Part 8

This put a new face on the matter. Instead of going to New York as a decrepit, friendless villager, imploring the pity of an old acquaintance, on whom her only claim was old acquaintanceship, she was offered a chance to float in on her as a bearer of rich gifts. She climbed evenly and thought of the Three Wise Men.

“I’d go there as a kind of a Mrs. Magi then?”

“Yes! Exactly! And I guess she’d treat you like a grand duchess, or something.”

“Oh, no, I don’t see how I could,” Momma sighed, slumping again, too deeply dejected to reach out and pluck the golden apple.

But Poppa had more insight than anyone suspected, and he had caught the glint of interest in Momma’s eye. It was the first sparkle he had seen there for weeks, and, though it had been quenched at once, it emboldened him to tyranny. He got to his feet and left the house with a maddening mysteriousness.

He was inspired to the amazing audacity of calling Mr. Killip on the long-distance telephone. He went to the hotel so that Momma could not interrupt him. When he had his New York victim by the ear he told him the whole story, and Killip, who was still human though a New Yorker, was as effusive in welcoming Momma as in accepting Poppa’s additional offer of money enough to stoke the stoker project to a hearty glow.

Poppa went back and told Momma what he had done, and told her to pack up. Her next obstacle was:

“But I got no clo’es here. I’ll have to go home and pack, and I just ain’t got the strength.”

“You got no clothes at home either,” Hattie put in. “You can go downtown with me and get you some decent things. You can’t go to New York looking like an old farmer.”

* * * * *

This was the wrong note. Momma broke her moorings again.

“I told you you was ashamed of me. I’m not fit to be seen in Terra Hut, let alone in New York. I’m simply not going to New York to make an exhabition of myself and make Ellar Killip turn up her nose at me.”

This battle had lasted only a few hours longer when a telegram arrived from Ella herself:

_Overjoyed dearest Mattie to learn that you will visit New York though greatly distressed to learn of your indisposition you must come to us of course just let me know the train and I will meet you whatever the hour. I know Dr. Courtneidge very well and he is an old darling. Love to you and your husband from us both._ ELLA.

The gracious warmth of this brought tears to the eyes of the poor derelict, but she masked her sniffle in a sniff.

“Where’d she learn all those swell words?”

Hattie told her mother, as usual, that she ought to be ashamed of herself, and Momma was.

She prolonged her resistance to the point where Poppa grew desperate enough to groan.

“Well, you do as you’re a mind to. Seein’ you’re strong enough to fight forever, you go home and run the business and I’ll go to the hospital my own self.”

“Run the business! That’s all you think of!” she retorted with a sublime non sequitur. “Put me on the cattle train and ship me off to the slaughter house. Ella still loves me, anyway, even if nobody else does, and she’ll see to it I get decently buried, and that’s all I got a right to expect.”

Poppa dashed out and bathed his hot head in cold water before he went to the ticket office. He nearly bit the head off the agent, just to show that he had some manhood left.

He was never quite the same man again after he got Momma on the train at last. He bade her a despondent farewell, feeling sure that he would never see her again. And, in a sense, he never did....

* * * * *

Going to the city for the first time in her life, especially at such a time in her life, was an adventure and a half for Momma.

In spite of the fact that she was advancing toward the knives of a surgeon who was her forlorn hope, she could not but feel a certain elation. She was experiencing what Victor Hugo called a “new shudder.”

She was almost more afraid of Ella Killip and her splendor than of the pancreatic specialist. She was fairly smothered with dread of facing the woman she had not seen since Ella was a gangling, noisy, small-town tomboy, all freckles and giggles and gawkiness.

She foresaw Ella as a sort of vast and glittering Queen Victoria, fattened on rich food and studded with jewels. She saw herself as a shabby farm wife whom Ella would probably give one glance and flee from with disdain.

When she reached New York at last, her first struggle was with a red-capped ruffian who tried to steal her valise. Her next struggle was with her terror of the meeting with Ella. If she had known how to get a train back to Carthage, she would have taken it. But the crowd hustled her up the platform and she lugged a soul heavier than her rusty hand bag.

No one had met her at the train, and she was morbid enough to hope that Ella had missed her. But inside the station she found a crowd held back by a rope, and paused to stare at the staring eyes.

She saw no one that suggested the Ella she had planned, but a tall slim creature, dressed like an actress, in glistening silk, came forward hesitantly. She looked young, and yet she didn’t. Her hair was hidden by a hat whose brim seemed to have been flourished by the impatient, whimsical stroke of a painter’s brush.

From this dressmaker’s model came a voice that startled the valise from Momma’s hand, for the voice came out of childhood, and it was the voice of Ella. It sang a new tune, but it was the old voice. It said timidly, tentatively: “Mattie? Is it you?”

Momma’s soft old knees caved in, and she sat on the valise as she whimpered: “This is me, but you’re never Ellar!”

“Oh, yes, I am, my dear,” said Ella with a good laugh as she hoisted Momma to her feet. “I’m the same old sixpence.”

“You look more like your own daughter, if you have one.”

“Oh, I have one--three, in fact. But--come along, you old dear.”

She nodded to a red cap, who took the valise and followed her as she led Momma through the station. Momma’s dazed eyes supposed they were taking a short cut through a cathedral.

The Killip limousine was marvelous, but she expected marvels. She was a trifle disappointed when she reached Ella’s home. She had expected to drive through a royal park to a palace. But she was put down at a house built jam in among a lot of other houses.

It was not half the size of Momma’s house and had no yard at all except a small patch at the back.

In place of a double row of stiff-necked butlers up a grand staircase, there was one very pleasant young man at the door and an awfully nice hired girl in cap and apron. Very friendly she was too, and helped Momma in the most folksy way up to her room.

* * * * *

Ella came along, and when the maid was sent for tea she petted Momma and stuffed a pillow in her back and then drew a chair close up and said: “Now, Mattie dear, tell me all about it. What on earth is the trouble, you poor soul?”

But Momma was so embarrassed by the numberless disparities between herself and this strange creature who had started life with even less advantage that she could not be at ease.

She was dazed by the brilliance of Ella, by her blithe yet haughty carriage, her young skin, slim deft hands, youthful alertness, her fashionable voice, her fashionable politeness.

She saw that Ella’s hair was white, now that her hat was off; but her hair was ironed and fluted and polished and dressed as for a fancy dress ball.

Momma summed up her bewildered homage, if it was homage, in one helpless query:

“What makes you powder your hair, Ella?”

Ella laughed aloud. A little of the old boisterousness broke through the years of control.

“As my boys would say: ‘Whaddaya mean, “powder my hair”?’ That’s my own poor old gray wool, damn it!”

Ella’s swear word even had a fashionable fillip! Momma had never sworn in her life, or, that is, hardly ever; certainly not with a smile. When she had needed profane words, she had used stupid old-womanish expletives.

But Ella’s casual objurgation broke the ice magically. There is nothing that clears the air of formality like a little damn.

Momma was so numb that it merely startled her from her torpor. She laughed the first laugh that had been shaken out of her dust bin of a soul for six weeks.

After that the two old women were themselves again, two girls who had parted and gone round the world two opposite ways and come together at last to exchange experiences. Their costumes and their dialects had changed with their travel, but their hearts were as of old.

Momma had to hear first of Ella’s amazing experiences. This desire itself was a miracle of change; she had already forgotten herself for a while.

Ella’s husband came home before Ella had finished her Arabian Nights’ Entertainment and he was pleasantly surprised and surprising. He had expected Mattie to be more ill than she was and he had not expected her to look at all like his own wife. He knew only too well how expensive Ella’s looks were and how different a life she led from the women of the old home town.

The dinner was simple but “awful tasty,” as Mattie proclaimed. She was astounded to find herself eating with relish. But the service was irresistible. The amiable gentleman who handed the plates around and took them away was so solicitous about suggesting to her the best morsels that she could not insult him by refusing anything or break his heart by leaving an untouched plate for him to carry away.

Sam Killip was eager to know about all the friends and enemies of his youth and remembered so well the people and the nooks and the scraps of those good old days that the dinner went by like a wedding feast.

Fortunately the Killip children were away at schools and house parties and Momma was not subjected to the inspection of a generation that found even Ella Killip old-fashioned and conservative. When Ella said she had given up trying to keep up with the youngsters, Momma laughed her to scorn with a quaint phrase: “Oh, yes, to hear you tell it!”

After dinner Sam had a meeting of some charitable board, and Ella and Mattie settled down for a confab. Ella neglected to mention that she had sent her opera box to friends of hers, and she made no allusion to the fact that it was the first performance of a new rôle for Caruso, and she would have given an eyetooth to hear him.

She spread Momma out on what she called a chaise longue. Momma said it was the only comfortable sofa she’d ever laid on and she was going to have one like it if it busted Poppa. Momma was already planning for the future! And thinking of it in terms of comfort!

She was reluctant to discuss her famous illness, but Ella insisted on knowing the worst.

“Well, it simply baffled all the doctors,” Momma said in a tone not altogether boastless. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a kind of gener’l gone-ness. I got no heart for anything--no appatite for my vittles, no int’rest in the house or church work or the heathen or the fambly. I don’t want to go to bed nights and I don’t want to get up mornings. Always been a fiend on housekeepin’, but I don’t much care now whether things are in their place or not. Dust don’t worry me like it used to. I’m all dusty myself. No special aches or pains, but I just don’t feel good anywheres.

“Want to cry all the time and I don’t know why. Hate to go outdoors and hate to stay in. Poppa drives me nearly crazy with everything he does and says, but I drive myself crazier still. I ain’t friends with myself or anybody. Want to die and can’t bear the thought of that either.

“It’s just a kind of all wrongness everywhere, if you can make anything out of that.”

To her amazement, Ella said: “I know just how you feel and you’ve come to the right place to be cured.”

* * * * *

It was not altogether pleasant to have Ella claim a share in Momma’s wonderful disease and to speak so off-handedly of its cure. But instead of rebuking Ella for presuming and for minimizing the crisis, Momma felt relieved and before long she was yawning nobly and confessing that she could not keep her eyes open. Ella went to her room with her and saw her bestowed, then kissed her good night and left her. Momma noted that her valise had been unpacked, her bed opened, her nightgown and slippers laid out, a water bottle set by the reading lamp on a little table by the bedhead, and a dozen little thoughtfulnesses executed in her behalf.

When she was in her old nightgown, which was modeled on the potato-bag pattern, and had said her prayers, she crept into the disgracefully fine linen sheets and slept in luxurious oblivion for nine good hours.

She did not know that Ella had sneaked into her own room, dressed swiftly, and stolen out to the opera, where she stood up, and that she went to a supper and there danced a while before she sneaked home.

Momma had her breakfast in bed at Ella’s previous order and wandered about the house for hours before Ella had rung for her breakfast and sent for Momma.

Ella was a sight. She looked like one of those immor’l French kings’ favorites. She had on a lace boudoir cap and a silk nightgown, very deckolett, and a “breakfast jacket” (of all things!) of satin and lace.

She did look handsome. Momma had always hated to have even Poppa see her before breakfast. She began to be a little eager for her cure.

“When do I go to see this Dr. Courtneidge?”

Ella hesitated a moment, then spoke with a certain sternness:

“There are two or three things that have to be done first, Mattie dear. I’m always a beast up till noon, so you mustn’t be surprised if I’m brutally frank now. Dr. Courtneidge is a very fussy and snappy old gentleman. He has only swells for patients and he’s very particular.”

“Don’t he treat poor folks at tall?” Momma gasped.

“Oh, yes, he has free clinics and hospitals and all that and does half his work for nothing. That’s why he’s so particular with his pay patients. You’ve got to go through a course of sprouts and buy some things or you’ll never get near him.

“His reception room is full of people, and you’d feel terribly embarrassed to wait there till he gets round. So you really must have some of this year’s clothes and a 1920 hat. And your hair--you mustn’t be offended, Mattie, dear, but really your hair and your skin! He’d give you one glance and send you away without an examination even. You see, I know him.

“And then the examination, Mattie dear--well, you know what that’s like. And in the hospital--well! I saw the nightgown laid out on your pillow and that sort of thing would simply frighten the doctor to death. He really couldn’t operate.”

“I’m not looking to marry the old fool,” Momma mumbled. “I got one husband a’ready.”

“I know, my dear Mattie, but your one husband put you in my charge and I’m going to see you through. My masseuse is coming to my house this morning. She’s downstairs now, I imagine, and I’m going to have her begin on you. When she’s finished, my hairdresser, François, will get to work on that dear old poll of yours and take off about forty years of age. Then we’ll have lunch and go shopping.”

Momma was choked with wrath, but Ella would neither fight nor plead. She just bullied her with laughter, and Momma, feeling like a convict unjustly imprisoned, set her jaws and resolved to go through with the sentence. She revolted, however, at the insolence of the masseuse--and her exclamations of horror at the neglect of a “skin that had never really been cleaned.”

But the wretch silenced Momma’s indignation with the indignity of smeared cold cream, and smothered her with hot towels and cold towels, and with lotions of every odor and smart.

Momma would not speak to her as she left, but when she scowled at the mirror, she gazed at the new face aghast it flung back at her. The dull parchment of her skin had become a living integument with a kind of dreamy radiance alive in it.

Momma felt bewitched. She would have sworn that the image in the looking-glass smiled first at her and nodded, compelling her to smile back and nod in return. She hung there fascinated, understanding a little of what Narcissus felt when he looked first in the pool.

Then a quiet Frenchman was shown in. He overawed Momma by his dignity and his dexterity. She dared not slap his face when he spoke of her hair as a crime. He called it a “cream,” but she understood his shoulders.

And then he attacked her poor head with ferocious familiarity. If Poppa had ever caught him, and her, he’d certainly have shot them both.

Momma was in for it, however, and she actually permitted this strange man, this appalling foreigner, to take down her hair, drench it, soap it, souse her head in water, pour curious smelly things over her scalp, and rinse them out, massage her occiput, comb and pull and torture and iron her hair and dress it on top of her astounded skull in what he called a “French twist.” She spent a whole hour of “feeling like a shirt in a steam laundry,” as she afterward expressed it. Then he brandished before her a mirror and uttered a triumphant cry of something that sounded like:

“Ah, my damn, walla, walla!”

Momma blushed vermilion and felt as immoral as she looked. Yet not at all remorseful, somehow. Fortunately Franswa dashed out to prepare the hair of Ella, leaving Momma to ponder her new face and her new hair with a new soul.

She felt that, in Hattie’s formula, she ought to be ashamed of herself, but, to save her immortal being, she could not.

Only one thing she was sure of, and that was that that head and that hair did not belong on top of that old dress of hers. Her one “best dress” was the one worst dress she had ever seen.

When at length she saw Ella, Ella screamed with delight at the transformation and said something that rimed:

_Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be._

The afternoon was spent in shopping for what Ella called “landjerree.”

Until she had the proper underpinnings, Ella simply refused to buy Mattie the new dress and hat she was already clamoring for.

The amount of Poppa’s money that Ella spent on silken shamelessness dazed Momma, but Ella would not be checked, and Momma was too childishly interested in the new doll rags to make more than a show of resistance.

Ella said: “If your husband has money enough to waste ten thousand dollars on my husband’s foolish investments, he has money enough to buy you some decent underclothes.”

“Did you say ‘decent’?” was Momma’s feeble disclaimer, but she barely muttered it.

That night, on a plea of going to bed early, Momma locked herself in her room and tried on the new things. She nearly died of palpitation of the heart when she stood up in silk stockings, satin mules, and in a new streamline corset that gave her a figure! A heroic figure indeed, but a shape, a contour, that was not altogether an insult to the Creator who fashioned it. Momma had to give it a religious significance to live through it.

* * * * *

And why not? What instinct is more deeply implanted in womanhood than the immemorial insatiable lust for pretty things? It has resisted the immemorial insatiable lust of preachers and satirists for insulting it, of economists and hardworking men for denouncing it. It has been called every contemptuous and cruel name in every language. Laws have been made against it innumerably, in vain. And it has flourished as unconquerably as violets in moss, as perfume in hyacinths, as bright plumage in birds, and ornate sunsets in western skies.

The weavers of silk and the needlers of laces, the designers of gowns and of hats have kept up their beautiful careers despite the thunders of self-styled virtue and the slanders of all times.

Poets and prosers and painters who have turned less beautiful lines and have married less beautiful colors, and the critics who have celebrated their achievements, have looked down with disdain on those who have devoted their inspirations and their toil to the creation of felicitous decorations for the living body.

But the women have known better. They never have despised the artists who improved them and enhanced them; and by hook or by crook they have kept those artists alive and blessed them with fame.

And again why not? The pietists and the Puritans who cannot forgive women for trying to be beautiful, do they not belie their own gods in their own barbaric praise of ugliness?

“O Justice, what crimes are committed in thy name!” And, O Beauty, what crimes in thine! Yet beauty shall not die nor the love of ornament, and those who hate them cannot prove their right to cast a stone. Frightful extravagances and cruelties are the result of the hunger for beauty and the feeding of that appetite, but this is true of every other religion and law and ideal.

If everybody who dressed plainly and lived without luxury, gave all he saved or she did not spend to the poor, their miserliness might be justified, but everybody knows that this is not so.

Beauty is generous. She who is pleased with herself is already hospitable, and until the millennium is here those who have not the energy or the wile to get fine clothes and wear them well may content themselves as best they can by watching the well-bedecked go by.

And who is he so mean of soul that he would decree the extinction of the custom women have of making themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible? And what benefits would the vandal confer on bedulled mankind?

Momma at least at last was not of that humor. She had become a girl again at heart. She could never be again the gracile nymph who had turned the heads of Carthage swains with her flesh of apple-blossom hue, her fleecy hair in its ribbons, and her gay body in its winsome fabrics.