People of the Whirlpool by Mabel Osgood Wright

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PEOPLE OF THE WHIRLPOOL

FROM THE EXPERIENCE BOOK OF A COMMUTER'S WIFE

BY MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT

1903

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I ON THE ADVANTAGE OF TWINS

CHAPTER II MISS LAVINIA'S LETTERS TO BARBARA

CHAPTER III MARTIN CORTRIGHT'S LETTERS

CHAPTER IV WHEN BARBARA GOES TO TOWN

CHAPTER V FEBRUARY VIOLETS

CHAPTER VI ENTER A MAN

CHAPTER VII SYLVIA LATHAM

CHAPTER VIII THE SWEATING OF THE CORN

CHAPTER IX A WAYSIDE COMEDY

CHAPTER X THE WHIRL BEGINS

CHAPTER XI REARRANGED FAMILIES

CHAPTER XII HIS MOTHER

CHAPTER XIII GOSSIP AND THE BUG HUNTERS

CHAPTER XIV THE OASIS

I

ON THE ADVANTAGE OF TWINS

_February 2_. Candlemas and mild, gray weather. If the woodchuck stirs
up his banked life-fire and ventures forth, he will not see his shadow,
and must straightway arrange with winter for a rebate in our favour.
To-day, however, it seems like the very dawn of winter, and as if the
cloud brooms were abroad gathering snow from remote and chilly corners
of the sky.

Six years ago I began the planting of my garden, and at the same time my
girlish habit of journal keeping veered into the making of a "Garden
Boke," to be a reversible signal, crying danger in face of forgotten
mistakes, then turning to give back glints of summer sunshine when read
in the attic of winter days and blue Mondays. Now once again I am in the
attic, writing. Not in a garden diary, but in my "Social Experience Boke"
this time, for it is "human warious," and its first volume, already
filled out, is lying in the old desk. Martin Cortright said, one stormy
day last autumn when he was sitting in the corner I have loaned him of my
precious attic retreat, that, owing to the incursion of the Bluff Colony
of New Yorkers, which we had been discussing, I should call this second
volume "People of the Whirlpool," because--ah, but I must wait and hunt
among my papers for his very words as I wrote them down.

My desk needs cleaning out and rearranging, for the dust flies up as I
rummage among the papers and letters that are a blending of past,
present, and future. All my pet pens are rusty, and must be replaced from
the box of stubs, for a stub pen assists one to straightforward, truthful
expression, while a fine point suggests evasion, polite equivocation, or
thin ideas. Even Lavinia Dorman's letters, whose cream-white envelopes,
with a curlicue monogram on the flap, quite cover the litter below, have
been, if possible, more satisfactory since she has adopted a fountain
stub that Evan gave her at Christmas.

There are many other things in the desk now beside the hickory-nut beads
and old papers. Little whiffs of subtle fragrance call me backward
through time faster than thought, and make me pinch myself to be sure
that I am awake, like the little old woman with the cutabout petticoats,
who was sure that if she was herself, her little dog would know her,--but
then he _didn't!_

I am awake and surely myself, yet my old dog is not near to recognize me.
This ring of rough, reddish hair, tied with a cigar ribbon and lying atop
the beads, was Bluff's best tail curl. Dear, happy, brave-hearted Bluff
with the human eyes; after an honourable life of fifteen years he stole
off to the happy hunting grounds of perpetual open season, quail and
rabbit, two years ago at beginning of winter, as quietly as he used to
slip out the back door and away to the fields on the first fall morning
that brings the hunting fever. For a long while not only I, but neither
father nor Evan could speak of him, it hurt so. Yet by a blessed
dispensation a good dog lives on in his race, and may be renewed (I
prefer that word to _replaced_) after a season, in a way in which our
best human friends may not be, so that we do not lack dogs. Lark is
senior now, and Timothy Saunders's sheep dog, The Orphan, is also a
veteran; the foxhounds are in their prime, while Martha Corkle, as we
shall always call her, is raising a promising pair of collie pups.

Beside the curl, and covering mother's diaries, lies a square white
volume, the first part of my "Experience Boke" before mentioned, and upon
it two queer fat little pairs of bronze kid shoes, buttonless and much
worn on the toes, telling a tale of feet that dragged and ankles that
wobbled through inexperience in walking. Ah yes! I'm quite awake and the
same Barbara, though looking over a wider and eye-opening horizon, having
had three rows of candles, ten in a row, around my last birthday cake and
one extra in the middle, which extravagance has constrained the family to
use lopsided, tearful, pink candles ever since.

And the two pairs of feet that first touched good earth so hesitatingly
with those crumpled shoes are now standing firmly in wool-lined rubber
boots topped by brown corduroy trousers, upon the winter slat walk that
leads to the tool house, while their owners, touched by the swish of the
Whirlpool that has recently drawn this peaceful town into its eddies, are
busy trying to turn their patrol wagon, that for a year has led a most
conservative existence as a hay wain and a stage-coach dragged by a
curiously assorted team of dogs and goat, into the semblance of some
weird sort of autocart, by the aid of bits of old garden hose, cast-away
bicycle gearing, a watering-pot, and an oil lantern.

I have wondered for a week past what yeast was working in their brains.
Of course, the seven-year-old Vanderveer boy on the Bluffs had an
electric runabout for a Christmas gift, also a man to run it! Corney
Delaney, as Evan named the majestic gray goat--of firm disposition
blended with a keen sense of humour--that father gave the boys last
spring and who has been their best beloved ever since, has for many days
been left in duress with the calves in the stack-yard, where the all-day
diet of cornstalks is fatally bulging his once straight-fronted figure.

In fact, it is the doings of these two pairs of precious feet, with the
bodies, heads, and arms that belong to them, that have caused the dust to
gather in my desk, and the "Garden Boke," though not the garden, which is
more of a joy than ever, to be suspended and take a different form.
Flesh-and-blood books that write themselves are so compelling and
absorbing that one often wonders at the existence of any other kind, and,
feeling this strongly, yet I turn to paper pages as silent confidants.
Why? Heredity and its understudy, Habit, the two _h_'s that control both
the making of solitary tartlets as well as family pies.

So the last entry in the "Garden Boke" was made a week before the day
recorded in the white book with the cherubs' heads painted on it that
underlies the shoes.

It seems both strange and significant to me now that this book chanced to
be given me by Lavinia Dorman, mother's school friend and bridesmaid, a
spinster of fifty-five, and was really the beginning of the transfer of
her friendship to me, the only woman friendship that I have ever had, and
its quality has that fragrant pungence that comes from sweet herbs, that
of all garden odours are the most lasting.

I suppose that it is one of the strongest human habits to write down the
very things that one is least likely to forget, and _vice-versa;_ for
certainly I shall never forget the date and double record on that first
fair page beneath the illuminated word _Born_,--yet I often steal up here
to peep at it,--and live the intervening five years backward for pure
joy. January 10, 189-, Richard Russell------ and John Evan------.

Every time I read the names anew I wonder what I should have done if
there had been a single name upon the page. I must then have chosen
between naming him for father _or_ Evan--an impossibility; for even if
the names had been combined, whose should I have put first?

No, the twins are in every way an advantage. To Evan, in providing him at
once with a commuted family sufficient for his means; to father, among
other reasons, by giving him the pleasure of saying, to friends who felt
it necessary to visit him in the privacy of his study and be
apologetically sympathetic, "I have observed that the first editions of
very important books are frequently in two volumes," sending them away
wondering what he really meant; to me by saving the rack of argument, the
form of evil I most detest, and to their own chubby selves no less, in
that neither one has been handicapped for a single day by the
disadvantage of being an only child!

It doubtless seems very odd for me to feel this last to be a
disadvantage, being myself an only child, and always a happy one, sharing
with mother all the space in father's big heart. But this is because God
has been very good to me, leaving me safe in the shelter of the home
nest. Suppose it had been otherwise and I had been forced to face the
world, how it would have hurt, for individual love is cruelly precious
sometimes, and an "onliest" cannot in the very nature of things be as
unselfish and adaptable as one of many.

I was selfish even when the twins came. I was so glad that they were
men-children. I could not bear to think of other woman hands ministering
to father and Evan, and I rejoiced in the promise of two more champions.
I often wonder how mother felt when I was born and what she thought.
Was she glad or disappointed? I wish that she had left written words to
guide me, if ever so few,--they would mean so much now; and let me know
if in her day social things surprised and troubled her as for the first
time they now stir me, and therefore belong to all awakening motherhood.
Her diaries were a blending of simple household happenings and garden
lore, nothing more; for when I was five years old and her son came, he
stayed but a few short hours and then stole her away with him.

I wonder if my boys, when they are grown and begin to realize woman, will
care to look into this book of mine, and read in and between the lines of
its jumble of scraps and letters what their mother thought of them, and
how things appeared to her in the days of their babyhood. Perhaps; who
knows? At present, being but five years old, they are centred in whatever
thing the particular day brings forth, and but that they are leashed fast
by an almost prenatal and unconscious affection, they are as unlike in
disposition, temperament, and colouring as they are alike in feature.
Richard is dark, like father and me, very quiet, except in the matter of
affection, in which he is clingingly demonstrative, slow to receive
impressions, but withal tenacious. He clearly inherits father's medical
instinct of preserving life, and the very thought of suffering on the
part of man or beast arouses him to action. When he was only a little
over three years old, I found him carefully mending some windfall robins'
eggs, cracked by their tumble, with bits of rubber sticking-plaster, then
putting them hopefully back into the nest, with an admonition to the
anxious parents to "sit very still and don't stwatch." While last summer
he unfortunately saw a chicken decapitated over at the farm barn, and, in
Martha Corkle's language, "the way he wound a bit o' paper round its poor
neck to stop its bleedin' went straight to my stummick, so it did, Mrs.
Evan;" for be it said here that Martha has fulfilled my wildest
expectations, and whereas, as queen of the kitchen, she was a trifle
unexpected and uncomfortable, as Mrs. Timothy Saunders, now comfortably
settled in the new cottage above the stable at the north corner of the
hayland, she is a veritable guardian angel, ready to swoop down with
strong wings at a moment's notice, in sickness or health, day or night,
and seize the nursery helm.

It is owing to her that I have never been obliged to have a nursemaid
under my feet or tagging after the boys, to the ruin of their
independence. For the first few years Effie, whose fiery locks have not
yet found their affinity, helped me, but now merely sees to buttons,
strings, and darns.

I found out long ago that those who get the best return from their flower
gardens were those who kept no gardeners, and it is the same way with the
child garden; those who are too overbusy, irresponsible, ignorant, or
rich to do without the orthodox nurse, never can know precisely what they
lose. To watch a baby untrammelled with clothes, dimple, glow, and expand
in its bath, is in an intense personal degree like watching, early of a
June morning, the first opening bud of a rose that you have coaxed and
raised from a mere cutting. You hoped and believed that it would be fair
and beautiful, but ah, what a glorious surprise it is!

And so it is at the other end of day, when sleep comes over the garden
and all the flowers that have been basking in sun vigour relax and their
colours are subdued, blended by the brush of darkness, and the night wind
steals new perfumes from them, and wings of all but a few night birds
have ceased to cleave the air. As you walk among the flowers and touch
them, or throw back the casement and look out, you read new meanings
everywhere. In the white cribs in the alcove the same change comes,
bright eyes, hair, cheeks, and lips lie blended in the shadow, the only
sound is the even breath of night, and when you press your lips behind
the ear where a curl curves and neck and garments meet, there comes a
little fragrance born of sweet flesh and new flannel, and the only motion
is that of the half-open hand that seems to recognize and closes about
your fingers as a vine to its trellis, or as a sleeping bird clings to
its perch.

A gardener or a nurse is equally a door between one and these silent
pleasures, for who would not steal up now and then from a troubled
dream to satisfy with sight and touch that the babes are really there
and all is well?

* * * * *

Richard has a clinging way even in sleep, and his speech, though very
direct for his age, is soft and cooing; he says "mother" in a lingering
tone that might belong to a girl, and there are what are called feminine
traits in him.

Ian (to save confusion, we called him from the first by the pretty Scotch
equivalent of Evan's first name) is of a wholly masculine mould, and like
his father in light hair, gray eyes, and determination. His very speech
is quick and staccato, his tendency is to overcome, to fight rather than
assuage, though he is the champion of everything he loves. From the time
he could form distinct sounds he has called me Barbara, and no amount of
reasoning will make him do otherwise, while the imitation of his father's
pronunciation of the word goes to my heart.

Recently, now that he is fully able to comprehend, Evan took him quietly
on his knee and told him that he must say "mother" and that he was not
respectful to me. He thought a few minutes, as if reasoning with himself,
and then the big gray eyes filled with tears, a very rare occurrence, as
he seemed to feel that he could not yield, and he said, trying very hard
to steady his voice, "Favver, I truly can't, I _think it _muvver_ inside,
but you and I, we must _say it_ Barbara," and I confess that my heart
leaped with joy, and I begged Evan to let the matter end here. To be
called, if it so may be, by one name from the beginning to the end of
life by the only true lovers that can never be rivals, is bliss enough
for any woman.

Equally resolved, but in a thing of minor importance, is Ian about his
headgear. As a baby of three, when he first tasted the liberty of going
out of garden bounds daily into the daisy field beyond the wild walk,
while Richard clung to his protecting baby sunbonnet, Ian spurned head
covering of any kind, and blinked away at the sun through his tangled
curls whenever he had the chance, in primitive directness until his
cheeks glowed like burnished copper; and his present compromise is a
little cap worn visor backward.

When the twins were very young, people were most funny in the way in
which they seemed to think it necessary to feel carefully about to make
sure whether condolence or congratulations were in order. The Severely
Protestant was greatly agitated, as, being himself the possessor of an
overflowing quiverful, his position was difficult. After making sure
which was the right side of the fence, and placing himself on it, he
tugged painfully at his starved red beard, and made an elaborate address
ending in a parallel,--the idea of the complete Bible being in two
volumes, the Old and New Testament, each being so necessary to the other,
and so inseparable, that they were only comparable to twins!

Father and Evan were present at the time,--I dared not look at
either,--and as soon as we were again alone, the room shook with
laughter, until Martha Corkle, who was then in temporary residence,
popped in to be sure that I was not being unduly agitated.

"The Old and New Testament, I wonder which is which?" gasped father,
going upstairs to look at the uninteresting if promising woolly bundles
by light of this startling suggestion.

Now, however, the joke has developed a serious side, as their two
characters, though in no wise precocious, have become distinctive. Ian
represents the Old, primitive and direct, the "sword of the Lord and
Gideon" type, while Richard is the New, the reconciler and peacemaker.

* * * * *

The various congratulations that the twins were boys, from my standpoint
I took as a matter of course, even though I had always heard that boys
gave the most worry and girls were referred to among our friends and
neighbours as the greatest comforts in a home unless they did something
decidedly unusual, fitting into nooks, and often taking up and bearing
burdens the brothers left behind. But when many people who had either
daughters or nieces of their own, and might be said to be in that mystic
ring called "Society," congratulated me pointedly about the boys, I began
to ponder about the matter mother-wise. Then, three years ago the New
York Colony seized upon the broad acres along the Bluffs, and dotted two
miles with the elaborate stone and brick houses they call cottages; not
for permanent summer homes (the very rich, the spenders, have no homes),
but merely hotels in series. These, for the spring and fall between
seasons and week-end parties and golfing, men and girls gay in red and
green coats, replaced the wild flowers in the shorn outlying fields. I
watched these girls, and, beginning to understand, wondered if I had
grown old before my time, or if I were too young to comprehend their
point of view, for, to their strange enlightenment I was practically as
yet unborn.

Lavinia Dorman says caustically that I really belong with her in the
middle of the last century, and she, born to what father says was really
the best society and privilege of New York life, like his college chum
Martin Cortright, is now swept quite aside by the swirl.

"Yes, dear child," she insists (how different this use of the word
sounds from when the Lady of the Bluffs uses the universal "my dear"
impartially to mistress and maid, shopgirl and guest), "you not only
belong to the last century, but as far back in it as myself, and I am
fifty-five, full measure.

"The new idea among the richer and consequently more privileged classes
is, that girls are to be fitted not only to go out into the world and
shine in different ways unknown to their grandmothers, but to be
superior to home, which of necessity unfits them for a return trip if the
excursion is unsuccessful.

"What with high ideas, high rents, and higher education, the home myth is
speedily following Santa Claus out of female education, and, argue as one
may, New York is the social pace-maker 'East of the Rockies,' as the free
delivery furniture companies advertise. I congratulate you anew that the
twins are boys!"

I laughed to myself over Miss Lavinia's letter; she is always so
deliciously in earnest and so perturbed over any change in the social
ways of her dearly beloved New York, that I'm wondering how she finds it,
on her return after two years or more abroad (she was becoming agitated
before she left), and whether she will ask me down for another of those
quaint little visits, where she so faithfully tours me through the shops
and a few select teas, when, to wind it up, Evan buys opera box seats so
that she may have the satisfaction of having her hair dressed, wearing
her point lace bertha and aigret, and showing us who is who, and the
remainder who are not. For she is well born, intricately related to the
original weavers of the social cobweb, and knows every one by name and
sight; but has found lately, I judge, that this knowledge unbacked by
money is no longer a social power that carries beyond mixed tea and
charity entertainments. Never mind, Lavinia Dorman is a dear! Ah, if she
would only come out here, and return my many little visits by a long
stay, and act as a key to the riddle the Whirlpool people are to me. But
of course she will not; for she frankly detests the country,--that is,
except Newport and Staten Island,--is wedded even in summer to her trim
back-yard that looks like a picture in a seed catalogue, and, like a
faithful spouse, declines to leave it or Josephus for more than a few
days. Josephus is a large, sleek, black cat, a fence-top sphinx, who sits
all day in summer wearing a silver collar, watching the sparrows and the
neighbourhood's wash with impartial interest, while at night he goes on
excursions of his own to a stable down a crooked street in "Greenwich
Village," where they still keep pigeons. Some day he won't come back!

Yet Martin Cortright, the Bookworm, was a pavement worshipper too, and he
came last fall for over a Sunday to wake father up; for I believe men
sometimes need the society of others of their own age and past, as much
as children need childlife, and Martin stayed a month, and is promising
to return next spring. I wonder if the Sylvia Latham who has been
travelling with Miss Lavinia is any kin of the Lathams who are building
the great colonial home above the Jenks-Smiths. I have never seen any of
the family except Mrs. Latham, a tall, colourless blonde, who reminds one
of a handsome unlit lamp. She seems to be superintending the work by
coming up now and then, and I met her at the butcher's where she was
buying sweetbreads--"a trifle for luncheon." Accusation No. 1, against
the Whirlpoolers: Since their advent sweetbreads have risen from two
pairs for a quarter, and "thank you kindly for taking them off our
hands," to fifty cents to a dollar a "set." We no longer care for
sweetbreads!

* * * * *

I was therefore amused, but no longer surprised, at the exaggerated way
in which the childless Lady of the Bluffs,--her step-daughter having ten
years back made a foolish foreign marriage,--gave me her views upon the
drawbacks of the daughters of her world, when she made me, on her return
from a European trip, a visit upon the twins' first birthday,--bearing,
with her usually reckless generosity, a pair of costly gold apostle
spoons, as she said, "to cut their teeth on." I admired, but frugally
popped them into the applewood treasure chests that father has had made
for the boys from the "mother tree," that was finally laid low by a
tornado the winter of their birth and is now succeeded by a younger one
of Richard's choice.

"My dear woman," she gasped, turning my face toward the light and
dropping into a chair at the same time, "how well you look; not a bit
upset by the double dose and sitting up nights and all that. But then,
maybe, they sleep and you haven't; for it's always the unexpected and
unusual that happens in your case, as this proves. But then, they are
boys, and that's everything nowadays, the way society's going, especially
to people like you, whose husband's trade, though pretty, is too open and
above-board to be a well-paying one, and yet you're thoroughbreds
underneath." (Poor vulgar soul, she didn't in the least realize how I
might take her stricture any more than she saw my desire to laugh.)

"Of course here and there a girl in society does turn out well and rides
an elephant or a coronet,--of course I mean wears a coronet,--though ten
to one it jams the hairpins into her head, but mostly daughters are
regular hornets,--that is, if you're ambitious and mean to keep in
society. Of course you're not in it, and, being comfortably poor, so to
speak, might be content to see your girls marry their best chance, even
if it wasn't worth much a year, and settle down to babies and minding
their own business; but then they mightn't agree to that, and where would
you and Evan be?

"This nice old house and garden of yours wouldn't hold 'em after they got
through with dolls, and some girls don't even have any doll-days now. It
would be town and travel and change, and you haven't got the price of
that between you all, and to keep this going, too. You'd have to go to
N'York, for a couple of months at least, to a hotel, and what would that
Evan of yours do trailing round to dances? For you're not built for it,
though I did once think you'd be a go in society with that innocent-wise
way, and your nose in the air, when you don't like people, would pass for
family pride. I'd wager soon, in a few years, he'd stop picking
boutonnieres in the garden every morning and sailing down to that 8:15
train as cool as if he owned time, if those boys were girls! Though if
Jenks-Smith gets the Bluff Colony he's planned under way next spring,
there'll soon be some riding and golfing men hereabouts that'll shake
things up a bit,--bridge whist, poker, and perhaps red and black to help
out in the between-seasons." (I little thought then what this colony and
shaking would come to mean.)

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