NOT PATS BUT SCRATCHES
Mrs. Colebrook went home the next day. She wore the air of an injured
martyr at breakfast. She told her brother that, of course, if he
preferred to have an ignorant servant girl take care of his poor
afflicted son, she had nothing to say; but that certainly he could not
expect HER to stay, too, especially after being insulted as she had
been.
Daniel Burton had remonstrated feebly, shrugged his shoulders and
flung his arms about in his usual gestures of impotent annoyance.
Susan, in the kitchen, went doggedly about her work, singing,
meanwhile, what Keith called her "mad" song. When Susan was
particularly "worked up" over something, "jest b'ilin' inside" as she
expressed it, she always sang this song--her own composition, to the
tune of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home":
"I've taken my worries, an' taken my woes,
I have, I have,
An' shut 'em up where nobody knows,
I have, I have.
I chucked 'em down, that's what I did,
An' now I'm sittin' upon the lid,
An' we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marchin' home.
I'm sittin' upon the lid, I am,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
I'm tryin' to be a little lamb,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
But I'm feelin' more like a great big slam
Than a nice little peaceful woolly lamb,
But we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marchin' home."
When Daniel Burton, this morning, therefore, heard Susan singing this
song, he was in no doubt as to Susan's state of mind--a fact which
certainly did not add to his own serenity.
Upstairs, Keith, wearily indifferent as to everything that was taking
place about him, lay motionless as usual, his face turned toward the
wall.
And at ten o'clock Mrs. Colebrook went. Five minutes later Daniel
Burton entered the kitchen--a proceeding so extraordinary that Susan
broke off her song in the middle of a "Hurrah" and grew actually pale.
"What is it?--KEITH? Is anything the matter with Keith?" she faltered.
Ignoring her question the man strode into the room.
"Well, Susan, this time you've done it," he ejaculated tersely.
"Done it--to Keith--ME? Why, Mr. Burton, what do you mean? Is
Keith--worse?" chattered Susan, with dry lips. "It was only a little
hash I took up. He simply won't eat that oatmeal stuff, an'--"
"No, no, I don't mean the hash," interrupted the man irritably. "Keith
is all right--that is, he is just as he has been. It's my sister, Mrs.
Colebrook. She's gone."
"Gone--for good?"
"Yes, she's gone home."
"Glory be!" The color came back to Susan's face in a flood, and frank
delight chased the terror from her eyes. "Now we can do somethin'
worthwhile."
"I reckon you'll find you have to do something, Susan. You know very
well I can't afford to hire a nurse--now."
"I don't want one."
"But there's all the other work, too."
"Work! Why, Mr. Burton, I won't mind a little work if I can have that
blessed boy all to myself with no one to feed him oatmeal mush with a
spoon, an' snivel over him. You jest wait. The first elemental thing
is to learn him self-defiance, so he can do things for himself. Then
he'll begin to get his health an' strength for the operator."
"You're forgetting the money, Susan. It costs money for that."
Susan's face fell.
"Yes, sir, I know." She hesitated, then went on, her color deepening.
"An' I hain't sold--none o' them poems yet. But there's other
magazines, a whole lot of 'em, that I hain't tried. Somebody's sure to
take 'em some time."
"I'm glad your courage is still good, Susan; but I'm afraid the dear
public is going to appreciate your poems about the way it does--my
pictures," shrugged the man bitterly, as he turned and left the room.
Not waiting to finish setting her kitchen in order, Susan ran up the
back stairs to Keith's room.
"Well, your aunt is gone, an' I'm on,
An' here we are together.
We'll chuck our worries into pawn,
An' how do you like the weather?"
she greeted him gayly. "How about gettin' up? Come on! Such a lazy
boy! Here it is away in the middle of the forenoon, an' you abed like
this!"
But it was not to be so easy this time. Keith was not to be cajoled
into getting up and dressing himself even to beat Susan's record.
Steadfastly he resisted all efforts to stir him into interest or
action; and a dismayed, disappointed Susan had to go downstairs in
acknowledged defeat.
"But, land's sake, what could you expect?" she muttered to herself,
after a sorrowful meditation before the kitchen fire. "You can't put a
backbone into a jellyfish by jest showin' him the bone--an' that's
what his aunt has made him--a flappy, transparallel jellyfish. Drat
her! But I ain't goin' to give up. Not much I ain't!" And Susan
attacked the little kitchen stove with a vigor that would have brought
terror to the clinkers of a furnace fire pot.
Susan did not attempt again that day to get Keith up and dressed; and
she gave him his favorite "pop-overs" for supper with a running fire
of merry talk and jingles that contained never a reference to the
unpleasant habit of putting on clothes, But the next morning, after
she had given Keith his breakfast (not of toast and oatmeal) she
suggested blithely that he get up and be dressed. When he refused she
tried coaxing, mildly, then more strenuously. When this failed she
tried to sting his pride by telling him she did not believe he could
get up now, anyhow, and dress himself.
"All right, Susan, let it go that I can't. I don't want to, anyhow,"
sighed the boy with impatient weariness. "Say, can't you let a fellow
alone?"
Susan drew a long breath and held it suspended for a moment. She had
the air of one about to make a dreaded plunge.
"No, I can't let you alone, Keith," she replied, voice and manner now
coldly firm.
"Why not? What's the use when I don't want to get up?"
"How about thinkin' for once what somebody else wants, young man?"
Susan caught her breath again, and glanced furtively at the
half-averted face on the pillow. Then doggedly she went on. "Maybe you
think I hain't got anything to do but trespass up an' down them stairs
all day waitin' on you, when you are perfectly capacious of waitin' on
yourself SOME."
"Why, SUSAN!" There was incredulous, hurt amazement in the boy's
voice; but Susan was visibly steeling herself against it.
"What do you think?--that I'm loafin' all day, an' your aunt gone now,
an' me with it all on my hands?" she demanded, her stony gaze
carefully turned away from the white face on the pillow. "An' to have
to keep runnin' up here all the mornin' when I've got to do the
dishes, an' bake bread, an' make soap, an'--"
"If you'll get my clothes, Susan, I'll get up," said Keith very
quietly from the bed.
And Susan, not daring to unclose her lips, wrested the garments from
the hooks, dropped them on to the chair by the bed, and fled from the
room. But she had not reached the hall below when the sobs shook her
frame.
"An' me talkin' like that when I'd be willin' to walk all day on my
hands an' knees, if't would help him one little minute," she choked.
Barely had Susan whipped herself into presentable shape again when
Keith's voice at the kitchen door caused her to face about with a
startled cry.
"I'm downstairs, Susan." The boy's voice challenged hers for coldness
now. "I'll take my meals down here, after this."
"Why, Keith, however in the world did you--" Then Susan pulled herself
up. "Good boy, Keith! That WILL make it lots easier," she said
cheerfully, impersonally, turning away and making a great clatter of
pans in the sink.
But later, at least once every half-hour through that long forenoon,
Susan crept softly through the side hall to the half-open living-room
door, where she could watch Keith. She watched him get up and move
slowly along the side of the room, picking his way. She watched him
pause and move hesitating fingers down the backs of the chairs that he
encountered. But when she saw him stop and finger the books on the
little table by the window, she crept back to her kitchen--and rattled
still more loudly the pots and pans in the sink.
Just before the noon meal Keith appeared once more at the kitchen
door.
"Susan, would it bother you very much if I ate out here--with you?" he
asked.
"With me? Nonsense! You'll eat in the dinin'-room with your dad, of
course. Why, what would he say to your eatin' out here with me?"
"That's just it. It's dad. He'd like it, I'm sure," insisted the boy
feverishly. "You know sometimes I--I don't get any food on my fork,
when I eat, an' I have to--to feel for things, an' it--it must be
disagreeable to see me. An' you know he never liked disagreeable--"
"Now, Keith Burton, you stop right where you are," interrupted Susan
harshly. "You're goin' to eat with your father where you belong. An'
do you now run back to the settin'-room. I've got my dinner to get."
Keith had not disappeared down the hall, however, before Susan was
halfway up the back stairs. A moment later she was in the studio.
"Daniel Burton, you're goin' to have company to dinner," she panted.
"Company?"
"Yes. Your son." "KEITH?" The man drew back perceptibly.
"There, now, Daniel Burton, don't you go to scowlin' an' lookin' for a
place to run, just because you hate to see him feel 'round for what he
eats."
"But, Susan, it breaks my heart," moaned the man, turning quite away.
"What if it does? Ain't his broke, too? Can't you think of him a
little? Let me tell you this, Daniel Burton--that boy has more
consolation for your feelin's than you have for his, every time.
Didn't he jest come to me an' beg to eat with me, 'cause his dad
didn't like to see disagreeable things, an'--"
The man wheeled sharply.
"Did Keith--do that?"
"He did, jest now, sir."
"All right, Susan. I--I don't think you'll have to say--any more."
And Susan, after a sharp glance into the man's half-averted face, said
no more. A moment later she had left the room.
At dinner that day, with red eyes but a vivacious manner, she waited
on a man who incessantly talked of nothing in particular, and a boy
who sat white-faced and silent, eating almost nothing.