One especial Sunday he awakened after a refreshing sleep, stretched his
arms and yawned aloud, then lay pleasantly conscious of the well-being
of his condition--half asleep still, and it was far into the morning!
Belowstairs he could hear the heavy footsteps of Eliza, and fancied the
early presage of dinner. Warrener listened, knowing he should soon hear
another footstep lighter than that of the maid-of-all-work.
“Gert!”
Mrs. Warrener came in.
“It’s twelve o’clock,” she said, “and you’ll just about have time to
get up, take your bath and dress for dinner.”
“All right,” he responded, cheerfully, but did not move. Instead,
putting his hands up behind his head, he watched his wife as she
fetched out his clean clothes and laid them with his Sunday suit over
a chair. As she moved quietly about the room, the man’s feeling of
content grew, added to by the feminine presence and the evidence of
care and wifely attention. The little room was bright with the sunshine
of a mild November day. The chromos, the glaring wall paper, the
cheap oak bedroom set, the thin lace curtains touched with the light,
appeared lovely in their master’s eyes. Before him was the prospect of
a long day of repose, spent in perfect, tranquil laziness, a day in
the fresh country air. There would be no office or telegraph calls,
no duties, no sounds to disturb the hard-earned hours. His relaxed
nerves and body rejoiced in the holiday. He was as happy as he could
ever be--did he know it, would ever be. Years afterward Warrener looked
back at that especial Sunday with something of the same affection he
bestowed upon his marriage memories, and with keener regret.
As Mrs. Warrener went out of the room, he called her:
“Say, Gert!”
She paused at the door, clean towels in her hand. She was going to get
his bath ready.
“Well, what?”
He wanted to call: “Give me a kiss.” But her manner rather distanced
him. So he said: “What’ll you give me if I guess what we’re going to
have for dinner?”
“Nothing,” she laughed. “I should think anybody with a nose would know.
Eliza leaves the kitchen door open all the time.”
“It smells good,” he sniffed. “And it’s away ahead of sandwiches and a
glass of beer; that’s my noon meal, as a rule.”
She warned him he wouldn’t get any dinner at all if he didn’t hurry
up, and in a few moments he heard the running of his bath; the sound,
to his good humor and contented frame of mind, was one more pleasant,
luxurious, agreeable part of the day.
Later, shaved and washed, dressed with great precision and care, he sat
in the parlor, the multitudinous sheets of the New York daily papers
around him.
Gertrude rocked idly in the window, her eyes on the deserted street.
Eliza washed the dinner dishes and put them rattling away, then tramped
up the front stairs, and in gorgeous magnificence went out the back
way, emerging into Grand Street. At the sight of her Mrs. Warrener
said: “I’m going to give you a cold supper, George, some salad and
tea--she’s made biscuits, I guess.”
“Oh, that’s all right. It seems as if we only just got up from dinner.”
He threw his paper down. “Want to take a walk, Gert? It’s nice out, and
I don’t think it’s cold.”
“Well,” she said, indifferently, “I’ll get my hat and coat.”
When she came down Warrener had been walking about his tiny parlor and
dining room, and was still under the spell of householder and in love
with his possessions.
“You’ve got the McAllister wedding present cleaned up fine.”
“It’s the only real silver we’ve got; it makes the other things look
common.”
Mrs. Warrener regarded the display on her buffet with some discontent.
“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the husband. “It’s as good as you can get
anywhere for the money.”
“The McAllisters have come back to Slocum,” his wife mentioned.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Mrs. McAllister used to go to Uncle Samson’s church.
I don’t see why you shouldn’t go up there to call some day.”
Mrs. Warrener had opened the front door and gone out on the stoop;
George, getting into his overcoat, followed her. Side by side they went
slowly down the front steps of the little wooden stoop.
“I shouldn’t know what to say.”
“Oh, she’ll say it all; besides, perhaps she’ll be out--leave a
card--got one of mine?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Well.”
As they turned into Grand Street and hesitated a moment as to their
direction, Warrener suggested:
“Might as well walk along up toward the McAllister place; it’s as good
a walk as any.”
As they started off in the fresh, crisp air, refreshing and sweet
to the man’s nostrils, stimulating and revivifying after his close
confined days, a sudden impulse to have the woman by his side nearer
him overcame him; he drew her arm through his.
“Let’s walk arm in arm, like old married couples.”
But Mrs. Warrener held back and took her arm away.
“No,” she demurred; “I think it’s common.”
In the following days Mrs. Warrener took up her life, or, more
accurately, began it, standing on the threshold of an abyss--the
flight of steps before her that led to the new. As she had never been
particularly interested in anything, she did not know that she was
an invalid with a fatal malady, a malady whose term is too commonly
employed by people whose reason for the state is less apparent than
this woman’s in a country town. She had never heard the word “boredom”
used.
There were half a dozen village friends of Mrs. Warrener’s whose status
was on a higher plane than hers, whose houses had more square feet of
land around them, whose “help” was more efficient. In their parlors now
and then she took an inadequate hand at euchre, and of late she had
been trying to learn bridge. These ladies made the town library and the
little hospital, the Children’s Home and the church interests, run more
or less smoothly; they had a hundred busy, useful interests. They were
good wives and good mothers and good citizens. She had never heard any
of them use the verb “to be bored,” and if she had, she would not have
known what it meant! She suffered under a complaint which, like many
maladies, is less fatal so long as it has no name; but the disease was
too acute to be ignored. It had engendered too many complications.
At the town library the librarian from among the rows of school books
one day handed down to Mrs. Warrener a French dictionary. From the
novel she had read a few days before she had copied out this phrase:
_Ennui_ is like the unseen worm in the wood, that slowly gnaws the
good, clean substance until his parasite presence is declared by
innumerable interstices that finally destroy the wood and proclaim
it rotten to the fiber--_ennui_ had eaten into her, devoured her.
There was not one inch of her that did not ache from desuetude,
from moral inertia.
Gertrude found the word “_ennui_” in the dictionary, and the following
definition: “Listlessness, languor, tedium, lassitude, tiresomeness,”
compared it with her scrap of paper, puzzled her pretty brows until
their lines looked like pain. As she put up the book and left the
library, she said to herself: “Well, I guess that’s what’s the matter
with me.”