Jane of Lantern Hill

  Magic! Why, the place was simply jammed with magic. You were falling over magic. Dad knew that. He was only talking for the sake of talking. When they went back Jane sat down on the big red sandstone slab which served as a doorstep, while dad went through the maple wood by a little twisted path the cows had made to see Jimmy John…otherwise Mr. J. J. Garland. The Garland house could be seen peeping around the corner of the maples…a snug, butter-colored farmhouse decently dressed in trees.

  Jimmy John came back with dad, a little fat man with twinkling gray eyes. He hadn’t been able to find the key, but they had seen the ground floor and he told them there were three rooms upstairs with a spool bed in one of them and a closet in each of them.

  “And a boot-shelf under the stairs.”

  They stood on the stone walk and looked at the house.

  “What are you going to do with me?” said the house as plainly as ever a house spoke.

  “What is your price?” said dad.

  “Four hundred with the furniture thrown in for good measure,” said Jimmy John, winking at Jane. Jane winked rakishly back. After all, grandmother was a thousand miles away.

  “Bang goes saxpence,” said dad. He did not try to “jew” Jimmy John down. That he could buy all this loveliness for four hundred dollars was enough luck.

  Dad handed over fifty dollars and said the rest would be paid next day.

  “The house is yours,” said Jimmy John with an air of making them a present of it. But Jane knew the house had always been theirs.

  “The house…and the pond…and the harbor…and the gulf! A good buy,” said dad. “And half an acre of land. All my life I’ve wanted to own a bit of land…just enough to stand on and say, ‘This is mine.’ And now, Jane, it’s brillig.”

  “Four o’clock in the afternoon.” Jane knew her Alice too well to be caught tripping on that.

  Just as they were leaving, a pocket edition of Jimmy John, with a little impudent face, came tearing through the maple grove with the key, which had turned up in his absence. Jimmy John handed it to Jane with a bow. Jane clutched it tightly all the way back to Brookview. She loved it. Think what it would open for her!

  They discovered they were hungry, having forgotten all about dinner, so they fished out Mrs. Meade’s butter cookies and ate them.

  “You’ll let me do the cooking, dad?”

  “Why, you’ll have to. I can’t.”

  Jane glowed.

  “I wish we could move in tomorrow, dad.”

  “Why not? I can get some bedding and some food. We can go on from there.”

  “I just can’t bear to have this day go,” said Jane. “It doesn’t seem as if there could ever be another so happy.”

  “We’ve got tomorrow, Jane…let me see…we’ve got about ninety-five tomorrows.”

  “Ninety-five,” gloated Jane.

  “And we’ll do just as we want to, inside of decency. We’ll be clean but not too clean. We’ll be lazy but not too lazy…just do enough to keep three jumps ahead of the wolf. And we’ll never have in our house that devilish thing known as an intermittent alarm clock.”

  “But we must have some kind of a clock,” said Jane.

  “Timothy Salt down at the harbor mouth has an old ship’s clock. I’ll get him to lend it to us. It only goes when it feels like it, but what matter? Can you darn my socks, Jane?”

  “Yes,” said Jane, who had never darned a sock in her life.

  “Jane, we’re sitting on the top of the world. It was a piece of amazing luck, your asking that man, Jane.”

  “It wasn’t luck. I knew he’d know,” said Jane. “And oh, dad, can we keep the house a secret till we’ve moved in?”

  “Of course,” agreed dad. “From everyone except Aunt Irene. We’ll have to tell her, of course.”

  Jane said nothing. She had not known till dad spoke that it was really from Aunt Irene she wished to keep it secret.

  Jane didn’t believe she would sleep that night. How could one go to sleep with so many wonderful things to think of? And some that were very puzzling. How could two people like mother and dad hate each other? It didn’t make sense. They were both so lovely in different ways. They must have loved each other once. What had changed them? If she, Jane, only knew the whole truth, perhaps she could do something about it.

  But as she drifted off into dreams of spruce-shadowed red roads that all led to dear little houses, her last conscious thought was “I wonder if we can get our milk at the Jimmy Johns’.”

  CHAPTER 17

  They “moved in” the next afternoon. Dad and Jane went to town in the forenoon and got a load of canned stuff and some bedding. Jane also got some gingham dresses and aprons. She knew none of the clothes grandmother had bought for her would be of any use at Lantern Hill. And she slipped into a bookstore unbeknown to dad and bought a Cookery for Beginners. Mother had given her a dollar when she left, and she was not going to take any chances.

  They called to see Aunt Irene but Aunt Irene was out. Jane had her own reasons for being pleased about this but she kept them to herself. After dinner they tied Jane’s trunk and suitcase on the running-boards and bounced off to Lantern Hill. Mrs. Meade gave them a box of doughnuts, three loaves of bread, a round pat of butter with a pattern of clover leaves on it, a jar of cream, a raisin pie, and three dried codfish.

  “Put one in soak tonight and broil it for your breakfast in the morning,” she told Jane.

  The house was still there. Jane had been half afraid it would be stolen in the night. It seemed so entirely desirable to her that she couldn’t imagine anyone else not wanting it. She felt so sorry for Aunt Matilda Jollie who had had to die and leave it. It was hard to believe that, even in the golden mansions, Aunt Matilda Jollie wouldn’t miss the house on Lantern Hill.

  “Let me unlock the door, please, dad.” She was trembling with delight as she stepped over the threshold.

  “This…this is home,” said Jane. Home…something she had never known before. She was nearer crying then than she had ever been in her life.

  They ran over the house like a couple of children. There were three rooms upstairs…a quite large one to the north, which Jane decided at once must be father’s.

  “Wouldn’t you like it yourself blithe spirit? The window looks over the gulf.”

  “No, I want this dear little one at the back. I want a little room, dad. And the other one will do nicely for a guest room.”

  “Do we need a guest room, Jane? Let me remind you that the measure of anyone’s freedom is what he can do without.”

  “Oh, but of course we need a guest room, dad.” Jane was quite tickled over the thought. “We’ll have company sometimes, won’t we?”

  “There isn’t a bed in it.”

  “Oh, we’ll get one somewhere. Dad, the house is glad to see us…glad to be lived in again. The chairs just want someone to sit on them!”

  “Little sentimentalist!” jeered dad. But there was understanding laughter behind his eyes.

  The house was surprisingly clean. Jane was to learn later that as soon as they knew Aunt Matilda Jollie’s house was sold, Mrs. Jimmy John and Miranda Jimmy John had come over, got in at one of the kitchen windows and given the whole place a Dutch cleaning from top to bottom. Jane was almost sorry the house was clean. She would have liked to clean it. She wanted to do everything for it.

  “I am as bad as Aunt Gertrude,” she thought. And a little glimmer of understanding of Aunt Gertrude came to her.

  There was nothing to do just now but put the mattresses and clothes on the beds, the cans in the kitchen cupboard, and the butter and cream in the cellar. Dad hung Mrs. Meade’s codfish on the nails behind the kitchen stove.

  “We’ll have sausages for supper,” Jane was saying.

  “Janekin,” said dad, clutching his hair in dismay, “I forgot to buy a frying pan.”
>
  “Oh, there’s an iron frying pan in the bottom of the cupboard,” said Jane serenely. “And a three-legged cooking pot,” she added in triumph.

  There was nothing about the house that Jane did not know by this time. Dad had kindled a fire in the stove and fed it with some of Aunt Matilda Jollie’s wood, Jane keeping a watchful eye on him as he did it. She had never seen a fire made in a stove before, but she meant to know how to do it herself next time. The stove was a bit wobbly on one of its feet, but Jane found a piece of flat stone in the yard which fitted nicely under it and everything was shipshape. Dad went over to the Jimmy Johns’ to borrow a pail of water…the well had to be cleaned out before they could use it…and Jane set the table with a red and white cloth like Mrs. Meade’s and the dishes dad had got at the five-and-ten. She went out to the neglected garden and picked a bouquet of bleeding-heart and June lilies for the center. There was nothing to hold them, but Jane found a rusty old tin can somewhere, swathed it in a green silk scarf she had dug out of her trunk…it was an expensive silk scarf Aunt Minnie had given her…and arranged her flowers in it. She cut and buttered bread, she made tea and fried the sausages. She had never done anything of the kind before but she had not watched Mary for nothing.

  “It’s good to get my legs under my own table again,” said dad, as they sat down to supper.

  “I suppose,” thought Jane wickedly, “if grandmother could see me eating in the kitchen…and liking it…she would say it was just my low tastes.”

  Aloud all she said was…but she nearly burst with pride as she said it…“How do you take your tea, dad?”

  There was a tangle of sunbeams on the bare white floor. They could see the maple wood through the east window, the gulf and the pond and the dunes through the north, the harbor through the west. Winds of the salt seas were blowing in. Swallows were swooping through the evening air. Everything she looked at belonged to dad and her. She was mistress of this house…her right there was none to dispute. She could do just as she wanted to without making excuses for anything. The memory of that first meal together with dad in Aunt Matilda Jollie’s house was to be “a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” Dad was so jolly. He talked to her just as if she were grown up. Jane felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have her father.

  Dad wanted to help her wash the dishes but Jane would have none of it. Wasn’t she to be the housekeeper? She knew how Mary washed dishes. She had always wanted to wash dishes…it must be such fun to make dirty plates clean. Dad had bought a dishpan that day, but neither of them had thought about a dishcloth or dish towels. Jane got two new undervests out of her trunk and slit them open.

  At sunset Jane and dad went down to the outside shore…as they were to do almost every night of that enchanted summer. All along the silvery curving sand ran a silvery curving wave. A dim, white-sailed vessel drifted past the bar of the shadowy dunes. The revolving light across the channel was winking at them. A great headland of gold and purple ran out behind it. At sunset that cape became a place of mystery to Jane. What lay behind it? “Magic seas in fairylands forlorn?” Jane couldn’t remember where she had heard or read that phrase but it suddenly came alive for her.

  Dad smoked a pipe…which he called his “Old Contemptible”…and said nothing. Jane sat beside him in the shadow of the bones of an old vessel and said nothing. There was no need to say anything. When they went back to the house they discovered that though dad had gotten three lamps, he had forgotten to get any coal-oil for them or any gasoline for his study lamp.

  “Well, I suppose we can go to bed in the dark for once.”

  No need of that. Indefatigable Jane remembered she had seen a piece of an old tallow candle in the cupboard drawer. She cut it in two, stuck the pieces in the necks of two old glass bottles, likewise salvaged from the cupboard, and what would you ask more?

  Jane looked about her tiny room, her heart swelling with satisfaction. There was as yet only the spool bed and a little table in it; the ceiling was stained with old leaks and the floor was slightly uneven. But this was the first room to be her very own, where she need never feel that someone was peeping at her through the keyhole. She undressed, blew out her candle, and looked out of the window, from which she could almost have touched the top of the steep little hill. The moon was up and had already worked its magic with the landscape. A mile away the lights of the little village at Lantern Corners shone. To the right of the window a young birch tree seemed a-tiptoe trying to peer over the hill. Soft, velvety shadows moved among the bracken.

  “I am going to pretend this is a magic window,” thought Jane, “and sometime when I look out of it I shall see a wonderful sight. I shall see mother coming up that road, looking for the lights of Lantern Hill.”

  Dad had picked a good mattress, and Jane was bone-tired after her strenuous day. But how lovely it was to lie in this comfortable little “spool” bed…neither Jane nor the Jimmy Johns knew that Aunt Matilda Jollie had been offered fifty dollars by a collector for that bed…and watch the moonlight patterning the walls with birch leaves and know that dad was just across the little “landing” from you, and that outside were free hills and wide, open fields where you could run wherever you liked, none daring to make you afraid, spruce barrens and shadowy sand dunes, instead of an iron fence and locked gates. And how quiet it all was…no honking, no glaring lights. Jane had pushed the window open and the scent of fern came in. Also a strange, soft faraway sound…the moaning call of the sea. The night seemed to be filled with it. Jane heard it and something deep down in her responded to it with a thrill that was between anguish and rapture. Why was the sea calling? What was its secret sorrow?

  Jane was just dropping off to sleep when a terrible remembrance tore through her mind. She had forgotten to put the codfish to soak.

  Two minutes later the codfish was soaking.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jane, to her horror, slept in next morning, and when she rushed downstairs she saw an extraordinary sight…dad coming over from the Jimmy Johns’ with a rocking chair on his head. He also had a gridiron in his hand.

  “Had to borrow one to broil the codfish on, Jane. And Mrs. Jimmy John made me take the chair. She said it belonged to Aunt Matilda Jollie and they had more rocking chairs than they had time to sit in. I made the porridge and it’s up to you to broil the codfish.”

  Jane broiled it and her face as well, and it was delicious. The porridge was a bit lumpy.

  “Dad isn’t a very good cook, I guess,” thought Jane affectionately. But she did not say so and she heroically swallowed all the lumps. Dad didn’t; he ranged them along the edge of his plate and looked at her quizzically.

  “I can write, my Jane, but I can’t make porridgeable porridge.”

  “You won’t have to make it after this. I’ll never sleep in again,” said Jane.

  There is no pleasure in life like the joy of achievement. Jane realized that in the weeks that followed, if she did not put it in just those words. Old Uncle Tombstone, the general handy man of the Queen’s Shore district, whose name was really Tunstone and who hadn’t a niece or nephew in the world, papered all the rooms for them, patched the roof and mended the shutters, painted the house white with green trim and taught Jane how, when, and where to dig for clams. He had a nice old rosy face with a fringe of white whisker under his chin.

  Jane, bubbling over with energy, worked like a beaver, cleaning up after Uncle Tombstone, arranging the bits of furniture as dad brought them home, and getting curtains up all over the house.

  “That girl can be in three places at once,” said dad. “I don’t know how she manages it…I suppose there really is such a thing as witchcraft.”

  Jane was very capable and could do almost anything she tried to do. It was nice to live where you could show how capable you were. This was her own world and she was a person of importance in it. There was joy in her heart the clock round. Life here was one endless advent
ure.

  When Jane was not cleaning up she was getting the meals. She studied her Cookery for Beginners every spare moment and went about muttering, “All measurements are level,” and things like that. Because she had watched Mary and because it was born in her to be a cook, she got on amazingly well. From the very first her biscuits were never soggy or her roast underdone. But one day she flew too high and produced for dessert something that a charitable person might have called a plum pudding. Uncle Tombstone ate some of it and had to have the doctor that night…or so he said. He brought his own dinner the next day…cold bacon and cold pancakes tied up in a red handkerchief, and told Jane he was on a diet.

  “That pudding of yours yesterday, miss, it was a mite too rich. My stomach ain’t used to Toronto cookery. Them there vitamins now…I reckon you have to be brought up on them for them to agree with you.”

  To his cronies he averred that that pudding would have given the rats indigestion. But he liked Jane.

  “Your daughter is a very superior person,” he told dad. “Most of the girls nowadays are all tops and no taters. But she’s superior—yes, sir, she’s superior.” How dad and Jane laughed over that. Dad called her “Superior Jane” in a tone of mock awe till the joke wore out.

  Jane liked Uncle Tombstone too. In fact, nothing in her new life amazed her more than the ease with which she liked people. It seemed as if everyone she met was sealed of her tribe. She thought it must be that the P. E. Islanders were nicer, or at least more neighborly, than the Toronto people. She did not realize that the change was in herself. She was no longer rebuffed, frightened, awkward because she was frightened. Her foot was on her native heath and her name was Jane. She felt friendly towards all the world and all the world responded. She could love all she wanted to…everybody she wanted to…without being accused of low tastes. Probably grandmother would not have recognized Uncle Tombstone socially; but the standards of 60 Gay were not the standards of Lantern Hill.

  As for the Jimmy Johns, Jane felt as if she must have known them all her life. They were so called, she discovered, because Mr. James John Garland had a James Garland to the northeast of him and a John Garland to the southwest of him, and so had to be distinguished in some way. Her first forenoon at Lantern Hill all the Jimmy Johns came galloping over in a body. At least, the young fry galloped with the three dogs…a brindled bull-terrier, a golden collie, and a long brown dog who was just a dog. Mrs. Jimmy John, who was as tall and thin as her Jimmy John was short and fat, with very wise, gentle gray eyes, walked briskly, carrying in her arms a baby as fat as a sausage. Miranda Jimmy John, who was sixteen, was as tall as her mother and as fat as her father. She had had a double chin at ten and nobody would ever believe that she was secretly overflowing with romance. Polly Jimmy John was Jane’s age but looked younger because she was short and thin. “Punch” Jimmy John, who had brought the key, was thirteen. There were the eight-year-old twins…the George twin and the Ella twin…their bare chubby legs all spotted with mosquito bites. And every one of them had a pleasant smile.