To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 24
"FEELS almost like summer, don't it?" Mrs. Driggs asked acquaintances as she came out of church. Walking home, because Noble liked to have his Sundays as free as possible, she let her sealskin coat fly open, and Mr. Driggs' face turned as red as a beet, as she told him several times. Noble had a big fire in the furnace. "Isn't it always the way?" she said. "If it was a chilly day he'd have let it go out, but here it's almost like summer—just a sliver of the well done, and some gravy on my potato, Papa—he's got a fire hot enough to roast us." And she added what she had been saying for over thirty years: "That man's so stupid I honestly don't think I can put up with him much longer."
It was a relief, after the big Sunday dinner that took endurance even on a cold day, to take off her heavily boned silk dress with the high net collar, to let her corsets pop open, and, in petticoat and dressing sacque, collapse with knees wide apart into the rocking chair by the window for a little rest before she tackled the Sunday papers.
"Why don't you have a good lie-down, Papa? It'd do you good. You ought to have seen your face, coming home from church! Just imagine this warm a day in November. I guess it must be Indian summer, maybe. Charlotte's going to take Mrs. Whipple for a drive this afternoon, it's so nice. 'S'kind of funny to remember how grand the old lady used to be, with her coachman and acting so superior and everything, and now she's very glad to go for a ride in Hoagland's Packard. Well, it's a queer world."
A steady gentle grunting from the bed indicated that her husband was asleep already, and she thought of lying down herself, on the sofa heaped with cushions in what Annie Laurie Collins, who had taken up interior decorating, called "boudoir tints" of old rose and mauve, scratchy with gold lace. The cushions, of course, had to be put in a chair before you could lie down on the sofa. There was a great deal of gold lace and galloon in the room, on lamp shades, on the hoop-skirt doll Mrs. Driggs always forgot to put the telephone back in. It was a handsome room, she thought contentedly, not plain, like Charlotte's, or shabby, like Mrs. Green's.
"Well, I guess I'll have a nice lie-down, too," she whispered to herself, with such a wide yawn that she felt the hinge of her jaw nervously. But she still sat looking sleepily out of the window at the bare maple branches. The Monroes' maid starting for her Sunday off in Mrs. Monroe's claret-colored hat that Mrs. Driggs had often played bridge opposite. Terriss Jackson, just back from London, in new tweeds, stepping bouncingly past with a large walking stick and the Jacksons' cocker spaniel. "Acting English!" Mrs. Driggs whispered, with a fat quiver of laughter.
There was the automobile, with Charlotte and Nancy Lou inside. Charlie blew the horn.
"Papa!
"Papa! Wake up! There's something wrong across the street!"
"Whasha ma'?" asked Mr. Driggs, drunken with sleep.
"Papa, come quick! Hurry! Miss Pyne came flying out of the house, and Charlotte went tearing in, and now Mrs. Green's called Charlie. Look, here he comes!" She flung up the window. "Charlie! Hoohoo! Charlie. What's a matter?"
Charlie ran across the street and right on to the new grass seed, but Mrs. Driggs was too excited to stop him.
"It's the old lady!" he called up, with a backward jerk of his thumb across his shoulder. "She started downstairs and tripped and fell the whole flight; they think her neck's broke. I gotta beat it for the doctor."
"For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them." Mr. Partridge read it beautifully, Carrie thought. The way his voice rose and fell, the way it trembled. Aunt Sarah's was a small heap of riches—a few thousand dollars, and Benjie. She had left it to Carrie.
"It seems too awful to be ninety-nine and then fall downstairs!" Carrie sobbed. "To be so nearly a hundred. Oh, Kate, if she'd only just lived to be a hundred!"
Kate wept, too, because Aunt Sarah had become a habit, because it was sad to think of ninety-nine years with as little love and laughter in them as there had been in Aunt Sarah's. Kate wept because she was excited and tired, because it made her sad to feel so little sorrow. She could have stopped crying at any moment, but she let her tears trickle on, glad that she catild do this last thing for poor Aunt Sarah.
At first Carrie clung to Kate, repeating that she would never leave her, never! But there was her married brother in California. She hadn't seen him nor his wife for thirty-seven years; she had never seen her nieces, Emma, Caroline, and Anna. And they had asked her to come and make her home with them.
"Think of whole hedges of heliotrope!" Kate said, trying not to sound too eager, speaking from the mixed motives of longing to have Carrie off her hands and wanting something fresh and beautiful to happen to her. Hedges of heliotrope and a bright blue ocean coming into Carrie's life after these years of cheerfully, patiently watching day after day crumble into ash.
"I know—and Will and I were always just devoted. Caroline's named for me"
"You'd be lovely and warm all the time."
"Oh, my! That would be heavenly!"
"You could send me oranges."
"No, Kate, no!" Carrie launched herself into Kate's arms. "I'll never leave you! I'll try to show my gratitude for all you've done for me! I'll never desert you in your loneliness!"
"I'll miss you like anything, Carrie, but I have Joe and Evelyn and Hope, and Charlotte and her children. I won't have a chance to be lonely. And I'm going to be very busy now. I'm going to paint again. You've thought of other people all your life; now think of yourself for a change."
And she has, too, Kate told herself, guiltily, because she longed so for an empty house, an empty studio. Of course I love poor Carrie, but, after all, he's her brother. Not to have to worry about anything for meals but tea and bread and butter and salad; not to have to talk in the middle of adding up accounts or when she wanted to read; to have the bathroom to herself. Above all, to have weeks, months, free for her painting.
"Emma and I were always very congenial. I don't believe I'd be any trouble to them. And what I could pay would help them, wouldn't it? Because, of course, I'd insist. I mean, Will's wonderful—it isn't just because he's my brother, Kate, but anyway, what I mean is, he's always been too—well, I don't know what. I guess he don't know how to push, and you have to know how to push to get on in business. But I don't know"
"Think of seeing whole fields of California poppies, Carrie!"
"No, Kate, I've made up my mind." But presently she was saying: "Do you think my cocoa suit dyed black would do to travel in?" And at night she couldn't sleep for thinking of the unknown person who would have the upper berth, of deserts with cactus plants on them, and maybe cowboys, of changing at Chicago—suppose the taxi driver took her to some dreadful house?
She had to press her hands against her stomach whenever she realized that after all these years she was going to plunge into adventure. Her manner became a trifle patronizing toward acquaintances who were not going to California, but she still hardly believed she was going herself on the day they saw her off, with Joe's violets wabbling on her coat and Hoagland's chocolates under her arm.
The first thing Kate did was to clean her old palette and put her brushes to soak. And then she made a long list beginning:
Rose madder
Raw sienna"
But before she began to paint, the studio must be cleared out; and the bathroom, that still was haunted by Aunt Sarah. The hot-water bottles, the dangling red rubber tubes, the boxes and bottles and jars with which she had tried to fight death—and then death had crept up behind her and pushed her downstairs. What a trick to play on a lady!
Then Kate and Effa painted the kitchen—bright blue, with white woodwork. And there were little things to do—the plants to be watered, an angel cake to make for the Altar Guild card party, a dress to smock for Hope. It was always nearly lunch time when she was ready to begin work in the studio, and it seemed inappropriate to recommence a career at quarter past twelve. Better wait until the next morning and start right.