upon hotel and dining-car food Mrs. Emma McChesney, representing the T.
A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, wondered if, perhaps, she did not
need a bottle of bitter tonic. On the fifth day she noticed that there
were chills chasing up and down her spine, and back and forth from
legs to shoulder-blades when other people were wiping their chins and
foreheads with bedraggled-looking handkerchiefs, and demanding to know
how long this heat was going to last, anyway. On the sixth day she lost
all interest in T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. And then she knew
that something was seriously wrong. On the seventh day, when the blonde
and nasal waitress approached her in the dining-room of the little hotel
at Glen Rock, Minnesota, Emma McChesney's mind somehow failed to grasp
the meaning of the all too obvious string of questions which were put to
her--questions ending in the inevitable “Tea, coffee 'r milk?” At that
juncture Emma McChesney had looked up into the girl's face in a puzzled,
uncomprehending way, had passed one hand dazedly over her hot forehead,
and replied, with great earnestness:
“Yours of the twelfth at hand and contents noted ... the greatest little
skirt on the market ... he's going to be a son to be proud of, God bless
him ... Want to leave a call for seven sharp--”
The lank waitress's face took on an added blankness. One of the two
traveling men at the same table started to laugh, but the other put out
his hand quickly, rose, and said, “Shut up, you blamed fool! Can't you
see the lady's sick?” And started in the direction of her chair.
Even then there came into Emma McChesney's ordinarily well-ordered,
alert mind the uncomfortable thought that she was talking nonsense. She
made a last effort to order her brain into its usual sane clearness,
failed, and saw the coarse white table-cloth rising swiftly and
slantingly to meet her head.
[Illustration: “'Shut up, you blamed fool! Can't you see the lady's
sick?'”]
It speaks well for Emma McChesney's balance that when she found herself
in bed, two strange women, and one strange man, and an all-too-familiar
bell-boy in the room, she did not say, “Where am I? What happened?”
Instead she told herself that the amazingly and unbelievably handsome
young man bending over her with a stethoscope was a doctor; that
the plump, bleached blonde in the white shirtwaist was the hotel
housekeeper; that the lank ditto was a waitress; and that the expression
on the face of each was that of apprehension, tinged with a pleasurable
excitement. So she sat up, dislodging the stethoscope, and ignoring the
purpose of the thermometer which had reposed under her tongue.
“Look here!” she said, addressing the doctor in a high, queer voice. “I
can't be sick, young man. Haven't time. Not just now. Put it off until
August and I'll be as sick as you like. Why, man, this is the middle of
June, and I'm due in Minneapolis now.”
“Lie down, please,” said the handsome young doctor, “and don't dare
remove this thermometer again until I tell you to. This can't be put off
until August. You're sick right now.”
Mrs. McChesney shut her lips over the little glass tube, and watched
the young doctor's impassive face (it takes them no time to learn that
trick) and, woman-wise, jumped to her own conclusion.
“How sick?” she demanded, the thermometer read.
“Oh, it won't be so bad,” said the very young doctor, with a
professionally cheerful smile.
Emma McChesney sat up in bed with a jerk. “You mean--sick! Not ill,
or grippy, or run down, but sick! Trained-nurse sick! Hospital sick!
Doctor-twice-a-day sick! Table-by-the-bedside-with-bottles-on-it sick!”
“Well--a--” hesitated the doctor, and then took shelter behind a
bristling hedge of Latin phrases. Emma McChesney hurdled it at a leap.
“Never mind,” she said. “I know.” She looked at the faces of those four
strangers. Sympathy--real, human sympathy--was uppermost in each. She
smiled a faint and friendly little smile at the group. And at that the
housekeeper began tucking in the covers at the foot of the bed, and the
lank waitress walked to the window and pulled down the shade, and the
bell-boy muttered something about ice-water. The doctor patted her wrist
lightly and reassuringly.
“You're all awfully good,” said Emma McChesney, her eyes glowing with
something other than fever. “I've something to say. It's just this.
If I'm going to be sick I'd prefer to be sick right here, unless it's
something catching. No hospital. Don't ask me why. I don't know. We
people on the road are all alike. Wire T. A. Buck, Junior, of the
Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York. You'll find plenty of clean
nightgowns in the left-hand tray of my trunk, covered with white tissue
paper. Get a nurse that doesn't sniffle, or talk about the palace she
nursed in last, where they treated her like a queen and waited on her
hand and foot. For goodness' sake, put my switch where nothing will
happen to it, and if I die and they run my picture in the _Dry Goods
Review_ under the caption, 'Veteran Traveling Saleswoman Succumbs at
Glen Rock,' I'll haunt the editor.” She paused a moment.
“Everything will be all right,” said the housekeeper, soothingly.
“You'll think you're right at home, it'll be so comfortable. Was there
anything else, now?”
“Yes,” said Emma McChesney. “The most important of all. My son, Jock
McChesney, is fishing up in the Canadian woods. A telegram may not reach
him for three weeks. They're shifting about from camp to camp. Try to
get him, but don't scare him too much. You'll find the address under J.
in my address book in my handbag. Poor kid. Perhaps it's just as well he
doesn't know.”
Perhaps it was. At any rate it was true that had the tribe
of McChesney been as the leaves of the trees, and had it
held a family reunion in Emma McChesney's little hotel bedroom,
it would have mattered not at all to her. For she _was_
sick--doctor-three-times-a-day-trained-nurse-bottles-by-the-bedside
sick, her head, with its bright hair rumpled and dry with the fever,
tossing from side to side on the lumpy hotel pillow, or lying terribly
silent and inert against the gray-white of the bed linen. She never
quite knew how narrowly she escaped that picture in the _Dry Goods
Review_.
Then one day the fever began to recede, slowly, whence fevers come,
and the indefinable air of suspense and repression that lingers about
a sick-room at such a crisis began to lift imperceptibly. There came a
time when Emma McChesney asked in a weak but sane voice:
“Did Jock come? Did they cut off my hair?”
“Not yet, dear,” the nurse had answered to the first, “but we'll hear in
a day or so, I'm sure.” And, “Your lovely hair! Well, not if I know it!”
to the second.
The spirit of small-town kindliness took Emma McChesney in its arms. The
dingy little hotel room glowed with flowers. The story of the sick woman
fighting there alone in the terrors of delirium had gone up and down
about the town. Housewives with a fine contempt for hotel soups sent
broths of chicken and beef. The local members of the U. C. T. sent roses
enough to tax every vase and wash-pitcher that the hotel could muster,
and asked their wives to call at the hotel and see what they could do.
The wives came, obediently, but with suspicion and distrust in their
eyes, and remained to pat Emma McChesney's arm, ask to read aloud to
her, and to indulge generally in that process known as “cheering her
up.” Every traveling man who stopped at the little hotel on his way to
Minneapolis added to the heaped-up offerings at Emma McChesney's shrine.
Books and magazines assumed the proportions of a library. One could see
the hand of T. A. Buck, Junior, in the cases of mineral water, quarts
of wine, cunning cordials and tiny bottles of liqueur that stood in
convivial rows on the closet shelf and floor. There came letters, too,
and telegrams with such phrases as “let nothing be left undone” and
“spare no expense” under T. A. Buck, Junior's, signature.
So Emma McChesney climbed the long, weary hill of illness and pain,
reached the top, panting and almost spent, rested there, and began the
easy descent on the other side that led to recovery and strength.
But something was lacking. That sunny optimism that had been Emma
McChesney's most valuable asset was absent. The blue eyes had lost their
brave laughter. A despondent droop lingered in the corners of the mouth
that had been such a rare mixture of firmness and tenderness. Even the
advent of Fat Ed Meyers, her keenest competitor, and representative of
the Strauss Sans-silk Company, failed to awaken in her the proper spirit
of antagonism. Fat Ed Meyers sent a bunch of violets that devastated
the violet beds at the local greenhouse. Emma McChesney regarded them
listlessly when the nurse lifted them out of their tissue wrappings. But
the name on the card brought a tiny smile to her lips.
“He says he'd like to see you, if you feel able,” said Miss Haney, the
nurse, when she came up from dinner.
Emma McChesney thought a minute. “Better tell him it's catching,” she
said.
“He knows it isn't,” returned Miss Haney. “But if you don't want him,
why--”
“Tell him to come up,” interrupted Emma McChesney, suddenly.
A faint gleam of the old humor lighted up her face when Fat Ed Meyers
painfully tip-toed in, brown derby in hand, his red face properly
doleful, brown shoes squeaking. His figure loomed mountainous in a
light-brown summer suit.
“Ain't you ashamed of yourself?” he began, heavily humorous. “Couldn't
you find anything better to do in the middle of the season? Say, on the
square, girlie, I'm dead sorry. Hard luck, by gosh! Young T. A. himself
went out with a line in your territory, didn't he? I didn't think that
guy had it in him, darned if I did.”
“It was sweet of you to send all those violets, Mr. Meyers. I hope
you're not disappointed that they couldn't have been worked in the form
of a pillow, with 'At Rest' done in white curlycues.”
“Mrs. McChesney!” Ed Meyers' round face expressed righteous reproof,
pain, and surprise. “You and I may have had a word, now and then, and I
will say that you dealt me a couple of low-down tricks on the road, but
that's all in the game. I never held it up against you. Say, nobody ever
admired you or appreciated you more than I did--”
“Look out!” said Emma McChesney. “You're speaking in the past tense.
Please don't. It makes me nervous.”
Ed Meyers laughed, uncomfortably, and glanced yearningly toward the
door. He seemed at a loss to account for something he failed to find in
the manner and conversation of Mrs. McChesney.
“Son here with you, I suppose,” he asked, cheerily, sure that he was on
safe ground at last.
Emma McChesney closed her eyes. The little room became very still. In a
panic Ed Meyers looked helplessly from the white face, with its hollow
cheeks and closed eyelids to the nurse who sat at the window. That
discreet damsel put her finger swiftly to her lips, and shook her head.
Ed Meyers rose, hastily, his face a shade redder than usual.
“Well, I guess I gotta be running along. I'm tickled to death to find
you looking so fat and sassy. I got an idea you were just stalling for
a rest, that's all. Say, Mrs. McChesney, there's a swell little dame in
the house named Riordon. She's on the road, too. I don't know what her
line is, but she's a friendly kid, with a bunch of talk. A woman always
likes to have another woman fussin' around when she's sick. I told her
about you, and how I'd bet you'd be crazy to get a chance to talk
shop and Featherlooms again. I guess you ain't lost your interest in
Featherlooms, eh, what?”
Emma McChesney's face indicated not the faintest knowledge of
Featherloom Petticoats. Ed Meyers stared, aghast. And as he stared
there came a little knock at the door--a series of staccato raps, with
feminine knuckles back of them. The nurse went to the door, disapproval
on her face. At the turning of the knob there bounced into the room a
vision in an Alice-blue suit, plumes to match, pearl earrings, elaborate
coiffure of reddish-gold and a complexion that showed an unbelievable
trust in the credulity of mankind.
“How-do, dearie!” exclaimed the vision. “You poor kid, you! I heard you
was sick, and I says, 'I'm going up to cheer her up if I have to miss
my train out to do it.' Say, I was laid up two years ago in Idaho Falls,
Idaho, and believe me, I'll never forget it. I don't know how sick I
was, but I don't even want to remember how lonesome I was. I just clung
to the chamber-maid like she was my own sister. If your nurse wants to
go out for an airing I'll sit with you. Glad to.”
“That's a grand little idea,” agreed Ed Meyers. “I told 'em you'd
brighten things up. Well, I'll be going. You'll be as good as new in a
week, Mrs. McChesney, don't you worry. So long.” And he closed the door
after himself with apparent relief.
Miss Haney, the nurse, was already preparing to go out. It was her
regular hour for exercise. Mrs. McChesney watched her go with a sinking
heart.
“Now!” said Miss Riordon, comfortably, “we girls can have a real,
old-fashioned talk. A nurse isn't human. The one I had in Idaho Falls
was strictly prophylactic, and antiseptic, and she certainly could
give the swell alcohol rubs, but you can't get chummy with a human
disinfectant. Your line's skirts, isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“Land, I've heard an awful lot about you. The boys on the road certainly
speak something grand of you. I'm really jealous. Say, I'd love to show
you some of my samples for this season. They're just great. I'll just
run down the hall to my room--”
She was gone. Emma McChesney shut her eyes, wearily. Her nerves were
twitching. Her thoughts were far, far away from samples and sample
cases. So he had turned out to be his worthless father's son after all!
He must have got some news of her by now. And he ignored it. He was
content to amuse himself up there in the Canadian woods, while his
mother--
Miss Riordon, flushed, and panting a little, burst into the room again,
sample-case in hand.
“Lordy, that's heavy! It's a wonder I haven't killed myself before now,
wrestling with those blamed things.”
Mrs. McChesney sat up on one elbow as Miss Riordon tugged at the
sample-case cover. Then she leaned forward, interested in spite of
herself at sight of the pile of sheer, white, exquisitely embroidered
and lacy garments that lay disclosed as the cover fell back.
“Oh, lingerie! That's an ideal line for a woman. Let's see the yoke in
that first nightgown. It's a really wonderful design.”
Miss Riordon laughed and shook out the folds of the topmost garment.
“Nightgown!” she said, and laughed again. “Take another look.”
“Why, what--” began Emma McChesney.
“Shrouds!” announced Miss Riordon complacently.
“Shrouds!” shrieked Mrs. McChesney, and her elbow gave way. She fell
back on the pillow.
“Beautiful, ain't they?” Miss Riordon twirled the white garment in her
hand. “They're the very newest thing. You'll notice they're made up
slightly hobble, with a French back, and high waist-line in the front.
Last season kimono sleeves was all the go, but they're not used this
season. This one--”
“Take them away!” screamed Emma McChesney hysterically. “Take them away!
Take them away!” And buried her face in her trembling white hands.
Miss Riordon stared. Then she slammed the cover of the case, rose, and
started toward the door. But before she reached it, and while the sick
woman's sobs were still sounding hysterically the door flew open to
admit a tall, slim, miraculously well-dressed young man. The next
instant Emma McChesney's lace nightgown was crushed against the top of
a correctly high-cut vest, and her tears coursed, unmolested, down the
folds of an exquisitely shaded lavender silk necktie.
“Jock!” cried Emma McChesney; and then, “Oh, my son, my son, my
beautiful boy!” like a woman in a play.
Jock was holding her tight, and patting her shoulder, and pressing his
healthy, glowing cheek close to hers that was so gaunt and pale.
“I got seven wires, all at the same time. They'd been chasing me for
days, up there in the woods. I thought I'd never get here.”
And at that a wonderful thing happened to Emma McChesney. She lifted her
face, and showed dimples where lines had been, smiles where tears had
coursed, a glow where there had been a grayish pallor. She leaned back a
bit to survey this son of hers.
“Ugh! how black you are!” It was the old Emma McChesney that spoke. “You
young devil, you're actually growing a mustache! There's something hard
in your left-hand vest pocket. If it's your fountain pen you'd better
rescue it, because I'm going to hug you again.”
But Jock McChesney was not smiling. He glanced around the stuffy little
hotel room. It looked stuffier and drearier than ever in contrast
with his radiant youth, his glowing freshness, his outdoor tan, his
immaculate attire. He looked at the astonished Miss Riordon. At his
gaze that lady muttered something, and fled, sample-case banging at
her knees. At the look in his eyes his mother hastened, woman-wise, to
reassure him.
[Illustration: “At his gaze that lady fled, sample-case banging at her
knees”]
“It wasn't so bad, Jock. Now that you're here, it's all right. Jock, I
didn't realize just what you meant to me until you didn't come. I didn't
realize--”
Jock sat down at the edge of the bed, and slid one arm under his
mother's head. There was a grim line about his mouth.
“And I've been fishing,” he said. “I've been sprawling under a tree in
front of a darned fool stream and wondering whether to fry 'em for lunch
now, or to put my hat over my eyes and fall asleep.”
His mother reached up and patted his shoulder. But the line around
Jock's jaw did not soften. He turned his head to gaze down at his
mother.
“Two of those telegrams, and one letter, were from T. A. Buck, Junior,”
he said. “He met me at Detroit. I never thought I'd stand from a total
stranger what I stood from that man.”
“Why, what do you mean?” Alarm, dismay, astonishment were in her eyes.
“He said things. And he meant 'em. He showed me, in a perfectly
well-bred, cleancut, and most convincing way just what a miserable,
selfish, low-down, worthless young hound I am.”
“He--dared!--”
“You bet he dared. And then some. And I hadn't an argument to come back
with. I don't know just where he got all his information from, but it
was straight.”
He got up, strode to the window, and came back to the bed. Both hands
thrust deep in his pockets, he announced his life plans, thus:
“I'm eighteen years old. And I look twenty-three, and act
twenty-five--when I'm with twenty-five-year-olds. I've been as much help
and comfort to you as a pet alligator. You've always said that I was to
go to college, and I've sort of trained myself to believe I was. Well,
I'm not. I want to get into business, with a capital B. And I want to
jump in now. This minute. I've started out to be a first-class slob,
with you keeping me in pocket money, and clothes, and the Lord knows
what all. Why, I--”
“Jock McChesney,” said that young man's bewildered mother, “just what
did T. A. Buck, Junior, say to you anyway?”
“Plenty. Enough to make me see things. I used to think that I wanted to
get into one of the professions. Professions! You talk about the romance
of a civil engineer's life! Why, to be a successful business man these
days you've got to be a buccaneer, and a diplomat, and a detective, and
a clairvoyant, and an expert mathematician, and a wizard. Business--just
plain everyday business--is the gamiest, chanciest, most thrilling line
there is to-day, and I'm for it. Let the other guy hang out his shingle
and wait for 'em. I'm going out and get mine.”
“Any particular line, or just planning to corner the business market
generally?” came a cool, not too amused voice from the bed.
“Advertising,” replied Jock crisply. “Magazine advertising, to start
with. I met a fellow up in the woods--named O'Rourke. He was a star
football man at Yale. He's bucking the advertising line now for the
_Mastodon Magazine_. He's crazy about it, and says it's the greatest
game ever. I want to get into it now--not four years from now.”
He stopped abruptly. Emma McChesney regarded him, eyes glowing. Then
she gave a happy little laugh, reached for her kimono at the foot of the
bed, and prepared to kick off the bedclothes.
“Just run into the hall a second, son,” she announced. “I'm going to get
up.”
“Up! No, you're not!” shouted Jock, making a rush at her. Then, in the
exuberance of his splendid young strength, he picked her up, swathed
snugly in a roll of sheeting and light blanket, carried her to the big
chair by the window, and seated himself, with his surprised and laughing
mother in his arms.
But Mrs. McChesney was serious again in a moment. She lay with her head
against her boy's breast for a while. Then she spoke what was in her
sane, far-seeing mind.
[Illustration: “In the exuberance of his young strength, he picked her
up”]
“Jock, if I've ever wished you were a girl, I take it all back now. I'd
rather have heard what you just said than any piece of unbelievable
good fortune in the world. God bless you for it, dear. But, Jock, you're
going to college. No--wait a minute. You'll have a chance to prove the
things you just said by getting through in three years instead of the
usual four. If you're in earnest you can do it. I want my boy to start
into this business war equipped with every means of defense. You
called it a game. It's more than that--it's a battle. Compared to the
successful business man of to-day the Revolutionary Minute Men were
as keen and alert as the Seven Sleepers. I know that there are more
non-college men driving street-cars than there are college men. But that
doesn't influence me. You could get a job now. Not much of a position,
perhaps, but something self-respecting and fairly well-paying.
It would teach you many things. You might get a knowledge
of human nature that no college could give you. But there's
something--poise--self-confidence--assurance--that nothing but college
can give you. You will find yourself in those three years. After you
finish college you'll have difficulty in fitting into your proper niche,
perhaps, and you'll want to curse the day on which you heeded my advice.
It'll look as though you had simply wasted those three precious years.
But in five or six years after, when your character has jelled, and
you've hit your pace, you'll bless me for it. As for a knowledge of
humanity, and of business tricks--well, your mother is fairly familiar
with the busy marts of trade. If you want to learn folks you can spend
your summers selling Featherlooms with me.”
“But, mother, you don't understand just why--”
“Yes, dear 'un, I do. After all, remember you're only eighteen. You'll
probably spend part of your time rushing around at class proms with a
red ribbon in your coat lapel to show you're on the floor committee. And
you'll be girl-fussing, too. But you'd be attracted to girls, in or
out of college, and I'd rather, just now, that it would be some pretty,
nice-thinking college girl in a white sweater and a blue serge skirt,
whose worst thought was wondering if you could be cajoled into taking
her to the Freshman-Sophomore basketball game, than some red-lipped,
black-jet-earringed siren gazing at you across the table in some
basement cafe. And, goodness knows, Jock, you wear your clothes so
beautifully that even the haberdashers' salesmen eye you with respect.
I've seen 'em. That's one course you needn't take at college.”
Jock sat silent, his face grave with thought. “But when I'm earning
money--real money--it's off the road for you,” he said, at last. “I
don't want this to sound like a scene from East Lynne, but, mother--”
“Um-m-m-m--ye-ee-es,” assented Emma McChesney, with no alarming
enthusiasm. “Jock dear, carry me back to bed again, will you? And then
open the closet door and pull out that big sample-case to the side of
my bed. The newest Fall Featherlooms are in it, and somehow, I've just a
whimsy notion that I'd like to look 'em over.”
VIII
CATCHING UP WITH CHRISTMAS