Chapter 6. A Discussion

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_ CHAPTER VI. A DISCUSSION

THE morning reading was over, but the girls lingered in the pine parlor, where the whole family had been gathered to hear some thrilling chapters of Parkman. Margaret and Bell had their sewing, Gertrude her drawing-board; Peggy was carving the handle of a walking-stick, while Kitty struggled with some refractory knitting-needles.

It was a pleasant place in which they were sitting: a little clear space of pine-needles, embroidered here and there with tiny ferns, and shut in by walls of dusky pine, soft and fragrant. The tree-trunks made excellent (though sometimes rather sticky) chair-backs; the sunshine filtered in through the branches overhead, making a golden half-light which was the very essence of restfulness.

"Oh, pleasant place!" said Margaret, breaking the silence that had followed the departure of the rest of the family. "How strange it seems, sitting here in this green peace and quiet, to read of all those terrible happenings. How can it be the same world?"

"He was a man, that La Salle!" exclaimed Peggy. "I never heard of such a man. Think of that winter voyage! Think of that man, brought up in luxury, with every kind of accomplishment, and that kind of thing, wading in snow-water up to his knees, and sleeping on the frozen ground, rolled in his blanket, while his clothes dried and froze stiff on the trees! think of him standing alone against courts and savages, and winning every time--till he was killed by those wretches. It is the greatest story I ever read. Now, if all history were like this, Margaret, I never should complain."

"Don't you like history, Peggy?" asked Bell, looking up in wonder.

"I used to detest it," said Peggy, laughing. "Julius Caesar, and William the Conqueror, and all those people used to bore me dreadfully, though Margaret did her very best to make them interesting; didn't you, you dear?"

"I tried, Peggy," said Margaret, with a smile; "but you never would admit that they were real people, just as real as if they were alive to-day."

"Oh, well, of course I know they were alive once, but so were mummies, and you can't expect me to be interested in _them_. However, I think I really am improving. 'Hereward' brought William alive for me, it truly did; and this Parkman book delights me. Oh! I should like to have made that voyage down the Mississippi, girls! I think, on the whole, I would rather be Cavalier de La Salle than any one I ever heard of."

"In spite of all the suffering and tragedy?" said Gertrude. "I could not say that, much as I admire him."

"Who would you be, if you could choose? Let us all say!" cried Bell. "A new game! two minutes for reflection!" and she took out her watch with a business-like air.

"Oh!" cried Gertrude. "But there are so many!"

"Silence!" said Bell; and there was an instant of absolute stillness. Taking advantage of it, a chipmunk ran across the brown carpet, and pausing midway, sat up on his haunches and surveyed the new and singular mountain ranges that had risen on his horizon. One of the mountains stirred--whisk! he was gone.

"Time's up!" said Bell. "Margaret, I will begin with you. With all history to choose from, who will you be?"

"Oh! must I be first?" cried Margaret. "As Gertrude says, there are so many; and yet when you come to think them over, there is something against every one; I mean something one would not like to do or to suffer. But,--on the whole,--I _think_ I would be Elizabeth of Hungary."

"Our Lady of the Roses? Well, she was lovely, though I should be sorry to marry her husband. The story would have been somewhat different if I had; but I am not a saint. Peggy, your turn!"

"This man we are reading about!" said Peggy, decidedly. "La Salle!"

"Toots!"

"Bell, you know I never _can_ decide between Shakespeare and Raphael. I have to be both; they lived quite far enough apart for separate incarnations."

"Greedy, grasping girl!" said Bell. "Kitty, who are you?"

"Jim Hawkins!" said Kitty, promptly.

"No fiction allowed this time, Missy, only history!"

"Oh, dear! well, then--Francis Drake!"

"Bound to have a pirate, aren't you, Kitty?" said Gertrude, mischievously.

"He wasn't a pirate!" cried Kitty, indignantly. "He was a great hero."

"_L'un n'empechait pas l'autre_, in those days!" said Bell.

"Well, now for yourself, Bell!" said Margaret. "It is your turn."

"Oh, I didn't need any two minutes," said Bell. "I am always William the Silent. I should be Beethoven if it were not for the deafness, but that I could not have borne."

"You all want to be men, don't you?" observed Margaret, thoughtfully.

"Why--yes, so we do! you are the only one who chose a woman."

"Everybody would be a man if they could!" cried Peggy, throwing grammar to the winds, as she was apt to do when excited.

"No, indeed, everybody would not!" cried Margaret, her soft eyes lighting up. "Nothing would induce me to be a man."

"I don't think you would make a very good one, to be sure!" said Peggy, looking affectionately at her cousin. "But I bet--I mean wager--you told me I might say 'wager,' Margaret!--that none of the other girls would hesitate a minute if they had the chance. I wouldn't! Think of it! No petticoats, no fuss, no having to remember to do this, and not to do that; and no hairpins, or gloves, or best hats--"

"Ah!" said Bell; "that is only the smallest part, Peggy. I don't mind the hairpin part--though of course it is a joy to get out here and dispense with them--but still, that is only a trifle. The thing I think about is the freedom, the strength, the power to go right ahead and _do_ things!" and, as she spoke, Bell threw her head back and stretched her arms abroad with a vigorous gesture. "Of course we girls are all well and strong, but it isn't the same strength as a man's. We are constantly running up against things we cannot, ought not to do. I _do_ envy the boys, I cannot help it."

"Yes!" cried Margaret, leaning forward, a soft flush rising to her cheeks. "I know--it is glorious to see them; but, Bell, isn't the very weakness part of our strength? Isn't it just because women _know_ the--the things they cannot do, that they are able to understand and sympathize, and--and help, in ways that men cannot, because they do not know?"

"I think Margaret is right!" said Gertrude, slowly. "And besides, there is strength and strength, Bell. For long endurance of pain or hardship, the woman will outlast the man nine times out of ten, I believe; and I heard Doctor Strong say once that women would often bear pain quietly that would set a man raving. Yes, I come over to your side, May Margaret. I would take Joan of Arc, if it were not for the stake. Let me see--oh, I know! I will be Grace Darling."

"Who was she?" asked Kitty.

"The lighthouse-keeper's daughter, at Longstone, off the Yorkshire coast. A ship, the _Forfarshire_, was wrecked on the rocks near by, and there seemed no chance of saving any of the crew; but Grace persuaded her father to try, and just those two rowed out, in a most terrible storm, to the reef on which the vessel had been wrecked, and saved the nine men, all that were left out of sixty-three, who were clinging to the rocks, waiting for death. Why wasn't that just as fine as commanding an army, or even leading a forlorn hope in battle? Then there was dear Margaret Roper--I think she is the one for you, May Margaret!--and Cochrane's Bonny Grizzy, and--oh, ever and ever so many of them. Yes, I take up my stand once and for all on my own side."

"Well!" said Bell, shaking her head. "I hear what you say, Betsy, but it makes no difference,--does it, Peggy?--though I admit the force of your remarks."

"Not a bit!" said Peggy. "I wouldn't have been Mrs. La Salle for a farm."

"There wasn't any!" said Margaret.

"The principle remains the same," said Peggy, "as Miss Russell used to say."

"There is another thing!" said Margaret. "Your life out here, Bell, shows me how much girls _can_ do; I mean in the active, outdoor, athletic way. More than I ever dreamed they could do. It really seems to me that, except just for the petticoats, you have very few drawbacks. I suppose it is having all the brothers. Why, you know as much as they do about the woods and all."

"Yes, it's partly the boys," said Bell; "but it is much more Papa. You see, from the time we could walk, he has always taken us out into the woods and fields, and made us use our eyes and ears, and talked to us about things. We should not know anything, if it were not for Papa."

"He does seem to know almost everything!" said Margaret. "I never saw any one like him."

"There _isn't_ any one like him," said Gertrude, decidedly. "What have you got there, Margaret?"

Margaret had drawn a letter from her pocket, and was looking it over.

"An argument on my side," she said, smiling. "May I read it aloud?"

"Do! do!" cried all the girls.

Margaret smoothed out the crumpled pages affectionately. "He carried it in his pocket two days before he remembered to post it!" she said. "I judge from the date, and the appearance of the envelope. There was candy in his pocket, and"--she sniffed at the letter--"yes! tar, without doubt. Now listen!

"'DEAR COUSIN MARGARET:--We miss you awfully,
and Uncle John says it is no kind of a house
without you, and it isn't. We went a walk
yesterday, Susan D. and me and the dogs,
because you know it was Sunday; Uncle John was
coming too, but he had roomatizm and coud not.
Well Cousin Margaret, we walked over the big
hill and just then the dogs began howling and
yelling in the most awful manner, and running
round and round like they were crazy; and we
ran to see what was up, and we found out, I
tell you! It was white hornets, about ten
thousand of them, and the dogs had rolled in a
nest of them, and they were stinging their
noses, and they flew at us with perfeck fewry,
I mean the hornets did. I hollered and ran, but
Susan D. said wait she knew what to do, so she
said "Come on," and we ran down to the brook
and she took mud and put it on my stings before
she touched her own, and it took a good deal of
the pane out though not all. And then she put
it on the dogs' noses, and they understood like
persons, and poked them into the mud themselves
and soon forgot their pane. But I thought I
would tell you this Cousin Margaret, because
Susan D. did really behave like a perfeck
brick, and you always said girls were as brave
as boys but I never thought so before but now I
do; because I hollered right out when they
stung me which I am ashamed of. You said
confession was good for the sole, and so I
think: so now I will say good-by from

"'BASIL.'"

"What a dear boy!" cried Gertrude.

"Oh, he is!" said Margaret, the happy tears springing to her eyes. "He is one of the very dearest boys that ever lived, Gertrude; so manly and honest, and so funny, too. Gerald knows him!" she added, shyly. "I wish he had been at home when you were there, Peggy."

"Yes; he must be a brick!" said Peggy. "Now, Margaret, you know he is, and you know that nothing but 'brick' expresses what I mean. Girls, I appeal to you. Margaret wants me to talk like a professor all the time, and I am not a professor, and am never likely to be one. Bell, isn't 'brick' all right?"

Bell looked conscious. "I confess I say it, Peggy; I confess it seems much heartier than the same thing in what my mother calls good English. Still--I believe it would sound very queer to me if she used it; the mother, I mean."

"Grace used to say 'a quadrangular piece of baked clay!'" said Gertrude. "Don't you remember, Peggy?"

"So she did--dear thing! Well, but, Bell, would you have girls talk just the way grown-up people do? It would sound awfully stiff and poky. I don't mean that it sounds so when your mother talks!" she cried; "of course you know I don't mean that. But girls _aren't_ grown-up, you know."

"But they are going to be!" said Margaret. "If they don't learn good English now, how are they going to do it later? It does seem to me a terrible pity, with all our great, glorious language, to use so little of it, and to use it so often wrong. You may think me priggish and professorial, and anything else you like, Peggy dear, but that is what I think."

"I love you to distraction," said Peggy; "you are an angel, but I think you carry it too far. What would you say instead of 'brick?' how would you describe this boy--who simply _is_ a brick?"

Margaret reflected. "I should say he was a nice, manly boy!" she said, presently.

"Nice! now, Margaret! 'nice' is niminy, you know it is, and piminy too."

"The great advantage of 'brick,'" said Bell, "is that it is one word, and 'nice manly boy' is three, and doesn't mean the same thing then."

"There!" cried Peggy, in triumph. "What do you say to that, Margaret? Find one word in your old 'good English' that does express 'brick?'"

"Well--it isn't easy!" Margaret admitted. "'Trump' is the only one I can think of, and I suppose that was slang fifty years ago."

"The mother says that when a word has held its own for twenty years, it isn't slang any more," said Gertrude. "The question is--"

At this moment the sound of a horn was heard; a long, ringing blast, followed by a second and a third.

The girls sprang to their feet. "Hurrah for a swim!" cried Bell. "Come, bricks and trumps--I'll race you all to the tents!" And off they went with a flash of petticoats, leaving the chipmunk to speculate on the sudden upheavals of nature. _

Read next: Chapter 7. Water Play

Read previous: Chapter 5. Kitty And Willy

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