The Other Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (free novels to read TXT) 📗

/> There was a side gas-light over the white-topped table, burning brightly. Upon the table were work-baskets, and a volume from the Public Library. The lounge was just turned out from the wall a little, towards it, and opposite stood the round rocking-chair. Cheeps, in his cage at the farther window, was asleep in a yellow ball, his head under his wing. Bel was hanging the last dish-towel upon a little folding-horse in the chimney corner, and they could hear Kate singing up-stairs to a gentle clatter of the dishes that she was putting away from the dining-room use.

"It looks as a kitchen ought to," said Mr. Scherman. "As my grandmother's used to look; as if all the house-comfort came from it."

"It isn't a place to forbid children out of, is it?" asked Asenath.

"I should think the only condition would be their own best behavior," returned her husband.

"They're almost always good down here," said Bel. "Children like to be where things are doing. They always feel put away, out of the good times, I think, in a nursery."

"My housekeeping is all turning round on a new pivot," said Sin to Frank, after they were seated again up-stairs. "Don't take up the 'Skelligs' yet; I want to tell you. If I thought the pivot would really _stay_, there are two or three more things I should do. And one of them is,--I'd have the nursery--a day-nursery--down-stairs; that is, if I could coax you into it."

"It seems the new pivot is two very large 'ifs,'" said Frank, laughing. "And not much space to turn in, either. Would you take the cellar, or build out? And if so, where?"

"I'd take the dining-room, Frank; and eat in the back parlor."

"I wish you would. I don't like dining-rooms. I was brought up to a back parlor."

"You do? You don't? You were? Why, Frank, I thought you'd hate it," cried Asenath, pouring forth her exclamations all in a heap, and coming round to lean upon his shoulder. "I wish I'd told you before! Just think of those south dining-room windows that they'll have the good of all the forenoon, and that all we do with is to shade them down at dinner-time! And the horse-chestnut tree, and the grape-vines, making it green and pleasant, by and by! And the saving of going over the stairs, and the times one of the girls might help me when I _couldn't_ ring her away up to my room; and the tending of table, with baby only to be looked after in here. Why, I should sit here, myself, mornings, always; and everything would be all together and the up-stairs work,--it would be better than two nurse-girls to have it so!"

"Then why not have it so right off? The more you turn on your pivot, the smoother it gets, you know. And the more nicely you balance and concentrate, the longer your machine will last."

Asenath lay awake late, and woke early, that night and the next morning, "planning."

When Frank saw a certain wide, intent, shining, "don't-speak-to-me" look in her eyes, he always knew that she was "planning." And he had found that out of her plans almost always resulted some charming novelty, at least, that gave one the feeling of beginning life over again; if it were only the putting of his bureau on the other side of the room, so that he started the wrong way for a few days, whenever he wanted to get a clean collar; or the setting the bedstead with side instead of head to the wall; issuing in delightful bewilderments of mind, when wakened suddenly and asked to find a match or turn up the dressing-room gas in the night, to meet some emergency of the baby's.

This time the development was a very busy Friday forenoon; in which the silver rubbing was omitted, and the dinner preparations put off,--the man who came for "chores" detained for heavy lifting,--the large dining-table turned up on edge and rolled into the back parlor, the sideboard brought in and put in the place of a sofa, which was wheeled to an obtuse angle with the fire-place,--nine square yards of gray drugget, with a black Etruscan border, sent up by Mr. Scherman from Lovejoy's, and tacked carefully down by seam and stripe, under Asenath's personal direction; cradle, rocking-horse, baby-house, tin carts and picture-books removed from the nursery and arranged in the new quarters,--the children themselves following back and forth untiringly with their one-foot-foremost hop over the stairs, and their hands clasping the rods of the balusters,--some little shabby treasure always hugged in the spare arm, chairs and crickets, and the low table suited to their baby-chairs, at which they played and ate, transferred also; until Asenath stood with a sudden sadness in the deserted chamber, reduced to the regular bedroom furnishings, and looking dead and bleak with the little life gone out of it.

But the warm south sun was beaming full into the pretty room below, where the small possessors of a whole new, beautiful world were chattering and dancing with delight; and up here, by and by, the western shine would come to meet them at their bedtime, and the new moon and the star-twinkle would peep in upon their sleep.

With her own hands, Asenath made the room as fresh and nice as could be; put little frilled covers over the pillows of the low bed, and on the half-high bureau top; brought in and set upon the middle of this last a slender vase from her own table, with a tea-rose in it, and said to herself when all was done,--

"How sweet and still it will be for them to come up to, after all! It _isn't_ nice for children to be put to sleep in the midst of the whole day's muss!"

The final thing was done the next morning. The carpenter came and put a little gate across the head of the short stairway which would now only be used as required between play-room and kitchen; the back stairway of the main house giving equal access on the other side to the parlor dining-room. China closet and dumb waiter were luckily in that angle, also.

A second little railed gate barred baby trespass into the halls. The sparrows were caged again.

"What would you have done if they hadn't been?" asked Hazel Ripwinkley, speaking of the china closet and dumb waiter happening to be just as they were. She had come over one morning with Miss Craydocke, for a nursery visit and to see the new arrangements.

"What should we have done if anything hadn't been?" asked Asenath, in return. "Everything always has been, somehow, in my life. I don't believe we have anything to do with the 'ifs' way back, do you, Miss Hapsie? We couldn't stop short of the 'if' out of which we came into the world,--or the world came out of darkness! I think that's the very beauty of living."

"The very everlasting livingness," said Miss Hapsie. "We don't want to see the strings by which the earths and moons are hung up; nor, any more, the threads that hold our little daily possibilities."

Asenath had other visitors, sometimes, with whom it was not so easy to strike the key-note of things.

Glossy Megilp and her mother had come home from Europe. They and the Ledwiths were in apartments in one of the great "Babulous" hotels, as Sin called them, with a mingling of idea and etymology.

"Good places enough," she said, "for the prologue and the epilogue of life; but not for the blessed meanwhile; for the acting of all the dear heart and home parts."

The two families had managed very well by taking two small "suites" and making a common parlor; thus bestowing themselves in one room less than they could possibly have done apart. They were very comfortable and content, made economical breakfasts and teas together, dined at the cafe, and had long forenoons in which to run about and look in upon their friends.

Glossy had always "cultivated" Asenath Scherman for though that young dame lived at present a very retired and domestic life, Miss Megilp was quite aware that she _might_ come out, and in precisely the right place, at any minute she chose; and meanwhile it was exceedingly suitable to know her well in this same intimate privilege of domesticity.

Glossy Megilp was very polite; but she did not believe in the new order of things; and her eyelids and the corners of her mouth showed it. Mrs. Megilp admired; thought it lovely for Asenath _just now_; but of course not a thing to count upon, or to expect generally. In short, they treated it all as a whim; a coincidence of whims. Asenath, although she would not trouble herself about the "ifs away back," had a spirit of looking forward which impelled her to argue against and clear away prospective ones.

"Bad things have lasted long enough," she said; "I don't see why the good ones should not, when once they have begun."

"They won't begin; one swallow never makes a summer. This has happened to you, but it is absolutely exceptional; it will never be pandemic," said Mrs. Megilp, who was fond of picking up little knowing terms of speech, and delivering herself of them at her earliest subsequent convenience.

"'Never' is the only really imposing word in the language," said Asenath, innocently. "I don't believe either you or I quite understand it. But I fancy everything begins with exceptions, and happens in spots,--from the settling of a continent to the doing up of back-hair in new fashions. I shouldn't wonder if it were an excellent way to take life, to make it as exceptional as you can, in all unexceptionable directions. To help to thicken up the good spots till the world gets confluent with them. I suppose that is what is meant by making one's mark in it, don't you?"

Mrs. Megilp headed about, as if in the turn the talk had taken she suddenly found no thoroughfare; and asked Asenath if she had been to hear Rubinstein.

Of course it was not in talk only, that--up-stairs or down-stairs--the exceptional household found its difficulties. It was not all pleasant arranging and contriving for an undeviating "living happy ever after."

There were days now and then when the baby fretted, or lost her nap, and somebody had to hold her nearly all the time; when the door-bell rang as if with a continuous and concerted intent of malice. Stormy Mondays happened when clothes would not dry, entailing Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays of interrupted and irregular service elsewhere.

If Asenath Scherman's real life had been anywhere but in her home and with her children,--if it had consisted in being dressed in train-skirt and panier, lace sleeves and bracelets, with hair in a result of hour-long elaboration, at twelve o'clock; or of being out making calls in high street toilet from that time until two; or if her strength had had to be reserved for and repaired after evening parties; if family care had been merely the constantly increasing friction which the whole study of the art of living must be to reduce and evade, that the real purpose and desire might sweep on unimpeded,--she would soon have given up her experiment in despair.

Or if, on the other part, there had been a household below, struggling continually to escape the necessity it was paid to meet, that it might get to its own separate interests and "privileges,"--if it had been utterly foreign and unsympathetic in idea and perception, only watchful that no "hand's turn" should be required of it beyond those