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“And here you are to live, and help us live. Bend close and listen, bird with folded wings. Here is life’s secret: Keep the upward glance; Remember Aries is your relative, The Moon’s your uncle, and those twinkling things Your sisters and your cousins and your aunts!” |
This letter seemed like the Peter Ketley we knew best, the sad-eyed Peter with the feather of courage in his cap, the Peter who could caper and make you forget that his heart had ever been heavy. For he wrote:
“This time, Dinkie-Boy, I’m going to tell you about the sea. For the water-tank, as I remember it, is the biggest sea you have at Casa Grande—unless you count the mud when winter breaks up! And your prairie, with its long waves of green, is, I suppose, really a sea that has gone to sleep. But I mean the truly honest-to-goodness sea which has tides and baby-whales and steamers and cramps and sea-serpents in it. You saw it once at Santa Monica, I know, though you may have been too small to remember. But yesterday, I motored to a place called Atlantic City where they sell picture post-cards and push you in a wheeled chair and let you sit on the 145 sand and watch the Water Babies, whom the policemen send to jail if they so much as walk along the beach without their stockings on. These Water Babies were not in a bottle—like the ones you’ll read about in the book—but I think there was a bottle or two in some of them, from the way they acted. But one of them was in a pickle, for Father Neptune caught her in his under-tow—which you must not mix up with his under-toe, something with which only the mermaids are familiar—and a life-guard had to swim out and bring her in. And a few minutes after that I saw a real beach-comber. I had read about them in the South Sea Islands, but had never seen one before. This one sat under a striped parasol, with a mirror between her knees, and combed and combed her hair until it was quite dry again. I was disappointed in her knees, because I was hoping, at first, she wouldn’t have any, but would be a mermaid who had come up on the sand to sun herself and would have a long and tapering tail covered with scales like a tarpon’s. But all she had was beach-shoes tied with silk ribbons, and I preferred watching the water. For when I watch the ocean I always feel like Mr. Hood and wish I was at least three small boys, so that I could pull off my three pairs of shoes and stockings and go paddling up to my six bare knees and let the rollers slap against my three startled little tummies and have thirty toes to step on the squids and star-fish with. And when I went back to the board-walk and watched all the gulls (I don’t think I ever saw so many of ’em in one place at once) I couldn’t help thinking it was too bad the Pilgrim Fathers didn’t wait for three centuries and land at a bright and lively place like this, since it would have 146 made them so much jollier and fizzier. They’d probably have turned the Mayflower into a diving-float and we’d never have had any Blue Laws to break and that curious thing known as The New England Conscience to keep us from being as happy as we feel we ought to be.”
Sunday the Twenty-Fourth
Harvest is on us, and Casa Grande hums like a beehive. There are three extra “hands” to feed, and Whinnie is going about with a moody eye because Struthers is directing more attention than necessary toward one of the smooth-spoken cutthroats now nesting in our bunk-house. His name is Cuba Sebeck and in times of peace he professes to be a horse-wrangler. Struthers, intent on showing Whinnie that he is not the only man in her world, is placidly but patiently showering the lanky Cuba with a barrage of her fluffiest pastries. She has also given her hair an extra strong wash of sage-tea, which is Struthers’ pet and particular way of putting on war-paint. Whinnie, I notice, shuts himself up after supper with that copy of Burns’ poems we gave him last Christmas, morosely exiling himself from all the laughing and gaming and pow-wowing which takes place in the long cool twilights, just outside the bunk-house. Cuba undertook to serenade the dour one by donning certain portions of Struthers’ apparel and 148 playing my old banjo under his window. Whinnie quietly retaliated by emptying his bath-water on the musician’s head—and the language was indescribable. I have been forced to speak to Dinky-Dunk, in fact, about the men’s profanity before my children. It is something I will not endure. My husband, on the other hand, refuses to take the matter very seriously. But I have been keeping a close eye over my kiddies—and woe betide the horse-wrangler who uses unseemly language within their hearing. So far they seem to have gone through it unscathed, about the same as a child can go through the indecorous moments of The Arabian Nights, which stands profoundly wicked to only Arabs and old gentlemen.