Family Sabbatical (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries)

by Carol Ryrie Brink

  Besides carving the pumpkin and turning the large, strange bathroom into a Chamber of Horrors, the children were busy making masks with letter paper and crayons, and carrying pine cones upstairs. There were many pine cones lying about on the ground under the pine trees in the garden, and Susan had decided that this was the perfect night to try out the fireplaces.

  “Pine cones burn splendidly,” she said, “and I’m sure that if we have enough of them we can roast our marshmallows.”

  “Has Mother asked the hotel manager about the fireplaces yet?” asked George.

  “I’m sure she has,” said Susan. “She said she’d ask that very next day and tell us if we couldn’t. I don’t like to ask her outright because then she’ll know in advance about one of the surprises of the party.”

  The party began at eight o’clock, just after dinner. Mother had invited the governess to have dinner with them in the hotel dining room, and Mademoiselle seemed to enjoy it very much. The children thought later that this was a good thing, because after dinner events became more and more wild and spooky, and it was well that Mademoiselle had had a good time earlier.

  The party was to be held in Susan and Dumpling’s room, and, while the three grown-up guests waited in the salon, the children made their final preparations.

  As Susan helped George into a sheet, and Dumpling into her red overalls and a mask with horns, she said, “It’s just as well to let them have a little time together. I heard Mademoiselle starting to tell Daddy and Mother what good children we are and what a lot of French we are learning.”

  “Swell!” said George, rubbing his face, first with Vaseline, and then with Mother’s white bath powder.

  “Now if some of Mother’s vanishing cream would only make us vanish—” Dumpling began. But Susan thought that would not really be practical.

  Susan wore the dark blue steamer rug with the fringe wrapped around her shoulders and over her head to represent a witch, and she had used black crayon to cover a couple of teeth and make it appear that they were missing. She had a black patch over one eye, and her hair was brushed forward into wispy bangs. She did look awful.

  The party began with weird noises—groaning and moaning, the rattling of George’s rocks in a tin box, and the mournful roar of water going out of the bathtub and down the drain. This was always a most dismal sound and was really what had made Susan think of using the bathroom for a Chamber of Horrors in the first place.

  Susan threw open the door of the bedroom and invited the guests in by exclaiming, “Bad evening, and I trust you will have a very unpleasant time!” How true this was to prove, nobody suspected at the moment.

  George, as a ghost, stood ready to shake the hands of the guests as they entered. On his right hand he wore an old suede glove of Mother’s to which the mate had been lost, and it had been soaked a long time in cold water, so that it was startlingly slimy and chilly. He passed the guests on to Dumpling, whose hand was sticky with apricot jam from the breakfast tray, and then, one by one, they were ushered into the Chamber of Horrors.

  Mother and Father were calm, because they had been through things like this before, but poor Mademoiselle twittered with alarm, and her glasses kept falling off her nose and dangling by the chain. She had never seen an All Saints’ Eve like this in her entire life.

  The Chamber of Horrors was hung with sheets and was dark except for the candlelight from the grinning pumpkin head. The first thing one saw, upon opening the door, was the very large clothes hamper. As the door slowly opened, the cover of the clothes hamper slowly rose, mysteriously disclosing a ghostly figure that also rose up like a genie out of a bottle.

  This was really Susan’s masterpiece, and enough to chill the bravest heart. Actually a sheet and a crayon mask were fastened inside the cover of the hamper; and a string was rigged up on the outside of it that passed over a hook on the top of the door jamb and came down to be tied around the door handle. In this way anyone who opened the door was sure to bring the ghost out of the basket.

  Mademoiselle gave a small shriek of dismay, and then she was guided by George’s clammy hand to the mirror over the washbasin.

  Susan recited in a hollow voice,

  “Look in the mirror and you will see,

  Your loving husband that is to be.”

  “Mon Dieu!” said Mademoiselle in surprise. “I have give up hoping for a husband.”

  “Don’t give up yet,” said George eagerly, for this part of the Chamber of Horrors was his particular invention. He had noticed that when the light in the bathroom was turned off, there was a round spot of light from the girls’ room which shone on the frosted glass of the partition just opposite the bathroom mirror and was reflected in it. He had cut a face like a jack-o’-lantern out of paper and secured it to the glass over the bright spot, and now, as Mademoiselle gazed hopefully into the mirror, Susan raised the sheet that covered the frosted glass and the grinning silhouette suddenly appeared, looking over Mademoiselle’s shoulder. It seemed to look at the governess in the mirror.

  She was a satisfactory victim and shrieked very appropriately. “No, no,” she said in dismay, “better I have no husband zan zis!”

  The children almost forgot to turn their giggles into groans and moans.

  After this she bobbed for an apple in the hand basin. Each apple had a fortune tied to the stem. The apples had been saved out of the fruit basket that always ended meals in the dining room, and the fortunes had come out of Susan’s head. They were somewhat damp after they had been bobbed for. But Mademoiselle, all wet, and astonished by this further adventure, was much pleased with her fortune. It said,

  You will be rich and a journey take,

  Across an ocean, not a lake.

  “Ah,” said Mademoiselle, “zat is better zan a husband, I believe. I must begin to sew me a costume de voyage. I sink it is my uncle in Ohioway who will one day send for me.”

  After that Mother and Father were initiated into the Chamber of Horrors in much the same way, only Susan thought it would be better and also quite romantic to have them see the ghost of a former sweetheart in the looking glass instead of a future husband or wife.

  “Dear me,” said Mother when she saw the face in the mirror, “that really is the spitting image of that old beau of mine who used to take me bicycle riding!”

  She told Father the same thing later, when they had both come safely out of the Chamber of Horrors, and he said, “If you mean that John Henry Quackenbush you used to go with, I can tell you that he was very much uglier than the face in the mirror.”

  But they didn’t have time to go into their past romances, because just then the real excitement started—the part that had not been planned.

  During the last part of the Chamber of Horrors, while the others were watching Father bobbing for his apple, Susan and George had quietly gone into the salon to light the fire in the fireplace in preparation for the toasting of the marshmallows. They raised the little black metal screen, which had been pulled down over the opening of the fireplace, and made a nice pile of old newspapers and pine cones on the hearth. The inside of the fireplace was very dusty, and it looked as if it had probably not been used for many, many years.

  “The dear old hearth will be glad to be used once more,” said Susan in her sentimental, storytelling voice. “The sparks will fly upward and warm the dear old chimney, and the firelight will illuminate the dear old faces!”

  “Where are the matches?” George wanted to know. “And let’s put the bag of marshmallows real close and handy. Boy, oh boy!”

  “Tell Dumpling to bring the others in,” Susan said. “I’m going to light the sacred fire.”

  The others all came in just as the paper caught fire and the pine cones began to crackle.

  Mother looked dismayed when she saw the fire. “Did you ask the manager if you could?” she inquired.

  “No, we thought you had,” said Susan.

  “Dear me!” said Mother. “I clean forgot.”

  It
was too late now to do anything, for the pine cones blazed up wonderfully and began to roar up the chimney in a tremendously Halloweenish way.

  “A holocaust!” said Father.

  “No, Daddy,” said George proudly, “it didn’t cost a thing. We got all the pine cones in the garden.”

  Now there began to be a strange and rumbling noise far up in the chimney, and things began to fall down. At first it was only soot and loose bricks and pieces of mortar. But after that came three bats.

  Mother and Mademoiselle began to scream, and screams in any language are the same.

  “Bats were all we needed,” said Father in a voice that was deadly calm. “Bats are the final touch.”

  The three bats sailed and swooped around and around the room, and it seemed that only George was pleased. He kept trying to explain to Mother and Mademoiselle and the girls that bats really did not try to get into ladies’ hair; that if they did, it was only by accident—if the hooks on their wings happened to catch in the hair. But the more he explained, the more fearfully they clutched at their hair and ran screaming around the room.

  Smoke was also pouring down the chimney now, and the bag of “marzi-malos” had been ignited by a flying spark and was burning and melting into a thick, bubbling, taffy-like substance all over the hearth.

  Father was trying to capture the bats with an umbrella and a bath towel, but they were far too swift for him.

  At this moment Anne Marie Fleurette Deschamps, attracted by the screams, came rushing in to see who was being murdered. When she saw the fire, she rushed to the bathroom for a glass of water to extinguish it. As soon as she opened the bathroom door, however, she was confronted by a horrible inhuman creature that rose out of the clothes hamper to greet her, and staring at her from the mirror was another ghastly face, not to mention the fiery eyes of the pumpkin.

  She uttered a despairing cry and fled away down the hall, screaming even more loudly than Mother and Mademoiselle and Susan and Dumpling.

  “Au secours, au secours!” screamed Anne Marie Fleurette—which simply means “Help!” but the French like to put things nicely even when they are in distress.

  So presently the hotel manager himself arrived. By that time Father had succeeded in driving the bats out by way of the balcony, and the ladies had stopped screaming, and the pine-cone fire had burned itself out. Of course there was still a mess of soot and fallen bricks and melted taffy on the hearth, and all the little gilt chairs had been turned upside down.

  Naturally there was quite a to-do. The children stood around in their strange costumes, looking anxiously up at Father and the hotel manager as the two men argued things back and forth. Each man was very polite to the other. Father said how sorry he was that a fire had been lighted without inquiries first being made, and the hotel manager expressed his regret that the chimneys did not work properly, and said that for many years they had not been used. Father promised to pay for any damage that might have been done, and the manager promised to have a chimney sweep in the next day to clean out the chimney.

  “And then can we have real fires?” asked George.

  “If you will provide your own wood,” said the manager. Just then he noticed George for the first time. “Ciel!” he said, which means, “Heavens!” “How the child is pale! Queek! He is going to faint!”

  Of course it was only the Vaseline and bath powder, but by that time everyone was so nervous that George was immediately made to lie down and the manager ordered a cup of tea to be sent up for him from the dining room. Even George himself was taken in and fancied for the moment that he must be dying.

  “There is only one thing I truly hope,” said the manager as he finally took his leave, “and that is that these screamings and alarms have not disturbed Her Majesty the Princess Adelaide Louisa von Mettnock-Hohenwürtzel. She is not at all well, nor does she sleep so good.”

  The Ridgeways looked at one another with stricken faces. The little invalid princess! What if they had disturbed or frightened her? However, there was no time to waste in regret because it was past bedtime and all the sheets had to be put back onto the beds before anyone could retire for the night. Mademoiselle was very good and insisted on helping them with this task before she went home. When the beds were all neat again, she shook hands politely with each and every one of them and thanked them for inviting her to such an unusual party. However, there was an anxious look in her eyes behind her nervous glasses, and Susan suspected that Mademoiselle thought them not only foreign but slightly mad as well.

  Her final farewells said, Mademoiselle had started down the hall toward the elevator when Dumpling suddenly caught up the pumpkin and ran after her. “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!” she called. At first it seemed as if Mademoiselle would either begin running or screaming again when she saw the grinning pumpkin coming after her. But she controlled herself and stopped.

  “This is for your soup, dear Mademoiselle,” said Dumpling, putting the pumpkin into the governess’s hands and holding up her mouth to be kissed. Mademoiselle kissed Dumpling tenderly and then rushed away to the bird-cage elevator. As she disappeared from view they saw that the light in the pumpkin was suddenly extinguished, probably by her tears.

  They were all extremely tired by that time, and so they went to bed.

  What a formidable Hallowween!! wrote Susan in her diary. With bats thrown in!!!

  Dumpling Has an Important Conversation

  The chimney sweep was a very pleasant fellow. He had just come from cleaning other people’s chimneys and he was black all over except for the whites of his eyes and his grin. He had brushes and brooms and ladders, and he went right up inside the chimney to clean away the soot and repair the bricks.

  George naturally wanted to go up, too, but Mother thought he had better not. She had had a difficult enough time getting all the Vaseline and bath powder out of his ears and she didn’t want to have to begin all over again to remove soot.

  Father asked the chimney sweep if he came from Savoy, and was pleased to learn that he did. It seems that for many hundreds of years French chimney sweeps have come from the province of Savoy, and Father always enjoyed seeing something really happen that he had read about in his books.

  Mademoiselle, looking a trifle paler after her first Halloween party, told them that it was considered good luck in France to meet a chimney sweep. And so, for good luck, they touched the chimney sweep and got soot on their fingers. Later she made the children learn a poem about the brave people from Savoy. It was not about chimney sweeps, but about Savoyards who scaled the walls of a fortress town like the one they had seen on George’s birthday. The children found this more interesting than the cats and balls.

  After the sweep had gone, the fireplace in the salon burned beautifully. Father bought a small load of wood that was stored in the garden and brought up in baskets when the ascenseur was working. On chilly evenings now they could have a cozy fire, without bats.

  “But zose marzi-malos,” said Mademoiselle, “why should you burn zem? I do not understand.”

  They tried and tried to explain to Mademoiselle, but for anyone who has not seen American marshmallows or had the pleasure of toasting them and watching how fat and luscious and golden-brown they become, a description is quite useless.

  One day Mademoiselle brought with her a small parcel wrapped in newspaper. It was the first chill, rainy day, and Father said that they might have a fire in the afternoon if they were careful.

  Mademoiselle opened her mysterious parcel and revealed a lot of small brown objects, something like the horse chestnuts that fell off the trees in the garden, and yet not entirely like those either.

  “What are they?” all the children wanted to know.

  “Ah, you will see,” said Mademoiselle. “Zese are marrons, what you call chestnuts in Engleesh, and a leetle like marzi-malos, I believe.”

  Mademoiselle set a number of the chestnuts in a row very close to the fire. The children looked at them doubtfully, not wishing to tell
Mademoiselle that once again she was completely mistaken. She seemed very pleased with herself, and her glasses fell off her nose and her earrings bobbed with excitement as she watched the chestnuts. The children watched, too, and the chestnuts continued to sit there like a row of brown blobs, but they did seem to be growing fatter, swelling in the heat. Suddenly, with a loud pop! like the report of a toy gun, one of them burst open and spun halfway around so that they could all see its white, mealy interior. Now the other chestnuts began popping and spinning and jumping about. It was very exciting.

  “Whee!” shouted Dumpling, and George cried, “Boy, oh boy!”

  “Now we eat,” said Mademoiselle. “Queek, while zey are yet warm.”

  They all began to eat, and the roasted chestnuts were perfectly delicious. The children tried to explain that marrons were more like popcorn than marshmallows, but Mademoiselle didn’t know about popcorn either.

  “Oh, Dumpling,” George and Susan cried, “aren’t chestnuts good?”

  Dumpling thought quickly. “Chestnuts are good,” she said, her eyes twinkling and her mouth full, “but marshmallows are better.”

  “It’s no use,” Susan said.

  There were times, of course, when all of them thought fondly of American food. The French are really the best cooks in the world. They make wonderful sauces and soups and stews and roasts, and most delicious little cakes. But, in spite of roasted chestnuts and all the marvelous food at the Grand Hotel and So Forth and So Forth, the Ridgeways sometimes yearned for cornflakes or waffles or hamburgers or hot dogs or ice cream or some of Mother’s pies or doughnuts. The French did not seem to know about any of these things.

  One day when the whole family was wandering along the street, looking at the interesting displays in shop windows, Susan, who was ahead, suddenly gave a cry of delight. “Come here, everybody, quick!” she said. They all came and looked in the window of a very small shop and tearoom, and there was a display of genuine American food! There were packages of cornflakes and familiar-looking cans.