Friendship Village Love Stories. Gale Zona

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СКАЧАТЬ the time has never wholly passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the walk—such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!—and in return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine—an isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say, it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in fellowship.

      In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives, striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere civility; and I love them all—unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole village has just given to Lyddy Ember:—

      "I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in, though that was all elegant, but it was the Togetherness of it. I couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin' anybody to neighbour with."

      It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship, comradeship, kinship—call it what you will. My neighbour and I will understand.

      "I heard you was here," my neighbour said—bless her, her voice trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of her voice.

      I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the wind—where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that—as is the custom of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and Meeting and Being Together.

      I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell our days to their end.

      My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street, and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out for us as if he knew.

      "If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."

      My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph. But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.

      "Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be up to talk to you in a day or two—I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can spell like the minister."

      I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!" Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of—shall I say?—brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I have seldom known this divination to fail me—though I am chary of using it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I knew that it would be Miggy.

      "What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the imminent; "why Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.

      "Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because she was a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy. 'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'—just like I've said it to you."

      It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June—that May was helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do СКАЧАТЬ