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BOOK ONE: Chapter X - An Interlude of Peace
Two events of importance in the small world which centred round William
B. Winfield occurred at about this time. The first was the entrance of
Mamie, the second the exit of Mrs. Porter.
Mamie was the last of a series of nurses who came and went in somewhat
rapid succession during the early years of the White Hope's life. She
was introduced by Steve, who, it seemed, had known her since she was a
child. She was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a compositor on one of
the morning papers, a little, mouselike thing, with tiny hands and
feet, a soft voice, and eyes that took up far more than their fair
share of her face.
She had had no professional experience as a nursery-maid; but, as Steve
pointed out, the fact that, in the absence of her mother, who had died
some years previously, she had had sole charge of three small brothers
at the age when small brothers are least easily handled, and had
steered them through to the office-boy age without mishap, put her
extremely high in the class of gifted amateurs. Mamie was accordingly
given a trial, and survived it triumphantly. William Bannister, that
discerning youth, took to her at once. Kirk liked the neat way she
moved about the studio, his heart being still sore at the performance
of one of her predecessors, who had upset and put a substantial foot
through his masterpiece, that same "Ariadne in Naxos" which Lora Delane
Porter had criticised on the occasion of her first visit to the studio.
Ruth, for her part, was delighted with Mamie.
As for Steve, though as an outside member of the firm he cannot be
considered to count, he had long ago made up his mind about her. Some
time before, when he had found it impossible for him to be in her
presence, still less to converse with her, without experiencing a warm,
clammy, shooting sensation and a feeling of general weakness similar to
that which follows a well-directed blow at the solar plexus, he had
come to the conclusion that he must be in love. The furious jealousy
which assailed him on seeing her embraced by and embracing a stout
person old enough to be her father convinced him of this.
The discovery that the stout man actually was her father's brother
relieved his mind to a certain extent, but the episode left him shaken.
He made up his mind to propose at once and get it over. When Mamie
joined the garrison of No. 90 a year later the dashing feat was still
unperformed. There was that about Mamie which unmanned Steve. She was
so small and dainty that the ruggedness which had once been his pride
seemed to him, when he thought of her, an insuperable defect. The
conviction that he was a roughneck deepened in him and tied his tongue.
The defection of Mrs. Porter was a gradual affair. From a very early
period in the new regime she had been dissatisfied. Accustomed to rule,
she found herself in an unexpectedly minor position. She had definite
views on the hygienic upbringing of children, and these she imparted to
Ruth, who listened pleasantly, smiled, and ignored them.
Mrs. Porter was not used to such treatment. She found Ruth considerably
less malleable than she had been before marriage, and she resented the
change.
Kirk, coming in one afternoon, found Ruth laughing.
"It's only Aunt Lora," she said. "She will come in and lecture me on
how to raise babies. She's crazy about microbes. It's the new idea.
Sterilization, and all that. She thinks that everything a child touches
ought to be sterilized first to kill the germs. Bill's running awful
risks being allowed to play about the studio like this."
Kirk looked at his son and heir, who was submitting at that moment to
be bathed. He was standing up. It was a peculiarity of his that he
refused to sit down in a bath, being apparently under the impression,
when asked to do so, that there was a conspiracy afoot to drown him.
"I don't see how the kid could be much fitter."
"It's not so much what he is now. She is worrying about what might
happen to him. She can talk about bacilli till your flesh creeps.
Honestly, if Bill ever did get really ill, I believe Aunt Lora could
talk me round to her views about them in a minute. It's only the fact
that he is so splendidly well that makes it seem so absurd."
Kirk laughed.
"It's all very well to laugh. You haven't heard her. I've caught myself
wavering a dozen times. Do you know, she says a child ought not to be
kissed?"
"It has struck me," said Kirk meditatively, "that your Aunt Lora, if I
may make the suggestion, is the least bit of what Steve would call a
shy-dome. Is there anything else she had mentioned?'
"Hundreds of things. Bill ought to be kept in a properly sterilized
nursery, with sterilized toys and sterilized everything, and the
temperature ought to be just so high and no higher, and just so low and
no lower. Get her to talk about it to you. She makes you wonder why
everybody is not dead."
"This is a new development, surely? Has she ever broken out in this
place before?"
"Oh, yes. In the old days she often used to talk about it. She has
written books about it."
"I thought her books were all about the selfishness of the modern young
man in not marrying."
"Not at all. Some of them are about how to look after the baby. It's no
good the modern young man marrying if he's going to murder his baby
directly afterward, is it?"
"Something in that. There's just one objection to this sterilized
nursery business, though, which she doesn't seem to have detected. How
am I going to provide these things on an income of five thousand and at
the same time live in that luxury which the artist soul demands? Bill,
my lad, you'll have to sacrifice yourself for your father's good. When
I'm a millionaire we'll see about it. Meanwhile--"
"Meanwhile," said Ruth, "come and be dried before you catch your death
of cold." She gathered William Bannister into her lap.
"I pity any germ that tries to play catch-as-catch-can with that
infant," remarked Kirk. "He'd simply flatten it out in a round. Did you
ever see such a chest on a kid of that age?"
It was after the installation of Whiskers at the studio that the
diminution of Mrs. Porter's visits became really marked. There was
something almost approaching a battle over Whiskers, who was an Irish
terrier puppy which Hank Jardine had presented to William Bannister as
a belated birthday present.
Mrs. Porter utterly excommunicated Whiskers. Nothing, she maintained,
was so notoriously supercharged with bacilli as a long-haired dog. If
this was true, William Bannister certainly gave them every chance to
get to work upon himself. It was his constant pleasure to clutch
Whiskers to him in a vice-like clinch, to bury his face in his shaggy
back, and generally to court destruction. Yet the more he clutched, the
healthier did he appear to grow, and Mrs. Porter's demand for the dog's
banishment was overruled.
Mrs. Porter retired in dudgeon. She liked to rule, and at No. 90 she
felt that she had become merely among those present. She was in the
position of a mother country whose colony has revolted. For years she
had been accustomed to look on Ruth as a disciple, a weaker spirit whom
she could mould to her will, and now Ruth was refusing to be moulded.
So Mrs. Porter's visits ceased. Ruth still saw her at the apartment
when she cared to go there, but she kept away from the studio. She
considered that in the matter of William Bannister her claim had been
jumped, that she had been deposed; and she withdrew.
"I shall bear up," said Kirk, when this fact was brought home to him.
"I mistrust your Aunt Lora as I should mistrust some great natural
force which may become active at any moment and give you yours. An
earthquake, for instance. I have no quarrel with your Aunt Lora in her
quiescent state, but I fear the developments of that giant mind. We are
better off without her."
"All the same," said Ruth loyally, "she's rather a dear. And we ought
to remember that, if it hadn't been for her, you and I would never have
met."
"I do remember it. And I'm grateful. But I can't help feeling that a
woman capable of taking other people's lives and juggling with them as
if they were india-rubber balls as she did with ours, is likely at any
moment to break out in a new place. My gratitude to her is the sort of
gratitude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late
for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.
Your Aunt Lora is a human cyclone. No, on the whole, she's more like an
earthquake. She has a habit of splitting up and altering the face of
the world whenever she feels like it, and I'm too well satisfied with
my world at present to relish the idea of having it changed."
Little by little the garrison of the studio had been whittled down.
Except for Steve, the community had no regular members outside the
family itself. Hank was generally out of town. Bailey paid one more
visit, then seemed to consider that he could now absent himself
altogether. And the members of Kirk's bachelor circle stayed away to a
man.
Their isolation was rendered more complete by the fact that Ruth, when
she had ornamented New York society, had made few real friends. Most of
the girls she had known bored her. They were gushing creatures with a
passion for sharing and imparting secrets, and Ruth's cool reserve had
alienated her from them.
When she married she dropped out. The romance of her wedding gave
people something to talk about for a few days, and then she was
forgotten.
And so it came about that she had her desire and was able practically
to monopolize Kirk. He and she and William Bannister lived in a kind of
hermit's cell for three and enjoyed this highly unnatural state of
things enormously. Life had never seemed so full either to Kirk or
herself. There was always something to do, something to think about,
something to look forward to, if it was only a visit to a theatre or
the inspection of William Bannister's bath.
Content of BOOK ONE: Chapter X - An Interlude of Peace [P G Wodehouse's novel: The Coming of Bill]
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