The Smoke of Battle
Then Linda walked down the hall, climbed the front stairs, and
presented herself at Eileen’s door, there to receive one of the
severest shocks of her young life. Eileen had tossed her hat and fur
upon a couch, seated herself at her dressing table, and was studying
her hair in the effort to decide whether she could fluff it up
sufficiently to serve for the evening or whether she must take it down
and redress it. At Linda’s step in the doorway she turned a smiling
face upon her and cried: “Hello, little sister, come in and tell me the
news.”
Linda stopped as if dazed. The wonderment in which she looked at Eileen
was stamped all over her. A surprised braid of hair hung over one of
her shoulders. Her hands were surprised, and the skirt of her dress,
and her shoes flatly set on the floor.
“Well, I’ll be darned!” she ejaculated, and then walked to where she
could face Eileen, and seated herself without making any attempt to
conceal her amazement.
“Linda,” said Eileen sweetly, “you would stand far better chance
of being popular and making a host of friends if you would not be
so coarse. I am quite sure you never heard Mama or me use such an
expression.”
For one long instant Linda was too amazed to speak. Then she recovered
herself.
“Look here, Eileen, you needn’t try any ‘perfect lady’ business on me,”
she said shortly. “Do you think I have forgotten the extent of your
vocabulary when the curling iron gets too hot or you fail to receive an
invitation to the Bachelors’ Ball?”
Linda never had been capable of understanding Eileen. At that minute
she could not know that Eileen had been facing facts through the long
hours of the night and all through the day, and that she had reached
the decision that for the future her only hope of working Linda to her
will was to conciliate her, to ignore the previous night, to try to put
their relationship upon the old basis by pretending that there never
had been a break. She laughed softly.
“On rare occasions, I grant it. Of course a little swear slips out
sometimes. What I am trying to point out is that you do too much of it.”
“How did you ever get the idea,” said Linda, “that I wanted to be
popular and have hosts of friends? What would I do with them if I had
them?”
“Why, use them, my child, use them,” answered Eileen promptly.
“Let’s cut this,” said Linda tersely. “I am not your child. I’m getting
to the place where I have serious doubt as to whether I am your sister
or not. If I am, it’s not my fault, and the same clay never made two
objects quite so different. I came up here to fight, and I’m going to
see it through. I’m on the war-path, so you may take your club and
proceed to battle.”
“What have we to fight about?” inquired Eileen.
“Every single thing that you have done that was unfair to me all my
life,” said Linda. “Since all of it has been deliberate you probably
know more about the details than I do, so I’ll just content myself with
telling you that for the future, last night marked a change in the
relations between us. I am going to be eighteen before so very long,
and I have ceased to be your maid or your waitress or your dupe. You
are not going to work me one single time when I have got brains to
see through your schemes after this. Hereafter I take my place in my
father’s house and at my father’s table on an equality with you.”
Eileen looked at Linda steadily, trying to see to the depths of her
soul. She saw enough to convince her that the young creature in front
of her was in earnest.
“Hm,” she said, “have I been so busy that I have failed to notice what
a great girl you are getting?”
“Busy!” scoffed Linda. “Tell that to Katy. It’s a kumquat!”
“Perhaps you are too big,” continued Eileen, “to be asked to wait on
the table any more.”
“I certainly am,” retorted Linda, “and I am also too big to wear such
shoes or such a dress as I have on at the present minute. I know all
about the war and the inflation of prices and the reduction in income,
but I know also that if there is enough to run the house, and dress
you, and furnish you such a suite of rooms as you’re enjoying right
now, there is enough to furnish me suitable clothes, a comfortable
bedroom and a place where I can leave my work without putting away
everything I am doing each time I step from the room. I told you four
years ago that you might take the touring car and do what you pleased
with it. I have never asked what you did or what you got out of it, so
I’ll thank you to observe equal silence about anything I choose to do
now with the runabout, which I reserved for myself. I told you to take
this suite, and this is the first time that I have ever mentioned to
you what you spent on it.”
Linda waved an inclusive hand toward the fully equipped, dainty
dressing table, over rugs of pale blue, and beautifully decorated
walls, including the sleeping room and bath adjoining.
“So now I’ll ask you to keep off while I do what I please about the
library and the billiard room. I’ll try to get along without much money
in doing what I desire there, but I must have some new clothes. I want
money to buy me a pair of new shoes for school. I want a pair of pumps
suitable for evenings when there are guests to dinner. I want a couple
of attractive school dresses. This old serge is getting too hot and too
worn for common decency. And I also want a couple of dresses something
like you are wearing, for afternoons and evenings.”
Eileen stared aghast at Linda.
“Where,” she inquired politely, “is the money for all this to come
from?”
“Eileen,” said Linda in a low tense voice, “I have reached the place
where even the _boys_ of the high school are twitting me about how I
am dressed, and that is the limit. I have stood it for three years
from the girls. I am an adept in pretending that I don’t see, and I
don’t hear. I have got to the point where I am perfectly capable of
walking into your wardrobe and taking out enough of the clothes there
and selling them at a second-hand store to buy me what I require to
dress me just plainly and decently. So take warning. I don’t know where
you are going to get the money, but you are going to get it. If you
would welcome a suggestion from me, come home only half the times you
dine yourself and your girl friends at tearooms and cafes in the city,
and you will save my share that way. I am going to give you a chance
to total your budget, and then I demand one half of the income from
Father’s estate above household expenses; and if I don’t get it, on the
day I am eighteen I shall go to John Gilman and say to him what I have
said to you, and I shall go to the bank and demand that a division be
made there, and that a separate bank book be started for me.”
Linda’s amazement on entering the room had been worthy of note.
Eileen’s at the present minute was beyond description. Dumbfounded was
a colourless word to describe her state of mind.
“You don’t mean that,” she gasped in a quivering voice when at last she
could speak.
“I can see, Eileen, that you are taken unawares,” said Linda. “I have
had four long years to work up to this hour. Hasn’t it even dawned on
you that this worm was ever going to turn? You know exquisite moths and
butterflies evolve in the canyons from very unprepossessing and lowly
living worms. You are spending your life on the butterfly stunt. Have I
been such a weak worm that it hasn’t ever occurred to you that I might
want to try a plain, everyday pair of wings sometime myself?”
Eileen’s face was an ugly red, her hands were shaking, her voice was
unnatural, but she controlled her temper.
“Of course,” she said, “I have always known that the time would come,
after you finished school and were of a proper age, when you would want
to enter society.”
“No, you never knew anything of the kind,” said Linda bluntly, “because
I have not the slightest ambition to enter society either now or then.
All I am asking is to enter the High School in a commonly decent,
suitable dress; to enter our dining room as a daughter; to enter a
workroom decently equipped for my convenience. You needn’t be surprised
if you hear some changes going on in the billiard room and see some
changes going on in the library. And if I feel that I can muster the
nerve to drive the runabout, it’s my car, it’s up to me.”
“Linda!” wailed Eileen, “how can you think of such a thing? You
wouldn’t dare.”
“Because I haven’t dared till the present is no reason why I should
deprive myself of every single pleasure in life,” said Linda. “You
spend your days doing exactly what you please; driving that runabout
for Father was my one soul-satisfying diversion. Why shouldn’t I do the
thing I love most, if I can muster the nerve?”
Linda arose, and walking over to a table, picked up a magazine lying
among some small packages that Eileen evidently had placed there on
entering her room.
“Are you subscribing to this?” she asked.
She turned in her hands and leafed through the pages of a most
attractive magazine, _Everybody’s Home_. It was devoted to poetry, good
fiction, and everything concerning home life from beef to biscuits, and
from rugs to roses.
“I saw it on a news-stand,” said Eileen. “I was at lunch with some
girls who had a copy and they were talking about some articles by
somebody named something—Meredith, I think it was—Jane Meredith, maybe
she’s a Californian, and she is advocating the queer idea that we go
back to nature by trying modern cooking on the food the aborigines
ate. If we find it good then she recommends that we specialize on the
growing of these native vegetables for home use and for export—as a new
industry.”
“I see,” said Linda. “Out-Burbanking Burbank, as it were.”
“No, not that,” said Eileen. “She is not proposing to evolve new forms.
She is proposing to show us how to make delicious dishes for luncheon
or dinner from wild things now going to waste. What the girls said was
so interesting that I thought I’d get a copy and if I see anything good
I’ll turn it over to Katy.”
“And where’s Katy going to get the wild vegetables?” asked Linda
sceptically.
“Why you might have some of them in your wild garden, or you could
easily find enough to try—all the prowling the canyons you do ought to
result in something.”
“So it should,” said Linda. “I quite agree with you. Did I understand
you to say that I should be ready to go to the bank with you to arrange
about my income next week?”
Again the colour deepened in Eileen’s face, again she made a visible
effort at self-control.
“Oh, Linda,” she said, “what is the use of being so hard? You will make
them think at the bank that I have not treated you fairly.”
“_I_?” said Linda, “_I_ will make them think? Don’t you think it is
_you_ who will make them think? Will you kindly answer my question?”
“If I show you the books,” said Eileen, “if I divide what is left after
the bills are paid so that you say yourself that it is fair, what more
can you ask?”
Linda hesitated.
“What I ought to do is exactly what I have said I would do,” she said
tersely, “but if you are going to put it on that basis I have no desire
to hurt you or humiliate you in public. If you do that, I can’t see
that I have any reason to complain, so we’ll call it a bargain and
we’ll say no more about it until the first of the month, unless the
spirit moves you, after taking a good square look at me, to produce
some shoes and a school dress instanter.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” answered Eileen.
“All right then,” said Linda. “See you at dinner.”
She went to her own room, slipped off her school dress, brushed her
hair, and put on the skirt and blouse she had worn the previous
evening, these being the only extra clothing she possessed. As she
straightened her hair she looked at herself intently.
“My, aren’t you coming on!” she said to the figure in the glass.
“Dressing for dinner! First thing you know you’ll be a perfect lady.”