Little Miss By The Day

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LITTLE MISS BY-THE-DAY

BY
LUCILLE VAN SLYKE

_Author of "Eve's Other Children"_

_With A Frontispiece In Color By MABEL HATT_

1919

TO GEORDIE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PROLOGUE
I IN THE BARRED GARDEN
II THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS
III LOST DREAMS
IV THE UNFINISHED SONG
V "CERTAIN LEGAL MATTERS"
VI THE LAST PRETENDING

PROLOGUE

The older I get the more convinced I become that the most fascinating
persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly
well but whom we never, as children say, "get to meet." They slip out
of countries, or towns--_or rooms even,_--just before we arrive,
leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated of
something that was rightfully and divinely ours. That's the way I
still feel about little Miss By-the-Day. Perhaps you, too, have been
baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person.
Perhaps you, too, tried to find her but never did.

She sounded so casual and commonplace when I first began hearing about
her that I let her slip through my fingers. She was just a little
seamstress who had a "vairee" odd way of speaking; it was quite a long
time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was
unconsciously trying to imitate her drawling voice. And then I noticed
that everybody who mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on
earth she'd come from. I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd
scraps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had
figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which
she lived. And presently, when it was too late, I found myself
listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who
couldn't find out what had become of her. She suddenly vanished,
leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house.

If you'll lend me your pencil a minute I'll show you on the back of
this envelope just how that house was situated. You can understand the
whole amazing story better if you keep in mind how the church on the
corner and the rectory were tucked in beside that great house. For it
_is_ a big house, so huge that the six prim brownstones across the
street from it look like toy houses. But I've been told that in
Brooklyn's early days there was no street, just a long terraced garden
that sloped down to the river.

For all that the streets have crowded so disrespectfully about it the
whole place still has a sort of "world-with-out-end-amen" air--perhaps
because of the impressive squareness of its structure, great blocks of
brownstone joined solidly; perhaps because of the enormous gnarled
wistaria vines that stretch above its massive cornices--but one does
feel as Felicia Day herself did when some one asked her how long she
thought it had been there. She said she thought it must have been
there "Much, much more than Always--it must have been _jamais au grand_
--forevaire and more than evaire!"

Maybe, like me, you've passed that house a dozen times and shuddered
at the filth of the little street.

[Illustration: Town map.]

I used to hold my breath as I hurried by that dismal old rookery. I
thought it the most hideous purgatory that ever sheltered a horde of
miserable humans. But you needn't be afraid to pass it now! The
immaculate sweetness and serenity of that wee street is like a miracle
and the old house is a fairy dream come true.

Its marble steps are softly yellowed with age, an exquisitely wrought
iron balcony stretches across the front above the high ceilinged
basement and great carved walnut doors open into a wide vestibule with
a marble floor exactly like a bit of a gigantic chessboard. The
transformation had so astounded me that I was almost afraid to touch
the neatly polished beaten silver bell for fear the whole house would
vanish.

"Coom in!" cried a Scotchy voice from the basement. So I stepped
across the tessellated floor of the hall into the broad drawing-room
and stared out through the long French doors of the glass room at the
green smudge of Battery Park beyond the river. There wasn't a soul in
sight in any of the rooms and yet I felt as if some one was there.
Perhaps it was just that I was awed by the disconcerting loveliness of
the portrait of the brunette lady that hung in a tarnished oval frame
above the drawing-room mantel. I looked at her and waited. Presently I
coughed apologetically.

"Could I please find out if a--er--Miss Day lives here? Or--if anybody
here knows her?"

The Scotchy voice lifted itself grudgingly above the vigorous swish of
a scrubbing brush.

"I dinna think ony one's home but th' Sculptor Girl--she's on th' top
floor an' it's not I that knows whether she's in a speaking humor, but
you're weelcoom to try her--"

It was raining, a miserable spring drizzle, yet the spacious hall
seemed flooded with sunlight. There's an oval skylight fitted with
amber glass; silhouetted against its leaded rims are outlined flying
birds.

"Hark, hark! The lark at heaven's gate sings!" I read beneath the
margins when I looked up to find the sunlight. I knew that I ought to
feel like an impertinent intruder but I just couldn't! And I defy any
one to go up those wonderful circling stairs and not smile! For at the
head of each flight of steps is a recessed niche such as used to be
built to hold statuary and in the one near the second floor is a flat
vase filled with flowers--little saffron rosebuds the day I passed by
--with an ever so discreet card engraved in sizable old English script
that hinted:

"One's for you."

I was still sniffing at my buttonhole when I reached the second niche.
There was a black varnished wicker tray heaped with fruit and a
Brittany platter filled with raison cookies.

"Aren't you hungry?" the card above them suggested. I nibbled an
apricot all the way up the third flight and almost laughed aloud when
I reached the top, though of course I was expecting something. There's
a yellow glazed vase there,

"For pits and stones
Or skins and bones"

and above it in the back of the niche through a marble dolphin's mouth
cold water trickles into a bronze holder with a basket of cups beside
it.

"Thirsty?" asks the dolphin.

"Dulcie Dierck" I read on the Sculptor Girl's doorplate. It took me a
full minute to get the courage to tap her gargoyle knocker because I
was so awestricken at remembering that she was the girl who won the
Ambrose Medal and the Pendleton Prize and goodness only knows how much
other loot and glory.

The door jerked open to let me peer into the cleanest, barest skylit
spot,--with flat creamy walls and a little old fireplace with a
Peggoty grate just like the pictures in "David Copperfield." And a
trig young person who didn't look a bit like an artist, because she
was so neatly belted and so smoothly coiffed, waved a clayey thumb tip
toward a bench by the fire.

"Sit down and get your breath," she suggested chirkily, "then you
won't feel quite so dumfoundered--"

An overwhelming sense of my colossal cheekiness made me stammer.

"Do--do you h-happen to know--" I burst forth desperately, "if there's
really any such person as a--a Miss Day?"

"Does that fire look real?"

I nodded.

"Well, then put another stick on that fire and hang the kettle on the
hob--" she was washing the clay from her hands in an old brass basin.
"Don't get peeved with me because I'm grouchy and bossy--" she flung
over her shoulder at me. "I always start off badly when I'm tired and
that fool question always makes me just darned tireder!"

She reached for a fat brown teapot and dumped in tea-leaves
recklessly. "I'll be decenter directly I'm fed. I'm a beast just
before tea--you won't find me half bad half an hour from now--"

We were both silent while the water boiled. She shoved her table
nearer the fire, so near that I found myself looking down at the
writing things that were arranged so primly at one end. There was an
ink bottle on a gray blotter, a pewter tray for pens and a queer
shaped lump of bronze, a paper weight I supposed. I wouldn't have been
human if I could have kept my fingers off that bit of metal. I
pretended to pick it up accidentally but I did it as guiltily as a
child touches something forbidden. She didn't say a word, just watched
me mischievously while she arranged the tea cups on the other end of
the table. Presently she lighted a tiny temple lamp, melted a dab of
sealing wax in its wavering blue flames--rose-colored wax it was--and
it splashed out on the gray blotter like molten fire.

She took the bit of bronze from my fingers and pressed it firmly on
the wax.

"It's a mouth--" I murmured. "It's lips--"

"It's her kiss," she answered me. "That's the most beautiful and the
most difficult thing I ever made. It's Felicia Day's letter seal."

"Then she really is a real person--" I stammered fatuously.

"Real?" The girl's low voice lifted itself belligerently. "What do you
think she is? Imitation? Why, she's the one REAL thing in this whole
sham world! I guess you've never met anybody who knew her or you
wouldn't keep gulping out idiotic things like that! I guess if you
ever talked with her even a minute you'd understand how real she is.
She has the crispest--the sincerest way of speaking. Though of course
it's not a bit like other people's ways. She probably doesn't talk
like anybody you've ever listened to. Not like anybody I've ever heard
of anyway." The girl's eyes were glowing. "Are you musical?" she
demanded. "Because I need a musical word to tell you how she talks.
She talks _rubato_. Her short words drawl ever so long and her long ones
hurry so's to let her make up for the stolen time. And she has a sort of
trace of accent like--well, it's not like anything except herself
really. You see, her mother wasn't French but she was brought up with
French people and Felice says 'evaire' and 'nevaire' and uses funny
little Frenchy phrases she heard her mother use though she doesn't
really talk French at all. And she has a bossy way of speaking, kind of
--well, humbly bossing, if you can get me. Talks like a Lady Pied Piper
and sweeps you along with her just about six minutes after she's begun
coaxing you to do whatever she's decided is the best thing for you to
do. Believe me, I know she does it! Because I was one of the first ones
she swept along!" The girl's words were tumbling so fast now that I
could hardly follow.

"Did you ever find yourself in heaps of trouble? Too much trouble to
stand? Did you? I was that way the day she opened my door. It made me
perfectly furious to have her open my door. And she looked so little
and so old and so frumpy--she'd been sewing all day for my beastly
step-aunt and I'd been trying all day to get the courage to--to--" the
girl's tears were streaming now and she didn't bother to wipe them
away, she seemed utterly unashamed of them, "to get rid of myself. And
just the minute I got the cork out of the bottle that little old angel
opened the door. She was so darned different from anybody I'd ever
seen in all my life and she talked so differently from anybody I'd
ever listened to, I--well, I sort of forgot wanting to die because I
was curious to find out where on earth she'd come from--or where on
earth she was going to! She had a funny little dog under her arm; she
gave it to me to hold. And the next thing I knew she was inviting me
to go home with her. She thought I might like this room, she said. She
told me it was filled 'with-an-abundance-of-weeds-we-have-not-any-
names-for--' Wasn't that an absolute corker? That was her way of
describing the Italian family with too many brats that were living
here. She'd got that apology for 'em out of her great-great-grandma's
garden book! Can you beat it? She talks about everybody as if they
belonged in a garden. She called me--" the girl's lips quivered,--"a
rosebush that had been pruned too much--roots cramped--she said--
anyway she picked me up to transplant me! Marched me into the
'orrible, messy, noisy, smelly hutch that this house used to be, up
all those eighty 'leven stairs, and she kept her chin in the air as
though it was a royal palace she was taking me into! She just kept
saying,

"'Come! You'll love, love, love it! And you're going to be proud,
proud, proud to live here--'

"I was proud, all right," the girl's voice choked. "I wouldn't have
missed living here those next two months, not for all the marble that
was ever quarried nor for all the glory that was Greece! That first
night we both slept in this room--" she paused dramatically and threw
open the door in the east wall to let me peer into the narrow hall
room, "there--see--"

Ah! that bare little room! So tidy! With faded discolored wall paper
and a scrubbed pine floor! With its battered iron bed! There's an old
table by the one window with a child's silver mug and plate and spoon
on it, each of them with a great bee carved upon it. That's all there
is in that room save a low chair and a superb but shabby walnut bureau.

"She loved it so much that she wouldn't change it when she was
building Octavia House over--"

"Octavia House!" I cried. "Why, that's that queer house where all the
young geniuses live! The one that the Peter Alden money built--"

"It's not a queer house!" the girl defied me. "It's--it's this house!
And you can't say Money built this house! Money couldn't have done it!
Not all the money in the world, couldn't! It wasn't Money! It was--
Pride! Not the sort of pride that goeth before _de_struction but that
mightier pride that goeth before _con_struction! No, no!" she murmured
vehemently, "it wasn't Money! It was really almost done before the money
came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us
over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in
us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know,
we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she
was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the
glory and the wonder of her until after she was gone--"

"She's not--?"

The Sculptor Girl answered my half-asked question almost ferociously.

"Of course she's not dead! She is the alivest person in this whole
world--aliver than you or I can ever be! And yet,--we've lost her. She
isn't just _ours_ any more. And when she was blessedly, absolutely just
ours--we didn't appreciate her. You see, she was so frumpy and absurd
and quiet we didn't think about her--we scarcely saw her. But oh--the
minute when we did see her! It came in a flash for me! I just knew, all
of a sudden, that she was perfectly beautiful--as beautiful as her own
whistle--her lovely, lovely Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"

"Oh! Oh!" I gasped, "_You can't mean that she was--is--Mademoiselle
Folly?_"

"Mean it? Didn't you know it? Didn't you ever hear her whistle? Oh,
even now that she's gone it seems to me that I can still hear her
whistling! And no matter what any one has said about it--they couldn't
all of them, put together, say half enough--not even if they all said
things as gushy as the Poetry Girl--she said it was like water
trickling in a moonlit fountain! I only know it's like what I tried to
put into my little Pandora--that it was like what Barrie was thinking
when he let Peter Pan cry, 'I'm Joy! Joy! Joy!'--Even the Painter Boy,
who has a silly pose that he hates music, used to hang around to hear
her whistle--he pretended he was just looking at her so's he could
paint her, but that didn't fool me--Listen, there's Nor' stumping up
stairs now--he's awfully lame on these rainy days and _that_ moody--"

"Do you mean Noralla? The one who did 'The Spirit of Romance'? Does he
live here?"

She nodded impishly.

"And Thad, the cartoonist and Blythe Modder and--" she began reeling
off a victorious list of young celebrities.

"And that one little dressmaker discovered you all?" I asked, quite
awestricken, "How could she? What sort of a wonder was she? How can
you explain it?"

The girl swung her lithe self up on the table, clasped her narrow
hands about her knees and smiled benignly down upon me. She seemed
naively content with herself, relaxed and quiet after her tempestuous
storm of words.

"You can't explain it, you just accept it--just as you accept sunshine
and rain--you can't explain any more than you can describe. And she's
the sort of woman that all of us who dwell within this house will go
on all the rest of our lives trying to describe and I'll bet that not
all of us put together can tell more'n half that there is to tell
about her. Why, her very faults are different than other people's
faults! She has a pippin of a temper and such stub-stub-stubborn ways!
Don't you think Thad's cartoons of 'Temperamental Therese' are
peaches? Well, they are nothing but Felice in her illogical crotchety
unfair minutes--Thad says the only way to explain such heavenly
rudeness as Felicia's is to remember that she began being rude in
1817--"

"How old is she?" I fairly shouted, "Oh, please get down to earth and
tell me something definite about her! You're perfectly maddening!"

The girl jumped lightly to the floor and slipped across the room to
swing the casement in the north wall and let me peer down into
Felicia's garden. If you'll look on the back of your envelope you can
see just how it was, just how the walls shut off the rectory yard.

"She's exactly twenty-seven," she sighed, "the most perfect age to be!
And if you were really going to tell her story you wouldn't have to go
back all the way to 1817, you'd begin it about--well, let me see--
you'd begin it about 1897, I think, and right down there in that wee
little garden. And of course you'd begin it with her whistling. And
you'd ask anybody you were trying to tell about her whether they'd
ever heard Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"

Did you? For if you have, I'm sure you've never forgotten the droll
way that Mademoiselle Folly stepped out upon a stage in her quaint
green frock and made her frightened curtsy. Can you recall her low
contralto drawl and her inevitable,

"Oh, my dears, I do _so_ hope that you're going to be good at
pretending! You all of you look as though you could pretend if you
just started! So let's you and I pretend that--"

Oh, I do so hope that you, too, are going "to be good at pretending"!
That you can make yourself pretend that it's twenty years ago and that
you're a nice invisible somebody standing down in a wee back yard of
Felicia's. From the garden you can't see the river because the walls
are too high. But now you're so close to them you see that they're
crumbly brick walls almost covered with vines and that at prim
intervals along their tops there are elaborate wrought-iron urns, each
filled with a huge dusty century plant. And in the side wall toward
the rectory yard of the church you can see an unused iron gate, its
rusty lock and hinges matted through and through with ancient ivy.
Pretend that it's moon-light and it's spring and that it's early
evening in the year of our Lord 1897 and that over there by the gate
is Felicia Day, about seven years old, peering through the gate into
the rectory yard, laughing softly as she always laughs on choir
practise nights. There was a certain bald dyspeptic choirmaster who
was most irritable as he drilled his unruly boy choir and on warm
evenings, when the oaken door under the heavy Gothic arches of the
church was ajar, she could watch their garbed figures and wide opened
mouths as they giggled over Gregorian chants under the swaying altar
lights.

Once the tallest, naughtiest boy of all, the one with the cherubic
"soprano" voice that was just threatening to break into piping
uselessness, had climbed to the top of the wall and dropped his little
black velvet cap at her feet.

"Get down from that wall!" the choirmaster had shouted.

Though the boy had ducked from view as suddenly as he had appeared he
had managed to demand of the small person under the wall,

"Who are you, girl?"

She was holding the cap tightly while she answered,

"I don't know, 'zactly who I are--" when she heard the choirmaster
shrieking,

"Dudley Hamilt! Come here at once!"

And though she watched every choir-practise night for ever so long she
never caught another glimpse of the mischievous-eyed boy, a nasal-
voiced woman sang in his stead and she never, never climbed walls.

But Felicia always waited patiently with the small black cap in her
hands until a night when she summoned courage to call softly through
the barred gate,

"Dudley! Dudley Hamilt!"

A fat boy ran to her and jeered,

"He's expelled! He can't come back till he's a tenor!"

So that's what you must pretend! That you can smile in the shadows of
that moonlit garden, that you can smile at a dear little stupid who is
waiting joyously for the time when Dudley Hamilt will come back a
tenor!

CHAPTER I

IN THE BARRED GARDEN

She was a distinctly droll looking child at the age of seven, our
little Felicia Day! With straight black hair brushed smoothly back and
bound with a "circle comb," with short-waisted dresses that left her
neck and arms bare. Her slender feet were encased in short white socks
and low black slippers. And at her dear little feet was usually--
Babiche.

Babiche was so old that she whined at the evening chill; she
perpetually teased to be taken back to her comfortable cushion at the
foot of her mistress's bed. She was really very amusing when she sat
up on her haunches and begged to be carried. For she was so fat that
she hated to walk and she was a very spoiled doggy, that wee spaniel!
A sort of a dowager queen of a doggy, a nice little old grandma lady
of a dog.

The gentle yap-yap-yapping that could always be heard beyond the rear
wall was from the throats of some score or more of her expensive
great-great-great offspring who lived in the stable in tiny stalls
with their pedigree cards tacked neatly under their elaborate kennel
names.

It was a cross to Felice that she was not allowed to go through the
small arched doorway at the back of the garden that led to the stable
that opened on the narrow cobblestone "Tradespersons' Street." The
Major didn't approve of the manners of Zeb Smathers the kennel man, or
Zeb's wife Marthy, though he knew there wasn't a pair with their
patience and skill to be found for miles around. All the same Felice
adored the stable yard and would have dearly loved to climb the narrow
stairs up to the low-ceilinged rooms above the stables where Marthy
liked to sit.

Lean, grizzled old Marthy! There was usually a dog or two in her lap,
either a sickly pup or a grieving-eyed mother dog whose babies had
been taken away from her. Such tiny creatures, even the mother dogs--
those little Blenheim spaniels! Snub-nosed, round-headed with long
silky flopping ears, soft curly coats and feathery tails. Felice liked
the yellow and white ones, and always reached for them, but her
grandfather coolly "weeded them out," as Zeb expressed it, because the
Trenton ideal was a white dog marked with red.

Felicia knew when the dogs were going away. They always went the day
after the Basket Man came with a pole tied full of oval gilded wicker
hampers. Sometimes she, was allowed to stand in the gateway and watch
them have their farewell bath, only of course she sniffed
uncomfortably when Zeb let brown drops drip into the rinsing water
from a fat bottle with a gay red skull and cross-bones on the label.
"Scarbolic" was what she understood it to be, she mustn't touch it or
she'd "go dead," whatever that was. But she forgot all about the smell
as she watched the fluffy doggies drying in the sunny stable yard
while Marthy sang vociferously to cheer her own drooping spirits; the
silly old woman never could bear the days the dogs went away.

And so Felice on her side of the gate could listen rapturously to the
throaty drone in which Marthy asked the world

"What's this dull town to me?
Rob-in's not here--"

or warbled heavily

"Churry Ripe, Churry Ripe,
Who'll buy my churries--"

or wailed

"Where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Where have you been, charming Billy?"

It almost made up for not being allowed to go out of the garden.

If Felice only could have been allowed to go around into the
Tradespersons' Street just once! I wish she could have gone--just
once! On one of the days when the swinging sign, that was gilded and
painted so beautifully, was hung outside to announce

"KING CHARLES AND BLENHEIM SPANIELS
For sale within."

I'm sure she would have loved the line of carriages waiting in the
cobble-stoned alley when the fine ladies came to buy. I think she
would have clapped her hands at the gay boxes of geraniums and the crisp
white curtains in Marthy's shining windows over the stable door.

But she could only stay in the garden with the thin visaged old French
woman who taught her to read and to write and to embroider and to play
upon an old lute and to curtsy and to dance. One thing she learned
that the French woman did not teach her--to whistle! She remembers
answering the sea-gulls who mewed outside in the harbor and the
sparrows who twittered in the ivy and the tiny pair of love-birds who
dwelt in a cage at her mother's bedroom window. She learned to whistle
without distorting her lips because her grandfather had forbidden her
to whistle and if she held her mouth almost normal he couldn't tell
when he looked out into the garden whether it was Felice or the birds
who were twittering.

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