If I could have made a dream for that night, I think it would have been that ever and ever so many of us were sitting in rows, waiting to be counted. And a big sun came by, whirling and growing, to take us, and we thought we couldn’t all get in. But there was room, whether we had been counted or not.
XI
DOLLS
The advent of the New Boy changed the face of the neighbourhood. Formerly I had been accustomed to peep through cracks in the fence only to look into a field of corn that grew at the side; or, on the other side, into raspberry bushes, where at any moment raspberries might be gathered and dropped over the fence to me. Also, there was one place in the deep green before those bushes where blue-eyed grass grew, and I had to watch for that. Then there was a great spotted dog that sometimes came, and when he had passed, I used to wait long by the high boards lest he should return and leap at me to whom, so far, he had never paid the slightest attention. As a child, my mother had once jumped down into a manger where a great spotted dog was inadvertently lying and, though from all accounts he was far more frightened than she, yet I feared his kind more than any other.... The only real excitement that we had been wont to know in the neighbourhood occurred whenever there was a Loose Horse. Somebody would give the alarm, and then we would all make sure that the gates were latched and we would retire to watch him fearfully, where he was quietly cropping the roadside grass. But sometimes, too, a Loose Horse would run—and then I was terrified by the sound of his hoofs galloping on the sidewalk and striking on the bricks and boards. I was always afraid that a Loose Horse would see me, and nights, after one had disturbed our peace, I would dream that he was trying to find me, and that he had come peering between the dining-room blinds; and though I hid under the red cotton spread that was used “between-meals,” it never came down far enough, and he always stood there interminably waiting, and found me, through the fringe.
But all these excitements were become as nothing. A new occupation presented itself. A dozen times a day now I had to watch through the fence-cracks, or through the knot-hole, or boldly between the pickets of the front fence, at the fascinating performances of the New Boy and his troops of friends. At any moment both Mary Elizabeth and I would abandon what we were doing to go to stare at the unaccountable activities which were forever agitating them. They were always producing something from their pockets and examining it, with their heads together, or manufacturing something or burying something, or disputing about something unguessed and alluring. Their whole world was filled with doing, doing, doing, whereas ours was made wholly of watching things get done.
On an afternoon Mary Elizabeth and I were playing together in our side yard. It was the day for Delia’s music lesson, and as she usually did her whole week’s practising in the time immediately preceding that event, the entire half day was virtually wasted. We could hear her going drearily over and over the first and last movements of “At Home,” which she had memorized and could play like lightning, while the entire middle of the piece went with infinite deliberation. Calista was, we understood (because of some matter pertaining to having filled the bath-tub and waded in it and ruined the dining-room ceiling), spending the day in her bed. And Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman were being kept at home because the family had company; and such was the prestige of the Rodmans that the two contrived to make this circumstance seem enviable, and the day before had pictured to us their embroidered white dresses and blue ribbons, and blue stockings, and the Charlotte Russe for supper, until we felt left out, and not in the least as if their company were of a kind with events of the sort familiar to us. Since I have grown up, I have observed this variety of genius in others. There is one family which, when it appears in afternoon gowns on occasions when I have worn a street dress, has power to make me wonder how I can have failed to do honour to the day; but who, when they wear street gowns and I am dressed for afternoon, invariably cause me to feel inexcusably overdressed. It is a kind of genius for the fit, and we must believe that it actually designates the atmosphere which an occasion shall breathe.
Mary Elizabeth and I were playing Dolls. We rarely did this on a pleasant day in Summer, Dolls being an indoor game, matched with carpets and furniture and sewing baskets rather than with blue sky and with the soft brilliance of the grass. But that day we had brought everything out in the side yard under the little catalpa tree, and my eleven dolls (counting the one without any face, and Irene Helena, the home-made one, and the two penny ones) were in a circle on chairs and boxes and their backs, getting dressed for the tea-party. There was always going to be a tea-party when you played Dolls—you of course had to lead up to something, and what else was there to lead up to save a tea-party? To be sure, there might be an occasional marriage, but boy-dolls were never very practical; they were invariably smaller than the bride-doll, and besides we had no mosquito-netting suitable for a veil. Sometimes we had them go for a walk, and once or twice we had tried playing that they were house-cleaning; but these operations were not desirable, because in neither of them could the dolls dress up, and the desirable part of playing dolls is, as everybody knows, to dress them in their best. That is the game. That, and the tea-party.
“Blue or rose-pink?” Mary Elizabeth inquired, indicating the two best gowns of the doll she was dressing.
It was a difficult question. We had never been able to decide which of these two colours we preferred. There was the sky for precedent of blue, but then rose-pink we loved so to say!