It was very quiet there on Meachin Street. The few trains that ran on the little branch railroad ceased at midnight. The sullen, dark, little houses gave forth no sound of human voice or even radio. Dark figures stole uncertainly down the street at intervals, quite late, and straggled into their abodes. The moon shone on, making sharp shadows of the factory walls across the bumpy road. Dim far bullfrogs from the pond across the dump gave forth dispassionate thudding noises occasionally. The city seemed a far vision against the sky, almost like a painted thing in silver and blue. And if there were stealthy footsteps passing like phantoms down behind the barn, they did not rouse the sleepers in the dusty cottage where they slept, worn-out with their labors of the day.
But in the morning, when Thurlow went to look behind the barn to see what the contrivance was like he had helped to fling out from the opening in the barn wall, there was nothing there save a trampled place in the dewy grass and a trace of footsteps back to the tumbledown fence that vanished in the cinder path below the embankment.
Thurlow paused and studied the trampled place where the heavy object had lain. His eye traveled down the trail to the fence in speculation, and he knit his brows, studying presently the whole miserable little backyard where he had come to live, for a time at least. Then his eyes dwelled on the house that sheltered his mother and sister. He had stolen out to investigate this still business and do away with it somehow before they should discover it. He hoped they might never know about it. He hoped they were still asleep.
Comparing their house with the others on the street, it seemed slightly better, more in repair, not quite so forlorn and decrepit as the one next door, for instance, with its patched walls, corrugated iron roof, and broken windowpanes.
The Reed house was whole at least. His father had probably kept it in repair. The gable of the roof faced the street with one window, meaning there must be a room upstairs, perhaps two, one front, one back. There was a lean-to next to the unpleasant neighbor’s house that explained the two downstairs bedrooms, the main part of the house consisting of two rooms, parlor and kitchen.
He studied the possibilities. If they had to stay here a few weeks, perhaps he could manage to build another wing on the other side for kitchen and dining room and use the old kitchen for another bedroom so that they could all be downstairs together at night. He was quite sure his nervous mother, when she got to know her neighborhood well, would not enjoy being downstairs with her son in the second story. The presence of that still in the empty barn might or might not denote lawlessness in the neighborhood, but Thurlow decided that he would feel much easier in his mind, for the present at least, if his mother and sister were protected.
Behind the house and midway between the barn and dwelling there was a sort of shed, perhaps a woodshed, standing at an odd angle, made of boards upright, with cleats over their joinings and a board roof. It seemed so casual and irregular and ill-fitted with the rest of the layout of the place that Thurlow was almost annoyed by it. It was long and narrow and wouldn’t make a bad offset on the side of the house, balancing the extension on the other side. There was a great pile of stones down at the back of the lot. Perhaps when they got things somewhat straightened inside, he could build a crude foundation and set that woodshed on top of it for a dining room and kitchen. And the curious formation that must have been meant for a chicken coop in a former scheme of things, loitering at the back of the lot as if it had just happened there, perhaps that could be moved up and used as a sort of porch or annex or something. Perhaps even a woodshed. It occurred to him to wonder how this house was heated. Would they have to have woodstoves? Did his mother realize what she was up against in coming here?
Well, it wasn’t winter yet, and meanwhile he could quietly be looking around for the right place to move to. Let his mother try her experiment. In his odd hours after work—when he got a job—he would be fixing up this place so they could rent or sell it, and then Mother would be willing to move to a plain, decent place somewhere.
So he comforted himself and then went in softly to see if his family had wakened.
Mrs. Reed was up and dressed and down on her knees before the meager little fireplace in the front room starting a blaze. She had a newspaper twisted up in small bundles and a few sticks.
“I brought them with me from our cellar,” she said in answer to the question in his eyes. “I tried to think of all the things we might need these first few hours, but I see I’ve forgotten some kind of a framework to set the coffeepot on. I wonder if you could get me a couple of stones out in the yard.”
Thurlow got the stones and placed them, meanwhile marveling once more at his mother’s adaptability. And when he turned around, he saw his mother holding out a long-handled fork, toasting a slice of bread.
“Where’s Rilla?” he asked.
“I’m letting her sleep,” said her mother tenderly. “She was very much broken up last night, worn out.”
“She ought to be letting you sleep,” he said harshly.
“Thurlow, don’t be hard on your sister,” said his mother pitifully. “She feels as if her world is broken.”
“It is,” said the brother with set lips. “So is mine. So is ours. But staying in bed isn’t going to mend it. Come on out, Rill, and play the game!” he cried out, lifting his voice.
“I’m coming!” said Rilla in a small dreary voice. “I’m almost ready.”
Rilla came out of the bedroom in a moment more. She had been powdering her nose vigorously, but there were traces of recent tears behind the powder. Thurlow gave her a quick, keen look.
“Call the butler, won’t you, little sister, and tell him to set the table. We are breakfasting in the living room this morning.” He grinned at her and provoked a tiny flutter of a smile.
Thurlow set out the little folding table, and Rilla graced it with a white cloth. Her mother had remembered that, too! There were even three cups and plates and spoons and knives. There was a basket with bread and butter, and strangely enough they found themselves hungry. Then came Mother with a bottle of orange juice she had prepared the day before. They looked at her lovingly for all her care and thoughtfulness to make good cheer in the midst of the dirt and desolation. And after all it proved quite a festive occasion.
When the meal was concluded, Thurlow got up and gathered an armful of dishes, taking them to the kitchen. After he had set them down on the questionable-looking shelf by the sink, he stooped over scowling and surveyed the funny old, rusty pump.
“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, straightening up and looking at his mother as she came bringing more dishes. “Do you mean to tell me that all the water we have has to be coaxed out of that lousy pump? Why, its throat is as dry as a desert!”
“Oh, no,” said his mother coolly, “I brought along ten Mason jars full of drinking water, besides two big old jugs full for washing. I thought we’d have enough till we got the pump primed.”
“Primed! What’s ‘primed’? You don’t mean painted up? You couldn’t make me believe that that little old runt of a rusty pump would give forth water even if you painted it all the colors in the rainbow!”
The mother set her armful of dishes down and laughed.
“Is it possible that you don’t know what priming a pump means? Here, pour some of the water from that jug slowly in at the top, Rill. And, Thurl, you pump. Steady now! You’ve got to take a pump seriously, and you mustn’t pour the water in too fast. There, now, it’s beginning to catch!”
The pump meanwhile began to wheeze and gasp and catch as if it were choking, and the young people grew excited over it, giggling and watching and making jokes about it. It coughed and gurgled and at last began to wheeze in a kind of rhythm.
“It’s coming, Mother?” demanded Thurlow desperately, ceasing his efforts for the moment to the entire discouragement of the pump, which suddenly gurgled despairingly like a lost hope and grew unresponsive again.
“Oh, now you’ve let it run down. You must keep on pumping! A pump is a very temperamental creature when it’s been dry for a long time. More water, Rilla. Keep on steadily, Thurlow.” The mother was as excited as a boy watching a dog fight.
Thurlow returned to the fray till the pump was back at its coy gurgling again, and at last a narrow stream of rusty water trickled out from its rusty mouth.
“Do you mean to tell me, Mother, that we’ve got to take this lousy pump in our arms and fondle it every time we want a drop of water to scrub with? I’ll be switched if I will. I’m going out and get a plumber. I’m going out and get a permit. I’m going out and look around and see how far the water main is from here. Even if we only stay here through the day, I’m going to have something to show this little, old, lousy pump that it can’t get the better of me. That it can’t expect the whole family to wait on it hand and foot every time we need a drop of water.”
Yet Thurlow, as he talked on, wildly showed that he had at least learned one lesson about pumps, for as he talked he kept on pumping, and now a good stream of muddy, rust-red water was gushing out.
“Isn’t there some way we can put a motor on this beast and keep it working? There isn’t any meter on it anyway, is there? We could perhaps train it to be a perpetual fountain and water the yard and the garden when we get one, couldn’t we?”
They were all laughing now till the tears were running down their faces. Tired and sad, with nerves taut as fiddle strings, the laughter relaxed them. They were making a game out of their sadness, and each was glad for the sake of the others.
Rilla brought a couple of tubs and some pails and pans from the box of kitchen things and filled them, and at last Thurlow cautiously ceased his ministrations with the pump handle.
“There! Now you be a good child and act a little human, and we’ll give you almost anything you want!” he said, bending over the pump and patting it on its unresponsive cold shoulder. “Here! Perhaps it’s coddling you want.” And he seized his mother’s apron and gravely wrapped it around the narrow iron shoulders, tying the apron strings around and fastening them in a large awkward bow.
Then he seized a dish towel that his mother had produced from somewhere and wrapped it around for a bonnet, leaving only the rusty spout of the pump sticking sulkily out.
“Now, sister,” said Thurlow, leaning over as if to look it in the face beneath the bonnet, “if you’ll just be good and not get the croup again, we’ll treat you like a brother, and you’ll find this is really a better home than you’d think. You really will!”
He gave it a final pat on the top of the hump-backed handle, and Rilla sat down and bent double with hysterical mirth.
Even the mother was laughing and crying at once. It did them all good, and they smiled bravely as they wiped away the tears and prepared to go to work. The house was just as dirty and discouraged looking in the garish morning light as it had been the night before in candlelight, but somehow a cloud had been lifted and their hearts were not quite so heavy.
“Now,” said Thurlow, “what’s first, Mom? You’re the boss today.”
“Hot water first,” said Mrs. Reed. “Plenty of it. If you’ll lift that large preserve kettle of water over the fire, that will do to begin on. I wonder if that mover brought the sticks of wood from our cellar that I told him about.”
“I’ll rustle some wood,” said the young man. “I saw a dead tree in the lot, and I know where the ax is, too. Perhaps I could even locate the sticks of wood.”
Thurlow went out and the two women set to work.
“Spread up the beds, Rilla, and lay our hats and coats and clean things on the beds. We know they are clean. Get everything you can out of this living room, and we’ll begin cleaning here. Did you see the stepladder? I thought I told the man to bring it over here.”
“It’s in the kitchen, Mother.”
Rilla caught up her brother’s coat that had slipped from the chair to the floor, gave it a careful shake to free it from its contaminating touch on the floor, and out of the pocket came a shower of small photographs, slithering across the floor in shining order. Barbara Sherwood playing deck tennis. Barbara Sherwood in bathing suit about to dive in the ship’s pool. Barbara Sherwood in lively converse with one young man after another, smiling up into their faces and apparently having the grandest time.
It was just as if some little demon had arranged them out in order so that one could not but see each one, even if one had no intention of looking. And it certainly never occurred to Rilla that there was anything in a handful of snapshots that was prohibitory. Thurlow would, of course, show them to her when he got time. She had seen the nice, fat letter with the foreign stamp in his hand when he gave her her own and had rejoiced in it for him. Her sisterly heart had ached for him when none had come all those long days after Barbara had sailed. But there was something sinister in this row of shining faces, so contented, so complacent. Rilla sensed it even in the quick, hurried glance she permitted herself.
She gave a little hurt gasp and then, stooping, gathered up the pictures to restore them to the pocket. But her mother had heard the exclamation, caught the look of compassion on her face.
“What is it?” she asked, sensing some disaster. She put out her hand and took the pictures, studying them an instant, Rilla with half-averted eyes getting another glimpse over her shoulder. This mother and son had no secrets, yet there were fine lines that the sister especially felt she had no right to cross. This was something that affected the deepest interests of her son, and the mother, after an instant’s study of the top picture, deliberately looked carefully at each one. Then with a quick motion, she swept them all together again and handed them to Rilla.
“Put them back in his pocket,” she said without comment.
Rilla slid them into the pocket, feeling the rattle of the single sheet they had come in as she put them away. Her heart was sorrowful for her brother. Was that all that Barbara had written?
But she hung the coat up circumspectly over the back of a nice, freshly dusted chair and went about her work.
An instant later Thurlow came in, his arms full of wood.
The fire was soon snapping and blazing briskly, and the water began to send up a prosperous-looking steam.
“Now,” said Mrs. Reed, “Thurlow, put enough hot water into that smallest tub of pump water to make it good and hot, and then fill up the kettle and put it to heat again. Here are three scrubbing brushes. I’ll take this wall and the front. Rilla, you take the back wall and the other side. Thurlow, your part is the ceiling and about a yard down, because you have the stepladder. You begin first and do a little way so we can go on from there and won’t be undoing each others’ work. Here are soap and cloths. Don’t be afraid to use plenty of water. Rinse out your cloths and scrubbing brushes often, and when you’ve done about a square yard, rinse it off and dry it with this big cloth. We’ll fill our scrub buckets from the tub. Rilla, we’ll wash windows and paint as we go. Do a yard or two at a time all the day down.”
They were off at the game of cleaning house and found it wasn’t half as bad as they had anticipated. Thurlow made comical remarks continually and kept them laughing, though now and then when he was silent and grave, sloshing on water and scrubbing vigorously, his sister would glance furtively toward him and wonder how he could be so cheerful when she was sure all the time he had a heavy heart. That look of bitterness that sat in his eyes when he was silent and thought they were not watching him must mean that he was not happy. Her heart swelled with pride at the brave front he was putting up, and she resolved not to be behind him in courage.
So presently, when the work began to assume serious form, and arms and shoulders began to tire with the unaccustomed labor, Rilla piped up a tune. It was only an old hymn, “Work for the Night Is Coming,” and sung half in derision to provoke another laugh, but it led to other hymns, favorite ones of their mother, and they all joined in, Mother taking the alto, and Thurlow rolling his rich baritone in, blending with Rilla’s sweet high notes. So presently, Meachin Street heard the Gospel in song. Ears that had been accustomed only to blasphemy and cursing, or at best to the latest popular whine from the one radio the street boasted, now caught the strains of “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” “For God so Loved the World,” “Abide with Me,” “Face to Face with Christ My Savior,” “Glad Day,” and many others. The morning passed on and the room grew cleaner and cleaner, though it seemed to stretch into unsuspected proportions as unaccustomed arms and backs and knees grew weary.
“Good night, Mom!” said Thurlow, climbing down from the ladder to change the water in his bucket. “I never suspected this room was so large. I would have said I could do the whole thing in an hour. But then, I never knew it was so bloomin’ dirty. Say, Mom, you’re a great little mother to have the daring to move down here the way you did, knowing there would be all this to do! I expect Mrs. Beddow, our old neighbor, is even now saying you are no lady for doing it.”
Mrs. Reed laughed lightly.
“Mrs. Beddow is not so hot herself, as a housekeeper!” she said nonchalantly and sent them both into peals of laughter over her unexpected slang.
“Now, Mother,” protested Rilla, “I never expected you to get your English corrupted the first day on Meachin Street. I’m afraid I shall have to reform my speech to set you a good example.”
“Okay with me!” said Mother, rubbing a pane of glass till it shone in surprise over its bath after all the years of neglect.
The morning went rapidly, and when a factory whistle from the neighborhood blew a heart-searching blast that startled them all, they stopped and looked at one another.
“Now, think of that!” said Thurlow comically. “We get that service free! We shan’t have the expense of keeping the clocks wound anymore. We can just take our time from the whistles from now on the rest of the day. There might be even two a day, one at six at night and likely one at six in the morning. Midnight, too. We ought to be able to keep up with the times with four whistles a day.”
They stopped work for a bowl of the delicious soup Mrs. Reed had found time to make amid the throes of moving at the old house, and while they ate, they admired their work and compared notes on the number of spiders each had killed.
Even inexperienced workmen can accomplish a lot when they have an experienced manager, and so, not long after they returned to their work, the walls and ceiling were finished, and the place began to take on a subdued, cleansed look. It was still ugly, and the cracks in the plaster were just as plain to be seen as before, but somehow they were not so offensive when one knew they were clean. Even some of the penciled decoration and family accounts, which were evidently kept on the walls by the last occupant, were somewhat dimmer.
“We’ll have to try our hands at paperhanging as soon as we really get cleaned,” said Mrs. Reed as she stood back to survey the wall. “I used to be pretty good at papering when I was a girl!”
“Mother! You couldn’t put up paper!” said Rilla, aghast.
“Why not?” asked Mother. “I can put it on, and I can teach you how to put it on, too.”
Thurlow bowed low before her with his hand on his heart.
“Mother-Mine, you are discovering to us many heretofore unsuspected talents that you frighten us. We never realized that we had a paperhanging mother in our midst.”
They were very tired, but they laughed again, and it rested them, and then the mother and sister were sobered with the memory of those snapshots they had seen. Oh, perhaps Thurlow wasn’t so hurt after all as they had feared. Maybe there had been a letter, too, and he had it hidden in an inner pocket over his heart and was just letting his satisfaction run out in this dear, funny way.
“Well, now,” said the mother, “if you aren’t too tired, perhaps you’ll put up the shades and the rods for the curtains.”
“Curtains? Do we get curtains already?” demanded the young man. “I supposed they were articles that didn’t come till sometime in the dim and misty future after everything else was done.”
“We can’t live behind newspapers long,” said his mother. “You’re sure you are not too tired?”
“Tired? Why should I be tired, woman? You insult my former football career! Me tired? I’m fresh as a lily!”
So the work went rapidly on.
By half past four the room was shining clean, smelling of soap and water. The shades were up, and the white muslin curtains from a guest room at home hung at the windows, and for a wonder just fit! Then Thurlow and Rilla went scurrying back and forth to the barn, bringing a few more chairs, a small table or two, and the hall mirror. Thurlow hung that on the wall at once, and the room began to take on a friendly, homelike atmosphere.
But when he turned around from hanging the mirror to see what his mother thought of it, she wasn’t there, and they found her in the kitchen filling a strange contrivance with kerosene.
“What on earth is that?” demanded Rilla with new qualms.
“An oil stove,” said her mother serenely. “I’m glad I kept it. I almost gave it away once, and then I decided to put it away in the attic, and now it has come in useful. I think it will work all right. I oiled it when I put it away, and it was well wrapped up. There wasn’t a spot of rust on it anywhere.”
“Do you mean to tell me there isn’t any gas connection in this dump?” asked the son, scanning the wall for an outlet.
“No gas on this street!” said his mother, still serene.
“And yet you thought you could come down here and live! Now, Mother-Mine, just turn around here and look at me! I’m not going to stand for this, do you understand? There isn’t a bit of need of your economizing like this. There are at least three hundred dollars we can use for necessities, and Rilla and I are both going to have jobs, and what is the point anyway? Now, Mother, tell me. Surely you’ve got sense enough to see that this isn’t true economy!”
Mrs. Reed calmly washed the oil off her hands, adjusted and lighted a broad cotton wick, set a teakettle to boil over its flame, and then turned around.
“Well, if you must know, my son,” she said, turning her pleasant, tired eyes toward Thurlow, “this perhaps is as good a time as any to tell you. The reason is that you are going back to college! Of course you’ll protest. I expect that. But Rilla and I have talked it over, and we’re not going to stand for your stopping now. You’ve got to finish your course and get your diploma. Rilla is going to get a job to help out, and we’ll have plenty to live on and see you through if we are careful. I’m only being careful, son!”
Thurlow stood dumbfounded.
“Well, I’ll be lambasted!” Thurlow exclaimed, dropping down on the kitchen chair he had just brought over from the barn. “Is that what you’ve got up your sleeve? I thought there was something in the wind, the way you two have been carrying on the last week. Well, you don’t expect me to settle down and take that on the chin, do you? Me? A great big husky giant? Well, if you do, you’ve got another guess coming, and you might as well understand now as later that that is final! I’m not letting any two women support me and send me through college, now or any other time, so that’s that!”
Thurlow brought the front legs of the wooden chair down with a thump and, rising, stalked out of the kitchen door and down to the barn. There were tears stinging in his eyes and a lump in his throat and anger and a frenzy of tenderness welling within him so that his heart was near to bursting. So he went to the barn and, tired as he was, began pulling things around and doing a lot of utterly unnecessary work. And in the midst of it, he took off his coat, which he had put on with the half intention of going down to the store to find a special kind of screw he felt he ought to have to fasten those boards on the back of the barn. For to tell the truth, in spite of the stout nailing of the night before, he had found that three boards were loose again, and there were wet footprints on the barn floor from the muddy place behind the barn where the drainings from the still had dripped. He didn’t mean his mother to know, nor Rilla either, but he was certain somebody had been in the barn in the night after he went to bed, perhaps ransacking their things, though he hadn’t yet discovered that anything was missing. So now, as he was pulling around the chairs and the old dining table to make a barricade that would not easily be pulled apart without making some noise at least, he swung off his coat to protect it, and as he flung it down, Barbara Sherwood again had projected herself into this strenuous day and cast a light, honeyed smile at him that filled him with pain.
He stood staring at the pictures a moment and then, stooping, swept them up in his hand and sat down on the chair deliberately to look them over once and for all. Scowling as he would never have scowled at Barbara Sherwood in the flesh, he faced her pictured face and hardened his heart; studied her expression of utter delight in first one pose and then another and gave particular attention to the men who were her companions.
“What she sees in that egg!” he apostrophized. Then he turned to another.
“That poor fish hasn’t anything but a smile and a set of good teeth!” he declared disgustedly. “And that one looks like a half-witted ape! If that’s the kind of men she likes, let her have ’em!” he murmured as he rose and took the whole bunch of pictures, feeling in his pocket for the written sheet in which they had been wrapped. He read the message over again contemptuously, folded it around the pictures, searched until he located his dresser, and stashed the packet in the secret drawer. Then he piled up the chairs in front of it again, locked the barn, and stamped back to the house.
Over in the kitchen where the two women were left with the strangely docile oil stove, which beamed with a bright flame much to the young girl’s amazement, there was silence for a space after the son had gone out. At last the mother lifted her head from bending down to be sure the flame was just high enough and not too high, and spoke.
“I expect we’re going to have a pretty hard time making him see it,” she said with a weary sigh.
“Yes,” said the girl thoughtfully, “I guess we are.” Then she added after a pause, “But I don’t know but I like him better because he feels that way, after all. He’s pretty sweet, Mother!”
“He is, isn’t he?” said his mother. “I do hope he is not going to feel it much about that girl.”
“He will,” said his sister with conviction. “He’s keen. You can’t fool him. She wouldn’t need to write a thing, just send him those pictures, to show him how little she cares he isn’t there!”
“Well,” sighed the mother, “if she’s that way, perhaps it’s just as well to have him find it out now as later.”
“It makes me furious!” said Rilla. “She ought to have better sense! Doesn’t she know what Thurl is? Can’t she see how he’s way above all those poor simps on the ship? And now, just because she’s sent those pictures, it’ll be just like Thurl to get his nose up in the air and not write to her at all.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well that he should not,” said Mrs. Reed sadly. “Perhaps that’s one reason all this had to happen, to test out things and people. You know even Thurlow may have some lessons to learn. I guess the Lord knows what He’s doing and why.”
Rilla was silent. Discontented. She wouldn’t say in so many words that she doubted this, but she thought it. Her eyes were smoldering. Her mother took note of her expression.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said soothingly. “Perhaps there isn’t anything to it at all.”
“Yes, there is! I’m sure there is. Betty’s letter showed she realized it. She wanted me to tell Thurl to write to Barby, to write often.”
“Well, it will all come out someday,” the mother said with a sigh, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t say anything about Betty’s letter. Not yet anyway.”
“Of course not,” said Rilla. “I didn’t mean to anyway. He’d never write if I did that. And I don’t know as I want him to write if she’s going high-hat! Thurl is just as good as she is any day, and someday she’ll find out.”
“Perhaps she will. But—there he comes! Let’s look cheerful.”
That night the little house that had been so long vacant shone cheerful and bright in the sordid neighborhood of Meachin Street, and furtive figures stole from the other cabins and peered at it curiously, even strolling by toward the dump to study it and wonder what it might portend for each and every one. Were these some squatters who ought to be ousted by fair means or foul? Were they some swells who would be snooty and have to be taught sharp lessons? With their lighted windows and curtains? Curtains! Imagine it, on the second night in!
Yet they looked wistfully at the brightness as if it were a distant star come near enough to be watched, and something stirred in breasts long callous to holy things, some memories of homes that one or another had had in the dim, sad past.
But if any furtive visitors tried the back wall of the barn, they failed to find entrance, for Thurlow had slipped out to the store before dark and got his screws and applied them to the boards ingeniously from inside, so that efforts from outside were ineffectual.