REBELLION
Not the least of the dissatisfactions that had grown in Sidney's breast
was belonging to an Estate.
Since the death of Joseph Romley four years earlier, the royalties from
his published verse and the government bonds and the oil stock, that
had never paid any dividend but might any year, and the four young
daughters were managed by two trustees who had been college friends of
the poet and who, even in his lifetime, had managed what of his affairs
had had any managing. One was a banker and one was a lawyer and they
lived in New York, making only rare visits to Middletown. They
considered it far better for Isolde and Trude to visit them twice a
year and to such an arrangement both older girls were quite agreeable.
But Sidney, knowing the Trustees only as two brusque busy men who
talked rapidly and called her "mouse" and "youngster" and brought her
childish presents and huge boxes of candy which never contained her
favorite chocolate alligators, found them embarrassingly lacking in the
dramatic qualities a "guardian," to be of any value to a girl, should
possess. Nor did they ever bother their heads in the least as to what
_she_ did or didn't do! In fact no one did. There seemed to be only one
law that controlled her and everything in the big old house--what one
could _afford_ to do! She disliked the word.
She resented, too, the Middletown Branch of the League of American
Poets. This was a band of women and a scattering of men who had pledged
to foster the art of verse-making; a few of them really wrote poetry, a
few more understood it, the greater number belonged to the League as
Associates. Before Joseph Romley's death Sidney had thought them only
very funny because her father and Trude and Isolde thought them funny.
There had been then a great timidity in their approach. They had seemed
to tremble in their adoring gratitude for a hastily scrawled autograph;
they had sometimes knocked at the back door and with deep apologies
asked if they might slip in _very_ quietly and take a time exposure of
THE desk where Joseph Romley worked. They brought senseless gifts which
they left unobtrusively on the piano or the hall rack. They dragged
their own daughters to the old house for awkwardly formal calls upon
Isolde and Trude. But after her father's death even Sidney realized
that the League ladies were different. They were not shy any more, they
swooped down upon the little household and cleaned and baked and sewed
and "deared" the four girls, actually almost living in the house.
Isolde and Trude had made no protest and had gone around with troubled
faces and had talked far into the nights in the bed which they shared.
Then one morning at breakfast Isolde had announced: "The League has
paid the mortgage on this house so that we can keep our home here. It
is very good of them--I'm sure I don't know where we could have gone.
We must show them how grateful we are." And Sidney had come to know, by
example and the rebukes cast her way by Isolde, that "showing them"
meant living, not as _they_ might want to live--but as the League
expected the four daughters of a great poet to live. _That_ was the
price for the mortgage. The League wanted to say possessively: "This is
Joseph Romley's second daughter" or "That is our lamb who was only ten
months old when the poor mother died. I am sure the great man would not
have known what to do if it had not been for old Huldah Mueller who
stayed on and took care of the house and the children for him. He wrote
a sonnet to Huldah once. It was worth a month's wages to the woman--"
And the League had bought its right to that possessive tone. Sidney,
when Isolde could not see, indulged in naughty faces behind stout Mrs.
Milliken's back and confided to her chum, Nancy Stevens, the story of
how Dad had once, in a rage of impatience, called down to the adoring
Mrs. Milliken, waiting in the hall for an autograph: "Madam, if you
don't go off at once and leave me alone I'll come down to you in my
pajamas! I tell you I've gone to bed." Oh, Mrs. Milliken had fled
_then_!
Sidney had to go to Miss Downs' stupid private day school when she
would have preferred the Middletown High (as long as she could not go
away to a boarding school), simply because Miss Downs was one of the
directors of the League and gave her her tuition as a scholarship.
But Sidney had never thought--until Isolde had spoken so strangely a
moment before--that her sisters minded either the Trustees or the
League or having to be "different." Isolde naturally was everything the
League wanted her to be, with her grave eyes and her cloudy hair with
the becoming fillets and her drawling voice and her clever smocks.
Trude always wanted to oblige everyone anyway, and Vicky was so pretty
that it didn't make any difference what she did. Sidney had considered
that she was alone in her rebellion, a rebellion that had flamed in her
outburst of the morning: "I'm _sick_ of being different!"
Isolde's words of a moment before, with their hard hint of some
portentous meaning, started a train of thought now in Sidney's mind
that drove away all joy in the promise of the next Egg, that made her
even forget her dislike of the duty Isolde had so unexpectedly put upon
her. Isolde had said distinctly: "You can't get away from it--look at
_me_--look at _Trude_!" And it had sounded queer, bitter, as though
somewhere down deep in her Isolde nursed an unhappy feeling about
something. Sidney pondered, lingering in the deserted dining room.
Maybe, after all, Isolde did not like being the daughter of a poet and
her smocks and her fillets and all the luncheons and teas to which she
had to go and the speeches of appreciation she had to make. And what
did Trude dislike? She always _seemed_ happy but maybe _she_ wanted
something. Sidney remembered once hearing Trude cry terribly hard in
the study. She and Dad had been talking at dinner about college. They
had come to the door of the study and Dad had said: "It can't be done,
sonny." That's what Dad had always called Trude because she was the boy
of the family. Trude had come out with her face all shiny with tears
and her father had stood on the threshold of the door with his hair
rumpled and his nose twitching the way it did when something bothered
him. That was probably it. Trude had wanted college. That seemed silly
to Sidney who hated lessons, at least the kind Miss Downs gave, but it
was too bad to have good old Trude, who was such a peach, want anything.
Isolde hadn't included Vicky, but then Vicky _couldn't_ want anything.
She wasn't afraid to fly in the faces of the Trustees and the whole
League and they wouldn't mind if she did. She was as clever as she was
pretty. She could take the old dresses which Mrs. Custer and Mrs.
White, the Trustees' wives, and Mrs. Deering whom Isolde had visited in
Chicago, and Godmother Jocelyn sent every now and then and make the
stunningest new dresses. And once an artist from New York had painted
her portrait and exhibited it in Paris and had won a medal for it. The
League ladies approved of that and always told of it.
Vicky had whole processions of beaux who came and crowded in the chairs
in the front room or sat on the broad window sills of the open windows
smoking while she talked to them or played for them. Isolde's few beaux
were not noisy and jolly like Vick's--they all looked as though the
League might have picked them out from some assortment. They usually
read to Isolde verses of their own or made her read them some of Dad's.
Maybe, Sidney's thoughts shot out at a new angle--maybe Isolde did not
like beaux who were poets, liked Vick's kind of men better.
Trude had only one beau and Sidney had never seen him because Trude had
had him when she was visiting Aunt Edith White. Trude and Isolde had
whispered a great deal about him and Trude had let Isolde read his
letters. Then a letter had come that had made Trude look all queer and
white and Isolde, after she had read it, had gone to Trude and put her
arms around her neck and Isolde only did a thing like that when
something dreadful happened. Sidney had hoped that she might find the
letter lying around somewhere so carelessly that she could be pardoned
for reading it, but though she had looked everywhere she had never
found it. She had had to piece together Trude's romance from the fabric
of her agile imagination.
Sidney had often tried to make herself hate the old house. Though it
was a jolly, rambly place it was so very down-at-the heels and the
light that poured in through the windows made things look even barer
and shabbier. Nancy Stevens lived in one of the new bungalows near the
school and it was beautiful with shiny furniture and rugs that felt
like woolly bed slippers under one's tread and two pairs of curtains at
each window and Nancy's own room was all pink even to the ruffled stuff
hung over her bed like a tent. But Sidney had once heard Mrs. Milliken
say to Isolde: "I hope, dear girl, that you will not be tempted to
change this fine old house in _any_ way--to leave it just as your
father lived in it is the greatest tribute we can pay to his memory."
After that Sidney knew there was no use hinting for even _one_ pair of
curtains. But her sisters had seemed quite contented.
There had been a disturbing ring of finality to Isolde's, "You can't
get away from it," that seemed almost to slap Sidney in the face. Would
they _always_--at least she and Isolde and Trude, Vick would manage to
escape someway--be bound down there in the "quaint" bare house with the
Trustees sending their skimpy allowances and long letters of advice and
the ladies of the League of Poets coming and going and owning them body
and soul? What was to prevent such a fate? They didn't have money
enough to just say--"Dear ladies, take the old house and the desk and
the pens and pencils and the old coat--they're yours--" and run away
and do what they pleased; probably a whole dozen of Eggs would not get
them anywhere!
"What are you doing mooning there in the window?" cried Vick from the
open door. Her arms were filled with a litter of boxes and old
portfolios. "Where's Isolde? I want her to know I dusted things in the
study."
"Isolde's writing letters. Then she's going to dye something."
"On Saturday!"
"Yes. _I'm_ going to receive the League visitors today."
"You!" Victoria went off into such a peal of laughter that she had to
lean against the door frame. "Oh--how funny! What's _ever_ in the air
today."
"I don't know why it's so funny. I'm--"
"Fifteen. So you are. But bless me, child, the Leaguers will never
accept you in a middy blouse and pigtails. What's Isolde _thinking_ of?
And you look _much_ too plump! Now--" But Sidney stalked haughtily past
her tormenter into the hall.
Vick's bantering, however, had stung her. The old clock on the stair
landing chiming out the approaching hour of the League visitors warned
Sidney that there was not time to change her middy with its faded
collar; nor to wind the despised pigtails, around her head in the
fashion Mrs. Milliken called "So beautifully quaint." Anyway, if there
were all the time in the world she would not do it. She'd begin right
now being her own self and not something the League wanted her to be
because she was a poet's daughter! Isolde and Trude might yield weakly
to their fate but she would be strong. Perhaps, some day, she would
rescue them--even Vicky!
But as an unmistakable wave of chattering from without struck her ear
her fine defiance deserted her. She ran to the door and peeped through
one of the narrow windows that framed the door on either side.
At the gate stood Mrs. Milliken and a strange woman. Behind them, in
twos, stretched a long queue of girls--girls of about her own age. They
wore trim serge dresses with white collars, all alike. They carried
notebooks in their hands. They leaned toward one another, whispering,
giggling.
Sidney's heart gave a tremendous bound. It was most certainly a
boarding school! It was the nearest she had ever been to one! She
forgot her middy and the hated pigtails, and the dread of the League.
She threw open the door. Mrs. Milliken's voice came to her: "He died on
April tenth, Nineteen eighteen. He had just written that sonnet to the
West Wind. You know it I am sure. He bought this house when he came to
Middletown but he made it his as though he'd lived in it all his
life--we have left it _exactly_ as it was when he was with us--our
committee----"
They came walking slowly toward the house, Mrs. Milliken and the
strange woman with reverent mien, the wriggling queue still whispering
and giggling.