Sweet-potatoes are firm.”
This last item brought Florida to her mind, and she thought for a moment of the gray-white soil which produces the sweet-potatoes; of the breezy sweep of the pine-barrens, with their carpet of wild flowers; of the blue Florida sky. Then she put down the sheet (it was an American paper), rose, and going to the window in her turn, looked out. It was the 13th of December. The autumn had been warm, and even now it was not cold, though the air was damp and chilling; fine gray rain had been falling steadily ever since the sluggish daylight—slow and unwilling—had dawned over vast London. The large house was in the London quarter called S.W.; it stood at a corner of Sloane Street, and these American travellers were occupying, temporarily, its ground-floor; it was literally a ground-floor, for there was only one step at the outer door. Miss Remington surveyed Sloane Street. Its smooth wooden pavement was dark and slippery; the houses opposite had a brown-black hue—brown in the centre of each brick and black at its edges; a vine was attached to one of these dwellings, and its leaves, though dripping, had a dried appearance, which told of the long-lasting dusts of the summer. Omnibuses, with their outside seats empty, and their drivers enveloped in oil-skins, constantly succeeded each other; the glass of their windows was obscured by damp, and their sides bore advice (important in the blackest of towns) about soap; each carried on its top something that looked like a broomstick, from which floated mournfully a wet rag. Among the pedestrians, the women all had feet that appeared to be entirely unelastic, like blocks of wood; they came clumping and pounding along, clutching at their skirts behind with one hand, and holding an open umbrella with the other; the clutch was always ineffectual, the skirts were always draggled. These women all wore small black bonnets; and the bonnets attached to the heads of the poorer class had a singularly battered appearance, as though they had been kicked across the floor—or even the street—more than once. Hansom cabs passed and repassed. The horse belonging to those which were empty walked slowly, his head hanging downward; the horse of those that carried a fare moved onward with a gait which had the air of being rapid, because he continually turned his high-held nose to the right or the left, according to the guidance of his driver, making a pretence at the same time of turning his body also; this last, however, he never really did unless compelled, for it would have been one step more. Huge covered carts, black and dripping, devoted (so said the white lettering on their sides) to the moving of furniture, rolled slowly by, taking with cynical despotism all the space they required, like Juggernauts. A red-faced milk-woman appeared, wearing a dirty white apron over her drabbled short skirt, with indescribable boots, and the inevitable small battered black bonnet. The gazer, finding the milk-woman more depressing even than the hansom cab-horses, turned and went to a fourth window, which overlooked the narrow street at the side of the house. Here the battered stone pavement held shallow pools of yellow water in each of its numerous depressions. On the opposite corner a baker’s shop displayed in its windows portly loaves, made in the shape of the Queen’s crown—loaves of a clay-colored hue, and an appearance which suggested endurance. There were also glass jars containing lady’s-fingers of immemorial age, and, above these, a placard announcing “Mineral Waters.” Next came a green-grocer’s stall, with piles of small, hard, dark green apples. Miss Remington imagined a meal composed of one of the clay-colored loaves, the mineral waters, the lady’s-fingers, and the hard apples. A hideous child now appeared, with a white face streaked with dirt, and white eyelashes; it wore a red feather in its torn wet gypsy hat, and it carried a skipping-rope, with which, drearily, it began to skip, after a while, in the rain. A younger child followed, equally hideous and dirty; it was sucking an orange as it trailed after its sister. Neither of the two looked hungry; but, oh! so unhealthy, so depraved. Miss Remington gave it up; she returned to her place by the fire.
Ten minutes later the door opened, and Mrs. Moore came in, freshly dressed. She drew an easy-chair forward and seated herself, putting out two dainty little shoes towards the blaze.
“Those English people upstairs are too ghastly,” she announced. “They do nothing but drink tea.”
“They have the best of it, then,” answered Miss Remington. “For probably they like it, and perhaps it is good. Whereas what we want—the coffee—is atrocious.”
“Just wait till I get home,” responded Amy, drumming noiselessly on the arm of her chair with her finger-tips, the motion drawing sparkles from her diamond rings. “I have only found one place in Europe where the coffee is as good as ours, and that is Vienna. But as regards tea, they do keep at it, that family upstairs. First, they all drink it for breakfast. Then again with luncheon. Then it goes in a third time at five or six, with piles of bread-and-butter. Then they have it in the evening after dinner. And if they go to the theatre or anything of that sort, they have a cup after they come home. In addition, if any one has a cold, or is tired, or has been out in the rain, there are extra supplies ordered. I should think it would make them nervous enough to fly.”
“It doesn’t appear to,” answered Gertrude. “We look far more nervous than they do. They are remarkably handsome, and pictures of health each one.”
“I am sure I don’t want to look like them,” responded Amy.
Miss Remington made no reply. Amy’s firm belief that she had still the beauty of twelve or fifteen years before always rankled a little in the older woman’s mind. Amy had been a very pretty girl, the pet of a large family circle, who thought that she had conferred a wonderful favor when she gave her hand to Philip Moore. Through the years which had passed, they had never concealed this opinion. And sometimes it was apparent also that Amy (in her own mind at least) agreed with them. At present her beauty was gone; in appearance she was insignificant. Her small figure was wasted, her little face was pallid, her blue eyes had lost their bright color, and the golden hair had grown ominously thin.
Presently she began again. “When one is abroad, if it rains, one is ended; one can’t get up home occupations in deadly rooms like these; at least I can’t. To-night there is Cavalleria, but between that and this nothing. Have you any books?”
“I have Vapour upstairs. Shall I get it?”
“That analytical thing? I hate analytical novels, and can’t imagine why any one writes them. Why don’t you talk? You’re as dumb as an owl.”
“What shall I say?”
“Anything you like. Why people write analytical novels will do as a starter.”
Miss Remington, who was embroidering, lifted her eyes. “I suppose you could tell me a great deal about Philip’s disposition, couldn’t you? All sorts of queer unexpected little ins and outs; oddities; surprises; and trip-you-up-in-the-dark places?”
“I rather think I could,” answered Amy, laughing.
“And well as I and all our family believe that we know him, I dare say you could astonish us with details and instances which would show him in lights which we have never suspected?”
“Of course I could.”
“Well, if all that you know should be carefully written down, it would be a study of Philip’s character which would be very interesting to those who think they know him. My idea is that the persons who write analytical novels, and those also who like to read them, are interested in the study of character generally, as you and I are interested in Philip’s in particular.”
Amy yawned. “But they put such little things in those novels—such trifles!”
“When Philip refused to buy that exquisite little drawing of Du Maurier’s that was for sale in Bond Street the other day—refused, though he was longing for it, simply because he had said that he would not buy another article of any kind or description, not even a pin, as long as he was abroad—was it not as vivid an example of his obstinacy (especially as that unexpected check from home had made it perfectly easy for him to indulge his longing) as if he had refused a Senatorship because he had said some time that he would ne
ver live in Washington?”
“Oh, I hope he has not said that!” answered Mrs. Moore. “Because if he has, he will stick to it, and I shall have endless trouble to persuade him out of it. For there is nothing I should like better than to live in Washington—I’ve been thinking of it for a long time. He need not have anything to do with the government, you know.”
“And when he flung that footstool of yours through the window into the garden last spring, breaking all the glass, wasn’t that as much an instance of uncontrollable temper as if he had knocked a man down?”
“The footstool was the embroidered velvet one,” answered Amy, “and it was completely spoiled—out all night in the rain. I have to have footstools, because I’m so short; I can’t stretch my legs all over the room, as you can. I was sitting in the study for an hour or two that day while they were sweeping the drawing-room, and I told Rosa to bring me one; and then when I went out, I forgot it, and there it staid. But it was a very little thing, I am sure, to be so furious about.”
“If it had happened only once, yes,” answered Gertrude, smiling. “But I seem to have heard before of footstools forgotten in the middle of the floor in the study, and its master coming in after dark in a hurry, and not expecting to find them there.”
“Ten times. Ten times at least,” responded Amy, gleefully. “It’s the funniest thing in the world. There’s a perfect fatality about it.”
The door opened, and a little boy and girl came in. They were very beautiful children, although slender and rather pale. They went to their mother and kissed her, climbing to her lap and the arm of her chair.
“A story!” demanded the boy. “About the dog who had a house up in a tree.”
“No,” said the girl. “About Wolla Kersina, the fairy.”
“But it isn’t story-time,” answered Mrs. Moore. “If you have them now, there’ll be none when you go to bed.”
Fritz and Polly considered this statement thoughtfully; they decided to wait until bedtime.
“Come on, Poll; let’s play water-cure,” said the boy.
“Well,” answered the girl, assentingly. She went to a closet and drew out a box, from which she took forty small china dolls, arrayed in silks and laces. “Here’s the passhints,” she said, arranging them on the floor.
“I’m the head doctor,” said the boy. “Is the passhints ready?” he inquired, in a gruff tone. Kneeling down, he extended his forefinger menacingly towards the first doll. “Good-morning. How are yer? You have a turrible fever, an’ you must take twenty baths, and a sitz and a pack, before eating a mossel.”
“Fritzy Moore, she’ll die with all that,” said the girl, indignantly, rescuing the doll. “That’s Grace Adelaide, and she’s delicate.”
Fritz went on to the next one. “Fer you, a shower-bath, and needles, and the deuce, every five minutes.”
“I’ve no appetite, doctor,” said Polly, speaking in a very weak voice for a doll whom she drew from the line. “I’ve been rather anxious because my ten children” (here she hustled forward rapidly ten of the smaller dolls) “have all had typhoid fever most dangerously for more than three years.”
“Vegetubble baths and the mind-cure,” ordered Fritz.
“I’m going to play I’m a lady who has come with her child to call on a passhint,” said the girl. She took a large doll from the closet, drew her own lips tightly together, and, speaking in a melancholy voice, said: “I’m very sorry, Maud Violet, that we accepturred Mrs. Razzers’s invitation to stay to dinner at this water-cure, for Mrs. Razzers isn’t very rich; I don’t think she has got more than twenty-five cents; and so we must be very careful. Eat just as little as you possibly can, Maud Violet, an’ say ‘no-thank-yer’ to everything, just ’cep’ meat and potatoes.” Dragging the doll by its hand, she walked with dignified steps towards the side window, where she seated herself on the floor with her back against the wall, the doll by her side. “No-thank-yer,” she said, as if speaking to a servant; “no soup. (Maud Violet, say ‘no-thank-yer’!)”
Mrs. Moore, meanwhile, had glanced towards the table. “French again? Why are you forever reading French books?”
“Aren’t they the cleverest?”
“They have so many s’écriais—he or she s’écriaid—as I always translate that ‘shriek,’ they go shrieking all down the page,” answered Amy. She made a long stretch and took two paper-covered volumes from the table. “Lemaitre? Who is he? Oh, it isn’t a novel. And this other one is that Bashkirtseff thing! The most perfectly unnatural book I have ever read.”
“I thought it so natural.”
“Mercy!”
“I don’t mean that it was natural to write it for publication, or even, perhaps, to write it at all; I referred to the ideas, merely. If some invisible power should reproduce with exact truthfulness each one of our secret thoughts, do you think we should come out of it so infinitely better than Marie Bashkirtseff?”
“What extraordinary notions you invent! If I thought that Polly would ever have such ideas as that girl’s— But she won’t. You spinsters are too queer. You are either so prudish that one can’t look at you, or else you’re so emancipated that Heaven alone knows what you’ll say next! It all comes from your ignorance, I suppose.”
“Yes; that answer is always flung at us,” responded Gertrude, holding her embroidery at arm’s-length for a moment, in order to inspect it critically.
Polly, having overheard her name, had come to her mother’s knee. “Want me, mamma?”
“No. Go back to your play.”
“We’re not playing. Fritzy won’t.”
“ ’Cause you’re so selfish with your old dolls,” said Fritz. “You said they was passhints. Then you came an’ yanked ’em all away.”
Polly made a face at him. Fritz responded with another, and one of preternatural hideousness, rolling his eyes up to the whites, and stretching out his tongue. This seemed to soothe him, for he demanded, after the effort was over:
“Where’s the Noah’s ark? You get it, and we’ll play crocodile.”
“I had happened to read the Life of Louisa Alcott just before I began the Bashkirtseff journal,” Gertrude went on. “What a contrast! It is true that the Russian girl was but twenty-four when she died, but one feels that she would have been the same at fifty. Miss Alcott worked all her life as hard as she possibly could, turning her hand to anything that offered, no matter what; and her sole motive was to assist her parents and her family, those who were dear to her; of herself she never thought at all. Marie Bashkirtseff’s behavior to her mother and aunt showed indifference, and often scorn; her one thought was herself—her own attractions, her own happiness, her own celebrity, and the persons who could perhaps add to the latter two. Her egotism—”
“Children, what are you about?” interrupted Mrs. Moore, turning her head; for Fritz and Polly were lying on the floor flat upon their stomachs, and in this position wriggling in zigzags across the room, with low roars, directing their course towards the animals of Noah’s ark, who were drawn up in a line before the sofa.
“We’re crocodiles,” called Fritz. “We’re ’vancing to scrunch ’em!”
“Polly, get up instantly; look at your nice white frock! Fritz— Oh, here’s Christine at last. Christine, do see to the children,” said Mrs. Moore.
The German nurse, who had entered, lifted Polly to her feet and smoothed down her skirts. Fritz sprang up and rushed to the window, for he heard music outside; a street band composed of four men of depressed aspect had begun to play before the house the strains associated with the words:
“Ever be hap-pee,
Wherever thou art,
Pride of the pirate’s heart—”
“How ridiculous to be tooting away in all this rain!” said Mrs. Moore, irritably.
“It isn’t raining now, mamma,” called Polly, her no
se also as well as Fritz’s pressed against the pane.
“As it ees no rain, meeses, I might take de childrens to see dat leedle boy at Norteeng Hill?” suggested the nurse, respectfully.
“Has it really stopped?” answered Mrs. Moore, turning to look. “Well, perhaps it would be better for them to go out. Put on their cork-soled shoes and their water-proofs, and you must be back by five o’clock, or half past—not later.”
“I veel at mine vatch look, and take de train shoost in time to be back at half past five,” answered Christine, in her earnest, careful fashion. “It ees not much meeneets to Norteeng Hill.”
She put the animals back in the ark, and placed it, with the box of dolls, in the closet.
“Take this shilling and give it to that dreadful band. Tell them to go away immediately,” said Mrs. Moore.
“Yes, meeses.” And taking the children with her, Christine left the room, softly closing the door behind her.
“I do wish Philip would go to Washington,” said Mrs. Moore, after some minutes of silence.
The band had ceased its wailed good wishes for the pride of the pirate’s heart; the room without the chatter of the children seemed suddenly very still; a coal dropping from the grate made a loud sound.
Miss Remington did not answer.
“It’s the very place for me,” pursued Amy. “There are all sorts of people there—foreigners and Southerners as well as Northerners. Not the seven deadly families, always the same, month after month, that we everlastingly have in New Edinburgh. I love variety and I love gayety, and I especially love dinner parties. I should like to dine out five nights in the week, and have friends to dine with us the other two. I don’t see, after all, why we shouldn’t go this very winter,” she went on, with animation. “I have all these lovely new things from Paris, you know. Think of their being wasted in New Edinburgh!”
“They won’t be wasted,” said Gertrude. “Everybody will profoundly admire them.”
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