To the right of the Silver house and almost directly across from
Vandemeeter’s stood a neat gray house with wide verandas and white
trimmings. There were tall trees of great age in front of the place that
gave it a retired look, and the fine lace curtains at the front windows
were always immaculate. The fence was gray with square fat gate posts,
and a row of blue and yellow and white crocuses were picketed on either
side of the gravel path. It was one of those places that you always feel
you can depend on, and the people who lived in it were like unto it.
Joshua Truman was the Silver Sands banker, and the fact that the whole
neighborhood called him Josh and that he had a hearty handshake and a
smile for everybody in no wise detracted from his dignity. He seems to
have been an honest banker, and beloved by everybody. He had shaggy
overhanging gray eyebrows, but they hid a twinkle in the mild blue eyes.
Mrs. Truman was plain with sweet eyes, wore her hair in close satin
ripples above her ears as she had done ever since she was married, and
kept always a neat brown silk with touches of velvet trimmings for her
best dress. She was president of the missionary society in the
Presbyterian church. There were two children, David, a lump of activity
aged ten, and Mary, a tall lank girl of fifteen with a heavy braid of
yellow hair down her back and big, dreamy eyes.
“I think Patterson Greeves has come back,” Mrs. Truman announced at the
breakfast table next morning. “I didn’t notice any one coming in, but
Hetty says she saw some trunks arrive. I thought perhaps you’d want to
run in and see if there is anything we can do—”
“Oh, why, yes of course,” said the banker heartily. “I forgot to speak
about it, those men coming in and staying so long after supper last
night. He did come. I met the minister and he told me. It seems he has
brought his two daughters home. One is about Mary’s age. I think she had
better arrange to run in today sometime, and show a little attention,
perhaps offer to take the girl to school or something just to make her
feel at home.”
“Oh, mother!” said Mary in dismay, “I can’t call on a strange girl!
_You_ go.”
“Is his—? Did he—? Well—what about his wife, Joshua, isn’t
he—_married_ now?”
“Oh, well—no—I believe not. That is—” he glanced at the children, “I
should think that was all the more reason why we should show some
courtesy to those motherless girls.”
“Yes, of course,” said his wife with a look of relief that the matter
was settled. “Certainly, Mary, you run in after school this afternoon
and call. You can take some of our strawberries and a bunch of daffodils
and just run in without any formality.”
“Oh, mother!” said Mary aghast, “I promised Roberta I’d play duets with
her this afternoon.”
“Well, take Roberta along,” said her mother crisply. “The Moffats were
always good friends of the Silvers.”
“Yes, certainly,” spoke up the father. “Get some of the other girls to
go too. It will be a pleasant thing for a stranger to feel that she is
welcomed into a community the first day. Talk to some of the girls and
make it _go_, Mary.”
“All right,” said Mary reluctantly, with a speculative glance over at
the Silver house which she could see from her place at the table. “I
might ask her to go to Christian Endeavor,” she suggested, “we girls are
on the Lookout committee. We all promised to try and get some new
members. What’s her name?”
“Well, that I didn’t discover. I guess it’s up to you to find out,
daughter,” said her father with a pat on her shoulder as he got up and
went to kiss his wife good-bye for the morning.
“Do I have to dress up mother?” asked Mary, still thinking of her
prospective call, “I don’t mind going if I can wear my school dress but
I hate to waste the time dolling up. Besides, I always feel so
embarrassed in my best clothes.”
“I don’t think it will be necessary to dress up,” said her mother with a
quick inspection of the neat blue gingham with its sheer white ruffles
and the crisp dark blue hair ribbon that tied the heavy braid of hair,
“little girls don’t have to bother about their clothes. She’ll probably
like you far better if you go just as you come from school. Be sure your
hands are clean of course.”
Mary brightened and went off to school quite full of her plans for the
afternoon. Her grade was in the old brick schoolhouse up beyond the
Truman house. She did not pass the Silver place. She would have been
surprised to know that the girl she was proposing to call upon was still
in bed asleep. Mary had been up for two hours, had practised an hour and
a half, and helped her mother get the breakfast on the table because
Hetty, the maid of all work, had a lame foot and was being saved. Mary
glanced back at the Silver place and felt a warm spot around her heart.
It was going to be nice to have a girl friend living there. They could
go to school together. Living next door she naturally would be “best
friend.” The Silver place would be an awfully nice house to have a
Christian Endeavor social in sometime. Would Mr. Greeves be willing? She
would suggest this to the girls. This would make them eager to go and
see her. She could hear the first bell ringing as she hurried along. She
started to run to have more time to talk before school began. Her eyes
were bright with the new idea when she entered the schoolyard. She
decided that she would ask the new girl over to make fudge that evening
if all went well.
On the other side of the Silver mansion, the side where Athalie’s room
faced, there was an old brown wooden house. It hadn’t been painted in
years and was not likely to be painted in years to come if it lasted so
long. It was built in the days of scroll work and rejoiced in a cupola,
lofty and square, with alternate lights of red and blue and yellow glass
bordering a large clear one, two on each side. The front gable was
ornamented with a fret work of ancient wood, faded brown like the rest,
which had somehow, either in a storm or in consequence of the mending of
the roof, become detached from the ridgepole on one side and fallen out
of plumb. The result was rakish, like a woman with her bonnet on
cock-eyed. The windows of the house were gothic and latticed, and the
doors all sagged. The Weldons lived there and they sagged too. Uri
Weldon usually did his sagging down in the lobby of the one hotel, sunk
deep in a worn-out leather chair with his heels above his head on
another, and a large sagging cigar in one corner of his mouth. He kept
up the hallucination that he was thus conducting business, which
consisted in trying to get someone to patent some of his inventions, but
his business sagged too and never came to anything. Lizette Weldon, his
wife, was spare and wore a false front over little black gimlet eyes.
When she walked she was the shape of rain in a driving storm but nothing
ever escaped her vision whichever way she was going. The property was
theirs for life, entailed so that they could not sell it, and would pass
to a nephew now residing in China when they no longer had need for it.
They had been there for years, however, and seemed likely to outlast the
nephew in China. Gentle Aunt Lavinia had had her trials with Lizette,
and young Patterson Greeves owed many a sound thrashing to her sharp
eyes and ready tongue.
A long stretch of ill-kept wire grass constituted the lawn in front of
the Weldons, ending abruptly in a row of sombre pine trees behind which
the house retired as if aware of its hopeless shabbiness. Had it not
been for these pines the whole place would have been a sorry contrast to
the well-kept Silver estate. There was something shielding, almost
dignifying in the pines.
But the side windows had no row of pines and looked across a clear space
straight to the side of the Silver house; and Athalie’s window presented
a liberal view for any interested eye.
On the first afternoon of her arrival Lizette was mounting the stairs
for her daily nap when she happened to notice a curious figure climbing
from the window. Having been occupied in the kitchen during the morning
she was as yet unaware of the arrivals, although she had seen a light in
the front room the night before, but the shades were drawn almost
immediately and the light remained but about five minutes so she thought
nothing of it. But this was startling.
Lizette hastened to get an old field glass which she kept handy and
wherewith she had often settled uncertainties in the neighborhood in
time past, and brought it to bear upon the object of her interest. She
applied the binoculars to her eyes and screwed them hastily into focus,
then withdrew them and stared with her naked eyes.
“Oh, my!” she said aloud, “ain’t that awful!” She lifted the glass once
more and gazed. “Pants!” she ejaculated wildly, a kind of triumph in her
tone, “well, now I guess they’re coming down a peg! What would the old
Silvers say to that! A girl in pants! Of course the papers advertise
them but the Silvers never were that kind. And look at her hair! My
soul! How does she get it to stay out so. Ain’t it redickilus! Where’s
she going? My good fathers! if she isn’t going to climb down! Well, that
beats everything! Who is she?”
Lizette hurried down the stairs and rushed to the front window to get a
closer view between the pines, then noting the stranger’s general
direction toward the stores she hastened to the telephone; calling up a
friend who lived farther down the street.
“That you Miz Hoskins? Well go to your front window and see that girl in
pants coming down the street. She just climbed down off the old Silver
pergola out the side bedroom window. Hurry and I’ll hold the phone.”
Mrs. Hoskins had a hot loaf of bread in a pan, holding it with a wet
towel in one hand when she took down the receiver, but she hurried to
the window, hot pan and all. There succeeded a pause during the passing
of Athalie, then steps and a voice.
“My, ain’t that scandalous? And all those young boys down around town!
Not that I mind the pants so much if everybody wore ’em. It’s sensible
you know. But the way she walks and all. And her face. Did you see how
it was made up? Why those girls that sang at the minstrel show weren’t
half so coarse looking. And the air of her. You said she came from
Silvers? Well I guess there’s going to be some doings there from all I
hear. My husband took the express over with the trunks. Say, you oughta
have seen those trunks. Seven of ’em I think there was, and not one
could be lifted without four men. Just to think such goings on in this
respectable town!”
“But who is she?”
“Dear knows! John says she might be most anybody. You know Patterson
Greeves got a divorce! Maybe she’s his typewriter. That’s the way they
do things nowadays. Isn’t it the limit? Say, I smell my other loaf of
bread burning. Excuse me a minute please. You hold the wire. I want to
ask you about what happened at the sewing circle the other day. I’ll be
back in a minute.”
Mrs. Weldon took no nap that afternoon. She was too excited. She felt it
her bounden duty to keep a watch and find out if there were “doings”
going on in the old house, and if she ought to do something about it.
What else should a good neighbor do when the respectable dwelling of an
old neighbor was threatened with modernism?
The hedge was too high for her to see the terrace and the scene in the
garden, but later when Athalie, having cried out her brief wrath,
attired herself in a gay little suit of pajamas with lace ruffles around
the ankles, and having turned on all the lights proceeded to practise a
little æsthetic dancing in front of the window, Lizette was there, glass
and all, with her fat husband behind her staring over his spectacles and
laughing coarsely in her ear. This was a good joke, a good joke to tell
down at the hotel. Those religious Silvers come to this!
The next morning when she slipped through the garden and under the back
fence across lots to the garden of Aunt Katie Barnes’s neat little place
on the side street where the minister boarded, to get a cup of sour
milk, she paused with her apron over her head and said:
“Oh, have you heard what’s happened over at the Silver place? They do
say Pat Greeves has come back and brought a _woman_ along! I’ve been
told she was his secretary or typewriter or something. But she’s very
ordinary. I saw her go by myself and I was shocked! Painted and
powdered, her hair all kind of wild, the queerest hat, and _pants_, mind
you, in the middle of the afternoon! I feel so sorry for poor Miss
Lavinia. She set such store by that boy! But it never pays to bring up
other people’s children does it? I can mind how she used to sit out
there in the garden by the hour playing with him and reading to him. A
waste of time I say—but aren’t you surprised that he should do this? It
seems as if he might have managed to stay respectable even if he is
divorced.”
Aunt Katie looked up from the potatoes she was frying for the minister’s
breakfast and smiled.
“Oh, didn’t you know who that was? It’s one of his daughters. He has
two, but this must have been the younger one. She’s only a child,
fourteen I think Mr. Bannard said, and she’s been off at boarding
school—I suppose you must expect some craziness from little girls
nowadays, there is so much more freedom in the world, especially in New
York. But isn’t it nice Mr. Greeves has two daughters to keep him from
being lonely? The other one is a little older. Her name is Silver. Mr.
Bannard says she is the perfect picture of her mother’s portrait hanging
over the mantel in the drawing room. Do you remember it, that lovely
Sargent painting?”
“No,” said Lizette coldly eyeing her adversary, “I don’t go over there.
That Mrs. Truesdale doesn’t show herself very friendly. I think she
takes on airs. _Daughters_, you think then? Are you _quite sure_? Well,
I suppose the minister ought to know.” She surrendered the bit of
scandal reluctantly, “it certainly is strange we never heard of them
before. Daughters! Well, he better keep a little control of them then.
One of ’em was having carryings on in her room last night, I’ll tell
you! Dancing, that’s what she was doing, in her underwear! A great big
girl like a full grown woman, and all her shades up! I never did approve
of those pajamas for men even. They don’t seem, well, Christian you
know. And when a woman takes up with such outlandish fashions it’s time
she was stopped by law, I say.”
“Well,” said Aunt Katie soothingly, “we don’t all have the same taste in
dress you know—”
“Dress!” sniffed Mrs. Weldon, “_un_dress I should say! However, as you
say, it takes all kinds to make a world. Well, I just ran over to see if
you could let me have a cup of sour milk. Mine got too sour and I had to
throw it out.”
Aunt Katie always seemed to have whatever was needed by anyone and the
sour milk was immediately forthcoming.
There being no further excuse for lingering, the neighbor lingered
anyway.
“The minister told you! So he’s been over to the Silver place _already_!
He’s a good deal younger than Pat Greeves. He must be nearer the age of
one of the daughters. Curious he should run after a man like that right
off the first day! I thought he set up not to be a tody-er, but I
suppose they’re all alike. They know which side their bread is buttered
when a rich man comes along.”
“Oh, they met at the fire down at Frogtown night before last. Mr.
Greeves ran across the meadow as soon as he heard the alarm and got into
the thick of it helping with the best of them. Then they came home
together and took to each other right away. It’s going to be grand
having the old Silver place open again, young people in it, and folks
going back and forth visiting.” Aunt Katie’s face was innocent as a
lamb. The guest eyed her keenly, but could detect no hidden sign that
Aunt Katie realized she had ignored the criticism.
“Oh, well, if you take it that way of course. Some might feel they
wanted to wait and be sure all was as it should be. But time will tell.
Well, I must run home and stir up my batter cakes. Uri’ll be waiting.”
Down at the fire house where Uri spent much of his time when he was not
sitting in the lobby of the hotel, it was discussed that morning. There
was always a knot of conversation around the fire house door even in
early morning. It was just across from the blacksmith’s shop, and the
hotel, and “handy-by” from the market and post office. When any
frequenters came down to the business portion of Silver Sands, morning,
noon or night, they always dropped around for a minute, or an hour, to
wait for whatever errand had brought them to mature, it might be the
mail to be distributed, the horseshoe to be set, or the drummer to
arrive at the hotel for their appointment with him, and there paused for
a bit of gossip. It was a kind of distributing agency for the private
affairs of the town and now and then the outlying districts. It was the
country club for the so-inclined of the town, and stood in place of golf
for the men who did not aspire to athletics. The good old fire engine
was athletic enough for them, and between fires they stood around and
polished it and worshipped it, and told tales of their own valor.
Uri Weldon hastened early to the rendezvous that morning with an air of
mysterious importance, and felt gravely the responsibility of so choice
a bit of news as he carried.
Back in the dim shadows of a windowless apartment under the stairs where
the oiling and polishing rags were kept, a tramp awoke at the first
scraping of the first armchair on the cement floor. Awoke to the dismal
necessity of another day, and the immediate problem of getting out of
his concealment before he was discovered. His hairy, dirty face appeared
weirdly in brief relief on the doorway, as Uri Weldon settled back with
his feet on an old soap box, and his pipe tilted at the right angle for
conversation. Ted Loundes and Flip Haines lounged up to the doorway, and
leaning up against the door frame, one either side of the door like a
couple of bronze figures personifying Ease and Relaxation.
Uri Weldon started in on his tale with many an embellishment,
interrupted by loud haw haws on the part of the younger men. The tramp
frowned and ventured another look, scouting for a back exit and finding
none. The tale went on. The tramp was not interested. He could not help
hearing, but he took no heed till Ted, helping himself to a long sliver
from the batten door behind him and cautiously picking his teeth
therewith remarked:
“I hear that guy Greeves has a pile of dough.”
Uri Weldon nodded, importantly.
“Well, yes, he’s got a pile. Them Silvers was always well off. Course
they owned the beach and the sand business, and all that ground the
fact’ries were built on, and then the right of way where the railroad
went, and stocks, and so on. But now you know a lot of land they had
somewhere out in Oklahoma has begun to produce oil. They say the money
is rolling in from that. And besides all that he writes books! Everybody
knows they charge a turrible price for books. It always beat me how they
got it. Just a little paper and ink, and words—just _words_! And
getting paid for it! They tell me he’s written a book about _bugs_ that
they charge three dollars and seventy-five cents for, and the people in
the colleges are buying ’em like hot cakes! It beats me how with all
that learning they can be so easily fooled! But so it is, and Pat
Greeves is profiting by it. Well, I suppose his pretty little brats of
daughters will inherit a coupla millions apiece or more when he kicks
off. Seems queer though. You boys don’t remember, but Pat Greeves and I
used to be in a fight in school pretty near every day when we was
kids—Hi, there boys! Look up the street there! I bet that’s her coming
down this way now!”
Uri’s feet and the front legs of his chair came down to the cement
pavement with a crash simultaneously, and the two younger men came about
face with alertness and looked in the direction of Uri’s finger.
“Gosh!” ejaculated Flip, “she’s some winner, isn’t she?” “Get onto that
epidermis, Ted? Some heft to her too.”
All three men with casual manner sauntered eagerly nearer the street and
the tramp, peered earnestly out, stealing across the open space with
catlike celerity, then drifting hastily behind the offset at the side of
the fire house, paused to take his own observation. This then was the
daughter of the rich oil magnate who wrote books about bugs.
He had once been a city tramp and he flattered himself he knew style
when he saw it. The cut of a garment, the hang of a fold that bespoke
quality, the deep blue flash of a jewel, the peculiar dash of the whole
makeup that spoke of lavish purse. The tramp watched and listened to the
comments of his companions unaware of his very existence, and thought
within himself how might he turn this accident of knowledge to his own
account. But when the three friends returned to their former attitudes
in the doorway of the fire house the tramp had melted away like the
shadows and was seen no more.