Free The Book of Small by Emily Carr Page B

still staring when I heard a little squashed “Mama” come from Helen, as if something had crushed it out of her.
    Sometimes I have thought that Mrs. Crane had the power to grow and shrivel at will. She filled the room, her eyes burnt and her voice froze.
    â€œCatch that fowl!”
    As I mounted the chair to catch the hen, I saw what her muddy feet and the oil had done to me. Helen’s hair was long and she could hide behind it, but mine was short. I stepped carefully over the hateful blue bottle oozing sluggishly over the rug.
    Out on the drive I plunged my burning face down into the fowl’s soft feathers.
    â€œOh, old hen, I wish I could shrivel and get under your wing!” I cried. I had to put her down and go back alone.
    It seemed almost as if I had shrivelled, I felt so shamed and small when I saw Mrs. Crane on her knees scrubbing the rug.
    I went close. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Crane.”
    No answer. I went closer. “I wanted to help your hen. She’s better. Perhaps it was only a little cuddling she wanted.”
    Oh, why didn’t she speak! Why didn’t she scold or even smack, not just scrub, scrub, scrub!
    I stood looking down at Mrs. Crane. I had never seen the top of her before. I saw the part of her hair, the round of her shoulders, her broad back, her thickness when you saw her from on top. Perhaps after all there was room for quite a wide heart.
    Suddenly now while I could reach her, I wanted to put my arms round her and cry.
    MRS. CRANE ROSE so suddenly that she almost trod on me. I stepped back. The wings of her nose trembled. Mrs. Crane was smelling.
    She strode to the doll cupboard and doubled down into it. When she backed out, a starfish dangled from the tips of the fingersof each hand. Helen and I had caught some under the boathouse ten days before and dressed them up in doll’s clothes. Mrs. Crane’s nose and hands were as far as they could get away from each other.
    Mrs. Crane looked at me hard. “Such things never enter my Helen’s head,” she said. “Your mama is better; they are coming for you tonight.”
    In spite of the bad-smell-nose she wore, and the disgust in her fingertips, Mrs. Crane seemed to me just then a most beautiful woman.
    â€œOh, Mrs. Crane!”
    My hands trembled up in that silly way pieces of us have of doing on their own, but the rest of me pulled them down quickly before Mrs. Crane saw.

WHITE CURRANTS
    IT HAPPENED MANY times, and it always happened just in that corner of the old garden.
    When it was going to happen, the dance in your feet took you there without your doing anything about it. You danced through the flower garden and the vegetable garden till you came to the row of currant bushes, and then you danced down it.
    First came the black currants with their strong wild smell. Then came the red currants hanging in bright tart clusters. On the very last bush in the row the currants were white. The white currants ripened first. The riper they got, the clearer they grew, till you could almost see right through them. You could see the tiny veins in their skins and the seeds and the juice. Each currant hung there like an almost-told secret.
    Oh! you thought, if the currants were just a wee bit clearer, then perhaps you could see them
living
, inside.
    The white currant bush was the finish of the garden, and after it was a little spare place before you came to the fence. Nobody ever came there except to dump garden rubbish.
    Bursting higgledy-piggledy up through the rubbish everywhere, grew a half-wild mauvy-pink flower. The leaves and theblossoms were not much to look at, because it poured every drop of its glory into its smell. When you went there the colour and the smell took you and wrapped you up in themselves.
    The smell called the bees and the butterflies from ever so far. The white butterflies liked it best; there were millions of them flickering among the pink flowers, and the hum of the bees never