Part 1

Chapter 14,095 wordsPublic domain

_The Painted Room_

_By_

_Margaret Wilson_

_Author of_ "THE KENWORTHYS" _and_ "THE ABLE MCLAUGHLINS"

_Harper & Brothers, Publishers New York and London 1926_

_THE PAINTED ROOM_

_Chapter One_

Little Martha Kenworthy, to use her own careless expression, was "in bad with her dad," as usual. But she was not a girl to be disturbed by a trifle of that sort. She had been home only a few days from her college in the east for her second summer holiday, and had been followed too closely by official comments on her term's work. The only explanation she saw fit to give to her father on that subject was to the effect that he should forget it. Her mother had taken him aside and said privately, firmly, and coaxingly:

"Now, Bob, I'm not going to have that child's life made miserable by somebody else's brilliance. It isn't Martha's fault that she hasn't phenomenal brains. I'm not going to have her scolded for being like me."

"Miserable! Huh! There's a fat chance of her being miserable. It would be a mighty good thing if some one could make her miserable a few minutes. That's what I'm trying to get at! She's got enough brains, if she wasn't too lazy to use them. She'll be fired next term if she isn't careful, and then where'll you be? I'm going to make her quit this eternal fooling around."

"Bronson's spoiled you, Bob. That's all the matter with you. You're always wishing Martha would dazzle people, sort of make them sit up and blink, the way he used to. It's all right for a boy to be so terribly clever, but it would be awkward for a woman. It would make her conspicuous, Bob."

"Well, I wouldn't care so much, Emily, if I could even get a rise out of her about it. I light into her, and you know what she says! 'Yes, daddy! Yes, daddy!' like a little angel. And she hasn't the least idea of doing anything about it. If she'd get good and mad about it once, we could get some place. She just goes on like a little mule!"

"No one but you ever calls her a mule, Bob," Emily cajoled him. "Other people seem to lead her about easy enough."

"Yes! Toward a dance, they do. But how about a trigonometry?"

"You ought to have married a Phi Beta Kappa, Bob, with a golden key. You never asked to see my school reports when you married me; that's where you made your mistake. She's her mother's own child, you know."

"I never saw a kid less like her mother in my life! I never saw anybody like her. I know I only got through exams. by the skin of my teeth, but I did work now and then."

"Martha works hard enough when anything interests her. You ought to see people look at her room, Bob. Grace, Mrs. Phillips, said to me day before yesterday, 'Goodness, Emily, you've got a clever daughter. How old is Martha? I thought she was only nineteen.' She doesn't think she's stupid, Bob. You just wait. Martha'll make you proud of her yet!"

"Oh, I'm waiting, all right. I've always been waiting. You might hurry her along a bit, old girl!"

So Bob had waited all that day, without seizing more than two or three fleeting opportunities to "roast" her about that report, and he was still waiting the next noon in a rather abused mood for some of those signs of promise that his wife was always talking about. He was thinking about it as he walked up to dinner, when he suddenly shuddered to recognize his car, that he ought to have been riding home in, disguised by loads of flowers, overflowing with bobbed heads, young arms and joys and shriekings, turned violently--to escape crashing into a milk truck--up over the curb into a neighbor's lawn, just missing an altogether unyielding elm.

Martha was clever enough at least to avoid her father until dinner was on the table. Emily, helping the crippled old maid-of-all-work in the dining room, heard them at it as they came in toward the table.

"I say you were coming around that corner at forty miles an hour!" Then suddenly stopping: "What's this, Emily! No company for dinner? Where's all the gang? My g-o-oodness! this is a treat! I told you, Martha----!"

Bob spoke with the abruptness of a man who sells hundreds of cars a year, and repairs thousands while their drivers wait. And Martha, when she bothered to reply to him, spoke like a siren from some island of lotus eaters. Her sentences, instead of ending crisply, trailed away rather, and were lost in indifference. Emily scarcely knew what to make of her, at times, nowadays. She had always been a quiet child. On the occasions of high delight in her childhood, which made other children laugh and shout and dance about with glee, little Martha had always stood still, her hands clasped together, and shone all over, with her gray eyes, her little pursed-up mouth, her whole little soft face. The shouting, squealing, roaring sort of little rejoicers are lovely, too, Emily had often thought. But this distinctive rising into shining quietness which was so characteristically Martha, had been a rare and fascinating kind of infant charm. And now, in the blossom of her maidenhood, Martha seemed instinctively to have chosen quietness, and passivity for her weapon of defense and conquest. When she flirted, and when she quarreled with her father, her voice was like the falling of "tired eyelids on tired eyes." Emily had said to Bob, perplexed by Martha's unconciliatory behavior to one whom Emily would have called in her youth an admirer, "Johnnie just wants to grab Martha and give her a shaking when she looks at him like that." And Bob replied, indignantly: "You bet your bottom dollar he does! That's why she does it!"

And now Martha, consuming a chop with haste, displeased with her father's outburst, lifted her eyes slowly toward him and looked at him casually for a moment, and then, letting her eyelashes fall, devoted herself to the chop, as she might have given a moment's careless attention to an English sparrow perched on the window sill of the house across the road. And she drawled, unperturbed to the last degree:

"I think you're mistaken, dad. I don't believe I was driving that fast. And, anyway, I stopped in time. A miss is as good as a mile, I suppose."

"Not with my car, it isn't. Not by a damned sight! You'd think it was a Lizzie the way you treat it. A mile is better than a miss with you, and don't you forget it! If this happens again, I won't let you drive the car all summer!"

"I said I was sorry, didn't I? I said I wouldn't do it again. You never saw me do a thing like that before, did you?"

"No, I didn't, young lady. You didn't imagine I was anywhere about, or I wouldn't have seen you this time, either! I give you credit for that much sense, at least!"

"How sweet of you, daddy!"

"Can't you see what you did?" Bob demanded, excited by her indifference. "Can't you see that if----"

"You talk as if I'd plowed up all Parker's lawn. By the way, why don't you get that bridge on Whinney's road fixed, father? Have we got to go that dusty detour all summer every time we want a game of golf, when we're only here three months?"

"Do you hear that, Emily? I try to put a little sense into her head, and she begins blaming me because that road isn't mended. Do you think the roads in this county are made for you kids? 'You haven't had that car a year,' Perkins says to me yesterday, 'and it looks like a bootleggers' express.' 'Bootleggers nothing! It's the women,' I said. 'They may be frail, but fenders crumble under them.' I remember I said to you----"

"Mother, why don't you speak up? You aren't functioning. After all, we worked all morning getting _you_ those flowers, and this is all the thanks we get for it. I tell you, mommie, there are absolute _tubs_ of delphiniums in Carson's cellar. Heavenly blues! They'll look cooler than anything to-night. This afternoon we're----"

"How could you expect to see anything with all that stuff piled in front of you?"

"Stuff! He calls them 'stuff.' They're all named varieties," she said, "with pedigrees behind them."

"Emily, I tell you the car looked like a florist's moving. That young fool of a Johnnie Benton riding clear home on the running board with his arms full of----"

"I wouldn't let him inside, mother." Martha spoke virtuously. "I knew you didn't want them all crushed."

"And if he hadn't seen that truck, and hollered and jumped----"

"Well, anyway, he saved the flowers, I'll say that for him. It's more than I expected him to do, if he did get a fall."

"And he didn't even have a shirt on, Emily. His coat flew open as he fell----"

"Oh, Bob, surely he must have had a shirt on! What did he have on, Martha?"

"I'm sorry I don't know, mother. I didn't understand father wanted me to examine all the fellows' B.V.D.'s. He'd been playing tennis, and he just grabbed some sweater when we hollered to him to come along. Next time I pick up a man, I'll say to him, 'If you haven't got a nice proper undershirt on, you can't go riding in my father's car.'"

Bob snorted.

"Who said anything about undershirts? A nice thing for a girl like you to be talking about!"

"You mean he didn't have an undershirt on? He wasn't certainly stark naked, mother." Martha suddenly had become prim.

"All I say is, he wasn't dressed right to go riding with girls. You listen to what I'm saying, Martha! If you had gone bang into the truck, not a bone in your body----"

And what happened then to interrupt him, Bob said happened every time he tried to "settle" Martha. A hooting and a tooting of horns, and laughing and whistles, from the street intervened. Martha jumped up.

"There they are," she said to her mother. "Send the car up by three, dad. I suppose you can trust the old bus to me if mother is along. It isn't a Rolls-Royce, after all." She stood gobbling down the dessert. With her fork she pushed together the last crumbs on her plate, and lifting it, she turned her smooth bobbed head halfway towards her father, and practically winking one gray eye towards her mother, she remarked, demurely, with an indifference that made the words absurd:

"My God! That was some cherry pie!"

Bob watched her depart, wilting, and turned to his wife.

"There you are, Emily!" he protested. It was as if he said, "Look how your child acts." She was, in fact, still Emily's child, as she had always been. Bob accepted responsibility now for her no more than ever. "She talks as if I was a Long Island millionaire. As if she couldn't waste her precious time saving a mere Packard from a smash-up. How many times have I told her not to pile more than eight people into the car? And thirteen of them piled out. One after another. Sitting on one another's laps. Just sitting on one another. A fat chance of the boys using their own cars when they can get a girl to hold on their knees. And when I bawled her out, she said there were only two in the front seat! If Johnnie hadn't happened to see that truck----!" Bob shrugged. "And all she says, in the end, is, 'Send up the old bus. My God! What a pie!'"

"Well, Bob, I've told you that she's reached years of discretion----"

"Discretion! That's a good one!"

"She chooses to use your expressions. I'm not going to say anything. I spanked her often enough for it when she was a baby. Anyway, she only does it to annoy you. She never uses it with me."

"God alone knows what she uses when she's with that gang!"

"Oh, well, they're having a good time, Bob. She won't be home many more summers."

"Why won't she? Where's she going?"

"I don't know--exactly. I mean--she'll be getting married. She'll be taking up some work."

And Emily, sitting there enjoying her juicy sweet cherries thoroughly, found some pleasure in the situation. At least, it had its elements of satisfaction in it, even though the growing--what should she call it?--misunderstanding between Martha and Bob made her sigh, often. For twenty years she had been annoyed, inwardly and ineffectively, by Bob's choice of expletives. And this chit of a child, by her occasional use of them that made her father shudder, kept him free from them for weeks together. If in her childhood he had ignored her, at least undervalued her, he was getting well paid for it just at present.

"Just as if I hadn't said a word to her! 'Send up the car at three,' she says, just like that, as if it was _her_ car. You'd think the only reason a father existed was to keep a car in repair for her."

"Well, that is one reason for them existing. Besides, she did say she was sorry. She said it two or three times. She promised not to do it again. I'm never afraid when she's driving, Bob. She never seems to me to lose her head."

"Oh no. Of course not. She's mighty careful to keep you on her side. She wouldn't----"

"On her side, old silly," Emily said, soothingly. "You talk as if there was some quarrel between you two. You know very well that if there was I'd never let her know I was, for a second. She's worked like a Trojan for to-night. I didn't see how I could possibly get over to Elgin this afternoon. And she offered to drive me over."

"Never you mind about _that_! She'll not miss anything. She'll go shopping while you call, if she can find anything worth buying. Or else she's made a date to meet somebody. I bet three minutes after she leaves you there, she'll have some young idiot making eyes at her in that car. I'll bet you a dollar she's 'phoned some of them she's coming over."

"Well, suppose she has, Bob. What do you expect of a girl? Do you want her to sit in the car with her eyes shut till I'm ready to come home? Why shouldn't she call up her friends?"

"Oh, I know it, Emily. But it's the principle of the thing. They're such a lazy bunch. They never do a thing but spend money and dance. That's what Fielding was saying to me."

Emily giggled perversely--effectively.

"Oh, well; have it your own way. They're all angels, if you say they are. I never interfere with them. Give them enough rope and they'll all hang themselves."

"Have some more pie," Emily urged. "A little more pie won't hurt you. I've got to begin canning cherries to-morrow."

"Oh, can the canning! What do you want to stew in the kitchen for, weather like this?"

When Emily left the table she went quickly to the kitchen. Strange how the maid's conscience could prick the mistress! Old Maggie now was crippled and Emily had promised to take the ironed clothes yesterday from the clothes horse and put them away. She had forgotten, almost cruelly forgotten, for to have something done on Thursday that should have been done on Wednesday was pain to Maggie. To that pathetic sensitiveness her years of faithful service had brought her. No woman in town but Emily would have endured the crankiness of the old thing, the neighbors said. But Emily from infancy had been used to her tyranny, and to her any servant was better than none at all. She apologized for having forgotten. And Maggie, hobbling around, demanded that she look at Martha's best "chimmey." The woman had scorched it, burned it, and doubled her fault carefully in so Emily wouldn't see it. And Emily looked at it, and grumbled a little, sympathizingly, and then spoiled the effect of her good deed by saying the garment was almost worn out, anyway. Whereat Maggie snorted. Did that excuse the careless, lazy, sneaky woman for folding it in so deceitfully? Certainly not, Emily hurried to assure her, trying to sound efficient and superior, and knowing as she went through the living room with an armful of mending that she had seemed as usual but a broken reed to the old thing who needed something strong, now, to lean on.

Bob saw her task, and said, of course:

"Why don't you make Martha do that for you?"

"You know she's gone to work on the committee, getting things ready for to-night. She's busy."

"Busy! Huh!" remarked Bob.

Emily had intended to get a lot of work done before Martha came back for her. Those bathroom sash curtains really must be changed. But a neighbor "ran in" for a minute. She wanted to talk about her grandchild, and Emily forgot her hurry. And then she thought she would take some of those lovely columbines to her friend's mother in Elgin. And so she went out and cut some, and wasn't at all ready to go when Martha came for her, calling up to her to hurry if she wanted to get back by five. But Emily seized her and made her wait.

"Martha, sit down a minute. Listen to me. You're a bad child. You ought to be spanked. I wish----"

"Oh, I know it, mother," Martha answered, sincerely. "I'm the limit. Can you imagine me talking that way to anyone else? But dad does get my goat, some way. What does he want to keep on after me for, after I've told him I'm sorry? He's just got into the habit of ya-ya-ya-ing at me, and he'll just have to get out of it. I'm not going to have it. Did you see him writhe, mother, when I mygodded him?" And Martha chuckled.

"We've had enough of that now, Martha! You can stop that just now. You know I don't think you're the one to correct your father!"

"But if I don't, who will? You're no good at it. You're too good-natured with him, you old precious lamb. He knows you don't like his godding. Does he stop? I know he doesn't like mine. Do I stop? We've got to be logical."

Emily smiled witheringly.

"Your logic is always so unexpected. Do behave yourself. You might at least ask him to send up the car, instead of ordering him to. He doesn't keep it for your benefit, you know."

"Oh, I don't know about that. If he keeps it just for himself, he's a selfish pig. If he keeps it partly for ours, why should we hesitate to acknowledge it? You're always defending him."

"Defending him from whom? He doesn't need any defense that I know of. He hasn't got any enemies."

"Well, maybe I shouldn't have said defense. That's not the word, maybe. But you'll have to acknowledge that he needs a good deal of--ahem--explanation, mother. You see for yourself he stops swearing like a sailor when I take him in hand. Everybody says 'My God.' But when he uses it you'd think he was a drunken sailor. Mother, come along. There's all that decoration to do when we get back. You can't trust them to do anything unless somebody's there to boss them. Get your hat."

They went out of the door together, and down the front walk to where the car waited in thick shade. The famous barberry hedge that divides the Kenworthy front lawn from the street dozes faintly in June, waking really only in October. But the lindens whose branches almost met across the narrow street were in the murmurous climax of leaf and blossom that day. Emily climbed into the car. Martha jumped in, slipped into the driving seat, and banged the door after her. Now Emily, when necessity compelled her to manipulate Bob's car, approached it humbly and coaxed it into action, praying it would get around the next corner safely. But Martha just seized it, and slapped it into obedience, and imperiously commanded it hither and thither hastily. Emily never saw her take charge of it without a sort of impulse of awe. The car, like everything else expensive, seemed to become the girl. She moved her hands on the large steering wheel with that surprising composure which Emily had admired from her babyhood. She always drove bareheaded. The breeze scarcely disturbed her hair, which was cut and combed almost as it had been ten years ago, when Jim Kenworthy used to sit and stroke it thoughtfully. There was never a day when Martha was at home that Emily didn't notice how distinguished the absolute straightness and fineness of that black hair seemed among shingled and marcelled heads. Bob didn't like bobbed hair, but he didn't make such an absolute fool of himself on the subject as some men did. Emily herself liked to think that there had never been any "putting up" of hair for her daughter. There had never been a day when a box of hairpins definitely divided her maturity from her childhood. There had never been any letting down of skirts for Martha. Her frocks, still cut simply, hung from her shoulders to--well, why should a man go fussing on indefinitely about the length of his daughter's skirts, after they had been determined! Of course, if Martha had had fat legs, and shaky hips, like some girls whose names might be mentioned, Emily might not have admired the prevailing styles so sincerely. But Martha was built slenderly enough, gracefully enough, to justify them, Emily thought, looking at her sitting there like a little child, in that pink gingham frock, uncorseted, unrestrained, all delicately and subtly blooming with color.

And Emily, though she enjoyed her daughter in perfect whiffs of satisfaction, looked at her not without uneasiness. For she knew, when she sat looking at that child, that she was seeing bodily before her eyes nineteen years of her life; and not the quantity of it only, but the very quality, the very flavor of it. Everything she had done she had done for that child; all that she had left undone she had left undone for her. Even Jim, the brother of her husband, whom she had loved, she had given up, she had kept distant from, for this child's sake. Often since he had died, six years ago, she had regretted that renunciation. She had thought bitterly at times that if she had gone to him, divorced or not divorced, child or no child, he might--who knew?--be living still. But generally, when she thought of it all, when Martha was with her, she had been glad of her decision. Martha was surely reward enough for any sacrifice a woman could make.

Because Martha was happy. That was the whole point. If her mother had divorced her father, or deserted him, surely there must have been something like a shadow, a sort of dimness, over the child's consciousness. But now how gay she was, how perfectly gay and light-hearted. For Emily, who had been an unhappy lonely young girl, that was enough. She fervently now loved the months when the whole house rose up to the zest of youth, when the rugs were rolled up and the victrola going, when the refrigerator was raided nightly, when the clothes lines were always adorned with swimming suits, the bathroom overflowing with girls, the railings even of the veranda lined with lads, cigarettes gleaming in the darkness of the garden--why ask whether feminine or masculine cigarettes--when there was no sleep till the last lingering car departing had made the night strident. Bob grumbled incessantly about Martha's company. But must not an only child, most of all, have friends about? "You'd think the house was run for that girl," Bob complained. And Emily answered to herself, for she was a wise one: "If this house of mine is run eight months of the year for you, why shouldn't it be run four months of the year for her?" But she said only: "Too bad! It's just a shame."