SPRINKLES AND GUSTS.
Mrs. Dunikin used to bring them in, almost all of them, and leave them
heaped up in the large round basket. Then there was the second-sized
basket, into which they would all go comfortably when they were folded
up.
One Monday night we went down as usual; some of us came in,--for we
had been playing croquet until into the twilight, and the Haddens had
just gone away, so we were later than usual at our laundry work.
Leslie and Harry went round with Rosamond to the front door; Ruth
slipped in at the back, and mother came down when she found that
Rosamond had not been released. Barbara finished setting the
tea-table, which she had a way of doing in a whiff, put on the sweet
loaf upon the white trencher, and the dish of raspberry jam and the
little silver-wire basket of crisp sugar-cakes, and then there was
nothing but the tea, which stood ready for drawing in the small
Japanese pot. Tea was nothing to get, ever.
"Mother, go back again! You tired old darling, Ruth and I are going to
do these!" and Barbara plunged in among the "blossoms."
That was what we called the fresh, sweet-smelling white things. There
are a great many pretty pieces of life, if you only know about them.
Hay-making is one; and rose-gathering is one; and sprinkling and
folding a great basket full of white clothes right out of the grass
and the air and the sunshine is one.
Mother went off,--chiefly to see that Leslie and Harry were kept to
tea, I believe. She knew how to compensate, in her lovely little
underhand way, with Barbara.
Barbara pinned up her muslin sleeves to the shoulder, shook out a
little ruffled short-skirt and put it on for an apron, took one end of
the long white ironing-table that stood across the window, pushed the
water-basin into the middle, and began with the shirts and the
starched things. Ruth, opposite, was making the soft underclothing
into little white rolls.
Barbara dampened and smoothed and stretched; she almost ironed with
her fingers, Mrs. Dunikin said. She patted and evened, laid collars
and cuffs one above another with a sprinkle of drops, just from her
finger-ends, between, and then gave a towel a nice equal shower with a
corn-whisk that she used for the large things, and rolled them up in
it, hard and fast, with a thump of her round pretty fist upon the
middle before she laid it by. It was a clever little process to
watch; and her arms were white in the twilight. Girls can't do all the
possible pretty manoeuvres in the German or out at croquet, if they
only once knew it. They do find it out in a one-sided sort of way: and
then they run to private theatricals. But the real every-day scenes
are just as nice, only they must have their audiences in ones and
twos; perhaps not always any audience at all.
Of a sudden Ruth became aware of an audience of one.
Upon the balcony, leaning over the rail, looking right down into the
nearest kitchen window and over Barbara's shoulder, stood Harry
Goldthwaite. He shook his head at Ruth, and she held her peace.
Barbara began to sing. She never sang to the piano,--only about her
work. She made up little snatches, piecemeal, of various things, and
put them to any sort of words. This time it was to her own,--her poem.
"I wrote some little books;
I said some little says;
I preached a little pre-e-each;
I lit a little blaze;
I made--things--pleasant--in one--little--place."
She ran down a most contented little trip, with repeats and returns,
in a G-octave, for the last line. Then she rolled up a bundle of
shirts in a square pillow-case, gave it its accolade, and pressed it
down into the basket.
"How do you suppose, Ruth, we shall manage the town-meetings? Do you
believe they will be as nice as this? Where shall we get our little
inspirations, after we have come out of all our corners?"
"We won't do it," said Ruth, quietly, shaking out one of mother's
nightcaps, and speaking under the disadvantage of her private
knowledge.
"I think they ought to let us vote just once," said Barbara; "to say
whether we ever would again. I believe we're in danger of being put
upon now, if we never were before."
"It isn't fair," said Ruth, with her eyes up out of the window at
Harry, who made noiseless motion of clapping his hands. How could she
tell what Barbara would say next, or how she would like it when she
knew?
"Of course it isn't," said Barbara, intent upon the gathers of a white
cambric waist of Rosamond's. "I wonder, Ruth, if we shall have to read
all those Pub. Doc.s that father gets. You see women will make awful
hard work of it, if they once do go at it; they are so used to doing
every--little--thing"; and she picked out the neck-edging, and
smoothed the hem between the buttons.
"We shall have to take vows, and devote ourselves to it," Barbara went
on, as if she were possessed. "There will have to be 'Sisters of
Polity.' Not that I ever will. I don't feel a vocation. I'd rather be
a Polly-put-the-kettle-on all the days of my life."
"Mr. Goldthwaite!" said Ruth.
"May I?" asked Harry, as if he had just come, leaning down over the
rail, and speaking to Barbara, who faced about with a jump.
She knew by his look; he could not keep in the fun.
"'_May_ you'? When you have, already!"
"O no, I haven't! I mean, come down? Into the one-pleasant-little-place,
and help?"
"You don't know the way," Barbara said, stolidly, turning back again,
and folding up the waist.
"Don't I? Which,--to come down, or to help?" and Harry flung himself
over the rail, clasped one hand and wrist around a copper water-pipe
that ran down there, reached the other to something-above the
window,--the mere pediment, I believe,--and swung his feet lightly to
the sill beneath. Then he dropped himself and sat down, close by
Barbara's elbow.
"You'll get sprinkled," said she, flourishing the corn-whisk over a
table-cloth.
"I dare say. Or patted, or punched, or something. I knew I took the
risk of all that when I came down amongst it. But it looked nice. I
couldn't help it, and I don't care!"
Barbara was thinking of two things,--how long he had been there, and
what in the world she had said besides what she remembered; and--how
she should get off her rough-dried apron.
"Which do you want,--napkins or pillow-cases?" and he came round to
the basket, and began to pull out.
"Napkins," says Barbara.
The napkins were underneath, and mixed up; while he stooped and
fumbled, she had the ruffled petticoat off over her head. She gave it
a shower in such a hurry, that as Harry came up with the napkins, he
did get a drift of it in his face.
"That won't do," said Barbara, quite shocked, and tossing the whisk
aside. "There are too many of us."
She began on the napkins, sprinkling with her fingers. Harry spread up
a pile on his part, dipping also into the bowl. "I used to do it when
I was a little boy," he said.
Ruth took the pillow-cases, and so they came to the last. They
stretched the sheets across the table, and all three had a hand in
smoothing and showering.
"Why, I wish it weren't all done," says Harry, turning over three
clothes-pins in the bottom of the basket, while Barbara buttoned her
sleeves. "Where does this go? What a nice place this is!" looking
round the clean kitchen, growing shadowy in the evening light. "I
think your house is full of nice places."
"Are you nearly ready, girls?" came in mother's voice from above.
"Yes, ma'am," Harry answered back, in an excessively cheery way.
"We're coming"; and up the stairs all three came together, greatly to
Mrs. Holabird's astonishment.
"You never know where help is coming from when you're trying to do
your duty," said Barbara, in a high-moral way. "Prince Percinet, Mrs.
Holabird."
"Miss Polly-put--" began Harry Goldthwaite, brimming up with a
half-diffident mischief. But Barbara walked round to her place at the
table with a very great dignity.
People think that young folks can only have properly arranged and
elaborately provided good times; with Germania band pieces, and
bouquets and ribbons for the German, and oysters and salmon-salad and
sweatmeat-and-spun-sugar "chignons"; at least, commerce games and
bewitching little prizes. Yet when lives just touch each other
naturally, as it were,--dip into each other's little interests and
doings, and take them as they are, what a multiplication-table of
opportunities it opens up! You may happen upon a good time any
minute, then. Neighborhoods used to go on in that simple fashion; life
used to be "co-operative."
Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry had gone away.
"Only you can't get them into it again," objected Rosamond. "It's a
case of Humpty Dumpty. The world will go on."
"_One_ world will," said Barbara. "But the world is manifold. You can
set up any kind of a monad you like, and a world will shape itself
round it. You've just got to live your own way, and everything that
belongs to it will be sure to join on. You'll have a world before you
know it. I think myself that's what the Ark means, and Mount Ararat,
and the Noachian--don't they call it?--new foundation. That's the way
they got up New England, anyhow."
"Barbara, what flights you take!"
"Do I? Well, we have to. The world lives up nineteen flights now, you
know, besides the old broken-down and buried ones."
It was a few days after that, that the news came to mother of Aunt
Radford's illness, and she had to go up to Oxenham. Father went with
her, but he came back the same night. Mother had made up her mind to
stay a week. And so we had to keep house without her.
One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down. I don't know why, but if
ever mother did happen to be out of the way, it seemed as if he took
the time to talk over special affairs with father. Yet he thought
everything of "Mrs. Stephen," too, and he quite relied upon her
judgment and influence. But I think old men do often feel as if they
had got their sons back again, quite to themselves, when the Mrs.
Stephens or the Mrs. Johns leave them alone for a little.
At any rate, Grandfather Holabird sat with father on the north piazza,
out of the way of the strong south-wind; and he had out a big wallet,
and a great many papers, and he stayed and stayed, from just after
dinner-time till almost the middle of the afternoon, so that father
did not go down to his office at all; and when old Mr. Holabird went
home at last, he walked over with him. Just after they had gone Leslie
Goldthwaite and Harry stopped, "for a minute only," they said; for the
south-wind had brought up clouds, and there was rain threatening. That
was how we all happened to be just as we were that night of the
September gale; for it was the September gale of last year that was
coming.
The wind had been queer, in gusts, all day; yet the weather had been
soft and mild. We had opened windows for the pleasant air, and shut
them again in a hurry when the papers blew about, and the pictures
swung to and fro against the walls. Once that afternoon, somebody had
left doors open through the brown room and the dining-room, where a
window was thrown up, as we could have it there where the three were
all on one side. Ruth was coming down stairs, and saw grandfather's
papers give a whirl out of his lap and across the piazza floor upon
the gravel. If she had not sprung so quickly and gathered them all up
for him, some of them might have blown quite away, and led father a
chase after them over the hill. After that, old Mr. Holabird put them
up in his wallet again, and when they had talked a few minutes more
they went off together to the old house.
[Illustration]
It was wonderful how that wind and rain did come up. The few minutes
that Harry and Leslie stopped with us, and then the few more they took
to consider whether it would do for Leslie to try to walk home, just
settled it that nobody could stir until there should be some sort of
lull or holding up.
Out of the far southerly hills came the blast, rending and crashing;
the first swirls of rain that flung themselves against our windows
seemed as if they might have rushed ten miles, horizontally, before
they got a chance to drop; the trees bent down and sprang again, and
lashed the air to and fro; chips and leaves and fragments of all
strange sorts took the wonderful opportunity and went soaring aloft
and onward in a false, plebeian triumph.
The rain came harder, in great streams; but it all went by in white,
wavy drifts; it seemed to rain from south to north across the
country,--not to fall from heaven to earth; we wondered if it _would_
fall anywhere. It beat against the house; that stood up in its way; it
rained straight in at the window-sills and under the doors; we ran
about the house with cloths and sponges to sop it up from cushions and
carpets.
"I say, Mrs. Housekeeper!" called out Stephen from above, "look out
for father's dressing-room! It's all afloat,--hair-brushes out on
voyages of discovery, and a horrid little kelpie sculling round on a
hat-box!"
Father's dressing-room was a windowed closet, in the corner space
beside the deep, old-fashioned chimney. It had hooks and shelves in
one end, and a round shaving-stand and a chair in the other. We had to
pull down all his clothes and pile them upon chairs, and stop up the
window with an old blanket. A pane was cracked, and the wind, although
its force was slanted here, had blown it in, and the fine driven spray
was dashed across, diagonally, into the very farthest corner.
In the room a gentle cascade descended beside the chimney, and a
picture had to be taken down. Down stairs the dining-room sofa,
standing across a window, got a little lake in the middle of it before
we knew. The side door blew open with a bang, and hats, coats, and
shawls went scurrying from their pegs, through sitting-room and hall,
like a flight of scared, living things. We were like a little garrison
in a great fort, besieged at all points at once. We had to bolt
doors,--latches were nothing,--and bar shutters. And when we could
pause indoors, what a froth and whirl we had to gaze out at!
The grass, all along the fields, was white, prostrate; swept fiercely
one way; every blade stretched out helpless upon its green face. The
little pear-trees, heavy with fruit, lay prone in literal "windrows."
The great ashes and walnuts twisted and writhed, and had their
branches stripped upward of their leaves, as a child might draw a head
of blossoming grass between his thumb and finger. The beautiful elms
were in a wild agony; their graceful little bough-tips were all
snapped off and whirled away upon the blast, leaving them in a ragged
blight. A great silver poplar went over by the fence, carrying the
posts and palings with it, and upturned a huge mass of roots and
earth, that had silently cemented itself for half a century beneath
the sward. Up and down, between Grandfather Holabird's home-field and
ours, fallen locusts and wild cherry-trees made an abatis. Over and
through all swept the smiting, powdery, seething storm of waters; the
air was like a sea, tossing and foaming; we could only see through it
by snatches, to cry out that this and that had happened. Down below
us, the roof was lifted from a barn, and crumpled up in a heap half a
furlong off, against some rocks; and the hay was flying in great locks
through the air.
It began to grow dark. We put a bright, steady light in the brown
room, to shine through the south window, and show father that we were
all right; directly after a lamp was set in Grandfather Holabird's
north porch. This little telegraphy was all we could manage; we were
as far apart as if the Atlantic were between us.
"Will they be frightened about you at home?" asked Ruth of Leslie.
"I think not. They will know we should go in somewhere, and that
there would be no way of getting out again. People must be caught
everywhere, just as it happens, to-night."
"It's just the jolliest turn-up!" cried Stephen, who had been in an
ecstasy all the time. "Let's make molasses-candy, and sit up all
night!"
Between eight and nine we had some tea. The wind had lulled a little
from its hurricane force; the rain had stopped.
"It had all been blown to Canada, by this time," Harry Goldthwaite
said. "That rain never stopped anywhere short, except at the walls and
windows."
True enough, next morning, when we went out, the grass was actually
dry.
It was nearly ten when Stephen went to the south window and put his
hands up each side of his face against the glass, and cried out that
there was a lantern coming over from grandfather's. Then we all went
and looked.
It came slowly; once or twice it stopped; and once it moved down hill
at right angles quite a long way. "That is where the trees are down,"
we said. But presently it took an unobstructed diagonal, and came
steadily on to the long piazza steps, and up to the side door that
opened upon the little passage to the dining-room.
We thought it was father, of course, and we all hurried to the door to
let him in, and at the same time to make it nearly impossible that he
should enter at all. But it was Grandfather Holabird's man, Robert.
"The old gentleman has been taken bad," he said. "Mr. Stephen wants to
know if you're all comfortable, and he won't come till Mr. Holabird's
better. I've got to go to the town for the doctor."
"On foot, Robert?"
"Sure. There's no other way. I take it there's many a good winter's
firing of wood down across the road atwixt here and there. There ain't
much knowing where you _can_ get along."
"But what is it?"
"We mustn't keep him," urged Barbara.
"No, I ain't goin' to be kep'. 'T won't do. I donno what it is. It's a
kind of a turn. He's comin' partly out of it; but it's bad. He had a
kind of a warnin' once before. It's his head. They're afraid it's
appalectic, or paralettic, or sunthin'."
Robert looked very sober. He quite passed by the wonder of the gale,
that another time would have stirred him to most lively speech. Robert
"thought a good deal," as he expressed it, of Grandfather Holabird.
Harry Goldthwaite came through the brown room with his hat in his
hand. How he ever found it we could not tell.
"I'll go with him," he said. "You won't be afraid now, will you,
Barbara? I'm _very_ sorry about Mr. Holabird."
He shook hands with Barbara,--it chanced that she stood
nearest,--bade us all good night, and went away. We turned back
silently into the brown room.
We were all quite hushed from our late excitement. What strange things
were happening to-night!
All in a moment something so solemn and important was put into our
minds. An event that,--never talked about, and thought of as little, I
suppose, as such a one ever was in any family like ours,--had yet
always loomed vaguely afar, as what should come some time, and would
bring changes when it came, was suddenly impending.
Grandfather might be going to die.
And yet what was there for us to do but to go quietly back into the
brown room and sit down?
There was nothing to say even. There never is anything to say about
the greatest things. People can only name the bare, grand, awful fact,
and say, "It was tremendous," or "startling," or "magnificent," or
"terrible," or "sad." How little we could really say about the gale,
even now that it was over! We could repeat that this and that tree
were blown down, and such a barn or house unroofed; but we could not
get the real wonder of it--the thing that moved us to try to talk it
over--into any words.
"He seemed so well this afternoon," said Rosamond.
"I don't think he _was_ quite well," said Ruth. "His hands trembled so
when he was folding up his papers; and he was very slow."
"O, men always are with their fingers. I don't think that was
anything," said Barbara. "But I think he seemed rather nervous when
he came over. And he would not sit in the house, though the wind was
coming up then. He said he liked the air; and he and father got the
shaker chairs up there by the front door; and he sat and pinched his
knees together to make a lap to hold his papers; it was as much as he
could manage; no wonder his hands trembled."
"I wonder what they were talking about," said Rosamond.
"I'm glad Uncle Stephen went home with him," said Ruth.
"I wonder if we shall have this house to live in if grandfather should
die," said Stephen, suddenly. It could not have been his _first_
thought; he had sat soberly silent a good while.
"O Stevie! _don't_ let's think anything about that!" said Ruth; and
nobody else answered at all.
We sent Stephen off to bed, and we girls sat round the fire, which we
had made up in the great open fireplace, till twelve o'clock; then we
all went up stairs, leaving the side door unfastened. Ruth brought
some pillows and comfortables into Rosamond and Barbara's room, made
up a couch for herself on the box-sofa, and gave her little white one
to Leslie. We kept the door open between. We could see the light in
grandfather's northwest chamber; and the lamp was still burning in the
porch below. We could not possibly know anything; whether Robert had
got back, and the doctor had come,--whether he was better or
worse,--whether father would come home to-night. We could only guess.
"O Leslie, it is so good you are here!" we said.
There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck and confusion of
the storm, in our loneliness without father and mother, and in the
possible awfulness and change that were so near,--over there in
Grandfather Holabird's lighted room.