"PLEASED TO MEET YOU"
NO one had ever known Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury to miss an
appointment.
The four girls were ready for her betimes, for she never kept any one
waiting and had the strongest objection to unpunctuality in another.
She rang the bell of the small apartment ten minutes earlier than the
Scollards had looked for her, and appeared erect and brisk as ever,
with that combination of thorough breeding and disregard for externals
which was peculiar to herself.
This time, however, it seemed that Miss Bradbury had passed her own
limit of garments which, however fine and costly in their day, were
stamped with the fact that their day had been marked on a calendar long
superseded.
"My children, I'm a frump!" she announced on entering, without other
greeting. "I am sure that you will be ashamed to be seen with me. I
should have made our investigating day a later one, and got myself
clad in the garments of the present year of grace first of all things.
Do look at this coat! Its sleeves cry aloud, like the great-mouthed
trombones they resemble, that they were made two years ago. One's
sleeves always turn traitor and betray one! My coat is not so bad,
except the sleeves. Will you mind seriously? And will you promise to
walk one on each side of me, pressed close every minute, so no one can
see how disgraceful I am? I look as though I had indeed come out of the
Ark yesterday!"
"You always look like a dear, old-fashioned gentlewoman, Aunt Keren,"
said Margery, sincerely and affectionately.
"It's beautiful cloth, Auntie Keren; it hasn't lost its gloss one bit,"
Happie added consolingly. The Scollards were under the impression that
Miss Bradbury's obsolete effect was not a matter of choice, that she
had too little money to discard good garments merely because they were
out of fashion.
"There's one thing: you don't outgrow your things now!"
"Literally and physically?" cried Miss Keren-happuch. "Why should I?
Surely there ought to be some compensation in being beyond the sixtieth
goal!"
"But we do," insisted Happie. "We are worse in our last winter's coats
than you are in yours. Your sleeves are behind the times, but ours
are above our wrists, Margery's and mine. Laura is safe because she
inherits. We were wishing for frilled muffs when you came."
"And I think it would be more sensible to wish for new coats," Polly
added.
"Such as we are we must get under way. Those who know us will know we
have been rusticating, and the other four millions, more or less, won't
care," said Miss Bradbury turning towards the door. "Are Polly and
Penny to be safely left alone? We may not get back to luncheon."
"Mrs. Gordon promised to keep her eye on them," said Margery, stooping
to kiss her two little sisters good-bye.
How noisy, bewilderingly noisy, crowded and unclean the streets of the
great city seemed to Margery and Happie after the wind-swept spaces,
the deep silence of the mountains! Gretta did not see them in detail.
She walked them clutching Happie's arm, her one idea to thread safely
between trolleys, trucks, automobiles and all the other monsters that
charged down upon her, to which Margery and Happie seemed recklessly
indifferent, and Miss Bradbury and Laura, each in her different way,
horribly oblivious.
"Oh, Auntie Keren, it isn't here, is it?" cried Happie, as Miss
Bradbury turned into a most desirable street, close to the shopping
district and between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. She had steadily
refused to tell the girls where she had found the place she thought
would be best for the proposed tea room. This neighborhood took their
breath away. It was so dismaying, yet so very desirable!
"We never could pay the rent of a room near here, Aunt Keren," said
Margery.
"Higher rents mean more business, my novices in the Art of Getting
Rich!" said Miss Bradbury keeping on her unruffled way. "This block is
my judgment for you; we will talk it over afterwards. If the rent is
not forth-coming at first, you understand that I am responsible for
it. If the tea room really amounts to anything it will be likely to
pay more than rent here. Elsewhere, I doubt it would get beyond making
its own lower rent. Do you see that house with the square bow window,
like a shop, but close curtained with green sash curtains? That is Mrs.
Stewart's dancing school, and she is anxious to sub-let the shop on the
lower floor. She will give it to you at a reasonable figure, and it has
the great advantage of being under the rooms which she uses, where you
can have the benefit of the dear little woman's advice and chaperonage.
I have known Mrs. Stewart for a long time, admiring her and pitying her
with all my heart. Here we are!"
A curtained door led down three steps into the shop, but Miss Bradbury
rang the house bell and a maid admitted her, with the four girls in her
train, into the hall and into a reception-room at its rear.
A little lady with a charming face, who moved with the rhythm of a
poem, came swiftly into the room to greet the arrivals.
"Oh, I hope you'll like the little shop!" she cried girlishly, giving
Margery a quick glance of admiration that instantly included handsome
Gretta and Happie, with her irregular, attractive face. "It never was
used as a shop. I am its first tenant and I used it for dancing classes
until I decided that the children were better kept altogether on the
first floor--this would be a basement shop, you know, if the house were
quite normal."
"Then you are not dismayed by the apparition of such youthful tenants?"
suggested Miss Keren. "Margery, this girl, will keep her eighteenth
birthday sooner than she would if she realized the penalties of being
grown up. Happie, my unfortunate namesake, is fifteen, Laura is
thirteen--but she is not a responsible person, only an assistant in the
project, as is Gretta, this Pennsylvania girl of ours who has turned
out the real owner of my farm--I mean the farm that I thought I owned.
Then, little Madam Terpsichore, will you let us see the room?"
"Yes, indeed," agreed Mrs. Stewart, leading the way. She opened the
door upon a large room, bare of all furniture except a piano, and a few
chairs neatly piled one upon another as if they had been arrested in
playing leap frog.
The woodwork of the room was white, panelled in green; there was about
it great cheerfulness and suggestions of all sorts of possibilities.
The girls looked at one another with bright, excited eyes.
"You like it," Miss Keren stated, not needing to ask.
"We love it, Aunt Keren--if we can afford to," said Happie whimsically.
"Love does not count cost," said Miss Keren. "Mrs. Stewart and I mapped
out the general lay of the land--your kingdom--thus: a curtain across
here, partly drawn, to cut off some of the light at the rear and allow
lanterns where you serve tea on small tables. A gas stove here--tapping
this pipe and hidden by a screen. On this, water perpetually boiling.
A dresser here, also hidden as you see,--the screen would cut off this
entire corner,--for teacups, cakes and all that sort of thing. Around
the front, book-shelves, if you decide to add a circulating library to
your tea room, as you planned at first to do. And possibly tables here,
too, if necessary--candies? Happie, your fudge could be a feature. With
hangings, touches of color wisely bestowed, and a little planning, this
could be made a delightful room, Mrs. Stewart and I think. But I don't
want to bias you."
"It would be perfect, Aunt Keren," said Margery. "No one could help
liking it. And the street--there isn't a better location in town, of
course. If you think we may risk it. You see, we never had anything so
important to decide, and it is hard to settle even less things without
mother. You must decide for us. Only--please, Auntie Keren dear, don't
reckon on your supplying deficiencies of rent. It would be bad enough
if you had to do it! So don't risk anything, counting on stepping in,
will you?"
"Yes, and you know we are going to do this seriously, as a business.
I'm sure it will be more fun than anything we ever did in all our
lives, but if it were only that, we ought to be at home scrubbing,"
Happie supplemented her sister, leaving to her hearers the application
of her remarks.
"Well, my girls, I truly think that your chance of success is greater
here than elsewhere, warranting a little more rent. It isn't much more.
Mrs. Stewart is most modest in her views. I think it is decided, Mrs.
Stewart!" said Miss Keren.
"You will take it, Miss Scollard?" asked Mrs. Stewart.
"If Aunt Keren says I may," assented Margery, after a glance at Happie,
who nodded hard.
"Then I shall ask the first favor," Mrs. Stewart said. "That piano! I
have another up-stairs which I use for classes. This is a particularly
good one, and my young pianist has the true dancing school heaviness of
touch. Would you find it in your way to let this piano stand here--for
a while?"
Laura, whom nobody had consulted, and who, with Gretta, had played the
rôle of listener to the discussion of taking the room, suddenly spoke.
"If I may play on it sometimes," she said. "I was just wishing it
could be here so I might play to people taking tea in the shadow with
lanterns lighting them."
Gretta looked distinctly shocked and Happie flushed, while Margery's
mortification was easily seen. But Mrs. Stewart was evidently
acquainted with the artistic temperament. She laughed and asked:
"Then you play, my dear?"
"I compose," said Laura. "I think soft music would add heaps to the tea
room."
"Soft music with weak tea, loud music with strong tea. Do come along,
Laura!" cried Happie, who, however proud she really was of her
genuinely gifted junior, was perpetually wishing "she wouldn't!"
Then, fearing that she had seemed pert, Happie turned back to Mrs.
Stewart. "Laura plays well enough for us to enjoy her music a great
deal. She meant that she would like to play a little on that piano,
if you weren't afraid of her hurting it, but she didn't mean that
it couldn't stay down here if you were afraid, though what she said
sounded like that. Of course it will not be in the way; it will make
the tea room ever so much more like a livable room, even though the
piano is locked."
"Which it certainly will never be," smiled Mrs. Stewart. "Perhaps your
Laura will let me steal down sometimes to listen to her music."
"Perhaps she can help you sometimes, playing for your classes," said
Margery, anxiously supplementing Happie's effort to cover Laura's
conceit and the glum expression with which the latter silently
recognized this effort.
"We shall have the nicest sort of times, in all sorts of ways, I am
sure," said the girls' attractive little landlady. And Miss Bradbury
led the new tenants away without their giving a thought to the fact
that they did not know what their rent was to be, nor to the wholly
unbusinesslike tone of the entire interview.
Miss Bradbury had taken the dimensions of the shop, a prevision which
had hot occurred to Margery or Happie, so while the party lunched
animatedly in the big hotel nearest to the future tea room, and while
Gretta lost herself completely in the music of the first good string
orchestra she had ever heard, the plans for the arrangement of the tea
room were decided.
After lunch Miss Bradbury departed in search of the carpenter who was
to put up book-shelves and portière poles, and the girls went home to
relieve trusty Polly of her housekeeping.
Margery found a letter waiting for her, a letter with the Baltimore
postmark and addressed in the fine writing which Happie always regarded
with aversion. Margery carried the letter with her to their room,
whither she went to lay off hat and coat, and Happie groaned to Gretta,
a careful groan, in a low key, so Margery should not hear.
"That Robert Gaston will be turning up in New York this winter, mark my
words!" she darkly prophesied. "I don't believe in friends!"
Gretta laughed. "How about Ralph and Snigs?" she suggested.
"Boys, just boys!" said Happie. "But I don't believe in elegant young
men friends who read aloud to you, the way Margery says this Baltimore
creature did at Bar Harbor last summer, and are six years older than
you! Of course you know as well as I do how such things always turn
out, and Margery is so perfectly lovely that a blind-deaf-feeble-minded
man would fall in love with her! It's no joke to see your dearest
sister in danger, Gretta."
Happie's voice was so tremulous at the end of this speech that it took
away from Gretta the desire to laugh, with which she had struggled
as she listened. "We'll just have to hope he isn't blind, deaf and
feeble-minded, then maybe he won't fall in love with her, and maybe
if he is all these things she won't care about him," Gretta said
comfortingly, with considerable show of probability. "And if worst
comes to worst, why we'll know it won't be as bad a worst as it looks
coming. Don't worry, Happie, it's not your way."
"No," Happie agreed dismally. "But I'm certain he is horrid, wears
serious, too-well-fitting clothes, quotes poetry, talks elegantly, and
only smiles as if he were trying to be kind. Ug-gh, but I do de-spise
that sort of man!"
"I never saw one," said Gretta.
Happie stared at her thoughtfully for an instant, then she burst out
laughing, her face all wrinkling into fun-lines, and dimpling with one
of those sudden changes of mood that made Happie so lovable.
"Why, neither did I, Gretta, now you speak of it!" she cried. "I think
I got him out of stories. I guess I'm a goose."
Margery reappeared, unchanged by this letter at least, so Happie put
menacing Robert Gaston out of her mind, and the Scollards talked tea
room until their mother and Bob came home, when they talked it more
than ever, and after dinner Ralph and Snigs came in, which multiplied
the tea-room talk by two.
There were exciting days, tiresome days too, included in the next two
weeks. Miss Bradbury hurried the preparations of the room in order to
let the girls have some of the benefit of the holiday shopping-time.
They were delightful days of selection of materials for hangings,
picking out teacups, spoons, dear little chunky Japanese teapots, sugar
bowls and cream jugs and pretty plates. They were made by the artistic
Japanese in such good designs and colors that only when one turned them
over and saw the quality of the ware did one realize that they were
picked up on one of the tables at Mardine's where tempting Japanese
knickknacks play a sort of progressive game of their own, from the
fifteen cent table up to the dollar one, after which they retire to the
shelves as winners.
The Patty-Pans undeniably suffered from neglect on the part of its
good housekeepers, and Mrs. Scollard and Bob patiently accepted what
Bob called "imitation dinners." The girls took turns in seeing after
the tea room arrangements, until Gretta volunteered to let Margery and
Happie both go while she looked after the housekeeping, and then it
went better.
The tea room was to be opened on Saturday, the fifteenth. Ralph and
Snigs were not allowed to see it until it was in order, save for the
finishing touches, and for these the Scollards and the Gordons made a
bee on Wednesday night.
They went down in high feather, Mrs. Gordon and her two tall boys, all
the Scollards, including even Penny, while Miss Bradbury was to come
down to meet them at the room.
Margery carried the key. She proudly put it into their own lock and
opened the door. Happie sprang forward and touched the electric
button, and light leaped joyously into each glass bulb, most of which
were transformed by crêpe tissue paper into blossoms of unclassified
varieties.
Cases stood around, which the bee party had come to open, but in spite
of them the room was already beautiful.
"Miss Keren!" expostulated Mrs. Scollard, realizing at a glance what an
outlay was represented by the tables, chairs, portières, and lanterns,
not to mention the contents of the still unopened cases.
"Charlotte, be still!" warned Miss Keren. "Was I not your mother's
closest friend, bound to her by ties of peculiar tenderness? And
am I not spiritually kinless? I have told you before that you are
not to remonstrate if it is my whim to play with my old friends'
grandchildren, and, I won't have you spoiling 'we girls'' fun by a look!
Bless their hearts, they have no idea of money. Don't you hint of it!"
Miss Keren's law was laid down rapidly in a low voice, covered by
Ralph's salutation of the tea room.
"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," he said, doffing his hat with an air
that suggested the plumed cap of a Romeo, as Bob introduced him: "R.
Gordon, T. Room; T. Room, your servant, R. Gordon. Now get to work,
ladies and gentlemen." He produced hammer and chisel from the pocket
of his outer coat and set an example to accompany his exhortation, by
valiantly attacking the boarded top of the nearest case.
There were not many books to begin with, but what there were proved
to be in the case Bob was opening, and were quickly set up on their
shelves.
"We're going to ask any one who borrows from us to deposit the value of
the book taken, which will be returned later, and we shall charge five
cents a reading," explained Margery, when Ralph expressed a doubt of
the tea room maidens' keeping their stock of latest novels intact.
"And if this part of the business goes well we're going to buy lots
of books," said Laura. Then, with her usual indifference to labor
that needed doing, she went over to Mrs. Stewart's piano and began to
improvise, while the others briskly hurried through the work of taking
out and dusting dishes and all the other contents of the cases and
setting them up on the shelves.
It did not take long--though it was long enough for Penny to get sleepy
and to be put by Bob into one of the empty cases for a nap, well padded
around with excelsior.
When everything was done, and the boys had carried the cases out into
the rear, and Penny had wakened as bright as a new penny from the mint,
the tea room was a joy to look upon.
Softened lights, dull, warm draperies, pretty china, the bindings of
the books, all contributed to an effect as homelike as it was artistic.
"She who comes once will come twice," said Mrs. Gordon looking around
her.
"Sounds like a well-worn adage, mother," observed Ralph. "But it's as
true as 'tis new. Old maids and tea has always been the combination.
Let's put out a quaint sign: "Ye Yonge Maids' Tea Room."
"Yes, with all the letters higgledy-piggledy to prove we know what's
true art," cried Happie. "I don't believe we want a sign out. Besides,
it might keep away elderly people; they might think it meant they
couldn't come in."
"Or else flatter them so that they'd come in hordes," added Miss
Keren. "Light your gas stove, girls, and brew us your first tea. We'll
christen the tea room."
Gretta sprang to obey, secretly proud of having overcome her fear of
the first spurt of the gas when it leaped to the match.
"We'll have to make hot lemonade for part of our guests, including me,"
said Happie, bustling about to set out cups and crackers, with a glance
at the boys who liked tea as little as she did.
Margery put English breakfast and fragrant Formosa Oolong into two
of the prettiest teapots, and they drank, standing, the toast to the
success of the enterprise, which was proposed by Miss Keren.
"Good-night, pretty place," said Polly, peeping back into the room from
under Margery's arm as she put the key in the door.
"Yes, good-night," said Ralph. "As I said when we came: 'We're pleased
to meet you.'"