Chapter 8 AT HOME WITH THE DUNNS

"I can't," said Peggy. "I've got to make a call after school."

Priscilla, who had suggested a trip to the public library, to look up some of the history references for the next day, glanced at her friend askance. "O," she said in a voice of deep meaning, "I can't imagine what you see in that Elaine Marshall."

"Can't you?" Peggy's tone was cheery.

"O, she's well enough. But to choose her for an intimate friend! You're the only one of us who really likes her, you know."

"It's lucky I like her so much, then," suggested Peggy, still reprehensibly cheerful.

"O, yes, it's lucky for her. Nobody would deny that. But as far as you're concerned, Peggy, I don't know. Of course the more intimate you get with her, the less you see-- Now, Peggy Raymond, I'd like to know what you're laughing at."

Peggy's pent-up chuckle had broken in on the conversation with rather startling effect. As a tease, Peggy was not an unqualified success, since she never had the heart to carry her teasing to the climax. "I was only laughing at your dragging Elaine into it," she explained blithely. "I'm not going to see her. I'm going to call on the Dunns."

Priscilla wavered between offence and curiosity. Peggy tipped the balance by giving her friend's arm a good-natured squeeze.

"The Dunns," repeated Priscilla hastily, as if glad to get away from the previous topic of conversation. "Where do they live?"

"Glen Echo Avenue."

"Pretty name, but I don't know it."

"It's over across the tracks, just beyond."

"Why, Peggy Raymond, I didn't suppose anybody lived over there."

"Lots of people do. Scads of 'em."

"I didn't mean that, Peggy. Of course, I meant the kind of people one goes to see.

"I never went to see these people before," Peggy admitted. "But I've wanted to ever since the night of the Bazar. That boy, you know--"

"O, the ice cream boy! Was he a Dunn?"

"Jimmy Dunn. I saw him on the street the other day, and asked him where he lived. He's an awful little rag-bag, and Graham Wylie calls him all sorts of names, but there's something about him I can't help liking. And I thought I'd see what sort of woman his mother was. Sometimes we have an extra woman in to scrub, at house-cleaning time, though I must say," Peggy concluded thoughtfully, "that judging from Jimmy, she wouldn't be much of a success as a scrubber."

"I'll go with you," Priscilla said, taking Peggy's arm. "It isn't a suitable neighborhood for you to go alone." Now that she had learned that Peggy was not planning to call upon Elaine, Priscilla's mood had become extremely affectionate. She pressed the arm she held. She complimented the way Peggy was doing her hair. While she did not acknowledge to herself that her impulse to be agreeable had its root in the knowledge that she had just been very disagreeable, Peggy recognized her friend's unusual demonstrativeness as an effort at atonement, and she met her half way.

An idealist of the most pronounced type must have christened Glen Echo Avenue. The objects on the landscape most closely resembling glens, were the grimy coal-sheds along the track, while it would have been hard for a professional riddle-guesser to say why the little twisting, squalid street should have been dignified with the name of avenue. A goat, with oblique, uncanny eyes, occupied apparently in the mastication of a paper bag, gazed at the girls as they passed, and swarms of dirty children paused in their play to take stock of the strangers.

"Does Mrs. Dunn live anywhere around here?" Peggy inquired, addressing a curly-haired little girl with enormous black eyes, and gold rings in her ears. Another girl, with fiery red hair, pushed forward.

"Mary can't understand English,": she explained importantly. "She's a dago and her folks ain't been here long. Who are you looking for?"

"I want to find Mrs. Dunn, Jimmy Dunn's mother."

A babel of shrill voices at once gave directions, which the pointing forefingers rendered unnecessary. As Peggy descended the steps which led to the Dunn's front door, placed, for some inexplicable reason, some feet below the street level, she reflected that in Glen Echo Avenue the name of Jimmy Dunn had proved effective. She was about to knock, when the red-haired girl pushed by and opened the door.

"Mis' Dunn," she screamed. "O, Mis' Dunn, you got company. Come right along," she added, looking over her shoulder. The girls followed as she led the way, uncomfortably aware that all the children from the street were crowding in after them, apparently resolved to lose no detail of the interview.

Mrs. Dunn was seated by the kitchen stove, with a baby in her arms. She was a flabby woman, with a double chin, which seemed superfluous, considering that poor Jimmy had scarcely flesh enough to cover one chin respectably. She eyed her callers with an air more hostile than hospitable.

"If you're lookin' for somebody to wash," she said abruptly, "'tain't no use comin' here. My health don't allow of more than rubbin' out a few pieces for the children."

Peggy explained that their call was purely social, and Mrs. Dunn's manner lost its cold aloofness.

"Isabel," she exclaimed, addressing a freckled child whom Peggy knew at a glance must be one of Jimmy's sisters, "clean off some chairs for the young ladies. Set the potatoes behind the stove. The kindlings might as well go under the bed. 'Liza," she added to the red-haired girl, who, with her usual officiousness, was lending a hand, "now there's a tea-towel hanging up over the sink; take that, some o' you, and dust the chairs off good. No, don't bother about the rungs, Estelle. They ain't going to set on the rungs, be they? Some o' you don't use the sense you was born with."

And so amid a confusion in which Mrs. Dunn sat calm and unperturbed, giving her orders, two chairs were cleared and the girls seated themselves. Peggy, who had discovered that a baby is always a safe entering wedge as a topic of conversation, ventured to pat the round cheek of the child in Mrs. Dunn's arms. "That's a nice fat baby, Mrs. Dunn," she said, and the compliment was not a careless bid for the mother's favor. To Peggy all babies were nice, though some were nicer. This baby was too dirty to admit of the comparative degree, though he was surprisingly plump considering his surroundings.

Mrs. Dunn groaned.

"He may look fat enough, but I've been up with him night and day all winter," she said. "Amonia of the lungs 'twas, and the mumps first of November. So much nursin' is bad for me on account of my heart."

"Do you have heart trouble?" asked Peggy, alarmed.

"Yes, Miss. But that's not the worst. I've got a disease that will take me off some day, I s'pose." She lowered her voice thrillingly. "Lots of folks die of it. You'll see by the papers. It's complication."

"Complication!" Peggy and Priscilla exchanged glances.

"Complication," repeated Mrs. Dunn, as if determined to make no concessions. "I guess it's pretty near the most fatal of any. You can buy things at any drug store to cure consumption and amonia of the lungs, but there ain't a cure for complication. I ast the druggist myself and he said he didn't know of none."

Peggy attempted to change the subject to something less depressing. "I don't suppose Jimmy is home?"

"No, Miss. He's off sellin' papers."

"He's left school, has he? It's a pity, for he seems so bright."

"Jimmy's been through the fourth grade," said Mrs. Dunn. "He can read well enough for anybody. And Francesca, she pretty near finished the fourth grade, too, and she's in the factory now. In the spring they're going to give her a machine."

"Isn't she pretty young? I thought they weren't allowed to work in the factory till--"

"Francesca got a permit," explained Mrs. Dunn, "'count of her pa being out of a job."

"Do you mean that Mr. Dunn hasn't any work at all?" exclaimed Peggy. "Do you have to live on what those two children earn?" Mrs. Dunn plainly expanded under the sympathetic interest.

"This is gettin' to be such a country that a man can't earn an honest living," she said. "Mr. Dunn's an awful smart man. He can turn his hand to most anything, but these Eytalians and other furren folks is comin', and takin' away all the jobs. The doctor told me last week that I'd ought to get some medicine to make my complication a little easier, but I haven't had a cent to spare for it. Seems as if it took all Jimmy and Francesca make to keep us in coal, and pay the rent." She looked thoughtfully in the direction of Peggy's pocket-book, which had a somewhat plump appearance owing to Peggy's habit of cutting recipes and poems out of the newspaper and tucking them away in her pocketbook to show the other girls.

What embarrassing turn the conversation might have taken next it is impossible to say for it was interrupted suddenly by the entrance of a young woman. She was a trim and business-like young woman who betrayed no surprise at the social aspect of Mrs. Dunn's kitchen, and who declined Peggy's offer of a chair, with a pleasant little smile.

"Can't stay long enough to sit down," she said briskly. "I've been down to the works, Mrs. Dunn, and I find that Mr. Dunn hasn't been there since a week ago Monday."

Mrs. Dunn turned so darkly red that Peggy wondered if the mysterious and dread disease "complication" could by any chance be allied to apoplexy.

"The work down there's too hard for him," she said sharply. "He ain't as strong as he looks, Mr. Dunn ain't. And the foreman's always picking on him."

The young woman shook her business-like head. "Come, Mrs. Dunn," she said, "the worst of Mr. Dunn's troubles is laziness, and the reason he had difficulty with the foreman was that he wouldn't attend to business. Now we are ready to help you, if you show a disposition to help yourselves, but there will be no more relief till Mr. Dunn goes back to work."

Peggy and Priscilla were feeling out of place. They rose murmuring something which might have been an apology for their abrupt departure, or a promise to come again. Mrs. Dunn paid little attention to their going, and it was the red-haired girl who ushered them to the door.

"That's the charity lady," she explained, with evident satisfaction in her superior knowledge. "She's all the time comin' to the Dunns. She don't never come to our home, 'less somebody's sick or dies, or something like that. My pa he sticks to his job, and Mr. Dunn don't, that's why."

"I wonder what that is," Peggy cried, losing interest in the red-haired girl's explanation, as she caught sight of something resembling a football scrimmage at the entrance to Glen Echo Avenue.

"Guess the boys are havin' a little fight about something," said the red-haired girl carelessly, and indeed none of the residents of the avenue seemed to take more than a superficial interest in the cluster of struggling bodies, from which proceeded outcries of the most blood-curdling nature. Only the goat which the girls had previously noticed, seemed to share their apprehensions, for it cantered past, a desperate expression in its oblique, wicked eyes, indicating a determination to put as much distance as possible between itself and the scene of the disturbance.

The group broke up as Peggy and Priscilla drew near, and proved to be composed of a score or so of boys, ranging in ages from six to fifteen. Some were grinning and some looked angry. And one was crying. The last was the central figure of the group, and he limped as he approached the sidewalk. His nose was bleeding so profusely as to make his appearance distinctly ghastly, and Peggy fumbled for her handkerchief. Then she uttered an exclamation.

"It's Jimmy! Priscilla, it is Jimmy Dunn!"

Jimmy's tears dissolved in a smile startlingly friendly. "I got it," he exclaimed and held forth a wet, dirty and uninviting object, whose proximity caused Priscilla to take a hasty backward step. "What is it?" she exclaimed in horror.

"It's a kitten, I think," Peggy replied doubtfully. "Yes, it is a kitten." Her uncertainty was less singular because the appearance of the poor bedraggled creature was so little suggestive of the kittens Peggy had known. Jimmy Dunn, however, regarded his prize with unalloyed satisfaction. "They was going to drown it, them smart kids," he said with a gesture that included all his late antagonists. "But they didn't. I got it. And that ain't all, you bet." Jimmy's voice took on a portentous hoarseness. "I can't lick 'em all to onct, but every kid in that bunch is going to get his, and don't you forgit it."

"I'm afraid you're hurt yourself, Jimmy," Peggy said, proffering her handkerchief. Jimmy shook his head and fell back on his sleeve.

"But you were crying," Priscilla suggested with less than Peggy's tact.

Jimmy Dunn looked a little sheepish.

"I mostly bawl when I get mad," he replied. "Seems as if I couldn't put up a good fight till I start cryin'. I'm going to the store and get a cent's worth o' milk for this kitten. Time it's dry and cleaned up, and had some milk to drink, you wouldn't know it."

Peggy thought it was very likely. It was impossible to imagine how any kitten dry, warm and fed, could bear even the faintest resemblance to the wet, muddy lump of fur in Jimmy's arms. Thinking it advisable that measures of resuscitation should begin as promptly as possible, the two girls said good-bye and walked on, hearing till they left Glen Echo Avenue far behind the shrill tones of Jimmy Dunn's voice as he called to his late opponents promises of retribution in the near future.

"Mrs. Dunn is a little disappointing," Peggy observed at last. "She doesn't seem quite--sincere." That was as severe as Peggy could very well be on short acquaintance. "But as for Jimmy," she went on with sudden enthusiasm, "that boy's got lots of good in him."

And in both particulars Priscilla agreed with her.