Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy (36 page)

Yours as ever,
SALLIE.

P.S. I left a pair of pale-blue bedroom slippers under the bed. Will you please have Mary wrap them up and mail them to me? And hold her hand while she writes the address. She spelt my name on the place-cards “Mackbird.”

 

 

Tuesday.

As I told you, I left an application for an accomplished nurse with the employment bureau of New York.

Wanted! A nurse maid with an ample lap suitable for the accommodation of seventeen babies at once.

She came this afternoon, and this is the fine figure of a woman that I drew!

We couldn't keep a baby from sliding off her lap unless we fastened him firmly with safety-pins.

Please give Sadie Kate the magazine. I'll read it to-night and return it to-morrow.

Was there ever a more docile and obedient pupil than

S. MCBRIDE?

 

 

Thursday.

I've been spending the last three days busily getting under way all those latest innovations that we planned in New York. Your word is law. A public cooky-jar has been established.

Also, the eighty play-boxes have been ordered. It is a wonderful idea, having a private box for each child, where he can store up his treasures. The ownership of a little personal property will help develop them into responsible citizens. I ought to have thought of it myself, but for some reason the idea didn't come. Poor Judy! You have inside knowledge of the longings of their little hearts that I shall never be able to achieve, not with all the sympathy I can muster.

We are doing our best to run this institution with as few discommoding rules as possible, but in regard to those play-boxes there is one point on which I shall have to be firm. The children may not keep in them mice or toads or angleworms.

I can't tell you how pleased I am that Betsy's salary is to be raised, and that we are to keep her permanently. But the Hon. Cy Wykoff deprecates the step. He has been making inquiries, and he finds that her people are perfectly able to take care of her without any salary.

“You don't furnish legal advice for nothing,” say I to him. “Why should she furnish her trained services for nothing?”

“This is charitable work.”

“Then work which is undertaken for your own good should be paid, but work which is undertaken for the public good should not be paid?”

“Fiddlesticks!” says he. “She's a woman, and her family ought to support her.”

This opened up vistas of argument which I did not care to enter with the Hon. Cy, so I asked him whether he thought it would be nicer to have a real lawn or hay on the slope that leads to the gate. He likes to be consulted, and I pamper him as much as possible in all unessential details. You see, I am following Sandy's canny advice: “Trustees are like fiddle-strings; they maunna be screwed ower tight. Humor the mon, but gang your ain gait.” Oh, the tact that this asylum is teaching me! I should make a wonderful politician's wife.

Thursday night.

You will be interested to hear that I have temporarily placed out Punch with two charming spinsters who have long been tottering on the brink of a child. They finally came last week, and said they would like to try one for a month to see what the sensation felt like.

They wanted, of course, a pretty ornament, dressed in pink and white and descended from the
Mayflower.
I told them that any one could bring up a daughter of the
Mayflower
to be an ornament to society, but the real feat was to bring up a son of an Italian organ-grinder and an Irish washerwoman. And I offered Punch. That Neapolitan heredity of his, aristically speaking, may turn out a glorious mixture, if the right environment comes along to choke out all the weeds.

I put it to them as a sporting proposition, and they were game. They have agreed to take him for one month and concentrate upon his remaking all their years of conserved force, to the end that he may be fit for adoption in some moral family. They both have a sense of humor and
accomplishing
characters, or I should never have dared to propose it. And really I believe it's going to be the one way of taming our young fire-eater. They will furnish the affection and caresses and attention that in his whole abused little life he has never had.

They live in a fascinating old house with an Italian garden, and furnishings selected from the whole round world. It does seem like sacrilege to turn that destructive child loose in such a collection of treasures. But he hasn't broken anything here for more than a month, and I believe that the Italian in him will respond to all that beauty.

I warned them that they must not shrink from any profanity that might issue from his pretty baby lips.

He departed last night in a very fancy automobile, and maybe I wasn't glad to say good-by to our disreputable young man! He has absorbed just about half of my energy.

Friday.

The pendant arrived this morning. Many thanks! But you really ought not to have given me another; a hostess cannot be held accountable for all the things that careless guests lose in her house. It is far too pretty for my chain. I am thinking of having my nose pierced, Cingalese fashion, and wearing my new jewel where it will really show.

I must tell you that our Percy is putting some good constructive work into this asylum. He has founded the John Grier Bank, and has worked out all the details in a very professional and businesslike fashion, entirely incomprehensible to my non-mathematical mind. All of the older children possess properly printed check-books, and they are each to be paid five dollars a week for their services, such as going to school and accomplishing housework. They are then to pay the institution (by check) for their board and clothes, which will consume their five dollars. It looks like a vicious circle, but it's really very educative ; they will comprehend the value of money before we dump them into a mercenary world. Those who are particularly good in lessons or work will receive an extra recompense. My head aches at the thought of the bookkeeping, but Percy waves that aside as a mere bagatelle. It is to be accomplished by our prize arithmeticians, and will train them for positions of trust. If Jervis hears of any opening for bank officials, let me know; I shall have a well-trained president, cashier, and paying-teller ready to be placed by this time next year.

Saturday.

Our doctor doesn't like to be called “Enemy.” It hurts his feelings or his dignity or something of the sort; but since I will persist, despite his expostulations, he has finally retaliated with a nickname for me. He calls me “Miss Sally Lunn,”
³⁵
and is in a glow of pride at having achieved such an imaginative flight.

He and I have invented a new pastime: he talks Scotch, and I answer in Irish. Our conversations run like this:

“Good afthernoon to ye, docther. An' how's yer health the day?”

“Verra weel, verra weel. And how gaes it wi' a' the bairns?”

“Shure, they're all av thim doin' foin.”

“I'm gey glad to hear it. This saft weather is hard on folk. There's muckle sickness aboot the kintra.”

“Hiven be praised it has not lighted here! But sit down, docther, an' make yersilf at home. Will ye be afther havin' a cup o' tay?”

“Hoot, woman! I would na hae you fash yoursel', but a wee drap tea winna coom amiss.”

“Whist! It's no thruble at all.”

You may not think this a very dizzying excursion into frivolity; but I assure you, for one of Sandy's dignity, it's positively riotous. The man has been in a heavenly temper ever since I came back; not a single cross word. I am beginning to think I may reform him as well as Punch.

This letter must be about long enough even for you; I've been writing it bit by bit for three days, whenever I happened to pass my desk.

Yours as ever,
SALLIE.

 

P.S. I don't think much of your vaunted prescription for hair tonic. Either the druggist didn't mix it right, or Jane didn't apply it with discretion. I stuck to the pillow this morning.

 

 

THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Saturday.

Your letter of Thursday is at hand, and extremely silly I consider it. Of course I am not trying to let you down easy; that isn't my way. If I let you down at all, it will be suddenly and with an awful bump. But I honestly didn't realize that it had been three weeks since I wrote. Please excuse!

Also, my dear sir, I have to bring you to account. You were in New York last week, and you never ran up to see us. You thought we wouldn't find it out, but we heard—and are insulted.

Would you like an outline of my day's activities? Wrote monthly report for trustees' meeting. Audited accounts. Entertained agent of State Charities Aid Association for luncheon. Supervised children's menus for next ten days. Dictated five letters to families who have our children. Visited our little feeble-minded Loretta Higgins (pardon the reference; I know you don't like me to mention the feeble-minded), who is being boarded out in a nice comfortable family, where she is learning to work. Came back to tea and a conference with the doctor about sending a child with tubercular glands to a sanatorium. Read an article on cottage
versus
congregate system for housing dependent children. (We do need cottages! I wish you'd send us a few for a Christmas present.) And now at nine o'clock I'm sleepily beginning a letter to you. Do you know many young society girls who can point to such a useful day as that?

Oh, I forgot to say that I stole ten minutes from my accounts this morning to install a new cook. Our Sallie Washington-Johnston, who cooked fit for the angels, had a dreadful, dreadful temper and terrorized poor Noah, our super-excellent furnace-man, to the point of giving notice. We couldn't spare Noah. He's more useful to the institution than its superintendent, and so Sallie Washington-Johnston is no more.

When I asked the new cook her name, she replied, “Ma name is Suzanne Estelle, but ma friends call me Pet.” Pet cooked the dinner to-night, but I must say that she lacks Sallie's delicate touch. I am awfully disappointed that you didn't visit us while Sallie was still here. You would have taken away an exalted opinion of my housekeeping.

Drowsiness overcame me at that point, and it's now two days later.

Poor neglected Gordon! It has just occurred to me that you never got thanked for the modeling-clay which came two weeks ago, and it was such an unusually intelligent present that I should have telegraphed my appreciation. When I opened the box and saw all that nice messy putty stuff, I sat down on the spot and created a statue of Singapore. The children love it; and it is very good to have the handicraft side of their training encouraged.

After a careful study of American history, I have determined that nothing is so valuable to a future president as an early obligatory unescapable performance of
chores.

Therefore I have divided the daily work of this institution into a hundred parcels, and the children rotate weekly through a succession of unaccustomed tasks. Of course they do everything badly, for just as they learn how, they progress to something new. It would be infinitely easier for us to follow Mrs. Lippett's immoral custom of keeping each child sentenced for life to a well-learned routine; but when the temptation assails me, I recall the dreary picture of Florence Henty, who polished the brass door-knobs of this institution for seven years—and I sternly shove the children on.

I get angry every time I think of Mrs. Lippett. She had exactly the point of view of a Tammany politician—no slightest sense of service to society; her only interest in the John Grier Home was to get a living out of it.

Wednesday.

What new branch of learning do you think I have introduced into my asylum? Table manners!

I never had any idea that it was such a lot of trouble to teach children how to eat and drink. Their favorite method is to put their mouths down to their mugs and lap their milk like kittens. Good manners are not merely snobbish ornaments, as Mrs. Lippett's régime appeared to believe; they mean self-discipline and thought for others, and my children have got to learn them.

That woman never allowed them to talk at their meals, and I am having the most dreadful time getting any conversation out of them above a frightened whisper. So I have instituted the custom of the entire staff, myself included, sitting with them at the table, and directing the talk along cheerful and improving lines. Also I have established a small, very strict training-table, where the little dears, in relays, undergo a week of steady badgering. Our uplifting table conversations run like this:

“Yes, Tom, Napoleon Bonaparte was a very great man—elbows off the table. He possessed a tremendous power of concentrating his mind on whatever he wanted to have; and that is the way to accomplish—don't snatch, Susan; ask politely for the bread, and Carrie will pass it to you.—But he was an example of the fact that selfish thought just for oneself, without considering the lives of others, will come to disaster in the—Tom! Keep your mouth shut when you chew—and after the battle of Waterloo—let Sadie's cooky alone—his fall was all the greater because—Sadie Kate, you may leave the table. It makes no difference what he did. Under no provocation does a lady slap a gentleman.”