Father's hand kept on aimlessly whittling, while his eyes poked out like
those of a harassed fiddler-crab when he saw Mrs. Vance Carter actually
stop. It was surely a dream. In his worry over inactivity he had found
himself falling into queer little illusions lately. He was conscious
that the chauffeur, whom he had bribed to stop some day, was winking at
him in a vulgar manner not at all appropriate to his dove-gray uniform.
He had a spasm of indignant wonder. "I'll bet a hat that fellow didn't
have a thing to do with this; he's a grafter." Then he sprang up,
bowing.
Mrs. Carter rustled up to him and murmured, "May we have some tea, here,
and a cake, do you know?"
"Oh yes, ma'am! Won't you step right in? Fine day, ma'am."
Mrs. Carter seemed not to have any opinions regarding the day. Quite
right, too; it wasn't an especially fine day; just _a day_.
She marched in, gave one quick, nervous look, and said, with tremendous
politeness: "May we have this table by the window? You have such a
charming view over the cliffs."
"Oh yes, ma'am! We hoped some day you'd take that table. Kind of kept
the view for you," said Father, with panting gallantry, fairly falling
over himself as he rushed across the floor to pull out their chairs and
straighten the table-cloth.
Mrs. Carter paid no attention to him whatsoever. She drew a
spectacle-case from her small hand-bag and set upon her beetling nose a
huge pair of horn-rimmed eye-glasses. She picked up the menu-card as
though she were delicately removing a bug--supposing there to be any bug
so presumptuous as to crawl upon her smart tan suit. She raised her chin
and held the card high.
"Uh, tea, lettuce sandwiches, cream-cheese sandwiches, chicken
sandwiches, doughnuts, cinnamon toast," she read off to her daughter.
So quickly that he started, she turned on Father and demanded, "What
sort of tea have you, please?"
"Why, uh--just a minute and I'll ask."
Father bolted through the door into the large, clean, woodeny,
old-fashioned kitchen, where Mother was wearily taking a batch of
doughnuts out of the fat-kettle.
"Mother!" he exulted. "Mrs. Carter--she's here!"
Mother dropped the doughnuts back into the kettle. The splashing fat
must have burnt her, but beyond mutely wiping the grease from her hand,
she paid no attention to it. She turned paper white. "Oh, Seth!" she
groaned. Then, in agony, "After your going and getting them here, I
haven't a thing ready for them but lettuce sandwiches and fresh
doughnuts."
"Never mind. I'll make them take those. Say, what kind of tea have we
got now?"
"Oh, dear! we haven't got a thing left but just--well, it's just tea,
mixed."
He galloped back into the tea-room, frightened lest the royal patrons
leave before they were served. On the way he resolved to lie--not as the
pinching tradesman lies, smugly and unconsciously, but desperately, to
save Mother.
"We have orange pekoe and oolong," he gasped.
"Then you might give us some orange pekoe and--oh, two chicken
sandwiches."
"Gee! I'm awfully sorry, ma'am, but we're just out of chicken
sandwiches. If we'd only known _you_ were coming-- But we have some very
nice fresh lettuce sandwiches, and I do wish you would try some of our
doughnuts. They're fresh-made, just this minute."
He clasped his hands, pressed them till the fingers of one gouged the
back of the other. Father was not a Uriah Heep. At Pilkings & Son's he
had often "talked back" to some of his best customers. But now he would
gladly have licked Mrs. Vance Carter's spatted shoes.
"No--oh, bring us some lettuce sandwiches and some orange pekoe. I don't
think we care for any doughnuts," said Mrs. Carter, impatiently.
Father bolted again, and whispered to Mother, who stood where he had
left her, "Lettuce sandwiches and tea, and for Heaven's sake make the
tea taste as much like orange pekoe as you can."
The Applebys had no delicately adjusted rule about the thickness of
bread in sandwiches. Sometimes Mother was moved to make them very
dainty, very thin and trim. But now, because he was in such a fever to
please the Carters, Father fairly slashed their last loaf of bread, and
slapped in the lettuce, while Mother was drawing tea. In two minutes he
was proudly entering with the service-tray. He set it down before the
Carters; he fussed with a crumb on the table-cloth, with the rather
faded crimson rambler in the ornate pressed-glass vase. Mrs. Carter
glanced at him impatiently. He realized that he was being officious, and
rushed away.
Mother was sitting by the wide kitchen table, which was scarred with
generations of use of cleaver and bread-knife and steak-pounder. The
kitchen door was open to the broad land, which flowed up to the sill in
a pleasant sea of waving grass. But she was turned from it, staring
apprehensively toward the tea-room. Round her swirled the heat from the
stove, and restless flies lighted on her cheek and flew off at hectic
tangents.
Father tiptoed up to her, smiling. "I've left the door open wide enough
so you can see them," he whispered. "Come and take a look at them. Mrs.
Vance Carter--gee! And her daughter's a mighty pretty girl--not that I
think much of these blouses that are cut so low and all."
"Oh, I wouldn't dare--"
Mother stopped short. Quiet as they were, they could distinctly hear
the voices from the other room.
The Carter girl--she who was known as "Pig Carter" at Miss Severance's
school--was snapping, "What in the world ever made you come to this
frightful hole, mama?"
"Simply because I wanted to stop some place, and I really can't stand
that mincing Miss Mitchin and her half-baked yearners and that odious
creature with the beard and the ballet skirt, again."
"At least Mitchin's shop is better than this awful place. Why, this
might be one of those railroad lunch-rooms you see from a train."
"I'm not so sure this really is worse than the Mitchin creature's zoo,
Marky. At least this is a perfect study in what not to do. I fancy it
would be a good thing for every interior decorator to come here and
learn what to avoid. And, you know, they really might have done
something with this place--rather a decent old house, with a good plain
fireplace. But then, any one could make a charming room, and only a
genius could have imagined this combination--an oak dining-room chair
with a wicker table and a cotton table-cloth. I'm sure that Exhibition
of Bad Taste--wasn't it? I don't pore over the newspapers as you
do--that they held in New York would have been charmed to secure that
picture of the kittens and the infant."
All this, conveyed in the Carters' clear, high-bred voices, Father and
Mother heard perfectly.... The picture of kittens and a baby they had
bought just after Lulu's birth, and it had always hung above the couch
in their living-room in New York.
Margaret Carter was continuing: "I don't mind the bad taste a bit, but I
was hungry after motoring all day, almost, and I did want a decent tea.
If you could see that horrid Victorian drawing-room at Miss Severance's
you could stand even sticky kitties--in a picture. I don't care about
the interior decoration as long as Marky's little interior gets
decorated decently. But this tea is simply terrible. Orange pekoe! Why,
even Miss Severance's horrid Ceylon is better than this, and she does
give you cream, instead of this milk of magnesia or soapy water or
whatever the beastly stuff is. And to have to drink it out of these
horrid thick cups--like toothbrush mugs. I'm sure I'll find a chewed-up
old toothbrush when I get to the bottom."
"Don't be vulgar, Marky. You might remember this is Massachusetts, not
New York."
"Well, this Massachusetts lettuce--I'm perfectly convinced that they
used it for floor-rags before they went and lost it in the
sandwiches--and this thick crumby bread--oh, it's unspeakable. I do wish
you wouldn't poke around in these horrid places, mama, or else leave me
in the car when you are moved to go slumming. I'm sure I don't feel any
call to uplift the poor."
"My dear child, I seem to remember your admiring Freddy Dabney because
he is so heroically poor. It's very good for you to come to a place like
this. Now you know what it's like to be poor, Marky. You can see
precisely how romantic it really is."
"Oh, I'll admit Marky is a perfect little devil. But I do want you to
observe that she's been brave enough to eat part of her sandwich. Let's
go. Where is the nice smiling little man? Let's pay our bill and go."
Twenty feet from the bored Carters was tragedy. Gray-faced, dumb, Father
stood by Mother's chair, stroking her dull hair as she laid her head on
the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back
and forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he
listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman
of old France might have caressed his marquise.
"Mother--" he began. It was hard to say anything when there was nothing
to say. "It's all right. They're just silly snobs. They--"
Yes, the Applebys could not understand every detail of what the
well-bred Carters had said. "Interior decoration"--that didn't mean
anything to them. All that they understood was that they were fools and
failures, in the beginning of their old age; that they belonged to the
quite ludicrously inefficient.
Father realized, presently, that the Carters were waiting for their
bill. For a minute more he stroked Mother's hair. If the Carters would
only go from this place they had desecrated, and take their damned money
with them! But he had been trained by years of dealing with
self-satisfied people in a shoe-store at least to make an effort to
conceal his feelings. He dragged himself into the tea-room, kept himself
waiting with expressionless face till Mrs. Carter murmured:
"The bill, please?"
Tonelessly he said, "Thirty cents."
Mrs. Carter took out, not three, but four dimes--four nice, shiny, new
dimes; she sometimes said at her bank that really she couldn't touch
soiled money. She dropped them on the table-cloth, and went modestly on
her way, an honorable, clever, rather kindly and unhappy woman who had
just committed murder.
Father picked up the ten-cent tip. With loathing he threw it in the
fireplace. Then went, knelt down, and picked it out again. Mother would
need all the money he could get for her in the coming wintry days of
failure--failure he himself had brought upon her.