"I am not afraid," I said, in the noble accents of courage. "I am not afraid to go. God goes with me."
Pride goeth before a fall. On the step outside I slid down into a drift, just on the eve of triumph. They picked me up; they brought me in. They found all of me inside my wrappings. They gave me a piece of sugar and sent me to bed. And I was very glad. I did hate to go all the way next door and all the way back, through the white snow, under the white stars, invisible company keeping step with me.
And I remember my playmates.
There was always a crowd of us girls. We were a mixed set,—rich little girls, well-to-do little girls, and poor little girls,—but not because we were so democratic. Rather it came about, if my sister and I are considered the centre of the ring, because we had suffered the several grades of fortune. In our best days no little girls had to stoop to us; in our humbler days we were not so proud that we had to condescend to our chance neighbors. The granddaughters of Raphael the Russian, in retaining their breeding and manners, retained a few of their more exalted friends, and became a link between them and those whom they later adopted through force of propinquity.
We were human little girls, so our amusements mimicked the life about us. We played house, we played soldiers, we played Gentiles, we celebrated weddings and funerals. We copied the life about us literally. We had not been to a Froebel kindergarten, and learned to impersonate butterflies and stones. Our elders would have laughed at us for such nonsense. I remember once standing on the river bank with a little boy, when a quantity of lumber was floating down on its way to the distant sawmill. A log and a board crowded each other near where we stood. The board slipped by first, but presently it swerved and swung partly around. Then it righted itself with the stream and kept straight on, the lazy log following behind. Said Zalmen to me, interpreting: "The board looks back and says, 'Log, log, you will not go with me? Then I will go on by myself.'" That boy was called simple, on account of such speeches as this. I wonder in what language he is writing poetry now.
We had very few toys. Neither Fetchke nor I cared much for dolls. A rag baby apiece contented us, and if we had a set of jackstones we were perfectly happy. Our jackstones, by the way, were not stones but bones. We used the knuckle bones of sheep, dried and scraped; every little girl cherished a set in her pocket.
I did not care much for playing house. I liked soldiers better, but it was not much fun without boys. Boys and girls always played apart.
I was very fond of playing Gentiles. I am afraid I liked everything that was a little risky. I particularly enjoyed being the corpse in a Gentile funeral. I was laid across two chairs, and my playmates, in borrowed shawls and long calicoes, with their hair loose and with candlesticks in their hands, marched around me, singing unearthly songs, and groaning till they scared themselves. As I lay there, covered over with a black cloth, I felt as dead as dead could be; and my playmates were the unholy priests in gorgeous robes of velvet and silk and gold. Their candlesticks were the crosiers that were carried in Christian funeral processions, and their chantings were hideous incantations to the arch enemy, the Christian God of horrible images. As I imagined the bareheaded crowds making way for my funeral to pass, my flesh crept, not because I was about to be buried, but because the people crossed themselves. But our procession stopped outside the church, because we did not dare to carry even our make-believe across that accursed threshold. Besides, none of us had ever been inside,—God forbid!—so we did not know what did happen next.
When I arose from my funeral I was indeed a ghost. I felt unreal and lost and hateful. I don't think we girls liked each other much after playing funeral. Anyway, we never played any more on the same day; or if we did, we soon quarrelled. Such was the hold which our hereditary terrors and hatreds had upon our childish minds that if we only mocked a Christian procession in our play, we suffered a mutual revulsion of feeling, as if we had led each other into sin.