: In the Garden of Delight by Hammond Lily Hardy - Interpersonal relations Fiction; Families Fiction

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I A COUNTRY CHILD

THERE is one thing, at least, in this puzzling world which, though everything changes it, nothing can spoil: and that is out-of-doors. Long ago, when this place was stately old Cedarhurst instead of home-y Bird Corners, and I a wilful small girl climbing trees and tearing my frocks whenever Great-aunt Virginia and Great-aunt Letitia were both looking the other way at the same time--a coincidence as blissful as it was infrequent--I thought being outdoors was heaven enough for anybody.

In the long winter afternoons I sat by the big wood fire in the back parlor and hemmed towels and napkins--when I wasn't pulling out yesterday's work because Great-aunt Virginia found the stitches too big: and I looked out at the cold, bare hills, blue and beautiful against the pale sky, and longed to play over them like the winds, and to be whirled up into the air like the brown leaves which scurried about them all winter long. And in the spring, when the budding branches draped the trees with jewelled mists, all silver and green and gold and ruby-red, I wished the great-aunts had learned to play on the grass with their whole selves, instead of just with their fingers on the big old rosewood piano, which stood stiff and square in the front parlor, an instrument of torture to rebellious hands that longed to be pulling wild-flowers, and to ears tuned to catch the songs of birds. And in summer time, when the rain blotted out the hills, and every leaf of every tree sang the Song of the Rushing Winds; when the lightning ran zig-zag all over the sky and the thunder jarred the house--oh, why should great-aunts call one indoors, and shut the free winds out, and put cotton in their ears, and make little girls come away from the windows, and the chimneys, and every place where they wanted to be, instead of leaving them out in the rain to be drenched like the flowers and shake themselves dry like the birds?

And in autumn--but those memories are too painful! On frosty days the house was shut tight, the log fires kindled, and my small person swathed in insufferable flannels--flannels!--in a Tennessee October! And when I rebelled, there were fearsome tales of children who had died of pneumonia, or gone into consumption, because their misguided relatives had allowed them to play outdoors in the cold.

And yet outdoors was never more beautiful. Some of the hills were far and blue, and some were near and green, or brown with stubble, or yellow with stalks of corn. The grass in the pasture was greenest green; and when I slipped out on the back porch the sycamores down by the brook rustled their drying leaves and called me as loud as they dared. And the doves flew by in flocks, and the killdeers whirred up from the valley with wild, free cries, and the field-larks sang on the fence-posts, or lighted on the short, sweet grass, the white of their outer tail feathers shining in the sun. But Great-aunt Letitia would call me back to the parlor, where she made tea, which she and Great-aunt Virginia drank, sitting in rosewood arm-chairs, dressed in soft shimmering silks, with cobwebby lace about their throats.

I myself balanced unhappily upon one of the big square ottomans, too small to get far enough back on it to have any purchase against the slippery horsehair, and painfully conscious of Great-aunt Virginia's eyes on my awkwardly swinging feet. I kept my place as best I could, holding a bit of egg-shell china, and sipping my odious cambric tea.

This was the chosen time to instill proper principles of conduct into my callous little soul. The gentle old aunts made a duet of it, and I always thought they practiced it together beforehand, like a "piece" on the piano. It was really very easy not to hear!

I always sat on the ottoman nearest the center table. The other was nearer the east window, and showed the long front drive bordered by the stiff lines of cedars, which gave Cedarhurst its name before the great-aunts were born. But the one by the table had the double advantage of giving me a dutiful appearance, being equally distant from both of the arm-chairs, and of allowing me, by an almost imperceptible sliding to one corner, to look out of the silver-maple window to the jug of water I kept in the center of the seven trunks, a drinking fountain for all the birds of the place. I sat very still during the duet, my head raised a little to see the lowest branches, where the birds always alighted; and I often quite forgot my cambric tea until Great-aunt Letitia gently reminded me of it. My docility touched them very much. I heard Great-aunt Letitia tell Great-aunt Virginia one day that she was afraid I would never live to grow up, my expression was so rapt when they urged my duty upon me; and she felt as though there were an invisible halo above my little brown head. I was running in through the hall when I heard this, and stopped in breathless amazement. I had no thought of eavesdropping, but I saw Great-aunt Virginia wipe her eyes; and Great-aunt Letitia almost sniffed. I sat stiller than ever after that, and rolled my eyes a little; and Great-aunt Letitia sent for the doctor, who said I needed calico dresses and mud pies. The great-aunts were shocked at first, but the doctor was firm. And after that I played outdoors unless the thermometer was very unkind and the wind in an especially dangerous quarter.

There are really two of the-most-beautiful-place-in-the-world. One of them is the real outdoors; and the other is outdoors in the Land of Make-Believe. The advantage of the real outdoors is that its loveliness is ready-made. One invents nothing; one merely opens eyes and ears and soul to drink in beauty and joy, and learns, almost without knowing it, the most curious and interesting things. The advantage of Make-Believe is that when things are as they shouldn't be, one can instantly step over into that blessed country and make them be exactly what they should. No one ever sees you do it, either, or guesses that you can make a world in a twinkling, out of dreams. It has all the charm and mystery of a fairy ring, or fern seed, or Aladdin's lamp. One's body can perch on a horsehair piano stool, twisting one's two little meat legs about its one fat leg of rosewood, and great-aunts may be sure you are practising scales most faithfully; and all the time you are really running races in the wind with charming, dirty children who tear their dresses all day long, and never had their hair in curl-papers in their lives.

And that is only the beginning. For one can learn so well the road to that dear land that one never forgets it, even in grown-up days. There is never any sickness in Make-Believe. One can walk and run there always, though one's body lies weak and helpless, or drags slowly about, year after year, in a world that is full of pain. One can slip away from the long, black, sleepless nights into a lovely world where imagination is the motive power, and all one needs and all one longs for lie ready to one's hand.

It was the January after I was sixteen that Cedarhurst burned down. It was a bitter cold time; and the heaviest snow I had ever seen turned my familiar world into fairyland under the winter moon.

It was Great-aunt Letitia who found the fire. She had been looking for it all her life. One of the most familiar memories of my childhood is the waking at night to hear a soft rustle past my open door--the doors were always left open that we might smell the fire when we really had one--and to see Great-aunt Letitia, her white hair tucked away under a dainty nightcap and the light of her candle bringing out soft gleams in her flowered silk dressing gown, as she followed her highbred nose to the spot where it assured her a fire had broken out. It used to frighten me at first; but I grew too accustomed to it even to wake. So it taxed my credulity to the utmost when, on that bitter night, she roused me to tell me with tense white lips that Cedarhurst was in flames.

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