Between the New Lady's house and the big, obvious deacon's lawn the boy stood, silent, his arms about the girl. So this was the way the world is, people bound together, needing one another, wanting one another, stretching out their hands....
"Why, it was you I wanted!" Nicholas said wonderingly.
XIII HOUSEHOLDRY
"After supper" in the village is like another room of the day. On these summer nights we all come out to our porches to read the daily paper, or we go to sit on the porch of a neighbour, or we walk about our lawns in excesses of leisure, giving little twitches to this green and to that. "In our yards" we usually say. Of these some are so tiny that the hammocks or the red swinging-chairs find room on the planting spaces outside the walks, and there men smoke and children frolic and call across the street to one another. And this evening, as I went down Daphne Street to post my letters, I saw in process the occasional evening tasks which I have noted, performed out-of-doors: at the Sykeses' cucumbers in preparation for to-morrow's pickles; a bushel of over-ripe cherries arrived unexpectedly at the Herons' and being pitted by hand; a belated needle-task of Mis' Holcomb's finishing itself in the tenuous after-light. This fashion of taking various employments into the open delights me. If we have peas to shell or beans to string or corn to husk, straightway we take them to the porch or into the yard. This seems to me to hold something of the grace of the days in the Joyous Garde, or on the grounds of old châteaux where they embroidered or wound worsted in woodland glades, or of colonial America, where we had out our spinning wheels under the oaks. When I see a great shining boiler of gasoline carried to the side yard for the washing of delicate fabrics, I like to think of it as done out-of-doors for the charm of it as much as for the safety. So Nausicaa would have cleansed with gasoline!
It was sight of the old Aunt Effie sewing a seam in Mis' Holcomb's dooryard which decided me to go to see Miggy. For I would not willingly be where Aunt Effie is, who has always some tragedy of gravy-scorching or dish-breaking to tell me. I have been for some time promising to go to see Miggy in her home, and this was the night to do so, for the New Lady went home to-day and I have been missing her sorely. There is a kind of minus-New Lady feeling about the universe.
At the same moment that I decided for Miggy, Peter rose out of the ground. I wonder if he can have risen a very little first? But that is one of those puzzles much dwelt upon by the theologians, and I will not decide. Perhaps the thought of Miggy is a mighty motive on which Peter's very being is conditioned. Anyway, there he was, suddenly beside me, and telling me some everyday affair of how little use in the cannery were Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade, whose houses we were passing. And to his talk of shop I responded by inviting him to go with me to see Miggy. Would he go? He smiled his slow smile, with that little twist of mouth and lifting of brow.
"This is like finding an evening where there wasn't one before," he said.
The little house where Miggy lives has a copper beech in the dooryard—these red-leaved trees seem to be always in a kind of hush at their own difference. The house is no-colour, with trimmings of another no-colour for contrast, and the little front porch looks like something that has started to run out the front door and is being sternly snatched backward. The door stood ajar—no doubt for the completion of this transaction—and no one was about. We rapped, for above the bell push was a legend of Aunt Effie's inscribing, saying: "Bell don't ring." For a moment our summons was unanswered. Then Miggy called from upstairs.