Little Miss By-The-Day Part 25

"You said you'd give me a joy-ride sometime if I had a new bonnet--I have. I really look like anybody else now. I do need that joy-ride just now, could you come for me?"

But can't you see that chauffeur's rueful smile when he reached the address she gave him and saw a nurse bringing the palefaced Painter Boy out the hospital door? Felice ran ahead of them, breathless with achievement.

"He is doing vairee nicely. His leg is better. It's only his spirit that's rather drowned, so I thought if he had a joy-ride and we took him home--"

At least Janet found comfort from the fact that the Painter Boy was the last pauper to be added to the list--there weren't any rooms or beds for any more! But the house hummed with their activities, rang with their arguments and theories, echoed with their laughter--and sighed with their midnight tears. They were so young! So impatient! So eager to set the river of life afire!

Dinner time was a joy. They usually had dinner in the garden and dinner was always THE DIs.h.!.+ Even with Janet's fingers on the purse strings and Molly's capable hands in the mixing the slender funds would not stretch to more than--THE DISH. It might be a huge Irish stew, or something Molly called Dago Puddin' (there never was such spaghetti as her Dago Puddin') or a gigantic pie made of pigeons that had to cook all day to become edible. Sometimes Molly "slipped 'em somethin'" that she claimed was left from her catering business, but usually they ate only what their pooled funds could pay for and leaned back content to listen while Felice "pretended" or scolded or encouraged them; her leaders.h.i.+p was utterly unconscious, her calm a.s.sumption that she was a very old lady hypnotized them into thinking she was. She made no rules or regulations. She frankly let them know that perhaps they could live there a day or perhaps a century; that the length of residence depended on the finding of the elusive, untraceable Portia Person. They all searched ardently for him. They all knew that when they "made good" they would have to find some fellow who hadn't and help him. Already Octavia's motto was lettered under her lovely portrait over the drawing-room fireplace in the charming simulation of medieval script that the Poetry Girl loved to make,

"She would like you to be happy here.

You can't be truly happy if you are making anyone else unhappy."

The days swept by so fast, Felicia brave as she was, didn't dare count them! Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, oh, it seemed as though they surely must find the Portia Person now that they were all looking! Yet each one in his heart generously hoped it would be Felicia herself who found him.

In spite of her high resolves to learn to "like to be a by-the-day"

she found some days impossible.

She grew to hate Thursdays. Sometimes it seemed as though she couldn't please anybody on Thursday. Thursday meant that she sewed in households that suffered from a feverish complaint known as Maid's- Day-Out. Thursdays always seemed to be a.s.sociated with worse and more hurried luncheons than other days--Thursdays she had to open doors and answer telephones--she used to think sometimes she could have stood all the other days if it hadn't been for Thursdays.

One Thursday in particular stood out as a terrific day. To begin with it rained. A drizzling, penetrating, gloomy kind of a rain that brought her into the Woman's Exchange exceedingly moist, and seemed to have permanently warped whatever courtesy time had left in the soul of the Disagreeable Walnut.

"--to Eighteen Willow Court--" grumbled the cross old woman sliding a card with the address across the littered counter to Felice.

One comfort was, Willow Court was not far and the "Eighteen" was emblazoned in enormous gilt letters over an elaborate plate-gla.s.s entrance. It was Felice's first apartment house experience. She walked with humble awe through an enormous mirrored hallway lined with the largest, dustiest, artificial foliage that ever disgraced vegetation.

An intolerant colored boy, pompous in green-and-gilt livery eyed her insolently. She stated her errand.

"The help's entrance is on the side street," he informed her impudently. "You turn right around and go right out where you just came in and go around to the side where I tells you and go in there and you tell Joe I sent you. If he hain't too busy maybe he'll run you up on the freight elevator, but if he is you can walk. It's apartment 41, fourth floor, front."

Ah, you should have seen Octavia's daughter, tired and little and dripping and frumpy, lift her chin and look through and through that impudent Senegambian! He confessed afterward she looked so like somebody's high-toned ghost that it had sent the s.h.i.+vers down his spine. And just when he was ready to hear the wrath that her eyes threatened she turned abruptly and walked away so regally that he found himself muttering,

"I didn't notice she was such a high-stepping lady--"

The service entrance and Joe and the freight elevator conquered, she found herself face to face with new insolence, this time from a frowsy maid who led her grudgingly into the living-room that stretched across the front of the apartment. From ornate curtains a plump and fretful woman emerged,

"You're fifteen minutes late--she said she'd send some one at eight o'clock--but come along, sew in the children's bedroom--"

Felice followed through the whole untidy apartment into the narrow cluttered room. It appeared that the children were not yet dressed nor had their beds been put in order and they sat, two weedy pallid- looking mites, in the midst of a tremendous heap of broken toys and fought desperately for the possession of an eyeless, hairless carca.s.s of a doll. A sewing machine piled high with garments was in front of the one broad window that opened on the gloomy whiteness of the court.

An overturned basket, from which oozed tangled spools and myriads of b.u.t.tons, lay on the floor in front of the machine. A stiff-backed gilt chair stood beside it.

"I cut out some pinafores yesterday," continued the fretful voice, "I wish you would run up the seams of those on the machine--french-seam them, please--and if I get time I'll show you how I want the collars-- "

Felicia stood, absurdly little beside her plump employer, and spoke the first words she'd been given opportunity to utter,

"Good morning, Madame," she said in her clear contralto, "I think you do not understand. The Exchange should have told you that I am a needle-woman--that I do only hand work--I do not understand sewing machines--"

"Not understand sewing machines!" shrilled the kimonoed one, "why anybody with any sense at all can run a sewing machine--"

Felicia smiled her wide ingenuous smile.

"I am not any one at all--but it so happens that I cannot use a sewing machine. Perhaps I can please you with my needle. Or, I can go home."

"You can't do anything of the kind. It's the maid's day out and I have to go to a matinee and I'd counted on you to watch the children--" she shook her head in exasperation. "Well, take off your hat, don't stand there gawping. I suppose I'll have to put up with it. Do you know enough to sew on b.u.t.tons and mend stockings?"

Felicia looked at her curiously for a moment. She couldn't think of any flower or any vegetable that this strange creature was like, or any weed for that matter, and it's very hard to keep the garden of a day in order when strange unexpected things spring up in it. She took off her hat and her dripping coat. She seated herself in the silly chair and began to make something like order out of the mess of crumpled things before her.

Somehow or other the dreadful day limped along. The children howled while they were dressed. Their mother by turns nagged or cajoled them from one crying spell into another. The frowsy maid pulled the covers untidily over the two little beds and half-heartedly picked up a few of the toys and dumped them in a closet. Felicia's delicate fingers guided her needle back and forth making exquisite darns and patches in small petticoats and dresses. One grudging word of approval did her plump and fretful employer allow her.

"You certainly can sew, but you needn't bother to take such small st.i.tches--I wish you'd stop fussing with that and press my frock--"

An ironing board added itself to the other confusion. Propped up between the sewing machine and the uneven metal footboard of a child's crib Felicia eyed it with misgiving. She almost laughed aloud.

"Do you think you'd better risk it with me, Madame?" she asked. "I am not what-you-call-a-blanchisseuse--I have never held a flat-iron--"

she was smiling because she was thinking of Grandy's inflexible order "never let her hand be spread on any heavy object."

She lived through My Lady Fretfulness's tirade at this appalling ignorance. She again patiently explained that she was sorry The Exchange had let Madame misunderstand.

"I am only a needlewoman for hand work," she reiterated. "I know only embroidery and mending and knitting and the beading of purses--as they should have informed you--"

The crisis was tided over by the frowsy maid being summoned to press the frock while Felice corralled various hooks and eyes, mended a rip in a stocking heel, helped to fasten the pressed frock around a stiffly corseted person, breathed a patient "yes" to numerous instructions about the children's lunch. She sighed with relief when two o'clock heard the door bang after a second grand exit when a caricatured edition of the mistress pa.s.sed out in the form of "Sadie's Thursday out."

Not that things were exactly placid after those two disrupting influences had fled to their pleasures. The rain dripped more steadily, the pile of garments heaped upon the sewing machine never seemed to grow less. The children ate the lunches that Felicia found in the half tidied kitchen. The little woman herself carried a plate of not unappetising sc.r.a.ps into the ornate mahogany dining-room, rummaged for a knife and fork and sat down to eat, much to the disapproval of the scraggly nine-year-old who informed her with unconscious imitation of the mother's manner that "Mama doesn't allow her servants to eat in here--"

Followed a b.u.mping, dragging, nerve-racking afternoon that made Felicia long to shriek like the raucous-voiced peddler who had disturbed her precious early morning sleep. By four o'clock things had become unendurable: She viewed her squabbling charges with scorn. They behaved no better nor no worse than "the-thousand-weeds-for-which-we- have-no-name--" yet a spirit of fairness roused itself in Felicia's unhappy thoughts.

"After all, they're not to blame, these two uncared-for savages!" She put down her needle and thimble, walked with a determination toward the wee contestants in a never ending fight and put her hand on the younger child's shoulder. The child jerked away. Felicia's hand went out more firmly this time.

"Let us go out of this room," she said coolly. "I do not think it is possible for any one of us to be happy here any longer--"

The children stared at her. This note of authority was something they did not question. There was something in this wide-eyed pale little seamstress' command that was unlike anything they had ever heard. They followed Felicia meekly enough. They walked quietly while she moved to the least covered and least ornate corner of the apartment--an alcove with a bookcase and a flat writing table.

"This," announced the older child, "won't do. It's Faddo's ONE CORNER and he will not let it be touched."

Felicia laughed. "Then there is but one thing for us to do," she announced leading her small sheep behind her. "We shall have to go back to that unhappy room and make ourselves ONE CORNER--" So back they went and watched her fling open the window. They obeyed her commands without murmuring for the next quarter of an hour. They helped her smooth their lumpy beds. They helped her stack the wrecked toys into an orderly heap. They helped her fold the heaps of mended and unmended garments. And when it was done she sat down on the floor on her knees as she had knelt so many times in her garden and smiled at them. She drew a long breath. You must remember that she had never known a child except that strange child: _herself_. She could only treat them as she had treated the lost flowers in her garden. Or perhaps, she thought, she could try treating them as she treated Bab.i.+.c.he, but in another thoughtful second--(during which she nearly lost their strangely won attention)--she clapped her hands. Those scowls on their puckered little foreheads were like Grandfather's in the old days when he had been wrangling with Certain Legal Matters. She seemed to hear her mother's happy voice:

"It's not easy. But it's a game too. You see some one who is tired or cross or worried and you think 'This isn't pleasant.' Maybe you play a little on your lute, maybe you tell something droll that happened in the kennel or the garden--"

She drew another long breath, "Let's pretend--" she began in her low contralto "let's pretend I have a little lute to make music for you."

She sunk back on a ha.s.sock and held her arms in position for playing a lute. The children settled in crossed legged heaps and regarded her solemnly.

"I haven't really a lute of course, so I shall have to whistle instead of playing the strings and I can't sing any words while I'm whistling so I shall have to tell you the story before I make the song--the first little song I'm going to do on my lute is about a bridge and how the pretty ladies liked to dance across it."

They pretended it with her rather timorously at first, but presently they were singing "sur le pont d'Avignon." A door swung open and a grizzled man in a dripping raincoat blocked the doorway. The children looked around at him.

"Go away, Papa," ordered the older one casually. "We are pretending."

He laughed.

"And why, may I ask, shouldn't I be allowed to pretend with you?"