Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall
back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman,"
states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young."
That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most
certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in
the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with
broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was
practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was
strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and
ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's
East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and
hired girls bought the naïve ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of
that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy Decker's hats were honest
hats.
The world is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women
of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married
sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless nieces
and nephews.
"Poor Aunt Soph," with a significant half smile. "She's such a good old
thing. And she's had so little in life, really."
She was, undoubtedly, a good old thing--Aunt Soph. Forever sending a
spray of sweeping black paradise, like a jet of liquid velvet, to this
pert little niece in Seattle; or taking Adele, sister Flora's daughter,
to Chicago or New York, as a treat, on one of her buying trips.
Burdening herself, on her business visits to these cities, with a dozen
foolish shopping commissions for the idle women folk of her family.
Hearing without partisanship her sisters' complaints about their
husbands, and her sisters' husbands' complaints about their wives. It
was always the same.
"I'm telling you this, Sophy. I wouldn't breathe it to another living
soul. But I honestly think, sometimes, that if it weren't for the
children--"
There is no knowing why they confided these things to Sophy instead of
to each other, these wedded sisters of hers. Perhaps they held for each
other an unuttered distrust or jealousy. Perhaps, in making a
confidante of Sophy, there was something of the satisfaction that comes
of dropping a surreptitious stone down a deep well and hearing it plunk,
safe in the knowledge that it has struck no one and that it cannot
rebound, lying there in the soft darkness. Sometimes they would end by
saying, "But you don't know what it is, Sophy. You can't. I'm sure I
don't know why I'm telling you all this."
But when Sophy answered, sagely, "I know; I know"--they paid little
heed, once having unburdened themselves. The curious part of it is that
she did know. She knew as a woman of fifty must know who, all her life,
has given and given and in return has received nothing. Sophy Decker had
never used the word inhibition in her life. I doubt if she knew what it
meant. When you are busy copying French models for the fall trade you
have little time or taste for Freud. She only knew (without in the least
knowing she knew) that in giving of her goods, of her affections, of her
time, of her energy, she found a certain relief. Her own people would
have been shocked if you had told them that there was about this old
maid aunt something rather splendidly Rabelaisian. Without being at all
what is known as a masculine woman she had, somehow, acquired the man's
viewpoint, his shrewd value sense. She ate a good deal, and enjoyed her
food. She did not care for those queer little stories that married women
sometimes tell, with narrowed eyes, but she was strangely tolerant of
what is known as sin. So simple and direct she was that you wondered how
she prospered in a line so subtle as the millinery business.
You might have got a fairly true characterization of Sophy Decker from
one of fifty people: from a dapper salesman in a New York or Chicago
wholesale millinery house; from Otis Cowan, cashier of the First
National Bank of Chippewa; from Julia Gold, her head milliner and
trimmer; from almost any one, in fact, except a member of her own
family. They knew her least of all, as is often true of one's own
people. Her three married sisters--Grace in Seattle, Ella in Chicago,
and Flora in Chippewa--regarded her with a rather affectionate
disapproval from the snug safety of their own conjugal ingle-nooks.
"I don't know. There's something--well--common about Sophy," Flora
confided to Ella. Flora, on shopping bent and Sophy, seeking hats, had
made the five-hour run from Chippewa to Chicago together. "She talks to
everybody. You should have heard her with the porter on our train.
Chums! And when the conductor took our tickets it was a social occasion.
You know how packed the seven fifty-two is. Every seat in the parlour
car taken. And Sophy asking the coloured porter about how his wife was
getting along--she called him William--and if they were going to send
her west, and all about her. I _wish_ she wouldn't."
Aunt Sophy undeniably had a habit of regarding people as human beings.
You found her talking to chambermaids and delivery boys, and elevator
starters, and gas collectors, and hotel clerks--all that aloof,
unapproachable, superior crew. Under her benign volubility they bloomed
and spread and took on colour as do those tight little Japanese paper
water-flowers when you cast them into a bowl. It wasn't idle curiosity
in her. She was interested. You found yourself confiding to her your
innermost longings, your secret tribulations, under the encouragement of
her sympathetic, "You don't say!" Perhaps it was as well that sister
Flora was in ignorance of the fact that the men millinery salesmen at
Danowitz & Danowitz, Importers, always called Miss Decker Aunt Soph, as,
with one arm flung about her plump blue serge shoulder, they revealed to
her the picture of their girl in the back flap of their bill-folder.
Flora, with a firm grip on Chippewa society, as represented by the
East-End set, did not find her position enhanced by a sister in the
millinery business in Elm Street.
"Of course it's wonderful that she's self-supporting and successful and
all," she told her husband. "But it's not so pleasant for Adele, now
that she's growing up, having all the girls she knows buying their hats
of her aunt. Not that I--but you know how it is."
H. Charnsworth Baldwin said yes, he knew. But perhaps you, until you are
made more intimately acquainted with Chippewa, Wisconsin; with the
Decker girls of twenty years ago; with Flora's husband, H. Charnsworth
Baldwin; and with their children Adele and Eugene, may feel a little
natural bewilderment.
The Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the
original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an
unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree
in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front
porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From
May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing
the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the vines,
accompanied by a murmur of young voices, laughter, and the creak-creak
of the hard-worked and protesting hammock hooks. Flora, Ella, and Grace
Decker had more beaux and fewer clothes than any other girls in
Chippewa. In a town full of pretty young things they were, undoubtedly,
the prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted)
Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose
never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose,
purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that
vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet
shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there
is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than
to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it.
Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only
her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and
as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was
that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a
photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. It was as though Nature, in prankish
mood, had given a cabbage the colour and texture of a rose, with none of
its fragile reticence and grace.
It was a manless household. Mrs. Decker, vague, garrulous, and given to
ice-wool shawls, referred to her dead husband, in frequent reminiscence,
as poor Mr. Decker. Mrs. Decker dragged one leg as she
walked--rheumatism, or a spinal affection. Small wonder, then, that
Sophy, the plain, with a gift for hat-making, a knack at eggless
cake-baking, and a genius for turning a sleeve so that last year's style
met this year's without a struggle, contributed nothing to the sag in
the centre of the old twine hammock on the front porch.
That the three girls should marry well, and Sophy not at all, was as
inevitable as the sequence of the seasons. Ella and Grace did not manage
badly, considering that they had only their girlish prettiness and the
twine hammock to work with. But Flora, with her beauty, captured H.
Charnsworth Baldwin. Chippewa gasped. H. Charnsworth Baldwin drove a
skittish mare to a high-wheeled yellow runabout (this was twenty years
ago); had his clothes made at Proctor Brothers in Milwaukee, and talked
about a game called golf. It was he who advocated laying out a section
of land for what he called links, and erecting a club house thereon.
"The section of the bluff overlooking the river," he explained, "is full
of natural hazards, besides having a really fine view."
Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-class section of it which got its
exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the
grass evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the
Chippewa _Eagle_.
"A golf course," they repeated to one another, grinning. "Conklin's cow
pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what
was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say,
couldn't you die!"
For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went
East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and
gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played
on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name,
in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-glass windows of
the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:
NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY.
H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES.
Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering,
which read:
MISS SOPHY DECKER
Millinery
Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had
always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional
hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself
in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat
trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little
bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top,
awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still
stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee,
came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy
cucumber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five
years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the
old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and
transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of
green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street,
and the Chippewa _Eagle_ ran a half column twice a year describing her
spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin,
and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the
superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her
city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:
"This is awfully good this year."
"Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the
style--the line--you're paying for, not the material."
"I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it.
Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on."
When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the
mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it
in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated
eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended,
slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples.
A little sigh of relieved suspense.
"That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because
you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have
a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I
proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this
needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it."
And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat
against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist
and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out
of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you
bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something
more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her
admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:
"My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do.
You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat
and veil as soon's I get my hair combed."
In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight
brassière and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat
and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the
bedroom from the shoulders down.
The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and
expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and
lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as
well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these
opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said,
frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart
trade.
"The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say.
They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell
them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em,
or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to
cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it.
Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the
same idea."
Her shop windows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely,
severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the
other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.
At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques
completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No
one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol.
"I don't expect 'em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody
feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a
fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it but it has to
be there."
The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a
treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of
satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make
her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of
the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little
scavenger.
"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt
Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."
Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore. "I
keep it," she said.
When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say
'Poor Sophy'?"
"Because Aunt Sophy's had so little in life. She never has married, and
has always worked."
Adele considered that. "If you don't get married do they say you're
poor?"
"Well--yes--"
"Then I'll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child,
skinny and rather foreign looking.
The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl's. Very
tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora
of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his
mother used to say. "They're wasted on a man. He doesn't need them but a
girl does. Adele will have to be well-dressed and interesting. And
that's such hard work."
Flora said she worshipped her children. And she actually sometimes still
coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to
baby talk when endeavouring to coax something out of someone. Her
admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her
selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen
years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great
deal of baking soda and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or
twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the
beautiful, and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change.
It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had
taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily,
unhealthily. With the encroaching fat Flora's small, delicate features
seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large
white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of
those enlarged photographs of the moon's surface as seen through a
telescope. A self-centred face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy's
large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating
strength, courage, and a great human understanding.
From her husband and her children Flora exacted service that would have
chafed a galley-slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in a
lavender bed-jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele or Eugene, or
her husband. They all hated it.
"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had
stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as
an excuse for everything and has, ever since 'Gene and I were children.
She's as strong as an ox." Not a very ladylike or daughterly speech,
but shockingly true.
Years before a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call,
had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of
pillows.
"Well, I don't blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way
you do in bed I'd stay there forever. Don't tell me you're sick, with
all that lovely colour!"
Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "Nobody ever gives me
credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my
blood is in my cheeks."
Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary
for success in that direction.
"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that's
a profession in itself--being a wife and mother."
She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband's
land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear
he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity
and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of
beauty.
"I don't understand it," she used to say in the child's very presence.
"Her father's handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn't such a
fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little, dark, skinny thing."
The boy Eugene grew up a very silent, handsome shy young fellow. The
girl dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more
immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods;
irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited
following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid
bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Any
one but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would
have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a
giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection
unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having
her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a
prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not
a step.
Sometimes Sophy the clear-eyed and level-headed, seeing this state of
affairs, tried to stop it.
"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day,
bluntly, to her sister.
"I!" Flora's dimpled hands had flown to her breast like a wounded thing.
"I! You're crazy! There isn't a more devoted wife and mother in the
world. That's the trouble. I love them too much."
"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That's half Eugene's
nervousness--your fussing over him. He's eighteen. Give him a chance.
You're weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele's
ears. She's got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom
she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban
that Angie Hatton--"
"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your
shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You're earning your living, and it's to
your credit. You're my sister. But I won't have Adele associated in the
minds of my friends with your hat store, understand. I won't have it.
That isn't what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her
come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little,
cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now understand, I won't have it! You don't
know what it is to be a mother. You don't know what it is to have
suffered. If you had brought two children into the world--"
So then, it had come about, during the years between their childhood and
their youth, that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences,
their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in
some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.
"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How
can Aunt Sophy hear when you're crying! That's my baby. Now, then."
This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and
became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy's house--the old
frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was
something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear,
that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin
house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the
Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best
residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively and correctly
furnished. The hall consol alone was enough to strike a preliminary
chill to your heart.
The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and
snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not
unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam,
and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head
trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray
patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him
for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have
around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls
would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and
cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold,
especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from
Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the
best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or
Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original
design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a
small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory
down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her
invaluable.
The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very
black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark
line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but
when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by
a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low.
She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking
something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream
she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being
pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the
sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers.
But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.
"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a
boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you
good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me
company."
Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the
house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big
flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her
skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in
and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny
game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand,
always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a
partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.
It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly
into the living room from the kitchen where she and Adele were foraging
for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms
clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came
in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was
thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite
twenty-one.
"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a
leaf of lettuce in her hand at the time, and still she did not look
comic.
"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other. We're
going to be married."
Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele's spoons and
plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen--" she began.
"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"
Except that it was very white and, somehow, old looking, Aunt Sophy's
face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That
isn't love and you know it. I'm an old maid, but I know what love is
when I see it. I'm ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you.
Hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother,
pretty near."
"Now, look here, Aunt Soph! I'm fond of you but if you're going to talk
that way--Why, she's wonderful. She's taught me what it means to
really--"
"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking, suddenly, very sick and
old.
And then, from the kitchen, Adele's clear young voice: "Heh! What's the
idea! I'm not going to do all the work. Where's everybody?"
Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a
capable, firm, steadying hand on the arm of each. The woman drew back
but the boy did not.
"Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will
you promise me? Will you?"
"Are you going to tell Father?"
"Not for a week if you'll promise not to see each other in that week.
No, I don't want to send you away, Julia, I don't want to--You're not a
bad girl. It's just--he's never had--at home they never gave him a
chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over
then."
Adele's footsteps coming from the kitchen.
"Quick!"
"I promise," said Eugene. Julia said nothing.
"Well, really," said Adele, from the doorway, "you're a nervy lot,
sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. 'Gene, see if you can open
the olives with this fool can opener. I tried."
There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy;
what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just
hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three
days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she knew
that her prayers were answered.
Flora was beside herself. "Eugene won't have to go. He isn't quite
twenty-one, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely."
She was almost hysterical.
Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt
Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said
nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora
took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted colour marking her
cheeks, walked into her mother's bedroom and stood at the side of the
recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing
up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the
floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted
curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and
crafty look.
"Charnsworth, won't you please stop ramping up and down like that! My
nerves are killing me. I can't help it if the war has done something or
other to your business. I'm sure no wife could have been more
economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he
do such a thing! I've given my whole life to my children--"
H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that it struck the wall at
the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her
teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.
Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her
hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there,
she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and
simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own
affairs, must have marked it.
The girl's head came up, stiffly. "Listen. I'm going to marry Daniel
Oakley."
Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father's. For years he had
been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and
Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his
strength and endurance, his walks, his golf, his rugged health; pounding
his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had
had business relations as well as friendly ones.
At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth
stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer
look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion
a whole maze of mental machinery within his brain.
"When did he ask you?"
"He's asked me a dozen times. But it's different now. All the men will
be going to war. There won't be any left. Look at England and France.
I'm not going to be left." She turned squarely toward her father, her
young face set and hard. "You know what I mean. You know what I mean."
Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. "I think you might have told your
mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say,
'I'm going to marry Daniel Oakley.' Oh, I _am_ so faint ... all of a
sudden ... get the spirits of ammonia...."
Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks
later. They had a regular pre-war wedding--veil, flowers, dinner, and
all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The
girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half-smile
twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever.
"In all this white, and my veil, I look just like a fly in a quart of
milk," she said, with a laugh. Then, suddenly, she turned to her aunt
who stood behind her and clung to her, holding her tight, tight. "I
can't!" she gasped. "I can't! I can't!"
Aunt Sophy held her off and looked at her, her eyes searching the girl.
"What do you mean, Della? Are you just nervous or do you mean you don't
want to marry him? Do you mean that? Then what are you marrying for?
Tell me! Tell your Aunt Sophy."
But Adele was straightening herself and pulling out the crushed folds of
her veil. "To pay the mortgage on the old homestead, of course. Just
like the girl in the play." She laughed a little. But Aunt Sophy did not
laugh.
"Now look here, Delia. If you're--"
But there was a knock at the door. Adele caught up her flowers. "It's
all right," she said.
Aunt Sophy stood with her back against the door. "If it's money," she
said. "It is! It is, isn't it! Listen. I've got money saved. It was for
you children. I've always been afraid. I knew he was sailing pretty
close, with his speculations and all, since the war. He can have it all.
It isn't too late yet. Adele! Della, my baby."
"Don't, Aunt Sophy. It wouldn't be enough, anyway. Daniel has been
wonderful, really. Don't look like that. I'd have hated being poor,
anyway. Never could have got used to it. It is ridiculous, though, isn't
it? Like one of those melodramas, or a cheap movie. I don't mind. I'm
lucky, really, when you come to think of it. A plain little black thing
like me."
"But your mother--"
"Mother doesn't know a thing."
Flora wept mistily all through the ceremony but Adele was composed
enough for two.
When, scarcely a month later, Baldwin came to Sophy Decker, his face
drawn and queer, Sophy knew.
"How much?" she said.
"Thirty thousand will cover it. If you've got more than that--"
"I thought Oakley--Adele said--"
"He did, but he won't any more, and this thing's got to be met. It's
this damned war that's done it. I'd have been all right. People got
scared. They wanted their money. They wanted it in cash."
"Speculating with it, were you?"
"Oh, well, a woman doesn't understand these business deals."
"No, naturally," said Aunt Sophy, "a butterfly like me."
"Sophy, for God's sake don't joke now. I tell you this will cover it,
and everything will be all right. If I had anybody else to go to for the
money I wouldn't ask you. But you'll get it back. You know that."
Aunt Sophy got up, heavily, and went over to her desk. "It was for the
children, anyway. They won't need it now."
He looked up at that. Something in her voice. "Who won't? Why won't
they?"
"I don't know what made me say that. I had a dream."
"Eugene?"
"Yes."
"Oh, well, we're all nervous. Flora has dreams every night and
presentiments every fifteen minutes. Now, look here, Sophy. About this
money. You'll never know how grateful I am. Flora doesn't understand
these things but I can talk to you. It's like this--"
"I might as well be honest about it," Sophy interrupted. "I'm doing it,
not for you, but for Flora, and Delia--and Eugene. Flora has lived such
a sheltered life. I sometimes wonder if she ever really knew any of you.
Her husband, or her children. I sometimes have the feeling that Delia
and Eugene are my children--were my children."
When he came home that night Baldwin told his wife that old Soph was
getting queer. "She talks about the children being hers," he said.
"Oh, well, she's awfully fond of them," Flora explained. "And she's
lived her little narrow life, with nothing to bother her but her hats
and her house. She doesn't know what it means to suffer as a mother
suffers--poor Sophy."
"Um," Baldwin grunted.
When the official notification of Eugene's death came from the War
Department Aunt Sophy was so calm that it might have appeared that Flora
had been right. She took to her bed now in earnest, did Flora, and they
thought that her grief would end in madness. Sophy neglected everything
to give comfort to the stricken two.
"How can you sit there like that!" Flora would rail. "How can you sit
there like that! Even if you weren't his mother surely you must feel
something."
"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.
"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!"
This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have
to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the
printed page. You must not skip this.
AMERICAN RED CROSS
(CROIX ROUGE AMÉRICAINE)