Читать книгу Jane's Island - Marjorie Hill Allee - Страница 8

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The Thomas family gathered in the dining-room promptly at half-past six, subdued and dressed for dinner. Ellen had helped Jane into a thin little frock with rows of beautiful smocking.

‘Mother made it,’ she answered Ellen’s admiring question without enthusiasm. ‘It buttons down the back of my neck, you see, and I never can reach the lowest button. Will you do it for me?’

Walter and his father, in fresh white, looked particularly well sunburnt; the elder was an easy, kindly man, who appeared to have forgotten that Ellen was expected until she was introduced, but to be very glad she was there.

‘We thought we were very lucky to find a guide, philosopher, and friend for Jane, so well recommended and so late in the season,’ he said, pleasing Ellen very much. ‘The fact is, I was instructed to inquire around earlier in the year, but it always slipped my mind whenever I wrote to my friends in colleges fortunate enough to have girl students. Jeffrey hasn’t.’

‘Father is just like that,’ Ellen said with a twinkle. ‘Not absent-minded, of course, but just occupied with more important matters.’

‘Ah, yes!’ said Dr. Thomas, twinkling back nicely. ‘And yet your father is not a college professor?’

‘No; Father’s a business man—insurance.’

‘I can see perfectly—always obliged to think about rates and liabilities and probabilities.’

Ellen nodded and smiled. ‘Mrs. Thomas,’ she ventured to say, ‘those pink roses are lovely in the blue-and-gray jar.’

Mrs. Thomas’s hot face lit with real pleasure. ‘—The blue-and-gray jar! John, will you take this platter? That is a ginger jar I bought in New Bedford, an old one; of course my Canton dishes are new, but they go well with the jar.’

‘And how well the chicken goes with the blue-and-white platter,’ her husband remarked cheerfully. ‘Sit down, Mother. If we need anything more, which hardly seems possible, Walter or Jane can hop up for it. I need your advice for dividing up this beautiful fowl.’

‘Just see that Ellen has a good slice of the breast,’ said Mrs. Thomas. ‘The rest of us as usual.’

She looked around in pleased approval. Every detail of the table was in perfect order, from the coarse linen mats to the firm yellow butter-balls on the blue-and-white plates; and all of it was set off by the background of pale gray walls and many small-paned windows, hung with brightly printed linen.

‘Did you have a good afternoon?’ she asked the girls. ‘It was a great comfort to have Jane in competent hands. There are so many things to be done about a new house!’

Ellen was inwardly a little doubtful whether Jane had been in her hands for the afternoon or she in Jane’s, but she answered in Jane’s silence, ‘We fished in the Eel Pond.’

‘In the Eel Pond! Jane might have found a less smelly spot for your first afternoon in Woods Hole.’

‘It was very interesting,’ Ellen hastened to say. ‘I caught a toadfish.’

Mrs. Thomas sighed. ‘A toadfish! I said that Jane went native in the summers; but that is a slander. No native in his right mind would fish in the Eel Pond for toadfish. Jane, why didn’t you try for a nice flounder off the pier? Father likes flounder; we could have had it for lunch tomorrow.’

For the first time Walter spoke up. ‘I’ll ask them to give us a flounder from the fish traps tomorrow, Mother, if they get any.’

‘Oh, don’t bother!’ his mother said hastily. ‘Thank you, Walter, but the mackerel are much easier to dress and we like them just as well.’

‘Then why——?’ the boy began impatiently.

‘Your mother was just trying to think of a more ladylike amusement for Jane,’ Dr. Thomas intervened, with a smile for Jane. ‘Now listen to me. Jane hasn’t gone native; Jane has gone scientific. I know the symptoms. She doesn’t mind what is ordinarily called dirt so long as she can find interesting things in it, and our soupy old Eel Pond certainly has a great many queer things thriving in it. I don’t know what the Laboratory would do without the Eel Pond; it’s almost as useful as the Hole.

‘I tell you, Jane’—he pointed a fork at her. ‘Why can’t you help me out in the morning and aid the cause of science? I need some more of those planaria we get on Nobska Beach. I’ll pay you a penny apiece for all you bring in. Alfred says they are getting scarce and the Collecting Crew hates to bother looking for them.’

Jane lifted grateful brown eyes. ‘I don’t need to be paid,’ she said. ‘Ellen and I would love to look for them. Wouldn’t you, Ellen?’

‘Surely,’ Ellen answered gallantly, wondering if these were anything like toadfishes. ‘What do you say they are?’

‘Planaria,’ Jane said glibly.

‘Planaria,’ Ellen repeated. ‘I wouldn’t know one from a sea-serpent, but you could show me.’

Walter and Jane looked concerned, but their father smiled.

‘Jane can tell you all about them. She’s better at finding planaria than the whole Collecting Crew, Walter included.’

‘They’re tiny things,’ Jane began eagerly, ‘brown and sort of slimy—— ’

‘Jane!’ cautioned her mother. ‘Not at table!’

Jane subsided into silence, and began to cut her salad, with great pains to spill none of the dressing on the mat under her plate. It was a difficult operation for her; she grasped her fork hard and studied the lettuce before she attempted each new mouthful.

Ellen said, to make agreeable conversation, ‘Jane swam very well this afternoon.’

‘Indeed she does swim well,’ agreed Dr. Thomas heartily.

‘Jane has won prizes in the water sports for two years now,’ said her mother with pride. ‘And some of the children who go into those have had expensive swimming instructors. Jane’s only trouble is that she sometimes takes risks too great for her strength. That was why we were particularly anxious to know if you swam. How did you like the water this afternoon?’

Ellen laughed. ‘Very much; but Jane was right. She told me that I would think it was queer to find the water salty, and I did, for all that I’ve read about the salt sea. Swimming-tanks and Lake Michigan are all I’ve ever tried before, and when I got a good taste of the ocean today it seemed as if there must have been a mistake!’

‘And next you’ll be saying, “How funny the tides are!” ’ Jane observed wisely. ‘You’ll say, “Why, yesterday there was water all over these stones!” ’

‘I suppose I shall,’ Ellen said good-naturedly, but flushing a little. ‘I expect to know a lot of new things by the end of the summer. I like having so much water. It’s all around, isn’t it? Jane says we swam in Buzzard’s Bay this afternoon.’

‘That’s what you get for coming to the elbow of the Cape,’ said Dr. Thomas. ‘There’s all of Vineyard Sound on one side, and all of Buzzard’s Bay on the other. If you go up on the highest hill of the golf course you can see both. And then there’s the Hole in between the Sound and the Bay, not to mention the Eel Pond and the Mill Pond in the middle of the village—and the swamp where the skunks live! Jane, you must take Ellen rowing on the Mill Pond in a nice safe dory that can’t run out of gasoline.’

Jane made a face at him. ‘Now that Ellen is here, we can go out with the motor!’

Dr. Thomas did not commit himself to this proposition. ‘What do you know about boats, Ellen?’

‘Not very much,’ Ellen confessed. ‘I can row a boat in the lagoon at Jackson Park!’

‘Excellent!’ he said cheerfully. ‘There is nothing better than to know how to row back when the motor fails! But I suspect you had better learn both our outboard motor and these waters before you venture far. We might begin to teach you this evening. Mother, wouldn’t you like to go out with us for a little while before I have to look at my experiment again?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly!’ said Mrs. Thomas. ‘Not tonight. I’m planning to finish the slip-cover for the big chair tonight. If I don’t keep at work, the house won’t be ready for my tea. But the girls may change their dresses and go.’

Jane ran upstairs with alacrity. ‘Put on something really old,’ she urged, and Ellen obediently dug a worn short skirt and a slipover sweater out of her trunk.

‘Your bathing-suit would have been better,’ Jane said critically, ‘but of course it is wet and would feel icky!’

Jane herself was comfortable again in her khaki shirt and shorts. She danced away down the flagstones beside Walter, whose knees were again illuminated with green and with red.

His father chuckled at the sight. ‘Walter’s very proud of those patches,’ he told Ellen. ‘Starboard and larboard lights, you know—green to the right, red to the left! He actually sewed them on for himself. He is on the Laboratory Collecting Crew this summer and I wonder that he doesn’t frighten the little fishes. Short cut, Jane?’

‘No!’ Jane called back emphatically. ‘Mrs. Ryan has a detestable new summer renter in her garage and he has the gate nailed up. He has no manners, even if he is a foreigner!’

‘Really? Well, Mrs. Ryan has been very kind to let us trespass as long as we have.’

‘It’s not Mrs. Ryan,’ Jane answered emphatically. ‘It’s that man.’

‘What do you think of Jane?’ her father inquired in a lower voice as he and Ellen walked along behind the other two.

Ellen hesitated. ‘I like Jane very much,’ she said at last. ‘But I would be a fraud if I let you think I could always manage her. Of course I could pull her out of the water if she needed that, and I hope I could see that she didn’t get hurt, but I think that Jane will mostly manage me!’

‘Good!’ said Dr. Thomas surprisingly to this confession. ‘That’s just what I hoped of you, though I feared we couldn’t get it. Of course the most important thing is for you to see that Jane doesn’t get hurt. She’s at a venturesome age and she needs to venture and try herself out. You go along with her, and if she gets into trouble, don’t blame yourself; just help her out.’

Ellen thought about this. ‘Mrs. Thomas,’ she said, ‘seemed to think that Jane needed to pay more attention to clothes and manners.’

‘I never believed manners could be taught,’ the other said. ‘They have to be absorbed from the people with whom you live; I want Jane’s manners to be pleasant, but I want them to be real.

‘Of course, since we have a nice new house, Mrs. Thomas wants us to match. Our old khakis aren’t as suitable to it as they were to the old camp; but she’ll see to it that we dress up; you needn’t worry about that!

‘You see, if you can,’ he added, ‘that both Jane and her mother have an easier time this summer than they could without you. Jane realizes that her world is beginning to expect her to grow up, and she doesn’t like the idea; she’s setting her heels and hanging back as hard as she can against it; except when she wants to run the car or the outboard motor or swim out to the fish traps!’

His eye was caught by the figure of a man limping down the path ahead of them.

‘New man,’ he commented. ‘I haven’t had time to learn all the investigators this season.’

They had reached the railing along the Eel Pond before they came up with the man leaning there, a solitary figure, watching the violet and rose reflections of the sunset in the waters. The light was full on his face, showing with painful distinctness the premature gray of his closely cut hair and the deep scar across the left cheek bone of his thin, unhappy face.

The young people swerved to one side to pass him, but Dr. Thomas shot one astonished glance at him and stopped in full stride. He put one hand on the stranger’s shoulder and there was no mistaking the recognition and the welcome in his voice.

‘Fritz!’ he cried. ‘You here? Why didn’t you send word that you were coming? How are you? What can you tell me about München?’

The man turned slowly, looking almost frightened; then the light of recognition came into his face as well; but he did not take Dr. Thomas’s outstretched hand. He backed away a little and bowed from the hips.

‘It is Dr. Thomas,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’

Jane crept back to nudge Ellen with a sharp little elbow and Ellen nodded. The voice was that of the man who had ordered them away from Mrs. Ryan’s back gate.

‘I couldn’t think of another scientist I should rather see at Woods Hole this summer,’ said Dr. Thomas. ‘Not only on account of those good days at Munich when we were young, but also because your work and mine are so much in the same field that we ought to be able to help each other a great deal. The experiments I am working on this summer are the most critical I have undertaken. Do you keep up with my work? I have sent you accounts of mine whenever I knew where you were. There was a time after the war when I lost you; but I have read all your reports that I could find.’

‘My address was a hospital for some years,’ said the other. ‘Yes, I have read what I could get, natürlich; perhaps I have missed something. In Germany we are not yet rich enough to subscribe to all the American journals; I shall try to repair that defect this summer.’

Contrasted with Dr. Thomas’s generous welcome, his manner was distinctly dampening, but Ellen did not feel the same resentment toward him that had struck her in the afternoon. She noticed that he felt for the railing behind him and braced himself against it, and that as he moved his lame leg the lines about his mouth tightened. Dr. Thomas seemed suddenly older and quieter again, though no less cordial.

‘Wouldn’t you like to go out with us in our boat for a little while?’ he asked. ‘You used to like that. The children and I are off for a half-hour’s exploring. This is Miss McNeill and my daughter Jane and my son Walter, Dr. von Bergen. We were students together at the University of Munich when we were young, a long time ago.’

Again the man pulled himself erect and bowed from the hips. ‘Thank you, no,’ he said. ‘I must go on to the Laboratory. I hope to be able to begin work in earnest in the morning. Time is short, and much of mine was wasted by the war.’

‘Then,’ said Dr. Thomas, ‘let me go with you and see what I can do to help you. Children, I’m sorry, but we won’t go out in the boat tonight. I’ll try to make time for it tomorrow afternoon if Walter can go out.’

Jane dropped her father’s hand and scowled at their new acquaintance, who did not even give her the pleasure of noticing her.

‘Do not let me change your plans,’ said von Bergen irritably. ‘I did not come here to ask favors.’

‘It is no favor,’ the other answered. ‘I shall learn as much as you do.’

Dr. von Bergen studied his face for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he rumbled. His voice, Ellen thought, was like the first warning growl of a cross dog. He braced himself on his cane and the two went off together.

‘Couldn’t you take us out, Walter?’ asked Jane, with a threat of tears in her voice, but Walter yawned, stretched his long arms above his head, and turned back homeward.

‘Long day tomorrow,’ he answered. ‘I’ve got to get up early to get some stuff for a man that wants to use it at eight.’

Jane picked up a stone beside the road and slung it viciously into the dying colors of the calm Eel Pond. ‘All right!’ she said. ‘All right! But I will put dead fish under his window!’

Walter was too far ahead to hear and Ellen thought it best to disregard this outburst. ‘Let’s go home and see about the crab,’ she proposed.

‘Did Mother say I might have it?’ Jane demanded.

‘She did. She was very sweet about it. I said I’d be responsible for his good behavior.’

‘Are-you-ever-nice!’ Jane exclaimed with grateful emphasis. She seized Ellen round the waist and hugged her with her thin strong arms until both were breathless, and then she trotted uncomplainingly up the hill.

In spite of her best intentions and the flashlight under her pillow, Jane forgot to wake in the night to inspect her crab.

‘Just as well,’ she admitted in the morning, examining the crab as he clattered around in his glass prison. ‘I can’t see that his claw has sprouted the slightest more. I’ll put him in the aquarium today.’

This proved to be a wooden bucket two thirds full of sea-water, standing under a shady wild grapevine in the back yard, and containing among its rocks and sea-plants red and purple starfishes and various other crusty animals.

‘We must carry it down to the beach this afternoon and get fresh water,’ Jane admonished herself, placing the little crab where he could conveniently scuttle under a stone.

‘Do you have any of the what-do-you-call-them, that we are going to get for your father this morning?’ Ellen asked.

‘Planaria? No. I like to get them for Father, but, personally, I don’t care much for them,’ said Jane. ‘They’re not a bit exciting.

‘Jiminy! We ought to hurry! Low tide is about nine this morning on the Vineyard side, and we have to eat our breakfasts and wash our dishes and straighten the room. Would you do the room? I can wash dishes pretty well, even if I do hate it, but Mother says I don’t have any feeling for pulling a sheet straight.’

It was not much later when they went off carrying an empty wooden bucket, twin to that in which Jane’s animals lived.

‘Hear that foghorn?’ said Jane. ‘That’s where we’re going, to the beach just this side of the Nobska Light.’ There was a certain grayness in the air that Ellen would not have thought of calling fog, until by devious ways they reached the Nobska Beach and saw their view across the water ending in haze, through which they could sometimes see the dim outlines of the islands and sometimes not. Across the deserted beach the mournful foghorn hooted at regular intervals from its station on a low headland, and a white lighthouse kept guard above it.

The end of the white sand beach was piled with little rocks and big angular boulders among which flapped harmless little waves. Bucket in hand, Jane balanced her way out across the uneven rocks until she reached a little pool sheltered from the sea by a great red granite boulder. Here she settled herself on a smaller flat-topped rock with her feet tucked as much out of the way as possible and began fishing in the pool in front of her for small stones, such as she could comfortably lift with one hand.

‘Come on,’ she told Ellen, ‘I’ll show you how to find them. Get yourself a good rock to sit on. That one has too many sharp barnacles.’

The barnacled rock was, however, the only seat conveniently near, and Ellen heroically took it, finding that it was not too bad if she did not move suddenly. By the time she had selected two smaller rocks on which to brace her feet, Jane had made her first catch. She showed Ellen proudly a dozen tiny things like so many bits of gelatine, moving about very slowly on the underside of the rock she had last picked up.

‘I’m going to put these into the bucket, rocks and all,’ she said. ‘They need a few rocks to live on; I think it keeps them from being homesick. But mostly we’ll wash them off into the water in the bucket with this pipette,’ and she produced from her shirt pocket one of the glass and rubber combinations that Ellen had always called medicine droppers.

‘That was a good start,’ Jane bragged. ‘I can always find planaria better than anybody. Most of the Collecting Crew hate to bother with them, they are so tiny.’

‘What is the Collecting Crew?’ Ellen asked politely.

Jane paused in her careful inspection of a dripping green stone to regard Ellen with pity.

‘You know there is a Laboratory here?’ she asked, as one would remind a good but backward child. ‘And biologists work in it—lots of biologists, three or four hundred—and of course they have to have animals to work with, unless they are botanists, and then they have to have seaweed. Well! The Collecting Crew gets the animals for them.’

‘Oh!’ said Ellen. ‘What other animals do they collect besides planaria?’

‘They almost never collect planaria,’ Jane informed her, ‘and Father says it’s a very good thing, too, because there aren’t many planaria, not much more than a good supply for his work. They collect sea-urchins and starfish and Nereis and lots of things. I’ll take you out to see them do it sometime.’

‘Thank you,’ said Ellen, shifting uneasily on her rock and hoping that the collecting of starfishes was a more comfortable employment. Imitating Jane, she selected a rock from the pool before her and began to study the underside of it. She recognized the few snails that it carried, but the smaller animals flipping across the water film that clung to it she was not sure about; they might turn out to be planaria that had suddenly waked up and become active.

Jane was scornful at the suggestion. ‘Amphipods!’ She waved them aside. ‘Look! Here are some more planaria. See how tiny they are and how they clump together?’ With water from the pipette she gently washed the sluggish bits of life down into the water of the wooden bucket. ‘Put the rock back where you found it, so that some others can come there to live.’

A truck had stopped by the road that led past the beach. Ellen, looking back, saw familiar red and green patches coming toward them, above turned-down rubber boots. Walter, swinging one of the wooden collecting buckets, and looking very tall as he balanced on the rocks, greeted them laconically and went on past.

‘What are you getting, Walter?’ Jane demanded, alert.

The boy was exploring the larger boulders beyond them where the long bleached timbers of an old wreck almost barred the way. Until he had found a sheltered pool somewhat similar to theirs and squatted down beside it, he did not reply. Then, ‘Planaria,’ he said, and began to examine the smaller half-submerged stones as they were doing.

‘You don’t need to,’ Jane said indignantly. ‘I’m going to get all that Father can use.’

Walter made no answer at first, and Jane had returned to her search when he spoke again.

‘I’m not getting them for Dad. That von Bergen we met last night has ordered some and he wants them in a hurry.’

Jane stiffened. ‘I hope you won’t find any for him! What’s more, I don’t think you will! That’s too far over.’

The boy went on deliberately with his work while Jane hurried nervously, with uncanny luck. Ellen had found only two rocks with the tiny creatures, but every other stone that Jane turned over seemed to carry a cluster of them.

Presently Walter, having found none at all, picked up his bucket and moved closer. Jane began to scold like an angry squirrel.

‘Walter, you know that Father has to be careful if he has enough planaria to last all summer. He said so. You can hunt over there by the wreck, if you want to, but leave this for us.’

For answer Walter came over to the pool just next to their own sheltering boulder.

‘Oh, Walter, don’t!’ Jane’s voice was distressed. ‘That’s always the best place of all. I was saving it for next. Dibs on that rock!’ she said sharply as Walter reached into the pool. ‘Van dibs! Quadruple van dibs!’

‘See here, Janey,’ said her brother, ‘you can’t have dibs on all these rocks, and Dad can’t have dibs on all the animals. If this man wants to work on planarians, he has as much right to them as Dad or any other worker in the Laboratory. And I’ve got to get them for him if I’m ordered to do it. What kind of a member of the Collecting Crew would I be if I saved all the best things for my father? Dad would be ashamed of me!’

Jane went slowly back to her place, blinking tears.

‘Never mind, Janey,’ Walter said cheerfully. ‘You can find more of these pesky little things than anybody we’ve got on the Crew; and if you want to side in with Dad, you can spend your mornings down here hunting them for him.’

‘I will,’ Jane declared huskily. ‘But I think you might help. Father’s experiments are very important this summer, and his apparatus is always breaking down, and he was tired when he came here—— ’

‘You don’t hear him complaining, do you?’ demanded her brother. ‘Well, don’t you complain for him! He can get better results from that old constant temperature box than most people could with a new one!’

‘I know it!’ Jane answered with fierce loyalty. She had begun to search among the rocks again when something else occurred to her.

‘Walter!’ she asked, straightening abruptly, ‘do you think there is any chance of Father’s getting that money from some Foundation or other for his experiments?’

‘Who told you about that?’

‘I heard him talking to a man down in his room.’

‘Well, have the sense to keep still about it,’ Walter advised, frowning. ‘We don’t know enough to talk about Dad’s affairs, Janey. And he can manage them himself. He’s all right.’

At this point Ellen felt obliged to shift to a smoother rock and at the movement the conversation broke off, although it had seemed to be understood that she was included in it.

‘I’ll take you back in the truck,’ Walter said, very kindly, ‘and I think I can get off to go out in the boat this afternoon. Ask Mother if we can have a beach supper, and if we can we’ll get a lot of Mytilus to take.’