Books: Missy

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

In a kind of dream she was wafted to the head of the table; for,
since the function was at her house, Missy had been voted the
presiding place of honour. It is a very great responsibility to sit
in the presiding place of honour. From that conspicuous position one
leads the whole table's activities: conversing to the right,
laughing to the left, sharply on the lookout for any conversational
gap, now and then drawing muted tete-a-tetes into a harmonic unison.
She is, as it were, the leader of an orchestra of which the
individual diners are the subsidiary instruments. Upon her watchful
resourcefulness hangs the success of a dinner-party. But Missy,
though a trifle fluttered, had felt no anxiety; she knew so well
just how Lady Chetwoode had managed these things.

The hostess must also, of course, direct the nutrimental as well as
the conversational process of the feast. She is served first, and
takes exactly the proper amount of whatever viand in exactly the
proper way and manipulates it with exactly the proper fork or knife
or spoon. But Missy had felt no anticipatory qualms.

She was possessed of a strange, almost a lightheaded feeling.
Perhaps the excitement of the day, the rush at the last, had
something to do with it. Perhaps the spectacle of the long, adorned
table, the scent of flowers, the sound of music, the dark eyes of
Mr. Edward Brown who was seated at her right hand.

(Dear old faithful Ben!--to think of how his devotion to tippling
Tim had brought Edward Brown into her life!)

She felt a stranger to herself. Something in her soared
intoxicatingly. The sound of her own gay chatter came to her from
afar--as from a stranger. Mr. Brown kept on looking at her.

The butler appeared, bringing the oyster cocktails (a genteel
delicacy possible in an inland midsummer thanks to the canning
industry), and proceeded to serve them with empressement.

The butler was really the climactic triumph of the event. And he was
Missy's own inspiration. She had been racking her brains for some
way to eliminate the undistinguished Marguerite, to conjure through
the very strength of her desire some approach to a proper servitor.
If only they had ONE of those estimable beings in Cherry vale! A
butler, preferably elderly, and "steeped in respectability" up to
his port-wine nose; one who would hover around the table, adjusting
this dish affectionately and straightening that, and who, whenever
he left the room, left it with a velvet step and an almost inaudible
sigh of satisfaction . . .

And then, quite suddenly, she had hit upon the idea of "Snowball"
Saunders. Snowball had come to the house to borrow the Merriams'
ice-cream freezer. There was to be an informal "repast" at the
Shriners' hall, and Snowball engineered all the Shriners' gustatory
festivities from "repasts" to "banquets." Sometimes, at the
banquets, he even wore a dress suit. It was of uncertain lineage and
too-certain present estate, yet it was a dress suit. It was the
recollection of the dress suit that had given Missy her inspiration.
To be sure, in England, butlers were seldom "coloured," but in
Cherry vale one had to make some concessions.

The butler was wearing his dress suit as he came bearing the oyster
cocktails.

"Hello, Snowball!" greeted Raymond Bonner, genially. "Didn't know
you were invited to-night."

Snowball!? what a gosherie! With deliberate hauteur Missy spoke:

"Oh, Saunders, don't forget to fill the glasses with ice-water."

Raymond cast her an astonished look, but, perhaps because he was
more impressed by the formality of the function than he would have
admitted, refrained from any bantering comment.

The hostess, then, with a certain righteous complacence, lowered her
eyes to her cocktail glass.

Oh, heavens!

It was the first time, so carried away had she been with this new,
intoxicating feeling, that she had really noticed what she was
eating--how she was eating it.

She was eating her oysters with her after-dinner coffee spoon!

The tiny-pronged oyster fork was lying there on the cloth,
untouched!

Oh, good heavens!

An icy chill of mortification crept down her spine, spread out
through her whole being. She had made a mistake--SHE, the hostess!

A whirlwind of mortal shame stormed round and round within her. If
only she could faint dead away in her chair! If only she could weep,
and summon mother! Or die! Or even if she could sink down under the
table and hide away from sight. But she didn't know how to faint;
and hostesses do not weep for their mothers; and, in real life,
people never die at the crucial moments; nor do they crawl under
tables. All she could do was to force herself. at last, to raise her
stricken eyelids and furtively regard her guests.

Oh, dear heaven!

They were all--ALL of them--eating their oyster cocktails with their
after-dinner coffee spoons!

Missy didn't know why, at that sight, she had to fight off a spasm
of laughter. She felt she must scream out in laughter, or die.

All at once she realized that Mr. Brown was speaking to her.

"What's the matter?" he was saying. "Want to sneeze?"

That struck her so funny that she laughed; and then she felt better.

"I was just terribly upset," she found herself explaining almost
naturally, "because I suddenly found myself eating the oyster
cocktail with the coffee spoon."

"Oh, isn't this the right implement?" queried Mr. Brown,
contemplating his spoon. "Well, if you ask ME, I'm glad you started
off with it--this soupy stuff'd be the mischief to get away with
with a fork."

Archibald Chesney wouldn't have talked that way. But, nevertheless,
Missy let her eyelids lift up at him in a smile.

"I'm glad you didn't know it was a mistake," she murmured. "I was
TERRIBLY mortified."

"Girls are funny," Mr. Brown replied to that. "Always worrying over
nothing." He returned her smile. "But YOU needn't ever worry."

What did he mean by that? But something in his dark eyes, gazing at
her full, kept Missy from asking the question, made her swiftly
lower her lashes.

"I bet YOU could start eating with a toothpick and get away with
it," he went on.

Did he mean her social savoir-faire--or did he mean--

Just then the butler appeared at her left hand to remove the
cocktail course. She felt emboldened to remark, with an air of ease:

"Oh, Saunders, don't forget to lay the spoons when you serve the
demi-tasses."

Mr. Brown laughed.

"Oh, say!" he chortled, "you ARE funny when you hand out that
highfalutin stuff!"

No; he surely hadn't meant admiration for her savoir-faire; yet, for
some reason, Missy didn't feel disappointed. She blushed, and found
it entrancingly difficult to lift her eyelids.

The function, rather stiffly and quite impressively, continued its
way without further contretemps. It was, according to the most
aristocratic standards, highly successful. To be sure, after the
guests had filed solemnly from the table and began to dance on the
porches, something of the empressement died away; but Missy was
finding Mr. Brown too good a dancer to remember to be critical. She
forgot altogether, now, to compare him with the admired Archibald.

Missy danced with Mr. Brown so much that Raymond Bonner grew openly
sulky. Missy liked Raymond, and she was sure she would never want to
do anything unkind--yet why, at the obvious ill temper of Raymond
Bonner, did she feel a strange little delicious thrill?

Oh, she was having a glorious time!

Once she ran across father, lurking unobtrusively in a shadowed
corner.

"Well," he remarked, "I see that Missy's come back for a breathing-
spell."

Just what did father mean by that?

But she was having too good a time to wonder long. Too good a time
to remember whether or not it was in the baronial spirit. She was
entirely uncritical when, the time for good nights finally at hand,
Mr. Brown said to her:

"Well, a fine time was had by all! I guess I "don't have to tell YOU
that--what?"

Archibald Chesney would never have put it that way. Yet Missy, with
Mr. Brown's eyes upon her in an openly admiring gaze, wouldn't have
had him changed one bit.

But, when at last sleep came to her in her little white bed, on the
silvery tide of the moon, it carried a dream to slip up under the
tight-closed eyes. . .

The ball is at its height. The door of the conservatory opens and a
fair young creature steals in. She is fairer than the flowers
themselves as, with a pretty consciousness of her own grace, she
advances into the bower. Her throat is fair and rounded under the
diamonds that are no brighter than her own great grey eyes; her nut-
brown locks lie in heavy masses on her well-shaped head, while
across her forehead a few rebellious tresses wantonly wander.

She suddenly sees in the shadows that other figure which has started
perceptibly at her entrance; a tall and eminently gloomy figure,
with hair of a rare blackness, and eyes dark and insouciant but
admiring withal.

With a silken frou-frou she glides toward him, happy and radiant,
for she is in her airiest mood tonight.

"Is not my dress charming, Mr. Brown?" she cries with charming
naivete. "Does it not become me?"

"It is as lovely as its wearer," replied the other, with a
suppressed sigh.

"Pouf! What a simile! Who dares compare me with a paltry gown?"

Then, laughing at his discomfiture, the coquette, with slow
nonchalance, gathers up her long train.

"But I'll forgive you--this once," she concedes, "for there is
positively no one to take poor little me back to the ballroom."

And Lady Melissa slips her hand beneath Mr. Brown's arm, and glances
up at him with laughing, friendly eyes. . .

CHAPTER VI.

INFLUENCING ARTHUR

No one in Cherryvale ever got a word from Melissa about the true
inwardness of the spiritual renaissance she experienced the winter
that the Reverend MacGill came to the Methodist church; naturally
not her father nor mother nor Aunt Nettie, because grown-ups, though
nice and well-meaning, with their inability to "understand," and
their tendency to laugh make one feel shy and reticent about the
really deep and vital things. And not even Tess O'Neill, Missy's
chum that year, a lively, ingenious, and wonderful girl, was in this
case clever enough to obtain complete confidence.

Once before Missy had felt the flame divine--a deep, vague kind of
glow all subtly mixed up with "One Sweetly Solemn Thought" and such
slow, stirring, minor harmonies, and with sunlight stealing through
the stained-glass window above the pulpit in colourful beauty that
pierced to her very soul. But that was a long time ago, when she was
a little thing--only ten. Now she was nearly sixteen. Things were
different. One now was conscious of the reality of inward
inexperiences: these must influence life--one's own and, haply, the
lives of others. What Missy did not emphasize in her mind was the
mystery of how piety evolved from white fox furs and white fox furs
finally evolved from piety. But she did perceive that it would be
hopeless to try to explain her motives about Arthur as mixed up with
the acquisition of the white fox furs. . . No; not even Tess O'Neill
could have grasped the true inwardness of it all.

It all began, as nearly as one could fix on a concrete beginning,
with Genevieve Hicks's receiving a set of white fox furs for
Christmas. The furs were soft and silky and luxurious, and Genevieve
might well have been excused for wearing them rather triumphantly.
Missy wasn't at all envious by nature and she tried to be fair-
minded in this case, but she couldn't help begrudging Genevieve her
regal air.

Genevieve had paraded her becoming new finery past the Merriam
residence on several Sunday afternoons, but this wasn't the entire
crux of Missy's discontent. Genevieve and the white fox furs were
escorted by Arthur Summers.

Now, Arthur had more than once asked Missy herself to "go walking"
on Sunday afternoons. But Mrs. Merriam had said Missy was too young
for such things. And when Missy, in rebuttal, once pointed out the
promenading Genevieve, Mrs. Merriam had only replied that
Genevieve's mother ought to know better--that Genevieve was a
frivolous-minded girl, anyway.

Missy, peering through the parlour lace curtains, made no answer;
but she thought: "Bother! Everybody can go walking but me!"

Then she thought:

"She's laughing awful loud. She is frivolous-minded."

Then:

"He looks as if he's having a good time, too; he's laughing back
straight at her. I wonder if he thinks she's very pretty."

And then:

"I wish I had some white fox furs."

That evening at the supper-table Missy voiced her desire. There were
just the four of them at the table--father, mother, Aunt Nettie and
herself. Missy sat silent, listening to the talk of the grownups;
but their voices floated to her as detached, far-off sounds, because
she was engrossed in looking at a mental picture; a red-haired,
laughing, admiring-eyed boy walking along beside a girl in white fox
furs--and the girl was not Genevieve Hicks. The delights of the
vision must have reflected in her face because finally her father
said:

"Well, Missy, what's all the smiling about?"

Missy blushed as if she'd been caught in mischief; but she answered,
wistfully rather than hopefully:

"I was just thinking how nice it would be if I had some white fox
furs."

"For heaven's sake!" commented mother. "When you've already got a
new set not two months old!"

Missy didn't reply to that; she didn't want to seem unappreciative.
It was true she had a new set, warm and serviceable, but--well, a
short-haired, dark-brown collarette hasn't the allure of a fluffy,
snow-white boa.

Mother was going on: "That ought to do you two winters at least--if
not three."

"I don't know what the present generation is coming to," put in Aunt
Nettie with what seemed to Missy entire irrelevance. Aunt Nettie was
a spinster, even older than Missy's mother, and her lack of
understanding and her tendency to criticize and to laugh was
especially dreaded by her niece.

"Nowadays girls still in knee-skirts expect to dress and act like
society belles!"

"I wasn't expecting the white fox furs," said Missy defensively. "I
was just thinking how nice it would be to have them." She was silent
a moment, then added: "I think if I had some white fox furs I'd be
the happiest person in the world."

"That doesn't strike me as such a large order for complete
happiness," observed father, smiling at her.

Missy smiled back at him. In another these words might have savoured
of irony, but Missy feared irony from her father less than from any
other old person.

Father was a big, silent man but he was always kind and particularly
lovable; and he "understood" better than most "old people."

"What is the special merit of these white fox furs?" he went on, and
something in the indulgent quality of his tone, something in the
expression of his eyes, made hope stir timidly to birth in her bosom
and rise to shine from her eyes.

But before she could answer, mother spoke. "I can tell you that.
That flighty Hicks girl went by here this afternoon wearing some.
That Summers boy who clerks in Pieker's grocery was with her. He
once wanted Missy to go walking with him and I had to put my foot
down. She doesn't seem to realize she's too young for such things.
Her brown furs will do her for this season--and next season too!"

Mother put on a stern, determined kind of look, almost hard. Into
the life of every woman who is a mother there comes a time when she
learns, suddenly, that her little girl is trying not to be a little
girl any longer but to become a woman. It is a hard moment for
mothers, and no wonder that they seem unwarrantedly adamantine. Mrs.
Merriam instinctively knew that wanting furs and wanting boys
spelled the same evil. But Missy, who was fifteen instead of thirty-
seven and whose emotions and desires were still as hazy and
uncorrelated as they were acute, stared with bewildered hurt at this
unjust harshness in her usually kind parent.

Then she turned large, pleading eyes upon her father; he had shown
a dawning interest in the subject of white fox furs. But Mr.
Merriam, now, seemed to have lost the issue of furs in the newer
issue of boys.

"What's this about the Summers boy?" he demanded. "It's the first
I've ever heard of this business."

"He only wanted me to go walking, father. All the rest of the girls
go walking with boys." "Indeed! Well, you won't. Nor for a good many
years!"

Such unexpected shortness and sharpness from father made her feel
suddenly wretched; he was even worse than mother.

"Who is he, anyway?" he exploded further.

Missy's lips were twitching inexplicably; she feared to essay
speech, but it was mother who answered.

"He's that red-headed boy who clerks in Pieker's grocery."

"Arthur's a nice boy," Missy then attempted courageously. "I don't
think he ought to be blamed just because he's poor and--"

Her defence ended ignominiously in a choking sound. She wasn't one
who cried easily and this unexpected outburst amazed herself; she
could not, to have saved her life, have told why she cried.

Her father reached over and patted her hand.

"I'm not blaming him because he's poor, daughter. It's just that I
don't want you to start thinking about the boys for a long while
yet. Not about Arthur or any other boy. You're just a little girl."

Missy knew very well that she was not "just a little girl," but she
knew, too, that parents nourish many absurd ideas. And though father
was now absurd, she couldn't help feeling tender toward him when he
called her "daughter" in that gentle tone. So, sighing a secret
little sigh, she smiled back at him a misty smile which he took for
comprehension and a promise. The subject of white fox furs seemed
closed; Missy was reluctant to re-open it because, in some
intangible way, it seemed bound up with the rather awkward subject
of Arthur.

After supper father conversed with her about a piece she was reading
in the Sunday Supplement, and seemed anxious to make her feel happy
and contented. So softened was he that, when Tess telephoned and
invited Missy to accompany the O'Neill family to the Methodist
church that evening, he lent permission to the unusual excursion.

The unusualness of it--the Merriams performed their Sabbath
devotions at 11 A.M.--served to give Missy a greater thrill than
usually attends going to church. Besides, since the Merriams were
Presbyterians, going to the Methodist church held a certain novelty-
-savouring of entertainment--and diversion from the same old
congregation, the same old church choir, and the same old preacher.
In literal truth, also, the new Methodist preacher was not old; he
was quite young. Missy had already heard reports of him. Some of the
Methodist girls declared that though ugly he was perfectly
fascinating; and grandpa and grandma Merriam, who were Methodists
(as had been her own father before he married mother, a
Presbyterian), granted that he was human as well as inspired.

As Missy entered the Methodist church that evening with the
O'Neills, it didn't occur to her memory that it was in this very
edifice she had once felt the flame divine. It was once when her
mother was away visiting and her less rigidly strict grandparents
had let her stay up evenings and attend revival meetings with them.
But all that had happened long ago--five years ago, when she was a
little thing of ten. One forgets much in five years. So she felt no
stir of memory and no presentiment of a coincidence to come.

Reverend MacGill, the new minister, at first disappointed her. He
was tall and gaunt; and his face was long and gaunt, lighted with
deep-set, smouldering, dark eyes and topped with an unruly thatch of
dark hair. Missy thought him terribly ugly until he smiled, and then
she wasn't quite so sure. As the sermon went on and his harsh but
flexible voice mounted, now and then, to an impassioned height, she
would feel herself mounting with it; then when it fell again to
calmness, she would feel herself falling, too. She understood why
grandma called him "inspired." And once when his smile, on one of
its sudden flashes from out that dark gauntness of his face, seemed
aimed directly at her she felt a quick, responsive, electric thrill.
The Methodist girls were right--he was fascinating.

She didn't wait until after the service to express her approbation
to Tess--anyway, to a fifteen-year-old surreptitiousness seems to
add zest to any communication. She tore a corner from the hymnal
fly-leaf and scribbled her verdict while the elder O'Neills and most
of the old people were kneeling in prayer. Assuring herself that all
nearby heads to be dreaded were reverentially bent, she passed the
missive. As she did so she chanced to glance up toward the minister.

Oh, dear heaven! He was looking straight down at her. He had seen
her--the O'Neill pew was only three rows back. It was too awful.
What would he think of her? An agony of embarrassment and shame
swept over her.

And then--could she believe her eyes?--right in the midst of his
prayer, his harshly melodious voice rising and falling with never a
break--the Reverend MacGill smiled. Smiled straight at her--there
could be no mistake. And a knowing, sympathetic, understanding kind
of smile! Yes, he was human.

She liked him better than she had ever thought it possible to like a
minister--especially an ugly one, and one whom she'd never "met."

But after service she "met" him at the door, where he was standing
to shake hands with the departing worshippers. As Mrs. O'Neill
introduced her, rather unhappily, as "one of Tess's little friends,"
he flashed her another smile which said, quite plainly: "I saw you
up to your pranks, young lady!" But it was not until after Dr. and
Mrs. O'Neill had passed on that he said aloud: "That was all right--
all I ask is that you don't look so innocent when your hands are at
mischief."

Oh, she adored his smile!

The following Sunday evening she was invited to the O'Neills' for
supper, and the Reverend MacGill was invited too. The knowledge of
this interesting meeting impending made it possible for her to view
Genevieve and Arthur, again out on a Sunday afternoon stroll, with a
certain equanimity. Genevieve, though very striking and vivacious in
her white fox, was indubitably a frivolous-minded girl; she, Missy,
was going to eat supper with the Reverend MacGill. Of course white
fox furs were nice, and Arthur's eyelashes curled up in an
attractive way, but there are higher, more ennobling things in life.

The Reverend MacGill did not prove disappointing on closer
acquaintance. Grandpa said he knew everything there is to know about
the Bible, but the Reverend MacGill did not talk about it. In a way
this was a pity, as his talk might have been instructive, but he got
Tess and Missy to talking about themselves instead. Not in the way
that makes you feel uncomfortable, as many older people do, but just
easy, chatty, laughing comradeship. You could talk to him almost as
though he were a boy of the "crowd."

It developed that the Reverend MacGill was planning a revival. He
said he hoped that Tess and Missy would persuade all their young
friends to attend. As Missy agreed to ally herself with his crusade,
she felt a sort of lofty zeal glow up in her. It was a pleasantly
superior kind of feeling. If one can't be fashionable and frivolous
one can still be pious.

In this noble missionary spirit she managed to be in the kitchen the
next time Arthur delivered the groceries from Pieker's. She asked
him to attend the opening session of the revival the following
Sunday night. Arthur blushed and stammered a little, so that, since
Arthur wasn't given to embarrassment, Missy at once surmised he had
a "date." Trying for an impersonal yet urbane and hospitable manner,
she added:

"Of course if you have an engagement, we hope you'll feel free to
bring any of your friends with you."

"Well," admitted Arthur, "you see the fact is I HAVE got a kind of
date. Of course if I'd KNOWN--"

"Oh, that's all right," she cut in with magnificent ease." I wasn't
asking you to go with me. Reverend MacGill just appointed me on a
kind of informal committee, you know--I'm asking Raymond Bonner and
all the boys of the crowd."

"You needn't rub it in--I get you. Swell chance of YOU ever wanting
to make a date!"

His sulkiness of tone, for some reason, gratified her. Her own
became even more gracious as she said again: "We hope you can come.
And bring any of your friends you wish."

She was much pleased with this sustained anonymity she had given
Genevieve.

When the opening night of the Methodist revival arrived, most of the
"crowd" might have been seen grouped together in one of the rearmost
pews of the church. Arthur and Genevieve were there, Genevieve in
her white fox furs, of course. She was giggling and making eyes as
if she were at a party or a movie show instead of in church. Missy--
who had had to do a great deal of arguing in order to be present
with her, so to speak, guests--preserved a calm, sweet, religious
manner; it was far too relentlessly Christian to take note of
waywardness. But the way she hung on the words of the minister,
joined in song, bowed her head in prayer, should have been rebuke
enough to any light conduct. It did seem to impress Arthur; for,
looking at her uplifted face and shining eyes, as in her high, sweet
treble, she sang, "Throw Out the Life-Line," he lost the point of
one of Genevieve's impromptu jokes and failed to laugh in the right
place. Genevieve noticed his lapse. She also noticed the reason. She
herself was not a whit impressed by Missy's devotions, but she was
unduly quiet for several minutes. Then she stealthily tore a bit of
leaf from her hymnal--the very page on which she and other frail
mortals were adjured to throw out life-lines--and began to fashion
it into a paper-wad.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20