There followed one of those years which come and go even in the small
affairs of small men, when for Ben Becker swift waters flowed under the
bridge. He was just that, a small man, prided himself upon it and was
frequent in his boast: "I'm a small man, Carrie. I don't hope to make a
big or showy success of it. Just a comfortable and unassuming living is
about all I expect to get out of it, and that's a pretty good deal."
The Spanish-American War, something of musical comedy in its setting,
had run its brief malarial engagement, netting Ben Becker, in one order
of hemp rope alone, a cleanly realized profit of forty-two
hundred dollars.
On a new and gradually attained bank credit the B. T. Becker Hemp, Rope,
and Twine Company bought out the about-to-be-insolvent Mound City Flax
Twine Company, the consolidated interests moving into a two-story brick
building on South Seventh Street.
The firm took on the subtle and psychological proportions that go with
incorporation, however unassuming, capitalizing at fifteen thousand
dollars, B. T. Becker, president; Jerry Hensel, trusted foreman of
years, vice president and holder of ten shares; Carrie Becker, secretary
and treasurer and, to propitiate the law, holder of one share.
The little house on Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding
the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none
the less---and with the flexible personality of houses--taking on the
print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale
through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's euchre friends,
arriving from Grand Rapids two months late, completed a careful and
thrifty period of housefurnishing. There were an upright piano, still
rented, but, like the house, payments to apply to a possible future
purchase, in the square of "reception hall"; a double brass bedstead in
the second-story front; and tucked away in the back of the tiny house,
overlooking, through sheerest of dimity curtains, a rolling ocean of
empty lots, the German-silver manicure set spread out on the dressing
table, Lilly's bird's-eye-maple bedroom come true.
Followed even then a long and uneasy period of adjustment. The up and
down stairs tugged at the rear muscles of Mrs. Becker's legs, compelling
evening foot baths. Mr. Becker chafed under the twenty minutes
additional street-car ride, eating his dinner by gaslight even in
August. The bed making and her allotment of the upstairs work irked
Lilly, even though Willie's stepniece, Georgia, came to help out once a
week, and evenings the little house could seem very still and
untenanted.
But after the arrival of the mahogany-and-velours parlor set, the music
cabinet, and the hanging of crispy lace curtains, Lilly standing on the
ladder, her mother steadying from below, and finally the laying of a
well-padded strip of stair carpet to eat in the hollow noises of new
tenancy, the house began to settle, so to speak.
Something latent, something congenital, even malignant, however, had
developed in Mrs. Becker. She took a fierce kind of joy, not untinged
with the mongrel emotion of self-pity, in scrubbing, on hands and knees,
the entire flight of back stairs at the black six-o'clock hour of wintry
mornings, her voice tickling up like a feather duster to Lilly's
reluctantly awakening senses.
"Lil-ly! Get up! I've done a day's work already. If I was a girl I
wouldn't want to sleep while my mother slaves."
But let Lilly so much as venture down into the wintry gaslight of the
bacon-fragrant kitchen, proffering her drowsy aid, a new flow, still in
the key of termagency, would greet her.
"Go right back to bed, Lilly. You want to catch your death of cold?"
"But, mamma, you fuss so. I'd rather help than listen. Here, let me stir
the oatmeal."
"Go back to bed, I say. I don't intend to have you spoil your hands with
kitchen work. Maybe some day your father will feel in a position to give
his wife a permanent servant girl like any other woman has."
"Mamma, he's always begging you to get one,"
"I know. Talk is cheap. Did you hear what I said, Lilly? Stop that
stirring and go back to bed! I'll bring up your breakfast after a while.
I'll fix your sandwiches for the sewing circle this afternoon."
"Oh, mamma, I just hate that circle! I wish to goodness you would let me
resign."
"I have a grateful daughter, I have. Any other child with your
advantages would think she had heaven on earth."
"I hate it, I tell you. Flora and Snow and all those girls, with nothing
on their brains except fellows and fancy work, make me positively sick."
"I notice Flora had enough brains to become engaged to a fine young
fellow with prospects like Vincent Bankhead."
"Every time I sit down at that circle I think I'm going to scream. I
just can't rake up enthusiasm over French knots. Something in me begins
to suffocate and I can't get out from under. I hate it."
Regarding her daughter through the bluish aroma of bacon in the frying,
her early-morning coiffure and wrapper not lenient with her, a
bitterness pulled at the lips of Mrs. Becker.
"That settles it. I'm going to have a talk with your father this
morning."
"Oh, mamma, please don't begin a scene!"
"Ben, are you ready for breakfast? Come down. What do you do up there so
long? You've been one solid hour splashing around the bathroom, as if I
didn't have to get down on my hands and knees to wipe up the flood
around the bathtub. Hurry! Your daughter has something to say to you."
"Coming, Carrie. Don't get excited."
"Don't get excited! I think your father would ram that down my throat if
this house was tumbling around our heads."
It was true that Mr. Becker's imperturbability incased him like a kindly
coating of tallow. His daily and peremptory call to breakfast brought
him down only after the last satisfactory application of whisk, tooth,
hand, shoe, bath, and hair brush, his invariable white-linen string tie
adjusted to a nicety, his neat gray business suit buttoned over a
gradual embonpoint.
"If I took as good care of myself as my husband does, I'd live to be a
thousand."
"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed to-day."
On this particular morning he descended genial, rubbing cold,
soap-exuding hands together.
"Well, little woman! Good morning, daughter."
"Ben, I'm at my row's end with Lilly. Something has got to be done or I
can't stand it."
He sat down, an immediate tiredness out in his face, adjusting his
napkin by the patent fasteners to each coat lapel.
"Now, Carrie, have you and Lilly been quarreling again? Doesn't it seem
too bad, Lilly, that you and your mother cannot get on without these
disturbances? Your mother may have her peculiarities, but she
means well."
A ready wave of red self-commiseration dashed itself across Mrs.
Becker's face.
"I can't stand it, Ben. I don't know what she wants. Maybe you can
please her. I can't. Everything I do is wrong. Everything."
In her little blue-gingham morning dress, out of which her neck flowered
white and ever beautiful of nape, Lilly crumbled up her biscuit, eyes
miserably down, the red-hot pricklings which invariably accompanied
these scenes flashing over her and a crowding in her throat as if she
must tear it open for language to make them understand.
"Talk to your father, now! Tell him some of the things you hound me
with."
"Lilly, what seems to be the trouble?"
"I--I don't know. Mamma gets so excited right away. I just happened to
mention that--I don't know what to do with myself."
"Do with yourself! Help me in the house. I can give you enough to do
with yourself. I don't get lonesome."
"Carrie, now, don't holler."
"That's the way she is, papa. She gets excited and hollers at me
because I can't get interested in sewing clubs and housework."
"It's because you've got it too good that you're not satisfied. That
Flora Kemble, that never has a decent thing to wear, gets engaged
to a--"
"Now, Carrie, that's no way to talk."
"Mamma always makes me feel uncomfortable because I'm not married yet."
"Now do you believe what I go through with, Ben?"
"You haven't any faith in me, but--somewhere--destiny, or whatever you
want to call it, has a job waiting for me!"
"That's too poetical for me to keep up with. Thank goodness I'm a plain
woman who knows her place in life."
"Exactly, mamma. It isn't that I consider myself above Flora's party
to-morrow night. It's not my place. I don't belong there. I hate it, I
tell you."
"You hear that, Ben? That's the thanks I get. You know the way I've
tried to make this little home one a child could be proud of. Take the
time that fine young Bryant fellow came to call. Why, that little parlor
of ours was fit for a princess. His knuckles didn't suit her! They
cracked, she said. I've heard of lots of excuses for not taking to boys,
but that beats all. Three girls out of the sewing club already married
and Flora engaged to that well-to-do Bankhead boy, and mine holds
herself above them all."
"Your mother isn't all wrong, Lilly."
"I've run my legs off for the white organdie so Katy Stutz could make it
up for Flora's engagement party to-morrow night. Does she appreciate it?
Oh yes, long face is the kind of appreciation I get."
"I'd rather stay home, mamma, and practice my singing or
read--anything--"
"You'll sing _there_. Mrs. Kemble has it all fixed for Flora to call on
you just before the refreshments. If you begin to pout about this party,
Lilly, I--"
"Oh," cried Lilly, turning her face away to hide the embitterment of lip
and still crumbling up her biscuit, "don't worry. I'm going if--if it
kills me."
Suddenly Mrs. Becker's face quivered ominously, the impending
storm-cloud bursting.
"I wish I was dead. What do I get out of it? Struggle and sacrifice, and
all for an ungrateful daughter that isn't happy in her home."
"It isn't that. Just let me be--myself!"
"Then what is yourself? For God's sake tell us what? Anything to end
this state of affairs."
"I'm suffocating here. Let me make something out of myself."
"Listen to her, Ben. Make something. Her stories come back from the
editors. Her teacher keeps telling me her voice isn't ready yet. Miss
Lee says her piano technique is lazy--"
"Then let me travel--college--anything."
"She thinks we're millionaires, Ben."
"Lilly, Lilly! What is the young generation coming to?"
"I wish I was dead. Dead," cried Mrs. Becker, beating at the table until
the dishes shivered. Danger lights sprang out in little green signals
around about the flanges of her nose. She was mounting to hysteria.
"Lilly, aren't you ashamed to torture your mother like this?" cried Mr.
Becker, his voice shot through with what for him amounted to a pistol
report. "Comfort your mother. Apologize at once!"
"Mamma, I'm sorry! I am, dear."
"You would think we were plotting against her."
"Now, now, Carrie, Lilly doesn't mean all she says."
"But she eats my life out."
"She wants to please us. Don't you, Lilly?"
"Y-yes, papa--"
"Now let us see if things can't run smoother in our little home, eh,
Lilly? We'll all try and do each his part, eh, Lilly?"
"Y-yes, papa."
"It's late," cried Mrs. Becker, suddenly, on the single gong of half
after seven, and, ever quick and kaleidoscopic of mood: "Katy Stutz will
be here any minute. That's her now. Run upstairs, Lilly, and take the
top off the sewing machine and lay out the white organdie. Quick, Lilly.
I want you to have it without fail for to-morrow night."