“If I were to say anything about this to Pemrose, she’d laugh at me—think it was all imagination. She’s—so different. Full of ‘pep’—a radio amateur!”
The girl, the dark-eyed girl whose nature was more woven of poetry than “pep”, who put morning songs into the heads of her flowers, continued to kneel “possessed”, upon a dew-silvered stone beside the rock garden, continued to stare, bewitched, at the dusky green of the early wood.
To her, the vague, sweet murmur which, like a silver cloud, enwrapped her, was not unnatural; it was part of the fairy wonder of the sunrise; of a May sun rising, dim and silvery, like a moon—like a young moon calf—behind shrubbery trees.
“Extra-ordinary!” Her earthy fingers sought each other, restlessly intertwining. “It can’t be a bee? Big, droning bumble bee—Canny Nannie, as the mountain children call it! A whole swarm of Canny Nannies! But there isn’t a bee in sight at this hour; and, if there were, ’twould have to be a glorified—glorified one for me to hear it—at this distance from the wood.”
She stumbled to her feet now, dropping the trowel almost upon the long-suffering heads of the Quaker Ladies, and wandered down a dewy pathway towards a point still nearer to the pine woods, where a gray old sundial upon its four-foot pedestal, shimmered at sunrise, like a huge primrose.
Around this U-te-yan, Flower had created her masterpiece, a ring-like bed in three-cornered sections, peopled only by horological flowers, as her books called them, those that closed sleepily at night, to open at various hours of the morning, energetically or lazily, as the case might be.
To the lovely flower clock, the blooming democracy, wild flowers, even weeds, were admitted, side by side with garden aristocrats, in order to find a flower, sometimes two or three, whose waking or sleeping habits corresponded to the numbers upon the dial’s face—to the sunny hours counted out by the pointing of the shadowy dial finger.
The flower clock had suddenly developed a tongue. The vague hum pursued her here. Pale, spring poppy, uncurling dandelion, caught it, held it—and winked at her over its mystery.
“If—if I were Pemrose now, I’d go right on into the wood, and find out where it comes from—what’s making it,” she murmured to those waking flowers. “The truth is, I’m too—t-too ‘funky’,” with a little deprecatory shrug. “That—that’s why father won’t hear of my going hiking, camping with the other girls this summer; he says I never would stand the sleeping out at night—even for a few nights. And Treff, my madcap cousin Treff, says I’d be such a ‘weer’ I’d turn them all ‘wuzzy’,”—a low laugh—“his barbarous college slang!