Time of the Singing of Birds

by Grace Livingston Hill

  He looked across to the soft green hills. Off there, just beyond the woods, gleamed the white stones of the little cemetery where his mother’s body had been laid, and a tender look came into his eyes. He hadn’t been up there yet. Someday he must go, pretty soon. But he had been taught better than to do honor to a mere human body from which the spirit was gone. He did not think of that spot up there on the hill as being sacred for his mother’s sake. It was only her tired-out body that lay there. Her spirit was with her Lord. She had taught him that. Yet he looked toward the white stones that gleamed in the morning sunshine and realized that he would want to mark the place where they had laid her with a stone bearing record of her birth and Home-Going, and some verse from God’s Word that could be a testimony for a chance reader who might be unsaved. Yes, even though he knew it was only her tired body that lay there waiting, like old garments that were no longer needed, it brought tender thoughts.

  And then he came in sight of the Roselle farm. A pleasant, wide, rambling white house, gleaming in the sun, nestling in its tall setting of old elms. It had such a tidy look, as if it had just newly been finished, although he knew it had been there many years. How well they had kept it up, even in these hard wartimes. And Sunny’s father must have been the only one to do the work, since Sunny’s brother went into the service.

  He was almost to the hedge-bordered lane that led to the house when he saw a lithe young figure flash out of the kitchen door carrying a clothes basket. She put it down on the stone pavement by the pump and, stooping, took out a roll of cloth and shook it out until it filmed into a curtain, thin and white. With firm, brisk fingers, she fastened it to the clothesline just a step away. Then she stooped and took out another roll and treated it the same way, until a row of curtains was blowing in the morning breeze.

  Barney was walking slowly, watching her. Apparently she had not noticed him yet, and most of the time her back was toward the road. It seemed that she was too busy to be watching what went on in the world around her.

  He had not reached the turning of the lane before she had the basket empty and all those curtains blowing on the line. Then she swung around and hurried up the steps to the kitchen door, and out of sight without even looking down toward the road. Had she seen him or not? He didn’t think she had. And yet, she wasn’t a girl who was always trying to attract attention to herself. Besides, she wouldn’t likely be expecting him to call so very early.

  With quickened step, he turned up the lane and hurried to the house, tapping at the door where he had seen her vanish, and calling, “Sunny! Sunny! Where are you?” Then he heard her mother’s voice calling from an inner room.

  “Margaret, someone is calling you at the kitchen door. Won’t you answer the knock? I’m not fit to be seen. I’ve just spilled some milk down the front of my dress.”

  And then he heard Sunny’s quick step hurrying to the door.

  “Oh!” she said, a glad light coming into her face. “Barney! It’s you! And out so early! I thought you were supposed to be an invalid who had to sleep late.”

  Barney grinned. “Not when I have something more important to do,” he said. “Did I come too early? Will I be in the way? If I am, just tell me the truth and I’ll go outside and sit in the sun till you have time for me, but I simply couldn’t stand it until I came to apologize for letting you go home that way last night.”

  The twinkle came into the girl’s eyes, just as when she was a tiny child.

  “Oh, but you couldn’t help it,” she laughed, and her laughter was like a string of silver bells. “I know how to vanish. And then it was getting dark. Besides, it wouldn’t have been good.”

  “Yes? Well, as soon as you get done what you’re doing you’ve got to sit down for at least five minutes and tell me just why it wouldn’t have been good. I thought it would, and I still think so, but out of deference to you I have tried to be reconciled till I could get here and have it explained.”

  The girl laughed brightly again. “Well, you see, I’m not in their crowd. Those girls have no use for me, and I’m afraid maybe I haven’t felt very friendly toward them. They are not at all in my class. We just don’t fit, that’s all. But—they are your friends. I don’t want to say anything against them. We just don’t fit.”

  Barney was studying her sweet face as she talked. He saw she was trying to be nice about it and not to say too much. Trying to be polite, and not to seem self-righteous. He watched her gravely until she stopped and gave him a grave questioning look.

  Barney grinned. “Having spent an entire evening with that crowd I can well understand that you don’t fit,” he said fervently. “And I’m glad you don’t! I would be disappointed in you if you did. Oh, there are two or three of those girls who aren’t so bad, might be all right if they were in the right company, but just now they aren’t. Yet, all the same, I’m sorry I had to let you go off that way unattended. It was not in my plan to have my own party end up that way.”

  Sunny’s eyes lighted. “Oh, that was all right,” she said demurely. “But thank you. It is nice you cared.”

  “Cared?” he said. “Why, of course I cared, and I still care. Aren’t you my little pal, Sunny? Did you suppose I could forget that? Only they call you Margaret, now, don’t they? I heard you called after I knocked. Was that your mother’s voice? Margaret! It fits you. I like it. I’ve always liked that name, only I’m afraid I shall always think of you as Sunny! Little Sunny!”

  He gave her a clear, admiring, steady look that seemed to be searching her through and through, and held her own glance for the moment, while the rosy color swept up into her lovely face, and then her eyes went down.

  How lovely she was, he thought as he watched her for another long minute in a sweet silence, and then he spoke: “And now, what were you going to do, and may I help? Were you going to hang those curtains? They have to be ironed first, don’t they? I can iron. My mother taught me, and then we often had to do some of that in training. And how about the windows? Don’t they have to be washed? I could do that! I used to be good at it.”

  “Oh, but those things can all wait,” said Sunny with a golden look. “You have come to call on me, and I’m going to have a nice time. I’ll do the work when this is over. I’m just going to enjoy your company now.”

  “Oh, yes?” he asked comically. “Not if the court knows herself. We’ll do the work first and then we’ll have earned a good time. We might even take a long walk to the woods and have a picnic. But the work must be done first. Where do I find the rags and brushes to clean the windows?”

  “But no!” said Sunny, with a troubled look. “You with a lovely uniform and all those wonderful decorations, washing windows! You’d get all messed up.”

  “No,” said Barney decidedly, “I’ll not get messed up. The army taught me to do work and not get messed up. And besides, young lady, you had your way last night, cutting my party short and running away in the dark, and now it’s my turn! I say we’re going to work first, and then play, and I mean it! May I take off my coat?”

  “But—” said Sunny, with still that troubled look.

  “What are you two arguing about?” said Mrs. Roselle, suddenly appearing at the door of the dining room. “Isn’t this our old friend Barney, Margaret? Why do you sound so dictatorial?”

  “But, Mother, he is insisting on helping me. He wants to wash windows! Imagine it. With that handsome uniform on.”

  “Mrs. Roselle, I am only offering to help Sunny, Margaret. We’ll get the work out of the way, and then we’ll go and play, have a picnic maybe. Isn’t that fair?”

  “Splendid!” said the mother, with a smile. “I’ll get him an apron, and he can roll up his sleeves. You’ll have fun working. There isn’t so much to be done. I’ve started the ironing, and you’ll have the curtains up in a jiffy. Barney will be a lot happier that way, I know, for I know how his mother brought him up.” And she trotted away and brought him a big apron that enveloped him. He tied it on and went around admiring himself i
n the crisp blue gingham folds, so that the whole argument ended in a good laugh, and then they went to work with a will.

  “But I thought you were an invalid, sent home to get well, and here you are working as hard as if you were fighting a battle,” said Sunny, still troubled.

  “I’m afraid, madam, your education has been neglected. I’m afraid you haven’t a very good idea of what a battle would be like as compared with a little job of washing a few windows with the garden hose and all these brushes to help.”

  So, with laughter and song they went to work. For the iron was close at hand where the windows had to be washed and they had a lot of time to talk. And then they got to the subject of whistling, and Barney asked her all about that, and demanded to hear her whistle, and Sunny began to whistle.

  Barney was amazed. He had always felt no girl could really whistle, but Sunny could whistle as well as he had ever been able to do it.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said. “I never found a boy that could do it that well, and I’ve tried to teach several of them. But you do it like a bird.”

  She looked at him with a quick flush, surprise and pleasure in her gaze.

  “I never expected you to say that,” she said quietly. “I practiced and practiced, and I never could get Roxy to say I did it as well as you did, except once. You can’t think what that used to mean to me when I was a child. I thought your whistle was the sweetest music I had ever heard anywhere. It seemed to me better than the birds’ singing.”

  “You certainly were a cute little trick,” said Barney with quick appreciation. “And how have they kept you so unspoiled? All the other girls are so made up that you can scarcely recognize your old acquaintances.”

  Sunny smiled. “I guess I’m just old-fashioned,” she said. “I don’t admire faces that are not natural. I like God’s plan best.”

  “So do I,” said Barney with vehemence. “I can’t see why anyone can like it. Well, I certainly like you as you are. You seem so much as you were, and not as if you were trying to be ‘smaht’ as Roxy says.” And then they laughed, and presently Mrs. Roselle came back into the room.

  “Come, children, you’ve worked enough for one lovely spring day. Enough for a soldier home on sick leave, and a busy little schoolmarm. Besides, I’ve got your lunch all ready and if you’re going on a picnic it’s high time you got started. It’s April, you know, and you’re liable to run into a shower or two by afternoon. Come now, put your work away and hurry off.”

  “Oh, but we’re almost done,” said Barney in his old familiar way. “I’ve just one more window curtain to hang, and then the room is done.”

  “Why, so it is! And how beautiful it seems! My, that’s wonderful to get these windows all cleaned so early in the season. Soldiers are great workers, aren’t they, Margaret?”

  It seemed a happy thing to Barney to be there with those two; his mother’s old friend and her little girl, in the simple home life doing honest work, and being happy together. It comforted a lonely spot in his heart that had been reaching out for something like a home ever since he arrived. Roxy was good and dear, but she wasn’t his mother, and there was an emptiness in his own home with Mother gone. He watched wistfully the companionship between this mother and daughter. It warmed his heart to know there was still such a mother and such a daughter.

  So with a generous basket of lunch, they started off to the woods. April it was, but a warm sunny day, and the birds were singing all around, through the meadow, and trilling through the air, as if they were just crazy-happy at the return of spring. As if they were glad this soldier was home, too, and this girl and he were going off to their out-of-doors to be happy together.

  They climbed the hill over the meadow, enjoying every step of the way, and when they came to a fence they climbed it and went on, Barney catching Margaret’s hand as they swung along together in the sunshine, like two children. Barney hadn’t been so happy since before his mother died. Somehow it had seemed to him those first few hours that he never would be happy again. That perhaps when people grew up they never were happy. Though when he thought back he realized that his own mother and father had been very happy together, and even after his father died, his mother and he had always had glad times together, until the war came along and separated them.

  They sat down on a mossy slope at last when they reached the top of the hill. It was warm and dry with the sunshine all the morning, and they were glad to rest.

  “I wonder what’s in that basket,” said Barney, eyeing it wistfully. “I’m hungry, aren’t you?”

  Margaret smiled warmly. “Wild strawberry tarts for one thing, I think. Mother made some yesterday. And there’ll likely be chicken sandwiches. Are you as tired of chicken as everybody is these rationing days?”

  “Me? Tired of chicken? Not on your life! We didn’t always have all the chicken we could use over there in that hospital where I was recovering. And I know your mother’s chicken sandwiches will be something to boast about. And those dear little sharp pickles I just love. I think they must be special to this part of the world, for somehow I don’t seem to remember having them anywhere else.”

  Just little nothings they talked about while they were eating, glad little nothings, that signified that they were happy to be together and having a grand time. And when they had finished everything in the basket, and drank the milk from the Thermos bottle, they shook out the napkins and closed the basket and settled down for a good talk.

  “Now,” said Barney, “we’ve got to get acquainted. You see, you are not at all the same little child you were when I went away, and we have a lot to catch up on. You begin first and tell me all about you.”

  So Sunny told pleasant little sketches from her sweet young life, and Barney watched her, impressing her lovely face like a picture on his heart. This was a girl worth knowing. This was a girl in a thousand.

  She told about the finish of her school days, about her brief year at college, before she was called home to teach. About her father and mother and little things of the farm life. She told of her school, and then of her Sunday school class, and the church choir and how she was having to play the organ because the man who used to play it had to go to war.

  “May I go to church with you tomorrow?” he asked suddenly, interrupting her story.

  “Oh, will you? And would you be able to sing a solo? Our soloist is gone into the navy, and I don’t know anyone else to get on such short notice.”

  “Why, yes, I’ll do my best, if you want me, but I’m really not much on singing anymore. I’ve been in a war, you know, and then in a hospital, and my voice is all shot to pieces. But I’ll try.”

  Then he suddenly reached out and took her hand in his.

  “You’re cold,” he charged. “I saw you shiver! Yes, I did. Your fingers are like little icicles.” He took both her hands in his own and rubbed them softly.

  “Such little bits of hands to do so many things,” he said gently, looking down at them, smiling as if she were still the little child she used to be when he went away.

  “Now come, we must walk around and get warm,” he said suddenly. “In fact, I’m afraid it’s time for me to go home. I’ve got some important letters to write and a phone call to make to Washington. But I’ve had such a nice time. May I come again?” Then he sprang up and drew her to her feet and they started on their way down the meadow.

  It was on the way down the quiet meadow that Sunny suddenly looked up with a question.

  “Do you have to go back to war, Barney?”

  He gave her a quick glance and hesitated before he answered. Then he spoke earnestly: “I sincerely hope so,” he said. “I wouldn’t have come away now if I could have had my way. But it seemed that at the time I had no strength to go on. I was just tired out. But now, the last few days, I feel rested, and I want to go back. I want to get this war done. That’s what I’m telephoning to Washington about. That, and trying to find my friend Stormy. I’ve got a friend down there, an admiral, with a pret
ty big pull among the powers that be, and I’m going to see if I can’t get them to send me back sooner than the stated time they gave me. I feel like a slacker staying home and resting day after day. It was wonderful at first, of course, hearing birds sing instead of bombs falling, getting the sound and smell of spring in a world that has not yet been desolated by war. And yet, since I’ve got around some and seen how little our people over here really understand what war is, I feel as if I must hurry back and do all I can. Oh, the people over here, some of them, many of them, think they know all about war because they can’t have as much meat as they want, or coffee or shoes or sugar! They think they are winning the war because they take a little time out of amusing themselves to entertain soldiers waiting to be sent overseas, or to roll a few bandages occasionally in the Red Cross. If you had stayed with us last night and heard them talk you would have understood what I mean.”