THE BONNIE SUSIE
Anyone, seeing the Bonnie Susie for the first time, would have stared.
Elizabeth Ann found out afterward that plenty of people, driving past
the house, stopped and stared, just as she and Doris were doing now.
For there, in the center of a beautiful green lawn, surrounded by
trees, stood a ship. A real ship, if you please, with masts and a deck
and everything just as you see on ships in pictures. To be sure there
were windows and doors cut in the hull of this ship, but they didn’t
make it seem like a house. Nothing could make it seem like a house. It
was a ship. And the name was painted up on what Uncle Hiram told them
was the bow--“B-O-N-N-I-E S-U-S-I-E” in large black letters.
“Isn’t it lovely!” cried Elizabeth Ann, clapping her hands. “I never
lived in a ship before.”
“I told you it was a ship,” Doris insisted, and Elizabeth Ann had to
admit that she had.
The front door opened as they went up the neat gravel path and a tall,
thin woman stood in the doorway. She reminded Elizabeth Ann a little of
the woman who had struck her with the ruler, but she had a pleasanter
face. And her hair, though it was gray, fluffed out around her face
prettily.
“Well, so this is Elizabeth Ann!” said the woman, stooping to kiss the
small girl. “And here’s Doris. I’m Aunt Grace, and I can’t begin to
tell you how glad I am to see you both.”
“How did you know which of us were which?” asked Elizabeth Ann, who was
perfectly famous for asking questions, as her Uncle Doctor could have
testified.
Aunt Grace seemed pleased at the question.
“Why I knew Doris had been ill,” she explained, “and when I saw you
bounding ahead and looking the picture of health I knew you couldn’t be
a little girl who had been sick recently. If you weren’t Doris, you
must be Elizabeth Ann.”
This sounded most reasonable and Elizabeth Ann could understand.
Aunt Grace took them into the house and it was absolutely the nicest
house they had ever been in--both Elizabeth Ann and Doris said so. In
the first place, there were no stairs--there were ladders. Not the
ordinary ladders that you see in barns, to be sure, nor yet the kind of
ladder your mother may stand on when she hangs the curtains. No, the
stairs in Uncle Hiram’s house were firm enough, but they were ladders
for all that--you looked right through the steps as you went up and
down. And the kitchen was called a galley, and there were no beds in
the bedrooms, but bunks, built against the wall. A bunk is like a box
and Elizabeth Ann for once in her life was eager to have bed-time come,
so she could have the experience of sleeping in a bunk.
There was so much to see that neither Elizabeth Ann or Doris thought
especially about supper, though they had been hungry an hour ago.
But as soon as Uncle Hiram came in, after putting the car in the
garage--which was a barn Elizabeth Ann discovered the next day--he
asked Aunt Grace if supper was ready.
“I planned to get here by four bells,” he said.
Elizabeth Ann stared at him and somewhere in the house a clock struck
some hour.
“It’s half-past six,” said Aunt Grace, “and supper is all ready and
waiting.”
Elizabeth Ann looked around, but could see no bells. She had already
asked so many questions--even for her--that she didn’t want to ask
another. And Doris, as usual, said nothing. Even when Doris didn’t
understand things, she wouldn’t ask questions. She knew that if she
waited long enough, Elizabeth Ann would find out about them and explain
them.
“Oh, I forgot Tony!” cried Elizabeth Ann suddenly. “His feelings will
be hurt; I never forgot him before.”
“Tony is in the kitchen,” Uncle Hiram assured her. “I brought him in.
He’s under the stove and as soon as he gets a little better acquainted,
I think he’ll come out.”
While they were eating supper--and a most delicious supper it was, too,
for Aunt Grace was a famous cook--Elizabeth Ann heard the clock strike
again. It sounded like a bell and she remembered what Uncle Hiram had
said--“four bells.”
Elizabeth Ann counted the strokes.
“It must be six o’clock,” she said politely.
“It’s seven o’clock,” said Aunt Grace.
“I just heard it strike six bells,” Uncle Hiram declared, taking out
his great silver watch. “Yes, the clock keeps good time--it’s exactly
seven o’clock.”
“But it struck six,” said the puzzled Elizabeth Ann.
“Now for pity’s sake, don’t tell that child about ship’s time
to-night,” begged Aunt Grace. “I’ve been married to your Uncle Hiram
for fifteen years,” she added, turning to Elizabeth Ann, “and I can’t
make head or tail of his bells. I go by my good Christian clock, and I
say it’s seven o’clock when it is seven o’clock; six bells will never
mean seven o’clock to me.”
Elizabeth Ann, before she went to bed was as completely tangled up
about time as a girl could well be. It seemed, for Uncle Hiram told
her so while Aunt Grace was giving Doris a hot bath and putting her
to bed--rather into her bunk--that on board a ship the half hours are
very important. The ship’s clock strikes for them all. And Uncle Hiram
showed Elizabeth Ann, using his beautiful mahogany clock which was in
what he called “the first cabin” (and that was the parlor) how the time
was told off, starting at midnight.
“One bell is half-past twelve,” explained Uncle Hiram. “Two bells is
one o’clock; three bells is half-past one, and so on, around the clock.
It’s easy enough to understand, once you’re used to it, but your Aunt
Grace never would bother to learn it. She says she went by land time so
long that she can’t learn any new way of telling time.”
“I don’t think it is easy,” Elizabeth Ann said honestly, “and it does
mix me up. But I am going to learn it. Ted and Lansing know lots of
things I don’t, and I am going to learn something to surprise them.”
“Don’t try to learn it all at once,” advised Uncle Hiram kindly. “Take
things easy--you’ll have all winter to learn ship’s time in, and I will
help you. There’s your Aunt Grace calling you now.”
Aunt Grace wanted Elizabeth Ann to take her bath, and after peeping
into the kitchen and seeing that Tony was asleep on a small round
rug quite as though he felt at home there, Elizabeth Ann climbed the
ladder up to the pretty blue and white bathroom and had her bath. Three
minutes after that she was fast asleep, for no matter how exciting it
might be to sleep in a bunk, no little girl who had traveled more than
two hundred miles in one day could hope to keep awake very long after
she had gotten into such a nice soft bed.
It was fortunate that the next day there was no school--perhaps Uncle
Hiram had arranged things purposely so that Elizabeth Ann and Doris
should reach the farm one day before school opened. He must have known
that there would be many things they wanted to see. The farm belonged
to Aunt Grace and she had lived on it all her life, she told the two
little girls, who insisted on drying the dishes for her the next
morning.
“Your Uncle Hiram,” said Aunt Grace, and while of course he was Doris’s
uncle Elizabeth Ann felt as though he might be her uncle “a little
bit” as she said, for Doris was her cousin. “Your Uncle Hiram was on
a sailing vessel for forty years. It’s no wonder he can’t bear to get
away from the sea. But when he retired, he came back to Gardner, where
he lived when he was a boy, and we planned to be married. I’m twenty
years younger than he is and I didn’t want to give up this farm--in
fact I’d promised my mother and father to always live here. Your uncle
would have liked to live nearer the ocean, I think, but he was very
nice about it. He had some money saved and he said he’d build us a
house to live in, if I would let him build the kind of house he liked.
So he built this ship and I had the tenant farmer move in the old farm
house and we’ve been right happy. Plenty of people think we’re crazy to
live in a place that is part ship and part house, but there are some
things I like about it.”
“I think it is lovely,” declared Elizabeth Ann loyally. “I like to go
up and down ladders; and I like to sleep in a bunk.”
“Well, I like the deck, myself,” Aunt Grace explained. “It’s the
best place to dry clothes you ever did see. And in summer we have a
awning stretched over part of it and have chairs out there and it is
fine--there’s always a breeze. Some folks call it the roof, of course,
but your Uncle Hiram likes me to say ‘deck’ and I always do.”
And after the dishes were dried and put away, Aunt Grace took Elizabeth
Ann and Doris up to see the deck. It was scrubbed to a shining
whiteness, and there was a railing all around, just as there would be
on a ship, so that no one could fall off. They could see far over the
fields, and Aunt Grace pointed out the farm house where the tenant
farmer lived and even the chimneys of the house on the next farm.
“Can we see the school from here?” asked Elizabeth Ann, who was just
the least bit anxious over the idea of going to a new school.