Little Miss By-The-Day Part 19

They fluttered after her as she walked down the corridor, the Matron walked beside her and the Wheezy's arm was through hers. Of course she was coming again, she promised them she would, they accepted her promises with eager queries like children.

"I'll come another visiting day--" she patted the Wheezy's shoulders, "I like to! You all are _so_ good at pretending!"

"Do you know," she told Judge Harlow in the morning, "I did find some one who knows who I am?" Her face was glowing with achievement,

"Even if you get so old that you don't look at all as you used to there's some part of you that people can't forget. Some Happy Part of you! You really ought to try it! Perhaps there is some old lady up there who used to know you when you were little! If you'd go there some visiting day and whistle for her she'd know you, just as quick!

You try it!"

She went away thrilling with antic.i.p.ation. He had a young lawyer there, who had a great many papers. The young lawyer explained to her that the Justice had asked him to keep track of things for her. And they were arranging it so that in another week, she would possess her house, mortgages, taxes, fines and all, and the thirty days "to straighten things" but she would actually possess it and the tailor and the tailor's missus and all their dreadful tenants would have to go out, bag and baggage.

She trotted into The Woman's Exchange at noon, positively buoyant.

"You'll have to find me another by-the-day," she announced to Miss Sarah.

"How'd you make out Sat.u.r.day?"

"I--made--_out_--" Felicia laughed back at her. "She was a WEED, that woman. The old man played chess with me but she didn't like us to do it.

I couldn't take the two dollars--"

"I'm afraid you aren't businesslike," Miss Sarah chided, "you said you needed the money."

"I do," Felicia a.s.sured her, "that's why I'm back for another by-the- day."

Miss Sarah found another job for her, indeed she jotted down several possible places in a small notebook whose florid cover extolled the virtues of d.i.n.kle's Cough Syrup.

"This would be a good book for anybody so unbusinesslike as you," she confided as she presented her client with it. "In the back here are pages to write what you earn and what you spend and to keep track of the days you are going out."

It fitted nicely into the reticule. Felicia felt competent with it there. She used to take it out at night and write in it. It had double entry pages labelled grandly "INCOME" "EXPENDITURES." With the first pages Felicia wrote a letter to Margot, a masterly letter in which she bade her servant tell Zeb that the filthy dirty heathen were going to be sent away, a letter in which she warned Margot that unless Grandy were too unhappy she would not go back to the House in the Woods until the house in the city was clean once more. She explained that certain legal matters had to be attended to. The round stroke of her pen seemed to proclaim her complete confidence that they could be attended to satisfactorily. But the postscript begged Margot to tell Bele to stay all he could with Grandy, "If Grandy looks at the chess board tell Bele to put the men on it and shove a man every time Grandy pushes one--you must all keep Grandy happy." And the last postscript of all said, "The narcissi are lovely, I have them in my room!"

Which was quite truthful. She did have narcissi in her room! Their fragrance almost overpowered her. She lay in the darkness and pretended that they were in the garden and that she was lying on them.

She had been most businesslike about them. If you could have audited her accounts in d.i.n.kle's Cough Syrup you would have seen on the page where she first began her reckoning,

"INCOME EXPENDITURES Two dollars Bone--five cents Apples, cakes and sandwiches forty five cents Narcissi One dollar."

It is delightful to relate that no one ever in all this world purchased more narcissi for one dollar than Felicia bought at the florist's stand that wonderful evening when she made her first expenditure from money she had actually earned. She looked so tired and wan in her frumpy old clothes that the florist's clerk, who was a sentimental young thing, a.s.sumed she must be purchasing them for some one's grave. Even though he might be foredoomed to lose his job, he recklessly tied up the whole bundle that her hand had indicated.

"Honest, she made me feel like I oughta be giving things away instead of selling 'em," he apologized to his astounded boss, who had met the new customer on her way out, "Honest, she got me hipped!"

In spite of the "heathen," in spite of taxes and fines--in spite of the fatigue that still remained from those days of travel and hunger, in spite of the strangeness of sitting all day st.i.tching, in spite of even the fierce longing, whenever she pa.s.sed a telephone, to speak with Dudley Hamilt, Felicia found herself--happy, happy with the same haunting happiness with which she had long ago untangled the puzzle of the lost garden, happy with the aching happiness that longs to attain and trembles lest it cannot.

"Babiche," she chattered, "When I was young, like the girls in Piqueur's song I found my fun in spring forests; but now--" she was looking out across the river at the gleaming towers of Manhattan, glimpsing the jewel-like line of trolleys crawling slowly over the lighted bridges, watching the busy shipping that scurried over the harbor in the violet and bronze evening, "Now I find it in spring cities--"

She consulted the garden book much, peering bravely down into the appalling rubbish heaps of her beloved back yard.

"All of the ivy isn't gone and there's wistaria and we can make new ivies from slips, next spring it must be just as it used to be.

Perhaps we can find the old benches, I know exactly where to build the paths. We will have to get some pebbles to make the paths. We must plant plenty of narcissi again, Babiche. Because some day, there might be some other girl who lived in this house and who walked in the garden and when Her Night came we would want it to be just as lovely as it was That Night--"

She had no definite girl in mind, she had not really, although she thought she had found the "pattern" of what the house was to be, she only longed to get the "filthy dirty heathen" out and make things orderly as they once had been. I doubt if she had yet visualized anybody as living in that house, save Maman and Grandy and herself.

Yet even before the heathen were out she had brought home a girl--the Sculptor Girl, the first of those starry-eyed young humans who were to call the house their own.

It happened this way. She set forth on a cloudy, threatening over-warm morning, Babiche under her arm, toward a new address, a morning so palpably "growing" that she longed to be planting. She had promised herself eagerly that the very day when the heathen were gone she would plant some ivies. She was pretending vehemently that the heathen were gone and that she didn't have to be a "by-the-day" yet before night she was exclaiming pa.s.sionately, "I am proud, proud, proud I was a by- the-day--"

The new place was not a hard one. A fat, seemingly good natured employer awaited her, a boarding house mistress who had curtains to be mended and napkins to be hemmed, who was dubious about taking the applicant when she discovered she could not use a sewing machine but who decided on second reflection (aided by the fact that she had just discovered that her sewing machine was not in repair) to allow Felicia her day's work.

The vestibule doors were embellished with gilt lettering that proclaimed the place to be

"Seeley's"

Mrs. Seeley did not object to Babiche. Indeed she kissed the top of her nose so resoundingly that Babiche was terrified and Felicia stared with amazement. It had never occurred to her that any one ever kissed a dog. If Felicia had been left comfortably to her own devices at her previous "places" she quickly discovered that the Seeley household made rather an event of the seamstress' coming. There was no necessity for stealing a lunch. Indeed, when lunchtime arrived she was ushered into the bas.e.m.e.nt dining-room and invited to eat with the rest of the family and as many of the "select boarders" as appeared. It was not a good luncheon. But to Felicia it was an extraordinarily gay function.

For at the table was Mr. Perry, immaculately groomed in a discreet uniform. Mrs. Seeley introduced them with a matter-of-fact statement of their occupations.

"Miss Day, meet Mrs. J. Furthrington's chauffeur--Miss Day is sewing for me--" she poured their teas impartially. It appeared that Mrs. J.

Furthrington's chauffeur did not often grace the boarding house for his meals. He usually, as he expressed it "ate wherever the run was."

He talked with whimsical despondency of his job which, it appeared, was new.

"Good gracious," chaffed Mrs. Seeley, "I thought you'd felt grand from a.s.sociating with swells and changing your rooms--"

"Well I feel swell," he admitted dubiously, "but in a way the job gets my goat. Munition millionaires, that's what I'm working for, can you beat it? Last year in a Canarsie bungalow and this year a-riding in a Rolls Royce! Everybody to his taste--mine wouldn't be for n.o.body else driving my car no matter how much spondulex come my way. It will be me for the little old low down 'steen cylinder racer when I get my pile--"

he slid his long body under the table and grasped his plate as a steering wheel, "'Poor, get out of muh way!' my horn will yell--"

His fellow boarders laughed uproariously, his landlady wiped tears from her eyes.

"Hain't he comical?" she appealed to her sewing woman.

Felicia viewed the redoubtable Mr. Perry with amused eyes.

"He's vairee good at pretending--" her shy approbation came. He winked at her.

"Any time you want a joy-ride, call on me!"

Which fresh sally seemed to explode uncontrollable mirth about the bas.e.m.e.nt dining-room. Flapping his wonderful gauntlets together he called a farewell from the doorway.

"Only get a different bunnet--" he waved Louisa's from the peg on the hall rack, Felicia didn't mind in the least, she was mouthing this new phrase "Joy-ride," it sounded delightful. All the same she rescued her bonnet and carried it upstairs with her. "I love that boy like a plate of fudge," confided Mrs. Seeley as she and Felicia were ascending to the ornate bedroom where the sewing was waiting. "He's the life of the place. Everybody likes him. I don't know what there is about him, he hain't so handsome but he certainly is poplar. Yet Dulcie won't stand for him--Dulcie thinks he's fresh."

It appeared that Dulcie was not pleased with anything or anybody.

Especially when she was having one of her "spells." Mrs. Seeley rocked violently as she recounted to her new seamstress her trials with Dulcie.

"She's a caution. In a way I do owe her a livin'. She's my husband's niece I know, that is by his first wife y'understand. She wasn't even exactly his niece. But on account of his havin' to use Dulcie's money in his plumbin' business we agreed to give her her livin'. Al kept her in a nart school, a swell art school when we was first married. That was a mistake. I said to him many a time to mark-my-words, it would be a mistake. Of course when he died I didn't feel it was up to me to keep her in a nart school. So I took her right into the family, same's I'd take you or anybody. But it's no use. All she does is mope. Even Mr. Perry can't cheer her up, though he tries.

"Says he to her only last night, 'Cheer up, I'll take you a nice ride down to the morgue.' I thought everybody'd die laughing to hear him but she just got up and stalked out of the dining-room like somebody had insulted her. And I can't get a peep out of her today. Just this noon I says to her, pleasant enough, because I was short of help, wouldn't she come down and wait on table, but would she?" demanded Mrs. Seeley bitterly, "She would not. She said she was no scullery maid and slammed the door in my face and went back to her wet mud--"

"Oh, is she building a garden?" asked Felice eagerly.

"Nothing so useful as a garden," snorted Mrs. Seeley, "it's clay she's fussin' with, thinkin' she's going to be able to make statues some day. Statues! What kind of a job is that nowadays! Artist jobs is impractical. Dulcie is awful impractical. I offered to send her to business college, she could make a good living, but no, she's gotta make statues! With the parks all full of 'em now and that kind of thing going out of style for parlors! I put both my Rogers groups upstairs in the attic when I bought the phonograph--there's no style to a statue any more. And she wants to learn to make 'em!"

"But I should think," breathed the seamstress her eyes glowing as she lifted them from her work, "that you'd be proud to have her want to try to make something."

What Mrs. Seeley thought expressed itself in the bang of the door as she left to answer a strident summons below stairs. But after she had gone Felice became aware of continued sobbing in the next room, a sobbing as penetrating, for all it was not so loud, as that of the noisy Italian baby at home.