The Star in the Window (Stokes)/Chapter 1
THE STAR IN THE WINDOW
CHAPTER I
CHESTNUT STREET led off Main at right angles. It shot up over a hill straight and uncompromisingly, and down again on the other side. At the crest of the hill the Jerome house stood—a huge, plain, square affair painted battleship gray, and approached by three formidable flights of granite steps. A dozen pointed blue spruces had been set out on the sloping ground in front of the house, at measured intervals, like so many birthday candles on a cake—a cake with a smooth white frosting, for it was winter now, and a nicely finished edge, for the Jerome place was bordered by a three-foot granite curb. On either side of the first flight of steps, there were rectangular pillars—miniature Bunker Hill monuments, pointed at the top, with the number eighty-pine painted on the face of each of them, in big white figures on a black ground.
From the street there wasn't a tree to be seen at 89 Chestnut Street, except the spruces—nor a shrub, nor a bush, nor a vine, nor a trellis for a vine. It was a scrupulous, bare-looking place. It suggested government property—something military and rigid. Pyramids of cannon-balls wouldn't have looked out of place on the Jerome lawn. In the summertime there appeared on each side of the granite approach, a large round flower-bed of red-leafed canna, such as cemeteries delight in, always neat and well groomed, edged by salvia. David Jerome, and David's father before him, liked flowers well enough, they said, but they liked them in their proper places, like children and dogs.
On this cold January afternoon, when the spruces, as early as four o'clock, were casting long slim triangular shadows on the white expanse about them, Rebecca Jerome sat by a western window inside the big, bare cube of forbidding gray architecture at the top of Chestnut Street, and sewed—in a desultory fashion. It had snowed a little the night before, and she glanced up every now and then to watch the sprinkling of dry powder on top of the crust outside whirl into tiny hurricanes—pink as the sun got lower—scud across the slippery surface and disappear in a cloud over the edge of the snow-covered curb.
This was January third. This was her birthday. She was twenty-five years old to-day. She sighed every now and then.
"Good gracious, Reba," Aunt Augusta had flung at her, from the sewing-machine, five minutes ago, "are you taking breathing exercises for your lungs, or what, I'd like to know?"
Reba made no reply to her aunt's inquiry. It wasn't necessary. She simply sighed more quietly
They called her Reba for short, pronouncing the first syllable with a long "e"—never Becky. "I don't like names ending in 'ie' and 'y,'" Aunt Augusta had announced before Rebecca was old enough to have any voice in the matter. "They sound sentimental. Soft!" she scorned. "The child is named after her aunt, Rebecca Marsh, and you can't imagine Aunt Reba being 'Becky'd' by anybody, can you?"
Certainly Reba Jerome, gazing at the tintype of her namesake, inclosed in the little black coffin-like case, which was kept in the parlor-table drawer, couldn't imagine "Beckying" her.
"A strong character, was your great-aunt Reba!" Aunt Augusta often reminded her.
She looked strong. She had a big firm mouth drawn down at the corners. She was like a man—an old man of sixty or seventy—in the picture, with a thick neck, and huge hands, folded masterfully across her abdomen.
As Rebecca sat and stifled her sighs this afternoon, she welcomed the occasional whirr of the sewing-machine, before which Aunt Augusta was seated, vigorously stitching now and then. It prevented the possibility of speech. It wrapped her away alone with her contemplations.
She was twenty-five years old! She had turned another corner! Every fifth year there was a corner. Thirty would be upon her soon, then thirty-five, and forty. She wouldn't have minded growing old if the corners brought anything new, but they didn't. Nothing changed. Nothing happened. Five years ago she had sat in the same little rocking-chair, by the same western window, and helped finish a new dress for herself, her invalid mother in the same wheel-chair nearby, her aunts—her mother's older sisters—in the very places they occupied to-day: Aunt Augusta, grim and erect, before the sewing-machine, seated on its wooden cover; Aunt Emma, round-backed and shaped, close beside the other window, curved over her work like a squirrel with a nut. She had thought much the same bitter thoughts too. For at twenty she had begun to suspect that her girlhood had somehow evaded her, overtaken her and quietly slipped by while she had been watching for it.
As she sat and sewed this afternoon she kept her face steadfastly turned away from the familiar details of the room behind her. It was an ugly room. It was the back-parlor made over into a bedroom for her mother, who couldn't go over the stairs. It was square and high-studded, heavily corniced in dark brown plaster, and in the center of the ceiling there was a rosette, round and ornate, which suggested the summer canna-beds. From it hung a heavy glass chandelier, with six bronze arms, holding up six white frosted globes. In one corner of the room stood the bed—black walnut, solid and substantial, its pillows covered with hand-crocheted shams, red-initialed in the center. Over the bed, suspended from the ceiling and fastened to the floor, appeared an awkward contrivance made of wheels and pulleys and ropes, a sort of derrick for moving the invalid.
The invalid was a yellow and shrunken little creature. Rheumatism had been slowly bending and twisting her for a quarter of a century now. The joints of her fingers curved backwards, and shone as if they had been oiled, where the skin was stretched. But she could still manage a needle. She held it deftly between her thumb and the knuckle of her forefinger.
It was she who next broke the silence of the room. Fifteen long minutes had been ticked off by the onyx clock on the black marble mantel since Aunt Augusta had spoken. The whirr of her machine had long since ceased. She was basting now.
"I'm sure I'm sorry to trouble anybody," plaintively the invalid began—she had a high-pitched, querulous voice—"but it's long past four."
"I'll go in a minute," said Reba. "I'm nearly at the end of this seam."
She took half a dozen more stitches.
"I don't know what good it does," complainingly the invalid went on, "to buy expensive medicine and then let it stand in the bottle."
Reba fastened her thread nicely, taking three precise little stitches in the same spot, and cutting off her thread close to the cloth with a pair of small scissors. She stuck her needle into a little red-woolen, tomato-shaped pin-cushion on the window-sill, and began folding up her work.
"I can always be put off," pursued her mother petulantly. "Seams are more important than I am, of course!" And still unsuccessful at getting any sympathetic response, she finished tearfully, "It will be a good thing when I'm out of the way, and not bothering anybody any more, I guess."
Even at that Reba made no reply. Her mother had used the same weapon so often before that it had long since lost its sharp edge. She laid aside her work and stood up.
Abruptly from her place in front of the machine Aunt Augusta spoke.
"While you're about it," she commented in a flat tone, "you can see to the furnace too."
"And open the draughts in the stove, as you go through," tucked in Aunt Emma from the window, speaking through the only corner of her mouth free from pins.
"All right," Reba replied listlessly, and went out of the room.
It was always like this—week after week, year after year. It never changed—never, never, never! It never would! Reba knew her way blindfolded down the dim cellar stairs to the coal-bin. In the winter every afternoon at dusk the furnace had to have its shovelful or two of coal. All the year around, every afternoon at four her mother had to have her spoonful of patent medicine in a quarter of a glass of water. Every afternoon, too, an hour before supper-time, the draughts of the kitchen stove had to be opened, its lids slipped back into place, and the tea-kettle moved over the coals. Reba went through the motions of these tasks as unconsciously as she walked. She had been performing them all her life. The sisters kept no "help." They preferred to do their own work to cleaning up after some slovenly hired-girl, they said. For the same reason they made all their own clothes. Dressmakers were careless and slipshod; their seams were never properly finished.
Reba sighed again, as she stood in the orderly kitchen before the soapstone sink, wiped dry and spotless, and measured off the usual dessert-spoonful of peppermint-smelling mixture from one of the big brown bottles, empty dozens of which filled a closet down-cellar. When she returned to the bedroom she placed the glass on the table beside her mother, making no comment and receiving none. Crossing the room to her low chair by the window, she sat down, letting her hands lie quietly in her lap with their palms upturned, and stared out at the lemon-colored sky, pinkening now a little around the edges, with a flickering star embedded just above where the glow was brightest.
Upturned palms irritated Aunt Augusta.
"For the land's sake, what is there to see out that window, anyhow?" she demanded, after enduring them for five minutes in silence.
"Nothing," Reba replied, which was true enough. The town lay on the other side of the house. From this window there were only rolling white fields, crossed and recrossed by uncertain stone-walls that lost themselves, now and then, in the drifted snow; and on the crest of the next hill, one of those solitary New England farms—a small, white house and a big, gaunt, unpainted barn behind—which does so much to make the country look bleak and dreary.
"Nothing! Humph!" sniffed Aunt Augusta, and fell to stitching at a terrific speed, so fast indeed that the machine purred as if it had a dozen cylinders inside to make it go instead of two wide, flat-footed feet placed squarely on a corrugated iron pedal. "My goodness!" she ejaculated sharply, bringing the machine to a sudden stop. "I should think you had a beau, by the way you moon." She glanced at Reba, over her steel-bowed spectacles.
The younger woman made no reply. To have denied the existence of a lover would be lacking in humor. But she might have said something. Her persistent silences were a source of annoyance to Aunt Augusta.
"When we were twenty-five," her aunt went on, "things were rather different, I can tell you that. Why, your Aunt Emma had been a widow for two years when she was twenty-five."
"Yes, and your Aunt Augusta," reciprocated Aunt Emma from the window, speaking thickly through her pins, "had lost her young man in the war, and was wearing black for him before she was twenty."
"And I," chimed in the invalid in her high whine (she, too, felt the same grievance), "had been engaged to your father six whole years when I was your age."
Reba was familiar with all these facts. Every, birthday her mother and her aunts aired them for her benefit. She ought to have been callous to them by this time. But she wasn't—not quite.
"I don't see," she replied in a hopeless voice, "where you think anybody's to come from—in a place like this." She was gazing at the barren hills.
"Where were any young men to come from in our day?" scoffed Aunt Augusta.
"But you never used to let me go to any of the Church Sociables, or Christian Endeavor Society meetings, you know," Reba gently reminded her tormentor.
"Well, I declare!" exclaimed Aunt Augusta. "A girl with your advantages talking like that! A girl who's had two weeks for I don't know how Augusts ever since she was eighteen years old, at summer resorts on the New Hampshire and Massachusetts coast, talking about Church Sociables! I tell you what, young lady, in our day there was no such thing as a grand-piano in the parlor, nor piano-lessons either." Aunt Augusta was trimming her seam now with a long pair of steel shears. "Nor diamond bracelets, that I can recall!" she went on, making her scissors snap at the end of each phrase, "nor gold watches and chains, nor black and white silk dresses, such as this! No, sir! Not in our day!" The scissors clattered as she tossed them in the basket on the floor.
"Nor furnace heat," took up Aunt Emma in a less severe tone but still in the same strain. "Dear me! I remember I had to have my callers in the kitchen sometimes, winter nights! It didn't seem to keep them away, though."
Reba wished she hadn't spoken at all now. Would she never learn that silence, just clear, unadulterated silence, was the only way to get along with these women? They were always agreed. No one of them was ever known to take her side against the other two. It was no use to argue. She burrowed down deep into her own thoughts, and stayed there, very quiet, fearful if she made a sound that they would probe her again.
They left her alone for a while—ten minutes, perhaps. Then, "I'll be ready for those sleeves as soon as they're basted," Aunt Augusta remarked, glancing toward Reba.
"I don't believe I'll sew any more," said Reba. "My head aches a little."
"Head aches! Well, I should think it would, staring out of the window the way you do. It's time to light up anyhow."
At that suggestion Reba rose. There was a gas drop-light with a green glass shade on the center table. Silently she went about the business of lighting it, afterwards rolling her mother's chair close up beside it, and helping her aunts move their tools and materials from the windows into the circle of artificial light. She then began pulling down the window-shades. She wished Aunt Augusta would leave the shades up till it was really dark. "But we don't want the whole neighborhood gaping in on us!" her aunt would be sure to retort, if she suggested it.
It was when she was pulling down the last shade, shutting out the last bit of glorious pink glow, that she remarked, "I guess I'll go outdoors for a little while."
"Outdoors!" Aunt Augusta repeated. "At this time of day! You ought to have thought of that when the sun was high, it seems to me."
"There wasn't a sunset then. It's so pretty out now."
"Pretty! It won't be very pretty for that throat of yours."
"Perhaps the air will do me good," Reba replied. She went toward the closet where she kept her hat and coat. "I won't stay long."
Aunt Augusta turned her head back over her shoulder, and spoke to the girl's mother.
"Eunice," she demanded, "are you going to allow that girl to go out at this time of day?"
"No, no. Of course I'm not," the invalid whined. "No, Reba, no. You're not to go. You might get tonsilitis again."
Reba stood uncertainly by the closet door.
"I've been in all day," she suggested. "I won't stay long." She put her hand on the knob of the closet door.
"Didn't you hear what your mother said?" Aunt Augusta inquired sharply.
"Do you mind, Mother?" Reba pursued.
"O dear, dear, dear!" her mother wailed, as if in physical torture, "I wish you wouldn't tease so! It always brings on my neuralgia."
A slight flush spread over Reba's cheeks. "But I'm twenty-five," she murmured. The last spark of her girlhood had gone out to-day. Were there to be no compensations? "You all go out when you want to. You don't ask permission. I don't see"
She stopped short. Aunt Augusta had turned halfway round on the machine cover, and had pulled down her spectacles. She was glaring at the younger woman over their steel rims.
"Rebecca!" she exclaimed. Just the one word twice repeated, "Rebecca!"
Rebecca had always been terrified by Aunt Augusta's eyes when they glared at her over the rims of her glasses. They were like gray-striped monsters peering over a fence.
"Oh, I don't mean anything," hastily she assured her aunt. "I won't go, of course. Only Oh, I won't go. I don't really care about it."
Her hand fell away from the knob. She gave it up. She surrendered. She had always surrendered. With drooping shoulders she crossed the room to the door that led into the hall.
"Where are you going?" Aunt Augusta demanded.
"Nowhere. Just upstairs to my room. Do you mind?"
"You better put on your jacket," she suggested, pushing her glasses back into place, and resuming her stitching.
It was very warm in the house. The sisters liked it at about eighty. Even upstairs the rooms were uncomfortably hot, after the furnace had had its shovelful of coal, and its draughts opened in the afternoon. But without a protest, Reba turned back, and opened the closet door. She took down a pink worsted sweater, slipped her arms into it, and went out into the hall.