“But I ain’t got any box,” she says. “They keep the things and bring ’em to us clean every time. And I ain’t got any box.”
“That’s so, you ain’t,” says I, looking at her shelf.
“I put my things in my dress,” she says, “but they always fall out. And I’ve got to stop to pick ’em up. And she don’t like it.”
No. The matron wouldn’t like it. I knew that. She was one of them that the thing was the thing even if it was something else.
“And so I thought,” says Grandma Stuart, “that if I had a pocket, I could put my things in that. I thought they wouldn’t fall out if I had a pocket. She says she can’t be making pockets for every one. But I keep thinking if I had a pocket.... It’s these things I’ve got,” she says.
She took from her dress three things: A man’s knife, a child’s ring, and a door-key.
“It was the extry key to my house,” she said. “I—brought it along. And I thought if I had a pocket....”
...I sat there with her till the lights come out. I promised to come next day and bring her a little calico pocket. And then I set and let her talk to me—about how things use’ to be. When at last the matron come to take ’em away to be fed, I went out, and I ran down the road in the dark. And it was one of the times when the world of life is right close up, and you can all but touch it, and you can almost hear what it says, and you know that it can hear you—yes, and you almost know that it’s waiting, eager, to hear what you are going to say to it. For one force breathes through things, trying to let us know it’s there. It was speaking to me through that wrecked home of Grandma Stuart’s—through the man’s knife, the child’s ring, the door-key; and through the pitiful, clever, crocheted stuff in the glass case in the County House; and through David, and through all them that we were trying to fix up a club for—like a pleasant plaster for something that couldn’t be touched by the remedy.
Out there in the soft night, the world looked different. I donno if you’ll know what I mean, but it was like the world I knew had suddenly slipped inside another world—like a shell; and the other one was bigger and better and cut in a pattern that we haven’t grown to—yet. In the west a little new moon was showing inside the gold circle of the big coming full moon. And it seemed to me as if the world that I was in must be just the little thin promise of the world that could be—if we knew. Sometimes we do know. Sometimes, for just a minute, we see it. That night was a night when I know that I saw. After you see, you never forget.
“Life is something else than what we think it is,” I says to myself as I ran along the road in the dark. “It’s something better than we think it is.”