CHAPTER IV

MAKING THE BEST OF IT

"I don't know where to put another thing," said Mrs. Wyndham, pushing aside a hat-box to sit beside it on the rocker, and casting a despairing glance from the shallow closet, already full, to the floor, covered with the heterogeneous contents of two trunks, in the midst of which Barbara was sitting.

It had been decided that Bab, as the liveliest member of the family, should share her mother's room; and a compact was drawn up solemnly pledging Barbara to keep a sharp lookout for symptoms of "blues" in her mother, and, if necessary, take as vigorous measures against them as the immortal Jerry Cruncher used to prevent his wife "flopping." The Wyndhams had taken possession of their new quarters but two hours earlier, and forceful measures against slight despondency were not considered yet in order.

A scream from the next room prevented Bab replying to her mother, and Nixie bounded through the open door, triumphantly worrying a slipper. He recognized Barbara, and dropped his prize to bestow several rapid kisses on the nose he had been the means of damaging before Bab, from her disadvantage-point on the floor, could stop him.

Tom Leighton appeared immediately behind his dog, calling Nixie with no result, for Bab had her arms around the wriggling black bit of enthusiasm, hugging him hard and begging his master to let him stay.

"Mama, this is the doctor who repaired me so nicely. Doctor Leighton--my mother," said Barbara.

"Please don't think me intrusive, Mrs. Wyndham," said Tom, stepping forward to take the delicate hand extended to him. "I am the son of John Leighton, a friend of your husband, and I wanted to ask if I could be of use in getting you in order. I'm a jack-of-all-trades, and have been boarding long enough to have learned dodges."

"I remember your father," said Mrs. Wyndham, cordially. "It is very pleasant to find a friend among strangers. I don't see what you can do, unless you can build a closet. This tiny cubby Bab and I must share is already overflowing, yet just look!" And Mrs. Wyndham made a comprehensive gesture toward the littered floor.

"I suppose we've too many clothes, but we don't dare give away one thing, because we may never be able to get any more, and we're going to buy patent patterns and make over this stock until we're old and gray. I expect that to be soon, however, if I have to sew," said Bab, scrambling to her feet and tossing up Nixie's purloined slipper for him to catch.

"A dog broke and entered--entered any way--and stole Jessamy's slipper--oh, I beg pardon!" said Phyllis, stopping short in the doorway at the unexpected apparition of Tom.

"My niece, Miss Phyllis Wyndham--and my elder daughter Jessamy, Doctor Leighton," added Mrs. Wyndham, as Jessamy followed Phyllis.

"I came to ask if you had any idea of what Jessamy and I could do with our things, auntie," said Phyllis. "We haven't begun to make an impression on the room, yet the closet and drawers are full."

"Bab and I are in the same plight; how do people get on in such narrow space?" sighed Mrs. Wyndham.

"You'll have to have a wigwam," said Tom.

"A wigwam! That would have no closet at all; besides, where could we build it in New York?" laughed Phyllis.

"In that corner; I'll make it," said Tom. "It's a corner shelf, with hooks in the under side and a curtain around it. It's the only kind of closet I have, for my room is a hall bedroom. You can keep things dust won't hurt in there. Then you want a divan--a woven-wire cot-bed, with the legs cut off, fastened by hinges to a box made to fit it. We could upholster it between us. It would be larger than the ready-made divans, and hold more; you'll be surprised to see what it holds. Then, if one of you were ill, it would be useful as a couch."

"There spoke the doctor," said Jessamy. "A couch is always useful. I suppose we shall have to have a trunk in each room besides," she added ruefully.

"If you could bring yourself to part with that table, you could set the trunk--the flat-topped one--in the window, and I could case it in with white pine; we'd cover it all over with felt, and it wouldn't be a very bad-looking book-stand," said Tom.

"Well, you are a genius!" cried Bab, in open admiration.

Phyllis sang softly under her breath, to the tune of "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning":

"All hail to the doctor who seems to be able To mend up a nose, or to make up a table! We gladly would cheer him, but that it seems risky, For cheers in a boarding-house may be too frisky."

"Well, I never!" laughed Tom. "Say, was that--of course it had to be--improvised?"

"Oh, Phyl is a genius," said Jessamy, proudly. "One of these days her name will be in all the magazines, and at last in the encyclopedia."

"And maybe in oblivion," added Phyl. "What time do you--do we dine, Doctor Leighton?"

"At six; I suppose you want to get ready. It is your first appearance in a boarding-house dining-room; you must make a strong impression."

"Yes, and only look at my court-plaster! Nixie, your first impression was too strong," groaned Bab.

"You mustn't let Nixie bother you; he'll try to be friendly," warned Tom.

"Let him, and his master, too," said Mrs. Wyndham, heartily. "You will both cheer us, and I appreciate your kindness very fully."

"Not a bit kindness, ma'am," said Tom, promptly. "I tell you, you don't know how forlorn a boy is alone in a boarding-house. It does me good to get a home breath again."

"We'll help each other if we can," said Mrs. Wyndham, gently. "You can't be more than a year or so older than my girls, and a nice boy will be a welcome addition to storm-tossed lassies' lives."

"Not to mention Nixie; _dogs_ are so dear," said Bab, with a slight, naughty emphasis on "dogs."

Tom and Nixie departed, followed by praise from all the Wyndhams. Fifteen minutes later a gong sounded through the house, and Mrs. Wyndham and the girls made their long descent into the basement.

Two tables ran the full length of the dining-room, at the first of which the newcomers took their places. A severe old lady, presented to them as Mrs. Hardy, sat at its head, beside Mrs. Wyndham. She demanded--and so received--more attention than any one else in the house; her favorite theme was her past splendors and the dignity of her acquaintances. Opposite Mrs. Wyndham sat a big, kindly-looking man, who said he was "just in" from a Western trip, thus revealing himself a traveling salesman. He was pathetically fond of his two overgrown, ill-mannered children, and deprecating toward his peevish wife, who, with the elegance brought from her early apprenticeship to a milliner, assumed superiority to her less pretentious husband, thus keeping him in wholesome abeyance and general readiness to endow her with ornaments.

Three over-dressed, painfully vivacious girls in a row completed the line opposite the Wyndhams, with a big man at the other end of the table, who combated with a sort of fury every proposition made by any one else. Beside him sat a widow who was a bookkeeper in a department store, and who looked utterly worn out and anemic. Two school-teachers, middle-aged and drab of complexion, with the aggressive air of women who had from girlhood fought the world to maintain a foothold in it, filled in the line between the wilted widow and Jessamy.

The girls were too young to realize all that these melancholy types stood for, but their poor mother felt, with utter heartsickness, that this was the fate of those whom poverty made homeless and forced to struggle for existence.

The second table was filled with men of varying degrees of youth, solitary and unattached, some of whom lived under the roof, but the majority came in from outside for meals only, thus belonging to the class designated as "table boarders."

This table almost to a man stared at Mrs. Wyndham and her three charges, especially at Jessamy. Tom Leighton sat there, and Phyllis, who was quickest of the three to seize a situation, saw him flush with annoyance, and guessed that they, and particularly Jessamy's beauty, were the subject of impertinent comment.

Bab was half amused and wholly excited by the new experience; there was something she liked in rubbing elbows with such a singular world. But the sense of humor of all the others failed them, and they ate but lightly, pecking from the individual vegetable-dishes, which resembled birds' bath-tubs, with not much more appetite than the birds themselves would have had.

Jessamy heard a loud whisper asking for "a knockdown to the beauty" as she smiled and bowed to Tom Leighton in leaving the room, and Phyllis was stopped by the three resplendent maidens, who introduced themselves as May Daly, Fanny Harmon, and Daisy Heimberger. "You just come?" they asked--it seemed to Phyllis they all talked at once. "Say, ain't your sister handsome? My, I think she's simply great! Too bad the other one got cut so; must be her who fell up the steps yest'day when the young doc was goin' out. Mis' Black was tellin' us last night. Funny way to meet! Do you know any of the other young gentlemen? They're awful nice, but I s'pose we won't have any chance now you've come!" This with a giggle that showed doubt of her own prediction. "They take us girls to the theater real often Sat'day nights--not doc, though; do you know him?"

"Mrs. Wyndham's husband and his father were friends," said Phyllis, prudently. It was the first time in her short life it had occurred to her to explain her actions.

"Well, come see us; we've got a room with two beds on the third floor." And Phyllis noticed, as they nodded good night, that each wore two buttons bearing photographs of the other two members of their trio.

"Very likely they are nice in their way--poor things!" she thought; "and share comforts and sorrows--but, oh, dear!" And she followed her family sadly up the stairs.

Their own rooms looked very peaceful and refined to the Wyndhams when they got back to them, and Phyllis and Barbara felt comforted when the door was closed behind them; but Jessamy sank into a chair in blank despondency, and her mother could not smile at Bab's wildest sallies.

"First aid to the injured!" cried a cheery voice, and Ruth Wells burst into the gloom--"like an arc-light," Barbara said, jumping up to hug her rapturously.

"No, don't; I've tacks and a hammer here," said Ruth, struggling free. "I knew you had no closets, or none worth calling one, so I came to show you how to make a charity."

"A what?" asked Jessamy.

"A charity; it covers a multitude of things, you see," laughed Ruth. "You take a board--we can get one down-stairs, probably--saw it off to the right length, and put it in a corner. Then you drive hooks--"

"In the under side--we know," interrupted Phyllis. "Only Doctor Leighton says it is a wigwam."

"Mama, let me call that boy; we'll have a bee--a be-autiful time, too," cried Bab, springing up. "I wonder if I could get him." And she looked wistfully out of the door.

By a strange chance, Tom's door happened to be open. "Do you want me?" he called, seeing the eager little face he had patched up so carefully.

"Yes. Ruth Wells has come, and we're going to make a wigwam, only she calls it a charity, because, she says, it covers a multitude of things," said Bab. "Nixie too; come, Nix."

"I don't know who Ruth Wells is, but we shall be glad to come," responded Tom, with alacrity.

In five minutes the little room was ringing with fun. The "charitable wigwam"--Phyllis's compromise on the name--could not be made for lack of boards, but the young people managed to cover up the dismal impressions of their first experience of the bleak side of life, and that was making a real charity, as Jessamy pointed out in bidding Ruth good night.

The wigwam was made in the end, the divan too, and the Wyndhams began to learn to adjust themselves to the new conditions. Tom had become almost one of themselves, and Nixie a necessity and no longer a luxury, as Bab noted. Tom was such a bright, honest, boyish young creature that no greater piece of good fortune could well have befallen the girls in their new trouble than his friendship--a fact their mother recognized gratefully. As to Tom himself, the motherly kindness of Mrs. Wyndham and the sweet, frank companionship of the girls were a boon to the young fellow, who had loved his own mother and sisters well.

Bab and he were the best comrades, but he admired beautiful Jessamy, and was not less proud of her than the girls were; and Phyllis he regarded from the first with affectionate reverence, as the embodiment of perfect maidenhood.

Winter was coming on, and for the first time in their lives the Wyndhams tried to make old answer for new in the matter of garments.

"Not a penny must be spent this season," declared Jessamy, sternly. "A year hence we may earn new clothes."

All the summer garments had been laid away in the new divan. "Never throw away a winter thing in the spring, nor a summer thing in the fall," advised Ruth, that little woman wise in ways and means. "You can't tell how anything looks out of its season, nor what you may want. Set up a scrap-box, and tuck everything into it; it's ten to one you'll be grateful for the very thing you thought least hopeful. Many a time I've all but hugged an old faded ribbon because its one bright part was just the right shade and length to line a collar."

The scrap-box was therefore established, and easily filled from a stock not yet depleted. Jessamy's artistic talents developed in the direction of hats. Ruth taught her to take the long wrists of light suede gloves which were past wearing, and stretch them over a frame for the foundation of especially pretty hats.

Jessamy made three hats, one for each of them, with crowns of old glove wrists and velvet puffs around the brims; and in the new scrap-box she found quills and ribbons and flowers to trim them, so that all three were different, yet each "a James Dandy," according to Tom Leighton's authoritative verdict.

Dressmaking was a more serious matter, but the three Wyndhams essayed it with the courage of ignorance. Ruth brought down mysterious brown tissue-paper patterns--"perforated to confuse the innocent," Bab said--and announced that she had come for a dress parade. Her friends were still too unversed in being poor to realize that when she came to them Ruth was sacrificing her own good for theirs, since her time meant money, and little Ruth's pockets jingled only when she spent long days at her needle.

"Get out all your last year's glories," commanded Ruth, perched on the footboard of Jessamy's and Phyllis's bed. "That's a pretty dark-blue cloth suit; whose is that?"

"Phyllis's; it was nice, but she tried it on the other day, and it's too full in the skirt," said Jessamy.

"I don't believe I'd dare touch anything so tailor-made; if we rip it we shall never be able to give it the same finish. I'll tell you, Phyllis; we can take out the gathers and lay a box-pleat in the back; that will make it look flatter and more in the present style," cried Ruth, with sudden illumination. "Now isn't it true that there's good blown to some one on all winds? If you didn't have stoves in your rooms, you wouldn't have any place to heat irons; and don't I know the impossibility of getting a flatiron from the lower regions when one is boarding?"

"Infernal regions do you mean, when you say 'lower'?" inquired Tom, from the doorway.

"Go away! This is a feminine occasion; no boys allowed," cried Ruth.

"Mysteries of Isis?" suggested Tom. "I only want a buttonhole sewed up; wouldn't the goddess allow that?"

"Yes," said Phyllis, holding out her hand for the collar Tom was waving appealingly. "It is rather in the line of the service about to begin in this temple. We are going into dressmaking."

"You'll succeed; you can do anything," said Tom, watching Phyllis's fingers as she twitched the thread in a scientific manner to draw the gaping buttonhole together. "Those laundry people apparently dry collars by hanging them upon crowbars thrust through the buttonholes. Couldn't I help with your dressmaking? I know there are bones in waists, and maybe I could set them."

The four girls groaned. "Such a pale, feeble little jokelet!" sighed Bab. "Take it to the hospital to be measured for crutches."

"Here's your collar. Run away and play with the other little boys; we're busy. By and by, if you're good, we may let you take out bastings," said Phyllis.

"Jupiter! That sounds familiar," sighed Tom. "My mother used to say just that when I was seven. Much obliged for the collar. When you want me for the bastings sing out, and I'll pardon your impertinence in consideration of service rendered." And Tom disappeared.

"Phyl will do very well with the blue, then," said Ruth, resuming practicalities. "What are your prospects, Other Two?"

"I had this gray, and I loved it," said Jessamy, smoothing a chinchilla-trimmed jacket fondly. "I think it isn't hurt at all, and I shouldn't dare touch it."

"There's a spot on the back where you leaned up against something greasy, but French chalk will make it all right," said Ruth, issuing her mandates from her perch like a mounted general at the head of an army.

"Mine was brown, with mink," said Barbara, sadly; "but I spilled something, sometime--I don't know what or when--on the front of the skirt, and I don't see what you can do with it; I haven't a smidge of the goods."

"A what?" murmured Ruth, absent-mindedly, wrinkling her brow over the problem. "Tailor-made or not, we shall have to rip that skirt and put in a breadth of something else; and it will never look right--No, I have it!" she cried, interrupting herself and sliding to her feet with a triumphant little shout.

"Eureka, Miss Archimedes! What is it?" asked Phyllis.

"Braid!" cried Ruth. "We'll get narrowest silk soutache--Jessamy shall draw a design--and you shall braid the entire front breadth of your skirt, Bab, resolving with each stitch to be neater in the future."

"I never saw such cleverness!" cried Jessamy, admiringly, while Bab made a wry face over the prospect.

"And now for house wear," said Ruth. "Here are some pretty light silks; the skirts are good, but the waists are worn out."

"I thought, perhaps, we could make fancy waists of the skirts to wear with our cloth gowns," said Phyllis, doubtfully, turning over a heap of light colors.

"Could? Why, of course we can. Let's rip them now," said Ruth, whipping out her own little scissors with alacrity. The four pairs of hands made quick work of the ripping, and Ruth cut out three waists by the tissue-paper patterns she had brought, pinned and basted them together, and left her friends to carry out her instructions.

Phyllis proved most adept at the new art; Jessamy succeeded fairly, but Bab had a dreadful time with her waist. Seams puckered and drew askew because of her reckless way of sewing them up in various widths, yet she felt aggrieved when the waist proved one-sided on trying on. And as to sleeves, Bab's would not go in with anything approaching civility and decorum. The poor child ripped, basted, tried on, ripped again, refusing all help in her proud determination to be independent, till her cheeks were purple, and she threw the waist down in despair and cried forlornly.

Tom surprised her in this tempest, and laughed at her until she longed to flay him. Then, sincerely repentant for having aggravated her woes, he humbly begged her pardon, and took her out for a walk with Nixie to cool her cheeks and calm her ruffled nerves. When she returned, Phyllis had taken it upon herself to disregard her wishes, and had basted in the refractory sleeves for her, which, like everything else, had yielded to Phyllis's charm and gone meekly into place. From this point Bab's path was smooth before her, and the last of the three waists, the first attempt of the girls at practical work, was brought to a triumphant finish.

There was real pleasure in using their wits in these things, the girls found; there was truly a bright side to poverty. But the ugly side remained--the jealousy of the three girls who were their opposites at table, as well as literally, and who disliked the Wyndhams for their difference in accent, manners, birth, for their unlikeness to themselves, for which neither side was to blame nor to praise.

And Mrs. Wyndham was ailing, fretting her heart out over the present situation and her poor girls' future. And--hardest of all to bear--the landlady made them feel that she considered the rate of their board insufficient to remunerate her for the immense, though to them imperceptible, generosity with which she served them.

But the most serious aspect of the anxieties closing in around the Wyndhams was that, in spite of all their prudence, money slipped away, laundry bills took on alarming proportions, and they had never dreamed how fast five-cent car fares could swell into as many dollars. Although they had taken care to make their expenditures come well within their income, they saw that there was not going to be enough to meet an emergency should it arise, and Jessamy and Phyllis talked till midnight many a night discussing how they could put their young shoulders to the wheel and join the great army of wage-earners.