Harper's Weekly/Shoula Rayfield

by Edward Lucas White

Shoula Rayfield

By EDWARD LUCAS WHITE

Illustrated by May Wilson Preston

I KNEW the Rayfields intimately, on a sort of first-cousin-by-courtesy footing, and I liked them all. They made no pretensions to social position or even to “being in society.” In fact, they made no pretensions to anything, being temperamentally incapable of any pretensions of any kind whatever.

Daddy Rayfield's income more than sufficed for all their needs and wants, the more easily as their wants were entirely the reverse of self-conscious. All through their steadily increasing prosperity they had been learning to pay other people to do for them what they had formerly done for themselves. Yet a great deal which they might easily have had others do for them they continued to do for themselves partly from instinct, because they had never happened to think at all of that particular feature of their daily life, partly from a sort of inertia of energy, because they spontaneously did things for themselves, for their own satisfaction or for pastime. Caring nothing for and hardly knowing anything of conventional diversions, they found amusement in all sorts of household chores, as they called them. Daddy Rayfield had almost forgotten that he had ever, as a young householder, carried out of the house the ashes from the kitchen and furnace, so many years had elapsed since it became one of the duties of the man who swept the front pavement and back yard and attended to other such matters; but Daddy Rayfield still stoked his furnace, shook its grate, and threw on coal, except insofar as his older sons had one by one come to share that responsibility and privilege. They preferred it that way—not so much that it saved coal, though that was a consideration, too—but more that it insured the best possible results in all sorts of conditions, the nearest possible approach to perfection of comfort, no matter what the outdoor temperature. Similarly, though the family plumber and gasfitter were called in frequently and their bills paid without objection or afterthought, one or other of the Rayfield boys was apt to repack a squirting faucet, readjust an incandescent gas burner, or tighten a leaky robin, just because it came natural to set right immediately any household appliance that got out of order, and the act was done before there was time to think about it.

As with the sons, so with the daughters: they habitually washed and ironed for themselves their finer, more expensive and more fragile articles of wear. Not that laundry bills made any difference to them or to their parents; but partly because they felt better-dressed and knew that they looked better-adorned when their possessions were deftly and perfectly laundried, and partly because they enjoyed their own household skill.

Not one of the girls but was a competent housekeeper in all respects and knew how to do everything necessary to keep each part of a house comfortable and agreeable. They preferred to dust their own bed- rooms, and each had her specialties in plain and fancy cooking.

BUT the Rayfields, if they worked, worked from choice and not from necessity. And if they were unostentatious and economical by nature, they lived in a roomy and comfortable house, they wore their choice of clothes in great variety, and they sat down to a table abundantly and even lavishly provided with nourishing and appetizing food. Not one of them had ever been worried or exhausted or hungry, not one of them had ever had to skimp on any of the comforts of life, still less on an actual necessity.

Shoula was the handsomest of the daughters, a tall, well-muscled, plump, young woman, active and energetic, full of high spirits and gaiety, overflowing with life and vigor. She laughed a great deal, and while she did not laugh loudly or uproariously her laughter was healthfully hearty. She walked with a swing and put her whole heart into everything she did. Her hair was abundant, glossy and very black, her eyes dark brown, her red cheeks very brilliant when she was excited or interested. For her size, her feet and hands were small, but then she was a large girl. Body and mind, heart and soul, there was plenty of Shoula.

Illustration: There is only one thing to do and that's to get married at once”

HER two elder sisters had married * well. Prosperous as Daddy Rayfield was, his sons-in-law were decidedly better off. And his daughter-in-law was even affluent in her own right. Naturally, with three children flourishingly married, the family expected Shoula, whom they all regarded as a beauty, to feather her nest notably. So they were all disgusted when she announced her engagement to Guy Williams.

Guy was a reporter on the Evening News at a salary of six dollars a week.

Daddy Rayfield consented to the match. But then, neither he nor any other human being could rebuff or oppose Shoula when she set out to have her way. Shoula was a determined and a persuasive creature. Her Daddy in particular could not refuse her. He agreed that whenever Guy was earning a salary of twenty-three dollars a week Shoula should marry him. This was not much of a concession, for at that time no reporter in Baltimore earned more than twenty dollars a week and Guy had not the remotest chance of early promotion. He was a sort of hanger-on at the News office. Also he had no qualities that were likely to make him successful at getting a job of any other kind.

But all the Rayfields liked Guy. They could not help it. He was a cheery being, an inch shorter than Shoula and twenty pounds lighter, with his merry gray eyes, close together and small, twinkling on either side of his parrot-beak nose. He dined at the Rayfields' every Sunday and spent nearly every evening there with Shoula, unless he took her to a theater or to some evening jollity. Moving pictures had not been invented in those days. He and Shoula were very happy and very hopeful. They talked of being married within three years and were perpetually planning ways and means on a basis of twenty-three dollars a week, for Daddy Rayfield had promised Shoula a comprehensive trousseau and an allowance of ten dollars a week.

Then came, all in three weeks, the meeting of Shoula's younger sister Afla with a particularly attractive and wealthy youth, their whirlwind courtship and their prompt marriage.

That event altered very much the outlook of the Rayfields.

Within six months from Afla's wedding I received a note from Shoula asking me to call. I went. She came straight to the point.

“Afla's good luck,” she said, “has been bad luck for me. The whole family has turned completely round. They have broken their word and are now doing all they can to make me give up Guy. At first I thought that would make no difference, and that I could stick it out and wait as patiently as before, if not as comfortably. But I see I was mistaken. Their opposition is wearing me out. If things go on this way they'll separate us. There's only one thing to do and that's to get married at once.”

“On six dollars a week?” I exclaimed.

Guy was not a cent better off than a year before.

“Yes, on six dollars a week,” she replied, calmly. “You see. Will, it's this way. Most girls can fall in love and get over it. I'm the other kind. I never loved anybody but Guy and I never shall. If I lose Guy, my whole life will be spoiled. I've only one life. I might just as well kill myself trying to live on six dollars a week with Guy as die ten deaths trying to live without him. Anyhow, my mind is made up, and you know what that means. It means I'm going to do what I intend. I have told Guy so.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Just what you said, or implied,” she answered. “He said we could not live on six dollars a week. I asked him did he mean to tell me that, if I was not afraid to marry him on that little, he was afraid to marry me on that much. He agreed to get married whenever I am ready.”

“When will you be ready?” I asked.

“Tomorrow, if I can manage it,” Shoula declared. “If not tomorrow, then the day after. Anyhow, the first minute after I am prepared.”

“What do you need to do to be prepared?” I queried.

“Rent a house,” she said, “furnish it, get a license, pack my things, and arrange for an expressman to call for them. That's all, I think.”

SHE spoke as if she had unlimited cash with which to rent and furnish a house. I reflected that she might have some hundreds of dollars in a savings bank, so I ignored these points.

“Do you think you can get your things out of the house?” I asked.

“You bet I can. They all can talk and they all can be horrid, they can threaten, they can say they'll never speak to me again, they can vow that if I go out of the house I go forever, that I can never come back, that they'll cast me off, that I'll never get a cent of cash or a finger-lift of help from any of them, they can keep their word; but there is not one of them that can look me in the face and stop me from having my trunk and bundles carried out of the house; yes, and my bedroom furniture, too. Every ounce that is in my room is mine, all my own.”

“Where do I come in?” I asked.

“Why, you see,” she explained, “Guy is busy from early morning until the sporting and financial edition goes to press; that is often nearly five o'clock. Almost everything I have to do must be done in business hours. Guy can't attend to anything for me, and most of what I have to do will go better with a man to help. You are free as you please, and any time you choose. Get a power of attorney from Guy so you can rent the house for him in his name, and meet me as soon as you have got it.”

When we met she said:

“The first thing is the house.”

I am ashamed to put down the name of the two streets that cross where we got out of the trolley car. The neighborhood was and is perfectly respectable, but when I contemplated what would be thought by Daddy Rayfield, by Ma Rayfield, by Afla, by Afla's husband, I shuddered.

I shuddered incomparably more when she led me to the middle of one of the blocks and tinned up the alley.

“Shoula!” I cried, “Niggers live in this alley.”

“Well,” she said, “I'd rather live next door to niggers with Guy, than in a palace without him. And I won't have to live next door to niggers, at least not yet, for the houses on either side of the one I'm going to take are occupied by white people, and pretty decent-looking white people, even if they are so poor that they have to live next door to niggers.”

In fact I found that three of the houses near the middle of one row had been lately repaired and painted and that the middle one was vacant.

“How did you hit on this?” I asked.

“Saw it in the papers,” Shoula explained. “Of course these houses were rented the instant they were done up and by better tenants than most of these alley cats. The folks in the house had some trouble with the police and were turned out. I paid Leslie Bentinck a month's rent in advance to hold the house for me. I said I knew some good tenants that wanted it.”

“Leslie Bentinck!” I cried. The picture of Shoula and I renting for Guy and Shoula this alley house from that most polished of real estate men, most conventional of bachelors, most correct of club dandies, Leslie Bentinck, overwhelmed me.

“Yes, he's the agent,” said Shoula.

THE house was red brick, with green shutters. The front steps were wood, painted white. The front door opened into a room about twelve feet square. It had one window next the front door. The wall-paper was new, bunches of carnations on a cream-colored ground.

In the middle of the long wall the light from the window glittered on a circular tin cover closing a hole for a stovepipe. The floor was new. The rear room was like the front room, except that the walls were kalsomined a glaring light blue. The floor was patched under the stovepipe-hole as far as the door in the corner, which led down into an earth-floored cellar lighted by two windows barely a foot high, level with the joists.

Between the front room and the kitchen was a boxed-in-stair, narrow and steep.

The second floor consisted of two whitewashed rooms, each with two windows. The floors were old and grimed with the filth of years. Each room had a tiny closet filling the space over the passage between the front and back rooms downstairs. There was no way of heating the upper rooms. There was no plumbing whatever in the house, only a sort of stable-hydrant in the bricked back yard.

“And you mean to live here?” I exclaimed.

“I do. You can help if you choose; but you couldn't hinder me, however much you tried.”

“I shan't try,” I disclaimed, “I mean to help. I'd never have the sand for such a game, but it will be a sporty game to watch.”

“I was banking on you,” said Shoula.

When the year's lease was executed Shoula led me to various auction rooms and second-hand stores. She considered every article she needed in every place she could find. She chaffered, she beat down prices, she made every cent go as far as she could.

She bought a small cook-stove and a smaller kerosene cook-stove.

“I'll spend most of my time cooking and washing,” said Shoula, “and I don't mean to fry in summer or freeze in winter. But no gasoline stoves for me.”

She bought wash-tubs, a kitchen table, eight kitchen chairs; a long-legged, smelly food-safe, with perforated tin panels in its doors and sides; pails, pokers and shovels and three coal-hods, bedroom and table crockery, a pine bedstead, bureau and washstand and a walnut wardrobe; also a husk mattress.

These, when they reached the house, she had placed in the second-story back room.

“You're puzzled,” she remarked to me. “Thank you so much for not asking questions. I'll enjoy explaining the whole scheme when we're settled.”

She also bought a ton of pea coal and saw it put in the cellar. We had some fun and more bother timing ourselves so as to be at the house when her purchases were delivered; kitchen and table utensils she bought at five-and-ten-cent stores; also a great many small articles.

Her eight kitchen chairs cost twenty-five cents apiece, second-hand (“tenth-hand, I suspect,” Shoula observed).

She bought a pair of blankets, and a pair of sheets and two pillow-cases.

“Awful extravagance, buying pillow-cases and sheets,” she commented, “but I've no time now to buy unbleached sheeting and make sheets and pillow-cases. I'll do that before wash day comes 'round for these.” She was choicy on pillows; “daren't economize on pillows,” she explained. “Pillows are sleep, and sleep's life, when you work all the time you are awake.”

She bought two cheap kerosene lamps, new, and carried them with her. When they were placed, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom, she looked over her new possessions and announced that the next thing was the license.

“You don't mean,” I cried, “that you are going to sleep in this house before it is scrubbed.”

“You bet I'll sleep,” she said. “But I'll be hard at work scrubbing a half-hour after sunrise, and when I get through there won't be a cleaner house in Maryland.”

They were married by the minister of her church in the parlor of his parsonage.

“If you won't marry us,” she had said to him, “I'll find some one else who will. You can tell that to the folks, and they'll know it's true. They can't blame you.”

As they left the parsonage she said to me: “Much obliged, Billy. We don't need you any more. I don't want you in the row, if there is one, when I get my stuff from the house. I'll get it. We are going to Moorehead's now, and I'll make him drive round and wait with two wagons. I'll clean out my room in a jiffy. Everything is packed. Remember, you dine with us Sunday afternoon at six.”

“At six!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, at six,” Shoula repeated. “When I explain, you'll understand.”

“God bless you, Billy,” said Guy, “and be sure to come.”

“I'll come,” I said, “and God bless you both.”

II

I FOUND in Shoula's front room the rug, table, sofa, armchair, and rocking-chair and two smaller chairs which had been part of the furniture of her big bedroom at her home. Five of her pictures hung on the walls. Her reading lamp stood on the table. The room looked cheerful. The weather did not call for a fire in the egg-stove, but that useful appointment was in place, on a square of sheet-tin, and the stove and its piping were as glossy black as polish and energy could make them.

Guy opened the door for me and accepted a cigarette. As we were lighting up Shoula came in from the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up and her dress hidden under a blue and white checked gingham apron. She looked as happy as possible.

“Kiss the bride,” said she and gave me a hearty smack on the lips, the first and last time Shoula ever kissed me.

“Isn't she a wonder?” Guy exclaimed, admiringly.

“The next move,” Shoula said, “is to present you to our boarders.”

She climbed the stairs and returned with Dorsey Brown and his wife. Dorsey was the reporter who had got Guy his job with the News. He had been married about three months. His wife was one of those skinny, limp, little blondes, who are pretty enough when well, but who are almost always ailing. They had been living in one of the cheapest boarding houses in Baltimore and had been very uncomfortable and terribly pinched for cash. I realized the expediency of Shoula's arrangement and saw how much it benefited all four.

SHOULA showed me the upstairs rooms. Her mahogany bedstead, bureau, washstand and wardrobe almost filled the front room. A small rocking-chair and one of her twenty-five cent kitchen chairs completed its furniture. Five more of her pictures adorned the walls.

“I think Mamie isn't hopelessly uncomfortable here,” she said.

The back room looked less bare since three of her smaller pictures had been hung up there. Nothing had been added since I had seen it before except two kitchen chairs.

“Trunks down cellar,” said Shoula.

In the kitchen I found hanging Shoula's three favorite pictures.

“I shall be here most all of every day,” she said, “and I might as well have something pleasant to look at.”

We dined off the bare pine kitchen table. We had soup, the thick satisfying soup for which Shoula's mother was famous; boiled potatoes, creamed cabbage and Shoula's own special meat-cakes with tomato gravy; we finished off with an apple tapioca pudding and coffee. It was a good dinner, and a jolly dinner. I had brought a big bag of bananas and a big box of good confectionery. We all felt well-fed and contented.

“One dinner a week,” said Shoula, “is going to be our rule. Our next dinner will come 'round next Sunday.”

I dined there on not a few Sundays and was always edified at the cheapness, abundance and savor of Shoula's dinners. Gradually I learnt the details of her housekeeping.

The rent of the house was two dollars a week, the usual rent for such convenienceless alley houses. The Browns paid eight dollars a week for their room, food and washing and for Shoula's care of Mamie, who was ill more than half the time. Shoula did all the marketing, cooking and washing for the four of them. Also, she scrubbed the front steps, swept the pavement and kept the house and back yard clean; and she kept them clean.

On Sundays the four slept late and had an abundant breakfast and their weekly banquet at six o'clock. On week days Shoula and Mamie had a good late breakfast and a sustaining afternoon dinner. Shoula said she never ate between meals; if Mamie felt weak she gave her a cup of scalding tea and a sandwich, or a biscuit or slice of bread. The two men never had a meal in the house except on Sundays. On week day mornings Shoula waked Guy at the last moment and he and Dorsey each had a big cup of Rio coffee and a roll, and went about their business. It was in the good old days of unlimited hot free lunch at saloons. Dorsey and Guy knew all the saloons in Baltimore, being reporters. They knew which made only a show of setting out free lunch, and which were lavish; they knew just where the free lunch was unappetizing, just where it was filling, satisfying and digestible. They arranged so that they never ate at the same saloon oftener than once in two weeks. In this way they provided themselves with two hearty, satisfying, nourishing meals each day at a daily expense of precisely ten cents each for two glasses of beer apiece.

This left Dorsey and Mamie six dollars and forty cents a week for all their other expenses, and Guy and Shoula three dollars and forty cents.

“Sometimes,” Guy confessed, “I save a nickel by gobbling a free lunch without buying a beer; but that is not good business unless somebody treats me to a stein.

I might lose out a good place from my lunch route.”

Shoula likewise confided to me that she saved something each week out of the Browns' board.

“I can keep the house going on just about a dollar a day,” she said.

Considering coal, kerosene and coffee, I could not see how she did it; but she said what worried her was the cost of soap.

“I use such a lot of soap,” she mourned.

EVERY moment of daylight left free from heavier housework, she put on mending or sewing. She descanted on her theories of needlework.

“Mending first, to the last patch and the last darn,” she said, “then plain sewing. I can make Guy a shirt for half what he can buy one, even at a department store marked down sale. Then, all the time left, on embroidery. Embroidery pays, but it does not pay to put embroidering ahead of keeping up with the real needs of one's clothes.”

Dorsey's wife sewed listlessly, but with an attempt at diligence, whenever she was well enough, and managed to do all her own darning and mending and some embroidery.

Shoula confided to me that between them, they took in more than two dollars a week, clear, for their embroidery.

“And every cent counts,” she said, “and needs to be counted.”

At least three evenings a week they went to the theater. In those days newspaper offices always had more free tickets to theaters than they knew what to do with. If by any chance neither Guy nor Dorsey could get four dead-head tickets, the two women would use the tickets and their husbands would walk in unchallenged as well-known reporters.

In the summer they often went down the bay on an excursion steamer. Free tickets for excursions were almost as easy for reporters to get in those days as were theater tickets.

Shoula was always well and never seemed weary, but I could see, after a time, that Guy was increasingly anxious. I puzzled a good bit, myself, as to what she meant to do and how she kept so sanguine.

Illustration: “Her daddy in -particular could not refuse her”

One Tuesday morning I found in my mail a letter from one of Shoula's girl friends. She had married a San Francisco man. She said she hated to trouble me. but as she did not know Shoula's address, the only way she could think of to get a letter to her was to enclose it to me; would I please deliver it as quickly as possible. I had nothing of importance to do, so I caught the next car for Shoula's part of town. She opened her door for me; she had her hat on.

“Glad to see you,” she said, ignoring the letter. “You always come in the nick of time. A minute later I'd have been gone. I finished my washing early yesterday and some of my ironing. I have just ironed the last piece. I meant to go to the Maternity Hospital this evening, but I think it would be imprudent for me to wait for Guy to come home. I'm going now. Will you walk round with me? ”

“Walk!” I cried. “I'll get you a hansom.”

“I'll bet you won't!” she snapped. “But I thank you for the offer. I can walk and walking will do me good. I can take my time. Will you go with me?”

THE situation was, to me, very startling and totally unforeseen. But there was no resisting Shoula's unembarrassed candor.

I went.

Shoula was wearing a gray cloth dress and strode along springily, head in air, as buoyant as possible.

“I'll be in the hospital,” she said serenely, “next Sunday and Sunday week. I'll be home tomorrow two weeks. You come to dinner Sunday two weeks.”

She shook hands at the entrance of the hospital, smiling and gay, no hint of a flush or blush about her, but with a fine, healthy color in her cheeks.

I went to dinner as bidden. Her baby was as fat as a chestnut worm and pink as a pink-carnation. Shoula seemed strong and vigorous; she walked, moved and stood as if she had reserve energy in plenty.

AFTER that their life went on as before. Shoula maintained that, although she gave her baby all the attention he needed, she seemed to have just as much time for housework as formerly.

“Every mother thinks her baby the greatest thing that ever happened, of course, but I've got more reason to say so than most.” She gloried, “Just think, that kid hasn't shown a symptom of colic yet, and he's past the colicky age, already. And he hasn't waked us at night yet, not once. I have to wake him to feed him. He's greedy as a pig, but he never seems hungry between meals. The matter with him is that he's as healthy as his mother.”

Shoula's second baby was three months old before Guy got his first raise in salary, and that was only to thirteen dollars a week.

“But it makes all the difference in the world,” Shoula declared. “I feel safe now, and I've been more scared than the English language can express. What saved us was the free theaters and free excursions on the water. An all-day excursion, for nothing, is just salvation for a young city baby in summer. Reporting is a badly-paid profession, but it has its compensations.”

She mailed her mother a picture of herself with her two children. This time Ma Rayfield gave in. There was a general family reconciliation. Shoula declined, however, to accept a cent of help. She had already moved into a three-dollar-a-week house, in a street instead of an alley and in a square inhabited by white people only. To that home she clung, as well as to Dorsey and Mamie. She said they had stuck by her and she wasn't going back on them. But family harmony made her days incomparably happier and easier.

AFTER that there was nothing remarkable about her life. The last time I saw them they were living in a flat somewhere in Harlem and enjoying New York completely. Guy was advance agent for a popular comedian at a salary of fourteen hundred a year. He was fat and complacent. Their three children were as healthy as possible.

“But I shouldn't advise any other woman to try it,” Shoula summed up, after many reminiscences. “I won out on free theater tickets and free water excursions and on my temperament. Few other women have such a temperament.”