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's _gone_! 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 chased _her_ away, though, Min;
_you_ know 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 that _is_ the 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.
11
_The Hot Spell_
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 to _us_. 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 die _more_!"
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's _go_!"
"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 he _did_ tend 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'm _dying_ for a swim."
"Now, wait a moment, wait a moment," said Mr. Payton, frowning. "Let
me see. There used to be--oh, years ago--but there _used_ to be a
limestone quarry back in the woods above Pork Ferry. _Way_ back.
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 I _can_;
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, and _then_ Mrs. 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."
"_If_ it'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, _exactly_ the 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. _Her_ stripes 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, watch _me_!"
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.
12
_The Plan_
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 what _that_ would mean," Portia said darkly.
"Paint _everywhere_ but 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.