He touched his lute, and its melody slipped into the sunshine.
“Toward the time when, holden in a vessel holy,
You shall be a flower.”
Then Peter stretched out his arms, and his whole slender little body became like one trumpet voice, and that voice strong and clear to reach round the world itself.
“I try once again!” he answered. “The world is beginning. I must go and help the king.”
VI
MY LADY OF THE APPLE TREE
Our lawn was nine apple trees large. There were none in front, where only Evergreens grew, and two silver Lombardy poplars, heaven-tall. The apple trees began with the Cooking-apple tree by the side porch. This was, of course, no true tree except in apple-blossom time, and at other times hardly counted. The length of twenty jumping ropes—they call them skipping ropes now, but we never called them so—laid one after another along the path would have brought one to the second tree, the Eating-apple tree, whose fruit was red without and pink-white within. To this day I do not know what kind of apples those were, whether Duchess, Gilliflower, Russet, Sweet, or Snow. But after all, these only name the body of the apple, as Jasper or Edith names the body of you. The soul of you, like the real sense of Apple, lives nameless all its days. Sometime we must play the game of giving us a secret name—the Pathfinder, the Lamplighter, the Starseeker, and so on. But colours and flavours are harder to name and must wait longer than we.
... Under this Nameless tree, then, the swing hung, and to sit in the swing and have one’s head touch apple-blossoms, and mind, not touch them with one’s foot, was precisely like having one’s swing knotted to the sky, so that one might rise in rhythm, head and toe, up among the living stars. I can think of no difference worth the mentioning, so high it seemed. And if one does not know what rhythm is, one has only to say it over: Spring, Summer, apple-blossom, apple; new moon, old moon, running river, echo—and then one will know.
“I would pick some,” said Mother, looking up at the apple-blossoms, “if I only knew which ones will never be apples.”