People of the Whirlpool. Mabel Osgood Wright

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      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066133481

Table of Contents

       I

       II

       III

       IV

       V

       VI

       VII

       VIII

       IX

       X

       XI

       XII

       XIII

       XIV

      CHAPTER I ON THE ADVANTAGE OF TWINS

      CHAPTER II MISS LAVINIA'S LETTERS TO BARBARA

      CHAPTER III MARTIN CORTRIGHT'S LETTERS

      CHAPTER IV WHEN BARBARA GOES TO TOWN

      CHAPTER V FEBRUARY VIOLETS

      CHAPTER VI ENTER A MAN

      CHAPTER VII SYLVIA LATHAM

      CHAPTER VIII THE SWEATING OF THE CORN

      CHAPTER IX A WAYSIDE COMEDY

      CHAPTER X THE WHIRL BEGINS

      CHAPTER XI REARRANGED FAMILIES

      CHAPTER XII HIS MOTHER

      CHAPTER XIII GOSSIP AND THE BUG HUNTERS

      CHAPTER XIV THE OASIS

      I

       Table of Contents

      ON THE ADVANTAGE OF TWINS

      February 2. Candlemas and mild, gray weather. If the woodchuck stirs up his banked life-fire and ventures forth, he will not see his shadow, and must straightway arrange with winter for a rebate in our favour. To-day, however, it seems like the very dawn of winter, and as if the cloud brooms were abroad gathering snow from remote and chilly corners of the sky.

      Six years ago I began the planting of my garden, and at the same time my girlish habit of journal keeping veered into the making of a "Garden Boke," to be a reversible signal, crying danger in face of forgotten mistakes, then turning to give back glints of summer sunshine when read in the attic of winter days and blue Mondays. Now once again I am in the attic, writing. Not in a garden diary, but in my "Social Experience Boke" this time, for it is "human warious," and its first volume, already filled out, is lying in the old desk. Martin Cortright said, one stormy day last autumn when he was sitting in the corner I have loaned him of my precious attic retreat, that, owing to the incursion of the Bluff Colony of New Yorkers, which we had been discussing, I should call this second volume "People of the Whirlpool," because—ah, but I must wait and hunt among my papers for his very words as I wrote them down.

      My desk needs cleaning out and rearranging, for the dust flies up as I rummage among the papers and letters that are a blending of past, present, and future. All my pet pens are rusty, and must be replaced from the box of stubs, for a stub pen assists one to straightforward, truthful expression, while a fine point suggests evasion, polite equivocation, or thin ideas. Even Lavinia Dorman's letters, whose cream-white envelopes, with a curlicue monogram on the flap, quite cover the litter below, have been, if possible, more satisfactory since she has adopted a fountain stub that Evan gave her at Christmas.

      There are many other things in the desk now beside the hickory-nut beads and old papers. Little whiffs of subtle fragrance call me backward through time faster than thought, and make me pinch myself to be sure that I am awake, like the little old woman with the cutabout petticoats, who was sure that if she was herself, her little dog would know her—but then he didn't!

      I am awake and surely myself, yet my old dog is not near to recognize me. This ring of rough, reddish hair, tied with a cigar ribbon and lying atop the beads, was Bluff's best tail curl. Dear, happy, brave-hearted Bluff with the human eyes; after an honourable life of fifteen years he stole off to the happy hunting grounds of perpetual open season, quail and rabbit, two years ago at beginning of winter, as quietly as he used to slip out the back door and away to the fields on the first fall morning that brings the hunting fever. For a long while not only I, but neither father nor Evan could speak of him, it hurt so. Yet by a blessed dispensation a good dog lives on in his race, and may be renewed (I prefer that word to replaced) after a season, in a way in which our best human friends may not be, so that we do not lack dogs. Lark is senior now, and Timothy Saunders's sheep dog, The Orphan, is also a veteran; the foxhounds are in their prime, while Martha Corkle, as we shall always call her, is raising a promising pair of collie pups.

      Beside the curl, and covering mother's diaries, lies a square white volume, the first part of my "Experience Boke" before mentioned, and upon it two queer fat little pairs of bronze kid shoes, buttonless and much worn on the toes, telling a tale of feet that dragged and ankles that wobbled through inexperience in walking. Ah yes! I'm quite awake and the same Barbara, though looking over a wider and eye-opening horizon, having had three rows of candles, ten in a row, around my last birthday cake and one extra in the middle, which extravagance has constrained the family to use lopsided, tearful, pink candles ever since.

      And the two pairs of feet that first touched good earth so hesitatingly with those crumpled shoes are now standing firmly in wool-lined rubber boots topped by brown corduroy trousers, upon the winter slat walk СКАЧАТЬ