Zona Gale

“ And at his lips, held like a trumpet, he carried little Peter, one hand on Peter’s feet set to the kingly lips, and the other stretched out to Peter’s breast.
Then Peter lifted up his shrill little voice and shouted loud his message:—
“The world is beginning! The world is beginning! The world is beginning! You must go and help the king. You must go-o-o and help the king!”
But just as he cried that, the carnival band struck into a merry march, and all the heralds were calling, and the people were shouting, and Peter’s little voice did not reach very far. ”

“ Grandmother leaned forward—I know how the shadows of the apple leaves fell on her black lace cap and how the pink sweet-peas were reflected in her delicate face.
“Suppose,” she said, “that instead of any of those reasons, somebody gave you this reason: That the earth is a great flower—a flower that has never really blossomed yet. And that when it blossoms, life is going to be more beautiful than we have ever dreamed, or than fairy stories have ever pretended. And suppose our doing one way, and not another, makes the flower come a little nearer to blossoming. ”

“ THE PRINCESS ROMANCIA
That night I could not go to sleep with the knowledge. If only I, as I am now, might have sat on the edge of the bed and told a story to me as I was then! I am always wishing that we two might have known each other—I as I am now and I as I was then. We should have been so much more interested in each other than anybody else could ever be. I can picture us looking curiously at each other through the dark, and each would have wished to be the other—how hard we would have wished that. ”

“ Delia followed Mary Elizabeth’s look into the blue.
“I don’t believe it,” said she. “The sun is biggest and the moon is next. How could there be any other sun? And it don’t whirl. It don’t even rise and set. It stands still. Miss Messmore said so.”
We looked at Mary Elizabeth, probably I alone having any impulse to defend her. And we became aware that she was quite white and trembling. In the same moment we understood that we were hearing something which we had been hearing without knowing that we heard. It was a thin, wavering strain of singing, in a man’s voice. ”

“ This Bookman, who was pleasant and gentle and seemed half dreaming, welcomed him in, and gave him fruit to eat, and Hazen fell asleep in the arbour. When he awoke, the Bookman sat beside him, still reading, and seeing that the boy was awake, he began reading to him.
He read a wonderful story about the elements of which everything in the world is made. He read that they are a great family of more than seventy, and so magically arranged that they make a music, done in octaves like the white keys of a piano. ”

“ Last, she looked in the face of the prince—and she did not look away.
146 Invisibly, as the hours leave a dial, the fairies drifted from the little room and back to the fairy ring among the old oaks to dance for very joyousness. The labourer and his family, hearing them go, were conscious of a faint lifting of the dark, as if morning were coming, bringing a new day. And to the Princess Romancia, beside Prince Hesperus, the world itself was a new world, where she did not walk alone as she had thought, but where all folk who will have it so walk together. ”

“ But one night, just as the soft outside edges of his heart began to take on a shining tinge, a little boy ran out in the road where the dwarf was passing, and in the dark mistook him for his father, and jumped up and threw his arms about the dwarf’s neck and hugged him. And of a sudden the dwarf’s heart began to beat, and when he got in the house, he saw that he wasn’t gold any more, and he wasn’t a dwarf—but he was straight and strong and real. “And so,” the Lady ended it, “you must love every grown-up you can, because maybe their hearts are turning into gold and you can stop it that way.” ”

“ And while I sat there alone on that straight-backed chair, I wish that I, as I am now, might have called in Mary Elizabeth, whom I could see drearily polishing the New Family’s lamp-chimneys, and that I might have told the story of Bit-bit.
Bit-bit, the smallest thing in the world, sat on the slipperiest edge of the highest mountain in the farthest land, weaving a little garment of sweet-grass. Then out of the valley a great Deev arose and leaned his elbows on the highest mountain and said what he thought—which is always a dangerous business. ”

“ She is not dead, for when certain things happen, she stirs slightly where she is, perhaps deep within the air. When the sun falls in a particular way, when graham griddle cakes are baking, when the sky laughs sudden blue after a storm, or the town clock points in its clearest you-will-be-late way at nine in the morning, when the moonlight is on the midnight and nothing moves—then, somewhere beyond sealed doors, the little girl says something, and it is plain that she is here all the time. ”

“ At this a little voice laughed and cracked as it laughed, so that it sounded like something being broken which could never be mended.
“Being strong and wise don’t mean making one’s fortune,” it said. “Just one thing means fortune, and that is being rich. To be rich—rich! That’s what we want and it is all we want. And I am ready to fight with everyone of you to get riches.”
Hazen looked where the voice sounded, and to his horror he saw a little Self made in his own image, but hideously bent and distorted, so that he knew exactly how he would look if he were a dwarf. ”

“ Prince Hesperus arrived at the palace at twilight, when the king’s garden was wrapped in that shadow light which no one can step through, if he looks, without feeling somewhat like a fairy himself and glad to be one. He sent his servants on ahead, folded his wings, and proceeded on foot through the silent gardens. And in a little arbour made of fallen petals, renewed each day, he came on the Princess Romancia, asleep. ”

“ Up at the palace the queen and the ladies-in-waiting to the queen and the princess regarded all this as but another sign of poor Romancia’s strangeness. From her tower window the queen peered anxiously down at her daughter toiling away at sunrise.
“Now she is raising carrots and beets,” cried the queen, wringing her hands. “She grows more different from us every moment of her life!” ”

“ Now the Earth had a friend and companion whom nobody thought much about. It was Earth’s Shadow, cast by the sun in the way that any other shadow is cast, but it was such a big shadow that of course it fell far, far out in space. And as Earth went round, naturally its Shadow went round, and if one could have looked down, one would have seen the Shadow sticking out and out, so that the Earth and its Shadow-handle would have seemed almost like a huge saucepan filled with cities and people, all being held out over the sun, to get them done. ”

“ Now, whoever has stood for the first time in a great, empty castle knows that there is one thing that he longs to do above all other things, and this is to explore. And when the afternoon lay brooding upon the air, and slanting sun fell through the dusty lattices, Hazen asked the old man eagerly if he might wander through the rooms. ”

“ I climbed on the fence and sat looking over in the deserted garden.
Round the corner of the house next door somebody came. I saw a long, gray plaid shawl, with torn and flapping tassels, pinned about a small figure, with long legs. As she put her hand on the latch, she flashed me her smile, and it was Mary Elizabeth. She went immediately inside the shed door, and left me staring. What was she doing there? What unexpected places I was always seeing her. Why should she go in the woodshed of the New Family whom we didn’t even know ourselves? ”

“ He would be moulding little balls of loam and fashioning them with seeds, when suddenly they would break into life as buds and then as flowers, almost as one now sees twigs of wood break into life, or as quiet cocoons become living butterflies—for the world is not so different. Or Peter would be playing with a spongy-looking mass on a rock in the brook, when it would break from its rock and go gayly swimming about, and be a fish-thing. ”

“ It proved that it was no other than Hazen whom he meant, and he took him with him in his carriage to a great, wonderful house overlooking the valley, and commanding a sovereign mountain on whose very summit stood a deserted castle. It seemed as if merely looking on that wonderful prospect would help one to be wise and really good and beautiful and worthy to be loved. ”

“ In the evenings there were always festivities; mirth and laughter were everywhere, and Hazen was laden with gifts of these and other things, and delighted in the entertainment. But by day, in a high-ceiled library and a cool study, the two spent hours pouring over letters and science, finding out the secrets of the world, getting on the other side of words, saying sentences, and thinking thoughts that became solid; or they would wander on the hillsides and carry rare books and dream of the beauty in the world and weave little songs. ”

“ I wonder why more people do not go to meet the Spring?”
“A charming idea!” cried the Rose Fairy to the Light Fairy, and the Light Fairy shone softly upon her, precisely like an answer.
Then somebody observed that the wind that night was a pure soprano, and the guests amused themselves comparing wind-notes; how on some nights the wind is deep bass, like a man’s voice, raging through the world; and sometimes it is tenor, sweet, and singing only serenades; and sometimes it is all contralto and like a lullaby;123 and sometimes, but not often, it is like harp music played on the trees. ”

“ Why don’t you harness up a mountain—you could do that, couldn’t you, Deevy?—and plough up the earth and trample it down and let people live as they were meant to live, and turn them into folks? Why don’t you?”
“It couldn’t be done that way,” said the Deev, very much excited and disgustingly certain.
“Well,” said Bit-bit, “then look at the men and women and children that have come along behind us. What about them—what about them? Why don’t you make your arms steel and act as if you had wings, and beat the world into a better place for them to live, instead of making a cake of it. ”

“ One night, when a fairy ring had been formed in an open grassy space among old oaks, the princess could bear it all no longer. When the music was at its merriest and a band of strolling goblin musicians were playing their maddest, she slipped away and returned to the palace by an unfrequented path and entered a long-disused part of the garden. And there, in a corner where she had never before walked, she came on a great place of rich, black earth, which, in the sweet Spring air, lay ready for the sowing. It was the spadeful of earth which the day labourer had brought to her christening ”

“ And he cried out loudly in answer:—
“No one has that power! No one is different! Those who seem different hold no truth. We are all alike, all of us that live!”
Swiftly the prince turned to the king and the queen and the court.
“The uninvited Human Being,” he cried, “did she say that the princess should be different from all the world, or that she should merely seem different?”
The queen and the court could not remember, but the king, who was a wise fairy, instantly remembered. ”

“ Miss Messmore had uttered it. Judge Rodman was repeating it, smiling blandly down with a pleased diffidence.
“There can be no one more fitted to do this, Judge Rodman,” Miss Messmore had promptly said, “than your daughter, Margaret Amelia, at whose suggestion this celebration, indeed, has come about.”
Poor Margaret Amelia. In spite of her embroidered gown, her blue ribbons, and her blue stockings, I have seldom seen anyone look so wretched as did she when they made her mount that platform. To give her courage her father met her, and took her hand. ”

“ The soul of you, like the real sense of Apple, lives nameless all its days. Sometime we must play104 the game of giving us a secret name—the Pathfinder, the Lamplighter, the Starseeker, and so on. But colours and flavours are harder to name and must wait longer than we.
... Under this Nameless tree, then, the swing hung, and to sit in the swing and have one’s head touch apple-blossoms, and mind, not touch them with one’s foot, was precisely like having one’s swing knotted to the sky, so that one might rise in rhythm, head and toe, up among the living stars. ”