Ninety-Nine Negroes

Peggy and Elizabeth were lying on the beach in their bathing suits. Peggy had hollowed out a careful seat in the sand, and built arm rests and a slanting support for the head, which she was trying to recline on and enjoy. Elizabeth, who had made no such elaborate preparations for relaxation, was really comfortable. She was wearing a black mohair suit with a patent leather belt and silk stockings, and a blue rubber cap put on with great care, so that tendrils of soft brown hair framed her face. Peggy wore a rubber diving cap that made her look as if she had been scalped, but her blue jersey suit was trimmed with blue and green stripes and slashed up the side and laced fetchingly.

"Did you get your birthday wish, or did you wish for a handsome husband in the sweet bye and bye?" Peggy asked, lazily. "I always wish for things that will happen right away, because I can't stand the strain of not knowing whether I'm going to get them or not."

"I didn't wish to get anything. I wished to be something. I can't tell yet whether I'm going to succeed in being it."

"Oh, I know—occasions like that always make you feel noble, but I hate to waste a wish on wanting to be a better girl. You can't tell your wish, and if you don't, there's nobody that can judge whether you've got it or not."

"Can't we judge for ourselves?"

"I suppose we can, but it's kind of embarrassing to award yourself prizes for virtue."

"I know it, but in a kind of general way you have to keep tabs on your own piggishness, because you're the only one that can."

"Did you say pig or fig?" Peggy had all of "Alice in Wonderland" on the tip of her tongue.

"I said pig, but I guess prig was what I meant, really. You're not a prig—but I am."

"Well, speaking of wishes," Peggy said, "do you know the very latest way of telling who you'll marry? You count ninety-nine niggers, twenty-seven white horses, and three red-heads, and then the next man you shake hands with, you'll marry. Let's begin and do it. I've been meaning to for a long time, but I wanted to wait until I had somebody to do it with. Those things are not so much fun alone. Kindly remove that inquisitive sand flea from my back. Oh! Ouch! Lots of people claim they don't bite." Elizabeth took the offender between thumb and forefinger.

"He's a funny looking beastie," she said. "He's got a kind of solemn, long face."

"I think he looks interrupted," Peggy said. "I guess he liked my flavour. Shall we start counting to-day?"

"There aren't many Negroes on the Cape, unless you count Portuguese."

"There are two kinds of Portuguese—black Portuguese and white Portuguese. We'll have to count the black ones. My mother once went to the Azores—that's inhabited by Portuguese, you know—she says that the high-class women all wear a kind of nun's costume, with a huge black head-dress made exactly like a pea-pod, and they are all quite light-skinned in spite of their black hair and eyes. Well, let's go in swimming."

Elizabeth swam her hundred strokes, and then stood breast high, watching Peggy's fearless performance as that young person displayed all the latest spectacular swimming feats, diving and wallowing and spouting like a young whale. The raft, which was usually rocking in at least seven feet of water, had at first filled Elizabeth with terror, but Peggy's adventurous spirit was beginning to animate her, and she followed courageously when Peggy cried, "Now, the raft," and climbed up its slippery sides with very little hesitation.

"You're an amphibious animal," Elizabeth said. "I don't just know what kind, but I do know what your mind is like—the way it flies around, up one thing and down another. It's exactly like a squirrel."

"I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. Look who's here, Elizabeth. A little fish, see. A perfectly good fish. I wonder how he got here."

"Is he dead?" Elizabeth asked, shrinking a little.

"He's either dead or sleeping. I think he's alive. He hasn't any eyes, that's his trouble. Let's put him back in the water—but let's wish on him first."

"Wait a minute," Elizabeth cried. "I know a perfectly lovely poem out of the Kipling book. I'll try it on the poor little thing.

"He couldn't very well open his eyes, on account of never having any, but I guess he got the general idea. Back you go into the water, you little blind fish."

"You wish, too."

"I did—one of my next week wishes. You know how they tell your fortune with cards. 'What you expect, What you don't expect, What's sure to come true. Next week.' My wishes are all on that principle. There goes fishie, swimming away for dear life."

"Bring me a lover, thou little blind fish." The raft was rocking gently under a fleece-lined sky, and the water was blue-green and full of little thrills and ripples. Peggy took off her cap, and let her black hair stream on the breeze.

"Have you ever thought much about lovers?" Elizabeth said.

Peggy blushed. "Have you?"

"Not about my own. That is, I mean not about anybody I ever knew or saw, but have you ever thought about anybody else having a lover? Any relation of yours?"

"About Ruthie, yes, but I don't believe she would ever really care about that. Except in a very friendly way. All the engaged people I ever knew were so mushy! I can't imagine Ruth being mushy."

"I never think about the engaged people I know. That isn't what I call being engaged—the way people are engaged. I always think of the way people in books get engaged, and that makes it easier to imagine."

"Yes, it does. That would be the only way Ruth would ever do it. But I don't think she would."

"Do you think she would be the kind of girl to get engaged by letter?"

"Well, I don't know. I don't like to think about her getting engaged. She's too useful around the house. You wouldn't like to think of your brother being engaged, would you?"

"I might, if he were very unhappy."

"Well, don't you worry about your brother being unhappy. The thing about being grown up is that you can do just about what you please. If a man wants to get married, he can do it, when he's as old as that."

"There might be things to prevent him—health and things."

"Say, I wouldn't worry about my brother and any girl if I were you. He isn't the marrying kind. I heard Sister tell Mother that. Mother was quizzing her, I guess; you know how mothers are about this suitor proposition. Well, Ruth said that John Swift was the one man she knew that was perfectly satisfied to be a friend, and a good friend to a girl, and that he had told her so. She said she had a perfectly tranquil, lovely friendship with him."

"Oh, dear!" Elizabeth thought.

"Buddy has got a very beautiful nature," she said aloud. "I think a girl of his own age would like him very much, and he would make a good friend to her."

"Ruth would make the best little friend in the world. I think friendship is much more beautiful than love. I don't think I should altogether like it, if my sister and your brother were the other kind, and wanted to behave, well, you know—that way. Would you?"

"I don't know," said Elizabeth, faintly.

On the way home she was very silent, while Peggy chattered, but at her own gate she looked at her friend speculatively.

"Do you know, Peggy," she said, "that there are ways in which I feel a whole lot older than you are?"

"Are there?" said Peggy, uncertainly. "Look, Elizabeth, there's the third Negro. I'll bet we'll really get our fate settled before the summer is over."

That afternoon Elizabeth took her knitting—she was making a scarf for Buddy, who had demanded one to bind himself round, soldier fashion, during the period of his anticipated convalescence on Cape Cod—and sat in Grandfather's chair by the living-room window. Her grandmother was darning stockings on the other side of the branching fern. Elizabeth's knitting would have progressed more rapidly if she had not been keeping a sharp eye on the street, in order that no Negroes should escape her.

"Did you ever do any stunts to see who you would marry?" she asked her grandmother.

"My sister and I used to hang horseshoes over the door, and the first one that passed under them was supposed to be the one we was going to marry."

"Did somebody pass under?"

"We did it a good many times. I remember one time we did it, and the first one that passed under was to be my husband, and the second was to be Alviry's. The first one turned out to be young Pork Joe, who was one o' the unlikeliest boys that ever put his waistcoat on hind-side before; he never would dress himself proper. I was pretty well discouraged at the idea of young Pork Joe for a husband, but Alviry she made me hang around watching for her beau to turn up, and lo and behold the very next person to set foot over that threshold was your grandfather. I thought I felt bad enough before, but when I saw John Swift's shoulders thrusting themselves through that door frame, I just bolted off upstairs and had a good cry. Alviry she wasn't pleased, either. She had her eye on Martin Nickerson at the time."

"Maybe it was the second one you were to marry, and the first didn't count. Who was young Pork Joe?"

"Old Pork Joe's son. He used to keep pigs to sell, and so they finally got calling him that."

"The way they call the plumber Pump Peter. I think Cape Cod is the funniest place."

"It ain't so different from other places."

"In other places you don't associate so much with—the baker and the butcher."

"Maybe they ain't so well worth associating with."

"My friend Jeanie Forsyth is a direct descendant from the Mayflower."

"Well, so're you. Don't you know it?"

"Have we really got Mayflower blood?"

"Those old pewter spoons on the dining-room mantle, that you was examining the other day, was made from a mold that Peregrine White brought over on the Mayflower. My mother was a White, you know."

"I didn't know. I guess I don't know much about anything, Grandmother."

"Live and learn. Babies ain't born with any great amount of contrivance, nor yet much of an idea of what's what."

"I've learned a lot since I've been down here."

"You ain't so sure as you was about the way things was meant to be. At first, we're pretty sure that things was meant to be just one way, and that way the one we've picked out. After living along a while, we get to realize that the other feller has his way, too. Then we have to kinder arrange our ideas again."

"Buddy thinks I'm a snob."

"Well, what do you think?"

"I—I think Buddy's right."

"Well, he ain't going to be right very long if you think so. When I was growing up, I used to have a stylish city friend that I spent a good deal of time with. She was the daughter of the biggest man we had had from these parts, and she used to spend her summers at home, in the big white house on Main Street—the one with the pillars and the cedar hedge, just opposite the post office. She used to get her dresses from Paris, and let me make copies of them, too, and she was courted by a member of the governor's staff. I don't know as she ever had a brother-in-law that was a count——"

"Oh, Grandmother!"

"Well, let Grandma have her joke—as long as she can keep Grandpa quiet. Well, when we was little girls, she used to love to go to my grandma's with me."

"Not Grandmother Elspeth's?"

"No, my grandmother; Grandmother White. Well, Mary's folks mostly lived away from here, and most of the ways and doings of home folks was a novelty to her. She liked to get Grandma telling about old times on Cape Cod. You see, when Grandmother was a little girl, her mother was bedridden, and the whole family was taken care of by her and a neighbour's daughter, a little girl called Hopey D.—I never knew what the rest of her name was. As fast as the babies come along, they was put in the old settee cradle, and she and Hopey used to have to change places sitting and rocking there all the time they wasn't doing housework. That's the same settee you got in your room upstairs. Grandma used to tell how the fire would go out in the old fireplace, on account of she and Hopey not keeping it going right. Those were the days before matches, you know; and she used to have to run through the woods to the nearest neighbour, who lived a mile away, to borrow fire and bring it home in a swinging pail."

"Oh," Elizabeth cried. "Oh, that doesn't seem possible. I thought that the days before matches were way back in Columbus's time, or something."

"No. I've got a piece o' flint and a tinder box upstairs somewhere that came from Grandma's. Supposing you had to strike a spark from a piece o' flint before you could get the kettle to boiling."

"Supposing I had a bedridden mother, like poor Grandma White. Oh, I hope that Hopey D. was a nice little girl, and that she and great—no, great-great-grandmother had good times together."

"When Grandma used to tell all those old stories to my stylish friend, do you know how I felt? I felt mortified at having a grandma that wasn't more high toned, and I used to try to get Mary not to go there, so's we wouldn't have no more talk about running after a pail of fire, and rocking babies on the old settee and such."

Elizabeth bent her head over her knitting, and the colour mounted slowly to her forehead, but she did not speak.

"So you see, girl nature is pretty much girl nature, wherever you find it."

"I was going to write a letter to-night, Grandmother," Elizabeth said, after a period of silence, "and it wasn't going to be a very nice kind of a letter, because it—it was going to misrepresent things some. Now, I am going to write entirely differently, because things you've been saying have set me to thinking. I'd be willing to show you the letter, if you thought you ought to see it," she added, anxiously, but her grandmother only smiled.

"I ain't never very particular about reading other folks' letters," she said. "I have trouble enough reading those I write myself, and those that is sent to me."

"All right," Elizabeth said, in a very small voice, "I guess it's going to be hard enough to write it, anyway." This was the fateful epistle:

Dear Jeanie:

I want to begin by correcting an impression I was snobby enough to give you when I first came down here. I wrote you about this place and my grandparents in an entirely false way. I did it because I was too proud to own up the truth. I was surprised and shocked when I got here, to find how things really were. I hadn't been here since I was a little girl, and then only for very brief visits. I imagined a kind of Farm de-luxe and a grandmother in real lace and mitts, and a kind of Lord Chesterfieldian grandfather, and all the comforts of a chÂteau. Instead, my dear Granddaddy and dearest Grandmother are just—natives. They murder the President's English, and they sit around in their shirt sleeves—the former, not the latter—and they, well, they aren't like anything I've ever known. So I got started pretending, in my letters to you, and kept right on. The "car" is an old, rattletrap Ford, and Granddaddy drives it in his suspenders when he wants to. The chauffeur I sort of gave you the impression we had is a regular, farm hired man. Our hired girl sits at the table with us, and she is nice, too. They are all nice, nice people—nicer than I am. My grandmother is beautiful looking. I wish you could see her. I didn't care for any one to see her, for a while. Now, I am getting anxious for everyone to.

Jeanie, can you understand me or not? I'm just a prig, snob, liar, and I don't feel fit to live. I don't know what got into me. I always tell you everything, and now I deliberately did this awful thing, and I've got something else that I can't tell you, but that is not my secret.

Can you love me any more? I ask this seriously, because I know you won't mind my humble origin half as much as the deception. I knew this all the time, and yet I could not seem to help the way I was behaving.

I am afraid to read your letter in answer to this, so don't write me one. Let me hear from you by return mail, but don't say anything, not much, about this anyway. If you love me, though, please begin your letter by saying so. I don't deserve you for my most intimate friend. I've taken a new name. My great-grandmother's name, and I am going to live up to it. I took it so to be thoroughly part of my family, and to cultivate the old-fashioned virtues with. It's

Elspeth.

P. S.—Call me by it. Everything I told you about my birthday was so. They did all those beautiful things for me. I slightly camouflaged details, but it was all the way I said, except that Judidy ate with us. Aren't I a pig?

Elspeth again.