CHAPTER V
VALHALLA
That was the name Nan gave to the little winter home.
“Valhalla is the place where the dead warriors go, and that is what we all of us are after the day’s work is done.”
Commuting at first was very tiring for both Nan and Lucy. Catching trains was hard on their nerves and the trip seemed interminable, but in a few weeks they fell into the attitude of mind of all commuters and just accepted it as part of the daily routine. It became no more irksome than doing one’s hair or brushing one’s teeth.
The girls made many friends on the train and before the winter was over really enjoyed the time spent going to and from school. Billy Sutton was Nan’s devoted cavalier. He managed, if possible, to sit by her and together they would study. He helped her with her mathematics, and she, quick at languages, would correct his French exercises. Those were sad mornings for Billy when the seat by Nan was taken before they reached Preston. He cursed his luck that Preston should not have been beyond Grantly instead of a station nearer to town. Coming home he always saw to it that no “fresh kid” got ahead of him in the choice of seats. He would get to the station ahead of time and watch with eagle eye for Nan’s sedate little figure; then he would pounce on her like a veritable eagle and possess himself of her books and parcels. Thereafter no power could have separated him from her short of the brakeman who cruelly called out: “P-errr-reston!”
Billy’s younger sister Mag was of great assistance to her big brother in his manœuvres. She struck up a warm friendship with Lucy, and since the two younger girls were together, what more natural than that he and Nan should be the same?
“How would you like me to run you over to see Lucy for a while this afternoon?” he would ask in the lordly and nonchalant manner of big brothers, and Mag would be duly grateful, all the time laughing in her sleeve, as is the way with small sisters.
The only person who ever got ahead of Billy on the homeward voyage was Count de Lestis. That man of the world with lordly condescension permitted Billy to carry all the books and parcels and then quietly appropriated the seat by Nan. That was hard enough, but what was harder was to see how Nan dimpled under the compliments the count paid her, and how gaily she laughed at his wit, and how easily she held her own in the very interesting conversation into which they plunged. Billy, boiling and raging, could not help catching bits of it. Actually Nan was quoting poetry to the handsome foreigner. With wonder her schoolboy friend heard her telling the count of how she had gone up in an aeroplane the preceding summer and what her sensations were. She had never told him all these things.
“And why is it you like so much to fly?” the count asked. “Is it merely the physical sensation?”
“Oh no, there is something else. I’ll tell you a little bit of poetry I learned the other day from a magazine. That is the way I feel, somehow:
“‘Well, good-by! We’re going!
Where?
Why there is no knowing
Where!
We’ve grown tired, we don’t know why,
Of our section of the sky,
Of our little patch of air,
And we’re going, going!
Where?
“‘Who would ever stop to care? —
Far off land or farther sea
Where our feet again are free,
We shall fare all unafraid
Where no trail or furrow’s made —
Where there’s room enough, room enough, room enough for laughter!
And we’ll find our Land o’ Dreaming at a long day’s close,
We’ll find our Land o’ Dreaming – perhaps, who knows?
To-morrow – or the next day – or maybe the day after!
“‘So good-by! We’re going!
Why?
O, there is no knowing
Why!
Something’s singing in our veins,
Something that no book explains.
There’s no magic in your air!
And we’re going, going!
Where?
“‘Where there’s magic and to spare!
So we break our chains and go.
Life? What is it but to know
Southern cross and Pleiades,
Sunny lands and windy seas;
Where there’s time enough, time enough, time enough for laughter!
We’ll find our Land o’ Dreaming, so away! Away!
We’ll find our Land o’ Dreaming – or at least we may —
Tomorrow, or the next day, or maybe the day after!’”
Nan Carter was a very charming girl at any time, but Nan Carter reciting poetry was irresistible. So the count found her. Her eyes looked more like forest pools than ever and the trembling Billy was very much afraid the handsome nobleman was going to fall into said pools. He gritted his teeth with the determination to be on the spot ready to pull him out by his aristocratic and well-shod heels if he should take such a tumble.
“Ah, you have the wanderlust, too! I’d like to go with you to your Land o’ Dreaming.” Fortunately Billy did not hear this remark, as the brakeman opened the door at this juncture and shouted the name of a station.
For once Billy was glad when the brakeman finally called: “P-err-reston!” If he had to get out, so had the hated count. He never had taken as much of a fancy to de Lestis as the other members of the neighborhood had, anyhow, and now he knew why he had never liked him.
“He is a selfish, arrogant foreigner,” he raged on in his boyish way. “He might have let me sit with Nan part of the way, anyhow.”
Nan went home quite pleased with the interesting conversation she had had on the train. The count was rapidly becoming a warm friend of the family. Everybody liked him but Lucy, and she had no especial reason for disliking him.
“He’s got no time for me and I guess that’s the reason,” she said when questioned. “Mag doesn’t cotton to him much, either.”
“Well, I should think you would be glad for Father to have somebody to talk to,” said Helen. “You and Mag are too young to have much in common with a grown-up gentleman.”
“Pooh, Miss Grandmother! I’m most as old as Nan and he cottons to her for fair. I know why he doesn’t think much of Mag and me – it is because he knows we know he is nothing but a Dutchman.”
“Dutchman! Nonsense! Dutchmen proper come from Holland and Count de Lestis is a Hungarian.”
“Well, he can talk Dutch like a Prussian, anyhow. You oughter hear him jabbering with that German family that live over near Preston. He brings old Mr. Blitz newspapers all the time and they laugh and laugh over jokes in them; at least, they must be jokes to make them laugh so.”
“Of course the count speaks German. He speaks a great many languages,” declared Helen with the dignified air that she thought necessary to assume when she and Lucy got in a discussion.
“Well, what’s the reason he ain’t fighting for his country? Tell me that! Mag says that Billy says that if his country was at war you wouldn’t catch him buying farms in strange countries, like this de Lestis. He says he’d be in the fight, if he couldn’t do anything but beat a drum.”
“But you see he is not in sympathy with the cause, child. All of the Austrians and Hungarians are not on the Kaiser’s side. A whole lot of them believe in a more democratic form of government than Emperor William wants. The count explained all that to Father. He says he could not conscientiously fight with Prussia against democracy.”
“All that sounds mighty fine but I like men that fight,” and Lucy tossed her head. “Me and Mag both like men that fight.”
“Mag and I,” admonished Helen.
The gentleman in question had just been off on a business trip. He had much business in New York and Washington and sometimes made flying visits to Chicago. He was interested in a land agency and was hoping to import some Hungarian and Serbian families to the United States. He had bought up quite a tract of land in Virginia, making cash payments that showed he had unlimited means.
“They make excellent servants,” he told the Misses Grant, “far superior to your negroes. The Serbs are especially fine farmers. It is really a nation of yeomen. They could make the barren tracts of Virginia blossom like the rose.”
“Well, bring them over then.” The sisters almost agreed about this but they had a diverging point in that Miss Ella thought she would rather have a family of Hungarians, since that was the count’s nationality; while Miss Louise fancied some Serbs, because they were at least fighting on the side of the Allies.
But to return to “Valhalla.”
Douglas did not at all approve of the name Nan had given the little home. “I am not a dead warrior when the day is over nor do I mean to be one ever,” she declared.
She started in on her winter of teaching with all the energy and vim of the proverbial new broom. She gloried in the fact that she was able to turn her education to some account; and while the remuneration of a country school teacher is certainly not munificent, it helped a great deal towards the family expenses.
The rent from the Carters’ pretty home in Richmond was all they had to live on now, except for a small sum in bank left over from the camp earnings. It would be possible to manage if no clothes had to be bought, and one and all promised to do with last year’s suits.
Only a born teacher could make a real success of a country school where thirty children must be taught in all grades up to high-school standing. It took infinite patience, boundless good humor, and a systematic saving of time, together with a keen sense of fun to get Douglas over each day. She found the school in a state of insurrection, due to having proved too much for the first teacher, who had found urgent business elsewhere, and then for a series of substitutes until the present incumbent, Miss Douglas Carter, was installed.
She made a little speech the first morning, telling the pupils quite frankly that this was her first year of teaching but that it was not going to be her last; that she was determined to make good and she asked their help; that she was willing to give them all she had in the way of knowledge and strength but that they must meet her half-way and do their best. She gave them to understand from the very first that she intended to have good order and that obedience was to be the first lesson taught.
Most of the children fell into her plans with enthusiasm. Of course there were the reactionaries who had to be dealt with summarily. Bobby was one of them. He was very difficult to manage in school. Never having been under the least restraint before in all of his seven years, it was hard on him to have to sit still and pretend to study, and he made it harder on Douglas. The faction opposed to government in any form egged him on. They laughed at his impertinent remarks to the teacher and bribed him to do and say many outrageous things.
Poor Douglas was tempted to confess herself beaten as far as her little brother was concerned and give up trying to teach him. He was rather young for school, she almost fooled herself into believing; but there was a sturdiness and determination in Douglas Carter’s make-up that would not let her succumb to difficulties.
“I will succeed! He shall learn! My pupils must respect me, and if I can’t make my own little brother obey me, how can I expect to control the rest of them?”
She asked herself what she would do with any other pupil, not her brother, who gave her so much trouble.
“Write a note to his mother or father, of course,” she answered.
“But I can’t bear to bother Father, and Mother would blame me and no doubt pet Bobby. I’ll write a note to Dr. Wright and his disapproval will hurt Bobby more than anything that could happen.”
And so she wrote the following letter to Bobby’s employer:
Preston, Va., R. F. D. Route 1.November 1, 1916.
Dear Dr. Wright:
I am sorry to inform you that your chauffeur, Robert Carter, Jr., is misbehaving at school in such a way that his teacher is afraid he will have to be expelled. She has done everything in her power to make him be more considerate but he is very, very naughty and tries to worry his teacher all the time.
Very sincerely,
Douglas Carter.
Dr. Wright telephoned that he would be down to see them on Saturday after receiving Douglas’s note; but the message was sent via Grantly, as the Carters had no telephone, and Miss Ella and Miss Louise could not agree just what his name was or when he said he was coming. So the matter was lost sight of in the wrangle that ensued and the word was not delivered until too late.
CHAPTER VI
CHLOE
To Helen had fallen the most difficult and trying part of the program: training a cheap, country servant to the ways of civilization. Many times did she think of Miss Louise’s trained monkey as she labored with Chloe, with whom she had to start all over every day.
A seven o’clock breakfast must be ready for Nan and Lucy, and the one morning that she left it to Chloe the girls had to go off with nothing more comforting on their little insides than cold bread and milk. That was when the new maid had first arrived and Helen had not sounded the depths of her incompetence and ignorance.
“What would you have done in your own home if you had had to have an early breakfast for someone?” asked Helen, curious to know if the girl knew how to do anything.
“I’d ’a’ done what I done this mornin’: let ’um fill up on what col’ victuals they was lef’ on de she’f.”
Helen endeavored to introduce Chloe to the mysteries of the fireless cooker, which they had brought with them from camp, but the girl seemed to think there was some kind of magic in a thing that cooked without fire and would none of it.
“I ain’t a-goin’ ter tetch no sich hoodoo doin’s as dat ’ere box,” she asserted. “It mus’ hab a kinder debble in it ter keep it hot ’thout a piece er dry wood or nothin’.”
Helen was lifting out the pot full of steaming oatmeal that she had put in the cooker the night before, determined that her sisters should not have to go off again with such cold comfort.
“All right, you keep up the wood fire and I’ll attend to the fireless cooker,” laughed Helen. “What makes the stove smoke? It was burning all right yesterday.”
“Smoking ’cause dat hoodoo debble done got in it,” and Chloe rolled her great eyes until nothing showed but the whites.
“Smoking because you’ve got the damper turned down,” and Helen righted the appliance. “Have you set the table?”
“Yassum!”
“Put everything on it just as I showed you yesterday?”
“Nom! I ain’t put nothin’ on it. I jes’ sot the cheers up to it, but all the gals is got ter do is jes’ retch the things off’n the sidebo’d.”
That meant that Helen must run and get the table set as quickly as possible as it was three minutes to seven.
Chloe followed her meekly to the dining-room to do her bidding.
“Run back to the kitchen, Chloe, and look at the biscuit, and see if they are burning,” cried Helen as she rapidly placed the silver on the table.
A few minutes later, having set the table she hastened to the kitchen. An ominous odor greeted her.
“Chloe, did you look at the biscuit?”
“Yassum! They was gettin’ ready to burn. I guess they is ’bout burned by now.”
“Oh, Chloe, why didn’t you take them out?” and poor Helen thought maybe she was going to weep with exasperation.
“You nebber tol’ me ter do mo’n look at ’em. My maw an’ Sis Tempy both done caution me not to be too frisky ’bout doin’ things ’til the white folks tells me. Tempy says white folks laks ter boss ’bout ev’ything.”
“Oh, for a trained monkey!” thought Helen. “I could at least give one a good switching.”
Chloe had only two characteristics to work on: one was perfect good-nature, the other unbounded health and strength. Helen wondered if she had enough material to go on to evolve even a passable servant. Anyhow she meant to try. She determined to do the cooking herself for a little while with Chloe as scullion, and also to have the girl do the housework.
Of course Mrs. Carter was of absolutely no assistance. She held to her purpose of semi-invalidism. The family would not listen to her when she offered the only sane suggestion for the winter: that they should oust the tenant and move back into their own pretty, comfortable, well-furnished home; Douglas to make her début in Richmond society and the other girls continue at school. As for money – why not just make bills? They had perfectly good credit, and what was credit for but to use? Dr. Wright had been so stern with her, and Douglas so severe and unfilial, and they had intimated that she wanted to kill her dear Robert, so she had just let them have their own way. She insisted she had not the strength to cope with these changed conditions and took on the habits of an invalid.
Helen, remembering how Susan, who was supposed to help with the cooking at the camp, had been kept busy waiting on her mistress, feared Chloe would be pressed into lady’s maid service, too. Indeed Mrs. Carter attempted it, but Chloe proved too rough for the job, and that poor lady was forced to run the ribbons in her lingerie herself.
Chloe’s cleaning was even worse than her cooking if such a thing was possible. She spread up the beds, leaving great wrinkles and bumps, which proved to be top sheets and blankets that she had not thought fit to pull up. When Helen remonstrated and made her take all the covers off to air before making the beds she obeyed, but put the covers back on regardless of sequence, with counterpanes next to the mattress and sheets on top, with blankets anywhere that her fancy dictated. She swept the dirt safely under the rugs; wiped up the floor with bath towels; and the crowning glory of her achievement was sticking all the tooth-brushes together.
Now when we remember that Helen herself had perhaps never made up a bed in her whole life until about eight months before this time, we may indeed have sympathy for her in her tribulations. Her days were full to running over, beginning very early in the morning and ending only after the family was fed at night. The cooking was not so difficult, as she had a genius for it and consequently a liking. Chloe could wash dishes after a fashion and clean the kitchen utensils, which was some comfort.
Mr. Carter always carried his wife’s breakfast tray to her room and waited on her like a devoted slave. He would even have run the ribbons in had she trusted him. All he could do for her now was wait on her and spoil her, and this he did to perfection. She was the same lovely little creature he had married and he was not unreasonable enough to expect her to be anything else. He did not think it strange that his little canary could not turn herself into a raven and feed him when he was hungry. His tenderness to his wife was so great that his daughters took their keynote from him and their patience towards their mother was wonderful. They vied with one another in their attentions to the parent that they would not let themselves call selfish.
Helen cooked her little dainties; Nan kept her in light literature from the circulating library in town; Lucy scoured the fields for mushrooms that a late fall had made plentiful; Douglas always brought her the choice fruit and flowers that her pupils showered on her; even Bobby did his part by bringing her ripe persimmons that the frost had nipped just enough to make delicious. Mr. Carter was often able to bring her in a partridge or a young hare. On the whole life wasn’t so bad. When one felt perfectly well, semi-invalidism was a pretty pleasant state. As for society: the count was a frequent visitor and the ladies from Grantly most attentive. The Suttons had called, too, several times, and other county families were finding the Carters out. It was easy to treat the fact that they were living in the overseer’s house as a kind of joke. Of course, anyone could tell that they were not the kind of persons who usually lived in overseers’ houses.
Chloe was the thorn in the flesh, the fly in the ointment for Mrs. Carter. Chloe could not be laughed away, – Chloe was no joke. Accustomed to trained, highly-paid servants to do her bidding, this rough, uncouth ourang-outang was more than the dainty little lady could stand.
The very first time Count de Lestis called, Mrs. Carter happened to be alone in the house except for Chloe, Mr. Carter having gone to Preston for much-needed nails and Helen having run up to Grantly to ask the advice of Miss Ella on the best way to preserve some late pears. A knock and Chloe promptly fell down the steps in her eagerness to get to the door. She had been up in Douglas’s and Helen’s room attempting to make up the bed to suit Miss Helen.
“Thank Gawd I fell down instidder up! If’n I had ’a’ fell up I wouldn’t ’a’ got ma’ied dis year,” and she picked herself up and dived at the front door.
“Are Mr. and Mrs. Carter and the young ladies at home?” Mrs. Carter heard in the count’s fine baritone.
“Nawsir! The boss is done gone ter Preston ter fetch some nails ter try ter bolster up this here ole shack, an’ Miss Douglas is done gone ter her teachin’ job an’ Miss Helen is done stepped up to see Miss Ellanlouise ’bout ’zervin’ some ole hard pears – ”
“And how about Mrs. Carter?” in an amused voice.
“Oh, she is a-layin’ on the sofy tryin’ ter git sick.”
“Is she ill?” solicitously.
“Naw! She is jes’ plum lazy. She’s too lazy ter chaw an’ has ter have all her victuals fixed soft like.”
“Well, will you please take her this card?”
“That there ticket?”
Imagine Mrs. Carter’s mortification, when the grinning Chloe came running into the sitting-room with the count’s card crushed in her eager hand, to discover that the wretched girl was in her stocking feet; capless, with her wrapped plaits sticking out all over her head like quills upon the fretful porcupine; her apron on hind part before.
“Chloe! Where is your cap?” exclaimed that elegant lady.
“Well, lawsamussy! I done forgot about it. It do make my haid eatch so I done pulled it off.”
“And your shoes?”
“I’s savin’ them fer big meetin’ nex’ year.”
“And why do you wear your apron in the back? Put it on right this minute.”
“Well, Ole Miss, my dress was siled an’ my ap’on was clean, so I jes’ slid it ’roun’ behinst so it wouldn’t git siled, too.”
Nothing but the fact that the count was cooling his heels on the front porch kept Mrs. Carter from weeping outright. Old Miss, indeed! All she could do was feebly tell Chloe to ask the gentleman in.
If Count de Lestis had been ushered in by a butler in livery he could not have entered in a more ceremonious manner. He bowed low over the fair lady’s hand, kissing her finger-tips lightly. Even the spectacle of Chloe’s walking off, with her clean apron on hind part before and her shoeless condition disclosing large holes in the heels of her stockings, did not upset his gravity. He, too, realized that Chloe was no joke.
Afterwards Chloe said to Helen:
“That sho’ is a pretty man what comed ter see you alls. I ain’t knowin’ yit what made him stoop over an’ smell yo’ ma’s hand. Cose she mus’ smell pow’ful good with never put’n her hands in nothin’ mo’ than her own victuals.” Helen was weak with laughter.
“What fer they call him a count, Miss Helen? Is it ’cause he spen’ all his time a-countin’ out money? They do say he is pow’ful good an’ kin’ ter the niggers. Some say he likes niggers better’n what he does white folks, but I says that is plum foolish. Anyhow, he talks mighty sweet to ’em an’ don’t never call ’em low down triflin’ black rascals whin they gits kinder lop-sided with liquor, like some of the county gents does whin hands gits so fur gone they can’t git in the craps. He done started a night school over at Weston what his secondary is teachin’.”
“I didn’t know he had a secretary,” exclaimed Helen, “but it certainly is kind of him to try and help the poor colored people. I wish you could go to night school, Chloe.”
“Lawd, Gawd, no! Miss Helen! I ain’t got no call to larn.”
“Can’t you read at all, Chloe?”
“Well, I kin read whin they is picters ter go by. I done been ter school mos’ six months countin’ the diffunt years what I started, but my ma, she say my haid was too hard an’ she ’fraid it might git cracked open if’n teacher tried to put any mo’ in it. She say some folks is got sof’ haids what kin stretch an’ they ain’t so ap’ ter bus’ open, haids kinder like hog bladders what you kin keep on a-blowin’ up.”
“Wouldn’t you like me to teach you to read, Chloe?” asked Helen, feeling rather ashamed that this foreigner should come to Virginia and take more interest in the education of the negroes than she should ever have done. “I believe I could teach you without breaking your head open.”
“Anything you says do I’ll do, but I tell you now I ain’t got no mo’ notion er readin’ than a tarrapin. A tarrapin kin git his haid out’n the shell an’ you might git a little larnin’ in it, but my haid is groun’ what you gotter break up with a grubbin’ hoe.”
“I am willing to try. Let’s begin now! First we will learn how to spell things right here in the kitchen and then you can soon be reading recipes,” said Helen kindly. “Now we are making biscuit, so we will begin with that. First take two cups of flour,” and she wrote on the whitewashed wall of the kitchen: “2 cups of flour.”
Chloe was delighted with this kind of school, very different from her former experiences where she was made to sit for hours on a hard bench saying the same thing over and over with no conception of what it was all about. Now “2 cups of flour” had some sense in it, so had “2 spoons of baking powder.” “Lard the size of an egg” was a brilliant remark; “1 spoon of salt” had a gleam of intelligence, too; “1 cup of milk” was filled with gumption. In less than a week the girl could read and write the recipe for biscuit and was eagerly waiting for her beloved Miss Helen to advance her to cake.