But at last it was June. At last school was over and summer, huge as an ocean, lay before them.
"September is forever away!" sang Portia, sitting on her suitcase to shut it. "Forever and ever and ever away!"
This time when they returned to the country, Gulliver went with them because they drove there. They drove in their own brand-new car: "Bought," as Mrs. Blake explained to Julian later, "by courtesy of the Sheraton octagonal drum table." She sighed when she said it: she had hated parting with the drum table. "But if we're going to have a house in the country miles from any town, we must have a car."
"And that's the only way we could afford it," Portia added, "because of buying the house and fixing it up and all."
They made the journey on a wonderful day: June at its most fragrant and expansive. Foster, to the relief of all, seemed to have outgrown his car sickness; and Gulliver, about whom there had been some doubt, proved to be a courteous passenger, neither trampling nor barking.
It was late afternoon when they turned in at the gates of the Villa Caprice. The road and driveway had been partly reclaimed from the woods, but were still far from smooth, the going was very jouncy. Emerging, finally, from the shade of new-leafed trees, the Blakes were surprised and charmed by what they saw. Eli Scaynes had made great headway with "The Property." The grass had been cut, and large areas of lawn were newly seeded. Bushes had been pruned, brush and brambles cleared away.
"It still looks wild, but sort of neatly wild," Portia said approvingly.
And the house looked so different! The porch was gone; the vine had been trimmed and the shutters painted. It was not beautiful, but it looked respectable. And in spite of looking respectable, it looked interesting.
"It's not a training school for witches any more, is it?" said Mr. Blake.
"No." Foster agreed. "Now it's a people's house."
Mr. Blake took one hand from the wheel and put his arm around Mrs. Blake's shoulders.
"Barbara, you've worked a miracle," he told her.
"Wait till you see the inside," said Mrs. Blake rather boastfully.
As they drove up to the house, the front door opened and down the broad shallow steps that had replaced the porch came all the Jarmans: Uncle Jake, Aunt Hilda, Julian, and their dogs, Katy and Othello, who had come to welcome Gulliver.
There was a turmoil of barkings, greetings, and embracings. Foster, grinning self-consciously at Julian, displayed the ingenuous gap where his two front teeth had been. (For at last, at last they had come out! A friend at school had recommended the biting of an apple, and this, though painful for a moment, had done the trick.)
"Holy crow," said Julian, "you look just like an adder!" Then he pretended to cower away. "Take cover, men, it is the Fang!" he warned. Foster was pleased.
"But come in, come in! Welcome to your own house," Aunt Hilda said, holding the big door open.
The first thing they saw was a great burst of peonies on the hall table. Aunt Hilda had filled the house with flowers, and it did look lovely, especially the drawing room, which was freshly painted, light, clean, and airy despite the large and curious assortment of furniture. The walls were white; the polished floor was the color of honey; overhead the chandelier twinkled and tinkled, and through the windows came a smell of lilies of the valley.
"I don't see why all these things go together so well," Uncle Jake objected. "There's absolutely no reason why they should."
But they did. The graceful Chippendale highboy looked perfectly at home with the boisterous red and gold piano. The curving Sheraton cabinet seemed entirely suited to the gilded chairs, the bamboo curtain, and the harp. The harp was so pretty that they had had to keep it, though nobody, as yet, knew how to play it.
Above the mantel hung a portrait of Mrs. Brace-Gideon; a well-corseted lady with a pink, opinionated face. She was sitting bolt-upright in a chair, wearing an embroidered gown and holding a fan.
"And there she is going to stay," said Mrs. Blake. "Because in her way, and though she could never know it, Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been a fairy godmother to this family."
"Indeed she has," said Mr. Blake.
When Portia went upstairs to look at her own round room in the turret, she screamed with delight.
"Mother, how did you know I wanted pink?"
"All girls want pink," replied her mother sensibly.
Just under the curving open window a giant rhododendron had put out hundreds of bouquets of flowers, delicately tinted: not quite white, less definite than pink.
"How lucky that they should turn out to be that color instead of the usual magenta," Mrs. Blake mused, sitting on the window seat and leaning her arms on the sill. "How lucky, really, about everything."
"I know," Portia said, staring dreamily out over her mother's head at the green lawn, the green orchard, the green woods beyond.
Their mood of quiet delight was shattered by a tremendous outburst of rushing waters. It was Foster trying out the plumbing to see if it would work.
"Hey, everybody, the plumbing's working!" he shouted, somewhat unnecessarily. "Come on and see this cool bathroom!"
For some reason Portia had overlooked the bathroom up to now, and it did turn out to be an interesting place: very large, with two high-up diamond-shaped windows, a frieze of mildewed swans above the molding, and many pictures on the wall of young ladies wearing pompadours, shirtwaists, and long skirts, like Mrs. Cheever's.
The hand basin, made of Delft china, was patterned with blue carnations. Swan-necked faucets drooped above it, and on each side there was a broad slab of marble, veined and gray as Roquefort cheese. Traces of ancient soap lay in an ancient dish; and, hung above the basin, an oval mirror offered a green and speckled face to anyone who looked in it.
The bathtub was immense, porcelain encased in solid mahogany. "Sort of like a coffin," Foster said. He would enjoy a bath in this from time to time, he thought. It was so huge, he might be able to swim a stroke or two.
The chain by which he had recently released the uproar was attached to a large tank high above the thronelike fixture, which stood nobly upon its own gray marble slab.
"Yipes, it's the loudest one I ever heard," Foster said in awe, giving the chain another pull and releasing another crashing avalanche of sound.
"This is much better than a new-time bathroom," he shouted above the tumult.
Curious, Portia opened the door of a cabinet hanging on the wall and began to examine the bottles with dried-up medicines and lotions in them: the round bronze-colored paper pillboxes containing petrified pills. From time to time she read a label out loud.
"'Mrs. Baggett's Bunion Balm,'" she read, and then: "Dr. Cupthorn's Efficacious Cough Deterrent, for the cure of coughs, colds, bronchitis, asthma, influenza, wasting diseases, and scrofulous humours!' I wonder what those are?"
"Scrofulous humours," Foster murmured dreamily, as he tried out the bathtub faucets (very slow and trickly). "Scrofulous humours, scrofulous humours."
"And listen to this: 'Princess Razzioli's Celebrated Elixir of Cucumber and Milkweed, for the Preservation of Pulchritude and a Pearly Complexion'!"
"Porsh, where are you?" came Julian's voice from the hall.
"In here reading medicines," Portia called in reply. "Come on in. Mr. Ormond Horton hasn't got around to painting the bathroom yet, so everything's just the way it was."
"Listen to this," Foster said, and gave the chain another pull. Julian was suitably impressed; he said it sounded like a thunderstorm on the Maine coast.
When the racket had subsided, giving way to a series of low mutterings and garglings, Julian's face assumed a serious, intent expression. He began to prowl about the room, stopping to lean against the wall and listen as he rapped it with his knuckles.
"What in the world are you doing?" Portia demanded.
"Well, a safe could be hidden anywhere, couldn't it? Even in a bathroom, couldn't it?"
Julian stooped to open the door of the cupboard beneath the hand basin. Nothing in there but rusty cans of cleaning powder and some stubbed-off scrub brushes.
"Oh, that old safe! You've got that old safe on the brain, Jule. I'd forgotten all about it. And I bet you we'll never find it; she probably buried it under an apple tree, or sent it out to California, or threw it in the well, or something. Anyway, come on; let's go outside," Portia said. "I'm tired of this old bathroom. I'm tired of indoors; I want outdoors."
"All right," Julian agreed willingly enough. "We'll keep the safe-hunting for rainy days. I'm not going to give up, though. Come on, Fang, come outdoors with us."
"O.K.," said Foster gladly, and all three went pelting down the stairs, where children had never pelted until now.
It was very early when Portia woke up the next morning; the birds woke her. Every bird on earth was singing, it seemed. She had never heard such a jingling and jangling in her life.
Getting up, she went to the window to look out at the flowering, loudly singing world, and decided to go for a walk in her pajamas.
Everyone else was still asleep, so she tiptoed down the stairs, past the suit of armor on the landing that looked just as if it had a real knight inside it, and past the bronze lady who stood poised on the newel post. The bronze lady was called Miss McCurdy because she bore a striking resemblance to a live lady of this name who was a cashier at the Blue Premium Grocery Store in Pork Ferry.
Gulliver came yawning and stretching from the kitchen.
"We're going for a walk," Portia told him.
When she had unbolted and opened the big front door, Gulliver bounded out and went racing around the lawn in a dance of circles, but Portia walked slowly down the broad new steps, sniffing the air. M-m-m, lilies of the valley. She let her nose lead her to where they grew, spread in a vast green carpet under the apple trees. I was sure they'd all be gone by now, she thought. Of course then she had to stop and pick a big wet bunch of them, admiring their crispness and freshness: each little staff of bells trimmed with two broad leaves, like rabbits' ears.
The air rang with the energetic, joyful clamor of the birds. Only one, whose song came sweetly through the others, sounded meditative and solitary: three minor notes ascending. She wondered what it was.
A lively clanking caused her to turn her head: there came Julian along the drive, his camera, his field glasses, his collecting case, his lunch box, and a small canteen all draped about his person. No wonder he clanked more than usual.
"So early?" Portia said, surprised.
"The birds. I'm used to them, but they even woke me up, so I was positive they'd wake you up. I thought we'd better get started early; we've got a lot of work to do."
"We have?"
"Why, sure. We have to get the club fixed up, don't we? No one's cleaned it since September."
"Good," Portia said; that was the one sort of house cleaning she enjoyed. "And Mother's given us some things from here to decorate it with!"
"Great. Foster can help carry."
Through the tangles of singing came the one sweet song.
"What's that bird, Jule? That sort of sad one?"
Julian listened. "White-throated sparrow," he told her. Honestly, that boy knows everything, Portia thought, but she didn't say so.
"I wish it had a prettier name." She sighed. "Hear how pretty it sounds."
"One's all right, maybe ... yes, it sounds nice, it really does ... but a bunch of them together can drive you nuts."
There was never more than one, though, all that month, and every day Portia listened for its song. It meant something special to her, perhaps because it was the little music of this first lovely morning....
Finally the racket of the birds even got through to Foster, and he woke up. Hearing conversation just below his window, he hopped up and looked out to see his sister and his cousin; then he, also in his pajamas, ran down the stairs and out of doors to join them.
"Hi, Fang!" Julian greeted him. "How are you today?"
"I have scrofulous humours," Foster said.
"You have what?"
"Something she read off a bottle," Foster explained, indicating his sister. "I haven't really got them. I don't think I have."
"I don't think so either."
"Well, I'm going up to dress," Portia said. "My pajama legs are soaked with dew. Have you had breakfast, Jule?"
"Ye-es." Julian sounded doubtful. "But—"
"But you could eat another one, you mean?"
"If Aunt Barbara wouldn't mind...."
"Oh, she won't mind, she never does. I think I could eat two myself. And afterwards—you help me with the dishes, Jule—and after that we'll go to Gone-Away and see about the club. It's probably a perfect mess," Portia said contentedly, and went singing into the house.
