_She_ can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again We"re goin" to have something to _eat_; I"m just a-livin" till then.
But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that"s gone-- Mother and Momma and Girly--well, I wouldn"t like to let on Before the children, but I can almost seem to see All of "em lookin" down, like as if they pitied me, After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up With nothing but bread and b.u.t.ter, and a little mis"able cup Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can"t tell how _you_ feel, But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.
X
THE MOTHER-BIRD
She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity graven on the pa.s.sing prettiness of her little face, that the notion and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else of her you knew that she was going out to them.
She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of lonely birds of pa.s.sage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of pa.s.sage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach, which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying.
But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge.
Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would have others believe in one"s devotion to one"s children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one"s impatience to join them as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to their children in New York or Boston.
The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.
The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at all, as time pa.s.sed.
It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear in the smoking-room, or say whether she pa.s.sed from the one to the other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women"s unwritten law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship, after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
There she pa.s.sed by quick transition from the conversation of the graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to birds like her.
From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a feather remained a touching question.
There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else; she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which others wore; but she was not often seen without them.
There is not much walking-weather on a November pa.s.sage, and she was seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been equally sorrowful to learn.
Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept; but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice if not of desert.
For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering up and down the ship"s promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them, and it had doubtless come to that.
One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship"s run were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.
XI
THE AMIGO
His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody called him the _amigo_, because that was the endearing term by which he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish, and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning spirits, he was always the _amigo_, for, when he hailed you so, you could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.
The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, _amigo_!" as if we were now meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogota; and the _amigo_ clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy"s knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were, with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.
There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss him into the air as they pa.s.sed, but I flattered myself that he had a peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it might be that, Bogota being said to be a very literary capital, as those things go in South America, he was mystically aware of a common ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him, for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without withdrawing his amity.
This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a const.i.tutional irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all suffered some fall or b.u.mp or bruise which, if not of his intention, was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He went about rolling his small black head, and darting roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the ship put together.
The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare, something must be done about the _amigo_. At the conversational end of the doctor"s table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions.
He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain, however, that their prayers would have been effective with the captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could have known how accurately the _amigo_ had dramatized his personal presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a foot in front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.
The _amigo_ had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit.
Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what grotesque att.i.tudes of sonorous slumber they pa.s.sed their day, and he spared neither age nor s.e.x in these graphic shows. When age refused one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one"s continued youth. It was then that the _amigo_ gave his own age, carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him naturally to every age; and the little blond German-American boy dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the _amigo_ to recall him by tender entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two days in the strained relations following upon the _amigo"s_ sweeping him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances of propitiation from the _amigo"s_ ironical eyes and murmurs of inarticulate apology as he pa.s.sed.
He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of _amigos_; then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the second officer"s legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on board, were hit with the stick that the _amigo_ had been innocently playing shuffle-board with; or some pa.s.senger was taken unawares in his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the _amigo"s_ pa.s.sion for active amus.e.m.e.nt.
At this point I ought to explain that the _amigo_ was not traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the _amigo_ walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the two with a theory we had that the _amigo_ had been found impossible in his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark, silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie between him and the _amigo_ was. He might have been his tutor, or his uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the _amigo_, who was exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they roomed together, it was his privilege to see the _amigo_ asleep, when that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow, and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed its pleasure and its prey in waking.
It would be idle to represent that the _amigo_ played his pranks upon that shipload of long-suffering people with final impunity. The time came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did something. It was by the hand of one of the _amigo"s_ sweetest and kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going out to be a.s.signed his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the affectionate tenderness for the _amigo_ which was felt by all except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table; and it must have been with a loving interest in the _amigo"s_ ultimate well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the _amigo_ face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastis.e.m.e.nt which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the _amigo_ read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more generous.
In fact there was nothing mean in the _amigo_. Impish he was, or might be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated subordinations.
We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted on wearing a pair of gla.s.ses which had large eyes painted on them, and on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably, therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogota, but it will always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight s.p.a.ce in our lives while he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from bad.
XII
BLACK CROSS FARM
(To F. S.)
After full many a mutual delay My friend and I at last fixed on a day For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song In all that charming region round about: Something that must not really be left out Of the account of things to do for me.
It was a teasing bit of mystery, He said, which he and his had tried in vain, Ever since they had found it, to explain.
The right way was to happen, as they did, Upon it in the hills where it was hid; But chance could not be always trusted, quite, You might not happen on it, though you might; Encores were usually objected to By chance. The next best thing that we could do Was in his carryall, to start together, And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather, With the eccentric progress of his horse, Would so far drift us from our settled course That we at least could lose ourselves, if not Find the mysterious object that we sought.
So one blithe morning of the ripe July We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky That rested one rim of its turquoise cup Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up, The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat The air to one delicious temperature; And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent In barter for the balsam that it lent!
And when my friend handed the reins to me, And drew a fuming match along his knee, And, lighting his cigar, began to talk, I let the old horse lapse into a walk From his perfunctory trot, content to listen, Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar, From every trouble of our anxious star.
From time to time, between effect and cause In this or that, making a questioning pause, My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay Hope that we might have taken the wrong way At the last turn, and then let me push on, Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon, And never in the middle of the track, Except when slanting off or slanting back.
He talked, I listened, while we wandered by The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye, With patches of potatoes and of corn, And now and then a garden spot forlorn, Run wild where once a house had stood, or where An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare Upon us blindly from the twisted gla.s.s Of windows that once let no wayfarer pa.s.s Unseen of children dancing at the pane, And vanishing to reappear again, Pulling their mother with them to the sight.
Still we kept on, with turnings left and right, Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods, Or solitary; then through shadowy woods Of pine or birch, until the road, gra.s.s-grown, Had given back to Nature all her own Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope, Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope, And then quite ceased, as if "t had turned and fled Out of the forest into which it led, And left us at the gate whose every bar Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!"
My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!"
And making our horse superfluously fast, He led the way onward by what had been A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a s.p.a.ce Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place Of kindly human life: a small plateau Open to the heaven that seemed bending low In liking for it. There beneath a roof Still against winter and summer weather-proof, With walls and doors and windows perfect yet, Between its garden and its graveyard set, Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished The home whose memory it dumbly cherished, And which, when at our push the door swung wide, We might have well imagined to have died And had its funeral the day before: So clean and cold it was from floor to floor, So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill Of hours when life and death encountered still Pa.s.sionate in it. They that lay below The tangled gra.s.ses or the drifted snow, Husband and wife, mother and little one, From that sad house less utterly were gone Than they that living had abandoned it.
In moonless nights their Absences might flit, Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose And lily in the neglected garden close; But they whose feet had borne them from the door Would pa.s.s the footworn threshold nevermore.
We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs, With lighter melancholy than the glooms Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense Suggestion of a mystical dismay, As in the brilliance of the summer day We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old, Though so well kept, as age by years is told In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast, Stood new and straight and strong--all battened fast At every opening; and where once the mow Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man, Aslant from left to right, athwart the span, And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed, I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed To this point and to that point, and then burst In the impotent questionings rejected first.
What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.
Who put it there? That was unknown as well.
Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.
No neighborhood story? He had sought for one In vain. Did he imagine it accident, With nothing really implied or meant By the boards set in that way? It might be, But I could answer that as well as he.
Then (desperately) what did he guess it was: Something of purpose, or without a cause Other than chance? He slowly shook his head, And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said: "We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising, For all our several and joint devising Has left us finally where I must leave you.
But now I think it is your part to do Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring A fresh mind to the riddle"s unraveling.
Come!"