The Star in the Window (Stokes)/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
WHEN Reba returned, three minutes later, she found Cousin Pattie in the parlor chuckling to herself, her soft flesh all a gentle tremor, like a mold of perfectly mixed gelatine. She was gazing at a big vase full of dried hydrangeas on the table in the corner.
"They were there twelve years ago," she exclaimed when Reba joined her. "I declare! Those same hydrangeas!"
"Oh, no," Reba corrected gently. "Not the same ones. I cut fresh ones every other year.
Cousin Pattie stopped chuckling, and gazed at Reba.
"How ever in the world do you stand it?" she exclaimed.
"Stand it?" queried Reba.
"Why," went on Cousin Pattie, "it would drive me crazy—the thought that I'd got to repeat a job even for every other week for a year—but every other year, for heaven knows how long, good lands! The monotony of it! How do you stand it—a young thing like you, Reba?"
Reba flushed.
"Why, I don't know," she stumbled, "I'm used to it, I guess." Then, "Wouldn't you like to see our family album?" she asked politely. "Pictures of people are so interesting, I think."
"Thanks," replied Cousin Pattie, "but I saw it last time, and, I declare, you showed it to me too, and asked me in just the same pretty way, twelve years ago. Lordy! Lordy!" she ejaculated, and sank into a deep, voluminous stuffed chair. "I can see," she went on, "how your mother stands doing the same things over and over again, year in and year out. She has to. She's tied to a wheel-chair—but you—young and well and strong! It's beyond me."
"It isn't always wheel-chairs," timidly Reba replied, "that—that—" she stopped, embarrassed.
"No," took up Cousin Pattie. "Sometimes it's Aunt Augustas, eh, Reba?" She winked at Reba. "Bless me," she went on, "when I was your age I was tied to about ten wheel-chairs of one kind or another, but I got rid of them somehow. I staved 'em to pieces and tossed them aside—all of them, all but one; that is," she added laughingly, "my flesh, and that I lug around with me. Of course it interferes somewhat," she confessed. "I have to give up mountain-climbing for the most part, though I did get a look down into the crater of Vesuvius. I tell you," she went on, "I don't let obstacles stop me. Not by a long shot. When I was your age I made up my mind I wouldn't go and get meek and submissive, even though I was born in New England. I wouldn't go and crawl underneath my cross, and stay there, calling myself good and pious, like half the women I've been seeing to-day, when all the time," she concluded with vehemence, "they're too weak and scared to go out and fight the difficult circumstances heaven has sent them. Oh, I get all out of patience with New England women sometimes. I've had a big dose of them to-day, and you mustn't mind the way I talk."
"Oh, I don't, I don't," murmured Reba.
"Why, they seem to think," she ran on, "that there's virtue in the mere act of enduring. Jesus Christ endured," she burst forth, bringing the color afresh to Reba's cheeks. One spoke that name only in church or in a lowered tone. "But lands," sacrilegiously it seemed to the girl, Cousin Pattie plowed ahead, "He endured things for the sake of something He wanted, and wanted bad. He had a big, driving purpose, just the way Columbus had, or Lieutenant Scott, or Napoleon, or Joan of Arc. Hardships were just incidental in the lives of men and women like them. While here, the hardships are the whole show. How much you can grin and bear is of more importance than what you're grinning and bearing it for. Here, if you do chance to be born with some big passion that interferes with your meekly bearing your infirmities, then the sooner you pluck it out, and crush it, and submit yourself to your fate, the better for your soul. Humph!" she gave a shrug of impatience. "That's all wrong, Reba," she declared. "Dead wrong!"
Reba had never heard any one talk such heresy as this. It struck at the very foundation of her lifelong belief in resignation.
"Come here," abruptly Cousin Pattie ordered. Then, "See that tooth?" she inquired, rather inelegantly stretching her mouth well to the left, and pointing with a stubby, unmanicured forefinger to a large molar. "See how gray it is beside the others, and dead-looking? A year or two ago a dentist put wires down into all its roots, and bit by bit, gradually dragged out every atom of feeling there was in it. It seems to me a good many women around here are like that tooth. All the nerve in 'em has been taken out, bit by bit, so there's no kick left. They'll never make any more trouble than that tooth will. I bet you God hates to see the pep he's thought best to put into us, picked out like that, and leave us meek as Moses, and no-account. I don't believe He likes it for a cent. Do you?" she asked abruptly.
"Perhaps not," murmured Reba.
"What big passion have you got driving you?" demanded Cousin Pattie.
Reba's soul squirmed within her at the staggering inquiry.
"Oh, none; I don't believe I've any big passion," she replied.
"None? Do you mean there's nothing you want that you haven't got in this world?" incredulously Cousin Pattie followed her up.
"Oh, yes; I suppose there are things I want, of course.'
"Well, what? What are they?"
"Why, I want—" she began, then stopped. How could she explain—what she wanted was so vague—people, life, adventure, youth. Youth! And she was twenty-five. Oh, it was too late for what she wanted. "Oh, I don't know," she ran to cover. "There used to be things I wanted, but I guess there's nothing special now. I'm twenty-five years old to-day!" she finished.
"Twenty-five!" Cousin Pattie raised both her fat hands, then let them drop dead weights on the arms of the chair. "Dear, dear, dear!" she sighed. "If I was only twenty-five again! Just at the start! Life all before me. And with your money—and no asthma—and thin! Goodness, what wouldn't I do? It never struck me," she raced on, "as wicked for a person to do what he wanted, just so 'twas self-respecting and didn't hurt anybody else. I wanted to see the world. Why, when I was a child, whenever I stood up in school and bounded a country, the very names—the Arctic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Coral, the Gulf of Guinea, the Bay of Bengal—called to me. Maps would get my cheeks all hot with excitement, tugging at my heartstrings. The bottoms of my feet fairly itched to press the ground of lavender Austria some day, green Turkey, pink India, lemon-colored China. I wanted to taste the river Jordan, touch the walls of Jerusalem, smell India, see a monkey hanging by his tail from a tropical tree, hear a dozen of them chatter in an African jungle. And I have—I have! But it hasn't been by surrender. My mother died, and left me at fifteen a penniless orphan. I was sent to my Uncle John's to help with the housework, for my board, but I didn't submit myself long to any such heaven's will as that! I went down and worked at the mills with the foreigners, and paid somebody else to do my chores at Uncle John's, and laid by two dollars a week in the bank. Oh, I didn't submit myself to anything that stood in the way of my ambition—not even an infirmity I had of making a noise like a foghorn whenever I blew my nose. I had an inspiration to advertise as a travelling companion, when, after two years at the mills I'd saved up only a little over seventy-five dollars. It took me a long while to land my first job, but finally a lady in Union, who was going to Florida for the winter, engaged me. I was terribly excited. I'd never even been across the state-line. But on the second day in New York she told me I'd got to go back. She simply couldn't stand another single hour of hearing me blow my nose like that. I was pretty well disappointed at first. I couldn't help the way I blew my nose. It was made that way. 'But, look here,' I said to myself on the train going home, 'why not get it made different then?' And I did. I went down to Boston, and I paid a specialist fifty dollars out of my seventy-five, and he made my nose over! And now I don't have to blow it very often, and when I do, it doesn't sound like a fog-horn. Get rid of your infirmities! That is what I say. Don't accept 'em. I tried to get rid of my fat. I found being so fat stood in the way of my placing myself as a travelling companion. I dieted like mad, but it was no go. I almost put myself in my grave. It appeared that if I was to see the world, I must see it fat. Also it appeared that if I was to see the sea, I must see it sick. I'm not a good sailor. But—rule two—don't let infirmities you can't get rid of, get rid of your ambition. Put them in the pack on your back, like the man in Pilgrim's Progress, and trudge along. Want to know my motto? It's a good one. Just three words—'In spite of'. You got a motto, Reba?"
"Thy will—not mine," flashed across the girl's mind, but she couldn't repeat those words to Cousin Pattie now, after she had just riddled them full of holes.
"I don't believe I have," she said in a low voice.
Cousin Pattie gazed at Reba reflectively. The girl was sitting on the edge of a straight-backed chair, with her feet very close together on the floor, and her hands folded on her knees which were hugged close together.
"I just wondered what you would be like," Cousin Pattie remarked.
"I suppose I've changed," Reba made answer, glancing up timidly.
"Changed! I wish to heaven you had!" vehemently the older woman exclaimed. "I said to myself last time I was here, 'She is like a bell that's never been rung' and you seem just the same to me now. I wish to goodness somebody would get hold of the end of your rope and make you thrill and tremble with the wonder that's in you. I wish I could get hold of it."
Reba looked down at her folded hands abashed, and was silent. Cousin Pattie shook her head and sighed audibly, as much as to say, "I give you up." Then, "You're like a pool of water," she broke out afresh. "Stuck up here all alone on your New England hill-top—no inlet, no outlet, and if you don't do something about it you'll dry up, as sure as preaching. There won't be anything left of you but the shallow impression of your shape and size."
Reba still looked at her folded hands. "It's hard sometimes," she groped, "to do one's duty, and at the same time, to—to"
"Pooh, pooh!" broke in Cousin Pattie. "Don't tell me you're one of those cowards hiding under a duty-cross. I hoped you'd inherited some of your ancestors' get-up-and-go. You must have a little of my blood in your veins, and the aunt whose name you've got was no weakling. And besides, there's your own grandfather! They say characteristics skip generations. Your grandfather was a courageous man, Reba,—cantankerous old fellow, but no coward, I can tell you that. He didn't let his conscience grow into a fat monstrosity. He saw to it that his sense of duty took its proper place among his other senses. It was your own grandfather, child, who put the mills at the foot of the hill onto the Massachusetts map. They didn't amount to a row of pins till he came along. It was your own grandfather who broke away from this everlasting New England holding-back and going-easy, and had the courage of his convictions to defy a whole family's advice, borrow huge sums of money, run risks, something awful, I'm told, all by himself, and simply hack his way through to success. Don't let your grandfather Jerome be ashamed of you, Reba, in his grave, as he was, before he died, of his son. Show him you can defy too. Show him you can ride over obstacles, and get what you want as well as himself. For I know there's something you want, Reba, though you won't tell me what it is. Hello!" she interrupted herself. "Here's Augusta. Come in, Augusta. I've been talking to Reba here like a dutch uncle. But I guess now I better go and visit a while with poor Eunice, and show her my postcards."
"Eunice is abed," announced Augusta Morgan. "Excitement always brings on one of her nervous spells. Emma's rubbing her. You better sit right here. I've told David to go hitch up. It'll be time to start for your train pretty soon. Reba can play for you till it's time to go."
Augusta approached the big black, shiny piano, closed as tight as a tomb, and very carefully proceeded to open it, revealing a spotless row of black and white keys, which she brushed gently with a silk duster.
"I noticed your new piano," Cousin Pattie remarked appreciatively. "I don't believe they're many in field as fine as that. Play something lively for me, Reba, and put on all the loud pedals."
But Reba's pieces were not lively ones, and she had always been cautious with the loud pedal—her playing sounded more like the tinkling of a harp—but she did as well as she knew how. Afterward she looked up to see her father standing in his overcoat in the doorway.
"All ready," he said briefly. Then, "Is there any need of an illumination in here?" he growled, and approached the high gas-chandelier and turned off one of the two lights Reba had lit.
Cousin Pattie chuckled. "My! David. Anybody'd think you were a poor man, and couldn't afford those lights!"
"Rich or poor, waste is wicked," David remarked.
"Waste of good-nature over trifles is wicked, David," she replied. Then with a mighty effort she drew herself out from the depths of the armchair and got to her feet.
"You all wait a minute," she said, leaning down, and proceeding to lift her outside skirt. From a deep pocket concealed somewhere in her voluminous petticoat, she drew out and placed on the mantel four little objects—a homeopathic pill-bottle, corked and labeled, a bit of gilt mosaic, a small pebble, and an imitation scarab. "Presents," she explained. "I always like to leave a little remembrance of some sort when I come. This is for you, Augusta," she pointed to the bottle. "Water from the Dead Sea; and this pebble, from the banks of the Ganges, is for Emma; and this bit of mosaic, which I picked out of a floor in Pompeii, is for Eunice; and this, Reba, this is a scarab for you. I bought it from a little Egyptian boy in Cairo. Now," she abruptly switched off, "I'll run up and put my bonnet on." She glanced at the watch on her wrist. "It's much too early for my train, but," she suggested good-naturedly, "seeing you're all hitched, David, I'm just going to ask you to let me run in to Martha Rand's, on my way to the depot and make her a five-minute call. There's plenty of time."
"See how I worked getting your father to take me to Martha's?" she sparkled triumphantly at Reba, when the girl accompanied her to the spare-chamber to help her on with her things. "Of course, you've got to have some imagination, as well as courage, to get what you want in this world. You've got to probe around and find the roundabout ways. Remember that, Reba, and remember too whose grandchild you are, and don't be afraid to put on the loud pedal. Good-by." She leaned suddenly and kissed Reba, rather damply, full on her mouth. Then, "Keep that scarab I brought," she said; "it will bring you luck. It stands for resurrection in Egypt."