Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard by Eleanor Farjeon (best new books to read txt) 📕

once more to steal pickles and jam by night, to learn your pothooks and hangers, and even in time to be rocked asleep by a cradle.

Jennifer: D-d-dear Master Pippin.

Martin: They look quite green, don't they?

And he laid the two blades side by side on her palm, and Jennifer, whose voice once more would not serve her, nodded and put the two blades in her pocket. Then Martin took out his handkerchief and very carefully dried her eyes and cheeks, saying as he did so, "Now that I have explained this to your satisfaction, won't you, please, explain something to mine?"

Jennifer: I will if I can.

Martin: Then explain what it is you have against men.

Jennifer: I don't know how to tell you, it is so terrible.

Martin: I will try to bear it.

Jennifer: They say women cannot--cannot--

Martin: Cannot?

Jennifer: Keep secrets!

Martin: Men say so?

Jennifer: Yes!

Martin: MEN say so?

Jennifer: They do, they do!

Martin: Men! Oh, Jupiter! if this were true--but it is not--these men would be blabbing the greatest of secrets in saying so. If I had a secret--but I have not--do you think I would trust it to a man? Not I! What does a man do with a secret? Forgets it, throws it behind him into some empty chamber of his brain and lets the cobwebs smother it! buries it in some deserted corner of his heart, and lets the weeds grow over it! Is this keeping a secret? Would you keep a garden or a baby so? I will a thousand times sooner give my secret to a woman. She will tend it and cherish it, laugh and cry with it, dress it in a new dress every day and dandle it in the world's eye for joy and pride in it--nay, she will bid the whole world come into her nursery to admire the pretty secret she keeps so well. And under her charge a little secret will grow into a big one, with a hundred charms and additions it had not when I confided it to her, so that I shall hardly know it again when I ask for it: so beautiful, so important, so mysterious will it have become in the woman's care. Oh, believe me, Mistress Jennifer, it is women who keep secrets and men who neglect them.

Jennifer: If I had only thought of these things to say! But I am not clever at argument like men.

Martin: I suspect these clever arguers. They can always find the right thing to say, even if they are in the wrong. Women are not to be blamed for washing their hands of them for ever.

Jennifer: I know. Yet I cannot help wondering who bakes them gingerbread for Sunday.

Martin: Let them go without. They do not deserve gingerbread.

Jennifer: I know, I know. But they like it so much. And it is nice making it, too.

Martin: Then I suppose it will have to be made till the last of Sundays. What a bother it all is.

Jennifer: I know. Good night, dear Master Pippin.

Martin: Dear milkmaid, good night. There lie your fellows, careless of the color of the grass they lie on, and of the years that lie on them. They have forsworn the baking of cakes, the eating of which begets dreams, to which women are not given. Go lie with them, and be if you can as careless and dreamless as they are.

And then, seeing the tears refilling her eyes, he hastily pulled out his handkerchief again and wiped them as they fell, saying, "But if you cannot--if you cannot (don't cry so fast!)--if you cannot, then give me your key (dear Jennifer, please dry up!) to Gillian's Well-House, because you were glad that my tale ended gladly, and also because all lovers, no matter of what age, are green enough, and chiefly because my handkerchief's sopping."

Then Jennifer caught his hands in hers and whispered, "Oh, Martin! are they? ALL lovers?--are they green enough?"

"God help them, yes!" said Martin Pippin.

She dropped his hands, leaving her key in them, and looked up at him with wet lashes, but happiness behind them. So he stooped and kissed the last tears from her eyes. Since his handkerchief had become quite useless for the purpose.

And she stole back to her place, and he lay down in his, and Jennifer dreamed that she was baking gingerbread, and Martin that he was eating it.

"Maids! maids! maids!"

It was Old Gillman on the heels of dawn.

"A pest on him and all farmers," groaned Martin, "who would harvest men's slumbers as soon as they're sown."

"Get into hiding!" commanded Joscelyn.

"I will not budge," said Martin. "I am going to sleep again. For at that moment I had a lion in one hand and a unicorn in the other--"

"WILL you conceal yourself!" whispered Joscelyn, with as much fury as a whisper can compass.

"And the lion had comfits in his crown, and the unicorn a gilded horn. And both were so sticky and spicy and sweet--"

Joscelyn flung herself upon her knees before him, spreading her yellow skirts which barely concealed him, as Old Gillman thrust his head through the hawthorn gap.

"Good morrow, maids," he grunted.

"--that I knew not, dear Mistress Joscelyn," murmured Martin, "which to bite first."

"Good morrow, master!" cried the milkmaids loudly; and they fluttered their petticoats like sunshine between the man at the hedge and the man in the grass.

"Is my daughter any merrier this morning?"

"No, master," said Jennifer, "yet I think I see smiles on their way."

"If they lag much longer," muttered the farmer, "they'll be on the wrong side of her mouth when they do come. For what sort of a home will she return to?--a pothouse! and what sort of a father?--a drunkard! And the fault's hers that deprives him of the drink he loved in his sober days. Gillian!" he exclaimed, "when will ye give up this child's whim to learn by experience, and take an old man's word for it?"

But Gillian was as deaf to him as to the cock crowing in the barnyard.

"Come fetch your