THE QUEER MAN
“Mother,” said Isabel with all the emphasis she could get into her
voice, “we want to sneak!”
“Do you, dear? And can’t you?” asked Mrs. Lindsay with no apparent
shock.
Mr. Lindsay looked up from his paper with a laugh in his eyes; they
were at breakfast and Isabel had followed up her announcement by
corking her lips with the biggest, most luscious strawberry on her
plate.
“Just a general sneak, or a special sneak, do you crave, Miss Lindsay?
Is it merely that you feel sneaking, or do you wish to sneak away from
something?” Isabel’s father inquired.
Isabel always said that she “loved the way her father treated her.” He
used toward her a playful, exaggerated politeness that delighted her
soul; needless to say, his love for this sole little girl left to him
was far beyond expression in words.
“Well, Mr. Lindsay,” said Isabel, hastily disposing of the big
strawberry and replying after his manner of asking, “it’s a special
sneak. We want to get away to Château Branche without Kathie and Dolly.
They’re nice, you know, but we did so like to be there by ourselves!”
“I realize that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but why you have
to take on new members of your Lucky Four Club, if you’d rather not,
is beyond me,” said Mr. Lindsay. “I suppose it’s because you are all
girls, all but Mark, and he can’t behave as he would if he weren’t
muffled in girls, so to speak. Now, if boys had a club and didn’t care
about new members, they’d say so, straight from the shoulder, not
ill-naturedly, but honestly, and the would-be members would see that
they were within their rights and take themselves off, unoffended.
But you seem to feel obliged to be wax, and give in. It will end in
a fuss--you see if it doesn’t! I want you to learn to take a stand
firmly, but amiably, my dear, and, having taken it, stand pat on that
stand!” Mr. Lindsay shook his head, as if this weakness in his Isa
annoyed him.
“But they do want awfully to belong,” said Isabel, “and it seems so
mean to keep lovely things to yourself--though we are four selves!
Prue says we might as well take people to live with us because we have
nice homes.”
“Prue is a sensible little person,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “She’s always
obliging, but she can tell clearly which are the boundaries of her
own fields, to use a figure that seems to express what I mean. Prue
is just, in a common-sense way, while my little lass gets weak-kneed,
fearing to hurt some one when she steps out.”
Mrs. Lindsay smiled most tenderly at Isabel, plainly finding her
weakness very lovable.
“Run right away as soon as you have finished those berries; get Prue
and the Hawthorne house pair, and climb up into Château Branche so
early that nobody else will be there--for a while, at least. That’s my
advice this perfect June morning,” Mrs. Lindsay added.
“And pull our legs up after us, so they won’t show?” cried Isabel
gayly. “All right, motherums; you’re a dear to help me sneak.”
“There is a cake,” remarked Mrs. Lindsay slowly. “A fresh, round,
two-story-and-basement cake, made late yesterday for a possible trip to
Château Branche. I think I’ll get it and put it in a box, with a knife
to cut it, and send it with you on your sneaking trip.”
“Oh, mother!” cried Isabel, rapidly eating her juicy strawberries as
her mother went in pursuit of the cake.
She came back in a moment bearing it aloft on the palm of her outspread
hand. Isabel’s back was toward her, but she heard the rustle of
paraffine paper and she sniffed the air as Bunkie might have done, as
Bunkie did do, in fact, for he lay at Isabel’s feet, under the table.
“Smells like fudge!” Isabel said.
“Wise little nose! It _is_ fudge; fudge icing and middle coatings!”
cried Mrs. Lindsay, setting the cake where Isabel could see it.
She folded the paraffine paper over and around the cake and dropped it
deftly into a box that might easily have been too small for it, and was
so exactly the right size that it took skill to get the cake into it
unharmed.
“I’m ready!” cried Isabel, hastily taking a long drink of water and
folding her napkin with her left hand as she did so.
“May I walk with you, Miss Lindsay, as far as Miss Wayne’s door?” asked
Mr. Lindsay, pushing back his chair.
As “Miss Wayne’s door” was the next door, the Wayne and Lindsay places
adjoining, this did not seem too much to ask, and Isabel giggled as she
tried to consent with dignity.
Hatless and happy, the cake in its box, resting on one arm, Isabel
started out beside her father and pulled his head down to kiss him when
they paused at the Wayne gate.
“Come on, Prue; we’re going early to have a little while all to
ourselves, if Kathie and Dolly should come,” Isabel called, standing in
the hall and trusting to luck that Prue would hear her.
“I’ll telephone Mark to be at Château Branche with Poppy when we get
there, save time going after them,” said Prue, the practical, ringing
up the Central as she spoke from the bend in the hall where the
telephone table stood, and where she happened to be when Isabel came in.
After this was done, the two little girls sallied forth, Bunkie running
ahead and pretending to startle himself with important discoveries
along the way. They proceeded to Château Branche by a short cut into
the woods.
Mark and Poppy were there waiting for them, thanks to Prue’s foresight,
when they reached the great pine in which Mr. Hawthorne had built their
house.
“We’ll get right up,” said Prue, beginning to climb the footholds which
led into Château Branche.
Isabel handed up the cake to Prue and followed; Mark and Poppy seemed
less to climb than to run up, like nuthatches, so agile they both were
at this sort of feat.
“Ah!” Mark drew a long breath of delight. “It seems to smell more
piney so early in the morning. Isn’t it great to be up in these dark
branches?”
“Hark!” whispered Isabel, holding up her hand.
A song so sweet, so liquid, so heart-stirring, that it was like the
voice of the woods, of the sky, the green leaves, of June itself,
pierced the stillness from a point near at hand.
“Oh, it’s the veery!” whispered Mark, his eyes dilating. He had been
taught by his father, wise in woods lore, the note of nearly every
bird, and could himself imitate many of them, calling around him the
little feathered denizens of the trees.
“It’s a thrush; the veery,” Mark repeated, and the four sat so still
that they hardly seemed to breathe, listening to this exquisite song.
At last the veery flew away. The children saw the brown body come out
from an oak that stood next to their pine, brighten as it crossed the
sunshine, and disappear.
“Why do you sort of want to cry when things are nice that way?” asked
Poppy.
“I think because they don’t last,” said Isabel, the poet, who always
saw deeper than the others.
“You see one reason we don’t care about having Kathie,” said Prue
unexpectedly, for the rest had forgotten all about Kathie for the
moment, “is because she always wants to be doing something. When we
come here we--we--well, we’re just _here_, don’t you see? We don’t want
to do one thing but--be here.”
“I do, now,” said Poppy. She laughed apologetically, but she said her
say. “It’s awful early after breakfast, but I want to try Isa’s cake
right off.”
“’Course!” cried Isabel, getting it out. “It doesn’t matter when we eat
it; it’s when it tastes good. There!”
She produced the cake, its icing slightly rubbed, and thrust the knife
into its creamy middle. “Cut it, Prue.”
“Cut it yourself.” Prue promptly declined the honor. “It’s yours, and
besides, I won’t; I’d jig it.”
“Sakes, don’t jig it! What is jigging it?” Mark laughed at Prue.
“Hacking,” explained Prue, watching Isabel, who was slowly penetrating
the center of the three layers, her head on one side, her tongue out of
the corner of her mouth, her wrist held stiff, her face expressive of
the deepest concentration and anxiety.
“There, sir!” Isabel exclaimed at last. “If I get one piece cut I won’t
mind the rest. Catch it, somebody. You, Pops!”
Poppy needed no urging. She held out both her hands, palms up, side by
side, to receive the thick pointed piece which Isabel deposited in them.
“Um-m-m! Land, what cake!” Poppy tried to say, rolling up her eyes at
her first mouthful, but because her mouth was indeed full, what she
really said, all in one word, was: “Lawbake!”
In a few minutes there was complete silence in Château Branche because
all four of its tenants were merrily--and also messily--devouring great
wedges of a cake so creamily fresh and soft, so thickly spread with
fudge-filling, that talking was out of the question.
Consequently any one coming along through the woods, past the tree,
would not have suspected it of being different from other trees,
inasmuch as it was occupied by children instead of birds. And some one
was coming along! Mark was the first to spy him. He leaned forward and
touched Prue and Isabel and Poppy, signaling them to keep quiet. Poppy
nearly cried out, but Prue, with great presence of mind, clapped a
fudgey hand over her mouth.
The four children peered down through the branch, which Mark pulled
forward, the better to conceal them.
They saw a small man with a queer, thin, wavering sort of face. He had
dark eyes, that roved perpetually from side to side, but never were
raised, for which the tree dwellers were duly grateful. His nose was
so long and sharp that, set in the middle of his thin, narrow face, it
lent itself to the children’s first thought of him as being some sort
of wild creature. His short body was painfully thin; his shoulders
were high; it took a few minutes for the children to discover that he
was slightly deformed, one shoulder higher than the other, his back a
little curved.
The queer little man seemed to have no plan as to the movements which
he was restlessly making. He walked short distances in every direction,
returning to the pine tree. Each time he started off the children hoped
that he was going on, away from there, but he returned to the pine tree
as if it were a magnet that drew him.
To their great terror, the children soon discovered that he was talking
to himself. It struck them as past bearing that this queer little man
should talk to himself alone, as he believed himself, in the middle of
the woods. Stray words came up to them; he spoke too low for them to
hear many.
“The brook,” he said. “Over there. Nice brook. Nice place. Should think
they would live here, want to.”
Did he mean themselves? the children wondered. No one lived beside the
lonely little brook that ran, talking to itself, much as this queer man
did, near Château Branche all day and every day.
Isabel and Poppy were frightened almost out of their wits. Prue was
frightened, too, as was Mark, but Mark was on fire with curiosity, and
Prue’s imagination did not build all sorts of awful fancies upon the
deformed creature as Isabel’s did. Poppy was so excitable that anything
so out of the ordinary as this adventure would be sure to wind her up
to the highest pitch.
“Better rest,” they heard the queer man say, and with that he lay down
on the carpet of brown needles which for years the great tree had
spread at its own feet.
“How shall we get away?” Isabel signaled to Mark.
Mark shook his head; he had no idea.
Presently, after a time of utter stillness and waiting, during which
eight young legs and arms developed prickles of nervousness and grew
numb from keeping so long in one position--no one dared to move--the
children in the tree saw Kathie and Dolly coming through the woods, on
their way to join them.
“Mercy me, he may kill them!” groaned Isabel, white to her lips and
almost forgetting caution for themselves.
The queer little man sat up, listened; got quickly on his feet,
listened.
With unspeakable relief the children saw that he was himself afraid of
being seen. Of being caught? They could not tell what he feared, but he
was evidently on the alert to get away unseen.
Their own fear vanished under this welcome discovery.
Mark grew positively rash. He had a beautiful, flexible singing voice,
which, though it was still a high soprano, was capable of doing many
queer feats. Dropping it low, Mark chanted in a way that even his
companions found rather awful: “Get out, get out, get out of here!”
The queer man gave one wild glance all around him, and then he acted on
the command. He got out of there, running like a deer, dodging around
trees, looking over his shoulder, but not slackening speed, till, in a
moment, he was gone.
Kathie and Dolly had not seen him; he had chanced to take the opposite
direction from the one in which they were coming.
Isabel, Prue, Poppy and Mark lost no time in coming down from Château
Branche.
“How could you, Mark; how dared you?” Isabel panted as she came down
backward, very fast, talking as she came. “Suppose he hadn’t run?
Suppose he had killed us!”
“I thought I’d try it before he saw Kathie and Dolly. You couldn’t tell
what he might have done to them,” said Mark, by this time in high glee.
“What? Who?” demanded Kathie as she and Dolly came up in time to hear
this answer.
All talking at once, the four children told the story of the queer
little man. The story lost nothing of mystery and terror in the telling.
“Well, no more Château Branche for me, thank you!” said Kathie
decidedly, as the tale ended.
“Not much!” Dolly supplemented her.
“We’ll be members in the club room, come there, I mean, but not up in
that tree; not ever!” Kathie continued.
“But are the woods spoiled?” asked Prue piteously.
“That’s according as you look at it,” said Mark sagely, trying to
catch Prue’s eye to convey to her that if Kathie and Dolly so looked at
it the Lucky Four might be the gainers.
“I think it was perfectly dreadful to sit there, penned up there, and
see that man lying at the foot of the tree, so we couldn’t get down,
just as if he was a dog and we were ’possums!” said Prue. “Why, where
is Bunkie? He didn’t bark!”
For the first time since she had owned him Bunkie had left Isabel and
gone home.
“It’s a pretty queer time, every way,” said Isabel gravely. “Here, have
some cake, Kathie and Dolly. Mother gave it to us, and I need some more
after this fearful experience.”