I’m not worth it. And that’s all there is about it.”
“Not worth it?” Poppa cried with the fervor, if not the rhetoric, of
a Romeo. “Well, if you ain’t worth it, I’d like to know who is? All I
got is none too much to spend on you. And if I had ten times as much,
what’d it be worth if I lost you, Momma?”
This was so poetic and beautiful that Momma had to get mad or break
down and beller, so she put up a big fight.
“Oh, that’s all very well for you to say, but what it comes down to is:
You’re sending me away to die like a dawg outside somewheres; you want
to treat me the way they do the old rats that they give a poison to
that guarantees they don’t die in the house.”
“Aw, Momma!” was all Poppa could groan. But Hattie lit into her mother
with all the vigor of a true and dutiful American child.
“Why, Momma Lundy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You must be out
of your mind to talk thataway when Poppa is so nice and so worried.”
“That’s right! Pick on me!” Momma moaned, taking unfair refuge in
cowardly tears. “But I notice nobody is offering to go to New York with
me.”
Hattie spoke first. “I’d go in a minute if I could leave the children,
but with little Eddie having his tonsils removed to-morrow and Fannie’s
chicken pox just coming out--”
Poppa sighed. “I’ll go, of course, if you want me to.”
Momma saw the reluctance in his assent, and, though she knew that he
had some strong business reason behind it, her cantankerous mood took
umbrage at it. “What’d I tell you? Well, I will go. I’ll go all by
myself, to some lonely old hotel, and if I never come back nobody will
know the difference.”
“Of course you shan’t go by yourself, honey,” Poppa protested. “I
was only thinkin’ that if I could go home for a while I could set my
business to rights and prob’ly close up a big deal I had on when I got
Hattie’s wire. If I was to put that through, it would net me a couple
o’ thousand, and that would go a long ways toward paying for your
operation, most likely; and then I could come on and be with you whilst
you was convalescing; and then, if anything was to happen to me, the
business would be all right and I’d leave you and the children fixed.”
This was the simple, humble statement of his mind in the matter; that
solemn devotion to his work that makes a priestcraft and an art of
business. Like all successful creators, he consecrated himself to his
work and sacrificed himself to its completion. No poet or sculptor
could have a holier or purer ambition for perfection and a flawless
conclusion, and there was no more thought of selfishness or greed.
Momma understood and loved him, but the disease in her soul took
offense at everything; and, though she realized the unselfishness of
his motive, she took a perverse delight in distorting it.
Then ensued one of those duels in which each took the wrong side with a
kind of devoted insincerity. Poppa frantically declared that he would
go and nothing should stop him, and she as frantically declared that if
he went she wouldn’t.
Momma insisted that she hadn’t a friend on earth or in New York, and
she would rather go back and die in her own bed than die alone in New
York.
This reminded her distraught husband that she did have a friend in New
York, her old playmate, Ella Jemison, who had married Sam Killip and
gone to New York and fortune.
“Oh, yes, I’m likely to ask rich folks like her to take me in!” Momma
sobbed. “She wouldn’t look at me. She’s forgotten she ever knew me,
though we are kind of second cousins by marriage.”
“Well, her husband hasn’t forgot he ever knew me,” Poppa snapped.
“Didn’t I have a letter from him only the other day, and didn’t he say
his wife asked to be kindly remembered to you?”
“Sam Killip wrote to you!” Momma cried. “How’d rich folks like him come
to write to you?”
Poppa winced again at being a prophet without honor in his own home.
“Oh, I guess he ain’t the only rich folks in the world. He said he saw
I was a director in the Third National Bank, and he wanted to enlarge
his capital, and he could offer me a chance to git in on the ground
floor of a patent locomotive stoker he was pushing. He said he was a
little short of cash.”
“Sam Killip short of cash!”
“Rich folks are always short of cash,” Poppa explained. “That’s why
they’re rich. The minute they git any cash they put it into something
and make it work. I was going to tell Sam I couldn’t see my way clear,
but if Ella will look after you a little I’ll help him out.”
This put a new face on the matter. Instead of going to New York
as a decrepit, friendless villager, imploring the pity of an old
acquaintance, on whom her only claim was old acquaintanceship, she was
offered a chance to float in on her as a bearer of rich gifts. She
climbed evenly and thought of the Three Wise Men.
“I’d go there as a kind of a Mrs. Magi then?”
“Yes! Exactly! And I guess she’d treat you like a grand duchess, or
something.”
“Oh, no, I don’t see how I could,” Momma sighed, slumping again, too
deeply dejected to reach out and pluck the golden apple.
But Poppa had more insight than anyone suspected, and he had caught
the glint of interest in Momma’s eye. It was the first sparkle he had
seen there for weeks, and, though it had been quenched at once, it
emboldened him to tyranny. He got to his feet and left the house with a
maddening mysteriousness.
He was inspired to the amazing audacity of calling Mr. Killip on the
long-distance telephone. He went to the hotel so that Momma could not
interrupt him. When he had his New York victim by the ear he told him
the whole story, and Killip, who was still human though a New Yorker,
was as effusive in welcoming Momma as in accepting Poppa’s additional
offer of money enough to stoke the stoker project to a hearty glow.
Poppa went back and told Momma what he had done, and told her to pack
up. Her next obstacle was:
“But I got no clo’es here. I’ll have to go home and pack, and I just
ain’t got the strength.”
“You got no clothes at home either,” Hattie put in. “You can go
downtown with me and get you some decent things. You can’t go to New
York looking like an old farmer.”
* * * * *
This was the wrong note. Momma broke her moorings again.
“I told you you was ashamed of me. I’m not fit to be seen in Terra Hut,
let alone in New York. I’m simply not going to New York to make an
exhabition of myself and make Ellar Killip turn up her nose at me.”
This battle had lasted only a few hours longer when a telegram arrived
from Ella herself:
_Overjoyed dearest Mattie to learn that you will visit New York
though greatly distressed to learn of your indisposition you must
come to us of course just let me know the train and I will meet you
whatever the hour. I know Dr. Courtneidge very well and he is an old
darling. Love to you and your husband from us both._ ELLA.
The gracious warmth of this brought tears to the eyes of the poor
derelict, but she masked her sniffle in a sniff.
“Where’d she learn all those swell words?”
Hattie told her mother, as usual, that she ought to be ashamed of
herself, and Momma was.
She prolonged her resistance to the point where Poppa grew desperate
enough to groan.
“Well, you do as you’re a mind to. Seein’ you’re strong enough to fight
forever, you go home and run the business and I’ll go to the hospital
my own self.”
“Run the business! That’s all you think of!” she retorted with a
sublime non sequitur. “Put me on the cattle train and ship me off to
the slaughter house. Ella still loves me, anyway, even if nobody else
does, and she’ll see to it I get decently buried, and that’s all I got
a right to expect.”
Poppa dashed out and bathed his hot head in cold water before he went
to the ticket office. He nearly bit the head off the agent, just to
show that he had some manhood left.
He was never quite the same man again after he got Momma on the train
at last. He bade her a despondent farewell, feeling sure that he would
never see her again. And, in a sense, he never did....
* * * * *
Going to the city for the first time in her life, especially at such a
time in her life, was an adventure and a half for Momma.
In spite of the fact that she was advancing toward the knives of a
surgeon who was her forlorn hope, she could not but feel a certain
elation. She was experiencing what Victor Hugo called a “new shudder.”
She was almost more afraid of Ella Killip and her splendor than of the
pancreatic specialist. She was fairly smothered with dread of facing
the woman she had not seen since Ella was a gangling, noisy, small-town
tomboy, all freckles and giggles and gawkiness.
She foresaw Ella as a sort of vast and glittering Queen Victoria,
fattened on rich food and studded with jewels. She saw herself as a
shabby farm wife whom Ella would probably give one glance and flee from
with disdain.
When she reached New York at last, her first struggle was with a
red-capped ruffian who tried to steal her valise. Her next struggle was
with her terror of the meeting with Ella. If she had known how to get a
train back to Carthage, she would have taken it. But the crowd hustled
her up the platform and she lugged a soul heavier than her rusty hand
bag.
No one had met her at the train, and she was morbid enough to hope that
Ella had missed her. But inside the station she found a crowd held back
by a rope, and paused to stare at the staring eyes.
She saw no one that suggested the Ella she had planned, but a tall slim
creature, dressed like an actress, in glistening silk, came forward
hesitantly. She looked young, and yet she didn’t. Her hair was hidden
by a hat whose brim seemed to have been flourished by the impatient,
whimsical stroke of a painter’s brush.
From this dressmaker’s model came a voice that startled the valise from
Momma’s hand, for the voice came out of childhood, and it was the voice
of Ella. It sang a new tune, but it was the old voice. It said timidly,
tentatively: “Mattie? Is it you?”
Momma’s soft old knees caved in, and she sat on the valise as she
whimpered: “This is me, but you’re never Ellar!”
“Oh, yes, I am, my dear,” said Ella with a good laugh as she hoisted
Momma to her feet. “I’m the same old sixpence.”
“You look more like your own daughter, if you have one.”
“Oh, I have one--three, in fact. But--come along, you old dear.”
She nodded to a red cap, who took the valise and followed her as she
led Momma through the station. Momma’s dazed eyes supposed they were
taking a short cut through a cathedral.
The Killip limousine was marvelous, but she expected marvels. She was a
trifle disappointed when she reached Ella’s home. She had expected to
drive through a royal park to a palace. But she was put down at a house
built jam in among a lot of other houses.
It was not half the size of Momma’s house and had no yard at all except
a small patch at the back.
In place of a double row of stiff-necked butlers up a grand staircase,
there was one very pleasant young man at the door and an awfully nice
hired girl in cap and apron. Very friendly she was too, and helped
Momma in the most folksy way up to her room.
* * * * *
Ella came along, and when the maid was sent for tea she petted Momma
and stuffed a pillow in her back and then drew a chair close up and
said: “Now, Mattie dear, tell me all about it. What on earth is the
trouble, you poor soul?”
But Momma was so embarrassed by the numberless disparities between
herself and this strange creature who had started life with even less
advantage that she could not be at ease.
She was dazed by the brilliance of Ella, by her blithe yet haughty
carriage, her young skin, slim deft hands, youthful alertness, her
fashionable voice, her fashionable politeness.
She saw that Ella’s hair was white, now that her hat was off; but her
hair was ironed and fluted and polished and dressed as for a fancy
dress ball.
Momma summed up her bewildered homage, if it was homage, in one
helpless query:
“What makes you powder your hair, Ella?”
Ella laughed aloud. A little of the old boisterousness broke through
the years of control.
“As my boys would say: ‘Whaddaya mean, “powder my hair”?’ That’s my own
poor old gray wool, damn it!”
Ella’s swear word even had a fashionable fillip! Momma had never sworn
in her life, or, that is, hardly ever; certainly not with a smile.
When she had needed profane words, she had used stupid old-womanish
expletives.
But Ella’s casual objurgation broke the ice magically. There is nothing
that clears the air of formality like a little damn.
Momma was so numb that it merely startled her from her torpor. She
laughed the first laugh that had been shaken out of her dust bin of a
soul for six weeks.
After that the two old women were themselves again, two girls who had
parted and gone round the world two opposite ways and come together at
last to exchange experiences. Their costumes and their dialects had
changed with their travel, but their hearts were as of old.
Momma had to hear first of Ella’s amazing experiences. This desire
itself was a miracle of change; she had already forgotten herself for a
while.
Ella’s husband came home before Ella had finished her Arabian Nights’
Entertainment and he was pleasantly surprised and surprising. He had
expected Mattie to be more ill than she was and he had not expected her
to look at all like his own wife. He knew only too well how expensive
Ella’s looks were and how different a life she led from the women of
the old home town.
The dinner was simple but “awful tasty,” as Mattie proclaimed. She
was astounded to find herself eating with relish. But the service was
irresistible. The amiable gentleman who handed the plates around and
took them away was so solicitous about suggesting to her the best
morsels that she could not insult him by refusing anything or break his
heart by leaving an untouched plate for him to carry away.
Sam Killip was eager to know about all the friends and enemies of his
youth and remembered so well the people and the nooks and the scraps of
those good old days that the dinner went by like a wedding feast.
Fortunately the Killip children were away at schools and house parties
and Momma was not subjected to the inspection of a generation that
found even Ella Killip old-fashioned and conservative. When Ella said
she had given up trying to keep up with the youngsters, Momma laughed
her to scorn with a quaint phrase: “Oh, yes, to hear you tell it!”
After dinner Sam had a meeting of some charitable board, and Ella and
Mattie settled down for a confab. Ella neglected to mention that she
had sent her opera box to friends of hers, and she made no allusion to
the fact that it was the first performance of a new rôle for Caruso,
and she would have given an eyetooth to hear him.
She spread Momma out on what she called a chaise longue. Momma said it
was the only comfortable sofa she’d ever laid on and she was going to
have one like it if it busted Poppa. Momma was already planning for the
future! And thinking of it in terms of comfort!
She was reluctant to discuss her famous illness, but Ella insisted on
knowing the worst.
“Well, it simply baffled all the doctors,” Momma said in a tone not
altogether boastless. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a
kind of gener’l gone-ness. I got no heart for anything--no appatite for
my vittles, no int’rest in the house or church work or the heathen or
the fambly. I don’t want to go to bed nights and I don’t want to get up
mornings. Always been a fiend on housekeepin’, but I don’t much care
now whether things are in their place or not. Dust don’t worry me like
it used to. I’m all dusty myself. No special aches or pains, but I just
don’t feel good anywheres.
“Want to cry all the time and I don’t know why. Hate to go outdoors and
hate to stay in. Poppa drives me nearly crazy with everything he does
and says, but I drive myself crazier still. I ain’t friends with myself
or anybody. Want to die and can’t bear the thought of that either.
“It’s just a kind of all wrongness everywhere, if you can make anything
out of that.”
To her amazement, Ella said: “I know just how you feel and you’ve come
to the right place to be cured.”
* * * * *
It was not altogether pleasant to have Ella claim a share in Momma’s
wonderful disease and to speak so off-handedly of its cure. But instead
of rebuking Ella for presuming and for minimizing the crisis, Momma
felt relieved and before long she was yawning nobly and confessing that
she could not keep her eyes open. Ella went to her room with her and
saw her bestowed, then kissed her good night and left her. Momma noted
that her valise had been unpacked, her bed opened, her nightgown and
slippers laid out, a water bottle set by the reading lamp on a little
table by the bedhead, and a dozen little thoughtfulnesses executed in
her behalf.
When she was in her old nightgown, which was modeled on the potato-bag
pattern, and had said her prayers, she crept into the disgracefully
fine linen sheets and slept in luxurious oblivion for nine good hours.
She did not know that Ella had sneaked into her own room, dressed
swiftly, and stolen out to the opera, where she stood up, and that she
went to a supper and there danced a while before she sneaked home.
Momma had her breakfast in bed at Ella’s previous order and wandered
about the house for hours before Ella had rung for her breakfast and
sent for Momma.
Ella was a sight. She looked like one of those immor’l French kings’
favorites. She had on a lace boudoir cap and a silk nightgown, very
deckolett, and a “breakfast jacket” (of all things!) of satin and lace.
She did look handsome. Momma had always hated to have even Poppa see
her before breakfast. She began to be a little eager for her cure.
“When do I go to see this Dr. Courtneidge?”
Ella hesitated a moment, then spoke with a certain sternness:
“There are two or three things that have to be done first, Mattie dear.
I’m always a beast up till noon, so you mustn’t be surprised if I’m
brutally frank now. Dr. Courtneidge is a very fussy and snappy old
gentleman. He has only swells for patients and he’s very particular.”
“Don’t he treat poor folks at tall?” Momma gasped.
“Oh, yes, he has free clinics and hospitals and all that and does
half his work for nothing. That’s why he’s so particular with his pay
patients. You’ve got to go through a course of sprouts and buy some
things or you’ll never get near him.
“His reception room is full of people, and you’d feel terribly
embarrassed to wait there till he gets round. So you really must have
some of this year’s clothes and a 1920 hat. And your hair--you mustn’t
be offended, Mattie, dear, but really your hair and your skin! He’d
give you one glance and send you away without an examination even. You
see, I know him.
“And then the examination, Mattie dear--well, you know what that’s
like. And in the hospital--well! I saw the nightgown laid out on your
pillow and that sort of thing would simply frighten the doctor to
death. He really couldn’t operate.”
“I’m not looking to marry the old fool,” Momma mumbled. “I got one
husband a’ready.”
“I know, my dear Mattie, but your one husband put you in my charge and
I’m going to see you through. My masseuse is coming to my house this
morning. She’s downstairs now, I imagine, and I’m going to have her
begin on you. When she’s finished, my hairdresser, François, will get
to work on that dear old poll of yours and take off about forty years
of age. Then we’ll have lunch and go shopping.”
Momma was choked with wrath, but Ella would neither fight nor plead.
She just bullied her with laughter, and Momma, feeling like a convict
unjustly imprisoned, set her jaws and resolved to go through with the
sentence. She revolted, however, at the insolence of the masseuse--and
her exclamations of horror at the neglect of a “skin that had never
really been cleaned.”
But the wretch silenced Momma’s indignation with the indignity of
smeared cold cream, and smothered her with hot towels and cold towels,
and with lotions of every odor and smart.
Momma would not speak to her as she left, but when she scowled at the
mirror, she gazed at the new face aghast it flung back at her. The dull
parchment of her skin had become a living integument with a kind of
dreamy radiance alive in it.
Momma felt bewitched. She would have sworn that the image in the
looking-glass smiled first at her and nodded, compelling her to smile
back and nod in return. She hung there fascinated, understanding a
little of what Narcissus felt when he looked first in the pool.
Then a quiet Frenchman was shown in. He overawed Momma by his dignity
and his dexterity. She dared not slap his face when he spoke of her
hair as a crime. He called it a “cream,” but she understood his
shoulders.
And then he attacked her poor head with ferocious familiarity. If Poppa
had ever caught him, and her, he’d certainly have shot them both.
Momma was in for it, however, and she actually permitted this strange
man, this appalling foreigner, to take down her hair, drench it, soap
it, souse her head in water, pour curious smelly things over her scalp,
and rinse them out, massage her occiput, comb and pull and torture
and iron her hair and dress it on top of her astounded skull in what
he called a “French twist.” She spent a whole hour of “feeling like
a shirt in a steam laundry,” as she afterward expressed it. Then
he brandished before her a mirror and uttered a triumphant cry of
something that sounded like:
“Ah, my damn, walla, walla!”
Momma blushed vermilion and felt as immoral as she looked. Yet not at
all remorseful, somehow. Fortunately Franswa dashed out to prepare the
hair of Ella, leaving Momma to ponder her new face and her new hair
with a new soul.
She felt that, in Hattie’s formula, she ought to be ashamed of herself,
but, to save her immortal being, she could not.
Only one thing she was sure of, and that was that that head and that
hair did not belong on top of that old dress of hers. Her one “best
dress” was the one worst dress she had ever seen.
When at length she saw Ella, Ella screamed with delight at the
transformation and said something that rimed:
_Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be._
The afternoon was spent in shopping for what Ella called “landjerree.”
Until she had the proper underpinnings, Ella simply refused to buy
Mattie the new dress and hat she was already clamoring for.
The amount of Poppa’s money that Ella spent on silken shamelessness
dazed Momma, but Ella would not be checked, and Momma was too
childishly interested in the new doll rags to make more than a show of
resistance.
Ella said: “If your husband has money enough to waste ten thousand
dollars on my husband’s foolish investments, he has money enough to buy
you some decent underclothes.”
“Did you say ‘decent’?” was Momma’s feeble disclaimer, but she barely
muttered it.
That night, on a plea of going to bed early, Momma locked herself in
her room and tried on the new things. She nearly died of palpitation of
the heart when she stood up in silk stockings, satin mules, and in a
new streamline corset that gave her a figure! A heroic figure indeed,
but a shape, a contour, that was not altogether an insult to the
Creator who fashioned it. Momma had to give it a religious significance
to live through it.
* * * * *
And why not? What instinct is more deeply implanted in womanhood than
the immemorial insatiable lust for pretty things? It has resisted the
immemorial insatiable lust of preachers and satirists for insulting
it, of economists and hardworking men for denouncing it. It has been
called every contemptuous and cruel name in every language. Laws have
been made against it innumerably, in vain. And it has flourished as
unconquerably as violets in moss, as perfume in hyacinths, as bright
plumage in birds, and ornate sunsets in western skies.
The weavers of silk and the needlers of laces, the designers of gowns
and of hats have kept up their beautiful careers despite the thunders
of self-styled virtue and the slanders of all times.
Poets and prosers and painters who have turned less beautiful lines
and have married less beautiful colors, and the critics who have
celebrated their achievements, have looked down with disdain on those
who have devoted their inspirations and their toil to the creation of
felicitous decorations for the living body.
But the women have known better. They never have despised the artists
who improved them and enhanced them; and by hook or by crook they have
kept those artists alive and blessed them with fame.