Maud departed for New York, radiant in new clothes and expectations of
others. She set her house in order and gave Horatia a detailed list of
instructions as to what to do on every usual occasion and in every
emergency. And Horatia found a surprising pleasure in what she was to
undertake. The Williams were to be gone two months and she would have
full charge of everything. It would be interesting and stimulating to
run a house and supervise the care of children. She liked Maud’s
children and she liked the housemaid and the cook. It would be very easy
and to Maud’s anxious worries she turned a laughing face and a competent
spirit. She stood, with Jackie held by one hand and the baby in her
arms, waving good-bye to their parents, and when the car was out of
sight took her charges to the nursery with a delightful new feeling of
personal responsibility.
After the flat, Maud’s house gave her a sense of expansion. To have her
breakfast served daintily at a dining-room table was refreshing after
months of getting up hurriedly and getting the milk and orange marmalade
and rolls together herself. To come back at night to a comfortable house
where there were two or three rooms into which she might wander instead
of the small living-room of the flat was restful and to go up to the
nursery was the most fun of all. The children were often in bed or just
being put to bed by the housemaid and their smiles and chuckles at the
sight of Horatia if she arrived in time to give them the finishing
touches and tuck them in was one of the nicest happenings of the day.
Their helplessness, their recognitions, their constantly growing
intelligence, all fascinated her. Mingled with her natural love for them
was wonder too and constant speculation. It was not unlikely that in a
few years she might have children too, children for whom the
responsibility would be always hers. She began to respect Maud, Maud
being absent and non-irritant, for this achievement of two children. Two
children brought into the world and preserved in perfect health. It was
no slight thing. It was a big thing--a big success.
There was further speculation in her mind when she paid her sister’s
bills. Dimly she had known that Harvey and Maud spent a great deal of
money but she had not guessed how much. Their home was simple and it was
not until she had checked over a great sheaf of bills which came in at
the end of Maud’s first week of absence that Horatia found that the
simplicity was the expensive result of many hands, many shops, many
materials all blended smoothly together into a domestic interior. The
total of the bills appalled her. She had laughed at Harvey’s insistence
on leaving her a sum in the bank, which she declared “would last a
year.” At this rate of expenditure she saw that it would possibly last
the two months of her sister’s absence. The most unexpected things cost
so much--in the kitchen and in the nursery. And a new speculation
bordering on worry came to take the place of those first rapturous
thoughts about her own children. She and Jim had figured on living on a
sum which did not represent a tenth of what her sister was spending.
Granted that she could save this and that and cut out this and that
expense, could she even then---- She decided that she must ask Jim.
Jim came every evening when she did not go to the office. He was
especially tender these days as if he were trying to completely and
surely eradicate the scar which Grace had left on Horatia’s mind. They
were beautiful, peaceful evenings with the house quiet and full of the
spirit of the sleeping children, and sometimes they imagined that it was
their house, that they were at home at last.
“Have you any idea how much this costs, Jim,” asked Horatia, “this peace
and order and well-keptness?”
“I can only guess at it in horror.”
She told him and he whistled.
“Worse than your guess?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I had some money of my own,” said Horatia, regretfully. “We’ll
have to devise ways of making _The Journal_ pay better.”
“If I left _The Journal_ I could get a fairly big salary on some other
paper, perhaps.”
“And have your policy dictated by a lot of rotters! No indeed. We’ll
stick to _The Journal_. It brought us all our luck. Something will
happen. And of course I could live on lots less than Maud can. But I
want my house even if it’s only a flat to have dignity too--not to be
messy and frumpy. You want that too.”
“I don’t think that I want anything in the world except you and to give
you everything I can.”
So they buried the difficulty in words and secretly Langley puzzled over
his account books and secretly Horatia made budgets, strange and
startling budgets, of household expenses with estimates of the cost of
things reduced to minimums which would have shocked Maud or made her
laugh. But even then----
The money part did not bother Horatia seriously. It was fun to puzzle
and to plan. And for three weeks things ran smoothly. Then the housemaid
was sent to the hospital one day for an operation for acute
appendicitis, and for a few hours confusion reigned. Horatia, to whom
the cook telephoned, left her work to Bob Brotherton and came home in
haste. She encouraged the terrified housemaid and got her safely into
the ambulance and engaged a nurse for her at the hospital. Then the cook
went shakily back to her own work and Horatia started to put the
children to bed. She had often done it before, but always before Ellen
had laid things out for her and the nursery had been in order and the
children fed. She found tonight a nursery in the wildest confusion, two
cross children and no supper ready for them. She consulted Anna, the
cook. Anna was but temperately helpful. She told Horatia what they had
for supper and how to prepare the baby’s food but she did not suggest
helping her. Horatia struggled with a maze of dishes, formulas and
prohibitions and finally bore the tray up to the nursery. It was an hour
and a half before she came down, but then the room was in order and the
children in bed and quiet. Anna, who had kept dinner waiting for half an
hour, did not seem especially coöperative. Now that the shock of Ellen’s
illness was over and a call from the hospital reported her as resting
easily, Anna seemed inclined to worry lest she be imposed upon. She told
Horatia that Ellen always dressed the children at half-past seven and
that she could not both get breakfast and dress them. Also she wondered
if she could care for them during the day when Horatia was at the
office. Horatia soothed her fears. Maud had left no instructions as to
what to do in case one of the servants had appendicitis but Horatia
guessed that the best thing was to engage a temporary housemaid. In the
morning she promised Anna that should be done.
She was up early to dress and feed the children--but in spite of her
early rising she found that she had to eat her own breakfast very
hurriedly and then was late at the office because she had to go to three
employment agencies. Rather discouraging places, the employment
agencies. They showed her long waiting lists of their patrons but
promised to do what they could. Horatia had no choice but to be content
and so she went to the office and plunging into an exciting day forgot
Maud’s household for a while.
But returning that night she was forced into the thick of domestic
difficulty again. Anna was distinctly cross. The children were cross.
There were many loose ends for Horatia to tie--many duties to perform
which seemed especially wearying after her long day at the office.
“Domesticity needs a lot of oiling,” she told Jim.
He made things easy for her in the office but even with a great many
things done for her there Horatia found both the office and the domestic
burdens heavy. Savagely she spurned a little thought which crawled into
her mind at times. “Of course I can manage my house and my work, when I
am attacking my own problems. It’s only because this is something I am
not used to, something that I have to carry out according to the plans
which other people have made for me.” But none the less the thought
crawled back again, suggesting that Maud had money and everything to
make things easy for her and that even then the care of two children and
a household was a heavy task when it was coupled with even eight hours
of office work. She did not take that problem to Jim. It was hard to
phrase and there seemed no very obvious way to solve it except by her
own efforts. They wanted children and a home and she must work. She was
doubly sure that she would want to work, especially when Anna’s
complaints and the children’s restlessness were forgotten in the busy
routine of the office--and yet there were times when just to get up in
the morning and go to the office seemed too hard a strain. Suppose that
after her marriage she should feel it too hard?
They could not find a new housemaid. The employment agencies seemed
futile and advertisements, even in _The Journal_, brought such
dilapidated creatures in answer that Horatia could not bear to entrust
the children to them. For a few days they tried a trained nurse with
whom Anna quarreled bitterly and who finally left because Anna insisted
that she should make beds and do the dusting. Anna was continually on
the defensive. After a visit to Ellen she felt it rather unfair that she
should not have had an attack of appendicitis and have been sent to a
pleasant hospital where her meals were brought to her on a tray and she
was watched over by nurses. Ellen continued to get better. That was the
bright spot. In a few weeks she would be as well as ever and in the
meantime, if Anna would only stay, Horatia felt that she could manage.
She refused to write Maud that she was having difficulties. Maud had
counted on this trip and after all there was nothing very wrong.
“Nothing except that you are wearing out under my eyes,” complained Jim.
But a worse complication came and after it had come, Horatia felt that
all had been easy before. Jackie, with the astonishing suddenness of
children, had been well when she started for her office in the morning
and when she came home at night he was sick and feverish and refused to
eat his supper. She put him to bed and consulting Maud’s lists found the
name of the baby doctor and summoned him. He was a gentle-voiced,
pleasant young man who after one look at the boy developed a frightening
air of seriousness and told Horatia to send for a nurse. She asked him
if she should telegraph Maud but he shook his head.
“It’s not much use. He’s poisoned somehow--eaten something or some
things that he shouldn’t have eaten. The chances are that he will come
out all right by tomorrow, but if he doesn’t she couldn’t get here
anyhow. You can wait until morning. He will probably be all right. But
it will mean prompt work now. Try to get a nurse from the children’s
hospital.”
A tangled night. Horatia remembered the coming of the nurse and her own
quick confidence that the uniform would help somehow in bringing Jackie
through. So much skill surely---- She remembered Jim’s coming and her
amazement that his arms could not comfort her--that nothing could help
her except the assurances that the poor, tossing, wailing little boy
would probably be all right. She heard him cry as they did things to his
little body which hurt before they relieved it. She had constant
pictures of the way he had looked two days before and she could hear his
jolly little laugh. She had an agonized sense of the terrible waste of
life there must be when children died. And once she turned to Jim with a
frightened cry:
“I can’t bear it, Jim! I tell you I can’t bear it. And what if it were
my child? Could it be worse? Dare we risk all that?”
She had a memory of Jim’s great strength and of all the things he
did--and how the doctor turned to him and asked things and of Jim’s
calmness and readiness, and of one moment when he took a wailing Anna by
the shoulders and sent her out of the room. Horatia did not wail. But
her face was so white and so full of suffering that Jim kept close
beside her ready for a collapse if it should come.
A fight for life is always terrible, but with a child, when the odds are
so unequal, it is especially terrible. The doctor and nurse, quiet and
coöperative, worked steadily together--hours passed--the cries from the
tortured little body became fewer and at last the doctor, coming out
into the upper hallway where Jim and Horatia sat together, said those
words which have brought such floods of happiness to so many watchers,
“He’ll get through all right. In a week he’ll be as fit as ever. Great
bit of luck that we caught it in time. In half an hour more he would
have had convulsions and it’s hard to get a baby well under those
conditions.”
Horatia was weeping silently.
“You’ve had a big strain, Miss Grant. Better get to bed. The nurse will
be here all night and tomorrow I’ll send someone to relieve her. In a
day or two he won’t need any watching; but while he is so weak it is
just as well to give him expert nursing.”
He was gone.
“Will you go to bed, now?”
“I don’t need to go to bed now,” she answered, smiling through her
tears. “I’ve strength enough for a lifetime.”
“You’re to go to bed at once,” said Jim. “If you don’t, you will lose
your job on _The Journal_. Come, you can lock me out and then go to
bed.”
They told Anna about the boy’s safety and Anna characteristically
relapsed into a quick account of what she herself had gone through since
he had begun to be sick. She admitted that she had given him a piece of
mince pie and that he had liked it so well that she had let him have
“another sliver.”
“He was pestering me for it.”
Horatia was past reproaches. She turned and went away, around the house
with Jim, locking the windows and doors and turning off the lights.
Coupled with her relief and happiness was a happiness in doing these
domestic things with Jim and a new closeness because they had been
through suffering together. At the front door, he took her in his arms.
“I couldn’t have borne it without you, Jim.”
“We can bear anything--together.”
Again that feeling that this might be repeated in their own life
together--their own children might go down to the edge of
death--suffering might come--but they would have each other. Life could
not frighten them.
Then, as if everything had become as hard as possible to test her, and
finding her brave under the test, was becoming kinder, the household
burdens lightened. Jackie was well--so amazingly well that it was hard
to believe that he ever had been sick--Ellen was better and came back to
her work and the house slid into order and ease again. And more and more
accustomed did Horatia become to the ways of a household and more and
more normal did it seem to imagine herself in a household. She absorbed
the touch of dogmatism natural to the competent woman who must dogmatize
about her household. That was one of the unfortunate results of her
adaptability and one bound to have grave consequences. All the things
around her were real and true. They were made graver and deeper by the
reflection of the things she had learned in the last six months but
their truth was not altered. Children were beautiful, homes were
beautiful, and love was the most beautiful and basic fact of all. The
episode of Grace had become a dulled tragedy and she rarely thought of
her previous life in their flat lest she resurrect what had been such an
ugly climax to it.