“But, Aunt Carry, how can I get to school? I’ll be late!”
“Well, gracious, what if you are! Don’t be so fussy! Time was made for slaves!” That was Aunt Carry’s favorite motto, which she was always citing, and for citing which there were plenty of occasions in her life. Little Pearl thought somewhat resentfully, as she rummaged in her trunk for her other shoes, that if Aunt Carry had to enter the school-room late and get scolded, she’d think differently about time! But anyhow it was fun to wear her best shoes if she liked, and to watch their patent leather tips twinkling as she scurried about. They twinkled very fast during that quarter of an hour, as Pearl collected her wraps (her mittens she never did find after that day) and tried to scare up something for breakfast in the disordered kitchen, where the cat, installed on the table, was methodically getting a breakfast by licking the dirty plates clean. Pearl was not so lucky, and had to go off to school with a cracker in one hand and a piece of marshmallow cake in the other. The less said about her hair the better! Grandmother Manley’s “forty thousand kisses” were not quite so wonderful this morning as they had been last night.
At noon Pearl ran home, her stomach in her heels, all one voracious demand for good food. Aunt Carry was crocheting by the window and there was no sign of any lunch. “Mercy me!” cried Grandmother Manley, “Is it noon? Why, how the morning has gone!” And then with the utmost compunction they both rushed out into the kitchen and began to hurry with all their might to get something for Pearl to eat. The kitchen fire was pretty low, and there were no potatoes cooked, and Aunt Carry had forgotten to order any eggs, and the milk bottle had been left outside and was frozen hard. Hurry as they might and apologize to Pearl almost with tears as they did, it was very little that Pearl had eaten when she went back to school, and she knew well enough that they would forget to-morrow, just as they had to-day. No, already Pearl felt that life could not be made wholly out of kisses and good nature. By nightfall, her thin kid shoes were rather scuffed and very wet, with a break in one of the patent leather tips where Cousin Tom had stepped on it, in a scuffle with his brother. Little Pearl nursed her sore toe and broken shoe with a weary feeling.
Always at the end of the six months with the Manleys, Pearl was nearly a nervous wreck. She was behind in her lessons, since there was not a quiet spot in the house to study, and even if there had been you couldn’t escape from the noise of the trombone, which Aunt Carry’s oldest was learning to play; she was underweight and anæemic for lack of regular food and enough sleep ... it wasn’t much use to go to bed when nobody else did, and Aunt Pearl and Aunt Carry always visited in more than audible voices as they put up their hair in curlers; she had nothing to wear (since nothing had been renewed or mended) except a blue silk dress which Grandfather Manley had bought for her in a fit of affection, and some mostly-lace underwear which Aunt Carry had sat up till all hours making for her, so that “she should have something pretty like the other girls!” But for an active little girl, mostly-lace underwear soon was reduced to the quality of mosquito netting; and a blue silk dress in the Manley’s house was first cousin to Sir Walter Raleigh’s cloak in the mud-puddle.
With all the family she had been night after night to the moving pictures and not infrequently was kept up afterwards by the hysterics of little Nelly, Aunt Carry’s nervous, high-strung five-year-old, who saw men with revolvers pointed at her, and desperadoes about to bind and gag her, till Pearl more than half saw them too, and dreamed of them afterwards. She had suffered the terrible humiliation of having the teacher send her home with a note saying that her hair must be washed and kept in better order, a humiliation scarcely lessened by the outraged affection of the Manleys, who had taken her into their loving arms, to moan over their darling’s hurt feelings. She had thereafter made frantic efforts to keep her own hair in order, with what brush and comb she could salvage out of the jetsam in the room which was at once hers and the aunts’ bedroom; but if she complained that her hair-ribbons disappeared, or were crumpled in a corner of the drawer, she was told comfortably, not to be fussy, “For goodness’ sakes, don’t make such a fuss about things! Folks that do never have a minute’s comfort in life, nor nobody else in the house either.”
Yes, it was a rather pale, wild-eyed little Pearl, who on the first day of July scrambled together into her trunk what she could find, put on the hat which had been so bright and pretty when Aunt Pearl gave it to her at Easter, and which now after two months with the Manleys looked like a floor-cloth. She did not put her hands over her ears to deaden a little the volume of noise as they all crowded about her in the station to say their affectionate and vociferous good-byes, but that was only because she did not want to hurt their feelings. The instant she was in the train, she always hid her face in her arms, quivering all over with nervous tension. Oh, the noise the Manleys always made over everything, and the confusion they were always in, when they tried to do anything, colliding with each other, and dropping things, and squealing and screaming! And it was all right for them to be warm-hearted and generous—but when they slathered money on ice-cream, and then didn’t have enough to pay for her ticket, till they’d borrowed it ...!
Well, then there was the re-entrance into the Purdon house, the beautiful, fragrant cleanliness of everything, the dustless order, her own room, with the clean, white sheets, and her own safe closet into which nobody would ever plunge rummaging. And Aunt Maria so quiet and calm, with her nice low voice, and Grandmother Purdon so neat with her white lace collar, and her lovely white hair so well-brushed, and oh, the good things to eat.... To sit down to a well-ordered table, with a well-cooked savory mutton stew, and potatoes neither watery nor underdone, and clear apple jelly quivering in a glass dish! And the clean, clean dishes! Had Maria ever complained of having to rinse the dishes too often! She remembered the dried-on bits of food always to be felt on the Manley plates ...!
The first evening too was always dream-like, the quiet, deft despatching of the dishes, in the kitchen shining with cleanliness, and then all the evening free, and so quiet, so blessedly quiet, with no trombone, and no whoops of chatter or boisterous crying and laughing; no piano banging (except perhaps Aunt Maria softly playing a hymn or two), no children overturning chairs and slamming doors, no one falling up or downstairs, no crash of breaking crockery from the kitchen ... little Maria sat on the well-swept porch behind the well-trained vines and soaked herself in the peace and quiet.
But by the next morning, the shine was a little off. When Aunt Maria came to wake her at half past six, half past six ... why, no one at Grandfather Manley’s thought of stirring till eight! And she was expected to wash and dress ... not a button unbuttoned or a hair out of place under penalty of a long lecture on neatness ... and “do” her room, even to wiping off the woodwork; and make her bed. Heavens! How fussy they were about those old corners! All this before she had a bit of breakfast. Then, breakfast with everybody’s whole soul fixed on the work to be done, and nobody so much as dimly aware that it was a glorious, sunny, windy, summer day outside. Maria’s heart sank, sank, sank, as she drank her perfectly made chocolate, and ate her golden-brown toast, till it struck the dismal level where it usually lived during the Purdon half-year. “Come, Maria, don’t loiter over your food. The only way to get the work done is to go right at it!”
“Oh, Maria, do you call that folding your napkin? I call it crumpling it into a ball.”