The next fall, however, the boarding did come to an end, and they went
to housekeeping. It was Mrs. Houghton who brought this about. Edith was
to enter Fern Hill School in the fall, and her mother had an
inspiration: "Let her board with Eleanor and Maurice! The trolley goes
right out to Medfield, and it will be very convenient for her. Also, it
will help them with expenses," Mrs. Houghton said, comfortably.
"But why can't she live at the school?" Edith's father objected, with a
troubled look; somehow, he did not like the idea of his girl in that
pathetic household, which was at once so conscious and so unconscious of
its own instability! "Why does she have to be with Eleanor and Maurice?"
Henry Houghton said.
"Eleanor has the refinement that a hobbledehoy like Edith needs," Mrs.
Houghton explained; "and I think the child will have better food than at
Fern Hill. School food is always horrid."
"But won't Eleanor's dullness afflict Buster?" he said, doubtfully;
then--because at that moment Edith banged into the room to show her
shuddering mother a garter snake she had captured--he added, with
complacent subtlety, "as for food, I, personally, prefer a dinner of
herbs with an _interesting_ woman, than a stalled ox and Eleanor."
Which caused Edith to say, "Is Eleanor uninteresting, father?"
"Good heavens, no!" said Mr. Houghton, with an alarmed look; "_of
course_ she isn't! What put such an idea into your head?" And as Buster
and her squirming prize departed, he told his Mary that her daughter was
destroying his nervous system. "She'll repeat that to Eleanor," he
groaned.
His wife had no sympathy for him; "You deserve anything you may get!"
she said, severely; and proceeded to write to Eleanor to make her
proposition. If they cared to take Edith, she said, they could hire a
house and stop boarding--"which is dreadful for both of your digestions;
and I will be glad if this plan appeals to you, to feel that Edith is
with anyone who has such gentle manners as you."
Eleanor, reading the friendly words at the boarding-house breakfast
table, said quickly to herself, "I don't want her... She would
monopolize Maurice!" Then she hesitated; "He would be more comfortable
in a house of his own... But Edith? Oh, I _don't_ want her!"
She turned to show the letter to Maurice, but he was sitting sidewise,
one arm over the back of his chair, in vociferous discussion with a
fellow boarder. "No, sir!" he was declaring; "if they revise the rules
again, they'll revise the guts out of the whole blessed game; they'll
make it all muscle and no mind."
"But football isn't any intellectual stunt," the other boarder insisted.
"It _is_--to a degree. The old flying wedge--"
"Maurice!" Eleanor said again; but Maurice, impassioned about "rules,"
didn't even hear her. She gave his arm a little friendly shake.
"Maurice! You are the limit, with your old football!"
He turned, laughing, and took the letter from her hand. As he read it,
his face changed sharply. "But Fern Hill is in Medfield!" he exclaimed.
"I suppose she could take the trolley almost to the school grounds,"
Eleanor conceded, reluctantly.
"Why can't she live out there? It's a boarding school, isn't it?" (She
might meet Lily on the car!)
For a moment she accepted his decision with relief; then the thought of
his comfort urged her: "I know of an awfully attractive house, with a
garden. Little Bingo could hide his bones in it."
"No," he said, sharply; "it wouldn't do. I don't want her."
Instantly Eleanor was buoyantly ready to have Edith ... he "_didn't want
her_!" When Maurice rose from the table she went to the front door with
him, detaining him--until the pretty school-teacher was well on her way
down the street;--with tender charges to take care of himself. Then, in
the darkness of the hall, with Maurice very uneasy lest some one might
see them, she kissed him good-by. "If we could afford to keep house
without taking Edith," she said, "I'd rather not have her. (Kiss me
again--no-body's looking!) But we can't. So let's have her."
"In two years I'll have my own money," he reminded her; "this hard
sledding is only temporary." But she looked so disappointed that he
hesitated; after all, if she wanted a house so much he ought not to
stand in the way. Poor Eleanor hadn't much fun! And, as far as he was
concerned, he would like to have Edith around. "It's only the Medfield
part of it I don't like," he told himself. Yet Lily, on Maple Street, a
mile from Fern Hill, was a needle in a haystack! (And even if Edith
should ever see her, she wouldn't know her.) ... "If you really want to
have her," he told Eleanor, "go ahead."
So that was how it happened that Edith burst in upon Eleanor's dear
domesticity of two. Maurice, having once agreed to his wife's wish, was
rather pleased at the prospect. "It will help on money," he thought;
"another hundred a year will come in handy to Lily. And it will be sort
of nice to have Buster in the house."
Lily had not said she must have another hundred. She did not even think
so. "_I_ can swing it!" Lily had said, sturdily. And she did; but of
course, as Maurice, to his intense discomfort, knew only too well, it
was hard to swing it. Even with what help he could give her, she
couldn't possibly have got along if she had not been astonishingly
efficient and thrifty, always looking at both sides of a cent! "I ain't
smoking any more," Lily said once; "well, 'tain't _only_ to save money;
but I don't want Jacky to be getting any funny ideas!" (this when
"Ernest Augustus" was only a few months old!) She had a tiny house on
Maple Street, with a sun-baked front yard, in which a few shrubs caught
the dust on their meager foliage; and she had a border of pansies in the
shade under the bay window;--"I _must_ have flowers!" Lily said,
apologetically;--and she had three roomers, and she had scraped the
locality for mealers. She would have made more money if she had not fed
her boarders so well. "But there!" said Lily; "if I give 'em nice food,
they'll stay!" But, all the same, Maurice knew that two or three dollars
more a week would "come in handy." His sense of irritated responsibility
about her made him long for that twenty-fifth birthday which would bring
him his own money. For, in spite of Lily's thriftiness, her expenses, as
well as her toil, kept increasing, and Maurice, cursing himself whenever
he thought that but for him she would be "on easy street" at Marston's,
had begun the inevitable borrowing. The payment of the interest on his
note was a tax on his salary; yet not so taxing as the necessity of
being constantly on guard against some careless word which might make
Eleanor ask questions about that salary.
But Eleanor asked very few questions about anything so practical as
income. Her interest in money matters, now, in regard to Edith, was
merely that Edith was a means to an end--Maurice could have his own
home! The finding a house, under Mrs. Newbolt's candid guidance--and
Maurice's worried reminders that he couldn't "afford" more than so much
rent!--gave Eleanor the pleasantest summer she had had since that first
summer when, in the meadow, she and Maurice had watched the clouds, and
the locust blossoms, and told each other that nothing in heaven or
earth, or the waters under the earth, could part them...
The old house they finally secured was in an unfashionable locality;
there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street,
and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the
block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window
casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also the discovery in the parlor,
behind a monstrous air-tight stove, of a bricked-up fireplace (which he
promptly tore open), all combined to make undertakers and tailors, as
neighbors, unimportant! On the rear of the house was an iron
veranda--roped with wistaria; below, inclosed in a crumbling brick wall,
was the back yard--"_Garden_, if you please!" Maurice announced--for
Bingo's bones. Clumps of Madonna lilies had bloomed here, and died, and
bloomed again, for almost a century; the yard was shaded by a silver
poplar, which would gray and whiten in the wind in hot weather, or
delicately etch itself against a wintry sky. A little path, with moss
between the bricks and always damp in the shadow of the poplar, led from
the basement door to an iron gate; through its rusty bars one could see,
a block away, the slipping gleam of the river, hurrying down from "their
meadow," to disappear under the bridge. Maurice said he would build a
seat around the poplar, "... and we'll put a table under it, and paint
it green, and have tea there in the afternoon! Skeezics will like that."
"Edith looks healthy," said Mrs. Newbolt; "my dear father used to say he
liked healthy females. Old-fashioned word--females. Well, I'm afraid
dear father liked 'em too much. But my dear mother--she was a
Dennison--pretended not to see it. She had sense. Great thing in married
life, to have sense, and know what not to see! Pity Edith's not musical.
Have you a cook? I believe she'd have caught you, Maurice, if Eleanor
hadn't got in ahead! I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo. Here, Bingo!"
Bingo, silky and snarly, climbed on to her steeply sloping black-satin
lap, ate the chocolate drop--keeping all the while a liquid and adoring
eye upon his mistress--then slid down and ran to curl up on Eleanor's
skirt.
By September the moving and seat building were accomplished--the last
not entirely on Edith's account; it was part of Maurice's painstaking
desire to do something--anything!--for "poor Eleanor," as he named her
in his remorseful thought. There was never a day--indeed, there was not
often an hour!--when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust
at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind. So he
tried, in all sorts of anxious ways, to please her. He almost never saw
Lily; but the thought of her often brought Eleanor a box of candy or a
bunch of violets. Such expenditures were slightly easier for him now,
because he had had another small raise,--which this time he had told
Eleanor about. On the strength of it he said to himself that he supposed
he ought to give Lily a little something extra? So on the day when Mrs.
Houghton and Edith were to arrive in Mercer, he went out to Medfield to
tell Jacky's mother that she might count on a few dollars more each
month. The last time he had seen her, Lily had told him that Jacky "was
fussing with his teeth something fierce. I had to hire a little girl
from across the street," she said, "to take him out in the perambulator,
or else I couldn't 'tend to my cooking. It costs money to live, Mr.
Curtis," Lily had said, "and eggs are going up, awful!" She had never
gone back to the familiarity of those days when she called him "Curt."
That he, dull and preoccupied, still called her Lily gave her, somehow,
such a respectful consciousness of his superiority that she had
hesitated to speak of anything so intimate as eggs... "Yes, I must give
her something extra," Maurice thought, remembering the "cost" of living.
"Talk about paying the piper! I bet _I'm_ paying him, all right!"
He was to meet Mrs. Houghton at seven-thirty that night, and it occurred
to him that if he told Eleanor he had some extra work to do at his desk
he could wedge this call in between office hours and the time when he
must go to the station--("and they call me 'G. Washington'!") He felt no
special cautiousness in going out to Maple Street; the few people he
knew in Mercer did not frequent this locality, and if any of them
should chance to see him--a most remote possibility!--why, was he not in
the real-estate business, and constantly looking at houses? On this
particular afternoon, jolting along in the trolley car, he grimly amused
himself with the thought of what he would do if, say, Eleanor herself
should see him turning that infernally shrill bell on Lily's door. It
was a wild flight of imagination, for Eleanor never would see him--never
could see him! Eleanor, who only went to Medfield when their wedding
anniversary came round, and she dragged him out to sit by the river and
sentimentalize! He thought of the loveliness of that past June--and the
contrasting and ironic ugliness of the present September.... Now, the
little secret house in the purlieus of Mercer's smoke and grime; then,
the river, and the rippling tides of grass and clover, and the blue
sky--and that ass, lying at the feet of a woman old enough to be his
mother!
He laughed as he swung off the car--then frowned; for he saw that to
reach Lily's door he would have to pass a baby carriage standing just
inside the gate. He didn't glance into the carriage at the roly-poly
youngster. He never, on the rare occasions when he went to see Lily,
looked at his child if he could avoid doing so--and she never asked him
to. Once, annoyed at Jacky's shrill noisiness, he had protested,
frowning: "Can't you keep it quiet? It needs a spanking!" After that
indifferent criticism ("For _I_ don't care how she brings it up!") Lily
had not wanted him to see her baby. She could not have said just
why--perhaps it was fear lest Maurice would notice his growing
perfection--but when Jacky's father came she kept Jacky in the
background! On this September afternoon she said, as she opened the
door:
"Why, you're a great stranger! Come right in! Wait a second till I get
Jacky. I've just nursed him and I put him out there so I could watch him
while I scrubbed the porch." She ran out to the gate, then pushed the
carriage up the path.
"Let me help you," Maurice said, politely; adding to himself,
"Damn--damn--!" Stepping backward, he lifted the front wheels, and with
Lily's help pulled the perambulator on to the little porch and over the
threshold into the house--which always shone with immaculate neatness
and ugly comfort. He kept his eyes away from the sleeping face on the
pillow. Together they got the carriage into the hall--Lily fumbling all
the while with one hand to fasten the front of her dress and skipping a
button or two as she did so; but he had a glimpse of the heavy abundance
of her bosom, and thought to himself that, esthetically, maternity was
rather unpleasant.
"Go on into the parlor and sit down," she said; "I'll put him in the
kitchen," She pushed the elaborate wicker perambulator, adorned with
bows of blue-satin ribbon, down a dark entry smelling of very good soup
stock. When she came back she found Maurice, his hat and stick in his
hands, standing in her tiny front room, where the sunny window was full
of geraniums and scraggly rose bushes. "I got 'em in early. And I dug up
my dahlias--I was afraid of frost. (Mercy! I must clean that window on
the outside!) Well, you _are_ a stranger!" she said, again,
good-naturedly. Then she sighed: "Mr. Curtis, Jacky seems kind o' sick.
He's been coughing, and he's hot. Would you send for a doctor, if you
was me?"
"Why, if you're worried, yes," Maurice said, impatiently; "I was just
passing, and--No, thank you; I won't sit down. I was passing, and I
thought I'd look in and give you a--a little present. If the youngster's
upset, it will come in well," he ended, as his hand sought his waistcoat
pocket. Lily's face was instantly anxious.
"What! Did _you_ think he looked sick, too? I was kind of worried, but
if you noticed it--"
"I didn't in the least," he said, frowning; "I didn't look at him."
"He 'ain't never been what you'd call sick," Lily tried to reassure
herself; "he's a reg'lar rascal!" she ended, tenderly; her eyes--those
curious amber eyes, through which sometimes a tigress looks!--looked
now at Maurice in passionate motherhood.
Maurice, putting the money down on the table, said, "I wish I could do
more for you, Lily; but I'm dreadfully strapped."
"Say, now, you take it right back! I can get along; I got my two
upstairs rooms rented, and I've got a new mealer. And if Jacky only
keeps well, I can manage fine. But that girl that's been wheelin' him
has measles at her house--little slut!" Lily said (the yellow eyes
glared); "she didn't let on to me about it. Wanted her two dollars a
week! If Jacky's caught 'em, I--I'll see to her!"
"Oh, he's all right," Maurice said; he didn't like "it"--although, if it
hadn't been for "it" he would probably, long before this, have slipped
down into the mere comfort of Lily; "it" held him prisoner in
self-contempt; "it," or perhaps the larger It? the It which he had seen
first in his glorious, passionately selfish ecstasy on his wedding day;
then glimpsed in the awful orderliness of the universe,--the It that
held the stars in their courses! Perhaps the tiny, personal thing, Joy,
and the stupendous, impersonal thing, Law, and the mysterious, unseen
thing, Life, were all one? "Call it God," Maurice had said of ecstasy,
and again of order; he did not call Jacky's milky lips "God." The little
personality which he had made was not in the least God to him! On the
contrary, it was a nuisance and a terror, and a financial anxiety. He
shrank from the thought of it, and kept "decent," merely through disgust
at the child as an entity--an entity which had driven him into loathsome
evasions and secrecies which once in a while sharpened into little lies.
But he was faintly sorry, now, to see Lily look unhappy about the Thing;
and he even had a friendly impulse to comfort her: "Jacky's all right!
But I'll send a doctor in, if you want me to. I saw a doctor's shingle
out as I came around the corner."
She said she'd be awfully obliged; and he, looking at his watch, and
realizing that Mrs. Houghton's train was due in less than an hour,
hurried off.
The doctor's bell was not answered promptly; then the doctor detained
him by writing down the address, getting it wrong, correcting it, and
saying: "Mrs. Dale? Oh yes; you are Mr. Dale?"
"No--not at all! Just a friend. I happened to be calling, and Mrs. Dale
asked me to stop and ask you to come in."
Then he rushed off. On the way to town, staring out of the window of the
car, he tingled all over at Doctor Nelson's question: "You are Mr.
Dale?"... "Why the devil did I offer to get a doctor? I wish Lily would
move to the ends of the earth; or that the brat would get well; or--or
something."
There was a little delay in reaching the station, and when he got there,
it was to find that Mrs. Houghton's train was in and she and Edith,
shifting for themselves, had presumably taken a hack to find their way
to Maurice's house. He was mortified, but annoyed, too, because it
involved giving Eleanor some sort of lying explanation for his
discourtesy. "I'll have to cook up some kind of yarn!" he thought,
disgustedly...
When Edith and her mother had arrived, unaccompanied by Maurice, Eleanor
was sharply worried; had anything happened to him? Oh, she was afraid
something had happened to him! "Where _do_ you suppose he is?" she said,
over and over. "I'm always so afraid he's been run over!" And when
Maurice, flushed and apologetic, appeared, she was so relieved that she
was cross. What on earth had detained him? "How _did_ you miss them?"
So Maurice immediately told half of the truth,--this being easier for
him than an out-and-out lie. He had been detained because he had to go
and see a house in Medfield. "Awfully sorry, Mrs. Houghton!"
Eleanor said she should have thought he needn't have stayed long enough
to be late at the station! Well, he hadn't stayed long; but the--"the
tenant was afraid her baby had measles and she had asked him to go and
get a doctor, and--"
"Of course!" Mrs. Houghton said; "don't give it a thought, Maurice.
John Bennett met us--you knew he was at the Polytechnical?--and brought
us here. But, anyhow, Edith and I were quite capable of looking out for
ourselves; weren't we, Edith?"
Edith, almost sixteen now, long-legged, silent, and friendly, said,
"Yes, mother" and helped herself so liberally to butter that her hostess
thought to herself, _"Gracious!"_
However, assured that Maurice had not been run over, Eleanor was really
indifferent to Edith's appetite, for the sum Mrs. Houghton had offered
for the girl's board was generous. So, proud of the new house, and
pleased with sitting at the head of her own table, and hoping that
Maurice would like the pudding, which, with infinite fussing, she had
made with her own hands, she felt both happy and hospitable. She told
Edith to take some more butter (which she did!); and tell Johnny to come
to dinner some night, "and we'll have some music," she added, kindly.
"Johnny doesn't like music," said Edith; "well, I don't, either. But I
guess he'll come. He likes food."
Edith effaced herself a good deal in the few days that, her mother
stayed on in Mercer to launch her at Fern Hill; effaced herself, indeed,
so much that Maurice, full of preoccupations of his own, was hardly
aware of her presence!... He had had a scared note from Lily:
Doctor Nelson says he's _awful_ sick, and I've got to have a nurse. I
don't like to, because I can't bear to have anybody do for him but me,
and she charges so much. Makes me tired to see her all fussed up in
white dresses--I suppose it's her laundry I'm paying for! That little
girl he caught it from ought to be sent to a Reformatory. I'm afraid my
new mealer'll go, if she thinks there's anything catching in the house.
I hate to ask you--
The scented, lavender-colored envelope was on Maurice's desk at the
office the morning after Mrs. Houghton and Edith arrived. When he had
read it, and torn it into minute scraps, Maurice had something else to
think of than Edith! He knew Lily wouldn't want to leave "her" baby to
go out and cash a money order, and checks were dangerous; so he must
take that trip to Medfield again. "Well," said Maurice--pulled and
jerked out to Maple Street on the leash of an ineradicable sense of
decency--"the devil is getting his money's worth out of _me_!"
He entered No. 16 without turning the clanging bell, for the door was
ajar. Lily was in the entry, talking to the doctor, who gave Mrs. Dale's
"friend" a rather keen look. "Oh, Mr. Curtis, he's _awful_ sick!" Lily
said; she was haggard with fright.
Maurice, swearing to himself for having arrived at that particular
moment, said, coldly, "Too bad."
"Oh, we'll pull him through," the doctor said, with a kind look at Lily.
She caught his hand and kissed it, and burst out crying. The two men
looked at each other--one amused, the other shrinking with disgust at
his own moral squalor. Then from the floor above came a whimpering cry,
and Lily, calling passionately, "Yes, Sweety! Maw's coming!" flew
upstairs.
"I'll look in this evening," Doctor Nelson said, and took himself off,
rubbing the back of his hand on his trousers. "I wonder if there's any
funny business there?" he reflected. But he thought no more about it
until weeks afterward, when he happened, one day, in the bank, to stand
before Maurice, waiting his turn at the teller's window. He said,
"Hello!" and Maurice said, "Hello!" and added that it was a cold day.
The fact that Maurice said not a word about that recovering little
patient in Medfield made the doctor's mind revert to the possibilities
he had recognized in Lily's entry.
"Yet he looks too decent for that sort of thing," the doctor thought;
"well, it's a rum world." Then Maurice took his turn at the window, and
Doctor Nelson put his notes in his pocket, and the two men nodded to
each other, and said, "By," and went their separate ways.