Alice Adams

ith this, having more immediately practical questions before them, they
dropped the subject, to bend their entire attention upon the dress; and
when the lunch-gong sounded downstairs Alice was still sketching repairs
and alterations. She continued to sketch them, not heeding the summons.

“I suppose we'd better go down to lunch,” Mrs. Adams said, absently.
“She's at the gong again.” “In a minute, mama. Now about the
sleeves----” And she went on with her planning. Unfortunately the
gong was inexpressive of the mood of the person who beat upon it. It
consisted of three little metal bowls upon a string; they were unequal
in size, and, upon being tapped with a padded stick, gave forth
vibrations almost musically pleasant. It was Alice who had substituted
this contrivance for the brass “dinner-bell” in use throughout her
childhood; and neither she nor the others of her family realized that
the substitution of sweeter sounds had made the life of that household
more difficult. In spite of dismaying increases in wages, the Adamses
still strove to keep a cook; and, as they were unable to pay the higher
rates demanded by a good one, what they usually had was a whimsical
coloured woman of nomadic impulses. In the hands of such a person the
old-fashioned “dinner-bell” was satisfying; life could instantly be
made intolerable for any one dawdling on his way to a meal; the bell was
capable of every desirable profanity and left nothing bottled up in the
breast of the ringer. But the chamois-covered stick might whack upon
Alice's little Chinese bowls for a considerable length of time and
produce no great effect of urgency upon a hearer, nor any other effect,
except fury in the cook. The ironical impossibility of expressing
indignation otherwise than by sounds of gentle harmony proved
exasperating; the cook was apt to become surcharged, so that explosive
resignations, never rare, were somewhat more frequent after the
introduction of the gong.

Mrs. Adams took this increased frequency to be only another
manifestation of the inexplicable new difficulties that beset all
housekeeping. You paid a cook double what you had paid one a few years
before; and the cook knew half as much of cookery, and had no gratitude.
The more you gave these people, it seemed, the worse they behaved--a
condition not to be remedied by simply giving them less, because you
couldn't even get the worst unless you paid her what she demanded.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Adams remained fitfully an optimist in the matter.
Brought up by her mother to speak of a female cook as “the girl,” she
had been instructed by Alice to drop that definition in favour of one
not an improvement in accuracy: “the maid.” Almost always, during
the first day or so after every cook came, Mrs. Adams would say, at
intervals, with an air of triumph: “I believe--of course it's a little
soon to be sure--but I do really believe this new maid is the treasure
we've been looking for so long!” Much in the same way that Alice dreamed
of a mysterious perfect mate for whom she “waited,” her mother had
a fairy theory that hidden somewhere in the universe there was the
treasure, the perfect “maid,” who would come and cook in the Adamses'
kitchen, not four days or four weeks, but forever.

The present incumbent was not she. Alice, profoundly interested herself,
kept her mother likewise so preoccupied with the dress that they were
but vaguely conscious of the gong's soft warnings, though these were
repeated and protracted unusually. Finally the sound of a hearty voice,
independent and enraged, reached the pair. It came from the hall below.

“I says goo'-BYE!” it called. “Da'ss all!”

Then the front door slammed.

“Why, what----” Mrs. Adams began.

They went down hurriedly to find out. Miss Perry informed them.

“I couldn't make her listen to reason,” she said. “She rang the gong
four or five times and got to talking to herself; and then she went up
to her room and packed her bag. I told her she had no business to go out
the front door, anyhow.”

Mrs. Adams took the news philosophically. “I thought she had something
like that in her eye when I paid her this morning, and I'm not
surprised. Well, we won't let Mr. Adams know anything's the matter till
I get a new one.”

They lunched upon what the late incumbent had left chilling on the
table, and then Mrs. Adams prepared to wash the dishes; she would “have
them done in a jiffy,” she said, cheerfully. But it was Alice who washed
the dishes.

“I DON'T like to have you do that, Alice,” her mother protested,
following her into the kitchen. “It roughens the hands, and when a girl
has hands like yours----”

“I know, mama.” Alice looked troubled, but shook her head. “It can't be
helped this time; you'll need every minute to get that dress done.”

Mrs. Adams went away lamenting, while Alice, no expert, began to splash
the plates and cups and saucers in the warm water. After a while, as
she worked, her eyes grew dreamy: she was making little gay-coloured
pictures of herself, unfounded prophecies of how she would look and what
would happen to her that evening. She saw herself, charming and demure,
wearing a fluffy idealization of the dress her mother now determinedly
struggled with upstairs; she saw herself framed in a garlanded archway,
the entrance to a ballroom, and saw the people on the shining floor
turning dramatically to look at her; then from all points a rush of
young men shouting for dances with her; and she constructed a superb
stranger, tall, dark, masterfully smiling, who swung her out of the
clamouring group as the music began. She saw herself dancing with him,
saw the half-troubled smile she would give him; and she accurately
smiled that smile as she rinsed the knives and forks.

These hopeful fragments of drama were not to be realized, she knew; but
she played that they were true, and went on creating them. In all of
them she wore or carried flowers--her mother's sorrow for her in this
detail but made it the more important--and she saw herself glamorous
with orchids; discarded these for an armful of long-stemmed, heavy
roses; tossed them away for a great bouquet of white camellias; and
so wandered down a lengthening hothouse gallery of floral beauty, all
costly and beyond her reach except in such a wistful day-dream. And upon
her present whole horizon, though she searched it earnestly, she could
discover no figure of a sender of flowers.

Out of her fancies the desire for flowers to wear that night emerged
definitely and became poignant; she began to feel that it might be
particularly important to have them. “This might be the night!” She was
still at the age to dream that the night of any dance may be the vital
point in destiny. No matter how commonplace or disappointing other
dance nights have been this one may bring the great meeting. The unknown
magnifico may be there.

Alice was almost unaware of her own reveries in which this being
appeared--reveries often so transitory that they developed and passed in
a few seconds. And in some of them the being was not wholly a stranger;
there were moments when he seemed to be composed of recognizable
fragments of young men she knew--a smile she had liked, from one; the
figure of another, the hair of another--and sometimes she thought
he might be concealed, so to say, within the person of an actual
acquaintance, someone she had never suspected of being the right seeker
for her, someone who had never suspected that it was she who “waited”
for him. Anything might reveal them to each other: a look, a turn of the
head, a singular word--perhaps some flowers upon her breast or in her
hand.

She wiped the dishes slowly, concluding the operation by dropping a
saucer upon the floor and dreamily sweeping the fragments under the
stove. She sighed and replaced the broom near a window, letting her
glance wander over the small yard outside. The grass, repulsively
besooted to the colour of coal-smoke all winter, had lately come to life
again and now sparkled with green, in the midst of which a tiny shot of
blue suddenly fixed her absent eyes. They remained upon it for several
moments, becoming less absent.

It was a violet.

Alice ran upstairs, put on her hat, went outdoors and began to search
out the violets. She found twenty-two, a bright omen--since the number
was that of her years--but not enough violets. There were no more; she
had ransacked every foot of the yard.

She looked dubiously at the little bunch in her hand, glanced at
the lawn next door, which offered no favourable prospect; then went
thoughtfully into the house, left her twenty-two violets in a bowl
of water, and came quickly out again, her brow marked with a frown of
decision. She went to a trolley-line and took a car to the outskirts of
the city where a new park had been opened.

Here she resumed her search, but it was not an easily rewarded one,
and for an hour after her arrival she found no violets. She walked
conscientiously over the whole stretch of meadow, her eyes roving
discontentedly; there was never a blue dot in the groomed expanse; but
at last, as she came near the borders of an old grove of trees, left
untouched by the municipal landscapers, the little flowers appeared, and
she began to gather them. She picked them carefully, loosening the earth
round each tiny plant, so as to bring the roots up with it, that it
might live the longer; and she had brought a napkin, which she
drenched at a hydrant, and kept loosely wrapped about the stems of her
collection.

The turf was too damp for her to kneel; she worked patiently, stooping
from the waist; and when she got home in a drizzle of rain at five
o'clock her knees were tremulous with strain, her back ached, and she
was tired all over, but she had three hundred violets. Her mother moaned
when Alice showed them to her, fragrant in a basin of water.

“Oh, you POOR child! To think of your having to work so hard to get
things that other girls only need lift their little fingers for!”

“Never mind,” said Alice, huskily. “I've got 'em and I AM going to have
a good time to-night!”

“You've just got to!” Mrs. Adams agreed, intensely sympathetic. “The
Lord knows you deserve to, after picking all these violets, poor thing,
and He wouldn't be mean enough to keep you from it. I may have to get
dinner before I finish the dress, but I can get it done in a few minutes
afterward, and it's going to look right pretty. Don't you worry about
THAT! And with all these lovely violets----”

“I wonder----” Alice began, paused, then went on, fragmentarily: “I
suppose--well, I wonder--do you suppose it would have been better policy
to have told Walter before----”

“No,” said her mother. “It would only have given him longer to grumble.”

“But he might----”

“Don't worry,” Mrs. Adams reassured her. “He'll be a little cross, but
he won't be stubborn; just let me talk to him and don't you say anything
at all, no matter what HE says.”

These references to Walter concerned some necessary manoeuvres which
took place at dinner, and were conducted by the mother, Alice having
accepted her advice to sit in silence. Mrs. Adams began by laughing
cheerfully. “I wonder how much longer it took me to cook this dinner
than it does Walter to eat it?” she said. “Don't gobble, child! There's
no hurry.”

In contact with his own family Walter was no squanderer of words.

“Is for me,” he said. “Got date.”

“I know you have, but there's plenty of time.”

He smiled in benevolent pity. “YOU know, do you? If you made any
coffee--don't bother if you didn't. Get some down-town.” He seemed
about to rise and depart; whereupon Alice, biting her lip, sent a
panic-stricken glance at her mother.

But Mrs. Adams seemed not at all disturbed; and laughed again. “Why,
what nonsense, Walter! I'll bring your coffee in a few minutes, but
we're going to have dessert first.”

“What sort?”

“Some lovely peaches.”

“Doe' want 'ny canned peaches,” said the frank Walter, moving back his
chair. “G'-night.”

“Walter! It doesn't begin till about nine o'clock at the earliest.”

He paused, mystified. “What doesn't?”

“The dance.”

“What dance?”

“Why, Mildred Palmer's dance, of course.”

Walter laughed briefly. “What's that to me?”

“Why, you haven't forgotten it's TO-NIGHT, have you?” Mrs. Adams cried.
“What a boy!”

“I told you a week ago I wasn't going to that ole dance,” he returned,
frowning. “You heard me.”

“Walter!” she exclaimed. “Of COURSE you're going. I got your clothes all
out this afternoon, and brushed them for you. They'll look very nice,
and----”

“They won't look nice on ME,” he interrupted. “Got date down-town, I
tell you.”

“But of course you'll----”

“See here!” Walter said, decisively. “Don't get any wrong ideas in your
head. I'm just as liable to go up to that ole dance at the Palmers' as I
am to eat a couple of barrels of broken glass.”

“But, Walter----”

Walter was beginning to be seriously annoyed. “Don't 'Walter' me! I'm no
s'ciety snake. I wouldn't jazz with that Palmer crowd if they coaxed me
with diamonds.”

“Walter----”

“Didn't I tell you it's no use to 'Walter' me?” he demanded.

“My dear child----”

“Oh, Glory!”

At this Mrs. Adams abandoned her air of amusement, looked hurt, and
glanced at the demure Miss Perry across the table. “I'm afraid Miss
Perry won't think you have very good manners, Walter.”

“You're right she won't,” he agreed, grimly. “Not if I haf to hear any
more about me goin' to----”

But his mother interrupted him with some asperity: “It seems very
strange that you always object to going anywhere among OUR friends,
Walter.”

“YOUR friends!” he said, and, rising from his chair, gave utterance to
an ironical laugh strictly monosyllabic. “Your friends!” he repeated,
going to the door. “Oh, yes! Certainly! Good-NIGHT!”

And looking back over his shoulder to offer a final brief view of his
derisive face, he took himself out of the room.

Alice gasped: “Mama----”

“I'll stop him!” her mother responded, sharply; and hurried after the
truant, catching him at the front door with his hat and raincoat on.

“Walter----”

“Told you had a date down-town,” he said, gruffly, and would have opened
the door, but she caught his arm and detained him.

“Walter, please come back and finish your dinner. When I take all the
trouble to cook it for you, I think you might at least----”

“Now, now!” he said. “That isn't what you're up to. You don't want to
make me eat; you want to make me listen.”

“Well, you MUST listen!” She retained her grasp upon his arm, and
made it tighter. “Walter, please!” she entreated, her voice becoming
tremulous. “PLEASE don't make me so much trouble!”

He drew back from her as far as her hold upon him permitted, and looked
at her sharply. “Look here!” he said. “I get you, all right! What's the
matter of Alice GOIN' to that party by herself?”

“She just CAN'T!”

“Why not?”

“It makes things too MEAN for her, Walter. All the other girls have
somebody to depend on after they get there.”

“Well, why doesn't she have somebody?” he asked, testily. “Somebody
besides ME, I mean! Why hasn't somebody asked her to go? She ought to be
THAT popular, anyhow, I sh'd think--she TRIES enough!”

“I don't understand how you can be so hard,” his mother wailed, huskily.
“You know why they don't run after her the way they do the other girls
she goes with, Walter. It's because we're poor, and she hasn't got any
background.

“'Background?'” Walter repeated. “'Background?' What kind of talk is
that?”

“You WILL go with her to-night, Walter?” his mother pleaded, not
stopping to enlighten him. “You don't understand how hard things are for
her and how brave she is about them, or you COULDN'T be so selfish! It'd
be more than I can bear to see her disappointed to-night! She went clear
out to Belleview Park this afternoon, Walter, and spent hours and hours
picking violets to wear. You WILL----”

Walter's heart was not iron, and the episode of the violets may have
reached it. “Oh, BLUB!” he said, and flung his soft hat violently at the
wall.

His mother beamed with delight. “THAT'S a good boy, darling! You'll
never be sorry you----”

“Cut it out,” he requested. “If I take her, will you pay for a taxi?”

“Oh, Walter!” And again Mrs. Adams showed distress. “Couldn't you?”

“No, I couldn't; I'm not goin' to throw away my good money like that,
and you can't tell what time o' night it'll be before she's willin' to
come home. What's the matter you payin' for one?”

“I haven't any money.”

“Well, father----”

She shook her head dolefully. “I got some from him this morning, and
I can't bother him for any more; it upsets him. He's ALWAYS been so
terribly close with money----”

“I guess he couldn't help that,” Walter observed. “We're liable to go to
the poorhouse the way it is. Well, what's the matter our walkin' to this
rotten party?”

“In the rain, Walter?”

“Well, it's only a drizzle and we can take a streetcar to within a block
of the house.”

Again his mother shook her head. “It wouldn't do.”

“Well, darn the luck, all right!” he consented, explosively. “I'll get
her something to ride in. It means seventy-five cents.”

“Why, Walter!” Mrs. Adams cried, much pleased. “Do you know how to get a
cab for that little? How splendid!”

“Tain't a cab,” Walter informed her crossly. “It's a tin Lizzie, but you
don't haf' to tell her what it is till I get her into it, do you?”

Mrs. Adams agreed that she didn't.