XIII
Pegeen carried a sore heart for many a day after Michael O’Neill’s funeral.
“He wasn’t a very good father,” she said pitifully to Archibald, “and he wasn’t very good to Mother, but ’twas the drink that did it; and I think the drink’s just a sickness, don’t you? Mother had a picture of him, a little picture that she wore in a locket. He was young in it; and he looked so brave and glad and lovery. I like to think of him that way—but I loved him, even after he was—sick. It’s a poor time to stop loving folks when they’re bad, isn’t it? That’s when they need it the very most, and Daddy loved back real hard when he was sober.”
In comforting her, Archibald dulled the edge of his own heartache; and the two neighbored faithfully, even enthusiastically. Sometimes they drove. More often they rode; and, though Pegeen was not quite her old gay self, the visits were usually high-hearted adventures. Everything one did with Peg was more or less of an adventure. There was something about her that lent spice to the most prosaic of expeditions and Archibald found himself looking at the Valley through her eyes and loving it. He had laughed skeptically when the Smiling Lady had said that there were no uninteresting people, that there were only people one didn’t get at; but he began to believe that she had been right. There were delightful folk in the Valley and there were queer folk; but, delightful or queer, none of them bored him; and, when he remembered how often and how intolerably he had been bored in the old days, he was forced to believe that the difference was in him, not in the people around him. After all, types were much the same. He could cap every character in the Valley with a corresponding one in New York. Externals were different; but the inner men and women were the same. So the change must be in himself; but he doubted whether, thrown on his own resources, he could walk the new road even now.
“It’s Pegeen,” he said to himself. “She’s a universal solvent. If I had neighbored without her, I’d never have known these people as I know them now. She coaxes the best of every one out into the open where I can see it; and, after that the worst of him can’t fool me. Even the worst of him doesn’t look bad to me when I see it through Peg’s eyes. Funny, perhaps, or pitiful, or sad, but not bad. Yes; it’s Pegeen. She’s made me free of her Valley.”
All of which was modest and, in a degree, true; but, as a matter of fact, the Valley, having first accepted him on Pegeen’s recommendation, and looked him over with the tolerance she inspired, liked him for himself and showed him its friendly side.
“Thee has a pleasant way with thee, Son,” Eldress Martha of the Shakers said to him when he had sat on one of the straight-backed, rush-bottomed chairs in her stiff, spotless sitting-room, for an hour one summer afternoon, holding high converse with the little old lady whose spirit was so much bigger and stronger than her body.
“I could wish thee were with us and at peace.”
“I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps I’m on the road to peace, Eldress Martha,” he said gently.
She smiled. When she smiled, the great gray eyes that glowed so wonderfully in her thin white face melted into sweetness and the hint of fanaticism died out of her look.
“The roads are many, Son, but there are sign posts along all,” she said. “It is easy to know whether one is traveling toward the right goal.”
“There are brand new kittens,” announced Pegeen skipping joyously into the quiet shaded room and bringing a gust of the sunshiny outdoor world with her, “and the jam is heavenly this year, Eldress Martha. I tried three kinds, and I saw Sister Jane take honey out of the hives,—only I didn’t see it as close as I wanted to.”
She dropped down on the floor at the Eldress’ feet and leaned her head against the gray clad knee.
“I don’t see why bees should want to sting me.” Her voice held a note of injury. “But they do.”
Eldress Martha laughed. Her laugh was even better than her smile, a thing surpassingly girlish, and the tenderness in her face, as she laid her hand lightly on the child’s head and smoothed the shining black hair, gave Archibald a sudden twinge of heartache. It must be very lonely sometimes, on the spiritual heights, and this dear woman had walked there so long. He wondered whether she ever looked back to some far-away time of youth and counted the cost of the peace she had now.
But Pegeen was contented to take Eldress Martha’s human side without question. She had never been over-awed by Shaker asceticism. That was perhaps the reason why the sisters adored her. They were such simple, friendly folk in spite of their rules and visions.
“Brother Paul came to the garden,” Pegeen rubbed her cheek softly against the caressing hand, as she spoke, “and he told me a spandy new poem,—a lovely one. He’d met it coming down through the orchard and it isn’t a speck religious,—just summery and sweet and all about butterflies and birds and clouds.”
“And thee doesn’t call that ‘religious’?” asked Eldress Martha.
Pegeen recognized the gentle reproof with a smile.
“Why of course it is, when you stop to think about it—praising God and all his works and psalmy things like that,—but I meant it wasn’t anything you’d sing in church.”
“Brother Paul meets many poems that are not for church Worship.” The Eldress spoke quietly but a shadow of anxiety clouded the serenity of her face.
“Sometimes I wonder if the beauty of this world is not too much in his mind and heart,” she added. “Thee sees, child, it is good to love the beautiful things God has made; but always one must look through them to the Eternal Beauty.”
“Well, you don’t always have to say it,” Pegeen said comfortably. “I believe that being chuckfull of love for anything is worshiping God, even if you don’t think about Him at all when you’re doing it. I just adore St. Francis. Miss Moran’s Ellen told me about him. She likes St. Anthony best because he finds things for her when she’s lost them, but I think St. Francis was a perfect old darling. He did love everything so hard.”
“But he is a Popish Saint, child.” There was rebuke in the Eldress’ voice, but Pegeen looked up at her serenely.
“I’ll bet the birds and beasts didn’t care what church he belonged to,” she said, and Eldress Martha laughed once more.
“Thee has small respect for creeds, Peggy,” she said, “but thee has a great heart.”
The sisters crowded doors and windows to wave good-by as Pegeen and Archibald rode away down the street and the small girl turned to throw kisses to them until a bend of the road hid the East Family buildings from view. Then she settled back into her saddle to talk things over. They always talked a neighboring visit over. That was one of the best parts of it.
“Aren’t they the sweetest things?” she said beamingly. “I just wish I could give every single one of them a nice little baby of her own.”
Archibald gasped.
“Wouldn’t it rather shake up the community?” he asked gravely.
Pegeen considered the proposition. “Well, I suppose it would a little—not having marrying and giving in marriage in their religion you know—like Heaven—but shaking up wouldn’t hurt them, and I think it’s dreadful for so many perfectly darling women to miss having babies—and it’s a shame for the babies too because somebody else that isn’t half as nice will have to take them.
“I think it’s the lonesomest thing to go on cooking and sweeping and dusting and making jam and nobody to do it for but each other and God. Just think of the fun all those old ladies could have if the top floor was plumb full of babies growing up into nice Shakers. I guess it’d have to be grandbabies but then if they had grandbabies they’d have had babies sometime so that would be all right.
“I told Sister Jane how I felt about it She’s the pretty one with pink cheeks that tends the bees,—and she said they couldn’t very well have babies of their own, but that she could find it in her heart to wish they had a top floor of real cuddly orphan babies. She loves to cuddle things. That’s one reason why we’re such great friends; and, do you know, she’s got twelve dresses all as good as can be. They all have to be gray but there aren’t any two the same shade and she gets a little change that way. I do love Sister Jane. She and I have splendid times together and she sort of spills over to me, when she isn’t feeling so awfully religious. When we went to see the kittens, after Brother Paul said his poem to us, she told me the Eldress didn’t like his writing poetry that wasn’t religious, and spending so much time out in the fields and woods instead of working when he’s the strongest, youngest man in the family. They were going to call him up about it; but Eldress Martha said ‘no’ she’d attend to the matter, and that settled it. I tell you when Eldress Martha says ‘no’ the Elders just pick up their coat tails and go away on their tippy toes. But Sister Jane says she thinks Eldress Martha’s worried about Brother Paul herself. She’s terribly fond of him and he isn’t very frequent in prayer lately and he doesn’t testify at all—but he certainly does write scrumptious poetry.”
“What was that you said about his meeting a poem in the orchard?” Archibald asked.
“Oh, that’s the way the Shakers always talk about their poetry. Lots of them write hymns. Eldress Martha writes lovely ones—and they always say they met them. They think the Lord gives them the poetry ready made, you know.”
“Direct inspiration: I see—Poor Brother Paul with his world beauty!”
Archibald looked as if he too were worried about the young poet. Little by little he was learning that the Happy Valley teemed with drama. This neighboring with Pegeen was interesting, extraordinarily interesting.
Day by day he grew more dependent upon this child’s companionship. Whether he rode or tramped or loafed or gardened or neighbored, he wanted her near. Even when, he painted, she usually sat beside him dreaming or busy with some quiet work but always ready with smiles and eager interest if he looked from his canvas to her face or spoke to her; and it was not possible to feel that the world was an altogether disappointing and lonely place when one had such a comrade. Wiggles, too, did his dog best in the line of companion plays and a yellow dog’s best of worship is a thing to warm the cockles of even the heaviest heart. There was a curious likeness between the child’s deep blue Irish eyes and the pup’s liquid brown eyes, during those long August days. Passionate devotion welling up from child heart and dog heart made the eyes kin.
The little garden in front of the shack was ablaze with August glory now and Pegeen’s face, as she bent over the flowers or knelt beside the borders making war on weeds, was a pleasant thing to see; but a sadness came into it, whenever she looked at the clumps of perennials striving lustily in preparation for another year. Archibald had said that he would come back to watch them bloom; but he had said that before Richard Meredith’s coming, and back in the darkest pigeonhole of Pegeen’s mind was a suspicion that she and Wiggles and Spunky and Mrs. Benderby and the horses and the neighbors and the garden all added together would never be able to make him happy, with Nora Moran away. She would not admit to herself in the daytime that the suspicion was there; but sometimes when she happened to waken in the night, she would take it out and cry over it a little, very quietly.
She and Archibald rode often to the Shaker village where Eldress Martha was in her element with work and responsibility, pouring upon her torrent-wise. Even on her busiest days she had time for Archibald. The friendship between the two, whose lives had run in grooves so different, was a real thing and the man went away from his hours with the tender-hearted, steel-willed old woman with an uplift of spirit. After all the needs of brave souls were much the same. Whether it was Eldress Martha with her religious faith and her life of the spirit or Dr. Fullerton with his agnosticism and bluff materialism, the test of the soul was its sincerity and courage. The doctor had put it in a nutshell, the night he had fought for Ezra Watt’s life and won. Playing the game was the thing. To choose a game in which one believes there was good and to play it for all there was in it—that was the life worth living. If love and laughter walked with the player, so much the better. If not,—still there was the game.
And the more Archibald went the Valley ways, the more he realized that, in one form or another, neighboring was the great game.—There in the valley—out beyond—wherever men and women worked and hoped and loved and suffered, there was call for players stout of heart, strong of will, great of soul, wise of brain. Once when a baby’s hand had curled round his finger, he had said to himself that neighboring was not the last word, that a man’s own meant more; but, during those Summer days when Pegeen and he went up and down the Valley, knocking at the doors of hearts and lives, he came to realize dimly that a man’s own reaches out beyond the doors of his home and that if he follows it to the soul heights and the love limits, he will find himself, walking there with the brotherhood of Man.
Ginsy Shalloway, who, by virtue of “sewing around,” had gained a shrewd knowledge of human nature and was prone to sharp criticism, voiced the general verdict when she admitted that “the artist man’s friendliness rang true.
“Seems as if he honestly liked folks and was real set on their liking him,” she said, when the matter came up for discussion at the ladies’ aid society. “I don’t know as I ever saw a city fellow with as few trimmings. He’s pleased as can be when he gets an invite to dinner and he eats so hearty, you’d think he didn’t get the right kind of victuals at home, if you didn’t know Peg. He was eating dinner up at Nelsons’ the other day when that big storm came up so sudden; and, if he didn’t pull off his coat and go out into the hay field with Martin and help to hustle the hay in. Real good help he was too, Martin says—stronger than you’d think and quick as a cat. And then the boys got to wrestling out in the barn; and if he didn’t lay them all out on their backs, as easy as rolling off a log. They were some surprised and ashamed; but he said he’d taken lessons of a Japanee and that the Japs beat the world for wrestling and that, if the boys would like to learn, he’d teach them all the tricks he knew.
“So now he’s got a sort of class down in an empty loft at Jim Neal’s and a lot of the boys go there twice a week. Mis’ Dawes says their Jim’s plumb crazy about it.”
Jimmy wasn’t the only boy who was crazy about the class in the barn loft. One by one they came trooping in, shyly and awkwardly at first; but soon with glad confidence and unbounded enthusiasm. Lem Tollerton dropped in one evening to learn the knock-out that had laid him low, and, in his wake, the young men of the Valley found their way to the loft. Archibald added gloves and foils to his equipment; and within a few weeks, wrestling, boxing, fencing and jiu-jitsu were epidemic.
“It beats all,” Martin Nelson, the father of four husky lads, confided to Mr. Colby. “My boys are poking and pounding each other all over the place, the minute they ain’t at work; but I don’t know as I ever saw them so good-natured. Seems as if they thought being knocked endways was a treat and they’re always and everlastingly talking about playing fair and not taking advantage and not losing temper and not poking here or punching there. I don’t know but what teaching them to fight’s going to take the fighting out of them. Anyway they ain’t hanging around the stores every evening cooking up trouble. They do say Lem Tollerton and his crowd are cutting out booze, because it gets at them and spoils their fighting.”
Now and again, one of the older men, drawn by curiosity, came to the class to look on. He seldom went away without having a bout with the gloves or a wrestling lesson and he usually came again. The crowd soon outgrew its quarters and Archibald went to Dr. Fullerton with a plan.
“The Valley needs a men’s and boys’ club,” he said. “Where can we have it and how will we run it? You know this community better than I do.”
“I’m not so popular with it, when it’s healthy,” the doctor said dryly. “You’re working as hard to make yourself solid as if you were running for office. Pity not to stand for something, with the pull you’ve got.” He dropped his banter and laid a friendly hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“It’s a bully work, man. You’re doing more to humanize the Valley than the doves of peace could if they came in flocks. Nothing like beating an idea of honest sport into a fellow’s head for making a decent citizen of him. When he’s grasped the idea that there are some things no fellow can do, he’s got something to work on. I’m inclined to think that boxing will grip a boy’s soul when Sunday school fails. Now about this club, How much money will it take?”
“Oh, I’ll put up the money.” Dr. Fullerton shook his head.
“No, you won’t. That would be a mistake. Buy or rent a place if you want to fix it up; but organize a regular club and put some of your toughest specimens in as officers. Responsibility’s most as good for a fellow as boxing. Let the members pay the running expenses out of the dues. They’ll think more of the club if they have to do some hustling to keep it going. There’s that old house of Rankins’. It’s been empty ever since the old man died. Nephew it was left to lives out in Seattle. It’s a whaling big place, but you wouldn’t need to use it all and I’ve a notion you could get it for a song.”
Archibald told Pegeen about the club that night. She was all interest and encouragement; but there was a hint of mental reservation in her approval, and the man noticed it.
“Well, Peg, out with it!” he commanded. “What’s wrong with the scheme?”
She blushed at discovery and hesitated, then spoke her thought frankly, as she always did to him.
“There isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s splendid of you to do it and folks will be perfectly crazy about it—only I was just thinkink how it’s most always the men and the boys that get things done for them. I s’pose it’s because they won’t be good all by themselves the way women and girls will; but I don’t think that’s exactly fair, do you? It’s like giving prizes to the worst spellers.”
Archibald looked at her with a puzzled frown between his eyes.
“Why, Peg,” he began; then stopped and thought the proposition over. Suddenly, something that the Smiling Lady had once said to him came back to him and his face cleared.
“Pegeen, I’m a fool—just a plain, block-headed fool. This Valley doesn’t need a men’s and boys’ club. It needs a neighborhood house and you are going to give it one. There can be a men’s club and a boys’ club and a women’s club and a girls’ club, just for the fun of the thing; but there’ll be a big get-together club that will take all the others in. How’s that?”
Pegeen’s face was his answer. It was one rapture from brow to chin.
“It’ll be perfectly wonderful,” she said happily.
Then a shadow drifted across the rapture and she sighed.
“Well?” questioned the man.
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”
“Thinking what?” he insisted.
She looked very uncomfortable, wriggled uneasily in her chair.
“It’s Miss Moran,” she said, at last. “She was always crazy to have a club, here in the Valley—a neighborhood house she called it just like you did. She used to talk and talk and plan and plan; but she didn’t have money enough. I was just thinking how lovely it would have been if—”
She was on the borderland of unspoken things and afraid to go further; but Archibald opened her way.
“See here, Peg,” he said abruptly. “You mustn’t make any mistake about my feeling for Miss Moran. I’m head over heels in love with her. You’re too clever not to know that and I don’t mind your knowing it; but, because I can’t marry her, is no reason why you and I shouldn’t talk about her exactly as we always did. If she’d like this club, there’s one more big reason for putting it across, and the more she helps with it, the better I’ll be satisfied; only you are giving the club house to the Valley. Just remember that. Now we’ll go and talk the thing over with Miss Moran.”
His frankness cleared the air for himself as well as for the child; and when they found the Smiling Lady on her veranda and told her about the plan, the vague chill that had seemed to envelop her melted quite away before their enthusiasm.
“Splendid!” she cried eagerly. “Splendid! How you have come on with your neighboring, Mr. Archibald! I prophesied you’d make something of him, Peggy.”
There was a ring of pride in the jesting voice, a glow of pride in the smiling face. Richard Meredith, watching her from the hammock, noticed both. She was glad for the Valley, but there was more gladness beyond that; gladness and pride and—yes, there was tenderness too. It meant much to her that her people were to have their neighborhood house; but it meant even more to her that this one man was to give it to them, that they had found their way to his heart, and that he was finding his way to theirs. Meredith’s face gave no sign of anything save civil interest; but he drew back a little further into the shadow of the vines that clambered over the veranda trellis, and watched the girl and the man who leaned toward each other in the white moonlight, talking eagerly and with an intimate understanding that was new to him but prehistoric to them.
They altogether forgot him, when they went into the lamp-lighted room to figure on changes in the club house; but, as he sat there in the shadow, feeling oddly old and tired, a little figure slipped out through the French windows and tucked herself cozily into the hammock beside him.
“Which do you think would be nicer to have—a piano or a phonograph?” Pegeen asked confidentially, gathering him, as a matter of course, into intimacy of discussion and planning.
The man smiled in the dusk. She was so small and sweet and friendly and—though that he could not know—so sure he needed seeing to.
“I’ll give you both, for your neighborhood house, Pegeen,” he said—but added quickly, “if Mr. Archibald doesn’t object.”
“Why, he’d be glad,” she insisted stoutly, though back in her own mind there was a doubt. “That’s perfectly sweet of you. Oh, dear, it does seem as if God must have been working on that club for years and years. Everything’s going so beautifully. Only Deacon Ransom’ll have a fit about the billiard table. He won’t fit hard enough to keep him away though, and Miss Moran says he’s just got to let Sally come. I wish she’d get a beau down there and run off with him. Honestly I do. I’d help—if he’s nice. Do you know, I think a piano and a phonograph’s an awful lot for you to give. I wouldn’t want anything but the phonograph, but you see the mothers are so proud if their daughters can play some pieces and when there’s an entertainment, they always want the girls to show off; so it seems as if we really did need a piano. I’m going to tell everybody that you thought it up all by yourself, and Miss Moran didn’t have a thing to do with it. I shouldn’t wonder if you’d think of lots of things like that after a while. It isn’t a bit hard, after you once get started—not if anybody’s nice inside, like you. I guess city folks have to get new glasses to see country folks right, and some of them don’t ever bother to do it; but the awfully nice ones, like you and Miss Moran and Mr. Archibald, do. And then, after they put on the new glasses, they see so many kind things to do that they work like the very old Scratch to catch up with themselves.”
Meredith pulled the child’s head down against his shoulder and rumpled the thick curls with a gentle hand.
“It’s late for me to be changing glasses or ways, Peg,” he said softly; and his voice matched the gray of his hair. “Do you think I could ever catch up with myself, if I didn’t have Miss Moran to help me?”
Peggy reached up and gave the hand on her hair a loving little pat.
“Why, it’d be as easy as can be for you,” she assured him. “If you ever begin neighboring—in earnest, you know—I bet you’ll be perfectly splendid at it. Of course it’d be lovely to have Miss Moran help—but she wouldn’t need to. She started Mr. Archibald, but look at him now! I get jealous of the neighbors sometimes just for a minute; and he’s done most of it all by himself. Miss Moran hasn’t helped him atall, since you came.”
“I’ve an idea she has kept right on helping him—in a way,” the man said slowly,—“and then he’s had you to see to him, Pegeen.”