The Dim Lantern

Sherwood Park is twelve miles from Washington. Starting as a somewhat pretentious suburb on the main line of a railroad, it was blessed with easy accessibility until encroaching trolleys swept the tide of settlement away from it, and left it high and dry--its train service, unable to compete with modern motor vehicles, increasingly inefficient.

Property values, inevitably, decreased. The little suburb degenerated, grew less fashionable. People who might have added social luster to its gatherings moved away. The frame houses, which at first had made such a brave showing, became a bit down at the heel. Most of them, built before the revival of good taste in architecture, seemed top-heavy and dull with their imitation towers, their fretted balconies, their gray and brown coloring, their bands of contrasting shingles tied like sashes around their middles.

The Barnes cottage was saved from the universal lack of loveliness by its simple lines, its white paint and green blinds. Yet the paint had peeled in places, and the concrete steps which followed the line of the two terraces were cracked and worn.

Old Baldwin Barnes had bought his house on the instalment plan, and his children were still paying for it. Old Baldwin had succumbed to the deadly monotony of writing the same inscription on red slips through thirty years of faithful service in the Pension Office, and had left the world with his debts behind him.

He had the artistic temperament which his son inherited. Julia was like her mother who had died two years before her husband. Mrs. Barnes had been unimaginative and capable. It was because of her that Julia had married an architect, and was living in a snug apartment in Chicago, that Baldwin Junior had gone through college and had some months at an art school before the war came on, and that Jane, the youngest, had a sense of thrift, and an intensive experience in domestic economy.

As for the rest of her, Jane was twenty, slender as a Florentine page, and fairly pretty. She was in love with life and liked to talk about it. Young Baldwin said, indeed, with the frankness of a brother, that Jane ran on like a babbling brook.

She was “running on” this November morning, as she and young Baldwin ate breakfast together. Jane always got the breakfast. Sophy, a capable negro woman, came over later to help with the housework, and to put the six o’clock dinner on the table. But it was Jane who started the percolator, poached the eggs, and made the toast on the electric toaster, while young Baldwin read the Washington Post. He read bits out loud when he was in the mood. He was not always in the mood, and then Jane talked to him. He did not always listen, but that made no difference.

Jane had named the percolator “Philomel,” because of its purling harmonies.

“Don’t you love it, Baldy?”

Her brother, with one eye on the paper, was eating his grapefruit.

“Love what?”

“Philomel.”

“Silly stuff----”

“It isn’t. I like to hear it sing.”

“In my present mood I prefer a hymn of hate.”

She buttered a slice of toast for him. “Well, of course, you’d feel like that.”

“Who wouldn’t?” He took the toast from her, and buried himself in his paper, so Jane buttered another slice for herself and ate it in protesting silence--plus a poached egg, and a cup of coffee rich with yellow cream and much sugar. Jane’s thinness made such indulgence possible. She enjoyed good food as she enjoyed a new frock, violets in the spring, the vista from the west front of the Capitol, free verse, and the book of Job. There were really no limits to Jane’s enthusiasms. She spoke again of the percolator. “It’s as nice as a kettle on the hob, isn’t it?”