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THE
ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND
BY
MARGARET WIDDEMER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
WALTER BIGGS
NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1915, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PUBLISHED, JANUARY 27, 1915
SECOND PRINTING, FEBRUARY 6, 1915
THIRD PRINTING, MARCH 12, 1915
FOURTH PRINTING, APRIL 23, 1915
FIFTH PRINTING, JUNE 10, 1915
SIXTH PRINTING, AUGUST 6, 1915
SEVENTH PRINTING, OCTOBER 21, 1915
EIGHTH PRINTING, MAY 1, 1916
NINTH PRINTING, OCTOBER 30, 1916
* * * * *
[Illustration: "YOU KNOW, I MARRIED YOU PRINCIPALLY FOR A ROSE-GARDEN,
AND THAT'S _LOVELY_!"
_Page 172_]
* * * * *
IN LOVING MEMORY
OF
HOWARD TAYLOR WIDDEMER
* * * * *
THE ROSE-GARDEN HUSBAND
I
The Liberry Teacher lifted her eyes from a half-made catalogue-card,
eyed the relentlessly slow clock and checked a long wriggle of purest,
frankest weariness. Then she gave a furtive glance around to see if the
children had noticed she was off guard; for if they had she knew the
whole crowd might take more liberties than they ought to, and have to be
spoken to by the janitor. He could do a great deal with them, because he
understood their attitude to life, but that wasn't good for the Liberry
Teacher's record.
It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is
anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around
thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the
week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and
coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller,
if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that
you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing
or--anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!
So the Liberry Teacher braced herself severely, and put on her
reading-glasses with a view to looking older and more firm. "Liberry
Teacher," it might be well to explain, was not her official title. Her
description on the pay-roll ran "Assistant for the Children's
Department, Greenway Branch, City Public Library." Grown-up people, when
she happened to run across them, called her Miss Braithwaite. But
"Liberry Teacher" was the only name the children ever used, and she saw
scarcely anybody but the children, six days a week, fifty-one weeks a
year. As for her real name, that nobody ever called her by, _that_ was
Phyllis Narcissa.
She was quite willing to have such a name as that buried out of sight.
She had a sense of fitness; and such a name belonged back in an old New
England parsonage garden full of pink roses and nice green caterpillars
and girl-dreams, and the days before she was eighteen: not in a smutty
city library, attached to a twenty-five-year-old young woman with
reading-glasses and fine discipline and a woolen shirt-waist!
It wasn't that the Liberry Teacher didn't like her position. She not
only liked it, but she had a great deal of admiration for it, because it
had been exceedingly hard to get. She had held it firmly now for a whole
year. Before that she had been in the Cataloguing, where your eyes hurt
and you get a little pain between your shoulders, but you sit down and
can talk to other girls; and before that in the Circulation, where it
hurts your feet and you get ink on your fingers, but you see lots of
funny things happening. She had started at eighteen years old, at thirty
dollars a month. Now she was twenty-five, and she got all of fifty
dollars, so she ought to have been a very happy Liberry Teacher indeed,
and generally she was. When the children wanted to specify her
particularly they described her as "the pretty one that laughs." But at
four o'clock of a wet Saturday afternoon, in a badly ventilated, badly
lighted room full of damp little unwashed foreign children, even the
most sunny-hearted Liberry Teacher may be excused for having thoughts
that are a little tired and cross and restless.
She flung herself back in her desk-chair and watched, with brazen
indifference, Giovanni and Liberata Bruno stickily pawing the colored
Bird Book that was supposed to be looked at only under supervision; she
ignored the fact that three little Czechs were fighting over the wailing
library cat; and the sounds of conflict caused by Jimsy Hoolan's desire
to get the last-surviving Alger book away from John Zanowski moved her
not a whit. The Liberry Teacher had stopped, for five minutes, being
grown-up and responsible, and she was wishing--wishing hard and
vengefully. This is always a risky thing to do, because you never know
when the Destinies may overhear you and take you at your exact word.
With the detailed and careful accuracy one acquires in library work, she
was wishing for a sum of money, a garden, and a husband--but
principally a husband. This is why:
That day as she was returning from her long-deferred twenty-minute
dairy-lunch, she had charged, umbrella down, almost full into a pretty
lady getting out of a shiny gray limousine. Such an unnecessarily pretty
lady, all furs and fluffles and veils and perfumes and waved hair! Her
cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her
white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was
wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had
brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively
kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could
have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children
were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the
matinee of a fairy-play.
The Liberry Teacher smiled at the children with more than her accustomed
goodwill, and lowered her umbrella quickly to let them pass. The mother
smiled back, a smile that changed, as the Liberry Teacher passed, to
puzzled remembrance. The gay little family went on into the theatre, and
Phyllis Braithwaite hurried on back to her work, trying to think who the
pretty lady could have been, to have seemed to almost remember her.
Somebody who took books out of the library, doubtless. Still the pretty
lady's face did not seem to fit that conjecture, though it still worried
her by its vague familiarity. Finally the solution came, just as Phyllis
was pulling off her raincoat in the dark little cloak-room. She nearly
dropped the coat.
"Eva Atkinson!" she said.
Eva Atkinson!... If it had been anybody else but _Eva_!
You see, back in long-ago, in the little leisurely windblown New England
town where Phyllis Braithwaite had lived till she was almost eighteen,
there had been a Principal Grocer. And Eva Atkinson had been his
daughter, not so very pretty, not so very pleasant, not so very clever,
and about six years older than Phyllis. Phyllis, as she tried vainly to
make her damp, straight hair go back the way it should, remembered
hearing that Eva had married and come to this city to live. She had
never heard where. And this had been Eva--Eva, by the grace of gold,
radiantly complexioned, wonderfully groomed, beautifully gowned, and
looking twenty-four, perhaps, at most: with a car and a placid
expression and _heaps_ of money, and pretty, clean children! The Liberry
Teacher, severely work-garbed and weather-draggled, jerked herself away
from the small greenish cloak-room mirror that was unkind to you at your
best.
She dashed down to the basement, harried by her usual panic-stricken
twenty-minutes-late feeling. She had only taken one glance at herself in
the wiggly mirror, but that one had been enough for her peace of mind,
supposing her to have had any left before. She felt as if she wanted to
break all the mirrors in the world, like the wicked queen in the French
fairy-tale.
Most people rather liked the face Phyllis saw in the mirror; but to her
own eyes, fresh from the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had
been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old
Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired,
twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green glass was _dreadful_.
What made her feel worst--and she entertained the thought with a
whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity--was that she'd had so
much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance
because her father was rich. And she, Phyllis, was condemned to be tidy
and accurate, and no more, just because she had to earn her living. That
face in the greenish glass, looking tiredly back at her! She gave a
little out-loud cry of vexation now as she thought of it, two hours
later.
"I must have looked to Eva like a battered bisque doll--no wonder she
couldn't place me!" she muttered crossly.
And it must be worse and more of it now, because in the interval between
two and four there had been many little sticky fingers pulling at her
sleeves and skirt, and you just _have_ to cuddle dear little library
children, even when they're not extra clean; and when Vera Aronsohn
burst into heartbroken tears on the Liberry Teacher's blue woolen
shoulder because her pet fairy-book was missing, she had caught several
strands of the Teacher's yellow hair in her anguish, much to the hair's
detriment.
It was straight, heavy hair, and it would have been of a dense and
fluffy honey-color, only that it was tarnished for lack of the constant
sunnings and brushings which blonde hair must have to stay its best
self. And her skin, too, that should have been a living rose-and-cream,
was dulled by exposure to all weathers, and lack of time to pet it with
creams and powders; perhaps a little, too, by the very stupid things to
eat one gets at a dairy-lunch and boarding-house. Some of the assistants
did interesting cooking over the library gas-range, but the Liberry
Teacher couldn't do that because she hadn't time.
She went on defiantly thinking about her looks. It isn't a noble-minded
thing to do, but when you might be so very, very pretty if you only had
a little time to be it in--"Yes, I _might_!" said Phyllis to her
shocked self defiantly.... Yes, the shape of her face was all right
still. Hard work and scant attention couldn't spoil its pretty oval. But
her eyes--well, you can't keep your eyes as blue and luminous and
childlike as they were back in the New England country, when you have
been using them hard for years in a bad light. And oh, they had been
such _nice_ eyes when she was just Phyllis Narcissa at home, so long and
blue and wondering! And now the cataloguing had heavied the lids and
etched a line between her straight brown brows. They weren't decorative
eyes now ... and they filled with indignant self-sympathy. The Liberry
Teacher laughed at herself a little here. The idea of eyes that cried
about themselves was funny, somehow.
"Direct from producer to consumer!" she quoted half-aloud, and wiped
each eye conscientiously by itself.
"Teacher! I want a liberry called 'Bride of Lemon Hill!' demanded a
small citizen just here. The school teacher, she says I must to have
it!"
Phyllis thought hard. But she had to search the pinned-up list of
required reading for schools for three solid minutes before she bestowed
"The Bride of Lammermoor" on a thirteen-year-old daughter of Hungary.
"This is it, isn't it, honey?" she asked with the flashing smile for
which her children, among other things, adored her.
"Yes, ma'am, thank you, teacher," said the thirteen-year-old gratefully;
and went off to a corner, where she sat till closing time entranced over
her own happy choice, "The Adventures of Peter Rabbit," with colored
pictures dotting it satisfactorily. The Liberry Teacher knew that it was
her duty to go over and hypnotize the child into reading something which
would lead more directly to Browning and Strindberg. But she didn't.
"Poor little wop!" she thought unacademically. "Let her be happy in her
own way!"
And the Liberry Teacher herself went on being unhappy in _her_ own way.
"I'm just a battered bisque doll!" she repeated to herself bitterly.
But she was wrong. One is apt to exaggerate things on a workaday
Saturday afternoon. She looked more like a pretty bisque figurine; slim
and clear-cut, and a little neglected, perhaps, by its owners, and
dressed in working clothes instead of the pretty draperies it should
have had; but needing only a touch or so, a little dusting, so to speak,
to be as good as ever.
"Eva _never_ was as pretty as I was!" her rebellious thoughts went on.
You think things, you know, that you'd never say aloud. "I'm sick of
elevating the public! I'm sick of working hard fifty-one weeks out of
fifty-two for board and lodging and carfare and shirtwaists and the
occasional society of a few girls who don't get any more out of life
than I do! I'm sick of libraries, and of being efficient! I want to be a
real girl! Oh, I wish--I wish I had a lot of money, and a rose-garden,
and a _husband_!"
The Liberry Teacher was aghast at herself. She hadn't meant to wish such
a very unmaidenly thing so hard. She jumped up and dashed across the
room and began frantically to shelf-read books, explaining meanwhile
with most violent emphasis to the listening Destinies:
"I didn't--oh, I _didn_'t mean a _real_ husband. It isn't that I yearn
to be married to some good man, like an old maid or a Duchess novel.
I--I just want all the lovely things Eva has, or any girl that _marries_
them, without any trouble but taking care of a man. One man _couldn't_
but be easier than a whole roomful of library babies. I want to be
looked after, and have time to keep pretty, and a chance to make
friends, and lovely frocks with lots of lace on them, and just months
and months and months when I never had to do anything by a
clock--and--and a rose-garden!"
This last idea was dangerous. It isn't a good thing, if you want to be
contented with your lot, to think of rose-gardens in a stuffy city
library o' Saturdays; especially when where you were brought up
rose-gardens were one of the common necessities of life; and more
especially when you are tired almost to the crying-point, and have all
the week's big sisters back of it dragging on you, and all its little
sisters to come worrying at you, and--time not up till six.
But the Liberry Teacher went blindly on straightening shelves nearly as
fast as the children could muss them up, and thinking about that
rose-garden she wanted, with files of masseuses and manicures and French
maids and messenger-boys with boxes banked soothingly behind every bush.
And the thought became too beautiful to dally with.
"I'd marry _anything_ that would give me a rose-garden!" reiterated the
Liberry Teacher passionately to the Destinies, who are rather catty
ladies, and apt to catch up unguarded remarks you make. "_Anything_--so
long as it was a gentleman--and he didn't scold me--and--and--I didn't
have to associate with him!" her New England maidenliness added in
haste.
Then, for the librarian who cannot laugh, like the one who reads, is
supposed in library circles to be lost, Phyllis shook herself and
laughed at herself a little, bravely. Then she collected the most
uproarious of her flock around her and began telling them stories out of
the "Merry Adventures of Robin Hood." It would keep the children quiet,
and her thoughts, too. She put rose-gardens, not to say manicurists and
husbands, severely out of her head. But you can't play fast and loose
with the Destinies that way.
"Done!" they had replied quietly to her last schedule of requirements.
"We'll send our messenger over right away." It was not their fault that
the Liberry Teacher could not hear them.
II
He was gray-haired, pink-cheeked, curvingly side-whiskered and
immaculately gray-clad; and he did not look in the least like a
messenger of Fate.
The Liberry Teacher was at a highly keyed part of her narrative, and
even the most fidgety children were tense and open-mouthed.
"'And where art thou now?' cried the Stranger to Robin Hood. And Robin
roared with laughter. 'Oh, in the flood, and floating down the stream
with all the little fishes,' said he--" she was relating breathlessly.
"_Tea_-cher!" hissed Isaac Rabinowitz, snapping his fingers at her at
this exciting point. "Teacher! There's a guy wants to speak to you!"
"Aw, shut-_tup_!" chorused his indignant little schoolmates. "Can't you
see that Teacher's tellin' a story? Go chase yerself! Go do a tango
roun' de block!"
Isaac, a small Polish Jew with tragic, dark eyes and one suspender,
received these and several more such suggestions with all the calm
impenetrability of his race.
"Here's de guy," was all he vouchsafed before he went back to the
unsocial nook where, afternoon by faithful afternoon, he read away at a
fat three-volume life of Alexander Hamilton.
The Liberry Teacher looked up without stopping her story, and smiled a
familiar greeting to the elderly gentleman, who was waiting a little
uncertainly at the Children's Room door, and had obviously been looking
for her in vain. He smiled and nodded in return.
"Just a minute, please, Mr. De Guenther," said the Liberry Teacher
cheerfully.
The elderly gentleman nodded again, crossed to Isaac and his ponderous
volumes, and began to talk to him with that benign lack of haste which
usually means a very competent personality. Phyllis hurried somewhat
with Robin Hood among his little fishes, and felt happier. It was
always, in her eventless life, something of a pleasant adventure to
have Mr. De Guenther or his wife drop in to see her. There was usually
something pleasant at the end of it.
They were an elderly couple whom she had known for some years. They were
so leisurely and trim and gentle-spoken that long ago, when she was only
a timorous substitute behind the circle of the big charging-desk, she
had picked them both out as people-you'd-like-if-you-got-the-chance.
Then she had waited on them, and identified them by their cards as
belonging to the same family. Then, one day, with a pleased little
quiver of joy, she had found him in the city Who's Who, age, profession
(he was a corporation lawyer), middle names, favorite recreation, and
all. Gradually she had come to know them both very well in a waiting-on
way. She often chose love-stories that ended happily and had colored
illustrations for Mrs. De Guenther when she was at home having
rheumatism; she had saved more detective stories for Mr. De Guenther
than her superiors ever knew; and once she had found his black-rimmed
eye-glasses where he had left them between the pages of the Pri-Zuz
volume of the encyclopedia, and mailed them to him.
When she had vanished temporarily from sight into the nunnery-promotion
of the cataloguing room the De Guenthers had still remembered her. Twice
she had been asked to Sunday dinner at their house, and had joyously
gone and remembered it as joyously for months afterward. Now that she
was out in the light of partial day again, in the Children's Room, she
ran across both of them every little while in her errands upstairs; and
once Mrs. De Guenther, gentle, lorgnetted and gray-clad, had been shown
over the Children's Room. The couple lived all alone in a great,
handsome old house that was being crowded now by the business district.
She had always thought that if she were a Theosophist she would try to
plan to have them for an uncle and aunt in her next incarnation. They
suited her exactly for the parts.
But it's a long way down to the basement where city libraries are apt to
keep their children, and the De Guenthers hadn't been down there since
the last time they asked her to dinner. And here, with every sign of
having come to say something _very_ special, stood Mr. De Guenther!
Phyllis' irrepressibly cheerful disposition gave a little jump toward
the light. But she went on with her story--business before pleasure!
However, she did manage to get Robin Hood out of his brook a little more
quickly than she had planned. She scattered her children with a swift
executive whisk, and made so straight for her friend that she deceived
the children into thinking they were going to see him expelled, and they
banked up and watched with anticipatory grins.
"I do hope you want to see me especially!" she said brightly.
The children, disappointed, relaxed their attention.
Mr. De Guenther rose slowly and neatly from his seat beside the rather
bored Isaac Rabinowitz, who dived into his book again with alacrity.
"Good afternoon, Miss Braithwaite," he said in the amiably precise voice
which matched so admirably his beautifully precise movements and his
immaculate gray spats. "Yes. In the language of our young friend here,
'I am the guy.'"
Phyllis giggled before she thought. Some people in the world always make
your spirits go up with a bound, and the De Guenther pair invariably had
that effect on her.
"Oh, Mr. De Guenther!" she said, "I am shocked at you! That's slang!"
"It was more in the nature of a quotation," said he apologetically. "And
how are you this exceedingly unpleasant day, Miss Braithwaite? We have
seen very little of you lately, Mrs. De Guenther and I."
The Liberry Teacher, gracefully respectful in her place, wriggled with
invisible impatience over this carefully polite conversational opening.
He had come down here on purpose to see her--there must be something
going to happen, even if it was only a request to save a seven-day book
for Mrs. De Guenther! Nobody ever wanted _something_, any kind of a
something, to happen more wildly than the Liberry Teacher did that
bored, stickily wet Saturday afternoon, with those tired seven years at
the Greenway Branch dragging at the back of her neck, and the seven
times seven to come making her want to scream. So few things can
possibly happen to you, no matter how good you are, when you work by the
day. And now maybe something--oh, please, the very smallest kind of a
something would be welcomed!--was going to occur. Maybe Mrs. De Guenther
had sent her a ticket to a concert; she had once before. Or maybe, since
you might as well wish for big things while you're at it, it might even
be a ticket to an expensive seat in a real theatre! Her pleasure-hungry,
work-heavy blue eyes burned luminous at the idea.
"But I really shouldn't wish," she reminded her prancing mind belatedly.
"He may only have come down to talk about the weather. It mayn't any of
it be true."
So she stood up straight and gravely, and answered very courteously and
holding-tightly all the amiable roundabout remarks the old gentleman was
shoving forward like pawns on a chessboard before the real game begins.
She answered with the same trained cheerfulness she could give her
library children when her head and her disposition ached worst; and even
warmed to a vicious enthusiasm over the state of the streets and the
wetness of the damp weather.
"He knows lots of real things to say," she complained to herself, "why
doesn't he say them, instead of talking editorials? I suppose this is
his bedside--no, lawyers don't have bedside manners--well, his barside
manner, then----"
It is difficult to think and listen at the same time: by this time she
had missed a beautiful long paragraph about the Street-Cleaning
Department; and something else, apparently. For her friend was holding
out to her a note addressed to her flowingly in his wife's English hand,
and was saying,
"--which she has asked me to deliver. I trust you have no imperative
engagement for to-morrow night."
Something _had_ happened!
"Why, no!" said the Liberry Teacher delightedly. "No, indeed! Thank you,
and her, too. I'd love to come."
"Teacher!" clamored a small chocolate-colored citizen in a Kewpie
muffler, "my maw she want' a book call' 'Ugwin!' She say it got a yellow
cover an' pictures in it."
"Just a moment!" said Phyllis; and sent him upstairs with a note asking
for "Hugh Wynne" in the two-volume edition. She was used to translating
that small colored boy's demands. Last week he had described to her a
play he called "Eas' Limb", with the final comment, "But it wan't no
good. 'Twant no limb in it anywhar, ner no trees atall!"
"Do you have much of that?" Mr. De Guenther asked idly.
"Lots!" said Phyllis cheerfully. "You take special training in guesswork
at library school. They call them 'teasers'. They say they're good for
your intellect."
"Ah--yes," said Mr. De Guenther absently in the barside manner.
And then, sitting calmly with his silvery head against a Washington's
Birthday poster so that three scarlet cherries stuck above him in the
manner of a scalp-lock, he said something else remarkably real:
"I have--we have--a little matter of business to discuss with you
to-morrow night, my dear; an offer, I may say, of a different line of
work. And I want you to satisfy yourself thoroughly--thoroughly, my dear
child, of my reputableness. Mr. Johnstone, the chief of the city
library, whose office I believe to be in this branch, is one of my
oldest friends. I am, I think I may say, well known as a lawyer in this
my native city. I should be glad to have you satisfy yourself personally
on these points, because----" could it be that the eminently poised Mr.
De Guenther was embarrassed? "Because the line of work which I wish, or
rather my wife wishes, to lay before you is--is a very different line of
work!" ended the old gentleman inconclusively. There was no mistake
about it this time--he _was_ embarrassed.
"Oh, Mr. De Guenther!" cried Phyllis before she thought, out of the
fulness of her heart, catching his arm in her eagerness; "Oh, Mr. De
Guenther, _could_ the Very Different Line of Work have a--have a
_rose-garden_ attached to it anywhere?"
Before she was fairly finished she knew what a silly question she had
asked. How could any line of work she was qualified to do possibly have
rose-gardens attached to it? You can't catalogue roses on neat cards, or
improve their minds by the Newark Ladder System, or do anything at all
librarious to them, except pressing them in books to mummify; and the
Liberry Teacher didn't think that was at all a courteous thing to do to
roses. So Mr. De Guenther's reply quite surprised her.
"There--seems--to be--no good reason," he said, slowly and placidly,
as if he were dropping his words one by one out of a slot;--"why
there should not--be--a very satisfactory rose-garden, or
even--_two_--connected with it. None--whatever."
That was all the explanation he offered. But the Liberry Teacher asked
no more. "_Oh!_" she said rapturously.
"Then we may expect you to-morrow at seven?" he said; and smiled
politely and moved to the door. He walked out as matter-of-coursely as
if he had dropped in to ask the meaning of "circumflex," or who
invented smallpox, or the name of Adam's house-cat, or how long it would
take her to do a graduation essay for his daughter--or any such little
things that librarians are prepared for most days.
And instead--his neat gray elderly back seemed to deny it--he had left
with her, the Liberry Teacher, her, dusty, tousled, shopworn Phyllis
Braithwaite, an invitation to consider a Line of Work which was so
mysteriously Different that she had to look up the spotless De Guenther
reputation before she came!
One loses track of time, staring at a red George Washington poster, and
wondering about a future with a sudden Different Line in it.... It was
ten minutes past putting-out-children time! She stared aghast at the
ruthless clock, then created two Monitors for Putting Out at one royal
sweep. She managed the nightly eviction with such gay expedition that it
almost felt like ten minutes ago when the place, except for the
pride-swollen monitors, was cleared. While these officers watched the
commonalty clumping reluctantly upstairs toward the umbrella-rack, the
Liberry Teacher paced sedately around the shelves, giving the books that
routine straightening they must have before seven struck and the horde
rushed in again. It was really her relieving officer's work, but the
Liberry Teacher felt that her mind needed straightening, too, and this
always seemed to do it.
She looked, as she moved slowly down along the shelves, very much like
most of the librarians you see; alert, pleasant, slender, a little
dishevelled, a little worn. But there was really no librarian there.
There was only Phyllis Narcissa--that dreaming young Phyllis who had had
to stay pushed out of sight all the seven years that Miss Braithwaite
had been efficiently earning her living.
She let her mind stray happily as far as it would over the possibilities
Mr. De Guenther had held out to her, and woke to discover herself trying
to find a place under "Domestic Economy--Condiments" for "Five Little
Peppers and How They Grew." She laughed aloud in the suddenly empty
room, and then lifted her head to find Miss Black, the night-duty girl
that week, standing in the doorway ready to relieve guard.
"Oh, Anna, see what I've done!" she laughed. Somehow everything seemed
merely light-hearted and laughable since Mr. De Guenther's most
fairy-tale visit, with its wild hints of Lines of Work. Anna Black came,
looked, laughed.
"In the 640's!" she said. "Well, you're liable to do nearly everything
by the time it's Saturday. Last Saturday, Dolly Graham up in the
Circulation was telling me, an old colored mammy said she'd lost her
mittens in the reading-room; and the first they knew Dolly was hunting
through the Woollen Goods classification, and Mary Gayley pawing the
dictionary wildly for m-i-t!"
"And they found the mittens hung around her neck by the cord," finished
the Liberry Teacher. "I know--it was a thrilling story. Well, good-by
till Monday, Anna Black. I'm going home now, to have some lovely prunes
and some real dried beef, and maybe a glass of almost-milk if I can
persuade the landlady I need it."
"Mine prefers dried apricots," responded Miss Black cheerfully, "but she
never has anything but canned milk in the house, thus sparing us the
embarrassment of asking for real. Good-by--good luck!"
But as the Liberry Teacher pinned her serviceable hat close, and
fastened her still good raincoat over her elderly sweater, neither
prunes nor mittens nor next week's work worried her at all. After all,
living among the fairy-stories with the Little People makes that
pleasant land where wanting is having, and all the impossibilities can
come true, very easy of access. Phyllis Braithwaite's mind, as she
picked her way down the bedraggled street, wandered innocently off in a
dream-place full of roses, till the muddy marble steps of her
boarding-place gleamed sloppily before her through the foggy rain.
She sat up late that night, doing improving things to the white net
waist that went with her best suit, which was black. As her needle
nibbled busily down the seams she continued happily to wonder about that
Entirely Different Line. It sounded to her more like a reportership on
a yellow journal than anything else imaginable. Or, perhaps, could she
be wanted to join the Secret Service?
"At any rate," she concluded light-heartedly, as she stitched the last
clean ruching into the last wrist-covering, sedate sleeve, "at any rate
I'll have a chance to-morrow to wear mother's gold earrings that I
mustn't have on in the library. And oh, how lovely it will be to have a
dinner that wasn't cooked by a poor old bored boarding-house cook or a
shiny tiled syndicate!"
And she went to bed--to dream of Entirely Different Lines all the colors
of the rainbow, that radiated out from the Circulation Desk like
tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied
face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far
at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line--a very hard one to
walk--there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where she
was to be.
III
When Phyllis woke next morning everything in the world had a
light-hearted, holiday feeling. Her Sundays, gloriously unoccupied,
generally did, but this was extra-special. The rain had managed to clear
away every vestige of last week's slush, and had then itself most
unselfishly retired down the gutters. The sun shone as if May had come,
and the wind, through the Liberry Teacher's window, had a springy,
pussy-willowy, come-for-a-walk-in-the-country feel to it. She found that
she had slept too late to go to church, and prepared for a joyful dash
to the boarding-house bathtub. There might be--who knew but there
actually might be--on this day of days, enough hot water for a real
bath!
"I feel as if everything was going to be lovely all day!" she said
without preface to old black Maggie, who was clumping her accustomed
bed-making way along the halls, with her woolly head tied up in her
Sunday silk handkerchief. Even she looked happier, Phyllis thought,
than she had yesterday. She grinned broadly at Phyllis, leaning
smilingly against the door in her kimona.
"Ah dunno, Miss Braithways," she said, and entered the room and took a
pillow-case-corner in her mouth. "Ah never has dem premeditations!"
Phyllis laughed frankly, and Maggie, much flattered at the happy
reception of her reply, grinned so widely that you might almost have
tied her mouth behind her ears.
"You sure is a cheerful person, Miss Braithways!" said Maggie, and went
on making the bed.
Phyllis fled on down the hall, laughing still. She had just remembered
another of old Maggie's compliments, made on one of the rare occasions
when Phyllis had sat down and sung to the boarding-house piano. (She
hadn't been able to do it long, because the Mental Science Lady on the
next floor had sent down word that it stopped her from concentrating,
and as she had a very expensive room there was nothing for the landlady
to do but make Phyllis stop.) Phyllis had come out in the hall to find
old Maggie listening rapturously.
"Oh, Miss Braithways!" she had murmured, rolling her eyes, "you
certainly does equalize a martingale!"
It had been a compliment Phyllis never forgot. She smiled to herself as
she found the bathroom door open. Why, the world was full of a number of
things, many of them funny. Being a Liberry Teacher was rather nice,
after all, when you were fresh from a long night's sleep. And if that
Mental Science Lady _wouldn't_ let her play the piano, why, her
thrilling tales of what she could do when her mind was unfettered were
worth the price. That story she told so seriously about how the pipes
burst--and the plumber wouldn't come, and "My dear, I gave those pipes
only half an hour's treatment, and they closed right up!" It was quite
as much fun--well, almost as much--hearing her, as it would have been to
play.
... All of the contented, and otherwise, elderly people who inhabited
the boarding-house with Phyllis appeared to have gone off without using
hot water, for there actually was some. The Liberry Teacher found that
she could have a genuine bath, and have enough water besides to wash her
hair, which is a rite all girls who work have to reserve for Sundays.
This was surely a day of days!
She used the water--alas for selfish human nature!--to the last warm
drop and went gayly back to her little room with no emotions whatever
for the poor other boarders, soon to find themselves wrathfully
hot-waterless. And then--she thoughtlessly curled down on the bed, and
slept and slept and slept! She wakened dimly in time for the one o'clock
dinner, dressed, and ate it in a half-sleep. She went back upstairs
planning a trolley-ride that should take her out into the country, where
a long walk might be had. And midway in changing her shoes she lay back
across the bed and--fell asleep again. The truth was, Phyllis was about
as tired as a girl can get.
She waked at dusk, with a jerk of terror lest she should have overslept
her time for going out. But it was only six. She had a whole hour to
prink in, which is a very long time for people who are used to being in
the library half-an-hour after the alarm-clock wakes them.
* * * * *
Some houses, all of themselves, and before you meet a soul who lives in
them, are silently indifferent to you. Some make you feel that you are
not wanted in the least; these usually have a lot of gilt furniture, and
what are called objects of art set stiffly about. Some seem to be having
an untidy good time all to themselves, in which you are not included.
The De Guenther house, staid and softly toned, did none of these things.
It gave the Liberry Teacher, in her neat, last year's best suit, a
feeling as of gentle welcome-home. She felt contented and _belonging_
even before quick-smiling, slender little Mrs. De Guenther came rustling
gently in to greet her. Then followed Mr. De Guenther, pleasant and
unperturbed as usual, and after him an agreeable, back-arching gray cat,
who had copied his master's walk as exactly as it can be done with four
feet.
All four sat amiably about the room and held precise and pleasant
converse, something like a cheerful essay written in dialogue, about
many amusing, intelligent things which didn't especially matter. The
Liberry Teacher liked it. It was pleasant beyond words to sit nestlingly
in a pluffy chair, and hear about all the little lightly-treated
scholarly day-before-yesterday things her father had used to talk of.
She carried on her own small part in the talk blithely enough. She
approved of herself and the way she was behaving, which makes very much
for comfort. There was only once that she was ashamed of herself, and
thought about it in bed afterwards and was mortified; when her eyes
filled with quick tears at a quite dry and unemotional--indeed, rather a
sarcastic--quotation from Horace on the part of Mr. De Guenther. But she
smiled, when she saw that they noticed her.
"That's the first time I've heard a Latin quotation since I came away
from home," she found herself saying quite simply in explanation, "and
Father quoted Horace so much every day that--that I felt as if an old
friend had walked in!"
But her hosts didn't seem to mind. Mr. De Guenther in his careful
evening clothes looked swiftly across at Mrs. De Guenther in her
gray-silk-and-cameo, and they both nodded little satisfied nods, as if
she had spoken in a way that they were glad to hear. And then dinner was
served, a dinner as different--well, she didn't want to remember in its
presence the dinners it differed from; they might have clouded the
moment. She merely ate it with a shameless inward joy.
It ended, still to a pleasant effortless accompaniment of talk about
books and music and pictures that Phyllis was interested in, and had
found nobody to share her interest with for so long--so long! She felt
happily running though everything the general, easy taking-for-granted
of all the old, gentle, inflexible standards of breeding that she had
nearly forgotten, down in the heart of the city among her obstreperous,
affectionate little foreigners.
They had coffee in the long old-fashioned salon parlor, and then Mr. De
Guenther straightened himself, and Mrs. De Guenther folded her veined,
ringed old white hands, and Phyllis prepared thrilledly to listen.
Surely now she would hear about that Different Line of Work.
There was nothing, at first, about work of any sort. They merely began
to tell her alternately about some clients of theirs, a Mrs. Harrington
and her son: rather interesting people, from what Phyllis could make
out. She wondered if she was going to hear that they needed a librarian.
"This lady, my client, Mrs. Harrington," continued her host gravely, "is
the one for whom I may ask you to consider doing some work. I say may,
but it is a practical certainty. She is absolutely alone, my dear Miss
Braithwaite, except for her son. I am afraid I must ask you to listen to
a long story about them."
It was coming!
"Oh, but I want to hear!" said Phyllis, with that quick, affectionate
sympathy of hers that was so winning, leaning forward and watching them
with the lighted look in her blue eyes. It all seemed to her tired,
alert mind like some story she might have read to her children, an
Arabian Nights narrative which might begin, "And the Master of the
House, ascribing praise unto Allah, repeated the following Tale."
"There have always been just the two of them, mother and son," said the
Master of the House. "And Allan has always been a very great deal to his
mother."
"Poor Angela!" murmured his wife.
"They are old friends of ours," her husband explained. "My wife and Mrs.
Harrington were schoolmates.
"Well, Allan, the boy, grew up, dowered with everything a mother could
possibly desire for her son, personally and otherwise. He was handsome
and intelligent, with much charm of manner."
"I know now what people mean by 'talking like a book,'" thought Phyllis
irreverently. "And I don't believe any one man _could_ be all that!"
"There was practically nothing," Mr. De Guenther went on, "which the
poor lad had not. That was one trouble, I imagine. If he had not been
highly intelligent he would not have studied so hard; if he had not been
strong and active he might not have taken up athletic sports so
whole-heartedly; and when I add that Allan possessed charm, money and
social status you may see that what he did would have broken down most
young fellows. In short, he kept studies, sports and social affairs all
going at high pressure during his four years of college. But he was
young and strong, and might not have felt so much ill effects from all
that; though his doctors said afterwards that he was nearly at the
breaking point when he graduated."
Phyllis bent closer to the story-teller in her intense interest. Why, it
_was_ like one of her fairy-tales! She held her breath to listen, while
the old lawyer went gravely on.
"Allan could not have been more than twenty-two when he graduated, and
it was a very short while afterwards that he became engaged to a young
girl, the daughter of a family friend. Louise Frey was her name, was it
not, love?"
"Yes, that is right," said his wife, "Louise Frey."
"A beautiful girl," he went on, "dark, with a brilliant color, and full
of life and good spirits. They were both very young, but there was no
good reason why the marriage should be delayed, and it was set for the
following September."
A princess, too, in the story! But--where had she gone? "The two of them
only," he had said.
"It must have been scarcely a month," the story went on--Mr. De Guenther
was telling it as if he were stating a case--"nearly a month before the
date set for the wedding, when the lovers went for a long automobile
ride, across a range of mountains near a country-place where they were
both staying. They were alone in the machine.
"Allan, of course, was driving, doubtless with a certain degree of
impetuosity, as he did most things.... They were on an unfrequented part
of the road," said Mr. De Guenther, lowering his voice, "when there
occurred an unforeseen wreckage in the car's machinery. The car was
thrown over and badly splintered. Both young people were pinned under
it.
"So far as he knew at the time, Allan was not injured, nor was he in any
pain; but he was held in absolute inability to move by the car above
him. Miss Frey, on the contrary, was badly hurt, and in suffering. She
died in about three hours, a little before relief came to them."
Phyllis clutched the arms of her chair, thrilled and wide-eyed. She
could imagine all the horror of the happening through the old lawyer's
precise and unemotional story. The boy-lover, pinioned, helpless,
condemned to watch his sweetheart dying by inches, and unable to help
her by so much as lifting a hand--could anything be more awful not only
to endure, but to remember?
"And yet," she thought whimsically, "it mightn't be so bad to have one
_real_ tragedy to remember, if you haven't anything else! All _I'll_
have to remember when I'm old will be bad little children and good
little children, and books and boarding-houses, and the recollection
that people said I was a very worthy young woman once!" But she threw
off the thought. It's just as well not to think of old age when all the
idea brings up is a vision of a nice, clean Old Ladies' Home.
"But you said he was an invalid?" she said aloud.
"Yes, I regret to say," answered Mr. De Guenther. "You see, it was found
that the shock to the nerves, acting on an already over-keyed mind and
body, together with some spinal blow concerning which the doctors are
still in doubt, had affected Allan's powers of locomotion." (Mr. De
Guenther certainly did like long words!) "He has been unable to walk
since. And, which is sadder, his state of mind and body has become
steadily worse. He can scarcely move at all now, and his mental attitude
can only be described as painfully morbid--yes, I may say _very_
painfully morbid. Sometimes he does not speak at all for days together,
even to his mother, or his attendant."
"Oh, poor boy!" said Phyllis. "How long has he been this way?"
"Seven years this fall," the answer came consideringly. "Is it not,
love?"
"Yes," said his wife, "seven years."
"_Oh!_" said the Liberry Teacher, with a quick catch of sympathy at her
heart.
Just as long as she had been working for her living in the big, dusty
library. Supposing--oh, supposing she'd had to live all that time in
such suffering as this poor Allan had endured and his mother had had to
witness! She felt suddenly as if the grimy, restless Children's Room,
with its clatter of turbulent little outland voices, were a safe, sunny
paradise in comparison.
Mr. De Guenther did not speak. He visibly braced himself and was visibly
ill-at-ease.
"I have told most of the story, Isabel, love," said he at last. "Would
you not prefer to tell the rest? It is at your instance that I have
undertaken this commission for Mrs. Harrington, you will remember."
It struck Phyllis that he didn't think it was quite a dignified
commission, at that.
"Very well, my dear," said his wife, and took up the tale in her swift,
soft voice.
"You can fancy, my dear Miss Braithwaite, how intensely his mother has
felt about it."
"Indeed, yes!" said Phyllis pitifully.
"Her whole life, since the accident, has been one long devotion to her
son. I don't think a half-hour ever passes that she does not see him.
But in spite of this constant care, as my husband has told you, he grows
steadily worse. And poor Angela has finally broken under the strain. She
was never strong. She is dying now--they give her maybe two months more.
"Her one anxiety, of course, is for poor Allan's welfare. You can
imagine how you would feel if you had to leave an entirely helpless son
or brother to the mercies of hired attendants, however faithful. And
they have no relatives--they are the last of the family."
The listening girl began to see. She was going to be asked to act as
nurse, perhaps attendant and guardian, to this morbid invalid with the
injured mind and body.
[Illustration: "NO," SAID MRS. DE GUENTHER GRAVELY. "YOU WOULD NOT. YOU
WOULD HAVE TO BE HIS WIFE"]
"But how would I be any better for him than a regular trained nurse?"
she wondered. "And they said he had an attendant."
She looked questioningly at the pair.
"Where does my part come in?" she asked with a certain sweet directness
which was sometimes hers. "Wouldn't I be a hireling too if--if I had
anything to do with it?"
"No," said Mrs. De Guenther gravely. "You would not. You would have to
be his wife."
IV
The Liberry Teacher, in her sober best suit, sat down in her entirely
commonplace chair in the quiet old parlor, and looked unbelievingly at
the sedate elderly couple who had made her this wild proposition. She
caught her breath. But catching her breath did not seem to affect
anything that had been said. Mr. De Guenther took up the explanation
again, a little deprecatingly, she thought.
"You see now why I requested you to investigate our reputability?" he
said. "Such a proposition as this, especially to a young lady who has no
parent or guardian, requires a considerable guarantee of good faith and
honesty of motive."
"Will you please tell me more about it?" she asked quietly. She did not
feel now as if it were anything which had especially to do with her. It
seemed more like an interesting story she was unravelling sentence by
sentence. The long, softly lighted old room, with its Stuarts and
Sullys, and its gracious, gray-haired host and hostess, seemed only a
picturesque part of it.... Her hostess caught up the tale again.