CHAPTER IV
HER IDEAL GIRL STEPS IN
All the time Barby was gone I didn't write a line in this record. I couldn't. Things seemed too trivial. Besides, the house had that strange, hushed air that you feel at a funeral when you're waiting for it to begin. I couldn't bear to touch the piano. It didn't seem right to be playing gay tunes while there was such awful sorrow in the world, and in all probability Father and Barby were spending their last days together.
I declined the invitation to Laura Nelson's dance on that account, and after Tippy had gone to bed I put on Barby's only black dress, a chiffon dinner gown that she had left behind in her closet, and sat by the window in the moonlight, listening to the music of piano and drum floating up from the Nelson cottage. I had turned the silver trimming in so as not to show, and looking down on the clinging black folds that trailed around me, I pictured to myself so vividly the way an orphan or a young widow must feel, that the tears splashed down into my lap till I was afraid it would make the chiffon all crinkly. The dance music sounded perfectly heartless to me. I could understand how bitter it might make one feel who was really in mourning.
When Barby came home and I told her about it, she said that I should have gone to the dance; that our first duty to ourselves and the world is to keep ourselves normal. After I'd spent the morning helping her unpack and hearing everything she had to tell about her week with Father and his departure to some unknown port, she told me she wanted me to stay out of doors all the rest of the day. I must go on the Quest of Cheerful Things, and she hoped that I'd be able to report at least two adventures.
The two things which happened are that I went to a furniture auction and met 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'd been out nearly half the afternoon. Babe is a far cry from anybody's ideal girl, that is, as far as looks and manners are concerned, but she has her good points. For one thing she is absolutely sincere, and it's always interesting to hear what new trouble she's been in.
She had her bathing suit bundled carelessly under her arm, and said she couldn't stay because she'd promised to be up at the West End beach by four o'clock, and it was almost that time then. But she'd heard that there was a furniture auction going on in front of the old Holloway house, which has been vacant for years, and she just had to go by and see if there was a white bedstead in the lot, with hollow brass balls on the posts. She was sure that there couldn't be, because she'd been told that the furniture had been brought up from Truro or Wellfleet, or some place down the Cape. It belonged to relatives of the Holloway family. Still she felt possessed to look, and she supposed she'd go through life like 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 and sisters are either steps or halves. She has no whole ones. And they are all socialists in a way, believing in a community of interests, such as wearing each other's clothes without asking, and using each other's things. Right while Babe was talking to me she had on one of her half-brother Jim's outing shirts, turned in V at the neck instead of her own middy blouse, because Viola had walked off with her last clean one.
With everybody free to root through her bureau drawers, and with no locks 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 for worlds. They were too sacred, and she couldn't bear to destroy them, for they breathed devotion in every line, and were her first of the kind. She thought of burying them under the garden hedge, but that would have necessitated digging them up every time she wanted to re-read them, and there was danger of the puppy trailing her and unearthing them if she went too often to that hallowed spot.
One night just before she and Viola went to Yarmouth for a visit, she found, quite by accident, that the brass balls on her bedposts were screwed on and were hollow. So she folded the letters up small and stuffed them into one, with a dried rose and a broken cuff-link that had associations, and screwed it back tight.
What was her horror when she came home two weeks later to find that her mother had had the room done over in their absence as a surprise for her and Viola. She had bought twin beds of bird's-eye maple and given one old bed to a Salvation Army man who was going through town collecting junk, and sent the other to a camp up in the White Mountains where her mother'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 see the light of day. It was bad enough to lose the letters, but Babe says she'll simply die if they fall into her Aunt Mattie's hands. She's the prim, cold kind who makes you feel that anything sentimental should never 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, but because it's a link in a chain. If I hadn't happened to meet Babe and go with her to hunt for that bedstead, I wouldn't have been at the auction when my ideal girl came along, or when Richard drove by and I hailed him to borrow a quarter, and he stopped and saw her. What she said and what he 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 odd andirons. There was a beaded mat and a glass case of wax flowers, and a motto, "The Lord is my Shepherd," cross-stitched in pink and gray worsted, sitting right out on the grass. Babe said probably it was the work of hands long dead and gone, and didn't it seem sad that they should come to this end? But the tide was in and she'd have to go. She might have known she'd not find that bedstead. Would I walk up to the beach with her?
But I told her no, I'd just rummage around awhile longer to see what else 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 color by staying, and took out my pencil and pad, which I always carry around in my knitting bag, and made a note of it.
An old-fashioned hoop-skirt was thrown across a rose-bush, and a black silk bonnet lay under it, beside a pair of worn shoes. Both the bonnet and the shoes had what Tippy calls a "genteel" air, and made me think they must have belonged to a prim maiden lady with proud nose and slender feet, probably called "Miss Althea." The name came to me like an inspiration, 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 came rolling out. Some of them were comical enough for a Sunday supplement, women in tight basques and little saucer hats, and men with whiskers beards or perfectly ridiculous bushy "burnsides." A crowd of summer people began making joking remarks about them to set each other to laughing.
But there was one in an oval walnut frame that I couldn't bear to have them make fun of, the photograph of a lady with a little boy leaning against her shoulder. She had a strong, kind face, with such steadfast eyes looking straight at you, that you just knew everybody went to her with their troubles. The boy was a dear little fellow, serious as a judge, with his hair brushed in a long roll on the top of his head in one of those old-fashioned coxcomb curls.