Chapter V: “the Lucky Four”

“Isa, child, do you realize that you and I are growing to be merely calling acquaintances? That you are gone all day long, after your practice and reading are done, and that we meet only at meals, sometimes not then? It is painful to see my only child slipping into a calling acquaintance, and to foresee that some day I may say: Miss Lindsay? Miss _Isabel_ Lindsay? Oh, yes; I do know her! She calls on me occasionally; I do not return her calls.”

Mrs. Lindsay tried to look pathetic, and succeeded so well that Isabel, though she knew that her mother was playing with her, threw herself upon her with a rush and hugged her violently.

“Mother, you darling, dreadful mother! You know I’m not so awful as that!” she cried. “But there’s so much, so _very_ much to do!”

“I had to try not to be pleased that school closed in April,” Mrs. Lindsay went on in a pensive tone as she smoothed her disordered garments. “It seemed wicked to be glad when the school had to close because so many children had measles, but I had to try hard not to be glad--and I’m not sure I succeeded!--because I was to have my daughter at home. And she deserts me! It is a blow. She gives me our twilight hour’s talk, but I may lose that.”

“Mother, stop!” begged Isabel. “I know you don’t mean it, but it’s horrid, because it would be so horrid if you did mean it! You know I wouldn’t miss my hour for anything in the world! It’s the loveliest thing ever to sit down with you every night in the dusk and tell you every single thing that I’ve done all day! But, mother, only think all that we four have now! There’s the Club Room, all our own, and we love it! And our gardens, and the things are poking right up since it came so warm after this rain! And the woods to go to, which we’ve got to love best of all, forever. And the secret passage, though we don’t like to go through it much; it’s so dark and damp and probably spidery, but it’s great to know it’s there, and it’s another of our places. And there’s Château Branche. We haven’t been up in it yet, but now it’s warm we thought we might go up and sit there this afternoon. Really, we are so busy! I think we are pretty lucky to have all these places our own. We are a sort of society, or club, or something now; our name is ‘the Lucky Four,’ and our badge is a four-leafed clover. I named us; isn’t it fine?”

“Fine, indeed!” Mrs. Lindsay dropped her pretense of feeling abused, and sympathized with Isabel’s pleasure, which was also her own pleasure; the greatest joy she had was her beloved little girl’s happiness.

“Are you going to Château Branche this afternoon? Because if you are I’ve a fairly good-sized box of candy that might enjoy the Château, if you’d take it with you and open it there,” she said.

“Mother, mother, there’s no other mother on earth like you!” Isabel declared, as she declared so often that it was like a refrain to a song that was hard to stop singing. “You think of such nice things!”

“Candy?” queried Mrs. Lindsay.

“And having it to take up into Château Branche to open there; that’s one of them,” Isabel tempestuously embraced her mother over again. “Now, I’ve got to go, duckie mother, or I’ll be late. Good-by till half-past five.”

Isabel ran out calling: “Hoo-hoo-oo-oo,” for Prue to hear and join her.

Prue heard; she had been listening for the call, and was ready to run the moment it fell on her ear. The two inseparable friends put their arms around each other and went on happily, chattering as if they had parted a month before, instead of at dinner time.

They met two little girls of their own age, schoolmates of theirs, who stopped them. Kathie Stevens, the taller of the two, moved and spoke energetically; she had a wilful face, with a snap in her eyes. Dolly Harding, her friend, was shorter, decidedly plump, with round features and a placid look that at the same time hinted of obstinacy. Dolly was inclined to be lazy, while Kathie was more energetic than was always pleasant. Prue and Isabel liked them, but they were too satisfied with each other and Mark--Poppy, too, added to their pleasure--to have much interest left to give any one else.

“Hello, Prue ’n Isa!” cried Kathie as they came toward one another from opposite directions. “Say, we saw that funny Poppy Meiggs just a while ago!”

“Did you?” Isabel answered. “What made her funny?”

“She is, all the time; she’s _funny_!” Kathie found it easier to repeat her statement than to explain it. “She said you’d got up a club.”

“Well, kind of,” Prue admitted warily, foreseeing danger. “It’s just us, same’s before, only we call it a club.”

“Lucky Four, Pop said it was,” Kathie persisted.

“Well, that’s what we _call_ it,” Prue said, as if it might, nevertheless, be almost anything else.

“Say, girls,” Kathie spoke so vehemently that the two words seemed to pop like corn on a popper, “say, let us be in it! Don’t be piggish with your club. Let us belong. We want to, don’t we, Doll?”

“Surest thing in the world, we want to,” Dolly approved her. “We think you might. We’d like to know why not? We wouldn’t hurt it, would we? More the merrier!”

“It wouldn’t be the Lucky Four if it was six,” said Isabel, uttering the first words that came into her head, to gain time. She knew instantly that she and Prue did not want Kathie and Dolly to join the club, and that Mark and Poppy would not want them; she was not at all sure that “more” would be “merrier,” but she had no idea of how to refuse the petition.

“Oh, well, my gracious! Can’t we change the name? Lucky Six is just as good, even if you can’t have a four-leaf clover for the badge--Poppy said that’s what you took. Have six rings all hitched together, in a circle, like doughnuts, for the badge. Just ’s good!” Kathie resumed her pleading.

“I shouldn’t care about doughnuts for my club badge,” said Prue, coming to Isabel’s rescue before she could speak again. She knew it was hard for Isa to say no to any one who wanted her to say yes, and Prue was afraid Isa’s tender-heartedness would give them two more club members on the spot unless she interfered.

“We couldn’t let you join right off like this, Kathie. We’d have to put it to Mark and Poppy and let them vote on it, have a club meeting or something, to decide, you know. We’re not the whole club; we’re only half,” she said.

Isabel looked at Prue with profound admiration. She certainly was the most sensible person! And her sense kept her out of scrapes into which Isabel’s greater sweetness, her sensitive desire to make everything pleasant, often landed her.

“Well, I suppose that’s fair,” Kathie admitted grudgingly. “We’ll go right along with you now and put it up to Mark and Poppy, then we’ll know how it went.”

“Oh, but clubs have to vote by themselves; only members there. You mustn’t come unless we let you belong,” Prue cried.

Dolly set her chin in a way she had that meant she had first set her mind. “It isn’t so much of a club. We’re going now,” she said.

And go they did, Kathie taking Prue by the arm, Dolly linking herself with Isabel with so much decision that poor Prue and Isa saw no way to prevent what they felt was an unwarrantable intrusion.

Mark and Poppy would be waiting for them at Château Branche; not in it, for they would be sure to wait for Isabel and Prue to help them up, and not choose places till they were there to choose fairly. There was one side of the platform in the tall pine tree, which was the children’s beloved summer house, that was not quite level, and these four honorable comrades were all equally anxious not to get the best of one another. So Mark and Poppy would surely wait till they had all assembled to mount together into their beautiful perch.

“This is the first time this year,” said Prue, as they came through the spring-green woods and espied the tree, with Mark and Poppy waiting beside it, as they had expected.

“I know it is,” said Isabel, her voice answering in its mournful tone Prue’s meaning, which was: “The first time this year, and Dolly and Kathie here!”

“Well, hello, Dolly; hello, Kathie,” said Mark, striving to greet the guests politely, but unable to greet them cordially.

Poppy frowned openly. “It’s a club now,” she remarked.

“We met the girls,” Prue at once plunged into an explanation to give Mark a clew to what had happened. “They want to join our club--we’d have to change the name, of course. And we said we couldn’t let ’em without talking to you. So they came along. I told them we had to meet first.”

Kathie saw the dismay that Mark could not keep out of his eyes, and that Poppy fairly glowered, looking ready to do more.

“You let us join this,” she said instantly, “and we’ll do something for you. We’ll kind of belong hitched on, not inside, so you can keep on being the Lucky Four, if you want to. That can be the real club, and we’ll be--I don’t know what we’d call it--just kind of belong, hitched on. And I’ve got a whole nice, awful nice, collection of old coins. I don’t want ’em, but they’re perfectly fine; I know that. You and Prue and Isa love history, Mark, so you’d be crazy over ’em. Some of ’em were Roman emperors’ money; pretty near two thousand years old, they are. I’ll divide ’em up with you three--Poppy wouldn’t care any more’n I do for ’em--and I won’t keep one myself, if you’ll let Doll and I--Doll and me--into the club. How’s that? We could pretend the coins were the club’s treasure!”

“Is that bribery, Mark?” asked Isabel.

“N-no,” Mark decided slowly. “It’s a fair offer. It’s kind of like tribute paid to the king to be allowed to belong to his kingdom. That’s all right. I’d love the coins. But, honestly, Kathie, you see this is just ourselves, and we have such nice times! It’s kind of risky to let in some one else. Suppose we let you come on trial? I don’t want to let any one in for keeps till we know how it works.”

“But he doesn’t want to be selfish with our lovely times, and we do like you both, you know that,” Isabel hastily interposed with her smile that always disarmed wrath, for she saw that Kathie looked indignant, and that Dolly was by no means pleased.

“Everybody keeps their own house for themselves, no matter if ’tis nice, and they are happy. They don’t take in boarders, just ’cause it’s nice,” said Poppy, her meaning only too plainly showing through her figure of speech.

“Oh, well, on trial,” said Prue. “Want to join that way, girls?”

“All right. Any way you say,” agreed Kathie, banishing her annoyance. “You’ll like us; we’ll be good clubbers. And I’ll bring the coins to-morrow.”

“Just to look at. We wouldn’t let you divide them till you are taken in,” said Mark firmly, as if he were afraid that he might be tempted.

“Now, let’s get up,” said Dolly, weary of waiting so long to get her way.

The children clambered up into Château Branche. Mark’s father had improved its entrance by footholds of wood nailed to the side of the tree; last year the climb had been difficult for the girls.

“O my! It’s worth more than coins to come here!” cried Kathie, catching her breath delightedly.

“We just love it,” said Isabel, softening toward the intruder when she found her so enthusiastic. “But we have company here. You could come here, if you didn’t belong, and without any coins.”

It was beautiful. No one could have resisted its loveliness. Lying back on their abundant pillows, the children looked up through the dark green pine, now pungent with the spring scent of newly mounted, resinous sap, to see the flecks of deep blue that were revealed as the branches moved in the breeze. Birds hopped about, most of them bits of motion, rather than color or shape, so thick were the pine needles, so heavy the shadows. But close above the branches which held Château Branche robins were darting in and out, nest-building. At first they doubted the children, discussing them between themselves with sharp chirps and nervous tail twitching, but finally they decided that human beings who had bird habits and nested in trees must be trustworthy, and resumed their work without any more delay. It was easy to see, by the short time between their trips after supplies and the rapid way they tucked those supplies into the growing nest, that there was no time to lose. For a long time--a long time for six children to be still--no one spoke. Then Isabel said softly:

“It would be nice to be dead and lying out under the trees, all quiet and lovely, among birds and grass and flowers, if only your body could know it was there, wouldn’t it be?”

“Oh, Isabel!” cried Dolly, in strong protest and horror.

But Mark smiled at Isabel and nodded.

“I’ve thought that, too, Isa,” he said. “But we can have it all and be alive; that’s still better.”

“Mother gave me a box of candy to open,” said Isa, sitting up and throwing off her dreams by an effort that showed.

She produced the box, two pounds, and the six fell upon it as if Château Branche were a desert island on which they had been shipwrecked without food for days.

It doesn’t take long to do away with two pounds of candy when there are six to eat it; after all, that is only a wee bit over five ounces apiece! Mrs. Lindsay had not reckoned on the extra two. When the candy was gone the spell of the quiet woods seemed broken; Kathie and Dolly grew restless and wanted to go down again.

“You can’t keep quiet a whole afternoon,” said Kathie.

“We do. We read and talk and just sit and look. We never get tired,” said Prue disapprovingly.

But they all came down, Mark with Pincushion on his shoulder in the fashion of the preceding summer when Isabel and Prue had first known him and Pincushion had been a kitten. Bunkie was waiting for them, and they all wandered slowly through the woods, toward the Hawthorne house.

“Show us the Club Room, too; Pops said you had a club room,” said Dolly.

“We have,” said Mark. “This way, then.”

He led the way through the house, into the room at its rear which the children claimed. It was furnished abundantly with the contributions from the families which had helped it to completion, albeit the odds and ends effect was somewhat queer, decidedly odds-and-endish.

“Now, I like this!” cried Kathie delightedly. “Isn’t it great to have this all our own? And dishes! Why, what fun! I’m going to give a party here--just us members!” she added, seeing disapproval of her instant taking possession gathering on the other faces. “You could climb up outside. Why don’t you come in that way always? Lots nicer.”

“Isabel and I like the stairs,” said Prue primly.

Poppy looked for the first time as if she found Kathie an addition to the club ranks.

“We will,” she said. “Us, anyway, Kathie.”

“Let’s be the Lucky Four and a Half--six, you know!” cried Dolly.

“We’ll see,” Mark said cautiously. “Maybe yes; maybe no. But you come and try. We don’t want things happening here to change it.”

But Mark was to discover things happening there, and that soon.