“Have you any reason to fear it?” asked Anne. Every one in Summerside knew about Cyrus Taylor’s sulky fits.
“You never can tell when he’ll take one,” said Trix dolefully. “He was frightfully upset tonight because he couldn’t find his new flannel nightshirt. Esme had put it in the wrong drawer. He may be over it by tomorrow night or he may not. If he’s not, he’ll disgrace us all and Dr. Carter will conclude he can’t marry into such a family. At least, that is what Esme says and I’m afraid she may be right. I think, Anne, that Lennox Carter is very fond of Esme . . . thinks she would make a ‘very suitable wife’ for him . . . but doesn’t want to do anything rash or throw his wonderful self away. I’ve heard that he told his cousin a man couldn’t be too careful what kind of family he married into. He’s just at the point where he might be turned either way by a trifle. And, if it comes to that, one of Papa’s sulky fits isn’t any trifle.”
“Doesn’t he like Dr. Carter?”
“Oh, he does. He thinks it would be a wonderful match for Esme. But when Father has one of his spells on, nothing has any influence over him while it lasts. That’s the Pringle for you, Anne. Grandmother Taylor was a Pringle, you know. You just can’t imagine what we’ve gone through as a family. He never goes into rages, you know . . . like Uncle George. Uncle George’s family don’t mind his rages. When he goes into a temper he blows off . . . you can hear him roaring three blocks away . . . and then he’s like a lamb and brings every one a new dress for a peace-offering. But Father just sulks and glowers, and won’t say a word to anybody at meal times. Esme says that, after all, that’s better than cousin Richard Taylor, who is always saying sarcastic things at the table and insulting his wife; but it seems to me nothing could be worse than those awful silences of Papa’s. They rattle us and we’re terrified to open our mouths. It wouldn’t be so bad, of course, if it was only when we are alone. But it’s just as apt to be where we have company. Esme and I are simply tired of trying to explain away Papa’s insulting silences. She’s just sick with fear that he won’t have got over the nightshirt before tomorrow night . . . and what will Lennox think? And she wants you to wear your blue dress. Her new dress is blue, because Lennox likes blue. But Papa hates it. Yours may reconcile him to hers.”
“Wouldn’t it be better for her to wear something else?”
“She hasn’t anything else fit to wear at a company dinner except the green poplin Father gave her at Christmas. It’s a lovely dress in itself . . . Father likes us to have pretty dresses . . . but you can’t think of anything as awful as Esme in green. Pringle says it makes her look as if she was in the last stages of consumption. And Lennox Carter’s cousin told Esme he would never marry a delicate person. I’m more than glad Johnny isn’t so ‘fastidious.’”
“Have you told your father about your engagement to Johnny yet?” asked Anne, who knew all about Trix’s love affair.
“No,” poor Trix groaned. “I can’t summon up the courage, Anne. I know he’ll make a frightful scene. Papa has always been so down on Johnny because he’s poor. Papa forgets that he was poorer than Johnny when he started out in the hardware business. Of course he’ll have to be told soon . . . but I want to wait until Esme’s affair is settled. I know Papa won’t speak to any of us for weeks after I tell him, and Mamma will worry so . . . she can’t bear Father’s sulky fits. We’re all such cowards before Papa. Of course, Mamma and Esme are naturally timid with every one, but Pringle and I have lots of ginger. It’s only Papa who can cow us. Sometimes I think if we had any one to back us up . . . but we haven’t, and we just feel paralyzed. You can’t imagine, Anne darling, what a company dinner is like at our place when Papa is sulking. But if he only behaves tomorrow night I’ll forgive him for everything. He can be very agreeable when he wants to be . . . Papa is really just like Longfellow’s little girl . . . ‘when he’s good he’s very, very good and when he’s bad he’s horrid.’ I’ve seen him the life of the party.”
“He was very nice the night I had dinner with you last month.”
“Oh, he likes you, as I’ve said. That’s one of the reasons why we want you so much. It may have a good influence on him. We’re not neglecting anything that may please him. But when he has a really bad fit of sulks on he seems to hate everything and everybody. Anyhow, we’ve got a bang-up dinner planned, with an elegant orange-custard dessert. Mamma wanted pie because she says every man in the world but Papa likes pie for dessert better than anything else . . . even Professors of Modern Languages. But Papa doesn’t, so it would never do to take a chance on it tomorrow night, when so much depends on it. Orange custard is Papa’s favorite dessert. As for poor Johnny and me, I suppose I’ll just have to elope with him some day and Papa will never forgive me.
“I believe if you’d just get up enough spunk to tell him and endure his resulting sulks you’d find he’d come round to it beautifully and you’d be saved months of anguish.”
“You don’t know Papa,” said Trix darkly.
“Perhaps I know him better than you do. You’ve lost your perspective.”
“Lost my . . . what? Anne darling, remember I’m not a B.A. I only went through the High. I’d have loved to go to college, but Papa doesn’t believe in the Higher Education of women.”
“I only meant that you’re too close to him to understand him. A stranger could very well see him more clearly . . . understand him better.”
“I understand that nothing can induce Papa to speak if he has made up his mind not to . . . nothing. He prides himself on that.”
“Then why don’t the rest of you just go on and talk as if nothing was the matter?”
“We can’t . . . I’ve told you he paralyzes us. You’ll find it out for yourself tomorrow night if he hasn’t got over the nightshirt. I don’t know how he does it but he does. I don’t believe we’d mind so much how cranky he was if he would only talk. It’s the silence that shatters us. I’ll never forgive Papa if he acts up tomorrow night when so much is at stake.”
“Let’s hope for the best, dear.”
“I’m trying to. And I know it will help to have you there. Mamma thought we ought to have Katherine Brooke too, but I knew it wouldn’t have a good effect on Papa. He hates her. I don’t blame him for that, I must say. I haven’t any use for her myself. I don’t see how you can be as nice to her as you are.”
“I’m sorry for her, Trix.”
“Sorry for her! But it’s all her own fault she isn’t liked. Oh, well, it takes all kinds of people to make a world . . . but Summerside could spare Katherine Brooke . . . glum old cat!”
“She’s an excellent teacher, Trix. . . .”
“Oh, do I know it? I was in her class. She did hammer things into my head . . . and flayed the flesh off my bones with sarcasm as well. And the way she dresses! Papa can’t bear to see a woman badly dressed. He says he has no use for dowds and he’s sure God hasn’t either. Mamma would be horrified if she knew I told you that, Anne. She excused it in Papa because he is a man. If that was all we had to excuse in him! And poor Johnny hardly daring to come to the house now because Papa is so rude to him. I slip out on fine nights and we walk round and round the square and get half frozen.”
Anne drew what was something like a breath of relief when Trix had gone, and slipped down to coax a snack out of Rebecca Dew.
“Going to the Taylors for dinner, are you? Well, I hope old Cyrus will be decent. If his family weren’t all so afraid of him in his sulky fits he wouldn’t indulge in them so often, of that I feel certain. I tell you, Miss Shirley, he enjoys his sulks. And now I suppose I must warm That Cat’s milk. Pampered animal!”
Chapter 10
When Anne arrived at the Cyrus Taylor house the next evening she felt the chill in the atmosphere as soon as she entered the door. A trim maid showed her up to the guest room but as Anne went up the stairs she caught sight of Mrs. Cyrus Taylor scuttling from the dining-room to the kitchen and Mrs. Cyrus was wiping tears away from her pale, careworn, but still rather sw
eet face. It was all too clear that Cyrus had not yet “got over” the nightshirt.
This was confirmed by a distressed Trix creeping into the room and whispering nervously,
“Oh, Anne, he’s in a dreadful humor. He seemed pretty amiable this morning and our hopes rose. But Hugh Pringle beat him at a game of checkers this afternoon and Papa can’t bear to lose a checker game. And it had to happen today, of course. He found Esme ‘admiring herself in the mirror,’ as he put it, and just walked her out of her room and locked the door. The poor darling was only wondering if he looked nice enough to please Lennox Carter, Ph.D. She hadn’t even a chance to put her pearl string on. And look at me. I didn’t dare curl my hair . . . Papa doesn’t like curls that are not natural . . . and I look like a fright. Not that it matters about me . . . only it just shows you. Papa threw out the flowers Mamma put on the dining-room table and she feels it so . . . she took such trouble with them . . . and he wouldn’t let her put on her garnet earrings. He hasn’t had such a bad spell since he came home from the west last spring and found Mamma had put red curtains in the sitting-room, when he preferred mulberry. Oh, Anne, do talk as hard as you can at dinner, if he won’t. If you don’t, it will be too dreadful.”
“I’ll do my best,” promised Anne, who certainly had never found herself at a loss for something to say. But then never had she found herself in such a situation as presently confronted her.
They were all gathered around the table . . . a very pretty and well appointed table in spite of the missing flowers. Timid Mrs. Cyrus, in a gray silk dress, had a face that was grayer than her dress. Esme, the beauty of the family . . . a very pale beauty, pale gold hair, pale pink lips, pale forget-me-not eyes . . . was so much paler than usual that she looked as if she were going to faint. Pringle, ordinarily a fat, cheerful urchin of fourteen, with round eyes and glasses and hair so fair it looked almost white, looked like a tied dog, and Trix had the air of a terrified school-girl.
Dr. Carter, who was undeniably handsome and distinguished-looking, with crisp dark hair, brilliant dark eyes and silver-rimmed glasses, but whom Anne, in the days of his Assistant Professorship at Redmond, had thought a rather pompous young bore, looked ill at ease. Evidently he felt that something was wrong somewhere . . . a reasonable conclusion when your host simply stalks to the head of the table and drops into his chair without a word to you or anybody.
Cyrus would not say grace. Mrs. Cyrus, blushing beet-red, murmured almost inaudibly, “For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly thankful.” The meal started badly by nervous Esme dropping her fork on the floor. Everybody except Cyrus jumped, because their nerves were likewise keyed up to the highest pitch. Cyrus glared at Esme out of his bulging blue eyes in a kind of enraged stillness. Then he glared at everybody and froze them into dumbness. He glared at poor Mrs. Cyrus, when she took a helping of horseradish sauce, with a glare that reminded her of her weak stomach. She couldn’t eat any of it after that . . . and she was so fond of it. She didn’t believe it would hurt her. But for that matter she couldn’t eat anything, nor could Esme. They only pretended. The meal proceeded in a ghastly silence, broken by spasmodic speeches about the weather from Trix and Anne. Trix implored Anne with her eyes to talk, but Anne found herself for once in her life with absolutely nothing to say. She felt desperately that she must talk, but only the most idiotic things came into her head . . . things it would be impossible to utter aloud. Was everyone bewitched? It was curious, the effect one sulky, stubborn man had on you. Anne couldn’t have believed it possible. And there was no doubt that he was really quite happy in the knowledge that he had made everybody at his table horribly uncomfortable. What on earth was going on in his mind? Would he jump if any one stuck a pin in him? Anne wanted to slap him . . . rap his knuckles . . . stand him in a corner . . . treat him like the spoiled child he really was, in spite of his spiky gray hair and truculent mustache.
Above all she wanted to make him speak. She felt instinctively that nothing in the world would punish him so much as to be tricked into speaking when he was determined not to.
Suppose she got up and deliberately smashed that huge, hideous, old-fashioned vase on the table in the corner . . . an ornate thing covered with wreaths of roses and leaves which it was most difficult to dust but which must be kept immaculately clean. Anne knew that the whole family hated it, but Cyrus Taylor would not hear of having it banished to the attic, because it had been his mother’s. Anne thought she would do it fearlessly if she really believed that it would make Cyrus explode into vocal anger.
Why didn’t Lennox Carter talk? If he would, she, Anne, could talk, too, and perhaps Trix and Pringle would escape from the spell that bound them and some kind of conversation would be possible. But he simply sat there and ate. Perhaps he thought it was really the best thing to do . . . perhaps he was afraid of saying something that would still further enrage the evidently already enraged parent of his lady.
“Will you please start the pickles, Miss Shirley?” said Mrs. Taylor faintly.
Something wicked stirred in Anne. She started the pickles . . . and something else. Without letting herself stop to think she bent forward, her great, gray-green eyes glimmering limpidly, and said gently,
“Perhaps you would be surprised to hear, Dr. Carter, that Mr. Taylor went deaf very suddenly last week?”
Anne sat back, having thrown her bomb. She could not tell precisely what she expected or hoped. If Dr. Carter got the impression that his host was deaf instead of in a towering rage of silence, it might loosen his tongue. She had not told a falsehood . . . she had not said Cyrus Taylor was deaf. As for Cyrus Taylor, if she had hoped to make him speak she had failed. He merely glared at her, still in silence.
But Anne’s remark had an effect on Trix and Pringle that she had never dreamed of. Trix was in a silent rage herself. She had, the moment before Anne had hurled her rhetorical question, seen Esme furtively wipe away a tear that had escaped from one of her despairing blue eyes. Everything was hopeless . . . Lennox Carter would never ask Esme to marry him now . . . it didn’t matter any more what any one said or did. Trix was suddenly possessed with a burning desire to get square with her brutal father. Anne’s speech gave her a weird inspiration, and Pringle, a volcano of suppressed impishness, blinked his white eyelashes for a dazed moment and then promptly followed her lead. Never, as long as they might live, would Anne, Esme or Mrs. Cyrus forget the dreadful quarter of an hour that followed.
“Such an affliction for poor papa,” said Trix, addressing Dr. Carter across the table. “And him only sixty-eight.”
Two little white dents appeared at the corners of Cyrus Taylor’s nostrils when he heard his age advanced six years. But he remained silent.
“It’s such a treat to have a decent meal,” said Pringle, clearly and distinctly. “What would you think, Dr. Carter, of a man who makes his family live on fruit and eggs . . . nothing but fruit and eggs . . . just for a fad?”
“Does your father . . . ?” began Dr. Carter bewilderedly.
“What would you think of a husband who bit his wife when she put up curtains he didn’t like . . . deliberately bit her?” demanded Trix.
“Till the blood came,” added Pringle solemnly.
“Do you mean to say your father . . . ?”
“What would you think of a man who would cut up a silk dress of his wife’s just because the way it was made didn’t suit him?” said Trix.
“What would you think,” said Pringle, “of a man who refuses to let his wife have a dog?”
“When she would so love to have one,” sighed Trix.
“What would you think of a man,” continued Pringle, who was beginning to enjoy himself hugely, “who would give his wife a pair of goloshes for a Christmas present . . . nothing but a pair of goloshes?”
“Goloshes don’t exactly warm the heart,” admitted Dr. Carter. His eyes met Anne’s and he smiled. Anne reflected that she had never seen him smile before. It changed his face wonderfully for th
e better. What was Trix saying? Who would have thought she could be such a demon?
“Have you ever wondered, Dr. Carter, how awful it must be to live with a man who thinks nothing . . . nothing — of picking up the roast, if it isn’t perfectly done, and hurling it at the maid?”
Dr. Carter glanced apprehensively at Cyrus Taylor, as if he feared Cyrus might throw the skeletons of the chickens at somebody. Then he seemed to remember comfortingly that his host was deaf.
“What would you think of a man who believed the earth was flat?” asked Pringle.
Anne thought Cyrus would speak then. A tremor seemed to pass over his rubicund face, but no words came. Still, she was sure his mustaches were a little less defiant.
“What would you think of a man who let his aunt . . . his only aunt . . . go to the poorhouse?” asked Trix.
“And pastured his cow in the graveyard?” said Pringle. “Summerside hasn’t got over that sight yet.”
“What would you think of a man who would write down in his diary every day what he had for dinner?” asked Trix.
“The great Pepys did that,” said Dr. Carter with another smile. His voice sounded as if he would like to laugh. Perhaps after all he was not pompous, thought Anne . . . only young and shy and overserious. But she was feeling positively aghast. She had never meant things to go as far as this. She was finding out that it is much easier to start things than finish them. Trix and Pringle were being diabolically clever. They had not said that their father did a single one of these things. Anne could fancy Pringle saying, his round eyes rounder still with pretended innocence, “I just asked those questions of Dr. Carter for information.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 88