Polly Oliver's Problem

GEORGE EDGERTON.

In an hour another message, marked "Collect," followed the first one:–

House burned last night. Defective flue. No carelessness on part of servants or family. Piano, portraits, ice-cream freezer, and wash-boiler saved by superhuman efforts of husband. Have you any instructions? Have taken to my bed. Accept love and sympathy.

CLEMENTINE CHADWICK GEEENWOOD.

So it was true. The buildings were burned, and there was no insurance.

I know you will say there never is, in stories where the heroine's courage is to be tested, even if the narrator has to burn down the whole township to do it satisfactorily. But to this objection I can make only this answer: First, that this house really did burn down; secondly, that there really was no insurance; and thirdly, if this combination of circumstances did not sometimes happen in real life, it would never occur to a story-teller to introduce it as a test for heroes and heroines.

"Well," said Mrs. Bird despairingly, "Polly must be told. Now, will you do it, or shall I? Of course you want me to do it! Men never have any courage about these things, nor any tact either."

At this moment the subject of conversation walked into the room, hat and coat on, and an unwonted color in her cheeks. Edgar Noble followed behind. Polly removed her hat and coat leisurely, sat down on a hassock on the hearth rug, and ruffled her hair with the old familiar gesture, almost forgotten these latter days.

Mrs. Bird looked warningly at the tell-tale yellow telegrams in Mr. Bird's lap, and strove to catch his eye and indicate to his dull masculine intelligence the necessity of hiding them until they could devise a plan of breaking the sad news.

Mrs. Bird's glance and Mr. Bird's entire obliviousness were too much for Polly's gravity. To their astonishment she burst into a peal of laughter.

"'My lodging is on the cold, cold ground,
And hard, very hard is my fare!'"

she sang, to the tune of "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." "So you know all about it, too?"

"How did you hear it?" gasped Mrs. Bird.

"I bought the evening paper to see if that lost child at the asylum had been found. Edgar jumped on the car, and seemed determined that I should not read the paper until I reached home. He was very kind, but slightly bungling in his attentions. I knew then that something was wrong, but just what was beyond my imagination, unless Jack Howard had been expelled from Harvard, or Bell Winship had been lost at sea on the way home; so I persisted in reading, and at last I found the fatal item. I don't know whether Edgar expected me to faint at sight! I 'm not one of the fainting sort!"

"I 'm relieved that you can take it so calmly. I have been shivering with dread all day, and Jack and I have been quarreling as to which should break it to you."

"Break it to me!" echoed Polly, in superb disdain. "My dear Fairy Godmother, you must think me a weak sort of person! As if the burning down of one patrimonial estate could shatter my nerves! What is a passing home or so? Let it burn, by all means, if it likes. 'He that is down need fear no fall.'"

"It is your only property," said Mr. Bird, trying to present the other side of the case properly, "and it was not insured."

"What of that?" she asked briskly. "Am I not housed and fed like a princess at the present moment? Have I not two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, and am I not earning twenty-five dollars a month with absolute regularity? Avaunt, cold Fear!"

"How was it that the house was not insured?" asked Mr. Bird.

"I 'm sure I don't know. It was insured once upon a time, if I remember right; when it got uninsured, I can't tell. How do things get uninsured, Mr. Bird?"

"The insurance lapses, of course, if the premium is n't regularly paid."

"Oh, that would account for it!" said Polly easily. "There were quantities of things that were n't paid regularly, though they were always paid in course of time. You ought to have asked me if we were insured, Edgar,–you were the boy of the house,–insurance is n't a girl's department. Let me see the telegrams, please."

They all laughed heartily over Mrs. Greenwood's characteristic message.

"Think of 'husband' bearing that aged ice-cream freezer and that leaky boiler to a place of safety!" exclaimed Polly. "'All that was left of them, left of six hundred!' Well, my family portraits, piano, freezer, and boiler will furnish a humble cot very nicely in my future spinster days. By the way, the land did n't burn up, I suppose, and that must be good for something, is n't it?"

"Rather," answered Edgar; "a corner lot on the best street in town, four blocks from the new hotel site! It's worth eighteen hundred or two thousand dollars, at least."

"Then why do you worry about me, good people? I 'm not a heroine. If I were sitting on the curbstone without a roof to my head, and did n't know where I should get my dinner, I should cry! But I smell my dinner" (here she sniffed pleasurably), "and I think it 's chicken! You see, it's so difficult for me to realize that I 'm a pauper, living here, a pampered darling in the halls of wealth, with such a large income rolling up daily that I shall be a prey to fortune-hunters by the time I am twenty! Pshaw! don't worry about me! This is just the sort of diet I have been accustomed to from my infancy! I rather enjoy it!"

Whereupon Edgar recited an impromptu nonsense verse:–

"There 's a queer little maiden named Polly,
Who always knows when to be jolly.
When ruined by fire
Her spirits rise higher.
This most inconsistent Miss Polly."

CHAPTER XVI

THE CANDLE CALLED PATIENCE

The burning of the house completely prostrated Mrs. Clementine Churchill Chadwick Greenwood, who, it is true, had the actual shock of the conflagration to upset her nervous system, though she suffered no financial loss.

Mr. Greenwood was heard to remark that he wished he could have foreseen that the house would burn down, for now he should have to move anyway, and if he had known that a few months before, why–

Here the sentence always ended mysteriously, and the neighbors finished it as they liked.

The calamity affected Polly, on the other hand, very much like a tonic. She felt the necessity of "bracing" to meet the fresh responsibilities that seemed waiting for her in the near future; and night and day, in sleeping and waking, resting and working, a plan was formulating itself in the brain just roused from its six months' apathy,–a novel, astonishing, enchanting, revolutionary plan, which she bided her time to disclose.

The opportunity came one evening after dinner, when Mrs. Bird, and her brother, Edgar and herself, were gathered in the library.

The library was a good place in which to disclose plans, or ask advice, or whisper confidences. The great carved oak mantel held on the broad space above the blazing logs the graven motto, "Esse Quod Opto." The walls were lined with books from floor half-way to ceiling, and from the tops of the cases Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and the Sage of Concord looked down with benignant wisdom. The table in the centre was covered with a methodical litter of pamphlets and magazines, and a soft light came from the fire and from two tall, shaded lamps.

Mr. Bird, as was his wont, leaned back in his leather chair, puffing delicate rings of smoke into the air. Edgar sat by the centre table, idly playing with a paper-knife. Mrs. Bird sat in her low rocking-chair with a bit of fancy-work, and Polly, on the hearth rug, leaned cosily back against her Fairy Godmother's knees.

The clinging tendrils in Polly's nature, left hanging so helplessly when her mother was torn away, reached out more and more to wind themselves about lovely Mrs. Bird, who, notwithstanding her three manly sons, had a place in her heart left sadly vacant by the loss of her only daughter.

Polly broke one of the pleasant silences. An open fire makes such delightful silences, if you ever noticed. When you sit in a room without it, the gaps in the conversation make everybody seem dull; the last comer rises with embarrassment and thinks he must be going, and you wish that some one would say the next thing and keep the ball rolling. The open fire arranges all these little matters with a perfect tact and grace all its own. It is acknowledged to be the centre of attraction, and the people gathered about it are only supernumeraries. It blazes and crackles and snaps cheerily, the logs break and fall, the coals glow and fade and glow again, and the dull man can always poke the fire if his wit desert him. Who ever feels like telling a precious secret over a steam-heater?

Polly looked away from everybody and gazed straight into the blaze.

"I have been thinking over a plan for my future work," she said, "and I want to tell it to you and see if you all approve and think me equal to it. It used to come to me in flashes, after this Fairy Godmother of mine opened an avenue for my surplus energy by sending me out as a story-teller; but lately I have n't had any heart for it. Work grew monotonous and disagreeable and hopeless, and I 'm afraid I had no wish to be useful or helpful to myself or to anybody else. But now everything is different. I am not so rich as I was (I wish, Mr. Bird, you would not smile so provokingly when I mention my riches!), and I must not be idle any longer; so this is my plan, I want to be a story-teller by profession. Perhaps you will say that nobody has ever done it; but surely that is an advantage; I should have the field to myself for a while, at least. I have dear Mrs. Bird's little poor children as a foundation. Now, I would like to get groups of other children together in somebody's parlor twice a week and tell them stories,–the older children one day in the week and the younger ones another. Of course I have n't thought out all the details, because I hoped my Fairy Godmother would help me there, if she approved of my plan; but I have ever so many afternoons all arranged, and enough stories and songs at my tongue's end for three months. Do you think it impossible or nonsensical, Mr. Bird?"

"No," said he thoughtfully, after a moment's pause. "It seems on the first hearing to be perfectly feasible. In fact, in one sense it will not be an experiment at all. You have tried your powers, gained self-possession and command of your natural resources; developed your ingenuity, learned the technicalities of your art, so to speak, already. You propose now, as I understand, to extend your usefulness, widen your sphere of action, address yourself to a larger public, and make a profession out of what was before only a side issue in your life. It's a new field, and it 's a noble one, taken in its highest aspect, as you have always taken it. My motto for you, Polly, is Goethe's couplet:–

"'What you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.'"

"Make way for the story-teller!" cried Edgar. "I will buy season tickets for both your groups, if you will only make your limit of age include me. I am only five feet ten, and I 'll sit very low if you 'll admit me to the charmed circle. Shall you have a stage name? I would suggest 'The Seraphic Sapphira.'"

"Now, don't tease," said Polly, with dignity; "this is in sober earnest. What do you think, Fairy Godmother? I 've written to my dear Miss Mary Denison in Santa Barbara, and she likes the idea."

"I think it is charming. In fact, I can hardly wait to begin. I will be your business manager, my Pollykins, and we 'll make it a success, if it is possible. If you 'll take me into your confidence and tell me what you mean to do, I will plan the hows and whens and wheres."

"You see, dear people," continued Polly, "it is really the only thing that I know how to do; and I have had several months' experience, so that I 'm not entirely untrained. I 'm not afraid any more, so long as it is only children; though the presence of one grown person makes me tongue-tied. Grown-up people never know how to listen, somehow, and they make you more conscious of yourself. But when the children gaze up at you with their shining eyes and their parted lips,–the smiles just longing to be smiled and the tear-drops just waiting to glisten,–I don't know what there is about it, but it makes you wish you could go on forever and never break the spell. And it makes you tremble, too, for fear you should say anything wrong. You seem so close to children when you are telling them stories; just as if a little, little silken thread spun itself out from one side of your heart through each of theirs, until it came back to be fastened in your own again; and it holds so tight, so tight, when you have done your best and the children are pleased and grateful."