center of the empty living-room. He was leaning on his stick and gazing
fixedly upward at the ornate chandelier. It was a handsome fixture, and
boasted some of the most advanced ideas in modern lighting equipment.
Yet it scarcely seemed to warrant the passionate scrutiny which T.
A. Buck was bestowing upon it. So rapt was his gaze that when the
telephone-bell shrilled unexpectedly in the hallway he started so that
his stick slipped on the polished floor, and as Emma McChesney and the
still voluble agent emerged from the kitchen the dignified head of the
firm of T. A. Buck and Company presented an animated picture, one leg in
the air, arms waving wildly, expression at once amazed and hurt.
Emma McChesney surveyed him wide-eyed. The agent, unruffled, continued
to talk on his way to the telephone.
“It only looks small to you,” he was saying. “Fact is, most people think
it's too large. They object to a big kitchen. Too much work.” He gave
his attention to the telephone.
Emma McChesney looked troubled. She stood in the doorway, head on one
side, as one who conjures up a mental picture.
“Come here,” she commanded suddenly, addressing the startled T. A. “You
nagged until I had to take you along. Here's a chance to justify your
coming. I want your opinion on the kitchen.”
“Kitchens,” announced T. A. Buck of the English clothes and the
gardenia, “are my specialty,” and entered the domain of the gas-range
and the sink.
Emma McChesney swept the infinitesimal room with a large gesture.
“Considering it as a kitchen, not as a locker, does it strike you as
being adequate?”
T. A. Buck, standing in the center of the room, touched all four walls
with his stick.
“I've heard,” he ventured, “that they're--ah--using 'em small this
year.”
Emma McChesney's eyes took on a certain wistful expression. “Maybe. But
whenever I've dreamed of a home, which was whenever I got lonesome on
the road, which was every evening for ten years, I'd start to plan a
kitchen. A kitchen where you could put up preserves, and a keg of dill
pickles, and get a full-sized dinner without getting things more than
just comfortably cluttered.”
T. A. Buck reflected. He flapped his arms as one who feels pressed for
room. “With two people occupying the room, as at present, the presence
of one dill pickle would sort of crowd things, not to speak of a keg of
'em, and the full-sized dinner, and the--er--preserves. Still--”
“As for a turkey,” wailed Emma McChesney, “one would have to go out on
the fire-escape to baste it.”
The swinging door opened to admit the agent. “Would you excuse me?
A party down-stairs--lease--be back in no time. Just look about--any
questions--glad to answer later--”
“Quite all right,” Mrs. McChesney assured him. Her expression was one of
relief as the hall door closed behind him. “Good! There's a spot in the
mirror over the mantel. I've been dying to find out if it was a flaw in
the glass or only a smudge.”
She made for the living-room. T. A. Buck followed thoughtfully.
Thoughtfully and interestedly he watched her as she stood on tiptoe,
breathed stormily upon the mirror's surface, and rubbed the moist place
with her handkerchief. She stood back a pace, eyes narrowed critically.
“It's gone, isn't it?” she asked.
T. A. Buck advanced to where she stood and cocked his head too,
judicially, and in the opposite direction to which Emma McChesney's head
was cocked. So that the two heads were very close together.
“It's a poor piece of glass,” he announced at last.
A simple enough remark. Perhaps it was made with an object in view, but
certainly it was not meant to bring forth the storm of protest that
came from Emma McChesney's lips. She turned on him, lips quivering, eyes
wrathful.
“You shouldn't have come!” she cried. “You're as much out of place in a
six-room flat as a truffle would be in a boiled New England dinner. Do
you think I don't see its shortcomings? Every normal woman, no matter
what sort of bungalow, palace, ranch-house, cave, cottage, or tenement
she may be living in, has in her mind's eye a picture of the sort of
apartment she'd live in if she could afford it. I've had mine mapped
out from the wall-paper in the front hall to the laundry-tubs in the
basement, and it doesn't even bear a family resemblance to this.”
“I'm sorry,” stammered T. A. Buck. “You asked my opinion and I--”
“Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion
when it was asked this would be a miserable world. I asked you because
I wanted you to lie. I expected it of you. I needed bolstering up.
I realize that the rent I'm paying and the flat I'm getting form a
geometrical problem where X equals the unknown quantity and only the
agent knows the answer. But it's going to be a home for Jock and me.
It's going to be a place where he can bring his friends; where he can
have his books, and his 'baccy, and his college junk. It will be
the first real home that youngster has known in all his miserable
boarding-house, hotel, boys' school, and college existence. Sometimes
when I think of what he's missed, of the loneliness and the neglect when
I was on the road, of the barrenness of his boyhood, I--”
T. A. Buck started forward as one who had made up his mind about
something long considered. Then he gulped, retreated, paced excitedly
to the door and back again. On the return trip he found smiling and
repentant Emma McChesney regarding him.
“Now aren't you sorry you insisted on coming along? Letting yourself in
for a ragging like that? I think I'm a wee bit taut in the nerves at the
prospect of seeing Jock--and planning things with him--I--”
T. A. Buck paused in his pacing. “Don't!” he said. “I had it coming to
me. I did it deliberately. I wanted to know how you really felt about
it.”
Emma McChesney stared at him curiously. “Well, now you know. But I
haven't told you half. In all those years while I was selling T. A.
Buck's Featherloom Petticoats on the road, and eating hotel food that
tasted the same, whether it was roast beef or ice-cream, I was planning
this little place. I've even made up my mind to the scandalous price I'm
willing to pay a maid who'll cook real dinners for us and serve them as
I've always vowed Jock's dinners should be served when I could afford
something more than a shifting hotel home.”
T. A. Buck was regarding the head of his if walking-stick with a gaze as
intent as that which he previously had bestowed upon the chandelier. For
that matter it was a handsome enough stick--a choice thing in malacca.
But it was scarcely more deserving than the chandelier had been.
Mrs. McChesney had wandered into the dining-room. She peered out of
windows. She poked into butler's pantry. She inspected wall-lights. And
still T. A. Buck stared at his stick.
“It's really robbery,” came Emma McChesney's voice from the next room.
“Only a New York agent could have the nerve to do it. I've a friend who
lives in Chicago--Mary Cutting. You've heard me speak of her. Has a
flat on the north side there, just next door to the lake. The rent
is ridiculous; and--would you believe it?--the flat is equipped with
bookcases, and gorgeous mantel shelves, and buffet, and bathroom
fixtures, and china-closets, and hall-tree--”
Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen.
When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the
absurdly low-priced Chicago flat, thus:
“--and full-length mirrors, and wonderful folding table-shelf gimcracks
in the kitchen, and--”
T. A. Buck did not look up. But, “Oh, Chicago!” he might have been heard
to murmur, as only a New-Yorker can breathe those two words.
“Don't 'Oh, Chicago!' like that,” mimicked Emma McChesney. “I've lain
awake nights dreaming of a home I once saw there, with the lake in
the back yard, and a couple of miles of veranda, and a darling
vegetable-garden, and the whole place simply honeycombed with bathrooms,
and sleeping-porches, and sun-parlors, and linen-closets, and--gracious,
I wonder what's keeping Jock!”
T. A. Buck wrenched his eyes from his stick. All previous remarks
descriptive of his eyes under excitement paled at the glow which lighted
them now. They glowed straight into Emma McChesney's eyes and held them,
startled.
“Emma,” said T. A. Buck quite calmly, “will you marry me? I want to
give you all those things, beginning with the lake in the back yard and
ending with the linen-closets and the sun-parlor.”
And Emma McChesney, standing there in the middle of the dining-room
floor, stared long at T. A. Buck, standing there in the center of the
living-room floor. And if any human face, in the space of seventeen
seconds, could be capable of expressing relief, and regret, and alarm,
and dismay, and tenderness, and wonder, and a great womanly sympathy,
Emma McChesney's countenance might be said to have expressed all those
emotions--and more. The last two were uppermost as she slowly came
toward him.
“T. A.,” she said, and her voice had in it a marvelous quality, “I'm
thirty-nine years old. You know I was married when I was eighteen and
got my divorce after eight years. Those eight years would have left any
woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up
life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and
sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood
over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by
its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank God! I said
then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. And
now--”
There was something almost fine in the lines of T. A. Buck's too
feminine mouth and chin; but not fine enough.
“Now, Emma,” he repeated, “will you marry me?”
Emma McChesney's eyes were a wonderful thing to see, so full of pain
were they, so wide with unshed tears.
“As long as--he--lived,” she went on, “the thought of marriage was
repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I
picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that
seemed to waver and dance”--she covered her eyes with her hand for a
moment--“'McChesney--Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven years.
Funeral to-day from Howland Brothers' chapel. Aberdeen and Edinburgh
papers please copy!'”
[Illustration: “'Emma.' he said, 'will you marry me?'”]
T. A. Buck took the hand that covered her eyes and brought it gently
down.
“Emma,” he said, “will you marry me?”
“T. A., I don't love you. Wait! Don't say it! I'm thirty-nine, but
I'm brave and foolish enough to say that all these years of work, and
disappointment, and struggle, and bitter experience haven't convinced
me that love does not exist. People have said about me, seeing me in
business, that I'm not a marrying woman. There is no such thing as that.
Every woman is a marrying woman, and sometimes the light-heartedest, and
the scoffingest, and the most self-sufficient of us are, beneath it all,
the marryingest. Perhaps I'm making a mistake. Perhaps ten years from
now I'll be ready to call myself a fool for having let slip what the
wise ones would call a 'chance.' But I don't think so, T. A.”
“You know me too well,” argued T. A. Buck rather miserably. “But at
least you know the worst of me as well as the best. You'd be taking no
risks.”
Emma McChesney walked to the window. There was a little silence. Then
she finished it with one clean stroke. “We've been good business
chums, you and I. I hope we always shall be. I can imagine nothing more
beautiful on this earth for a woman than being married to a man she
cares for and who cares for her. But, T. A., you're not the man.”
And then there were quick steps in the corridor, a hand at the
door-knob, a slim, tall figure in the doorway. Emma McChesney seemed to
waft across the rooms and into the embrace of the slim, tall figure.
“Welcome--home!” she cried. “Sketch in the furniture to suit yourself.”
“This is going to be great--great!” announced Jock. “What do you know
about the Oriental potentate down-stairs! I guess Otis Skinner has
nothing on him when it comes--Why, hello, Mr. Buck!” He was peering into
the next room. “Why don't you folks light up? I thought you were another
agent person. Met that one down in the hail. Said he'd be right up.
What's the matter with him anyway? He smiles like a waxworks. When the
elevator took me up he was still smiling from the foyer, and I could
see his grin after the rest of him was lost to sight. Regular Cheshire.
What's this? Droring-room?”
[Illustration: “'Welcome home!' she cried. 'Sketch in the furniture to
suit yourself'”]
He rattled on like a pleased boy. He strode over to shake hands with
Buck. Emma McChesney, cheeks glowing, eyed him adoringly. Then she gave
a little suppressed cry.
“Jock, what's happened?”
Jock whirled around like a cat. “Where? When? What?”
Emma McChesney pointed at him with one shaking finger. “You! You're
thin! You're--you're emaciated. Your shoulders, where are they?
Your--your legs--”
Jock looked down at himself. His glance was pride. “Clothes,” he said.
“Clothes?” faltered his mother.
“You're losing your punch, Mother? You used to be up on men's rigging.
All the boys look like their own shadows these days. English cut. No
padding. No heels. Incurve at the waist. Watch me walk.” He flapped
across the room, chest concave, shoulders rounded, arms hanging limp,
feet wide apart, chin thrust forward.
“Do you mean to tell me that's your present form of locomotion?”
demanded his mother.
“I hope so. Been practising it for weeks. They call it the juvenile
jump, and all our best leading men have it. I trailed Douglas Fairbanks
for days before I really got it.”
And the tension between T. A. Buck and Emma McChesney snapped with
a jerk, and they both laughed, and laughed again, at Jock's air of
offended dignity. They laughed until the rancor in the heart of the man
and the hurt and pity in the heart of the woman melted into a bond of
lasting understanding.
“Go on--laugh!” said Jock. “Say, Mother, is there a shower in the
bathroom, h'm?” And was off to investigate.
The laughter trailed away into nothingness. “Jock,” called his mother,
“do you want your bedroom done in plain or stripes?”
“Plain,” came from the regions beyond. “Got a lot of pennants and
everything.”
T. A. Buck picked up his stick from the corner in which it stood.
“I'll run along,” he said. “You two will want to talk things over
together.” He raised his voice to reach the boy in the other room. “I'm
off, Jock.”
Jock's protest sounded down the hall. “Don't leave me alone with her.
She'll blarney me into consenting to blue-and-pink rosebud paper in my
bedroom.”
T. A. Buck had the courage to smile even at that. Emma McChesney was
watching him, her clear eyes troubled, anxious.
At the door Buck turned, came back a step or two. “I--I think, if you
don't mind, I'll play hooky this time and run over to Atlantic City for
a couple of days. You'll find things slowing up, now that the holidays
are so near.”
“Fine idea--fine!” agreed Emma McChesney; but her eyes still wore the
troubled look.
“Good-by,” said T. A. Buck abruptly.
“Good--” and then she stopped. “I've a brand-new idea. Give you
something to worry about on your vacation.”
“I'm supplied,” answered T. A. Buck grimly.
“Nonsense! A real worry. A business worry. A surprise.”
Jock had joined them, and was towering over his mother, her hand in his.
T. A. Buck regarded them moodily. “After your pajama and knickerbocker
stunt I'm braced for anything.”
“Nothing theatrical this time,” she assured him. “Don't expect a show
such as you got when I touched off the last fuse.”
An eager, expectant look was replacing the gloom that bad clouded his
face. “Spring it.”
Emma McChesney waited a moment; then, “I think the time has come to put
in another line--a staple. It's--flannel nightgowns.”
“Flannel nightgowns!” Disgust shivered through Buck's voice. “_Flannel
nightgowns!_ They quit wearing those when Broadway was a cow-path.”
“Did, eh?” retorted Emma McChesney. “That's the New-Yorker speaking.
Just because the French near-actresses at the Winter Garden wear silk
lace and sea-foam nighties in their imported boudoir skits, and just
because they display only those frilly, beribboned handmade affairs
in the Fifth Avenue shop-windows, don't you ever think that they're a
national vice. Let me tell you,” she went on as T. A. Buck's demeanor
grew more bristlingly antagonistic, “there are thousands and thousands
of women up in Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Oregon, and
Alaska, and Nebraska, and Dakota who are thankful to retire every night
protected by one long, thick, serviceable flannel nightie, and one
practical hot-water bag. Up in those countries retiring isn't a social
rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full,
roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A. Buck
Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after
knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork.”
The moody look was quite absent from T. A. Buck's face now, and the
troubled look from Emma McChesney's eyes.
“Well,” Buck said grudgingly, “if you were to advise making up a line of
the latest models in deep-sea divers' uniforms, I suppose I'd give in.
But flannel nightgowns! In the twentieth century--flannel night--”
“Think it over,” laughed Emma McChesney as he opened the door. “We'll
have it out, tooth and nail, when you get back.”
The door closed upon him. Emma McChesney and her son were left alone in
their new home to be.
“Turn out the light, son,” said Emma McChesney, “and come to the window.
There's a view! Worth the money, alone.”
Jock switched off the light. “D' you know, Blonde, I shouldn't wonder if
old T. A.'s sweetish on you,” he said as he came over to the window.
“Old!”
“He's forty or over, isn't he?”
“Son, do you realize your charming mother's thirty-nine?”
“Oh, you! That's different. You look a kid. You're young in all the
spots where other women of thirty-nine look old. Around the eyes, and
under the chin, and your hands, and the corners of your mouth.”
In the twilight Emma McChesney turned to stare at her son. “Just where
did you learn all that, young 'un? At college?”
And, “Some view, isn't it, Mother?” parried Jock. The two stood there,
side by side, looking out across the great city that glittered and swam
in the soft haze of the late November afternoon. There are lovelier
sights than New York seen at night, from a window eyrie with a mauve
haze softening all, as a beautiful but experienced woman is softened by
an artfully draped scarf of chiffon. There are cities of roses, cities
of mountains, cities of palm-trees and sparkling lakes; but no sight,
be it of mountains, or roses, or lakes, or waving palm-trees, is more
likely to cause that vague something which catches you in the throat.
It caught those two home-hungry people. And it opened the lips of one of
them almost against his will.
“Mother,” said Jock haltingly, painfully, “I came mighty near coming
home--for good--this time.”
His mother turned and searched his face in the dim light.
“What was it, Jock?” she asked, quite without fuss.
The slim young figure in the jumping juvenile clothes stirred and tried
to speak, tried again, formed the two words: “A--girl.”
Emma McChesney waited a second, until the icy, cruel, relentless hand
that clutched her very heart should have relaxed ever so little. Then,
“Tell me, sonny boy,” she said.
“Why, Mother--that girl--” There was an agony of bitterness and of
disillusioned youth in his voice.
Emma McChesney came very close, so that her head, in the pert little
close-fitting hat, rested on the boy's shoulder. She linked her arm
through his, snug and warm.
“That girl--” she echoed encouragingly.
And, “That girl,” went on Jock, taking up the thread of his grief, “why,
Mother, that--girl--”
THE END