Janice Day, the Young Homemaker Part 5

"She was a Swede," Janice replied wearily.

"Heh! Them Swedes!" sniffed Delia, voicing a p.r.o.nounced national prejudice.

"She left in a hurry," Janice explained. "She--she got mad. One of the neighbor's boys played a trick on her and she left."

"Ye don't be tellin' me? Couldn't she spank the boy? Sure, 'tis no sinse them foreigners has."

"I hope you will not take offense so easily," Janice rejoined.

"Here is clean linen for your bed. We send the flat work to the laundry. There is a broom and carpet sweeper in the storeroom, and plenty of dust cloths. You would better put your own room in order first. Then you can come down and I will show you about getting dinner."

"Sure, you is very young to be so knowin' about housework. Is your mother dead?"

"Yes."

"I didn't know but she'd gone off and left you and your

paw," observed this strange creature, "So many of them be's doin'

that now."

"Oh!" gasped the girl.

"So that's why your paw did the hirin' through Murphy's Agency!

Well, I like to work where there's no lady boss," said Delia.

"You and me is goin' to get on fine."

Janice wondered if that were so. In no very enthusiastic frame of mind, she descended the stairs to put away her hat and coat and to place her books on the table in the living room.

CHAPTER IV. MORE TROUBLES THAN ONE

Janice dreaded to have this new houseworker look into that back kitchen and see its condition. What Olga had done with the soft coal ammunition was enough to make Delia depart before she had even taken up her new duties.

Yet Janice shrank from cleaning the room herself. She had a lot of home work to do for school, and she would have to show the new girl, too, just where everything was kept and what was expected of her.

Fortunately the dinner-getting would be a simple matter. There was a roast already prepared for the oven, potatoes and another vegetable, and a salad. The latter were in the house. Olga had been no dessert maker, but there were canned pears in the refrigerator and some baker's cake (Daddy called it "sweetened sawdust") in the cupboard.

The girl would have to be told about these things. Fortunately they had not begun to use the summer kitchen as yet. It was true that Olga had only the day before cleaned the place, as well as she knew how, in preparation for the approaching warm weather.

But to put things to rights in that room again, and to remove all traces of the bombardment of the cats, would take half a day or more. And Janice Day shrank from the use of the scrubbing brush and strong soda-water.

She decided that the back kitchen could not be cleaned this afternoon. She put on her bungalow ap.r.o.n and took the salad from the icebox where it had lain on the ice in a cheesecloth bag.

She usually prepared the salad herself, for daddy was fond of it and most of the itinerant help they had had considered "gra.s.s only fit for horses and cows."

She was decanting the oil, drop by drop, into the salad dressing when Delia appeared in the kitchen. There was one good point about the giantess; her face and hands looked as though they were familiar with soap and water. She had removed the ruffled monstrosity and had put on a more simple frock. It did not serve to make her look less ungainly; but nevertheless it, likewise, was clean.

"Are you doing the cooking?" asked the new inc.u.mbent, her weak, squeaky voice quite above high C. "An' do I help you?"

"I am fixing the salad because my father likes it prepared in a certain way. I will show you what, else there is to do, Delia."

Janice spoke in rather a grown-up way because she had had so much experience with a cla.s.s of houseworkers only too willing to take advantage of her youth and inexperience.

"Isn't that nice!" sighed Delia, with her rather, foolish smile.

Janice wondered whether the woman was making fun of her, or if she was quite as silly as she appeared. But if Delia would only do the work and do it half-way right, Janice told herself she did not care if Delia was actually an idiot. At least the new girl seemed good-natured.

And she was not all thumbs! But Janice stuffed the end of a kitchen towel into her mouth more than once to stifle her giggles when she chanced to think Of how daddy would look when he caught his first glimpse of the gigantic Delia.

When the vegetables were peeled and on the stove, and the roast was cooking in the covered roaster, Janice led Delia through the lower part of the house. She tried to explain what there was to do on the morrow when Delia would be alone all day, with daddy at business and herself at school.

"Yes, ma'am," said Delia, after each item was explained. "And then what do I do?"

Her vacant face advertised to all beholders that she promptly forgot what she was told. One particular formula for work drove the previously explained item immediately out of Delia's head.

"Isn't it a nice house?" was her final whistling comment as they came back to the kitchen. "And where does this door lead?"

She opened the back kitchen door. She stared at the coal-littered floor, at the streaked and s.m.u.tted walls, at the overturned chairs and a broken flower-pot or two that had come to ruin during the bombardment.

"Sure! whativer struck the place?" asked Delia in her high, squeaking voice. "What happened?"

Janice told her. Delia shook her head and slowly closed the door--slowly but firmly. "If folks will hire them Swedes, 'tis all they can expect," was her comment.

There was a finality to this that was uncanny. Janice became sure, right then and there, that Mrs. Bridget Burns would never clear up the wreck Olga Cedarstrom had made of the back kitchen.

The girl wished with all her heart that she had boxed Arlo Junior's ears harder.

Miss Peckham, her sharp chin hung upon the top rail of the boundary fence, called Janice just before daddy came home. As the Day house was on the corner of Love Street, Miss Peckham was the nearest neighbor.

She was a weazened little woman, with very sharp black eyes, who had a.s.sumed the censors.h.i.+p of the neighborhood years before.

Living alone with her cats and Ambrose, her parrot, Miss Peckham rigidly adhered to the harshest precepts of spinsterhood.

Even Janice could understand that Miss Peckham considered daddy not at all fit to bring up, or have the sole care of, a daughter, and that Mr. Broxton Day was not to be altogether trusted.

Miss Peckham's nature overflowed with tenderness toward animals, and it was regarding one of her pets she now called to Janice about.

"You haven't seen him, have you, Janice? You haven't seen my Sam?"

"Your Sam?" murmured Janice, rather non-plussed for the moment.

"You don't mean the dog you bought of the butcher, do you, Miss Peckham?"

"No, indeed. That's Cicero. But Sam, the cat. He's got black and yellow on him, Janice. You've seen him, I know."

And suddenly Janice remembered that she had seen him. He had been one of those cats tolled into the back kitchen by Arlo Junior.

Worse than all, Sam was the cat Olga Cedarstrom had hurt with a lump of coal. She remembered that he was the last to escape when she opened the kitchen door, dragging his injured leg behind him.

How could Janice tell her of this awful thing that had happened to Sam? The poor cat had probably dragged himself off into some secret place to lick his wounds --to die, perhaps.

"You've seen him! I know you have, Janice Day," cried the shrewd maiden lady. "What have you done to poor Sam?"