CHAPTER III

THE BEE-HIVE.

When three years before, Hadyn Stuyvesant, the owner of the property rented by the Carruths, had followed out Constance Carruth’s plans for a model kitchen in which she could make her candy, he was not a little surprised at the sixteen-year-old girl’s practical ideas. She asked him to build an extension to the little cottage at the end of the grounds occupied by Mammy and Charles, and had drawn the plans and specifications herself. The result was a marvel to him.

The extension consisted of three rooms on the first floor and two on the second. Upon entering the door one found one’s self in a good-sized room, with rubber-tiled floor all blue and white, the walls snowy in alabasterine. Here on numberless white enameled shelves were placed the boxes of candy ready for shipment. From this attractive room opened the packing room, floor, walls and ceiling scrupulous. Long zinc-covered tables ready for the pans of candy, little portable stands at hand to hold the boxes in which the candy was to be packed. Perhaps the most practical feature of this packing room was the height of the tables, or more correctly their lack of height. Constance had reason to know that one can be foot-weary after several hours spent in candy-making. Consequently these packing tables were made low enough to enable those working at them to sit upon the comfortable bent-wood chairs while doing the work, which often required several hours, for not only had the candy to be packed in its pretty boxes, but the boxes had to be wrapped and tied with dainty ribbons. Nothing must fall short of perfection.

But the crowning point of Constance’s practicability was shown in the actual kitchen itself. This was also tiled, but the tiles were of shining porcelain, washable, scrubable, scourable to the very limit. A big gas range stood at one side, near it hung pans, pots and kettles of every size and possible need, all of white enamel ware. A big porcelain sink and draining tray stood next. Close at hand was a large table, its top of white marble warranted to withstand the hottest candy which could be poured upon it, to chill it quickly for handling or cutting, and to come forth from its boiling baptism immaculate under the alchemy of hot soapsuds.

On the walls were great hooks, upon which to pull long ropes of molasses or cream candy. Along another side of the kitchen were shelves to hold the hundred and one ingredients which were to be transformed into the most toothsome of dainties, and these were too numerous to name. A spacious closet held aprons, caps, towels, dish-cloths and what not, needed in the work.

On the floor overhead, and reached by a quaint little stairway from the shipping room, was the stock room, where boxes, labels, wrapping paper, twine, and a hundred other needfuls were kept. In one corner a business-like roll-top desk, with still more business-like ledgers, told of the ability of this little lady to keep track of her finances. And room number five? Ah, the eternal feminine! Who says she must waive all claim to her womanly instincts, merge them in the coarser, less refined ones of the hurrying, struggling world around her when she sets out to be a bread-winner among her masculine contemporaries? If some do this, Constance Carruth was not to be numbered among them, and no better proof of it could have been offered than the “fifth wheel to her business wagon,” as she laughingly called room number five. That little room is worthy of minute description.

To begin with, the walls were tinted a soft ivory white, with a delft blue frieze running around the top. The floor was of hard wood, with a pretty blue and white rug spread in the center. On this stood a white enameled table, with snowy linen cover, a reading lamp, the several books and magazines testifying to its primal use. Four or five comfortable wicker chairs, with cushions of pretty figured Japanese crepe, stood about. In one corner a couch with a delft blue and white cover and enough pillows to spell luxury, invited weary bodies to rest when labors were ended, and yet never once hinted that by removing the cover and pillows a bed stood ready for a guest if extra space were needed. Book shelves of white enameled wood filled half one side of the room, and held every sort of cook-book ever published, as well as many of Constance’s favorite authors. A white chiffonnier held many necessary articles, for after one has spent several hours over a boiling kettle one longs for a tub and fresh garments; and all these were at hand in the big closet. Opening from this restful room was a perfectly appointed bathroom. Could plans have been more perfect?

Certainly the girl, bending over the big saucepan, stirring its boiling contents, felt that _her_ little paradise had been gained when she changed from the bustling, rushing Arcade to the peace, tranquillity and refinement of her present surroundings. The accident which short-circuited the switchboard wires in the telephone booth that eventful Labor Day had brought to Mary Willing, even at the cost of a good deal of physical suffering, present advantages and an outlook for the future such as she had never pictured. Indeed, her horizon had been much too circumscribed for her imagination to reach so far. It needed the influence and environment of the past three years to make her fully appreciate the vast difference between the acquisitions which mere dollars can command, and those which true refinement of heart, mind, soul and body hold as invaluable and indeprivable heritages. Possibly the best proof that she had taken the lesson to heart lay in the fact that “Pearl” Willing had completely dropped out of the world’s ken, and in her stead, quiet, dignified Mary Willing moved and had her being. Unconsciously Mrs. Carruth had undertaken to solve a knotty, sociological problem, but the results already obtained seemed to justify her belief that she was right in her estimate of this girl. At all events she had reason to be sanguine of ultimate success in bending a hitherto neglected twig. It needed courage, however, upon Mrs. Carruth’s part to undertake this reformation. From her childhood, to her nineteenth year Mary Willing’s environment had been, if not demoralizing, certainly detrimental to a higher development in any girl. Her associates were coarse, boisterous, heedless girls, without the faintest sense of the fitness of things, or the first rudiments of refinement. To earn enough money to clothe themselves in shoddy finery, to contribute as small a percentage of their earnings to the family purse as possible, and to have as much “fun,” never mind at whose expense, or at what sacrifice of their own dignity, bounded their aims and ambitions. And Mary Willing had seen no reason for not following in their footsteps. Handsomer than any of her companions, and holding a position where her personal charms were conspicuous for all who passed to comment upon them, she had used them to attract the attention of those whom she thought likely to contribute to her pleasure.

To make her more self-conscious, and senselessly pave the way to greater evil, her mother had continually urged her to make the most of her good looks while she had them, assuring her that unless she managed to “catch a rich husband with her handsome face she needn’t hope to get one at all.”

Was it any wonder the girl grew up vain, shallow, and with standards poorly calculated to withstand temptations if offered opportunely? Still, there was a certain something in her which, up to her nineteenth year, had saved her from anything worse than shallow flirtations; and then when everything seemed conspiring to lead her to more serious consequences of her folly, Fate had established close at her side a personality and atmosphere in such contrast to her own, and all she had ever known, that it acted as a dash of cold water acts upon a sleepwalker. At first she was startled, then roused, and finally thoroughly wakened to the perilous path she was following.

But the strangest part of it all lay in the fact that the individual which capricious Dame Fate had used as her instrument never for one moment suspected that she was being used at all, but continued on her sweet, cheery, sunny way entirely unconscious of her responsibilities. Perhaps therein lay her greatest strength. Then came the accident on the river, and Mrs. Carruth, quick to read and comprehend, found a field for the sweetest missionary work a woman can enter upon—that of shaping the life of a young girl for the noblest position to which she can attain—a refined young womanhood, a beautiful wifehood, and a motherhood as perfect as God will give her grace to make it. Mary Willing could hardly have found a more beautiful example, and the three years had wrought miracles.

Mrs. Carruth had made haste slowly. The first year Mary Willing entered upon her duties in the candy kitchen she went and came daily, learning and applying herself with all the enthusiasm her gratitude to those she so admired and strove to emulate inspired. The relations between the girl and Constance were those of valued employee and respected employer. It could not have been otherwise. Mary had a vast deal to _un_learn, the hardest of all things to accomplish, and when old impressions were effaced to begin an entirely new page. Gradually as time passed on the girl grew into her new environment. Old habits of manner and speech gave way to gentler ones, old viewpoints shifted to those of these good friends, who had risen up at such a crucial point in her life and were fitting her to be a little woman in the truest sense. In the course of the three years just passed she and Constance had grown closer to each other. The latter, quick to see the former’s sincere desire to improve, and take advantage of every opportunity to do so, felt the keenest sympathy for her less fortunate sister, and the strongest desire to aid her. Mary’s aim and ambition was to grow “just exactly like Constance Carruth! The dearest, best and loveliest girl that ever lived,” as she confided to her mother. The greatest obstacle to be overcome was the unhappy influence in Mary Willing’s own home life. It sometimes seemed to Mrs. Carruth that whatever good they accomplished in the five and a half working days of the week was entirely undone during the one day and a half which the girl spent in the hurly-burly, the untidiness and hopeless shallowness of her own home, to say nothing of the coarsening influence of a worthless, dissipated father’s presence. Mrs. Carruth believed that Mary Willing had naturally been endowed with instincts far above the average of her class, though from what source inherited she could not understand, and that all needed to develop them was a more wholesome atmosphere, wise guiding, and, of course, separation from former contaminating influences. But she bided her time and, when least expecting to do so, discovered the secret. At length, when she felt the moment to be ripe, she suggested most tactfully that Mary come to live with them, to occupy the little room which had once been Mammy’s, but, since her marriage to Charles, and her removal to the snug cottage adjoining the candy kitchen, had been newly decorated and furnished for what Jean, in her characteristic fashion, termed “the left-overs;” “left-overs” being any extra guest who might claim the hospitality of the family when the other guest room was occupied. It was a pretty little room, up in the third floor at the rear of the house, and overlooked the lawn, the candy kitchen, Mammy’s cottage, and the rolling country beyond owned by Jabe Raulsbury. It had been papered in the softest green paper, with garlands of pink roses as a border. The floor was carpeted with a deeper shade of ingrain filling, upon which lay two pretty rugs in pink and green. Dimity curtains, looped back with chintz bands, draped the windows. The furniture was of white enamel, with plain white iron bedstead. Cushions and coverings, as well as table and bureau scarfs, were of the chintz, edged with inexpensive lace—the bedspread of snowy white. Had the room been designed for Mary Willing’s rich coloring it could hardly have suited her more perfectly. But it had not; Fate was simply working out her scheme not only in color but in influence. How great the influence of that simple little room would prove not even Mrs. Carruth suspected, although she was a firm believer in the influence of one’s surroundings.

When Mrs. Carruth suggested that Mary remain with them in order to be at hand whenever needed in an emergency, and to avoid during the cold, stormy days of winter the long trip to and from her own home, the girl had responded with an eagerness which touched Mrs. Carruth very deeply. “And if I come here to live you must let me pay my board,” she cried, impulsively. Then, noticing the color which crept into the older woman’s face, she hastened to add, contritely: “Oh, dear me! Shall I ever learn how to say things? I’m—I’m so—I mean I know so _little_. Please forgive me, Mrs. Carruth. I didn’t stop to think how rude that was. I ought to have said you must not pay me such a large salary if you let me live here. I know that no amount of money that I could earn could pay my board. I’ve learned _that_ much, you see, even if I don’t seem to have learned very much more during the last two years. But I’m truly, truly trying hard to learn.”

“I know it, dear. Perhaps I am over-sensitive. Old instincts are hard to overcome. No, I do not think we will change the salary. Constance had already thought of increasing the sum she is now paying you, for you earn it. Work has increased rapidly during these two years, and you are very proficient, and very valuable to her.”

“Oh, I am so glad! I want so much to be.”

“You are; so live here with us, and let the little room and the ‘bread and salt’ stand as a part of your salary.”

Mary Willing had never had occasion to enter this room, and when Constance led her to it upon the day she took up her residence with them, the girl stopped short upon the threshold, clasped her hands in a little ecstacy of rapture, and cried: “I’ll live up to every single thing in it, for only a gentlewoman could have arranged such a room, and only a gentlewoman has any right to live in it. It just speaks of that dear, blessed little mother of yours from every corner, and from every single rose on the paper and the chintz; and if I don’t live to make her proud of me I shall want to know why.”