Crabbing

Elizabeth's first impulse the next morning was to write to Jean. It was Jean who always helped her to think out her problems, and this was the greatest problem that she had ever been called to face. She could not entirely confide in her friend, still she was comforted by the mere act of opening her birthday writing-case, and filling the fountain pen with which she was going to write.

She wondered if the Christian Graces, when they looked down on her Aunt Helen, had ever found her in such a state of real trouble and dismay.

"Hope can't do me much good," she thought, "and there is nobody to have any Charity for but Mr. Piggy Chambers. It's Faith I need for my guide, and she is the saddest looking sister of the lot."

Dear Jean:

All I can say is, I wish you were here, and I don't see how I am going to stop saying that and write anything else. Letters are such cold and far-away things. I hope you do know how I love you, and how the thought of you comforts me. I told you about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Well, there they stand grinning above me, and they don't offer much consolation.

I am in trouble, Jean. I can tell you this much. Ruth Farraday is going to marry Mr. Chambers, and she was Buddy's girl. I can't tell you the ins and outs of it, because they are other people's different secrets, but I am afraid that this will kill Buddy, and I don't see one single thing to do about it. I feel like a criminal and a German spy, to tell you even this much, but I feel as if I should burst with grief—really burst. You know that feeling of suffocating you get after you have eaten a lot too much. I have that same feeling emotionally. I know this is a funny way to say it, but it's the only way I can express it. I wish we could be together, and I could hear you reading poetry or something soothing, and you could help me think how to break it to Buddy. It will have to be told him. After I write you, I am going to write him. So you see how much I value writing to you.

I will answer your questions some other time, when my mind is more free. Though I can only doubt if that time will ever come. I wish you could see Ruth Farraday. There is something about her that makes me think of the girl in the "First Violin," though she isn't in the least like her. I don't know what it is. I guess it is the sadness that hangs about that book. There is a sadness hanging about her, and about me, too, Jeanie-that-I-love.

I am glad your friend Neil Seymour is at the Point. I liked him very much. If he still wants to send me "Prometheus Bound," he may, Mother says. I guess she thinks anything that will keep me contented is a good idea. I think "Prometheus Bound" would help me, if it is anything like what I think it is.

When I write you, I feel a little as if I were right in the room with you. What I am doing now is to hang onto the door, not to have to shut it, and go into another room, where my sick Buddy is. Life is a strange thing. Good-bye—good-bye—good-bye. I love you—hard.

That old-fashioned girl, Elspeth.

My Dear Brother:

I have got to use my own judgment about writing to you. I am to blame for writing you the way I did, but I did not know any better at that time. I only told you the truth. Now I have more truth to tell you. Buddy, will you brace up as if you were in the trenches again? You are a soldier, you know, and you've got to fight another battle.

Mother said I was not to tell you anything that might trouble you, but I have got to trouble you the worst of all. Buddy, Ruth Farraday is engaged to marry that goop, and her family have egged her on till she did not know which way to turn, and has turned this way. She told me and her family, and her face looked like death. I am not making this up. Peggy says so, and she knows. She loves Ruthie with all her heart, and she would not make anything up. She is not that kind. I am more that kind, but this is really and truly so. Ruth is not a happy girl, and we both know it. She has lost her lovely pink cheeks, and is a white apple blossom now. A pear blossom is more like it, only not pretty enough for her.

Well, Buddy, I have never had any real, grown-up trouble, but the kind of fourteen-year-old trouble I have had has seemed pretty hard sometimes. Grandmother says that you've always got to live, whether you can or not. I know you don't want my condolences, but I love you so that I can't help being sick over this. It's hard work for me to eat and sleep. I hope you can swear a little, because that will help you.

Sister.

"I don't feel very much like going to Swan Pond crabbing," she thought, as she sealed her two letters, and set them before her on the desk, "but I suppose people mustn't give up to things. Even if my heart is breaking, the Robbins boy and his cousin and Peggy ought not to have their plans spoiled."

She made her way through the chain of little rooms between her den and her sleeping chamber, unfastening, as she went, the blue linen gown, buttoned all the way down the back, that, with its pink twin, was her regular morning uniform. In her bed room she slipped into a blouse cut like a boy's, and dark blue woollen bloomers with wool stockings to match. With this she put on, very carefully, a blue tam o' shanter. She saw in the glass that her face was drawn, and her eyes had dark shadows beneath them.

"If Tom Robbins notices how I look and asks me any questions, I shall only tell him that I am in deep trouble," she thought. "I won't say anything like that to Bill. He would only grin and be embarrassed, but I think Tom Robbins would understand more about grief."

She was a little ashamed of having thought so much of her own trouble when she saw Peggy's stricken face.

"Don't ask me what has happened," Peggy whispered, as they clambered into the car and Grandfather started for the cross-roads where they were to pick up the two boys. "I don't know what hasn't happened. Ruth has shut herself into her room, after some sort of a tragic heart-to-heart talk with Father, and Mother and Father are scarcely speaking, and the cook is mad, and ruined the breakfast muffins and gave us bad eggs, or baddish eggs, for breakfast, and Sister won't see me. Piggy sent her a huge box of flowers this morning. I've got to stop calling him Piggy and call him Albert, I suppose. Wouldn't you know his name would be Albert? Isn't he the most Albertish person? Elizabeth, I never hated anybody so much in all my life. He never did me any harm, but I would be pleased and proud to—to choke him to death."

"So would I," sighed Elizabeth.

"Wasn't it funny, her getting that telegram from your brother just when she did? Sometimes I think she was keen on your brother, and sort of peeved because he didn't ever write to her when he got back. You don't suppose she'd get herself engaged to Piggy just out of pride, do you?"

"Oh, I don't know," Elizabeth cried.

"Anyhow, she took that telegram to bed with her, and it was all mussed up under her pillow. I know, because I made the beds this morning. Our treasure of a second maid went to mass, and stayed out to breakfast."

"What's all that whispering about?" Grandfather inquired, looking over his shoulder. "I've a great mind to just reach over and tech the whip to you," he made a movement toward an invisible whip socket. "I guess I won't. It makes Lizzie nervous to have me flourishing a whip around. I suppose you are trying to get all giggled and whispered up before you have to stop it and talk to the boys."

"We aren't giggling much this morning," Elizabeth said. "There they are on the corner, waving to us."

"Did you ever see such red hair?" Peggy said. "I like red-headed children and boys. I don't think I like red-headed girls so much. I think Mabel is awfully cunning with her red curls."

"Mabel? Oh, she has real auburn hair," Elizabeth said, "and it's beautiful. How do you do?" she returned Tom Robbins' greeting with more than a touch of her customary shyness as he scrambled for a place on the floor of the car at her feet.

"It's my turn," he insisted, as his friend Bill tried to argue the matter. "You ride with Captain Swift, and mind the rakes."

"You've got real nets!" Peggy cried. "How scrumptious! We just take rakes, you know."

"I don't know as the Swan Pond crabs will consent to do anything but be raked in," Grandfather said. "I heard of a boy once that caught a crab in one of those store nets, but it was a bad one."

"You wait and see," Tom said. "Our object is to catch crabs, and we are going to catch them."

"So am I," said Grandfather.

They left the machine in a clearing by the roadside, and, laden with nets and bait, made their way through a path among the underbrush, until they stood on the shore of Swan Lake. A blue sky, with here and there a winging cloud, met the low horizon, skirted with the dense green of low-set pine and oak trees. The gray-green water lapped the shore alluringly.

There was a general scramble to remove encumbering shoes and stockings.

"If anybody says, 'Come on in, the water's fine,' they'll owe me a pineapple college ice," Peggy declared, "or, if you prefer it in New York-ese, a pineapple sundae—though why they should think over there that by spelling Sunday with an e, they can make it a soda-fountain dish, I don't know."

"Don't you go jeering at the manners and customs of my native town," Elizabeth cried.

"Did your ancestors own most of New York?" Grandfather asked, innocently. "I thought most of Manhattan Island belonged to the Dutch."

"I don't know what my ancestors owned," Elizabeth said.

"They owned this, for instance," her grandfather waved a nonchalant hand at the beautiful country about him, "forty or fifty acres around these parts. My Great-grandfather Swift, he got kinder tired of having so much property, and he sold a chunk to the town for a cemetery, and one thing and another."

"Where did he live?" Elizabeth asked.

"Up the road apiece, in a great house that was burnt down long before my time. He was quite a likely old fellow, though, from all I can hear of him. He had a lot of stories told about him. He started a bank, and all his money was carted up to it in ox teams, because they didn't have anything but silver money in those days."

"Quite an influential old party, wasn't he?" Peggy said. "Doesn't it make you feel creepy, Elizabeth, to descend from the very oldest settlers, the way you do? I don't know anything about my ancestors."

"I never did before," Elizabeth said.

"The time is going to come when Elizabeth will be proud of what she comes from," her grandfather said. "Well, if anybody really wants to go crabbing with me, I'd advise them to——"

"Come in while the water's fine," the boys chanted together.

"I owe you a pineapple college ice," Bill grinned at Peggy.

"I owe you a pineapple sundae," Tom told Elizabeth.

"I wasn't betting," Elizabeth said.

"But I was," Tom's grin was almost as broad as his cousin's. "You can have a maple marshmallow sundae if you prefer it. I do."

"Well, it's hard to choose," Elizabeth temporized.

"You can have both," Tom decided. "I'll show you how to use the crab catcher. You float the bait on this line, and when the crab comes to the surface, you——"

But Grandfather, scorning artificial allurements, caught the first crab. The crab was scurrying away over the pebbles and shells at the bottom of the transparent water when Grandfather's inexorable implement caught him in mid-career, and he was imprisoned in the covered basket they had brought for the purpose.

"I didn't know that you could catch them so near the shore," Elizabeth said, looking down at her bare toes in some dismay, "do they hurt when they bite you?"

"The game is not to let them bite you," Peggy said. "Hooray! One for me—us, I mean."

"Three," said Grandfather, landing another.

"I've got the father and mother of all crabs here," Bill Dean said, as he dragged at the handle of his net. "Look at old Grandfather Crab."

"He isn't very pretty," Elizabeth said, "but I prefer him to a raw lobster. I never saw a green lobster till the other day."

"She was just making Judidy throw it out when I caught her at it," Grandfather laughed, "she said it was sick, and would give us all ptomaine poisoning, and the lobster was so mad when he heard it that he tried to claw poor Judidy's hand off."

"It is strange that they turn bright red after being bright green," Elizabeth said. "I think I prefer crabs."

"Come with me, and we'll get some," Tom said, taking possession of her.

"I guess we can rest now," he said a little later, "we got more than any of them."

"Did we?"

"Well, we got as many, anyhow. I'm hot, aren't you?"

Elizabeth mopped her forehead and smiled by way of answer.

"Look here," Tom said, "there is something I want to ask you, Miss Swift. If you don't like it you just have to say so, and I will understand and not ask you again. I was just wondering if I couldn't call you Elizabeth. Bill he's going to ask Peggy, I mean Miss Farraday, the same thing."

"I didn't know you had been calling me anything," Elizabeth said.

"Well, I haven't. I think last names are rather stiff, you know, and I didn't like to use your first name without permission."

"I'd just as soon have you call me by my first name," Elizabeth said, "if—if only——"

"You've got something in your mind about me that you aren't saying. If you think it's—well—fresh—of me, to ask you that question about first names, you can say so."

"I don't think that's fresh of you," Elizabeth said, "but I—well, I don't feel like talking in any way but a very straightforward and truthful way to-day. The thing I don't like, really, is the way you tried to get acquainted with us. Every time I think of that, I feel as if—well, I wish it hadn't happened, that's all."

"So do I," said Tom Robbins, soberly, "but I'll tell you something. I have never done anything like that before. We just made up our minds that we would, that's all. You know the way you make up your mind to try something that you've seen other people do."

"But I don't see why you tried it on us," said Elizabeth.

"I don't see why we did, either, except that we wanted to know you the most of any girls."

"I don't like to have a boy make me feel that he thinks I am a girl he can scrape acquaintance with," Elizabeth said. "It hurts my feelings."

"I wouldn't hurt your feelings for anything, and you ought to know now that I am not the kind of boy that does things like that, except for a lark. Don't you?"

"Don't I what?"

"Know that?"

"Yes, I guess I do."

"Well, then?"

"All right, you can call me Elizabeth."

"Peggy and I have caught more than you have," Bill shouted, as he came up with crawling crabs in his net.

"I guess it worked all right," Tom whispered to Elizabeth, "with them."

"Bill asked if he could call me Peggy," that young lady whispered to Elizabeth, on the way home. "I was so surprised I nearly fell over. I thought he always had. I've always called him Bill."

"I think boys sort of make up their minds to do a certain kind of thing, and then they do it," said Elizabeth, "without thinking whether it is really appropriate or not."

"I guess you are right," Peggy said, "and now that we've had this pleasant afternoon, we'll just have to take up the burden of our gloomy thoughts again."

"I know it," said Elizabeth, forlornly.