VII
The next day was a momentous one at the shack. Archibald and Pegeen started their garden and Wiggles was taken into the family. The garden came along according to plan but Wiggles was accidental. Peggy brought him with her when she arrived in the morning and the first intimation of his presence came to Archibald with a request for an antiseptic bandage.
“I saw you had some in your trunk, and it’s time for you to get up anyway,” Peggy called through the bedroom door.
“Are you hurt?” he asked in alarm.
“No, I’m all right. It’s a dog. I guess it was an automobile. Anyway its leg’s hurt.”
The explanation was hardly lucid but Archibald gathered that first aid measures were being taken for the dog not for the automobile.
“Wait a minute and I’ll help,” he said as he passed a roll of bandage through the partly opened door.
“It’d only spoil your breakfast.” She was serious but practical. “I can do it. I’ve done it to lots of things. There’s peroxide on the mantel and he’s as patient as can be.”
When Archibald, shaven and dressed, left his room a half hour later, there were no signs of casualty and Pegeen was as serene as usual.
“He’s all fixed,” she said. “It wasn’t so terribly bad, but he couldn’t walk and of course I couldn’t leave him down there.”
“Of course not,” agreed Archibald.
But after breakfast, as she led him out to see the cripple, a shade of anxiety crossed her face.
“He isn’t a handsome dog,” she warned—“not exactly handsome, but he’ll be real cute when I’ve washed him—and he won’t be a bit of trouble to you. I’ll keep him in the shed and I’ll—”
“Piffle, Peg!” interrupted the man rudely. “We needed a dog.”
The dirty, shaggy little beast lying on a pile of burlap in the shed was not handsome. Pegeen had spoken within bounds. Mongrel was written large on him, but a strain of Airedale, albeit with a bar sinister across it, gave his ugliness a redeeming dash of distinction, and when two beseeching, friendly brown eyes met Archibald’s and the whole dog from sniffing nose to frantically wagging tail, wiggled propitiation, the man took the new-comer into the family with something like enthusiasm.
“He’s not handsome, Peg,” he agreed, “but he’s a jolly little chap. We’ll call him Wiggles.”
A day or two later, Archibald coming home from a morning’s painting found Pegeen with something on her mind.
After a little it came out.
“Do you like kittens, Mr. Archibald?” she asked with elaborate casualness.
“Oh, so-so.” He was absorbed in cleaning his pipe.
“I think it’s awful to drown them, don’t you?”
He caught the note of anxiety in her voice and looked at her quickly.
“Miss Moran does too,” she urged in defense of her position. “Maybe she’d take it if you don’t want me to have it, but I’d like to doctor its eyes first. It’ll be lovely when its eyes are well—and the boys had a piece of fish line and a stone. They thought it was fun. I flew right at Benny Crocker and slapped him—as hard as ever I could—and he was so surprised he dropped the kitten and then I grabbed it up—and I always did want to slap Benny anyway. If I’d been a boy I’d have licked him long ago and I don’t see why being a girl—only of course long hair’s handy to pull—but they didn’t get a chance to-day. I can run as fast as any boy, if I do have skirts. It’s gray with one white paw. I think you’d like it, if its eyes weren’t sore. I’m putting boric acid in them. That’s what the doctor gave Mrs. Neal for hers when they were red and hurt her and she loaned me some.”
“What does Wiggles say about it?” Archibald asked gravely.
Pegeen giggled.
“I wouldn’t dare tell you,” she said. “He swore. Honestly he did—dog swearing anyhow—but when he found I liked the kitten, he quieted down and now he just laughs when the spunky little thing spits at him. I do love a dog that has a long nose so he can laugh, don’t you? I wouldn’t have one of those snub-nosed, sulky looking dogs for anything—unless it was sick or something and needed to be taken care of.”
“Oh, Peg, Peg! Are we going to take care of all the halt and maimed and blind?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “Well,—they aren’t all likely to come along our way and anyway I won’t have any more here if you hate it; but you see I always did—and I can’t leave them alone at Mrs. Benderby’s all day and so I—but of course we won’t have any more here if it bothers you—just Wiggles and Spunky. I thought we’d call kitten Spunky. She’s so little and she stands up to Wiggles as if she were his size. I sort of think that kitten’s Irish.”
“Bless you, child, I don’t mind running a foundling asylum. Why should I? I’m one of the foundlings and I’m as grateful to you as Wiggles and Spunky ever can be.”
She looked at him soberly for a moment and then she smiled. There was something extra special about Pegeen’s smile. A hint of it was not always playing about her lips and eyes as the elusive promise of smiles always lurked in Nora Moran’s face. The child’s sensitive mouth and great dark blue eyes were profoundly serious much of the time—quietly happy but serious for all that. When the smiles came, they flashed out suddenly, radiantly, a surprise, an illumination, a wave of gaiety rippling from brow to chin and overflowing the whole child. Even her hair ribbons seemed to quiver with it, her short skirts to swish with mirth, her slim little feet to move to dance tunes.
To see it once was to want more of it.
“Making you happy is sheer, wanton self-indulgence, Peg,” Archibald said as he studied her face. “I’ll not acquire merit by anything I do to set you smiling. That’s sure.”
She did not understand but that made no difference. He often talked over her head, but words were unimportant. The essential thing was that he should be pleased with her and he was. She could see that. Moreover, he wasn’t prejudiced against stray kittens.
“But I won’t show her to you until her eyes are better,” she said wisely. “A smashed leg like Wiggles’ is sort of interesting when it’s all bandaged up, but you’ve got to love a thing considerable much not to mind sore eyes. If I ever get sick and stay sick a long time, I do hope it’ll be a nice, clean, interesting kind of sickness—but what I’d like best would be to be sitting out in the sunshine feeling happy and then just not to be there—like Mr. Benderby. It was hard on Mrs. Benderby, but wasn’t it perfectly lovely for him? Out under the big apple tree he was, and it was all in bloom and there were orioles nesting in it. I think that was wonderful, don’t you? I’d have liked that for Mother—only it was so lovely for me to have a chance to take care of her. I guess that’s why God doesn’t let everybody go in beautiful ways. He knows they’re going to be so happy in a little while that having been sick won’t count and He lets them go the hard way so that the people who love them and are going to have to stay on without them can have the comfort of taking care of them.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Archibald.
They were occupying their favorite seat on the doorstep now. Pegeen’s elbows were on her knees, her hands cupping her chin, her eyes gazing out across the Valley.
“What do you think souls look like, Mr. Archibald?” she asked suddenly.
Archibald considered the subject and acknowledged that he had no theories on it.
“Well, I’ve thought about it lots,” Peg said cheerfully. Her discussions of life, death, and immortality were always imperturbably cheerful. Nothing morbid touched her. Life was a fact and death was a fact and immortality was a fact. They were all vastly interesting. Why not wonder about them and talk about them?
“I think most people have a horrid idea about souls, don’t you?” she said. “Sort of foggy, lonesome things that go floating around trying to be happy when they haven’t got anything to be happy with. Honestly, that kind of souls would have just about as good a time in heaven as Bill Briggs does at grange parties. They don’t have liquor and he says he isn’t built for conversation. I think heaven’s going to be heaps cozier than the ministers say. I’m counting on having legs and hands and eyes and nose and everything, just the way I have here, only no aches or freckles or anything, and only beautiful things to feel and see and smell—and stacks of little child angels to see to, so that we won’t miss having the old people and sick people to take care of. I’m expecting to enjoy heaven and if I do it’ll have to be mighty different from the way they tell about it.”
“I know a job in heaven that would suit you,” Archibald said, “but another angel has it. Maybe he’d take you on to help.”
“Tell me,” she urged eagerly.
“Well, it’s in the Japanese heaven; but I suppose we’ll all be talking the same language when we get over there so that won’t shut you out. There’s a Japanese angel—Jizo, they call him,—and he puts in his whole time playing with the souls of the little children that come to heaven, so that they won’t be lonesome for their mothers.”
“Oh, my stars!” The small girl was all aglow. “What a bee-autiful job! Wouldn’t it be cunning to see—all those blessed little baby souls playing around and that big kind angel making up games for them and seeing to them for God? But one angel couldn’t do it—not possibly. Maybe he could when the world started and there weren’t many children going to heaven, but now he’d have to have somebody else. Oh, I do hope he’ll let me help. That’s the most interesting thing I ever heard about heaven. Mostly it sounds stupid, but I always did think God would be too sensible to let us all sit around and rest forever. I wonder if that Jizo thought up his job for himself and asked for it or if God just gave it to him. Mr. Frisbie says the Japanese are awfully smart but that they’re ruining wages—only I don’t suppose they bother about wages in heaven. I wouldn’t want wages.”
Archibald rose and stretched himself, laughing down at the earnest little face upturned to him.
“I’m willing to bet your month’s wages here that you’ll be given a chance to take care of somebody in heaven,” he said. “They say the seraphim are for adoration and the cherubim are for service. Well, I can see you chumming with the cherubs.”
Pegeen looked perturbed.
“Miss Moran has pictures of them,” she said doubtfully. “They aren’t anything but heads and wings.”
“That’s the painters’ fault. They couldn’t imagine anything as beautiful as a cherub so they gave up before they got fairly started.” The small girl on the doorstep nodded understanding and relief.
“You need legs and hands if you’re going to do much,” she said, “and if I don’t set mine going you won’t have any supper.”
Wiggles and Spunky improved so rapidly under expert treatment that bandages and boric acid were speedily put aside and the two new members of the household were promoted from obscurity to family intimacy.
A crow with an injured wing, and a squirrel rescued at the eleventh hour from Wiggles, and two fluffy yellow chickens whose hysterical mother had tramped on them during a panic over a temporary scarcity of worms, were at various times added to the family group, but the crow and the chickens and the squirrel were merely transients. Once repaired, they went back to the wild life and Mrs. Neal’s chicken yard, though Peterkin, the crow, came back occasionally to sit on the birch tree by the kitchen door and caw at Peg; and Jabberwok, the squirrel, had a nest in a near-by oak from which he threw acorns at Wiggles with unerring aim.
Boots was a transient too, but he did not need bandaging or doctoring and he stayed on as a day boarder for a long time.
Archibald almost stumbled over him one day as he came through the woodshed after an early morning fishing excursion with Jimmy Dawes. He had brought Jimmy home to breakfast and then came in the back way, triumphantly waving creditable strings of trout.
A gurgle of appreciation sounded at Archibald’s feet and he stepped back, hastily looking down into the round staring eyes of a fat baby who sat comfortably strapped into a pine box and held out chubby hands toward the shining fish.
“Well, I’ll be—” began the man. Then he remembered Jimmy, and left the remark hanging in the air unfinished.
“Hello!” commented Jimmy. “Going in for baby farming?”
“Peg!” Archibald’s voice held alarm and protest. It brought Pegeen out from the kitchen, frying pan in hand.
“Hello, Jimmy! Going to stay for breakfast? My, what a lot of fish!”
Suddenly she saw the question in Archibald’s face and her glance followed his to the occupant of the box.
“Oh, yes,” she explained. “That’s Boots—Mrs. McKenzie’s Boots. His mother’s sick and there isn’t anybody except old Granny McKenzie and she can’t possibly do everything and take care of Boots too. I ran over there this morning to see how sick Mrs. McKenzie was and everything was a mess and the poor old lady was most crazy. I’d have stayed, only of course there’s you; so I helped tidy things up and then I just brought Boots along with me. I knew you’d want me to. He won’t be a mite of trouble. I never saw such a good baby. I can look after him here, daytimes and take him home with me nights. He’s so cunning. Look at him laugh.”
She dropped on her knees beside the box and waggled her head at the baby, who discarded his wide-eyed solemnity for a dimpling, gurgling hilarity that would have disarmed the most confirmed baby hater.
“What d’ you guess Jizo’d think of him?” Peg asked enthusiastically. She was so happy in her new responsibility, so utterly confident of Archibald’s readiness to share it with her, that the protest faded out of him. He stooped and experimentally poked at the baby’s ribs with a fishy forefinger which Boots promptly grabbed, crowing in triumph as he held fast to it.
Something curious happened to the stooping man. He wasn’t at all sure what it was but knew that it had to do with the feeling of that tiny hand curled round his finger. The hand was so absurdly small and soft and clinging. He had never noticed babies. People had them, but they had always seemed to him one of the necessary evils, mitigated in his own class by the existence of vigilant nurses who kept their charges out of sight and hearing.
He wouldn’t have believed that there could be something extraordinarily pleasant about having a baby hang fast to one’s forefinger and jump up and down with pride in the feat.
“Strong little beggar, isn’t he?” he said with a shamefaced glance at Jimmy that bespoke masculine sympathy for his embarrassment But Jimmy was used to babies.
“Jolly kid!” he said, swinging his string of fish toward the baby who abandoned Archibald’s finger to clutch at the slippery prize. “I’ll fix the trout for you, Peg.”
Archibald straightened up and looked at the boy admiringly. Nothing disturbed Jimmy’s cheerful nonchalance—but then Jimmy had not a strange baby deposited, without warning, in his family circle. He would eat his breakfast and go home, but the baby, apparently, was to stay at the shack.
“What did you call him, Peg?” the alleged Head of the Family asked feebly.
“Well, his name’s Bruce,—after the spider man, you know. The McKenzies are Scotch. But they call him ‘Boots.’ Baby talk’s silly but I do think Boots is a nice funny little name, don’t you?”
She went back to the kitchen with Jimmy, and Archibald followed, with a backward glance at the baby who resigned himself philosophically to the desertion and settled back among the pillows with the evident intention of going to sleep at once.
“Good old Boots!” murmured the man to whom philosophy had always come hard.
As he washed his hands at the kitchen pump, he eyed his forefinger with a whimsical smile. Queer little thing, a baby’s hand. He could imagine that if the baby happened to be a man’s own—after all, perhaps even neighboring wasn’t the last word. Human brotherhood was a big thing, but a man’s own—
“D’ you like them fried in corn meal, Mr. Archibald?” called Pegeen.
He said that he did.