Little Miss By-The-Day Part 23

"Look Dulcie, it's not the way that she does it that matters--you and I brush as hard--but it's because it's Janet brushing--the broom acts as though it were Janet instead of just a broom--isn't it delightful?

I shall have to make my needle me--and you shall--"

They were silent. All had not been victory for poor Dulcie. There was the model stand and the tools and the "wet mud," but the part of Dulcie that had wanted to create seemed dead--it seemed to have died back there that day when she had tried to die in "Aunt Jen's" house.

Morning after morning when Felice went away she would encourage her.

She would a.s.sure her that when she came back at night she would hear Dulcie calling "It's begun." But alas, it never was--it was only by keeping madly, tempestuously busy at other things that Dulcie endured the nag of some of those April days. Sometimes she gave up entirely, flung herself prostrate on the sofa under the dormer windows and wept until she was no longer Dulcie, until she was merely a limp rag of a human who wouldn't even speak to Felice, who actually cursed when Janet tried to bring her soup.

But somehow or other the three of them squeezed and b.u.mped along, a precarious existence really, which would have been utterly impossible if it hadn't been for Janet. She it was, who held the purse strings.

She it was who cooked sad looking, unpalatable, but none the less nourishing, stews and broths. You should have seen Janet during one of those solemn conclaves with the young lawyer whom Justice Harlow had a.s.signed to the case. He was a frankly gloomy lawyer. He was sure they were wasting time and money and energy in their attempt to make the house habitable--he didn't believe it was possible, he didn't think that even another thirty days extension of time could be procured and as for the debts on the property, they looked to his impoverished purse like the combined national debts of all the Americas. He was a very young lawyer. He was sorry, he said he was sorry, protesting that he was doing everything on earth he could do to help "The Case." He always called the house "The Case."

Janet called him back one night after the two younger women had left.

She informed him bluntly that she didn't think he was anything much of a lawyer. He retorted hotly that he'd done everything any lawyer could do. Janet eyed him cannily.

"Where might ye be livin'? You're no married?"

He admitted his single blessedness; he named his address; he on further urging named his room rent. And Janet came back at him with a practical ferocity that was magnificent.

"If you're so keen on helping my little lady why are ye no livin' here and paying her rent?"

He murmured things about neighborhoods and slums and not being able to afford to live in such a hole and appearances and other futile excuses. But in the end he followed her meekly up the stairway and was shown the glories of Grandy's old room. It was a huge cavern of a room, a whale of a room, with a curtained alcove holding a stately bed, with wide windows overlooking the bay and a low squatty chair beside the fireplace. While he was looking Dulcie tripped down the stairs and winked solemnly at Janet. And she too a.s.sailed him. He hadn't an argument left when the two of them were through with him. He felt like a henpecked Mormon husband; he was red with wrath at the Sculptor Girl's cool bossiness; he loathed the very idea of living in the same house with such a person. Especially when she told him bluntly, that he'd have to go to Felice and beg to be taken in.

Felicia mustn't know that he'd been "influenced" she put it.

In the end he capitulated, clambering up to the nursery and tapping meekly on the door, stammering as he made his request.

But he'd his reward straight with--the reward of her wide, sincere smile.

"How stupid I was not to offer it to you! Of course you must have longed for it directly you saw it--oh, do you know I think you must have felt it was just the place for a lawyer! Shall I tell you something--" she was down the stairs, running like a girl to point out the wonders of the room. "You see Grandy's father was a Judge and he knew Louisa's uncle--It was Louisa's uncle who used to live in this house and both those men used to sit in this room and talk and talk and talk--Mademoiselle told me about it. You shall have Grandy's father's picture over the fireplace. We shall bring it up from the hall. It's a beautiful picture--you'll just admire him! And to think-- we haven't unpacked the books, Grandy's father's books--" she smiled over her shoulder at Dulcie as she always smiled when she quoted that slangy young person, "That will be Some Law!"

All the same he was young enough so that he apologized profusely to his friends for having such a disreputable lodging,

"Yep, I know it's a rookery and a rotten neighborhood, but I have reasons--" he said it darkly as though he were plotting. He didn't yet know that a very powerful reason was Dulcie. He was so busy hating her, thinking up things to say back when she let her saucy, slangy phrases loose at him that he didn't know how easily he was learning to love the solemn heavy furniture that surrounded him, the bit of fire in the grate on chilly evenings, and Dulcie herself, poking her head in the door crying,

"How is the majesty of the law? Would it mind lifting a ladder for a poor woiking goil?"

The day he knew that the house was home was the languorous spring day when he stopped to stare at a bowl of strawberries in the niche outside his door. Their purchase had driven Janet almost to drink. She plainly told Felice they'd all end in the poorhouse. But Felice hadn't minded, she had inscribed a card, on which in her spidery slanting scrawl was written,

"NOTICE TO LAWYERS AND SCULPTORS: HAVE SOME ON ME."

"By gad!" he breathed, grinning, "she's coming on!"

He didn't protest at Dulcie's demurely calling him "The Rumor," not even when she added, "Because as a lawyer, you're a false alarm."

He took his humble part in the gigantic house-cleaning. He opportunely called to mind a chance acquaintance in the Street Cleaning department, whereupon an ancient white wings was stationed in the block.

Of course the White Wings couldn't remove the dingy lace curtains and the grimy lodgings signs from the disconsolate six houses across the way; but he could and did do wonders to gutters and sidewalks. The hordes that had inhabited the great house had really made most of the noise, the "across the street" houses were fairly quiet.

Spring did a lot. She draped new ivy over the dilapidated church and rectory; she let the gray-green leaves of the wistaria flutter gaily over the cornices; she touched with magic the old denuded stumps of the trees of heaven and the back yard became a shaded retreat.

Sometimes at twilight when Felice came home, it seemed to her that the long ago look of the street was creeping slowly back--perhaps, of course, it was just that she was growing used to it or else it was the tender light through the old willows that made the spirit of things strangely young again.

She always came home bubbling with adventure now. Dulcie would sit shamelessly smoking a cigarette filched from the lawyer and listen by the hour while little Miss By-the-Day imitated her employers and their maid servants and their man servants and the strangers within their gates. The two women would sit in the back yard on the old iron benches, which Janet had found in the depths of the coal bin. The lawyer would walk grandly about, and chuckle and chuckle while Felicia pretended she was a very fat customer who was always going to begin dieting after "Mrs. Poomsonby's bridge luncheon." And when Janet was gone for her bit of walk--the dear soul liked to gossip with her old neighbors four blocks over--Dulcie and the lawyer would laugh until tears blinded them at Felicia pretending she was Janet. Oh, but she was inimitable at that!

Janet arguing with the fish man, Janet experimenting with the telephone the lawyer had put in the hall, Janet simultaneously polishing a window and singing.

"Ouch--" Felicia would pull imaginary rheumatism through an imaginary cas.e.m.e.nt, "Oh weel--oh weel--to look at the du-urt! it's sickenin'!

weel--

You tak the high road And I'll tak the low road And I'll be in Scotland before ye, Oh, I and my true luv shall never be--

oot of the way below there--summat is drapping--Th' De'il tak my bit of soapie!--

'On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.'"

The folk who lived in the rear alley used to lean, sill-warming fashion on their windows, the children shrilly whistling the chorus, the men forgetting their pipes, the women sniffling as women do when they hear old ballads, for of course once Felice had started "pretending" she didn't stop. A moment after she'd been Janet she'd be Marthy, dear, lean, grizzled old Marthy, dead these many years, singing,

"In the gloaming Oh, my darling, Think not bitterly of me--"

It never occurred to any of them, least of all Felice, how many, many hours she spent "pretending." Two evenings a week at chess with Uncle Peter--(thank heaven Dudley Hamilt came no more--!) Sunday afternoons with the Wheezy's gentle old fellow sufferers, almost all the other evenings in the garden. She was using ounce after ounce of her precious strength, pouring out her self to the whole world around her, making it laugh, making it weep, making it thrill, making it--work.

She stopped one morning to see Justice Harlow. He stared at her as though it were the first time he had ever seen her. She no longer wore eccentric garb. Dulcie had divided with her. She had a simple hat and a serge frock. She was shabby, to be sure, but it was no longer a ridiculous shabbiness. She was pale and wan, even paler than when she had first come to him but the timidity, the uncertainty, had gone. Her eyes were deeper. They shone like jewels; the softened outlines of her profile were thinner, clearer; her beautiful mouth had grown firm and a bit of gray showed in her hair. She was altogether adorable, like a wee wren after a stormy day. The stilted phrases were slipping away.

She spoke more alertly. Bits of Dulcie's lingo were creeping into her speech. But she still answered with a literalness that took one's breath away.

"Now whadda ye know about that?" asked the Justice all unconscious that he was colloquial.

"I do not know anything about it," she said demurely, and added with one of her casual references to the ill.u.s.trious dead--she treated them all as though they were contemporary--"I think Heloise might know what to do. One of the things Abelard loved about her was that she always knew what to do--she was vairee good at administrating, like Janet, don't you think?"

All the while she was filling her house--with gentle paupers! Think you how Janet raged the day she brought home the most useless citizen of all--the Poetry Girl.

Felice had been sewing for two or three days for a dentist's wife, a rather amusing job for she was stationed in an upstairs window that let one look down two streets, and at the other window in the room the dentist's white haired mother sat and gossiped softly about all the persons who came.

It was the dentist's mother who saw the Poetry Girl first, a thin figure who walked uncertainly up and down the street, eyeing doctors'

signs. It was a regular streetful of doctors.

"There's a poor thing that's lost her address," crooned Mrs. Miller, "she does look sick. It's a tooth, too, see how she holds her hand to her face, you can almost see the pain."

Felice saw, that is she thought she saw. Of course no one could really see such an ENORMOUS pain as the one that was sweeping the Poetry Girl along. It was too big to see.

It was something like this. Orange red, pale blue, E flat minor, acrobatic, Ariel-like in its changes. Sometimes it made her careen heavily toward the curb--that was the time it made her head seem big and her feet very far away. Sometimes she could walk but she wanted to scream, sometimes she felt like a volcano, a Vesuvius of shooting pains, sometimes it hammered at her ears and she couldn't hear at all.

But one thing she remembered all the time, that she had exactly twenty-seven cents in her purse.

She was planning whether she'd better dash up to a door and act as though she had an appointment and give a false address for the bill to be sent or whether she'd better announce she hadn't any way to pay the dentist and would he take his pay in poetry, or whether she'd just shriek, "Stop it!"

In the end her body decided for her. It just flopped down outside the house where Felicia and Mrs. Miller were watching.

The Poetry Girl was normally very sweet tempered but she wasn't at all her usual self when she opened her eyes. She was in an operating chair and she looked accusingly at the man beside her.

"You shouldn't sprinkle me," she murmured reproachfully, "I'm wet enough as it is and I've no rubbers;--" the faint blue shadows under her eyes accused them all. Her thin hand tried to pat her rumpled hair, "I do believe you've lost another hairpin for me--I'd only three--" she was petulant, "And if you do pull it I can't pay you--"

she was defiant. "Not unless you need some poetry written.

"Or a play. I can write a play. But I can't sell knit underwear or I can't do general housework--I'm only--a toothache--Bobby Burns wrote me--maybe you've read me--"