Читать книгу The Greycliff Girls in Camp - Harriet Pyne Grove - Страница 5

Table of Contents

It was eleven o’clock the next morning before the girls were finally rounded up for breakfast or lunch, as they might choose to call it. For this they went to an attractive place not far from the hotel where June again found ripe strawberries, big and luscious.

“You’ll turn into a strawberry, June,” said Hilary, but June only pointed to the dishes of the same natural product on all the other trays in the cafeteria procession, as she replied, “I don’t eat so many more than the rest of you,—I just say more about it.”

“By the way, Miss West,” continued Hilary, “we’re going in victorias, aren’t we?”

“How many vote for victorias?” asked Patricia, “hands up.” Every hand at the little table went up, and as the girls at the table close by had heard the question, theirs as well were lifted.

“It is already arranged. Several of you had spoken of it—victorias it is. Now for shopping. I will go with Marjorie, Jean and Rhoda, for they seem to have the most to do. The rest of you meet us at the hotel in not less than an hour. There is a drug store right here on the corner, a department store half block in that direction. Keep in mind this corner and the way to the hotel. Hilary, you are in charge.”

Hilary pretended to be much honored and the rest of the girls began to joke her by asking if they might do the most obviously proper things. But they had little shopping to do and arranged to meet at the entrance of the big store.

“Listen,” said Cathalina, as they were returning to the hotel. “That boy has a French paper. I’m going to get one. I had no idea that Montreal was so French, though I heard some French spoken on the boat, of course.”

“I heard a lady say that Montreal is fifty per cent French, and that of that fifty per cent ninety per cent can not speak English.”

“No wonder, then, Betty, that they have both French and English on the shop signs. I should like to spend a summer up here some time. No need of going abroad to keep up your French!” Later, Cathalina discovered that McGill University has many such summer pupils.

Duly at two-thirty, three victorias, drivers high in the air, rolled away from the hotel to see the Canadian city of Montreal.

“O, I feel so English,” sighed Marjorie.

“Me, too,” said Rhoda, “but I think they ought to be called ‘Queen Marys’ now instead of victorias!”

“Did you notice, Rhoda,” drawled Helen, “what our elderly waiter said to you last night?”

“About my ‘’am sandwich’? Wasn’t I good not even to smile?”

“You were indeed, and so were the rest of us, I think, though Lil gave me one look that almost upset me. She kept as sober as an owl, of course. I didn’t want to make fun of any one, but I never heard the h’s dropped, outside of a book or a movie.”

“Did you ever hear it in either?”

“Well, you know what I mean!”

“Gently, girls, the driver might hear you,” warned Miss Patty, who made the fourth passenger in this vehicle.

The first place at which the driver stopped was in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. The girls ran up the broad stone steps which led to the entrance. Silently they entered, viewed the brilliant interior, the altars and shrines with their candles, walked quietly down the aisle to the right past a kneeling worshipper who was telling her beads before a shrine, and into a part of the building to the rear of the altar.

“I can translate that,” whispered Marjorie to Cathalina as they looked at the inscriptions upon the wall. “‘Silence in the holy place’.” (Silence dans le lieu saint.)

“Notice the Latin inscriptions, too,—‘Oculos ad nos converte’—”

Hilary lingered a little to drop a coin into a box and came out with her eyes full of tears. “I’ve been brought up in another kind of service,” she explained to June, “but this touches me some way.”

“It’s the Lord’s house,” replied June solemnly.

“And some people’s faith and hope.”

“Des Jardins,” read Cathalina on the windows of a store where the victorias were stopping. “I did not catch what the man said and I was in the last victoria,” she explained later to one of the party, “so imagine my surprise, after having translated it ‘gardens’ and expecting to find flowers, to see this wonderful fur store.”

A great display of furs it was. The girls all longed to buy some at the summer prices, but had not planned for any large expenditures on this trip.

“Mother usually buys her furs up north,” said Betty, “since Auntie lives there, you know.”

“Look at the darling white moccasins!” Hilary and June immediately decided to purchase a pair for Mary, and several of the party bought the bead-trimmed, leather moccasins before they left Montreal.

The ascent of Mt. Royal was made by easy stages, around a beautiful, winding drive, past rocks and grassy slopes, interesting varieties of trees and bushes, skirting a bridle path part of the way, till finally the “look out”, “La Terrasse d’Observatoire au Mont-Royal” was reached and a fine view of the city and river obtained.

“Just see me come up here some summer,” said Cathalina, as she leaned upon the parapet next to Betty, “and read French while I live in some French family and talk it all the time.”

When evening came, it was decided that in view of the long trip the next day no outside entertainment should be sought.

“Let’s make it unanimous for bed,” suggested Hilary, who intended in any event to see that June was early in the land of dreams.

“I vote with Hilary,” said Jean. “My brain can’t hold so much at one time. I can’t remember all I’ve seen today!”

Helen, Evelyn and the three younger girls were with Miss West in a suite of two rooms and bath. Hilary with June and Lilian, and Betty with Cathalina were in adjoining rooms not far away. Like the girls, Patricia dropped to sleep early, thinking about how perfectly everything was going about the trip, and how lovely and sensible her girls were. “And Cathalina has had so much experience in traveling.” But if she had known what was happening that night scarcely the proverbial forty winks would have been hers.

Waking early, and dozing uneasily for a while for fear that she would oversleep, Miss West rose and dressed, wakened the girls that were with her, saw that they were really roused and getting ready, and went to call the rest. In the room occupied by Cathalina and Betty she heard voices as she tapped on the door. “Up already, are you?” she said, as Betty, fully dressed, threw open the door and several somewhat excited voices began, “O, Miss West,—”

“Where did you find the pocketbook?” Hilary was asking Cathalina.

“Right there, on the floor.”

“And was nothing but the money gone?”

“That was all.” Cathalina was quite cool.

“What is this?” asked Patricia.

“Why, Miss Patricia, I seem to have been robbed last night,—but don’t worry. I don’t mind, really, though I wish I’d spent it yesterday!”

Miss West sat down on the bed. “Do you mean to tell me that your room was broken into last night? Tell me all about it. Did you wake up and see the robber?”

“Mercy, I hadn’t thought that we might! Wouldn’t it have been terrible? There isn’t much to tell. You see we didn’t lock the door—”

“I thought you girls always did that.—O, if I had only come and tucked you all in!”

“It wasn’t your fault at all, and really we meant to lock the door as usual. Indeed we do lock it, Miss West. You see, we were waiting for ice water and got too sleepy to have any sense, I guess. We rang and the boy didn’t come, and then we waited a while and were just nearly falling over with sleep,—”

“After being out in the air all day,” inserted Betty.

“But your door should have been locked until he came.”

“Yes; we didn’t know it wasn’t. I put a tip on the table to have it ready, and I finally crawled into bed with my Kimono on, after ringing again,—and I woke up with it on this morning! The door was wide open, my purse on the floor and the money gone. Please don’t scold, Miss West; truly we won’t be so careless again.”

“My dear, I never felt less like scolding, and am only too thankful that nothing happened to you and that you were not awakened or frightened. But it is odd, Cathalina, for I thought of going in again to see if you were all right, then I thought ‘Cathalina has traveled so much that she will let me know if they need anything’ and went off to sleep more peacefully than usual! Do you remember how much was in the purse?”

“About twenty dollars, I think. I have some besides, that wasn’t in the pocketbook, and my check-book.”

“I was going to say that I can attend to all your expenses, of course.”

“Shall I write Mother about it?”

“I wouldn’t send a telegram,” Betty suggested with a laugh.

“When you get safely into camp she will not worry. You can write the details then. It is safely over now and will teach us all a lesson in making sure that it is not too easy for some thief to get our money.”

“It must be great to have your own check-book and money in the bank,” whispered June to Hilary. “Is Cathalina awful rich?”

“‘Very,’ not ‘awful,’” corrected June’s elder sister. “Yes, you know how much I have told you about their lovely home and servants and everything. Cathalina has about everything she wants.”

“I will speak to the hotel people about it, but I fancy that we shall never see the money,” Miss West was saying to Cathalina. “Perhaps we can find out whether the bellboy ever came or not.”

There was little time for any detective work. Breakfast must be eaten, bags packed, and an early departure made to the train. Cathalina dismissed the matter, and by the time the party was on the train bound for Portland everybody else seemed to have forgotten it. Patricia had an occasional shiver whenever she thought of her sleeping girls with their door opened by some prowler, but the necessary arrangements of the present often most fortunately crowd out the too vivid memory of some unpleasant occurrence.

“Here’s our last look at Montreal,” said Evelyn, as the train drew away from the city. “There are two square towers of Notre Dame.”

“Goodbye, Mt. Royal,” and June waved her hand blithely. Too many good times were ahead of them all for regrets.

“This is the Canadian Pacific bridge, I suppose,” said Rhoda, “that we saw when we came down the river,—yes, there is the Indian village that hasn’t any streets.”

“I’ve seen my last French sign, I guess,” remarked Cathalina. “It was at the crossing. ‘Traverse Du Chemin De Fer’ was one cross-piece and ‘Railroad Crossing’ on the other.”

They were comfortably settled for the all day trip to Portland in a chair car and looked very serious when an official appeared to ask them if they had bought anything in Canada. They began to open their suit-cases or bags and told of their moccasins at once, but in their sincere faces the most suspicious of custom officers could find no guile.

“It’s the Green Mountains that we see first, girls, then the White Mountains. The conductor said so.” Jean was looking at the map in her folder. “And we’re not in the United States right away after crossing the St. Lawrence.”

As Hawthorne’s Tales of the White Hills are usually read in that department of school work known as “English”, these girls were quite interested in finding, among post cards bought on the train, a photograph of the “Great Stone Face”. “I hadn’t thought of it myself,” said Patty, “that these are Hawthorne’s White Hills at last.”

“This scenery is the most lovely of all we have seen,” said Lilian.

They had been watching the clouds floating about the hill-tops, little cascades leaping down the rugged heights, pretty glens, little streams, lakes and rocky cliffs. Yet beautiful as the scenery was, no one could keep in a state of rapture all the time. At intervals Cathalina read her French papers. Other papers and magazines were passed around, or the girls chatted happily about many things. It was a day to be remembered, and interesting to have celebrated “Dominion Day” in Canada, this “glorious Fourth”, or most of it, in New England.

“What do you think about it, girls?” asked Miss West of a few near her, as they were nearing Portland. “Was it worth the trouble to take the trip?”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” cried Marjorie, and seemed to express the general sentiment.

A sight-seeing trip in Portland the next day showed them its buildings and parks, and Casco Bay with its schooners, sail-boats and freighters of all sorts. On Congress Street they saw the home of Longfellow, “next to Keith’s!” This struck the girls as particularly funny. “‘From the sublime to the ridiculous’ both literally and figuratively,” said Hilary.

The journey to Bath seemed incredibly short in comparison with the long trips which they had been having. It was the Maine country, with its buttercups, daisies, wild roses, evergreens, and the aged rocks peeping out here and there,—and now they had arrived at Bath, with nothing but a boat ride between them and camp!