A TRANSACTION IN APPLES
Phil was not visible the next morning when at seven o'clock Kirkwood
glanced about the house for her. She had indulged herself in the matter
of rising since the high-school bell no longer regulated her habits, and
her father had hardly expected to see her. There was no morning
newspaper to read--he took a Chicago daily at his office--and he opened
the windows and doors to admit the air. Domestic affairs interested
Thomas Kirkwood little. During the years in which Phil was passed from
aunt to aunt he had lived at the Morton House, and after establishing
the new home that he might have her with him, one or another of the
aunts had supervised his household, and at times, to his discomfiture,
all had taken a hand at it.
This rented cottage where the Kirkwoods lived was in the least
fashionable part of Main Street, beyond the commercial district and near
the railroad. Trains thundered through a cut not far from the rear
fence, and the cars of the Sycamore Traction Company rumbled by at
intervals. The cottage was old but comfortable, and it was remarked that
Kirkwood had probably chosen it for the reason that he could go to and
from his office without passing his abandoned home. Phil liked living on
Main Street. Her devotion to that thoroughfare had been a source of
great pain to her aunts. Even as her Uncle Amzi absorbed local color
from the steps of his bank, Phil was an alert agent in the field, on
nodding terms with the motormen of the interurban cars, and with the
jehus, who, cigarette in mouth and hat tipped on one side, drove the
village hacks. Captain Joshua Wilson, who had been recorder of his
county continuously since he lost a leg at Missionary Ridge, and who
wrote a poem every year for the reunion of his regiment, had written
certain lines for the "Evening Star" in which "P. K." was addressed as
the Diana of Main Street. As to the soundness of his mythology there
might be debate, but there was no question as to Phil's thorough
identification with Main Street, all the way from her father's house,
past the court-house, shops, and banks, out to the old Sugar Creek
Bridge where the town became country without any warning whatever.
It was Judge Walters who first called her "Otherwise Phyllis." This was
in Phil's school days before she passed from her aunts' custody. The
judge delighted in Phil's battles with the aunts. Whenever his wife
began to recount a day's occurrences at the supper-table, and the
recital opened promisingly, it was the judge's habit to cut short her
prefaces with, "Otherwise Phyllis--" and bid her hurry on to the
catastrophe, sparing no tragic detail.
Kirkwood had never, from the day his wife left him, offered himself in
the market-place as an object of sympathy. He had been a man of reserves
at all times, and the sudden termination of his married life had merely
driven him in further upon himself. If he was broken-hearted, the
fragments were well hidden. He felt that he was a failure, and he saw
men of less ability passing him in the race. Now and then he had roused
himself under stress and demonstrated his unusual gifts by striking
successes; but after one of these spurts he would relapse into an
indifference to which he seemed increasingly ready to yield.
He had risen this morning with a new resolution, attributable to his
talk with Nan Bartlett the night before. Even if he did not care for
himself, there was always Phil to consider. And Phil was very much to
consider. She had decided for herself that the high school had given her
all the education she needed. Kirkwood had weighed the matter carefully
and decided that she would not profit greatly by a college course--a
decision which Phil had stoutly supported. Her aunts favored a year at a
finishing school to tone down her rough edges, but having laid their
plan before their brother Amzi that gentleman had sniffed at it. What
was the use of spoiling Phil? he demanded. "Thunder!" And there was no
reason in the world why Phil should be spoiled.
Phil was not, in any view of the case, an ignorant person. She knew a
great many things that were not embraced in the high-school curriculum.
Her father harbored an old-fashioned love of the poets; which is not
merely to say that at some time in his life he had run through them, but
that he read poetry as one ordinarily reads novels, quite naturally and
without shame. Something of his own love of poetry had passed to his
daughter. He had so trained her that literature meant to Phil not
printed pages, but veritable nature and life. Books were a matter of
course, to be taken up and put down as the reader pleased, and nothing
to grow priggish about. She had caught from him an old habit, formed in
his undergraduate days, of a light, whimsical use of historical and
literary allusions. She entered zestfully into the spirit of this kind
of fooling; and, to his surprise, she had developed an astonishing knack
of imitation and parody. Sometimes Kirkwood without preluding, would
utter a line for Phil to cap; they even composed sonnets in this
antiphonal fashion and pronounced them superior to the average magazine
product. Phil had not only learned much from her father, but she had
absorbed a great deal of lore at the Bartletts', where everything
bookish was vitalized and humanized.
Kirkwood, hearing the creak of the swinging door between the pantry and
dining-room,--a familiar breakfast signal,--chose with care a volume of
Bagehot and carried it to the table which had been set, he imagined, by
the "girl" selected by his sisters-in-law to carry on his establishment
during the winter.
He helped himself to grapes, and was eating with his eye on a page of
Bagehot when the door swung again and Phil piped a cheerful
good-morning. She was an aproned young Phil and her face was flushed
from recent proximity to the range. She described her entrance in lines
she had fashioned for the purpose:--
"She came
While yet the jocund day was young, and fetched
In hands but lightly singed upon the stove
The coffee-pot, with muddy contents filled--"
Kirkwood, concealing his surprise at seeing her, took his cue:--
"And he, toying meanwhile with fruitage of the vine,
To-wit the mellow grape, scarce breathed to see
The nut-brown maid, and gasped, 'Where is the cook?'"
"Oh, the cook has went, to come down to the plain prose of it, daddy.
There was one here yesterday, but one's dynastic aunts had picked her
for her powers of observation and ready communication, so I fired her
hence. And with that careless grace which I hope you find becoming in me
I decided to run the shop all by my lonesome for a while. I thought I'd
start with breakfast so that any poisons that may creep into the
victuals will have time to work while the drug-stores are open. How long
do you cook an egg, is it two minutes or two weeks?"
"This will never do," said Kirkwood gravely, watching her pour the
coffee. "You shouldn't have discharged one cook until you had another."
"Tut! There's not enough to do in this house for two able-bodied
women--and I'm one! Rose taught me how to make coffee yesterday, and
toast and eggs are easy. Just look at that coffee! Real amber? It's an
improvement for looks on what you've been brewing for yourself in camp.
And I've been watching your winning ways with the camp frying-pan. Rose
gave me a cook-book that is full of perfectly adorable ideas. Come up
for lunch and I'll show you some real creations."
She slipped away into the kitchen and reappeared with toast and boiled
eggs. She had cooked the eggs by the watch as Rose had instructed her.
Her father relaxed the severity of his countenance to commend them. But
he did not like Phil in this new role. The casting forth of the cook
provided by the aunts would be regarded as an offense not lightly to be
passed by those ladies; but Phil had never appeared so wholly
self-possessed. She poured coffee for herself, diluted it with hot
water, buttered a slice of toast with composure, tasted it and
complained that the grocer had sent rancid butter.
Kirkwood pushed aside his Bagehot. He did not know just how to deal with
a daughter who, without the slightest warning, dispatched her cook and
took upon herself the burden of the household. The coffee was to his
liking; it was indubitably better than he had been used to; but the
thing would not do. He must show Phil the error of her ways and lose no
time about it.
"I'm sorry you didn't like the girl they sent you; but you must find
another. There's no reason, of course, why you shouldn't choose for
yourself; but it's not easy to find help in a town like this. I can't
have you doing the housework. That must be understood, Phil."
"You're not having me; I'm having me, which is a very different thing.
If you had driven me into the kitchen with loud, furious words, I should
have rebelled--screamed, and made a terrible scene. But you did nothing
of the kind. It happened in this wise. Glancing up quite by chance, as
it were, you beheld me pouring coffee of my own brewing. Fatherly pride
extinguished any feeling of shock or chagrin. You have smothered any
class feeling that may linger in your aristocratic soul and are making a
good bluff at enjoying the eating of your breakfast with the lady who
cooked it. Could anything be more beautiful? The ayes seem to have it;
the ayes have it, as I used to be fond of saying when I was boss of the
Philomathean. I wish now I'd taken the domestic science course more
seriously and spent less time in the gymnasium. But thus it is we live
and learn."
Phil's tone made rebuke difficult. He loved her foolishness just as her
Uncle Amzi did--just as every one did except her aunts, for whom the
affected stiltedness of her speech was merely a part of her general
deplorable unconventionality.
"Well, Phil, the idea of your cooking the meals for this establishment
isn't debatable. You're overruled and the debate closed."
"Still harping on my daughter's cooking! Please, in current idiom, cut
it out. Try marmalade on that too, too perfect toast."
He accepted marmalade and returned to the attack.
"You see, Phil, everything's different now. You've got to wake up to
your social responsibilities."
"And be a perfect lady? I know. Amy got me into the back room of the
bank yesterday and told me. One's aunts had bullied the old dear into
springing the sad intelligence. Then Nan had already given me a session.
And now you, too, Brutus, are about to lay the matter before me in a few
crisp sentences. But why all this assumption that I'm not a real lady?
There's a good deal of loose thinking on that subject, to use one of
your own best phrases. If there is nothing more before the house--"
Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit
into it before looking at her father.
"You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in
your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world--the
world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society.
It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't
have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to
assume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it
necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well
that if it were necessary you would be equal to it--you are equal to
anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such
things."
"Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really
serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not
very much, anyhow."
She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in
her mind that she must speak to her father about their affairs, but she
had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to
say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an
economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate
prospect of paying.
The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking.
When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she
had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been
above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation
of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they
had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the
facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was incumbent
upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it
circumspectly.
Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints
natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of
fifteen is apt to view life,--the first realizations of sex, the age of
the first novels,--Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her
mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a
lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good
deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been
glorified in scenes of renunciation, following nobly the high call of a
greater love. By a swift transition her father assumed the sympathetic
role in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned
husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father
fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to the _dramatis
personae_, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were
only passing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was
the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and
gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of
solid learning.
Phil's question startled her father. Money had never been discussed in
the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him.
Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her
aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her
money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often
amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been
touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from
a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose
definitive edition he had coveted--Shelley or Landor or Matthew Arnold.
No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father
found her direct question disconcerting.
"No, Phil. We are not rich--far from it. It's hardly possible for a
lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as
well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it."
He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had
stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was
quite like him to allow his watch to run down.
"I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I
was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills.
Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't
been paid for--and some things like that. We must economize until those
bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out
of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosdick
say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't
know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by
wringing it from the tenants."
She laughed, to make it easier for him.
"Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that
expires--I'm not sure when it does expire--" he concluded, and the color
deepened in his dark cheeks. It was his business to know when the lease
on the property expired, and as though reminded by this lapse of
similar failures in other directions, he drew out his watch again and
made sure that he had wound it.
"It expires," said Phil, "on the last day of this next December. I
looked it up yesterday afternoon in that little memorandum book you keep
in your desk."
"I guess that's right. I'm glad you mentioned it. I'll see Bernstein
right away and ask him if he wants to renew the lease. I suppose I ought
to coax a higher rent out of him, but he's been there a long time."
"Oh, he'll stand another fifty and be glad of it. His sign is on all the
fences in the country--'Bernstein's--The Same Old Place.' It would cost
him some money to change that. And you could cheer him up by painting
the front of the building. The interurban is bringing a lot more
business to Montgomery. I've been thinking we ought to do something
about that third floor room where the photograph shop used to be.
Bernstein has an upstairs room in the next building where his tailor
imparts that final deft touch that adjusts ready-made garments to the
most difficult figure. It would be handier for him to conduct the
sartorial transformations in the chamber over his own gate, wouldn't it?
And I don't think we need wait for that photographer to come back from
the penitentiary or wherever he languisheth."
She was minimizing the significance of these suggestions--a significance
that lay, she knew, in the fact of their coming from her--by lapsing
into the absurdities with which she embellished her familiar talk. She
pronounced "languisheth" with a prolongation of the last syllable that
gave to it a characteristic touch of mockery.
"I'd been hoping he'd show up again and cart off his rubbish. But we've
had some fun out of the gallery. If we rent it to Bernstein for his
retouching mysteries, we shan't have any place to develop our
negatives."
"That's so; but maybe we can retouch Bernstein for enough extra to get
them done for us. It's the ducats, my lord, that move my fancy. The
Bernsteins have grown almost disagreeably rich at the same old stand and
it's about time the Kirkwoods were thrusting their talons into the
treasure chest."
Sounds of disaster in the kitchen caused Phil to rise hastily and
disappear through the swing doors. She returned calmly a moment later.
"Only the tea-kettle playing at being a geyser. When we get rich I'm
going to have a gas range. They say it's the only way to cook and cook
and be a lady still."
"That brings us back to cooking--" began her father.
"Not at all, daddy. The subject is dismissed forever. I'm going to have
that Ethiop who does chores for us clean up the photograph gallery. I'll
be down after while, to see how it looks."
She bade him good-bye at the front door, and went whistling about the
further business of the morning. The sky was blue and the air warmed as
the sun climbed into the heavens. Phil felt that she had conveyed to her
father a sense of their imperative needs without wounding him. She was
resolved to help him if she could. Her pride had been pricked by her
Uncle Amzi's proffered aid, which she had carefully avoided mentioning
to her father. She knew that it would have hurt him, and she had
reasoned, much in the fashion of Nan Bartlett, that her father owed it
to himself to exercise his unquestioned gifts to reestablish himself in
his profession. As he left her and walked toward the street, she was
aware that he strode away more quickly than was his wont.
Phil's morning was not eventless. The telephone jingled three times, as
three aunts demanded to know why she had parted with the
maid-of-all-work they had installed in the Kirkwood kitchen. Aunt Josie
was censorious and Aunt Fanny mildly remonstrative; Aunt Kate sought
light as to the reason for the cook's early passing, as she was anxious
to try her herself. Phil disposed of these calls with entire good humor.
Then a senior, between lectures at the college, asked her if she would
go driving with him Sunday afternoon. The senior, in the security of his
fraternity house, prolonged the conversation. As this was Thursday and
there was never any imperative need in Montgomery for making engagements
so far ahead, the senior was exercising unjustifiable precaution. Phil
declined the invitation. Her aunts had repeatedly warned her against
college boys. A daughter of the house of Montgomery was not to waste
herself upon students, a lawless body of whom no one knew anything in
particular save that they seized every opportunity to murder sleep for
reputable citizens.
Phil employed the telephone to order of the grocer and butcher, made
beds, swept rooms, and sat down with a new magazine, dropped at the door
by the postman, to run her eyes over the pictures. One or two things she
was sure her father would like; a sketch of Massenet she must call to
Rose Bartlett's attention. She planned luncheon and began the peeling of
potatoes with a page of Keats propped on the table beside her--a trick
she had learned at the Bartletts'. "Endymion" need suffer nothing from
proximity to potatoes, though it should be said that Phil's paring would
have distressed a frugal housekeeper.
While thus employed a step sounded on the brick walk, and a young man
knocked at the open door without glancing in. He chewed a straw as he
observed the chimneys of the adjoining house, and Phil, sitting by the
kitchen table, paused in her paring to make sure of his identity. Then
she placed her pan of potatoes on the table and crossed quickly to the
door.
"Good-morning, madam. Would you like--"
He extended two apples as samples. Phil glanced at them with interest.
They were not the best of apples, as any one could see. Fred Holton
removed his hat and pulled the straw from his mouth.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Kirkwood," he said, with a gravity that was not
mitigated by a slight quivering of Phil's lips as she continued to
ignore their earlier acquaintance. "I didn't know this was your house or
I shouldn't have come in."
"Then it's a good thing you didn't know," replied Phil. "If you're
selling apples you have to try all the houses you come to. Not to go
into every gate wouldn't be business."
"Well, I suppose that's so," observed Holton doubtfully, letting one of
the apples fall. Phil picked it up with the quick reach of a shortstop.
She ignored his apologies for failing to recover it himself, and
examined the apple critically.
"If you haven't any better apples in your wagon than this, you're not
likely to sell many," Phil commented. "This one's spotted and it's a
safe guess that a worm nestles within. You ought to pick out the best
for samples."
"They're not a very good lot," confessed Holton. "It's an old orchard
and it hasn't had any attention. I'm going to put out some new trees
next year."
"That's a good idea," Phil observed reflectively. "I've noticed that
they've been planting pears and apples in several places around there.
Uncle Amy got a good first crop this year from his young orchard. But he
had a man spray the bugs off. There are a lot of things to do to an
orchard. The land Uncle Amy turned into an orchard runs right up to your
place, and it must be the same kind of land. But it isn't as easy as it
looks--apples isn't."
"Apples isn't?" he repeated soberly.
"Oh, cheer up, that's a joke! I know apples _aren't_!"
The young man smiled.
"Mine _isn't_, I'm afraid, from what you say about them."
"I think maybe that speck isn't a wormhole, after all," said Phil,
subjecting the apple she still held to another scrutiny. "You might give
us a half a bushel of these. My ambitions lead me toward apple pie, and
if it doesn't come out well I can blame your apples."
He smiled again, and frank admiration shone in his eyes as they surveyed
Phil with more assurance.
"If you really want some of these I'll bring them in. Half a bushel?"
"That will be enough," replied Phil succinctly. She rubbed the apple
with the corner of her blue-and-white apron, chose a spot that inspired
confidence, and bit into it. She waited for the effect absently and
puckered her lips. "It's a cooker. What's the name of the brand?"
"Give it up."
"Then I'll tell you. It's a 'Liza Browning. You'd better learn the names
of apples before you go much further in the business. Any farmhand can
tell you. Uncle Amy's taught me about twenty. What's the price of this
precious fruit?"
"Oh, I couldn't charge you for these, you know. You see--"
"Then I won't take them--nary an apple! You bring in those apples and
I'll pay you just the same price you ask everybody else."
Her attention was attracted by a black cat moving along the alley fence
with noble unconcern. Phil stepped out upon the brick walk, drew back
her arm and threw the apple. It struck the fence immediately beneath the
cat, which vanished on the alley side.
"Good shot. You almost got him!"
"Almost nothing!" said Phil scornfully. "You didn't suppose I wanted to
hit the wretch, did you? He's an old pal of mine and would be lonesome
if I didn't scare him to death occasionally."
Holton brought the apples in a sack which he emptied into a basket Phil
found for the purpose. His absence had been prolonged. To measure half a
bushel of apples is not ordinarily a serious matter, but in this
instance the vendor chose fastidiously. The fruit that went into the
sack was beyond question the best in the wagon.
"How much?" asked Phil, surveying her purchase, purse in hand.
"Oh, about a quarter."
She handed him a fifty cent piece.
"Please don't try that again--not here! I've been telephoning the
grocery and apples about like those are a dollar a bushel.
Good-morning!"
"Good-morning, Miss Kirkwood."
He looked at her intently, laughed, threw the sack over his shoulder and
went out, holding the coin in his hand.