text:
Phoebe and the Household Gods

HEN Phoebe came back from her first long visit, it was borne in upon the Martin family that they offended constantly in matters pertaining to etiquette and taste. Mrs. Martin's sympathy never ran thin—even at the hundredth repetition of the glories of the Warburton social circle. But the time came when the application to argumentative discussion of the word Marblehead produced on the male half of the family an effect far from soothing.

“Mother,” Ernest said once, “I hate to be called to grub by a vulgar dinner-bell. Can't you train the kitchen canary to announce our meals? Delia's stutter would put any vaudeville act on the fritz. Now, in Marblehead, the butler always sasshayed to the drawing-room door and whispered, 'Madame, the dinner is served!' Oh, Lizzie!”

And once, goaded beyond human endurance, Mr. Martin said, “Ernest, I prithee do not say, 'Chase the cow up to this end of the table!' In Marblehead, we always said, 'May I solicit the cream?'”

But, undaunted by the slings and arrows of an envious conservatism, Phoebe continued to hammer along the lines of esthetic reform. And Mrs. Martin continued to wonder for what all this maneuvering was preparation.

In Mrs. Martin's case, Phoebe's domestic muckraking had gone no farther than: “Mother Martin, this winter you've got to have some clothes. This putting every cent you can rake and scrape together on me has got to stop. You ought to see the way Mrs. Warburton dressed at Marblehead—my goodness! At least you ought to have one dress-up gown—a whole dress—a princess. That waist-and-skirt proposition has all gone out. It looks funny.”

But to Mrs. Martin's great relief—for economy was so instinctive with her now that spending money on herself seemed almost criminal—her daughter said nothing more about clothes. Indeed, on one pretext or another Phoebe herself postponed the inevitable shopping expedition.

Of all these things Mrs. Martin thought as she watched her husband and her daughter turn the corner and come up the drive together. At sight of them, Mrs. Martin's first subconscious comment was, “She's teasing him for something he don't want to give.” Her next, “How crazy those two are about each other!” was subconscious, too. None the less was it prideful and self-glorifying. For, in some vague, illogical way, this devotion seemed her handiwork. Her last came consciously and with a sigh. “I wonder what he'll say when she gets engaged? He'll never reconcile himself to it in this world.”

But the front door was open now, and Phoebe's well-pitched voice seemed to disperse the last wisp of the lurking Sunday stillness. “Let's talk it over with mother, father dear,” she said. In another moment, Mr. Martin had sunk into the morris-chair beside the fire with a long “A-a-ah!” of relief, and Phoebe had curled herself into another one of the big armchairs.

“Mother,” exclaimed Phoebe breathlessly, “I've been telling father how much I'd like to give a little dance—a cotillion—in the Playroom, I mean the Gym, on my birthday. It won't be any expense to him,” she threw in hastily, forefending [sic] criticism, “for I've saved up most of my allowance for six months and all the money I earned doing that brass-work in the summer. It will cost me very little, you see, because I'll have only ice cream and cake and Miss Peck will play the piano until twelve for five dollars. And you know, Mother Martin, it's about time that we did some entertaining—with father such an important man in the community and—and—besides—it would be nice for Ern if we could keep him in nights—and—and—make this house a sort of rendezvous for”

Mrs. Martin's whole face lighted up with a smile of real little-girl glee. She shook her hands with her characteristic gesture of delight. “I think it will be the greatest fun! Let's make out the list of invitations now.”

Phoebe gasped. It is always a shock, when you have prepared for battle involving terrific carnage, to achieve victory at the end of the first skirmish. She turned her back on her father as on a discredited ally, and she paid gallant tribute to her mother's readiness.

“Oh, Mother Martin, how you always do just what I don't expect!” She flew blithely to the desk and returned armed with pencils and paper. “Girls first,” she began.

“Molly Tate, the Gould twins, Margaret Farnum and Janet Dodge,” Mrs. Martin rattled off at Phoebe's own breakneck speed.

“Marian Ordway,” Phoebe took it up. “Oh, yes, and Augusta Pugh.”

“Oh, you Gussie!” gibed Ernest, who had tumbled into the room, drawn downstairs by some powerful psychological suction. “Gee, I'm glad you're inviting her! For if Gussie comes, it's the barn for mine.”

“Who else did you say, mother?” Phoebe spent not the flicker of an eyelash on this interruption. But in another instant, she added casually: “I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'll invite you, Ern Martin, at all. Remember this is my party. Oh, and of course, father, I want to invite all the girls in your office—I never shall forget how sweet they were to me that time I went in to work. Then there's Florence Marsh.” Phoebe bent to her pencil-point.

For an instant the room was silent. Then Mr. and Mrs. Martin spoke simultaneously.

“I thought Florence was away,” Mrs. Martin said. And, “What's your idea in inviting Florence Marsh?” Mr. Martin said. “She never comes here.”

Unwittingly, Phoebe had flicked her father on the raw. It was a source of private indignation with Mr. Martin that Mrs. Martin had never been properly appreciated in Maywood. At first she had been too poor, and always she had been too busy, to take any important place in their pleasant little community. Maywood boasted a Woman's Club which she had never thought of joining and a Whist Club which she had never been invited to enter. Mrs. Marsh, the richest woman in town, divided its social leadership with Mrs. Warburton, a representative of its most distinguished family. Mrs. Warburton, with whom Phoebe was a great favorite, had always been “neighborly,” but Mrs. Marsh had never stepped foot inside their house. Marsh himself was a pleasant, democratic sort of person with whom Mr. Martin had been forced into social relations. Wednesday night, for instance, the committee of which Marsh was chairman and Mr. Martin a member would meet at the Marsh house. Mr. Martin knew that the wives of the other committeemen would, by special invitation, be spending the evening with Mrs. Marsh, in the intimate seclusion of their hostess's upstairs sitting-room. Mr. Martin had to attend these functions—duty required that—but he had never got over the hurt of knowing that certain doors, open in a sense to him, remained closed to his wife. He had not spoken of the matter to Mrs. Martin. Sometimes he wondered what she thought of it all.

“Oh, Ive got to,” Phoebe was saying casually. “Didn't I tell you, mother, that Florence and I were great chums in Marblehead?”

Mrs. Martin dropped her pencil and looked at Phoebe over her glasses. “You mentioned meeting her.”

“I saw her every single day,” Phoebe explained with calmness. “She was staying at the most beautiful old place in Salem and she came to that first tea that Mrs. Warburton gave for me. She seemed to take the greatest fancy to me—rushed me like everything. And I liked her ever so much. She's not very pretty or very brilliant, but she's a dandy girl.”

This was Phoebe. In her social game, she alternated canny calculation with an unexpected innocence of the importance of her conquests. She would have told you that her real “crush” of the summer had been for Sylvia Gordon, who was paying her way through college by waiting on table at the hotel.

“The only trouble,” Phoebe rippled on, “is that Mrs. Marsh will surely come if Florence does. She has an idea that a girl ought to be chaperoned every moment of the time. It makes Florence perfectly crazy.”

Mrs. Martin spoke first, and her voice had the uncharacteristic dryness of emphasis.

“I wouldn't bother about that. Neither Florence nor her mother will come here.”

“Oh, yes, they'll come, all right,” Phoebe disagreed lightly. “In fact, I met Florence yesterday and asked her if she'd be a 'floater'—that's a girl who helps you to get things started at teas and functions of all sorts—and she said that she was just crazy to do anything she could. My goodness, is that the October 'Ladies Household Guide'? Why didn't somebody tell me when I've just been on pins and needles waiting for it to come?”

Under cover of the family conversation, always dully statistical without her mental eagerness and her forthrightness of expression to whirl it along, Phoebe whipped through the magazine. The head of one of the back pages—GIRLS' PROBLEMS—stopped her. Her pink finger-tip ran swiftly down the column of small-type answers to correspondents, and paused at an item near the bottom.

“Mother,” Phoebe said casually, coming into her mother's room to be kissed good night, “haven't you a box full of old lace somewhere that Aunt Mary left you? I wish you'd get it out to-morrow and let me look at it. And by the way, mother, to-morrow we'll go in and get that new gown of yours.”

The evening of the following Wednesday, Phoebe threw another bomb into the family circle. “Father,” she said, after an interval of silence during which she studied his gala attire, “do you know that you need some new evening-clothes?”

“A new swallow-tail!” Mr. Martin ejaculated. And he said it in the tone of one who sees the sway and anticipates the crash of his dearest illusion. “What's the matter with this one?”

“Everything's the matter with it,” Phoebe said emphatically. “The tails are too long and the coat is too short and it hasn't a stripe along the seam of its trousers. You ought to have a white piqué waistcoat and that tie's the limit. How long have you had it, father?”

“Seventeen years,” Mr. Martin confessed. And he cringed.

“Seventeen years!” Phoebe repeated. And again, “Seventeen years!” She did not hurt her argument by further comment. But in her inflection, Mr. Martin read his doom.

“And while you're about it,” continued Phoebe, as though the matter were settled, “you might as well get some for Ern. It's time he had some. He's as big as he'll ever be—goodness knows we'll have to put a hole in the roof if he grows another inch. Ern'll sure be invited to lots of dances this winter—”

“And I'll go to them all—I don't think—nitsky,” interpolated Ernest.

“—and he ought to have the right thing to wear,” Phoebe went on, not turning a hair. “And when you do get some new clothes, father, do go and have your pictures taken. I'm sick and tired of having the Boston papers publish that fierce old effigy that they're always sticking in whenever you do anything.”

With a “I have spoken” air, Phoebe returned to her book.

“Is there anything else in a small way that you think you'd like?” Mr. Martin inquired. But into his voice had crept a certain flatness, the germ of that doubt which first festers, then gangrenes, then sends a man, hotfoot, to his tailor. The next Saturday he said peremptorily: “Ernest, you meet me at ten o'clock in the office. I'm going round to order a new swallow-tail and you might as well get measured, too.”

For the next two days, Phoebe contributed little to the family history. Indeed, her manner was informed with an unfamiliar conservatism, her aspect exuded a dovelike mildness. But on the third night she dropped into the peaceable domestic group what proved the highest explosive yet.

“Father,” she said in her most winning tones, “do you know it's time that you bought Mother Martin some new furniture?”

“New furniture! Mr. Martin repeated in a dazed tone. “New furniture! Phoebe,” he demanded scathingly, “how is it that you manage to exist in such a low-brow circle?”

“Now, father dear, don't get cross,” Phoebe remonstrated. She deposited herself in Mr. Martin's lap and rubbed her smooth cheek against his. “Please, don't be sarcastic, because that frightens me. I want to talk reasonably with you. I may be wrong lots of times, but this time I know I'm right. It is time we had some new furniture. Don't you think so, mother?”

Mrs. Martin was torn with conflicting allegiances. For Mrs. Martin did think so. Emphatically she thought so. She had never thought anything else. In point of fact, Mrs. Martin had never considered that she had any furniture. She and her husband had married on almost nothing. The few sticks of things which they bought at first had been augmented by a legacy of furniture from her Aunt Mary. At the time, it had seemed a godsend. But in the early years of her married life, Mrs. Martin longed intensely for the plush and mirrored “sets” of her generation of brides. In the twenty-odd years of their marriage, there had always been something to eat into their savings. After the children were born, they decided to buy the Esdaile place. It was a beautifully built house, big for those days and for these even, but a great bargain, and they had never regretted the half dozen cramping years that followed. Then came the stable, a horse and carriage, the automobile. Always there was the insurance and the fund for Ernest's college education. The Martins were fairly well-to-do now. There were two maids in the house. Mrs. Martin had a liberal housekeeping allowance. In fact, the economical tension had relaxed all along the line.

Although Mrs. Martin did not know it and Phoebe could never have suspected it, the house was in admirable if quiet taste, because it adjusted itself so closely to the needs of its tenants. True, the rooms were big, square, a little unmitigated. But Mrs. Martin was the kind of woman for whom green things love to grow. Everywhere ivies, ferns, and feathery, drooping plants softened the gauntness of the walls. The furniture was all dignified and simple, the mahogany, although they did not know it, exceptional, the few old engravings excellent examples of their school. Economy had prevented Mrs. Martin from acquiring the clutter of foolish bric-à-brac which would have put all these fine effects to shame. In fact, everything, though not especially decorative, was good of its kind, useful and used.

Swayed equally by the claims of sentiment and the joys of acquisitiveness, Mrs. Martin asked non-committally, “Well, what are you thinking of doing?”

“Well, in the first place, I want to get rid of all that old truck of Aunt Mary's,” Phoebe said emphatically and with unhesitating decision.

Phoebe's mentality resembled nothing so much as a roll-top desk. It was full of big drawers and little drawers, convenient pigeon-holes and broad, flat shelves. Every opinion Phoebe had—and she had one on every conceivable subject—was neatly tied up, labeled and filed away. Phoebe could put her hand on any one of them at an instant's notice.

Again Mrs. Martin fenced. And, a little, she bristled. “What truck?” she asked.

“Well, for instance, those black-walnut bookcases. “They're such lumbering, high, hideous things. Nobody has poky old stuff like that nowadays. All the furniture is—well, sort of heavy but airy, if you know what I mean. Oh, mother, if you could only see Mrs. Warburton's place in Marblehead—”

Ernest groaned ostentatiously. Mr. Martin reached for a book. Mrs. Martin had a sudden impulse to take up the cudgels for Aunt Mary's lares against the Warburton penates. But another impulse silenced her. For, all through Phoebe's discontent sounded the voice of the Coming Generation. And Mrs. Martin recognized it. Also, by that token, she knew that Aunt Mary, her goods and chattels, were doomed.

“—and other places she took me to—artists and people like that,” Phoebe was still racing on with her narrative. “I don't care for the artists' places, myself. They're too bare and messy. They stick up pictures with thumb-tacks—it looks like—just anywhere it occurs to them. They never have any frames on them. And they think the queerest, ugliest things are beautiful. What I mean is their studios aren't the least bit cozy. But there are some new houses I went into—oh, weren't they the crackajacks! Chockful of the loveliest, bright-looking, new, modern furniture. Every room done in a color. Now, for instance, mother, your room ought to be pink and mine yellow to go with our complexions. Everybody has bookcases built in nowadays and built low to put bric-à-brac on them. The stunt is to have everything on a level with the eye—search me why. And just slews and slathers and rafts of pictures, all little ones, just as few big ones as possible.”

Much of this was in accordance with Mrs. Martin's own observation. But, for the moment, it pleased her, as, axiomatically, it pleases the half-converted, to put obstacles in the way of a relentless progress. “What would you do with Aunt Mary's bookcases?” For the first time, Phoebe hesitated. And when Phoebe hesitated, the air always quivered with latent possibilities.

“Put them in Ern's room,” Ernest broke in with an ominous falsetto imitation of his sister's treble. “Mother, if you let Phoeb' Martin dump those old coffins in my room, I'll chop them up for kindling-wood. Look what's in there now! Everything that nobody else wants—two trunks, two bureaus, a broken table, and every chair that's ever got smashed since I was born. Tug asked me once if you got my furniture at a rummage sale.”

Ernest had interrupted Phoebe just in time. “Ern's room,” had so choked in her throat that she had, finally, to swallow it. “I'd either sell them or put them in the stable, mother,” she said as one inspired. “Now that will be about all from you, Ern Martin. You know that if I've offered to fix your room up once, I've offered a million times.”

“Gee, and a grand job you'd make of it,” Ernest countered offensively. “Tidies and all kinds of dinky, footless girl-stuff everywhere.”

“We are talking about something that doesn't concern you, Ern Martin, in the least, and which you could not possibly understand if it did. Now what I want for the house, mother, is—” and for the first time, Phoebe really let herself go. “I think,” she concluded at the end of the most eloquent quarter of an hour of her life, “now that you and father have reached the time of life when you can afford such comforts, there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't have them. Now is there?”

Mrs. Martin, overcome by this oral flood, could not answer. But Mr. Martin, less susceptible to the claims of the Coming Generation, took it by the forelock. “That furniture is good enough for your mother and me, Phoebe,” he said, “and I guess you'll have to put up with it a little while longer.”

Superficially, it seemed as if the matter were settled. But when the Coming Generation allies itself with a Latent Maternal Ambition, something is sure to break. So, a few nights later, Ernest Martin, dashing into the house just ahead of the dinner-bell, came upon a pale and exhausted Phoebe stretched out on the library couch.

“Ern Martin, if I haven't put in a day,” she began. “They bought everything that I wanted in the end—all except one plush chair, shaped like a letter S, that mother said she'd always wanted and was going to have now if she didn't have another thing. I guess you'll show some signs of excitement, Ern Martin, when I tell you that I got them to buy a whole new set for your room. Yes, sir—curly birch and a corker! And you can just thank me, for I never worked so hard for anything in my life. I got father to buy you one of those high chiffoniers—the kind Tug has at Harvard—all kinds of drawers in it and a peachy mirror. I think they're great—they're so manny. And they're going to sell all the tumbledown truck—that is, all except Aunt Mary's things. Mother says she'd as soon think of selling one of us as that—you know how funny she is about anything that's been in the family—darling, old duck! But she's agreed to put them in the stable! It wasn't so bad with father—you know there's one thing about father—you can tire him out. But mother held back on everything. Why, she actually turned pale when father began to loosen up. I thought at times she was going to cry.”

“Mother always does get cold feet when it comes to spending money,” Ernest remarked reflectively, “but father's the easiest thing on earth—once you get him going.”

“Maybe we haven't got to hustle though to get ready for that dance! For I just put it to father and mother coming home in the train that with all that new furniture they simply must have some painting and papering done. Father saw the sense of that immediately. So, now we've got to hold the furniture back until the house is ready. But I guess we'll make it—we've got a whole month!”

But a night's sleep could do much for Phoebe. The morning found her fresh, buoyant, the light of a new resolution shining in her eyes. “Father,” she began unhesitatingly at breakfast, “do you know that now that the house is being all fixed over, it does seem to me as if we ought to make more of a junction of this affair. You see it's almost in the nature of a house-warming. I really think, considering you're kind of a public man, that we ought to have engraved invitations and a caterer. And when you come to count up, we're really inviting almost everybody in Maywood. It seems to me that Miss Peck's music will seem rather funny for such a big dance.”

Mr. Martin fixed his daughter with a look in which suspicion had kindled exasperation. She returned it with a gaze of seraphic, star-eyed innocence.

“Phoebe,” he said at last, “I'll bring my bank-book home to-night and give it to you. You go ahead and do whatever you want, but don't you insult me again by pretending to consult me about anything.”

For a month, domestic anarchy reigned in the Martin household. Mrs. Martin said again and again that the house would never be finished in time. As it was, on the night of the dance, the last bit of furniture barely grazed the first incoming guest. But, even then, there was no hitch—the reins of government were too firmly clutched in Phoebe's slender brown hands.

After the light dinner, Phoebe sent her family to their rooms with the command to be ready for inspection in an hour. Alone, she made the final tour of the house. Now and again she called instructions to the struggling ones upstairs.

The place was almost unrecognizable. The big living-rooms, papered in a brilliant red cartridge and carpeted with Axminster rugs of rainbow dyes, bulged with heavy mission furniture. From the sideboard in the dining-room came the diamond glitter of new cut glass, the unrelieved glare of new silver. A plate-rail almost sagged under an accumulation of exotic china, copper and brass, and much-mottoed steins. The walls were hidden behind casts and pictures, many the passepartout work of Phoebe's own tireless fingers. Mrs. Martin had held out stubbornly for her plants. Phoebe had supplemented them with bowls of flowers. These, and the new, hospitably doorless, low bookcases, filled with Aunt Mary's fine old books, saved to the place some of its old-time flavor. Phoebe's face was one smile, as she looked about her.

“Don't anybody sit on the couch in the hall,” she commanded. “I've been fifteen minutes making the cushions look as if somebody had just been sitting there.”

Phoebe appeared in her brother's room a minute later with a framed photograph in her hand. “Now, Ern,” she said placatingly, “you've just got to let me put this picture of myself on your chiffonier. I promise I'll take it out to-morrow. But it will look so nice here so long as you have father's and mother's on the dresser. That suit is perfectly stunning, Ern—I'm so glad I got father to get it for you. You're all right. You can go downstairs if you want to. But be sure not to move a thing.”

From there, she proceeded to her mother's room. “Now, mother, I'm going to put just a little wave in your hair. It will be so becoming and I promise you I'll do just the weeniest mite. Please, mother, please—remember it's my birthday. Oh, that's a duck! My goodness, mother, but that mauve meteor is becoming to you! I don't know, though, but what we ought to have got new lace for it, after all. That of Aunt Mary's is so yellowy.”

And, last, she dashed into her father's room, a copy of “Men's Fashions” in her hand.

“Oh, father, if you don't look swell! Mother, just you wait until you see father! Now, to be sure that you're all right, there's a picture here— Now, where is that picture—I had it a moment ago? Here it is! See, father, 'Morning, afternoon and dress.' Oh, father, you can't wear that watch-chain—there's none in the picture.”

“But, Phoebe, I always carry a watch. I'd be lost without it. And I've got to have a chain, haven't I?”

“Father, dear, please don't wear the watch to-night. It's my birthday, you know. There, that's right. You'll be the handsomest man in the house to-night. And remember, father, the instant the music strikes up, you're to open the dance with me.”

A moment later, she herded them into the downstairs living-room. She engineered them brilliantly through that moment of embarrassment which accompanied their first glimpse of each other. She even successfully parried Mr. Martin's sardonic, “Bertha, is that method of arranging your hair the result of premeditation or accident—or has Phoebe ordered it?” and Ernest's heated, “This coat pinches so under the arms that I've a good mind to take it off and put on a sweater.” After that, in order to get herself dressed, Phoebe had to leave them alone with each other. As was inevitable, discipline relaxed. The deadly depression that, by an interminable quarter of an hour, precedes all entertaining, fell heavily on the Martin family.

“I can't dance a step to-night,” Ernest prophesied morosely. “These pumps hurt like the very dickens!”

“Edward,” Mrs. Martin said fearfully, “I feel like a dressed-up doll with my hair curled like this. And Phoebe would have a transparent yoke to this dress.”

“Oh, you look all right, Bertha,” Mr. Martin growled. “But what I want to know is how did we ever come to get dragged into such a mess?”

“Oh, I don't know, Edward,” Mrs. Martin groaned. “I feel so queer. How are we going to take care of all those people? I don't feel as if I could say one word.”

“Me,” Mr. Martin remarked saturninely, “all I know is that I was counting up to-day, and I find this affair has put me back just fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Oh, Edward!” Mrs. Martin wailed.

Then, providentially, Phoebe returned—a Phoebe brilliant as a California poppy in her apricot gown, a Phoebe with gray eyes unnaturally bright, a Phoebe with an unaccustomed winy flush burning through the olive of her skin, a Phoebe whose tall, slim, virginal presence so dripped and shimmered with beauty that even her mother gasped as she looked at her.

And then the bell rang.

Five minutes later, the radiant excitement inevitable to hospitality had quite freed Mr. and Mrs. Martin of their self-consciousness. Fifteen minutes later, a steady file of maidenhood trooping, muffled and shapeless, to Phoebe's room, had returned delicate, floating bubbles of femininity. Twenty minutes later, the group of husky adolescents—putting off the fatal moment of introduction by a cowardly segregation in Ernest's room—had been routed out to the last man. Twenty-five minutes later, Mrs. Martin was welcoming Mrs. Marsh and Florence in the tones of an established composure. A half an hour later, Phoebe had discovered, to the swaying music of the first waltz, that her father was an excellent dancer, and Ernest had found himself whirling about the room a mother who had feet of thistledown. An hour later, the figures which Phoebe had invented and the favors which she had made were turning the cotillion into a pageant.

Mr. and Mrs. Martin finally lost sight of their children in the flutter of conducting Mrs. Marsh on a voyage about the house. Mrs. Marsh was a large, square, bulky lady, cut on strict mathematical lines, better fitted, architecturally, than anybody else in the house to adorn the mission furniture which Phoebe had selected.

“Ah, Mrs. Martin,” she was saying in her heaviest tone of patronage, “I'm so glad to see that you have not fallen under the spell of the modern craze for antiques. You, like me, have gone in for the furniture of your period. Personally, I have the greatest interest in my contemporaries. I believe it a duty for us to encourage the able mechanics of our own generation.”

Of course Mr. and Mrs. Martin did not know the hidden tragedy of Mrs. Marsh's domestic life. Early in her married career, she had invested several thousand dollars in a houseful of modern furniture, only to discover later that “the thing,” so far as household goods were concerned, was to collect antiques.

Mr. Martin, it was, who answered her. “Yes,” he said, “I confess that I like the modern stuff. My wife and I have been feeling for a long time that we ought to get rid of the old furniture we've had ever since we were married. But you know how it is about these things—you talk about it for years before you really do anything. The other day we just made up our minds that the time had come. We put in a whole day in Boston, buying these things.”

“They are in excellent taste,” Mrs. Marsh said, and again, impressively, “in excellent taste.”

“There was a set in Circassian walnut,” Mr. Martin went on recklessly, “that my wife liked immensely, although we didn't get it. But to-morrow, Bertha, I'm going to telephone them to send it out here.” He fixed his wife with an expression that dared her to raise the banner of economy.

But Mrs. Martin only said placidly, “That's right, Edward—it will go beautifully with that old-rose paper. And, Edward, I've been thinking. Next spring, I want you to build on an outside dining-room at the back of the house and a piazza at the side.”

A little after twelve, the file of delicate, floating bubbles of femininity had begun to troop to Phoebe's room, returning muffled and shapeless. Now they were vanishing down the street, accompanied by a twin file of the husky adolescents. Mrs. Marsh, having lingered unaccountably long, was saying in farewell:

“Oh, Mrs. Martin, do let me present your name for membership in our Woman's Club. Your children are almost grown up now and I don't think you have quite the right to neglect your civic duties any longer. I'm very sure I can get you elected in time for you to serve on the committee for Gentlemen's Night. We need women there with just your peculiar talent for entertaining—who can plan things and make them go. And do wear that gown—that old pointe de Venise is simply marvelous. And remember, Mrs. Martin, that the next time Mr. Martin attends a committee meeting at our house, you must be sure to come, too. Some of the wives have got into the habit of spending the evening with me—and we do have such pleasant evenings. Not wasted evenings, I assure you, Mrs. Martin, for while the rest sew, one of our number always reads from some instructive book. Good night, dear Mrs. Martin.”

“Well,” Mr. Martin said when he came back from putting Mrs. Marsh into her carriage, “we must give more of these little affairs, mother. They're no trouble at all and very little expense.” His eyes glowed as they rested on his wife's happy face.

“Sure! That was the best ice-cream I ever tasted,” approved Ernest. “I had five plates.”

And, “Now, Mother Martin, you see!” crowed Phoebe. “We never could have made such a hit if it hadn't been for that furniture you and father bought.”

title: Phoebe and the Household Gods


text: Talk:Phoebe and the Household Gods

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title: Talk:Phoebe and the Household Gods


text:
Page:A treatise on Asiatic cholera.djvu/18

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HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF CHOLERA.

pression of urine, and profuse perspiration. The skin is inelastic, and that of the liands and feet shrivelled and dusky ; the eyes are sunk, and the features pinched ; cramps are felt in the Hmbs ; there is diffi- culty of breathing, intense thirst, excessive restless- ness, rapid and ^mall pulse, and suppressed voice. The external temperature of the body sinks below 98° F., and a pecuHar sweetish sickly odour (fishy) is exhaled from the body, breath, and dejections.

If left to nature, about one half of those attacked with cholera recover of themselves, reaction super- vening, and often being accompanied with fever, and not unfrequently with suppression of urine and various other complications : or the disease may terminate, within a few hours from its commencement, in fatal collapse.

Section II. — Historical Account of Cholera.

Earliest records of cholera. — The early Sanskrit writers rank among the most ancient authorities on the science of medicine. Of these Chararka is beheved by the Hindus to have derived his knowledge from a mythological personage known as Dhawantari, coin- ciding in character with Esculapius. Chararka's works are inc?omplete ; but in the Nidan of his dis- ciple 'Susruta, we meet with the following description of a form of " Vishuka." The patient is attacked with "vomiting, purging, faintness, thirst, pam m the abdomen, yawning, forgetfulness, burning heat in the stomach, duskiness of the surface of the body, pain in the head and heart." The worst symptoms are " blueness of the gums, lips, and nails, diminution


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 EARLY EECOEDS — SANSKEET GEEEK.

3

of tlie senses, coldness of the body, sunken eyes, suppressed voice, a feeling of complete lassitude but "if burning of the palms of the hands and body, accompanied with sharp vomiting," occur, the patient is hkely to recover ; and should " he digest his food, all danger is passed," the patient obtaining immediate reHef, the purging stops, and he is in comfort. If this description refers to cholera, the disease must have been in existence for many centuries, Susruta being mentioned in the Mahabarata, which was com- piled before the Christian era. These Hindu authori- ties hved and wrote in the North-Western Provinces of India, and it is remarkable that they describe Vishuka as being a sporadic affection, — a character it has retained up to the present time in the north- west, with the exception of waves of the disease which burst over the country from time to time.

Hippocrates,* Galen, and Whang-shoohof are wit- nesses to the existence of cholera in their* day, both in Europe and China, and their evidence is supported by a series of Grecian, Eoman, and Arabian authors, bearing record to the fact of the pre'sence of the disease in the various countries in which they lived. J

The hterature of the middle ages is singularly barren in original observations regarding the science of medi- cine. Men occupied themselves rather with the ancient terms of art than with actual observation, and, in their critical researches, entirely overlooked

Francofurti, a.d. 1624.
 * ' Hippocrates Coi, de morb. vul,,' lib. v, sec. vii, fol. 1144, ed. fol.,

t ' Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society, Calcutta ' vol i p. 204.

X Celsua A. C, 'De Medicina,' lib. iv, cap. xi; Alexander Trallianus, ' De Cholera,' cap. xvi. Aretajus, lib. ii, cap. v. Ccelius AureUanus, Hb. iii, cap. XX. Avicenna, p. 492, edit. Rome, 1593.


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 4 HISTORY OP CHOLERA IN INDIA.

tlie important events that were passing before their eyes ;* and this is precisely what is even now going on among Hindus and Mahammedans in India: the Baids and Hakims pore over their ancient works with the greatest avidity, but are utterly blind to the necessity of noticing what is passing around them. Consequently, we have but few records in Persian or other ©riental languages to enUghten us on the history of the diseases of India. f Otherwise there can be httle doubt we should have had evidence of waves of epidemic cholera extending over the length and breadth of the country, long prior to the time of our occupying it.

The earliest notice of the existence of cholera in Hindustan, from the pen of a European, occurs in the ' LendaS' da India ' by Gaspar Correa, a Portuguese. He says that, during £he spring of the year 1503, 20,000 men had died in the army of the Zamoryn Sovereign?' of OaHcut, the enemy of the King of Cochin, and that the cause of this mortahty was enhanced " by the current spring diseases, and also smallpox, besides ivhich there was another disease, sudden-like, which struck ivith pain in the belly, so that a man did not last out eight hours' time.'' I

The same author informs us that in the spring of 1543 he met with cholera in an epidemic form at Goa ; that the natives called it morijxy, and that the mortality was so great that it was with difficulty the dead cculd be buried ; "so grievous was the throe, and of so bad a sort, that the very worst kind of poison seemed there

Babington. London, 1846.
 * Hecker ' On tbe Epidemics of the Middle Ages.' Translated by Dr.

t " Contribution to Literature of Cholera." By G. Gaskoin. ' Medico- Chirurg. Review,' 1867, p. 217.

+ Idem, p. 222.


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 SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. O

(in the Stomach) to take effect, as proved by vomiting, with dronglit of water accompanying it, as if the stomach were parched up, and cramps that fixed m the sinews of the joints and of the flat of the foot, with pain so extreme that the sufferer seemed at point of death ; the eyes dimmed to s.ense, and the nails of the hands and feet black and arched."

In 1563, Gargia d'Orta,* another Portuguese, gives us a vivid description of cholera 3S he met with it at Goa. He says the Arabs called it hachaiza (liaiza), the name it is known by throughout India to this day. He adds that the disease is always most severe in " June and July."

Linschot, a Dutchman, who resided at Goa for some few years prior to 1589, remarks that " the diseases which these changes of the season bring to the inhabit- ants of Goa are several, among which that commonly known as morclexin occurs, which comes on very suddenly to those subject to it, with swelling of the stomach and continual vomiting, till they fall into a faint. This disease is common, and proves deadly to many, t

There seems, therefore, no reason to doubt that epidemic cholera existed in Goa, the only province in India known to Europeans during the sixteenth century, and that its phenomena, and the time of its principal visitations, were precisely similar to those of the,disease as'seen ttere at the present day.

In the seventeenth century we have evidence of the presence of epidemic cholera in BataviaJ (1629), in

view,' 1867, p. 228. t ' Quarterly Review,' 18G7, vol. cxxii, p. 32.
 * Gaskoin " On the Literature of Cholera." ' Medico-Chirurg. Re-

X 'An Account of the Diseases of the East Indies,' p. 26. By Bontius. Translated and published in London.

a


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HISTORY OF CHOLERA IN INDIA.

the province of Goa in 1638,* and in London during the autumn of 16^^6,1 when Sydenham states that the cholera morbus was raging, and, owing to the unusual heat of the weather, brought with it convulsive symp- toms severer and of longer duration thafi had been observed before. ► Not only the abdomen but the muscles of the whole body, particularly of the arms and legs, wfere attacked with spasms of the most terri- ble violence, so that the patient would again and again leap out of bed. Lastly, Thevenot was himself attacked with cholera some time prior to 1678, near Surat.

Records of cholera in India from the English occuimtion until 1817. — The earliest account of the occurrence of cholera in India, from the pen of an English physician (Dr. Paisley), is dated Madras, February, 1774, and is to be found in Gurtis's Works on Diseases of India, pub- lished in Edinburgh in 1807. It is somewhat remark- able that this important communication should not have been* brought to light until thirty -three years after it was written, particularly as, in the meantime. Dr. Girdlestone had published a work in London, in 1787, on the *' Spasmodic Affections " of India, under which heading he gives an accurate description of cholera. It is evident, therefore, that, in spite of Dr. Paisley's letter, neither Girdlestone nor " a general meeting of the Faculty at Madras " which he consulted in 1782, recogiiised the disease we now designate cholera, as cholera. " *

I am anxious to bring this point somewhat promi- nently forward, not as a proof of ignorance or neglect on the part of the authorities whom I shall quote, for

 * ' Quarterly Review,' vol. cxxii, p. 33.

t ' The Works of Sydenham.' By T. Levan. London, 3rd edition, p. 146.


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they had a perfect right to follow Cullen's nosology, and class cholera under the heading of spasmodic diseases if they pleased ; but, supposing this were the case, we can hardly be surprised at failing to meet with a desG*ription of this affection as cholera among the writings of English physicians in India, during the latter part of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

In 1774 Dr. Paisley writes I am happy to hear you have occasioned the army to change its ground, for there can be no doubt, from the circum- stances you have mentioned, that their situation contributed to the frequency and violence of the attacks of this dangerous disease, which, as you have observed, is true cholera morbus, the same they had at Trincomale." (In a footnote Dr. Ci^rtis remarks that this must refer to some' occasion long anterior to the war of 1782.) Dr. Paisley goes on to observe that it is often epidemic among the nativest " In the first campaign made m this country, the same disease was terribly fatal among them, and fifty Europeans of the line were seized with it. I have niet with many single cases since." In 1770 cholera was endemic among the natives in the Amboo Valley in Arcot, and throughout the Travancore country. f

In 1781 we find cholera prevalent during the month of March in the district of Ganjam.* It attacked a division Of some 5000 Bengal troops marching 'through that province under Colonel Pearse. He reports that, besides those who died, no less than five hundred men were admitted into hospital on the 22nd of March.

Surgeon to the " Medea " frigate. Edinburgh, 1807, p. 85, t Idem, p. 16.
 * 'An Account of the Diseases of IncHii.' By 0. Curtis, formerly


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HISTORY 0¥ CHOLERA IN INDIA.

He further adds : — " Death raged in tlie camp with horror not to be ^described, and all expected to be devoured by the pestilence. In vain I studied to discover the cause of our misfortune. I attributed it to a poison, but at length found that therb had been a ^pestilential clisordef raging in the parts through which our first marches lay, and' that part of our camp was already drinking the au^ of death and destruction." In the course of, a few days 1143 men were in hospital affected with this disease. On the 29th of March, however, the sick were reduced to 908, and on the 1st of the following month the force was able to march, leaving 300 men convalescent behind.

It will be observed that Colonel Pearse does not men- tion the disease as being cholera ; he calls it a pesti- lence, and in,the following quotation from a despatch of the Supreme Government to the Court of Directors, no mention is made of cholera. This document is dated 27th April, 1781 ; the occurrence of the disease is notified, and the destruction which it caused in this detachment mentioned in terms of becoming regret.* After adverting to its progress in the Circars,, the despatch proceeds : — " The disease to which we allude has not been confined to the country of Ganjam; it afterwards found its way to this place (Calcutta) ; and after chiefly affecting the native inhabitants, so as to occasion a great mortahty during the period of a fortnight, it is now generally abated, and pursuing its course to the northward." The progress of this epidemic has never been recorded; but we have, at any rate, evidence of epidemic cholera raging through-

subject to tlic Presidency of Bengal.' By James Jameson. Calcutta, 1820.
 * ' Report on tlie Epidemic Cholera Morbus as it visited the territories


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 THE EPIDEMIC OF 1781-83.

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out the district of Ganjam in Marcli and April, 1781, of its travelling northward to Calcutta, attacking tlie inhabitants of that city and the intervening country, and passing on in the same northerly direction. Here, unfortunately, a blank occurs in the history of its progress; but we ' find that/n April, 1783, cholera burst out at Hurdwar, and in less than eight days is supposed to have cut off 20,000 pilgrims. *

This is precisely the course, and about the same time which subsequent waves of cholera have taken when passing over India ; and it seems to me that this fragmentary history is presumptive evidence that the epidemic was of a similar nature to that which occurred in 1817, and on subsequent occasions. This position is strengthened by the fact that Dr. Girdlestone says :* — " Spasms was the first disease which appeared among the troops who arriveS. at Madras in October, 1782. More than fifty of these fresh men were killed by them within the first three days after they landed in that country, and in less than a month's time upwards of a thousand had suffered from attacks of these . complaints." He goes on to 'describe the disease thus : — There is " coldness of the surface of the body, especially of the hands, feebleness of the pulse, spasmodic contraction of the lower extremities, the hands and feet become sodden with cold sweats, nails livid, pulse more feeble, breath cold, thirst insatiable, vomitmg incessant, which last, if not checked, soon terminates the existence of the patient." This is evidently an account of the disease we recognise as epidemic cholera.

Fra Paolino da S. Bartolomeo also, in a work

J. Girdlestone, M.D. London, 1787.
 * Essays ' On the Hepatitis and Spasmodic AiFections in India.' By


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published at Rome in 1796, gives a curious account of cholera.* He say^ : — " The disease is called mirtirissa, or nircomhen, in the language of Malabar, viszucega in Sanscrit, vulgarly mordexein, and not morte de chien as described by Sonnerat. It is an intestinal' colic caused by the cold wind from the Ghattes, or from bathing in the cold mornings. This disease is frequent in Malabar in Octobei', November, and December, when the wind comes from the Ghattes loaded with particles of nitre ; it is as common on the Coromandel Coast in April and May, and often carries off thirty or forty persons in a village during one night ; for, unless instantly relieved, it destroys life in the course of a few hours. In 1782 the disease hrohe out tvitJi terrible ferocity, and destroyed an enormous number of jpeople^

In the month of May, 1782, cholera was raging in an epidemic form at Trincomale, and our fleet at anchor there was severely affected. M. Sonnerat, f in his ' Travels in India,' also mentions the presence of epidemic cholera along the Coromandel Coast from 1772 to 1781. So that we have independent evidence of the existeiice of this disease in an epidemic form in Bengal during March, 1781, in Madras, and in fact along the whole of the Eastern Coast of India in 1782, and at Hurdwar in the Punjab during the year 1783.

In the foregoing extracts we have, I conceive, distinct evidence, though far from a detailed account, of the first wave of epidemic cholera which passed bver India since the occupation of the country by the English; and it seems that the reason for our not possessing clearer indications of the character of the disease, and of the circimistances attending its outbreak and

t Scott's ' Madras Reports,' p. iv.
 * ' Viaggio Alle Indie Oricntali,' p. 350.


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progress, is to be found in the fact, that it was hardly recognised as cholera. Moreover, it was not till 1786 that the Hospital Board was estabhshed in Bengal and Madras, before which period no returns of the sick were made. • Mr. Scott adds, that the reports from that date up to 1802 were kept in.no regular order. Our possessions in India also, prior to 1781, were surrounded by vast areas of unsubjected country, beyond which the course of the epidemic could not possibly be traced; but the details above given are, nevertheless, important, as evidence of the passage of a wave of epidemic cholera over a considerable portion of Hindustan within twenty- four years of the battle of Plassey.

During the month of October, 1787, epidemic cholera committed terrible ravages at -Arcot, and Yellore. With regard to this outbreak, Mr. Davis, a member of the Madras Hospital Board, remarks : — " I found in what was called the Epidemic Hospital, three different diseases, viz., patients labouring under cholera morbus ; an inflammatory fever with universal cramps ; and a spasmodic affection of the nervous s't^stem, distinct from cholera morbus. I understood, from the Regi- mental Surgeon, that the last disease had proved fatal to all who had been attacked with it, and that he had already lost twenty-seven men of the regiment in a few days. Five patients were then shown to me with scarce anf circulation whatever to be discovered ; with their eyes sunk within the orbits ; jaws set, bodies cold, and extremities livid."*

During the year 1790 cholera was very prevalent again in Ganjam ; in 1794 at Vellore, where it was described as the " Causis."

 * Scott's ' Report,' p. xii.


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HISTORY or CHOLEllA IN INDIA.

From tlie returns kept in the Office of tlie Bengal Medical Board d-uring tlie early part of the present century, and which relate exclusively to the European troops, I find that in 1808 five cases of cholera are reported, — one at Meerut, one at Delhij another at Muttra, and two ^ in Calcutta. In 1809 three cases occurred, and in 1811, 1812, 1813 no less than seventy- nine cases' of cholera are reported as having taken place at Chunar, but not a single one from any other station in the Presidency. During the year 1814 instances of cholera occurred at Cawnpore, Nagpoor, Benares, Meerut, and Dinapore ; in all forty-six cases, and eleven deaths. These are the first deaths re- ported fi'om this disease among our European troops in Bengal. In 1815 and 1816 there were no cases of chx)lera; and in this Presidency only two instances occurred among the troops at Benares in 1817, although the disease was raging throughout the whole of Bengal, showing that statistics, drawn simply from the condition of our European troops, are hardly to be relied upon as a criterion of the prevalence of cholera in Iildia.

The disease appeared in a crowded barrack in Fort William, in 1814, among recruits just arrived from England;* and in an epidemic form at Jaulna during the same year. With regard to this latter outbreak, Dr. Cruickshanks subsequently explained (in 1831) that "he entered these cases in the Hospital Returns as bowel complaint in 1814, because the matter ejected by vomiting and stool was of an aqueous or muci- laginous consistency, containing no bile." Mr. Scott

occurred in the District of Jessore.' By R. Tytler. Calcutta, Septem- ber, 1817. Printed by C. M. Pratt and Co.
 * ' A Concise Narrative of Facts connected with the Disease which


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Ernest and the Latch Key Question

HEN rumor proclaimed that the Chandler estate—the show-place of Maywood and for many years vacant—was let for the summer, joy reigned in the Martin family.

For various reasons it looked as if they would have to spend the summer at home, and new neighbors, especially if they proved interesting, could much alleviate that situation.

Mr. Martin was glad because the opening of the Chandler place would undoubtedly have a quickening effect on their end of the street. He had been conscious of a vague homesick feeling as, one after another, the houses in the vicinity closed up.

Mrs. Martin was glad because she felt that the new family might prove a sop to “the children.” Secretly, Mrs. Martin was delighted that they were going to spend their summer at home. The rest of the family loved the sea and so, invariably, to the seashore they went. Nobody had ever suspected that Mrs. Martin hated the ocean, that she longed with a yearning that was a positive ache for summer greenness and calm. Ordinarily, too, they left Maywood just as the azaleas and rhododendrons were in bloom. Her lilacs and roses wasted their sweetness on the little mucker-boys who so wantonly pilfered and destroyed them. This year—planting, weeding, pruning—Mrs. Martin was enjoying the “grounds” as she had not had a chance to enjoy them in years.

Phoebe was glad because she remembered the big dance-hall at the top of the Chandler house. On the first star of every evening and on uncountable loads of hay, she wished that the new family might include a daughter of her own age.

Ernest was glad because he remembered the well-appointed billiard-room, leading off the dance-hall. He hoped, with a hope so fierce that it amounted almost to exorcism, that the new family might include a son of his own age.

And both the children agreed to be satisfied if the heir of the house were either male or female, provided it played tennis.

As a matter of fact, Mr. and Mrs. Ventry proved to be childless.

Mrs. Martin called promptly with Phoebe.

“What do you think of her, mother?” Phoebe asked as soon as the door closed behind them.

Phoebe always asked her mother's opinion of everybody. And it was the only opinion that, having demanded, she did not immediately forestall by her own vivid, eager, dogmatic commentary. Mrs. Martin often wondered why her opinion was thus honored. A mild maternal asteism [sic] explained the phenomenon on the principle that, in order to bring out all the dazzling contrariety of her own viewpoint, Phoebe required the stimulus of an exact antithesis of opinion.

“I think she's very pleasant,” Mrs. Martin said with an effort. “She's a typical New Yorker though.”

As if released by a spring, Phoebe's enthusiasm poured out. “Did you ever see hair done so beautifully in your life?” she exclaimed. “I love that wide look her puffs gave her head here.” Phoebe's hands went just above her temples. “I'd give anything if my hair was black. Oh, mother, I do wish you'd let me wear puffs. Lots of girls do. Did you notice that one wide gold bracelet on her arm—wasn't that the darlingest thing! And hasn't she a corking figure? Just the kind to look grand in those skinny dresses. Wasn't she just lovely and cordial?”

Mrs. Martin hesitated as Phoebe, breathlessly brought to a full stop, gave her a chance to speak. But, as if in obedience to some inner, self-criticising prod, she seemed to assent to all her daughter had said with “And she's got the most beautiful eyes I ever saw in my life.”

“How old should you say she was, mother?”

“Well!” Mrs. Martin's tone seemed to hold the dregs of recent meditation on this subject. “She's one of those women who seem younger than they really are. She looks about twenty-seven. I guess she's thirty.”

“Thirty!” Phobe's voice whirred with horror. “Oh, mother, how can you? She can't be a day over twenty-three. Thirty!” There could be no doubt as to the year that, in Phoebe's opinion, marked the beginning of feminine desuetude.

“What do you think of her, Ern?” Phoebe asked after their call had been returned.

In the unease inevitable to masculinity when compelled to give a snap judgment on womenkind, Ernest grunted and shuffled. “I hate to see a woman wear earrings,” he said at last.

“Oh Ern!” Phoebe exclaimed. Her accent indicated that of the many things he could have said, he had hit upon the one least sapient. “Those earrings are simply swell. They make her look so quaint. Have you noticed those long gold ones she wears, mother—I mean the old-fashioned ones with the black enamel and pearls.”

“I guess I have,” Mrs. Martin replied with unexpected interest. “I think they're beautiful. I have a brooch that just matches them upstairs in my jewelry box. Your Aunt Mary left it to me. She always treasured that pin and I think a sight of it. I used to wear it all the time, but I haven't put it on for years now—somehow it looks so old-fashioned.”

“Well, just think, mother!” the onrush of Phoebe's informative impulse brushed Aunt Mary's heirlooms entirely out of the conversation. “Mrs. Ventry told me that she picked up those earrings in a pawn-shop in New York. Isn't that the strangest thing with all the money she's got! Why I wouldn't any more wear anything that came out of a pawnshop—I should expect it to be just loaded with germs. But Ern,” Phoebe returned undaunted to the attack on insensate masculinity—“don't you think she's pretty?” And to his growl of denial, she added, disgustedly. “It's just like pulling teeth, Ern Martin, to get you to say that a woman's good-looking.”

As a matter of fact, Ernest secretly thought Mrs. Ventry a “pіppіn.” But somehow—Ernest did not quite understand it himself—there seemed something emasculate about admitting good looks in a female.

But if Mrs. Martin and Ernest were a little measured in their praise of the new neighbor, both Phoebe and Mr. Martin were decidedly enthusiastic.

Mr. Martin spoke in terms of highest admiration of a lady who, on all occasions, treated him to a delicate, light raillery—a lure at which, to his wife's astonishment, he leaped with a gallant verbal agility.

And Phoebe—having penetrated beyond the glamour of their neighbor's shell to greater glories of mind and heart—fairly spattered adjectives at the mention of her name. “Beautiful,” “charming,” “stunning,” “picturesque,” “grand,” they flowed in adulatory profusion. Whenever Mrs. Ventry was near, she sat literally at her feet—a slim living picture of continual adoration.

In regard to Mr. Ventry, the Martin family held but one opinion—all, that is, except Ernest, who had never been known to dislike anything male in his life. Phoebe voiced it with her usual frankness after the first encounter. “I loathe him,” she pronounced crisply.

Mr. Ventry was much older than Mrs. Ventry. He had a huge, flabby body and the face of a cruel Punchinello. All expression seemed to be held down by a net-work of faintly-etched lines. His eyes were as changeless as green pebbles and they looked out over swelling blue puffs under lids that were mere lashless folds of flesh. Phoebe's most impassioned criticism of Mr. Ventry was that those eyes never seemed to see Mrs. Ventry when they rested on her.

As time went on, Mrs. Martin found herself liking Mrs. Ventry more and more. There lingered—she admitted it only to herself—a half-intuitive residuum of disapproval. For instance, once as she came unexpectedly to the Ventry house in the twilight, a pair of cigarettes cut twin arcs of fire from rail to lawn. Yet, when she arrived on the piazza, only Mr. and Mrs. Ventry arose to greet her. But it was not easy to resist Mrs. Ventry's very perceptible fancy for herself. The new neighbor subjected her to a running fire of pretty attentions. Mrs. Ventry was always sending Mrs. Martin new slips from the garden, flowers, fruits, even occasional portions of the delicious Ventry desserts, always lending her books, patterns for dress and lace-making. Mrs. Ventry was always coming over in the morning—an extraordinary vision for Maywood in her trailing negligees of lace and Chinese embroidery, her light, flapping, untrimmed garden hat tied with long green ribbons under her chin, her flexible garden gloves, her inevitable earrings—to compare notes on the progress of various horticultural weaklings. To be made so much of socially was a new experience for Mrs. Martin.

Then, certainly, the Ventrys were giving the children social opportunities that more than made up for the lost summer in Marblehead. Especially was this true in Ernest's case. And Ernest's case was causing his mother considerable perturbation these days.

For Ernest Martin was rapidly growing handsome. Always he had been well-built. And at no time had he gone through that weedy period in which boys, as much as girls, resemble willow wands. Now he stood six feet and over. In his case, growth seemed a shearing down of heavy masses of flesh rather than the opposite process of a filling out to shapely bulk. At sixteen, Ernest looked twenty. His black hair ruffled in the wind, thick and velvety as the breast-plumage of a bird. His face still retained its cherubic outlines, for experience had done nothing to sharpen his features. His clear blue eyes still looked out on the world with the incurious, untroubled gaze of childhood.

Mrs. Martin was beginning to realize what it means to be the mother of so comely a lad. Girls who had never before called on Phoebe now put the Martin place in a flutter of ruffles and ribbons. Girls who never had cared for tennis now invested the mangy Martin court with an inexplicable popularity. Girls who formerly never passed their way seemed to rise from the ground as Ernest curved out of the driveway in the runabout. Mrs. Martin, herself, was subjected to much furtive wooing from nubile Maywood.

To Mrs. Martin's despair, this process had not made a scratch on Ernest's extraordinary social diffidence. But, perhaps, constant association with Mrs. Ventry's friends might accomplish the impossible. For Mrs. Ventry was what Mrs. Martin called “a woman of the world.” Her coming had made a great difference in Maywood.

In the first place, under her direction, the Chandler place had bloomed as it had not in years. The lawns, which had degenerated into overgrown patches of daisies and timothy-grass, turned to crescents, geometrically precise, of green velvet. Flower-pots made spots of color, bunches of shrubbery, expanses of shade. The-long, elm-bordered drive looked like a monster whetstone. The tennis-courts were kept cut to a trimness that was the marvel of the Martin children. The dance-hall and the billiard-room glittered with the last cry in fittings and adornments. Moreover, the household was run on what seemed to Maywood the most luxurious principles, especially as it was understood that the Ventrys were economizing. Mrs. Ventry thought nothing of inviting half a dozen extra to dinner. And as for incidental entertaining

“I never saw so many eats, drinks and smokes in my life,” said Ernest who, as yet, neither drank nor smoked.

Naturally the Ventry household became in these circumstances, the meeting-place for the  of Maywood. Mr. Ventry went early to business and came home late at night. He seemed the most devoted of business men. So, at least, Mr. Martin seemed to admit by the consenting silence with which, invariably, he greeted this theory. But Mr. Ventry was not missed. Mrs. Ventry was always importing smart guests from New York and Boston. With them mingled “Тug” Warburton—until his family went to Marblehead—the Warren boys, a pair of young brokers who looked down upon Maywood society from ice-laden heights of social superiority, Tom Deane the Maywood cut-up, Fred Partland, Maywood's local celebrity, recently returned from the Latin Quarter and—and—AND Billy Thurston, the current Harvard Varsity pitcher, into whose presence Ernest would have crawled on his hands and knees. Over this little masculine court, Mrs. Ventry reigned undisputed queen with Phoebe, Molly Tate, Florence Marsh and the Gould twins for permanent ladies-in-waiting.

Ernest seemed actually to live on the Ventry place. But so far the only effect of his new association had been to make him rebel against having to come in so early at night. He clamored hourly for a latch-key.

“I had to come home the other night just as Billy Thurston started to tell how Hinkey used to box the tackle,” he said once. Even Mrs. Martin could see that Ernest was voicing the greatest wrong of his boyhood. But “Home every night at ten and no latch-key until you're out of school,” was her unyielding decision.

To Mrs. Martin's surprise, Mr. Martin seemed to take a very lenient view of this matter. “I'm glad Ernest's meeting some Harvard men,” he said again and again. Once only he offered an objection. “How about this billiard and pool business, mother?” he asked.

“Well, I look at it this way,” Mrs. Martin answered instantly. Her tone revealed that she had already worked the problem out to its last detail. This usually happened before it presented itself as a problem to Mr. Martin. “Ernie's bound to play billiards sooner or later. You did and Tug does.” Mrs. Martin was of course blissfully unaware that Ernest had held the junior pool championship of Maywood for six months. “Now, I'd much rather have him over to Mrs. Ventry's playing with his sister than down at Sliney's with that gang of loafers there.”

In the midst of this activity, Mrs. Ventry herself lived the idlest of lives. She puttered a little about her garden in the morning, but most of the afternoon she spent in the hammock reading the books and magazines that seemed to come with every mail. A light burned in her bedroom until after midnight. She had, however, what was from Phoebe's and Ernest's point of view an inexplicable mania—a passion for old things.

Maywood was far enough away from Boston to merge, after a few miles, with genuine country. Mrs. Ventry got in the habit of exploring these districts, following the trail of colonial mahogany, china and pewter. The Ventrys had dispensed with their chauffeur and, as Mrs. Ventry did not like to go too far alone in the big car, she invariably invited Ernest to accompany her. Ernest, rushing through the house like a whirlwind, gathering a coat here, a cap there, goggles yonder, would call, “Say, mother, I won't be home to lunch to-day. Mrs. Ventry wants me to take her to Shayneford. That'll be a ninety-mile run going and coming.”

Mrs. Martin never put any obstacles to these expeditions. But she always asked questions when Ernest returned.

“Is Mrs. Ventry an interesting talker Ernie?” was one form. GillmorWhat do you find to say to interest a woman like Mrs. Ventry?” was another. “I hope you don't talk too much, Ernie, so's to wear Mrs. Ventry out. I shouldn't think she'd be much interested in the talk of a boy like you,” was a third.

“She isn't, I guess,” Ernest would reply. “Anyway, I'm not interested in hers or any woman's chin when I've got an automobile that will go fifty miles an hour. Gee, don't I hate to wait round while she gasses with those antique-furniture guys! You, Mrs. Edward D. Martin, don't you ever get the bug to buy any of that bum-looking, cracked crockery. Any pie left, mother?”

What Ernest forgot to add was that, often, Mrs. Ventry sat for hours oblivious of him, silent, brooding, her hand over her eyes.

But even as the constant dropping of Mrs. Ventry's kindness had worn away Mrs. Martin's distrust, a parallel series had washed down most of Ernest's prejudice. Still no female is perfect and Mrs. Ventry had her faults. If Ernest could have formulated his impressions, his main objection to Mrs. Ventry would have been—well, somehow, she was not like Phoebe or Molly Tate, comfortable females to have about, whose presence you were just as likely to forget as to remember. “If Mrs. Ventry is in the room with you,” Ernest would have said, “by George, you know it!” And it was not, he might have added that, like the more irritating of her sex, she asked foolish questions, dropped things and required constant attention. It was more that—well, she had a mischievous habit of fixing a fellow with a pair of eyes that were as different as possible from any eyes Ernest knew. Phoebe for instance. When Phoebe's gaze met yours, it was soft and innocently speculative. But the deep, blue lakes that were the avenues of Mrs. Ventry's vision seemed to run over with a prickly sparkle. And when she fixed that sparkle on him—“oh, Lord!” Ernest would have inaptly concluded. But Ernest was eternally grateful to Mrs. Ventry because, having discovered how easily she could embarrass him, she never looked at him now when she talked with him. Ernest would have ended his list of objections with the statement that Mrs. Ventry “”jollied” a fellow. And if there was anything Ernest dreaded it was a woman who “jollied” you. Ernest had concluded that verbal fireworks were an integral part of female psychology. He, himself, could never think of a “come back.” Indeed, Ernest would, he thought, have been justified in calling Mrs. Ventry's manner towards the other fellows flirtatious—only that of course, after marriage people just naturally do not flirt, any more than heavy objects cast earthwards leap into the air.

But allowing for these serious flaws—and Ernest had decided philosophically that you have to make allowances for a female—there was much about Mrs. Ventry to endear her to a lad of sixteen. She could play tennis almost as well as Phoebe, and billiards a good deal better. She was fond of golf. You could not run a car too fast for her. And what she did not know about a machine was not considered of enough importance to put in any of the motor magazines that Ernest devoured monthly. Perhaps it is enough to say that, so far as automobiles were concerned, Ernest had found a kindred soul. Indeed, at the end of a month, Ernest actually condescended to approve Mrs. Ventry without qualifications. Perhaps his opinion was a little mixed with his enjoyment of her hospitalities.

Early in July, Mrs. Ventry went away for a week. The sudden cessation of their tiny social merry-go-round nearly threw the Martin children into a quicksand of ennui. Ernest found himself actually glad when a business errand of his father's delayed him in Boston beyond dinner-time. For the first time in his life he ate alone in a restaurant. He was strolling up Tremont Street, in the effort to kill time before the eight o'clock train, when his name came to him suddenly out of the crowd. Turning, he found himself face to face with Mr. Ventry.

“That's right,” that gentleman exclaimed, playfully hooking Ernest with his stick. “Don't cut an old friend like that. Let me introduce you to er—my sister, Miss Tracey, Mr. Martin, Miss Tracey. Er—er—Miss Tracey is Mrs. Ventry's sister, you know. Miss Tracey's just run over suddenly on business from New York. We've been trying the whole afternoon to get Mrs. Ventry on the 'phone.”

Miss Tracey was a very pretty girl—Ernest simply had to admit that. She was little, slender, flower-faced and big-eyed. Ernest actually noticed her clothes. More startling than any combination of colors, the entire absence, in her close-fitting gown, of any ornamentation revealed the boy-like modelings of her supple figure. That sense of oral inhibition which always attacked Ernest when he talked with the female of his species fell on him like a blanket. He glued his eyes to Mr. Ventry, although in view of Miss Tracey's vivacity, it was like trying to keep your eyes off an electric fountain on a dark night.

Ernest had never seen Mr. Ventry in a mood like this. He was affable, companionable, even jolly. He talked boisterously, asked a great many questions, answered them himself, laughed often and at nothing in particular. He slapped Ernest on the shoulder and called him “old chap.” Ernest had a sudden proud feeling of being a man among men.

“Now Ernest, Miss Tracey and I are going to the Pop Concert and you've got to come along with us. Got to—see? Don't try to say 'no' because we can't even hear such a foolish noise as that.”

After admitting that he must surely leave by the ten train, Ernest went along willingly, eagerly. Ernest had never attended a Pop Concert and this, it appeared, was Harvard Night. The experience of dashing through Boston in a taxi-cab was in itself memorable. And what followed—the crowded hall, the pretty table-groups, drinking and applauding, the mob of students standing to sing and cheer themselves hoarse—it all took its place among Ernest's most cherished first experiences. In fact, he had to reinforce his determination to leave by recalling how his mother would worry if he stayed. And, in addition, there was Mr. Ventry's regret, his disgust, his despair to contend with. In the end, Ernest had metaphorically to tear himself away from Miss Tracey's cooed pleadings and, literally, from Mr. Ventry's detaining clutch. He found himself in the South Station ten minutes ahead of time.

As he walked back and forth waiting for his train to be made up, he heard his name called for the second time that evening. Now, it was Mrs. Ventry.

“Oh Ernest,” she said, “I'm so glad to see you!”

Even to Ernest's unsensitive perception, it was evident that something had happened. Mrs. Ventry's whole appearance proclaimed emotional fire. Her cheeks blazed and her eyes burned.

“Come into the waiting-room a moment, Ernest,” she said immediately, “І have something to tell you.” But before she reached that haven, before Ernest could speak, in fact, “The whole thing's up,” she burst out, I've just left my husband!”

For a moment Ernest did not understand. He opened his mouth to say, “Why, you couldn't have done that. I've just left him myself,” when she followed it by a statement even more astonishing.

“I called him up this afternoon from Manchester and told him I was going to leave him. I told him I should never see him again as long as I lived. I've stood a great deal—you know how he neglects me. But lately—I've been thinking of it for months but to-day, I made up my mind.”

Ernest's head rocked. His thoughts whirled. Mr. Ventry had told him that he had tried all the afternoon to get Mrs. Ventry on the wire. And yet Mrs. Ventry had just said— Suddenly—it was like the sudden burst of an electric light—Ernest had a moment of mental illumination.

Mr. Ventry was trying to keep his wife and her sister apart.

Mrs. Ventry was still talking. “I'm going to New York on the midnight to stay at the Hotel Hamblen. Promise me, Ernest, that you will never tell anybody that you met me here to-night. I wouldn't have anybody in Maywood know this for the world.” Her hand touched Ernest's arm. “You do promise?”

Afterward, even the unanalytic Ernest remembered how lightly he promised.

“I don't know what I'm going to do to kill time until then,” she went on absently.

But Ernest was still thinking over this tangled situation from his own inside view. Suddenly, following that wonderful illumination came an idea quite as wonderful—a plan. Could he put it through? He would put it through.

“Mrs. Ventry,” he said soberly, “will you come to the Pop Concert with me?” For the first time in their acquaintance, he looked without flushing straight into her eyes.

Mrs. Ventry stared at him a moment. For an instant, her face shadowed. “Et tu, Ernest,” she said; then she laughed that rippling laugh which Phoebe so much admired. “I'd love to go. What a ripping idea, Ernest!”

But Ernest's only reflection was that now he must lose the ten train. He rushed Mrs. Ventry to the Elevated.

The noise of the train discouraged conversation. Ernest was glad. He was turning over many things in his mind. It occurred to him that, after all, he had attempted rather a big feat in social engineering. At Symphony Hall, he spent the last two dollars of his allowance for admission to the floor. The strains of the closing march had begun. Mrs. Ventry followed in his broad-shouldered wake, as he made straight for Mr. Ventry's table. That gentleman still sat, now a cross between Silenus and Punchinello, hunched attentively in the direction of his pretty companion. He looked up.

“What the—how'd you get here?” Mr. Ventry snarled. In a flash, Ernest perceived that Mr. Ventry's jovial mood had gone stale. He did not falter, however. He stepped aside. “I met Mrs. Ventry in the station and I've brought her here to see her sister,” he said.

Ernest saw Mr. Ventry's jaw drop, saw Miss Tracey arise as if at the onslaught of some trepidant emotion. He brushed past Mrs. Ventry and left the hall.

At the station he found to his horror that a change to the summer schedule had allowed him to lose the eleven train by three minutes.

The milk train deposited Ernest at Maywood a little after four the next morning. Since he had no money to go to a hotel, he had spent the night walking the streets and lounging about the station.

He moved with almost his usual energy. But his face was white and many lines, not of fatigue, snarled his forehead. He walked with the utmost quiet up the concrete path to the house. He did not even try the front door. He walked around to the back of the house and made some noiseless if futile investigations there. Finally, he removed his shoes, climbed over the shed, made the laborious passage of the sloping roof and crawled through the bath-room window, and this he accomplished in a curious, half-hearted way as if he dreaded to enter. And when, just inside, the ghost-shape of a woman confronted him, he did not even start.

Mrs. Martin wore her long purple kimono. Her hair was done for the night. But it was evident that she had not slept.

“Ernest,” she said quietly, “what kept you so late?”

“I stayed until the ten train, mother. Then I missed the eleven. I came out on the milk train.”

“Were you alone?”

“No.”

“Where have you been?”

“Mother,” Ernest said desperately after a long pause in which he seemed to go round and round the circle that, always with the same conclusion, his mind had traveled so many times that evening, “I've been out.”

Mrs. Martin did not speak. She did not stir. She continued to look at Ernest and he continued to look at her. After an interval, she walked past her son down the hall. Her door shut softly. Ernest went into his room, but he did not close his door. For a long time, he sat and leaned his head against the back of his chair, waiting. Finally, he went to bed.

“What time did Ernest get home?” Mr. Martin asked the next morning.

“He lost both trains,” Mrs. Martin said easily. “Just think he had to come home on the milk train. Now, Edward, I don't want that you should scold him or say one word to him. I've scolded him enough. You leave him in my hands.”

“All right, mother.” The relief with which Mr. Martin slipped parental discipline on to his wife's shoulders was audible in his long sigh.

Phoebe came to the dinner-table that night, bursting with information. “I went over to the Ventrys this afternoon, mother, to find out when Mrs. Ventry was coming home and what do you think? George says that she isn't expected back this summer. She's left Manchester and is staying at the Hotel Hamblen in New York. They're packing up all her clothes. Isn't it the strangest thing you ever heard—and she never said one word about it to anybody. What do you suppose has happened?”

Nobody supposed anything. But, “I shall miss Mrs. Ventry very much,” Mrs. Martin said.

For two or three days the atmosphere of the Martin house was strange. Mrs. Martin spoke little—she seemed absorbed in unvoiced, mental problems. Mr. Martin discovered her several times wandering aimlessly about the house late at night.

“Is anything the matter with you, Bertha?” he asked once. “You're not finding this summer at home too much for you? Just say the word and we'll go down to the seashore to-morrow.”

Mrs. Martin's tired eyes went to the lawn. “I wouldn't leave this place for a farm down east,” she said, a note of passionate determination in her voice. “I love it. It's home.”

With this, Mr. Martin had to be content. If he had been a more careful observer, he would have noted that, although his wife spoke to Ernest when it was necessary, she never otherwise addressed him; that in no case did she look at him.

Ernest, during these days, was a model of good behavior. He dropped the feud that he was waging with the Irish queen of the kitchen just as victory loomed in sight. His work was accomplished promptly to the minute. He went out of his way to find things to do. He even resumed certain household responsibilities that he had outgrown with his childhood.

“Say, what's the matter with you, Ern?” Phoebe asked. “You're getting so easy to live with that you must be coming down sick.”

If Phoebe had been a little less self-centered—to do Phoebe justice, it should be mentioned that she was getting ready to visit the Warburtons in Marblehead—she would have observed that Ernest's eyes always followed his mother's figure, followed it with the helpless, imploring look of a sick puppy.

At the end of the third day, Ernest suddenly borrowed two dollars of Phebe. He went to the telephone of the Maywood House, called New York, the Hotel Hamblen, Mrs. E. B. Ventry. Then he waited.

After a long time, a cool voice said, “Who is this?”

“Ernest Martin,” he answered. “Is this you, Mrs. Ventry?”

“Yes,” the voice answered. “What is it, Ernest?”

“I want to know if you will let me tell my mother about the other night,” Ernest said, straight to the point. “You see I missed the eleven train and didn't get home until after four. I never staid [sic] out so late before, and when she asked me where I'd been, I couldn't tell her because I'd promised you that I wouldn't tell anybody. I guess she's most sick worrying about it. She thinks—well, I don't know what she thinks. Of course, I'll keep my promise if you ask me. But it would be a great favor if you'll let me tell her.”

For an instant the wire fairly vibrated with silence. Then the voice came very soft. “Ernest, how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

Ernest could almost feel the choke of surprise that this statement elicited. “Oh, you're younger than Phoebe then,” Mrs. Ventry said. “I thought you were nineteen or twenty—you're so big.”

Ernest passed, unnoting, over the delicious flattery of this. “Can I tell her?” he persisted.

The voice responded immediately. “You go right home, Ernest,” it advised, “and tell your mother everything. Take my advice and always tell her everything. Your mother is the sweetest thing in Maywood. She was the only one who made life endurable for me there. I'm never coming back, and I want you to tell her that for me. Will you?”

But Ernest did not even wait to answer this question. He forgot to thank Mrs. Ventry. He bounded out of the telephone-box. A porter came racing after him to collect the toll. That duty accomplished, Ernest tore home, raced up the stairs, burst into his mother's living-room.

Mrs. Martin looked up as he entered. Her faint, impersonal gaze just grazed him before it fell again on her work. She did not speak.

“Mother,” Ernest panted, “І can tell you all about the other night now.”

Mrs. Martin's work fell out of her hands. She riveted her eyes to her son's face and she did not take them away until the last word of his lumbering explanation hobbled out. Even then she did not speak. It almost seemed she could not. But she looked as if new life had been breathed into her.

“I'll never lose the train again, mother,” Ernest concluded futilely.

But Mrs. Martin had not emerged from her three days of Golgotha without profit.

“Ernie,” she said, “you're getting to be such a big boy now—just think of it, you're most seventeen—that I'm not going to make you come in at ten every night any more. I'm going to give you a latch-key and you can decide yourself where to come in.”

“Yes m'm,” Ernest answered with the docility which, as a little boy, he had always presented to maternal mandate. In his joy at release from the load on his heart, he was quite impervious to this additional easement.

“But I hope, Ernie,” Mrs. Martin's eyes seemed to implore dumbly for something that she did not express, “that you will always get in as early as you can. For I'm afraid, dear, that as long as I live, I shall never get over worrying about you when you're out late.”

“Yes m'm,” Ernest said again.

It may here be mentioned that, although Ernest received his first latch-key in the course of a week, he did not have occasion to use it for over a year.

When Mr. Martin came home that night, he was astonished to find his wife sparkling with the spirits of her very girlhood. She joked all though dinner. Ernest, too, laughed and larked.

“I guess the lids off again all right,” Phoebe remarked scornfully to her brother.

Although the night was hot, Mrs. Martin insisted on a game of bridge. She played with Ernest, and Phoebe with her father. Mrs. Martin held such hands that Phoebe, in disgust, accused her brother of passing his trumps under the table. Mrs. Martin engineered successfully so daring a series of finesses that Mr. Martin accused her of looking into his hand. As Ernest elegantly expressed it, they “licked the tar” out of their opponents.

Half-way up the stairs to bed that night, Mrs. Martin, to Mr. Martin's surprise, suddenly sat down on the steps and burst out laughing. “What in the world's got into you, Bertha?” he asked.

“Oh, just the moonlight, I guess,” Mrs. Martin answered. But in that answer Mrs. Martin was practising the evasion which, for the purposes of household discipline, she had reduced both to a science and an art. What in reality she thought was, “I'd given a hat to see those three faces when Ernie brought them together.”

The next day Phoebe observed her mother in the process of stamping and directing a small box, jewelers' size.

“What's that, mother?” she asked, exercising, unabashed, the curiosity which had assisted so signally in developing her stock of general information.

“It's Aunt Mary's gold brooch—the one I told you about with the jet and pearls. I'm sending it to Mrs. Ventry. She was so kind to me when she was in Maywood and I never did a thing for her. It matches those earrings of hers, you know.”

title: Ernest and the Latch Key Question


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Page:Art of Cookery 1774 edition.djvu/395

 Rh

TAKE half a pound of very fine wheat flour, and as much sugar finely fierced, and dry them very well before the fire, dry the flour more than the sugar; then take four new laid eggs, take out the strains, then swing them very well, then put the sugar in, and swing it well with the eggs, then put the flour in it, and beat all together half an hour at the least; put in some aniseeds, or carraway seeds, and rub the plates with butter, and set them into the oven.

TAKE it in April, boil it in water till it be tender; then take it up and drain it from the water very well, then scrape the outside of it, and dry it in a clean cloth, and lay it in the syrup, and let it lie in three or four days, and cover it close: the syrup must be strong of sugar, and keep it hot a good while, and let it not boil; after it is heated a good while, lay it upon a pyeplate, and so let it dry, keep it near the fire lest it dissolve.

TAKE their weight in sugar before you stone them; when stoned, make your syrup, then put in your cherries, let them boil slowly at the first, till they be thoroughly warmed, then boil them as fast as you can; when they are boiled clear, put in the jelly, with almost the weight in sugar; strew the sugar on the cherries, for the colouring you must be ruled by your eye; to a pound of sugar put a jack of water, strew your sugar on them before they boil, and put in the juice of currants soon after they boil.

TAKE two pounds of pear plumbs to one pound of sugar; stone them and fill them every one with sugar; lay them in an earthen pot, put to them as much water as will prevent burning them; then set them in an oven after bread is drawn, let them stand till they be tender, then put them into a sieve to drain well from the syrup, then set them in an oven again, until they be a little dry; then smooth the skins as well as you can,


text:
Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 128.pdf/3118

128 STAT. 3094

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

The table of contents for this Act is as follows:

(a) —The purpose of this Act is to codify certain existing laws relating to the National Park System as title 54, United States Code, “National Park Service and Related Programs”.

(b) —In the codification of laws by this Act, the intent is to conform to the understood policy, intent, and purpose of Congress in the original enactments, with such amendments and corrections as will remove ambiguities, contradictions, and other imperfections, in accordance with section 205(c)(1) of House Resolution No. 988, 93d Congress, as enacted into law by Public Law 93–554 (2 U.S.C. 285b(1)).

Title 54, United States Code, “National Park Service and Related Programs”, is enacted as follows:

Subtitle I—National Park System
 * Division A—Establishment and General Administration


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Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 128.pdf/3119

Rh

 * Division B—System Units and Related Areas—Reserved

Subtitle II—Outdoor Recreation Programs

Subtitle III—National Preservation Programs
 * Division A—Historic Preservation
 * Subdivision 1—General Provisions

 * Subdivision 2—Historic Preservation Program

 * Subdivision 3—Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

 * Subdivision 4—Other Organizations and Programs

 * Subdivision 5—Federal Agency Historic Preservation Responsibilities

 * Subdivision 6—Miscellaneous

 * Division B—Organizations and Programs
 * Subdivision 1—Administered by National Park Service

 * Subdivision 2—Administered Jointly With National Park Service

 * Subdivision 3—Administered by Other Than National Park Service

 * Division C—American Antiquities


text:
Page:Agreement relating to Malaysia (1963).djvu/163

 * (2) No moneys shall be withdrawn from the Consolidated Fund except in the manner provided by Federal law.

 * (3) Clause (1) of this Article shall not apply to any such sums as are mentioned in clause (3) of Article 84 of this Constitution.

 * (4) The Legislative Assembly may, by resolution approving estimates containing a vote on account, authorise expenditure for part of any year before the passing of the Supply law for that year, but the aggregate sums so voted shall be included, under the appropriate heads, in the Supply Bill for that year.

 * (5) If a Supply Bill has not become law by the first day of the financial year to which it relates, the Minister responsible for finance may, with the prior approval of the Cabinet, authorise such expenditure (not otherwise authorised by law) from the Consolidated Fund or other Government funds as he may consider essential for the continuance of the public services shown in the estimates until the Supply Bill becomes law:

Provided that the expenditure so authorised for any service shall not exceed one-quarter of the amount voted for that service in the Supply law for the preceding year.

87. (1) The Legislature may by law create a Contingencies Fund and authorise the Minister responsible for finance to make advances from that Fund if he is satisfied that there is an urgent and unforeseen need for expenditure for which no provision or no sufficient provision has been made by a Supply law.

 * (2) Where any advance is made by virtue of the authority conferred under the preceding clause, a supplementary estimate of the sum required to replace the amount so advanced shall as soon as practicable be laid before and voted on by the Legislative Assembly and the sum so voted shall be included in a Supplementary Supply Bill or a Final Supply Bill.

88. (1) The following are hereby charged on the Consolidated Fund—

 * (a) all debt charges for which the State is liable;

 * (b) any moneys required to satisfy any judgment, decision or judgments award against the State by any court or tribunal.

 * (2) For the purposes of this Article debt charges include interest, sinking fund charges, repayment or amortisation of debt and all expenditure in connection with the raising of loans on the security of the Consolidated Fund and the service and redemption of debt created thereby.

89. (1) It shall be the responsibility of the Government constantly to care for the interests of the racial and religious minorities in the position of State.


text: Public Law 113-287

title: Public Law 113-287


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Page:A Wreath of Cloud.djvu/300

HIS year great pains had been taken to improve the Empress Akikonomu’s domain; and by now her gardens were aglow with the varied tints of innumerable frost-stained leaves and autumn flowers. Above all, the new pergolas made an admirable show, now that their timber, here stripped of bark, there used in its natural state, was thickly interwoven with blossoming boughs. And when at morning and evening the sun slanted across the dewy gardens, it was as though every flower and tree were decked with strings of glittering pearls. Those who but a few months back had been carried away by the spring-time loveliness of the Southern Garden, could not fail, as they gazed upon the colder beauty of this autumnal scene, with one accord to resume their earlier preference. The lovers of autumn have, I am persuaded, at all times embraced the larger part of mankind; and in thus returning to their allegiance the Empress’s companions were but following their natural bent.

So delighted was Akikonomu with the scene I have described that she asked for leave of absence from the Emperor and settled for a while in her own establishment. Unfortunately the anniversary of the late Prince Zembō’s death fell in the eighth month, and it was with great anxiety that she watched Autumn’s almost hourly advance; for she feared that the best month would be over before she

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Page:A Wreath of Cloud.djvu/301

Rh came out of mourning. Meanwhile she was confined to the house and all amusements were suspended.

The equinoctial gales were this year particularly violent. Then came a day when the whole sky grew black, and an appalling typhoon began. It would have been bad enough wherever one had been to see every tree stripped of its leaves just when they were at their loveliest, every flower stricken to the earth; but to witness such havoc in an exquisite garden, planned from corner to corner with endless foresight and care, to see those dew-pearls unthreaded in an instant and scattered upon the ground, was a sight calculated to drive the onlooker well nigh to madness. As time went on the hurricane became more and more alarming, till all was lost to view in a blinding swirl of fog and dust. But while she sat behind tightly closed shutters in a room that rocked with every fresh blast, it was with thoughts of autumn splendours irrevocably lost rather than with terror of the storm that the Empress’s heart was shaken.

The Southern Gardens were just being laid out with wild plants from the countryside when the high winds began, and that impatient longing which the poet attributes to the young lespidezas was indeed fulfilled in all too ample measure. Morning after morning Murasaki too saw the dew roughly snatched from leaf and flower. She was sitting thus one day on watch at her window, while Genji played with the little princess in a neighbouring room. It happened that Yūgiri had occasion to come across from the eastern wing. When he reached the door at the end of the passage he noticed that the great double-doors leading into Murasaki’s room were half-open. Without thinking what he was doing, he paused and looked in. Numerous ladies-in-waiting were passing to and fro just inside, and

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