Nancy and Plum (9 page)

Miss Waverly said, “I believe that you are responsible for Nancy and Plum’s fine spirit.”

“What do you mean?” Miss Appleby asked.

“I mean,” Miss Waverly said, “that you have encouraged
them to read, which has given them wisdom and understanding and humor way beyond their years.”

Miss Appleby said, “Well, I wish I had enough money to give them a big meal with every story-telling hour.”

Miss Waverly said, “Sometimes food for the soul is more important than food for the body. I wish I could learn more about Nancy and Plum. They don’t seem to know anything about their background beyond the fact that their parents were killed in a train wreck and they are supposed to be in the care of an uncle who has never written or been to see them since he deposited them in Mrs. Monday’s Boarding Home.”

Miss Appleby said, “I’d like to have a chance to talk to that uncle or any of the other people responsible for those little waifs that live with Mrs. Monday.”

Miss Waverly said, “Just wait until I tell you about Christmas and the doll Eunice’s aunt gave her.”

When she got through with the story, Miss Appleby said, “Where did Nancy and Plum go for Christmas?”

Miss Waverly said she didn’t know. She hadn’t asked them. She said, “Nancy and Plum are proud. They don’t complain. The only reason I learned anything at all about Christmas was because they needed help in making that doll for Eunice.”

Miss Appleby said, “The thing that makes me so boiling mad is that I know of at least a dozen homes right here in Heavenly Valley where a child would be as welcome as sunshine. Homes where they either don’t have children or their children are grown up.”

Miss Waverly said, “Oh, I know but what are you going to
do? Mrs. Monday won’t give out any information and you can’t take the children away from her without their parents’ or guardians’ consent. All we can do is to make the little time they spend with us as happy as possible. My only trouble is that every single time I plan a picnic or a play or anything that is going to be fun, Mrs. Monday manages to keep the children home. All except Marybelle, of course, she has and does everything.”

Miss Appleby said, “She is the only child I ever have any trouble with here in the library. Speaking of trouble, it’s almost time for the children, so I’d better get busy.”

So, here they were out on the lawn and Miss Appleby was just finishing
The Secret Garden
.

“ ‘Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in the air and his eyes full of laughter walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire—Master Colin!’

“And that,” said Miss Appleby, “is the end of
The Secret Garden
. ”

“May I take it home and read it over again?” asked Nancy.

“But, Nancy,” Miss Appleby said, “you’ve read
The Secret Garden
four times already.”

Nancy said, “I don’t care. When I read it I forget I live at Mrs. Monday’s and I run on the moors with Dickon and I go through those hundred rooms with Mary and I look at books with Colin.”

Miss Appleby said, “That’s the wonderful thing about
reading. You can go anywhere in the world, you can live a hundred, even a thousand different lives, you can learn about everything.”

Plum said, “To be a librarian do you have to read every book there is?”

Miss Appleby said, “Goodness no. But I have read a great many. Probably more than a thousand.”

Plum said, “How many books had you read when you were almost nine, like me?”

Miss Appleby said, “Well, when I was nine years old I lived with my grandmother and grandfather, who were very, very strict, very, very industrious people who didn’t believe in wasting a single minute. Unfortunately they considered reading wasting time, and so I had to do all my reading secretly. I went to a little country school and the teacher, who was very understanding, used to keep me after school supposedly to clean the blackboards, but in reality so that I could curl up by the stove and read. She loaned me all of her books and I read
Black Beauty, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Treasure Island, Heidi, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Anne of Green Gables, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, The Jungle Book, The Water Babies, Timothy’s Quest, Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn, Dandelion Cottage, The Live Dolls, Sara Crewe, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Toby Tyler, The Secret Garden, Pinocchio, Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist
and, of course, all of the fairy tales.”

Nancy said, “Did your grandfather find out?”

Miss Appleby said, “Yes he did. One day a blizzard was blowing up and he came to school to get me and found me curled up in a chair by the stove reading
Sara Crewe
. He said, ‘Evangeline Appleby, you are a wicked little girl and you have deliberately deceived me. You led your grandmother and me to believe that you had to stay after school to help the teacher and now I find you wasting your time reading. I am going to give you a whipping when you get home.’

“Ordinarily I was scared to death of my grandfather, who was a tall, stern old man. But this day I had just gotten to the part in
Sara Crewe
after Sara’s father dies, when Miss Minchin is being horrible to Sara and Sara is up in the attic hungry and cold, talking to her doll Emily and she says, ‘When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word—just to look at them and
think
 … there’s nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in, that’s stronger.’ I knew that my grandfather was very, very angry because his voice shook when he spoke to me, his face was mottled, blue veins stood out on his temples and his blue eyes had turned almost black. But I stood up and faced him and I wasn’t Evangeline Appleby, the fat little girl who shivered and got tears in her eyes every time her grandfather spoke to her, I was Sara Crewe facing Miss Minchin and I was brave and strong. I said, ‘Grandfather, reading is not wasting time. Reading is learning and you may whip me if you like but I am going to read every chance I get.’

“Well, my grandfather looked very surprised. He said, ‘Have
you been reading here all winter?’ and I said, ‘I certainly have. I have read about twenty books.’ My grandfather just said, ‘Twenty books?’ and I said, ‘Maybe more.’ He said, ‘Twenty books is an awful lot of reading for one little girl.’

“My teacher, who had been sitting quietly at her desk correcting some papers, spoke up then and said, ‘Twenty books is a lot of reading and a lot of learning, Mr. Appleby, and that is why we are skipping Evangeline to the fifth grade.’

“When we got in the sleigh to go home, the wind was whining and it was snowing awfully hard and Grandfather told me to keep the robe tucked tight around me. That’s all he said. Not a word about the reading or skipping to the fifth grade. Old Charlie, the horse, seemed in a hurry to get home and we flew along, the snow stinging our faces, the wind screaming and jerking at the robe. Darkness was creeping in over the mountains and the road got harder and harder to make out. Once we went over a big bump and Grandfather said, ‘That was a fallen log. We must be off the road.’ He stopped the horse and got out of the sleigh and felt around in the snow with his hands. When he got back in he said, ‘We may be lost. I can’t make out a thing in this storm.’

“I said, ‘What do you think we had better do, Grandfather?’ and he said, ‘Just keep on driving. That’s all we can do. If we stand still we’ll freeze to death.’ His voice was thin and worried, so I said, ‘Would you like me to tell you a story, Grandfather? The story of one of those books I’ve been reading?’

“He said, ‘Well, it might help to keep us awake.’

“So I told him the story of King Arthur and the Round Table. I chose that one because it was history and I thought he might approve of history and anyway I had read it just before
Sara Crewe
and could remember it very well. I told about the knights and the jousting and the wicked Sir Mordred and Lancelot and The Holy Grail and Elaine and Guinevere and I grew so interested I forgot all about the snowstorm and the rough, raw wind and my feet like lumps of ice under the robe. I guess Grandfather got very interested, too, because I noticed that he let the reins go slack while he asked me questions about the drawbridges and the castles and the knights’ armor.

“Then suddenly our horse stopped. ‘Giddayup,’ Grandfather shouted above the wind, but the horse wouldn’t move.

“I was scared. ‘Oh, Grandfather,’ I wailed. ‘Charlie is standing still and we’ll freeze to death.’

“ ‘Giddayup, you old fool!’ Grandfather yelled again, slapping Charlie hard with the reins. But Charlie just stood there.

“Grandfather jumped out of the sleigh, put his hand on Charlie’s flanks to guide himself, so he could walk ahead to try and find out why Charlie was balking. He was bending over, rummaging around in the snow up by Charlie’s head, when suddenly a lantern appeared out of the darkness and Grandmother’s voice said, ‘What in the world’s the matter, Hector?’

“Grandfather straightened up and he felt pretty foolish. You see, Charlie the horse had brought us home. Charlie really saved our lives but Grandfather gave all the credit to the story of King Arthur I had told him. He said that if I
hadn’t gotten him so interested in the Knights of the Round Table he would never have let the reins go slack and given old Charlie his head and we might still be out in that blizzard. From that day on as long as I lived with them, he and Grandmother drove me to the library every single Saturday and for every Christmas and birthday they gave me a new book.”

Plum said quietly to Nancy, “I wish I could get Mrs. Monday out in a sleigh in a blizzard. I wouldn’t tell her a story, I’d push her out of the sleigh.”

Nancy said, “That was a wonderful story, Miss Appleby. You know, I used to read books and then tell the stories to the children during darning and sock-mending time and it made the work go so much faster and the children just loved it.”

Miss Appleby said, “Do you still tell them stories, Nancy?”

Nancy said, “No, Mrs. Monday said that telling stories slowed up my mending too much.”

Plum said, “Every single time I get to an interesting part in a book, Mrs. Monday says, ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do’ and makes me hem napkins.”

Miss Appleby said, “Perhaps I should call on Mrs. Monday and see if I can interest her in reading. Maybe I should invite her to these story-telling sessions.”

Plum said, “Oh, don’t, please don’t. She’d make us all sit bolt upright with our hands folded in our laps and every time you’d get to a terribly exciting part she’d interrupt and say, ‘Pamela, time to bring up the coal for my sitting-room fire …’ or, ‘Nancy, start polishing the brass immediately.’ ”

Plum’s imitation of Mrs. Monday was so perfect that Miss
Appleby laughed, but Marybelle said, “I’m going to tell on you, Plum Remson. I’m going to tell Aunty Marybelle that you mocked her.”

Miss Appleby said, “Plum didn’t mean any harm, Marybelle. She was just explaining that Mrs. Monday might be bored by our reading aloud.”

Marybelle said, “She mocked her. I heard her.”

Miss Appleby said quickly, “What is your favorite book, Marybelle?”

Marybelle said, “Oh, any one with a lot of pictures. I don’t like to read, I just like to look at the pictures.”

Plum said, “If you’d look in a mirror you’d see the funniest picture of all.”

Miss Appleby said, “Come, come, girls. Hurry and choose your books or I’ll be driving home in the dark just like Grandfather.”

Because Nancy and Plum were intelligent, imaginative children and because she had a fair idea of the atmosphere in the Boarding Home, Miss Appleby always recommended to them the stories that she had loved when she was a child on her grandfather’s farm. She knew that after reading
Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
or
Anne of Green Gables
, Nancy and Plum would find their lot at Mrs. Monday’s not quite so hard.

Miss Appleby loved Nancy’s dreamy gentleness and recognized it by giving her special little girl books such as
Dandelion Cottage
and
The Live Dolls
. She also admired Plum’s daring and quick humor and always saved her books about pioneer
children who fought Indians or little Rebels who were spies in the Civil War.

Next to Miss Waverly, the children loved Miss Appleby more than anyone in the whole world and Nancy decided that when she grew up she was going to be a librarian.

She said, “Imagine sitting all day long in a room filled with hundreds and hundreds of books.”

Plum said, “And all the fine-money for your very own. I’d fine everybody and I’d buy a great big bag of candy every day.”

Miss Appleby said, “But the fine-money doesn’t belong to the librarian, Plum, it belongs to the library and is used to help keep up the books. A fine is just a little reminder not to be selfish. That somebody else would like to read the book you have.”

Plum said, “If I was a librarian and Mrs. Monday came in to get a book, I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, Madam, but the only book we have left is this great big huge dictionary,’ and then I’d drop it on her toes.”

Miss Appleby said, “I really think that Nancy would make the best librarian, Plum, why don’t you be a cowgirl?”

Plum said, “That’s just what I was going to be. I’ll ride my horse up to Nancy’s library and lasso the books right off the shelves.”

Miss Appleby laughed and said, “Well, whatever you and Nancy decide to be when you grow up, I know that you’ll be happy because you have discovered the comfort and joy of reading.”

A
S THE MORNING BELL SOUNDED
its harsh
clang! clang! clang!
Plum jumped out of bed and ran to the window to see what kind of a day it was. Pushing aside a branch of the maple, whose limp, shining leaves looked as if they had been cut out of green oilcloth, she saw that the valley was wrapped in a mist as thick and white as a caterpillar’s cocoon. A mist that hid all of the barn but its roof, all of the orchard but a few upper branches, and made the familiar early morning sounds of chuffing mail train, mooing cows, cackling hens, peeping birds and crowing roosters, muffled and choky like Miss Gronk clearing her throat.