"CERTAIN LEGAL MATTERS"
Of Janet MacGregor and why she couldn't abide Mrs. Freddie Alden the
Poetry Girl once said epics could have been written. Janet was gaunt
and wiry, the relict of the late Jock MacGregor, who had cared for
Uncle Peter Alden's horses for a lifetime and died leaving his savings
and a bit of life insurance to Janet, together with an admonition to
"keep an eye on Mr. Peter."
Janet did. She dropped into the Alden kitchen frequently of an evening
to glean a melancholy satisfaction from the morbid details of Uncle
Peter's lingering betwixt life and death. Whenever--which was
frequent--there was an upheaval in the Alden's domestic arrangements,
Janet filled in the gaps, spoke her mind freely to Mrs. Freddie,
secure in the knowledge that Mrs. Freddie wouldn't talk back until a
new cook arrived, and usually departed in a wholesome rage--which
didn't at all deter her from accepting Mr. Freddie's sizable peace
offering.
To see her "washing oop" after dinner on an evening when she was about
to depart FOREVER--or anyhow until Mr. Freddie came for her again--was
a tremendous sight. Especially on an evening when at the highest
moment of her justifiable wrath Mr. Freddie would appear and
nonchalantly suggest a "few eats for some chaps who'd dropped in" as
casually as though Janet were not already on the verge of explosion.
Of course she would prepare the lunch, stabbing the bread-saw
viciously into the defenseless loaf and muttering dark things as she
assembled something she called "old doves" on a big Sheffield platter.
Janet couldn't cook at all but she could arrange things as beautifully
as her ancestors did--and they had been a race of public park
gardeners! There wasn't anything she couldn't do with some parsley, a
can of sardines and the cheese that was left from dinner. And then she
would wait grimly for the platter. Not for anything, even though she
were leaving FOREVER, would Janet let the remnants remain to stain
that sacred platter. Besides if she waited she always had a fine
chance to growl whimpering things about what an hour it was for a
decent widow woman to be a-walkin' the roads and to agree, feebly, oh
very feebly, that maybe Mr. Freddie was right, that it wouldn't hurt
the chauffeur to drive her back to her tiny flat.
This particular evening Janet had been speaking her mind so freely
that the new dining-room girl had fled absolutely dazed by Janet's
dark threat that, Mr. Peter or no Mr. Peter, she, Janet MacGregor,
would never let her shadow rest again on the Alden walls. She would
tell Mr. Freddie that, she would let him understand that she didn't
have to take Miss' Alden's lip, that she, at least, wasn't married to
her, that she had some spirit left even if she was a widow woman. And
that she wasn't dependent on the Aldens nor anybody else. That she was
going to quit service of any kind--day of week or month. She had a
grand chance to open a window-cleaning emporium. She could get the
ladders and harnesses and chamois scrubs for almost nothing from the
widow of a boss cleaner who had cleaned a twenty-second story window
without the aid of one of his own reliable harnesses. She didn't care
so much for her flat anyhow. She was going to find a basement, she
was, with a long hall to keep the ladders in and a sunny front room
for her to live in and put her sign in the window. But with the Aldens
she was through--unless, of course, Mr. Freddie wanted to give her a
window-cleaning contract.
She had been loitering near the pantry door shamelessly eavesdropping
during Dudley Hamilt's song because she hoped that meant the gentlemen
would be going and that she could air her grievances while Mr. Freddie
smoked and chuckled at her grumbling. So that when Mr. Freddie called
for Miss Grant, Janet was on the stairs a good three seconds before
that professionally calm person appeared.
Janet sat on the landing window seat and cuddled Felicia in her thin
arms, crooning over her like a setting hen.
"There, there--don't ye mind her--" she lifted glum eyes to Mr.
Freddie as she soothed the sobbing woman, "It's this that Miss'
Freddie's tantrums brings the help to! Many a time have I masel' felt
like givin' way the way this poor soul is givin' way. It's on'y ma
fierce pride that saves me--don't ye cry over Miss' Freddie's way o'
speakin'--"
"It wasn't Mrs. Freddie, it wasn't anybody--" Felicia lifted her
streaming eyes from Janet's spare bosom. She was deeply chagrined that
the group hovering on the stairway could see her tears. "It was just
that--I was tired--that Uncle Peter's room was rather hot--that I
liked to hear the man sing--I'm vairee well--" Her drawling "vairee"
sounded anything but well, it was almost a sob in itself. "Truly
vairee well--"
She was still "very well" a few moments later when she and Janet
settled themselves in the luxurious car. They were the oddest pair.
Janet's bonnet and shawl were as battered as Felicia's garb; exhausted
as she was Felicia found herself whimsically wondering how she'd tell
herself from Janet when it was time to get out. Felicia's tears had
dissolved in little smothered hysterical sniffs. She was laughing at
Janet's scolding because the seamstress had refused to take what Mr.
Freddie had tried to give her just as they were stepping into the car.
"It's worth ony money to Mr. Freddie to have Mr. Peter snatch a bit of
contentment from life--and Mr. Freddie is that prodigal with money
that if you don't take it of him he'll hand it to the next one--"
"But I can't take money for playing--chess is only playing, its only
for work we should take money."
Janet snorted. She talked volubly in her rich broad Scotch. Agitated
as she was, Felicia's own lips were mouthing these strange new sounds,
she was sure she could get the gutteral A, she wasn't sure of the
burry R. She couldn't heed at all what Janet was saying, indeed she
couldn't listen intelligently, because her tired ears were still
filled with the glorious harmonies of Dudley Hamilt's unfinished song.
When she shut her eyes she could see his tall figure swinging up the
stairs--she was trying to convince herself that she was really glad
that he hadn't recognized her, when the car stopped before her
darkened house. Janet got out first, haughtily dismissing the
chauffeur with the assurance that she could walk the four blocks over
to her own house and she'd not leave a clean car in such a dirty
street as Montrose Place.
Dulcie was waiting on the old balcony. Babiche trotted ahead of her
when she opened the door, in ecstacy at Felicia's home coming. Dulcie
set her flaring candle carefully on the newel post and eyed Janet.
"It's Janet MacGregor with me, Dulcie. She's a widow woman. This is
Dulcie Dierckx, Janet, you'll like Dulcie--" She had Babiche in her
arms now, and was leaning wearily against the balustrade, "Janet was
good to bring me home--I was a silly fool--I cried, Dulcie--"
Janet was peering curiously into the empty house.
"Is onybody livin' here?" she demanded. "I thought I saw them all
movin' out--I heard the building was comin' down to make room for
lofts."
Dulcie answered that it wasn't, holding the door open as a tactful
hint that she'd better go. But Janet had no intention of leaving. She
had a woman's curiosity about a vacant house, and she was frankly
looking things over, craning her neck to glance down the murky
hallway.
"Would you think the basement might be to let to a decent body? It's
no worth much, so old and all but I know a body as might conseeder
it." Impractical as the "beastly step-aunt" had proclaimed her to be
Dulcie grasped Janet's thin arm.
"How much would you pay?"
"Is it your hous'?"
"It's Miss Day's--" Dulcie nodded toward Felicia. "She's just been
thinking she might rent part of it. Of course its altogether too large
for her."
"If she's livin' here where's her furnishings?" demanded Janet
cannily.
Felicia sat down on a stair. She motioned but the others remained
standing, their lean figures casting grotesque shadows in the
flickering light of the candle.
"This is the pattern of it," the little seamstress explained. "It's my
house, Janet MacGregor, only it's dirty because while I was gone
building my garden, some dirty filthy heathen came to live here. But
now I'm home His Honor made them all go away. And as soon as I have
earned enough money to pay the taxes and other things I shall make the
house lovely again. The furniture is in a place called storage. I
think I have to pay them something before I get my things, don't I,
Dulcie?"
"What's the matter o' the storage bills?" demanded Janet her eyes
gleaming.
Dulcie answered her, her sharp slangy syllables falling incisively
after Felicia's low drawl.
"I don't know that it's any of your business but they amount to about
two hundred dollars. I know what you're thinking, that with the
furniture we could open a rooming house. I've been thinking that
myself while Miss Day was gone. I've experience you know, my beastly
step-aunt does make a good thing of it. So if you wanted to rent the
basement and had some furniture of your own Miss Day might consider
it."
Janet's thin arms rested akimbo. She nodded.
"If you've lodgings to let you've got to have some one to keep 'em
tidy. There's a good bit o' money there for an able body. If the
furnishings is what she ree-presents and you'd conseeder takin' me in
on shares--I might conseeder--"
"Consider what?" gasped Dulcie.
"Conseeder advancing for the storage of the furnishings--with the
furnishings as security o' course. And doin' some cleanin' toward the
matter o' what ma rent would be. Mind I'm no sayin' I would until I
see the furnishings. I'm on'y conseederin'--I'll have the matter o'
some ladders--" she peered again down the dark hallway, "and I'd want
a neat ticket in the window--"
At midnight, by the embers of their dying fire, Felicia lay with
Dulcie's rug about her, plaintively pretending from the feel of the
chair, that she was the young Felice of those long years ago,
journeying toward the beloved House in the Woods. It was an easy
pretense for she could glimpse the dark waters of the bay and the
silent ships drifting on the tide. A spring fog seeped through the
open windows and she was quite as miserable as she had been on that
memorable trip. Beside her in her own chair, Dulcie talked and talked,
a thousand details that Felicia's tired wits could not follow. It did
not seem at all a miracle to her that she had found Janet. She
accepted her with the simplicity with which she accepted any one who
came into her life.
"The garden is a little old pippin," Dulcie boasted. "We can make that
all O. K. in a day or so, but the house did stump me! Janet MacGregor
is an angel sent straight from heaven. If I ever get a commish' to
sculpt an angel I shall use Janet MacGregor for my model, little Miss
By-the-Day," she sighed drowsily, "your middle name must be Luck."
"My middle name is Trenton," answered Felicia literally. "Dulcie, I am
going to tell you something. Something you must remember. When our
little garden is lovely again, if any one--ever--kisses--you out there
and you love him--don't let any one take you away from him. Because it
might be too long afterward that you come back--you might be old like
Grandy and Piqueur--so that he wouldn't know you when he saw you. He
wouldn't know that you were the--Girl,--"
Something in the level flatness of her tones almost broke the Sculptor
Girl's heart. She reached out her hand and caught Felicia's and
gripped it hard. She did not say much but what she said Felicia found
strangely comforting.
"Why--" her reply was the breathless reply of discovery, "I hadn't
noticed till now--_how young your hands are!"_
They awoke to the dazzling wonder of the new day, a bit stiff from
their unaccustomed couches but exuberant over the adventure. Almost
before they had finished their simple breakfast the excited Janet
MacGregor appeared.
It was Dulcie Dierckx, impractical Dulcie Dierckx, who took charge.
She was a very different person from the hysterical girl that Felicia
had brought home with her two days before.
"You'd better go to your by-the-day." Dulcie was almost saucy.
"Babiche and I will stay and guard the fort. I'll show Janet all the
dirt, I think there's enough to satisfy even her unholy craving--and
then if she still wants to go into the deal I can go to the storage
place. I know I could arrange it because I did it once for Aunt Jen;
it's a bore, it takes all kinds of time, you'd hate it and--" tears
threatened, "unless I'm doing something for my keep I can't stay."
Little Miss Day agreed gratefully. She departed with tactful
discretion before Janet and Dulcie began their argument. Which was
some argument! But in the end they came to something like a feasible
plan and when they did--! Ah! if you could have seen what those two
accomplished that day! Each put the other on her mettle. They did
wonderful team work. Janet agreed readily enough when she saw the
massive furniture that she had ample security. Dulcie fairly browbeat
the storage manager, and between the two of them they actually
arranged for a small van load of furniture to be delivered at Montrose
Place before dark. As for the rest of it, Dulcie had a wrist-watch,
that for all we know is still reposing in the dusty pawnbroker's at
which she cheerfully hocked it. She'd always wondered why she had it
and I don't believe she ever remembered to go back for it. And Janet
had a nephew, a cross-eyed nephew, who was an odd-job man. Can't you
see Dulcie buying the bags of creamy kalsomine and the brushes and
Janet packing up her pails and scrubbing things?
There never was such a polishing, such a mopping, such a scrubbing
such a--whisper!--fumigating--since the old house had been built!
They'd sense enough not to try too much. They confined their efforts
to the nursery, Janet's basement room and Mademoiselle's old quarters.
Dulcie knew she mustn't touch the shepherdesses there. Felice had told
her about the battle royal with the sponge, but in the nursery--well,
the crossy-eyed nephew couldn't work fast enough to suit Dulcie. She
feverishly grabbed a brush herself and slashed about delightedly in
kalsomine. Janet bossed the nephew and Dulcie, Dulcie bossed Janet and
the nephew, the nephew nearly uncrossed his eyes from trying to follow
all the instructions the two shouted at him.
At quarter after six when Miss By-the-Day climbed slowly up the
stairs, reaching out delightedly for Babiche, who had been sleeping in
the top-most niche of the stair, two tired and aching women flung open
the door of the nursery. They were smiling. Neither of them could
think of a thing to say, but a curious mingling of odors told their
story for them. The freshness of the clean, scarcely-dried, kalsomine,
the faint tinge of smoke from the bit of fire, the delicious soapy
cleanliness and a wholesome whiff of barley broth floated out into the
dusty hallway to the little person on the stairs. She looked through
the doorway and saw clean walls, creamy yellow; windows that
glistened, a glowing fire, a tiny table spread for two--Janet knew her
place!--Grandy's fat sofa under the dormer windows, the stately hall
table flat against the side wall, Maman's chaise-longue, the slender
chaise-longue with its flowered chintz cushions, beside the fire--
When Felicia saw that she reached out her arms and sighed contentedly,
rapturously--
"Oh! it's home--it's really home--"
Who shall say which of them won the greater triumph in those mad April
days? Sometimes it seemed as though it must be the valiant Janet, who
fought with soap and brushes and won Gargantuan victories over squalor
and filth. Sometimes it seemed as though it were the belligerent
Dulcie, who bravely tried to forget that she had ever wept over "wet
mud" and wanted to die--die! Why, she couldn't live hard enough, the
days seemed so short! She threw herself heart and soul into the fray;
she grubbed in the bit of garden, she toiled upstairs and down with
the clumsy paint brushes. Whenever she lacked for pence she strode
forth to the art school where she had once been a pupil in the days
before "Uncle Al" had put her money into the disastrous plumbing
venture, and boldly demanded the right to pose at fifty cents an hour.
With the bravado born of her new grip on life she brazenly descended
on the "beastly Aunt Jen" and demanded and received her trunks and
personal trinkets.
As for Felice, her victories were humbler--they were small, silent
victories over Self. In the long hours while she sat sewing she fought
out her little battle--the battle of hating uncongenial toil. It was
not easy, for she had an honest hatred of it.
Not even the goal in sight could make her like being a "by-the-day."
Moreover as she grew wiser in the matter of reckoning she realized the
utter impossibility of actually earning, with her hands, the appalling
sum that she owed. She could only work on blindly from day to day,
hoping, hoping against hope that she would find the Portia Person. She
never gave that up. Long hours after her day's work was over she kept
following elusive trails that led nowhere. She would never admit
defeat in that respect. She would find him and she was sure that he
could solve the difficulties that beset her.
Slowly she was evolving a philosophy of life. It began with a bitter
feeling that she had been cheated, that Grandy hadn't been fair to
her, to let her grow up so ignorant of life, so ignorant of the ways
to earn a living. But gradually she began to discover that neither
Grandy nor Mademoiselle nor Maman herself could have taught her to
live.
"It's my stub, stub, stubborn way--" she chided herself, "I won't let
any one tell me--I think it's only when I work that I learn--Work!
that's the thing to learn with--it's like the 'Binnage'--the second
digging of the garden to make things grow--its not pleasant but after
all--it must be done."
Next she found out that it wasn't enough to work--you must like to do
it! Janet now, she _liked_ to clean--and so she did it beautifully, did
it superlatively, whereas when Dulcie or Felice tried, it was only half
done. So Felice set herself to "like to" be a "by-the-day."
And that was the time she discovered that to like to do anything you
must make it genuinely amusing.
"We should be immensely gay when we're working, shouldn't we, Dulcie?"
she asked one evening when they leaned far out of the windows to watch
the ships in the harbor. "Think how gay the sailors are. I remember
one who whistled while he cleaned the deck--he did it very quickly,
much more quickly than the stupid boys who didn't whistle--I think
when I sew I shall whistle,--not aloud--" she laughed, "it would wake
folks' babies! But in my heart--"
She watched Janet vigorously sweeping the area-way.
"Look Dulcie, it's not the way that she does it that matters--you and
I brush as hard--but it's because it's Janet brushing--the broom acts
as though it were Janet instead of just a broom--isn't it delightful?
I shall have to make my needle me--and you shall--"
They were silent. All had not been victory for poor Dulcie. There was
the model stand and the tools and the "wet mud," but the part of
Dulcie that had wanted to create seemed dead--it seemed to have died
back there that day when she had tried to die in "Aunt Jen's" house.
Morning after morning when Felice went away she would encourage her.
She would assure her that when she came back at night she would hear
Dulcie calling "It's begun." But alas, it never was--it was only by
keeping madly, tempestuously busy at other things that Dulcie endured
the nag of some of those April days. Sometimes she gave up entirely,
flung herself prostrate on the sofa under the dormer windows and wept
until she was no longer Dulcie, until she was merely a limp rag of a
human who wouldn't even speak to Felice, who actually cursed when
Janet tried to bring her soup.
But somehow or other the three of them squeezed and bumped along, a
precarious existence really, which would have been utterly impossible
if it hadn't been for Janet. She it was, who held the purse strings.
She it was who cooked sad looking, unpalatable, but none the less
nourishing, stews and broths. You should have seen Janet during one of
those solemn conclaves with the young lawyer whom Justice Harlow had
assigned to the case. He was a frankly gloomy lawyer. He was sure they
were wasting time and money and energy in their attempt to make the
house habitable--he didn't believe it was possible, he didn't think
that even another thirty days extension of time could be procured and
as for the debts on the property, they looked to his impoverished
purse like the combined national debts of all the Americas. He was a
very young lawyer. He was sorry, he said he was sorry, protesting that
he was doing everything on earth he could do to help "The Case." He
always called the house "The Case."
Janet called him back one night after the two younger women had left.
She informed him bluntly that she didn't think he was anything much of
a lawyer. He retorted hotly that he'd done everything any lawyer could
do. Janet eyed him cannily.
"Where might ye be livin'? You're no married?"
He admitted his single blessedness; he named his address; he on
further urging named his room rent. And Janet came back at him with a
practical ferocity that was magnificent.
"If you're so keen on helping my little lady why are ye no livin' here
and paying her rent?"
He murmured things about neighborhoods and slums and not being able to
afford to live in such a hole and appearances and other futile
excuses. But in the end he followed her meekly up the stairway and was
shown the glories of Grandy's old room. It was a huge cavern of a
room, a whale of a room, with a curtained alcove holding a stately
bed, with wide windows overlooking the bay and a low squatty chair
beside the fireplace. While he was looking Dulcie tripped down the
stairs and winked solemnly at Janet. And she too assailed him. He
hadn't an argument left when the two of them were through with him. He
felt like a henpecked Mormon husband; he was red with wrath at the
Sculptor Girl's cool bossiness; he loathed the very idea of living in
the same house with such a person. Especially when she told him
bluntly, that he'd have to go to Felice and beg to be taken in.
Felicia mustn't know that he'd been "influenced" she put it.
In the end he capitulated, clambering up to the nursery and tapping
meekly on the door, stammering as he made his request.
But he'd his reward straight with--the reward of her wide, sincere
smile.
"How stupid I was not to offer it to you! Of course you must have
longed for it directly you saw it--oh, do you know I think you must
have felt it was just the place for a lawyer! Shall I tell you
something--" she was down the stairs, running like a girl to point out
the wonders of the room. "You see Grandy's father was a Judge and he
knew Louisa's uncle--It was Louisa's uncle who used to live in this
house and both those men used to sit in this room and talk and talk
and talk--Mademoiselle told me about it. You shall have Grandy's
father's picture over the fireplace. We shall bring it up from the
hall. It's a beautiful picture--you'll just admire him! And to think--
we haven't unpacked the books, Grandy's father's books--" she smiled
over her shoulder at Dulcie as she always smiled when she quoted that
slangy young person, "That will be Some Law!"
All the same he was young enough so that he apologized profusely to
his friends for having such a disreputable lodging,
"Yep, I know it's a rookery and a rotten neighborhood, but I have
reasons--" he said it darkly as though he were plotting. He didn't yet
know that a very powerful reason was Dulcie. He was so busy hating
her, thinking up things to say back when she let her saucy, slangy
phrases loose at him that he didn't know how easily he was learning to
love the solemn heavy furniture that surrounded him, the bit of fire
in the grate on chilly evenings, and Dulcie herself, poking her head
in the door crying,
"How is the majesty of the law? Would it mind lifting a ladder for a
poor woiking goil?"
The day he knew that the house was home was the languorous spring day
when he stopped to stare at a bowl of strawberries in the niche
outside his door. Their purchase had driven Janet almost to drink. She
plainly told Felice they'd all end in the poorhouse. But Felice hadn't
minded, she had inscribed a card, on which in her spidery slanting
scrawl was written,
"NOTICE TO LAWYERS AND SCULPTORS: HAVE SOME ON ME."
"By gad!" he breathed, grinning, "she's coming on!"
He didn't protest at Dulcie's demurely calling him "The Rumor," not
even when she added, "Because as a lawyer, you're a false alarm."
He took his humble part in the gigantic house-cleaning. He opportunely
called to mind a chance acquaintance in the Street Cleaning
department, whereupon an ancient white wings was stationed in the
block.
Of course the White Wings couldn't remove the dingy lace curtains and
the grimy lodgings signs from the disconsolate six houses across the
way; but he could and did do wonders to gutters and sidewalks. The
hordes that had inhabited the great house had really made most of the
noise, the "across the street" houses were fairly quiet.
Spring did a lot. She draped new ivy over the dilapidated church and
rectory; she let the gray-green leaves of the wistaria flutter gaily
over the cornices; she touched with magic the old denuded stumps of
the trees of heaven and the back yard became a shaded retreat.
Sometimes at twilight when Felice came home, it seemed to her that the
long ago look of the street was creeping slowly back--perhaps, of
course, it was just that she was growing used to it or else it was the
tender light through the old willows that made the spirit of things
strangely young again.
She always came home bubbling with adventure now. Dulcie would sit
shamelessly smoking a cigarette filched from the lawyer and listen by
the hour while little Miss By-the-Day imitated her employers and their
maid servants and their man servants and the strangers within their
gates. The two women would sit in the back yard on the old iron
benches, which Janet had found in the depths of the coal bin. The
lawyer would walk grandly about, and chuckle and chuckle while Felicia
pretended she was a very fat customer who was always going to begin
dieting after "Mrs. Poomsonby's bridge luncheon." And when Janet was
gone for her bit of walk--the dear soul liked to gossip with her old
neighbors four blocks over--Dulcie and the lawyer would laugh until
tears blinded them at Felicia pretending she was Janet. Oh, but she
was inimitable at that!
Janet arguing with the fish man, Janet experimenting with the
telephone the lawyer had put in the hall, Janet simultaneously
polishing a window and singing.
"Ouch--" Felicia would pull imaginary rheumatism through an imaginary
casement, "Oh weel--oh weel--to look at the du-urt! it's sickenin'!
weel--
You tak the high road
And I'll tak the low road
And I'll be in Scotland before ye,
Oh, I and my true luv shall never be--
oot of the way below there--summat is drapping--Th' De'il tak my bit
of soapie!--
'On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.'"
The folk who lived in the rear alley used to lean, sill-warming fashion
on their windows, the children shrilly whistling the chorus, the men
forgetting their pipes, the women sniffling as women do when they hear
old ballads, for of course once Felice had started "pretending" she
didn't stop. A moment after she'd been Janet she'd be Marthy, dear,
lean, grizzled old Marthy, dead these many years, singing,
"In the gloaming
Oh, my darling,
Think not bitterly of me--"
It never occurred to any of them, least of all Felice, how many, many
hours she spent "pretending." Two evenings a week at chess with Uncle
Peter--(thank heaven Dudley Hamilt came no more--!) Sunday afternoons
with the Wheezy's gentle old fellow sufferers, almost all the other
evenings in the garden. She was using ounce after ounce of her
precious strength, pouring out her self to the whole world around her,
making it laugh, making it weep, making it thrill, making it--work.
She stopped one morning to see Justice Harlow. He stared at her as
though it were the first time he had ever seen her. She no longer wore
eccentric garb. Dulcie had divided with her. She had a simple hat and
a serge frock. She was shabby, to be sure, but it was no longer a
ridiculous shabbiness. She was pale and wan, even paler than when she
had first come to him but the timidity, the uncertainty, had gone. Her
eyes were deeper. They shone like jewels; the softened outlines of her
profile were thinner, clearer; her beautiful mouth had grown firm and
a bit of gray showed in her hair. She was altogether adorable, like a
wee wren after a stormy day. The stilted phrases were slipping away.
She spoke more alertly. Bits of Dulcie's lingo were creeping into her
speech. But she still answered with a literalness that took one's
breath away.
"Now whadda ye know about that?" asked the Justice all unconscious
that he was colloquial.
"I do not know anything about it," she said demurely, and added with
one of her casual references to the illustrious dead--she treated them
all as though they were contemporary--"I think Heloise might know what
to do. One of the things Abelard loved about her was that she always
knew what to do--she was vairee good at administrating, like Janet,
don't you think?"
All the while she was filling her house--with gentle paupers! Think
you how Janet raged the day she brought home the most useless citizen
of all--the Poetry Girl.
Felice had been sewing for two or three days for a dentist's wife, a
rather amusing job for she was stationed in an upstairs window that
let one look down two streets, and at the other window in the room the
dentist's white haired mother sat and gossiped softly about all the
persons who came.
It was the dentist's mother who saw the Poetry Girl first, a thin
figure who walked uncertainly up and down the street, eyeing doctors'
signs. It was a regular streetful of doctors.
"There's a poor thing that's lost her address," crooned Mrs. Miller,
"she does look sick. It's a tooth, too, see how she holds her hand to
her face, you can almost see the pain."
Felice saw, that is she thought she saw. Of course no one could really
see such an ENORMOUS pain as the one that was sweeping the Poetry Girl
along. It was too big to see.
It was something like this. Orange red, pale blue, E flat minor,
acrobatic, Ariel-like in its changes. Sometimes it made her careen
heavily toward the curb--that was the time it made her head seem big
and her feet very far away. Sometimes she could walk but she wanted to
scream, sometimes she felt like a volcano, a Vesuvius of shooting
pains, sometimes it hammered at her ears and she couldn't hear at all.
But one thing she remembered all the time, that she had exactly
twenty-seven cents in her purse.
She was planning whether she'd better dash up to a door and act as
though she had an appointment and give a false address for the bill to
be sent or whether she'd better announce she hadn't any way to pay the
dentist and would he take his pay in poetry, or whether she'd just
shriek, "Stop it!"
In the end her body decided for her. It just flopped down outside the
house where Felicia and Mrs. Miller were watching.
The Poetry Girl was normally very sweet tempered but she wasn't at all
her usual self when she opened her eyes. She was in an operating chair
and she looked accusingly at the man beside her.
"You shouldn't sprinkle me," she murmured reproachfully, "I'm wet
enough as it is and I've no rubbers;--" the faint blue shadows under
her eyes accused them all. Her thin hand tried to pat her rumpled
hair, "I do believe you've lost another hairpin for me--I'd only
three--" she was petulant, "And if you do pull it I can't pay you--"
she was defiant. "Not unless you need some poetry written.
"Or a play. I can write a play. But I can't sell knit underwear or I
can't do general housework--I'm only--a toothache--Bobby Burns wrote
me--maybe you've read me--"
Of course Felicia took her home with her,--that was foreordained from
the moment she saw her,--but she had a beautiful row getting her! The
Poetry Girl had a "stub, stub, stubborn way" too. She was suspicious,
she was wary. She said she didn't care a damn where she went but she
didn't want any one to take her there. The dentist agreed with her. He
took Felicia aside and told her it was his private opinion that the
girl was either drunk or on the verge of a nervous breakdown and he
thought the best thing to do would be to notify a police matron. In
short he was cool and practical. If there was anything Felicia Day
couldn't endure it was a Van Dyke beard on a cool and practical man.
She told the Sculptor Girl afterward that it took strength of mind not
to pull his silly beard off.
She tucked her thimble in her pocket, folded her apron and asked,
"Will you promise not to let her go till I get my hat?"
"You can't manage her," said the dentist, "I tell you she's
irresponsible."
"So am I," confided Felicia serenely, "but I'll come back to-morrow
for the sewing. As soon as I get her in bed and Janet brings her some
soup she'll be perfectly all right--"
But all the same it wasn't easy getting her home. It was a long walk.
Felicia hadn't two carfares and she had forgotten to ask the dentist
for money. To make bad matters worse a heavy down pour of rain
overtook them a good half mile from the house. Its cool splatter
seemed to bring the Poetry Girl to her senses. She laughed a bit.
"What an idiot!" she exclaimed, "you must think me--my name is Blythe
Modder, and usually I'm sane. You see just before I went into that
dentist's I did such a fool thing. I bought some patent liniment and
put on my tooth and I didn't notice until afterward that it said
'external use only'--I was such an idiot--I think it went to my head--
I'm very much better now."
"Well, come along and get some dry clothes and tea anyhow, then you'll
be vairee all right."
She left her with Janet while she ran for the dry clothes. She left
her on Janet's immaculate bed in Janet's atrocious dressing gown. Her
clothes she unceremoniously turned over to Janet to dry, leaving that
practical soul verbose with disgust.
Felicia herself was drenched and she loved it. She was loth to strip
the damp clothes off; she felt like running miles and miles in the
rain. She was dreamily happy, dreamily miserable; she felt like the
day--all tears and smiles both. She dropped the outer garments to
floor and pulled her shoes and stockings off. Babiche sat up and
begged for a cracker. Felicia stooped, her damp hair clinging to her
beautiful forehead, the long scant chemise that had been Octavia's
falling loosely from her smooth shoulders.
"Poor Babiche," she crooned, "When your mistress does come in--" So
intent was she on reaching for the cracker box that she lifted her
voice a bit. Dulcie, outside the door ready to tap on it, swung it
open just in time to glimpse the charming posture.
Felicia blushed like a sixteen year old. She reached for her dressing
gown and pulled it toward her.
But Dulcie Dierckx, slamming the door behind her, leaned against the
panels fairly devouring Felicia with her eyes.
"Oh! Oh!" she cried in absolute ecstacy; "Oh, Pandora! Pandora! don't
move! How could I have been so stupid not to have seen you before! Oh,
please drop the coat! Oh! Oh! you adorable--you beautiful person--you
little old peach!"
Felicia laughed. Laughed her soft, breathless laugh and drew the gown
closer.
"You--you're rather embarrassing--" she sighed, "Though of course,"
her eyes danced mischievously, "my knees and my ankles and my insteps
are vairee nice indeed--I got them all from Louisa, Margot says--and
my hands--" she stretched one out--"They're Grandmother Trenton's--and
I think I have nice ears--but the rest of me--" she shrugged, "The
rest of me won't do at all--my mouth is too big and--no, I wouldn't be
at all your Pandora--it's dark here--that's why you thought you saw
her--"
"I saw her," insisted the Sculptor Girl stubbornly. "And you'd be a
brute not to help me--I--look here," she lied casually, "I didn't tell
you but I've managed a bit of money--I'm not asking you to pose for
nothing--I can pay you more than you earn at your sewing--"
"Oh, money," she stammered. "I didn't think about money--Sculptor
Girl--how could you--"
"Taxes," ejaculated the Sculptor Girl bluntly. "Interest! You can't
forget 'em or we'll all be back in the gutter you know--So that's
settled--to-morrow morning at nine--I'll have a good fire--you won't
mind awfully, will you, if I hang wet cheese cloth around you--?"
She was trying to keep the excitement out of her voice but her eyes
were sparkling. She no longer saw Felicia, she only saw Pandora--the
Pandora of her dreams!
But all the same, after she'd lighted her cigarette in her own room
she drew a long breath and pottered about her few possessions until
she found something pawnable.
In the shop she bargained coolly enough with the pawn-broker, pocketed
the money she fought for and as she was leaving stopped to gaze
casually at the motley array of things in the dusty case. She stared
unbelievingly at a quaint mahogany box, warily priced two or three
other things and finally asked "how much for the damaged writing
case?" Ten minutes later she fled with it under her arm. It didn't
look like much. It was quite empty and it would make a nice box for
Pandora to be opening. But over and over her heart was pounding,
"It's the same Bee on it that's on her brushes--it's the same Bee she
has said was on the silver--it's--oh, if it only could be hers!"
She burst in upon the Poetry Girl (now warm and snug in some of
Dulcie's own garments) and Felicia sitting by the nursery fire. They
were having a friendly little party. Felicia introduced the two girls
with the affable hope they'd be nice neighbors. "Blythe's coming to
have the front room next as soon as Cross Eyes can pink-wash it--" Her
eyes glimpsed the box, she fairly ran for it, "That's Maman's," she
exclaimed, "How did you find it?" She hugged it delightedly; she
opened it--"Even its emptiness smells nice," she sighed.
"Oughtn't there to be a secrud pocket in it, m'loidy? With the missing
will and the dagger he stabbed her with?"
"Nothing like that," laughed Miss Day with one of her delicious
excursions into slang, "it was just for Maman's writing things--but
I'm _that_ proud to have it--"
She was still holding the box when Janet brought up their dinner.
After the Poetry Girl had left, she settled herself for her scolding.
She knew that she was due for it. For naturally she had to confess
that she'd asked Miss Modder to come live in the house.
"What's she paying?" demanded Janet.
"A good bargain, I made. It's like this--she writes, you know, so she
doesn't get her money everyday as you and I do, Janet. She's more
like--well, Dulcie when she's sculpting. So I made a bargain with her
that she'd not pay her rent just now, that she'll pay later. She's to
pay some girl's rent for as long as she stays herself rent free, do
you see? As soon as she can she'll pay her own rent and she'll pay
another rent too, that's vairee business like, don't you think,
Dulcie?"
Dulcie solemnly assured Janet she "couldn't beat it." She offered to
enter into a similar agreement. Janet couldn't get any sense out of
either of them. She retired baffled and defeated.
"All the same," confessed Dulcie, "You've got to quit bringing home
losers, Miss Day. You ought to pick one winner just to square yourself
with Janet."
Felicia promised. And, mirabile dictu, kept her word the very next
week.
Of all the persons that her mistress brought home Janet really
approved of only that one. But that one, as she grudgingly admitted,
made up for the whole "shiftless crew."
"She's Christian," she assured Felice solemnly, "A Christian." Which
was the more delightful from the fact that her sect was one that Janet
had hitherto scorned as "Irish Roman Catolic." But just to look at
Molly O'Reilly was to know you'd love her. Fat, oh, ridiculously fat,
in comparison with the rest of that skinny household--ruddy, glowingly
ruddy, beside that pale-faced "crew." Just by the law of contrasts
they adored her when they saw her--especially after they'd tasted her
heavenly food.
Miss By-the-Day met her in the laundry of a great house where she'd
put in a day mending curtains and table linen. Not a bad sort of job
if one had a suitable spot to work in; but a laundry, a steamy, soapy,
wet-woolens-smelling laundry is not a comfortable place to sew. By
noon Felice wanted to indulge in one of Dulcie's weeps--she was so
nervous--when there entered, bearing a tray, Molly O'Reilly, with her
blue sleeves rolled over her dimpled elbows and her red hair lightly
dusted with flour.
"Here's something to put inside you--" she called to the perspiring
colored woman who was washing and the tiny white person who was
laboriously darning thin net, "something to think on save work." She
stole a keen glance at the seamstress. "Yours goes on this bit of
table; Susy, put down the top of your toobs and get a stool."
Ah, that food! Even Margot couldn't cook like Molly O'Reilly. Why,
Molly cooked as Janet scrubbed, as the Poetry Girl wrote, as the
Sculptor Girl modeled--by inspiration! There wasn't anything on that
tray she put before Felicia that hadn't been made from crumbs that
fell from the rich man's feast. Yet so cunningly had she warmed it, so
deftly had she flavored it, so daintily had she garnished it that it
seemed food ambrosial. Felicia let her fork slide into delectable
crust underneath which snuggled the tenderest chicken she'd ever
tasted in her life. Bits of carrots and celery and potatoes drifted
idly about a sea of creamy gravy--um--when you go to Montrose Place
order "Old Fashioned Chicken Pie."
The artist who had created this delight sat easily against the laundry
sill and grumbled.
"Coompany, coompany all hours. And niver a sound of them reaching the
kitchen. Meals from marning till night and me niver seeing them ate.
You'd think I'd be contint--the wages is so gr'rand, but honest, Susy,
I was happier doing gineral housework for brides at twenty per mont'--
at least I'd a bit of heart put in me, I heard something savin' a
voice on the house 'phone sayin',
"'Dinner fur eight at seven o'clock--' I'm going to quit. As soon as
iver I can find a partner. I'm going to open one of these stylish tea
rooms where's I can peep through the door and see me food bein'
appreciated--"
Can't you almost hear Felicia talking with her, describing the kitchen
and the back yard and the dumb-waiter that goes up to Grandy's room
and stops at Maman's room and on up to the old nursery? Can't you see
Felicia triumphantly bringing Mollyhome to look it over? And can't you
almost hear the lovely Irish songs that Molly's mother taught her? And
Felicia pretending that she is Molly's mother? If you can't, why I'm
afraid you haven't really understood Felicia.
So the days grew longer and sweeter and the little after-dinner group
in the garden grew bigger--think of the excitement of the day when the
lawyer brought home the architect and his timid wife! They came to
live in Maman's room, the room that Felice had intended to keep for
herself. But you'll know presently why she gave it to them. You
remember it was only one flight up. He was a young architect well able
to climb but Mrs. Architect couldn't. And he was a very new architect.
Felice said staunchly that she wouldn't think of having an old fat
successful architect around, that he'd be bored with all the small
jobs the house needed, but this obliging young one, now HE was quite
willing to work hours over where new bathrooms might go--if they ever
had any tub money, or where old lattices could be replaced--if they
ever had any lattice money. You see the idea was that he could pay his
room rent architecting, a "vairee practical" idea Felice assured
Janet. But Janet sniffed.
Everybody brought somebody else. Janet didn't approve of any of them
but she did love them all! That was the unanswerable argument about
all these persons who flocked to the house in Montrose Place--they
were so lovable! Such buoyant souls, who hadn't quite gotten a grip on
life but were pathetically sure that once they did--!
They triumphantly felt that the fact they'd been starving mostly,
helped to prove their genius. Though Felice could never see it that
way. Long after the rest were in bed she used to walk passionately up
and down Mademoiselle's tiny room.
"They're all starlings singing that they can't get out--it's not fair
--not a bit right--they ought not to starve, they ought not to freeze.
And folks who say so are stupid! You can't grow roses like weeds--just
anywhere! And they're going to be the roses in the garden of world--
they ought to be in the sun, they ought to be watched so carefully--
why can't the stupid old world see it! But it doesn't. It just
tramples and chokes and freezes them until it's a wonder they evaire
do blossom at all. And di-_rectly_ they do--the world's surprised--huh--
I should think it would be! It's not fair. It's all wrong. When I find
the Portia Person I shall do something, I shall buy the church next door
and I shall make a school. It shall be a school where you learn to do
one useful thing that will earn your bread and butter. And the rest of
the time--you shall dream." Babiche was a patient listener. But even
Babiche yawned at all the Utopian theories with which her mistress would
reform the world.
Do you remember the chauffeur who promised Felice a "joy-ride"? Can't
you see his fatuous grin one day as he listened to a drawling young-
sounding voice over the telephone of Seeley's Boarding house, a voice
that he couldn't remember at all, demurely saying,
"You said you'd give me a joy-ride sometime if I had a new bonnet--I
have. I really look like anybody else now. I do need that joy-ride
just now, could you come for me?"
But can't you see that chauffeur's rueful smile when he reached the
address she gave him and saw a nurse bringing the palefaced Painter
Boy out the hospital door? Felice ran ahead of them, breathless with
achievement.
"He is doing vairee nicely. His leg is better. It's only his spirit
that's rather drowned, so I thought if he had a joy-ride and we took
him home--"
At least Janet found comfort from the fact that the Painter Boy was
the last pauper to be added to the list--there weren't any rooms or
beds for any more! But the house hummed with their activities, rang
with their arguments and theories, echoed with their laughter--and
sighed with their midnight tears. They were so young! So impatient! So
eager to set the river of life afire!
Dinner time was a joy. They usually had dinner in the garden and
dinner was always THE DISH! Even with Janet's fingers on the purse
strings and Molly's capable hands in the mixing the slender funds
would not stretch to more than--THE DISH. It might be a huge Irish
stew, or something Molly called Dago Puddin' (there never was such
spaghetti as her Dago Puddin') or a gigantic pie made of pigeons that
had to cook all day to become edible. Sometimes Molly "slipped 'em
somethin'" that she claimed was left from her catering business, but
usually they ate only what their pooled funds could pay for and leaned
back content to listen while Felice "pretended" or scolded or
encouraged them; her leadership was utterly unconscious, her calm
assumption that she was a very old lady hypnotized them into thinking
she was. She made no rules or regulations. She frankly let them know
that perhaps they could live there a day or perhaps a century; that
the length of residence depended on the finding of the elusive,
untraceable Portia Person. They all searched ardently for him. They
all knew that when they "made good" they would have to find some
fellow who hadn't and help him. Already Octavia's motto was lettered
under her lovely portrait over the drawing-room fireplace in the
charming simulation of medieval script that the Poetry Girl loved to
make,
"She would like you to be happy here.
You can't be truly happy if you are
making anyone else unhappy."
The days swept by so fast, Felicia brave as she was, didn't dare count
them! Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, oh, it seemed as
though they surely must find the Portia Person now that they were all
looking! Yet each one in his heart generously hoped it would be
Felicia herself who found him.
In spite of her high resolves to learn to "like to be a by-the-day"
she found some days impossible.
She grew to hate Thursdays. Sometimes it seemed as though she couldn't
please anybody on Thursday. Thursday meant that she sewed in
households that suffered from a feverish complaint known as Maid's-
Day-Out. Thursdays always seemed to be associated with worse and more
hurried luncheons than other days--Thursdays she had to open doors and
answer telephones--she used to think sometimes she could have stood
all the other days if it hadn't been for Thursdays.
One Thursday in particular stood out as a terrific day. To begin with
it rained. A drizzling, penetrating, gloomy kind of a rain that
brought her into the Woman's Exchange exceedingly moist, and seemed to
have permanently warped whatever courtesy time had left in the soul of
the Disagreeable Walnut.
"--to Eighteen Willow Court--" grumbled the cross old woman sliding a
card with the address across the littered counter to Felice.
One comfort was, Willow Court was not far and the "Eighteen" was
emblazoned in enormous gilt letters over an elaborate plate-glass
entrance. It was Felice's first apartment house experience. She walked
with humble awe through an enormous mirrored hallway lined with the
largest, dustiest, artificial foliage that ever disgraced vegetation.
An intolerant colored boy, pompous in green-and-gilt livery eyed her
insolently. She stated her errand.
"The help's entrance is on the side street," he informed her
impudently. "You turn right around and go right out where you just
came in and go around to the side where I tells you and go in there
and you tell Joe I sent you. If he hain't too busy maybe he'll run you
up on the freight elevator, but if he is you can walk. It's apartment
41, fourth floor, front."
Ah, you should have seen Octavia's daughter, tired and little and
dripping and frumpy, lift her chin and look through and through that
impudent Senegambian! He confessed afterward she looked so like
somebody's high-toned ghost that it had sent the shivers down his
spine. And just when he was ready to hear the wrath that her eyes
threatened she turned abruptly and walked away so regally that he
found himself muttering,
"I didn't notice she was such a high-stepping lady--"
The service entrance and Joe and the freight elevator conquered, she
found herself face to face with new insolence, this time from a
frowsy maid who led her grudgingly into the living-room that stretched
across the front of the apartment. From ornate curtains a plump and
fretful woman emerged,
"You're fifteen minutes late--she said she'd send some one at eight
o'clock--but come along, sew in the children's bedroom--"
Felice followed through the whole untidy apartment into the narrow
cluttered room. It appeared that the children were not yet dressed nor
had their beds been put in order and they sat, two weedy pallid-
looking mites, in the midst of a tremendous heap of broken toys and
fought desperately for the possession of an eyeless, hairless carcass
of a doll. A sewing machine piled high with garments was in front of
the one broad window that opened on the gloomy whiteness of the court.
An overturned basket, from which oozed tangled spools and myriads of
buttons, lay on the floor in front of the machine. A stiff-backed gilt
chair stood beside it.
"I cut out some pinafores yesterday," continued the fretful voice, "I
wish you would run up the seams of those on the machine--french-seam
them, please--and if I get time I'll show you how I want the collars--
"
Felicia stood, absurdly little beside her plump employer, and spoke
the first words she'd been given opportunity to utter,
"Good morning, Madame," she said in her clear contralto, "I think you
do not understand. The Exchange should have told you that I am a
needle-woman--that I do only hand work--I do not understand sewing
machines--"
"Not understand sewing machines!" shrilled the kimonoed one, "why
anybody with any sense at all can run a sewing machine--"
Felicia smiled her wide ingenuous smile.
"I am not any one at all--but it so happens that I cannot use a sewing
machine. Perhaps I can please you with my needle. Or, I can go home."
"You can't do anything of the kind. It's the maid's day out and I have
to go to a matinee and I'd counted on you to watch the children--" she
shook her head in exasperation. "Well, take off your hat, don't stand
there gawping. I suppose I'll have to put up with it. Do you know
enough to sew on buttons and mend stockings?"
Felicia looked at her curiously for a moment. She couldn't think of
any flower or any vegetable that this strange creature was like, or
any weed for that matter, and it's very hard to keep the garden of a
day in order when strange unexpected things spring up in it. She took
off her hat and her dripping coat. She seated herself in the silly
chair and began to make something like order out of the mess of
crumpled things before her.
Somehow or other the dreadful day limped along. The children howled
while they were dressed. Their mother by turns nagged or cajoled them
from one crying spell into another. The frowsy maid pulled the covers
untidily over the two little beds and half-heartedly picked up a few
of the toys and dumped them in a closet. Felicia's delicate fingers
guided her needle back and forth making exquisite darns and patches in
small petticoats and dresses. One grudging word of approval did her
plump and fretful employer allow her.
"You certainly can sew, but you needn't bother to take such small
stitches--I wish you'd stop fussing with that and press my frock--"
An ironing board added itself to the other confusion. Propped up
between the sewing machine and the uneven metal footboard of a child's
crib Felicia eyed it with misgiving. She almost laughed aloud.
"Do you think you'd better risk it with me, Madame?" she asked. "I am
not what-you-call-a-blanchisseuse--I have never held a flat-iron--"
she was smiling because she was thinking of Grandy's inflexible order
"never let her hand be spread on any heavy object."
She lived through My Lady Fretfulness's tirade at this appalling
ignorance. She again patiently explained that she was sorry The
Exchange had let Madame misunderstand.
"I am only a needlewoman for hand work," she reiterated. "I know only
embroidery and mending and knitting and the beading of purses--as they
should have informed you--"
The crisis was tided over by the frowsy maid being summoned to press
the frock while Felice corralled various hooks and eyes, mended a rip
in a stocking heel, helped to fasten the pressed frock around a
stiffly corseted person, breathed a patient "yes" to numerous
instructions about the children's lunch. She sighed with relief when
two o'clock heard the door bang after a second grand exit when a
caricatured edition of the mistress passed out in the form of "Sadie's
Thursday out."
Not that things were exactly placid after those two disrupting
influences had fled to their pleasures. The rain dripped more
steadily, the pile of garments heaped upon the sewing machine never
seemed to grow less. The children ate the lunches that Felicia found
in the half tidied kitchen. The little woman herself carried a plate
of not unappetising scraps into the ornate mahogany dining-room,
rummaged for a knife and fork and sat down to eat, much to the
disapproval of the scraggly nine-year-old who informed her with
unconscious imitation of the mother's manner that "Mama doesn't allow
her servants to eat in here--"
Followed a bumping, dragging, nerve-racking afternoon that made
Felicia long to shriek like the raucous-voiced peddler who had
disturbed her precious early morning sleep. By four o'clock things had
become unendurable: She viewed her squabbling charges with scorn. They
behaved no better nor no worse than "the-thousand-weeds-for-which-we-
have-no-name--" yet a spirit of fairness roused itself in Felicia's
unhappy thoughts.
"After all, they're not to blame, these two uncared-for savages!" She
put down her needle and thimble, walked with a determination toward
the wee contestants in a never ending fight and put her hand on the
younger child's shoulder. The child jerked away. Felicia's hand went
out more firmly this time.
"Let us go out of this room," she said coolly. "I do not think it is
possible for any one of us to be happy here any longer--"
The children stared at her. This note of authority was something they
did not question. There was something in this wide-eyed pale little
seamstress' command that was unlike anything they had ever heard. They
followed Felicia meekly enough. They walked quietly while she moved to
the least covered and least ornate corner of the apartment--an alcove
with a bookcase and a flat writing table.
"This," announced the older child, "won't do. It's Faddo's ONE CORNER
and he will not let it be touched."
Felicia laughed. "Then there is but one thing for us to do," she
announced leading her small sheep behind her. "We shall have to go
back to that unhappy room and make ourselves ONE CORNER--" So back
they went and watched her fling open the window. They obeyed her
commands without murmuring for the next quarter of an hour. They
helped her smooth their lumpy beds. They helped her stack the wrecked
toys into an orderly heap. They helped her fold the heaps of mended
and unmended garments. And when it was done she sat down on the floor
on her knees as she had knelt so many times in her garden and smiled
at them. She drew a long breath. You must remember that she had never
known a child except that strange child: _herself_. She could only treat
them as she had treated the lost flowers in her garden. Or perhaps, she
thought, she could try treating them as she treated Babiche, but in
another thoughtful second--(during which she nearly lost their strangely
won attention)--she clapped her hands. Those scowls on their puckered
little foreheads were like Grandfather's in the old days when he had
been wrangling with Certain Legal Matters. She seemed to hear her
mother's happy voice:
"It's not easy. But it's a game too. You see some one who is tired or
cross or worried and you think 'This isn't pleasant.' Maybe you play a
little on your lute, maybe you tell something droll that happened in
the kennel or the garden--"
She drew another long breath, "Let's pretend--" she began in her low
contralto "let's pretend I have a little lute to make music for you."
She sunk back on a hassock and held her arms in position for playing a
lute. The children settled in crossed legged heaps and regarded her
solemnly.
"I haven't really a lute of course, so I shall have to whistle instead
of playing the strings and I can't sing any words while I'm whistling
so I shall have to tell you the story before I make the song--the
first little song I'm going to do on my lute is about a bridge and how
the pretty ladies liked to dance across it."
They pretended it with her rather timorously at first, but presently
they were singing "sur le pont d'Avignon." A door swung open and a
grizzled man in a dripping raincoat blocked the doorway. The children
looked around at him.
"Go away, Papa," ordered the older one casually. "We are pretending."
He laughed.
"And why, may I ask, shouldn't I be allowed to pretend with you?"
"Will you let him pretend with us?" the child asked Felicia gravely.
And, Felicia looking at the tired face of the man in the doorway,
nodded. He sat down on the edge of the larger bed and if Felicia was
aware of him after that she didn't let him know it. Precious golden
moments of happiness began to drip into the little room as incessantly
as the silvery gray drops of the rain fell outside.
"This," confided Felicia "is a story about a girl who wanted to write
a letter. She was a very pretty girl, a French girl. Do you understand
French? I don't very well. I didn't learn it when I was little like
you--so we'll tell it in English the way Margot--who is a nice fat,
comfortable woman who lives in the little house in the woods right
beside my big house in the woods--tells me. I'll whistle the gay tune
about the girl who is going to write the letter until you can sing it
with a tra-la-la-la so--and then while you make the music we'll
pretend I'm the girl who wants Peirrot to open his door so she can
write the letter by the moonlight because her candle had blown out.
Her fire was quite low--she was cold," the children shivered
sympathetically, "first we will do the tune--so."
Felicia's beautiful lips closed. Remember that you could hardly see
her lips move when she whistled and remember how very beautiful her
whistle was! Such a gay little tune, that old, old tune, _Au Clair de la
Lune!_ The wide-eyed children watched her, humming as she motioned. The
tired man on the edge of the bed watched her, humming unconsciously as
the little song sang itself into his eager ears. Higher and sweeter and
faster the tripping tune came. Felice was clapping her slender hands to
give them the time and now the two children and their father were
singing it uproariously while Felice on her hassock gestured and spoke
the words.
"--open your door, Peirrot--" Oh Margot! with your translation that
should not offend your atheistic master by telling his granddaughter
what _Dieu_ really means! The tired man, who'd known the song when he
was a boy, was already laughing at Margot's version. But when Felicia
came to "_Pour l'amour de Dieu_" and merrily cried out "For the love of
Mike" he caught up a pillow and hugged it as he howled his unholy glee.
The four of them shouted together, shouted youthfully, buoyantly,
savagely, not caring in the least at what they shouted.
"Oh! Oh!" exulted Felice, "how _de_-liciously happy we are--"
Under the noise of their merriment the outer door had opened and
closed; the tread of overshoes pattered quietly along the hall--she
stood in the doorway plump and puffing, her finery bundled clumsily
under her coat. She wasn't very pretty. It didn't seem as if she'd
ever been young, and it seemed as though she was the angriest woman in
the world. And her voice thin, soprano, nasal, rose above the joyous
shouting of the merry-makers.
"You didn't know how to run the sewing machine!" she mocked the little
woman who was rising from the hassock, "you didn't know how to use the
flat-iron! You were much too fine to do the work you came to do! But
the minute my back is turned you sit there playing with my children--"
the anger was rising higher and higher now, "and flirting with my
husband--" The man arose.
"Bertha!" he exclaimed. But even above the strident shrill of the
scolding and the abrupt command of the man's voice and the frightened
wail of the littlest girl, rose the cry of Felicia's own anger. Did I
say her employer was the angriest woman in the world? I was mistaken.
The angriest woman in the world was Felicia Day.
Tiny in stature, absurdly dowdy she stood. She didn't raise her voice
after that first cry but its deep contralto seemed to penetrate
everywhere. All the petty insults that she had endured through all the
dreadful Thursdays seemed as nothing compared to the unjust assault of
this unfair person.
"You'd better not talk any more," Felicia's clear voice interrupted
the angry tirade. "Because I'm not listening and I'm sure you don't
know yourself what you're saying. All day long I've been wondering
what I could pretend you were like. First I pretended you were a big
coarse zinnia. I don't like zinnias at all but some people do--they
are gay and bold. Part of the time I thought I'd pretend you were a
weed--a rather pretty weed that chokes flowers out if you don't watch
it--but you aren't even as much use as a weed--"
Her employer gave a little scream. She stepped closer to her husband
and shook his arm a little. He was staring, as though hypnotized, at
Felice.
"Stop her! Make her stop!" the woman screamed. "She's insulting me!
Make her stop!"
He pulled himself together.
"Of course you must stop!" he spoke sternly as though he were speaking
to a naughty child. "You must be out of your wits to talk that way!
You'd--you'd better go--" he ended tamely.
"Much better," Felicia agreed. "But I'd much better go after I get
through telling her what I'm going to pretend she is! She's exactly
like the Black Blight--that horrid black thing that makes the green
leaves droop and the gay little flowers shrivel up--there's only one
thing to do to keep it from killing the whole garden--that's to burn
it out with coals!"
"Stop that!" the man commanded sharply.
Felicia coolly folded her arms.
"I can't," she answered quietly, "not till I'm through. For I've
started now. Besides--" her eager words tumbled more gently now, "all
the morning through she told me about things I didn't know--things of
which I was ignorant. She thought it vairee dreadful that I did not
know how to work with a flat-iron--she thought it vairee stupid that I
could not manage the sewing machine--and I was ashamed because I did
not know vairee much--and I would be glad if she would tell me how to
do these things I do not know. Now, I know something that she does not
know--" she stepped very close to the amazed woman, "something I
think--she will like to hear about--" a cooing sweetness crept into
Felicia's tones, the naive earnestness, the gentle candor of her
appeal, silenced both the man and the woman. "She will like to hear
about the way to be a mother. I know exactly the way--it's like this--
it isn't a bit like the way you do it--" her clear eyes looked
straight into those of the awed person before her. "The way you do it
is not at all pretty--not at all amusing--you shout and scold and fret
and 'don't--don't don't'--all the time! That's not the way to be a
mother!" Felicia's eyes grew tender, her hand touched the woman's hand
and patted it reassuringly. "I'll tell you the vairee best way to be a
mother--evairy morning you have some one make you vairee, vairee
pretty with a little lace cap and a rosy pillow--you must stay in your
bed and wait till your children come to see you and then you must
smile at them and speak vairee softly--this way, saying 'Go out in the
garden and be happy, my dears!' And when they come back to you at
twilight, oh so vairee happy--" her voice wavered, she was no longer
looking at them, she was looking far back across the years. She
shivered a little.
"That's the time for you to say, 'Ah, Felicia, you look as though
you'd been vairee happy today--in your garden--"
The man strode toward her eagerly. He put his hands on her heaving
shoulders and dragged her toward the light.
"Who are you?" he demanded sharply, "tell me quickly, who are you?"
And Felicia looked at him, still dazed, still drifting happily on the
flood of her beautiful memories.
"Why, of course I know you--" she whispered gently, "I've been looking
everywhere to find you. You're my Portia Person--only the Portia part
of you is all quite lost--"