IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansingwalked back alone from the school at which she had justdeposited the four eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passywhere, for the last two months, she had been living with them.
She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year'shat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took noparticular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busyto think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge ofthe Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents inItaly, she had had to pass through such an arduousapprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her wakinghours was packed with things to do at once, and other things toremember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but attimes they were like an army with banners, and their power ofself-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in whichthey could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were asingle tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of thehouse in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting forthem--and which, of course, were it the bonne's room in theattic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept,had been singled out by them for that very reason.
These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed toSusy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of manycharacteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now shefelt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, andthe search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal orindividual, was as exciting to her as the development of adetective story.
What interested her most in the whole stirring business was thediscovery that they had a method. These little creatures,pitched upward into experience on the tossing waves of theirparents' agitated lives, had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government. Junie, the eldest (the one whoalready chose her mother's hats, and tried to put order in herwardrobe) was the recognized head of the state. At twelve sheknew lots of things which her mother had never thoroughlylearned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even guessedat: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, fromcastor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing ofstamps or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding orjam which each child was entitled to.
There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of hersubjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence,according to laws which Junie acknowledged and respected; andthe interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights andprivileges had not been without difficulty for Susy.
Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with.
The six of them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slavedfor them all, had but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junieremarked, you'd have thought the boys ate their shoes, the waythey vanished. They ate, certainly, a great deal else, andmostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They had definiteviews about the amount and quality of their food, and werecapable of concerted rebellion when Susy's catering fell beneaththeir standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassingbusiness, but never-- what she had most feared it would be adull or depressing one.
It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmerchildren had roused in her any abstract passion for the humanyoung. She knew--had known since Nick's first kiss--how shewould love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poorlittle Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistfulsolicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she took apositive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clearto her. It was because, in the first place, they were allintelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only onthings worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer'sbringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard inher company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books andgood talk had been their daily food, and if at times theystamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed bysuch privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetryand spoke with the voice of wisdom.
That had been Susy's discovery: for the first time she wasamong awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty.
>From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and NatFulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations,shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the greatimages of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures thatstood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.
No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susyno sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scalewould never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, inodd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking herfirst steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun toseem so much more substantial than any she had known.
On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel andcomfort she had little guessed that they would come to her inthis form. She had found her friend, more than ever distractedand yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life withthe splashed ease of an amphibian. Grace was probably the onlyperson among Susy's friends who could have understood why shecould not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but at themoment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to paymuch attention to her friend's, and, according to her wont, sheimmediately "unpacked" her difficulties.
Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his Europeanopportunity. Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to knowthat there must be fallow periods--that the impact of newimpressions seldom produced immediate results. She had allowedfor all that. But her past experience of Nat's moods had taughther to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions werefructifying in him. And now they were not, and he knew it aswell as she did. There had been too much rushing about, toomuch excitement and sterile flattery ... Mrs. Melrose? Well,yes, for a while ... the trip to Spain had been a love-journey,no doubt. Grace spoke calmly, but the lines of her facesharpened: she had suffered, oh horribly, at his going to Spainwithout her. Yet she couldn't, for the children's sake, affordto miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given her for herfortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and led,on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements inprivate houses in London. Fashionable society had made "alittle fuss" about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat,and given her a new importance in his eyes. "He was beginningto forget that I wasn't only a nursery-maid, and it's been agood thing for him to be reminded ... but the great thing isthat with what I've earned he and I can go off to southern Italyand Sicily for three months. You know I know how to manage ...
and, alone with me, Nat will settle down to work: to observing,feeling, soaking things in. It's the only way. Mrs. Melrosewants to take him, to pay all the expenses again-well sheshan't. I'll pay them." Her worn cheek flushed with triumph.
"And you'll see what wonders will come of it .... Only there'sthe problem of the children. Junie quite agrees that we can'ttake them ...."Thereupon she had unfolded her idea. If Susy was at a looseend, and hard up, why shouldn't she take charge of the childrenwhile their parents were in Italy? For three months at most-Grace could promise it shouldn't be longer. They couldn't payher much, of course, but at least she would be lodged and fed.
"And, you know, it will end by interesting you--I'm sure itwill," the mother concluded, her irrepressible hopefulnessrising even to this height, while Susy stood before her with ahesitating smile.
Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowedher. If there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest andyoungest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. Butthere was Nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had drivenher and Nick out to the hill-side on their fatal day at theFulmers' and there were the twins, Jack and Peggy, of whom shehad kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule thisuproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying tobeguile Clarissa Vanderlyn's ladylike leisure; and she wouldhave refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if theonly possible alternatives had not come to seem so much lessbearable, and if Junie, called in for advice, and standingthere, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quietgrown-up voice: "Oh, yes, I'm sure Mrs. Lansing and I canmanage while you're away--especially if she reads aloud well."Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She hadnever before known children who cared to be read aloud to; sheremembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa inanything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which thechild had said, showing Strefford's trinket to her father:
"Because I said I'd rather have it than a book."And here were children who consented to be left for three monthsby their parents, but on condition that a good reader wasprovided for them!
"Very well--I will! But what shall I be expected to read toyou?" she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, afterone of her sober pauses of reflection: "The little ones likenearly everything; but Nat and I want poetry particularly,because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce thepuzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.""Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right," Susy murmured,stricken with self-distrust and humility.
Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even thetwins and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed toprefer a ringing page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from theMidsummer Night's Dream, to their own more specializedliterature, though that had also at times to be provided.
There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; butits commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and thereforeless fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence ofpeople like Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and theirtrain; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy wasbeginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returnedthere after her tramps to and from the children's classes. Atany rate she had the sense of doing something useful and evennecessary, and of earning her own keep, though on so modest ascale; and when the children were in their quiet mood, anddemanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at thesurprising Junie's instigation, a collective visit to theLouvre, where they recognized the most unlikely pictures, andthe two elders emitted startling technical judgments, and calledtheir com............