We Girls: A Home Story by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
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Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney >> We Girls: A Home Story
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13 [Illustration: BINDING THE RINGS.]
WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY
By
MRS. A.D.T. WHITNEY
AUTHOR OF "FAITH GARTNEY'S GIRLHOOD," "THE GAYWORTHYS,"
"A SUMMER IN LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
BOSTON
1870, 1890
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. THE STORY BEGINS
CHAPTER II. AMPHIBIOUS
CHAPTER III. BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
CHAPTER IV. NEXT THINGS
CHAPTER V. THE "BACK YETT AJEE."
CHAPTER VI. CO-OPERATING
CHAPTER VII. SPRINKLES AND GUSTS
CHAPTER VIII. HALLOWEEN
CHAPTER IX. WINTER NIGHTS AND WINTER DAYS.
CHAPTER X. RUTH'S RESPONSIBILITY.
CHAPTER XI. BARBARA'S BUZZ.
CHAPTER XII. EMERGENCIES.
WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY.
CHAPTER I.
THE STORY BEGINS.
It begins right in the middle; but a story must begin somewhere.
The town is down below the hill.
It lies in the hollow, and stretches on till it runs against another
hill, over opposite; up which it goes a little way before it can stop
itself, just as it does on this side.
It is no matter for the name of the town. It is a good, large
country town,--in fact, it has some time since come under city
regulations,--thinking sufficiently well of itself, and, for that
which it lacks, only twenty miles from the metropolis.
Up our hill straggle the more ambitious houses, that have shaken off
the dust from their feet, or their foundations, and surrounded
themselves with green grass, and are shaded with trees, and are called
"places." There are the Marchbanks places, and the "Haddens," and the
old Pennington place. At these houses they dine at five o'clock, when
the great city bankers and merchants come home in the afternoon train;
down in the town, where people keep shops, or doctors' or lawyers'
offices, or manage the Bank, and where the manufactories are, they eat
at one, and have long afternoons; and the schools keep twice a day.
We lived in the town--that is, Mr. and Mrs. Holabird did, and their
children, for such length of the time as their ages allowed--for
nineteen years; and then we moved to Westover, and this story began.
They called it "Westover," more or less, years and years before; when
there were no houses up the hill at all; only farm lands and pastures,
and a turnpike road running straight up one side and down the other,
in the sun. When anybody had need to climb over the crown, to get to
the fields on this side, they called it "going west over"; and so came
the name.
We always thought it was a pretty, sunsetty name; but it isn't
considered quite so fine to have a house here as to have it below the
brow. When you get up sufficiently high, in any sense, you begin to go
down again. Or is it that people can't be distinctively genteel, if
they get so far away from the common as no longer to well overlook it?
Grandfather Holabird--old Mr. Rufus,--I don't say whether he was my
grandfather or not, for it doesn't matter which Holabird tells this
story, or whether it is a Holabird at all--bought land here ever so
many years ago, and built a large, plain, roomy house; and here the
boys grew up,--Roderick and Rufus and Stephen and John.
Roderick went into the manufactory with his father,--who had himself
come up from being a workman to being owner,--and learned the
business, and made money, and married a Miss Bragdowne from C----, and
lived on at home. Rufus married and went away, and died when he was
yet a young man. His wife went home to her family, and there were no
little children. John lives in New York, and has two sons and three
daughters.
There are of us--Stephen Holabird's family--just six. Stephen and his
wife, Rosamond and Barbara and little Stephen and Ruth. Ruth is Mrs.
Holabird's niece, and Mr. Holabird's second cousin; for two cousins
married two sisters. She came here when she had neither father nor
mother left. They thought it queer up at the other house; because
"Stephen had never managed to have any too much for his own"; but of
course, being the wife's niece, they never thought of interfering, on
the mere claim of the common cousinship.
Ruth Holabird is a quiet little body, but she has her own particular
ways too.
There is one thing different in our house from most others. We are all
known by our straight names. I say _known_; because we do have little
pet ways of calling, among ourselves,--sometimes one way and sometimes
another; but we don't let these get out of doors much. Mr. Holabird
doesn't like it. So though up stairs, over our sewing, or our
bed-making, or our dressing, we shorten or sweeten, or make a little
fun,--though Rose of the world gets translated, if she looks or
behaves rather specially nice, or stays at the glass trying to do the
first,--or Barbara gets only "Barb" when she is sharper than common,
or Stephen is "Steve" when he's a dear, and "Stiff" when he's
obstinate,--we always _introduce_ "my daughter Rosamond," or "my
sister Barbara," or,--but Ruth of course never gets nicknamed, because
nothing could be easier or pleasanter than just "Ruth,"--and Stephen
is plain strong Stephen, because he is a boy and is expected to be a
man some time. Nobody writes to us, or speaks of us, except as we were
christened. This is only rather a pity for Rosamond. Rose Holabird is
such a pretty name. "But it will keep," her mother tells her. "She
wouldn't want to be everybody's Rose."
Our moving to Westover was a great time.
That was because we had to move the house; which is what everybody
does not do who moves into a house by any means.
We were very much astonished when Grandfather Holabird came in and
told us, one morning, of his having bought it,--the empty Beaman
house, that nobody had lived in for five years. The Haddens had bought
the land for somebody in their family who wanted to come out and
build, and so the old house was to be sold and moved away; and nobody
but old Mr. Holabird owned land near enough to put it upon. For it was
large and solid-built, and could not be taken far.
We were a great deal more astonished when he came in again, another
day, and proposed that we should go and live in it.
We were all a good deal afraid of Grandfather Holabird. He had very
strict ideas of what people ought to do about money. Or rather of what
they ought to do _without_ it, when they didn't happen to have any.
Mrs. Stephen pulled down the green blinds when she saw him coming that
day,--him and his cane. Barbara said she didn't exactly know which it
was she dreaded; she thought she could bear the cane without him, or
even him without the cane; but both together were "_scare-mendous_;
they did put down so."
Mrs. Holabird pulled down the blinds, because he would be sure to
notice the new carpet the first thing; it was a cheap ingrain, and the
old one had been all holes, so that Barbara had proposed putting up a
board at the door,--"Private way; dangerous passing." And we had all
made over our three winters' old cloaks this year, for the sake of it:
and we hadn't got the carpet then till the winter was half over. But
we couldn't tell all this to Grandfather Holabird. There was never
time for the whole of it. And he knew that Mr. Stephen was troubled
just now for his rent and taxes. For Stephen Holabird was the one in
this family who couldn't make, or couldn't manage, money. There is
always one. I don't know but it is usually the best one of all, in
other ways.
Stephen Holabird is a good man, kind and true; loving to live a
gentle, thoughtful life, in his home and among his books; not made for
the din and scramble of business.
He never looks to his father; his father does not believe in allowing
his sons to look to him; so in the terrible time of '57, when the loss
and the worry came, he had to struggle as long as he could, and then
go down with the rest, paying sixty cents on the dollar of all his
debts, and beginning again, to try and earn the forty, and to feed and
clothe his family meanwhile.
Grandfather Holabird sent us down all our milk, and once a week, when
he bought his Sunday dinner, he would order a turkey for us. In the
summer, we had all the vegetables we wanted from his garden, and at
Thanksgiving a barrel of cranberries from his meadow. But these
obliged us to buy an extra half-barrel of sugar. For all these things
we made separate small change of thanks, each time, and were all the
more afraid of his noticing our new gowns or carpets.
"When you haven't any money, don't buy anything," was his stern
precept.
"When you're in the Black Hole, don't breathe," Barbara would say,
after he was gone.
But then we thought a good deal of Grandfather Holabird, for all. That
day, when he came in and astonished us so, we were all as busy and as
cosey as we could be.
Mrs. Holabird was making a rug of the piece of the new carpet that had
been cut out for the hearth, bordering it with a strip of shag.
Rosamond was inventing a feather for her hat out of the best of an old
black-cock plume, and some bits of beautiful downy white ones with
smooth tips, that she brought forth out of a box.
"What are they, Rose? And where did you get them?" Ruth asked,
wondering.
"They were dropped,--and I picked them up," Rosamond answered,
mysteriously. "The owner never missed them."
"Why, Rosamond!" cried Stephen, looking up from his Latin grammar.
"Did!" persisted Rosamond. "And would again. I'm sure I wanted 'em
most. Hens lay themselves out on their underclothing, don't they?" she
went on, quietly, putting the white against the black, and admiring
the effect. "They don't dress much outside."
"O, hens! What did you make us think it was people for?"
"Don't you ever let anybody know it was hens! Never cackle about
contrivances. Things mustn't be contrived; they must happen. Woman and
her accidents,--mine are usually catastrophes."
Rosamond was so busy fastening in the plume, and giving it the right
set-up, that she talked a little delirium of nonsense.
Barbara flung down a magazine,--some old number.
"Just as they were putting the very tassel on to the cap of the
climax, the page is torn out! What do you want, little cat?" she went
on to her pussy, that had tumbled out of her lap as she got up, and
was stretching and mewing. "Want to go out doors and play, little cat?
Well, you can. There's plenty of room out of doors for two little
cats!" And going to the door with her, she met grandfather and the
cane coming in.
There was time enough for Mrs. Holabird to pull down the blinds, and
for Ruth to take a long, thinking look out from under hers, through
the sash of window left unshaded; for old Mr. Holabird and his cane
were slow; the more awful for that.
Ruth thought to herself, "Yes; there is plenty of room out of doors;
and yet people crowd so! I wonder why we can't live bigger!"
[Illustration]
Mrs. Holabird's thinking was something like it.
"Five hundred dollars to worry about, for what is set down upon a few
square yards of 'out of doors.' And inside of that, a great contriving
and going without, to put something warm underfoot over the sixteen
square feet that we live on most!"
She had almost a mind to pull up the blinds again; it was such a very
little matter, the bit of new carpet, after all.
"How do I know what they were thinking?" Never mind. People do know,
or else how do they ever tell stories? We know lots of things that we
_don't_ tell all the time. We don't stop to think whether we know
them or not; but they are underneath the things we feel, and the
things we do.
Grandfather came in, and said over the same old stereotypes. He had a
way of saying them, so that we knew just what was coming, sentence
after sentence. It was a kind of family psalter. What it all meant
was, "I've looked in to see you, and how you are getting along. I do
think of you once in a while." And our worn-out responses were, "It's
very good of you, and we're much obliged to you, as far as it goes."
It was only just as he got up to leave that he said the real thing.
When there was one, he always kept it to the last.
"Your lease is up here in May, isn't it, Mrs. Stephen?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'm going to move over that Beaman house next month, as soon as the
around settles. I thought it might suit you, perhaps, to come and live
in it. It would be handier about a good many things than it is now.
Stephen might do something to his piece, in a way of small farming.
I'd let him have the rent for three years. You can talk it over."
He turned round and walked right out. Nobody thanked him or said a
word. We were too much surprised.
Mother spoke first; after we had hushed up Stephen, who shouted.
I shall call her "mother," now; for it always seems as if that were a
woman's real name among her children. Mr. Holabird was apt to call her
so himself. She did not altogether like it, always, from him. She
asked him once if "Emily" were dead and buried. She had tried to keep
her name herself, she said; that was the reason she had not given it
to either of her daughters. It was a good thing to leave to a
grandchild; but she could not do without it as long as she lived.
"We could keep a cow!" said mother.
"We could have a pony!" cried Stephen, utterly disregarded.
"What does he want to move it quite over for?" asked Rosamond. "His
land begins this side."
"Rosamond wants so to get among the Hill people! Pray, why can't we
have a colony of our own?" said Barbara, sharply and proudly.
"I should think it would be less trouble," said Rosamond, quietly, in
continuation of her own remark; holding up, as she spoke, her finished
hat upon her hand. Rosamond aimed at being truly elegant. She would
never discuss, directly, any questions of our position, or our
limitations.
"Does that look--"
"Holabirdy?" put in Barbara. "No. Not a bit. Things that you do never
do."
Rosamond felt herself flush up. Alice Marchbanks had said once, of
something that we wore, which was praised as pretty, that it "might
be, but it was Holabirdy." Rosamond found it hard to forget that.
"I beg your pardon, Rose. It's just as pretty as it can be; and I
don't mean to tease you," said Barbara, quickly. "But _I do_ mean to
be proud of being Holabirdy, just as long as there's a piece of the
name left."
"I wish we hadn't bought the new carpet now," said mother. "And what
_shall_ we do about all those other great rooms? It will take ready
money to move. I'm afraid we shall have to cut it off somewhere else
for a while. What if it should be the music, Ruth?"
That did go to Ruth's heart. She tried so hard to be willing that she
did not speak at first.
"'Open and shet is a sign of more wet!'" cried Barbara. "I don't
believe there ever was a family that had so _much_ opening and
shetting! We just get a little squeak out of a crack, and it goes
together again and snips our noses!"
"What _is_ a 'squeak' out of a crack?" said Rosamond, laughing. "A
mouse pinched in it, I should think."
"Exactly," replied Barbara. "The most expressive words are
fricassees,--heads and tails dished up together. Can't you see the
philology of it? 'Squint' and 'peek.' Worcester can't put down
everything. He leaves something to human ingenuity. The language isn't
all made,--or used,--yet!"
Barbara had a way of putting heads and tails together, in defiance--in
aid, as she maintained--of the dictionaries.
"O, I can practise," Ruth said, cheerily. "It will be so bright out
there, and the mornings will be so early!"
"That's just what they won't be, particularly," said Barbara, "seeing
we're going 'west over.'"
"Well, then, the afternoons will be long. It is all the same," said
Ruth. That was the best she could do.
"Mother," said Rosamond, "I've been thinking. Get grandfather to have
some of the floors stained. I think rugs, and English druggets, put
down with brass-headed nails, in the middle, are delightful.
Especially for a country house."
"It seems, then, we _are_ going?"
Nobody had even raised a question of that.
Nobody raised a question when Mr. Holabird came in. He himself raised
none. He sat and listened to all the propositions and corollaries,
quite as one does go through the form of demonstration of a
geometrical fact patent at first glance.
"We can have a cow," mother repeated.
"Or a dog, at any rate," put in Stephen, who found it hard to get a
hearing.
"You can have a garden, father," said Barbara. "It's to be near to the
parcel of ground that Rufus gave to his son Stephen."
"I don't like to have you quote Scripture so," said father, gravely.
"I don't," said Barbara. "It quoted itself. And it isn't there either.
I don't know of a Rufus in all sacred history. And there aren't many
in profane."
"Somebody was the 'father of Alexander and Rufus'; and there's a Rufus
'saluted' at the end of an epistle."
"Ruth is sure to catch one, if one's out in Scripture. But that isn't
history; that's mere mention."
"We can ask the girls to come 'over' now, instead of 'down,'"
suggested Rosamond, complacently.
Barbara smiled.
"And we can tell _the girl_ to come 'over,' instead of 'up,' when
she's to fetch us home from a tea-drinking That will be one of the
'handy' things."
"Girl! we shall have a man, if we have a garden." This was between
the two.
"Mayhap," said Barbara. "And perlikely a wheel-barrow."
"We shall all have to remember that it will only be living there
instead of here," said father, cautiously, putting up an umbrella
under the rain of suggestion.
The umbrella settled the question of the weather, however. There was
no doubt about it after that. Mother calculated measurements, and it
was found out, between her and the girls, that the six muslin curtains
in our double town parlor would be lovely for the six windows in the
square Beaman best room. Also that the parlor carpet would make over,
and leave pieces for rugs for some of our delightful stained floors.
The little tables, and the two or three brackets, and the few
pictures, and other art-ornaments, that only "strinkled," Barbara
said, in two rooms, would be charmingly "crowsy" in one. And up stairs
there would be such nice space for cushioning and flouncing, and
making upholstery out of nothing, that you couldn't do here, because
in these spyglass houses the sleeping-rooms were all bedstead, and
fireplace, and closet doors.
They were left to their uninterrupted feminine speculations, for Mr.
Holabird had put on his hat and coat again, and gone off west over to
see his father; and Stephen had "piled" out into the kitchen, to
communicate his delight to Winifred, with whom he was on terms of a
kind of odd-glove intimacy, neither of them having in the house any
precisely matched companionship.
This ought to have been foreseen, and an embargo put on; for it led
to trouble. By the time the green holland shades were apportioned to
their new places, and an approximate estimate reached of the whole
number of windows to be provided, Winny had made up her gregarious
mind that she could not give up her town connection, and go out to
live in "such a fersaakunness"; and as any remainder of time is to
Irish valuation like the broken change of a dollar, when the whole can
no longer be counted on, she gave us warning next morning at breakfast
that she "must just be lukkin out fer a plaashe."
"But," said mother, in her most conciliatory way, "it must be two or
three months, Winny, before we move, if we do go; and I should be glad
to have you stay and help us through."
"Ah, sure, I'd do annything to hilp yiz through; an' I'm sure, I taks
an intheresht in yiz ahl, down to the little cat hersel'; an' indeed I
niver tuk an intheresht in anny little cat but that little cat; but I
couldn't go live where it wud be so loahnsome, an' I can't be out oo a
plaashe, ye see."
It was no use talking; it was only transposing sentences; she "tuk a
graat intheresht in us, an' sure she'd do annything to hilp us, but
she must just be lukkin out fer hersel'." And that very day she had
the kitchen scrubbed up at a most unwonted hour, and her best bonnet
on,--a rim of flowers and lace, with a wide expanse--of ungarnished
head between it and the chignon it was supposed to accommodate,--and
took her "afternoon out" to search for some new situation, where
people were subject neither to sickness nor removals nor company nor
children nor much of anything; and where, under these circumstances,
and especially if there were "set tubs, and hot and cold water," she
would probably remain just about as long as her "intheresht" would
_not_ allow of her continuing with us.
A kitchen exodus is like other small natural commotions,--sure to
happen when anything greater does. When the sun crosses the line we
have a gale down below.
"_Now_ what shall we do?" asked Mrs. Holabird, forlornly, coming back
into the sitting-room out of that vacancy in the farther apartments
which spreads itself in such a still desertedness of feeling all
through the house.
"Just what we've done before, motherums!" said Barbara, more bravely
than she felt. "The next one is somewhere. Like Tupper's 'wife of thy
youth,' she must be 'now living upon the earth.' In fact, I don't
doubt there's a long line of them yet, threaded in and out among the
rest of humanity, all with faces set by fate toward our back door.
There's always a coming woman, in that direction at least."
"I would as lief come across the staying one," said Mrs. Holabird,
with meekness.
It cooled down our enthusiasm. Stephen, especially, was very much
quenched.
The next one was not only somewhere, but everywhere, it seemed, and
nowhere. "Everything by turns and nothing long," Barbara wrote up over
the kitchen chimney with the baker's chalk. We had five girls between
that time and our moving to Westover, and we had to move without a
girl at last; only getting a woman in to do days' work. But I have not
come to the family-moving yet.
The house-moving was the pretty part. Every pleasant afternoon, while
the building was upon the rollers, we walked over, and went up into
all the rooms, and looked out of every window, noting what new
pictures they gave as the position changed from day to day; how now
this tree and now that shaded them: how we gradually came to see by
the end of the Haddens' barn, and at last across it,--for the slope,
though gradual, was long,--and how the sunset came in more and more,
as we squared toward the west; and there was always a thrill of
excitement when we felt under us, as we did again and again, the
onward momentary surge of the timbers, as the workmen brought all
rightly to bear, and the great team of oxen started up. Stephen called
these earthquakes.
We found places, day by day, where it would be nice to stop. It was
such a funny thing to travel along in a house that might stop
anywhere, and thenceforward belong. Only, in fact, it couldn't;
because, like some other things that seem a matter of choice, it was
all pre-ordained; and there was a solid stone foundation waiting over
on the west side, where grandfather meant it to be.
We got little new peeps at the southerly hills, in the fresh breaks
between trees and buildings that we went by. As we reached the broad,
open crown, we saw away down beyond where it was still and woodsy; and
the nice farm-fields of Grandfather Holabird's place looked sunny and
pleasant and real countrified.
It was not a steep eminence on either side; if it had been the great
house could not have been carried over as it was. It was a grand
generous swell of land, lifting up with a slow serenity into pure airs
and splendid vision. We did not know, exactly, where the highest
point had been; but as we came on toward the little walled-in
excavation which seemed such a small mark to aim at, and one which we
might so easily fail to hit after all, we saw how behind us rose the
green bosom of the field against the sky, and how, day by day, we got
less of the great town within our view as we settled down upon our
side of the ridge.
The air was different here, it was full of hill and pasture.
There were not many trees immediately about the spot where we were to
be; but a great group of ashes and walnuts stood a little way down
against the roadside, and all around in the far margins of the fields
were beautiful elms, and round maples that would be globes of fire in
autumn days, and above was the high blue glory of the unobstructed
sky.
The ground fell off suddenly into a great hill-dimple, just where the
walls were laid; that was why Grandfather Holabird had chosen the
spot. There could be a cellar-kitchen; and it had been needful for the
moving, that all the rambling, outrunning L, which had held the
kitchens and woodsheds before, should be cut off and disposed of as
mere lumber. It was only the main building--L-shaped still, of three
very large rooms below and five by more subdivision above--which had
majestically taken up its line of march, like the star of empire,
westward. All else that was needful must be rebuilt.
Mother did not like a cellar-kitchen. It would be inconvenient with
one servant. But Grandfather Holabird had planned the house before he
offered it to us to live in. What we were going to save in rent we
must take out cheerfully in extra steps.
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