The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn't come to the Feet. It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn't, and if you could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come. During church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet. Once, long ago, it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and made his own forever one image: the image of a mighty foot carved in marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway. It had been severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border of lace. It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to each perfect toe. Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it—and what did you have to do when you got to the Feet? The possibility of not getting to them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the Front Room—particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.
During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity. She would even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired and of which he learned to repeat not a few. One of her pastoral poems told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a neighbouring State. It began thus:
"New Hampshire is a pretty place,
I did go there to see
The maple-sugar being boiled
By one that's dear to me."
Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza——
"I loved to hear the banjo hum,
It sounds so very calmly;
If a happy home you wish to find,
Visit the Thompson family."
After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice—
"At lovers' promises fates grow merrilee;
Some are made on land,
Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave
Streams of tears."
He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.
Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own:
"For her dear sake whom he did pity,
He took her back to Jersey City."