Bonnyborough

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Contents

FAGB

I. The Schotts 1

II. The Knolls n

I. *' Peace Polly."

The congregation stared, and the child screamed, all through the christening.

" No wonder," said the rector's lively little wife to him, when he had got out of his surplice, and was walking along with her homeward in his coat, — " no wonder. * Peace Polly Schott ! ' ' Pease porridge hot ! ' is what it will get to be called. Lucky you did n't have to say the surname ! "

" Now, Dora, — Pan-dora, — don't let that out of the box ! " said the rector. " Other people may n't think of all you do," — which, indeed, they would often have had to be nimble to manage.

"But just think, — if she should 'lead the remainder of her life according to this beginning ' ! "

" Wijie I " said the rector. He always said " wifie " when he reproved her, and I am afraid that was not seldom. But he did it under that tender acknowledginent that she was one flesh with himself, even in faults, after all. " You are making pleasantry of the Prayer-Book, now. And remember, too, that this beginning is not the outward, natural one, but the very thing that is to shape and overrule it, — the grace prayed for and promised." 1

" Oh, I know, dear," said Dora, meekly. " But it is funny. And I can't help feeling the grace will all be needed."

So Peace Polly Schott was in the world, and in the church. And both, I may as well say at the outset, grew to be lively in her, as she grew and was trained.

She inherited, perhaps, some curiously balancing or contending characteristics from the same descent through which had come her names. They were the names of her two grandmothers, — Peace Marvin, a sweet old Quakeress, and Polly Schott, tlie smartest, drivingest, most uncompromising, of housekeepers and family managers. She got her quick perceptions and energies and her hasty tongue from the Schott side ; something inward and hidden, that often secretly arraigned and testified against the outer self, from the dear old disciple of the Inner Lightr

I have said a good deal about names in many stories I have told ; if I live to tell others, I may say a good deal more. For Shakespeare never suggested more deeply th^ when he put the question, " What 's in a name ? " I think, myself, there is pretty nearly everything in it; though, as in that other matter he discourses of, we are some of us born and fitted to our appellations, while upon some of us they are thrust, and are either an irony through life, or fit us to themselves by the wonderful power of Name upon the thing or soul that bears it. Why should it not be a power ? It is given us solemnly, in the very moment that we are baptized into the Name of the Lord. And the Name of the Lord is his own revelation.

Any way. Peace Polly was the very impersonation of hers, with all its associations. She was born with a rush in her brain, a quick, intense flow of life, and the recognition of life. She was full of idea, of purpose, and she was intense of will in the carrying out of these. There followed, naturally, with one of her temperament, an impetuous rebellion against whatever contradicted, crossed, or thwarted. Things, happenings, doings, — - all fell under her sudden indignation, when they jarred, interrupted, contradicted. And inside, all the while, was the " grace " that would not let her be angry comfortably, — a " peace " that spoke itself to her rebukingly in the very midst of her explosions. But nobody knew about this, save herself and the Giver.

Peace Polly was the youngest child of her father, and her mother was the second Mrs. Schott. There had been an interval of eighteen years between the little girl and her half-brother, Lyman. Lyman was tolerably fond of his little sister. He liked, also, to " stir Peace Polly up." He had a quiet, narrow mind, as different from Peace Polly's as calm daylight through a shutter-crack from forked lightning across the sky ; that was what came between them of the two mothers. Lyman saw just what that chink-ray fell upon, — saw it clearly, exclusively, but not an inch on either side of it. Peace Polly's thought illumined all creation to her, for one minute, and was apt to strike somewhere. But it was over — the insight and impulse — as quickly, often. She had many an eager notion, which she raged if opposed in, but which, if left to herself, she might speedily have done with, as a thing exhausted in the inception. She had frequently had enough of it before there was time or opportunity to carry it out in practice.

The nursery rhyme did get fitted to her, and by slow

brother Lyman himself. It was apropos of these her brief

enthusiasms : —

"Peace Polly 'shot, Peace Polly 's cold; Peace Polly 's got a lot Of plans, but they 've all gone to pot, Nine davs old! "

And by another aiDplication, once, -when she had banged

away to her own room, and slammed the door, after a

wrathful outburst at him, and he coolly followed to write

upon the outer panel in pencil, —

"Peace Polly 's hot; Peace, Polly scold! "

These were two of Lyman's exceptional inspirations. He was not ordinarily quick in any sense, and I think these were somewhat careful impromptus elaborated between times.

It is impossible to say that there was nothing in Peace Polly's name to her experience long before she herself was fifteen and Lyman thirty-three.

. But Lyman never knew that after the door was slammed in his face that day something gave way in his little sister's heart, and she was down on her knees in the window, with her head upon the sill, and great throbs were seeking their way upward as into the deeps of calm blue that she did not even lift her eyes to, but, like a little publican, clenched her two hands tight across her breast, and sobbed out, purposeless and yet as to Some One, "Oh, I am just hateful, and just as I do hate to be ! "

Not knowing, he went on, in a mild, slow, almost mechanical way as it came to be, "stirring up Pease Porridge."

" I wish you 'd get married, and go off, and -let people be ! " Peace Polly said to him, when she was ten and he was twenty-eight.

" Ho, ho ! " laughed Lyman.

" Only I pity your wife," added Peace Polly.

" So do I," said Lyman, gravely. " So much that I shall not let her be. You '11 grow up. Pease Porridge, and keep house for me when we 're two old folks, — or an old folk and a half. We shan't be exactly old together."

"There '11 have to be two to agree to that," said Peace Polly, in an elderly way.

" Or three, may be. Though it is n't likely," returned Lyman.

Peace Polly looked up with shrewd inquiry.

"What ain't?" she said.

" Number three."

" I know what you mean," said the child. " No ; number three ainH likely. It '11 be number one, if anything."

" Guess so, too. Would n't advise you to skip him," retorted Lyman, with obscure satire, half suspected by little Peace Polly.

When Lyman went out of the room a few minutes after, she walked straight to the looking-glass, and gazed searchingly and unflinchingly in.

" I ain't pretty, and I ain't good," she said, solemnly honest with herself. "Nobody '11 want to marry me. That 's what he meant. Well, it 's a long time to look forward to, and a good many things may happen," she added, quoting from her child-memory a speech of Mrs. Schott's. And with that she turned away from the glass, and went back to reading " Diamonds and Toads," from which and its companion tales she had got all her present ideas of marriage and seeking in marriage. She could still put herself by into that dim future between now and when so much might happen, and be heart-absorbed in the fates of Blanche and Dorinda.

The first Mrs. Schott had been a zealous, faithful, Puritan woman, a church-member, and conscientious in her family relations, after that devoted and anxious order. Mr. Schott was not a "professor," but he was a very fair, kindly, upright man, according to the light of nature ; and nature's light is God's also, that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, though it be only by his grace that we find it out to be his light and his living love.

Lyman Schott was, of course, baptized and nurtured according to his mother's persuasions. He accepted, in his quiet way, what he had been taught, and in the same quietness and dependence had submitted himself in due time to the spiritual processes and helps that he found at work and offering around him, and took his Christian name in simple earnest at nineteen. It was not the fault of his religion that he was of but a limited nature ; without it, mere petty earthliness would have left him really pitiful.

The second Mrs. Schott, Peace Polly's mother, had been an Episcopalian. Her husband, being no church-member, adapted his church-going to his wife's, who again, in her different fashion, was zealous in her faith. And so it was that the brother and sister held their Christianity under different forms, and sometimes, as such very different temperaments and characters are liable to do, attributed each other's incompatibilities and failures to the spiritual quality and motive, when they were quite distinctly of the flesh and its feebleness. It was odd that the one who took things in grooves was the non-conformist ; that the other, striking out in all things to test and know for herself, was of the order and succession.

" What you want is to experience religion," Lyman had said to Peace Polly in some of her tempers.

And she had retorted, " So I am experiencing it. That 's just the trouble. I 'm experiencing it all the time. I can't make it such a short and easy job as you have ! "

" If you had a real conviction, Peace Polly " — began Lyman again, for he felt it his duty; but duty could not carry the man of slow and reluctant self-utteranco through the sentence. Polly snapped it up.

" I 'm under more conviction of sin every day than you ever had in all your life ! I know every time I 'm ugly, — and you don't ! "

It was unrevealed to Peace Polly, in her turn, that Lyman went away silently with that sting, and took it home to himself in a certain dull fashion, which made him quieter and more careful with her for very nearly a week. After that the impression wore down, and habit had its way again.

" Don't you hate people that keep their tempers ? " Peace Polly asked of her elder friend, Serena Wyse, into whose bright little kitchen she had run one day with an errand, and paused, as it was her privilege and custom to do, for a bit of neighboring beyond the errand.

Serena was the only person Polly had to neighbor with. There were others not further off, geographically ; but Peace Polly used to say she did n't " care to run in, where she was n't in after she got in." That country phrase of " being in with " people held truth as concerning the intimacy of our tumultuous Peace Polly with calm, considerate Serena Wyse, more than a dozen years her senior.

Miss Serena was down on her knees on the hearth with a dustpan and brush, a heap of sweepings, and a piece of newspaper. She did not answer Peace Polly at once, but finished gathering her dust into the pan, whence she carefully swept it again upon the opened paper, and then proceeded to roll it snugly up therein, making of it a , tight little bundle. This she tucked under the sticks that crossed each other tidily from the bright andirons to the clean red bricks below, ready for any future fire-lighting.

Peace Polly was diverted from her subject. " Well ! isn't that a way ! " she exclaimed.

" It 's one of my ways," said Serena, " You get rid of it. It don't fly and scatter and come settlin' back. It 's bound to get burned up, some time, and you don't see it waiting. I like things done with, when they are done, sj)ecially dirt."

" Serena," said the girl, " don't you wish we could sweejD ourselves out so ? "

" And take the trash up in dustpans, and bind it in bundles to burn it ? " answered Serena, falling into the Scripture word that had said it long before, and that came now, answering of true accord the question.

" Why, that 's it ! " cried Peace Polly. " That 's clearing up, and putting away. Not even hiding in a dusthole ; much less putting in your pocket. Don't you hate to have a person 'pocket an afEront,' Serena? "

Again Serena did not answer directly. She seemed to follow the first word of her companion, passing over, as unheard, the rest.

" Putting away," she repeated. " Don't everything that comes up just bring some bit of Bible with it, and show it new? " Serena said " niew," with a trace of the peculiar New England voweling ; but what does that matter to mention, except that we hear her as she spoke, and so as a living voice ? " ' He put away our sins by the sacrifice of Himself,' " she quoted, once more involuntarily. ^' Folks can't put away ever so little an affront without a giving up. Somebody must give up, always, when things fall wrong. I guess that 's to/or-give, — to give for. We could n't come out of our horridness and give up to Him, till He first come and give up to us. Then it was done. It ain't even in human nature to hold out after that. * While we were yet sinners,' " the dear little woman went on in a low voice to herself, " ' Christ died for us.' "

There was the great, blessed Gospel in a mustard-seed.

Peace Polly was touched. But she had a grievance ; she had come to her friend with it, and she could not go away v/ith it as she had come.

" The worst thing that ever happens," she said outright, " is when Lyman begins to keep his temper ! It 's more awful in the house than a dynamite cartridge ! "

" Hash ! " the color was up in Miss Serena's face, and her eyes flashed.

Peace Polly stared. Was there dynamite even here, also ?

" I beg your pardon, my dear, but I 've known Lyman Schott all my days. He 's a good man."

" It 's his goodness I can't have any patience with," said Peace Polly, her tone lowered. " I wish you had the good of it a while, Serena, — I just do. I 'd like to see how you 'd make out with it."

" I know his ways, dear," said Serena Wyse. " We all of us have our ways, and most of us have our queers. But he 's a good man." And Serena's face stayed rosy, after the rebuking flash had died down. She was very pretty then, with the pink tremble in her cheeks and the blue sparkle in her eyes, although she was over thirty, and nobody was likely, ordinarily, to consider the whether or no of her prettiness.

It came upon Polly, though ; and other things in the light of it. She looked at Serena with what people call a blank surprise, — the blankness that intervenes when one sudden idea drives a former out, but is not defined or clear enough to replace it.

" I wish " — she began to say, hastily ; and then for a wonder fulfilled her name and held her peace, took up the little pitcher of buttermilk she had come for, and went off abruptly.

Serena stood still a moment ; then she went and hung up her dustpan in the corner under the shelf. " It 's the child's fashion," she said to herself. " She 's got a sight of sobering down to do."

Serena wist not of the face-glow, nor of its lovely taletelling of a commotion in her life so far off and long ago. ^

As Peace Polly hurried across the field by the diagonal footpath that gave the short cut from Miss Wyse's kitchen porch to their own, her unsettled trouble tossed itself uppermost again in her mind, and she burst forth, aloud, all alone, —

" If anybody only knew ! But nobody does — just how it is — to me — but me myself ! "

One can't be precise with the nominative case, when holding one's self so utterly in the objective with commiseration.

II. The Knolls

Grandfather Schott built his house double, to accommodate two households of the same family : his own and great-uncle Aaron's. He looked forward to its serving the same purpose for his own two sons, Aaron having no children. But only Joshua, of the two young brothers, survived to occupy it, and to bring there in succession his two wives, as we have seen.

The house was carefully planned and divided to take in the sunshine for its occupants, share and share alike ; though he who can so build a dwelling, or order a family, that no one part ever stands in the light of any other will have achieved what was not even attempted in the solar system, which patiently suffers its eclipses.

The old man fronted it to the south, however ; and the hall, which was both common and separating, as the sea is to the nations, opened through the middle ; a wide parallelogram, — or cubic space, taking in its height, — of really noble size, though plain as a barn as to architectural adornment. The big staircase adorned it inevitably, as a generous smile graces a homely countenance ; it offered easy access and welcome everywhere, like the wholehearted hospitality of a finely unreserved nature. There were private staircases, smaller, one in each independent wing. These wings were curiously lapped on to the central structure : the easterly one running southward, and the westerly one north, that each might afford in its projection the aspect denied in the apartments joining and opening directly from the hall ; so that each inmate had east, south, and west exposures, advantaged yet further by cut-off corners, broadly windowed, at all points except the northerly ones. So scrupulous was the equality that a little corner bay jutted slightly from the west wing at the front, giving on that side a slant bit to the southeast, otherwise lacking. The building, therefore, in its initial plan and chief outline, lay somewhat like a winch, or windlasshandle, along its green level, its west wing running so close upon the quick ascent of a rugged knoll to the north — one of many that gave a real, honest, time-used name to the farmstead and property — that it quite carried out the suggestion of a huge crank set there against it, to draw out of it its treasure, which in good truth poured forth from the shaded rock-face, exactly opposite, across the footpath; namely, the clear water of a mountain spring that found its outlet here into a basin built for it, and supplied the dwellers in absolute untaintedness with one of the two purest things that God has made. The other, the sweet air of piny hills, came down without conduit or hindrance, and swept about them its invisible, waving mantle of life. It was good to live here at The Knolls but that says for itself in the description, already too long, perhaps, for the intended proportions of oar story. I was obliged to tell you, though, as the fact of the double homestead had mainly to do with the ordering of Peace Polly's life, — the thing I hope you begin to care for; it having happened, as you perceive, in this third generation, that Lyman Schott and his half-sister came to be the representatives and successors of the two family sides ; the easterly half of the mansion belonging now to the former, and the westerly to Peace Polly.

But Peace Polly's part was mostly left unused ; she kept house for Lyman in the east side, where they had lived on, naturally, together, since their father died ; Joshua Schott having chosen, years before, when the whole dwelling became his own through the death of his Uncle Aaron, to continue to abide toward the sunrising, where he had spent his childhood ; closing up the other rooms, not needing or consenting to rent them, as he might very readily have done.

Her home inheritance seemed, somehow, like Peace Polly's life, — hers and not hers. It was shut up half the year round.

When the crocuses began to send up their purple and golden lances through the brown beds below the southern windows, and the snowdrops were trembling with their delicate ecstasy of life among the grasses down underneath the old oaks, and the air came in with a blessing, like God's spirit, wherever door or window was unclosed, Peace Polly was used to throw open her domain for its spring airing, to go through all its rooms, dust its handsome old-time furnishings, put white covers on the tables and chests of drawers, even blossoms and pussy-willows in the quaint chimney vases, — cornucopias of blue and white china that matched the tiles around the fireplaces, — and unpin the curtains that had hung all winter in the chintz bags made for them out of yet older draperies. Then she would sit down of a quiet morning with some sewing-work in a southeast window, and play at living in her very own home. Or at twilight, in the first warm evenings, when the frogs were piping, and the woodcock " seek-seek-seek-ing " in his flight above the lower dusks, she would sit in the wide-open west doorway, listening to it all, with the chime of the dropping waters from the hill-face into the brimming basin for accompaniment, and think, with a strange, pathetic fullness of delight and longing all at once, how lovely it all was, and how happy that it was hers, if only she could quite live in it with any real home-presences or uses.

She had had plans, of course ; Peace Polly was never without a " notion," as her brother thought. She had proposed an old schoolmate, or a far-off, unknown Western cousin, or even a boarder or two, as summer visitants ; but Lyman always quietly answered, "You can do what you like with your own, of course. Rebeccarabby can take care of me ; or I can get my meals at the tavern."

If he had said, " I don't like it ; I don't want company, and I do want you," Peace Polly would hardly have minded the refusal. It would at least have put a motive and a consciousness of worthy self-denial to her relinquishment. After all, what the girl wanted most restlessly was a raison d'etre; a theory of her life by which she could give account of herself to herself, by which she could make it out worth while to be.

She was ready to take almost any view of it, and valiantly live it out, could it once present itself in coherent shape, and she recognize herself set in it, as in lawful allotted surrounding, like any sort of person that had a place and character, real, or among those she had read about. She wanted to read some sort, almost. any sort, of story, of herself. But not to have a story, not t' y ^ice any picture, any likeness of anything in heaven or earth, to be as a ghost without a body, looking on at life, — this was the strange hardness of it. These were the kind of things she used to say to herself ; it seemed to her that she was a mere negative, a being without end, cause, or effect, so far as satisfying purpose, action, or rewarding accomplishment were concerned.

Rebeccarabby, or Rabby, condensed for use from double name of patriarchess and prophetess, could have baked and boiled, darned and swept, for Lyman, undoubtedly; whether she would or no, were Peace Polly withdrawn, might become another question. So that if Peace Polly effected anything essential, it was simply that, by presence and female headship of the house, she kept Rebeccarabby at her post and in her round. All her own housewifery — and she Was by no meatus idle — was but as work of supererogation ; her sacrifice but the acceptance of a comfortable home and the saving of her own little income for wider margin in mere personal ways, or for a future benefit. So she thought it looked to Lyman ; and so it did ; yet when she ventured any suggestion of a different plan, as we have seen, it was, " Oh, yes ; I can go to the tavern." Which altogether miserable condition and alternative (Rebeccarabby would have said, not inappositely, ^^ fraternity ^^) drove her back to her unrecognized selfimmolation, her fifth-wheel circumvolution, and her ache of uncontent.

"It is company I want, not visitors ; and he does n't see it, nor help it. He 's got his mill ; all he wants here is his bed made, and his table set, and his newspaper, and the cat. And I may grind my heart out, for my share."

This was what Peace Polly said to herself one April evening, sitting, as I have spoken of her, at the west door. She had not many conversations, you will perceive, in these days ; we shall have to depend a good deal, as she did, upon her soliloquies.

" I wonder if I 'm turning into a cross old maid ? Looks like it. I wonder what crossness really is ; whether it 's sinning or being sinned against, mostly ? Things are crossed — or people — when they go different ways. I don't think it 's I that do the crossing always. Anybody can be comfortable and good-natured that has their way laid right along with the grain of the world. But when ever}i;hing is put athwart, you 're ' thrawn,' you 're * curst/ — that 's the Scotch and the Shakespeare of it, — and how can you help it? I '11 just ask Serena Wyse."

As she sat on the broad sill, with her chin in her hands, her elbows on her knees, and her feet on the big, irregular flat doorstone, she did not notice Lyman, coming in his slijDpers over the carpeted fl.oor of the room behind her. Behind Lyman walked the cat, also in her slippers. She came up to him as he stopped in the passageway, and rubbed her head against his leg. Lyman stooped down and lifted her up. He held her on his arm and stroked her softly, as he spoke to Peace, startling her out of her deep thinking.

" Did you remember about my thin overcoat ? " he asked, not unpleasantly, yet to Peace Polly's ear with the indefinable tone of expectation on the wrong side ; namely, that she should not have remembered, especially — so Peace Polly imagined he was thinking — since he found her here in her newly-opened territories, with the pretty evidences of her day's work about her.

" I did," answered Peace Polly, with a short dignity. " I lined the sleeves and faced the collar. It is hanging in the back hall."

"All right," rejoined Lyman. There was no more "thank you " in his words than there had been " I did it with a [)leasure, and you 're welcome," in Peace Polly's.

Lyman stood still, and went on stroking the cat. " It 's pretty near tea-time," he said.

Yes, that was the next thing ; nothing that in the mean while occupied or interested Peace Polly held any corresponding import or interest for him.

The girl half turned and looked up.

The cat in his arms was an offense to her. She did not understand, perhaps, that a certain gentleness in his nature that failed to express itself readily to her or anyother human being took this roundabout method of making known a mood of mind which she might have accepted, if she could have discerned it under the oblique sign. It was not in Lyman's way to caress, or say soft things, — to people. He could stroke the cat as accompaniment to an ordinary, practical remark, which really carried covertly something of the complacency, if not endearment, with it, over pussy's head ; but not every one — certainly not Peace Polly — could take the delicate indirection.