Читать книгу Jean Craig in New York - Kay Lyttleton - Страница 4

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It was just five days before Christmas when a pink express card arrived in the noon mail. The Craigs knew there must be something unusual in the mail, for Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, had lingered at the end of the drive.

Jean, the oldest of the four children, slipped into a coat and stadium boots and ran down the drive to see what he wanted.

“There’s something for you folks at the express office, I guess. If it’s anything heavy I suggest you go down and get it today. Looks like we’d have some snow before nightfall.” He waited while Jean glanced at the card. “Know what it is?”

“Why, no, I don’t believe I do,” she answered. “We’ve gotten all our Christmas packages. Maybe they’re books for Dad.”

“Like enough,” said Mr. Ricketts. “I didn’t know. I always feel a little bit interested, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” laughed Jean, as he started his truck. She hurried back to the house, her head down against the wind. The front door banged as Kit, fifteen and two years younger than Jean, let her in, her hands floury from baking.

“For Pete’s sake, why do you stand talking all day to that old gossip? Any mail from the West?”

The previous spring, the Craig family had moved to Elmhurst, Connecticut, because of Mr. Craig’s health. Due to a war injury, he had required a complete rest. At the suggestion of his cousin Rebecca, the family had left Long Island to live on a farm. Rural living was far different from anything Jean, Kit, thirteen-year-old Doris, and eleven-year-old Tommy were used to, but they grew to love it more and more as they made new friends and discovered the never-ending surprises that the country held for them.

As told in Jean Craig Grows Up, the family met their landlord, Ralph McRae, a young good-looking boy of twenty-four, from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who was immediately attracted to Jean. When he returned to his western ranch, he took Buzzy Hancock, his cousin and Kit’s best friend, back with him. Now, Jean was finding it hard to wait for the summer to come when Ralph and Buzzy would return.

With a letter from Ralph in her hand, Jean answered Kit’s questions hurriedly. “Mr. Ricketts only wanted to know about an express package, whether it was heavy or light, where it came from, and if we expected it.” She piled the rest of the mail on the dining room table. “There is no mail from Saskatoon for you, Kit, only for me.”

“Oh, I thought maybe Buzzy might have written to me. The mug, he promised to send me a silver fox skin for Christmas, if he could find one. I’m going to give up waiting for it. With Christmas five days away, he surely would have sent it by now.”

Kit’s face was perfectly serious. Buzzy had asked her before he left Elmhurst what she would like best, and she had told him. The others laughed at her, but she held firmly to the idea that if it were possible, Buzzy would get it for her.

Jean was engrossed in a five-page letter from Ralph and had paid no attention to Kit’s remarks. She finished reading the letter, full of Christmas wishes and regret for having to be away from her, especially during the holiday season, and opened another from one of the students at the Academy back in New York. The previous winter, Jean had studied art there and had been sorry to give it up.

“Peg Moffat is taking up impressionism.” Jean turned back to the first page of the letter she had been reading. “She says she never fully realized before that art is only the highest form of expressing your ideals to the world at large.”

“Tell her she’s all wrong.” Kit looked up from her seed catalogues. “Becky told me the other day she believes schools were first invented for the relief of distressed parents just to give them a breathing spell, and not for kids at all.”

“Still, if Peg’s hit a new trail of interest, it will make her think she’s really working. Things have come to her so easily, she doesn’t appreciate them. Perhaps she can express herself now.”

“Express herself? For gosh sakes, Jeannie, tell her to come up here, and we’ll let her express herself all over the place. Gee! Just smell my mince pies this minute. Isn’t cooking an expression of individual art too?” And Kit made a beeline for the oven in time to rescue four mince pies.

“Who’s going to drive down after the package?” asked Mrs. Craig from the doorway. “I want to send an order for groceries too and you’ll want to be back before dark.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mom,” called Kit from the kitchen, “but Lucy and some of the girls are coming over and I promised them I’d go after evergreen and Princess pine. We’re getting it for wreaths and stars to decorate the church.”

“Tommy and I’ll go. I love the drive.” Jean handed Peg’s letter over to Kit to read, and gave just a bit of a sigh. Nobody could possibly have sustained any inward melancholy at Woodhow. There was too much to be done every minute of the day. Still, Peg’s letter did bring back vividly memories of last winter at the Art Academy. Perhaps the students did take themselves and their aims too seriously, yet it had all been wonderful and interesting. Even in the peaceful countryside, Jean missed the companionship of girls her own age, with the same tastes and interests as herself.

She called to Tommy, who was down in the basement making a model airplane, and told him to come with her to the express office. He came upstairs under protest, his face smeared with dirt.

“Gosh, Tommy, you look a sight. If you’re going to come with me, you’ll have to wash first. Look at your hands.”

“Gee, whiz,” he grumbled, “what’s the use in washing all the time. A guy only gets dirty again, anyway.” But he leisurely went upstairs and came down again after what seemed to Jean an unnecessarily long time.

“What took you so long, anyway? Hurry up. I don’t want to be driving after dark.”

“OK, OK, I’m coming.” And the two went out the back door to the garage.

It was only a drive of seven miles to Nantic, but the children never tired of the ride. It was so still and dreamlike with the early winter silence on the land. At the mill house, Lucy Peckham waved to them. Along the riverside meadows they saw the two little Peckham boys driving sheep with Shep, their black and white dog, barking madly at the foot of a tall hickory tree.

“Look, Tommy, see those red berries in that thicket overhanging the rail fence? Will you get out and pick me some?” Jean stopped the car and Tommy jumped out. A car passed going the other way while Jean was waiting, and she recognized the driver as the stationmaster’s son.

“Somebody is coming home for Christmas, I guess,” she remarked to Tommy when he came back.

Jean drove on with her chin up, cheeks rosy and eyes alert. When they drove up in front of the express office, Tommy didn’t want to wait in the car, so they walked up the steps of the office together. Just as they opened the door, they caught the voice of Mr. Briggs, the agent, not pleasant and sociable as it usually was, but sharp and high-pitched.

“Well, you can’t loaf around here, son, I tell you that right now. The minute I spied you hiding behind that stack of ties down the track, I knew you’d run away from some place, and I’m going to find out all about you and let your family know you’re caught.”

“I ain’t got any family,” came back a boy’s voice hopefully. “I’m my own boss and can go where I please.”

“Did you hear that, Jean?” exclaimed Mr. Briggs, turning around at the opening of the door. “Just size him up, will you. He says he’s his own boss, and he’s no bigger than a pint of cider. Where did you come from?”

“Off a freight train.”

Mr. Briggs leaned his hands on his knees and bent down to get his face on a level with the boy’s.

“Isn’t he slick, though? Can’t get a bit of real information out of him except that he liked the looks of Nantic and dropped off the slow freight when she was shunting back and forth up yonder. What’s your name?”

“Jack. Jack Davis.” He didn’t look at Mr. Briggs, but off at the hills, windswept and bare except for their patches of green pines. There was a curious expression in his eyes, Jean thought, not loneliness, but a dumb fatalism. As Becky might have said, it was as if he had known nothing but trouble and didn’t expect anything better.

“How old are you?”

“’Bout nine or ten.”

“What made you drop off that freight here?”

Jack was silent and seemed embarrassed. Tommy, who had been eyeing him curiously, responded instantly.

“Because you like it best, isn’t that why?” he suggested eagerly. Jack’s face brightened up at that.

“I liked the looks of the hills, but when I saw all them mills, I—I thought I’d get some work maybe.”

“You’re too little,” Mr. Briggs cut in. “I’m going to hand you right over to the proper authorities, and you’ll land up in the State Home for Boys if you haven’t got any folks of your own.”

Jack met the shrewd gray eyes doubtfully. His own filled with tears that rose slowly and dropped on his worn short coat. He put his hand up to his shirt collar and held on to it tightly as if he would have kept back the ache there, and Jean’s heart could stand it no longer.

“I think he belongs up at Woodhow, please, Mr. Briggs,” she said quickly. “I know Mother and Dad will take him up there if he hasn’t any place to go, and we’ll look after him. I’m sure of it. He can drive back with us.”

“But you don’t know where he came from nor anything about him, Jean. I tell you he’s just a little tramp. You can see that, or he wouldn’t be hitching on to freight trains. That’s no way to do if you’re decent God-fearing folks, riding freights and dodging trainmen.”

“Let me take him home with me now, anyway,” pleaded Jean. “We can find out about him, later. It’s Christmas Friday, remember, Mr. Briggs.”

There was no resisting the appeal that underlay her words, and Mr. Briggs relented gracefully, although he maintained the county school was the proper receptacle for all such human rubbish.

Jean laughed at him happily, as he stood with his feet wide apart, his hands thrust into his coat pockets.

“It’s your own affair, Jean,” he returned dubiously. “I wouldn’t stand in your way so long as you see fit to take him along. But he’s just human rubbish. Want to go, Jack?”

And Jack rose, wiping his eyes with his coat sleeve, and glared resentfully back at Mr. Briggs. He took the smaller package, Tommy the other, and the three left the office.

“Guess we can all squeeze into the front seat,” Jean said. “We’re going down to the store, and then home.”