The Red Book Magazine/Volume 14/Number 2/A Shift in Values

by Inez Haynes Irwin

 

A Shift In Values

BY INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE

Author of “In The Gallery,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY BLANCHE V. FISHER

OBEDIENT to her mother's commands, Dodie revolved in the middle of the room. She held herself stiff. She looked like a Dresden china tea-bell, of which her many starched petticoats made the body, her slender torso, the handle. On one side her mother held the new white dress. On the other side her grandmother unrolled the new blue sash. Myrtle Rollins slipped the dress over the child's head, and standing off, closely examined the effect.

“Thank goodness!” she exclaimed in a relieved tone. “Those petticoats are short enough. I guess it's the first time I ever got them right. That's the advantage of being such an idiot about dressmaking.”

It was taking the efforts of both the women to dress the child for the Christmas tree. Ever since Philippa Meade's invitation came, they had talked of little else. Myrtle had always relied on her mother-in-law in regard to every detail of the child's wardrobe. That oracle decided promptly in favor of a new dress for this occasion. Though Myrtle made it from materials of an expensive fineness that she had never dared before, she cut it by the pattern she invariably used—a pattern that her mother-in-law had provided when Dodie went into short dresses. The elder Mrs. Rollins presented Dodie with the sash and shoes. Indeed, she was even more interested and excited than her daughter-in-law over the child's first appearance in society. It was, of course, that she wanted King's baby to make the proper sensation among the relatives of King's wife.

“You do a good deal better than I ever thought you would, Myrtle,” Mrs. Rollins said. “When I consider what a flyaway little thing you were when you married King—why you couldn't much more than sew a straight seam. I think it's a great deal to your credit what you've accomplished.”

“I have tried,” Myrtle admitted, “and tried hard. But I guess I haven't the knack.”

“Knack! I don't see but you have plenty of knack,” Mrs. Rollins protested.

“Well, I owe it all to you, mother.”

Myrtle took the sash from Mrs, Rollins' hand and tied it about Dodie's waist.

“It's an awful pretty blue. If she spills any ice-cream on it, it will break my heart.”

“I'm glad you're going out for once, Myrtle,” Mrs. Rollins went on. “You need a little change now and then. Besides, it gives you ideas. I do wish there were some young folks round here for you to sew with. Why when my children were growing up, I always belonged to a sewing-circle.”

“But, mother, where do I get the time? Don't I sew and embroider every blessed moment? I'm too busy for anything like that. And as for being lonely—how can I be with Dodie and you?”

She finished her daughter's toilet with a few perking dashes at ribbon-loops and ruffles.

“Now you sit just as still as a little mouse, lamb-baby!” she apostrophized her, lifting her into a chair, “until mother's all ready. Don't slip down on to the floor, for you'll be sure to get into something. And. mother wants her baby to be as neat as a pin when she meets all her little cousins.”

There could be no doubt that Myrtle Rollins took her motherhood hard. It softened her wide brown eyes with a delicate starriness just to look at Dodie. It flooded her voice with a rich, vibrating quality just to speak to her. It was hard for her, in conversation, to keep long away from her daughter. She lived in a world into which considerations other than Dodie's infantile needs no longer entered.

“I'm glad Dodie's going to see some other children at last,” said Mrs. Rollins.

She sank into a chair and absently watched Myrtle complete her own toilet.

“She'll enjoy it a sight. I do wish there were some nice little children round here for her to play with. Sometimes I'm afraid being with grown people so much isn't good for her. It makes her too old fashioned.”

Myrtle's mouth took its most inflexible curve. She was a fragile-looking woman, with a flickering brunette coloring and a thread of silver here and there in her jet-black hair. Maternity had brought out in her a certain physical tensity. Her forehead was sown with a net-work of fine lines. Sometime, when the ivory and rose faded, she would grow old all at once. The more tired she was, the deeper her cheeks blushed, the whiter grew her slim, nervous hands. To-day her face blazed.

“No children are better than bad ones,” she pronounced crisply. “I can't let Dodie play with those common children at the foot of the street. And they're all the children there are round here.”

Illustration: If she spills any ice-cream on it, it will break my heart—

Mrs. Rollins, the elder, was wide and pudgy. She always accented her stoutness by wearing short-waisted blouses with broad flat belts. Always, too, she wore flat sailor-collars with large flat bows, held down by a large cameo pin. At first Myrtle had thought her—with her mothy brown skin, her blurred brown eyes and her high, long-nostriled nose the “homeliest” woman she had ever seen. Now she wondered how she ever could have thought her “homely.” There was something about her face—you always turned to her whenever you had anything to say. This compelling power, had Myrtle only known it, was sympathy—a sympathy so deep that it had created a subtle beauty of its own. And how Dodie loved her! Myrtle did not mind that her daughter would, at any time, leave her mother for her grandmother.

Mrs. Rollins had a hard time when her son, King, brought his wife home to live. Myrtle was frivolous and arrogant. She hated the faded Dorchester neighborhood, from which all the young people fled as soon as they were married. She hated the gloomy old house, the stark, black-walnut rooms, the atmosphere of an uncompromising, aged routine. She had not hesitated to show her disgust, and she had taken every opportunity to slip back to Maywood, the scene of her ante-marital belleship. Disagreements had arisen that were only saved by the older woman's tact from becoming open quarrels.

Then Dodie was born and the differences vanished utterly. A common interest drew the two women into a constant companionship. A common affection built friendship between them, then love. Myrtle discovered her mother-in-law's good sense and, practically, she deferred to her in everything that touched Dodie's material welfare. All the foolish interests of her girlhood and bridehood fell away from her. And, on her side, Mrs. Rollins, mother of many, observed, with a respect sometimes deepening to a vague uneasiness, a conception of motherhood which seemed to eat up every atom of the girl's energy, which threatened to sap her very youth.

It was perhaps of all these things that Mrs. Rollins thought in the moment before she answered.

“No,” she agreed, “you can't do that.”

But her voice held a wavering note of uncertainty.

It was the tone Myrtle answered.

“You know perfectly well, mother, she'd learn all kinds of things from them—naughty words, for instance. And she might be saucy.”

“Well, anyway, she'll be going to kindergarten another year.” Mrs. Rollins spoke as if that prospect mitigated much. “Miss Whitney never has any but the nicest children. When I think King went to her—it don't seem possible that his little girl is going, too. Dodie'll be older then and know how to play with other children.”

“Oh, she'll know how to play with other children all right,” Myrtle said easily. “That always comes to them.”

This, Mrs. Rollins did not answer at all. She hooked Myrtle into her lace waist, the look of preoccupation still accenting her extraordinary plainness.

“And you'll trim the Christmas tree while we're gone, mother?”

Myrtle said this in an undertone, her eyes sliding past her own reflection and fixing on a counterfeit Dodie in the glass

“Yes, it'll be all ready when you get home. She'll be so tired that she'll want to go right to bed.”

“All right. Be sure to lay out all the little furniture in rooms under the Tree. I'1l let her run in, in her nightie, the first thing in the morning. I'll fill her stocking, myself, after she's got to sleep. Oh mother, look at her—isn't she beautiful?” Myrtle ended in an ecstatic hiss.

Both the women stopped to adore the child for a moment. It was a ritual they performed half-a-dozen times a day. Unwontedly docile through the splendor of an unaccustomed gold locket and an unaccustomed turquoise ring, her little hands were disposed primly that they might not muss her skirt. She seemed to focus in her vivid little person all the scant light and color of the big bleak chamber. Dodie was in the very flower of infantile condition. Her flesh, velvety, pearly; her cheeks, a warm peony-pink; her eyes, brilliant, long-lashed, blue; her ravishing little red-and-white mouth all dotted with dimples, proved this. Smiling from concentric whirls of hamburg, she looked like an old-fashioned bouquet in a circle of embroidered paper.

“Your cousin's going to see a pretty child and a healthy child—if she's never seen one in her life before.”

Mrs. Rollins spoke quietly, but her voice rang with the conviction of grandmotherhood.

“Oh, Philippa's children are both lovely,' Myrtle remonstrated.

She felt that she must say this in the interest of fair play. But she knew, with the conviction of motherhood—which is only a shade less sure than the conviction of grandmotherhood—that what the older woman had insinuated was true. There would be no child at Philippa Meade's Christmas-tree to compare with Dodie. It was going to be a social triumph for her, Dodie's mother. And she was anticipating it with tumultuous throbs of exultation. Owing to the distance and to Dodie's fragile infancy, she had not been able to accept Philippa's previous invitations. But every refusal had cost her a pang. Now she was glad of the delay. Dodie was so much bigger, stronger, and more beautiful. She would burst like a vision on that whole Maywood crowd. Myrtle could hardly wait.

Her glow of complacency carried her over the realization that her lace waist and dark, broadcloth skirt had a curiously old fashioned look. It lifted her above the minor irritations of the start. After the process of getting Dodie into leggings, rubbers, coat, collar, muff, mittens, veil, hood, there were the special inconveniences of the slippery walk down—no, up the street.

By choice Myrtle took the car-line at the head of the street. She did not like to take Dodie through the little squatter settlement at the foot that had set so many of the old Dorchester families to buying new houses in Brookline. Her exhilaration did not evaporate during the railroad trip. Indeed, it took a distinct leap upwards when the guard called, “Maywood!”

Philippa had ordered a carriage to bring her to the house. Myrtle leaned back against the cushions, which seemed to symbolize the more splendid luxury to come, and drank in the shifting view. Maywood was a lively, crisp little town, wilderness of tortured, wooden architecture, laid out as symmetrically as a toy-village, across velvet lawns and between rows of maples. Some day, when King had money enough, they were coming out here to live. Any one of the houses would satisfy Myrtle. She loved rooms that were not square, that had all kinds of breaks and turns and twists in them. In imagination she could see her wedding-presents, which still lay in their boxes, against such a background.

To-day, Christmas positively sizzled in the air. The ground was powdered with snow. The trees sparkled brilliantly in the flooding December sun. Huge green wreaths with flying crimson streamers glimmered through the frost on the window-panes. In the doorway, a postman, festooned with packages from knee to shoulder, was rapidly running through his impedimenta. At one house they were unloading a Christmas-tree. At another, a glossy black delivery-wagon, with the name in gilt letters of a Boston firm, was disgorging huge bundles after huger ones—a sled, a doll's carriage—the last was surely a doll's house.

Philippa came running out bare-headed to meet them—a stouter Philippa but a radiant one, still with the faint coat of her summer tan overlaying her vigorous blondness. Myrtle noted that she wore a new yellow, princess gown, that her hair was done a different way, a big yellow bow in its puffed elaboration.

“Oh, Myrtie, I'm so glad to see you!” she boomed in her deep, hearty voice. “I've been on pins and needles for an hour, I was so afraid that something would happen at the last moment to prevent—and here's Dorothy Persis! Oh, you darling bunny-duck, come and kiss you' Auntie Phil!”

But Dodie, in a sudden fit of shyness, shrank to her mother's side.

“Oh, she's frightened—the love!” Philippa went on. “Never mind, pettie-lamb, you' Auntie Phil wont bother you till we get acquainted. Then she's going to eat you up. Come right in!”

She bustled them into the big square hall that seemed to brim with the flaming colors of an oriental corner, to snap with the vivacity of an open fire. Myrtle caught glimpses through the portières of the dining-room: she had a confused impression of holly-wreaths, cut glass, beer-mugs, a shining table with circles of Mexican drawn-work, a white-capped maid moving about. Coming in from the cold, she exulted in this dazzling detail and haphazard color. It spelled ease and opulence to her. Even the luscious heat seemed to intensify that effect. And she looked upon it, not as Philippa's home, but as the proper frame for Dodie's beauty, a background laid by a scenic master for her coming triumph.

Still talking in her deep-voiced, vigorous way, Philippa urged them up the broad stairs and into a big Delft-blue bedroom. She started to roll Dodie out of her wraps, but another access of shyness gripped the little girl.

She ran to her mother.

Both the women laughed.

“Well, what's got into the child?” Myrtle exclaimed.

But in her eyes shone the pride that mothers feel when their children will have none of aliens for little intimate services. She pulled Dodie upright and began to unpeel her, chatting frantically all the time. Philippa's presence exerted its old-time intoxication—she felt inclined to frisk—even to giggle.

Dodie emerged from her cocoon more brilliantly flushed than ever and with a positive blue fire sparkling between her fringing lashes. A stroke or two from Philippa's brush and the thick, hanging hair broke into ripples and waves. Myrtle pulled out sash-ends and petticoats. She looked over at her cousin in open triumph.

“Oh, what a darling!” Philippa responded promptly to this wordless cue. “You certainly have taken every care of her, Myrtle.”

“I guess I have,” Myrtle admitted. “There isn't an inch of her skin that isn't like satin.”

“Come upstairs now,” Philippa urged. “We're having the Tree in the nursery. Lou Thayer's come with Baby Marjory—you remember Lou Eliot—you know she lost her first one—awfully sad, wasn't it? Marjory's about Dorothy's—Dodie, you call her—about Dodie's age. She's a perfect little fairy. Then Polly Perkins is here with her two boys—she's got a handful in them, I can tell you. But she knows just how to manage them—that tomboy's turned out the loveliest mother. And Miriam Dodge is here with her family. And Ella Stacey with the twins. Then I'm expecting Edith Whittier with Thomas. Why, you haven't seen these girls since—not for four years, have you?”

“I guess not—not since before Dodie was born. Don't you remember that you had a whist on your birthday and I came out for that?”

Philippa led the way up a second flight of stairs. They opened directly into the big garret nursery. In the middle of the floor glittered the Tree, bulging with tinsel toys and veiled in silver sheen. The children playing about it turned round eyes of curiosity on the new-comers. Clustered about a couch in the corner, a group of mothers looked up inquiringly as they entered. Subconsciously, Myrtle noted pretty silken bags gaping to expose dainty sewing utensils, bits of linen and embroidery.

“Why, it's Mrs. Rollins!” one of the mothers exclaimed. She came rushing forward—a pretty little dark woman sparking out of a raspberry-colored gown, all ruffles. “We were so afraid something would prevent you from coming.”

Myrtle recognized her as Polly Perkins.

“How do you do?”

She held out a formal hand. Dodie was still anchored to her skirts.

“And this is little Dorothy,” Mrs. Perkins said, kneeling down. “Oh, you cunning bunch! Come, girls, come and see Mrs. Rollins' little girl! Do kiss me, lambie!”

The other women came forward. They greeted Myrtle cordially, but devoted themselves to the child. Dodie could not be coaxed out of her shyness, however. The more entreating grew their voices, the more beguiling their ways, the closer she clung, the deeper she buried her face in her mother's skirts.

“She's frightened, of course,” Mrs. Perkins said, relieving the situation with her quick tact. “Wait until she gets used to all these new faces. Take this chair, Mrs. Rollins.”

Myrtle sat down, embarrassed. She pulled Dodie to her side. The child clung to her like a little limpet.

Appreciating Myrtle's dilemma, they brought the children up to her for inspection, first Philippa's black browed, sturdy boys, last Mrs. Stacey's baby, who cooed approval for a second from Myrtle's arms. Dodie would look at none of them. But the children, as they slipped moistly polite little paws into the strange lady's hand, stared very hard at the strange little girl, awed by her air of haughty exclusiveness.

Illustration: In the middle of the floor glittered the tree, the children playing about it—

“I hope you brought your sewing, Mrs. Rollins,” Polly Perkins said, after this ordeal was over.

“No, I didn't. I wish I had.”

“If you lived in Maywood,” laughed Lou Thayer, “you'd soon learn to go nowhere without it. We sew at everything but weddings and funerals.” And she went on with her hem-stitching. “At present we're all crazy about hand-work and we're doing the children's best dresses without a stitch on the machine. I'm naturally slow myself. I have to work like a beaver to keep up with the rest.”

Myrtle did not reply to this and the group swung easily into talk of their own concerns. She listened. They recognized her presence with an occasional remark, in a courteous explanation of local allusions. But in spite of it all, Myrtle had that sense of being on the outside that inevitably comes when a stranger joins a group closely knit by neighborhood interests. She had a feeling that she was older than the rest and yet, by a curious paradox, less experienced. How well they talked! How they seemed to know each other! And then the extraordinary number of things they had in common! They drifted from a consideration of the next “whist,” through an argument about a play running in Boston, to a discussion of a magazine-serial whose very name Myrtle had not heard. Then they got back with much laughter and anecdote to servants, household economy, and clothes.

Left to herself, Dodie gradually lifted her head. Urged by her mother, she slipped to the floor. Still holding Myrtle's hand, she gazed in wonder at the romping children.

Philippa observed.

“Come here, children!” she called sonorously. “The little girl's all ready to play with you now. Come, Marjory and Daisy and Ted and Billy! Come, Freddie and Rutherford! Come, Eleanor!”

Obedient to her call, the group danced over to her side. Myrtle stared at them as if seeing them for the first time. Had she ever children seen before? Little fairy girls all ruffles and ribbon and ringlets—stalwart boys in the most shining of freshly laundered linen, the most polished of patent leather slippers—they gathered in an appreciative circle about Dodie. Tiny, blonde Marjory—it looked as if a puff of wind would send her across the slippery floor in an involuntary dance—ventured to take her hand.

Dodie watched their approach with an apprehension that grew rapidly into alarm. At Marjory's shy touch, her self-control went utterly. She burst into a sob that voiced sheer terror. She caught convulsively at Myrtle's neck.

Again the group of mothers rang with sympathetic cries.

“Run away, children!” This was Philippa. “The little girl will play with you later. Poor little dear! She's frightened at the confusion.”

“She's not used to other children, is she, Mrs. Rollins?” from the others.

Myrtle answered the last question.

“No, she's never played with other children.”

She spoke with composure. But inwardly she was suffering. Dodie was not doing her mother proud. Dodie was not doing herself justice. However, she'd get over her terrors after a while and then they'd see her beauties and graces, all her little darling, baby ways. A wild surge of adoration came over her. She lifted the child into her arms, pressing a flurry of kisses on the round velvety cheeks. Soothed by this demonstration, Dodie subsided into a quiescent heap.

The talk among the mothers had turned to children's clothes. An argument about a pattern provoked laughing contradictions on one side, wagers on the other. Philippa disappeared, came back with all the month's harvest of women's magazines. Her guests grabbed them from her hand, ransacked them, studied the illustrations. They talked in terms Myrtle did not understand, but she listened avidly. It all helped to crystallize in her mind something that had been growing there, vague but definite. Furtively she examined the little girls playing about the Tree. Once or twice, with a premeditated effect of unconsciousness, she swept Dodie with a critical gaze. There was something about the little girls. What was it? There was something about Dodie. What was it? It came to her after a while. They looked “smart.” Dodie looked—well, she might as well admit it—Dodie looked “gorming.”

Dodie's dress was too long to be graceful, yet not long enough to be “quaint.” Their skirts came just above the bend of the knee. Dodie wore long black stockings. They wore delicately tinted, silk socks that left bare delicious areas of dimpled flesh. Dodie wore button boots that were too wide at the top for her slender legs. They wore dainty strapped slippers. Dodie's hair, left to hang unconfined to her waist, had tangled and snarled. Their heads—they wore either the “Dutch cut” or curls, smartly bowed—looked trim. Dodie wore a sash too wide for her height, gathered into a big awkward bow at the back. Sashless, their little bodies were dotted at pretty intervals with choux of nursery ribbon, were striped with insertions of filmiest lace.

Dodie looked horrid!

Well, what wonder in a dress made from a pattern that dated back to the babyhood of King's youngest sister? Dodie's clothes might be all wrong, but Dodie herself was surely beautiful. She examined the child's face in a kind of terror. Dodie smiled limpidly up at her out of eyes that were wells of pure color. Wait until she got at some of those fashion magazines. Wait until next Christmas. She'd show them!

The arrival of Edith Whittier created a diversion. With her came Thomas, the boy-toy of the whole united little circle—Thomas, a thing of chubby cheeks, eyes like black O's and a baby smile of rare ingenuousness—a Thomas, moreover, in the glories of his first trousers—a Thomas who stood for inspection in the doorway, thrusting dimpled hands into black velvet pockets. A shriek of grown-up appreciation greeted this sartorial debut. But the excitement would doubtless have tapered down to the calm that precedes the gift-giving if Thomas had not marked Dodie for his own. Speeding to her side, he kissed her.

It was a fatal impulse. From it came confusion and chaos, came utter rout and ruin. Dodie's terrified screams could not be hushed. Myrtle kissed her and patted her, walked her and rocked her, entreated her. Everybody offered a new scheme for placating her and each scheme plunged the child into deeper woe. Myrtle retreated, finally, to Philippa's bedroom, where she nursed Dodie to tranquility and her own sense of outrage to composure.

 

Always in memory, the rest of the party was a blur to Myrtle Rollins—a series of greater mortifications rolling on lesser ones to make a sum total that she always shrank from considering. After an hour of calm with Dodie, Myrtle ventured back to the nursery with her. But the confusion of gift-giving proved too much for Dodie. She spurned the fruitage of the marvelous tree. She spurned the children who made friendly overtures. She spurned the parents who tried to make amends. Finally, she spurned her mother. All this went to the accompaniment of wails and sobs and screams. At last Myrtle bore her, yelling and kicking back to Philippa's bedroom and hushed her to an exhausted sleep.

Myrtle made herself assist Philippa in putting the last touches to the table. She made herself join the pretty procession coming, gift-laden and laughing, down the stairs. She made herself sit with them when every detail of the picture—the child-encircled table, a mother behind each little head—threw into aching contrast her own childlessness. She made herself answer calmly the kindly inquiries of those happier mothers, made herself accept with smiles their tactful explanation of Dodie's behavior. She laughed and appreciated. But, all the time, she carried the picture of Dodie asleep upstairs, tumbled, disheveled, her features swollen out of shape, her exquisite coloring a mottled ruin. All the time she swayed in the turmoil of a mental hurricane; she was enduring the acutest mortification of her life.

 

She was too dispirited to notice that she had taken the car-line that went by the foot of the street until the hated crowd of cheap wooden houses came into view.

Frowning involuntarily, she helped Dodie out of the car and started up the hill.

Half-way up a voice arrested her.

“Why, Myrtle Meade,” it called, “of all things!”

Myrtle looked around in surprise.

“Why, Maggie Kelly,” she said, “is it really you?”

She stood irresolutely at the gate, but Maggie came bounding down the steps.

“The sight of you's good for sore eyes!” Maggie said, shaking Myrtle's hand.

“I'm glad to see you, too,” Myrtle said, formally.

The two girls had sat beside each other in the grammar school, had, in fact, graduated from the same class. Myrtle had adored Maggie in those democratic days of her early teens. Now it amused and embarrassed her a little to see that Maggie expected that the intimacy could be taken up just where it was left off.

“I'm married. My name's Flaherty. My man's a motorman,” Maggie explained, breathlessly. “Come in, Myrtle—do. I want you to see my house and my—is that your little girl?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, do come in,” Maggie begged, jumping up and down as if in the throes of the most delicious emotions. “Oh, do come in. I want to show you something.”

And Myrtle went, Dodie tagging at her heels.

Maggie, not stopping to explain, disappeared. Myrtle, loosening Dodie's coat, removed her hat and fur collar, gazed disdainfully about the mean little room. Maggie whisked back into sight. She was pulling something by the hand.

“Here's my little girl,” she said.

She looked at Myra with all the pride of motherhood beaming in her face. Then her gaze went to Dodie.

Dodie, in that lucent physical calm which follows a storm and a nap, was a vision of ravishing color—all velvety pinks and seraphic blues, all long lashes and shining masses of hair. And with the perversity of childhood she was dimpling at the strange child.

Myrtle saw Maggie's look, turning swiftly back to her own daughter's face, change subtly. For little Maggie was not beautiful. She was a big-nosed, freckled child—one of those coarse flowers of babyhood, predestined to grow uglier and uglier as the years should steal from her the inalienable freshness of infancy.

Maggie's radiance began to fade.

“Here's my little girl,” she said again—and then more slowly, “she's not so very beautiful, I guess, but she's the best child that ever—”

But Myrtle had bounded across the room, was down on her knees, was kissing the little freckled face. Her voice caught and broke.

“She's a lovely little girl, Maggie,” she said, “you ought to be proud of her. Wont you let her come to Dodie's Christmas tree to-morrow? And now, Maggie, that you're so near, you must come up every single afternoon and sew with me. Oh, do come!”