Her shopwindows reflected her business ac.u.men. One was chastely, severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick.
In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.
At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques completely covered with violets. That violet-covered toque was a symbol.
"I don"t expect "em to buy it," Sophy Decker explained. "But everybody feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It"s like a fruit centerpiece at a family dinner. n.o.body ever eats it, but it has to be there."
The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy"s shop a treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of satin and velvet sc.r.a.ps, and bits of lace and ribbon and jet as to make her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little scavenger.
"What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?" asked Aunt Sophy. "You must have barrels of it."
Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore.
"I keep it," she said.
When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, "Why do you always say "Poor Sophy"?"
"Because--Aunt Sophy"s had so little in life. She never has married, and has always worked."
Adele considered that. "If you don"t get married do they say you"re poor?"
"Well--yes----"
"Then I"ll get married," announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl"s. Very tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of twenty years ago. "If only Adele could have had his looks," his mother used to say. "They"re wasted on a man. He doesn"t need them, but a girl does. Adele will have to be well dressed and interesting. And that"s such hard work."
Flora said she worshiped her children. And she actually sometimes still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to baby talk when endeavoring to coax something out of someone. Her admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great deal of soda bicarbonate and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the beautiful and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily. With the encroaching fat, Flora"s small, delicate features seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of those enlarged photographs of the moon"s surface as seen through a telescope. A self-centered face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy"s large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating strength, courage, and a great human understanding.
From her husband and her children, Flora exacted service that would have chafed a galley slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in an orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele, or Eugene, or her husband. They all hated it.
"She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired," Adele had stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. "She uses it as an excuse for everything and has, ever since Gene and I were children.
She"s as strong as an ox." Not a daughterly speech, but true.
Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of pillows.
"Well, I don"t blame you," the caller had gushed. "If I looked the way you do in bed I"d stay there forever. Don"t tell me you"re sick, with all that lovely color!"
Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. "n.o.body ever gives me credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my blood is in my cheeks."
Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary for success in that direction.
"I love my family," she would say. "They fill my life. After all, that"s a profession in itself--being a wife and mother."
She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband"s land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of beauty.
"I don"t understand it," she used to say in the child"s presence. "Her father"s handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn"t such a fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little dark skinny thing."
The boy, Eugene, grew up a very silent, handsome, shy young fellow.
The girl, dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Anyone but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not a step.
Sometimes Sophy, the clear-eyed, seeing this state of affairs, tried to stop it.
"You expect too much of your husband and children," she said one day, bluntly, to her sister.
"I!" Flora"s dimpled hand had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. "I! You"re crazy! There isn"t a more devoted wife and mother in the world. That"s the trouble. I love them too much."
"Well, then," grimly, "stop it for a change. That"s half Eugene"s nervousness--your fussing over him. He"s eighteen. Give him a chance.
You"re weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele"s ears. She"s got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom, she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned out a little turban that Angie Hatton----"
"Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You"re earning your living, and it"s to your credit. You"re my sister. But I won"t have Adele a.s.sociated in the minds of my friends with your hat store, understand? I won"t have it. That isn"t what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now, understand, I won"t have it!
You don"t know what it is to be a mother. You don"t know what it is to have suffered. If you had brought two children into the world----"
So, then, it had come about during the years between their childhood and their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.
"Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How can I hear when you"re crying! That"s my baby. Now, then."
This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy"s house--the old frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. The hall console alone was enough to strike a preliminary chill to your heart.
The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and glue and steam and flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark-gray patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around.
Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush season, the girls would not go home to dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank quant.i.ties of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original design, or she never would have been content to be head milliner in a small-town shop.
But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable.
The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick dark line. Her face as she bent over her work was sullen and brooding, but when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by a vivid flash of teeth and eyes and smile. Her voice was deep and low. She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking something. Around the worktable, mornings, she used to relate the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming."
Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.
"You"re alone too much, evenings. That"s what comes of living in a boardinghouse. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you good, and it"ll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me company."
Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy negligees with big flower patterns strewn over them. They made her hair look blacker and her skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.
It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly into the living room from the kitchen, where she and Adele were foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite twenty-one.
"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a leaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did not look comic.
"I"m crazy about her," said Eugene. "We"re crazy about each other.
We"re going to be married."
Aunt Sophy listened for the rea.s.suring sound of Adele"s spoons and plates in the kitchen. She came forward. "Now, listen----" she began.
"I love him," said Julia Gold, dramatically. "I love him!"
Except that it was very white and, somehow, old-looking, Aunt Sophy"s face was as benign as always. "Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That isn"t love, and you know it. I"m an old maid, but I know what love is when I see it. I"m ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you, hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother."
"Now, look here, Aunt Sophy! If you"re going to talk that way---- Why, she"s wonderful. She"s taught me what it means to really----"
"Oh, my land!" Aunt Sophy sat down, looking suddenly very ill.
And then, from the kitchen, Adele"s clear young voice: "Heh! What"s the idea! I"m not going to do all the work. Where"s everybody?"
Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand--a capable, firm, steadying hand--on the arm of each. The woman drew back, but the boy did not.