Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy, you would have to coin a term or
fall back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried
woman," states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer
young." That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly.
And most certainly no longer young. In figure, she was, at fifty, what
is known in the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in dark
suits, with broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The suit
was practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat
was strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute
and ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin.
Chippewa's East End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill
hands and hired girls bought the naive ones. But whether lumpy or
possessed of that thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest
hats.
The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women
of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of
married sisters and tolerant, good-humored brothers-in-law, and
careless nieces and nephews.
"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good
old thing. And she's had so little in life, really."
She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a
model hat to this pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, Sister
Flora's daughter, to Chicago or New York as a treat on one of her
buying trips.
Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen
foolish shopping commissions for the idle womenfolk of her family.
Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their
husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It
was always the same.
"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living
soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the
children----"
There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of
to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for
each other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a
confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes
of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it
plunk, safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it
cannot rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would
end by saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm
sure I don't know why I'm telling you all this."
But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know," they paid little
heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is
that she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her
life, has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy
Decker had never used the word inhibition in her life. She may not
have known what it meant. She only knew (without in the least knowing
she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her time,
of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would have
been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old-maid
aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being what is
known as a masculine woman, she had, somehow, acquired the man's
viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed
her food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married
women sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely
tolerant of what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that
you wondered how she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery
business.
You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from
one of fifty people: from a salesman in a New York or Chicago wholesale
millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First National Bank of
Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and trimmer; from almost
anyone, in fact, except a member of her own family. They knew her
least of all. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in
Chicago, and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate
disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal inglenooks.
"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora
confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent, and Sophy, seeking hats,
had made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She
talks to everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our
train. Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social
occasion. You know how packed the seven-fifty-two is. Every seat in
the parlor car taken. And Sophy asking the colored porter about how
his wife was getting along--she called him William--and if they were
going to send her West, and all about her. I wish she wouldn't."
Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings.
You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator
starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof,
unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they
bloomed and spread and took on color as do those tight little paper
water flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity
in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your
innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement
of her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that
Sister Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the millinery salesmen
at Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph,
as, with one arm flung about her plump shoulder, they revealed to her
the picture of their girl in the back flap of their billfold.
Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the East
End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the
millinery business in Elm Street.
"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and
all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now
that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats
of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is."
H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew.
When the Decker girls were young, the Deckers had lived in a sagging
old frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in
great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. There
was a worm-eaten, russet-apple tree in the yard, an untidy tangle of
wild-cucumber vine over the front porch, and an uncut brush of
sunburned grass and weeds all about.
From May until September you never passed the Decker place without
hearing the plunkety-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the
vines, laughter, and the creak-creak of the hard-worked and protesting
hammock hooks.
Flora, Ella, and Grace Decker had had more beaux and fewer clothes than
any other girls in Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things,
they were, undoubtedly, the prettiest; and in a family of pretty
sisters (Sophy always excepted) Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She
was the kind of girl whose nose never turns red on a frosty morning. A
little, white, exquisite nose, purest example of the degree of
perfection which may be attained by that vulgarest of features. Under
her great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of
almost poignant wistfulness. Her slow, sweet smile give the beholder
an actual physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as a
behemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry
shark. The strange and cruel part of it was that, in some grotesque,
exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a photograph, Sophy resembled
Flora. It was as though nature, in prankish mood, had given a cabbage
the color and texture of a rose, with none of its fragile reticence and
grace.
It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, referred to
her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence, as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs.
Decker dragged one leg as she walked--rheumatism, or a spinal
affection. Small wonder, then, that Sophy, the plain, with a gift for
hatmaking, a knack at eggless cake baking, and a genius for turning a
sleeve so that last year's style met this year's without a struggle,
contributed nothing to the sag in the center of the old twine hammock
on the front porch.
That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as
inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not
manage badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness
and the twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty,
captured H. Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth
Baldwin drove a skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout; had
his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee; and talked about a
game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section of land
for what he called links, and erecting a clubhouse thereon.
"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is
full of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view."
Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its
exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the
grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the
Chippewa Eagle.
"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow
pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what
was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say,
couldn't you die!"
For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went
East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and
gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament
played on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And
his name, in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass
windows of the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:
NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY
H. Charnsworth Baldwin, Pres.
Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering,
which read:
Miss Sophy Decker
Millinery
Sophy's hatmaking, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had
always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an
occasional hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married, Sophy
found herself in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare
time. The hat trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather
botchy little bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin
at the top, awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death
Sophy still stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery
in Milwaukee, came home, stuck up a homemade sign in the parlor window
(the untidy cucumber vines came down), and began her hatmaking in
earnest. In five years she had opened a shop on a side street near
Elm, had painted the old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty
stucco porch, and transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an
orderly stretch of green lawn and bright flower beds. In ten years she
was in Elm Street, and the Chippewa Eagle ran a half column twice a
year describing her spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt
Sophy, in black satin and marcel wave and her most relentless corsets,
was, in all the superficial things, not a pleat or fold or line or wave
behind her city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:
"This is awfully good this year."
"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model."
"... Well, but, my dear, it's the style--the line--you're paying for,
not the material."
"No, that hat doesn't do a thing for you."
"I've got it. I had you in mind when I bought it. Now don't say you
can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."
When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before
the mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head,
holding it in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your
fascinated eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it
descended, slowly, slowly. A quick pressure.
Her fingers firm against your temples. A little sigh of relieved
suspense.
"That's wonderful on you! ... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's
because you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you
had to have a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your
nose, until I proved to you that if the head size was only big ...
Well, perhaps this needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip.
There! That does it."
And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat
against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist
and too shrewd a businesswoman for that. She preferred that you go out
of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether
you bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop
something more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear
her admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:
"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do.
You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my
hat and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."
In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight
brassiere and scant slip, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat and
veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the
bedroom from the shoulders down.
The East End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish
and expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and
lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as
well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these
opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said,
frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart
trade.
"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say.
They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to
sell them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't
understand 'em or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think
I was trying to cheat them. They want a hat with something good and
solid on it. Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would
they? It's the same idea."
Her shopwindows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely,
severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick.
In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and
plumes.
At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques
completely covered with violets. That violet-covered toque was a
symbol.
"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody
feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a
fruit centerpiece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it, but it has
to be there."
The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a
treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of
satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace and ribbon and jet as to make
her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor
of the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little
scavenger.
"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt
Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."
Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore.
"I keep it," she said.
When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say
'Poor Sophy'?"
"Because--Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married,
and has always worked."
Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're
poor?"
"Well--yes----"
"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child,
skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had the beauty
which should have been the girl's. Very tall, very blond, with the
straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of twenty years ago. "If
only Adele could have had his looks," his mother used to say. "They're
wasted on a man. He doesn't need them, but a girl does. Adele will
have to be well dressed and interesting. And that's such hard work."
Flora said she worshiped her children. And she actually sometimes
still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been
addicted to baby talk when endeavoring to coax something out of
someone. Her admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was
awful. Her selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism
and for fifteen years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no
exercise and a great deal of soda bicarbonate and tried to fight her
fat with baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling change
in the two sisters, Flora the beautiful and Sophy the plain. It was
more than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing, though
neither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the one,
solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily. With the
encroaching fat, Flora's small, delicate features seemed, somehow, to
disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large white surface
bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of those enlarged
photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a telescope. A
self-centered face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's large, plain
features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating strength,
courage, and a great human understanding.
From her husband and her children, Flora exacted service that would
have chafed a galley slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in
an orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele, or Eugene,
or her husband. They all hated it.
"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had
stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as
an excuse for everything and has, ever since Gene and I were children.
She's as strong as an ox." Not a daughterly speech, but true.
Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call,
had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of
pillows.
"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way
you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with
all that lovely color!"
Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me
credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my
blood is in my cheeks."
Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort
necessary for success in that direction.
"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all,
that's a profession in itself--being a wife and mother."
She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's
land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear
he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for
vivacity and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack
of beauty.
"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's presence. "Her
father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a fright
when I was a girl. And look at her! Little dark skinny thing."
The boy, Eugene, grew up a very silent, handsome, shy young fellow.
The girl, dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and
more immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods
irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited
following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and
unpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive
luxury. Anyone but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as
Flora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a
taker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because she
craved affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she
insisted on having her children with her, under her thumb, marking
their devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly,
shufflingly, advancing not a step.
Sometimes Sophy, the clear-eyed, seeing this state of affairs, tried to
stop it.
"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day,
bluntly, to her sister.
"I!" Flora's dimpled hand had flown to her breast like a wounded
thing. "I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother
in the world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."
"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's
nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance.
You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's
ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the
workroom, she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a
little turban that Angie Hatton----"
"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your
shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to
your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in
the minds of my friends with your hat store, understand? I won't have
it. That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To
have her come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of
little, cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now, understand, I won't have it!
You don't know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to
have suffered. If you had brought two children into the world----"
So, then, it had come about during the years between their childhood
and their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their
confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to
understand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.
"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How
can I hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."
This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and
became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old
frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was
something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear,
that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin
house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the
Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best
residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. The
hall console alone was enough to strike a preliminary chill to your
heart.
The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and
snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not
unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and glue and steam and
flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer,
always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark-gray patch on
his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him for
style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around.
Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush season, the girls would
not go home to dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffee
over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank
quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago. She had
been with her for five years. She said Julia was the best trimmer she
had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or Chicago on her
buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original design, or she
never would have been content to be head milliner in a small-town shop.
But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory down to the last
detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable.
The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very
black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick dark
line. Her face as she bent over her work was sullen and brooding, but
when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled
by a vivid flash of teeth and eyes and smile. Her voice was deep and
low. She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to
be asking something. Around the worktable, mornings, she used to
relate the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams she was
always being pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming."
Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these
confidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.
"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a
boardinghouse. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you
good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me
company."
Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the
house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy negligees with big
flower patterns strewn over them. They made her hair look blacker and
her skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would
drop in and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and
canny game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous
hand, always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as
a partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.
It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly
into the living room from the kitchen, where she and Adele were
foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene,
arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she
came in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia
Gold was thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite
twenty-one.
"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a
leaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did not look comic.
"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other.
We're going to be married."
Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and
plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen----" she began.
"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"
Except that it was very white and, somehow, old-looking, Aunt Sophy's
face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That
isn't love, and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is
when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you,
hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother."
"Now, look here, Aunt Sophy! If you're going to talk that way---- Why,
she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to really----"
"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking suddenly very ill.
And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's
the idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?"
Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a
capable, firm, steadying hand--on the arm of each. The woman drew
back, but the boy did not.
"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will
you promise me? Will you?"
"Are you going to tell Father?"
"Not for a week, if you'll promise not to see each other in that week.
No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to.... You're
not a bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave him
a chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk
things over then."
Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen.
"Quick!"
"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.
"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot,
sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. Gene, see if you can open
the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."
There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy;
what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just
hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when,
three days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she
had her answer.
Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't old
enough, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely."
She was almost hysterical.
Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt
Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said
nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone.
Flora took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted color marking
her cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of
the recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was
pacing up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to
the floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted
curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.
"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My
nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something
or other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more
economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could
he do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children----"
H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at
the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her
teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.
Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her
hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood
there, she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and
simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own
affairs, must have marked it.
The girl's head came up stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel
Oakley."
Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he
had been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She
and Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking
about his strength and endurance, his walks, his rugged health;
pounding his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and
Baldwin had had business relations as well as friendly ones.
At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth
stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer
look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in
motion a whole mass of mental machinery within his brain.
"When did he ask you?"
"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men
will be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and
France. I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her
father, her young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know
what I mean."
Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told
your mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and
say, 'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I am so faint ... all of
a sudden ... Get the spirits of ammonia."
Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks
later. They had a regular prewar wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, and
all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil.
The girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half smile
twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever.
"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of
milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt,
who stood behind her, and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I
can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!"
Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl.
"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you
don't want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying
for? Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy."
But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds
of her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course.
Just like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy
did not.
"Now look here, Della. If you're----"
But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's
all right," she said. Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door.
"If it's money," she said. "It is! It is, isn't it! I've got money
saved. It was for you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he
was sailing pretty close, with his speculations and all, since the war.
He can have it all. It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby."
"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been
wonderful, really. Dad's been stealing money for years. Dan's. Don't
look like that. I'd have hated being poor, anyway. Never could have
got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't it? Like something in
the movies. I don't mind. I'm lucky, really, when you come to think
of it. A plain little black thing like me."
"But your mother----"
"Mother doesn't know a thing."
Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony, but Adele was composed
enough for two.
When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face
drawn and queer, Sophy knew.
"How much?" she said.
"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that----"
"I thought Oakley----Adele said----"
"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's
this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got
scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash."
"Speculating with it, were you?"
"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."
"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."
"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it,
and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for
the money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that."
Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the
children, anyway. They won't need it now."
He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't
they?"
"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."
"Eugene?"
"Yes."
"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and
presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this
money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand
these things, but I can talk to you. It's like this----"
"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing
it, not for you, but for Flora, and Della--and Eugene. Flora has lived
such a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any
of you. Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling
that Della and Eugene are my children--were my children."
When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was
getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said.
"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's
lived her little, narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats
and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother
suffers--poor Sophy."
"Um," Baldwin grunted.
When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War
Department, Aunt Sophy was so calm it might have appeared that Flora
had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora. Sophy
neglected everything to give comfort to the stricken two.
"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit
there like that! Even if you weren't his mother, surely you must feel
something."
"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.
"What difference does that make!"
AMERICAN RED CROSS
(Croix Rouge Americaine)