XIII

He came on Saturday afternoon long before anyone expected him. Mamma was lying down, May was tying a rose-colored velvet ribbon around her curls, and Maggie, who had been helping Martha preserve strawberries, was trying to get the stains off her fingers with the grated lemon rinds left from the lemon-icing cake Mamma had made that morning. It was Lily, strolling around the corner from the kitchen with her mouth full of buttered biscuit, who saw him on his bicycle with the huge front wheel and the tiny back one come wobbling up the drive between the pine trees.

“Is this the Campions’ house?” he shouted.

Lily, crimson with embarrassment, made muffled sounds and would have run away, if Edward hadn’t fallen off cheerfully into a bed of peonies.

“My bicycle’s new, and I don’t know how to ride it very well yet. I hope you’ll excuse my smashing your flowers.”

Lily swallowed her mouthful of biscuit with a gulp that forced the tears into her eyes, and became vehement through shyness.

“Oh, my yes, we hate those peonies. Mamma’ll be glad you fell off in them⁠—oh, I didn’t mean that! I mean she hates these, we all do, the pretty ones are all down in the garden, the big white ones with the pink bottoms⁠—”

Oh, what had possessed her? What would he think of her? As soon as the others came down, she rushed off and flung herself into a game of solitary croquet, pretending to be deeply absorbed, and passing from one agony of blushes to another.

They had set up a target on the lawn near the beech tree. Edward and May shot against Maggie and Victor, and Mamma sat in a rustic chair, watching them, chaperoning the young people. The pleated ruffles of her skirt flowed out on the grass beside her, crisp fan after fan. In her spreading white, with her cooing voice, she was like one of Victor’s pigeons. How nice the girls looked, she thought, in their tight basques and three-ruffled skirts, their bustles, and sashes, their trains and long tight sleeves. Fashions had never been so pretty. Nobody would have dreamed that Maggie’s tobacco-brown dress had started life as a crinoline skirt of Aunt Priscilla’s. But how sunburned the child was! She must wear her hat more, and rub cucumbers on her face at night.

Maggie shot well when she got over trying to hide her stained fingers. Edward had to work hard to beat her. He looked at her with dawning interest as she drew her bow. Her straight, strong body in its tight brown sheath, like a young tree; her face, the golden rose of peaches above the white of her stiff little linen turn-back collar; her hair in a thick bang over her dark eyebrows and clear light eyes.

Over and over again May had to jerk him back to her.

“Oh! Oh!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, a bee! Oh, make it go away!”

But she was really calling:

“Come back to me! Don’t be Maggie’s! Come back to me!”

For she was nineteen, a whole year older than Mamma had been when she was married, and she was terrified sometimes for fear life had passed her by.

When they were tired of archery, they went up on the porch and ate cherries. Albert had brought a big basket of them, great shining black worlds, each bursting with the sun, the rain, the earth; each holding hidden in its seed a tree with roots and branches, with snowdrifts of blossoms, and green leaves, and a universe of crimson black worlds each hiding in its heart another tree.

“Just throw your stones into the lily-of-the-valley bed⁠—we always do,” said Maggie. She and Edward ate their cherries, ever so many of them. May put hers on for earrings, and decorated Edward, too; and Victor threw his into the air and caught them in his mouth.

Mamma had slipped away, and presently there came a tinkling, and she brought out a frosty pitcher of raspberry shrub, and the fresh lemon-icing cake. She and May tried to act as if it happened every afternoon, but Victor, who was showing off by walking on the porch railing, nearly fell over in his delight, and shouted rapturously to the round blue figure knocking the croquet balls about.

“Lil-lee!”

“What-ee?”

“Cake and raspberry shru-hub!”

Conversation, that had been wandering happy and silly and free, resumed its ball and chain.

“This is a wonderful view of the river you have, Mrs. Campion.”

“Yes, we’re very fond of our view. Do you like Delaware, Mr. Cobb?”

“Mr. Post, Mamma!”

“Oh, me! How silly of me! What do you suppose made me call you Mr. Cobb? Of course, there was Papa’s friend with the red hair who had the racehorses, Carrot-Top Cobb they used to call him; but you aren’t a bit like him, with your dark hair and everything. Heigho! I haven’t thought of him for years⁠—let me fill your glass. Do you think that you’re going to like Delaware?”

“Yes, indeed, thank you, though I haven’t seen much of it yet. Do you go to Wilmington often?”

“Well, not very often. Victor goes to school every day on the steam-cars, to Rugby Academy, but, of course, not in summer; and the girls have some very pleasant friends in town, haven’t you, girls?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“But it’s a long drive, and we find plenty to do out here. Oh, yes, you must, just a little piece! But we always drive in once a week to market⁠—Victor, precious! I wouldn’t eat any more, darling; you’ll spoil your supper! No, honey, Mamma said no⁠—well, just a teeny piece. We generally go Saturday, but this week we went Wednesday, so we didn’t go this morning.”

“Aunt Jo drove in.”

“How is your aunty, Mr. Cobb?”

“Mr. Post, Mamma.”

Presently he had to go, and they all went out on the front porch to watch him climb up on his bicycle. Victor and Maggie saw themselves skimming along on it with the clouds foaming about their heads; Mamma and May said the very notion made them feel faint; and Lily, blushing, tried not to look at the crushed peonies.

“Goodbye,” Edward said to Maggie, smiling at her, taking her hand in his.

What is happening? What is this feeling that floods them both? Two drops of water touch, and are one.

It was the most wonderful summer. The Sun said, “Lift up your hearts,” and the flowers answered, “We lift them up unto the Lord.” The big creamy roses had never been so fragrant, the river had never been so blue, the nights had never held such swarms of stars.

They got out the Chinese lanterns, lopsided, green and yellow and raspberry red, so crushed and dusty in their box in the attic, such miracles of beauty alight and afloat in the blue summer night. By their light, they ate the watermelons they had sailed across the river for, and popped the seeds at each other.

Edward came on Sunday evening to sing hymns with the Campions. While Mamma played the accompaniments, selecting one nice chord for the bass, which she stuck to through thick and thin, he would sing so loudly, so tunelessly, with such a sweet, serious expression on his face that Maggie would melt with love and laughter. Lily taught him to play chopsticks on the piano, and his Aunt Jo complained to Mamma that she was nearly driven crazy by his practicing.

Fourth of July! Victor was up before the sun, exploding his torpedoes on the bricks by the kitchen shed. That last one, found in the sawdust when he thought he had used them all! It sounded twice as loud as any.

Every now and then he had to go into the house to look at the rockets and Roman candles, lying there wrapped in lovely pastel colors, waiting for darkness. Then out again. The red and gold of the firecracker packages were as exciting as clashing Chinese gongs, and sometimes braided in with the bunches of red firecrackers was a yellow one, or a green one. Bang! Bang! And there was his toy pistol, and the round brown cardboard boxes full of magenta caps. Bang! Mamma lay in her darkened room with a handkerchief wet with eau-de-cologne on her forehead, and saw Victor with his right hand torn off⁠—Victor blinded.

May gathered red and white Sweet-William and blue cornflowers for the dining-room table; and Albert made a big freezer of raspberry water-ice for the evening, when the Blows, and the Willie Campions, and Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Edward Post were coming for the fireworks.

The light never lingered so long as on Fourth of July; but at last it grew dark.

“Victor! Victor! Oh, honey, be careful!”

“It’s only a Roman candle, Mamma!”

“I won’t let him blow himself up, Mrs. Campion.”

“Oh, dear! Are you sure that it’s safe? Take care of him, Edward!”

(Take care of my darling, take care of my life and my love!)

The Roman candles burst softly into balls of ice-green, rose and blue. Over by the hedge were white flashes of teeth and rolling eyes, black faces melting into the night, soft voices full of sad cadences, broken by sudden yells of laughter, quickly hushed because of the white folks further up on the lawn.

Rushing up, tearing the darkness, the rockets ascended unto heaven, burst, spread into ferns of fire, blossomed into golden stars and tears that floated, melted, and were gone.

“Maggie? Where is Maggie?”

“Here I am, Edward.”

That was all he needed. He must be sure she was there, feeling everything with him.

Edward persuaded them to go bathing in the river at high tide. The girls used the boathouse as a dressing-room, sitting on the edge of the wobbly gunning skiff. The boathouse was musty smelling and dark, but through the cracks between the boards you could see the blue river dancing. There were old starch boxes full of cartridge shells, and wooden decoy ducks, some without their heads, that had belonged to Papa. Lily was afraid of the wasps that built their nests in the corners, but May was never afraid of them unless she was with a young man.

Getting out of their tight dresses, their shoes and stockings, stepping from circle after circle of petticoat, calling “Don’t look!” to each other, as they took off corset covers, drawers, corsets shaped like hourglasses, chemises, and long ribbed shirts, getting into their blue flannel bathing-suits with the white braid on the sailor collars stained café au lait by the river, they felt like butterflies, light, free as air, escaped from their thick cocoons.

Maggie could swim a little, and so could Victor, though for Mamma he drowned each day they bathed. Lily pretended to swim, but she was really hopping along with one foot on the bottom. But May wanted Edward to teach her.

“Oh! Oh! Edward! Oh, I’m going down! Oh, don’t let me go down!”

He disentangled her clinging arms.

“Now look here, May, do you want to learn, or don’t you? Kick! Pull up! Kick! Pull up! Keep your head down and imagine you’re a frog.”

A frog! The little mermaid floats in the foam, the Lady of Shalott drifts down the river, and all the prince sees, all Sir Lancelot sees, is a frog!

So she gave up bathing in the dirty old river; and, because she was unhappy, became disagreeable and distant, until she began an affair with a new young man named Ralph Wither, who taught her the names of the stars.

They all went crabbing after supper on the tremulous pier that ran out from Uncle Willie’s boathouse. The blue crabs scrabbled and waved their claws in the old peach-baskets, the river clucked coolly under the pier, and May cried:

“Oh, Ralph! Help me! Oh, I’ve got such a big old one I’m frightened to death!”

“I don’t see why you’re so scared of the crabs, May. You never used to be,” said Lily, who always thought that what people said and what they meant were the same.

Edward and Maggie sat together, swinging their feet over the water. A light warm wind flowed over them, and up from the grey river into the grey sky floated an enormous apricot-pink moon. Silently they watched it, and then looked at each other, smiling faintly.