Life's Minor Collisions Part 3

My brother Geoffrey, in his day, has been a great sufferer from this kind of thing. As memory reviews his youth, there stands out only one occasion when he really achieved anything like freedom from sisterly counsel. This was when he picked the pears. The pears on six large loaded trees were ready to harvest. Geoffrey said that he was willing to pick, but not to pick to order. We would have to engage to let him pick the pears in his own way. We promised, though we knew too well our brother's way of picking pears. He holds quite a little reception from the tree-tops, entertaining pa.s.sers-by with delightful repartee, and giving everybody a pear. As time goes on, he gets to throwing pears.

"Somebody will get hurt," said our mother anxiously. But a contract is a contract, and we tried not to look out of the window. In this unaccustomed air of freedom, Geoffrey's spirits rose and rose. High in the branches, taking his time, he grew more and more abandoned. He had just reached the very top of the tallest tree when he saw far up the street the form of the ugliest and largest dog who ever visited our town, a strange white creature named Joe--a dog hard to define, but resembling one's childhood idea of the blood-hound type. Every one spoke of this dog as "Joseph A. Graham": "Joe" seemed too simple a name to be in scale with his size and ferocity. Down the street he came, loafing along. Geoffrey, ordinarily kind to pets, selected a large mellow pear, aimed it with steady eye, and hit Joseph A. Graham, accurately, amidships. Joseph flew up into the air, landed on a slant, gathered his large feet together for a plunge, and came dashing down the street with murder in his great red eye. At that moment Geoffrey looked down and saw with horror that an elderly gentleman was just coming up the street. It was obvious that Joseph thought that the old gentleman threw the pear.

Geoffrey, emitting hoa.r.s.e cries of warning, came swarming down the tree to the rescue, swinging from branch to branch like an orang-outang. The elderly gentleman, grasping the situation in the nick of time, stepped neatly inside our screen door, and Joseph, thwarted of reprisal, snuffed around the steps, muttered to himself for a few moments, and then went shuffling on down the street. Geoffrey, still ardently apologizing to the pa.s.ser-by, went back to his tree-top to recover from this, the only troubled moment in that influential day.

By clever bargaining, you can occasionally buy off your natural advisers in this way, and enjoy perfect independence. But there are projects that really call for a good boss. When a number of people are at work together, the trained worker should direct the group. Even in your family, you are allowed to be an autocrat in things that are your specialty. But you are supposed to be pleasant about it. This is not so easy when you are in the full heat of action. When you have your mind on a difficult project, your commands to your helpers are apt to sound curt. You are likely to talk to them as if they were beneath you. The unskilled helper in an affair demanding skill gives the impression of belonging to an inferior cla.s.s--something a little below the social status of a coolie. He even feels inferior, and is therefore touchy. If you order him too gruffly, he is likely to take offence and knock off for the day.

Barbara, for instance, once very nearly lost a valued slave when I was giving her my awkward a.s.sistance about the camera. She had decided to take a picture of Israel Putnam's Wolf-Den from a spot where no camera-tripod had ever been pitched before. The Wolf-Den sits on a slant above a cliff in the deep woods. At one side of it there is a capital place from which to take its picture, a level spot on which a tripod will stand securely. From this point most of the pictures. .h.i.therto taken of the Den were snapped. But Barbara was resolved to get a full front view to show the lettering on a bronze tablet that had recently been placed on the Den. She wanted a time exposure, and she said that she was going to need a.s.sistance. Her idea was to stand on a jutting rock just at the edge of the cliff and hold the camera in the desired position while the rest of the party adjusted the legs of the tripod beneath it.

Every one who has ever set up a tripod knows that its loosely hinged legs can be elongated or telescoped by a system of slides and screws. In order to arrange our tripod with all its three pods on the uneven ground, we found that we must shorten one leg to its extreme shortness, and lengthen the second leg to its maximum length. This left the third leg out in the air over the brink of the precipice. Our guest was to manage the short leg, our mother was to manage the important and strategic leg among the rocks, and I offered to build a combination of bridge and flying b.u.t.tress out from the slope of the cliff, for the third.

We started our project with that cordial fellow-feeling that rises from a common faith in a visionary enterprise, and I am sure that we could have kept that beautiful spirit to the end if it had not been for the mosquitoes. There are no wolves at the Wolf-Den now, but on a muggy day the mosquitoes are just as hungry. They rise all around in insubstantial drifts, never seeming to alight, yet stinging in cl.u.s.ters. A true Wolf-Den mosquito can land, bite, and make good his escape before you have finished brushing him out of your eyes. You cannot brush insects out of your eyes, slap the back of your neck, and take a picture at the same time. Barbara, both hands busy holding the camera, was desperately kicking the ankle of one foot with the toe of the other. I counted fifteen mosquitoes sitting unmoved around the rims of her low shoes.

"Don't take too much pains with that bridge," said she to me in considerate company tones.

"No," said I respectfully, "but I have to build it up high enough to meet the leg."

"Well, then, hurry," said she, still kindly.

"Yes," said I evenly, "I am."

When two sisters discourse like this before a guest, there creeps into their voices a note of preternatural sweetness, a restraint and simplicity of utterance that speak volumes to the trained ear.

I was hurrying all I could, but for my unnatural bridge I had not the materials I could have wished. I found a weathered wooden fence-rail, balanced one end of it on the cliff and the other end in the crotch of a big tree that leaned over the side hill; but this bridge had to be built up with a pile of sand, leaves, small stones, and stubble balanced carefully upon it. Meanwhile, my mother was busily drilling a hole in the rock to make a firm emplacement at a distance for leg number two.

Finally our three positions were approximately correct, and the more delicate process of adjustment began. Barbara, from under her dark cloth, gave m.u.f.fled directions. We obeyed, shifting, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, adjusting. Our guest was still cheery. Success hovered before us in plain sight. So did the mosquitoes. Barbara's directions began to sound tense. They sounded especially tense when she spoke to me. I was balancing precariously part-way down the shale cliff, digging in my heels and doing the best I could with the materials at hand.

Looking timidly up at my sister's black-draped, mosquito studded figure, I had been first conciliatory, then surly, then sullen. Barbara had now begun to focus.

"Lower!" said Barbara between her teeth.

Obediently we all three lowered.

"No, no, not you!" said Barbara to me. "Yours was too low already."

There are moments in this life when the presence of a guest is an impediment to free speech. Barbara, as anybody can see, had the advantage. She was the commanding officer. Any response from me would have been a retort from the ranks. Since one of her other two helpers was her mother and the other a guest, her words to them had to be sugared. In a sugar-shortage, it is the lower cla.s.ses who suffer. By this time one could easily distinguish her directions to me by their truculent tone.

"Make the bridge a trifle higher," said she curtly.

I obediently brought another grain of sand.

"Higher!"

I silently added five smooth stones.

"Oh, build it up!" she begged. "You ought to see the slant."

I pried a large boulder from the ledge and balanced it on the rail.

"Your rail's breaking!" cried my mother, so suddenly that I lost my footing.

I seized the leg of the tripod in one hand, the branch of a tree with the other, while the flying b.u.t.tress went rumbling down the defile, and I was left clinging to the bare rock, that refuge of the wild goat.

We have now some very attractive pictures of the Den, taken from a spot where no tripod was ever pitched before, and where I hope no tripod will be pitched again. But as we developed the plates that night, I told Barbara that I did not think that I was qualified to help her much about the camera any more.

"You were all right," said she kindly. "It was the mosquitoes."

And I was mollified by this as perhaps I could have been by no logic in the world.

The right to boss is conceded to the expert. It is also sometimes extended to members of the family who are for the time being in the centre of the stage. At such times you are permitted to dictate--when you are to have a guest, for instance, or when you are about to be married. For a day or two before the wedding, your wish is law. You really need to stay on hand until the last minute, however, to enforce the letter of the law to the end. Otherwise, circ.u.mstances may get ahead of you.

Geoffrey, for example, directly after announcing his engagement to our best friend Priscilla Sherwood, enjoyed a time of perfect power. He knew that he needed only to say, "Priscilla likes so and so," and so and so would follow. Barbara and I reminded him that we knew Priscilla better than he did, but we could not say that we were engaged to her. Just before the wedding, Geoffrey took us aside to explain seriously about his plans, and to give us our orders for the day.

"We don't want you to throw anything," said Geoffrey reasonably. "No rice or confetti or shoes. And you needn't even see us to the train.

Priscilla doesn't care about any demonstration, and I think it would be just as well to go off quietly. We'd just as soon the other people on the train didn't know we were a bride and groom."

Barbara and I, struck with the originality of this point of view, promised to throw nothing. Priscilla, meanwhile, reasoned equally well with her brothers. After the wedding, we all stood cordially on the curbstone and let them drive off to the train. Then, deserted, the two families confronted each other rather blankly.

"It doesn't seem as if they had actually gone, does it?" said Barbara uneasily.

"They wouldn't mind if we waved to them when the train goes out, would they?" began one of the Sherwoods tentatively.

Barbara was inspired. "Come on down to our house," said she, "and then they can see us from the train."

One of the advantages of a home near the railway is the fact that you can see your friends off on trips without leaving your dooryard. Each man for himself, we went streaming down the last hill, fearing at any minute to hear the train pull out. To our dismay, we saw that a long freight-train was standing on the siding in such a position as to cut off our view of the express.

"When you are on the train," I panted as I ran, "you can see our upstairs windows even when freight-cars are in the way."

"We'll wave out of the front windows," said Barbara, and we all rushed upstairs.

"They'll never think to look up here, will they?" said one of the brothers Sherwood anxiously as we peered out along the vista of track.

"The pear trees are in the way."

"We might just step outside the window," said Barbara resourcefully.

"The piazza roof is perfectly safe. Then they couldn't help seeing us."

Wrapping our best clothes about us, we crept out through the window one by one, and went cautiously along the tin roof to a vantage-point beyond the pear trees. When a company of grown people goes walking on a tin roof, there are moments of shock when the tin bubbles snap and crackle, making a sound nothing short of terrifying, like the reverberations of season-cracks in the ice on a pond. We ranged ourselves in a row near the eaves-pipe, just in time. The train went hooting by. They saw us. We waved the wedding flowers, and they waved back. We saw them laughing. We waved until the end of the train disappeared around the curve. And as we a.s.sisted each other politely one by one through the window again, we had a comfortable sensation of having wound up the affair with a finish and completeness that had been lacking after the first farewell.

Still feeling a little uplifted with excitement, we went up the street to report events to our grandmother.

"You mean to say that you went up on to the _roof_ to wave?" said our grandmother.

"Well," said Barbara thoughtfully, "it didn't seem quite like going up on the roof at the time. It all happened so gradually. We just stepped out."

"And they saw you?" inquired Grandmother.

"Oh, yes. n.o.body could help it. Everybody saw us." Barbara glowed reminiscently.

"And you waved the wedding flowers?"

"Yes," said Barbara happily. "Father Sherwood gave us each an armful."