Hey, Rub-a-dub! Hey, Rub-a-dub-dub!
CHAPTER II
On Christmas Eve there came to our home to spend the next two days, which chanced to be Saturday and Sunday, Alice Kane, a friend and fellow-clerk of one of my sisters in a department store. Because the store kept open until ten-thirty or eleven that Christmas Eve, and my labors at the Herald office detained me until the same hour, we three arrived at the house at nearly the same time.
I should say here that the previous year, my mother having died and the home being in dissolution, I had ventured into the world on my own. Several sisters, two brothers and my father were still together, but it was a divided and somewhat colorless home at best. Our mother was gone. I was already wondering, in great sadness, how long it could endure, for she had made of it something as sweet as dreams. That temperament, that charity and understanding and sympathy! We who were left were like fledglings, trying our wings but fearful of the world. My practical experience was slight. I was a creature of slow and uncertain response to anything practical, having an eye single to color, romance, beauty. I was but a half-baked poet, romancer, dreamer.
As I was hurrying upstairs to take a bath and then see what pleasures were being arranged for the morrow, I was intercepted by my sister with a “Hurry now and come down. I have a friend here and I want you to meet her. She’s awful nice.”
At the mere thought of meeting a girl I brightened, for my thoughts were always on the other sex and I was forever complaining to myself of my lack of opportunity, and of lack of courage when I had the opportunity, to do the one thing I most craved to do: shine as a lover. Although at her suggestion of a girl I pretended to sniff and be superior, still I bustled to the task of embellishing myself. On coming into the general livingroom, where a fire was burning brightly, I beheld a pretty dark-haired girl of medium height, smooth-cheeked and graceful, who seemed and really was guileless, good-natured and sympathetic. For a while after meeting her I felt stiff and awkward, for the mere presence of so pretty a girl was sufficient to make me nervous and self-conscious. My brother, E——, had gone off early in the evening to join the family of some girl in whom he was interested; another brother, A——, was out on some Christmas Eve lark with a group of fellow-employees; so here I was alone with C—— and this stranger, doing my best to appear gallant and clever.
I recall now the sense of sympathy and interest which I felt for this girl from the start. It must have been clear to my sister, for before the night was over she had explained, by way of tantalizing me, that Miss Kane had a beau. Later I learned that Alice was an orphan adopted by a fairly comfortable Irish couple, who loved her dearly and gave her as many pleasures and as much liberty as their circumstances would permit. They had made the mistake, however, of telling her that she was only an adopted child. This gave her a sense of forlornness and a longing for a closer and more enduring love.
Such a mild and sweet little thing she was! I never knew a more attractive or clinging temperament. She could play the banjo and guitar. I remember marveling at the dexterity of her fingers as they raced up and down the frets and across the strings. She was wearing a dark green blouse and brown corduroy skirt, with a pale brown ribbon about her neck; her hair was parted on one side, and this gave her a sort of maidenish masculinity. I found her looking at me slyly now and then, and smiling at one or another of my affected remarks as though she were pleased. I recounted the nature of the work I was doing, but deliberately attempted to confuse it in her mind and my sister’s with the idea that I was regularly employed by the Herald as a newspaper man and that this was merely a side task. Subsequently, out of sheer vanity and a desire to appear more than I was, I allowed her to believe that I was a reporter on this paper.
It was snowing. We could see great flakes fluttering about the gas lamps outside. In the cottage of an Irish family across the street a party of merrymakers was at play. I proposed that we go out and buy chestnuts and popcorn and roast them, and that we make snow punch out of milk, sugar and snow. How gay I felt, how hopeful! In a fit of great daring I took one hand of each of my companions and ran, trying to slide with them over the snow. Alice’s screams and laughter were disturbingly musical, and as she ran her little feet twinkled under her skirts. At one corner, where the stores were brightly lighted, she stopped and did a graceful little dance under the electric light.