THIRTY DOLLARS A WEEK
When, with Ruth on my arm, I walked up the steps of the house and
unlocked the front door, I entered upon a new life. It was my first
taste of home since my mother died and added to that was this new love
which was finer than anything I had ever dreamed about. It seemed hard
to have to leave every morning at half past six and not get back until
after five at night, but to offset this we used to get up as early as
four o'clock during the long summer days. Many the time even in June
Ruth and I ate our breakfast by lamp-light. It gave us an extra hour
and she was bred in the country where getting up in the morning is no
great hardship.
We couldn't afford a servant and we didn't want one. Ruth was a fine
cook and I certainly did justice to her dishes after ten years of
restaurants and boarding-houses. On rainy days when we couldn't get
out, she used to do her cooking early so that I might watch her. It
seemed a lot more like her cooking when I saw her pat out the dough
and put it in the oven instead of coming home and finding it all done.
I used to fill up my pipe and sit by the kitchen stove until I had
just time to catch the train by sprinting.
But when the morning was fine we'd either take a long walk through the
big park reservation which was near the house or we'd fuss over the
garden. We had twenty-two inches of radishes, thirty-eight inches of
lettuce, four tomato plants, two hills of corn, three hills of beans
and about four yards of early peas. In addition to this Ruth had
squeezed a geranium into one corner and a fern into another and
planted sweet alyssum around the whole business. Everyone out here
planned to raise his own vegetables. It was supposed to cut down
expenses but I noticed the market man always did a good business.
I had met two or three of the men at the country club and they
introduced me to the others. We were all earning about the same
salaries and living in about the same type of house. Still there were
differences and you could tell more by the wives than the husbands
those whose salaries went over two thousand. Two or three of the men
were in banks, one was in a leather firm, one was an agent for an
insurance company, another was with the telegraph company, another was
with the Standard Oil, and two or three others were with firms like
mine. Most of them had been settled out here three or four years and
had children. In a general way they looked comfortable and happy
enough but you heard a good deal of talk among them about the high
cost of living and you couldn't help noticing that those who dressed
the best had the fewest children. One or two of them owned horses but
even they felt obliged to explain that they saved the cost of them in
car fares.
They all called and left their cards but that first year we didn't see
much of them. There wasn't room in my life for anyone but Ruth at that
time. I didn't see even the old office gang except during business
hours and at lunch.
The rent scaled my salary down to one thousand and eighty dollars at
one swoop. Then we had to save out at least five dollars a week to pay
on the furniture. This left eight hundred and twenty, or fifteen
dollars and seventy-five cents a week, to cover running expenses. We
paid cash for everything and though we never had much left over at the
end of the week and never anything at the end of the month, we had
about everything we wanted. For one thing our tastes were not
extravagant and we did no entertaining. Our grocery and meat bill
amounted to from five to seven dollars a week. Of course I had my
lunches in town but I got out of those for twenty cents. My daily car
fare was twenty cents more which brought my total weekly expenses up
to about three dollars. This left a comfortable margin of from five to
seven dollars for light, coal, clothes and amusements. In the summer
the first three items didn't amount to much so some weeks we put most
of this into the furniture. But the city was new to Ruth, especially
at night, so we were in town a good deal. She used to meet me at the
office and we'd walk about the city and then take dinner at some
little French restaurant and then maybe go to a concert or the
theatre. She made everything new to me again. At the theatre she used
to perch on the edge of her seat so breathless, so responsive that I
often saw the old timers watch her instead of the show. I often did
myself. And sometimes it seemed as though the whole company acted to
her alone.
Those days were perfect. The only incident to mar them was the death
of Ruth's parents. They died suddenly and left an estate of six or
seven hundred dollars. Ruth insisted upon putting that into the
furniture. But in our own lives every day was as fair as the first. My
salary came as regularly as an annuity and there was every prospect
for advancement. The garden did well and Ruth became acquainted with
most of the women in a sociable way. She joined a sewing circle which
met twice a month chiefly I guess for the purpose of finding out about
one another's husbands. At any rate she told me more about them than I
would have learned in ten years.
Still, during the fall and winter we kept pretty much by ourselves,
not deliberately but because neither of us cared particularly about
whist parties and such things but preferred to spend together what
time we had. And then I guess Ruth was a little shy about her clothes.
She dressed mighty well to my eye but she made most of her things
herself and didn't care much about style. She didn't notice the
difference at home but when she was out among others, they made her
feel it. However spring came around again and we forgot all about
those details. We didn't go in town so much that summer and used to
spend more time on our piazza. I saw more of the men in this way and
found them a pleasant, companionable lot. They asked me to join the
Neighborhood Club and I did, more to meet them half way than because I
wanted to. There we played billiards and discussed the stock market
and furnaces. All of them had schemes for making fortunes if only they
had a few thousand dollars capital. Now and then you'd find a group of
them in one corner discussing a rumor that so and so had lost his job.
They spoke of this as they would of a death. But none of those
subjects interested me especially in view of what I was looking
forward to in my own family.
In the afternoons of the early fall the women sent over jellies and
such stuff to Ruth and dropped in upon her with whispered advice. She
used to repeat it to me at night with a gay little laugh and her eyes
sparkling like diamonds. She was happier now than I had ever seen her
and so was I myself. When I went in town in the morning I felt very
important.
I thought I had touched the climax of life when I married Ruth but
when the boy came he lifted me a notch higher. And with him he brought
me a new wife in Ruth, without taking one whit from the old.
Sweetheart, wife and mother now, she revealed to me new depths of
womanhood.
She taught me, too, what real courage is. I was the coward when the
time came. I had taken a day off but the doctor ordered me out of the
house. I went down to the club and I felt more one of the neighborhood
that day than I ever did before or afterwards. It was Saturday and
during the afternoon a number of the men came in and just silently
gripped my hand.
The women, too, seemed to take a new interest in us. When Ruth was
able to sit up they brought in numberless little things. But you'd
have thought it was their house and not mine, the way they treated me.
When any of them came I felt as though I didn't belong there and ought
to tip-toe out.
We'd been saving up during the summer for this emergency so that we
had enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse but that was only the
beginning of the new expenses. In the first place we had to have a
servant now. I secured a girl who knew how to cook after a fashion,
for four dollars a week. But that wasn't by any means what she cost
us. In spite of Ruth's supervision the girl wasted as much as she used
so that our provision bill was nearly doubled. If we hadn't succeeded
in paying for the furniture before this I don't know what we would
have done. As it was I found my salary pretty well strained. I hadn't
any idea that so small a thing as a baby could cost so much. Ruth had
made most of his things but I know that some of his shirts cost as
much as mine.
When the boy was older Ruth insisted upon getting along without a girl
again. I didn't approve of this but I saw that it would make her
happier to try anyway. How in the world she managed to do it I don't
know but she did. This gave her an excuse for not going out--though it
was an excuse that made me half ashamed of myself--and so we saved in
another way. Even with this we just made both ends meet and that was
all.
The boy grew like a weed and before I knew it he was five years old.
Until he began to walk and talk I didn't think of him as a possible
man. He didn't seem like anything in particular. He was just soft and
round and warm. But when he began to wear knickerbockers he set me to
thinking hard. He wasn't going to remain always a baby; he was going
to grow into a boy and then a young man and before I knew it he would
be facing the very same problem that now confronted me. And that
problem was how to get enough ahead of the game to give him a fair
start in life. I realized, too, that I wanted him to do something
better than I had done. When I stopped to think of it I had
accomplished mighty little. I had lived and that was about all. That I
had lived happily was due to Ruth. But if I was finding difficulty in
keeping even with the game now, what was I going to do when the
youngster would prove a decidedly more serious item of expense?
I talked this over with Ruth and we both decided that somehow, in some
way, we must save some money every year. We started in by reducing our
household expenses still further. But it seemed as though fate were
against us for prices rose just enough to absorb all our little
economies. Flour went up and sugar went up, and though we had done
away with meat almost wholly now, vegetables went up. So, too, did
coal. Not only that but we had long since found it impossible to keep
to ourselves as we had that first year. Little by little we had been
drawn into the social life of the neighborhood. Not a month went by
but what there was a dinner or two or a whist party or a dance.
Personally I didn't care about such things but as Ruth had become a
matron and in consequence had been thrown more in contact with the
women, she had lost her shyness and grown more sociable. She often
suggested declining an invitation but we couldn't decline one without
declining all. I saw clearly enough that I had no right to do this.
She did more work than I and did not have the daily change. To have
made a social exile of her would have been to make her little better
than a slave. But it cost money. It cost a lot of money. We had to do
our part in return and though Ruth accomplished this by careful buying
and all sorts of clever devices, the item became a big one in the
year's expenses.
I began to look forward with some anxiety for the next raise. At the
office I hunted for extra work with an eye upon the place above; but
though I found the work nothing came of it but extra hours. In fact I
began to think myself lucky to hold the job I had for a gradual change
of methods had been slowly going on in the office. Mechanical adding
machines had cost a dozen men their jobs; a card system of bookkeeping
had made it possible to discharge another dozen, while an off year in
woollens sent two or three more flying, among them the man who had
found me the position in the first place. But he hadn't married and he
went out west somewhere. Occasionally when work picked up again a
young man was taken on to fill the place of one of the discharged men.
The company always saved a few hundred dollars by such a shift for the
lad never got the salary of the old employee, and so far as anyone
could see the work went on just as well.
While these moves were ominous, as I can see now in looking back, they
didn't disturb me very much at the time. I filled a little niche in
the office that was all my own. At every opportunity I had
familiarized myself with the work of the man above me and was on very
good terms with him. I waited patiently and confidently for the day
when Morse should call me in and announce his own advance and leave me
to fill his place. I might have to begin on two thousand but it was a
sure twenty-five hundred eventually to say nothing of what it led to.
The president of the company had begun as I had and had moved up the
same steps that now lay ahead of me.
In the meanwhile the life at home ran smoothly in spite of everything.
Neither the wife, the boy nor I was sick a day for we all had sound
bodies to start with. Our country-bred ancestors didn't need a will to
leave us those. If at times we felt a trifle pinched especially in the
matter of clothes, it was wonderful how rich Ruth contrived to make us
feel. She knew how to take care of things and though I didn't spend
half what some of the men spent on their suits, I went in town every
morning looking better than two-thirds of them. I was inspected from
head to foot before I started and there wasn't a wrinkle or a spot so
small that it could last twenty-four hours. I shined my own shoes and
pressed my own trousers and Ruth looked to it that this was done well.
Moreover she could turn a tie, clean and press it so that it looked
brand new. I think some of the neighbors even thought I was
extravagant in my dressing.
She did the same for herself and had caught the knack of seeming to
dress stylishly without really doing so. She had beautiful hair and
this in itself made her look well dressed. As for the boy he was a
model for them all.
In the meanwhile the boy had grown into short trousers and before we
knew it he was in school. It made it lonesome for her during the day
when he began to trudge off every morning at nine o'clock. She began
to look forward to Saturdays as eagerly as the boy did. Then the next
thing we knew he'd start off even earlier on that day to join his
playmates. Sunday was the only day either of us had him to ourselves.
After he began to go to school, Ruth and I seemed to begin another
life. In a way we felt all by ourselves once more. I didn't get home
until half past seven now and Dick was then abed. He was abed too when
I left in the morning. Of course he was never off my mind and if he
hadn't been asleep upstairs I guess I'd have known a difference. But
at the same time he was, in a small way, living his own life now
which left Ruth and me to ourselves once more. She used to go over for
me all the details of his day from the time she took him up in the
morning until she tucked him away in bed again at night and then there
would come a pause. It seemed as though there ought to be something
more, but there wasn't. The next few months it seemed almost as though
she was waiting. For what, I didn't know and yet I too felt there was
a lapse in our lives. I never loved her more. There was never a time
when she was so truly my wife and yet in our combined lives there was
something lacking. After a while I began to notice a wistful
expression in her eyes. It always came after she had said,
"So Dicky said, 'God bless father and mother,' and then he went to
sleep."
Then one night it dawned on me. Hers was the same heart hunger that
had been eating at me. Dick was a boy now and there was no baby to
take his place. But, good Lord, as it was I hadn't been able to save a
dollar. I knew that we were simply holding on tight and drifting. The
boat was loaded to the gunwales even now. And yet that expression in
her eyes had a right to be answered. But I couldn't answer it. I
didn't dare open my mouth. I didn't dare speak even one night when she
said,
"He's all we have, Billy--just one."
I gripped her hand and sat staring into the little coal hod fireplace
which we didn't light more than once a month now. Even as I watched
the flames I saw them licking up pennies.
Just one! And I too wanted a houseful like Dick.
I had to see that look night after night and I had to go to town
knowing I was leaving her all alone with the one away at school. And
what a mother she was! She ought to have had a baby by her side all
the time.
As the one grew, his expenses increased. The only way to meet them was
by cutting down our own expenses still more. I cut out smoking and
made my old clothes do an extra year. Ruth spent half her time in
bargain hunting and saved still more by taking it out of herself. Poor
little woman, she worked harder for a quarter than I did and I was
working harder for that sum than I used to work for a dollar. But we
were not alone in the struggle. As we came to know more about the
people in that group of snug little houses we knew that the same grim
fight was going on in all of them. Some of them were not so lucky as
we and ran into debt while a few of them were luckier and were helped
out with legacies or by well-to-do relatives. We were as much alike as
peas in a pod. We were living on the future and bluffing out the
present. You'd have thought it would have cast a gloom over the
neighborhood--you'd have thought it would have done away with some of
the parties and dances. But it didn't. In the first place this was, to
most of us, just life. In the second place there didn't seem to be any
alternative. There was no other way of living. The conditions seemed
to be fixed; we had to eat, we had to wear a certain type of dress;
and unless we wished to exist as exiles we had to meet on a certain
plane of social intercourse. The conventions were as iron clad here as
among the nobility of England. No one thought of violating them; no
one thought it was possible. You had to live as the others did or die
and be done with it. If anyone of us had thought we might have seen
the foolishness of this but it was all so manifest that no one did
think. The only method of escape was a raise and that meant moving
into another sphere which would cover that.
A new complication came when the boy grew old enough to have social
functions of his own. He had made many new friends and he wanted to
join a tennis club, a dancing class and contribute towards the support
of the athletic teams of the school. Moreover he was invited to
parties and had to give parties himself. Once again I tried to see
some way out of this social business. It seemed such a pitiful waste
of ammunition under the circumstances. I wanted to save the money if
it was possible in any way to eke it out, for his education. But what
could I do? The boy had to live as his friends lived or give them up.
He wasn't asked to do any more than the other boys of the neighborhood
but he was rightly asked to do as much. If he couldn't it would be at
the sacrifice of his pride that he associated with them at all. And a
just pride in a boy is something you can't safely tamper with. He had
to have the money and we managed it somehow. But it brought home the
old grim fact that I hadn't as yet saved a dollar.
I clung more than ever now to the one ray of hope--the job ahead. It
was the only comfort Ruth and I had and whenever I felt especially
downhearted she'd start in and plan how we'd spend it. It took the
edge off the immediate thought of danger. In the meanwhile I resigned
even from the Neighborhood Club and let the boy join the tennis club.
I noticed at once a change in the attitude of the men towards me. But
I was reaching a point now where I didn't care.
In this way, then, we lived until I was thirty-eight and Ruth was
thirty, and the boy was eleven. For the last few months I had been
doing night work without extra pay and so was practically exiled from
the boy except on Sundays. He was not developing the way I wanted. The
local grammar school was almost a private school for the neighborhood.
I should have preferred to have it more cosmopolitan. The boy was
rubbing up against only his own kind and this was making him soft,
both physically and mentally. He was also getting querulous and
autocratic. Ruth saw it, but with only one.... Well, on Sundays I took
the boy with me on long cross-country jaunts and did a good deal of
talking to him. But all I said rolled off like water off a duck. He
lacked energy and initiative. He was becoming distinctly more
middle-class than either of us, with some of the faults of the
so-called upper class thrown in. He chattered about Harvard, not as an
opportunity, but as a class privilege. I didn't like it. But before I
had time to worry much about this the crash came that I had not been
wise enough to foresee.