CHAPTER III
REBA had never been allowed to attend the public-schools in Ridgefield. They were not considered good enough for her. They were monopolized by the mill-hand children. When the question of Reba's schooling had first come up, Augusta had announced to David that her niece wasn't going to become contaminated by a lot of dirty, ill-kept foreigners, if she had anything to say about the matter. Of course she had a great deal to say. Ever since Reba was seven years old she had been taught by a private teacher at home.
Augusta Morgan was economical in the kitchen; she was economical in the sick-room too, but she had her extravagances. There's as much personality shown in the choice of one's economies, as in the choice of one's amusements. Augusta always scraped her mixing-bowls scrupulously clean. She never threw away a piece of wrapping-paper, nor a string, nor a candle end; and on the few occasions when she was obliged to order food in a restaurant, she always selected eggs hard-boiled, instead of soft, so as not to leave a particle of her money's worth on the dish. But when it came to such things as table-linen, for instance, sheets and towels, dress materials, sealskin coats, or schooling for Reba, she said the best was none too good for her.
Augusta considered herself something of an aristocrat. "Living in a house like this, and rich as you are, David Jerome, I'd be ashamed to send my child to school with a lot of Poles and Greeks and Italians," she had told David when he had objected to the expense of private lessons. When Reba herself had objected (for she had looked forward to the companionship that would be sure to come with school) Aunt Augusta had retorted, "You don't know when you ought to be grateful, child. It's only very lucky little girls can have private tutors."
Miss Billings, whom Aunt Augusta engaged to come every week-day morning except Saturday, at eight o'clock, was a retired high-school teacher, considered too old for competent service, even when Reba was seven. She had continued to come every week-day morning except Saturday for ten years, to give Reba private lessons. She must have been near seventy when Reba was seventeen.
Reba recalled now how often throughout those ten long years she had stared wistfully through the high picket fence around the public school-yard at recess-time, when she was out taking exercise with Miss Billings, and wondered what it would be like to play with other children like that—run fast, make one's feet fly; how it would feel to strain one's self to the very limit in a hard-run race; to reach the outstretched hands of imprisoned comrades, and set them free with a wild shriek of "Relievo!" Then to trot back afterward to the home-base, with approving arms flung over one's shoulder.
Whenever Reba visualized her childhood she always saw a solitary little figure sitting somewhere on the long front tiers of granite steps in front of the house, patiently waiting till it was time to go indoors, moving over every little while as a big rectangular shadow shoved her along, slowly, inch by inch, possessing itself of her sunshine and enveloping her at last completely with cold, gray gloom.
It was usually winter-time when Reba recalled that lonely child on the steps. She wore a little gray astrakhan tippet around her neck, and her hands were tucked inside a little round, gray muff to match. She was watching the coasters. In the winter-time, every afternoon when the sliding was good, the school-children used to come in crowds to coast down Chestnut Street. They flashed by her at a terrific speed, on flat, battered little rafts, stomachs down, legs stretched out behind, like leaping frogs, screaming shrilly at the top of their lungs. Reba herself was not allowed to slide down Chestnut Street. It was dangerous.
"Besides the company! Mill riff-raff!" Aunt Augusta sniffed. "You've got your own back-yard, and your own sled. You ought to be contented." But it was a very empty back-yard, with a very tame little slope, and it took a long while for a single sled to wear a track down it alone.
Some children who lacked brothers and sisters were provided with cousins, who occasionally came and "spent the day." But not Reba. The only prolific families in Reba's neighborhood appeared to be despised foreigners. She had never had a playmate—she had never had a plaything with any red-blood in it, not even a canary-bird. Once in a while she used to steal out to the forbidden barn (a perilous place with holes a child might slip through) and shyly approach the stall occupied by her father's solitary horse, courageously reaching up craving fingers and poking them against the dumb creature's warm investigating nose.
A lonely childhood it had been, a lonely girlhood too.
She sighed now as she looked back down the long years to the time when Aunt Augusta first let down her skirts. They were eventless years—like a long narrow corridor, she thought, empty, unfurnished. She had few memories with which to decorate and adorn them. It seemed impossible, but she had never even had a girl-friend of her own. Oh, how could they blame her downstairs for the present barrenness?
As in most places the size and remoteness of Ridgefield, the social life of the town centered in and about the several churches. Hopefully, as Reba grew older, did she look toward the church as an avenue to the companionship she longed for. Her father and mother and aunts all attended the Congregational Church, were members there—her father was a deacon—and timidly, when Reba was fourteen she had asked permission to join the Christian Endeavor Society at the Congregational Church. But, "What! At your age?" Aunt Augusta had exclaimed. "Humph! I should say not! I've heard of the goings-on down at the church after the Christian Endeavor meetings. All half the girls and boys join the Christian Endeavor Society for, is to walk home with each other afterwards in the dark. I know. Some folks are willing to let their girls run wild, but you don't belong to that sort of family, Reba, and you ought to be glad of it."
At fourteen Reba never even went to morning-service alone. One or the other of her two aunts was always there in the pew beside her, with the Morgan keep-off, don't-speak-to-me air imprinted unmistakably on tightly-shut lips and primly folded hands.
Boarding-school had gone the same way as public-school and the Christian Endeavor Society. It was when Reba was first beginning to despair of ever meeting any young people that she heard that the Methodist minister's daughter was going away for a year to a girls' boarding-school. She brought the news home one afternoon, and in a voice that trembled with entreaty, wondered if she, too, might not go away for a year to a girls' boarding-school. She had learned by now that her father could really afford anything. She wanted to go so, she said,—they couldn't know how much she wanted to go! She had never been anywhere alone away from home. "But what's the use," Aunt Augusta had argued, "in exposing Reba at her impressionable age to the foolish notions of fifty-odd girls, brought up every which way, whose folks we've never seen nor heard of. No, sir! I prefer to keep my eye on Reba, till she's settled down to what she's going to be. Best let a custard set before disturbing it. That's my rule. We're fortunate in Miss Billings. Miss Billings can take her through Latin as well as any boarding-school, I guess. I don't intend to let any public, money-making institution go and spoil Reba for us now. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll have her father buy her a grand-piano and she can take music-lessons instead."
A piano instead of fifty shining opportunities of a girl-friend all her own! Piano-lessons instead of some one to share confidences with! Oh, the pity of it! Reba glanced down now at the bracelet on her wrist, and shook her head. They had given her that bracelet instead of a coveted week at Northfield, when the church had wanted to send her as a delegate to a conference there. They had given her her gold watch instead of an automobile trip to Boston with the Horweens. Always, always, they had given her things that money could buy, instead of things that money couldn't.
At seventeen Rebecca Jerome had learned all that Miss Billings could teach her. She could translate a little French, a little Latin, and a little Greek, with the aid of various dictionaries. She could recite the dates of the births and deaths, and principal works, of all the English poets, from Chaucer down. She was an excellent speller. She had been introduced to geometry and algebra. She could, moreover, play two or three pieces without her notes, on the grand-piano. She could make long neat rows of faultless stitches, paint in oils on china. She gave no trouble at all, as most girls do, teasing to go out, and was not "silly" about boys. She spoke to people nicely, too, with a precise correctness that was very pleasing to Aunt Augusta. She was pretty, in a soft suppressed sort of way—had brown, fawn-like eyes, a smooth olive complexion, faintly pink at times. At seventeen Rebecca was like a little tight yellowish-pink rosebud. Sometimes such a little bud fades in its vase before it opens.
But Augusta and Emma and Eunice had no notion that Reba would fade before she opened. They had a plan for her. They were going to let down her skirts later, and roll up her hair, and when she was eighteen Aunt Augusta was going to take her for two weeks to a fashionable summer-resort abounding in desirable young people. For as intolerant as she had been of "boys" for girls of fourteen, she felt a thrill of delight at the prospect of the handsome and eligible young men who would some day come paying respects to Reba.
"She's getting to be quite a young lady. You'll have to watch out," Reba recalled the minister having smilingly said to her mother and aunts when she appeared before him for the first time in her lengthened skirts. "There'll be young men coming thick and fast now, I'm thinking."
How they had beamed! Inwardly how she had beamed too. Aunt Augusta had had the parlor furniture re-covered in preparation for the minister's prediction. All three of the women who had tended Reba so long, with such diligence, expected wonderful things of her when at last she stood before them a finished young lady. When they began removing life-long restraints from Reba they observed her as eagerly as if (instead of being anything so ruled by the laws of nature as a girl, or even a rose) she were a magical Japanese flower that had only to be dropped into a glass of water to unfold into marvelous beauty.
But Reba disappointed them. For five years Aunt Augusta repeated the two weeks at the fashionable summer-resorts, but it was absolutely useless. No handsome and eligible young men came courting Reba. No young men of any kind came courting her. In spite of long skirts and turned-up hair, removed restrictions, summer-resorts full of young people, diamond bracelets, gold watches and chains, Reba would not unfold. Occasionally one finds a Japanese flower that refuses to bloom in the water. It has been too tightly compressed. So had Reba.
The weeks spent at the summer hotels with Aunt Augusta had all been periods of torture. "Why don't you go off with the young folks?" Aunt Augusta would ask. "I don't see! It beats me! Here you are down here, in this expensive place, and all you do is to hide around alone among the rocks, and sit on the piazza, and sew, and rock! My grief, you're the queerest I ever saw! Why don't you join in and have a nice time?"
"Why don't I join in and have a nice time with the sea-gulls?" Reba wanted to reply, but she never "talked back" to Aunt Augusta. "Oh, I don't care about it," was all she would ever say.
The truth was that the young people at the summer-resorts Reba visited were creatures of a different breed from her. They made different motions, uttered different sounds; they could laugh and joke banter; they could play tennis and golf; they could dance, swim. Miss Billings had taught Reba none of these.
"But my lands," Aunt Augusta had argued once. "You don't have to swim, to go in bathing, do you? You haven't had on your bathing-suit but just once, and after all the pains we took!"
The thought of that "just once" had made Reba blush with shame as she recalled it. One of the young people in the group, which Aunt Augusta wanted Reba to join, had smiled and whispered, "Look!" to a tanned, half-naked young man beside her, when Reba first timidly appeared on the beach in the bathing-suit modeled by Aunt Augusta and Aunt Emma and her mother in the first floor bedroom at home.
They hadn't been able to get a pattern for a bathing-suit in Ridgefield, and they had guessed all wrong. The sleeves were long; the skirt reached half-way to her ankles; and it buttoned down behind! It seemed to Reba that all her carefully made clothes were peculiar beside the creations worn by the young people at the summer-hotels. She had been glad that the big rocking-chairs on the verandas had such high, concealing backs. They helped hide Aunt Augusta as well as herself. Aunt Augusta was an extraordinarily tall women. People stared at her.
Yet, in spite of such disheartening experiences, repeated year after year, Reba had never quite lost faith that sometime—somehow—the choice of a summer-resort would prove more fortunate. Each season, for weeks before the actual day of departure, she nursed a secret hope that this time circumstances would be kinder. She never started forth without having wistfully air-castled for days upon the possibility of running across somebody, among all the strangers this year—man or girl, it wouldn't matter which—just somebody who would be willing to become her friend; somebody she could walk and talk with, and—thrilling thought—write letters to afterward! The mail had never been a source of eager expectations to Reba.
But out of all the five fortnights spent at the summer-resorts (Aunt Augusta had abandoned the experiment finally) Reba treasured but one pleasant memory, and that a small one—simply the kind, and as she now analyzed it, probably pitying, invitation from a young man—a wonderful creature in white flannels—to join a sailing-party of young people. She hadn't accepted, of course. Why, even his smile, and his clear eyes looking straight at her, had struck her almost dumb. But he had asked her! He had thought it possible to ask her! In spite of the tall gaunt spectre that stood beside her, in spite of her own hair done the wrong way—crimped (she did it up on hair-pins at night) and pompadoured, Japanese fashion—and her white kid shoes with heels, when they should have been buckskin and flat, in spite of such handicaps, a young god had once bowed before her, and lifted his hat, and asked her to be one of his sailing-party. Reba smiled now at the dim recollection.
What a pitifully meager little memory for a woman of twenty-five to be treasuring! How pitifully meager everything had always been in her life. What a failure she was anyhow! She, who might have made the lives of those women downstairs green again with her youth, had not done so. They had thought that there would be party-frocks to make for her (they loved to sew), sheets to tear, napkins to hem, a wedding-dress perhaps, and—daring supposition—baby-clothes possibly sometime. It was because of their disappointment in her that her mother and her aunts had become so bitter. With every one of her succeeding birthdays it became more and more clear that the future would soon hold nothing more of surprise or anticipation for them. In maturing Reba had robbed the sisters of the joy of the unfulfilled.
Gazing down at the lights in the valley she told herself that another girl in her place would have re-created this gray mausoleum of a house, made of it a thing to shine and sparkle like other houses. She had only herself to blame for the unused, unlit front rooms, she supposed. Aunt Augusta had done her part. She had made ready the rooms at the proper time with new brocade coverings and lace tidies in preparation for the young men callers that never came.
Only once had the lights in the parlor been lit for a young man caller for Reba, and then he had been one of the employees at the mills. He had had an unpronounceable Polish name. Of course he hadn't come again. Aunt Augusta told Reba afterward that she hadn't had the parlor done over to entertain foreigners in! However, the young man hadn't asked to come again. In her honest heart, Reba knew he hadn't wanted to. It had been a painful evening. Oh, she had no charm, just as they had said downstairs; it wasn't in her to attract. They were right, she guessed.
Suddenly the long-drawn-out blast of the six o'clock mill whistle sounded. Reba was as familiar with its deep hollow voice as with her mother's high whine. She had lived all her life with the mill whistle. Would she still be sitting here in the same little room, in the same little chair, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, listening to the same mill-whistle toll off the eventless hours? The monotony of her existence swept over Reba in a big engulfing wave. The lights at the foot of the hill, in spite of herself, melted into a gold sea before her vision. Older people used to tell her, first shaking their heads dismally, to make the most of her childhood. She had thought then that growing old simply meant work instead of play. But the tragedy of age she knew now was disillusion. A tear rolled down her face and splashed upon her wrist.
She stood up. "This won't do," she whispered resolutely. "This simply won't do."
She crossed the room and lit the gas by the bureau (it was quite dark now), afterward pulled down the shades. Then she went over to a small marble-topped oval table by her bed, and got her Bible. She moved a chair under the light, and opened the Bible to the second chapter of Exodus. She was reading the book through for the third time.
"Reba! Reba!" she was suddenly interrupted by the voice of Aunt Augusta calling from below.
Her aunt was standing, she well knew, at the foot of the stairs, with one hand on the black-walnut newel-post, and her chin lifted. "Reb-a!" she called again, drawing out the last syllable with an effective crescendo.
Reba rose and opened the door.
"Yes," she replied.
"Come down here," briefly her aunt called.
Reba laid her Bible on the marble-topped table and went downstairs.