CYNTHY’S NEIGHBORS
After the entertainment there followed a siege of cold weather that
pretty well “froze up everybody,” as Shad said. A still coldness without
wind settled over the hills. No horses could stand up on the icy roads.
Mr. Ricketts was held up with the mail cart for three days, and when the
road committee started out to remedy matters, they got as far as Judge
Ellis’s and turned back. None of the girls could get to school, so they
made the best of it. Even the telephone refused to respond to calls. On
the fourth day Mr. Peckham managed to break through the roads with his
big wood sled, and riding on it was Sally muffled to the eyebrows.
“Unwind before you try to talk,” Kit exclaimed, taking one end of the
long knit muffler. “How on earth did you get through?”
“It isn’t so bad,” Sally replied in her matter-of-fact way, warming her
hands over the kitchen fire. “And our hill is fine for coasting. The
boys have been using it. Father’s going to break the road through for
the mail cart, and on his way back we can all get on and ride back. You
don’t need any sleds. We’ve got a big bob.”
Jean and Helen hesitated. Winter at the Cove had never meant this, but
Doris pleaded for them all to go, and Kit was frankly rebellious against
this spirit in the family.
“Jean Robbins,” she said, “do you really think it is beneath your
dignity to slide down hill on a bobsled? You won’t meet one of Bab
Crane’s crowd. Come along.”
“It’s so cold,” Helen demurred, from her seat by the sitting-room fire
with a book to read as usual.
“Cold? You’re a couple of cats, curled up by the fire. Bundle up and
let’s have some fun.”
“Do you all a pile of good,” Mrs. Gorham said placidly. “You just sit
around and toast yourselves ’stid of getting used to the cold. Get out
and stir around. Look at Sally’s red cheeks.”
So laughing together, they all wrapped up warmly and went out to get on
the wood sled when it came back. The hill over by the sawmill was not so
steep, but it swept in long, undulating sections, as it were, clear from
the top of Woodchuck Hill down to the bridge at Little River. The
Peckham boys had been sliding for a couple of days, and had worn a fair
sized track over the snow and ice.
“There’ll be fine skating when the snow clears off a bit,” Billy called
out. “We’ve got a skating club, and you’ll have to join. Piney’s the
best girl skater. Jiminy, you ought to see her spin ahead. We skate on
the river when it’s like this and you can keep on going for miles.”
“Do you know, girls,” Jean said on the way back, “I think we stay in the
house too much and coddle ourselves just as Mrs. Gorham says. I feel
simply dandy now. Who’s for the skating club?”
Even Helen joined in. It seemed to take the edge off the loneliness,
this co-operation of outdoor fun and sport. The end of the week found
the river clear and ready for skating. Jean never forgot her first
experience there. It was not a straight river. It slipped unexpectedly
around bends and dipping hillsides, curving in and out as if it played
hide-and-seek with itself, Doris said, like the sea serpent that met its
own tail half way around the seven seas.
Up near the Greenacre bridge Astrid and Ingeborg met them with Hedda.
Helen, the fanciful, whispered to Jean how splendid it was to have real
daughters of the northland with them, but Jean laughed at her.
“Cousin Roxy would say ‘fiddlesticks’ to that. I’m sure they were all
born right on this side of the briny deep, you little romancer.”
“It doesn’t matter where they were born,” answered Helen, loftily. “They
are the daughters of vikings somewhere back. Just look at their hair and
eyes.”
It really was a good argument, Jean thought. They had the bluest eyes
and the most golden hair she had ever seen. Sally skated up close to her
and began to talk.
“Father says when his father was a boy, there were gray wolves used to
come down in wintertime from Massachusetts, and they’ve been chased by
them on this river when they were skating.”
“My father tells of wolves too,” Astrid said in her slow, wide-eyed way.
“Back in Sweden. He says he was in a camp in the forest on the side of a
great mountain, and the men told him to watch the fires while they were
hunting. While he was there alone there came a pack of wolves after the
freshly killed game. He stood with his back to the fire and threw
blazing pine knots at them to keep them back. While the fire kept up
they were afraid to come close, but he could see the gleam of their eyes
in the darkness all around him, and hear them snap and snarl to get at
him. Then the men and dogs returned and fought them. He was only
thirteen.”
“Oh, and his name should have been Eric the Bold, son of Sigfried, son
of Leofric.” Kit skated in circles around them, her muff up to her face
as she talked. “You’ve got such a dandy name, Astrid, know it?”
“It is my grandmother’s name,” Astrid answered in her grave unsmiling
way.
“But it means a star, the same as Stella or Estelle or Astarte or
Ishtar. We’ve been studying the meanings of proper names at school, and
it’s so fascinating. I wish I had been named something like Astrid. I’d
love to be Brunhilde.”
Jean watched them amusedly. Kit and Helen had always been the two who
had loved to make believe they were “somebody else,” as Helen called it.
“Let’s play we’re somebody else,” had been their unfailing slogan for
diversion and variety, but Jean lived in the world of reality. She was
Jean Robbins, living today, not Melisande in an enchanted forest, nor
Berengaria, not even Kit’s favorite warrior maid, Jeanne D’Arc. Helen
could do up the supper dishes all by herself, and forget the sordid
details entirely making believe she was the Lady of Tripoli waiting for
Rudel’s barque to appear, but Jean experienced all of the deadly
sameness in everyday life. She could not sweep and dust a room and make
believe she was at the spring exhibitions. She could not face a basket
of inevitable mending, and imagine herself in a castle garden clad in
clinging green velvet with stag hounds pacing at her heels.
When they had first come to the country to live, it had been comical,
this difference in the girls’ temperaments. Mrs. Robbins had wanted a
certain book in her room upstairs, after dark, and had asked Helen to
run up after it. And Helen had hesitated, plainly distressed.
“For pity’s sake, Helenita, run along,” Jean had said laughingly.
“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”
“I don’t know,” Helen had answered, doubtfully. “Maybe I am. I’m the
only one in the family with imagination.”
Sometimes Jean almost envied the two their complete self-absorption. She
was never satisfied with herself or her relation to her environment.
Seeing so many needs, she felt a certain lack in herself when she shrank
from the little duties that crowded on her, and stole away her time. She
had brought up from New York a fair supply of material for study, and
had laid out work ahead for the winter evenings, but the days were
slipping by, and time was short. Her pads of drawing paper lay untouched
in her desk drawer. Not a single new pencil had been used, not a stick
of crayon touched. The memory of Daddy Higginson driving his herd of
cattle cheered her more than anything when she felt discouraged. And
after all, when she thought of the California trip and what a benefit it
would be to her father, that thought alone made her put every regret
from her, and face tomorrow pluckily.
“I’m half frozen,” Doris said suddenly, just as they swung around a bend
of the river, and faced long levels of snow-covered meadows. “Oh, girls,
look there.” She stopped short, the rest halting too. Crossing over the
frozen land daintily, following a big antlered leader, were five deer.
Straight down to the river edge they came, only three fields from the
girls.
“They’ve got a path to their drinking place,” said Sally. “Don’t move,
any of you.”
“Oh, I wonder if ours is there,” Doris whispered. “He hasn’t been with
the cows since the storm passed, but I know I could tell him from the
rest. He had a dark patch of brown on his shoulder.”
“There’s only one with antlers,” Sally answered. “I hope the hunters
won’t find them. I never could bear hunters. Maybe if we had to depend
on them for food it would be different, but when they just come up here
and kill for fun, well, my mother says she just hopes some day it’ll all
come back to them good and plenty.”
“Yes, and who eats squirrel pie with the rest of us,” her brother
teased. “And partridge too. She’s only talking.”
“Don’t fight,” Helen told them softly. “Isn’t that a house over there
where the smoke is?”
“It’s Cynthy Allan’s house,” Ingeborg looked around warningly as she
spoke the name. “I’m not allowed to go there. She’s queer.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Kit cried. “I love queer people. Let’s all go
over and call on Cynthy. How old is she, Ingeborg?”
“Oh, very old, over seventy. But she thinks she is only about seventeen,
and she’s always doing flighty things. She’s lived out in the woods all
summer, and she ran away from her family.”
“She won’t hurt you, I suppose,” Sally explained. “Mother says she just
worked herself crazy. Once she started to make doughnuts and they found
her hanging them on nails all over her kitchen, the round doughnuts, I
mean. Lots of them. So folks have been afraid of her ever since.”
“Just because she made a lot of doughnuts and hung them around her
kitchen? I think that’s lovely,” Kit cried. “What fun she must have had.
Maybe she just did it to nonplus people.”
“I don’t know,” Sally said doubtfully. “She took to the woods after
that, and now she lives in the house along with about fourteen cats.”
“I shall call on Cynthy today, won’t you, Jean?”
“I’d like to get warmed up before we skate back,” Jean agreed. “I don’t
suppose she’d mind. If you don’t want to, Ingeborg, you could wait for
us.”
Ingeborg thought waiting the wiser plan, but the rest of them took off
their skates, and started up over the fields towards the little grey
house in the snow. There were bare rose bushes around the front door and
lilacs at the back. Several cats scudded away at their approach and took
refuge in the woodshed, and at the side window there appeared a face, a
long, haggard, old face, supported on one old, thin hand that
incessantly moved to hide the trembling of the lips. Kit, on the impulse
of the moment, waved to her, and smiled.
“Gee, I hope she’s been cooking some of those doughnuts today,” said one
of the Peckham boys.
Jean tapped at the door. It was several minutes before it opened. Cynthy
looked them over first from the window before she took any chances, and
even when she did deign to lift her latch, the door only opened a few
inches.
“Could we please come in and get warm?” asked Jean in her friendliest
way.
“What did you stick out in the cold and get all froze up for?” asked
Cynthy tartly. But the door opened wider, and they all trooped into the
kitchen. Out of every rush bottomed chair there leaped a startled cat.
The kitchen was poorly furnished, only an old-fashioned painted dresser,
a wood stove, a maple table, and some chairs, but the braided rugs on
the floor made little oases of comfort, and the fire crackled
cheerfully, throwing sparkles from the copper tea kettle.
“Ain’t had nobody to draw me no well water today,” Cynthy remarked
apologetically. “Else I wouldn’t mind making you a cup of tea, such as
it is. Warm you up a mite anyhow.”
Steve Peckham grabbed the water pail and hustled out to the well, and
his brother made for the woodshed to add to the scanty supply in the
woodbox.
“Ain’t had nobody to cut me no wood for a spell nuther,” Cynthy
acknowledged. “You won’t find much out there ’ceptin’ birch and chips.
Sit right down close to the fire, girls.” She looked them all over in a
dazed but interested sort of way. “Don’t suppose—” she hesitated, and
Kit flashed a telepathic glance at Jean. It wasn’t possible Cynthy was
still in the doughnut making business, she thought. But the old lady
went on, “Don’t suppose you’d all like some of my doughnuts, would ye?
They’re real good and tasty.”
Would they? They drew up around the old maple table while Cynthy spread
a red tablecloth over it, and set out a big milkpan filled with golden
brown doughnuts. Jean found a chance to say softly, she hoped Miss Allan
would come up to Greenacres soon, and sample some of their cooking too.
“Ain’t got any hat to wear,” Cynthy answered briefly. “Never go
anywheres at all, never see anybody. Might just as well be dead and
buried. Anyhow, it’s over two and a half miles to your place, ain’t it?
Used to be the old Trowbridge place, only you put a fancy name on it, I
heard from the fishman. Don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t for him
coming ’round once a week. I never buy anything, but he likes to have a
few doughnuts, and I like to hear all the news. I’d like to see how
you’ve fixed up the old house. When nobody lived there, I used to go
down and pick red raspberries. Fearful good ones over in that side lot
by the barn.”
“We made jam of them last year,” Kit exclaimed, eagerly. “I’ll bring
some down to you, sure.”
“Wish I did have a hat to wear,” went on Cynthy, irrelevantly. “Wish I
had a hat with a red rose on it. I had one once when I was a girl, and
it was so becoming to me. Wish I had another just like it.”
“There’s a red silk rose at home among some of Mother’s things. I know
she’d love you to have it. She’ll be home soon, and I’ll bring it down
to you when I find the rose.”
The very last thing that Cynthy called from the door as they all trooped
down the path, was the injunction to Kit not to forget the rose.
“Isn’t it wonderful,” she said enthusiastically to Jean, as they skated
home. “She must be seventy or eighty, Jean, but she longs for a red
rose. I don’t believe age amounts to a thing, really and truly, except
for wrinkles and rheumatism. I’ll bet two cents when I’m as old as
Cynthy is, I’ll be hankering after pink satin slippers and a breakfast
cap with rosebuds.”
Jean laughed happily. The outing had brought the bright color to her
cheeks, and it seemed as if she felt a premonition of good tidings even
before they reached the house up on the pine-crowned hill. She was
singing with Doris as they turned in at the gateway and went up the
winding drive, but Kit’s eagle eye discovered signs of fresh tracks in
the snow.
“There’s been a team or a sleigh in here since we went out,” she called
back to them, and all at once Doris gave an excited little squeal of
joy, and dashed ahead, waving to somebody who stood at the side window,
the big, sunny bay window where the plant stand stood. Then Kit ran, and
after her Helen, and Jean too, all speeding along the drive to the wide
front steps and into the spacious doors, where the Motherbird stood
waiting to clasp them in her arms.