THE HONOR GIRL (3 page)

She paused at the steps, and took note of several things that displeased her. One of the boards in the lower step was rotted away at one end, and the whole thing gave when her foot touched it. The paint was all off the porch and steps. Three old porch rockers in various stages of dejection stood about in position for the feet of a possible occupant to rest on the weather-beaten railing of the porch. The vines had clambered unchecked over floor and railing alike, adding to the general clutter. Three or four Sunday supplements were scattered about on the floor of the porch and several others matted like a cushion in an old bottomless rocker. Gathering her skirts about her daintily, the daughter of the house made her way disdainfully through the dismal approach and tried the front door. It was locked. She rang the bell several times, with no result. Then she stooped and lifted the old doormat. There was the key in its old place. It seemed to look at her with a pitiful appeal in its worn, rusty way. She picked it quickly from the accumulated dust and fitted it into the lock, a great distaste in her soul for the entrance she was about to make into the home of her childhood. She did not like to think that here had been her beginning of life.

She wondered as she threw the door open what had become of Rebecca? Inside the door she paused in dismay. Everything was dirt and disorder. Desolation came to meet her at the threshold.

The pleasant square hall that she remembered as a child mocked at her out of its ruin. The door of the hall closet stood open and hooks and floor bulged with their contents. Overcoats, a roll of carpet, two dilapidated raincoats, three old straw hats, and some felt ones, a stringless tennis racket, an old moth-eaten football suit, and a broken umbrella, all in a heterogeneous mass. The big wooden ball from the top of the newel post lolled in a corner amid rolls of dust. The little couch fairly groaned with more coats and hats. It seemed as if several people’s entire wardrobes must be piled upon this single article of furniture. The window seat was piled with books and papers all mixed up together, with burned matches and ends of cigarettes among them. A picture with a broken glass stood behind the hall table, adding desolation to the scene.

Through the wide doorway the dining table could be seen, covered with a torn, much soiled tablecloth, and piled high with soiled dishes bearing traces of fired eggs, bacon, apple cores, and banana skins. A plate in the middle held a single hard end of a baker’s loaf. The tin pepperbox from the kitchen stood in the middle of the table and a lump of salt lay on the cloth beside it. Neckties and soiled collars appeared on the sideboard, window seats, and chairs.

In dismay Elsie turned to the living room on her right, but confusion also reigned there. More Sunday supplements littered the floor. A bundle of laundry, half open, lay in a chair. A man’s new gray felt hat hung on the broken shade of the lamp on the center table. The piano—her piano on which she had first picked out her scales, and then with one finger played haltingly “The Star Spangled Banner”—was closed and covered with dust. Half a dozen pieces of ragtime, illumined jazzily, stood on the rack, and an old overcoat had been thrown over the top, upsetting a Dresden shepherdess vase containing ancient hydrangeas, dry and crumbling.

With an expression of disgust on her face, she turned to flee upstairs, get her book and depart as quickly as possible. To think this was her home! The house where she was born! The place where her father and brothers still lived. To think that her own flesh and blood were satisfied to live like this. It was too dreadful! What if those people last night could have had a glimpse of this, just before her performance? Would they have given her as much praise?

Then with sudden determination to know the worst, Elsie went through the dining room to the kitchen beyond.

Confusion and destruction met her gaze. A gaunt cat greeted her with a weak protest from a hunched-up position on the kitchen table beside the debris of a hasty breakfast wherein eggs had played a prominent part. A bottle half filled with thick milk long past the stage of sourness stood on the dresser, menacing the atmosphere with its green and pink coloring. The old sink clogged and half filled with waste water fairly reeked with bits of garbage from the last attempt at dish washing. The cooking utensils on the cold range were filled with sticky messes of varying ages and stages, some burned almost beyond recognition, some sour mashed potatoes, some pasty stewed tomatoes filled with soggy bread, some canned corn burned to the sauce pan, its empty can still on the back of the range.

Sick at heart, the girl drew back the bolt of the outer kitchen to let in the air. The cat sprang down and hauled from behind the refrigerator a bit of old dried fish with a stench unspeakable and began to gnaw at it starvedly. Outside the back door a company of dogs held high carnival over the forlorn upturned garbage pail.

Elsie slammed the kitchen door shut again and retreated, wondering frantically whether she could catch the next car back. She hurried upstairs, shutting her eyes to all the sights.

Her own old room had been at the head of the stairs, opening from the front one belonging to her mother and father. It was the only place in the house where any semblance of order prevailed. Everything was in its place just as she had left it, the bedspread up with an old cover that had once been white. The pictures on the walls, her childish treasures on the bureau, her books in the little bookshelves strung up by cords on the wall, her little rocking chair. Everything was thick with dust, of course; but it seemed to be the only spot in the house where the finger of ruin and despair had not been laid. It was desolate, of course, and utterly unattractive; yet looked like an oasis in the desert compared to the rest of the place.

Elsie found her book, selected one or two others, and turned to go downstairs; but at the top step something compelled her to go back and look into the other rooms. Her father’s room, with the bedclothes in a heap, his own garments scattered wildly about, a brandy-flask openly standing on the bureau!

She fled hastily. Something had caught her eye hanging over the headboard close by the pillow. Her mother’s old dressing gown of flowered flannelette, faded and torn. Did her father keep it there because it reminded him of her? They had been very fond of each other. Was he lonely? It was the first time the thought had ever occurred to her. She had always pitied herself, a motherless child. She had never thought of him as one to be pitied.

Something forced her to go on and see the rooms.

The bathroom was as desolate as such a spot can become when no one cares for it. Smeared marble black with grime and soap, no towels save two worn soiled ones in a heap on the floor, the oilcloth worn into holes, shoe polish and shaving articles strewn inharmoniously together, the window curtain torn, the door of the medicine-closet hanging by one hinge! Nothing as it ought to be!

She glanced into her elder brother’s room. Gene had always been particular. Surely he would have things in some order. But no, the prospect was as dreary as elsewhere, only that there had been an attempt to put the bureau in some kind of order for a row of photographs that held the place of honor there. Elsie stopped to look at them. Girls! Many girls! “Tough girls.” Girls with high heels and short skirts, and hair plastered out on their cheeks and forehead after the extreme fashion of the day; showing their teeth, languishing with their eyes, and saucily looking into Gene’s eyes in some groups. The kinds of girls with whom Aunt Esther did not like Katharine, Bettina, and herself to associate. Not bad girls, perhaps, just bold girls, coarse, common girls. With a curl of her lip she went out of the room and shut the door.

What ever made her mount the third-story stairs she did not know. Possibly a desire to see what had become of Rebecca. She pushed open the door of the back room that had formerly belonged to that servant and found no trace of inhabitant. The cot was there, and the hooks on which Rebecca’s garments had hung were vacant. Rebecca had evidently departed. No wonder. Who would want to stay in such a house? Or had the house gone into this state after the departure of Rebecca? Of course, that was it. Rebecca used to keep things in some sort of order, at least.

The front room had been Jack’s. He always hated it because he could not stand upright in the corners on account of the sloping roof. He used to protest against the high headboard of his bed that would not allow it to be shoved against the wall. As she passed the little middle storeroom, she caught sight of that headboard and footboard standing back against the wall across the window of the storeroom. Had Jack, then, bought a new bed? She pushed open his door curiously, and her heart sank at the appalling sight.

On the floor in the middle of the room lay the spring and mattress of the great old bed. A single sheet that was torn down the middle, and seemed to have served for months without changing, was the only semblance of bed linen. From the scanty snarl of bedclothes she recognized her mother’s old plaid shawl, the only article resembling a blanket. An old overcoat and sweater were in the heap, as if they too had been used for covering. The pillow was guiltless of case and much soiled. It dawned upon her that the stock of bedding and table linen had likely never been replenished since her mother’s death.

Jack’s garments hung or lay about the room in wild confusion, one incongruous mass upon floor and chairs and rickety chest of drawers. One could hardly step without putting a foot on something. Soiled laundry and clean lay side by side.

The chest of drawers was strung across the back with brilliant neckties, and here and there a clean collar mingled with a soiled one. Cigarette stumps and burned matches were literally everywhere. Elsie had never imagined a human being trying to live and sleep in such confusion. She stood stricken in the desolate place, and thought of Jack, with his brave bright eyes and his beautiful crest of wavy golden hair, existing in a room like this. A sudden lump rose in her throat; and she slipped out of the room, and closed the door after her, filled with a kind of shame for her young brother.

She hurried out of the house, closed the door, and locked it, putting the key scrupulously where she had found it, and went out to wait for the car.

She tried to forget the impression she had just received in the house. She tried to think that probably men didn’t mind such things; else, why didn’t they get some new things, and fix the house up? They were all working and had good salaries. There was no excuse for a state of things like that. Had that been the reason why her father wanted her to come home? Well, she couldn’t be a slave to three men in an awful household like that, she who had been so long used to better things, she who had already made a reputation for herself in a small way, young though she was. Was she not the honor girl of Professor Bowen’s school?

The car had almost reached the corner where she stood, and she was just about to step down from the curb and signal it, when a sudden remembrance of that room of Jack’s in the third story blurred her vision and some invisible hand seemed to draw her back, some voice calling to her, some strange influence touching with vibrant hand her heart-strings. It came to her that she could not leave that room in that condition for Jack to come back to at night. She must go up and try to make things a little more habitable. The others might stand it if they would, but Jack was only a boy. It was dangerous for boys to have no spot in the world that was decent.

She stepped back impulsively, and let the car go by her, then wondered why she had done it. She had no settled purpose, and no distinct idea what she would do. Something seemed compelling her to wait, drawing her back to that pandemonium in the house.

She walked feverishly to the steps again, looking at her watch. If she worked fast, she might be able to catch the next car back to the city; they passed every fifteen minutes. Or the car after that, at least. She could even go without her lunch for once if necessary.

She unlocked the door, and went in again.

The disorder seemed to rush to meet her with more of a shock than at her first entrance, perhaps because her eyes were now open to see it.

She had had it in mind to rush up to Jack’s room, shutting her eyes to all else, and put it in quick order that she might catch the next car if possible; but the hall fairly cried out to her for attention. What an entrance home at night for three lonely men! How was it she had never thought of them in this way before?

She stood hesitating a moment, then frantically set to work picking up things.

E
lsie collected the newspapers in a pile, swept the coats from the chairs and couch, hanging them on the empty hooks in the closet, and attacked the window-seat. All those books and papers piled in a heap with a collar and a tie on the top, the old green faded silk curtain pinned back so that the mess was plainly visible from the side street! It took but a minute to straighten the books in a row on the little shelf below the hall table, throw the match-ends, cigar-stumps, and bits of paper into the waste-basket, and remove the collar and a few other misplaced articles. She seized upon an old napkin over the back of a dining-room chair. It was ragged, but in a state of comparative cleanliness, and would do nicely for a duster. And, when the window-seat was wiped off carefully and the curtain straightened, the sun shone in brightly as if to encourage her with one spot of order at least. Next she turned her attention to the hall table, and began to be interested. It really did not take so long to bring order out of chaos when one went at it in the right spirit.

She went to the kitchen and dampened her duster slightly, returning to wipe off the lamp-globe. She shook out the faded silk table-cover, and wondered with a pang whether it might not perhaps have once been one of her mother’s treasures. The thought made her handle it more tenderly, and she arranged the table with a few books until that corner at least began to take on a habitable look. The head of the newel drew her attention. She managed to find a hammer, and set it in place, driving the twisted nails back shakily again; and then after a moment’s frowning pause she dusted off the old leather couch and attacked the yawning closet. There was no use in trying to make things look nice with that closet door bursting open and sending its contents over the floor.