“Oh, we’re ever so glad to know you, Sally,” Jean said at once. “Buzzy’s
told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you.”
Sally blushed deeper than ever, just as Buzzy did, and brushed a fly off
her horse’s neck. She sat her horse well, in a pair of navy-blue riding
breeches and a man’s shirt open at the throat. Altogether both Mrs.
Craig and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl
edition of Buzzy himself.
Sally told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left
after they passed the cemetery.
“I’m going down the other way or I’d ride along and show you where it
is.”
“You must come down to see us when you can, please. We’re rather
lonesome, since we’re quite new around here. Are there many boys and
girls?”
“Quite a few,” said Sally. “And luckily there are just about as many
girls as boys. The Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there
are two French girls near us. Their father’s the carpenter, Mr.
Chappelle. Etoile’s the older one and the little on they call Tony. I’ll
be over to see you one of these days.”
“Isn’t she a darling, Mother?” Jean exclaimed when they drove on. “I do
hope she’ll come down. Kit would be crazy about her.”
“Anybody would be,” agreed Mrs. Craig, still smiling. “You know, Jean, I
think that you youngsters are going to find a special work up here that
only you can do. A work among these boys and girls of our own
neighborhood.”
“But, Mom, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten
miles.”
“Even so. Rebecca’s old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it
for forty years. He knows all of the families as if he were a census
taker.”
Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and she
shifted into second. “There seem to be so few real American girls up
here, Mother,” Jean began slowly. “I thought we’d find ever so many, but
while I lived up at Maple Grove I rode around a good deal, and you’d be
surprised how many foreigners are up here. Becky told me the reason. The
old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns,
and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply.”
“Well, dear?”
“But, Mother, you don’t understand. There are all sorts. French
Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller
up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the
real old families, of course—”
“Are you thinking of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old
families, Jeannie?”
Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother’s voice.
“Of course not, Mom. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into
a new place like this. We don’t want to get intimate with everybody.
You’ll like _some_ of the old families.”
“I think I’ll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in
driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather
run-down-looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, probably of first settlers?”
“Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them
too, how they came out—walked, actually walked most of them—from the
Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a breakup, and a
few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in villages
wherever they happened to stop. I found a cemetery in the woods near
Becky’s, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717.”
“I’d like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners
too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can’t you
understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the
country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean,
and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different
nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend
whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles
who sought a haven in our land. There was Sienkiewicz, the great
novelist, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend’s name
and my mother and aunts didn’t like me to be so friendly toward her
because she was a foreigner, completely forgetting that they themselves
had come from foreign extraction. I think that you children are very
fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these
race barriers, are being torn down and the idea of one world is coming
forth. Up here in our lonely hills, we are going to face this same
problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can
help open the gates of the future.”
“Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before,” Jean exclaimed.
“You always seemed just sweet and feminine. I—why, somehow I never felt
you were interested in such things.”
“If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?” she asked,
her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. “And you are
going to do your share right here in Elmhurst, making a circle that
shall join together the hands of all these boys and girls from different
races. We’ll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now
let’s pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house.”
Jean turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well
back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it
had been outdoors all its life, it was so weatherbeaten and gray. “Ma”
Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own
Plymouth Rocks.
“Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?” she said. “Well, I guess I
can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder.” She led the
way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were
wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay.
“Ma” scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch
for it.
“I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to, too,” she said
pleasantly. “Now, we’ll take any that you like and put them into bags.
I’m going to sell you my very best rooster. His name’s Jim Dandy and
he’s all of that. He’s pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You
don’t have to worry about hawks when he’s around.”
After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put into the trailer,
“Ma” waved goodbye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that
was moving into her house.
“I’m going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don’t
know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as
neighbors. There’s a man and his widowed sister and her children. All
God’s folks, you know.”
“Finns,” murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. “There’s a new
blend to our community, Mom. I’ve always wanted to know someone from the
Scandinavian countries and Sally told me there is a Swedish family here
too.”
Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days,
as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit awhile, Becky said.
One day the earth still looked windswept and bare, and the next there
seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and
lacy with the delicate budding leaves.
One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the
pigeons’ pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly
like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the
woods and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. It
sounded keenest and sweetest over where the waters of the lake above the
old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses.
Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet
insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.
“It’s the peep frogs,” called Buzzy, coming up from the barn with
Buttercup’s creamy contribution to the family. “They’re just waking up.
That means it’s spring for sure.”
“Isn’t it cute of them to try to tell us all about it,” Doris cried
delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean
and Tommy come out and listen too. In the twilight they walked around
the terraces below the porch. Once Doris stopped below their father’s
window to call up to him.
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and
health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in
channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to
relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Tommy, all night long, something
he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really
getting to be quite encouraging.
Sally paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls
and Tommy received their first real information about the other
neighbors around Elmhurst.
Buzzy was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean,
with Sally at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from
the orchard, poring over a seed catalogue.
“I’d love some zinnias and snapdragons and blue delphiniums in big beds
along the terraces,” she said. “Think of the splashes of blue up against
those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies’ place back at the Cove. Mrs.
Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.”
“You’ll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner
beans better,” Sally declared merrily. “We always lay out money on the
food seeds first and then what’s left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when
you’ve got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and
things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don’t need to
buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the
north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl.”
The girls were silent, remembering what Rebecca had told them of the
romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Tommy’s curiosity got the better of
his caution and he coaxed Sally away to hunt for the lilies of the
valley hidden away under the hazel bushes.
It was Sally, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture
and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray,
mossy rocks. And it was Sally, who pointed out to them the wintergreen,
or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.
“She’s perfectly wonderful,” Kit declared that day at lunch. “She knows
the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up
in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white
trillium and bloodroot, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn’t
let us pick many either, only a few. She says it’s just as cruel to rob
a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it
is to rob birds’ nests.”
Here Doris chimed in.
“And she’s going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a
book, Mom. We’re going to take some of that monk’s cloth and mount
specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed
sheepskin.”
“Sally seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities,” said Mrs.
Craig amusedly.
“She is just exactly that,” Kit answered earnestly. “I never met a girl
with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they’re as poor as churchmice.
Sally told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Elmhurst without
any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell
her how to do it.”
“Sally’s going to peddle our rhubarb for us,” Kit went on. “I think that
rhubarb is a most wonderful plant. It seems to spring up everywhere and
pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing
and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Sally told me it was rhubarb,
and we’re going to market it. She says there’s a big cranberry bog on
this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we
must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking
anything at all about it. So we’re going to watch the old wood road that
turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mom, from the window over
the kitchen sink, and heaven help anybody who takes our cranberries!”
“I wouldn’t start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won’t be
along until frost,” laughed Mrs. Craig.
Tommy, with Buzzy’s help, was devoting himself to the hens. Although
they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Tommy had
several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the “coming
offs,” as Buzzy put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff
in the brooder from Rebecca’s incubator, and over these Tommy fussed and
wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.
One of “Ma” Parmelee’s pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never
would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard,
or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At
feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the
flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.
Jean named her “Hamlet” in fun, because she said she was always looking
for “rats in the arras.” But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that
Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she
didn’t have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that
she didn’t even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was
appear promptly at mealtime and eat her share.
“There’ll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays,” Kit prophesied
darkly, but Tommy begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on
the bill-of-fare Tommy always begged off any of his flock from
execution, and Buzzy had to go to one of the neighboring farms and buy
one.
“It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you’re well-acquainted with,”
Tommy explained. “And another thing, Mom, did you know that the boys set
traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it’s in the
fall. I had Buzzy paint me some signs on shingles and I’m going to put
them all over the place.”
“What do they say, dear?”
“They say just this.” Tommy’s tone was full of firmness and decision.
“_Any traps set on this property will be sprung by_ ME.”
“Do they state who ‘Me’ is?”
“I signed it with Dad’s name, and put underneath ‘Per T.’”
The screen door slammed and Kit walked into the living room from the
porch. “Good night, everybody,” she said. “The night is yet young, but
I’ve promised Buzzy—or rather, Buzzy and I have a bet that I can’t get
up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my tennis racket against
five of Buzzy’s records. Don’t anyone call me, because it’s got to be
fair.”
Doris and Tommy decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went
upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living
room. Presently Mrs. Craig glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on
Jean’s lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the
old fireplace.
“What is it, dear?” she asked. “Tired?”
Jean shook her head, and smiled. “No, country life doesn’t tire me. I
love it even though I am lonesome for my old friends. I think I’ll go
over to Sally’s tomorrow and see if she’ll take me to meet some of the
young people.” Jean dangled her legs over the arm of the chair and
studied her scuffed saddle shoes. “If they are all as nice as Buzzy and
Sally they must be swell.”