"Foster, _don't sit down on it_!"
"Heck, why not?"
"It's probably full of spiders," Portia told him.
"Or maybe rats?" Foster suggested hopefully.
His mother looked far from happy.
Aunt Hilda went over to one of the windows and, after a short struggle,
managed to open it wide. The first fresh air in more than fifty years
came into the room, chilly, but it brought a smell of spring. Beside
the window, heavy curtains of torn damask flapped softly, shaking down
more dust.
Julian came into the room carrying a stepladder that he'd found in the
laundry.
"What are you going to do, Jule?" asked Portia.
"I want to set the chandelier free," he said, opening the ladder and
ascending. "Hold onto it, will you, Porsh? I don't know how strong it
is."
Standing on tiptoe, he began to unfasten the dark baize cover of the
chandelier; dust smoked up from it; dead moths, dead spiders, dead
gnats showered down.
"Ow, watch it, Jule!" protested Portia, spitting out dried moth wings.
"You're all right; you've got your head tied up in a rag. All you have
to do is keep your mouth closed, but I can hardly breathe," Julian
said, and sneezed six times, as if to prove his point.
"Look out below!" he called in a moment, and Portia skipped aside as
the baize bag dropped to the floor in a cloudy heap.
"Wow! Look at that!" shouted Foster. "It's like an upside-down
fountain!"
And that was the way the chandelier did look. Elaborate, sparkling, it
had been closed away from dust all these years, and its many lusters
trembled, fresh and bright as drops of ice water.
"What a lovely thing!" cried Aunt Hilda. "Barbara, do you realize what
you have? A Waterford chandelier!"
"Waterford? Really? Yes, I do believe it is!" Mrs. Blake's face, which
had been rather worried and upset, began at once to have another look.
Foster jumped up and down as hard as he could to see if he could make
the chandelier tinkle, and he did: it even _sounded_ like ice water, or
like the pieces of ice in ice water.
"Foster, for pity's sake, stop!" said his mother. "Julian, as long as
you've brought the ladder, would you mind taking down those dreary
curtains? And now let's start our house cleaning."
Soon they were all at work; even Foster had a cloth, which he flapped
and whacked at everything, stirring up much more dust than he disposed
of.
"It's fun to sweep and clean when there's plenty of _real dirt_,"
Portia said enthusiastically, wielding her broom. "The trouble is
there's not usually enough to make anything look any better when you're
through."
Outdoors the men still banged and hammered at the window boards, with
Davey supervising. Indoors there was a commotion of sweeping and
sneezing. The gloomy curtains dropped from their rods, pair by pair,
and each time the room grew lighter. Already it seemed a different
place.
Somewhere outside a bird began to sing: a real bird, not a sparrow, not
a jay; and then, as if the whistling song had been a signal, the sun
came out.
"Mrs. Blake, Mrs. Blake!" shouted Davey Gayson, thrusting his head in
at the open window. "There's flowers out already, about a hundred of
them or a million! I brought you some. Look!" He held out a handful of
crocuses: small lighted cups of white and lavender and yellow. "They're
all _over_!" he said triumphantly, feeling as if he had invented them.
Mrs. Blake took the little bunch of flowers. The bird sang. The
chandelier chimed softly as air moved in the room, and then the
sunlight caught it and all the many lusters blazed and dazzled.
"Oh, I think we're going to _love_ this house," said Mrs. Blake.
"Going to? I love it already," Foster declared.
"So do I, I'm crazy about it," Portia agreed, giving her brother a hug
before he could defend himself.
As for Julian, he felt so fine that he went over to the piano and
played a chord that sounded like a broken bedspring.
"Perhaps some day we can afford to buy that piano a new set of
insides," Mrs. Blake said, dusting off one of the stout gilded ladies
that held up the keyboard. "But until then it's just going to stay here
as it is; I could never bear to part with it."
"Oh, never!" Aunt Hilda agreed. "Just looking at it makes you think of
all those big, fat, glorious singers that Great-Aunt Ida used to talk
about: Schumann-Heink and Nordica and Nellie Melba. And of boxes at the
opera stuffed with people named Vanderbilt and Astor, all flaming with
diamonds and waving fans made of feathers...."
"It doesn't look as if it should make piano noises," Julian said. "I
mean it's so fancy and gaudy, it ought to make kind of a loud racket
of tunes like a jukebox or a steam calliope."
"Or a fire engine," added Foster, influenced by the combination of
red and gold; and having uttered the words, he became a fire engine
himself, howling and wailing like a siren and careening busily about
the crowded room, taking each corner on two wheels.
"Out, Foster, out! Out!" commanded his mother, flapping her dustcloth
at him. "Go find Davey and stay outdoors!"
Willingly the fire engine departed through a window, siren going full
blast.
* * * * *
By noon the room was beginning to show signs of being conquered. The
moth-eaten rugs had been flung out of the window; so had the curtains,
and so had the doleful swags above the Turkish cozy corner.
"But, Mother, please leave the bamboo curtain, will you? Please?"
Portia pleaded. "Listen to the sound it makes." She ran her fingers
across the strands, which did make a delicious sound: small hailstones
rattling on dry leaves.
"Well, I don't know. It is rather pretty. All right, I will," her
mother said. "But on one condition, dear: that you will string the
beads and put the fallen strands back up again."
Portia agreed willingly to this (and lived to regret it later, for it
proved to be a most tedious job and took hours. Still it looked very
pretty in the end).
A sound of noon whistles, one from Attica, one from Pork Ferry, came
through the open windows, and then a welcome call from the men. They
had brought the lunch from the station wagon, and everyone was
starved. They all went out by way of the window, and Davey led them to
the place where the crocuses, "a hundred of them, or a million," were
starred over a gentle slope that once had been a lawn.
"Is the water running in the pipes yet?" Foster wanted to know, and
when his father told him it wasn't, he said: "Hooray, then we can't
wash, we can't wash, we can't wash!"
"Yippee!" was Davey's comment, but Aunt Hilda said: "Not so fast"; and
she produced a gallon Thermos jug. "Hot water for washing hands _only_;
we can't waste it on faces. And here's a bar of soap."
"Heck," said Foster, but he did the job.
Then all of them, with clean hands and dirty faces, settled down to the
delightful occupation of eating sandwiches and deviled eggs and fruit
and Aunt Hilda's angel cake. The sun was warm on their heads, and the
air smelled of spring, and they kept looking up proudly at the queer
old towered house that they were bringing back to life again.
* * * * *
All they were able to do that day was to clean the drawing room and
the front hall. By the time they were done, the walls had been cleared
of hanging wallpaper strips and dusted down; the floors had been
swept, scrubbed, and waxed. The divan of the Turkish cozy corner,
gingerly dismantled (and proved to be the archaeological site for many
civilizations past and present of clothes moths, silver fish, spiders,
and beetles), had been thrust out the window, since the front door
refused to budge, to join the other discards on the grass.
Mrs. Blake kept wandering about the room and pausing to observe it,
first from one angle, then another. She looked very happy and dirty.
All of them were dirty, black as sweeps and exhausted, but all felt
sustained by the satisfaction of accomplishment.
"Time to call it a day," Mr. Blake said at last, peering in at the
window. "We've liberated thirty-seven windows and the back door. And
that's enough!"
He also admired the work of those who had stayed indoors, and climbed
over the sill to exclaim about the drawing room. So did Uncle Jake.
Portia and Julian were sent in search of the little boys, who were
finally located in the greenhouse, resting among ancient flowerpots.
They had had an extremely busy afternoon exploring what Foster grandly
called "The Property."
"We found a brook way back in the woods," he said. "We own the piece of
it that goes through 'The Property,' don't we, Daddy?"
"It's ours to use, at least."
"There's a bridge across it," Davey added. "Kind of a. It's pretty
rotten, I guess."
"He fell through," Foster said casually.
"Oh, Davey," cried Mrs. Blake. "Are you soaked? What will your mother
say!"
"I dried off all right; it was a good long time ago," Davey assured
her. "So _she_ won't care."
"Well, I just hope you don't catch cold!"
All of them, in straggling procession, trailed along the nearly
obliterated drive. Mr. Blake had a swollen thumb from banging it with
a hammer; Uncle Jake had a crick in his back. Mrs. Blake had a bruise
on her shinbone, and Aunt Hilda had one on her elbow. Julian had a cut
on his hand, and Portia had a splinter under her fingernail. As for
the little boys, their jeans were stuck with last year's burs; old
goldenrod fuzz clung to their sweaters; and where the brambles had
managed to reach their skin, they were scratched.
"We look more like a left-over army than ever," Mr. Blake observed.
"But I'm not quite sure whether we're the victors or the vanquished."
"Why, we're the victors, Daddy. You _know_ that!" Portia chided him.
"I wish all battles were as pleasant," her mother said. Then she said:
"I don't think yellow after all. No. Something warmer. Coral or rose;
or a rose pattern."
"Linoleum?" Foster asked.
"Curtains," replied his mother.
That night before he went to bed Foster emptied the pockets of his
jeans, which, if they had been clean in the morning, now looked very
tired and dirty, just the way he liked them.
The pockets yielded a good assortment: a brass ring from a portiere,
several flaky pieces of mica, two rather bashed-in oak galls, a pine
cone, a bone of unknown origin, an empty milkweed pod, and Baron
Bloodshed's buttonhook.
He set the oak galls, the pine cone, and the milkweed pod on his bureau
to decorate it, but put everything else back in his pockets. Pockets,
after all, are to keep things in.
5
_The Sheep-Lady's Secret_
The next eight days flew by for the Blake family. Every morning they
returned to the Villa Caprice ("I wish I could think of another name
for the place!" Mrs. Blake kept saying), and every day they worked
like beavers. Nor were they alone. Julian and Aunt Hilda always came
with them; Uncle Jake when he could steal the time. Mrs. Cheever
lent a willing hand, and so did her brother; and then there were the
newcomers, newcomers who soon became friends: Mr. Lance de Lacey,
the plumber, and his assistant, Henry Bayles; Mr. Matt Caduggan, the
carpenter, and _his_ assistant, Joe Baskerville; Mr. Ormond Horton, the
painter; and old Eli Scaynes, who did not care to be called "mister"
and who was going to "do something about the grounds."
The children liked Mr. Caduggan the best because he brought his dog to
work. It was a large tan animal with one game leg and a bent ear, and
its name was Popeye.
"Only dog in the world likes spinach," Mr. Caduggan explained. "That's
why we call him Popeye. Used to be his name was Duke, but one day while
I was to the phone at dinnertime, he come up to the table while my wife
wasn't looking, raised up on his hind legs, and et up all the spinach
in the dish. _Left_ the liverwurst that was right there, _left_ the ham
baloney. Just et up the spinach. So we call him Popeye."
All the men were nice, however. Mr. de Lacey had a beautiful singing
voice and the word "Mother" tattooed on his arm in red and blue ink.
Henry Bayles handed out free chewing gum. Joe Baskerville was good at
cracking jokes. Mr. Ormond Horton had a cat at home that was going to
have kittens, and he promised one to Portia. Eli Scaynes knew the name
of every bush, bird, flower, and tree, and was a very practiced talker.
The house that had been locked in silence for so many years rang now
with sounds of calling and talking, and occasionally of groaning, as
Mr. Blake received the news from Mr. de Lacey that he would "have to
have all new copper piping," and from Mr. Caduggan that "the carrying
timbers under the main floor is settling so bad they'll all have to be
propped up on lolly-columns."
There were all the other busy sounds of banging and thumping and sawing
and scraping. The ancient smell of mildew and neglect was replaced by
robust smells of soap and polish; later there would be a strong odor of
wet paint.
Nearly every day somebody discovered something new and important.
Mrs. Blake discovered a Lowestoft tea set wrapped up in very old
newspapers at the back of a cupboard. It was white with a pattern of
green ivy leaves.
"Why, I remember hearing about that tea set," Mrs. Cheever told her.
"Mrs. Brace-Gideon never cared much for it; she thought it too plain.
The one she preferred was a fancy one, all curlicues and gold and
roses, but she knew that this one was valuable, so she kept it, thank
fortune."
"Thank fortune," echoed Mrs. Blake fervently.
Mr. Blake discovered the cellar. "A full cellar!" he exulted. "Someday
we can have a furnace and spend the Christmas holidays here."
"Or just plain live here all the time," said Foster.
Portia discovered a closet full of Mrs. Brace-Gideon's old party
dresses: bowed and beaded and bugled and spangled and fringed; draped
with festoons of ribbons and lace, and each one weighing pounds. "When
Lucy Lapham gets here, we can dress up every day," she said.
Foster discovered the dumb-waiter.
In the pantry, which, planning for the future, he had entered several
times already by the small serving window, he had noticed in a casual
way that there was a door set into the wall. It was a square door, a
cupboard door he supposed, set about three feet above the floor. One
day he gave it a whack by accident, and hearing that the whack made an
unusually hollow drumlike sound, he decided to open the door. It was
hard work to get it open because it was stuck in its frame. (Everything
in the house was stuck, being swollen with damp and disuse, and all the
Blakes developed good muscles and bad blisters that summer simply from
the amount of lifting, yanking, shoving, pushing, and pulling that was
required of them.)
Finally, though, Foster managed to wrench the thing open, and looked
in at what appeared to be a very small elevator in a shaft.
"Hey, Dave!" yelled Foster. "Come look at this!"
Davey came from the kitchen, where he had been industriously grinding
up acorns in the coffee grinder; a fact unknown to Mrs. Blake.
"What is it?" he inquired. "An elevator?"
"Not for people. Maybe for dogs," said Foster, who had never seen a
dumb-waiter in his life.
"Maybe for children?" Davey wondered.
"Well, come on. What are we waiting for?" invited Foster; and he hiked
himself up and into the box of the dumb-waiter. "Come on in, Dave;
there's room for two if we sit kind of squeezy."
Davey fitted himself in by Foster. It was rich with dust in there, but
by now they were very much at home with dust, so who cared. They had to
sit cross-legged and pull in their elbows, and if they had been a few
years older, they would have had to bend their heads down, too, but as
it was they fitted very well.
Foster grasped the prickly hemp rope that hung at one side, gave it a
tug, and with a croak and a wobble, their elevator rose up in the shaft.
"Man!" cried Davey in delight. "Give her another yank, Foss, and see if
she goes up to the roof!"
It was dark as they went up the shaft, but not badly dark, not pitch
dark, because the door below stood open, letting in the light.
Foster maneuvered the dumb-waiter up as far as it would go: to another
door on the next story, but there was no latch on the inside, so of
course they couldn't open it. Then they went down to the first floor
and then up again. The ascending box lurched pleasantly on its rope,
knocking against the walls of the shaft now and then and creaking and
croaking as it went.
"Up to Pluto, up to the moon!" cried Foster.
"Up to the moon in an old soup spoon!" sang Davey, in a burst of
inspiration.
This seemed so terribly funny to them both that they began to giggle.
They reached the top of the shaft again with a bump, and paused there
in the exciting darkness that was not dark enough to be scary.
"Up to the moon in an old jelly spoon!" sang Foster, and the giggles
redoubled.
At that very instant, outdoors on the front porch, Mr. Caduggan and Joe
Baskerville, after a mighty effort and some strong language, managed
to force the great front door to open at last. It swung in heavily,
rustily, with a slow reluctant groan, and as it gave way, the March
wind entered, blew in a current through the hall and the dining room,
finally reached the pantry, and firmly slammed the dumb-waiter door.
Total blackness in the shaft.
The giggles stopped abruptly.
"_Hey!_" yelled Davey.
"Ma-a-a!" yelled Foster. "_Daddy!_"
They called and called, but no one heard them. After a while, because
it seemed the only thing to do, they began to cry.
* * * * *
Portia, coming upstairs to refresh herself with a look at her beloved
round room, heard most curious noises: a keening and wailing and then
some thumps. But where were they coming from? Where in the world? She
listened a moment, then hurried into her parents' room: the big one
that had belonged to Mrs. Brace-Gideon herself.
But the room was empty.
Empty of people, that is. Otherwise, it was occupied by large
furniture, large mirrors, and on the wall opposite the door a large
square oil painting of a motherly-looking barefoot lady wearing a
Grecian robe and balancing a sort of pitcher on her shoulder. In the
background, above an arrangement of sheep and ruins, fat pink sunset
clouds swam in a school.
"Ma-a-a! Boo-hoo!" came the wail, directly it seemed, from the picture
itself or from the wall behind it.
Portia felt her scalp creep and, turning, ran from the room, through
the hall, and down the stairs, calling in her turn.
"Mother! Daddy! Mother! Daddy!"
Oh, I don't want it to be a ghost, she thought. Oh, I don't want our
lovely house to be haunted!
Her mother, holding a ruler and a pair of pliers, emerged from the
drawing room. Her father, holding a monkey wrench and a can of machine
oil, came bounding up from the cellar stairs.
"What is it, Portia?"
"Upstairs, upstairs--oh, I hope it isn't a ghost--somebody's crying in
the wall!"
"_What?_"
"Listen! Just listen!"
With their faces turned toward the ceiling they listened. Faintly they
heard the wailing.
"That's not a ghost; that's Foster!" declared Mrs. Blake, running for
the stairs. Her husband and daughter were close behind.
"In your room," Portia directed, and when they entered it, her father
and mother were as puzzled as she had been.
"But there's nobody.... _Foster!_" called Mrs. Blake. "Where are you,
darling? Can you hear me?"
"We--we're in here. In the elevator thing," gulped Foster's voice,
right behind the sheep-lady's picture.
"Oho!" said Mr. Blake, with the tone of one who is inspired. He leaped
across the room to the picture and ran his fingers along the heavy
gilt frame. "Fake!" he exclaimed. "I thought so! It's not a picture
hanging on a wall; it's a door!"
His searching fingers found the partially concealed latch on the right
side of the frame, and after the usual struggle of wrenching and
tugging, managed to open the picture door. Foster and Davey, two dirty
owls, blinked in the sudden light, tear tracks shining on their cheeks.
"Oh, darling!" cried Mrs. Blake, hugging Foster out of the dumb-waiter;
then she reached for Davey and hugged him out, too.
"Great Scott, those ropes are _ancient_!" said Mr. Blake. "Thank the
Lord they didn't fail! Luckily they were closed away from the weather
all this time. Otherwise--" But he left the sentence unfinished.
Mrs. Blake was so relieved that she began to scold. "Never again,
Foster, do you hear? _Never!_ It was a dreadfully stupid thing to
do! Those ropes are more than fifty years old: maybe even sixty or
sixty-five! They might very well have broken and then--" But she, too,
left the sentence unfinished and gave her son another hug instead.
Foster was so relieved that he began to boast. "It was neat! I yanked
that old jalopy up till it hit the top, bang! And then I yanked it down
till it hit the bottom, bang! And then I yanked it up again, and I bet
that old jalopy never went so fast before. It was neat, wasn't it,
Dave?"
"Ye-es," Davey said. "But I guess we better never do it again."
"Nope," said Foster soberly, remembering the pitch-black shaft. "I
guess we better never."
"But why in the world do you suppose Mrs. Brace-Gideon had a
dumb-waiter landing in her bedroom?" Portia asked. "And why did she
hide it with that picture?"
"Mrs. Brace-Gideon was a lady of leisure," her mother said. "She
probably took her breakfast in bed. The dumb-waiter would bring her
tray up each morning, nice and hot, from the kitchen pantry."
"And the painting, no doubt, was put there to conceal a plain
functional door with what she considered to be a thing of beauty," said
Mr. Blake, studying the picture.
Portia thought of the dumb-waiter and the sheep-lady, and Baron
Bloodshed, and the crystal chandelier, and all the other curious or
lovely things they had discovered.
"What a place!" she said thoughtfully. "You know what this house is,
Mother? Daddy? It is a house of astonishment!"
6
_The House of Astonishment_
It was indeed a house of astonishment. The day before the last day
of spring vacation, Mr. Caduggan, who had been having what he called
"a jawb" getting the attic door open, finally _did_ get it open and
mounted the steep stairs beyond it carefully, testing the treads.
A few minutes after he had reached the top he came licketty-splitting
down again, with Popeye at his heels in a three-legged run.
"Mrs. Blake, Mrs. Blake!" shouted Mr. Caduggan. "Oh, Mrs. Bla-ake!"
Portia was startled from her room by his intemperate bellows, and Mr.
Caduggan drew up short at sight of her.
"Where's your mama, Portia?"
"In the pantry looking over the china, I think," Portia said. "Why?
What is it? What's the matter?"
But Mr. Caduggan was already on his way down the next flight of stairs,
with Popeye just behind him, barking impulsively. Portia followed, of
course, and Julian joined them in the front hall.
"What goes? Is the house afire?"
"I don't know," Portia said. "I guess not or he'd say so."
They ran after him through the hall, through the dining room, to the
pantry. Popeye barked.
Mrs. Blake and Aunt Hilda turned from their work, startled by the
racket, and Aunt Hilda nearly dropped a teacup.
"What in the _world_?" said Mrs. Blake.
"Well, I tell you, ma'am," Mr. Caduggan said gustily, heaving with
mystery and importance. "If you'll just step up-attic for a minute, I
think there's something there you'll want to see."
Foster and Davey, who had been in the laundry, sitting cozily in a
washtub reading comics, dislodged themselves and came to find out what
was happening.
"What in the _world_?" repeated Mrs. Blake, dusting her hands on her
dusty apron. "What can it be, Mr. Caduggan?"
"I'd rather you saw for yourself, ma'am," he replied cryptically.
"Is it something good or something bad?" Portia pleaded as they all
mounted the stairs to the second floor.
"Wait and see," said Mr. Caduggan.
"Is it something dangerous?" asked Foster, alight with hope.
"Is it a live thing?" asked Davey. And then he asked in a lower tone:
"Is it a _dead_ thing?"
"Wait and see," replied Mr. Caduggan imperturbably.
At the attic door he turned and said: "One at a time, please, up these
stairs. They ain't none too steady. Need bracin'. Mrs. Blake, you
first, ma'am."
Mrs. Blake ran lightly up the wooden steps, then Aunt Hilda, then the
children (Julian first, as usual).
It was dim "up-attic" and like the rest of the house, full of objects
and full of dust. Mr. Caduggan went to a window and ripped off the dark
and rotting window shade.
"There," said he.
Mrs. Blake drew in her breath. So did Aunt Hilda.
"Duncan Phyfe!" exclaimed Mrs. Blake, in the low voice of awe.
"Duncan who? I don't see _anybody_," Foster said.