Eric put his hand in his coat pocket and he found his box of matches. Gilbert got up and got the flat green saucer ash tray, from the mantelpiece.
There are the Boy and the Girl there; in the hall, is the Old Man and the Old Lady; Mama brought the Boy and the Girl back, too, from her honeymoon. The Girl has her skirt tucked up and they both have bare legs and they are fisherboy and fishergirl. The Boy has a net on a stick, like for catching butterflies, over his shoulder, and the Girl has a basket and there are two blue fish-heads poking out of the lid of the basket.
Eric dropped the match in the flat green saucer ashtray, and Gilbert put the ashtray on the table and Gilbert said, “Where’s the new copy of Saint Nicholas, Hilda, where did you put the new Saint Nicholas?”
I was watching Eric to see if his cigarette was really lighted, but it was and he was smoking, and he looked at Harold as if he had just seen him and he looked at Gilbert, then he took a pull on his cigarette and looked around the room, then he said, “Thank you, Harold,” then he said, “Thank you, Gilbert, thank you”; he said, “Yes, yes, yes,” like he does, all in one word and said, “What are you doing? What are you painting, Hilda?”
I said I wasn’t painting, it was Harold, and Harold came and stood by me and Eric turned over the pages of the paint-book.
“Oh,” said Eric and he turned back the pages and he said, “Maybe that painting isn’t dry yet, I don’t want to smudge your painting, Harold.”
He pressed the middle of the book flat with his other hand and we were back at the picture of the dog with the collar and the clown with the hoop and the lady who was standing on a horse on one toe and who would jump through the hoop. This was a circus and we had been to a circus; when we first came to Philadelphia, Papa took us to a circus; there was a lady in a cage with lions, dressed like the prince in my old Grimm and she shot off a pistol and she said “hi-hi” and cracked a whip and shot off the pistol again and the lions jumped around the cage but Papa said they couldn’t possibly eat her, they were old lions, he guessed and he laughed because we thought the lady would be eaten.
“It’s dry,” Harold said.
“Yes, yes,” said Eric, “Oh yes, I see.”
I said, “He did that a long time ago, he did that before—” and then I remembered the bump on the front porch and the way Gilbert had put back the desk shears and the way I was thinking I was glad that Annie had not come in and told us to go to bed.
Gilbert was watching Eric turn over the pages, now Eric turned over to the boys fishing on the bridge and the mill with the boat and he said, “That’s a nice boat — I— er — we must take a trip on the river sometime, I mean the Delaware river,” he said. “We could take one of those steam-boats at the wharves at the end of Market Street, we could take a whole day trip. There is a steamboat, Mr. Evans told me, that runs right down the river to Cape May.”
I said, “What is Cape May?” and he said, “Oh, it’s the name of a place, it’s in New Jersey, it’s the seashore.”
Gilbert said, “Like Point Pleasant where we went once,” and Eric said yes, it was; he hadn’t been to Point Pleasant but that is what it was like, there was lots of sand and shells and you could walk for miles along the ocean and there was always a place where you could buy balloons, he thought, but he was sure we could get peanuts, he said. He said peanuts grew in New Jersey and they had farms of peach trees and he said things grew in New Jersey like melons because it was so sandy, we would find a place and get a watermelon; he dropped the ash off into the green saucer.
“Let me see,” he said. “We can’t go yet, we’ll go as soon as the excursion boats start; we could even,” he said, “take a boat to Baltimore.”
I had a girl in Baltimore was a song we sang.
Nellie was a girl that Eric was going to marry, but when we said, when he was shaving in the bathroom in the old house, “How’s Nellie, how’s Nellie?” and sat on the edge of the bathtub, he said “I wouldn’t—” and he turned his face to get the light on the side from the window, where he was shaving.
We waited for him to get off the soap from his chin, and we waited for what he would say, but he didn’t say anything so “I had a girl in Baltimore, Nellie, Nellie, Nellie,” Gilbert went on with it, to the wrong tune, he was just singing anything.
Then Eric turned round with the soap off his face and he was wiping the razor on a towel and he took up another towel and dabbed at his face and we saw blood on the towel.
“You cut yourself,” Gilbert said.
Eric said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and then he said, “Confound it,” which isn’t real swearing but Mama said we must not say it. Gilbert kicked his heels on the bathtub, holding on by his hands, we put our tin duck, tin fish, small tin boat that was no bigger than the fish, tin swan, tin frog in that tub. We had the window open and we floated our soap bubbles out of the window till someone wanted to come in, “I told you children you must not lock the door and play games in here,” Mama said, so we were not to lock the door.
Eric held his handkerchief to his face now as if he had the toothache; we said “Nellie, Nellie” at him again, and he looked at the handkerchief and did not put it back and there was the cut on his chin, but it was not bleeding very much now, and he said in a different voice, “I would be very glad if you wouldn’t — make games about Nellie anymore or — or say Nellie to me anymore.”
Then he went and got his coat and went out to wherever it was he was going.
Eric was leafing through the book and he came to the orchard and the cow in the orchard. It was spotted like the pony in the circus picture. It was like that terrible time, that we never told anybody about, when we were going to a farm in the country and it was a big farm with an old lady and a barn and pigs and about six cows and a bull tied up and hens, and the old lady said we could feed the hens.
What it was, was that Papa and Mama were going to the World’s Fair, but they said we must have a happy time too; so we talked about it and talked about it and they thought Point Pleasant was too far and it would be better if Ida took us near, where her cousin had a house; there was a big farm, Cousin Clarence wrote, he had a little church near there, Mama said, and he would look after us.
So we went and looked at the farm and the old lady said it would be nice to have children and we would all help her feed the hens.
Then we went back to the station, where Ida’s cousin had a little hot brick house near the station rails. And Ida said, “I don’t think we want to go to that farm, it’s dirty, we don’t want to go there. Here is this nice place and Gilbert can play with Fritzie and you and Harold will be so happy. Now this is a nice place, Mrs. Schneider says we can stay here,” and it was terrible, and I do not know what happened that we were so hot and the lady was always cross and went and sat with Ida on rocking chairs and always said, “Run away, don’t bother me,” and Gilbert went off with Fritzie, who would not let us ride his rocking horse, to get frogs and Harold and I were so hot and there was no one to talk to, but Cousin Clarence came and took us to see nice people who let us sit on their porch and they had apple trees.