we’re lonely,” said Robin, “that’s a fact.” And he stared up at the dark rafters above him, and at some birds who were clinging to them and twittering about a nest.
“I said I wished there was a City Beautiful,” Meg said, “but it seems to make it worse that there is going to be something like it so near, and that we should never get any nearer to it than a hundred miles.”
Rob sat up, and locked his hands together round his knees.
“How do you know?” he said.
“How do I know?” cried Meg, desperately, and she lifted her head, turning her wet face sideways to look at him. He unlocked his hands to give his forehead a hard rub, as if he were trying either to rub some thought out of or into it.
“Just because we are lonely there is use in doing things,” he said. “There’s nobody to do them for us. At any rate, we’ve got as far on the way to the City as the bottom of the Hill of Difficulty.”
And he gave his forehead another rub and looked straight before him, and Meg drew a little closer to him on the straw, and the family of birds filled the silence with domestic twitters.
III
During the weeks that followed they spent more time than ever in their hiding-place. They had an absorbing topic of conversation, a new and wonderful thing, better than their old books, even better than the stories Meg made when she lay on the straw, her elbows supporting her, her cheeks on her hands, and her black-lashed gray eyes staring into space. Hers were always good stories, full of palaces and knights and robber chiefs and fairies. But this new thing had the thrill of being a fairy story which was real – so real that one could read about it in the newspapers, and everybody was talking about it, even Aunt Matilda, her neighbors, and the work-hands on the farm. To the two lonely children, in their high nest in the straw-stack, it seemed a curious thing to hear these people in the world below talk about it in their ordinary, everyday way, without excitement or awe, as if it was a new kind of big ploughing or winnowing machine. To them it was a thing so beautiful that they could scarcely find the words to express their thoughts and dreams about it, and yet they were never alone together without trying to do so.
On wet, cheerless days, in which they huddled close together in their nest to keep from being chilled, it was their comfort to try to imagine and paint pictures of the various wonders until, in their interest, they forgot the dampness of the air, and felt the unending patter of the rain-drops on the barn roof merely a pleasant sort of accompaniment to the stories of their fancies.
Since the day when they had listened to Jones and Jerry joking, down below them in the barn, Rob had formed the habit of collecting every scrap of newspaper relating to the wonder. He cut paragraphs out of Aunt Matilda’s cast-aside newspapers; he begged them from the farm-hands and from the country store-keepers. Anything in the form of an illustration he held as a treasure beyond price, and hoarded it to bring to Meg with exultant joy.
How they pored over these things, reading the paragraphs again and again, until they knew them almost by heart. How they studied the pictures, trying to gather the proportions and color of every column and dome and arch! What enthusiast, living in Chicago itself, knew the marvel as they did, and so dwelt on and revelled in its beauties! No one knew of their pleasure; like the Straw Parlor, it was their secret. The strangeness of their lives lay in the fact that absolutely no one knew anything about them at all, or asked anything, thinking it quite sufficient that their friendlessness was supplied with enough animal heat and nourishment to keep their bodies alive.
Of that other part of them – their restless, growing young brains and naturally craving hearts, which in their own poor enough but still human little home had at least been recognized and cared for – Aunt Matilda knew nothing, and, indeed, had never given a thought to it. She had not undertaken the care of intelligences and affections; her own were not of an order to require supervision. She was too much occupied with her thousand-acre farm, and the amazing things she was doing with it. That the children could read and write and understood some arithmetic she knew. She had learned no more herself, and had found it enough to build her fortune upon. She had never known what it was to feel lonely and neglected, because she was a person quite free from affections and quite enough for herself. She never suspected that others could suffer from a weakness of which she knew nothing, because it had never touched her.
If any one had told her that these two children, who ate her plentiful, rough meals at her table, among field-hands and servants, were neglected and lonely, and that their dim knowledge of it burned in their childish minds, she would have thought the announcement a piece of idle, sentimental folly; but that no solid detail of her farming was a fact more real than this one was the grievous truth.
“When we were at home,” was Meg’s summing-up of the situation, “at least we belonged to somebody. We were poor, and wore our clothes a long time, and had shabby shoes, and couldn’t go on excursions, but we had our little bench by the fire, and father and mother used to talk to us and let us read their books and papers, and try to teach us things. I don’t know what we were going to be when we grew up, but we were going to do some sort of work, and know as much as father and mother did. I don’t know whether that was a great deal or not, but it was something.”
“It was enough to teach school,” said Robin. “If we were not so far out in the country now, I believe Aunt Matilda would let us go to school if we asked her. It wouldn’t cost her anything if we went to the public school.”
“She wouldn’t if we didn’t ask her,” said Meg. “She would never think of it herself. Do you know what I was thinking yesterday? I was looking at the pigs in their sty. Some of them were eating, and one was full, and was lying down going to sleep. And I said to myself, ‘Robin and I are just like you. We live just like you. We eat our food and go to bed, and get up again and eat some more food. We don’t learn anything more than you do, and we are not worth as much to anybody. We are not even worth killing at Christmas.’”
If they had never known any other life, or if nature had not given them the big, questioning eyes and square little jaws and strong, nervous little fists, they might have been content to sink into careless idleness and apathy. No one was actively unkind to them; they had their Straw Parlor, and were free to amuse themselves as they chose. But they had been made of the material of which the world’s workers are built, and their young hearts were full of a restlessness and longing whose full significance they themselves did not comprehend.
And this wonder working in the world beyond them – this huge, beautiful marvel, planned by the human brain and carried out by mere human hands; this great thing with which all the world seemed to them to be throbbing, and which seemed to set no limit to itself and prove that there was no limit to the power of human wills and minds – this filled them with a passion of restlessness and yearning greater than they had ever known before.
“It is an enchanted thing, you know, Robin – it’s an enchanted thing,” Meg said one day, looking up from her study of some newspaper clippings and a magazine with some pictures in it.
“It seems like it,” said Robin.
“I’m sure it’s enchanted,” Meg went on. “It seems so tremendous that people should think they could do such huge things. As if they felt as if they could do anything or bring anything from anywhere in the world. It almost frightens me sometimes, because it reminds me of the Tower of Babel. Don’t you remember how the people got so proud that they thought they could do anything, and they began to build the tower that was to reach to heaven; and then they all woke up one morning and found they were all speaking different languages and could not understand each other. Suppose everybody was suddenly struck like that some morning now – I mean the Fair people!” widening her eyes with a little shiver.
