CHAPTER IV
HER IDEAL GIRL STEPS IN
ALL the time Barby was gone I didn't write a line in this record. Icouldn't. Things seemed too trivial. Besides, the house had thatstrange, hushed air that you feel at a funeral when you're waiting forit to begin. I couldn't bear to touch the piano. It didn't seem right tobe playing gay tunes while there was such awful sorrow in the world, andin all probability Father and Barby were spending their last daystogether.
I declined the invitation to Laura Nelson's dance on that account, andafter Tippy had gone to bed I put on Barby's only black dress, a chiffondinner gown that she had left behind in her closet, and sat by thewindow in the moonlight, listening to the music of piano and drumfloating up from the Nelson cottage. I had turned the silver trimming inso as not to show, and looking down on the clinging black folds thattrailed around me, I pictured to myself so vividly the way an orphan ora young widow must feel, that the tears splashed down into my lap tillI was afraid it would make the chiffon all crinkly. The dance musicsounded perfectly heartless to me. I could understand how bitter itmight make one feel who was really in mourning.
When Barby came home and I told her about it, she said that I shouldhave gone to the dance; that our first duty to ourselves and the worldis to keep ourselves normal. After I'd spent the morning helping herunpack and hearing everything she had to tell about her week with Fatherand his departure to some unknown port, she told me she wanted me tostay out of doors all the rest of the day. I must go on the Quest ofCheerful Things, and she hoped that I'd be able to report at least twoadventures.
The two things which happened are that I went to a furniture auction andmet my ideal girl. While they're not particularly cheerful things,they're important enough to be recorded here.
It began by Babe Nolan bumping into me as I turned a corner, after I'dbeen out nearly half the afternoon. Babe is a far cry from anybody'sideal girl, that is, as far as looks and manners are concerned, but shehas her good points. For one thing she is absolutely sincere, and it'salways interesting to hear what new trouble she's been in.
She had her bathing suit bundled carelessly under her arm, and said shecouldn't stay because she'd promised to be up at the West End beach byfour o'clock, and it was almost that time then. But she'd heard thatthere was a furniture auction going on in front of the old Hollowayhouse, which has been vacant for years, and she just had to go by andsee if there was a white bedstead in the lot, with hollow brass balls onthe posts. She was sure that there couldn't be, because she'd been toldthat the furniture had been brought up from Truro or Wellfleet, or someplace down the Cape. It belonged to relatives of the Holloway family.Still she felt possessed to look, and she supposed she'd go through lifelike the Wandering Jew, looking for that bedstead and never finding it.
Then she told me why. Babe is very unfortunate in her family life,having a stepfather which complicates matters. All her brothers andsisters are either steps or halves. She has no whole ones. And they areall socialists in a way, believing in a community of interests, such aswearing each other's clothes without asking, and using each other'sthings. Right while Babe was talking to me she had on one of herhalf-brother Jim's outing shirts, turned in V at the neck instead of herown middy blouse, because Viola had walked off with her last clean one.
With everybody free to root through her bureau drawers, and with nolocks in the house that work, of course she has absolutely no privacy,and she had several letters that she wouldn't have the family read forworlds. They were too sacred, and she couldn't bear to destroy them, forthey breathed devotion in every line, and were her first of the kind.She thought of burying them under the garden hedge, but that would havenecessitated digging them up every time she wanted to re-read them, andthere was danger of the puppy trailing her and unearthing them if shewent too often to that hallowed spot.
One night just before she and Viola went to Yarmouth for a visit, shefound, quite by accident, that the brass balls on her bedposts werescrewed on and were hollow. So she folded the letters up small andstuffed them into one, with a dried rose and a broken cuff-link that hadassociations, and screwed it back tight.
What was her horror when she came home two weeks later to find that hermother had had the room done over in their absence as a surprise for herand Viola. She had bought twin beds of bird's-eye maple and given oneold bed to a Salvation Army man who was going through town collectingjunk, and sent the other to a camp up in the White Mountains where hermother's people go every year. She didn't know which went where.
Now there's no telling how, when or where those letters will next seethe light of day. It was bad enough to lose the letters, but Babe saysshe'll simply die if they fall into her Aunt Mattie's hands. She's theprim, cold kind who makes you feel that anything sentimental shouldnever be mentioned. It's something to be ashamed of. Tippy's that kind.
I have written all this out not because it's important in itself, butbecause it's a link in a chain. If I hadn't happened to meet Babe and gowith her to hunt for that bedstead, I wouldn't have been at the auctionwhen my ideal girl came along, or when Richard drove by and I hailed himto borrow a quarter, and he stopped and saw her. What she said and whathe said, and what happened afterward was like a game of "Consequences."
All sorts of stuff lay around on the grass--dishes and bed-slats and oddandirons. There was a beaded mat and a glass case of wax flowers, and amotto, "The Lord is my Shepherd," cross-stitched in pink and grayworsted, sitting right out on the grass. Babe said probably it was thework of hands long dead and gone, and didn't it seem sad that theyshould come to this end? But the tide was in and she'd have to go. Shemight have known she'd not find that bedstead. Would I walk up to thebeach with her?
But I told her no, I'd just rummage around awhile longer to see whatelse there was for sale. Maybe I could get some "local color" that way.Babe knows about my writing. She is one of the girls I read my novel to,and she respects my talent. So she left me. I did get some local colorby staying, and took out my pencil and pad, which I always carry aroundin my knitting bag, and made a note of it.
An old-fashioned hoop-skirt was thrown across a rose-bush, and a blacksilk bonnet lay under it, beside a pair of worn shoes. Both the bonnetand the shoes had what Tippy calls a "genteel" air, and made me thinkthey must have belonged to a prim maiden lady with proud nose andslender feet, probably called "Miss Althea." The name came to me like aninspiration, I could almost see her standing by the rose-bush.
Just then some boys, who were wrestling around, bumping into everything,upset a barrel on the grass, and a great pile of framed photographs camerolling out. Some of them were comical enough for a Sunday supplement,women in tight basques and little saucer hats, and men withwhiskers--beards or perfectly ridiculous bushy "burnsides." A crowd ofsummer people began making joking remarks about them to set each otherto laughing.
But there was one in an oval walnut frame that I couldn't bear to havethem make fun of, the photograph of a lady with a little boy leaningagainst her shoulder. She had a strong, kind face, with such steadfasteyes looking straight at you, that you just knew everybody went to herwith their troubles. The boy was a dear little fellow, serious as ajudge, with his hair brushed in a long roll on the top of his head inone of those old-fashioned coxcomb curls.
One of the girls from the hotel picked it up and began declaiming averse from "Somebody's Darling," that's in one of our school readers.
"Kiss him once for somebody's sake.
* * * * * *
One bright curl from its fair mates take---- They were somebody's pride you know."
It came over me in a great wave how I would feel if it were Barby'spicture thrown out that way for strangers to ridicule and step on, orthe one I've always loved of Father, when he was a little boy, hugginghis white rabbit. I felt that I simply must save it from furtherdesecration. The only way was to buy it. The man said I could have anyframe in the barrel, picture thrown in free, for twenty-five cents,w
ithout waiting for it to be put up at auction. They were in a hurry toget through. I told him I'd take it, then I discovered I hadn't a pennyleft in my knitting bag. I'd spent my last one on the way down, treatingBabe to a soda water.
It was right while I was standing there with the frame in my hands,uncertain whether to go to the bakery and borrow a quarter or ask theman if he'd take my note for it till next day, that Judith Gilfred cameinto the yard with a girl I'd never seen before. I knew at a glance thatit must be the cousin she'd been expecting from the South. She's talkedabout her for a month, and said such gushing things that I was preparedto see quite a pretty girl, but not the most beautiful one I had everseen in my life. That's what she is, and also my ideal of all that isgracious and lovely and sweet.
She's a blonde with the most exquisite hair, the color of amber orhoney, with little gold crinkles in it. And her eyes--well, they makeyou think of clear blue sapphires. I loved her from the moment Judithintroduced us. Loved her smile, the way it lights up her face, and hervoice, soft and slow, blurring her r's the way Barby does. From herlittle white-slippered feet to the jewelled vanity box on a slenderchain around her neck, she looks exactly as I'd choose to look if Icould make myself over. Her name is Esther Gilfred.
Judith must have told her as much about me as me about her, for she wasso cordial and dear. Judith has been my most intimate friend ever sinceI started to school. Esther was so interested in the auction. One of hergreatest charms I think is her enthusiasm for whatever you happen to beinterested in. She made the picture I was carrying around seem doublydesirable, just by saying in that indescribably charming way of hersthat antique frames are quite the rage now. There is such a fad for themin her town.
We must have spent more than half an hour poking around among all thequeer old things being auctioned off, when I heard the honk of anautomobile horn, which I recognized as Richard's. He was signaling me.He had slowed down as he came opposite the place, to see why such acrowd was gathered in there, and, as he did so, caught sight of us.
He stopped when I waved to him, and I ran out and asked him to loan me aquarter. As he fished one out of his pocket, he told me he'd take mehome if I was ready to go.
So I ran back to pay for the frame, and ask the girls what time they'dbe ready to go rowing next morning. While Judith was answering, Estherlaid her hand on my arm in her enthusiastic way and exclaimed in a lowtone, "Who is that young Apollo you spoke to? He has the most gorgeousdark eyes I ever saw, and the shoulders of an athlete. He's simplystunning!"
On the way home I told Richard what Esther said about him. He looked sopleased and conscious, that it was funny to watch his face.
"Which one said it?" he asked. "The little goldilocks in blue, or theone under the red parasol?"
I surely was astonished, for I had no idea that Richard was soobserving. Heretofore, he had never seemed to notice how girls looked,or what they wore.