People of the Whirlpool. Mabel Osgood Wright

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СКАЧАТЬ house, while their owners, touched by the swish of the Whirlpool that has recently drawn this peaceful town into its eddies, are busy trying to turn their patrol wagon, that for a year has led a most conservative existence as a hay wain and a stage-coach dragged by a curiously assorted team of dogs and goat, into the semblance of some weird sort of autocart, by the aid of bits of old garden hose, cast-away bicycle gearing, a watering-pot, and an oil lantern.

      I have wondered for a week past what yeast was working in their brains. Of course, the seven-year-old Vanderveer boy on the Bluffs had an electric runabout for a Christmas gift, also a man to run it! Corney Delaney, as Evan named the majestic gray goat—of firm disposition blended with a keen sense of humour—that father gave the boys last spring and who has been their best beloved ever since, has for many days been left in duress with the calves in the stack-yard, where the all-day diet of cornstalks is fatally bulging his once straight-fronted figure.

      In fact, it is the doings of these two pairs of precious feet, with the bodies, heads, and arms that belong to them, that have caused the dust to gather in my desk, and the "Garden Boke," though not the garden, which is more of a joy than ever, to be suspended and take a different form. Flesh-and-blood books that write themselves are so compelling and absorbing that one often wonders at the existence of any other kind, and, feeling this strongly, yet I turn to paper pages as silent confidants. Why? Heredity and its understudy, Habit, the two h's that control both the making of solitary tartlets as well as family pies.

      So the last entry in the "Garden Boke" was made a week before the day recorded in the white book with the cherubs' heads painted on it that underlies the shoes.

      It seems both strange and significant to me now that this book chanced to be given me by Lavinia Dorman, mother's school friend and bridesmaid, a spinster of fifty-five, and was really the beginning of the transfer of her friendship to me, the only woman friendship that I have ever had, and its quality has that fragrant pungence that comes from sweet herbs, that of all garden odours are the most lasting.

      I suppose that it is one of the strongest human habits to write down the very things that one is least likely to forget, and vice-versa; for certainly I shall never forget the date and double record on that first fair page beneath the illuminated word Born—yet I often steal up here to peep at it—and live the intervening five years backward for pure joy. January 10, 189-, Richard Russell———and John Evan———.

      Every time I read the names anew I wonder what I should have done if there had been a single name upon the page. I must then have chosen between naming him for father or Evan—an impossibility; for even if the names had been combined, whose should I have put first?

      No, the twins are in every way an advantage. To Evan, in providing him at once with a commuted family sufficient for his means; to father, among other reasons, by giving him the pleasure of saying, to friends who felt it necessary to visit him in the privacy of his study and be apologetically sympathetic, "I have observed that the first editions of very important books are frequently in two volumes," sending them away wondering what he really meant; to me by saving the rack of argument, the form of evil I most detest, and to their own chubby selves no less, in that neither one has been handicapped for a single day by the disadvantage of being an only child!

      It doubtless seems very odd for me to feel this last to be a disadvantage, being myself an only child, and always a happy one, sharing with mother all the space in father's big heart. But this is because God has been very good to me, leaving me safe in the shelter of the home nest. Suppose it had been otherwise and I had been forced to face the world, how it would have hurt, for individual love is cruelly precious sometimes, and an "onliest" cannot in the very nature of things be as unselfish and adaptable as one of many.

      I was selfish even when the twins came. I was so glad that they were men-children. I could not bear to think of other woman hands ministering to father and Evan, and I rejoiced in the promise of two more champions. I often wonder how mother felt when I was born and what she thought. Was she glad or disappointed? I wish that she had left written words to guide me, if ever so few—they would mean so much now; and let me know if in her day social things surprised and troubled her as for the first time they now stir me, and therefore belong to all awakening motherhood. Her diaries were a blending of simple household happenings and garden lore, nothing more; for when I was five years old and her son came, he stayed but a few short hours and then stole her away with him.

      I wonder if my boys, when they are grown and begin to realize woman, will care to look into this book of mine, and read in and between the lines of its jumble of scraps and letters what their mother thought of them, and how things appeared to her in the days of their babyhood. Perhaps; who knows? At present, being but five years old, they are centred in whatever thing the particular day brings forth, and but that they are leashed fast by an almost prenatal and unconscious affection, they are as unlike in disposition, temperament, and colouring as they are alike in feature. Richard is dark, like father and me, very quiet, except in the matter of affection, in which he is clingingly demonstrative, slow to receive impressions, but withal tenacious. He clearly inherits father's medical instinct of preserving life, and the very thought of suffering on the part of man or beast arouses him to action. When he was only a little over three years old, I found him carefully mending some windfall robins' eggs, cracked by their tumble, with bits of rubber sticking-plaster, then putting them hopefully back into the nest, with an admonition to the anxious parents to "sit very still and don't stwatch." While last summer he unfortunately saw a chicken decapitated over at the farm barn, and, in Martha Corkle's language, "the way he wound a bit o' paper round its poor neck to stop its bleedin' went straight to my stummick, so it did, Mrs. Evan;" for be it said here that Martha has fulfilled my wildest expectations, and whereas, as queen of the kitchen, she was a trifle unexpected and uncomfortable, as Mrs. Timothy Saunders, now comfortably settled in the new cottage above the stable at the north corner of the hayland, she is a veritable guardian angel, ready to swoop down with strong wings at a moment's notice, in sickness or health, day or night, and seize the nursery helm.

      It is owing to her that I have never been obliged to have a nursemaid under my feet or tagging after the boys, to the ruin of their independence. For the first few years Effie, whose fiery locks have not yet found their affinity, helped me, but now merely sees to buttons, strings, and darns.

      I found out long ago that those who get the best return from their flower gardens were those who kept no gardeners, and it is the same way with the child garden; those who are too overbusy, irresponsible, ignorant, or rich to do without the orthodox nurse, never can know precisely what they lose. To watch a baby untrammelled with clothes, dimple, glow, and expand in its bath, is in an intense personal degree like watching, early of a June morning, the first opening bud of a rose that you have coaxed and raised from a mere cutting. You hoped and believed that it would be fair and beautiful, but ah, what a glorious surprise it is!

      And so it is at the other end of day, when sleep comes over the garden and all the flowers that have been basking in sun vigour relax and their colours are subdued, blended by the brush of darkness, and the night wind steals new perfumes from them, and wings of all but a few night birds have ceased to cleave the air. As you walk among the flowers and touch them, or throw back the casement and look out, you read new meanings everywhere. In the white cribs in the alcove the same change comes, bright eyes, hair, cheeks, and lips lie blended in the shadow, the only sound is the even breath of night, and when you press your lips behind the ear where a curl curves and neck and garments meet, there comes a little fragrance born of sweet flesh and new flannel, and the only motion is that of the half-open hand that seems to recognize and closes about your fingers as a vine to its trellis, or as a sleeping bird clings to its perch.

      A gardener or a nurse is equally a door between one and these silent pleasures, for who would not steal up now and then from a troubled dream to satisfy with sight and touch that the babes are really there and all is well?

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