Pollyanna Grows Up, Eleanor H. Porter [best short novels of all time txt] 📗

were spent over books and fancywork on the Harrington veranda.

Pollyanna was delighted. Not only were her paying guests being kept from any possibilities of ennui and homesickness, but her good friends, the Carews, were becoming delightfully acquainted with her other good friends, the Pendletons. So, like a mother hen with a brood of chickens, she hovered over the veranda meetings, and did everything in her power to keep the group together and happy.

Neither the Carews nor the Pendletons, however, were at all satisfied to have Pollyanna merely an onlooker in their pastimes, and very strenuously they urged her to join them. They would not take no for an answer, indeed, and Pollyanna very frequently found the way opened for her.

“Just as if we were going to have you poked up in this hot kitchen frosting cake!” Jamie scolded one day, after he had penetrated the fastnesses of her domain. “It is a perfectly glorious morning, and we’re all going over to the Gorge and take our luncheon. And you are going with us.”

“But, Jamie, I can’t⁠—indeed I can’t,” refused Pollyanna.

“Why not? You won’t have dinner to get for us, for we shan’t be here to eat it.”

“But there’s the⁠—the luncheon.”

“Wrong again. We’ll have the luncheon with us, so you can’t stay home to get that. Now what’s to hinder your going along with the luncheon, eh?”

“Why, Jamie, I⁠—I can’t. There’s the cake to frost⁠—”

“Don’t want it frosted.”

“And the dusting⁠—”

“Don’t want it dusted.”

“And the ordering to do for tomorrow.”

“Give us crackers and milk. We’d lots rather have you and crackers and milk than a turkey dinner and not you.”

“But I can’t begin to tell you the things I’ve got to do today.”

“Don’t want you to begin to tell me,” retorted Jamie, cheerfully. “I want you to stop telling me. Come, put on your bonnet. I saw Betty in the dining room, and she says she’ll put our luncheon up. Now hurry.”

“Why, Jamie, you ridiculous boy, I can’t go,” laughed Pollyanna, holding feebly back, as he tugged at her dress-sleeve. “I can’t go to that picnic with you!”

But she went. She went not only then, but again and again. She could not help going, indeed, for she found arrayed against her not only Jamie, but Jimmy and Mr. Pendleton, to say nothing of Mrs. Carew and Sadie Dean, and even Aunt Polly herself.

“And of course I am glad to go,” she would sigh happily, when some dreary bit of work was taken out of her hands in spite of all protesting. “But, surely, never before were there any boarders like mine⁠—teasing for crackers-and-milk and cold things; and never before was there a boarding mistress like me⁠—running around the country after this fashion!”

The climax came when one day John Pendleton (and Aunt Polly never ceased to exclaim because it was John Pendleton)⁠—suggested that they all go on a two weeks’ camping trip to a little lake up among the mountains forty miles from Beldingsville.

The idea was received with enthusiastic approbation by everybody except Aunt Polly. Aunt Polly said, privately, to Pollyanna, that it was all very good and well and desirable that John Pendleton should have gotten out of the sour, morose aloofness that had been his state for so many years, but that it did not necessarily follow that it was equally desirable that he should be trying to turn himself into a twenty-year-old boy again; and that was what, in her opinion, he seemed to be doing now! Publicly she contented herself with saying coldly that she certainly should not go on any insane camping trip to sleep on damp ground and eat bugs and spiders, under the guise of “fun,” nor did she think it a sensible thing for anybody over forty to do.

If John Pendleton felt any wound from this shaft, he made no sign. Certainly there was no diminution of apparent interest and enthusiasm on his part, and the plans for the camping expedition came on apace, for it was unanimously decided that, even if Aunt Polly would not go, that was no reason why the rest should not.

“And Mrs. Carew will be all the chaperon we need, anyhow,” Jimmy had declared airily.

For a week, therefore, little was talked of but tents, food supplies, cameras, and fishing tackle, and little was done that was not a preparation in some way for the trip.

“And let’s make it the real thing,” proposed Jimmy, eagerly, “⁠—yes, even to Mrs. Chilton’s bugs and spiders,” he added, with a merry smile straight into that lady’s severely disapproving eyes. “None of your log-cabin-central-dining-room idea for us! We want real campfires with potatoes baked in the ashes, and we want to sit around and tell stories and roast corn on a stick.”

“And we want to swim and row and fish,” chimed in Pollyanna. “And⁠—” She stopped suddenly, her eyes on Jamie’s face. “That is, of course,” she corrected quickly, “we wouldn’t want to⁠—to do those things all the time. There’d be a lot of quiet things we’d want to do, too⁠—read and talk, you know.”

Jamie’s eyes darkened. His face grew a little white. His lips parted, but before any words came, Sadie Dean was speaking.

“Oh, but on camping trips and picnics, you know, we expect to do outdoor stunts,” she interposed feverishly; “and I’m sure we want to. Last summer we were down in Maine, and you should have seen the fish Mr. Carew caught. It was⁠—You tell it,” she begged, turning to Jamie.

Jamie laughed and shook his head.

“They’d never believe it,” he objected; “⁠—a fish story like that!”

“Try us,” challenged Pollyanna.

Jamie still shook his head⁠—but the color had come back to his face, and his eyes were no longer somber as if with pain. Pollyanna, glancing at Sadie Dean, vaguely wondered why she suddenly settled back in her seat with so very evident an air of relief.

At last the appointed day came, and the start was made in John Pendleton’s big new touring car with Jimmy at the wheel. A whir, a throbbing rumble, a chorus of goodbyes, and