"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."
My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph. But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.
"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be up to talk to you in a day or two—I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can spell like the minister."
I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!" Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of—shall I say?—brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I have seldom known this divination to fail me—though I am chary of using it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I knew that it would be Miggy.
"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the imminent; "why Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.
"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because she was a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy. 'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'—just like I've said it to you."
It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June—that May was helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do you think of your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless, usually speechless, and always without curiosity—some one, save for the tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time, moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.
... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think, because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the idea of something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her. But I am never quick enough to let her know....
When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,
"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.