Little Eva

I come to tell you that my mother's sick," Moses said. "She's hollering something awful. She said to tell Miss Laury Ann, but I can't find her nowhere."

"She's out with Grandfather," Elizabeth said, "and I don't know when she'll be back."

"Maybe Marmer'll be dead by that time. She's kind of turned green already."

"She can't be going to die."

"I arsked her was she going to die, and she said she guessed she was. I dunno nothing about it."

"I'll go home with you," Elizabeth resolved suddenly. "I'll get Judidy, and we'll go and see what we can do."

"Marmer didn't tell me to get no girls," Moses said, doubtfully, "she told me to get Miss Laury Ann."

"I'll be better than nobody, Moses."

"Well, if you do come over to my house, I ain't agoing to wear no bloomer suit."

"Oh, I shan't expect you to," Elizabeth said, hastily.

Judidy was nowhere to be found, so leaving word with Zeckal, the good-natured hired man, to send either Judidy or her grandmother to the rescue as soon as possible, Elizabeth followed Moses to the tumbledown little red house that was his home. On an old horsehair sofa in the middle of the kitchen, which was the first room they entered, a young woman with her blonde hair straggling into blue eyes swimming with pain was lying in a huddled heap. In the middle of the floor was a wash-tub full of dirty water and half-submerged, grimy garments.

"I was trying to git some washing done when the pain struck me," a weak voice said. "I ain't in no condition to receive visitors."

"I didn't come to visit," Elizabeth said, gently. "I came to help."

A spasm of pain racked the sick woman. Elizabeth was down on her knees beside her in an instant.

"You're all corseted up!" she said. "I'm going to rip these things off," for under the trailing, ragged garments that overlaid Mrs. Steppe she was wearing a corset like a board. Elizabeth tore at the strings until she released her.

"You shouldn't lace like that," she said, in horror.

"I don't lace," the sick woman breathed, "my waist is only—eighteen—inches—around. It's naturally—small. I guess if I could only get a little hot water to drink I would feel better."

Elizabeth found a one-wick kerosene stove so begrimed and choked with soot that she could scarcely light the sputtering wick, but thanks to her recent investigations in her grandmother's kitchen, she was able to heat a little water over it.

"A month ago I didn't even know there was such a thing as a one-wick kerosene stove," she thought. She caught sight of what at first glance looked like a small gray animal on the floor under the table. "It's nothing but a piece of moldy bread, the kind that poor Madget was afraid would crawl out on her. Oh, dear!"

"Where are the little girls?" she asked, as the sufferer sat up and drank the steaming water in the cracked blue cup that was the only china receptacle of any kind that Elizabeth could find.

"I wasn't able to get them any breakfast, so they went out to see if they could pick some blue berries."

"Madget is so little she ought to have milk in the morning." Elizabeth could not refrain from making this superfluous suggestion.

"Milk sours so." The spasm of pain that attacked her was of longer duration this time. Elizabeth began rubbing the afflicted area, and calling to Moses, who presently appeared, and gazed at his mother speculatively as she winced and writhed in agony.

"Go and get a doctor, Moses. Any doctor you know about."

"I don't believe in doctors," Mrs. Steppe breathed. "I—I believe in spirit healing. Get a medium."

"You get a doctor, Moses," Elizabeth said. "Tell him that I—Captain John Swift's granddaughter—will settle the bill."

"Oh, all right," Moses said.

"I don't know much about mediums," she explained to the sick woman, "but I know that a doctor would be able to help you right away."

"I—I don't believe in medical healing," the woman moaned, "but if you want to spend your money that way—the last time—I had a sick spell, Mis' Abithy Hawes, she's a fine medium, she—come here and went into a trance—and had me cured in half an—hour. No doctor—could do—do like that. Her control is—Little Eva."

"Don't try to talk," Elizabeth said, mystified.

The next half hour was one that she remembered all her life. The spasms of pain increased. Elizabeth's experience of acute illness was so limited that she earnestly believed she had a dying woman on her hands. Madget and Mabel came in whimpering and hungry, and Madget cried steadily and consistently from the moment when she caught her first glimpse of her mother's tortured face. Mrs. Steppe continued to call for Mis' Abithy Hawes, and Elizabeth finally thought of sending Mabel to look for that lady. Mabel returned from this quest with amazing promptitude.

"She had her hands in the flour dough," Mabel explained, "and she can't come. She sent word that she couldn't have no trances till she got her work done up, and then she'd see. She give me a cookie."

"Did you explain to her how sick your mother was?"

"Yes, she said she couldn't have no trances now. She said Little Eva was cranky to-day."

By the time Moses appeared, with the word that the doctor would follow him shortly, Elizabeth was at the limit of her endurance and her ingenuity. She had been heating water in a leaky lard pail, and stripping off her own white petticoat to make hot compresses to relieve the increasing pain of her patient, quieting the ubiquitous Madget for a few seconds at a time only to provoke the din again as soon as she set her down from her lap; and trying in the intervals to reduce the slovenly room to something like order.

"Is she dead yet?" Moses inquired, solemnly.

Elizabeth shook her head.

"Moses, dear," she said, "you mustn't talk like that. It's unfeeling."

"All right," he said with unexpected docility, "I won't. I just wanted to make some plans, that's all. I thought I might come to live with you, if Marmer died."

Elizabeth put her arms around the forlorn little figure.

"She isn't going to die," she said, "at least, I don't think she is."

"Well, you can't tell," said Moses, skeptically.

The doctor, who proved to be a portly being with a red beard and the kindest eyes Elizabeth had ever seen, as she told Peggy afterward, explained that the seizure was nothing more serious than neuralgia complicated with a slight gastric attack.

"Lack of nourishment, lack of exercise, lack of any sort of proper care for mind or body," he said.

"What is neuralgia?" Elizabeth asked.

"Starved nerves in revolt is one way of putting it."

"I thought she had appendicitis or pleurisy or something."

"She has nothing that a week's care won't bring her out of. If she isn't looked out for at least for that length of time the trouble is likely to increase. There isn't anybody to take care of her, is there?"

"Well, there is nobody but me," said Elizabeth.

The doctor looked at her under quizzical eyebrows with an expression that reminded her of her grandfather.

"Give her this medicine regularly," he said, as if he found nothing remarkable in her statement, "and see that she has three nourishing meals a day and keep her quiet."

"It's easier to keep her quiet when you are here," Elizabeth said, indicating the awestruck Madget, Moses, and Mabel, who stood in a respectful row, at a respectful distance from the great man.

"I understand these children are always quiet when they're asleep or when the doctor comes."

"Well," Elizabeth said, "the better they feel that they know you the more noise they make. They treat me like an old friend now."

"I used to live in New York myself," the doctor observed, "and I miss it a good deal more than most people suspect. I know all about you, you see. I know pretty well all the news of the comings and goings in town."

"You're a New Yorker, and yet you stay down here all the year round," Elizabeth said. "I don't see how you can, if you really liked New York."

"I liked New York," he said, "but you can't be a country doctor on Broadway. I'd rather take care of these people than those."

"Oh, why?"

"They need it more," he said, simply. "In a big city you don't get the same chance to find out what people do need. It isn't always sick bodies a doctor is called in to look out for, you know. A doctor down here has to be a kind of a lawyer and a justice of the peace and a plumber, into the bargain. In New York he doesn't get that kind of an opportunity."

"That seems a funny kind of thing to call an opportunity, I think."

"It is one, though," the doctor said. "Where is these children's father?"

"He's on a coal barge. He only gets home once in a while."

"He must make pretty good money."

"He does, only she—" Elizabeth, who had walked to the door with him, and was standing just outside it as they talked, indicated the woman in the room beyond—"spends it on candy and novels and things, and then he gets discouraged, and doesn't send it to her, or drinks."

"Well, call me again if you need me. No, I won't send you the bill. There isn't any bill. I'm paid already."

"I hope he didn't mean that it paid him just to see me here doing good," Elizabeth thought, when she realized that that was what he did mean. "I don't want him thinking I'm always looking after the poor when this is the first time I ever did it."

The children crowded around her when the doctor left.

"Your mother is going to be well in a week," she told Moses. "I'm going to wash your face, Mabel—and Madget, if you don't stop crying, do you know what I'm going to do to you?"

"Spank me!" wailed Madget.

"No, I'm not. I'm going to kiss you, but I guess it would be more to the purpose to feed you. What does your mother make oatmeal in when she makes it?"

"She don't make none," Mabel said. "Can you make oatmeal?"

"I could follow the directions on the package, I guess. I can make cake."

"I want some cake," cried Madget, promptly.

Elizabeth was trying to get some water "boiling, foaming, scalding hot," according to directions, when Judidy appeared at the door, her moon face beaming over various pails and packages.

"Land o' Liberty!" she said. "You up here a-tending the sick, and me out skylarking with my feller. I brought some milk and sandwiches for the children. I guess she ain't sick much, is she?"

"I'm dretful sick, Judidy," a voice from the couch said, weakly; "I had the doctor."

"I thought you was a spiritualist, and didn't believe in no medicine."

"I don't believe that no doctor could doctor me as well as Little Eva could, but Mis' Hawes she couldn't come. I was too sick to depend on a contrary control, so we called the doctor, and he left me some kinder dark stuff to take, and some light-coloured pills that's kind o' quieting."

"Do tell," said Judidy, politely. "Now you drink to where I've got my finger," she instructed Madget, as she held out the milk bottle, which the children were trying to reach, "then Mabel, then——"

"Pour a little out in this cup, and I'll feed Madget myself," Elizabeth said. "I guess the other children had better drink out of the bottle."

Judidy looked at Elizabeth admiringly as she lifted the little girl on her lap.

"My, ain't you a pretty picture," she said, heartily. "You was just as stuck up, when you first came, with your ideas about having a demi-tassy after you had et, and laffing at the pump in the kitchen, and never eating anything between meals, and to see you now, a-taking up with the town's poor as if they was own relations."

"Don't you call us town's poor," Mrs. Steppe said, sitting up suddenly, and then falling back with a groan. "I ain't never been called such a name, Judidy Eldredge."

"You just lay still," Judidy said, "and don't you worry. I'll stay now, Elizabeth, and you can go home and get ready for your dinner. It's a lucky thing I had it all arranged to have a day off on account of my feller being home. Miss Laury Ann she told me to send you as soon as I got here."

"But I don't want you to have to lose a day with your—feller," Elizabeth said, trying not to be guilty of the rudeness of correcting Judidy's pronunciation. "I'll come back as soon as Grandma will let me."

Madget began to whimper as she set her down, but Moses assured her that if his marmer died, he would "come over there right away and tell her about it."

"I don't know whatever makes him so pleased to think of my dying," his mother said, plaintively, "he has never known anybody that died or anything, if he is always burying birds with regular funeral preaching."

"He doesn't want you to die," Elizabeth said, "he just gets ideas in his mind."

"Well, they aren't very cheerful ideas for a sick woman to hear."

"No, they aren't," Elizabeth agreed.

"If I can get Mis' Hawes over here, Little Eva will tell me if I'm going to die. I'd like to lick Moses once, anyway, whether I'm going to die or not."

"I don't think anybody could 'a' done any better," her grandmother said, when she told her the story. "Hot compresses is the thing that always relieves pain, and what the whole situation needed was somebody to take charge and send for the doctor. You was a pretty brave, practical girl, I should say. The Swifts always had good contrivance, and come out strong when there was anything real to be done."

"I don't think that I managed so very well. The children kept crying and I couldn't stop them, and Mrs. Steppe kept asking for a medium that I couldn't get for her. What does she mean by Little Eva being Mrs. Hawes' control?"

To her surprise her grandmother began to laugh, and laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks.

"I suppose it is funny," Elizabeth said, "but I never thought of it that way. I suppose it's funny about Moses keeping on asking if his mother was going to die, but it didn't seem funny at the time, it just seemed queer and—and awfully hard to manage. I—I——" to her chagrin, her lip began to tremble. "What—what is a control, anyway?" she wailed.

"It ain't nothing that you got to bother with just at present," her grandmother said, "you come here." She sank into one of the numerous valanced rockers conveniently placed about the house, and held out her arms. "You come here—to Grandma," she said.

"You'll think I'm an awful baby," Elizabeth sobbed on the comfortable bosom, snuggling a little closer in the protecting embrace. "It isn't so much what I've done that I mind, but what I've got to do. It isn't very brave of me, but I dread taking care of that awful woman for a whole week. She—she isn't very grateful, or anything. She'd rather have a medium. But—but the children—they love me."

"Elizabeth," her grandmother said, "I ain't a-going to let you go there for any week."

"But it's my duty, Grandmother. You aren't going to stop me doing my duty, are you? You can't spare Judidy, and there isn't anybody else. There aren't any real servants or charity organization societies here. I don't see what there is to do but just what Doctor Hartly does, go around and be anything that the people need you for."

"You can't be all things to all men, Elizabeth," her grandmother said, sagely. "If you can be like that Holland boy I've heard tell of, that put his hand through a hole in the wall and kept the water from destroying a whole town, that's one thing, but the kind of a hole that the water'll roll through forever, the minute you take your arm out, is another. The Steppe family is going to be in need of any person's full strength as long as Mis' Steppe continues to breathe, and we can't wish anybody's breath to stop, in spite of Moses. The best you can do for any set o' people in that condition is just what you went and done to-day. Look out for 'em when they get way down, give 'em what extry strength and vittles you got at all times, but don't try to lift 'em up unless you can lift 'em all the way out. Mis' Steppe will always sag back from her own weight."

"Oh, dear," Elizabeth sighed. "Don't you think she could be reformed?"

"She might, and then again she mightn't. I should say she couldn't be. She's always trying to get something for nothing, that woman is. This business of getting a medium to get her control to fix up things she's too lazy to fix for herself that's Mis' Steppe all over."

"But what is a control?"

"A control is a spirit guide that takes possession of a medium when she goes into a trance. Somebody that has lived and died, usually somebody kind o' tricky, that has a hard time getting into communication with whoever 'tis they want to talk to."

"But that's just pure faking, isn't it?"

"I don't know whether 'tis or not. I don't understand it. My idea is, never to make too light of a thing that I don't understand."

"You don't think there is a Little Eva, do you, Grandma?"

"No, I don't, but Mis' Hawes does."

"I shouldn't think there was anything to do but laugh at Little Eva."

"So wouldn't anybody, first off, but spiritualism is some people's religion. It ain't mine, but in general it ain't a good idea to laugh at anybody's religion, not even the cannibals'."

"What shall we do about the Steppes, then?"

"I'm going to get Judidy's sister to go over there and stay what she can. What she can't, you and me and Judidy'll make up between us. We'll have a kind of general care of 'em till they get out o' this particular patch o' woods. Then they'll have to go on their own gait again."

"It does seem sort of awful, not to really do anything."

"Yes, it does, but the thing to do is to keep people like that in the back of your mind, and when any chance comes that might benefit 'em, not to be too lazy to pass it along. I'm kind of arguing with your grandfather about taking Moses to come and live with us. I ain't pushing the matter, but kind o' working along easy. I've got an idea of getting Mis' Steppe interested in a different class o' books. Any woman that'll get the notion out of a book that she can wear a eighteen-inch corset around her waist under her rags and stick to it can get some other more practical notion through her head in time. Anyhow, that's one thing to work on. I ain't very hopeful, but I thought of it. I keep at the Steppes, and little by little I hope to get something accomplished. I see that the children is fed up about once a day anyway, but I don't stick my wrist through the hole o' their shiftlessness, I just bail out a little water as often as I can."

"That is the way, isn't it?" said Elizabeth. "I just thought I'd have to go there and practically live for weeks. It—it seemed like a bottomless pit."

"There ain't really no such thing as a bottomless pit," Grandmother said, sagely; "there are only pits that we can't plumb the bottom of."

She told the story of Elizabeth's activities to Grandfather that night and this time she did not laugh, even in recapitulating the difficulties the little girl had encountered in relation to Mrs. Steppe's religious convictions and her constant demand for Little Eva. On the contrary, she wiped her eyes quite openly.

"She was calculating to go there," she said, "and take entire charge of that miserable Steppe family without any help from anybody, nurse that sick woman and feed those children for a week and longer if it was required of her. She would have done it, too, if I hadn't put a stop to it. I wish you could have seen that pretty, anxious little face, and those great eyes of hers brim full o' tears but game as a fightin' cock. I do wish you could have seen her, Father."

"I wish I could of," said Grandfather, gravely.

"Just one thought come into my mind as I set there talking to her, and it come so strong I almost up and said it aloud before I caught myself. I was thinking o' that first night she come, and the dejected way you sat in that chair there, after she had gone up to bed, and I said to myself, holding her there in my lap all exhausted and quivering, after a whole forenoon spent doing battle with the slothfulness of the Steppe family, 'Father Swift,' I said to myself, 'what do you think o' John's girl now?' I said."

"Didn't you hear what I spoke up and answered? Well, you couldn't 'a' been listening very hard. When you said that, I had my answer ready to the dot. 'I think a whole lot better of her,' that's what I said, 'and I have been doing so for some time back'."