enjoying herself somewhere, Mrs. Harris could be sure of enough
privacy to undress. She took off the calico cover from her lounge
bed and folded it up, put on her nightgown and white nightcap.
Mandy, the bound girl, appeared at the kitchen door.
"Miz' Harris," she said in a guarded tone, ducking her head, "you
want me to rub your feet for you?"
For the first time in the long day the old woman's low composure
broke a little. "Oh, Mandy, I would take it kindly of you!" she
breathed gratefully.
That had to be done in the kitchen; Victoria didn't like anybody
slopping about. Mrs. Harris put an old checked shawl round her
shoulders and followed Mandy. Beside the kitchen stove Mandy had a
little wooden tub full of warm water. She knelt down and untied
Mrs. Harris's garter strings and took off her flat cloth slippers
and stockings.
"Oh, Miz' Harris, your feet an' legs is swelled turrible tonight!"
"I expect they air, Mandy. They feel like it."
"Pore soul!" murmured Mandy. She put Grandma's feet in the tub
and, crouching beside it, slowly, slowly rubbed her swollen legs.
Mandy was tired, too. Mrs. Harris sat in her nightcap and shawl,
her hands crossed in her lap. She never asked for this greatest
solace of the day; it was something that Mandy gave, who had
nothing else to give. If there could be a comparison in absolutes,
Mandy was the needier of the two,--but she was younger. The
kitchen was quiet and full of shadow, with only the light from an
old lantern. Neither spoke. Mrs. Harris dozed from comfort, and
Mandy herself was half asleep as she performed one of the oldest
rites of compassion.
Although Mrs. Harris's lounge had no springs, only a thin cotton
mattress between her and the wooden slats, she usually went to
sleep as soon as she was in bed. To be off her feet, to lie flat,
to say over the psalm beginning: "The Lord is my shepherd" was
comfort enough. About four o'clock in the morning, however, she
would begin to feel the hard slats under her, and the heaviness of
the old home-made quilts, with weight but little warmth, on top of
her. Then she would reach under her pillow for her little
comforter (she called it that to herself) that Mrs. Rosen had given
her. It was a tan sweater of very soft brushed wool, with one
sleeve torn and ragged. A young nephew from Chicago had spent a
fortnight with Mrs. Rosen last summer and had left this behind him.
One morning, when Mrs. Harris went out to the stable at the back of
the yard to pat Buttercup, the cow, Mrs. Rosen ran across the
alley-way.
"Grandma Harris," she said, coming into the shelter of the stable,
"I wonder if you could make any use of this sweater Sammy left?
The yarn might be good for your darning."
Mrs. Harris felt of the article gravely. Mrs. Rosen thought her
face brightened. "Yes'm, indeed I could use it. I thank you
kindly."
She slipped it under her apron, carried it into the house with her,
and concealed it under her mattress. There she had kept it ever
since. She knew Mrs. Rosen understood how it was; that Victoria
couldn't bear to have anything come into the house that was not for
her to dispose of.
On winter nights, and even on summer nights after the cocks began
to crow, Mrs. Harris often felt cold and lonely about the chest.
Sometimes her cat, Blue Boy, would creep in beside her and warm
that aching spot. But on spring and summer nights he was likely to
be abroad skylarking, and this little sweater had become the
dearest of Grandmother's few possessions. It was kinder to her,
she used to think, as she wrapped it about her middle, than any of
her own children had been. She had married at eighteen and had had
eight children; but some died, and some were, as she said,
scattered.
After she was warm in that tender spot under the ribs, the old
woman could lie patiently on the slats, waiting for daybreak;
thinking about the comfortable rambling old house in Tennessee, its
feather beds and hand-woven rag carpets and splint-bottom chairs,
the mahogany sideboard, and the marble-top parlour table; all that
she had left behind to follow Victoria's fortunes.
She did not regret her decision; indeed, there had been no
decision. Victoria had never once thought it possible that Ma
should not go wherever she and the children went, and Mrs. Harris
had never thought it possible. Of course she regretted Tennessee,
though she would never admit it to Mrs. Rosen:--the old neighbours,
the yard and garden she had worked in all her life, the apple trees
she had planted, the lilac arbour, tall enough to walk in, which
she had clipped and shaped so many years. Especially she missed
her lemon tree, in a tub on the front porch, which bore little
lemons almost every summer, and folks would come for miles to see
it.
But the road had led westward, and Mrs. Harris didn't believe that
women, especially old women, could say when or where they would
stop. They were tied to the chariot of young life, and had to go
where it went, because they were needed. Mrs. Harris had gathered
from Mrs. Rosen's manner, and from comments she occasionally
dropped, that the Jewish people had an altogether different
attitude toward their old folks; therefore her friendship with this
kind neighbour was almost as disturbing as it was pleasant. She
didn't want Mrs. Rosen to think that she was "put upon," that there
was anything unusual or pitiful in her lot. To be pitied was the
deepest hurt anybody could know. And if Victoria once suspected
Mrs. Rosen's indignation, it would be all over. She would freeze
her neighbour out, and that friendly voice, that quick pleasant
chatter with the little foreign twist, would thenceforth be heard
only at a distance, in the alley-way or across the fence. Victoria
had a good heart, but she was terribly proud and could not bear the
least criticism.
As soon as the grey light began to steal into the room, Mrs. Harris
would get up softly and wash at the basin on the oilcloth-covered
box. She would wet her hair above her forehead, comb it with a
little bone comb set in a tin rim, do it up in two smooth little
horns over her ears, wipe the comb dry, and put it away in the
pocket of her full-gathered calico skirt. She left nothing lying
about. As soon as she was dressed, she made her bed, folding her
nightgown and nightcap under the pillow, the sweater under the
mattress. She smoothed the heavy quilts, and drew the red calico
spread neatly over all. Her towel was hung on its special nail
behind the curtain. Her soap she kept in a tin tobacco-box; the
children's soap was in a crockery saucer. If her soap or towel got
mixed up with the children's, Victoria was always sharp about it.
The little rented house was much too small for the family, and Mrs.
Harris and her "things" were almost required to be invisible. Two
clean calico dresses hung in the cu
rtained corner; another was on
her back, and a fourth was in the wash. Behind the curtain there
was always a good supply of aprons; Victoria bought them at church
fairs, and it was a great satisfaction to Mrs. Harris to put on a
clean one whenever she liked. Upstairs, in Mandy's attic room over
the kitchen, hung a black cashmere dress and a black bonnet with a
long cr?pe veil, for the rare occasions when Mr. Templeton hired a
double buggy and horses and drove his family to a picnic or to
Decoration Day exercises. Mrs. Harris rather dreaded these drives,
for Victoria was usually cross afterwards.
When Mrs. Harris went out into the kitchen to get breakfast, Mandy
always had the fire started and the water boiling. They enjoyed a
quiet half-hour before the little boys came running down the
stairs, always in a good humour. In winter the boys had their
breakfast in the kitchen, with Vickie. Mrs. Harris made Mandy eat
the cakes and fried ham the children left, so that she would not
fast so long. Mr. and Mrs. Templeton breakfasted rather late, in
the dining-room, and they always had fruit and thick cream,--a
small pitcher of the very thickest was for Mrs. Templeton. The
children were never fussy about their food. As Grandmother often
said feelingly to Mrs. Rosen, they were as little trouble as
children could possibly be. They sometimes tore their clothes, of
course, or got sick. But even when Albert had an abscess in his
ear and was in such pain, he would lie for hours on Grandmother's
lounge with his cheek on a bag of hot salt, if only she or Vickie
would read aloud to him.
"It's true, too, what de old lady says," remarked Mrs. Rosen to her
husband one night at supper, "dey are nice children. No one ever
taught them anything, but they have good instincts, even dat
Vickie. And think, if you please, of all the self-sacrificing
mothers we know,--Fannie and Esther, to come near home; how they
have planned for those children from infancy and given them every
advantage. And now ingratitude and coldness is what dey meet
with."
Mr. Rosen smiled his teasing smile. "Evidently your sister and
mine have the wrong method. The way to make your children
unselfish is to be comfortably selfish yourself."
"But dat woman takes no more responsibility for her children than a
cat takes for her kittens. Nor does poor young Mr. Templeton, for
dat matter. How can he expect to get so many children started in
life, I ask you? It is not at all fair!"
Mr. Rosen sometimes had to hear altogether too much about the
Templetons, but he was patient, because it was a bitter sorrow to
Mrs. Rosen that she had no children. There was nothing else in the
world she wanted so much.
III
Mrs. Rosen in one of her blue working dresses, the indigo blue that
became a dark skin and dusky red cheeks with a tone of salmon
colour, was in her shining kitchen, washing her beautiful dishes--
her neighbours often wondered why she used her best china and linen
every day--when Vickie Templeton came in with a book under her arm.
"Good day, Mrs. Rosen. Can I have the second volume?"
"Certainly. You know where the books are." She spoke coolly, for
it always annoyed her that Vickie never suggested wiping the dishes
or helping with such household work as happened to be going on when
she dropped in. She hated the girl's bringing-up so much that
sometimes she almost hated the girl.
Vickie strolled carelessly through the dining-room into the parlour
and opened the doors of one of the big bookcases. Mr. Rosen had a
large library, and a great many unusual books. There was a
complete set of the Waverley Novels in German, for example; thick,
dumpy little volumes bound in tooled leather, with very black type
and dramatic engravings printed on wrinkled, yellowing pages.
There were many French books, and some of the German classics done
into English, such as Coleridge's translation of Schiller's
Wallenstein.
Of course no other house in Skyline was in the least like Mrs.
Rosen's; it was the nearest thing to an art gallery and a museum
that the Templetons had ever seen. All the rooms were carpeted
alike (that was very unusual), with a soft velvet carpet, little
blue and rose flowers scattered on a rose-grey ground. The deep
chairs were upholstered in dark blue velvet. The walls were hung
with engravings in pale gold frames: some of Raphael's "Hours," a
large soft engraving of a castle on the Rhine, and another of
cypress trees about a Roman ruin, under a full moon. There were a
number of water-colour sketches, made in Italy by Mr. Rosen himself
when he was a boy. A rich uncle had taken him abroad as his
secretary. Mr. Rosen was a reflective, unambitious man, who didn't
mind keeping a clothing-store in a little Western town, so long as
he had a great deal of time to read philosophy. He was the only
unsuccessful member of a large, rich Jewish family.
Last August, when the heat was terrible in Skyline, and the crops
were burned up on all the farms to the north, and the wind from the
pink and yellow sand-hills to the south blew so hot that it singed
the few green lawns in the town, Vickie had taken to dropping in
upon Mrs. Rosen at the very hottest part of the afternoon. Mrs.
Rosen knew, of course, that it was probably because the girl had no
other cool and quiet place to go--her room at home under the roof
would be hot enough! Now, Mrs. Rosen liked to undress and take a
nap from three to five,--if only to get out of her tight corsets,
for she would have an hourglass figure at any cost. She told
Vickie firmly that she was welcome to come if she would read in the
parlour with the blind up only a little way, and would be as still
as a mouse. Vickie came, meekly enough, but she seldom read. She
would take a sofa pillow and lie down on the soft carpet and look
up at the pictures in the dusky room, and feel a happy, pleasant
excitement from the heat and glare outside and the deep shadow and
quiet within. Curiously enough, Mrs. Rosen's house never made her
dissatisfied with her own; she thought that very nice, too.
Mrs. Rosen, leaving her kitchen in a state of such perfection as
the Templetons were unable to sense or to admire, came into the
parlour and found her visitor sitting cross-legged on the floor
before one of the bookcases.
"Well, Vickie, and how did you get along with Wilhelm Meister?"
"I like it," said Vickie.
Mrs. Rosen shrugged. The Templetons always said that; quite as if
a book or a cake were lucky to win their approbation.
"Well, WHAT did you like?"
"I guess I liked all that about the theatre and Shakspere best."
"It's rather celebrated," remarked Mrs. Rosen dryly. "And are you
studying every day? Do you think you will be able to win that
scholarship?"
"I don't know. I'm going to try awful hard."
Mrs. Rosen wondered whether any Templeton knew how to try ver
y
hard. She reached for her work-basket and began to do cross-
stitch. It made her nervous to sit with folded hands.
Vickie was looking at a German book in her lap, an illustrated
edition of Faust. She had stopped at a very German picture of
Gretchen entering the church, with Faustus gazing at her from
behind a rose tree, Mephisto at his shoulder.
"I wish I could read this," she said, frowning at the black Gothic
text. "It's splendid, isn't it?"
Mrs. Rosen rolled her eyes upward and sighed. "Oh, my dear, one of
de world's masterpieces!"
That meant little to Vickie. She had not been taught to respect
masterpieces, she had no scale of that sort in her mind. She cared
about a book only because it took hold of her.
She kept turning over the pages. Between the first and second
parts, in this edition, there was inserted the Dies Ir? hymn in
full. She stopped and puzzled over it for a long while.
"Here is something I can read," she said, showing the page to Mrs.
Rosen.
Mrs. Rosen looked up from her cross-stitch. "There you have the
advantage of me. I do not read Latin. You might translate it for
me."
Vickie began:
"Day of wrath, upon that day
The world to ashes melts away,
As David and the Sibyl say.
"But that don't give you the rhyme; every line ought to end in two
syllables."
"Never mind if it doesn't give the metre," corrected Mrs. Rosen
kindly; "go on, if you can."
Vickie went on stumbling through the Latin verses, and Mrs. Rosen
sat watching her. You couldn't tell about Vickie. She wasn't
pretty, yet Mrs. Rosen found her attractive. She liked her sturdy
build, and the steady vitality that glowed in her rosy skin and
dark blue eyes,--even gave a springy quality to her curly reddish-
brown hair, which she still wore in a single braid down her back.
Mrs. Rosen liked to have Vickie about because she was never
listless or dreamy or apathetic. A half-smile nearly always played
about her lips and eyes, and it was there because she was pleased
with something, not because she wanted to be agreeable. Even a
half-smile made her cheeks dimple. She had what her mother called
"a happy disposition."
When she finished the verses, Mrs. Rosen nodded approvingly.
"Thank you, Vickie. The very next time I go to Chicago, I will try
to get an English translation of Faust for you."
"But I want to read this one." Vickie's open smile darkened.
"What I want is to pick up any of these books and just read them,
like you and Mr. Rosen do."
The dusky red of Mrs. Rosen's cheeks grew a trifle deeper. Vickie
never paid compliments, absolutely never; but if she really admired
anyone, something in her voice betrayed it so convincingly that one
felt flattered. When she dropped a remark of this kind, she added
another link to the chain of responsibility which Mrs. Rosen
unwillingly bore and tried to shake off--the irritating sense of
being somehow responsible for Vickie, since, God knew, no one else
felt responsible.
Once or twice, when she happened to meet pleasant young Mr.
Templeton alone, she had tried to talk to him seriously about his
daughter's future. "She has finished de school here, and she
should be getting training of some sort; she is growing up," she
told him severely.
He laughed and said in his way that was so honest, and so
disarmingly sweet and frank: "Oh, don't remind me, Mrs. Rosen!
I just pretend to myself she isn't. I want to keep my little
daughter as long as I can." And there it ended.
Sometimes Vickie Templeton seemed so dense, so utterly
unperceptive, that Mrs. Rosen was ready to wash her hands of her.
Then some queer streak of sensibility in the child would make her
change her mind. Last winter, when Mrs. Rosen came home from a
visit to her sister in Chicago, she brought with her a new cloak of