Bobbie, General Manager: A Novel

by Olive Higgins Prouty

I know I'm neglecting my story, but I must tell about one special letter of Mrs. Maynard's, because it referred to me. It didn't happen to be written to her son but to a woman friend whom I didn't know. It was a chatty letter, that related all the important events and happenings in the town, very long and full of the littlest details you can imagine. It was on the fourth thin sheet that I ran across this: "And our dear neighbour Mrs. Vars has a little daughter three weeks old," I deciphered. "She has named her Lucy for herself. I went in to see her last week and took her a jar of my quince jelly. She is a very happy woman. She has always wanted a little girl. When she took the little baby in her arms she said with tears in her eyes, 'My little daughter and I are going to be "best friends" all our lives.'"

I read that precious sentence over and over again. My mother and I 'best friends all our lives'—and oh, I couldn't remember her smile. 'Best friends all our lives'—and she had gone before we could share a single secret. I leaned right forward over my copying and cried, "If you'd lived I wouldn't care if we were poor. If you and I were 'best friends,' I wouldn't care if I never had a good time. Oh, if you were here! If you were here!"

And yet, although I cried so hard, I was strangely happy that evening. Of course I don't believe in miracles. They don't happen nowadays, and yet it seems almost as if my mother might have sent that message to me, to console me in my struggle, to tell me that I wasn't all alone. I gazed at her picture—the only one she had ever had taken—under its cold glass over my bed, before I went to sleep that night. It is a profile, clear-cut and a little sad. They tell me she was only nineteen in the picture—my age, just my age now.

"My best friend," I whispered, "my best friend all my life!"

As the dreary days wore on, all the sympathy that I possessed yearned over my patient brother Alec. But I couldn't help him any. Time and time again I tried to cheer him up, but my attempts fell flat. There was a time when Alec used to go out among the young people in Hilton quite a good deal, but I observed that lately he had nothing but business engagements to take him away.

Alec had never talked to me about a certain young lady named Edith Campbell—I don't know that he had ever mentioned her name to me—but I knew that he had always entertained a sneaking admiration for her. Since father died he hadn't seen her so much and I had been glad of it. I don't like Edith Campbell. There is so much show about her, and she always contrives to make Alec look so forlorn and pathetic. I remember one morning not long after Alec's serious talk with me, that he went out of the door gloomier than ever with his green felt bag filled with the ledgers that he'd been working over till midnight. Just as he was going down the front steps who should appear but Edith Campbell in a sporty little rig, driving a new cob of hers—round and plump and shiny. She had some little out-of-town whippersnapper of a man beside her, and as she drew her horse to a standstill right by Alec, she looked trig and sporty enough for the front cover of a magazine. She gave Alec a play salute from the brim of her perky little hat, and my poor tired brother took off his limp grey felt. He went over and leaned one hand on the horse's brilliant flank, and gazed up at Edith. His overcoat that used to be black looked greenish in the bright sunlight and the velvet collar was worn about the edges.

"Hello, Al Vars!" exclaimed Miss Campbell. I could hear her through the open door, hidden behind the lace. "I haven't seen you for one age. You ought to come out of that shell of yours. Al used to be a pal of mine," she laughed to the man beside her and introduced them. The stiffly-starched little out-of-town man gave Alec a hand gloved in yellow dog-skin and Alec turned and said something I couldn't hear to Miss Campbell. She called her reply back over her shoulder as she drove off. "Sorry, Al. Can't. Too bad. I'm going to Florida with Mother and Dad for the winter next week!"

Alec stood forlorn in the middle of the street, watching her descend the hill. The back of the highly-shellacked little waggonette flashed in the sunlight. Miss Campbell sat erect, sleek as her horse. My feelings grew savage against her, and when Alec finally shifted the heavy green bag to the other hand and moved slowly off down the street toward the factory I wanted to run after him and tell him she wasn't worth a single thought of his. I wished that my life-long devotion might make up for this single morning's sting of Edith Campbell's heartless exhibition of prosperity. But it couldn't. It couldn't break through my brother's brooding silence for even an interval.

Ruth took our change of circumstances very philosophically at first. Ruth is sixteen now, and awfully pretty. She has boy-callers about three times a week. She's very popular. She can sing like a little prima-donna, and can dance a cake-walk like a young vaudeville performer. The twins think Ruth is the cleverest little creature alive. She's a very independent sort of girl. No one can give any advice to Ruth on what is the proper thing for her to wear; no one can tell her what is the correct way for girls of sixteen to act; at least, I can't. Ruth loves fashion and style. She was glad to have Alec dispose of Dixie.

"Why," she said to me in her little sophisticated way, "Dixie is eating his head off, and he limps! I'd be ashamed to be seen at a funeral driving Dixie! You may have noticed I never use him." She was delighted to learn that Alec was going to sell the house. "For he says," she announced to me gleefully, "that perhaps now we can live in one of those darling little shingled houses on the south side. Those houses have the loveliest little dens in them with a stained-glass window, where I could have my callers. I just hate the parlour here. There's a big new crack over the marble mantel, and I have a dreadful time making people sit with their backs to it."