Part 1 (2/2)
The door jerked open to let me peer into the cleanest, barest skylit spot,--with flat creamy walls and a little old fireplace with a Peggoty grate just like the pictures in ”David Copperfield.” And a trig young person who didn't look a bit like an artist, because she was so neatly belted and so smoothly coiffed, waved a clayey thumb tip toward a bench by the fire.
”Sit down and get your breath,” she suggested chirkily, ”then you won't feel quite so dumfoundered--”
An overwhelming sense of my colossal cheekiness made me stammer.
”Do--do you h-happen to know--” I burst forth desperately, ”if there's really any such person as a--a Miss Day?”
”Does that fire look real?”
I nodded.
”Well, then put another stick on that fire and hang the kettle on the hob--” she was was.h.i.+ng the clay from her hands in an old bra.s.s basin.
”Don't get peeved with me because I'm grouchy and bossy--” she flung over her shoulder at me. ”I always start off badly when I'm tired and that fool question always makes me just darned tireder!”
She reached for a fat brown teapot and dumped in tea-leaves recklessly. ”I'll be decenter directly I'm fed. I'm a beast just before tea--you won't find me half bad half an hour from now--”
We were both silent while the water boiled. She shoved her table nearer the fire, so near that I found myself looking down at the writing things that were arranged so primly at one end. There was an ink bottle on a gray blotter, a pewter tray for pens and a queer shaped lump of bronze, a paper weight I supposed. I wouldn't have been human if I could have kept my fingers off that bit of metal. I pretended to pick it up accidentally but I did it as guiltily as a child touches something forbidden. She didn't say a word, just watched me mischievously while she arranged the tea cups on the other end of the table. Presently she lighted a tiny temple lamp, melted a dab of sealing wax in its wavering blue flames--rose-colored wax it was--and it splashed out on the gray blotter like molten fire.
She took the bit of bronze from my fingers and pressed it firmly on the wax.
”It's a mouth--” I murmured. ”It's lips--”
”It's her kiss,” she answered me. ”That's the most beautiful and the most difficult thing I ever made. It's Felicia Day's letter seal.”
”Then she really is a real person--” I stammered fatuously.
”Real?” The girl's low voice lifted itself belligerently. ”What do you think she is? Imitation? Why, she's the one REAL thing in this whole sham world! I guess you've never met anybody who knew her or you wouldn't keep gulping out idiotic things like that! I guess if you ever talked with her even a minute you'd understand how real she is.
She has the crispest--the sincerest way of speaking. Though of course it's not a bit like other people's ways. She probably doesn't talk like anybody you've ever listened to. Not like anybody I've ever heard of anyway.” The girl's eyes were glowing. ”Are you musical?” she demanded. ”Because I need a musical word to tell you how she talks.
She talks _rubato_. Her short words drawl ever so long and her long ones hurry so's to let her make up for the stolen time. And she has a sort of trace of accent like--well, it's not like anything except herself really. You see, her mother wasn't French but she was brought up with French people and Felice says 'evaire' and 'nevaire' and uses funny little Frenchy phrases she heard her mother use though she doesn't really talk French at all. And she has a bossy way of speaking, kind of --well, humbly bossing, if you can get me. Talks like a Lady Pied Piper and sweeps you along with her just about six minutes after she's begun coaxing you to do whatever she's decided is the best thing for you to do. Believe me, I know she does it! Because I was one of the first ones she swept along!” The girl's words were tumbling so fast now that I could hardly follow.
”Did you ever find yourself in heaps of trouble? Too much trouble to stand? Did you? I was that way the day she opened my door. It made me perfectly furious to have her open my door. And she looked so little and so old and so frumpy--she'd been sewing all day for my beastly step-aunt and I'd been trying all day to get the courage to--to--” the girl's tears were streaming now and she didn't bother to wipe them away, she seemed utterly unashamed of them, ”to get rid of myself. And just the minute I got the cork out of the bottle that little old angel opened the door. She was so darned different from anybody I'd ever seen in all my life and she talked so differently from anybody I'd ever listened to, I--well, I sort of forgot wanting to die because I was curious to find out where on earth she'd come from--or where on earth she was going to! She had a funny little dog under her arm; she gave it to me to hold. And the next thing I knew she was inviting me to go home with her. She thought I might like this room, she said. She told me it was filled 'with-an-abundance-of-weeds-we-have-not-any- names-for--' Wasn't that an absolute corker? That was her way of describing the Italian family with too many brats that were living here. She'd got that apology for 'em out of her great-great-grandma's garden book! Can you beat it? She talks about everybody as if they belonged in a garden. She called me--” the girl's lips quivered,--”a rosebush that had been pruned too much--roots cramped--she said-- anyway she picked me up to transplant me! Marched me into the 'orrible, messy, noisy, smelly hutch that this house used to be, up all those eighty 'leven stairs, and she kept her chin in the air as though it was a royal palace she was taking me into! She just kept saying,
”'Come! You'll love, love, love it! And you're going to be proud, proud, proud to live here--'
”I was proud, all right,” the girl's voice choked. ”I wouldn't have missed living here those next two months, not for all the marble that was ever quarried nor for all the glory that was Greece! That first night we both slept in this room--” she paused dramatically and threw open the door in the east wall to let me peer into the narrow hall room, ”there--see--”
Ah! that bare little room! So tidy! With faded discolored wall paper and a scrubbed pine floor! With its battered iron bed! There's an old table by the one window with a child's silver mug and plate and spoon on it, each of them with a great bee carved upon it. That's all there is in that room save a low chair and a superb but shabby walnut bureau.
”She loved it so much that she wouldn't change it when she was building Octavia House over--”
”Octavia House!” I cried. ”Why, that's that queer house where all the young geniuses live! The one that the Peter Alden money built--”
”It's not a queer house!” the girl defied me. ”It's--it's this house!
And you can't say Money built this house! Money couldn't have done it!
Not all the money in the world, couldn't! It wasn't Money! It was-- Pride! Not the sort of pride that goeth before _de_struction but that mightier pride that goeth before _con_struction! No, no!” she murmured vehemently, ”it wasn't Money! It was really almost done before the money came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know, we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the glory and the wonder of her until after she was gone--”
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