Pegeen

“Please, sir, I’ve come to see to you,” announced the Very Small Person.

John Archibald turned from his easel, eyed the intruder with amazement, faintly tinged with alarm, and thought of laughing—but did not laugh. She was such a mere wisp of a child and so profoundly serious.

“Oh, you have, have you?” the painter remarked feebly. There was a solemn determination about this invader of his privacy that made him uncomfortably sure she would do whatever she had come to do.

“Yes, sir, I’m Pegeen O’Neill. I’ll begin in the kitchen. They say it’s a sight.”

She was taking off her battered straw hat and her wet coat and rubbers, and rolling up the sleeves of her clean but much patched gingham dress. The artist liked her better without the hat, though the extraordinary mass of black tumbled curls was too heavy a frame for the thin, sensitive, little face.

“I brought cleaning rags with me.” The child had an oddly efficient air. One understood that she would always bring the needed things with her. “Men never have such things around. They’re the wastingest creatures.”

“Oh, but I do have rags around—often,” protested Archibald, “only I’m usually wearing them.”

The weak attempt to meet the situation lightly made no impression upon her seriousness.

“Never mind. I’ll keep you mended up now,” she said, with an air of brisk capability.

“B-b-but,” began the painter.

“You go right on with your painting,” she advised kindly but firmly.

“I won’t want to come in here to-day, if that kitchen’s anything like what they say it is, ’n’ maybe it’ll clear up by to-morrow so that you can paint outdoors and not be in my way. What time do you have dinner?”

He looked helplessly at the clock. Meals were always a movable feast with him. He had them when he chanced to think of them, when the light was poor, when the work went badly, when there happened to be something in the house to eat.

“Oh, all right,” said the Very Small Person, quite as though he had explained all this aloud. “But I guess we’ll have our dinner at half-past twelve. You just go right ahead until then and don’t mind me.”

She went into the kitchen and shut the door gently behind her.

That was how it began.

John Archibald had run away from New York—and from Nadine Ransome. The two had sapped his strength and dulled his spirit and blurred his vision. He loved them both—and, in much the same way, loved the beauty and the power and the indescribable, gripping charm of them; but the soul of him had run away from them before they had altogether had their way with it and had carried his fagged brain and struggling heart to a place where June was busy with a wonderful outdoor world.

There was a little shack on the edge of a wood, with a meadow dropping away from before the doorstep to join a quiet green valley that wandered narrowly between two lines of blue hills into dim, purple distances. He had camped there once, with a fellow artist, and, on a day when the city world was an ache in his brain and a bitterness in his heart, the winding, white ribbon of valley road and the upland meadow trail had called to him, the murmur of pine top seas and the drip of fern-hidden springs and the silences of green woodland dusks, had promised peace.

So he ran away.

Running away may not be heroic, but at times it is exceedingly wise.

The shack and the land upon which it stood belonged to a colony of Shakers who lived across the Valley among the heaven-climbing hills, and they rented it willingly but with mild amazement.

“Thee doesn’t intend to live in it?” asked the gray-clad eldress with the visioning eyes and the firm chin.

“When it rains,” explained the tenant. “The rest of the time I’ll live out of doors. I’m a painter.”

“Oh, yea,—an artist!”

Her tones conveyed an understanding that unto artists all forms of lunacy were possible.

And so the man who had run away took possession of four rooms, a big stone fireplace, a rusty stove, a table, three rough chairs and a decrepit pine bureau. He made an expedition to a neighboring town, bought a comfortable willow chair, some cushions and linen, a few dishes and cooking utensils, a broom, and a couch hammock. With the broom he made a clumsy, half-hearted, masculine attack upon the accumulated dirt of years. He hung the hammock in the living-room where it served in lieu of bed, knocked up some shelves for books, set an easel by the north window, built a fire on the hearth, pulled the willow chair up in front of it, lighted his pipe, and was at home—but not at peace. The place was haunted by ghosts he had brought with him. Beneath the night noises of wood and meadow he heard the muffled throb and roar of city streets. In every corner lurked a shadowy face—an alluring, heartbreaking face, with lying promises in its eyes and lying smiles on its lips.

In the open, with the sun and wind and trees and sky for comrades, he could forget; but, when the violet dusk closed in and the friendly, green-gold world fell a-dreaming and lost itself in faint silver lights and creeping shadows, the old longing stirred, the old fight began again. It always ended by his flinging out into the night and tramping the roads and paths under the still stars or through the storm. It is hard to be strong within four walls.

He painted in a desultory way and he made friends with shy, wood creatures who finally accepted him as a harmless and well-meaning neighbor, and he fished a little and read a little and cooked a little and roamed the woods and fields a great deal, and June was kind to him in her bountiful, burgeoning way; but she worked no sudden cure. Nature does not hurry, even in her healing.

Yet, on the stormy morning when the Very Small Person appeared at the shack, John Archibald, standing before a window and watching the rain sweep down the Valley like a gray veil, through which the glooming hills peered, shadow-like and shivering, had admitted to himself that he was nearer in tune than he had been in many a day.

The silver flails of the rain, beating against the swaying young birches, made his fingers itch for a paint brush, the low-hung cloud masses tangled in the wind-tossed locks of the pines brought a smile to his lips, a clump of mountain laurel blurred to misty rose by the rain curtain set his memory groping for some half-forgotten melody. Yes: there was beauty in the world and he still had eyes for it, and there were worse things than a leaping fire on a hearth and a summer rain against the window panes.

He sat down before his easel and went to work with a whistled tune on his lips. After the Very Small Person had appeared and disappeared, he took up the work and the tune where he had left off; but when it occurred to him that he was whistling, he stopped abruptly. No man likes to admit to himself that he is convalescent from a heart malady he has believed fatal.

A particularly happy experiment with madder made him forget that he was a passion-racked soul and set him whistling gaily once more. The Very Small Person interrupted a carefully executed bit from Rigoletto when she came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray load much too big for her and went about setting the table.

Archibald looked up from his sketch, stared at her blankly, remembered, and laughed.

“Oh, yes,” he said, whirling around on his chair and resting his arms on its back, “you are seeing to me.”

“Yessir. Dinner’ll be ready in a minute. I couldn’t find a tablecloth, so I took a paper napkin. S’pose you use them to get out of washing, don’t you?”

“I do,” acknowledged the painter. “What—if it isn’t intrusive to ask—are we going to have for dinner?”

“Well, bread ’n’ milk was all you had in the house; but I’d sort of figured it would be that way, so I stopped at Mrs. Neal’s on my way up. I knew you got your butter ’n’ eggs, ’n’ milk there, ’n’ I told her you needed eggs ’n’ butter, ’n’ then, while I was there, I got a slice of ham—their hams are fine—’n’ some fresh pot cheese ’n’ a jar of preserves. Mrs. Neal says she’ll be glad to let us have anything she can spare. I told her to save us a chicken for Sunday. She was real interested about my doing your work.”

“It is interesting,” agreed Archibald.

“Yessir. She said the folks along the Valley were just downright troubled about your living so dirty ’n’ accidental when anybody could see you were used to having things proper. They’d all come up and looked in through the windows when you were away, so they knew how things were. Course they understood about you being an artist ’n’ that that was why, but Mrs. Neal said she’d feel a heap more comfortable, knowing I was seeing to you.”

“I believe I’ll feel more comfortable, myself, after I get over the first shock,” confessed the artist, eyeing with approval the ham and eggs which had just been put upon the table; “but may I ask how you came to undertake seeing to me?”

“Why, I don’t know. I heard folks talking about how shiftless and helpless you were, ’n’ that kind of bothered me; ’n’ then she said yesterday: ‘Pegeen, why don’t you go and take care of that ridikilus orphan up in the shack?’ ’N’ I said, ‘Why, I don’t know.’ ’N’ she said, ‘You need somebody to take care of, ’n’ he certainly needs somebody to take care of him, ’n’ it looks to me like a good combination.’ ’N’ I said, ‘Well, I guess I will.’ So I came, to-day.

“She said she was sure we’d get along finely together. She’s seen you somewhere; ’n’ she said you looked unhappy and neglected but sort of nice, ’n’ as if you’d be a credit to me, after a while.”

“Optimistic soul,” laughed Archibald. “Who is She?”

The Very Small Person started for the kitchen after another cup of coffee.

“Why, she’s the Smiling Lady,” she called back across her shoulder, as she went.

The words were left hanging on the air, and the little room seemed the brighter for them. Archibald said them over to himself softly.

“The Smiling Lady!” Had another Mona Lisa come to light in this Peaceful Valley?

“Pegeen,” he asked as the small girl came with his coffee, “who is the Smiling Lady?”

She set the full cup down carefully.

“Oh, that’s just a name for her,” she explained. “I made it for her when she first came, ’n’ it fitted her so well that the others took it up, ’n’ now she’s the Smiling Lady all up ’n’ down the Valley; but her other name’s Moran.”

“And does she smile prettily, Peggy?”

“It just melts the heart out of you, sir, it does—but she isn’t always smiling, you know—not with her lips. It’s a sort of a smile that goes with her like the words to a tune. ’N’ her hair’s all bright ’n’ ripply ’n’ smiley, ’n’ she walks so light, ’n’ she just has a way with her. When she comes into a room you feel as if birds had begun singing there.”

Archibald leaned back in his chair and looked at the slip of a girl, with the thin, expressive face in which now adoration glowed warmly.

“Pegeen,” he said, with conviction, “when you aren’t taking care of somebody, you write poetry?”

She looked bewildered.

“No, sir. I haven’t ever. I couldn’t.”

“Well, there’s the making of a poet in you. Did you say the Smiling Lady’s name was Mrs. Moran?”

His voice held a tint of anxiety.

“Miss Moran, it is. She isn’t married.”

“That’s better, much better. Peggy, my child, I like the way you take care of me.”

And that night the ghosts forgot to walk.