Otherwise Phyllis Part 7

Her father relaxed the severity of his countenance to commend them. But he did not like Phil in this new role. The casting forth of the cook provided by the aunts would be regarded as an offense not lightly to be pa.s.sed by those ladies; but Phil had never appeared so wholly self-possessed. She poured coffee for herself, diluted it with hot water, b.u.t.tered a slice of toast with composure, tasted it and complained that the grocer had sent rancid b.u.t.ter.

Kirkwood pushed aside his Bagehot. He did not know just how to deal with a daughter who, without the slightest warning, dispatched her cook and took upon herself the burden of the household. The coffee was to his liking; it was indubitably better than he had been used to; but the thing would not do. He must show Phil the error of her ways and lose no time about it.

"I'm sorry you didn't like the girl they sent you; but you must find another. There's no reason, of course, why you shouldn't choose for yourself; but it's not easy to find help in a town like this. I can't have you doing the housework. That must be understood, Phil."

"You're not having me; I'm having me, which is a very different thing.

If you had driven me into the kitchen with loud, furious words, I should have rebelled--screamed, and made a terrible scene. But you did nothing of the kind. It happened in this wise. Glancing up quite by chance, as it were, you beheld me pouring coffee of my own brewing. Fatherly pride extinguished any feeling of shock or chagrin. You have smothered any cla.s.s feeling that may linger in your aristocratic soul and are making a good bluff at enjoying the eating of your breakfast with the lady who cooked it. Could anything be more beautiful? The ayes seem to have it; the ayes have it, as I used to be fond of saying when I was boss of the Philomathean. I wish now I'd taken the domestic science course more seriously and spent less time in the gymnasium. But thus it is we live and learn."

Phil's tone made rebuke difficult. He loved her foolishness just as her Uncle Amzi did--just as every one did except her aunts, for whom the affected stiltedness of her speech was merely a part of her general deplorable unconventionality.

"Well, Phil, the idea of your cooking the meals for this establishment isn't debatable. You're overruled and the debate closed."

"Still harping on my daughter's cooking! Please, in current idiom, cut it out. Try marmalade on that too, too perfect toast."

He accepted marmalade and returned to the attack.

"You see, Phil, everything's different now. You've got to wake up to your social responsibilities."

"And be a perfect lady? I know. Amy got me into the back room of the bank yesterday and told me. One's aunts had bullied the old dear into springing the sad intelligence. Then Nan had already given me a session.

And now you, too, Brutus, are about to lay the matter before me in a few crisp sentences. But why all this a.s.sumption that I'm not a real lady?

There's a good deal of loose thinking on that subject, to use one of your own best phrases. If there is nothing more before the house--"

Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit into it before looking at her father.

"You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world--the world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society.

It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to a.s.sume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well that if it were necessary you would be equal to it--you are equal to anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such things."

"Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not very much, anyhow."

She had broached the matter as delicately as possible. It had been in her mind that she must speak to her father about their affairs, but she had not thought the opportunity would offer so quickly. It was hard to say to him that she had undertaken to manage the housekeeping as an economical measure; that she knew he owed money that he had no immediate prospect of paying.

The hurt look that she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking.

When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they had established in her a belief that her mother was a bad woman: the facts spoke for themselves. And having had a bad mother it was inc.u.mbent upon Phil to choose her path with a particular care and to walk in it circ.u.mspectly.

Phil had, by this time, considered the case from the changing viewpoints natural to the young mind. In that rosy light through which a girl of fifteen is apt to view life,--the first realizations of s.e.x, the age of the first novels,--Phil had not been free from the contemplation of her mother as a romantic figure. For a woman to forsake a husband for a lover was not without precedents. Phil had dreamed over this a good deal, in an impersonal sort of way, and the unknown mother had been glorified in scenes of renunciation, following n.o.bly the high call of a greater love. By a swift transition her father a.s.sumed the sympathetic role in the domestic drama. She chanced upon novels in which the spurned husband was exalted to the shame of the dishonorable wife. Her father fitted well into this picture. She even added herself to the _dramatis personae_, not without a sense of her value in the scene. But these were only pa.s.sing phases. There was no morbid strain in Phil. Her father was the best of companions, and she was quick to recognize his fineness and gentleness and to appreciate his cultivation with its background of solid learning.

Phil's question startled her father. Money had never been discussed in the household, and this new gravity in his daughter's eyes troubled him.

Phil's needs had been few; her demands had burdened him little. Her aunts had bought her clothes and sent him the bills. When he gave her money to spend, he never asked for an accounting, though he was often amused by the uses to which she put it; and sometimes he had been touched by her gifts at Christmas or on his birthdays, which ranged from a reckless investment in gay neckties to a set of some author whose definitive edition he had coveted--Sh.e.l.ley or Landor or Matthew Arnold.

No; money was not a subject that had interested Phil, and her father found her direct question disconcerting.

"No, Phil. We are not rich--far from it. It's hardly possible for a lawyer to grow rich in a town like this. But I haven't been doing as well as I could lately. I've got to do better and I must be about it."

He drew himself up in his chair and glanced at his watch. It had stopped, and as the court-house clock boomed eight he set it. It was quite like him to allow his watch to run down.

"I was in your office yesterday, daddy, and I hope you won't mind, but I was straightening your desk and I couldn't help seeing some old bills.

Several of them had been there a long time. My graduating dress hasn't been paid for--and some things like that. We must economize until those bills are paid. And I was thinking that you ought to get more money out of the building. Rents are going up on Main Street. I heard Paul Fosd.i.c.k say so. You ought to raise the clothing store rent right away. I don't know of any easier way of getting money," she added drolly, "than by wringing it from the tenants."

She laughed, to make it easier for him.

"Yes; that's one way of doing it; only Bernstein had a long lease that expires--I'm not sure when it does expire--" he concluded, and the color deepened in his dark cheeks. It was his business to know when the lease on the property expired, and as though reminded by this lapse of similar failures in other directions, he drew out his watch again and made sure that he had wound it.

"It expires," said Phil, "on the last day of this next December. I looked it up yesterday afternoon in that little memorandum book you keep in your desk."

"I guess that's right. I'm glad you mentioned it. I'll see Bernstein right away and ask him if he wants to renew the lease. I suppose I ought to coax a higher rent out of him, but he's been there a long time."

"Oh, he'll stand another fifty and be glad of it. His sign is on all the fences in the country--'Bernstein's--The Same Old Place.' It would cost him some money to change that. And you could cheer him up by painting the front of the building. The interurban is bringing a lot more business to Montgomery. I've been thinking we ought to do something about that third floor room where the photograph shop used to be.

Bernstein has an upstairs room in the next building where his tailor imparts that final deft touch that adjusts ready-made garments to the most difficult figure. It would be handier for him to conduct the sartorial transformations in the chamber over his own gate, wouldn't it?

And I don't think we need wait for that photographer to come back from the penitentiary or wherever he languisheth."

She was minimizing the significance of these suggestions--a significance that lay, she knew, in the fact of their coming from her--by lapsing into the absurdities with which she embellished her familiar talk. She p.r.o.nounced "languisheth" with a prolongation of the last syllable that gave to it a characteristic touch of mockery.

"I'd been hoping he'd show up again and cart off his rubbish. But we've had some fun out of the gallery. If we rent it to Bernstein for his retouching mysteries, we shan't have any place to develop our negatives."

"That's so; but maybe we can retouch Bernstein for enough extra to get them done for us. It's the ducats, my lord, that move my fancy. The Bernsteins have grown almost disagreeably rich at the same old stand and it's about time the Kirkwoods were thrusting their talons into the treasure chest."

Sounds of disaster in the kitchen caused Phil to rise hastily and disappear through the swing doors. She returned calmly a moment later.

"Only the tea-kettle playing at being a geyser. When we get rich I'm going to have a gas range. They say it's the only way to cook and cook and be a lady still."

"That brings us back to cooking--" began her father.

"Not at all, daddy. The subject is dismissed forever. I'm going to have that Ethiop who does ch.o.r.es for us clean up the photograph gallery. I'll be down after while, to see how it looks."

She bade him good-bye at the front door, and went whistling about the further business of the morning. The sky was blue and the air warmed as the sun climbed into the heavens. Phil felt that she had conveyed to her father a sense of their imperative needs without wounding him. She was resolved to help him if she could. Her pride had been p.r.i.c.ked by her Uncle Amzi's proffered aid, which she had carefully avoided mentioning to her father. She knew that it would have hurt him, and she had reasoned, much in the fashion of Nan Bartlett, that her father owed it to himself to exercise his unquestioned gifts to reestablish himself in his profession. As he left her and walked toward the street, she was aware that he strode away more quickly than was his wont.

Phil's morning was not eventless. The telephone jingled three times, as three aunts demanded to know why she had parted with the maid-of-all-work they had installed in the Kirkwood kitchen. Aunt Josie was censorious and Aunt f.a.n.n.y mildly remonstrative; Aunt Kate sought light as to the reason for the cook's early pa.s.sing, as she was anxious to try her herself. Phil disposed of these calls with entire good humor.

Then a senior, between lectures at the college, asked her if she would go driving with him Sunday afternoon. The senior, in the security of his fraternity house, prolonged the conversation. As this was Thursday and there was never any imperative need in Montgomery for making engagements so far ahead, the senior was exercising unjustifiable precaution. Phil declined the invitation. Her aunts had repeatedly warned her against college boys. A daughter of the house of Montgomery was not to waste herself upon students, a lawless body of whom no one knew anything in particular save that they seized every opportunity to murder sleep for reputable citizens.

Phil employed the telephone to order of the grocer and butcher, made beds, swept rooms, and sat down with a new magazine, dropped at the door by the postman, to run her eyes over the pictures. One or two things she was sure her father would like; a sketch of Ma.s.senet she must call to Rose Bartlett's attention. She planned luncheon and began the peeling of potatoes with a page of Keats propped on the table beside her--a trick she had learned at the Bartletts'. "Endymion" need suffer nothing from proximity to potatoes, though it should be said that Phil's paring would have distressed a frugal housekeeper.

While thus employed a step sounded on the brick walk, and a young man knocked at the open door without glancing in. He chewed a straw as he observed the chimneys of the adjoining house, and Phil, sitting by the kitchen table, paused in her paring to make sure of his ident.i.ty. Then she placed her pan of potatoes on the table and crossed quickly to the door.

"Good-morning, madam. Would you like--"

He extended two apples as samples. Phil glanced at them with interest.

They were not the best of apples, as any one could see. Fred Holton removed his hat and pulled the straw from his mouth.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Kirkwood," he said, with a gravity that was not mitigated by a slight quivering of Phil's lips as she continued to ignore their earlier acquaintance. "I didn't know this was your house or I shouldn't have come in."

"Then it's a good thing you didn't know," replied Phil. "If you're selling apples you have to try all the houses you come to. Not to go into every gate wouldn't be business."

"Well, I suppose that's so," observed Holton doubtfully, letting one of the apples fall. Phil picked it up with the quick reach of a shortstop.

She ignored his apologies for failing to recover it himself, and examined the apple critically.

"If you haven't any better apples in your wagon than this, you're not likely to sell many," Phil commented. "This one's spotted and it's a safe guess that a worm nestles within. You ought to pick out the best for samples."

"They're not a very good lot," confessed Holton. "It's an old orchard and it hasn't had any attention. I'm going to put out some new trees next year."

"That's a good idea," Phil observed reflectively. "I've noticed that they've been planting pears and apples in several places around there.