If success lies in having what you want, then my three farmer friends have attained it. But sometimes I look at them and wonder, Is it what once they wanted? The Lady of the Roses, I am sure she has a story; I am not sure she will not some day have another; surely there are things her hands might touch fairer even than roses. Lady Two has no story, and is too hearty and happy to note the fact, but when I see her lift in a strong brown grasp a yellow duckling, I remember there are heads even more golden and downy. Lady Three, cozily ensconced in her snug old farmhouse, looks back into her homeless past, forward into her unhoused future, fearless in the knowledge that whithersoever she goes she carries with her a serene personality that will always be shaping its whereabouts to fit it, but her eyes are bright with philosophies that might have sent forth sons and daughters to splendid living. Like my three friends who have found quiet in the morning call of the sun, in the coming of the rain on a thirsting flower-bed, on all the big little concerns of a farmyard, I must lean back on the good green peace of the universe—a universe which must have some stout principle of growth spiritual beneath its seeming waste of mortal energies, in order that I may not question why it is that the farm feminine is not, as it might have been, the farm masculine, the farm infantine.
XVI
A Little Girl and Her Grandmother
I AM always sorry for children who have never known what it is to have a grandmother and a grandfather and an old mountain farm to visit, far away from everywhere. A little girl I once knew had all three. Her grandmother was the dearest grandmother I have ever seen. She was tall and stout, with a broad, comfortable lap, and her hands, as they stroked the little girl’s head on her shoulder, were smooth and soft. The grandmother’s eyes were blue and full of mischief and fun and love. When she laughed she shook all over so that nobody looking at her could help laughing too; even the little girl, who was naturally serious. The grandmother’s cheeks were a soft pink, and her hair was black, faintly silvered. She wore it parted plain on week-days, but on Sundays it was crimped. On Sundays, too, she wore her black grenadine, but on other days her dress was blue gingham with a long white apron.
The grandmother lived on a farm so steep that it seemed always to be sliding down the mountain into the valley below. At the back of the house were a few acres of cleared space, and then beyond this the stretches of mountain woods. From these woods you could hear the call of the whip-poor-wills in the evenings, and there were wildcats and bears there, too, perhaps, and rattlesnakes surely. The farm had been a wild sort of place until the grandmother took hold of it and tamed it. She had them build a line of white fence palings between the house and the grass-grown mountain road. She would have the porch trimmed with clematis, and they had to build her a grape arbor, too, and swing a hammock under it. Above the whitewashed fence a row of sunflowers nodded, and within was a line of sweet-peas. In front of the house were two long flower-beds, bordered with mignonette. In one was heliotrope, in the other flowering red geraniums. There were other flower-beds, too, wherever the grandmother could find a place for them, and in one was a tall plant of lemon verbena. The grandmother was always plucking a leaf of this and crushing it, and then clapping her fragrant hand over the little girl’s nose. Such fun they had with the flowers, snipping and weeding and watering, their two gossipy sunbonnets close together! Whatever the grandmother was doing, the little girl was always at her heels, except when she was tagging after her grandfather.
All through her childhood the little girl used to make long visits at the farm. She was a queer little girl, not at all happy. Her grandmother said she was “high-strung,” but her mother and the little girl herself called it just plain “naughty.” At any rate, she was always losing her temper, and then crying for hours over the sin of it. She worried over everything that happened by day, and she was afraid of everything that might happen by night, and was always flying from her bed in terror of the dark. At last, when the little girl’s cheeks would grow so thin, and her eyes so big and anxious that her mother was at her wits’ end what to do with her, she would say to the father: “We must send Margie down to mother.”
Now the little girl’s father, who was a minister, had very little money, and the grandmother had less, but somehow they would do without things and do without things until they got the little girl safely off to the old farm, where she grew so brown and fat and jolly that her mother hardly knew her.
The first of these visits was when Margie was so little that she would have been a baby if there hadn’t been another baby at home. She remembers only one happening of that visit—riding high on the hay wagon, she and her grandmother, while her grandfather drove the mules. Margie thinks now that perhaps her grandmother did not enjoy that ride, for hay is hot and prickly, but whatever the little girl wanted to do, that the grandmother did. Another incident of that first visit her grandmother used to tell the little girl afterwards. The little girl always wanted to help her grandfather in all his work, and often she was much in the way. Sometimes when there was hoeing that must be done, the grandfather would try to slip away unnoticed; then that tease of a grandmother would point out to the little girl how the grandfather’s overalls were just disappearing around the corner of the house, and the little girl would snatch up her sunbonnet and her fire shovel, and run after, crying: “Wait for me, grandpa!” Then she would stand in the furrow right in front of him and pound away with her shovel, so hot and earnest that the grandfather had nothing to do but stand and laugh at her, and down in the doorway the grandmother, watching them, laughed, too, because she was teasing the grandfather and pleasing the little girl.
Another visit came the summer when Margie was seven. Her father was going to Convocation, and so could take her with him and drop her off at the grandmother’s station. Margie wore a big sailor hat and a brand-new sailor suit. She was so excited all the way that she did not talk at all, and would not touch her lunch. At last, peering out of the window, she saw the old spring wagon and her grandfather holding the reins and her grandmother waiting on the platform. Her grandmother lifted her up in her arms, doll and satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her over to the wagon: at home Margie was much too old to be lifted and carried. Seated between her grandparents, while her grandmother held her hat and the mountain wind blew through her curls and her trunk bumped along at the back, all Margie’s worries fell away from her—she forgot she was a sinful child, she ceased to think that the babies were doomed to drown in the river, that her mother would be stricken by dread disease and die, that her father would be run over in crossing the railroad track; and as for springing from her bed in fear, that night and all the rest she slept so soundly that she never woke at all.
Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmother would open Margie’s trunk and take out all the little garments and think them the prettiest ever seen, because the little girl’s mother had made them every stitch. From the little dresses the grandmother would select the very oldest, and then lock all the others away again. Down at the village store she would buy some coarse brown and white stockings, costing ten cents a pair. From a corner behind the sewing-machine she would bring out the sunbonnet she had stitched for Margie in the winter. It was blue check and had pasteboard slats that came out when it was washed. Thus equipped, the little girl might run free of the farm. She helped to feed the calves and the chickens and the pigs; she wiped the dishes for Minnie, the little Dutch maid, in order that Minnie might be sooner ready to play in the haymow with her in the long sultry afternoons through which the locusts shrilled; she went huckleberrying with her grandfather, pushing far into the mountain woods, always treading warily because of the rattlers, and coming home with a face smirched with purple under the sunbonnet; she took long drives with her grandfather along strange, still mountain roads. With him, too, she tried milking: the cow-bells tinkled through the dusk of the long shed, and the air was fragrant with the hay and the steaming milk-pails, and the little girl tried with all her might, but usually she only succeeded in sending a fine stream into her grandfather’s eye. On indoor days Margie would draw her little red rocker up beside her grandmother’s knee and listen to stories. The stories were all about mysterious and unknown relatives, Cousin Letty This and Uncle Josiah That and Aunt Tirzah Something Else. Much of it the little girl did not understand at all, yet somehow she liked listening to stories, snuggled against her grandmother’s knee, better than anything else in the long, blithe days, and the little girl felt sleepy very early here on the farm—she that was such a sleepless midget at home.
After supper, while the light was still clear, her grandmother would undress her and put on her nightgown: then, when her hair was combed and her teeth brushed and her prayers said, she would wrap the little girl in the gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the big rocking-chair on the front porch. There the grandmother would croon old songs while the little girl’s head drowsed against her shoulder, and the summer twilight stole upon them. Sometimes the call of a whip-poor-will would sound out from the woods, or the roosting turkeys in the apple trees across the road would rustle and flap their wings, and sometimes the white moon would come gliding up the sky, seen dreamily through the clematis bloom.