By a strange conspiracy of middle-class morality, which clothes the
white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own
sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the sexlessness of a
young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her,
walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping
sensitively.
The same, in a measure, was true of Albert, who came into his immaculate
inheritance, himself immaculate, but with a nervous system well
insulated by a great cautiousness of life.
He was highly subject to head colds and occasional attacks of dyspepsia,
due to his inability to abstain from certain foods. He was, therefore,
sensitive to draughts and would not eat hot bread. He carried an
umbrella absolutely upon all occasions and a celluloid toothpick in his
waistcoat pocket.
Then, too, he gargled. To chronicle the heroic emotions that motivate
men is a fine task. Love and hate and all the chemistry of their
mingling that go to form the plasma of human experience. It is a lesser,
even an ignominious one to narrate Lilly's kind of anguish during this
matinal performance of her husband. She suffered a tight-throated sort
of anguish that could have been no keener had it been of larger
provocation. Her toes and her fingers would curl and a quick ripple of
flesh rush over her.
Mornings, when he departed, his kiss, which smelled of mouth wash, would
remain coldly against her lips with the peculiar burn of camphor ice.
All her sensibilities seemed suddenly to fester.
On a week day of the third week of her marriage, in her little canary
cage of a yellow bedroom dominated with the monstrous brass bedstead of
the period and a swell-front dresser elaborate in Honiton and flat
silver, she endured, with her head crushed into the chair back, those
noisome ablutions from across the hallway. She was wearing, these first
mornings, a rose-colored negligée, foamy with lace and still violet
scented from the trousseau chest, and especially designed to pink this
early hour.
It lay light to a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual
touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It
was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays,
all her to-morrows ruthlessly and terribly solved.
Something swift and eager had died within her. She was herself gone
flabby. A wife, with a sudden and, to her, horrid new consciousness that
had twisted every ligament of life.
Her husband's collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt,
awaiting studs, spread out on the bed--their bed. His suspenders
straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking
back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he
had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers)
when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After
the first week, he liked the bone, too, gnawing it, not mussily, but
with his broad white teeth predatory and his temples working. She was a
veritable bundle of these petty accumulated concepts, harrowed to
their quick.
She knew that presently he would enter the room in his trousers and
undershirt, which he did upon the very minute, the little purple circle,
like a stamp mark on the rind of a bacon, showing just beneath his
Adam's apple, the shag of his yellow hair wetly curly from dousing, like
a spaniel's.
"Certainly fine water pressure we have in the bathroom, Lilly. I am
going to bring home some tubing from the store and attach a spray."
She looked out of the window over the languid little patch of front
lawn, more gray than green from the scourge of heat. Insect life hung
midair like a curtain of buzzings. Directly opposite the dusty, unmade
street, she could see her parents' home standing unprotected except for
one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades.
There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling
leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of
Lilly's neck.
It was just that spot, while tugging at his collar, that Albert Penny
stooped to kiss.
"Little wife," he said.
"Ugh!" she felt.
"Poor little wife, it was ninety-four and a half at six-thirty-eight
this morning."
His capacity for accuracy could madden her.
He computed life in the minutiae of fractions, reckoning in terms of the
halfpenny, the half minute, the half degree.
She sat now, laying pleats in the pink negligée where it flowed over her
knees, a half smile forced out on her lips.
"Well, Albert," she said, wanting to keep her voice lifted, "I guess
we're in it, aren't we? Up to our necks."
"In what?"
"Marriage."
Leaning to the mirror for the adjustment of his collar button, he
paused, regarding her reflection.
"Well now, what an idea! Of course we're in it, and the wonder to me is
how we ever stayed out so long."
She reached up to yawn, her long white arms stretched above her head.
"Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!" she said in what might have been the key of
anything.
"Poor little girl!" he said. "I wish I could make it cooler for you."
"It isn't that."
"What then is bothering your little head?"
"I--oh, I don't know. I guess it's just the reaction after the
excitement of the wedding."
He came back to kiss the same tendril at the nape of her neck.
"I'm glad it's over, too. Feels mighty good to settle down."
"'Settle down.' Somehow I hate that expression."
"All right, then, Mrs. Penny, we'll settle up. Speaking of settling up,
I guess the missus wants her Monday-morning allowance, doesn't she?"
"I--guess--so."
He placed three already counted out five-dollar bills on the dresser,
weighting them down with a silver-back mirror.
"See if you can't make it last this week, Lilly. You watch Mother Becker
market and you'll come out all right."
"Oh, I can't pick around raw meat the way mamma does. It makes me sick."
"Housekeeping may seem a little strange at first, but I'm not afraid my
little wife is going to let any of them get ahead of her."
"Whoever wants it, can have that honor."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"What's the program for to-day, Lilly?"
"Oh, I don't know."
"I'm going to send Joe out from the store to-day with some washers for
the kitchen faucets and some poultry netting for a chicken yard. I'll
potter around this evening and build one behind the woodshed. Chickens
give a place a right homey touch."
"And send out a man from Knatt's to fix the piano. They delivered it
with a middle C that sticks."
"Yes, and I'll send a can of Killbug out with the wire. I noticed a
cockroach run over the ice box last night. You must watch that a little,
even in a new house."
"Ugh!"
"I hope I'm not getting a cold. I feel kind of that way. Mother Becker
fixed me up fine with that wet cloth around my neck last time. I'll try
it to-night."
"Come," she said, "breakfast is ready."
They descended to the little oak dining room, quite a glitter of new cut
glass on the sideboard and the round table white and immaculately
spread. There was a little maidservant, Lena Obendorfer, the
fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kemble washerwoman, shy and red rims
about her eyes from secret tears of homesickness.
"Why, Lena, the breakfast table looks lovely; and don't forget, dearie,
Mr. Penny takes three eggs in the morning, and he doesn't like his
rolls heated."
The child, her poor flat face pock-marked, fluttered into service.
Lilly regarded her husband through his meal, elbows on table, cheek in
her palm. He ate the three two-minute eggs with gusto, alternating with
deep draughts of coffee, and crisp little ribbons of bacon made into a
sandwich between his rolls.
"This is certainly delicious bacon."
"Mamma sent a whole one over yesterday."
"I like it lean. Always buy it with plenty of dark streaks through it.
Don't you like it lean?"
Silence.
"Can't you eat, Lilly? That's a shame."
"Too hot."
"Poor girlie!"
"Lena, bring Mr. Penny some more bacon."
"Certainly delicious. I like it lean."
She watched his temples quiver to the motion of his jaws, her
unspeakable depression tightening up her tonsils and the very pit of her
scared and empty.
"Albert--"
"Um-hum!"
"I--What if you should find that I--I'm not--not--"
"What?"
"Not right--here. Not the--wife for you."
He leaned over to pinch her cheek, waggling it softly and masticating
well before he spoke.
"If my little wife suited me any better they would have to chain me
down. Ah, it's great! I tell you, Lilly, a man makes the mistake of his
life not to do it earlier. If I had it to do over again I'd marry at
twenty. Solid comfort. Something to work for. I feel five years closer
to the general managership than I did six months ago. Certainly fine
bacon. Best I ever ate."
"Albert--let us not permit our marriage to drag us down into the kind
of rut we see all about us. Take Flora and Vincent. Married five months
and she never so much as wears corsets when she takes him to the street
car, mornings. And he used to be such a clever dresser, and look at him
now. All baggy. Let's not get baggy, Albert."
"I agree with you there. A man owes it to himself and his business to
appear well pressed. It's a slogan of mine. Clothes may not make the
man, but neatness often goes a long way toward making the opportunity.
Don't you worry about me becoming baggy, Lilly. I'm going to send one of
those folding ironing boards up from the store this day."
"I don't mean only that. You mustn't be so literal about everything. I
mean let's not become baggy-minded. Take Flora again. Flora was her
class poetess and I don't believe she has a literary thought or a book
in her head now except her account book. Let us improve ourselves,
Albert. Read evenings and subscribe to the Symphony and the Rubinstein
Evening Choral."
"Speaking of Rubinstein, Lilly, I'm going to take out a thousand
dollars' burglary insurance with Eckstein. One cannot be too careful."
She pushed back from the table. "We're invited over to the Duncans'
to-night for supper. They've one of the new self-playing pianos."
He felt in his waistcoat pocket for the toothpick.
"I'll go if you want it, Lilly, but guess where I'd rather eat my
supper."
"Where?"
"Right here. And fry the sirloin the way Mother Becker does it, Lilly,
sprinkle a few onions on it. If I were you I wouldn't let Lena
tackle it."
"This is the third night for beefsteak."
"Fine. You'll learn this about your hubby, he--"
"Don't use that word, Albert. I hate it."
"What?"
"Hubby."
"All right then, husband. Bless her heart, she likes to hear the real
thing. Well then, your husband is a beefsteak fellow. Let the others
have all the ruffly dishes they want. Good strong beefsteak is my pace."
She let him lift her face for a kiss.
"I'll be home six-forty-six to the dot. That's what I've figured out it
takes me if I leave the office at six-five."
He kissed her again, pressing her head backward against the cove of his
arm, pinching her cheeks together so that her mouth puckered.
"Won't kiss my little wife on the lips this morning. I'm getting a head
cold. Good-by, Mrs. Penny. Um-m-m! like to say it."
"Good-by."
"Mother Becker coming over to-day?"
"Yes. We had planned to go to the meat market together."
"Fine."
"But I'm not going."
"Why?"
"I--don't know. Too hot, I guess."
He looked at her rather intently.
"That's right, Lilly," he said, his eyes, with something new in them,
roving over her figure; "if you don't feel up to the mark, just you take
care of yourself. Jove!" he repeated. "Jove!" kissed her again, and went
down the front steps, whistling.