“It was kind o’ nice to do that,” I observed, with some embarrassment.
“No, it wasn’t either,” rejoined Mary Elizabeth, modestly.
We stood kicking at the gravel for a moment. Then she went away.
I faced about to the quiet garden. And suddenly, for no reason that I knew, I found myself skipping on the path, in the dark, just as if the day were only beginning.
V
THE KING’S TRUMPETER
And so it is for that night long ago when Mary Elizabeth and I stood by the tree and tried to think of something to say, that after all these years I have made the story of Peter.
Long years ago, when the world was just beginning to be, there was a kingdom which was not yet finished. Of course when a world has just stopped being nothing and is beginning to be something, it takes a great while to set all the kingdoms going. And this one wasn’t done.
For example, in the palace garden where little Peter used to play, the strangest things were to be met. For the mineral kingdom was just beginning to be vegetable, and the vegetable was just beginning to be animal, and the animal was just beginning to be man,—and man was just, just beginning to know about his living spirit. Do you see what that means? While you looked at a mound of earth it became a bush—or a very little time afterward, as time in these things is reckoned. While you looked at a beast-shaped bush—all bushes at night are shaped like beasts—it became a living animal—or, again, a very little afterward. And men had by no means got over being apes, tigers, swine, and dogs, and sometimes you hardly knew which a man was, a real man or one of these animals. And spirits were growing in men as fast as this might be. Everything, you see, lay in savage angles and wild lines.