Bubbles

== BUBBLES ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
Carol lived in hotels and her governess was always
being mistaken for her mamma. Or it might be her trained nurse or it might be
Daddy's secretary who was mistaken for her mamma. Most often it was governess.
Miss Flower, Miss Runkle, Madame Dunaye, respectively in Nice, on the Isle of
Man, and in Deauville, were governesses. But Miss Tolley, in Florida, was
Daddy's secretary. And Mrs. Kenyon (with long silky legs and an amount of
pale-gold hair) was Carol's trained nurse for nearly three months at Capri, though
fortunately Carol was not ill a day of the time. 
It was a little confusing at first, each time, for in
a way they all seemed much alike. One had to remember arbitrarily, that was
all, just as one had to remember that whereas two "f's" hitched
together make "double-f," two "v's" hitched together make a
"double-u." Moreover, Coddie helped her. "Do mind now, child; if
anyone's to ask you, Miss Runkle is your governess. Not Daddy's secretary, this
time, but Carol's governess?'' Coddie was severe about this, unnecessarily so
it seemed to Carol, upon whom would be lost the glitter of an ironical
amusement in the nurse's sea-gray eyes. 
Coddie was middle-aged, and broad, and ate with Carol
and not with Daddy. No matter who was governess, Coddie did the governing; no
matter who was trained nurse, Coddie did the nursing; and even if it happened
to be a secretary Mr. Bonaparte was having, it was Coddie who got the letters
from the concierge, the commissionaire, or the desk clerk, and arranged them on
the table in his room. And beyond all, Coddie was permanent. 
It had never occurred to Carol to wonder what would
have happened to the world had Coddie not been permanent. Perhaps it had to Mr.
Bonaparte. Perhaps that was why he was always so polite to Coddie, poor man,
walking lightly among his words with her, as a man (and a little ashamed of it)
walking on tiptoe past a sleeping dog. 
Mr. Bonaparte was of medium height, well set up, with
fair hair and mustache waxed at the points, and blue eyes which had a way of widening
abruptly sometimes, like the eyes of some people who suffer from the pangs of
unadmitted maladies. At forty-one he had habitually a deep line which,
springing from between his eyes, divided into dozens of creases all over his
forehead, as fine as threads and as tangled as the hunting of the Wandering
Jew. This wasn't always, to be sure. Sometimes his brow was as smooth as a
boy's. Such were the times when Carol admired him most, and Coddie, knowing by
the signs what was in the air, admired him least of all. 
Coddie admired him most when she was seeing him most,
that is, when there were but the three of them, and Mr. Bonaparte cleaved
grimly to the apartment, and grew white of conscience and rumpled of soul and
clothing, alternately tender and sharp with Carol, and (for once) defiantly
spleenish with Coddie herself, till he was like a lean wolf prowling the
windows by day, and by night, in his slippers, the bedroom floor. 
Carol admired him most when she was seeing him least.
Not for more than scattered minutes in whole days. A "good morning"
perhaps, and late in the morning too, after she had been brought back from her
walk in Central Park or Kensington Gardens or along the Croisette or the Lido
sands, and he still in bed, like all the princes charming of Coddie's tales
rolled in one, with his brow smoothed out and an adventurous kindness in his
big, blue, far-off eyes. And after that only in chance glimpses— Daddy in the
distance in High Street helping a lady into a motorcar— Daddy in a vista of the
Casino gardens at tea with a lady under a striped umbrella— or after the lights
were lit and Carol in her bed, a blur of Daddy in the hallway in shining black
and white and tails. 
Oh, how splendid he was! It was queer: Carol was proud
and jealous all in one. She wished she were dying, so he couldn't go but must
stay and be distracted about her. Yet just as fiercely she wanted him to go—
out where the clustered lights were and the admiring throngs. "Po look:
who is that wonderful man?" . . . "But don't you know? You know the
girl with the red-brown curls and the green jacket and gaiters— well, that's
her father/" Between the two wants she wept, and often she would be asleep
before she could make up her mind which one she was mostly weeping for. . . .
And presently, one day, "I shouldn't be surprised," she would confide
to Coddie, "if Daddy were looking out for somebody for me— like a
governess." 
Why did Coddie make it sound so odd when she echoed,
"I shouldn't be surprised." 
So they weren't surprised when the trunks appeared in
the rooms, and when Daddy, as if he had been on the point of forgetting to
mention it, called back from the door on his way to luncheon, "By the way,
might just pack things up, you know; we're leaving for the South tomorrow"
(or "for Scotland" or "for America"). Nor were they
surprised when, arriving at the station, they found one seat in their
compartment occupied by a lady, and the lady was Carol's governess. 
Or in America, of course, it would be in the Pullman.
That was where Miss Tolley was, in the bright low cave of the two seats and the
berth made up above, and porters and other passengers stepping on one's heels,
and Daddy with his face pressed to the window as if trying to think what he
might have forgotten, while he said in the back of his mouth, "This is
Miss Tolley, Carol. Miss Tolley is going to do some secretarial work for Daddy
down in Florida." 
Miss Tolley was small and dark and quick and she had
enthusiasms. She adored things. She adored the sea. She spent lots of time at Miami
on the beach in an old-rose bathing costume, but she never went into the water.
Coddie had funny ways of saying things to herself aloud. Later on she said to
herself that Daddy had "let the Tolley go" for just that— that she
"never went into the water." . . . Miss Tolley liked perfumes. 
Mrs. Kenyon did not like perfumes. She liked black
coffee, black cigarettes, black Italian shawls, which was interesting, since
she was so distinctly un-black herself, all creamy and pale gold in the hot
white Capri sun. 
They were all different in little ways. Madame Dunaye
disliked anything flavored with pistachio and wore a ribbon across her forehead
to make it look wide and low, and she and Daddy went to the races. 
Miss Flower was an English girl. Sometimes she grew
red and at other times she cried. At the Manx Arms, where she was with them,
she asked Coddie to let her have one of Carol's lesson books, and sometimes
when people looked at her she would come and get Carol, and they would sit in
the gardens and read together, much to Coddie's amusement later on. Miss Flower
wouldn't go near the water (though it wasn't like Miss Tolley— it was sadder).
On the steamer all the way across to New York she would hardly look at the
waves, and unless she was tramping the deck with Daddy she was always hidden
away somewhere inside, alone. Carol asked her why. Then she told Carol: 
"My father and my two brothers were fishermen.
They were all lost at sea." 
One night Miss Flower stole into the stateroom while
Coddie was out. She got on her knees by Carol's berth and put her face in the
blankets and sobbed. "Is it because you are frightened of being
drowned?" Carol asked her. 
Miss Flower was a slow, big, hale person, and there
was a silk of down on the arms she flung around Carol suddenly, without a word.
"Or why then?" Carol persisted, feeling
puzzled and responsible. 
"Nothing! Nothing! Except that I— I— I wish you
were miner 
That's an odd kind of a governess. 
Miss Flower wept too at the High Ridge House in the
White Mountains. One night she wept nearly all night long. It must have been
over something she and Daddy were discussing late, for she was in Daddy's room,
where Carol could hear her sobbing. She could hear Daddy too. Once she heard
distinctly what he said. "You've got to be quieter, I beg of you, Clare!
Good God, this isn't the Continent, remember— this is America!" And once
he too sobbed. 
He took Carol for a long tramp next day. When they got
back home to the High Ridge House, Miss Flower was gone. 
Times like that— just when someone was gone, and
before Daddy had begun to grow fidgety— were the times above all that Carol
loved. It didn't mean just the one tramp. There were dozens. Up hill and down
dale, hand in hand, woods like Persian rugs where autumn was commencing, little
clouds in the clear, and blue shadow splashes; boot nails ringing on the rocks,
Daddy in rough tweeds, a big brown pipe going, instead of so many cigarettes. 
There was a hillside facing the sun, a field running
down to a pine forest that, in its turn, ran down into a shining river. There
was the ruin of a house, and on an outer corner of the old foundation they sat
and let their legs hang over. And Carol began to feel queer. 
"Old Girl," Daddy was saying, "what are
you going to remember about your dad? What ever do you suppose you think you
really think of him?" 
Think? Oh, she couldn't think. Somehow, the way she
loved him —the way she was thrilled by his bigness and kindness and handsome
strength, so that sometimes she was almost scared to know that he was there
with her, undivided, monopolized— somehow or other, it was more than she cared
to tackle in words. There are times in the heart of woman when lightness is the
only way out. 
"I like," she said (though she was feeling
queerer all the while), "the way your mustache does at the ends, like the
lances knights level at dastard cravens." She squeezed his hand to make
him understand this was whimsicality. "And I like the way this suit smells."
Daddy burst out laughing, twisting still tighter the
mustache ends. "Ah, woman, woman!" 
But then he stopped and his face grew red. After that
it turned a greeny white, like the faces one sees in deck chairs. For a while
he sat and hugged his knees. So he hadn't understood after all. 
He said, "Old Girl, Daddy needs something. Daddy
needs people. Daddy's not much good in this world without— somebody." 
Oh, but couldn't he see? Idiot! There were teardrops
in his eyes. 
But now Carol was feeling queerer than ever. 
"Daddy," she said before she knew it,
"have we ever been here before?" 
"Here?" He stared at her blinking.
"No!" Then he looked down the pasture to the woods and river, and
gave a sort of start. "I see what you mean." 
If he saw what she meant, certainly Carol didn't. 
"Daddy, listen to me. Was I ever— did I ever have
a mamma?" 
Daddy kept on looking steadily at the river. "By
George, I see what you mean," he repeated to himself. He slid from the
wall and put his hands up. "Come, jump." But her face was the funny
color now. "Lord!" he said. "What's wrong? Tummy?" 
That was it. Presently she was ill-and-up-with-it in a
corner of the wall. 
They laughed over it as they tramped back across the
world. 
"What a silly thing to do!" . . . "What
a perfectly!" Yet it was a little because they felt they had to. There was
a change. That was the last of their walks just then. 
Daddy went under again. Anyone could see how vilely he
hated to. The looks he gave Carol sometimes! It was as if he were a wolf in a
forest, but the forest was enchanted, and even while he prowled and growled his
horridest he was all the while trying to tell one with his dumb eyes that he
wasn't really a wolf at all but a prince under the spell of an evil sorcerer. 
It was growing late in the season and the hotel was
nearly empty, and there was nothing but the hotel in miles. Carol and Coddie
discussed governesses. 
"He'll hardly find one here" Carol decided,
and Coddie concurred. 
Bored! It was a more positive thing; more like a
disease he had to fight, and tried to fight, sometimes angrily and sometimes in
dull despair. His trousers bagged at the knees, and the ends of his mustache
came undone. The hotel followed his mood; servants were laid off; the wooden
corridors sounded hollower and hollower. 
Then one morning Coddie, bringing up the mail, said to
Carol, "Here they are." She meant the folders. Cunard, White Star,
United Fruit, Royal Mail. Carol looked them over superficially, then turned to
the letters, which it was her privilege to sort, Mr. Bonaparte's from Miss
Eliza Codd's. 
"Here's one for Daddy from someone who's a doctor
and who's at home. 'Doctor Kamp's Home!' Now isn't that too silly to put on the
outside?" 
Coddie was surprisingly impressed. Snatching the
letter from Carol's hand and hiding it behind her, she hardened her eyes at the
girl as though it were a crime she had been caught in. And within two minutes
after she had taken the mail into Daddy's room, here was Daddy out in his
pajamas. 
"Codd, I want you to get the trunks packed
immediately. I've this 
letter from " He hesitated, more and more
distracted. "Carol, Old 
Girl, will you run along down and play on the veranda
for a while? Dash!" 
Carol played on the veranda for a while, but she had
nothing to play with and a while is rather indefinite. Returning to the rooms
she heard Coddie saying, "Yes, Mr. Bonaparte, we're both right: / would
hardly do." 
And Daddy, at his wit's end, "Well, how to
manage? I suppose my best plan would be to wire the agency to send somebody
down direct to 'The Pasture.' " 
Carol felt things a good deal more than she knew
things. She could feel a shadow coming before she could see it. All the way to
the station in the hotel car that afternoon— she didn't know why— but it was
dreadful. What made her cling so hard to Coddie's hand? And why was Coddie, who
hadn't a cold, forever blowing her nose on the sly? 
Why was it so queer when they got into the parlor car?
There was no new governess there, but that wasn't the half, nor the hundredth.
It happened just before the train started to move. Coddie bent of a sudden,
dabbed a kiss on Carol's temple, cried, "Be a good girl, now,
always," and in another wink there she was outside on the platform, waving,
and the landscape was sliding, and Daddy and Carol were awkwardly all alone. .
. . 
It was late at night and it was a strange house, a
strange room, and a strange bed. Strangest of all was the getting to bed. The
only one there was to preside over it was Daddy (there were servants of sorts
in the strange downstairs, but of course they wouldn't do), and Daddy was
bungling and distraught, and Carol was inept and distrait, and the whole affair
was getting to be a dream which she wished she didn't have to have. 
How could she ask where such a thing as her nightie
was, when she couldn't ask where Coddie was? In ways it was quite as hard for
Daddy. With him it took the form of an embarrassment which grew with the
child's numbness and dumbness, till it seemed he would have to yell and shake
her if she persisted in it ten minutes more. This going on as if nothing had
happened! 
He did shake her presently, and give her a fumbling
kiss on top of her head, so that she couldn't see his face. 
"Don't know what it's all about, do you, Old
Girl? You'll be so happy, though, when you know the surprise." 
"When is the surprise?" Her voice was as
dead as dead. 
"Tomorrow." 
"Is it Coddie?" 
Daddy looked worse than exasperated: he looked hurt.
Painstakingly, like one counting twenty before he spoke, he turned down the
bed. Then he stared at the farther wall and said, "You're getting too old
for simply a nurse now, Carol. Tomorrow your regular governess will be
here." 
"Oh-h-h-h!" 
Carol got in, pulled the covers to her chin, and lay
quiet, studying him as he bent in circles picking up things that didn't need
picking up. 
"Oh-h-h-h! S0-0-0-! I see-e-e-e!" 
Daddy jerked up, his face flaming. 
"No, you don't see. And it's a real surprise— and
can't you take Daddy's word for it— and not look like that— and— go to sleep
like a good girl?" 
He rushed around. "Want a drink of water on your
table? No?" 
He vanished, and presently he was back again in
triumph, bearing a kitten captured somewhere, a gray little creature with
fluffy cheeks and pert eyes. 
"Look! Isn't it cunning? Want to pet?" 
"No, thank you." 
Unfortunately the kitten had taken matters into its
own paws. No sooner had Daddy put it beside the pillow than it was gone under
the covers, and no sooner was it curled in a lump on Carol's chest than it
began to purr. 
Carol would do nothing about it. Daddy stood and
scratched his head. 
"Well, I don't suppose it's at all the right
thing. However— just tonight " He sighed, opened the window, put out the
light, and fled. 
Carol lay and stared into the dark. "So-0-0-0. I
see-e-e-e." 
The first sob was hard to get up, the second was
easier, and then the wild tears came. The ball in her arms wriggled in protest,
not liking to be hugged so jokingly. . . . There, that was better. 
Not since she could remember had Carol been in one
place long enough to be allowed to have a pet. Kittens were amazingly soft and
warm. As little by little the sobbing wore itself out, so did the purring.
Neither kittens nor kids can stay awake forever. 
Carol had a start when she awoke in the morning. It
came back with a thump: "Coddie isn't hereP Then, hearing someone in the
room, she turned her head, and for a wink she thought it was Coddie. The same
square figure, a broad back, a head with a topknot. But when the person turned
it was a stranger. 
Her name, she said, was Mrs. Lephant and, although it
wasn't her fault Carol had mistaken her for Coddie, Carol hated her. It didn't
help that Coddie would have cried, "A kitten in bed/" and flung up
her hands in just as holy a horror; no, somehow or other it wouldn't have been
the same. Nor would her "Up you get now, Carol: don't be a lazy
thing!" 
The thing that was the hardest to bear, as Carol went
about her dressing with averted eyes and heavy hands, was that Daddy had told
her a deliberate fib. "Too old for simply a nurse now." If that
wasn't to say she wasn't to have a new nurse in poor Coddie's place, she didn't
know what it was. Of course it never occurred to her that Mrs. Lephant might be
the governess he had spoken of. Governesses don't have red wrists and grizzling
hair; if Carol knew anything in the world at going-on-seven, she knew
governesses. 
When Carol looked out of her window she had another
start. Last night, whirling up in the car, it had all been dark. Now the
sunshine of the clear morning discovered to her eyes an oblique and rocky
pastureland falling away to a pine wood, and at the foot of the wood the broad
Connecticut. 
"Come along to your breakfast, child; don't be
lagging there." 
Carol had felt queer once before. Was she going to
have a "tummy" again? 
Mrs. Lephant came treading back. There would need to
be some discipline. 
"Did you hear me, Carol, when I Why, what ails
the child?" 
"Mrs. Lephant, I've been here before." 
"Been here before? Gracious! It's your home,
isn't it?" 
"My-home?" 
"I thought your papa told me you were born here.
. . . Now whatever the game is, please leave it till after breakfast, my dear,
and take my hand and come." 
At breakfast, after a long time, Carol asked,
"Where is my daddy?" 
"He has gone out for a while. He didn't say when
he would be back." 
"Oh-h-h!" (It was true about the governess's
coming then.) "I see-e-e." 
That day of waiting was long and it was short. It was
long on account of Coddie, who wasn't there, and of Mrs. Lephant, who was. It
was short on account of the diverting way in which each new thing about the
place was at very first glance familiar, and then, as soon as Carol had time to
think about it, strange. And also on account of the kitten, whose name, the
cook said, was Bubble. 
Bubble was an irresponsible creature. It's the way of
the world. Impetuously loved, profoundly depended upon, she seemed to take a
perverse delight in maintaining her own poise and doing as she sweetly pleased.
Here one moment, rubbing an arched back, cleaving softly, purring like
incipient volcanoes and brightening the sun— another moment and Bubble was no
more. Run here and call there as Carol might, with panic growing in her, Bubble
was gone. Gone like Coddie and, perhaps, like Coddie, never to come again. 
It wasn't until after lunch (still no Daddy) that
Carol discovered the wile of triumph. It might be a twig, but better it was a
string with a crumple of paper tied at the end. Bubble was gone, was she?
Forever! Well, then, forget Bubble! Go about your business doing as you sweetly
please. Prowl, explore. Craning at the eaves high overhead, where, in and out
of the gingerbread frettings, birds "wheeled with tiny whistling sounds,
wonder what it can be that makes the heart stop, trying to remember— what? Or
all of a sudden, scouting along a path between high barberry walls, know that
there is a gravelly circle and a birdbath at the farther end of it, and begin
to run— and plop! Tug!— there's Bubble, dropped from heaven, battling at the
crumple of paper dragging quite forgotten in the rear, as if Bubble had never
been away. 
Once it was nearly disastrous. On the side toward the
valley the garden was built up, the stone wall of the terrace falling away ten
feet at least to the pasture's rocky ground. It was just here that the kitten
exploded from a clump of rhododendrons, and Carol, turning her eyes at the tug,
saw the gray fluff teetering after the paper along the giddy edge, at a
perilous balance and apt at any breath to lose it and go tumbling away to break
her neck. 
Carol stopped, her heart stopped, her hand froze.
Prickles climbed her spine. She was afraid to breathe, but she had to breathe
to whisper: 
"Mrs. Lephant— where are you?" 
"I'm right here, child. Why?" 
"Call Bubble a-a-way fr-from there. G-g-get
another string and dr-dr-drag it Oh, she -will fall off!" 
Mrs. Lephant dared disaster by laughing out loud.
"Why, my dear child, cats don't fall. They never do. And even if they did
See!" 
With a swoop almost as quick as a cat's Mrs. Lephant
caught Bubble by the scruff and held her at arm's length, squirming in terror
of the abyss. Then leaning down and out over it, before Carol could so much as
gasp, she had opened her fingers and let the kitten fall. 
"There, you see? It doesn't matter how a cat is
dropped, it always lands right side up. See, though! Why, Carol! Don't look at
me so!" 
Carol hazarded one eye over. When she saw that Bubble
wasn't dead, but bouncing off along the foot of the wall with a tail as big as
indignation, she stopped being faint. She sprang up. She towered, pink with
fury. 
"Mrs. Lephant, I want you to know right square
now I think you're a— a " 
But she was a well-brought-up girl, and it does tell.
Appalled, she wheeled and ran as fast as she could run away. Mrs. Lephant
called after her, but Carol would have cut off her ears before they would have
heard. Tears blinded her, she crashed into plantings, scratched her legs on
thorns, and hid in a deep hedge of lilacs, cowering down in the leaf shadow, so
that that woman should never find her till the world's end. 
Bubble found her though. Together they thought their
thoughts of hate. 
Someone was walking on the drive outside the hiding
place. When Carol had decided it couldn't be the Lephant she dared one peep. It
was a lady. 
Something turned over with a flop in the middle of the
child's insides. "But I— I know her!" But then, as with all the other
things, "Do I?" How could she, when she couldn't remember ever having
seen her till this day? 
The lady's eyes were fixed, on the house, and she
walked like a laggard, perhaps because there were others coming behind. She had
slightly wavy chestnut hair, laid back as smoothly as it would go from her
temples and over her ears. Her face was pale, but it was handsome. By that, and
by her slender, prettily clad figure and her silk stockings and high-heeled
shoes, Carol knew her of a sudden for what she was. She was the new governess. 
Slowly, still intent on the house before her, she
passed out of the spy gap in the leaves. Daddy moved into it, conversing with a
gentleman with black whiskers and a gold-rimmed pince-nez. Coming to a halt
just there, Daddy's voice dropped to almost nothing. "Doctor," he
said, "I want— God knows how deeply I want to thank you. And I hope to
heaven it's going to be " 
The other coughed, like people who are embarrassed by
being thanked. 
"I hope so, too. And, Bonaparte, I believe so. I
shouldn't have written you unless, by every test I know, I'd been
convinced." 
"Well? " Daddy's eyes went after the
vanished governess. He now seemed the embarrassed one. "Well, Doctor— you
won't stay, eh? Overnight?" 
"I don't think it's best. I'll call you up first
thing in the morning —or better— I'll drop around. Yes, I'll do that. Good-by,
Bonaparte. And good luck!" 
There was the sound of a motor near at hand getting up
its appetite. Both men blew their noses. Carol slid out the other way, quiet as
an Indian, and made for the farthest corner, where was the house that held the
garden tools. 
Governesses were always bad enough. But this one! And
Daddy blowing his nose with strangers! And Mrs. Lephant! "Bubble!"
she wailed. "Where, oh where is Coddie gone?" 
But before Bubble could even begin to answer, a shadow
around the toolhouse corner was followed by the hurrying Lephant in the flesh. 
"Where have you been, child? Come along directly
and see your mamma." 
Carol was so flustered that she did go along,
suffering tugs at her frock here and dabs at her hair there, and had got almost
to the steps of the veranda before her reason came back. Then she balked.
Escaping Mrs. Lephant's hand, she stood off and looked at her from beneath wise
brows, precisely as Coddie might have done it, with a nipped-in, faintly
alkaline smile. 
"But you see, Mrs. Lephant, it isn't my mamma.
People are always making just exactly mistakes like that." 
When even Daddy assured Carol that it was her mamma,
and when the lady herself, waiting near the mantel in the big double-bayed
living room, stretched out her arms a little stiffly, as if it hurt her, and
was nothing of a sudden but hands and two huge dark eyes, it was more than
Carol could deal with on such short notice. She felt like a stick and she acted
like a stick. 
It was an idea to be gone at slowly. It's doubtful if
even Atlas could lift a new world without working up to it. Perhaps the lady
didn't realize. 
If only Coddie could have been there. Thank heaven,
Bubble was! . . . 
It would have been easier if they could all have
settled down to it quietly; simply have taken three big easy chairs there in
the living room and sat, and sat, and looked one another over, as much as to
say, "Well, now, let's see." But they couldn't. None of them seemed
to be able to stay still. First it was outdoors to look at the plantings; then
it was upstairs, going through the chambers; then out again to look at the
sunset beyond the hills. 
Daddy was the worst in a way. When he wasn't breathing
very hard, he wasn't breathing at all; when he wasn't going red he was just
getting over being red. It was worse than governesses had ever been— he was so
anxious that everything should be precisely right for Mamma— now a footstool
for her feet; now a hand to help her over an inch-high culvert "in the
garden walk; again a, "Shan't I run bring you out a scarf, Stacia?"
or a "Come, dear, sit down for a moment and rest." His blue eyes,
always a little helpless, seemed permanently dilated, as one's eyes will be
when there's a gun that may go off any minute or a bubble that may burst. And
he talked a lot. 
Mamma was quite different. Her quietude (even though
she was forever on the move) was extraordinary. It was almost like
sleepwalking, it seemed to Carol, and so it startled her, every time Mamma took
her hand, to find the fingers that closed on hers were as tight as twisted
wires and trembling with a slight but very rapid pulse. Carol wished they
wouldn't. She wished that the dark brown eyes, whenever they came roving after
her, wouldn't turn so abruptly and so inkily black. It made her shy, and the
thing she was trying most to do was to get over being shy. 
Oh, if only she could act like herself, like the Carol
she and Daddy and Coddie knew! If only she could charge, arms wide, engulf this
mamma in a great hug, and cry passionately as the wonder rushed up from her
heart, "I love you, and you're so beautiful, and you're my mamma, and my
own, forever and ever— promise me you are!" 
But because she was shy she had always to hang back.
She had to make believe to be interested in nothing on earth but the kitten
that tumbled across the garden at the end of her string. She had to pretend it
was secrets, when it was only "She's my own, my really mamma!" that
she whispered over and over into Bubble's ear till the creature was nearly
frantic with the tickle, and the lovely lady smiled. 
It was when they were out for the sunset that Mamma
smiled. She stopped dead still and flashed a look at the child, knee-deep with
Bubble in a thicket of old snapdragon stalks. She started to speak, then closed
her lips tight, and wound her fingers into her palms, as people do who are very
nervous at hotels in Italy. Then she smiled, and it was a funny, slow, thin
smile, and she said in a tone playfully wistful on top and something
mysteriously else beneath, "I wish / had a string, little daughter. Would
you be my little kitty then, and —and— play with me?" 
Carol was allowed to stay down to dinner at table that
evening, and if there had been any doubts left, that would have settled it. One
doesn't stay down to dine with governesses. 
It was wonderful. There were candles on the table,
tall ones, whose fat flames wavered softly in miniature in silver and crystal
and china such as Carol had never seen in all the hotels in the world. They
wavered in Daddy's eyes too, and in Mamma's: they must have been in Carol's
own; the three faces and Mamma's neck and Daddy's shirt front were bright, and
all was gloom behind. 
There was a pale wine in glasses. Daddy lifted his and
leaned forward. 
"Stacia?" 
Mamma was like a lady, Carol decided, sitting in a
crystal tower. He had to speak again before she heard and lifted her glass to
clink on his. 
Daddy's trembled a little. "Here's to— God bless
all of us, Stacia." 
Mamma sipped and said nothing. When one came to think
of it, Mamma had said nothing all that afternoon, or nearly nothing. It was
always Daddy. 
"Stacia," he went on, musing at his glass, a
twisty smile about his lips that was both sad and gay, "I was never built
for— going it alone. I'm not the lone wolf. I feel as if I'd been through
" He shook himself, bright teardrops starting. "Never mind! I feel as
if I'd come back to life today!" 
What Mamma felt she didn't say. Dreaming down at the
fires in her wineglass, perhaps she was thinking of nothing at all as she
twirled the stem of it idly in the fingers of her left hand, somnambulist
still. 
Carol couldn't help bouncing (it was a mercy she
didn't gasp out loud) when she felt the other hand coming through the darkness
under the table. She would have liked to get her own two quickly in safe sight
above the cloth, but it was so weird somehow, and she was so confused, she
didn't know what to do. And then it was too late; the unseen thing that
searched had come to her fingers and slid around them, swift as whips and tight
as tentacles. 
Carol had never been so abashed in her life. It was
really more like terror. Of course it wouldn't have been anything at all if the
others at table had known about it. But Daddy didn't seem to, and no more did
Mamma, sitting there above the serene white damask (miles and miles away) in
her tower of glass. And it wasn't just that it was clandestine, that
subterranean grasp; it wasn't even a grasp, but more like a grab, a static
violence, gradually tightening. 
"I'm going to do lots of things now,
Stacia," Daddy was musing. "I'm going to buy back into the firm, and
I'm going — " From Mamma's face his eyes came abruptly to Carol's.
"Why, Carol, Old Girl, what's wrong?" 
Carol swallowed, and was red. "N-n-nothing.
Really and tr-trtruly." 
In a panic she averted her eyes. She peered busily
into the shadows in the corners. "Only I— I am a— a little worried about
Bub-Bubble. I wonder where Bub-Bub-Bubble is." 
There! If only she had thought of that sooner. Under
the table the grab had suddenly ungrabbed and flown away, and almost in the
same wink of time Mamma, come out of her tower, was smoothing with her right
hand a wisp of her lovely chestnut hair. She appeared to have rediscovered
Carol. 
"Bubble is the kitten?" she asked, smiling
the same funny, slow, thin smile she had used once before. 
Daddy laughed. "Yes, and kittens aren't allowed
in dining rooms, Old Girl." 
In the living room, after dinner, with Mrs. Lephant
waiting rather sniffily in the doorway (for after all, she was a governess, not
a nurse), Carol was allowed to bid her parents good night. For the first time
in her career and for no known reason, she shook hands gravely with her father.
Then she turned with a kind of shiver of stage fright to deal with the other
one. 
On the flare-backed couch before the new fire in the
chimney Mamma half reclined, obliquely, one knee over the other, one elbow up
and a hand supporting her head, which was tilted a little so, like a bird's in
half -preoccupied interrogation. There was a perfume about her that Carol had
never known or dreamed of— as if it weren't of earthly flowers— exquisitely
faint. Scent and sight worked backward with Carol. A lovely fragrance made her
eyes film; to make her nostrils dilate it took an entrancing vision, like the
soft flames running and playing in Mamma's hair. 
The eyes in the face that was more beautiful in its
set pallor than all the roses in the world were turning blacker and blacker as
the seconds ticked. Carol felt herself being intoxicated. In the "V"
of Mamma's gown she saw the hollow of the white bosom beginning, and it came to
her that what she wanted fiercely was to lay her head there, her cheek and
temple, and press tight. On the hidden side of her, lying on the couch in the
shadow her crossed knees threw, Mamma's other hand was moving. Carol saw it in
a corner of her eye, the long fingers coiling and uncoiling restlessly. 
"I hope you sleep very well indeed, Mamma,"
she heard herself saying. "Good night, Mamma." 
But then her feet were glued, not knowing how to go.
Bubble saved her. When she saw the kitten cleaving to a table leg and making
her eyes green she managed a gasp of joy and skipped. 
"Now, child!" Mrs. Lephant called from the
doorway. 
But Carol had to catch that kitten first. She had to
fall on her knees and hug her, kiss her on the whiskers and blow into her ear a
"Don't you think she is beautiful, Bubble; don't you think she's darling;
don't we love her almost to death?" Otherwise she would have had to burst
with a rubbery shriek, like an overblown balloon. 
In the hall Mrs. Lephant said, "Now drop your
kitty, that's a good girl." 
"Mightn't I have her just a little— just a
weency-weency while?" 
"Upstairs! What an idea! Bedrooms are no place
for animals, not  night. Neither are
houses. They're much better off outdoors." 
"Oh, but Mrs. Lephant— you— wouldn't. You
couldn't! She'd freezer' 
"Cats? What do you suppose they've fur for? Let
her down; that's right. Scat, kitty; I'll tend to you later. Take Mrs.
Lephant's hand now, my dear." 
Carol couldn't go to sleep. The tighter she closed her
eyes the wider she was awake. A procession of "she's" ramped through
her mind. With venomous sarcasm: "She seems to know a great deal about
cats!" With a surge of the heart: "She wanted me to put my head there
in her neck; I know she did! She loves me. Tomorrow— oh, to— morrow!" With
a guilty, almost forgotten hollow feeling: "I wonder if she has gone to be
some other girl's nurse, now I've a Mamma and she can't be mine." And with
a sudden eye on the window, wide open and blue-green-black and chill: "She
hasn't enough fur; I don't care! If she doesn't freeze, she'll catch her death.
Oh, dear!" 
It was at the same time ironic and tragic. For the
first time with so many responsibilities, for the first time there was no one
in reach to share them with. The room grew as big as the house, the house grew
as empty as the whole black outdoors; the time grew hours. 
Then came temptation and the fall. 
At first it was creepy, like burglars. No door had
been opened, but someone or something was in that room. Whether she heard it or
simply felt it, she didn't know: she only knew she mustn't stir and mustn't
open her eyes. 
When she flopped over and popped open her eyes, Bubble
said "Prraouw" from the window sill, where she was busy tidying
herself after her trouble with the woodbine by which she had come. Presently, vanishing
in lower darkness, she arrived on the bed with a thump. 
Carol was firm. "You wicked! You heard what Mrs.
Lephant said as well as I did." Bubble rubbed, filling the lecturer's face
with fluff. Carol sat bolt up for authority. As she did so Bubble took
advantage of the lifted coverlet, dived beneath, whipped into a fat knot, and
began to purr. 
Carol sat and thought. 
"Mrs. Lephant thinks she knows everything, but
she doesn't know as much as Daddy. She says Bubble shouldn't be here, but last
night Daddy said — " 
She curled back into the warm place under the covers
and got hold of the kitten. Thinking of that window (it's much more dangerous
to go down vines than up them— and no matter what Mrs. Lephant thought she knew
about cats), she got still better hold, her arms double all the way around. 
It was the light that awakened her, falling through an
open door. She would have said it must be nearly morning, but it wasn't, for
Daddy and Mamma were just coming up to bed. Daddy was in the doorway and Mamma
was near the bed. 
"Is she sleeping?" Daddy asked in a low
voice. 
"I don't know." It was hardly above a
whisper, in case. "Carol, dear?" 
Carol, peering through sleepy lashes at her there,
felt all the things she had felt in the whole of the day in one lump now, and
the lump was in her throat. There was something that ravished her in that
silhouette of a mother, the shoulders bent a little and the head held still,
like hovering. Carol needn't wait till tomorrow after all to fling up and cry,
"Mamma! I love you, and I'm glad." 
She would have done it that moment, had something
dreadful not occurred. She wasn't the only one awakened. Bubble stretched under
the bedclothes and began automatically to purr. It rumbled, nothing less. 
There was no time to plan. Carol opened her mouth and
snored. She never snored; she didn't even know how to snore; but she snored. 
Mamma hadn't moved. Or if she had, it was only her
neck and head, by a fraction of an inch, and so swiftly that nobody would have
known. Like an Indian in the dark when his brother touches him for "Did
you hear?" 
Had she heard? Carol snored in despair. Oh, had she
heard? 
Daddy reiterated his question from the door, but with
another emphasis, of mirth: "Is she sleeping!" 
"One would think so, wouldn't one?" 
Mamma turned like a shadow, stiffly but without a
sound, and moved away toward the bright rectangle where Daddy was waiting, one
arm crooked out and a smile trembling about his lips and eyes. 
The door was closed and it was dark again. Thank
heaven, Bubble Bonaparte! They were both young in crime yet, and it had been a
pretty narrow squeak. 
It was late when Carol awoke in the morning; it wasn't
indeed until Mrs. Lephant came; and it was a clear warm day full of sun. Still
blinking, Carol pawed about under the covers. Then she lay suddenly as still as
scared mice and studied Mrs. Lephant out of the corners of her eyes. 
"Mrs. Lephant," she began in a small voice,
when the woman wouldn't stop her bustling and wouldn't end the suspense by
opening her mouth (providing, of course, that she knew). 
"Yes, child, what is it? Why don't you get up as
I told you?" 
"Mrs. Le-Lephant, you— you didn't— you haven't
seen anything of my— of Bubble— this morning?" 
"If you're still talking about that cat, no, I
haven't. And now if I have to speak again " 
But Carol had to lie one more moment, staring at that
open window. "The little monkey!" she thought to herself with what
tried to be amusement. 
She was wild to get out of doors. Tugging at the
monitor's hand on the way down to breakfast she attempted stratagems. "I
don't seem to be very hungry this morning, Mrs. Lephant. Must I eat breakfast,
please?" 
She wouldn't take even the Lephant's look for answer,
but appealed from it to Daddy, who was just getting up from his coffee and
eggs. Daddy laughed. "You sit down there and cram!" 
"Where's Mamma?" Carol inquired in a smaller
tone. 
"Not up yet, the lazy. I'm sending her a tray;
imagine that!" He was full of animation. All his motions were big, even
the way he filled his pipe. "This is the life, eh, Old Girl! Now gobble.
It's no day to be inside." 
Carol got a piece of string from the maid and a piece
of paper from a basket and set forth. She tried the east side of the grounds. 
"Kittikittikitti " She combed the cover as
far as the toolhouse 
there and cast back along the front hedge toward the
drive, bareheaded in the sunshine. Daddy stood talking with the doctor of
yesterday. 
"A bit nervous and quiet last evening— but she
slept like an angel, 
Doctor, and this morning she looks like one. Doctor— I
think it's a go-" 
Failing in the east, Carol trailed her bait into the
south, the backyard region, where the land began to slope and the outbuildings
were. She didn't go to the valley side till the last. She wouldn't, that was
all. 
She didn't make a sound for a full half minute after
her eyes had found Bubble in the long grass. But when she did, it brought Daddy
around the corner at the double, and the doctor behind. 
"What is it, Carol? Oh, I see. Oh, poor kitty!
Isn't that a shame/" 
"The old fool!" 
It rasped Carol's throat. It was rage. Grief hadn't
had time as yet. 
Daddy stared at her. "Who's a fool?" 
"Mrs. Lephant. She is! She t-t-told me a
k-k-kitten couldn't hurt itself f-f -falling." 
"Where'd Bubble fall from?" Daddy craned up.
"That your window there?" 
Now the sobs began to rack and the tears to roll. 
"It wasn't Bu-Bu-Bubble's fault. She came to bed
with me— but— bu-but / let her st-stay. And of course she wanted to g-g-get up
early— and the doors were sh-shut— and she sl-sl-slipped on the v-v-vine and —
Oh, Daddy!" 
Daddy caught her up in his arms. His attention,
though, was curiously divided, more than half of it still fixed on the gray
little body in the grass. 
"It's odd," he mused, "but I didn't
suppose, myself " He spoke 
aloud to the doctor, who had bent to prod with a
professional finger. "Neck broken, is it?" 
"Broken, yes." The doctor snapped his own
neck back of a sudden to look up at Carol's window, but nothing was there.
"Broken, yes." His lips moved in a funny way. "I'm afraid a
little worse than broken, Bonaparte. Wrung" 
Somewhere aloft someone was laughing. It was low but
unmuffled and pure, wandering, softly jubilating, soliloquizing, a little
saraband of mirth. . 
Carol couldn't help it, she shook her hands at the
high windows. "Mamma, no! . . . Oh, Daddy, but poor Mamma, she won't laugh
when we— when we t-t-tell her— that." 
Daddy, getting his face in another direction, carried
Carol away, while the doctor lingered a moment to break a bit of brush down
over the place where Bubble lay. . . . 
If yesterday had been upsetting, it was as nothing to
today. Carol was too prostrate with woe even to try to make it all out. Trunks,
bags, boys on bicycles arriving and departing with yellow telegrams, everybody
in a hurry, everything in a mess, Mrs. Lephant going about with a flounce and a
sniffle, Mamma still invisible, still a lazy, Carol guessed. 
It wasn't till Carol and Daddy were in the station
taxi that afternoon that a suspicion of the possible truth came into the
child's head. 
"Daddy, it wasn't so, after all. I mean, it was
all a— a kind of a joke— or I mean a kind of fooling. She was a governess,
after all?" 
Daddy sat and stared at the driver's back. Something
distressing had happened to his shoulders between the morning and now. To his
color too. It couldn't have been worse if he had been suffering one of his
conscientious bored spells for weeks and months; no, it couldn't have been so
bad. It made Carol uneasy. She got hold of his hand. 
"She was a governess, Daddy, wasn't she?" 
Daddy's gray-looking mouth moved with difficulty.
"I suppose we might as well call it— why, yes, Carol, yes. And now— it
wasn't long —we'll just forget." 
On the platform at the little station, where the train
was coming at them with a rush and roar, Carol got hold of his fingers again
and tugged. 
"Where are we going— this time?" 
Daddy stared at the engine. He seemed distraught. He
got the question mixed up with the answer he must have meant to give. 
"Where are we going," he echoed, "this
time?" 
A wild wish was trying to dare to spring in Carol's
heart. She quit tugging and began to stroke the wooden fingers she held. 
"Daddy, couldn't we Daddy, mightn't we, don't you
suppose " 
But she didn't need to finish. As the coaches rocked
by to a grinding halt her eyes had caught a flicker of a face. 
Carol shrieked. 
"Daddy! Coddie is on this train!'
Category:Steele
Category:Published