MISS MITCHIN OF BROOKLINE ANNOUNCES THE QUAINTEST TEA-ROOM ON THE CAPE. HISTORIC SOULE MANSION, GRIMSBY CENTER. CRUMPETS AND SALLY LUNNS WITH FRESH STRAWBERRY JAM. OPEN JULY 1.
MISS MITCHIN OF BROOKLINE ANNOUNCES THE QUAINTEST TEA-ROOM ON THE CAPE. HISTORIC SOULE MANSION, GRIMSBY CENTER. CRUMPETS AND SALLY LUNNS WITH FRESH STRAWBERRY JAM. OPEN JULY 1.
And the Applebys had never heard of crumpets or Sally Lunns.
While the light turned the moors to a wistfullavender, the little old couple stood in a hollow of the road, looking mutely up at the sign that mocked them from its elevation on a bare gravel bank beside the way. Father’s shoulders braced; he bit his lips; he reached out for Mother’s hand and patted it. He led her on, and it was he who spoke first:
“Oh, that kind of miffle-business won’t hurt us any. Girly-girly stuff, that’s what it is. Regular autoists would rather have one of your home-made doughnuts than all the crumples in the world, and you can just bet your bottom dollar on that, Sary Jane.”
He even chuckled, but it was a feeble chuckle, and he could find no other solace to give as they trudged toward Grimsby Center, two insignificant people, hand in hand, dim in the melancholy light which made mysterious the stretching moors. Presently they and the black highroad disappeared. Only the sandy casual trails and mirror-bright tiny pools stood out in the twilight.
Yet there was light enough for them to see the silhouettes of two more tea-pot signs before they entered Grimsby Center.
The village was gay, comparatively. There was to be a motion-picture show in the townhall, and the sign advertising it was glaring with no less than four incandescent lights. In the Old Harbor Inn the guests were dancing to phonograph music, after their early supper. A man who probably meant well was playing long, yellowish, twilit wails on a cornet, somewhere on the outskirts. Girls in sailor jumpers, with vivid V’s of warmly tanned flesh, or in sweaters of green and rose and violet and canary yellow, wandered down to the post-office. To the city-bred Applebys there would have been cheer and excitement in this mild activity, after their farm-house weeks; indeed Father suggested, “We ought to stay and see the movies. Look! Royal X. Snivvles in ‘The Lure of the Crimson Cobra’—six reels—that sounds snappy.” But his exuberance died in a sigh. A block down Harpoon Street they saw a sign, light-encircled, tea-pot shaped, hung out from a great elm. Without explanations they turned toward it.
They passed a mansion of those proud old days when whalers and China traders and West-Indiamen brought home gold and blacks, Cashmere shawls and sweet sandalwood, Malay oaths and the jawbones of whales. The Applebys could see by the electric lights bowered inthe lilac-bushes that a stately grass walk, lined with Madonna lilies and hollyhock and phlox, led to the fanlight-crested white door, above which hung the mocking tea-pot sign. The house was lighted, the windows open. To the right of the hall was the arts-shop where, among walls softened with silky Turkish rugs and paintings of blue dawn amid the dunes, were tables of black-and-white china, sports hats, and Swiss toys, which the Grimsby summer colony meekly bought at the suggestion of the sprightly Miss Mitchin.
To the left was the dining-room, full of small white candle-lighted tables and the sound of laughter.
“Gosh! they even serve supper there!” Father’s voice complained. He scarcely knew that he had spoken. Like Mother, he was picturing their own small tea-room and the cardboard-shaded oil-lamp that lighted it.
“Come, don’t let’s stand here,” said Mother, fiercely, and they trailed forlornly past. They were not so much envious as in awe of Miss Mitchin’s; it seemed to belong to the same unattainable world as Newport and the giant New York hotels.
The Applebys didn’t know it, but GrimsbyCenter had become artistic. They couldn’t know it, but that sharp-nosed genius-hound Miss Mitchin was cashing in on hersalon. She came from Brookline, hence Massachusetts Brahmins of almost pure caste could permit themselves to be seen at her tea-room. But nowadays she spent her winters in New York, as an artistic photographer, and she entertained interior decorators, minor fiction-writers, and minus poets with free food every Thursday evening. It may be hard to believe, but ina.d.1915 she was still calling her grab-bag of talent a “salon.” It was really a saloon, with a literary free-lunch counter. In return, whenever they could borrow the price from commercialized friends, the yearners had her take their photographs artistically, which meant throwing the camera out of focus and producing masterpieces which were everything except likenesses.
When Miss Mitchin resolved to come to Grimsby Center her group of writers, who had protected themselves against the rude, crude world of business men and lawyers by living together in Chelsea Village, were left defenseless. They were in danger of becoming human. So they all followed Miss Mitchin to Grimsby,and contentedly went on writing about one another.
There are many such groups, with the same summer watering-places and the same winter beering-places. Some of them drink hard liquor and play cards. But Miss Mitchin’s group were very mild in manner, though desperately violent in theory. The young women wore platter-sized tortoise-shell spectacles and smocks that were home-dyed to a pleasing shrimp pink. The young men also wore tortoise-shell spectacles, but not smocks—not usually, at least. One of them had an Albanian costume and a beard that was a cross between the beard of an early Christian martyr on a diet and that of a hobo who merely needed a shave. Elderly ladies loved to have him one-step with them and squeeze their elbows.
All of the yearners read their poetry aloud, very superior, and rising in the inflections. It is probable that they made a living by taking in one another’s literary washing. But they were ever so brave about their financial misfortunes, and they could talk about the ballet Russe and also charlotte russes in quite the nicest way. Indeed it was a pretty sight to see them playing there on the lawn before theMitchin mansion, talking about the novels they were going to write and the revolutions they were going to lead.
Had Miss Mitchin’s ballet of hobohemians been tough newspapermen they wouldn’t have been drawing-cards for a tea-room. But these literary ewe-lambs were a spectacle to charm the languishing eyes of the spinsters who filled the Old Harbor Inn and the club-women from the yellow water regions who were viewing the marvels of nature as displayed on and adjacent to the ocean. Practically without exception these ladies put vine leaves in their hair—geranium leaves, anyway—and galloped to Miss Mitchin’s, to drink tea and discuss Freud and dance the fox-trot in a wild, free, artistic, somewhat unstandardized manner.
Because it was talked about and crowded, ordinary untutored motorists judged Miss Mitchin’s the best place to go, and permitted their wives to drag them past the tortoise-shell spectacles and the unprostituted art and the angular young ladies in baggy smocks breaking out in sudden irresponsible imitations of Pavlova.
None of this subtlety, this psycho-analysis and fellowship of the arts, was evident to the Applebys. They didn’t understand the problem,“Why is a Miss Mitchin?” All that they knew, as they dragged weary joints down the elm-rustling road and back to the bakery on Main Street, was that Miss Mitchin’s caravanserai was intimidatingly grand—and very busy.
They were plodding out of town again when Mother exclaimed, “Why, Father, you forgot to get your cigarettes.”
“No, I— Oh, I been smoking too much. Do me good to lay off.”
They had gone half a mile farther before she sighed: “Cigarettes don’t cost much. ’Twouldn’t have hurt you to got ’em. You get ’em the very next time we’re in town—or send Katie down. I won’t have you denying—”
Her voice droned away. They could think of nothing but mean economies as they trudged the wide and magic night of the moors.
When they were home, and the familiar golden-oak chairs and tidies blurred their memory of Miss Mitchin’s crushing competition, Father again declared that no dinky tea-pot inn could permanently rival Mother’s home-made doughnuts. But he said it faintly then, and more faintly on the days following, for inactivity again enervated him—made him, for the first time in his life, feel almost old.
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APPARENTLY the Applebys’ customers had liked “The T Room” well enough—some of them had complimented Mrs. Appleby on the crispness of her doughnuts, the generousness of her chicken sandwiches. Those who had quarreled about the thickness of the bread or the vagueness of flavor in the tea Father had considered insulting, and he had been perky as a fighting-sparrow in answering them. A good many must have been pleased, for on their trip back from Provincetown they returned, exclaimed that they remembered the view from the rose-arbor, and chatted with Father about the roads and New York and fish. As soon as the first novelty of Miss Mitchin’s was gone, the Applebys settled down to custom which was just large enough to keep their hopes staggering onward, and just small enough to eat away their capital a few cents a day, instead of giving them a profit.
In the last week of July they were visited by their daughter Lulu—Lulu the fair, Lulu the spectacled, Lulu the lily wife of Harris Hartwig, the up-to-date druggist of Saserkopee, New York.
Lulu had informed them two weeks beforehand that they were to be honored with the presence of herself and her son Harry; and Father and Mother had been unable to think of any excuse strong enough to keep her away. Lulu wasn’t unkind to her parents; rather, she was too kind; she gave them good advice and tried to arrange Mother’s hair in the coiffures displayed by Mrs. Edward Schuyler Deflaver of Saserkopee, who gave smart teas at the Woman’s Exchange. Lulu cheerily told Father how well he was withstanding the hand of Time, which made him feel decrepit and become profane.
In fact, though they took it for granted that they adored their dear daughter Lulu, they knew that they would not enjoy a single game of cribbage, nor a single recital by Signor Sethico Applebi the mouth-organ virtuoso, as long as she was with them. But she was coming, and Mother frantically cleaned everything and hid her favorite old shoes.
Mrs. Lulu Hartwig arrived with a steamer-trunk, two new gowns, a camera, and Harry. She seemed disappointed not to find a large summer hotel with dancing and golf next door to “The T Room,” and she didn’t hesitate to say that her parents would have done better—which meant that Lulu would have enjoyed her visit more—if they had “located” at Bar Harbor or Newport. She rearranged the furniture, but as there was nothing in the tea-room but chairs, tables, and a fireplace, there wasn’t much she could do.
She descended on Grimsby Center, and came back enthusiastic about Miss Mitchin’s. She had met the young man with the Albanian costume, and he had talked to her about vorticism and this jolly new Polish composer with his suite for tom-tom and cymbals. She led Father into the arbor and effervescently demanded, “Why don’t Mother and you have a place like that dear old mansion of Miss Mitchin’s, and all those clever people there and all?”
Father fairly snarled, “Now look here, young woman, the less you say about Miss Mitten the more popular you’ll be around here. And don’t you dare to speak to your mother about thatplace. It’s raised the devil with our trade, and I won’t have your mother bothered with it. And if you mean the young fellow that needs a decent pair of pantaloons by this ‘Albanian costume’ business, why I sh’d think you’d be ashamed to speak of him.”
“Now, Father, of course you have particularly studied artists—”
“Look here, young woman, when you used to visit us in New York, it was all right for you to get our goats by sticking your snub nose in the air and asking us if we’d read a lot of new-fangled books that we’d never heard of. I’ll admit that was a good way to show us how superior you were. But this Miss Mitten place is a pretty serious proposition for us to buck, and I absolutely forbid you to bother your mother with mentioning it.”
Father stood straight and glared at her. There was in him nothing of the weary little man who was in awe of Miss Mitchin’s. Even his daughter was impressed. She forgot for a moment that she was Mrs. Hartwig, now, and had the best phonograph in Saserkopee. But she took one more shot:
“All the same, it would be a good thing for you if you had some clever people—orsome society people—coming here often. It would advertise the place as nothing else would.”
“Well, we’ll see about that,” said Father—which meant, of course, that he wouldn’t see about it.
Lulu Hartwig was a source of agitation for two weeks. After Father’s outbreak she stopped commenting, but every day when business was light they could feel her accusingly counting the number of customers. But she did not become active again till the Sunday before her going.
The Applebys were sitting up-stairs, that day, holding hands and avoiding Lulu. Below them they heard a motor-car stop, and Mother prepared to go down and serve the tourists. The brazen, beloved voice of Uncle Joe Tubbs of West Skipsit blared out: “Where’s the folks, heh? Tell ’em the Tubbses are here.”
And Lulu’s congealed voice, in answer: “I don’t know whether they are at home. If they are, who shall I tell them is calling, please?”
“Huh? Oh, well, just say the Tubbses.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Tubbs?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”
By this time Father and Mother were galloping down-stairs. They welcomed the Tubbses with yelps of pleasure; the four of them sat in rockers on the grass and talked about the Tubbses’ boarders, and the Applebys admired to hear that Uncle Joe now ran the car himself. But all of them were conscious that Lulu, in a chiffon scarf and eye-glasses, was watching them amusedly, and the Tubbses uneasily took leave in an hour, pleading the distance back to West Skipsit.
Not till evening, when he got the chance to walk by himself on the beach below the gravel cliffs, did Father quite realize what his daughter had done—that, with her superior manner, she had frightened the Tubbses away. Yet there was nothing to do about it.
Even at her departure there was a certain difficulty, for Lulu developed a resolution to have her parents visit her at Saserkopee. Perhaps she wished to show them in what state she now lived; or it may conceivably be that, in her refined and determined manner, she was fond of her parents. She kissed them repeatedly and was gone with much waving of a handkerchief and yelps of “Now don’t forget—you’reyou’re to visit me—be sure and write—Harry, don’t stick your head out of the window, d’yuhhearme?”
Lulu’s visit had two effects upon the lives of Father and Mother. They found that their quiet love had grown many-fold stronger, sweeter, in the two weeks it had been denied the silly fondnesses of utterance. They could laugh, now that there was no critic of their shy brand of humor. Father stopped on the step and winked an immense shameless wink at Mother, and she sighed and said, with unexpected understanding, “Yes, I’m afraid Lulu is a little—just a leet-le bit—”
“And I reckon we won’t be in such a gosh-awful hustle to visit her.”
Mother was so vulgar as to grunt, “Well, I guess not!”
That evening they sat in the rose-arbor again. And had tone poems on the mouth-organ. And dreamed that something would happen to make their investment pay.
Another result there was of Lulu’s visit. Father couldn’t help remembering her suggestion that they ought to bag a social or artistic lion as an attraction for “The T Room.” Hewas delighted to find that, after weeks of vacuous worry, he had another idea.
Now that August, the height of the season, had come, he would capture Mrs. Vance Carter herself.
Mrs. Vance Carter was the widow of the Boothbay Textile Mills millions. She was a Winslow on her father’s side, a Cabot on her mother’s, and Beacon Street was officially swept from end to end and tidied with little pink feather dusters whenever she returned to Boston. She was so solid that society reporters didn’t dare write little items about her, and when she was in Charleston she was invited to the Saint Cecilia Ball. Also she was rather ignorant, rather unhappy, and completely aimless. She and her daughter spent their summers three miles from Grimsby Head, in an estate with a gate-house and a conservatory and a golf course and a house with three towers and other architecture. When America becomes a military autocracy she will be Lady Carter or the Countess of Grimsby.
The Applebys saw her go by every day, in a landaulet with liveried chauffeur and footman.
With breathless secrecy Father planned to entice Mrs. Vance Carter to “The T Room.” Once they had her there, she would certainly appreciate the wholesome goodness of Mother’s cooking. He imagined long intimate conversations in which Mrs. Carter would say to him, “Mr. Appleby, I can’t tell you how much I like to get away from my French cook and enjoy your nice old house and Mrs. Appleby’s delicious homey doughnuts.” It was easy to win Mrs. Carter, in imagination. Sitting by himself in the rose-arbor while Mother served their infrequent customers or stood at the door unhappily watching for them, Father visualized Mrs. Carter exclaiming over the view from the arbor, the sunset across the moors as seen from their door—which was, Father believed, absolutely the largest and finest sunset in the world. He even went so far as to discover in Mrs. Vance Carter, Mrs. Cabot-Winslow-Carter, a sneaking fondness for cribbage, which, in her exalted social position, she had had to conceal. He saw her send the chauffeur away, and cache her lorgnette, and roll up her sleeves, and simply wade into an orgy of cribbage, with pleasing light refreshments of cider and cakes waiting by the fireplace. Then he saw Mrs. Carter sending all her acquaintances to “The T Room,” and the establishment so prosperous that MissMitchin would come around and beg the Applebys to enter into partnership.
Father was not such a fool as to believe all his fancies. But hadn’t he heard the most surprising tales of how friendly these great folk could be? Why here just the other day he had been reading in the boiler-plate innards of theGrimsby Recorderhow Jim Hill, the railroad king, had dropped off at a little station in North Dakota one night, incog., and talked for hours to the young station-master.
He was burning to do something besides helping Mother in the kitchen—something which would save them and pull the tea-room out of the hole. Without a word to Mother he started for Grimsby Hill, the estate of Mrs. Vance Carter. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he was certain that he was going to do something.
As he arrived at the long line of iron picket fence surrounding Grimsby Hill, he saw Mrs. Carter’s motor enter the gate. It seemed to be a good omen. He hurried to the gate, peered in, then passed on. He couldn’t go and swagger past that exclusive-looking gate-house and intrude on that sweep of rhododendron-lined private driveway. He walked shyly along theiron fence for a quarter of a mile before he got up courage to go back, rush through the towering iron gateway and past the gate-house, into the sacred estate. He expected to hear a voice—it would be a cockney servant’s voice—demanding, “’Ere you, wot do you want?” But no one stopped him; no one spoke to him; he was safe among the rhododendrons. He clumped along as though he had important business, secretly patting his tie into shape and smoothing his hair. Just let anybody try to stop him! He knew what he was about! But he really didn’t know what he was about; he hadn’t the slightest notion as to whether he would go up and invite their dear cribbage-companion Mrs. Carter to come and see them or tack up a “T Room” advertisement on the porch.
He came to a stretch of lawn, with the house and all its three towers scowling down at him. Behind it were the edges of a group of out-buildings. He veered around toward these. Outside the garage he saw the chauffeur, with his livery coat off, polishing a fender. Great! Perhaps he could persuade the chauffeur to help him. He put on what he felt to be a New York briskness, furtively touched his tie again, and skipped up to the chauffeur.
“Fine day!” he said, breezily, starting with the one neutral topic of conversation in the world.
“What of it?” said the chauffeur, and went on polishing.
“Well, uh, say, I wanted to have a talk with you.”
“I guess there’s nothing stopping you. G’wan and have your talk. I can’t get away. The old dragon wanted to have a talk with me, too, this morning. So did the housekeeper. Everybody does.” And he polished harder than ever.
“Ha, ha!” Which indicates Father’s laughter, though actually it sounded more like “Hick, hick!” As carelessly as he could Father observed: “That’s how it goes, all right. I know. When I was in the shoe business—”
“Waal, waal, you don’t say so, Si! Haow’s the shoe business in Hyannis, papa?”
“Hyannis, hell! I’ve been in business in New York City, New York, for more than forty years!”
“Oh!”
Father felt that he had made an impression. He stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets—as he had not done these six gloomy weeks—threwout his chest, and tried to look like Thirty-fourth and Broadway, with a dash of Wall Street and a flavor of Fifth Avenue.
The chauffeur sighed, “Well, all I can say is that any guy that’s lived in New York that long and then comes to this God-forsaken neck of land is a nut.”
With an almost cosmic sorrow in his manner and an irritated twist in his suspenders, the chauffeur disappeared into the garage. Father forlornly felt that he wasn’t visibly getting nearer to the heart and patronage of Mrs. Vance Carter.
He stood alone on the cement terrace before the garage. The square grim back of the big house didn’t so much “look down on him” as beautifully ignore him. A maid in a cap peeped wonderingly at him from a window. A man in dun livery wheeled a vacuum cleaner out of an unexpected basement door. An under-gardener, appearing at the corner, dragging a cultivator, stared at him. Far off, somewhere, he heard a voice crying, “Fif’ love!” He could see a corner of a sunken garden with stiff borders of box. He had an uneasy feeling that a whole army of unexpected servants stood between him and Mrs. Vance Carter; that, atany moment, a fat, side-whiskered, expensive butler, like the butlers you see in the movies, would pop up and order him off the grounds.
The unsatisfactory chauffeur reappeared. In a panic Father urged, “Say, my name’s Appleby and I run the tea-room at Grimsby Head—you know, couple of miles this side of the Center. It would be pretty nice for our class of business if the Madam was to stop there some time, and I was just wondering, just kinda wondering, if some time when she felt thirsty you c—”
“She don’t never tell me when she’s thirsty. She just tells me when she’s mad.”
“Well, you know, some time you might be stopping to show her the view or something—you fix it up, and— Here, you get yourself some cigars.” He timidly held out a two-dollar bill. It seemed to bore the chauffeur a good deal, but he condescended to take it. Father tried to look knowing and friendly and sophisticated all at once. He added, “Any time you feel like a good cup o’ tea and the finest home-made doughnuts you ever ate, why, you just drop in yourself, and ’twon’t cost you a cent.”
“All right, ’bo, I’ll see what I can do,” said the chauffeur, and vanished again.
Father airily stamped along the driveway.His head was high and hopeful. He inspected the tennis-courts as though he were Maurice McLoughlin. He admitted that the rhododendrons were quite extensive. In fact, he liked Grimsby Hill.
He had saved their fortunes—not for himself, but for Mother. He whistled “The Harum-Scarum Rag” all the way home, interrupting himself only to murmur: “I wonder where the back door of that house is. Not at the back, anyway. Never saw even a garbage-pail.”
And then for two weeks he sat with Mother in the sun and watched the motors go by.
They were almost ready to admit, now, that their venture was a complete failure; that they were ruined; that they didn’t know what they would do, with no savings and a rainy day coming.
They let their maid go. They gave the grocer smaller and smaller orders for bread and butter and cheese—and even these orders were invariably too large for the little custom that came their way.
For a week Father concealed the fact that Mrs. Vance Carter would be coming—not now, but very soon. Then he had to tell Mother the secret to save her from prostrating worry. Theytalked always of that coming miracle as they sat with hand desperately clutching hand in the evening; they nearly convinced themselves that Mrs. Carter would send her friends. September was almost here, and it was too late for Mrs. Carter’s influence to help them this year, but they trusted that somehow, by the magic of her wealth and position, she would enable them to get through the winter and find success during the next year.
They developed a remarkable skill in seeing her car coming far down the road. When either of them saw it the other was summoned, and they waited tremblingly. But the landaulet always passed, with Mrs. Carter staring straight ahead, gray-haired and hook-nosed; sometimes with Miss Margaret Carter, whose softly piquant little nose would in time be hooked like her mother’s. Father’s treacherous ally the chauffeur never even looked at “The T Room.” Sometimes Father wondered if the chauffeur knew just where the house was; perhaps he had never noticed it. He planned to wave and attract the chauffeur’s attention, but in face of the prodigious Mrs. Carter he never dared to carry out the plan.
September 1st. The Applebys had given uphope of miracles. They were making up their minds to notify Mr. Pilkings, of Pilkings & Son’s Sixth Avenue Standard Shoe Parlor, that Father again wanted the job he had held for so many years.
They must leave the rose-arbor for the noise of that most alien of places, their native New York.
Mother was in the kitchen; Father at the front door, aimlessly whittling. He looked up, saw the Vance Carter motor approach. He shrugged his shoulders, growled, “Let her go to the dickens.”
Then the car had stopped, and Mrs. Vance Carter and Miss Margaret Carter had incredibly stepped out, had started up the path to the tea-room.
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FATHER’S hand kept on aimlessly whittling, while his eyes poked out like those of a harassed fiddler-crab when he saw Mrs. Vance Carter actually stop. It was surely a dream. In his worry over inactivity he had found himself falling into queer little illusions lately. He was conscious that the chauffeur, whom he had bribed to stop some day, was winking at him in a vulgar manner not at all appropriate to his dove-gray uniform. He had a spasm of indignant wonder. “I’ll bet a hat that fellow didn’t have a thing to do with this; he’s a grafter.” Then he sprang up, bowing.
Mrs. Carter rustled up to him and murmured, “May we have some tea, here, and a cake, do you know?”
“Oh yes, ma’am! Won’t you step right in? Fine day, ma’am.”
Mrs. Carter seemed not to have any opinions regarding the day. Quite right, too; it wasn’t an especially fine day; justa day.
She marched in, gave one quick, nervous look, and said, with tremendous politeness: “May we have this table by the window? You have such a charming view over the cliffs.”
“Oh yes, ma’am! We hoped some day you’d take that table. Kind of kept the view for you,” said Father, with panting gallantry, fairly falling over himself as he rushed across the floor to pull out their chairs and straighten the table-cloth.
Mrs. Carter paid no attention to him whatsoever. She drew a spectacle-case from her small hand-bag and set upon her beetling nose a huge pair of horn-rimmed eye-glasses. She picked up the menu-card as though she were delicately removing a bug—supposing there to be any bug so presumptuous as to crawl upon her smart tan suit. She raised her chin and held the card high.
“Uh, tea, lettuce sandwiches, cream-cheese sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, doughnuts, cinnamon toast,” she read off to her daughter.
So quickly that he started, she turned on Father and demanded, “What sort of tea have you, please?”
“Why, uh—just a minute and I’ll ask.”
Father bolted through the door into thelarge, clean, woodeny, old-fashioned kitchen, where Mother was wearily taking a batch of doughnuts out of the fat-kettle.
“Mother!” he exulted. “Mrs. Carter—she’s here!”
Mother dropped the doughnuts back into the kettle. The splashing fat must have burnt her, but beyond mutely wiping the grease from her hand, she paid no attention to it. She turned paper white. “Oh, Seth!” she groaned. Then, in agony, “After your going and getting them here, I haven’t a thing ready for them but lettuce sandwiches and fresh doughnuts.”
“Never mind. I’ll make them take those. Say, what kind of tea have we got now?”
“Oh, dear! we haven’t got a thing left but just—well, it’s just tea, mixed.”
He galloped back into the tea-room, frightened lest the royal patrons leave before they were served. On the way he resolved to lie—not as the pinching tradesman lies, smugly and unconsciously, but desperately, to save Mother.
“We have orange pekoe and oolong,” he gasped.
“Then you might give us some orange pekoe and—oh, two chicken sandwiches.”
“Gee! I’m awfully sorry, ma’am, but we’re just out of chicken sandwiches. If we’d only knownyouwere coming— But we have some very nice fresh lettuce sandwiches, and I do wish you would try some of our doughnuts. They’re fresh-made, just this minute.”
He clasped his hands, pressed them till the fingers of one gouged the back of the other. Father was not a Uriah Heep. At Pilkings & Son’s he had often “talked back” to some of his best customers. But now he would gladly have licked Mrs. Vance Carter’s spatted shoes.
“No—oh, bring us some lettuce sandwiches and some orange pekoe. I don’t think we care for any doughnuts,” said Mrs. Carter, impatiently.
Father bolted again, and whispered to Mother, who stood where he had left her, “Lettuce sandwiches and tea, and for Heaven’s sake make the tea taste as much like orange pekoe as you can.”
The Applebys had no delicately adjusted rule about the thickness of bread in sandwiches. Sometimes Mother was moved to make them very dainty, very thin and trim. But now, because he was in such a fever to please the Carters, Father fairly slashed their last loaf ofbread, and slapped in the lettuce, while Mother was drawing tea. In two minutes he was proudly entering with the service-tray. He set it down before the Carters; he fussed with a crumb on the table-cloth, with the rather faded crimson rambler in the ornate pressed-glass vase. Mrs. Carter glanced at him impatiently. He realized that he was being officious, and rushed away.
Mother was sitting by the wide kitchen table, which was scarred with generations of use of cleaver and bread-knife and steak-pounder. The kitchen door was open to the broad land, which flowed up to the sill in a pleasant sea of waving grass. But she was turned from it, staring apprehensively toward the tea-room. Round her swirled the heat from the stove, and restless flies lighted on her cheek and flew off at hectic tangents.
Father tiptoed up to her, smiling. “I’ve left the door open wide enough so you can see them,” he whispered. “Come and take a look at them. Mrs. Vance Carter—gee! And her daughter’s a mighty pretty girl—not that I think much of these blouses that are cut so low and all.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare—”
Mother stopped short. Quiet as they were,they could distinctly hear the voices from the other room.
The Carter girl—she who was known as “Pig Carter” at Miss Severance’s school—was snapping, “What in the world ever made you come to this frightful hole, mama?”
“Simply because I wanted to stop some place, and I really can’t stand that mincing Miss Mitchin and her half-baked yearners and that odious creature with the beard and the ballet skirt, again.”
“At least Mitchin’s shop is better than this awful place. Why, this might be one of those railroad lunch-rooms you see from a train.”
“I’m not so sure this really is worse than the Mitchin creature’s zoo, Marky. At least this is a perfect study in what not to do. I fancy it would be a good thing for every interior decorator to come here and learn what to avoid. And, you know, they really might have done something with this place—rather a decent old house, with a good plain fireplace. But then, any one could make a charming room, and only a genius could have imagined this combination—an oak dining-room chair with a wicker table and a cotton table-cloth. I’m sure that Exhibition of Bad Taste—wasn’t it? I don’tpore over the newspapers as you do—that they held in New York would have been charmed to secure that picture of the kittens and the infant.”
All this, conveyed in the Carters’ clear, high-bred voices, Father and Mother heard perfectly.... The picture of kittens and a baby they had bought just after Lulu’s birth, and it had always hung above the couch in their living-room in New York.
Margaret Carter was continuing: “I don’t mind the bad taste a bit, but I was hungry after motoring all day, almost, and I did want a decent tea. If you could see that horrid Victorian drawing-room at Miss Severance’s you could stand even sticky kitties—in a picture. I don’t care about the interior decoration as long as Marky’s little interior gets decorated decently. But this tea is simply terrible. Orange pekoe! Why, even Miss Severance’s horrid Ceylon is better than this, and she does give you cream, instead of this milk of magnesia or soapy water or whatever the beastly stuff is. And to have to drink it out of these horrid thick cups—like toothbrush mugs. I’m sure I’ll find a chewed-up old toothbrush when I get to the bottom.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Marky. You might remember this is Massachusetts, not New York.”
“Well, this Massachusetts lettuce—I’m perfectly convinced that they used it for floor-rags before they went and lost it in the sandwiches—and this thick crumby bread—oh, it’s unspeakable. I do wish you wouldn’t poke around in these horrid places, mama, or else leave me in the car when you are moved to go slumming. I’m sure I don’t feel any call to uplift the poor.”
“My dear child, I seem to remember your admiring Freddy Dabney because he is so heroically poor. It’s very good for you to come to a place like this. Now you know what it’s like to be poor, Marky. You can see precisely how romantic it really is.”
“Oh, I’ll admit Marky is a perfect little devil. But I do want you to observe that she’s been brave enough to eat part of her sandwich. Let’s go. Where is the nice smiling little man? Let’s pay our bill and go.”
Twenty feet from the bored Carters was tragedy. Gray-faced, dumb, Father stood by Mother’s chair, stroking her dull hair as she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, backand forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France might have caressed his marquise.
“Mother—” he began. It was hard to say anything when there was nothing to say. “It’s all right. They’re just silly snobs. They—”
Yes, the Applebys could not understand every detail of what the well-bred Carters had said. “Interior decoration”—that didn’t mean anything to them. All that they understood was that they were fools and failures, in the beginning of their old age; that they belonged to the quite ludicrously inefficient.
Father realized, presently, that the Carters were waiting for their bill. For a minute more he stroked Mother’s hair. If the Carters would only go from this place they had desecrated, and take their damned money with them! But he had been trained by years of dealing with self-satisfied people in a shoe-store at least to make an effort to conceal his feelings. He dragged himself into the tea-room, kept himself waiting with expressionless face till Mrs. Carter murmured:
“The bill, please?”
Tonelessly he said, “Thirty cents.”
Mrs. Carter took out, not three, but four dimes—four nice, shiny, new dimes; she sometimes said at her bank that really she couldn’t touch soiled money. She dropped them on the table-cloth, and went modestly on her way, an honorable, clever, rather kindly and unhappy woman who had just committed murder.
Father picked up the ten-cent tip. With loathing he threw it in the fireplace. Then went, knelt down, and picked it out again. Mother would need all the money he could get for her in the coming wintry days of failure—failure he himself had brought upon her.
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HAVING once admitted hopelessness, it was humanly natural that they should again hope that they hoped. For perhaps two weeks after the Carters’ visit they pretended that the tea-room was open, and they did have six or seven customers. But late in September Father got his courage up, took out the family pen and bottle of ink, the tablet of ruled stationery and a stamped-envelope, and wrote to Mr. J. Pilkings that he wanted his shoe-store job back.
When he had mailed the letter he told Mother. She sighed and said, “Yes, that is better, after all.”
An Indian summer of happiness came over them. They were going back to security. Again Father played the mouth-organ a little, and they talked of the familiar city places they would see. They would enjoy the movies—weeks since they had seen a movie! And they would have, Father chucklingly declared, “abang-up dinner at Bomberghof Terrace, with music, and yes, by Jiminy! and cocktails!”
For a week he awaited an answer, waited anxiously, though he kept reassuring himself that old Pilkings had promised to keep the job open for him. He received a reply. But it was from Pilkings’s son. It informed him that Pilkings,père, was rather ill, with grippe, and that until he recovered “no action can be taken regarding your valued proposition in letter of recent date.”
Bewildered, incredulous, Father had a flash of understanding that he, who felt himself so young and fit, was already discarded.
Mother sat across the kitchen table from him, pretending to read theGrimsby Recorder, but really watching him.
He held his forehead, looked dizzy, and let the letter slip from his fingers. “I—uh—” he groaned. “I— Is there anything I can do for you around the house?”
“Tell me—what did the letter say?”
“Oh, Mother, Mother, maybe I won’t get my job back at all! I honestly don’t know what we can do.”
Running to her, he hid his face in her lap—he, the head of the family, the imperturbable adventurer,changed to a child. And Mother, she who had always looked to him for inspiration, was indeed the mother now. She stroked his cheek, she cried, “Never mind—’course you’ll get it back, or a better one!” She made fun of his tousled hair till she had him ruefully smiling. Her voice had a crisp briskness which it had lacked in the days when she had brooded in the flat and waited for her man.
Father could not face another indefinite period of such inactivity as had been sapping him all summer. He longed for the dusty drudgery of Pilkings & Son’s; longed to be busy all day, and to bring home news—and money—to Mother at night.
Aside from his personal desires, what were they going to do? They had left, in actual money, less than fifty dollars.
Father did not become querulous, but day by day he became more dependent on Mother’s cheer as October opened, as chilly rains began to shut them in the house. When she was not busy, and he was not cutting wood or forlornly pecking away at useless cleanings of the cold and empty tea-room, they talked of what they would do. Father had wild plans of dashing down to New York, of seeing young Pilkings,of getting work in some other shoe-store. But he knew very little about other stores. He was not so much a shoe-clerk as a Pilkings clerk. It had been as important a part of his duties, these many years, to know what to say to Mr. Pilkings as to know what to show to customers. Surely when Pilkings, senior, was well he would remember his offer to keep the job open.
Mother cautiously began to suggest her plan. She spoke fondly of their daughter Lulu, of their grandson Harry, of how estimable and upright a citizen was their son-in-law, Mr. Harris Hartwig of Saserkopee, New York. As Father knew none of these suggestions to have any factual basis whatever his clear little mind was bored by them. Then, after a stormy evening when the fire was warm and they had cheered up enough to play cribbage, Mother suddenly plumped out her plan—to go to Saserkopee and live with daughter till something turned up.
Father shrank. He crouched in his chair, a wizened, frightened, unhappy, oldish man. “No, no, no, no!” he cried. “She is a good girl, but she would badger us to death. She wouldn’t let us do one single thing our way. She alwaysacts as though she wanted to make you all over, and I love you the way you are. I’d rather get a job cooking on a fishing schooner than do that.”
But he knew Mother’s way of sticking to an idea, and he began to persuade himself that Saserkopee was a haven of refuge. Whenever they seemed to be having a peaceful discussion of Lulu Hartwig’s canary-yellow sweater, they were hearing her voice, wondering if they could tolerate its twangy comments the rest of their lives.
If the weather was clear they sat out in the rose-arbor as though they were soon to lose it. The roses were dead, now, but a bank of purple asters glowed by the laurel-bushes, and in the garden plucky pansies withstood the chill. They tried to keep up a pretense of happiness, but always they were listening—listening.
There were two or three October days when the sea was blue and silver, sharply and brightly outlined against the far skyline where the deep blue heavens modulated to a filmy turquoise. Gulls followed the furrows of the breakers. Father and Mother paced the edge of the cliff or sat sun-refreshed in the beloved arbor.Then a day of iron sea, cruelly steel-bright on one side and sullenly black on the other, with broken rolling clouds, and sand whisking along the dunes in shallow eddies; rain coming and the breakers pounding in with a terrifying roar and the menace of illimitable power. Father gathered piles of pine-knots for the fire, whistling as he hacked at them with a dull hatchet—trimming them, not because it was necessary, but because it gave him something energetic to do. Whenever he came into the kitchen with an armful of them he found Mother standing at the window, anxiously watching the flurries of sand and rain.
“Be a fine night to sit by the fire,” he chirruped. “Guess we’ll get out the old mouth-organ and have a little band-concert, admission five bucks, eh?” Something of the old command was in his voice. Mother actually needed his comfort against the black hours of storm!
Though they used a very prosaic stove for cooking, the old farm-house fireplace still filled half the back of the kitchen, and this had become the center of their house. Neither of them could abide the echoing emptiness and shabby grandeur of the tea-room. Before thefireplace they sat, after a supper at which Father had made much of enjoying fish chowder, though they had had it four times in eight days. Cheaper. And very nourishing.
The shutters banged, sand crashed against the panes, rain leaked in a steady drip down one corner of the room, and the sea smashed unceasingly. But Father played “My Gal’s a High-born Lady” and “Any Little Girl That’s a Nice Little Girl Is the Right Little Girl for Me,” and other silly, cheerful melodies which even the hand-organs had forgotten.
There was a sense of glaring mounting light through the window which gave on the cliff.
“I wonder what that is,” Mother shuddered. “It’s like a big fire. I declare it seems as though the whole world was coming to an end to-night.” She turned from the window and shivered over the embers, in her golden-oak rocker which Father had filled with cushions.
He kissed her boyishly and trotted over to the window. The fact that they were alone against the elements, with no apartment-house full of people to share the tumultuous night, weakened her, but delighted him. He cried out, with a feeling of dramatic joy.
There was a fire below, on the beach, wherethere should be nothing but sand and the terror of the storm. The outer edge of the cliff was outlined by the light.
“It’s a wreck!” he whooped. “It’s the life-savers! Mother, I’m going down. Maybe there’s something I can do. I want to do something again! Maybe some poor devil coming ashore in the breeches buoy—help him ashore— Don’t suppose I could row—”
He darted at the closet and yanked out his ineffectual city raincoat and rubbers, and the dreary wreck of what had once been his pert new vacation traveling-cap.
“No, no, don’t, please don’t!” Mother begged. “You couldn’t do anything, and I don’t dast to go out—and I’m afraid to stay here alone.”
But Father was putting on his raincoat. “I’ll just run down and see—be right back.”
“Don’t go a step farther than the top of the cliff,” she wailed.
He hesitated. He wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be in the midst of heroic effort. The gods had set the stage for epic action that night, and his spirit was big with desire for bigness. It was very hard to promise to put goloshes upon his winged feet.
But Mother held out her hands. “Oh, I need you, Seth. You’ll stay near me, won’t you?”
There may have been lordly deeds in the surf that night—men gambling their lives to save strangers and aliens. One deed there certainly was—though the movies, which are our modern minstrelsy, will never portray it. While he strained with longing to go down and show himself a man—not just a scullion in an unsuccessful tea-room—Father stood on the edge of the cliff and watched the life-savers launch the boat, saw them disappear from the radius of the calcium carbide beach-light into the spume of surf. He didn’t even wait to see them return. Mother needed him, and he trotted back to tell her all about it.
They went happily to bed, and she slept with her head cuddled on his left shoulder, his left arm protectingly about her.
It was still raining when they awoke, a weary, whining drizzle. And Father was still virile with desire of heroism. He scampered out to see what he could of the wreck.
He returned, suddenly. His voice was low and unhappy as he demanded, “Oh, Mother, it’s— Come and see.”
He led her to the kitchen door and round thecorner of the house. The beloved rose-arbor had been wrecked by the storm. The lattice-work was smashed. The gray bare stems of the crimson ramblers drooped drearily into a sullen puddle. The green settee was smeared with splashed mud.
“They couldn’t even leave us that,” Father wailed, in the voice of a man broken. “Oh yes, yes, yes, I’ll go to Lulu’s with you. But we won’t stay. Will we! I will fight again. I did have a little gumption left last night, didn’t I? Didn’t I? But—but we’ll go there for a while.”
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