The Purple Heights | Page 7

the angels of the Little
Peoples turned his boyish head aside and made him see birds' wings,
and bees, and the shapes of leaves, and the colors of trees and clouds,
and the faces of flowers. It is further written that one may not
intimately know the Little Peoples without loving them. When one
begins to love, one begins to grow. Peter, then, was growing.
Lying awake in the dark now wasn't a thing to be dreaded; the dark was
no longer filled with shapes of fear, for Peter was beginning to discover
in himself a power of whose unique and immense value he was not as
yet aware. It was the great power of being able clearly to visualize
things, of bringing before his mind's eye whatever he had seen, with

every distinction of shape and size and color sharply present, and
accurately to portray it in the absence of the original. If one should ask
him, "What's the shape of the milkweed butterfly's wing, and the color
of the spice-bush swallowtail, Peter Champneys? What does the
humming-bird's nest look like? What's the color of the rainbow-snake
and of the cotton-mouth moccasin? What's the difference between the
ironweed and the aster?"--Ask Peter things like that, and lend him a bit
of paper and a pencil, and he literally had the answers at his finger-tips.
But they never asked him what would, to him, have been natural
questions; they wished him, instead, to tell them where the Onion River
flows, and the latitude of the middle of Kamchatka, and to spell
phthisis, and on what date the Battle of Somethingorother was fought,
and if a man buys old iron at such a price, and makes it over into stoves
weighing so much, and sells his stoves at such another price, what does
it profit him, and other such-like illuminating and uplifting problems,
warranted to make any school-child wiser than Solomon. It is a
beautiful system; only, God, who is no respecter of systems, every now
and then delights to flout it by making him a dunce like Peter
Champneys, to be the torment of school-teachers--and the delight of the
angels of the Little Peoples.
Those long, silent, solitary hours in the open gave Peter the power of
concentration, and a serenity that sat oddly on his slight shoulders.
Thoughts came to him, out there, that he couldn't put into words nor yet
set down upon paper.
On warm nights, when his mother's sewing-machine was for a time still
and the tired little woman slept, Peter slipped out of the shed room into
a big, white, enchanted world, and saw things that are to be seen only
by an imaginative and beauty-loving little boy in the light of the
midsummer moon. Big hawk-moths, swift and sudden, darted by him
with owl-like wings. Mocking-birds broke into silvery, irrepressible
singing, and water-birds croaked and rustled in the cove, where the
tide-water lipped the land. The slim, black pine-trees nodded and bent
to one another, with the moon looking over their shoulders. Something
wild and sweet and secret invaded the little boy's spirit, and stayed on

in his heart. Maybe it was the heart-shaking call of the whippoorwill, or
the song of the mocking-bird, truest voices of the summer night; or
perhaps it was the spirit of the great green luna-moth, loveliest of all
the daughters of the dark. Or perhaps the Red Admiral was indeed a
fairy, as Peter said he was.
Peter was superstitious about the Red Admiral. He was a good-luck
sign, a sort of flying four-leaf clover. Peter noticed that whenever the
Red Admiral crossed his path now, something pleasant always
impended; it meant that he wouldn't be very unhappy in school; or
maybe he'd find a thrush's nest, or the pink orchid. Or the meeting
might simply imply something nice and homey, such as a little treat his
mother contrived to make for him when sewing had been somewhat
better-paying than usual, and she could sit by the table and enjoy his
enjoyment as only one's mother can. Decidedly, the Red Admiral was
good luck!
So, all along, quietly, persistently, not exactly secretly but still all by
himself, Peter had been learning to use his fingers, as he had been
learning to use his eyes and ears. He was morbidly shy about it. It never
occurred to him that anybody might admire anything he could do, as
nobody had ever admired anything he had done.
On his mother's last birthday--though Peter didn't know then that it was
to be her last--he made for her his first sketch in water-colors. By
herculean efforts he had managed to get his materials; he had picked
berries, weeded gardens until his head whirled and his back ached,
chopped fire-wood, run errands, caught crabs. Presently he