Pegeen

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

II

Archibald wakened, sniffed incredulously, sat up in his hammock bed, and sniffed again.

Yes, it certainly was coffee—good coffee, and there was a subdued rustle and stir beyond the door leading into the kitchen.

Why, of course! He was being “seen to.” Pegeen had come back.

He had not really expected her, but he might have known she was not one to put her hand to the plow and look back.

Incidentally it might be well for him to arise and shine. The Young Person who had adopted him had intimated that, if the weather cleared over night, he would be expected to paint out of doors and let her clean his quarters. When she got ready to clean she would probably clean, and he must breakfast and make his escape.

Queer how mad women, even very small women, were about cleaning things. No man could stand against them when the sacred rage possessed them. He would not think of attempting it. No more comfortable and unashamed grubbiness. He was going to be kept clean, whether he would or no. He had seen it in the gleam of Peggy’s eye. When she saw to people, she saw to them.

There was a whimsical smile on the face the man turned toward the kitchen, but his eyes were very kind. On the whole, he was rather glad he had been taken in hand. He liked the Very Small Person and there was something pleasant about awakening to an aroma of coffee and a smell of toast.

He made a hasty toilet and looked into the kitchen.

“You ready?” said Pegeen, briskly. “I forgot to ask you last night when you wanted breakfast, so I just decided to have it at eight. I’d have called you, only I heard you moving around. How d’ you like your boiled eggs?”

“I have a theory that I like them cooked two minutes,” said Archibald, humbly, “but I’ve never been able to get them that way.”

“Well, you’ll get them now. She likes hers coddled.”

“Oh, does she?”

“Yessir. I’d love to coddle you some.”

“I’ve an idea you’ll coddle me a great deal.”

Pegeen laughed.

“That’s just the way she twists things. I didn’t know anybody else did. It makes talking lots more fun, don’t it? Most people talk right straight ahead about sensible things and you’d as leave they’d stop any time. I like it when sometimes you say what you don’t mean or don’t say what you mean—not lies, you know, but all twisty, like a guessing game—’n’ then I like the things that don’t mean things—just sound as if they did,—snarks and goober snatches and such, you know.

“She read me lots of those when I had measles. Measles was the best time I’ve ever had. I went and had them right at her house when I was staying there over Sunday once.”

She flew into the other room, set the table, and came back for the coffee and toast.

“Now you sit down ’n’ I’ll cook that two-minute egg. We’ll have to fix a bed for you in the little room where you’ve got your trunk, so I can come in here and have the table all ready soon as I get here mornings. It’s kind of messy anyway, sleeping in your dining-room. It’d be nice if you could afford another hammock for your bedroom. This one helps to furnish here.”

“I’ll send for another,” said the man who was being seen to.

He got his two-minute egg, and the coffee was delicious, and the toast was crisp and browned and hot as the toast one sees in hungry dreams.

While he ate, Pegeen went out and came back with her hands full of maidenhair fern.

“You might send for some vases when you’re ordering the hammock,” she said happily, as she put the ferns in a glass of water and set them on the table. “She says it’s wicked to let a room starve for flowers and green things when you can’t walk a step outdoors without finding something that would put heart into the very lonesomest, saddest room. I always did like flowers, but I never realized about ferns and green things till she showed me, ’n’ now I like them most better ’n flowers. They’re so cool, ’n’ fresh, ’n’ kind of resting. There’s always flowers or ferns or pine branches or bayberry or something in her rooms. I guess that’s why, even when she isn’t in them, they all seem kind of as if she must have just gone through them, smiling in her eyes, the way she does. Is that egg all right?”

“Perfect. She must be rather a wonderful Smiling Lady. Where does she live?”

“Right down the other side of Pine Knob. You can go over or around, but it’s prettiest over. There’s a spring up on top with pine trees around it and a place where you can look way out ’n’ out ’n’ out. She goes up there sometimes to watch the sunset. My, but she does love things.”

“And people?” questioned Archibald, idly.

“Well, I should say! She’s the lovingest thing. Sometimes I think the Loving Lady’d be a better name than the Smiling Lady, but I guess it’s all the same thing. Loving makes smiling, don’t it?”

“Not always,” said the man. His voice rang hard, and Pegeen shot a swift, surprised look at him.

“Well, it ought to,” she said soberly. “That’s what it’s really for—except when people you love get sick or die—or are bad. ’N’ if they’re bad that’s because they aren’t loving. She says if you love hard enough you just naturally make the world smiley—only you have to be sure it’s the real, right love, the kind of love God has. She’s the funniest thing. She talks about God right out, as if He were folks, ’n’ as if He and she had beautiful times together—like my measles. ’N’ she don’t go to church so awfully much either, ’n’ once I saw her sew on Sunday. That was when they were trying to get some clothes ready for the Johnston twins that came unexpected. I asked her how she was going to fix that with God—my mother was a Presbyterian—’n’ she laughed ’n’ said she didn’t have to fix it, ’cause sewing in His name was just as good as praying in His name, ’n’ loving was a bigger commandment ’n that one about not doing any work, ’n’ those twins surely would need loving, with their mother having no back bone ’n’ their father having delirious tremors.

“It’s nice out of doors now, ’n’ as soon as I wash dishes I’m going to begin cleaning.”

“I’m off,” laughed Archibald.

“It’ll be over before dinner ’n’ I’ll only do it thorough once a week,” she called after him encouragingly, as he went away down the sunlit slope where the daisies made way for him.

Mrs. Neal, his nearest neighbor, who was working in her garden as he skirted her side yard, dropped her trowel and strolled over to the fence when she saw him coming.

She was a sociable woman. He had discovered that before and resented it. Above all things in the world he had wanted to escape from people, to be left alone with his bruised soul; but, oddly enough, he was not conscious of bruises this morning, was not even conscious of a soul, which is quite as things should be on a June morning.

And so, to the waiting woman’s surprise, he took his pipe from his mouth, bade her a blithe good morning, rested his elbows comfortably on the top rail of the fence beside her own, and smiled into her broad, astonished, and kindly face.

“My land,” said the woman. “Was it as bad as all that?”

“It was,” admitted the man.

“And here I was thinking it was a bad disposition. Just goes to show that you never can tell.”

Mrs. Neal’s tone was self-reproachful. Her face had taken on creases still more kindly.

“I told Peggy she’d got her work cut out for her; but she said if you was grouchy you needed seein’ to all the more, and that bein’ grouchy was, like as not, just not bein’ used to bein’ pleasant; but I didn’t suppose she’d get you used to bein’ pleasant as quick as this.”

Archibald’s grin held no hurt vanity. He had evidently made an uncommonly bad first impression, but his neighbor was plainly ready and willing to reverse her judgment.

“And here all the time you was only lonesome,” Mrs. Neal went on, in her fat, friendly voice. “Well, Pegeen surely is quite a kid. Now, ain’t she?”

“She is,” agreed the man emphatically. “Tell me about her.”

The woman draped her bulk more comfortably over the fence, as one who settles herself for a long social session. She always had time to visit, and next to the sound of her own voice, she loved best the sound of another person’s voice, yet she managed to accomplish an astonishing amount of work between talks.

“Well,” she began, her eyes looking past the listening man and down the winding road, “Peggy wasn’t born here. She came along one day on a broken-down cart behind a broken-down horse. A baby thing she was, only five years old, but she was taking care of folks already. I saw ’em as they went by here and the youngster was pulling a shawl up tight around her mother’s throat and shoulders. Broken down worse’n the cart and horse, the woman was. I never saw anybody more peaked and sad. Why, say, that woman’s eyes made you ache—except when they looked at Peggy. I don’t know but what they made you ache worse than ever then. The little smile that came into them looked so sort of pitiful in that face of hers. You know the kind of face—the kind that’s been pretty once and fine, but has had the youth and prettiness and fineness all killed out of it. A face that’s sort of a tombstone telling where everything worth while in a life has been buried. She’d been clear outside her husband’s class. It was easy to tell that. Land knows how she ever came to marry him. Common, drunken brute he was. Might have been handsome in a beefy sort of a way once, but drink had knocked that out of him, along with any other decency he might have had. Honest to God, if I’d ’a’ been a man I’d ’a’ started every day by going down the road and licking that man O’Neill, just for luck; but his wife wouldn’t have thanked me for it—nor Peg either. The woman didn’t love him, but she had some queer idea of duty or pluck or something hidden away in her, and she never complained and never let any one say hard things about him to her.—Just hid what she could, and endured what she couldn’t hide.

“I figured it that she’d run away and married a handsome, blarneying, good-for-nothing Irishman against her family’s wishes and in the face of all sorts of prophecies about the evil that’d come of it, and seeing as she’d made her bed she was going to lie on it without whining. I’ll bet her folks never knew how things went with her.

“She tried to teach Peggy what she could and the youngster was a good deal like her in some ways—tidy, little mite with pretty ideas about things and lots of pluck. She ain’t a whiner, no more ’n her mother, but it ain’t all plain pluck with Peg. She’s got just the one good thing that her father had to give her, ’n’ that’s cheerfulness. She’s got a disposition like one of them toy balloons, Peg has, and it’s a good thing. If it hadn’t been for that she’d ’a’ been dead, with all the responsibility and want and abuse she’s had to stand.

“She’s too old for her years, of course, and she’s got serious ways and some awfully grown-up thoughts, but she’ll never die of broken heart and broken spirit like her mother did. No, sir. You can’t down Peg. That’s the Irish in her. She’d see something cheerful and encouraging in a smallpox epidemic—’n’ she’d be out nursing the sick ones too. Well, there’s no telling what the man was himself before the drink got him. He was something a fine-souled, big-hearted woman fell in love with, and maybe a better father might have given Peggy something that wasn’t as handy to have around as her cheerfulness.”

“What became of the mother?” Archibald asked. There was a very friendly light in his eyes as he looked into the face beside him. He was going to like this neighbor.

“Oh, she dragged around, getting weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter. I’ll say one thing for O’Neill. He never beat her—not even when he was drunk. He didn’t make a living for her and he didn’t raise a hand to help her, the lazy whelp. Chopped her own wood, she did, when Peggy didn’t pick it up in the woods. The neighbors would have helped but they couldn’t do much—didn’t dare. She was so proud she’d rather starve than take charity. You couldn’t even offer it—just had to do what you could in a round-about, happen-so way.

“By and by she took to her bed and then Peggy had to do everything that got done. She surely was a wonder too—waited on her mother hand and foot, and kept things clean and cooked whenever there was anything to cook, and got wood to keep them all warm, and looked after O’Neill as if he was a bad child that she loved even if he was bad.

“Then her mother died about a year ago. That did for O’Neill. He’d been a brute to the woman, but then he’d been a brute to himself. The drink did it, and some place back in his rotten old soul I guess there was a clean spot that loved her. He was too drunk to see her buried and he kept that way most of the time for two or three months. Lord knows where he got the money for his whisky. Peggy used to help around at the neighbors, taking care of babies mostly. She’s a wonderful hand with babies. Some of the folks offered to take her on and look out for her, but she wouldn’t leave her father, and what little she made she’d use to feed him—washed for him, too, and tried to keep his clothes mended. Her mother had taught her to read and write and spell, and she went to school sometimes when she could. O’Neill’d be off for two or three days at a time and then she’d slip down to the schoolhouse. Miss Keyes, the teacher, says Peg’s the smartest scholar she ever had.”

“Couldn’t some one interfere legally and take her away from her father?” asked Archibald.

Mrs. Neal smiled indulgently.

“You don’t really know Peg yet,” she said. “We all worried a great deal and did what we could to help the child, but as for taking her away from what she thought was her duty—from somebody that was dependent on her—well, you wait till you know Pegeen O’Neill.

“O’Neill, he settled the business himself by going off on one of his sprees and not coming back at all. The Lord knows what became of him. I hope he’s dead and I guess he is, but his mind had sort of been going for a while before he left and Peggy, she has an idea that he just lost his memory and didn’t know where he belonged, or else he’d have come home to her.

“Grieved for him—that youngster did. Not exactly about her being without him, but about his being without her. She was afraid he was somewhere crazy and wasn’t being seen to properly.

“Several of us offered to take her in, after that, but what’d she do but go over to Mrs. Potter’s. She was sick—Mrs. Potter I mean—and had a little baby, and her husband’s work took him away most of the time. Poison poor, they were too. Peg she said they sort of needed her and she’d got the habit of taking care of somebody; so she took on that job until Mrs. Potter died. Then she took care of the baby until its mother’s folks came and got it last month. Peg felt real bad about the baby, but Mrs. Benderby’s husband had died in the winter and she was all alone and walking down to the village, three miles, early every morning to get day’s work and walking home, dog tired, at night; so Peg she said she’d just move over and see to Mrs. Benderby.—Gets up and has fire and breakfast at half-past six for the woman and tidies up the house and mends and has a supper waiting for the poor soul when she comes in at night. That didn’t keep the child busy though; so she took you on.”

“Good heavens!” protested the man. “It’s too much for her.”

“No, it ain’t,”—Mrs. Neal’s smile was reassuring. “It’s just a lark for her at your place and she’ll have good food up there and make a little money, and she can fix Mrs. Benderby up, night and morning, all the same. Peg’s got to take care of something with all her might and it may as well be you and Mrs. Benderby.”

“Well, perhaps it may,” agreed Mrs. Benderby’s fellow beneficiary, humbly.

After that there was a little talk of June peas and lettuce and the vicious propensities of cut worms; and then Mrs. Neal went back to her gardening, while Archibald swung himself over a stone wall into the road, over another wall into a clover field, and made his leisurely way toward the most sketchable of willow-fringed brooks.

For a while he made pretense of working, but even the brook laughed at the faint-heartedness of his efforts and the drooping willow boughs quivered with mirth and the sunlight stealing through the green leaves danced over his canvas and mocked at its futility.

“Work? In June?” sang a bird in the willows and, at the idea, all the summer world laughed with the brook.

“Smell!” whispered the clover sea, billowing away from the tree shadows where he sat.

“Feel!” crooned the breeze, touching his cheek with cool, caressing fingers.

“Look!” shouted the sun, driving shadow-throwing clouds across the low meadowland and up the far blue hills.

“Listen!” lilted the bird in the branches.

Archibald gave up the struggle. Why dabble with paints? Loafing was more glorious business.

“You’re quite right about it,” he said cheerfully to the derisive brook. “I’m a punk painter, but the Lord knew his business when he sketched in June. Come along and show me more of the canvas.”

He set off across the meadow, the brook chuckling its sunlit way beside him and together they wandered down the Valley. A companionable brook it was, full of surprises and whimsies as a woman, running quietly through brown, sun-warmed shallows, working itself into a fury against solid, unyielding stones, dreaming under overhanging elders, glooming among thick clustering pine trees, dashing noisily, recklessly, down steep slopes.

Winding and wandering, it led its comrade around the base of Pine Knob, into a bird-enchanted woodland and whirling suddenly around a sharp corner, swooped out into an open, birch-fringed glade where a host of Quaker ladies powdered the grass and butter-cups made love to them brazenly.

“There!” shouted the brook, leaping a mossy stone for sheer love of splashing, and making rainbows in the sunlight. “What do you think of June now?” With a gurgle of glee it romped away through the birches, but Archibald stayed in the glade.

A girl was sitting among the Quaker ladies. Her hair was full of golden lights. Her eyes were full of laughter. Her lap was full of flowers and puppies and kittens. A big collie dog stood sentinel at her shoulder. At her feet on the grass, two fat babies rolled about in a riotous tussle with a puppy, strayed from the lapful.

A twig cracked under the man’s foot. The dog growled warningly and the girl, glancing round, saw the intruder standing among the birches.

Apparently she was not startled, and she was as little embarrassed.

“Don’t pay any attention to him. It’s principle with him, not passion,” she said, laying a quieting hand on the dog’s head.

Archibald and she might have been meeting every day for months. Not a hint of self-consciousness ruffled her gay serenity. She made no effort to rise—merely sat there in the sunshine with young life rioting over her and round her and smiled up at the stranger out of clear, fearless, brown eyes that were used to greeting friends. There was no room for doubt. This was Pegeen’s Smiling Lady.

Archibald’s cap was in his hand. Apology was on his lips, but looking down at the group, he laughed instead of apologizing. Babies, puppies, kittens—all were staring at him solemnly, uncertainly. The collie was staring, too, with more dignity and with deeper suspicion.

Only the Smiling Lady accepted him without reserve, had no doubts about him.

“We came after flowers,” she said. “At least we intended to get flowers, but there were so many of us, and some of us had such short legs, and all of us except Sandy had such vagabond, inconsequent souls, that we just sat down and rolled around in flowers instead of picking them.”

“I’ve been sketching. At least I intended to sketch,” Archibald paraphrased.

She laughed. The laugh was as satisfactory in its way as the smile.

“Yes, it’s that kind of a day,” she admitted lazily.

She moved a wandering puppy and a kitten or two, to make room for the man on the grassy bank beside her, but there was no coquetry in the invitation—merely a matter-of-fact acceptance of another companion less reliable than the collie perhaps, less amusing than the puppies and kittens and babies, but doubtless well meaning. There was June joy enough for all comers, and she was no monopolist. And when Archibald had stretched himself out on his back beside her, she evidently considered her responsibility ended, took his well being and content for granted, and went back to playing with her young things. The young things, after their first surprise, accepted him in much the same tranquil way. Only Sandy, the collie, maintained a haughty aloofness, stood manifestly on guard.

One of the kittens made a tentative excursion along the man’s recumbent form and curled up in a soft ball on his chest. A puppy of inquiring and friendly turn of mind chewed two or three of the newcomer’s fingers in turn, then gamboled awkwardly up to his head and licked his cheek with a warm, wet tongue. A chubby, laughing baby in sadly faded and much patched blue rompers filled her hot little hands with Quaker ladies and scattered them painstakingly over the front of the artist’s flannel shirt.

“Thank you, Ophelia,” murmured Archibald. “Or perhaps I should say Hamlet,” he added doubtfully.

The Smiling Lady rescued a kitten from the strangle hold of the other diminutive being in blue rompers, and cleared up the situation.

“There’s simply no telling in rompers,” she said. “But that’s Rosamond strewing flowers over you and this is Jeremiah. They’re the Johnston twins, four years old and very active, thank you. Father Johnston is religious and Mother Johnston is romantic and each one named a baby, but I do think Mr. Johnston might have picked out one of the cheerful prophets. Jerry isn’t a bit of a wailer. Jerry and Rosy aren’t such bad little names for them, though, are they?”

“Very good little names,” protested Archibald. “But how do you know which child belongs to which name?”

“You have to go by manners, not by looks,” the Smiling Lady explained. “Now if Jerry’s attention had been concentrated upon you, he wouldn’t have strewn flowers over you. He’d probably have bitten your thumb or poked a finger in your eye. You see, Jerry’s on the way to being a man.”

“A thumb-biting, eye-poking class, I gather?”

“Forceful, let us put it—and yet so helpless, poor things! How is Pegeen?”

“The connection is obvious,” Archibald confessed. “I am wax in her hands. Within a week there won’t be a paint brush in the shack that I can call my own. She’s going to keep me tidy if she has to drive me from home in order to do it. In fact, she did drive me from home this morning. She’s cleaning.”

“She’ll take very good care of you,” said the Smiling Lady, “and how she will love doing it! She’ll mother you as if you were Jerry’s age. Peggy was born for mothering.”

She had risen as she spoke.

“Sandy and I must take all these babies home before they begin clamoring for food,” she said lightly, “and I haven’t a doubt but that Peggy is watching the meadow path for you. Give her my love.”

She took it for granted that he knew her as she knew him. Pegeen was sure to have talked of her and so why bother with formalities? Yet, in spite of her frank acceptance of him, Archibald did not offer to walk home with her.

There was a definite finality about her leave-taking, a door quietly shut. Evidently this unconventional Young Woman made her own laws and limitations, and Archibald, being no dullard in feminine psychology, realized that the man who presumed upon her casual friendliness would be likely to find the door permanently closed. So he stood quietly and watched her going away across the sunshiny glade.

She walked as she spoke, as she looked, as she smiled, with a fine freedom, a blithe assurance; and though the figure that swayed so lightly as it went away between the birches was girlishly slender, there was a subtle hint of strength and vigor in its flowing lines.

As Archibald looked, she stooped to one of the babies, and the man drew a sharp breath of appreciation, noting with an artist’s eye, the gracious curves of her breast under the clinging muslin blouse, the rhythmic length of limb, the modeling of the bare forearms, the well-set head.

When she gathered the child into her arms, tossed it high before cuddling it close against her shoulder, and went on her way as swiftly and lightly as though unburdened, the watcher sighed with satisfaction.

He was still thinking of her as he leaped the wall into his own meadow and swung his cap over his head, in answer to the greeting waved to him by a little figure in the doorway of the shack.

“Not so much beautiful,” he summed up, “as made up of beauties. She’d never drive a man mad, but, holy smoke, what a delight she might be to him in his sane moments.”