PEMROSE LORRY, RADIO AMATEUR
By Isabel Hornibrook
DRAKE OF TROOP ONE
SCOUT DRAKE IN WAR TIME
COXSWAIN DRAKE OF THE SEASCOUTS
DRAKE AND THE ADVENTURERS’ CUP
PEMROSE LORRY: CAMP FIRE GIRL
PEMROSE LORRY: RADIO AMATEUR
[Illustration: “We’ve got to ride on—your own horse is here—to where you
and I can be together.”]
PEMROSE LORRY
RADIO AMATEUR
BY
ISABEL HORNIBROOK
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
NANA BICKFORD ROLLINS
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1923
Copyright, 1923,
By LITTLE, Brown, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Published April, 1923
Printed in the United States of America
The author acknowledges her indebtedness to Nawadaha of the Camp Fire
(Ethel V. Smart) for the songs and rhymes, and for some helpful
collaboration.
CONTENTS
I A Flower Clock
II A “Roaring Buckie”
III An Awful Note
IV Fathers
V The Magic Carpet
VI A Gentleman
VII Fit for Fit
VII The Wee Hour
IX Dandering Kate
X Hidden Valley
XI Her
XII The Shack Corner
XIII The Long Pasture
XIV Revel and Revelation
XV Wheeled through Life
XVI The Lip
XVII Wild Flowers
XVIII Mondamin
XIX A Girl Brigade
XX No Answer
XXI The Call of the Air
XXII On Little Sister
XXIII The Ring
XXIV The Race
XXV Spring
ILLUSTRATIONS
“We’ve got to ride on—your own horse is here—to where you and
I can be together.”
Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.
“Well! I say, this is a little bit of all right—isn’t it?”
Pemrose was standing with her aërial out to a gnarled pine-tree.
PEMROSE LORRY RADIO AMATEUR
CHAPTER I
A Flower Clock
“Good morning, Daytime!” A girl stood upon the gray stone steps of a
Lenox mansion and, looking up, answered the first lovely smile that
young day flung down to her as, robed in pale pink and bluish bloom, it
slowly climbed the eastern sky.
“Good morning, Day-sky!” she laughed again—smiling all over in response
to that pink of beauty above her. “Well! this is the first time that the
Sunrise and I have been chums,” she murmured to herself, “the first
spring, I mean; I—I who used to suffer from the sleepy fevers more
than—than the ‘nappiest’ little flower in my garden.”
She laughed softly now, Una Grosvenor, known to her girl chums as Jack—a
gay bit of satire, by the way—and by the Council Fire as U-te-yan,
Flower, as she descended the gray steps into a dewy garden, where those
Rogues O’May, the late spring flowers, were still, many of them,
slumbering with eyes tight shut.
“Yes, you gain an hour by the daylight saving—or you think you do, you
sluggards!” she flung at them, a slight nearsighted peculiarity in her
dark eye flashing with pretty mockery. “Six o’clock, now, by my
watch—really only five—and there you are: chicory, tulip, wild rose,
pond lily, fast asleep still; poppy, marigold, daisy—and wild dandelion,
only just awaking—and one little belated Crocus, just one, dozing, too!”
It was with a smile, roguish and tender, tender as that of the dawn,
that Una stood still, cooling her toes in the dew, to look at her
garden—with its cheek, silver and pink as a baby’s, reflecting the flush
of the sky.
A large, old-fashioned garden it was and full of surprises, inclosing
U-te-yan’s blooming beds where, as a Camp Fire Girl, she had sown or
planted, experimented and transplanted herself; and it was plain from
the look upon her face that she lived in it—dreamed in it, as a princess
might live in a fairy tale.
“My flowers!” She dimpled imaginatively. “Oh-h! at this hour, I can
almost hear them singing to me. What is it—they—say? I made it up, for
them, before:
“Good morning, dear Una! Good morning, dear Day!
The gloom of the night clouds has all flown away,
We kick off our blankets of mist, soft and white,
And dress ourselves up in the lovely gold light,
From rock, bed and border we’re smiling at you,
Good morning! Good morning! Now, you say it too!”
“Good morning! Good morning!” threw back the caroling sprite, her dark
eyes dressing themselves up in light, too, as she impersonated her
flowers. “Now! what was it I wanted especially to do this morning,” thus
she silently questioned the dewy beds, “besides watching the sleepy
_flowers_ open in my flower clock, my sundial bed—that’s the clock which
really gets me up early,” with a merry nod, “to study _their_ waking
time, as the shadow of the dial hand, beginning to move with sunrise,
points to one after the other? Oh-h! I know; I wanted to do some
transplanting, ‘housemove’ my little Quaker Ladies, before—before old
Sods gets around. Now! did any of you ever hear of such a thing as a
crusty old gardener whose ‘really truly’ name is—Jacob Sods?”
Whimsically she interrogated pansy and little blue johnny-jump-up, just
opening its sleepy eye, daffodil, narcissus and lamp-like geranium
which, open-eyed, had kept vigil all night long.
“Humph! There he is now! I never can get ahead of him.” The girl
shrugged her shoulders.
“Lorie me! Miss Una,” grunted an old mountaineer who at that moment came
shuffling down a garden path, spade in hand and munching a dew-piece, a
hunch of bread. “Lorie me! Now, what be you up for so ear-rly! It ben’t
but—five—o’clock.” He pulled a timeworn old silver watch out of a side
pocket.
“Six—by—me!” Una glanced at her tiny jeweled wrist watch.
“Humph! I go by the Lord’s time, I’ll have you to know!” snorted Jacob
Sods, gardener. “I—I ain’t no ‘nose o’ wax’ to be changin’ round.” He
shuffled on, grunting.
Una’s tickled laughter rang out as she set to work to transplant her
little Quaker Ladies from what was known as the wildflower garden to a
sunny rock bed.
“A plant—a plant is a regular tomboy when you’re making a new home for
it,” she was murmuring archly to herself, five minutes later, her dark
eyebrows lifting over the busy trowel. “You have to make a nice little
mound of earth, deep in your hole, for it to sit on and swing its legs,
its roots, just like a boy or girl. And—and it likes a snug fit, too!
There now, my bluets are in a nice, comfy hole.... And the little Quaker
Ladies will never know what happened to them!”
She started. Something was happening to her. Breathlessly she kneeled
upright—earthy knuckles pressed against her lips, ear intent.
“Goodness! this—this isn’t the first time when I’ve been up early,
before anybody else was around—Pemrose, anybody—that—I thought—I thought
I heard a strange sound from the wood. There it is again! Faint
hum—silvery hum—all round us in the air! Don’t you—don’t you hear it?”
She turned half wildly to the Quaker Ladies, who seemed to be settling
into their new home to music—if music the faintest, vaguest murmur could
be called.
“It—it comes from the wood, but it isn’t the trees—pines or beeches—it
isn’t, oh! it isn’t any sound in Nature, at all.” Una waved her trowel,
in utter bewilderment. “What can be doing it—making it? That distant
‘surgy’ hum, rising, falling, murmur, murmuration! Silvery murmuration!”
The little peculiar cast in her fascinated eye, too slight to be a
blemish, shone, a morning star of marvel, now as she gazed off towards a
low, stone wall about a hundred feet away, beyond which was a dark,
slowly lighting pine wood.
“If I were to say anything about this to Pemrose, she’d laugh at
me—think it was all imagination. She’s—so different. Full of ‘pep’—a
radio amateur!”
The girl, the dark-eyed girl whose nature was more woven of poetry than
“pep”, who put morning songs into the heads of her flowers, continued to
kneel “possessed”, upon a dew-silvered stone beside the rock garden,
continued to stare, bewitched, at the dusky green of the early wood.
To her, the vague, sweet murmur which, like a silver cloud, enwrapped
her, was not unnatural; it was part of the fairy wonder of the sunrise;
of a May sun rising, dim and silvery, like a moon—like a young moon
calf—behind shrubbery trees.
“Extra-ordinary!” Her earthy fingers sought each other, restlessly
intertwining. “It can’t be a bee? Big, droning bumble bee—Canny Nannie,
as the mountain children call it! A whole swarm of Canny Nannies! But
there isn’t a bee in sight at this hour; and, if there were, ’twould
have to be a glorified—glorified one for me to hear it—at this distance
from the wood.”
She stumbled to her feet now, dropping the trowel almost upon the
long-suffering heads of the Quaker Ladies, and wandered down a dewy
pathway towards a point still nearer to the pine woods, where a gray old
sundial upon its four-foot pedestal, shimmered at sunrise, like a huge
primrose.
Around this U-te-yan, Flower had created her masterpiece, a ring-like
bed in three-cornered sections, peopled only by horological flowers, as
her books called them, those that closed sleepily at night, to open at
various hours of the morning, energetically or lazily, as the case might
be.
To the lovely flower clock, the blooming democracy, wild flowers, even
weeds, were admitted, side by side with garden aristocrats, in order to
find a flower, sometimes two or three, whose waking or sleeping habits
corresponded to the numbers upon the dial’s face—to the sunny hours
counted out by the pointing of the shadowy dial finger.
The flower clock had suddenly developed a tongue. The vague hum pursued
her here. Pale, spring poppy, uncurling dandelion, caught it, held
it—and winked at her over its mystery.
“If—if I were Pemrose now, I’d go right on into the wood, and find out
where it comes from—what’s making it,” she murmured to those waking
flowers. “The truth is, I’m too—t-too ‘funky’,” with a little
deprecatory shrug. “That—that’s why father won’t hear of my going
hiking, camping with the other girls this summer; he says I never would
stand the sleeping out at night—even for a few nights. And Treff, my
madcap cousin Treff, says I’d be such a ‘weer’ I’d turn them all
‘wuzzy’,”—a low laugh—“his barbarous college slang!
“He—he’s coming over to take Pemrose for a little flight, this morning,
a little ‘air-hop’, as he calls it, before breakfast. I—I daren’t go up
with him in his aëroplane, to hear voices among the clouds—his new radio
outfit. That must be weird. But—this is weirder!” The girl’s lips curved
silently. “And yet—and yet that’s not the word, either; it’s too sweet.
Gracious! Now I hear it, now I d-don’t.” She stole forward a step,
bending her ear towards the intoning pines.
“Now—now it’s like a wandering organ note. Oh! am I listening in on
anything by radio—a new sort of radio ‘bug’?” with the faintest whiff of
laughter. “Am I awake, at all? I’d give worlds—worlds—to go on into the
wood, find out what it is—what’s making it. But I’ve seldom been into
that pine wood, alone. Never—at this hour.”
Yet, as if that dulcet, wavy murmur, now high-pitched, now low-pitched,
faint, yet audible—increasingly audible—in the still May morning, were a
luminous belt, an irresistible power-belt, drawing her, Una was moving
slowly—vaguely—towards the wood.
She reached the low stone wall—the dark skirts of the passive pines were
only fifty feet away.
Each gray stone in that rough wall was now a ruby, reflecting the
wonderful amethyst lights in the sky—wings of that mild young sun which
had risen so like a moon calf.
Suddenly her hands clutched each other convulsively. Was she
masquerading, too? The morning had, all in a moment, become dim; and she
was the ghost of a girl standing down, in a mist, by a seashore—holding
a hollow sea shell to her ear.
“I can’t—oh! I can’t be happy—unless I find out what’s doing it!”
She sobbed it aloud, now, in light, breathless, seafoam sobs—all
irradiated, too—to the dewy flowers among which she stood; gay cottage
tulips straggling among sweetbriars along by the wall, each red and
yellow mite flashing as if, true to its legend, it had rocked a little
elf in its cradle the night before.
There was not a flower in the garden whose legend was not in Una’s
flower-basket brain.
This soft sea shell throbbing of the air about her, the faint, shrill
piping—now, again, it was high, clear, metallic—yet strangely
disembodied—fitted in with a dozen of them.
“It’s not _earthly_; it’s not,” she cried passionately to the tulips;
“it’s t-too fairy-like—too unlike anything I ever heard ... but I can’t
be happy, unless—”
A sweetbriar, herself, now, the unfinished protest a thorn in her brain,
she was over the low wall—and through the dim shadow gate of the wood.