Читать книгу Our Miss Boo - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 5

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Miss Boo is our Ambassador of Good Willingness. Next to inviting people to our house, she likes nothing so much as going around the neighborhood paying calls, for she is a social little being, gregarious as sunshine, unsnobbish as the rain.

This morning she is a walking synopsis of what has gone on in our house ... attic-cleaning. She has on a sun-suit, hip boots, and lace mitts. There was a hat with cherries which went with the costume. But it kept sliding down over that little pink button of nose, and when a lady goes calling, she does want to see what’s happening.

Going calling is half; bringing home things that have been given to her is the other half.

To-day there was a bird’s nest, from the woman whose house turned its back on our road a hundred years ago. That’s why she bought the house; she, too, is trying to turn her back on things. But Miss Boo wouldn’t know about that.

“She likes birds,” she said when she came home. “She says she likes ’em about as well as people. She said I laughed like a bird. Do they laugh? Maybe if you know them awfully well?”

And there was a cookie. (“Although I ’stinkly told her I wasn’t to eat between meals.”) That came from the six-foot-tall Jamaican cook who works for the people at the top of our hill.

Her eyes are smoldering carnelians in a face of carved cinnabar. She speaks with an English accent, and our postman says she has been homesick for ten years now. She gets no mail, he says, and certainly she has no acquaintances in this town of ours.

Except one four-year-old friend, who ’stinkly likes her cookies.

And last of all she had a dime. A dime hasn’t yet become something magical that can turn into a subway ride, two lollipops, or a kite. A dime to her isn’t the tenth part of a dollar, with all its dazzling possibilities; a dime is only a less-shiny button.

But this dime, when I look at it, is much more than a button. For I know how much back-bending farm labor has gone into it. The farmer who gave it to her is a Swede, a gentle giant who learned his sizzling profanity at sea when he was a lad, and who talks about his land as if he were its mother.

“In the old country, in Varmland where Gösta Berling lived, we got along good without money,” he said to us last week, when we stopped for rhubarb and eggs. “But here a man must have some money. If I make forty dollars a month off my vegetables and flowers ... why, I can live like a king.”

He looked lovingly across his field, and then he said softly, as if he didn’t want the land to hear any reproach, “Of course, I can’t make that much. But I will sometime ... maybe.”

That’s where to-day’s dime came from....

She’s sitting on the terrace steps now, with her precious, irrelevant loot.

“Maybe the neighbors don’t like having you call so early in the day?” we tactfully suggest.

“Oh, they do,” she says confidently. “I’m somebody they can give things to.” She doesn’t know she has found something profound, for she is four and everything is simple and fitting-together.

But suddenly we know why a child is important in a neighborhood. We see that giving is a necessity sometimes ... more urgent, indeed, than having. There are things which cannot be said in any other way, except by the giving of some absurd little object. Whole wordless volumes surge into the heart at the sight of some one four years old coming up the path in rubber boots, with a handful of daisies clutched moistly in lace mitts.

Even casual dearness is suddenly inexpressibly more poignant because one knows that across the earth the dancing of children has stilled, and the little innocent laughter has sobered to a whisper in shadow. Forgotten mornings locked in the cash registers of humdrum hearts ... children who were, long ago ... children who now will never be born ... absurd and solemn children with eyes as blue as delphinium petals ... these and a thousand other fragments come to life when a little girl calls at the back door. There are things which must be said, and cannot be. And so one needs “somebody to give things to.”

To-day we have written five business letters and cleaned an attic. These have been good and useful deeds. But there are other jobs to be done, which only a child could do on an open-handed summer morning.