Speed Nell
Tripping with the Tucker Twins

CHAPTER XV
WHO WON THE BET?

We arrived at the Misses Laurens, bag and baggage, at the appointed hour. Those ladies greeted us with studied courtesy, but it was evident from their manner that they looked upon us as Yankee invaders. The fact that Tweedles and I were from Virginia and Mrs. Green from Kentucky, all of us with as good Confederate records as one could wish, had no weight with them. We were all clumped as Northerners in their minds. But we were guests under their ancestral roof and must be treated with punctilious politeness.

Tweedles and I were shown into two large adjoining rooms, the Greens across the hall from us, with a room beyond theirs for Mr. Tucker. The beds were great four-posters that looked as though there should be little stepladders furnished to climb into them, like those the porter brings you to scramble into an upper berth.

"Just 'spose you should fall out of bed! 'Twould be sure death," declared Dee.

"Look at this mahogany candle-stand! Did you ever in all your life see anything quite so lovely? And look, only look at this silver candlestick! It looks like it had been looted from some old Spanish church," and Dum reverently picked up the heavy old silver to examine the quaint design beaten around its base.

"But this wardrobe! I'm sure there's a skeleton in it hiding behind rustling old silks. It is big enough to go to housekeeping in. I wonder if Miss Arabella and Miss Judith ever played in it when they were children."

"Old Page, always romancing."

"Well, if anyone is ever going to romance she would do it here. It smells like romance even. I know there are jars of dried rose leaves in every room. I am sure there is lavender in the sheets and I am positive there is a ghost around somewhere."

"Can you smell it, too? How does a ghost smell? Not like a rat, I hope," teased Dee.

"How are we going to sleep? If there is a ghost flaunting his fragrance around, I hope I shall not draw the lonesome singleton," said Dum.

"I'll take the room by myself," I said magnanimously, the truth of the matter being that while I approved of our custom of drawing straws or tossing up for everything, I was afraid that Dee might draw the lonesome singleton, and I did not think that after the experience she had so recently been through she should be put off by herself. I did not want to say anything about my reasons, but decided that I would simply install myself in the far room.

"Are you aware of the fact, girls, that there is no gas in these rooms? These candlesticks are not meant for ornaments, but to light us to our couches. Shades of Bracken! I wonder if there is any plumbing!" Like most persons born and brought up without plumbing, I thought more of it than daily bread. I had my own great English bathtub at Bracken, but plumbingless houses were not always equipped with individual tubs.

"I thought of asking Miss Arabella where the bathroom was, but somehow it was as difficult as asking her how much she charged for board, and I could not muster courage," laughed Dee.

"Where does that door go? If it is not locked, we might explore a little."

It yielded and proved to be the opening into an old-fashioned dressing-room that had been converted into a bathroom as an afterthought. It was big enough for four ordinary bathrooms, and had, besides the copper-lined bathtub, with plumbing that must have been the first to be installed in South Carolina, a wardrobe, bureau, washstand and several chairs. Another door opening into a narrow hall must have been meant for the other occupants of the house.

"Thank goodness for the tub, even if it is reminiscent of a preserving-kettle," I sighed. "I had visions of our making out with bird dishes, and had begun to regret that I had not taken several more baths at the hotel, where the arrangements were certainly perfect."

"It's an awful pity a body can't save up cleanliness like she can save up dirt," said Dee. "Wouldn't it be nice if we could take seven baths in one day at a nice hotel and then come stay a week in a delightful old house like this, delightful in every way but tubs, and not have to wash all that time?"

"I knew a girl in Richmond who was one of these once-a-weekers, and she was going abroad for the summer and decided to get a Turkish bath before sailing. Do you know she saved up two weeks so as to get her money's worth? But we had better get unpacked and into our dinner dresses," and Dum began to pull things out of her suitcase with her unpacking manner – not calculated to improve the condition of clothes.

We found Professor and Mrs. Green walking in the garden.

"Edwin is as pleased as we were, and has forgiven us for not seeing the bedrooms, now that he finds he shall not have to sleep on a stone bench. We have a bed big enough for an old-fashioned family of fifteen to sleep in. I hope you girls are comfortably placed."

"Yes, indeed, beautifully!" we exclaimed in chorus.

"Only look at this old sun-dial, Molly! 'Tempus Fugit' carved around it! I don't believe Time has flown here for many a year. I think he has stood stock-still."

The garden was wondrously sweet in the soft evening light. Waxen white japonicas gleamed through the shrubbery and lilacs, lavender, purple and white were in a perfect tangle, meeting overhead, almost concealing an overgrown walk that led to a rustic summer house in the far corner. Wherever there was nothing else, there was honeysuckle. It seemed to be trying to over-run the place, but periwinkle was holding its own on the ground, asserting itself with its darker green leaves, and snow balls and syringa bushes, shaking off the honeysuckle that had tried to smother and choke it, rose superior with their masses of whiteness. Hyacinths, narcissi, lilies-of-the-valley, snowdrops and violets filled the beds to overflowing, a floral struggle for the survival of the fittest.

"Won't Zebedee love it, though!" said Dee. "It seems almost as peaceful as a graveyard. Listen! Listen! A mocking-bird!"

"We might have known a mocking-bird would build here," whispered Mrs. Green. "There he is on that oleander, and there's his mate still busy with her household duties, carrying straw for her nest. It must be hard to be a female bird and not to be able to pour forth your soul in song, no matter how bursting you are with the joy of living. I always thought that it was unfair. No doubt that little newlywed mocking-bird feels as deeply as the male, but all she can do to show it is just drag straw and hairs and build and build, and then sit patiently on her eggs, and then teach the little ones to fly after she has worn herself to skin and bone grubbing worms for them. No doubt if she should begin to sing she would astonish her little husband to such an extent that he would call her a suffragette, and tell her a lady bird's place was in her nest and he could make noise enough for two, thank you!"

"Well, it certainly would be a pity for her to sing if she couldn't sing," objected Professor Green. "I suppose long ages of thinking she couldn't sing has put her where she can't. Perhaps she can sing, and Mr. Cock Mocking-Bird has told her she can't because he wants the floor, or rather the swinging limb, himself."

"Edwin is trying to get me into an argument on feminism, but the evening is too perfect, and the mere male bird is singing too wonderfully to tempt me to bring discord into the garden."

"Have you talked business yet with either of the ladies, Professor Green? I am getting ready to tell my Timrod good-by."

"Well – er – not yet. I have not had an opportunity."

"Why, Edwin, you have seen both of them several times since we arrived."

"Yes, but the subject of our conversation was such that it did not seem an appropriate time to broach the matter of board."

All of us laughed at our masculine contingent's being as bad as we had been, and I felt more secure than ever that father would get his Timrod and I would own a volume of J. Gordon Coogler.

Dilsey, the corn-field hand, almost fell down the steps announcing supper. Of course we were hungry, and even though the garden was so lovely we were glad to go to supper. We hoped its loveliness would keep, and we knew that food could not be trusted to.

The ladies of the house were dressed in stiff grosgrain silk. Mrs. Green knew the name of the kind of silk; we had never seen it before. She said she had an Aunt Clay in Kentucky who wore it on state occasions. They did not look nearly so funereal, as they had bits of fine old lace in necks and sleeves. Lace is a wonderful fabric for lightening up sombreness. It can cheer up dripping black.

It seems that I was wrong about the Misses Laurens having suffered recent bereavement. They had the mourning habit. Claire Gaillard had told us that they had had no deaths in the family for at least ten years, but that they always wore mourning, poor old things. When we met them in the bus, the morning of our arrival, they were not coming from the funeral of a relative who had not left them the legacy they had been counting on, as I had made up about them; on the contrary, they were coming from the wedding of a young cousin in a neighboring town. So the would-be author fell down that time in her surmises. Surely persons who expect to figure in plots of stories have no business looking as though they were coming from funerals when they have been to weddings. It is hard on real authors to have to contend with such contrariness, and simply impossible for would-bes.

The dining-room was even lovelier than the parlor. The walls were papered with a hunting scene that had faded very little, considering it must have been there half a century. It was a peculiar paper that seemed to have been varnished, no doubt thus preserving it.

The sideboard was worth a king's ransom, whatever that is. It was not the eternal Colonial that is of course beautiful, but it has come to the pass that Americans think there is no other style worth considering. It was very old Florentine, as were also the chairs and table. The carving on the sideboard could only be equalled by the Cimabue gates, I am sure. The chairs were upholstered in deep red Genoese velvet. It seems a remote Huguenot ancestor had been United States Consul in Florence and had brought home with him this dining-room furniture. There were no pictures in this room, as with paper of that type pictures are out of place, but polychrome sconces were hung at intervals, half a dozen in all. The candles in them were not lighted, as it was still daylight, and a great silver candelabrum on the table gave what additional light was needed.

The table was set with the finest Sevres china, cobweb mats and thin old teaspoons that looked a little like the old ladies themselves. The forks, however, were as big as two ordinary forks of the day; so big in fact that one might have been forgiven if, like Sam Weller, he "handled his wittles with cold steel."

Miss Judith looked flushed, and I was afraid she had been cooking the supper herself, while Miss Arabella had on a fresh thumb-stall that suggested a possible burn on her thin, blue-veined old hand. Supper consisted of fried chicken, hot rolls, four kinds of preserves, the inevitable rice that is served twice a day in South Carolina, as though to encourage home industries, and gravy, of course, to go on the rice, another thing that is the rule in the best families, so I have been told.

It is very funny how different sections of the country establish their aristocracy by the way certain favorite dishes are served. I heard a lady from Plymouth, Massachusetts, say once that some of her townsmen were not really very good people; they put too much molasses in their baked beans. I am sure a South Carolinian would consider any one po' white trash who liked rice cooked mushy and not dry with every grain standing out like a pearl. Certainly anywhere in the South sugar in the cornbread would label any family as not to the manor-born, while in the North sugar in the cornbread is a regular thing, born or not born.

Everything was delicious on that table, and the hostesses quite warmed up into a pleasant glow of hospitality. It is difficult to be stiff, even if you have swallowed a heredity poker, when gay, happy, hungry young people are at your board, showing their appreciation of your culinary skill by devouring everything handed to them.

Dilsey waited on table as though it had been set on ploughed ground, every now and then almost falling down in an imaginary furrow. The Misses Laurens completely ignored her awkwardness, although in all probability, being human, they were in agony for fear she would shoot the rolls across the room, or pour the coffee down a guest's back or do something else equally trying. Dilsey seemed delighted with her prowess, and every time she safely landed some article of food to the destination to which her mistresses had sent it, she gave a pleased cluck. She would come up to you and lean over your shoulder in a really most engaging manner, and say:

"Now do hab a lil' mo' 'sarves! Try dem quinches dis time."

She was especially lively with the "graby," and handed it every time there was a lull in operations. Professor Green refused it so often that it really became embarrassing, but still the girl persisted in her endeavors. "Jes' lil' graby on yo' rice!" Finally Miss Arabella interfered to prevent further persecution, and this is where Professor Green "broke his 'lasses pitcher" with the Misses Laurens.

"Perhaps you do not care for gravy," she suggested. "Won't you have some butter on your rice? The butter to Professor Green, Dilsey."

"Thank you, no butter! I should like some sugar and cream on my rice, however. I am very fond of it that way."

"Sugar and cream! On rice!" came in gasps from both ladies.

Oh, ye gods and little fishes! What had our masculine contingent done? Flown in the face of customs older than Time! Dilsey's awkward waiting, taking boarders, nothing had upset the well-bred equanimity of these descendants of ancestors like this awful alien fact. "Sugar on rice! Cream on rice! The Yankees are upon us! Hide the spoons!" That was the manner they had when almost tearfully they instructed Dilsey to pass the rice, pass the sugar and cream.

The professor ate it with about as much relish as Proserpine must have eaten the dried-up pomegranate that Pluto obtained for her. He knew he had done something terrible, but, man-like, he did not know just exactly what it was. He knew that rice and sugar and cream were mixed up in it, but how? Had he realized as I did that his request for a peculiar combination of food had lost him the bet, perhaps it would have choked him outright. It was a difficult feat to accomplish at best, to tackle these old aristocrats on the subject of remuneration, but now that he had done such a terribly plebeian thing as to want his rice mushy and sweet, there was no possible way to get back in their good graces, certainly no quick way of doing it. A reconstruction period would have to be gone through with and then after much burying of many hatchets perhaps cordial relations could be re-established.

Professor Green looked scared and rather boyish. His Molly was bubbling over with suppressed merriment, while Dum and I had to assume a deep gloom to keep from exploding. Dee came to the rescue, of course, with rhapsodies over the garden, jumping from that to the pictures in the City Hall and back to praise Claire Gaillard, who was evidently a favorite of the old ladies.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed seven and St. Michael's bells verified its strike. I looked up at Professor Green as he choked down the last of the fatal rice.

"I'll give you another hour," I whispered.

"Thank you, but I believe another year would not help me."

I now own J. Gordon Coogler and father will have his Timrod, which, after all, had never really been in jeopardy.

CHAPTER XVI
LETTERS

From Mrs. Edwin Green to Mrs. Kent Brown, New York City.

Meeting Street,

Charleston, S. C.,

April … 19…

My dearest Judy:

No doubt you and Kent will be astonished to find that Edwin and I are actually on the long talked-of trip to this wonderful old city. Mother is taking care of little Mildred in our absence, and Dr. McLean is to be called if she sneezes or coughs or does anything in the least out of the way. She is such a blooming, rosy baby, and so thoroughly normal that I am sure it is perfectly safe to leave her. Mother says she is more like Kent than any of her babies.

Charleston is more delightful even than it has been pictured. We only got here yesterday morning, and already we love it as though we belonged here. We went to a hotel for one night, but by rare good chance have found board in one of the real old Charleston homes.

You will laugh when I tell you that after an acquaintance of about twenty-four hours I find myself the chaperone of three girls about seventeen years old. I know you and Kent are grinning and saying to each other: "Some more of Molly's lame ducks!" but I can assure you they are as far from being that as any girls you ever saw. They are the Tucker twins, Dum and Dee, otherwise known as Virginia and Caroline, and their friend, Page Allison – all from Virginia. They have come down here with Mr. Tucker, the father of the twins, a newspaper man from Richmond, but he has had to go to Columbia on his paper's business and I volunteered to look after the girls in his absence. He is a delightful man, and he and Edwin are already Greening and Tuckering each other, which means that they struck up quite a friendship. He is the most absurdly young person to be the father of these strapping twins. He looks younger than Edwin, but I fancy he must be a little older. You know Edwin's "high forehead" makes him look older than he is.

The Tucker twins are bright, handsome, generous, original – everything you like to see in young girls. Their mother died when they were tiny babies and their young father has had the raising of them. A pretty good job he has made of it, too, although he declares he has done nothing toward bringing them up but just remove obstacles. They call their father Zebedee, because of the old joke about "Who's the father of Zebedee's children?" They say nobody ever believes he is their father. Dum is most artistic, wants to be a sculptor. She hopes to study in New York next winter. Dee is as fond of lame ducks as you used to say I was, and may make a trained nurse of herself, or perhaps a veterinary surgeon.

Their friend, Page Allison, is a delightful girl. She is the daughter of a country doctor, and has been the twins' room-mate at boarding school. By the way, these girls had heard of you, and me too, from Mattie Ball, who has been teaching them English literature at Gresham. (Mattie had been most complimentary to us both, so they have an exalted idea of us.) Page is lots of fun. She is in for anything that is going, but at the same time acts as a kind of balance wheel for the twins, who are a harum-scarum pair. Page has a writing bee in her bonnet, which of course appeals to me. You would have been amused to see both of us whip out our notebooks to take down things that we did not want to forget. Mr. Tucker is evidently very much interested in this little girl, more interested than he knows himself, and she is perfectly unconscious of his feeling in any way differently from the way he feels for his own daughters. I may be mistaken, however. I know when one is so happily married as I am it is a great temptation to be constantly match-making.

I fancy you and Kent are wondering why I should go to as interesting a place as Charleston and then find nothing to write about but three schoolgirls. Charleston is thrilling indeed, but you know I always did think more of people than things. We are seeing the sights very thoroughly – have deciphered every inscription on the old tombstones in three cemeteries, and are going tomorrow to Magnolia Cemetery. They say there is the most wonderful old live oak tree there in the world.

Now that we are settled in a boarding-house, kept by two old befo'-the-war ladies, we may stay here quite a little while. Edwin needs this rest that the Easter recess fortunately offered him.

I wish I could picture these old ladies to you, but they are too wonderful to try to describe. Whistler's mother does not belong in the frame in which her artist son placed her any more than these ladies belong in this old house. They hate boarders. You can see it in spite of their punctilious manners and old-world courtesy. I believe we are the first they have had, and if they only knew how much nicer we are than most boarders, I fancy they would not hate us quite so much. Mother always says that being a boarder changes one's whole nature – the gentlest and most generous becoming stern and exacting. At any rate, Edwin and I have not been boarders long enough to become very hateful, and these three girls could board forever and never become professionals in that line.

Please write to me soon. I am so glad Kent's firm won the competition for that great hotel. Tell him it is too bad I can't be there to tell him where the closets ought to be and which way the doors should open. He and I never agree on these points, you remember. It is splendid that you keep up your painting. I have no patience with these persons who insist that a career and matrimony cannot go hand in hand. Of course my little Mildred is very engrossing, but I do not intend to let her take every moment of the day and night. I find if I am going to write, however, that I cannot sew, but you know sewing was never one of my strong points. Giving it up is like Huck Finn's giving up stealing green persimmons. If occasionally, and only occasionally, I can persuade a magazine to see how worth printing one of my stories is, and I can make an honest penny that way, it is surely no extravagance to get someone to make Mildred's little clothes and to buy mine ready-made.

But Edwin is rearing and champing for me to go walking with him, and I must also look up these dear girls I am chaperoning, so good-by, my dear sister-in-law. My best love to "that 'ere Kent," as Aunt Mary used to call him. Poor old Aunt Mary! How we shall miss her!

 

Yours with all the love in the world,

Molly Brown Green.

To Dr. James Allison, Milton, Va., from Page Allison.

Meeting Street,

Charleston, S. C.

My dearest Father:

I can't get over how good it was in you to let me go tripping with the Tuckers. It has been a wonderful experience, and we are having the most gorgeous time. Already, of course, we have plunged into adventures, as is always the case if you train with the Tucker twins. I am not going to tell you of these adventures until I come back to Bracken; they are too thrilling for mere pen and ink.

As you see by the above address, we have left the hotel and are now installed in a boarding-house on Meeting Street. It seems absurd to call such a place a boarding-house – indeed, a sacrilege. It has just become a boarding-house in the last twelve hours, as I am sure we are the first "paying guests" the poor Misses Laurens have ever had.

We are being chaperoned by a perfectly lovely young woman, a Mrs. Edwin Green. She and her husband were at the hotel and we scraped up an acquaintance with them, and as Mr. Tucker had to go over to Columbia on business she offered to look after us while he was away. Tweedles and I have not been chaperoned before to any great extent, as Miss Cox was our one experience, and we think chaperones are pretty nice, lots nicer than we had been led to expect. Certainly no one could be more charming than Miss Cox, unless it were this lovely Mrs. Green. In the first place, she is so sympathetic, then she is so kind, then she is so pretty, then she is so intelligent and so extremely well-bred, – on top of it all she has married one of the nicest men I ever saw; he really is almost as nice as Mr. Tucker and you. (I should have said you and Mr. Tucker, but you were an afterthought, as you well know!)

Afterthought or not, I do wish you were here, my dearest father. You would delight in the quaintness of this old city. I am getting all the postal cards I can find, which I will not send you, but will bring you, and make you sit down and listen to me while I tell you all about it. I am also going to bring you a volume of Henry Timrod's poetry, which you must duly appreciate, as it was difficult to find it. It seems that although the South Carolinians are very proud of him, none of them have seen fit to get out a new edition of his poetry, and the old editions are very expensive. This I was told by the very pleasant man who has opened a second-hand book shop here.

I found a book there I was crazy to get for you, but as it was a first edition, and that a limited one, I could not afford it. By an amusing chance it has since become my property. I will tell you about that some day. It is entitled "Purely Original Verse," by J. Gordon Coogler. He, too, was a South Carolinian, and such ridiculous stuff you have never imagined. The kind man who owned the shop let me copy a few of the poems before I dreamed of possessing the book. What do you think of these?

A Couplet

 
Alas for the South, her books have grown fewer —
She was never much given to literature.
 

Byron

 
Oh! thou immortal bard!
Men may condemn the song
That issued from thy heart sublime,
Yet alas! its music sweet
Has left an echo that will sound
Thro' the lone corridors of time.
 
 
Thou immortal Byron!
Thy inspired genius
Let no man attempt to smother —
May all that was good within thee
Be attributed to Heaven,
All that was evil – to thy mother.
 

A Pretty Girl

 
On her beautiful face there are smiles of grace
That linger in beauty serene,
And there are no pimples encircling her dimples
As ever, as yet, I have seen.
 

But, father dear, do not be too hard on this bard, or you will come under this ban:

 
Oh, jealous heart that seeks to belittle my gentle muse,
And blow your damnable bugle in my lonely ears;
You'll lie some day in expressing your recognition
Of this very song you disowned in other years.
 

Surely you must have sympathy for the person who could write the following stanza, especially when your only child goes tripping with the Tuckers when she ought to be down in the country with her old father:

 
I feel like some lone deserted lad,
Standing on the shore of life's great ocean,
Casting pebbles in its billows, as if to excite
Some past emotion.
 

Please give Mammy Susan my dearest love. I wish she could see the flower gardens down here. They are very wonderful. Every house almost has porch-boxes, and no place is too poor or mean to have some bright flowers around it. We went through some real slummy parts yesterday where no one but darkies lived; beautiful old foreign-looking houses that have belonged in days gone by to the wealthy. I don't believe a single window was without flowers. They were growing in tomato cans and old broken jars and pots, but flowers don't mind what they are in just so the people who plant them love them and know how to attend to them. They seemed to me to be making a braver show than they do when they boast brass jardinières.

I can't help thinking what Cousin Park Garnett would say if she knew that Mr. Tucker had left us alone in Charleston with a perfectly strange lady to chaperone us. I reckon she would throw about a million aristocratic fits.

I don't know how long we will be here. It will depend on Mr. Tucker. I think he needs a rest. He seems to me to be not quite himself. I have noticed that he is in a way irascible. That, you know, is not like him, as there never was but one better tempered man in all the world. You see, you were not an afterthought this time, but came first.

I must stop now without telling you about the dear ladies where we are boarding. They are like rare editions of old forgotten poetry, or odd pieces of china no one has used for generations but has kept in a cabinet until one has forgotten whether they are meant for tea or coffee. They are very dignified with us, but I have a notion that the Tucker twins will be able to limber 'em up by hook or crook. I saw the younger one almost smile when Dee took her cat in her arms.

Your devoted daughter,

Page.