Going home that night Mr. Hendricks met Edith Boyd, and accompanied her
for a block or two. At his corner he stopped.
“How's your mother, Edith?”
It was Mr. Hendricks' business to know his ward thoroughly.
“About the same. She isn't really sick, Mr. Hendricks. She's just low
spirited, but that's enough. I hate to go home.”
Hendricks hesitated.
“Still, home's a pretty good place,” he said. “Especially for a pretty
girl.” There was unmistakable meaning in his tone, and she threw up her
head.
“I've got to get some pleasure out of life, Mr. Hendricks.”
“Sure you have,” he agreed affably. “But playing around with Louis Akers
is like playing with a hand-grenade, Edith.” She said nothing. “I'd cut
him out, little girl. He's poor stuff. Mind, I'm not saying he's a fool,
but he's a bad actor. Now if I was a pretty girl, and there was a nice
fellow around like this Cameron, I'd be likely to think he was all
right. He's got brains.” Mr. Hendricks had a great admiration for
brains.
“I'm sick of men.”
He turned at her tone and eyed her sharply.
“Well, don't judge them all by Akers. This is my corner. Good-night. Not
afraid to go on by yourself, are you?”
“If I ever was I've had a good many chances to get over it.”
He turned the corner, but stopped and called after her.
“Tell Dan I'll be in to see him soon, Edith. Haven't seen him since he
came back from France.”
“All right.”
She went on, her steps lagging. She hated going home. When she reached
the little house she did not go in at once. The March night was not
cold, and she sat the step, hoping to see her mother's light go out in
the second-story front windows. But it continued to burn steadily, and
at last, with a gesture of despair, she rose and unlocked the door.
Almost at once she heard footsteps above, and a peevish voice.
“That you, Edie?”
“Yes.”
“D'you mind bringing up the chloroform liniment and rubbing my back?”
“I'll bring it, mother.”
She found it on the wainscoting in the untidy kitchen. She could hear
the faint scurrying of water beetles over the oilcloth-covered floor,
and then silence. She fancied myriads of tiny, watchful eyes on her,
and something crunched under her foot. She felt like screaming. That new
clerk at the store was always talking about homes. What did he know
of squalid city houses, with their insects and rats, their damp, moldy
cellars, their hateful plumbing? A thought struck her. She lighted the
gas and stared around. It was as she had expected. The dishes had not
been washed. They were piled in the sink, and a soiled dish-towel had
been thrown over them.
She lowered the gas and went upstairs. The hardness had, somehow, gone
out of her when she thought of Willy Cameron.
“Back bad again, is it?” she asked.
“It's always bad. But I've got a pain in my left shoulder and down my
arm that's driving me crazy. I couldn't wash the dishes.”
“Never mind the dishes. I'm not tired. Now crawl into bed and let me rub
you.”
Mrs. Boyd complied. She was a small, thin woman in her early fifties,
who had set out to conquer life and had been conquered by it. The
hopeless drab of her days stretched behind her, broken only by the
incident of her widowhood, and stretched ahead hopelessly. She had
accepted Dan's going to France resignedly, with neither protest nor
undue anxiety. She had never been very close to Dan, although she
loved him more than she did Edith. She was the sort of woman who has
no fundamental knowledge of men. They had to be fed and mended for, and
they had strange physical wants that made a great deal of trouble in the
world. But mostly they ate and slept and went to work in the morning,
and came home at night smelling of sweat and beer.
There had been one little rift in the gray fog of her daily life,
however. And through it she had seen Edith well married, with perhaps
a girl to do the house work, and a room where Edith's mother could fold
her hands and sit in the long silences without thought that were her
sanctuary against life.
“Is that the place, mother?”
“Yes.” Edith's unwonted solicitude gave her courage.
“Edie, I want to ask you something.”
“Well?” But the girl stiffened.
“Lou hasn't been round, lately.”
“That's all over, mother.”
“You mean you've quarreled? Oh, Edie, and me planning you'd have a nice
home and everything.”
“He never meant to marry me, if that's what you mean.”
Mrs. Boyd turned on her back impatiently.
“You could have had him. He was crazy about you. Trouble is with you,
you think you've got a fellow hard and fast, and you begin acting up.
Then, first thing you know--”
Some of that strange new tolerance persisted in the girl. “Listen,
mother,” she said. “I give you my word, Lou'd run a mile if he thought
any girl wanted to marry him. I know him better than you do. If any one
ever does rope him in, he'll stick about three months, and then beat
it.”
“I don't know why we have to have men, anyhow. Put out the gas, Edie.
No, don't open the window. The night air makes me cough.”
Edith started downstairs and set to work in the kitchen. Something
would have to be done about the house. Dan was taking to staying out
at nights, because the untidy rooms repelled him. And there was the
question of food. Her mother had never learned to cook, and recently
more and more of the food had been something warmed out of a tin. If
only they could keep a girl, one who would scrub and wash dishes. There
was a room on the third floor, an attic, full now of her mother's untidy
harborings of years, that might be used for a servant. Or she could move
up there, and they could get a roomer. The rent would pay a woman to
come in now and then to clean up.
She had played with that thought before, and the roomer she had had in
mind was Willy Cameron. But the knowledge that he knew the Cardews
had somehow changed all that. She couldn't picture him going from this
sordid house to the Cardew mansion, and worse still, returning to it
afterwards. She saw him there, at the Cardews, surrounded by bowing
flunkies--a picture of wealth gained from the movies--and by women
who moved indolently, trailing through long vistas of ball room and
conservatory in low gowns without sleeves, and draped with ropes of
pearls. Women who smoked cigarettes after dinner and played bridge for
money.
She hated the Cardews.
On her way to her room she paused at her mother's door.
“Asleep yet, mother?”
“No. Feel like I'm not going to sleep at all.”
“Mother,” she said, with a desperate catch in her voice, “we've got to
change things around here. It isn't fair to Dan, for one thing. We've
got to get a girl to do the work. And to do that we'll have to rent a
room.”
She heard the thin figure twist impatiently.
“I've never yet been reduced to taking roomers, and I'm not going to let
the neighbors begin looking down on me now.”
“Now, listen, mother--”
“Go on away, Edie.”
“But suppose we could get a young man, a gentleman, who would be out all
but three evenings a week. I don't know, but Mr. Cameron at the store
isn't satisfied where he is. He's got a dog, and they haven't any yard.
We've got a yard.”
“I won't be bothered with any dog,” said the querulous voice, from the
darkness.
With a gesture of despair the girl turned away. What was the use,
anyhow? Let them go on, then, her mother and Dan. Only let them let her
go on, too. She had tried her best to change herself, the house, the
whole rotten mess. But they wouldn't let her.
Her mood of disgust continued the next morning. When, at eleven o'clock,
Louis Akers sauntered in for the first time in days, she looked at him
somberly but without disdain. Lou or somebody else, what did it
matter? So long as something took her for a little while away from
the sordidness of home, its stale odors, its untidiness, its querulous
inmates.
“What's got into you lately, Edith?” he inquired, lowering his voice.
“You used to be the best little pal ever. Now the other day, when I
called up--”
“Had the headache,” she said laconically. “Well?”
“Want to play around this evening?”
She hesitated. Then she remembered where Willy Cameron would be that
night, and her face hardened. Had any one told Edith that she was
beginning to care for the lame young man in the rear room, with
his exaggerated chivalry toward women, his belief in home, and his
sentimental whistling, she would have laughed. But he gave her something
that the other men she knew robbed her of, a sort of self-respect. It
was perhaps not so much that she cared for him, as that he enabled her
to care more for herself.
But he was going to dinner with Lily Cardew.
“I might, depending on what you've got to offer.”
“I've got a car now, Edith. I'm not joking. There was a lot of outside
work, and the organization came over. I've been after it for six months.
We can have a ride, and supper somewhere. How's the young man with the
wooden leg?”
“If you want to know I'll call him out and let him tell you.”
“Quick, aren't you?” He smiled down at where she stood, firmly
entrenched behind a show case. “Well, don't fall in love with him.
That's all. I'm a bad man when I'm jealous.”
He sauntered out, leaving Edith gazing thoughtfully after him. He did
not know, nor would have cared had he known, that her acceptance of his
invitation was a complex of disgust of home, of the call of youth, and
of the fact that Willy Cameron was dining at the Cardews that night.