"I really can't see why they should call this cottage Valhalla," Dr.
McAlister said thoughtfully.
"Probably because there isn't any hall, and the dining-room is a tight
fit for five of us," Phebe answered, as she took a cup from the china
closet without troubling herself to leave her seat at the table.
"Teddy's establishment boasts the poetic name of Dandelion Lodge," Mrs.
McAlister added. "There isn't a dandelion in sight, and, architecturally
speaking, it is more like a hen-house than a lodge. Still, I suppose it
is well to have a name, even if there isn't anything in it."
"No matter," Hope said contentedly; "it's good to be free from the
everlasting Belviews and Wavecrests. Valhalla isn't trite; Babe and I
will be the Valkyries, and we have caught one hero already." She smiled
at her father, as she spoke.
"I intend to have another before I leave here," Phebe proclaimed, as she
passed her plate for more fish. "One hero isn't enough for us; we need
one apiece."
"Where will you get him, sister Valkyrie?"
"I don't know; out of the briny deep perhaps, but time will show."
"'Or old Valhalla's roaring hail,
Her ever-circling mead and ale,'"
the doctor sang, and Phebe joined his song,--
"'Where for eternity unite
The joys of wassail ad the fight,'"
for the stirring ballad was a favorite with them both.
Mac levelled his fork at them accusingly.
"You mustn't sing at ve table. It's horrid to sing at ve table."
"I beg your pardon, Mac," said his grandfather meekly.
Outside their windows, the sun was glowing over the steel blue sea. Not a
sail broke the distance; only the ceaseless tossing of white foam above
the rips, and close at hand a dory or two, rocking and rolling just
outside the line of surf. In the foreground was a broad strip of sand and
silvery beach grass then a narrower strip of sand without any grass at
all, and then the huge breakers which came crashing in, wave on wave,
mounting up, curling over, falling, breaking and racing up the sharp
slope of sand, with never a halt for rest. Beyond that, the sea; beyond
that again, three thousand miles beyond, Spain.
Qantuck lies crescent-wise along its low sandy cliff. The arms of the
crescent are made up of new houses of more normal shape and size; but
between them, the primeval village huddles itself together around the old
town pump. No seaside villas are there, but the tiny low cottages of the
old fishing hamlet, which seem to have grown like an amoeba, by the
simple process of putting out arms in any direction that chance may
dictate. Between them, the rutted, grass-grown roads are so narrow that
traffic is seriously congested by the meeting of a box cart and a certain
stout old dachshund that frequents the streets, and the cottages present
their fronts or sides or rears to the roads, according to the whim of the
owner. Crowded under the cliff are the bits of fishhouses, built, like
the cottages above, all of shingles all gray with the passing years, for
Quantuck history stretches back far into the long-ago, when, Town seven
miles away, was a prosperous whaling port. But though the summer
visitors come in schools like the bluefish, the little gray village on
the cliff is unchanging and unchanged.
In the very heart of the old settlement, poised on the verge of the
cliff, Valhalla and Dandelion Lodge were side by side, and the middle of
July found Dr. McAlister in one, in the other the Farringtons with Hubert
and Allyn as their guests.
"Valhalla can't hold you all," Billy had said, when they were making
their plans for the summer. "If we take the Lodge, there will be an
extra room, and Allyn and Hubert may as well use it. It really won't
make any difference how we divide up. At Quantuck the houses only count
on foggy days."
In fact, it had been Billy's idea, their choosing Quantuck, that summer.
Years before, in his young boyhood, the Farringtons had been there,
season after season, and he had always wanted to get back to the old
place. Again and again he had been prevented, and it was not until this
summer that he had succeeded in carrying out his plans. Now, for the
first time in years, Dr. McAlister had consented to take a long vacation;
Theodora's novel was locked up in the safe at home, waiting for
revision; Hubert was to be with them for three weeks of the time, and
Hope had come on from Helena to make the family circle complete.
To no one of the family had the week before the flitting been absolutely
enjoyable. On one scorching July morning, Phebe and Phebe's own familiar
friend, Isabel St. John, had roused their respective households at four
o'clock in order that they might catch the six-thirty train for New York.
Once there, they betook themselves to Hester Street in order to study the
conditions of life in the East Side. It chanced, however, to be Friday,
market day, and the place was a veritable Babel with the cries of the
hucksters and the shrill clamor of the women elbowing each other about
the push-carts. No one paid any heed to the girls; and on their side,
after a brief inspection they paid heed to but one question, how to get
out of the region as speedily as possible. Accordingly, they went up town
to lunch, strolled about Twenty-third Street for an hour or two before
going to the office of the fresh-air charity, and, late that evening,
reappeared at their own front doors, each with a wan and weary child at
her heels. Isabel's was a boy; Phebe, in deference to the conditions of a
family treaty, had a girl.
For about three weeks, Phebe's table had been heaped with books on
child-study, on pedagogy, on domestic hygiene; her room had been littered
with syllabi on child impressions in every conceivable relation. Phebe
was resolved to be scientific, or die in the attempt. She came nearer
achieving the latter alternative. The struggle began on the first morning
of her new charge. She was up early and ran down to the kitchen to put
the oatmeal over the fire. Then full of courage and sociological zeal,
she approached the tub, a thermometer in one hand, the child in the
other. The fray which followed, was a short one. It began with Phebe's
dropping the thermometer on the floor and plumping the child bodily into
the bath. It ended with the child's breaking away and diving into bed
again, dripping with bath-water and tears, while Phebe picked up the
scattered fragments of the thermometer and fished the towels from the tub
where they floated limply.
During the next half hour, Phebe parted with most of her theories and all
of her temper. In the first place, she had never before tried to dress a
child, and this first experience was not a pleasing one. The child's toes
persisted in catching in the tops of the stockings, the little waist
seemed to her unaccustomed eyes to be constructed upside down, and the
scant little skirt went on hind side before. In spite of shrill
protestations, she braided up the lanky hair and scoured a patch of skin
in the very middle of the child's face, and at last the toilet was
complete. Breakfast brought with it a new chapter in her experiences. No
arguments could induce the child to touch the oatmeal, unless it were
combined with equal parts of sugar, and Phebe meekly yielded to the
inevitable, while she hung up the dripping sheets to dry. Then she locked
the child into her room, and went wearily down to join the others at the
breakfast-table.
Later, when she appeared on the lawn, leading her charge by the hand, Mac
came forward to meet them. With his pudgy hands clasped behind him and
his small legs wide apart, he halted in front of the girl and, bending
forward, peered up under her sunbonnet.
"Shake hands, baby," he said encouragingly.
The child obediently put out one small fist; but unluckily Phebe had
spent all her energies on the face and neglected the hands entirely. Mac
looked at the grimy fingers, recalled the talk at the breakfast-table and
put his own hands behind him once more.
"Nahsty little girl!" he said severely, and, turning on his heel,
departed in search of Allyn.
For the next seven days, Phebe passed through every variety of toil and
woe and anxiety, also, it must be confessed, of teasing from her family.
According to its lights, the child was good. It was not bright enough to
be mischievous; it was pitifully apathetic on most points. In four
directions, however, it held pronounced opinions, and, moreover, it had
the courage of its convictions. It refused to be left alone for more than
five minutes at a time; it refused to be washed; it refused to eat plain
food, and it persisted, in spite of all opposition, in calling Phebe
_grandma_. The title suggested affectionate devotion; but Phebe would
have given up the devotion with perfect readiness.
It had been decreed that, if Phebe took the child, she should assume the
whole responsibility in the matter, and she was resolute in carrying out
her share of the compact. Theodora washed her hands of the affair
entirely and only viewed it as an immense joke; but Hope, motherly and
tender-hearted woman that she was, tried her best to come to the aid of
her young sister. It was in vain. The little girl, homesick and forlorn
for her wonted ways and plays, appeared to regard Phebe as the sole
connecting link between the present gilded captivity and her old-time
freedom. She wailed loudly at the approach of any one else, and was only
content when her temporary guardian was within sight and touch. For seven
weary days, the child was Phebe's inseparable companion and adjunct. On
the evening of the eighth day, Phebe came home from New York, burned her
syllabi and carried seven bulky tomes back to the public library.
"Retail reform isn't of the least use," she said vehemently to Isabel,
that night. "Next time, I'll either import a colony, or let the whole
thing alone. Either I will go and live with them, or nothing. It doesn't
do any good to drag them here to pine for their ashbins. Just wait till
next year, Isabel, and we'll try one of the settlements. This year, I've
got to go to Quantuck and enjoy myself."
With whatever misgivings she started for Quantuck, she certainly achieved
her end of enjoying herself. The summer colony, that year, was a large
and lively one, and Phebe threw herself into it with the same fervor
which had marked her entrance into slumming, and, before that, into
medicine. Skeletons and syllabi appeared to be alike forgotten; golf and
swimming lessons took their place, and Phebe revelled in her out-of-door
life as simply and as sincerely as Mac himself. Out on the cliff at dawn,
down on the beach for the bathing hour, out to the links for the
afternoon, back on the beach to watch the moon rise, she was perpetually
active, perpetually in earnest, perpetually in a hurry. To the others,
her energy was amusing and, at times, a little wearing. They liked better
to spend long hours on the beach, where their awning soon became a focal
point for the fun of the bathing hour; they loved to roam over the moors,
to sit down now and then on their own broad piazzas and glance from book
to sea and from sea to book again with the curious indifference to time
and literature which is characteristic of the place.
"Do stay down here, this afternoon," Theodora urged her, one day. "The
Bensons are coming over here soon, and it is much more fun to be here, a
day like this, than to be prancing around those links."
But Phebe shook her head.
"I didn't come down here to frivol, Ted; I leave that to you. Nobody
knows when I may have another chance to get myself in good form at golf,
and I must make the most of this."
"But there are more days coming, and the Bensons are such pleasant
people to know."
"I know more people now than I can get any good of," Phebe said, as she
balanced her driver, and then swept it around in a circle with a force
which nearly overturned her. "What's the use of any more? There comes
Harold; he's going to caddy for me, to-day. I must go."
"What do you suppose can be the attraction out at the links?" Theodora
said, after she had gone.
"Sheer delight in the sport," Hubert answered lazily, for he was
sprawling on the sand by his sister's side, and it seemed almost too
great an effort to speak.
"Isn't there any attendant knight?" Hope asked. "Phebe is impenetrable;
but I have sometimes wondered whether there might not be a social side to
it, rather than athletic."
"Don't waste any romance on Babe, Hope," Hubert advised her. "I wondered
about it, myself, for there is rather a gay crowd out there, and I didn't
know what might be going on. I went out, one day. I found the others all
in a bunch, and Babe tearing around the links all by herself, with her
poor caddie trotting hard to keep up with her."
"Who's that? Babe?" Allyn had suddenly plunged into the midst of the
group. "I hear that the caddies are talking of a boycott, charging her
double fees unless she goes slow. She plays a smashing game; but there's
no sort of sense in the way she goes about it."
Theodora yawned.
"Babe is upsetting all my ideas," she said languidly. "I had always
regarded golf as a suitable amusement for stout elderly persons who
waddled, a good deal like the caucus race in _Alice_. Babe's vigor fairly
takes my breath away."
"Same with her swimming," Allyn remarked, with a certain pride. "She's
gone into it all over."
"Into the surf?" Cicely inquired, as she scooped little mounds of sand
over his feet.
"Yes, just that. She swims under water like a fish. There isn't another
girl here to beat her. You are nothing but a porpoise beside her, Cis,
and you swim fairly well. Hope, I do wish you'd take lessons. I'm tired
of seeing you chug up and down beside that lifeline."
"Do you know," Theodora said meditatively; "I'd rather face the
footlights at the Metropolitan than come down this beach at the bathing
hour. It makes me feel pigeon-toed in the extreme."
Cicely eyed her with a calm lack of comprehension born of healthy
girlhood.
"I don't see why," she said.
"Because you stay in the water, and can't hear the gossip along shore,"
Theodora answered. "Just you stay out here, some morning, and sit in the
Dragons' Row, as Billy calls it, and you will find out what I mean.
Charity covers a multitude of sins; but it never drapes an awkward woman
in an unbecoming bathing suit."
"That is where Babe has the advantage," Hubert remarked. "She isn't
exactly graceful; but she is no more awkward than an unbroken colt."
"And she acts a good deal like one," Hope added, laughing. "Still, she
may get broken soon, so let's let her go her ways in peace. She has
worked hard, the past six months, and she deserves to be allowed to take
her vacation in any form she chooses."