Chapter 3
“DON’T you want to sit by the window here, Mrs. Farnham?” suggested Mrs. Prouty, the rector’s wife. “The light’ll be better for your sewing. That dark material is hard on the eyes.”
All the Ladies’ Guild understood that Mrs. Farnham was being posted there to give the alarm when Mrs. Knapp turned into the walk leading to the Parish House, and they went on talking with an agreeable sense of security.
“It’s pretty hard on those Willing’s Emporium people, I say,” Mrs. Prouty remarked, “after years of faithful service, to have everything turned topsy-turvy over their heads by a young whippersnapper. They say he’s going to change the store all around too; put the Ladies’ Cloak Department upstairs where the shoes always were; and he’s taken that top floor that old Mr. Willing rented to the Knights of Pythias and is going to add some new departments. A body won’t know where to find a thing! In my opinion he’ll live to regret it.”
They all reflected silently that if the young Mr. Willing had only been an Episcopalian like his defunct uncle, instead of a Presbyterian, Mrs. Proutymight not have taken the change of the Ladies’ Cloak Department quite so hard.
“Poor Mrs. Knapp feels simply terrible about her husband’s not being promoted,” said Mrs. Merritt, the doctor’s wife. “I saw her yesterday at Wertheimer’s for an instant. Not that she said anything. She wouldn’t, you know, not if she died for it. But you could feel it. All over her. And no wonder!”
“Poor thing!” (Mrs. Prouty had acquired the full, solicitous intonation of the parish visitor.) “She has many burdens to bear. Mr. Prouty often says that in these days it is wonderful to see a woman so devoted to her duty as a home-maker. She simply gives up her whole life to her family! Absolutely!”
“The children are such delicate little things, too, a constant care.” Mrs. Merritt snatched the opportunity to display her inside information. “There’s hardly a week that Doctor isn’t called in there for one or another of them. He often tells me thathedoesn’t know what to do for them. They don’t seem to have anything to dowith! No digestions, no constitutions. Just like their father. All but little Stephen. He’sstrongenough!”
“He’s a perfect imp of darkness!” cried old Mrs. Anderson, lifting her thin gray face from her sewing. “I’ve raised a lot of children in my day andseen a lot more, but I never saw such a naughty contrary child as he is in all my born days. Nor so hateful! He never does anything unless it’s to plague somebody by it. The other day, in the last thaw it was, I’d just got my back porch mopped up after the grocer’s boy—you know how he tracks mud in—and I heard somebody fussing around out there, and I opened the door quick, and there was Stephen Knapp lugging over a great pail of mud to dump it on my porch. He’d dumped one already and got it all spread out on the boards. I said, ‘Why, Stephen Knapp, what makes you do such a bad thing?’ I was really paralyzed to see him at it. ‘Whatmakesyou be so bad, Stephen?’ I said. And he said—he’s got the hardest, coolest way of saying those wicked things—he said, as cool as you please, ‘’Tause I hate you, Mis’ Anderson, ’tause I hate you.’ And gave me that black look of his....”
Through the tepid, stagnant air of the room flickered a sulphurous zig-zag of passion. The women shrank back from it, horrified and fascinated.
“Mr. Prouty says,” quoted his wife, “that Stephen Knapp makes him think of the old Bible stories about people possessed of the devil. His mother is at her wit’s end. Mr. Prouty says she has asked him to help her with prayer. And Stephen gets worse all the time. And yet she’s always perfectlyfirm with him, never spoils him. And it’s wonderful, her iron self-control when he is in one of his tempers. I never could keepmytemper like that. It can’t be due to anything about the way she manages him, for she never had a particle of trouble with the other two. Well, it’ll be a great relief to her, as she often says, when he goes to school with the others.”
Mrs. Merritt now said, lowering her voice, “You know she has a chronic skin trouble too that she never says anything about.”
“Like St. Paul, Mr. Prouty says.”
“Doctor has tried everything to cure it. Diet. Electricity. X-rays. All the salves in the drugstores. Oh, no,” she explained hastily in answer to an unspoken thought somewhere in the room. “Oh,no, it’s nothinghorrid! Her husband is aniceenough man, as far as that goes. Doctor thinks it may be nervous, may be due to....”
“Nervous!” cried Mrs. Mattie Farnham. “Why, it’s a real eruption, discharging pus and everything. I had to help her dress a place on her back once when Stephen was a tiny baby. Nervous!”
“Oh, Doctor doesn’t mean it is anything she could help. He often says that just because you’ve called a thing nervous is no reason for thinking it’s not serious. It’s as real tothem, he says, as a broken leg.”
“Well, I’d have something worse than eczema if I had three delicate children to bring up and only that broken reed of a Lester Knapp to lean on,” said Mrs. Prouty with energy. “They tell me that he all but lost his job in the shake-up at Willing’s—let alone not getting advanced. Young Mrs. Willing told Mr. Prouty that her husband told her that he’d be blessed if he knew anything Lester Knappwouldbe good for—unless teaching poetry, maybe. Young Mrs. Willing is a Churchwoman, you know. It’s only her husband who is a Presbyterian. That’s how she happened to be talking to Mr. Prouty. She was telling him that if it depended onherwhich church....”
“He’s aniceman, Lester Knapp is,” broke in Mrs. Farnham stoutly. “You know we’re sort of related. His sister married my husband’s brother. The children call me Aunt. When you come to know Lester he’s a real nice man. And he’s a smart man too, in his way. When he was at the State University he was considered one of the best students there, I’ve always heard ’em say. If he hadn’t married so young, he was lotting on being....” Her tone changed suddenly—“Oh, Mrs. Merritt, do you think I ought to hem this or face it?”
“It’d be pretty bungling to hem, wouldn’t it?” Mrs. Merritt responded on the same note, “such heavy material—to turninthe hem, anyhow.Maybe you could feather-stitch it down—oh, how do youdo, Mrs. Knapp? So glad to see you out. But then you’re one of the faithful ones, as Mr. Prouty always says.”
They all looked up from their work, smiling earnestly at her, drawing their needles in and out rapidly, and Evangeline Knapp knew from the expression of their eyes that they had been talking of her, of Lester’s failure to make good; that they had been pitying her from their superior position of women whose husbands were good providers.
She resented their pity—and yet it was a comfort to her. She loved coming to these weekly meetings of the Guild, the only outings of her life, and always went home refreshed and strengthened by her contact with people who looked at things as she did. She passed her life in solitary confinement, as home-makers always do, with a man who naturally looked at things from a man’s standpoint (and in her case from a very queer standpoint of his own) and with children who could not in the nature of things share a single interest of hers; it was an inexpressible relief to her to have these weekly glimpses of human beings who talked of things she liked, who had her standards and desires.
Shelikedwomen, anyhow, and had the deepest sympathy for their struggle to arrange in a decent pattern the crude masculine and crude childish rawmaterial of their home-lives. She liked too the respect of these women for her, the way they all asked her advice, and saved up perplexities for her to solve. To-day, for instance, she had scarcely taken out her thimble when Mrs. Prouty passed over a sample of blue material to ask whether it was really linen as claimed—when anybody with an eye in her head could see that it was not even a very good imitation. After that, Mrs. Merritt said she had noticed that Paisley effects were coming in. Would it be possible to drape one of those old shawls—she had a lovely one from her grandmother—to make a cloak—to simulate the wide-sleeved effect—without cutting it, you know—of course you wouldn’t want tocutit!
Mrs. Knapp said she would think it over, and as she rapidly basted the collar on the child’s dress she was making, she concentrated her inner vision on the problem. She saw it as though it were there—the great square of richly patterned fabric. She draped it in imagination this way and that. No, that would be too bungling at the neck—perhaps drawn up in the middle....
They felt her absorption and preserved a respectful silence, sewing and glancing up occasionally at her inward-looking face to see how she was progressing. Their own minds were quite relaxed and vacant. Mrs. Knapp had taken up the problem.What need for any one else to think of it? They had such confidence in Mrs. Knapp.
Presently, “I believe you could do it this way, Mrs. Merritt,” she said. “Mrs. Anderson, hand me that piece of sateen, will you, please. See, this is your shawl. You make a fold in the middle, so, half-way up—and catch it between with a....” They laid down their work to give their whole attention to her explanation, their eyes following her fingers, their minds accepting her conclusions without question.
She felt very happy, very warm, very kind. She loved being able to help Mrs. Merritt out this way. Dr. Merritt was such a splendid doctor and so good always to Henry and Helen. And she loved helping somebody to make use of something, to rescue something fine, as she had rescued the sofa. It would be a beautiful, beautiful cloak, especially with Mrs. Merritt’s mink neckpiece made over into a collar, a detail that came into her mind like an inspiration as she talked.
Yes, she was very happy the afternoons when the Guild met.
Mr. Prouty usually brought his rosy-gilled face and round collar into the Guild Room before the group broke up and chatted with the ladies over the cup of tea which ended their meetings. He hadsomething on his mind to-day—that was evident to every one of those married women the instant he stepped into the room. But he did not bring it out at once, making pleasant conversation with the preoccupied dexterity of an elderly clergyman. As he talked, he looked often at Mrs. Knapp’s dark intense face, bent over her work. She never stopped for tea. And when he said in his well-known, colloquial, facetious way, “Ladies, I’ve got a big job for you. Take a brace. I’m going to shoot!” it was towards Mrs. Knapp that he spoke.
He tried to address himself to them all equally as he made his appeal, but unconsciously he turned almost constantly to the keen attentive eyes which never left his for an instant as he talked. He spoke earnestly, partly because he feared lest the Presbyterians might steal a march on him, and partly because of a very real sympathy with the wretched children whose needs he was describing. When he finished, they all waited for Mrs. Knapp to speak.
She said firmly, “There’s just one thing to do. A good visiting nurse attached to our parish work is the only way we could get anywhere. Anything else—baskets of food, volunteer visiting—they never amount to a row of pins.”
The feeble, amateur, fumbling plans which they were beginning to formulate fell to earth. But they were aghast at her.
“Anurse! How ever could we get the money to pay one?”
“Only big-city parishes can hope to....”
“We could if wetried!” she said, quelling them by her accent. She looked around at them with burning eyes. She was like a falcon in a barnyard. “A visiting nurse would cost—let us say a thousand a year.”
“Oh, more than that!” cried Mr. Prouty.
“Not if we supplied her with lodging and heat. Why couldn’t we arrange the little storeroom at the head of the stairs here in the Parish House for a bedroom for her? We could....”
“How could you heat it? There’s no radiator there.”
“There’s a steam-riser goes through that room. I noticed it when we were putting the folding chairs away last week. That would make it warm enough. We could furnish it by contributions, without its costing a cent in cash. Everybody has at least one piece of furniture she could spare from her house—in such a cause. About the pay, now. We have more than four hundred dollars in the Ladies’ Guild Treasury, and next Christmas our Bazaar ought to bring in two hundred more; it always does. We could hire Hunt’s Hall on Union Street for it, and have the bazaar bigger, and make more than two hundred easily. Then, there’s Miss Jelliffe, themusic supervisor in the public schools, you know. Now that she’s joined St. Peter’s, I’m very sure she would help us get up some concerts later on. We could give ‘Songs of All Countries’ in costume, with the children. When you have lots of children in a program, you can always sell tickets. Their folks want to see them. And we could get a certain amount from the poor families the nurse visits—perhaps enough to make up the rest of her salary. They’d appreciate the service more if they paid something for it. Folks do.”
All this had poured from her effortlessly, as if she had been simply pointing out what lay there to see, not as though she were beating her brains to invent it.
They gaped at her breathlessly.
“I wish you would be chairman of the Committee,” said Mr. Prouty deferentially, “and take charge of the campaign for funds.”
Her face which had been for an instant clear and open, clouded and shut. “I’dloveto!” she said passionately. “I see it all!” She began to roll her sewing together as though to give herself time to be able to speak more calmly. “But I mustn’t think of it,” she said at last. “I have too much to do at home. It’s all I can manage to get to church and to Guild meeting once a week. I never leave the house for anything else except to go to market. Ican take Stephen with me there. Of course, after he starts going to school....”
Yes, they all knew what a relief it was when the children started going to school, and you could keep the house in some kind of order, and have a little peace.
Their silent, sympathetic understanding brought out from her now something she had not meant to say, something which had been like a lump of lead on her heart, the dread that her only open door, would soon close upon her. “Even for Guild-meetings,” she said, speaking grimly to keep her lips from trembling, “I may have to give them up, too. Mr. Knapp has always been able to make an arrangement to get away from the store an hour and a half earlier on Thursdays to stay with Stephen and the other two after school. But I don’t know whether he will be able to manage that now. Mr. Willing, I mean old Mr. Willing saw no objection. But now....”
Her voice was harsh and dry; but they all knew why. And she was quite aware of the silent glosses and commentaries she knew them to be supplying mentally. She pinned her roll of sewing together firmly. Nobody could put in a pin with her gesture of mastery. “My first duty is to my home and children,” she said.
“Oh, yes, oh, yes, we all know that, of course.”Mr. Prouty gave to the aphorism a lip-service which scantily covered his bitter objection to it in this case.
“Our circumstances don’t permit us to hire help,” she added, making this resolutely a statement of fact and not a complaint. “I do the washings, you know.”
“I know. Wonderful! Wonderful!” said Mr. Prouty irritably.
“She sets an example to us all, I always tell ’em,” said Mrs. Farnham.
“Yes, indeed youdo, Mrs. Knapp!” they all agreed fervently. Evangeline knew that this was their way of trying to make up to her for having a poor stick of a husband. She savored their compassion with a bitter-sweet mixture of humiliation over her need for it and of triumph that she had drawn this sympathy from them under the appearance of repelling it. “Nobody ever heardmecomplain!” she was saying to herself.
“Well, I’ll do what I can,” she said, standing up to go. “I’ll think of things. I’ve just thought of another. If we can provide the nurse with dinner every day, that ought to cut down on cash expenses. There are twenty-four members of the Guild. That’d hardly mean more than one dinner a month for each of us. And it would cut off fifteen dollars a month from the money we’d have to provide. And in that way we could keep in closer touch with her.Seeing her every day and hearing about her work, we’d be more apt to coöperate with her right along.”
“Splendid! Simply splendid!” cried Mr. Prouty. “We will be the only parish of our size in the State to have a visiting nurse of our own.” He saw himself at the next diocesan meeting the center of a group of envious clergymen, expounding to them the ingenious devices by which this remarkable result had been achieved. He had had a good deal of this sort of gratification since the Knapps had moved into his parish.