It was hardly a minute till the doorbell rang and Gander scuttled through the dining room to answer it. Lou went after her, but Gander was back before she had time to get through the door. Everyone looked up.
“ ’Tis for Master Hubert,” said Gander.
“Stop kidding, Gand,” said Hubert, stretching so that his hands went halfway to the ceiling.
Gander marched up to his side and placed a card by his plate with a hard sharp snap of her thumb.
“Good heavens!” said Hubert, reading sideways.
“The English aristocracy to be sure,” said Gander.
“Let’s see!” said everybody but Mr. Parker.
“That little man in the white suit is after wanting an answer,” said Gander.
“Good heavens!” said Hubert.
“Scat, scat,” said Theodore and cleared the intervening heads out of his way by simply shoveling them off with his hands.
“Lord and Lady Throgmorten,” he read aloud. “No, it can’t be. Not Lord and Lady Throg, old chap?”
“You’re not funny,” said Hubert firmly. “There’s a boy in my form. We always called him Throggy. He must be English!”
“But this isn’t from dear old Throggy,” said Theodore. “His Lordship and Ladyship want you to come aboard the good ship Arethusa for tea, wot, wot.”
“Are you going?” said Edie. “I wouldn’t.”
She had enjoyed every bit of Hubert’s decline, and it seemed too bad for him to get well so fast.
Hubert got up and sauntered out into the hall. They could hear him as plain as day giving the sailor instructions, and Edie who went to the door could see him as well.
“My compliments,” he said, making a slight bow, “and tell Lord and Lady Throgmorten that I accept with pleasure.”
The sailor saluted with a sweep of his hand and was gone.
“Well, Master Hubert,” said Gander, “you’ve come up in the world.”
It was what they all most sincerely felt, but Hubert was nonchalant. He suddenly seemed to know all about high society. “It’s tennis week in Newport and I’m going. See!” he said, which he seemed to think was explanation enough.
“Do you feel up to it?” said Mr. Parker.
“I shall do my darndest to pull myself together,” said Hubert.
It was the rest of them, however, who pulled him together. By four o’clock, in Theodore’s pants, Jane’s T-shirt, Mr. Parker’s best scarf, and a haircut by Gander, he stood on the dock.
“Ship ahoy,” he called in a voice so tremendous no one knew he had it, and immediately the launch with the sailor put off to get him. Hubert on his way back to the yacht did not sit down. With his hands in his pockets he stood looking around the harbor and horizon as if he owned all he surveyed.
Edie thought he was more exciting than she had ever expected one of her brothers to be.
“I didn’t know he had it in him,” said Theodore.
He did not come back after tea. When the yacht sailed off on the afternoon high tide, he went with it after sending in a note, with a crown on the top of the paper, that he would be back in a week or more.
Jane was the next to leave Aunt Louise’s, but not in any such splendor. She just got her racquet out of the chest in the hall, packed a suitcase, and went down to stay at the Tennis Club until she had won the tournament.
Theodore did not go away by himself—he was taken away by Mrs. Palmer, the flirtatious lady staying with the Chadwicks down the beach, and brought back every night. Not right to the door. Mrs. Palmer, since as Mr. Parker said, “she was robbing the cradle,” did not want to come near enough to be seen doing it, and so she left him at the bridge. Ted came down the shell road loaded with golf clubs, yawned all through supper, and went very early to bed. He seemed to have given up conversation altogether, until one morning at breakfast when Edie asked him why he had to be so disagreeable these days.
“I bet it’s that old Mrs. Palmer,” she said.
“Oh, do you?” said Theodore. “Your brains must be growing. Do you know what you are?”
Edie knew danger signals when she heard them. She ate her last spoonful of cereal with great care.
“Chris,” said Theodore, “see this knife?”
“Yes,” said Chris gravely.
“Well, it’s alive.”
“No,” said Chris, but she still listened.
“Yes, it is too,” said Theodore. “You watch. I’m going to whirl it. Whoever it stops at is the biggest—”
“Donkey,” said Chris, catching on. She had played this game before.
“In the world,” said Theodore.
He spun the knife and, by a discreet poke administered at the end, it stopped, pointing at Edie.
Edie looked at her full mug of milk. Theodore cheated; he always, always cheated; it made her mad, hot and mad. But no, she was not going to do it. Hubert, when he heard about it, would only say for about the ninetieth time: “What do you stick your head in his traps for?” Instead, she drank up the milk, piled her plate with toast, rose with neatness and majesty, and walked out to sit on the lawn.
All of a sudden without any particular reason for it, the summer, which was being so wonderful, had collapsed. Day after day there was nobody agreeable around but Chris and Lou. And Mr. Parker maybe. At least he always said over his book, “Let me know if you want anything.” But Edie could not say, “There’s no fun any more.” She could only sit on the lawn and think it while she dug a hole with a stick from one of the pines. It got to be quite a good hole in the end. Absent-mindedly she broke her stick in pieces and laid them across the top—a miniature elephant trap, she thought, as good as the ones in the jungle, but there were no miniature elephants around Mount Harbor unless you could count Cook, and she never went walking on account of her feet. Edie scrabbled up some grass and scattered it over the sticks. You could barely tell it now from the rest of the lawn. But she wasn’t really interested in elephant traps. She was interested in getting out of here and leaving those awful people.
Jane, she knew, had once run away and tried to live in a tree. Just like a silly old hen like Jane. She was not going to do anything as foolish as that. But—her plan began to unravel like a thread—she would go over to Millard’s Island to the cove there and stay for a while. For at least a night anyway. She could explore Millard’s Island and she could—well, she would dearly have loved to be a pirate for a while but there weren’t any any more—so she could settle down and be Robinson Crusoe instead.
It took Edie two days to make her preparations because they were elaborate. Food, a blanket, something to drink, a sweater and—last but not least—a pair of Hubert’s old pants she had seen in the hall chest, and still further, scissors to cut off her hair.
She managed to get the things to eat by dodging in and out of the pantry and kitchen. Fruit and crackers were easy enough, but getting two lamb chops out of the ice chest was hard. She was only barely able to do it while Cook was on the kitchen balcony rattling the garbage pail, but she had no trouble at all grabbing a bottle of milk from the back steps before it had been taken in. She took them all directly to the boathouse, and from there on it was easy enough. She simply used the clamming pail to get them to the dock, and there she covered them with the dory’s jib. Hood, wandering round attached to Chris and Lou, was the only one who might see them, and her responsibility as she had been overheard saying to Mr. Parker “did not extend to Miss Edith.”
Hubert’s pants were just where she thought, and having been there some time were just the right size by now. It was the scissors that caused her the most trouble. It was a mystery why scissors were always so hard to find; you might see Hood using a pair to do the mending; Gander had some for flowers; Madam had a pair—new, bright, and sharp—but try to discover where they kept them! The best Edie could do was a pair with broken ends that were in the bottom drawer of the desk in the chintz parlor. These and the pants she took up to her room to await the last minute. That came after lunch
on the second day.
“Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to do,” said Mr. Parker, settling down with his book.
“I will,” said Edie. “Just at the moment I think I’ll go out on the porch and swing.”
She closed the door after her and pushed the canvas hammock back and forth a few times to make the creaking that would mean she was there, then leaving it swinging and bumping, she went up the back stairs to her room. The scissors and pants were under her pillow waiting for her. Now to finish the job and get away! There was no reason that she could see to have to have so much hair going round with you all your life. It was hot, it was heavy, it got full of salt water, it got snarls in it, it—it had so many things the matter with it she hadn’t time to count. She was going to get rid of it anyhow. She went into the room her stepmother used at Aunt Louise’s and stood before the long mirror, holding up her thick golden braid. She meant to cut right through it with a couple of good chops. But she soon found that what everyone said about hair was wrong. It was much harder to get rid of in her case than to grow it. No matter how frantically she brought the dull old scissors together, they just turned sideways and refused to work. She grew so angry with them they slipped out of her hand and clittered along the floor. Gander, of course, happened to be going up by the front stairs to her afternoon rest, and she looked in.
“What’s the commotion?” she asked. “And in the Madam’s room too. What are you after doing in here, Miss Edith?”
“Just looking at myself in this mirror for heaven’s sake,” said Edie, looking at herself so that Gander would go away.
“That’s the ticket,” said Gander, becoming interested. “Sarah Burn Hard to the life.”
“I was only trying to cut my old hair ribbon,” said Edie, “but there never is a pair of scissors in this house that would cut a custard.”
Gander went on upstairs naturally when she heard that. All she said was not to litter up the Madam’s room because she had just cleaned it. But it got her out of the way anyhow and left it clear to find a carving knife in the pantry—Father’s best in the green plush case. That worked. The braid came away as neat as a bunch of clover. It made her feel a little scalped as she held it in her hand with the ribbon still on the end, but she shook her head and enjoyed being so light-headed. Now! It took two and a half minutes to get into Hubert’s pants and an old riding shirt of her own and to tie a sweater round her waist by its sleeves, giving it a good tight jerk at the end. As she went out the door to the side veranda, she gave the canvas swing another slight push so that Mr. Parker would hear it in his dreams and feel comfortable. Not that she was doing anything she shouldn’t because Father’s rules allowed sailing in the bay to the end of Millard’s Island and he only hoped that any child of his would keep an eye on the weather. That she was doing, though it didn’t need it. It was a golden day, with great big tumbling clouds that would disappear at sunset and breeze enough to fill the sails, but which would get lighter later on. By the time she was at Millard’s Cove it would blow her into the “gut” and then be as calm as soup. She might even have to row, but that was all right. She glanced comfortably at the oars nicely shipped on the dory bottom and the oarlocks hanging by their strings. This time she had not forgotten anything. The rudder for which she was still paying every week’s allowance and had mortgaged what any relations might donate for Christmases or her birthdays was securely tied and the tiller tightly and comfortably held by a raised knee. She thought as she came out of the narrows into the blue of the bay that this was the right thing to have done. She expected that Mr. Parker might worry a bit, but it had made her freer not to report where she was going. She was free as a sea gull, and the whole world was glancing and glimmering.
The fair wind got her to the passageway far too soon. She could have gone on around the world without any trouble at all. Oh, how she loved boats and what you could do with them! When you were in one, it almost became yourself obeying the wind and water. No, better than yourself. It could do more and looked better. This old cow itself was doing everything exactly right. The centerboard gave a little jump and settled down again. They were over the bar. Good old cow! Wonderful old cow! As the cove opened out before her and she saw the crescent of yellow sand that ran all round it, she could not help but think that she liked it just as well—well, maybe more, than her brothers and sisters. She had been to Millard’s Cove before—they all had. Now it belonged to her and nobody else—the sand, the clear water, the scrubby pine that she could smell already, the waving moor grass that covered its background hills, and the blue sea and white sky that was behind them all. Of course, not really. Millard’s Cove and Millard’s Island belonged really to the Fawkes family who liked it so well they never went anywhere else or allowed anything else to come anywhere near them—no telephones, no automobiles, no electricity—not even things for grown people like cigars, cigarettes, and whiskies and sodas. Old Mr. Fawkes, who had once governed a real island for the government very kindly, governed his own island very strictly. Father had often said so. He and Madam knew old Mr. Fawkes and had been sent invitations to dinner by the food launch that came to Mount Harbor twice a week. They had to wear their best evening clothes when they accepted, though it was still the food launch that took them back and forth. Well, thought Edie, let ’em own it. They did not mind how much you used their island as long as you picked up papers and watched your picnic fire carefully. She meant to obey both rules, and they need never know that she owned the island too.
It was a long time from sunset, but it was beginning to be late afternoon when Edie was at last ready to swim and enjoy her domain, and instead found herself going distracted and wishing she was dead. She had worked the dory up the beach to safety as the tide came in and put the looped painter over a good big rock. She had got everything out of the dory and made herself a shelter in a clump of pines; she had collected rocks and driftwood to make her fire for the lamb chops and put her pail with the fruit and crackers nearby covered by her sweater to keep out the ants; now she had put on her bathing suit and meant to take time to watch a small animal of some kind that looked like a mouse nose about in the beach grass—when the mosquitoes began. She wanted to look for shells awhile, but she found herself slapping and scratching so often she gave it up and rushed into the water. There she forgot the mosquitoes on account of the wonderful excitement of the tide. There was a place you could step into the water in the cove where the tide would pick you up, whirl you through the “gut,” and cast you up on the sand around the corner. She tried it over and over again, slapping absent-mindedly as she walked back to her starting point. It was when she was so waterlogged that she had to come out that she was forced to keep saying, “Golly, oh golly!” as she danced out of her bathing suit and into her clothes. It was cool enough to put on her sweater, but there was still a lot of leg and face and neck to try to keep them away from. “Smoke,” she thought frantically, “smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, they don’t like smoke.” She would start her supper fire and after the chops were done would put seaweed on it and make what Father called a “smudge.” All the time she was getting the stones in place and breaking twigs, the mosquitoes were at her. Her paradise had turned into a place full of fiends. She covered her legs with the dory’s jib as she crouched by her little starting blaze, singeing her hair as it got hotter, and when the chops were done, hardly daring to put her hand out to hold the fork to nibble from them. Before she went on to fruit and crackers she ran up and down the beach collecting seaweed as fast as she could. It made a good smudge just as it was supposed to, but it was almost as bad for her as it was for the mosquitoes, and she ate a pear drawing little sobbing breaths of fury and despair. An enormous fear began growing inside her. What was she going to do from now till morning? The tide would have turned—it wouldn’t be full for hours —and she could never run the dory back against it without wind. “Golly, oh golly,” she whispered through a mouthful of pear with her eyes streaming.
“Are
you trying to cook yourself?” said a voice from the sky.
Edie jumped. I bet it’s God, she thought wildly. He had sent the mosquitoes and now come to see how His punishment was getting along. She wasn’t going to answer, although she would have to keep on slapping mosquitoes.
“What are you up to?” the deep voice said. “Come, speak up!”
“Go away,” said Edie in her frenzy, “go away, go away. Can’t you see I’m nearly dead already.” She grabbed the back of her neck. “You can come back later and get what’s left. I can tell you it won’t be much.” She pulled the jib up over her neck and crouched still nearer the fire, which was getting feebler. Why didn’t He go! She would have to get more sticks and she knew she mustn’t catch sight of Him. She had certainly heard about somebody who had tried it and been struck dead on the spot.
“I belong here,” said God, “and am driving sheep.”
Just what He should be doing, of course! Well, if He was that kind of a person, why didn’t He rescue her? Anyway she had better not be so fresh.
“I’m being eaten alive,” she said with miserable politeness, although she thought He might have seen that by this time. “Can you get rid of them or something?”
“Perhaps I can,” said the Voice. “But will you do something for me in return?”
“Yes!” said Edie. Even if she had to go to church every Sunday for a year! While tears from smoke and relief ran down her face, she thought how wrong the ministers were. You could bargain with God! What a mercy! as Nurse used to say.
“Hurry,” she said, “please hurry. What is it?”
“I need an extra boy to ride herd,” God said. “There’s a gap in our line.”
“I’m a girl!” said Edie. Maybe he wouldn’t take her, but she wasn’t going to pretend to be one of those animals.
“Can you ride?”
“Yes!”
Terrible, Horrible Edie Page 8