From 'With the Procession.' Copyright 1894 by Henry B. Fuller, and
reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers, New York
"Well, here goes!" said Jane half aloud, with her foot on the lowest
of the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous
pillared arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a
sturdy and rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough-faced glitter
of a vast and variegated facade; and higher still, the morning sun
shattered its beams over a tumult of angular roofs and towering
chimneys.
"It _is_ swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the
wrought-iron work of the outer doors, and the jewels and bevels of the
inner ones.
"Where is the thingamajig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was
searching for the door-bell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo
in order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming
splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in
for it." She had decided to take the richest and best known and most
fashionable woman on her list to start with; the worst over at the
beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.
"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed
further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"
The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates--" she began.
The door opened half-way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his
chin and upper lip had the mottled smudge that shows in so many of
those conscientious portraits of the olden time.
"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself.
She dropped her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. Then she saw that
the man wore knee-breeches and black-silk stockings.
"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in _this_
town!"
She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.
The man in the meanwhile studied her with a searching gravity, and as
it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but
there were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all.
Some of these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought
polish for the piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in
appearance as Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy;
few of them were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at
the threshold by exhibiting a black leather bag.
"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will: she
acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him
into the concession that she herself was nothing less.
The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that
he was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
permitted to pass the gate.
She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa of
forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted
upon nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow
door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with
the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and a stairway which led
with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.
"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
speaking; he in fact loomed up, to the practical eclipse of all this
luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
eight hundred feet from the Monument!"
Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected
in an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity
of the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more
amply, than she could have imagined possible through the passage of
one person merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow
and somewhat ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning-gown
with a broad plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous
material in the sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and
her voluminous gray hair was tossed and fretted about the temples
after the fashion of a marquise of the old regime. Jane set her jaw
and clamped her knotty fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable
chair.
"I don't care if she _is_ so rich," she muttered, "and so famous, and
so fashionable, and so terribly handsome; she can't bear _me_ down."
The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps
was silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide
and roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she
was to deal: with one of the big, the broad, the great, the
triumphant; with one of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian
keenness and sagacity, an American ambition and determination; with
one who baffles circumstance and almost masters fate--with one of the
conquerors, in short.
"I don't hear her," thought the expectant girl, in some trepidation;
"but all the same, she's got to cross that bare space just outside the
door before--yes, there's her step! And here she is herself!"
Mrs. Bates appeared in the doorway. She had a strong nose of the lofty
Roman type; her bosom heaved with breaths deep, but quiet and regular.
She had a pair of large, full blue eyes, and these she now fixed on
Jane with an expression of rather cold questioning.
"Miss Marshall?" Her voice was firm, smooth, even, rich, deep. She
advanced a foot or two within the room and remained standing
there....
"My father," Jane began again, in the same tone, "is David Marshall.
He is very well known, I believe, in Chicago. We have lived here a
great many years. It seems to me that there ought to--"
"David Marshall?" repeated Mrs. Bates, gently. "Ah, I _do_ know David
Marshall--yes," she said; "or did--a good many years ago." She looked
up into Jane's face now with a completely altered expression. Her
glance was curious and searching, but it was very kindly. "And you are
David Marshall's daughter?" She smiled indulgently at Jane's outburst
of spunk. "Really--David Marshall's daughter?"
"Yes," answered Jane, with a gruff brevity. She was far from ready to
be placated yet.
"David Marshall's daughter! Then, my dear child, why not have said so
in the first place, without lugging in everybody and everything else
you could think of? Hasn't your father ever spoken of me? And how is
he, anyway? I haven't seen him--to really speak to him--for fifteen
years. It may be even more."
She seemed to have laid hands on a heavy bar, to have wrenched it from
its holds, to have flung it aside from the footpath, and to be
inviting Jane to advance without let or hindrance.
But Jane stood there with pique in her breast, and her long thin arms
laid rigid against her sides. "Let her 'dear child' me, if she wants
to; she sha'n't bring me around in any such way as that."
All this, however, availed little against Mrs. Bates's new manner. The
citadel so closely sealed to charity was throwing itself wide open to
memory. The portcullis was dropped, and the late enemy was invited to
advance as a friend.
Nay, urged. Mrs. Bates presently seized Jane's unwilling hands. She
gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles
within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and
looked into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that
temper once myself," she said.
The sluice gates of caution and reserve were opening wide; the streams
of tenderness and sympathy were bubbling and fretting to take their
course.
"And your father is well? And you are living in the same old place?
Oh, this terrible town! You can't keep your old friends; you can
hardly know your new ones. We are only a mile or two apart, and yet it
is the same as if it were a hundred."
Jane yielded up her hands half unwillingly. She could not, in spite of
herself, remain completely unrelenting, but she was determined not to
permit herself to be patronized. "Yes, we live in the same old place.
And in the same old way," she added--in the spirit of concession.
Mrs. Bates studied her face intently. "Do you look like him--like your
father?"
"No," answered Jane. "Not so very much. Nor like any of the rest of
the family." The statue was beginning to melt. "I'm unique." And
another drop fell.
"Don't slander yourself." She tapped Jane lightly on the shoulder.
Jane looked at her with a protesting, or at least a questioning,
seriousness. It had the usual effect of a wild stare. "I wasn't
meaning to," she said, shortly, and began to congeal again. She also
shrugged her shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and
patted.
"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially.
She motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the
roomier sofa. "Or no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day;
it's so hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should.
Come, it ought to be warmer in the music-room."
"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
have a spare hour on my hands this morning--the first in a month. My
music teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You
shall have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your
plans; I dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane
Marshall."
"Her music teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor
so far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from
searching out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of
fifty-five want to be taking music lessons for?"
The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
hard-woods; its paneled walls and ceilings rang with a magnificent
sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like
marquetry of the floor.
To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by
special order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall
music-stand in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound
scores of all the German classics and the usual operas of the French
and Italian schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing
there seemed to have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it
grand!" sighed Jane. She already felt herself succumbing beneath these
accumulated splendors.
Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano stool, with her back
to the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I
have sat down here for a month."
"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this
I should play in it every day."
"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
practicing in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
thing?"--thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover
of the keyboard.
"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it was. I
don't believe she can play a single note."
"What do you suppose happened to me last winter?" Mrs. Bates went on.
"I had the greatest set-back of my life. I asked to join the Amateur
Musical Club. They wouldn't let me in."
"Why not?"
"Well, I played before their committee, and then the secretary wrote
me a note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it
meant. I see now well enough that my fingers _were_ rather stiffer
than I realized, and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering
Zephyrs' were not quite up to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and
Chopin. 'Very well,' said I, 'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under.
I never give up. So I sent right out for a teacher. I practiced scales
an hour a day for weeks and months. Granger thought I was crazy. I
tackled Grieg and Lassen and Chopin,--yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. I'm
going to play for that committee next month. Let me see if they'll
dare to vote me out again!"
"Oh, _that's_ it!" thought Jane. She was beginning to feel desirous of
meting out exact and even-handed justice. She found it impossible to
withhold respect from so much grit and determination.
"But your father liked those old-time things, and so did all the other
young men." Mrs. Bates creased and folded the end of one of her long
sleeves, and seemed lapsing into a retrospective mood. "Why, some
evenings they used to sit two deep around the room to hear me do the
'Battle of Prague.' Do you know the 'Java March'?" she asked suddenly.
"I'm afraid not," Jane was obliged to confess.
"Your father always had a great fondness for that. I don't know," she
went on, after a short pause, "whether you understand that your father
was one of my old beaux--at least, I always counted him with the rest.
I was a gay girl in my day, and I wanted to make the list as long as I
could; so I counted in the quiet ones as well as the noisy ones. Your
father was one of the quiet ones."
"So I should have imagined," said Jane. Her maiden delicacy was just a
shade affrighted at the turn the talk was taking.
"When I was playing he would sit there by the hour and never say a
word. My banner piece was really a fantasia on 'Sonnambula'--a new
thing here; I was the first one in town to have it. There were
thirteen pages, and there was always a rush to see who should turn
them. Your father didn't often enter the rush, but I really liked his
way of turning the best of any. He never turned too soon or too late;
he never bothered me by shifting his feet every second or two, nor by
talking to me at the hard places. In fact, he was the only one who
could do it right."
"Yes," said Jane, with an appreciative sigh; "that's pa--all over."
Mrs. Bates was twisting her long sleeves around her wrists. Presently
she shivered slightly. "Well, really," she said, "I don't see that
this place is much warmer than the other; let's try the library."
In this room our antique and Spartan Jane was made to feel the need of
yet stronger props to hold her up against the overbearing weight of
latter-day magnificence. She found herself surrounded now by a sombre
and solid splendor. Stamped hangings of Cordova leather lined the
walls, around whose bases ran a low range of ornate bookcases,
constructed with the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's
art. In the centre of the room a wide and substantial table was set
with all the paraphernalia of correspondence, and the leathery abysses
of three or four vast easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish
self-abandonment.
"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows
of formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after
that poor sole book-case of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing
like a wardrobe, and with a couple of drawers at the bottom,
receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes.
"How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole
being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and
Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets', and--"
"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in genially;
"and enough Encyclopaedia Britannica to reach around the corner and
back again. Sets--sets--sets."
"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all
abashed by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and
write papers at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.
"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But
really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it
was put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the
keys are to get at them with. _I_ can't do anything with them; why,
some of them weigh five or six pounds!"
Jane shriveled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she
had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest
interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her
head to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the
cord; doing nobody any good--their owners least of all." She resolved
to admire openly nothing more whatever.
Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane
towards another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with
a resumption of her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of
books--especially poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I
was likely to be alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe
I could give you even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the
Romans. Yes; and almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."
Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman; and here
apparently was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell me," she
inquired, with something approaching sternness, "that my father--_my
father_--was ever fond of poetry and--and music, and--and all that
sort of thing?"
"Certainly. Why not? I remember your father as a high-minded young
man, with a great deal of good taste; I always thought him much above
the average. And that Shakespeare of his--I recall it perfectly. It
was a chubby little book bound in brown leather, with an embossed
stamp, and print a great deal too fine for _my_ eyes. He always had to
do the reading; and he read very pleasantly." She scanned Jane
closely. "Perhaps you have never done your father justice."
Jane felt herself driven to defense--even to apology. "The fact is,"
she said, "pa is so quiet; he never says much of anything. I'm about
the only one of the family who knows him very well, and I guess _I_
don't know him any too well." She felt, though, that Mrs. Bates had no
right to defend her father against his own daughter; no, nor any need.
"I suppose so," said Mrs. Bates slowly. She crossed over to the
radiator and began working at the valve. "I _told_ Granger I knew he'd
be sorry if he didn't put in furnace flues too. I really can't ask you
to take your things off down here; let's go up-stairs--that's the only
warm place I can think of."
She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the
rooms before you go up?"
"Yes--I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage
no ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as
she felt good manners would allow.
Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This,"
she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is
the--well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have
decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"
Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering
apartment; it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of
the eighteenth century--an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking.
Grilles, panels, mirror frames, all glimmered in green and gold, and a
row of lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty
ceiling.
Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose
general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of
guide-post, had rather baffled her.
"Hem!" she observed critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious
splendor of the place; "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period;
done, too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a
real _jardin d'hiver_, in fact. Very handsome indeed."
Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a
response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"
"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different
periods in architecture and decoration."
"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself--and to three or four
others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand
still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music lessons. It _is_ a
little singular, I admit--my beginning as a teacher and ending as a
pupil. You know, of course, that I _was_ a school-teacher? Yes, I had
a little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church
basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a
little bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know
those old-fashioned frame cottages--one of them. In the early days pa
was a carpenter--a boss carpenter, to do him full justice; the town
was growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the
beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted,
and wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own
hats till long after I was married."
Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a
tapestried _causeuse_. The light from the lofty windows shattered on
the prisms of her glittering chandeliers, and diffused itself over the
paneled Loves and Graces around her.
"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out
and do something for myself--I've always tried to hold up my own end.
My little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback--another
school next door, full of great rowdy boys. They would climb the fence
and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw
stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught
book-keeping. Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I
used to lie awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival
institution. Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or
three children who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to
work on single entry. I don't know whether they learned anything, but
_I_ did--enough to keep Granger's books for the first year after we
started out."
Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such
confidences as these.
"We were married at the most fashionable church in town--right there
in Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like
it, in her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves,
but we had some awfully stylish neighbors--all those Terrace Row
people, just around the corner. 'We'll get there too, sometime,' I
said to Granger. 'This is going to be a big town, and we have a good
show to be big people in it. Don't let's start in life like beggars
going to the back door for cold victuals; let's march right up the
front steps and ring the bell _like_ somebody.' So, as I say, we were
married at the best church in town; we thought it safe enough to
discount the future."
"Good for you," said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick
of these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."
"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
Granger:--'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out
some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--'
The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this
room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people.
You ought to have been here at the _bal poudre_ I gave last
season--lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on
their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this."
Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor.
"The next thing will be something else."
Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment.
"This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my
distinguished guests."
"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's 'Alhambra' by heart. "Only it
isn't Moorish; it's Baroque--and a very good example."
The room had a heavy paneled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in
each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners,
half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast
fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment,
broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is
Baroque all over."
"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly, "are you the woman who read
about the 'Decadence of the Renaissance Forms' at the last
Fortnightly?"
"I'm the woman," responded Jane modestly.
"I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an
awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind
that day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something--or
so we thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear--well, it just made
me blue. You didn't notice it?"
"I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there."
"Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to
it; it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then--you
think them corrupt and degraded?"
"Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later
forms are interesting from a historical and sociological point of
view. And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter."
Jane slid over these big words with a practiced ease.
"They impressed my notables, any way," retorted Mrs. Bates. "We
entertained a good deal during the Fair--it was expected, of course,
from people of our position. We had princes and counts and honorables
without end. I remember how delighted I was with my first prince--a
Russian. H'm! later in the season Russian princes were as plentiful as
blackberries: you stepped on one at every turn. We had some of the
English too. One of their young men visited us at Geneva during the
summer. I never quite made out who invited him; I have half an idea
that he invited himself. He was a great trial. Queer about the
English, isn't it? How can people who are so clever and capable in
practical things ever be such insolent tom-fools in social things?
Well, we might just stick our noses in the picture gallery for a
minute.
"We're almost beginners in this branch of industry," she expounded, as
she stood beside Jane in the centre of the room under the coldly
diffused glare of the skylight. "In my young days it was all Bierstadt
and De Haas; there wasn't supposed to be anything beyond. But as soon
as I began to hear about the Millet and the Barbizon crowd, I saw
there was. Well, I set to work, as usual. I studied and learned. I
_want_ to learn. I want to move; I want to keep right up with the
times and the people. I got books and photographs, and I went to all
the galleries. I read the artists' biographies and took in all the
loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too. Some of these things are going
to the Art Institute next week--that Daubigny, for one. It's little,
but it's good: there couldn't be anything more like him, could there?
"We haven't got any Millet yet, but that morning thing over there is a
Corot--at least we think so. I was going to ask one of the French
commissioners about it last summer, but my nerve gave out at the last
minute. Mr. Bates bought it on his own responsibility. I let him go
ahead; for after all, people of our position would naturally be
expected to have a Corot. I don't care to tell you what he paid for
it."...
"There's some more high art," said Mrs. Bates, with a wave of her hand
towards the opposite wall. "Carolus Duran; fifty thousand francs; and
he wouldn't let me pick out my own costume either....
"And now," she said, "let's go up-stairs." Jane followed her, too
dazed to speak or even to smile.
Mrs. Bates hastened forward light-footedly. "Conservatory--_that's_
Moorish," she indicated casually; "nothing in it but orchids and
things. Come along." Jane followed--dumbly, humbly.
Mrs. Bates paused on the lower step of her great stairway. A huge vase
of Japanese bronze flanked either newel, and a Turkish lantern
depended above her head. The bright green of a dwarf palm peeped over
the balustrade, and a tempered light strained down through the painted
window on the landing-stage.
"There!" she said, "you've seen it all." She stood there in a kind of
impassioned splendor, her jeweled fingers shut tightly, and her fists
thrown out and apart so as to show the veins and cords of her wrists.
"_We_ did it, we two--just Granger and I. Nothing but our own hands
and hearts and hopes, and each other. We have fought the fight--a fair
field and no favor--and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay
there too; keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you
can. I _do_ head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't
foot it with the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have
me. But they'll never get me--never! There's ten more good years in me
yet; and if we were to slip to the bottom to-morrow we should work
back to the top again before we finish. When I led the grand march at
the Charity Ball I was accused of taking a vainglorious part in a
vainglorious show. Well, who would look better in such a role than I,
or who has earned a better right to play it? There, child! ain't that
success? ain't that glory? ain't that poetry?--h'm," she broke off
suddenly, "I'm glad Jimmy wasn't by to hear that! He's always taking
up his poor mother."
"Jimmy? Is he humble-minded, do you mean?"
"Humble-minded? one of my boys humble-minded? No indeed; he's
grammatical, that's all: he prefers 'isn't.' Come up."
Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several
halls and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and
spacious room done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier
wires mingled with pipes, and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a
massive brass bedstead full-panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases,
and the mirror of the dressing-case reflected a formal row of
silver-backed brushes and combs.
"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"
"Why," stammered Jane, "it's all very fine, but--"
"Oh, yes; I know what they say about it--I've heard them a dozen
times: 'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like.
_I_ shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"
"About," said Jane.
"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "I _don't_ sleep here. I'd as soon
think of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to _sleep_ in;
it's for the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there
now."
Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed
it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her
mussy little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman,"
she murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano;
she doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any
sleep out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the
next stage of her adventure.
"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side door....
"This is my office." She traversed the "office," passed into a room
beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door....
The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a
great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she
understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what
footing she had been placed.
She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was
filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old
mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to
correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid
was lined with faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was
an old Brussels carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare
as to surface. The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose
plaintive primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with
narrow green vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose
top was littered with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung
a set of thin black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and
loaded with a variety of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal
fire.
Mrs. Bates sat down on the foot of the bed, and motioned Jane to a
small rocker that had been re-seated with a bit of old rugging.
"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at
your service."
"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this
was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."
"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a
charity. You'd better; this is the last room--there's nothing beyond."
Her eyes were twinkling, but immensely kind.
"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt too
that not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber.
"How good you are to me!"
Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her
small plan. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old
Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of club-room in
some convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and
others employed in business. There was to be a room where they could
get lunch, or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor
where they could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or
music; it was the expectation to have a piano and a few books and
magazines.
"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down
on old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's
mother," concluded Jane.
"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss
Peters--but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that
hair-brush."
Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?"
she asked, "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you
see--two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords,
but simple catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want
anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use
a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."...
She dropped her voice.
"Did you ever have a private secretary?"
"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."
"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever
change--no matter how many engagements and appointments and letters
and dates you come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards.
Tutors are bad enough--but thank goodness, my boys are past that age.
And men-servants are bad enough--every time I want to stir in my own
house I seem to have a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my
train; however, people in our position--well, Granger insists, you
know."...
"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?"
She nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row
of flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draft.
"Asters?"
"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're
chrysanthemums--you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're
the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and
American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass?
How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of
gladiolus and foliage in the front yard, one on each side of the
steps? Still, in our position, I suppose it can't be helped. No; what
I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up
strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford
it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London-pride and
bachelor's-buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls can run
their clothes-lines somewhere else."
"It's hard to keep flowers in the city," said Jane.
"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in
the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little
yellow brier roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And
it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh,
child"--wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"
"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.
"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach basket
and fire shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of
yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all
I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the
wall-paper."
"The wall-paper?"
"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second street. Then I went
down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West
Side. Then I had the pattern put down on paper and I made a tour of
the country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville,
and to lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"
"Well, what--finally?"
"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I
chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more
than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but--"
She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and
cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too
quaintly ugly for anything?"
"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can
be! I only wish mine was like it."