There was one thing about Bob Blake's four-room house--it exactly fitted
his family. The floor plan was simple and economically efficient.
Between the monolithic door slab--relic of a time when Bob's house had
been frankly "in the country"--and the public street lay a walk formed
of a single plank supported on chance-set bricks. From the door slab one
stepped through the front doorway directly into the parlor. Beyond the
parlor lay the kitchen, from which one could pass out through a narrow
door to a patch of weed-grown back yard. A ladderlike stair led up from
one side of the kitchen, opposite to the single window and the small
coal range. At the top of the stair was a slit of unlighted hallway with
a door near either end of it. The door toward Birch Street gave upon the
bedroom occupied by Bob and Pearl; the rearward door led to Susan's
sternly ascetic cubiculum. No one of these four rooms could be described
as spacious, but the parlor and Bob's bedroom may have been twelve by
fifteen or thereabouts. Susan's quarters were a scant ten by ten.
The solider and more useful pieces of furniture in the house belonged to
the regime of Susan's mother--the great black-walnut bed which almost
filled the front bedroom; Susan's single iron cot frame; the parlor
table with its marble top; the melodeon; the kitchen range; and the deal
table in the kitchen, upon which, impartially, food was prepared and
meals were served. To these respectable properties Pearl had added from
time to time certain other objects of interest or art.
Thus, in the parlor, there was a cane rocking-chair, gilded; and on the
wall above the melodeon hung a banjo suspended from a nail by a broad
sash of soiled blue ribbon. On the drumhead of the banjo someone had
painted a bunch of nondescript flowers, and Pearl always claimed these
as her own handiwork, wrought in happier days. This was her one eagerly
contested point of pride; for Bob, when in liquor, invariably denied the
possibility of her ever having painted "that there bouquet." This flat
denial was always the starting point for those more violent Sunday-night
quarrels, which had done so much to reduce the furniture of the house to
its stouter, more imperishable elements.
During the brief interval between the death of Susan's mother and the
arrival of Pearl, Bob had placed his domestic affairs in the hands of an
old negro-woman, who came in during the day to clean up, keep an eye on
Susan and prepare Bob's dinner. Most of the hours during Bob's absence
this poor old creature spent in a rocking-chair, nodding in and out of
sleep; and it was rather baby Susan, sprawling about the kitchen floor,
who kept an eye on her, than the reverse. Pearl's installation had
changed all that. Bob naturally expected any woman he chose to support
to work for her board and lodging; and it may be that at first Pearl had
been too grateful for any shelter to risk jeopardizing her good luck by
shirking. There seems to be no doubt that for a while she did her poor
utmost to keep house--but the sloven in her was too deeply rooted not to
flower.
By the time Susan was six or seven the interior condition of Bob's
house was too crawlingly unpleasant to bear exact description; and even
Bob, though callous enough in such matters, began to have serious
thoughts of giving Pearl the slip--not to mention his landlord--and of
running off with Susan to some other city, where he could make a fresh
start and perhaps contrive now and then to get something decent to eat
set before him. It never occurred to him to give Susan the slip as
well--which would have freed his hands; not because he had a soft spot
somewhere for the child, nor because he felt toward her any special
sense of moral obligation. Simply, it never occurred to him. Susan was
his kid; and if he went she went with him, along with his pipe, his shop
tools, and his set of six English razors--his dearest possession, of
which he was jealously and irascibly proud.
But, as it happens, Bob never acted upon this slowly forming desire to
escape; the desire was quietly checked and insensibly receded; and for
this Susan herself was directly responsible.
Very early in life she began to supplement Pearl's feeble housewifery,
but it was not until her ninth year that Susan decided to bring about a
domestic revolution. Whether or no hatred of dirt be inheritable, I
leave to biologists, merely thumbnailing two facts for their
consideration: Susan's mother had hated dirt with an unappeasable
hatred; her nightly, after-supper, insensate pursuit of imaginary
cobwebs had been one of Bob's choicest grievances against her. And
little Susan hated dirt, in all its forms, with an almost equal venom,
but with a brain at once more active and more unreeling. She had good
reason to hate it. She must either have hated it or been subdued to it.
For five years, more or less, she had lived in the midst of dirt and
suffered. It had seemed to her one of the inexpungable evils of
existence, like mosquitoes, or her father's temper, or the smell of
Pearl's cheap talcum powder when warmed by the fumes of cooking cabbage.
But gradually it came upon her that dirt only accumulated in the absence
of a will to removal.
Once her outreaching mind had grasped--without wordily
formulating--this physical and moral law, her course was plain. Since
the will to removal was dormant or missing in Pearl, she must supply it.
Within the scope of her childish strength, she did supply it. Susan
insists that it took her two years merely to overcome the handicap of
Pearl's neglect. Her self-taught technique was faulty; proper tools were
lacking. There was a bucket which, when filled, she could not lift; a
broom that tripped her; high corners she could not reach--corners she
had to grow up to, even with the aid of a chair. But in the end she
triumphed. By the time she was thirteen--she was thirteen when I first
saw in the Eureka Garage--Bob's four rooms were spotless six and
one-half days out of every seven.
Even Pearl, in her flaccid way, approved the change. "It beats hell,"
she remarked affably to Bob one night, "how that ugly little monkey
likes to scrub things. She's a real help to me, that child is. But no
comp'ny. And she's a sight."
"Well," growled Bob, "she comes by that honest. So was the old woman."
They were annoyed when Susan, sitting by them, for the first time within
their memory burst into flooding, uncontrollable tears.