CHAPTER III. DELIA

In spite of her anxiety Janice fixed her mind upon her recitations with her usual success. During the past few months so many, many things had happened to trouble the home pool that the girl was pretty well used to seeing it ruffled.

"Help" came and went at the Day cottage on Knight Street in a procession of incompetents. Some inc.u.mbents of the domestic situation remained but a week. Olga Cedarstrom had been longer than any in Mr. Day's employ.

Often, when they were without a girl, Janice had spent her Sat.u.r.day holiday trying to clean house and set things to rights, and when daddy had come home from the bank he had donned a kitchen ap.r.o.n and helped.

The house was by no means kept as it had been when Mrs. Day was alive. For she had been a trained housewife, and she knew how to make the domestic help do the work properly.

Now there was dust under the furniture and in the corners. Pots and pans were grimy. Because of the rough methods of cleaning pursued by Olga, the baseboards of the kitchen were streaked with a "high-tide" mark of soapy water.

The stove and the gas range were smeared with grease. Scarcely a cooking utensil but was sticky. The silver went unpolished. The yolk of egg ("the very stickingest thing there was" Janice declared,) could be found on the edges of plates and spoons.

And the laundry! The "wet wash," the "flat work" laundry, and the complete service laundry were all only a little worse than the attempts of the hired help to wash clothes properly.

Bed and table linen wore out twice as fast as it should, Janice knew. n.o.body would wash and turn socks and stockings as they should be washed and turned. Fruit stains were never removed.

Either the girls used kerosene in boiling the clothes and the odor of it clung to them even after they were laid away in the bureau drawers, or she threw chloride of lime into the water which ate holes in the various fabrics. Mother used to make Javelle water to whiten the clothes, but Janice did not know how it was made, nor had she time to make it.

Indeed, with school-closing in the offing and lessons and examinations getting harder and harder, the girl scarcely had time to keep her own clothing neat and mended. She knew that right now daddy was wearing socks with holes in them.

So, when her mind was not fixed upon her lessons, it was not likely that even Stella Latham's birthday party occupied much of Janice's thought. She started home from school as soon as she was released, considering if she could get the back kitchen cleaned up before it was time to get supper for daddy. The lumps of soft coal Olga Cedarstrom had thrown at the cats had made an awful mess of the place, Janice very well knew.

As she turned the corner into Knight Street there was Arlo Weeks, Junior, just ahead of her. Arlo Junior, the cause of the morning's trouble! Arlo Junior, the cause of Olga's leaving the Days in the lurch! More, Arlo Junior, who was the spring of Janice Day's deeper trouble, for if it had not been for that mischievous wight, Olga Cedarstrom could not have run off with the treasure-box!

Arlo Junior had black, curly hair like his father. He had snapping brown eyes, too, and was quick and nervous in his movements. Of all the Weeks' children (Daddy said there was a "raft" of them!) Arlo Junior was the worst behaved. He was forever in trouble.

To report him to his parents was just like shooting cannon b.a.l.l.s into a stack of feathers. His mother, tall, cadaverous, and of complaining voice and manner, only declared:

"He's too much for me. I tell Arlo that Junior ought to be locked up, or handcuffed, or something. And that's all the good it does."

To complain to Mr. Weeks of his namesake was quite as unsatisfactory.

"What? The young rascal!" Mr. Weeks would emphatically say.

"Arlo did that? Well, I tell you what. If you catch him at any of his tricks, you thrash him. That's what you do--thrash him!

You have my full permission to punish him as though he were your own boy. That's the only way to deal with a rascal like him."

So, you see, both parents shed responsibility, both for Arlo Junior's mischief and punishment, just as easily as a duck sheds rainwater. Under these circ.u.mstances , Arlo Junior usually went without punishment, no matter what he did.

And here he was, swaggering along the walk with some of his mates, hilariously telling them, perhaps, of how he had tolled all the cats of the neighborhood into the Days' back kitchen.

Janice Day was a very human girl indeed. The thought of Junior's trick and all it had brought about made her very, very angry.

She rushed right into the group of boys, all fully as big as she was, soundly boxed Arlo Weeks' ears, and just as many times as she could do so before he outran her and left her, panting and still wrathful, on the curb.

The other boys backed away, leaving Arlo Junior to fight his own battle--or run, if that seemed to him the part of wisdom, as evidently it had.

"I hope that will teach you to bring cats into our kitchen, Arlo Junior!" Janice cried after him.

"No, 'twon't," declared the boy, rubbing the ear that had received the greater number of her blows. "I knew how to do it before, didn't I? My, Janice Day! but you can slam a fella."

"I wish I could hurt you more," declared the girl. "You've made me enough trouble."

She marched on, leaving the scattered crowd of urchins to gather again about Arlo Junior, but now in a scoffing rather than in an admiring crowd. The bubble of Arlo Junior's conceit had been punctured. He had been whipped by a girl!

"Now," thought Janice, as she went along home, "I would not want Daddy to know I did that. Fighting a boy on the street! I guess Miss Peckham, who is always peering through her blinds at what I do, if she had seen me would be sure to say I was misbehaving because I had no mother to make me mind. As though I wouldn't behave just as well for Daddy as I used to for dear mother!

"Only I haven't really behaved very well to-day," she went on, reviewing the matter to herself. "I don't care! Yes, I do too!

No matter what Arlo Weeks, Junior, did, I oughtn't to have fought him on the street like that. Oh, dear!" mused the girl, "I don't know whether I am sorry I hit Arlo Junior or am sorry that I'm not sorry. It's awfully confusing."

She choked back a sob, dashed the tears from her eyes, and suddenly saw that the hazy object she had been looking at for the past minute was really a human figure squatting on the side porch steps of the Day's cottage.

"Why! who can that be?" thought Janice Day, staring with all her might at the odd-looking creature perched thus on the steps, with a bulging old-fashioned black oilcloth bag beside her.

It was a woman in a cheap, homemade calico dress, and with rows upon rows of flounces on the skirt. She sat on the next-to-the-top step of the porch while her shoes were planted flat-footed on the walk. She was very short-waisted, while her limbs, accentuated by the model of the flounced skirt seemed enormously long.

Indeed, she looked like the halves of two people mysteriously glued together. Her nether limbs without doubt belonged to a giantess; her body although broad and st.u.r.dy, was almost dwarflike. Her arms were very short.

Above this strange figure was a fat, baby-like face, with staring, light-blue eyes and whisps of straw-colored hair laid flat to her, head under a close fitting hat.

"It's another one," groaned Janice, her heart sinking. "I know she must be from the intelligence office, because--well--she looks so unintelligent, I guess!"

Janice opened the gate and approached the ungainly woman doubtfully. Surely daddy could not have seen her before hiring this very peculiar-looking person. He must have accepted her services over the telephone, and "sight, unseen."

The newly hired girl wreathed her flabby face in a vacuous smile.

She bobbed up from her seat, bringing the oilcloth bag with her, and towering over Janice Day in a most startling manner.

"How-de-do! I guess you are after bein' Mr. Day's little girl, heh?"

The voice from the giantess made Janice jump. It was high and squealing, like a bat's voice; and some people's ears are not attuned to the bat's cry and cannot hear it at all.

"Ye-es. I am Janice Day," admitted the girl.

"Well," squealed the newcomer, "I'm the lady your paw sent up to do the work. You're a right pretty little girl, ain't you?"

Janice ignored this bit of flattery as she mounted the steps and drew forth the door key.

"What is your name, please?" she asked the woman.

"Why, I'll tell you," said the other in a most confidential tone, blundering up the steps after Janice and stooping to get her lips near the girl's ear. "My real name is Mrs. Bridget Burns; but my friends all call me Delia. I don't like 'Bridget.' Would you mind callin' me Delia, or else Mrs. Burns, heh?"

"I think father would prefer to call you by your first name,"

Janice said, trying not to show her surprise and amus.e.m.e.nt. "We will call you Delia if that pleases you."

"You're a real nice little girl, I can see that," said Delia, with a huge sigh of satisfaction, following Janice, bag and all, into the house.

Janice led the way up the back stairs to the girl's room. It was just as Olga had left it--as untidy and "mussed up" as ever a room was.

Delia uttered a high, nasal e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. "I guess your last girl wasn't very clean," she said. "Who was she?"