Family Sabbatical (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries)

by Carol Ryrie Brink

  “Campbell’s soup!” George howled. “Good old Campbell’s soup.”

  “You used to get quite tired of it at home, George,” Mother said.

  But now the cans looked wonderful to George. He read off the labels: “Chicken Gumbo; Oxtail; Black Bean; Vegetable with Beef; Vegetable—”

  “With alphabet letters!” cried Dumpling.

  The whole family stood there entranced. There was also a sign in the window that said:

  HAMBURGER BUNS, HOT DOGS, WAFFLES, CHERRY PIE, ICE CREAM, AND AMERICAN COFFEE

  “Hamburger buns!” murmured Susan dreamily.

  “Hot diggity dogs!” shouted George.

  “Cherry pie with ice cream on top!” said Dumpling, and Father and Mother both said with a wistful sigh, “Real American coffee!”

  But there was one great difficulty. The rates at the Grand Hotel and So Forth and So Forth included all their meals. The cost was much more reasonable if arranged that way. To go out to a tearoom to eat a meal would mean that they would at the same time be paying for a meal which they did not eat at the Grand Hotel.

  “We are too poor,” Father said, “to pay for two meals for five people when we eat only one of them.”

  “Besides,” said Mother sensibly, “these are all foods which we can get at home any time. After all, we’ll be back home in a few months, and then we’ll probably be longing for all the wonderful French foods that we won’t be able to get in America.”

  “Mother is right,” said Susan as they all went walking on by to look into the next window. The others agreed, but they couldn’t help remembering the American foods, and presently George and Susan made up a chant which went like this:

  “Oxtail, black-bean, consommé,

  Clam chowder, chicken gumbo, hey-hey-hey,

  Vegetable with alphabet, vegetable with beef,

  Scotch broth, mushroom, purée of peef.”

  “What is peef?” asked Dumpling.

  “It’s just a way to make peas rhyme with beef,” said Susan.

  “And what is hey-hey-hey?”

  “Oh dear!” said Susan. “Poetry is a thing you can’t explain, Dumpling.”

  So now that it was all made clear to her, Dumpling joined them in their song. They sang it all the way back to the hotel, and Dumpling said, “I expect Mr. Campbell would be proud if he could hear how nicely we sing about his soups.”

  On this day the sun was shining pleasantly again, and when they returned to the hotel the children went into the garden to play. George and Susan began acting out a story about the Savoyards scaling the walls of the rock grotto against hundreds of imaginary defenders.

  They were just struggling to the top of the wall against frightful difficulties when they heard the rumble of an approaching train, so they dashed the boiling oil out of their eyes and the melted lead out of their hair and ran on up to watch the train whizz by.

  Meanwhile Dumpling, with Irene clutched in her arms, wandered out to the terrace, which was a pleasant place for strolling up and down if one cared for only a short walk. Dumpling stood at one end of the terrace and asked Irene if she cared to take a short walk. But Irene replied that she would rather sit on the bench at the side of the terrace, since she had already taken quite a long walk to look at the American foods.

  “Then I will sing you to sleep, darling,” Dumpling said, “and you can rest.” So they sat on the bench, and Dumpling rocked Irene and sang the song about the soups. As Dumpling sat there, singing, the godmother suddenly appeared and began to walk slowly up and down the terrace, leaning on her cane as she walked. Dumpling continued to sing very softly, but her mind was neither on Irene nor on Campbell’s soup. She looked at the godmother, and she thought, She really looks nice. I wouldn’t be afraid to speak to her. When she had come to this conclusion, Dumpling cleared her throat. “Ahem!”

  The old woman started and looked around.

  “Would you care to have somebody walk with you?” Dumpling asked politely.

  “Bitte?” said the godmother, which happened to be her way of saying, “Please, I did not understand you. Will you kindly repeat yourself?” But Dumpling took it for consent, so she slid off the bench and ran along to the godmother’s side.

  “I am sorry,” said Dumpling, “that you have to use a cane. Does it hurt you very much to walk?”

  “No, my child,” the godmother said. They walked silently for a few paces.

  “Then why do you use it?” Dumpling asked. There were always many things that Dumpling wanted to know, and sometimes she could be quite tiresome.

  “It gives me a feeling of security,” the godmother said. She spoke fairly good English, but with a little accent which was not like Mademoiselle’s accent.

  “Are you afraid you will fall?” asked Dumpling.

  “Yes,” replied the godmother. “There was once a time that I fell, and then my hip I broke.”

  “How long ago?” asked Dumpling.

  “Is this important to you, my child?” asked the godmother gravely.

  “Well, I am interested,” Dumpling said.

  “Ah!” said the godmother with a kind of sigh. “It is three years since my hip I broke. I believe that it even longer is since some person has been so interested in me.”

  “We are all very interested in you,” Dumpling said, “and we are even more interested in the little princess who is sick in bed. I hope our Halloween did not disturb her.”

  “Bitte?” said the old lady politely.

  “The little princess with the golden hair,” said Dumpling. “I hope the bat screams didn’t frighten her. Do you mind telling what color eyes she has?”

  “Eyes?” repeated the godmother. “What color? I do not know about colored eyes.”

  “Well, of course she has two eyes,” Dumpling said, “unless it’s like in the story of Little One Eye, Two Eyes, and Three Eyes. But Susan says they are blue, and George and I say brown. We would be glad to have it settled.”

  The godmother stopped and leaned on her cane. She looked bewildered and troubled. “Bitte?” she said.

  “Dear me,” said Dumpling, “you are harder to explain to than Mademoiselle, but I will try again. It is about the little sick princess that you are the godmother to. We think about her a good deal, and if we could go in to see her we would take her a bouquet.”

  “A bouquet?” repeated the old lady, and Dumpling began to think that of all the godmothers she had read about, this was surely the least intelligent one.

  “I mean the Princess Adelaide Louisa von Mettnock-Hohenwürtzel,” said Dumpling, wondering at the same time why they had never made a song out of that name, because it was even more like a song than the names of the soups.

  “But I,” said the old lady, drawing herself up proudly, “I myself am that one. I am the Princess Adelaide Louisa von Mettnock-Hohenwürtzel!”

  “You?” said Dumpling. She and the elderly lady stopped in their very slow walk and looked at each other in surprised dismay.

  “You did not know?” asked the princess.

  “We thought you were her godmother,” Dumpling said.

  “Alas, my poor child!” said the princess kindly. “So is the world very full of sad surprises. Instead of a little golden hair, you find the princess an old woman.”

  “But your eyes are brown,” Dumpling said. “George will be glad to know.”

  “I was once a little girl like you,” the princess said. “Yes, here in this very hotel with my parents I would come. With my nursemaid and my governess I would come, and play, as you play now, with my dolly in this pretty garden. It was very nice here then. You would not believe to see it now. But many people came, and it was happy. I was so happy here, because I was allowed to run and play as I wished. I could forget a little that I was a princess. You see, in those days to be a princess, that was something important. To be a princess in these times is nothing. Pouf!” As she spoke, she opened her hand in the air as if to show how something could vanish.

  “B
ut we think it is very important,” Dumpling said. “We don’t have princesses in Midwest City, and we are very impressed.”

  “So? You are not too greatly disappointed, little one?”

  “Well, only a little bit,” said Dumpling. “We’ll soon get over that, I guess. Anyway, it was tiresome to have the little princess in her room where nobody could ever see her.”

  “And what do they call you, little one?” asked the princess.

  So then Dumpling had to explain about how she happened to be called by that name, and about her doll Irene, and about how George was sometimes called Shorsh, and Susan, Suzanne, and about Father and the sabbatical leave and Mother and Angus McAngus the detective, and about how Mother had been greatly helped in her novel writing by the circular addressed to the princess.

  It took Dumpling a long time to tell everything, and when George and Susan came back from watching the train, they could hear her voice, through the trees and shrubbery, busily recounting the family history, before they could see her.

  “She’s found a friend who understands English,” Susan said, and George said, “I wonder who?”

  So they were quite surprised to come onto the terrace and see Dumpling walking hand in hand with the old, bent lady in the gray dress.

  “Do you like football?” Dumpling was asking as she and the old lady passed along before the other two. “Because if you do, you will be interested to know that in Midwest City we have a quarterback to mow our lawn. And George—I mean Shorsh—has a dog and a canary bird and guinea pigs and rabbits and white rats, and, although this place is nice, I really like home better—” Just then she saw George and Susan standing there looking surprised.

  “Hello,” Dumpling said. “Princess, I would like to introduce you to George and Susan, and, kids, this is the Princess Adelaide Louisa von Mettnock-Hohenwürtzel, and she is really very nice—I think better than if she were little and sick in bed.”

  “How do you do?” said the princess politely.

  Susan and George stood there with open mouths, until Dumpling said, “Don’t forget your manners, Susie and George.”

  Then they both said, “Pleased to meet you,” and shook the princess’s hand.

  It was only later, when Susan was less surprised, that she remembered what she had read of royal etiquette. She wrote in her diary, I should have kurtisied, and George should have kissed her hand. But we just acted as if all the ladies we knew were princesses. Still, we are Americans and maybe that is the best way for Americans to act.

  She thought privately, although she did not write it in her diary, that to get George to kiss the hand of any lady, even a princess, would be quite impossible. There’s no use pretending to be what we aren’t, she said to herself, and anyway, the princess is a dear old lady and she seemed to like us even if we didn’t kiss or curtsy.

  Susan Begins to Solve a Mystery

  It was hard to get used to the fact that the godmother was really the princess, and yet it was also quite interesting and exciting to be able to break the news to Mother and Father.

  “Hmm,” said Mother musingly, “I wonder if I could use that in my novel. The beautiful young princess only an impostor. The real princess practically unnoticed because she is old and simply dressed. Hmm!”

  Father was more impressed. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I suspected as much all the time, but I didn’t like to spoil your romances. What a lot of history that poor old woman has lived through! I should like to talk with her sometime. She must be a cousin twice removed of the last Emperor of Germany—something of the sort, at least. I’ll have to look her up in the books. The last leaf on the tree, poor soul!”

  At lunch the next day all the children smiled at the princess when she took her seat at her small table by the window. She nodded her head at them in a friendly way, and as the meal was ending, she beckoned to Dumpling with her finger. Dumpling hopped off her chair and trotted over to the Princess Adelaide Louisa’s table.

  “How are you today?” asked Dumpling. “Would you like to go walking again? I could tell you a little more about football, because I forgot to explain to you that our house has a tower that looks right over the wall into the football stadium.”

  “Yes, that would be very beautiful,” said the princess, “but later perhaps. In the night last night, when I am not so well sleeping, I think about you.”

  “About me?” repeated Dumpling, flattered to find herself in the princess’s midnight thoughts.

  “About you and your brother and sister,” said the old lady. “I think to myself, These children are disappointed not to find a little, young princess, beautiful, with golden hair. So also I think to myself that possibly you would be pleased to see a picture of such a little princess.”

  “Well, now we are not very disappointed,” Dumpling said, “because we think it is interesting that you are old and have lived in history. But we would like to see the picture anyway.”

  “Then if your mother and father will permit,” said the princess, “I should be pleased that the three of you come to my room for a moment before my rest should come, and I will show you.”

  Dumpling ran back to the Ridgeways’ table to convey the princess’s invitation. Mother and Father were glad to permit the children to go, on condition that they would not stay long or make themselves bothersome.

  So in a moment, and all excited and full of anticipation, the three children found themselves following the princess along the hotel corridor to her room. Dumpling skipped up and down beside the old lady, whose progress with the cane was very slow. Susan and George, quite awed and subdued for once in their lives, came quietly on behind. The rooms of the princess were on the ground floor at the end of a long hall. When they reached the end of the hall, the princess stooped to unlock the door, but it was hard for her to make the key work, and George finally had to unlock the door for her.

  “It is very troublesome, that lock,” the princess said—just the way Grandma Ridgeway used to complain about the lock on the front door at home, which everyone else could turn so easily.

  “I think,” said Susan politely, “that you were trying to turn the key in the wrong direction, just as Grandma Ridgeway does.”

  After that George and Susan felt as much at home with the Princess Adelaide Louisa von Mettnock-Hohenwürtzel as Dumpling did.

  Inside, the two rooms of the princess looked very much like the other hotel rooms, except that in them there were dozens of photographs and small portraits in gilt and silver frames. They stood on the tables and desk and dresser and hung on the walls.

  “These are my friends and my family,” said the princess. “One cannot be lonely with one’s friends and family about one.”

  Some of the ladies in the portraits wore small crowns on their heads, and the gentlemen wore uniforms decorated with ribbons and medals. There were pictures of children, too, in strange, long-waisted dresses and large hats, who stood together, looking seriously into the lens of the camera. Some of the pictures had messages written across them in faded ink and in strange languages. One inscription was in English, and it said, “To Cousin Weezee from Bertie,” and Susan felt sure that somewhere in one of Father’s history books she had seen the face of the bearded young man in the picture.

  Crowded in among the pictures were many other interesting objects. There was a piece of green stone carved into a wonderful scene of a tiny mountain and rocks and a weeping-willow tree. There was an Easter egg, very beautifully painted and mounted on a little platform of black wood. There was a piece of rock crystal that needed no carving or adornment to make it beautiful. There was a silk fan painted with exquisite figures of ladies and gentlemen bowing to one another in a garden.

  George stopped to gaze with fascinated eyes at a paperweight that was made of a large piece of cut and polished agate. “Boy, oh boy!” he said. For he had never seen an agate as large and as beautiful as this. It was striped with colors ranging from milky white to a soft golden brown. The surface was
as smooth as glass. It was the most marvelous stone that he had ever seen.

  The princess came and stood beside George. She took the beautiful paperweight up in her small, wrinkled fingers. “So? You admire my pretty stone?” she said.

  “Gee!” said George. “I should say so.”

  “Do you know,” said the princess, “that I picked it up myself beside a mountain stream in Switzerland?”

  “Oh!” the Ridgeways said. “How wonderful!”

  “But it was not like this,” said the princess. “You must not suppose so for an instant. It was rough and brown and quite unpromising to see. But I knew, you see, that it was an agate of some sort. There will be beauty inside it, I said to myself. Yes, can I but open it, there will be beauty.”

  “But how—” Susan asked.

  “Very easily, of course,” said the princess. “I took it to a lapidary—that is a workman who cuts small precious stones. ‘I think it will be beautiful,’ I said, and to me he replied, ‘Ah, madame, one never knows until the stone is cut. It may be quite ordinary. One never knows.’ ”

  “But it was not ordinary, was it?” said Dumpling, touching the beautiful stone very lightly with her fingertips.

  “No,” said the princess. “We were fortunate. It was, as you see, a beautiful piece.”

  George said nothing at all, which was strange. But, all the same, he had a very strong feeling that did not come out in words.

  “Beautiful things,” continued the princess, “they are very important, don’t you think? It is good to have them around us. One must keep one’s eyes open always for beauty. One finds it sometimes in the expensive shops, but more often it lies unnoticed beside an Alpine stream for anyone to take. This is important to know, I think—that inside a brown rock lies beauty, if we have knowledge and imagination to find it there.”

  “That’s like a poem or a sermon or something, isn’t it?” said Susan. “But I think it must be true.”