Nothing, except kiss dearest Mother McBirney good night, trying not to yawn in her face as I do it, and after paying my respects to Father McBirney and “brother” Jim, slip away up to my darling loft.
Now, there, Carin! You see I’m nicer than your other friends, more unusual and surprising. (You told me the last time I saw you that you liked your friends to be unusual and surprising.) Well, have you any other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company? You have not, Carin Carson, and you know it. And, Oh, how I love it! Shall I ever have another room I love so well? The soft noises of the night come purling down into it like a stream. The stars of the northern sky shine into it. The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it. When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self. Everything slips away from me except the night and myself and—and God.
Dearest Carin, I am feeling rather serious. It is because of something that I have just come to realize. Do you remember how, at the end of our school-teaching up at Sunset Gap three years ago, your father and mother offered to send me away to school, and I—thanking them more than I could possibly make them understand—refused? I said I wanted it to be Azalea for herself. That I meant to spin my own little web, and that I hoped it would be a silver one.
Since then, as you know, I have tried my best. I decided that I would become a teacher of the mountain handicrafts; I hoped that some day when good Mrs. Kitchell resigned her position as head of the Mountain Industries which your father and mother established, that I could take her place. What is more, I wanted to develop the Industries so that they would become much, much more useful and inspiring and important than they are now. I wanted, too, to fit myself to meet all the people who come to Lee—all the charming, gracious people. You know how I have worked for all this. Haystack Thompson, the best basket-maker in the country, has taught me to make baskets. Mrs. Kitchell, the cleverest little weaver of all the weavers, has instructed me in the weaving of woolen and linen and cotton cloth, and in the making of counterpanes, as well as the knotting of fringe and the looping of fancy edges. Mother McBirney has taught me knitting and lace making and crocheting. I can do a little wood carving. I can make mats. I can weave carpets. Even, if put to it, I can turn a jug. Then I have read and studied and thought. And in doing all that I have grown vain and foolish.
I’ll tell you how I found out.
Dear Father McBirney isn’t well. I think I spoke about this to you the other day. But he’s been getting rapidly worse, and now he can hardly move from his chair. It is rheumatism; and it’s likely to stay with him for a long, long time. He cannot help about the farm at all, and so all of the farm work falls on Jim. He can’t even go about the country to collect the chairs the mountaineers make for the Mountain Industries, as he promised your father he would.
Oh, Carin, do you remember the day you and your father and mother came up to our cabin to ask my foster-parents to go down and take charge of the Industries? And do you remember how Pa and Ma looked about at the darling cabin with its wistaria and trumpet vine, and its Pride of India tree with the graves of their little Molly and my own dear mama beneath it, and how they would not go? And then do you recall how Father McBirney promised to “beat up trade” for the Industries, and so we all stayed in the cabin with its nice open room in between the closed ones, and its own queer little smithy, and its beehives on the south slope, and its martin houses by the door? Oh, the dear, dear little house!
Well, there has been such a demand for the mountain chairs from the visitors to Lee, that the chair-makers have been making a good profit and Father McBirney has been enjoying a nice commission. This winter he quite depended on it, because, owing to his bad health, he hadn’t been able to do as much with the farm as usual. But now he isn’t well enough to go over the mountains arranging about the chairs, or getting them together, so even that little profit is denied us.
What are we to do? Jim may be able to do some hauling for people; there’s wood to be carted, and some work to do for the miller, but it’s very irregular.
And this is where I come in. This is where I am shown up as a person with much vanity and little common sense. For, of course, it should be my part to make ready money for the family. And I can’t. I don’t know how. I have been thinking I was so capable, and now I see I’m just as useless as—as most girls!