Young Peoples Pride | Page 7

wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'"
"I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us, though," says Oliver, didactically. "We are young, you know."
"Melgrove!" the conductor howls, sleepily. "Melgrove! Melgrove!"

V
The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the Sound.
Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a continual, piteous fear of "black men wif masks," had omitted to put the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.
"Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch, unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub," the note read. "Breakfast at convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine. And DON'T wake Dickie up.
MOTHER."
Oliver passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly knocking over the hatrack.
"For _God's_ sake!" said Oliver in a piercing whisper, "Jane Ellen will think that's Indians!"
Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there was no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver had often wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family chanced to breathe in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could see the papery walls blown apart like scraps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie falling, falling with her bed from her little bird-house under the eaves, giving vent to one deaf, terrified "Hey--what's that?" as she sank like Lucifer cast from Heaven inexorably down into the laundry stove, her little tight, white curls standing up on end....
Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.
"'Night!" called Oliver softly.
"G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step on Dickie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a bloodhound!"
"I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter."
"So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my love!"
He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A stair creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old women's bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled "_Sonofa--_"
"What's matter?"
"Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain head. 'S all right. 'Night."
"'Night." Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, "Remember, if you wake Dickie, you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or he'll wake up everybody else!"
"If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night."
"'Night."
Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat down to read his letter.
It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem, gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy making the stiff "t's" bend and twisting the tails of the "e's," to the little scrunched-up "Love, Nancy" at the end, as if she had squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental "x's," with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of