Father bolted through the door into the large, clean, woodeny, old-fashioned kitchen, where Mother was wearily taking a batch of doughnuts out of the fat-kettle.
"Mother!" he exulted. "Mrs. Carter--she"s here!"
Mother dropped the doughnuts back into the kettle. The splashing fat must have burnt her, but beyond mutely wiping the grease from her hand, she paid no attention to it. She turned paper white. "Oh, Seth!" she groaned. Then, in agony, "After your going and getting them here, I haven"t a thing ready for them but lettuce sandwiches and fresh doughnuts."
"Never mind. I"ll make them take those. Say, what kind of tea have we got now?"
"Oh, dear! we haven"t got a thing left but just--well, it"s just tea, mixed."
He galloped back into the tea-room, frightened lest the royal patrons leave before they were served. On the way he resolved to lie--not as the pinching tradesman lies, smugly and unconsciously, but desperately, to save Mother.
"We have orange pekoe and oolong," he gasped.
"Then you might give us some orange pekoe and--oh, two chicken sandwiches."
"Gee! I"m awfully sorry, ma"am, but we"re just out of chicken sandwiches. If we"d only known _you_ were coming-- But we have some very nice fresh lettuce sandwiches, and I do wish you would try some of our doughnuts. They"re fresh-made, just this minute."
He clasped his hands, pressed them till the fingers of one gouged the back of the other. Father was not a Uriah Heep. At Pilkings & Son"s he had often "talked back" to some of his best customers. But now he would gladly have licked Mrs. Vance Carter"s spatted shoes.
"No--oh, bring us some lettuce sandwiches and some orange pekoe. I don"t think we care for any doughnuts," said Mrs. Carter, impatiently.
Father bolted again, and whispered to Mother, who stood where he had left her, "Lettuce sandwiches and tea, and for Heaven"s sake make the tea taste as much like orange pekoe as you can."
The Applebys had no delicately adjusted rule about the thickness of bread in sandwiches. Sometimes Mother was moved to make them very dainty, very thin and trim. But now, because he was in such a fever to please the Carters, Father fairly slashed their last loaf of bread, and slapped in the lettuce, while Mother was drawing tea. In two minutes he was proudly entering with the service-tray. He set it down before the Carters; he fussed with a crumb on the table-cloth, with the rather faded crimson rambler in the ornate pressed-gla.s.s vase. Mrs. Carter glanced at him impatiently. He realized that he was being officious, and rushed away.
Mother was sitting by the wide kitchen table, which was scarred with generations of use of cleaver and bread-knife and steak-pounder. The kitchen door was open to the broad land, which flowed up to the sill in a pleasant sea of waving gra.s.s. But she was turned from it, staring apprehensively toward the tea-room. Round her swirled the heat from the stove, and restless flies lighted on her cheek and flew off at hectic tangents.
Father tiptoed up to her, smiling. "I"ve left the door open wide enough so you can see them," he whispered. "Come and take a look at them. Mrs.
Vance Carter--gee! And her daughter"s a mighty pretty girl--not that I think much of these blouses that are cut so low and all."
"Oh, I wouldn"t dare--"
Mother stopped short. Quiet as they were, they could distinctly hear the voices from the other room.
The Carter girl--she who was known as "Pig Carter" at Miss Severance"s school--was snapping, "What in the world ever made you come to this frightful hole, mama?"
"Simply because I wanted to stop some place, and I really can"t stand that mincing Miss Mitchin and her half-baked yearners and that odious creature with the beard and the ballet skirt, again."
"At least Mitchin"s shop is better than this awful place. Why, this might be one of those railroad lunch-rooms you see from a train."
"I"m not so sure this really is worse than the Mitchin creature"s zoo, Marky. At least this is a perfect study in what not to do. I fancy it would be a good thing for every interior decorator to come here and learn what to avoid. And, you know, they really might have done something with this place--rather a decent old house, with a good plain fireplace. But then, any one could make a charming room, and only a genius could have imagined this combination--an oak dining-room chair with a wicker table and a cotton table-cloth. I"m sure that Exhibition of Bad Taste--wasn"t it? I don"t pore over the newspapers as you do--that they held in New York would have been charmed to secure that picture of the kittens and the infant."
All this, conveyed in the Carters" clear, high-bred voices, Father and Mother heard perfectly.... The picture of kittens and a baby they had bought just after Lulu"s birth, and it had always hung above the couch in their living-room in New York.
Margaret Carter was continuing: "I don"t mind the bad taste a bit, but I was hungry after motoring all day, almost, and I did want a decent tea.
If you could see that horrid Victorian drawing-room at Miss Severance"s you could stand even sticky kitties--in a picture. I don"t care about the interior decoration as long as Marky"s little interior gets decorated decently. But this tea is simply terrible. Orange pekoe! Why, even Miss Severance"s horrid Ceylon is better than this, and she does give you cream, instead of this milk of magnesia or soapy water or whatever the beastly stuff is. And to have to drink it out of these horrid thick cups--like toothbrush mugs. I"m sure I"ll find a chewed-up old toothbrush when I get to the bottom."
"Don"t be vulgar, Marky. You might remember this is Ma.s.sachusetts, not New York."
"Well, this Ma.s.sachusetts lettuce--I"m perfectly convinced that they used it for floor-rags before they went and lost it in the sandwiches--and this thick crumby bread--oh, it"s unspeakable. I do wish you wouldn"t poke around in these horrid places, mama, or else leave me in the car when you are moved to go slumming. I"m sure I don"t feel any call to uplift the poor."
"My dear child, I seem to remember your admiring Freddy Dabney because he is so heroically poor. It"s very good for you to come to a place like this. Now you know what it"s like to be poor, Marky. You can see precisely how romantic it really is."
"Oh, I"ll admit Marky is a perfect little devil. But I do want you to observe that she"s been brave enough to eat part of her sandwich. Let"s go. Where is the nice smiling little man? Let"s pay our bill and go."
Twenty feet from the bored Carters was tragedy. Gray-faced, dumb, Father stood by Mother"s chair, stroking her dull hair as she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back and forth, his hand pa.s.sed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France might have caressed his marquise.
"Mother--" he began. It was hard to say anything when there was nothing to say. "It"s all right. They"re just silly sn.o.bs. They--"
Yes, the Applebys could not understand every detail of what the well-bred Carters had said. "Interior decoration"--that didn"t mean anything to them. All that they understood was that they were fools and failures, in the beginning of their old age; that they belonged to the quite ludicrously inefficient.
Father realized, presently, that the Carters were waiting for their bill. For a minute more he stroked Mother"s hair. If the Carters would only go from this place they had desecrated, and take their d.a.m.ned money with them! But he had been trained by years of dealing with self-satisfied people in a shoe-store at least to make an effort to conceal his feelings. He dragged himself into the tea-room, kept himself waiting with expressionless face till Mrs. Carter murmured:
"The bill, please?"
Tonelessly he said, "Thirty cents."
Mrs. Carter took out, not three, but four dimes--four nice, shiny, new dimes; she sometimes said at her bank that really she couldn"t touch soiled money. She dropped them on the table-cloth, and went modestly on her way, an honorable, clever, rather kindly and unhappy woman who had just committed murder.
Father picked up the ten-cent tip. With loathing he threw it in the fireplace. Then went, knelt down, and picked it out again. Mother would need all the money he could get for her in the coming wintry days of failure--failure he himself had brought upon her.
CHAPTER VIII
Having once admitted hopelessness, it was humanly natural that they should again hope that they hoped. For perhaps two weeks after the Carters" visit they pretended that the tea-room was open, and they did have six or seven customers. But late in September Father got his courage up, took out the family pen and bottle of ink, the tablet of ruled stationery and a stamped-envelope, and wrote to Mr. J. Pilkings that he wanted his shoe-store job back.
When he had mailed the letter he told Mother. She sighed and said, "Yes, that is better, after all."
An Indian summer of happiness came over them. They were going back to security. Again Father played the mouth-organ a little, and they talked of the familiar city places they would see. They would enjoy the movies--weeks since they had seen a movie! And they would have, Father chucklingly declared, "a bang-up dinner at Bomberghof Terrace, with music, and yes, by Jiminy! and c.o.c.ktails!"
For a week he awaited an answer, waited anxiously, though he kept rea.s.suring himself that old Pilkings had promised to keep the job open for him. He received a reply. But it was from Pilkings"s son. It informed him that Pilkings, _pere_, was rather ill, with grippe, and that until he recovered "no action can be taken regarding your valued proposition in letter of recent date."
Bewildered, incredulous, Father had a flash of understanding that he, who felt himself so young and fit, was already discarded.
Mother sat across the kitchen table from him, pretending to read the _Grimsby Recorder_, but really watching him.
He held his forehead, looked dizzy, and let the letter slip from his fingers. "I--uh--" he groaned. "I-- Is there anything I can do for you around the house?"
"Tell me--what did the letter say?"
"Oh, Mother, Mother, maybe I won"t get my job back at all! I honestly don"t know what we can do."
Running to her, he hid his face in her lap--he, the head of the family, the imperturbable adventurer, changed to a child. And Mother, she who had always looked to him for inspiration, was indeed the mother now. She stroked his cheek, she cried, "Never mind--"course you"ll get it back, or a better one!" She made fun of his tousled hair till she had him ruefully smiling. Her voice had a crisp briskness which it had lacked in the days when she had brooded in the flat and waited for her man.
Father could not face another indefinite period of such inactivity as had been sapping him all summer. He longed for the dusty drudgery of Pilkings & Son"s; longed to be busy all day, and to bring home news--and money--to Mother at night.