CHAPTER V

JUST A CITY SPARROW

Christmas week had already passed when the surprise came. As Kit said the charm of the unexpected was always gripping you unawares when you lived on the edge of Nowhere. Mrs. Newell and Elliott had departed two days after Christmas for Weston. Somehow the girls could not get really acquainted with this new boy cousin. Billie, once won, was a friend for ever, but Elliott was a smiling, confident boy, quiet and resourceful, with little to say.

“He overlooks girls,” Helen had said. “It isn’t that he doesn’t like us, but he doesn’t see us. He’s been going to a boys’ school ever since he was seven years old, and all he can think about or talk about is boys. When I told him I didn’t know anything about baseball, he looked at me through his eye glasses so curiously.”

“I think he was embarrassed by such a galaxy of the fair cousins,” Kit declared. “He’s lived alone as the sole chick, and he just couldn’t get the right angle on us. Billie says he got along with him all right. He was very polite, girls, anyway. You expect too much of him because Cousin Beth was so nice. If he’d been named Bob or Dave or Billie or Jack, he’d have felt different too. His full name’s Elliott Peabody Newell. I’ll bet a cookie when I have a large family, I’ll never, never give them family names.”

“You said you were going to be a bachelor maid forever just the other day.”

“Did I? Well, you know about consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds,” Kit retorted calmly. “Since we were over at the Judge’s for Christmas, I’ve decided to marry my childhood love too.”

“That’s Billie.”

“No, it is not, young lady. Billie is a kindred spirit, an entirely different person from your childhood love. I haven’t got one yet, but after listening to the Judge say those tender things about Cousin Roxy, I’m going to find one or know the reason why.”

By this time, Jean had settled down contentedly to the winter régime. She was giving Doris piano lessons, and taking over the extra household duties with Kit back at school. School had been one of the problems to be solved that first year. Doris and Helen went over the hill road to Gayhead District Schoolhouse. It stood at the crossroads, a one story red frame building, with a “leanto” on one side, and a woodshed on the other. Helen had despised it thoroughly until she heard that her father had gone there in his boyhood, and she had found his old desk with his initials carved on it. Anything that Father or Mother had been associated with was forever hallowed in the eyes of the girls.

But Kit was in High School, and the nearest one was over the hills to Central Village, six miles away. As Kit said, it was so tantalizing to get to the top of the first hill and see the square white bell tower rising out of the green trees way off on another hill and not be able to fly across. But Piney was going and she rode horseback on Mollie, the brown mare.

“And if Piney Hancock can do it, I can,” Kit said. “I shall ride Princess over and back. Piney says she’ll meet me down at the bridge crossing every morning. It will be lots of fun, and she knows where we can put the horses up. All you do is take your own bag of grain with you, and it only costs ten cents to stable them.”

“But, dear, in heavy winter weather what will you do?”

“Piney says if it’s too rough to get home, she stays overnight with Mrs. Parmalee. You remember, Mother dear, Ma Parmalee from whom we bought the chickens. I could stay too. Cousin Roxy says you mustn’t just make a virtue of Necessity, sometimes you have to take her into the bosom of the family.”

Accordingly, Kit rode in good weather, a trim, lithe figure in her brown corduroy cross saddle skirt, pongee silk waist, and brown tie. After she reached Central Village, and Princess was stabled, she could button up her skirt and feel just as properly garbed as any of the girls. And the ride over the rounded hills in the late fall months was a wonderful tonic. Mrs. Robbins would often stand out on the wide porch of an early morning and watch the setting forth of her brood, Helen and Doris turning to wave back to her at the entrance gates, Kit swinging her last salute at the turn of the hill road, where Princess got her first wind after her starting gallop.

“I think they’re wonderfully plucky,” she said one morning to Jean. “If they had been country girls, born and bred, it would be different, but stepping right out of Long Island shore life into these hills, you have all managed splendidly.”

“We’d have been a fine lot of quitters if we hadn’t,” Jean answered. “I think it’s been much harder for you than for us girls, Mother darling.”

And then the oddest, most unexpected thing had happened, something that had strengthened the bond between them and made Jean’s way easier. The Motherbird had turned, with a certain quick grace she had, seemingly as girlish and impulsive as any of her daughters, and had met Jean’s glance with a tell-tale flush on her cheeks and a certain whimsical glint in her eyes.

“Jean, do you never suspect me?” she had asked, half laughingly. “I know just exactly what a struggle you have gone through, and how you miss all that lies back yonder. I do too. If we could just divide up the time, and live part of the year here and the other part back at the Cove. I wouldn’t dare tell Cousin Roxy that I had ever ‘repined’ as she would say, but there are days when the silence and the loneliness up here seem to crush so strongly in on one.”

“Oh, Mother! I never thought that you minded it.” Jean’s arms were around her in a moment. “I’ve been horribly selfish, just thinking of myself. But now that Father’s getting strong again, you can go away, can’t you, for a little visit anyway?”

“Not without him,” she said decidedly. “Perhaps by next summer we can, I don’t know. I don’t want to suggest it until he feels the need of a change too. But I’ve been thinking about you, Jean, and if Babbie writes again for you to come, I want you to go for a week or two anyway. I’ll get Shad’s sister to help me with the housework, and you must go. Beth and I had a talk together before she left, and I felt proud of my first nestling’s ambitions after I heard her speak of your work. She says the greatest worry on her mind is that Elliott has no definite ambition, no aim. He has always had everything that they could give him, and she begins now to realize it was all wrong. He expects everything to come to him without any effort of his own.”

“But, Mother, how can I go and leave you—”

“I want you to, Jean. You have been a great help to me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed everything you have done to save me worry, because I have.”

“Well, you had Father to care for—”

“I know, and he’s so much better now that I haven’t any dread left. If Babbie writes again tell her you will come.”

Babbie wrote after receiving her Christmas box of woodland things. Jean had arranged it herself, not thinking it was bearing a message. It was lined with birch bark, and covered with the same. Inside, packed in moss, were hardy little winter ferns, sprays of red berries, a wind tossed bluebird’s nest, acorns and rose seed pods, and twined around the edge wild blackberry vines that turn a deep ruby red in wintertime. Jean called it a winter garden and it was one of several she had sent out to city friends for whom she felt she could not afford expensive presents.

Babbie had caught the real spirit of it, and had written back urgently.

“You must run down if only for a few days, Jean. I’ve put your winter garden on the studio windowsill in the sunlight, and it just talks at me about you all the time. Never mind about new clothes. Come along.”

It was these same new clothes that secretly worried Jean all the same, but with some fresh touches on two of last year’s evening frocks, her winter suit sponged and pressed, and her mother’s set of white fox furs, she felt she could make the trip.

“You can wear that art smock in the studio that Bab sent you for Christmas,” Kit told her. “That funny dull mustard yellow with the Dutch blue embroidery just suits you. But do your hair differently, Jean. It’s too stiff that way. Fluff it.”

“Don’t you do it, Jean,” Helen advised. “Just because Kit has a flyaway mop, she doesn’t want us to wear braids. I shall wear braids some day if my hair ever gets long enough. I love yours all around your head like that. It looks like a crown.”

“Stuff!” laughed Kit, merrily. “Sit thee down, my sister, and let me turn thee into a radiant beauty.”

Laughingly, Jean was taken away from her sewing and planted before the oval mirror. The smooth brown plaits were taken down and Kit deftly brushed her hair high on her head, rolled it, patted it, put in big shell pins, and fluffed out the sides around the ears.

“Now you look like Mary Lavinia Peabody and Dolly Madison and the Countess Potocka.”

“Do I?” Jean surveyed herself dubiously. “Well, I like the braids best, and I’d never get it up like that by myself. I shall be individual and not a slave to any mode. You know what Hiram used to say about his plaid necktie, ‘Them as don’t like it can lump it for all of me.’”

The second week in January Shad drove Princess down to the station with Jean and her two suitcases tucked away on the back seat. Mr. Briggs glanced up in bold surprise when her face appeared at the ticket window.

“Ain’t leaving us, be you?”

“Just for a week or two. New York, please.”

“New York? Well, well.” He turned and fished leisurely for a ticket from the little rack on the side wall. “Figuring on visiting friends or maybe relatives, I shouldn’t wonder?”

“A girl friend.” Jean couldn’t bear to sidestep Mr. Briggs’s friendly interest in the comings and goings of the Robbins family. “Miss Crane.”

“Oh, yes, Miss Crane. Same one you sent down that box to by express before Christmas. Did she get it all right?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“I kind of wondered what was in it. Nothing that rattled, and it didn’t feel heavy.” He looked out at her meditatively, but just then the train came along and Jean had to hurry away without appeasing Mr. Briggs’s thirst for information.

It was strange, the sensation of adventure that came over her as the little two coach local train wound its way around the hills down towards New London. The unexpected, as she had said once, always brought the greatest thrill, and she had put from her absolutely any hope of a trip away from home so that now it came as a double pleasure.

It was late afternoon and the sunshine lay in a hazy glow of red and gold over the russet fields. There was no sign of snow yet. The land lay in a sort of sleepy stillness, without wind or sound of birds, waiting for the real winter. On the hillsides the laurel bushes kept their deep green lustre, the winter ferns reared brave fresh tinted fronds above the dry leaf mold. On withered goldenrod stalks tiny brown Phoebe birds clung, hunting for stray seed pods. Here and there rose leisurely from a pine grove a line of crows, flying low over the bare fields.

The train followed the river bank all the way down to New London. Jean loved to watch the scenery as it flashed around the bends, past the great water lily ponds below Jewett City, past the tumbling falls above the mills, over a bridge so narrow that it seemed made of pontoons, through beautiful old Norwich, sitting like Rome of old on her seven hills, the very “Rose of New England.” Then down again to catch the broad sweep of the Thames River, ever widening until at last it spread out below the Navy Yard and slipped away to join the blue waters of the Sound.

It was all familiar and common enough through custom and long knowledge to the people born and bred there. Jean thought an outsider caught the perspective better. And how many of the old English names had been given in loving remembrance of the Mother country, New London and Norwich, Hanover, Scotland, Canterbury, Windham, and oddly enough, wedged in among the little French Canadian settlements around Nantic was Versailles. How on earth, Jean wondered, among those staid Non-Conformist villages and towns, had Marie Antoinette’s toy palace ever slipped in for remembrance.

At New London she had to change from the local train to the Boston express. It was eleven before she reached the Grand Central at New York and found Bab waiting for her. Jean saw her as she came up the Concourse, a slim figure in gray, her fluffy blonde hair curling from under her gray velvet Tam, just as Kit had coaxed Jean’s to do. Beside her was Mrs. Crane, a little motherly woman, plump and cheerful, who always reminded Jean of a hen that had just hatched a duck’s egg and was trying to make the best of it.

“What a wonderful color you have, child,” she said, kissing Jean’s rosy cheeks. “She looks a hundred per cent better, doesn’t she, Bab, since she left Shady Cove.”

“Fine,” Babbie declared. “Give the porter your suitcases, Kit. We’ve got a taxi waiting over here.”

It was very nearly a year since Jean had left the New York atmosphere. Now the rush and hurly burly of people and vehicles almost bewildered her. After months of the silent nights in the country, the noise and flashing lights rattled her, as Kit would have expressed it. She kept close to Mrs. Crane, and settled back finally in the taxi with relief, as they started uptown for the studio.

“Yet you can hardly call it a studio now, since Mother came and took possession,” Bab said. “We girls had it all nice and messy, and she keeps it in order, I tell you. But you’ll like it, and it’s close to the Park so we can get out for some good hikes.”

“Somebody was needed to keep it in order,” Mrs. Crane put in. “You know, Jean, I had to stay over in Paris until things were a little bit settled. We had a lease on the apartment there, and of course, they held me to it, so I let Bab come back with the Setons as she had to be in time for her fall term at the Academy.”

“Noodles and Justine and I kept house,” Bab put in significantly. “And, my dear, talk about temperament! We had no regular meals at all, and Justine says if you show her crackers and pimento cheese again for a year, she’ll just simply die in her tracks. Mother has fed us up beautifully since she came. Real substantial food, you know, fixed up differently, Mother fashion.”

“Yes, and they didn’t think they needed me at all, Jean. Somehow a mother doesn’t go with a studio equipment, but this one does, and now everyone in the building troops down to visit us. They all need mothering now.”

It was one of the smaller brick buildings off Sixth Avenue on Fifty-Seventh Street. There had been a garage on the first floor, but Vatelli, the sculptor, had turned it into a work room with a wife and three little Vatellis to make it cosy. The second floor was the Cranes’ apartment, one very large room and two small ones. The two floors above were divided into one- and two-room studios. It looked very unpretentious from the outside, but within everything was delightfully attractive. The ceiling was beamed in dark oak, and a wide fireplace with a crackling wood fire made Jean almost feel as if she were back home. There were wide Dutch shelves around the room and cushioned seats along the walls. An old fashioned three-cornered piano stood crosswise at one end, and there were several oak settees and cupboards. At the windows hung art scrim curtains next the panes, and within, heavy dark red ones that shut out the night.

Noodles came barking to meet them, a regular dowager of a Belgian griffon, plump and consequential, with big brown eyes and a snub nose. And smiling archly, with her eyes sparkling, Justine stood with arms akimbo. She had been Bab’s nurse years before in France, and had watched over her ever since. Jean loved the tall, dark-browed Brittany woman. In her quick efficient way, she managed Bab as nobody else could. No one ever looked upon Justine as a servant. She was distinctly “family,” and Jean was kissed soundly on both rosy cheeks and complimented volubly on her improved appearance.

“It’s just the country air and plenty of exercise, Justine,” she said.

“Ah, but yes, the happy heart too, gives that look,” Justine answered shrewdly. “I know. I have it myself in Brittany. One minute, I have something warm to eat.”

She was gone into the inner room humming to herself, with Noodles tagging at her high heels.

“Now take off your things and toast,” Bab said. “There aren’t any bedrooms excepting Mother’s in yonder. She will have a practical bedroom to sleep in, but we’ll curl up on the couches out here, and Justine has one. Oh, Jean, come and sing for me this minute.”

Coat and hat off, she was at the piano, running over airs lightly, not the songs of Gilead, but bits that made Jean’s heart beat faster; some from their campfire club out at the Cove, others from the old art class Bab and she had belonged to, and then the melody stole into one she had loved, the gay Chanson de Florian,

“Ah, have you seen a shepherd pass this way?”

Standing behind her, under the amber glow of the big silk shaded copper lamp, Jean sang softly, and all at once, her voice broke.

“What is it?” asked Bab, glancing up. “Tired?”

Jean’s lashes were wet with tears.

“I was wishing Mother were here too,” she answered. “She loves all this so—just as I do. It’s awfully lonesome up there sometimes without any of this.”

Bab reached up impulsively and threw her arms around her.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “I told Mother just from your letters that you had Gileaditis and must come down.”

“Gileaditis?” laughed Jean. “That’s funny. Kit would love it. And it’s what I have got too. I love the hills and the freedom, but, oh, it is so lonely. Why, I love even to hear the elevated whiz by, and the sound of the wheels on the paved streets again.”

“Jean Robbins,” Bab said solemnly. “You’re not a country robin at all, you’re a city sparrow.”