The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher
where to find the cookies, don't you, Elly?" asked Aunt Hetty, over her shoulder, trotting rapidly like a little dry, wind-blown leaf, towards Agnes and the comforter.
"Oh yes, Aunt Hetty!" shouted Elly, halfway down the stairs.
Aunt Hetty called after her, "Take all you want … three or four. They won't hurt you. There's no egg in our recipe."
Elly was there again, in the empty pantry, before the cookie-jar. She lifted the cracked plate again. … But, oh! how differently she did feel now! … and she had a shock of pure, almost solemn, happiness at the sight of the cookies. She had not only been good and done as Mother would want her to, but she was going to have four of those cookies. Three or four, Aunt Hetty had said! As if anybody would take three if he was let to have four! Which ones had the most raisins? She knew of course it wasn't so very nice to pick and choose that way, but she knew Mother would let her, only just laugh a little and say it was a pity to be eight years old if you couldn't be a little greedy!
Oh, how happy she was! How light she felt! How she floated back up the stairs! What a perfectly sweet old thing Aunt Hetty was! And what a nice old house she had, though not so nice as home, of course. What pretty mahogany balusters, and nice white stairs! Too bad she had brought in that mud. But they were house-cleaning anyhow. A little bit more to clean up, that was all. And what luck that they were in the east-room garret, the one that had all the old things in it, the hoop-skirts and the shells and the old scoop-bonnets, and the four-poster bed and those fascinating old cretonne bags full of treasures.
She sat down near the door on the darling little old hair-covered trunk that had been Great-grandfather's, and watched the two old women at work. The first cookie had disappeared now, and the second was well on the way. She felt a great appeasement in her insides. She leaned back against the old dresses hung on the wall and drew a long breath.
"Well," said Aunt Hetty, "you've got neighbors up your way, so they tell me. Funny thing, a city man coming up here to live. He'll never stick it out. The summer maybe. But that's all. You just see, come autumn, if he don't light out for New York again."
Elly made no comment on this. She often heard her elders say that she was not a talkative child, and that it was hard to get anything out of her. That was because mostly they wanted to know about things she hadn't once thought of noticing, and weren't a bit interested when she tried to talk about what she had noticed. Just imagine trying to tell Aunt Hetty about that poor old gray snow-bank out in her woods, all lonely and scrumpled up! She went on eating her cookie.
"How does he like it, anyhow?" asked Aunt Hetty, bending the upper part of her out of the window to shake something. "And what kind of a critter is he?"
"Well, he's rather an old man," said Elly. She added conscientiously, trying to be chatty, "Paul's crazy about him. He goes over there all the time to visit. I like him all right. The old man seems to like it here all right. They both of them do."
"Both?" said Aunt Hetty, curving herself back into the room again.
"Oh, the other one isn't going to live here, like Mr. Welles. He's just come to get Mr. Welles settled, and to make him a visit. His name is Mr. Marsh."
"Well, what's he like?" asked Aunt Hetty, folding together the old wadded petticoat she had been shaking.
"Oh, he's all right too," said Elly. She wasn't going to say anything about that funny softness of his hands, she didn't like, because that would be like speaking about the snow-drift; something Aunt Hetty would just laugh at, and call one of her notions.
"Well, what do they do with themselves, two great hulking men set off by themselves?"
Elly tried seriously to remember what they did do. "I don't see them, of course, much in the morning before I go to school. I guess they get up and have their breakfast, the way anybody does."
Aunt Hetty snorted a little, "Gracious, child, a person needs a corkscrew to get anything out of you. I mean all day, with no chores, or farmin', or anything."
"I don't know," Elly confessed. "Mr. Clark, of course, he's busy cooking and washing dishes and keeping house, but … "
"Are there three of them?" Aunt Hetty stopped her dudsing in her astonishment. "I thought you said two."
"Oh well, Mr. Marsh sent down to the city and had this Mr. Clark come up to work for them. He doesn't call him 'Mr. Clark'—just 'Clark,' short like that. I guess he's Mr. Marsh's hired man in the city. Only he can do everything in the house, too. But I don't feel like calling him 'Clark' because he's grown-up, and so I call him 'Mr. Clark.'" She did not tell Aunt Hetty that she sort of wanted to make up to him for being somebody's servant and being called like one. It made her mad and she wanted to show he could be a mister as well as anybody. She began on the third cookie. What else could she say to Aunt Hetty, who always wanted to know the news so? She brought out, "Well, I tell you, in the afternoon, when I get home, mostly old Mr. Welles is out in his garden."
"Gardin!" cried Aunt Hetty. "Mercy on us, making garden the fore-part of April. Where does he think he's living? Florida?"
"I don't believe he's exactly making garden," said Elly. "He just sort of pokes around there, and looks at things. And sometimes he sits down on the bench and just sits there. He's pretty old, I guess, and he walks kind of tired, always."
"Does the other one?" asked Aunt Hetty.
This made Elly sit up, and say very loud, "No, indeedy!" She really hadn't thought before how very untired Mr. Marsh always seemed. She added, "No, the other one doesn't walk tired, nor he doesn't poke around in the garden. He takes long tramps way back of the mountains, over Burnham way."
"For goodness' sakes, what's he find up there?"
"He likes it. He comes over and borrows our maps and things to study, and he gets Mother to tell him all about everything. He gets Touclé to tell him about the back trails, too."
"Well, he's a smart one if he can get a word out of Touclé."
"Yes, he does. Everybody talks to him. You have to if he starts in. He's very lively."
"Does he get you to talk?" asked Aunt Hetty, laughing at the idea.
"Well, some," stated Elly soberly. She did not say that Mr. Marsh always seemed to her to be trying to get some secret out of her. She didn't have any secret that she knew of, but that was the way he made her feel. She dodged him mostly, when she could.
"What's the news from your father?"
"Oh, he's all right," said Elly. She fell to thinking of Father and wishing he would come back.
"When's he going to get through his business, up there?"
"Before long, I guess. Mother said maybe he'd be back here next month." Elly was aware that she was again not being talkative. She tried to think of something to add. "I'm very much obliged for these cookies," she said. "They are awfully good."
"They're the kind your mother always liked, when she was your age," said Aunt Hetty casually. "I remember how she used to sit right there on Father's hair-trunk and eat them and watch me just like you now."
At this statement Elly could feel her thoughts getting bigger and longer and higher, like something being opened out. "And the heaven was removed as a scroll when it is rolled up." That sentence she'd heard in church and never understood, and always wondered what was behind, what they had seen when the scroll was rolled up. … Something inside her now seemed to roll up as though she were going to see what was behind it. How much longer time was than you thought! Mother had sat there as a little girl … a little girl like her. Mother who was now grown-up and finished, knowing everything, never changing, never making any mistakes. Why, how could she have been a little girl! And such a short time ago that Aunt Hetty remembered her sitting there, right there, maybe come in from walking across that very meadow, and down those very rocks. What had she been thinking about, that other little girl who had been Mother?