Carney's House Party/Winona's Pony Cart

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  The girls had been carefully graded for height so that each pair matched. It was said that some pretty girl of average height might fail to be chosen because an exceptionally tall or an especially small outstanding beauty had to have a partner. There were too many pretty girls of average height.

  “If you’d been either tall or short you’d have been on the Chain,” Sue whispered to Carney.

  “I’m not missed,” Carney replied. “Isobel represents the Tower like a million.”

  She did. When the procession started across the lawn, none of the twenty-four carried the flowery burden with more dignity and grace. The dresses of the beauties trailed on the ground. The sun shone with June warmth, bringing out the smell of the pines and of the roses in the arms of the seniors. The seniors followed, two by two, until the chain opened out and they walked between ropes of daisies to a temporary grandstand under their Class Tree.

  “How old is the Daisy Chain tradition?” Carney whispered to Peg.

  “No one knows exactly. The first mention in the records is 1890, I believe.”

  “I hope they will still have it when my daughter comes to college,” Carney said.

  The next day, leaving the campus to the graduates, parents, alumnae, and the impending Commencement, the sophomores also departed.

  Everyone looked strange and dressed up in traveling clothes. Girls, who all year had worn ribbons about their heads, were magnificent in halos. Winkie looked uncomfortable in a basket-shaped hat. They all wore large hats and fluffy, pleated jabots or flat bows at their necks, and suits with long jackets and almost trailing skirts. Lined satin boas were tossed over really fashionable shoulders.

  Winkie shook Carney’s hand. “Remember you represent Vassar on every occasion.”

  “Yes, Mrs. K,” Carney replied.

  “Be sure to write,” said Sue, Win, and Peg.

  “See you in July,” said Isobel, kissing her.

  They left ahead of Carney, for trains to New England, New York, and Long Island left earlier than that train for the West with whose haunting whistle Carney was so familiar.

  After they were gone she finished packing. There wasn’t much left to do, for Carney was always forehanded, but she put Larry’s picture in her suitcase. That was always the last article packed and the first unpacked.

  Picking up Suzanne she went out to the drowsy campus.

  She visited her Class Tree…everyone said good-by to that…and looked in at the music building where she had had those wonderful lessons from Miss Chittenden. It had originally been a riding academy, and the students practised at pianos in old horse stalls.

  “I’ll be glad to get back to my stall,” Carney thought. In spite of Mr. Lang she loved her piano.

  She wished she could go down to the brook and up Sunset Hill but she didn’t have time. She had to take her doll over to Professor Bracq’s.

  Jean Charlemagne Bracq, with his moustache and pointed gray beard, was a distinguished figure on the campus. He was an author and head of the French department. Nevertheless Suzanne always spent the summer in a bureau drawer in his bedroom.

  His wife had taught Carney’s mother back in Vermont, and the Bracqs had given a dinner party for Carney as soon as she reached Vassar. As guest of honor she had been served first and she had been mystified by certain plates and forks. Being Carney she had spontaneously laughed. They had all become great friends.

  “Now if I should be invited to one of the Hutchinsons’ grand parties I’d know just how to act,” she thought, dimpling.

  Her thoughts were pushing ahead to home, for this afternoon, when the west-bound train whistled, she would be aboard it. She would be rushing off through New York State, eating in the dining car, tucked into a sleeper behind waving green curtains, looking out the window at the flying lighted towns. Tomorrow she would wake to her own midwestern country, and change at Chicago to the train which would carry her home.

  Cradling Suzanne, she hurried across the campus to the Bracqs.

  4

  Deep Valley

  DURING THE LONG TRIP Carney began to think about her reunion with Bonnie.

  Bonnie had left Deep Valley the same spring the Humphreys had, and parting from her had been a wrench comparable to the parting from Larry. Her father was the Presbyterian minister, and the parsonage had been just across the street from the Sibley home. For years the two little girls had played together and had gone to Sunday School together. Later they had belonged to the same high school crowd. Once, Carney remembered, they had had their best dresses made alike.

  Like Larry, Bonnie had been a faithful correspondent. The friendship had not shriveled, as such friendships sometimes do into a mere routine of Christmas and birthday greetings. The thought of seeing Bonnie added to the satisfaction which filled her when she woke, after a second night in the train, to find herself nearing the final great landmark.

  Carney always felt a lift of the heart when she crossed the Mississippi River. On the other side was Minnesota, home. The river was wide and full of islands where the train rumbled over the bridge. Carney looked out at the heaving watery expanse, the towering bluffs.

  “They’re more beautiful than the Palisades of the Hudson,” she thought loyally.

  The train struck off across southern Minnesota and the rugged hills melted into that undulating prairie she knew so well. Little lakes flashed past, and leaf-embowered rivers, and broad farms. The names of the towns grew familiar, and Carney stood up and put on her hat. She collected her purse and gloves and although they were still two towns away she waited in the aisle.

  “Deep Valley!” the brakeman called at last and mounting excitement almost choked her. The porter brushed her. He carried out her bags. She was there.

  She expected her family to be waiting for her, and they were: her tall, handsome father with his smiling eyes and trim, close-clipped moustache; her erect, dainty mother; her three brothers, Hunter, Gerald, and Bobbie.

  Carney was impressed by how Hunter had grown up. He had passed some invisible sign post and entered her world. The eighteen months’ difference in their ages which had been so important in the past was important no longer. Now, although he was only just entering his senior year in high school, even a college girl would look at him with interest. He was handsome in the same tall, smiling-eyed way his father was, but he looked less inflexible.

  Jerry, the middle one, hadn’t changed. He hadn’t grown any taller. He still wore knickers, although he was a junior in high school now. A bookworm, he was absentminded and dreamy. He grinned at her shyly.

  Bobbie, the nine-year-old youngest, would one day look like Hunter. But his eyes had a sparkle of mischief peculiarly his own. He pushed out of the crowd of relatives crying, “Hi! Sis! Hi! Will you buy some bluing? It’s swell bluing and if I can sell enough I can win a baseball suit.”

  “Bobbie!” his father said. “Sister hasn’t had time yet to greet her grandmothers.”

  Carney greeted both grandmothers, the white-haired saintly Sibley grandmother, and Grandmother Hunter who had a strong, plain, humorous face. She and Grandfather Hunter came from Vermont. They had followed their only daughter out to Minnesota.

  Carney greeted uncles and aunts from both sides of the family, cousins and second cousins. Some of them she loved and some she didn’t, but they were all part of her life. At last, she and her father, mother, and brothers piled into the family Maxwell.

  Carney looked about eagerly during the drive home. Front Street, where the stores and hotels were, flanked the river. Residential streets with wide shady lawns ran parallel to it up the eastern hills.

  At last they reached the Sibley home on Broad Street, and the big gray-blue house, with its bay windows and tower and the porch hung thickly with vines, looked just as she had treasured it in her heart all year.

  “It looks natural,” said Carney, who never overstated.

  She went to the kitchen to greet Olga, the Swedish hired girl. Then her father and mother and the boys all
said at once, proudly, “Don’t you want to see the sleeping porch?”

  Sleeping porches were new and very popular, and the male Sibleys had built this one themselves. You entered it from a window in the closet of the boys’ room, and it darkened the bathroom deplorably, but it would hold two double beds and a single one. Curtains were hung between them. It was screened, and looked out into treetops.

  “We thought your house-party guests might like to sleep out here,” Mrs. Sibley said.

  “Fine,” Carney answered, her dimple flickering at the thought of Isobel climbing through the closet window.

  A gang of small boys was waiting for Bobbie out on the spacious side lawn. He left her murmuring, “Don’t forget what I said about that bluing, Sis. Ladies all use bluing.” Jerry found a book and disappeared. But Hunter lingered a moment as though he were as delighted as she was to find that they had suddenly “grown together.”

  “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun this summer, Sis,” he remarked, before he went out to tinker with the auto. The Maxwell could always do with any amount of tinkering.

  Carney went into her own room where Hunter had already left her bags. It looked just the same—or would as soon as she got Larry’s picture out. The curtains and bedspread had been laundered and the windows freshly washed for her home-coming.

  The furniture was of heavy bird’s-eye maple—a high-backed bed, a bureau, a dressing table with a nest of drawers beside the mirror, a slender desk, a rocker and straight chair. Photographs of relatives adorned the walls which were papered with yellow poppies.

  She took off her suit and put on a faded blue dress she found in her closet. It was a pleasure to wear something she had not had at school. She went slowly and happily down the curving stairs.

  Front parlor, back parlor, library opened one into another by archways. They were lighted by broad windows and beyond lay the green expanse of lawn. Smilingly, Carney touched the family treasures in the what-not which she and Hunter had secretly named the “what-in-ell.” She paused at her piano and ran her fingers over the keys. It had been, she noticed with pleasure, newly tuned.

  Darting into the pantry, she found the doughnut jar. It ought to be full of freshly baked doughnuts. It was! She helped herself and returned through the back parlor to the library.

  This was the heart of the house. It had not only the fireplace and Grandfather Sibley’s portrait and a curving window seat, but Mr. Sibley’s chair, a tremendous black, leather-covered arm chair, deep and soft with pillowy arms. It swung on a patent rocker and could be luxuriously tilted.

  All the members of the family loved this chair. Jerry loved to read in it, his legs twisted beneath him. He vacated it promptly, of course, when the rightful owner came in. Mr. Sibley was definitely head of the house, but he was a benevolent disciplinarian. Carney remembered studying her high school Latin on her father’s lap in this chair.

  “No Dad and leather chair at college,” she thought, sinking into the soft refuge. She leaned back, crossing her feet on the footstool.

  Her mother came in presently and sat down near by. A New Englander, with all a New Englander’s reserve, she did not put into words her pleasure at having her daughter at home. But it shone in her eyes.

  Like Carney, she had sparkling dark eyes, and her small, heart-shaped face was framed in abundant dark curly hair. She had once been the prettiest girl in Chester, Vermont.

  She had come west to visit an uncle, and Hunter Sibley, college-bred son of a wealthy pioneer family, would not let her go home without a large three diamond ring. She had accepted the ring, but she had never worn it in Chester. It was too ostentatious, she had told Carney, for that modest town. After her marriage, the beautiful ring had seldom left her finger. She was a devoted wife.

  As a girl she had been gently artistic, embroidering, painting lilies of the valley and violets on glass. As a young wife she had painted china with a teacher three mornings a week. But after her children came she had channeled her talent into her housekeeping. She was happy that her daughter also valued domestic skills.

  “It will be nice to see Bonnie,” she said now.

  “Won’t it!” Carney replied.

  “When is Isobel coming?”

  “Right after the Fourth. Who’s in town of the old Crowd?”

  “Not very many,” Mrs. Sibley answered. “The Mullers have gone to Milwaukee and the Biscays to the lake. Your Crowd isn’t the same since the Rays and the Kellys went away.”

  Both families had moved to Minneapolis, a happy coincidence since Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly were inseparable friends. But Betsy had gone farther. During her freshman year at the University she had had an appendicitis operation. About that time her step-grandfather had died in California and Betsy had gone to San Diego to stay with her grandmother.

  “She’s having a wonderful time,” Carney remarked. “She’s seen the Humphreys boys.”

  “Oh…has she?” Carney saw her mother’s lashes flutter. Her mother wasn’t, she knew, entirely easy in her mind about the faithful correspondence between Carney and Larry.

  “Does she…enjoy them?” Mrs. Sibley asked.

  “Yes. A lot. What boys are in town?” Carney changed the subject.

  “Lloyd Harrington,” answered her mother. “And Dennie, I believe. And Cab.”

  “Hunter can beau me around,” said Carney. “Isn’t he the handsomest thing?”

  Mrs. Sibley’s eyes sparkled more than ever. “He’s not bad looking,” she admitted.

  She returned to the kitchen presently. There would be an extra good dinner, Carney thought contentedly, because she had come home. Boiled custard, probably. That was her favorite dessert. Again she stretched out luxuriously.

  The soft June air came in through the open window along with the smell of freshly cut grass and the sound of Bobbie’s gang at play. She was back in Deep Valley. She was safe-back-home in Deep Valley. Relaxed and peaceful, she closed her eyes.

  Strange light touches on her arm, an eerie scamper, brought her suddenly awake. Tingling, she jumped to her feet and shrieked.

  “What’s the matter?” asked her mother, running in. Hunter came, too, and Jerry, with a book. Bobbie and his gang pressed against the screens.

  Tiny white objects were running in all directions.

  “Why, they’re mice!” Carney stammered.

  “They’re my white mice, Sis,” said Bobbie in an injured tone. “They won’t hurt you.”

  “I know that,” she returned defensively. “I was Tower mouse-catcher at Vassar.”

  Bobbie stared admiringly. “Were you? What’s that?”

  “I set the traps and took the mice out. The other girls were afraid to.”

  “Then why did you scream at Snow White and her babies?”

  “You come and catch them!” Carney replied, laughing. She returned to the chair, tucking her feet beneath her.

  Bobbie’s white mice provided the most excitement she was to know for some time. The days fell into a quiet routine. It was wonderful to be home, and yet Deep Valley was different in a melancholy way, because she was out of high school. The pattern of life she had lived there for eighteen years had been broken.

  Bobbie was busy selling his bluing and Jerry was reading all the books in the Carnegie Library. Hunter had his high school gang—he was going with a shy slender girl named Ellen—and Carney felt actually old with them. They looked up to her so. The boys still belonged to Deep Valley and Deep Valley to them, but Carney felt herself cut off.

  She was busy with housework, of course. She had always been required to help Olga with the housework. All through high school she had baked a cake every Saturday. She had wiped the Sunday dishes, and cleaned her own room, even scrubbing the soft wood floor. She took over these and other duties now.

  She and her mother made plans for the house party. With zestful efficiency they made out menus and accompanying grocery lists, memoranda of things which must be done. In the warm afternoons they crocheted or embroi
dered with grandmothers, aunts, or cousins. Carney attended her mother’s sewing circle and played the piano for them. (She always cheerfully played the piano when asked to do so.) She practised. She played the organ Sunday afternoons at a Mission Chapel in North Deep Valley in which her father was interested.

  Sometimes she went riding in the automobile with Hunter, or out to the movies with a boy. Lloyd, Dennie, and Cab all came to see her. But, as her mother had said, the Crowd was scattered. Everyone missed the Kellys and the Rays.

  Fortunately Winona Root was in town. She was the daughter of Deep Valley’s newspaper editor. Tall, dark, and dashing, she was always gay company.

  “Have you seen that Hutchinson house yet?” she asked.

  Carney shook her head.

  “Well, have you seen the son and heir? Of course,” added Winona, “you may have thought he was a comet the way he rushes through town in that big black Locomobile. He goes like a streak.”

  “It’s a good thing he does,” Carney answered. “This town needs stirring up.”

  It was stirred up by Ringling Brothers Circus as the Fourth drew near. Colored posters blazed all over town, and Bobbie was in a fever of excitement. He even forgot to sell bluing. He and Jerry were going together. Hunter had invited Ellen. Lloyd Harrington invited Carney, but she had already planned to take her grandmothers.

  Rosy and smiling, in a crisp pink linen dress, she piloted them carefully into the big tent—the saintly white-haired Sibley grandmother and the chuckly Vermonter. She bought them popcorn and red lemonade. She bought them balloons.

  They came early to see the animals and stayed for the chariot race at the end. They were enchanted with everything: the blaring bands, the crowds, the smell of sawdust, the brightly clad performers swinging from trapezes and standing on the backs of racing horses.

  Grandmother Sibley liked the seals best. “They’re so intelligent,” she said.

  Grandmother Hunter liked the clowns. “I love to laugh,” she confided to Carney. “You have little enough chance in this world.”