on a plank in a building, and he heard some one say:
“I believe the old boy’s English.”
He looked round. There were a lot of men lying there, and others in
khaki and white overalls were busy among them. He sat up, rubbed his
head, and said:
“Hi, Mister, where be I now?”
Some one laughed, and a young man came up and said:
“Well, old man, you were very nearly in hell. Who the devil are you?”
Some one came up, and two of them were discussing him. One of them said:
“He’s quite all right. He was only knocked out. Better take him in to
the colonel. He may be a spy.”
The other came up, touched his shoulder, and remarked:
“Can you walk, Uncle?”
He replied:
“Aye, I can walk all roight.”
“That’s an old sport!”
The young man took his arm and helped him out of the room into a
courtyard. They entered another room, where an elderly, kind-faced
officer was seated at a desk. The officer looked up and exclaimed:
“Good God! Bradshaw, do you know who you’ve got there?”
The younger one said:
“No. Who, sir?”
“It’s Paul Jouperts!” exclaimed the colonel.
“Paul Jouperts! Great Scott!”
The older officer addressed himself to Sam. He said:
“Well, we’ve got you once more, Paul. We shall have to be a little more
careful this time.”
The young officer said:
“Shall I detail a squad, sir?”
“We can’t shoot him without a courtmartial,” replied the kind-faced
senior.
Then Sam interpolated:
“Look ’ee ’ere, sir, I’m fair’ sick of all this. My name bean’t Paul.
My name’s Sam. I was a-thinnin’ a loine o’ turnips--”
Both officers burst out laughing, and the younger one said:
“Good! damn good! Isn’t it amazing, sir, the way they not only learn
the language, but even take the trouble to learn a dialect!”
The older man busied himself with some papers.
“Well, Sam,” he remarked, “you shall be given a chance to prove your
identity. Our methods are less drastic than those of your _Boche_
masters. What part of England are you supposed to come from? Let’s see
how much you can bluff us with your topographical knowledge.”
“I was a-thinnin’ a loine o’ turnips this mornin’ at ’alf-past seven on
Mr. Hodge’s farm at Halvesham when one o’ these ’ere airyplanes came
down among the swedes. I tells ’e to get clear o’ that, when the feller
what gets out o’ the car ’e drahs a revowlver and ’e says, ‘You must
’company I--’”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted the senior officer, “that’s all very good. Now
tell me--where is Halvesham? What is the name of the local vicar? I’m
sure you’d know that.”
Old Sam rubbed his chin.
“I sits under the Reverend David Pryce, Mister, and a good, God-fearin’
man he be. I took him a cookin’ o’ runner beans on’y yesterday. I
works for Mr. Hodge, what owns Greenway Manor and ’as a stud-farm at
Newmarket, they say.”
“Charles Hodge?” asked the young officer.
“Aye, Charlie Hodge. You write and ask un if he knows old Sam Gates.”
The two officers looked at each other, and the older one looked at Sam
more closely.
“It’s very extraordinary,” he remarked.
“Everybody knows Charlie Hodge,” added the younger officer.
It was at that moment that a wave of genius swept over old Sam. He put
his hand to his head and suddenly jerked out:
“What’s more, I can tell ’ee where this yere Paul is. He’s actin’ a
gardener in a convent at--” He puckered up his brows, fumbled with his
hat, and then got out, “Mighteno.”
The older officer gasped.
“Mailleton-en-haut! Good God! what makes you say that, old man?”
Sam tried to give an account of his experience and the things he had
heard said by the German officers; but he was getting tired, and he
broke off in the middle to say:
“Ye haven’t a bite o’ somethin’ to eat, I suppose, Mister; or a glass
o’ beer? I usually ’as my dinner at twelve o’clock.”
Both the officers laughed, and the older said:
“Get him some food, Bradshaw, and a bottle of beer from the mess. We’ll
keep this old man here. He interests me.”
While the younger man was doing this, the chief pressed a button and
summoned another junior officer.
“Gateshead,” he remarked, “ring up the G. H. Q. and instruct them to
arrest the gardener in that convent at the top of the hill and then to
report.”
The officer saluted and went out, and in a few minutes a tray of hot
food and a large bottle of beer were brought to the old man, and he
was left alone in the corner of the room to negotiate this welcome
compensation. And in the execution he did himself and his county
credit. In the meanwhile the officers were very busy. People were
coming and going and examining maps, and telephone bells were ringing
furiously. They did not disturb old Sam’s gastric operations. He
cleaned up the mess tins and finished the last drop of beer. The senior
officer found time to offer him a cigarette, but he replied:
“Thank ’ee kindly, sir, but I’d rather smoke my pipe.”
The colonel smiled and said:
“Oh, all right; smoke away.”
He lighted up, and the fumes of the shag permeated the room. Some one
opened another window, and the young officer who had addressed him at
first suddenly looked at him and exclaimed:
“Innocent, by God! You couldn’t get shag like that anywhere but in
Norfolk.”
It must have been an hour later when another officer entered and
saluted.
“Message from the G. H. Q., sir,” he said.
“Well?”
“They have arrested the gardener at the convent of St. Eloise, and they
have every reason to believe that he is the notorious Paul Jouperts.”
The colonel stood up, and his eyes beamed. He came over to old Sam and
shook his hand.
“Mr. Gates,” he said, “you are an old brick. You will probably hear
more of this. You have probably been the means of delivering something
very useful into our hands. Your own honor is vindicated. A loving
Government will probably award you five shillings or a Victoria Cross
or something of that sort. In the meantime, what can I do for you?”
Old Sam scratched his chin.
“I want to get back ’ome,” he said.
“Well, even that might be arranged.”
“I want to get back ’ome in toime for tea.”
“What time do you have tea?”
“Foive o’clock or thereabouts.”
“I see.”
A kindly smile came into the eyes of the colonel. He turned to another
officer standing by the table and said:
“Raikes, is any one going across this afternoon with despatches?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the other officer. “Commander Jennings is leaving
at three o’clock.”
“You might ask him if he could see me.”
Within ten minutes a young man in a flight-commander’s uniform entered.
“Ah, Jennings,” said the colonel, “here is a little affair which
concerns the honor of the British army. My friend here, Sam Gates, has
come over from Halvesham, in Norfolk, in order to give us valuable
information. I have promised him that he shall get home to tea at five
o’clock. Can you take a passenger?”
The young man threw back his head and laughed.
“Lord!” he exclaimed, “what an old sport! Yes, I expect I can manage
it. Where is the God-forsaken place?”
A large ordnance-map of Norfolk (which had been captured from a German
officer) was produced, and the young man studied it closely.
At three o’clock precisely old Sam, finding himself something of a hero
and quite glad to escape from the embarrassment which the position
entailed upon him, once more sped skyward in a “dratted airyplane.”
At twenty minutes to five he landed once more among Mr. Hodge’s swedes.
The breezy young airman shook hands with him and departed inland. Old
Sam sat down and surveyed the familiar field of turnips.
“A noice thing, I must say!” he muttered to himself as he looked along
the lines of unthinned turnips. He still had twenty minutes, and so
he went slowly along and completed a line which he had begun in the
morning. He then deliberately packed up his dinner-things and his tools
and started out for home.
As he came round the corner of Stillway’s meadow and the cottage came
in view, his niece stepped out of the copse with a basket on her arm.
“Well, Uncle,” she said, “is there any noos?”
It was then that old Sam really lost his temper.
“Noos!” he said. “Noos! Drat the girl! What noos should there be?
Sixty-nine year’ I live in these ’ere parts, hoein’ and weedin’ and
thinnin’, and mindin’ Charlie Hodge’s sheep. Am I one o’ these ’ere
story-book folk havin’ noos ’appen to me all the time? Ain’t it enough,
ye silly, dab-faced zany, to earn enough to buy a bite o’ some’at to
eat and a glass o’ beer and a place to rest a’s head o’night without
always wantin’ noos, noos, noos! I tell ’ee it’s this that leads ’ee to
’alf the troubles in the world. Devil take the noos!”
And turning his back on her, he went fuming up the hill.
_Collier’s, The National Weekly_
“MOMMA”
BY
RUPERT HUGHES
“MOMMA”[4]
By RUPERT HUGHES
Momma was sick, right sick. Momma was awful sick! Momma looked like she
was going to die any minute. And she didn’t care if she did. She up and
as good as told Poppa that.
Poppa was scared almost to death when he realized it. He was all alone
with her, and had none of the children to talk to about it; though, for
the matter of that, Momma and Poppa had never told the children about
their own ailments. And now the children had growed up and vamoosed.
All that was left of the fact that there ever had been any children
round the place was the two old names Momma and Poppa that the old
folks had caught by contagion and got to calling each other by from
hearing themselves called them by the children when they were children.
Momma and Poppa had been drifting down life like a pair of old mud
turtles floating south on an old log. And now all of a sudden one of
them felt that the other’n was going to roll off into the muddy water
and sink downward, backward, dead!
Perhaps the poor turtles know and grieve and mourn to the full capacity
of their tight shells.
But Poppa was a human, gifted with sympathy. He was old acquaintances
with grief of every sort, a pitiful postgraduate in all a man knows
who has been a lover, a husband, and a father, and has seen children
born from one pain and ache to another and another, who has seen
some of his own little children die, or pray for death in the long
procession of disappointments and thwarted hopes that begin with the
first irretrievable rattle lost over the edge of the crib, and pass on
to the rainy holidays, the sunny schooldays, the warm Christmases,
cracked dolls, lost games, indignities from parents who misunderstand
and spank, from sweethearts who misunderstand and flirt, and so on and
so forth to the dreary, shabby campfollower sorrows that trudge along
at the tail end of the parade.
Poppa’s habit had been to take things as they come, because, as
somebody said, that’s the only way they come. He had grown so jaded
with existence that he became a veteran Horatio, who, as Will
Shakespeare said, “fortune’s buffets and rewards hast ta’en with equal
thanks.”
Nothing had excited him much of late at the store, at home, at church,
the lodge, or in the newspapers. As he had worn what seemed to be the
same suit of clothes for years, so his face had worn the same suit of
expressions. It was hard to tell his smile from his scowl. Funny things
all had a touch of misfortune in them for somebody, and sad things were
all kind of funny, so the same twitch at the muscles about his mouth
served for an acknowledgment of everything unusual.
But now, when Momma almost wisht she was dead, that last dreadful
word twitched Poppa’s very heart. He felt as if in the calm slumber
of habitude somebody had reached into his breast and given his heart
a yank. And it shivered and rattled as an old doorbell clamors pulled
hard at midnight by somebody crying: “Wake up! Your house is on fire!”
* * * * *
Poppa woke up. Instinct told him that he must save Momma and himself
from the incredible disaster of her death. His business worries had
kept him from noticing the little symptoms of her decline, though she
had stopped quarreling with him, and had simply quarreled with life,
with everything: the food, the neighbors, her clothes, the weather, her
stummick, her head, her eyes, her feet, her hands, her appetite, her
looks--she even complained of her looks!
And now, as if scales had been scraped off his eyes, Poppa saw that
Momma didn’t look good. She didn’t look a bit good. She looked
something scandalous.
Poppa belonged to a lodge, and he had gone to numberless funerals. Yet
he had hardly even imagined that some day his fellow members might
in turn come to his house, all dressed up with sashes and plumes and
swords, to march alongside the black wagon that should carry his one
woman in a box to a ditch.
As if some one had set a moving picture going against the wall of his
own sitting room, he saw the whole thing, and he shuddered back from
it with a cry that struck inward and cut downward and stuck. He had a
fishbone in his throat.
He became suddenly young and arrantly afraid. He wanted to run to his
wife and cling to her and beg her not to think of such things. But he
had given up the habit of hugging Momma or taking her into his lap or
sitting on the arm of her chair since the ancient days when the first
child began to take notice.
He wanted to go back to the old ways, but it would have looked foolish,
and the two frumps had been afraid of each other’s love for years and
years.
He did nothing and said nothing; but he did a heap of thinking. “Heap”
was the word, for his thoughts were like a pile of dead leaves,
tarnished, crumpled brown leaves that had been green and radiant and
breathing once.
His thoughts were a heap of autumnal rubbish set on fire. Red torment
ran through them, and they writhed and twisted as if a new life had
come back to them just that they might suffer a little more.
The terror stung him to a determination. “I’ll call the doctor,” he
said. He rose from his chair and shuffled to the telephone. Momma ran
after him and dragged his hands down, crying: “I don’t want to see that
old fool. I’ll go jump in the river if you send for him. I couldn’t
stand the sight of him.”
“When a woman’s too sick to see the doctor,” Poppa said, “it’s high
time somebody called him in.”
He backed round and bunted her away with the minimum of grace and the
maximum of devotion, and held her at a distance until he got the number.
Momma flopped helplessly into a chair and cried like a petulant little
girl, while Poppa ordered the doctor to put on his shoes and come right
over.
She was still pouting like a little girl when Dr. Noxon came. Her lips
were pushed out and her chin was purse-drawn when he asked her what was
the matter of her. He held her wrist in one hand and his watch in the
other, glanced at her tongue, and in a lowered voice asked one or two
very personal questions.
Poppa did most of the talking, while Dr. Noxon nodded and said: “I see,
I see.” As might have been expected, he left two sets of pills, one
kind to be taken after each meal and before retiring, and another kind
of pill to be taken on arising and every three hours.
Momma could hardly keep from laughing in the old owl’s face, and as
soon as he closed the door she bust right out. It was not a nice
laugh--hysterics like. She whooped: “I’ve seen that old nuisance leave
those same fool pills on those same fool pieces of paper since we first
came to Carthage and called him in. Everybody that ever took ’em has
died, and I guess it’s my turn! And I don’t care!”
Her laughter ended in the wild weeping of a young girl, and Poppa was
almost distracted. She went to bed all wore out, but she couldn’t sleep.
She kept him awake worse when she laid still trying not to wake him
than she did when she thrashed about and groaned.
* * * * *
That was a long night, and Poppa entertained a whole herd of nightmares
without falling asleep, or, if he did, he didn’t know it and it didn’t
do him a mite of good.
He waited a day or two to see what effect Dr. Noxon’s immemorial pills
would have. They had even less effect than he expected they would.
The third day he took the almost sacrilegious step of seeing one of the
other doctors. Dr. Champe refused to call since Mrs. Lundy was known
to be one of Dr. Noxon’s regular customers, a life member in his pill
association.
But Poppa threatened to brain Champe if he didn’t see Momma, and he
consented to see her if she would call after dark. Poppa had to drive
her there “like a pig to market,” he said, and he was more wore out
than what she was.
Dr. Champe gave spoon medicines. They were bittersweet and sticky, and
had no effect whatever except to cause a brief ague of nausea and leave
a nasty taste on the tongue.
A third doctor tried massage, another electricity. Momma even flirted
with science--science with a capital S. But the optimism that was
ladled out to her made her sicker than Dr. Champe’s sticky sweet
medicine. She was in one of those moods when a cheerful word or a smile
is a deadly insult.
The last doctor in town advised a trip, a change of climate and
environment. Momma ridiculed the idea, but Poppa telegraphed their
married daughter in Terre Haute that Momma was coming, and he fairly
boosted her on the train.
Momma was dismal and ashamed of being dumped as a burden on a daughter
she had always babied even after Hattie (now Mrs. Fred Eppes) had
babies of her own. So the reunion lacked the delight that belonged to
the occasion.
Hattie hugged her mother hard and squealed: “Why, Momma, you’re looking
fine!”
Momma was doleful enough to remember her own woes, and she groaned:
“You just say that! I don’t feel a bit good and I’m a sight! Don’t show
me to any of your swell Terra Hut friends, for I’ll disgrace you.”
Hattie had hard sledding before her. Her mother did not even want
to cheer up. She wanted to be sick, and she doubled her misery by
bewailing the fact that she couldn’t throw off her gloom. She tried to
smile once or twice, but Hattie begged her not to.
Since Momma would neither go calling nor receive callers, she was not
easy to entertain. She was ashamed of her shabby clothes and her dowdy
appearance, and so was Hattie.
Hattie would not admit it, though she did say that Poppa, with all his
money, ought to dress her up better. Poor Poppa had tried to. The
average American husband does not often get the chance to complain of
his wife’s thrift in clothes, but Mr. Lundy, little as he noticed such
things, had finally urged Momma to spend a little more money on duds
now that the children were buying their own. But his well-meant hints
had only depressed her the more, and she had retorted that he was sick
and tired of her and her old face.
He had dropped the subject. Hattie had no better success. All that
she succeeded in accomplishing was a round of the Terre Haute
physicians--especially of those frightful personages known as
“specialists.” Each of these found his specialty in Momma, and went
after it. One of them got away with a large number of her teeth before
she could fight him off.
Others offered to remove various parts of her, but she declined to be
separated from any more of her fixtures.
She reduced Hattie’s general practitioner almost to nervous
prostration, and at last, in order to get her off his hands and off her
daughter’s nerves, he casually recommended a New York specialist, Dr.
Courtneidge, who had the monopoly on a very abstruse operation dealing
with the pancreas or something that Momma didn’t even know she had.
She was quite overawed at finding herself the proud possessor of such
a thing. She felt like an old watch that has suddenly learned it has
had jewelled movements all these years. But after a few hours of being
interested in herself she slumped again and said she guessed she’d take
her old pancreas back to Carthage with her. She’d got along with it so
far, and, seeing as she’d denied herself a trip to New York all her
life for fun, she certainly wa’nt going all that ways to let a doctor
poke a knife into her.
Hattie fumed and bullied in vain for a day or two, then she fired off a
telegram to Poppa to come over at once.
* * * * *
Poppa was putting through a big land deal and the telegram nearly
jolted him out of his wits. He would not wait to extend his option.
He ran down to the station and swung on a train just pulling out.
He did not even stop for the collar, toothbrush, and nightgown that
constituted his usual going-away equipment.
He spent a horrible night in the smoking car, sleeping among his
distorted limbs like a wrecked grasshopper. At Terre Haute he took a
taxicab to Hattie’s house, and was in such a mental and facial disarray
when he rang the bell that the maid who answered it slammed the door
on him and ran to tell her mistress that there was a crazy man on the
porch.
Hattie peeked through the little side window and recognized her father,
and flung open the door and her arms to him.
He expected to find Momma on her deathbed, but she was at breakfast,
crying into her rolled oats.
“What on earth is the matter of you, Momma?” he gasped.
“Nothing’s the matter of me,” she snapped. “What on earth’s the matter
of you? Had your breakfast? Sed-down! And--Hattie, could you ask your
girl to fry him a negg--turned over, you remember; and if the coffee’s
out, here you can have the rest of mine.”
Poppa sank into a chair and consented to break his fast while the news
was broken to him. The word “pancreas” dazed him. It sounded like
something for breakfast till Hattie explained. Then he was convinced.
There is something about a new word that solves all mysteries for most
people, and Poppa was very much like most people.
When Hattie had explained that Dr. Appleyard himself had settled upon
the pancreas and its malfunctioning, or something like that, as the
secret of Momma’s indomitable obscurities, Poppa set his jaw.
“When’s first train to N’York?” he asked.
“I’m not goin’, I tell you,” Momma pealed. “I’m not goin’ one step.”
“You are goin’!” Poppa stormed. “Why ain’t you goin’?”
“Because it costs too much money.”
That is a thing a man likes to say for himself. He cannot endure to
hear anyone else tell it to him. It is insulting. When the children
were young, Momma had always said it first when she wanted to make
sure of his consenting to an expenditure. Things she would never have
browbeaten or wept out of him into permitting, she could always force
him to force her to accept by that approach--using the word “force” as
card tricksters do when they deftly permit you to drag from them the
one card that will work the trick.
But now Momma was not stacking the cards. She had economized for so
many decades that money had become a thing sacrosanct. Unwittingly she
had dealt Poppa the deadliest humiliation in her power, for he was what
Carthage people called “rich”; he had lands and lands in his own and
Momma’s name, and big sums out on mortgages.
A standard of living that had been forced on him by his early poverty
had sufficed him in his gradual wealth.
A new suit of clothes was a nuisance. Extra servants were like
unwelcome guests that never went home. The simplest food everlastingly
repeated was all his stomach craved.
Momma would as soon have had the measles as a limousine, and jewels
on her fingers would have crippled her like inflammatory rheumatism.
The changing styles of Paris interested her as much as the tides of
Barnegat. She had not changed the manner of wearing her hair since she
was a mother for the first time, and her dresses were made by a sewing
woman who was more interested in the gossip of the families she moved
among than in the daily hints from Paris.
With money pouring in in amounts whose importance neither husband nor
wife ever thought of translating into luxuries, and seeping out in a
slow trickle, the old couple had come near to being misers without
dreaming of stinginess.
This last big land deal of Poppa’s had brought him to a sudden
realization that he was a pretty big fellow. The banks had begun to
turn to him with opportunities for large turnovers, and bonds were
offered him in bundles.
And so when Momma implied that a trip to New York, to save her life
maybe, was beyond his means, he was hurt and enraged, and in his anger
he rose to an eloquence of gallantry he never would have achieved in a
more temperate mood.
“Too much money, hey? You think you can’t afford it, do you? Well, let
me tell you that I can afford to send you to any town that anybody
else can afford to go to. And if that old pankers doctor has got any
patients at tall besides millionaires, and if he don’t charge more’n
a hundred thousand dollars a patient, you can have the best operation
he’s got in his shop.”
Momma braced up a bit at this and gave Hattie a proud look as much as
to say: “You haven’t married the only successful man in the world, Mrs.
Eppes.” But she shook her head.