Chapter 14
LESTER was glad to see Mattie Farnham come bustling in the very afternoon of the day she returned from Maine. He liked Mattie—indeed he almost loved her—in spite of the fact that so far as he had been able to ascertain she had never yet understood anything he ever said to her. They did not use at all the same vocabulary, but they held friendly communication by means of sign-language, like a dog and cat who have grown up in the same house and have an old affection for each other.
“Hello there, Mattie,” he welcomed her, as she entered. “How are the potatoes in Maine? Ours have spots in them.”
It amused him with Mattie to disconcert her decent sense of what was the suitable attitude to strike. He knew that both she and her husband were relieved to have their ninety-year-old, bed-ridden aunt safely and painlessly in the next world. Blessed if he’d go through the motions of condoling with her.
But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared to“sympathize” with him. Mattie always had to go through the proper motions.
“How are you gettingon, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children. I’ve been sick to think I wasn’t here to help out in this sad time. Now I’m back you must let me do everything I can.”
“You might come and call on Stephen and me once in a while and bring us some of your famous home-cooking,” he suggested mischievously. She laughed, in spite of herself, at his jibe over her weakness for delicatessen potato salad. “You miserablesinner!” she cried, in her own voice, dropping for an instant into their old joking relationship. She sobered at once, however, into what Lester called to himself the “mourners-waiting-for-the-benediction manner” and said, “I was planning as I walked over how I could arrange my own work to have two hours free every afternoon and come here to do for you.”
“You’ll find it all done,” he told her genially. “You can’t beat me to it. Come along all the same, and we’ll play cribbage.” She was perplexed as well as shocked by his levity and at last simply threw herself on his mercy, “Lester, do tell me all about things,” she said in an honest, human tone ofaffection and concern which brought from him an answer in kind.
“Well, Mattie, I will. It was hell at first ... all the kinds of hell there are. But you know how folks are, how you get used to everything. And I got better, got so it didn’t make me faint away with pain to have somebody touch the bed. And then little by little I settled down to where I am now. Both legs incurably paralyzed, I’m told, but the rest of me all right. In the meantime, Eva—you know how Eva never lies down and gives up—as soon as I could be left, hustled right out and got a job. She’s in the Cloak-and-Suits at Willing’s now, and making good money. What with her commissions on extra sales, she’s making just about what I did. With the promise of a good raise soon. The Willings have treated her very white, I must say. And I imagine she is the wonder of the world as a saleswoman.”
“She would be, at anything!” breathed Mattie devoutly.
“She surely would,” agreed her husband heartily. “Well, here at the house we’ve shuffled things around into a new pattern, and we’re getting on. I can do anything that needs to be done on this floor with Henry and Helen’s help, and the doctor says I’ll soon be on crutches and able to get upstairs once a day. It seemed queer to be doing housework, butthere isn’t another mortal thing I can do but to keep things running. So I do.”
“Poor Lester!” said Mattie, just as he knew she would.
“Not on your life!” he told her. “I don’t mind the work a bit, now I’ve got used to the idea. I can’t say it is exactly enlivening to be tied up to half your body that’s dead but not buried, but I haven’t got anything else to complain of. As to the housework, I haven’t had such a good time in years. You know what an absent-minded scut I am, with my head always full of odds and ends of book-junk I like to mull over. Well, housework doesn’t interfere with thinking as account-keeping does, believe me! I can start my hands and arms to washing dishes or peeling potatoes or setting the table, and then leave them to do the job while I roam from China to Peru. Every time I tried that at the office—the bottom dropped out. Here I’ve more time for thinking and for reading too in the evenings! The children bring the books to me from the Library.”
“Well, it’s verybraveof you to take it that way, I’m sure,” said Mattie with a decent sigh of sympathy.
He thought to himself with exasperation that Mattie’s mental indolence was invincible. She never made the slightest effort of her own accord to escape from the rubber-stamp formula in which she hadbeen brought up. By lively joshing you could occasionally jolt her into a spontaneous perception of her own, but the minute you stopped, back she sank and pulled the cover of the Ladies’ Guild mummy-case over her. And she was so human under it,—one of the most human people he had ever met. As he was thinking all this, by no means for the first time in his life, she caught out of the corner of her eye a glimpse of something in the kitchen over which she now exclaimed in amazement “What in the name oftimeis all that litter of papers on the kitchen floor?”
“All that litter?” he protested. “That’s not litter, that is an original exercise of the human intelligence in contact with real life. You encounter so few of those you don’t recognize one when you meet it. That is one of the patented inventions of the Knapp Family, Incorporated.”
She looked at him dumbly with the patient expression of bewilderment which always brought him to time. He began to explain, literally and explicitly, “We have executive sessions, the children and I, to figure out ways and means to cope with life and not get beaten by small details. We all got together on this floor proposition. We put it to ourselves this way: the kitchen floor has to be scrubbed to keep it clean. None of us are smart enough to scrub it. What’s the answer? Of courseEva must simply do nothing whatever about the house. The doctor issued an ultimatum aboutthat. She has all she can do at the store. Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but Stephen got the answer. He said, ‘When I paint with my water-colors, Mother always ’preads papers down on the floor.’
“Done! The attic was piled to the eaves with old newspapers. Every day Helen or Henry brings down a fresh supply. We spread them around two or three thick, drop our grease on them with all the peace of mind in the world, whisk them up at night before Eva comes in, and have a spotless floor to show her. What’s the matter with that?”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing in my life!” cried Mattie.
“People seemed to think,” reflected Lester, “that they make an all-sufficient comment when they say that.”
She got up now and walked to the kitchen door to gaze down on the paper.
“That’s a sample of the waywedo business,” said Lester to her back. He wheeled himself over to the table and took out of a work-basket a pair of Stephen’s little stockings which he prepared to darn.
Mattie turned, saw what he was doing and pounced on him with shocked, peremptory benevolence.“Oh,Lester, let me do that! The idea ofyourdarning stockings! It’s dreadful enough your having to do the housework!”
“Eva darned them a good many years,” he said, with some warmth, “and did the housework. Why shouldn’t I?” He looked at her hard and went on, “Do you know what you are saying to me, Mattie Farnham? You are telling me that you really think that home-making is a poor, mean, cheap job beneath the dignity of anybody who can do anything else.”
Mattie Farnham was for a moment helpless with shock over his attack. When she slowly rose to a comprehension of what he had said she shouted indignantly, “Lester Knapp, how dare you say such a thing! I neverdreamedof having such an awful idea.” She brought out a formula again, but this time with heartfelt personal conviction, “Home-making is the noblest work anybody can do!”
“Why pity me then?” asked Lester with a grin, drawing his needle in and out of the little stocking.
“Well, but....” she said breathlessly, and was silent.
There was a pause. Then she asked meekly, climbing down with relief from the abstruse and unfamiliar abstract to the friendly concrete, “However in the world did youlearnto darn, Lester?”
“Out of a book,” he told her tranquilly. “While Iwas still in bed I sent to the Library for any books they had on housekeeping. They sent me some corking ones—as good reading as ever I saw.”
“Why, I didn’t know they had books about housekeeping at the Library!” said Mattie, who was a great reader of novels.
“I bet I know more about cooking than you do, this minute,” he said, laughing at her. “Why do you put your flour for a cream sauce into the butter and cook it before you add the milk?”
“I don’t,” she said, astonished. “I heat my milk and mix my flour with a little cold water and....”
“Well, you’re wrong,” he said authoritatively. “That’s not the best way. The flour isn’t thoroughly cooked. Fat can be heated many degrees hotter than water.”
Mattie Farnham felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into a stupid bewilderment. Was it really Lester Knapp with whom she sat discussing recipes? She had come over to sympathize and condole with him. However in the living world had she been switched off to cream sauce? She got up, shook herself and took a step or two around the room.
“Don’t go looking to see if the furniture is dusted or the floor polished,” said Lester calmly. “We concentrate on the important things in our house and let the non-essentials go.”
“I wasn’t thinking aboutdust!” she told him,exasperated (although she had been). And then, struck by a sudden thought, “Where’s Stephen?”
“Out in his sandpile.”
“Why, I thought he ran away if he was left out of anybody’s sight for a minute. I thought you didn’t dare let him be by himself for....”
“Oh, Stevie’s all right,” said Lester carelessly; “he’s coming along like a house afire.”
He wheeled himself to the door, opened it and rolled his chair out on the porch. A blue-denimed little figure rose up from the other end and showed a tousled head, bright dark eyes and a round dirty face with a calm expression. “I got my tunnel fixed,” he announced.
“Did you?” asked Lester, with interest. “That can business did work?” To Mattie he explained, “Stephen is fixing up a railway system, and the sand kept falling in on his tunnel. We finally thought of taking the bottom out of an old baking-powder can. That leaves it open at both ends.”
“It works dandy,” said Stephen. He now added of his own accord, with a casual look at Mrs. Farnham, “Hello, Aunt Mattie.”
It was the first time Mrs. Farnham could remember that she had ever had a friendly greeting from Stephen. Eva’s conscientious attempts to make him perform the minimum of decent salutations, to come and shake hands and say “How do you do?”usually ended in a storm of raging stamping refusals.
“Hello, Stephen,” she answered, feeling quite touched by his friendly tone. He looked very quiet and good-natured, too. Well, of course, all children do grow out of their naughty ways if you can only live till then. She had always said that Stephen would outgrow his. But she had never believed it. It was a good idea to have a sandpile for him. Children always like them. Of course it brought sand into the house something terrible. Children never would wipe their feet. But now that any attempt at real housekeeping had been given up in poor Eva’s house, a little more or less dirt didn’t matter. She had as a matter of fact (although she had denied it) noticed that the corners of the room were very dusty. And those preposterous papers on the floor! What a ridiculous idea!
No more ridiculous than having the sandpile on the porch! Whoever heard of such a thing!
“I should think you’d find it hard to keep the porch clean,” she said to Lester.
“We don’t,” he said bafflingly.
“Why not have it out in the yard?”
“Some of the playthings would get spoiled by the rain.” He advanced this as conclusive.
Stephen had squatted down again to his sand. She went cautiously towards the wide plank to seewhat he was doing, prepared to have him snarl out one of his hateful catch-words: “Go ’way! Go ’way!” or the one he had acquired lately, the insolent, “Who’s doing this anyhow?”
But what she saw was so astonishing to her that before she could stop to think, she burst out in an impulsive exclamation of admiration, “Why, Stephen Knapp, did you do all that yourself?”
Beyond the board lay a tiny fairy-world of small, tree-lined, pebble-paved roads, moss-covered hills, small looking-glass lakes, white pasteboard farmhouses with green blinds, surrounded by neat white tooth-pick fences, broad meadows with red-and-white paper cows and a tiny farm wagon with minute, plumped-out sacks, driving to the railroad.
A large area of her own simple consciousness was still sunny with child-heartedness, and it was with the utmost sincerity of accent that she cried out, “Why, I’d love to play with that myself!”
Stephen looked proudly up at her and lovingly down at his creation. “You can if you want to.” He conceded the privilege with lordly generosity.
She got stiffly down on her middle-aged knees, to be nearer the little world, and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the “sweet little barn” and the “darling locomotive.” Why, she remembered now that she herself had given that toy train to Stephen. The last time she had noticed it was when, unsurprised,she had seen Stephen kicking it down the stairs. Lucky it was made of steel.
“It fits in just great,” said Stephen, also remembering who had given it. “I never had any way to play with it before. See, it carries the corn from this farm to the city. I’m going to start in on the city to-morrow, over there in that corner, as soon’s I get the track fixed. Mother is going to bring me some little houses from the ten-cent store. Mother brought me the little wagon and horses. She brings me something ’most every night. Those bags are filled with real corn-meal.”
“Oh, see the real grade-crossing with the little ‘Look out for the engine’ sign,” cried Mrs. Farnham rapturously.
They had both entirely forgotten Lester. He smiled to himself and wheeled his chair back into the house. Mattie was a fat old darling, that’s what she was.
He went on darning the little stocking and murmuring to himself,
“She wars not with the mysteryOf time and distance, night and day:The bonds of our humanity.Her joy is like an instinct joyOf kitten, bird, or summer fly.She dances, runs without an aim;She chatters in her ecstasy.”
“She wars not with the mysteryOf time and distance, night and day:The bonds of our humanity.Her joy is like an instinct joyOf kitten, bird, or summer fly.She dances, runs without an aim;She chatters in her ecstasy.”
“She wars not with the mystery
Of time and distance, night and day:
The bonds of our humanity.
Her joy is like an instinct joy
Of kitten, bird, or summer fly.
She dances, runs without an aim;
She chatters in her ecstasy.”
When Mattie came in, not dancing at all but walking rather rheumatically as though her knees creaked, she closed the door behind her and said in an impressive way, “Lester Knapp, that is a very smart thing for Stephen to do. I don’t believe you appreciate it. There’s not one five-year-old child in a hundred with the headpiece to do it.”
He answered with an impressive manner of his own, “Appreciate it! I’m the fellow who does appreciate it! Stephen Knapp is a very remarkable child, I’d have you to know, Mrs. Farnham. I bet you a nickel he will amount to more than anybody else in this whole town if he only gets the right chance.”
As she walked home, Mattie thought how funny it was to hear a man going on like a mother, standing up for the least promising of the children!
But all the same, perhaps therewasmore to Stephen than just his cussedness.
How cheerful Lester had seemed! It must be that his food had set better than usual to-day.