FOUR LITTLE BLOSSOMSTHROUGH THE HOLIDAYSCHAPTER ITWADDLES MAKES A GIFT
FOUR LITTLE BLOSSOMSTHROUGH THE HOLIDAYS
“WHERE’S the soap, Norah?” demanded Meg importantly. “The soap and the scrubbing brush and a clean towel, please. I need them very much.”
Norah looked at her calmly.
“And why do you be wanting to take a scrubbing brush and the soap down cellar?” she asked. “What are you all up to down there, anyway? I can’t get Twaddles to go to the store for me, and Dot has been poking about in the pantry till she has me wild. What are you doing anyway?”
“Why, you know, Norah, I told you last week,” replied Meg. “We’re getting theThanksgiving stuff ready to take to school; all the children bring something good to eat and then it is collected and the poor people have a Thanksgiving Day dinner.”
“Well, I’ve been poor in my time,” said Norah, tying on her clean, white apron and preparing to start her dinner, “but never have I been so starved that I could eat soap or, for that matter, a scrubbing brush or a towel, even if ’twas a clean one.”
Meg’s blue eyes widened in surprise, and then she laughed.
“Oh, Norah, how funny you are!” she cried. “You know I don’t want the soap for the poor people to eat! I want to wash the potatoes for them!”
And then it was Norah’s turn to laugh. She laughed till the tears came in her eyes and she had to take her clean apron to wipe them away.
“Meg, Meg, you’ll be the end of me yet!” laughed Norah. “Who ever heard of scrubbing potatoes with soap and water and using a towel to dry ’em? Won’t Sam snicker when I tell him!”
“I don’t see anything funny about that,” said Meg, edging toward the cellar door. “I want to take nice, clean potatoes and you wash those we eat, you know you do, Norah.”
“Yes, child, that I do,” admitted Norah kindly and her voice was sober though her eyes still twinkled. “But water and a good stiff brush will be all your potatoes need. They’ll dry of themselves and you won’t need the towel; and the soap would spoil ’em completely if the poor people should be wistful to have ’em baked.”
“Meg, what you doing? Did you get the soap yet?” shouted Bobby from the bottom of the cellar steps.
“Here’s the brush,” said Norah, hastily giving Meg the small vegetable brush from the shelf over the sink. “Now be off with you and don’t let me find water all over the laundry floor either; drowning Dot in water isn’t going to help the poor folks.”
Meg ran down the steps and joined the other children who were exceedingly busy. Bobby was sorting over the apples in the apple bin and trying to keep Twaddles from eating theperfect ones he selected. Dot had filled the laundry tubs with hot water and was only waiting Meg’s return to put in the turnips and potatoes to be thoroughly washed. As for Twaddles, he was walking up and down before the preserve closet, munching apples, and trying to decide which jar of preserves he would choose. Mother Blossom had promised each of the children one jar of jelly, jam or canned fruit, to take to school.
“And Dot and Twaddles may send something, too,” she had said, when the twins as usual declared that they never had any of the fun because they were too young to go to school. “Meg and Bobby will take your thank-offering to school for you, twinnies.”
It was warm and dry in the cellar and the electric light made it bright even though it was already dark outside at half-past four that November afternoon. The glowing heater occupied one end of the cemented room and the laundry tubs the other. In between were the vegetable and fruit bins and closets where foodthat would keep through the winter had been stored.
“Norah says we don’t use soap on the potatoes,” reported Meg to Dot. “Maybe we shouldn’t have hot water, either.”
“Course we need hot water,” insisted Dot, who was already splashed from head to foot. “Hot water is the only way to get ’em clean.”
“There’s Sam—we’ll ask him,” said Bobby as someone opened the door of the cellar and came in, bringing a blast of cold, fresh air.
“Well, you look happy,” smiled Sam Layton, who ran the car and mowed the lawn in summer and took care of the heater in winter for the Blossom family. “What mischief are you into now?”
“Sam, don’t you wash turnips and things like that in hot water?” demanded Dot earnestly.
“So that’s it,” cried Sam. “I knew, soon as I saw the cloud of steam from the laundry tubs, that something was going on. Are you counting on washing vegetables in Norah’s pet tubs and in that boiling hot water?”
“They’re for the poor folks,” explainedBobby, polishing an apple by the simple method of rubbing it on his stocking. “We have to take ’em to school tomorrow and we want them to be clean.”
“Very nice and quite correct,” approved Sam seriously. “But somehow it doesn’t fit in with my sanitary ideas to wash vegetables where the clothes are done or polish apples on stockings, Bobby.”
“I meant to get a rag,” said Bobby quickly. “Norah will give me one. What shall we do to the potatoes, Sam?”
Sam explained that he thought the best thing to do was to borrow a pan from Norah and scrub the vegetables with the brush in water not too cold for their hands and yet not hot enough to shrivel the skin of the turnips and potatoes.
“How you going to get your stuff over to school?” he asked, when Bobby had gone after the pan and returned with both pan and Norah, who declared that she knew she would have to help them. “Potatoes weigh heavy, when you try to carry them.”
“Daddy said you’d take us in the car,” repliedMeg. “You will, won’t you, Sam? We have potatoes and carrots and turnips and apples and four jars of fruit to take.”
“Then you certainly can’t walk,” said Sam, shaking the heater and raising his voice above the racket he made. “I guess I can take you before your father is ready to go in the morning.”
When the vegetables were all nicely washed, and the laundry floor mopped up, and Dot placed before the heater to dry off, since she refused to go upstairs and get into another dress, and the apples polished to Bobby’s liking, then it was time to choose the cans of fruit.
The twins could not make up their minds. Dot wavered between her two favorites, blackberry jam and orange marmalade, and Twaddles insisted on peach butter and mustard pickles.
“Mother said one,” Meg reminded him. Meg had her own jar of canned pears she had filled herself and labeled with a little red label. “Filled by Meg, October 2,” Mother Blossom had written, and Meg was eager to give the jaraway because, as she said, it was something she had done herself.
“Well, pickles don’t count,” argued Twaddles. “Pickles are extra.”
Bobby had chosen his favorite strawberry jam and he was anxious to go upstairs and see if dinner wasn’t almost ready.
“Hurry up, Twaddles!” he urged his small brother. “We can’t wait all night. Which do you want, Dot?”
“Blackberry jam,” said Dot, shutting her eyes and gulping as she always did when she had to make a choice.
“Children, dinner will be ready in a minute!” Mother Blossom called down to them.
“Now, you see,” scolded Bobby. “Take the pickles, Twaddles, and put them over there with the apples. I have to lock up the closet.”
Bobby took the jar of peach butter out of Twaddles’ hands and put it back on the shelf. Then he locked the door of the preserve closet and put the key in his pocket to give his mother.
Twaddles scowled.
“I didn’t want pickles,” he said. “You’remean, Bobby Blossom. I hope the poor folks will throw away your old apples.”
Twaddles never could stay cross very long, though, and before dinner was over, he was teasing with Dot to be allowed to go to the school the next day with Meg and Bobby.
“Please, Daddy,” pleaded the twins. “We’re sending things for the poor people to eat and can’t we go and see them?”
“They won’t be there,” said Meg hastily. “The Charity Bureau comes and gets the stuff and gives it to the poor people; don’t they, Bobby?”
Bobby nodded and Father Blossom laughed.
“Now, Twaddles, don’t begin to see a nice comfortable walnut bureau like the one in Mother’s room going around collecting food for the poor folk,” he said teasingly. “I can see your big eyes beginning to wonder what a Charity Bureau is. That is only a name for the kind men and women who go around taking care of hungry and cold people.”
But though Dot continued to tease to be allowed to go to school the next day, Twaddles’busy little brain kept thinking about the “Charity Bureau.” He couldn’t understand—Twaddles was only four years old—exactly why men and women who collected food for hungry people should be called a bureau, and the more he thought about it, the more tangled up he became. When bedtime came for him and Dot he was still puzzling over it and it was not till the next morning that he decided what he should do.
Meg and Bobby were seated on the front seat of the car with Sam Layton, and the vegetables and apples and fruit jars were carefully arranged on the back seat, when Twaddles came running out of the house. Mother Blossom had said the twins were not to go to school—much to Meg’s and Bobby’s relief—and Meg at first thought Twaddles was determined to have his own way.
“Go back, Twaddles! Mother said you couldn’t go,” she cried, when Twaddles bounced on the running board.
“I’m not going! I brought you something!”gasped Twaddles, breathless from running. “It’s for the Charity Bureau.”
Meg took the little box, wrapped in white tissue paper, and Sam started the car. The twins stood and waved to Bobby and Meg as though they were going on a voyage instead of to school where they went every school day morning, and Meg did not look at the package till Sam suggested that it might be well to see what was in it.
“You never can tell what Twaddles is going to do,” observed Sam sagely, “and if I were you, I’d want to know what I was taking to the Bureau for him.”
Meg unwrapped the box while Bobby and Sam stared curiously. When she lifted the cover, there lay a bottle of cologne!
“It’s his own bottle, the one he bought with his own money and Daddy laughed at him so,” said Meg. “Twaddles does love cologne! And why do you suppose he wants to give it to the poor people?”
Sam Layton chuckled.
“Don’t you see, this isn’t for the poor folks,”he explained. “Twaddles said it was for the ‘Charity Bureau’—the poor kid has the bureau idea in his mind in spite of what your father told him. Pretty nice of him to give away his own cologne, though, isn’t it?”
Nora had told Sam how Father Blossom had tried to explain what the Charity Bureau was to Twaddles the night before, and Meg and Bobby remembered, too. They laughed a little at poor Twaddles but it was at the idea of the cologne bottle to stand on the Charity Bureau, and not at the little boy himself.
“We won’t make fun of him a bit, will we, Bobby?” said Meg, as the car stopped before the school. “Twaddles was as good as gold to give away his own bottle of cologne, and perhaps someone will like to have it.”