When I Was a Little Girl

In Those Days

In those days time always bothered us. It went fast or it went slow, with no one interfering. It was impossible to hurry it or to hold it back.

“Only ten weeks more,” we invariably said glibly, when the Spring term began.

“Just think! We’ve--got--t-e-n--weeks!” we told one another at the beginning of vacation, what time we came home with our books, chanting it:--

“_No more Latin, No more French, No more sitting on a hard wood bench._”

--both chorally and antiphonally chanting it.

Yet, in spite of every encouragement, the Spring term lasted immeasurably and the Summer vacation melted. It was the kindred difference of experience respectively presented by a bowl of hot ginger tea and an equal bulk of ice-cream.

In other ways time was extraordinary. We used to play with it: “Now is now. But now that other Now is gone and a Then is now. How did it do it? How do all the Nows begin?”

“When is the party?” we had sometimes inquired.

“To-morrow,” we would be told.

Next morning, “Now it’s to-morrow!” we would joyfully announce, only to be informed that it was, on the contrary, to-day. But there was no cause for alarm, for now the party, it seemed, had changed too, and that would be to-day. It was frightfully confusing.

“_When_ is to-morrow?” we demanded.

“When to-day stops being,” they said.

But never, never once did to-day stop that much. Gradually we understood and humoured the pathetic delusion of the Grown-ups: To-day lasted always and yet the poor things kept right on forever waiting for to-morrow.

As for me, I had been born without the time sense. If I was told that we would go to drive in ten minutes, I always assumed that I could finish dressing my doll, tidy my play-house, put her in it with all her family disposed about her down to the penny black-rubber baby dressed in yarn, wash my face and hands, smooth my hair (including the protests that these were superfluous), make sure that the kitten was shut in the woodshed ... long before most of which the family was following me, haling me away, chiding me for keeping older folk waiting, and the ten minutes were gone far by. Who would have thought it? Ten minutes seem so much.

And if I went somewhere with permission to stay an hour! Then the hour stretched invitingly before me, a vista lined with crowding possibilities.

“How long can you stay?” we always promptly asked our guests, for there was a feeling that the quality of the game to be entered on depended on the time at our disposal. But when they asked me, it never was conceivable that anything so real as a game should be dependent on anything so hazy as time.

“Oh, a whole hour!” I would say royally. “Let’s play City.”

With this attitude Delia Dart, who lived across the street, had no patience. Delia was definite. Her evenly braided hair, her square finger tips, her blunt questions, her sense of what was due to Delia--all these were definite.

“City!” she would burst out. “You can’t play City unless you’ve got all afternoon.”

And Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman, who were pretty definite too, would back Delia up; but since they usually had permission to stay all afternoon, they would acquiesce when I urged: “Oh, well, let’s start in anyhow.” Then about the time the outside wall had been laid up in the sand-pile and we had selected our building sites, the town clock would strike my hour, which would be brought home to me only by Delia saying:--

“Don’t you go. Will she care if you’re late?”

On such occasions we never used the substantive, but merely “she.” It is worth being a child to have a sense of values so simple and unassailable as that.

“I’m going to do just this much. I can run all the way home,” I would answer; and I would begin on my house walls. But when these were done, and the rooms defined by moist sand partitions, there was all the fascination of its garden, with walks to be outlined with a shingle and sprays of Old Man and cedar to be stuck in for trees, and single stems of Fever-few and Sweet Alyssum or Flowering-currant and Bleeding-heart for the beds, and Catnip for the borders, and a chick from Old-Hen-and-Chickens for a tropical plant. We would be just begun on the stones for the fountain when some alien consciousness, some plucking at me, would recall the moment. And it would be half an hour past my hour.

“You were to come home at four o’clock,” Mother would say, when I reached there panting.

“_Why_ did I have to come home at four o’clock?” I would finally give way to the sense of great and arbitrary wrong.

She always told me. I think that never in my life was I bidden to do a thing, or not to do it, “because I tell you to.” But never once did a time-reason seem sufficient. What were company, a nap-because-I-was-to-sit-up-late, or having-to-go-somewhere-else beside the reality of that house which I would never occupy, that garden where I would never walk?

“You can make it the next time you go to Delia’s,” Mother would say. But I knew that this was impossible. I might build another house, adventure in another garden; this one was forever lost to me.

“... only,” Mother would add, “you can not go to Delia’s for ...” she would name a period that yawned to me as black as the abyss. “... because you did not come home to-day when you were told.” And still time seemed to me indefinite. For now it appeared that I should never go to Delia’s again.

I thought about it more and more. What was this time that was laid on us so heavy? Why did I have to get up because it was seven o’clock, go to school because it was nine, come home from Delia’s because the clock struck something else ... above all, why did I have to go to bed because it was eight o’clock?

I laid it before my little council.

“Why do we have to go to bed because it’s bed-time?” I asked them. “Which started first--bed-time or us?”

None of us could tell. Margaret Amelia Rodman, however, was of opinion that bed-time started first.

“Nearly everything was here before we were,” she said gloomily. “We haven’t got anything in the house but the piano and the rabbits that wasn’t first before us. Mother told father this morning that we’d had our stair-carpet fifteen years.”

We faced that. Fifteen years. Nearly twice as long as we had lived. If a stair-carpet had lasted like that, what was the use of thinking that we could find anything to control on the ground of our having been here first?