Phebe, Her Profession Part 22

Mac levelled his fork at them accusingly.

"You mustn't sing at ve table. It's horrid to sing at ve table."

"I beg your pardon, Mac," said his grandfather meekly.

Outside their windows, the sun was glowing over the steel blue sea. Not a sail broke the distance; only the ceaseless tossing of white foam above the rips, and close at hand a dory or two, rocking and rolling just outside the line of surf. In the foreground was a broad strip of sand and silvery beach gra.s.s then a narrower strip of sand without any gra.s.s at all, and then the huge breakers which came cras.h.i.+ng in, wave on wave, mounting up, curling over, falling, breaking and racing up the sharp slope of sand, with never a halt for rest. Beyond that, the sea; beyond that again, three thousand miles beyond, Spain.

Qantuck lies crescent-wise along its low sandy cliff. The arms of the crescent are made up of new houses of more normal shape and size; but between them, the primeval village huddles itself together around the old town pump. No seaside villas are there, but the tiny low cottages of the old fis.h.i.+ng hamlet, which seem to have grown like an amoeba, by the simple process of putting out arms in any direction that chance may dictate. Between them, the rutted, gra.s.s-grown roads are so narrow that traffic is seriously congested by the meeting of a box cart and a certain stout old dachshund that frequents the streets, and the cottages present their fronts or sides or rears to the roads, according to the whim of the owner. Crowded under the cliff are the bits of fishhouses, built, like the cottages above, all of s.h.i.+ngles all gray with the pa.s.sing years, for Quantuck history stretches back far into the long-ago, when, Town seven miles away, was a prosperous whaling port. But though the summer visitors come in schools like the bluefish, the little gray village on the cliff is unchanging and unchanged.

In the very heart of the old settlement, poised on the verge of the cliff, Valhalla and Dandelion Lodge were side by side, and the middle of July found Dr. McAlister in one, in the other the Farringtons with Hubert and Allyn as their guests.

"Valhalla can't hold you all," Billy had said, when they were making their plans for the summer. "If we take the Lodge, there will be an extra room, and Allyn and Hubert may as well use it. It really won't make any difference how we divide up. At Quantuck the houses only count on foggy days."

In fact, it had been Billy's idea, their choosing Quantuck, that summer.

Years before, in his young boyhood, the Farringtons had been there, season after season, and he had always wanted to get back to the old place. Again and again he had been prevented, and it was not until this summer that he had succeeded in carrying out his plans. Now, for the first time in years, Dr. McAlister had consented to take a long vacation; Theodora's novel was locked up in the safe at home, waiting for revision; Hubert was to be with them for three weeks of the time, and Hope had come on from Helena to make the family circle complete.

To no one of the family had the week before the flitting been absolutely enjoyable. On one scorching July morning, Phebe and Phebe's own familiar friend, Isabel St. John, had roused their respective households at four o'clock in order that they might catch the six-thirty train for New York.

Once there, they betook themselves to Hester Street in order to study the conditions of life in the East Side. It chanced, however, to be Friday, market day, and the place was a veritable Babel with the cries of the hucksters and the shrill clamor of the women elbowing each other about the push-carts. No one paid any heed to the girls; and on their side, after a brief inspection they paid heed to but one question, how to get out of the region as speedily as possible. Accordingly, they went up town to lunch, strolled about Twenty-third Street for an hour or two before going to the office of the fresh-air charity, and, late that evening, reappeared at their own front doors, each with a wan and weary child at her heels. Isabel's was a boy; Phebe, in deference to the conditions of a family treaty, had a girl.

For about three weeks, Phebe's table had been heaped with books on child-study, on pedagogy, on domestic hygiene; her room had been littered with syllabi on child impressions in every conceivable relation. Phebe was resolved to be scientific, or die in the attempt. She came nearer achieving the latter alternative. The struggle began on the first morning of her new charge. She was up early and ran down to the kitchen to put the oatmeal over the fire. Then full of courage and sociological zeal, she approached the tub, a thermometer in one hand, the child in the other. The fray which followed, was a short one. It began with Phebe's dropping the thermometer on the floor and plumping the child bodily into the bath. It ended with the child's breaking away and diving into bed again, dripping with bath-water and tears, while Phebe picked up the scattered fragments of the thermometer and fished the towels from the tub where they floated limply.

During the next half hour, Phebe parted with most of her theories and all of her temper. In the first place, she had never before tried to dress a child, and this first experience was not a pleasing one. The child's toes persisted in catching in the tops of the stockings, the little waist seemed to her unaccustomed eyes to be constructed upside down, and the scant little skirt went on hind side before. In spite of shrill protestations, she braided up the lanky hair and scoured a patch of skin in the very middle of the child's face, and at last the toilet was complete. Breakfast brought with it a new chapter in her experiences. No arguments could induce the child to touch the oatmeal, unless it were combined with equal parts of sugar, and Phebe meekly yielded to the inevitable, while she hung up the dripping sheets to dry. Then she locked the child into her room, and went wearily down to join the others at the breakfast-table.

Later, when she appeared on the lawn, leading her charge by the hand, Mac came forward to meet them. With his pudgy hands clasped behind him and his small legs wide apart, he halted in front of the girl and, bending forward, peered up under her sunbonnet.

"Shake hands, baby," he said encouragingly.

The child obediently put out one small fist; but unluckily Phebe had spent all her energies on the face and neglected the hands entirely. Mac looked at the grimy fingers, recalled the talk at the breakfast-table and put his own hands behind him once more.

"Nahsty little girl!" he said severely, and, turning on his heel, departed in search of Allyn.

For the next seven days, Phebe pa.s.sed through every variety of toil and woe and anxiety, also, it must be confessed, of teasing from her family.

According to its lights, the child was good. It was not bright enough to be mischievous; it was pitifully apathetic on most points. In four directions, however, it held p.r.o.nounced opinions, and, moreover, it had the courage of its convictions. It refused to be left alone for more than five minutes at a time; it refused to be washed; it refused to eat plain food, and it persisted, in spite of all opposition, in calling Phebe _grandma_. The t.i.tle suggested affectionate devotion; but Phebe would have given up the devotion with perfect readiness.

It had been decreed that, if Phebe took the child, she should a.s.sume the whole responsibility in the matter, and she was resolute in carrying out her share of the compact. Theodora washed her hands of the affair entirely and only viewed it as an immense joke; but Hope, motherly and tender-hearted woman that she was, tried her best to come to the aid of her young sister. It was in vain. The little girl, homesick and forlorn for her wonted ways and plays, appeared to regard Phebe as the sole connecting link between the present gilded captivity and her old-time freedom. She wailed loudly at the approach of any one else, and was only content when her temporary guardian was within sight and touch. For seven weary days, the child was Phebe's inseparable companion and adjunct. On the evening of the eighth day, Phebe came home from New York, burned her syllabi and carried seven bulky tomes back to the public library.

"Retail reform isn't of the least use," she said vehemently to Isabel, that night. "Next time, I'll either import a colony, or let the whole thing alone. Either I will go and live with them, or nothing. It doesn't do any good to drag them here to pine for their ashbins. Just wait till next year, Isabel, and we'll try one of the settlements. This year, I've got to go to Quantuck and enjoy myself."

With whatever misgivings she started for Quantuck, she certainly achieved her end of enjoying herself. The summer colony, that year, was a large and lively one, and Phebe threw herself into it with the same fervor which had marked her entrance into slumming, and, before that, into medicine. Skeletons and syllabi appeared to be alike forgotten; golf and swimming lessons took their place, and Phebe revelled in her out-of-door life as simply and as sincerely as Mac himself. Out on the cliff at dawn, down on the beach for the bathing hour, out to the links for the afternoon, back on the beach to watch the moon rise, she was perpetually active, perpetually in earnest, perpetually in a hurry. To the others, her energy was amusing and, at times, a little wearing. They liked better to spend long hours on the beach, where their awning soon became a focal point for the fun of the bathing hour; they loved to roam over the moors, to sit down now and then on their own broad piazzas and glance from book to sea and from sea to book again with the curious indifference to time and literature which is characteristic of the place.

"Do stay down here, this afternoon," Theodora urged her, one day. "The Bensons are coming over here soon, and it is much more fun to be here, a day like this, than to be prancing around those links."

But Phebe shook her head.

"I didn't come down here to frivol, Ted; I leave that to you. n.o.body knows when I may have another chance to get myself in good form at golf, and I must make the most of this."

"But there are more days coming, and the Bensons are such pleasant people to know."

"I know more people now than I can get any good of," Phebe said, as she balanced her driver, and then swept it around in a circle with a force which nearly overturned her. "What's the use of any more? There comes Harold; he's going to caddy for me, to-day. I must go."

"What do you suppose can be the attraction out at the links?" Theodora said, after she had gone.

"Sheer delight in the sport," Hubert answered lazily, for he was sprawling on the sand by his sister's side, and it seemed almost too great an effort to speak.

"Isn't there any attendant knight?" Hope asked. "Phebe is impenetrable; but I have sometimes wondered whether there might not be a social side to it, rather than athletic."

"Don't waste any romance on Babe, Hope," Hubert advised her. "I wondered about it, myself, for there is rather a gay crowd out there, and I didn't know what might be going on. I went out, one day. I found the others all in a bunch, and Babe tearing around the links all by herself, with her poor caddie trotting hard to keep up with her."

"Who's that? Babe?" Allyn had suddenly plunged into the midst of the group. "I hear that the caddies are talking of a boycott, charging her double fees unless she goes slow. She plays a smas.h.i.+ng game; but there's no sort of sense in the way she goes about it."

Theodora yawned.

"Babe is upsetting all my ideas," she said languidly. "I had always regarded golf as a suitable amus.e.m.e.nt for stout elderly persons who waddled, a good deal like the caucus race in _Alice_. Babe's vigor fairly takes my breath away."

"Same with her swimming," Allyn remarked, with a certain pride. "She's gone into it all over."

"Into the surf?" Cicely inquired, as she scooped little mounds of sand over his feet.

"Yes, just that. She swims under water like a fish. There isn't another girl here to beat her. You are nothing but a porpoise beside her, Cis, and you swim fairly well. Hope, I do wish you'd take lessons. I'm tired of seeing you chug up and down beside that lifeline."

"Do you know," Theodora said meditatively; "I'd rather face the footlights at the Metropolitan than come down this beach at the bathing hour. It makes me feel pigeon-toed in the extreme."

Cicely eyed her with a calm lack of comprehension born of healthy girlhood.

"I don't see why," she said.

"Because you stay in the water, and can't hear the gossip along sh.o.r.e,"

Theodora answered. "Just you stay out here, some morning, and sit in the Dragons' Row, as Billy calls it, and you will find out what I mean.

Charity covers a mult.i.tude of sins; but it never drapes an awkward woman in an unbecoming bathing suit."

"That is where Babe has the advantage," Hubert remarked. "She isn't exactly graceful; but she is no more awkward than an unbroken colt."

"And she acts a good deal like one," Hope added, laughing. "Still, she may get broken soon, so let's let her go her ways in peace. She has worked hard, the past six months, and she deserves to be allowed to take her vacation in any form she chooses."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Down on the sh.o.r.e, Dragons' Row was holding high carnival. It was the bathing hour, when those who had much energy plunged through and through the breakers, those who had little floundered in the edge of the foam, and those who had none sat upright under the awnings, lorgnette in hand, and pa.s.sed judgment upon their fellows. The tall, sinewy bathing master sat on the sh.o.r.e, his yellow collie beside him, enjoying an interval of well-earned leisure, for at this season he was the most conspicuous and the most popular figure on Quantuck beach. Just now, he was looking on in manifest pride at the skill of his latest pupil, Phebe McAlister. Even Dragons' Row fell silent, when Phebe took to the water for her noon bath.

It was good to see her free, firm step as she came down the board walk, dressed in the plain black suit which set off her fresh, clear skin and her bright hair. Phebe scorned caps entirely, and no sunburn could roughen her cheeks. Her suit fitted her, and she was as trim and comely in it as in her more conventional raiment. Once on the beach, she had a trick of standing for a moment, looking out at the distant water with an unconsciousness which was not feigned, then rapidly measuring the incoming wave, she chose the exact moment of its rising to curl over and break, plunged through it and, after an interval when the onlookers waited breathlessly, she reappeared on the farther side and swam tranquilly away up the sh.o.r.e. Hope might cling to the lifeline and be boiled to her heart's content, and Theodora was welcome to paddle about in the thick of the crowd, with Hubert and Billy beside her. To Phebe, there was something fairly intoxicating in the knowledge of her strength, in feeling the free, firm play of her muscles and in conquering the power of the sea.

The wind had been blowing strongly, all the morning, and the waves were rolling in heavily. Their green tops were crested with white foam which rose high and higher, curved over as softly as a rose petal, balanced for a brief second, then fell with a crash and went flowing up the bank of the beach, circling and twisting in countless eddies that now and then crept to the very awnings and caused a stampede among their inhabitants.

A dozen portly matrons sat in the sand, rocking to and fro as the wave came up about them and receded; and children innumerable pranced around them, playing tag with the tricky surf that often caught them unawares.

"Grandma," Mac said, trudging up to the McAlister awning with a pail of sand under his arm; "isn't vat sky just lovely? I'd like to fly up vere, and maybe G.o.d would let me work ve sun."