I
Mrs. Serina Pepperall had called her husband twice without success. It
was at that hatefulest hour of the whole week when everybody that has to
get up is getting up and realizing that it is Monday morning, and
raining besides.
It is bad enough for it to be Monday, but for it to be raining is
inexcusable.
Young Horace Pepperall used to say that that was the reason the world
didn't improve much. People got good on Sunday, and then it had to go
and be Monday. He had an idea that if Sunday could be followed by some
other day, preferably Saturday, there would be more happiness and virtue
in the world. Mrs. Pepperall used to say that her boy was quite a
ph'losopher in his way. Mr. Pepperall said he was a hopeless loafer and
spent more time deciding whether he'd ought to do this or that than it
would have taken to do 'em both twice. Whereupon Mrs. Pepperall, whose
maiden name was Boody--daughter of Mrs. Ex-County-Clerk Boody--would
remind her husband that he was only a Pepperall, after all, while her
son was at least half Boody. Whereupon her husband would remind her of
certain things about the Boodys. And so it would go. But that was other
mornings. This was this morning.
Among all the homes that the sun looked upon--or would have looked upon
if it could have looked upon anything and if it hadn't been raining and
the Pepperall roof had not been impervious to light, though not to
moisture--among them all, surely the Pepperall reveille would have been
the least attractive. Homer never got his picture of rosy-fingered
Aurora smilingly leaping out of the couch of night from any such home as
the Pepperalls' in Carthage.
Serina was as unlike Aurora as possible. Aurora is usually poised on
tiptoe, with her well-manicured nails gracefully extended, and nothing
much about her except a chariot and more or less chiffon, according to
whether the picture is for families or bachelors.
Serina was entirely surrounded by flannelette, of simple and pitilessly
chaste design--a hole at the top for her head to go through and a larger
one at the other extreme for her feet to stick out at. But it was so
long that you couldn't have seen her feet if you had been there. And
Papa Pepperall, who was there, was no longer interested in those once
exciting ankles. They had been more interesting when there had been less
of them. But we'd better talk about the sleeves.
The sleeves were so long that they kept falling into the water where
Serina was making a hasty toilet at the little marble-topped altar to
cleanliness which the Pepperalls called the "worsh-stand"--that is, the
"hand-wash-basin," as Mrs. Hippisley called it after she came back from
her never-to-be-forgotten trip to England.
But then Serina's sleeves had always been falling into the suds, and
ever since she could remember she had rolled them up again with that
peculiar motion with which people roll up sleeves. This morning, having
failed to elicit papa from the bed by persuasion, she made such a racket
about her ablutions that he lifted his dreary lids at last. He realized
that it was morning, Monday, and raining. It irritated him so that he
glared at his faithful wife with no fervor for her unsullied and
unwearied--if not altogether unwearisome--devotion. He watched her roll
up those sleeves thrice more. Somehow he wanted to scream at the
futility of it. But he checked the impulse partly, and it was with
softness that he made a comment he had choked back for years. "Serina--"
he began.
"Well," she returned, pausing with the soap clenched in one hand.
He spoke with the luxurious leisureliness and the pauses for commas of a
nearly educated man lolling too long abed:
"Serina, it has just occurred to me that, since we have been married,
you have expended, on rolling back those everlastingly relapsing sleeves
of yours, enough energy to have rolled the Sphinx of Egypt up on top of
the Pyramid of Cheops."
Serina was so surprised that she shot the slippery soap under the
wash-stand. She went right after it. There may be nymphs who can stalk a
cake of soap under a wash-stand with grace, but Serina was not one of
them. Her indolent spouse made another cynical comment:
"Don't do that! You look like the Goddess of Liberty trying to peek into
the Subway."
But she did not hear him. She was rummaging for the soap and for an
answer to his first remark. At length she emerged with both. She stood
up and panted.
"Well, I can't see as it would 'a' done me any good if I had have!"
"Had have what?" her husband yawned, having forgotten his original
remark.
"Got the Sphinnix on top of the Cheops. And besides, I've been meaning
to hem them up; but now that you've gone bankrupt again, and I have to
do my own cooking and all--"
"But, my dear Serina, you've said the same thing ever since we were
married. What frets me is to think of the terrible waste of labor with
nothing to show for it."
She sniffed, and retorted with all the superiority of the unsuccessful
wife of an unsuccessful husband:
"Well, I can't see as you're so smart. Ever since we been married you
been goin' to that stationery-store of yours, and you never learned
enough to keep from going bankrupt three times. And now they've shut
the shop, and you've nothing better to do than lay in bed and make fun
of me that have slaved for you and your children."
They were always his children when she talked of the trouble they were.
Her all too familiar oration was interrupted by the eel-like leap of the
soap. This time it described a graceful arc that landed it under the
middle of the bed--a double bed at that.
Pepperall had the gallantry to pursue it. He went head first over the
starboard quarter of the deck, leaving his feet aboard. Just as he
tagged the soap with his fingers his feet came on over after him, and he
found himself flat on his back, with his head under the bed and his feet
under the bureau.
When the thunder of his downfall had subsided he heard Serina say, "Now
that you're up you better stay up."
So he wriggled out from under and got himself aloft, rubbing his
indignant back. If Serina was no Aurora rising from the sea, her husband
was no Phoebus Apollo. His gown looked like hers, only younger. It had
a frivolous little pocket, and the slit-skirt effect on both sides; and
it was cut what is called "misses' length," disclosing two of the least
attractive shins in Carthage.
He was aching all over and he was angry, and he snarled as he stood at
the wash-stand:
"Have you finished with this water?"
"Yes," she said, muffledly, from the depths of a face-towel.
"Why don't you ever empty the bowl then?" he growled, and viciously
tilted the contents into the--must I say the awful word?--the
slop-jar--what other word is there?
The water splashed over and struck the bare feet of both icily. They
yowled and danced like Piute Indians, and glared at each other as they
danced. They glared in a nagged rage that would have turned into an ugly
quarrel if a great sorrow had not suddenly overswept them. They saw
themselves as they were and by a whim of memory they remembered what
they had been. He laughed bitterly:
"It's the first time we've danced together in a long time, eh?"
Her lower lip began to quiver and swell quite independently and she
sighed:
"Not much like the dances we used to dance. Oh dear!"
She dropped into a chair and stared, not at her husband, but at the
bridegroom of long ago he had shriveled from. She remembered those
honeymoon mornings when they had awakened like eager children and
laughed and romped and been glad of the new day. The mornings had been
precious then, for it was a tragedy to let him go to his shop, as it was
a festival to watch from the porch in the evening till he came round the
corner and waved to her.
She looked from him to herself, to what she could see of herself--it was
not all, but more than enough. She saw her heavy red hands and the
coarse gown over her awkward knees, and the dismal slovenliness of her
attitude. She felt that he was remembering the slim, wild, sweet girl he
had married. And she was ashamed before his eyes, because she had let
the years prey upon her and had lazily permitted beauty to escape from
her--from her body, her face, her motions, her thoughts.
She felt that for all her prating of duty she had committed a great
wickedness lifelong. She wondered if this were not "the unpardonable
sin," whose exact identity nobody had seemed to decide--to grow
strangers with beauty and to forget grace.