Lulu was dusting the parlour. The parlour was rarely used, but every
morning it was dusted. By Lulu.
She dusted the black walnut centre table which was of Ina's choosing,
and looked like Ina, shining, complacent, abundantly curved. The leather
rocker, too, looked like Ina, brown, plumply upholstered, tipping back a
bit. Really, the davenport looked like Ina, for its chintz pattern
seemed to bear a design of lifted eyebrows and arch, reproachful eyes.
Lulu dusted the upright piano, and that was like Dwight--in a perpetual
attitude of rearing back, with paws out, playful, but capable, too, of
roaring a ready bass.
And the black fireplace--there was Mrs. Bett to the life. Colourless,
fireless, and with a dust of ashes.
In the midst of all was Lulu herself reflected in the narrow pier
glass, bodiless-looking in her blue gingham gown, but somehow alive.
Natural.
This pier glass Lulu approached with expectation, not because of herself
but because of the photograph on its low marble shelf. A large
photograph on a little shelf-easel. A photograph of a man with evident
eyes, evident lips, evident cheeks--and each of the six were rounded and
convex. You could construct the rest of him. Down there under the glass
you could imagine him extending, rounded and convex, with plump hands
and curly thumbs and snug clothes. It was Ninian Deacon, Dwight's
brother.
Every day since his coming had been announced Lulu, dusting the parlour,
had seen the photograph looking at her with its eyes somehow new. Or
were her own eyes new? She dusted this photograph with a difference,
lifted, dusted, set it back, less as a process than as an experience. As
she dusted the mirror and saw his trim semblance over against her own
bodiless reflection, she hurried away. But the eyes of the picture
followed her, and she liked it.
She dusted the south window-sill and saw Bobby Larkin come round the
house and go to the wood-shed for the lawn mower. She heard the smooth
blur of the cutter. Not six times had Bobby traversed the lawn when Lulu
saw Di emerge from the house. Di had been caring for her canary and she
carried her bird-bath and went to the well, and Lulu divined that Di had
deliberately disregarded the handy kitchen taps. Lulu dusted the south
window and watched, and in her watching was no quality of spying or of
criticism. Nor did she watch wistfully. Rather, she looked out on
something in which she had never shared, could not by any chance imagine
herself sharing.
The south windows were open. Airs of May bore the soft talking.
"Oh, Bobby, will you pump while I hold this?" And again: "Now wait till
I rinse." And again: "You needn't be so glum"--the village salutation
signifying kindly attention.
Bobby now first spoke: "Who's glum?" he countered gloomily.
The iron of those days when she had laughed at him was deep within him,
and this she now divined, and said absently:
"I used to think you were pretty nice. But I don't like you any more."
"Yes, you used to!" Bobby repeated derisively. "Is that why you made fun
of me all the time?"
At this Di coloured and tapped her foot on the well-curb. He seemed to
have her now, and enjoyed his triumph. But Di looked up at him shyly and
looked down. "I had to," she admitted. "They were all teasing me about
you."
"They were?" This was a new thought to him. Teasing her about him, were
they? He straightened. "Huh!" he said, in magnificent evasion.
"I had to make them stop, so I teased you. I--I never wanted to." Again
the upward look.
"Well!" Bobby stared at her. "I never thought it was anything like
that."
"Of course you didn't." She tossed back her bright hair, met his eyes
full. "And you never came where I could tell you. I wanted to tell you."
She ran into the house.
Lulu lowered her eyes. It was as if she had witnessed the exercise of
some secret gift, had seen a cocoon open or an egg hatch. She was
thinking:
"How easy she done it. Got him right over. But _how_ did she do that?"
Dusting the Dwight-like piano, Lulu looked over-shoulder, with a manner
of speculation, at the photograph of Ninian.
Bobby mowed and pondered. The magnificent conceit of the male in his
understanding of the female character was sufficiently developed to
cause him to welcome the improvisation which he had just heard. Perhaps
that was the way it had been. Of course that was the way it had been.
What a fool he had been not to understand. He cast his eyes repeatedly
toward the house. He managed to make the job last over so that he could
return in the afternoon. He was not conscious of planning this, but it
was in some manner contrived for him by forces of his own with which he
seemed to be coöperating without his conscious will. Continually he
glanced toward the house.
These glances Lulu saw. She was a woman of thirty-four and Di and Bobby
were eighteen, but Lulu felt for them no adult indulgence. She felt that
sweetness of attention which we bestow upon May robins. She felt more.
She cut a fresh cake, filled a plate, called to Di, saying: "Take some
out to that Bobby Larkin, why don't you?"
It was Lulu's way of participating. It was her vicarious thrill.
After supper Dwight and Ina took their books and departed to the
Chautauqua Circle. To these meetings Lulu never went. The reason seemed
to be that she never went anywhere.
When they were gone Lulu felt an instant liberation. She turned
aimlessly to the garden and dug round things with her finger. And she
thought about the brightness of that Chautauqua scene to which Ina and
Dwight had gone. Lulu thought about such gatherings in somewhat the way
that a futurist receives the subjects of his art--forms not vague, but
heightened to intolerable definiteness, acute colour, and always
motion--motion as an integral part of the desirable. But a factor of all
was that Lulu herself was the participant, not the onlooker. The
perfection of her dream was not impaired by any longing. She had her
dream as a saint her sense of heaven.
"Lulie!" her mother called. "You come out of that damp."
She obeyed, as she had obeyed that voice all her life. But she took one
last look down the dim street. She had not known it, but superimposed on
her Chautauqua thoughts had been her faint hope that it would be
to-night, while she was in the garden alone, that Ninian Deacon would
arrive. And she had on her wool chally, her coral beads, her cameo
pin....
She went into the lighted dining-room. Monona was in bed. Di was not
there. Mrs. Bett was in Dwight Herbert's leather chair and she lolled at
her ease. It was strange to see this woman, usually so erect and tense,
now actually lolling, as if lolling were the positive, the vital, and
her ordinary rigidity a negation of her. In some corresponding orgy of
leisure and liberation, Lulu sat down with no needle.
"Inie ought to make over her delaine," Mrs. Bett comfortably began. They
talked of this, devised a mode, recalled other delaines. "Dear, dear,"
said Mrs. Bett, "I had on a delaine when I met your father." She
described it. Both women talked freely, with animation. They were
individuals and alive. To the two pallid beings accessory to the
Deacons' presence, Mrs. Bett and her daughter Lulu now bore no
relationship. They emerged, had opinions, contradicted, their eyes were
bright.
Toward nine o'clock Mrs. Bett announced that she thought she should have
a lunch. This was debauchery. She brought in bread-and-butter, and a
dish of cold canned peas. She was committing all the excesses that she
knew--offering opinions, laughing, eating. It was to be seen that this
woman had an immense store of vitality, perpetually submerged.
When she had eaten she grew sleepy--rather cross at the last and
inclined to hold up her sister's excellencies to Lulu; and, at Lulu's
defence, lifted an ancient weapon.
"What's the use of finding fault with Inie? Where'd you been if she
hadn't married?"
Lulu said nothing.
"What say?" Mrs. Bett demanded shrilly. She was enjoying it.
Lulu said no more. After a long time:
"You always was jealous of Inie," said Mrs. Bett, and went to her bed.
As soon as her mother's door had closed, Lulu took the lamp from its
bracket, stretching up her long body and her long arms until her skirt
lifted to show her really slim and pretty feet. Lulu's feet gave news of
some other Lulu, but slightly incarnate. Perhaps, so far, incarnate only
in her feet and her long hair.
She took the lamp to the parlour and stood before the photograph of
Ninian Deacon, and looked her fill. She did not admire the photograph,
but she wanted to look at it. The house was still, there was no
possibility of interruption. The occasion became sensation, which she
made no effort to quench. She held a rendezvous with she knew not what.
In the early hours of the next afternoon with the sun shining across
the threshold, Lulu was paring something at the kitchen table. Mrs. Bett
was asleep. ("I don't blame you a bit, mother," Lulu had said, as her
mother named the intention.) Ina was asleep. (But Ina always took off
the curse by calling it her "si-esta," long _i_.) Monona was playing
with a neighbour's child--you heard their shrill yet lovely laughter as
they obeyed the adult law that motion is pleasure. Di was not there.
A man came round the house and stood tying a puppy to the porch post. A
long shadow fell through the west doorway, the puppy whined.
"Oh," said this man. "I didn't mean to arrive at the back door, but
since I'm here--"
He lifted a suitcase to the porch, entered, and filled the kitchen.
"It's Ina, isn't it?" he said.
"I'm her sister," said Lulu, and understood that he was here at last.
"Well, I'm Bert's brother," said Ninian. "So I can come in, can't I?"
He did so, turned round like a dog before his chair and sat down
heavily, forcing his fingers through heavy, upspringing brown hair.
"Oh, yes," said Lulu. "I'll call Ina. She's asleep."
"Don't call her, then," said Ninian. "Let's you and I get acquainted."
He said it absently, hardly looking at her.
"I'll get the pup a drink if you can spare me a basin," he added.
Lulu brought the basin, and while he went to the dog she ran tiptoeing
to the dining-room china closet and brought a cut-glass tumbler, as
heavy, as ungainly as a stone crock. This she filled with milk.
"I thought maybe ..." said she, and offered it.
"Thank _you_!" said Ninian, and drained it. "Making pies, as I live," he
observed, and brought his chair nearer to the table. "I didn't know Ina
had a sister," he went on. "I remember now Bert said he had two of her
relatives----"
Lulu flushed and glanced at him pitifully.
"He has," she said. "It's my mother and me. But we do quite a good deal
of the work."
"I'll bet you do," said Ninian, and did not perceive that anything had
been violated. "What's your name?" he bethought.
She was in an immense and obscure excitement. Her manner was serene, her
hands as they went on with the peeling did not tremble; her replies were
given with sufficient quiet. But she told him her name as one tells
something of another and more remote creature. She felt as one may feel
in catastrophe--no sharp understanding but merely the sense that the
thing cannot possibly be happening.
"You folks expect me?" he went on.
"Oh, yes," she cried, almost with vehemence. "Why, we've looked for you
every day."
"'See," he said, "how long have they been married?"