Dear Enemy (16 page)

Characters neatly remodeled. S. McBride.

Sandy dropped in two nights ago to have a bit of conversation with Betsy and me, and he was FRIVOLOUS. He made three jokes, and he sat down at the piano and sang some old Scotch, "My luve's like a red, red rose," and "Come under my plaidie," and "Wha's at the window? Wha? Wha?" not in the least educational, and then danced a few steps of the strathspey!

I sat and beamed upon my handiwork, for it's true, I've done it all through my frivolous example and the books I've given him and the introducing of such lightsome companions as Jimmie and Percy and Gordon Hallock. If I have a few more months in which to work, I shall get the man human. He has given up purple ties, and at my tactful suggestion has adopted a suit of gray. You have no idea how it sets him off. He will be quite distinguished looking as soon as I can make him stop carrying bulgy things in his pockets.

Good-by; and remember that we're expecting you on Friday.

SALLIE.

P.S. Here is a picture of Allegra, taken by Mr. Witherspoon. Isn't she a love? Her present clothes do not enhance her beauty, but in the course of a few weeks she will move into a pink smocked frock.

Wednesday, June 24, 10 A.M. MRS. JERVIS PENDLETON.

Madam:

Your letter is at hand, stating that you cannot visit me on Friday per promise, because your husband has business that keeps him in town. What clishmaclaver is this! Has it come to such a pass that you can't leave him for two days?

I did not let 113 babies interfere with my visit to you, and I see no reason why you should let one husband interfere with your visit to me. I shall meet the Berkshire express on Friday as agreed. S. McBRIDE.

June 30. My dear Judy:

That was a very flying visit you paid us; but for all small favors we are grateful. I am awfully pleased that you were so delighted with the way things are going, and I can't wait for Jervis and the architect to get up here and really begin a fundamental ripping-up.

You know, I had the queerest feeling all the time that you were here. I can't make it seem true that you, my dear, wonderful Judy, were actually brought up in this institution, and know from the bitter inside what these little tots need. Sometimes the tragedy of your childhood fills me with an anger that makes me want to roll up my sleeves and fight the whole world and force it into making itself over into a place more fit for children to live in. That Scotch-Irish ancestry of mine seems to have deposited a tremendous amount of FIGHT in my character.

If you had started me with a modern asylum, equipped with nice, clean, hygienic cottages and everything in running order, I couldn't have stood the monotony of its perfect clockwork. It's the sight of so many things crying to be done that makes it possible for me to stay. Sometimes, I must confess, I wake up in the morning and listen to these institution noises, and sniff this institution air, and long for the happy, carefree life that by rights is mine.

You my dear witch, cast a spell over me, and I came. But often in the night watches your spell wears thin, and I start the day with the burning decision to run away from the John Grier Home. But I postpone starting until after breakfast. And as I issue into the corridor, one of these pathetic tots runs to meet me, and shyly slips a warm, crumpled little fist into my hand, and looks up with wide baby eyes, mutely asking for a little petting, and I snatch him up and hug him. And then, as I look over his shoulder at the other forlorn little mites, I long to take all 113 into my arms and love them into happiness. There is something hypnotic about this working with children. Struggle as you may, it gets you in the end.

Your visit seems to have left me in a broadly philosophical frame of mind; but I really have one or two bits of news that I might convey. The new frocks are marching along, and, oh, but they are going to be sweet! Mrs. Livermore was entranced with those parti-colored bales of cotton cloth you sent,--you should see our workroom, with it all scattered about,--and when I think of sixty little girls, attired in pink and blue and yellow and lavender, romping upon our lawn of a sunny day, I feel that we should have a supply of smoked eye glasses to offer visitors. Of course you know that some of those brilliant fabrics are going to be very fadeable and impractical. But Mrs. Livermore is as bad as you--she doesn't give a hang. She'll make a second and a third set if necessary. DOWN WITH CHECKED GINGHAM!

I am glad you liked our doctor. Of course we reserve the right to say anything about him we choose, but our feelings would be awfully hurt if anybody else should make fun of him.

He and I are still superintending each other's reading. Last week he appeared with Herbert Spencer's "System of Synthetic Philosophy" for me to glance at. I gratefully accepted it, and gave him in return the "Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff." Do you remember in college how we used to enrich our daily speech with quotations from Marie? Well, Sandy took her home and read her painstakingly and thoughtfully.

"Yes," he acknowledged today when he came to report, "it is a truthful record of a certain kind of morbid, egotistical personality that unfortunately does exist. But I can't understand why you care to read it; for, thank God! Sally Lunn, you and Bash haven't anything in common."

That's the nearest to a compliment he ever came, and I feel extremely flattered. As to poor Marie, he refers to her as "Bash" because he can't pronounce her name, and is too disdainful to try.

We have a child here, the daughter of a chorus girl, and she is a conceited, selfish, vain, posing, morbid, lying little minx, but she has eyelashes! Sandy has taken the most violent dislike to that child. And since reading poor Marie's diary, he has found a new comprehensive adjective for summing up all of her distressing qualities. He calls her BASHY, and dismisses her.

Good-by and come again.

SALLIE.

P.S. My children show a distressing tendency to draw out their entire bank accounts to buy candy.

Tuesday night. My dear Judy:

What do you think Sandy has done now? He has gone off on a pleasure trip to that psychopathic institution whose head alienist visited us a month or so ago. Did you ever know anything like the man? He is fascinated by insane people, and can't let them alone.

When I asked for some parting medical instructions, he replied:

"Feed a cowld and hunger a colic and put nae faith in doctors."

With that advice, and a few bottles of cod-liver oil we are left to our own devices. I feel very free and adventurous. Perhaps you had better run up here again, as there's no telling what joyous upheaval I may accomplish when out from under Sandy's dampening influence.

S.

THE JOHN GRIER HOME,

Friday. Dear Enemy:

Here I stay lashed to the mast, while you run about the country disporting yourself with insane people. And just as I was thinking that I had nicely cured you of this morbid predilection for psychopathic institutions! It's very disappointing. You had seemed almost human of late.

May I ask how long you are intending to stay? You had permission to go for two days, and you've already been away four.

Charlie Martin fell out of a cherry tree yesterday and cut his head open, and we were driven to calling in a foreign doctor. Five stitches. Patient doing well. But we don't like to depend on strangers. I wouldn't say a word if you were away on legitimate business, but you know very well that, after associating with melancholics for a week, you will come back home in a dreadful state of gloom, dead sure that humanity is going to the dogs; and upon me will fall the burden of getting you decently cheerful again.

Do leave those insane people to their delusions, and come back to the John Grier Home, which needs you.

I am most fervent' Your friend and servant, S. McB.

P.S. Don't you admire that poetical ending? It was borrowed from Robert Burns, whose works I am reading assiduously as a compliment to a Scotch friend.

July 6. Dear Judy:

That doctor man is still away. No word; just disappeared into space. I don't know whether he is ever coming back or not, but we seem to be running very happily without him.

I lunched yesterday CHEZ the two kind ladies who have taken our Punch to their hearts. The young man seems to be very much at home. He took me by the hand, and did the honors of the garden, presenting me with the bluebell of my choice. At luncheon the English butler lifted him into his chair and tied on his bib with as much manner as though he were serving a prince of the blood. The butler has lately come from the household of the Earl of Durham, Punch from a cellar in Houston Street. It was a very uplifting spectacle.

My hostesses entertained me afterward with excerpts from their table conversations of the last two weeks. (I wonder the butler hasn't given notice; he looked like a respectable man.) If nothing more comes of it, at least Punch has furnished them with funny stories for the rest of their lives. One of them is even thinking of writing a book. "At least," says she, wiping hysterical tears from her eyes, "we have lived!"

The Hon. Cy dropped in at 6:30 last night, and found me in an evening gown, starting for a dinner at Mrs. Livermore's house. He mildly observed that Mrs. Lippett did not aspire to be a society leader, but saved her energy for her work. You know I'm not vindictive, but I never look at that man without wishing he were at the bottom of the duck pond, securely anchored to a rock.

Otherwise he'd pop up and float.

Singapore respectfully salutes you, and is very glad that you can't see him as he now appears. A shocking calamity has befallen his good looks. Some bad child--and I don't think she's a boy--has clipped that poor beastie in spots, until he looks like a mangy, moth-eaten checkerboard. No one can imagine who did it. Sadie Kate is very handy with the scissors, but she is also handy with an alibi! During the time when the clipping presumably occurred, she was occupying a stool in the corner of the schoolroom with her face to the wall, as twenty-eight children can testify. However, it has become Sadie Kate's daily duty to treat those spots with your hair tonic.

I am, as usual,

SALLIE.

P.S. This is a recent portrait of the Hon. Cy drawn from life. The man, in some respects, is a fascinating talker; he makes gestures with his nose.

Thursday evening. Dear Judy:

Sandy is back after a ten-days' absence,--no explanations,--and plunged deep into gloom. He resents our amiable efforts to cheer him up, and will have nothing to do with any of us except baby Allegra. He took her to his house for supper tonight and never brought her back until half-past seven, a scandalous hour for a young miss of three. I don't know what to make of our doctor; he grows more incomprehensible every day.

But Percy, now, is an open-minded, confiding young man. He has just been making a dinner call (he is very punctilious in all social matters), and our entire conversation was devoted to the girl in Detroit. He is lonely and likes to talk about her; and the wonderful things he says! I hope that Miss Detroit is worthy of all this fine affection, but I'm afraid. He fetched out a leather case from the innermost recesses of his waistcoat and, reverently unwrapping two layers of tissue-paper, showed me the photograph of a silly little thing, all eyes and earrings and fuzzy hair. I did my best to appear congratulatory, but my heart shut up out of pity for the poor boy's future.

Isn't it funny how the nicest men often choose the worst wives, and the nicest women the worst husbands? Their very niceness, I suppose, makes them blind and unsuspicious.

You know, the most interesting pursuit in the world is studying character. I believe I was meant to be a novelist; people fascinate me--until I know them thoroughly. Percy and the doctor form a most engaging contrast. You always know at any moment what that nice young man is thinking about; he is written like a primer in big type and one-syllable words. But the doctor! He might as well be written in Chinese so far as legibility goes. You have heard of people with a dual nature; well, Sandy possesses a triple one. Usually he's scientific and as hard as granite, but occasionally I suspect him of being quite a sentimental person underneath his official casing. For days at a time he will be patient and kind and helpful, and I begin to like him; then without any warning an untamed wild man swells up from the innermost depths, and--oh, dear! the creature's impossible.

I always suspect that sometime in the past he has suffered a terrible hurt, and that he is still brooding over the memory of it. All the time he is talking you have the uncomfortable feeling that in the far back corners of his mind he is thinking something else. But this may be merely my romantic interpretation of an uncommonly bad temper. In any case, he's baffling.

We have been waiting for a week for a fine windy afternoon, and this is it. My children are enjoying "kite-day," a leaf taken from Japan. All of the big-enough boys and most of the girls are spread over "Knowltop" (that high, rocky sheep pasture which joins us on the east) flying kites made by themselves.

I had a dreadful time coaxing the crusty old gentleman who owns the estate into granting permission. He doesn't like orphans, he says, and if he once lets them get a start in his grounds, the place will be infested with them forever. You would think, to hear him talk, that orphans were a pernicious kind of beetle.

But after half an hour's persuasive talking on my part, he grudgingly made us free of his sheep pasture for two hours, provided we didn't step foot into the cow pasture over the lane, and came home promptly when our time was up. To insure the sanctity of his cow pasture, Mr. Knowltop has sent his gardener and chauffeur and two grooms to patrol its boundaries while the flying is on. The children are still at it, and are having a wonderful adventure racing over that windy height and getting tangled up in one another's strings. When they come panting back they are to have a surprise in the shape of ginger cookies and lemonade.

These pitiful little youngsters with their old faces! It's a difficult task to make them young, but I believe I'm accomplishing it. And it really is fun to feel you're doing something positive for the good of the world. If I don't fight hard against it, you'll be accomplishing your purpose of turning me into a useful person. The social excitements of Worcester almost seem tame before the engrossing interest of 113 live, warm, wriggling little orphans.