It was a beautiful summer. There was just enough rain to keep the land green and the farmers contented, but most of the days were warm and fair.
The children swam, roamed, rode their bicycles up hill and down dale, picnicked, conducted meetings in the club, and paid visits almost daily to their Gone-Away friends. In the long, light evenings they played Prisoner's Base and Any Over and Allee, Allee, In-Free.
In addition, they had their private projects. Foster and Davey, though they had their own little house on Craneycrow, decided to build themselves another in the boughs of an oak tree on "The Property." They went to work with hammers and nails, inflicting so many minor injuries upon themselves that Julian said the tree house should be named Palazzo Band-Aid. Between hammerings, the little boys could be heard arguing and conversing, shrill as the sparrows that clustered in the Boston ivy.
Portia and Lucy practiced ballet (Lucy took lessons in Albany). They had scratched out a garden for themselves containing only the vegetables they preferred: tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and carrots.
"No beets!" Portia said firmly.
"No spinach!" said Lucy.
"Oh, no, never! And absolutely no cucumbers and no broccoli and no cabbages!"
Another project was the rehabilitation of the six sad little rooms in the attic. Mr. Ormond Horton donated the paint, but the girls proposed to do the work themselves.
"Let's have each one a different color," said Portia. "One blue, one green, one red—or, no, pink—"
"And one yellow, and one orange, and—what other colors are there?"
"Purple?" suggested Portia.
"Yes, why not! I never did see a purple room."
Fortunately for them, the rooms were tiny. Even so, the work was harder than they had supposed, and nobody would help them. The little boys offered to hopefully, but were refused.
"You know what that would mean," Portia said darkly.
"Paint everywhere but on the walls," said Lucy, sounding like her own grandmother. She had a green streak in her hair that wouldn't wash out, and Portia's fingernails were purple. But it was all in a good cause; the rooms were beginning to look cheerful, to say the least.
Julian had started a paper route that took him half the morning, and the other boys, too, had part-time jobs.
Mr. Blake's vacation was over; he had had to return to his work in the city and only came out for weekends, but his weekend projects were so numerous that, as he said, he had "to get back to the office to relax."
As for Mrs. Blake, she was seldom seen without something in her hands: hammer and nails, or paint and paintbrush, or lengths of fabric. "You really never get finished with a house," she said contentedly. But sometimes she just wandered quietly from room to room, gloating.
The Villa Caprice continued to offer surprises: certain tall spikey plants near the house turned out to be lilies: great freckled fragrant ones. A drawer in the library desk was discovered to be full of jigsaw puzzles, dominoes, playing cards, and a chess set. Some surprises were not so pleasant: the leak that appeared in the dining room; the peculiar temperament of the bathroom plumbing; the fact that the drawing-room fireplace smoked in rainy weather.
Gradually they became familiar with the sounds peculiar to the house: the stairtread in the hall stairs that chirped like a cricket when anyone stepped on it; the swing door into the dining room that whooshed and sighed; the way the chimneys rumbled when the wind was high. All these were nice because they were the sounds of home.
"This place is home, now," Portia said. "And the apartment in New York is just the place we stay in in wintertime."
"Winter. Ugh," said Foster. "I wish it wouldn't get here for eleven years."
But the summer, as summers are apt to do, was spinning itself out fast, too fast. Already it was August.
"It's funny," Portia observed. "I never really believe in school in summertime. I know it exists, and all, but it just doesn't seem really real."
"Mine does," Lucy said. "I can smell it if I think about it. I can smell the blackboard and the varnish on my desk and the wet floor in the hall when they've scrubbed it."
"I move we change the subject," suggested Tom Parks. "Is there another stuffed egg on the premises?"
They had met, all of them, for a picnic at Gone-Away—both the official groups, of course: the members of the Fang Club, all two of them; the members of the Philosophers' Club, all five.
It was exactly the sort of day for watermelon, so that was what they had for dessert. Foster luxuriated, sinking two thirds of his face into the icy pink slice.
"Hey, you know what, Dave?"
"No, what?"
"My new front teeth are getting to be more than just edges. I can sort of bite with them now."
"I've been biting with mine for months," Davey said wearily.
Except for a watery crunching and slurping, there was silence; then Foster said: "But you know what, Dave?"
"No, what?"
"When we've got our real full-grown front teeth, we won't be able to call it the Fang Club any more, because we won't have any fangs."
"What will we call it then?"
"I don't know. We'll think of something."
"What about the Dental Maturity Club?" suggested Julian; but of course they didn't pay any attention to him.
After the watermelon had been eaten right down to the rind, the little boys repaired to Craneycrow and the girls went off to visit Mrs. Cheever.
Tom Parks sighed and let his belt out a notch. Then he and Julian and Joe, for no particular reason and not really thinking about it, climbed up in the Vogelhart willow tree. Sun and food had made them lazy, and each of them found a perching place and sat there like a sleepy baboon high among the wind-sifting, sun-sifting leaves.
Swallows looped and dipped around Judge Chater's tipsy cupola.
"You know something, Jule?" Joe Felder said. "I bet you'd never dare spend a night in one of these old dumps. Judge Chater's house, for instance."
"I bet I would."
"I bet you wouldn't."
"I bet I would," but then Julian, who was a fairly honest boy, felt compelled to add: "Not alone, though. With somebody. You, maybe. How about it? I dare you!"
It was a bright, lively afternoon. Foster and Davey could be heard sparrow-chirping on their island, and Mr. Payton, distantly, could be heard whistling in his garden. To the left, there was the scatterbrained conversation of hens and a sound of feminine voices as Mrs. Cheever and the girls came out of her house to go berrying.
The world was a safe place. Anyone could see that it was safe.
"O.K.," Joe said. "You say when."
"You too, Tom?"
"Well, I guess so." Tom agreed, but not with alacrity.
"We'll do it on the night of the full moon," Julian said. "That's only three nights off, Thursday. We'll be able to find our way around better by moonlight, and another thing is—another rule is—that we can't bring any flashlights."
"Heck, why not?"
"That would make it too easy," Julian said happily. His very eyeglasses sparkled with excitement. "We don't just want this to be an easy sort of thing, do we? Because it has to be in the nature of a—of a test."
"Why?" Tom wanted to know.
"For discipline," Julian replied. He had a noble feeling in his forehead as he said it. "Self-discipline," he added.
"I don't know if I need it," Tom said. "I get discipline. I get it everywhere. I get it at home, I get it at school, I get it in the mornings working at Bilmeyer's store."
"Oh, everybody needs it," Julian assured him. "And listen, you guys, this whole operation has to be kept secret. Absolutely secret. From everyone."
"Our families, even?"
"Especially our families. They might say no."
"From the girls, too?" asked Joe.
Julian just ignored him. That went without saying.
"We'll slip out after dark, see, when everything's quiet. We'll meet here under the tree. I'll be spending the night at the Blakes so I can get here fast, and you guys will have your bikes...."
Busily and happily he laid his plans, and soon his companions were infected with his enthusiasm; even Tom.
"We'll bring some blankets in case we get sleepy," Julian said.
"And some food in case we get hungry," Tom added.
"And an alarm clock to wake us up in time to go home before they miss us. I'll bring it," Joe volunteered.
Thursday came: fine and clear and very warm. Julian smuggled three blankets into Judge Chater's house. He had also brought a bottle of Mrs. Cheever's A.P. Decoction because at night the mosquitoes were apt to be bad. He crawled cautiously up the rickety stairs that swayed and swagged beneath his feet. Reconnoitering, the day before, he had found that there was a fairly sound room on the second floor not quite so littered and ruined as the rest. Besides, though he scarcely admitted it to himself, to be upstairs seemed somehow—safer.
Now in the broad light of day even the hint of such a thought appeared ridiculous. Sunshine blazed beyond the broken windows; flies buzzed in and out. Everything looked perfectly ordinary and cheerful, however shabby.
"Nothing to it," Julian remarked aloud, sweeping fallen plaster aside with his foot and clearing a space to spread the blankets on.
"Hey, Jule," called Tom's voice below stairs. "Where are you anyway?"
"Up here; come on up! Take it easy on the stairs, though."
Tom came, carrying a tin box under his arm. He lifted the lid of it and peered in lovingly.
"Three chocolate-almond bars," he recited. "Three bags of potato chips. Three bags of salted peanuts. And Joe's bringing cold root-beer tonight along with the alarm clock."
"Great," Julian said. "And I know where I can get some salami and a bottle of dill pickles."
"M-m," murmured Tom wordlessly. The thought of dill pickles made his mouth water; then he said: "You know, Jule, this doesn't seem like a test, or discipline, or anything. It just seems like a neat thing to do. It just seems like fun."
"I know," said Julian. "Let's hope we feel the same tomorrow morning.”
