She had ten days before his coming to anticipate with some uneasiness
the shock he would certainly get in making the acquaintance of her
husband's sisters and in seeing the kind of home she lived in.
"If only I could dispose of that navy blue owl on the sideboard!" she
worried. "And of all that imitation onyx in the parlour! And the
'oil-paintings' in the sitting-room! As for Jennie and Sadie
themselves---- Oh, what can Walter be coming here for? I don't
suppose they've discovered coal on _our_ estate. I hope not, such a
dirty mess as it would make! More like _our_ luck to discover we
don't, after all, own the place."
But she found, when she announced her brother-in-law's prospective
visit, that she herself had not yet got all the shocks and surprises
the Leitzels were capable of affording her. Her Southern sentiment of
hospitality received another unexpected blow in discovering that Jennie
and Sadie quite seriously objected to entertaining her brother-in-law
at their home.
"We ain't used to comp'ny stopping here," Jennie explained to her.
"Danny's business acquaintances always go to the _ho_tel. It wouldn't
suit me just so well. We ain't so young as we used to be, and it would
certainly be a worry to me to have company stopping here. You'd best
not begin that kind of thing, Margaret. If your brother-in-law slep'
and eat here, it would mebby give our Sadie the headache."
That New Munich hospitality, instead of being a condition of daily life
as with Southerners, was so specialized an occasion as to cause the
upsetting of a household and the expenditure of the nervous energy of a
whole family, Margaret had come to recognize. People did not "keep
open house"; they "entertained." But how was she to spring such a
thing upon Walter, who knew no other standard of hospitality than that
of the open Southern home? How explain to him upon his arrival that
her home and her husband's was not open to him, and that he must stop
at a hotel?
She had not at all solved the problem when in a wholly unlooked-for way
it was solved for her. Confined to bed one day with a violent
headache, and quite helpless to protect her babies from Jennie's
hygienic theories, the twins were kept by their aunt in a hot, airtight
room such as Jennie considered their proper environment, with the
result that they cried all day; and the next day had heavy colds--their
first disorder of any kind since their birth. But when Margaret,
herself recovered, insisted upon taking them, suffering from influenza
as they were, out into the chill air of a cold day in January, Jennie's
thwarted will, thwarted affection, and wild anxiety for these babies of
Danny's whom she loved almost fiercely, broke all bounds, and she gave
Margaret her ultimatum.
"Or either you keep those children in the house till they're well
already, or either I and Sadie leave this house where we have to look
on at such croolities, and go to keep house by ourselves! Yes, this
very day we go!"
Margaret paused in the strenuous work of getting little Daniel's arms
into his coat sleeves, preparatory to his outing, and gazed up at
Jennie with such a light of joyful hope in her eyes that Jennie, had
she not been too blindly furious to see it, would certainly have
withdrawn this proffered happiness from her now heartily detested
sister-in-law.
"If Danny wasn't in Philadelphia to-day, I'd 'phone to his office and
have him _make_ you keep them in!" she raged frantically. "They'll get
pneumonia, so they will!"
"Daniel couldn't make me, Jennie. I act under the doctor's orders.
Daniel's a lawyer, not a physician. I'm taking the babies out to
_save_ them from having pneumonia."
"Daniel couldn't make you, couldn't he? Well, I can! Yes, and I mean
what I say! You take these babies out on a day like this when they're
sick, and I and Sadie _move out this very day_!" she harshly
reiterated, under the delusion that Margaret would never put her to the
test: for not only was Jennie incapable of realizing Margaret's utter
indifference to the economic advantage of their joint housekeeping, but
it also seemed to her wholly incredible that her sister-in-law could
subject her devoted and indulgent husband to the suffering he would
certainly undergo if deprived of his sisters' constant ministrations to
his comforts.
"And when Danny comes home from Philadelphia to-night and finds us
_gone_ and our half of the furniture being moved out, what do you think
he'll say to _you_ for driving us out?"
Margaret, realizing that she must conceal the heaven opened up by this
unexpected ultimatum, quickly cast down her eyes, that her tormentor
might not see her quivering eagerness.
"I'll _goad_ her to moving out!" she desperately resolved. "Oh! if
only I can make it impossible for her to back down from her threat."
She suddenly raised her eyes again and laughed sarcastically. "Oh, you
can't scare me with your threats! _You'll_ not go!"
"You'll see whether we won't! You just dare to take those sick
children outside this house, and you won't find I and Sadie here when
you come home!"
"That won't worry me. You'll be back soon enough. Catch _you_ leaving
your brother's house! Oh, no, my dear, you don't fool me for one
minute. Why, where on earth would you go?"
"Maybe you don't know," put in Sadie triumphantly, "that Jennie and me
_own_ the nice empty house at the corner that the tenants moved out of
because we wouldn't repaper!"
"Yes," exclaimed Jennie, "we own it and it's empty; and it's all been
cleaned only last week a'ready. So then you _see_ if we couldn't move
out of here perfectly convenient!"
Margaret's hopes rose higher, while at the same time she suffered
fearful misgivings lest by any inadvertency on her part they be dashed.
"Ha!" she laughed derisively and most artificially. "You'd never move
in there and lose the rent of that house! You can't fool me! _I'm_
not scared. Come, baby dear, other little arm now!" she said, tugging
at Daniel Junior's coat. "_Fancy_ your moving out! Ha!"
Her utterly unnatural tone of taunting sarcasm ought not to have
deceived even so slow a mind as Jennie Leitzel's, but the woman's rage
dulled what penetration she ordinarily had and she was completely
misled.
"I'm not _trying_ to fool you!" she almost screamed. "I tell you that
sure as you go out the door with those two twins, my brother, when he
comes home this evening, will find us and our furniture _gone_, never
to come back! I'll prove it to you, I'll _prove_ it! And we'll take
Emmy along, and there'll be no dinner _for_ my poor brother when he
comes home!"
"Oh, yes, there will," Margaret laughed quite sardonically. "There
will be dinner and there will be two dear, devoted sisters. If you do
take your departure, you'll be _back_ soon enough!" Her unnatural
tones kept it up, every phrase carefully calculated to force the
consummation she so devoutly wished, though inwardly her very soul was
sick at the part she played; for deep down in her heart there was an
undercurrent of pity for these poor creatures so limited in their
capacity for happiness and yet capable of fiercely loving the babies so
dear to them all and the brother they had cherished from babyhood.
"You'll _see_, then, if we'll come back again!" Jennie hoarsely harked
back at her. "Yes, you'll see! And you'll see what Danny'll----"
Margaret having tucked the babies warmly into their coach, laughed
again devilishly as she wheeled them out to the porch.
"_You'll_ be back! Bye-bye until I _see_ you again!" And with a peal
of mocking laughter, so cleverly melodramatic that she marvelled at her
own hitherto unsuspected histrionic talent, she disappeared.
And so it transpired that the marriage of Daniel Leitzel afforded one
more sensation to New Munich's not yet surfeited taste for gossip
concerning their notable townsman; for when Daniel got home that
evening at seven o'clock he found a dismantled and disordered house, no
dinner, no cook, no sisters; only two sweetly sleeping babies in the
nursery and a wife with a face uplifted with a new-born happiness and
peace. So deep was the serenity that had settled upon her and upon the
servantless, dismantled, and disordered household, that Daniel's rage
and grief, his bitter reproaches, his lamentations over the extra
expense his home would now be to him passed over her head as though it
were nothing more than the somewhat irritating cackle of an old hen.
Daniel, after a call on his sisters at their new home down at the
corner and a long and painful interview with them, in which they
affirmed that unless he exercised his marital and scriptural authority
to make Margaret apologize and promise that in the future she would
treat them and their wishes with the consideration which was their due,
they would not return to his house, though from this close proximity to
him they could and would continue to see after his comforts--after this
most unsatisfactory and upsetting conversation with his sisters, Daniel
went to his bed very late that night, feeling, for the first time in
his life, that he was abused of Fate; but Margaret lay awake long,
revelling ecstatically in the realization that now at last she had a
home of her very own; two lovely babies on whom she could expend the
pent-up riches of her heart and in whom her own highest ideals might
perhaps be wrought out; a friend who deeply shared her life and whom
now she could freely bring into the sanctum of her own home. Oh, life
was full and rich! She was young, she was strong, she was happy.
The husband asleep at her side was a negligible quantity in her
estimate of her blessings; he was a responsibility she had incurred and
to which she certainly meant to be faithful. It was not in his power
to make her very unhappy.
But Margaret was, in fact, rejoicing a little too soon. Jennie and
Sadie had gone out from her home, but they had not yet gone out of her
life, as she was to realize later.
Daniel's anger was not modified when, next morning, he was obliged, for
the first time in his life, to get up and attend to the furnace and the
kitchen range. Margaret judiciously repressed her amusement at his
plight.
"Oh, well, dear, you are not the only one. It's the first time in my
life I ever had to get up and get breakfast," she offered what seemed
to him most irrelevant consolation.
"Marriage," she reflected philosophically when, without kissing her
good-bye, he left her to go to his office, "must be an adjusting of
one's self to, and acceptance of, the inevitable, Daniel being the
Inevitable!"
She decided, as she called up the Employment Office, that she needed
three servants, but she did not have the temerity to engage more than
one. For here was a point at which Daniel held the whip-hand: he could
refuse to pay the wages of those he considered superfluous, and she had
no money of her own.
"As Jennie and Sadie paid half of Emmy's wages," she reflected, "it
will go hard with Daniel to have to pay the maid entirely himself.
Anyway," she rejoiced, "I shan't now have to send Walter to a hotel."