They began married life by buying the house they were now living in;
and when Greensleeve also failed as a farmer, they opened the place as
a public tavern, and took in Ledlie to finance it.
So it was to her mother that Athalie went for any information that her
ardent and growing intellect required. And her mother, intuitively
surmising the mind-hunger of youth, and its vigorous needs, did her
limited best to satisfy it in her children. And that is really all the
education they had; for what they got in the country school amounted
to--well it amounted to what anybody ever gets in school.
* * * * *
Her most enduring, most vivid memories of her mother clustered around
those summer days of her twelfth year, brief lamp-lit scenes between
long, sunlit hours of healthy, youthful madness--quiet moments when
she came in flushed and panting from the headlong chase after
pleasure, tired, physically satisfied, to sit on the faded carpet at
her mother's feet and clasp her hands over her mother's knees.
Then "what?" and "why?" and "when?" and "how?" were the burden of the
child's eager speech. Nothing seemed to have escaped her quick ears or
eyes, no natural phenomena of the open; life, birth, movement, growth,
the flow, and ebb of tides, thunder pealing from high-piled clouds,
the sun shining through fragrant falling rain, mists that grew over
swamp and meadow.
And, "Why?" she always asked.
Nothing escaped her;--swallows skimming and sheering Spring Pond,
trout that jumped at sunset, the quick furry shapes of mink and
muskrat, the rattling flash of a blue-winged kingfisher, a tall heron
wading, a gull mewing.
Nothing escaped her; the casual caress of mating birds, procreation in
farm-yard and barn-yard, fledgelings crying from a robin's nest of mud
and messy refuse, blind kittens tugging at their blinking mother.
Death, too, she saw,--a dusty heap of feathers here, a little mound of
fur, there, which the idle breezes stirred under the high sky,--and
once a dead dog, battered, filthy and bloody, shot by the roadside;
and once some pigs being killed on a farm, all screaming.
Then, in that school as in every school, there was the sinister
minority, always huddling in corners, full of mean silences and
furtive leering. And their half-heard words, half-understood
phrases,--a gesture, a look that silenced and perplexed her--these the
child brought also to her mother, sitting at her feet, face against
her knees.
* * * * *
For a month or two her mother had not been very well, and the doctor
who had brought Athalie into the world stopped in once or twice a
week. When he was with her mother the children were forbidden the
room.