John's Girl

A little girl in a short-sleeved, blue ruffled nightgown flung herself across the foot of Grandmother Swift's great guest-chamber bed, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

Downstairs, each in an old-fashioned, valanced rocking chair before one of the living-room windows, Grandfather and Grandmother Swift were discussing the newcomer.

"I think she seems real glad to be here," Grandmother was saying. "She looks a little pale and peaked, but we'll soon have her fed up and as brown as a berry."

"I never see any brown berries. All the berries I ever had anything to do with was red or blue, but there must be berries that is brown, if you say so, Mother."

Grandmother's amber needles flew.

"She seemed real pleased at the things I had cooked up for her," she said, "especially the chocolate cake. She didn't more than sample the lemon pie."

"I thought she seemed a little high-toned about her vittles. She kinder turned up her nose at your ginger tea, Mother. She was used to having her dinner at night, she said, and drunk nothing but a demi-tassy after it."

"You hadn't ought to have begun your teasing before she was fairly in the house, Father—it made her feel strange. She hasn't been here for four years, and four years, when a child is just getting into her teens, is a long while."

"An inch in a man's nose is considerable."

Grandmother surveyed him severely over the top of her bi-focal glasses.

"Speaking of noses," she said, "you be careful how you try pulling Elizabeth's nose or chuck her under the chin, or any such actions. Growing girls is particular about such things."

"And I'm particular who I chuck under the chin. I'm afraid you are going to ruin your eyes with those glasses, Mother, you have to strain so hard to look over the top when you want to see anything at a distance, and work so hard trying to look under 'em when you want to see anything nigh to."

He chuckled at Grandmother's sudden effort to concentrate her keen brown eyes within the space of the glass half-moon through which she was supposed to focus her knitting.

"I just wanted to bind off the sleeve before the light faded," she said.

"When Congress repeals this here light-saving scheme, it'll hurt your feelings two ways, won't it, Mother? You won't have the satisfaction of expressing your mind at the Administration for setting the clock back, and you won't have a extry hour of light to strain your eyes in."

The old lady—she was seventy-five, but in a strong light when she was not quite becomingly dressed, which was not often, she looked sixty—drew her rocking chair closer to the small window, and knitted in silence. All the windows in that remarkable old house were small, and divided into little, square panes. Grandfather drew his rocking chair closer to his window, and made a great pretence of reading, but he did not turn or rattle his paper.

"You trying to prove that your eyes is just as good as mine? Well, I don't know as I blame you, Father, but your glasses is out in the barn on the feed box. If you could read a line without 'em, I'd know the contents of the whole paper by this time."

Grandfather Swift grinned, and unbuttoned a lower button on the immaculate linen waistcoat he had put on in his granddaughter's honour—he wore no coat.

"Got back at me that time, didn't you, Mother? I always feel uneasy after I get the better of you till you've worked the laugh round to me again. Well, I thought we'd be setting up till all hours of the night, entertaining John's girl, and hearing all the news of the family. I wonder if she always goes to bed before sundown. She didn't look a might sleepy to me."

"She travelled all the way from New York—of course she was sleepy."

"Her father brought her all the way from New York to Boston, and she rested there a couple of days before he put her on the Cape train. All she had to do was to sit among her bags and boxes till she got here. Three shiny black bags, she had, and as proud of 'em as if she had made 'em herself—and a wardrobe trunk. I thought myself that all trunks was wardrobe trunks until she told me different."

"You can't hardly judge the child till she gets settled down a little."

Grandfather Swift let his paper fall to the floor. Then he picked it up and folded it carefully, and made a place for it on the stand between the two windows under the wide fronds of Grandmother's pet fern, which was supposed never to be displaced for such a purpose.

"I did hope John's girl was going to be a little more like folks," he admitted.

The dimity curtains in the guest chamber puffed in the light night breeze. An insect with the voice of a bird set up a cheerful chirping just under her window, but Elizabeth Swift, in a little, huddled heap on the four-poster bed that had belonged to her great-grandmother, with her head smothered in the best goose-feather pillows to shut out the sound she was making, was still sobbing as if she could never stop again.

"They don't even speak the English language," she was saying to herself. "They are just countrified and ordinary, and I've got to have them for my grandparents just as if they were like other people, and eat great hunks of corn beef and drink ginger tea, and never see my parents, or my dear, dear brother."

The goose-feather pillow got wetter and wetter until Elizabeth, still very miserable but quieter now, began to be concerned about the damage she was doing, and finally dragged herself up on the edge of the bed to examine it.

"I mustn't do damage to property, no matter how anguished I am," she thought. "People's things aren't to blame, if they do say 'hadn't oughter,' and 'ain't,' but I don't see how my own mother and my own Father John could have sent me here."

She groped for the second pillow, and the tears started afresh, but presently she began to try to stop them. The soft wind that was pushing the dimity curtains into the room brought with it a heavy breath of honeysuckle and roses. Her mind began to stray away from her immediate trouble.

"Honeysuckle toilet water might be the very best toilet water that any one could have. I wonder if you couldn't make some with honeysuckle blossoms and wood alcohol. There's a bird going to bed in that tree. Maybe it's an oriole."

She had never seen an oriole except in pictures, but that was one of the things she had wanted to come to Cape Cod for, when she had thought she was coming with her mother and her big soldier brother to a cottage on the beach, before they had realized how sick he was going to be when he got home from France. The bird chirped drowsily once more, and the insect in the grass drew its string over its bow again. She almost went to the window to look, but she had cried so long that she wasn't quite willing to think of pleasant things yet. Her head ached and her nose was sore, and the second pillow was almost as wet as the first. She hung them both over the foot-board to dry.

"I suppose it is a little funny to cry quarts into old family goose-feather pillows. I might have cried so long I would have had to use a whole feather-bed, too. I wonder if Grandmother would scold me just as if I were a child. I told her I was going to have my fourteenth birthday here. I told my horrid grandfather, when he pinched me, that I wasn't in the habit of being teased. What would Jean Forsyth say if she could see me now? I guess I'll get up and put some talcum powder on my nose."

There was a knock on the door as she began to move around the room. She scrambled back into bed meaning to pretend to be asleep, but her grandmother opened the door and came in just as if she had spoken.

"Are you asleep, Elizabeth?"

"No, Grandma."

"I thought you might like a glass o' milk to kinder stay your stomach between now and breakfast."

"Thank you, Grandma."

"Would you like a cookie to go with it? I made up a whole jar full o' sugar-molasses cookies so's you could go and help yourself to them whenever you was a mind to. I'll set the milk right here on the stand, and then I'll go fetch the cookie."

"Thank you for the milk, Grandmother, but I don't care for the cookie. I never eat between meals."

"Your grandfather and I had a little spell o' argument about that cookie. He claimed you wouldn't be used to eating sugar-molasses cookies, but I thought you might of inherited your father's taste for them."

"I have inherited a great many of Father's tastes."

"Your brother Johnny, he used to like 'em, too, when he was a little feller. He was a real good little boy, Johnny was. He spent every summer of his life with me and Grandpa till he began to go to that college."

"We don't called him Johnny. We called him Junior when he was growing up, and I called him Buddy, but now we call him John—or John Junior when we wish to distinguish him from Father."

"Well, your grandfather and I always called him Johnny. It seemed to suit him. I hope he'll get well enough to get down to Gran'ma's before the summer is over. Gran'ma could help him to get well."

"He is quite sick now, and unable to see any one at all. He is very devoted to me, but he is in such a weakened condition that even I wasn't allowed to see him. He won the D. S. C.—the Distinguished Service Cross, you know."

"I don't know so much about this new-fangled soldiering. I lost two brothers in the Civil War—your great uncles they would have been. Only eighteen and twenty, but grown men they seemed to be in them days. Your father favoured my brother William more'n he did anybody on his father's side o' the house. Johnny, he looked like Sam when he was a little feller. Well, I'm real glad Johnny got home safe."

"Of course, we can't be sure that he is safe yet, but the recent reports have been very encouraging."

"Your father's proud of his boy, I guess. It was a great thing for him to have a grown boy to go. The next best thing to going himself."

"I don't think he cared about going himself."

"Did he ever say anything about not caring to go?"

"I don't think I ever heard him express himself on the subject; but the work he was doing here, of course, was very important. Anybody who was connected with steel production in any way felt that they were being a great deal more useful on this side of the ocean."

"Whatever your father was doing on this side of the ocean, I guess his soul and his spirit was all the way across it."

"I think you are mistaken, Grandmother."

Grandmother Swift looked at her granddaughter over the rim of her bi-focal glasses, and smiled.

"It's one o' the easiest things in this world to be mistaken, Elizabeth," she said.

Elizabeth put out her hand for her glass of milk, and began to drink it with a sudden meekness.

"You go and set yourself in the chair by the bed, and finish your milk, and I'll lay back your bed for you. There's a golden robin has a nest in that tree, and I guess there'll be a family there pretty soon."

"You mean an oriole, don't you, Grandmother? Oh, I'm crazy to see one."

"Some folks calls it that. Golden robin means more to me. I like to have things called by their prettiest names." She was busying herself about the bed. "I'm going to turn these pillows over on their dry side," she said, as if Great-grandmother's goose-feather pillows had always one tear-dampened surface.

"Oh!" Elizabeth said, "I—I——"

But her grandmother wasn't looking at her.

"Speaking o' names," she was saying, "I'll tell you a conundrum that my grandmother used to tell me, a real appropriate conundrum, seeing that it's about a namesake o' yours. See how long it takes you to guess it.

"But how could they?" Elizabeth cried.

"Well, they did, and now's a good chance to show how smart you are, so's Gran'ma needn't make any mistake about it."

Something in the eyes over the bi-focal glasses made Elizabeth squirm a trifle.

"The girls at home," she said, rapidly, "often call me Betsy. Oh, I know now. That's the answer. It was all one girl—Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess—all nicknames for Elizabeth. I never heard of any one called Elspeth, but I'm called all the others myself."

"Your great-grandmother was always called Elspeth. She always called you that when you was a baby."

"Did she? I didn't know that I ever saw Great-grandmother."

"She saw you. She loved you better than any grandchild she lived to see, because you was named after her, I suppose. She used to say that conundrum was wrote about her, because she was four or five different characters all in one. Elizabeth when she was feeling high and mighty, Elspeth when she was good, Betsy when she had trouble keeping herself in, and Bess when she put on her airs and graces. Bessie was a real stylish name in her day."

"Why, I have different names for myself—Beth you know, and Betty, they are contractions of Elizabeth, too, but I never knew any one else who thought of themselves in different characters."

"Your great-grandmother was quite a remarkable woman. She was your grandfather's mother, but she seemed like my own. You look considerable like her, Elizabeth."

"I've always thought I resembled my own mother more than any one. She was an Endicott, you know."

"Your great-grandmother was a Jones. The Joneses had the name o' being one of the likeliest families in Crocker Neck."

"Did they?"

"And she had the reputation of having the prettiest manners and the kindest ways of any girl from here to Chatham. Your father takes after her in that. It was the first trouble that ever come to him when his gran'ma died, and he took it hard. He went out behind the henhouse and lay there a whole night; just the way he used to when he had trouble as a boy."

"But he was a grown man then, and I was born."

"He wasn't so much of a grown man that he didn't lay and blubber all night. He ain't so much of a grown man now that he wouldn't do the same thing if he was in the same kind of trouble."

"He—he didn't when we thought we had lost Buddy."

Grandmother's eyes looked kindly over the tops of her ridiculous glasses, but all that she said was,

"You come and hop into bed now. You'll get cold setting by that open window."

"I guess I know how my own father felt and acted last winter," Elizabeth said, but not aloud, as she slipped between the creamy linen sheets, and her grandmother tucked her under the blue-and-white comfortable. She closed her eyes for the good-night kiss that she expected to submit to, but it did not come. Instead, her grandmother made her way to the door and stood holding it open, as she looked back to say:

"Your grandfather and I are real glad to have you with us, Elizabeth. It's always a day of rejoicing to us when we have our own flesh and blood under our roof. No matter what you start out in life thinking, the conclusion you kinder come to, when all's said and done, is that blood is thicker than water."

Her tone was exactly as gentle as before, but alone in the darkening room Elizabeth felt a slow wave of crimson mount to her forehead, and spread hot over her face.

"Grandmother doesn't think I am very nice," she said.