The Book of Susan: A Novel. Dodd Lee Wilson
keep an eye on Susan and prepare Bob's dinner. Most of the hours during Bob's absence this poor old creature spent in a rocking-chair, nodding in and out of sleep; and it was rather baby Susan, sprawling about the kitchen floor, who kept an eye on her, than the reverse. Pearl's installation had changed all that. Bob naturally expected any woman he chose to support to work for her board and lodging; and it may be that at first Pearl had been too grateful for any shelter to risk jeopardizing her good luck by shirking. There seems to be no doubt that for a while she did her poor utmost to keep house – but the sloven in her was too deeply rooted not to flower.
By the time Susan was six or seven the interior condition of Bob's house was too crawlingly unpleasant to bear exact description; and even Bob, though callous enough in such matters, began to have serious thoughts of giving Pearl the slip – not to mention his landlord – and of running off with Susan to some other city, where he could make a fresh start and perhaps contrive now and then to get something decent to eat set before him. It never occurred to him to give Susan the slip as well – which would have freed his hands; not because he had a soft spot somewhere for the child, nor because he felt toward her any special sense of moral obligation. Simply, it never occurred to him. Susan was his kid; and if he went she went with him, along with his pipe, his shop tools, and his set of six English razors – his dearest possession, of which he was jealously and irascibly proud.
But, as it happens, Bob never acted upon this slowly forming desire to escape; the desire was quietly checked and insensibly receded; and for this Susan herself was directly responsible.
Very early in life she began to supplement Pearl's feeble housewifery, but it was not until her ninth year that Susan decided to bring about a domestic revolution. Whether or no hatred of dirt be inheritable, I leave to biologists, merely thumbnailing two facts for their consideration: Susan's mother had hated dirt with an unappeasable hatred; her nightly, after-supper, insensate pursuit of imaginary cobwebs had been one of Bob's choicest grievances against her. And little Susan hated dirt, in all its forms, with an almost equal venom, but with a brain at once more active and more unreeling. She had good reason to hate it. She must either have hated it or been subdued to it. For five years, more or less, she had lived in the midst of dirt and suffered. It had seemed to her one of the inexpungable evils of existence, like mosquitoes, or her father's temper, or the smell of Pearl's cheap talcum powder when warmed by the fumes of cooking cabbage. But gradually it came upon her that dirt only accumulated in the absence of a will to removal.
Once her outreaching mind had grasped – without wordily formulating – this physical and moral law, her course was plain. Since the will to removal was dormant or missing in Pearl, she must supply it. Within the scope of her childish strength, she did supply it. Susan insists that it took her two years merely to overcome the handicap of Pearl's neglect. Her self-taught technique was faulty; proper tools were lacking. There was a bucket which, when filled, she could not lift; a broom that tripped her; high corners she could not reach – corners she had to grow up to, even with the aid of a chair. But in the end she triumphed. By the time she was thirteen – she was thirteen when I first saw in the Eureka Garage – Bob's four rooms were spotless six and one-half days out of every seven.
Even Pearl, in her flaccid way, approved the change. "It beats hell," she remarked affably to Bob one night, "how that ugly little monkey likes to scrub things. She's a real help to me, that child is. But no comp'ny. And she's a sight."
"Well," growled Bob, "she comes by that honest. So was the old woman." They were annoyed when Susan, sitting by them, for the first time within their memory burst into flooding, uncontrollable tears.
IV
I should probably, in my own flaccid way, have lost all track of Susan, if it had not been for certain ugly things that befell in Bob's four-room house one breathless evening – June twentieth of the year 1907. It is a date stamped into my consciousness like a notarial seal. For one thing it happened to be my birthday – my thirty-third, which I was not precisely celebrating, since it was also the anniversary of the day my wife had left me, two years before. Nor was I entirely pleased to have become, suddenly, thirty-three. I counted it the threshold of middle-age. Now that eleven years have passed, and with them my health and the world's futile pretense at peace, I am feeling younger.
This book is about Susan, but it will be simpler if you know something, too, concerning her scribe. Fortunately there is not much that it will be needful to tell.
I was – in those bad, grossly comfortable old days – that least happy of Nature's experiments, a man whose inherited income permitted him to be an idler, and whose tastes urged him to write precious little essays about precious little for the more precious reviews. My half-hearted attempt to practice law I had long abandoned. I lived in a commodious, inherited mansion on Hillhouse Avenue – an avenue which in all fairness must be called aristocratic, since it has no wrong end to it. It is right at both ends, so, naturally, though broad, it is not very long. My grandfather, toward the end of a profitably ill-spent life, built this mansion of sad-colored stone in a somewhat mixed Italian style; my father filled it with expensive and unsightly movables – the spoils of a grand European tour; and I, in my turn, had emptied it of these treasures and refilled it with my own carefully chosen collection of rare furniture, rare Oriental carpets, rare first editions, and costly objets d'art. This collection I then anxiously believed, and do still in part believe, to be beautiful – though I am no longer haunted by an earlier fear lest the next generation should repudiate my taste and reverse my opinion. Let the auction rooms of 1960 decide. Neither in flesh nor in spirit shall I attend them.
The tragi-comedy of my luckless marriage I shall not stop here to explain, but its rather mysterious ending had at first largely cut me off from my old family friends and my socially correct acquaintances. When Gertrude left me, their sympathies, or their sense of security, went with her. I can hardly blame them. There had been no glaring scandal, but the fault was inferentially mine. To speak quite brutally, I did not altogether regret their loss. Too many of them had bored me for too many years. I was glad to rely more on the companionship of certain writers and painters which my scribbling had quietly won for me, here and in France. I traveled about a good deal. When at home, I kept my guest rooms filled – often, in the horrid phrase, with "visitors of distinction."
In this way I became a social problem, locally, of some magnitude. Visitors of distinction – even when of eccentric distinction – cannot easily be ignored in a university town. Thus it made it a little awkward, perhaps, that I should so often prove to be their host; a little – less, on the whole, than one would suppose. Within two years – just following Ballou's brief stay with me, on his way to introduce that now forgotten nine-days wonder, Polymorphous Prose, among initiates of the Plymouth Rock Poetry Guild, at Boston – my slight remaining ineligibility was tacitly and finally ignored. The old family friends began to hint that Gertrude, though a splendid woman, had always been a little austere. Possibly there were faults on both sides. One never knew.
And it was just at this hour of social reëstablishment that my birthday swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the destiny of a luxurious dilettante, living at the very center of bonded respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad avenue which is right at both ends!
V
"Never in this (obviously outcast) world!" grumbled Bob Blake, bringing his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table.
The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo, where it hung suspended above the melodeon.
"I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What's the good of bein' so mean? If you wasn't heeled you'd let me have it my way. Didn't I bring that banjo with me?"
"Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?"
"I guess it proves somethin', all right."
"Proves