The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher
get hold of his address, all right." He explained briefly to Mrs. Crittenden, startled by the portentous name. "Just a specialist in gladiolus seeds."
"Bulbs!" cried Mr. Welles, in involuntary correction, and knew as he spoke that he had been switched off to a side-track.
"Oh well, bulbs be it," Vincent conceded the point indulgently. He took off his hat in a final salutation to Mrs. Crittenden, and grasping his elderly friend by the arm, moved with him down the flag-paved path.
CHAPTER IV
TABLE TALK
An Hour in the Home Life of Mrs. Neale Crittenden, aet. 34 March 20.
As she and Paul carried the table out to the windless, sunny side-porch, Marise was struck by a hospitable inspiration. "You and Elly go on setting the table," she told the children, and ran across the side-yard to the hedge. She leaned over this, calling, "Mr. Welles! Mr. Welles!" and when he came to the door, "The children and I are just celebrating this first really warm day by having lunch out of doors. Won't you and Mr. Marsh come and join us?"
By the time the explanations and protestations and renewals of the invitation were over and she brought them back to the porch, Paul and Elly had almost finished setting the table. Elly nodded a country-child's silent greeting to the newcomers. Paul said, "Oh goody! Mr. Welles, you sit by me."
Marise was pleased at the friendship growing up between the gentle old man and her little boy.
"Elly, don't you want me to sit by you?" asked Marsh with a playful accent.
Elly looked down at the plate she was setting on the table. "If you want to," she said neutrally.
Her mother smiled inwardly. How amusingly Elly had acquired as only a child could acquire an accent, the exact astringent, controlled brevity of the mountain idiom.
"I think Elly means that she would like it very much, Mr. Marsh," she said laughingly. "You'll soon learn to translate Vermontese into ordinary talk, if you stay on here."
She herself went through the house into the kitchen and began placing on the wheel-tray all the components of the lunch, telling them over to herself to be sure she missed none. "Meat, macaroni, spinach, hot plates, bread, butter, water … a pretty plain meal to invite city people to share. Here, I'll open a bottle of olives. Paul, help me get this through the door."
As he pulled at the other end of the wheeled tray, Paul said that Mark had gone upstairs to wash his hands, ages ago, and was probably still fooling around in the soap-suds, and like as not leaving the soap in the water.
"Paul the responsible!" thought his mother. As they passed the foot of the stairs she called up, "Mark! Come along, dear. Lunch is served. All ready," she announced as they pushed the tray out on the porch.
The two men turned around from where they had been gazing up at the mountain. "What is that great cliff of bare rock called?" asked Mr. Marsh.
"Those are the Eagle Rocks," explained Marise, sitting down and motioning them to their places. "Elly dear, don't spread it on your bread so thick. If Mr. Bayweather were here he could probably tell you why they are called that. I have known but I've forgotten. There's some sort of tradition, I believe … no, I see you are getting ready to hear it called the Maiden's Leap where the Indian girl leaped off to escape an unwelcome lover. But it's not that this time: something or other about Tories and an American spy … ask Mr. Bayweather."
"Heaven forfend!" exclaimed Mr. Marsh.
Marise was amused. "Oh, you've been lectured to on local history, I see," she surmised.
"I found it very interesting," said Mr. Welles, loyally. "Though perhaps he does try to give you a little too much at one sitting."
"Mr. Welles," said Paul, with his mouth full, "fishing season begins in ten days."
Marise decided that she would really have to have a rest from telling Paul not to talk with food in his mouth, and said nothing.
Mr. Welles confessed that he had never gone fishing in his life, and asked if Paul would take him.
"Sure!" said Paul. "Mother and I go, lots."
Mr. Marsh looked at Marise inquiringly. "Yes," she said, "I'm a confirmed fisherman. Some of the earliest and happiest recollections I have, are of fishing these brooks when I was a little girl."
"Here?" asked Mr. Welles. "I thought you lived in France."
"There's time in a child's life to live in various places," she explained. "I spent part of my childhood and youth here with my dear old cousin. The place is full of associations for me. Will you have your spinach now, or later? It'll keep hot all right if you'd rather wait."
"What is this delicious dish?" asked Mr. Marsh. "It tastes like a man's version of creamed chicken, which is always a little too lady-like for me."
"It's a blanquette de veau, and you may be sure I learned to make it in one of the French incarnations, not a Vermont one."
Paul stirred and asked, "Mother, where is Mark? He'll be late for school, if he doesn't hurry."
"That's so," she said, and reflected how often one used that phrase in response to one of Paul's solid and unanswerable statements.
Mark appeared just then and she began to laugh helplessly. His hands were wetly, pinkly, unnaturally clean, but his round, rosy, sunny little face was appallingly streaked and black.
Paul did not laugh. He said in horrified reproach, "Oh, Mark! You never touched your face! It's piggy dirty."
Mark was staggered for a moment, but nothing staggered him long. "I don't get microbes off my face into my food," he said calmly. "And you bet there aren't any microbes left on my hands." He went on, looking at the table disapprovingly, "Mother, there isn't a many on the table this day, and I wanted a many."
"The stew's awful good," said Paul, putting away a large quantity.
"'Very,' not 'awful,' and don't hold your fork like that," corrected Marise, half-heartedly, thinking that she herself did not like the insipid phrase "very good" nor did she consider the way a fork was held so very essential to salvation. "How much of life is convention, any way you arrange it," she thought, "even in such an entirely unconventional one as ours."
"It is good," said Mark, taking his first mouthful. Evidently he had not taken the remarks about his face at all seriously.
"See here, Mark," his mother put it to him as man to man, "do you think you ought to sit down to the table looking like that?"
Mark wriggled, took another mouthful, and got up mournfully.
Paul was touched. "Here, I'll go up with you and get it over quick," he said. Marise gave him a quick approving glance. That was the best side of Paul. You could say what you pleased about the faults of American and French family life, but at any rate the children didn't hate each other, as English children seemed to, in novels at least. It was only last week that Paul had fought the big French Canadian boy in his room at school, because he had made fun of Elly's rubber boots.
As the little boys clattered out she said to the two guests, "I don't know whether you're used to children. If you're not, you must be feeling as though you were taking lunch in a boiler factory."
Mr. Welles answered, "I never knew what I was missing before. Especially Paul. That first evening when you sent him over with the cake, as he stood in the door, I thought, 'I wish I could have had a little son like that!'"
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