“All the time,” she said, “O, quite ever since she could talk, she has insisted on this ‘sister.’ Heaven knows where she ever got the name. I never heard it. She is very tiresome with it—she never forgets her. She saves food for Halverson; she won’t go to drive unless there is room for Halverson; she wakes us in the night to get Halverson a drink. Of course I’ve been to specialists. They say she is fanciful and that she’ll outgrow it. But I don’t know—she seems to get worse. I used to lock her up, but that did no good. She insisted that I couldn’t lock Halverson out—the idea! She has stopped talking the nonsense to me, but I can see she’s never stopped pretending. When I have my nervous headaches I declare the dear child gives me cold chills.”
When she was gone Pelleas and I looked at each other in silence. Between the vulgar skepticism of the mother and the madness of believing that Margaret saw what we did not see, we hesitated not a moment to ally ourselves with the little girl. After all, who are we that we should be prepared to doubt the authority of the fancies of a child?
“They’ve been to specialists!” said Pelleas, shaking his head.
The night was very still, moonless, and having that lack of motion among the leaves which gives to a garden the look of mid-Summer. Pelleas and I stepped through the long glass doors of our sitting room, crossed the veranda and descended to the path. There we were wont to walk for an hour, looking toward the fields where the farm-house candles spelled out the meaning of the dark as do children instead of giving it forth in one loud, electric word as adults talk. That night we were later than on other nights and the fields were still and black.
“Etarre,” Pelleas said, “of course I want to live as long as I can. But more and more I am wildly eager to understand.”
“I know,” I said.
“‘I want to see my universe,’” he quoted. “Sometime,” he went on, “one of us will know, perhaps, and not be able to tell the other. One of us may know first. Isn’t it marvelous that people can talk about anything else? Although,” he added, “I’m heartily glad that they can. It is bad enough to hear many of us on the subject of beer and skittles without being obliged to listen to what we have to say on the universe.”
I remember a certain judge who was delightful when he talked about machinery and poultry and Chippendale; but the moment that he approached law and order and the cosmic forces every one hoped for dessert or leave-taking. Truly, there are worthy people who would better talk of “love, taste and the musical glasses” and leave the universe alone. But for us whose bread is wonder it is marvelous indeed that we can talk of anything else. Nor do Pelleas and I often attempt any other subject, “in such a night.”
“But I hold to my notion,” Pelleas said, “that we might know a great many extraordinary things before we die, if only we would do our best.”