The next week they asked if they might bring Mrs. Scundar. The following week it was Mrs. Mahluff. They were learning quickly, and their gratitude was touching. They never came empty-handed; in spite of Emily’s protests they brought pastries and embroidered belts and pieces of handmade lace.
No wonder they were happy about it, Emily thought! They had been like caged birds. Their husbands learned English at business where they did very well, she had discovered. Some of those who had come ten years before and started out as peddlers, now owned their own stores. The children learned the new language at school, but the women had no chance to learn.
“This class should include all the women in the settlement. But I couldn’t handle that in my small house. The public schools ought to take it over.”
She broached the matter to her grandfather. “Don’t you suppose the schools could be persuaded to start English classes for the Syrians?”
“No harm in trying, and we’ve got that contraption there.” He nodded at the telephone.
Emily laughed. “I’ll call Miss Fowler.”
At first she thought she would ask Miss Fowler to supper. The plan required a leisurely talking over. But she still had that shrinking from bringing outsiders into the little house. Instead she asked if she might bring a picnic supper to Miss Fowler’s apartment. She told briefly what her scheme was.
Miss Fowler was enthusiastic. “You have a wonderful idea, Emily. Two wonderful ideas, for I’d love a picnic supper. Bring enough for three, though. I know another teacher who would be interested in working up Americanization classes.”
“When may I come?”
“Tomorrow night? I’ll make the coffee.”
Elatedly, Emily put beans to soak. Miss Fowler came from Boston; she ought to like baked beans. They would keep hot, too, in a crockery jar. The next day she baked them, according to her grandmother’s recipe, and baked brown bread and made cole slaw. She baked an apple pie and fixed the basket daintily with a lunch cloth and napkins on top.
She sat with her grandfather while he ate his bread and milk, talking about the great plan. She had changed to the new rose-colored wool, and now she put on the brown velvet hat with the rose underneath, and her coat and furs; and picked up the basket.
“You look like Little Red Riding Hood,” he chuckled as she started away.
The basket was heavy, but Emily was too happy to mind. She walked briskly over the dark slough. She was bursting with her plan. And it was fun to be taking a picnic to Miss Fowler’s. She had come to be fond of the little apartment, so warmly inviting with its fire, its books and magazines, and the pictures which always beckoned her thoughts to far-away places.
When Miss Fowler drew her hospitably into the living room, Emily saw a card table set up before the fire.
“I thought we’d have our picnic here,” Miss Fowler said. A tall man came in with an armful of wood.
“Emily, you know Mr. Wakeman.”
“Why, of course!” She looked up into friendly brown eyes.
He put down the wood, dusted himself off, and they shook hands.
“You look like Little Red Riding Hood, Miss Emily.”
“That’s just what my grandfather said.”
He lifted the basket. “This is heavy. Did you walk?”
“Oh, yes!”
“And she lives all the way across the slough!”
When Emily’s wraps were hung in the closet, they all went to the kitchen with the basket.
“I hope things are still hot,” said Emily. “That coffee smells good, Miss Fowler.”
“So does this,” observed Mr. Wakeman, sniffing at the pie.
“You’ve even brought a lunch cloth and napkins!” Miss Fowler spread them on the card table, and Emily set out the baked beans and brown bread, the butter in its print of strawberry leaves, the cole slaw.
As soon as they were seated Miss Fowler said, “Start right in on your big idea, Emily. This can’t be a late party, for Jed and I teach tomorrow.”
Jed! Emily put down her fork. She looked across the table at the large, handsome young man who was serving himself to beans with pleased concentration.
“Do you, by any chance, wrestle?”
He looked up, smiling. “Yes.”
“Are you, by any chance, Mr. Jed?”
“Some people call me that. You can just drop off the mister.”
Emily stared at him radiantly. “Oh! Oh! I don’t know what to say! I don’t know how to tell you what that meant to Kalil and Yusef—the day we started the Wrestling Champs—that’s our club!” She was too confused to talk intelligibly.
“Kalil told me that he won,” Jed Wakeman said.
“Oh, yes! He won! And it changed everything for them. The American boys looked at them with different eyes…” She broke off. “But they said Mr. Jed had gone away.”
“Why, yes! I was away for Christmas. But they told me all about it when I came back.”
“All about what?” Miss Fowler said. “I want to hear.” So Emily told the story, bubbling over with her excitement and the happy memory of Kalil’s great triumph. She told about her grandfather acting as referee, and how Kalil and Yusef had been renamed Charley and Joe, and about the name of the club, the Wrestling Champs. All three were laughing.
“To think of you being Mr. Jed!” Emily ended.
“Well, you didn’t know that I was Mr. Jed, but I’ve known for some time that you were Emily. The boys told me about the Wrestling Champs, and Layla told me about her music lessons and, of course, the women try out their English on me.”
“Wait till Grandpa hears!” Emily said.
The baked beans were a great success. Jed Wakeman ate like Bobby Sibley, Emily thought. She didn’t eat much. She was too busy talking.
“What are the women like, Emily?”
“They’re sweet. So warm-hearted and hospitable! And they’re very religious. Their religion is the center of their lives. They get respect and obedience from their children. They do beautiful embroidery and crocheting. And their cooking!” She turned to Jed. “Have you tasted baklawa?”
“Yes. It’s heavenly. But it can’t compete with this pie.”
“They deserve to be helped.” Emily looked as she looked on the debating platform, alert and eager.
“The men need help, too,” said Jed. “They need some simple classes in American history and government to help them in getting their Americanization papers.”
“That’s their greatest ambition,” said Emily, “to get their Americanization papers. They love America. They adore it. It’s hard to understand when you see their difficulties and humiliations here. The new world must be a lot better than the old one.”
“Freedom is pretty important,” Jed said soberly.
Miss Fowler said that many of the larger cities had such classes for the foreign born. They met in the evening.
“The government finances them, I believe. But the application has to be approved by the school authorities. I’m sure Miss Bangeter will like the idea, and Mr. Hunt, the Superintendent of Schools. I’ll talk to them tomorrow.”
“I’ll talk to Mr. Sibley if you want me to,” Emily cried. “He’s very influential.”
“Leave something for me,” said Jed.
“You’ve done enough already!” She looked at him with shining eyes. “How did you come to be interested in the Syrians?” she asked.
He laughed. “Why, it’s because of the Syrians I’m here. I’m a southerner.”
“I could tell that from the way you talk.”
“Louisiana. Tulane University. I want to take my Master’s in sociology after I’ve taught a year or two. I heard about the Syrian colony here. It’s a particularly interesting one. Deep Valley, of course, is a bit of New England transplanted to the middle west, and in the heart of it is this alien growth. I thought I’d like to do a thesis on the reactions of the two groups. I was especially interested to see just what the New Englanders were doing to help.”
“I’m afraid you found they weren’t doing anything,” Emily said.
“Well!” answered Jed. “One of them was!”
Everything he said seemed complimentary, somehow, although he wasn’t gallant in the artificial sense. But plainly he liked her, and she liked him.
When the dishes were washed and he had helped Emily into her coat, he went for his own.
“I’ll carry that basket home,” he said.
“It was a lovely supper, Emily,” Miss Fowler declared, smiling. “And I think we’ve accomplished quite a lot.”
They walked home across a starlit slough, Jed carrying the basket and holding her arm, looming very tall and big above her. They were still talking about Syrians. He knew where they came from. It was the Lebanon district, he said. She told him about Mr. Meecham.
“I want to interview that old gentleman.”
“He likes the Syrians, Grandpa said.”
When they turned in at the gate he stopped and looked up the path to the little house. Light from the lamp her grandfather had left in the window streamed across the snow.
“So this is the Hull House of Deep Valley!” Jed said.
Emily looked up quickly. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, it is, isn’t it? Jane Addams invited the poor and the lonely and the strange right into her house in order to help them, and you’re doing the same.”
Sensing something tense in her silence, he said in a puzzled tone, “You’ve read Twenty Years at Hull House, haven’t you?”
“Yes. My oration, when I graduated, was about Jane Addams and Hull House.”
“And you never saw the similarity between what she did and what you’re doing?”
“Not till this moment. But I’ve often thought I would like to do what she did, if I could only go to college.”
“And now you’re doing it without going to college!” he replied.
On the porch he took off his hat. “I’d like to come to call if I may.”
“Of course. My grandfather will be so delighted to meet Mr. Jed.”
“When may I come?”
“Saturday night?”
“Thank you very much.”
“That Jed Wakeman is nice,” Emily remarked aloud when she reached her own room. He was, she thought, such a happy normal person, so—outgiving.
Her eyes chanced to fall on Don’s picture inspecting her disdainfully. She took it up and changed it from the front row of pictures to the back. As she did so she wished she could put him that easily into the background of her life.
She turned away smiling. “Just wait till I tell Grandpa that he’s going to meet Mr. Jed!”
18
Mr. Jed
EMILY HAD A WARM FEELING of pleasure about the request to call.
Don had always just dropped in, indifferent to her convenience. Cab had only taken her to dances. There was a flattering formality, an indication of a genuine wish to get acquainted, about Jed Wakeman’s overture. It gratified her.
The ungratifying thought occurred that he might be coming just to talk about the Syrians.
“What makes me have ideas like that?” she asked herself. “There’s a side of my nature that’s always trying to pull me down—the way Don does. Well, I won’t allow it! He asked to call because he likes me. And I like him. And I’m glad he’s coming.”
She wondered whether it was usual for a girl to serve refreshments on such an occasion. Annette would make fudge, probably, or something in the chafing dish. But she had no chafing dish, and she couldn’t bear to think of taking Jed into the kitchen with its old range and oil stove and the wash basin with the roller towel hanging beside it.
“He does like to eat, though,” she remembered.
She decided to have freshly baked cookies in the jar, and then wait for the inspiration of the moment.
Arranging the little parlor on Saturday evening, she felt the familiar qualms, but she suppressed them. She had subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly and to Theatre Magazine after seeing them at Miss Fowler’s apartment, and now she laid the newest issues on the parlor table. She put music on the piano rack. She shook down the stove and added fresh coals so that the fire would be glowing when Jed came in.
Observing these preparations, Grandpa Webster put on a clean collar. He was jubilant about the visit.
“What’s he like, Emmy? Big, I’ll bet.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Shoulders like an ox, I’ll bet.”
“Yes, he has big shoulders.”
“That’s the way wrestlers are built. I’ve known plenty of ’em, thrown ’em, too. I’ll tell him some stories!” He chuckled in anticipation.
Emily secretly hoped that he wouldn’t tell too many. But she was glad her grandfather was staying up. She liked to have her home be like other girls’ homes. If she had a father and mother, and a young man called, they would certainly wish to meet him, and her grandfather stood in their place.
“Of course, I’d just as soon he didn’t stay up too late,” she admitted, smiling into her mirror as she took a last-minute peek. She was wearing the rose-colored dress again, but she had added big gold earrings that had been her grandmother’s. She sat down to wait.
At eight o’clock exactly the old doorbell chimed, and Emily opened the door. The tall young teacher almost touched the lintel, although his hat was in his hand. He handed Emily a green-wrapped parcel, obviously flowers, and she gave him her slow shy smile. She introduced him to her grandfather and went to the kitchen.
“I never had flowers given to me before,” she thought, arranging yellow roses in her grandmother’s Parian vase. She carried them into the parlor.
Jed was straddling a dining room chair, smiling over the old man’s account of Kalil’s triumph.
“Cutest double wrist-lock you ever saw! I couldn’t have done better myself when I was twenty.”
“Charley is a bright boy,” said Jed. He stood up when Emily came in, and she took her usual rocker. Grandpa Webster talked on with Jed listening and laughing. Jed seemed to be having a very good time, but Emily began to wish her grandfather would remember that it was past his bedtime.
At last he stood up, shaking Jed’s hand warmly. “Come to a meeting of the Wrestling Champs, why don’t you?”
“I’d love to, if I may.” Jed glanced at Emily.
“Of course.”
“Come to our Lincoln’s Birthday meeting. We’re going to have flags and a decorated cake. And I’m going to tell them about Abe. Emmy and I have been studying him all winter, and besides I feel as though I knew him because I fought in his war.”
Jed leaned forward. “So did my grandfather.”
“He did? By Jingo!” Grandpa Webster beamed. “What was his regiment?”
“I’m ashamed to say I don’t know. But he was under Beauregard.”
Emily’s heart sank. But her grandfather rallied gallantly. “Those Johnny Rebs were darned good fighters! I met a few at Gettysburg. Tell you what we’ll do…” He studied Jed from under his bushy brows. Emily saw that he liked the big, gay, self-possessed young man but she did not dream how much until he completed his sentence. “Tell you what we’ll do,” he repeated. “After I’ve told the Champs my side of the Civil War, you can tell them your grandfather’s side.”
And having made this magnificent gesture, Grandpa Webster went to bed.
When the door had closed behind him, Jed said, “What a soldier!”
He looked around the softly lamplit room. “And what a treasure of a little house! It’s more like the homes down south than most of the Deep Valley homes I’ve been in.”
Emily was too astonished to reply.
“It’s so full of old things. Isn’t that a Boston rocker you’re sitting in?”
She jumped up. “Why, I don’t know! It’s one of the things my grandmother’s family brought from New Hampshire in their covered wagon. I’ve always loved it.”
“No wonder!” he replied. He ran his hand along the landscape on the ch
air’s top rail. “I don’t believe they made those stencil decorations after 1840. My mother could tell you. She knows all about such things. I’ve picked up a little from her.”
“If you like old things,” said Emily, “you must come and see the parlor.”
He walked around it, smiling tenderly, examining the carving on the sofa and side chairs, pausing before the secretary, lifting the objects in the what-not carefully in his big fingers. He smiled down at the wax flowers.
“These are delightful.”
“My grandmother made them. I’ve kept everything the way she left it for Grandpa’s sake. I’ve often wished I could bring in some modern things.”
“You could, of course. For myself, I like to mix old and new. But so many houses here have nothing old at all. And a house with nothing old in it seems—unseasoned.” He gave the parlor a last circling glance. “How my mother would love this room!”
“Tell me about your family,” Emily said when they were sitting beside the stove again.
“It’s a short story,” he replied, “because there are only three of us, and we’re very good friends. My Dad and mother were at special pains to make a friend of me, I suppose, because I didn’t have brothers or sisters. We’ve always had a lot of people around—writers and artists. Dad is a writer, and mother an artist. And I was always included in the circle.”
It accounted, Emily thought, for his self-confidence. She did not think he would be awed by anyone or at a loss in any situation.
“Where did the wrestling come in?”
“College.” He grinned. “I can qualify for membership in the Wrestling Champs. I was middle-weight champion my last two years, urged to go into professional wrestling. But I liked sociology better. Now how about you? First, you’re a schoolgirl in a hair ribbon; then, a pretty young lady at a dance, and now an earnest student of sociology.”
Emily laughed, coloring. “Speaking of sociology,” she said, “what’s the news of our Americanization class?”
“Miss Bangeter likes the idea. Not that you’ve answered my question! And so does Mr. Hunt. But it will have to come up before the school board.”
Emily of Deep Valley Page 16
