It was after Mr. Houghton had swallowed the scorched soup and meditated
infanticide, that boarding became inevitable. Several times that winter
Maurice said that Hannah "was the limit; so let's board?"
And toward spring, in spite of the cavorting lambs and waddling ducks in
the little waiting, empty room upstairs, Eleanor yielded. "We can go to
housekeeping again," she thought, "_if_--"
So the third year of their marriage opened in a boarding house. They
moved (Bingo again banished to Mrs. O'Brien), on their wedding
anniversary, and instead of celebrating by going out to "their river,"
they spent a hot, grimy day settling down in their third-floor front.
"If people come to see us," said Maurice, ruefully, standing with his
hands in his pockets surveying their new quarters, "they'll have to sit
on the piano!"
"Nobody'll come," Eleanor said.
Maurice's eyes narrowed: "I believe you need 'em, Nelly? I knock up
against people at the office, and I know several fellows and girls
outside--"
"What girls?"
"Oh, the fellows' sisters; but you--"
"I don't want anybody but you!"
Maurice was silent. Two years ago, when Eleanor had said almost the same
thing: she was willing to live on a desert island, _with him_!--it had
been oil on the flames of his love; now, it puzzled him. He didn't want
to live on a desert island, with anybody! He needed more than one man
"Friday," and any women "Thursdays" who might come along were joyously
welcomed. "I am a social beggar, myself," he said; and began to whistle
and fuss about, trying to bring order out of a chaos of books and
photographs and sheet music. She sat watching him--the alert, vigorous
figure; the keen face under the shock of blond hair; the blue eyes that
crinkled so easily into laughter. Her face was thinner, and there were
rings of fatigue under her dark eyes, and that little nursery in the
house they had left, made a swelling sense of emptiness in her heart.
("If I see any awfully pretty nursery paper this winter, I'll buy it,
and have it ready,--_in case_ we should have to get another house," she
thought.) "Oh, do stop whistling," she said; "it goes through me!"
"Poor Nelly!" he said, kindly, and stopped.
The astonishing thing about the "boarding-house marriage," is that it
ever survives the strain of the woman's idleness and the man's
discomfort! But it does, occasionally. Even this marriage survived Miss
Ladd's boarding house, for a time. At first it went smoothly enough
because Maurice couldn't blame Eleanor's cook, and Eleanor couldn't say
that "nothing she did pleased Maurice"; so two reasons for irritability
were eliminated; but a new reason appeared: Maurice's eager interest in
everything and everybody--especially everybody!--and his endless good
nature, overflowed around the boarding-house table. Everyone liked him,
which Eleanor entirely understood; but he liked everyone,--which she
didn't understand.
The note of this mutual liking was struck the very first night when
Maurice went down into the dingy basement dining room; he and Eleanor
made rather a sensation as they entered: Eleanor, handsome and silent,
produced the impression of cold reserve; Maurice, amiable and talkative,
gave a little shock of interest and pleasure to the fifteen or twenty
people eating indifferent food about a table covered with a not very
fresh cloth. Before the meal was over he had made himself agreeable to
an elderly woman on his left, ventured some drollery to a pretty
high-school teacher of mathematics opposite him, and given a man at the
end of the table the score. When Eleanor rose, Maurice had to rise, too,
though his dessert was not quite devoured; and as the couple left the
room there was a murmur of pleasure:
"A real addition to our family," said Miss Ladd.
The bond salesman said, "I wonder if he'll go to the ball game with me
on Saturday? I'll get the tickets."
The school-teacher said, "He's awfully good looking."
The widow's comment was only, "Nice boy."
Upstairs in their own room, Maurice said: "What pleasant people! Nelly,
let's get some fun out of this; don't dash up here the minute you
swallow your food!"
She wondered, silently, how he could call them "pleasant"! To her they
were all rather common, pushing persons, who wanted to talk to Maurice.
But as her one desire was to do what he liked, she really did try to
help him "get some fun out of them." Every night at dinner she smiled
laboriously when he teased the teacher, and she listened to the elderly
woman in mourning, whose clever talk was so absorbing to Maurice that
sometimes he didn't hear his wife speaking to him! Yes; Eleanor tried.
Yet, in less than a month Maurice found himself beside a boarder of his
own sex, instead of Mrs. Davis, and saw that the school-teacher was too
far down the table for jokes. When he asked why their seats had been
changed, Eleanor said she had felt a draught--which caused the widow to
smile, and write on a piece of paper an arithmetical statement:
"Selfishness + vanity - humor = jealousy." She handed it to the teacher,
who laughed and shrugged her shoulders:
"But she's awfully in love with him," she conceded, under her breath.
The older woman shook her head: "No, my dear; she isn't. No jealous
woman knows the meaning of love."
But Eleanor did not see Miss Moore's contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis's
grave glance. One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that
they don't know how amusing--or else boring--or else irritating--they
are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world! Eleanor had no
idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found
her ridiculous. She only knew that Maurice seemed to like them--which
meant that her society "wasn't enough for him "! So she tried to make it
enough for him. At dinner she talked to him so animatedly (and so
personally) that no one else could get a word in edgewise. Dinner over,
she was uneasy until she had dragged her eager-eyed young husband up to
the desert island of their third-floor front--a dingy room, with a
black-marble mantelpiece, and a worn and frowzy carpet. There were some
steel engravings, dim under their old glasses, on the wall,--Evangeline,
and Lincoln's Cabinet, and Daniel Webster in a rumpled shirt and a long
swallowtail;--all of which Eleanor's looking-glass and the mirrored
doors of a black-walnut wardrobe, reflected in multiplying dullness.
Maurice's charming good nature in that first boarding winter never
failed. Eleanor's silences--which he had long since discovered were
merely empty, not mysterious--were at least no tax on his patience; so
he never once called her "silly." He did, occasionally, feel a faint
uneasiness lest people might think she was older than he--which was, of
course, the beginning of self-consciousness as to what he had done in
marrying her. But he loved her. He still loved her. "She isn't very
well," he used to defend her to Mrs. Newbolt; "she nearly killed
herself, saving my life. She's not been the same girl since."
"'Girl'?" said Mrs. Newbolt; "she's exactly the same _woman_, only more
so because she's older. I hope she won't lose her figger; she's gettin'
thin. My dear grandmother--she was a Dennison; fat; I can hear her now
talkin' to her daughters: 'Girls! _Don't_ lose your figgers!' She had
red hair."
Eleanor had not lost her figure; it was still graciously erect, and with
lovely curves of bosom and shoulders; but, somehow, she seemed
older--older even than she was! Perhaps because of her efforts to be
girlish? It was as if she wore clothes she had outgrown--clothes that
were too tight and too short. She used Maurice's slang without its
virile appropriateness; when they accepted an invitation from one of
Maurice's new acquaintances, her anxiety to be of his generation was
pathetic--or ludicrous, as one happened to look at it. These friends of
Maurice's seemed to have innumerable interests in common with him that
she knew nothing about--and jokes! How tired she got of their jokes,
which were mostly preposterous badinage, expressed with entire solemnity
and ending in yells of laughter. Yet she tried to laugh, too; though she
rarely knew what it was all about. There is nothing which divides the
generations more sharply than their ideas of humor. But Eleanor tried,
very pitifully hard, to be silly with the kind of silliness which
Maurice seemed to enjoy; but, alas! she only achieved the silliness
which he--like every husband on earth!--hated: the silliness of small
jealousies. Once she told Maurice she didn't like those dinner parties
that his friends were always asking them to,--"I think it's nicer here,"
she said.
And he said, cheerfully: "Don't go! I don't mind going alone."
"I know you don't," she said, wistfully.... "Why can't he be satisfied
to stay at home with me?" she said once to her aunt; and Mrs. Newbolt
told her why:
"Because you don't interest him. Eleanor! if you want to keep that boy,
urge him to go out and have a good time, _without you_!" Then she added
some poignantly true remarks: "My dear father used to say, 'Just as many
men are faithless to their wives because their wives have plain minds,
as because other women have pretty faces.' Well, I'm afraid poor dear
mother's mind was plain; that's why I always made an effort to talk to
your uncle, and be entertainin'. And I'll tell you another thing--for
if I have a virtue it's candor--if you let him see you're jealous, he'll
make it worth your while! You've got a rip in the back seam of your
waist. No man ever keeps on lovin' a jealous woman; he just pretends to,
to keep the peace."
Of course this was as unintelligible to Eleanor as it is to all women
of her type of mind. So, instead of considering Maurice's enjoyment of
society, she committed the absurdity of urging him to enjoy what she
enjoyed--a solitude of two. To herself she explained his desire to see
other people, by saying it was because they had no children. "When we
have a child, he won't want to be with those boys and girls! Oh, why
don't we have a baby?" Her longing for children was like physical
hunger. But only Mrs. O'Brien understood it. When Eleanor went, in her
faithful way, two or three times a week, to sing to little sickly Don
(and pet the boarding and rather pining Bingo), Mrs. O'Brien, listening
to the little songs, pretty and silly, would draw a puckery hand over
her eyes: "She'd ought to have a dozen of her own! If that boy don't
treat her good, I'll iron off every button he's got!"
When Eleanor (hoping for a baby) worried lest Maurice's hopes, too, were
disappointed, her gentleness to him was passionate and beseeching; but
sometimes, watching his attention to other people, the gentleness grew
rigid in an accusation that, because they hadn't a child, he was
"getting tired of her"! Whenever she said this foolish thing, there
would come, afterward, a rain of repentant tears. But repentance cannot
always change the result of foolish words--and the result is so often
out of proportion to the words! As Maurice had said that day in their
meadow, of Professor Bradley and the banana skin--a very little thing
"can throw the switches," in human life!
It was the "little thing" of a lead pencil, in keeping the accounts of
their endless games of solitaire, that threw the switches now, for
Maurice Curtis.... He happened to produce a very soft pencil, which he
had borrowed, he said, "from a darned pretty woman he was showing a
house to," and had forgotten to return to her.
Eleanor said it seemed to her bad taste to talk of a strange woman that
way: "If she's a lady she wouldn't want a man she didn't know to speak
so--so lightly of her."
"I have yet to meet one of your sex who objects to being called pretty,"
Maurice said, dryly.
To which Eleanor replied that she preferred a hard lead pencil,
anyhow,--but _her_ wishes seemed to be of no importance! "You're tired
of me, Maurice." He said, "Oh, damn!" She said, "I won't have you swear
at me!"
He pushed back his chair, toppled the flimsy table over, scattering all
the cards on the floor. The falling table struck her knee; she screamed;
he flung out of the room--out of the house, into the hot darkness of an
August night.... The switches were thrown....
Down on Tyler Street there had been another quarrel--as trivial as the
difference of opinion as to hard and soft lead pencils, and again human
lives were shifted from one track to another. It was Lily who ran out
into the darkness, and wandered through the streets; then strayed down
to the bridge that spanned the hurrying black water of that same river
which, two years before, had lisped and laughed under Maurice and
Eleanor's happy eyes. Lily, watching the current, thought angrily of
Batty--then a passing elbow jostled her and some one said, "Beg pardon!"
She turned and saw Maurice.
"Well, I do say!" she said; and Maurice, pausing at the voice in the
dark, began a brief, "Excuse me; I stumbled--" saw who it was, and said,
"Why, Miss Lily! How are you? I haven't seen you for an age!"
She answered with some small jocosity; then suddenly struck her little
fist on the railing. "Well, I'm just miserable; that's how I am, if you
want to know! Batty--"
Maurice frowned. "Has that pup hurt you?"
She nodded: "I don't know why I put up with him!"
"Shake him!" he advised, good-naturedly.
"I 'ain't got any other friend." She spoke with half-laughing anger;
indeed, she was so pretty and so plucky that he forgot, for a moment,
the irritation at Eleanor which had driven him out into the night, and
it came into his mind that something ought to be done for girls like
this. He remembered that Eleanor herself had said so, "Perhaps I could
do something for her?" Eleanor had said.
"She isn't bad," he thought, looking at Lily; "she's just a fool, like
all of 'em. But there ought to be some way of fishing 'em out of the
gutter, before they get to the very bottom. Maybe Eleanor could give her
a hand up?" Then he asked her about herself: Had she friends? Where did
her family live? Could she do any work? He was rather diverted by his
own philanthropy, but it seemed to him that it would be the decent thing
to advise the girl, seriously. "I'll talk to her," he thought. "Come
on!" he said; "let's hunt up some place and have something to eat."
"I ain't hungry," she said--then saw the careless straightforwardness of
his face, and was straightforward herself: "I guess I'd better be going
home."
"Oh, come on," he urged her.
She yielded, with a little rollicking chuckle; and as they walked toward
a part of town more suitable for such excursions, she confided to him
she was twenty, and she'd been "around" for a year.
("Twenty-five, if she's a day," he thought.)
They strolled along for several blocks before discovering, in the
purlieus of Tyler Street, a dingy "ice-cream parlor," eminently fitted
for interviews with the Lilys of the locality. At a marble-topped table,
translucent with years of ice-cream rendezvous, they waited for his
order to be filled, and she saw the amused honesty of his face and he
saw the good nature of hers; which made him think again of Eleanor's
wish to help her.
He urged some indifferent cake upon her, and joked about how many
saucers of ice cream they could consume between them; then he became
serious: Why didn't she drop Batty?
"Oh," she said, "if I only _could_ drop him! I hate him. He's the first
friend I've had."
"Was he really the--the first?" Maurice said. His question was the old
human interest of playing with fire, but he supposed that it was a
desire to raise the fallen.
"Well, except ... there was a man; I expected to marry _him_. Then
Batty, he come along."
"I see," said Maurice. "Where's the first man?"
"_I_ don't know. I was only sixteen."
"Damn him!" Maurice said, sympathetically. He was so moved that he
ordered more ice cream; then it occurred to him that he ought to let her
know that he was entirely a philanthropist. "My wife and I'll help you,"
he said.
"Oh ... you're _married_? You're real young!" she commented.
"I'm no chicken. My wife and I think exactly alike about these things.
Of course she's not a prude. She understands life, just as I do. And
she'd love to be a real friend to you. She'll put you on your feet, and
think none the worse of you. Tell me about yourself," he urged,
intimately; he felt some deep satisfaction stir within him, which he
supposed was his recognition of a moral purpose. But she drew back into
her own reserves.
"They always ask that," she thought; and the momentary reality she had
shown hardened into the easy lying of her business: she told this or
that--the cruel father of fiction, who tried to drive her into marriage
with the rich old man; the wicked lover who destroyed trusting
innocence; the inevitable _facilis descensus_--Batty at last. And now
the ice-cream parlor in this dirty street, with the clear-eyed,
handsome, amused young man, who had forgotten his own anger in the
impulse, so frequent in the very young and very upright man, to "save"
some little creature of the gutter! As for Maurice, he said to himself,
"She's a sweet little thing; and not really bad."
He was right there: Lily was not bad; she was as far from sin as she was
from virtue--just a little, unmoral, very amiable animal.
As for Maurice, he continued to discuss her future of rectitude and
honor--his imagination reaching in a bound amazing heights. Why not be a
trained nurse?--and have a hospital of her own, and gather about her, as
assistants, girls who--"well, had had a tough time of it," he said,
delicately. As he talked, fatigue at the boredom of his highly moral
sentiments crept into her face. She swallowed an occasional yawn, and
murmured to most of his statements, "Is that so?" She was sleepy, and
wished he would stop talking....
"Guess I'll be going along," she said, good-naturedly.
"I'll come and see you to-morrow," Maurice said, impassioned with the
idea of saving her; "then I'll tell you what my wife will do for you."
They went out together and walked toward Lily's rooms; but somehow they
both fell silent. Lily was again afraid of Batty, and Maurice's
exhilaration had begun to ebb; there came into his mind the bleak
remembrance of the overturned table and Eleanor's sobs....
At the door of the apartment house where Lily lived, she said,
nervously, "I'd ask you to come in, but he--"
"Oh, I understand; I've no desire to meet the gentleman! What time will
I come to-morrow, when he's not around?"
She reflected, uneasily: "Well, I ain't sure--"
Before she could finish, Batty loomed up beside them. He was plainly
drunk. "I lost my key," he said; "and I've been waiting--"
"Good night, Miss Lily," Maurice said,--"If he's nasty to her, I'll go
back," he thought. He was only halfway down the block when he heard a
little piping scream--"O-o-o-w! O-o-o-w!" He turned, and saw her trying
to pull her hand away from Batty's twisting grip: he was at her side in
a moment: "Here! _Drop_ it!" he said, sharply--and landed an extremely
neat blow on the drunken man's jaw. Batty, rubbing his cheek, and
staring at this very unexpected assailant in profound and giggling
astonishment, slouched into the house.
"He 'most twisted my hand off!" Lily said; "oh, ain't he the beast?" She
cringed and shook her bruised wrist, then gave Maurice an admiring look.
"My soul and body! you lit into him good!" she said; "what am I going to
do? I'm afraid to go in."
"If I had a house of my own," Maurice said, "I'd take you home, and my
wife would look after you. But we are boarding.... Haven't you some
friend you could go to for to-night? ... To-morrow my wife will come and
see you," he declared.
"Oh, gracious me, no!" In the midst of her anger she couldn't help
laughing. ("He's a reg'lar baby!" she thought.) "No; your wife's a busy
society lady, I'm sure. Don't bother about me. I'll just wait round till
he goes to sleep." She dabbed at her eyes with a little wet ball of a
handkerchief.
"Here, take mine," he said. And with this larger and dryer piece of
linen, she did manage to make her face more presentable.
"When he's asleep, I'll slip in," she said.
"Well, let's go and sit down somewhere," Maurice suggested. She agreed,
and there was some haphazard wandering about in the darkness, then a
weary sitting on a bench in the park, marking time till Batty would
surely be asleep.
"You sure handed one out to him," Lily said.
Maurice chuckled at the role of knight-errant which she seemed to
discern in him, but he talked earnestly of her future, and once or
twice, soothed by his voice, she dozed--but he didn't know it. Indeed,
he told himself afterward that her silences showed how his words were
sinking in! "It only goes to prove," he thought, when at midnight he
left her at her own door, "that the _flower_ is in all of them! If you
only go about it right, you can bring their purity to the surface! She
felt all I said. Eleanor will be awfully interested in her."
He was quite sure about Eleanor; he had entirely forgiven her; he wanted
to wake her up, and sit on the edge of her bed, and tell her of his
evening, and what a glorious thing it would be to lift one lovely young
soul from the gutter.