Story-Tell Lib | Page 2

Lib, and spoke through her pinched
pale lips. I leave you your theories, I keep my own.
But one thing which I find I have omitted thus far may seem to you to
throw a little light on this matter. It does not help me much. Lib was a
wonderful listener, as well as a narrator. Miss Jane sometimes took an
occasional boarder. Teachers, clergymen, learned professors, had from
time to time tarried under her roof. And while these talked to one
another, or to some visitor from neighboring hotels, little Lib would sit
motionless and silent by the hour. One would scarcely call it listening;
to listen seems too active a verb in this case. The girl's face wore no
eager look of interest, the faded, short-sighted eyes did not light up
with intelligence, nor the features quiver with varied emotions. If she
received ideas from what fell upon her ears, it must have been by a sort
of unconscious absorption. She took it in as the earth does the rain or
the flower the sunshine. And so it was with any reading aloud from
book or paper. She would sit, utterly quiet, while the reader's voice
went on, and nothing could draw her away till it was ended. Question
her later as to what was read or spoken of, and you gained no
satisfaction. If she had any idea of what she had heard, she had not the
power of putting it into words. "I like it. I like it lots," she would say;

that was all.
Throughout the whole summer in which I knew the child, the summer
which came so quickly, so sadly, to an end, little Lib sat, on bright, fair
days, in a low wooden chair under the maples in front of the farmhouse.
And it had grown to be the custom of her many friends, both young and
old, to gather there, and listen to her stories, if she had any to tell. I
often joined the group of listeners. On many, many days, as the season
advanced, Lib had no words for us. She had always been a fragile, puny
little creature, and this year she seemed to grow weaker, thinner, more
waxen white, each day. She had a wonderful voice, shrill, far-reaching,
but strangely sweet and clear, with a certain vibrating, reedy, bird-like
quality, which even yet thrills me as I recall it.
I am going to tell you a few of the little stories, pictures, fables,
parables, allegories,--I scarcely know what to call them,--which I heard
Story-tell Lib relate. The words are her own, but I cannot give you the
sweet tones, the quaint manner, the weird, strange personality, of the
little narrator. Let me say here that often the little parables seemed
meant to cheer and lift up Lib's own trembling soul, shut up in the frail,
crippled body. Meant, I say; perhaps that is not the right word. For did
she mean anything by these tales, at least consciously? Be that as it
may, certain of these little stories seemed to touch her own case
strangely.

The Shet-up Posy
II
The first story I ever heard the child tell was one of those which
seemed to hold comfort and cheer for herself or for humble little souls
like her. It was a story of the closed gentian, the title of which she
announced, as she always did, loudly, and with an amusing little air of
self-satisfaction.
The Shet-up Posy

Once there was a posy. 'T wa'n't a common kind o' posy, that blows out
wide open, so's everybody can see its outsides and its insides too. But 't
was one of them posies like what grows down the road, back o' your
pa's sugar-house, Danny, and don't come till way towards fall. They're
sort o' blue, but real dark, and they look 's if they was buds 'stead o'
posies,--only buds opens out, and these doesn't They're all shet up close
and tight, and they never, never, never opens. Never mind how much
sun they get, never mind how much rain or how much drouth, whether
it's cold or hot, them posies stay shet up tight, kind o' buddy, and not
finished and humly. But if you pick 'em open, real careful, with a
pin,--I've done it,--you find they're dreadful pretty inside.
You couldn't see a posy that was finished off better, soft and nice, with
pretty little stripes painted on 'em, and all the little things like threads in
the middle, sech as the open posies has, standing up, with little knots on
their tops, oh, so pretty,--you never did! Makes you think real hard, that
does; leastways, makes me. What's they that way for? If they ain't never
goin' to open out, what's the use o' havin'