CHAPTER VI
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HEDGE
THE civilized-looking hedge had been long since investigated. The plot of land it enclosed—reached, for the Sturgises, through a breach in the hedge—was very different from the wild country which surrounded it. The place had once been a very beautiful garden, but years and neglect had made of it a half-formal wilderness, fascinating in its over-grown beauty and its hint of earlier glory. For Kirk, it was an enchanted land of close-pressing leafy alleys, pungent with the smell of box; of brick-paved paths chanced on unexpectedly—followed cautiously to the rim of empty, stone-coped pools. He and Felicia, or he and Ken, went there when cookery or carpentry left an elder free. For when they had discovered that the tall old house, though by no means so neglected as the garden, was as empty, they ventured often into the place. Kirk invented endless tales of enchanted castles, and peopled the still lawns and deserted alleys with every hero he had ever read or heard of. Who could tell? They might indeed lurk in the silent tangle—invisible to him only as all else was invisible. So he liked to think, and wandered, rapt, up and down the grass-grown paths of this enchanting play-ground.
It was not far to the hedge—over the rail fence, across the stubbly meadow. Kirk had been privately amassing landmarks. He had enough, he considered, to venture forth alone to the garden of mystery. Felicia was in the kitchen—not eating bread and honey, but reading a cook-book and making think-lines in her forehead. Ken was in Asquam. Kirk stepped off the door-stone; sharp to the right, along the wall of the house, then a stretch in the open to the well, over the fence—and then nothing but certain queer stones and the bare feel of the faint path that had already been worn in the meadow.
Kirk won the breach in the hedge and squeezed through. Then he was alone in the warm, green-smelling stillness of the trees. He found his way from the moss velvet under the pines to the paved path, and followed it, unhesitating, to the terrace before the house. On the shallow, sun-warmed steps he sat playing with fir-cones, fingering their scaly curves and sniffing their dry, brown fragrance. He swept a handful of them out of his lap and stood up, preparatory to questing further up the stone steps, to the house itself. But suddenly he stood quite still, for he knew that he was not alone in the garden. He knew, also, that it was neither Ken nor Felicia who stood looking at him. Had one of the fairy-tale heroes materialized, after all, and slipped out of magic coverts to walk with him? Rather uncertainly, he said, "Is somebody there?"
His voice sounded very small in the outdoor silence. Suppose no one were there at all! How silly it would sound to be addressing a tree! There was a moment of stillness, and then a rather old voice said:
"Considering that you are looking straight at me, that seems a somewhat foolish question."
So there was some one! Kirk said:
"I can't see you, because I can't see anything."
After a pause, the voice said, "Forgive me."
But indeed, at first glance, the grave shadowed beauty of Kirk's eyes did not betray their blindness.
"Are you one of the enchanted things, or a person?" Kirk inquired.
"I might say, now, that I am enchanted," said the voice, drily.
"I don't think I quite know what you mean," Kirk said. "You sound like a Puck of Pook's Hill sort of person."
"Nothing so exciting. Though Oak and Ash and Thorn do grow in my garden."
"Do they? I haven't found them. I knew it was a different place, ever so different from anything near—different from the other side of the hedge."
"I am not so young as you," said the voice, "to stand about hatless on an April afternoon. Let us come in and sit on either side of the chimney-corner."
And a long, dry, firm hand took Kirk's, and Kirk followed unhesitatingly where it led.
The smoothness of old polished floors, a sense of height, absolute silence, a dry, aromatic smell—this was Kirk's impression as he crossed the threshold, walking carefully and softly, that he might not break the spellbound stillness of the house. Then came the familiar crackle of an open fire, and Kirk was piloted into the delicious cozy depths of a big chair beside the hearth. Creakings, as of another chair being pulled up, then a contented sigh, indicated that his host had sat down opposite him.
"May I now ask your name?" the voice inquired.
"I'm Kirkleigh Sturgis, at Applegate Farm," said Kirk.
"' . . . I s'pose you know, Miss Jean,
That I'm Young Richard o' Taunton Dean . . .'"
murmured the old gentleman.
Kirk pricked up his ears instantly. "Phil sings that," he said delightedly. "I'm glad you know it. But you would."
"Who'd have thought you would know it?" said the voice. "I am fond of Young Richard. Is Phil your brother?"
"She's my sister—but I have a brother. He's sixteen, and he's almost as high as the doorways at Applegate Farm."
"I seem not to know where Applegate Farm is," the old gentleman mused.
"It's quite next door to you," said Kirk. "They call it the Baldwin place, really. But Ken happened to think that Baldwin's a kind of apple, and there is an orchard and a gate, so we called it that."
"The old farm-house across the meadow!" There was a shade of perplexity in the voice. "You live there?"
"It's the most beautiful place in the world," said Kirk, with conviction, "except your garden."
"Beautiful—to you! Why?"
"Oh, everything!" Kirk said, frowning, and trying to put into words what was really joy in life and spring and the love of his brother and sister. "Everything—the wind in the trees, and in the chimney at night, and the little toads that sing,—do you ever hear them?—and the fire, and, and—everything!"
"And youth," said the old gentleman to himself, "and an unconscious courage to surmount all obstacles. But perhaps, after all, the unseen part of Applegate Farm is the more beautiful." Aloud, he said: "Do you like to look at odd things? That is—I mean—"
Kirk helped him out. "I do like to," he said. "I look at them with my fingers—but it's all the same."
Such things to look at! They were deposited, one after the other, in Kirk's eager hands,—the intricate carving of Japanese ivory, entrancingly smooth—almost like something warm and living, after one had held it for a few adoring moments in careful hands. And there was a Burmese ebony elephant, with a ruby in his forehead.
"A ruby is red," Kirk murmured; "it is like the fire. And the elephant is black. I see him very well."
"Once upon a time," said the old gentleman, "a rajah rode on him—a rajah no bigger than your finger. And his turban was encrusted with the most precious of jewels, and his robe was stiff with gold. The elephant wore anklets of beaten silver, and they clinked as he walked."
Kirk's face was intent, listening. The little ebony elephant stood motionless on his palm, dim in the firelight.
"I hear them clinking," he said, "and the people shouting—oh, so far away!"
He put the treasure back into his host's hand, at last.
"I'd like, please, to look at you," he said. "It won't hurt," he added quickly, instantly conscious of some unspoken hesitancy.
"I have no fear of that," said the voice, "but you will find little worth the looking for."
Kirk, nevertheless, stood beside the old gentleman's chair, ready with a quick, light hand to visualize his friend's features.
"My hair, if that will help you," the voice told him, "is quite white, and my eyes are usually rather blue."
"Blue," murmured Kirk, his fingers flitting down the fine lines of the old gentleman's profile; "that's cool and nice, like the sea and the wind. Your face is like the ivory thing—smooth and—and carved. I think you really must be something different and rather enchanted."
But the old man had caught both Kirk's hands and spread them out in his own. There was a moment of silence, and then he said:
"Do you care for music, my child?"
"I love Phil's songs," Kirk answered, puzzled a little by a different note in the voice he was beginning to know. "She sings and plays the accompaniments on the piano."
"Do you ever sing?"
"Only when I'm all alone." The color rushed for an instant to Kirk’s cheeks, why, he could not have said.
Without a word, the old gentleman, still holding Kirk's hands, pushed him gently into the chair he had himself been sitting in. There was a little time of stillness, filled only by the crack and rustle of the fire. Then, into the silence, crept the first dew-clear notes of Chopin's F Sharp Major Nocturne. The liquid beauty of the last bars had scarcely died away, when the unseen piano gave forth, tragically exultant, the glorious chords of the Twentieth Prelude—climbing higher and higher in a mournful triumph of minor chords and sinking at last into the final solemn splendor of the closing measures. The old gentleman turned on the piano-stool to find Kirk weeping passionately and silently into the cushions of the big chair.
"Have I done more than I meant?" he questioned himself, "or is it only the proof?" His hands on Kirk's quivering shoulders, he asked, "What is it?"
Kirk sat up, ashamed, and wondering why he had cried.
"It was because it was so much more wonderful than anything that ever happened," he said unsteadily. "And I never can do it."
The musician almost shook him.
"But you can," he said; "you must! How can you help yourself, with those hands? Has no one guessed? How stupid all the world is!"
He pulled Kirk suddenly to the piano, swept him abruptly into the wiry circle of his arm.
"See," he whispered; "oh, listen!"
He spread Kirk's fingers above the keyboard—brought them down on a fine chord of the Chopin prelude, and for one instant Kirk felt coursing through him a feeling inexplicable as it was exciting—as painful as it was glad. The next moment the chord died; the old man was again the gentle friend of the fireside.
"I am stupid," he said, "and ill-advised. Let's have tea."
The tea came, magically—delicious cambric tea and cinnamon toast. Kirk and the old gentleman talked of the farm, and of Asquam, and other every-day subjects, till the spring dusk gathered at the window, and the musician started up.
"Your folk will be anxious," he said. "We must be off. But you will come to me again, will you not?"
Nothing could have kept Kirk away, and he said so.
"And what's your name, please?" he asked. "I've told you mine." A silence made him add, "Of course, if you mind telling me—"
Silence still, and Kirk, inspired, said:
"Phil was reading a book aloud to Mother, once, and it was partly about a man who made wonderful music and they called him 'Maestro.' Would you mind if I called you Maestro—just for something to call you, you know?"
He feared, in the stillness, that he had hurt his friend's feelings, but the voice, when it next spoke, was kind and grave.
"I am unworthy," it said, "but I should like you to call me Maestro. Come—it is falling dusk. I'll go with you to the end of the meadow."
And they went out together into the April twilight.
Ken and Felicia were just beginning to be really anxious, when Kirk tumbled in at the living-room door, with a headlong tale of enchanted hearthstones, ebony elephants, cinnamon toast, music that had made him cry, and, most of all, of the benevolent, mysterious presence who had wrought all this. Phil and Ken shook their heads, suggested that some supper would make Kirk feel better, and set a boundary limit of the orchard and meadow fence on his peregrinations.
"But I promised him I'd come again," Kirk protested; "and I can find the way. I must, because he says I can make music like that—and he's the only person who could show me how."
Felicia extracted a more coherent story as she sat on the edge of Kirk's bed later that evening. She came downstairs sober and strangely elated, to electrify her brother by saying:
"Something queer has happened to Kirk. He's too excited, but he's simply shining. And do you suppose it can possibly be true that he has music in him? I mean real, extraordinary music, like—Beethoven or somebody."
But Ken roared so gleefully over the ridiculous idea of his small brother's remotely resembling Beethoven, that Phil suddenly thought herself very silly, and lapsed into somewhat humiliated silence.
It was some time before the cares of a household permitted the Sturgises to do very much exploring. One of their first expeditions, however, had been straight to the bay from the farm-house—a scramble through wild, long-deserted pastures, an amazingly thick young alder grove, and finally out on the stony, salty water's edge. Here all was silver to the sea's rim, where the bay met wider waters; in the opposite direction it narrowed till it was not more than a river, winding among salt flats and surden rocky points until it lost itself in a maze of blue among the distant uplands. The other shore was just beginning to be tenderly alight with April green, and Felicia caught her breath for very joy at the faint pink of distant maple boughs and the smell of spring and the sea. A song-sparrow dropped a sudden, clear throatful of notes, and Kirk, too, caught the rapture of the spring and flung wide his arms in impartial welcome.
Ken had been poking down the shore and came back now, evidently with something to say.
"There's the queerest little inlet down there," he said, "with a tide eddy that runs into it. And there's an old motor-boat hove way up on the rocks in there among the bushes."
"What about it?" Felicia asked.
"I merely wished it were ours."
"Naturally it's some one else's."
"He takes mighty poor care of it, then. The engine's all rusted up, and there's a hole stove in the bottom."
"Then we should n't want it."
"It could be fixed," Ken murmured; "easily. I examined it."
He stared out at the misty bay's end, thinking, somehow, of the Celestine, which he had not forgotten in his anxieties as a householder.
But even the joy of April on the bayside was shadowed when the mail came to Applegate Farm that day. The United States mail was represented, in the environs of Asquam, by a preposterously small wagon,—more like a longitudinal slice of a milk-cart than anything else,—drawn by two thin, rangy horses that seemed all out of proportion to their load. Their rhythmic and leisurely trot jangled a loud but not unmusical bell which hung from some hidden part of the wagon's anatomy, and warned all dwellers on Rural Route No. 1 that the United States mail, ably piloted by Mr. Truman Hobart, was on its way.
The jangling stopped at Applegate Farm, and Mr. Hobart delved into a soap—box in his cart and extracted the Sturgis mail, which he delivered into Kirk's outstretched hand. Mr. Hobart waited, as usual, to watch, admire, and marvel at Kirk's unhesitating progress to the house, and then he clucked to the horses and tinkled on his way.
There was a penciled note from Mrs. Sturgis, forwarded, as always, from Westover Street, where she, of course, thought her children were (they sent all their letters for her to Mr. Dodge, that they might bear the Bedford postmark—and very difficult letters those were to write!), a bill from the City Transfer Company (carting: 1 table, etc., etc.), and a letter from Mr. Dodge. It was this letter which shadowed Applegate Farm and dug a new think-line in Ken's young forehead. For Rocky Head Granite was, it seemed, by no means so firm as its name sounded. Mr. Dodge's hopes for it were unfulfilled. It was very little indeed that could now be wrung from it. The Fidelity was for Mother—with a margin, scant enough, to eke out the young Sturgises' income. There was the bill for carting, other bills, daily expenses. Felicia, reading over Ken’s shoulder, bit her lip.
"Come back to town, my dear boy," wrote Mr. Dodge, "and I will try to get you something to do. You are all welcome to my house and help as long as you may have need."
It had been dawning more and more on Ken that he had been an idiot not to stay in town, where there was work to do. He had hated to prick Phil's ideal bubble and cancel the lease on the farm,—for it was really she who had picked out the place,—but he was becoming aware that he should have done so. This latest turn in the Sturgis fortunes made it evident that something must be done to bring more money than the invested capital yielded. There was no work here; unless perhaps he might hire out as a farm-hand, at small wages indeed. And he knew nothing of farm work. Nevertheless, he and Felicia shook their heads at Mr. Dodge's proposal. They sat at the table within the mellow ring of lamplight, after Kirk had gone to bed, and thrashed out their problem,—pride fighting need and vanquishing judgment. It was a good letter that Kenelm sent Mr. Dodge, and the attorney shook his own head as he read it in his study, and said:
"I admire your principle, my boy—but oh, I pity your inexperience!"