She turned sadly away from the room and shut the door. It was a work of time to think of getting that mess straightened out into any sort of order, and it made her heartsick and hopeless. She must look further and learn the whole story before she began to do anything.
She stumbled blindly downstairs, only half glancing into the messy bathroom where soap and toothbrushes got standing room indiscriminately where they could; took a quick look into the small enclosure that Louise had described as a “linen closet,” probably on account of a row of dirty-looking shelves at one end of the room; and looked hesitatingly toward the door of her own room, wondering whether to stop there long enough to make the bed and tidy up but shook her head and went on downstairs. She must know the whole thing before she attempted to do anything.
The stairs ascended at the back of the hall, with a cloak closet under them now stuffed with old coats and hats belonging to the whole family. Opposite this closet the dining room door opened. All the space in front was devoted to the large front room known as the “parlor.” Cornelia flung the door open wide and stepped in. The blinds were closed, letting in only a slant ray of light from a broken slat over the desolation of half-unpacked boxes and barrels that prevailed. Evidently the children had mauled everything over in search of certain articles they needed and had not put back or put away anything. Pictures and dishes and clothing lay about miscellaneously in a confused heap, and a single step into the room was liable to do damage, for one might step into a china meat platter under a down quilt or knock over a cut-glass pitcher in the dark. Cornelia stopped and rescued several of her mother’s best dishes from a row near the first barrel by the door, transferring them to the hall rack before she dared go in to look around.
The piano was still encased in burlap, standing with its keyboard to the wall, an emblem of the family’s desolation. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, Cornelia gradually began to identify various familiar objects. There were the old sofa and upholstered chairs that used to be in the nursery when Louise and Harry were mere babies. The springs were sagging and the tapestry faded.
She searched in vain for the better suite of furniture that had been bought for the living room before she went to college. Where was it? It hadn’t been in the dining room the night before, she was sure; and of course it couldn’t be in the kitchen. Could there be a shed at the back somewhere, with more things that were not as yet unpacked? With a growing fear she slipped behind some barrels and tried to find the big bookcase with the glass doors, and the mahogany tables that Mother had been so proud of because they had belonged to her great-grandmother, and the claw-legged desk with the cabinet on the top. Not one of them was to be found.
A horrible suspicion was dawning in her mind. She waited only to turn back the corners of several rolls of carpet and rugs and make sure the Oriental rugs were missing, before she fled in a panic to the back of the house.
Through the bare little kitchen she passed without even noticing how hard the children had worked to clear it up. Perhaps she would not have called it cleared up, her standard being on an entirely different scale from theirs. Yes, there was a door at the farther side. She flung it open and found the hoped-for shed, but no furniture. Its meager space was choked with tubs and an old washing machine, broken boxes and barrel staves, a marble tabletop broken in two, and a rusty washtub. With a shiver of conviction she stood and stared at them and then slammed the door shut, and flinging herself into a kitchen chair, burst into tears.
She had not wept like that since she was a little girl, but the tears somehow cleared the cobwebs from her eyes and heart. She knew now that those beautiful things of her mother’s were gone, and her strong suspicions were that she was the cause of it all. Someone else was enjoying them so that the money they brought could be used to keep her in college! And she had been blaming her father for not having managed somehow to let her stay longer! All these months, or perhaps years for all she knew, he had been straining and striving to keep her from knowing how hard he and her dear mother were saving and scrimping to make her happy and give her the education she wanted; and she, selfish, unloving girl that she was, had been painting, drawing, studying, directing class plays, making fudge, playing hockey, reading delightful books, attending wonderful lectures and concerts, studying beautiful pictures, and all the time growing further and further away from the dear people who were giving their lives—yes, literally giving their lives, for they couldn’t have had much enjoyment in living at this rate—to make it all possible for her!
Oh! She saw it all clearly enough now, and she hated herself for it. She began to go back over last night and how she had met them. She visualized their faces as they stood at the gate eagerly awaiting her, and she, little college snob that she was, was ashamed to greet them eagerly because she was with a fine lady and her probably snobbish son. Her suddenly awakened instinct recalled the disappointed look on the tired father’s face and the sudden dulling of the merry twinkles of gladness in the children’s eyes. Oh! She could see it all now, and each new memory and conviction brought a stab of pain to her heart. Then, as if the old walls of the house took up the accusation against her, she began to hear over again the plaintive voices of Louise and Harry as they wiped the dishes and talked her over. It was all too plain that she had been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Something in the pitiful wistfulness of Harry’s voice as he had made that quick turn about interior decoration roused her at last to the present and her immediate duty. It was no use whatever to sit here and cry about it when such a mountain of work awaited her. The lady on the train had been right when she told her there would be plenty of chance for her talents. She had not dreamed of any such desolation as this, of course, but it was true that the opportunity, if one could look on it as an opportunity, was great, and she would see what she could do. At least things could be clean and tidy. And there should be waffles! That was a settled thing, waffles for the first meal. And she rose and looked about her with the spirit of victory in her eyes and in the firm, sweet line of her quivering lips.
What time was it, and what ought she to do first? She stepped to the dining room door to consult the clock, which she could hear ticking noisily from the mantel, and her eye caught her sister’s note written large across the corner of a paper bag.
Dear Nellie,
I had to go to school. I’ll get back as soon after four as I can. You can heet the fride potatoes, and there are some eggs.
Louie
Suddenly the tears blurred into her eyes at the thought of the little disappointed sister yet taking care for her in her absence. Dear little Louie! How hard it must have been for her! And she remembered the sigh she had heard from the kitchen a little while ago. Well, she was thankful she had been awakened right away and not allowed to go on in her selfish indifference. She glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to nine. She had lost a lot of time mooning over her own troubles. She had but seven hours in which to work wonders before anyone returned. She must go to work at once.
Chapter 4
Ahasty survey of the pantry showed a scant supply of materials. There was flour and sugar and half a basket of potatoes. Some cans of tomatoes and corn, a paper bag of dried beans, another of rice, two eggs in a bowl, and a dish of discouraged-looking fried potatoes with burnt edges completed the count. A small bit of butter on a plate and the end of a baker’s loaf of bread had evidently been left on the dining room table for her. There were a good many things needed from the store, and she began to write them down on the other side of her sister’s note. A further investigation revealed half a bottle of milk that had soured. Cornelia’s face brightened. That would make a wonderful gingerbread, and she wrote down “molasses, soda, brown sugar, baking powder” on her list.
It wasn’t as if Cornelia hadn’t spent the first sixteen years of her life at home with her mother, for she knew how to cook and manage quite well before she went away to school; only of course she hadn’t done a thing at it since she left home,
and like most girls she thought she hated the very idea of kitchen work.
“Now, where do they buy things?” she wondered aloud to the clock as if it were alive. “I shall have to find out. I suppose if I take a basket and go far enough, I shall come to a store. If I don’t, I can ask somebody.”
She ran upstairs and got her hat and coat, and patted her pocketbook happily. At least she was not penniless and did not have to wait until her father came home for what she wanted to get; for she had almost all of the last money her mother had sent before her illness. It had been sent for new spring clothes, and Cornelia had been so busy she had not had time to buy them. It sent a glad thrill through her heart now, strangely mingled with a pang at the things that she had planned and that now would not be hers. Yet after all, the pang did not last, for already her mind was taken up with the new interests and needs of home, and she was genuinely glad that she had the money still unspent.
Down the dull little street she sped, thinking of all she had to do in the house before the family came home, trying not to feel the desolation of the night before as she passed the commonplace houses and saw what kind of neighborhood she had come to live in, trying not to realize that almost every house showed neglect or poverty of some kind. Well, what of it? If she did live in a neighborhood that was utterly uncongenial, she could at least make their little home more comfortable. She knew she could. She could feel the ability for it tingling to her very fingertips, and she smiled as she hurried on to the next corner, where the gleam of a trolley track gave hint of a possible business street. She paused at the corner and looked each way, a pretty picture of girlhood, balancing daintily on her neat little feet and looking quite out of place in that neighborhood. Some of her new neighbors eyed her from behind their Nottingham lace curtains and their blue paper shades and wondered unsympathetically where she came from and how she had strayed there, and a young matron in a dirty silver-lace nightcap with fluttering pink and blue ribbons came out with her market basket and gave a cool, calculating stare, so far in another world that she did not mind being caught at it.
The nightcap was almost too much for Cornelia, bobbing around the fat, red face of the frowsy woman, but the market basket gave her a hint, and she gracefully fell in behind her fellow shopper and presently arrived at a market.
About this time Mrs. Maxwell and her son sat in the hotel dining room downtown, eating their breakfast. A telegram had just been laid beside the son’s plate, and he looked up from reading it with a troubled brow.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to upset our plans again,” he said. “I’m awfully sorry, Mother, but Brown is coming on from Boston expecting to meet me at noon, and I guess there’s nothing to do but wait until the two o’clock train. Shall you mind very much?”
“Not at all,” said his mother, smiling. “Why should I mind? I came on to be with you. Does it matter whether I’m in Philadelphia or Washington?”
“Is there anything you would like to do this morning? Any shopping? Or would you like to drive about a bit?”
She shook her head.
“I can shop at home. I came here to be with you.”
“Then let’s drive,” he decided with a loving smile. “Where would you like to go? Anything you want to see?”
“No—or wait. Yes, there is. I’ve a notion I’d like to drive past the house where that little girl I met on the train lives. I’d like to see exactly what she’s up against with her firm little chin and her clear, wise eyes and her artistic ways.”
“At it again, aren’t you, Mother? Always falling in love and chasing after your object. You’re worse than a young man in his teens.” He smiled understandingly. “All right. We’ll hunt her up, Mother, only we shan’t have much time to stop, for I have to be here sharp at twelve thirty. Do you know where she lives?”
“Yes, I have her address here,” said his mother, searching in her silver bag for the card on which Cornelia had written it. “But I don’t want to stop. It wouldn’t do. She would think me intruding.”
The young man took the address and ordered a taxicab, and five minutes after Cornelia entered the door of her home with her arms full of bundles from the market and grocery, a taxicab crawled slowly by the house, and two pairs of eyes eagerly scanned the high, narrow, weather-stained building, with its number over the front door the only really distinct thing about it.
“The poor child!” murmured the lady.
“Well, she sure is up against it!” growled the son, sitting back with an air of not looking but taking it all in out of the tail end of his eye the way young men can do.
“And she wants to be an interior decorator!” said the mother, turning from her last look out the little window behind.
“She’s got some task this time, I’ll say!” answered the son. “It may show up more promisingly from the interior, but I doubt it. And you say she’s been to college? Dwight Hall, didn’t you say, where Dorothy Mayo graduated? Some comedown! It’s a hard world. Well, Mother, I guess we’ve got to get back or I’ll miss my appointment,” and he gave the chauffeur directions to turn about.
More rapidly they passed this time, but the eyes of the woman took in all the details: the blank sidewall where windows ought to have abounded; the shallow third story obviously with space for only one room; the lowly neighbors; the dirty, noisy children in the street. She thought of the girl’s lovely refined face and sighed.
“One might, of course, do a great deal of good in such a neighborhood. It is an opportunity,” she murmured thoughtfully.
Her son looked amused.
“I imagine she’ll confine her attention to the interior of her own home if she does anything at all. I’m afraid if I came home from college to a place like that, I’d beat it, mother mine.”
His mother looked up with a trusting smile.
“You wouldn’t, though!” she said sunnily and added thoughtfully, “And she won’t either. She had a true face. Sometime I’m coming back to see how it came out.”
Meantime, Cornelia in the kitchen started the fire up brightly, put on the teakettle, and began to concoct a soft gingerbread with the aid of the nice thick sour milk. When it was in the oven, she hunted out her mother’s old worn bread raiser, greased the squeaking handle with butter, and started some bread. She remembered how everybody in the family loved Mother’s homemade bread, and if there was one thing above another in which she had excelled as a little girl in the kitchen, it was in making bread. Somehow it did not seem as though things were on a right basis until she had some bread on the way. As she crumbled the yeast cake into a sauce dish and put it a-soak, she began to hum a little tune, yet her mind was so preoccupied with what she had to do that she scarcely remembered it was the theme of the music that ran all through the college play. College life had somehow receded for the present, and in place of costumes and drapery she was considering what she ought to make and bake in order to have the pantry and refrigerator well stocked, and how soon she might with a clear conscience go upstairs and start clearing up Carey’s bedroom. She couldn’t settle rightly to anything until that awful mess was straightened out. The consciousness of the disorder up there in the third story was like a bruise that had been given her, which made itself more and more felt as the minutes passed.
When the cover was put down tight on the bread-raiser, Cornelia looked about her.
“I really ought to clean this kitchen first,” she said thoughtfully, speaking aloud as if she and herself were having it out about the work. “There aren’t enough dishes unpacked for the family to eat comfortably, but there’s not room on those shelves for them if they were unpacked.”
So, with a glance at the rapidly rising gingerbread that let out a whiff of delicious aroma, she mounted on a chair and began to clear off the top shelves of the dresser. It seemed as if there had been no system whatever in placing things. Bottles of shoe polish, a hammer, a box of gingersnaps, a can of putty, and several old neckties were settled in between glass sauce dishes and
the electric iron. She kept coming on little necessities. With small ceremony she swept them all down to an orderly row on the floor on the least-used side of the room, and with soap, hot water, and a scrubbing brush went at the shelves. It didn’t take long, of course, but she put a great deal of energy into the work and began to feel actually happy as she smelled the clean soapsuds and saw what a difference it made in the shabby, paintless shelves to get rid of the dirt.
“Now, we’ve at least got a spot to put things!” she announced as she took the gingerbread tins out of the oven and with great satisfaction noted that she had not forgotten how to make gingerbread in the interval of her college days.
The gingerbread reminded her that she had as yet had no breakfast, but she would not mar the velvet beauty of those fragrant loaves of gingerbread by cutting one now. She cut off a slice of the dry end of a loaf and buttered it. She was surprised to find how good it tasted as she ate it going about her work, picking up what dishes on the floor belonged back on the shelves, and washing and arranging them. Later, if there was time, she would unpack more dishes, but she must get up to Carey’s room. It was like leaving something dead about uncovered, to know that that room looked so above her head.