by Ernest Poole
Bruce Cunningham had married just after he left law school. He had worked in a law office which took receiverships by the score, and through managing bankrupt concerns by slow degrees he had made himself a financial surgeon. He had set up an office of his own and was doing splendidly. But he worked under fearful tension. Bruce had to deal with bankrupts who had barely closed their eyes for weeks, men half out of their minds from the strain, the struggle to keep up their heads in those angry waters of finance which Roger vaguely pictured as a giant whirlpool. Though honest enough in his own affairs, Bruce showed a genial relish for all the tricks of the savage world which was as the breath to his nostrils. And at times he appeared so wise and keen he made Roger feel like a child. But again it was Bruce who seemed the child. He seemed to be so naïve at times, and Edith had him so under her thumb. Roger liked to hear Bruce’s stories of business, when Edith would let her husband talk. But this she would not often do, for she said Bruce needed rest at night. She reproved him now for staying so late, she wrung from him the fact that he’d had no supper.
“Well, Bruce,” she exclaimed impatiently, “now isn’t that just like you? You’re going straight home—that’s where you’re going—”
“To be fed up and put to bed,” her husband grumbled good-naturedly. And while she made ready to bundle him off he turned to his father-in-law.
“What do you think’s my latest?” he asked, and he gave a low chuckle which Roger liked. “Last week I was a brewer, to-day I’m an engineer,” he said. “Can you beat it? A building contractor. Me.” And as he smoked his cigarette, in laconic phrases he explained how a huge steel construction concern had gone to the wall, through building skyscrapers “on spec” and outstripping even the growth of New York. “They got into court last week,” he said, “and the judge handed me the receivership. The judge and I have been chums for years. He has hay fever—so do I.”
“Come, Bruce, I’m ready,” said his wife.
“I’ve been in their office all day,” he went on. “Their general manager was stark mad. He hadn’t been out of the office since last Sunday night, he said. You had to ask him a question and wait—while he looked at you and held onto his chair. He broke down and blubbered—the poor damn fool—he’ll be in Matteawan in a week—”
“You’ll be there yourself if you don’t come home,” broke in Edith’s voice impatiently.
“And out of that poor devil, and out of the mess his books are in, I’ve been learning engineering!”
He had followed his wife out on the steps. He turned back with a quick appealing smile:
“Well, good-night—see you soon—”
“Good-night, my boy,” said Roger. “Good luck to the engineering.”
“Oh, father dear,” cried Edith, from the taxi down below. “Remember supper Sunday night—”
“I won’t forget,” said Roger.
* * * * *
He watched them start off up the street. The night was soft, refreshing, and the place was quiet and personal. The house was one of a dozen others, some of red brick and some of brown stone, that stood in an uneven row on a street but a few rods in length, one side of a little triangular park enclosed by a low iron fence, inside of which were a few gnarled trees and three or four park benches. On one of these benches his eye was caught by the figure of an old woman there, and he stood a moment watching her, some memory stirring in his mind.
Occasionally somebody passed. Otherwise it was silent here. But even in the silence could be felt the throes of change; the very atmosphere seemed charged with drastic things impending. Already the opposite house line had been broken near the center by a high apartment building, and another still higher rose like a cliff just back of the house in which Roger lived. Still others, and many factory lofts, reared shadowy bulks on every hand. From the top of one an enormous sign, a corset pictured forth in lights, flashed out at regular intervals; and from farther off, high up in the misty haze of the night, could be seen the gleaming pinnacle where hour by hour that great bell slowly boomed the time away. Yes, here the old was passing. Already the tiny parklet was like the dark bottom of a pit, with the hard sparkling modern town towering on every side, slowly pressing, pressing in and glaring down with yellow eyes.
But Roger noticed none of these things. He watched the old woman on the bench and groped for the memory she had stirred. Ah, now at last he had it. An April night long, long ago, when he had sat where she was now, while here in the house his wife’s first baby, Edith, had begun her life….
Slowly he turned and went inside.
CHAPTER II
Roger’s hearing was extremely acute. Though the room where he was sitting, his study, was at the back of the house, he heard Deborah’s key at the street door and he heard the door softly open and close.
“Are you there, dearie?” Her voice from the hallway was low; and his answer, “Yes, child,” was in the same tone, as though she were with him in the room. This keen sense of hearing had long been a peculiar bond between them. To her father, Deborah’s voice was the most distinctive part of her, for often as he listened the memory came of her voice as a girl, unpleasant, hurried and stammering. But she had overcome all that. “No grown woman,” she had declared, when she was eighteen, “has any excuse for a voice like mine.” That was eleven years ago; and the voice she had acquired since, with its sweet magnetic quality, its clear and easy articulation, was to him an expression of Deborah’s growth. As she took off her coat and hat in the hall she said, in the same low tone as before,
“Edith has been here, I suppose—”
“Yes—”
“I’m so sorry I missed her. I tried to get home early, but it has been a busy night.”
Her voice sounded tired, comfortably so, and she looked that way as she came in. Though only a little taller than Edith, she was of a sturdier build and more decided features. Her mouth was large with a humorous droop and her face rather broad with high cheekbones. As she put her soft black hair up over her high forehead, her father noticed her birthmark, a faint curving line of red running up from between her eyes. Imperceptible as a rule, it showed when she was tired. In the big school in the tenements where she had taught for many years, she gave herself hard without stint to her work, but she had such a good time through it all. She had a way, too, he reflected, of always putting things in their place. As now she came in and kissed him and sank back on his leather lounge with a tranquil breath of relief, she seemed to be dropping school out of her life.
Roger picked up his paper and continued his reading. Presently they would have a talk, but first he knew that she wanted to lie quite still for a little while. Vaguely he pictured her work that night, her class-room packed to bursting with small Jews and Italians, and Deborah at the blackboard with a long pointer in her hand. The fact that for the last two years she had been the principal of her school had made little impression upon him.
And meanwhile, as she lay back with eyes closed, her mind still taut from the evening called up no simple class-room but far different places—a mass meeting in Carnegie Hall where she had just been speaking, some schools which she had visited out in Indiana, a block of tenements far downtown and the private office of the mayor. For her school had long curious arms these days.
“Was Bruce here too this evening?” she asked her father presently. Roger finished what he was reading, then looked over to the lounge, which was in a shadowy corner.
“Yes, he came in late.” And he went on to tell her of Bruce’s “engineering.” At once she was interested. Rising on one elbow she questioned him good-humoredly, for Deborah was fond of Bruce.
“Has he bought that automobile he wanted?”
“No,” replied her father. “Edith said they couldn’t afford it.”
“Why not?”
“This time it’s the dentist’s bills. Young Betsy’s teeth aren’t straightened yet—and as soon as she’s been beautified they’re going to put the clamps on George.”
“
Poor Georgie,” Deborah murmured. At the look of pain and disapproval on her father’s heavy face, she smiled quietly to herself. George, who was Edith’s oldest and the worry of her days, was Roger’s favorite grandson. “Has he been bringing home any more sick dogs?”
“No, this time it was a rat—a white one,” Roger answered. A glint of dry relish appeared in his eyes. “George brought it home the other night. He had on a pair of ragged old pants.”
“What on earth—”
“He had traded his own breeches for the rat,” said Roger placidly.
“No! Oh, father! Really!” And she sank back laughing on the lounge.
“His school report,” said Roger, “was quite as bad as ever.”
“Of course it was,” said Deborah. And she spoke so sharply that her father glanced at her in surprise. She was up again on one elbow, and there was an eager expression on her bright attractive face. “Do you know what we’re going to do some day? We’re going to put the rat in the school,” Deborah said impatiently. “We’re going to take a boy like George and study him till we think we know just what interests him most. And if in his case it’s animals, we’ll have a regular zoo in school. And for other boys we’ll have other things they really want to know about. And we’ll keep them until five o’clock—when their mothers will have to drag them away.” Her father looked bewildered.
“But arithmetic, my dear.”
“You’ll find they’ll have learned their arithmetic without knowing it,” Deborah answered.
“Sounds a bit wild,” murmured Roger. Again to his mind came the picture of hordes of little Italians and Jews. “My dear, if I had your children to teach, I don’t think I’d add a zoo,” he said. And with a breath of discomfort he turned back to his reading. He knew that he ought to question her, to show an interest in her work. But he had a deep aversion for those millions of foreign tenement people, always shoving, shoving upward through the filth of their surroundings. They had already spoiled his neighborhood, they had flowed up like an ocean tide. And so he read his paper, frowning guiltily down at the page. He glanced up in a little while and saw Deborah smiling across at him, reading his dislike of such talk. The smile which he sent back at her was half apologetic, half an appeal for mercy. And Deborah seemed to understand. She went into the living room, and there at the piano she was soon playing softly. Listening from his study, again the feeling came to him of her fresh and abundant vitality. He mused a little enviously on how it must feel to be strong like that, never really tired.
And while her father thought in this wise, Deborah at the piano, leaning back with eyes half closed, could feel her tortured nerves relax, could feel her pulse stop throbbing so and the dull aching at her temples little by little pass away. She played like this so many nights. Soon she would be ready for sleep.
* * * * *
After she had gone to bed, Roger rose heavily from his chair. By long habit he went about the house trying the windows and turning out lights. Last he came to the front door. There were double outer doors with a ponderous system of locks and bolts and a heavy chain. Mechanically he fastened them all; and putting out the light in the hall, in the darkness he went up the stairs. He could so easily feel his way. He put his hand lightly, first on the foot of the banister, then on a curve in it halfway up, again on the sharper curve at the top and last on the knob of his bedroom door. And it was as though these guiding objects came out to meet him like old friends.
In his bedroom, while he slowly undressed, his glance was caught by the picture upon the wall opposite his bed, a little landscape poster done in restful tones of blue, of two herdsmen and their cattle far up on a mountainside in the hour just before the dawn, tiny clear-cut silhouettes against the awakening eastern sky. So immense and still, this birth of the day—the picture always gave him the feeling of life everlasting. Judith his wife had placed it there.
From his bed through the window close beside him he looked up at the cliff-like wall of the new apartment building, with tier upon tier of windows from which murmurous voices dropped out of the dark: now soft, now suddenly angry, loud; now droning, sullen, bitter, hard; now gay with little screams of mirth; now low and amorous, drowsy sounds. Tier upon tier of modern homes, all overhanging Roger’s house as though presently to crush it down.
But Roger was not thinking of that. He was thinking of his children—of Edith’s approaching confinement and all her anxious hunting about to find what was best for her family, of Bruce and the way he was driving himself in the unnatural world downtown where men were at each other’s throats, of Deborah and that school of hers in the heart of a vast foul region of tenement buildings swarming with strange, dirty little urchins. And last he thought of Laura, his youngest daughter, wild as a hawk, gadding about the Lord knew where. She even danced in restaurants! Through his children he felt flowing into his house the seething life of this new town. And drowsily he told himself he must make a real effort, and make it soon, to know his family better. For in spite of the storm of long ago which had swept away his faith in God, the feeling had come to him of late that somewhere, in some manner, he was to meet his wife again. He rarely tried to think this out, for as soon as he did it became a mere wish, a hungry longing, nothing more. So he had learned to let it lie, deep down inside of him. Sometimes he vividly saw her face. After all, who could tell? And she would want to hear of her children. Yes, he must know them better. Some day soon he must begin.
Suddenly he remembered that Laura had not yet come home. With a sigh of discomfort he got out of bed and went downstairs, re-lit the gas in the hallway, unfastened the locks and the chain at the door. He came back and was soon asleep. He must have dozed for an hour or two. He was roused by hearing the front door close and a big motor thundering. And then like a flash of light in the dark came Laura’s rippling laughter.
CHAPTER III
On the next evening, Saturday, while Roger ate his dinner, Laura came to sit with him. She herself was dining out. That she should have dressed so early in order to keep him company had caused her father some surprise, and a faint suspicion entered his mind that she had overdrawn at the bank, as she had the last time she sat with him like this. Her manner certainly was a bit strange.
But Roger put the thought aside. Whatever she wanted, Laura was worth it. In a tingling fashion he felt what a glorious time she was having, what a gorgeous town she knew. It was difficult to realize she was his own daughter, this dashing stranger sitting here, playing idly with a knife and caressing him with her voice and her eyes. The blue evening gown she was wearing to-night (doubtless not yet paid for) made her figure even more supple and lithe, set off her splendid bosom, her slender neck, her creamy skin. Her hair, worn low over her temples, was brown with just a tinge of red. Her eyes were black, with gleaming lights; her lips were warm and rich, alive. He did not approve of her lips. Once when she had kissed him Roger had started slightly back. For his daughter’s lips were rouged, and they had reminded him of his youth. He had asked her sister to speak to her. But Deborah had told him she did not care to speak to people in that way—”especially women—especially sisters,” she had said, with a quiet smile. All very well, he reflected, but somebody ought to take Laura in hand.
She had been his favorite as a child, his pet, his tiny daughter. He remembered her on his lap like a kitten. How she had liked to cuddle there. And she had liked to bite his hand, a curious habit in a child. “I hurt daddy!” He could still recollect the gay little laugh with which she said that, looking up brightly into his face.
And here she was already grown, and like a light in the sober old house, fascinating while she disturbed him. He liked to hear her high pitched voice, gossiping in Deborah’s room or in her own dainty chamber chatting with the adoring maid who was dressing her to go out. He loved her joyous thrilling laugh. And he would have missed her from the house as he would have missed Fifth Avenue if it had been dropped from the city. For the picture Roger had formed of this daughter was more of
a symbol than of a girl, a symbol of the ardent town, spending, wasting, dancing mad. It was Laura who had kept him living right up to his income.
“Where are you dining to-night?” he asked.
“With the Raymonds.” He wondered who they were. “Oh, Sarah,” she added to the maid. “Call up Mrs. Raymond’s apartment and ask what time is dinner to-night.”
“Are you going to dance later on?” he inquired.
“Oh, I guess so,” she replied. “On the Astor Roof, I think they said—”
Her father went on with his dinner. These hotel dances, he had heard, ran well into Sunday morning. How Judith would have disapproved. He hesitated uneasily.
“I don’t especially care for this dancing into Sunday,” he said. For a moment he did not look up from his plate. When he did he saw Laura regarding him.
“Oh, do you mind? I’m sorry. I won’t, after this,” she answered. And Roger colored angrily, for the glint of amusement in Laura’s mischievous black eyes revealed quite unmistakably that she regarded both her father and his feeling for the Sabbath as very dear and quaint and old. Old? Of course he seemed old to her, Roger thought indignantly. For what was Laura but a child? Did she ever think of anything except having a good time? Had she ever stopped to think out her own morals, let alone anyone else’s? Was she any judge of what was old—or of who was old? And he determined then and there to show her he was in his prime. Impatiently he strove to remember the names of her friends and ask her about them, to show a keen lively interest in this giddy gaddy life she led. And when that was rather a failure he tried his daughter next on books, books of the most modern kind. Stoutly he lied and said he was reading a certain Russian novel of which he had heard Deborah speak. But this valiant falsehood made no impression whatever, for Laura had never heard of the book.