like to think on this day of days of the 42 BEHIND THE SCENES ground-hog, a creature of which I had a very definite impression (in my imagina- tion), peering out of his hole in search of a certain hairy furtive Shadow, banished by the modern child to the limbo of " has- beens." Even on a sunny morning, I re- joiced in his presumable joy in the game, despite the untoward dallying of spring so forecasted. Mr. Ground-hog, I still half suspect you of being abroad this moment, and laughing in your sleeve. Of one thing I'm morally certain: You'll not see your shadow today — not here. There's a fog over these hills like a draping of great gray scarfs of tulle. Poor Spotty Sue, the only one to venture forth in it on an investigation tour, as a reward for her pains, got into a trap set in the woodpile by the Miracle Man for a weasel that has been making depredations on his chicken-house. As good fortune would have it, he discovered her almost at once and released her, while, in complete bewilderment, she fought him with cat- fury. She does not understand what has hurt her, nor why her body fails to obey her bidding. It is heartrending to see the mute question in her eyes when she holds 43 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE up her paw with the little drops of blood spotting the snow. " Pusheen, pusheen," soothes the Miracle Man, over and over, binding the hurt with a marvelous gentleness to which, from him, I am no stranger. Babe- to-come, if you are a woman-child, among other of my dearest wishes, I want you one day to know the tender strength of rough man-hands. February 4. Drifted down from a clear sky last night that rara avis at The Cabin — a visitor, a boyhood friend of the Mir- acle Man's from over the hills, with a glowing tale of fish beauties caught through the ice at Lake Phantom, fifteen miles from here, and a proposition to make the trip today with team and buckboard. Did my Miracle Man, who has seemed a bit dull of late (or have I only fancied it?), come to life? I wish you could have seen him with the shine in his eyes, the tawny red in his cheeks, to match his hair (there, I've let the cat out of the bag), and the vigor in his stride. Today, without him. The Cabin has been so creepily still, I've been playing I'm 44 BEHIND THE SCENES the Captive Princess in the far-off land of Bombaloo, and have reached the point where the captor witch declares: "The matter is: I would like to have your heart to eat." I am not sure but that she has it. Anyhow, the great lump of loneliness in it is sure to choke her. The wind has been playing an un- finished symphony all day, seething in the cedars. The snow is off in great patches; the slush ankle-deep. Perhaps that is why Cissie Ricketty, who was to stay with me, has not come. . . . Positive — lonely; comparative — lone- lier; superlative — loneliest! The wind is rising, turning to a sob and getting on my nerves. A host of small fears tug at my heart. Puttering about the house doesn't help. I've baked cookies for supper (moderately successful ones); it takes so long to cut them in the various shapes. And this doily with the violets I've embroidered consumed four hours, blessed thing; yet such is the state of my mind, both sides of it look like the wrong side! Later. The table is set, and supper cool- ing in the dishes. Chu-chu has had his 45 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE feed, which he was in doubt about taking from me, lifting up his head and whinny- ing for his master. Mooley, even, has had to submit to my clumsy ministrations. I tried to whistle at my tasks, but I've a fancy old Harpocrates with his finger on his mouth has me in a spell. The wind is still rising with a clattering of the shutters and a rattling of the doors. The Cabin lurches like a ship in a heavy sea, and shakes like Messina. I've watched the road one way for Cissie and the other way for the Miracle Man (whom I expected before nightfall) till I'm as divided in my mind as the traveler trying to blow hot and cold at the same time. At last I've given up Cissie. A woman's life is nine-tenths wait- ing. Patience! It's a long drive and the roads difficult. 10 o'clock. He isn't here yet. I haven't the heart to get away from this window, where I've been sitting for three hours see- ing nothing for the outer wall of dark. And how I've prayed! I've had so much, so infinitely much of good, dear God, be- yond my deserts, but I shall have to ask one thing more. Bring my Miracle Man 46 BEHIND THE SCENES home safely. If — if — ! Oh, what a terrible gap could occur in the ranks of one's largest, taken-for-granted blessings in one little day's span! I often forget to sing my paean of thanksgiving when I'm happy, but stress of any kind invariably unseals my lips in a plea (constrained by my sense of the sin of omission). Unhappily, I'm not a so-called competent woman; neither have I the resourcefulness commonly credited to the " school-ma'am " make-up, otherwise, doubtlessly, I suppose I'd " do something," though I'm sure that's untranslatable in this case into anything definite. The last task, mixing the " sponge " for bread, is finished, and the yeasty smell is filling the room. The kitchen fire has gone out, and the place looks as desolate as a wind-swept desert. Midnight — and after! The old clock tolled out the hour some minutes ago. I take my pen and my little book to com- pel my fingers, shaking with cold and nervousness, to steady themselves. I do not know whether I am worried now, or not; I can't feel any more. I'm just tired, un- believably tired and sick at heart, I try 47 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE to pray again, but my soul is a blank, and God seems a million-million miles away. Every time the back door rattles (Next- to-Nowhere etiquette is decidedly opposed to locks), a different vision unrolls itself in my vivid fancy. Sometimes it's a grin- ning tramp with an ax in his hand; some- times an escaped madman, doing the latest thing in waltz steps; sometimes it is a burglar desperate enough to come to Next- to-Nowhere; sometimes, even, the Miracle Man himself, drunk and shouting evilly. (I've never known him to touch a drop of the stuff, but then I haven't known him " for always.") Spotty Sue, to be sure, is a good friend, but her disposition is too affectionate. If any of the aforesaid happened in, she'd try to win his heart by rubbing her sides on his trouser-legs. I've got right to the point where I don't care who knows it: I'm going to creep into bed with my clothes on, and cover up my head! February 5. I am feeling very small and shamed and haggard by daylight. I am not even very sure but that I am a Mrs. 48 BEHIND THE SCENES Henpeck. I suggested this to the Miracle Man in a wee, small voice like that at which the prophet hid his face in his mantle, when I finally dared to meet his eyes across the breakfast table this morning, and he answered magnanimously that he had lately read somewhere on scientific authority that a henpeck had never been known to cause a fatal hemorrhage yet. It was half past twelve when he arrived last night. At the first sound of his step in the house (after all, nobody v/alks in the least like him), I sprang from the bed with my hair streaming down my back, and flew at him, candle in hand, with a barked de- mand for an explanation. He blinked in the candlelight like a great, surprised owl for a minute, looking at me as if he had just discovered me and was at a loss for a label. Then he leaned back and burst into a huge laugh and began to prance around the kitchen, holding up his bag of fish (really fine ones) for my inspection. This failing to have the desired result, he threw down the bag and lifted me off my feet, demand- ing to know " why my mountains were always molehills, and why I wasn't in bed — he'd expected to find Cissie and m^e 49 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE asleep on one pillow as snug as two bugs in a rug " (an appropriate figure in connection with that verminous, malodorous child)! Finally, he settled down to the rational part of his story — how the trip one way had taken four hours over the bad roads; how hungry he and Harker were. (Jack Harker is the name of this friend of his); how, having made short work of the con- tents of their lunch baskets, they went several miles out of their way to a country hotel for supper (it turned out to be a supper fit for the gods, too)! And hadn't he told me he might be as late as mid- night? — aghast — of course he had! Danny Ricketty, the third Ricketty child, a pale stripling with a look in his eyes as if he were listening for the crack of doom, appeared during the course of breakfast, sans overcoat and mittens, blue- nosed, wide-mouthed, and so hungry he swallowed a warm biscuit in savage bites like a stray dog. He said Cissie " had a tantrum yesterday, and wouldn't go nowheres." I am oppressed by two questions: Is Cissie Ricketty temperamental? Did the Miracle Man really tell me he expected to return home late — or didn't he? 50 CHAPTER V Views Afield February 6. Snow and more snow in royal gale-driven veils of whiteness, until we have reached the dignity of a Sabbath blizzard. Three miles from church con- stitute as effectual a bar as thirty under the circumstances. But we are not without our own resources in this direction, and it is by no means unpleasant here where we sit with our backs to the fire. This is playing at life. This is studying the inscrutable blanched face of Nature at leisure. Across the road, at the gate of the little neglected cemetery where Screechy the owl is wont to hold forth, are three great, priestly cedars, now white-surpliced and whispering and bowing like the Three Wise Men. What is it they vsay, I wonder, sit- ting tense and listening at intervals, and then the material sense of comfort whelms all other senses for the moment, and I just placidly exist and am glad. Such a delectable odor as steals in from 51 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE the kitchen meanwhile! A delicacy came our way yesterday. We are to have baked rabbit in cream gravy. Mr. Cottontail was seen to secrete himself in a culvert in front of The Cabin yesterday, from whence I drove him forth v/ith a prodding fishpole (according to instructions), to leap into the Miracle Man's waiting arms — such was the tale of the capture. For the slaughter I did not stay. Poor, pretty thing, so soft and silent and unresisting! " You've killed him! " I announced tragi- cally to the Miracle Man when the deed was done. He stared at me in unfeigned astonish- ment. " Did you want to eat him alive? " was his mild rejoinder. Little Ego, I am ashamed of the lusts of the flesh, but I am puzzled how to evade many of them. Still, blotting out the sense of the shortcomings of an earthly heritage, is an innermost, paradoxical joy in the hope that you may live to know human passion. How easily you take on the garb of flesh in such an hour as this, to my imagining. In one moment you strut and shout and puff out your cheeks boy fashion, and 52 VIEWS AFIELD scarcely is the vision fixed, when presto! you flirt your skirts and toss your hair over your shoulders and kiss your doll! Sur- reptitiously, I say to myself, " My son; my daughter," to determine, if possible, which has the better taste in my mouth — and fail hopelessly. I am like the donkey of ancient debate standing midway between two equally desirable haycocks and leaving it to the philosophers to decide to which one he will turn for his first bite. You see the Road to Motherhood has such long, long vistas as to make indeed a puzzle of it. But I have it all planned in a general way what shall happen when you can creep and when you can walk, and when you go to college, for that matter. Will you introduce your little old mother to the President, I wonder? February 11. At last, at last, a glorious sun full and warm! This air, as I open the door, is like an elixir, and the road, cleared for the milk-wagons, looks reasonably pas- sable. Why be at the daily routine like a squirrel in a revolving cage any longer? Why not erase the mental stamp of these four walls before it becomes indelible? 53 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Business of frantic searching for the Miracle Man's leggings, which I appropriate on occasion. Business of burying you, Book of My Heart, in the bottom of a bureau drawer, where like a dead man you will tell no inadvertent tales. Adieu, adieu for an hour and a half, and let me tell you in parting I wouldn't walk a city street if I could. Come to light again this day, little book of my confidences, while I introduce to you, as abruptly and unceremoniously as I myself met her in my morning's meander- ings, Next-to-Nowhere's Mis' Muffet — not the Miss Muffet to whom " there came a great spider, and sat down beside her." No spider, great or small, unless suicidally inclined, would sit down in. the vicinity of this Mis' Muffet; he would be apt to be struck decidedly with no delicate fist, and an irregularly defined, but very distinct, outline made of him. " Come in! " she commanded as I passed her door, next the smithy, on my morn- ing's walk. (She's the smith's wife, and as brawny as he.) 54 VIEWS AFIELD I came; it isn't easy to disobey her. " Sit down! " (The cerement of formal- ity has never held her a moment in its wrapping.) I sat — with the automatic obedience of a tin soldier when the string is pulled. " You're the new Mis' Barney, ain't you? " I meekly assented. More, I proceeded to ansv/er a long, brisk catechism with the careful exactness of a nice little girl of ten. I'll admit it — my catechist fascinated me. She's a large woman, this Mis' Muffet (as Next-to-Nowhere has her appellation), not to say colossal, in her purple-figured house-dress, unconfined save for the fasten- ing at the throat — a huge square brooch enclosed in a frame-like arrangement, and with spots like powdered cinnamon in the enclosure. On her ample breast and in the corners of her mouth (which has the ap- pearance of being stitched in heavily with gray thread) reposed the cake crumbs of a recent lunch, together with a generous sprinkling of the spice garnish. Her hair is dingy gray, her chin heavy, her eyes rheumy and unswerving in gaze. I shifted 55 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE mine uneasily under their fixed intensity to the flaring lithograph on the wall behind the plush self-rocker where she sat — " Doggy, will you bite? " " Doggy," I meditated seriously, " perhaps you have occasion to bite — sometimes." My hostess could not have been aware of this unflattering thought digression, for presently, having finished her catechism and her inspection, she gave vent to a loud, frank laugh. " Why, you little figgerine, you pore little chippin* pewee," she remarked dis- passionately betw^een the gasps " you hain't big enough to be no man's wife! " My fascination grew. It bade fair to continue to grow. Again, I was the cap- tive Princess in the far-off land of Bom- baloo, and once more the witch had ap- peared. " Go along, you little hussy," I heard her say in some subconscious stratum of me, " boil me a beefsteak at once, and see that there are plenty of black beetles in the sauce! " To add to the effect. Mis' Muffet drew her chair up closer in the half darkness of the room (she has a grudge apparently against the sunshine). She wanted to tell 56 VIEWS AFIELD me, it appeared, apropos of nothing in particular, of her niece Corrina Anne, who had a continual, unsatisfied craving for cucumbers, before the birth of a child, and who bore a son with a cucumber on his lip — "yes, a perfect one, stem and all!" (Does this witch-like soul, by any chance, know of my condition?) And had I ever heard of the woman who shot a gopher while in a similar state and " marked " the cheek of her babe with the hairy outline of the little creature? . . . There was Sally Per- kins, too, over in the Hollow, who cut her thumb, and held it in a tight clutch to keep the blood back, and whose little daughter had never yet been able to open her hand. She — But the rather eerie recital was inter- rupted here by the appearance of Andy, the sole offspring of the Muffets' — a lad of twenty, who lounged into the room. Andy Muffet was designed as a model for a Kewpie doll instead of a blacksmith's son. He's a short, fattish, round-eyed youth with an expression of arrested baby- ishness and the tender mouth of a Greuze study grown up. " I wanted a girl the worst way, 'fore 57 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE , he come," continued his mother in a bass buzzing behind her hand, not to be swayed by any consideration from her apparent hobby, " an' you see that red an' white skin o' his'n an' them dimples? Poor boy, he hates 'em like poison, an' I try to make it up to him ev'ry way I kin. You noticed that flute I got him, over there on the table, maybe? I give nine hens an' a carpet-sweeper in trade fer it." As I rose to go, taking advantage of the interruption, the husks seemed to fall in that speech from the character I had drawn mentally of the woman before me. I saw instead the mother-sacrifice of a strange creature, superstition-ridden, lonely some- times almost to madness, hungry with a mind-hunger she could not even gauge, crav- ing woman-sympathy, woman-understand- ing. " Will you come to see me? " I asked on impulse, taking her hand. " I make a point of having tea every afternoon, and I'd be glad to have you." Mis' Muffet drew back a step, her mouth working with some undecipherable emotion. " Good laws! " she said with a touch of raw cynicism, " you don't know what 58 VIEWS AFIELD you're a-askin', er you'd have no truck with me. Hep Sidney ast me to a coffee drinkin' over to her place t' the Prairie ' seven years ago, an' her pa was tuk with creepin' paralysis that same day an' never got up off'n his bed." February 12. " All the world's a neigh- borhood, and only the stars are foreign countries." Little Ego, I've been speculating on that since the Wanderlust took me in tow, and I must needs set the ball of my adventures rolling. And the further I go, the truer I find it. Twenty miles away from home today on a prosaic and very necessary trip to the dentist's. In the newness of my journeying, it might have been as many thousand! Abroad, same little human drama of yesteryear, yes, and the year before, and the year before that, I affirmed to myself, as I waved my farewell to the Miracle Man in the sleigh, and took a quick look around the already moving " interurban." There was the inevitable fat man with the cropped moustache and the absorbing newspaper; there, behind me, the equally 59 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE inevitable thin one, with the faded necktie and the hair-agitating cough (problem for some philosopher: How many germs can sit on a hair, and are they always congenial enough to sit close?); there the dapper man with the fondness for violet water, and his friend, the inveterate talker, jaw working cheerfully. There, too, was the large woman under the tiny hat (deco- rated, by the way, with an erect flame- colored affair resembling nothing as much as a burning broom); the little one swathed in a widow's veil; the ultra-fashionable dowager in military blue, skirt of ab- breviated length; the over-tired, prematurely old woman with the huge, back-bending basket; the smiling, fresh-colored strap- hanging lass in her teens; the older society girl imitation of her, cheeks rouge-daubed. For me — my dear, how quickly the freedom of open spaces gets its grip on one! Entre nous, the restraint of street clothing bites into my soul. Neither am I in the habit of taking my air in homoeo- pathic doses. So I squirmed and yawned and tugged at my gloves and opened and closed my bag unnecessarily, until — well, I think I must have touched accidentally 60 VIEWS AFIELD that Aladdin's Lamp to which I seem to have lately fallen heir, and which I have only to rub to enrich my inner vision. Little Conjurer, my good Genii, when have you failed me yet? There, at the touch of the Lamp, as with the shifting of a film, I saw you all, fellow- journeymen, in a new guise — each as some woman's baby, some woman's and God's — with underneath the Everlasting Arms. You, Mr. Fat Man, wore a tiny bonnet of white and blue, and you, Mr. Talker, walked on wobbly, uncertain legs. You lisped, Mrs. Dowager Militaire, and put your cuddly little nose in your mother's neck, and as for you, Mrs. Burden Bearer, you blinked your wee eyes and beat with your soft fists in a way to make some woman forget that she staggered under the birth-curse for you and paid in flaccid breast and the sweat of agony. My heart warmed toward you, one and all; I wanted to know you better, to reach out the hand of fellowship to you, to serve you in some way if possible. Somebody's baby, each, and God's — with underneath the Everlasting Arms! 61 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE It has been a long trip home tonight in the sleigh — a fragile night it is, so white and pretty it looks as if it might break. And all the while the mothers of the uni- verse came very near to me and touched my hands and communed with me. I never knew that hearts could hold so much, or stars shine so brightly. I couldn't say a word, but there was no need for me to talk. The Miracle Man, goaded to it no doubt by his day of loneliness, found his tongue, for a change, and used it, save when cheek on cheek took the place of speech. It would have been an ideal time to have told him a secret that is fast getting too big for me to carry alone. But for some reason, trivial as a sigh, elusive as thistledown, I hold it still. February 14. St. Valentine, benign and hoary, smiles at us from over the hills. In honor of the day I have unearthed a treasure-box of dear, foolish little things a king's ransom could not buy. Here's a little lawn apron piped with pink, that belonged to the Miracle Man, aged three, and there's his little knitted shoe, yellowed with age. (His mother, bless her sainted 62 VIEWS AFIELD memory, kept them for me.) And this is his photograph, aged five. Was ever a boy more sturdy and promising in his ten- der years? Here's his first composition, a marvelous scrawl on the subject of Crab- fishing; and a little, old, faded two-penny valentine with huge roses and a heart with " For my mother " written across it in the same sprawling hand. Oh, Miracle Man, my Miracle Man, of whom such a short time ago I knew noth- ing, now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, what a queer thing is life! Some- body's father and mother-to-be! How good God is to us! It's an old woman who lives in reminis- cences you say. Little Book? Listen, then, while I relate the rest of my St. Valentine's story. When the mail-man drove up this morn- ing, he hallooed, and having so inveigled me forth, put a parcel into my hand, a parcel marked " perishable " and having a city postmark. Opened, it revealed under layers of packing, nothing more or less than a florist's box of violets — real, hones t- 63 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE to-goodness, living, breathing violets on this snow Sahara! (No, I'm not dreaming, though I've had to pinch myself till I'm black and blue to make sure of it.) The Miracle Man and I, having flipped off a card which lay on the top, marked only M. L., walked around them in a trance for a half hour, and this not sufficing in my case to relieve my pent-up feelings, I waited until he went out, and then got down on my knees and kissed them (an entirely impersonal kiss with no thought of a donor). I couldn't help it; though I had the grace to blush at my weakness when he came back and caught me at it. Ever since, he has seemed awkwardly quiet and a little distrait. I wonder — I wonder — yes, and I half know, too. You see, there was Martin Lester. Martin Lester is a part of my story (a very small part), a neat little professor who once tried to hold my hand. The Miracle Man would never have known anything about him, only that Aunt Idella, in an attempt to discourage his Irish pertinacity, once said before him that she should think if I had to marry I'd consider Martin's suit. Mr. Lester, as it happens, is at the 64 VIEWS AFIELD present moment, a missionary in China, but of that the Miracle Man knows noth- ing. I smile to myself with the knowledge, and hold my peace. Why do I like to hurt a perfectly good man? Sitting tonight with the violets between us (in more senses than one), filling the room with their sweetness, I unrolled casually before his eyes a bit of paper which I had found some time since in their depths. " Romans 1 : 1-12 " is the inscription: "That I may be comforted together with you, by the mutual faith, both of you and me. Mary Laird." (" Asking Mary.") And above is the name of the hospital, " Trinity," where she has been persuaded at last to go for treatment. February 17. What a mushroom growth a meditated-on secret attains in the course of a few days. Ever since the violet episode, I've felt that I ought to tell the Miracle Man of this thing that is overflowing the walls of my soul — this thing that makes me more truly and indisputably his even than my vows, if possible, but how, how? 65 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE I lately read a little story of a woman with a like puzzle on her mind, who solved it in a burst of inspiration by formally putting on her coat and hat, and going as a patient to her doctor-husband. But obviously that way is barred for me. Nor dare I evolve too complex a scheme. There's an alienist some twenty miles from here, and the leading man in the drama might find some way of communicat- ing with him. It's a delicate situation in all truth. I'm no clairvoyant, by any means, but, judging by the excellent opportunities that I have already permitted to slip from my grasp, I foresee that my confession is planning to try its wings in the most awkward and inopportune and unromantic moment possible. February 21. Wash Day. I'm a better prophetess than you might think, little Ego. At least I guessed rightly about the " awkward and inopportune and unromantic moment " aforementioned. Let me tell you, as a sort of premonitory burst, there's very little romance in wash day anyhow, particularly if taken in con- 66 VIEWS AFIELD junction with a low bread supply, an amazing array of unwashed dishes, a remnant of mending from a previous week, the prospect of a dinner of Kaiserine sim- plicity, and a vision of the endless wash days through which one will probably live, together with their long multiplication of Spartan meals. I had my hands in the biscuit dough, and I was obliged to turn my head to one side, to my intense disgust with myself, to keep drops of salt water from falling into it (I so despise a crying woman, my approval is with the man who boasted that he had seen his wife's tears only four times — three for death, and once when the ink froze) — when in trotted my Miracle Man from the shop, unexpectedly. Did I behave myself in a seemly manner, befitting a woman my age? Make your own deductions. I rushed at him, doughy hands uplifted, as if I were doing the Sea- gull Swoop in the Fox Trot (old Dan Tucker is the sole terpsichorean indulgence in Next-to-Nowhere, but I've seen the pictures). He stopped short, arms folded high and chin up like Caruso as Rhadames in Aida (another picture). 67 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE But the minute it was out, he moved — backward, against the cellar-door, where he leaned basso-rilievo, pale as a prophet. I could have bitten my tongue out for the sheer clumsiness of the performance, only that it would have availed me nothing, then. Besides, what with his gathering me up the next moment, and washing my hands and face at the sink as gently and master- fully as if I'd been two years old, I didn't have time. " For me, for me," he kept saying as if I'd martyred myself for him. (If God ever made a more tender man, I wonder where He put him.) I wanted to tell him some- thing of this sort, but my throat hurt, and I only managed to murmur a platitude about my willingness to walk on hot plow- shares for him. And all the while I hadn't been able to keep my precious bit of in- formation from popping out at him as if it had been shot out of a gun! 68 CHAPTER VI Heights and Depths February 27 . A secret that has once taken flight from the heart, even to wing no further than that heart's nearest, is a secret no longer. But this sharing of ours is too exquisite to regret. Today, with al- most a week of it gone by, the bloom is still intact, and we have walked all over the place together as if it were perfectly new to us, unraveling the knowable things of the saga of parenthood. The Miracle Man says whimsically that we have found the leprechawn, an Irish fairy which when captured gives you all the gold you want. (How different is his kiss, his touch, since he knows! Oh, God, it was a wonderful moment in which Thou didst make women to be mothers!) What a warm, singing, inexplicable thing is this hope in the breast! We plan as we have never planned before. We will enlarge the strawberry patch another year, and add to the garden. Alfalfa is a comparatively new crop here, 69 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE but worth trying, we decide, in the light of the experience of a Scotch farmer of the vicinity who last year realized $80 an acre from it. We shall find the leprechawn indeed, and must hold fast, says the Miracle Man, who is, " as the greatest only are, in his simplicity divine." In view already of the glint of fairy trappings, we babbled to each other without listening, and went, as is our habit, like two children, to feed the chickens, laughing absurdly at the Malvolian strut of a certain Mrs. Biddie whom we suspect of " Suffragette " tenden- cies. A covey of quail sometimes come to share in the meal, the long, hard winter having made their food very scarce. But a hint of spring is on the way. There was a flock of wild ducks in an open space on the mill-pond this afternoon. We hailed them with rapture, and frightened them into flight. Some white-winged gulls scurried over the ice to take their place. The mill- wheel churned peacefully. Under the pink valance of joy, what transformations appear on every side. In the opalescent light, The Cabin, even, took on the whiteness of Carrara marble. Tonight there is a " cold " moon away to 70 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS the north, prodigal of its light, and thin as an old crone's wedding-ring. But with the softly burning candles of the sanctity of home alight on our hearth, what need have we for other illumination? What need, I may ask, for anything over and above our holdings? Hold fast to the leprechawn, for- sooth! We are rich now, redundantly rich! Palpitant little Mystery, with whom the whole place is thought-tapestried, till life is full to the point of tears, if ever I have been in doubt of it, this hour I am sure, without you we should have gone all our lives beggared! March 4. " The whirligig of time brings his revenges." I am sitting propped up with pillows like a Pasha of the Porte, my right ankle strapped with adhesive plaster, and the pervasive odor of liniment filling the room. Little Ego, I'm afraid, with some of the ultra- modernists, I've been trying to change my marriage vows from " love, honor and obey " to " love, honor and be gay," and as a reward, I am feeling as sheepish as Willy Beals used to look in the dunce's seat. 71 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE And thereon hangs the tale of how, in the soft, melty afternoon of day before yesterday, I went out with a small shining tin pail to hunt trouble in its lair. Now, the tin pail was designed for spring water — not trouble — for we've a spring in the clump of willows beyond the marsh, a bubbling, busy spring with peppery sands, a fringe of cress-greenness and a sparkle all of its own. " I feel the lure of the teetery bogs," said I tentatively to the Miracle Man, who had Chu-chu hitched to the cart, and was about to start on an expedition for groceries. He jumped down and intercepted me with the authoritative way of the male Irishman. " But it's not fit for you to go," he said, superiorly, reaching out an imperative hand for the pail; " I forbid you." "You — forbid me?" my voice sounded weak and a long way ofif. The wind whipped my drabbled skirts around my ankles, and turned his nose to a hue contrasting unpleasantly with his hair. How could I ever have imagined that I admired dominance in a man? 72 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS My own Irish, of v/hich I flatter myself I ordinarily keep the upper hand, was clamoring for its chance. It failed to get it — in words. But I walked awa}^, head well up, with a sadden- ing reflection on the capriciousness of this marital joy that lifts one to perilously delightful heights, and then collapses as suddenly as the air goes out of a toy bal- loon — a reflection I took care should not show itself in the glad abandon of my gait as I struck out gaily across the scatter- ing snow-patches into the bunchy swale beyond. I hoped he was looking; I earnestly hoped so. As a matter of fact, he was not, or he would have seen me, shortly, dem- onstrating the wisdom of Solomon in his setting forth that " pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall." (The sort of elucidation I attempted was that the fall may be very literal and immediate.) In justice to myself, I made a laudable endeavor to rise with unconcern, but a wrenching stab in the region of my foot caused me to think better of it. Utter inertia while the pain talked glibly. I babbled back some kind of an 73 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE answer, choking on a sob, and finishing it with a series of whines that might have coaxed a coyote forth from the wild. A pair of loud-voiced crows, jetty little goblins of the marsh, sharply outlined by the sapphire ice of the creek, jeered un- kindly. A V-shaped battalion of wild geese at the zenith, honking toward Lake Winne- bago, shrieked out their derision. I moved a trifle, beginning to discover that I was more effectual than waning old Sol in " melting a spot." I could creep a bit, but it hurt — oh, it hurt — and how chilling after all was the seemingly mild spring air. The discarded tin pail blinked faintly with a puzzled glint. I was puzzled myself — not how I'd spend the remainder of the day, however, nor — bleak possibility — the night soon to come, the night, long and grim and cruel and sleety with black clouds wig-wagging weird messages to me I couldn't make out, and — and — I covered my face, and lived through it, then and there, and uncovered it — to a glimpse of dingy anilin-pink calico that looked better to me at that moment than a coronation robe! " Why, you poor, mis'able little gump," 74 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS came in dulcet tones across the bogs, " what d'ye think yer a-doin', anyhow? " And a few minutes later, for the second time in the course of a few weeks, I was seized by the arms and lifted into space by the gallant Cissie. " It's your luck I was comin' cross-lots," was her terse observation as she performed the feat. " 'Tis the day of the woman — after that, the reckoning," said the Miracle Man, equally terse, on his return, following the reeking scent of my emergency bottle into the bedroom with the stalk of a caged lion. But that quick Celtic pallor of his belied the brusqueness of his speech. And for the scientific skill and deftness of those big hands he owns, quieting as a soporific, I could forgive him anything. March 11. Still propped up in state, al- though I have been so fortunate as to sus- tain nothing more serious than an ordinary sprain. There are more ways than one of playing at life. I am reminded of the great army of hurt and maimed and handicapped ones 75 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE amongst us, daily condemned to watch the great pageant, sorrowfully, from the out- skirts of the procession, as it were. Why? Why? Mother Nature pauses a minute to shake her head inscrutably, and turns her atten- tion again to her chief concern, the fertility of the output. Meantime they sit, the un- fortunates, a long, white-faced, unanswered line in the light of day, each trying pitifully to construct from the fragments of things left to him his own " modus vivendi." And ^ the delicate pendulum of Destiny swings on, and the great world wags her way, little guessing. What matters it when Heaven guesses and lays a cool hand on the fevered forehead of Mischance? Some day, in God's good time, she will lay bare to the sufferer a reason. " For now we see as through a glass darkly, but then face to face." A robin flew down from the porch-roof just now, and perched on the topmost step below — another mile-stone on our journey to spring. Out of his extended vocabulary, he picked a single word of interrogation, repeating it again and again. How stupid of me, for all my vaunted human intelli- 76 HEIvGHTS AND DEPTHS gence, not to be able to understand, after all the unfailing years I have known the comfort of the sound! I apologize, little companionable fellow, and imitate your word as nearly as I can in my clumsy foreign tongue to cover my embarrassment. You recall to me a warm spring morning in March — how long ago is it? — when I set out to teach my first term of school, and little Lottie Meade, the youngest pupil, still dimpled with the divinity of babyhood, toddled across the lawn after you, or was it your great-grandfather several times removed ? No matter. Little Lottie wears a Miss before her name today, and has no inkling of how her old teacher once took her in her lap and crooned over her and smoothed her yellow curls, and asked God speechlessly for a little girl of her own some day, not daring to put the naked desire into lan- guage. The hour of my young passion is by, and yet He who holdeth in His hand this oldest verity of the race has remem- bered, nor taken into account my proven unfitness in the little House of my Achieve- ment which I have builded upon the sands. Sing for me my Te Deum Laudamus, little 77 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE questioner of the red and quivering throat. It is a world of redeemed promises, is it not, this spring world silently stretching out to where the willows are growing red- der with the receding of the white sea — a world of redeemed promises and music. My very dreams are like a melody, with Spotty Sue, who is quite herself again, purring the obligato. And see, there comes the Miracle Man into the well-trod path his feet have made. What is it he carries with such awkward carefulness? Cress from the spring, as I live — yes, and the little shining, dented tin pail filled to the brim — his way of eating humble pie! Dear heart, dear heart, irrefragably mine, having once tasted of your devotion is like the first quaff of some Pierian spring; one thirsts forever afterward. March 16 Said the Shah of Teheran, 'Now, tell me, if you can. Why a man his life encumbers With wives in plural numbers, When it takes but one small wife To make a man's whole life A source of endless strife? ' Then he swore — the worthy man." 78 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS The housecleaning fever seized me in no merciful grip the moment I again set foot to the floor — not that I know anything about that periodic housewifely disturbance by teaching or habit — simply a call — is it of civilization or the wild? Would Mrs. Man Friday, I wonder (had there been such a dame), been given, for example, to the beating of her goat-skin rugs at regular intervals? Happy Man Friday who had no chance to find out, for " This little diff'rence 'twixt a man and woman Has been the cause of lots of strife, I've seen; Man thinks a house was made for folks to live in, A woman that 'twas simply made to clean." The Miracle Man departed this morning for the woodlot, where he is hewing down a tree, and Cissie and I improved the time by taking all of the dishes out of the cupboard, and heaping them in unpicturesque con- fusion on table and sink. He returned abruptly a half hour later, and casting an eye over the despoliation about the kitchen, gave me the saddest, most speaking look I have ever had from him. " You too," it said, with an actual wince, " bitten v/ith that common mania? " 79 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE I perceive that I have discovered the loca- tion of his psychological corns. But the work must go on willy-nilly. Things look shabby, and I foresee a long pull. "Oh, poverty's a weary thing, 'Tis full of grief and pain," quotes his disgruntled lordship, with a humorous wagging of his head, as I drag to light among other things a worn comforter. Fie, fie, Mr. Miracle Man, as if there were any poverty whatever in all the land save that of heart and brain! And this unseemly upheaval, I would have you under- stand, is educative — yes, I said educative. One must cultivate an eye even for cob- webs. " Never mind," he says, soothingly, though whether to himself or me is an open matter of debate, " you'll get over it after a while." March 18. A little peddler woman came to the door this morning — one of those derelicts with which the country is flooded with the first warm rays of the spring sun. Poor little soul, what a sorry story she spelled from her low, unseasonable, almost 80 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS soleless shoes to her sparse, dingy gray knob! I did not want the shoestrings she had to offer, nor yet the red bandannas nor yellow suspenders, and so, on principle, I did not buy, though I had to slam the door of my heart hard to close it against the practiced appeal of her soft foreign voice and beseeching hands folded like a devotee's at a shrine, to carry meaning, I suppose, over a linguistic gulf. Is it wise or not, Little Ego, always to act on principle? You will have to decide alone. For myself, I cannot now get the sight of that little peddler woman's dry blue lips out of my mind. I am wishing I had offered her something consoling, a cup of tea, perhaps, or the red geranium I have coaxed into blossom. A v/isp of time to grudge out of the day's hurry. Would she have understood? What a problem life is on every hand! As stewards accountable for every moment, how wretchedly we fail, dear, and again how wretchedly. What if God retaliated in failure? But no — look at His spring world from the window with me, its sodden places now white-encrusted and marked with the unending trails of 81 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE rabbits over the fields. How steadily it marches on, let the little blessed golden touslehead dandelion I found today in a fence corner tell. Some of the posts are down in the enclosure surrounding the tiny cemetery across the way. They put me in mind of prostrate bodies — not human — unwieldly, useless things like dead opportunities. Was there ever a sadder ghost that walked than the ghost of Wasted Chance? March 23, 2 A.M. Ho, learned man of science who lately proudly fathered adrenin, the substitute of sleep, here is a lone woman on the edge of the wilderness blinking in the light of a guttering candle with a rival discovery — a Fear-ghost communing which banishes old-fashioned sleep to the shad- ows of the forgotten! What a pity surely in the slothfulness of slumber to miss this marvelous blue- black night world, pulsing with stars, set with a silver plaque of moon and wrapped in a silence so eloquent, so forgetful of the fever of life, one is reminded of the Hindoo Kaber's " Hark to the unstruck bells and drums! " 82 HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS I am possessed of the fancy that I could touch the stars by reaching out. The big trees stand waiting breathlessly for something to happen. A million million fermenting deeds have melted into the spiritual coolness of the night. " Bos'n Bill's an atheist still," we are told, " except sometimes in the dark." Was there ever an atheist in the dark? My pulses are like trip-hammers as I think of all those other mothers-to-be out there across the enchanted space's velvety pall, from painted women to saints, each with her own peculiar pain-problem. A spikenard for the ease of suffering is this subtle kinship. Our souls speak a universal language, the Esperanto of mothers. I will not be afraid; and again I send the thought message out across the depth- less ether to those other waiting ones, I will not be afraid! 83 CHAPTER VII Spring Smiles and Frowns March 30. We have been the instigators and only eye-witnesses of a tragedy in which we were not the participants. Another auction in the neighborhood furnished an excuse for the Miracle Man to bring home to his poultry pen a great, proud, superfluous, thoroughbred Rhode Island rooster of which he had become enamoured — Mike Reddy by name — with a swagger like the leading man in a musical comedy. Little Ego, I have a game these lengthening days, a secret sort of game at which only two can play, in which I take you up in my arms and carry you out to see the bid- dies and hear their raucous, joyous egg- songs. My special admiration has been bestowed thus far on the Shah of the flock, a digni- fied Plymouth Rock bird, dubbed Chauncy Woodhead for his quiet, scholarly, and re- tiring manner (for his species), not to men- 84 SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS tion the rings like spectacles about his eyes. Fancy then my consternation last night when Mike Reddy stepped in, took an officious look around, attacked poor Chauncy on no visible provocation and all but finished him. Did his harem of biddies stand by him, you ask? With Clytemnestra-like faithlessness they deserted him to a fowl (a disgrace to the sex I call it), preened themselves, and sang around the newcomer shamelessly to the huge amusement of the Miracle Man — a short-lived amusement albeit, for this morning by some unsolved Nemesis which overtook Mike Reddy we found him dead under the roosts, one of the faithless, an " enolamous sufiflagette of a hen," standing by with hysterical cackling. Chauncy, for his part, seemed none the worse for the fray, and bore himself with his customary modesty — a true model for the victor. Babe-to-be, it is a place of endless interest, a place of endless study, even to its uttermost parts and to its tiniest detail, this place that is holding out its arms to you, and I would that you might know early 85 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE in your stay so that it may redound to your eternal profit, " commonplaces are the raw material of greatness; in common- places we find our thrones." April 1. See, see, Madame April has come up golden-footed into the valley. The air is soft-freighted with the smoky, earthy breath of smouldering, marsh- turned loam. The pink shafts of early day still lie on the eastern horizon. The cowslips are yellow buttons on the fresh green middy of spring, for lo, " the winter is past, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land." Little Ego, they are making this meek, erstwhile frost-bit earth over new for you, sweeping it, and garnishing it afresh with greening grass in the spring run, and fat gray catkins on the alders, subtly trans- muting the meanness of dingy brown to the glory tints of budding summer. I am carried away with Thoreau's problem: What is the first thing that stirs in the spring? But though I have made honest investigation, searching broadly in my wanderings as 86 SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS " Wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy nilly blowing " I have found no answer. April 2. The faraway ting of a Sabbath bell on the clear air. Sparrows venturing on coloratura trills. Marsh fires glowing smoky red against the distant horizon. Crows cawing madly to each other; the lingering reverberations of a thundering train. The bluish, wraith-like columns of smoke from our handful of chimney-pots rising like incense to the pearly luminance of heaven. Such was the picture of our day at its beginning. Cissie Ricketty joined our little procession made in answer to the bell's invitation, over the hill to church. I wish you might see our Cissie today. I have made her a little straw bonnet out of one of my own of yesteryear, trimmed with a wreath of long preserved silk June roses which bid fair to last forever. She is inordinately proud of it, and grateful with a pitiful, doggish gratitude. In keeping with the consequent new role she has deemed it necessary to assume, she has 87 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE surprised her olive skin with a soapy bath that has put unwonted high lights upon it, and unearthed a bit of ribbon from somewhere. She sat in seeming disgust during the rather operatic rendition of the offertory solo sung by a young lady from afar, but the real state of her mind was revealed later when she remarked to me on our homeward way, " warn't it queer how a woman could be made to holler so, 'thout bein' neither scairt ner hurt? " No malice, I feel sure, was intended, though she m.ay have felt some jealousy. Andy Muffet sings in the choir, for the better display, I half believe, of his white vest and tan shoes, and he this morning occupied the chair next the visiting so- prano and made the most of it. Is Cissie interested in Andy Muffet? As she herself informs me naively, she is not one to '* hang her heart on a tree for the birds to peck at," but- — but — the more shame to me for the restricting clause I am tempted to put down. It is only a Mattie Meddler who concerns herself with the workings of another woman's heart unbidden. Worse, I am deserving, I sus- 88 SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS pect, of Aunt Idella's accusation of some time past that I could " find a romance in a pan of ashes! " April 10. Did you ever know an Irish- man's menage that was complete without a pig? Up to date, by some freak of fortune, we have been without that useful and unornamental addition to our holdings. Behold us, then, in an effort to redeem ourselves. The Miracle Man had Chu-chu in the cart directly after breakfast, with a hasty explanation concerning a certain O. I. C. to be had at a farm of country-side re- nown in the Hollow — " O. I. C," he repeated impatiently in a futile attempt to elucidate. " But, oh, I do not see, unfortunately," I complained with would-be facetiousness, planting myself firmly in the path of the meditative Chu-chu — "that is, I do not see why I am left to play the lonely part of watch-dog on the premises so often of late." That recalcitrant dimple of his (I for- got to tell you, didn't I, of a winning 89 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE indentation in his beardless right cheek?) whipped itself into play at this, but he showed no further signs of having received a broad hint. "There's a thunderstorm from over the lake about due," he parried, pointing with his whip to the eastward, where some dingy clouds spread themselves like the wings of an infinitely magnified dun hawk-moth; " suppose it were to overtake us; you know you'd never have the courage to remain out in it." This last so determined me, I had clapped on my hat, and was jabbing in the pins, before he had it well out of his mouth. He gave in reluctantly at that and we set out laughing — was there a spice of wickedness in his laugh! I have thought so since, but I was so absorbed in my triumph at the moment I could not be sure. At any rate, we had gone scarcely two miles when the warm, murky air (what un- seasonable warmth we have had now and then this year for early spring!), broke into long vivid streaks of quivering zigzagging light- ning; cows lowed in presage of the oncoming disturbance; lambs bleat; sheep bounded 90 SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS awkwardly up the hillside (their grayish festoons of wool decorate the wire fences for miles hereabouts) ; a ghostly whippoor- will set up its plaint; thunder crashed, and the rain began to fall in torrents. Now, truth to tell, a thunderstorm terri- fies me more than would a hungry, playful tiger, or the Kaiser's army in full pursuit, but I sat up stiffly and held my jaw to keep it from shaking while the lightning tickled the tips of our noses and the thunder was in a fair way to split our ear-drums; for five minutes, that is. Then I cast my eyes despairingly about the miserable tumble- down shed in which we were lucky enough to secure some refuge, and began to rave. I am not a woman for nothing. " You have no regard for me," I shrieked hysterically, doing my best to out-tempest the tempest, " or you would have made me stay at home! " The Miracle Man bit his lips. He couldn't answer an argument like that, it was plain to be seen. He seemed as comfortable, as provokingly comfortable, furthermore, as if he were leaning back in an easy-chair, looking at the picture of a storm. 91 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE ''You don't know what fear means," I quavered finally, with regret, for I hate, oh, I hate to pander to the male vanity; but there are times — times when it becomes ex- pedient, you know. And, having won him. so, as I calculated to do, he held me close, and the strong, steady, even stir of his heart comforted me ; and the tempest abated ; and — yes, we are to own that wonderful O. I. C. — though it looks to me just like a common pig- Tonight we glory in a delicately far- reaching smell of wet, greening grass, which in its drenched sweetness is like nothing else; "... the fitful storm has fied, The clouds lie piled up in the splendid west, In massive shadow, topped with purplish red Crimson or gold; the scene is one of rest." "I'm afraid you think I specialize in tragedy," I have murmured meekly to the man beside me on the porch. " Tragedy, tragedy," he scratched his head ruminatively; " literally, it seems to me, if I remember rightly, a goat-song, probably from tragedies being originally exhibited when a goat was the prize. Well, sure enough, you had mine, this time! " 92 SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS And I have been pondering over that jumbled observation ever since. April 12. Little Ego, how will you like having cave-people in your immediate ancestry, I wonder. Today I have been initiated into a fresh mystery of the wild — I was invited, yes coaxed, to accompany the Miracle Man on his round for spring muskrats, and having a weighty sense of the honor thus con- ferred, I could not do less than go. It was quite worth while, and here is a gleaning from the trip for you. In one of the traps, set in a place where the pond encroaches on a gray little break in the woods, we discovered a white weasel — a tiny creature with a long, soft, cold, sinuous body, an underhung jaw, and a peculiar, penetrating scent. The skin will bring more than that of the muskrat, I am told, and the money we earn in this way is to go toward a layette fund. Delightful prospect, but — poor little white weasel! How It happens that my family Is more important than his, I should hate to be called upon to explain. 93 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE We salve our consciences with the worn excuse: somebody would have made the capture if we had not. How sure of our- selves we mortals are! April 22. A fortnight in which old King Winter picked us up by the scruff of the neck, laughed at Madame April, and bandied us about to suit his whim. But the sun is the more a godsend as it reappears, stirring to life new chirpings in the grass, and swelling the fat buds of unripe green on the lilac trees. How life waits on its ministry! Our spotted calf, a recent arrival, its unruly head already in an encumbering poke, stretches out his long legs idly in it. Spotty Sue, who had been missing for some days, descended wanly from the haymow to bask on the woodpile. I followed cer- tain pitiful mewings which she left in her wake, and discovered three tiny gray kit- tens, whereupon she returned and set about her maternal duties anew. Dear Spotty Sue, with pleading eyes and motherly solicitude, she seems a being deified. With what congenial indoor evenings, memorable in the flight of time, have we 94 SPRING SMILES AND FROWNS improved the interim of the sun's absence! The Miracle Man says he knows we are mates because we both like to sit in our stockinged feet, we invariably say " Hop along, Cassiday " to any frog which ven- tures into our path, and neither of us can carry a tune. I smiled over my sewing at that. I am stitching a little night-dress with a draw-string in the hem to keep a wee pair of feet cozily warm. " Sister Susie's sewing shirts for soldiers," he mocks when he discovers me in the act. " For soldiers! " I protest. " See, see, it looks charming on her — " holding it out at arm's length. And then perhaps because the Miracle Man feigns to doubt my sanity, and insists upon a change of occupation, I put the little gown aside, and read to him from a new magazine a story in which the hero stands with a gardenia in his buttonhole and a delicate cup in his hand, sipping chocolate and telling some other man's wife of his love for her. I try to imagine my Miracle Man in like situation, and find the thing so incongruous, I laugh till Cissie Ricketty and her younger sister 95 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Norine, who are making candy in the kitchen, thrust curious heads in at the door — a laugh in which my sole auditor joins so derisively, I toss the tale aside for an old, old novel. " Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! " I begin in the reaction. '' Asylum is good," growls the Miracle Man under his breath, with shocking slanginess. So we are obliged to fall back upon the mail-order catalogue and the output of various seed-houses, which are often ro- mantic but never maudlin, and which in the rural districts are always distinctly in order. To betray us further, we have been knov/n to desert Hume's Philosophy and Ibsen for them. Little Ego, all this by way of warning — or rather, preparation. Will you, with true modern tendency, attempt some day to reform this hopelessly commonplace old father and mother of yours? There is a wide field, I must admit, ready to your hand. 96 CHAPTER VIII With the March of Things May 1. We have had the sensation of the year. Who should come to us in a dazzHngly accoutred automobile this morning, but June Craddock going a-Maying, and driving her own car like an expert. June is a wonderful woman — a clear exponent of the modern capable type, and withal (I believe I neglected to enlarge upon this) as lovely as her name. It is hard to imagine that such gold tints exist (outside of a story-book) as her excellently well-cared-for hair shows, her skin has the delicacy of texture of a Mariposa lily; and her little even teeth in their flexible red sheath of lip, when she laughs, are a continual fascination. The Miracle Man, who came out of his shop at the honk of her horn, actually had on his carpenter's apron, and was running his hands good-naturedly through 97 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE that thick, red, hirsute jungle of his. But — be prepared for a surprise, Httle Book of My Heart, I watched with both eyes and well-concealed belligerence for that critical, characteristic oblique glance afore- said, and saw never a vestige of it. It's the unexpected that always happens, isn't it? As the children say in the old, old game: " Here we go, 'round and 'round, by the rules of contrary." How June's merry chatter takes the dull edge from things! Already she has been all over the place, not neglecting the shop, for she says she loves the smell of pine shavings. She's as tactful as she's merry, too. I was glad to be left to my own devices with the dinner — for, perversely, I dislike an offer of help from a guest — a fact she must have discovered by intuition. Remembering the slaw-cutter episode, however, and being of a firm mind to avoid catastrophe in this instance, I was so slow and painstaking as to barely leave time at the noon hour to " slick " my hair and slip into my new white wash-silk ma- ternity dress. The two came in together, chatting like old friends, and swinging their hats 98 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS like a pair of school-children. He frankly delights in the beauty of her, as who would not? We secured, after some persuasion, her consent to stay for a few days, and I do not know that I ever saw him more contented at any ultimatum in his life. His talk at dinner was quite edifying. Indeed, he even made use of a Latin phrase or two, and when I managed to get him aside to quiz him about it later, he said those were trump cards he kept up his sleeve for emergencies. May Eve. This is the eve the fairies grant the desires of those who have faith in them, especially those who step in the primrose ring. Dare I enter that charmed circle tonight, I wonder, with a foolish wish of my own? Little book, little book, I haven't put down all I wanted to say today, and the reason was not for lack of time, for they gave me an hour in which I was supposed to be taking a nap. I have tacitly promised you my whole heart, and you shall have it. Strange new queries are humming in it, like bees in a clump of candytuft. Query 1 : After all, is any normal man really 99 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE proof to beauty in the concrete? Query 2: Does he compare me, consciously or unconsciously, to her? Emerson, you know, has said somicwhere that the lover should never compare his beloved with any other woman. I have set these things down with reluc- tance. I am adding with still greater re- luctance, and I trust no jealousy (I have only contempt for a jealous person), I feel like a little brown turtle shorn of its last mark of adornment, and I wish, oh, I wish I could creep into my carapace! May 8. Another week has gone over our heads with incredible swiftness and tran- quility, leaving scarcely so much as a feather to mark its flight. June and I have scoured the woods in every direction, delving deeply into the green gloom, answering the love-calls of the birds, wash- ing our faces in the dew and gathering the lavender-tinted windflowers in their silvery down on the hills. More, we have talked volumes. Who is the kindly French psy- chologist who indorses woman's chatter, with the claim that it is more important to the race than any literature because by 100 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS its iteration babes learn to talk? If this be true, mine will not be lacking for able tutorage when the time comes. June has just left for home, the Miracle Man taking her with Chu-chu as far as Cull Prairie, where she was obliged to leave her machine after an accident to a tire yesterday. She looked radiantly pretty behind that filmy veil of her's, light as a gossamer against the matchless rose of her cheeks. That last merry peal of her laugh I suspect was due to Chu-chu's stopping at the first hill. (Chu-chu, by the way, is what is known as a " courtin' horse *' hereabouts — which, however, has no refer- ence to his own amours.) I waved my handkerchief to her for the last time at the turn in the road, and then went back into the house and stood before the mirror in my bedroom and tried to make myself believe that the lump in my throat was due to her leaving. Really, I do not know what is the matter with me. Of this much only am I sure, I look the least attractive I ever did in my life, so little, indeed, I am reminded of a time when as a child I once stood and stared in horror at the caricature of my thin self in 101 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE a convex mirror. So Nature makes us pay to the uttermost farthing! Aunt Marietta, who knows little of me now (I have not brought myself to the point of confiding in her yet), sent me a white satin girdle with a note for my birthday this morning — the first personal correspondence I've had in weeks. I promptly had hysterics. Also, there ar- rived by the same post, an ivory-backed hand-mirror which the Miracle Man had ordered sent out from the city. Gross extravagance, I moaned, thrusting it upside down into its silk-lined case. How the little Foxes of the Selfish Heart creep in and nibble the vines of the spirit! May 11, An elfin piping — a microphonic chorus in all the land. The languor of spring has laid its finger on me, and I haven't felt so well today. Also, factor of chiefest importance, I have had time to think of it. The Miracle Man has been away from home all day, working on a neighborhood barn. He came home late tonight, silent as a tomb and sullen as a bear. I had kept supper waiting nearly an hour, and the potatoes were 102 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS fried to a frazzle, and the tea infused to that new shade of deep orange known in fashionable circles, I believe, as tango. Of course I was " fussed," and it made my headache worse. And — oh, I might as well out with it — I attacked him. I was tragic — tragic as Aunt Marietta gets on occa- sion (it's dreadful to have anything like that in your blood). I clasped my hands in hieratic gesture, too, and threw back my uncoifed head (the exigencies of the toilette annoy us little here, and my hair will never stay " put " at the nape of my neck). " You can smile at her! " I ac- cused in a trembling and pizzicato voice that was a fine imitation of Screechy, the hunting owl, when he tells his woes to the darkness, at night, on the cemetery fence. " You can smile at her! " He didn't say a word, and I went by him as majestically as the rather limited space would allow, into the other room, passing my mirror on a dog-trot and find- ing my destination at the sitting-room lounge, where I lay down, covering myself pathetically with my worsted shawl, while visions of a modern Hagar in the wilderness ran rife in my head. (Fancy Hagar in a 103 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE navy blue, brocaded Mother Hubbard! I shall bury that particular article of dress when my ordeal is over, as the Miracle Man buried the suit in which he went to make the capture of a skunk.) I had just gotten as far in the history of Hagar as where the water was spent in the bottle, when " clink, clink, clatter, clatter." I began to discover that the lord of the manor, having probably finished his meagre repast, was putting the dishes away, and preparing to wash them with a great to-do among the china. Was I mis- taken, or did my ears tell me that his movements were clumsy even beyond a reasonable male limit of clumsiness? I reconnoitered, tiptoeing, and putting my head in abruptly at the kitchen door. The lamplight fell full on the awkwardly ministering hand nearest me — it was marked with a nail laceration and dis- tinctly swollen! He hadn't told me, it seemed, because (imagine the absurdity of it) he didn't want to worry me with his small troubles, and because (I deduced), manlike, he was ashamed of what he was pleased to call his awkwardness. Well, I succeeded after a fashion in 104 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS bandaging the place — one needs several varieties of skill, I discover, to be a house- mother — and once more we are reeking of antiseptic like a small dispensary. He lies on the lounge I have deserted — just to please me, so he says — and smiles at me now and then, a kind of a pale smile despite his protestations to the contrary, and tired, very tired. " Put another lump of sugar in the tea, love," he says twit- tlngly, quoting the loved apostle of the Red Ribbon Movement, as he does sometimes when I fail of sweetness. Dear God, recoin me for his spending, I pray in the intervals of watching him. Create within me a new heart, large enough for true loving and with self shut out. And oh. Little Ego, if you should hap- pen, upon your arrival, to discover a little bald spot on the head of the woman you must needs call mother, remember it was put there by the coals of your father's heaping! May 15. Another wash day in the ever- lengthening series, with Norine Ricketty, who is seventeen, and Cissie's indifferent substitute, at the helm. 105 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Life is all very, very new to Norine. I have read in her eyes all day that she thinks it the height of madness to hang over a blankly unresponsive washtub when the skies are unutterably blue, the creek breeze stirring the young grasses and the redwing sounding his inviting, if mysterious, 0-ka- lee. (Half true, little girl, half true; and as subtle as half truths always are.) Norine is so little like Cissie, or any other member of her family for that mat- ter, that I am set wondering about that strange force that for w'ant of a more clearly defining name we call heredity, and how it, among other vaguely understood but powerful forces, disports itself among the humankind. She is clean, strangely clean, and pretty after the meaningless fashion of the stiff, highly-colored china doll so popu- lar with our grandmothers. Her eyes are quite as blue, with a gun-metal dullness over- casting them, her chin and forehead quite as china-white, her back quite as rigid. Her cheeks are the hue of pink japonicas, and her hair warm-colored as ripe oats. She has no nerves, I judge. In any event she can sit stone-still until one is seized with the desire to galvanize her into action, 106 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS a condition arising, I fancy, rather from the gauche fear of doing the wrong thing than from any unwilHngness to move. She perches a gigantic bow of frayed scarlet ribbon, Hke a monster intoxicated redbird, at the top of her head, and makes eyes at Andy Mufifet, who has been plowing the garden-plat. (Whoever taught Norine to make eyes?) In token of his appreciation of her effort, Andy is whining dismally on his flute on the porch this evening — an occupation he alternates with a running, inflectionless recital concerning a recent " social " at Cull Prairie at which, according to his version, he was quite lionized. She flatters him whenever he speaks, with that most primitive and compelling feminine flattery — taking a silently re- spectful inventory of him, while cuddling to her breast Spotty Sue, who is wrapped in her scarf. Meanwhile, supper is in process of prep- aration. By the way, is that the vehement odor of burning bacon that assails my nostrils? Little book, your pardon a mo- ment. . . . The bacon was charred, but that's the least of the problems that con- 107 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE front me. In passing the window, I saw Andy reach out a bold arm in the growing dusk and place it about the shoulders of the little girl beside him — the little girl, I learned today from a slighting remark from his own lips, he considers distinctly beneath him in a social way. And she, dryad of the woods that she is — why, she simply lifted her corn-silk lashes, and parted her Madonna mouth, and looked up at him with an expression that said as plainly as any words, that she would no more have thought of reproving him for the act than she would have thought of reproving a clean white angel for smiling at her out of a rift in the sky. May 18. Norine and I have had a frank talk anent the conventionalities of life and the reasons for their existence, and while I took up the role of instructor in it, she seemed not to resent the circumstance in the least. On the contrary, the little thing actually bridled, and there was a sug- gestion of triumph in her manner that might lead one to suspect she had tres- passed wilfully on another's possessions — only that Andy is so ridiculously young. 108 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS Further, she gave me a pitying contempla- tive look out of those serene blue eyes of hers, which, being interpreted, probably meant: So you really think it necessary to ensconce oneself behind a hedge of make- believe thorns of thought and manner, do you? I'm sorry, but I presume I could hardly make you understand the delights of the free sunshine of unrestrained give and take. And again I am reminded, life is so very, very new to this child-woman, and the shadows of spring, which are like no other shadows at all in all the world, are on all the valley, bewitching us into who knows what. Who is to blame, little gaudy butterfly Norine, if you seek your natural heritage in the flower of admiration, and own as your sole philosophy: " take the gifts the gods provide you " ? Even a gaudy butterfly may have its resources. She pretended not to notice, though I saw her knuckles whiten with her clutch on the tin dipper from which she was drinking, and her cheeks flame like poppies, when Andy appeared in the porch tonight with his flute, and I think I know 109 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE why. She has held up for his reading the deHcate waking woman-side of her, and he has grossly misunderstood. " Here's to you, colleen," smiled I silently over the rack of laundered clothes that represented our day's work. She showed her resourcefulness in another way, too. A swarthy faced gypsy woman from a wagon on the road came up to the door with the nightfall, and forcing her way in, emptied into her ragged skirt, held bag-fashion, a plateful of boiled pota- toes designed for breakfast, and departed without a " thank you." Returning, she was about to renew her exploits, when Norine, in a burst of inspiration, secreted herself behind the door and barked like a dog. The imitation was truly marvelous, and moreover effectual. " Here's to you, col- leen," murmured I again — this time, I am constrained to say, from the recesses of a corner where I was hiding. May 19. Will wonders ever cease? We have staged at the Rollin B. Barney abode tonight a party — an evening party — undeniably real, no matter how unique. Dramatis personse: the master of the house 110 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS himself in his arm-chair at the window, legs crossed, frame tilted at a perilous angle, his whimsical smile playing over his large mouth at the strains of Humoresque proceeding from the new graphophone which arrived this morning by parcel post (to- gether with a dozen records) as a surprise for me; the mistress of the house, beaming absently and indiscriminately, and sneaking away at intervals for a confab with her beloved book; the Misses Ricketty and Andy Muffet, all in gala attire, and with ears wide to the music. Behold the gor- geousness of Andy in a new mail-order suit of a pronounced amethyst shade — ''snappy," the catalogue designates it, I believe. (How he pored over tha.t same catalogue to make his choice, lying on his stomach, infant fashion, on the sitting-room lounge!) Observe the keen consideration for minu- tiae — the white tie beneath his cherubic chin, with the skull-and-cross-bones scarf pin; the nickel badge on his lapel, with its crass modern inscription. Chicken Inspector; the long black cigar protruding from his vest pocket in positive assertion of his masculinity; his important stride (he steps like a Bantam in a flock of Plymouth 111 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Rocks); his omnipresence; his wanton good nature; his ingrained sense of his own cor- rectness. Norine, whose tipsy head-dress is pale blue tonight in honor of the occasion, and whose frock of threadbare white is by its cut and make, clearly second-handed, still looks at him wistfully askance, so he must perforce practice his wiles on Cissie. Cissie is one of those rare representa- tives of her sex who face a lack of pulchri- tude squarely. She makes no pretensions of any nature whatever, other than that a new black band confines her intractable hair, her face is a shade less sullen, and her one dress of anilin pink bears witness to a hastily joined rent, and an indifferent and rather recent ablution. Neither, seem- ingly, has she any notion of being fed out- right to the Minotaur of Andy's vanity. In one of the intervals unclaimed by the all but incessant mechanical purr of the graphophone, when Andy had repeated a finale vocally with much gusto, I heard her observe caustically, " If that's singin', cryin' must be mournful, Snookums " — (her pet name for him, bestowed in de- rision). 112 WITH THE MARCH OF THINGS But her eye and its trend belied the crispness of her speech, and I saw the dull color rise and recede under that ungirlish mask of hers when Andy retained Norine's hand unnecessarily long in a game they were playing. (It was not Adolesence mimicking Adult Life, mark you. Your child of ignorance and neglect leaps toward a rank maturity from the moment he is out of his swaddling clothes. Further, he mans his boat with the one oar — In- stinct.) An unaccountable change has come over Cissie, it occurs to me, since I saw her last, something sinister, and upon which I am unable to put my finger. Little Book, a hostess' time, you may have guessed ere now, is not her own. Just a word in parting. I perceive that in our party we shall have the usual num- ber of heart-burnings proportionately as harbored by the most elaborate fete, which is merely another case on record, I take it, to prove that " The Colonel's lady and Julia O'Grady Are sisters under their skin." And so the little social world of man's benighted making goes 'round! 113 CHAPTER IX Still Pressing On May 27. Babe-to-come, if you are a man- child, this page of your mother's heart is not for you, and you are in duty bound, should you chance to come upon it some dim and distant day, to turn it at once without reading. There! I've made myself reasonably se- cure, I hope, and may proceed to free my mind (womanwise, it is oddly disturbing to me to throttle an idea in silence). The truth is simply this: there are days, virginal days in a woman's life, when de- spite all previous conclusions to the con- trary, she despises man and his ways, both in the abstract and the concrete. In his heart of hearts he's a savage, dear little woman-child who may be reading this, a primal thing, the human in the rough, and it would not be honest to set down the most elemental history of him without making mention of the fact. All this apropos, obscurely enough, of a 114 STILL PRESSING ON tardy midweek ironing — the lilacs cajoled me out of doors on Tuesday, and laughed in my face at my faint demurrings. Who, let me ask in passing, can bury his nose in a clump of them, and doubt that God is good; yes, and that life is good, all good, even to the gripping death-end of it! Later, like all deserters of posts, big and little, I sweated out my penance in the additional effort demanded, in this case, by an undue dryness of the starched pieces: my pink print sacque with the Dutch neck, the sunbonnet to match with its two trying ruffles, the natty bungalow apron of my special pride. Today — and just here the cat steps serenely out of the bag — happening to open the closet door, my dear, listen! I came upon the print sacque on the floor, a muddy boot on top of it; the sunbonnet contended for its place with a slouchy felt hat with sagging band, and piling Pelion on Ossa, a shabby corduroy coat, distinctly " stablish " as to odor, crushed the final semblance of dignity out of that laboriously stiff apron. It was bad enough, to be sure, but I am here to relate the worst. 115 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE I took the coat down with a vicious jerk (after recovering my breath), undecided between the floor and the ragbag as to its destination, when — no, this is not a fairy story — while I dehberated, it began to argue with me, and then to plead, and finally to hold out its arms. It's as wily as its owner. How did I answer the argument, you ask? Whisper. I, a presumably sane woman, ex- school-ma'am, cohead of a household, and candidate for honors to come, retreated with the thing to my lair, spent the greater part of an hour in the unnecessary performance of mending it, talked to it, patted it, caressed it with my cheek, and hung it back over the apron! Is this the usual effect of marriage, tell me, or simply a case of '' Qiios Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ".? May 29. I've had to give up my chief indoor diversion of changing the position of the various articles of furniture about the shack. To make the place seem new, and to lend that variety which is said to give the necessary piquancy to life, I have made a practice of experimenting indefi- 116 STILL PRESSING ON nitely in this line, trying the effect of a table in the corner, for example, as com- pared to the freer situation in the middle of the room. It is hard to feel " past your usefulness," as Andy Muffet's grandmother, who has come to make her home with the Muffets, says, expressing the hope, neverthe- less, that she may live until the varnish wears off the new chair the Prairie Sewing Society gave her for her birthday. I am unduly conscious of myself as I rise and walk about. A vagrant sense of something — something for which I have no explana- tion and no name, overwhelms me if even Norine's eye happens to dwell on me over- long. Only God's own breathing spaces really beckon me, and I prowl ardently in that thing of beauty to be — my flower garden — or lie listlessly under the eye of the spiked sun in Heaven, watching idly the passing of the white cloud flotillas. Curiously enough, even that fails to awaken in me real response, though I have never before been proof against such ministra- tion in my life. My spirit wanders forth on wayward feet in the burgeoning green, past the little Eden of cream-v/hite locust blossoms a-hum with the giddy bacchanale 117 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE of the bees, to the bleak spots in my ex- perience. I feel a strange sense of kin- ship with the gnarled old apple-tree at the orchard gate — the one with the single pink clump of buds in its sparse foliage, and which, in the proper course of things, will be hewn down another season. If I die in my ordeal, I must remember to ask God why is Peter Ricketty's ninth baby. June 1. " Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." My veins are singing rivers of delight. Roses, wild roses everywhere, pale pink to deep red, golden-hearted and fragrant as the breath of the gods, stirring the fires of ideality in our souls. How lavish be- yond belief is the Donor, filling our hands so full of the blessedness of earth, we are obliged to cry, " Stop." " Somebody," said stolid-seeming Cissie, who came up the path this morning with an entrancing armful, " somebody mus' care 'n awful sight fer us — somebody that'd take the trouble t' count out all o' them pink leaves s' careful." I was sur- prised to see a slow tear splash on the pink blossoms as she said it. 118 STILL PRESSING ON For some reason, Cissie is not herself, but I have had Httle time in which to try- to win her confidence. Andy Muffet, who is our gardener-now-and-then (Cissie sniffs, and says he uses a hoe hke a pickaxe), has claimed the whole of the stage today. His excuse for doing so is that he has had a place offered him in the mill, of which he is more than proud, old Joel Tibbs, the present miller, who, it seems, has had him in training, off and on, for some time, being about to leave. He acquainted us with the news immediately upon his arrival, swagger- ing with importance, and nothing would do but that we must visit the scene of his future labors at once. So Cissie and I this afternoon have duly admired the ob- scured view from each white-clogged win- dow, and sniffed in the musty, floury odor, and stepped upon the scales to be weighed, and even invaded old Joel's bachelor apartments in the little mill house hard by, so reeking of rank tobacco that our stay was brief. Andy offered to walk home with Cissie from this point, with an alacrity that told me he was planning to have the evening free to sit on the porch as usual with Norine, whom I have kidnapped for 119 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE my own, and boast of his success and his prowess. Somehow, I do not Hke the idea of even such a harmless-seeming wolf as he playing fast and loose in my girlish sheepfold. And I have not a mother's voice in the matter. I sit at my window and worry and watch with the futile concern of a mother-hen w^ith ducklings. Last night I went to sleep with my head on the sill. June 2. That implacable little bravo, Fate, tired, no doubt, of seeing me lie idle on the chess-board of things-that-be, has begun to shuffle me about with a ven- geance. I am on my way to Aunt Mari- etta's. Aunt Marietta, I learned this morning by letter, is ill and wants me. I have premonitions — not particularly with regard to her illness, for she says it is merely one of her old attacks of " nerves," but vague ones I can't locate, with regard to leaving. But then, my premonitions are like weeds, springing up anywhere on small provocation, and flourishing in any soil. I shall not be gone longer than three days, I plan, and I have left careful orders, including instructions as to the hour and 120 STILL PRESSING ON place of meeting me at my return. What important creatures we women of family come to believe ourselves! Later. A motor truck has just jarred by the front window of this flat like a djinn of destruction. The buzzing city, a sooty mass of bricks and mortar, hard at heart as its concrete pavings, lies below in the summer sun. Bartering here, bartering there, and greed, the septic poisoning, at work at its vitals! How does any one ever endure its immutable clutch and sphinx-like gaze, day in and day out, with- out change? A glimpse at its tinselled trappings, its sparkling night-life, its poly- tinted confusion — yes — I enjoy it as I might a taste of caviar, but, as a regular diet, how, how find it palatable? This was the question I put to Aunt Marietta, who was lying back, pouting, in her easy-chair, in a flowered dressing-gown, having been basely deserted by Aunt Idella, who, it appears, is out on the trail of a " new cult." Aunt Marietta is per- fectly contented with it, however, she maintains. Poor exotic soul, she is horrified at my tanned arms and roughened nails and 121 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE sunburned nose, to say nothing of the " chief- est revelation " when I removed my ulster. *' The place will get you, if the loneliness of it does not," she laments, modifying her lachrymose prediction. " You are part and parcel of it already." Poor Aunt Marietta! Alone here in my room, I close my eyes and feel the coolness of the blessed green of leafage of that de- spised place, the unanalyzable delight of its colorful skies, the caress of its fluting and quivering breeze, yes, even the wrench of the wind in spiteful mood; and wonder, ** With thou beside me," my Miracle Man, " Singing in the wilderness," was ever a transplanted thing more satisfied with the plat of its adoption? June 5. The jerking and chugging and lengthy stops of this so-called milk train are driving me mad. It seems to me as if I have been away from home a month, and I feel soiled and crumpled and fidgety in spite of myself, while I admire and envy the sweet, unmoved placidity of the white-haired elderly woman across the aisle, the one with the handsome turban 122 STILL PRESSING ON and the cloIsonn6 chain and the long white gloves. (Little girl-child who may be read- ing this one day, if I should go out of the world when you come into it, I do not want you to think of your mother as hav- ing been a person who despised pretty, womanly trifles, neither as agreeing en- tirely with the woman who asserted that clothes are capable of giving a sense of well- being that religion can never give. That there are times when they contribute to the mind's serenity, I shall not attempt to deny, in spite of a personal prejudice, born, no doubt, of having viewed them for years over the dividing line of a long series of desires crucified.) Meantime, my foolish premonitions, which I have been unable to down in my absence, occupy the time in thronging about me. Ridiculously enough, I do not know what I fear. At the station. There is no one here to meet me. Why this cavalier desertion? A half hour of waiting has availed nothing. If only I had an inkling of the reason. Perhaps I 123 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE could hire a conveyance, but I have no idea where, and I do not feel equal to the exertion of finding out. I hang on the kindly offices of Peter Ricketty, who is in town, I discover, with a starey look in his eyes, and a voice so thick as to make his utterance practically unintelligible. Home! Yes, actually. I confess I had given up all hope of arriving at this little caravansary by the road alive. Peter Ricketty, in some freak of drunken en- deavor, drove all the way at breakneck speed, laying the whip heavily on his crippled nag, singing at the top of his voice, and refusing to listen to any pro- tests, or answer any questions. The rank odor of his whiskey and tobacco-laden breath is still in my nostrils. I feel as if I had been dreaming, and was not yet awake. Maybe I am crazy to sit here telling my woes to the Book o' My Heart in such a time as this, but I might as well so indulge myself, to all intents and pur- poses; there is no one else at hand. Like one under a spell, I've kindled the kitchen fire and put some water in the kettle for 124 STILL PRESSING ON tea I do not seem to need. . . . Some one has just appeared at the bend in the road toward which I have been straining my eyes. By a flash of flapping pink and the gallant stride of the narrow-hipped wearer, I should say it is my usual rescuer. June 6. I am still minus the mate of my bosom, but I think I can say that my mind is at least a little easier on that score; that is, if there is any room in it just now for ease. I shall never forget my interview with Cissie yesterday noon, though I live to be a hundred. Poor child, if I had been a grim Inquisitor there could not have been more of fear in her slant brown eyes or greater determination in her approach. Gone entirely was the ungirlish mask of her customary wearing; her face was white, dead -white and tear-marked, and its ex- pression so plainly that of grief and re- morse that the veriest child could not have failed in its reading. But her first thought was of me. " Ye'U be wan tin' to know about yer man," was what she said, jerking the sentence out with an effort; " he's all right; he's gone after Andy." 125 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE " After Andy? " I echoed weakly, com- pletely in the dark. " Yes'm, Mrs. Barney; Andy, he's made trouble, awful trouble; an' he's gone — nobody knows where. I had to tell Mr. Rollin, pa bein' not fit." She threw herself onto the floor rigidly, with a tearless sob. I opened my mouth, and closed it again with a snap. A light broke in on me. For the first time, I placed my vague fears as having to do with Norine and Andy. "It — it is never our poor little Norine he has made a victim of ? " I forced my- self to ejaculate feebly, at last. Cissie crumpled visibly ; then she looked up like an animal at bay — a poor dumb thing in a trap, and I got the shock of my life. " It's me an' him 's done the wrong," she burst forth as if the words had been hot lava, " me an' him. An' — an' that ain't all. Norine knows, an' she's took to her bed. I guess I've broke the pretty little heart of her — an ugly, underhand wart like me! " June 7. Cissie and I are still groping our way alone together through the maze of 126 STILL PRESSING ON things — to nothing. For who can recall the yesterday which he has marred and furbish it up so that its consequences will not abide with him today, yes, and ofttimes through all the days to come, hard and relentless though the reckoning may seem? The question is too big for us, and we sit and hold hands wordlessly over it, while going over and over the ground in thought. " Oh, I didn't know, I couldn't know, Mis' Barney," is the burden of this girl- woman's cry, through tears that are a bitter baptismal chrism of tardy-born knowl- edge; and in an extenuating summing-up, I remember the stultifying poverty she knows, the lax mother-care, her natural jealousy of a fairer sister to whom such desirable things as came their way have always poured out like an essence. ("When she was ten, a lady give her a doll, an' said nar' a word to me," she says among other things, in bitter reminiscence. "An' — an', oh. Mis' Barney, when first Andy used to meet me at the head o' the lane, what made me the happiest o' all was to think maybe somebody liked me better'n her fer all her pretty face an' the shine to her 127 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE hair. I'd — I'd — I guess I'd 'a' done almost anything to make it so! ") It is a sober and still day, uneventful, and long as the spine of a diplodocus, but that it will leave its mark on both of us goes without saying. June 8. Mis' Muffet has put out her maternal antennae — now that it is too late. For the first time in months she de- serted the fastnesses of her retreat in the shadow of the smithy, and swooped down upon us like a galleon sailing. Cissie fled to the haystack, and I stood up, refusing to play the role of spider for her, when she seized the chair I designated and dragged it near my own. All the time she kept up a bass denunciation of everybody con- cerned in this that has come to pass, or that she imagines in any way concerned — except her Andy. " I never dremp o' no sech a thing, no, sir, I didn't! " was her continual reitera- tion. And, " No, madam," I was minded to answer, " m.ost of the realities of life lie just over the rim of our dreams." But I kept my own counsel and struggled with my temper, while I ached to tell her, 128 STILL PRESSING ON as every school-ma'am in the land has ached sometimes to tell some mother, " Yes, my dear woman, it is quite possible for him to do wrong, even though he happens to be your son." " He ain't of age, an' I'll never give my consent to him marryin' no Ricketty," she announced flatly at last, with a firmness that sent my heart into my shoes. I am free to say that I hardened that organ to Mis' Muffet then and there, but there was a little gulp in my throat for all that v/hen she started for the door, and I saw that she went blindly for her tears. " An' I was that tickled when he got the place in the mill," she was saying with the naivette of a child, and with a shakiness of voice she strove vali- antly to control, " I give our dog Ponto a hull sausage fer his supper! " June 9. The strays have returned, the Miracle Man pale and unsmiling and ab- stracted as a Trappist. He says little, but I read meaning into what he does not say. We have never before been separated so long in our wedded life. He has been worried, and it has not been an agreeable 129 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE trip. Andy acts like a prisoner, but his round, pretty boy's face is little changed, and he eats heartily. (I had baked beans for supper, and he passed his plate for a third helping.) Cissie, whom I finally prevailed upon to come to the table, for her part, scarcely touched a mouthful. At first sight of Andy, I thought she would faint. Alone with my Miracle Man, I have suc- ceeded in worming from him some of the details of the chase. Characteristically, he takes no credit to himself, saying that any one who had known Andy from his in- fancy could be reasonably certain of his movements, and that it demanded no Sherlock Holmes to trace him and a boy cousin he had induced to accompany him on their way West. The boy cousin, it appeared, had soon tired of his bargain, and, when found, Andy was alone on a depot bench, chewing dejectedly on the contents of a huge bag of peanuts, his big eyes moist with tears. (Under the Binet test, I imagine he would be about five years old.) I fancy him slipping his hand into his pursuer's like a little man, weeping on his neck, and promising to be good. 130 STILL PRESSING ON Just now he is asleep on the lounge, his arm curled under his head, his chest rising and falling peacefully, his long, curling lashes sweeping his Greuze cheeks. Cissie kneels at the window, her arms folded on the sill, her unslept eyes peering into the dark, her inner vision intent on what I cannot say, traveling the usual way of woman — to the cross — alone. Little Ego, a wonderful bit of news for you before I close the book. Mis' Muffet returned tonight in all that adipose dignity of hers, determined, as she intimated, to have her say out and make clear her stand. In her first paroxysm of wrath, however, her eye happened to fall on a little bonnet I had been embroidering for you — a little white bonnet, dear, with blue ribbon rosettes. She stopped short, picked it up, smoothed it with a huge hand, and burst into tears. Since then she has been as wax in our hands. Little Ego, Little Ego, only think what it means! Already you have had a part in the world's work. Is it not wonderful, indeed? June 10. We have had a wedding — just imagine — a wedding at high noon, 131 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE by special dispensation, at The Cabin, today. I was up betimes to make the cake, tiptoeing back and forth with a testing-straw between my lips, after I had it in the oven, like a huge, imbecile robin looking for a place to build a nest. And one layer was brown, and another red, and a third white to prove beyond perad venture it was a gala cake, and when all were in their places on the baking rack, I went down on my knees beside the oven door in a sort of wordless supplication that the whole might turn out worthy the occasion. And my prayer was answered; really, let me set it down for my own satisfaction: that parti-colored creation of art stood up properly, bore its icing like a major, and looked almost intelligent. (If only I could preserve this, my chef-d'ceuvre in some kind of a cake-mausoleum for the inspec- tion of future generations!) The warm, fragrant breath of its baking that penetrated every nook and cranny in the house had barely died away when the young minister who has newly taken charge of our country church — a nice boy, with sincere eyes and an understanding smile — arrived, having walked cross-lots 132 STILL PRESSING ON through the woods. After him came our mild, if powerful, smith and Mis' Muffet, the latter chastened as to smile and re- cherche as to manner and wearing a black silk dress that needed only nickel trim- mings to make her resemble an old-fash- ioned parlor stove. I was relieved to see her shake hands with Norine Ricketty, who decided to leave her bed for the event, and who stood at the door in her second- handed frock, red-eyed and staring. (Norine arrived early with the jumbled excuse for the remainder of the family: " Pa's anussin' Cicero's sore foot, an' ma ain't gone nowheres sence her front teeth is out." And there was our bride, like a voluptuous figure of brown bisque, with some, if not quite all, of her old manner back, and her bridegroom, who has a wholesome respect for her, if nothing else, despite the inferior social position he has been taught to think of her as occupying — red-mouthed and with the hangdog air of one emerging from a penitential cell, his baby face actually sobered. And the sun shone, though the weather for the most part, of late, has been as indifferent and un-summerlike as possible, 133 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE save in unduly warm snatches; and the birds sang in supernal staves, ecstatic melodies, perfect sapphics of sound. On the whole, I think we achieved the savor of a real wedding, and only a single flagrant incident marked the occasion as not being of the elite. Norine looked up vindictively in one of the pauses of the service and said to me in an audible whisper, that she " reckoned Cissie'd put him " (the bridegroom) " through a course of sprouts." I am not certain that I know what a "course of sprouts" is; but I feel sure that Andy, for all his present meekness, needs it. June 19. I had my first visit from the bridegroom this morning, when he brought me some chick-feed, filling an order. (He and Cissie are at the Muffet home next the smithy for the time being.) He was as unconscious and serene in his white miller-boy suit and cap as if the current of his life had never been so much as breeze ruffled, so embedded is he in the stucco of his youthful conceit. But he is fairly capable in a simple 134 STILL PRESSING ON business transaction, and his sunny good- nature disarms one. He bent his round, chunky, amiable back for a half hour in the strawberry patch to show his good-will, the luscious red berries contrasting well with his plump white fingers, and admired at length, at my bidding, the delicately green alfalfa of our pride. On two things, chiefly, do I stake my hope for his future: the dignity of being a married man (he will be twenty-one in September) appeals to him as does a weapon of warfare to a small boy, and though the fascination may be dimmed with time, he will grow naturally with the ties of responsibility. He announces with the air of one who has lived down a reckless and tragic past: " No more crooked work for me; it makes things too uneasy for a man." In all truth, I should think the last few weeks might have impressed at least that one practical and ever present aspect of all sin permanently upon him! June 30. For a solid week, Norine and I have helped put the little mill house in order for our newly weds, and yet we linger at the task. 135 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE (Norine, whose currents of feeling run infinitely more shallow, I suspect, than do Cissie's, has forgotten in the novelty of it that there is such a thing as a possible lover in the world, though even old Joel's eyes follow her pretty hands as she picks gingerly among the unique assortment of pipes and fish-hooks and buttons and ten- penny nails we are attempting to reduce to sufficient order to enable him to remove them from the place.) These unpremeditated weddings entail work — and scrimping, often. They have had to do with the barest necessities in the furniture outlay. But Cissie has lost her mask in the undertaking. She looks human, and sufficient unto herself. Life has brought her the unexpected boon of a home of her own, and, watching her, I send up a silent prayer that she may not have to go too far alone on the way, nor know the warping touch of over-harsh criticism. Andy came up whistling this afternoon while we rested on a bench outside, and Norine and I exchanged significant looks to see him stop and clean his feet on the mat at the door — an act entirely new to 136 STILL PRESSING ON him. As true reformation, like many another great thing with which we are acquainted, commonly manifests itself in a small be- ginning, my hope for him brightens. 137 CHAPTER X Fruition July 2. A sharp dearth of events — a vacuum after the excitement of the last few weeks — has thrown us deep into our- selves for social nourishment. We have fallen back upon lover-like ways, walking hand in hand in the garden at evening; riding out under quiet stars where the young blades of corn whisper their nightly prayers, where the barley lies golden in the dusk, and the green-gold fireflies dart like friars' lanterns; returning in speech to the phraseology of our earliest love letters. A lover and his lass are we — almost, and then. Little Ego, you come back, delicate, palpitating keynote to a poignant recollection, and we are reminded of the greater riches of wedded love — the love which is " all made of faith and service." By what name shall we call you when we are obliged to attach to you some- thing so prosaic as the name of man or woman — that is the question that is troubling us now. 138 FRUITION We have run the whole gamut from Anne to Zachariah, and each in its turn has fallen absurdly short. July 8. My flower beds for their idyllic beauty ttnd sweetness might be tiny rep- licas of those of some old-fashioned Eden. Rosemary, lavender, sweet-william, old man, poppies, nasturtiums, all are here, a riotous arabesque of color. How patient the buds are! So patient, I would that I might learn waiting from them, waiting which is woman's lesson no less than their's. One of the odd vagaries of memory brings to my mind a garden, in which I played as a child, a narrow, walled-in city garden at whose limited confines even the wooden, one-armed doll companion of those hours v/as wont to protest, being found most frequently at the very edge of the wall. I have wondered since, with the recollec- tion of much idling, why we needs must spend so many years before the day of our usefulness, when there is so much to do in this world and so little time to do it in. 139 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE Preparation, however unconscious, is not that the secret? How could I know that a painted, crippled doll was a lesson in mothering from life's great book on the economics of love? Little Ego, how soon shall I have my reward for the study of that lesson? July 10. History repeats itself even across the centuries. We have entertained angels unawares. The Miracle Man was planing a board at the door of his tent, and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and lo! three men stood by him. (It seems a pity to be obliged to add such hopelessly modern touches as the chugging of the machine which brought them, and the patent leather shoes which encumbered their feet, which I feel sure should have been sandaled, but one may not juggle with the truth in history.) They remained for dinner, and while they talked much and genially, they re- vealed little concerning their errand. It has transpired since, however, that they are interested in the stone-quarry which is Next-to-Nowhere's chief asset. If the company they represent decide to 140 FRUITION buy, it will make all the difference in the world, I dare say, to our little hamlet. My dear, shall we yet be Next-to-Some- where, or even Somewhere itself? You should hear the chorus of the birds at dawn these mornings, and note the sparrows taking delicately frugal breakfasts from dandelion fluff. They have no sordid ambitions. For them, life is just to be glad and thank God. July 26. The ring of the hammer is heard in the land. Early and late It re- sounds, drowning the flute-like call of the v/ood-thrush at evening, and the cat- bird's mocking cry. The thing we have looked for has come to pass. The generous pagan sun looks down surprised from a milky wash of sky on our seething caldron of activity. We shall have the railroad, lodging houses, new homes — a systematic network devised by the mind of man — a cosmos which our present chaos makes possible. Where the squirrels played, Italians walk and gibber, flashing white teeth. We are at the mercy of flotsam and jetsam. Yesterday Norine and I had a call from a 141 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE blond Viking tramp with a blood-wrinkling, insane glare. He departed peaceably upon persuasion, but we shall have to pull in our latch string. The Miracle Man is so busy, I scarcely get a glimpse of him. We will share in the progress, of course, but at the cost of more separation. My spirits are barometrical. I look on with some regret and a vapid taste of emptiness. Such is the caprice of the human mind! After all, did we really want it? Do we ever know what we really want? July 30. My hour approaches, and my heart beats high with greed. Mine, mine, mine! A potent word in any language, so long as Self exists in the human soul. I might have learned to love some other woman's child — yes, but never, I fear, in the same way. The little clothes are ready to my hand; in my mind's eye I see a precious mite of curled body under the blue-striped baby- blanket, a little downy head on the crib pillow. Mine, mine, m.ine; I chant it like an incantation! 142 FRUITION If — if — that grisly '' if " that con- fronts all expectant mothers is with me still, but I shall not again set it down in words. Should it sweep me with it, when the time comes, leaving you without the shelter of mother-arms, there is just this that I want to say as a guide to you in some hour of need you may face in the future — your aegis against the world : Life is not complex; it is simple. It gives you measure for measure just as you give to it. Walk with Him who has sent you with some particular destiny in mind for you. Walk so closely that you cannot help find out what it is, and glory in the wisdom of His will. " There is no difficulty in which He cannot help you, except the difficulty you do not take to Him." A little Bible which is for you, dear, is in the top drawer of your mother's dresser. The print is not so clear as I should have liked, and the binding leaves much to be desired, but the wealth of the Indies would not be a richer legacy to you. August 26. You are here. Aline Barney, — (that is the name I had in my holy of 143 THE HEART OF A MOTHER-TO-BE holies all of the time; I never wanted a son, much less since I have seen you), — indeed, you have been here three weeks, and are therefore now no stranger, though your father who, bless his heart, has freely forgiven you your sex, and is already your willing slave, demands of you your name each day — and your business. The old doctor says you are simply a normal, everyday baby. Poor old fellow, how benighted one becomes wiling away a lifetime in the hills. We know you're a princess — a wonder- ful Celtic princess, with a red-gold halo, fat little dimpled fists, eyes that are the very counterpart of our Miracle Man's, gray heliotrope, and a mouth that is a bow of sweetness. Have you not in your retinue Cissie and Norine and Andy — yes, and June Craddock and Asking Mary, who is "asking" no longer — all of them worship- pers — idolators, if you will? The reality of your presence transcends every dream. The universe is transfigured for us. "Joy," say I, "never feasts so high as when the first course is of misery." Little Aline, the book of your mother's 144 FRUITION heart is done. It shall be put away for you, with the prayer that you may find a crumb of comfort in it some day. For the nonce (a primal christening this), " I have lifted you up to the wild wind and the warm light of the sun, That both may receive you, and make you theirs — Oh, little, glorious one! " The wild, west wind shall give you its strength — of its song and will a part, And the deep, sweet warmth of the golden sun shall lie for aye in your heart." 145 ■^i.^ !' "-a^--?*;