CHAPTER III
LIKE Harvey, Horatia had no doubts as to her ability to look out for herself. To a certain extent she had been already doing it and she had begun doing it early so that it was natural for her to be independent and vigorous. Her father had died when she was five and after that her mother had not seemed to care enough about living to keep it up. She had been a pretty, intense woman who had taken her wifehood and maternity very seriously, so seriously that she had quickly faded and at the time of her death had not looked at all like the lovely young girl in leg-o’-mutton sleeves, who smiled out of the photograph in the West Park parlor.
She had two children, both girls to her secret relief and her husband’s secret disappointment, and she fussed over their clothes and their childish illnesses interminably. In spite of or perhaps because of her fussing, they were, when she left them, two sturdy little girls with pleasant tempers and good digestions. They accepted the change in their fortunes quietly, taking all the kissing and patting and uncomprehended signs of sympathy which came their way, and, climbing into the big walnut bed at the Grant house on the first night of their transference there, they cuddled closely together and fell asleep.
George Grant, their uncle, came in to see if they were asleep a little later and stood looking down at them in a kind of puzzled wonder and with a rusty throb of pity at the fact that they looked very small indeed in the big bed. It was as near to a definite emotion towards them as he ever got. He was their father’s brother and had officially “taken them” because it was the natural and proper thing to do. He was the head of a dry-goods establishment and by dint of steady application and learning one thing, the wholesale dry-goods business, well, he had made money in a slow accumulating way. And he had built his house, which perfectly expressed him. Like it he was good and substantial and like it also, provincial, unimaginative and unconscious of his limitations and lacks. His wife was enough like him to have been his sister and whether this was the result of slow absorption of his characteristics or had been the original bond between them, no one knew. Mrs. Grant knew as much about clean housekeeping as he knew about dry-goods. She had a subsidiary passion for church work and was an authority on church suppers and foreign missions.
She also had taken her brother-in-law’s children because it was the obvious thing for a childless, well-to-do couple to do. But perhaps because the Grants had been married for twelve years without having any children, the desire for them had either died or never been cultivated and they took Maud and Horatia without warmth. From the very beginning the house on the hill meant repression to them. There was never cruelty or even unkindness but it was all cold. Even in the kitchen there was no freedom or expansion. The food was measured and counted and it was not a place where an enterprising or hungry girl might take a pot of jam or a dozen cookies and abscond with them for an after-school lunch. To be sure if they were hungry they were allowed to have bread and butter and brown sugar—or a doughnut perhaps. But their aunt or the raw-boned Swedish girl who helped her gave it out always with an air of rationing and several admonitions not to drop the crumbs.
At intervals, all along their path through grammar school, High School and Sabbath school, came the supposedly high spots of recreation, parties which they themselves gave or which they went to as guests. Even at a very early age they had no question as to which kind they enjoyed most. They liked to go to parties and they hated them at home. Parties in other houses usually involved some stiffness at the beginning but they warmed up to gaiety and a joyous kind of disorderliness which sent all the children home flushed, tired and happy. At the Grant house they were functions all the way through. Mrs. George Grant modeled them on the parties she gave to the ladies of the Missionary Guild.
“I hate parties at home,” Maud would grumble to her sister when some morning Mrs. Grant would gravely announce that she thought one was due, and Horatia, always braver, would say, “But Aunt Caroline, what shall we do at the party?” Aunt Caroline, her mind already on the refreshments and the exact dozen of napkins which she would dedicate to the use of the children, had always the same answer, “Why, play games, Horatia—just as you always do.”
The children all came. Parties were never events to be ignored, and the young public of West Park was not discriminating if refreshments were involved. They came, all clean and scrubbed, and were sent down to the big bare hall which a freshly-lit fire tried in vain to heat, and they seconded the embarrassed efforts of Maud and Horatia to get up some games. But Mrs. Grant sat by the wall and watched with a mother or two flanking her, and there was no abandon. The refreshments, served in the big dining-room, were all that saved the situation, and even those were spoiled for the two hostesses by a feeling of their aunt’s eyes lurking for crumbs. Yet, afterwards, when the children had gone home again and all traces of them were carefully removed, Mrs. Grant would smile and say to her nieces, “Did you have a nice time?” And faithfully, true to a convention which they did not in the least understand, they answered, “Oh, yes, Aunt Caroline.”
Of course even all Mrs. Grant’s passion for routine could not prevent some crises arising. One came when Maud refused to do any more studying after she graduated from the High School. In spite of her lamentable monthly report card, Maud had been destined for a teacher and her sudden rebellion at the end of her seventeenth year shocked her aunt terribly. But Maud had a way of being silent and sullen and she had secret reinforcement from Harvey Williams, who was one of the reasons why she did not intend to go to the University. She rather concealed the fact of Harvey at the time of her rebellion, but after she had gained her point, Harvey became a steady caller at the Grant house. Maud had insisted that she was going to earn her own living but she postponed beginning to do it and it shortly became very obvious that she might better spend her few unmarried days preparing a trousseau. Harvey was quite an eligible person, beginning a law practice in the city and living with his mother in West Park. The Grants, once adjusted, smiled in their cheerless way upon the match. Maud’s love-making had gone on during Horatia’s last year at High School and first year at the University. She was at first tremendously impressed by the fact that Maud’s brown curls and pink skin were desirable to the point of matrimony. She recognized the fact that Maud was pretty but rooming with the prettiness and eternally removing jars of cold cream and boxes of pink powder from her side of the bureau had lessened its effectiveness for her. It was, none the less, a great thing to have Maud being made love to and to think of her in secret as the recipient of passionate kisses and delightful murmured phrases of love. Maud jarred on the romance by being Maud throughout, inclined to giggle and enjoy even Uncle George’s crude jokes about Harvey, and Harvey had done his share of the jarring by being a blushful, diffident young man who shot side glances at his fiancée and giggled heavily himself. Horatia did her best to forget them actually and to remember the delightful fact that they were lovers, hoping against hope that they spent their evenings in moonlight walks instead of holding hands at the movies.
By the time Maud was married, her sister was more sophisticated. She had finished her first year at the University and begun to read a great deal. Many subjects, more or less taboo in West Park, she had heard discussed freely by both students and professors. She had decided that there was something wrong with the social and economic systems of the world, that West Park was a small and narrow place, that flirting was silly, that she must devote a great deal of time to reading essays and books on psychology, and that she would like to meet some “real men” and get away from West Park. In spite of all this accumulated philosophy, she was oddly glad to get on a street-car labeled “West Park” when she came home on her first vacation, and to see all the familiar landmarks on the way to the stone house on the hill. She never forgot that homecoming. It was home, and not even the facts that Aunt Caroline was at a missionary meeting and that Maud had a cold in her head and wanted to talk about the initialing of her linen could keep Horatia from romancing somewhat over it.