Part 5

It sobered Emily to see the ancestry driving her defenseless daughter hither and thither like a slave. Would it not be ironical, now, if this girl "turned out" like that aunt whom Emily's childhood had so futilely resented! It seemed to Emily that never in her young days had that house been free a week from the sound of hammers or the smell of paint. She had wondered, sometimes, in her maturity, whether she turned instinctively away from the thought of "improving" her house because she had so continually in her childhood revolted against her aunt, or whether it was simply laziness that made her tolerate any closet shelf, however inconvenient, rather than bestir herself to alter it. Since she had inherited the house, it had had peace. She had merely kept it in repair, and tolerated the electric devices with which Bob filled it. But now, looking at Martha, she saw again all her aunt's zeal for change overflowing again.

She had not suspected the child of any such constructive inclinations until one day of the last Christmas vacation. They had been talking carelessly together, when suddenly she had heard:

"Do you know what I'm going to do the first thing, mammie, as soon as I get my money?"

That was a question naturally never far from Emily's mind then, because in fifteen months Martha would be twenty, and, according to the terms of her great-aunt's will, she would then receive the first monthly installment of an income of nearly four thousand dollars. Emily had hated that will when she first heard its terms, because it had been drawn up, she understood, so as to keep the least control of the money away from Bob Kenworthy. Exactly what grounds her aunt had had for these suspicions, Emily never knew. She could have discovered only by asking her husband, and it was the very essence of her character that she would not ask him. The very vagueness of that suspicion had been a wound that years of Bob's respectability and kindness had healed. He had not complained about the will at first--Emily had wondered why he had not. Did he not dare? But now that the child had grown up, without much regard for him, he thought it outrageous that that old woman should have made her independent of him. Emily herself, who loved ease with all her heart, who was no manager, in the local sense of the term, had tried faithfully to prepare her daughter to use her money wisely--if not wisely, exactly, at least not too foolishly at first. So when Martha brought up the subject, her mother had asked her once, curiously:

"What will be the first thing you do with it?"

"I'll chuck all that junk out of my bedroom and do it all over."

Emily had been shocked, but she had to smile presently; for wasn't that the very thing she had done first herself, when she had returned to the house after her aunt's death? To be sure, she had later brought down from the attic the old pieces she had especially hated in her childhood. But she remembered with what joy she had stored them away, how she had taken off shutters, and thrown away faded carpets, and gloried in rugs. But Martha's was rather unreasonable, for her bedroom Emily had furnished only six years ago, and most daintily. She had given Martha some of the best things in the house; a dear little chest of drawers that had been before in the spare room, and two little old tables, and gone to great pains to get a bed to suit them. And Martha now had called it "junk"!

"What sort of furniture would you get?"

"Oh mother--it doesn't matter." Martha was apologetic. "You wouldn't let me, anyway."

"How do you know I wouldn't?" Emily had retorted. "I don't know that I'm so tyrannical!"

"I never said you were any such thing. But you know, mother, you'd just sort of persuade me to get what you liked."

"Why Martha! Maybe I would let you get what you wanted!"

Martha went on with the subject hesitatingly. She spoke wistfully, but without hope.

"I'd throw all that junk out and paint it all over. I'd do the floor a nice dull bluey purple--

"A purple floor?"

"Yes. And the woodwork I'd do all creamy yellow, like good fresh butter, or a sort of sea green."

"But, Martha, that floor's _oak_!"

"Oak takes paint."

"Mine doesn't."

"But I'm just saying what I _would_ do if it was mine. I knew you wouldn't let me. I'd get a little pine chest made, to paint just like my little old one. Oh, wouldn't I love to do it, though! The girls have such lovely rooms, mother. You ought to see Grace Richmond's. It's all vermilion and blue. But she's an orphan, of course." Martha sighed.

"Oh, Martha!" Emily had exclaimed, "what a lot you have to look forward to! You'll be an orphan some day, and you can paint the whole house purple!"

"Now, mammie, that's just plain nasty of you. You egged me on to say what I would do, and now you make fun of me!" But Martha, mollified, had gone on to tell of the staggering sights she had seen in other girls' homes, reeling colors, threatening emerald ceilings, and cubistic ornamentations.

And Emily had pondered the matter, Martha's sigh rankling. "Her room is all vermilion and blue. But she's an orphan, of course." Did her child, in spite of her mother's long determination to the contrary, feel hampered, thwarted of joy by parental preferences? Was she getting eager to get out of the home, away some place to freedom, as her mother had run once? After all, that floor wasn't so very valuable, and the paper needed renewing. Martha wouldn't be at home months together now, to get tired of her gaudiness. It wouldn't cost such a lot, and no one would have to see it. The door into the outer hall could be kept shut.

A day or two later she had said:

"Do you know what I'm going to give you for your birthday?"

Martha guessed extravagantly:

"A car, mammie? A little runabout to take back to school?"

"Not much! I'm going to let you do your bedroom over to suit yourself."

And Martha had looked blank for a moment, and then murmured:

"Oh no! It wouldn't do, mother. We couldn't. We'd--mother--we'd _quarrel_, as sure as you live. I'd get started, and I'd want my own way, and you wouldn't approve."

"But I say I _will_ approve. After all, it's _your_ room. _I_ don't have to live in it. You can have it blue and vermilion, if you want to!"

And Martha had sat there for a moment without saying a word, her eyes beginning to twinkle, her dimples all chuckling, just shining and beaming, all her pleasure intensified by her quietness. Then she had hugged Emily after that and had run up to her room straight away. And up and down she ran, hunting for scissors, for yardsticks, measuring, planning, 'phoning to carpenters, twinkling, utterly happy. It had been Emily's sense of her utter happiness that had enabled her to stifle her impulses to interfere.

Once things had got rather serious. The child wouldn't have a bed in the room. She wanted to turn it into a sitting room. And when Emily had pointed out that she didn't need a sitting room, Martha had hugged her and, warningly, "I told you we'd quarrel, mother!" Emily had given way, and Martha had gone on, working like a beaver. She had dyed, and she had shopped in Chicago; she had "jollied" painters whole mornings, and gone back to school in the end, leaving her mother sewing balls of silken high-brow carpet rags. Her very letters had been full of instructions about the room. And during her spring vacation the whole house seemed to be an orgy of renewal, so that Martha hadn't been far wrong when she said that her mother only endured her nowadays through gritted teeth. She had said it from her "studio" in the attic, where she was painting tables, for there alone could she be found that holiday. She had planned so well that in that fortnight she had almost completed her purposes, and she had hated leaving it to go back to college. And to that room she had flown home again, not eager, as she generally was, to go away for the summer. Not once had she mentioned the Rockies or Canada, or even Europe. And her heart was so absorbed in it that now, on awakening to raspberries and cream, she had to go and adjust that blind and study the way the light fell on the cerise--practically--rug.

And Emily looked around, and smiled cautiously. It had been the girl's idea to make the room "amusing." That was the adjective she had continually used of her plan. And certainly she had succeeded in inciting mirth at least in the elders who beheld it. To be sure, with the blind down, the darkly gleaming floor wasn't so bad after one had got used to it. The sand-colored walls were matched by woodwork with little green lines on it. And the rosy silken oval rugs and those black day beds--hateful objects, which kept the edges of the bedding always on the floor, piled by day with cushions like shrieking parrots--all this was almost laughable. She had told Martha firmly the beds ought to be side by side between the windows. But Martha ignored the suggestion. The bookshelves had absurd little cupboards at each end, which Martha opened to show her friends, and an electric stove on a little tray which you stood, so, on this little shelf which pulled out, so. She had gathered a primitive sort of crockery bowls from New York, which were called "just too quaint," and the coffee things from the Chicago Ghetto. Emily had almost protested against this miniature kitchen. Martha never would be making fudge up there, she was sure. But then she had got to thinking of Martha's outgrown playhouse under the willow. "I used to let her have dishes and everything out there," she remembered. And she had not only stifled her objections; she had come heartily to admire this adolescent playhouse.

For there, opening off this room, was the amazing dressing room Martha had made from that large closet where formerly clothes had hung drably. People in the town used to say that, for the sake of having daylight in that closet and preserving the symmetry of the outside of the house, Emily's aunt had torn out and built over that wall seven times. Now Emily had to take visitors up to see that closet, many and insistent visitors, for all Martha's chums were bringing their mothers enviously to show them "Martha's apartment." When she heard their exclamations, she would look at her daughter with that feeling which she experienced when the child, blowing her horn, adjusting her brakes, watching the traffic "cop," drove that panting great headstrong car so calmly, without hurrying one eyelash, through the tangle of vehicles of any city that might lie in her path. For Martha quietly had taken that long narrow closet and lined it on both mirrored sides with hanging wardrobes, and a great total and variety of cunningly planned shelves, shallow and deep drawers, great and small, pulling out on patent rollers; she had packed away a beautifully lighted dressing table, with a stool that pushed back into its own "ducky nook." She had painted all the drawers a dull gold on the inside, and a creamy yellow on the outside, and made them gold knobs and handles. The purple floor and the glow of the rug, less violent than those of the larger room, left her visitors quite mad with envy and surprise.

"It's just Martha all over!" one girl sighed, and Emily had pondered that. Was Martha then to be a lover of perfect places to stow away things? There had been plenty of drawers and closets in the house before, Emily had said to herself. And when she had seen the child's delight in that huge big topmost drawer, she had let her have a great pile of old soft pieced quilts to pack away in it, just as she had given her old hats years before for the games in the willow playhouse. Was that dressing closet "just Martha all over"? Was the child going to be an architect, as she had carelessly suggested once, or an "interior decorator," possibly? Perhaps she was yet going to be brilliant, and do many things as successfully as she had done this, so that Bob would yet be proud of her. Or perhaps she was going to be a furious housewife, delighting in a family of children. And Emily grew serious thinking of that. She had every reason to distrust too great interest in housekeeping. She would see that Martha never loved furniture more than children's ease of mind, never put order of a room before its usefulness. She did hope Martha wouldn't carry these things to excess, as her heredity might urge her to. Here the child hadn't got all the rugs for this room home from the woman who was making them, and she had already begun to talk about enlarging the garage. It disfigured the whole house, as it was, she had told her father. If she might be allowed to double the size of it, making room for two cars----

Then Bob had interrupted: "I'm not going to keep two cars!"

"But _I'll_ have a car next year," she had suggested.

"You don't _need_ a car!" Bob had asserted, hotly.

"Maybe I don't," Martha had answered, softly, infuriatingly, for her lazily lifted eyes had added, defiantly, "But I'm going to have one, anyway!"

"If I could add another part to the garage and change that hideous entrance so we could hide it with some--lilacs and--things, mother, then I could change the west window of my room into a door, and have the whole roof of the garage for a veranda of my own, with an adjustable awning kind of over it, and some roses up the supports of it. And how much nicer it would be in the summer to sit there without a roof over us. We'd get all the breeze there was there, don't you think, mammie?"

"Oh, Martha, give us a rest. Let's have some peace. There's no reason why you should have a car, I tell you, anyway at your age." Thus Bob received her suggestion.

"We'll have to think it all over," Emily had replied. It would have to stop some place. Martha couldn't just be allowed to "express herself" all over the house whenever it suited her fancy. If Bob would only stop threatening to forbid her to use his car, maybe she wouldn't insist so frequently on having one of her own next year.

The raspberries stimulated Martha to action, for she dressed as Eve and Emily sat discussing the evening. She had to go and get some flowers for her room, before her guests came, she said, departing. And Eve began spreading those day beds into order. Emily bestirred herself to help. She had a notion to move those beds into the middle of the room together. But she refrained. She had to reflect that, though Martha decorated with fury, she dusted with less zeal. In that, too, she resembled her mother. She returned presently with her hands full of lilacs for her red-copper bowls. She threw them down on the bed and when Emily suggested arranging them she said, "Wait, mother. I've 'phoned Johnnie to get me some blue ones from the high-school garden." Emily began a faint protest, knowing Mrs. Benton didn't allow anyone to gather the flowers of that young hedge of hybrid lilacs which she had given to the high school. Martha said: "Oh, I wanted one or two. Mother, we've just got to have a place in the garden for a very late lilac like that, because it makes the bouquets for this room." And Johnnie came in immediately. With half a dozen great blossoms right up the stairs he walked, and into that--no, it wasn't a bedroom, but it still seemed strange to have him making himself at home among the bedrooms. Martha scolded him for bringing so many branches, but she had to have at least two of those dark purply ones. "You can see that for yourself," she insisted to Johnnie. Emily could see it for herself. The flow of color melted and shifted about those darkest blues as Martha lowered one shade and pushed up another, grumbling because mignonette couldn't be got to bloom earlier. If she had ever thought those delphiniums would have been all crushed up that way the first dance last night, she would have saved some for her room.

Emily had told Johnnie to hand her the pile of books that lay on the floor beside Eve's bed. Eve, to judge from the literature with which she surrounded herself continually, couldn't enjoy one book unless there were ten others as good waiting at her elbow for their turn. She came out of the dressing room while Johnnie was looking over the books he had put on the shelf for Emily.

He said, "Hello! You still here?"

"You can't say anything. You're here again."

"_I_ was invited. _I_ was 'phoned for."

"But I'm leaving soon, and that's more than you're likely to do."

"I'm expecting to be kicked out any minute," he replied, looking at Emily. "Nobody appreciates me here. Is this any good?" he asked, carelessly fingering a book.

"What is it?"

He read the name out. Emily stood listening. It was the book that had shocked her so entirely years ago--the book about which she and Jim Kenworthy had quarreled so destructively.

"Haven't you read that?"

"No. I've heard of it."

"How intellectual of you! They make you read it, in most schools, that is, if you're interested in technique. You'd call it a thousand miles of sand. I haven't got any Robert Chambers," Eve went on, looking over possibilities. "You might try Michael Arlen, there. His style would be lost on you, but the subject would appeal to your heart. There's the Kreutzer Sonata. Have you read _Crime and Punishment_?"

"Can't stand Russian stuff."

"Does seem difficult, after the _Saturday Evening Post_," Eve remarked. Skirts may have clung to Johnnie, but Eve wasn't one of them. She had commented, on hearing of his masterpiece, that its music was hackneyed, the verse was rot and the theme disgusting. Martha had retorted that the theme, rather, was rot. Johnnie and Eve quarreled on till Eve departed.

"You're going to stay for lunch, Johnnie?" Emily asked.

"I won't if you don't want me to."

"How truly magnanimous!" Emily murmured. "No. You stay and talk to the girls, but don't stay for lunch. You know your mother wants you." Emily wondered then, and she wondered later, why Martha had wanted Johnnie to stay. Did she want him to hear what the Wright girls' mother was sure to say about the dressing room? Did Martha care really what Johnnie thought--Johnnie, who was always asking her to marry him?

And what _did_ he think, as he stood lazily leaning against the door into the dressing room, watching the women examine the drawers? Mrs. Wright had brought with her a friend who was planning a new house, a prosperous-looking person, and who listened thoughtfully to Martha's answers to her questions. This person was impressed. She kept looking at Martha when they were seated at length in the painted room.

"How much of this did you do yourself?" she asked. "Hadn't you seen something like it somewhere?"

Martha was sitting on a cushion at Emily's feet.

"Oh yes. I'd seen one in New York. And I just told the old Dane, the carpenter, how many drawers I wanted, and how big, and he did it all himself. I couldn't measure them, or anything like that. He had them all ready to put in when I got home. I'd like to do over all the closets in the house." She looked at her mother, against whom she was leaning.

The guests looked at Emily. She had to say something.

"But if all the closets in this house had so many drawers, we wouldn't have enough to put into them."

"I know it. Isn't that funny?" Martha turned to the other. "People are so silly. The closets are so big there's nothing to fill them with. Same way with our basement. It's a horror!" Martha spoke with such conviction that her hearers laughed. "Well, it is," she insisted to Emily. "There's a wood room and a coal room, and drying room, and storeroom with nothing but the hose and two old barrels in it. I could put all those things into one room nicely, and have three great big rooms. They could be billiard rooms, or play rooms, or nice workshops. If I had a lot of children in this house I could give them all two rooms apiece."

Emily included Johnnie in her glance. He had his eyes fixed hard on Martha--who avoided them innocently but persistently.

And that thoughtful and prosperous-looking stranger said:

"Wouldn't you like to drive over and look at my plans? Our basement is going to cost an awful lot."

Martha twinkled at the invitation.

"Oh, I just love to look at plans!" she said. "I just love to think about people's houses. I was thinking, if ever I'm a reformer, do you know what I'm going to reform? Everybody's closets!"

Wasn't she lovely, sitting there innocently, Emily thought. No wonder they admired her, all of them.

"You come and reform all my closets," the stranger said. But Mrs. Wright said: "Don't look at mine till I've had a chance to go over them. You've made me a lot of trouble, Martha. The girls won't give me a minute's peace now till I let them start doing their rooms over."

When Emily, having dismissed the visitors, turned from the hall into her living room, the sight of these familiar things almost shocked her. They stirred her, at least, to question the very room she had for years taken for granted. The glamour of that room upstairs seemed to make the rest of the house faded, some way. The living room she had always sat down in with satisfaction. Now it looked--timid--meager--insipid--unexpectant. Its walls and its woodwork were almost the color of its neutral light pongee curtains. Those were good rugs on the oak floor. They were rich, and they were mellow. Emily had bought them recklessly with a large share of the first installment of her inheritance, when she had moved back to the house when Martha was a small girl, and she had never regretted her fling. The davenport and the two chairs that went with it, those most comfortable monstrosities, had been done once in blue corduroy. Well, it was still corduroy. That was about all that could be said for it. But its blue dullness some way had seemed to match the rugs. That was a good table. No one bought a table like that in any town in Illinois. Nor was there a desk like that, which plainly had been cherished for some generations. And how infinitely superior were the pictures on the wall to most of the pictures on the walls of that town. Emily's grandfather, once the Governor of the sprawling infant state of Illinois, had brought that engraving of Mt. Vernon sentimentality to the wilderness because he remembered his mother holding her successive babies up to see the dogs and horses that surrounded the father of his country, who stood in a declamatory attitude on the very brink of the Potomac, with his women folk and youthful intimates hovering pictorially about him.