To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 5
THE children were playing "statues" on the Driggs lawn. "Furious Rage!" Laddie Baylow called, spinning them around, whirling them off into space, while the Greens' old Shep dashed among them, barking, wagging his tail. Each child fell into position, trying to stop giggling long enough to look raging and furious. Dotty Jackson was best. "Beautifulness!" And they went whirling into new positions, the boys being silly, stretching their mouths and rolling their eyes. Charlotte really tried to be most beautiful, staggering about longer than she need, and flinging up an arm in what she felt was a graceful manner, hoping that Hoagland was looking at her. And she felt warm and glowing when Dotty, in spite of the fact that Charlotte was a plain, solid child, with spectacles, and hair cut like a boy's under the two bunches of pale-yellow shavings she had stuck beneath her hat over each ear, chose her as most beautiful.
Jodie staggered about, reeling in exaggerated circles, copying the big boys. His old straw sailor hat bumped against his shoulders, hanging from a knotted elastic around his neck; he was so hot that his hair stuck in damp points on his forehead.
The air was drenched with the perfume of lilacs; there was a smell of wet dust from the street where the watering cart had passed. In the beds of dark earth that bordered the cement path leading from the gate to the front porch, Noble, the Driggs' hired man, had that morning set out clumps of pansies from Clark's, each clump wide apart and surrounded by a moat of muddy water, and newly-set-out pansy plants circled the fountain where the two iron children took shelter under their iron umbrella. Charlotte always pretended that she was the little iron girl, and Hoagland the boy. And Hoagland liked Charlotte best of all the girls, and used to take her to drive in his pony cart, drawn by small Prince with his deep bang and tiny fleet feet, while the other children escorted them on foot, chanting:
And I know what will please her—
A bottle of wine to make her shine,
And Hoagland Driggs to squeeze her!"
They would all trail downtown to McCardle's, for sodas, scrambling up on the high stools, Charlotte giving Jodie a boost, choosing wild cherry or blood orange—adventurous, almost frightening names—blowing through straws into their sodas to make them bubble and foam. Hoagland generally paid for everyone. "Wait till I go in and tease mamma for some money," he would say in a businesslike way before they started. Sometimes he had two or three sodas at a time. Once he rode Prince right up to the soda fountain. Mr. McCardle didn't mind. He liked having the children come to the drug store, and sometimes gave them presents—cardboard fans like giant pansies, with his advertisement on the backs, or tiny sample bottles of Geisha Girl perfume. "Mr. McCardle will give the children all the plain soda they can hold, and more," Kate told Joe.
Charlotte was calmly pleased by Hoagland's attentions, although her mother was nearly driven wild by Mrs. Driggs' arch references to "the little sweethearts."
In the lilac bushes the wrens cocked their tails and sang their beadlike songs, and under the lilac bush Hoagland sang, too, to charm his love, dancing a sort of breakdown:
Charlotte watched with placid approval, tying Jodie's shoelace. He was too young to play with them, really, but he always tagged along, and she was kind to her little cousin, with her own calm, firm kindness. Now she shared with him love's offering of sat-upon chocolate creams from Hoagland's pocket, picking out the most noticeable of the embedded pencil leads, elastic bands, and pocket fuzz.
"Hey, kids! Let's play follow my leader! Leader! Leader!"
"Leader! Leader!" Jodie cried, jumping up and down with excitement, not really wanting to be leader, just copying the big boys. Kate, repainting the porch chairs on the lawn across the street, could hear the children, Charlotte sensibly bossing everybody, and Jodie's voice, happy and excited, piercing her heart.
She straightened up to smile at the two nuns coming around the house from the kitchen, where they had been to see Lizzie, and they smiled back shyly, their round pink faces, framed in stiff white pleats, like two pink-icing cakes in white-frilled paper cases. They moved as smoothly as if they were on roller skates, under the canopy of Miss Smith's white lilac bush that had pushed half through the Greens' fence and arched above the side path. Poor things! They must feel this tide of spring, as she and the wrens and Charlotte and Hoagland felt it, these waves that poured over the little town, breaking in foam of pear blossom and white lilac, and yet they must never answer. How could they look so contented?
Kate bowed sweetly to Doctor Wells, being driven past, and then pretended not to see Mrs. Martine, with her red cheeks and big puffed fawn-colored sleeves, a gtass-green veil floating from her sailor hat with the white ribbon, sitting up straighter than a steeple, in a yellow-wheeled runabout, driving a bob-tailed chest nut. She couldn't bear that woman; she simply couldn't bear her. But even Mrs. Martine couldn't bother her long to-day.
She felt so happy, almost like crying, or making little squeaks. She loved the smooth moss-green paint flowing from her brush, green bubbles glistening and breaking. The thought of the radishes and spring onions from the garden, chill and crisp in their bowl of water on the kitchen porch, delighted her. She had to stop painting for a minute and run around the corner of the house to pull a few more radishes out of the dark earth, guiltily thrusting back one or two still white and threadlike. The twisted bellflower tree in the back yard was almost through blooming, but a few clusters of pale, wide-open flowers gleamed among the leaves, and the ground beneath it, bare because of the shade and the trampling of children's feet, was drifted over with petals. A few had floated out and lay on the vivid mossy tufts of coarse grass. That was the tree all the neighborhood children loved best, playing house under it, hanging by hooked knees from its low branches, while their faces turned purple and the little girls' skirts fell over their heads, showing gathered drawers with Hamburg edging. That was the tree that gave the children gifts—white blossoms and satiny red buds to fill their May baskets in the spring, long pale-yellow apples in the autumn, sometimes in the winter a bird's nest empty except for snow, a feather, a fragment of blue eggshell.
Kate broke off a cluster of blossoms to smell, to hold against her cheek. Why were petals always so cool? What secret of the moist darkness under the earth did they keep?
The children were leaving the Driggs's. She could hear them calling: "Laddie's going home!" "Dotty's got to go!" "Good-by, kids!" "Good-by-ee!" All so happy, and yet she heard a sadness through the joyous voices.
"Mother!"
"Hello, Jodiekins! Down, Shep! Down, old fellow! Mercy! Jodie Green! What a dirty little boy! What have you been doing to get yourself so hot, darling?"
Feeling his weight against her, his silky head touching her cheek, she was hardly strong enough to bear her love for him.
"Now wash yourself nicely before you go out to Lizzie."
Jodie liked having supper in the warm clean kitchen, at one end of the table covered with a red cloth woven with white roses and wheat and a snowfall of dots. Lizzie had put sprigs of flowering wild currant, smelling like hot gingerbread, in a jelly glass of water on the shelf by the alarm clock. The kettle puffed out steam, the bubbling saucepan kept tipping its shining hat. Jodie was a big boy now, and had a napkin instead of a bib. Lizzie tied it in two rabbit's ears, and it made hammocks under his chin to catch blobs of mush or apple sauce. He told Lizzie all his news, between spoonfuls, and listened to hers, his blue eyes round, a milk mustache on his upper lip.
Out-of-doors, Miss Smith's white lilacs were foamy in the dusk, and Kate could hardly see to paint any more. But she went on, sopping down the full paintbrush, drawing it along, half hypnotized. This sweet spring dusk, mysterious and stirring. She was aching with happiness, humming, like a plucked string.
The front gate clicked and Joe came up the path. He looked tired to-night, she thought; his shoulders were drooping.
"Too dark to work, Katie."
"I know it is. I was just stopping." She came and sat beside him on the porch steps. "You look tired, Joey."
He sighed. "I am. Spring fever, I guess—and then it's been one of those days when everything goes wrong—you know."
Kate sighed, too, tucking her hand under his arm. She had been so blissful, and now she was troubled, but she would rather be worrying with Joe than happy all by herself.
And she had been worried lately, sometimes with Joe, oftener because of him while he remained care free. If only he wouldn't drink so much! Of course she didn't want him to be like Mr. Cuthbert, spreading his hand over his wineglass at dinners, but as soon as he went into the house she knew he would go straight to the dining-room sideboard, to the whisky in the cut-glass decanter that had been Carrie Pyne's wedding present. He had grown to depend on it so. Not that he was ever drunk, except that awful night after the Mahogany Club dinner when she woke in the gray dawn to hear a cab drawing up in front of the house, a cab that held Mr. Palmer and a singing, whooping Joe. She could hardly bear to speak to Mr. Palmer after that. She would hurry past when she met him, turning away a flaming face, pretending to be absorbed in the reddening maple leaves, or the half-unrolled bolts of cloth in Small's window that splintered to, colored crystals through the tears that sprang to her eyes. Joe hadn't been like that again, but often he was detached, far away where she couldn't reach him, lost behind a dreamy, silly smile.
And she had learned what it was to have a husband who couldn't pay his bills, a husband she could never depend on for anything except that he would be charming. He was a butterfly, a whole flock of butterflies, with a pale-brown one perched on his upper lip, an azure one beneath his chin. And if that smothering dark butterfly net of worry nearly got him—off went the flock of butterflies into the sunshine. The net never caught him, but it caught whoever was near him. It caught Kate every time.
She knew he was borrowing from everyone that he could draw upon, and she was ashamed. She imagined a difference in the way people spoke to them—or did she imagine it? Joe was as cheery as ever, most of the time, still giving her surprises, sprays of gardenias when they were asked out to dine by people who had lent them: money, or bunches of white grapes and bottles of champagne when she had headaches from worry over the bills. Surprises that were always followed by more bills, with nothing to pay them.
But this evening his forehead was as lined as a washboard.
"I'm sorry you're bothered, Joe darling."
His arm tightened on her hand. "Don't you fret, Kate—it's just for the moment. We're all right. What did you do to-day?"
"Well, Carrie came in, for one thing, on her new bicycle."
"I saw her wabbling along Lake Street. How does Carrie always manage to look as if she was escaping from a cyclone in a stranger's clothes?"
"Now, Joe, it's mean to laugh! But she certainly does. She had to come in about some mix-up in Aunt Sarah's account at the bank. You know she's got a worse head for figures than I have, even—Aunt Sarah, I mean. You'd think she'd be good at them, she's so sharp about everything else, but I declare I believe Jodie can count up better than she can, and of course Carrie's no help. It's certainly a lucky thing for her that you take care of her investments for her. . . . What's this?"
"Some chocolate peppermints for you."
"Oh, goody! I was just wishing for some. . . . Joe, don't; you'll spoil your supper! Mmm! these are delicious! Look, aren't Miss Smith's lilacs lovely? She says I can pick all I want on this side of the fence. . . . Joe, please don't eat those peppermints! . . . Look at the way the irises have come out to-day. You know, I could actually see them unwrapping this afternoon; a petal would cling, and then sort of quiver and unstick itself. It made me feel all sort of—I don't know what, exactly. I wonder if I could paint my old straw that color? I think it might be very becoming. Do you? Oh, look! the first star! See, over the Driggs's, like a little trembling drop of water.
Very first star I've seen to-night.
Wish I may, wish"
"Scat!"
"Mercy! Don't ever do that again! You scared me out of a year's growth!"
"It was Miss Smith's cat after that robin's nest."
"I don't believe a boarding-house cat gets too much to eat. It's always at our kitchen door, Lizzie says. Y'll tell you what else I did to-day—Joe, I do love telling you things! I painted all these porch chairs. I think they're going to look lovely, don't you? Doctor Wells went by and saw me—I don't know what he thought."
"How long has it been since you've done any real painting, Kate?"
"Goodness! I don't know—ages."
"I wish you wouldn't give it up."
He was always trying to make her paint, suggesting subjects, subscribing to the Art Interchange for her. All the back numbers were stored on the shelf of the closet where the overshoes were kept, so many now that when you opened the door a cataract of designs for embroidery, wood carving, pyrography, glass decoration, oil and water-color painting, and colored supplements of Trysting Places and Showers of Roses cascaded out on your head.
"I haven't given it up, as you call it, but if you'll kindly tell me when I have time to do any painting, with making my clothes and Jodie's, and taking care of him, and working in the garden, and doing the things Lizzie can't—you know yourself you won't eat her cake, Joe—and mending and darning and sewing on buttons and trying to keep the house half-way decent"
"I know—I know—I blame myself—you have to do too much. Perhaps soon we can have another maid. I do blame myself so, when I think"
"Oh no! I love to do those things, darling! I love to! I really have time to paint if I want to, only I've let it go so long now I believe I'm a little bit scared about starting in again. I keep planning to, and then—I don't know. But I really am going to. I was just thinking this afternoon that I'd like to do a little picture of Jodie, he's so cunning now. I believe I have a canvas. I wonder if my paints are all dried up? I believe I'll start to-morrow morning—no, I can't to-morrow. I told Mrs. Cuthbert I'd make some sketches for costumes for the Masque of May. Jodie's going to be Jack in the Pulpit, I have the cun ningest idea for it. But maybe next day"
"Speaking of painting, do you know what I'd like to do? Give a little tea in the studio, just a few people. We haven't had a party for ever so long."
So they had their studio tea.