CHAPTER IV
THE man who opened the door was so fine and imposing that Betty would have taken him for Mr. Meadowcroft if she hadn’t known of the latter’s infirmity. She asked for him in her polite, old-womanly fashion and was told to go right up. But as she would have started, she saw Mrs. Phillips, dressed for the carriage, about to descend the grand stairway. Betty stifled a sigh, but she waited dutifully and greeted the lady with sweet formality.
“Who’s this! Not Bouncing Bet, surely!” cried Mrs. Phillips effusively. “Dear me, how you do grow! You’re as tall as I, and you’d make three of me, if not four. My goodness! how do you buy your belts—by the yard? And how old are you, pray?”
“Thirteen in July,” said the girl reluctantly, as if confessing a fault. But Mrs. Phillips was not waiting for a reply.
“Did you want to see me?” she asked rather rudely, “because, as you can see, I am on my way out.”
“I came to see Mr. Meadowcroft,” said Betty quietly.
“O, I’m sorry, but you see it’s really shockingly early,” Mrs. Phillips began. But the man at the door, though he didn’t interrupt, took advantage of her pause to say: “Mr. Meadowcroft said as how the young lady was to come right up, ma’am, as he’s expecting her.”
Mrs. Phillips shrugged her shoulders and went on without a word. She had never understood her brother’svagaries and now he seemed “queerer” than ever to her. But she liked having him in the house, not only because he was so distinguished and elegant both in manner and appearance, but because he was a wonderful companion. And though she would have liked to manage his personal affairs as she had managed her husband’s, and those of everyone else within her sphere, she realized that she couldn’t keep him with her if she made any such attempt.
As Betty climbed the stair, it came to her that it would be a pleasanter world if people would choose their words in speaking to overgrown girls—to fat people, in short—just as they did for the lame and blind. It wasn’t, of course, the same, but it seemed sometimes as bad as a real affliction.
The door of the room the man had indicated stood open. As she knocked on the lintel, the girl drew her breath sharply. Aunt Sarah’s word “cripple” came up before her, making her forget all Tommy’s enthusiastic praise, and she shrank momentarily from what was before her. But bidden to enter, she complied without an instant’s delay, and went straight to the wheel-chair.
At first sight, however, Mr. Meadowcroft was so impressive and so charming that she couldn’t help feeling conscience-stricken for her moment of hesitation.
“Pardon my not rising, and pray make yourself comfortable, Miss Pogany,” he said in the pleasantest voice Betty had ever heard. “I am sorry I can’t tell you which chair is most comfortable, for Tommy Finnemore changes from one to another so frequently that I sometimes suspect they’re all like dentists’ chairs. However, that blue one doesn’t look so bad. You might try that.”
The blue chair was truly very comfortable. Moreover, it was small. Anyone else would have pointed out the largest in the room; and Betty sank into it gratefully.
“It’s right good of you to give me a part of your holiday, Miss Pogany,” the gentleman remarked, glancing kindly upon her.
Already Meadowcroft saw that the girl’s countenance, which upon closer view resembled yet more nearly the facial type of the American Indian, was redeemed from its potential Indian impassiveness or even stolidity by her soft-brown eyes, which were gentle and lovely of expression and full of keen intelligence. Mrs. Phillips’s voice was high and thin and very penetrating, and her brother had been exceedingly annoyed to hear her greet his guest as Bouncing Bet. Now he said to himself that Black-eyed Susan would be a more fitting nickname. But he didn’t dwell upon the comparison, for it came to him that that wild flower is also called ox-eyed daisy, and that reminded him of his sister’s epithet “cow-like.”
“I was very glad to come, sir,” replied the girl politely. “I visit—the sick considerably, you know.”
“But bless you, child, I’m not sick,” he retorted, smiling. “I stay in this contraption much of the time, it is true, and one arm and leg aren’t of much service to me; but for all that——”
Pausing, he looked at her searching but very kindly. And though she was sensitive and his gaze held steadily for half a minute, Betty Pogany didn’t mind it. It seemed, indeed, rather like standing in a bar of sunlight on a chill day. For somehow, she didn’t feel that he was thinking how big she was—what a bouncing girl for under thirteen years. He seemed to be looking at thereal Betty who wasn’t fat or—anything—who was just herself, a human being like others.
And as he went on, his words seemed an echo of her sensation.
“At any rate, I didn’t ask you to come in to see me as an invalid or anything of the sort, but just as a fellow human being,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I had a rather definite purpose in mind, and I don’t feel that I need to fuss and bother about leading up to it and all that, Miss Betty. I think I can get right at it at once. May I begin instanter by telling you something about a boy I knew? You’ll get the bearing.”
Betty’s eyes assented warmly though her face was as expressionless as her polite affirmation. Meadowcroft wheeled his chair about and adjusted it at a better angle. And the girl, whose part in life had been largely that of a spectator, observed the beauty of the long, slender right hand with a curious cameo on the third finger.
“The boy I speak of was lame—deformed might perhaps be a better word, though it’s rather ugly,” he began. “His parents had money—fortunately, most people would say. In any event, he was unfortunate in that they had a lot too much. They lavished it upon all sorts of specialists in surgery in the effort to have him become like other boys. Then when they found that to be quite impossible, they used the money as a barrier between him and his fellows. They padded a prison with it in which they confined him. He was shut off from the society of other boys, from the sight and so far as possible from the knowledge of boyish sports and pursuits. They kept him in ignorance, so far as was possible, of the universeas a boy knows it. I don’t think he had a genuine boy’s book until he went to boarding-school as an old man of sixteen. He had servants and tutors and drove and traveled and all that, and for years believed himself well off and a person of consequence. Then, somehow, though only when it was too late, he began to feel that something was wrong. He didn’t know what it was; but he begged to be allowed to go away to school. He felt that there he might come to know what it was that was awry. At first his parents wouldn’t hear of it; but finally they succumbed to his pleading, and a year before he was to be ready for college, he was sent to the best boarding-school they could select. He was permitted to have a man-servant, and his parents paid the expenses of another boy who served as a sort of fag. He was full of enthusiasm at first, but it didn’t last. For he didn’t fit in at all. He couldn’t get near the other lads and they couldn’t get near him, though they were well-disposed and did their level best to pretend to let him into things. He couldn’t even make an acquaintance of the boy who helped him; and he was lonelier than ever, and actually unhappy, where he had been only vaguely ill at ease before. And then presently the explanation came to him. He picked up a book belonging to the underclass boy who waited on him, and—do you understand Latin, Miss Betty?”
The girl started violently. She had been utterly lost in the narration, her dark eyes far away, her face dumbly appreciative.
“No, sir; but I am to begin it in September when I go over to the high school,” she replied in her prim, demure way.
“Well anyhow, I probably shouldn’t quote correctly from memory. The passage was rather impressively put and was to the effect that, as a boy, Marcus Livius Drusus had no holidays,—that is, he never had a chance to play, to get out with the boys, to have a jolly time. Well, it came to me that this Roman worthy and I were in the same class. Alike, we had been defrauded of a precious, yes, an inalienable right. You know, it’s not only the fun one loses, Miss Betty; it’s the association with one’s kind, one’s peers, the give and take, the rubbing up against the sharp corners of other fellows’ personalities, the gradual learning one’s proper place in the world, the sharpening of wits as well as quickening of understanding sympathy, the glimpses of homely, sturdy, hidden virtues and the reaching out for them unawares.”
Humphrey Meadowcroft paused, and drew his hand across his brow. He had suddenly grown white; lines showed in his forehead that Betty, close observer as experience had made her, hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to the girl that he had actually grown older since she had entered the room. As a matter of fact, the man had never before said so much as this of his thwarted youth to anyone.
He did not feel that he could go further; but he realized that he had no need so to do. For the girl understood. Her eyes were downcast; her face was almost stolidly inexpressive despite the sweetness of her mouth; nevertheless Meadowcroft was aware that she understood with the sympathetic understanding that is theirs who have themselves suffered hurt and pain.
Still, she did not make the desired application. She was only sorry for the boy.
“Well, Miss Betty?” he said after some moments. His smile, infrequent but rarely attractive, banished the lines of care. And now he looked, as usual, younger than his years, which were four times hers.
Her brown eyes, full of wonder, met his brilliant gray eyes.
“I can’t help feeling, somehow, that you are in the same boat with the boy that was I, and so I want to warn you—back to land while there’s yet time,” he observed half lightly. “For in your case I am happy to feel that it isn’t too late. It isn’t nearly too late. But there’s the chance that it may be so before you realize it. This is how the situation looks to me. Because you are, and perhaps always have been, large for your age, you have never gone in for the things other children take up naturally all along the path of the years. You’re grown up now when you ought to be a little girl—a romping little girl!”
She looked at him so understandingly, so ruefully, so deprecatingly, and she was so big, so truly bouncing, that Meadowcroft couldn’t himself help thinking of the baby giant. But his heart went out to her only the more warmly.
“Tell me. How long is it since you have left off playing—running and romping and all that?” he demanded. “How long have you been as grown-up as you are now?”
She smiled wanly. “O, almost always, it seems, sir,” she declared. “I have worn long dresses—almost long—for years, and of course you can’t do much with long skirts. And then I always looked so queer, even in games like Green Gravel and On the Green Carpetthat I—hardly ever played. And—they’ve called me Bouncing Bet ever since before I was six.”
Betty Pogany’s self-control was really exceptional for her years. But the girl had never before known real, understanding sympathy. On a sudden her eyes filled with tears which overflowed upon her fair pink cheeks. Once more, as she reached for her pocket handkerchief, Meadowcroft saw Isabel Phillips’s picture of the baby giant in tears. But the girl controlled herself almost at once and tried to smile.
“I pretended—after a little—I guess when I was about eight—that I didn’t care, and I kept on pretending,” she owned, finding it curiously easy as she went on to speak after her years of reserve. “But I did care—I cared so that it seemed almost to kill me, and—I care now. And even now, I’d just love to play tag and Puss-in-the-Corner and the very babiest games. And sometimes I just hate to be at the head of my class, and I’d like to waste time in school instead of always studying, and even to be real bad, just to see how it would feel. But you can’t, of course, when you’re bigger than everyone in school, even the teacher. I never was even spoken to in school in all my life, but sometimes I dream I am. I dream that Miss Sherman says: ‘Why, Betty Pogany, a great big girl like you!’ And the boys all grinning and everybody in school looking at me!”
As she glanced up, Meadowcroft smiled kindly. The girl smiled frankly, too. Apparently she didn’t lack a sense of humor.
“You don’t admire compulsory virtue, I take it?” he queried.
She smiled ruefully.
“That’s a good name for it,” she observed. “Rose Harrow spoke a piece once in the intermediate school that was just like that and like me. It began—
‘I don’t know how it came aboutI put my sacque on wrong-side-out,I didn’t take it off all day,Because ’twould drive my luck away.’
‘I don’t know how it came aboutI put my sacque on wrong-side-out,I didn’t take it off all day,Because ’twould drive my luck away.’
‘I don’t know how it came about
I put my sacque on wrong-side-out,
I didn’t take it off all day,
Because ’twould drive my luck away.’
And it goes on to tell how they all made fun of her, but she sat still and learned her lessons with a will. And at the end she got the prize.”
“I see. But that was only for one day, and you have gone on all your life sitting still and learning your lessons with a will, as it were,” he returned. “Well, you’re mighty lucky that it isn’t too late to change. You can turn your jacket right side out at once and start out to-morrow morning doing exactly what other girls of twelve do.”
Betty Pogany gasped. “But—O, how could I?” she cried.
“O, just resume—begin, I should say,” he returned coolly.
“But even if I knew how, I couldn’t, honestly, Mr. Meadowcroft,” she declared mournfully. “The other girls are all—well, sort of paired off by now, and I always only watch. And Ican’twalk fast and they wouldn’t want me tagging on. And I can’t act bad in school time, because always being so good. Miss Sherman would think I was terrible. And I might be expelled. And even if I didn’t want to go to the high school, there’s father,—and O. Aunt Sarah!”
“Well, you needn’t be a naughty girl. Just a natural, lively girl that has a jolly time every day is what I want you to turn into.”
Betty glanced helplessly at her tight boots. Meadowcroft looked hard at her.
“Suppose you begin by letting down your hair,” he suggested. “Wear it in a tail or in curls, you know, and cut off a number of inches from your skirts. Then get some low-heeled, round-toed, comfortable shoes and—for heaven’s sake take off that horribly tight belt and never put it on again. Isn’t there some sort of gown you can wear that doesn’t have to be spliced that way?” On a sudden he remembered Tommy’s cousin in Jersey. “Couldn’t you get a sailor-suit?” he suggested.
“A Peter Thompson?” cried the girl with shining eyes. “O, how I should love one! But—could I, do you think? Wouldn’t it look—silly?”
“Indeed no, nothing of the sort,” he asseverated. “It would look first-rate. It would not only be pretty and appropriate, but I don’t see how it could help being a lot more comfortable than your present costume. With a sailor-suit and easy shoes, I’ll wager that you can keep up with any of your friends.”
Her eyes shone. She drew a deep breath. Then her eyes fell, and when she raised them, they were clouded.
“O, but you don’t understand. I’m so—sort of stiff and settled,” she almost wailed.
“But just wait until you see how much of the stiffness will disappear with the tight, elderly clothing,” he bade her. “Leave off everything that isn’t perfectly comfortable. Get into a sailor-suit as soon as ever youcan and then—just throw yourself into things. Go in for whatever’s going on.”
The girl pondered silently, but her eyes were full of wistful excitement.
“Here’s something in your favor. Tommy says you have only a fortnight more of school,” he reminded her. “Begin right away, anyhow, but the summer holidays will give you a capital chance to get wholly limbered up before you enter the high school. And there you can make a perfectly fresh start. Paulding’s a large town. The school will therefore be large, and your class may be three-quarters strangers. It will be easy to start in with them as a girl among girls and boys. Don’t think of your size. Just go in for everything as if you’d always been in the habit of doing so. You’re not stiff in your mind, you know, Miss Betty. You’re supple enough mentally to carry it all off if you can begin as a more flexible being physically. You can, as I said, limber up during the summer, and then—by the way, how do the South Paulding pupils go back and forth?”
Betty explained that they used the railway, leaving on the eight-thirty train in the morning and returning at three.
“And what’s the distance by the highway?” he inquired.
“Two miles and a half each way.”
“It would be unusual, not to say uncanny, if either way were longer? Well, that is just what they would call in London atidy walk. Now if I were you. Miss Betty Pogany, I should get into practise during the holidays and then walk back and forth every trip all the autumn and winter and spring.”
The girl stared at him in amazement. She had never heard of anyone walking to Paulding. “Five miles a day!” she exclaimed.
“Certainly. That’s the least any healthy person ought to do,” he said firmly. “Are you game?”
Whereupon Betty Pogany proved that he was right as to her mental suppleness.
“Yes, sir, I’m game,” she said seriously.
“And you will—go in for it all?” he cried in genuine excitement.
“Yes, sir, all,” she declared demurely.