The Four-Story Mistake (8 page)

Oh it was a wild night. The oak was racked with wind: it creaked and groaned in all its limbs; cold leaves flew at Rush like bats. Overhead the torn, moon-filtered clouds raced hauntedly across the sky. What a howling, tossing, frenzied world it was! Too bad it's not Halloween, he thought. Anybody could believe in witches tonight. But Halloween had come and gone a week ago, mild as a lamb.

He shook with chill and burned with fever by turns. Against the darkness strange patterns flamed and were gone; fiery pinwheels, dancing stars, geometrical designs outlined in colored light; all the fantastic figures of a fevered imagination. Rush watched them with his teeth chattering. The Brahms Rhapsody galloped interminably through his mind in tune with the wild night. I don't think I'll ever be able to play it again, he thought, without feeling sick.

At half past eight the rain began. It was violent, like the wind, coming in great bursts and waves, cold and heavy as water pouring over a dam. He huddled against the tree, his head on his knees, his arms around his head; he had never been so wretched in his life. There was nothing left in the whole world but noise, and water, and confusion. This is how a soldier feels, Rush thought, far away in a foreign land; hiding in the dark and rain, waiting to fight. Somehow the thought made him feel braver. After all, he was lucky: there was no enemy searching for
him,
at least.

In the warm living room of the house the fire hissed and crackled; a log caved in, sending up a shower of sparks. Mona sighed over her Latin, and Randy sighed over her English grammar. Isaac whimpered in his sleep. There was no sound from Oliver; he had gone to bed long ago.

Cuffy put down her mending.

“Poor Rush,” she said. “He's been sleeping all day. He ought to have some hot lemonade.”

“I'll make it, Cuffy,” Mona offered, glad to escape from her homework. “You go and see how he is.”

Cuffy tiptoed up the stairs and opened Rush's door. She stood there in the rectangle of light cast by the hall lamp, and listened. Gracious, how still the child was! There was no sound of deep, even breathing; no restless stirring against the pillow. She frowned and went quickly over to the bed.

An instant later she came out of the room and hurried upstairs to the Office. Then to the cupola; and down again.

“Randy!” called Cuffy from the landing. “Mona! Rush isn't here! The rapscallion's gone off somewheres and left his pillow in the bed. One of you go down cellar and see if he's there! One of you go out and get Willy. Hurry!”

“I'll go,” cried Randy, and rushed for the door.

“Put on your raincoat,” ordered Cuffy, even in the midst of her distraction, “and take your shoes off the minute you get back. It's pouring! Now where in time did I put the flashlight?”

But Randy didn't wait. Grabbing her slicker she rushed out. The wind almost took her off her feet; the cold rain was blown against her. She ran to the stable, leaping over fallen branches and splashing through puddles. The stable door was closed and she almost broke her back getting it open. Recklessly she made her way to the narrow stairs and bumped her shin hard against the first step, but hardly even felt it, she was so frightened. A crack of light was shining under Willy's door, and his radio was going full blast: dance music loud enough to burst an eardrum!

“Willy, Willy!” shouted Randy, banging her fists against the door.

“What's the matter?” cried Willy, throwing it open. “House on fire? Someone sick? What's the matter?”

“It's Rush!” gasped Randy. “We can't find him.”

Willy waited for nothing. Still wearing his old fleece-lined slippers and holding a copy of
Popular Mechanics
in one hand, he raced down the stairs beside Randy. Behind them dance music still poured lavishly out of the radio.

“He's not in the house nowheres?”

“We couldn't find him. We don't know
where
he is!” Randy was almost in tears. “He's got a temperature, too.”

“I bet
I
know!” cried Willy, with a flash of inspiration. “You go on back to the house now. Go on, do like I say. Go get your feet dry. I've got my pocket flashlight with me.”

A few minutes later Rush thought he heard someone calling his name. He paid no attention. Probably just fever again, he thought to himself. Or maybe it's the angel Gabriel. But then he heard the sound of something scraping against the tree, and saw a light shining vertically through the rain. He tottered to his feet and looked over the railing right into the ascending face of Willy Sloper.

“You look even better than the angel Gabriel to me,” croaked Rush thankfully; and Willy reached out a wiry arm, helped him over the railing, half carried him down the ladder, and really did carry him all the way through the woods to the house. Willy was a swell guy. He never fussed around with whys and hows. He just carried Rush home and kept saying, “It's all right now. You're okay now. We'll have you back in your bed in a jiffy.”

And in a jiffy Rush was back in bed, wearing dry pajamas, and feeling as if he had died and gone to a warm, dry heaven. The storm had put the lights out again, of course, but there was a kerosene lamp purring on the table beside him. Nobody scolded him, not even Cuffy. They seemed to take it for granted that he had been punished enough, as indeed he had.

“Are you frozen anyplace?” asked Mona eagerly. “I know exactly what to do for frostbite!”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Rush replied through the pleasant ringing in his ears, “but I'm
not
frozen anyplace. I feel swell.”

Mona draped a shawl across his shoulders, Randy brought him a hot-water bottle, and Willy heaped wood on the fire. Cuffy came up with a trayful of hot things to eat: hot soup, hot Ovaltine, hot milk toast.

“I feel like a very rich old lady,” Rush remarked appreciatively. “My only regret is that in real life I'll never get to be a grandmother.”

“Or rich either, probably,” said Mona witheringly.

“Go on now,” Cuffy said. “All of you.
Out!
He has to have his temperature taken before he eats these hot things. And he has to have an aspirin
afterward.
”

Rush was sick in bed for over a week with bronchitis, and except for the first two days enjoyed every minute of it. Father brought him some new books, Oliver loaned him his comics, and Willy the back issues of
Popular Mechanics.
Cuffy was always making delicious streamlined things that went down his throat without bumping it. Nobody was allowed to come into the room to see him except grownups, who were tough old things, less liable to catch his germs. But Cuffy spent hours mending in the rocker beside the window; she was always good company and so was Father, who spent each evening with him, and Willy Sloper, who came for frequent conversational visits. When he was alone, Rush read and read and read. When he got tired of reading he played the gramophone or his radio. When he got tired of that he worked on his model airplanes, and when he got tired of that he added the finishing touches to a story he was writing called “The Ghost in the Dumbwaiter,” and when he got tired of
that
he simply lay still and watched the swaying spruce branches against the grey sky, and listened to the music inside his head. Sometimes he just slept.

Yes, it was a fine illness. But after eight days of it he was glad to be up again; tottering weak and pale about the house. Also he retained a distinctive bass cough, more animal than human, that hung on for weeks and startled everyone who heard it. It kept him provided with free cough drops, oranges, lozenges, and whole jars of honey. He was quite sorry when he got over it.

CHAPTER VI

Clarinda, 1869

“It's snowing!” cried Randy one Saturday morning from her roost in the cupola. She had gone up there with a book of Father's called
Jean-Christophe
which she didn't understand. “Real snow!” she shouted exultantly, forgetting all about the strange boy in the book and tumbling down the steps to the Office. “First I thought it was just ashes from the chimney but I watched and it melted right on the windowsill!”

Rush stopped playing the piano. Mona stopped writing her play. Oliver stopped trying to draw a battle between fourteen airplanes and thirteen submarines, all on the same sheet of paper. With one accord they went downstairs, put on their coats and, as an afterthought, their galoshes, and went outdoors. None of them had ever seen snow in the country. At first it wasn't very exciting, really. The sparse, papery flakes flew down, alighted, and vanished without making any difference on the landscape.

But Oliver made a discovery.

“Look,” he said, examining the snowflakes on his sleeve. “They're shaped like little sort of fuzzy stars.”

Oh, everybody knew
that!

“Didn't you really ever notice it before, Oliver?” Randy sounded astonished. Nevertheless, she ran into the house and borrowed one of the lenses from Rush's microscope and she and Oliver took turns peering through it at the snow crystals. How wonderful they were! So tiny, so perfect, down to the last point, the last feathering of frost. There were little stars, and miniature geometrical ferns and flowers and patterns for fairy crowns, and tiny hexagons of lace. And each was different from all the others.

“How can they ever think of so many patterns?” wondered Randy, relinquishing the lens to Oliver.

“How can
who
ever think of them?” said Oliver, breathing so hard on the flake he was examining that it turned into a drop of water.

“God I suppose,” Randy answered, catching some snow on the tip of her tongue and eating it.

“Does He draw them first, or does He just go ahead and cut them out and drop them?” Oliver wanted to know.

But that was too much for Randy. Snowflakes were a mystery altogether.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's go up through the woods to the top of the hill and see how it looks from up there.”

By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar; and by half past three the snow was of a respectable depth: halfway to the tops of their galoshes. There was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.

They cleared the front drive with Willy, built a snowman for Oliver and a fort for all of them. “But, gee, if we only had a sled!” Rush said finally. Oliver stopped digging, leaned thoughtfully on his spade, and in a moment or two drifted inconspicuously toward the house.

Scrape, scr-a-a-pe, went Willy's industrious shovel. The millions of little white stars twinkled down, and down, and down; an endless supply. Mona bent over and wrote her name, big, on the snow with the point of her mitten.

MONA MELENDY.

Then she stood off and looked at it. It was the kind of name that would look well in lights when she was famous. Oh, yes, of course, Mona Melendy. Isn't she wonderful? The most perfect Juliet I ever—

“Ow! Rush, you devil!” yelped Mona furiously as a wet, generous handful of snow down her back brought the glorious daydream to a close. The fight was on. Half in earnest, half in fun, they pelted each other, rolled on the ground, got soaking wet. Rush was strong, but Mona was bigger. She got him down, finally, and was sitting firmly on his chest combing her disheveled hair when she saw Oliver returning.

“Why, look what he's got!” she exclaimed, rising suddenly and liberating her victim.

“Sleds, gee whiz,” murmured Rush, in awe. They were sort of funny, shabby old things with high, rusted runners, and names painted on them in fancy letters. “Snow Demon,” one was called. “Little Kriss Kringle” was the other. Yes, they were strange, but never mind, they were sleds!

“Where'd you ever get them, Fatso?” inquired Rush.

“Me? Oh. I just found them,” replied Oliver vaguely.

“But
where?
”

“Oh, just around.”

“What do you mean
around?
I never saw any sleds lying around the Four-Story Mistake. Come on, Oliver, give us the dope, like a good guy.”

“I can't,” said Oliver firmly. “It's a secret.”

Randy couldn't resist boasting a little. “I know where he got them,” she crowed. “But I promised not to tell.” And she and Oliver exchanged a wink of the greatest satisfaction and good will.

The sleds turned out to be all right, though not greased lightning by any means. Rush had an inspiration, too, and went and got two large dishpans from the house; so each of them had a suitable vehicle for traveling down a snowy hill. The dishpans were particularly exciting, because they not only descended rapidly, but spun round and round while doing so. At the bottom of the slope you rose with difficulty, staggered, and discovered that you were the exact center of a world that revolved about you like a mammoth merry-go-round. Oliver was the only one who didn't care for this. His stomach resented the spinning of the dishpan, though for some reason it did not resent being slammed down belly-whopper on a sled over and over again.

Even Willy Sloper came and joined them for a while, and the picture of him going down the slide in a dishpan, arms and legs waving like an old-fashioned windmill was one that none of them would ever forget.

“I know what let's do,” Mona said, when they were all exhausted and hot and red-cheeked. “I read about it in a book. They made snow ice cream in this book. Why don't we make some?”

“How do you do it?”

“Well, first we have to beg a bottle of milk and some sugar from Cuffy. You do it, Rush. You're best at it.”

“Okay,” said Rush, who was hungry, trotting obediently toward the house.

“And some cups,” called Mona, “and some
spoons!
”

Then she and Randy and Oliver went looking for the cleanest, purest patch of snow they could find, which was in the middle of the front lawn: untouched, unmarked, it looked as though it had been created to be eaten.