Tiverton Tales | Page 2

if you will, since
famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose to read
fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field of the
cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure met and
sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out in the days
when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a woman. This
was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the wife of a
farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the ox which
ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his heavy

slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a
gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown
shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die. She
had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she
walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied delight,
dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a hand-organ and
monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who followed them; for
the children were little, and all the saner house-mothers contented
themselves with leaning over the gates till the wandering train had
passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the dregs, and then
tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest joy,--one that
leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope, where there
is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but she had
something far better, an alert and undiscouraged mind. On one dizzy
afternoon, at a Fourth of July picnic, when wickets had been set up near
the wood, she had played with the minister, and beaten him. The game
opened before her an endless vista of delight. She saw herself
perpetually knocking red-striped balls through an eternity of wickets;
and she knew that here was the one pastime of which no soul could tire.
Afterwards, driving home with her husband and two children, still in a
daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:--
"Wonder how much they cost?"
"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:--
"Oh, nothin'!"
That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the sleep
of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to work,
and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a monotonous,
high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang at moments
when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom. Even Eben
had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty crooning from
the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or using more
sugar than was conformable.
"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Della never

answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary
concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.
Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes
from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.
Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the house
and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing old
associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed the
ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the
one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician,
and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might
decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have
flinched; to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She
laid her balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into
shape; for there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure
and large content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,--good alike
to draw a weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres.
And so, with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet (the
heavy sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in triumph,
played her first game against herself.
"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when
Eben came up from the lot in his dingle cart.
"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He
looked at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.
"What under the sun 'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones
wouldn't turn their hand over for 't. They ain't big enough."
"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."
Eben