In the years that followed they did come back to the big woods, but not
every year, for in the beginning of their life together there were hard
times, and troubled times, when even a fortnight's irresponsibility and
ease was not possible. Yet they came often enough to keep fresh in
their hearts the memory of great spaces and great silences, and to
dream their old dreams.
The great earthquake brought them home hurriedly from their honeymoon,
and Susan had her work to do, amid all the confusion that followed the
uprooting of ten thousand homes. Young Mrs. Oliver listened to terrible
stories, while she distributed second-hand clothing, and filed cards,
walked back to her own little kitchen at five o'clock to cook her
dinner, and wrapped and addressed copies of the "Protest" far into the
night.
With the deeper social problems that followed the days of mere physical
need,--what was in her of love and charity rushed into sudden
blossoming,--she found that her inexperienced hands must deal. She,
whose wifehood was all joy and sanity, all sweet and mysterious
deepening of the color of life, encountered now the hideous travesty of
wifehood and motherhood, met by immature, ill-nourished bodies, and
hearts sullen and afraid.
"You ought not be seeing these things now," Billy warned her. But Susan
shook her head.
"It's good for me, Billy. And it's good for the little person, too.
It's no credit to him that he's more fortunate than these--he needn't
feel so superior!" smiled Susan.
Every cent must be counted in these days. Susan and Billy laughed long
afterward to remember that on many a Sunday they walked over to the
little General Post Office in Mission Street, hoping for a subscription
or two in the mail, to fan the dying fires of the "Protest" for a few
more days. Better times came; the little sheet struck roots, carried a
modest advertisement or two, and a woman's column under the heading
"Mary Jane's Letter" whose claims kept the editor's wife far too busy.
As in the early days of her marriage all the women of the world had
been simply classified as wives or not wives, so now Susan saw no
distinction except that of motherhood or childlessness. When she lay
sick, feverish and confused, in the first hours that followed the
arrival of her first-born, she found her problem no longer that of the
individual, no longer the question merely of little Martin's crib and
care and impending school and college expenses. It was the great burden
of the mothers of the world that Susan took upon her shoulders. Why so
much strangeness and pain, why such ignorance of rules and needs, she
wondered. She lay thinking of tired women, nervous women, women hanging
over midnight demands of colic and croup, women catching the little
forms back from the treacherous open window, and snatching away the
dangerous bottle from little hands---!
"Miss Allen," said Susan, out of a silence, "he doesn't seem to be
breathing. The blanket hasn't gotten over his little face, has it?"
So began the joyous martyrdom. Susan's heart would never beat again
only for herself. Hand in hand with the rapture of owning the baby
walked the terror of losing him. His meals might have been a special
miracle, so awed and radiant was Susan's face when she had him in her
arms. His goodness, when he was good, seemed to her no more remarkable
than his badness, when he was bad. Susan ran to him after the briefest
absences with icy fear at her heart. He had loosened a pin--gotten it
into his mouth, he had wedged his darling little head in between the
bars of his crib---!
But she left him very rarely. What Susan did now must be done at home.
Her six-days-old son asleep beside her, she was discovered by Anna
cheerfully dictating to her nurse "Mary Jane's Letter" for an
approaching issue of the "Protest." The young mother laughed joyfully
at Anna's concern, but later, when the trained nurse was gone, and the
warm heavy days of the hot summer came, when fat little Martin was
restless through the long, summer nights with teething, Susan's courage
and strength were put to a hard test.
"We ought to get a girl in to help you," Billy said, distressedly, on a
night when Susan, flushed and excited, refused his help everywhere, and
attempted to manage baby and dinner and house unassisted.
"We ought to get clothes and china and linen and furniture,--we ought
to move out of this house and this block!" Susan wanted to say. But
with some effort she refrained from answering at all, and felt tears
sting her eyes when Billy carried the baby off, to do with his big
gentle fingers all the folding and pinning and buttoning that preceded
Martin's disappearance for the evening.
"Never mind!" Susan said later, smiling bravely over the dinner table,
"he needs less care every day! He'll soon be walking and amusing
himself."
But Martin was only staggering uncertainly and far from self-sufficient
when Billy Junior came laughing into the family group. "How do women DO
it!" thought Susan, recovering slowly from a second heavy drain on
nerves and strength.
No other child, of course, would ever mean to her quite what the oldest
son meant. The first-born is the miracle, brought from Heaven itself
through the very gates of death, a pioneer, merciless and helpless, a
little monarch whose kingdom never existed before the day he set up his
feeble little cry. All the delightful innovations are for him,--the
chair, the mug, the little airings, the remodeled domestic routine.
"Pain in his poor little tum!" Susan said cheerfully and tenderly, when
the youthful Billy cried. Under exactly similar circumstances, with
Martin, she had shed tears of terror and despair, while Billy,
shivering in his nightgown, had hung at the telephone awaiting her word
to call the doctor. Martin's tawny, finely shaped little head, the grip
of his sturdy, affectionate little arms, his early voyages into the
uncharted sea of English speech,--these were so many marvels to his
mother and father.
But it had to be speedily admitted that Billy had his own particular
charm too. The two were in everything a sharp contrast. Martin's bright
hair blew in loose waves, Billy's dark curls fitted his head like a
cap. Martin's eyes were blue and grave, Billy's dancing and brown.
Martin used words carefully, with a nice sense of values, Billy
achieved his purposes with stamping and dimpling, and early coined a
tiny vocabulary of his own. Martin slept flat on his small back, a
muscular little viking drifting into unknown waters, but drowsiness
must always capture Billy alive and fighting. Susan untangled him
nightly from his covers, loosened his small fingers from the bars of
his crib.
She took her maternal responsibilities gravely. Billy Senior thought it
very amusing to see her, buttering a bowl for bread-pudding, or running
small garments through her machine, while she recited "The Pied Piper"
or "Goblin Market" to a rapt audience of two staring babies. But
somehow the sight was a little touching, too.
"Bill, don't you honestly think that they're smarter than other
children, or is it just because they're mine?" Susan would ask. And
Billy always answered in sober good faith, "No, it's not you, dear, for
I see it too! And they really ARE unusual!"
Susan sometimes put both boys into the carriage and went to see
Georgie, to whose group a silent, heavy little boy had now been added.
Mrs. O'Connor was a stout, complacent little person; the doctor's
mother was dead, and Georgie spoke of her with sad affection and
reverence. The old servant stayed on, tirelessly devoted to the new
mistress, as she had been to the old, and passionately proud of the
children. Joe's practice had grown enormously; Joe kept a runabout now,
and on Sundays took his well-dressed wife out with him to the park.
They had a circle of friends very much like themselves, prosperous
young fathers and mothers, and there was a pleasant rivalry in
card-parties, and the dressing of little boys and girls. Myra and
Helen, colored ribbons tying their damp, straight, carefully ringletted
hair, were a nicely mannered little pair, and the boy fat and sweet and
heavy.
"Georgie is absolutely satisfied," Susan said wistfully. "Do you think
we will ever reach our ideals, Aunt Jo, as she has hers?"
It was a summer Saturday, only a month or two after the birth of
William Junior. Susan had not been to Sausalito for a long time, and
Mrs. Carroll was ending a day's shopping with a call on mother and
babies. Martin, drowsy and contented, was in her arms. Susan,
luxuriating in an hour's idleness and gossip, sat near the open window,
with the tiny Billy. Outside, a gusty August wind was sweeping chaff
and papers before it; passers-by dodged it as if it were sleet.
"I think there's no question about it, Sue," Mrs. Carroll's motherly
voice said, cheerfully. "This is a hard time; you and Billy are both
doing too much,--but this won't last! You'll come out of it some day,
dear, a splendid big experienced woman, ready for any big work. And
then you'll look back, and think that the days when the boys needed you
every hour were short enough. Character is the one thing that you have
to buy this way, Sue,--by effort and hardship and self-denial!"
"But after all," Susan said somberly, so eager to ease her full heart
that she must keep her voice low to keep it steady, "after all, Aunt
Jo, aren't there lots of women who do this sort of thing year in and
year out and DON'T achieve anything? As a means to an end," said Susan,
groping for words, "as a road--this is comprehensible, but--but one
hates to think of it as a goal!"
"Hundreds of women reach their highest ambitions, Sue," the other woman
answered thoughtfully, "without necessarily reaching YOURS. It depends
upon which star you've selected for your wagon, Sue! You have just been
telling me that the Lords, for instance, are happier than crowned
kings, in their little garden, with a state position assured for Lydia.
Then there's Georgie; Georgie is one of the happiest women I ever saw!
And when you remember that the first thirty years of her life were
practically wasted, it makes you feel very hopeful of anyone's life!"
"Yes, but I couldn't be happy as Mary and Lydia are, and Georgie's life
would drive me to strong drink!" Susan said, with a flash of her old
fire.
"Exactly. So YOUR fulfilment will come in some other way,--some way
that they would probably think extremely terrifying or unconventional
or strange. Meanwhile you are learning something every day, about women
who have tiny babies to care for, about housekeeping as half the women
of the world have to regard it. All that is extremely useful, if you
ever want to do anything that touches women. About office work you
know, about life downtown. Some day just the use for all this will come
to you, and then I'll feel that I was quite right when I expected great
things of my Sue!"
"Of me?" stammered Susan. A lovely color crept into her thin cheeks and
a tear splashed down upon the cheek of the sleeping baby.
Anna's dearest dream was suddenly realized that summer, and Anna,
lovelier than ever, came out to tell Sue of the chance meeting with
Doctor Hoffmann in the laboratory that had, in two short minutes,
turned the entire current of her life. It was all wonderful and
delightful beyond words, not a tiny cloud darkened the sky.
Conrad Hoffmann was forty-five years old, seventeen years older than
his promised wife, but splendidly tall and strong, and--Anna and Susan
agreed--STRIKINGLY handsome. He was at the very top of his profession,
managed his own small surgical hospital, and maintained one of the
prettiest homes in the city. A musician, a humanitarian, rich in his
own right, he was so conspicuous a figure among the unmarried men of
San Francisco that Anna's marriage created no small stir, and the six
weeks of her engagement were packed with affairs in her honor.
Susan's little sons were presently taken to Sausalito to be present at
Aunt Anna's wedding. Susan was nervous and tired before she had
finished her own dressing, wrapped and fed the beribboned baby, and
slipped the wriggling Martin into his best white clothes. But she
forgot everything but pride and pleasure when Betsey, the bride and
"Grandma" fell with shrieks of rapture upon the children, and during
the whole happy day she found herself over and over again at Billy's
side, listening to him, watching him, and his effect on other people,
slipping her hand into his. It was as if, after quiet months of taking
him for granted, she had suddenly seen her big, clever, gentle husband
as a stranger again, and fallen again in love with him.
Susan felt strangely older than Anna to-day; she thought of that other
day when she and Billy had gone up to the big woods; she remembered the
odor of roses and acacia, the fragrance of her gown, the stiffness of
her rose-crowned hat.
Anna and Conrad were going away to Germany for six months, and Susan
and the babies spent a happy week in Anna's old room. Betsey was
filling what had been Susan's position on the "Democrat" now, and
cherished literary ambitions.
"Oh, why must you go, Sue?" Mrs. Carroll asked, wistfully, when the
time for packing came. "Couldn't you stay on awhile, it's so lovely to
have you here!"
But Susan was firm. She had had her holiday; Billy could not divide his
time between Sausalito and the "Protest" office any longer. They
crossed the bay in mid-afternoon, and the radiant husband and father
met them at the ferry. Susan sighed in supreme relief as he lifted the
older boy to his shoulder, and picked up the heavy suitcase.
"We could send that?" submitted Susan, but Billy answered by signaling
a carriage, and placing his little family inside.
"Oh, Bill, you plutocrat!" Susan said, sinking back with a great sigh
of pleasure.
"Well, my wife doesn't come home every day!" Billy said beaming.
Susan felt, in some subtle climatic change, that the heat of the summer
was over. Mission Street slept under a soft autumn haze; the hint of a
cool night was already in the air.
In the dining-room, as she entered with her baby in her arms, she saw
that a new table and new chairs replaced the old ones, a ruffled little
cotton house-gown was folded neatly on the table. A new, hooded
baby-carriage awaited little Billy.
"Oh, BILLY!" The baby was bundled unceremoniously into his new coach,
and Susan put her arms about her husband's neck. "You OUGHTN'T!" she
protested.
"Clem and Mrs. Cudahy sent the carriage," Billy beamed.
"And you did the rest! Bill, dear--when I am such a tired, cross
apology for a wife!" Susan found nothing in life so bracing as the arm
that was now tight about her. She had a full minute's respite before
the boys' claims must be met.
"What first, Sue?" asked Billy. "Dinner's all ordered, and the things
are here, but I guess you'll have to fix things---"
"I'll feed baby while you give Mart his milk and toast," Susan said
capably, "then I'll get into something comfortable and we'll put them
off, and you can set the table while I get dinner! It's been a heavenly
week, Billy dear," said Susan, settling herself in a low rocker, "but
it does seem good to get home!"
The next spring all four did indeed go up to the woods, but it was
after a severe attack of typhoid fever on Billy Senior's part, and
Susan was almost too much exhausted in every way to trust herself to
the rough life of the cabin. But they came back after a month's
gypsying so brown and strong and happy that even Susan had forgotten
the horrors of the winter, and in mid-summer the "Protest" moved into
more dignified quarters, and the Olivers found the comfortable old
house in Oakland that was to be a home for them all for a long time.
Oakland was chosen because it is near the city, yet country-like enough
to be ideal for children. The house was commonplace, shabby and cheaply
built, but to Susan it seemed delightfully roomy and comfortable, and
she gloried in the big yards, the fruit trees, and the old-fashioned
garden. She cared for her sweet-pea vines and her chickens while the
little boys tumbled about her, or connived against the safety of the
cat, and she liked her neighbors, simple women who advised her about
her plants, and brought their own babies over to play with Mart and
Billy.
Certain old interests Susan found that she must sacrifice for a time at
least. Even with the reliable, capable, obstinate personage
affectionately known as "Big Mary" in the kitchen, they could not leave
the children for more than a few hours at a time. Susan had to let some
of the old friends go; she had neither the gowns nor the time for
afternoon calls, nor had she the knowledge of small current events that
is more important than either. She and Billy could not often dine in
town and go to the theater, for running expenses were heavy, the
"Protest" still a constant problem, and Big Mary did not lend herself
readily to sudden changes and interruptions.
Entertaining, in any formal sense, was also out of the question, for to
be done well it must be done constantly and easily, and the Oliver
larder and linen closet did not lend itself to impromptu suppers and
long dinners. Susan was too concerned in the manufacture of nourishing
puddings and soups, too anxious to have thirty little brown stockings
and twenty little blue suits hanging on the line every Monday morning
to jeopardize the even running of her domestic machinery with very much
hospitality. She loved to have any or all of the Carrolls with her,
welcomed Billy's business associates warmly, and three times a year had
Georgie and her family come to a one o'clock Sunday dinner, and planned
for the comfort of the O'Connors, little and big, with the greatest
pleasure and care. But this was almost the extent of her entertaining
in these days.
Isabel Furlong had indeed tried to bridge the gulf that lay between
their manners of living, with a warm and sweet insistence that had
conquered even the home-loving Billy. Isabel had silenced all of
Susan's objections--Susan must bring the boys; they would have dinner
with Isabel's own boy, Alan, then the children could all go to sleep in
the Furlong nursery, and the mothers have a chat and a cup of tea
before it was time to dress for dinner. Isabel's car should come all
the way to Oakland for them, and take them all home again the next day.
"But, angel dear, I haven't a gown!" protested Susan.
"Oh, Sue, just ourselves and Daddy and John's mother!"
"I could freshen up my black---" mused Susan.
"Of course you could!" triumphed Isabel. And her enthusiasm carried the
day. The Olivers went to dine and spend the night with the Furlongs,
and were afterward sorry.
In the first place, it was expensive. Susan indeed "freshened up" the
black gown, but slippers and gloves, a belt and a silk petticoat were
new for the occasion. The boys' wardrobes, too, were supplemented with
various touches that raised them nearer the level of young Alan's
clothes; Billy's dress suit was pressed, and at the last moment there
seemed nothing to be done but buy a new suitcase--his old one was quite
too shabby.
The children behaved well, but Susan was too nervous about their
behavior to appreciate that until the visit was long over, and the
exquisite ease and order of Isabel's home made her feel hopelessly
clumsy, shabby and strange. Her mood communicated itself somewhat to
Billy, but Billy forgot all lesser emotions in the heat of a discussion
into which he entered with Isabel's father during dinner. The old man
was interested, tolerant, amused. Susan thought Billy nothing short of
rude, although the meal finished harmoniously enough, and the men made
an engagement the next morning to see each other again, and thresh out
the subject thoroughly.
Isabel kept Susan until afternoon, and strolled with her across the
road to show her the pretty house that had been the Wallaces' home, in
her mother's lifetime, empty now, and ready to lease.
Susan had forgotten what a charming house it really was, bowered in
gardens, flooded with sunshine, old-fashioned, elegant, comfortable and
spacious. The upper windows gave on the tree-hidden roofs of San
Rafael's nicest quarter, the hotel, the tennis-courts were but a few
minutes' walk away.
"Oh, if only you dear people could live here, what bliss we'd have!"
sighed Isabel.
"Isabel--it's out of the question! But what's the rent?"
"Eighteen hundred---" submitted Isabel dubiously. "What do you pay?"
"We're buying, you know. We pay six per cent, on a small mortgage."
"Still, you could rent that house?" Isabel suggested, brightening.
"Well, that's so!" Susan let her fancy play with it. She saw Mart and
Billy playing here, in this sheltered garden, peeping through the
handsome iron fence at horsemen and motor-cars passing by. She saw them
growing up among such princely children as little Alan, saw herself the
admired center of a group of women sensible enough to realize that
young Mrs. Oliver was of no common clay.
Then she smiled and shook her head. She went home depressed and silent,
vexed at herself because the question of tipping or not tipping
Isabel's chauffeur spoiled the last half of the trip, and absent-minded
over Billy's account of the day, and the boys' prayers.
Other undertakings, however, terminated more happily. Susan went with
Billy to various meetings, somehow found herself in charge of a girls'
dramatic club, and meeting in a bare hall with a score or two of little
laundry-workers, waitresses and factory girls on every Tuesday evening.
Sometimes it was hard to leave the home lamp-light, and come out into
the cold on Tuesday evenings, but Susan was always glad she had made
the effort when she reached the hall and when her own particular
friends among the "Swastika Hyacinth Club" girls came to meet her.
She had so recently been a working girl herself that it was easy to
settle down among them, easy to ask the questions that brought their
confidence, easy to discuss ways and means from their standpoint. Susan
became very popular; the girls laughed with her, copied her, confided
in her. At the monthly dances they introduced her to their "friends,"
and their "friends" were always rendered red and incoherent with
emotion upon learning that Mrs. Oliver was the wife of Mr. Oliver of
the "Protest."
Sometimes Susan took the children to see Virginia, who had long ago
left Mary Lou's home to accept a small position in the great
institution for the blind. Virginia, with her little class to teach,
and her responsibilities when the children were in the refectory and
dormitory, was a changed creature, busy, important, absorbed. She
showed the toddling Olivers the playroom and conservatory, and sent
them home with their fat hands full of flowers.
"Bless their little hearts, they don't know how fortunate they are!"
said Virginia, saying good-bye to Mart and Billy. "But _I_ know!" And
she sent a pitiful glance back toward her little charges.
After such a visit, Susan went home with a heart too full of gratitude
for words. "God has given us everything in the world!" she would say to
Billy, looking across the hearth at him, in the silent happy evening.
Walking with the children, in the long spring afternoons, Susan liked
to go in for a moment to see Lydia Lord in the library. Lydia would
glance up from the book she was stamping, and at the sight of Susan and
the children, her whole plain face would brighten. She always came out
from behind her little gates and fences to talk in whispers to Susan,
always had some little card or puzzle or fan or box for Mart and Billy.
"And Mary's well!"
"Well---! You never saw anything like it. Yesterday she was out in the
garden from eight o'clock until ten at night! And she's never alone,
everyone in the neighborhood loves her---!" Miss Lord would accompany
them to the door when they went, wave to the boys through the glass
panels, and go back to her desk still beaming.
Happiest of all the times away from home were those Susan spent with
the Carrolls, or with Anna in the Hoffmanns' beautiful city home. Anna
did not often come to Oakland, she was never for more than a few hours
out of her husband's sight, but she loved to have Susan and the boys
with her. The doctor wanted a glimpse of her between his operations and
his lectures, would not eat his belated lunch unless his lovely wife
sat opposite him, and planned a hundred delights for each of their
little holidays. Anna lived only for him, her color changed at his
voice, her only freedom, in the hours when Conrad positively must be
separated from her, was spent in doing the things that pleased him,
visiting his wards, practicing the music he loved, making herself
beautiful in some gown that he had selected for her.
"It's idolatry, mon Guillaume," said Mrs. Oliver, briskly, when she was
discussing the case of the Hoffmanns with her lord. "Now, I'm crazy
enough about you, as you well know," continued Susan, "but, at the same
time, I don't turn pale, start up, and whisper, 'Oh, it's Willie!' when
you happen to come home half an hour earlier than usual. I don't
stammer with excitement when I meet you downtown, and I don't cry when
you--well, yes, I do! I feel pretty badly when you have to be away
overnight!" confessed Susan, rather tamely.
"Wait until little Con comes!" Billy predicted comfortably. "Then
they'll be less strong on the balcony scene!"
"They think they want one," said Susan wisely, "but I don't believe
they really do!"
On the fifth anniversary of her wedding day Susan's daughter was born,
and the whole household welcomed the tiny Josephine, whose sudden
arrival took all their hearts by storm.
"Take your slangy, freckled, roller-skating, rifle-shooting boys and be
off with you!" said Susan, over the hour-old baby, to Billy, who had
come flying home in mid-morning. "Now I feel like David Copperfield's
landlady, 'at last I have summat I can love!' Oh, the mistakes that you
WON'T make, Jo!" she apostrophized the baby. "The smart, capable,
self-sufficient way that you'll manage everything!"
"Do you really want me to take the boys away for a few days?" asked
Billy, who was kneeling down for a better view of mother and child.
Susan's eyes widened with instant alarm.
"Why should you?" she asked, cool fingers tightening on his.
"I thought you had no further use for the sex," answered Billy meekly.
"Oh---?" Susan dimpled. "Oh, she's too little to really absorb me yet,"
she said. "I'll continue a sort of superficial interest in the boys
until she's eighteen or so!"
Sometimes echoes of the old life came to her, and Susan, pondering them
for an hour or two, let them drift away from her again. Billy showed
her the headlines one day that told of Peter Coleman's narrow escape
from death, in his falling airship, and later she learned that he was
well again and had given up aeronautics, and was going around the world
to add to his matchless collection of semi-precious stones. Susan was
sobered one day to hear of Emily Saunders' sudden death. She sat for a
long time wondering over the empty and wasted life. Mrs. Kenneth
Saunders, with a smartly clad little girl, was caught by press cameras
at many fashionable European watering-places; Kenneth spent much of his
time in institutions and sanitariums, Susan heard. She heard that he
worshipped his little girl.
And one evening a London paper, at which she was carelessly glancing in
a library, while Billy hunted through files nearby for some lost
reference, shocked her suddenly with the sight of Stephen Bocqueraz's
name. Susan had a sensation of shame and terror; she shut the paper
quickly.
She looked about her. Two or three young men, hard-working young men to
judge from appearance, were sitting with her at the long,
magazine-strewn table. Gas-lights flared high above them, soft
footfalls came and went in the warm, big room. At the desk the
librarian was whispering with two nervous-looking young women. At one
of the file-racks, Billy stood slowly turning page after page of a heap
of papers. Susan looked at him, trying to see the kind, keen face from
an outsider's viewpoint, but she had to give up the attempt. Every
little line was familiar now, every little expression. William looked
up and caught her smile and his lips noiselessly formed, "I love you!"
"Me?" said Susan, also without a voice, and with her hand on her heart.
And when he said "Fool!" and returned grinning to his paper, she opened
her London sheet and turned to the paragraph she had seen.
Not sensational. Mr. Stephen Bocqueraz, the well-known American writer,
and Mrs. Bocqueraz, said the paragraph, had taken the house of Mrs.
Bromley Rose-Rogers for the season, and were being extensively
entertained. Mr. and Mrs. Bocqueraz would thus be near their daughter,
Miss Julia Bocqueraz, whose marriage to Mr. Guy Harold Wetmore, second
son of Lord Westcastle, would take place on Tuesday next.
Susan told Billy about it late that night, more because not telling him
gave the thing the importance inseparable from the fact withheld than
because she felt any especial pang at the opening of the old wound.
They had sauntered out of the library, well before closing time, Billy
delighted to have found his reference, Susan glad to get out into the
cool summer night.
"Oysters?" asked William. Susan hesitated.
"This doesn't come out of my expenses," she stipulated. "I'm hard-up
this week!"
"Oh, no--no! This is up to me," Billy said. So they went in to watch
the oyster-man fry them two hot little panfuls, and sat over the coarse
little table-cloth for a long half-hour, contentedly eating and
talking. Fortified, they walked home, Susan so eager to interrogate Big
Mary about the children that she reached the orderly kitchen quite
breathless.
Not a sound out of any of them was Big Mary's satisfactory report.
Still their mother ran upstairs. Children had been known to die while
parents and guardians supposed them to be asleep.
However the young Olivers were slumbering safely, and were wide-awake
in a flash, the boys clamoring for drinks, from the next room,
Josephine wide-eyed and dewy, through the bars of her crib. Susan sat
down with the baby, while Billy opened windows, wound the alarm clock,
and quieted his sons.
A full half-hour passed before everything was quiet. Susan found
herself lying wakeful in the dark. Presently she said:
"Billy?"
"What is it?" he asked, roused instantly.
"Why, I saw something funny in the London 'News' to-night," Susan
began. She repeated the paragraph. Billy speculated upon it
interestedly.
"Sure, he's probably gone back to his wife," said Billy. "Circumstances
influence us all, you know."
"Do you mean that you don't think he ever meant to get a divorce?"
"Oh, no, not necessarily! Especially if there was any reason for him to
get it. I think that, if it had been possible, he would have gotten it.
If not, he wouldn't have. Selfish, you know, darned selfish!"
Susan pondered in silence.
"I was to blame," she said finally.
"Oh, no, you weren't, not as much as he was--and he knew it!" Billy
said.
"All sensation has so entirely died out of the whole thing," Susan said
presently, "that it's just like looking at a place where you burned
your hand ten years ago, and trying to remember whether the burn hurt
worst, or dressing the burn, or curing the burn! I know it was all
wrong, but at the time I thought it was only convention I was going
against--I didn't realize that one of the advantages of laws is that
you can follow them blind, when you've lost all your moorings. You
can't follow your instincts, but you can remember your rule. I've
thought a lot about Stephen Bocqueraz in the past few years, and I
don't believe he meant to do anything terribly wrong and, as things
turned out, I think he really did me more good than harm! I'm confident
that but for him I would have married Kenneth, and he certainly did
teach me a lot about poetry, Billy, about art and music, and more than
that, about the SPIRIT of art and music and poetry, the sheer beauty of
the world. So I've let all the rest go, like the fever out of a burn,
and I believe I could meet him now, and like him almost. Does that seem
very strange to you? Have you any feeling of resentment?"
Billy was silent.
"Billy!" Susan said, in quick uneasiness, "ARE you angry?"
After a tense moment the regular sound of deep and placid breathing
answered her. Billy lay on his back sound asleep.
Susan stared at him a moment in the dimness. Then the absurdity of the
thing struck her, and she began to laugh.
"I wonder if, when we get to another world, EVERYTHING we do here will
seem just ridiculous and funny?" speculated Susan.