In spite of her anxiety Janice fixed her mind upon her
recitations with her usual success. During the past few months
so many, many things had happened to trouble the home pool that
the girl was pretty well used to seeing it ruffled.
"Help" came and went at the Day cottage on Knight Street in a
procession of incompetents. Some incumbents of the domestic
situation remained but a week. Olga Cedarstrom had been longer
than any in Mr. Day's employ.
Often, when they were without a girl, Janice had spent her
Saturday holiday trying to clean house and set things to rights,
and when daddy had come home from the bank he had donned a
kitchen apron and helped.
The house was by no means kept as it had been when Mrs. Day was
alive. For she had been a trained housewife, and she knew how to
make the domestic help do the work properly.
Now there was dust under the furniture and in the corners. Pots
and pans were grimy. Because of the rough methods of cleaning
pursued by Olga, the baseboards of the kitchen were streaked with
a "high-tide" mark of soapy water.
The stove and the gas range were smeared with grease. Scarcely a
cooking utensil but was sticky. The silver went unpolished. The
yolk of egg ("the very stickingest thing there was" Janice
declared,) could be found on the edges of plates and spoons.
And the laundry! The "wet wash," the "flat work" laundry, and
the complete service laundry were all only a little worse than
the attempts of the hired help to wash clothes properly.
Bed and table linen wore out twice as fast as it should, Janice
knew. Nobody would wash and turn socks and stockings as they
should be washed and turned. Fruit stains were never removed.
Either the girls used kerosene in boiling the clothes and the
odor of it clung to them even after they were laid away in the
bureau drawers, or she threw chloride of lime into the water
which ate holes in the various fabrics. Mother used to make
Javelle water to whiten the clothes, but Janice did not know how
it was made, nor had she time to make it.
Indeed, with school-closing in the offing and lessons and
examinations getting harder and harder, the girl scarcely had
time to keep her own clothing neat and mended. She knew that
right now daddy was wearing socks with holes in them.
So, when her mind was not fixed upon her lessons, it was not
likely that even Stella Latham's birthday party occupied much of
Janice's thought. She started home from school as soon as she
was released, considering if she could get the back kitchen
cleaned up before it was time to get supper for daddy. The lumps
of soft coal Olga Cedarstrom had thrown at the cats had made an
awful mess of the place, Janice very well knew.
As she turned the corner into Knight Street there was Arlo Weeks,
Junior, just ahead of her. Arlo Junior, the cause of the
morning's trouble! Arlo Junior, the cause of Olga's leaving the
Days in the lurch! More, Arlo Junior, who was the spring of
Janice Day's deeper trouble, for if it had not been for that
mischievous wight, Olga Cedarstrom could not have run off with
the treasure-box!
Arlo Junior had black, curly hair like his father. He had
snapping brown eyes, too, and was quick and nervous in his
movements. Of all the Weeks' children (Daddy said there was a
"raft" of them!) Arlo Junior was the worst behaved. He was
forever in trouble.
To report him to his parents was just like shooting cannon balls
into a stack of feathers. His mother, tall, cadaverous, and of
complaining voice and manner, only declared:
"He's too much for me. I tell Arlo that Junior ought to be
locked up, or handcuffed, or something. And that's all the good
it does."
To complain to Mr. Weeks of his namesake was quite as
unsatisfactory.
"What? The young rascal!" Mr. Weeks would emphatically say.
"Arlo did that? Well, I tell you what. If you catch him at any
of his tricks, you thrash him. That's what you do--thrash him!
You have my full permission to punish him as though he were your
own boy. That's the only way to deal with a rascal like him."
So, you see, both parents shed responsibility, both for Arlo
Junior's mischief and punishment, just as easily as a duck sheds
rainwater. Under these circumstances
,
Arlo Junior usually went without punishment, no matter what he
did.
And here he was, swaggering along the walk with some of his
mates, hilariously telling them, perhaps, of how he had tolled
all the cats of the neighborhood into the Days' back kitchen.
Janice Day was a very human girl indeed. The thought of Junior's
trick and all it had brought about made her very, very angry.
She rushed right into the group of boys, all fully as big as she
was, soundly boxed Arlo Weeks' ears, and just as many times as
she could do so before he outran her and left her, panting and
still wrathful, on the curb.
The other boys backed away, leaving Arlo Junior to fight his own
battle--or run, if that seemed to him the part of wisdom, as
evidently it had.
"I hope that will teach you to bring cats into our kitchen, Arlo
Junior!" Janice cried after him.
"No, 'twon't," declared the boy, rubbing the ear that had
received the greater number of her blows. "I knew how to do it
before, didn't I? My, Janice Day! but you can slam a fella."
"I wish I could hurt you more," declared the girl. "You've made
me enough trouble."
She marched on, leaving the scattered crowd of urchins to gather
again about Arlo Junior, but now in a scoffing rather than in an
admiring crowd. The bubble of Arlo Junior's conceit had been
punctured. He had been whipped by a girl!
"Now," thought Janice, as she went along home, "I would not want
Daddy to know I did that. Fighting a boy on the street! I guess
Miss Peckham, who is always peering through her blinds at what I
do, if she had seen me would be sure to say I was misbehaving
because I had no mother to make me mind. As though I wouldn't
behave just as well for Daddy as I used to for dear mother!
"Only I haven't really behaved very well to-day," she went on,
reviewing the matter to herself. "I don't care! Yes, I do too!
No matter what Arlo Weeks, Junior, did, I oughtn't to have fought
him on the street like that. Oh, dear!" mused the girl, "I don't
know whether I am sorry I hit Arlo Junior or am sorry that I'm
not sorry. It's awfully confusing."
She choked back a sob, dashed the tears from her eyes, and
suddenly saw that the hazy object she had been looking at for the
past minute was really a human figure squatting on the side porch
steps of the Day's cottage.
"Why! who can that be?" thought Janice Day, staring with all her
might at the odd-looking creature perched thus on the steps, with
a bulging old-fashioned black oilcloth bag beside her.
It was a woman in a cheap, homemade calico dress, and with rows
upon rows of flounces on the skirt. She sat on the
next-to-the-top step of the porch while her shoes were planted
flat-footed on the walk. She was very short-waisted, while her
limbs, accentuated by the model of the flounced skirt seemed
enormously long.
Indeed, she looked like the halves of two people mysteriously
glued together. Her nether limbs without doubt belonged to a
giantess; her body although broad and sturdy, was almost
dwarflike. Her arms were very short.
Above this strange figure was a fat, baby-like face, with
staring, light-blue eyes and whisps of straw-colored hair laid
flat to her, head under a close fitting hat.
"It's another one," groaned Janice, her heart sinking. "I know
she must be from the intelligence office, because--well--she
looks so unintelligent, I
guess!"
Janice opened the gate and approached the ungainly woman
doubtfully. Surely daddy could not have seen her before hiring
this very peculiar-looking person. He must have accepted her
services over the telephone, and "sight, unseen."
The newly hired girl wreathed her flabby face in a vacuous smile.
She bobbed up from her seat, bringing the oilcloth bag with her,
and towering over Janice Day in a most startling manner.
"How-de-do! I guess you are after bein' Mr. Day's little girl,
heh?"
The voice from the giantess made Janice jump. It was high and
squealing, like a bat's voice; and some people's ears are not
attuned to the bat's cry and cannot hear it at all.
"Ye-es. I am Janice Day," admitted the girl.
"Well," squealed the newcomer, "I'm the lady your paw sent up to
do the work. You're a right pretty little girl, ain't you?"
Janice ignored this bit of flattery as she mounted the steps and
drew forth the door key.
"What is your name, please?" she asked the woman.
"Why, I'll tell you," said the other in a most confidential tone,
blundering up the steps after Janice and stooping to get her lips
near the girl's ear. "My real name is Mrs. Bridget Burns; but my
friends all call me Delia. I don't like 'Bridget.' Would you
mind callin' me Delia, or else Mrs. Burns, heh?"
"I think father would prefer to call you by your first name,"
Janice said, trying not to show her surprise and amusement. "We
will call you Delia if that pleases you."
"You're a real nice little girl, I can see that," said Delia,
with a huge sigh of satisfaction, following Janice, bag and all,
into the house.
Janice led the way up the back stairs to the girl's room. It was
just as Olga had left it--as untidy and "mussed up" as ever a
room was.
Delia uttered a high, nasal ejaculation. "I guess your last girl
wasn't very clean," she said. "Who was she?"
"She was a Swede," Janice replied wearily.
"Heh! Them Swedes!" sniffed Delia, voicing a pronounced national
prejudice.
"She left in a hurry," Janice explained. "She--she got mad. One
of the neighbor's boys played a trick on her and she left."
"Ye don't be tellin' me? Couldn't she spank the boy? Sure, 'tis
no sinse them foreigners has."
"I hope you will not take offense so easily," Janice rejoined.
"Here is clean linen for your bed. We send the flat work to the
laundry. There is a broom and carpet sweeper in the storeroom,
and plenty of dust cloths. You would better put your own room in
order first. Then you can come down and I will show you about
getting dinner."
"Sure, you is very young to be so knowin' about housework. Is
your mother dead?"
"Yes."
"I didn't know but she'd gone off and left you and your
paw," observed this strange creature, "So many of them be's doin'
that now."
"Oh!" gasped the girl.
"So that's why your paw did the hirin' through Murphy's Agency!
Well, I like to work where there's no lady boss," said Delia.
"You and me is goin' to get on fine."
Janice wondered if that were so. In no very enthusiastic frame
of mind, she descended the stairs to put away her hat and coat
and to place her books on the table in the living room.