The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

There was another figure that often came and went when the garden gate clicked: the little mother, the children’s grandmother, in her morning gingham and white apron and garden hat, and the gloves without fingers she wore when she went to cut her roses. Sometimes she wore no hat, and the sun shone through her muslin cap. It came to a point just above her forehead, and was finished with a bunch of narrow ribbon, pale straw-color or lavender. Her face in the open sunlight or under the shade of her hat had the tender fairness of one of her own faintly tinted tea-roses. Young girls and children’s faces may be likened to flowers, but that fairness of the white soul shining through does not belong to youth. The soul of a mother is hardly in full bloom until her cheek begins to sink a little and grow soft with age.

The garden was laid out on an old-fashioned plan, in three low terraces, each a single step above the other. A long, straight walk divided the middle terrace, extending from the gate to the seat underneath the grapevine and pear-tree; and another long, straight path crossed the first one at right angles from the blackberry bushes at the top of the garden to the arbor-vitæ hedge at the bottom. The borders were of box, or polyanthus, or primroses, and the beds were filled with a confusion of flowers of all seasons, crowding the spaces between the rose-bushes; so that there where literally layers of flowers, the ones above half hiding, half supporting the ones beneath, and all uniting to praise the hand of the gardener that made them grow. Some persons said the garden needed systematizing; that there was a waste of material there. Others thought its charm lay in its careless lavishness of beauty—as if it took no thought for what it was or had, but gave with both hands and never counted what was left.

It was certain you could pick armfuls, apronfuls, of flowers there, and never miss them from the beds or the bushes where they grew.

The hedge ran along on top of the stone wall that guarded the embankment to the road. In June, when the sun lay hot on the whitening dust, Jack used to lean with his arms deep in the cool, green, springy mass of the hedge, his chin barely above its close-shorn twigs, and stare at the slow-moving tops of the tall chestnut-trees across the meadow, and dream of journeys and of circuses passing, with band wagons and piebald horses and tramp of elephants and zebras with stiff manes. How queer an elephant would look walking past the gate of Uncle Townsend’s meadow!

When the first crop of organ-grinders began to spread along the country roads, Jack, atilt like a big robin in the hedge, would prick his ear at the sound of a faint, whining sweetness, far away at the next house but one. After a silence he would hear it again in a louder strain, at the very next house; another plodding silence, and the joy had arrived. The organ-man had actually perceived grandfather’s house, far back as it was behind the fir-trees, and had stopped by the little gate at the foot of the brick walk. Then Jack races out of the garden, slamming the gate behind him, across the dooryard and up the piazza steps, to beg a few pennies to encourage the man. He has already turned back his blanket and adjusted his stick. Will grandmother please hurry? It takes such a long time to find only four pennies, and the music has begun!

All the neighbors’ children have followed the man, and are congregated about him in the road below. Looks are exchanged between them and Jack, dangling his legs over the brink of the wall, but no words are wasted.

Then come those moments of indecision as to the best plan of bestowing the pennies. If you give them too soon, the man may pack up the rest of his tunes and go away; if you keep them back too long, he may get discouraged and go, anyhow. Jack concludes to give two pennies at the close of the first air, and make the others apparent in his hands. But the organ-man does not seem to be aware of the other two pennies in reserve. His melancholy eyes are fixed on the tops of the fir-trees that swing in a circle above Jack’s head, as he sits on the wall. “Poor man,” Jack thinks, “he is disappointed to get only two pennies! He thinks, perhaps, I am keeping the others for the next man. How good of him to go on playing all the same!” He plays all his tunes out to the end. Down goes the blanket. Jack almost drops the pennies in his haste to be in time. The man stumps away down the road, and Jack loiters up the long path to the house, dreamy with the droning music, and flattered to the soul by the man’s thanks and the way he took off his hat when he said good-day. Nobody need try to make Jack believe that an organ-grinder can ever be a nuisance.

The road gate, the garden gate, and the gate at the foot of the path were the only gates that ever made any pretense to paint. The others were of the color that wind and weather freely bestow upon a good piece of old wood that has never been planed.

Jack became acquainted with the farm gates one by one, as his knowledge of the fields progressed. At first, for his short legs, it was a long journey to the barn. Here there was a gate which he often climbed upon but never opened; for within its protection the deep growl of the old bull was often heard, or his reddish-black head, lowering eye, and hunched shoulders were seen emerging from the low, dark passage to the sheds into the sunny cattle-yard. Even though nothing were in sight more awful than a clucking hen, that doorway, always agape and always dark as night, was a bad spot for a small boy to pass, with the gate of retreat closed behind him and the gate of escape into the comfortable, safe barnyard not yet open.

The left-hand gate, on the upper side of the barn, was the children’s favorite of all the gates. The barn was built against a hill, and the roof on the upper side came down nearly to the ground. The children used to go through the left-hand gate when, with one impulse, they decided, “Let’s go and slide on the roof!” This was their summer coasting. Soles of shoes were soon so polished that the sliders were obliged to climb up the roof on hands and knees. It was not good for stockings, and in those days there were no “knee-protectors;” mothers’ darning was the only invention for keeping young knees inside of middle-aged stockings that were expected to “last out” the summer.