Part 3
"Oh, that girl is as good as gold, Bob. They all wear thin things in the halls, Martha says." Emily liked her. To be sure, the ease with which she had taken up her permanent abode at the Kenworthys' was somewhat--nonplusing. Emily had asked her, when Martha first brought her home, where she had been brought up. And she had said: "Oh, I never was brought up at all. I'm just the little prairie flower, growing wilder every hour. Just hauled about from aunt to boarding-school--between the devil and the deep sea all my tender days." Though she had said it so frankly, so seriously, Emily had thought it scarcely sufficient. But Martha had hooted at Emily's quizzings. "It's too funny the way you act, mother, as if maybe she wasn't fit to associate with your precious child. At school I'm simply nothing. I'm the least worm in the apple. But Eve's everything. The profs just eat out of her hands. She's chairman of the student council--you know--the gang that makes us all behave. She edits the magazine, and she'll be president of her class next year, as like as not. At school everybody wants to get a stand in with Eve. She'd never looked at me if her dad hadn't moved to this town. And now you don't know whether I better make her acquaintance or not!"
"You know I didn't mean that, child. I simply asked who she was and where she had lived. That's only natural. I think she's a dear."
And Emily had been reassured because it was her theory that women never again have such a capacity for judging one another rightly, and choosing friends wisely, as they have in college. No girl, she thought, looking at Eve's thin, rather over-bred face, fools a campusful of her companions. Bob said her father was always well spoken of. No one knew him very well. He had bought a great elevator in town some time ago, one of several he had in the state, and recently had bought a large old house and settled his family in it. That had consisted of his old bedridden mother and her nurse--until Eve's vacation had begun. Martha had gone at once to see her there, and, coming back, had said to Emily: "It's a funny sort of house, mother. It's furnished all right, and everything. But it looks like an orphan asylum." She had asked Eve to come and stay the night, and Eve had accepted gladly. Her grandmother, she told Emily, had been "out of her head, mildly" for months. Her nurses weren't very easy to get along with. "Dad had a hard enough time getting any he can trust grandma to," she had said, very sensibly. "He's away so much. These two are awfully good to her. I'll say that for them. They're sisters. So why should I come home for three months and ball everything up? I just keep still as a mouse and let them have their own way. Grandma never knows me. I never go into the room."
Well, that was a nice sort of place for a young girl to spend her holiday, Emily had thought. "Stay with us," she had suggested. And she hadn't had to suggest it twice. Bob grumbled every day about this steady boarder, but that didn't excite Emily unduly. She liked Eve better and better. How sweet of her now, to think of doing those cherries! She was always doing little things that Martha would never have thought of.
In fact, Emily had almost to acknowledge to herself that Eve had certain traits that Martha might well have had. Bob, of course, talked about them openly. Eve had a proper attitude towards her father, for one thing. She had said, quite naturally, that her dad was a lamb, a perfect duck, and a good old sport. And the fourth evening she had been at Emily's, the four of them, with another girl, Johnnie Benton, and another lad of the town, had been sitting on the veranda, waiting for the third lad to come in his car, so that the six of them could drive over to the lake to dance. They had heard some one come in, and called to him to come out, thinking it was the dilatory sixth. And Eve's father had come out to them.
Bob couldn't get over that scene. Eve had sprung up and hugged him and kissed him and patted him. Emily, seeing even that greeting, would have been sure that Eve's rather shocking sophistication was only a pose. For she had started at once to get her things together to go home with him. And when Johnnie Benton had protested she had turned to him indignantly. "I like your nerve!" she had cried to him. "Do you suppose I'm going to a dance with you when I haven't seen my dad for six weeks?" And she wouldn't go. They couldn't persuade her. Bob, sitting there, had seen her father relishing the situation. The man obviously overflowed with pride in his "Evelyn."
"Now, can you beat that?" Bob had demanded of Emily afterwards. "Can you imagine Martha cutting a dance for me? Maybe Eve'll do her some good. Can you beat that?"
Emily couldn't possibly imagine Martha preferring her father to a dance, or to very much else. But she wouldn't acknowledge it.
"Oh, well, Bob, that's another matter. It was sweet, the way she did it. But Eve hadn't seen him for weeks. And then, she hasn't got a mother. She's had to depend on him always. It's much more normal, I must say, for a girl to prefer a dance to her parents. You can't deny that."
"I know it. But it's the principle of the thing." And he had liked Eve, till he had met her coming from the bathroom in what he called, "an obscene Mother Hubbard."
And now, getting ready for supper, Emily wished she knew why Eve had, once, mentioned father-in-law in connection with Wilton. Bob would have laughed at her, if he had known, for she thought every man in town was in love with Martha, he said. A fat chance she had of getting near her as hard-headed a man as Wilton. He had too much sense to fall for any such kid as Martha, Bob had assured her. But how could she help thinking about it when Wilton's father had told her that he absolutely refused to leave his hospital work to come home for any dance? He was interned already, by what he called a streak of luck, but Emily knew it was rather his ability. And now he was coming out to see Martha--and his father was a barber. How could a mother help thinking about her child's matrimonial possibilities, a lovely girl of that age? "When I was her age," thought Emily, "I fell in love with Jim." And it was because she had been thinking of the possibility, any time now, of Martha's marriage, that she had tolerated the painted room.
One thing Emily Kenworthy was sure of. She had almost gritted her teeth in the intensity of her resolutions on this subject for years, whenever she had had to think over the surprising course of her own life. She had married really to get out of this very house, made intolerable to her by the tyranny of her aunt. But her daughter wouldn't ever marry to get away from her. She would never marry for freedom! Not while Emily Kenworthy knew what she was doing! Emily had few strong convictions, but that one was unalterable.
Emily loved every meal when Martha was home. That evening at supper she sat cherishing her enjoyment. Afterwards it was so amusing to be running in and out of the painted room, where Eve and Martha were dressing. No sooner had they gone up to dress, ready for the evening, than Martha called to her from the bathroom, above the noise of water steaming into the tub:
"Mother!"
When Emily went to her, there she stood, twinkling importantly.
"Got a secret to tell you, mother. Wilton said I might tell you. You're not to tell a soul, yet. Not dad!"
Emily's heart gave a protesting leap. She didn't manage to speak indifferently.
"Tell me what it is!" she commanded.
"He's engaged, mother. He came out to break the news to his dad. She's a nurse. That's good, isn't it? And he's crazy as a loon about her. He said I could tell you. He's been rushing that girl all summer, and his dad thinks he's working himself to death!" Martha smiled cynically.
What a relief! What a fine young man that Wilton was! Emily wished him every happiness she could think of. Martha didn't care a rap about him. Of course not! Trust Martha to choose exactly the right man! "Wasn't I just silly to worry about it?" Emily thought.
The pleasure of this assurance was added to the excitement of their preparations. Martha looked too sweet in that simple little flesh-colored frock. Emily kissed her impulsively. Eve looked lovely, too, but one didn't just kiss Eve on the impulse, even if she did take one's part stanchly against tender derision. Martha had been making her mother turn round and round to display her new gown. "If you know the trouble I had getting her to get it, Eve!" Martha had murmured. "It took me all the spring vacation to persuade her. I never saw a human being cling to old rags the way that woman does." And they surveyed her. She was as large, almost, as the two of them, of flowing line and generous bosom, gray-eyed, with soft brown hair. But her color, Martha said falsely, was ghastly. "You're tired out, mother. Now stand still. I bought this specially for you this afternoon. Mine don't suit you. Now don't be such a snob, mother. Stop rubbing it off! A little rouge isn't going to corrupt your morals. You'll come home as pure as you went! Mother! Oh, you're hopeless! When I try so hard to make you look presentable!" Wasn't that delicious, when one understood it? And wouldn't Bob have been annoyed to hear the child's impertinence? "Eve, look at her!" Martha begged, tragically. But Eve said: "Let her alone. You'd paint a lily, Martha. You'd marcel Thomas Hardy himself, if you got a chance. You look just sweet now, Mrs. Kenworthy!" And they turned their attention again to their own long-considered faces.
Martha certainly managed her adorning skillfully. No crude blotches of color for her. She knew what subtly became her. Her mother hadn't thought she used rouge until a few days before, when she came upon her in the act. "Why, Martha Kenworthy!" she had protested, "where did you get that stuff?" And Martha, turning to Eve, had imitated her very tone fondly. "Where did I get that stuff? Isn't she priceless, Eve? Isn't she a sort of an old treasure? I got it, to be precise, in a drug store in Madison Avenue. Not far from the station." And since then more than once she had turned her faintly tinted cheeks naughtily up for her mother's inspection. "Am I pure, mammie? Or am I painted?" she would ask. The doubt was scarcely as objectionable as the question. Pure wasn't a word girls ought to be throwing about just carelessly, it seemed to Emily. But both the girls failed to see her point. "What's the matter with 'pure,' mother? Do you like 'virgin' better?" They were just naughty, trying to shock her. And she would do better to keep her Victorian scruples, as they called them, to herself.
Or if she didn't want to keep them to herself, wrapped in paper and stored away on some upper shelf, let her discard them altogether. That was what the dancing, balloon-entangled mass of youth seemed to say to the Emily and Mrs. Benton who looked down upon it that evening from the platform. But Cora Benton, that lordly and distinguished daughter of the American Revolution, by her very presence retorted, as it were, "Yes! Lay aside Victorian scruples and New England tradition. Have I not Georgian scruples and Illinois decorum sufficient unto the day?" The city band, in brand-new maroon uniforms, was playing worse than ever, but they played--that was the point, for they had said they would never play if wireless music was to be chiefly used. The mayor and the councilors looked down on the dancers--those gentlemen who had refused to accept this hall as a gift--determined not to admit what their eyes saw, but unable to refrain. The Presbyterian minister and the Catholic priest, who planned to bless it by their presence but momentarily, still tarried, wondering. The representatives of the farm bureau and the granges were trying to estimate the number of people on the floor. All the reluctant admirers, all the gossipers, the obstructionists, the knockers, might stand on that platform, and look down over that rhythmic mass, right away to the farther side, where the dancers were swinging out on to the wide verandas to the starlight, and back again into the pink-shaded electric light--they might all gaze continually, eager to find some impropriety, anxious to see, as they had foretold, some daring lad come dripping in, in bathing suit from the adjacent swimming-place--but in it all, nothing, nothing could they find to shudder over.
For Mrs. Benton had reinforced herself, as it were, by the American Legion. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, bull-necked, yellow-haired, low-foreheaded, somebody's Dutch hired man. He had redeemed the Legion from the hands of the disreputable and he rallied about it the decent element of the community, re-established it financially--after its treasurers had absconded--made its dances popular again, and started to build it a permanent home. Mrs. Benton had wanted her hall to have the added prestige of being a sort of memorial to the county's soldiers. She had laid her plan before him, and when he had considered it and announced publicly that he had "no use for guys that was always knocking the dames," she thought she had persuaded him, although, really, a pretty farmer's daughter had put into the Legion's mind thoughts of settling down and renting a farm of his own. So he was weary of his public work. Why should he devote his evenings to running around trying to collect money when the dames were willing to leave him free to sit close to the farmer's daughter? He backed Mrs. Benton to the limit of his great ability. He had allowed no one, of late, to "dance vulgar" at his dances. And now he stood on the platform with Mrs. Benton, who knew that if he gave an order for the mayor himself to leave the floor, the whole crowd would applaud him. He was the community hero. But Mrs. Benton had no delusions about him. "A young Lincoln" the sentimental called him. But she remarked, grimly, "Easy enough to begin where Lincoln did, in Illinois. The trick is to finish where he finished."
The invited and distinguished guests began departing. The oldest G.A.R. had hobbled away, and the representatives of the Chamber of Commerce had left the platform in a body, giving Mrs. Benton magnanimous congratulations which she had received but impatiently for the dancing crowd kept still increasing, and the committee in charge of the refreshments had summoned her to a conference. They said cars were parked one against the other right down to Main Street, and were still arriving by dozens. All the ice cream in the town had been eaten, and a dozen freezers were on their way from the nearest source of relief. And as they spoke, all the women breathed their success in deeply, wallowing in their sense of victory. They consulted, and they gloated. They stood looking down over the work of their hands, eying one another significantly. They said to one another, "I told you so!" They added, "But I never told you so much!" Mrs. Benton and Emily were standing together when Johnnie made his way to the platform. Presently Emily was standing between mother and son.
She had been standing between mother and son intermittently for years.
People who said that Mrs. Benton was queenly belittled her. She was kingly. She was nearly six feet tall--Johnnie was an inch or two taller. She had the neck and head of a Roman Emperor--imperial, magnificent. She was wearing that night a smart black net frock, girded about and corseted as regally as usual. She had artificial pearls about her thick neck. She wore, moreover, a crown. It was largely that coronation of great black braids round her head that made the bobbed-hair femininity near her seem to be bowing their insignificant heads, their thin and modish shoulders before her like groveling subjects. She had a habit of pulling one of those braids up to a sort of point exactly above the middle of her forehead, because it became her--that is--it suggested more vividly a crown.
Seen from behind, the mother and the son were not unlike. Johnnie had the same beautifully shaped head--and no line of his was hidden beneath the billows of hair--beautifully set on broad, thin shoulders. Seen from the side, he had the advantage of her. He had a good chin. If Mrs. Benton's chin had matched her crowned forehead, democracy probably would not have tolerated her. Fortunately, it fell away and folded into her neck--somewhat fatly. But a clever observer, studying mother and son from the front, might have guessed the sorrow of the mother. There was a gentleness, a sort of ease, about the son's mouth, though a woman who had "inside information" later called it the sweetest mouth in the world. She said, in fact, that it was so sweet that his false teeth looked beautiful even in a glass of water. He was certainly not effeminate. How could a lad born of two male parents manage to be girlish! He lacked what is called "push" perhaps. The engine of his life had not been started. Hers was never turned off. One could see it pounding impatiently away as she stood there. Her eyes, as they looked, lorded it over the scene; when they roved about, they reigned. They were even now seizing upon the scene to command it. Johnnie looked at it and grinned, hoping to see another pretty girl come dancing into his ken. He was shockingly content with the world as he found it. Nature had given him dancing feet, and "the dames" had made a perfect floor for him. The tailor made him pockets and the banker gave him check books. His mother had been sore with him ever since he got home from college. And now he had squared himself with her by getting such a crowd to come to the opening of the hall. He reminded her and Emily that he deserved credit for the multitude as he stood with them, a manicured sum of frustration to maternal ambition.
"You mustn't ask me to do anything for you if you don't want it well done," he said to them.
For Johnnie had posted announcements of this great opening dance on the telephone poles of six counties, rising early and coming home from his work late practically every day for two weeks. This unusual industry was prompted by the most noble filial reason possible. He wanted to please his mother. And he had good reason for wanting to please her. Emily realized that keenly, for not more than half an hour ago she had thought she heard some wag in the crowd around the hall whistling one of those absurd tunes. She wasn't sure it was one of those tunes of Johnnie's "opera." All tunes sound so much alike, nowadays. But she feared it, uneasily, right in the midst of their triumph. For this Johnnie Benton had inadvertently brought half their club committee, as well as his mother, into humming derision. He had held up their past to jazzy scorn. Doggedly he insisted that it was an accident. He had never intended writing a comic opera for his college class. It had just happened. It never entered his head that if he wrote up one of his mother's activities, away down East, the news of it would ever get back home. He acknowledged to Emily he had known that the editor of the town daily "had it in" for the club women; that he had been biding his time ever since they had bought the vacant lots next to his dwelling for a parking place for the cars of the dancers who came to their hall. The committee had openly regretted the necessity of doing anything to spoil the peace of his home. But as towns grow, apparently some provision for cars must be made. They had not wanted to antagonize the press. But they had been forced to. They had regretted it at the time, but they had regretted it more two weeks ago. For then, one day--Martha had just got home from college and Johnnie Benton was to arrive the following morning--the town had been startled at the horrid, leering headlines:
SCHOLASTIC HONORS OF OUR TOWNSMAN
And beneath it, in smaller letters:
VERSE ON FAMILIAR TOPICS
Each verse was commented upon, with a sort of mock literary criticism.
The needs of the poor For garden manure.
That was bad enough.
The lack of barn litter Makes poverty bitter.
That was worse.
Let her give us fertilizer If she wants us not to prize her.
That was intolerable, almost.
Our need of land dressing Is truly distressing.
That was absolutely and unpardonably intolerable.
For Miss Sisson, poor old thing, who had moved in the committee that perhaps the more elegant term of "land dressing" might be substituted for "manure," which seemed coarse, had made herself ridiculous at the time in the club. And now, when she was mourning her sister, she was made ridiculous publicly. Well, Johnnie Benton had a great deal to answer for! All the women said that.
For it had happened some years after Mrs. Benton had bought one whole freight car full of peony plants at reduced prices and had sold them off cheap to the women of her county. She had been driving through the western suburbs of Chicago, and had noticed certain sterile spots that during the war had been used as allotment gardens. It was pitiful to her to see those poor hard-working foreigners were still trying to grow a few vegetables on sandy rubbish heaps. It made her consider what a lot of manure was piled up in the barnyards around her town. She laid the matter before the garden committee of the club at once. If every farmer's wife who had bought a peony would give one sackful of manure, the committee would see that it was distributed among the needy allotments of Cook County. The county adviser had opposed the scheme bitterly. The Farm Bureau had condemned it. Every ounce of manure was needed at home, the county bulletin said. But Mrs. Benton asked how farmers working on their distant forties were going to know how many sacks of manure their wives gave away. Did they ever count them, wasteful managers that they were? She would let the women know when the truck would call for it.
But this generous plan had been balked by Johnnie and his kind. They said it had been all right enough to get the loan of the family cars when they were freshmen in high school, and to go driving about distributing peonies. But they drew the line at manure. Mrs. Benton said to Emily that she had told Johnnie he was a selfish boy, and that he had said: "Well, maybe I'm selfish. But I'm certainly fragrant." Emily had never believed Johnnie capable of that retort. She thought his mother had made it up for the story. But now--well--she was beginning to think maybe he had made it.