Little Miss By-The-Day Part 1

Little Miss By-The-Day.

by Lucille Van Slyke.

PROLOGUE

The older I get the more convinced I become that the most fascinating persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly well but whom we never, as children say, "get to meet." They slip out of countries, or towns--_or rooms even,_--just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated of something that was rightfully and divinely ours. That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day. Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person.

Perhaps you, too, tried to find her but never did.

She sounded so casual and commonplace when I first began hearing about her that I let her slip through my fingers. She was just a little seamstress who had a "vairee" odd way of speaking; it was quite a long time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was unconsciously trying to imitate her drawling voice. And then I noticed that everybody who mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on earth she'd come from. I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd sc.r.a.ps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which she lived. And presently, when it was too late, I found myself listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who couldn't find out what had become of her. She suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house.

If you'll lend me your pencil a minute I'll show you on the back of this envelope just how that house was situated. You can understand the whole amazing story better if you keep in mind how the church on the corner and the rectory were tucked in beside that great house. For it _is_ a big house, so huge that the six prim brownstones across the street from it look like toy houses. But I've been told that in Brooklyn's early days there was no street, just a long terraced garden that sloped down to the river.

For all that the streets have crowded so disrespectfully about it the whole place still has a sort of "world-with-out-end-amen" air--perhaps because of the impressive squareness of its structure, great blocks of brownstone joined solidly; perhaps because of the enormous gnarled wistaria vines that stretch above its ma.s.sive cornices--but one does feel as Felicia Day herself did when some one asked her how long she thought it had been there. She said she thought it must have been there "Much, much more than Always--it must have been _jamais au grand_ --forevaire and more than evaire!"

Maybe, like me, you've pa.s.sed that house a dozen times and shuddered at the filth of the little street.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Town map.]

I used to hold my breath as I hurried by that dismal old rookery. I thought it the most hideous purgatory that ever sheltered a horde of miserable humans. But you needn't be afraid to pa.s.s it now! The immaculate sweetness and serenity of that wee street is like a miracle and the old house is a fairy dream come true.

Its marble steps are softly yellowed with age, an exquisitely wrought iron balcony stretches across the front above the high ceilinged bas.e.m.e.nt and great carved walnut doors open into a wide vestibule with a marble floor exactly like a bit of a gigantic chessboard. The transformation had so astounded me that I was almost afraid to touch the neatly polished beaten silver bell for fear the whole house would vanish.

"Coom in!" cried a Scotchy voice from the bas.e.m.e.nt. So I stepped across the tessellated floor of the hall into the broad drawing-room and stared out through the long French doors of the gla.s.s room at the green smudge of Battery Park beyond the river. There wasn't a soul in sight in any of the rooms and yet I felt as if some one was there.

Perhaps it was just that I was awed by the disconcerting loveliness of the portrait of the brunette lady that hung in a tarnished oval frame above the drawing-room mantel. I looked at her and waited. Presently I coughed apologetically.

"Could I please find out if a--er--Miss Day lives here? Or--if anybody here knows her?"

The Scotchy voice lifted itself grudgingly above the vigorous swish of a scrubbing brush.

"I dinna think ony one's home but th' Sculptor Girl--she's on th' top floor an' it's not I that knows whether she's in a speaking humor, but you're weelcoom to try her--"

It was raining, a miserable spring drizzle, yet the s.p.a.cious hall seemed flooded with sunlight. There's an oval skylight fitted with amber gla.s.s; silhouetted against its leaded rims are outlined flying birds.

"Hark, hark! The lark at heaven's gate sings!" I read beneath the margins when I looked up to find the sunlight. I knew that I ought to feel like an impertinent intruder but I just couldn't! And I defy any one to go up those wonderful circling stairs and not smile! For at the head of each flight of steps is a recessed niche such as used to be built to hold statuary and in the one near the second floor is a flat vase filled with flowers--little saffron rosebuds the day I pa.s.sed by --with an ever so discreet card engraved in sizable old English script that hinted:

"One's for you."

I was still sniffing at my b.u.t.tonhole when I reached the second niche.

There was a black varnished wicker tray heaped with fruit and a Brittany platter filled with raison cookies.

"Aren't you hungry?" the card above them suggested. I nibbled an apricot all the way up the third flight and almost laughed aloud when I reached the top, though of course I was expecting something. There's a yellow glazed vase there,

"For pits and stones Or skins and bones"

and above it in the back of the niche through a marble dolphin's mouth cold water trickles into a bronze holder with a basket of cups beside it.

"Thirsty?" asks the dolphin.

"Dulcie Dierck" I read on the Sculptor Girl's doorplate. It took me a full minute to get the courage to tap her gargoyle knocker because I was so awestricken at remembering that she was the girl who won the Ambrose Medal and the Pendleton Prize and goodness only knows how much other loot and glory.

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--"