Terrible, Horrible Edie

by E. C. Spykman

  The harbor was not a millpond as it usually was. There was still part of that stiff wind to take her, surging before it, down to Aunt Louise’s dock, and Edie decided that of the whole day and night and day, maybe this was the best. She had had to have help, it was true, but only because her boat was not big enough. All that anyone could do, she had done, and here she was getting home. She wished this part could last longer. At the end of it, she had now to remember, was Mr. Silas Applegate Parker. As soon as she put up the dory, she was going to have to come face to face with him and say whatever he would think might be proper. She wished she could think what that should be.

  When she got to the hall door after she had left the sails to dry in the boathouse, she opened it softly and was going softly across and upstairs, hoping she would not meet anybody until she could change and get dry herself. If she were seen now with her hair all plastered down and her clothes plastered flat, Mr. Parker could easily think she had been drowned and her ghost was coming back—enough to scare anybody.

  Her good intentions were upset by her sweater catching on the knob of the door. It made a noise and Mr. Parker was right there, his hands leaning on the window sill looking out at the bay with all his might. He whirled round and she had to notice him. At least she had to stand and look at him. He did not seem to know what to say either. He just came toward her, stealthily like a lion, with his mouth tight closed. Edie managed to speak first.

  “Did you send the cutter?” she said. “It was a bright thing to do. I needed it.” She nodded her gratitude. But he did not seem to hear her.

  “What makes you do such terrible things?” he said.

  Edie thought it over as quickly as she could.

  “All you terrible men, I suppose,” she said.

  Mr. Parker straightened up like a jack-in-the-box and went to look out the window again. What was she supposed to do now, Edie wondered.

  “Look,” said Mr. Parker, coming back. “I earn my education taking care of horrible kids like you. Who do you think would ever give me another job if I let you get into trouble? Eh? Do you understand that much? Do you?”

  Edie was making a large pond on Aunt Louise’s chintz room carpet, but she felt she would have to stay and get finished with it. After all he had sent the cutter.

  “I don’t see what you want an old education for,” she said. “But why don’t you keep me out of trouble then with those horrible boys?” Her voice rose. “How would you like being called names from day until night? How would you like being left alone all your life? How would you like to be teased till you were nearly dead? Yah!” she said, hoping she was not going to cry because she hadn’t slept very well. “What do you understand I’d like to know?” She turned away from him quickly, and quickly made for the stairs. She was hating herself for trying to explain to that old Silas Applegate Parker. She had her own friends now, and she didn’t need to ask him for help. Or didn’t she? Her feet began to drag. Oh dear, she would have to go back. She went to the sitting-room door and stood with her hands behind her. Mr. Parker was sitting in a chair with his face in his hands staring at the floor.

  “If you sent the cutter,” said Edie loudly and firmly, “it was a dandy thing to do. I needed it badly.”

  The silence baffled her.

  “What shall I say now?” she asked.

  “It’s not saying, it’s feeling,” said Mr. Parker.

  “I feel wonderful,” said Edie. “I had the most marvelous time in my life.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Parker. He linked his hands and stretched them out in front of him as if to keep something off. “All right, all right, all right. No more said.” He got up and stood looking down at her as she wiped back her hair with her palms. He even smiled.

  “I guess,” he said, “you and I better go to the barber’s this afternoon. How about it?”

  “All right, yourself,” said Edie. “I didn’t really do a very good job, but whoever can find a pair of scissors?”

  As she went upstairs, she put her hand on the little gold football and thought, “It’s still there. I’m so glad. It’s still there.” She meant to keep it forever and ever and ever.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Weather

  The weather that blew up after the sheep drive at Millard’s Island was reluctant to leave Mount Harbor for a single day that August. Some clear days did manage to sneak in and stay for a little while, but presently the moon had a golden ring again and the next morning it was blowing and raining like mad; mold collected on shoes; sheets were damp and cool; and Aunt Louise’s began to smell of Widgy in every room.

  “If this keeps up, we’ll have moss behind our own ears,” was Theodore’s opinion on the fourteenth day of downpour.

  When it rained at the beach, it made almost no difference in having a good life except to him. He could not sail on account of the high wind, and he could not play golf with the flirtatious Mrs. Palmer even if it were only drizzling.

  “It might wash her off,” said Hubert, but he did not say it in front of Theodore.

  Hubert was back from his cruise on the Arethusa. The weather had been so bad that the Throgs, themselves, who were supposed to be sailors, had not been able to stand it and had brought him back in a black limousine almost as big as the big black yacht. No one had seen his arrival; but Edie, who was on the way up from clamming, found him pushing a girl at top speed down the shell drive in a wheelbarrow. It turned out to be Lady Alicia Throgmorten, and it was obvious, after Edie had got Jane and Theodore to see the sight, that Hubert’s decline was over for good. Just the same after the limousine had driven off without him, he was perfectly content to take up his position again on the chintz window seat with his feet in the air.

  “Well, that’s the end of that romance,” said Theodore in his hearing.

  “Oh dear no,” said Hubert. “I’ve been invited out for another week as soon as the weather clears.”

  Mr. Parker took up the study of economics on the window seat in the opposite room, and Jane and Edie took up a daytime residence in the boathouse in order to use the player piano. By them, rain at this time was almost welcomed. The player piano, they had discovered long ago, had one hundred and thirteen rolls, and during the rainy season, they said, they meant to play them all. This was not getting done. They had got stuck at “Maryland, My Maryland” and “Marching Through Georgia,” because, if they played these two tunes and one or two others just as they wanted, they could make themselves laugh, cry, be in a fury, gallop like taking the good news to Aix—anything. Edie often did not see the use of taking all the trouble people went to to learn to play the real piano when the player piano would do it just as well and do all the work besides. She was, herself, quite an expert. Perhaps you had to learn that much. But after the simple technique of pedals, speed, and stops had been mastered, you could go! Rollicking, dashing, headlong crashing, creeping, crawling, and softly, softly crying if you really wanted. It was the one time that nobody in the Cares family said anything about crying. You could sit at the player piano and drip tears. They were not remarked upon; all the others did the same when it was their turn. There was only one thing the matter—Widgy, on account of howling, had to spend a lot of time in Aunt Louise’s cellar.

  Chris and Lou, when they could not go out, played in the cupola, or on the cupola stairs, which during the rain no one dared to go and take a look at. They were conscious that Hood was allowing messes of every description, which were being stirred, dumped, spilled, and scattered—at least if the way Chris and Lou looked was any indication—in every direction, and especially on the stairs.

  So when it rained unusually hard for another two days and the wind was still stronger, no one really minded but Ted. He tramped the hall and the sitting rooms after breakfast and went upstairs and downstairs looking out every window in turn.

  “For the love of lollapaloosa,” said Hubert, “can’t you keep still?”

  To him the house seemed in a particularly elegant state. On o
ne of the good days before this last storm Lou had run her face into the corner of the small blue boat she and Chris were allowed to use when it was tied to the shore in shallow water. It had made a hole in her chin through which she could make a drop of milk and blood come out, and everyone, including Lou herself, had been delighted with it. But Hood had made Mr. Parker telephone Aunt Charlotte, and Aunt Charlotte, because the beach was “a wilderness” that no good doctor would be likely to inhabit, had commanded Mr. Parker to drive Hood and the children up to Charlottesville, where she herself could get Lou properly plugged up. In the meantime, Aunt Louise’s, with Jane and Edie drenching themselves with sentiment in the boathouse, was Hubert’s ideal of how a house should be. He thought Theodore ought to appreciate it, and besides, having him walking all over the house without cessation took his own mind off Sherlock Holmes.

  Just the same Ted kept on with his inside cruising and running his hands through his hair, and every time the wind gave the house a buffet he would stop to listen. He put in a few minutes at Hubert’s window seat sometimes, taking the other end, and putting up his feet in the same way. He looked as if he were reading a magazine. But it apparently did not suit him, so he got up again and walked some more, jingling something in his pocket. When Hubert looked at him disgustedly over his book and Ted noticed it, he took the chance to speak to him.

  “It’s blowing,” he said.

  “Tell me another,” said Hubert.

  “I think I’m going out to the P.D.Q. and put out another anchor.”

  “Just as your lordship pleases,” said Hubert.

  “You won’t come?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Theodore couldn’t make up his mind though. He took another tour, going to the top of the house and then down cellar. He looked out the dining-room window for a long time. After a particularly hard buffet he at last put on his yellow slicker, took off his sneakers, and went out the veranda door toward the boathouse. If that lump of inertia wouldn’t help him, he would have to try elsewhere. Bracing himself against the wind, he knew that it was going to be a hard job, just as he had suspected, and he would need some extra hands. But Jane was playing “Old Black Joe” and “The Bells of Shandon” alternately and she did not want to go either.

  “Take Edie,” she said indifferently.

  “Do you hear that,” said Theodore when the wind gave the boathouse a blow.

  “No,” said Jane. She drew out the chorus agonizingly in order to break her heart, and hopefully Ted’s too, but he had a heart of stone. She had known this many, many years.

  “Come on, Edie,” said Theodore. “You don’t want her to go ashore, do you?”

  “You never let me sail her,” said Edie consideringly from the floor. She had found a nest of mice in the boathouse cupboard and had them in the lap of her dress.

  Theodore would have liked to tell them what he thought of them, but he saw it was not the time for that. He would do it after he had saved the P.D.Q.

  “Well, I will next week,” he said. “If there’s anything left to sail,” he added, trying to make an impression. As neither of them moved, his temper rose and leaped out like a knife. “You batter-headed bone domes,” he said, “are you blind and deaf? Wake up!”

  Jane shut the sliding door of the player piano and covered the keys in a leisurely way.

  “I don’t see what you’re fussing about,” she said as she put on her slicker, and as she opened and shut the boathouse door easily and softly, she added: “There’s no wind here.”

  But as they came round the corner, it hit them so hard they were knocked against the wall.

  “See what I mean?” said Theodore.

  “Gee,” said Jane when she could get her breath.

  There did seem to be a sort of gale. It licked her hair across her face, and she could see when they reached the shore the boats in the harbor bobbing and turning as if they were being whipped. She and Theodore had to shout at each other, it was true, but since the tender was pulled up on the dock, it would be easy to get her away.

  After they had left, Edie put the mice back in the cupboard and opened up the piano to have her turn. She played “My Old Kentucky Home” and started “Comin’ Through the Rye” but stopped in the middle because it didn’t seem any fun any more. She wished she had gone with Ted. It might have been fun trying to get out to the P.D.Q. in the wind and rain. She just hadn’t realized what was going on. With envy she watched them putting out from the dock. Crickey, the wind had whirled the tender and smashed it up against the dock cushions, and Ted was having an awful time trying to push off. She looked down at the shore and saw that the tide, which should not be high until two o’clock, was already halfway up the sand. It would begin to fill the little ravine between the boathouse and Aunt Louise’s lawn pretty soon. It must be one of those big tides they talked about, and she wondered why she had heard they came in the fall. This was only August. She wandered back to the piano after she had waited to see Theodore and Jane finally, after a tough row, the wind pushing them this way and that, board the P.D.Q. She played “Silver Threads Among the Gold” as sadly as she could. And then “The Rosary” and “The Lost Chord” twice apiece. She began to be aware that no matter what she did with the stops and pedals, the music did not quite drown out what was happening outside and it made her uneasy. She took several looks at the tide. It was coming on like anything, and just as she had her nose pressed to the balcony window, the boat-house started and then trembled as if it had been a frightened horse. Out in the harbor, she noticed, the little two-for-a-cent dory of the Howlands’ had turned over and was floating bottom up toward shore. Well, it had always been unseaworthy. She did not much care. She could also see that Jane and Ted were managing to get out the second anchor and felt proud of them. She wished she had gone. She went back and finished the last piece, pulling out all the stops and keeping her foot on the loud pedal so that the music would wail disconsolately. It seemed a fitting accompaniment to the wind. But the wind was the strongest; she could feel it as well as hear it, and she heard it whack the roof so that it began to dance and flop. Just as she reached the end, there was a wild screeching tear, two or three mighty bangs, and the roof settled down like a wounded animal half on and half off the boathouse. Edie covered the player piano in less than a second, grabbed the billiard table cover, tore it off, and flung that on too. “I guess I better get out of here,” she said to the noises all around her. But she had to rescue the mice. Before she could get to the cupboard, the roof gave another scream and tear and she saw it go up in the air and heard it crash away against the pine trees that bordered the drive. “Oh, the poor player piano!” Every bit of covering was ripped off it the minute the roof was gone; the billiard cover went straight up in the air, and her slicker hopped after it from the nail on the door. “Oh, the poor mice!” What could she do for them? She ran around in a crazy kind of hurry. When there was a tiny lull, she had time to pick up a mat and make a tent over the nest in the cupboard while the rain poured down her face and neck and the wind made grabs at her. Then she scooted for the door. She stepped out into a flood and saw that the tide had risen so fast and far that the ravine was full and she would have to swim for it. Not that she minded. The hard part would be getting across the lawn to the house. There the wind would catch her, and besides there seemed to be a lot of things flying through the air. One was a sofa cushion that rolled across the top of the water. Where had that come from? It wasn’t Aunt Louise’s. She wasn’t quite sure that her eyes were seeing right, but she decided it must be a real gale and perhaps it came from Mrs. Johnson’s.

  Edie reached the edge of the lawn and then crawled along as far as she could under the lee of the blue- and bayberry bushes. The rest of the way she waded up to her knees, trying not to get knocked down by the wind. She was almost to the door when the top of one of the pine trees was swirled over her head. “That was a bit lucky,” she thought, as Hubert held the door open a crack to let her slip through.

>   “Quite a blow!” said Hubert. “Where’s Ted?”

  “The roof blew off the boathouse and I had to swim the ravine,” said Edie.

  “I saw it,” said Hubert. “Where’s Theodore?”

  “He and Jane went to rescue the P.D.Q.”

  “Of all the darn fools. The wharf’s gone, the pier’s twisted into a U, and the cupola’s blown off.”

  “How simply marvelous!” said Edie. “They’ll have to swim for it. I wish I was there.”

  “Don’t be so darn sure,” said Hubert. First he looked out the window and then he turned back into the room, walked around the table, and looked out the window again.

  “Where are Father’s glasses, do you know?”

  Edie did know and went directly to the cupboard and got them. Hubert screwed them to fit his eyes.

  “It’s easy enough to see that they don’t know what to do,” he said, and handed them to Edie.

  After seeing nothing but branches and sky for a while she finally got them focused to where a tiny boat and two tiny figures could be seen, getting the full strength of the blast.

  “The Q is going under in just about a minute,” said Hubert.

  Edie could see that she was well settled in the water and that Jane and Theodore were sitting precariously on the edge of the cockpit rail evidently trying to make up their minds about something. She hung on to the glasses when Hubert wanted to take them. “No, wait, wait, one sec, one sec.” The funny thing about the harbor was that there wasn’t a wave on it. The wind had flattened it out like a board. Still, not being able to head to the wind fast enough, the Q shipped some more water just before Hubert took the glasses away.

  “She’s down,” he said after a minute with a kind of solemnity.

  Edie could not see what there was to be worried about. With the water so smooth and the wind blowing toward shore, all Jane and Theodore had to do was tread water and wait. They might end up in the village instead of Aunt Louise’s, but they would certainly end up. She herself would have liked to see if she could have walked on the water like Jesus Christ—it looked so firm and easy to do. It probably wasn’t, though, because the two black specks that were Jane and Theodore’s heads were bobbing along up to their necks. She followed their progress, wishing she were one of them, but she did not want to seem hardhearted if Hubert thought Ted and Jane were liable to be drowned before their eyes, so she said nothing.