Lester was glad to see Mattie Farnham come bustling in the very
afternoon of the day she returned from Maine. He liked Mattie--indeed
he almost loved her--in spite of the fact that so far as he had been
able to ascertain she had never yet understood anything he ever said
to her. They did not use at all the same vocabulary, but they held
friendly communication by means of sign-language, like a dog and cat
who have grown up in the same house and have an old affection for each
other.
“Hello there, Mattie,” he welcomed her, as she entered. “How are the
potatoes in Maine? Ours have spots in them.”
It amused him with Mattie to disconcert her decent sense of what was
the suitable attitude to strike. He knew that both she and her husband
were relieved to have their ninety-year-old, bed-ridden aunt safely and
painlessly in the next world. Blessed if he’d go through the motions of
condoling with her.
But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper
attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared
to “sympathize” with him. Mattie always had to go through the proper
motions.
“How are you getting _on_, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best
Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have
worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children. I’ve been sick to
think I wasn’t here to help out in this sad time. Now I’m back you must
let me do everything I can.”
“You might come and call on Stephen and me once in a while and bring
us some of your famous home-cooking,” he suggested mischievously.
She laughed, in spite of herself, at his jibe over her weakness for
delicatessen potato salad. “You miserable _sinner_!” she cried, in her
own voice, dropping for an instant into their old joking relationship.
She sobered at once, however, into what Lester called to himself the
“mourners-waiting-for-the-benediction manner” and said, “I was planning
as I walked over how I could arrange my own work to have two hours free
every afternoon and come here to do for you.”
“You’ll find it all done,” he told her genially. “You can’t beat me
to it. Come along all the same, and we’ll play cribbage.” She was
perplexed as well as shocked by his levity and at last simply threw
herself on his mercy, “Lester, do tell me all about things,” she said
in an honest, human tone of affection and concern which brought from
him an answer in kind.
“Well, Mattie, I will. It was hell at first ... all the kinds of hell
there are. But you know how folks are, how you get used to everything.
And I got better, got so it didn’t make me faint away with pain to have
somebody touch the bed. And then little by little I settled down to
where I am now. Both legs incurably paralyzed, I’m told, but the rest
of me all right. In the meantime, Eva--you know how Eva never lies
down and gives up--as soon as I could be left, hustled right out and
got a job. She’s in the Cloak-and-Suits at Willing’s now, and making
good money. What with her commissions on extra sales, she’s making just
about what I did. With the promise of a good raise soon. The Willings
have treated her very white, I must say. And I imagine she is the
wonder of the world as a saleswoman.”
“She would be, at anything!” breathed Mattie devoutly.
“She surely would,” agreed her husband heartily. “Well, here at the
house we’ve shuffled things around into a new pattern, and we’re
getting on. I can do anything that needs to be done on this floor with
Henry and Helen’s help, and the doctor says I’ll soon be on crutches
and able to get upstairs once a day. It seemed queer to be doing
housework, but there isn’t another mortal thing I can do but to keep
things running. So I do.”
“Poor Lester!” said Mattie, just as he knew she would.
“Not on your life!” he told her. “I don’t mind the work a bit, now I’ve
got used to the idea. I can’t say it is exactly enlivening to be tied
up to half your body that’s dead but not buried, but I haven’t got
anything else to complain of. As to the housework, I haven’t had such
a good time in years. You know what an absent-minded scut I am, with
my head always full of odds and ends of book-junk I like to mull over.
Well, housework doesn’t interfere with thinking as account-keeping
does, believe me! I can start my hands and arms to washing dishes or
peeling potatoes or setting the table, and then leave them to do the
job while I roam from China to Peru. Every time I tried that at the
office--the bottom dropped out. Here I’ve more time for thinking and
for reading too in the evenings! The children bring the books to me
from the Library.”
“Well, it’s very _brave_ of you to take it that way, I’m sure,” said
Mattie with a decent sigh of sympathy.
He thought to himself with exasperation that Mattie’s mental indolence
was invincible. She never made the slightest effort of her own accord
to escape from the rubber-stamp formula in which she had been
brought up. By lively joshing you could occasionally jolt her into a
spontaneous perception of her own, but the minute you stopped, back she
sank and pulled the cover of the Ladies’ Guild mummy-case over her. And
she was so human under it,--one of the most human people he had ever
met. As he was thinking all this, by no means for the first time in his
life, she caught out of the corner of her eye a glimpse of something in
the kitchen over which she now exclaimed in amazement “What in the name
of _time_ is all that litter of papers on the kitchen floor?”
“All that litter?” he protested. “That’s not litter, that is an
original exercise of the human intelligence in contact with real
life. You encounter so few of those you don’t recognize one when you
meet it. That is one of the patented inventions of the Knapp Family,
Incorporated.”
She looked at him dumbly with the patient expression of bewilderment
which always brought him to time. He began to explain, literally and
explicitly, “We have executive sessions, the children and I, to figure
out ways and means to cope with life and not get beaten by small
details. We all got together on this floor proposition. We put it to
ourselves this way: the kitchen floor has to be scrubbed to keep it
clean. None of us are smart enough to scrub it. What’s the answer? Of
course Eva must simply do nothing whatever about the house. The doctor
issued an ultimatum about _that_. She has all she can do at the store.
Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but Stephen got the answer. He said,
‘When I paint with my water-colors, Mother always ’preads papers down
on the floor.’
“Done! The attic was piled to the eaves with old newspapers. Every day
Helen or Henry brings down a fresh supply. We spread them around two or
three thick, drop our grease on them with all the peace of mind in the
world, whisk them up at night before Eva comes in, and have a spotless
floor to show her. What’s the matter with that?”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing in my life!” cried Mattie.
“People seemed to think,” reflected Lester, “that they make an
all-sufficient comment when they say that.”
She got up now and walked to the kitchen door to gaze down on the paper.
“That’s a sample of the way _we_ do business,” said Lester to her back.
He wheeled himself over to the table and took out of a work-basket a
pair of Stephen’s little stockings which he prepared to darn.
Mattie turned, saw what he was doing and pounced on him with shocked,
peremptory benevolence. “Oh, _Lester_, let me do that! The idea of
_your_ darning stockings! It’s dreadful enough your having to do the
housework!”
“Eva darned them a good many years,” he said, with some warmth, “and
did the housework. Why shouldn’t I?” He looked at her hard and went on,
“Do you know what you are saying to me, Mattie Farnham? You are telling
me that you really think that home-making is a poor, mean, cheap job
beneath the dignity of anybody who can do anything else.”
Mattie Farnham was for a moment helpless with shock over his attack.
When she slowly rose to a comprehension of what he had said she shouted
indignantly, “Lester Knapp, how dare you say such a thing! I never
_dreamed_ of having such an awful idea.” She brought out a formula
again, but this time with heartfelt personal conviction, “Home-making
is the noblest work anybody can do!”
“Why pity me then?” asked Lester with a grin, drawing his needle in and
out of the little stocking.
“Well, but....” she said breathlessly, and was silent.
There was a pause. Then she asked meekly, climbing down with relief
from the abstruse and unfamiliar abstract to the friendly concrete,
“However in the world did you _learn_ to darn, Lester?”
“Out of a book,” he told her tranquilly. “While I was still in bed I
sent to the Library for any books they had on housekeeping. They sent
me some corking ones--as good reading as ever I saw.”
“Why, I didn’t know they had books about housekeeping at the Library!”
said Mattie, who was a great reader of novels.
“I bet I know more about cooking than you do, this minute,” he said,
laughing at her. “Why do you put your flour for a cream sauce into the
butter and cook it before you add the milk?”
“I don’t,” she said, astonished. “I heat my milk and mix my flour with
a little cold water and....”
“Well, you’re wrong,” he said authoritatively. “That’s not the best
way. The flour isn’t thoroughly cooked. Fat can be heated many degrees
hotter than water.”
Mattie Farnham felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into a stupid
bewilderment. Was it really Lester Knapp with whom she sat discussing
recipes? She had come over to sympathize and condole with him. However
in the living world had she been switched off to cream sauce? She got
up, shook herself and took a step or two around the room.
“Don’t go looking to see if the furniture is dusted or the floor
polished,” said Lester calmly. “We concentrate on the important things
in our house and let the non-essentials go.”
“I wasn’t thinking about _dust_!” she told him, exasperated (although
she had been). And then, struck by a sudden thought, “Where’s Stephen?”
“Out in his sandpile.”
“Why, I thought he ran away if he was left out of anybody’s sight for a
minute. I thought you didn’t dare let him be by himself for....”
“Oh, Stevie’s all right,” said Lester carelessly; “he’s coming along
like a house afire.”
He wheeled himself to the door, opened it and rolled his chair out on
the porch. A blue-denimed little figure rose up from the other end and
showed a tousled head, bright dark eyes and a round dirty face with a
calm expression. “I got my tunnel fixed,” he announced.
“Did you?” asked Lester, with interest. “That can business did work?”
To Mattie he explained, “Stephen is fixing up a railway system, and the
sand kept falling in on his tunnel. We finally thought of taking the
bottom out of an old baking-powder can. That leaves it open at both
ends.”
“It works dandy,” said Stephen. He now added of his own accord, with a
casual look at Mrs. Farnham, “Hello, Aunt Mattie.”
It was the first time Mrs. Farnham could remember that she had ever had
a friendly greeting from Stephen. Eva’s conscientious attempts to make
him perform the minimum of decent salutations, to come and shake hands
and say “How do you do?” usually ended in a storm of raging stamping
refusals.
“Hello, Stephen,” she answered, feeling quite touched by his friendly
tone. He looked very quiet and good-natured, too. Well, of course,
all children do grow out of their naughty ways if you can only live
till then. She had always said that Stephen would outgrow his. But she
had never believed it. It was a good idea to have a sandpile for him.
Children always like them. Of course it brought sand into the house
something terrible. Children never would wipe their feet. But now that
any attempt at real housekeeping had been given up in poor Eva’s house,
a little more or less dirt didn’t matter. She had as a matter of fact
(although she had denied it) noticed that the corners of the room
were very dusty. And those preposterous papers on the floor! What a
ridiculous idea!
No more ridiculous than having the sandpile on the porch! Whoever heard
of such a thing!
“I should think you’d find it hard to keep the porch clean,” she said
to Lester.
“We don’t,” he said bafflingly.
“Why not have it out in the yard?”
“Some of the playthings would get spoiled by the rain.” He advanced
this as conclusive.
Stephen had squatted down again to his sand. She went cautiously
towards the wide plank to see what he was doing, prepared to have him
snarl out one of his hateful catch-words: “Go ’way! Go ’way!” or the
one he had acquired lately, the insolent, “Who’s doing this anyhow?”
But what she saw was so astonishing to her that before she could stop
to think, she burst out in an impulsive exclamation of admiration,
“Why, Stephen Knapp, did you do all that your_self_?”
Beyond the board lay a tiny fairy-world of small, tree-lined,
pebble-paved roads, moss-covered hills, small looking-glass lakes,
white pasteboard farmhouses with green blinds, surrounded by neat white
tooth-pick fences, broad meadows with red-and-white paper cows and a
tiny farm wagon with minute, plumped-out sacks, driving to the railroad.
A large area of her own simple consciousness was still sunny with
child-heartedness, and it was with the utmost sincerity of accent that
she cried out, “Why, I’d love to play with that myself!”
Stephen looked proudly up at her and lovingly down at his creation.
“You can if you want to.” He conceded the privilege with lordly
generosity.
She got stiffly down on her middle-aged knees, to be nearer the little
world, and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the “sweet little barn”
and the “darling locomotive.” Why, she remembered now that she herself
had given that toy train to Stephen. The last time she had noticed
it was when, unsurprised, she had seen Stephen kicking it down the
stairs. Lucky it was made of steel.
“It fits in just great,” said Stephen, also remembering who had given
it. “I never had any way to play with it before. See, it carries the
corn from this farm to the city. I’m going to start in on the city
to-morrow, over there in that corner, as soon’s I get the track fixed.
Mother is going to bring me some little houses from the ten-cent store.
Mother brought me the little wagon and horses. She brings me something
’most every night. Those bags are filled with real corn-meal.”
“Oh, see the real grade-crossing with the little ‘Look out for the
engine’ sign,” cried Mrs. Farnham rapturously.
They had both entirely forgotten Lester. He smiled to himself and
wheeled his chair back into the house. Mattie was a fat old darling,
that’s what she was.
He went on darning the little stocking and murmuring to himself,
“She wars not with the mystery
Of time and distance, night and day:
The bonds of our humanity.
Her joy is like an instinct joy
Of kitten, bird, or summer fly.
She dances, runs without an aim;
She chatters in her ecstasy.”
When Mattie came in, not dancing at all but walking rather
rheumatically as though her knees creaked, she closed the door behind
her and said in an impressive way, “Lester Knapp, that is a very smart
thing for Stephen to do. I don’t believe you appreciate it. There’s not
one five-year-old child in a hundred with the headpiece to do it.”
He answered with an impressive manner of his own, “Appreciate it! I’m
the fellow who does appreciate it! Stephen Knapp is a very remarkable
child, I’d have you to know, Mrs. Farnham. I bet you a nickel he will
amount to more than anybody else in this whole town if he only gets the
right chance.”
* * * * *
As she walked home, Mattie thought how funny it was to hear a man going
on like a mother, standing up for the least promising of the children!
But all the same, perhaps there _was_ more to Stephen than just his
cussedness.
How cheerful Lester had seemed! It must be that his food had set better
than usual to-day.