Carney's House Party/Winona's Pony Cart Page 9

  “Race me to the raft?” called Sam who stood behind her on the diving board. “That is, if you think you can make it.”

  “If I think I can make it!” repeated Carney scornfully, and dove.

  Just two strokes behind him, breathless and laughing, she pulled up on the raft which was moored in front of a neighboring estate. Around them the lake glittered and twinkled. She wrung the water out of her heavy skirt and wished she could take off her shoes and stockings as she did when swimming alone with her brothers.

  “Gee, it’s fun out here!” she said.

  “I want to have your whole Crowd out. We’ll have to make it on a Saturday, though, so many of the boys are working.”

  “How does it happen you’re not working?”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  “I have an idea,” she said mischievously, “that you’re on vacation all the time.”

  “The heck I am! I fire the boiler at the mill.”

  “But for your father! It isn’t the same thing.”

  Sam looked at her in exasperation. “What are you like when you aren’t scolding?” he asked.

  Carney showed her dimple. “I embroider center pieces. And sometimes I play the piano. By the way, I’d like to play your Steinway. Would anybody mind?”

  His face warmed. “We’d love it. Mother especially. She’s very fond of music and she doesn’t get out much.”

  “I’d like to play for her,” Carney said quickly.

  After the swim, while the other girls bathed luxuriously in the big tub and took their time dressing, Carney twisted up her still damp hair and hurried into her skirt and middy.

  She ran downstairs and into the music room, leaving the door ajar. She struck a few chords, listening with pleasure to the resonant tone, and began MacDowell’s playful Brer Rabbit. She heard Sam come in and presently saw him in the mirror listening with attention.

  She passed from MacDowell to Weber’s Perpetual Motion. She was rather proud of the way she played that. Then she played a Chopin prelude and the Nocturne, Opus Nine, No. 2, and Grieg’s Witches Dance, which was one of her favorites. It pleased her to think of Mrs. Hutchinson, who was never able to go to a concert, listening from her chaise lounge.

  When she jumped up at last Sam rose and came toward her.

  “You play very well,” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Do you like music?”

  “Very much.”

  “Do you play the piano yourself?”

  “No, but I fool around with a saxophone.”

  “Won’t you show it to me? I never saw one.”

  “Sure,” he answered. “It’s up on the third floor.”

  The third floor was filled by one large room. It held a billiard table and cases full of the mementos of travels. A birch bark canoe hung from the ceiling. There was a phonograph with a pile of records.

  Sam took his saxophone out of its case and Carney sat down in a window seat beneath tall uncurtained windows. Across the lake the sun was sending up showy fountains of color.

  He licked the reed energetically. “I have to do that to get it going. I warn you I make horrible squawks at first.” He did, but when he started running up and down the scale, his instrument sounded like a cello.

  “I just play by ear,” he said and began a song she knew.

  “Pale hands I love,

  Beside the Shalimar…”

  After one song he put the saxophone aside.

  “Did you hear much music in New York?” he asked, sitting down beside her.

  “I went to the Metropolitan Opera,” she replied. “We heard La Boheme. I liked the music but it seemed a little silly…a fat prima donna dying of consumption, people shouting their hearts’ secrets all over that big auditorium.”

  “How about orchestra concerts?”

  “I liked them. Have you heard Tschaikovsky’s Fifth?” she asked eagerly.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s my favorite. I wish I knew how to follow a symphony properly. Can you pick out the themes?”

  “I’m learning to.”

  “And I wish I understood the set-up of a big orchestra.” She frowned. “I don’t know what the different instruments do.”

  “It’s fascinating how they work it out,” said Sam. “One instrument takes a cue from another, repeating the same melody. I wish we could go to a concert together sometime. I would show you what little I know. Who’s your teacher in piano?”

  “Kate Chittenden.”

  “She’s good.”

  “She’s very good, and she’s been very kind to me. She took me to New York to play for Matthew Lang.” After a pause Carney said abruptly, unsmiling, “He said my Scarlatti sounded silly.”

  “Maybe you were frightened,” suggested Sam.

  “I was, and Miss Chittenden said so, and Mr. Lang said, ‘By their works shall ye know them.’”

  “He sounds like a pleasant character.”

  “He’s a very fine pianist.”

  “Of course. What else did you play for him?”

  “Some Chopin. And do you know what he said to that? ‘You play those notes beautifully, but you don’t know what they mean.’”

  “Anything else?” asked Sam, for it was obvious from Carney’s painful swallowing that she hadn’t yet got it all out.

  “He said, ‘You ought to lose your money, or have a sorrow, or fall in love.’”

  After a thoughtful pause Sam asked, “You don’t want to play professionally, do you?”

  “No. I wouldn’t for the world. And I know I’m not good enough. Still…I was humiliated at his saying that.”

  “Why?”

  “It made me sound so shallow.”

  “Not shallow, just young.” Sam’s voice, which was always soft, grew very gentle. “Probably,” he went on, “you will play better after you fall in love. But the joke on Mr. Lang is that it won’t seem important to you then. Those musicians think music is everything. Writers are the same about writing, and artists about painting. They live in a different world from the rest of us. No telling whether it’s better or worse than ours.

  “Myself, I like the world ordinary people live in. I just want the Loco, lots of fishing, poker at low stakes, my sax…a home and kids sometime, of course. A girl like you, I think, would like a home and kids, with music just for the frosting on the cake.

  “You’ll keep on playing the piano. Probably your husband will hound you to play for him every night after supper. But as the kids grow older you’ll play less and less. And you won’t feel bad about that, for one of the kids will be musical, maybe…all your technical skill and talent plus a little from his dad. Say, that would be swell!”

  “Wouldn’t it!” They glowed at each other.

  There was a shout from downstairs. “Carney! Sam! Where are you?”

  Carney jumped up and she saw that the third floor room had grown quite dim. Beyond the tall windows the western sky was a sheet of flaming color.

  “Heavens!” she cried. “It’s time to go home.”

  Sam put his hand over hers. He gave it a warm squeeze.

  “There’s your future in a handbasket,” he said.

  During the farewells, while Mrs. Hutchinson thanked her for the music and Mr. Hutchinson urged them all to come again, Carney kept thinking about the strange conversation. The ride home was hilarious. Isobel rode with Carney, Sam, and Hunter in the Loco, and she taught the boys Vassar songs…about the Female blowing off the college, about Matthew Vassar’s ale.

  “The ale he brewed was excellent,

  His neighbors liked it well,

  And Matthew was a miracle of thrift…”

  The boys shouted it enthusiastically and Carney could hardly sing for laughing. Yet underneath she kept thinking about the talk. The memory of it warmed her.

  She had always known what she wanted to do—get married and have children. There had never been a moment’s doubt, no other possible choice. And yet Sam Hutchinson seemed to have molded her futur
e.

  He had decided that her oldest child was a boy—and musical. Carney could almost see him. He had thick dark hair and a crooked smile.

  10

  The Little Colonel’s House Party

  “GIRLS!” CRIED BETSY RAY, on the sleeping porch that night. “Do you know what this is?”

  “It’s a house party.”

  “It’s The Little Colonel’s House Party!” The Little Colonel books for girls had been the rage during their childhood.

  “Hurray!” said Carney. “Then I’m The Little Colonel.”

  “You always did remind me of her,” Betsy replied. “I’m the gal named Betty because she was a writer. And Bonnie is Joyce, the artist.”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “No. But you’ve been in France, and so had Joyce. And Isobel is Eugenia, the rich eastern snob.”

  “Well, I like that!” cried Isobel.

  “Oh, you have a heart of gold! Don’t you remember?”

  “I never read the things.”

  “You take us all abroad,” chirruped Bonnie, “and support us the rest of our lives.”

  They were all acting silly. The day at Murmuring Lake, the gay ride home had welded them together. They were beginning to feel like a house party, Carney thought with satisfaction, climbing into bed beside Isobel. Betsy and Bonnie were giggling in the adjoining bed.

  There was room for all four girls on the sleeping porch now, for Hunter and Jerry had obligingly moved inside. Only Bobbie still slept behind a curtain in the corner.

  The giggling stopped at last but Carney lay awake, looking up at the dark lacy treetops. She was thinking about the singular conversation with Sam. When she fell asleep at last, it was only to come suddenly awake, knowing instinctively that her nap had been short.

  Isobel was sleeping peacefully but as Carney’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she saw that the bed where Betsy and Bonnie slept was empty.

  “They must have gone downstairs for a snack,” she thought. “Well, I could eat!”

  Slipping out of bed, she stepped through the window into the boys’ closet. The hall was dimly lighted by a gas flame turned low. The door admitting to the back stairs was open and as Carney tiptoed toward it she saw two ghostly figures.

  Betsy and Bonnie were ascending with a fearful caution, carrying between them a large awkward object. When they reached the top step Carney saw what it was.

  “You demons!” she hissed.

  Her appearance was so unexpected, her whisper so violent, that they dropped Snow White’s cage. The door flew open and white mice raced in all directions.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Clutching at their long night gowns Betsy and Bonnie ran toward the sleeping porch. They leaped through the closet window to the nearest bed, where Isobel was sleeping. Carney leaped after them, and Isobel sprang up.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “Plenty! Those fiends were going to put mice in our bed.”

  “We weren’t!” wailed Betsy and Bonnie, but unconvincingly.

  “They dropped the cage and the mice got out. Goodness knows where they are by this time! Ssh!” Carney cautioned as laughter shook the bed. “You’ll wake the folks.”

  “Could mice jump over a closet window?” Isobel shuddered, sitting on her feet.

  “Of course not,” said Carney, but she whisked her feet under her, too. So did Betsy and Bonnie.

  “They’re sure to go into our bedroom. They’ll climb into our shoes.”

  “They’ll climb up the curtains.”

  “They’ll be looking in our mirror polishing their whiskers.”

  Again the bed shook with giggles.

  Carney “Sshed!” again. “It won’t be so funny,” she declared, “if they get into father’s and mother’s room. Somebody has to catch them.”

  “That’s obvious,” said Isobel. “And it’s obvious, too, who the somebody is.”

  “Perfectly obvious,” said Carney, and she and Isobel began pushing and prodding their companions who clung to one another with muffled shrieks as they slid slowly and inexorably toward the floor.

  “Wait a minute! I have an idea!” Betsy grabbed at Bonnie and the bed clothes.

  “Bobbie!” she called softly. “Bobbie!”

  “You’ll never wake him by calling,” Carney jeered. “You’ll have to go over and shake him.”

  “But I wouldn’t get out of this bed for a farm.”

  “Neither would I,” Bonnie squealed.

  “Bobb-ee!” They called together, “Bobb-ee!”

  Their whispers had the force of desperation.

  “What is it?” he answered sleepily.

  “Wake up, Bobbie. Come here, please, Bobbie,” they wheedled.

  He came around the curtain, rubbing his eyes.

  “Bobbie,” said Betsy dramatically, “Snow White’s babies came upstairs looking for a cool place to sleep. Snow White came after them, and now they’re running all over. Would you catch them for us?”

  “How did they get out?” asked Bobbie. “I shut the cage myself.”

  “Did you carry it upstairs?”

  “No, I left it in the basement.”

  “Well, it’s upstairs now. It’s out in the hall.” Betsy lowered her voice mysteriously. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think there’s lots we don’t understand about Snow White. She can do things that ordinary mice can’t do.”

  Bobbie was puzzled, but the Sibleys weren’t easily taken in.

  “Aw, shucks!” he said, and turned to go back to bed.

  Bonnie tried a more realistic approach.

  “If you’ll catch them,” she promised, “I’ll buy you a bat to go with your baseball suit.”

  “And I’ll buy you a mitt,” said Betsy.

  “You will?” Bobbie was alert at once. “All right,” he added, heading for the window.

  “Be careful not to wake Dad and Mother. At least,” Carney said, with a giggle, “be careful not to wake Dad.”

  “’Nuff said,” answered Bobbie and climbed through.

  Snow White and her babies were found and returned to the basement. Bobbie went back to bed, but still waves of laughter swept the sleeping porch. Next morning there was tacked to the bedroom door a sheet of foolscap headed, “Rules For The Little Colonel’s House Party.”

  It was decorated with mice, jaunty fellows with long curling whiskers and tails. The first rule announced that mice in bed were strictly forbidden.

  Wearing boudoir caps to breakfast was forbidden also. (Carney had already warned them that her father detested the habit.)

  Flirting was forbidden. Isobel was enjoined to consider Ellen and leave Hunter alone.

  Betsy was asked to throw away her Kosmeo, her Pompeian Massage Cream, and her pink face powder. (She adored such items.)

  Carney was warned that she represented Vassar on every occasion.

  Bonnie was reminded that she was a preacher’s daughter.

  Betsy was told not to write so many letters to Joe. Carney was told not to write so many letters to Larry. Isobel was told not to write so many letters to whomever it was she wrote them to. “Is it Howard Sedgwick???” demanded the Rules.

  “I write to my parents, of course,” said Isobel.

  “Such daughterly devotion!”

  “Oh, I have friends, too.”

  “Friends who write you every day in the same sprawling handwriting?”

  “It’s not sprawling!”

  “It isn’t so handsome as Joe’s,” sang Betsy.

  Yes, the house party was beginning to feel just as a house party should.

  Betsy was partly responsible, Carney thought as the days went by. She loved fun and was very inventive. If the girls didn’t react to one idea, she offered another, but if someone else had a better one she accepted that—anything for fun! Bonnie’s laughter, flowing in appreciation of everyone’s jokes, helped, too, and so did Isobel’s good nature.

  To Carney’s relief both Betsy and Bonnie liked Isobel.
The town girls at first were a little guarded with her. She had been abroad, she had attended private schools, she had an Eastern accent, and her clothes were exquisite. But as party followed party, her tact and charm won them.

  There were parties almost every day. The opening affair was a luncheon given by some favorite second cousins, school teachers from Vermont. It was a rose luncheon, very elegant, with pink streamers from the chandelier to each place, pink baskets filled with candy, and a fresh rose, with the name of a girl attached, pinned to each napkin.

  Grandmother Sibley gave her thimble bee, using the heaviest Sibley silver, and the thinnest Sibley china, and the lace cloth and napkins from Brussels. Tall and stately with her halo of white hair, she sat down graciously to pour.

  Isobel’s appraising glance turned to admiration.

  “Your grandmother looks like a duchess,” she told Carney.

  Grandmother Hunter didn’t look like a duchess, but Carney loved the way she looked. Although her gray hair was carefully crimped, scolding locks fell over her collar. A white apron was tied about her soft uncorseted waist. A long black skirt sprang out with unfashionable fullness. In honor of her party she wore the brooch and earrings that Carney had worn for the masquerade.

  She was a good cook and knew it. Her eyes twinkled when the girls exclaimed over her feathery popovers. These were served with strawberry jam and ham and eggs and fried potatoes and a pitcher of milk and a pot of fragrant coffee. She brought out sugar cookies too.

  After breakfast the girls showed Isobel the kaleidoscope. You put it to your eye like a telescope and, as you turned it, pieces of colored glass in its mirrored insides fell into magical patterns.

  “I remember looking in this when I was a little girl,” Bonnie cried.

  Laurenza Hunter looked on with pleasure, holding her lips tightly while her eyes brimmed with fun.

  “I hope,” Carney thought, “that when I’m a grandmother I’ll be just like Grandmother Hunter.”

  Alice gave a porch party. Her home was on a hillside with a view. The vine-hung porch was furnished with chairs and pillows and a table which held magazines and a pitcher of lemonade.