The little straw wife

Front matter

I

S^v f

'C.OOD-BY, LITTLE GIRL," HE SAID.

II

It was when I was seven that I had first seen Aunt Emmeline.

Tubby and I had been playing in the garden.

Tubby was the boy who lived on the other side of our brick wall. He was a nice boy with one freckle and I loved him dearly. We had constructed a topply house of fallen oranges with a yucca spear for a cupola. We expected to inhabit it the rest of our natural lives, and Tubby had just started bringing in wood that we might, when need arose, regale our conjugal felicity with cooked food. We had each abstracted from our respective pantries, little pillboxes of sugar and flour, and I had a cologne bottle filled with strawberry extract. We were ready for the future. I was stacking these commodities on the rungs of a little step-ladder which Tubby had obligingly stolen from somewhere, when Black Annie came out on the porch and began calling. It was Black Annie's custom to appear at all crucial intervals in my life, but I associate the memory of this interruption with a feeling of especial annoyance, for she announced that company was coming and I must have my hair combed. Now the hair-brush in our house was a double corrective agency, the bristly side being employed daily and with infinite pains upon tangled hair. The other side — the flat side — was employed otherwise, not so frequently, perhaps, but with pains equally infinite. In each instance, it was Black Annie who wielded it. Her methods were primitive, and, because of her antiquity, and her proven loyalty, she was allowed some latitude in relieving her emotions. But when she broached the subject of the hair-brush in either capacity, I always went under the bed. It was a big bed, a queer old " four-poster," whose low-hung proportions refused to shelter anything larger than a very little squeezed-up girl.

Black Annie's bulk was phenomenal and, although the broom sometimes investigatingly followed my ingress, its contact was less stimulating than that of the hair-brush must inevitably be, and, sooner or later, it always retreated discomfited.

To-day, however, there was no need of retiring beneath the big bed. I was in the wildest, thickest part of the garden and Black Annie was too busy to come look for me. Safe as a pirate in mid-seas, I knew myself — until, indeed, Tubby, himself, should be called home, and I must return to Black Annie of my own accord.

Aunt Emmeline was not a widow then, and the big, kind, cordial man beside her I had straightway loved.

They two were my first glimpse of the outer world.

Before that, I had no thoughts beyond the wall that guarded our garden and the little rose-covered gate that opened into the long country road — except, to be sure, of the stately, columned house next door where Tubby lived, and the memories of the city we had left, memories that grew fewer, day by day.

Here in my leafy world I had conversed with toad and caterpillar, overcoming through compassion on their groveling lives what might have been terror of the unbeautiful. I knew the little pointed leaves and the big round ones. I knew the timid, prayerful ferns and the humble mosses. I lay in the grass under the magnolia trees and allowed wee flying things and blundering, creeping things to make bold with me. I had deep respect, but no fear, of centipedes and spotted tarantulas. I knew their intentions, and since they didn't know mine, I profited by my advantage and kept out of their way. I caught in my hands the white-nosed bees and allowed to the black-nosed bees their own freedom. For the white-nosed bees are as 'harmless as the honey-bells they rifle, but the black-nosed bees are warriors with ready spears! Alas! Why didn't I learn then to be a black-nosed bee? Perhaps I had not been caught and prisoned so many times !

But I learned nothing except to romp and roll in the grass and to get burs in ray mop of hair. I learned nothing except to play under the orange trees with Tubby, and to love him dearly, and to weep with rage whenever the woman in the big house next door came looking for him through a crack in the wall and commanded him to come home.

I hated the woman. She wore a gray apron, and her voice was harsh. There was a lady next door who wore white dresses and had a gold comb in her hair. I loved the lady. But the woman I planned to slay. In cold blood one day I climbed the wall and cast a green orange at the woman. Then I sat huddled on the ground all afternoon regretting that I had killed her. But Tubby came over finally and his omission to mention the funeral led me to infer that my green orange had missed its aim. I was glad. On second thought, I didn't want to destroy anything that belonged to Tubby.

And then Tubby started a-building our house and a-singing his little song just where he had left off. For he was a cheerful, plodding little soul and interruptions drove him to nothing so desperate as green oranges and tears and discouragement with his task. Song and work started again as blithely as if he had been a little phonograph. And the song of Tubby was the strangest, comicalest little song I ever heard. Indeed, I never did hear anything at all like it, either before or since.

It wasn't a song, really, but a sort of gruff incantation, half chant, half growl — like the intoning of a frog, suddenly grown articulate!

"Old Monza, Queen of Samarcand,

She was a doughty soul!

She spanked her sons with spik-ed hand,

And fed them barley whole!

And fed them barley whole!"

That was the first verse, and the others went on to tell of the eldest prince of Samarcand, and the next, and the next, clear down to the present king.

I have forgotten the words, but the princes grew every one to be brave warriors, and all ate barley whole — only Tubby called it " bollyhole," and I always supposed it was some sort of doughnut, a diet that had its attractions, but I earnestly deplored the necessity for the spik-ed hand.

It sounded even worse than the hair-brush.

And then, when Tubby had gone home to return no more that day, and the garden had become a desert far bleaker than before he came, there was nothing left but to go inside and let Mother get the burs out of my hair.

This was the operation preceding Black Annie's brushing, but my mother's hands were slow and kind, and we had some of our most comfortable reunions while she extracted burs. My mother never left her place by the window.

Always she sat there in the long, low chair, looking into the garden. And always, when I came in, she turned to me and smiled. Sometimes, before she saw me, there would be a strange light in her eyes, a lingering, wistful glow, like the last sunset of summer. But always she turned — and smiled. And, as she sat there, she made with her fingers soft frocks for me, frocks of infinite, miraculous stitches that I keep even now, rent and stained from where I climbed the wall or sat in the trees with Tubby. And which were the whiter, the frocks or her fingers, I cannot tell. But whiter than either was her face, and burning in each cheek a red, red rose.

Her brown-gold eyes were full of light and their least look was a caress. There were two curls on either side her face and they brushed my cheek at night when she bent over me. They, too, had something tender in their touch, something vibrant with love.

Is it not good to have in the background of one's life a little walled-in garden of memories, where one may go back on rainy days and gather flowers ?

But there was one who knew what her long looking into the sunshine meant. He had left his work in the far city, had my father, to come with her here where the roses and the sweet sea sunshine might help her to forget.

It was only a month after Hope had gone that we came. Hope was my sister, two years younger than I, and she had flitted away with a wonder in her round eyes and a glint in her gold hair, as if already the brightness of some heavenly dawn had found her. Lightly she had gone, and quickly, leaving in my mother's cheek the red, red rose, and in my mother's eyes the look of following.

A few pupils had my father here. They had followed him from the great university and he taught them out under the magnolias in the society of my caterpillars and white-nosed bees. They said reverend things about Plato which cling to me even now, and rolled out Latin words like chords of music. And though I knew nothing of the meaning of the things I heard, when the wind is in the south, I sometimes hear in my father's voice, blended with the smell of the magnolias and the drumming of the bees,

Spes ultima! And then the student would depart with his books through the little flowered gate and he, my father, would go in to her. He would go in and take out his violin, and, tuning it a little, begin to play. Looking back — listening back, I think he could not have played with the technical skill he brought to Plato and Vergil, but I know that those who listened loved him better after — and that is the great test of violin playing! And I know that the lady next door, the lady with the gold comb in her hair, sitting amid her lilacs and spirea — I know she told me that when the nights were still, she could not sleep for listening to his music — its sweetness broke the heart.

Sometimes my mother sang as he played, sang in a voice that was like the perfume of the roses in the hedge. Its sweetness broke the heart.

But there came days when she seemed too tired to sing, and the violin sent its slender cry into the night alone. Oftener and longer my father played. It was as if they two had less to talk about, or were afraid to talk, and in the silence she would signal toward the little case. Strangely enough I wished now that the violin would be still. There was something in its note I could not understand. It was like her looking into the garden, day after day.

And then Aunt Emmeline came. She was my mother's half sister, and they were very rich. I felt some vague aloofness in her glance about the Little House and in the rustle of her full silk dress.

They had meant to tidy me before the train came in, but I had not obeyed Black Annie's call, so, having many things to do, she had let me be, and I had strolled in shortly after the arrival of the company, bringing with me an unprecedented crop of burs.

My mother lay on the bed. She had been there three days, and it looked as if the roses in her cheeks were angry and meant to devour her. Her dark hair lay all about her on the pillow, and the little unfinished frock was beside her on the bed. She smiled at me.

The Big Man and my father were talking. The Big Man opened his arms. " Come here, you beauty ! " he said.

" Beauties are usually tidy," remarked Aunt Emmeline. " How do you do, Zoe ? "

And, turning, I saw her for the first time.

Straightway I went to my father and climbed on his knee. Whereupon, he began clumsily to extract burs, and Aunt Emmeline forgot all about me.

The next day a strange man with a satchel came up from the city, and the Big Man and I took a walk along the beach. Before we left the garden I introduced him to a horned frog, a creature he confessed to never having met before. He let the gray, knobbly thing escape while he smoothed my hair which Annie had combed, and patted my hands as they twisted buttercups. I wound the yellow chains about his neck and he wore them home as if he scarcely knew that they were there. When we reached our gate the lady with the gold comb was coming down our walk, her fair young husband by her side. The lady's dark hair was rumpled a little and her eyes were strange. She knelt before me on the gravel and, folding me about, kissed me and held me in her arms. Her hair smelled of lilacs. I felt the soft stir of her heart. I was sorry when she let me go. But at last she rose and moved away without a word. Her husband delayed, his hand resting on my hair, then presently he kissed me too. The Big Man went in. I looked up then to see Tubby sitting upon the wall. I caught his feet and pulled until he descended and sat beside me on the grass.

" When I am grown," said Tubby, apropos of nothing, " I am going to marry you."

" All right," I conceded. For it had always been my intention that he should.

" I am going to build you a house out of lumber and a flower-garden and fix a clothes-line where you can hang out the washing."

" All right," I agreed, moved deeply by the prospect of a real clothes-line.

" And when you go away," continued Tubby, looking very fierce and swallowing hard, " I'm going to write you letters."

I agreed to this, too, adding only that I didn't mean to go away — ever. At which Tubby looked even fiercer and, reaching into his pocket, drew forth a fat stick of candy, and breaking it in two, pushed half into my hand. Then quickly he climbed the wall and disappeared.

That night I slept in a far room and there was no one to find my nightgown. I was told only to be very quiet and not to leave my bed. Black Annie passed my door crying, and when I called to her to unbutton me she merely hugged me over and over and went away, leaving me as hopelessly fastened as before. After which I tugged myself gradually apart and put on a little rumpled petticoat in default of a nightgown. Then I went to sleep, having planned buttercup-chains for my mother and Tubby.

I was wakened by my father at my bed. It was deep in the night and the rain was falling. I could not understand at first. My father's voice seemed, somehow, part of the rain. But finally I crept from the bed and he took me by the hand.

I was to come and kiss my mother good night.

There are flowers in my little walled-in garden that will not bear the touch. They dwell in the dim recesses of the cypress trees, and they shrink from the light. Their bloom and dew vanish at the brushing of a hand.

One morning I passed down the little walk, clinging to my father's hand. Aunt Emmeline and the Big Man walked before, and Tubby sat on the wall. My father passed into the road and gave instructions to the driver of the hack that should carry us into town. Tubby, at this moment, came down from the wall and pressed something into my hand. It was round and hard and swathed in paper. Laboriously I unwrapped it. It was the other half of the stick of candy. I looked up to thank him.

He was gone.

I followed Aunt Emmeline through the flowered gate and climbed into the hack.

I never saw the Little House again.

in

Let me give Aunt Emmeline her due.

From the moment of our first meeting she made no pretense. All that she did for me afterward had its birth in a sense of duty, a form of philanthropy whose bounties are hard to accept, but harder still to discharge.

If she had beheld in me that morning some likeness to her ideal of childhood ; if there had been in me some quality of appeal, even, that had set vibrating in her heart the longings she might have known for children of her own, then all her later gifts would have fallen ripe from her hands. Giving would have been a rite simple enough, a pleasant pastime, and not a task conscientiously and painfully performed. That the task was painful, and that she performed it conscientiously, this acknowledgment is her due. Was it her fault that I was nobody's ideal? That my hair was a mop, that my eyes were queer? — " golden " someone has called them since, but, frankly, they were precisely the shade of Tubby's cat's. Later, as I ate the ginger cookies with which Black Annie had lured me from under the bed, that humiliated soul commented on my soiled dress and brown, scratched knees.

" Ain't you got no reasonment? " asked Black Annie. *' You been a-rippin' and a-snortin' 'round heah lak a rattle-snake! Don' you know when you does dat you ain't gwine make no impressions on comp'ny lessen you change yo' clothes? "

It was merely another way of stating that old truth, mistreated of the idealists, that " Beauties are usually tidy " !

When my father, then, returned to his work in the university, the Big Man proposed that I accompany them home. Aunt Emmeline demurred. She felt, she said, that my father and I should not be separated. The Big Man replied that I might visit my father once in a while ; that I could not be left in the city with no woman to look after me.

Aunt Emmeline replied that Black Annie was a woman.

But the Big Man spoke slightingly of " hirelings " and said something about training and environment.

He spoke so sternly that I felt sure he was angry, but he turned to me suddenly, and lifting me to his knee began to smooth my hair. Aunt Emmeline caressed her black silk lap. She said no more.

Later, my father came — it was night and Annie had tucked me in bed. He sat by my side in the dim light and held my hand. When I fell asleep, he was still there, my hand closed warm in his. I had prattled of many things. But my father had not said a word.

The next day I went away with the Big Man and Aunt Emmeline.

Their house in New York was very wonderful. The floors were as slippery as polished amber. The walls were covered with dim brocade and there were rich hangings and soft old rugs. There was one great room filled with pictures which strange people sometimes came to see. And there were queer, precious, carven relics in this same room, and statues of white marble in out of the way recesses about the house, and lamps of lucent Venetian glass, and exquisite ornaments and rare old books.

Some of these things Aunt Emmeline liked, as for instance, the strange lamps and the bric'-a-brac'. But the Big Man used to stand silent before the pictures, and explain the curios to callers if they seemed to care, and stroke the books with gentle, caressing hand. There came a time when we found he had bequeathed these last to my father, and thence of course they came to me. They are still with Aunt Emmeline, and I hope she will let me have them. When I finally finished school these books became my fairy-land. There were tales in Old French, hand-illuminated on parchment, yellow as jonquils; fragments of original manuscript — I remember one little interlined page of Charles Dickens', treasure of treasures! — and quaint first editions. Big tomes of mythology and queer old Puritan anthologies. I hope they will come to me one day, not so much for what they are themselves, as for the ghost of the Big Man's handtouch that dwells in every one, and for my father's faint, penciled marginals, made in the brief period that they were his.

It was a treasure house, indeed, this palace of Aunt Emmeline's. Let me do her further justice and say that she suffered much when she introduced thereinto so lawless a little rowdy as myself. As for me, I entered this domain of wealth and dignity with precisely that attitude of mind in which I crawled into the topply orange house reared by Tubby. Perhaps I evinced more curiosity, but I showed no more reverence.

I ran up and down the stairs. I skated on the slippery floors. I peeped behind all the hangings. I built a pyramid of rare, fragile books on the library rug. I sang and I called, flopping my great gypsy mane which was the despair of the French maid. I drummed on the piano and I teased the bored and elegant Persian cat.

The naughtinesses which dissipate themselves harmlessly in the wide sunlight of a garden, become unendurable when confined in close and unaccustomed quarters. Aunt Emmeline was driven well-nigh distrait.

Her hitherto peaceful days were given over to restraining me — or attempting to — into something bordering on decorum. " Lady like " was her slogan. I had never heard the phrase before, and it filled me with a vague internal shrinking, the feeling one has in contemplating a height both difficult and undesirable. Through all my body I felt the accumulation of energies which the staid walks in the park — I wasn't allowed to run — rather aggravated than removed. I wanted to dance, to jump, to cry aloud. Oh, to stretch my body in a quick climb up the wall with Tubby ! To leap from the top amid the soft grass and the pansies 1 One day I thought of the banisters. Others may have slid down stairrailings before me, but I had never heard of it. So far as I was concerned, it was a purely original sin. Surely, I conceived, one could trip softly up the carpeted stair, and, mounting at the top, do silent and ecstatic chutes through long, delicious hours! And if no one were disturbed, wherein lay the crime?

It was some reasoning of this sort that brought about my banishment. For on my third descent — > Oh, the heaven of those preceding moments! — • Aunt Emmeline elected to come down in a manner more approved, and, discovering my orgy at midheight, called Minette to rescue and restrain me. Then slje retired to her room and wrote a certain letter to my father. Next week she received another in return and its news was broached to me. I was to go to a convent — St. Ursula's — and it was only a short distance from the university where my father lived. It was, therefore, next door to heaven, and a most extraordinary place, it appeared to me, to send a little girl for her sins. The very magnitude of my joy repressed me into something like quiet for the two days I remained. Aunt Emmeline was equally rejoiced, and I think Minette, who had had charge of me, thanked her especial saint with hourly fervor. Only the Big Man was silent. The evening before I left he held me on his knees and read to me until his voice grew tired. J must have gone to sleep in his arms, for I dimly remember Minette receiving my hand from his and guiding me as I stumbled up the stair.

Three years I stayed at the convent. Three brief years, crowded with the memory of other little girls, of dark-veiled women with kind eyes, of swings under the trees and shaded walks : of a rounded, laughing priest who taught us games and dressed in queer robes for mass or vespers; of rosaries and incense and angelus bells ; of lessons in French and painting flowers ; of learning to write letters and do sums, to sew and to dance. All this was a new world, for I had never been taught anything at all, unless it was my prayers and a little German song or two.

And this new world's pleasant chaos was broken rhythmically by those golden, distinct Sundays when my father came to see me and took me to the parks and to ride on the street cars.

I was eleven when I left the convent and both my father and the Big Man were gone. I had no one now in all the world, except Aunt Emmeline.

But I was better behaved. I had learned to say, " Yes, Aunt Emmeline," and " No, Aunt Emmeline." I could sit for an hour with my hands folded in my lap, and I could play nice little pieces on the piano, and courtesy when I was brought in to see company. Aunt Emmeline was very pleased with me, but she said it reminded her too much of Uncle Richard to have me in the house, so I was sent to Miss Trippett's School for Girls, two hours' ride from town.

At Miss Trippett's I learned still other things. For example, the iniquity of unpolished nails, and of ribbons out of tone with one's frock. I learned that the absence of lace on one's petticoat, that to be shabby, and, above all, mended, removed one from all title to affiliation with " us."

And yet, in spite of all, I came to love Rebecca Hardy, the housekeeper's little girl. Rebecca committed daily all this list of crimes. She was shabby and mended too. Her plain frock was covered with plainer pinafores, and everybody knows that pinafores vanished with the dinosaur. Moreover, she wore no ribbons at all, but a round-comb ! It was the only round-comb I had ever seen, and its use effected on Rebecca a peeled brow and an out-standing coiffure that were the butt of Miss Trippett's.

But under the cropped, queer hair, what a sturdy, kindly comfortable little countenance ! There was a freckle on her nose like Tubby's, and she had something of Tubby's smile, and I loved her. I loved her with a deep and absorbing love, and I fought for her among the girls like a little tigress.

In the presence of Miss Trippett, Rebecca's mother was as silent and weary-faced as the most approved housekeeper I ever knew, but alone with Rebecca and me, she grew loquacious and even demonstrative, slipping out of the storeroom as I passed, and giving me a hug and a cooky and a shower of pet names, all in the space of a breath.

Rebecca didn't go to the classes at Miss Trippett's. She went to the public school in the street below. On bright days and dull days, through wind and rain and sleet, we saw her trudging through the big stone portals, her little second-hand books under her arm and her little outgrown coat buttoned tight across her chest. And when she came back in the afternoon I was waiting on the cellar steps, having sneaked out of the play-room upstairs.

Rebecca didn't mind the snubs of the girls, not she ! As for going to the public school, she said one could learn more there than at Miss Trippett's.

She said Miss Trippett's girls were snobs.

It was a horrible word. It made me think of " lady like."

But Rebecca said that I wasn't a snob, and she cried very much when we embraced for the last time upon the cellar steps. She said she would write to me. And, unlike Tubby, she kept her word.

From Miss Trippett's I went to Chenevix Seminary. Chenevix was the blossom as Miss Trippett's had been the bud. It was a " finishing " school — and if it hadn't been for the Big Man's library — But the library was there, like a forest of enchanted flowers, and I had finally long days of leisure to wander, and gather what I could.

At last I came back to Aunt Emmeline for good.

" Zoe," she said then, " I have done everything for you since your father died. We promised your mother — that is, Richard did — that we would look after you if your father's heart failed, and we have. I tried, as you know, to keep you here from the beginning, but that was impossible. I intend to do my duty by you until the end, and I hope that you won't prove a failure or a disappointment. As you realize, perhaps, your father left you practically nothing — something like five hundred dollars, which your Uncle Richard wasn't here to improve for you, and which, when you marry, I will give you."

" Let me take it now," I said, " and go somewhere and work." For Aunt Emmeline's voice had held a note of weariness that hurt me. Though tired with dragging her burden, she had lifted it to her shoulders, and she seemed scarcely equal to the weight.

" Work? " echoed Aunt Emmeline. " What could you do ? "

What, indeed? Miss Trippett's and Chenevix do not fit girls for work.

" No, Zoe. I have no patience with this modern mania of women for self-support. They invariably end with marriage, so why not aim toward it in the beginning? I have fitted you to marry into wealth and position, and I shall give you every opportunity to accomplish it. I shall place you in the hands of the best modistes and coiffeuse. I will surround you with the most brilliant eligibles in New York. I will give you setting and background, with all that means — for two years. Then I shall be through."