The lady had apparently dressed in great haste. All her buttons seemed to have shot clear of the eye-holes. She had on a mouse colour canton flannel dressing-gown, half a dozen buttons squabbling for one buttonhole. Her iron grey hair was in a little plaited snarl and aggressively poked round the far cheek. One hand clutched a morsel of grey worsted shawl to her throat, while the other held a miscellany of garments, and prominently and unmistakably a white pair of trimmed drawers too wide for sleeves. A little button-up top garment, darted and boned, hung over her wrist. Her hand was through the armhole. Several hairpins were in her mouth. 

As I looked she moved. She ducked forward to administer a series of lip-noises. They began at Middle’s forehead, and straggled up and down her cheek like wild geese migrating in a high sky, all of a flock but each goose separate. Her kisses were like that, and her skin smelled old and dry and furry. I was glad that, tucked in between Middle and the wall, I was out of kissing range. Slowly the house was bringing back yesterday to me—but yesterday we had a mother in the room just steps away, up a few stairs on the next landing. Yesterday we had been kept from school and the house was quiet. 

Father was home all day and not a bit cross. He sat by Mother’s bedside and held her hand. He could not enjoy his food or his garden or his grapevine. He could not even enjoy his temper. It had forsaken him with his appetite. Everyone was trying to behave as usual and could not. When it came to saying good night Mother held us each in her weak arms. It was very late when we went to bed. Now this was the next day. “What does she mean?” I said to Middle. “Is Mother dead?” Middle said with a sob, “I suppose so.” But that was not enough for me. I climbed over the foot of the bed, not an easy feat. It was one of the old-fashioned spool kind and high. Now I started for the stairs.

 Middle and the old lady followed. Father was crossing the top landing. He did not speak. He went into his room and shut the door. Mother’s door just opposite was open and the Elder was moving about inside. But the feel was quite different in the room. The old lady took each of us by a hand and led us to the bedside. There were no blankets on the bed, just a sheet and her night dress covered Mother, and she looked so thin and little. 

The Elder folded down the sheet from the face and Middle and I took a long long look. Mother not struggling to breathe! I was going to kiss her but the Elder snatched me back. “It is not good,” she said, “to kiss the dead.” Then Bigger came with a candle and said she would see the neighbour down to the front door and undo the bolt. That time Bigger was included in the “happy happy children” but Bigger was equal to her and gave her back chapters of texts. 

Then the old lady descended the stair, putting on clothing as she went. The Elder gathered a bundle of blankets to take downstairs to make up a bed for herself on the sofa. She had been sleeping in Mother’s room. “Do we have to go to bed again?” “Yes.” Middle was always so quiet about things. She got in and was asleep before I had climbed over her. “Middle, aren’t grownups stupid?” “Um, I s’pose so.” “Calling us ‘happy children’ over and over, when we never can be happy again and she knows it.” If she had said, “Unhappy me! I put both my feet in one drawer leg going downstairs and might have fallen and broken both legs,” it would have been sensible talk and true. Crazy to step into those things going down steps!

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The tongue always gabbles away and leaves the heart stranded, because your heart is much shyer than your tongue. Small had not read a great many books. The Elder often read Dickens aloud to the children in the evenings. Small loved that, and Small had a whole shelf of Poets over the top of her bed and she loved those, mulling dreamily over the poems as she went to sleep. 

Small tried to write poetry; it appealed to her more than prose. Poetry took her into a new world when she read it, but she could not write it. She could just make silly jingles to go with caricatures that she drew of people. Just stupid things that tickled a laugh out of people. She wanted to write things different to that, things that played tunes on the expressions of people’s faces, but she did not know how to begin. That was not the worst of it either. 

Suppose people wrote of the puzzles and bewilderments, and suppose they got found, these worded puzzles and bewilderments and they were trodden on and laughed at—well it would hurt. Could one go on living for hurt? Small thought not. “So I’d die,” concluded Small and went on getting more and more muddled. Middle and she did not like the same things, no good discussing it with Middle. Neither did Bigger and brother Dick, who were four years too young and four years too old. 

I suppose all adolescent children grow too big to contain themselves in prose, so eventually in self-protection they have to expand in poetry. All young life is poetry, frightfully serious poetry. Words would help, but where does one find the right words, because think and say are not the same. There were always grown-ups to laugh! Prose writers can say just the same things as poets, but it seems that except for good ones, their saying is not quite so right, as poetry meanings are apt to go silly. The prose writer kept within limits, wide expansive bounds maybe, but they had not the spring, the mystery of poetry. 

They had just as much or more truth. Prose was alright but poetry was more uplifting, at least that was the way it seemed to Small. In the year her father gave Small The Lady of the Lake,(1) the Elder gave Bigger, Middle and Small each a diary, a big Letts(2) diary. The children were supposed to write in them every day. Bigger filled hers with religion, not her feelings towards it as much as a faithful record of goings to churchp, how much she put in the collection plate, a short resume of the sermon, the text and the names of the hymns. 

Middle’s diary was a chronicle of the births, deaths, and marriages of her doll family and her cats. Small’s diary was almost empty except for repeated Monday entries: “Monday is our wash day,” she wrote, “Mary comes to do it for Mother. Mary is an Indian.” It seemed to have been the great event of Small’s life at that time, not so much the washing as the Indian. Here and there came an entry: “Father and I found a bird’s nest in the hedge… The cow found a most lovely calf in the hay stack.” 

In looking through the diaries in after-years, Small’s thought was this: All I wanted to say I dare not say more, nor did Bigger or Middle, because we felt that our diaries were supervised. We would have had much to say. Things about the world, about us, and to write about them would have taught us something and helped us to identify ourselves with nature. 

Our diaries were amusement for the elders. Well, Small had not gained a thing from her diary as far as wording thoughts went. She was pretty young at the time of the diaries but when she became a big girl and was thinking harder, then the desire came again to express, so she invented the fictitious “Topsy.” “I’ll give you a stupid name, so you won’t even think you are real yourself, Topsy, and if I do, I’ll remember you are not real and I won’t be so shy of speaking straight to you. I’ll write it in letters and I can think a think and come back to it again and add more thought to it because you’ve kept it there in my letter to you. I will write you a long, long letter.” 

There was one great drawback to Topsy which really was not her fault. Every place we had was still supervised for tidiness. I was not afraid of Middle reading Topsy. Though she and I shared all the space in our world that was ours, we did not quite share each other’s thoughts. But Bigger and Elder snooped. They seemed to think that reading anything written by a younger sister was their duty—why you might even write a “love letter.” Quite young girls did and it was disgraceful. The Elder and Bigger stamped with both feet on love, or supposedly so. Or you might write something about them! Young girls’ correspondence certainly should be guided. It was the duty of our elders. They did it for your own sakes and sometimes they laughed and quoted your words back at you.

Small’s first device was to change a good clear but perfectly char-acterless handwriting to an unintelligible scribble which even she herself could not read. Her next protective step was to climb to the most inaccessible places and hide the old exercise book which was arithmetic sums on one side and Topsy letters on the other. Small had three chapters written. What with the long, long walk to and from school, the being kept in for arithmetic every day and the home work, there was not much time for Topsy.

So Small got up a little earlier for her. ≈  ≈  ≈ Ah, this lovely spring morning there was twenty minutes before she need leave for school! She dived into Topsy. Middle thought she was preparing her home work. Bigger came rushing by the open door, shouted, “Girls! The clock is fifteen minutes slow, hurry, hurry!” Middle seized her coat and followed Bigger, struggling with the sleeves as she went. “Topsy Tiddles!” Small groaned. No time to rush to the hay loft or the dark slope above the dairy roof. The others were already downstairs and out the doors. Small dashed into the drawing room, rammed Topsy up the chimney and followed the others to school in agony.

Aunt had just arrived from the south. It was one of our summer grey days; the afternoon turned cold. Aunt demanded a fire in the drawing room. When halfway home, rain commenced to spit. Small knew what would happen and ran all the way. It was as she thought it would be. The Elder was just putting the match. Aunt was coughing. “That chimney needs cleaning!” Small told them. “Aunt, Mother is calling you like anything, don’t you hear?” To the Elder: “Your Tom Turkey has flown the fence and is making off!” Both women hurried away. Small was on her knees before the grate. “You nasty tormenting little beast Topsy! You’re no good and now I’ve told three lies just for you, ugh!”

She rammed the Topsy book into the midst of the flames. That was the end of Topsy Tiddles.

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A dirt path trodden hard by the children’s feet divided Bigger’s garden from Middle’s. Middle’s garden was more cemetery than flower bed. Up near the asparagus bed was a bush of old man’s beard(1) and a root of bleeding heart. There was a rim of annuals around the edge of the plot and some seedy-looking pansies. The centre of the plot was bumpy from the shallow graves of creatures buried in shoe boxes, matchboxes and some in paper bags.

Creatures as big as cats took an apple box and a grave that took days to dig. It was hard for the three toy spades, even at work in combination, to dig graves deep enough. Middle tried to combine the planting of a corpse with the simultaneous planting of a flower root to lessen digging. The flowers did not thrive on boxes and died before their roots could reach the meat of the corpse. Small’s garden was at the end of the gravel walk. It was square and small. Everyone walked over it to save the corner. You might as well try to dig cement, and Small’s spade was wood.

Small gave up flower growing and established a mud pie bakery. Small’s spade of wood was blunt. It would not even dent the hard soil till she hit it with a stone. After a number of prodigious grunts, Small gave up and imported dough earth from the chicken yard for her bakery. She made pies of all sizes and shapes but unfortunately, though she stood them in rows on boards, they never even sun-cracked because no sun ever touched Small’s garden. “Oh,” wailed Small, “if there were only cracks like grown-up pies to let the jam run out, I could bear it.”

Brother Dick was too young for a garden then. But by and by when he grew big enough, and Bigger outgrew a child’s garden and interested herself in the grown-up garden beds, Small was promoted to Bigger’s plot and Dick had Small’s. ≈  ≈  ≈ By and by the three little girls grew up and the town grew up, and the Father and Mother died. Then the old property was divided, cut up into city lots. The Elder built a big house on her lot to rent out but lived on in the family home. Bigger lived with Elder. She did not build a house, she built a garden on her lot next door to the Elder’s lot.

Middle built her school just opposite and Small an apartment house just round the corner. All staying by Father’s original land, the sisters dined together on Sundays immediately after morning Church. When dinner was over they went to the three houses to inspect the three gardens each had made according to her taste. Bigger’s was the finest of the three, and she was very proud of it. It took up the whole deep lot and had pergolas and rockeries and a vegetable garden and orchard as well as flowers.

It took a long time to see it all, for Bigger made us compare each Sunday how much each plant had grown during the week. Then we crossed the street to Middle’s schoolhouse, with a flower and fruit garden behind and a gravel play-yard with a swing for the children. In front it was not so orderly as Bigger’s but it was pretty and homey and full of life. “Now,” said Small, quivering to show the others what she had made out of her hummocky Elder’s lot.

Middle built her school just opposite and Small an apartment house just round the corner. All staying by Father’s original land, the sisters dined together on Sundays immediately after morning Church. When dinner was over they went to the three houses to inspect the three gardens each had made according to her taste. Bigger’s was the finest of the three, and she was very proud of it. It took up the whole deep lot and had pergolas and rockeries and a vegetable garden and orchard as well as flowers.

It took a long time to see it all, for Bigger made us compare each Sunday how much each plant had grown during the week. Then we crossed the street to Middle’s schoolhouse, with a flower and fruit garden behind and a gravel play-yard with a swing for the children. In front it was not so orderly as Bigger’s but it was pretty and homey and full of life. “Now,” said Small, quivering to show the others what she had made out of her hummocky wild lot. But Bigger said, “I must get ready for Sunday school,” and Middle said, “I must take the children to the beach.” So Small went to her garden alone. It was the same every Sunday. Her sisters took no more interest in Small’s garden than they had taken in her mud pie bakery.

It hurt Small but with a toss of her head she lied, “I don’t care. I think mine the very nicest garden of them all,” and she opened the gate that shut the apartment house business from her own private garden. There in the cherry tree sat the little monkey Woo with a whoop of joy at seeing her, and there came the great silver Persian cat, and the moment she opened the yard gates, in poured the “Bobbies”, adult dogs and puppies.

Any kind of creature Small had in her possession at the moment came running to the lawn, for this was their garden as much as Small’s. Every flower, every shrub and bulb was a live friend. Today was Small’s, her own. The tenants minded their own business on Sundays. And Small had her garden and her creatures. “Punk,” whispered Small into the ear of the great Bobtail kennel sire.

“Punk, we have the most lovely garden in the whole world!” and every creature bounced with the truth of it. Bigger passed by with a tangle of Sabbath School girls hanging on each arm. Middle passed with a drove of infants in wheeling wagons before her and behind her. But Small and her creatures drowsed in their own garden. A nose, a paw touched Small’s hammock, or a warm human monkey hand swung the hammock rope. Sway, sway, “Life is dear,” sighed Small, and slept a little and sang a little.

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