By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how worried Hugo had looked....
Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in duration.
She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle"s face hardened again.
The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil"s voice, hoa.r.s.e with sobs.
"I"ve tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it wasn"t for the baby coming sometimes I think I"d--"
"You"re just nervous and excited, Lil. It"ll come out all right. She"s an old lady--"
"I know it. I know it. I"ve said that a million times in the last year and a half. But that doesn"t excuse everything, does it? Is that any reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn"t fair. It isn"t fair!"
"Sh! Don"t cry like that, dear. Don"t! You"ll only make yourself sick."
Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through the tears.
"No, I"m not hysterical. I--it just struck me funny. I was just wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries, maybe I"ll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love them too much we really harm them. I suppose--"
"Oh, it"s going to be a son, is it?"
"Yes."
Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You"re all worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don"t believe I ever saw you cry before."
"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right.
I"m sorry. She"s so old, dear. That"s the trouble. They live in the past and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to her, Hughie. That"s why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good, maybe. You"ve spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you."
Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He"s his mother"s son by accident of birth. But he"s his wife"s husband by choice, and deliberately."
But she laughed again at that. "It isn"t as easy as that, sweetheart. If it was there"d be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just now, too, when you"re so worried about business."
"Business"ll be all right, Lil. Trade"ll open up next winter. It"s got to. We"ve kept going on the j.a.panese and English stuff. But if the French and Austrian factories start running we"ll have a whirlwind year.
If it hadn"t been for you this last year I don"t know how I"d have stood the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above water. But you were right, honey. We"ve weathered the worst of it now."
"I"m glad you didn"t tell Mother about it. She"d have worried herself sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the business--"
"We"ll get it back ten times over. You"ll see."
The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn"t to be out alone. I"m kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don"t you think you"d better--"
Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as though she had just come in.
"That you, Ma?" called Hugo.
He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began to worry about you."
"I"m all right. I"m going to bed."
He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going over to the drug store for a soda, it"s so hot. Come on along, Ma."
Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled bravely.
"Come on, Mother," she said. "It"ll cool you off."
But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I"m better off at home. You run along, you two."
That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone.
Something new, something gentle, something wise.
She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would express the meaning of life--this she had never tried to do. She could not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo"s wife and the child to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life.
She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in a neat k.n.o.b at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it to-morrow--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a moth get into her husband"s winter suit.
"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never.
But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my son"s wife care! I never had a moth in my house."
Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She forgets. We all forget."
It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from the lake, but not often.... How red Lil"s eyes had been ... poor girl.
Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare feet, found a sc.r.a.p of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room.
With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil"s pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again.
She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her head ... pounding....
At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful awkwardness up the hall again.
"She"s asleep, all right. I didn"t think she"d get to sleep so early on a scorcher like this."
Lil turned on the light in her room. "It"s too hot to sleep," she said.
She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the sc.r.a.p of paper pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read it.
"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder.
"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in the world."
A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished reading them.
YOU"VE GOT TO BE SELFISH
When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short story. Three would swamp a book. It"s like one of those plays advertised as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the background. You can"t see the heavens for the stars.
Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though quoted, thus:
"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol" clo"es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to a vice."
Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say, "It"s scarlet! No--it"s blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--"