CHAPTER IV
It did not take long, once Claire was fairly on her feet again, to adjust herself to her new surroundings, to find her place and part in the social economy of the little family-group where she was never for a moment made to feel an alien. She appropriated a share in the work of the household at once, insisting, to Martha's dismay, upon lending a hand mornings with the older children, who were to be got off to school, and with the three-year-old Sabina, who was to stay at home. She assisted with the breakfast preparations, and then, when the busy swarm had flown for the day, she "turned to," to Ma's delight, and got the place "rid up" so it was "clean as a whistle an' neat as a pin."
Ma was not what Martha approvingly called "a hustler."
"Ma ain't thorer," her daughter-in-law confided to Claire, without reproach. "She means well, but, as she says, her mind ain't fixed on things below, an' when that's the case, the dirt is bound to settle. Ma thinks you can run a fam'ly, readin' the Bible an' singin' hymns. Well, p'raps you can, only I ain't never dared try. When I married Sammy he looked dretful peaky, the fack bein' he hadn't never been properly fed, an' it's took me all of the goin'-on fifteen years now, we been livin' together, to get'm filled up accordin' to his appetite, which is heavy. You see, Ma never had any time to attend to such earthly matters as cookin' a square meal—but she's settin' out to have a lot of leisure with the Lord."
As for Ma, she found it pleasant to watch, from a comfortable distance, the work progressing satisfactorily, without any draft on her own energies.
"Martha's a good woman, miss," she observed judicially, in her detached manner, "but she is like the lady of her name we read about in the blessed Book. When I set out in life, I chose the betther part, an' now I'm old, I have the faith to believe I'll have a front seat in heaven. I've knew throuble in me day. I raised ten childern, an' I had three felons, an' God knows I think I earned a front seat in heaven."
Claire's pause, before she spoke, seemed to Ma to indicate she was giving the subject the weighty consideration it deserved.
"According to that, it would certainly seem so. You have rheumatism, too, haven't you?" as if that might be regarded as an added guarantee of special celestial reservation.
Ma paled visibly. "No, miss. I don't never have the rheumatiz now—not so you'd notice it," she said plaintively. "Oncet I'd it thurrbl, an' me son Sammy had it, too, loikewoise, fierce. I'd uster lay in bed moanin' an' cryin' till you'd be surprised, an' me son Sammy, he was a'most as bad. Well, for a week or two, Martha, she done for us the best she cud, I s'pose, but she didn't make for to stop the pain, an' at last one night, when me son Sammy was gruntin', an' I was groanin' to beat the band, Martha, she up, all of a suddint, an' says she, she was goin' for to cure us of the rheumatiz, or know the reason why. An' she went, an' got the karrysene-can, an' she poured out two thurrbl big doses, an' she stood over me son Sammy an' I, till we swalleyed it down, an' since ever we tuk it, me an' Sammy ain't never had a retur-rn. Sometimes I have a sharp twinge o' somethin' in me leg or me arrm, but it ain't rheumatiz, an' I wouldn't like for me son Sammy's wife to be knowin' it, for the very sight of her startin' for the karrysene—if it's only to fill the lamp, is enough to make me gullup, an' I know it's the same wit' me son Sammy, though we never mention the subjeck between us."
"But if your son didn't want to take the stuff," Claire said, trying to hide her amusement, "why didn't he stand up and say so? He's a man. He's much bigger and stronger than his wife. How could she make him do what he didn't want to?"
The question was evidently not a new one to Ma.
"That's what annywan'd naturrly think," she returned promptly. "But that's because they wouldn't be knowin' me son Sammy's wife. It ain't size, an' it ain't stren'th—it's just, well, Martha. There's that about her you wouldn't like to take any chances wit'. Perhaps it's the thing manny does be talkin' of these days. Perhaps it's that got a holt of her. Annyhow, she says she's in for't. They does be callin' it Woman Sufferrich, I'm told. In my day a dacint body'd have thought shame to be discoursin' in public to the men. They held their tongues, an' let their betthers do the colloguein', but Martha says some of the ladies she works for says, if they talk about it enough the men will give them their rights, an' let 'em vote. I'm an old woman, an' I never had much book-learnin', but I'm thinkin' one like me son Sammy's wife has all the rights she needs wit'out the votin'. She goes out worrkin', same's me son Sammy, day in, day out. She says Sammy could support her good enough, but she won't raise her childern in a teniment, along wit' th' low companions. Me son Sammy, he has it harrd these days. He'd not be able to pay for such a grrand flat as this, in a dacint, quiet neighborhood, an' so Martha turrns to, an' lends a hand. An' wance, when me son Sammy was sick, an' out av a job entirely, Martha, she run the whole concern herself. She wouldn't let me son Sammy give up, or get down-hearted, like he mighta done. She said it was her right to care for us all, an' him, too, bein' he was down an' out, like he was. It seems to me that's fairrly all the rights anny woman'd want—to look out for four childern, an' a man, an' a mother-in-law. But if Martha wants to vote, too, why, I'm thinkin' she will."
It was particularly encouraging to Claire, just at this time, to view Martha in the light of one who did not know the meaning of the word fail, for Mrs. Slawson had assured her that if she would give up all attempt to find employment on her own account, she, Mrs. Slawson, felt she could safely promise to get her "a job that would be satisfacktry all round, only one must be a little pationate."
But a week, ten days, had gone by, since Martha announced she had an idea, and still the idea had not materialized. Meanwhile, Claire had ample time to unpack her trunk and settle her belongings about her, so "the pretty lady's room" took on a look of real comfort, and the children never passed the door without pausing before the threshold, waiting with bated breath for some wonderful chance that would give them a "peek" into the enchanted chamber. As a matter of fact, the transformation was effected with singularly few "properties." Some good photographs tastefully framed in plain, dark wood. A Baghdad rug left over from her college days, some scraps of charming old textiles, and such few of the precious home trifles as could be safely packed in her trunk. There was a daguerreotype of her mother, done when she was a girl. "As old-fashioned as your grandmother's hoopskirt," Martha called it. A sampler wrought by some ancient great-aunt, both aunt and sampler long since yellowed and mellowed by the years. A della Robbia plaque, with its exquisite swaddled baby holding out eager arms, as if to be taken. A lacquer casket, a string of Egyptian mummy-beads—what seemed to the children an inexhaustible stock of wonderful, mysterious treasures.
But the object that appeared to interest their mother more than anything else in the whole collection, was a book of unmounted photographs, snap-shots taken by Claire at college, during her travels abroad, some few, even, here in the city during those first days when she had dreamed it was easy to walk straight into an art-editorship, and no questions asked.
Mrs. Slawson scrutinized the prints with an earnestness so eager that Claire was fairly touched, until she discovered that here was no aching hunger for knowledge, no ungratified yearning "for to admire and for to see, for to be'old this world so wide," but just what looked like a perfectly feminine curiosity, and nothing more.
"Say, ain't it a pity you ain't any real good likeness of you?" Martha deplored. "These is so aggeravatin'. They don't show you up at all. Just a taste-like, an' then nothin' to squench the appetite."
"That sounds as if I were an entrée or something," laughed Claire. "But, you see, I don't want to be shown up, Martha. I couldn't abear it, as my friend, Sairy Gamp, would say. When I was little, my naughty big brother used to tease me dreadfully about my looks. He invented the most embarrassing nicknames for me; he alluded to my features with every sort of disrespect. It made me horribly conscious of myself, a thing no properly-constituted kiddie ought ever to be, of course. And I've never really got over the feeling that I am a 'sawed-off,' that my nose is 'curly,' and my hair's a wig, and that the least said about the rest of me, the better. But if you'd actually like to see something my people at home consider rather good, why, here's a little tinted photograph I had done for my dear Daddy, the last Christmas he was with us. He liked it, and that's the reason I carry it about with me—because he wore it on his old-fashioned watch-chain."
She put into Martha's hand a thin, flat, dull-gold locket.
Mrs. Slawson opened it, and gave a quick gasp of delight—the sound of triumph escaping one who, having diligently sought, has satisfactorily found. "Like it!" Martha ejaculated.
Claire deliberated a moment, watching the play of expression on Martha's mobile face. "If you like it as much as all that," she said at last, "I wish you'd take it and keep it. It seems conceited—priggish—to suppose you'd care to own it, but if you really would care to—"
Mrs. Slawson closed one great, finely-formed, work-hardened fist over the delicate treasure, with a sort of ecstatic grab of appropriation. "Care to own it! You betcher life! There's nothin' you could give me I'd care to own better," she said with honest feeling, then and there tying its slender ribbon about her neck, and slipping the locket inside her dress, as if it had been a precious amulet.
The day following saw her started bright and early for work at the Shermans'. When she arrived at the area-gate and rang, there was no response, and though she waited a reasonable time, and then rang and rang again, nobody answered the bell.
"They must be up," she said, settling down to business with a steady thumb on the electric button. "What ails the bunch o' them in the kitchen, I should like to know. It'd be a pity to disturb Eliza. She might be busy, gettin' herself an extry cup o' coffee, an' couple o' fried hams-an'-eggs, to break her fast before breakfast. But that gay young sprig of a kitchen-maid, she might answer the bell an' open the door to an honest woman."
The gay young sprig still failing of her duty, and Martha's patience giving out at last, the honest woman began to tamper with the spring-lock of the iron gate. For any one else, it would never have yielded, but it opened to Martha's hand, as with the dull submission of the conquered.
Mrs. Slawson closed the gate after her with care. "I'll just step light," she said to herself, "an' steal in on 'em unbeknownst, an' give 'em as good a scare as ever they had in their lives—the whole lazy lot of 'em."
But, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard, the kitchen was bare, and no soul was to be found in the laundry, the pantry or, in fact, anywhere throughout the basement region. Softly, and with some real misgiving now, Martha made her way upstairs. Here, for the first time, she distinguished the sound of a human voice breaking the early morning hush of the silent house. It was Radcliffe's voice issuing, evidently, from the dining-room, in which imposing apartment he chose to have his breakfast served in solitary grandeur every morning, what time the rest of his family still slept.
Martha, pausing on her way up, peeped around the edge of the half-closed door, and then stopped short.
Along the wall, ranged up in line, like soldiers facing their captain, or victims of a hold-up their captor, stood the household servants—portly Shaw the butler, Beatrice the parlor-maid, Eliza the "chef-cook"—all, down to the gay young sprig, aforesaid, who, as Martha had explained to her family in strong disapproval, "was engaged to do scullerywork, an' then didn't even know how to scull." Before them, in an attitude of command, not to say menace, stood Radcliffe, brandishing a carving-knife which, in his cruelly mischievous little hand, became a weapon full of dangerous possibilities.
"Don't dare to budge, any one of you," he breathed masterfully to his cowed regiment. "Get back there, you Shaw! An', Beetrice, if you don't mind me, I'll carve your ear off. You better be afraid of me, all of you, an' mind what I say, or I'll take this dagger, an' dag the life out of you! You're all my servants—you're all my slaves! D'you hear me!"
Evidently they did, and not one of them cared or dared to stir.
For a second Radcliffe faced them in silence, before beginning to march Napoleonically back and forth, his savage young eye alert, his naughty hand brandishing the knife threateningly. A second, and then, suddenly, without warning, the scene changed, and Radcliffe was a squirming, wriggling little boy, shorn of his power, grasped firmly in a grip from which there was no chance of escape.
"Shame on you!" exclaimed Martha indignantly, addressing the spellbound line, staring at her blankly. "Shame on you! To stand there gawkin', an' never raisin' a finger to this poor little fella, an' him just perishin' for the touch of a real mother's hand. Get out of this—the whole crowd o' you," and before the force of her righteous wrath they fled as chaff before the wind. Then, quick as the automatic click of a monstrous spring, the hitherto unknown—the supposed-to-be-impossible—befell Radcliffe Sherman. He was treated as if he had been an iron girder on which the massive clutch of a steam-lift had fastened. He was raised, lowered, laid across what seemed to be two moveless iron trestles, and then the weight as of a mighty, relentless paddle, beat down upon him once, twice, thrice—and he knew what it was to suffer.
The whole thing was so utterly novel, so absolutely unexpected, that for the first instant he was positively stunned with surprise. Then the knowledge that he was being spanked, that an unspeakable indignity was happening him, made him clinch his teeth against the sobs that rose in his throat, and he bore his punishment in white-faced, shivering silence.
When it was over, Martha stood him down in front of her, holding him firmly against her knees, and looked him squarely in the eyes. His colorless, quivering lips gave out no sound.
"You've got off easy," observed Mrs. Slawson benevolently. "If you'd been my boy Sammy, you'd a got about twict as much an' three times as thora. As it is, I just kinder favored you—give you a lick an' a promise, as you might say, seein' it's you and you ain't used to it—yet. Besides, I reely like you, an' want you to be a good boy. But, if you should need any more at any other time, why, you can take it from me, I keep my hand in on Sammy, an' practice makes perfect."
She released the two small, trembling hands, rose to her feet, and made as if to leave the room. Then for the first time Radcliffe spoke.
"S-say," he breathed with difficulty, "s-say—are you—are you goin' to t-tell?"
Martha paused, regarding him and his question with due concern. "Tell?"
"Are y-you going to—t-tell on me, t-to ev-everybody? Are y-you going to t-tell—S-Sammy?"
"Shoor I'm not! I'm a perfect lady! I always keep such little affairs with my gen'lemen friends strickly confidential. Besides—Sammy has troubles of his own."