The Happy Venture by Edith Ballinger Price
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Edith Ballinger Price >> The Happy Venture
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"I'm being careful. And I know already about this door. There's a kink
in the wall and then a hump in the floor-boards just before you get
there. It's an exciting house."
"That it is!" said Ken, reaching with a forked stick for the handle of
the galvanized iron pail which sat upon the fire. Nobody ever heard of
boiling eggs in a galvanized iron pail but that is exactly what the
Sturgises did. The pail, in an excellent state of preservation, had been
found in the woodshed. The pump yielded, unhesitatingly, any amount of
delicious cold water, and though three eggs did look surprisingly small
in the bottom of the pail, they boiled quite as well as if they'd been
in a saucepan.
"Only think of all the kettles and things I brought!" Felicia mourned.
"We'll have to buy some plates and cups, though, Ken." Most of the
Sturgis china was reposing in a well-packed barrel in a room over Mr.
Dodge's garage, accompanied by many other things for which their owners
longed.
"How the dickens do we capture the eggs!" Ken demanded. "Pigs in
clover's not in it. Lend a hand, Phil!"
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 door-step could be easily disposed of. It was a wide stone
door-step, 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 over-grown
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. Hopkins 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!"
CHAPTER VI
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HEDGE
The civilized-looking hedge had been long since investigated. The plot
of land it enclosed--reached, for the Sturgises, through a breach in the
hedge--was very different from the wild country which surrounded it. The
place had once been a very beautiful garden, but years and neglect had
made of it a half-formal wilderness, fascinating in its over-grown
beauty and its hint of earlier glory. For Kirk, it was an enchanted land
of close-pressing leafy alleys, pungent with the smell of box; of
brick-paved paths chanced on unexpectedly--followed cautiously to the
rim of empty, stone-coped pools. He and Felicia, or he and Ken, went
there when cookery or carpentry left an elder free. For when they had
discovered that the tall old house, though by no means so neglected as
the garden, was as empty, they ventured often into the place. Kirk
invented endless tales of enchanted castles, and peopled the still
lawns and deserted alleys with every hero he had ever read or heard of.
Who could tell? They might indeed lurk in the silent tangle--invisible
to him only as all else was invisible. So he liked to think, and
wandered, rapt, up and down the grass-grown paths of this enchanting
play-ground.
It was not far to the hedge--over the rail fence, across the stubbly
meadow. Kirk had been privately amassing landmarks. He had enough, he
considered, to venture forth alone to the garden of mystery. Felicia was
in the kitchen--not eating bread and honey, but reading a cook-book and
making think-lines in her forehead. Ken was in Asquam. Kirk stepped off
the door-stone; sharp to the right, along the wall of the house, then a
stretch in the open to the well, over the fence--and then nothing but
certain queer stones and the bare feel of the faint path that had
already been worn in the meadow.
Kirk won the breach in the hedge and squeezed through. Then he was alone
in the warm, green-smelling stillness of the trees. He found his way
from the moss velvet under the pines to the paved path, and followed
it, unhesitating, to the terrace before the house. On the shallow,
sun-warmed steps he sat playing with fir-cones, fingering their scaly
curves and sniffing their dry, brown fragrance. He swept a handful of
them out of his lap and stood up, preparatory to questing further up the
stone steps, to the house itself. But suddenly he stood quite still, for
he knew that he was not alone in the garden. He knew, also, that it was
neither Ken nor Felicia who stood looking at him. Had one of the
fairy-tale heroes materialized, after all, and slipped out of magic
coverts to walk with him? Rather uncertainly, he said, "Is somebody
there?"
His voice sounded very small in the outdoor silence. Suppose no one were
there at all! How silly it would sound to be addressing a tree! There
was a moment of stillness, and then a rather old voice said:
"Considering that you are looking straight at me, that seems a somewhat
foolish question."
So there _was_ some one! Kirk said:
"I can't see you, because I can't see anything."
After a pause, the voice said, "Forgive me." But indeed, at first
glance, the grave shadowed beauty of Kirk's eyes did not betray their
blindness.
"Are you one of the enchanted things, or a person?" Kirk inquired.
"I might say, now, that I am enchanted," said the voice, drily.
"I don't think I quite know what you mean," Kirk said. "You sound like a
_Puck of Pook's Hill_ sort of person."
"Nothing so exciting. Though Oak and Ash and Thorn do grow in my
garden."
"_Do_ they? I haven't found them. I knew it was a different place, ever
so different from anything near--different from the other side of the
hedge."
"I am not so young as you," said the voice, "to stand about hatless on
an April afternoon. Let us come in and sit on either side of the
chimney-corner."
And a long, dry, firm hand took Kirk's, and Kirk followed unhesitatingly
where it led.
The smoothness of old polished floors, a sense of height, absolute
silence, a dry, aromatic smell--this was Kirk's impression as he crossed
the threshold, walking carefully and softly, that he might not break
the spellbound stillness of the house. Then came the familiar crackle of
an open fire, and Kirk was piloted into the delicious cozy depths of a
big chair beside the hearth. Creakings, as of another chair being pulled
up, then a contented sigh, indicated that his host had sat down opposite
him.
"May I now ask your name?" the voice inquired.
"I'm Kirkleigh Sturgis, at Applegate Farm," said Kirk.
"' ... I s'pose you know, Miss Jean,
That I'm Young Richard o' Taunton Dean....'"
murmured the old gentleman.
Kirk pricked up his ears instantly. "Phil sings that," he said
delightedly. "I'm glad you know it. But you would."
"Who'd have thought _you_ would know it?" said the voice. "I am fond of
_Young Richard_. Is Phil your brother?"
"She's my sister--but I have a brother. He's sixteen, and he's almost as
high as the doorways at Applegate Farm."
"I seem not to know where Applegate Farm is," the old gentleman mused.
"It's quite next door to you," said Kirk.
"They call it the Baldwin place, really. But Ken happened to think that
Baldwin's a kind of apple, and there _is_ an orchard and a gate, so we
called it that."
"The old farm-house across the meadow!" There was a shade of perplexity
in the voice. "You live _there_?"
"It's the most beautiful place in the world," said Kirk, with
conviction, "except your garden."
"Beautiful--to you! Why?"
"Oh, everything!" Kirk said, frowning, and trying to put into words what
was really joy in life and spring and the love of his brother and
sister. "Everything--the wind in the trees, and in the chimney at night,
and the little toads that sing,--do you ever hear them?--and the fire,
and, and--_everything_!"
"And youth," said the old gentleman to himself, "and an unconscious
courage to surmount all obstacles. But perhaps, after all, the unseen
part of Applegate Farm is the more beautiful." Aloud, he said: "Do you
like to look at odd things? That is--I mean--"
Kirk helped him out. "I do like to," he said. "I look at them with my
fingers--but it's all the same."
Such things to look at! They were deposited, one after the other, in
Kirk's eager hands,--the intricate carving of Japanese ivory,
entrancingly smooth--almost like something warm and living, after one
had held it for a few adoring moments in careful hands. And there was a
Burmese ebony elephant, with a ruby in his forehead.
"A ruby is red," Kirk murmured; "it is like the fire. And the elephant
is black. I see him very well."
"Once upon a time," said the old gentleman, "a rajah rode on him--a
rajah no bigger than your finger. And his turban was encrusted with the
most precious of jewels, and his robe was stiff with gold. The elephant
wore anklets of beaten silver, and they clinked as he walked."
Kirk's face was intent, listening. The little ebony elephant stood
motionless on his palm, dim in the firelight.
"I hear them clinking," he said, "and the people shouting--oh, so far
away!"
He put the treasure back into his host's hand, at last. "I'd like,
please, to look at _you_," he said. "It won't hurt," he added quickly,
instantly conscious of some unspoken hesitancy.
"I have no fear of that," said the voice, "but you will find little
worth the looking for."
Kirk, nevertheless, stood beside the old gentleman's chair, ready with a
quick, light hand to visualize his friend's features.
"My hair, if that will help you," the voice told him, "is quite white,
and my eyes are usually rather blue."
"Blue," murmured Kirk, his fingers flitting down the fine lines of the
old gentleman's profile; "that's cool and nice, like the sea and the
wind. Your face is like the ivory thing--smooth and--and carved. I think
you really must be something different and rather enchanted."
But the old man had caught both Kirk's hands and spread them out in his
own. There was a moment of silence, and then he said:
"Do you care for music, my child?"
"I love Phil's songs," Kirk answered, puzzled a little by a different
note in the voice he was beginning to know. "She sings and plays the
accompaniments on the piano."
"Do you ever sing?"
"Only when I'm all alone." The color rushed for an instant to Kirk's
cheeks, why, he could not have said.
"Without a word, the old gentleman, still holding Kirk's hands, pushed
him gently into the chair he had himself been sitting in. There was a
little time of stillness, filled only by the crack and rustle of the
fire. Then, into the silence, crept the first dew-clear notes of
Chopin's F Sharp Major Nocturne. The liquid beauty of the last bars had
scarcely died away, when the unseen piano gave forth, tragically
exultant, the glorious chords of the Twentieth Prelude--climbing higher
and higher in a mournful triumph of minor chords and sinking at last
into the final solemn splendor of the closing measures. The old
gentleman turned on the piano-stool to find Kirk weeping passionately
and silently into the cushions of the big chair.
"Have I done more than I meant?" he questioned himself, "or is it only
the proof?" His hands on Kirk's quivering shoulders, he asked, "What is
it?"
Kirk sat up, ashamed, and wondering why he had cried. "It was because
it was so much more wonderful than anything that ever happened," he said
unsteadily. "And I never can do it."
The musician almost shook him.
"But you can," he said; "you must! How can you _help_ yourself, with
those hands? Has no one guessed? How stupid all the world is!"
He pulled Kirk suddenly to the piano, swept him abruptly into the wiry
circle of his arm.
"See," he whispered; "oh, listen!"
He spread Kirk's fingers above the keyboard--brought them down on a fine
chord of the Chopin prelude, and for one instant Kirk felt coursing
through him a feeling inexplicable as it was exciting--as painful as it
was glad. The next moment the chord died; the old man was again the
gentle friend of the fireside.
"I am stupid," he said, "and ill-advised. Let's have tea."
The tea came, magically--delicious cambric tea and cinnamon toast. Kirk
and the old gentleman talked of the farm, and of Asquam, and other
every-day subjects, till the spring dusk gathered at the window, and the
musician started up. "Your folk will be anxious," he said. "We must be
off. But you will come to me again, will you not?"
Nothing could have kept Kirk away, and he said so.
"And what's _your_ name, please?" he asked. "I've told you mine." A
silence made him add, "Of course, if you mind telling me--"
Silence still, and Kirk, inspired, said:
"Phil was reading a book aloud to Mother, once, and it was partly about
a man who made wonderful music and they called him 'Maestro.' Would you
mind if I called you Maestro--just for something to call you, you know?"
He feared, in the stillness, that he had hurt his friend's feelings, but
the voice, when it next spoke, was kind and grave.
"I am unworthy," it said, "but I should like you to call me Maestro.
Come--it is falling dusk. I'll go with you to the end of the meadow."
And they went out together into the April twilight.
Ken and Felicia were just beginning to be really anxious, when Kirk
tumbled in at the living-room door, with a headlong tale of enchanted
hearthstones, ebony elephants, cinnamon toast, music that had made him
cry, and most of all, of the benevolent, mysterious presence who had
wrought all this. Phil and Ken shook their heads, suggested that some
supper would make Kirk feel better, and set a boundary limit of the
orchard and meadow fence on his peregrinations.
"But I promised him I'd come again," Kirk protested; "and I can find the
way. I _must_, because he says I can make music like that--and he's the
only person who could show me how."
Felicia extracted a more coherent story as she sat on the edge of Kirk's
bed later that evening. She came downstairs sober and strangely elated,
to electrify her brother by saying:
"Something queer has happened to Kirk. He's too excited, but he's simply
shining. And do you suppose it can possibly be true that he has music in
him? I mean _real_, extraordinary music, like--Beethoven or somebody."
But Ken roared so gleefully over the ridiculous idea of his small
brother's remotely resembling Beethoven, that Phil suddenly thought
herself very silly, and lapsed into somewhat humiliated silence.
* * * * *
It was some time before the cares of a household permitted the Sturgises
to do very much exploring. One of their first expeditions, however, had
been straight to the bay from the farm-house--a scramble through wild,
long-deserted pastures, an amazingly thick young alder grove, and
finally out on the stony, salty water's edge. Here all was silver to the
sea's rim, where the bay met wider waters; in the opposite direction it
narrowed till it was not more than a river, winding among salt flats and
sudden rocky points until it lost itself in a maze of blue among the
distant uplands. The other shore was just beginning to be tenderly
alight with April green, and Felicia caught her breath for very joy at
the faint pink of distant maple boughs and the smell of spring and the
sea. A song-sparrow dropped a sudden, clear throatful of notes, and
Kirk, too, caught the rapture of the spring and flung wide his arms in
impartial welcome.
Ken had been poking down the shore and came back now, evidently with
something to say.
"There's the queerest little inlet down there," he said, "with a tide
eddy that runs into it. And there's an old motor-boat hove way up on the
rocks in there among the bushes."
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