The Happy Venture/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
VENTURES AND ADVENTURES
KEN had not much time for these visits. The Sturgis Water Line was so popular that he could not even find a spare day or two in which to haul out the Dutchman and give her the "lick of paint" she needed. He had feared that, with the filling of the cottages at the beginning of the season, business would fall off, but so many weekly visitors came and went at the hotels that the Dutchman rarely made a trip entirely empty, and quite often she was forced to leave, till the next time, a little heap of luggage which even her wide cockpit could not carry. Sometimes Ken made an extra trip, which brought him back to the pier at Asquam as the first twilight was gathering.
He had just come in from such an "extra," one day during the busy Fourth of July weekend, and climbed out upon the wharf when the shadows of the pile-heads stretched darkly up the streetway. Hop fastened the tail-board of his wagon behind the last trunk, rubbed his hands, and said:
"Wife sent ye down some pie. Thought ye desarved it a'ter runnin' up 'n' down all day."
He produced the pie, wrapped up in a paper, from under the seat, and presented it to Ken with a flourish and a shuffle that were altogether characteristic. Supper was waiting at Applegate Farm, Ken knew, but the pie—which was a cherry one, drippy and delectable—was not to be resisted, after long hours on—the water. He bit into it heartily as he left Asquam and swung into Pickery Lane.
He hurried along, still wrapped in the atmosphere which had surrounded him all day. He felt still the lift of the boat over the short swell, he smelled the pleasant combination of salt, and gasolene, and the whiff of the hayfields, and his eyes still kept the glare and the blue, and the swinging dark shape of the Dutchman's bows as he headed her down the bay. Just before he reached Winterbottom Road, he saw, rather vaguely through the twilight, the figures of a man and a small boy, coming toward him. They had, apparently, seen him, also, for the man walked more quickly for a step or two, then stopped altogether, and finally turned sharply off the road and swung the child over a stone wall, with a quick remark which Ken did not hear.
He did hear, however, the child's reply, for it was in a clear and well-known voice. It said: "I don't think this can be the way. I didn't come over a wall."
The remainder of the cherry pie dropped to the dust of the Winterbottom Road. Not more than three gigantic leaps brought Ken to the spot; he vaulted the wall with a clean and magnificent spring that would have won him fame at school. The man was a stranger, as Ken had thought—an untidy and unshaven stranger. He was not quite so tall as Ken, who seized him by the arm.
"May I ask where you're going?" roared Ken, at which the small boy leaped rapturously, fastened himself to Ken's coat-tail, and cried:
"Oh, I'm so glad it's you! I started to come and meet you, and I walked farther than I meant, and I got lost, and I met this person, and he said he'd take me home, and—"
"Shut up!" said Ken. "And let go of me!" at which Kirk, thoroughly shocked, dropped back as though he could not believe his ears.
"I was takin' the kid home," muttered the man, "just like he says."
"Why were you going in exactly the opposite direction, then?" Ken demanded.
As he leaped abreast of the man, who was trying to back away, the day's receipts of the Sturgis Water Line jingled loudly in his trousers pocket. The stranger, whose first plan had been so rudely interfered with, determined on the instant not to leave altogether empty-handed, and planted a forcible and unexpected blow on the side of Ken's head. Ken staggered and went down, and Kirk, who had been standing dangerously near all this activity, went down on top of him. It so happened that he sprawled exactly on top of the trousers pocket aforesaid, and when the man sought, with hasty and ungentle hands, to remove him from it, Kirk launched a sudden and violent kick, in the hope of its doing some execution.
Kirk's boots were stout, and himself horrified and indignant; his heel caught the stranger with full force in the temple, and the man, too, was added to the prostrate figures in the darkening field. Two of them did not long remain prostrate. Ken lurched, bewildered, to his feet, and, seeing his foe stretched by some miracle upon the ground, he bundled Kirk over the wall and followed giddily. Stumbling down the shadowy road, with Kirk's hand in his, he said:
"That was good luck. I must have given the gentleman a crack as he got me."
"He was trying to steal your money, I think," Kirk said. "I was lying on top of you, so I kicked him, hard."
"Oh, that was it, was it?" Ken exclaimed. "Well, very neat work, even if not sporting. By the way, excuse me for speaking to you the way I did, but it wasn't any time to have a talk. You precious, trusting little idiot, don't you know better than to go off with the first person who comes along?"
"He said he'd take me home," Kirk said plaintively. "I told him where it was."
"You've got to learn," said his brother, stalking grimly on in the dusk, "that everybody in the world isn't so kind and honest as the people you've met so far. That individual was going to take you goodness knows where, and not let us have you back till we'd paid him all the money we have in the world. If I hadn't come along just as that particular moment, that's what would have happened.
Kirk sniffed, but Ken went on relentlessly:
"What were you doing outside the gate, anyway? You're not allowed there. I don't like your going to the Maestro's, even, but at least it's a safe path. There are automobiles on Winterbottom Road, and they suppose that you can see 'em and get out of their way. I'm afraid we'll have to say that you can't leave the house without Phil or me."
Ken was over-wrought, and forgot that his brother probably was, also. Kirk wept passionately at last, and Ken, who could never bear to see his tears, crouched penitent in the gloom of the road, to dry his eyes and murmur tender apologies. At the gate of the farm, Ken paused suddenly, and then said:
"Let's not say anything about all this to Phil; she'd just be worried and upset. What do you say?"
"Don't let's," Kirk agreed. They shook hands solemnly, and then turned to the lighted windows of Applegate Farm.
But it would not have been so easy to keep the unpleasant adventure secret, or conceal from Felicia that something had been wrong, if she herself had not been so obviously cherishing a surprise. She had thought that Kirk was waiting at the gate for Ken, and so had been spared any anxiety on that score. She could hardly wait for Ken to take off his sweater and wash his hands. Supper was on the table, and it was to something which lay beside her elder brother's plate that her dancing eyes kept turning.
Ken, weary with good cause, sat down with a sigh, and then leaned forward as if an electric button had been touched somewhere about his person.
"What—well, by Jiminy!" shouted Ken. "I never believed it, never!"
"It's real," Phil said excitedly; "it looks just like a real one."
"What?" Kirk asked wildly; "tell me what!"
Ken lifted the crisp new sheet of music and stared at it, and then read aloud the words on the cover.
"Fairy Music," it said—and his name was there, and the Maestro's, and "net price, 60c" "like a real one," indeed. And within were flights of printed notes, and the words of the "Toad Pome" in cold black and white. And above them, in small italics, "Dedicated to Kirkleigh Sturgis."
"Just like Beethoven's things to the Countess von Something, don't you know!" Phil murmured, awed and rapturous.
When Ken laid the pages down at last, Kirk seized on them, and though they could mean nothing to him but the cool smoothness of paper and the smell of newly dried printers' ink, he seemed to get an immense satisfaction from them.
But the surprise was not yet over. Beneath the copy of the song lay a much smaller bit of paper, long, narrow, and greenish. It bore such words as Central Trust Company, and Pay to the Order of Kenelm Sturgis. The sum which was to be paid him was such as to make Ken put a hand dramatically to his forehead. He then produced from his pocket the money which had so nearly gone off in the pocket of the stranger, and stacked it neatly beside his plate.
"One day's bone labor for man and boat," he said. "Less than a quarter as much as what I get for fifteen minutes' scribbling."
"And the Maestro says there'll be more," Felicia put in; "because there are royalties, which I don't understand."
"But," said Ken, pursuing his line of thought, "I can depend on the Dutchman and my good right arm, and I can’t depend on the Pure Flame of Inspiration, or whatever it's called, so methinks the Sturgis Water Line will make its first trip at 8:30 promptly to-morrow morning, as advertised. All the same," he added jubilantly, "what a tremendous lark it is, to be sure!"
And he gave way suddenly to an outburst of the sheer delight which he really felt, and, leaping up, caught Felicia with one hand and Kirk with the other. The three executed for a few moments a hilarious ring-around-a-rosy about the table, till Felicia finally protested at the congealing state of the supper, and they all dropped breathless to their seats and fell to without more words.
After supper, Felicia played the Toad Song on the melodeon until it ran in all their heads, and Kirk could be heard caroling it, upstairs, when he was supposed to be settling himself to sleep.
It was not till Ken was bending over the lamp, preparatory to blowing it out, that Phil noticed the bruise above his eye.
"How did you get that, lamb?" she said, touching Ken's forehead, illuminated by the lamp's glow.
Ken blew out the flame swiftly, and faced his sister in a room lit only by the faint, dusky reflection of moonlight without.
"Oh, I whacked up against something this afternoon," he said. "I'll put some witch-hazel on it, if you like."
"I'm so awfully glad about the Toad Song," whispered Felicia, slipping her hand within his arm. "Good old brother!"
"Good old Maestro," said Ken; and they went arm in arm up the steep stairs.
Ken lighted his sister's candle for her, and took his own into the room he shared with Kirk. There was no fear of candle-light waking Kirk. He was very sound asleep, with the covers thrown about, and Ken stood looking at him for some time, with the candle held above his brother's tranquil face.
"I wonder where he'd have been sleeping to-night if I hadn't come along just about when I did?" mused Ken. "The innocent little youngster—he never supposed for a minute that the rapscallion would do anything but take him home. How's he ever going to learn all the ways of the wicked world? And what ever possessed him to shoot off the Toad Pome to the Maestro?"
Ken put the candle on the bureau and undid his necktie.
"The blessed little goose!" he added affectionately.
There is nothing like interesting work to make time pass incredibly quickly. For the Sturgises were interested in all their labors, even the "chores" of Applegate Farm. It goes without saying that Kirk's music—which was the hardest sort of work—absorbed him completely; he lived in a new world. So, almost before they could believe it, September came, filling the distance with tranquil haze, and mellowing the flats to dim orange, threaded with the keen blue inlets of the bay. Asters began to open lavender stars at the door-stone of Applegate Farm; tall rich milkweed pressed dusty flower-bunches against the fence, and, the sumach brandished smoldering pyramids of fire along the roadsides.
Ken came home late, whistling, up from Asquam. Trade for the Sturgis Water Line was heavy again just now; the hotels and cottages were being vacated every day, and more baggage than the Dutchman could carry lay piled in the Sturgis "warehouse" till next morning. Ken's whistle stopped as he swung into Winterbottom Road and began to climb the hill. Just at the crest of the rise, where the pale strip of road met the twilight of the sky, the full moon hung, a golden disc scarcely more luminous than the sky around it. As he moved up the hill, it moved also, till it floated clear of the dark juniper-trees and stood high above them. Crickets were taking up their minor creaking, and there was no other sound.
Through the half dusk, the white chimneys of Applegate Farm showed vaguely, with smoke rising so lazily that it seemed almost a stationary streak of blue across the trees. What a decent old place it was, thought Ken. Was it only because it constituted home? No; they had worked to make it so, and it had ripened and expanded under their hands.
"I should n't mind Mother's seeing it, now," Ken reflected.
He sighed as he remembered the last difficult letter which he and Phil had composed—a strictly truthful letter, which said much and told nothing. He wondered how much longer the fiction would have to be sustained; when the doctor at Hilltop would sanction a revelation of all that had been going on since that desolate March day, now so long ago.
As Ken neared the house, he heard the reedy voice of the organ, and, stopping beside the lighted window, looked in. Felicia was mending beside the lamp; Kirk sat at the melodeon, rapturously making music. From the somewhat vague sweetness of the melody, Ken recognized it as one of Kirk's own compositions—without beginning, middle, or end, but with a gentle, eerie harmony all its own. The Maestro, who was thoroughly modern in his instruction, if old-school himself, was teaching composition hand in hand with the other branches of music, and he allowed himself, at times, to become rather enthusiastic.
"Even if I didn't want him to make music of his own," he told Felicia, "I couldn't stop him. So I supply the bricks and mortar for the foundation. He might as well build his little tunes rightly from the beginning. He will go far—yes, far. It is sheer harmony." And the Maestro would sigh deeply, and nod his fine head.
Ken, remembering these words with some awe, studied his brother's face, through the pane, and then came quietly in at the door. Kirk left his tune unfinished, and launched himself in the direction of Ken, who scooped him into his arms.
"Do you know, Phil," Ken said, voicing at once the thought he had felt all the way up Winterbottom Road; "do you know, I think, after all, this is the very best thing we could have done."
"What?" Phil asked, not being a mind-reader.
"This," Ken said, sweeping his arm about the lamplit room. "This place. We thought it was such a horrible mistake, at first. It was a sort of venture to take."
"A happy venture," Felicia murmured, bending over her sewing. "But it wouldn't have been so happy if the defender of his kindred hadn't slaved on the high seas 'for to maintain his brither and me,' like Henry Martin in the ballad."
"Oh, fiddlestick!" said Ken. "Who wants to loaf around? Speaking of loaf, I'm hungry."
"Supper's doing itself on the stove," Phil said. "Look lively with the table, Kirk."
Kirk did so,—his efficiency as a table-setter had long since been proved,—and Ken, as the weary breadwinner, stretched out in a chair.
"Did you happen to remember," said Felicia, coming to the door, spoon in hand, "that the Kirk has a birthday this week?"
"It has?" exclaimed Ken. "I say, I'd forgotten."
"It's going to be nine; think of that!" said Phil. "Woof! My kettle's boiling over!" She made a hasty exit, while Ken collared his brother and looked him over.
"Who'd ha' thunk it!" he said. "Well, well, what's to be done about this?"
"Lots," said Felicia, suddenly appearing with the supper. "Lots!"