lifted the lid; the last thing she had expected was the sight of fur,
and just for an instant she thought an animal was packed in there! It
gave her a shock. This trunk released a blinding smell of moth balls
and camphor, but the moths had obviously hardened themselves long ago
to the defenses laid down against them; they had invaded the trunk as
Caesar's legions had invaded Gaul. When Portia lifted out the thick
soft cape that lay on top, she gave it a little shake, and all the fur
departed from the skins; it rose in clouds of soft black thistledown,
tickling her nose and getting in her eyelashes and nestling gently on
her arms.
"Ow, Jule, help! Oh, how horrid! Ugh!" Portia blew fur from her lips,
brushed herself off, shivered. "I bet this is exactly how Pandora felt!"
"Better keep on digging, then. Hope was in that box, remember? Maybe
there's something great in this one, too."
"I'll never know," Portia said, shutting the clasps firmly, still
shaking herself, and blowing at the little hairs of fur.
"Do you suppose Mrs. Brace-Gideon ever threw _anything_ away?"
"I'm glad she didn't. I like finding things," Julian said. He was
wearing a very old pith helmet that sat down on his ears like a
soup tureen. Lacking panels to tap and quickly exhausting the
safe-searching possibilities of the attic, he had been opening a box or
two himself.
In the next trunk that Portia tackled there were many flannel bags with
ribbon drawstrings, and each bag contained a pair of shoes or slippers:
little pointy shoes with heels, buttoned ones, buckled ones, silk ones
with bead-embroidered toes.
"Mrs. Brace-Gideon must have had very tiny feet for such a great big
lady," Portia said thoughtfully, looking at the small frayed slipper in
her hand.
"Jule?"
"M-m?... Yes?"
"Do you think it's really all right for us to do this? I mean, to go
through all her very own things like this? _I_ don't believe she'd like
it if she knew ... do you?"
Julian considered.
"Well, think of it this way. Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been gone a long,
long time. Long before our fathers and mothers were born, even. So
now she's like someone in a book, or in history. If we were a couple
of archaeologists digging up a buried palace that had belonged to an
ancient queen or something, we wouldn't feel wrong about it, would we?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Well, there you are," Julian said handily, and Portia felt better.
Among the large trunks there was a very small one, a box really,
covered with cowhide and bearing on its curved lid the initial D, made
of brass nailheads. She lifted the lid cautiously (she had been very
cautious since opening the fur trunk) and saw that the little chest
was filled to the brim with yellowed paper bundles.
"Jule, come here; let's see what these are."
The paper was so old that it crumbled and powdered when she opened the
first bundle; and what it had contained was a sea shell, curved and
dappled as a little quail.
"Why, how pretty!"
"Look, it's got a label on it, too."
And so it had; a tiny glued-on label with the Latin name of the shell
written on it in meticulous old-fashioned handwriting.
"_Cypraea zebra_," Julian read, pronouncing the _zebra_ part correctly.
Portia had opened another bundle and held out a brown shell, fancy as a
fern.
"_Murex palmarosae_," read Julian, stabbing wildly at pronunciation.
Then he undid a bundle himself.
"Anyway, I know what this one is," he said, showing her a large
ear-shaped shell, lined with the luminous greens and blues of peacock
feathers. "It's an abalone. But that's not what it _says_ it is; it
says it's a _Haliotis_ something or other. I give up. I can't wait till
I study Latin. How are you going to be a scientist without it?"
"I don't look forward to it in the least," said Portia. "And I'm never
going to be a scientist."
Happy and absorbed, they sat cross-legged on the floor, taking out
bundle after bundle. Outside of a museum they had never seen such
shells: they were shaped like fans, lockets, towers, pin wheels,
hearts, trumpets. They were pleated and patterned, tinted with pink,
rose, crimson, yellow, mother-of-pearl; there were several pairs that
looked as if they had petals and that were colored like dahlias.
"I'm going to take these down to show Mother, later," Portia said.
"This is as good as a Christmas stocking, isn't it, Jule?"
"Better. More in it. I wonder who collected them all and marked them
all?"
"There's an initial on the lid: the letter D."
"Oh. Then obviously it must have been that ancestor of Mrs.
Brace-Gideon's: that Captain Deuteronomy Dadware. He must have sailed
to every beach on earth!"
"The lucky!"
"I know," agreed Julian.
When they were done with the shells, they found some cardboard boxes
containing quantities of old, old magazines: fashion magazines of the
early 1900's adorned with many pictures of strangely shaped young
ladies wearing hairdo's that jutted forward from their heads, and large
upturned hats that shot forward from the hairdo's, so that each young
lady looked something like a water pitcher.
Julian soon tired of these, but Portia was entranced. There were other
sorts of magazines, too, even older: in one, Portia found a story
called _Peter Ibbetson_. She liked the illustrations, and there were
children in them, so she began to read....
When Foster started calling Julian at the top of his lungs, she hardly
heard him, and when Julian told her he was going downstairs, she did
not hear him, either. Sometimes a story can open a world for you: you
step into it and forget the real one that you live in. Evidently this
was such a story.
* * * * *
Foster was waiting on the downstairs landing by the suit of armor. He
had a monkey wrench, a pair of pliers, and a can opener.
"I thought maybe you'd need these."
Julian looked at the suit of armor, then at Foster.
"Listen, Fang, it's still too big for you. No use even trying."
"I was afraid so. I suppose I'll just have to wait to grow into it,
then, won't I?" said Foster philosophically.
"Perhaps we can try the helmet on you, though. If I can ever get it
off; it probably hasn't _been_ off in hundreds of years."
Julian gave a mighty tug, and the helmet flew up in his hands with no
effort at all.
"Why, it's not even fastened down! O.K., Foss, stand still; let's try
this bonnet on you."
Julian lowered the helmet gently down over Foster's head.
"There you go, Sir Launcelot! Can you see all right?"
"Yes, through the eye windows, but it isn't very comfortable in here,"
Foster complained. His voice inside the helmet had a clangorous twang:
a robot's voice. "I don't like it very much. Something keeps tickling
my nose. Ow."
"Wait a minute."
Julian lifted the sharp-snouted visor without any trouble. Foster's
eyes and nose looked out, and a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor.
"Was that what was bothering my nose?"
But Julian didn't answer him. He had stooped to retrieve the piece of
paper and was studying it.
"Now what the--" he muttered, perplexed. Then all at once he jumped
straight up in the air as though he had stepped on a bee barefoot. "Oh,
man! Oh man, oh _brother_! PORSH!"
And he went thundering up the stairs in a one-boy stampede to the attic.
"Hey, wait!" cried Foster in his robot voice: the steel visor had
dropped down again. "Let me out of this thing!"
But Julian was gone. Foster sighed an echoing sigh within the helmet.
He could see pretty well through the eye slits, but he felt top-heavy,
as though he were wearing an iron bucket on his head, and he couldn't
get it off by himself. Sighing again, he felt for the banister and
started cautiously up the stairs to find his cousin.
"_Portia!_" roared Julian.
"Now what?" she said, marking her place on the page with her finger.
"Listen to this, just listen! This piece of paper fell out of the
helmet--"
"What helmet?"
"Oh, never mind, it doesn't matter. Listen; here's what it says: zero
dash, six R dash, two L dash, eight R dash, three whole turns R to
eight."
Portia stared at him. "Are you crazy or something?"
"Doesn't it mean anything to you? Listen again. R means right and L
means left, see? So it's zero dash, six _right_ dash, two _left_ dash,
eight _right_ dash, three whole turns _right_ to _eight_. Do you dig it
now?"
"No," Portia said.
"Oh, for Pete's sake. It's a combin_ation_, brain. It's sort of a
recipe for opening a safe. Now do you see?"
"Mrs. Brace-Gideon's safe?"
Julian just sighed.
"Well, how do you know that's what it is? Maybe it's a recipe for some
kind of dance: turn three times to the right and then six times to the
left or whatever it is. It _could_ be a dance."
Julian rolled his eyes upward.
"How do you start a dance at zero?" he inquired. "Just give me a clue."
At this moment, staring beyond him, Portia gasped. Footsteps were
sounding slowly on the attic stairs, and just above the level of the
attic floor appeared the helmet of an armored knight.
"Oh, Jule, oh, Jule," she whispered, grasping his arm; and then she
wished she hadn't. How she wished she hadn't! Because below the shining
headdress of Sir Launcelot was the figure of her brother Foster,
sloppily attired in blue jeans and a grass-stained T-shirt.
"_When Knighthood Was in Flower_," commented Julian, kindly ignoring
his cousin's moment of panic.
"Get me out of here, will you?" begged Foster, his plea reverberating
in the helmet. "Please hurry up."
When Julian had liberated him, he did a little hopping.
"Now my head feels light again. I feel light all over, and nice. But
you know what, Jule? I bet they used to have a lot of headaches in
knight-days. And stiff necks, too. And if their ear itched, how could
they ever scratch it?"
10
_The Rescue Shell_
"What I don't see," Portia objected later that day, "is what's so
wonderful about finding the combination when you haven't found the safe
and maybe never will."
"I don't know myself, to tell you the truth. It's just that it makes
the safe seem _realer_--as if we really would find it. I know that
doesn't make sense and it's a dumb way to reason; I guess you'd call it
a superstition or a hunch or something, but that's the way I feel."
"It will probably be empty if we do find it, just as Aunt Minnehaha
said."
"Maybe," Julian conceded, but he did not sound convinced. He refused
to give up the lovely thought of treasure--though for an instant he
glimpsed the idea that even if they did find the safe and even if it
did contain marvels, it still wouldn't be quite as good as thinking
about it and looking for it.
He and Portia were tramping along the soaked drive toward the road to
Gone-Away. The rain had stopped, but one felt it had only taken the
time to draw a breath or two before it began again. The clouds hung
low and wet, and when the small breeze stirred, every tree shook water
down.
"I like this day," Julian said. "But I don't see why I do."
The woods looked mysterious and dark, particularly where the
honeysuckle had woven its canopies among the branches; the roadside
was edged thickly with the green umbrellas of May-apple leaves;
and here and there, like a queer bell with a clapper, stood a
jack-in-the-pulpit, lonely and alert.
"Indians used to make flour from the roots of those, Aunt Minnehaha
says," Portia told Julian. "She said she tried it once and it tasted
terrible. She knows absolutely everything about everything that grows:
all the plants that you can eat or make medicine of, and all the plants
that can make you sick or kill you."
"Well, _I_ know that," Julian said. He had eaten many oddities at
Aunt Minnehaha's table; some he had liked: the day-lily buds dipped
in batter and fried, the salads made of young purslane and nasturtium
leaves; and some he had not: the pigweed spinach, and the boiled
milkweed sprouts.
"Aunt Minnehaha says there's no excuse for anybody starving in this
region. Why, you can even eat reindeer moss if you boil it! Did you
know that?"
"Well, I'm never going to do it till I have to," Julian said.
He and Portia were bearing gifts for Mrs. Cheever and her brother.
Julian had a pound of butter because the old people relished it and
had it rarely. Portia was bringing one of Captain Dadware's sea shells
(_Voluta imperialis_ was what the label said it was), because Mrs.
Cheever had once told her she was "partial to shells."
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 imperialis_ was 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, _almost_ your age--I came down with typhoid fever. I know
how I got it, too, though no one else did, except for Baby-Belle
Tuckertown.
"_That_ summer 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! _She_ didn't care if her garter broke and her stocking
went shriveling down her leg. _She_ didn'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's_
mother, 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. _She_ had 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, I _hate_ Mamzelle!' 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 to _kill_ her!'
"And I said: 'Oh, no, Baby-Belle, you must never hate _anybody_ that
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, I _hate_ her! 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 the _house_.
"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 they _did_ let 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
just _hate_ her! 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 our
_bathroom_ this 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, _never_ to 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 no _sooner_
had 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 way _not_ to 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 then _very_ ill, 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.)
"I _had_ always 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.