The Collected Works of Susan Coolidge: 7 Novels, 35+ Short Stories, Essays & Poems (Illustrated). Susan Coolidge
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and saying something very fast which none of them understood, while she waved two fingers at them with a curious gesture.
“I do believe she is afraid Mabel will cast the evil eye on her doll,” said Katy at last, with a sudden understanding as to what this pantomime meant.
“Why, you silly thing!” cried the outraged Amy; “do you suppose for one moment that my child could hurt your dirty old dolly? You ought to be glad to have her noticed at all by anybody that’s clean.”
The sound of the foreign tongue completed the discomfiture of the little Italian. With a shriek she fled, and all the other children after her; pausing at a distance to look back at the alarming creatures who didn’t speak the familiar language. Katy, wishing to leave a pleasant impression, made Mabel kiss her waxen fingers toward them. This sent the children off into another fit of laughter and chatter, and they followed our friends for quite a distance as they proceeded on their way to the hotel.
All that night, over a sea as smooth as glass, the “Marco Polo” slipped along the coasts past which the ships of Ulysses sailed in those old legendary days which wear so charmed a light to our modern eyes. Katy roused at three in the morning, and looking from her cabin window had a glimpse of an island, which her map showed her must be Elba, where that war-eagle Napoleon was chained for a while. Then she fell asleep again, and when she roused in full daylight the steamer was off the coast of Ostia and nearing the mouth of the Tiber. Dreamy mountain-shapes rose beyond the far-away Campagna, and every curve and indentation of the coast bore a name which recalled some interesting thing.
About eleven a dim-drawn bubble appeared on the horizon, which the captain assured them was the dome of St. Peter’s, nearly thirty miles distant. This was one of the “moments” which Clover had been fond of speculating about; and Katy, contrasting the real with the imaginary moment, could not help smiling. Neither she nor Clover had ever supposed that her first glimpse of the great dome was to be so little impressive.
On and on they went till the air-hung bubble disappeared; and Amy, grown very tired of scenery with which she had no associations, and grown-up raptures which she did not comprehend, squeezed herself into the end of the long wooden settee on which Katy sat, and began to beg for another story concerning Violet and Emma.
“Just a little tiny CHAPTER, you know, Miss Katy, about what they did on New Year’s Day or something. It’s so dull to keep sailing and sailing all day and have nothing to do, and it’s ever so long since you told me anything about them, really and truly it is!”
Now, Violet and Emma, if the truth is to be told, had grown to be the bane of Katy’s existence. She had rung the changes on their uneventful adventures, and racked her brains to invent more and more details, till her imagination felt like a dry sponge from which every possible drop of moisture had been squeezed. Amy was insatiable. Her interest in the tale never flagged; and when her exhausted friend explained that she really could not think of another word to say on the subject, she would turn the tables by asking, “Then, Miss Katy, mayn’t I tell you a CHAPTER?” whereupon she would proceed somewhat in this fashion:—
“It was the day before Christmas—no, we won’t have it the day before Christmas; it shall be three days before Thanksgiving. Violet and Emma got up in the morning, and—well, they didn’t do anything in particular that day. They just had their breakfasts and dinners, and played and studied a little, and went to bed early, you know, and the next morning —well, there didn’t much happen that day, either; they just had their breakfasts and dinners, and played.”
Listening to Amy’s stories was so much worse than telling them to her, that Katy in self-defence was driven to recommence her narrations, but she had grown to hate Violet and Emma with a deadly hatred. So when Amy made this appeal on the steamer’s deck, a sudden resolution took possession of her, and she decided to put an end to these dreadful children once for all.
“Yes, Amy,” she said, “I will tell you one more story about Violet and Emma; but this is positively the last.”
So Amy cuddled close to her friend, and listened with rapt attention as Katy told how on a certain day just before the New Year, Violet and Emma started by themselves in a little sleigh drawn by a pony, to carry to a poor woman who lived in a lonely house high up on a mountain slope a basket containing a turkey, a mould of cranberry jelly, a bunch of celery, and a mince-pie.
“They were so pleased at having all these nice things to take to poor widow Simpson and in thinking how glad she would be to see them,” proceeded the naughty Katy, “that they never noticed how black the sky was getting to be, or how the wind howled through the bare boughs of the trees. They had to go slowly, for the road was up hill all the way, and it was hard work for the poor pony. But he was a stout little fellow, and tugged away up the slippery track, and Violet and Emma talked and laughed, and never thought what was going to happen. Just half-way up the mountain there was a rocky cliff which overhung the road, and on this cliff grew an enormous hemlock tree. The branches were loaded with snow, which made them much heavier than usual. Just as the sleigh passed slowly underneath the cliff, a violent blast of wind blew up from the ravine, struck the hemlock and tore it out of the ground, roots and all. It fell directly across the sleigh, and Violet and Emma and the pony and the basket with the turkey and the other things in it were all crushed as flat as pancakes!”
“Well,” said Amy, as Katy stopped, “go on! what happened then?”
“Nothing happened then,” replied Katy, in a tone of awful solemnity; “nothing could happen! Violet and Emma were dead, the pony was dead, the things in the basket were broken all to little bits, and a great snowstorm began and covered them up, and no one knew where they were or what had become of them till the snow melted in the spring.”
With a loud shriek Amy jumped up from the bench.
“No! no! no!” she cried; “they aren’t dead! I won’t let them be dead!” Then she burst into tears, ran down the stairs, locked herself into her mother’s stateroom, and did not appear again for several hours.
Katy laughed heartily at first over this outburst, but presently she began to repent and to think that she had treated her pet unkindly. She went down and knocked at the stateroom door; but Amy would not answer. She called her softly through the key-hole, and coaxed and pleaded, but it was all in vain. Amy remained invisible till late in the afternoon; and when she finally crept up again to the deck, her eyes were red with crying, and her little face as pale and miserable as if she had been attending the funeral of her dearest friend.
Katy’s heart smote her.
“Come here, my darling,” she said, holding out her hand; “come and sit in my lap and forgive me. Violet and Emma shall not be dead. They shall go on living, since you care so much for them, and I will tell stories about them to the end of the CHAPTER.”
“No,” said Amy, shaking her head mournfully; “you can’t. They’re dead, and they won’t come to life again ever. It’s all over, and I’m so so-o-rry.”
All Katy’s apologies and efforts to resuscitate the story were useless. Violet and Emma were dead to Amy’s imagination, and she could not make herself believe in them any more.
She was too woe-begone to care for the fables of Circe and her swine which Katy told as they rounded the magnificent Cape Circello, and the isles where the sirens used to sing appealed to her in vain. The sun set, the stars came out; and under the beams of their countless lamps and the beckonings of a slender new moon, the “Marco Polo” sailed into the Bay of Naples, past Vesuvius, whose dusky curl of smoke could be seen outlined against the luminous sky, and brought her passengers to their landing-place.
They woke next morning to a summer atmosphere full of yellow sunshine and true July warmth. Flower-vendors stood on every corner, and pursued each newcomer with their fragrant wares. Katy could not stop exclaiming over the cheapness of the flowers, which were thrust in at the carriage windows as they drove slowly up and down the streets. They were tied into flat nosegays, whose centre was a white camellia, encircled with concentric rows of pink tea rosebuds, ring after ring, till the whole was