CHAPTER IV
Following this little disturbance the Sims couple, lowering their heads, side by side, resolutely regained the smooth rut of their placid existence. Everything in this world is easier than is imagined. Much easier. In the case of the Sims" household, it was just a matter of adding each morning, to the daily shave of Charles-Norton, another operation quite as facile.
"Dolly," he would call, as soon as his hot towel had removed from his ruddy cheeks the last bubbles of lather.
And Dolly, her hungry little scissors agleam in her hand, trotted in alacriously. She sat Charles-Norton on the edge of the tub and bent over him her happy, humming head. Zip-zip-zip, went the scissors, zip-zip--and a soft white fluff that looked like the stuffing of a pillow (an A-one pillow; not the kind upon which Charles-Norton and Dolly laid their modest heads) eddied slowly to Charles-Norton"s feet while he shivered slightly to the coldness of the steel. (Dolly cut very close.)
Then, "All right; all done," she sang, dropping the scissors into the round pocket of her crackling ap.r.o.n; "now to breakfast, quick! And here"s a kiss for the good boy."
Placing her red lips upon his, she whisked off to the kitchenette; and Charles-Norton, emerging all dressed a little later, found the cheerful blue ware on the table, and his waffles upon his plate, hot beneath his napkin. After which, stuffing the morning paper into his pocket, he departed with another kiss on the landing, and strode forth for the L.
Life was just as before.
And yet, not quite. Because, to tell the truth, Charles-Norton was not absolutely happy.
He could not have told what was the matter. Mostly, it was an emptiness.
An emptiness is hard to a.n.a.lyze. He knew that there was much of which he should be content. With the careful repression of the vagaries of his shoulders, there had come to him a new attentiveness at his work. His nose, now, never wandered after pa.s.sing b.u.t.terflies, and his salary had been raised to twenty-two dollars a week. Also, the ridiculous flapping had gone, and the impulse to draw fool lines upon a card.
But with these--and that was the trouble--other things had vanished. That deep filling of his lungs with spring, for instance. And the longing that went with it. That was it--the longing. He longed for the longing--if that is comprehensible. He longed vaguely for a longing that had been his, and which was gone. He never saw, now, a land that was as a golden pool beneath a turquoise dome; nor a boy in the wild oats watching a circling hawk.
And there was something else, something more definite. He felt that Dolly--yes, Dolly took too much pleasure, altogether too much pleasure in that clipping business. Of course, the clipping had to be. He knew that.
A respectable man can"t have feathers on his shoulders. It was necessary.
But somehow he would have felt that necessity more, if Dolly had felt it--less. He would have liked a chance to voice it himself. If Dolly, now, only would, some fine morning, say, "Oh, Goosie, let them be to-day; they are so pretty," then he could have answered, very firmly, "No, clip away!" But she never gave him that chance. She was always so radiantly ready! As he watched her head in the mirror, bent upon the busy scissors with an expression of tight determination, a distinct irritation seized him sometimes.
Charles-Norton, in short, was acc.u.mulating, drop by drop, a masculine grouch. A grouch deeper than he realized, till that morning.
That morning Dolly, in the midst of the daily operation, paused with scissors in air, a sudden inspiration upon her brow.
"Oh, Goosie," she exclaimed; "How would it be to cauterize them?"
Charles-Norton gave a jump. "Cauterize!" he cried; "cauterize what?"
"Why, the little feathers. Supposing we burned the place, you know, with nitrate of silver, or something like that. They do it to people who have moles--or when they have been bitten by a mad dog. Maybe--maybe it would stop it--altogether."
Charles-Norton looked up at her. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes were bright; she was excited and pleased with her ingenious idea. A cold wave rose about Charles-Norton and closed over his head. "Say,"" he bawled ungraciously; "what do you take me for! Think I"m made of asbestos?"
Discreet Dolly immediately dropped the subject; though somehow Charles-Norton had the distinct impression that it was only discreetly that she did so, that, in fact, she was not dropping the idea, but merely tucking it away somewhere within the secret hiding-places of her being, for further use. He could still see it, in fact, graven there upon the whiteness of her voluntary little forehead.
He brooded black over it all day. He brooded on other things, too--insignificant things that had happened in the past, that had not mattered one whit then, but which now, beneath his fostering care, began to grow into big, flapping boog-a-boos. And when he returned that night, he was a very mean Charles-Norton. He spoke hardly a word at dinner, pretended he did not like the vanilla custard over which Dolly had toiled all day, her soul aglow with creative delight, sipped but half of his demi-ta.s.se (as though the coffee were bitter, which it wasn"t), and went off to bed early with a good-night so frigid that Dolly"s little nose tingled for several minutes afterward.
And the next morning, when Dolly, astonished at the delay, finally peeped into the bath-room, scissors in hand, she found Charles-Norton fully dressed, his coat on.
"Why, Goosie," she said in surprise; "I haven"t clipped you yet!"
"No?" he growled enigmatically.
"Take off your coat, dearie," she went on.
"And you"re not going to," said Charles-Norton, finishing his statement with complete disregard of hers.
Dolly stood there a moment, looking at him with head slightly c.o.c.ked to one side. "All right, Goosie," she said cheerily. "Only, don"t get mad at poor little me. Come on to breakfast, you big, s.h.a.ggy bear, you!"
"I don"t _want_ any breakfast," growled Charles-Norton between closed teeth (as a matter of fact, he did, and a fragrance of waffles from the kitchen was at the moment profoundly agitating the pit of his being). "I don"t _want_ any breakfast--where"s my hat--quick, I"m in a hurry--good-by."
And tossing the hat bellicosely upon his head, he pulled to himself the hall door, swaggered through, and let it slam back on his departing heels, right before the astonished nose of his little wife.
She remained there before this rude door, examining its blank surface with a sort of objective curiosity. At the same time she was listening to the sound of steps gradually diminishing down the five flights. She shook her head; "the bad, bad boy!" she said.
She pivoted with a shrug of the shoulders and went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table, all set for breakfast. She took up her fork and cut off a bit of waffle. She placed it in her mouth. Her eyes went off far away.
It took it a long time, this little piece of waffle, to go down. Lordie, what a tough, resilient, flannelly, bit of waffle this was! Suddenly her head went forward. It lit upon the table, in her hands. A cup of the precious blue ware, dislodged, balanced itself a moment on the edge of the table, then, as if giving up hope, let go and crashed to the floor at her feet in many pieces. She gave it no heed. Her head was in her hands, her hands were on the table, her hair lay like a golden delta among plates and saucers; and the table trembled.
CHAPTER V
Meanwhile Charles-Norton was not having such a good time either. Starting off swaggeringly, he had halted three times on his way to the station, and three times had taken at least two steps back toward the flat which he felt desolate behind him. And now in his gla.s.s cage, a weight was at his stomach, a constant weight like an indigestible plum-pudding. At regular intervals, as he bent over his books, he felt his heart descend swiftly to the soles of his feet; he paled at the sight of a telegraph messenger, at the sound of the telephone bell. He had visions of hospitals--of a white cot to which he was brought, a white cot about which grave men stood hopelessly, and on the pillow of which spread a cascade of golden hair. Too imaginative, this Charles-Norton, too imaginative altogether!
He did not know that after a while Dolly had risen, and a bit wearily, with heavy sighs, had washed the dishes; that after this she had put the little flat in order; that during this operation, in spite of her best efforts, she had felt her woe slowly oozing from her; that the provisioning tour in the street and stores gay with gossipy, bargaining young matrons, had almost completed this process; and that a providential peep in a milliner"s window, which had suddenly solved for her the hara.s.sing problem of the spring hat (she had seen one she liked and with a flash of inspiration had seen how she could make one just like it out of her old straw and some feathers long at the bottom of her trunk) had sent her bounding back up her five flights of stairs with a song purring in her heart.
So that when, returning in the evening, Charles-Norton opened the door with bated breath, to find Dolly humming happily in the kitchen, he was struck by something like disappointment. "She"s shallow," he thought; "doesn"t feel." He did not mean by this, of course, that he wished she had in despair done something catastrophic. He meant merely--well, he did not know what he meant. He was disillusioned, that was all. This was but a prosy world after all. Few Heroics here!
And immediately a warning knocked at his consciousness. He must be careful if he were to hold what advantage he had gained in the day. He turned from the kitchen threshold and silently slunk back into the room which was both dining and sitting-room, and isolated himself behind the spread pages of the evening paper. He was curt and cold the entire evening. And in the morning he again left with calculated violence--breakfastless and unsheared.
This time, Dolly did not weep. She sat long on the edge of her bed, thinking silently; then a silver rocket of sound broke the sepulchral quiet of the flat. Dolly had had a vision of what must inevitably happen; and Dolly was laughing.
It took just ten days to happen--ten days which were rather disagreeable, of course, but which Dolly, sure of the trumps in her little hands, bore with jolly fort.i.tude. All that time, Charles-Norton glowered constantly.
He was monosyllabic and ostentatiously unhappy. This more than was necessary, and very deliberate. It had to be deliberate; for, as a matter of fact, on the outside Charles was not having at all a bad time.
The exaltation of the ante-clipping days had returned--returned heightened, and was still growing day by day. A constant joyous babbling, as of some inexhaustible spring, lay at the bottom of his soul. His senses were singularly acute. He thrilled to a leaf, to a bud, to a patch of blue sky; and the thrill remained long, a profound satisfaction within him, after the stimulant had gone. With the resolution of a roue plunging back into his vice after an enforced vacation, he had brought a large sketch book; and he pa.s.sed much time drawing lines into it--rapid beauty streaks that gave him a sensation of birds. He saw often, now, a land which was as a pool of gold beneath a turquoise sky; and a boy in the wild oats watching a circling hawk. At such times his lungs filled deep with the spring, and his arms were apt to beat at his sides in rapid tattoo. This, in fact made up solely his morning exercises now. Standing with legs close together, a-tip-toe, head back and chest forward, placing his hands beneath his shoulders he waved his arms up and down in a beat that rose in fervid crescendo, till his eyes closed and there went through him a soaring ecstasy that threatened at times to lift him from the floor.
All this, of course, was not without its disadvantage. Vaguely he felt that in some subtle way he was gaining the disapproval of his fellows.
Men were apt to look at him askance, half doubtful, half-indignant. They tread on his toes in the Elevated. His work, too, was going to pot; he could not stick to his figures. His chief, an old fragile-necked book-keeper, had spoken to him once.
"Mr. Sims," he had said, after a preliminary little cough; "Mr. Sims, you ought to take care of your health. You are not well."
"Oh, yes I am," answered Charles-Norton, absent-mindedly. His eyes were on the ceiling, where a fly was buzzing. "I"m all right!"
"You should--er--you should consult--a specialist, Mr. Sims. Don"t you know--your shoulders, your back--you should consult a spine-specialist, Mr. Sims."
"Oh, that"s all right," said Charles-Norton, easily. "Don"t worry." And thus he had sent back the old gentleman baffled to his high stool.
And then came Dolly"s day.
"Dolly! Dolly! Dolly!"
It was morning, before breakfast. Charles-Norton was in the bedroom; Dolly was setting the table in the living-room. She paused, and stood very still, while a little knowing smile parted her lips.