The Little Room—and Peggy

The golden robins woke first, and demanded their breakfast in weak, insistent voices. Then the blue counterpane slid to the floor and two ruffled blue dimity sleeves were flung out at right angles. The clear bell of the schoolhouse clock struck six times.

"Dear me, I must hustle," Elizabeth said.

She flew to the wash-stand and poured the creamy, gilt-edged bowl of the best room set full of well water, in which she laved and splashed. An aroma of bacon and coffee and the inimitable savour of raised biscuits helped to accelerate her progress. She sang as she dressed, but she thought of nothing at all but her breakfast.

Her grandfather, in his shirt sleeves and sand-coloured waistcoat, was already at the table when she took her place there, and unfolded her red-fringed, damask napkin from the napkin ring that was her father's, and marked with his name. It was on a standard, and supported by twin boys, wreathed and carrying trumpets. Elizabeth always tried to hide it behind some dish as she ate.

"Good morning, Miss Betsy."

"Good morning, Grandfather."

The hired girl, who was sixteen and the daughter of a neighbour, wiped her immaculate pink hands on a more immaculate and pinker apron, and took her seat opposite Elizabeth. She was an enormously fat blonde, who never spoke without blushing. Grandmother was bustling about with plates of biscuit and coffee cups.

"The reason we don't have more help around the place is that Mother wears herself all out waitin' on them," Grandfather observed. "Judidy, ain't you got no control over Mis' Swift? Can't you make her set down to the table when breakfast is ready?"

"No, sir," Judidy blushed. "She told me to set down, so I set."

"Well, whenever she tells me to set down—I set, but I thought maybe you had more independence of spirit."

"No, sir."

"Elizabeth, here—she don't pay much attention to what anybody says. She sets all the time, so's to be on the safe side. Well, I guess we're in for a spell o' bad weather. I see old Samuel Swift out bright and early this morning, and when Samuel comes out of his hiding that means rain sure enough."

Elizabeth shuddered. Samuel Swift was an unbelievably unkempt individual who lived in a hermit's shack in the woods, and was locally known as a "weather breeder." Whenever he harnessed his ancient mare to his antiquated buggy and emerged into the light of day the wind changed, according to neighbourhood tradition, and the fog and rain swept in. She quoted:

"That's poetry," her grandfather explained with a wink at Judidy. "Fall to," he said as he served the last plateful of golden eggs and crisp bacon. "Here's Mother with her last chore done, and we ain't more than half through our breakfast. If that coffee's for Elizabeth, Mother, you can give it to me."

"I thought Elizabeth could have a little—very weak."

"Not at my table," Grandfather said.

Elizabeth poured a glass of milk and drank it in silence, but her grandfather gave her one sharp look from under his bushy brows.

"I see old Samuel's crawled out," he said, turning to Grandmother. "I guess we'll have some wet weather, now."

"He's a disgusting creature," Elizabeth said, looking resentfully at the jug of milk—and taking a second glass of it.

"He's a kind of relation of yours. His mother was my father's cousin. I think he'd be better off at the poor farm, but he's so dirty, the selectmen kinder hate the job o' trying to get him there."

"A relation?" Elizabeth cried. "Oh!"

"You don't know much about your Cape Cod relations, do you, Elizabeth?"

"I guess I'm a kind o' relation, too," Judidy simpered. "Everybody's relation on Cape Cod, I guess."

"Elizabeth would be proud to have you for a relation, Judidy," Grandfather said, gravely. This time Elizabeth saw the sharp glance that appraised her, and she turned quickly toward Judidy.

"Anybody would be proud to have a—a cousin with such a lovely complexion," something urged her to say.

"Don't!" Judidy protested. "I'm all tanned up."

"I have a friend in New York, Jean Forsyth," Elizabeth said, presently, "whose sister married a count."

"And when you get back to New York, you can tell her all about your cousin Samuel," her grandfather twinkled. "My, what good times you can have, comparing notes."

"Father!" said Grandmother Swift, warningly. "You run along upstairs, Elizabeth, and I'll come up there as soon's I take one more swaller o' coffee. I got something I want to say when there ain't no men-folks about."

Upstairs again, Elizabeth took the photograph of a deep-eyed girl in a silver frame out of the drawer in her wardrobe trunk and gazed at it with gathering woe.

"Oh, dear, Jeanie," she said, "the only thing that would make me any less miserable in these surroundings would be to sit down and write you just exactly how things are, and that I can never do."

"You come with me," her grandmother called suddenly from the threshold. "I got an idea."

She led the way past the landing and tiny hall into which the steep stairway debouched, into the regions in the rear of the three bedrooms that Elizabeth was familiar with. There seemed to be a chain of small, stuffy rooms dimly stored with old furniture and boxes, and not all on the same level, and beyond them a low room, with a slanting roof, half chamber, half hallway.

"I never knew you had all these rooms," Elizabeth said. "Why, the old house is enormous, isn't it?"

"The front o' the house is new; it hasn't been built more'n fifty years at the outset, but these back chambers belong to the old house—the one your great-grandfather built to go to housekeeping in." She flung open a door that led into a little room still beyond.

"Oh, what a darling, what a sweetheart of a room!" Elizabeth cried. "Whose was it?"

"It was your Aunt Helen's room. She had it papered in this robin's egg blue paper, and she got a lot o' old, painted furniture, and fixed it up real cunning. I thought maybe you might like to do the same thing."

There was only one portion of the room in which Elizabeth could stand upright. The roof sloped gradually until it met the partition about shoulder high, where two tiny, square windows, of many panes, were set; but the main part of the chamber, in spite of its low ceiling, was big enough to hold all the essentials of comfortable furnishing.

"You could hunt around through the house and the attic chamber until you found the things you wanted to put in it, and furnish it just according to your taste, and nobody would ever set foot inside of it unless you happened to want them to. I know girls. That's what they want."

"I guess you do know girls, Grandma," Elizabeth said. "I guess Aunt Helen must have had a good time growing up if you let her do things like this. I don't remember her much."

"Well, that ain't so remarkable. She's lived in China since before you was born. I ain't never let anybody use this room, but now I kinder think her lease has expired. She's got daughters as big as you, and sons that's grown men now."

"I'll be just as good to her room!"

"I guess you can't help it. There's a good spirit in it. You rummage around in these different rooms here, and then you go up in the barn chamber and look till you find the things that suits you. There's a powerful lot of what some folks calls antiques around this place. Dealers and what-not is always coming around and begging to look through my pantry and my attic, wanting to buy all Grandmother's pretty dishes, and a good many that warn't so pretty, but I tell 'em all that when I'm ready to part with 'em I'll let 'em know."

"The Washington Vase china that you use all the time is really valuable, isn't it?"

"Well, so those collectors say. It's valuable to me, because I was brought up on it. Money value ain't everything. The value of a dollar is one thing—the joy it brings to you is another. You just rummage around and find the things that you like, and we'll get Grampa or Zeckal to move 'em up for you."

"How did you ever think of such a thing, Grandmother?"

"Well, your grandpa thought he hadn't seen you looking around the house much, and s'long's it's full o' the kind o' things that most city folks goes so wild about, I kinder figured you might like something to get your interest started. Helen, she was never very much interested in anything she didn't have to do with. You favour her in some ways."

"I suppose I haven't seemed very much interested in the house and things, I've—had other things on my mind."

"You've been worried about your brother, and a little homesick."

"I didn't think I showed it."

"You don't always have to show your feelings to Grandma. You better start in the barn chamber, and then work on through the house. When you get all the furniture you want, you can come to me and get the key to that closet some day." She indicated a door that might have been a panel set in the wall, except for the keyhole, where a knob might have been. "There's a closet there, that runs clear under the eaves. I guess you might find some fol-de-rols you would like."

"It might be fun to start in the closet," Elizabeth suggested.

"It might," her grandmother agreed, "but better save that till the last."

"I will," said Elizabeth.

The barn chamber, reached by a rickety stairway leading from the region of the stalls, from which a white mare poked a friendly nose as she went by, proved to be a storehouse of the most heterogeneous assemblage of objects Elizabeth had ever imagined. The overflow of fifty years of housecleaning and readjustment had been brought together under those dusty rafters.

"Poor things," Elizabeth thought, looking about at the old settees and rocking chairs, broken backed and legless. "A horse in that condition is put out of its misery. I don't suppose they could blindfold and shoot an old sofa, but they might cremate it, or something."

She came upon the wreck of a little old rocking chair, a child's chair, with a back beautifully decorated with grape clusters and leaves, and two limp, broken arms stuck out helplessly. These she tied up with strips of faded blue cambric that were lying about, and set the little chair gallantly rocking.

There were innumerable cracked china jugs, big bowls, and strange wooden utensils and cabinets; beds that had been taken apart, forlorn, carved old posters minus springs or mattresses that were merely being used as pens to keep forlorn chairs and tables herded together. These things were all draped with dust and spiders' webs; and in a corner, from a pile of ancient straw, Elizabeth heard a faint, continuous rustling.

"Mice!" she said, "but they can't frighten me unless they get a good deal nearer. Still, I guess I'll look carefully around and choose my nearest exit."

Her first discovery for her house furnishing was a flag-bottomed chair with rockers about two inches long. It was perfectly preserved. It wasn't a child's chair, though it was very little of its age, she told herself. The next was a spinning wheel, which was the first one she had ever seen outside of a picture book.

"I'm going to get Grandmother to teach me to spin on it," she said.

There was a writing desk, a rosewood box with inlaid corner pieces, and a short-legged, square stand to set it on; and then more rustling in the straw sent Elizabeth suddenly downstairs again, though not until she had segregated her chosen furniture.

"Zeckal, whoever he may be, can come and get it," she said.

She went back to the little blue room under the eaves, and began a diagram of arrangement. Standing against the wall was a long, panelled picture in a black frame, that had made its appearance there in her absence. Elizabeth lifted it to the light and disclosed three barefooted ladies in flowing garments of gauze, who were standing on a light turf from which lilies of the valley were springing. One of these ladies was reclining on the breast of another, and the third was standing erect and aloof, with shining eyes.

"'The Christian Graces,'" Elizabeth said. "For goodness' sake!" and beneath, the curious inscription, simulating letters cut into stone, was engraved in a neat, Spencerian hand, "Faith, Hope, and Charity."

"For goodness' sake!" said Elizabeth, again.

She turned the picture around, and found on the board at its back another inscription, written in a round, childish hand, "Helen Swift, aged eleven, hung in my room to help me to remember."

"I guess I'll hang it in my room, to help me to remember," Elizabeth said.

She was a little self-conscious about going down to dinner. She knew that her grandfather had found a good many things to chuckle at in her breakfast-table conversation. She always knew afterward just what things she had said that Grandfather would consider most typical of what he referred to as her "city manner." This time she realized that her allusion to Jean Forsyth's brother-in-law would be the subject of many sly, humorous thrusts for a long time to come. However, when she reached the table again, her grandfather had not yet come in, but he appeared almost instantly, with a tall, freckled girl hanging on his arm—a girl with a turned-up nose and a bronzed pigtail the size of her doubled fist hanging down her back.

"But, Granddaddy Swift," she was saying, earnestly, "don't you see that I can't come and meet a brand-new city granddaughter, and sit down to a respectable person's dinner table, attired in a bloomer suit? Don't you know it isn't done in the circles in which we move? Make him let go of my ear, Grandmummy."

Elizabeth rose shyly, and then she sat down again, but the stranger eluded Grandfather's masterful grip, and slipped around to her side, with a hand out-stretched in greeting.

"Isn't he dreadful?" she said, indicating her tormentor affectionately. "When I heard you were here, I was going back to the cottage, to put on my best bib and tucker and make a proper call upon you, but Granddaddy wouldn't hear of it. He insisted on dragging me hither by the hair. So here I am—Peggy Farraday, at your service, and am very glad to meet you, too."

"I'm glad to meet you," Elizabeth said. "I haven't seen any girls for a long time."

"The woods down here are full of them."

"Well, I guess I haven't been into the woods very much."

"Elizabeth ain't a tomboy, like you, into everybody else's business, all day long. She stays at home with me and Gra'ma, and minds her p's and q's."

"Well, we'll change all that. Attractive as you and Grandmummy are, you can't expect to monopolize her forever. Now it's my turn."

Elizabeth saw that both her grandfather and grandmother were beaming at this tall girl's impulsive chattering. She felt her own stiffness relaxing under the sunny influence of the stranger's smile.

"I adopted Grandmummy and Granddaddy three years ago, when I came over to this ducky old house, on my very first day on the Cape, to beg a pint of milk and a pail of water for my hungry, unkempt family. I saw that they were just the grandparents I was looking for, and so I took them on, and I've been the plague of their existence every summer since. Haven't I, Granddaddy? Isn't he a lamb? You know, my one ambition is to squeeze him to pieces, but he's so woolly and scratchy and cantankerous, that it's almost impossible to get your arms around him, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," Elizabeth said, crimsoning, with a quick glance at her grandfather.

To her surprise, he took no notice of her discomfiture. Both he and Grandmother seemed unaware of the delicate ground upon which Miss Peggy Farraday had set her enthusiastic little heels.

"I'm fifteen," that young lady continued, with very little pause either between her mouthfuls of food or of conversation—"You're fourteen, aren't you? I had more fun the year I was fourteen than I ever had before, or ever expect to have again."

"I'll be fourteen next Thursday," Elizabeth said.

"I took on an entirely new character the day I was fourteen. I became very sedate and dignified, and changed my name from Peg to Peggy. Do you expect to do that?"

"I think perhaps I shall," Elizabeth said. "I guess my character does need improving."

She expected some retort from her grandfather at this, but he only held out his hand for her plate, and heaped it high with roast lamb and tender green peas from the kitchen garden.

"I envy you the scrumptious things you have to eat all the time over here. We bring our fat cook down with us. She cooks all right in town in the winter, but she always sulks on Cape Cod, and we have a dreadful time getting anything. We're not lucky enough to have Judidy."

"Don't!" that flattered young lady protested. "Land, think of anybody feeling lucky to have me! I kin cook, though, whenever Mis' Swift is willing."

"Mother, she don't let our help do much work. She's afraid they'd get the habit, and kinder get in her way whenever she wanted to make a day of it. When she's cooking, Judidy she generally sets down and reads the newspaper."

"I'm so fat," Judidy explained, "that I kinder make hard work getting around."

To Elizabeth's surprise, Peggy Farraday went off into peals and spasms of laughter at this.

"They are such loves," she explained. "They are such darlings! I adore the way they do things. Grandmummy—I call her that, because she was jealous of Granddaddy for a name—is a lot like the Peterkins in her domestic arrangements."

"I ought to be like Elizabeth Eliza. That's my name." Elizabeth was glad that she had read the "Peterkin Papers" with Buddy the summer before. She had never met any other girl who was familiar with them.

"I'll tell you later what character in fiction I think you're like. It takes me a while to make up my mind about things like that. I seem to jump at conclusions a good deal quicker than I do."

"Can you always tell whether you like people or not, at first meeting?"

"Yes, I can. Can't you?"

"Yes."

Peggy looked up quickly, and then her eyes dropped to her plate and she began eating rapidly.

"She's shy, too," Elizabeth thought.

"If you'll come upstairs after dinner," she said, aloud, "I've got something I want to show you. You've come just in time to give me your advice about something pretty exciting."

As she was leaving the dining room something made her turn and look back at her grandmother, who was smiling broadly to herself, like the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland."

"The something I was going to show you was her surprise to me," Elizabeth whispered to Peggy.