Cruelties

== CRUELTIES ==
=== By Edwina Babcock ===
From  Harper’s Magazine 1918, 
The bell tinkled as Mrs. Tyarck entered the
little shop. She looked about her and smiled pityingly. The dim cases and
counters were in dusty disarray, some cards of needlework had tumbled to the
floor, a drawer showing a wrinkled jumble of tissue-paper patterns caught the
last rays of the setting sun.
“Of all the sights!” was Mrs. Tyarck’s
comment. “She needs some one to help her. She needs new taste. Them buttons,
now, who’d buy ’em? They belong to the year one.”
Scornfully the shopper eyed the shelves
where were boxes of buttons dating back to periods of red and black glass.
There were transparent buttons with lions crouching within; there were bronze
buttons with Japanese ladies smiling against gay parasols; speckled buttons
with snow, hail, and planetary disturbances occurring within their circumscribed
limits, and large mourning buttons with white lilies drooping upon their hard
surfaces. Each box had a sample button sewn on its cover, and these sample
buttons, like eyes of a bygone century, glimmered watchfully.
Mrs. Tyarck penetrated a screen of
raw-colored worsteds suspended in fat hanks from a sort of clothes-line
stretched above the counter. She sought the proprietor of the little shop. In
the back of the store, barricaded by a hodge-podge of scattered merchandise,
was a door leading to a private room. Toward this door she directed a
commanding voice:
“Frenzy! Frenzy Giddings! How long I got to
wait here?”
There was an apologetic stir in the back
room, the genteel click of a spoon in a saucer, soft hurried creakings, then a
bony hand pushed back a faded curtain. Miss Frances Giddings, known among her
acquaintances as “Frenzy,” peered from the privacy of her kitchen into the
uncertainties of the shop.
“I shall be with you presently.”
When the tall figure finally emerged, her
feet shuffled in carpet-slippered indecision, her glasses glimmered
irresolutely. In another woman there might have been, out of recognition of
Mrs. Tyarck’s impatience, bustling haste and nervous dispatch. In Miss Frenzy
Giddings there was merely slow, gentle concern.
“I am at a loss to explain my un-readiness,”
said the punctilious, cracked voice. “Usually on prayer-meeting nights I am, if
anything, in advance of the hour, but to-night I regret exceedingly that,
without realizing the extent of time, I became over-absorbed in the anxieties
of my garden. Now select the article you desire and I will endeavor to make amends.”
“What ails your garden?” asked Mrs. Tyarck,
carelessly adding, “I come in for some new kitchen toweling; that last I got
down to the other store was sleazy.”
Miss Frenzy, with careful inefficiency,
lifted down and arranged on a dusty counter three bolts of toweling. With
deliberation as unconscious as it was accustomed, she unwrapped the three, the
cracked voice explaining, “The perturbation to which I allude is the
extraordinary claims made upon me by rose-worms.”
Mrs. Tyarck, peering in the dim light,
carefully examined the toweling. She pulled a few threads from one bolt and,
with the air of one who protects herself against systematic fraud, proceeded
ostentatiously to chew them.
“This here toweling gone up any?” The
threads of the assayed linen still lingered on her thin lips as she decided.
“If it’s the same price it was, I’ll take two yards.” Then, returning to the
question of lesser importance, “Well, I can’t help you none with them worms
until you tell me whether they’re chewers or suckers.”
Miss Frenzy, putting on a second pair of
glasses over those she habitually wore, now essayed the project of cutting off
the two yards of toweling.
“Chewers or—er—ahem, suckers? I really
cannot say. Shall you be astonished at my negligence when I tell you that I
have not yet taken the measures to determine whether these worms are, as you so
grotesquely term them, chewers or—er—ahem, suckers?”
Mrs. Tyarck laughed sarcastically. “For
Heaven’s sake, Frenzy Giddings! it’s a wonder to me you know  anything , the time you take with your words!
You ain’t acquainted with your own stock, I see, for here you’ve cut me off two
yards of the twenty-cent when I asked for the ten-cent. Well, it’s your
mistake, so I’ll take it as if ’t wuz what I’m payin’ for; but look here,
Frenzy, you’ve no call to be wool-gatherin’  your  time
of life.”
The rough criticism had no effect upon the
native elegance of the old shopkeeper. She smiled at Mrs. Tyarck’s outburst
with an air of polite, if detached, sympathy. Dropping her scissors, she turned
to the window, poking her head between hanging flannel nightgowns to remark:
“Pleasant weather and many taking advantage
of it; were I not occupied I, too, should promenade.”
Mrs. Tyarck meanwhile creaked about the
little store on a tour of inspection. Some especially frivolous sets of “Hair
Goods” underwent her instant repudiation. “I wear my own, thank God!” she
exclaimed, adding, “it’s good enough for Tyarck and me.” Picking up a cluster
of children’s handkerchiefs, she carried them to the window for more complete condemnation,
muttering: “Ark-animals and butterflies! Now what’s all  that  foolishness got to do with the nose?” As Mrs.
Tyarck stood apostrophizing the handkerchiefs there was a whir outside the
store, the toot of a claxon, a girl’s excited laugh, the flash of a scarlet
jersey and tam-o’-shanter. The two women, lowering their heads after the furtive
fashion that obtains in country districts, took the thing in. They stared after
the automobile.
“Pleasure-riding, I see,” remarked the
near-sighted Miss Frenzy. “Young folks appreciate the automobiles; the extreme
velocity seems peculiarly to gratify their fancy!”
Mrs. Tyarck pursed up her lips; she looked
with narrow speculation after the pair, her thin face hardening.
“Them two is going out to the Forked Road
Supper House,” she prophesied. “No daughter of mine wouldn’t be allowed to set
foot in that place. Well, you’re lookin’ at two of a kind. That red sweater of
hern won’t help her none.”
Miss Frenzy, now sorting change in slow
pensiveness, demurred. “She is young,” she remarked. “She entered the store
recently for some scarlet wool for that very jersey” (Miss Frenzy was at pains
to avoid the word “sweater”), “and I observed her young cheeks—quite like
peaches, yes,” insisted Miss Frenzy, sentimentally, “quite like peaches—I could
wish that she should be careful of her complexion and not ride too extensively
in the cold air.”
“There’s more to be thought of than
complexions, these days,” said the other woman, coldly. There was relentless
judgment in her face, but she went on: “Well, ’tain’t meetin’-time yet. Say I
step back and take a look at them worms ’n’ see ef there’s anything I can
recommend.”
The thin figure of the shopkeeper preceding
her, and Mrs. Tyarck casting looks of disparagement on all she passed, the two
took their way into the little garden. Here, enclosed by high palings, shut
away from everything but sun and air, was Miss Frenzy’s kingdom, and here there
came a sudden change in her manner. She did not lose the careful elegance of
the polite shopkeeper, but into gesture and voice crept an authority, the
subtle sense of ownership and power invariably felt by those who own a bit of
land, who can make things grow.
“Step judiciously,” she admonished her
visitor; “my cucumber-frames are somewhat eliminated by the tall verdure: here
and there I have set out new plants. I should deplore having my arrangements
disturbed.”
Mrs. Tyarck sniffed. “You and your garden!”
she ejaculated; but she resolutely made her way, eyes squinting with curiosity.
Settling her hat, whose black wing stuck out with a virtuous swagger, Mrs.
Tyarck gave herself all the married woman’s amusement over the puttering concerns
of a spinster.
Soon, however, as the two women stole
farther into the dense square of growing things, the envy of the natural
flower-lover crept into her sharp comments. “My!” she said, jealously—“my!
ain’t your white duchy doin’ good? Say, look at them gooseberries! I suspect
you don’t have no particular use for ’em?” It was said of Mrs. Tyarck that she
was skilful at paving the way for gifts of any kind. She made this last
suggestion with a hard, conscious laugh.
All around the little garden was a fence
like the high fences in 
suburbs. Close against it honeysuckle poured saffron cascades, a mulberry-tree
showed the beginning of conical fruitage. Blackberry vines sprayed white stars
over a sunny bit of stone wall. Amid a patch of feathery grasses swayed the
prim carillons of canterbury-bells; soft gaieties of sweet-williams and phlox
were massed against the silvery weather-boarding of Miss Frenzy’s kitchen. As
the two women, skirts held high, paused in front of the white-rose bush the
indefatigability of the chewers and suckers was revealed. Already thousands of
young rose leaves were eaten to the green framework. Miss Frenzy, with a sudden
exclamation, bent to a branch on which were clusters of dainty buds.
“Ah-ah!  Millions! ” she whispered. Then, tremulously
defying the worms: “ No, no, no! How dare you? Hi, hi, hi!  there’s another! Ugh! Look here! Mercy! See
that spray!”
With every ejaculation, shudderingly
emitted, the bony hand went out like lightning, plucked something gingerly from
a leaf, gave it a swift, vindictive pinch, and abhorrently tossed it away.
“That’s right,” nodded Mrs. Tyarck.
“Squeeze ’em and heave ’em—it’s about all you can do. They’ll try to take
advantage of you every time! There’s no gratitude in worms! They ain’t
pertikler. It don’t mean nothing to them that roses is pretty or grows good.
They want to eat. Squeeze ’em and heave ’em! It’s all you can do!”
There was a distant tinkle of the store
bell. Miss Frenzy, absorbed in her daily horror, did not hear this. “Ugh! Ugh!”
she was moaning. Again the long hand went out in a capturing gesture.
“There—there! I told you so; quantities more,  quantities ! Yet last night I was under the impression
that I had disposed of the greater majority.”
Mrs. Tyarck’s attention was diverted from
the rose-worms and concentrated on the deserted shop. “I heard the bell,”
warned that accurate lady. Then, reprovingly: “Don’t you never have any one to
keep store when you’re out here? You’ll lose custom, Frenzy. What’s more, if you
ain’t careful, you’ll lose stock. Ivy Corners ain’t what it used to be; there’s
them Eastern peddlers that walks around as big as life, and speakin’ English to
fool everybody; and now, with the war and all, every other person you see is a
German spy.”
As she spoke a large form appeared in the
back doorway of Miss Frenzy’s shop and a primly dressed woman entered the
garden. She had a curiously large and blank face. She wore a mannishly made
suit of slate-gray, wiry material, and her hat had two large pins of green
which, inserted in front, glittered high on her forehead like bulbous,
misplaced eyes. This lady carried a netted catch-all distended with many knobby
parcels and a bundle of tracts. As she saw the two in the garden she stretched
her formless mouth over the white smile of recently installed porcelain, but the
long reaches of her face had no radiance. The lady was, however, furnished with
a curious catarrhal hawking which she used parenthetically, like comment. What
she now had to say she prefaced with this juridic hawking.
“Well, there ain’t no responsibility here,
I see! Store door open, nobody around! Them two young ones of Smedge’s lookin’
in at the things, rubbin’ their dirty hands all over the glass case, choosin’
what’s their favorite dry-goods! All I can say is, Frenzy, that either you
trust yourself too much or you expect that Serapham and Cherabum is going to keep
store for you.”
Mrs. Tyarck turned as to a kindred spirit,
remarking, with a contemptuous wink: “Frenzy’s rose-worms is on her mind. Seems
she’s overrun with ’em.”
Mrs. Capron, the newcomer, strode up the
little path to the scene of action, but at the sharp exclamation of Miss Frenzy
she halted.
“Have a care!” said the gaunt shopkeeper,
authoritatively. She waved a bony hand in ceremonious warning. “I should have
warned you before,” explained Miss Frenzy, “but the impediment in your way is
my cat-trap. It would seem that I am systematically pestered with marauding
cats. The annoyance continuing for some time, I am obliged to originate devices
that curtail their penetrations.”
Mrs. Capron, indignantly whisking her skirt
away from a strange-looking arrangement of corset steels and barrel staves connected
by wires, strode into some deep grass, then gave vent to a majestic hawk of displeasure:
“What’s this I got on my shoes? Fly-paper?
For the land’s sake! Now how in the name of Job do I get that off?”
Mrs. Tyarck, ingratiatingly perturbed, came
to the rescue of her friend; the two wrestled with adhesive bits of paper, but
certain fragments, affected by contact, fulfilled their utmost prerogative and
were not detachable. When they were finally prevailed upon to leave the shoe of
Mrs. Capron, they stuck with surprising pertinacity to the glove of her friend.
The outcries of the two ladies were full of disgust and criticism.
“Well, Frenzy Giddings! You need a man in
here! Some one to clean up after you. All this old paper ’n’ stuff around! It’s
a wonder you don’t get into it yourself, but then  you  know where to step,” they said, grudgingly.
Miss Frenzy hardly heard them; she was
still peering carefully under the leaves and around the many clusters of
babyish rosebuds. “Ah-ah!” she was still saying, shudderingly. Out went her
hand with the same abhorrent gesture. “After all my watchfulness! Another, and
another!”
Mrs. Capron, indignant over this
indifference to her fly-paper discomfort, now sought recognition of the damages
she had sustained:
“I dun’no’ will this plaguey stuff ever
come off my mohair! Well, I’ll never set foot in  here  again! Say, Frenzy, I can send up one of my boys
to-morrow and he’ll clean up for you, fly-paper and all, for ten cents.”
For a moment Miss Frenzy hesitated. She
stood tall and sheltering over the rose-bush, the little shawl thrown over her
shoulders lifted in the breeze. She looked something like a gray moth: her arms
long and thin like antennæ, her spectacled eyes, gave her a moth’s fateful look
of flutter and blindness before light and scorching flame.
“You are most kind, but”—with a discouraged
sigh—“it cannot be done.”
“It can’t be done?” hawked Mrs. Capron.
Mrs. Tyarck turned a sharp look of
disapproval around the little garden, saying in a low tone, “It’s reel sloven
in here; she’d ought to do something for it.”
“Yes,” insisted Mrs. Capron, “you want
cleaning up in here; that’s what. That seedy grass! Them ragged vines! Your
flowers overrun you—and that there fly-paper—”
Miss Frenzy sought to change the subject.
With an air of obstinacy that sat curiously upon her, she directed the
attention of her visitors to a young tree shooting up in green assurance.
“My mystery,” she announced, with gentle
archness. “Not planted by human hands. Undoubtedly a seed dropped by a bird in flight.
A fruit-tree, I suspect—possibly cherry, but whether wild or of the domestic
species remains to be seen; only the fruit will solve the enigma.”
Mrs. Capron and Mrs. Tyarck regarded the
little tree carelessly. “Wild,” they pronounced as one woman, adding: “Wild
cherry. When it’s big, it will dirty your yard something fearful.”
“I had a friend,” related Mrs. Tyarck. “Her
husband was a Mason. Seems she had a wild cherry-tree into her yard and she
could never lay out a piece of light goods for bleachin’ without fear of
stains, and then the flies and the sparrers racketin’ around all summer—why, it
nearly druv her crazy!”
Miss Frenzy ignored these comments. “My
mystery,” she repeated, with reflecting eyes. “The seed dropped by a bird in
flight. Only the fruit will solve the enigma.” With an air of ceremonious
explanation, Miss Giddings turned to the two visitors. “I should acquaint you,”
she remarked in soft courtesy, “with the fact that, much as I regret the necessity
of the fly-paper, it is, as you might say,  calculated .”
“Calculated!” With a gasp Mrs. Tyarck took
off and began to polish her glasses; she kept two hard little eyes fixed on the
speaker.
Mrs. Capron forgot to hawk. “ Calculated? ”
“It is to arrest the depredations of ants,”
confessed Miss Frenzy. She looked from one to the other with great dignity,
supplementing: “I have long suffered greatly from the onslaughts of ants, both
red and black. With the fly-paper, judiciously placed, I have hoped to curtail
their activities.”
It had grown a little grayer of twilight;
the two visitors, trapped as it were within the high board enclosures, fenced
all about with sweeps of tangled vine, the pale glimmering of ghostly blossoms,
felt uncomfortable. With slow suspicion they moved away from one so frankly the
author of gin and pitfall; from one who could so calmly admit that bits of
fly-paper dribbling about her garden paths were “calculated.” “Who was it,”
whispered Mrs. Tyarck, darkly—“who was it once said that Frenzy was sort of
odd?” The two visitors moved instinctively toward a way of exit. With one more
sigh Miss Frenzy reluctantly followed them. As they cast about in their minds
for means of final reproof, she paused at the kitchen door. There, where a
rain-barrel stood under a leader, was a bit of soap in a flower-pot saucer;
seizing it, the old shopkeeper began vigorously washing her hands.
“Five waters,” sighed Miss Frenzy—“five
waters, before I can feel that my hands are in any degree cleansed!”
The others stood watching her. Instantly
they seized the opportunity.
“Well, I should think so.” Mrs. Capron
hawked her superior virtue. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Frenzy. Nice work
indeed you’ve been doin’ with them hands! Murderin’ and slayin’! Why can’t you
live and let live (unless, of course, it’s rats or mosquitoes)? Now you go and
get the blood of them innercent worms on your shoulders! Why couldn’t you let ’em
go on feedin’ where their Creator wanted ’em to feed?”
They looked at her.
“All them different cruelties,” they
commented—“fly-paper to track them ignorant ants onto, and that there trap for
cats.... Well, you got more spots onto your soul than soap can take off. ‘Thou
shalt not kill,’ it says. Why”—this burst of feeling from Mrs. Tyarck—“why,
it’s all I can do to set foot on a spider!”
“And look at me with wasps!” exclaimed Mrs.
Capron. “How many wasps I’ve let go for their enjoyment of life, even though,
for all I know, next thing they might sting me or one of mine.”
Mrs. Capron, getting warm and virtuous, sat
down in the kitchen doorway. Opening the netted catchall, she took out
therefrom a bundle of tracts. This lady was the important local officer of many
humanitarian societies and lost no opportunity to improve the morale of her
community. The tract she selected for Miss Frenzy was of an impressive blue
with the title, “Deal Tenderly with the Humble Animals that Cannot Speak.”
“Now think of them ants,” exhorted Mrs.
Capron. She looked hard at Miss Frenzy Giddings. “Think of them thoughtless
ants runnin’ onto that fly-paper and not able to call out to the others what’s
happened to ’em!”
“You’re like me,” said Mrs. Tyarck. Taking
her handkerchief, she wet it in the rain-barrel and obsequiously attempted to
rub off a slight fly-paper stickiness still on the mohair of her friend.
“You’re like me. I’m that tender-hearted I can’t even boil a lobster. I was so
from a child. Come time the kettle boils it’s Tyarck always has to put the lobster
in—me all of a tremble!”
“And flies,” suggested Mrs. Capron—“there’s
a many thinks that flies has got souls (though not the Board of Health). But
even flies—look at me! I keep sugar and molasses for ’em in their own saucer,
and if they come to their last end that way, why, they must die likin’ it, and
it’s what they chose for theirselves.”
Mrs. Capron drew the string of her netted
catchall tight. She hawked, drew her upper lip down over the lower, and
buttoned up the tight-fitting coat of mohair.
“Them cruelties of yourn will haunt you,
Frenzy,” summed up both ladies; “there’s verses in the Bible for just such
things,” exclaimed the visitors together; then they all went in, the two
friends turning their attention to Miss Giddings’s household arrangements,
offering her advice and counsel as to her clothes and the management of her
kitchen range.
There were no more words about the
cruelties except that that night in the long, wandering prayer in which Mrs.
Capron, as leader of the meeting, had ample opportunity to score against any
one whom she fancied delinquent, or against whom she had a private grudge, she
inserted into her petition:
“And from all needless cruelties, keep us,
O Lord. The bird that hops onto our sill”—Mrs. Capron did not specify whether
sparrow or nightingale, but she implored fervently—“help us to remember it’s
one of Thy birds and set no snare for it, and the—er—the innercent creepin’ things
mindin’ their own business and praisin’ Thee—defend ’em from our impident
croolties ... help us to live and let live and refrain from all light-minded
killin’ and irreligious trap-settin’.”
Little Johnnie Tyarck, sitting big-eared
and thin-faced alongside of his mother’s angular orisons, rubbed puzzled eyes.
Johnnie wondered if Mrs. Capron, always severe in her attitude toward boys,
could possibly have learned about those twenty-five hop-toads he had corralled
in a sewer-pipe, carefully stopping up the ends of the pipe with mud and stones.
The interned hop-toads had haunted Johnnie—and yet—and yet— Well, there was
something insolent and forthputting about hop-toads—they breathed with their
stomachs, had morose mouths, and proved themselves crassly superfluous and
useless in the general scheme. Some one, it had seemed to Johnnie, should
discipline hop-toads.
Behind Johnnie’s wispy little head was the
grizzled one of Mr. Bloomby, the ragman. Mr. Bloomby, it was understood, was
invariably haled to prayer-meeting by Mrs. Bloomby, a person of extreme virtue.
As Mrs. Capron’s prayer to be defended from
cruelties proceeded, Mr. Bloomby became rather hot under the celluloid collar
he had extracted from recent collections of rags—he wondered if it could have
possibly got round that he had once built a fire, a small but provocative fire,
under a recalcitrant mule in order to persuade the mule to draw a load which
he, Mr. Bloomby, deemed entirely adapted to the mule’s capacity. Mr. Bloomby
mentally confronted the inexperienced Supreme Being with data as to mules and
the way a mule would try to get even with you.
But there was one person on whom Mrs.
Capron’s prayer made little, if any, impression. Miss Frances Giddings bowed
her sallow face into her wobbly, gloved hand. “Five waters must I pass my hands
through, O Lord,” she prayed, “but never will I neglect Thy roses!” Into her
mind swept clouds of fresh, heavenly bloom. With a dedication to beauty that
she did not know was pagan, she lost herself in the dream of eternal gardening.
Nevertheless, the story of Frances
Giddings’s “cruelties” got about. There was much discussion over the dark
revelations made by Mrs. Capron and Mrs. Tyarck. Morning wrappers conferred in
basements; lead-wrapped crimps met in cellars; in church there were eyeglasses
that glittered judgment. Just how was the 
to look upon a person whose backyard was full of contraptions—this one for
cats, that one for locusts; pitfalls for inquiring chickens, fly-paper for
migrating ants! Under the amazing elasticity of village imagination it was
finally evolved and told with indrawn breath that there had been cruelty like that
“in the family.” A Giddings, ancestor of Miss , forgotten till now, but
revamped for especial significance, was said to have been “dog-catcher,” and in
this governmental disguise to have inflicted incredible torments upon the stray
animals of his impounding. Then came horrified descriptions of Miss Frenzy,
head tied up, a flaming wad of newspaper on a broom, attacking the diaphanous
intrenchments of caterpillars. These recitals, all working up to an hysterical
crescendo, were pounded like so many coffin-nails in the final burial of a shy,
gentle personality. Little by little the impression grew stronger that Miss
Frenzy, though still out of jail, was both cruel and “queer,” and between these
judgments and her sensitive appreciation of them, the tall, stooping figure was
seen less and less among intimate gatherings of Ivy Corners.
Months passed before another name came up
for discussion; this time it was the name of the girl in the scarlet cap and
sweater; a poor enough little country name; a name hardly destined for tragedy,
but when the older townswomen had finished with it, it had become a foul thing—fouler,
poor defenseless young name, than the great red-ember names of Catherine de’
Medici or the Empress Faustine. When autumn dragged its gritty brown leaves
into the gutters of Ivy Corners this name, too, had become nearly buried. The
little scarlet coat had vanished from the town, but every door-knob seemed to
be aware of its history, every window was alert and cold to face it down. White
curtains, carefully tied back, seemed to wait primly for the moment when they
also would be called to impress themselves upon any one who should be so bold
as to try to win their immaculate favor.
Yet one winter night when the wind-blown
trees seemed to try to claw the stars out of the sky, the girl in the scarlet
coat did come back. There was a push at Miss Frenzy’s door, the little shop
bell jumped with a scared jangle. It was almost ; shadows shivered under the electric lights and
the village streets were empty; a prickling drift of snow sifted past the blue
bleakness of the windows. Things were at the relentless hour; a second
desperate pull sent the store bell into a frightened spasm.
“Who’s there?” quavered Miss Frenzy. She
sat up; then, looking like a nut-colored Persian in her strange-figured
wrapper, she got out of bed and held high the lamp that burned all night on her
chair. The cold made her gray face quiver, but she shuffled bravely into the
store where the street light still flickered its bleak question.
On the shop floor lay a figure. Its abandon
had a stark quality, as if it had been buffeted and abandoned to unappeased
tortures of the elements. The old spinster, lamp in hand, leaned shivering over
it. It was a little scrap of life’s tragedy that had blown like a dead leaf in Miss
Frenzy’s path; she was not prepared for it. “Not dead? Not dead?” she quavered.
Well, yes, it was dead. Miss Frenzy could see animation, the thing we call
“life,” but even she knew that it was dead youth, with all its fairy powers
lost, that she looked upon. She bent closely to stricken lips that muttered a
tuneless kind of song:
“ The night train.... If I go back, if I go
back ... ” There was a long silence and then the young voice chanted,
deliriously, “ In Miss Frenzy’s garden ... the fences are high ... ”
The girl’s body lay with the stamp of
primal woe fixed indelibly upon it. It was wastage in the social scheme, yet it
had something of torn petal, of wind-blown butterfly, of wings that had been
frozen while fluttering at the very center of the flower of life. Protest
dragged at Miss Frenzy’s heart.
“ Young ,” muttered the cracked voice. “ Young.
” The tears tore to the near-sighted eyes. Out of the old maid’s defeated being
came the curious sense of being true to something; of loyalty to hidden forces
life had hitherto kept her from recognizing. As she might have raised a vestal virgin
struck down by her flame she raised the piteous form. Staggering to her
deserted bed, Miss Frenzy laid the girl in its warmth. She drew off the wrecked
red clothing, she made a hot drink and got it somehow between the locked lips.
“There, there!” sobbed Miss Frenzy. She knew that “There, there” was what
mothers said to their hurt children, and yet she was not a mother—and this—oh,
this was not a child!
When at last the exhausted frame shuddered
down to sleep the old storekeeper moved away, shutting the bedroom door. She
went back into the shop and roamed restlessly hither and yon. The electric
light had gone out and dawn was stealing in. On every hand some article of
woman’s clothing interrogated her. Lace collars, immaculate in their set pattern,
swayed fastidiously from her absent touch; the cards of buttons eyed her
curiously; bolts of smooth, conventional satin ribbon conveyed calm judgments.
With a frightened look, she turned out the lamp and sat sleepless at the store
window....
All that winter Miss Frenzy held her little
fort alone; her gentle face grew sterner, her careful speech more and more
stilted. To all inquiries, curious, suave, or critical, she returned the
invariable statement:
“I have long been in need of an assistant.
This young girl is bright and willing; her friends have, most regrettably, cast
her off—” A dark flush would come into Miss Frenzy’s face as she forced herself
to add: “It appears that she has had a sad experience.... I intend to befriend
her.”
An attitude like this held by a character
already under the ban of local disapproval seemed to have only one significance
for the leaders of thought in Ivy Corners. It conveyed to such leaders blatant
immorality, the countenancing of a sinner who should be made to pay the full
penalty for a misstep. Mrs. Tyarck, head held high, was theatrically outraged. With
superb ostentation she took to patronizing the “other” dry-goods shop, where,
in order to put down vice, she bought things of which she disapproved, did not
want, or already possessed duplicates. At this store she made gloomy remarks,
such as, “Ef we ain’t careful we’ll be back ag’in in Godom and Sommarah.” No
one noticed the slight inaccuracy of pronunciation, but the angle of the wing on
Mrs. Tyarck’s hat proclaimed to the world at large the direction of her
virtuous sentiments.
Mrs. Capron, however, laid a loftier plan
of attack. Entering the little shop of an evening, she would plant herself
before the counter, sigh heavily, and produce from the knobby catch-all a
tract. This she would hand to the drooping girl in attendance, saying,
solemnly, “ There is things, young woman, as will bear thinkin’ on. ” Several
days later the methodical Mrs. Capron would return with another tract, commanding,
as one in authority, “Give that to your mistaken benefactor.” She would then
hawk once with juridic deliberation, stare into the stricken young face, and
majestically depart.
But spring, which, when it brings the surge
of sap in the trees, also brings back something like kindness and pity in the
withered human heart, came to Ivy Corners with its old tender ministry, until
the very tufts of grass between the village stones had an air of escape from confining
limitations; and until the little store’s isolation was pierced by one or two
rays of human warmth. The minister’s wife called. One or two mothers of large
families invented shopping errands in order to show some measure of interest in
the young life Miss Frenzy was helping back to usefulness and sanity. The
girl’s shamed eyes, eyes that would probably never again meet the world’s with
the gaze of square integrity, often rested like tired birds in looks of
sympathy and encouragement. Such persons as displayed these qualities, however,
were sharply disapproved by the more decided voices in village conclaves.
“There is things which has limits,”
criticized Mrs. Tyarck. This lady, in her effort to convey her idea of
sustained condemnation, even went so far as once more to enter the little shop
to inquire the price of some purple veiling hanging seductively in the window.
Miss Giddings herself waited on the shopper; the girl sat near by cutting fresh
paper for the shelves.
“I ain’t here because I’m any the less
scandalized,” began Mrs. Tyarck in a loud whisper. “Your own reputation was
none too safe, Frenzy, that you should go and get a Jezebel to keep store for
you. Are you goin’ to reduce that veilin’ any? I know it’s loud, but Tyarck
always wants I should dress young.”
Then there was short silence. The veiling
was measured and cut off. Miss Giddings wrapped up the purple net without
speaking. Under her glasses her eyes shot fire, her long face was suffused, but
she spoke no word. Mrs. Tyarck leaned over the counter, her face poked between
rows of hanging black stockings, taking on a look of bland counsel.
“It’s on account of them cruelties of
yours,” she explained—continuing with ostentatious secrecy, “you ain’t in no
position to take up for this girl, Frenzy.”
Then the whispers grew louder and louder
until they were like hisses. Mrs. Tyarck’s head darted forward like a snake’s.
At last in the back of the store the girl’s head fell forward, her weak
shoulders were shaken by helpless sobs.
The hands of the old shopkeeper fumbling
with the package trembled, but Miss Frenzy appeared outwardly calm. Before
counting out change, however, she paused, regarding the shopper musingly.
“Pardon me. Did I rightly hear you use the
word ‘cruelties’?” she questioned. To an onlooker her manner might have seemed
suspiciously tranquil.
“Yes—cruelties,” repeated the other,
patronizingly. “There’s no use denying it, Frenzy—there’s that fly-paper
loomin’ up before you! There’s them cat-traps and killin’ devices, and, as if
it wasn’t bad enough, what must you do but go and take up with a girl that the
whole town says is—”
There was a sudden curious cessation of the
speaker’s words. This was caused by a very sudden action on the part of Miss
Giddings. Desperately seizing on a pair of the hanging black stockings, she
darted with incredible swiftness around the end of the counter. With a curious
sweep of her long arms she passed the black lengths around the shopper’s mouth,
effectively muffling her.
“Cruelties!” gasped the old shopkeeper.
“Cruelties indeed! You will [gasp] be so good [gasp] as to take the word
cruelties and go home and reflect upon it.”
“Hey?” gasped Mrs. Tyarck. “Hey? Now, now,
now!” Over the black gag her eyes looked frightened and uncomprehending. She
suddenly saw herself in the grasp of the heaver and squeezer, of the chewers
and suckers, and was full of consternation. “You’ve no call to get excited,
Frenzy,” she mumbled through the cottony thicknesses of stocking; then, as she
worked her mouth out of its leash, “I’ll have the law on you, Frenzy Giddings!”
“Leave the store!” was Miss Frenzy’s sole
response. She said it between set jaws. She suddenly let go of the stockings
and they dropped to the floor. She picked up the parcel of purple veiling and
cast it through the door into the gutter. She stood, tall and withering,
pointing with inexorable finger; then, as Mrs. Tyarck, the gag removed, began
to chatter fierce intimations of reprisal the old shopkeeper’s eyes again flashed.
“Cruelties!” repeated Miss Frenzy, dwelling
scornfully upon the word—“cruelties! Yes, I understand your reference.” She
kept on pointing to the open door. “You refer to the worms, to those creatures
that ate and defaced helpless roses; tender young things that couldn’t help themselves....
Very well. I am still, as it were, inexorable toward worms! So,” with a shrill,
excited laugh, “I still heave them and squeeze them. Therefore depart—worm!
Leave the store!”
“ Worm? ” questioned Mrs. Tyarck, faintly.
This lady had suddenly lost all her assurance, the very upstanding wing in her
hat became spiritless. She looked aghast, puzzled. Her eyes, like those of a
person in a trance, wandered to the package of purple veiling lying outside in the
gutter, and she tried to rally. “Worm! Now look here, Frenzy Giddings, I don’t
know whether it’s assault and battery to call a person such names, or whether
it’s slander, but I tell you the law has had people up for saying less than
‘worm.’”
“But I said ‘worm,’” repeated the old
shopkeeper, firmly—“worms, contemptible and crawling, chewers and suckers of
reputations; you and Mrs. Capron, the whole town (with lamentably few
exceptions) are a nest of small, mean, crawling, contemptible worms.... , I repeat, worms!”
“Frenzy Giddings!” whispered the shocked
Mrs. Tyarck. She stood frozen in horror under the last hissing, unsparing
indictment, then turned and fled. As she scuttled, almost whimpering, through
the door she was followed by the ceaseless, unsparing epithet, “Worm!”
The shopkeeper’s protégée found her stiff
and still unyielding, bowed over the counter, her forehead reddened with shame,
her hands twisted together in self-loathing.
“Get me some hot tea, my dear,” gasped Miss
Frenzy. She still shook and her voice was as the voice of a dying person. The
fine raiment of courtesy and punctilious speech that she had all her life worn
had been torn from her by her own fierce old hands; in her own gentle eyes she was
hopelessly degraded. Yet she smiled triumphantly at the anxious young face of
the girl as she proffered the steaming tea. “Young,” muttered Miss Frenzy, her
eyes following the movements of the other. “Young.”
At last she roused herself and went slowly
toward the door of the little private room, the girl hurrying to assist her.
She paused, took the dark young head between her wrinkled hands, and kissed it.
“I called her a ‘worm,’ my dear,” said Miss Frenzy. “It was a regrettable
circumstance, but she accused me of cruelties—cruelties?... I called her a
‘worm.’” The old shopkeeper’s eyes twinkled. “On the whole, I am glad I did
so.”
Later, when the roses came again and the
two sat with their sewing in the little garden, Miss Frenzy cheerfully remarked
upon the entire absence of rose-worms. “Without conceit,” she remarked—“without
conceit, I should be inclined to say that the Lord has endorsed my activities.”
She looked affectionately at the slender figure sewing near the honeysuckle and
called attention to the young cherry-tree shooting up in green assurance.
“My mystery!” announced Miss Frenzy. “Not
planted by human hands. The seed doubtless dropped by a bird in flight. Whether
the fruit will be sweet or bitter is to me a matter of pleasing conjecture.”
Category:Harper's
Category:Babcock