red mosquito-netting, preferably from peach baskets, was best for bottles of pink water. you soaked the netting for a time depending in length on the shade of pink you desired—light, deep, or plain. a very little red ink produced a beautiful red water, likewise of a superior tint. violet ink, diluted, remained true to type. cold coffee gave the browns and yellows. green tissue paper dissolved into somewhat dull emerald. pure blue and orange, however, had been almost impossible to obtain save by recourse to our paint boxes, too choice to be used in this fashion, or to a chance artificial flower on an accessible hat—of which we were not at all too choice, but whose utilization might be followed, not to say attended, by consequences.
that august afternoon we were at work on a grand scale. at the rodmans, who lived on the top of the hill overlooking the town and the376 peaceful westward-lying valley of the river, we had chosen to set up a great soda fountain, the like of which had never been.
“it’s the kind of a fountain,” margaret amelia rodman explained, “that knights used to drink at. that kind.”
we classified it instantly.
“now,” she went on, “us damsels are getting this thing up for the knights that are tourmeying. if the king knew it, he wouldn’t leave us do it, because he’d think it’s beneath our dignity. but he don’t know it. he’s off. he’s to the chase. but all the king’s household is inside the palace, and us damsels have to be secret, getting up our preparations. now we must divide up the—er—responsibility.”
i listened, spellbound.
“i thought you and betty didn’t like to play pretend,” i was surprised into saying.
“why, we’ll pretend if there’s anything to pretend about that’s real,” said margaret amelia, haughtily.
they told us where in the palace the various ingredients were likely to be found. red mosquito-netting, perhaps, in the cellar—at this time of day fairly safe. red and violet ink377 in the library—very dangerous indeed at this hour. cold coffee—almost unobtainable. green tissue paper, to be taken from the flower-pots in the dining-room—exceedingly dangerous. blue and orange, if discoverable at all, then in the christmas tree box in the trunk room—attended by few perils as to meetings en route, but in respect to appropriating what was desired, by the greatest perils of all.
this last adventure the rodmans themselves heroically undertook. it was also conceded that, on their return from their quest—provided they ever did return alive—it would be theirs to procure the necessary cold coffee. the other adventures were distributed, and mary elizabeth and i were told off together to penetrate the cellar in search of red mosquito-netting. the bottles had already been collected, and these little harold rodman was left to guard and luxuriously to fill with water and luxuriously to empty.
there was an outside cellar door, and it was closed. this invited mary elizabeth and me to an expedition or two before we even entered. we slid from the top to the bottom, sitting, standing, and backward. then, since harold was378 beginning to observe us with some attention, we lifted the ring—the ring—in the door and descended.
“aladdin immediately beheld bags of inexhaustible riches,” said mary elizabeth, almost reverently.
first, there was a long, narrow passage lined with ash barrels, a derelict coal scuttle, starch boxes, mummies of brooms, and the like. but at this point if we had chanced on the red mosquito-netting, we should have felt distinctly cheated of some right. a little farther on, however, the passage branched, and we stood in delighted uncertainty. if the giant lived one way and the gorgon the other, which was our way?
the way that we did choose led into a small round cellar, lighted by a narrow, dusty window, now closed. formless things stood everywhere—crates, tubs, shelves whose ghostly contents were shrouded by newspapers. it occurred to me that i had never yet told mary elizabeth about our cellar. i decided to do so then and there. she backed up against the wall to listen, manifestly so that there should be nothing over her shoulder.
379 our cellar was a round, bricked-in place under the dining-room. sometimes i had been down there while they had been selecting preserves by candle-light. and i had long ago settled that the curved walls were set with little sealed doors behind each of which he sat. these he’s were not in the least unfriendly—they merely sat there close to the wall, square shouldered and very still, looking neither to right nor left, waiting. probably, i thought, it might happen some day—whatever they waited for; and then they would all go away. meanwhile, there they were; and they evidently knew that i knew they were there, but they evidently did not expect me to mention it; for once, when i did so, they all stopped doing nothing and looked at me, all together, as if something used their eyes for them at a signal. it was to mary gilbraith that i had spoken, while she was at our house-cleaning, and the moment i had chosen was when she was down in the cellar without a candle and i was lying flat on the floor above her, peering down the trap doorway.
“mary,” i said, “they’s a big row of he’s sitting close together inside the wall. they’ve got big foreheads. bang on the wall and see if380 they’ll answer—” for i had always longed to bang and had never quite dared.
“oh, my great scotland!” said mary gilbraith, and was up the ladder in a second. that was when they looked at me, and then i knew that i should not have spoken to her about them, and i began to see that there are some things that must not be said. and i felt a kind of shame, too, when mary turned on me. “you little miss,” she said wrathfully, “with your big eyes. an’ myself bitin’ on my own nerves for fear of picking up a lizard for a potato. go play.”
“i was playing,” i tried to explain.
“play playthings, then, and not ha’nts,” said mary.
so i never said anything more to her, save about plates and fritters and such things.
to this recital mary elizabeth listened sympathetically.
“there’s just one great big one lives down in our cellar,” she confided in turn. “not in the wall—but out loose. when the apples and stuff go down there, i always think how glad he is.”
“are you afraid of him?” i asked.
381 “afraid!” mary elizabeth repeated. “why, no. once, when i was down there, i tried to pretend there wasn’t anything lived there—and then it was frightening and i was scared.”
i understood. it would indeed be a great, lonely, terrifying world if these little friendly folk did not live in cellars, walls, attics, stair-closets and the like. of course they were friendly. why should they be otherwise?
“r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-t,” something went, close by mary elizabeth’s head.
we looked up. the dimness of the ceiling was miles deep. we could not see a ceiling.
“st-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t,” it went again. and this time it did not stop, and it began to be accompanied by a rumbling sound as from the very cave inside the world.
mary elizabeth and i took hold of hands and ran. we scrambled up the steps and escaped to the sultry welcome of bright day. out there everything was as before. little harold was crossing the lawn carrying a flower-pot of water which was running steadily from the hole in the bottom. with the maternal importance of little girls, we got the jar from him and undertook to bring him more water. and when he382 led us to the source of supply, this was a faucet in the side of the house just beyond a narrow, dusty, cellar window. when he turned the faucet, we were, so to speak, face to face with that r-s-t-t-t-t-t.
mary elizabeth and i looked at each other and looked away. then we looked back and braved it through.
“anyway,” she said, “we were afraid of a truly thing, and not of a pretend thing.”
there seemed to us, i recall, a certain loyalty in this as to a creed.
already delia had returned from the library. the authorities refused the ink. one might come in there and write with it, but one must not take it from the table. calista arrived from the dining-room. a waiting-woman to the queen, she reported, was engaged in dusting the sideboard and she herself had advanced no farther than the pantry door. it remained only for margaret amelia and betty to come from their farther quest bearing a green handbill which they thought might take the place of calista’s quarry if she returned empty-handed; but we were no nearer than before to blue and orange materials, or to any other.
383 we took counsel and came to a certain ancient conclusion that in union there is strength. we must, we thought we saw, act the aggressor. we moved on the stronghold together. armed with a spoon and two bottles, we found a keeper of properties within who spooned us out the necessary ink; tea was promised to take the place of coffee if we would keep out of the house and not bother anybody any more, indefinitely; shoe-polish was conceded in a limited quantity, briefly, and under inspection; and we all descended into aladdin’s cave and easily found baskets to which red mosquito-netting was clinging in sufficient measure. then we sat in the shade of the side lawn and proceeded to colour many waters.
it was a delicate task to cloud the clear liquid to this tint and that, to watch it change expression under our hands, pale, deepen, vary to our touch; in its heart to set jewels and to light fires. we worked with deep deliberation, testing by old standards of taste set up by at least two or three previous experiences, consulting one another’s soberest judgment, occasionally inventing a new liquid. i remember that it was on that day that we first thought of bluing.384 common washing bluing, the one substance really intended for colouring water, had so far escaped our notice.
“somebody,” observed margaret amelia, as we worked, “ought to keep keeping a look-out to see if they’re coming back.”
delia, who was our man of action, ran to the clothes-reel, which stood on the highest land of the castle grounds, and looked away over the valley.
“there’s a cloud of dust on the horizon,” she reported, “but i think it’s mr. wells getting home from caledonia.”
“wouldn’t they blare their horns before they got here?” mary elizabeth wanted to know.
“what was a knight for, anyway?” delia demanded.
“for?” margaret amelia repeated, in a kind of personal indignation. “why, to—to—to right wrongs, of course.”
delia surveyed the surrounding scene through the diluted red ink in a glass-stoppered bottle.
“i guess i know that,” she said. “but i mean, what was his job?”
we had never thought of that. did one, then, have to have a job other than righting wrongs?
margaret amelia undertook to explain.
385 “why,” she said, “it was this way: knights liberated damsels and razed down strongholds and took robber chieftains and got into adventures. and they lived off the king and off hermits.”
“but what was the end of ’em?” delia wanted to know. “they never married and lived happily ever after. they married and just kept right on going.”
“that was on account of the holy grail,” said mary elizabeth. it was wonderful, as i look back, to remember how her face would light sometimes; as just then, and as when somebody came to school with the first violets.
“the what?” said delia.
“they woke up in the night sometimes,” mary elizabeth recited softly, “and they saw it, in light, right there inside their dark cell. and they looked and looked, and it was all shiny and near-to. and when they saw it, they knew about all the principal things. and those that never woke up and saw it, always kept trying to, because they knew they weren’t really ones till they saw. most everybody wasn’t really, because only a few saw it. most of them died and never saw it at all.”
386 “what did it look like?” demanded delia.
“hush!” said calista, with a shocked glance, having somewhere picked up the impression that very sacred things, like very wicked things, must never be mentioned. but mary elizabeth did not heed her.
“it was all shining and near to,” she repeated. “it was in a great, dark sky, with great, bright worlds falling all around it, but it was in the centre and it didn’t fall. it was all still, and brighter than anything; and when you saw it, you never forgot.”
there was a moment’s pause, which delia broke.
“how do you know?” she demanded.
mary elizabeth was clouding red mosquito-netting water by shaking soap in it, an effect much to be desired. she went on shaking the corked bottle, and looking away toward the sun slanting to late afternoon.
“i don’t know how i know,” she said in manifest surprise. “but i know.”
we sat silent for a minute.
“well, i’m going back to see if they’re coming home from the hunt now,” said delia, scrambling up.
387 “from the chase,” margaret amelia corrected her loftily, “and from the tourmey. i b’lieve,” she corrected herself conscientiously, “that had ought to be tourmament.”
this time delia thought that she saw them coming, the king and his knights, with pennons and plumes, just entering conant street down by the brices. as we must be ready by the time the party dismounted, there was need for the greatest haste. but we found that the clothes-reel, which was to be the fountain, must have a rug and should have flowing curtains if it were to grace a castle courtyard; so, matters having been further delayed by the discovery of harold about to drink the vanilla water, we concluded that we had been mistaken about the approach of the knights; and that they were by now only on the bridge.
a journey to the attic for the rug and curtains resulted in delays, the sight of some cast-off garments imperatively suggesting the fitness of our dressing for the r?le we were to assume. this took some time and was accompanied by the selection of new names all around. at last, however, we were back in the yard with the rugs and the muslin curtains in place, and the array388 of coloured bottles set up in rows at the top of the carpeted steps. then we arranged ourselves behind these delicacies, in our bravery of old veils and scarves and tattered sequins. harold was below, as a page, in a red sash. “a little foot-page,” margaret amelia had wanted him called, but this he himself vetoed.
“mine feet big feet,” he defended himself.
then we waited.
we waited, chatted amiably, as court ladies will. occasionally we rose and scanned the street, and reported that they were almost here. then we resumed our seats and waited. this business had distinctly palled on us all when delia faced it.
“let’s have them get here if they’re going to,” she said.
so we sat and told each other that they were entering the yard, that they were approaching the dais, that they were kneeling at our feet. but it was unconvincing. none of us really wanted them to kneel or knew what to do with them when they did kneel. the whole pretence was lacking in action, and very pale.
“it was lots more fun getting ready than this is,” said calista, somewhat brutally.
389 we stared in one another’s faces, feeling guilty of a kind of disloyalty, yet compelled to acknowledge this great truth. in our hearts we remembered to have noticed this thing before: that getting ready for a thing was more fun than doing that thing.
“why couldn’t we get a quest?” inquired margaret amelia. “then it wouldn’t have to stop. it’d last every day.”
that was the obvious solution: we would get a quest.
“girls can’t quest, can they?” betty suggested doubtfully.
we looked in one another’s faces. could it be true? did the damsels sit at home? was it only the knights who quested?
delia was a free soul. forthwith she made a precedent.
“well,” she said, “i don’t know whether they did quest. but they can quest. so let’s do it.”
the reason in this appealed to us all. immediately we confronted the problem: what should we quest for?
we stared off over the valley through which the little river ran shining and slipped beyond our horizon.
390 “i wonder,” said mary elizabeth, “if it would be wrong to quest for the holy grail now.”
we stood there against the west, where bright doors seemed opening in the pouring gold of the sun, thick with shining dust. the glory seemed very near. why not do something beautiful? why not—why not....
