CHAPTER XI
THE ADVENT OF THE PLOSHKIN
IF you are busy enough, you usually don’t discover that you are homesick—especially if, whenever you do take time to think of your own private affairs, you can run to the calendar to count the days before the coming of the smallest sister. And between work and fun, Betty and Madeline were very busy indeed.
First there was Christmas dinner at Mary’s—as gay and lively as all Mary’s hospitalities. Next day there was a select lunch party at the Tally-ho, at which Mary was the only guest, and at the end of which, with much pomp and ceremony, she was officially designated the One and Only Perfect Patron, and initiated with the rite of the Secret Drawer.
“You’re not opening that the way you did before, Madeline,” Betty declared, as the three bent their heads together over the desk, while Madeline pressed one after another of the tiny, hidden springs.
“Oh, yes, I am,” Madeline assured her. “There couldn’t be but one way to open it. First you press this spring and take out this drawer; then you press another spring in the side wall, and out flies your secret compartment.”
“You did at least two more things before,” insisted Betty.
“Well, the woman I bought the desk of thought one push would do it all,” Madeline reminded her. “Before long we may discover the one magic touch.”
“Oh, I hope not,” sighed Mary rapturously. “I like to have it complicated, so that you forget exactly how it goes between times, and have to fuss and fumble around. Now please shut it and let me find it again all by myself.”
“No, that is the second rite,” Madeline told her severely. “Come back in a week, a day, and an hour. Meditate, meanwhile, on the Rules for the Perfect Patron, and concoct at least one beautiful new feature for the tea-shop. Then, and not till then, are you permitted to touch these mystic springs. For to-day all is finished, and your long-suffering husband is waiting sadly for his tea.”
Though it was vacation time, the Tally-ho Tea-Shop found plenty of patrons. Besides Mr. Thayer, there were all the left-over girls, who, having discovered that they could have a good time if they kept together, organized breakfast and lunch parties and afternoon tea-drinkings, with skating, snow-shoeing, and sliding expeditions for appetizers between times. Betty and Eugenia had to seek the privacy of the loft for their lessons, while Madeline spread her Literary Career, in the shape of a heterogeneous litter of half-finished stories, over Betty’s desk, and good-naturedly combined the duties of cashier and manager with the toils of authorship. The best thing about a Literary Career, she confided to Mr. Thayer, when he came in one day for his tea, is that you can pursue it in any reasonably quiet corner.
“Who publishes your things?” Mr. Thayer inquired interestedly. “I must read them.”
And Madeline was forced to admit that so far she had no publishers. “But I’m going to keep on till I do,” she declared hopefully. “I could learn to paint easier, I know, because that runs in the family, but I don’t want to. I’m bound to write, and I’ll keep at it until I succeed.”
“And I’ll back you to make a big hit,” Mr. Thayer declared solemnly. “Anybody that could write those Cake songs, and that Stocking Act—— By the way, please ask the real cashier to send me a bill for my party.”
Madeline promised, and wasted the next hour considering whether she should spend her share of the December profits for a trip to Bohemia, New York, or a set of Dickens in morocco bindings. The worst thing about a Literary Career is the ease with which one’s mind wanders away from it.
Eugenia Ford cheered up a little over the Pageant of the Cakes, but when that was done with she relapsed into her former state of tearful melancholy. She was too busy to join in the fun the other girls were having, and besides, as she explained carefully to Betty, they weren’t any of them in her crowd. Betty received this statement in discreet silence. She believed in taking things one at a time, and Eugenia’s complete ignorance of the history of early English literature, her hopeless wonder at the intricacies of geometrical figures, and her perfectly appalling ideas about the principles of exposition, as exhibited in her themes, were certainly all that could be attended to in a two weeks’ vacation. Betty had been “good” in solid geometry; she could glean the main facts of the literary history from the text-book and the notes that Eugenia had thoughtfully borrowed from a friend who was a “Lit. shark”; the themes she could easily see were poor enough to secure their author a warning, but what the exact trouble was she could not tell.
“I don’t believe I could do any better myself,” Betty confided to Madeline. “Please tell me what to tell her.”
Madeline read through a few of Eugenia’s stupid little efforts, and called Betty’s attention to the marks in blue pencil at the end.
“‘No sequence of thought, no progressive logic, no relevant detail.’ That’s the trouble with them all. ‘Poor paragraphing; no development of the central idea.’ Her instructor gave her plenty of hints, but she blissfully ignored them all.”
“She didn’t understand them, I suppose,” Betty defended Eugenia. “Anyway I don’t, and you’ve got to explain till I do, Madeline Ayres. I’m sorry to bother so, but I’ve got her on my hands, and she shan’t be flunked in composition if I can help it.”
“All right,” laughed Madeline. “Now just what is it that you don’t understand?”
At the end of an hour’s careful explanation Betty declared that she thought she could coach Eugenia in theme-work. “You might have explained straight to her instead of to me,” she added, “only she cries such a lot. It’s awfully embarrassing, until you get used to it, to have to talk to a fountain.”
But if Eugenia wept copiously, she listened attentively, and worked hard, and gradually both she and Betty were conscious that their efforts were telling. Betty was more relieved, if possible, than Eugenia.
“You’ve certainly improved a heap in geometry,” she told her pupil, toward the end of the second week. “And you know that table of dates in ‘Lit.,’ and your themes are a speck better. Your regular tutor will have to put most of her time on those.”
“My regular tutor!” Eugenia’s tone was terror-stricken. “Oh, Miss Wales, I want to keep on with you, of course.”
“No, you don’t want anything of the kind,” Betty assured her emphatically. “I was second choice, remember, and besides, I don’t do tutoring. I only did it through vacation to oblige you and Miss Ferris, but just as soon as she gets back and the tutor, and——” Betty paused. Eugenia had not cried for three days, but now she was winking hard. “Well, we’ll talk it over with Miss Ferris,” Betty told her hastily. “I really must go now. I’ve got to take the two-fifteen to the Junction to meet my little sister.”
Eugenia’s face softened and brightened suddenly. “Is she really little?” she demanded. “Because I had—I mean I love little girls.”
“Yes, she’s really little,” Betty laughed. “She’s eleven and very small for her age.”
“Mine would have been——” began Eugenia, and stopped again, the soft, sweet look still in her eyes.
“You wouldn’t care to come and meet her too?” Betty asked hesitatingly. “Madeline was going with me, but some girls have engaged tea here, so she’s staying to see to it.”
“I should perfectly love to,” declared Eugenia enthusiastically. “I’ll be company for you on the way down, but on the way back I’ll sit in another seat and—and do theme outlines. It’s lovely of you to ask me, Miss Wales.”
But Eugenia did no theme outlines that afternoon. The smallest sister was a very friendly little person. She flew into Betty’s arms—Will, who had brought her, was going straight to Boston on business for Cousin Joe—and having hugged and been hugged “’most to pieces” she turned to Eugenia, held up her face for a kiss, and snuggled confidingly up to her new friend while Betty went to see about the baggage, and later sat in the car with one arm around Betty and the other around Eugenia.
Eugenia smiled rapturously at Betty. “It feels so good. You see I had a little sister, Miss Wales, and she—I miss her every day of my life. May I please come and play with yours sometimes?”
Betty assured her that she might come whenever she pleased, smiling to herself as she remembered how she had meant to warn little Dorothy that girls like Eugenia Ford were too busy to bother with smallest sisters.
It seemed as if nobody was too busy to amuse Dorothy. Miss Dick’s school did not open until a week after Harding, and by that time the smallest sister had become a regular—if very restless—feature of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop. Polly and Georgia and Lucile and the fluffy-haired Dutton twin had each had her to dinner on the campus, and the straight-haired twin, who was a basket-ball fiend, had secured her as mascot for the sophomore team, thereby plunging Eugenia, who took no particular interest in basket-ball and so had not thought of the freshman mascot, into the depths of woe. But no amount of flattering attention could supplant Eugenia in Dorothy’s affections. Eugenia knew how to talk to little girls. She had a way of appearing when Betty was busy and Dorothy was thinking hard of mother. Her stories were almost as nice as Madeline’s, and she was never too busy to tell one. It soon got to be a regular thing for her to slip down from the campus in the dusk of the afternoon, when Betty was always busiest in the tea-room, and it was too cold and dark for a little girl to want to play outdoors by herself. That was Dorothy’s lonesome time—or it would have been, but for Eugenia.
First Eugenia told “true stories” of dolls and canary birds that she had had when she was little, and of a tame toad that lived under the door-step at home. Then she invented the ploshkin, and after that she had to tell how to catch and kill a ploshkin every night for two weeks.
“Do you know how to catch and kill a ploshkin?” the story began, and the answer to that was an anxious “No,” even after you knew quite well, by heart, how the deed was done.
“The ploshkin is a sad little soul,” Eugenia went on solemnly, “and it lives in the middle of the bay.”
“What bay?” demanded Dorothy.
TRUE STORIES OF DOLLS
“The bay of the ploshkin, of course. It lurks in the deep round hole that you see exactly in the middle of the bay. So you must row out there in a skiff, taking with you a pail of mortar.”
“What a funny thing to take,” giggled Dorothy each time.
“The only thing,” Eugenia announced severely. “And when the skiff is exactly in the centre of the bay you must fasten the prow to the top of a wave, with a pink shoe-string.”
“Who ever heard of a pink shoe-string?” demanded Dorothy gleefully.
“You have—now,” Eugenia told her. “Where was I? Oh, yes, tie the prow to the top of a wave with a pink shoe-string, and then you must wait and wait and wait and wait, till by and by the ploshkin will come up to drink.”
“I should think he could drink enough down where he was. Don’t you mean come up to breathe?” inquired Dorothy acutely.
“I mean come up to drink. The ploshkin has an ingrowing face and he drinks up, not down. Now shall I go on with the story?”
“Please,” begged Dorothy.
“Well, when he comes up with a flip of his tail, you must jump for the pail of mortar and sprinkle it on him, and he’ll be so mortified that he’ll die of mortification.”
“And must you hold him by the tail? You said ‘catch and kill,’” Dorothy reminded her.
Eugenia nodded. “But it’s never been done yet. The tail is prickly, you see, and slippery between the pricks, and the pink shoe-string gets in your eyes.”
“How could it?” demanded Dorothy.
“It’s enchanted,” Eugenia assured her with the air of finality that little girls love. “And so this is how you catch and kill a ploshkin.”
“Could you please make me a picture of a ploshkin?” asked Dorothy on the third night of the story.
“I can’t draw pictures, dear, but Miss Ayres will, I’m sure,” Eugenia told her, and that was how Madeline heard of the ploshkin, and fell so in love with its name, its ingrowing face, and its prickly, slippery tail, that she spent a whole morning making sketches of it, when she should have been pursuing her Literary Career.
Dorothy displayed the sketches to all her friends, and the exact appearance of the ploshkin began to be vigorously discussed in college circles, and pictures of it adorned the fly-leaves of note-books and the margins of corrected themes. The fluffy-haired Dutton twin, who took modeling, even made a comical little clay ploshkin and presented it to Dorothy, who thanked her and tactfully refrained from mentioning that she had forgotten the prickly tail. But Madeline was not so reticent, and she and the Dutton twin together modeled another figure that made Dorothy fairly dance with delight. It had, besides the prickly tail, one wing, held coquettishly before its “ingrowing face,” which was rather like a fish’s, except for a “sunny Jim” smile around the mouth; and there was something inexplicably fascinating about the grotesque huddle of its posture.
“That’s a real touch of genius—that makes you feel like laughing whenever you look at it,” explained the Dutton twin triumphantly, “but it won’t help me any if I cut again in Elocution. Good-bye,” and she was off, singing, “Midyears are coming, tra-la, tra-la,” with a joyous disregard for time and tune.
While the others were still admiring the new ploshkin Mary Brooks appeared.
“It’s two weeks, and two days, less two hours,” she explained, when she had kissed Dorothy and examined the ploshkin. “I couldn’t come at the proper time, because my Uncle Marcellus has been to visit us—the one that gave us the desert island for a wedding gift, you know.” Mary sighed deeply. “A desert island is a lovely thing to own, but when it involves an Uncle Marcellus I’d advise anybody to think twice. Well, he’s gone at last and here I am, to open the drawer.”
“Why didn’t you bring your Uncle Marcellus in to lunch?” demanded Madeline severely. “You haven’t been any kind of a patron lately. And where’s your new feature for the shop that I told you to think up? You’re trying to shirk your responsibilities, little Mary.”
“Uncle Marcellus,” said Mary calmly, “is a vegetarian with dyspepsia. Of course I didn’t bring him in here to find fault with everything. New rule for the Perfect Patron: Keep the dyspeptic vegetarian away from the Tea-Room. As for features, I’d thought of something. Let me see—oh,—why, of course! Make ploshkins.” Mary smiled her beamish smile at the two proprietors.
“Now, Mary, you thought that up on the spur of the minute,” began Madeline. “It’s not fair——”
“Nonsense,” Mary denounced her affably. “You’re always preaching the advantage of impromptu inspirations.”
“But why should we make ploshkins?” demanded Betty.
“Why indeed?” Mary beamed. “Have you forgotten the day when the Gibson girl hung over every desk on the Harding campus? And after that came the Winged Victory. Last year it was red devils, wasn’t it? Well, now it shall be ploshkins. The Harding girl must have her little idol, and the Tally-ho Tea-Shop may as well have the Harding girl’s money.”
“But they’d take ages to make,” objected Madeline. “Fluffy and I spent two long and weary afternoons on this one.”
“Don’t be so literal, child,” advised Mary. “Have them made, I mean, of course. Get one of those plaster statuette places in New York to turn them off for you. Let me see—three—five—order five hundred. Three hundred girls will rush to buy them, and two hundred out of the three will get that wing broken off before June and sorrowfully buy another.” Mary smiled blandly. “I ought to have been the wife of a shopkeeper, oughtn’t I? Now may I play with your secret drawer?”
Being of a fickle disposition, Mary had no sooner received full and free permission to play with the drawer whenever she liked, than the secret springs lost their tremendous attraction for her. She had just got the drawer open when Georgia Ames appeared and Mary promptly deserted her new plaything to secure Georgia’s advance order for ploshkins, and then to help her concoct a beautiful little notice about them to be circulated discreetly through the college.
“Zoology classes, Attention!” it ran. “The ploshkin is as instructive as the grasshopper, and you should lose no time in observing its anatomy. To be had, without the trouble of catching it in the Bay, at the Tally-ho Tea-Shop. Order early.”
“The name and that senseless touch about the Bay will get them,” Mary declared, and went home to tell George Garrison Hinsdale all about it. So the secret drawer stood open all day long—for Betty, who would have noticed it, had had an exasperating struggle with the stove, on top of a particularly irritating time over the carriage lamps, and went home early with a headache, leaving a message for Eugenia, who still insisted upon coming for lessons. Madeline found the drawer, when she was straightening up the tea-room for the night, and shut it in hot haste. For what is the use of having a secret drawer at all if you leave it wide open all day for every one to look at?
