Читать книгу Our Miss Boo - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 7

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This is the day that stepped out of the calendar wearing new shoes. Of all new things that happen to a child, nothing is lovelier than new shoes. Grown-ups try to fathom the reason for this; but they cannot; they can only remember that it is so.

Watching her, so enchanted with those twin five-inch lengths of newness, I decide that their charm lies in:

A. Being two.

B. Being seeable in completeness and not in fragments like a new frock.

C. Being a part of one’s self and yet separate.

These, to-day, have the added wonderfulness of rubber soles. One walks in whispers. Every room in the house must be walked in, experimentally. Upstairs, downstairs, attic, and basement.

One has the feet of bunnies, of rain falling on moss, of snow itself. One is in love with quietness to-day. Even the voice, usually a twittering, high, four-year-old voice, speaks little sentences which cling to the air like growing, down-shod vines. One wears rubber soles, in fact, from top to toe.

“You can hardly hear me,” she says in ecstasy, coming boldly across the “imaginary line” which keeps her out of the workroom ... usually. “You’d hardly know you had a child in the house.”

“Hardly at all,” I concede, as though I had not counted her approaching steps as doomfully as if they were Beethoven’s footfalls of fate marching through the Fifth.

“Go play, darling,” I say, trying to look undisturbed. “Go tie shoe-strings, perhaps.”

Surprisingly enough, she goes. Tying shoe-strings is an advanced lesson in being-nearly-five. She has dressed herself for months; she can report what time it is when you send her upstairs to find out. (“The little hand says eleven, and the big hand says six.”) She has solved many routine problems, but shoe-strings, unless a grown-up helps, still dangle.

But this morning ... this giddy, New Shoes Morning ... she masters the shoe-strings. She comes clumping helter-skelter downstairs—more like a torrent of ducks than of petals this time.

“I can tie a bow,” she cries triumphantly. “I can really tie a bow! Well, it isn’t a square bow,” she says honestly. “It’s a kind of three-cornered bow.” But it is a beginning. It is, in fact, a milestone—something to be celebrated. Even I, typewriter-tied though I am, see that this is a national holiday in our private country. So I put the hood over the typewriter, as though it were a garrulous parrot tucked away for the sake of silence, and I give in.

“What’s a day, more or less,” I say to myself defiantly. “When she’s grown up we’ll have plenty of quiet days. Beastly quiet days, with nobody four years old to interrupt!”

So Lilliam packs us a luncheon, and hardly is the last waxed paper snapped into creases before we unpack it again ravenously. We eat in the shadow of our own house, which is a fine place for picnics.

After luncheon we take what is somewhat leniently called our nap, lying in the shade of the hollyhocks, starched and pink against the summer sky. During naps we do not intrude on each other’s thinking; or if we must speak we rap first on the door of privacy.

“May I say something?” she asks politely in her new rubber-soled whisper.

“Just one remark,” I say sleepily, watching the big puddles of shadow which the hollyhock leaves throw across her face. A dragon-fly, glistening metallically, takes a stitch here and there in the sunshine. He, too, will baste this moment lightly in our memory ... hers and mine.

“When I’m a big lady and have all my babies,” she says, sitting up in her earnestness, “I’m going to have a very big house, and you must come and live with us.”

“Thank you,” I say, thinking that it’s mornings like this that bring on things like that. “Well, I’ll consider it anyway.”

“We’ll build a room for you at the very top of the house, and you can shut the door when you want to work. I’ll teach all my babies not to disturve you.”

“I tried to teach you not to disturb me,” I say smilingly, “and look what came of it.” I can see from her thoughtful look that she intends doing better teaching than I. But she doesn’t bring out that point. She looks at her shoes blissfully.

“Well, I know what,” she says. “We’ll all wear rubber soles. And then we can disturve you so quietly you won’t even know it!”