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 excitement193 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 both194 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 family195 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 brought196 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!
She settled everything in that way; she counted the petals of fennel daisies and blew thistle from dandelions.
197 “If they’s one cloud in the sky, we’ll put on the rose-pink one,” said Mary Elizabeth. “And if there isn’t any, that’ll mean blue.”
She settled everything that way—she counted the petals of fennel daisies, blew the thistle from dandelions, did one thing if she could find twelve acorns and another if they were lacking. Even then Mary Elizabeth seemed always to be watching for a guiding hand, to be listening for a voice to tell her what to do, and trying to find these in things of Nature.
We dressed the Eleven in their best frocks, weighing each choice long, and seated them about a table made of a box covered with a towel. We sliced a doughnut and with it filled two small baskets for each end of the table, on which rested my toy castor and such of my dishes as had survived the necessity which I had felt for going to bed with the full set, on the night of the day, some years before, when I had acquired them. We picked all the flowers suitable for doll decorations—clover, sorrel, candytuft, sweet alyssum. We observed the unities198 by retiring for a time sufficient to occupy the tea-party in disposing of the feast; and then we came back and sat down and stared at them. Irene Helena, I remember, had slipped under the table in a heap, a proceeding which always irritated me, as nakedly uncovering the real depths of our pretence—and I jerked her up and set her down, like some maternal Nemesis.
In that moment a wild, I may almost say thick, shriek sounded through our block, and there came that stimulating thud-thud of feet on earth that accompanies all the best diversions, and also there came the cracking of things,—whips, or pistols, or even a punch, which rapidly operated will do almost as well. And down the yards of the block and over the fences and over the roof of my play-house came tumbling and shrieking the New Boy, and in his wake were ten of his kind.
Usually they raced by with a look in their eyes which we knew well, though we never could distinguish whether it meant robbers or pirates or dragons or the enemy. Usually they did not even see us. But that day something in our elaborate preparation to receive somebody or to welcome something, and our eternal moment199 of suspended animation at which they found us, must have caught the fancy of the New Boy.
“Halt!” he roared with the force and effect of a steam whistle, and in a moment they were all stamping and breathing about Mary Elizabeth and me.
We sprang up in instant alarm and the vague, pathetic, immemorial impulse to defence. We need not have feared. The game was still going forward and we were merely pawns.
“Who is the lord of this castle?” demanded the New Boy.
“Bindyliggs,” replied Mary Elizabeth, without a moment’s hesitation, a name which I believe neither of us to have heard before.
“Where is this Lord of Bindyliggs?” the New Boy pressed it.
Mary Elizabeth indicated the woodshed. “At meat,” she added gravely.
“Forward!” the New Boy instantly commanded, and the whole troop disappeared in our shed. We heard wood fall, and the clash of meeting weapons, and the troop reappeared, two by way of the low window.
“Enough!” cried the New Boy, grandly. “We have spared him, but there is not a moment to200 lose. You must come with us immediately. What you got to eat?”
Raptly, we gave them, from under the wistful noses of Irene Helena and the doll without the face and the rest, the entire sliced doughnut, and two more doughnuts, dipped in sugar, which we had been saving so as to have something to look forward to.
“Come with us,” said the New Boy, graciously. “To horse! We may reach the settlement by nightfall—if we escape the Brigands in the Wood. The Black Wood,” he added.
Even then, I recall, I was smitten with wonder that he who had shown so little imagination in that matter of dirt and apples and potatoes should here be teeming with fancy on his own familiar ground. It was years before I understood that there are almost as many varieties of imaginative as of religious experience.
Fascinated, we dropped everything and followed. The way led, it appeared, to the Wells’s barn, a huge, red barn in the block, with doors always invitingly open and chickens pecking about, and doves on a little platform close to the pointed roof.
“Aw, say, you ain’t goin’ to take ’em along,201 are you?” demanded one knight, below his voice. “They’ll spoil everythin’.”
“You’re rescuin’ ’em, you geezer,” the New Boy explained. “You got to have ’em along till you get ’em rescued, ain’t you? Arrest that man!” he added. “Put him in double irons with chains and balls on. And gag him,............