On my way to mail my letter I came on Mis' Toplady and Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, downtown to get something for supper. And I
told them all about it.
Mis' Toplady hunched her shawl farther up her back and sighed abundant.
"Ain't that just grand, Calliope?" says she. "To think you're going to
do something you ain't been doing all your days."
That was the point, and she knew it.
"I says to Timothy the other night," she went on, "I says, 'Don't you
wish I had something to tell you about, or you had something to tell me
about, that we both of us didn't know by heart, forward and back?'"
"Eppleby and me, too," says Mis' Holcomb, "I wish to the land we could
do something--or be something--that would give a body something to kind
of--relate to each other."
"I know," I says. "Husbands and wives _is_ awful simultaneous, I always
think."
But I didn't say anything more, being I wasn't married to one; and they
didn't say anything more, being they was.
Mis' Holcomb waved her cheese at me, cheerful.
"Be gay for us!" says she, and then went home to cook supper for her
hungry family.
And so did I, wishing with all my heart that the two of them--that
hadn't seen over the rim of home in thirty years--could have had my
chance.
When I got to the city that night it was raining--rather, it was past
raining and on up to pouring. So I got in a taxi to go up to Ellen's--a
taxi that was nothing but an automobile after all, in spite of its
foreign name, ending in a letter that no civilized name ought to end in.
And never, never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget
my first look at that living-room of theirs--in the apartment building,
as big as a ship, and as lighted up as our church at Christmas-time,
which was where Ellen and Russell lived.
A pretty maid let me in. I remember I went in by her with my eyes on her
white embroidery cap, perked up on her head and all ironed up, saucy as
a blue jay's crest.
"Excuse me," I says to her over my shoulder, "I've read about them, but
yours is the first one I ever saw. My dear, you look like a queen in a
new starched crown."
She was an awful stiff little thing--'most as stiff as her head-piece.
She never smiled.
"What name?" she says, though--and I see she was friendlier than I'd
thought.
"Why, mine's Calliope Marsh," I says, hearty. "What's yours?"
She looked so funny--I guess not many paid her much attention.
"Delia," she says. "You're expected," she says, and opened the inside
door.
The room was long and soft and wine-colored, with a fire burning in the
fireplace, and more lamps than was necessary, but that altogether didn't
make much more light than one, only spread it out more. The piano was
open, and there was a vase of roses--in Winter! They seemed to have
them, I found out later, as casual as if there was a combined wedding
and funeral in the house all the time. But they certainly made a
beautiful picture.
But all this I sort of took in out of my eyes' four corners, while the
rest of me looked at what was before the fire.
A big, low-backed chair was there, as fat and soft as a sofa. And in it
was Ellen, in a white dress--in Winter! She wore them, I saw after a
while, as casual as if she was at a party, perpetual. But there was
something else there in a white dress, too, sitting on her lap, with his
pink, bare feet stretched out to the blaze. And he was laughing, and
Ellen was, too, at Russell, her husband, sitting on the floor, and
aiming his head right at the baby's stomach, to hear him laugh out
like--oh, like bluebells must be doing in the Spring.
"Pretty enough to paint," says I--which was the first they knew I was
there.
It was a shame to spoil it, but Ellen and Russell sprang up, and tried
to shake hands with me, though I wasn't taking the slightest notice of
them. It was the baby I was engaged in. I'd never seen him before. In
fact, I'd never seen Ellen and Russell since they were married two years
before and went off to Europe, and lived on a peak of the Alps where the
baby was born.
They took me to a gray little room that was to be mine, and I put on a
fresh lace collar and my cameo pin and my best back comb. And then
dinner was ready--a little, round white table with not one living thing
on it but lace and roses and glass and silver.
"Why," says I, before I got through with my melon that came first, "why,
you two must be perfectly happy, ain't you?"
And Ellen says, looking over to him:
"Perfectly, absolutely, radiantly happy. Yes, I am."
And this is what Russell done. He broke his bread, and nodded to both of
us promiscuous, and he says:
"Considerable happier than any decent man has a right to be, I'm
thinking."
I noticed that incident particular. And when I look back on it now, I
know that that very first evening I begun noticing other things. I
remember the talk went on about like this:
"Ellen," says Russell, "the dog show opened yesterday. They've got some
great little pups, I hear. Aren't you going in?"
"Why--I am if you are," says Ellen.
"Nonsense," says Russell, "I can run in any time, but I can't very well
meet you there in the middle of the day. You go in yourself."
"Well, I only enjoy it about a third as much to go alone," says she.
"The dogs don't differ when I'm along, you know, lady," says he,
smiling.
"You know that isn't what I mean," she says.
And she looked over at him, and smiled at his eyes with her eyes. But I
saw that he looked away first, sort of troubled. And I thought:
"Why, she acts as if not enjoying things when he ain't along is a kind
of joyful sacrifice, that would please any man. I wonder if it does."
It happened two-three times through dinner. She hadn't been over to see
some kind of a collection, and couldn't he come home some night early
and take her? He couldn't promise--why didn't she go herself and tell
him about it?
"You wouldn't have said that three years ago," she says, half fun, half
earnest, and waited for him to deny it. But he didn't seem to sense what
was expected of him, and he just et on.
Ain't it funny how you can sort of see things through the pores of your
skin? By the time dinner was over, I knew most as much about those two
as if I had lived in the house with them a week.
He was wonderful tender with her, though. I don't mean just in little
loverlike ways, saying things and calling her things and looking at her
gentle. I mean in ways that don't have to be said or called or looked,
but that just are. To my mind they mean a thousand times more. But I
thought that in her heart she sort of hankered for the said and called
and looked kind. And of course they _are_ nice. Nice, but not vital like
the other sort. If you had to get along without one, you know which one
would be the one.
When we went into the other room, Ellen took me to look at the baby, in
bed, asleep, same as a kitten and a rosebud and a little yellow chicken,
and all the things that you love even the names of. And when we went
back, Ellen went to the piano and begun to play rambley things but low
so's you could hardly hear them across the room, on account of the baby.
I sank down and was listening, contented, and thinking of the most
thinkable things I knew, when she looked over her shoulder.
"Russell," she says, "if you'll come and turn the music, I'll do that
new Serenade."
Russell was on a couch, stretched out with a newspaper and his pipe, and
I dunno if I ever seen a man look more luxurious. But he got up, sort
of a one-joint-at-a-time fashion, and came slumping over, with his hair
sticking out at the back. He stood and turned the music, with his pipe
behind him. And when she'd got through, he says:
"Very pretty, indeed. Now I'll just finish my article, I guess, dear."
He went back to his couch. And she got up, kind of quick, and walked
over and stared into the fire. And I got up and went over and stared out
the window. It seemed kind of indelicate to be looking, when I knew so
well what was happening in that room.
_For she'd forgot he was a person. She was thinking that he was just
another one of her. And that seems to me a terrible thing for any human
being to get to thinking about another, married to them or not though
they be._
When I looked out the window, I needed new words. I hadn't realized the
elevator had skimmed up so high with me--and done it in the time it
would have taken the Emporium elevator, home, to go the two stories. But
we were up ten, I found afterward. And there I was looking the city
plain in the face. Rows and rows and fields of little lights from
windows that were homes--and homes--and homes. I'd never seen so many
homes in my life before, at any one time. And it came over me, as I
looked, that in all the hundreds of them I was looking at, and in the
thousands that lay stretched out beyond, the same kind of thing must
have gone on at some time or other, or be going to go on, or be going on
now, like I saw clear as clear was going on with Ellen and Russell.
It was the third night I was there that the thing happened. I was
getting along fine. I did the ordering and the managing and took part
care of the baby and mended up clothes and did the dozens of things that
Ellen wasn't strong enough to do. Delia and I had got to be real good
friends by the second day.
Russell came home that third night looking fagged out. He was never
nervous or impatient--I noticed that about him. I'd never once seen him
take it out in his conversation with his wife merely because he had had
a hard day. We'd just gone in from the dining-room when Russell, instead
of lighting his pipe and taking his paper, turned round on the rug, and
says:
"Dear, I think I'll go over to Beldon's a while to-night."
She was crossing the floor, and I remember how she turned and looked at
him.
"Beldon's?" she said. "Have--have you some business?"
"No," Russell says. "He wanted me to come in and have a game of
billiards."
"Very well," she says only, and she went and sat down by the fire.
He got into his coat, humming a little under his breath, and then he
came over and stooped down and kissed her. She kissed him, but she
hardly turned her head. And she didn't turn her head at all as he went
out.
When he'd gone and she heard the apartment door shut, Ellen fairly
frightened me. She sank down in the big chair where I had first seen
her, and put her head on its arm, and cried--cried till her little
shoulders shook, and I could hear her sobs. "Ellen," I says, "what is
it?" Though, mind you, I knew well enough.
She put her arms round my neck as I kneeled down beside her. "Oh,
Calliope, Calliope!" she says. "It's the end of things."
"End," says I, "of what?"
She looked in my face, with the tears streaming down hers. "Didn't you
realize," she says, "that that is the first time my husband ever has
left me in the evening--when he didn't have to?"
I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if
I was to help her--and help him. And all at once I felt as if I _was_
ten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all.
Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate
that minute when it comes to any other woman. For out of it there are
likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the
worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her
power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes.
"What of it?" I says, as calm as if I didn't see anything at all,
instead of seeing more than she saw, as I know I did.