Baby Island (10 page)

“Oh, Jean, everybody has better feelings if you can just get at them.”

“I think Mr. Peterkin’s are pretty far under,” said Jean gloomily.

“You leave him to me,” said Mary.

They were awakened in the morning by a hoarse voice singing:

“Oh, Bedelia
,

I’d like to steal yuh!”

Halfred, the parrot, had come over to inspect camp. He walked around and around them while Jean held the chattering Charley safely in her arms.

“Good morning, Halfred,” said Mary politely. “I hope that you had a good night.”

“Oh, you would, would you? Oh, you would, would you?” said Halfred sarcastically.

Mary held out a small piece of hardtack. Halfred took it in one claw and, standing one-legged, nibbled it daintily, cocking his yellow eye at them the while.

“Well, bless my soul!” he remarked. “Well, bless my soul and body!”

Mary held out another bit of hardtack.

“Oh, you would, would you?” said Halfred, but this time his tone had lost its sarcasm and was quite ingratiating. Presently he was like one of the family, letting the twins pet him and call him “Birdie,” and Mary scratch his head and smooth his tail feathers. For Mary knew the right place to scratch parrots’ heads, too.

In the midst of this pleasant domestic scene, Mr. Peterkin arrived like a thundercloud.

“Halfred, come out o’ that!” he commanded sternly.

Halfred flew obediently to his master’s shoulder, tweaking his ear and remarking hoarsely, “Man the pumps, Captain, man the pumps!”

“Look ’ere,” said Mr. Peterkin, addressing Mary, “that kid’s sick again. ’E won’t eat no’ow. I gives ’im the bottle just like you did, an’ bly’me if ’e don’t shun me cold.”

“Well,” said Mary, “of course he won’t take the bottle if you’re cross with him. You have to make yourself look and sound like his mother.”

“Me?” roared Mr. Peterkin. “Me look an’ sound like a nanny goat?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Look ’ere, Miss. You come give ’im the bottle. I’ll give
ye milk for yer young ’uns’ breakfast, if ye’ll get the little beggar to take ’is.”

Mary wanted nothing better. “Here, you hold these babies for me,” she said, putting Jonah and Ann Elizabeth into the astonished seaman’s arms, and she ran off to the goat pen.

Jean followed her, holding the twins by the hand, with Halfred and Charley hopping along on each side. Last of all came the dazed Mr. Peterkin, carrying the two babies as gingerly as if they had smallpox. Ann Elizabeth gave Mr. Peterkin a long look, and then her face dimpled into a lovely baby smile.

“Pitty,” said Ann Elizabeth, touching his fierce black whiskers. “Pitty-pitty.”

Mr. Peterkin was embarrassed, but he was also just a little flattered. Nobody had ever before called his beard pretty.

It took Mary only a moment to persuade the baby goat to take his breakfast. All he wanted was a kind hand and a gentle voice to administer it. When he had finished it, Mary turned to Mr. Peterkin.

“Now, I’ll show you how to get his confidence,” she said, and in a moment the haughty Mr. Peterkin was taking lessons in the art of looking and sounding like a mama nanny goat.

“Well, blow me down!” he remarked hoarsely, when Mary told him that he had done well at his lesson.

Meanwhile inquisitive Jean and the twins were exploring Mr. Peterkin’s shanty.

“Oh, Mary,” cried Jean, from the shanty door, “he’s got a phonograph.”

As it happened, the phonograph was Mr. Peterkin’s greatest weakness, and now he couldn’t resist showing it off. Making a great pretense of grumbling, he went into the shanty and wound it up. It was an old-fashioned affair with a large horn shaped like a purple morning-glory. The records were little black-wax cylinders. With a certain amount of pride and condescension, Mr. Peterkin played two records for them: “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,” and “Oh, Bedelia.” Halfred, perching himself upon the horn, sang the choruses. He was quite off key and about a measure behind, but nobody minded that.

“So that’s where he learned it,” said Mary, “and nearly scared Jean to death!”

Jean and the babies were delighted, but soon tidy Mary could do nothing but gaze about the awful disarray of Mr. Peterkin’s one room.

“Oh, Mr. Peterkin!” she said, “what a dreadful mess!”

“I’m not a ’ousekeeper, Miss,” said he, apologetically.

“I should say not!”

“Oh, but it’s a lovely mess, Mary!” cried Jean. “What with the phonograph and
Pharaoh’s Horses
in that great
gold picture frame, and the shells and ship models, and the iron stove, and that great brass-bound chest. What’s in that, Mr. Peterkin?”

“I say, you leave that chest alone, you ’ear?” Mr. Peterkin was angry again, and Jean retreated rapidly. “You’re not to touch that,
never!
D’you ’ear?”

“But his bed’s not made,” said Mary, unable to think of anything else, “and the dust is terrible.”

“Well, I ’ates ’ousework!” cried Mr. Peterkin crossly. “’Tis the only ’ardship in living by myself. Cookin’ is ’ateful, too, but a man’s got to live even on a desert hi’land!”

Suddenly Mary’s eyes grew starry with an idea.

“Look here!” she said. “If one of us came over every week and cleaned your house and cooked up some food for you, would you give us milk for the babies? Would you?”

He scratched his head. “You’d bother me,” he growled.

“No, we promise not to bother! We’ll cross our hearts, won’t we, Jean?”

Solemnly they crossed their hearts.

“Women!” snorted Mr. Peterkin. “Babies! I thought I’d escaped them.”

“Oh, come, come!” said Mary sensibly. “You’re being awfully silly, you know. We won’t hurt you at all, and we’re offering to take all your troublesome housework off your hands. Think how nice it would be to have a tidy
cabin and some well-cooked food while you go out hunting or lie in your hammock, and all we ask is a little milk for the babies. You have a lot more milk than you need yourself.”

Mr. Peterkin looked at her and scratched his head. He looked at Jean and at each of the babies. When he looked at Ann Elizabeth, she burst into smiles and said, “Pitty-pitty.” Mr. Peterkin actually blushed. Then he turned to Halfred.

“What say, Halfred?” he asked doubtfully. Halfred flew onto his shoulder and tweaked his ear.

“Man the pumps, Captain, man the pumps!” he remarked genially.

“Well,” said Mr. Peterkin. “We’ll give ’er a try. But be’ave yourselves! That’s all I say. Be’ave yourselves! An’ never for
no
reason look into that chest o’ mine!”

CHAPTER TEN

S
O
B
ABY
I
SLAND
was not a desert island any longer, with Mr. Peterkin and Halfred and the goats living just around the other side. There was even a boat, Mr. Peterkin told them, which called at the island every two years to leave Mr. Peterkin’s supplies and a letter from Belinda.

“Oh, how soon will it come?” cried Mary.

“Just left, Miss, about two months gone.”

“Two years to wait!” said Mary sadly, and Jean cried, “Oh, Mary, they will have forgotten all about us in two years!”

So the girls went back to the tepee—a little happy and a little sad.

Every Wednesday morning at daybreak either Mary or Jean started off to clean Mr. Peterkin’s house, while the other stayed at the tepee with the babies. When Mary went, Mr. Peterkin’s house was shining clean and he had a nice pan of biscuits or a cocoanut pudding. He had a bounteous store of supplies on his shelves, so that cooking should have been easy. But when Jean went, things did not always shine
so brightly, and instead of golden biscuits there was a fallen cake or what Jean called a “flumperty-wumperty,” which was a mixture of whatever she could find in Mr. Peterkin’s cupboard. However, on Jean’s days there was certainly more fun, for the phonograph played most of the time and Halfred sang and Charley danced or swung from the rafters by his tail. On these occasions poor Mr. Peterkin, unable to bear “young ’uns,” went into the jungle to hunt, or far up the beach for gulls’ eggs. There was only one thing which spoiled Jean’s visits for her. Mr. Peterkin had forbidden her to look into his chest.

“It’s that chest of his that worries me, Mary,” remarked Jean one evening after she had been at the shanty. “Think of having to see it there every time I go, and not knowing what’s inside it.”

“Oh, old sailors always have sea chests, Jean.”

“So do pirates, Mary, and theirs are full of poltroons.”

“Don’t you mean doubloons, dear?”

“Well, anyway, I can’t rest until I know.”

“Jean, you know that story we had in our reader about Pandora? She was just the kind of girl you are and couldn’t rest until she knew what was inside everything.”

“I don’t think I ever read that story,” said Jean uncomfortably.

“Then I’ll tell you. She finally opened the chest to see
what it held, and all the troubles and sicknesses and fearful things in the world that had been shut up in there flew out and went to work again.”

“Well, I never said I was going to look, did I?” demanded Jean.

“No, of course not,” said Mary. “I just thought maybe you ought to know about Pandora.”

“Yes, and there was that awful thing that happened to Bluebeard’s wife, too, wasn’t there, Mary?”

“Yes, Bluebeard had definitely told her not to look, and she went and did. It served her right to find all those ladies hanging by their hair.”

“It certainly did!” agreed Jean heartily. “But you wouldn’t call Mr. Peterkin’s whisker exactly blue, would you, Mary? Or would you?”

“It’s very, very black,” said Mary. “Sometimes very black things are almost blue.”

Jean shuddered. “Of course, I’m not really interested in his old chest,” she said. “But what I do want to know is how he lost his toe. There must be a good story about that. I wish you’d ask him, Mary.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Maybe I will sometime, if I feel quite brave.”

Mr. Peterkin was harsh, but he never forgot to pay them with a pail of goats’ milk. The girls had learned to heat it
on Mr. Peterkin’s stove, so that it would not sour quickly, and, by keeping it in the cold stream which flowed past the tepee, they were able to have sweet milk for the babies for nearly a week. Toward the end of the week, however, they had to fall back on canned milk, and Mary began to wonder how they could get the fresh goats’ milk more often. It was certainly a long way around to Mr. Peterkin’s house, and, even without the babies, it took them several hours to walk each way, besides doing Mr. Peterkin’s work.

“But we can’t move any nearer because of leaving our stream,” said Mary. “Of course, Mr. Peterkin has a spring at his place, but he’d never let us live beside him, and I’m not sure I’d want to either.”

“If we could go through the jungle,” said Jean, “it would be nearer.”

“I know,” said Mary, “but we’d be sure to get lost.”

“Mr. Peterkin has never been over here,” said Jean. “Maybe he doesn’t know how far we go every week.”

“I expect he doesn’t care. But, listen, Jean, why don’t we invite him over to dinner sometime? Let’s do it on a Sunday when he can come to Sunday school. It might do his bad character a lot of good.”

“It might,” said Jean doubtfully, “but he’s got an awful bad character, and I don’t think that me saying the twenty-third Psalm would do anybody much good.”

“Well, it certainly does
you
a lot of good, Jean. Besides, we’ll sing ’Scots, Wha’ Hae wi’ Wallace Bled,’ and maybe I’ll preach a sermon, if I can think of some good ways to reform a character like Mr. Peterkin’s. Then we’ll give him something good to eat—that always helps to reform people. You hardly ever see anyone acting bad on a full stomach.”

But somehow the invitation was always delayed. Mr. Peterkin had a frightful way of scowling that made it very difficult even for Mary to say, “Won’t you drop in for a plain family dinner next Sabbath after service?” as Aunt Emma used to say to her friends in Scotsville.

The next time that Jean went around the island to do Mr. Peterkin’s cleaning, she resolved to solve at least one of the mysteries surrounding him. Pandora and Mrs. Bluebeard had scared her temporarily out of thoughts about his chest, but there was still his toe. She found him taking his ease as usual in the hammock. Halfred flew out to greet her and lit upon her shoulder. Prince Charley was occupying the other shoulder at the moment and they always skirmished cheerily about her ears, Halfred trying to tweak Charley’s tail and Charley grabbing a handful of red and green feathers. But on the whole they were very good friends by now. “If only Mr. Peterkin had as nice a disposition as Halfred’s,” thought Jean. She went and stood before the
hammock until Mr. Peterkin lifted the palm-leaf fan off his face and looked at her.