The Wishing Carpet

ONCE, when Glen Darrow was six years old, she put a hand on her mother’s thin knee and halted the reading of a fairy tale.

“Mummie,” she whispered, “is that one?”

She was pointing at a small and very beautiful Oriental rug which seemed singularly out of place in the ugly and characterless sitting room. Color, design, and texture were exquisite. A fanciful person, contrasting it with the strident carpet, the atrocious vases and pictures, the glistening golden oak furniture, might have thought it was like a nobleman, briefly taking refuge in the mean hut of a peasant.

“Mummie, dear!” The child was insistent. “Is that a Wishing Carpet?”

Her mother did not answer immediately. Her blue gaze, with its habitual expression of brooding pathos, rested on the rug, and she sighed mistily before she spoke, which was her vaguely irritating custom. She had the effect of pleading with the world to be sorry for her. This seemed, to busy and hard-headed people, a waste of time—she was so patently and amply sorry for herself.

“Yes, darling,” she replied at length, gently and tremulously, “it is a Wishing Carpet in a way, because, for nine long years I’ve been looking at it and wishing for things I knew I could never have!”

“Well, maybe,” Glen Darrow suggested hopefully, “you didn’t stand right on it with your eyes shut tight and your left hand on your heart, like the old witch said?” Then, as Mrs. Darrow shook her head—“Well, when I wish I’ll wish the right way!” She patted her mother’s knee again, consolingly, this time. “And I won’t wish till I have to, and then I’ll wish for something I think is going to happen anyway!”

That was her father in her, the woman reflected rather peevishly. That was Glenwood Darrow all over. No striving after higher things, no yearning.... Well, doubtless she would be better off. The fine-fibered, over-sensitive people of the world were never really happy, as no one knew better than herself.... Effie Darrow’s soft eyes filled and her soft chin quivered.

The doctor had married her eyes without noticing her chin. She had played the small, sobbing organ in the church he boredly attended while he earned a summer vacation by caring for a godly and epileptic youth. The top of the hymn book had cut her face in two. Glenwood Darrow saw only a white brow under fine, fair hair, a mild gaze, blue and beautiful, celestially sweet. The chin and the ineffectual mouth with its permanent sag at the corners were not discovered until too late.

Young Glen’s eyes were like her mother’s in size and coloring, but there was a drastic difference in their expression: they were not in the least wistful or appealing. Features, however, were not going to matter very much with Glen Darrow, because of the hair which framed her face in a veritable flame of shimmering, blazing red, bequeathed by some ancestor who was not even a legend on either side of the house.

People stopped and stared at it: sometimes the child could feel them touching it with a tentative finger, as if to see if it really radiated heat.

“All right. Never mind!” she said now, closing the issue of the Wishing Carpet. “Go on, Mummie!”

The woman read steadily in her pretty and plaintive voice, but she was not aware of the adventures of the prince and the princess and the wicked witch, because her thoughts were making a melancholy pilgrimage, walking backward....

When Dr. Darrow had brought her from her prairie town to Chicago she was startled to find that he had already furnished the flat, office and living quarters, in his own exuberant taste. She winced visibly when her eyes fell upon the magenta and mustard colored roses in the carpet, and lifted to the idealized Brussels sprouts on the wall paper, but she had darted toward the Persian rug with a little cry of pure pleasure.

“Oh, Glenwood! How lovely!” Here, at last, was something she could whole-heartedly praise, and she knelt and worshiped it. “I heard a missionary lecture on Oriental rugs, once, and then I got a book and studied, and I know enough to realize that this is really fine!” Her soft little hand was held up to him. “Oh, dearest, I think you were wonderful to choose it for me!”

Her bridegroom was ruefully honest. “Didn’t choose it. It’s a G. P.”

“What’s that?”

“‘Grateful Patient.’ Old Mrs. Ludermann, only rich family on my books. Most of this junk”—he waved a complacent hand—“is wedding presents.”

He had many patients who were grateful, it appeared, but only one with taste. There were appalling ornaments and pictures, among them, inevitably, a feverishly tinted copy of “The Dying Child.” Darrow had stirred the edge of the rug with the toe of his boot. “Well, Effie, I’m glad something makes a hit with you! Fact is, I sort of figured we’d take it back to Field’s and get credit for it. Old Lady Ludermann’d never know the difference, and it’s out a’ place with the rest of our stuff.”

But the bride had cried out in passionate protest. “No, Glenwood, no! Please let me keep it! I think—I feel everything else is out of place with this!”

“Suit yourself.” He had yielded, good-temperedly enough, but he was a little hurt under his crust of gruffness. “It stays. Unless”—he grinned—“unless it takes one good look around and starts crawling back to Persia!”

During the early years of her marriage Effie Darrow had held the lovely rug as a symbol, a goal, but without success. Her husband was a good doctor, and a bad business man. He loved his work, and it bothered him very little when people paid him slowly, in dribblets which never seemed to count, or not at all, but the comfortable, shabby, easy-going poverty which ensued crushed his wife completely.

After the birth of their only child—and Darrow had wanted six, and four of them boys—she began definitely to droop.

A palely pretty creature, Glenwood Darrow continued to love her faithfully, though he had stopped being in love with her rather early in the second year. It is probable that he came to regard her more as a patient than a wife,—a patient who never paid.

At any rate, when two of his colleagues met in consultation, decreed that she must be moved to a milder climate, he submitted without complaint or audible regret.

Effie rallied immediately. With every mile of the journey southward a faint pink warmed in her cheeks and lips. It was not merely the thought of a more indulgent thermometer: it was escape into a new life, a new world. Not even the thought of the hideous carpets and the glistening golden oak, following her slowly but inexorably by freight, could crush her: she and her daughter were on the Wishing Carpet, which was bearing them away to enchanted isles.

She had always been the type of Northerner who applauds violently when the band plays “Dixie,” and now she visualized herself in softly ruffled and gauzy frocks, rocking on a white pillared porch while her child disported herself beneath the magnolia trees, and the dusky, adoring servitors sang at their toil. There were other women in the vision, delicate, high-bred creatures who dropped their r’s and spoke in a sweet, languorous drawl—who understood her, and made her one of them. The doctor did not appear in the picture very prominently. He would be in his office or away on his calls, but even Glenwood Darrow, she dared to hope, would mellow in that rich and golden atmosphere.

It was her slow, reluctant relinquishment of the fiction, her bitter and rebellious acceptance of the fact, which put the seal of permanence on her invalidism. She was better in body for a year or two, but the will-to-live went out of her, never to return.

Dr. Darrow disliked the South and refused to adjust himself to it. He was a rushing, bustling sort of person who enjoyed movement for its own sake, and he went charging about among the slow-stepping, slow-speaking Southerners and found himself with wide margins of time left over, and grew caustic and choleric. He went out of his way to mention that his father and two of his uncles had shared Sherman’s march to the sea, and took pains to contrast the speed and efficiency of Chicago with the meandering methods of the lovely, drowsy old Southern city.

It was both natural and just that they should resent his attitude, but it was hard that Effie, who, like Agag, had come unto them delicately, ready to rise at the first strains of “Dixie,” ready even to drop her r’s as soon as she could get the knack of it, should be so inflexibly ignored.

They were never actively unkind to her: they were simply—and utterly—unaware of her. She felt, to the day of her death, snatching at every chance to blame her heedless husband, that his choice of a house had a great deal to do with her failure. He bought it while they were staying at a hotel, without consulting her.

“Wanted to surprise you!” he beamed, but sensing very soon how thoroughly and disastrously he had done so.

“Oh, Glenwood, dear,”—Effie always employed endearments in italics when she found fault—“why didn’t you select a nicer neighborhood?”

“S’matter with the neighborhood? Darn’ good location, lemme tell you—just halfway between the residence section and town!”

“That’s just it!” she wailed, hooding her blue gaze under grieving white lids. “Halfway—always halfway....”

He stared for an instant and then cleared his throat. “Now, look here, Effie, you want to get this front family bee out of your bonnet,” he said gruffly. “I’ll never get a sniff of the top-layer practice! Why, there’s doctors doddering around this berg that tapped a drum in the Lost Cause, and their sons are carrying on their practice, and grandsons on the mark, ready to go! It’s a close corporation; no outsider’d ever get a smell! And that suits me,” he finished robustly. “Plain man myself, likes to deal with plain people. I’ll get all I need with the tradespeople and the mill workers and the mountaineers. That’s our kind, Effie! Let small boats keep near the shore!”

The fine old residence section was on softly rolling ridges back of the city and above it: the cotton mills were down on the level. One spoke of The Hill, and the mills, and between the two, inevitably, was a great gulf fixed. Dwellers on The Hill looked down on the rest of the community, literally and figuratively, which was their quite natural and pleasant prerogative, and had never annoyed anybody except the Darrows, while mill hands and villagers looked up to The Hill, again in the double sense and without rancor.

The Darrows’ characterless house was on a dull street which ran from the business section to the heights: beneath the one in birth and breeding and background (Effie was keen enough to know that money mattered little) and above the other....

Often, during the first weeks, she took her child by the hand and walked up to the seats of the mighty at her frail and hesitating gait. The heat was modified by a piney and pungent breeze; they did not even seek the shady side of the street. Fine old houses sat well back from their gracious gateways; vague white and faintly tinted figures moved among the trees and shrubbery; soft voices, light laughter, drifted out to her. Sometimes a gorgeous cardinal would sit on a blossoming bough and make joyous, liquid inquiry:

“What cheer? What cheer? What cheer?”

The woman was almost overborne by her yearning to go up the shaded walks, to cross the ancient lawns, to mount the shallow steps, to enter into and become a component part of the story-book life, but for all their gates swung wide and vines wrapped confidently about rusted hinges she could sense the barriers.

All hope was abandoned, presently, for herself, but surely the little Glen, transplanted so young, must be allowed to take root, to climb and cling, to bud and blossom in this rich soil! Childish friendships were her liveliest hope, and she talked down the doctor’s democracy and sent the child to a private school which had functioned since Civil War days. Nancy Carey, a beautiful, mildly amiable child who had nodded and smiled at Glen, attended Miss Josephine’s little seminary, and Effie built feverishly upon her favor. The Careys owned a cotton mill, and their shabby, stately ante-bellum mansion was her favorite of all the dwellings on The Hill.

“Darling,” Effie urged her daughter, “you must be very nice to that little girl!”

“Why?” She was a downright child, with a measuring glance very like her father’s, for all her startling beauty.

“Because—why, because she’s such a very nice little girl, dearie, and Mama hopes you’ll be little chums. You might walk home with her after school, because the exercise is so good for you, and remember what your father says about holding your shoulders back and taking deep breaths. And if Nancy should ask you to come in for a little while, why, Mama wouldn’t mind!”

Mrs. Darrow’s valentine party for her daughter’s little schoolmates was a gallant but ghastly effort, seared into the child’s memory for all time. She always remembered her mother, hectic red spots on her cheekbones, breathing fast, cutting out fat red hearts and stringing them about the ugly room, making tiny heart-shaped cakes, slackly assisted by the yellow slattern Emma-leen. She had taken the place of the dusky servitor (adoring) who sang and toiled simultaneously in the long-dead northern vision. Emma-leen sang even less than she toiled, and clearly scorned her timid mistress.

The day was mild and fine. Birds perched on greening branches and butterflies balanced delicately on flowering shrubs: doors and windows were wide and there was the feel of spring in the house. They were ready early—Glen in a white dotted swiss with a blue sash and a blue bow in her flaming hair.

Nobody came.

Mrs. Darrow had felt it cannier not to send written invitations. The little girls were merely to trip home and say—“Glen Darrow wants me to come to a party this afternoon!”—and the little girls had doubtless carried out their part of the program perfectly. It was the mothers who had missed their cues.

Lying long awake that night beside her placidly puffing spouse, Effie tortured herself with imagined dialogues——

“Why, honey-lamb, yo’ don’t know that child!— Well, suppose she does go to Miss Josephine’s—I don’t know her and I don’t know her mother and I don’t even know where she lives! No, yo’ just tell little what’s-her-name yo’ thank her just the same, but yo’ motha had otha plans fo’ yo’.”

Not even Nancy Carey! She came as far as the front gate under convoy of a stiffly starched young negress, and called up regretfully:

“Oh, Glen! I’m right sorry, but I can’t come! I have to go visiting with my Auntie Lou-May!”

At four o’clock one guest was among those present, Janice Jennings, a Northern child sojourning at the Bella Vista with a gay grandmother while her parents were being divorced.

“Grammer said I could come for a while but I can’t eat any refreshments,” she announced with sincere regret. “My stummick is upset. She sent for your popper and he said I dassent eat any sweet stuff for a week. Lookit!” She produced, as evidence, an unpleasant tongue.

Pert, sharp with the brittle wisdom of a hotel child, she inspected games and food and favors, contrasting them frankly with more opulent affairs in her native Pittsburg, and when it seemed certain that no one else was coming she retrieved her hat and wrap.

“No fun playing games with just us two,” she said, candidly, “and as long as I can’t eat I’d rather sit on the hotel porch and listen to the ladies talking. They tell about who’s trying to get married, and who’s getting divorced, like my mother and father, and about babies coming, and if I keep awful still they don’t tell me to run away and play like a good girl.”

On departure, shaking hands primly and assuring them that she’d had a perfectly lovely time, shrill mirth laid hold on her.

“Oh, golly,” she giggled, “you know what it makes me think of?

Of course, it’s really ‘belly,’ to rhyme with ‘jelly,’” she explained engagingly, “but my grammer makes me say ‘stummick’.”

Directly she was out of sight, Effie Darrow had hysterics, entirely against her better judgment, for she well know that Emma-leen would gleefully carry the tale to other kitchens, but she was beyond caring for the moment.

Glenwood Darrow, walking in on the scene, became the target of her revilings.

“If you’d settled in a decent neighborhood! If we had a decent house! If you tried—even tried—to get decent people for patients!” The reproaches came forth in little yelps of woe. “If you ever did anything—not for me—I expect nothing, but for your poor child——”

The doctor picked her up roughly but capably, carried her upstairs and put her to bed with a sleeping potion, and took his red-eyed, hot-cheeked daughter for a ten-mile drive into the hills.

That trip, and her father’s words to her, stayed always in her memory beside her mother’s tragic festivity.

“Now, you listen here to me,” he said sternly. “Don’t you ever think you’re not good enough for those little washed-out blue bloods that wouldn’t come to your party! You’re too good, d’you hear? Too good! And I want you to let ’em see that you know you are, understand? My God, I don’t know what they ever did, these people down here, to feel so dressy about, except get beaten to a pulp! Your mother’s got her head full of sentimental slush—well, she’s a sick woman, but you’re a strong, hearty, sensible young one, and I want you to get this thing straight!” Brutally, competently, he bound up the bleeding wounds of her little pride, cauterizing them first with his own bitter, bracing philosophy of life.

She was able to face her small, giggling world next day with dry eyes and an upheld chin, even—when the hotel child repeated her ditty of the day before—with an outthrust tongue.

The thing, therefore, trivial in itself, had definite consequences. Young Glen Darrow stopped being her mother’s dear little girl and became her father’s boyish daughter. She no longer sought to be very nice to nice little girls in order that they might be nice to her; she strove, instead, and with marked success, to show all little girls that she did not like or heed or want them.

The vivid hair, flaming about her small truculent face, was a red flag of defiance to all other children.