There came a day when Miss White's little school in the garret was
broken up. Mr. Ferguson declared that David and Blair needed a boot
instead of a petticoat to teach them their Latin--and a few other
things, too! He had found Mrs. Richie in tears because, under the big
hawthorn in her own back yard, David had blacked Blair's eye, and had
himself achieved a bloody nose. Mrs. Richie was for putting on her
things to go and apologize to Mrs. Maitland, and was hardly restrained
by her landlord's snort of laughter.
"Next time I hope he'll give him two black eyes, and Blair will loosen
one of his front teeth!" said Mr. Ferguson.
David's mother was speechless with horror.
"That's the worst of trusting a boy to a good woman," he barked,
knocking off his glasses angrily; "but I'll do what I can to thwart
you! I'll make sure there isn't any young-eyed cherubin business about
David. He has got to go to boarding-school, and learn something besides
his prayers. If somebody doesn't rescue him from apron-strings, he'll
be a 'very, very good young man'--and then may the Lord have mercy on
his soul!"
"I didn't know anybody could be too good," Mrs. Richie ventured.
"A woman can't be too good, but a man oughtn't to be," her landlord
instructed her.
David's mother was too bewildered by such sentiments to
protest--although, indeed, Mr. Ferguson need not have been quite so
concerned about David's "goodness." This freckled, clear-eyed
youngster, with straight yellow hair and good red cheeks, was just an
honest, growly boy, who dropped his clothes about on the floor of his
room, and whined over his lessons, and blustered largely when out of
his mother's hearing; furthermore, he had already experienced his first
stogie--with a consequent pallor about the gills that scared Mrs.
Richie nearly to death. But Robert Ferguson's jeering reference to
apron-strings resulted in his being sent to boarding school. Blair went
with him, "rescued" from the goodwoman regime of Cherry-pie's
instruction by Mr. Ferguson's advice to Mrs. Maitland; "although,"
Robert Ferguson admitted, candidly, "he doesn't need it as poor David
does; his mother wouldn't know how to make a Miss Nancy of him, even if
she wanted to!" Then, with a sardonic guess at Mrs. Richie's unspoken
thought, he added that Mrs. Maitland would not dream of going to live
in the town where her son was at school. "She has sense enough to know
that Blair, or any other boy worth his salt, would hate his mother if
she tagged on behind," said Mr. Ferguson; "of course you would never
think of doing such a thing, either," he ended, ironically.
"Of course not," said Mrs. Richie, faintly. So it was that, assisted by
her landlord, David's mother thrust her one chicken out into the world
unprotected by her hovering wing. About the time Miss White lost her
two masculine pupils, the girls began to go to a day-school in Mercer,
Cherry-pie's entire deposition as a teacher being brought about
because, poor lady! she fumbled badly when it came to a critical moment
with Elizabeth. It all grew out of one of the child's innumerable
squabbles with David--she got along fairly peaceably with Blair. She
and Nannie had been comparing pigtails, and David had asserted that
Elizabeth's hair was "the nicest"; which so gratified her that she
first hugged him violently, and then invited him to take her out rowing.
"I'll pay for the boat!" she said, and pirouetted around the room,
keeping time with:
"'Oh, that will be joyful, joyful, joyful!
Oh, that will be--'
"Uncle gave me a dollar yesterday," she interrupted herself,
breathlessly.
To this David, patiently straightening his collar after that ecstatic
embrace, objected; but his magnanimity was lessened by his explanation
that he wasn't going to have any _girl_ pay for him! This ruffled
Elizabeth's pride for a moment; however, she was not averse to saving
her dollar, so everything was arranged. David was to row her to
Willis's, a country tavern two miles down the river, where, as all
middle-aged Mercer will remember, the best jumbles in the world could
be purchased at the agreeable price of two for a cent. Elizabeth, who
was still congratulating herself on having "nicer hair than Nannie,"
and who loved the river (and the jumbles), was as punctual as a clock
in arriving at the covered bridge where at the toll-house wharf they
were to meet and embark. She had even been so forehanded as to bargain
with Mrs. Todd for the hire of the skiff, in which she immediately
seated herself, the tiller-ropes in her hands, all ready for David to
take the oars. "And I've waited, and waited, and waited!" she told
herself angrily, as she sat there in the faintly rocking skiff. And
after an hour of waiting, what should she see but David Richie racing
on the bridge with Blair Maitland! He had just simply forgotten his
engagement! (Elizabeth was so nearly a young lady that she said
"engagement.")
"I'll never forgive him," she said, and the dimple hardened in her
cheek. Sitting in the boat, she looked up at the two boys, David in
advance, a young, lithe figure, in cotton small-clothes and jersey,
leaping in great, beautiful strides, on and on and on, his face
glowing, his eyes like stars; then, alas, he gave a downward glance and
there was Elizabeth, waiting fiercely in the skiff! His "engagement"
came back to him; there was just one astonished, faltering instant; and
in it, of course, Blair shot ahead! It must be confessed that in his
rage at being beaten David promptly forgot Elizabeth again, for though
she waited still a little longer for him and his apology, no David
appeared, he and Blair being occupied in wrangling over their race. She
went home in a slowly gathering passion. _David had forgotten her!_ "He
likes Blair better than me; he'd rather race with another boy than go
out in a boat with me; and I said I'd pay for it--and I've only got one
dollar in the whole world!" At that stab of self-pity a tear ran down
the side of her nose (and she was still a whole block away from home!);
when it reached her lip, she was obliged to put her tongue out
furtively and lick it away. But repression made the outbreak, when it
came, doubly furious. She burst in upon Miss White, her dry eyes
blazing with rage.
"He made me wait; he didn't come; I hate him. I'll never speak to him
again. He hurt my feelings. He is a beast."
"Elizabeth! You mustn't use such unladylike words! When I was a young
lady I never even heard such words. Oh, my lamb, if you don't control
your temper, something dreadful will happen to you some day!"
"I hope something dreadful will happen to him some day," said
Elizabeth. And with that came the tears--a torrential rain, through
which the lightning played and the thunder crashed. Miss White in real
terror, left her, to get some smelling-salts, and the instant she was
alone Elizabeth ran across the room and stood before her mirror; then
she took a pair of scissors in her shaking hand and hacked off lock
after lock, strand after strand, of her shining hair. When it was done,
she looked at the russet stubble that was left with triumphant rage.
"There, now! I guess he won't think my hair is nicer than Nannie's any
more. I _hate_ him!" she said, and laughed out loud, her vivid face wet
and quivering.
Miss White, hurrying in, heard the laugh, and stood transfixed:
"Elizabeth!" The poor, ugly, shorn head, the pile of gleaming hair on
the bureau, the wicked, tear-stained, laughing face brought the poor
lady's heart into her throat. "Elizabeth!" she faltered again; and
Elizabeth ran and flung her arms about her neck.
"David forgot all about me," she sobbed. "He is always hurting my
feelings! And I can't _bear_ to have my feelings hurt. Oh, Cherry-pie,
kiss me! Kiss me!"
That was the end of the outburst; the ensuing penitence was unbridled
and temporary. The next morning she waylaid David to offer him some
candy, which he took with serene unconsciousness of any bad behavior on
his part.
"Awfully sorry I forgot about Willis's," he said casually; and took a
hearty handful of candy.
Elizabeth, looking into the nearly empty box, winced; then said,
bravely, "Take some more." He took a good deal more.
"David, I--I'm sorry I cut my hair."
"Why, I didn't notice," David said, wrinkling up his freckled nose and
glancing at her with some interest. "It looks awfully, doesn't it?"
"David, don't tell your mother, will you? She looks so sort of
horrified when I've been provoked. It almost makes me mad again,"
Elizabeth said, candidly.
"Materna thinks it's dreadful in you."
"Do you mind about my hair?" Elizabeth asked.
David laughed uproariously. "Why on earth should _I_ mind? If I were a
girl, you bet I'd keep my hair cut."
"Do you forgive me?" she said, in a whisper; "if you don't forgive me,
I shall die."
"Forgive you?" said David, astonished, his mouth full of candy; "why,
it's nothing to me if you cut off your hair. Only I shouldn't think
you'd want to look so like 'Sam Hill.' But I tell you what, Elizabeth;
you're too thin-skinned. What's the use of getting mad over every
little thing?"
"It wasn't so very little, to be forgotten."
"Well, yes; I suppose you were disappointed, but--"
Elizabeth's color began to rise. "Oh, I wasn't so terribly
disappointed. You needn't flatter yourself. I simply don't like to be
insulted."
"Ah, now, Elizabeth," he coaxed, "there you go again!"
"No, I don't. I'm _not_ angry. Only--you went with Blair; you didn't
want--" she choked, and flew back into the house, deaf to his clumsy
and troubled explanations.
In Miss White's room, Elizabeth announced her intention of entering a
convent, and it was then that Cherry-pie fumbled: she took the convent
seriously! The next morning she broke the awful news to Elizabeth's
uncle. It was before breakfast, and Mr. Ferguson--who had not time to
read his Bible for pressure of business--had gone out into the
grape-arbor in his narrow garden to feed the pigeons. There was a crowd
of them about his feet, their rimpling, iridescent necks and soft gray
bosoms pushing and jostling against one another, and their pink feet
actually touching his boots. When Miss White burst out at him, the
pigeons rose in startled flight, and Mr. Ferguson frowned.
"And she says," Miss White ended, almost in tears--"she says she is
going to enter a convent immejetly!"
"My dear Miss White," said Elizabeth's uncle, grimly, "there's no such
luck."
Miss White positively reeled. Then he explained, and Cherry-pie came
nearer to her employer in those ten minutes than in the ten years in
which she had looked after his niece. "I don't care about Elizabeth's
temper; she'll get over that. And I don't care a continental about her
hair or her religion; she can wear a wig or be a Mohammedan if it keeps
her straight. She has a bad inheritance, Miss White; I would be only
too pleased to know that she was shut up in a convent, safe and sound.
But this whim isn't worth talking about."
Miss White retired, nibbling with horror, and that night Robert
Ferguson went in to tell his neighbor his worries.
"What _am_ I to do with her?" he groaned. "She cut off her hair?" Mrs.
Richie repeated, astounded; "but why? How perfectly irrational!"
"Don't say 'how irrational'; say 'how Elizabeth.'"
"I wish she would try to control her temper," Mrs. Richie said,
anxiously.
But Mr. Ferguson was not troubled about that. "She's vain; that's what
worries me. She cried all afternoon about her hair."
"She needs a stronger hand than kind Miss White's," Mrs. Richie said;
"why not send her to school?" And the harassed uncle sighed with relief
at the idea, which was put into immediate execution.
With growing hair and the wholesome companionship of other girls, of
course the ascetic impulse died a natural death; but the temper did not
die. It only hid itself under that sense of propriety which is
responsible for so much of our good behavior. When it did break loose,
the child suffered afterward from the consciousness of having made a
fool of herself--which is a wholesome consciousness so far as it
goes--but it did not go very far with Elizabeth; she never suffered in
any deeper way. She took her temper for granted; she was not complacent
about it; she did not credit it to "temperament," she was merely matter
of fact; she said she "couldn't help it." "I don't want to get mad,"
she used to say to Nannie; "and of course I never mean any of the
horrid things I say. I'd like to be good, like you; but I can't help
being wicked." Between those dark moments of being "wicked" she was a
joyous, unself-conscious girl of generous loves, which she expressed as
primitively as she did her angers; indeed, in the expression of
affection Elizabeth had the exquisite and sometimes embarrassing
innocence of a child who has been brought up by a sad old bachelor and
a timid old maid. As for her angers, they were followed by irrational
efforts to "make up" with any one she felt she had wronged. She spent
her little pocket-money in buying presents for her maleficiaries, she
invented punishments for herself; and generally she confessed her sin
with humiliating fullness. Once she confessed to her uncle, thereby
greatly embarrassing him:
"Uncle, I want you to know I am a great sinner; probably the chief of
sinners," she said, breathing hard. She had come into his library after
supper, and was standing with a hand on the back of his chair; her eyes
were bright with unshed tears.
"Good gracious!" said Robert Ferguson, looking at her blankly over his
glasses, "what on earth have you been doing now?"
"I got mad, and I chopped up the feather in Cherry-pie's new bonnet,
and I told her she was a hideous, monstrous old donkey-hag."
"Elizabeth!"
"I did."
"Have you apologized?"
"Yes," said Elizabeth; "but what's the good of 'pologizing? _I said
it._ 'Course I 'pologized; and I kissed her muddy rubbers when she
wasn't looking; and I gave her all my money for a new feather"--she
stopped, and sighed deeply; "and here is the money you gave me to go to
the theater. So now I haven't any money at all, in the world."
Poor Robert Ferguson, with a despairing jerk at the black ribbon of his
glasses, leaned back in his chair, helpless with perplexity. Why on
earth did she give him back his money? He could not follow her mental
processes. He said as much to Mrs. Richie the next time he went to see
her. He went to see her quite often in those days. For the convenience
of David and Elizabeth, a doorway had been cut in the brick wall
between the two gardens, and Mr. Ferguson used it frequently. In their
five or six years of living next door to each other the acquaintance of
these two neighbors had deepened into a sort of tentative intimacy,
which they never quite thought of as friendship, but which permitted
many confidences about their two children.
And when they talked about their children, they spoke, of course, of
the other two, for one could not think of David without remembering
Blair, or talk of Elizabeth without contrasting her with Nannie. Nannie
had none of that caroling vitality which made the younger girl an acute
anxiety and a perpetual delight. She was like a little plant growing in
the shade--a gently good child, who never gave anybody any trouble; she
continued to be a 'fraid-cat, and looked under the bed every night for
a burglar. With Blair at boarding-school her life was very solitary,
for of course there was no intimacy between her and her stepmother.
Mrs. Maitland was invariably kind to her, and astonishingly patient
with the rather dull little mind--one of those minds that are like
softly tangled skeins of single zephyr; if you try to unwind the mild,
elusive thoughts, they only knot tightly upon themselves, and the
result is a half-frightened and very obstinate silence. But Mrs.
Maitland never tried to unwind Nannie's thoughts; she used to look at
her sometimes in kindly amusement, as one might look at a kitten or a
canary; and sometimes she said to Robert Ferguson that Nannie was like
her own mother;--"but Blair has brains!" she would say, complacently.
School did not give the girl the usual intense friendships, and except
for Elizabeth, she had no companions; her one interest was Blair, and
her only occupation out of school hours was her drawing--which was
nothing more than endless, meaningless copying. It was Nannie's
essential child-likeness that kept her elders, and indeed David and
Blair too, from understanding that she and Elizabeth were no longer
little girls. Perhaps the boys first realized Elizabeth's age when they
simultaneously discovered that she was pretty....
Elizabeth's long braids had been always attractive to the masculine
eye; they had suggested jokes about pigtails, and much of that peculiar
humor so pleasing to the young male; but the summer that she "put up
her hair," the puppies, so to speak, got their eyes open. When the boys
saw those soft plaits, no longer hanging within easy reach of a rude
and teasing hand, but folded around her head behind her little ears;
when they saw the small curls breaking over and through the brown
braids that were flecked with gilt, and the stray locks, like feathers
of spun silk, clustering in the nape of her neck; when David and Blair
saw these things--it was about the time their voices were showing
amazing and ludicrous register--something below the artless brutalities
of the boys' sense of humor was touched. They took abruptly their first
perilous step out of boyhood. Of course they did not know it.... The
significant moment came one afternoon when they all went out to the
toll-house for ice-cream. There was a little delay at the gate, while
the boys wrangled as to who should stand treat. "I'll pull straws with
you," said Blair; Blair's pleasant, indolent mind found the appeal to
chance the easiest way to settle things, but he was always good-natured
when, as now, the verdict was against him. "Come on," he commanded,
gayly, "I'll shell out!" Mrs. Todd, who had begun to dispense pink and
brown ice-cream, for them when they were very little children, winked
and nodded as they all came in together, and made a jocose remark about
"handsome couples"; then she trundled off to get the ice-cream, leaving
them in the saloon. This "saloon" was an ell of the toll-house; it
opened on a little garden, from which a flight of rickety steps led
down to a float where half a dozen skiffs were tied up, waiting to be
hired. In warm weather, when the garden was blazing with fragrant
color, Mrs. Todd would permit favored patrons to put their small tables
out among the marigolds and zinnias and sit and eat and talk. The
saloon itself had Nottingham-lace window-curtains, and crewel texts
enjoining remembrance of the Creator, and calling upon Him to "bless
our home." The tables, with marble tops translucent from years of
spilled ice cream, had each a worsted mat, on which was a glass vase
full of blue paper roses; on the ceiling there was a wonderful star of
scalloped blue tissue-paper--ostensibly to allure flies, but hanging
there winter and summer, year in and year out. Between the windows that
looked out on the river stood a piano, draped with a festooning scarf
of bandanna handkerchiefs. These things seemed to Blair, at this stage
of his esthetic development, very satisfying, and part of his pleasure
in "treating" came from his surroundings; he used to look about him
enviously, thinking of the terrible dining-room at home; and on sunny
days he used to look, with even keener pleasure, at the reflected
ripple of light, striking up from the river below, and moving endlessly
across the fly-specked ceiling. Watching the play of moving light, he
would put his tin spoon into his tumbler of ice-cream and taste the
snowy mixture with a slow prolongation of pleasure, while the two girls
chattered like sparrows, and David listened, saying very little and
always ready to let Elizabeth finish his ice-cream after she had
devoured her own.
It was on one of these occasions that Blair, watching that long ripple
on the ceiling, suddenly saw the sunshine sparkle on Elizabeth's hair,
and his spoon paused midway to his lips. "Oh, say, isn't Elizabeth's
hair nice?" he said.
David turned and looked at it. "I've seen lots of girls with hair like
that," he said; but he sighed, and scratched his left ankle with his
right foot. Blair, smiling to himself, put out a hesitating finger and
touched a shimmering curl; upon which Elizabeth ducked and laughed, and
dancing over to the old tin pan of a piano pounded out "Shoo Fly" with
one finger. Blair, watching the lovely color in her cheek, said in
honest delight: "When your face gets red like that, you are awfully
good-looking, Elizabeth."
"Good-looking"; that was a new idea to the four friends. Nannie gaped;
Elizabeth giggled; David "got red" on his own account, and muttered
under his breath, "Tell that to the marines!" But into Blair's face had
come, suddenly, a new expression; his eyes smiled vaguely; he came
sidling over to Elizabeth and stood beside her, sighing deeply:
"Elizabeth, you are an awful nice girl."
Elizabeth shrieked with laughter. "Listen to Blair--he's spoony!"
Instantly Blair was angry; "spooniness" vanished in a flash; he did not
speak for fully five minutes. Just as they started home, however, he
came out of his glumness to remember Miss White. "I'm going to take
Cherry-pie some ice-cream," he said; and all the way back he was so
absorbed in trying--unsuccessfully--to keep the pallid pink contents of
the mussy paper box from dripping on his clothes that he was able to
forget Elizabeth's rudeness. But childhood, for all four of them, ended
that afternoon.
When vacation was over, and they were back in the harness again, both
boys forgot that first tremulous clutch at the garments of life; in
fact, like all wholesome boys of fifteen or sixteen, they thought
"girls" a bore. It was not until the next long vacation that the old,
happy, squabbling relationship began to be tinged with a new
consciousness. It was the elemental instinct, the everlasting human
impulse. The boys, hobbledehoys, both of them, grew shy and turned red
at unexpected moments. The girls developed a certain condescension of
manner, which was very confusing and irritating to the boys. Elizabeth,
as unaware of herself as the bud that has not opened to the bee, sighed
a good deal, and repeated poetry to any one who would listen to her.
She said boys were awfully rough, and their boots had a disagreeable
smell, "I shall never get married," said Elizabeth; "I hate boys."
Nannie did not hate anybody, but she thought she would rather be a
missionary than marry;--"though I'm afraid I'd be afraid of the
savages," she confessed, timorously.
David and Blair were confidential to each other about girls in general,
and Elizabeth in particular; they said she was terribly stand-offish.
"Oh, well, she's a girl," said David; "what can you expect?"
"She's darned good-looking," Blair blurted out. And David said, with
some annoyance, "What's that amount to?" He said that, for his part, he
didn't mean to fool around after girls. "But I'm older than you, Blair;
you'll feel that way when you get to be my age; it's only when a man is
very young that he bothers with 'em."
"That's so," said Blair, gloomily. "Well, I never expect to marry."
Blair was very gloomy just then; he had come home from school the
embodiment of discontent. He was old enough now to suffer agonies of
mortification because of his mother's occupation. "The idea of a lady
running an Iron Works!" he said to David, who tried rather
half-heartedly to comfort him; David was complacently sure that _his_
mother wouldn't run an Iron Works! "I hate the whole caboodle," Blair
said, angrily. It was his old shrinking from "ugliness." And everything
at home was ugly;--the great old house in the midst of Maitland's
Shantytown; the darkness and grime of it; the smell of soot in the
halls; Harris's slatternly ways; his mother's big, beautiful, dirty
fingers. "When she sneezes," Blair said, grinding his teeth, "I
could--swear! She takes the roof off." He grew hot with shame when Mrs.
Richie, whom he admired profoundly, came to take supper with his mother
at the office table with its odds and ends of china. (As the old Canton
dinner service had broken and fire-cracked, Harris had replenished the
shelves of the china-closet according to his own taste limited by Mrs.
Maitland's economic orders.) Blair found everything hideous, or vulgar,
or uncomfortable, and he said so to Nannie with a violence that
betrayed real suffering. For it is suffering when the young creature
finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively the child is
proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest point,
its sense of conventionality--for nothing is as conventional as
adolescence--that natural instinct is headed off, and of course there
is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her mixture of squalor and
dignity, had no time to consider such abstractions. As for there being
anything unwomanly in her occupation, such an idea never entered her
head. To Sarah Maitland, no work which it was a woman's duty to do
could be unwomanly; she was incapable of consciously aping masculinity,
but to earn her living and heap up a fortune for her son, was, to her
way of thinking, just the plain common sense of duty. But more than
that, the heart in her bosom would have proved her sex to her; how she
loved to knit the pink socks for dimpled little feet! how she winced
when her son seemed to shrink from her; how jealous she was still of
that goose Molly,--who had been another man's wife for as many years as
Herbert Maitland had been in his grave. But Blair saw none of these
things that might have told him that his mother was a very woman.
Instead, his conventionality was insulted at every turn; his love of
beauty was outraged. As a result a wall was slowly built between the
mother and son, a wall whose foundations had been laid when the little
boy had pointed his finger at her and said "uggy."
Mrs. Maitland was, of course, perfectly unconscious of her son's hot
misery; she was so happy at having him at home again that she could not
see that he was unhappy at being at home. She was pathetically eager to
please him. Her theory--if in her absorbed life she could be said to
have a theory--was that Blair should have everything he wanted, so that
he should the sooner be a man. Money, she thought, would give him
everything. She herself wanted nothing money could give, except food
and shelter; the only use she had for money was to make more money; but
she realized that other people, especially young men, like the things
it would buy. Twice during that particular vacation, for no cause
except to gratify herself, she gave her son a wickedly large check; and
once, when Nannie told her that he wanted to pay for some painting
lessons, though she demurred just for a moment, she paid the bill so
that his own spending-money should not be diminished.
"What on earth does a man who is going to run an Iron Works want with
painting lessons?" she said to the entreating sister. But even while
she made her grumbling protest, she wrote a check.
As for Blair, he took the money, as he took everything else that she
gave him of opportunity and happiness, and said, "Thank you, mother;
you are awfully good"; but he shut his eyes when he kissed her. He was
blind to the love, the yearning, the outstretched hands of
motherhood,--not because he was cruel, or hard, or mean; but because he
was young, and delighted in beauty.
Of course his wretchedness lessened after a fortnight or so--habit does
much to reconcile us to unpleasantness; besides that, his painting was
an interest, and his voice began to be a delight to him; he used to
sing a good deal, making Nannie play his accompaniments, and sometimes
his mother, working in the dining-room, would pause a moment, with
lifted head, and listen and half smile--then fall to work again
furiously.
But the real solace to his misery and irritation came to him--a boy
still in years--in the sudden realization of _Elizabeth!_