It was almost dark when they arrived a Meachin Street. The moving vans were drawn up in front of the shadowy property in a straggling uncertain line, four truckloads. Thurlow had got them cheap because he was willing to take them after hours. They were not among the listed professional movers, and he had felt a little nervous about their ability to move Rilla’s beloved piano carefully and handle some of his mother’s fine old mahogany pieces that had come to her from her grandmother, but the mother had insisted. Indeed she seemed to have developed an intense desire to save every cent possible. It wasn’t like her. Thurlow wondered a little at her. The thought passed through his mind that she was probably filled with a great fear that they would have nothing to depend on for a possible time of illness. But he had had no time to talk to her about it.
But now, as he stopped the borrowed flivver in front of a sagging gate, he was suddenly filled with great dismay. How could they ever live here? Even in the dark the sordidness of the street was apparent. Why hadn’t he insisted on seeing it before they came? Surely if he had known, he could have persuaded her to try and find something better. But now they were here, and his mother had flung open the door of the car and was climbing out as if she knew her way around. This awful place! A sudden impulse seized him to cry out against it even yet, to insist on going back to the house and unloading the furniture until they could find a proper home.
Across the street were the great brick buildings of a factory, which gave all evidence of being shut down, for most of the windows were broken and it was dark and apparently empty.
There were no curbs on the street and no path in the deep growth of grass and weeds in front of the fence. The other houses on the block were tumbledown cottages of wood. The one next to theirs had an addition crudely built of corrugated iron with a stovepipe coming out of the roof. It seemed to be surrounded with straggling cabbages in various stages of decay. Perhaps it never had been painted. Theirs was the only house that had even a pretense at a fence, though along the row there was one where a few scraggly barberry tufts showed a former attempt, long since demolished.
All this Thurlow’s eyes took in at a glance as the flivver’s lights swept the block and then leveled straight ahead down the blackness that seemed to end in a dump partly overgrown with weeds, with one tall late hollyhock standing out pinkly in the unexpected brightness to crown the peak of ashes.
He drew in a sharp breath of protest, glanced toward the house itself—took in its meager proportions, the scattered outbuildings, chicken coop, woodshed, the looming barn farther on toward the dump—and his heart went bumping down to the valley of despair. How could they ever …? He opened his mouth to protest and then closed it again. Perhaps it would be easier to bring his mother to reason if she saw for herself how impossible it was. She had agreed to be guided by them in the second search for a home if this one failed. It would be easier just to let her see what it was like when she tried to live in it. They could, of course, stand anything for one night. He had a wild idea of asking the mover just to leave his vans there till morning and wait until they found another place before unloading, though he knew that was practically impossible. Then he suddenly realized that his mother was out on the ground and walking toward the mover, who stood grimly, impatiently, awaiting directions. So Thurlow swung himself out and went forward beside her.
“Mother, why don’t you sit in the car till we get a place fixed for you?”
“Nonsense!” said his mother sharply. “This is no time to sit down and be waited on. Thurlow, I want the things in this van with the blue and white letters on the side to go in the house. The rest, all but a few large pieces, can go in the barn for tonight. Tell the man to bring in that large clothes basket first, and the big box he put in the last thing. The basket has the lamps in it. Lamps and matches!”
“Lamps?” said Rilla in dismay. “You didn’t say lamps, did you, Mother? You don’t mean there aren’t electric lights yet? I should think if you telephoned to the office they might send up someone to turn on the electricity. Couldn’t I go next door and telephone to them?”
“There is no electricity!” said Mrs. Reed crisply. “It isn’t on the street yet. I investigated that.”
“Mother!” said Rilla in a voice of horror. “But—there’s a big arc light over at the corner of the factory.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t come over here. The street isn’t wired.”
“But, Mother, how did you ever think—“
“There now, Rilla, we are not discussing lighting tonight. We haven’t time. Here’s the key to the front door, and here are a couple of candles I brought along in my bag. Go unlock the door and light these candles, and we’ll soon have it light enough to fill the lamps.”
“But lamps—Mother! I wouldn’t know how to light them. Kerosene lamps?”
“Well, I would,” said her mother serenely. “I was brought up with kerosene lamps. I know all about them. And they’re not half so bad as you think. Run along and open that door for the man. Hurry!”
Rilla picked her way daintily over the dewy grass in the darkness and fumbled with the key with unaccustomed fingers till one of the men took it from her and unlocked the door. Then with cold, trembling hands, she applied one of the matches to the door frame and lit the candles. She stood an instant in the doorway, shielding the flame with her hand, a pretty girl, slender and half defiant, looking around her with dread and distaste in her whole attitude.
Her brother caught the vision of her and sighed as he went over toward the barn with the key to its old, rusty padlock in his hand.
A dark lurking figure, hovering across the road in the shadow of the old factory, saw her, too, and stood staring furtively in wonder and deadly speculation.
Her mother saw her and set her lips, smothering the mother-sigh that came to her lips, then plunging through the tall grass to the steps of the uninviting little house.
“But, Mother, we can’t stay here!” murmured the girl as she stepped within and took in the tiny dimensions of the rooms.
“Can’t we? Why not?” said the mother firmly, crossing the small front room and flinging open a door to the left. “We said we must see Thurlow through college, didn’t we? Well, this is a way to do it. This house will cost us almost nothing and will shelter us. It needn’t last forever, you know. And of course we can fix it up a little. It won’t be half bad when it is cleaned.”
“But lamps!” The girl sighed and gave a distasteful little shudder. “Oh, Mother, wouldn’t there be some other way?”
“Perhaps, but not that I know of at present. Besides, lamps aren’t so bad. I’ll show you how to keep them bright and clean. They make a beautiful light.”
“Oh, Mother!”
“Be careful! Don’t let your brother know what we’re doing it for yet, or you know what he will do, and you know how stubborn he can be. There! Don’t I hear him coming?”
“No, it’s only two of the movers. They are bringing the living room couch,” said the girl drearily.
“Yes, that’s right, put it right in here,” said Mrs. Reed, “and the beds go in these two rooms.” She indicated the open doors to the left.
Rilla walked to the kitchen, staring out the one high little window into the unknown darkness, trying to blink back the tears so that her mother would not see them. She was so tired, and it seemed as if they had worked so hard all for nothing!
A speck of light down a short distance approached and shot along the high embankment with a roar. The railroad! Hadn’t her mother said something about a railroad? They were backed up to a railroad. How distressing! The train thundered by, reminding one of heavy feet slatted down upon metal slabs. She turned away to look out the glass of a door that opened toward the barn, and as she looked, the light from one of the vans shot out, illuminating the open doorway of the barn, and from the back of the square old barn there scuttled forth dark creatures, half a dozen of them, like cockroaches running from a sudden approach. And the light streamed forth in pursuit of them in long thin slants, like gashes in the darkness, till it ended in the blackness of the meadow lot that ran down to the foot of the embankment below the railroad. Rilla looked and rubbed her eyes and looked again, but the sudden dark objects had disappeared, and of course it must have been just a hallucination, a blurring of her eyes with tears. She brushed away the moisture and went back to the front room. She must forget her horror at everything and help.
Her mother was busy with the lamps. She had stood them on the box the man had brought in, nice clean glass lamps of antique pattern. She had a tiny funnel and was pouring kerosene into them. There were clean cotton wicks running down into the liquid and up to a brass holder that turned them up and down by a little screw. There were three shining glass chimneys standing nearby, and the flicker of the candlelight fell across Mrs. Reed’s tired, eager face. Rilla suddenly realized that her mother couldn’t be so keen about this little old dirty house either. Her mother was willing to do anything to send Thurlow through his education, and her main concern now was not whether she was going to like living in a cramped little house below the railroad, or filling lamps with nasty-smelling kerosene, but whether she was going to be able to get things comfortable and pleasant for her children before they made a fuss about it and tried to drive her away from her plan.
Then Rilla was ashamed, and flinging her hat down on the couch the men had just brought in, tied on the apron her mother had unwrapped and looked around for a job.
There were brooms and mops and cleaning rags and soap and scrub buckets. Her mother had thought of everything. But where did one begin in a dirty little house that had been shut up for so long? And at this time of the night?
Rilla picked up a mop in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other and looked around aimlessly. To scrub one should have hot water. Was there hot water to be had in a house that had no electric light? She stepped into the kitchen, but in the dimness she could see only a small iron sink, very rusty, and an odd, inadequate-looking iron pump whose handle when lifted gave forth a melancholy, raucous croak.
Her heart sank lower yet. Did one have to depend on a thing like that for water? And of course there was no stove yet, so it couldn’t be heated.
She came back to the front room where her mother had conquered two of the lamps and set them triumphantly on the ugly brown mantel. They showed up clearly every crack in the un-papered plaster of the walls and every scuttling spider in the corners and on the floor. A pale brown creature like a specter of a slim beetle slithered out of a crack in the kitchen doorway and flashed out of sight. Rilla suppressed a shudder. She supposed that must be a cockroach. She had heard of roaches but had never seen them. Then she remembered the dark forms that had shot out from under the back of the barn and wondered if she was losing her reason or perhaps falling asleep on her tired feet.
“What shall I do, Mother,” she asked helplessly at last.
“Make the beds, Rill, dear,” said her mother cheerily. “They just set them up. Never mind about deciding whose room is whose tonight. Make them up just where they are. You’ll find the bedding all in the drawers of that bureau they are bringing in now.”
“But, Mother, I think I saw a cockroach just now.”
“Probably!” said her mother as if that were a pleasant thought. “But we mustn’t mind a little thing like that now. Just be careful not to get the sheets or blankets on the floor at all, and we’ll be all right. We know our beds are clean. In the morning we’ll look after cockroaches and any other intruders. I’ve got some stuff that will clear them out, and we’ll have it all clean and cozy by another night.”
Rilla stood and stared at her wonderful mother. She had known all along that they would have all these things to face, and yet she had done this preposterous thing! What courage! Why, Mother stood there wiping off the third lamp with a cloth almost as cheerfully as if she enjoyed filling oil lamps on the top of a packing box in a strange, dirty house.
Feeling a sudden rush of more tears, Rilla turned and went into the bedroom, approaching the bureau with the key her mother had handed her. Mother had not forgotten one thing, it seemed. She came now with the bright lighted lamp and set it on the bureau.
“We won’t bother about bureau covers tonight,” she said with an almost impish grin. Poor Mother! She was trying so hard to take everything as a joke. Dear Mother!
“But, Mother, where did you get all these lamps? We’ve never used lamps before.”
“I had them packed away in the attic,” said the mother. “They were my lamps that I went to housekeeping with when I was married.” Her eyes dwelled on the one she had just put down with gravely tender reminiscence.
Rilla felt a sudden lump rising in her throat. She tried to smile, but her lips were stiff with weariness and astonishment. She tried to say something but found there were no words, and her mother only stood there an instant and then went away, leaving her with the clean smooth sheets that smelled of lavender and home, and the familiar beds she had known since childhood. So while she smoothed the sheets neatly and tried to stuff the pillows into the cases, she was struggling to think life out in wider terms than she had known it before. After all, life was something more than things. More than even a clean house to move into. Necessity had sent them here into these most trying circumstances, and Mother was looking tenderly at her old lamps and thinking of Father and the dear times they had had together. Rilla knew she was thinking about him. She knew it by the sweet look of her eyes.
Out in the barn things were happening.
The big van had drawn up in front of the door to enter as Thurlow, with difficulty, unlocked the rusty padlock. It was their idea to drive into the barn and unload close at hand to save carrying. The barn door was wide and high and would easily admit the van, but when the door swung wide and the two great headlights illumined the place, there was a sudden stir, whether in the dark corners of the barn itself or underneath the floor, they could not tell. But a cavern yawned ahead of them; boards had been torn loose irregularly in the back wall. A strange acrid smell arose and filled the nostrils of the men as they brought the van to a standstill.
Thurlow, standing within the great grim barn, nearer to the stir than the others, thought he saw a shabby foot disappearing through the opening in the boards where the light shot through and picked it out again in the grass. And the strong, pungent odor was distinct now and suggestive.
The driver swung off the van, gave a keen look at Thurlow, and came around, peering into the shadows with eyes that were used to seeing many things. Then he sniffed the air.
“Looks as if somebody had been making himself at home in our barn,” said Thurlow coolly. “I saw a foot disappearing through that hole.”
“Mmmmm!” growled the driver, sniffing off into a corner toward a dim, dark shape and whipping out a pocket flashlight.
“Somebody’s got a still somewhere around here—!”
The other movers, scenting some excitement, appeared on the scene now, and the flashlight showed up various pipes and a good-sized vat.
A quiet consultation in the shadows of the barn, a low direction from Thurlow, and the offending machinery disappeared through the opening between the boards out into the lot behind the barn, and presently good strong hammer blows drove strong nails into old, warped planks. The last board was in place when Mrs. Reed appeared in the doorway with two old-fashioned tin lanterns lit and ready for service.
“I meant to give you these the first thing,” she apologized to the head mover as she handed them in, “but I got to doing other things and forgot to fill them. I can’t seem to think of everything at once.”
“At that you’re doin’ fairly well, ma’am,” said the man.
When she got back in the house again, she said to Rilla in a low tone, “There’s an awfully strange smell over there at the barn. I do hope those movers aren’t drinking men. I thought I got the smell of a whiskey breath when I spoke to the head one. I hope they’ll be steady when they bring the piano in. I shan’t rest easy until that’s placed. I wouldn’t have anything happen to your piano for all the world—your father’s last gift to you.”
“Oh, I’m sure they seem very careful, Mother,” soothed Rilla. It seemed to the girl that little things like accidents to their worldly goods at this time did not loom very large, since their world itself seemed to be destroyed. If they had been suddenly caught off their native continent and flung on an uninhabited island in the sea, Rilla could not have been much more dismayed than she was tonight.
And it cannot be denied that her brother was not much behind her in dismay. He did not hear the low-voiced comments between the movers when they heaved the ill-smelling contrivance out behind the barn, nor see the significant glances that passed between the men, the winks with their tongues in their cheeks, but suddenly it was borne in upon Thurlow that it was not a very savory neighborhood to which they had come to camp, even for a night, and he was impressed with the conviction that he ought at any cost to have come down here first and investigated.
He was silent and distraught as the men unloaded the goods and placed them, giving a direction now and again or lending a hand. He looked at some of his mother’s precious furniture dubiously and wondered how safe it would be in this place.
One of the last things to be taken from the last van was the lot of shrubs and plants.
“Where you want these put, buddy?” asked one of the movers as he lifted a giant forsythia out of the van. “Here, you,” he said to his fellow workman, “get busy! I seen a shovel and a pick around here somewheres—dig some holes, an’ we’ll stick ’em in the ground as we go! Where you want ’em, bud?”
They had called Thurlow “bud” or “buddy” all the evening—he could not be sure whether in derision or condescension, but he had taken it all in good part and gone gravely on with the business of the hour. But he was exceedingly grateful to them for this suggestion, for it would be days perhaps before he would be able to put those big shrubs in the ground, and meantime they might die, which would be worse than not having tried to bring them.
So Thurlow took a lantern and walked ahead of the men, placing bushes at random in a general line just as they were in the ground so Mother wouldn’t realize that they had not been native here, he thought.
He gave a generous tip to each man as they prepared to leave and then turned back to the dim gloomy barn alone.
There were cobwebs looping everywhere, showing up in the weird light of the lantern, and grim, spooky shadows on the walls as he walked around making sure that everything was as safe as it could be made in a barn that had been recently used for an illicit still.
Then suddenly he dropped into one of the fine old parlor chairs that had been set down in front of everything, looking out of place in that strange surrounding like a lady in a pigsty. He dropped his weary head down into his hands and sighed.
Then, like a garment, all his bitterness and vexation of spirit came and fitted itself down upon him again. He had time now to think about Barbara and her cheerful indifference and to let the hurt of it press into his weary spirit like a great thorn. Like many thorns, every one of those pictures being an individual thorn.
He had only glanced through them, but he had caught her expression in each picture and knew it was not for him. He had also noticed that not in one pose had she been carrying the precious handbag that he had taken such pains to get for her. Of course that might have been accidental. The pictures might have been snapped unawares. That did not prove that she did not care for it. But he chose to let it seem a slight to his gift. If she had really cared, would she not have taken pains to get it and have it in evidence in at least one of her pictures?
For a full five minutes, he sat there and let the sharpness of his disappointment sink into his heart.
Then suddenly he rose and flung his arms wide.
“Oh well, that’s that!” he said aloud in a despairing tone. College was gone. Home was gone. He had to live for Mother and Rilla. That was all right, of course, and the sooner he got at it the better.
His eye fell upon the spade and pick lying where the men had left them on the barn floor, and suddenly it seemed to him that he would not go into the house and talk, nor could he lie down and sleep. His overwrought nerves could not relax, though he was weary almost to the breaking point. But he must go on. He would go out there and spade up a place around the lot for those bulbs. He would get them in before his mother knew.
But his mother came to the door and called him softly.
“Thurlow! Son! Aren’t you almost done? You ought to get to bed.”
“Presently, Mother,” he said. “I’ve got a few little things to do yet.”
“But you’re so tired! Let everything go till morning, can’t you?”
“Pretty soon, Mother!”
“I’ve got our beds all made up, and I’ve heated some soup. Won’t you come and get it while it’s hot?”
He dropped the spade and the lantern and stepped to the door. Soup sounded good.
He stepped inside the room that already had taken on an air of being inhabited. The clean lamp shone clear on the ugly mantel, the clean sheets and pillow were waiting for him, but he could not lie down yet. He had to think his way through before he stopped.
“Are you all right?” he questioned pitifully, searching her tired, courageous face.
“Right as can be,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve sent Rilla to bed, and she’s asleep already. Can’t you come in now?”
“Not just yet. I’ve got to look around and see that everything is all right,” he evaded. “Here are a few little things. You go to sleep. I’ll be in presently.”
So he slipped away to the yard and sought out his basket of bulbs, determined to get them in the ground before she knew about them.
The moon had risen high in the heaven—a full moon, the harvest moon—and the world was bright as day. It showed up the little barren house and neglected yard and made the factory across the street loom even larger than it was. Desolation and a desert future it seemed to the weary boy as he plunged his spade into the rank sod and tried with all his tired might to dig a neat foot-wide bed along the fence.
His muscles were so weary that his very shoulders sagged, big football player though he was, and his heart was so heavy that it fairly sagged his body down to earth, but he dug on, thinking through all his troubles bitterly. Bitterly. Why did God let all this happen to him? Well, he wouldn’t blame God. He believed in God, though he didn’t spend much time thinking about Him. He was just up against it; that was all. He had always had things nice and comfortable, and everything had gone so smoothly for him, college and girl and home all satisfactory, and now to have the money and the home gone and college out of the question, and then on the top of it all Barbara off having a good time with a lot of other fellows where he couldn’t hold his own, that was the last straw.
Viciously he jammed the spade into the reluctant ground, now and then changing to the pick to subdue a particularly resistant spot, until he had gone all the way across the front fence. Then down on his knees, sticking bulbs in the soil six inches apart. So much would be accomplished, whether he ever got time to do any more than that or not. Mother would have her April gold at front and back. And perhaps another night or early morning he could get in the rest.
He was sure his mother must be asleep by this time, or she would have been out to call him again. He had thrashed out all the bitter thoughts of his girl that he could think of. Of course she wasn’t his anymore anyway. It was good she didn’t care. She wouldn’t be hurt. And if he loved her, he didn’t want her to be hurt by his love, did he? Of course not. All was well. He was out of her class now, probably for life. A young man without a full education, with a family to support and no job and no possible future, could not consider entering the Sherwood family.
And so at last he dragged his weary feet back to the barn, put away his tools and the bulb basket, put out the lantern, snapped the rusty padlock shut, and went softly into the house.
Mother had left the lamp burning on the mantel, had pinned newspapers up at the windows, had opened the clean, inviting bed, and had even put a newspaper by his bed for him to stand on, a basin of clean water and a towel on a box nearby, a chair on which to put his clothes. There was a glass of water, too. Where had she gotten the water? A big bottle half full on the mantel answered that question.
He undressed wearily, turned out the unfamiliar lamp, and lay down on the heavenly bed, tireder in soul and body than he had ever been before in his life. They were moved to this strange, sordid house, and what would the morrow bring?