Rose was not a coquettish girl. She had that curious directness that some very timid people possess. There were her scruples, of course, but Mr. Durant readily reasoned them away. Not that he was a master of technique, either. He had had some experiences, probably a third as many as he habitually thought of himself as having been through, but none that taught him much of the delicate shadings of wooing. But then, Rose"s simplicity asked exceedingly little.
She was never one to demand much of him, anyway. She never thought of stirring up any trouble between him and his wife, never besought him to leave his family and go away with her, even for a day. Mr. Durant valued her for that. It did away with a lot of probable fussing.
It was amazing how free they were, how little lying there was to do. They stayed in the office after hours-Mr. Durant found many letters that must be dictated. No one thought anything of that. Rose was busy most of the day, and it was only considerate that Mr. Durant should not break in on her employer"s time, only natural that he should want as good a stenographer as she was to attend to his correspondence.
Rose"s only relative, a married sister, lived in another town. The girl roomed with an acquaintance named Ruby, also employed at the rubber works, and Ruby, who was much taken up with her own affairs of the emotions, never appeared to think it strange if Rose was late to dinner, or missed the meal entirely. Mr. Durant readily explained to his wife that he was detained by a rush of business. It only increased his importance, to her, and spurred her on to devising especially pleasing dishes, and solicitously keeping them hot for his return. Sometimes, important in their guilt, Rose and he put out the light in the little office and locked the door, to trick the other employees into thinking that they had long ago gone home. But no one ever so much as rattled the doork.n.o.b, seeking admission.
It was all so simple that Mr. Durant never thought of it as anything outside the usual order of things. His interest in Rose did not blunt his appreciation of chance attractive legs or provocative glances. It was an entanglement of the most restful, comfortable nature. It even held a sort of homelike quality, for him.
And then everything had to go and get spoiled. "Wouldn"t you know?" Mr. Durant asked himself, with deep bitterness.
Ten days before, Rose had come weeping to his office. She had the sense to wait till after hours, for a wonder, but anybody might have walked in and seen her blubbering there; Mr. Durant felt it to be due only to the efficient management of his personal G.o.d that no one had. She wept, as he sweepingly put it, all over the place. The color left her cheeks and collected damply in her nose, and rims of vivid pink grew around her pale eyelashes. Even her hair became affected; it came away from the pins, and stray ends of it wandered limply over her neck. Mr. Durant hated to look at her, could not bring himself to touch her.
All his energies were expended in urging her for G.o.d"s sake to keep quiet; he did not ask her what was the matter. But it came out, between bursts of unpleasant-sounding sobs. She was "in trouble." Neither then nor in the succeeding days did she and Mr. Durant ever use any less delicate phrase to describe her condition. Even in their thoughts, they referred to it that way.
She had suspected it, she said, for some time, but she hadn"t wanted to bother him about it until she was absolutely sure. "Didn"t want to bother me!" thought Mr. Durant.
Naturally, he was furious. Innocence is a desirable thing, a dainty thing, an appealing thing, in its place; but carried too far, it is merely ridiculous. Mr. Durant wished to G.o.d that he had never seen Rose. He explained this desire to her.
But that was no way to get things done. As he had often jovially remarked to his friends, he knew "a thing or two." Cases like this could be what people of the world called "fixed up"-New York society women, he understood, thought virtually nothing of it. This case could be fixed up, too. He got Rose to go home, telling her not to worry, he would see that everything was all right. The main thing was to get her out of sight, with that nose and those eyes.
But knowing a thing or two and putting the knowledge into practice turned out to be vastly different things. Mr. Durant did not know whom to seek for information. He pictured himself inquiring of his intimates if they could tell him of "someone that this girl he had heard about could go to." He could hear his voice uttering the words, could hear the nervous laugh that would accompany them, the terrible flatness of them as they left his lips. To confide in one person would be confiding in at least one too many. It was a progressing town, but still small enough for gossip to travel like a typhoon. Not that he thought for a moment that his wife would believe any such thing, if it reached her; but where would be the sense in troubling her?
Mr. Durant grew pale and jumpy over the thing as the days went by. His wife worried herself into one of her sick spells over his petulant refusals of second helpings. There daily arose in him an increasing anger that he should be drawn into conniving to find a way to break the law of his country-probably the law of every country in the world. Certainly of every decent, Christian place.
It was Ruby, finally, who got them out of it. When Rose confessed to him that she had broken down and told Ruby, his rage leaped higher than any words. Ruby was secretary to the vice-president of the rubber company. It would be pretty, wouldn"t it, if she let it out? He had lain wide-eyed beside his wife all that night through. He shuddered at the thought of chance meetings with Ruby in the hall.
But Ruby had made it delightfully simple, when they did meet. There were no reproachful looks, no cold turnings away of the head. She had given him her usual smiling "good-morning," and added a little upward glance, mischievous, understanding, with just the least hint of admiration in it. There was a sense of intimacy, of a shared secret binding them cozily together. A fine girl, that Ruby!
Ruby had managed it all without any fuss. Mr. Durant was not directly concerned in the planning. He heard of it only through Rose, on the infrequent occasions when he had had to see her. Ruby knew, through some indistinct friends of hers, of "a woman." It would be twenty-five dollars. Mr. Durant had gallantly insisted upon giving Rose the money. She had started to sniffle about taking it, but he had finally prevailed. Not that he couldn"t have used the twenty-five very nicely himself, just then, with Junior"s teeth, and all!
Well, it was all over now. The invaluable Ruby had gone with Rose to "the woman"; had that very afternoon taken her to the station and put her on a train for her sister"s. She had even thought of wiring the sister beforehand that Rose had had influenza and must have a rest.
Mr. Durant had urged Rose to look on it as just a little vacation. He promised, moreover, to put in a good word for her whenever she wanted her job back. But Rose had gone pink about the nose again at the thought. She had sobbed her rasping sobs, then had raised her face from her stringy handkerchief and said, with an entirely foreign firmness, that she never wanted to see the rubber works or Ruby or Mr. Durant again. He had laughed indulgently, had made himself pat her thin back. In his relief at the outcome of things, he could be generous to the pettish.
He chuckled inaudibly, as he reviewed that last scene. "I suppose she thought she"d make me sore, saying she was never coming back," he told himself. "I suppose I was supposed to get down on my knees and coax her."
It was fine to dwell on the surety that it was all done with. Mr. Durant had somewhere picked up a phrase that seemed ideally suited to the occasion. It was to him an admirably dashing expression. There was something stylish about it; it was the sort of thing you would expect to hear used by men who wore spats and swung canes without self-consciousness. He employed it now, with satisfaction.
"Well, that"s that," he said to himself. He was not sure that he didn"t say it aloud.
The car slowed, and the girl in the rough coat came down toward the door. She was jolted against Mr. Durant-he would have sworn she did it purposely-uttered a word of laughing apology, gave him what he interpreted as an inviting glance. He half rose to follow her, then sank back again. After all, it was a wet night, and his corner was five blocks farther on. Again there came over him the cozy a.s.surance that there would always be others.
In high humor, he left the car at his street, and walked in the direction of his house. It was a mean night, but the insinuating cold and the black rain only made more graphic his picture of the warm, bright house, the great dish of steaming fish chowder, the well-behaved children and wife that awaited him. He walked rather slowly to make them seem all the better for the wait, humming a little on his way down the neat sidewalk, past the solid, reputably shabby houses.
Two girls ran past him, holding their hands over their heads to protect their hats from the wet. He enjoyed the click of their heels on the pavement, their little bursts of breathless laughter, their arms upraised in a position that brought out all the neat lines of their bodies. He knew who they were-they lived three doors down from him, in the house with the lamp-post in front of it. He had often lingeringly noticed their fresh prettiness. He hurried, so that he might see them run up the steps, their narrow skirts sliding up over their legs. His mind went back to the girl with the run in her stocking, and amusing thoughts filled him as he entered his own house.
His children rushed, clamoring, to meet him, as he unlocked the door. There was something exciting going on, for Junior and Charlotte were usually too careful-mannered to cause people discomfort by rushing and babbling. They were nice, sensible children, good at their lessons, and punctilious about brushing their teeth, speaking the truth, and avoiding playmates who used bad words. Junior would be the very picture of his father, when they got the bands off his teeth, and little Charlotte strongly resembled her mother. Friends often commented on what a nice arrangement it was.
Mr. Durant smiled good-naturedly through their racket, carefully hanging up his coat and hat. There was even pleasure for him in the arrangement of his apparel on the cool, shiny k.n.o.b of the hatrack. Everything was pleasant, tonight. Even the children"s noise couldn"t irritate him.
Eventually he discovered the cause of the commotion. It was a little stray dog that had come to the back door. They were out in the kitchen helping Freda, and Charlotte thought she heard something scratching, and Freda said nonsense, but Charlotte went to the door, anyway, and there was this little dog, trying to get in out of the wet. Mother helped them give it a bath, and Freda fed it, and now it was in the living-room. Oh, Father, couldn"t they keep it, please, couldn"t they, couldn"t they, please, Father, couldn"t they? It didn"t have any collar on it-so you see it didn"t belong to anybody. Mother said all right, if he said so, and Freda liked it fine.
Mr. Durant still smiled his gentle smile. "We"ll see," he said.
The children looked disappointed, but not despondent. They would have liked more enthusiasm, but "we"ll see," they knew by experience, meant a leaning in the right direction.
Mr. Durant proceeded to the living-room, to inspect the visitor. It was not a beauty. All too obviously, it was the living souvenir of a mother who had never been able to say no. It was a rather stocky little beast with s.h.a.ggy white hair and occasional, rakishly placed patches of black. There was a suggestion of Sealyham terrier about it, but that was almost blotted out by hosts of reminiscences of other breeds. It looked, on the whole, like a composite photograph of Popular Dogs. But you could tell at a glance that it had a way with it. Scepters have been tossed aside for that.
It lay, now, by the fire, waving its tragically long tail wistfully, its eyes pleading with Mr. Durant to give it a fair trial. The children had told it to lie down there, and so it did not move. That was something it could do toward repaying them.
Mr. Durant warmed to it. He did not dislike dogs, and he somewhat fancied the picture of himself as a soft-hearted fellow who extended shelter to friendless animals. He bent, and held out a hand to it.
"Well, sir," he said, genially. "Come here, good fellow."
The dog ran to him, wriggling ecstatically. It covered his cold hand with joyous, though respectful kisses, then laid its warm, heavy head on his palm. "You are beyond a doubt the greatest man in America," it told him with its eyes.
Mr. Durant enjoyed appreciation and grat.i.tude. He patted the dog graciously.
"Well, sir, how"d you like to board with us?" he said. "I guess you can plan to settle down." Charlotte squeezed Junior"s arm wildly. Neither of them, though, thought it best to crowd their good fortune by making any immediate comment on it.
Mrs. Durant entered from the kitchen, flushed with her final attentions to the chowder. There was a worried line between her eyes. Part of the worry was due to the dinner, and part to the disturbing entrance of the little dog into the family life. Anything not previously included in her day"s schedule threw Mrs. Durant into a state resembling that of one convalescing from sh.e.l.lshock. Her hands jerked nervously, beginning gestures that they never finished.
Relief smoothed her face when she saw her husband patting the dog. The children, always at ease with her, broke their silence and jumped about her, shrieking that Father said it might stay.
"There, now-didn"t I tell you what a dear, good father you had?" she said in the tone parents employ when they have happened to guess right. "That"s fine, Father. With that big yard and all, I think we"ll make out all right. She really seems to be an awfully good little--"
Mr. Durant"s hand stopped sharply in its patting motions, as if the dog"s neck had become red-hot to his touch. He rose, and looked at his wife as at a stranger who had suddenly begun to behave wildly.
"She?" he said. He maintained the look and repeated the word. "She?"
Mrs. Durant"s hands jerked.
"Well-" she began, as if about to plunge into a recital of extenuating circ.u.mstances. "Well-yes," she concluded.
The children and the dog looked nervously at Mr. Durant, feeling something was gone wrong. Charlotte whimpered wordlessly.
"Quiet!" said her father, turning suddenly upon her. "I said it could stay, didn"t I? Did you ever know Father to break a promise?"
Charlotte politely murmured, "No, Father," but conviction was not hers. She was a philosophical child, though, and she decided to leave the whole issue to G.o.d, occasionally jogging Him up a bit with prayer.
Mr. Durant frowned at his wife, and jerked his head backward. This indicated that he wished to have a few words with her, for adults only, in the privacy of the little room across the hall, known as "Father"s den."
He had directed the decoration of his den, had seen that it had been made a truly masculine room. Red paper covered its walls, up to the wooden rack on which were displayed ornamental steins, of domestic manufacture. Empty pipe-racks-Mr. Durant smoked cigars-were nailed against the red paper at frequent intervals. On one wall was an indifferent reproduction of a drawing of a young woman with wings like a vampire bat, and on another, a watercolored photograph of "Sep tember Morn," the tints running a bit beyond the edges of the figure as if the artist"s emotions had rendered his hand unsteady. Over the table was carefully flung a tanned and fringed hide with the profile of an unknown Indian maiden painted on it, and the rocking-chair held a leather pillow bearing the picture, done by pyrography, of a girl in a fencing costume which set off her distressingly dated figure.
Mr. Durant"s books were lined up behind the gla.s.s of the bookcase. They were all tall, thick books, brightly bound, and they justified his pride in their showing. They were mostly accounts of favorites of the French court, with a few volumes on odd personal habits of various monarchs, and the adventures of former Russian monks. Mrs. Durant, who never had time to get around to reading, regarded them with awe, and thought of her husband as one of the country"s leading bibliophiles. There were books, too, in the living-room, but those she had inherited or been given. She had arranged a few on the living-room table; they looked as if they had been placed there by the Gideons.
Mr. Durant thought of himself as an indefatigable collector and an insatiable reader. But he was always disappointed in his books, after he had sent for them. They were never so good as the advertis.e.m.e.nts had led him to believe.
Into his den Mr. Durant preceded his wife, and faced her, still frowning. His calm was not shattered, but it was punctured. Something annoying always had to go and come up. Wouldn"t you know?
"Now you know perfectly well, Fan, we can"t have that dog around," he told her. He used the low voice reserved for underwear and bathroom articles and kindred shady topics. There was all the kindness in his tones that one has for a backward child, but a Gibraltar-like firmness was behind it. "You must be crazy to even think we could for a minute. Why, I wouldn"t give a she-dog houseroom, not for any amount of money. It"s disgusting, that"s what it is."
"Well, but, Father-" began Mrs. Durant, her hands again going off into their convulsions.
"Disgusting," he repeated. "You have a female around, and you know what happens. All the males in the neighborhood will be running after her. First thing you know, she"d be having puppies-and the way they look after they"ve had them, and all! That would be nice for the children to see, wouldn"t it? I should think you"d think of the children, Fan. No, sir, there"ll be nothing like that around here, not while I know it. Disgusting!"
"But the children," she said. "They"ll be just simply--"
"Now you just leave all that to me," he rea.s.sured her. "I told them the dog could stay, and I"ve never broken a promise yet, have I? Here"s what I"ll do-I"ll wait till they"re asleep, and then I"ll just take this little dog and put it out. Then, in the morning, you can tell them it ran away during the night, see?"
She nodded. Her husband patted her shoulder, in its c.r.a.py-smelling black silk. His peace with the world was once more intact, restored by this simple solution of the little difficulty. Again his mind wrapped itself in the knowledge that everything was all fixed, all ready for a nice, fresh start. His arm was still about his wife"s shoulder as they went on in to dinner.
American Mercury, September 1924.
A Certain Lady.
My friend, Mrs. Legion, is one of those few, as tradition numbers them, who are New Yorkers by birth. This gives her an appreciable edge on the parvenus who are Manhattanites only by migration. The Legions occupy an apartment on upper Riverside Drive, in a building called "The Emdor"-an apt and amicable blending of the name of the owner"s wife, Emma, with that of his daughter, Doris. Thus, at one crack, are any possible hard feelings averted, and a happy literary effect achieved. "Isn"t it a cute idea?" Mrs. Legion asks you, when she has explained the origin of the t.i.tle. "Isn"t it," you answer, without an interrogation point. And there you both are, ready to start all over again.
Shortly-oh, anywhere from seven to ten minutes-after she has met you, Mrs. Legion is supplying you with all the ground floor information as to why she lives on Riverside Drive, instead of Park Avenue. There is all the sun they get, and that big kitchen, and the superintendent is so obliging, and just look how convenient the busses are. Not for worlds, she promises you, would she dwell in any other section of the city. Yet, oddly enough-just about enough-she may be found frequently inspecting and pricing Park Avenue apartments, and hopefully calling up real estate agents to inquire if the rents in that part of town have taken a change for the better since her last inquiry.
Although she lives as far from Park Avenue as it is possible to do and still keep out of Jersey, Mrs. Legion is cozily conversant of all the comings and goings, or what have you, of the Avenue dwellers. Breathlessly she pursues the society notes in the daily papers; promptly on their days of publication she buys the magazines dealing with the activities of the socially elect. Only drop a hat, and she can give you anything you want to know in the way of dates, and maiden names, and who married whom, and how they are getting along, if any. She employs nicknames, in referring to members of the favored few hundred, with an easy casualness that gives her remarks a truly homey flavor.
Naturally, it eats into her time to keep so admirably posted on these matters. And Mrs. Legion is pretty hard pressed for time. You might think, with her husband earning a cheery income, with Junior and Barbara safely in school, and a pleasant sufficiency of maids-two will do it nicely-around the apartment, that Mrs. Legion"s life would follow the course made celebrated by the proverbial Riley; but the days are all too short for her to complete her business. She is always late for her appointments, rushing in a bit breathless, almost embarra.s.singly apologetic for those things that lack of time has forced her to leave undone. You simply must excuse the way she looks, but she didn"t have a minute to get her hair waved, or, goodness, she must try to crowd in a manicure somehow, or for heaven"s sake, remind her to stop at the baker"s on her way home-she didn"t have a second all morning. Her life is pa.s.sed in an oddly imperceptible process known as "getting around" to things,-getting around to answer a letter, getting around to having her fur coat done over, getting around to having a talk with Junior"s teacher.
And then, of course, there is all her shopping to do. Mrs. Legion"s shopping has never yet reached a stage even approaching completion. Rarely a day pa.s.ses that she must not visit the stores, if not to purchase, then to look around and get an idea or so. To look at her, you realize instantly that it must indeed take time and thought and research for her to a.s.semble her costumes, to get them so faithfully like those worn by all other women of her circ.u.mstances. Mrs. Legion and her friends dress with the uniformity of the Tiller girls. Their hats are of the same shape and worn at the same angle, their coiffures meticulously alike, their dresses follow one another closely in material and design, their shoes are of the same last. Not until she has sedulously effaced all traces of individuality does Mrs. Legion feel that she is smart enough to appear in public.
Duties aside, Mrs. Legion must have her fun, being only human. Her good times consist in meeting her women friends almost daily, either at her house or at one of theirs, and having a real old-fashioned talk. Sometimes this is staged over the bridge table, sometimes over the Mah Jong tiles, sometimes a bit of silky and lacy sewing. The Legion school of conversationalists deals entirely with personalities, nor does it fear to probe deep into the intimate affairs of absent acquaintances. Detailed stories of miserable matrimony and racking separation, of lingering illness and agonizing childbirth and ancestral insanity, of heartbreak and poverty and desertion burble melodiously from the ladies" cool, smooth, expensively rouged lips.
The talk is interrupted by the serving of a lavish and imaginative tea, of which Mrs. Legion partakes generously. She is always going to begin dieting next Monday morning.
For her further diversion, there are literature and the drama. Mrs. Legion is by her own admission a great reader. She has long been a member of the circulating library contained in the stationer"s nearest her. She is saved the wear and tear of selecting appropriate reading matter-there is the nicest girl there, who knows just the sort of thing she likes. Mrs. Legion can seldom tell you the t.i.tle of a book she reads, and never the author"s name, but she can always give you a pretty comprehensive resume of the plot. She likes a book because there is the cutest girl in it, or the most attractive man, or because the author says the rawest things,-well, my dear, simply nothing is left to your imagination. And the lifting of any strain on the imagination is regarded, in the Legion circle, as the king of a.s.sets.
In the theatre, she likes best to patronize, even though she must wait weeks to obtain desirable seats, those exhibits which she euphemistically describes as "my dear, they say it"s the most off-color thing you ever saw. I do hope the police don"t stop it before we can get tickets." She does not care for drama of the drab, the every-day, or the underworld. As she says, she does love to see pretty clothes.
Sporadically, Mrs. Legion goes in for culture in a really big way, and signs up for a course of lectures on Flemish paintings or current events or interior decoration. The first lecture of the series is largely attended and faithfully quoted: along about the sixth or seventh, only the first row of gilt chairs is occupied. Mrs. Legion has looked on this world for some thirty-seven years, and she has not failed to draw conclusions. So clear are her views that she can dismiss any subject with a single sentence. Of politics, she says that Mrs. Coolidge is awfully sweet looking, and they say she is very popular in Washington. Of the unemployment situation, that these beggars you see in the streets all have big bank accounts and probably most of them own tenement buildings. Of married life, that she honestly believes that Fred Legion would eat steak every night if you"d give it to him. Of the race question, that these Swedes and Irish girls are so independent that she has half a mind to get a couple of darkie servants. Of art and belles lettres, that she wouldn"t live in Greenwich Village if you gave her the place. Of motherhood, that it certainly is hard to know how to dress children when they"re at that awkward age. Of the relation of the s.e.xes, that it"s terrible what women have to go through in this world.
My friend, Mrs. Legion. Heiress of the ages.
The New Yorker, February 28, 1925.
The Wonderful Old Gentleman.
If the Bains had striven for years, they could have been no more successful in making their living-room into a small but admirably complete museum of objects suggesting strain, discomfort, or the tomb. Yet they had never even tried for the effect. Some of the articles that the room contained were wedding-presents; some had been put in from time to time as subst.i.tutes as their predecessors succ.u.mbed to age and wear; a few had been brought along by the Old Gentleman when he had come to make his home with the Bains some five years before.
It was curious how perfectly they all fitted into the general scheme. It was as if they had all been selected by a single enthusiast to whom time was but little object, so long as he could achieve the eventual result of transforming the Bain living-room into a home chamber of horrors, modified a bit for family use.
It was a high-ceilinged room, with heavy, dark old woodwork, that brought long and unavoidable thoughts of silver handles and weaving worms. The paper was the color of stale mustard. Its design, once a dashing affair of a darker tone splashed with twinkling gold, had faded into lines and smears that resolved themselves, before the eyes of the sensitive, into hordes of battered heads and tortured profiles, some eye-less, some with clotted gashes for mouths.
The furniture was dark and c.u.mbersome and subject to painful creakings-sudden, sharp creaks that seemed to be wrung from its brave silence only when it could bear no more. A close, earthy smell came from its dulled tapestry cushions, and try as Mrs. Bain might, furry gray dust acc.u.mulated in the crevices.
The center-table was upheld by the perpetually strained arms of three carved figures, insistently female to the waist, then trailing discreetly off into a confusion of scrolls and scales. Upon it rested a row of blameless books, kept in place at the ends by the straining shoulder-muscles of two bronze-colored plaster elephants, forever pushing at their tedious toil.
On the heavily carved mantel was a gayly colored figure of a curly-headed peasant boy, ingeniously made so that he sat on the shelf and dangled one leg over. He was in the eternal act of removing a thorn from his chubby foot, his round face realistically wrinkled with the cruel pain. Just above him hung a steel-engraving of a chariot-race, the dust flying, the chariots careening wildly, the drivers ferociously lashing their maddened horses, the horses themselves caught by the artist the moment before their hearts burst, and they dropped in their traces.
The opposite wall was devoted to the religious in art; a steel-engraving of the Crucifixion, lavish of ghastly detail; a sepia-print of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, the cords cutting deep into the arms writhing from the stake, arrows bristling in the thick, soft-looking body; a water-color copy of a "Mother of Sorrows," the agonized eyes raised to a cold heaven, great, bitter tears forever on the wan cheeks, paler for the grave-like draperies that wrapped the head.
Beneath the windows hung a painting in oil of two lost sheep, huddled hopelessly together in the midst of a wild blizzard. This was one of the Old Gentleman"s contributions to the room. Mrs. Bain was wont to observe of it that the frame was worth she didn"t know how much.
The wall-s.p.a.ce beside the door was reserved for a bit of modern art that had once caught Mr. Bain"s eye in a stationer"s window-a colored print, showing a railroad-crossing, with a train flying relentlessly toward it, and a low, red automobile trying to dash across the track before the iron terror shattered it into eternity. Nervous visitors who were given chairs facing this scene usually made opportunity to change their seats before they could give their whole minds to the conversation.
The ornaments, placed with careful casualness on the table and the upright piano, included a small gilt lion of Lucerne, a little, chipped, plaster Laoc.o.o.n, and a savage china kitten eternally about to pounce upon a plump and helpless china mouse. This last had been one of the Old Gentleman"s own wedding-gifts. Mrs. Bain explained, in tones low with awe, that it was very old.
The ash-receivers, of Oriental manufacture, were in the form of grotesque heads, tufted with bits of gray human hair, and given bulging, dead, gla.s.sy eyes and mouths stretched into great gapes, into which those who had the heart for it might flick their ashes. Thus the smallest details of the room kept loyally to the spirit of the thing, and carried on the effect.
But the three people now sitting in the Bains" living-room were not in the least oppressed by the decorative scheme. Two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Bain, not only had had twenty-eight years of the room to accustom themselves to it, but had been stanch admirers of it from the first. And no surroundings, however morbid, could close in on the aristocratic calm of Mrs. Bain"s sister, Mrs. Whittaker.
She graciously patronized the very chair she now sat in, smiled kindly on the gla.s.s of cider she held in her hand. The Bains were poor, and Mrs. Whittaker had, as it is ingenuously called, married well, and none of them ever lost sight of these facts.
But Mrs. Whittaker"s att.i.tude of kindly tolerance was not confined to her less fortunate relatives. It extended to friends of her youth, working people, the arts, politics, the United States in general, and G.o.d, Who had always supplied her with the best of service. She could have given Him an excellent reference at any time.
The three people sat with a comfortable look of spending the evening. There was an air of expectancy about them, a not unpleasant little nervousness, as of those who wait for a curtain to rise. Mrs. Bain had brought in cider in the best tumblers, and had served some of her nut cookies in the plate painted by hand with cl.u.s.ters of cherries-the plate she had used for sandwiches when, several years ago, her card club had met at her house.
She had thought it over a little tonight, before she lifted out the cherry plate, then quickly decided and resolutely heaped it with cookies. After all, it was an occasion-informal, perhaps, but still an occasion. The Old Gentleman was dying upstairs. At five o"clock that afternoon the doctor had said that it would be a surprise to him if the Old Gentleman lasted till the middle of the night-a big surprise, he had augmented.
There was no need for them to gather at the Old Gentleman"s bedside. He would not have known any of them. In fact, he had not known them for almost a year, addressing them by wrong names and asking them grave, courteous questions about the health of husbands or wives or children who belonged to other branches of the family. And he was quite unconscious now.
Miss Chester, the nurse who had been with him since "this last stroke," as Mrs. Bain importantly called it, was entirely competent to attend and watch him. She had promised to call them if, in her tactful words, she saw any signs.
So the Old Gentleman"s daughters and son-in-law waited in the warm living-room, and sipped their cider, and conversed in low, polite tones.
Mrs. Bain cried a little in pauses in the conversation. She had always cried easily and often. Yet, in spite of her years of practice, she did not do it well. Her eyelids grew pink and sticky, and her nose gave her no little trouble, necessitating almost constant sniffling. She sniffled loudly and conscientiously, and frequently removed her pince-nez to wipe her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, gray with damp.
Mrs. Whittaker, too, bore a handkerchief, but she appeared to be holding it in waiting. She was dressed, in compliment to the occasion, in her black crepe de Chine, and she had left her lapis-lazuli pin, her olivine bracelet, and her topaz and amethyst rings at home in her bureau drawer, retaining only her lorgnette on its gold chain, in case there should be any reading to be done.
Mrs. Whittaker"s dress was always studiously suited to its occasion; thus, her bearing had always that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy. She was an authority on where to place monograms on linen, how to instruct working folk, and what to say in letters of condolence. The word "lady" figured largely in her conversation. Blood, she often predicted, would tell.
Mrs. Bain wore a rumpled white shirt-waist and the old blue skirt she saved for "around the kitchen." There had been time to change, after she had telephoned the doctor"s verdict to her sister, but she had not been quite sure whether it was the thing to do. She had thought that Mrs. Whittaker might expect her to display a little distraught untidiness at a time like this; might even go in for it in a mild way herself.
Now Mrs. Bain looked at her sister"s elaborately curled, painstakingly brown coiffure, and nervously patted her own straggling hair, gray at the front, with strands of almost lime-color in the little twist at the back. Her eyelids grew wet and sticky again, and she hung her gla.s.ses over one forefinger while she applied the damp handkerchief. After all, she reminded herself and the others, it was her poor father.