The sky had been a blue steam all day, but at night it quieted, there
were faint airs. From the window of the apartment on Riverside Drive you
could see it grow gentle, fade from a strong heat of azure through gray
gauze into darkness, thick-soft as a sable's fur at first, then uneasily
patterned all at once with idle leopard-spottings and strokes of light.
The lights fell into the river and dissolved, the dark wash took them
and carried them into streaks of lesser, more fluid light. Even so, if
there could have been country silence for five minutes at a time, the
running river, the hills so disturbed with light beyond, might have worn
some aspect of peace. But even in the high bird's nest of the apartment
there was no real silence, only a pretending at silence, like the forced
quiet of a child told to keep still in a corner--the two people dining
together could talk in whispers, if they wanted, and still be heard,
but always at the back of the brain of either ran a thin pulsation of
mumbling sound like the buzz of a kettle-drum softly struck in a passage
of music where the orchestra talks full-voiced--the night sound of the
city, breathing and moving and saying words.
They must have been married rather contentedly for quite a while now,
they said so little of importance at dinner and yet seemed so quietly
pleased at having dinner together and so neat at understanding half
sentences without asking explanations. That would have been the first
conclusion of anybody who had been able to take out a wall and watch
their doll-house unobserved. Besides, though the short, decided man with
the greyish hair must be fifty at least, the woman who stood his own
height when she rose from the table was too slimly mature for anything
but the thirties. Not a highly original New York couple by any means--a
prospering banker or president of a Consolidated Toothpick Company with
a beautiful wife, American matron-without-children model, except for her
chin which was less dimpled than cleft with decisiveness and the wholly
original lustre of her hair, a buried lustre like the shine of “Murray's
red gold” in a Border ballad. A wife rather less society-stricken than
the run of such wives since she obviously preferred hot August in a New
York apartment with her husband's company to beach-picnics at Greenwich
or Southampton without it. Still the apartment, though compact as an
army mess-kit, was perfectly furnished and the maid who had served
the cool little dinner an efficient effacedness of the race that
housekeepers with large families and little money assert passed with the
Spanish War. Money enough, and the knowledge of how to use it without
blatancy or pinching--that would have been the second conclusion.
They were sitting in deep chairs in the living room now, a tall-stemmed
reading lamp glowing softly between them, hardly speaking. The tiredness
that had been in the man's face like the writing in a 'crossed' letter
began to leave it softly. He reached over, took the woman's hand and
held it--not closely or with greediness but with a firm clasp that had
something weary like appeal in it and something strong like a knowledge
of rest.
“Always like this, at home,” he said slowly.
“It _is_ rather sweet.” Her voice had the gentleness of water running
into water. Her eyes looked at him once and left him deliberately
but not as if they didn't care. It must have been a love-match in the
beginning then--her eyes seemed so infirm.
“You'll read a little?”
“Yes.”
“Home,” he said. He seemed queerly satisfied to say the word, queerly
moved as if even after so much reality had been lived through together,
he couldn't quite believe that it was reality.
“And I've been waiting for it--five days, six days, this time?”
She must have been at the seashore after all--tan or lack of it meant
little these days, especially to a woman who lived in this kind of an
apartment. The third conclusion might have been rather sentimental, a
title out of a moving picture--something about Even in the Wastes of the
Giant City the Weary Heart Will Always Turn To--Just Home.
A doll on a small table began to buzz mysteriously in its internals. The
man released the woman's hand--both looking deeply annoyed.
“I thought we had a private number here,” said the man, the tiredness
coming back into his face like scribbles on parchment.
She crossed to the telephone with a charming furtiveness--you could see
she was playing they had just been found behind the piano together in a
game of hide-and-seek. The doll was disembowelled of its telephone.
“No--No--Oh very well--”
“What was it?”
She smiled.
“Is this the Eclair Picture Palace?” she mimicked. [Illustration: THE
TIREDNESS THAT HAD BEEN IN THE MAN'S FACE BEGAN TO LEAVE IT] Both seemed
almost childishly relieved. So in spite of his successful-business-man
mouth, he wasn't the kind that is less a husband than a
telephone-receiver, especially at home. Still, she would have made a
difference even to telephone-receivers, that could be felt even without
the usual complement of senses.
“That was--bothersome for a minute.” His tone lent the words a quaint
accent of scare.
“Oh, well--if you have one at all--the way the service is now--”
“There won't be any telephone when we take our vacation together, that's
_settled_.”
She had been kneeling, examining a bookcase for books. Now she turned
with one in her hand, her hair ruddy and smooth as ruddy amber in the
reflected light.
“No, but _telegrams_. And wireless,” she whispered mockingly, the more
mockingly because it so obviously made him worried as a worried boy.
She came over and stood smoothing his ear a moment, a half-unconscious
customary gesture, no doubt, for he relaxed under it and the look of
rest came back. Then she went to her chair, sat down and opened the
book.
“No use borrowing trouble now, dear. Now listen. Cigar?” “Going.”
“Ashtray?”
“Yes.”
“And remember not to knock it over when you get excited. Promise?”
“Um.”
“Very well.”
Mrs. Severance's even voice began to flow into the stillness.
“As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt--”