CHAPTER XI

BLUEBELL MAKES A POEM

In the night Bluebell was wakened by the cherry-boughs scraping her window--and how they did scrape! The rain was tramping; it beat the house and roared on the shingles; the pines were making a high, thrilling noise which she did not know was like the voice of the sea. All within was so dry and comfortable; all without so muddy and dark. Yet off in the woods there were sweet smells, and birds’ nests tucked in forked branches, and the May-apples were rank, and even old rotten logs crumbling to yellow dust had a pungent odor of their own. What did the birds do in a storm? Did they turn their tails down like chickens? And how did the naked birds that were all furry bill and sprawling limbs like the baby swallows under the shed-eaves, get along?

Father, on his night-ride, was the thread on which these thoughts were strung. She thought of him first, and he ran through everything else. Ballie’s firm, quick step was moving on distant roads; the pill-bags were fastened behind the saddle; father whistled softly between his teeth; and anxious people looked into the storm for him. It scarcely occurred to Bluebell to wish him indoors. He and rough weather were old acquaintances. She had seen him come to the open fire stamping, the frost in his hair, or take off cloth leggings covered with mud, or stiff-frozen from the ford. What did he care for summer rain, housed as he was too, in rubber coat and boots, and on the most sensible horse in the world! Bluebell decided to ask Liza if she might not put on her very oldest dress and stand under the eaves where the water ran over in a constant shower.

But in the morning everything looked so dreary and soaked that she did not care to do it. Clouds scudded close to the earth; the hill above the house showed black under its foliage; the elder-flowers by the rock play-house were beaten to the ground; and hollyhocks in the garden leaned down as if about to swoon. The cherry-leaves had a higher polish and intenser green, but little unripe apples strewed the orchard.

Doctor Garde had not come home. Liza said she did not expect him before night. In very bad weather she had known him to be gone two or three days. Still, she kept some warm chicken in the old-fashioned Dutch oven before the fire while she did her baking.

The air was oppressive. But Miss Melissa moved around wrapped in a thick shawl. Liza took the roses out of her fireplace and started a warmer color dancing over some sticks. The low-scudding clouds began to pour again.

Bluebell spent the morning with Miss Calder making doll-clothes, and wondering if Tildy’s mother let _her_ go to school. Only a few of the children who lived nearest would be there, for so many had to cross the numerous bends and turns of the Rocky Fork. They would have to play in the house if it did not clear before noon, and the tracks of the boys’ bare feet would look so funny on the floor. To-day seemed years removed from yesterday. This was a bit of dingy autumn thrust through a summer day. Bluebell enjoyed the dress-making with zest, but she hoped it would clear.

Rocco had her high chair drawn to the kitchen table, and helped Liza with the baking. Her tow hair was braided back, the ends turned up and tied with black thread, and her slim claws as clean as soap and water could make them. She had Bluebell’s little rolling-pin and baking tins and Liza’s thimble before her. Liza was making caraway seed-cake; she watched the baby fondly, giving her dabs of dough which Rocco rolled out, cut up and placed in her tins. As soon as they were baked she divided them evenly on two saucers; for Rocco never ate any treat of which Bluebell did not have exactly half. She had been known to keep a mellow apple or pear from morning till dusk when Bluebell came home; smelling it and turning it over wistfully, but waiting its division.

The rain poured while they ate dinner.

“It comes down by bucketfuls,” said Liza. “I do hope Abram will get round and look after Liza-Robert’s stock. Lambs is so simple, and hers are always gettin’ into the run.”

“Why doesn’t she let her farm to a tenant?” suggested Miss Calder.

“Well, that’s not the way around here. Abram, he’s her brother-in-law and my first cousin; he lives about half a mile above us, and he ’tends to things for her. Liza’s no manager.”

Soon after dinner Miss Melissa lay down for her daily nap. Georgiana sat on the sitting-room mantel in an incomplete gingham dress, smiling on the weather with unchanged serenity. Liza went up garret to do a small “stent” of spinning. She always spun on dismal afternoons when the needle would lag in sewing. She knit winter stockings for the family. Bluebell and Rocco followed her, and the wheel could be heard soon after the children’s feet ceased sounding on the stairs.

When the children’s feet ceased sounding on the stairs, they were in the garret. It was one big dusky room, extending over the whole house, with a chasm in the floor through which the stairs came up. At each side the roof sloped so that even Rocco might knock her head. There were windows in the gables; and from all the rafters hung dried peppers, pennyroyal, ears of seed-corn, bags of seed, and sage, and of dried raspberries, and blackberries, cherries, and peaches, for in those days the art of canning fruit was not generally known to housewifery. Liza’s special jams and preserves stood along a system of shelves, in stone jars, broken-nosed tea-pots and flowered bowls tied up closely with white cloths. The floor was clean and dustless. A retired rocking-chair which had lost one rocker in the battle of life, was settled in one corner where it lived on a pension of the children’s favor. For right by it was their mother’s old trunk, the black and white hair worn off it in patches, leaving a tough hide exposed.

In this casket Bluebell kept many of her play-things and all her most precious books. She had “Emma and Caroline,” a paper-book some three inches square, a diminutive Mother Goose, several histories, and a work on geology suitable to advanced students which her father had brought her, and her school prizes--notable among them a pink-backed volume of Dr. Watts’s hymns which she had learned by heart. Here also reposed her last Sunday-school book, which had rather harrowed her mind; for it was the Memoir of Jane Ann Smith, who caught fire and burned to death; the picture of Jane Ann running out of the mill door all on fire, was put in as a lively frontispiece. There were almost no books for children in those days. Hannah More’s tracts and memoirs of very pious people constituted the library from which Bluebell and all the other little Rocky Forkers chose; if it could be called choosing when the librarian held the backs of an armload of books towards you, and you might pick out only one at a hazard. Bluebell had found one delicious story of a little girl whose uncle came and took her away to India where she had no end of wonderful times. But most of the books were grown-up, or very serious, or consisted of advice to young English servants when starting out to service. So Bluebell unfolded from its wrappings with tremulous delight that real fairy-book, “Tales from Catland” which Aunt Melissa brought her. It was a book with some long words in it, but even these were a sonorous pleasure; the Countess Von Rustenfustenmustencrustenberg, Grandmagnificolowsky, the tall page, Glumdalkin, the cross cat, Friskarina, the amiable cat. Bluebell settled into the one-sided rocker, and lived in castles and woods and palaces, while the rain beat the shingles directly overhead as if it were playing thousands of small castanets, and Liza’s wheel sang high or low.

Rocco sat down on the front of a small flax-wheel which worked with a treadle, and afforded the baby just sitting-room, to watch Liza spin.

The great wheel stood in the centre of the garret; on its long bench lay a pile of wool-rolls. Liza took hold of the end of a roll, attached it to the spindle in some mysterious manner, and turned the wheel around and around and around with a smooth stick which she called her wheel-pin. The spokes seemed to approach each other, then melted together into a transparency, the hum rose higher and higher until it became a musical scream, and Liza stepped back drawing her roll off the spindle into a long woolly thread. Back and forth she moved, from the spindle to the gable window; now hurrying up the wheel, and now letting it sing, as it seemed, away down in the sloping bench which supported it.

[Illustration: LIZA STEPPED BACK, DRAWING HER ROLL OFF THE SPINDLE INTO A LONG WOOLLY THREAD.--_Page 134._]

The rain rained on. Bluebell forgot her head-marks. When she had read two stories and let the Cat-book sink to her knees, her imagination was so stimulated that she craved half-unconsciously to make a story herself. But Liza’s wheel put rhythm into her head, and Liza’s presence mixed the practical with the purely ideal.

For a long time she sat and thought, constrained to form into shape what she had in her mind; and if the thing itself was simple and the shape grotesque, many an author since Bluebell will confess to having given very poor expression to the finest inspiration.

“I believe it’s going to quit raining,” said Liza as a very pale ray slanted through the window and shone on the point of the spindle.

She pulled out the last roll and stopped her wheel.

“What’s that noise?”

It seemed to be some one knocking perseveringly at the kitchen door. Liza gave the wheel one more vigorous turn and finished her “stent” before she started down.

“I expect it’s Abram,” she said. “Don’t let Rocco fall down the stairs, Bluebell, and don’t play with my spinning.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

Roused from the spell which wheel and book had cast, the children turned to each other for a romp.

Bluebell paused impressively as she caught the little sister in her arms, and proceeded to make a confidant of her.

“Honey-dew, sisser’s made a pretty piece!”

“Piece o’ what?”

“Poetry! Like ‘Poor Jane Ray’ and ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’”

Rocco heard these standards of literary excellence mentioned without any emotion.

“I’ll say it to you.”

“Le’s p’ay,” suggested Rocco instead.

“It’s somethin’ pretty--about Liza,” urged the poet, tasting the first difficulties of securing a public.

Rocco paused in the mad-career of a tumble and consented to listen.

“See that pretty maiden,”

(“That’s Liza, you know,” explained Bluebell,)

“Spinning in the rain.”

“’Tain’t wainin’,” said Rocco; “it’s twit.”

“It was, though. Now you just listen:

“See that pretty maiden, Spinning in the rain: The wheel goes round and round to make Our stocking-yarn again.

“The wind goes roar and roar, The wheel roars with its band; The maiden turns it with a pin For fear she might hurt her hand.”

“Isn’t that pretty?”

Rocco meditated. The subject of poetry had aroused other thoughts within her; and the faculty of association carried her on from a hymn Liza frequently sung to her--

“On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand, And cast a wistful eye On Canaan’s fair and happy land Where my possessions lie--”

to the family who represented the idea to her. So without making any comment on Bluebell’s poem, she said decidedly,

“I want to go to Jordan Stormy Banks’s house.”