Ariel Custer (5 page)

When she remembered that she was a stranger in a strange city without a job or a friend, and only a little over fifty dollars in cash between herself and starvation, she was appalled. Yet she was not alone, for her Lord was with her, and hadn’t He proved already that His messengers were all along the way? Sometimes they didn’t even seem to know they were His messengers. Who knew but she was sent to tell that young man about knowing God? He had seemed interested. Then, as was her custom to pray about everything at all times, she closed her eyes for a moment and prayed: “Dear Savior, help him to see and understand.”

Miss Darcy stood beside her for an instant and watched the sweet, tired face with the closed eyes, the loveliness of outline, the purity of expression, and her heart went out to the lonely girl. Then she touched her gently on the shoulder, and Ariel opened her eyes and realized that here was another of God’s messengers on duty close at hand.

O
ut in the darkness the suburban train sped through the night, stopping at every little station to let off a few late stragglers who did not get home to the evening meal. In the last seat of the last car, with his cap pulled unsociably far over his eyes, sat Judson Granniss, going over the occurrences of the evening.

Strange that he should have been the one to pick up that girl! He remembered feeling annoyed when she fell just in front of him, for he had been running for his train. He had wanted especially to get that train that he might get at a bit of work he had promised to do for one of the businessmen in Glenside, going over his accounts for him. It would mean several extra dollars in his pocket, and he wanted the money. But he had missed the train and thought nothing about it until now. The accounts and the dollars seemed a small matter beside the evening he had spent.

Now that he thought it over, it all seemed such a foreign experience for him to have—a girl, alone, and he taking her to dinner, and anxious to do it! A stranger, and he going out of his way to find her perplexities when he already had enough of his own! Why hadn’t he handed her over to the police or an ambulance and run for his train? Why hadn’t he hunted up Miss Darcy at the start and at least got the seven ten home? Why had he lingered, and even been reluctant to come away now?

Well, she was a wonderful girl. There was no question about that. Now here was a girl one could like. Why didn’t his mother get hold of a girl like that instead of Helena Boggs? He would like to have his mother meet this girl from Virginia and see what a real girl was like. How he would have liked to be able to say to the girl in her perplexity: “Come home to my mother. She’ll make it all right and show you what to do. She’ll welcome you and help you.” But he couldn’t imagine doing such a thing. He let his thoughts fancy for a minute what would have happened if he had attempted to bring home a girl he had picked up in the street for his mother to tend. And she would have known the circumstances almost before they got into the house. Trust his mother for that. She would have extracted it from them by a torturous method all her own, swift and cruel as death. He could remember the time he brought home a little lost puppy in a storm when he was a small child. Harriet Granniss had held her skirts away and waited only to decide on the social status of the little shivering beast, then she took the tongs and, holding him at arm’s length, thrust him out again into the night and the storm while her pleading son stood helpless before her wrath. He could remember the look of disgust upon her face as she slammed the door. And it would have been the same with Ariel; delicate Ariel with her cameo-face and her star-eyes. She would have been swiftly thrust into the blackness of a dark, strange world. Yet his mother was a good church member, a professed follower of that God that Ariel knew; a believer, so she declared, in the holy scriptures by which Ariel lived! How could the two things be possible? Both followers of the same Christ, yet with such varying results?

He thought over the assured words of the girl, and into his heart there came a yearning to know a God like the one she owned.

He thought of Emily Dillon. She was another one who believed and read the Bible. He had come upon her reading it at different times through the years, a little timid about being caught at it, yet very true to it and reverent about it. Suddenly he wondered if maybe it was that which made the difference in her life. He tried to think if there were more he knew who were guided by that Book, but could not be sure of any whom he knew well enough to judge.

He did not go directly home but tried to find the man who wanted to employ someone in his office. He found him at last but only to hear that the position had been filled that morning, and he went home quite disappointed and trying to think how he might help to find Ariel a position. Somehow he could not bear to think of her having to return to Virginia. He wanted to get acquainted with her, to know if she was really as wonderful as she seemed.

Harriet was terribly upset at his late homecoming. She had had Helena Boggs to supper, and there was steak and mushrooms she told him; and her purring voice berated him as she aired her grievances. She was like a hen scolding a chicken. It got on Jud’s nerves terribly. He finally went up to his room without telling his mother where he had been, which was an offense he knew he would have to answer for sooner or later. Harriet usually managed to get out of people just what they had done so that she might deal out adequate punishment.

But tonight for some reason her son was not nearly so vulnerable as usual. His mind was wholly absorbed in trying to think up a job for Ariel Custer, and all too well he knew his mother’s ability to pierce his strongest reticence, so he took himself away to his own room and locked his door.

Poor Harriet. She lay awake and wept her bitter tears about that boy. She never had understood what a wonderful boy he was, nor what a nagging, mistaken, bitter, domineering woman she was—and she probably never would till the great day of Judgment and Understanding revealed it to her—but she suffered intensely in her bitter way in every fiber of her big intolerant soul and body.

So she lay awake and planned for her son’s good. Planned how Helena Boggs and she could make him over into the very amiable and pliant Judson Granniss that she had always wanted him to be, and confidently expected him to turn out to be someday, somehow, just because he was her son and she loved him.

In his small iron bed in a tiny hall bedroom in a house not two blocks away, Dick Smalley wakened after a restless sleep and began to plan for Harriet Granniss’s good. He figured that she needed a lesson. She had thrown a stone at his dog, Stubby, and driven him from a perfectly good bone that he had got for him at the market with five cents of his newspaper money. She had taken the bone, which the dog had dropped when the stone hit him, and thrown it into her garbage pail! It wasn’t her bone! She had no right! He had paid for that bone! Stubby wasn’t doing her any harm, just quietly eating it in her backyard to get away from that pest of a terrier that lived next door. He would have gone away if she had told him. He was only a dog. He didn’t know she minded. But she didn’t tell him to go. He knew, for he was delivering a paper at the side door of Harriet Granniss’s next-door neighbor when it happened. He had hurled himself over the fence, leaving his papers behind him on the step, and had told her in youthful though forcible language what he thought of her, “where to get off,” as he expressed it, and she had turned on him and told him she would report him to the police and tell his mother and that he was not fit to be delivering papers to decent citizens. Tell his mother! He, a kid who got up every morning and went out on his route like a man; a kid whom the men at the firehouse spoke of as a “tough egg.” Tell his
mother
! He called a taunt to her that was not fit for orthodox Congregational ears to hear, and Harriet slammed her door and retired with a vanquishing air while Stubby yelped down the street with a broken foot, mourning a lost bone.

Dick had glared at the kitchen door for a minute and then, with a look that promised future return, vaulted the fence, recovered his papers, and went wrathfully on his way. But he had not forgotten the episode though the day had been full of others. And if he had been so inclined, Stubby would have reminded him. Stubby who was his master’s shadow, never losing sight of him from sunup to sundown, now forced to an ignominious cushion with his poor foot in a bandage. Stubby who lay on the foot of his bed tenderly guarded and pampered! Stubby should be avenged!

The dog stirred and whined in his sleep, and the boy tossed and planned, but finally decided that the offending garbage pail should be the medium through which vengeance should be done. The bone should return to the hand that flung it away. So Dick turned over and went to sleep like a cherub with Stubby’s well paw held tight in his own grubby one.

Quite early the next morning, while it was yet dark, came a sturdy shadow stealing across the backyards, across the hedges silently, skillfully, until he came within range of Harriet Granniss’s garbage pail. Carefully reconnoitering, he managed quite silently to find that bone and tie it to the doorknob. Then with a noisy clatter he flung the cover of the pail to the brick pavement, and lifting the pail from its high hook where dogs could not possibly maraud it, he sloshed the contents thoroughly and pervasively across the neat gray floor of the back porch and dropped the pail down the steps with a bum and a bang. Harriet Granniss’s head in curlers came forth impressively, but Dicky was far and away down toward the station after his early morning papers by that time, and Harriet’s demands to know who was there rang on empty air.

It was still too dark for Harriet Granniss to see the havoc wrought, so she withdrew her head and slammed down the window when she discovered her efforts were futile, with the conviction that she had frightened the intruder away. But when at six o’clock she descended the stairs and noisily began her preparations for a virtuous breakfast, she opened the back door to take in the milk, and the whole devastated porch was revealed.

The view of Harriet Granniss’s face when she first saw it resembled a large black storm at sea with the lightning playing over it. The blackness lasted through the breakfast hour, which began on the usual dot, in spite of the fact that both back porch and garbage pail had been duly scrubbed and were gleaming in their usual freshness. Disapproval sat heavily upon her moist, unhappy countenance, and Emily Dillon was made somehow to feel as if she were the cause of whatever trouble there was.

Harriet announced the distress toward the close of the meal with her usual fine sarcasm: “Well, we’re beginning to get the benefit of your philanthropy at last, Emily.”

Emily lifted sweet, dreamy eyes from a plate that was almost as well filled with creamed codfish and potatoes as when it was first passed to her, and smiled pleasantly: “Yes? How is that?”

It was one of Harriet Granniss’s grievances that Emily never called her by her first name. She always avoided calling her at all.

She waited until she had poured Emily’s coffee before she answered. She considered it one of her prerogatives to pour the coffee and sit in the seat of mistress, and Emily quickly let her do as she pleased.

“You would buy morning papers of that little rat of a boy what lives up the street. Smalley, the name is. His mother is that washed-out piece that goes by here Sundays in purple. Well, you ought to have been down here this
morning
“—Harriet spoke as if it were now nearly noon, although it had but just struck eight—“you would have seen how much gratitude the little beast has. He emptied the garbage pail all over the back porch, and it was filthy! And there was a great big bone tied to the doorknob.”

“A bone?” questioned Emily. “Whose bone?”

“Well, I’m sure I didn’t stop to identify the bone,” snapped Harriet. “I had enough to do to get the mess cleared up before the grocery man came. It wasn’t
my
bone, I’m sure of that! It may have been yours, of course, if you find one missing.”

Harriet considered this grim humor.

“I
mean
,” said Emily again with a worried look, “did it come from our house? Was it a bone from our table? Our meat, you know?”

“Well, no, I don’t suppose it was,” grudged Harriet. “What difference does that make?”

“Not much, and yet—if it was brought here for that purpose—”

“Well, no, it wasn’t brought here for that purpose. If you’ve got to know the exact ins and outs of it, it was a bone a dog brought here, and I threw a stone at him and took his bone away and put it in the garbage pail.”

“Oh, I see.” Emily ate another bit of fried potato.

“Well, what do you see?” snapped Harriet. But Emily remained silent.

“I gave that dog a lesson he won’t forget soon,” crowed Harriet. “He went off yelping up the street with one foot in the air. It’s ridiculous keeping dogs in a town. They’ve no business doing it. If I had my way, all the dogs would be shot!”

“Oh, poor fellow!” said Emily involuntarily, stopping to sip her coffee.