6. Pulling Up Stakes
It had been suggested that Kit and Jean stay behind to finish their schooling. They could board at the Phelpses’ home next to Sandy Cove along the shore road, but both girls begged to go with the family.
“Why don’t you stay?” advised Doris. “You’ll escape all of the moving and settling and ploughing.”
“We don’t want to escape anything,” said Kit firmly. “It isn’t any fun being left behind with the charred remains.”
“Oh, Kit, don’t call them that, it’s gruesome.”
“I don’t care. I feel gruesome when I think of being left behind. How do you suppose we’d feel to walk past the Cove and not see any of the rest of you around?”
“It’s better than being cut right bang off in the middle of everything,” replied Doris, with one of her rare explosions. “But everything,” she repeated tragically. “I can’t finish a single thing and I know I’ll never pass, being switched off to gosh knows what sort of a school.”
“Let’s not grouch anyway,” reminded Jean. “Mom’s getting thinner every day. As long as it’s got to be, let’s be cheerful about it.”
“I do wish that Kit wouldn’t be so happy about things that make you just miserable,” grumbled Doris.
Kit danced away down the hallway crooning:
“Night and day,
You are the one.
Only you beneath the moon
And under the sun.”[1]
“You’re an old tease, Kit,” Jean admonished in her very best big-sister style. “Please keep away from that crate of dishes.”
It had been decided to send Mr. Craig up before the moving, so he could have a week or two of rest at Maple Grove, Rebecca’s home. The latter was diligently sending down descriptions of adjacent farms and all sorts of home possibilities, but none seemed to fit the bill. Either there was too much land or not enough, or it was too far from the village or not far enough, or too much room or not room enough.
“For gosh sake,” Kit said one night, after all the family had suggested various possible houses, “let’s all tent out and do summer light housekeeping. We’ll never find just what we want—never, Mom. Jean wants a rose garden. I want at least a tennis court, even if we have to remove the hay fields. Doris wants wisteria arbors and a very large vine-covered porch. Tommy wants a dog, four cats, a hive of bees, a calf, and a pony. You want a house facing south, far back from the road, barn not too near, dry cellar, porch, century-old elms for shade, modern kitchen, indoor plumbing, and option of purchase, not over sixty-five dollars a month.”
“What do you want, Dad?” asked Jean. It was one of her father’s good days, when he was able to sit up in his big lounge chair before the fire in the bedroom, and be one of the family circle with them.
“Peace and rest,” smiled Mr. Craig.
“Me too,” Kit agreed, kneeling beside his chair and rubbing her head up and down his arm. “Dad and I are going to seek glorious peace the livelong day under some shady chestnut tree.”
“Dad may, but you won’t, Kathleen,” Jean laughingly warned. “It’s going to be a family project and you’ll have to do your share.”
“Wish we were going to an island,” Doris said wistfully. “I’ve always felt as if I could do wonders with an island.”
“Anybody could. There’s some chance for imagination to work on an island, but what can you do with a farm in Elmhurst?” Kit looked pensive with her head on one side, eyes half closed in melancholy anticipation. “Darling, precious old Dad here doesn’t know a blessed thing about farming—”
“Now, Kit, go easy,” Mr. Craig chided. “After all, I was born and raised on a farm. I should have learned something about it, I expect.”
“We’ll all be scouring pots, Kathleen,” offered Jean. “It’s the Craigs’ destiny. You know, Dad, I thought all along that Lydia would go with us. I thought she’d feel hurt if we didn’t take her, after she’d been telling us all these fairy tales about her native land where she loved to milk twenty cows at three A. M. I thought she’d simply leap at the chance of rural delights, and now she isn’t going along with us at all. She says she won’t go anywhere unless there are streetcars, tall buildings, and movies. It’s going to be tough without her.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it’s going to be nearly as bad as we expect,” Mrs. Craig said happily, as she passed through the room with her favorite silver candlesticks in her hands. “We’re facing the summer, remember, and I can’t help thinking that Rebecca will be a regular bulwark of strength to all of us.”
By the second week in March word came from the family’s bulwark that she thought the weather was mild enough for Jean and Mr. Craig to attempt the trip. Accordingly, the first section of the caravan set out on its trip to the land of oblivion, as Kit called it.
“It does seem, Mom,” Jean said at the last minute, “as if Kit ought to go with Dad, and let me stay down here to help you close up things. Kit knows how to drive.”
“I’d rather have you with your father.” Mrs. Craig laid her hands tenderly on Jean’s slender shoulders. “If I can’t be with him, I’d rather have the little first mate. Remember how he used to call you that, when you were only Tommy’s size?”
“Well, I feel terribly grown up now, Mother. Seventeen is really the dividing line. You begin to think of everything in a more serious way, you know. When I look at Kit and Doris sometimes, it seems years and years since I felt the way they do, so sort of irresponsible.”
“Poor old grandma.” Mrs. Craig laughed as she kissed her.
Jean had to laugh too, seeing the comic side of her aged feeling, but it was true that she felt a new sense of responsibility when they left New York for Elmhurst. The Saturday following their departure, the first carload of household goods left Sandy Cove. It had been a difficult job, weeding out the necessities from the luxuries, as Kit expressed it. Many a semi-luxury was slipped in by the girls on the plea that Father might need it, or would miss it. Kit had managed to save all the furniture from the study on this excuse.
“Books and pictures are necessities,” she declared firmly, saving a still life done in water colors. “This, for instance, has always hung over the desk, hasn’t it? Could we separate them? I guess not. In it goes, Doris, and see that you handle it with care. There’s one thing that we can take up with us and nothing can get it away from us, either, that’s atmosphere. Even if we have to live in a well-shingled, airy barn, we can have atmosphere.”
“Don’t laugh, Tommy,” Doris admonished as he dove into a mass of pillows. “Kit doesn’t mean that sort of atmosphere. She means—”
“I mean living with a copper vase. Miss Carruthers, our teacher at the art class, told us a story the other day about a woman she knew who was married to a band leader and they had to travel continually, living only in hotel rooms. She had a copper vase that she took wherever they went. She said even one familiar object like that, in strange surroundings, was the difference between living and just existing. Just think of Dad’s face if we can blindfold him, lead him into a lovely sunny room up there, take off the bandage, and let him find himself right in his own study just as he had it down here!”
“And as long as he’s going to stay in bed or lie on a couch he’ll never know what the rest of the house is like,” added Doris.
“But he’s not going to stay in bed, we hope,” answered their mother, catching up Tommy for a quick kiss, and for once he didn’t protest. “That’s why we’re going up there, to get him out into the sunlight as soon as possible, so he’ll get quite well again.”
Kit passed down the stairs completely covered with the burden which she bore. “I’ve got all the drapes, tablecloths, slipcovers, and underneath this load is me,” she called. “We may have to turn the attic into a cosy corner before we get through. It’s all in the effect, isn’t it, Mom?”
“I’m sorry that Dad sold your car, that’s all,” Doris remarked. Doris was the farsighted one of the family. “Bruce Pearson says he knows we could have gotten fifteen hundred for it just as easy as not. His mother told him it was worth every penny of fifteen hundred, and Dad let it go for eight hundred just because he liked the Phelpses.”
“Doris, dear, eight hundred cash is worth more than fifteen hundred promised,” Mrs. Craig said, smiling over at her. “And the car is several years old. I’m glad with all my heart that Mr. Phelps bought it, because they’ve been wanting one very much, and the children will get so much pleasure out of it.”
The children looked down at her admiringly, almost gloatingly, as she sat back contentedly in the low slipper chair in the sunny window.
“Mother, you’re a regular darling, truly you are,” Kit exclaimed. “You’re so big and fine and sympathetic that you make us feel like two cents sometimes when we’ve been selfish. Why do you look so happy when everything’s going topsy-turvy?”
Mrs. Craig held up a letter that Tommy had just brought in from the mailbox.
“Rebecca writes that Father stood the trip well and has slept every night since they reached Maple Grove. Isn’t that worth all the automobiles in the world?”
The eight hundred dollars in cash had been a helpful addition to their bank account. During the past few weeks, the girls and Tommy had learned what it meant to consider money, something they had never given a thought to before. While they had never been rich, they never had wanted, and never a suggestion of retrenching on expenses until now. Once they understood the situation, however, they all seemed to enjoy helping to solve the family problem. For several days Tommy had appeared to have something on his mind. Finally, he came in smiling and opened his hand, disclosing a ten-dollar bill. Kit staggered over to fall into a chair.
“Tommy, you mustn’t give your poor old sister sudden shocks like that in these days,” she exclaimed. “Where did you find that?”
“I sold Jiggers to Bruce Pearson,” Tommy replied, his eyes shining like stars. “He’s been asking and asking for him ever since I got him, and now I’ve done it. There’s ten dollars I got all by myself to help Dad.”
Neither Kit nor Doris spoke, but they regarded the youngest member of the family with the deepest pride and affection. Jiggers was a cocker spaniel puppy, the special property of Tommy, and they knew just what it took to part with him. Mrs. Craig took the crisp green bill from Tommy’s hand, while the tears slowly gathered on her lashes.
“It’s perfectly splendid of you, dear,” she said.
Tommy beamed and put his hands into his pockets. The family noticed that he kept carefully avoiding the window for outside was where Jiggers’ little kennel had stood. There are some things the heart cannot quite bear.
Much debating was held over the piano. The children loved it and declared it could not be true economy to part with it. It was a baby grand that they had had ever since the Riverside apartment days in town. Doris said she wanted to continue her practicing even if she couldn’t take any more lessons.
“Listen, Mom,” Kit said finally, “you know what I told you about the copper vase. That precious old piano is a copper vase and we’ll starve our inmost souls if we try to live without it. Why, we’ve loved it and pounded it for years.”
So it was boxed and shipped to Elmhurst as a copper vase, together with many another disguised necessity.
“They’ve turned into arrant smugglers,” Mrs. Craig wrote her husband. “And I cannot blame them, because I catch myself doing the same thing, packing things I should not take, and making myself believe they are essential. I’m sure I don’t see where we are ever to put everything in a farmhouse.”
Rebecca brightened up and smiled when that portion of the letter was read aloud to her. She was sitting in a straight-backed, split-bottomed chair by the south window in the sitting room, sorting out morning-glory and nasturtium seeds and putting them into old baking powder cans.
“Guess Margie’ll buck up some when she sees the house we think she will like,” she said.