Bobbie, General Manager
CHAPTER I
I AM a junior in the H.C.H.S., which stands for Hilton Classical High School, and am sixteen years old. I live in a big brown house at number 240 Main Street, and my father is a state senator in Boston. I am a member of the First Congregational Church, which I joined when I was thirteen, and am captain of the basket-ball team at the high school. I have travelled as far east as Revere Beach, as far west as the Hoosac Tunnel, on my way to Aunt Ella's funeral in Adams, and as far south as New London, Connecticut, where I watched my oldest brother Tom row in a perfectly stunning eight-oared boat-race on the Thames. I haven't been north at all. I have had six diseases, including scarlet fever and typhoid, with which I almost died last year, and as a result of which am now wearing my hair as short as a child with a Dutch-cut.
I am not pretty, nor a bit popular with the boys. I can't play the piano, and I never went to dancing-school in my life. Most of my clothes are as ugly as mud, for I haven't any mother; and my hair has always been as straight as a stick. They say that the kink that has appeared in it since the typhoid won't last but a little while, so it isn't much comfort. In fact, the only real consolation that I have is a secret conviction which I keep well concealed in the innermost compartment of my heart. No one knows of its existence except myself, and I wouldn't be the one to tell of it for anything in the world. It is on account of it, however, that I am writing the experiences of my early life. I often think how valuable it would have been if William Shakespeare had told us about his school-days or Julius Caesar had described his family and what they used to do when he was a boy of fifteen. Of course I may not be a genius; but facts point that way. I hate mathematics, my imagination is vivid, my life is difficult and full of obstacles, and my handwriting illegible. My Themes are generally read out loud in English, and my quarterly deportment mark is frightfully low. Moreover, if I am not a genius I shall be awfully disappointed. Why, I think I should rather be a genius than to go to a College Prom. It makes everything so bearable, from a flunk in geometry, to not being invited to Bessie Jaynes' birthday-party last week.
My life has not been an easy one. Ever since I can remember I have been the mother of five children—two of them older and three younger than myself. They all call me Bobbie for short, but my real name is Lucy Chenery Vars.
Our house is a big ugly brown affair which Father built when we were all babies and the business was prosperous. The house has twenty rooms in it, and on the top an octagon cupola, which I have fixed up with a fish-net and some old tennis rackets, and call my study. I have a plaster cast of a skull up here, and a "No Trespassing" sign which Juliet Adams and I stole out of old Silas Morton's blueberry-pasture. It looks exactly like a college man's room now and I intend to do all my writing up here. It is a perfectly lovely place for inspirations! From my eight little windows I can see all over New England, and at night every star that shines. It is simply glorious up here in a thunder-storm, and when I have the trap-door once closed behind me, with all my cares and troubles shut safely away down below, I feel as if I could fly with the birds. I ought to write something wonderful.
In the first place I had better state that I haven't anything distinguishing about me except my experience. I am middling tall—five feet five inches, to be precise; middling heavy—112 pounds; and am one of six children—four boys and two girls—without the honour of being either the oldest or youngest. With Father there are seven of us; with Nellie and the cook (when we have one) and poor little Dixie, the horse, there are ten.
Father is a big, quiet, solemn man and is sixty-eight years old. He is president of the Vars & Company Woollen Mills, has perfectly white hair, and wears grey and white seersucker coats in the summer. Tom is the oldest and is in business out West. We're all awfully proud of Tom. He was a perfect star in college, and is making money hand over fist with his lumber camps in Michigan. Alec, the next to oldest, is struggling along in business with Father. Then I come, and next to me the twins—Oliver and Malcolm, aged fifteen and perfect terrors. Last is Ruthie; and after her, mother died and so there weren't any more. I was the mother then, and I was only a little over five. Father says he used to put me on the dictionary in mother's chair at the table when I was so little that Nellie had to help lift the big silver pot while I poured the coffee. Well, I've sat there ever since, pushed the bell, scowled at the twins and performed a mother's duty generally, as well as I knew how.
It hasn't been easy. Ruthie isn't the kind of little sister who likes to be petted or cuddled. The twins scorn everything I do or say. The house is a perfect elephant to run (there are thirty-three steps between the refrigerator and the kitchen sink) and our washings are something frightful. Alec says we simply cannot afford a laundress, and the result is that I spend most of my Saturday mornings in intelligence-offices hunting cooks. Intelligence-offices are dreadful on inspirations.
Ever since I can remember, the house has been out of repair—certain doors that won't close, certain windows that have no shades, certain ceilings that are stained and smoked. It's hard to give the rooms the proper look when there are paths worn all over the Brussels carpet, exactly like cow-paths in a pasture, and the stuffed arms of the furniture in the parlour are worn as bare as the back of a little baby's head I once saw.
When Tom wrote that he was going to bring Elise, his young bride, whom we had never laid eyes on, to Hilton on their wedding trip, I nearly had a Conniption Fit. I thought Tom must have lost his mind. Any one ought to know what a shock our house would be to the kind of girl Tom would choose to marry. The concrete walk that leads up to the front door was dreadfully cracked, and the crevices were filled with a healthy growth of green grass. The iron fountain in the centre of the walk was as dry as a desert, and the four iron urns on the square porch as empty as shells. The ninety feet of elaborate iron fence that runs in front of the house needed a new coat of paint, and the little filigree iron edging, standing up like stiffly starched Hamburg embroidery around the top of the cupola, had a piece knocked out in front. But Tom would come, so I buckled down and made preparations.
I must explain a little about Tom. It isn't simply because he is the oldest son that we all look up to him so much. Every one in Hilton admires Tom. The Weekly Messenger refers to his "brilliant career," and the minister at our church calls him "an exceptional young man." He isn't a genius—he's too successful and everybody likes him too much for a genius—but he's different from the other young men in Hilton. When Father picked out some little technical school or other for Tom to go to, Tom announced that he was awfully sorry but that he had made up his mind to graduate from the biggest university in the country. And once there, Tom had a perfectly elegant time! Every one adored him. I saw him carried off once on the shoulders of a lot of shouting young men, who were singing his name. Why, I was proud to be Tom Vars' sister! He was captain of the crew, president of his class, a member of a whole lot of societies, and when he graduated his name was printed under the magna cum laude list on the programme (I can show it to you in my Souvenir Book) which meant that he was a perfect wizard in his lessons.
Tom graduated the year that Father's business began to look a little wobbly. Just when Father was looking forward, with a good deal of hope, to his oldest son's help and coöperation, Tom ran up home for over Sunday one day in May, and broke the news that after Commencement he had decided to accept a position from his room-mate's rich uncle in some wild and woolly lumber camps in Michigan. It just about broke poor Father's heart. He couldn't enjoy the honours of Tom's Commencement. But Tom went out West just the same—for Tom always carries out his plans—he went, smiling and confident, with never a single reference to Father's silence, ignoring absolutely the sad look in Father's eyes. He went just as if he were carrying out Father's dearest hope; and the funny part is, that inside of three years Tom had made Father so proud of his hard work and steady success that the poor dear man's disappointment faded away like mist before the sun, as they say in Shakespeare or the Bible—I forget which. The whole scheme worked like a charm, as Tom's schemes always do. There was faithful Alec to help Father; and the rich uncle, who had no son of his own, was simply aching to get hold of a fine, smart, clean young man like Tom Chenery Vars to boost up to success.
Whenever Tom had a holiday, except Christmas when he came home, he spent it in Chicago with his room-mate or the uncle. That is how he happened to fall in with such a lot of fashionable people—not that Tom ever boasted that his friends were fashionable, for Tom never blows his own horn—but I knew they were, just the same. He used to send stunning monograms to Ruthie and me for our collections, torn off from the notes which his wealthy young-lady friends wrote to him; besides, when he came home for Christmas he always had a pocketful of kodak pictures to show us of his life in the West. They weren't all taken in the lumber camps. Some were snapshots of house-parties, which he'd been on, and I assure you, I always took in the expensive background of these pictures—carved stone doorways, perfectly elegant houses, lawns kept like a park, and automobiles with chauffeurs sitting up as stiff as ramrods. I hadn't much doubt, when Tom wrote that he was engaged to be married to Miss Elise Hildegarde Parmenter, but that she was an inmate of one of these millionaire mansions, and I was absolutely convinced of it when I laid eyes on her photograph—one of those brown carbons a foot square—and counted the six magnificent plumes on her big drooping picture-hat. I knew that 240 Main Street, Hilton, Mass., would look pretty worn and dingy alongside Sunny-lawn-by-the-Lake, which was engraved in gold letters and hyphens at the top of Miss Parmenter's heavy grey note-paper.
The minute Tom wrote that he was going to bring his elegant bride to Hilton I button-holed Father and Alec one day after dinner, and told those two men that the house had simply got to be done over. It was disgraceful as it was; it hadn't been painted since I could remember; it was unworthy of our name. Father reminded me that the reason none of us went to the wedding (Tom was married in California, on Elise's father's orange ranch) was to save expense, as I already knew, and merely to paint the house would cost the price of a ticket or two.
"Let us be ourselves, Lucy," said Father to me, "ourselves, child. If Tom's wife is the right kind of woman, she will look within, within, Lucy."
"Oh," I said, "but the inside is worse than the out, Father. The wall-paper in the guest-room—"
Father interrupted me gently.
"Within our hearts," he corrected, touching his heavy gold watch-chain across his chest. "Within our hearts, Lucy."
Father is a perfectly splendid man, but I knew that spotless hearts wouldn't excuse smoked ceilings; and when, the next day being Sunday, I saw Father drop his little white sealed envelope, which I knew contained five perfectly good dollars, into the contribution box, I didn't believe any heathen girl needed that money more than I.
I am going to tell about that first appearance of Elise's in detail. But it's got to be after dinner, for fifteen minutes ago the big whistle on Father's factory spurted out its puff of white steam (I could see it from my north window before I heard the blast) and Father and Alec will soon be driving up the hill in the phaeton, with the top down and the reins slack over faithful Dixie's back. I must be within calling-distance when Father strikes the Chinese gong at the foot of the stairs. It's the first thing he always does when he enters the house at noon. We all recognise his two strokes on each one of the three notes as surely as his voice or step. Why, that ring of Father's simply speaks! It is as full of impatience as a motorman ringing for a truck to get off the track.
Father hates to wait for dinner. By the time he has taken off his overcoat, and scrubbed up in the wash-room off the hall, he likes us all to be seated at the table when he comes into the dining-room. "Hello, chicken," he says to me. "Hello, baby," to Ruth. (He calls Dixie "baby" too.) "Hello, boys," to the twins. Then he sits down at the head of the table, opposite me, clears his throat as a signal, and asks the blessing.
Father's blessing is always the same except when we have company. I can tell how important the company is by the length of Father's prayer. When Juliet Adams, my best friend, drops in for supper, she is served the regular everyday family blessing, but when we have company important enough to put on the best dishes, or at the first meal that Tom is with us, Father keeps at it so long that the twins get to fooling with each other under cover of the tablecloth. I wished Father would omit the blessing entirely when Elise came, and family prayers too. They're so old-fashioned nowadays; but I knew better than to suggest such a preposterous thing. Father is a member of the Standing Committee at our church, and has a lot of principles.
There he is coming now! I wish he could afford a new carriage. I'm simply dying for one of those sporty little red-wheeled runabouts!