Strawberry Acres Part 28

"Oh, what an energetic crowd!" she cried, "this hot August morning, too. Sally, where are your men? Neil wants to see some of them while I talk to you."

Sally pointed off into the distance. "Jarvis and Bob are hoeing potatoes over there in the field. There's a tree near by, and Neil can sit in the shade of that. You don't mind going, Neil? They're 'way behind with the potatoes."

Neil Chase bowed impressively to the group on the porch. "I should much prefer to stay here," said he gallantly, "but business reasons impel me to seek that inferno out yonder. What Jarve finds interesting in that sort of thing is beyond me."

He drove on by the house and over the gra.s.s behind, getting as near to the corn-field as possible, that he might have to walk only the least necessary distance. Meanwhile his wife sat down and inspected the quality of the work being done on the porch.

"Are you people sewing for an orphan asylum?" she inquired, after discovering that red and blue ginghams and white cotton cloth of a grade only moderately fine were the materials being used for certain small garments.

"Something like it. One of Mr. Ferry's poor families was burned out the other day--five children and an invalid mother."

"Of course--the mother's always an invalid, isn't she? I believe they make themselves invalids on purpose. Well--it makes no difference how important it is. Those children won't freeze in this weather, if you don't get these things all done to-night. And I'm in a perfectly awful difficulty. You all have simply got to help me out."

"What's the matter?" Josephine asked the question calmly, being used to Dorothy Chase's fashion of putting things. She threaded her needle as she spoke, as if she had every intention of continuing to work for as long a period as she had planned to do. The other girls resumed their sewing also. The cause of their being at work at all certainly was apology sufficient for going on with it, in spite of the visitor.

"Just listen--and n.o.body is to say a word till I'm through. It's no use raising objections--you're to do as I ask, if you care anything whatever about my friendship." She grasped the ends of the lavender-silk parasol lying on her lavender-linen lap, nodded her head violently, causing several lavender plumes to nutter agitatedly upon her lavender-straw hat, and plunged into her subject.

"I'm entertaining to-night for our new bishop--and he's a distant connection besides. I made it an evening affair, because it's so hot, and our new house opens up so beautifully. I planned to have some informal music--and at this last minute Herr Braun and Madame Hafsky have failed me. It was a misunderstanding about the date. It turns out they were engaged for to-day weeks ago by somebody very important--they won't give it up. I must have music--and everybody is out of town. Now what I want is to have you four go back with me to luncheon, help me about the decorations and things this afternoon, and then have Miss Carew sing and Miss Ferry play for us in the evening. Neil will come back for the men for the evening. You know I didn't ask you in the beginning only because I knew you didn't want to be invited. But now--you _must_ come!"

It was precisely like Dorothy Chase. That was all that could be said.

n.o.body said it, but Sally and Josephine thought it, and Janet and Constance told themselves, as they sewed on, that the young matron who made this decidedly startling proposition must be accustomed to having things her own way, or she would not have acquired so confident a manner of making her demands.

Sally was the first to give voice to her astonishment. "Well, Dorothy,"

said she, "you certainly take us off our feet. Here are we, just settled down to work that absolutely must be done, and in you walk and ask us to lay it down and go off to help entertain a bishop who's probably wishing you wouldn't do anything special at all for him this hot weather!"

"Nothing of the sort. He's heard all about Miss Carew's voice--people that met her last year in Leipsic."

Constance sat up. "Who, please?"

"The Markhams--and the Carrolls. Now will you be good?"

Constance leaned back again, applying herself to her sewing.

"I don't remember anybody of that name," mused Janet, looking at Constance.

"Yes, you do--friends of Mrs. Sears--just stopping over a day?"

The two pairs of eyes met. There must have been something in Constance's--invisible to other beholders--which recalled some incident or other to Janet, for after staring a minute she suddenly dropped her eyes, said, "Oh, yes--" and sewed away faster than ever.

"Will you come?" demanded Dorothy Chase.

They tried to get out of it--they pointed out various reasons why it would be difficult for them to come away. Dorothy overrode all their objections, and became so persistent that at last the four agreed, but refused to go until evening. As for the young men of the household, it would be of no use to ask them.

"Send out for us just in time for your affair, and we'll come," promised Sally. "But what you want of Jo and me I don't see. We can't perform for you in any way."

"Oh, but you can help make things go. Sally can talk to the bishop--"

"I can't," cried Sally, dismayed.

"And Jo can be nice to Mrs. bishop. I don't see why your men won't come. It's so hard to get men for anything except sports in summer.

How perfectly absurd it is for Jarvis Burnside to prefer hoeing potatoes in this frightful sun to playing society man for an hour or two in the evening!"

"It's truly incomprehensible, but so it is. Besides, he looks like an Indian, and in his evening clothes would resemble a fiend. Be satisfied, Dorothy, now you have us for victims, and let the men stay at home." And Sally slashed a seam open with shears that clipped like her speech.

But Mrs. Chase was not satisfied, and berated Jarvis roundly, when, presently he came walking up to the porch with Neil, looking the picture of well-browned contentment. He took her displeasure lightly enough, and presently had her laughing in spite of herself.

"Well, I know all about it now," Neil Chase informed the company, as he got into his car. "We ploughed seven acres and sowed it to buckwheat, turned the buckwheat under and have now planted the ground to potatoes.

In the end there are to be strawberries on the seven acres--or a good share of it--and Burnside, Lane & Co. are to become the most successful strawberry culturists in this part of the country."

"Right you are," agreed Jarvis placidly, sitting down on the edge of the porch and poking about in Janet Ferry's work-bag until he found a thimble, which he placed on the only finger it would fit, the smallest one on his right hand. He had washed the hands before he came to the porch, but they were so brown that the little gold thimble looked most absurd in its new position.

"If I sew for you for an hour, Miss Janet," he proposed, as the car bolted away down the drive, "will you come and hoe potatoes for me until lunch time?"

"I would gladly hoe potatoes all day if I could be let off from going to play for Mrs. Chase's friends this evening." The fierce energy with which Janet pulled out a row of bastings gave emphasis to her words.

Jarvis looked at his sister. "How did you manage not to let me in for this affair, Sis?"

"I knew you wouldn't go, and Janet knew her brother wouldn't. Sally said Max would be too used up. Happy boys--we saved you from it at the price of going ourselves."

"Self-sacrificing girls! We'll have to make it up to you somehow. When I see Ferry I'll--Hold on, I've an idea. How are you coming home?"

"In Neil's car--as we go."

"We'll see that you come in a better way. Be good little girls, do your stunts, keep up your courage, and we'll rescue you promptly at eleven o'clock," and putting down the thimble Jarvis went away, deaf to entreaties to tell what his interesting plan might be.

"Oh, dear, isn't it horrid?" demanded Sally that evening, running into Josephine's room in the course of her dressing to have certain unreachable hooks and eyes fastened. "After sewing all day we deserve something better than one of the Chases' fussy affairs."

"Stop fuming and stand still. Anybody who looks as pretty as you do in this white swiss--"

"Poor old white swiss--the same one. I wish Dorothy could forget the pattern of it. She'll undoubtedly mention that I wore it at her wedding,--she does, every time."

"Don't you care a bit. Those touches of blue make it seem perfectly fresh to me, and I've seen it much oftener than Dorothy Chase has."

"You're a comfort. You look like a dream yourself, in that peach-coloured thing."

"A midsummer day's dream, then--with my gypsy skin. Oh, there's Neil and his car."

"A nice lot you are," Neil Chase was exclaiming outside, as he drove up to the porch and eyed the male figures occupying its comfortable recesses. Max reposed in a hammock; Mr. Timothy Rudd swayed to and fro in a rocker, reading the evening paper by the sunset light; Alec and Bob, sitting on the steps, were playing a game of some sort; and Jarvis lay stretched at full length on a rug, his arms beneath his head, luxuriously resting after his bath and change of work clothes for fresh flannels, enjoying the sense of virtue earned by having hoed many rows of potatoes with a vigorous arm.

"A nice lot," Neil went on. "We have it in for you particularly, Jarve.

Max never was much of a society chap, but you once could be depended upon to do your duty like a man. Bob, run in and see if those girls are ready.

Dorothy won't be easy till she sees them. One thing I know--you'll soon tire of this playing at farming. To be the real thing you fellows ought to work till the sun goes down, doing 'ch.o.r.es.' I'll wager a fiver you come in and get your bath every night before dinner, eh?"

"We certainly do," Jarvis laughed.

"And you don't sit down in your shirt-sleeves?"

"Well--hardly."