HUCKLEBERRYING
It seemed as if a summer of ordinary time was compressed into that first
fortnight at the old homestead. Esther wondered sometimes whether the
surrounding hills, over whose tops the morning broke earlier, and in
whose soft green hollows the twilights seemed to linger longer than any
she had known before, had not something to do with the lifting of the
days into the lengthened space of life and happiness. The charm of the
New England landscape, its restful yet enticing beauty, its reserves,
its revelations, had captured her fancy and her heart completely. Her
letters were full of the new delight. Mrs. Northmore smiled as she read
them, and felt that in Esther she was living over again the joys of her
own girlhood.
As for Kate, she was feeling the new environment as keenly as her
sister, but there was a difference in the letters. They were not
rhapsodical, and they were sprinkled with questions, such, for instance,
as, “_Don’t_ we speak as correctly in the West as they do in New
England?” “_Isn’t_ it absurd to drop the _r_ clear out of words, and
_do_ we over-do it?”
Between herself and Tom Saxon there was continual sharpshooting as to
the relative merits of their respective sections, but it did not
diminish in the least their relish for each other’s company. She rode
with him in the mornings to the milk factory, and occasionally took down
the load of cans in his stead. She went with him for the cows, and was
regularly depended on as the person to take the luncheon to the hayfield
in the middle of the forenoon. Sometimes she stopped and ate a doughnut
with the workmen under the trees, but she had not yet developed a
fondness for the peculiar beverage compounded of water, molasses, and
vinegar, vaguely called “drink,” which seemed the approved liquid in
this region for quenching the thirst of haymakers.
Indeed, the daily round furnished to each of the girls so much of
enjoyment that they could easily have spared the more formal pleasures,
but Aunt Elsie had definite ideas as to the courtesies due between
families, and Stella’s prestige in the community gained ready attention
for her cousins. There were calls in plenty to be received and returned,
and for picnics and teas there were early invitations.
Esterly was counted one of the most social of New England towns, and its
summer population included city boarders who had a mind for pleasure.
They fell in with whatever was planned for them, Kate and Esther, with
ready enjoyment, yet for them both the distinctive engagements of the
old home and the old farm remained easily the best. One of them,
suggested by Aunt Elsie one day at table, brought a thrill of peculiar
pleasure.
“I do wish,” she said, with a glance at the young people which included
them all, “that we could get some huckleberries. They say they’re ripe
on Gray’s Hill, and I do need something to make pies of.”
Stella gave a little sigh. It was the first invitation of the season to
an occupation which she detested; but Esther exclaimed: “Go
huckleberrying! Oh, I should like that so much! I’ve heard mother talk
about huckleberrying, and I want to see what it’s like.”
“So do I,” said Kate, eagerly. “Why can’t we go this afternoon?”
Stella gave another sigh, this time a deeper one. “Oh, what
accommodating creatures you are!” she said. “I ought to want to go with
you, of course, but to tell the honest truth I don’t hanker for it, and
I’m positively opposed to climbing Gray’s Hill unless we know for
certain that those berries are ripe.”
“I saw some there yesterday, over on the south side,” said Tom.
“Then maybe you’d better go too,” said his mother, persuasively. “You
could show the girls right where they are.”
Tom may have regretted that he had aired his knowledge, but there was no
escape for him now, especially as his grandfather added briskly, “Yes,
Tom, you can go as well as not, for we shan’t get in the hay that’s down
this afternoon, it’s so cloudy.”
And so it happened that an hour later the four, well supplied with tin
pails, were off in search of huckleberries. Across the fields odorous of
new-mown hay, by the foot-bridge over the meadow brook, across the old
county road and over the low stone wall, they made their pleasant
pilgrimage. Tom and Kate were ahead, she keeping steady pace with his
easy swing, lowlander though she was, and not to the manner born of such
climbing as this. Once, in a dimple of the hill, she made a dash
forward, and, swinging her pail above her head, shouted: “I’ve found the
first! Here they are!”
But Tom, who was up with her in a moment, gave a whoop of disdain as he
scanned the low cluster of bushes. “Those! why, those are blueberries.
Don’t you know the difference?”
Kate confessed with some humility that she did not, but the humility
vanished when he added loftily: “And just as like as not you never will.
There were some Westerners boarding over at Lester’s one summer, and
those folks couldn’t tell one from t’other clear up to the end of the
season.”
“Well,” said Kate, with a toss of her head, “maybe we can’t tell
huckleberries from blueberries, but we can always tell hickory nuts from
walnuts, which is more than you folks here can do, and there’s a sight
more difference between them than there is between _these_ little
things.”
She broke a blueberry bush, and looked at it with an attention which
promised that she, at least, would know the species when she met it
again, then started on with the remark, “Well, whichever of them I get,
I mean to fill my bucket with something before I leave this hill.”
“There you go again,” grumbled Tom, who had been rather set back by the
taunt about the nuts. “You always call a pail a bucket.”
“Well, it _is_ a bucket,” cried Kate, beating a tattoo on the bottom of
hers with spirit. “You couldn’t prove that I was wrong when you went to
the dictionary about it, and anyway it isn’t half as funny to call a
pail a bucket as to call a frying-pan a ‘spider’ and a stool a
‘cricket.’”
“I suppose you children are quarrelling about something as usual,”
observed Stella, who with Esther had just caught up with the advance
guard. “I wonder how you can keep it up so steadily. I should think
you’d sometimes get tired.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, sis,” said Tom, with brotherly responsiveness,
“you’ll have to keep at the picking a little steadier than you generally
do, or it won’t make anybody tired to carry home the berries you’ll get.
This is the way she does,” he added, turning to his cousins; “she goes
fidgeting round, looking for the place where they’re thickest, and when
she finds it she settles down and draws a picture of a tree, or a rock,
or something. I’ll bet she’s got her drawing things with her now.”
Stella did not deny the charge. “What irrelevant remarks you do contrive
to make, Tom!” she said. “Come, go ahead, if you mean to show us where
those berries are.”
They found them, and were all busily picking in a few minutes more.
However Stella’s interest in huckleberries might flag later on there was
no criticism to be made on her attention at first, and her fingers flew
over the bushes at a rate which augured well for the filling of her
pail. As for the Northmore girls, they were in ecstasies. Kate settled
down to the business at once, though for a while she ate most of the
berries she picked, while Esther paused between the handfuls to take
long whiffs of the sweet fern which grew everywhere among the bushes,
and to fill her eyes with the landscape which looked fairer than ever
from the side of this green old hill.
Everything was interesting—the sights, the smells, the blossoms which
were all around them; even the sprig of lobelia which Tom presented for
his cousins’ tasting, having first cunningly prepared the way with
spearmint and pennyroyal—how Kate wished she could return the favor with
a green persimmon!—and the slender yellow worm, industriously measuring
the bushes, had its own claim to attention. Its name and manner of
travel reminded Kate of one of Aunt Milly’s songs with an admonishing
refrain of, “Keep an inching along, Keep an inching along,” and she
trolled it out with a rollicking plantation accent that charmed her
audience.
Perhaps it was the singing which drew a traveller who was climbing up
the hill in their direction. In a pause of the verses Tom suddenly
exclaimed: “Upon my word, there’s Solomon Ridgeway. He’s got his pack on
his back, too. Let’s have some fun.”
It was indeed the queer protégé of Aunt Katharine who appeared at that
moment, bowing and smiling as he emerged from behind a rock. Evidently
Tom did not share his grandfather’s extreme dislike for the man’s
society, for he advanced to meet him in the most friendly manner.
“Well, Solomon,” he exclaimed, “so you thought you’d come
huckleberrying, too! Do you expect to fill that box of yours this
afternoon?”
The face of the little old man, which was fairly twinkling with
pleasure, expressed an eager dissent. “Oh, no, I—I didn’t come
huckleberryin’,” he said, “and I couldn’t think of puttin’ ’em in this
box. Why this box—” he lowered his voice with a delighted chuckle—“has
got some of my jewels in it You see, I’m goin’ over to see little Mary
Berger. They say she’s got the mumps, and I kind o’ thought ’twould
brighten her up to see ’em. It don’t hurt the children—bless their
hearts—to see fine things; it does ’em good. And I always tell ’em,” he
added earnestly, “that there _air_ things better ’n pearls and rubies.
Tain’t everybody that the Lord gives riches to, and if they’re good
they’ll be happy without ’em.”
“Why, that’s quite a moral, Solomon,” said Tom. “You ought to have been
a preacher.” He sent a roguish glance at the girls, then, throwing an
accent of solicitude into his voice, added: “But aren’t you afraid you
might get robbed going through those woods? There’s quite a strip of
them before you get to Berger’s.”
The owner of the jewels sent an apprehensive glance into the woods which
skirted the brow of the hill and answered bravely: “Yes, I be, Thomas. I
be a little afeared of it. I—I won’t go so far as to say I ain’t. But I
don’t b’lieve a body or’ to stan’ back on that account when there’s
somethin’ they feel as if they or’ to be doin’, and I’ve always been
took care of before—I’ve always been took care of.”
The manliness of this ought to have shamed Tom out of his waggishness,
but he was not done with it yet. “Solomon,” he said, with the utmost
gravity,—“I should think you’d want to get your property into something
besides jewellery. Then you wouldn’t run such risks. Besides, if you had
it in the bank, you know, it would be growing bigger all the time.”
The little man’s face wore a look of distress, and he put his hand on
his box protectingly. “They tell me that sometimes,” he said in a
plaintive tone, “but I—I couldn’t think of it. It wouldn’t be half as
much comfort to me as ’tis this way. Besides, I’m rich enough now, and
when a body’s got enough, it’s enough, ain’t it? And why can’t you
settle down and take the good of it?”
“I think you’re quite right, Mr. Ridgeway,” said Stella. “It’s perfectly
vulgar for people to go straining and scrambling after more money when
they have as much as they can enjoy already. The world would be a good
deal pleasanter place than it is if more people felt as you do about
that.”
She punctuated this with reproving glances at Tom, to which, however, he
paid not the smallest attention.
“But you know, Solomon,” he said artfully, “if you only had your money
where you could draw on it, you wouldn’t have to work as you do now.
They keep you trotting pretty lively at the farm, don’t they? And I’ll
warrant Aunt Katharine finds you chores enough when you’re at her
house.”
The little man’s face was clear again. Here, at least, was a point on
which he had no misgiving. “Law, Thomas,” he said, “I—I like to keep
busy. Why, there ain’t a bit o’ sense in a body bein’ all puffed up and
thinkin’ he’s too good to work like other folks jest ’cause he’s rich.
’Tain’t your own doings, being rich, leastways not all of it. It’s
partly the way things happen, and then it’s the disposition you’ve got.
That’s the way I look at it. And it always ’peared to me,” he added,
with the most touching simplicity, “that, when a body’s rich as I be, he
or’ to do a leetle more ’n common folks to sort o’ try ’n’ pay up for
it.”
“Mr. Ridgeway,” exclaimed Stella—it was impossible after this to let
that graceless brother say another word—“would you mind showing us some
of your pretty things right now? My cousins never saw them, and I’m sure
they’d enjoy it ever so much.”
The countenance of Solomon Ridgeway was aflame with pleasure. He lowered
his box from his shoulders and unstrapped it with a childish eagerness.
“Why, I—I’d be proud to, Miss Stella,” he said, with a hurrying rapture.
Then, looking about for a suitable place of exhibition, he added, “Jest
come under that big chestnut tree over there, and I’ll spread ’em all
out so you can see ’em.”
It was not huckleberrying, but something much more unique, which engaged
them for the next half hour. The collection which Solomon Ridgeway drew
from his box and spread before their dazzled eyes was a marvel of tinsel
and glitter. There were brooches and rings and chains enough to have
made the fortune of half a dozen pedlers; trumpery stuff, most of it,
but what of that?
The owner was not one to let a carping world settle for him the value of
his treasure. There was paste that gleamed like diamonds in settings
burnished like the finest gold, and there were the colors of topaz and
emerald and sapphire and ruby. Who cared whether they flashed in bits of
glass or in stones drawn from the mines? They were things of beauty for
a’ that, and they filled their owner’s soul with joy. He had gathered
them slowly through the savings of earlier years, and the gifts of
friends; he loved them every one, and believed them to be of fabulous
value.
“They ain’t all I’ve got, you know. There’s a lot more,” he said
repeatedly; and then he rubbed his hands together and smiled upon his
audience with the air of a Crœsus demanding, “Do you know any one richer
than I?”
It was impossible not to wish to give him pleasure, and more than once
the girls exclaimed over the beauty of some trinket. Esther was
especially warm in her admiration, and there was no insincerity in her
words when she said: “I think you have some perfectly lovely things, Mr.
Ridgeway. I don’t wonder you prize them, and I’m sure that little girl
who is sick will thank you all her life for letting her see them.”
He had almost forgotten his friend on the other side of the hill. He
gathered up his treasures now with a sudden remembrance, lifted his box
to his shoulders again and was off, turning back again and again to make
his little bow, half of pomposity and half of humility, as he hurried
away.
“Is he crazy, or isn’t he?” exclaimed Kate, when he was fairly out of
hearing.
“He’s queer. That’s all you can say,” said Stella; “but for my part, I
don’t mind him. People are so much of a pattern here in America that I
think it’s rather nice to have one of a different sort mixed in now and
then.”
“I don’t see how he can keep up his notion of being rich and live in a
poorhouse,” said Kate.
“Don Quixote thought all the inns were castles,” said Stella. “I don’t
know why a person with an imagination like his shouldn’t take a
poorhouse for a first-class hotel.”
Her interest in huckleberrying was gone now, and the mood Tom had
foretold was upon her. Esther divined it as she saw her looking at the
chestnut tree, with her head tipped to one side.
“Oh, do sketch it, dear,” she whispered. “Did you really bring drawing
materials with you?”
Stella laughed, and drew a pencil and small pad from the bag that hung
at her belt.
“Fill my pail for me, and you shall have it for a souvenir,” she said.
The sketch was a pretty thing, and the pails, though not all full,
contained a goodly quantity of berries, when they descended the hill in
the late afternoon. As they reached the bottom a sudden thought came to
Esther. “Do you suppose your mother would care if I should take my
berries round to Aunt Katharine?” she asked.
“My mother would be ready to give you a special reward for thinking of
it,” said Stella. “But do you really feel like going round by Aunt
Katharine’s? It’s ever so far out of our way!”
“Oh, I don’t care for that,” said Esther, and she added quickly: “but
please don’t feel that you must go too. I know the way.”
Perhaps she was not really anxious that Stella should accompany her, nor
sorry that Kate was already far ahead with Tom, when she turned down the
old road a few minutes later with her face toward Aunt Katharine’s. “I
shall only stay a little while,” she called back. “You won’t be home
very long before me.”
But she was wrong as to this. Supper was over and the sunset fading when
she appeared at her grandfather’s.
“She insisted on my staying, though I had no thought of her asking me,”
she explained to Aunt Elsie. “She was delighted with the huckleberries.”
Sitting in the south doorway afterward with Stella, she said very
earnestly: “You never saw anybody pleasanter than Aunt Katharine was all
the time I was there. I’m sure she’s a great deal kinder than you think
she is. Do you know we got talking of Solomon Ridgeway, and she told me
some real interesting things about him. She says he was married when he
was young, but his wife only lived a few months. Evidently Aunt
Katharine didn’t think much of her, for she said she was a silly little
thing, who cared more about finery than anything else. But he was all
bound up in her, and when she died it almost killed him. He had a
terrible sickness, and when he got over it his mind had this queer kink
in it, and never came right afterward.” She paused a moment, then added,
“Somehow I couldn’t help thinking that there might be a clew in that
story to the reason why she is so good to him.”
“She’s just as queer in her way as he is in his. I guess it’s an
affinity of queerness,” said Stella, carelessly. And then she called her
cousin’s attention to the color of the clouds, which were fading in airy
fringes over Gray’s Hill.