"She was just making Judidy throw it out when I caught her at it," Grandfather laughed, "she said it was sick, and would give us all ptomaine poisoning,and the lobster was so mad when he heard it that he tried to claw poor Judidy's hand off."
"Itisstrange that they turn bright red after being bright green," Elizabeth said. "I think I prefer crabs."
"Come with me, and we'll get some," Tom said, taking possession of her.
"I guess we can rest now," he said a little later, "we got more than any of them."
"Did we?"
"Well, we got as many, anyhow. I'm hot, aren't you?"
Elizabeth mopped her forehead and smiled by way of answer.
"Look here," Tom said, "there is something I want to ask you, Miss Swift. If you don't like it you just have to say so, and I will understand and not ask you again. I was just wondering if I couldn't call you Elizabeth. Bill he's going to ask Peggy, I mean Miss Farraday, the same thing."
"I didn't know you had been calling me anything," Elizabeth said.
"Well, I haven't. I think last names are rather stiff, you know, and I didn't like to use your first name without permission."
"I'd just as soon have you call me by my first name," Elizabeth said, "if—if only——"
"You've got something in your mind about methat you aren't saying. If you think it's—well—fresh—of me, to ask you that question about first names, you can say so."
"I don't think that's fresh of you," Elizabeth said, "but I—well, I don't feel like talking in any way but a very straightforward and truthful way to-day. The thing I don't like, really, is the way you tried to get acquainted with us. Every time I think of that, I feel as if—well, I wish it hadn't happened, that's all."
"So do I," said Tom Robbins, soberly, "but I'll tell you something. I have never done anything like that before. We just made up our minds that we would, that's all. You know the way you make up your mind to try something that you've seen other people do."
"But I don't see why you tried it on us," said Elizabeth.
"I don't see why we did, either, except that we wanted to know you the most of any girls."
"I don't like to have a boy make me feel that he thinks I am a girl he can scrape acquaintance with," Elizabeth said. "It hurts my feelings."
"I wouldn't hurt your feelings for anything, and you ought to know now that I am not the kind of boy that does things like that, except for a lark. Don't you?"
"Don't I what?"
"Know that?"
"Yes, I guess I do."
"Well, then?"
"All right, you can call me Elizabeth."
"Peggy and I have caught more than you have," Bill shouted, as he came up with crawling crabs in his net.
"I guess it worked all right," Tom whispered to Elizabeth, "with them."
"Bill asked if he could call me Peggy," that young lady whispered to Elizabeth, on the way home. "I was so surprised I nearly fell over. I thought he always had. I've always called him Bill."
"I think boys sort of make up their minds to do a certain kind of thing, and then they do it," said Elizabeth, "without thinking whether it is really appropriate or not."
"I guess you are right," Peggy said, "and now that we've had this pleasant afternoon, we'll just have to take up the burden of our gloomy thoughts again."
"I know it," said Elizabeth, forlornly.
Elizabeth Is Rude
Elizabeth and Moses took the shore road, and finally struck off across the fields and through the woods to make a short cut for the bathing beach. Moses was going to initiate the new bathing suit Elizabeth had bought him, and Elizabeth to sit on the beach and knit on a sweater she was making for Madget.
It was a rehabilitated Moses that alternately darted and jogged along by her side. He was wearing one of the half-dozen shirts that Grandmother had cut and made by the famous Butterick pattern from which the girls had fashioned the garment he wore on his appearance at the bean supper. His trousers were the veritable "pants" of his dreams, and the rudiments of suspenders, with which he would not part, were tucked in under his belt. His face was comparatively clean, and he had allowed Elizabeth to brush his heavy, upstanding hair until it looked almost personable.
"What are those things around your neck?" Elizabeth cried, catching sight of an extraordinarydecoration only partially concealed by his shirt collar.
"Shark's teeth. I wear 'em for luck. I cut 'em out myself."
"Cut them out of what?"
"Sharks. What'd you think I got 'em from? Cats or something?"
"Moses, you've got to learn to be a little more respectful to me. I don't like the way you speak to me."
"All right," he agreed, amiably.
"Where did you get those teeth from?"
"I told you I got 'em from sharks. I go down to the shore when the boats come in from their weir. You know, the men bring in a lot of fish every day. Well, yesterday they brought in four sharks and they let me cut out these teeth. I could of got more if my knife had been sharper, or I'd had more time. Every night they give me a fish, too."
"That doesn't sound a bit probable, about the sharks. Still, I never caught you telling a lie, Moses. What do you do with the fish they give you?"
"I take 'em home and I cook 'em. Mis' Laury Ann, she showed me how, one time. Mabel, I'm learning her to cook, and Madget she wants I should learn her, but I don't think I shall."
"Oh, dear, I'm afraid I've rather neglected you lately," Elizabeth said. "I haven't been to see your mother for a long time."
"Well, Mis' Laury Ann she comes, and Judidy. Mother says neglecting is all you can expect from girls."
"She's a whole lot better, isn't she?" Elizabeth asked, hastily.
"Sure. Mis' Abithy Hawes she come around and got Little Eva to going it, and Little Eva she said that Mother had water on her lungs."
"Mercy!"
"But Mother she got to reading a book that said housework was a good cure for sickness. About sweeping bein' good for the spine, and washing bein' good for the stomick, and housecleaning a good thing for the figger. So she thought she'd try that, too."
"Where did she get the book?"
"It was one that Mis' Laury Ann lent her."
"I guess Grandmother is working along the way she said she was going to," Elizabeth thought. "Does your mother really do housework?" she asked, aloud.
"Most every day," Moses said, proudly, "she bought me these pants, too."
"Does she do any cooking?"
"She don't like to cook, and she ain't never learned. I kin learn her when I've learned myself some more."
"It does seem as if there weresomeimprovement in your family's condition, doesn't it, Moses?"
"Judidy, she told Ma she was the town's poor,and Ma says she ain't. That kind of stuck in Ma's crop, and Madget cried and said she wouldn't go to the poor house. Now Ma says she is going to buy tea and coffee enough to git a premium set o' dishes. I don't know whether she will or not. If she don't I'm going to earn them. Captain Swift is going to let me sell some corn and string beans out of his garden."
The path emerged on the beach, and Moses disappeared abruptly in the direction of his favourite clump of pines, scorning a bath-house. He reappeared almost immediately, clad in a single garment of blue jersey that glistened with newness.
"You watch me pretending to be a whale," he said, "first I'll dive. Then I'll come up spouting a whole mouthful of water."
"He's a good little swimmer," Elizabeth thought, as she watched his antics. "I guess he'll turn out all right. How wonderful Grandmother is, always keeping her eye on them. It's so much easier to do a thing like that as hard as you can sometimes, and then drop it, than it is to keep pegging along at it all the time."
She was knitting so busily that she did not see Ruth Farraday approaching along the beach, and it was not until a long shadow fell across her work that she realized Ruth was near. Ruth in a pink voile frock, with a frilly, rose-coloured parasol, smiled down at her—a smile of the lips only.
"Shall I sit down beside you?" she asked, in her low, clear voice. "Peggy couldn't come down to the beach to-day. I was too lazy to go in swimming, but I thought I'd like a smell of the sea, all the same."
"I—I'm very glad to see you," Elizabeth said.
"I'm glad to see you. I haven't seen you since that other day at tea."
"No," said Elizabeth, gravely.
"I haven't been feeling very well since then. It was—nice of your brother to wire me, wasn't it?"
"I told Buddy that I thought you would be pleased to hear from him. It was my fault. I shouldn't have told him, if I had known."
"If you had known what?" asked Ruth Farraday, lightly.
"That you were going to marry somebody else."
"Somebody else?" she laughed.
"Somebody that wasn't Buddy," Elizabeth said, bravely.
"There never was any question of my marrying your brother. We were very good friends before he went abroad. Then he seemed to let it—our friendship, die a natural death."
"I told you about his being sick," Elizabeth said, "and I told you that there weren't any other girls."
"There not being any other girls doesn't—didn't necessarily mean——"
"Oh, yes, it does, with Buddy."
"That's putting it rather ambiguously."
"I don't know how it's putting it," Elizabeth cried, "but I do know that there wasn't any other girl."
"He didn't tell you so, did he?"
"He—he——" Elizabeth stammered.
"You—you said that you told him to communicate with me?" Ruth was having almost as much difficulty in speaking as Elizabeth.
"He wrote and asked my advice, and I told him I would, if I were he, and that was why he did it, and then I had to write him that you were engaged."
"Oh, you've written him that already?"
"I had to," Elizabeth said, miserably. "I had just told him that you weren't engaged to anybody else, and that you inquired about him, and that you—you might want to hear from him. He's very sick, and he wrote and asked me what to do."
"When did he write that?"
"Just the other day."
"And you wrote just the other day?"
"There was time for him to get my letter before he telegraphed to you."
"And then you wrote again to say that I was engaged?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm still engaged," Ruth Farraday said, lightly. "When you write to him, won't you tell him that I thank him for remembering me so—sopleasantly, but that I'm a good deal occupied just at present."
"No, I won't," said Elizabeth.
"Indeed?"
"He's too sick, and it would bother him too much."
"Oh, very well," said Ruth Farraday.
"I didn't mean to be rude," Elizabeth said.
"You were, rather. I'd like to send your brother a message, you see, and I—I can't write to him. I've tried, and I can't. I don't want him to think I am altogether unappreciative. What message shall I send him, Elizabeth?"
"Send him your love, if you really mean it, and then not any message."
"I will. I do send him my love. I'm sorry he's sick. Wouldn't it be wise to say that?"
"I think so."
"Send him my love and tell him—oh, tell him he was a day too late."
"I will," said Elizabeth.
With one long, indrawn breath, Ruth Farraday turned and walked back along the beach.
"She's shivering as if she were cold," Elizabeth thought, as she watched the diminishing figure.
It was high tide, and the deep blue waves were foam-crested. The wide sky was streaked with clouds, and a bright sun lay hot upon the sands. Elizabeth looked first at Moses' bobbing head, andthen at the bobbing, rose-coloured parasol dwindling in the distance.
"Life is a curious thing," she said to herself, slowly, "it keeps changing so, getting better or worse all the time. Here's Moses and the Steppes, who were so perfectly hopeless and helpless, and there is an improvement in them. They are my friends and my responsibility—if I don't live up to it very well. Then here is Ruth Farraday, that I truly love, and everything about her is getting worse every minute, and it's all mixed up with me, somehow. I don't do much good, or anything, but it's mixed up with me all the same."
She knitted to the end of her row and pulled out her needle. She gave another long look at sea and sky.
"Everything is a part of everything," she said, a little confusedly. "Poor Buddy, dear."
She wrote him a long letter that night, and told him what Ruth had said, and then she tried not to think about him at all for the next few days. She was afraid for what she had done. She had had no word from him in answer to her letter announcing Ruth's engagement, and only the briefest line from her mother, who was evidently gravely anxious about her son's condition. She knew that Buddy was worse, and she knew that the letter she had written him had made him worse; how much worse, Elizabeth could not bear to think.
It was five days after her meeting with Ruth upon the beach that the evening mail brought her two letters, one in her mother's handwriting and one in Buddy's. Judidy brought them in and put them in her lap.
"We are going to lose Judidy next winter," her grandmother said when that young woman had blushed, giggled, and withdrawn to the back porch, from which the sound of a drawling, masculine voice was heard at intervals, interspersed with Judidy's high-pitched protestations. "She's going to be married, she tells me."
"Is she?" said Elizabeth, trying to subdue the dizziness she felt at the sight of Buddy's familiar scrawl.
"Your grandfather and I thought we'd give them a wedding. Judidy's folks won't. They are nice enough people, but peculiar—odd. They believe in saving trouble and expense on everything."
"Oh, Grandmother," Elizabeth said, trembling, "will you hold my hand while I read these letters? I—I am so worried about Buddy."
"Certain." Grandmother drew out the little footstool that matched the particular valanced rocker she was sitting in. "You come here."
Elizabeth leaned her head against her grandmother's knee, with the feeling of faintness still upon her. Her grandmother stroked her hair gently.
"I can't read them out loud, Grandma. They are private in a way. It's—it's the private things in them that frighten me."
"There ain't nothing in this world to be afraid of. There ain't," said Grandmother. "Fear once killed a cat, you know."
"Don't you ever get afraid, Grandma?"
"Certain I get afraid, but when I do, I just think that there ain't nothing in this world to be afraid of so much as of being afraid, and that kind of stops me."
"I can't help being afraid of what's in this particular letter."
"'I can't help being afraid of what's in this particular letter'"
"'I can't help being afraid of what's in this particular letter'"
"'I can't help being afraid of what's in this particular letter'"
"What are you afraid it's going to do to you?"
"I—I don't know."
"Well, you just open it up and read it, and after you've opened it up, you'll just find you're sitting here the way you were before, with your grandma's arms around you."
Elizabeth pulled the kindly hand down to meet her lips.
"Well," she said, "I'm going to read it now."
Dear Little Sister:I can't tell you how much I thank you for your two letters. They cured me. I've been seeing ghosts, but "being gone, I am a man again." I'm going to get my discharge if I have to bust the whole darned hospital, and I'm coming down to Cape Cod. While there, I shall tell you what I think of several things, includingthe opinion I have of a man who sits in a cloud of vapour all day in a United States Base Hospital, and lets things go some other man's way.You tell Miss Ruth Farraday that it's never too late. No, don't tell her anything, but whenever you see the man in the case, stick out your sweet little tongue at him. I'm sick—sure I'm sick, but I'm a well man, just the same. You wait and see. I broke the news to Mother and she doesn't believe it. She thinks that I'm probably delirious. Father sees that something significant has happened, but doesn't believe that I can bust out so easy. You wait, dear.Keep your eye on Ruth and report to me.I love and admire you, and you are my own darling sister, for whom and which I devoutly thank whatever gods there be. I am the Captain of my Soul.Your Buddy.
Dear Little Sister:
I can't tell you how much I thank you for your two letters. They cured me. I've been seeing ghosts, but "being gone, I am a man again." I'm going to get my discharge if I have to bust the whole darned hospital, and I'm coming down to Cape Cod. While there, I shall tell you what I think of several things, includingthe opinion I have of a man who sits in a cloud of vapour all day in a United States Base Hospital, and lets things go some other man's way.
You tell Miss Ruth Farraday that it's never too late. No, don't tell her anything, but whenever you see the man in the case, stick out your sweet little tongue at him. I'm sick—sure I'm sick, but I'm a well man, just the same. You wait and see. I broke the news to Mother and she doesn't believe it. She thinks that I'm probably delirious. Father sees that something significant has happened, but doesn't believe that I can bust out so easy. You wait, dear.
Keep your eye on Ruth and report to me.
I love and admire you, and you are my own darling sister, for whom and which I devoutly thank whatever gods there be. I am the Captain of my Soul.
Your Buddy.
Elizabeth buried her face in the ample folds of her grandmother's white apron.
"He's better. He's going to get well," she sobbed. "Oh, dear, I was afraid I had killed him, but I didn't. I did him good."
"He needed something to rouse him," Grandmother said, "your mother says the doctor has been saying that for some time. I don't know how you've done it, but I guess you've turned the trick."
"He says he's going to get out and come down here right away."
"I thought 'twas about time."
"He's so sweet and dear and handsome, and he was so brave, and oh, I love him so!"
"That don't seem to me to be anything to sob over."
"I—I can't help it."
"I always cried more tears of joy than I ever cried of sorrow. It runs in the family."
"I guess I can read Mother's letter aloud. It's longer than Buddy's."
Elizabeth Dear:The strangest thing has happened to your brother. He has suddenly taken a new lease of life. Night before last I left him just as dull and discouraged and apathetic as ever, and this morning when I went to see him, at about ten o'clock, he was another boy. The nurse said he had been that way ever since he got a letter from you in the morning mail. I suppose that was merely a coincidence. I don't mean to say that I found him in any seraphic mood. He was literally fighting mad at the hospital authorities, and his whole mind seemed concentrated on getting out. At first I thought his fever had risen, but the doctor assures me that the subtle cloud that has been resting over his mind has lifted. He says he has never known a case where the patient provided his own stimulus before, that usually it has come from the outside in the form of some kind of shock, pleasant or unpleasant.It hasn't been entirely a nervous case, you understand. He would probably have less trouble in getting away, if it had been just a matter of mind, but his mind has kept his body sick. It's been a vicious circle. He has believed, it now develops, that the physical matter was incurable. His old job was gone, you know, and that seemed to depress him. Your father was perfectly willing to keep him at home indefinitely, and we kept tellinghim so, but in his poor, tortured mind he had construed our doing so into an admission that we never expected him to get well.At any rate, the worst is over now. I believe we'll have our boy restored in mind and body very soon. I don't dare to hope we'll all get down to Cape Cod as soon as he thinks we shall but I am inclined to think that he is too lively a character for the United States Government to hold very much longer.You have been my brave, darling daughter, and I love you more than I can tell you. I am sending your shoes by this post.Mother.
Elizabeth Dear:
The strangest thing has happened to your brother. He has suddenly taken a new lease of life. Night before last I left him just as dull and discouraged and apathetic as ever, and this morning when I went to see him, at about ten o'clock, he was another boy. The nurse said he had been that way ever since he got a letter from you in the morning mail. I suppose that was merely a coincidence. I don't mean to say that I found him in any seraphic mood. He was literally fighting mad at the hospital authorities, and his whole mind seemed concentrated on getting out. At first I thought his fever had risen, but the doctor assures me that the subtle cloud that has been resting over his mind has lifted. He says he has never known a case where the patient provided his own stimulus before, that usually it has come from the outside in the form of some kind of shock, pleasant or unpleasant.
It hasn't been entirely a nervous case, you understand. He would probably have less trouble in getting away, if it had been just a matter of mind, but his mind has kept his body sick. It's been a vicious circle. He has believed, it now develops, that the physical matter was incurable. His old job was gone, you know, and that seemed to depress him. Your father was perfectly willing to keep him at home indefinitely, and we kept tellinghim so, but in his poor, tortured mind he had construed our doing so into an admission that we never expected him to get well.
At any rate, the worst is over now. I believe we'll have our boy restored in mind and body very soon. I don't dare to hope we'll all get down to Cape Cod as soon as he thinks we shall but I am inclined to think that he is too lively a character for the United States Government to hold very much longer.
You have been my brave, darling daughter, and I love you more than I can tell you. I am sending your shoes by this post.
Mother.
"I hope he'll get here while it's still cucumber season," Grandmother said. "My, how that boy used to eat herrings and cucumbers! I cooked a whole half dozen once, and I vow he et the whole lot, and I don't know how many cucumbers. He was a dretful one to eat. He used to like to climb up in the pear tree in pear season, and pick the topmost pear on the tree and eat his way down."
"Do you mind if I cry a little more, Grandma? I can stop, but I don't want to," Elizabeth sniffled.
"It will be good for the fern to have a little dampness in the air. You cry, and I'll knit a spell."
"You tease just about as much as Grandfather does, don't—don't you? Only you're so—so sly about it, nobody realizes it."
"Ain't that our ring on the telephone?"
"I don't know. I just sit here and let it ring all the time. I forget to count whether it's fifteen or fourteen."
"Land, fourteen will wake me up out of a sound sleep when I'm to bed upstairs. And I don't never hear fifteen no more'n if it hadn't sounded."
"Itisfourteen," Elizabeth said, as the imperious instrument sounded one long and four short signals distinctly. "I'll answer."
"Elizabeth, where have you been all day?" Peggy's voice inquired. "I particularly want to see you about something, but Mother insists it's too late for me to come over."
"I went swimming with Moses," Elizabeth said, "and finished Madget's sweater, and made a chocolate cake. What is it that you've got to tell me?"
"I can't tell you very well over the phone."
"Is it pleasant or unpleasant?"
"Unpleasant," Peggy whispered, with her mouth close to the receiver.
"Tell me."
"I can't."
"Hint it. Is it about Ruthie?"
"Yes."
"And it's unpleasant?"
"Well, there is something pleasant about it. The festivities will be pleasant."
"Oh, Peggy, tell me. I've just about got to know."
"Well, listen close. It's going to be hurried up."
"What is?"
"The—well—you know. Somebody's receiver isdown. They are listening in. Don't you hear that clock ticking?"
"Oh, don't mind that. Tell me."
"They've hung up, I think. Guess what I mean. The festivities are going to be hurried up. We want you to take part in them. It's going to be in two weeks. Now do you know? It begins with w."
"You mean Ruth is going to be——"
"Yes, but don't breathe it. We want you at it—you know—the w. You and me, dressed alike in blue dimity. There won't be many people."
"Oh, Peggy, I couldn't."
"Yes, you can. The way I look at it is that we might as well be philosophical about it and have a good time, even if our hearts do hang down to our boots. Don't you say so? Mother is calling me and I've got to go. Don't breathe a word. I'll tell you all about it to-morrow. I'll be over. Good-bye."
"Oh, good-bye!" said Elizabeth.
Picking Chickens
"Do you want to come out and set with me in the woodshed while I pick a couple o' chicken?" Grandfather asked one morning at the breakfast table.
"Ye—es," said his granddaughter.
"I don't mind picking a chicken, but I do like encouragement while I'm a-doing of it. All the pesky little pin feathers stick twice as tight when I'm alone with 'em."
"When do you begin?" Elizabeth faltered.
"Soon's I can get to it. First I catch my chickens. After you have heard them squawking for a while, you get your knitting and come out to the shed."
"When he cuts off their heads, I just about pass into Kingdom Come," said Judidy. "I hate to hear them squawking as much as I hate to hear a pig stuck."
"Oh, do you cut off their heads?" Elizabeth asked, faintly.
"Well, I wring their necks first."
"Don't take Jehoshaphat, will you, CaptainSwift? I've fed him about every day this year, and he eats out o' my hand just as cute's the next one."
"Don't take Speckletop, will you, Grandfather?" Elizabeth moaned.
"She's a setting hen. I don't calculate to eat no chicken pie made out o' setting hens."
"It's dretful hard to eat your own hens," Grandmother said. "You raise 'em from chickens, and you get to know every one from every t'other one, and then some fine morning Father he puts their heads on the chopping block, and that's the last of them, but they do stick, going down, when I try to eat them."
"You don't have to worry, Mother. I know this is a pretty middling tender-hearted family, so I bought this pair o' roosters over to Battletown."
"Where's Battletown?" Elizabeth asked.
"That's the old-fashioned name for the region over yonder. This here was called Crocker Neck. You remind me and I'll tell you some poetry about it."
"I hate to eat anybody else's hens," Grandmother said, "you don't know how they been raised."
"They say old Uncle Jonathan Swift won't take his vittles hot nor cold," Grandfather chuckled. "Either way they hurt his teeth, he says."
"If you feel too squeamish about seeing those chickens picked, you just tell Grandfather, Elizabeth,"her grandmother said after he had left the table. "I used to feel pretty delicate about such things myself, till I decided I'd got to get hardened."
"How did you get hardened?"
"Well, I took a spell to think about it. I can stand most anything if I can get my ideas fixed up about it."
"Oh, so can I," Elizabeth cried. "I guess I inherited it."
"I couldn't stand the sight o' blood, or hearing about killing a pig or a chicken, much less seeing the carcasses around. Well, I come to the conclusion that every time a chicken was killed somebody'd have to pick it, and I could pick a chicken if anybody else could. I figured out that if it wasn't me, it would have to be somebody else, probably just as squeamish. So I went ahead and caught a chicken and wrung its neck. I couldn't of chopped off its head if I suffered, but after Father helped me out that far, I cleaned it and picked it just like a storekeeper."
"I suppose that's the way you do get character, just by doing things that you can't do—all the time."
"Well, Providence sees that you have plenty of things to do that can't be done. I kinder hate to see young folks forcing themselves into it."
"I guess I'll go and see that chicken picked all the same, Grandmother," Elizabeth said.
She did not even put her fingers in her ears to shutout the sounds of attack and slaughter in the chicken yard when she went out to the woodshed and took her place determinedly on the step, companionably near the three-legged stool that her grandfather had drawn up to the door.
"What was the poetry you said you were going to say to me?" she began, "that poetry about Crocker Neck?"
"It's just what the girls used to say to the boys when they went a-courting:
"Hasty pudding in the pot,Pumpkin in the lantern,If you hadn't come from Crocker Neck,You wouldn't be so handsome."
"Hasty pudding in the pot,Pumpkin in the lantern,If you hadn't come from Crocker Neck,You wouldn't be so handsome."
"It doesn't rhyme very well, does it?" Elizabeth said.
"It used to kinder tickle the young folks. We used to have one that we said to the girls:
"The Cape Cod girls they have no combs.They comb their hair with the codfish bones.
"The Cape Cod girls they have no combs.They comb their hair with the codfish bones.
I don't know as that rhymes any better, but young folks get up things that don't have much rhyme or reason."
The air was full of the scent of wet feathers. Elizabeth looked up in time to see him lift a dripping fowl from the pail of hot water at his side, and then hastily looked away again.
"Grandfather, what did you do when you were a young man?" she said.
"I went to sea."
"How old were you when you first went?"
"'Long about nine or ten. I started in by going cook."
"Cook?" Elizabeth cried. "Cook? How—how did that happen?"
"All the boys went cook summers. We used to go to district school in the winter and then go to sea in the summer. I cooked for seventeen men my first trip, and I hadn't nothing to cook in but a baking kettle, neither."
"What kind of boat did you go in?"
Grandfather industriously plucked at the carcass in his hand.
"A fishing vessel. She was called theGood Intent. I used to make seven loaves of bread at a time, and we had to eat it every scrap up before we could touch the new. It didn't make much difference, though, because we carried four bushels of meal, part Indian and part rye, and it all soured before we was out long, but we et it just the same. We used to stay out two or three weeks at a time, and bring in seven or eight thousand fish."
"I can't believe that you used to be a cook. It doesn't seem possible."
"I didn't used to be a cook," said Grandfather,quietly, "I used to go cook on my grandfather's vessel. Have you heard from that friend of yours lately whose brother-in-law is a count?"
"No. Yes, that is. She writes me quite regularly." Elizabeth blushed crimson. "She's an awfully nice girl, with no nonsense about her at all."
"'Taint so much her that I'm interested in as her brother-in-law," Grandfather said, solemnly, "he must have been a pretty smart man, to earn that title of count by his own efforts."
"I—I don't think he did," Elizabeth said, before she caught the twinkle in her grandfather's eye.
"Your grandmother's father he was a sailmaker, you know," he continued, soberly. "He used to have a sail loft where he sat and sewed on sails. He used to pay your grandmother by the dozen for threading for him."
"I didn't know," said Elizabeth. She looked up from her knitting for an instant, and saw the strange, prickly surface of the denuded fowl. "I didn't realize that the reason they called it goose flesh when they got chilled was because your flesh looked like a goose's flesh—I mean a—a geese's," she added, hastily.
"Yes, and sometimes the reason they call a young girl a little goose is that all of a sudden she begins to act like one. Pesky things, these little pin feathers!"
"I—I can help you do that," Elizabeth said.
"Well, put that towel over your lap and don't get any blood on you. Sure it won't make you sick?"
"I'm just about sure that it will," said Elizabeth, "but—but what do I care? Did it make you sick when you first went to sea, Grandfather?"
"Sick as a dog," said her grandfather, heartily, "and the smell of that souring meal, and mouldy corn beef, and dead fish—well, I——"
"Oh, you poor, poor granddaddy," Elizabeth cried, "you poor little boy, why did they make you go?"
"That was my father's idea of bringing me up. I ain't so sure it wasn't a pretty good one."
"Did you get paid for it?"
"Six dollars a month and found. I had the promise of a new hat in the fall, but I never saw it. Times has changed considerable since I was a boy."
"I should think they had," said Elizabeth, fervently.
"You see, Grandfather he owned a fleet of fishing vessels, he owned a dozen himself, and he was part owner with your grandmother's father in as many more."
"But I thought you said Grandmother's father was a—was just a sailmaker?"
"So he was, but he was a shipowner, too. He had to have an interest in a good many vessels in order to get the business of making sails for them."
"Did he make them all by himself?"
Grandfather smiled.
"Well, not exactly. His will was good, but he couldn't manage to fit out more than a few hundred boats single-handed."
"You laugh at me every word you say, Grandfather."
"About every other word, I should call it. He went to sea a good part of his life, but he had learned his trade at sailmaking. Boys learned a trade those days, if they was real enterprising. My father he learned the cooper's trade when he was a boy."
"How big were these boats?"
"They carried from ten to twenty-five men. Grandfather he built a sailing vessel down here at the mouth of Herring River that went all around the world nearabout. 'Twas his boast that he built it from timber cut on his own land. I was on board of her just off New Bedford when the steamerMorning Starstruck her amidships. She sunk in less'n fifteen minutes."
"But you—were saved?"
"I woke up when she struck, and I come up from below just as I was, in my underclothes. I saw a dark shape coming alongside, and that was all I knew. I jumped for her. They said I was the first one over the side. 'Twas the old coastwise steamer that saved us, nosing along in the dark. She was good enough for me to land on."
"All these things don't seem possible, Grandfather. I can't believe them. You must have been a brave little boy."
"I don't know. I don't think boys is born brave, but they get the fear o' God put into them one way or another, the same as little girls."
"But all these things are like—story books."
"Like enough. Story books is imitated from real life, as near as I can make out."
"I didn't think any things like these could happen to anybody I knew. I mean, things so exciting."
"You never thought to sink so low as to be picking pin feathers out of the same fowl with a feller that had been cook on a fishing schooner."
This time Elizabeth met his twinkling gaze. She rose from her task long enough to deposit an emphatic kiss on the top of a shiny, bald pate.
"Who called me a goose?" she said.
"In the circles you're accustomed to, I suppose they don't call such names?"
"This is the circle in which I move," Elizabeth said, "this circle of you and Grandmother and Judidy. Now I know where I inherited my cooking ability from—you, sir."
"Well, there was times when the crew could get their teeth into my pie crust," grandfather admitted.
Elizabeth slipped up to her room that afternoon, after her noonday dinner, and wrote to Jean:
Jeanie Dear:I have learned so much since I came to Cape Cod, that I don't see how there is going to be much more in the world to learn. I suppose there will be, but I don't think it can possibly be so important. I was an untried child when I came here, and now look at me. You can't, but I wish you could. I have grown a little taller and, I think, a lot sadder looking. Also, I am healthier. I feel a lot like Alice in Wonderland, mentally, however—I have to keep running and running, to stay in the same place, and then I don't.I have some things in my mind that I can hardly bear, and some that I can hardly wait for, and some that I can hardly believe. You know what they are all about. The first is Buddy's girl and her approaching wedding. I am to stand up with them. I couldn't refuse; how could I, Jean? It's just a terrible, terrible thing. Buddy doesn't know it, because he is coming out of the hospital and down here just as soon as he can, and I am afraid it would retard his recovery if I wrote him. So I am not telling him till he gets here. Do you wonder, Jean, that I feel like a so much older girl than I did when I first came down here? Sometimes I think that my hair ought to be quite gray, with all my responsibility. I lit a light once, in the middle of the night, and got up to see if I hadn't really got gray hair, I felt so gray. I keep having to decide what to tell Buddy and what not. I can't ask Mother, because Buddy would never forgive me if I did, and what he would do to me would turn me gray for a fact, I guess. I've hinted it all out to you to keep from bursting, but Jeanie, it isn't the same thing as talking to you. It's only like saying my prayers or writing a diary. Besides, I haven't told you details. Only the general facts.The things I can hardly wait for are my parents and Buddy coming—my own brother, that has come out of the jaws of death in two senses, since I have seen him. Once from the Trenchesand once from the U. S. Base Hospital. Having a brother is the strangest, sweetest thing. I'd rather have one than a sister, though I do think Ruth Farraday is beautiful, and Peggy's lot is, next to mine, the most fortunate in that respect. I ought not to crow like this to an only child, though.The things I can hardly believe are the things I've been hearing about my ancestors. In a way, you know, I think it is more interesting to be an American than even to be a count. I've lived along all my life with the idea that I was a New Yorker, or rather a New Jerseyite with one foot on Broadway or Fifth Avenue, and I thought the cook was the cook and the butcher the butcher, and that was all there was to it. I had a grandfather and grandmother that I had idealized in my imagination, all dressed up in city clothes and manners. I didn't stop to think what I came from, except that Mother was an Endicott, and that all her relations lived abroad most of the time.You know the rude shock I got when I came down here. The corner grocer is my distant uncle. The hired girl is a kind of cousin. The butcher that goes out selling things in a cart, meat all raw and pig pork that he has killed himself, is the family's friend. It seemed just plain awful to me at first. I didn't know what any of itmeant. But now I'm getting to. I talked with grandfather, who quite rightly understands my horrid scruples and teases me to pieces about them, and I talked with Peggy, whose father tells her a lot of things. (Those girls get their niceness from their father.)He says this early settlers' blood is a wonderful thing. It was mostly the younger sons of aristocrat families that settled here, and a great many of them married their cooks or serving maids. (Perhaps that's why cooking is such a general talent.) They had to hew a living out of a very sterile soil, and to learn all the virtues of thrift and prudence from actual practise. They didn't have any houses or money or matches or anything. They justhad to make them, and learn not to be aristocrats, instead of learning to be. They had tomakeNew England. Well, my grandparents and my great-great-great-greats did an awful lot about this. There wouldn't be any Cape Cod, if it hadn't been for these Industries that they were engaged in, and it's the most romantic thing, the way even young children lived this seagoing, hardy life in the school of hard knocks. My grandfather was a cook at a very early age, and was lost at sea, only he jumped into a coastwise steamer instead of being drowned.It's all wonderful, about grandmother's being courted at a Harvest Ball, and her grandmother running to get fire in a swing-pail, and funny little old songs they sing. Do you know what I feel as if I had done? I feel my roots pushing right down into the ground, and I love the ground, and it loves my roots.Also, I love you, my own Jeanie, and more so all the time as I grow better. Some time I am going to show you all this Cape. Well, now I must take up my cross and my scare again. I almost forgot it when I was writing.YourElizabeth.
Jeanie Dear:
I have learned so much since I came to Cape Cod, that I don't see how there is going to be much more in the world to learn. I suppose there will be, but I don't think it can possibly be so important. I was an untried child when I came here, and now look at me. You can't, but I wish you could. I have grown a little taller and, I think, a lot sadder looking. Also, I am healthier. I feel a lot like Alice in Wonderland, mentally, however—I have to keep running and running, to stay in the same place, and then I don't.
I have some things in my mind that I can hardly bear, and some that I can hardly wait for, and some that I can hardly believe. You know what they are all about. The first is Buddy's girl and her approaching wedding. I am to stand up with them. I couldn't refuse; how could I, Jean? It's just a terrible, terrible thing. Buddy doesn't know it, because he is coming out of the hospital and down here just as soon as he can, and I am afraid it would retard his recovery if I wrote him. So I am not telling him till he gets here. Do you wonder, Jean, that I feel like a so much older girl than I did when I first came down here? Sometimes I think that my hair ought to be quite gray, with all my responsibility. I lit a light once, in the middle of the night, and got up to see if I hadn't really got gray hair, I felt so gray. I keep having to decide what to tell Buddy and what not. I can't ask Mother, because Buddy would never forgive me if I did, and what he would do to me would turn me gray for a fact, I guess. I've hinted it all out to you to keep from bursting, but Jeanie, it isn't the same thing as talking to you. It's only like saying my prayers or writing a diary. Besides, I haven't told you details. Only the general facts.
The things I can hardly wait for are my parents and Buddy coming—my own brother, that has come out of the jaws of death in two senses, since I have seen him. Once from the Trenchesand once from the U. S. Base Hospital. Having a brother is the strangest, sweetest thing. I'd rather have one than a sister, though I do think Ruth Farraday is beautiful, and Peggy's lot is, next to mine, the most fortunate in that respect. I ought not to crow like this to an only child, though.
The things I can hardly believe are the things I've been hearing about my ancestors. In a way, you know, I think it is more interesting to be an American than even to be a count. I've lived along all my life with the idea that I was a New Yorker, or rather a New Jerseyite with one foot on Broadway or Fifth Avenue, and I thought the cook was the cook and the butcher the butcher, and that was all there was to it. I had a grandfather and grandmother that I had idealized in my imagination, all dressed up in city clothes and manners. I didn't stop to think what I came from, except that Mother was an Endicott, and that all her relations lived abroad most of the time.
You know the rude shock I got when I came down here. The corner grocer is my distant uncle. The hired girl is a kind of cousin. The butcher that goes out selling things in a cart, meat all raw and pig pork that he has killed himself, is the family's friend. It seemed just plain awful to me at first. I didn't know what any of itmeant. But now I'm getting to. I talked with grandfather, who quite rightly understands my horrid scruples and teases me to pieces about them, and I talked with Peggy, whose father tells her a lot of things. (Those girls get their niceness from their father.)
He says this early settlers' blood is a wonderful thing. It was mostly the younger sons of aristocrat families that settled here, and a great many of them married their cooks or serving maids. (Perhaps that's why cooking is such a general talent.) They had to hew a living out of a very sterile soil, and to learn all the virtues of thrift and prudence from actual practise. They didn't have any houses or money or matches or anything. They justhad to make them, and learn not to be aristocrats, instead of learning to be. They had tomakeNew England. Well, my grandparents and my great-great-great-greats did an awful lot about this. There wouldn't be any Cape Cod, if it hadn't been for these Industries that they were engaged in, and it's the most romantic thing, the way even young children lived this seagoing, hardy life in the school of hard knocks. My grandfather was a cook at a very early age, and was lost at sea, only he jumped into a coastwise steamer instead of being drowned.
It's all wonderful, about grandmother's being courted at a Harvest Ball, and her grandmother running to get fire in a swing-pail, and funny little old songs they sing. Do you know what I feel as if I had done? I feel my roots pushing right down into the ground, and I love the ground, and it loves my roots.
Also, I love you, my own Jeanie, and more so all the time as I grow better. Some time I am going to show you all this Cape. Well, now I must take up my cross and my scare again. I almost forgot it when I was writing.
YourElizabeth.
When she had finished and stamped this letter, Elizabeth took it in her hand and went slowly down the stairs. It was nearly time for the auto-bus from the morning train, the rumble of which could be heard distinctly on the street beyond that on which the old house stood. Elizabeth always waited for this before she went to the post office. She had heard the whistle of the train some time since.
Her grandmother stood at the door.
"The barge has turned in on our street, and it'sstopping here," she said, "I guess we're going to have company. I'm dretful glad Father killed those roosters this morning. There's plenty cooked."
"Who do you suppose it is?" Elizabeth said.
"Some o' Father's folks. They're always turning up when least expected."
Elizabeth watched the high-set, curtained vehicle, a hybrid motor truck and picnic carryall that had been converted to its present use by the exigencies of "depot" traffic. A boy in overalls had descended from the driver's seat, and was lifting out a small motor trunk by its handle, and a big, pig-skin suitcase.
"Why, that's like Mother's trunk," Elizabeth said, "and that suitcase is like her suitcase."
A tall, blonde woman in a blue tailored suit and a blue veil jumped lightly out of the unwieldy conveyance, her hand touching that of the boy in overalls.
"Shall I lift these here baggages into the house for you?" he said.
"Yes, thank you. Thirty-five cents, isn't it? Oh, don't bother to make change. That's all right."
"For the Land o' Liberty!" Grandmother exclaimed. "For the land sakes!"
"Why, itisMother!" cried Elizabeth.
Mother
Madget was sitting on the floor, and singing to herself: