XI. HOW JEAN HAD AN OUTING.
“Is it warm in that green valley,
Vale of Childhood, where you dwell?
Is it calm in that green valley,
Round whose bourns such great hills swell?
Are there giants in the valley,
Giants leaving foot-prints yet?
Are there angels in the valley?
Tell me—I forget.”
—Jean Ingelow.
Jean had been crying; in fact, she was crying now, but the tears were stopped on their way down her cheeks by the rush of her new thought. She was always having new thoughts; but this was the most splendid new thought she had ever had in her fourteen years of life.
“I’ll do it!” she exclaimed aloud, springing to her feet. “I’ll just do it, and nobody will know but myself. I’ll go away to a new place and stay two weeks.”
In her delight she clapped her hands and whirled about the room. It was such a small room to clap your hands and whirl about in. That was the cause of her tears—that small room; that and the house, the farm, and everything she had to do—and doing the same disagreeable things every day, and never going anywhere.
School closed yesterday; and this morning Sophie Elting, her best friend, had gone away, for an outing she called it, with a little city air she had caught from her cousins. She was going to the sea-shore to be gone two weeks.
“I’ll play go,” cried Jean, “and I’ll stay at home and do all the things here that people do when they go on an outing.”
The first thing was to pack up. Sophie had a new trunk, and had shown her all her pretty things packed snugly in it: cologne, a box of paper, new handkerchiefs, and ever so many things to go on an outing with. How could Jean play she had things which she hadn’t? And she had no trunk. She would “pack” in a shawl-strap.
She put in her Sunday dress, her morning gingham, two white aprons, her Bible and tooth-brush. She had ever so many things to take on an outing. In half an hour her shawl-strap was packed. She looked down at it with a sigh of relief and pleasure. Now she had started.
“Jean,” came up the stairway, “do you want to go to town?”
Of course she did! The coming back would be “getting there.” She was going into the country for two weeks to board. The boarding was a part of it. She had never boarded in her life; she would be a summer boarder at Daisy Farm.
“There’s the butter to take,” the voice at the foot of the stairs went on, “and you may as well get your shoes, and I’ll give you twenty-five cents to spend as you like.”
“Oh, thank you!” cried Jean, delightedly. That would buy a box of paper and envelopes, and she had twenty cents for stamps. She could not think of another thing she wanted.
At six o’clock that afternoon, when Jean drove back into the yard with her father, she had two packages, her shoes and the box of paper. She had not been her usual talkative self on the way home. This gentleman sitting beside her was the farmer to whose house she was going. He had met her at the train. She was looking about the country and admiring things; she found seven things to admire which she had never noticed before. At the tea-table she intended to talk about them—“rave,” as the summer boarders did.
She went up to her little room and gravely unpacked her shawl-strap, putting the things into the drawers and the closet.
Her sister Lottie was setting the tea-table,—not in her play, but in sober reality,—and it was Minnie’s turn to milk to-night. The four sisters shared the housework with their mother; Jean was number three. Pet, eleven years old, was the youngest.
“I must take a great interest in everybody,” Jean said to herself. “Boarders always do. I must try to do good to somebody, as Mrs. Lane helped me last summer.”
At the supper-table she began to talk about the beautiful five-mile drive from town, and the sunset from the top of the hill.
“It is pretty,” said Minnie.
“And the bridge with the willows. It is pretty enough for a picture; and the ducks sailing down the stream.”
“I always said we had pretty things near home,” remarked her father.
Then Lottie found a nook in the woods to talk about, and Pet told of a place like a cave, and the view on the top after you climbed the big rock. The tired mother brightened. After supper Jean followed her father out the back door and stood beside him.
“How is the watermelon patch doing?” she asked, in a voice of great interest, after thinking a minute.
“Finely! Never so well before. Come and look at it.”
It was a pleasant walk. Jean imagined that she had a white shawl thrown about her, and once in a while gave it a twitch as she listened while the farmer talked about his melons. She asked questions she had never thought of asking before, and learned several new things about the farm.
“It’s a good thing to be a good farmer,” she said. “I never thought before how much farmers had to know.” Her father looked pleased.
It was Jean’s work to wash the milk-pails and milk-pans. She did it that night with a sense of enjoyment which she had never had before, for she was simply “helping” of her own accord. She would be very helpful; she would try to make these strangers care very much for her. She would watch every day to see what she could do for them. Mrs. Lane last summer had taught the class in the Sunday-school to which Jean belonged, and had said that “all must try to be a blessing to every one whom their life touched.” It appeared to Jean that her life touched everybody’s in this house.
Sunday was a wonderful day. She listened to the new preacher, and the new Sunday-school was certainly very pleasant. She spoke to a little girl she had never noticed before, and gave a rose to Julia Weed, whom she had always disliked. She was trying to be like Mrs. Lane.
In the evening she stayed at home from church with her mother, because her mother’s head ached; and when, for the first time in her life, she proposed reading her Sunday-school book to her mother, she was both pleased and rebuked to hear her reply, “Oh yes, I should like it! I can’t read evenings, and I often think how interesting your books look.”
“And if I can’t finish it to-night, may I read tomorrow night?” Jean asked eagerly.
“If I am not too tired.”
“But it will rest you.”
“Perhaps so. It will be something new.”
Something new for her to be thoughtful about her own hard-working mother! And she had to imagine herself in somebody else’s home to think of it.
What a day Monday was! She was busy all the morning, “helping,” and she found it good fun. In the afternoon she wrote a long letter to Sophie, and she had so much to tell that she filled three sheets. In the evening she read aloud to her mother, and her father listened, after he read his paper, and said it was a “jolly good book.”
When she left the room to go to bed, she said, “Good night!” Usually she forgot it. She was careful to remember “thank you,” and “please.”
It was not her turn to iron. To-morrow would be a long, hot ironing day, and there were so many starched things this week. Lottie was in a hurry to finish the pink muslin she was making for herself. If she should offer to iron two hours, and let Lottie sew—but how she hated to iron!
Still, she could only stay with these people two weeks—and there was nothing else Lottie would like so much; she and Lottie had not been very good friends lately, and this would “make up.” She was the one to make up, for she had been cross and had refused to do her work in order to let Lottie go to the picnic. Minnie did it, and let Lottie go, and Jean had felt mean ever since.
But she was only fourteen, and it was vacation. But Mrs. Lane said—and now she wished she hadn’t!—that nobody ever had a vacation from doing kind things.
She could help iron next week. This was her week.
“I guess it’s God’s week!” This was one of Jean’s new thoughts. Going into your own home like a new somebody was very hard work; she almost wished she were not a summer boarder, that she had stayed at home! And this last thought was so funny that the people down-stairs heard her laughing.
“Jean is a happy child,” said her mother.
“Yes, she seems to have a new kink,” replied her father. “She is taking a sudden interest in everything. I used to think she hated the farm and everything about it. The farm is all I’ve got to give my girls, and it hurts me to have them care nothing about it.”
“It’s vacation, and she’s more rested,” said Minnie. “She loves books better than any of us, and studies harder.”
“I don’t know what the secret is, but I’m glad of it,” her father replied.
With a brave heart the next morning Jean asked Lottie if she might iron two hours and let her sew on her pink muslin.
“You blessed child!” cried Lottie. “I had thought I must sit up all night to get it done for tomorrow. Two hours will be a great lift.”
Ironing was hot and hard work, beside being extremely unpleasant work to Jean; but she pushed the two hours into three, and never was so happy in her life as when her oldest sister gave her an unaccustomed kiss, which was even better than her words: “I won’t forget this, Jeanie.”
Wednesday morning Jean remembered that, as a stranger, she must learn something about the village and the village people. Bensalem was a pretty village with one long street, two churches, one store, a post-office, and an old school-house. She had another thought to-day; this, too, grew out of something Mrs. Lane said at Sunday-school. “Bind something, if you can; make some good thing fast, like forming a little society.”
How she would like to do that! She counted over the girls she liked best. There were nine, and ten would form a society, bound fast together. This she regarded as a very promising new thought. But what should it be for? Jean pondered a great deal, but she could think of nothing but her “outing.”
Her outing! Why shouldn’t it be an Outing Society—not to get up real vacations for people, but to get them out of themselves, and into the way of helping things along, and beginning right at home. For that was the curious part of it—that you didn’t have to go away anywhere. It seemed to come to you.
Jean resolved to call on the girls and tell them about it, and ask them to come to her house and talk it over. She knew now what she would call it: The Outing Ten.
First she would call at the Parsonage and tell Miss Marion about it, and ask her what to do first and next.
But she could not tell Miss Marion about it all herself; perhaps Judith Mackenzie would go; Judith knew Miss Marion better than any of the girls. She was always staying at the Parsonage “for company” for Miss Marion.