They came out of the woods and approached the Gone-Away houses. The wet, tall grass was speckled with buttercups, and the air was darting with Judge Chater's swallows, uttering shrill cries of alarm.
At Mrs. Cheever's house a loudly singing radio voice was silenced in mid-warble at their knock. Trip-trip-trip came Mrs. Cheever's rapid footsteps. The door opened.
"Come in, come in," she told them. "We'll hang your waterproofs right here in the entry. What inclement weather! But the swamp likes it; I declare you can almost hear it purring!"
Mr. Payton, in the kitchen, rose as they entered, wreathed in pipe smoke.
"Figure of speech. What you can really hear is the frogs," he said. "Good afternoon, Philosophers; it's a pleasure to see bright faces on a dull day. Sit down, do. My sister is making tea."
"I brought some butter for a present." Julian planked the package on the table.
"Wonderful. Thank you; then we'll certainly have toast."
When they were all seated, Portia said: "I brought a present, too, Aunt Minnehaha."
Mrs. Cheever opened the package eagerly.Voluta imperialiswas a lovely thing: buff, tinged with pink. It was gracefully turned, and on top of it there was a circle of little points that gave it a crowned look.
Mrs. Cheever was enchanted. She clasped her thin hands, and the wintry pink came into her cheeks.
"Oh, Portia, what a beautiful shell! I can't tell you how it pleases me. No, indeed I can't."
She lifted it to her ear, listening, looking thoughtful, looking far away. She smiled to herself.
"Once a sea shell saved my life," she said. "At least I think it did."
"Tell!" demanded Portia.
"Please," Julian added severely.
"Yes,please."
"I never saw the ocean as a child, you know. I never saw any kind of salt water. We lived in town all winter, and in the summer we were always here at Tarrigo (as it was called then), and we asked nothing better.
"Now, the summer I was eleven years old—just your age, Portia—"
"Except I'm eleven and a half," Portia reminded her.
"Yes, well,almostyour age—I came down with typhoid fever. I know how I got it, too, though no one else did, except for Baby-Belle Tuckertown.
"Thatsummer a terrible thing happened to Baby-Belle; a governess was engaged to take care of her! A French governess called Mamzelle. (We children thought that was her real name: 'Mamzelle,' just like 'Edith' or 'Alice' or 'Ethel.') She was a short-tempered woman, spare and tall, with an oblong nose, rather red, and cheekbones that looked varnished. She wore glasses attached to a chain, and she never took her eyes off Baby-Belle. Oh, Baby-Belle was just like a bird in a cage! I felt sorry for her, yes, indeed I did. And besides it was no fun to be with her any more because Mamzelle was always there, too.
"Poor Baby-Belle! She had always been a free, happy, willful girl: a regular tomboy, full of ginger! She could throw a ball as well as a boy (almost). She could climb trees like a wild ape of the jungle and swim like a fish!Shedidn't care if her garter broke and her stocking went shriveling down her leg.Shedidn't care if she lost her hair ribbon. I declare, by the end of summer Tarrigo was littered with Baby-Belle's lost hair ribbons!... She didn't show one single solitary sign that she would ever grow up to be a young lady. No, indeed she did not.
"So I suppose all that worried her dainty little mother—Mrs. Tuckertown was very small and dainty—but it was Mrs.Tuckertown'smother, that bossy old Mrs. Ravenel, who was responsible for hiring Mamzelle, I'll be bound.
"I don't know which was the more miserable: Baby-Belle or that governess.Shehad a perfect horror of the lake. Every time Baby-Belle went swimming, Mamzelle would hover and flap along the shore shrieking and calling: 'Bébé-Belle, Bébé-Belle! Trop loin! Trop loin! Viens ici! Vitement! Immédiatement!' (That means 'Come here this minute' in French.)
"And then if it rained, poor Baby-Belle, who loved to go barefoot, was made to wear rubbers and carry an umbrella! Oh, the blow to her pride! And when she rode horseback, she had to ride sidesaddle; and in the mornings she had to sit still while Mamzelle curled her hair in long curls around a wet stick, and whenever she talked back or was naughty, Mamzelle would strike her sharply on the knuckles with that same stick.
"'Oh, IhateMamzelle!' Baby-Belle said to me on one of the few occasions when we were by ourselves. She was ready to cry with rage. 'I'd like tokillher!'
"And I said: 'Oh, no, Baby-Belle, you must never hateanybodythat much!' I was a dreadfully goody-goody child in those days (but I got over it, thank fortune).
"And Baby-Belle stuck her tongue out at me and said: 'I don't give a hang. I hate her, I hate her, Ihateher! I wish she was dead. So there!'
"Well, the last straw was what happened next.
"Baby-Belle had a dear little dog, a toy fox terrier named Snippet. She thought the world of that little dog and he thought the world of her. He followed her everywhere, and his basket was in her room, though where he really slept, of course, was right on the foot of her bed.
"So one day Baby-Belle did something particularly outrageous. I don't recollect what it was now, but it must have been pretty bad, because that night, to punish her, Mamzelle shut Snippet outside; not just outside Baby-Belle's room, mind you, but outside thehouse.
"Oh, Baby-Belle really did cry then and promised to be good as gold for the rest of her natural life. But to no avail; Mamzelle was relentless. Baby-Belle could hear her poor little dog crying and yelping, but when she attempted to steal downstairs and let him in, she got no farther than her bedroom door, because right out there in the hall Mamzelle was sitting with that stick in her hand! Baby-Belle just had to go back to bed and cry herself to sleep.
"Now late that night a storm came up; a heavy, cold rain. If she hadn't been asleep, I'm sure even Mamzelle would have taken pity on poor Snip and let him in. In the morning when theydidlet him in, he was soaked to the bone and shivering dreadfully. Poor little mite, the next thing anyone knew he was down with pneumonia and had to be taken to Dr. Clisbee, the veterinary, and Dr. Clisbee said he didn't think he could save him—"
"But did he? Could he?" Portia interrupted with great anxiety.
"Yes, dear, in the end he did. Snippet lived to be very old and spoiled and fat. But of course there was no way Baby-Belle could know that at the time. When she thought he was going to die and she'd never see him again, she came racing over to our house and rushed up to my room and told me the whole story with tears running down her cheeks.
"Well, I was perfectly horrified. Yes, indeed I was, and I said to Baby-Belle: 'Baby-Belle, I agree with you now. I hate Mamzelle, too. I justhateher! How'd she let you come here now without her?'
"And Baby-Belle said: 'She thinks I'm in the bathroom. That's the only place she lets me be alone. The amount of time I've spent in ourbathroomthis summer!' And then Baby-Belle told me she had determined to run away. I must never tell a soul, she said, and could I please let her have some money, as she didn't have a cent.
"Well, I had a little bank, and we managed to get the money out of the slit with the aid of a nail file: not much more than a dollar, but that seemed like a good sum to us, then. I told Baby-Belle that I thought she was very wise to run away and that I would get some food for her to take and accompany her part of the way.
"So I got some bread and cheese and cold biscuits from the larder—it was all I could manage; the cook was in the kitchen—and pretty soon we started out, sneaking off into the woods behind Tarrigo so nobody would see us....
"We kept turning our heads and looking back, half expecting to see Mamzelle bearing down on us, waving that horrid stick! But we never did, thank fortune, and after a while we knew we were safe and slowed our pace.
"Oh, we walked and we walked. We climbed fences and crossed meadows, and the sun grew hot and I grew thirsty. It was August, as I recollect: a fine bright day.
"But I grew more and more thirsty. It became positive torture. Finally, I declare I could not stand it, no, I could not, and when we came to a little brook trickling through a meadow, I lay right down on my stomach and lapped up water like a dog. Now, I knew better than that. Papa had told all of us, time and time again,neverto drink from brooks we didn't know about. But I felt perished with thirst, and I just plain didn't care. No, indeed I did not.
"Pretty soon after that I had to say good-by to Baby-Belle. 'I'm not the one who's running away,' I told her. 'And I have to go home to lunch.'
"So we said our good-bys, and I wished Baby-Belle good luck. Once I turned around, I remember, and looked at her trudging away, with her hair ribbon untied and dangling as usual and the bag of bread and cheese in her hand, and I wondered when I would ever see her again!
"Well, as matters turned out, I saw her again that very same day. Poor Baby-Belle! She got tired of climbing fences and jumping ditches, and in one field she was chased by a bull; so when she came to the highway, she determined to walk on it for a while. And nosoonerhad she started to do this than along came—who do you think?—Mrs. Brace-Gideon in her big, glittering barouche with its two big, glittering horses and the coachman and footman on the box.
"Baby-Belle tried to scrunch herself invisible, she told me later, but oh, no, Mrs. Brace-Gideon spotted her with her bright, bold eagle eye and commanded the coachman to stop.
"'Why, Baby-Belle Tuckertown, what are you doing so far from home?' Mrs. Brace-Gideon asked her. 'And all by yourself, too; why that's not proper! Climb right in, child; we will drive you home at once!'
"Of course, Baby-Belle couldn't think of any waynotto climb in, so she had to. And it's my suspicion that she was greatly relieved. Running away from home is not the easy thing they claim it is in books. No, indeed it is not."
"Was it the brook water that gave you typhoid?" Julian asked.
"I'm very sure it was. Shortly afterwards, I began to feel ill and listless, and thenveryill, oh, dreadful, and it seemed to go on and on.... So there I was lying on my bed one day, burning up with fever—I was alone in the room for a few minutes for some reason—when I heard a strange sound at the window and there was Baby-Belle flinging her leg over the sill.... My room was on the second floor, but I didn't think about that; my fever gave me so many queer thoughts and dreams that nothing seemed queerer than anything else.
"'Min?' Baby-Belle whispered to me, and I said: 'You better go away quick; I'm catching!' And Baby-Belle said: 'Pshaw, I don't give a hang. I've brought you that sea shell Uncle Ninian gave me; the one you always liked, remember? Here, take it.'
"Well, at that moment I didn't really want the shell or anything else—except to be lying in a snow field at the North Pole maybe—but when she pushed it into my hand, it did feel cool, oh, how cool it felt, and I thanked her. Then we heard footsteps in the hall and Baby-Belle skedaddled out the window. (She had borrowed the painter's ladder.)
"Ihadalways admired the shell: a beautiful thing, exquisite in color, and smoothly shaped, like an egg. Baby-Belle told me how her Uncle Ninian had visited the Pacific isles; and once when he was in a boat on some lagoon, he had looked down into the water, down and down, and the water was as clear as if it wasn't there at all. The fishes might have been floating in air, Baby-Belle said he said, and they were all colors: gold and blue and purple and striped; and there were sea ferns and things, and way down, below the fishes and the ferns, was this beautiful shell. So Baby-Belle's Uncle Ninian decided to dive down and get it for his niece, and he did, though the water was much deeper than he'd thought, and he felt his lungs would burst before he regained the surface. When he gave the shell to Baby-Belle, he told her that if she held it to her ear, she would hear exactly the way the surf sounded on the barrier reef beyond the lagoon.
"After a while I put the shell to my own ear, and sure enough it seemed as if I could really hear the soft roar of surf on a distant reef; and when my dreams began again, they were all about the cool, clear water of the lagoon and the fishes drifting and the sea ferns waving, and I really believe, I really do, that that shell and the dreams it gave me helped me to recover."
"Minnie, you never told me that story before," said Mr. Payton rather indignantly, as he knocked the ashes from his pipe. "Nobody could ever figure out how you'd got typhoid—ever. Not even Papa."
"Oh, I still have a few secrets up my sleeve," replied Mrs. Cheever airily. "And the story isn't quite ended, because when I was convalescing, Baby-Belle came to see me. My hair had been cut off short as a boy's—they did that in those days when you had a bad fever—and Baby-Belle was really envious. She resented the poor judgment Fate had shown in making her a girl instead of a boy in the first place.
"She picked up the shell—I kept it on my bedside table—and she said: 'You know why I gave you this, Min? I gave it to you because Mamzelle is gone. She'sgone! Forever! And it's all because of you!'
"'Me?' I said, perfectly bewildered, and Baby-Belle said: 'Yes. Because when Mamzelle heard you had typhoid fever, she flew into a panic, she was so scared she'd catch it. Why, she couldn't get away fast enough, and she packed in such a rush that there was a long black stocking hanging out of one end of her suitcase like a tail!'
"So we both laughed at that picture, and then Baby-Belle looked sort of worried and she said: 'You know something, Min? When Mamzelle said she was leaving, I couldn't help feeling glad as anything that you'd caught typhoid fever! But only because it chasedheraway, though, Min;youknow that.... But I felt so bad about feeling glad that I thought I'd better give you Uncle Ninian's shell that you always admired so. Then I knew I'd feel all right again. And I did.'
"And thatisthe end of the story," Mrs. Cheever said decisively.
"But what about the shell, Aunt Minnehaha?" Portia asked her. "Where is it? Have you got it still? I'd love to see it."
A strange little expression flitted over Mrs. Cheever's face.
"No," she said. "No, as a matter of fact, I no longer have it." She hesitated a moment, then went on. "The shell proved to be extremely rare, and after the death of my husband, Mr. Cheever, when I fell upon hard times, I sold it. The amount I received for it tided me over until I could return to Tarrigo—or Gone-Away, as it was called by then. So it was twice that that sea shell came to my rescue! I hope it has been as kind to those who purchased it."
"But I wish you had it still." Portia sighed. Money seemed to her a very troubling, grown-up thing.
Outside, the rain was pouring down again, pouring hard. It trounced the leaves and bounced from the sills. Mrs. Cheever's hens, complaining, scurried for shelter; but the duck waddled serenely along the path. Now and then he would stop and look about him, and one could have sworn that he was smiling.
"We'd better go," said Julian.
"Would you like me to drive you?" offered Mr. Payton.
But, no, they wanted to run home. This rain was exciting; a massive downpour, and massive, too, was the sound of the summer's first thunder. It had a rolling, good-natured quality, like the roar of a well-fed lion.
"Good-by, Aunt Minnehaha, good-by, Uncle Pin!"
And Portia and Julian burst from the house, leaping and shouting: glad that it was raining hard and glad that they were children.
Early in July the weather turned very hot.
"Ain't had a spell like this in fourteen years," Eli Scaynes said happily, for though wiry, he was thin and elderly. The heat just suited his bones, and he went about his work humming a tuneless tune.
It suited the children, too, who wore as little as possible in the way of clothing and walked in and out of the hose sprinkler whenever they wanted to. It was hot in the morning when they woke up, and it kept on growing hotter all day long: still, burning, intense. The windless evenings, sparked with the drifting lights of fireflies and the fixed lights of stars, were so warm that the children were allowed to stay up later than usual. They made firefly lanterns and carried them off in the shadows, glimmering like will-o'-the-wisps, while the grownups sat in the lawn chairs talking and tinkling the ice in their cool glasses.
Each day it was hotter. Julian and Portia felt proud of it.
"The thermometer says 95°," Julian announced one morning; and on the next he said triumphantly, "It's 98!"
And then one day it was 100°, and the children were overjoyed, though the grownups were not.
The sun-beaten roses opened wide, large as lettuces, dropping their petals all too soon; and the soft new grass of the lawns felt warm and wilted under a bare foot.
The grownups sighed and complained; the dogs hung their tongues out; and the new kitten, Mousenick, slept flat as a dead kitten in any scrap of shade.
Mr. Ormond Horton had been as good as his word; he had brought Portia one of his cat's best kittens. He (it was a he-kitten) was little and gray, with tabby stripes on his sides like the wavery marks on watered silk, and eyes that were still blue because he was so young.
He did all the things a proper kitten should do. He romped, rolled, pursued his tail delightfully, tapped at a thimble with his perfect paw. He could flatten his ears, crouch, growl and stalk like a tiger. He could purr a miniature purr and wash his face better than Foster could. At dusk, small though he was, he could be quite alarming as he humped his back up, bushed his tail, and danced sideways staring eerily at something no one else could see.
Julian had named him, though Portia had planned to. He had just scooped the kitten up in his hand and said: "Here you go, Mousenick," and the name had stuck.
Everybody in the family liked him, and Gulliver and Othello did not mind him. As for Portia, whenever she looked at him, her heart melted.
During those hot days the Gone-Away houses stood cooking in the sun, giving off a smell of baked wood and dry rot, and very, very faintly of creosote: a delicious smell, the children thought. In the burning heat they were sometimes lured into the shady interiors of the most neglected houses, where, if they penetrated deeply enough, climbing over the rubble, the broken galleries and stairways, they could usually find a place, an inner hall or pantry, that was cool.
Judge Chater's was such a house; at the heart of the debris his dark-paneled dining room was like a cave: so damp that toadstools grew between the floor boards and the walls were stippled with mildew. Vandals had scratched their names on the plaster, broken the windowpanes and the Tiffany glass shades of the wall fixtures. Rainbow-colored shards glimmered among the toadstools.
"Yes. It's cool, but it's creepy," Portia said to Julian, who had led her there. "I don't—I'm not sure I like it."
"Well, it's not any place you'd want to stay," Julian admitted; and both of them thought of what Mrs. Cheever had told them.
"Next to Mrs. Brace-Gideon's house, the judge's house was the grandest one at Tarrigo," she had said. "Full of painted screens, you know, and jade figurines and porcelain vases, because he had spent many years in the Orient. He was a widower: a very rich elderly gentleman with no family left, except for his servants. They were all Chinese. I remember how they used to sound talking together: quacking and singing, or that's how it sounded tous. They were very nice and they liked children. It was so long ago that each of the menservants still wore a pigtail; and the women wore little coats and trousers, and when they ran, they trotted. All of them trotted on their boat-shaped slippers....
"Sometimes, I declare, even now when the wind's from the northeast, I fancy it carries a memory of their voices, a very faint quacking and singing!"
Standing in the cool ruin, Portia said to Julian: "I know I'd die if I should ever meet a ghost, but if I met a Chinese ghost, I'd diemore!"
At that moment a swallow flew in through a window, swished like a scimitar past their faces, uttered its frightened chatter, and departed as Portia uttered a frightened squeak.
"Julian, come on; let'sgo!"
"Take it easy, now, ta-a-ke it easy," Julian drawled; but he was glad to go himself.
On the day the thermometer showed one hundred degrees, Portia and Julian set out early for Gone-Away. It was only a little after nine, but already every trace of dew was licked away. As usual they carried their lunch boxes, but for a change each was wearing a straw hat. The sun's rays could be brutal as the day neared noon.
They had to stop to watch a chipmunk in the woods; they had to stop while Julian caught a butterfly; when they heard a cuckoo's wooden-mallet note, they had to stop until Julian could spot him with the field glasses.
At Gone-Away, wading through yarrow and Queen Anne's lace, they made straight for Mr. Payton's house and found him working in his garden. He had a tropical, exotic look because he was wearing the pith helmet Julian had discovered in the attic. They had decided to give this to him when they noticed how often, on these hot days, he would remove his broad-brimmed hat, sighing as he blotted his forehead with one of his fine frayed handkerchiefs. The present had pleased him greatly.
"Always, since boyhood, I have longed to own a solar topee!" he exclaimed.
"That's another name for a pith helmet," Julian murmured to Portia, and Portia said she knew it.
Mr. Payton turned the helmet on his hand, admiring it. Then he clapped it on his head, slightly tilted, stroked his mustache preeningly, and went to look at his reflection in a windowpane.
"Now, all I need is a large umbrella with a green lining. And a camel," he had said. "Oh, and perhaps a pyramid or a sphinx. But seriously, Philosophers, this topee will be a boon: light and cool, yet no bee's sting can penetrate it when I tend the hives."
And after that whenever hedidtend his beehives, whether the weather was warm or cold, he always wore the pith helmet under the bee veil instead of his usual hat.
Now he doffed it to them.
"Good morning, Philosophers. A pleasure to see you. We're in for another scorcher, I fear."
"The thermometer says 100° right now," Julian was glad to inform him. "Already.It will be worse than that by noon!" He sounded perfectly delighted, and was.
"By Jupiter!" Mr. Payton gave a whistle and dropped his hoe on the ground. "This is no day for gardening, then. Perhaps we'd better go and see how my sister is faring, though she never seems bothered by the heat."
They found Mrs. Cheever sitting on her front porch quite contented. Tarrigo lay at her feet, panting. He rolled his eyes at them pathetically, too hot to bark; but Mrs. Cheever looked cool and composed. She was wearing a dress of embroidered India mull. Once it had been white—"My sister Persy's graduation dress, just fancy!"—but time had tanned it and frayed it in many places. It looked very pretty, though, and she had pinned a rose to her collar, and the bow on her hair was the same color as the rose. She was sitting in a rocking chair with her mending, and on the table beside her lay a palm-leaf fan with green words painted on it: Atlantic City, 1889.
"Why, children, your clubhouse will be suffocating, won't it?"
"We're not going to use it today," Julian told her. "The guys—the other fellows—Tom Parks and Joe Felder are coming here to meet us—"
"And Lucy Lapham, too," Portia interrupted. "She's back visiting the Gaysons, thank goodness."
"The membership reunited, eh?" said Mr. Payton.
"Yes. They'll be here at eleven, and then we'll decide what to do. I wish there was anything to swim in but the brook."
"They won't let us use the river; too dangerous," Portia explained dolefully. "Oh, if only Tarrigo could turn back into a lake just for one day! I'mdyingfor a swim."
"Now, wait a moment, wait a moment," said Mr. Payton, frowning. "Let me see. There used to be—oh, years ago—but thereusedto be a limestone quarry back in the woods above Pork Ferry.Wayback. Abandoned. Springs fed into it. Cold. Refreshing. Wonder if it's still there? Probably not. Probably a used-car lot by now, or a public dump, or a drive-in motion-picture theater, or some other confounded thing," he concluded grumpily; the heat had made him grumpy.
"But we could go and see, couldn't we, sir? If you gave us directions."
"Nonsense, I'll drive you there in the Machine. As far as Ican; after that we'll walk."
"Now, Pin, I wonder if you should," his sister objected. "It might be too much for you. You might get heat exhaustion."
"Perfect nonsense, Minnie. You make me feel like an old crock!"
"Very well, then. Very well." Mrs. Cheever creaked her rocker back and forth. "How I wish you would not call me Minnie!"
Portia fanned herself with her hat. "We went exploring in Judge Chater's house yesterday, Aunt Minnehaha. I didn't like it very much. I thought it was spooky."
"I suppose it may be, now, all broken as it is. It was very grand once, though, wasn't it, Pin?... And every summer, just about this time of year, Judge Chater would give an evening party. He invited all the Tarrigo grownups and other ones from Pork Ferry and even Creston.
"Oh, we children hung out of our windows on that night! We could just glimpse the Chinese lanterns in the garden: big pearls, they looked like! And we could hear the carriages come driving up, so festive-sounding, and then the greetings and gabblings and the ladies laughing and trilling; and from the back of the house, where the kitchen was, came the sing-songing of the Chinese people. And the smell that wafted toward us! The party smell! Oh, Pin, do you remember?"
"Chinese delicacies. Fine cigars. Perfumery," Mr. Payton said with relish, stroking his mustache reminiscently.
"And there was a noise of popping, just like my little brother Lex's popgun, but it was really bottle corks. And then always at one point a silence would fall; an important chord would be struck on the piano, an introduction played, andthenMrs. Brace-Gideon's great big singing voice would come ballooning out of the windows into the night ... into the summer night ... and we children would hold our ears and roll up our eyes and groan out loud...."
"It was generally opined that Mrs. Brace-Gideon had her cap set for Judge Chater," Mr. Payton said.
"But she never got him. No, indeed she did not!" Mrs. Cheever shook her head decisively.
"The best thing, though," she continued, "the thing we were all waiting for, groggy with sleep though we were, was that very late in the evening—oh, very late indeed—a display of fireworks would be set off at the end of Judge Chater's dock."
"Set off by Wing Pin and Fat Lo, my two good friends," said Mr. Payton.
"And what fireworks they were! Weren't they, Pin? Oh, I never saw anything to equal them! Dragons! Fountains! Flower gardens! Big blazing birds! All made of fiery stars and colors! And everything sizzled and banged and dazzled, and there was a wonderful, exciting Chinese-y burning smell. Wasn't there, Pin?"
"M-m-m!" agreed her brother, smiling as he remembered. "Yes ... yes ... Wing Pin and Fat Lo. Years since I've thought of them. Fine fellows. One fat, one thin. (Fat Lo was the thin one.) They kept Tark and me and all the rest of the Tarrigo rascals supplied with Chinese firecrackers. Not just for the Fourth of July. No. All the time. Kept us very happy. Not the girls, though."
"Not the grownups, either," said his sister. "Poor Mrs. Ravenel—"
But Mrs. Cheever was interrupted here by the arrival of the other charter members of the Philosophers' Club: plump Tom Parks, handsome Joe Felder, and Portia's special friend Lucy Lapham, a dark-eyed girl with curly hair.
"Oh, I'm so glad to see you!" cried Portia, giving her a hug. "I'm so glad to see another girl!"
After the flurry of greetings, Tom Parks sat down on the porch steps with a heavy groan.
"I bet I've melted off five pounds."
"Better melt off twenty more," Julian advised him kindly.
They all looked very hot from their long walk. Their cheeks were strawberry red, their noses spangled with sweat, and their hair was soaking.
"I bet you could fry an egg on my hat," Joe Felder said. "I mean it's hot, man,hot!"
"Well, cheer up, though." Portia comforted them. "Uncle Pin is going to show us a place to swim."
"Ifit's still there," the old gentleman amended.
"Oh, boy, I hope it is!" Tom said fervently. Then his face fell. "We didn't bring any bathing suits. Heck!"
But Mrs. Cheever, it seemed, was equal to any occasion. She recalled that in one of the trunks that had been brought from the Big House, she had seen a quantity of ancient bathing suits, all sizes, that had long ago been worn by the Payton children.
"As Portia says, we were a very 'keeping' family. Thank fortune," Mrs. Cheever observed. "Girls, come with me to my storeroom, will you?"
And soon their arms were laden with the old wool bathing suits, smelling of moth balls so strongly that, as Lucy said, "You could lean against it."
"I advise you each to wear a boy's suit," Mrs. Cheever told them. "Good gracious, when I think of what we had to wear! Dresses with skirts and collars and sleeves! Stockings and sand shoes!Hats, straw hats, tied under our chins! I wonder they didn't make us wear gloves!"
Each boy's suit consisted of a striped tunic and striped trousers.
"It was the fashion then," said Mrs. Cheever. "Stripes were considered very continental."
Packed into the Franklin, Mr. Payton and the children steamed along the road to the hot highway, contributing an unusual odor of moth balls to the day. The highway danced with heat and shimmered with puddle mirages; and once Mr. Payton stopped the car so that they could watch the phenomenon of a turtle hurrying,trotting, across the blazing asphalt that burned its feet.
"I never saw a turtle run before. I never knew they could," Julian said in awe.
"They keep their secret well," Mr. Payton agreed. "It occurs to me that that old fable of the tortoise and the hare may well be simply propaganda put out by the hare."
They drove through the red-hot main street of Pork Ferry, where people carrying bags of groceries stopped to gape at the loud majestic progress of the Franklin. Mr. Payton bowed cordially to left and right, like visiting royalty.
After they left the village and the highway, they drove along a wooded road, slowly ascending. The Franklin huffed and struggled, and all of them, except Mr. Payton, got out and walked to make things easier for it.
"Just about here, I'd say," Mr. Payton announced finally, applying the brake. "There seems to be the remnant of a footpath."
It was a remnant indeed, and they kept losing it. The woods were shady, it was true, but the shade was hot and close; cat-claw scratched at them, and gnats kept trying to get into their eyes.
Mr. Payton, in the lead, fought his way through hazel bushes.
"It's clearing ahead," he called encouragingly, and in a moment they heard him give an exclamation of pleasure.
"Well, by Jove. Just look at that! A sight for sore eyes, Philosophers, and the same,exactlythe same, as it was more than sixty years ago!"
The quarry held deep water in its cup: a little lake that lay still as a jewel, clear as a jewel, without a breath of air to wrinkle its surface. On this scorching noonday it was indeed a sight for sore eyes.
"Suave," breathed Julian.
"What are we waiting for!" demanded Tom, pulling off his shirt. He and the other boys scrambled into the bushes to put on their suits, and Lucy and Portia found their own little dressing room behind a rock. Soon they were in the striped bathing suits. Lucy giggled at the sight of Portia, and Portia giggled at the sight of Lucy. The tight-fitting trousers reached well below their knees; the tight-fitting tunics hugged their ribs and had high necks and little shoulder sleeves. Lucy's stripes were black and yellow.
"You look like a big fat hornet," Portia said.Herstripes were red, white, and blue.
"You look like a skinny little patriotic barber pole," Lucy retorted.
The boys looked just as odd as they did, and so did Mr. Payton, whose suit, also vividly striped, was a relic of the same era.
Good-natured jeers and insults filled the air. So did an alien smell of moth balls. But not for long. Soon the children were popping into the water, happy as frogs.
It was cold! Cold and delicious, and so clear that they could see the carpet of drowned leaves lying far below them on the bottom.
At first they just swam and soaked and luxuriated. The midday sun blazed down on them. Mr. Payton swam the breast stroke holding his beard well out of the water and smiling benignly.
"Ah, by Jupiter, ah, by Jove," he purred contentedly.
"Let's stay here all day long, Uncle Pin, can we? Let's stay until it's suppertime."
"Why not, why not? When we're chilled, we'll lie on the rocks and bake ourselves dry, and then we'll swim again."
After a while Julian, who wanted to show off his diving, managed to find a plank and some boulders, and contrived a springboard. For the first few dives his skill was greatly admired, but then everybody else wanted a turn, even Tom Parks, who slapped the water resoundingly with his stomach every time.
The rock walls of the quarry echoed with squabbles and laughter and splashing and shouts. It echoed often with the words: "Look at me! Watch this! Hey, you guys, watchme!"
Old Mathew Partridgeberry, a recluse who lived in a house halfway up the mountain, heard the racket and came to see who was making it. Peeping between hazel leaves, he saw the children in their hornet stripes, and the old man in his. Not since his own distant childhood had he seen bathing suits like these! It gave him a turn. For a moment he felt a chill of superstition: could it be ... ghosts? A switch in time?... But then he smiled to himself. No. These were real live children; live, loud twentieth century children. A prank of some sort, or a game, no doubt. Still smiling, he turned away and was lost in the shrubbery, and no one ever knew that he had been there.
It was a beautiful summer. There was just enough rain to keep the land green and the farmers contented, but most of the days were warm and fair.
The children swam, roamed, rode their bicycles up hill and down dale, picnicked, conducted meetings in the club, and paid visits almost daily to their Gone-Away friends. In the long, light evenings they played Prisoner's Base and Any Over and Allee, Allee, In-Free.
In addition, they had their private projects. Foster and Davey, though they had their own little house on Craneycrow, decided to build themselves another in the boughs of an oak tree on "The Property." They went to work with hammers and nails, inflicting so many minor injuries upon themselves that Julian said the tree house should be named Palazzo Band-Aid. Between hammerings, the little boys could be heard arguing and conversing, shrill as the sparrows that clustered in the Boston ivy.
Portia and Lucy practiced ballet (Lucy took lessons in Albany). They had scratched out a garden for themselves containing only the vegetables they preferred: tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and carrots.
"No beets!" Portia said firmly.
"No spinach!" said Lucy.
"Oh, no, never! And absolutely no cucumbers and no broccoli and no cabbages!"
Another project was the rehabilitation of the six sad little rooms in the attic. Mr. Ormond Horton donated the paint, but the girls proposed to do the work themselves.
"Let's have each one a different color," said Portia. "One blue, one green, one red—or, no, pink—"
"And one yellow, and one orange, and—what other colors are there?"
"Purple?" suggested Portia.
"Yes, why not! I never did see a purple room."
Fortunately for them, the rooms were tiny. Even so, the work was harder than they had supposed, and nobody would help them. The little boys offered to hopefully, but were refused.
"You know whatthatwould mean," Portia said darkly.
"Painteverywherebut on the walls," said Lucy, sounding like her own grandmother. She had a green streak in her hair that wouldn't wash out, and Portia's fingernails were purple. But it was all in a good cause; the rooms were beginning to look cheerful, to say the least.
Julian had started a paper route that took him half the morning, and the other boys, too, had part-time jobs.
Mr. Blake's vacation was over; he had had to return to his work in the city and only came out for weekends, but his weekend projects were so numerous that, as he said, he had "to get back to the office to relax."
As for Mrs. Blake, she was seldom seen without something in her hands: hammer and nails, or paint and paintbrush, or lengths of fabric. "You really never get finished with a house," she said contentedly. But sometimes she just wandered quietly from room to room, gloating.
The Villa Caprice continued to offer surprises: certain tall spikey plants near the house turned out to be lilies: great freckled fragrant ones. A drawer in the library desk was discovered to be full of jigsaw puzzles, dominoes, playing cards, and a chess set. Some surprises were not so pleasant: the leak that appeared in the dining room; the peculiar temperament of the bathroom plumbing; the fact that the drawing-room fireplace smoked in rainy weather.
Gradually they became familiar with the sounds peculiar to the house: the stairtread in the hall stairs that chirped like a cricket when anyone stepped on it; the swing door into the dining room that whooshed and sighed; the way the chimneys rumbled when the wind was high. All these were nice because they were the sounds of home.
"This placeishome, now," Portia said. "And the apartment in New York is just the place we stay in in wintertime."
"Winter. Ugh," said Foster. "I wish it wouldn't get here for eleven years."
But the summer, as summers are apt to do, was spinning itself out fast, too fast. Already it was August.
"It's funny," Portia observed. "I never really believe in school in summertime. I know it exists, and all, but it just doesn't seem reallyreal."
"Mine does," Lucy said. "I can smell it if I think about it. I can smell the blackboard and the varnish on my desk and the wet floor in the hall when they've scrubbed it."
"I move we change the subject," suggested Tom Parks. "Is there another stuffed egg on the premises?"
They had met, all of them, for a picnic at Gone-Away—both the official groups, of course: the members of the Fang Club, all two of them; the members of the Philosophers' Club, all five.
It was exactly the sort of day for watermelon, so that was what they had for dessert. Foster luxuriated, sinking two thirds of his face into the icy pink slice.
"Hey, you know what, Dave?"
"No, what?"
"My new front teeth are getting to be more than just edges. I can sort of bite with them now."
"I've been biting with mine for months," Davey said wearily.
Except for a watery crunching and slurping, there was silence; then Foster said: "But you know what, Dave?"
"No, what?"
"When we've got our real full-grown front teeth, we won't be able to call it the Fang Club any more, because we won't have any fangs."
"What will we call it then?"
"I don't know. We'll think of something."
"What about the Dental Maturity Club?" suggested Julian; but of course they didn't pay any attention tohim.
After the watermelon had been eaten right down to the rind, the little boys repaired to Craneycrow and the girls went off to visit Mrs. Cheever.
Tom Parks sighed and let his belt out a notch. Then he and Julian and Joe, for no particular reason and not really thinking about it, climbed up in the Vogelhart willow tree. Sun and food had made them lazy, and each of them found a perching place and sat there like a sleepy baboon high among the wind-sifting, sun-sifting leaves.
Swallows looped and dipped around Judge Chater's tipsy cupola.
"You know something, Jule?" Joe Felder said. "I bet you'd never dare spend a night in one of these old dumps. Judge Chater's house, for instance."
"I bet I would."
"I bet you wouldn't."
"I bet I would," but then Julian, who was a fairly honest boy, felt compelled to add: "Not alone, though.Withsomebody. You, maybe. How about it? I dare you!"
It was a bright, lively afternoon. Foster and Davey could be heard sparrow-chirping on their island, and Mr. Payton, distantly, could be heard whistling in his garden. To the left, there was the scatterbrained conversation of hens and a sound of feminine voices as Mrs. Cheever and the girls came out of her house to go berrying.
The world was a safe place. Anyone could see that it was safe.
"O.K.," Joe said. "You say when."
"You too, Tom?"
"Well, I guess so." Tom agreed, but not with alacrity.
"We'll do it on the night of the full moon," Julian said. "That's only three nights off, Thursday. We'll be able to find our way around better by moonlight, and another thing is—another rule is—that we can't bring any flashlights."
"Heck, why not?"
"That would make it too easy," Julian said happily. His very eyeglasses sparkled with excitement. "We don't just want this to be aneasysort of thing, do we? Because it has to be in the nature of a—of a test."
"Why?" Tom wanted to know.
"For discipline," Julian replied. He had a noble feeling in his forehead as he said it. "Self-discipline," he added.
"I don't know if I need it," Tom said. "Igetdiscipline. I get it everywhere. I get it at home, I get it at school, I get it in the mornings working at Bilmeyer's store."
"Oh, everybody needs it," Julian assured him. "And listen, you guys, this whole operation has to be kept secret. Absolutely secret. From everyone."
"Our families, even?"
"Especially our families. They might say no."
"From the girls, too?" asked Joe.
Julian just ignored him. That went without saying.
"We'll slip out after dark, see, when everything's quiet. We'll meet here under the tree. I'll be spending the night at the Blakes so I can get here fast, and you guys will have your bikes...."
Busily and happily he laid his plans, and soon his companions were infected with his enthusiasm; even Tom.
"We'll bring some blankets in case we get sleepy," Julian said.
"And some food in case we get hungry," Tom added.
"And an alarm clock to wake us up in time to go home before they miss us. I'll bring it," Joe volunteered.
Thursday came: fine and clear and very warm. Julian smuggled three blankets into Judge Chater's house. He had also brought a bottle of Mrs. Cheever's A.P. Decoction because at night the mosquitoes were apt to be bad. He crawled cautiously up the rickety stairs that swayed and swagged beneath his feet. Reconnoitering, the day before, he had found that there was a fairly sound room on the second floor not quite so littered and ruined as the rest. Besides, though he scarcely admitted it to himself, to be upstairs seemed somehow—safer.
Now in the broad light of day even the hint of such a thought appeared ridiculous. Sunshine blazed beyond the broken windows; flies buzzed in and out. Everything looked perfectly ordinary and cheerful, however shabby.
"Nothing to it," Julian remarked aloud, sweeping fallen plaster aside with his foot and clearing a space to spread the blankets on.
"Hey, Jule," called Tom's voice below stairs. "Where are you anyway?"
"Up here; come on up! Take it easy on the stairs, though."
Tom came, carrying a tin box under his arm. He lifted the lid of it and peered in lovingly.
"Three chocolate-almond bars," he recited. "Three bags of potato chips. Three bags of salted peanuts. And Joe's bringing cold root-beer tonight along with the alarm clock."
"Great," Julian said. "And I know where I can get some salami and a bottle of dill pickles."
"M-m," murmured Tom wordlessly. The thought of dill pickles made his mouth water; then he said: "You know, Jule, this doesn't seem like a test, or discipline, or anything. It just seems like a neat thing to do. It just seems like fun."
"I know," said Julian. "Let's hope we feel the same tomorrow morning."
Julian thought that the Blakes' house would never quiet down that night. He waited in his room, and waited. He felt himself getting sleepy and fought himself awake again. But finally, after all the last good nights were said, after all the tooth-brushings and murmurings and yawns and the closing of doors, he was able to creep out of his room and inch his way along the hall. Pressed against his chest, he held the bag of salami and dill pickles as if to keep them quiet, too.
Going down the front stairs, he forgot about the chirping stair tread, and of course it chirped loudly. Julian froze against the banister, staring down at Miss McCurdy's dim figure on the newel post. He had chosen to come this way because the back stairs were uncarpeted and noisy, and now—But no one came; nothing happened. Soon he continued down and tiptoed through the dark, watchful house to the back door. Behind him, the kitchen clock ticked in a little scolding voice.
Outdoors the sound of crickets shimmered in the air; everywhere, all over the summer land. The bright moon was small in the sky; it lighted up the edges of the clouds that were swimming toward it. A small soft wind moved forward, and the trees, dry with August, rustled their leaves and whispered.
Julian hurried along the drive. Moon patches dappled the ground, moving now as wind stirred the branches above. The honeysuckle trees were frightening at night; they looked like stooping figures: old soldiers, giants, in great dragging cloaks. Julian would not have admitted to a soul that his heart was hurrying in his chest, but it was. He was glad of the strong reassuring smell of the salami pressed against his ribs.
He slowed down when he came to the clearing, and his heart slowed down, too. The clearing was blue with moonlight and humming with crickets. The wind was warm. Far to the right there was a lighted window in Mr. Payton's house. Far to the left there was another in Mrs. Cheever's. Julian whistled a tune softly. He felt fine; everything was going right, and there, sure enough, waiting under the willow, was good old Tom Parks.
"Hey, where've you been! You're late!"
"Couldn't help it; they just wouldn't settle down and I had to wait. Where's Joe?"
"Search me. I waited for him, too, but his house was all dark, and when I threw pebbles at his window, they made such a racket, I was scared his folks would wake up, so I scrammed out of there pretty fast."
"Well, there's no sense waiting any longer. Let's go in. I don't think he chickened out, do you?"
"No, not Joe. He's no coward."
They entered the gaunt old house on tiptoe. It was still in there, and stale. It smelled of age, of decay, of damp; and it was very dark. The swimming clouds had caught the moon and covered it. Wind was beginning to tease the house.
"Ow!" exclaimed Tom in an outraged whisper; he had barked his shin on something. "I think it was a crazy idea not to bring a flashlight. I think it was dumb. Ow!"
The stairway quivered and swung as the boys felt their way up, and then felt their way to the room they had chosen. The moon tore itself free from clouds just long enough to light them in; then it was seized and darkened again. Far, far away there was a sort of shuddering. One could hardly have called it a sound.
"Was that thunder?" Tom asked apprehensively.
"I don't think so," Julian said. He certainly hoped not. He walked over to one of the windows and leaned his arms on the sill. Mrs. Cheever's house was dark now; all the world was dimmed, but you could tell there was a moon somewhere; the clouds could not quite smother its light. Below, the Vogelhart willow tossed softly in the wind.
"What do you say we have a snack?" Tom suggested.
That seemed a good idea to both of them, and they spread the blankets out on the floor and sat down. Tom rattled open the metal box. Julian crackled open the paper bag. Soon the air was warmed with an odor of peanuts and salami and dill pickle, and there was a sound of crunching. In the darkness everything tasted perfectly delicious.
"But salty," Julian objected. "Do you realize, Tom, that every single thing we brought is salty? Except the chocolate, and that always make you thirsty anyway."
"Well, we counted on Joe and the root-beer. How could we know? I'm not thirsty yet, though, are you? If we don't think about it, maybe we won't be."
"Maybe not." Julian agreed doubtfully. But the more he tried not to think about it, the more he thought about it. He could feel himself inventing his own thirstiness.
"Doggone it, what do you supposehappenedto Joe?"
"I don't know. Fell asleep maybe, but there's no use worrying," Tom said philosophically. He was clanging things back into the tin box. "There's plenty left over for a snack later on if we need it."
He yawned a loud, satisfied yawn.
"Maybe we should sleep for a while."
"All right," Julian said, thinking about thirstiness; and they each stretched out on a blanket—it was much too warm for covers—and were quiet for nearly two minutes.
"Ow," Tom complained. "I never knew my bones had so many corners."
"You thinkyouhave troubles. You've got good natural padding, and I haven't. This is the hardest floor I ever felt."
"Well, we'll just have to get used to it. Soldiers do. Marines do."
"Rugs do," added Julian. "I don't mind the hardness of the floor so much, but I'm getting so thirsty I may have to drink the A.P. Decoction!"
Tom laughed. "Good thing you brought it anyway; here come the mosquitoes."
It was true. Somewhere just above their heads there was a sound like the wailing of the tiniest violin imaginable. Then another.
Hurriedly, Julian slapped his face and arms with Mrs. Cheever's famous Anti-Pest Decoction and handed the bottle to Tom. The room was suddenly permeated with an extraordinary smell, and because of it the sound of little violins diminished and was gone.
There was another distant shuddering in the air.
"Itisthunder, Jule," Tom said accusingly. "I told you it was."
"It may never get here, though. It's a long way away."
"It will get here," Tom pronounced gloomily. "Just wait and see."
Outside, the wind was picking up; the trees churned under it, and all the reeds of Gone-Away hissed and rustled as they bowed.
"Sh-h! What'sthat!" whispered Tom, clutching Julian's arm.
"Hey, quitgrabbingme like that; it startles me. What'swhat?"
"Listen—"
Clapcame the sound; then a sort of jiggle and squeak; thenclapagain.
"Oh, that. It's only a broken shutter banging against the house. I think."
"You hope."
Both boys were whispering now, and Julian was wishing that they had chosen a room with a door that would close and preferably lock. This door had been wedged and warped ajar by time and weather. Nothing would ever close it now.
An abandoned house takes the wind the way a ship takes heavy seas. It creaks throughout, seems to stretch and groan, then settle for a bit, then stretch and groan again. It does other things, too, or at least this one did: it had a constantly varying repertory of creaks, tap-taps, and sounds like the most hesitant of footsteps.
When Julian had thought about this adventure, he had imagined that the scary thing would be the deadly silence of Judge Chater's midnight house. But now it was the sounds—all these different sounds—that were scaring him, and in his heart of hearts he was beginning to wish that he had never insisted on this idiotic undertaking: this "test!" The only good thing about it, at the moment, was that he felt too worried to be thirsty.
Evidently Tom shared his attitude about the venture. "I don't know," he said. "I don't see what good it's going to do our characters just to sit here in a thunderstorm in a beat-up old house, feeling scared. I think it's going to bebadfor our characters. It is for mine."
"Well, why don't you go on home, then? Go ahead."
"And leave you here alone? You know I wouldn't. And anyhow, I'd probably get struck by lightning on my bike."
As if its name had been a cue, a tongue of lightning flickered, bright and close. It lighted the room so that for a split second each boy saw the worried solemn look on the face of the other. Then it was dark again, and approaching thunder slammed in the sky.
The broken shutter banged frantically; the old house strained and shook as if it were trying to tear itself loose from its foundations; and after a while the rain began all at once so that it fell on the roof like a solid thing.
The storm went on and on; they could not guess how long, but they knew when it had reached its pitch. The lightning, blue and blinding, winked and winked and hardly stopped winking; it seemed to lick the house. And the thunder hardly stopped thundering; sometimes it rolled and grumbled, and sometimes it burst the air with a bang; but it, like the lightning, seemed to have singled out this house for its prey.
"Hey, Jule! Listen!" shouted Tom. He had to shout above the uproar. "Anyone could be coming into this house, anythingcould be, and we'd never even hear it!"
But he was wrong. In one of those instants of lull, when the rain left to itself sounds peaceful and industrious, they heard something else—another sound—and it was in the house with them, yes, in this very house: hard, brisk footsteps, then an old voice calling....
"Uncle Pin?" breathed Tom, moving closer to Julian.
"Oh no, it's not him," whispered Julian, icy with the thought of Chinese ghosts.
"Listen—listen! Something is coming up the stairs!"
Something was. Something was coming, clicking and clattering—what? Oh, what? And then the sound was lost as the thunder burst itself apart, and burst the lightning with it. The world seemed to blow up.
Almost immediately there was a hideous tearing noise; a mighty crashinsidethe house!
And something white flashed by the door....
All this took only an instant, but when there is terror, an instant seems pinned motionless on time. The boys were clinging to each other, unashamed.
"The house has been struck," croaked Tom. "There'll be a fire."
"But the white thing! The white thing...."
There was another lull; in that last burst the storm seemed to have spent itself. Only the rain poured down and down; and now, quite close to them, the thin old voice called out again.
"Ma-a-a-a," it called.
Julian let go of Tom.
"It's only Uncle Sam! That crazy goat! He must have broken out of his pen."
"And come in here for shelter, I guess."
"Why here, I wonder? Why not somewhere else?"
But they would never know the reason. When they called him, Uncle Sam came clicking into the room, smelling strongly of wet goat, and the boys were so relieved, so glad to see him, that they gave him a chocolate bar to eat, paper and all.
"That crash though, brother, what was that?" Tom wondered, and sneezed. The air seemed suddenly thick and itchy. "Do you think we were struck?"
"No," said Julian, ashamed that his teeth were chattering still. "I think—I think that Uncle Sam finished off the s-stairs."
And that is what had happened, as they saw when they went to investigate. They could see, by the diminishing, fitful lightning, that where the stairs had been there was a chasm, edged with a hanging fringe of balustrade. The stifling cloud of dust and wood particles was beginning to settle now, but the boys kept sneezing.