The Rose-Garden Husband Part 1

The Rose Garden Husband.

by Margaret Widdemer.

I

The Liberry Teacher lifted her eyes from a half-made catalogue-card, eyed the relentlessly slow clock and checked a long wriggle of purest, frankest weariness. Then she gave a furtive glance around to see if the children had noticed she was off guard; for if they had she knew the whole crowd might take more liberties than they ought to, and have to be spoken to by the janitor. He could do a great deal with them, because he understood their att.i.tude to life, but that wasn't good for the Liberry Teacher's record.

It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Sat.u.r.day. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Sat.u.r.day off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or--anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!

So the Liberry Teacher braced herself severely, and put on her reading-gla.s.ses with a view to looking older and more firm. "Liberry Teacher," it might be well to explain, was not her official t.i.tle. Her description on the pay-roll ran "a.s.sistant for the Children's Department, Greenway Branch, City Public Library." Grown-up people, when she happened to run across them, called her Miss Braithwaite. But "Liberry Teacher" was the only name the children ever used, and she saw scarcely anybody but the children, six days a week, fifty-one weeks a year. As for her real name, that n.o.body ever called her by, _that_ was Phyllis Narcissa.

She was quite willing to have such a name as that buried out of sight.

She had a sense of fitness; and such a name belonged back in an old New England parsonage garden full of pink roses and nice green caterpillars and girl-dreams, and the days before she was eighteen: not in a s.m.u.tty city library, attached to a twenty-five-year-old young woman with reading-gla.s.ses and fine discipline and a woolen s.h.i.+rt-waist!

It wasn't that the Liberry Teacher didn't like her position. She not only liked it, but she had a great deal of admiration for it, because it had been exceedingly hard to get. She had held it firmly now for a whole year. Before that she had been in the Cataloguing, where your eyes hurt and you get a little pain between your shoulders, but you sit down and can talk to other girls; and before that in the Circulation, where it hurts your feet and you get ink on your fingers, but you see lots of funny things happening. She had started at eighteen years old, at thirty dollars a month. Now she was twenty-five, and she got all of fifty dollars, so she ought to have been a very happy Liberry Teacher indeed, and generally she was. When the children wanted to specify her particularly they described her as "the pretty one that laughs." But at four o'clock of a wet Sat.u.r.day afternoon, in a badly ventilated, badly lighted room full of damp little unwashed foreign children, even the most sunny-hearted Liberry Teacher may be excused for having thoughts that are a little tired and cross and restless.

She flung herself back in her desk-chair and watched, with brazen indifference, Giovanni and Liberata Bruno stickily pawing the colored Bird Book that was supposed to be looked at only under supervision; she ignored the fact that three little Czechs were fighting over the wailing library cat; and the sounds of conflict caused by Jimsy Hoolan's desire to get the last-surviving Alger book away from John Zanowski moved her not a whit. The Liberry Teacher had stopped, for five minutes, being grown-up and responsible, and she was wis.h.i.+ng--wis.h.i.+ng hard and vengefully. This is always a risky thing to do, because you never know when the Destinies may overhear you and take you at your exact word.

With the detailed and careful accuracy one acquires in library work, she was wis.h.i.+ng for a sum of money, a garden, and a husband--but princ.i.p.ally a husband. This is why:

That day as she was returning from her long-deferred twenty-minute dairy-lunch, she had charged, umbrella down, almost full into a pretty lady getting out of a s.h.i.+ny gray limousine. Such an unnecessarily pretty lady, all furs and fluffles and veils and perfumes and waved hair! Her cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the matinee of a fairy-play.

The Liberry Teacher smiled at the children with more than her accustomed goodwill, and lowered her umbrella quickly to let them pa.s.s. The mother smiled back, a smile that changed, as the Liberry Teacher pa.s.sed, to puzzled remembrance. The gay little family went on into the theatre, and Phyllis Braithwaite hurried on back to her work, trying to think who the pretty lady could have been, to have seemed to almost remember her.

Somebody who took books out of the library, doubtless. Still the pretty lady's face did not seem to fit that conjecture, though it still worried her by its vague familiarity. Finally the solution came, just as Phyllis was pulling off her raincoat in the dark little cloak-room. She nearly dropped the coat.

"Eva Atkinson!" she said.

Eva Atkinson!... If it had been anybody else but _Eva_!

You see, back in long-ago, in the little leisurely windblown New England town where Phyllis Braithwaite had lived till she was almost eighteen, there had been a Princ.i.p.al Grocer. And Eva Atkinson had been his daughter, not so very pretty, not so very pleasant, not so very clever, and about six years older than Phyllis. Phyllis, as she tried vainly to make her damp, straight hair go back the way it should, remembered hearing that Eva had married and come to this city to live. She had never heard where. And this had been Eva--Eva, by the grace of gold, radiantly complexioned, wonderfully groomed, beautifully gowned, and looking twenty-four, perhaps, at most: with a car and a placid expression and _heaps_ of money, and pretty, clean children! The Liberry Teacher, severely work-garbed and weather-draggled, jerked herself away from the small greenish cloak-room mirror that was unkind to you at your best.

She dashed down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, harried by her usual panic-stricken twenty-minutes-late feeling. She had only taken one glance at herself in the wiggly mirror, but that one had been enough for her peace of mind, supposing her to have had any left before. She felt as if she wanted to break all the mirrors in the world, like the wicked queen in the French fairy-tale.

Most people rather liked the face Phyllis saw in the mirror; but to her own eyes, fresh from the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired, twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green gla.s.s was _dreadful_.

What made her feel worst--and she entertained the thought with a whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity--was that she'd had so much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance because her father was rich. And she, Phyllis, was condemned to be tidy and accurate, and no more, just because she had to earn her living. That face in the greenish gla.s.s, looking tiredly back at her! She gave a little out-loud cry of vexation now as she thought of it, two hours later.

"I must have looked to Eva like a battered bisque doll--no wonder she couldn't place me!" she muttered crossly.

And it must be worse and more of it now, because in the interval between two and four there had been many little sticky fingers pulling at her sleeves and skirt, and you just _have_ to cuddle dear little library children, even when they're not extra clean; and when Vera Aronsohn burst into heartbroken tears on the Liberry Teacher's blue woolen shoulder because her pet fairy-book was missing, she had caught several strands of the Teacher's yellow hair in her anguish, much to the hair's detriment.

It was straight, heavy hair, and it would have been of a dense and fluffy honey-color, only that it was tarnished for lack of the constant sunnings and brus.h.i.+ngs which blonde hair must have to stay its best self. And her skin, too, that should have been a living rose-and-cream, was dulled by exposure to all weathers, and lack of time to pet it with creams and powders; perhaps a little, too, by the very stupid things to eat one gets at a dairy-lunch and boarding-house. Some of the a.s.sistants did interesting cooking over the library gas-range, but the Liberry Teacher couldn't do that because she hadn't time.

She went on defiantly thinking about her looks. It isn't a n.o.ble-minded thing to do, but when you might be so very, very pretty if you only had a little time to be it in--"Yes, I _might_!" said Phyllis to her shocked self defiantly.... Yes, the shape of her face was all right still. Hard work and scant attention couldn't spoil its pretty oval. But her eyes--well, you can't keep your eyes as blue and luminous and childlike as they were back in the New England country, when you have been using them hard for years in a bad light. And oh, they had been such _nice_ eyes when she was just Phyllis Narcissa at home, so long and blue and wondering! And now the cataloguing had heavied the lids and etched a line between her straight brown brows. They weren't decorative eyes now ... and they filled with indignant self-sympathy. The Liberry Teacher laughed at herself a little here. The idea of eyes that cried about themselves was funny, somehow.

"Direct from producer to consumer!" she quoted half-aloud, and wiped each eye conscientiously by itself.

"Teacher! I want a liberry called 'Bride of Lemon Hill!' demanded a small citizen just here. The school teacher, she says I must to have it!"

Phyllis thought hard. But she had to search the pinned-up list of required reading for schools for three solid minutes before she bestowed "The Bride of Lammermoor" on a thirteen-year-old daughter of Hungary.

"This is it, isn't it, honey?" she asked with the flas.h.i.+ng smile for which her children, among other things, adored her.

"Yes, ma'am, thank you, teacher," said the thirteen-year-old gratefully; and went off to a corner, where she sat till closing time entranced over her own happy choice, "The Adventures of Peter Rabbit," with colored pictures dotting it satisfactorily. The Liberry Teacher knew that it was her duty to go over and hypnotize the child into reading something which would lead more directly to Browning and Strindberg. But she didn't.

"Poor little wop!" she thought unacademically. "Let her be happy in her own way!"

And the Liberry Teacher herself went on being unhappy in _her_ own way.

"I'm just a battered bisque doll!" she repeated to herself bitterly.

But she was wrong. One is apt to exaggerate things on a workaday Sat.u.r.day afternoon. She looked more like a pretty bisque figurine; slim and clear-cut, and a little neglected, perhaps, by its owners, and dressed in working clothes instead of the pretty draperies it should have had; but needing only a touch or so, a little dusting, so to speak, to be as good as ever.

"Eva _never_ was as pretty as I was!" her rebellious thoughts went on.

You think things, you know, that you'd never say aloud. "I'm sick of elevating the public! I'm sick of working hard fifty-one weeks out of fifty-two for board and lodging and carfare and s.h.i.+rtwaists and the occasional society of a few girls who don't get any more out of life than I do! I'm sick of libraries, and of being efficient! I want to be a real girl! Oh, I wish--I wish I had a lot of money, and a rose-garden, and a _husband_!"

The Liberry Teacher was aghast at herself. She hadn't meant to wish such a very unmaidenly thing so hard. She jumped up and dashed across the room and began frantically to shelf-read books, explaining meanwhile with most violent emphasis to the listening Destinies:

"I didn't--oh, I _didn_'t mean a _real_ husband. It isn't that I yearn to be married to some good man, like an old maid or a d.u.c.h.ess novel.

I--I just want all the lovely things Eva has, or any girl that _marries_ them, without any trouble but taking care of a man. One man _couldn't_ but be easier than a whole roomful of library babies. I want to be looked after, and have time to keep pretty, and a chance to make friends, and lovely frocks with lots of lace on them, and just months and months and months when I never had to do anything by a clock--and--and a rose-garden!"

This last idea was dangerous. It isn't a good thing, if you want to be contented with your lot, to think of rose-gardens in a stuffy city library o' Sat.u.r.days; especially when where you were brought up rose-gardens were one of the common necessities of life; and more especially when you are tired almost to the crying-point, and have all the week's big sisters back of it dragging on you, and all its little sisters to come worrying at you, and--time not up till six.

But the Liberry Teacher went blindly on straightening shelves nearly as fast as the children could muss them up, and thinking about that rose-garden she wanted, with files of ma.s.seuses and manicures and French maids and messenger-boys with boxes banked soothingly behind every bush.

And the thought became too beautiful to dally with.

"I'd marry _anything_ that would give me a rose-garden!" reiterated the Liberry Teacher pa.s.sionately to the Destinies, who are rather catty ladies, and apt to catch up unguarded remarks you make. "_Anything_--so long as it was a gentleman--and he didn't scold me--and--and--I didn't have to a.s.sociate with him!" her New England maidenliness added in haste.

Then, for the librarian who cannot laugh, like the one who reads, is supposed in library circles to be lost, Phyllis shook herself and laughed at herself a little, bravely. Then she collected the most uproarious of her flock around her and began telling them stories out of the "Merry Adventures of Robin Hood." It would keep the children quiet, and her thoughts, too. She put rose-gardens, not to say manicurists and husbands, severely out of her head. But you can't play fast and loose with the Destinies that way.

"Done!" they had replied quietly to her last schedule of requirements.

"We'll send our messenger over right away." It was not their fault that the Liberry Teacher could not hear them.

II

He was gray-haired, pink-cheeked, curvingly side-whiskered and immaculately gray-clad; and he did not look in the least like a messenger of Fate.

The Liberry Teacher was at a highly keyed part of her narrative, and even the most fidgety children were tense and open-mouthed.

"'And where art thou now?' cried the Stranger to Robin Hood. And Robin roared with laughter. 'Oh, in the flood, and floating down the stream with all the little fishes,' said he--" she was relating breathlessly.

"_Tea_-cher!" hissed Isaac Rabinowitz, snapping his fingers at her at this exciting point. "Teacher! There's a guy wants to speak to you!"

"Aw, shut-_tup_!" chorused his indignant little schoolmates. "Can't you see that Teacher's tellin' a story? Go chase yerself! Go do a tango roun' de block!"