Chapter I: Opening Day

Four children sat around a large room which was empty of all furniture except wooden packing cases, in attitudes that indicated their various temperaments. Prue Wayne, twelve years old, sat up straight; she was as trim in muscles as in her tightly braided fair hair, her fleckless deep collar, her correctly laced shoes which were crossed, one over the other at the ankles above her sturdy feet.

Isabel Lindsay, also twelve years old, half lay over the arm of her chair on her elbow, every line of her body graceful and expressive of interest, although her position might easily have been a lazy one. She was far prettier than neat and shining Prudence; her dark hair turned into rings wherever it could steal the chance, her gray-blue eyes were brilliantly soft under their dark lashes; she had delicate, flexible lips, and clear, healthy pallor of complexion.

The third little girl was not yet ten. No one, even if he had not merely kissed, but had dined on the Blarney stone, could have said she was pretty. Fiery red hair was the first thing one saw about Poppy Meiggs, and that could be seen afar. She was a thin little creature, with light lashes, a sharp face, now covered with more than its ordinary quantity of freckles, because March had been and gone and had left upon poor little Poppy’s sensitive skin a crop of these brown reminders of its sunny days and strong winds.

Poor little Poppy was plain _plus_; she was downright ill-looking, but those who loved her--and there were now several of these--forgot her looks.

Her temper was as fiery as her hair; she had no patience, not yet much self-control, but she was loyal and generous, and loved her beloveds with all her tempestuous heart. She was clever, too. Now that dear little Mrs. Hawthorne had rescued her from destitution, after her father had died and her mother had run away and left her children, Poppy was fast learning more than most children of her age know. “She grabbed everything she heard with both hands and fairly crammed it into herself,” Mark Hawthorne said.

Mark Hawthorne was the one boy in this group; he, like Poppy, was perched on a window sill, but where Poppy sat up keen and small and tense, like a sharp little splinter of redwood, Mark sat lightly poised, swinging his crossed legs, giving the effect of a woodland, winged thing that was his wonderful attraction. He was a beautiful creature, lithe, graceful, his hair a tawny brown, his eyes brown and gold, flecked like a goldstone. His face was full of witchery. He made older people long to seize him in a tight embrace, yet feel as though he would still be free, however tight they held him. Isabel and Prue had dubbed him Jack-in-the-Box when they had first known him, because he had appeared and disappeared so suddenly; like a jack-in-the-box he was there and then he was not. But now that he and his father were making a beautiful home for dear little Mrs. Hawthorne, Mr. Gilbert Hawthorne’s mother, after years of cruel sorrow and separation and bitter poverty for her, the nickname was passing into disuse.

“Well, am I housekeeper or amn’t I?” demanded Poppy. “That’s what I want to know. Motherkins said I was to look after the men age; that’s French for men and boys--Mr. Hawthorne and Mark--and it means the whole shebang. So if I say we can have this room you don’t have to ask, so there!” Poppy was excited, but then she usually was excited.

“I think we ought to ask her,” Prue said firmly. “My mother says no matter if we know she’ll say yes about a thing, give her the chance to say it. She calls it ‘proper deference.’”

“Oh, gosh!” Poppy exploded disgustedly. “It’s all right to be good, but you’re a regular fussy! Ain’t what I say enough, Isabel?”

“Of course a housekeeper settles things, but if I were you I’d always show little Motherkins you have her on your mind. She’ll love to be told, Pops,” said Isabel, the tactful, who could get around Poppy’s danger signals without causing an explosion, as Prue never could.

“Well, of course I like to tickle her,” conceded Poppy, her scowl abating, and the question was settled.

“We’ve decided that this is Opening Day, and it sounds all right, but I don’t know what we mean, not really! We’re to have this room for our headquarters; Mrs. Hawthorne won’t care when Poppy asks her, because they don’t use this half of the house, and we’re to furnish it in packing boxes, and meet here and sit on the boxes, and have one for a table. Please don’t any one tell me this, because we’ve said it over and over and I’m kind of tired of it. But that’s all I do know. We ought to open something, or open for something--or something!” Prue apparently had got herself tangled up in the word and could not shake it off.

“We’ll open--open--open to begin, like spring!” cried Isabel with a laugh. “Just to be nice and have good times, and be ready for everything, anything that comes along. It’s the twenty-fifth of April, and Mark is thirteen years old to-day. He’s opening his ’teens; we’re opening a club in his honor.”

Isabel seemed to feel that this explanation covered the case.

“Oh, well, my gracious!” cried Prue in a sort of patient exasperation; “we were all together before now, and ready for good times. What I say is if a thing doesn’t mean anything, why--why--well, what does it mean?”

“It means to run around all the faster, particular Prue; like Pincushion when she tries to catch her tail. Now that doesn’t mean anything, but look at the fun she has!” cried Mark catching up his round kitten, Pincushion, now grown into a rounder little cat. “I’ll tell you what, Prue: You’re thinking about opening things that are full--like sardine boxes, or nuts, or a prize package. This club isn’t like that! It’s opening _up_; not just opening. You open up something to be filled after a while--like a new country, or a mine, or possibilities! That’s it! We’re opening up possibilities! We don’t know what we’re for; we just open _up_, don’t you see?” Mark explained this with much waving of hands and with his shining eyes full of laughter, but nevertheless he was not a little impressed by his own discovery. It instantly became clear to him that wonderful things were to fill this opening they were making.

Isabel kindled with him. These two were “of imagination all compact”: they got out of every play and every day not only more than Prue, but more than was there to get.

“You can’t tell _what_ will happen!” declared Isabel. “Look how we went to the woods that day last spring, Prue! Just happened to race the way we do, and we found Jack-in-the-Box-Mark! Shall I ever in all my life forget how I thought maybe he was a fairy, or some one like Peter Pan, when he told us to shut our eyes and count and then was nowhere to be seen? Oh, you never can tell! I sort of think it’s better not to know what we mean by Opening Day, because then we can feel it’s too big to understand.”

Prue had not been following Isabel’s enthusiastic reasoning.

“Is that why you were named Mark, because you were born to-day?” she asked. Prue-like she had been plodding along by herself the path indicated by Isa’s allusion to the twenty-fifth of April.

“Surest thing you know!” Mark nodded hard. “Daddy liked naming me after St. Mark, as long as I was born on his feast. He said he wouldn’t have called me Martha or Clotilda if I’d been born on those days, but St. Mark was just right.”

“How do you make packing box chairs?” asked Poppy, in her turn not heeding what was said.

“I’m going to put one on top of another, instead of making legs; they’d wobble, sure,” said Mark. “Then I’ll knock out one side and leave the other three sides. Then I’ll wad it soft and easy. Then I’ll cover it with some kind of nice stuff. Then----”

“Then I’ll sit on it!” shouted Poppy in high glee. “I bet it’ll be funny! You can’t make ’em, Mark! Four, besides some for comp’ny--Motherkins and your dad.”

“Certainly I can make them,” said Mark with scorn.

“I could do that, too,” said Prue, who had a taste for using a hammer, and never failed to hit a nail on the head, nor ever hit her own nail. “I can carpenter as well as you, Mark Hawthorne!”

“Carpenter away, Prudence! We’ll be able to use another hand in my shop,” Mark smiled with the kindly toleration of the sex made by nature to wield a hammer.

“I can’t build the chairs, but I can make the covers fit and plan how they’ll be prettiest,” began Isabel, but Poppy, who had been looking sharply from one to another, broke in upon her.

“Well, _I_ shall sweep up! A nice mess you’d make if I didn’t keep it nice! And I shall get what there is for eats, and _I_ shall fix it, so now!” she announced.

“Oh, mercy, you’ll do more than that, Poppy!” cried Isabel.

Sometimes it was a slight burden to keep in order Poppy’s touchy desire to equal the rest. She was a jealous little creature, but in her jealousy seemed less mean than in others. She adored Mrs. Hawthorne, Mark and Mark’s father, and loved Isabel Lindsay with a sort of furious worship. A poor, untaught child, made motherless by her mother’s desertion, which was so much sadder than to lose a mother by death, Poppy had set out in life with heavy handicaps. It was natural that she should be on the watch lest these happier children should surpass her. They never resented her touchiness, but understood and helped her. Isabel especially made a point of smoothing the feathers which Poppy was always ruffling up in the fear of being ever so little out of things.

“I hear her!” shrieked Poppy suddenly, and darted out of the room at top speed.

She came back panting, towing by the hand sweet little Motherkins, like a little craft with a prize captured on the high seas.

“Here she is,” announced Poppy. “Now tell her and ask her.”

Motherkins smiled inquiringly, but calmly. She was used to Poppy’s ways. She was a very dear little woman; that was to be seen at a glance. She had soft brown hair turning gray; it had a sheen over it like exquisite silk. Her face had an expression of playing laughter, yet with it the patient sadness left by her long years of desolate grief when she had been poor and had thought that her one child, Mark’s father, was lost to her forever. He had come back rich enough in money, richer by far in Mark, the dear lad! Now little Motherkins, brought back into the big house that had been her home before trouble came, was the happiest person outside a fairy tale. But her face still bore the imprint of what she had suffered; it had made her tender to all things, great and small.

The children’s name for her showed what she was. Mark could not think of calling one as youthful and tiny as she was “grandmother,” so he called her Motherkins, and she was a little mother to the other three.

“Dear me, Poppy,” Motherkins remonstrated as Poppy breathlessly tugged her into the big unfurnished room. “I’ll come along peacefully! I won’t run away. Why use violence?”

“We’re going to tell you something,” said Poppy putting her capture on the most comfortable box, more comfortable than the others because it was a better height to sit on, though not softer. “We’re having Opening Day.”

“Are you?” asked Motherkins glancing about with a little laugh. “What are you opening--or is it only the day that opens?”

“That’s it, Motherkins!” Mark leaped down from the window sill and ran over to pat her approvingly. “That’s what I told ’em when they were fidgetting to find out what it was about. It’s Opening Day; that’s all.”

“And my dear boy is opening his ’teens to-day!” Motherkins looked up with shining eyes into the golden-brown eyes bent toward her. “It sounds nice and uncertain, as if anything might come of it, from the four and twenty blackbirds that were in the pie, to a congress! All sorts of things are opened, when one comes to think of it.”

“You’re the one to catch on!” cried Mark with a triumphant crow of delight, but Prue, steadily intent upon her duty, said:

“We thought, Mrs. Hawthorne, we ought to ask you if you cared if we used this room? Right along, to meet in? We kind of think we’ll do things and have it for our headquarters. Do you care?”

“Not in the least wee bit, except to be honored to have something so cloudily splendid sounding in the house,” declared Motherkins. “The room is yours from this instant.”

“We wanted it because of the balcony out that window and the piazza roof,” said Isabel as though that explained the mystery.

“Oh!” said Motherkins, and Mark laughed.

“Might be handy,” he added.

“Certainly, but do be careful not to slip if you get in and out that way,” said this understanding little lady.

“Thanks, oh, thanks, you darling Motherkins!” cried Isabel. “Is that Bunkie I hear? I know it’s his voice.”

“It is Bunkie and has been for some time; he thinks you have been in session without him long enough,” said Mrs. Hawthorne, rising. “And I have a sort of Opening Day of my own. Mine is opened downstairs, and it is not only a day, but a freezer opened! In honor of Mark Jack-in-the-Box having a birthday. Won’t you come down to the dining room and celebrate with me?”

With a shout the children rushed to the door, Poppy turning three cartwheels in rapturous welcome of these tidings.

“I’d like to know where you hid it,” she panted coming right side up once more. “I kinder thought maybe you and Mr. Daddy’d be doing somethin’ for the birthday, and I sorter snooped, but not a freezer did there be, nowheres.”

Poppy’s English still failed her under excitement.

Motherkins laughed. “Mark’s daddy and I can play tricks, too, little Miss Gladys Popham Meiggs!” she cried.

“Well, there ain’t much I can’t hunt out when I try,” boasted Poppy justly.

Dashing out of the room she fell over Isabel’s little rough haired dog, mostly Scotch terrier, who had been named Bunker in honor of his christening day, the seventeenth of June, and whom, like Poppy, Mrs. Hawthorne had adopted when he sorely needed kindness, but against whom Poppy harbored a little jealousy. Isabel had taken him into her heart and home, but still Poppy disliked loving little Bunkie.

“Gee, that Punk!” Poppy exclaimed as she tripped over the small creature, who was rapturously running to meet the children. “Pretty near I went kersmash over him! He’s the snarledest looking dog! He’s the limit. If you’d of made me tumble, you raggedy ravelledy thing!”

Laughing and shouting the three children, with Bunkie barking and leaping, and Poppy stalking behind, really angry for a few minutes, went down to the dining room. Only part of the house, occupied but six months, was in order, but this room was one that was beautifully furnished. A fire of logs blazed on the hearth in the library beyond, its color reflected in the dark mahogany in line of the open door.

Mr. Hawthorne, Mark’s wonderful father who knew all sorts of woodland lore and was in every way a child’s ideal, stood at one end of the table. Before him sat a platter with a sliding mound of delectable brown, pink and creamy white, which he was ready to serve.

“Many happy returns, dearest boy of mine!” he said giving Mark his ice cream last of all.

“Yum-Yum; opening day!” said Mark significantly, stretching his mouth wide to admit a heaped teaspoonful of ice cream.