sights that met her blizzard-habituated eyes it is only fair to
say that Mrs. Tome Gallien in all her years of experience in
every kind of a Southland had never seen any thing that astonished
her as much as the sight of Solvei Kjelland.
Fuming helplessly in her great mahogany bed with its weird-carven
bed-posts of pirate and sailor and siren, the sick woman lay
staring blankly from the ceiling to the piazza railing and from
the piazza railing to the dull gray sea when the vision first
burst upon her.
"Why--why--Martha!" she screamed to her deaf woman. "There is a
bright blue girl in the wrangle boat! And nobody is wrangling!
They are coming right along, I mean! Scudding! And the girl is
running the engine!"
From her own quick glance at the scene the deaf woman's answering
voice came back as calm, as remote, as de-magnetized as the voice
of an old letter.
"You sent for a girl to come, I believe," said the deaf woman.
"Yes, I know," fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But I hardly dreamed for
a moment that she really would!"
"What?" said the deaf woman.
"Never--dreamed--that--she--would!" repeated Mrs. Tome Gallien
as economically as she could.
"Most things that you send for--seem to come," monotoned the deaf
woman by no means unamiably. "There's no room left in the storeroom
now for the last box of Japanese bric-a-brac, or the French wedding
gown or the new-fangled fireless cooker. Where shall we put the
girl?"
"In the fireless cooker!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien.
From the vague acquiescent smile on Martha's face it was evident
that she sensed the spirit if not the words of the suggestion.
The next direction however was startlingly clear. With a quite
unmistakable gesture Mrs. Tome Gallien pointed toward the stairs.
"Martha! Go to it!" she screamed.
To a person lying in bed voices travel so much quicker than do the
owners of the voices. Through what seemed an eternity then of time
and noise, boat-keels grounding, men grumbling, boys shouting,
women chattering, the sick woman waited in the lonely hush of her
immediate surroundings with a very perceptible shiver of nervousness
flashing from moment to moment across her spine.
[Illustration: As coolly as if she had been appraising a new dog
or pussy, Mrs. Tome Gallien narrowed her eyes to both the vision
and the announcement.]
Then all a-glow and a-blow and theatrically incongruous like some
splendid young Viking of Old rigged out in a girl's blue and
ultramodern rain-coat, the stranger loomed up suddenly at the
foot of the bed with Martha's portly white figure backgrounding
every radiant flutter and line of the blue and gold silhouette.
"I am come!" said Solvei Kjelland.
As coolly as if she had been appraising a new dog or pussy Mrs.
Tome Gallien narrowed her eyes to both the vision and the
announcement.
"Certainly you are a very good-looking young person!" she
conceded at last. "But of such an ungodly name! Is there no
way to overcome it?"
"Over--come it?" puzzled Solvei for a single shadowed instant.
"Oh, that is most easy," she brightened, almost at once. "Solway
it is as though it was. And Ch-Chelland."
"You may call me 'Elizabeth,'" said Mrs. Tome Gallien without
the flicker of an eyelash.
"E-lee-sa-buth?" repeated the girl painstakingly.
"Oh, I suppose that will do," sighed Mrs. Tome Gallien, struggling
up a little bit higher on her pillows. "But whatever in the world
made you come?" she demanded tartly.
But if the question was like a dash of cold water, Solvei's reaction
to it was at least the reaction of a duck's back.
"You mean you did not really want me?" she preened and fluttered.
Her voice was ecstasy, her eyes like stars.
"I certainly did not," sliced Mrs. Tome Gallien's clear incisive
voice.
"Oh, of what a joyousness and retribution!" beamed Solvei. "Of
what a gloriosity! As the shooting camping is to the sad little
lady, and the piano to the Young Doctor,--so thus am I to you!
What then shall happen to everyone of us is yet on the lap of the
gods! Let us kiss!" she suggested as one prize fighter might
proffer his hand to another.
"I am not a kisser, thank you," said Mrs. Tome Gallien with some
coldness.
"So-o?" acquiesced the girl softly. If her spirit faltered for
an instant, her blue eyes fortunately faltered no lower than the
great clutter of boxes that flanked Mrs. Gallien's bed in every
direction. "For why are there so many boxes?" she looked up
suddenly to ask with a smile that would have disarmed a Tartar.
"Why--why those are just some things I've been buying lately,"
relaxed Mrs. Tome Gallien ever so slightly. "There isn't so very
much to do here, some days, except just to read the advertisements
in the back of the magazines--and send for things. Martha hates
it!" she added with a sudden wry glance at Martha's impassive face.
"O-h!" said Solvei. And the word was divided absolutely evenly
between praise of the boxes and disparagement of Martha.
The boxes seemed to have heard their part of it anyway. The string
on a huge brown paper package burst suddenly as though for sheer
excitement.
"Martha will show you to your room," said Mrs. Tome Gallien quite
imperviously. "And whatever else you try to jar, pray don't waste
your energies trying to jar Martha. By a most merciful dispensation
of Providence her sensibilities have been wrapped in a cotton
batting silence for the past twenty years. You may in time learn
to understand me," she smiled faintly with her first kindness. "But
you will never understand Martha. Come back to me after supper,
if you wish. And wear something blue if you have it. I like you
in blue."
It was long after supper when Solvei returned. But at least she
was in blue, and a very neat and trim blue it was and essentially
boyish with its soft collar rolling back sailor-wise from her
slender throat. Like one fairly consumed with the winter novelty
of boats and beaches, too full of a hundred new excitements to
speak, she dropped down on the low footstool by Mrs. Tome Gallien's
pungent, smoky, lightwood fire, and with her blue elbows on her
blue knees and her white chin cupped in her white hands, sat
staring wide-eyed at her hostess. The whole breathless significance
of youth was in her face. Youth struggled eternally for its own
best self-expression. But when she spoke, a single sentence only
burst from her lips.
"What was in that big brown bundle-box that should burst so?" she
asked with a sudden elfish impudence.
But instead of being annoyed by the question, Mrs. Tome Gallien
seemed on the contrary to be rather amused with it.
"You like boxes?" she asked with a faintly quizzical lift of her
eyebrows.
"Boxes?" flamed Solvei. "It is like the new day! When the string
breaks--it is the dawn! 'What should there then be in it?' jumps
the heart. What is there yet that will come?"
"Oh, dear me," smiled Mrs. Tome Gallien. "If you feel like that
about it by all means come and open it. I forget myself what is
in it, there are so many. Nuts maybe," she laughed, "or a new
carpet sweeper. Or a sable muff even!"
With all the frank eagerness of a child Solvei Kjelland jumped
up to investigate the mystery, and like a kitten snarling itself into
worsteds disappeared for the moment into interminable pale-colored
tissue papers, only to emerge at last brandishing on high the
plumpest, gaudiest, altogether most hideous hand-embroidered
sofa pillow that human eyes were ever forced to contemplate.
"It is not nuts," said Solvei Kjelland. In another moment she had
clasped the pillow to her breast. "Oh, of what a horror!" she
laughed. "And how beloved! Is it the work then," she demanded, "of
a blind one? Or of one crazy? Or of one both blind and crazy?" Back
of the laughter and the question was a sincere and unmistakable
concern.
"A clergyman's widow makes them," confided Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Somebody over in Alabama,--I saw the advertisement in a country
newspaper. I take a whole lot of country newspapers for just that
sort of amusement," she added a bit drily. "There seems to be such
an everlasting number of bunglers in the world who are trying so
desperately hard to make a little money. This woman I believe is
trying to send her boy to college."
With the pillow extended precipitously to full arm's length Solvei
sat for a moment staring from the chaotic embroidery to Mrs. Tome
Gallien's perfectly composed face.
"Could a boy come to any of the good that should go to college on
a pillow like that?" she demanded uproariously, while all the
laughing curves of her mouth seemed reaching suddenly up to fend
off the threat of tears in her eyes. Once again she clasped the
pillow to her breast. "Oh, the bridge that it does make into the
other's life!" she cried. "Can you not see all at once, the house,
the desolation, the no store anywhere with fine goods to compare
with! The boy so thin, so white, so eager perhaps, so watching of
every stitch! That most dreadful magenta? Will there be by the
grace of the good God a chance perhaps for the Latin? That screaming
oranges? Should it be humanly possible that so much joys as histories
and boots might yet be in the same world with the Latin. And the
mother? So pricked with needles? So consumed with hopings----"
"You--you see it, do you?" drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"See it?" flamed Solvei. "I _am_ it!" With the gesture of one who
sought suddenly to hide her emotion she swung around abruptly
toward the other side of the room. "What else is there then?"
she asked, all laughter and mischief again. "That box so wooden,
so busted at the top? Is that also a bridge to some other livings?"
"If you choose to call it so," nodded Mrs. Tome Gallien. A frankly
quizzical invitation to explore was in the nod.
Solvei certainly needed no urging. In another instant down on
her knees before the great wooden box, she was slowly extracting
from wads of excelsior, piece after piece of the most exquisitely
delicate and transparent turquoise blue china beaded in gold and
airily overwrought with soaring sea gulls. There was a big breakfast
cup, and a middle-sized breakfast cup, and a big plate, and a
middle-sized plate, and a cereal saucer and another cereal saucer,
and a most stately little coffee pot and all the other attendants
and attendants to attendants which Fashion assigns to just that
sort of a service.
"Oh, it is for the fairies then?" gasped Solvei. "Or a Princess?"
Deftly as she spoke she pulled a great white sheet of paper to her
and spread it on the floor as a cloth. "No!" she quickened. "It is
for lovers! See? The first breakfast of the new home?" As cautiously
as though she had been handling butterfly wings she began to dramatize
the scene, the big plate there, the middle-sized plate here, a man's
elbow-room, thus, a woman's daintiness, so! In the ingenuousness of
her own visualization she lifted the bride's cup to her lips and
sipped an ecstatic draught from it.
"Mocha or Java?" mocked Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Joy!" said Solvei Kjelland.
In a sudden fit of abstraction then the girl struggled slowly to
her knees and knelt thus staring very thoughtfully all around her.
"So is it then with all these boxes?" she asked. "That from this
desert island lying so you would make constantly such little bridges
across to other people's livings? In time, it is, I mean, as soon
as you should bear to part with them you would build even these most
Heavenish dishes across to some young happiness? But will such a
young happiness ever take the troubles to cross back to you?" she
demanded with sudden fierceness. "That is it, I say! That is it! A
prattling note perhaps? A praise-you for being so rich? But do they
ever yet write more late to tell that the gift is still well, that
it has made new joy that very morning perhaps, that even yet after
one month, six months, twenty, it is still so dear?"
"They never have," admitted Mrs. Tome Gallien.
In utter irrelevance the girl sank back on her heels and crossing
her arms on her breast began to rock herself joyously to and fro.
"Oh, I do love this place so!" she confided. "I do love it so! And
if you should then keep me," she beamed. "And I should be quite
pleasant,--there is a lawn mower I read in yesterday's paper! Most
wonderful it is, and runs by the gasolene, so that all one needs to
do is to follow singing gaily. Could you send for such?"
"A lawn mower?" sniffed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "You noticed, I trust,
that there was no nice grass whatsoever on this island?"
"Yes, that is most so," admitted Solvei. "Neither equally is there
any young happinesses or bare-toed boys making for Latin. But if
we were possessed of such a lawn mower and its wonderfulness we
could at least make the fine green lawns in the mind."
"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien, "I am dreadfully afraid that
I am going to like you! But before I actually commit myself," she
frowned, "I want to ask you one question. Are you in the habit of
letting strange young men kiss you?"
"What?" jumped Solvei.
Very significantly Mrs. Tome Gallien repeated the question. "Strange
young men?" she revised it. "Are you in the habit of letting strange
young men kiss you?"
"Oh!" flushed Solvei. "It is then the Young Doctor that you mean?
Was it so that he thus confessed it to you?" she questioned a bit
bewilderedly. "So shamed he was, so worried, I had not just thought
that he should tell. Yes, it is as you say he is one most strange
young man."
"Yes, but you?" persisted Mrs. Tome Gallien. "How did you feel
about it? That's what I want to know!"
"How should I feel?" laughed Solvei. "Why it was so mad I was,
so strong, I could have crushed him on the steps! And then suddenly
I see his face! Bah!" shrugged Solvei. "I have one father and nine
brothers and all the world is most full of men! It is not from such
a face as the Young Doctor's that any evil should come. It is just
as I have said, one very sad accident!"
"It does not seem to be just the sadness of the accident that
lingers longest in your mind," drawled Mrs. Tome Gallien.
With her chin tip-tilted and her eyes like stars the girl met the
sarcasm without a flicker of resentment.
"No!" she laughed. "It is not the sadness of the accident that
remains longest in the mind!"
"U-m-mmmm," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "All the same," she resumed
with sharpness, "I certainly think it was most cruel, most brutal
of him, not to make the trip down here with me! It would have done
him good," she insisted. "Just the mere balmy change of it! He is
so grim!"
"Oh, but he cannot help the being grim," flared Solvei. "He is so
poor and so wanting things! How should he yet achieve them except
by sticking close to that most saddest of all truths that the only
ways to get ahead is to stay behind and attend to one's business?"
"Solvei!" asked Mrs. Tome Gallien quite abruptly. "Have you gotten
the impression in any way that the Young Doctor was--was attracted
at all to my little widow friend?"
"Oh, of a surety!" attested Solvei. "He is I think what one would
say 'crazy' of her."
"Oh, I hardly dare to hope that," mused Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But of
course--" In some far-away speculation the sentence faded suddenly
off into silence. "She will of course be very rich some day, I
suppose," she resumed a bit haughtily. "I shall, I suppose, make
her my heir."
"S-o?" said Solvei Kjelland.
"Solvei!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien with another spurt of abruptness.
"Speaking of 'attending to one's business,' if _you_ should decide
to stay here and make _me_ your business, what do you think you
could do for me?"
"Oh, I could do the reading aloud," brightened Solvei instantly.
"And I could thus open the boxes! And I could run the wrangle boat!"
she quickened and glowed. "And also if it should so seem best I
could scrub the blue flannel crockings from the Wrangle Boy's neck!"
"On the whole--as a really steady employment," conceded Mrs. Tome
Gallien, "suppose we begin on the reading aloud. I adore being read
to."
"Oh, I am very fine on this reading aloud!" preened Solvei.
"So dramatic is it that you say? So intensed?" With absolute
self-assurance she picked up the only book in reach, it happened
to be the "Golden Treasury," and just out of sheer temperamental
eagerness selected the biggest-looking poem she could find. "It
should be an 'Ode,' is it that you call it?" she confided. "And
it is about--about--? I do not know such words," she faltered for
a single second only and passed the page to Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"Oh," said Mrs. Tome Gallien, "Wordsworth, you mean. 'Ode on
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.'"
"S-o?" conceded Solvei. "All that? It is not certainly of a poetry
sound but more--later perhaps it will tell. All the rest is most
easy looking.
"There was--some time" (she began) "when--when
meadows, groves, also streams,
"The earth and all things perfectly--ordinary
"To me did--did seems
"Ap-pareled--"
I do not know that word and here is another--
"in ce--les--tial lightings,
"The----"
"Yes--anybody could see at once that you are a remarkable reader!"
slashed Mrs. Tome Gallien's coolest, thinnest voice. "The picture
it suggests of our long spring evenings together is----"
With a startled glance upward Solvei detected for the first time
the actual glinting mockery in the older woman's eyes. "What is
it?" she stammered. "What?" Still like some one more bewildered
than hurt she struggled to her feet. "Even as from the first," she
questioned, "is it that you are making the sport of me when I wish
so hard to do the things that would please you? Through and through,
is your heart then so cruel?" she demanded, "that it must make
mockerings of the confused and the far-from-homes?"
"Oh, Solvei!" cried the older woman suddenly. "Smile again! Laugh
again! I can't bear it! It's as though the sun had died! It's as
though the moon had gone! If you are angry and leave me, I shall
be left all alone again with just the fog and the sea! I am a brute,
and I know it! But oh, if you will only just smile again! Even just
once, I mean! Oh, my poor dear little girl," she implored her. "Oh,
my poor dear touchy little blonde girl!"
"I am not a 'poor--poor little blonde girl,'" asserted Solvei with
some spirit. "I am indeed as I said, very young, very strong. And
very laughing," she insisted without even the remotest flicker of
a smile.
"Are you young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to come
over here and sit on my bed?" rallied Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"I am young enough and strong enough and laughing enough to do
anything!" said Solvei Kjelland.
Stiff and stern as a ramrod she went over and sat on the side
of the Sick Woman's bed.
Without an atom of self-consciousness or embarrassment both
women began all over again to study each other's faces.
"Could I put my hand on your yellow hair?" asked Mrs. Gallien
at last quite surprisingly.
"You could put your hand on my yellow hair," said Solvei.
"If I should apologize fairly decently for existing at all,"
experimented Mrs. Tome Gallien a little further, "would you be
willing to kiss now?
"I should never be willing," sighed Solvei, "to kiss any lips that
tasted of mockerings."
"What would you be willing to do?" ventured Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"What would you want me to do?" relaxed Solvei ever so slightly.
Through Mrs. Tome Gallien's busy brain a dozen possible answers
tested themselves one against the other.
"Well, would you be willing to--to tell me a little story?" she
chose as the most promising one.
"Tell you a little story?" queried Solvei. Once again her whole
face darkened with suspicion.
"Yes, about my little island," hurried Mrs. Tome Gallien. "It
was dark when I came and they put me right into this bed. I do
not leave my bed, you know."
"What?" quivered Solvei. "This most beautiful little island, you
have not seen it--since you came?" In the very tensity of the
question all the blue seemed to surge back suddenly to her eyes,
all the pink to her cheeks. "Why of a sureness," she cried, "will
I tell you about this little island!" Softly then for a moment she
patted her skirts and recrossed her slippered feet and fumbled with
the big silk tie that closed her collar. Then quite geographically
she began her narrative. "First of all," she explained, "it is a
round little island."
"Really, you surprise me," said Mrs. Tome Gallien purely
automatically. "So many islands are square."
"And there are fish upon it!" glowed the narrator.
"Oh, surely not upon it?" shivered Mrs. Tome Gallien.
"And there are seven monstrous what you call 'live-oak' trees
dripping with gray beards,--it is most terrible," gloated the
narrator. "And in one tree alone have I seen with my own eyes
seven most scarlet birds and two blue birds. And in yet another
tree there is a fine snake.--And all along by what you should call
the edge of the porch blue violets are coming. And on the roof
where the wrangle boat sleeps there is an green vine that shall
yet be yellow and sweet, Martha tells. And--and--" Around the
corners of the girl's red lips a faint little smile showed
suddenly. "And there is one little black pig, so grunting!"
she announced with rapture. "And--and----"
So the sweet, eager, revitalizing young voice ran on till Martha
herself appeared to announce Sleeping Time, and Mrs. Tome Gallien
whose "sleeping time" for years had been a farce of ghost and
specter dozed off before she was even half undressed to dream
like a child of budding violets and flitting birds and a glow
that should be of jessamine instead of gold.
Hours fall so easily out of a day, days out of a week, weeks out
of a month!
The jessamine glow did come in its own good time as did also
various other things which Nature had ordained, March winds,
March rains, March tides, March sunshine.
Other wonders came too that were of course Mrs. Tome Gallien's
ordaining rather than Nature's fabulous shoppings from all the big
marts of the world, and little pitiful, home made products from
backwoods settlement or lonely prairie.
Once and for all time relieved of the hazardous task of reading
aloud to a capricious invalid, Solvei came and went like a young
Sea Breeze, whistling through the halls, singing through the rooms,
sweeping across the island, frolicking on the water. If it was
fair to rate her as a rather exceptionally clever and daring young
navigator on the sea of fact it was only fair to acknowledge her
equally clever, equally daring in the realms of fancy. Smiling
knowingly into Martha's silences, laughing at the wrangle boat man
or boy, waving a slim hand in and out of Mrs. Tome Gallien's narrow
sea-blue vista, scudding to and from the mainland on interminable
errands, or curled up for long cozy evenings on the foot of Mrs.
Tome Gallien's bed to visualize their mutual magic path across one
new box or another into "other people's livings," Solvei Kjelland
as a companion was frankly a success.
Then one day very late in March, or even the first of April,
something came which was partly of Nature's ordaining and partly
of Mrs. Tome Gallien's, though most thoroughly a surprise to the
latter one concerned.
It was a letter from Dr. Sam Kendrue. And very Northern. Whatever
the New York winter had been it was plainly evident that the New
York spring was still exceedingly cold.
MRS. TOME GALLIEN,
DEAR MADAM (said the letter):
As it seems best to me at just this time that Mrs. Kendrue should
supplement her treatment with a trip South, it is my intention to
accompany her. In view of this fact I will take the liberty of
calling upon you on Tuesday next. Trusting that your island
experience has proved beneficial to your health,
I am, Yours truly, etc., etc.
"U-m-mmmm," smiled Mrs. Tome Gallien. But before the dull, fretted
bewilderment in Solvei Kjelland's face, her smile sharpened
suddenly into impatience. "Why surely, Solvei," she scolded. "With
all your English you might at least understand that."
"N-o," shifted Solvei from one slim ankle to the other. "It does
not seem to me of any understanding whatever--whether it should
be Dr. Sam Kendrue's Mrs. Kendrue who comes or just Mrs. Kendrue's
Mrs. Kendrue?"