The Perennial Bachelor

To
Frances Brincklerbee

I

As she lay floating in the grey river that flows between sleeping and waking, Maggie Campion knew, without remembering why, that it was a happy day. And when she opened her eyes, the sunlight falling on the carpet in stripes of pale warm gold, the warm buff walls, even the fat little buff potichomanie flagons with their crimson rosebuds, all held a secret happiness—what was it? The looped-back muslin curtains were like ladies in billowing white, curtseying to each other, two in each window, and even Maggie’s stout scuffed little shoes on the floor where she had left them when she undressed, pointed their toes in the first position of dancing.

She lay pressing her hands together under the blankets, floating in this still bright bliss. She remembered now what it was. It was Papa’s birthday, and he was coming home from New York.

Maggie was ten years old, with light eyes looking out from under dark scowling brows, brown hair that fell straight and limp from curling-rags even as they were unrolled, and a face covered with freckles. She was more like a boy than a girl, everyone said. She was always carrying hop-toads about in her hat, or tearing her petticoats climbing trees and sliding down the ice house roof. She was sometimes as bold as brass and sometimes one crimson blush of shyness, and she had the strangest ways of showing people that she loved them—boasting in front of them in a loud gruff voice, making awful faces, twisting one leg around the other, or standing on the sides of her feet.

Six-year-old May slept beside her in the big bed carved with oak-leaves and acorns, under the picture of the guardian angel hovering above the little brother and sister gathering wild flowers at the edge of the precipice. May had short bright brown curls foaming all over her head, and brown eyes with long curled lashes, and she knew perfectly well what Mamma’s friends meant when they exclaimed, “Oh, what a little b-e-a-u-t-y!” She loved her pretty clothes, and never tore them as Maggie did, but would stroke her small muff or her best blue sash as another little girl might stroke a kitten; and Mamma had been dreadfully troubled once to find her kissing her best bonnet goodnight. When May loved people she told them so, flinging her arms around them and kissing them again and again, which they found at first charming and presently exhausting, for she never knew when to stop, and always had to be disentangled, like a burr or a kitten, and carried weeping from the room.

Sometimes, when there was company of an evening, Papa would pick her up out of bed and carry her downstairs in her nightgown to dance on the top of the piano, while Mamma played, not quite accurately, but with a lot of ripple and splash, and Papa sang in the voice that pierced so thrillingly the heart of his eldest daughter, lying awake in the dark:

“ ‘Sound, sound, the tambourine,
Welcome now the gipsy star;
Strike, strike the mandoline,
And the light guitar;
When the moon is beaming bright,
The gipsies dance, the gipsies dance;
’Neath the moonbeams’ glittering ray,
Now their figures glance.
See, see, they trip along,
O’er the green, o’er the green,
List, list, the cheerful song,
To the merry, merry, merry, merry, merry, merry, merry,
merry, merry, merry, merry, merry,
tambourine!’ ”

And excited little May would hold up her long nightie and dance, while the company applauded. But she generally ended in tears. “May is very high-strung,” Mamma would say, gently complacent.

Lily, who was four, lay in a cot beside the big bed, as fat and fast asleep as a milk-white kitten. Her hair was palest silky yellow, curling up in little duck-tails from her fat neck, and her round eyes, so tight shut now, were like Mamma’s, as blue as flower petals. She trotted through childhood’s endless days on fat legs that could never catch up with Maggie and May, calling always, “Wait! Wait! Wait for Lily!”

Maggie, lying there, heard from below the swish, swish of Albert’s broom, sweeping the porch; the squeak of the pump-handle as old Chloe filled the kettle; Trusty barking at the starlings. The beautiful day had begun.

The three little Campions spent the morning in the kitchen, drawn by the smell of baking cake, as bees are drawn to apple-blossoms, being stepped on and bumped into, stealing almonds, scraping icing-bowls and licking the sugary, buttery batter from the wooden cake spoons, until old Chloe shooed them out as if they were chickens.

Dressed alike in brown merino frocks and bibbed black aprons edged with quilling, with long tucked drawers showing beneath their full skirts, they sat squeezed together in the door of the kitchen shed, eating the hot little try-cakes with which old Chloe tested the oven. At their feet, on the rose-red bricks, silky black Trusty sat and watched each vanishing mouthful with drooling jaws and an agony of longing in his eyes. The pale spring sunshine lay on them delicately warm; starlings, shining and black as wet ink, swayed in the tree tops; and the weeping willow, hanging over the whitewashed cabins across the road where the negro servants slept, was turning brightest yellow green. The small hot cakes with their crisp brown lace-like edgings were so delicious. Oh, everything was so nice! And Papa was coming home!

Great things were being done inside, for Uncle Willie and poor Aunt Priscilla and Cousin Lizzie and Cousin Sam were coming to dinner because it was Papa’s birthday.

“Do you really think you ought to have us, Margaret?” Cousin Lizzie had asked. “In your condition?” For Mamma was expecting another baby in two months.

It seemed to Mamma not quite—well—delicate—of Lizzie to keep reminding her of her condition. She herself never spoke of it except reluctantly in answer to Papa. There was some excuse for him, he wanted a son so intensely, and then gentlemen were different. It was a fact that complicated life, but could not be denied. But Lizzie, with her sharp eyes and sharp tongue, was dreadfully embarrassing.

“I’ll give you just what we’d have ourselves, Lizzie.” Mamma had lied gently; and she wrote out the menu and carried it about tucked into her bodice like a love letter.

“Mock turtel soup, boiled turky with oyster sauce, roasted ham, chicken-pie, roast goose with applesauce, smoke-tongue, beets, cold-slaw, squash, salsify, fried celery, almond pudding, mince pie, calf’s foot jelly, blancmange.”

There was a beautiful cut-paper trouser-frill for the roasted ham, and the crust of the chicken-pie, meltingly, tenderly brown, was ornamented with pie-crust stars and squiggles. As for the blancmange, the little girls had never seen anything so charming. It had been moulded in blown eggshells, and lay in a nest of clear amber jelly and lemon peel cut in thin strips to look like straw.

Of course, today of all days, poor Aunt Priscilla had to come to help, and that always delayed things so. She came with her beautiful Cashmere shawl all huddled about her round shoulders, and her hair spraying out of torn places in her net, and her shabby old Adelaide boots that drove Uncle Willie nearly crazy. He wanted her to dress fashionably, and she couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. She used to tell Mamma she couldn’t, sitting and eating a piece of cake or drinking wild cherry bounce, while the tears trickled down her cheeks.

Now, when poor Priscilla appeared, Mamma said, “Botheration!” softly, under her breath; but she didn’t really mind, for Priscilla was the only one of Papa’s relations who made her feel quick and clever and sure of herself; and she moved twice as briskly, with an important little frown, as soft as a wrinkle in cream, between her eyebrows, after Priscilla came.

But she had to get her out of the kitchen, for old Chloe’s puckered black face was getting crosser every minute. So they went into the conservatory to cut some flowers for Papa’s welcoming.

Mamma loved her conservatory so! Papa said she loved it better than she loved him, but, of course, that was only his fun. There were the delicate drooping ferns; the bloodred foliage of the dragon-plant; the fuchsias, trained like umbrellas, all tasselled with crimson and purple, umbrellas gorgeous enough to hold over the heads of Chinese emperors. And begonias with crimson-lined, silver-spotted leaves; intense blue and purple velvet disks of cinerarias; creamy calla lilies; and the little pouches of the calceolarias, golden, crimson, maroon and rose colored, mottled and flecked—moneybags for the elves. All along one side were the spice-scented, winter-flowering carnations, with their flakes and veinings and marblings of color—yellow edged with a fringe of rose, rosy pink and carmine. La Pureté and La Pureté Variée. Mamma could never understand what Papa found funny in “Variegated Purity”; but then she couldn’t understand most of the jokes that amused him, although she always gave them her gentle smile, puzzled and polite.

Snip went her scissors through the stem of a tea-rose. Snip! That was a little bit of myrtle. And then back into the parlor to arrange charming unaesthetic bouquets—rosebuds and fuchsia, an airy tendril of vine, a spray of wax-white lemon blossoms, with glossy dark leaves—while Aunt Priscilla followed, talking in a mild steady trickle.

“So I had my new dress laid out on the bed, and that new fancy dinner-cap I got in Philadelphia, the black lace one with the magenta ribbons, all ready to surprise Willie. I meant to have them on when he came home to tea, but I got to reading a new book by that Mr. Wilkie Collins—‘Sister Rose; or, The Ominous Marriage,’ it’s called. I read about it in Godey’s. It said: ‘has merit and is neatly printed,’ so I knew it would be good—so anyway—what was I talking about?”

“Willie,” Mamma replied. She hadn’t been listening, but she knew that all Aunt Priscilla’s conversation rippled around that name.

“Oh, yes, Willie!” And she said the name tenderly, as if her heart was giving it a little kiss. “Well, so I hadn’t an idea how late it was; and the first thing I knew, there was Willie home and Henry Allen with him—come to tea—and me in my old crocheted Zouave because it was so chilly, and my hoops off. And nothing for tea but chip-beef because I told the girl I’d make some whips for dessert—she don’t seem to have much success with her desserts—girls aren’t what they used to be—no faculty, and independent! And even the green ones asking two dollars a week.”

“Don’t talk to me about girls!” cried Mamma, meaning do.

“And so Willie—O‑oh!”

Priscilla’s hands flew to her mouth, her mild kind eyes swam with tears, and the small nose that looked like a button in the middle of a puffy cushion flushed pink. On the floor lay the glass swan her sleeve had brushed from the table; and Mamma looking at it, felt her eyes fill with tears too. She had never thought about it much before, but, now that it was broken, it seemed to her that it had always been her favorite ornament. Poor little swan! It lay there with its fragile neck snapped right in two, with the violets old Toot had brought in from the cold-frame scattered around it, and a dark patch beside it on the crimson carpet that looked as if it had been bleeding. Yet with those pale bewildered eyes looking at her so beseechingly, she could only repeat to herself the family saying:

“Poor Priscilla means so well!”

She was dreadfully tired by the time Aunt Priscilla went home! But the parlor was decked satisfactorily for Papa’s return. She loved her parlor, almost as much as her conservatory. Each fat chair was a friend, the sofa was a lover who said to her, “Come, lie in my arms.” To walk on the carpet was to walk on crimson roses. Between looped-back crimson window-curtains hung cages of canaries and lovebirds that she had tamed with the endless patience of indolence combined with a sweet nature, and taught to perch on her shoulder and peck at lumps of sugar held between her lips. Under the cages green iron plantstands held geraniums soft as butterfly wings, their velvet leaves banded with chocolate color, growing in pots covered with putty into which she had pressed acorns and little pine-cones. She had crocheted the blue and green and scarlet worsted covers for the goose-egg baskets in the windows, each holding a little bunch of flowers or a feather of fern; she had made the wax pond lilies floating on their mirror pools under glass shades. And even a picture hanging on the wall was hers—a castle on a lake, with mountains and clouds for background. The sky and water were painted; and the mountains were of gray sand; the rocks, of red sand; and a road of yellow sand, sprinkled on glue. The castle was made of white birch-bark, with its dark reddish lining used for the parts in shadow, and the windows and doors painted in with ivory black; and, springing from the moss of the foreground, were trees—bits of untwisted rope with the strands divided at the top to make the limbs. Cousin Lizzie and Aunt Priscilla had made sand-pictures, too. The directions said you could have white clouds, storm clouds, or sunset clouds, but pointed out that sunset clouds were more difficult and required more patience to paint. Mamma had been contented with white clouds, but Cousin Lizzie had done a sunset. As for poor Priscilla’s, hers had ended in nothing much but glue all over everything in the house.

And now to rest!