The Happy Venture/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE WHEELS BEGIN TO TURN
KEN walked to Asquam almost immediately after breakfast, and Felicia explored their new abode most thoroughly, inside and out. Corners and steps there were in plenty, as Kirk had said; it seemed as if the house had been built in several pieces and patched together. Two biggish rooms downstairs, besides the kitchen; a large, built-in, white-doored closet in the living-room,—quite jolly, Felicia thought,—rusty nails driven in unbelievable quantities in all the walls. She couldn't imagine how any one could have wanted to hang anything in some of the queer places where nails sprouted, and she longed to get at them with a claw-hammer.
Upstairs there was one big room (for Ken and Kirk, Phil thought), a little one for herself, and what she immediately named "The Poke-Hole" for trunks and such things. When Mother came home, as come she must, the extra downstairs room could be fitted up for her, Felicia decided—or the boys could take it over for themselves. The upstairs rooms were all under the eaves, and, at present, were hot and musty. Felicia pounded open the windows, which had small, old-fashioned panes, somewhat lacking in putty. In came the good April air, fresh after the murk of yesterday, and smelling of salt, and heathy grass, and spring. It summoned Felicia peremptorily, and she ran downstairs and out to look at the "ten acres of land, peach and apple orchards."
Kirk went, too, his hand in hers.
"It's an easy house," he confided. "You'd think it would be hard, but the floor's different all over—bumpy, and as soon as I find out which bump means what, I'll know how to go all over the place. I dare say it's the same out here."
Felicia was not so sure. It seemed a trackless waste of blown grass for one to navigate in the dark. It was always a mystery to her how Kirk found his way through the mazy confusion of unseen surroundings. Now, on unfamiliar ground, he was unsure of himself, but in a place he knew, it was seldom that he asked or accepted guidance.
The house was not forbidding, Felicia decided—only tired, and very shabby. The burdocks at the doorstep could be easily disposed of. It was a wide stone doorstep, as she had hoped and from it, though there was not much view of the bay, there were nice things to be seen. Before it, the orchard dropped away at one side, leaving a wide vista of brown meadows, sown with more of the pointy trees and grayed here and there by rocks; beyond that, a silver slip of water, and the far shore blue, blue in the distance. To the right of the house the land rolled away over another dun meadow that stopped at a rather civilized-looking hedge, above which rose a dense tumble of high trees. To the left lay the overgrown dooryard, the old lichened stone wall, and the sagging gate which opened to Winterbottom Road. Felicia tried to describe it all to Kirk, and wondered as she gazed at him, standing beside her with the eager, listening look his face so often wore, how much of it could mean anything to him but an incomprehensible string of words.
Ken returned from Asquam in Hop's chariot, surrounded by bundles.
"Luxury!" he proclaimed, when the spoils were unloaded. "An oil-stove, two burners—and food, and beautiful plates with posies on 'em—and tin spoons! And I met Mrs. Hopkins, and she almost fainted when I told her we'd slept on the floor. She wanted us to come to her house, but it's the size of a butter-box, and stuffy; so she insisted on sending three quilts. Behold! And the oil-stove was cheap because one of the doors was broken (which I can fix). So there you are!"
"No sign of the goods, I suppose?"
"Our goods? Law, no! Old Mr. Thingummy put on his spectacles and peered around as if he expected to find them behind the door!"
"Oh, my only aunt! They are wonderful plates!" Felicia cried, as she extracted one from its wrapper.
"That's my idea of high art," Ken said, "I got them at the Asquam Utility Emporium. And have you remarked the chairs? Mrs. Hop sent those, too. They were in her corn-crib,—on the rafters,—and she said if we didn't see convenient to bring 'em back, never mind, 'cause she was plumb tired of clutterin' 'em round from here to thar."
"Mrs. Hopkins seems to be an angel unawares," said Felicia, with enthusiastic misapplication.
It was the finding of the ancient sickle near the well that gave Ken the bright idea of cutting down the tall, dry grass for bedding.
"Not that it's much of a weapon," he said. "Far less like a sickle than a dissipated saw, to quote. But the edge is rusted so thin that I believe it'll do the trick."
Kirk gathered the grass up into soft scratchy heaps as Ken mowed it, keeping at a respectful distance behind the swinging sickle. Ken began to whistle, then stopped to hear the marsh frogs, which were still chorusing their mad joy in the flight of winter.
"I made up a pome about those thar toads," Ken said, "last night after you'd gone to sleep again."
Kirk leaped dangerously near the sickle.
"You haven't made me a pome for ages!" he cried. "Stop sickling and do it—quick!"
"It's a grand one," Ken said; "listen to this!
"Down in the marshes the sounds begin
Of a far-away fairy violin,
Faint and reedy and cobweb thin.
"Cricket and marsh-frog and brown tree-toad,
Sit in the sedgy grass by the road,
Each at the door of his own abode;
"Each with a fairy fiddle or flute
Fashioned out of a briar root;
The fairies join their notes, to boot.
"Sitting all in a magic ring,
They lift their voices and sing and sing,
Because it is April, 'Spring! Spring!'"
"That is a nice one!" Kirk agreed. "It sounds real. I don't know how you can do it."
A faint clapping was heard from the direction of the house, and turning, Ken saw his sister dropping him a curtsey at the door. "That," she said, "is a poem, not a pome—a perfectly good one."
"Go 'way!" shouted Ken. "You're a wicked interloper. And you don't even know why Kirk and I write pomes about toads, so you don't!"
"I never could see," Ken remarked that night, "why people are so keen about beds of roses. If you ask me, I should think they'd be uncommon prickly and uncomfortable. Give me a bed of herbs—where love is, don't you know?"
"It wasn't a bed of herbs," Felicia contended; "it was a dinner of them. This isn't herbs, anyway. And think of the delectable smell of the bed of roses!"
"But every rose would have its thorn," Ken objected. "No, no, 'herbs' is preferable."
This argument was being held during the try-out of the grass beds in the living-room.
"See-saw, Margery Daw,
She packed up her bed and lay upon straw,"
sang Felicia.
But the grass was an improvement. Grass below and Mrs. Hop's quilts above, with the overcoats in reserve—the Sturgises considered themselves quite luxurious, after last night's shift at sleep.
"What care we if the beds don't come?" Ken said. "We could live this way all summer. Let them perish untended in the trolley freight-house."
But when Kirk was asleep, the note of the conversation dropped. Ken and Felicia talked till late into the night, in earnest undertones, of ways and means and the needs of the old house.
And slowly, slowly, all the wheels did begin to turn together. Some of the freight came,—notably the beds,—after a week of waiting. Ken and Hop carried them upstairs and set them up, with much toil. Ken chopped down two dead apple-trees, and filled the shed with substantial fuel. The Asquam Market would deliver out Winterbottom Road after May first. Trunks came, with old clothes, and Braille books and other books—and things that Felicia had not been able to leave behind at the last moment. Eventually, came a table, and the Sturgises set their posied plates upon it, and lighted their two candles stuck in saucers, and proclaimed themselves ready to entertain.
"And," thought Felicia, pausing at the kitchen door, "what a difference it does make!"
Firelight and candle-light wrought together their gracious spell on the old room. The tin spoons gleamed like silver, the big brown crash towel that Ken had jokingly laid across the table looked quite like a runner. The light ran and glowed on the white-plastered ceiling and the heavy beams; it flung a mellow aureole about Kirk, who was very carefully arranging three tumblers on the table.
The two candle-flames swayed suddenly and straightened, as Ken opened the outer door and came in.
He, too, paused, looking at the little oasis in the dark, silent house.
"We're beginning," he said, "to make friends with the glum old place."
There was much to be done. The rusty nails were pulled out, and others substituted in places where things could really be hung on them—notably in the kitchen, where they supported Felicia's pots and pans in neatly ordered rows. The burdocks disappeared, the shutters were persuaded not to squeak, the few pieces of furniture from home were settled in places where they would look largest. Yes, the house began to be friendly. The rooms were not, after all, so enormous as Felicia had thought. The furniture made them look much smaller. At the Asquam Utility Emporium, Felicia purchased several yards of white cheese-cloth from which she fashioned curtains for the living-room windows. She also cleaned the windows themselves, and Ken did a wondrous amount of scrubbing.
Now, when fire and candle-light shone out in the living room, it looked indeed like a room in which to live—so thought the Sturgises, who asked little.
"Come out here, Phil," Ken whispered, plucking his sister by the sleeve, one evening just before supper. Mystified, she followed him out into the soft April twilight; he drew her away from the door a little and bade her look back.
There were new green leaves on the little bush by the door-stone; they gleamed startlingly light in the dusk. A new moon hung beside the stalwart white chimney—all the house was a mouse-colored shadow against the darkening sky. The living-room windows showed as orange squares cut cheerfully from the night. Through the filmy whiteness of the cheese-cloth curtains, could be seen the fire, the table spread for supper, the gallant candles. Kirk lying on the hearth, reading.
"Doesn't it look like a place to live in—and to have a nice time in?" Ken asked.
"Oh," Felicia said, "it almost does!"