The house was large and beautiful, and there were several servants, all
highly specialized; and Milly’s job was to do all the things which they
refused to do. When in the spring the chamber maid refused to bring down
the wicker furniture from the storeroom because the verandah was the care
of the parlor maid; and when the parlor maid said that the storeroom was
on the second floor and out of her hands, then Milly brought down the
wicker furniture. But the work was pleasant, for she helped them all,
on three floors and in the basement, and had not the burden of deciding
whether this was her job or that, for she was engaged to do anything.
One morning Mrs. Pettigrew ordered Milly to select some old garments
from a certain trunk. The sharp tone of her mistress was Milly’s chief
dismay; and when she would be happily at her work, and the sharp thin
tone would come ordering her, Milly would tremble, and at the back of
her head there would flicker a fiery pain. She longed to say, “Please,
please do not speak to me so,” but she dared not, having been so highly
recommended by her agency. She went now to the attic and selected the
old garments, as the sharp voice bade, and brought them to the limousine
waiting at the door. Seated beside her mistress in the blue velvet lined
car, Milly was glad of the beauty and the bearing of Mrs. Pettigrew, of
her perfumes and her gown.
They took the old clothes to the workhouse for two women who were to be
released, a mother and her daughter. Mrs. Pettigrew and Milly saw them,
spotted and underfed and defiant. The daughter said openly that if it
had not been for her mother, she should not have been where she was; and
when the older women ordered her raucously, “Shut up, Little Varmint,”
the girl wept. But they both thanked Mrs. Pettigrew quite nicely for the
serge suits and the hats with ornaments.
“What are they going to do now?” Milly asked, as the limousine rolled
away.
“How on earth should I know?” Mrs. Pettigrew cried sharply.
“I was wondering,” said Milly.
With mounting irritability Mrs. Pettigrew said that they had not asked
her what _she_ was going to do and she saw no reason why she should ask
them. And her voice was so hard and sharply edged that Milly felt fear
and a physical nausea.
In a little time, a matter of months, it became clear that nearly
everything Milly said irritated her mistress. Milly was pink and full,
like a dahlia, and pretty, too. But she spoke with so enormous a
distinctness. She would say loudly and nakedly in the hearing of others:
“Shall I cut off the buttons?” before an old gown was to be sent to some
one; or, “Is the yesterday cake good enough for tea?” And when she had
her reply she invariably added: “I was wondering....” At last everything
that she said annoyed Mrs. Pettigrew, who would answer her with a
strangled irritation as sad as violence. And the arrows in the tone of
her mistress pierced Milly, set her to trembling, gave her the fiery pain
flickering at the back of her head and a great weight on her chest.
One evening Mrs. Pettigrew said to Milly: “Take down the rose gown and
give me the silver brocade slippers.”
“The old slippers?” Milly asked, with enormous distinctness.
“Certainly _not_!” cried Mrs. Pettigrew, jarred and mangled not by the
words but by their pitch.
“I was wondering....” said Milly trembling.
Mrs. Pettigrew rose from her dressing table. She too was trembling. She
spoke in a terrible voice:
“Milly, I cannot stand it. Your voice drives me frantic. You’ll have to
go. I give you your notice. You’ll have to go!”
“Yes’m,” said Milly. “How much is my notice? A week—yes’m. I was
wondering....”
Mrs. Pettigrew did not pry into Milly’s affairs. Milly had no home. Work
was scarce. In six weeks she had used her savings. The demands of society
faced her: shoes, a winter coat, food. A man said: “I’ll be your friend.”
These words seemed beautiful to Milly until she understood. But she was
ill and hungry and despised by Mrs. Pettigrew, and she had read in Mrs.
Pettigrew’s books that such friendships happened. She went with him.
As the years passed, and other such friendships followed, she ran
the gamut of the garden—from dahlia, ripe with summer, to frowsy
autumn-flawed chrysanthemum.
At forty she was nearing the end of a sentence in the workhouse when a
lady came to her cell. This lady had now a face like an eagle, but Milly
knew her winter beauty, her bearing and her perfume.
“My poor woman,” said Mrs. Pettigrew kindly, so kindly, “what brought
you here?”
“I lost my job,” Milly answered.
“Yes? Well? Go on....” Mrs. Pettigrew pressed her. “I meant, you know, in
the first place....”
“I lost my _job_,” Milly repeated.
“But what else?” Mrs. Pettigrew encouraged her sharply.
Her tone set Milly to trembling in the old way. From out the perfect
anonymity of her battered face, Milly answered:
“It was on account of my voice—my voice....”
As Mrs. Pettigrew left, she said to the attendant: “The poor thing—had
she, then, been a singer?”
They were interrupted by Milly calling loudly down the corridor her
forgotten thanks for the suit which Mrs. Pettigrew had brought, and the
hat with an ornament.
THE BLUE VELVET GOWN
My mother and I used to walk, in the mornings, in a pleasant valley near
our home, and we would stop at a cottage where lived a woman who did
our laundry work and who often told my mother her story. And I remember
everything she said though this was fifty years ago.
Blue velvet, she said, became her best, and it was blue velvet that she
was wearing when she broke the seal of Barlo’s letter. He wrote a hard
hand, biting into the paper: Might he see her for only a moment on a
matter most important to himself. “I am not known to you, I take care of
the harnesses in the coach house, and sometimes I have brought round the
horses. But do not refuse this....” She told the messenger that she would
come to the south terrace in an hour, as the letter asked.
Sitting through the long dinner with the other ladies-in-waiting to the
old princess, and with the gallants of the little court, she wondered
what this stranger should have to say to her, he whose writing was so
savage and bit so deep into the page. She looked at the white hands of
the little lord beside her, heard the fulsome praise and pretense of
the others, saw the old princess doze, and she scorned them all. Of the
ladies in silver and rose she thought: “Who has ever asked aught of you?”
When they called her to the harpsichord, she escaped them and stepped to
the south terrace as the moon was rising red, above the thin young trees.
The castle lay long and dark, its hundred windows shrouded, by moving
creepers, from the moon.
In a full play of the moonlight he was waiting, and he came toward her,
and his voice ate its way into her as his writing had scored the page:
“I am in danger. I leave here to-night. It is because of the things that
I believe make a man’s freedom. These many months when I have brought
the horses round, I have read your face. I have a young sister. I would
beg you sometimes to see her—to let her sometimes be with you....”
“You leave England? You go....”
“To America. Where a man may think his thoughts.”
Beyond the belief of any one he was beautiful, tall, strong, possessing.
She looked up at him, saying nothing while he talked much of freedom and
his hatred of courts. But his words faltered, and she being so fair, and
he so near, suddenly he stooped to her hand and whispered: “God forgive
me, I lied. I think that my sister is safe enough. The truth is that I
wanted once to see you near—and alone. Now I can ask no more....”
He began, but not with his eyes, to take leave of her; and since this
was good-by, abruptly he told her of his old passion for her, of how
she had long sung in his being, how he had watched outside the hundred
windows for her face. He was like no other man, he with his soft ways,
his bigness, his biting eyes, and his rough clean clothes. The little
philandering lords within the castle were a weariness; and before this
man crying out to her but with no words, she held her bright head like a
sudden banner, and she said: “Why do you not ask me to go with you ...”
as a man might have spoken in those days. In that moment she was in his
arms. He whispered: “If I do not escape those men who love not freedom
...” and even: “There is a price upon my head.” But she was in his arms
and she answered: “You _shall_ escape them. I can answer for that.”
When he strode away in the moonlight, then returned and lingered and
drove himself from her side, she said to him that for this she had lived
her life.
When the two sailed on a tramp steamer, she had with her all the gowns
and trappings that she had worn at the court of the old princess,
together with hose and underthings, silken and pale, slippers of silver
and gold, and many ornaments of French paste. He asked only that she
bring the blue velvet gown that she had worn that night on the terrace.
Thus she left her people—her mother, father, home.
On the ship Barlo owned to her that he had no sister. “I meant to bring
you with me,” he boasted.
They lived far inland in America, where the pioneering was yet in
progress, and ways were wild. Barlo made with his own hands a rude home,
she did what she could to keep it neat and warm, but it was little and
bare. Instead of plate and flowers there were tin and oilcloth; and
there was water to fetch from the spring and wood from the pile at the
clearing’s edge. She bore and raised children—six that lived, children
who loved beauty and saw none but the beauty of the wilderness and the
sky with its yellow wilds of light. At night Barlo would come home, cast
down his ax, and stretch out by the fire; and their talk would be of
grain and hides and the beasts in the shed.
Once when she told him that a stranger had come asking for him, he
turned a queer solid-color, so that she cried out: “_Was_ it for the
freedom of your thought that a price was on your head?” But his eyes and
his voice bit into her so cruelly that she never asked again. Yet in his
own overpowering fashion he loved her; and to her all nights might have
been as that first night, on the south terrace.
While yet the children were little, a letter came to him, brought by
a messenger riding hard, and she seeing his stress broke the seal and
read. Thus from that morning she knew why indeed Barlo had been forced
to leave England. She sent the messenger away with food in his wallet,
resealed the letter, met her husband with her smile, asked nothing, and
even turned away while he read. Nor after the reading did she let a
questioning silence fall, but spoke casually of the beasts in the shed.
When now in haste he changed their dwelling place, and went driving west
and camping by the way, she acquiesced with no question. When she saw
him build in the new cabin a wood box of logs, and having a part where a
man might lie, she seemed not to notice. She lived beside him, saying not
a word of what she knew.
Now they were come among the mines, to a place rougher and wilder than
before, and she would sit through the evening, watching her children at
their books. For they grew and loved beauty, and they had none to see. So
one day, in her husband’s absence, she took the children into her bedroom
and spread before them those gowns and trappings which she had brought
with her from overseas—the blue velvet and the gold and silver cloth, the
colored hose and the slippers, and the ornaments of French paste. Sitting
in the kitchen with its one window toward the dense wood, she told them
of the house in which she had lived, whose hundred windows were shrouded,
by creepers, from the moon. “And the summer palace had a window for every
day in the year,” she told them proudly. The children listened, slender
aristocratic things, the girls like lilies, the boys like blades. Then
all the eyes in the kitchen dreamed of beauty.
Barlo too dreamed, but he muttered in his sleep, woke crying out in fear,
and he began to speak to her with oaths. To forget his deep shadows, he
brought strong liquors from the town. He grew afraid to venture out, he
sat all day by the stove; he sent his children for the liquor. At this
she remonstrated, and he snarled, and struck her.
One night when the food was eaten and there was nothing for her to cook,
she put on her blue velvet gown, the silver slippers, and her ornaments
on her shoulders and her arms, and she came and sat by Barlo, before
the kitchen range. He looked at her and burst into weeping, rose and
overturned a chair, cursed, and flung out of the house.
She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him go. The moon shone above
the thick black of the wood, and surged on the little kitchen, with its
single window bare. She saw him stride away, his feet biting into the
trail, his body boring into the dark. She did not see him again.
When it became clear that he would not return, she moved their few
belongings nearer to the little town where she could sell her butter and
eggs. But there was not enough for the seven mouths, and she began to do
laundry work for the well-to-do of that place. On the wall of the General
Store she advertised: “Monica St. Mount, laundry.” It was so that she
contrived to send all her children through the school of the town. Then
they went out, one by one—somewhere in America—to find beauty; all save
the youngest, a lordly girl, who stayed to help her mother.
One morning when my mother and I had walked across our pleasant valley
and stopped at her door, we found this young daughter on the door step.
At once she explained without emotion: “My father has been arrested. He
had gone back to England. We have just heard that he is there, in gaol.”
Mechanically my mother protested his innocence, but the child said no,
quite quietly; and in a voice of incredible maturity she named his crime.
I remember how my mother paled, and the little girl led us to the tiny
kitchen.
There, over her tubs, Monica St. Mount toiled, and at our entrance she
glanced down at herself with an apology.
“You must forgive my costume,” she said, “I’ve really nothing else to
wear, any more.”
She was washing her clothes, in the soap and the steam, and wearing a
blue velvet gown, richly trimmed in the fashion of a bygone day.
TOMMY TAYLOR
When Aunt Parmenter Taylor was dying, she said something which nobody
could distinguish, and she died with the words locked by her lips. So her
favorite nephew, Tommy, who had hoped to inherit some of her property,
got nothing but the cherry chest of drawers which she had always said
that he must have. He now had nothing with which to finish the home that
he had begun to build while Aunt Parmenter’s cancer was yet in its first
stages.
From nine black windows and one black door Tommy’s cream brick house
looked over Belle Prairie—a shell of a house, its two great parlors, its
dining room, its library and its four “chambers” standing within their
outer walls and their lath. But the kitchen was finished and two low
bedrooms and a loft overhead, and for six years the family had lived
there: Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, Lucien, Amy and Jane.
Every time that Tommy went to the town, he heard the people say: “Wonder
when Tommy’ll get his house done.”
Every time that Mrs. Taylor went to church she heard the women whisper:
“No signs of the house being finished yet, is they? Beulah Taylor, she
won’t lord it over us yet awhile.”
And at dances, the young folk said boldly to Lucien and Amy and Jane:
“Hurry up and get your house done, why don’t you, so you can have a
housewarming.”
These gibes the Taylors took variously: Amy and Jane with secret tears
but unabated hope; Lucien sullenly so that his birthmark looked purple;
Tommy’s wife with a head held high in public, an appearance of cheerful
expectation before her friends; and toward her husband a neutrality
in peace, but an occasional piercing thrust in moments of domestic
dissonance. It was Tommy himself for whom the situation was both dart
and poison. For though he was gentle and hopeful, yet when his crops
failed for the fourth time, when investments stood still, when he faced
a fifth winter behind the nine black windows and the one black door, he
became unbearable about the house, and gave his family to understand that
this ill luck was in some direct way traceable to them. So his wife said
placidly: “That may be—since we’ve a husband and father not like other
folks.” Then they had a black hour—Amy and Jane, pink, white and golden,
feeling the need of golden feathers to match; and Lucien, who said that
he was sick of being the joke of Belle Prairie, and flung out of the
house, his birthmark glowing.
Now Tommy pulled down the burlap which they had hung over the door of the
embryo dining room, and he stalked alone through his naked rooms, large
and lordly, high, and set with the hollow threats of fireplaces. Here he
had dreamed of entertaining his neighbors about a freighted table; in the
“study” were to have been ranged rows of bright books, and there he had
meant to keep his accounts, which now he had in the back of the almanac.
He tiptoed, as he always did in here, across the rough flooring awaiting
its hard wood in the two vast parlors. It was twilight and from within
these rooms the windows seemed like soft faces pressing from the outside
upon his walls, and mocking him for his ineptitude. And his two hundred
and forty acres waiting about the unfinished house which they had failed
to promote, lay like dust whereon he had breathed in vain. Tommy Taylor,
the gaunt brown man, with the carriage of a gentleman and a telltale
looseness of wrist and indecision of gesture, stood up and beat with his
fist on the top of Aunt Parmenter’s cherry chest of drawers which was
indeed the only bit of furniture in the rooms on which a man could beat
his hands, if he wanted to.
“I’m damned,” he said aloud, “if I can keep on like this.”
He unbolted the wooden door over the aperture which was to have been his
front entrance, swung himself loosely down from the high lip o£ the
threshold, and entered the night. At Belle Prairie the hotel keeper lent
him a little money; he made his way to the city a hundred miles away,
and from there notified his family that he was going west. “I shall make
the money to finish the house, or....” he wrote, and wrote no more. And
though he wrote inconclusively, and they thought that he would be back in
a few days, he did not return.
Tommy Taylor stayed in the west for seven years. Meanwhile Lucien ran
the farm, and made no more than would hold together the four souls and
the four bodies. And this was tragedy, for there was Bethna, who waited
for Lucien through those seven years, and would not come into the little
kitchen to live with his family—no, not even if he finished off one of
the chambers, as he hoped in time to be able to do. Amy and Jane reached
their late twenties, and pink and white and golden though they were,
not a boy on the prairie asked them in marriage. For none of the boys,
presumably, cared to be drawn into that great cream brick web, looking
so hopefully from its nine eyes for somebody to come and share the heavy
burden of itself. There were Dan and Harvey, who “shone round,” Belle
Prairie said, longer than the others, and at last went off to the county
seat and married school teachers. And after that Amy and Jane dropped
out of the dances and seldom went in town. Mrs. Taylor was rarely seen,
working as she did early and late in the kitchen and the lean-to, the
spring house, the smoke house and the chicken yard, littered behind the
rearing walls of her potential home. If sometimes driving home in the
buggy back of the old gray, she dreamed her old dream of the pair of
grays which should come pacing up the maple drive to a comfortable porch,
she said nothing, and merely alighted, a broad-backed shabby woman, at
her kitchen door. But when she met her neighbors, she held her head high:
“Good news from Mr. Taylor—yes. But he’ll not be back for another year.
No, we shall do nothing about the house till he’s here.”
Seven years, Amy and Jane were thirty, Lucien thirty-two, their mother
toward sixty. Now the eaves of the house were showing their lack of
paint, the shingles had mangy spots, and burdock and Bouncing Bet were
netted before the front door. Walking at twilight under the apple trees
about the house, the women heard passers say: “Tommy Taylor’s Folly.”
Then, on a Saturday when the streets of Belle Prairie were filled,
there he was back, shaking hands with every one. Tommy Taylor,
gentle and pleasant and glad. And when had he looked so prosperous,
so distinguished, so well-dressed, so well-shod? His hands were
loose-wristed and wandering as always, but his eyes were so clear and so
hopeful, his carriage so erect, and his coat so well-pressed that Belle
Prairie said at its supper table: “Tommy Taylor’s come back, to finish
his house.”
At his own supper table, Tommy Taylor was being served to a spring
chicken perfectly fried; and he was saying quite gently:
“No, I haven’t got near enough to finish it, and I never would have had
if I’d stayed there for forty years. But I’ve come to see that I’ve got a
pretty good thing in this farm—no reason why I shouldn’t make it pay now
and go on with the house, in a year or two. Once ...” he eyed his wife
dreamily, “once I thought of investing in a fruit farm out in the Bitter
Root and sending for you and the children. I could see a fortune, right
there. But I guess I can make the farm go now, if we all turn in—and
then, in a year or two, we’ll finish the house.”
At this Lucien, his son, began to laugh—flung back his head until his
neck was long, and laughed very loudly, looking at the ceiling. After
a moment of struggle, Amy and Jane joined him, and the laughter of the
three, which should have been young laughter, free and wild, came from
them shrill and gusty, like winds angry and not at play.
“The damned house,” said Lucien. “Damn it, damn it....”
He rose and caught the lamp and strode toward that door with its mock
portière of burlap, and the girls sprang up and followed. “No, children,
no, no, no....” said the mother feebly, and followed after them—her
children in the thirties, laughing and laughing through the empty rooms,
with the red glass lamp held high. And Tommy Taylor followed too, looking
distinguished and prosperous and bewildered, his hands making wavering
gestures as he went through that dining room where no neighbors came,
that study in which he had no accounts to keep, and those parlors on
whose walls the windows laid their faces, like something from without.
Lucien shouted: “It’s killed mother. It’s robbed the girls. It’s done for
Bethna and me—and what has it brought you? You’re a hopeful old man....”
The red lamp tipped, and his mother took it from him as she would have
taken a danger from a child. And Lucien, standing as he was by Aunt
Parmenter’s cherry chest, his birthmark red and twisted, flung up his arm
and brought it crashing down on the chest’s flat top.
Something slid and thudded, dropped so sharply to the floor that they all
looked down. The bottom of the chest had fallen out, and from under the
lowest drawer a shallow drawer lay tipping. It was Mrs. Taylor who drew
it out and saw lying there, unwrapped, piles upon piles of neatly folded
greenbacks bearing the heady yellow design of gold certificates.
“Tommy!” she said.
They squatted about the drawer and the red lamp on the floor. They lifted
the piles, ran them through, estimated—twenty-two piles wide, ten rows
deep, twenty twenty-dollar bills in a pile.... It was Mrs. Taylor who
whispered capably:
“Eighty thousand dollars.”
“Aunt Parmenter,” said Tommy, tensely, “Aunt Parmenter. She tried to
talk when she was dying....”
They squatted about this drawer which for twelve lean years had kept
vigil in the cherry chest, that single waiting piece of furniture in the
empty house, that lordly and empty and naked house behind whose walls the
family had starved and watched.
Like a coffin they bore the drawer among them into the kitchen, and there
hid their treasure under the cupboard, and threw over it pieces of old
carpet. Then they sat about, still whispering.
“We’ll pay off old Matthews,” said Lucien, “And Bethna and I’ll start
somewhere else.”
“We’ll finish the house,” cried his mother, a deep breath waving her
voice like ripe grain. In her eyes the rooms now spread warm, lighted,
filled with neighbors, and she drove up to the door of her home behind a
pacing pair, caught herself at that old dream, and came in a motor car.
Tommy Taylor’s eyes were bright and deep. His loose-wristed hands he
smote sharply together. “We’ll sell the house to Matthews,” said he, “and
your mother and I will take this money, and go out to the Bitter Root,
and get that fruit ranch, and start over again!”