Some Little People

by George Kringle

When 'Lisbeth made up her mind to a thing it was made up.

'Lisbeth tried very hard from this time to use the mother's head; and though the mother used it too it did not get worn out half as fast as it had done before; it began to look newer—I mean younger—and to look as though use did it a great deal of good; and 'Lisbeth's head looked the better for it too—I mean her face looked the better for it—it looked rested; perhaps I should say it looked better contented than it did before, it looked more comfortable. In fact, by using the mother's head very frequently instead of her own, 'Lisbeth improved inside of a week, and in the two months while they yet remained in London she began to look like a helping child instead of a hindering one.

When the time came for the packing up to be done 'Lisbeth really helped. She did; nobody need be astonished. She helped a great deal, and everybody seemed so happy that the mother laughed a dozen times just in packing up. This was such a remarkable thing to happen that every one was astonished; they could not help being astonished.

Mother had not laughed for a great while. It seemed a very strange thing for her to do. Nobody could quite tell what she was laughing at either by thinking over it or by inquiring. Dickon inquired, but Dickon could not understand it any better after he had inquired.

Gorham thought over it. He was older than Dickon, and perhaps should have been able to understand by thinking over it, but he did not. Gorham had been in London for some time, and had become accustomed to the two little rooms at the top of the house, where the walls were so black, and to the hubbub of voices above and below, and to the tatters on the little children, and to the dirt and tatters on the grown people; and had become accustomed to the little boys who were not very nice, or very comfortable to play with; Gorham had become accustomed to all this and did not dislike it all as much as he did when he first came to London.

Indeed Gorham was growing a little bit like these little boys; just a little like them, not very much; I am glad to be able to say that it was not very much. But at any rate, Gorham could not see why his mother was laughing when she had not laughed for such a long time; laughing over her cracked crockery, broken-nosed teapots, and black old crocks. It never entered his mind that she was laughing because, though she seemed to be looking at the old crockery, she was looking over and past them with her mind's eye, to the clover tufts on the dear old fields, and to the paths winding about the mill, to the spire of the white wooden church; to the market-place where the mill-hands used to gather together and chat and talk. Yet she was looking at these and at many things beside, and not at all at the broken-nosed pots.

'Lisbeth knew better than Gorham or Dickon why it was the mother laughed. I think she knew a great deal better. I think when she would put her face down close beside her mother's, and they would both smile so pleasantly, glancing toward each other and looking away, I think they were then seeing the same things, the very same things, though they were both a hundred miles away from the things themselves.

This was very comfortable; so comfortable that Dickon and Gorham smiled too, though only looking at their two faces and at the iron pots, and broken noses, and the rubbish which the mother had gathered up. And indeed, though they could not tell why, they laughed themselves when the mother laughed, and who knows but perhaps after all they did, without knowing it, catch glimpses of the far-away things which 'Lisbeth and her mother were seeing.

Everything was very comfortable all this packing-up time, in fact much of the two months before it.

Now I do not intend you to suppose, when I say that everything was very comfortable, that everything was in order in those two rooms, that everything was fixed up; that the iron pots were full of cookies or of all kinds of cookeries; that the crockery was full of good things; that the black walls had been whitened; not a bit of it. Things had changed; things had changed very much. The faces had changed.