MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
In a little house overlooking the fields on the far side of Waltonville,
where Mrs. Margie Bent, of Waltonville's middle class, lived with her
daughter Eleanor, preparations for Commencement were in progress. The
house was pale gray in color, and had about its little porch a mass of
pink climbing roses with dark foliage and thick clusters of bloom.
Before it lay a smooth lawn, and back of it a tiny garden, symmetrically
divided by grass paths. There were no outbuildings, there was no stick
or weed; the little establishment looked like a playhouse or the model
for an architect's picture. One did not ascribe to its inhabitants any
academic aspirations.
Waltonville was accustomed to think of the little house as "back of" the
town. Yet the town was in a truer sense back of the little gray house,
which looked out upon a wide sweep of open country. Before it the fields
dipped in a long and beautiful slope, then rose a few miles away to a
low range of blue hills. A part of the land was cultivated, but there
remained many stretches of woodland, especially along a wandering stream
whose silver course could be followed for a long distance, and from
which rose mist, now in thick, obscuring masses, now in transparent
vapor. Beyond the low hills was another higher range. Here and there in
the pleasant valley were farmhouses and large barns whose dimensions and
design were copied from the barns of Lancaster County not many miles
away.
Within the little house was the same clean prettiness. The furniture was
simple and plain and there was a great deal of exquisite hand-sewing;
hem-stitching on the white curtains, heavy initials on the linen, and
beautiful embroidery on Eleanor's clothes in the closets. In the little
parlor stood a bookcase filled with handsome and well-chosen books, and
in the dining-room there were both bookcase and desk, the latter now
neatly closed.
Little Mrs. Bent was helping her tall daughter into the Commencement
dress which she had made with her own unresting hands. Her fair hair
curled about her forehead, her short upper lip made her look like a
little girl, and her whole appearance was at once attractive and
pathetic. Mrs. Scott, whose inquisitive spirit made her wish to know
every one in Waltonville by sight and as much about each person as she
could discover, said of Mrs. Bent that she looked and acted like a lady,
though she was none. Thomasina Davis, whose kindly spirit made her judge
her acquaintances with sympathy, said that she believed that Mrs. Bent
was a good woman who had suffered cruelly. Thomasina remembered her
perfectly as Margie Ginter, the daughter of the most unpleasant, sodden,
law-breaking tavern-keeper Waltonville had ever had, but did not think
evil of her on that account. She knew that Margie had been light as
thistledown, too easily pleased, too careless of the company she kept,
entirely too free with her smiles, and a source of anxiety to the
mothers of the young men of the town and to those who had the well-being
of the college boys at heart; but she did not believe any of the serious
accusations made against her by the older women; had not believed them
when they were made and did not believe them now that they were
occasionally recalled.
Margie had left Waltonville long ago with her father for another tavern
in another State, and after a few years had returned with a married name
and with a little girl whom she called "Nellie," and with means for very
simple living. Whether her income had its source in the ill-gotten gains
of her father or in the property of a deceased husband, or in some other
less creditable source, Waltonville did not know. A few persons
speculated about her when she returned, but she and her little daughter
were soon accepted and ignored.
If there had been any one to compare Margie Ginter with Mrs. Bent, he
would scarcely have believed her to be the same person. Margie Ginter
had lived indifferently in a miserable tavern; Mrs. Bent conducted her
little house with the most exquisite tidiness, and maintained therein
the most perfect order. Her linens were less elegant than Mrs. Lister's,
but they were no less beautifully laundered, no less elaborately marked.
Margie had longed for constant company, and a succession of the most
idle of pleasures; Mrs. Bent shrank even from the back-door calls of her
neighbors. Margie had been confident, assured in all her motions, and
almost impertinent in her glances at those whose disapproval she
surmised; Mrs. Bent was humble, even frightened. Margie had never gone
to church, but Mrs. Bent took a little side pew in the college church
and sat there at each service. To Margie had come some mighty
metamorphosis, changing her instincts, changing her very soul, as
completely as a human body could have changed its position at a
"Right-about face." The process had not been easy; it had written
pathetic lines in the countenance which had once expressed only
light-heartedness.
The tall daughter whom she was helping into her embroidered Commencement
dress was as dark as her mother was fair and as direct of gaze as her
mother was timid. Her gray eyes were singularly clear and bright; they
held the glance so that her other features, beautiful as they were,
became unimportant. Her other features, except her nose and her upper
lip, were like her mother's; she had evidently a maternal inheritance,
permeated and strengthened by a different strain.
She had not inherited, it was clear, from little Mrs. Bent the good mind
which put her at the head of her class in college. Mrs. Bent was not a
dull person, and she had certainly strength of will, but she had no
aptitude for books even though she sat from time to time with one of
Eleanor's volumes in her hand and listened for hours together while
Eleanor read to her. Sometimes when her daughter was not about she
looked in a puzzled, frightened way over what Eleanor had been reading,
and she kept an old grammar hidden under a pile of neatly folded clothes
in her bureau drawer.
Poor little Mrs. Bent made a brave effort to follow her swan in her
flight. She had not, however, risen far, even in her effort to speak as
others spoke. Her mistakes were those of a low stratum. Falling from her
pretty lips in her youth and heard by uncritical ears, they had not
seemed so dreadful. Now they were shocking. In her anxiety to do well,
she sometimes formed new words upon the analogy of those which she knew.
"I thicken it with cream and I thinnen it with vinegar," she would say
sweetly.
Sometimes a sudden "them there," long pruned from Eleanor's speech,
slipped from her mother's tongue. "Them there" Mrs. Bent knew was
execrable and was tortured by that knowledge.
Eleanor was now almost twenty years old, and seldom do twenty years flow
with such smooth current. She could not remember when she had come to
Waltonville to live, and she could recall distinctly only one incident
in her life before she started to the village school. Children, in
families where the past is frequently referred to, recall, or imagine
that they recall, many incidents, but to Eleanor nothing was recalled.
The single incident which she remembered was impressed upon her by
terror. Her mother and she were walking together upon a shady street
when a man stopped them and spoke to them. "So you've come back,
Margie!" was all that Eleanor could remember but the words remained in
her mind. The man had laid his hand on her mother's arm, and Mrs. Bent
had jerked away and had hurried down the street. Eleanor had seen the
man a hundred times since, a heavy, dissipated creature named Bates who
sat all day on the porch of the hotel.
When she went to school the teacher, a newcomer in Waltonville, asked
her her father's name and she had stood bewildered.
"Her father is dead, I guess," said the little girl next to her.
Eleanor nodded solemnly. A day or two later, when the teacher's question
came to her mind again, she repeated it to her mother. Mrs. Bent, whose
experience had not prepared her for the questions of a first day in
school, stared at her daughter.
"The teacher asked me, and a little girl said she guessed he was dead,
and so I said he was dead. Was that right, mother?"
Mrs. Bent's face grew deathly pale, so that long afterwards the incident
came back to Eleanor.
"Yes, that was right," said she.
Another problem suggested itself.
"Were we ever away from here?"
"Why do you ask that?"
"Because that man said, 'So you've come back.'"
Mrs. Bent shivered. "Yes, we were away from here once. Don't think of
that man, and don't ever speak to him. If he comes toward you, you run,
Nellie." Then Mrs. Bent took the little girl roughly by the arm.
"Children should be seen and not heard--remember that!"
From Eleanor's first year in school a few vivid experiences remained.
Racing home, she had fallen and had cut her head and several stitches
had to be put in under her thick hair. A neighbor, running for the old
doctor, had returned with the newcomer, Dr. Green, who had dismissed the
spectators and had hurt her terribly. Then he had carried her to bed,
where she slept for a long time and waked with a burning pain in her
head, the first pain she had ever had.
When he came the next day, she was better and he had sat by her bed for
a long time, asking her question after question about her lessons. He
spoke in a stern, fierce tone, as though nothing about her education or
about the world pleased him. He corrected savagely her inherited errors
in speech as though he could re-make her language in a morning. Her eyes
closed in the middle of a sentence, and when she woke he was no longer
in the room. But it seemed to her that a voice was still about, going on
and on and on. Another excited voice made answer after a long time, "I
ain't a-goin' to do it!" If it was Dr. Green's voice and if it was to
Mrs. Bent that he was speaking, their knowledge of one another had
advanced far beyond the stage of casual acquaintance. Their dialogue was
not a conversation, but a quarrel.
The next day, when Eleanor sat up against the pillows, Dr. Green brought
her a book. He had written "Eleanor" on the fly-leaf.
"Nellie is a nonsensical name," he declared. "It must be changed."
Eleanor looked at her mother.
"I don't care," said Mrs. Bent. If Eleanor had been dragged from the
grave instead of suffering a small scalp wound, she could have been no
more terrified. Her face was tear-stained, her color was gone, and one
hand closed and opened constantly upon the other. In her eyes shone not
only anguish, but a fierce anger. She seemed to take little pleasure in
this friend of her youth.
The picture book was the first of a long series of books which appeared
in the little house. First came story-books, wonder-tales, fairy-tales,
"Robinson Crusoe," "Swiss Family Robinson," then a set of Scott, then
poetry. Presently a bookcase had to be bought, then another.
She was allowed to go henceforth to Dr. Green's untidy office, or, at
least, her mother did not reprove her when she came late from school
because Dr. Green had called to her to stop, or to climb into his buggy
and go with him into the country. She had ceased to be afraid of him;
once or twice she ventured a shy touch of hand. There was a need in
little Eleanor's soul which he supplied, a precocious intellectual
curiosity which was now wakening. Presently she began to ask questions
and Dr. Green answered them. Curt and positive as he was with others, he
never was curt with her. He sometimes examined her to see what she had
retained, and smiled to himself over the success of his teachings.
Eleanor had gained all unconsciously a knowledge far superior to that
of Cora Scott or even to that of Richard Lister. Neither Dr. Scott nor
Dr. Lister talked to their offspring about world politics, about the
literature of their own country and all others, about the trees by the
wayside and the stars in the heavens as Dr. Green talked to little
Eleanor Bent. It was when she repeated at home, as nearly as she could
in his language, all his wisdom, that Mrs. Bent took to studying her
grammar in the evenings, after Eleanor had gone to bed, and hiding it
under her pillow.
Eleanor was deeply impressed by what she read and was also acutely
conscious of the world about her. She had vivid impressions of each
detail of the landscape before the door; of the smooth, concave fields
rising to the blue hills, which rose in turn to mountains of paler blue;
of the winding stream with its accompanying mists; of the journeying sun
with its single moment of rest through all the year in a deep cradle in
the southwestern ridge; of the distant, dim sound of the train which
made its way along the next valley with rhythmic thunder; of the peace
of quiet afternoons and evenings; of the changing light.
She had not yet, though she was graduating from college, begun to
observe or to understand the sorrows or sufferings of human beings or
the strange complexities and thwartings of human life. She lived within
herself without speculating about other people, even about the life so
close to her, to which she was so thoroughly accustomed that its
shrinking, its various and inconsistent characteristics, did not seem
strange to her. In her eighth year she followed to the cemetery the
funeral of the father of one of her schoolmates, and saw from a distance
his widow throw herself upon his coffin. She pictured thenceforth her
mother in the same situation and regarded her with tender awe.
In only one respect did she fear her mother. The dreadful "them there"
was pruned out of her own speech by Dr. Green's continued admonitions
and, having learned her lesson, she proceeded to pass it on.
"Mother, you must not say 'them there.' Dr. Green says that it is
outlandish talk."
Mrs. Bent rose from her place at one side of the little table. Her eyes
looked no more wild when Eleanor was brought home to her bleeding.
"Don't you dare to tell your mother how to talk! That is a dreadful sin,
a dreadful, dreadful sin!"
Eleanor burst into tears; her mother did not stay to comfort her, but
went upstairs to her room and there remained until Eleanor started to
school. Eleanor heard her talking to herself, heard her pacing back and
forth, and did not dare to go to her. It was only after many days that
their old pleasant relations were restored.
Eleanor and her mother went nowhere to pay social visits and few persons
came into their little house. They were so situated with reference to
their nearest neighbors that either the making of a long journey or the
scaling of a sharp picket fence was a necessary preliminary to the
borrowing of a lemon or a recipe. The nearest neighbor, who often
needed lemons, had suggested a gate through the common fence, but it had
never been cut.
The successive pastors of the college church came at proper intervals to
call. There were no aid societies or "Busy Bees" in the church
government, and the young people were not drawn into association by
oyster suppers or similar entertainments. Nor was Mrs. Bent drawn into
the company of the older women. Mrs. Scott, whose pew was near by,
walked with her once or twice a year to the corner and had always some
impertinent inquiry to make. Only a week ago she had asked about
Eleanor's future.
"Nursing, perhaps, Mrs. Bent? Young women are taking up nursing."
A person with a sharper tongue than Mrs. Bent's might have asked whether
Cora meant to take up nursing. But Mrs. Bent said, with her gentle,
frightened air, "Oh, I think not!"
"Then, teaching, perhaps?"
"She hasn't said anything yet about teaching."
"Fit her for something, Mrs. Bent. I suppose she will have to earn her
living?"
Mrs. Bent smiled and passed on, not seeming to realize that Mrs. Scott's
last sentence was a question. Mrs. Scott was still talking. She said, in
conclusion, that she had great difficulty in finding maids; that colored
girls were almost worse than nobody and that white girls had wrong and
proud notions. If she meant to imply that Eleanor had wrong or proud
notions, Mrs. Bent did not understand. If she had a "place" in
Waltonville society, she knew, alas! where that place was.
If Mrs. Scott had suspected the ambitions which filled the mind of
pretty Eleanor, she would have run after Mrs. Bent. Eleanor had become
inspired with a desire to write, an ambition put into her head by Dr.
Green, and zealously cultivated by him, and she had got into shape,
without telling any one but her mother, several stories which were not
without merit. One she had ventured to send away and to-day the
excitement of graduation was dulled by the approach of a more important
event. The editor of "Willard's Magazine" to which she had sent
"Professor Ellenborough's Last Class" had written to say that a
representative of that magazine would call upon her in the course of the
week. It was improbable that they would send a messenger from New York
to distant and inaccessible Waltonville unless her story was really to
be accepted! Yet acceptance was outside the bounds of possibility.
"I shouldn't eat or sleep for a week," she declared as the embroidered
Commencement dress went over her head and her white shoulders.
Mrs. Bent looked up at her with her most frightened expression. Her
duckling had proved to be a swan--there was no doubt of that.
"Don't set yourself on it," she said, remembering sundry very different
disappointments of her own. "Things often don't turn out like we want
they should."
Mrs. Bent's hands trembled; she would have given her life to have
things turn out the way Eleanor wanted they should. Even now there was
another happiness approaching, of which Eleanor knew nothing. Going one
day to Thomasina's house, Mrs. Bent had asked Thomasina to do a service
for her and Eleanor.
"I don't like to put you to trouble," she explained nervously. "I want
to sell my piano."
"Yes?" said Thomasina. Was poor little Mrs. Bent in financial
difficulties? It would be a great pity if Eleanor had to discontinue her
lessons. "That is, not exactly to sell it, but to change it."
"Yes," said Thomasina, who never interrupted or tried to complete the
sentences of other persons.
"For a better one."
"Yes." Thomasina saw that her guess was wrong.
"But I don't know much about--about such things." Mrs. Bent had meant to
say about pianos, but she suddenly could not remember whether the i was
long or short. She knew that one or the other was very wrong, but she
could not remember which she had used a moment ago.
"I'll be very glad to help you."
Mrs. Bent's relief showed on her face and she breathed a long sigh.
"What kind of piano do you want, Mrs. Bent?"
"A large one," answered Mrs. Bent, knowing now certainly that she had
the wrong word.
"A grand piano?"
"That is it, exactly."
Thomasina hazarded the name of the best by way of elimination.
"That is it," said Mrs. Bent. "If you will pick it out when you go to
the city, the money part will be fixed. It is a Commencement present to
her."
Mrs. Bent rose to go. She was invited to stay longer, and she would have
liked to sit forever in the pleasant room, but she was afraid. When she
had gone, Thomasina stood for a moment frowning, then bit her lip. She
wondered a good deal about Mrs. Bent, and she was to wonder still more
when she saw the large check in the hand of the salesman in Baltimore
from whose stock she selected the finest piano. Not only the amount, but
the signature of the check astonished her.
The piano, now at the railroad station upon its side, its shining
rosewood swathed in many folds of flannel and canvas and rubber, was to
be delivered while Eleanor was at Commencement. If she had dreamed of
its presence, her cheeks would have been still redder, her shining eyes
still happier. She laid her black gown over her arm and took her black
cap by its tassel.
"Get your bonnet, mother."
A glance at the clock frightened Mrs. Bent. Eleanor should be off at
once or she would meet the men with the piano. Mrs. Bent had given
explicit charges as to the time of its delivery. She was to let the
carriers, whose chief she knew to be trustworthy, into the house before
she started.
"I'm not ready yet. You go quick, and I'll come right away."
"You'll surely wait for me afterwards?"
"Oh, yes."
She followed Eleanor to the door, and watched her pass the corner. The
emotion which shone from her eyes was sufficiently intense to explain
even a greater metamorphosis than that which had changed Margie Ginter
into Mrs. Bent.
Almost at once the piano, towering high above the horses which drew it,
lumbered in from the other direction. All had turned out well.