Balcony Stories

THERE is much of life passed on the balcony in a country where the summer unrolls in six moon-lengths, and where the nights have to come with a double endowment of vastness and splendor to compensate for the tedious, sun-parched days. And in that country the women love to sit and talk together of summer nights, on balconies, in their vague, loose, white garments, - men are not balcony sitters, - with their sleeping children within easy hearing, the stars breaking the cool darkness, or the moon making a show of light - oh, such a discreet show of light! - through the vines. And the children inside, waking to go from one sleep into another, hear the low, soft mother-voices on the balcony, talking about this person and that, old times, old friends, old experiences; and it seems to them, hovering a moment in wakefulness, that there is no end of the world or time, or of the mother-knowledge; but, illimitable as it is, the mother-voices and the mother-love and protection fill it all, - with their mother's hand in theirs, children are not afraid even of God, - and they drift into slumber again, their little dreams taking all kinds of pretty reflections from the great unknown horizon outside, as their fragile soap-bubbles take on reflections from the sun and clouds. Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know how to pick them up from other women's lives, - or other women's destinies, as they prefer to call them, - and told as only women know how to relate them; what God has done or is doing with some other woman whom they have known - that is what interests women once embarked on their own lives, - the embarkation takes place at marriage, or after the marriageable time, - or, rather, that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano.