Two Little Pilgrims' Progress

VI

Afterwards, when they looked back upon that day, they knew that the thing had decided itself then, though neither of them had said so.

“The truth was,” Robin used to say, “we had both been thinking the same thing, as we always do, but we had been thinking it in the back part of our minds. We were afraid to let it come to the front at first, because it seemed such a big thing. But it went on thinking by itself. That time, when you said ‘We shall never see it,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ we were both thinking about it in one way; and I know I was thinking about it when I said, ‘We are not going to stay here always. That is the first step up the Hill of Difficulty.’”

“And that day when you said you would not let it go by you,” Meg would answer, “that was the day we reached the Wicket Gate.”

It seemed very like it, for from that day their strange, unchildish purpose grew and ripened, and never for an hour was absent from the mind of either. If they had been like other children, living happy lives, full of young interests and pleasures, it might have been crossed out by other and newer things; if they had been of a slighter mental build, and less strong, they might have forgotten it; but they never did. When they had counted the Treasure, and had realized how small it was after all, they had sat and gazed at each other for a while with grave eyes, but they had only been grave, and not despairing.

“Twenty-five dollars,” said Robin. “Well, that’s not much after nearly six years; but we saved it nearly all by cents, you know, Meg.”

“And it takes a hundred cents to make a dollar,” said Meg; “and we were poor people’s children.”

“And we bought the chickens,” said Robin.

“And you have always given me a present at Christmas, Robin, even if it was only a little one. That’s six Christmases.”

“We have eight months to work in,” said Robin, calculating. “If you get four dollars a month, and I get four, that will be sixty-four dollars by next June. Twenty-five dollars and sixty-four dollars make eighty-nine. Eighty-nine dollars for us to live on and go to see all the things; because we must see them all, if we go. And I suppose we shall have to come back” – with a long breath.

“Oh, dear!” cried Meg, “how can we come back?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin. “We shall hate it, but we have nowhere else to go.”

“Perhaps we are going to seek our fortunes, and perhaps we shall find them,” said Meg; “or perhaps Aunt Matilda won’t let us come back. Rob,” with some awe, “do you think she will be angry?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Robin answered contemplatively, “and I don’t think she will. She would be too busy to care much even if we ran away and said nothing. But I shall leave a letter, and tell her we have saved our money and gone somewhere for a holiday, and we’re all right, and she need not bother.”

“She won’t bother even if she is angry,” Meg said, with mournful eyes. “She doesn’t care about us enough.”

“If she loved us,” Rob said, “and was too poor to take us herself, we couldn’t go at all. We couldn’t run away, because it would worry her so. You can’t do a thing, however much you want to do it, if it is going to hurt somebody who is good to you, and cares.”

“Well, then, we needn’t stay here because of Aunt Matilda,” said Meggy. “That’s one sure thing. It wouldn’t interfere with her ploughing if we were both to die at once.”

“No,” said Rob, deliberately, “that’s just what it would not.” And he threw himself back on the straw and clasped his hands under his head, gazing up into the dark roof above him with very reflective eyes.

But they had reached the Wicket Gate, and from the hour they passed it there was no looking back. That in their utter friendlessness and loneliness they should take their twelve-year-old fates in their own strong little hands was, perhaps, a pathetic thing; that once having done so they moved towards their object as steadily as if they had been of the maturest years was remarkable, but no one ever knew or even suspected the first until the last.

The days went by, full of work, which left them little time to lie and talk in the Straw Parlor. They could only see each other in the leisure hours, which were so few, and only came when the day was waning. Finding them faithful and ready, those about them fell into the natural, easy, human unworthiness of imposing by no means infrequently on their inexperienced willingness and youth. So they were hard enough worked, but each felt that every day that passed brought them nearer to the end in view; and there was always something to think of, some detail to be worked out mentally, or to be discussed, in the valuable moments when they were together.

“It’s a great deal better than it used to be,” Meg said, “at all events. It’s better to feel tired by working than to be tired of doing nothing but think and think dreary things.”

As the weather grew colder it was hard enough to keep warm in their hiding-place. They used to sit and talk, huddled close together, bundled in their heaviest clothing, and with the straw heaped close around them and over them.

There were so many things to be thought of and talked over! Robin collected facts more sedulously than ever – facts about entrance fees, facts about prices of things to eat, facts about places to sleep.

“Going to the Fair yourself, sonny?” Jones said to him one day. Jones was fond of his joke. “You’re right to be inquirin’ round. Them hotel-keepers is given to tot up bills several stories higher than their hotels is themselves.”

“But I suppose a person needn’t go to a hotel,” said Robin. “There must be plenty of poor people who can’t go to hotels, and they’ll have to sleep somewhere.”

“Ah, there’s plenty of poor people,” responded Jones, cheerfully, “plenty of ’em. Always is. But they won’t go to Chicago while the Fair’s on. They’ll sleep at home – that’s where they’ll sleep.”

“That’s the worst of it,” Rob said to Meg afterwards; “you see, we have to sleep somewhere. We could live on bread and milk or crackers and cheese – or oatmeal – but we have to sleep somewhere.”

“It will be warm weather,” Meg said, reflectively. “Perhaps we could sleep out of doors. Beggars do. We don’t mind.”

“I don’t think the police would let us,” Robin answered. “If they would – perhaps we might have to, some night; but we are going to that place, Meg – we are going.”

Yes, they believed they were going, and lived on the belief. This being decided, howsoever difficult to attain, it was like them both that they should dwell upon the dream, and revel in it in a way peculiarly their own. It was Meg whose imagination was the stronger, and it is true that it was always she who made pictures in words and told stories. But Robin was always as ready to enter into the spirit of her imaginings as she was to talk about them. There was a word he had once heard his father use which had caught his fancy, in fact, it had attracted them both, and they applied it to this favorite pleasure of theirs of romancing with everyday things. The word was “philander.”

“Now we have finished adding up and making plans,” he would say, putting his ten-cent account-book into his pocket, “let us philander about it.”

And then Meg would begin to talk about the City Beautiful – a City Beautiful which was a wonderful and curious mixture of the enchanted one the whole world was pouring its treasures into, one hundred miles away, and that City Beautiful of her own which she had founded upon the one towards which Christian had toiled through the Slough of Despond and up the Hill of Difficulty and past Doubting Castle. Somehow one could scarcely tell where one ended and the others began, they were so much alike, these three cities – Christian’s, Meg’s, and the fair, ephemeral one the ending of the nineteenth century had built upon the blue lake’s side.

“They must look alike,” said Meg. “I am sure they must. See what it says in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ‘Now just as the gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them, and behold, the City shone like the sun’ – and then it says, ‘The talk they had with the Shining Ones was about the glory of the place; who told them that the beauty and glory of it were inexpressible.’ I always think of it, Robin, when I read about those places like white palaces and temples and towers that are being built. I am so glad they are white. Think how the City will ‘shine like the sun’ when it stands under the blue sky and by the blue water, on a sunshiny day.”

They had never read the dear old worn “Pilgrim’s Progress” as they did in those days. They kept it in the straw near the Treasure, and always had it at hand to refer to. In it they seemed to find parallels for everything.

“Aunt Matilda’s world is the City of Destruction,” they would say. “And our loneliness and poorness are like Christian’s ‘burden.’ We have to carry it like a heavy weight, and it holds us back.”

“What was it that Goodwill said to Christian about it?” Robin asked.

Meg turned over the pages. She knew all the places by heart. It was easy enough to find and read how “At last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill,” and in the end he said, “As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance; for there it will fall from thy back itself.”

“But out of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’” Robin said, with his reflecting air, “burdens don’t fall off by themselves. If you are content with them they stick on and get bigger. Ours would, I know. You have to do something yourself to get them off. But – ” with a little pause for thought, “I like that part, Meg. And I like Goodwill, because he told it to him. It encouraged him, you know. You see it says next, ‘Then Christian began to gird up his loins and address himself to his journey.’”

“Robin,” said Meg, suddenly shutting the book and giving it a little thump on the back, “it’s not only Christian’s City that is like our City. We are like Christian. We are pilgrims, and our way to that place is our Pilgrims’ Progress.”

VII

And the cold days of hard work kept going by, and the City Beautiful grew, and, huddled close together in the straw, the children planned and dreamed, and read and re-read the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” following Christian step by step. And Aunt Matilda became busier every day, it seemed, and did not remember that they were alive except when she saw them. And nobody guessed and nobody knew.

Days so quickly grow to weeks, and weeks slip by so easily until they are months, and at last there came a time when Meg, going out in the morning, felt a softer air, and stopped a moment by a bare tree to breathe it in and feel its lovely touch upon her cheek. She turned her face upward with a half-involuntary movement, and found herself looking at such a limitless vault of tender blueness that her heart gave a quick throb, seemed to spring up to it, and carry her with it. For a moment it seemed as if she had left the earth far below, and was soaring in the soft depths of blueness themselves. And suddenly, even as she felt it, she heard on the topmost branch of the bare tree a brief little rapturous trill, and her heart gave a leap again, and she felt her cheeks grow warm.

“It is a bluebird,” she said; “it is a bluebird. And it is the spring, and that means that the time is quite near.”

She had a queer little smile on her face all day as she worked. She did not know it was there herself, but Mrs. Macartney saw it.

“What’s pleasing you so, Meggy, my girl?” she asked.

Meg wakened up with a sort of start.

“I don’t know – exactly,” she said.

“You don’t know,” said the woman, good-naturedly. “You look as if you were thinking over a secret, and it was a pleasant one.”

That evening it was not cold when they sat in the Straw Parlor, and Meg told Robin about the bluebird.

“It gave me a strange feeling to hear it,” she said. “It seemed as if it was speaking to me. It said, ‘You must get ready. It is quite near.’”

They had made up their minds that they would go in June, before the weather became so hot that they might suffer from it.

“Because we have to consider everything,” was Robin’s idea. “We shall be walking about all the time, and we have no cool clothes, and we shall have no money to buy cool things; and if we should be ill, it would be worse for us than for children who have some one with them.”

In the little account-book they had calculated all they should own on the day their pilgrimage began. They had apportioned it all out: so much for the price of the railroad tickets, so much for entrance fees, and – not so much, but so little – oh, so little! – for their food and lodging.

“I have listened when Jones and the others were talking,” said Robin; “and they say that everybody who has room to spare, and wants to make money, is going to let every corner they have. So you see there will be sure to be people who have quite poor places that they would be obliged to rent cheap to people who are poor, like themselves. We will go through the small side streets and look.”

The first bluebird came again, day after day, and others came with it, until the swift dart of blue wings through the air and the delicious ripple of joyous sound were no longer rare things. The days grew warmer, and the men threw off their coats, and began to draw their shirt-sleeves across their foreheads when they were at work.

One evening when Robin came up into the Straw Parlor he brought something with him. It was a battered old tin coffee-pot.

“What is that for?” asked Meg; for he seemed to carry it as if it was of some value.

“It’s old and rusty, but there are no holes in it,” Robin answered. “I saw it lying in a fence corner, where some one had thrown it – perhaps a tramp. And it put a new thought into my head. It will do to boil eggs in.”

“Eggs!” said Meg.

“There’s nothing much nicer than hard-boiled eggs,” said Robin, “and you can carry them about with you. It just came into my mind that we could take some of our eggs, and go somewhere where no one would be likely to see us, and build a fire of sticks, and boil some eggs, and carry them with us to eat.”

“Robin,” cried Meg, with admiring ecstasy, “I wish I had thought of that!”

“It doesn’t matter which of us thought of it,” said Rob, “it’s all the same.”

So it was decided that when the time came they should boil their supply of eggs very hard, and roll them up in pieces of paper and tuck them away carefully in the one small bag which was to carry all their necessary belongings. These belongings would be very few – just enough to keep them decent and clean, and a brush and comb between them. They used to lie in bed at night, with beating hearts, thinking it all over, sometimes awakening in a cold perspiration from a dreadful dream, in which Aunt Matilda or Jones or some of the hands had discovered their secret and confronted them with it in all its daring. They were so full of it night and day that Meg used to wonder that the people about them did not see it in their faces.

“They are not thinking of us,” said Robin. “They are thinking about crops. I dare say Aunt Matilda would like to see the Agricultural Building, but she couldn’t waste the time to go through the others.”

Oh, what a day it was, what a thrilling, exciting, almost unbearably joyful day, when Robin gathered sticks and dried bits of branches, and piled them in a corner of a field far enough from the house and outbuildings to be quite safe! He did it one noon hour, and as he passed Meg on his way back to his work, he whispered:

“I have got the sticks for the fire all ready.”

And after supper they crept out to the place, with matches, and the battered old coffee-pot, and the eggs.

As they made their preparations, they found themselves talking in whispers, though there was not the least chance of any one’s hearing them. Meg looked rather like a little witch as she stood over the bubbling old pot, with her strange, little dark face and shining eyes and black elf locks.

“It’s like making a kind of sacrifice on an altar,” she said.

“You always think queer things about everything, don’t you?” said Robin. “But they’re all right; I don’t think of them myself, but I like them.”

When the eggs were boiled hard enough they carried them to the barn and hid them in the Straw Parlor, near the Treasure. Then they sat and talked, in whispers still, almost trembling with joy.

“Somehow, do you know,” Meg said, “it feels as if we were going to do something more than just go to the Fair. When people in stories go to seek their fortunes, I’m sure they feel like this. Does it give you a kind of creeping in your stomach whenever you think of it, Rob?”

“Yes, it does,” Robin whispered back; “and when it comes into my mind suddenly something gives a queer jump inside me.”

“That’s your heart,” said Meg. “Robin, if anything should stop us, I believe I should drop dead.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” was Rob’s answer, “but it’s better not to let ourselves think about it. And I don’t believe anything as bad as that could happen. We’ve worked so hard, and we have nobody but ourselves, and it can’t do any one any harm – and we don’t want to do any one any harm. No, there must be something that wouldn’t let it be.”

“I believe that too,” said Meg, and this time it was she who clutched at Robin’s hand; but he seemed glad she did, and held as close as she.

And then, after the bluebirds had sung a few times more, there came a night when Meg crept out of her cot after she was sure that the woman in the other bed was sleeping heavily enough. Every one went to bed early, and every one slept through the night in heavy, tired sleep. Too much work was done on the place to allow people to waste time in sleeplessness. Meg knew no one would waken as she crept down stairs to the lower part of the house and softly opened the back door.

Robin was standing outside, with the little leather satchel in his hand. It was a soft, warm night, and the dark blue sky was full of the glitter of stars.

Both he and Meg stood still a moment, and looked up. “I’m glad it’s like this,” Meg said; “it doesn’t seem so lonely. Is your heart thumping, Robin?”

“Yes, rather,” whispered Robin. “I left the letter in a place where Aunt Matilda will be likely to find it some time to-morrow.”