THE "BACK YETT AJEE."
Those who do not like common people need not read this chapter.
We had Delia Waite the next week. It happened well, in a sort of
Box-and-Cox fashion; for Mrs. Van Alstyne went off with some friends
to the Isles of Shoals, and Alice and Adelaide Marchbanks went with
her; so that we knew we should see nothing of the two great families
for a good many days; and when Leslie came, or the Haddens, we did not
so much mind; besides, they knew that we were busy, and they did not
expect any "coil" got up for them. Leslie came right up stairs, when
she was alone; if Harry or Mr. Thayne were with her, one of us would
take a wristband or a bit of ruffling, and go down. Somehow, if it
happened to be Harry, Barbara was always tumultuously busy, and never
offered to receive: but it always ended in Rosamond's making her. It
seemed to be one of the things that people wait to be overcome in
their objections to.
We always had a snug, cosey time when Delia was with us; we were all
simple and busy, and the work was getting on; that was such an
under-satisfaction; and Delia was having such a good time. She hardly
ever failed to come to us when we wanted her; she could always make
some arrangement.
Ruth was artful; she tucked in Lucilla Waters, after all; she said it
would be such a nice chance to have her; she knew she would rather
come when we were by ourselves, and especially when we had our work
and patterns about. Lucilla brought a sack and an overskirt to make;
she could hardly have been spared if she had had to bring mere idle
work. She sewed in gathers upon the shirts for mother, while Delia cut
out her pretty material in a style she had not seen. If we had had
grasshopper parties all summer before, this was certainly a bee, and I
think we all really liked it just as well as the other.
We had the comfort of mother's great, airy room, now, as we had never
even realized it before. Everybody had a window to sit at;
green-shaded with closed blinds for the most part; but that is so
beautiful in summer, when the out-of-doors comes brimming in with
scent and sound, and we know how glorious it is if we choose to open
to it, and how glorious it is going to be when we do throw all wide in
the cooling afternoon.
"How glad I am we _have_ to have busy weeks sometimes!" said Ruth,
stopping the little "common-sense" for an instant, while she tossed a
long flouncing over her sewing-table. "I know now why people who
never do their own work are obliged to go away from home for a change.
It must be dreadfully same if they didn't. I like a book full of
different stories!"
Lucilla Waters lives down in the heart of the town. So does Leslie
Goldthwaite, to be sure; but then Mr. Goldthwaite's is one of the old,
old-fashioned houses that were built when the town was country, and
that has its great yard full of trees and flowers around it now; and
Mrs. Waters lives in a block, flat-face to the street, with nothing
pretty outside, and not very much in; for they have never been rich,
the Waterses, and Mr. Waters died ten years ago, when Lucilla was a
little child. Lucilla and her mother keep a little children's school;
but it was vacation now, of course.
Lucilla is in Mrs. Ingleside's Bible-class; that is how Ruth, and then
the rest of us, came to know her. Arctura Fish is another of Mrs.
Ingleside's scholars. She is a poor girl, living at service,--or,
rather, working in a family for board, clothing, and a little
"schooling,"--the best of which last she gets on Sundays of Mrs.
Ingleside,--until she shall have "learned how," and be "worth wages."
Arctura Fish is making herself up, slowly, after the pattern of
Lucilla Waters. She would not undertake Leslie Goldthwaite or Helen
Josselyn,--Mrs. Ingleside's younger sister, who stays with her so
much,--or even our quiet Ruth. But Lucilla Waters comes _just next_.
She can just reach up to her. She can see how she does up her hair, in
something approaching the new way, leaning back behind her in the
class and tracing out the twists between the questions; for Lucilla
can only afford to use her own, and a few strands of harmless Berlin
wool under it; she can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats, or
intricacies ready made up at the--upholsterer's, I was going to say.
So it is not a hopeless puzzle and an impracticable achievement to
little Arctura Fish. It is wonderful how nice she has made herself
look lately, and how many little ways she puts on, just like
Lucilla's. She hasn't got beyond mere mechanical copying, yet; when
she reaches to where Lucilla really is, she will take in differently.
Ruth gave up her little white room to Delia Waite, and went to sleep
with Lucilla in the great, square east room.
Delia Waite thought a great deal of this; and it was wonderful how
nobody could ever get a peep at the room when it looked as if anything
in it had been used or touched. Ruth is pretty nice about it; but she
cannot keep it so _sacredly_ fair and pure as Delia did for her. Only
one thing showed.
"I say," said Stephen, one morning, sliding by Ruth on the stair-rail
as they came down to breakfast, "do you look after that _piousosity_,
now, mornings?"
"No," said Ruth, laughing, "of course I can't."
"It's always whopped," said Stephen, sententiously.
Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these days. Not her very
finest, out of Miss Leslie; she said that was too much like the fox
and the crane, when Lucilla asked for the receipts. It wasn't fair to
give a taste of things that we ourselves could only have for very
best, and send people home to wish for them. But she made some of her
"griddles trimmed with lace," as only Barbara's griddles were trimmed;
the brown lightness running out at the edges into crisp filigree. And
another time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed
golden-tawny over the coals; and then it was breakfast potato, beaten
almost frothy with one white-of-egg, a pretty good bit of butter, a
few spoonfuls of top-of-the-milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt,
and delicately with pepper,--the oven doing the rest, and turning it
into a snowy soufflé.
Barbara said we had none of us a specialty; she knew better; only hers
was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and
would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens
should come into play; for who cares to put one's genius into the
universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-soufflés to be
carried half a mile to the table?
Barbara delighted to "make company" of seamstress week; "it was so
nice," she said, "to entertain somebody who thought 'chickings was
'evingly.'"
Rosamond liked that part of it; she enjoyed giving pleasure no less
than any; but she had a secret misgiving that we were being very
vulgarly comfortable in an underhand way. She would never, by any
means, go off by herself to eat with her fingers.
Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she did not get some
new ideas to carry home to Arabel.
Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more; she was the oldest child of
one marriage and Delia the youngest of another. All the Waites between
them had dropped away,--out of the world, or into homes here and there
of their own,--and Arabel and Delia were left together in the square,
low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other hill, where the town ran
up small.
Arabel Waite was an old dressmaker. She _could_ make two skirts to a
dress, one shorter, the other longer; and she could cut out the upper
one by any new paper pattern; and she could make shell-trimmings and
flutings and box-plaitings and flouncings, and sew them on
exquisitely, even now, with her old eyes; but she never had adapted
herself to the modern ideas of the corsage. She could not fit a bias
to save her life; she could only stitch up a straight slant, and leave
the rest to nature and fate. So all her people had the squarest of
wooden fronts, and were preternaturally large around the waist. Delia
sewed with her, abroad and at home,--abroad without her, also, as she
was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, or a cape, or a
panier,--or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or a johnny-cake, was
something to go home with rejoicing.
Arabel Waite and Delia could only use three rooms of the old house;
the rest was blinded and shut up; the garret was given over to the
squirrels, who came in from the great butternut-trees in the yard, and
stowed away their rich provision under the eaves and away down between
the walls, and grew fat there all winter, and frolicked like a troop
of horse. We liked to hear Delia tell of their pranks, and of all the
other queer, quaint things in their way of living. Everybody has a way
of living; and if you can get into it, every one is as good as a
story. It always seemed to us as if Delia brought with her the
atmosphere of mysterious old houses, and old, old books stowed away in
their by-places, and stories of the far past that had been lived
there, and curious ancient garments done with long ago, and packed
into trunks and bureaus in the dark, unused rooms, where there had
been parties once, and weddings and funerals and children's games in
nurseries; and strange fellowship of little wild things that strayed
in now,--bees in summer, and squirrels in winter,--and brought the
woods and fields with them under the old roof. Why, I think we should
have missed it more than she would, if we had put her into some back
room, and poked her sewing in at her, and left her to herself!
The only thing that wasn't nice that week was Aunt Roderick coming
over one morning in the very thick of our work, and Lucilla's too,
walking straight up stairs, as aunts can, whether you want them or
not, and standing astonished at the great goings-on.
"Well!" she exclaimed, with a strong falling inflection, "are any of
you getting ready to be married?"
"Yes'm," said Barbara, gravely, handing her a chair. "All of us."
Then Barbara made rather an unnecessary parade of ribbon that she was
quilling up, and of black lace that was to go each side of it upon a
little round jacket for her blue silk dress, made of a piece laid away
five years ago, when she first had it. The skirt was turned now, and
the waist was gone.
While Aunt Roderick was there, she also took occasion to toss over,
more or less, everything that lay about,--"to help her in her
inventory," she said after she went away.
"Twelve new embroidered cambric handkerchiefs," repeated she, as she
turned back from the stair-head, having seen Aunt Roderick down.
Barbara had once, in a severe fit of needle-industry, inspired by the
discovery of two baby robes of linen cambric among mother's old
treasures, and their bestowal upon her, turned them into these
elegances, broadly hemmed with the finest machine stitch, and marked
with beautiful great B's in the corners. She showed them, in her
pride, to Mrs. Roderick; and we knew afterward what her abstract
report had been, in Grandfather Holabird's hearing. Grandfather
Holabird knew we did without a good many things; but he had an
impression of us, from instances like these, that we were seized with
sudden spasms of recklessness at times, and rushed into French
embroideries and sets of jewelry. I believe he heard of mother's one
handsome black silk, every time she wore it upon semiannual occasions,
until he would have said that Mrs. Stephen had a new fifty-dollar
dress every six months. This was one of our little family trials.
"I don't think Mrs. Roderick does it on purpose," Ruth would say. "I
think there are two things that make her talk in that way. In the
first place, she has got into the habit of carrying home all the news
she can, and making it as big as possible, to amuse Mr. Holabird; and
then she has to settle it over in her own mind, every once in a while,
that things must be pretty comfortable amongst us, down here, after
all."
Ruth never dreamed of being satirical; it was a perfectly
straightforward explanation; and it showed, she truly believed, two
quite kind and considerate points in Aunt Roderick's character.
After the party came back from the Isles of Shoals, Mrs. Van Alstyne
went down to Newport. The Marchbankses had other visitors,--people
whom we did not know, and in whose way we were not thrown; the _haute
volée_ was sufficient to itself again, and we lived on a piece of our
own life once more.
"It's rather nice to knit on straight," said Barbara; "without any
widening or narrowing or counting of stitches. I like very well to
come to a plain place."
Rosamond never liked the plain places quite so much; but she
accommodated herself beautifully, and was just as nice as she could
be. And the very best thing about Rose was, that she never put on
anything, or left anything off, of her gentle ways and notions. She
would have been ready at any time for the most delicate fancy-pattern
that could be woven upon her plain places. That was one thing which
mother taught us all.
"Your life will come to you; you need not run after it," she would
say, if we ever got restless and began to think there was no way out
of the family hedge. "Have everything in yourselves as it should be,
and then you can take the chances as they arrive."
"Only we needn't put our bonnets on, and sit at the windows," Barbara
once replied.
"No," said Mrs. Holabird; "and especially at the front windows. A
great deal that is good--a great deal of the best--comes in at the
back-doors."
Everybody, we thought, did not have a back-door to their life, as we
did. They hardly seemed to know if they had one to their houses.
Our "back yett was ajee," now, at any rate.
Leslie Goldthwaite came in at it, though, just the same, and so did
her cousin and Dakie. [Footnote: Harry Goldthwaite is Leslie's cousin,
and Mr. Aaron Goldthwaite's ward. I do not believe we have ever
thought to put this in before.]
Otherwise, for two or three weeks, our chief variety was in sending
for old Miss Trixie Spring to spend the day.
Miss Trixie Spring is a lively old lady, who, some threescore and five
years ago, was christened "Beatrix." She plays backgammon in the
twilights, with mother, and makes a table at whist, at once lively and
severe, in the evenings, for father. At this whist-table, Barbara
usually is the fourth. Rosamond gets sleepy over it, and Ruth--Miss
Trixie says--"plays like a ninkum."
We always wanted Miss Trixie, somehow, to complete comfort, when we
were especially comfortable by ourselves; when we had something
particularly good for dinner, or found ourselves set cheerily
down for a long day at quiet work, with everything early-nice
about us; or when we were going to make something "contrive-y,"
"Swiss-family-Robinson-ish," that got us all together over it, in the
hilarity of enterprise and the zeal of acquisition. Miss Trixie could
appreciate homely cleverness; darning of carpets and covering of old
furniture; she could darn a carpet herself, so as almost to improve
upon--certainly to supplant--the original pattern. Yet she always had
a fresh amazement for all our performances, as if nothing notable had
ever been done before, and a personal delight in every one of our
improvements, as if they had been her own. "We're just as cosey as we
can be, already,--it isn't that; but we want somebody to tell us how
cosey we are. Let's get Miss Trixie to-day," says Barbara.
Once was when the new drugget went down, at last, in the dining-room.
It was tan-color, bound with crimson,--covering three square yards;
and mother nailed it down with brass-headed tacks, right after
breakfast, one cool morning. Then Katty washed up the dark
floor-margin, and the table had its crimson-striped cloth on, and
mother brought down the brown stuff for the new sofa-cover, and the
great bunch of crimson braid to bind that with, and we drew up our
camp-chairs and crickets, and got ready to be busy and jolly, and to
have a brand-new piece of furniture before night.
Barbara had made peach-dumpling for dinner, and of course Aunt Trixie
was the last and crowning suggestion. It was not far to send, and she
was not long in coming, with her second-best cap pinned up in a
handkerchief, and her knitting-work and her spectacles in her bag.
The Marchbankses never made sofa-covers of brown waterproof, nor had
Miss Trixies to spend the day. That was because they had no back-door
to their house.
I suppose you think there are a good many people in our story. There
are; when we think it up there are ever so many people that have to do
with our story every day; but we don't mean to tell you all _their_
stories; so you can bear with the momentary introduction when you meet
them in our brown room, or in our dining-room, of a morning, although
we know very well also that passing introductions are going out of
fashion.
We had Dakie Thayne's last visit that day, in the midst of the
hammering and binding. Leslie and he came in with Ruth, when she came
back from her hour with Reba Hadden. It was to bid us good by; his
furlough was over, he was to return to West Point on Monday.
[Illustration]
"Another two years' pull," he said. "Won't you all come to West Point
next summer?"
"If we take the journey we think of," said Barbara, composedly,--"to
the mountains and Montreal and Quebec; perhaps up the Saguenay; and
then back, up Lake Champlain, and down the Hudson, on our way to
Saratoga and Niagara. We might keep on to West Point first, and have a
day or two there."
"Barbara," said mother, remonstratingly.
"Why? _Don't_ we think of it? I'm sure I do. I've thought of it till
I'm almost tired of it. I don't much believe we shall come, after all,
Mr. Thayne."
"We shall miss you very much," said Mrs. Holabird, covering Barbara's
nonsense.
"Our summer has stopped right in the middle," said Barbara, determined
to talk.
"I shall hear about you all," said Dakie Thayne. "There's to be a
Westover column in Leslie's news. I wish--" and there the cadet
stopped.
Mother looked up at him with a pleasant inquiry.
"I was going to say, I wish there might be a Westover correspondent,
to put in just a word or two, sometimes; but then I was afraid that
would be impertinent. When a fellow has only eight weeks in the year
of living, Mrs. Holabird, and all the rest is drill, you don't know
how he hangs on to those eight weeks,--and how they hang on to him
afterwards."
Mother looked so motherly at him then!
"We shall not forget you--Dakie," she said, using his first name for
the first time. "You shall have a message from us now and then."
Dakie said, "Thank you," in a tone that responded to her "Dakie."
We all knew he liked Mrs. Holabird ever so much. Homes and mothers are
beautiful things to boys who have had to do without them.
He shook hands with us all round, when he got up to go. He shook hands
also with our old friend, Miss Trixie, whom he had never happened to
see before. Then Rosamond went out with him and Leslie,--as it was our
cordial, countrified fashion for somebody to do,--through the hall to
the door. Ruth went as far as the stairs, on her way to her room to
take off her things. She stood there, up two steps, as they were
leaving.
Dakie Thayne said good by again to Rosamond, at the door, as was
natural; and then he came quite back, and said it last of all, once
more, to little Ruth upon the stairs. He certainly did hate to go away
and leave us all.
"That is a very remarkable pretty-behaved young man," said Miss
Trixie, when we all picked up our breadths of waterproof, and got in
behind them again.
"The world is a desert, and the sand has got into my eyes," said
Barbara, who had hushed up ever since mother had said "Dakie." When
anybody came close to mother, Barbara was touched. I think her love
for mother is more like a son's than a daughter's, in the sort of
chivalry it has with it.
* * * * *
It was curious how suddenly our little accession of social importance
had come on, and wonderful how quickly it had subsided; more curious
and wonderful still, how entirely it seemed to stay subsided.
We had plenty to do, though; we did not miss anything; only we had
quite taken up with another set of things. This was the way it was
with us; we had things we _must_ take up; we could not have spared
time to lead society for a long while together.
Aunt Roderick claimed us, too, in our leisure hours, just then; she
had a niece come to stay with her; and we had to go over to the "old
house" and spend afternoons, and ask Aunt Roderick and Miss Bragdowne
in to tea with us. Aunt Roderick always expected this sort of
attention; and yet she had a way with her as if we ought not to try to
afford things, looked scrutinizingly at the quality of our cake and
preserves, and seemed to eat our bread and butter with consideration.
It helped Rosamond very much, though, over the transition. We, also,
had had private occupation.
"There had been family company at grandfather's," she told Jeannie
Hadden, one morning. "We had been very much engaged among ourselves.
We had hardly seen anything of the other girls for two or three
weeks."
Barbara sat at the round table, where Stephen had been doing his
geometry last night, twirling a pair of pencil compasses about on a
sheet of paper, while this was saying. She lifted up her eyes a
little, cornerwise, without moving her head, and gave a twinkle of
mischief over at mother and Ruth. When Jeannie was gone, she kept on
silently, a few minutes, with her diagrams. Then she said, in her
funniest, repressed way,--
"I can see a little how it must be; but I suppose I ought to
understand the differential calculus to compute it. Circles are
wonderful things; and the science of curves holds almost everything.
Rose, when do you think we shall get round again?"
She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled over with
intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against whose curves and
circumferences she had written names: Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite,
Holabird.
"It's a mere question of centre and radius," she said. "You may be big
enough to take in the whole of them, or you may only cut in at the
sides. You may be just tangent for a minute, and then go off into
space on your own account. You may have your centre barely inside of a
great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a good part; you
_must_ be small to be taken quite in by anybody's!"
"It doesn't illustrate," said Rose, coolly. "Orbits don't snarl up in
that fashion."
"Geometry does," said Barbara. "I told you I couldn't work it all out.
But I suppose there's a Q.E.D. at the end of it somewhere."
* * * * *
Two or three days after something new happened; an old thing happened
freshly, rather,--which also had to do with our orbit and its
eccentricities. Barbara, as usual, discovered and announced it.
"I should think _any_ kind of an astronomer might be mad!" she
exclaimed. "Periods and distances are bad enough; but then come the
perturbations! Here's one. We're used to it, to be sure; but we never
know exactly where it may come in. The girl we live with has formed
other views for herself, and is going off at a tangent. What _is_ the
reason we can't keep a satellite,--planet, I mean?"
"Barbara!" said mother, anxiously, "don't be absurd!"
"Well, what shall I be? We're all out of a place again." And she sat
down resignedly on a very low cricket, in the middle of the room.
"I'll tell you what we'll do, mother," said Ruth, coming round. "I've
thought of it this good while. We'll co-operate!"
"She's glad of it! She's been waiting for a chance! I believe she put
the luminary up to it! Ruth, you're a brick--moon!"