Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/9

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ILBERT was almost six years old when they all—Mother, Olga, and baby—went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is smothering. Here was space and a new largeness to things. Gilbert was freed forever from the back-street.

Garna's house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.

Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water, which to Gilbert tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt Nan's room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning. Only on wash-day, was that pump