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The Treasure

K >> Kathleen Norris >> The Treasure



Produced by Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




THE TREASURE

KATHLEEN NORRIS




CHAPTER I


Lizzie, who happened to be the Salisbury's one servant at the time,
was wasteful. It was almost her only fault, in Mrs. Salisbury's
eyes, for such trifles as her habit of becoming excited and "saucy,"
in moments of domestic stress, or to ask boldly for other holidays
than her alternate Sunday and Thursday afternoons, or to resent at
all times the intrusion of any person, even her mistress, into her
immaculate kitchen, might have been overlooked. Mrs. Salisbury had
been keeping house in a suburban town for twenty years; she was not
considered an exacting mistress. She was perfectly willing to
forgive Lizzie what was said in the hurried hours before the company
dinner or impromptu lunch, and to let Lizzie slip out for a walk
with her sister in the evening, and to keep out of the kitchen
herself as much as was possible. So much might be conceded to a girl
who was honest and clean, industrious, respectable, and a fair cook.

But the wastefulness was a serious matter. Mrs. Salisbury was a
careful and an experienced manager; she resented waste; indeed, she
could not afford to tolerate it. She liked to go into the kitchen
herself every morning, to eye the contents of icebox and pantry, and
decide upon needed stores. Enough butter, enough cold meat for
dinner, enough milk for a nourishing soup, eggs and salad for
luncheon--what about potatoes?

Lizzie deliberately frustrated this house-wifely ambition. She
flounced and muttered when other hands than her own were laid upon
her icebox. She turned on rushing faucets, rattled dishes in her
pan. Yet Mrs. Salisbury felt that she must personally superintend
these matters, because Lizzie was so wasteful. The girl had not been
three months in the Salisbury family before all bills for supplies
soared alarmingly.

This was all wrong. Mrs. Salisbury fretted over it a few weeks, then
confided her concern to her husband. But Kane Salisbury would not
listen to the details. He scowled at the introduction of the topic,
glanced restlessly at his paper, murmured that Lizzie might be
"fired"; and, when Mrs. Salisbury had resolutely bottled up her
seething discontent inside of herself, she sometimes heard him
murmuring, "Bad--bad--management" as he sat chewing his pipe-stem on
the dark porch or beside the fire.

Alexandra, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house, was equally
incurious and unreasonable about domestic details.

"But, honestly, Mother, you know you're afraid of Lizzie, and she
knows it," Alexandra would declare gaily; "I can't tell you how I'd
manage her, because she's not my servant, but I know I would do
something!"

Beauty and intelligence gave Alexandra, even at eighteen, a certain
serene poise and self-reliance that lifted her above the old-
fashioned topics of "trouble with girls," and housekeeping, and
marketing. Alexandra touched these subjects under the titles of
"budgets," "domestic science," and "efficiency." Neither she nor her
mother recognized the old, homely subjects under their new names,
and so the daughter felt a lack of interest, and the mother a lack
of sympathy, that kept them from understanding each other.
Alexandra, ready to meet and conquer all the troubles of a badly
managed world, felt that one small home did not present a very
terrible problem. Poor Mrs. Salisbury only knew that it was becoming
increasingly difficult to keep a general servant at all in a family
of five, and that her husband's salary, of something a little less
than four thousand dollars a year, did not at all seem the princely
sum that they would have thought it when they were married on twenty
dollars a week.

From the younger members of the family, Fred, who was fifteen, and
Stanford, three years younger, she expected, and got, no sympathy.
The three young Salisburys found money interesting only when they
needed it for new gowns, or matinee tickets, or tennis rackets, or
some kindred purchase. They needed it desperately, asked for it, got
it, spent it, and gave it no further thought. It meant nothing to
them that Lizzie was wasteful. It was only to their mother that the
girl's slipshod ways were becoming an absolute trial.

Lizzie, very neat and respectful, would interfere with Mrs.
Salisbury's plan of a visit to the kitchen by appearing to ask for
instructions before breakfast was fairly over. When the man of the
house had gone, and before the children appeared, Lizzie would
inquire:

"Just yourselves for dinner, Mrs. Salisbury?"

"Just ourselves. Let--me--see--" Mrs. Salisbury would lay down her
newspaper, stir her cooling coffee. The memory of last night's
vegetables would rise before her; there must be baked onions left,
and some of the corn.

"There was some lamb left, wasn't there?" she might ask.

Amazement on Lizzie's part.

"That wasn't such an awful big leg, Mrs. Salisbury. And the boys had
Perry White in, you know. There's just a little plateful left. I
gave Sam the bones."

Mrs. Salisbury could imagine the plateful: small, neat, cold.

"Sometimes I think that if you left the joint on the platter,
Lizzie, there are scrapings, you know--" she might suggest.

"I scraped it," Lizzie would answer briefly, conclusively.

"Well, that for lunch, then, for Miss Sandy and me," Mrs. Salisbury
would decide hastily. "I'll order something fresh for dinner. Were
there any vegetables left?"

"There were a few potatoes, enough for lunch," Lizzie would admit
guardedly.

"I'll order vegetables, too, then!" And Mrs. Salisbury would sigh.
Every housekeeper knows that there is no economy in ordering afresh
for every meal.

"And we need butter--"

"Butter again! Those two pounds gone?"

"There's a little piece left, not enough, though. And I'm on my last
cake of soap, and we need crackers, and vanilla, and sugar, unless
you're not going to have a dessert, and salad oil--"

"Just get me a pencil, will you?" This was as usual. Mrs. Salisbury
would pencil a long list, would bite her lips thoughtfully, and sigh
as she read it over.

"Asparagus to-night, then. And, Lizzie, don't serve so much melted
butter with it as you did last time; there must have been a cupful
of melted butter. And, another time, save what little scraps of
vegetables there are left; they help out so at lunch--"

"There wasn't a saucerful of onions left last night," Lizzie would
assert, "and two cobs of corn, after I'd had my dinner. You couldn't
do much with those. And, as for butter on the asparagus"--Lizzie was
very respectful, but her tone would rise aggrievedly--"it was every
bit eaten, Mrs. Salisbury!"

"Yes, I know. But we mustn't let these young vandals eat us out of
house and home, you know," the mistress would say, feeling as if she
were doing something contemptibly small. And, worsted, she would
return to her paper. "But I don't care, we cannot afford it!" Mrs.
Salisbury would say to herself, when Lizzie had gone, and very
thoughtfully she would write out a check payable to "cash." "I used
to use up little odds and ends so deliciously, years ago!" she
sometimes reflected disconsolately. "And Kane always says we never
live as well now as we did then! He always praised my dinners."

Nowadays Mr. Salisbury was not so well satisfied. Lizzie rang the
changes upon roasted and fried meats, boiled and creamed vegetables,
baked puddings and canned fruits contentedly enough. She made cup
cake and sponge cake, sponge cake and cup cake all the year round.
Nothing was ever changed, no unexpected flavor ever surprised the
palates of the Salisbury family. May brought strawberry shortcake,
December cottage puddings, cold beef always made a stew; creamed
codfish was never served without baked potatoes. The Salisbury table
was a duplicate of some millions of other tables, scattered the
length and breadth of the land.

"And still the bills go up!" fretted Mrs. Salisbury.

"Well, why don't you fire her, Sally?" her husband asked, as he had
asked of almost every maid they had ever had--of lazy Annies, and
untidy Selmas, and ignorant Katies. And, as always, Mrs. Salisbury
answered patiently:

"Oh, Kane, what's the use? It simply means my going to Miss Crosby's
again, and facing that awful row of them, and beginning that I have
three grown children, and no other help--"

"Mother, have you ever had a perfect maid?" Sandy had asked
earnestly years before. Her mother spent a moment in reflection,
arresting the hand with which she was polishing silver. Alexandra
was only sixteen then, and mother and daughter were bridging a gap
when there was no maid at all in the Salisbury kitchen.

"Well, there was Libby," the mother answered at length, "the colored
girl I had when you were born. She really was perfect, in a way. She
was a clean darky, and such a cook! Daddy talks still of her fried
chicken and blueberry pies! And she loved company, too. But, you
see, Grandma Salisbury was with us then, and she paid a little girl
to look after you, so Libby had really nothing but the kitchen and
dining-room to care for. Afterward, just before Fred came, she got
lazy and ugly, and I had to let her go. Canadian Annie was a
wonderful girl, too," pursued Mrs. Salisbury, "but we only had her
two months. Then she got a place where there were no children, and
left on two days' notice. And when I think of the others!--the
Hungarian girl who boiled two pairs of Fred's little brown socks and
darkened the entire wash, sheets and napkins and all! And the
colored girl who drank, and the girl who gave us boiled rice for
dessert whenever I forgot to tell her anything else! And then Dad
and I never will forget the woman who put pudding sauce on his
mutton--dear me, dear me!" And Mrs. Salisbury laughed out at the
memory. "Between her not knowing one thing, and not understanding a
word we said, she was pretty trying all around!" she presently
added. "And, of course, the instant you have them really trained
they leave; and that's the end of that! One left me the day Stan was
born, and another--and she was a nice girl, too--simply departed
when you three were all down with scarlet fever, and left her bed
unmade, and the tea cup and saucer from her breakfast on the end of
the kitchen table! Luckily we had a wonderful nurse, and she simply
took hold and saved the day."

"Isn't it a wonder that there isn't a training school for house
servants?" Sandy had inquired, youthful interest in her eye.

"There's no such thing," her mother assured her positively, "as
getting one who knows her business! And why? Why, because all the
smart girls prefer to go into factories, and slave away for three or
four dollars a week, instead of coming into good homes! Do Pearsall
and Thompson ever have any difficulty in getting girls for the glove
factory? Never! There's a line of them waiting, a block long, every
time they advertise. But you may make up your mind to it, dear, if
you get a good cook, she's wasteful or she's lazy, or she's
irritable, or dirty, or she won't wait on table, or she slips out at
night, and laughs under street lamps with some man or other! She's
always on your mind, and she's always an irritation."

"It just shows what a hopelessly stupid class you have to deal with,
Mother," the younger Sandy had said. But at eighteen, she was not so
sure.

Alexandra frankly hated housework, and she did not know how to cook.
She did not think it strange that it was hard to find a clever and
well-trained young woman who would gladly spend all her time in
housework and cooking for something less than three hundred dollars
a year. Her eyes were beginning to be opened to the immense moral
and social questions that lie behind the simple preference of
American girls to work for men rather than for women. Household work
was women's sphere, Sandy reasoned, and they had made it a sphere
insufferable to other women. Something was wrong.

Sandy was too young, and too mentally independent, to enter very
sympathetically into her mother's side of the matter. The younger
woman's attitude was tinged with affectionate contempt, and when the
stupidity of the maid, or the inconvenience of having no maid at
all, interfered with the smooth current of her life, or her busy
comings and goings, she became impatient and intolerant.

"Other people manage!" said Alexandra.

"Who, for instance?" demanded her mother, in calm exasperation.

"Oh, everyone--the Bernards, the Watermans! Doilies and finger
bowls, and Elsie in a cap and apron!"

"But Doctor and Mrs. Bernard are old people, dear, and the Watermans
are three business women--no lunch, no children, very little
company!"

"Well, Grace Elliot, then!"

"With two maids, Sandy. That's a very different matter!"

"And is there any reason why we shouldn't have two?" asked Sandy,
with youthful logic.

"Ah, well, there you come to the question of expense, dear!" And
Mrs. Salisbury dismissed the subject with a quiet air of triumph.

But of course the topic came up again. It is the one household ghost
that is never laid in such a family. Sometimes Kane Salisbury
himself took a part in it.

"Do you mean to tell me," he once demanded, in the days of the
dreadfully incompetent maids who preceded Lizzie, "that it is
becoming practically impossible to get a good general servant?"

"Well, I wish you'd try it yourself," his wife answered, grimly
quiet. "It's just about wearing me out! I don't know what has become
of the good old maid-of-all-work," she presently pursued, with a
sigh, "but she has simply vanished from the face of the earth. Even
the greenest girls fresh from the other side begin to talk about
having the washing put out, and to have extra help come in to wash
windows and beat rugs! I don't know what we're coming to--you teach
them to tell a blanket from a sheet, and how to boil coffee, and set
a table, and then away they go to get more money somewhere. Dear me!
Your father's mother used to have girls who had the wash on the line
before eight o'clock--"

"Yes, but then Grandma's house was simpler," Sandy contributed, a
little doubtfully. "You know, Grandma never put on any style,
Mother--"

"Her house was always one of the most comfortable, most hospitable--
"

"Yes, I know, Mother!" Alexandra persisted eagerly. "But Fanny never
had to answer the door, and Grandma used to let her leave the
tablecloth on between meals--Grandma told me so herself!--and no
fussing with doilies, or service plates under the soup plates, or
glass saucers for dessert. And Grandma herself used to help wipe
dishes, or sometimes set the table, and make the beds, if there was
company--"

"That may be," Mrs. Salisbury had the satisfaction of answering
coldly. "Perhaps she did, although _I_ never remember hearing her
say so. But my mother always had colored servants, and I never saw
her so much as dust the piano!"

"I suppose we couldn't simplify things, Sally? Cut out some of the
extra touches?" suggested the head of the house.

Mrs. Salisbury merely shook her head, compressing her lips firmly.
It was quite difficult enough to keep things "nice," with two
growing boys in the family, without encountering such opposition as
this. A day or two later she went into New Troy, the nearest big
city, and came back triumphantly with Lizzie.

And at first Lizzie really did seem perfection. It was some weeks
before Mrs. Salisbury realized that Lizzie was not truthful;
absolutely reliable in money matters, yet Lizzie could not be
believed in the simplest statement. Tasteless oatmeal, Lizzie glibly
asseverated, had been well salted; weak coffee, or coffee as strong
as brown paint, were the fault of the pot. Lizzie, rushing through
dinner so that she might get out; Lizzie throwing out cold
vegetables that "weren't worth saving"; Lizzie growing snappy and
noisy at the first hint of criticism, somehow seemed worse sometimes
than no servant at all.

"I wonder--if we moved into New Troy, Kane," Mrs. Salisbury mused,
"and got one of those wonderful modern apartments, with a gas stove,
and a dumbwaiter, and hardwood floors, if Sandy and I couldn't
manage everything? With a woman to clean and dinners downtown now
and then, and a waitress in for occasions."

"And me jumping up to change the salad plates, Mother!" Alexandra
put in briskly. "And a pile of dishes to do every night!"

"Gosh, let's not move into the city--" protested Stanford. "No
tennis, no canoe, no baseball!"

"And we know everyone in River Falls, we'd have to keep coming out
here for parties!" Sandy added.

"Well," Mrs. Salisbury sighed, "I admit that it is too much of a
problem for me!" she said. "I know that I married your father on
twenty dollars a week," she told the children severely, "and we
lived in a dear little cottage, only eighteen dollars a month, and I
did all my own work! And never in our lives have we lived so well.
But the minute you get inexperienced help, your bills simply double,
and inexperienced help means simply one annoyance after another. I
give it up!"

"Well, I'll tell you, Mother," Alexandra offered innocently;
"perhaps we don't systematize enough ourselves. It ought to be all
so well arranged and regulated that a girl would know what she was
expected to do, and know that you had a perfect right to call her
down for wasting or slighting things. Why couldn't women--a bunch of
women, say--"

"Why couldn't they form a set of household rules and regulations?"
her mother intercepted smoothly. "Because--it's just one of the
things that you young, inexperienced people can talk very easily
about," she interrupted herself to say with feeling, "but it never
seems to occur to any one of you that every household has its
different demands and regulations. The market fluctuates, the size
of a family changes--fixed laws are impossible! No. Lizzie is no
worse than lots of others, better than the average. I shall hold on
to her!"

"Mrs. Sargent says that all these unnecessary demands have been
instituted and insisted upon by women," said Alexandra. "She says
that the secret of the whole trouble is that women try to live above
their class, and make one servant appear to do the work of three--"

The introduction of Mrs. Sargent's name was not a happy one.

"Ellen Sargent," said Mrs. Salisbury icily, "is not a lady herself,
in the true sense of the word, and she does very well to talk about
class distinctions! She was his stenographer when Cyrus Sargent
married her, and the daughter of a tannery hand. Now, just because
she has millions, I am not going to be impressed by anything Ellen
Sargent does or says!"

"Mother, I don't think she meant quality by 'class,'" Sandy
protested. "Everyone knows that Grandfather was General Stanford,
and all that! But I think she meant, in a way, the money side of it,
the financial division of people into classes!"

"We won't discuss her," decided Mrs. Salisbury majestically. "The
money standard is one I am not anxious to judge my friends by!"

Still, with the rest of the family, Mrs. Salisbury was relieved when
Lizzie, shortly after this, decided of her own accord to accept a
better-paid position. "Unless, Mama says, you'd care to raise me to
seven a week," said Lizzie, in parting.

"No, no, I cannot pay that," Mrs. Salisbury said firmly and Lizzie
accordingly left.

Her place was taken by a middle-aged French woman, and whipped cream
and the subtle flavor of sherry began to appear in the Salisbury
bills of fare. Germaine had no idea whatever of time, and Sandy
perforce must set the table whenever there was a company dinner
afoot, and lend a hand with the last preparations as well. The
kitchen was never really in order in these days, but Germaine cooked
deliciously, and Mrs. Salisbury gave eight dinners and a club
luncheon during the month of her reign. Then the French woman grew
more and more irregular as to hours, and more utterly unreliable as
to meals; sometimes the family fared delightfully, sometimes there
was almost nothing for dinner. Germaine seemed to fade from sight,
not entirely of her own volition, not really discharged; simply she
was gone. A Norwegian girl came next, a good-natured, blundering
creature whose English was just enough to utterly confuse herself
and everyone else. Freda's mistakes were not half so funny in the
making as Alexandra made them in anecdotes afterward; and Freda was
given to weird chanting, accompanying herself with a banjo,
throughout the evenings. Finally a blonde giant known as "Freda's
cousin" came to see her, and Kane Salisbury, followed by his elated
and excited boys, had to eject Freda's cousin early in the evening,
while Freda wept and chattered to the ladies of the house. After
that the cousin called often to ask for her, but Freda had vanished
the day after this event, and the Salisburys never heard of her
again.

They tried another Norwegian, then a Polack, then a Scandinavian.
Then they had a German man and wife for a week, a couple who
asserted that they would work, without pay, for a good home. This
was a most uncomfortable experience, unsuccessful from the first
instant. Then came a low-voiced, good-natured South American
negress, Marthe, not much of a cook, but willing and strong.

July was mercilessly hot that year, thirty-one burning days of
sunshine. Mrs. Salisbury was not a very strong woman, and she had a
great many visitors to entertain. She kept Marthe, because the
colored woman did not resent constant supervision, and an almost
hourly change of plans. Mrs. Salisbury did almost all of the cooking
herself, fussing for hours in the hot kitchen over the cold meats
and salads and ices that formed the little informal cold suppers to
which the Salisburys loved to ask their friends on Saturday and
Sunday nights.

Alexandra helped fitfully. She would put her pretty head into the
kitchen doorway, perhaps to find her mother icing cake.

"Listen, Mother; I'm going over to Con's. She's got that new serve
down to a fine point! And I've done the boys' room and the guest
room; it's all ready for the Cutters. And I put towels and soap in
the bathroom, only you'll have to have Marthe wipe up the floor and
the tub."

"You're a darling child," the mother would say gratefully.

"Darling nothing!" And Sandy, with her protest, would lay a cool
cheek against her mother's hot one. "Do you have to stay out here,
Mother?" she would ask resentfully. "Can't the Culled Lady do this?"

"Well, I left her to watch it, and it burned," Mrs. Salisbury would
say, "so now it has to be pared and frosted. Such a bother! But this
is the very last thing, dear. You run along; I'll be out of here in
two minutes!"

But it was always something more than two minutes. Sometimes even
Kane Salisbury was led to protest.

"Can't we eat less, dear? Or differently? Isn't there some simple
way of managing this week-end supper business? Now, Brewer--Brewer
manages it awfully well. He has his man set out a big cold roast or
two, cheese, and coffee, and a bowlful of salad, and beer. He'll get
a fruit pie from the club sometimes, or pastries, or a pot of
marmalade--"

"Yes, indeed, we must try to simplify," Mrs. Salisbury would agree
brightly. But after such a conversation as this she would go over
her accounts very soberly indeed. "Roasts--cheeses--fruit pies!" she
would say bitterly to herself. "Why is it that a man will spend as
much on a single lunch for his friends as a woman is supposed to
spend on her table for a whole week, and then ask her what on earth
she has done with her money!"

"Kane, I wish you would go over my accounts," she said one evening,
in desperation. "Just suggest where you would cut down!"

Mr. Salisbury ran his eye carelessly over the pages of the little
ledger.

"Roast beef, two-forty?" he presently read aloud, questioningly.

"Twenty-two cents a pound," his wife answered simply. But the man's
slight frown deepened.

"Too much--too much!" he said, shaking his head.

Mrs. Salisbury let him read on a moment, turn a page or two. Then
she said, in a dead calm:

"Do you think my roasts are too big, Kane?"

"Too big? On the contrary," her husband answered briskly, "I like a
big roast. Sometimes ours are skimpy-looking before they're even
cut!"

"Well!" Mrs. Salisbury said triumphantly.

Her smile apprised her husband that he was trapped, and he put down
the account book in natural irritation.

"Well, my dear, it's your problem!" he said unsympathetically,
returning to his newspaper. "I run my business, I expect you to run
yours! If we can't live on our income, we'll have to move to a
cheaper house, that's all, or take Stanford out of school and put
him to work. Dickens says somewhere--and he never said a truer
thing!" pursued the man of the house comfortably, "that, if you
spend a sixpence less than your income every week, you are rich. If
you spend a sixpence more, you never may expect to be anything but
poor!"

Mrs. Salisbury did not answer. She took up her embroidery, whose
bright colors blurred and swam together through the tears that came
to her eyes.

"Never expect to feel anything but poor!" she echoed sadly to
herself. "I am sure I never do! Things just seem to run away with
me; I can't seem to get hold of them. I don't see where it's going
to end!"

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