Читать книгу At the Age of Eve - Kate Trimble Sharber - Страница 4

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THE NEW NEIGHBORS

"You mus' be mighty clean, or mighty dirty, one," Mammy Lou called out to me this morning as she looked up from the kitchen door and espied me at the bath-room window with my robe wrapped around me toga-fashion.

"Oh, excuse me," she continued with exaggerated politeness after a moment in which I did not speak. "Of course you ain't to be spoke to when you're breathin' like a heathen!"

I finished the prescribed number of breaths laid down in the rules for Yogi breathing, which I am trying just now because I am so tired of breathing the same old way, then looked down at mammy.

"A girl who can take a cold bath every morning and bait a fish-hook can take care of herself in this life!" I answered. "You ought to be proud of my courage."

"'Tain't no Christian notion for no girl to be wantin' to take care of herself," she began to argue, but rather than get into a debate and be routed, as she sometimes is, she suddenly assumed an air of excitement and cried: "Listen! Wasn't that the thing hollerin'?"

"The thing" here referred to is the new inter-urban line which now runs past our house, much to the chagrin of Mammy Lou, who calls it the "interruption line," because it is "always drappin' somebody off here right in the midst o' dinner time, when there ain't nothin' lef' but backs and wings."

This very disconcerting thing has happened so many times that mother found she would have to carry a full line of emergency tins in her pantry, all bearing on their labels the comforting assurance that they could be served hot in three minutes. These were ever small consolation to Mammy Lou, however, and she always serves them with as much humiliation as if the "Yankee beans" and "het-over peas" were the proverbial dinner of herbs.

This morning, though, the lid was shut fast on the tinned diet department and there was as much beautiful fried chicken sizzling drowsily on the back of the stove as northern people always give us Southerners credit for having. The best white and gold china was on the table, and a tall vase of Paul Neron roses on the mantelpiece, hiding father's bottle of rheumatism cure.

At mammy's suggestion that she heard the "thing" hollering I had thrown on my clothes without waiting to wipe all the water out of my ears, and had run down-stairs to see if mother needed me to pin her collar down in the back, for I knew she would be wanting to look her best this morning. We were all a little excited (things so seldom happen here) and I noticed that father was using his most rheumatic hand and arm every few minutes to take his watch out of his pocket; yet he forgot to frown.

The Claybornes were coming, Waterloo, Rufe and Cousin Eunice. We were feeling particularly anxious about the outcome of their visit, for mother and I had conspired together that a few political talks with Rufe had to cure father of his rheumatism. So we were watching every movement on his part with eager interest.

You must not imagine that we are unsympathetic with father when he actually has an attack. We rub him and put hot things to his shoulder, and I have actually gone so far as to let him explain the primary plan to me in words of one syllable that a child could understand, just to get his mind diverted.

Like most high-spirited men, when father does get down into the depths he tries to burrow clear on through to China. I wonder why this is? Possibly it is on the same principle that effervescent drugs are kept in blue bottles. I do not blame him, certainly, for rheumatism is enough to get on anybody's nerves. The poor man has to try as many different positions to get any ease sometimes as a worn-out alarm clock that will run only on a certain side. So the summer has been a hard one for us all, father waxing so melancholy here lately that if he has a gum-boil he gives us directions for his cremation.

It was during one of these outbursts of pessimism that father took it into his head to disfigure the landscape across the road from our house with a row of smart cottages, which were to rent for so much a month that they would prove a get-rich-quick scheme and so save us from the humiliation of being cared for by the Masons in our old age, which was another one of the notions in the train of rheumatic gloom.

Fortunately the first cottage cost so much more than it was worth that the project for the rest was abandoned; and, after it was duly insured, mother and I were secretly burning candles to our patron saint for its incineration when it was rented to a family named Sullivan. This Sullivan family consists of a father who drinks, just a little, enough to keep him jolly all the time; a mother who is of such a despondent nature that you wish she would drink; a daughter who wears crimson silk gowns and jeweled combs to the post-office when she goes for her mail every morning, yet withal has more beaus than any other girl in the village, as is attested by the candy boxes piled piano-high in her parlor; and a maiden aunt, Miss Delia Badger, who dyes her hair. Now, this term, "maiden aunt," is usually employed to denote a condition of hopelessness, but you will understand from the dyed hair that, in this case, the condition is far from being hopeless—else why the dye?

The pristine blackness of Miss Delia's crown of glory was beginning to wear off, and in the stress of moving had not been replaced as soon as it should have been, so, on the day that I made her acquaintance, her hair displayed an iridescent sheen, shading from light tan to deep purple. This made me so angry with father for having built the cottage that I ran past him without a word of sympathy when I reached home, although he was sitting on the front porch reading the paper and making horrible faces every time he had to move his arm.

The next day, which was the second after their moving, when I turned in at our gate after my morning tramp, I found that the Sullivans were presenting a much more homelike view from the front of their house, elaborate curtains showing at the parlor windows, and at the front door a white panel of lace, a most lifelike affair, representing Andrew Jackson mounted upon his fiery steed and lifting his high white hat to an imaginary, though evidently enthusiastic, throng.

"Now, I reckon you're satisfied," I exclaimed to father as I came into the house and found him cleaning his gun, one end of it resting on the piano, and a pile of greasy rags perilously close to my limp-backed copy of Gray's Elegy.

He quickly moved the gun and rags, but seeing that this offense was not the cause of my wrath, he meekly inquired: "What?"

Mother came in at this juncture and I explained to them my indignation over the Andrew Jackson.

"Jumping Jerusalem!" father said, thus admitting his horrified surprise, but after a moment he parried.

"It may be Napoleon, or Frederick the Great."

"What difference would that make?" I demanded. "A warrior has no place on a door-panel. Besides, it's 'Old Hickory.' I'd know that high white hat anywhere! Wasn't I born and raised in the shadow of it?"

"Dear me! But maybe you are mistaken," mother interposed gently. "It is quite a distance across the road—it may be a peculiar pattern of Batten—"

Before she had finished I darted up the steps and scrambled around in the bureau drawer for my opera-glasses.

"Take these out to the porch and look," I begged, as I came down again and found the two still facing each other with a quizzical smile. She carried out my suggestion and presently came back, still smiling.

"It's Andrew," she reported, reaching out for my opera-bag and slipping the glasses into it; "it's Andrew beyond a doubt; but, dearie, it can't outlast two washings."

This assurance comforted me somewhat every time I had to look at the military door-panel, but on cleaning days when the parlor curtains at the cottage were tucked up and I discerned the large, colored portrait of Mr. Roosevelt which smiled sunnily down from the space above the mantelpiece there was no such consoling reflection.

About this time it was that I grew to know Neva, the daughter of the house. Her family called her "Nevar," most nasally, after the manner of "ordinary" people in the South; but I soon found qualities in her that made me forgive the silk gowns and jeweled combs, aye, even the Andrew Jackson.

In the first place I discovered that she entertained a most profound admiration for me, especially for my pronunciation and finger-nails. Of these she at once set about a frank imitation which later extended to things more impersonal. Once, after I had shown her my books and she had breathed a long, ecstatic sigh over the pictures in the library I found that the hero of San Juan was falling into disfavor as a parlor ornament. Neva had been especially impressed with a small oval portrait of my childhood's hero, Lord Byron, which mother had found once in a curio-shop in New Orleans and brought home to me.

"Who is he?" she asked, her eyes fixed admiringly on the matchless face. I explained to her.

"Is he dead?" she inquired softly.

"Alas, yes!"

"But it certainly is swell to have his picture here," she volunteered. "I reckon it's because he's dead that it is more quiet and elegant, somehow, than a president's picture. Now Mr. Roosevelt looks so horrid and lively!"

From this I gathered that the ex-president would sooner or later be deposed, but I was surprised to find that it had happened much sooner than I had expected, for the next time I visited the Sullivan home I found Mr. Roosevelt's jolly face gone; and in its stead the gentle features of William McKinley looked down on the candy-boxes and pink-flowered cuspidors. That he was dead was evidenced by the black border running mournfully around the print; and Neva called my attention to the fact as soon as I came into the room.

"You see he looks quieter than Roosevelt because he's dead," she elucidated, "although he isn't a poet! Papa said he'd buy me a poet the next time he went up to the city—and oh, a green leather copy of Gray's 'Prodigy!'—like yours!"

So, in trying to teach Neva the difference between presidents and poets, I have been able to enliven some of the dull days; and she is such a sweet little thing at heart that, if she never gets the difference clear, my time is not ill-spent anyway.

But ah, this morning the Claybornes were coming! And we were all out at the gate in a twinkling when we finally did hear the shrill whistle of the car! The first sight of Waterloo's sparkling little face rewarded me for dressing while my ears were still wet. He had on a Buster Brown suit of white linen, with red anchors embroidered in their usual places, and a brave red badge setting forth his political inclinations. Father's lame hand had already reached out for him.

"Hello, Uncle Dan!" he said cordially, paying no attention to the feminine portion of the crowd. "Are you for it or 'ginst it?"

"I'm 'ginst it, too," father answered, drawing from his pocket a similar badge.

"That's right! Now show me the mules!"

He and father led the way up the walk, followed by the rest of us, with Grapefruit, escorted by a hilarious Lares and Penates, bringing up the rear.

Grapefruit, be it known, is Waterloo's nurse, or, more properly speaking, is a kind of jester to His Majesty. Her genuine name is Gertrude, but she came to him when he was at such a tender age that he corrupted it to Grapefruit, and Rufe says that if he had named her Fragrant Pomegranate Vine it would not be any too good for her. She is an ethereal little darky with wonderful powers of diversion. Cousin Eunice tells about how she found her out in the side yard playing with Waterloo one May morning long ago, and how his soul so clave unto her soul that he refused to give her up.

Automobiles, red wagons, fire-engines, boxes of candy—all were suggested in vain. "I want my little Grapefruit," he tearfully insisted, over and over again, until the attractive one modestly announced that she might be engaged to stay and amuse him by the week for "seventy-five or fifty cents, or I'll stay for nothing if you'll let me play on the piano."

Cousin Eunice joyfully agreed to the highest figure asked, with the use of the piano thrown in, yea and the telephone, the type-writer, in short, everything in the house except her tooth-brush. So Grapefruit stayed, and at this period of their lives is as necessary a part of the Claybornes' traveling outfit as their collapsible drinking-cup.

After breakfast was over we lingered in the dining-room a while, as is our custom when we have interesting guests; and we women rested our elbows on the table and talked, while the men lit their cigars and pounded the table-cloth until the spoons jumped out of the saucers, so vehement were their expressions about "that blackguard of a governor."

We women talked about Waterloo, of course.

"He's at the loveliest age, right now, I think," mother said, as our three pairs of eyes wandered out in his direction to the long back porch, where Grapefruit and Lares were making him a pack-saddle, so they could "tote 'im" down to the lot. He was entirely too good to walk that first morning.

"Yes, I rather dislike the thought of his growing into a great, rough, short-haired boy," Cousin Eunice assented, looking at him fondly. "That terrible age when they always smell like their puppies! But, that's quite a while off. He is still a baby."

"I find that they are always more or less babies," mother said, looking toward me, "—no matter what their age may be."

"Oh, this talk about ages reminds me of a book I brought for Ann to read," Cousin Eunice said, rising from the table and starting toward the front hall where their bags had been hastily dropped that we might not delay Mammy Lou's hot breakfast. "Stay here, all of you, and wait until I get it. It contains an interesting thought."

"Then it's that much ahead of most new books," Rufe remarked, his attention having been attracted from his own line of talk by Cousin Eunice starting to leave the dining-room.

"It isn't strictly new," she commented, returning in a few moments with the book in her hand. "It was written several years ago. It's nothing out of the ordinary in plot, and the thought which impressed some of us in the 'Scribblers' Club' was concerning the age of Eve when she was created. The heroine of the story is named Eve and is young and fair, so the hero, a gallant soldier, remarks to her one day as they are walking by the river bank at a stolen tryst, that he fancies the first mother was at his sweetheart's identical age when she was created. You see, it is quite a poetic fancy."

"More poetic than true. Soldiers don't talk that way," father said drily. "How old did the book say this Eve was?"

"The author was too wise to tell in plain figures," she answered, "but it was somewhere under the twenties—in the early flush of youth."

"Well, Adam was the first man who ever had the chance of a wife made to order," father kept on. "Surely he had more sense than to take a seventeen-year-old girl."

"No, you're wrong," Rufe disagreed. "I believe that Adam was too much of a gentleman to look a gift wife in the mouth."

"I'll get the Concordance and see if there's any record of her age," mother said, bustling off toward her bedroom and returning in a moment with her well-worn book, but she was unable to find any definite facts about Eve on the morning of that first surgical operation.

"What difference does it make about the actual number of years?" Rufe inquired, with an air of dismissing the subject. "The age of Eve is that picturesque period which comes to a girl after her elbows are rounded out."

My bared arms happened to be resting again on the table during this discussion, and, as Rufe spoke, Cousin Eunice's eyes wandered in their direction. "Then Ann's at it," she concluded triumphantly, and they all stared at me curiously, as if the age of Eve were showing on me like pock-marks!

"Ann doesn't seem nearly so old as she really is," mother began with a kind of uneasy look. "You see, she has never been to school very much, so her education—"

"Now, please don't begin about my education," I begged, for it is a mooted question in my family whether or not I have any, father and I maintaining that I have all that is necessary, mother wishing that it had been more carefully directed along the conventional lines. "If I should go to school until I'm as old as Halley's comet I couldn't learn the things I don't like. And I know all the rest without going! Don't people call me up for miles around to ask who wrote Prometheus Bound and how to spell 'candidacy?'"

"So you're satisfied with yourself?" Rufe teased.

"Far from it," I denied, "but I am certainly satisfied with the amount of schooling in schools I've had. Ugh, I hate the thought of it!"

"But how can you ever amount to anything without an education?" mother persisted.

"Never fear," I assured her easily. "I'll amount to my destiny, no matter whether I've ever seen inside a school or not. When I was a child I always imagined I was cut out to be Somebody; and even now I occasionally have a notion that Fate is watching me through her lorgnette!"

"You and Jean Everett used to have such queer ideas about yourselves—with your notions of marrying dukes and living in castles, and all that kind of thing," Cousin Eunice said, after a moment of amused thought.

"Jean still has her notions," Rufe broke in. "Our city editor is out of his depth in love with her and I met her on the street the other day and tried to bespeak her pity for the poor fellow. She assured me that the man she married would be so important the papers would all get out an extra every time his assassination was attempted!"

"Well, she'd better decide to take Guilford then," I said warmly, for it is a source of great satisfaction to me that my old friend, Jean (still my best friend), is half-engaged to Guilford Houghton, a grave young lawyer who is already making people take notice. He is a very quiet, dignified young man, so tall and thin and straight that he reminds me of a silk umbrella carefully rolled.

For a long time Jean seemed not to care much about him, but he kept paying his court as persistently as a fly in wet weather until she was finally won—half-way. He has very methodical ways, and calls to see her only on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, but she devotes so much time and care to her toilet for hours and hours preceding these visits that we call them her "days of purification."

"Guilford is not so showy, maybe," she said to me one time, in explanation of her fondness for him, which she tries hard to conceal, "but he's so dependable. That's worth a lot to a girl who has been engaged to four or five Apollos, all of them about as reliable as drop-stitch stockings!"

"For my part, I admire Jean's ambition," father spoke up, although none of us suspected that he was listening to our rambling talk. "I'd rather see a girl with an ambition like that than one with none at all—one of these little empty-headed gigglers whose age of Eve announces its arrival by all the i's in her name being changed into y's."

Waterloo came in at this point and demanded again that the mules be shown him, so father and Rufe set out for the stables.

"Shall we walk around and look at things, too?" I asked Cousin Eunice as we filed out on to the back porch. It is a habit with us two to steal away for a quiet little talk the first few hours we are together and take stock of each other's happenings since we met last.

"No," she answered, looking at me steadily. "The orchard and vineyard are more beautiful in the afternoon. We'll walk all over the place then. Besides, I have a notion that you'll want to tell me things which will sound better in the afternoon sunshine."

"Not a thing," I denied, and wondered how a discussion of poetic fancies at the breakfast table could make her so sentimental.

"Then you are wasting some mighty valuable time," she replied. "Most normal girls of your age are brimful of plans and ideas." She would have said secrets, as she intended to, but Mammy Lou hove in sight just then with a big pan of butter-beans for me to shell for dinner.

Rufe had stopped her at the kitchen door with the usual query, "Well, Mammy, you're not married again?"

"Naw, sir," she had admitted, with a self-conscious smile, "although I did have a boa'der all the spring."

Waterloo protested against even this slight pause in their progress toward the stables, so with an amused smile Rufe forbore to continue the conversation, but passed on and Mammy Lou ambled in our direction just in time to hear part of Cousin Eunice's remark to me.

"Law, Miss Eunice, you can't git nothin' out o' her," she said disgustedly, as she set the pan of beans down and began to fan herself with her apron. "She's plen'y old enough, the Lord knows, to be takin' notice, although Mis' Mary don't think so. I heerd you-all talkin' 'bout certain ages at the breakfas' table, but I can tell you she ain't at it. She don't look at nary one of 'em twicet; an' when the shore-nuff age of Eve has come to a girl she begins eyin' ever' man she meets to see if he's got a missin' rib that'll match with hern!"