A faint spark of understanding leapt between us. Dressed-up little girls usually did say “how de do.” It was only in a kind of unconscious deference to her own appearance that I had not done so. She was unkempt and ragged—her sleeve was torn from cuff to elbow.
“What you doing here?” I inquired, not averse to breaking the business of calling by a bit of gossip.
At this she did for the third time what I had been vaguely conscious of her having done: She glanced over her shoulder toward a corner of the yard which the piled wood concealed from me. I stepped forward and looked there.
On an end of wood-pile which we children had pulled down so as to make a slope to ascend its heights, a man was sitting. His head and shoulders were drooping, his legs were relaxed, and his hands were hanging loose, as if they were heavy. His eyes were closed and his lips were parted, yet about the face, with its fair hair and beard, there was something singularly attractive and gentle. He looked like a man who would tell you a story.
“Who’s he?” I asked, and involuntarily I whispered.
The girl began backing a little away from me, her eyes on my face, her finger on her lips.
“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s—resting.”
I had never heard of a man resting in the daytime. Save, perhaps, on Sunday afternoons, this was no true function of men. I longed to look at the man and understand better, but something in the little girl’s manner forbade me. I looked perplexedly after her. Then I peered round the fence post and saw my Mother standing under a tree, waiting for me. She beckoned. I took one more look inside the fence, and I saw the little girl sit down beside the sleeping man and fold her hands. The afternoon sun smote across the long wood yard, with its mysterious rooms made by the piling of the cords. It seemed impossible that this strange, still place, with its thick carpet of sawdust and its moist odours, should belong at all to the commonplace little street. And the two strange occupants gave the last touch to its enchantment.
I ran to overtake Mother, and I tried to tell her something of what I had seen. But some way my words gave nothing of the air of the place and of the two who waited there for something that I could not guess. Already I knew this about words—that they were all very well for saying a thing, but seldom for letting anybody taste what you were talking about.
I did not give up trying to tell it until we passed the Rodmans’. From the direction of their high-board fence I heard voices. Margaret Amelia and Betty and Delia and Calista were engaged in writing on the weathered boards of the fence with willows dipped in the clear-flowing gutter stream.