We have just had another flood, bad enough, but only
a foot or two of water on the first floor. Yesterday
we got the mud shoveled out of the cellar and found
Peter, the spaniel that Mr. Ladley left when he “went
away”. The flood, and the fact that it was
Mr. Ladley’s dog whose body was found half buried
in the basement fruit closet, brought back to me the
strange events of the other flood five years ago, when
the water reached more than half-way to the second
story, and brought with it, to some, mystery and sudden
death, and to me the worst case of “shingles”
I have ever seen.
My name is Pitman—in this narrative.
It is not really Pitman, but that does well enough.
I belong to an old Pittsburgh family. I was born
on Penn Avenue, when that was the best part of town,
and I lived, until I was fifteen, very close to what
is now the Pittsburgh Club. It was a dwelling
then; I have forgotten who lived there.
I was a girl in seventy-seven, during the railroad
riots, and I recall our driving in the family carriage
over to one of the Allegheny hills, and seeing the
yards burning, and a great noise of shooting from
across the river. It was the next year that I
ran away from school to marry Mr. Pitman, and I have
not known my family since. We were never reconciled,
although I came back to Pittsburgh after twenty years
of wandering. Mr. Pitman was dead; the old city
called me, and I came. I had a hundred dollars
or so, and I took a house in lower Allegheny, where,
because they are partly inundated every spring, rents
are cheap, and I kept boarders. My house was
always orderly and clean, and although the neighborhood
had a bad name, a good many theatrical people stopped
with me. Five minutes across the bridge, and they
were in the theater district. Allegheny at that
time, I believe, was still an independent city.
But since then it has allied itself with Pittsburgh;
it is now the North Side.
I was glad to get back. I worked hard, but I
made my rent and my living, and a little over.
Now and then on summer evenings I went to one of the
parks, and sitting on a bench, watched the children
playing around, and looked at my sister’s house,
closed for the summer. It is a very large house:
her butler once had his wife boarding with me—a
nice little woman.
It is curious to recall that, at that time, five years
ago, I had never seen my niece, Lida Harvey, and then
to think that only the day before yesterday she came
in her automobile as far as she dared, and then sat
there, waving to me, while the police patrol brought
across in a skiff a basket of provisions she had sent
me.
I wonder what she would have thought had she known
that the elderly woman in a calico wrapper with an
old overcoat over it, and a pair of rubber boots,
was her full aunt!
The flood and the sight of Lida both brought back
the case of Jennie Brice. For even then, Lida
and Mr. Howell were interested in each other.
