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THE POLLY PAGE YACHT CLUB
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[Illustration: She Leaned Forward, Intent on Every Point]
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THE POLLY PAGE YACHT CLUB
BY
IZOLA L. FORRESTER
AUTHOR OF “ROOK’S NEST,” “US FELLERS,” ETC.
PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS
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Copyright, 1910, by
George W. Jacobs & Company
Published November 1910
All rights reserved
Printed in U. S. A.
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CONTENTS
I The Launching Party
II Glenwood
III Polly Ships Her Crew
IV Fitting Out
V On Board the “Hippocampus”
VI Three Days at Sea
VII Landing at Lost Island
VIII Dropping Anchor
IX The Captain Calls
X A Home on the Rolling Deep
XI Smugglers’ Isle
XII “Girl Overboard”
XIII Polly’s “Current Events”
XIV “Mr. Smith of Smugglers’ Cove”
XV The Pearl Fest
XVI The Captain’s Party
XVII Polly Prepares
XVIII The Regatta
XIX The First Event
XX The Winner of the Junior Cup
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ILLUSTRATIONS
She leaned forward, intent on every point
“Girls, I’ve got it!”
A happy, dripping lot
“First batch of marshmallows ready!” called Ruth
Combing their hair and chatting, girl fashion
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THE POLLY PAGE YACHT CLUB
CHAPTER I
THE LAUNCHING PARTY
“She was here just a minute ago. Wait till I find her, girls. We can’t
go ahead without Polly.”
Ruth Brooks dropped her bouquet of white roses on the piano stool, and
hurried out into the long corridor. It was still crowded with people,
although Crullers had played the tenderest, saddest strains of
“Träumerei,” and “Blumenlied,” to let them know it was time to go home.
Ruth paused on the lower staircase a minute to see if Polly’s brown head
showed anywhere below. Between the square reception hall, and the
library, stood Miss Calvert, her figure tall and imposing in its black
silk gown of state, even among so many. If there was one day in the
entire year, when she was radiantly happy, and in her favorite element,
it was Commencement day, so her girls said.
After the closing exercises, the members of the H. S. Club had managed
to slip away unobserved during the reception. Polly had passed the
secret word around that a last meeting would be held in the music room
before school closed for vacation time. Yet in spite of this Polly
herself, founder of the Hungry Six Club, and its president, and chief
cook, was now missing.
Months before, when the fall term opened, the H. S. had been formed as a
mutually protective association. Out of thirty-four pupils, twenty-eight
at Calvert Hall were out-of-town girls. The other six were day scholars,
and all lived at Queen’s Ferry, Virginia. Therefore the six had banded
together, and stood by one another faithfully, against the united force
of the twenty-eight “regulars.”
“What did Polly tell us to wait up here for?” asked Isabel Lee.
“Vacation,” came Sue’s matter-of-fact tone from the curtained window,
where she was watching the long procession of carriages and automobiles
in front of Calvert Hall. “Polly has an idea, and she wants us to sew
buttons on it.”
“Oh, girls, who’s got the chafing-dish? Did any one remember to get it
at all?” Edwina, which the girls cut short to Ted, looked dismayed at
the others, and nobody responded. It was a serious moment. If the H. S.
Club had possessed a coat-of-arms, there would have been a chafing-dish
rampant on a field of fire as part of its symbolism. It had been Polly’s
Christmas present to the club. She had smuggled it in, all unknown to
Miss Calvert or the other girls, and had beguiled Annie May, the colored
cook, to hide it. On special occasions it made its appearance at feasts,
wonderful feasts, prepared with the help of Annie May, when the Hungry
Six foregathered behind locked doors, with the chafing-dish in the place
of honor.
“Open the door, just a little way, girls,” Polly would always say, just
at the crucial moment, and the tempting fumes of some chafing-dish
decoction would float away down the long dormitory corridor, until the
noses of the twenty-eight caught it, and there was an instantaneous
bombardment.
“Hold it open till the last minute when you see them coming,” Polly
would cry, her brown eyes dancing with fun, as she presided in one of
Annie May’s huge aprons, and waved a big spoon. “Just let them get a
good whiff of it, so the clans will gather, and then we’ll bar the
door.”
And the clans always gathered. First from one room, then another, in the
upper dormitories, the “regulars” would troop forth, and cluster around
the door where the day pupils ate their luncheon. Polly always held that
it was wise to wait until twelve-thirty, as by that time the regulars
would have finished eating. Sometimes they would catch murmurs from the
corridor.
“Smells like crab meat,” some one would whisper, and from the inner
shrine Polly would declaim,
“’Tis crab meat, with green peppers.”
Then a deep groan would rise from the “regulars,” and the Hungry Six
would smile at each other, for revenge is sweet. They could not forget
the midnight feasts which the “regulars” held while they were away.
Yet, at the very last minute, they had forgotten the chafing-dish. Some
of the people were already leaving, and the imposing line of carriages
outside the stately old Hall was growing thinner.
“Hadn’t one of us better go downstairs to the kitchen, and find Annie
May,” suggested Ted, anxiously. “Polly’s probably talking to somebody,
and has forgotten all about us. I saw the Admiral lift up his finger at
her, and that signal between them always calls Polly to attention.
Wasn’t it dear of him to come and talk to us! What was it he said? Oh, I
know. Look, girls, like this.” Ted struck a dignified posture in the
center of the floor, her chin set deeply in her lace collar, her brows
drawn down in imitation of the Admiral’s own bushy ones.
“Standing with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Maidenhood and—”
“Girls, I’ve got it!”
In the doorway stood Polly, her curly hair, brown and glossy as a ripe
chestnut, tied back in a cluster of long curls that reached to her
waist, her brown eyes brimming over with mischief, and in her hand,
wrapped carefully in a clean pillow case, was something the girls all
recognized by its outlines.
[Illustration: “Girls, I’ve Got It!”]
“I thought of it the very last minute,” went on Polly, quickly, “Annie
May hid it the last time we used it, you know, and I forgot to ask her
where she had put it. And she’s down in the back hall, crying over the
girls who are leaving, so of course I couldn’t disturb her. So I hunted
around the kitchen, in the wash boiler, and up in her room, then I
guessed. You know the linen closet in the back hall. It was in there,
way down under some gray blankets on the bottom shelf. Wasn’t she the
wise old darling to put it under the gray ones, so it wouldn’t show if
it should happen to get a spot on them! And then I heard Honoria calling
me.”
“Whatever did you do, Polly?” whispered the girls, tensely.
“I slipped the chafing-dish into a pillow case, left it on the hall
settee, and went to see what she wanted. And afterwards, Mrs. Yates sent
for me to be introduced to her.”
“The Senator’s wife?” asked Isabel, eagerly.
“Yes’m. She used to be one of Miss Calvert’s girls when she was young,
and she wanted specially to meet me for the sake of the Admiral. It’s
dreadful, all the things I have to go through for the sake of that boy.
She even said I looked like him.”
Polly’s low, rippling laugh was smothered by a judicious toss of a sofa
pillow from Sue.
“Be quiet, goosie, or you’ll have everybody rushing up here to see
what’s the matter. Put the pillow case over the chafing-dish so it won’t
be seen, and tell us what happened. Why did you tell us all to come up
here?”
Polly seated herself on the arm of the nearest chair, and pushed back
her hair from her forehead with a gesture exactly like the Admiral’s.
“Ladies, and sisters, and dear colleagues,” she began, in imitation of
Miss Calvert’s Commencement Day rhetoric.
“Don’t speechify, Polly,” ordered Ruth, cheerfully. “Hurry up. It’s
getting late.”
But Polly went serenely on her own way, which was characteristic of her.
“We stand at the parting of the ways, don’t we? The last year at dear,
precious old Honoria’s is over for Ruth and Kate. No more will we six
use the historic chafing-dish, no more battle with the twenty-eight
strangers who have lingered within our gates.” She turned her head, and
smiled at Ted and Sue. “Am I on the right thread of discourse, sisters?
Does it sound like oratory?”
“Oh, bozzer,” said Sue, helplessly. “Play ball, Polly, please, please,
play ball.”
“I’ll be good, and stop,” Polly retorted, laughing. “Listen. All the
rest of the girls, excepting us, are going away on vacations. Real ones,
I mean. And for the next two months, what are we going to do?”
“Nothing but rest,” Sue said, dismally.
“That’s just it. We’ll stay around home the way we always do, have a few
picnics, and a few lawn parties, and all that sort of thing. We shan’t
have any real vacation, anything that is different from everything else
we do the whole year round, shall we?”
Five heads shook in unison.
“But, Polly, it would take so much money,” began Ruth, picking one of
her roses abstractedly to pieces.
“If we went any distance at all,” Kate Julian laid down the book she had
been looking over while Polly talked. She met Polly’s eager glance, and
smiled. Kate was nearly eighteen, but both Ruth and herself were firm,
true friends of Polly’s, and the Admiral said he approved because Polly
needed ballast now and then to keep her steady on her course.
“Oh, it’s quite a distance,” exclaimed Polly. “It wouldn’t be any fun to
go along the shore here.”
“Anybody’d think to hear you, Polly, that you had a whole island to
colonize, and an airship to travel in,” Kate teased. “I think you’re
just blowing a lovely bubble.”
Even Polly had to laugh, for at Calvert Hall her rainbow bubbles that
would float so beautifully for a whole minute, then turn into air, were
a steady source of fun among the girls.
“Well, you may laugh, but I have the island even if I haven’t any
airship,” she said.
There was the soft rustle of silk outside, and Miss Calvert stood in the
doorway. She was not the typical principal of a school for girls,
Honoria Calvert. There were too many “laughing wrinkles,” as Polly
called them, around her gray eyes; and the corners of her generous
mouth, and the way the girls clustered about her, told more plainly than
words, how dear she was to them all.
“The Admiral is asking for you, Polly, my dear,” she said. “Won’t the
girls excuse you, now?”
“Tell my commanding officer, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ please, Miss Calvert,”
Polly replied, rising at attention.
“Hurry, girls,” cautioned Miss Calvert, with a warning uplift of her
finger, as she went back to her guests. Polly hurried.
“Girls,” she whispered, “report for duty Saturday afternoon, at
Glenwood, all of you, because if we are going to do this thing, it must
be started right away.”
“Oh, Polly,” pleaded Sue, “is it anything where we can have the dear old
chafing-dish feasts?”
Polly turned around as she reached the doorway, and swung the
pillow-case around her head. Inside it, the chafing dish cover rattled.
“Indeed it is,” she cried. “We’ll need it more than ever. Will you all
be sure to come Saturday?”
“Sure,” echoed all of the girls, solemnly. “Polly’s going to hold a
launching party all her own.”
Polly laughed, and nodded mysteriously.
“There’ll be something happening besides a big splash if I do,” she
said, and hurried out to join the Admiral.