VI
Bobbetty’s hand was flung out and fell, soft and limp, across Mrs. Champney’s face. She opened her eyes. The dawn was stealing into the room, coming like music. One drowsy little bird was awake in the world, piping sweetly. The breeze came, fluttering the window curtain, and it seemed to her that she could hear the footsteps of the glorious sun coming up the sky. All creation waited for him—waited breathless, to break into a great chorus of ecstasy when he appeared.
Bobbetty was waking, too. His hard little head bumped against her shoulder. His toes moved softly, he scowled, his great black eyes opened, he looked sternly into her face, and then he smiled.
“Gramma!” he said contentedly, and sat up.
“We must be very quiet, not to wake mother,” said Mrs. Champney.
“Why?” asked Bobbetty.
In his superb arrogance he looked upon his mother somewhat as he looked upon the sun. She existed solely for him. He adored her and he needed her—that was why she existed. Mrs. Champney did not trouble to explain. He would learn soon enough how very many other people there were in this world, and that it was not his own world and his own sun at all. In the meantime, let him make the most of it. She said that they would surprise mother, and the idea appealed to Bobbetty. He said he would be as quiet as a mouse, and so he was.
Mrs. Champney got his ridiculous little garments and dressed him. She knelt at his feet to put on his stubby sandals. She even kissed his feet, and his hands, and his warm, olive-tinted cheeks, and the back of his neck. He smiled upon her, condescendingly but kindly.
Then she carried him down into the kitchen. He was a plump and sturdy baby, but he was no burden to her arms. She wasn’t tired now. Indeed, she thought she had never in her life felt so gay and light and happy.
The sun had come, and the kitchen was filled with it. The aluminium saucepans glittered like silver, and the water ran out of the tap in a rainbow spray. She laid the table in the dining room, and Bobbetty followed her back and forth, carrying the less dangerous things.
There was a wonderful perfume in the air—the intangible sweetness of spring—and with it, and no less wonderful, was the homely fragrance of coffee and oatmeal and bacon. It was a divine hour, and Bobbetty knew it. Bobbetty could share it with her—he and he alone.
He dropped a loaf of bread that he was carrying, and, moved by impulse, kicked it across the room. Mrs. Champney picked it up, without a word of reproof. She knew how Bobbetty felt.
Then she drew the chairs up to the table—and made her great discovery.
“There are four chairs!” she cried aloud. “There are four of us! Why, I’m not the third person at all!”
She was so overcome by this that she sat down, and stared before her with a dazed look.
“There were three already—I’m the fourth, and four’s such a nice number! I can’t go away and leave Robert and Molly alone together. They’ll never be alone together any more—there’s Bobbetty. I can help so much! They’re both so very, very young, and I could do so much! Molly could have time for music. There are two buttons off Bobbetty’s underwaist. Mother-in-law, indeed![Pg 281]”
She heard the percolator boiling too hard, and she got up. In the kitchen doorway she met Bobbetty with the bowwow.
“Bobbetty!” she said. “Do you know something?”
“Yes, I do!” shouted the child.
But Mrs. Champney told him, anyhow.
“Bobbetty,” she said, “there’s a Lucy Stone League for women who don’t want to use their husbands’ names. I believe I’ll start a Jessica Champney League for women who refuse to be called mothers-in-law. There’s really no such thing as a mother-in-law, Bobbetty. It’s just a joke, and a very nasty one. Really and truly, Bobbetty, there are nothing but mothers-in-nature. I think I’ll invent some other word. Why not ‘husbandsmother,’ or ‘wifesmother,’ or—”
Molly appeared before her, evidently in great distress.
“Oh, mother darling!” she cried. “You shouldn’t have done this! You shouldn’t be up so early! You’ll be tired out before you start!”
Mrs. Champney stirred the oatmeal, which was bubbling and spouting like molten lava.
“I don’t believe I will go,” she said. “It seems—such a waste of time. I think I’ll stay home, and help you, and be a grandmother. I’ve tried everything else, and I believe I’d do well at that.”
Molly stared for a moment. Then she ran to the foot of the stairs.
“Robert!” she called, in her ringing, joyous voice. “Robert! Mother’s going to stay home![Pg 282]”
MUNSEY’S
MAGAZINE
DECEMBER, 1925
Vol. LXXXVI NUMBER 3
As Is
HOW MAUDE’S AUNT DEMONSTRATED THAT SHE WASN’T YOUNG, LIKE HER CHARMING NIECE, AND DIDN’T CARE TO BE SILLY
By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
MISS CARTER fished out the last doughnut from the kettle of bubbling fat, laid it on a sheet of brown paper, and sprinkled it with powdered sugar.
“They’re extra good this time!” she said to herself.
She stood looking down at them. There they lay in rows and rows, feathery light, richly crisp and brown.
“Oh, my!” she cried. “I do wish I could eat just one!”
But even one doughnut would be treachery to Maude.
“You’ll ruin your figure and your digestion by eating between meals, Auntie Sue,” Maude had said. “Promise me you won’t!”
Miss Carter had refused to promise, but she had said that she would try, and she did try. She turned her back upon this temptation, with a faint sigh, and gave a last glance round the kitchen.
Nothing more for her to do here! It was as spotless as a chemist’s laboratory. Indeed, that was what Maude wanted it to be like. She said that a kitchen ought to be a home laboratory, and she wanted it all white and bleak and stern.
Even a high white stool had been provided for Miss Carter. She found it very convenient for many purposes, but she did like a rocking-chair, and she had apologetically brought one down from the attic. To please Maude she had painted it white, so that it also had a somewhat severe look; but when there was nobody else in the house, Miss Carter always got out that nice, downy old red silk cushion from the hall cupboard, put it into the chair, and sat down and rocked comfortably while she shelled peas or hulled berries, and so on.
The cushion always disappeared before Maude got home, because it would distress her. If she were to see it, she would surely go out the very next day and buy a scientific, up-to-date one—perhaps one like those hard, shiny things that dentists have in their chairs.
Maude disapproved of old, soft, comfortable things, and called them “slipshod.” She hated all that was not exact and efficient. It was misery for her to hear Miss Carter talk about putting in “a pinch” of cinnamon, instead of one-eighth of a teaspoonful, and the mention of “a lump of butter the size of an egg” appalled her.
She had bought Miss Carter glass measuring cups, quart measures, pint measures, scales, and sets of spoons of all sizes; and yet, in the making of these very doughnuts, Miss Carter had used that old blue teacup for measuring, and she had put in many “pinches” of things. It made her feel guilty to think of it, but she really couldn’t help it. At forty—
Now there was another treacherous thought! Maude never allowed her to be forty.
“Never think of yourself as forty,” Maude often said, “and you won’t feel forty.”
But in her secret heart Miss Carter wished that she could just comfortably be forty. It seemed to her a remarkably nice age to be. Indeed, she felt proud of it. When she went to buy a hat, and the saleswoman said something nice about her splendid head of hair, Miss Carter liked to say:
“It’s not bad for a woman of forty, if I do say it myself!”
She didn’t say this any more, because it[Pg 284] worried Maude, but there were times when she defiantly thought it. It gave so much zest to life. For instance, that evening when they came back from the picnic, and every one else was so tired, and she wasn’t, one bit, even if she was for—
As she left the kitchen and the tantalizing aroma of the doughnuts, another perfume came floating in at the open front door. It was the scent of those dear little pinks and verbenas in the garden.
“I guess I’ll go out and sit on the porch for half an hour,” thought Miss Carter.
So out she went, and the very sight of the garden on this summer day made her so happy that tears came to her eyes. Maude had improved the house a good deal, but she had been satisfied to leave the garden to her aunt, and it was just as it had always been—a gay, careless sort of garden, with a lawn shaded by fine old trees, and a rebellious crowd of bright, old-fashioned flowers. The sweet alyssum was foaming over the borders of the largest bed and marching down to the path, just as it had done when she was a little girl. There were the rosebushes that her mother had planted, and the privet hedge that had seemed so tall and dark and impenetrable to a child’s vision. It was indeed a dear and wonderful old garden!
With a sigh of content, she sank into a chair—and almost at once jumped up again. She mustn’t sit out here in her gingham house dress, wearing these old shoes! Somebody might see her, and Maude would never get over it if anybody should see her aunt looking really comfortable; so she went back to the house, and up to her own room.
This was, in Miss Carter’s eyes, the most charming room in all the world. The things in it were old, and some of them were not very beautiful, but she liked them—all of them, even the two old calendars on the wall and the French clock that had not ticked for years and years. The dark shades were pulled down against the afternoon sun, and a limpid green light filled the room. The mahogany bureau shone like dark water, and the big four-post bed, with its old-fashioned bolster and the ruffled spread, looked exquisitely restful.
“Upon my word,” said Miss Carter to herself, “I believe I could take forty winks! Such a hot afternoon! And there’s nothing much I ought to do for the next half hour.”
Now the naps of housekeepers are different from the naps of other people. There is always a faint feeling of guilt about them, no matter how much work has been done, or how well earned the rest—always a consciousness of all sorts of other things that ought to be done. Even Miss Carter, whose house was a model of cleanliness and order, had this feeling of guilt, and was quite human enough to enjoy her nap all the more for it.
She settled herself comfortably on the sofa, and closed her eyes. One of the shades flapped softly in the breeze, and she thought that it was like a sail, and that she was floating off somewhere—floating off—
The telephone bell rang.
Miss Carter sat up, frowned a little, yawned, and went downstairs; and over the wire came the voice that was dearer to her than any other voice in the world.
“Auntie Sue, darling, would it bother you if I were to bring some one home for dinner?”
“Bother me?” cried Miss Carter. “Why, of course not, child! You can bring a dozen people, any time you’ve a mind to!”
“I just thought I’d ask Mr. Rhodes,” said Maude.
A very odd sort of feeling came over Miss Carter. She smiled graciously, as people do who wish to hide their emotions from the watchful telephone, and said:
“I’ll be very glad to see him, child.”
But this was not quite true. She had never heard of Mr. Rhodes before, yet she had been expecting him for five years, ever since Maude was eighteen. She had known that somebody was bound to come and take Maude away, and this was the man—she was sure of it! The way Maude said she would “ask Mr. Rhodes” was enough.
“Well, why not?” Miss Carter demanded sternly of herself. “You couldn’t expect a girl like Maude t-to s-stay—Pshaw, I’ve left my handkerchief upstairs!”
She went upstairs hastily, and lay down on the sofa again for a little while, but she did not go to sleep.
After awhile she got up and washed her face in cold water, and began to get ready for Maude’s guest. Naturally Maude would expect her to wear the crêpe de Chine dress she had given her aunt as a birthday present, so Miss Carter opened the cupboard door, and there it was—a dark and elegant stranger, hanging there[Pg 285] with a sort of disdainful air among the sensible, sturdy linens and cottons.
She brought it out, took off her loose, comfortable house dress, and struggled into the crêpe de Chine.
“A slip-on-dress,” Maude had called it.
“A squirm-on dress, I should say!” thought Miss Carter.
She did not like herself in that dress. She looked at her image in the mirror, and she did not like it. A sturdy little woman she was, straight as an arrow. Her face, with its small, clear, regular features and healthy color, and those very blue eyes of hers, was quite as pretty as it had been fifteen years ago—perhaps even more so, because of the patience and the compassion she had learned; but she had long ago forgotten to think about being pretty. She noted nothing except the dress, which didn’t suit her.
“Specially designed upon long, slender lines,” Maude had said.
“And I’m not!” thought Miss Carter. “What’s the sense in a dress being long and slender, if the person inside it is short and”—she paused—“and roly-poly,” she added firmly. “That’s what I am!”
She covered up all this magnificence with a big checked apron, and went down into the kitchen again. The dinners that she prepared for Maude every night were so good that it was scarcely possible to improve upon them, but this evening she intended to try. She intended to outdo herself for Maude’s Mr. Rhodes.
From the garden she picked enough early June peas to make cream-of-pea soup. The chicken, which she had intended to roast, was not, she thought, quite large enough for three, so she made it into a fricassee, with dumplings beyond description. Then she had a dish of wax beans, and a dish of asparagus, cooked to perfection and seasoned only with plenty of butter, and potatoes most marvelously fried, and she made fresh strawberry ice cream. When you consider what it meant to crack ice and turn the freezer, in that dress with long, tight sleeves and floating things that hung from the shoulders—
She didn’t dare to take it off, though, for fear of their coming by an early train, because she knew that even more than a superb dinner Maude would want to see her aunt in all her glory.
Then she laid the table with her finest tablecloth and her grandmother’s china, and with every rose in the garden in a bowl in the center. She really was pleased with the result.