We Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (the gingerbread man read aloud .txt) 📗

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,