MARY-JANE PEG
Mary-Jane Peg was munching a green apple. Green apples had never swamped
her. To her they were the prize and the poetry of existence.
Other things were well enough in their way, such as a daily mess that
had as many flavors in it as there were airs in a musical medley or
scents in a _pot-pourri_. A succulent cabbage or young turnip weren’t
bad. Indeed, so far as satisfying hunger went, all was grist that came
to the mill of her astounding digestion, roots, leaves, land-turtle’s
eggs found among potato rows, anything, everything went, from a lately
hatched chicken killed by herself to an old shoe of her owner’s.
But the real greens of life, that which lent to it a bitter-sweet
rapture, were the hard windfall apples of July, shaken by the orchard
breeze from a tree whose fruit would not ripen until fall; she preferred
them even to a red astrachan, with the early bloom of maturity upon its
cheek.
“Ungh! Ung-gh!” muttered Mary-Jane, closing her white eyelashes until
her little grey-green eye almost vanished into her head over which two
quivering upright ears stood sentinel. “Ungh! Ungh!” That apple tasted
uncommonly good. She nodded over it like a hungry child over his bread
and milk when it exactly hits his taste. As its tart juices slid down
her capacious throat she said a grunting grace to the universe and
started upon a rooting search for another.
“Oh! Mary-Jane Peg, how—how everlastingly happy you are! You haven’t a
_thing_ to worry you!”
As the envious human voice fell upon Mary-Jane’s now slanting ears,
coming from the edge of a shabby, swaying hammock slung between two
orchard trees, the muncher of green apples raised her head and,
happening at that moment to be in the vicinity of that hammock, rubbed
her white-haired side against a pair of small muslin knees drooping over
its edge. “Ungh! Ungh!” she vouchsafed in a snort of semi-intelligent
sympathy. “Ungh! _Un-ngh!_” her conversation, except in some squealing
emergency, being monotonously limited to this monosyllable.
“Oh, Mary-Jane! Oh, Mary-Jane Peg, I don’t want to die—to die before you
do—I don’t _want_ to die young!”
It was a frankly doomed cry now; had there been an executioner in
waiting behind an orchard tree, had Mary-Jane Peg been the sheriff whose
business it was to hurry a victim off to an untimely end, the voice
could not have carried more pathetic conviction.
“_Die!_ Lord ha’ mercy! who’s talking about dying?—not you, Kitty? You
talking about ‘stepping out’ at the advanced age of fourteen!” came a
blusterous voice, suddenly breezing-up among the apple and cherry trees.
The doomed one, the occupant of the hammock and owner of the muslin
knees, dropped, startled, to her feet and whisked around like a shaken
leaf, the orchard zephyr fluttering the hem of her green muslin frock,
lengthened to suit her years, but falling shrunkenly short in that
respect.
“You don’t want to _die_, eh?” challenged the breezy voice again in an
orchard gust. “You don’t want to die before that pampered pig that’s
_hazaracking_ round here, surfeiting herself with windfall apples. Well!
she’s sure to lie down an’ grunt her last, some time, if she don’t make
tasty bacon first, but where’s the fun of sitting in a hammock, talking
to her about it? That’s what I’d like to know!”
“She’ll never make bacon—although she may after I’m gone!” This last was
a plaintive after-clap of thought; the wearer of the muslin dress of
shrunken green looked up with melting defiance into the face which upon
a far-away city playground had reminded a Camp Fire Girl of “sheltering
flame.”
It flamed protectively now all over the massive features as its narrowed
blue eyes from under their heavy, weather-beaten eyelids dropped a
glance half of amusement, half of deep concern, that floated downward
quite a distance like the petal of a flower to alight on the brown head
of the little four-feet-seven figure in green.
Yes, it was scarcely half an inch taller, that figure, than the buoyant
little form of Betty Ayres, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti, the Holly,
chosen from a book of symbols because the holly is “gayest when other
trees are bare.”
There was a sort of grimness rather than gaiety about this other small
girlish figure palpitating under the orchard trees as if at its core
there was a spike rather than an elastic spring, that steely spike being
fairly well covered up by the rounded, childish form, whose curves were
not quite as well-filled out as they ought to be, the curly brown hair
and dimpling face—quite a shade paler than nature intended—and the
mischievous brown eyes, more liquid than Sally’s, now amber pools of
sunlight in which a tiny brown trout seemed perversely to leap, refusing
to be caught.
Captain Andy, looking down upon the brown head, made up his mind that,
now or never, he _would_ catch that little perverse troutlet which had
been dodging him and everybody else for some months and extract the
spiky hook about which it played in Kitty’s being; in other words, that
he would get at the grim core of secret fear, or whatever it might be,
which, as he put it to himself, seemed to be eating the very heart out
of the child.
“Come! let’s sit down an’ talk a while; I’m just full to the hatches
with things I want to tell you, Kitty,” he said. “That hammock looks too
skittish to bear my weight; let’s put for the seat under the cherry-tree
there, the tree that you an’ I did some grafting on last spring,”
indicating a bandaged trunk on which a surgical operation had been
performed. “Neat piece of vegetable surgery it was, too, grafting a slip
from a tree bearing fine ox-heart cherries on to one bearing mighty poor
bleeding-hearts, eh?” muttered the captain as he caught the hand of his
little grandniece, Kitty Sill. “Sounds some like a parable that!” under
his breath. “Maybe there’s the same ticklish job ahead o’ me, now, to
graft something on to _this_ little bleeding heart,” glancing askance at
Kitty’s face with its set lips in contrast to the fluctuating dimples.
“But, first, to find out why it bleeds—and there I’ve got my work before
me!... Let’s see, what d’ye call that crunching pig that you swap
secrets with, here, secrets you won’t tell your mother?” he asked aloud.
“Mary-Jane _Peg_.” Kitty linked the two first names, emphasizing the
last like a surname. “She won a prize at a fair; she’s a pedigreed pig.”
“Ungh! Ungh!” corroborated Mary-Jane, boastfully, rubbing herself
against the captain’s legs as he seated himself with his grandniece.
“Avast there!” boomed Captain Andy. “I haven’t got any prizes, nor yarns
to swap with you, either,” applying the toe of his boot to the pink-shot
side of the pedigreed pig. “Don’t you—don’t you come hazaracking around
me!”
Mary-Jane understood that raging word beginning with “h” as little as
Kitty Sill did, and Kitty had never found it in a school dictionary yet,
but, somehow, it always cowed her as it did the corkscrew-tailed pig;
Mary-Jane made off and Kitty felt constrained to answer something when
her great-uncle baldly put the question to her: “Now then, chicken, out
with it; what did you mean by talking ’bout dying—dying young, too, as
if you meant it?”
But the trout was not caught yet, nor the spiky hook extracted: Kitty
opened her mouth, indeed, but this is what she coolly said, with a
little, sly smile of mischief, kicking at a leg of the orchard bench
with the heel of her swinging slipper:
“Well, I don’t know but what it would be better to die young than have
the things that preacher said come true!” with nonchalant indifference.
“What did he say? Where did you hear him?”
“Two years ago at Ma’am Barrows’s house; he had a meeting Sunday
afternoon; she said he was a revival preacher,”—the foot swinging
vehemently—“but most o’ the folks let on that they considered him a
‘survival,’ or something like that.”
“What did he preach about?”
“Oh! I don’t take any stock in it now; I did then; he talked a whole lot
about wrath an’ anger comin’ in pailfuls on the earth—that’s what I
understood him to say—and ’bout folks calling on the rocks to fall on
them an’ hide ’em, so’s the hot wrath couldn’t strike.”
“And what did you do, little Kitty?” Captain Andy was much interested,
although he knew he had not got at the spiky secret yet.
“Me!” Kitty raised her level brown eyebrows; the dimples flashed. “Me!
Why, I just came home, all tuckered out, and went down to the bottom of
the orchard there and picked out that big, tall rock near the stream
that has a bed of soft earth under it, an’ I thought that, if worst came
to worst, I’d lie down and call on _that_ rock to fall, for ’twas the
earth that would, really, tumble on to me—an’ that wouldn’t hurt very
much!”
If only the preacher could have seen Kitty’s outwitting expression, her
swinging shoe!
Her granduncle stared at her a minute. Then the orchard rang with his
gusty laugh.
“Great Kingdom! if you ain’t the sly-boots,” he blankly ejaculated. “If
you haven’t an eye to business, picking out a rock that’s bedded in good
soft earth so’s the earth might smother, but not mangle you, cheating
the anger of the Almighty!”
But Captain Andy’s laughter was a brief puff. It died summarily. He rose
and paced the orchard, thrusting Mary-Jane out of the way with his
meditative foot, his figure looming massively against the background of
fruit-trees.
Just as suddenly he sat down again and touched Kitty’s hand with a horny
forefinger, his face at this moment a sheltering flame, indeed, fed by
an inner fire.
“Kitty child! listen to me,” he said. “You ain’t so ready to tell me
things, but I’m going to tell you something that I never told yet to a
soul outside my wife—your gran’aunt, Kitty—who died more’n five years
ago. Kitty, I’ve led a rough an’ racking life, take it all together,
with maybe more storm than shine in it—I’ve gone winter-fishing for
years to the far-away ocean fishing-grounds an’ that’s about the hardest
life a man can lead—an’ he’s sure to ask at times what’s the meaning of
it all. Kitty, I don’t set up to know the meaning. But two or three
times in my life, once when I was a boy of your age, again when I was a
tossed seaman standing to the wheel o’ my vessel at twilight, something
has come to me like a flash an’ I’ve seemed to see surer than sunlight
the Power behind everything an’—and it was the ‘Big Good Thing,’ as
somebody calls it, Fatherhood an’ Truth an’ Understanding—and it isn’t
dropping rocks on anybody. Pretty often we roll ’em on to ourselves,
though, or get on the rocks, whichever way you like to put it, by taking
false bearings, by our mistakes and the like. Now, little girl, don’t
you go and make the big mistake of shutting up tighter’n a clam on any
secret that’s troubling you—sharing it only with a pig!
“Bless your heart!” went on the moved captain after an interval during
which tears had begun to steal down his grandniece’s cheeks. “Why, bless
your heart, dearie, Death and I ain’t strangers. I’ve seen him and his
shadow often enough to know him pretty well, an’ two-thirds of the time
I’ve ousted him, too, when he was just setting up a claim.” Something
superb stirred in the speaker’s tones at memory of the lives he had
saved. “An’, maybe, if he was casting an eye on you at all—else why
should you talk about ‘dying young’—I might be able to drive him off
again.”
“It—’twas what _Aunt Hannah_ said,” began Kitty weakly, no longer
perverse. “She said it to Aunt Kate, sitting on this very seat under the
cherry-tree, only last spring. I”—with a stifled sob—“was playing ’round
with Mary-Jane and my little topknot duck; she thought I didn’t hear.”
“Great Neptune, I’d as lief be with Davy Jones as to live with that
woman’s scarecrow tongue; she’s always ridden by a nightmare or a
daymare or something.” Captain Andy sprang to his feet again with
nautical restlessness, but he did not pace the orchard; he stood glaring
down in a half-savage, half-tender way on Kitty.
“What did she say—what scare was she passing on to somebody then? Now,
out with it—no bushwhacking—no beatin’ about the bush—you can’t get by
me, you know!”
Kitty rubbed the back of a freckled little hand against her right eye
and her right dimple blossomed forth; already she was feeling better,
deriving a comfort which neither Mary-Jane nor the topknot duck nor any
other member of her animal kingdom could impart; if this heroic
granduncle of hers would rather depart this life with Davy Jones (the
fabulous gentleman who summons sailors when death claims them at last)
than to live with the tongue and the scares of Mrs. Hannah Beals, her
aunt by marriage, then, perhaps, there wasn’t much in the spiky scare
which the said Aunt Hannah had planted in her heart three months
earlier.
“She said I was the livin’ image of my Aunt Lottie, father’s sister, who
died when she was less than seventeen,” returned Kitty sedately. “Then
Aunt Kate said she thought I looked a little peaked and thin—that I
ought to go round more with girls of my own age.”
“So you ought! An’ that’s what I’m going to talk to you about
presently,” put in the listener. “Well! an’ did Aunt Hannah drive the
nightmare then?” laughingly.
“_She_ said that she didn’t see as ’twould do much good for me to go
round more with girls an’ boys, go to their parties an’ such-like,
because I was so like my Aunt Lottie in looks and ways that it seemed
borne in on her—that’s what she said—that I’d start a cough one o’ these
fine days, not far off, and go as Aunt Lottie did; an’ that I was
looking more like it every day, getting thinner”—sniff—Kitty wiped away
a tear.
“Gosh! I wish I had the _keelhauling_ of that woman; she’d go down under
a vessel’s keel an’ she’d never come up again! Now, Kitty child, listen
to me!” Captain Andy touched the child’s shoulder. “And take it from me
as straight that you’re like your Aunt Lottie”—Kitty sniffed forlornly
again—“and you’re not like her; she was a grain taller an’ a bit
narrower in the chest than you are,” critically eyeing the small green
figure in the shrunken muslin dress. “But, even with that handicap, she
wouldn’t have faded away before she was seventeen—not a bit of it—if
she’d got it fast in her head, like those Camp Fire Girls who are in one
of my camps over on the Sugarloaf sand-dunes, that to ‘Hold on to
Health’ comes pretty near being the strongest point in the law of life.
“She was ambitious about her studies; she had her heart set on going to
college; it was, with her, come home from high school, peck at her
dinner, then out into this orchard, not to swap gossip with a pig an’ a
crested duck, but to sit in a hammock with a study-book, or if ’twas
winter, she’d be half the afternoon poring over that book or another, in
her own little bedroom, maybe, and come down, weazened an’
blue-nosed”—sadly—“to peck like a bird at her supper. I told her mother
that Lottie was going ahead on that tack under more sail than she could
carry. ‘Take her out o’ school,’ I said; ‘turn her loose in the woods.
I’ll teach her to swim an’ dive until she’s as much at home in the water
as a young harbor-seal and has the appetite of a shark!’ ... Land!
there’s a fine bathing-beach half-a-mile from this orchard, but she
couldn’t swim any farther than that pedigreed pig there, ’bout the only
animal that can’t hold its own in the water. Can you? Can you swim
farther than Mary-Jane Peg?” He frowned fiercely on Kitty.
“Ye-es—with water-wings,” she faltered, “I can swim ten yards.”
“‘Ten yards! Water-wings!’ Gumph! An’ you of my breed! That’s the way
with about half the boys an’ girls on this cape, of sea-faring stock,
too! Can’t swim a stroke until some summer visitor who spends
nine-tenths o’ the year away from the ocean takes pity on ’em and
teaches ’em—then they’ll hand his name down to their children as a
water-god who had Neptune ‘skun a mile.’” Honk! Captain Andy’s angry
laughter scaled the bandaged tree.
“But to come back to Lottie!” He reseated himself mournfully. “Well,
p’raps her mother would have hearkened to my advice, but the child
herself was set against it, an’ nobody said her nay. She graduated from
high school at sixteen with tall honors—an’ a face the color of
sea-foam. The following winter she overworked at college, studied about
every minute when she wasn’t waiting on table to win her way through,
broke down, came home with a cough that turned to a galloping
consumption or something o’ the sort—they buried her in the spring.”
Kitty drew a long sob-like breath.
“Well now, you ha’n’t got the over-study fever, but you’ve anchored in
this orchard too long, with a pig an’ a duck for crew, fishing up
scares. It’s ‘Up anchor!’ now; you’re going to be ready for me to-morrow
when I come for you in my power-boat—I’ve been talking to your mother
about it already—an’ you’ll spend a couple o’ weeks, at any rate, in one
or other of those camps on the white Sugarloaf Peninsula, either among
the Camp Fire Girls or sleeping in my big tent if you prefer it. You’ll
do things ’long with other girls (that Mary-Jane she’s a mighty
intelligent pig, but a silent partner), you’ll slide down sand-hills,
watch the seals, learn to swim, breast-stroke, crawl-stroke——”
“I won’t do it!” That little brown trout, a minnow of perversity, leaped
again in the amber pool of Kitty’s eyes.
But the flying-dolphin-like gleam in Captain Andy’s swallowed it up at a
gulp.
“Oh, tut, tut! Avast there! What I say _goes_, this trip!” The
granduncle stamped his foot on the orchard buttercups just as he had
many a time stamped it at Death upon a reeking deck which the seas were
pounding like an earthquake, bidding that grim spectre begone; so he was
bent on driving off his shadow now.
“They—they’d only laugh at me, those Camp Fire Girls; they wear short
skirts or bloomers an’ middy blouses—I’ve seen a tribe of them
before—an’ they dress up grandly at ceremonial meetings; I have only
frocks like these; an’ they’d laugh at me for chumming with a pig an’ a
duck an’ some hens.”
“I’ll warrant they wouldn’t. They’d give you a colored honor-bead,
instead, to string on a leather thong round your neck—that is if you
joined them—for knowing so much about a farmyard. As for the Camp Fire
duds, I’ll see that you have ’em when you need ’em. Bless your heart,
little Kitty, you won’t know yourself in green bloomers—any more’n a
vessel seems to know herself when she gets her first suit o’ sails on
and feels herself moving; all your fears’ll run to hide an’ laugh at you
out o’ the knees of those bloomers. An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears
once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”
“Is that what they call it?” A dawn-pink stole into Kitty’s cheeks.
“Sure. And they call the biggest o’ my camps that they roost in at
night, twelve of ’em—not all the tribe could come—Camp Morning-Glory.
Sounds slick, doesn’t it? Sounds as if they had hit the sun’s trail,
doesn’t it? And, by gracious! they have. They’re a lighthearted tribe,
always ‘on deck,’ always alert an’ doing something, swimming or rowing,
dressing up in Indian toggery, singing, sliding, cooking—middling good
cookery, too—I’ve tasted it—laundering their own blouses, even one or
two rich girls among ’em, whose father could charter a laundry for the
whole outfit an’ not miss it—‘glorifying work,’ they call it!”
“But—I don’t want to go.” Perversity’s last stand!
“Ah, but hearken a minute; do you know what I’m going to do when I get
back to the Sugarloaf this afternoon? I’m going to prowl about the white
sand-dunes until I find a nice hard chunk o’ birch-wood—there’s all
sorts o’ driftage among those dunes, even to planks and great big logs
washed down from Maine lumber camps an’ trundled ashore there—what d’you
suppose I want that birch-chunk for?”
Kitty’s eyes widened.
“I’m going to make a top of it—a guessing-top, to spin on a flat
stone—about a foot long that top’s to be, nine inches in circumference
near the point, thirty at the head-end; ’twill be painted with symbols
an’ it’s called by an Indian name ‘_Kullibígan_.’ It’s a magic top; it
tells fortunes.”
“Non-sense!”
“You wait and see! ’Twas the Morning-Glory who thought of that game;
she’s the prettiest little dancer and her name is Jessica, the sort of
girl”—Captain Andy looked at some old-farm buildings beyond the orchard
and drew his comparison, now, from the farm, not the foam—“the sort of
girl who if she was run through a milk separator would come out all
cream! From what I gather she’s pretty much alone in the world, too, has
her own way to make; that don’t down her; she’s a Morning-Glory in spite
of it—that’s her Camp Fire name.”
[Illustration: “An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears, once you join the
Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”]
“How did she learn about the Indian top?”
“Why! she learned of it from a professor who watched the Indian maidens
play the Kullibígan spinner game in their own camps or on their
reservations. They ask it a question about who’s going to marry first or
that sort of thing, sitting round in a scattered ring, and the one
toward whom the big painted top falls after it has spun itself dizzy,
why, it has pitched on her for the answer to the question.”
“Something like playing ‘This year, next year, some time, never,’ with a
holly leaf!”
“Hum-m! You see you might ask that Kullibígan guessing-top which of you
were going to die young—you sitting round among the Camp Fire Girls—an’
it mightn’t topple your way at all.”
The Doomed One crowed triumphantly; Kullibígan had sent the orchard
spectre that stalked her scampering, when Mary-Jane Peg had failed to
root him out.