Stella Dallas (1923, Houghton Mifflin)/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
1
A new venture always acted upon Stella like fresh soil in a garden upon seeds. It brought out renewed effort and vigor. An experiment untried possessed all the possibilities of success. Stella never considered failure until it was demonstrated. Even then she would not accept it as such—invariably searching for some hidden advantage in her various disappointments and rebuffs. Even when she had the daunting situation of a forced exile to face, she kept right on spinning her thread of optimism like a spider rudely ejected from her web, falling dizzily at first, but quickly recovering herself and fastening her slender cable to the first solid support that offered itself.
"You never can tell," she said to Effie McDavitt. "It may be the best thing in the world that ever happened that there wasn't any room for Laurel at Miss Fillibrown's this year, and that I've got to get out of the King Arthur. I'd gotten into the way of thinking that the sun rose and set in Milhampton society. I'm going to take an apartment round Boston somewheres! A housekeeping apartment. Lollie is just crazy to have a home of our own, so she can 'entertain,' and I guess it's high time. Mercy, I just wish I'd had sense enough to get out of Milhampton before. The town has always had it in for Laurel and me, ever since Stephen cleared out."
Stella didn't know anything about apartments in Boston. She didn't know anything about where "the right place was to live," nor "whom the right people were to know," nor which was the "right church," nor the "right school." Her knowledge of Boston was confined to the shopping district.
"But that's where this flare-up with Stephen comes in handy," she told Effie. "Before I had to dig up a lawyer to defend me against that Morley Smith creature, I didn't have a soul in Boston to ask advice about desirable locations, and desirable schools and things, that you have to know about to start right in any new place."
Mr. Joseph Hinckly, of the firm of Hinckly, Jones and Hinckly, became to Stella more than a mere legal adviser. His knowledge of Boston was somewhat confined too, although not to the same district as Stella's. However, he never hesitated to give her an authoritative opinion on any subject if she asked for it. That was instinctive with him.
When Stella inquired, "Commonwealth Avenue's one of the best residential streets, isn't it?" he had assured her there was nothing to compare with it this side of Riverside Drive.
"Well, I've found an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, way out beyond the thousands, and its front windows are just flooded with sunshine."
"Snap it up quick," exclaimed Mr. Hinckly. "The sunny side of Commonwealth Avenue! Great Scott! You can't do better than that!"
Mr. Hinckly was fully aware that the distance between one and one thousand in some instances, in some streets, is as great as between one side of the globe and the other. (He himself had been born at the wrong end of a fashionable street, he once said in a political speech.) But he was also fully aware that his client might live in the very heart of the Back Bay and barriers more forbidding than space would prevent her from ever crossing its thresholds.
Stella moved into her five-roomed furnished apartment just before Christmas. She still possessed some of the old knack in copying department-store window effects. But it had been a long time since she had had "her eye out for that sort of thing." With no one to guide her, and the matter of expense a constant argument for the cheaper article, her results were not successful. As Laurel gazed upon the slowly growing tawdriness of the apartment, the joy she thought she would feel in inviting the vague new friends her mother told her she would make in her new environment, once they got settled, began to fade.
The living-room was furnished in Mission of the Roycroft Style—big oak chairs with leather cushions; a rectangular couch, leather-cushioned also; a table that was strong enough to be used for a carpenter's bench. And all in spite of the fact of a two-toned light-green, satin-finished wall-paper of the 1890 "parlor period," and an ivory-tinted mantel, which, mongrel though it was, showed more strain of Adam than of Elbert Hubbard.
Stella put yellow-flowered cretonne at the windows. She told Laurel that she had seen a colored picture of a Mission room, in a magazine with yellow-flowered cretonne for hangings, and it was perfectly stunning! She knew where she could get some yellow-flowered cretonne for only ninety-eight cents a yard as effective as linen at six-fifty. But the hangings did not make the room right. Laurel felt convinced at last that the room would never be right.
One afternoon, when her mother was out shopping, she tried to give it just a little of the same look that Mrs. Morrison gave her rooms. But it was hopeless. Afterwards she wandered through the apartment gazing upon all its details with despairing eyes.
The kitchenette with its piled-up breakfast and dinner dishes, waiting for their nightly washing (Stella kept no maid, and she had her own way of keeping house), suggested to Laurel little of the homeyness of Mrs. Morrison's big roomy kitchen, basking in the afternoon warmth of a great black stove, the table spread with a bright red cloth, and a cheerful, broad-faced clock ticking lazily on the mantel.
The Boston apartment was very little like the "home all of our own" of Laurel's dreams. There was no garden. There was no lawn. There was no front door with a knocker, and a single bell. The only difference, as far as Laurel could see, between an apartment and a hotel was that in an apartment you ate your meals in your own rooms instead of downstairs, and it wasn't against the rules to use the gas for cooking.
2
Laurel didn't like Boston. She didn't know of a single winding river, over which to glide upon skates, in and out among alder bushes; nor of a single bare hillside, white with the first snowfall, down which to fly into the sunset, upon skiis; nor of any stone wall to follow for pussy-willows in March; nor rocky pasture-land nor rough woodland, to steal away to, all alone, in April, in search of trailing arbutus.
She didn't know of any corner store where stationery was sold and pencil boxes and return balls and jackstones, and gumdrops, seven for five cents, and cocoanut cakes, three for two. She didn't know of any hump-backed cobbler, whose tiny shop smelled deliciously of leather and was such a cheery place to visit when school was over and her mother was out. Jake, the hump-backed cobbler, would bow and bob at her like a Rip Van Winkle dwarf, whenever she came into his little box, and sweep off a place with his grimy shirt-sleeve for her to sit down upon, and chuckle and spit, and tell her stories about what his father used to do when he was drunk.
Laurel missed Jake. She missed Tony, too—the black-haired, olive-skinned young Greek, who kept a fruit store, and gave her a plum or a pear, or a banana, not the least bit rotten, whenever she went to see him; and, smiling, showing his beautiful white teeth, told her about the lovely dark girl in Athens, waiting for him to send her a ticket to come to America and marry him.
She missed Mrs. McDavitt, who had so many children, and lived in Cataract Village in the top of a tenement house, whom her mother used to take her to see occasionally of late—but whom she must never refer to, any more than to her grandfather—the queer, glum, ragged old man, who lived all alone in a little reddish house, which her mother called "that hovel," on the edge of the river, whom occasionally, also, of late, her mother used to take her to see. She missed Sadie, the chambermaid at the King Arthur, and Michael Dolan, the policeman; and Jim Doherty, the mailman, who knew her father's handwriting; and "peg-legged Eddy," who sold pencils and shoestrings at the corner of Main and Depot Streets. Laurel missed all her Milhampton friends. For Laurel had friends in Milhampton, although they did not attend Miss Fillibrown's Private School.
Most of all, perhaps, she missed Miss Thomas, the kind, wrinkled-faced, quiet-voiced librarian at the Milhampton Public Library, who let her wander at will, alone, among the book-stalls, and take out and put back any volume she pleased without asking.
She believed she hated the librarian at the public library to which Mr. Hinckly directed her. On her first day there the librarian had spoken harshly to Laurel, and made her blush with shame. Laurel had never used a card catalogue before. It hadn't been necessary with Miss Thomas. In her engrossed interest in the myriads of varying titles she had drawn out and piled on the table beside her at least a dozen of the little drawers that contained the luring cards.
Suddenly somebody at her elbow exclaimed, "You mustn't do that!"
Laurel gave a little startled jump. She had been a thousand miles away.
"It's not necessary to remove but one drawer at a time." There was displeasure in the voice.
Laurel flushed.
The librarian began returning the drawers to their places with emphatic little jerks and shoves. Then, glancing at Laurel sharply, she remarked, "Why, you've picked them from A to Z! What book is it you're hunting for, anyway?"
Laurel was forced to answer. "I wasn't hunting for any special book."
"What were you doing, then?"
"I was just looking at the titles for fun," Laurel murmured.
The librarian gave her a withering look. "The card catalogue is not fun. It's for use," she reprimanded. "It's not a toy. It's a tool. Don't ever play with it again."
Once out on the street Laurel said to herself, fighting with tears she could not control, "I'll never go near it again! I'll never go into the building again!"
It was six months before her hunger for books overcame her fear of being recognized, and humiliated a second time.
3
Laurel spent many hours in the trolley-cars in Boston. Her mother decided it was too late in the year to attempt to place her in any private school (of course public schools were no more to be considered in Boston than in Milhampton), but Mr. Hinckly said Boston was full of splendid institutions that specialized in about every subject that existed, and he could arrange for Laurel to take up courses of instruction in almost any of them.
Therefore Laurel traveled from one side of Boston to another, pursuing music in one building, French and German in another. Art in a third. Current Events in a fourth. Filet lace-making in the top loft of a fifth. She chafed beneath the incoherent routine. She longed for Miss Fillibrown's, although she hadn't been very happy there. She thought it was the familiar classrooms and familiar faces she was homesick for, but really it was the coördination and consistency of an organized unit. The pupils in Laurel's classes in Boston were as varied in age, race, sex, and station as are a chance group gathered together in the elevator of a public building.
Night after night Laurel cried softly into her pillow after her mother had fallen safely to sleep. Day after day she struggled with tears that seemed always to be just beneath the thin surface of her smiles.
She tried to reason with herself. She had been away from Milhampton before. Why, almost every summer since she could remember, she had been lonely in some unfamiliar place. But it had been bearable, she supposed, because it had been only for limited periods. And, besides, there had always been bellboys to speak to, elevator-men, and chambermaids. There had always been a game of billiards to watch, or an auction-table of women to listen to.
Once, on the sidewalk outside the apartment, waiting for her mother to return from a shopping-tour, Laurel fell into shy conversation with a dark little girl, a few years younger than herself who lived in the apartment below. The possibility of a friendship with this gentle child filled Laurel with timid happiness for a whole afternoon.
But when she told her mother about the conversation, Stella had exclaimed, "Heavens, we can't know those people, Laurel. They're foreigners! So is the family above us. I've discovered this place is riddled with them. Mr. Hinckly couldn't have known what he was talking about! We've simply got to get out sooner or later."
Until Stella moved to Boston, Laurel had preferred a tramp in the country, or a call on Jake, or Tony, or peg-legged Eddy, to the movies; or a stolen pilgrimage to the little house that used to be red, where the mysterious old man whom she must never tell was her grandfather lived, to a vaudeville or play. But in her new solitude, where there was no place to go and nowhere to call, Laurel looked with interest upon the diverting interior of any amusement place.
She went to the movies with her mother three times a week regularly. They climbed to gallery seats at Keith's every time the bill was changed. On Saturday nights Stella and Laurel usually dressed up in their best clothes, and dined at a fashionable hotel, ordering the lowest-priced entrée on the bill, dawdling over their bread and butter, as they observed the gay parties about them, and watched the waiters bear in marvelous planked steaks and Peach Melbas.
It was a bleak and forlorn sort of an existence for both mother and child, and terribly shorn of human contacts. But it needn't have been quite so bleak and forlorn and shorn, Stella said, if Laurel hadn't taken such a dislike to Alfred Munn. Ed tried to be awfully kind. He called at the apartment before they had been in it a week. He tried to be awfully kind to Laurel especially. But the child wouldn't let him.
4
"I can't bear that man, mother," she had said as soon as the door had closed upon him after his first call. "Don't let him come again." There was a red spot in the center of each of her cheeks.
"Mercy, mercy, Lollie," laughed Stella. (Lately Lollie would flare up like a little firebrand every once in a while over the littlest things! Her age, probably, Stella concluded.) "Why, what's the matter with Ed?" she asked lightly, humoringly.
"He's horrid!"
"Horrid? How's he horrid?"
"He tickled me in the ribs and said I was pretty, and kissed me."
"Well, what of that? You're only a little girl. Why shouldn't he tell you you are pretty, and kiss you?"
"His lips were wet, and his breath smelled. Oh, mother!" shuddered Laurel. "Don't let him kiss me again. Don't let him come here again."
"Now don't be silly, Laurel. I can't tell Ed Munn not to come here again. It would be awfully rude and bad-mannered."
"But he's rude, he's bad-mannered."
"Why, Laurel, how can you talk so about a gentleman who's trying to do so much for us?"
"He isn't a gentleman."
"He's more of a gentleman, I guess, than that dirty old cobbler you like so, who spits and swears, and that Dago who sells fruit, and came over steerage."
"Jake isn't dirty—only on the outside, and Tony is not a Dago. He's a Greek and he comes from a place in Greece where the most beautiful things in the world came from! Besides, Jake and Tony don't kiss me, and Jake and Tony don't say horrid things to me about you."
"And what things did Ed say about me?"
"When you were out of the room he put his arm around me, and told me he thought you were pretty, too."
"Well?"
"He shouldn't have said that, should he? Not to me? The way he did?"
"Why not? I don't call that horrid."
"Don't you? Really?"
"Certainly not. Why shouldn't he say it, if he thought it?"
Laurel stared at her mother, confused, perplexed. She didn't know how to answer, how to explain. She had never liked Ed Munn, but her dislike of him had never swept over her like this. It was frightening. Her sudden hatred of the man was like a big dense cloud that had rolled upon her unawares and enveloped her completely. She had turned toward her mother for help, for comprehension. She had groped for a steadying hand. But no hand had been held out.
Suddenly Laurel turned and buried her face in the pillow on the couch and burst into violent weeping. Of late many of her emotions were like enveloping clouds—love and worship, as well as hate and scorn. Her passion for Mrs. Morrison was big, dense, un-understandable. As she lay with her face buried in the dark of the pillow, she could see great masses of red and purple light-dust, shapeless and conglomerate, rolling and shifting senselessly in the dark behind her closed lids. Life was like that. Oh, if only somebody would show her a straight easy little path leading through the confusion.
"Oh, come, come, Lollie," exclaimed Stella. "Don't do that way. Of course if you feel so badly as all that about poor Ed, why—he needn't come, I suppose. But for the life of me, I don't see what he's done to you."
It was the first time for years Stella had seen Laurel cry like a little girl. It was the last time she ever saw her. After that one outburst, Laurel never again betrayed to her mother her fear of the shifting clouds of the twilight stratum of the dawning of her soul.
Stella was not mistaken in attributing Laurel's sudden aversion to Ed to her age, but she soon discovered it was no whim. In fact, Laurel seemed so terribly set against "poor Ed" that she almost was inclined to believe that Stephen must have "poisoned" her mind somehow. Why, when Ed invited Laurel and her mother to go to the theater with him, and choose their own show, the child refused absolutely to stir an inch. She wouldn't touch a piece of the generous box of candy he sent them. "Oh, how can you bear him?" she remarked quietly (for all the world like Stephen) when she found his name written on the card in the envelope tucked underneath the showy bow of ribbon.
Stella had to tell Ed the truth at last. She hated to give up all the good times he stood ready to shower upon them. She didn't mind giving up Ed himself. She always got sick of him after a little while, anyhow, and she must confess he had run downhill considerably even since last September. He had changed his business again. He was working in some sort of machine-shop now, and his finger-nails were terribly broken and greasy.