The Girl From Follow

I

WHEN Father first told us of the girl from Follow, I was sitting between my brothers on the long window seat near the stove. Behind the oval eyes of the grate the fire shone red. Its light glowed on the soft fur of our great yellow cat stretched across my knees. Outside in the early Canada evening the snow was blue, and the spruces made a blue-green wall about the clearing. Against the blue the frost on the windowpane raised silver fernlike patterns with firelight gleaming here and there in them.

The click of my mother’s knitting needles, the whisper and crackle of the fire, the rise and fall of my father’s voice, along with the heaviness and sadness of the tale he was reading, had set me nodding more than once. But I was awake when he stopped reading to us and laid his book, open roof-like, on his knee. My mother noticed how dark it had grown and thrust her free needles into the ball of yarn and started to get up to fetch the lamp, but Father raised his hand and motioned for her to stay where she was and began to tell us of the girl at Follow.

My baby brother slid from my sister’s lap and went to my father and put up his arms to be taken. He sat bolt upright on Father’s knee, and looked up gravely, pretending to understand because the rest of us were listening so quietly.

That winter evening is so long ago that the beginning of the story of the blacksmith at Follow and his young daughter, and of the stranger Father met on the lonely road between Peace Hills and the smithy at Follow, seems as dim as Father’s face in the dusk, but as unforgettable as the timber wall beyond the window.

Father was on skis, his pack on his back, coming toward home. Ahead of him he saw other ski tracks making toward Follow. He topped a hill. The snowy willow brush and the frosty poplars stretched away on either hand. Before him on the next hillcrest rose a black line of timber. A wedge of sky cut through the timber to the hillcrest where the wagon trail led. Black against the wedge of sky was the little figure of a man. Father took off his mittens, put his hands to his mouth, and hallooed. The echoes came back from the timber wall. The distant one waved his arm in answer and stood waiting, slapping his mittened hands against his thighs. Father crossed the valley and went up to him, his skis making a thin dry sound in the quiet ravine.

The sun was low. As the stranger waited on the hilltop the breath rose from his nostrils like powdered gold to fade away in the still cold air.

They went on together, talking, Father taking a slower pace, for the stranger, though taller and much younger, found the air hard to breathe and complained that his legs were weary with the long miles in the soft snow. His speech showed him to be English. He told Father that he had taken a homestead near Follow and had built himself a log house. He had been to Peace Hills for his letters and was bringing home a package of books sent out to him from Toronto.

Father had letters in his pack, too, along with gifts for his children — some dainty for the baby, ribbons for his girls, knives for carving in birch for the boys, and yarns, red, black, and gray, for Mother’s knitting. There were books, too. They talked of books, of schools in England, and of other countries as they went along, and the way to Follow seemed short to them.

II

When the sun had gone down and the stars began to show through the white poplar branches, they came to the smithy at Follow, and the smith, when he saw Father, asked them to let down their packs and stay the night. He led them into the long low living room behind the smithy, where a lamp with a green shade shone on the supper table, and told them to warm themselves at the fire. Then the blacksmith’s daughter came from the kitchen carrying a large bowl in her hands, walking in an agony of carefulness, her eyelids down, her teeth on her underlip. She was wearing a red dress and a white apron. Father and the stranger stood and spoke to her. She set the bowl down on the table, looked wildly from one to the other of them, and turned and ran to the kitchen, her apron strings flying.

‘Ann is deaf,’ the smith said, ‘and she cannot talk.’

When the girl came in again to fill the cups, her hands shook. Her father drew her to him and, holding her, told her that Father had girls of his own and she was not to be afraid, and that the Englishman came from across the sea and had very queer speech and she should watch him when he talked and see if she could understand him. She watched her father’s lips, wonderingly, her own lips parted.

The Englishman could not take his eyes from her when she went in and out carrying dishes. ‘She is beautiful,’ he said to Father and the smith.

‘She’s a child,’ the smith said, ‘and no one knows what notions she gets from the little she makes out of watching us talk. She’s bright, though.’

No, the blacksmith told my father, he had never sent her to school. Why should he? She might cry with all the children staring at her. She was a very timid child. Besides, she was too helpless a young one to go the four miles alone to school. She was happy where she was. Everything was alive to her, the fire, and the trees in the smithy yard, and Father should see her playing at talk with the horses and her kitten.

While he was telling Father this, the girl came to him and hid her face against his shoulder as though she were ashamed to have him tell that she believed the fire and the trees were alive. She was delighted when she found that she could read Father’s lips, too, and understand much of his talk with the smith. The packs were opened and the books brought out. Father gave her a book to look at and she turned the pages wonderingly, looking at the pictures, and smiling for the first time. When she came to a picture of a knight on a horse she pointed toward the smithy, and then went to the Englishman and touched first the pictured knight and then the stranger’s wrist, laughing strangely in her throat.

The smith roared his pleasure. ‘I’ll get her books,’ he said, ‘all the books there are in Peace Hills. Why did I never think of them? Now if she could only read them!’ Father asked if we might have her for a while, so that she might learn with us (there was no school near our homestead), but the smith would not hear to her being out of his sight. Then the young Englishman offered to try his hand at teaching her to read.

She was a little girl then, not grown, not more than thirteen or fourteen.

III

For days after my father told us this story, my sister and I played it. She would be first the smith and then Father and then the young Englishman, and I insisted always on being Ann. I motioned with my hands, and she talked so carefully that the baby, following us about, began to make queer gestures, to roll his eyes and make faces, till we grew frightened and took him by the arms and made him repeat the half-dozen words he could say.

We would take our pencils and draw on large shavings from our father’s plane little pictures of Ann in her red dress with her dark hair about her face. The Englishman we put in armor, copying carefully from the pictures in our new King Arthur book.

Summers, I suppose, we forgot her, except when Father made trips to Follow to bring home the mail. Then we asked eagerly about her and learned that she could read a little. Once, Father said, when he stopped at the smithy, the little girl was there watching the smith mend a wagon wheel. With a piece of blue chalk for marking logs to go down the river, she had written their names on the tools her father was using. When the smith rubbed the letters from the hammer with his sweaty hands she made scolding sounds and took the tool from him and wrote the word in again.

That story delighted us, and we vexed our mother for days by pinning tags on dresses and curtains, by writing on the fresh-scrubbed floor, and by hanging a label under the cat’s chin with both ‘cat’ and ‘kitty’ written on it.

The Englishman seemed more real to us, and we stopped drawing pictures of him as a plumed and spurred knight when he sent us by Father a number of books with his name plate in Latin with a shield and motto. In one of the books we found a fingerprint in blue chalk that we knew must be Ann’s own. More than once the Englishman sent us books, and Father took back to him, for him to read to Ann, books we loved and knew by heart.

One Christmas she was to come to us, along with the blacksmith and the Englishman. Mother had written the invitation, with my sister on one side of her and me on the other, and the baby on the table, his two hands imprisoned in mine so he would not snatch for the feather pen; and Father had taken the letter himself and had brought back word that they would come. But it stormed terribly and they did not come Christmas Eve, nor all day Christmas. We put away the presents we had made for her — the carved birch doll with her silk dress and three petticoats, the birch-bark letter holder with her name burned on it, and the pair of white mittens — and Father took them to her when the bitter cold was over and he went again.

IV

Once, in early spring, when we had known of Ann for more than three years, I went away from home for a week to visit with a family who lived by the lake. They had lost a little daughter, and the homesteader came asking if one of the children might be lent for a time to cheer his wife and take her mind from her sorrow. I wanted to go, and my parents were willing.

Father put me up behind the homesteader on his horse and we rode away. I clutched the man round the middle and nodded good-bye to Mother where she stood at the corner of the house under the white moose horns, holding the baby high to see the last of me through the trees. All the other children came as far as the forks with us and then stopped on the knoll, calling and waving good-byes till the willow brush hid us from sight.

I told the homesteader I felt like a child crusader starting off to the Holy Land, and he pulled in his horse and gaped round at me over his shoulder, half a mind, I thought, to turn back and ask for my sister.

We had taken the west fork of the road. It wound in and out through the brush, climbed up and down grassy slopes, crossed willow-hidden springs, and skirted sloughs where new green was trying to show through last year’s matted rushes and amber water lay over all. Even the ground on the hilltops was wet and spongy beneath the horse’s feet. Everywhere else water lay in sheets, for, though new green covered the ground, there was still frost a few inches down and the water could not yet soak into the soil. Between the sloughs little brooks ran bank-full. At last we found our path, following a ridge between two of these. As we rode, the brook beds fell away into canyons, which grew deeper and deeper. Snow still lay under the north banks, and the water ran swift and dark, but very clear. Then our trail ran out on to a point of land. At its base the two brooks joined and flowed through a still deeper canyon for a way, then poured out across a meadow that was now all under water.

The path down the point was more steep than any other way I had ever seen. The homesteader got down from the horse, lifted me forward into the saddle, and, walking beside the horse, started down the hill. The horse went carefully, in sidling fashion. The grass was so slippery that once the man fell and had to catch at the willow stems with one hand. The horse’s feet, sliding in the spongy sod, left little furrows behind.

It had been raining for many days, steadily and quietly. Though the clouds still lowered, the rain had stopped falling, but the drops shook from the poplar leaves till it seemed the rain had not stopped. The grass and the little new leaves were so green that the air seemed filled with a pale green light coming from the ground. Though the water pouring down the canyon was so dark, it was clear and green, too, so clear that as we came down toward it I could see the grass on the bottom weaving in the current.

When we came to the water’s edge the man got back on the horse, behind the saddle. ‘The water has risen,’ he said, ‘since I forded it this morning. Bally may have to swim. You just take hold of the saddle horn tight. Don’t get scared if the water comes up around you. You just hold on to the saddle horn. And don’t you get scared, either, if I slide off behind and swim, too. Don’t let go the saddle horn.’

The horse hesitated at going into the water, then plunged with a great leap. At first the water splashed up around his legs in white sheets, like snow against the dark green water, then the water stopped splashing and ran along the horse’s side in waves. Once he reared out of the water and tried to turn back, but the man struck him with his glove and the horse went forward again. The clear cold water poured up over my knees, over my thighs. My body felt suddenly light. I had to crook one knee about the cantle of the saddle to keep from floating clear of the horse’s back. I found myself wanting to, just to let my legs go floating out on the strong current, the water flowed so smoothly, so beautifully. It was almost like the desire to fly when one faces a strong wind.

Only the saddle horn and the horse’s mane and head were out of water. I looked back. The homesteader had slipped off behind. Beneath the clear water I could see his hand knotted in the horse’s tail. His legs, moving in the water, looked short and twisted. He had his gloves in his teeth. He looked like a great dark frog.

The horse swam hard, swinging his head from side to side, and breathing in great snores. I could feel his body swell with his breathing, and the pull of the big muscles down his back and sides. He had a hard time getting up the opposite bank, for the turf kept breaking off in great chunks. When at last he was clear of the water and on solid ground again, he sneezed loudly several times, and shook himself all over, like a great dog. His white feet looked whiter than I had ever seen horses’ feet look before.

The homesteader put me back behind the cantle again and climbed into the saddle once more. Had he known how bad the ford was to be, he would have gone home the way he came, by the south road, he told me. As we rode away I could not keep from looking back at the rushing green water and remembering the otter and all the little newts and efts in The Water-Babies, and I wanted to go on with the sliding water and to cry, too, ‘Down to the sea, down to the sea!’ But the horse’s hot loins felt good between my thighs. My teeth were chattering with cold by the time we reached the homesteader’s house.

The homesteader’s wife bathed me and fed me and warmed me. After the first night, when I woke once and could not remember where I was, it was a happy week for me. Most of the time I played on the lake shore, wandering over the banks between the slender limbs of the willows and the alders, or hunting bright pebbles on the beach, or climbing in and out of the homesteader’s boat. The wife, when I looked toward the house, would be standing in window or doorway, some piece of cloth in her hand, watching me. Once, hid by pines from the house, I took off first my shoes and stockings, then all of my clothing, and slid from a log into the cold lake water. There was no danger of my drowning in such a shallow, pebbled place, but the one cold dip was enough for me.

When the homesteader took me home, the stream we had crossed at such peril was shallow again. The horse stopped in the middle of it to drink, and I peeked around the homesteader’s arm and looked up the bank where the willows were waving in the wind and the tiger lilies were dancing and wondered that the place could ever have been so frightening.

V

The joy of telling my adventures, when I got home, was much dimmed by something that had happened while I was away. Before I had kissed all around, or was asked a single question, my sister demanded with shining eyes that I guess what had happened the day before. I guessed new pigs and calves, but she tossed her hair and spread out her hands as much as to say, ‘Newborn things are nothing compared with this! Guess!’

I guessed my best and cried, ‘Ann has been here! ’ and was told I had overguessed. ‘The Englishman!’ I cried, and then was told all about his visit, where he sat at the table, what he said to each child as he took from his pack the books he had brought to give us to keep, how he and Father walked a long time in the clearing, back and forth between the split spruce and the Jackpine Stump, how he had raised his hat and waved it when he rode away through the trees.

I had to see the Englishman’s books and hold them in my hands and turn the pages from picture to picture. Father came in while they were still telling me about him and the Englishman. He put his axe in the corner, took me on his knee, and told them all to be still while I told of my adventure.

VI

Midsummer brought the day Ann came to us.

Mother sent us to Second Swamp to fill a tick with hay. We took the baby with us, riding on my eldest brother’s back. The boys raked the dried hay into windrows with the big wooden rakes Father had made, and we girls stuffed it into the tick. When the tick was full we ran about gathering wild flowers till the boys were through with the raking. At the lower end of the hay slough we found grass that was still tall and green, and deep in the grass were wild strawberries. We ate till the boys came to tell us that we must go home.

It was very hot and still there in the tall grass. Now and then a great black and yellow striped bee went bumbling past. Myriads of black gnats hovered above us, but we shook our curls loose over our faces and necks and pulled our sleeves down over the backs of our hands and kept on picking berries. In the deep shade of the spruces at the edge of the slough we could hear the mosquitoes singing angrily.

The boys carried the tick till we came to the little road, then they let it down on the ground, set the baby in the middle of it, the flowers we had picked in his fist, and the four of us lifted it to our shoulders and carried it on toward the house, singing. When we came near we saw a little gray pony tied under the moose horns at the house corner. We stopped singing and lowered the tick. The baby rolled off it and ran into the house, holding his flowers high. We all went in, and there, in the red dress, sitting in my father’s chair near the window, was Ann.

Several years later, when we were on the train going away from Canada, I looked from the window and saw some white swans gliding under hanging willows near the edge of a river. Few moments of more intense joy have come to me. Never before had it occurred to me that swans might be, outside of books. I could not have been more overcome had I seen a unicorn walking all slender and white beneath the trees. Stunned with the happiness of it, I went to tell my sister, where she was looking out of the other side of the train. ‘Such things happen,’ she said. ‘Once, when I woke from a nap, I was lying in my waist and panties on a pallet near the doorway; I looked up and saw an angel of Heaven standing between me and the door with the sunlight shining through the thin part of his wings.’

My joy and wonder in seeing Ann sitting in our father’s chair were almost as great as the swans were to bring me. Mother had fixed her some bread and milk in a bowl, and she was looking up between bites at the open doorway. After we had greeted her we little girls slid behind the curtain at the end of the room and put on clean dresses and our shoes and stockings and smoothed out each other’s tangled hair.

VII

Father came to the door and called the boys, saying that a storm was gathering in the northwest and that they must throw the cut hay in the slough into a stack before the storm broke, whether it was perfectly cured or not, or it might all be lost. The boys ran away, shouting excitedly to each other, but Mother called to Father, asking if he could not see who had come to call on us. He entered, trying to see in the shadowed room after being out in the brilliant sunlight.

Ann got out of the chair and ran to him. He took both her hands and talked to her, very slowly and carefully. My sister and I drew close. She did not take her eyes from Father’s lips.

‘He has gone back to England,’ Father said. ‘A house was left him and he had to go.’

Ann freed her hands, clasped them, and pressed them against her throat. Her eyes were very wide. Then she bowed her head, and some of her dark hair fell over her face. She went back to the big chair. The baby ran to her suddenly, crying, ‘Here!’ and thrust into her lap the flowers we had picked.

It was Mother, I think, who suggested we take Ann to see the colt. The colt was sleeping on the deep mat left where last year’s haystack had stood near the barn. It looked at us sleepily out of its large clear eyes, nibbled at our finger tips with its white teeth, and wrinkled its velvet muzzle cunningly, before it shook its head and got to its feet. Ann stroked its round sides with the palms of her hands and ran her finger tip along the narrow black stripe in the little crease down its back. But she did not smile. The gnats and flies had grown unbearable. The colt ran away to the shelter of the barn and we went back to the house.

The clouds in the northwest became a great wall of steel blue and purple. Against it the spruces took on an angry yellow-green color. A loud wind moved in great circles over the tree tops. When at last the sun was clear gone, the wind came with a rush and roar straight out of the black clouds. The trees all bent before it and the limbs lashed about, clashing, roaring. Then the wind failed and the first few great drops began to fall, making a loud pattering on the leaves.

The boys came running in, hot and panting.

Ann would have gotten on her pony to ride home, but Father would not let her go away with such a storm threatening. My brothers led her pony away to the barn.

Soon the sound of rain was a steady mutter; the wind came again, and until long after dark there was only the roaring of the timber, and the beat ing of the rain. Just before sunset the clouds, low in the west, broke apart to show a heaven of palest green, while the low sun flooded the yard with saffronyellow light. All the chips had been washed from every little hummock and ridge and were floating on the pools that sheeted the yard. We ran to the edge of the yard to see the ‘silver leaf,’ at a poplar’s roots, shining with raindrops. After the sun was gone the clouds drew together again and the rain began to fall steadily and heavily.

At supper Ann sat between my sister and me and ate very little. Afterward Father asked Ann to choose a book for him to read aloud to us. She climbed up on the window seat and looked at the books on the shelf above the window. There she found one the Englishman had sent to us, the story of Undine, the water sprite who was wedded to a knight. We had heard the story many times, and liked it, both for the story itself and for the detailed drawings of mermaids, sprites, cottagers, and centaurs. Ann had read the book, too, with the Englishman to help her, and now nothing would do but that Father should read it to us. She sat by Father’s side, looking from the book to his face and back again, nodding her head understandingly.

While he read, the storm raged.

Once I fell asleep and dreamed that I was in the fisherman’s cottage, and that the fisherman and his wife were the homesteaders I had stayed with for a week down by the lake. When Father came to the place in the story where the storm is raging, he stopped reading and held the book on his knee, his finger in the place, and we all listened to the rain and the wind.

The last time I woke he was reading: ‘. . . He must have fallen asleep, for it seemed to him as if he were lifted up upon the fluttering wings of swans, and borne by them far over land and sea, while they sang to him their sweetest music. “The music of the swan! The music of the swan!” he kept saying to himself; “does it always portend death?” But it had yet another meaning. All at once he felt as if he were hovering over the Mediterranean Sea. A swan was singing musically in his ear that this was the Mediterranean Sea. And whilst he was looking down upon the waters below they became clear as crystal, so that he could see through them to the bottom. He was delighted at this, for he could see Undine sitting beneath the crystal arch.’

When the story was done it was time to go to bed. Mother brought one of her own gowns for Ann, and while the boys and Father were out to have a look at the stock we all undressed by the fire. Ann slept in one of the upper bunks between my sister and me. Once in the night I woke to hear her sobbing. I put my arm about her to comfort her and she stopped crying almost at once. The wind had died. There was only the steady pattering of raindrops on the poplar leaves, but the world was so still that I could hear the raindrops falling far away in the timber as clearly as those falling near.

VIII

I woke early and went to the swing to swing a little while by myself before the other children should wake. I had thought, at first, that it was still raining, the poplar leaves were rustling so. But when I went out of doors the sun wasshining. Raindrops glittered everywhere. The white arms of the poplars gleamed as though they had been rubbed with wax, a pale, green, aromatic wax, and they shone against the blue sky, where snowy clouds floated slowly. There was a steady, chill breeze, so sweet and fresh that I did not care that it was chill. The swing was near the cowpen fence, close to the timber wall. At the foot of the trees, sheltered from the wind, the ground was steaming wherever the sun touched it. There were new fronds uncurling from every fern root, but the flowers lay beaten on the moss, scentless and pale. The cranberry clusters were stuck together like handfuls of rubies caught in crystal. Each spruce branch had put out new tips like pale green fingers.

The ropes of the swing had shrunk till the board was so high that I could scarcely climb into it. I sat there silently, feeling the wet, hard ropes. I leaned back and let my hair down as far as I could to see if it would reach to the ground. Looking so, I could see the world upside down. Just within the cowpen fence Father was milking. Mother was standing near him, holding a bright pail. Their backs were toward me. They were talking. I could hear the slow streams of milk in the pail, and their words.

It was to talk of Ann, as well as to bid my father good-bye, that the Englishman had come to see us that one time, I learned. He had seen Ann almost every day for three years and his heart was sore to leave her. He had told her that he was betrothed to a girl in England, but she had not seemed to understand. She was little more than a child, and, except for books, knew nothing of the world beyond the smithy. Perhaps in England he could forget her. He had not the heart to tell her that he would not be coming back.

Father stood up, and my mother and he looked at each other so sadly that, from my strange position, they seemed to me like unreal people, like people in a story, in the story of Ann.

I slipped from the swing, ran to the house, and climbed up and looked into the upper bunk. Ann was lying as I had left her when I got up. She turned her dark head on the pillow and looked into my eyes. Bewildered by such sadness, I had nothing to say, and dropped down and went and found the cat and gave him his breakfast.

IX

After breakfast, because she wanted to hear it, I read parts of Undine aloud to Ann. She watched me. Suddenly I decided to tell her of my visit to the homesteader by the lake. She seemed to understand when I told her of the horse’s swimming at the ford on the west road. ‘I might have been washed away in the current,’ I told her, ‘and I am not a water sprite like Undine.’ She found the place again of Undine’s going back to the water when the knight was unkind to her, and read it to herself, her finger moving under the lines. I told her then about my dip into the lake. I jumped from the window seat and flung my arms about, laughing and shouting as though I were in the water again, making myself far braver than I really was, until Mother, at the other end of the house, called to me, telling me not to be silly.

Mother had made some cakes for Ann to take with her, and Father had written a letter to the smith, asking that Ann might come to stay with us for a while. When my brothers went to the barn for the little gray pony, I followed. They lifted me to the saddle and let me ride from the barn to the house. There I slid down, elated because in one of the pools which still lay on the path the pony had stumbled and slipped to his knees, but I had not fallen from the saddle. Father lifted Ann into the saddle and put the reins in her hands. Then he explained to her ever so carefully that she must take the south instead of the west road home, that the stream on the west road would be much too deep and swift for fording. Did she understand him? She nodded gravely, pointed west and shook her head, pointed south and nodded.

At the gate she turned in the saddle and raised her hand. We children were all waving and calling, ‘Good-bye!’ The baby, not understanding why she did not answer, ran after her in his pink bare feet, waving both his hands and crying, ‘ Good-bye, good-bye, goodbye!’

In the house again, out of the sunlight, it seemed that the chill and the sadness of the storm lingered. We went out of doors again, but we did not feel like playing. Hand in hand, my sister and I started down the trail, wading through the pools in the low places and coming at last to the knoll where the roads forked. We stopped there. Behind us rose the timber, a blue and gold mottled mist lying under the trees. Before us stretched the brush land, the wind rippling the amber pools along either road, beneath the willow stems. We stood there, silent, knowing it was too late to do anything about it, when we saw the tracks of the pony on the west road.