CHAPTER III
THAT TEA-ROOM AGAIN
BETTY WALES, arrayed in her cook’s regalia, sat by the kitchen table, one eye on the range, the other on the fly-leaf of the new cook-book that Will had given her. It was scribbled full of figures, which Betty added and subtracted and multiplied laboriously, with sighs and incredulous stares at the distinctly unpleasant results.
“Three weeks’ hard work, and so far as I can see I’ve saved the family exactly five dollars and sixty-four cents. And that Vermont maple sugar is boiling over again!” Betty made a dive for the saucepan in which she was cooking maple frosting for father’s birthday cake. “If it tastes burned, what’s left of it, I shall just give up!” she declared plaintively.
“Oh, Betty dear!” Dorothy’s shrill voice and pattering footsteps sounded down the hall. “You aren’t forgetting the kitten’s birthday, are you?”
“Of course not,” Betty assured her, tasting the frosting critically. “She’s to have oysters and whipped cream. By and by you can whip the cream, dearie, but it’s too soon now, and I’m very busy, so you’d better run and find mother.”
“All right. I’m busy too. I’ve got to tie on my kitten’s new neck-bow, and she wiggles so that it’s awfully hard work. And then I’m going to give her her box of corks that I bought for her.”
Betty tasted the frosting again, decided that it was done, put it away to cool, and went back to her figures.
“Burned steak, two dollars,” she murmured; “salty ice-cream, a dollar and twenty cents; boiled-over coffee, thirty cents. I don’t believe I’ve forgotten anything important that I spoiled.” Then her smile flashed out suddenly. “But real cooks spoil things—why, of course they do! Not so many, maybe, but some.” She began stirring the frosting vigorously. “You always hear that figures lie. I suppose the reason is because it’s so hard to put down all about real cooks and other real things in figures. Anyway, I’ve tried to help hard enough. After this I shall always be sorry for cooks. I suppose there may be worse ways of earning your living, but I shouldn’t want to try them.”
“Here’s a letter for you, Betty!” The smallest sister was back again, having evidently intercepted the postman. “And the kitten has got a post-card that says ‘Birthday greetings.’ Isn’t it pretty? My chum at school sent it to her.”
Betty declared hastily that the kitten’s post-card was perfectly lovely, and asked Dorothy to put her letter, with the address in Madeline’s fascinating scrawling hand, and a foreign stamp, into the table drawer; for the cook’s fingers were sticky, the frosting obstinately refused to thicken, and dinner-time was approaching with alarming rapidity.
The day after Mary Hooper’s ill-timed call Betty had delivered an ultimatum: “You’ve either got to tend up to things or leave them alone. Hereafter, when I’m busy in the kitchen I can’t stop, no matter what happens. Just tell people the truth, please.”
It was trying that the first thing to happen should have been an invitation to go automobiling by moonlight; and missing the second—an impromptu tally-ho party, with a corn-roast and a barn-dance to follow—would have plunged Betty into the depths of woe if she had not sternly resolved to “smile and smile and go on cooking,” as Katherine had picturesquely advised her, no matter what happened. It was worth the cost too, when father called her into the library to tell her, in confidence, that he was proud of her, and that she was setting Will a splendid example.
Will was finding Cousin Joe quite as trying as he had been led to expect, and as he had gone through life hitherto on the easy theory that it is foolish to put yourself out much, because the people who expect the most of you are always cranks, nobody had thought that he would stay long with Cousin Joe, who was certainly an ideal instance of the theory. But though he came home every evening tired and discouraged, and grumbled a good deal about Cousin Joe’s unfairness and silly notions, he refused to give up his position.
“I’m no quitter. I can stick it out if the girls can,” he announced doggedly, and on his very first pay-day he bought Betty a cook-book inscribed “With deep respect, from a sympathetic fellow laborer,” which meant a great deal from reserved, undemonstrative Will.
Betty suspected that Will’s admiration was at the bottom of her mother’s tacit consent to her keeping on as cook. They had never discussed the matter after the first interview, but Mrs. Wales had gradually stopped visiting agencies and looking up advertisements, and Betty was beginning to feel that she was accepted as “permanent.” And now some bad fairy had put it into her head to see how much she had saved father, and all she could see was five dollars and sixty-four cents!
But that didn’t prevent the birthday dinner from being a great success. Three weeks’ experience had wrought a wonderful change in the new cook’s methods. Not only did she “tend up” to the business in hand, herself, but she could plan work for Maggie, and she was no longer too proud to call on mother or Dorothy for help if she needed it. So things went smoothly, not by happy accident, as things had always had a fashion of doing for Betty Wales, but because she had planned them to go that way. The cream soup did not curdle, the roast came on hot and done just as mother liked it at one end and as father liked it in the middle. The salad was crisp and deliciously flavored. The pineapple ice was not salty, and if the maple frosting was a little inclined to drip off the edges of the birthday cake, that was due, as Will pompously explained, to “the extreme age of the distinguished person whose semi-centennial we celebrate, and to the consequent over-heating of his cake by fifty burning candles.”
After dinner they went into the library to taste a wonderful cereal coffee, which Betty felt sure father would like just as well as the real thing that he mustn’t drink.
“Let me see, Betty,” said Will sipping his share reflectively. “This is the sixth near-coffee that glib-tongued salesmen have palmed off on you in three weeks.”
“It’s only the fifth,” returned Betty indignantly, “and besides they were all free samples.”
“In that case suppose you see if you can’t discover some more brands before we settle on one for family use,” suggested father gaily.
Betty made a wry face as she emptied her cup. “The trouble is the directions always say ‘the whole secret of success is in the cooking,’ and ‘one trial is a gross injustice,’” she quoted so solemnly that everybody laughed.
“Come and see the kitten eat her whipped cream,” begged Dorothy. “She gets it all over her little nose, and she hates to stop and wash it off. Besides, I think she ought to have more people than just Maggie and me at her party.”
So Betty went out to the kitchen to swell the numbers at the kitten’s party, and suddenly remembering Madeline’s neglected letter she slipped away to read it.
“Well, I’m coming back to my own, my native land,” Madeline wrote. “Father thinks he wants to sub-let the apartment in Washington Square. Of course he’ll jolly well change his mind before I get to New York, and then he’ll waste his substance cabling me frantically not to sub-let. And perhaps he and mother will come back too, later on. But I don’t mind coming along by myself. I’ve had enough of Italy and idleness. My head is full of tales that I want to get out of my system and into the magazines. I want to talk them over with Dick Blake. He’s a frightful cynic, and he’ll be sure to tell me that I can never make good. But he can’t stop me that way, not till I’ve sat on editors’ door-steps for a while and seen for myself.
“Incidentally here I am in London buying china madly for the tea-room—yours and mine and Babbie’s, that we planned last summer. The plans are so lovely that we’ve simply got to carry them out. I ‘elect’ us to do it. I’ve written Babbie to come and spend October with me and help at one of my famous house-cleanings. You must come too, and then we can discuss it—the tea-room, I mean. I should hate to hear my house-cleanings discussed. And if we don’t have the tea-room, the china will be adorable in the apartment. It’s a blue Canton kind, and I’m getting mostly double-decker bread-trays, and little toast-racks, and mustard pots—such fascinating squatty fat ones—and pepper grinders. If you were here, we’d hunt up an English cooking school and learn to make scones and bannocks and Bath buns. I’ve asked a queer little English woman in my boarding-house to give me the recipes. Perhaps you can make them out. I can cook only by taste, just as I can play only by ear; and the taste of scones and bannocks is as complicated as Wagner. I got your letter about being the family cook. It will be valuable experience for the tea-room.
“Come down early in October. Wire and I’ll meet you any day after the fourth, when my boat is supposed to come in. If either of you could get there sooner, it would be terribly jolly, because then you could meet me. The key to the house is at the tailor’s underneath, the cook left her new address on the mantle in a pink cloisonné jar, and she’ll bring the usual black cat for company while you wait.
“Yours en route,
“MADELINE.”
Betty read it all through twice. It was so delightfully haphazard and cheerful and Bohemian. To-day was the twenty-sixth of September. It would be such fun to go to New York and share Madeline’s welcome home to Bohemia. Babbie would go, of course, and they would have famous parties to make use of the blue Canton mustard pots. And if they should really open a tea-room! For the first time since the launching of the economy program Betty winked back some real tears. Then she carefully turned out the lights in the dining-room, which Maggie never could remember about, and went back to the library to read the family her letter, as she always did when any of the Old Guard wrote to her. As Will said, the penalty of writing entertaining letters to Betty was that she felt under obligation to celebrate your epistolary ability by turning herself into a town-crier, and crying your bon mots from the house-tops.
And the very next morning came a scrap of a note from Babbie:
“I’m going to spend October with Madeline. Mother is off paying visits, so I can get away easily. Be sure to come right away, because we ought to get the tea-room started at once. Mother says I may do just as I like about it, only of course I know that I can’t stay away from her all the time. When she says I can do as I like she really means that I may have all the money I want.
“Betty dear, if you really want to earn some money, why couldn’t you run the tea-room? Madeline will be too busy with her writing. Besides, she hates running things. I should love it, only there’s mother to be amused.
“Babe is too wrapped up in her beloved John to answer any letters. Bob is trying to make her father start a newsboys’ home, and he says perhaps he will if he can have his own home back again. Bob has some little ragamuffin or other up there all the time. I prefer tea-rooms myself to newsboys’ homes or fiancés.
“BABBIE.”
“P. S. Jack and I have had a dreadful quarrel. He was the one who came to see me off, you know, and I never, never dreamed we could change our minds. But all is over between us. Please never mention his name to me again.
“P. S. Do you think we should have the tea-room in New York or Harding?”
This letter Betty read and reread, and finally put away in her writing-desk without so much as mentioning it to any one. But that afternoon she went all by herself to have afternoon tea at an attractive little shop that had just been opened down-town. She read the menu carefully, and finally asked the waitress if she might take it away with her. She counted the tables, the waitresses, and the patrons. She scanned the decorations with a critical eye. She frowned when she noticed that there were three different kinds of china in the tea service that the maid had brought her. Then she sat for a long while, sipping her tea and trying to remember little details of the fascinating Glasgow tea-rooms, and of the Oxford Street and Piccadilly shops that the B. A.’s abroad had haunted so persistently in the pursuit of Madeline’s “dominant interest.” Finally she tried to compare the prices on the cards with those at Cuyler’s and Holmes’s in Harding. And last of all, she extracted a tiny silver pencil from her shopping-bag, and put down a few figures on the back of the menu. But she soon gave up that. Hadn’t she just discovered that figures lie? And besides, when you can’t even guess at rents, and haven’t the least idea how much chairs and tables and china cost, and are even a little uncertain about waitress’s wages, the calculating of the probable expenses per month of running a tea-room becomes, to say the least, a difficult matter.
At last, having remembered her responsibilities about dinner, Betty rushed home and into her big apron—she had half a dozen big ones now—as fast as possible. She was very quiet during dinner, but afterward, as soon as she had helped Maggie clear the table, she put out the lights, walked into the library, and made an astonishing announcement.
“Father dear, if you’re willing and mother can get another cook and you won’t all miss me too much, I want to go to New York next week to see about running a tea-room for Babbie Hildreth. We haven’t decided yet whether to have it there or in Harding, but Babbie thinks I could run it, and I think so too.”
“Why, Betty, don’t be absurd!”
That was mother’s comment. Will whistled; Dorothy, scenting the loss of her beloved Betty, came over to hug her; but father threw away his cigar, folded his paper slowly, and pointed to the arm of his chair as the best available seat.
“Now begin again,” he advised, when Betty had established herself comfortably. “Your proposition does sound absurd, as mother says, but perhaps that’s because we don’t understand it. To begin with, has Miss Babbie Hildreth already gone into the tea-room business? I understood from Miss Bohemia’s letter of yesterday, that so far the sole assets of the tea-room were some double-decker bread-trays, whatever those may be, and some very fat mustard jars, which hadn’t yet left London, and which Miss Bohemia really wanted for her own use.”
“Oh, father, that was just Madeline’s queer way of saying it. She’s written to Babbie, and Babbie has asked her mother for the money, and her mother is willing. So now Babbie has written me. Of course there are a lot of things still to be arranged,” Betty admitted reluctantly, “but it won’t take Babbie and Madeline long to arrange them.”
“I see.” This time Mr. Wales was quite serious. “And you think that under the circumstances—my circumstances, I mean—you would like to join in their project. I’m afraid I can’t spare you any capital, little girl.”
“Oh, I don’t want you to,” explained Betty hastily. “The others don’t expect it. But I’ve thought it over and—isn’t it likely to be a long while before business is good again, father?”
“I’m afraid it will be fully a year before I’m on my feet again.”
“Well, I want to help, to be really and truly earning something, I mean, like Nan and Will. I should perfectly hate to teach, but I should love to run a tea-room.”
“I don’t like the idea of my daughter’s going into the restaurant business,” put in Mrs. Wales stiffly.
“Oh, mummy dear!” Betty abandoned her father’s chair for a seat beside her mother on the sofa. “An adorable little tea-room isn’t a restaurant. College girls are always running tea-rooms. Why, Mary Hooper has a friend in Boston who does it, and Mary is always telling about her, for all she’s such a snob.”
“Would you have to sit at a desk near the door and see that everybody paid up before he could get out?” demanded Will, very scornfully.
Betty considered. “Why, I don’t know. I might. But if Madeline plans things she’ll have a desk that the Queen of England would be dying to sit at, if she saw it,” she ended gaily.
“But are you sure of making money?” demanded father dryly. “Times are bad——”
“But even in bad times people have to eat,” Betty took him up hastily. “And if tea is sixty cents a pound, and there are piles of cups in that, and you sell a cup for ten cents, how can you help making money? People do, in tea-rooms, or they wouldn’t be sprouting up everywhere. And if it can be done I’m sure Madeline and Babbie and I can do it. I just know we can!”
Mr. Wales’s glance traveled from Betty’s dancing eyes to her mouth with its pleading curves. “Well, mother,” he said, “shall we let her try?”
Mrs. Wales hesitated. “I don’t like the idea at all, but under the circumstances——”
“We’ll talk it over and let you know in the morning,” father suggested.
“Betty,” began little Dorothy forlornly, “you said I could be ’sistant cook as soon as I learned to toast the bread and not burn it. And now I’ve learned. If you go away and have a tea-room, I think I ought to be something in that.”
“You can be a silent partner, mademoiselle,” suggested Will teasingly.
“What’s that?” demanded Dorothy.
“About the same thing as a company, I guess,” explained Will. “Betty can call herself Betty Wales & Co., and you can be the Co. See?”
“Of course I see,” declared Dorothy with great dignity. “And I think I’d rather be a Co. than a ’sistant cook. Don’t forget that I’m the Co., Betty.”
“I won’t,” Betty promised laughingly. But she gave “Co.” a hug that made the little girl gasp for breath. The tea-room might be mere fun for Madeline and Babbie, and father and mother might look upon it as a foolish fad; but to Betty it was solemn earnest, and the unqualified interest and approval of even one little girl, who didn’t understand, helped.