don’t want to go,” he protested stoutly, “it wouldn’t be the same thing
at all without you.”
——“Everything is ready now,” said his wife. “Though I do hate to disturb
Edith and Alan. I’ll just run up and hear the children say their prayers
before I put those things on the table. If you would just take a look at
the furnace—” it was the sentence Mr. Belmore had been dreading—“and
then you can come up and kiss the children good night.”
Mr. Belmore, on his way up from stoking, caught a glimpse projected from
the parlor mirror through an aperture in the doorway which the porti—res
had left uncovered. The reflection was of a girl, with tear-stained face
and closed eyes, her head upon a young man’s shoulder, while his lips
were touchingly pressed to her hair. The picture might have been called
“After the Storm,” the wreckage was so plainly apparent. As Mr. Belmore
turned after ascending the flight of stairs he came full in sight of
another picture, spread out to view in the room at the end of the hall.
He stood unseen in the shadow regarding it.
His wife sat in a low chair near one of the two white beds; little
Dorothy’s crib was in their room, beyond. The three children were
perched on the foot of the nearest bed, white-gowned, with rosy faces
and neatly brushed hair. While he looked, the youngest child gave a
birdlike flutter and jump, and lighted on the floor, falling on her
knees, with her bowed head in the mother’s lap, her hands upraised. As
she finished the murmured prayer, helped by the tender mother-voice, she
rose and stood to one side, in infantine seriousness, while the next one
spread her white plumes for the same flight, waiting afterwards in
reverent line with the first as the third hovered down.
It was plain to see from the mother’s face that she had striven to put
all earthly thoughts aside in the performance of this sacred office of
ministering to innocence; her eyes must be holy when her children’s
looked up at her on their way to God.
This was the little inner chapel, the Sanctuary of Home, where she was
priestess by divine right. It would have been an indifferent man,
indeed, who had not fallen upon his knees in spirit, in company with
this little household of faith, in mute recognition of the love and
peace and order that crowned his days.
He kissed the laughing children as they clung to him, before she turned
down the light. When she came out of the room he was waiting for her. He
put his arm around her as he said, with the darling tenderness that made
her life,
“Come along, old sweetness. We’ve got to go down and stir up those
lunatics again. Call _that_ ‘the happiest time of your life!’ _We_ know
better than that, don’t we, petty? I’ll tell you what it is: I’ll go to
church with you next Sunday, if you say so!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Married Quarters
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Married Quarters
MR. BROOKTON RIVERS watched the spark at the end of his cigar as he held
the short stub between his thumb and forefinger. It was going out. While
he had had that cigar to smoke his mind had been at rest, for he knew
that he was going to sit in that particular angle in the piazza until he
finished it, which would be about half-past eight. After that—what?
He threw away the cigar and leaned meditatively forward to catch a
glimpse of the moon as it rose over the patch of straggling woods next
to the Queen Anne cottage opposite him. It showed a deserted piazza, and
a man and his wife and two small children walking past it. The man
walked with the heavy, shuffling steps of a laborer, and the woman, in a
white shirt-waist and a dragging skirt, held one child by the hand,
while the other, in tiny trousers, toddled bow-leggedly behind. As they
vanished down the street, two silent men on bicycles sped past, their
little lamps twinkling in the shadows; then half a dozen more, laughing
and calling to each other, then a swiftly driven buggy that sent the
dust flying up on the vines that were already laden with it. The
prevailing smell of the humid night was of damp weeds. It was also very
hot.
There were no lights in the house opposite, nor in the one next to it,
or in the one next to that, nor were there any, as he knew without
seeing, in either of the houses next to his own. From farther down the
street came the sound of a jangling piano, obstructed intermittently by
the loud, unvaried barking of a melancholy dog. From nearer by the
persistent wail of a very young infant, protesting already against
existence in such a hot world, became more and more unbearable each
instant. Mr. Rivers absent-mindedly killed three feasting mosquitoes at
a blow, and rose to his feet with determination. He could stay here no
longer. Should he go out, or retire to his room in the doubtful comfort
of extreme negligee, and read?
It will, of course, be evident to the meanest suburban intelligence that
the month was August, and that Mrs. Rivers was away, as were most of her
immediate neighbors, enjoying a holiday by either mountains or seashore.
Rivers could see in imagination how glorious this moonlight became as
the waves rolled into its path and broke there on the wet sands into a
delicious rush and swirl of silvery sparkling foam. He could smell the
very perfume of the sea, and feel the cold breath that the water exhales
with one’s face close down by it, no matter how warm the night. It had
been a pretty bad day in town. He was glad, very glad, that Elizabeth
had the change. She needed it. He had said this stoutly to himself many
times in the last six weeks, and knew that it was true. She had
protested against going, and only yielded at last for the children’s
sake and in wifely obedience to lawful masculine authority. He had
insisted on sleeping in the house alone, in defiance of her pleading,
alleging an affinity for his own bed, his own belongings, and an
individual bath tub. A woman came once a week to sweep and straighten up
the house. He had repeatedly declared there would be really nothing to
do after business hours but to go around and enjoy himself. He had made
her almost envious of these prospective joys. He would take little trips
to Manhattan Beach with “the boys” and go to Bronxville to see Tom
Westfield, as he had been meaning to for five years, and visit the roof
garden with the Danas, who were on from St. Louis, and take dinner at
the Café Ruritania. On the between nights he would visit the neighbors.
All these things he had done, more or less disappointingly, but what
should he do to-night?
“I beg your pardon, Rivers, but have you any paregoric in the house?
We’ve got to get something to quiet the baby.”
A tall, thin, wearied-looking young man had come up the steps, hidden by
the vines in which dwellers in a mosquito country are wont to
picturesquely embower themselves, defiant of results.
“Why, how are you, Parker?” said Rivers cordially. “Paregoric is it that
you want? Come inside, and we’ll have a look for it, old man.” He led
the way, scratching matches as he went to relieve the darkness, dropping
them on the floor as they went out, and finally lighting the gas in the
butler’s pantry.
“My wife keeps the medicines on the top shelf here to be out of the way
of the children,” he explained. “I don’t know about the paregoric,
though. I seem to remember that she didn’t believe much in using it for
babies.”
“We’ve had a fight with the nurse about it,” said the other man, gnawing
at a very light mustache as he leaned against the door, “but Great
Scott, Rivers, we’ve got to do something. _I_ would have murdered
anybody whose child cried like this one. We’ve been complained of as it
is. That’s paregoric, isn’t it?”
“It was, but the bottle’s empty,” said Rivers, who was standing on the
rung of a chair, holding out a vial now and then from an inner recess
to read the name on it. “That’s another empty bottle—and here’s
_another_ empty bottle—and, this is—another. Bottle of sewing machine
oil. Prescription for neuralgia, 178, 902, empty. Bottle of
glycerine—confound the thing! the cork was out of it; get my
handkerchief for me out of my pocket, will you? Prescription for hair
tonic; empty bottle—another empty prescription bottle—dregs of cough
medicine. What in thunder does Bess want with all these empty bottles?
I’m awfully sorry, Parker, but we don’t seem to have the stuff you
want, or any other, for that matter.”
“Never mind,” said Parker. “I’ll ride down to the village and get some.
I’d have gone there first, but the tire of my wheel wants blowing up.”
“I’d lend you my wheel, but it’s at the shop,” called Rivers as they
disappeared out of the door.
He put the bottles back, upsetting, as he did so, a package of some
white powder, out of which ran three cockroaches. As he stooped to
gather it up again in the paper he disturbed a half-eaten peach which he
remembered leaving there the night before, and a small colony of ants
that had made their dwelling in it scuttled cheerily around. He uttered
an exclamation of disgust, and shut the door of the butler’s pantry upon
them. The whole house seemed given up to a plague of insects, utterly
unknown in the reign of its careful mistress. In spite of screens, small
stinging mosquitoes whizzed out from everything he touched; spiders hung
down from webs in the ceiling, and a moth had flown from his closet that
very morning. He kept the blinds and windows closed while he was away
all day; he had begun by leaving them open, but a slanting shower had
made havoc in his absence and also flooded the cellar through the open
cellar door. It had not dried up since, and he was sure that there were
fleas down there.
There was a deadly hot damp and silence in the dining-room and parlor as
he came through them, and the same unnatural atmosphere in the rooms
above as he drearily invaded them for a clean collar. Every place was
shut up and in order; the tops of the dressing tables even were bare
save for the clean towel laid over each. His own room was in an ugly,
disheveled confusion, and though his windows were open, no air came
through the wire screens. He opened a closet door inadvertently, and the
sight of a pink kimono of his wife’s, and the hats of the two little
boys hanging up neatly beside it, emphasized his solitude. His latent
idea of spending the rest of the evening at home was gone from him—he
felt that he could not get out of this accursed house quickly enough,
although he had not made up his mind where to go; he did not feel up to
cheering the sick man in the next street, or equal to a gentle literary
conversation with the two elderly ladies beyond who had known his
mother. He wanted to go somewhere where he could smoke and have some
pleasing light drink for refreshment, and be cheered and amused himself.
The Callenders! If he only had his wheel—it was nine o’clock now, and
the place was away over on the other side of town. Never mind, he would
go, and chance their being at home and out of bed when he got there.
Anything to get away from this loathsome place, although coming back to
it again seemed suddenly an impossible horror. He wondered if he were
getting ill. The night before—
As he walked, the shadows of the moonlight lengthened his long legs, and
their dragging strides. His face, with its short brown beard and the
hollows under his dark eyes, was bent forward. He figured out anew the
income there would be from his insurance money, and how it might be
supplemented for Bess and the children. Clearly, he would have to earn
more before he died. And oh, the burden, the burden, the burden was his!
The thought leaped out like a visible thing. Her sweet presence, her
curling hair, her dimples, her loving feminine inconsequence, with the
innocent, laughing faces of the little boys, overlaid the daily care for
him, but with these appointed Lighteners of Life away it loomed up into
a hideously exaggerated specter that seemed to have always had its hand
upon his fearsome heart, and only pressed a little closer upon him now
in this hot windless night. Even his wilted collar partook of the
tragic; he might as well have kept on the first one.
“Hello! Hello! Where are you going? This is the place.” A shout of
laughter accompanied the words. “Come up, brother, we’ve been waiting
for you!”
He looked up to see that he was in front of Callender’s house, and that
the piazza, a large square end of which was screened off into a room,
held a company in jovial mood, under moonlight as bright as day. The
women were in white, with half bare neck and arms, rocking and fanning
themselves, and the men in tennis shirts and belts, two of them smoking
pipes, and the other a cigar. A tray, holding a large crystal bowl and
glasses, stood on a bamboo table at one side, half shielded by jars of
palms whose spiked shadows carpeted the floor and projected themselves
across the white dress and arms of Mrs. Callender, while she held the
door open with one hand, and half welcomed, half dragged him in with the
other, amid a chorus of voices,
“Come in, come in, you’re one of us.”
“If you let a mosquito in—Take that chair by Mrs. Weir if you feel up to
it; she wants to be entertained.”
“I feel up to anything—now,” said Rivers, taking with alacrity the seat
allotted to him, after shaking hands with pretty Mrs. Waring, who lived
next door, and her cousin, Mrs. Weir. “Same old crowd, I see.”
The laughter broke out anew as his wandering eyes took tally of the
group, and he said, “Where’s Callender? and Weir? What’s the joke?”
“Oh, don’t ask for any woman’s husband or any man’s wife,” said Mrs.
Callender despairingly, with her graceful figure reclining back in the
low chair. “Can’t you see that we’re all detached?” Her charming smile
suddenly broke forth. “It’s really too absurd.”
“No!” said Rivers, a light dawning on him. “Nichols, you don’t mean that
you are on the waiting list too?”
Mr. Nichols, a large man with a grizzled head, nodded and helped himself
to the contents of the suggestive bowl. “The missus and the kids went
off last week; I’m detained for a while longer. As for Callender; he got
a summons from the company, and he’s half way to Chicago by this time, I
hope. I came over on purpose to tell his last words to his wife, who
didn’t want them.”
“Ned had already brought them,” said Mrs. Callender, turning to the
tall, quiet man of the cigar, Mr. Atwood, who was her brother. “It’s
such a mercy that he happened to come on, or I’d have been here all
alone.”
“Looks like it,” said Mr. Porter, a stout fair gentleman with a cool
gray eye, a bald head, and a gurgling laugh. “What do you think, Rivers,
these girls here”—he waved his hand—“had been counting on seeing the
whole lot of us to-night, and brewed that lemonade on purpose.”
“Everyone has come now but the Martindales,” said Mrs. Weir, a little
woman with loosely piled dark hair, and a gentle, winning voice,
occasionally diversified with a surprising shriek of laughter.
“The Martindales! Why, they only returned this evening—I met them on the
boat,” said Rivers.
“Yes, we know that, but one of them will be over here just the same,”
said Mrs. Callender placidly. “They’ll want to see what we’re doing. Do
somebody pay a little attention to Mrs. Waring; she hasn’t said a word
for half an hour. I believe she’s hoping that Henry’ll be too homesick
to stay away.”
“Not quite,” said Mrs. Waring with a little tremble of her lower lip.
“Nice, kind little woman you are,” said Porter severely. “Want to enjoy
yourself thinking how unhappy Waring is. Well, I’m _glad_ he went, and I
hope he’ll stay until he’s well; if any man needed a change, he did.”
“He would have taken me with him if I could have left the children,”
murmured Mrs. Waring.
“Yes, the children win every time,” said Porter with easy philosophy.
“You think you’re important, my brothers, until you’re confronted with
your own offspring, and then you’re not in it.”
“I don’t see,” said Mr. Nichols, filling his pipe again, “why a man’s
family should stay in town and broil because he has to. It wouldn’t be
any satisfaction to _me_, I know that. My little girls write to me every
day.”
“I remember,” said Rivers, leaning forward, “once when Bess and I took a
trip together we had to come home just when the fishing was at its
height, because she imagined what it would be like if a menagerie broke
loose and a tiger got at little Brook when he was asleep in his crib.
She said she knew it was perfectly absurd, but she couldn’t stand it a
moment longer. So we came home.”
He laughed tenderly at the reminiscence, and the other men laughed with
him, but the women, even Mrs. Callender, who had no children, were
serious, and Mrs. Weir said, as if speaking for the rest,
“Yes, one does feel that way sometimes.”
The men looked at each other and nodded, as in the presence of something
known of old, something to be smiled at, and yet reverenced. The fierce
maternal impulses of his wife were divine to Rivers, he loved her the
more for her foolishness; it seemed fitting, and all he could expect,
that the children should be her passion, as she was his. If he had once
dreamed that it would be otherwise, he knew better now. Women were to be
taken care of and loved for their very limitations, even if one bore a
little sense of loss and soreness forever in one’s own heart. What could
they know?
“Why don’t you take a vacation, Mr. Rivers?” asked Mrs. Weir later as
the others had fallen into general conversation. “You look as if _you_
needed it. Mr. Nichols says it was dreadful in town to-day; forty-seven
heat prostrations.”
“Oh, I can’t get off,” said Rivers with unconscious weariness in his
voice. “It makes an awful lot of difference when you’re running the
business yourself. If I were working for somebody else I’d take my
little two weeks the way my own clerks do, without caring a hang what
became of the concern in my absence. I thought I was going to get up to
Maine over the Fourth, and after all I couldn’t leave in time. It’s
quite a journey, you know. Bess and the boys were as disappointed as I
was,” he added conscientiously. “But they’re getting along finely. Sam
and Jack are learning to swim, she says—pretty good for little shavers
of five and six! They’re as brown as Indians. She says—” he began to
laugh as he repeated confidentially some anecdotes of their prowess to
which Mrs. Weir apparently listened with the deeply interested attention
that is balm to the family exile, only asking him after a while
irrelevantly, as he pushed back the hair from his forehead,
“How did you get that ugly cut on your temple?”
Even in the moonlight she could see his face flush.
“Oh, come, Rivers,” said Atwood, who was passing, “make up some story,
for the credit of mankind.”
“Then you might as well have the truth, I suppose,” said Rivers,
laughing, yet embarrassed. “It’s really nothing, though; I felt dizzy
and queer when I went to bed last night. I suppose it was just the heat,
and I have had a good deal to carry in a business way lately. I found
myself at daylight this morning lying on the floor with my head by the
edge of the bureau, and I don’t know in the least how I got there. I
have a faint memory that I started to go for some water. I’m all right
to-day, though; it hasn’t bothered me a bit.”
“No, of course not,” said Mrs. Weir encouragingly. “And you don’t mind
staying alone?” she dropped her voice.
“Oh, no, not at all. Only—I don’t mind telling _you_—” he looked at her
with strange eyes—“I _hate_ the house! It’s got all the plagues of Egypt
in it. And all the hours I’ve spent alone there are shut up in it too. I
know just how it’s going to be when I open that front door and walk in.”
“Stay here to-night,” said Mrs. Weir smoothly. “Stay here with Mr.
Atwood; Mrs. Callender will be delighted to have you.”
“Oh, I can’t, possibly,” said Rivers with decision. “I didn’t even lock
the front door when I came away. I only remembered it a moment ago. And
I won’t really mind a bit after I’m once back there—it’s only the
plunge. You’re awfully good to me, Mrs. Weir,” he added gratefully; but
he wanted his wife—he did not want to be confidential with anyone but
her. No matter what enjoyment he had in this brief hour, it was bound to
fail him at the end. One of the dearest pleasures of married life is the
going home together after the outside pleasuring is over.
As they all trooped into the dining-room for the crabs and salad Mrs.
Callender told of as in the ice-box, the figure of Elizabeth in her pink
kimono seemed to weave in and out among the others, but in another
moment he was laughing and talking uproariously with the men, while the
women, on Mrs. Callender’s assertion that the servants were in bed,
tucked up their gowns and descended the cellar stairs for the
provisions, refusing all masculine assistance.
“I think it’s an eternal shame,” said Mrs. Callender as the three held
an excited conclave in cellared seclusion by the open refrigerator.
“It’s just as Celeste says, he’s ill—anyone can see it. Why, he starts
whenever he’s spoken to. He told Mr. Callender the other day that he’d
been horribly worried about business. He’s a nervous kind of a fellow,
and he takes everything too hard. He ought not to be left alone in this
way.”
“I think somebody ought to write to _her_,” said Mrs. Waring solemnly,
resting the dish of salad on the top of the ice-box. “I think it’s
perfectly heartless of her to go on enjoying herself when he’s ill.”
“She doesn’t know it,” interrupted Mrs. Callender with rare justice.
“That’s what I say, somebody ought to _tell_ her. She never seems to
think about anything but herself, though—or the children, or clothes. If
I thought that Henry—but I’d never leave him this way, never; _I_
wouldn’t have a bit of comfort. He’s so devoted to his home, just like
Mr. Rivers.”
“Do you know—I have a dreadful feeling that something is going to happen
to him to-night?”
“If you had heard him talk—” said Mrs. Weir with tragic impressiveness.
The three women looked at each other silently.
“Are we to have anything to eat to-night, or are you girls going to talk
until morning?” came the steady tones of Porter from the head of the
stairs. “It’s after eleven now.”
“Goodness!” said Mrs. Callender, hastily completing her preparations.
“Yes! we’re coming. You can send Ned down now to crack some more ice,
and then we’ll be ready.”
But she turned to say, “I think someone _ought_ to go home with him.”
“This is what I call comfort,” said Porter as they sat hilariously
around the Flemish oak table, eating the cool viands and drinking anew
from the iced bowl, a lacy square of white linen and a glass vase of
scarlet nasturtiums gracing the center of the board. “Clear, clear
comfort!”
“I feel at peace with all mankind—even with Atwood, who believes in an
imperial policy.”
“Hush,” said Mrs. Callender, “who is that on the piazza?”
The door opened, a head was thrust in, and a shout arose.
“Martindale! Martindale, by all that’s holy! Come in, we’re expecting
you.”
“That’s mighty good of you,” said the intruder, who seemed to be all red
hair and smiles. “All the same, you don’t seem to have left me much of
anything to eat.” He drew up a chair to the table and sat down.
“Where’s your wife?” asked Mrs. Weir.
“Oh, she had a headache this evening. I went out for a ride, and when I
came back I saw you were on deck over here, so I thought I’d look in and
see what was up.” He stopped, oblivious of the renewed laughter, and
stared at Rivers. “Why, when did _you_ get here? I saw a light in your
house ten minutes ago. I nearly dropped in on you.”
“A light in _my_ house!” exclaimed Rivers. He rose, and the others
instinctively rose also, with startled glances at each other.
“Perhaps your family has come home,” suggested Mrs. Waring.
Rivers shook his head. “No, I had a letter from Bess to-day saying she
had taken the rooms for two weeks more. It might have been Parker, but I
don’t think so. Are you sure you saw a light?”
“On the lower floor,” asseverated Martindale. “Was the door locked when
you came out?”
“No.”
“All right,” said Atwood briskly. “Porter and I’ll go back with you,
Rivers. No, we don’t need you, Nichols, you’re tired. Come upstairs and
choose from Callender’s arsenal.”