His Family

by Ernest Poole

  “What is it to-night?” he inquired.

  “A big meeting at Cooper Union.”

  And at dinner she went on to say that in her five schools the neighborhood clubs had combined to hold this meeting, and she herself was to preside. At once her young niece was all animation.

  “Oh, I wish I could go and hear you!” she sighed.

  “Afraid you can’t, Betsy,” her aunt replied. And at this, with an instinctive glance toward the door where her mother would soon come in to stop by her mere presence all such conversation, Elizabeth eagerly threw out one inquiry after the other, pell mell.

  “How on earth do you do it?” she wanted to know. “How do you get a speech ready, Aunt Deborah—how much of it do you write out ahead? Aren’t you just the least bit nervous—now, I mean—this minute? And how will you feel on the platform? _What on earth do you do with your feet?_”

  As the girl bent forward there with her gaze fixed ardently on her aunt, her grandfather thought in half comic dismay, “Lord, now she’ll want to be a great speaker—like her aunt. And she will tell her mother so!”

  “What’s the meeting all about?” he inquired. And Deborah began to explain.

  In her five schools the poverty was rapidly becoming worse. Each week more children stayed away or came to school ragged and unkempt, some without any overcoats, small pitiful mites wearing shoes so old as barely to stick on their feet. And when the teachers and visitors followed these children into their homes they found bare, dirty, chilly rooms where the little folk shivered and wailed for food and the mothers looked distracted, gaunt and sullen and half crazed. Over three hundred thousand workers were idle in the city. Meanwhile, to make matters worse, half the money from uptown which had gone in former years into work for the tenements was going over to Belgium instead. And the same relentless drain of war was felt by the tenement people themselves; for all of them were foreigners, and from their relatives abroad, in those wide zones of Europe already blackened and laid waste, in endless torrents through the mails came wild appeals for money.

  In such homes her children lived. And Deborah had set her mind on vigorous measures of relief. Landlords must be made to wait and the city be persuaded to give work to the most needy, food and fuel must be secured. As she spoke of the task before her, with a flush of animation upon her bright expressive face at the thought that in less than an hour she would be facing thousands of people, the gloom of the picture she painted was dispelled in the spirit she showed.

  “These things always work out,” she declared, with an impatient shrug of her shoulders. And watching her admiringly, young Betsy thought, “How strong she is! What a wonderful grown-up woman!” And Roger watching thought, “How young.”

  * * * * *

  “What things?” It was Edith’s voice at the door, and among those at the table there was a little stir of alarm. She had entered unnoticed and now took her seat. She was looking pale and tired. “What things work out so finely?” she asked, and with a glance at Deborah’s gown,

  “Where are you going?” she added.

  “To a meeting,” Deborah answered.

  “Oh.” And Edith began her soup. In the awkward pause that followed, twice Deborah started to speak to her sister, but checked herself, for at other dinners just like this she had made such dismal failures.

  “By the way, Edith,” she said, at last, “I’ve been thinking of all that furniture of yours which is lying in storage.” Her sister looked up at her, startled.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “There’s so much of it you don’t care for,” Deborah answered quietly. “Why don’t you let a part of it go? I mean the few pieces you’ve always disliked.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Why, it seems such a pity not to have Hannah back in the house. She would make things so much easier.” Roger felt a glow of relief.

  “A capital plan!” he declared at once.

  “It would be,” Edith corrected him, “if I hadn’t already made other plans.” And then in a brisk, breathless tone, “You see I’ve made up my mind,” she said, “to sell not only part but all my furniture—very soon—and a few other belongings as well—and use the money to put George and Elizabeth and little Bob back in the schools where they belong.”

  “Mother!” gasped Elizabeth, and with a prolonged “Oh-h” of delight she ran around to her mother’s chair.

  “But look here,” George blurted worriedly, “I don’t like it, mother, darned if I do! You’re selling everything—just for school!”

  “School is rather important, George,” was Edith’s tart rejoinder. “If you don’t think so, ask your aunt.” “What do you think of it, Auntie?” he asked. The cloud which had come on Deborah’s face was lifted in an instant.

  “I think, George,” she answered gently, “that you’d better let your mother do what she thinks best for you. It will make things easier here in the house,” she added, to her sister, “but I wish you could have Hannah, too.”

  “Oh, I’ll manage nicely now,” said Edith. And with a slight smile of triumph she resumed her dinner.

  “The war won’t last forever,” muttered Roger uneasily. And to himself: “But suppose it should last—a year or more.” He did not approve of Edith’s scheme. “It’s burning her bridges all at once, for something that isn’t essential,” he thought. But he would not tell her so.

  Meanwhile Deborah glanced at the clock.

  “Oh! It’s nearly eight o’clock! I must hurry or I’ll be late,” she said. “Good-night, all—”

  And she left them.

  Roger followed her into the hall.

  “What do you think of this?” he demanded. Her reply was a tolerant shrug.

  “It’s her own money, father—”

  “All her money!” he rejoined. “Every dollar she has in the world!”

  “But I don’t just see how it can be helped.”

  “Can’t you talk to her, show her what folly it is?”

  “Hardly,” said Deborah, smiling. Already she had on her coat and hat and was turning to go. And her father scowled with annoyance. She was always going, he told himself, leaving him to handle her sister alone. He would like to go out himself in the evenings—yes, by George, this very night—it would act like a tonic on his mind. Just for a moment, standing there, he saw Cooper Union packed to the doors, he heard the ringing speeches, the cheers. But no, it was not to be thought of. With this silent war going on in his house he knew he must stay neutral. Watchful waiting was his course. If he went out with Deborah, Edith would be distinctly hurt, and sitting all evening here alone she would draw still deeper into herself. And so it would be night after night, as it had been for many weeks. He would be cooped up at home while Deborah did the running about…. In half the time it takes to tell it, Roger had worked himself into a state where he felt like a mighty badly used man.

  “I wish you would speak to her,” he said. “I wish you could manage to find time to be here more in the evenings. Edith worries so much and she’s trying so hard. A little sympathy now and then—”

  “But she doesn’t seem to want any from me,” said his daughter, a bit impatiently. “I know it’s hard—of course it is. But what can I do? She won’t let me help. And besides—there are other families, you know—thousands—really suffering—for the lack of all that we have here.” She smiled and kissed him quickly. “Good-night, dad dear, I’ve got to run.”

  And the door closed behind her.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  After dinner that night, in the living room the two older children studied their lessons and Edith sat mending a pair of rompers for little Tad. Presently Roger came out from his den with the evening paper in his hand and sat down close beside her. He did this conscientiously almost every evening. With a sigh he opened his paper to read, again there was silence in the room, and in this silence Roger’s mind roamed far away across the sea.

  For the front page of his paper was filled with the u
sual headlines, tidings which a year before would have made a man’s heart jump into his throat, but which were getting commonplace now. Dead and wounded by the thousands, famine, bombs and shrapnel, hideous atrocities, submarines and floating mines, words once remote but now familiar, always there on the front page and penetrating into his soul, becoming a part of Roger Gale, so that never again when the war was done would he be the same man he was before. For he had forever lost his faith in the sanity and steadiness of the great mind of humanity. Roger had thought of mankind as mature, but there had come to him of late the same feeling he had had before in the bosom of his family. Mankind had suddenly unmasked and shown itself for what it was—still only a precocious child, with a terrible precocity. For its growth had been one sided. Its strength was growing at a speed breathless and astounding. But its vision and its poise, its sense of human justice, of kindliness and tolerance and of generous brotherly love, these had been neglected and were being left behind. Vaguely he thought of its ships of steel, its railroads and its flaming mills, its miracles, its prodigies. And the picture rose in his mind of a child, standing there of giant’s size with dangerous playthings in its hands, and boastfully declaring,

  “I can thunder over the earth, dive in the ocean, soar on the clouds! I can shiver to atoms a mountain, I can drench whole lands with blood! I can look up and laugh at God!”

  And Roger frowned as he read the news. What strange new century lay ahead? What convulsing throes of change? What was in store for his children? Tighter set his heavy jaw.

  “It shall be good,” he told himself with a grim determination. “For them there shall be better things. Something great and splendid shall come out of it at last. They will look back upon this time as I look on the French Revolution.”

  He tried to peer into that world ahead, dazzling, distant as the sun. But then with a sigh he returned to the news, and little by little his mind again was gripped and held by the most compelling of all appeals so far revealed in humanity’s growth, the appeal of war to the mind of a man. He frowned as he read, but he read on. Why didn’t England send over more men?

  The clock struck nine.

  “Now, George. Now, Elizabeth,” Edith said. With the usual delay and reluctance the children brought their work to an end, kissed their mother and went up to bed. And Edith continued sewing. Presently she smiled to herself. Little Tad had been so droll that day.

  On the third page of his paper, Roger’s glance was arrested by a full column story concerning Deborah’s meeting that night. And as in a long interview he read here in the public print the same things she had told him at supper, he felt a little glow of pride. Yes, this daughter of his was a wonderful woman, living a big useful life, taking a leading part in work which would certainly brighten the lives of millions of children still unborn. Again he felt the tonic of it. Here was a glimmer of hope in the world, here was an antidote to war. He finished the column and glanced up.

  Edith was still sewing. He thought of her plan to sell all she possessed in order to put her children back in their expensive schools uptown.

  “Why can’t she save her money?” he thought. “God knows there’s little enough of it left. But I can’t tell her that. If I do she’ll sell everything, hand me the cash and tell me she’s sorry to be such a burden. She’ll sit like a thundercloud in my house.”

  No, he could say nothing to stop her. And over the top of his paper her father shot a look at her of keen exasperation. Why risk everything she had to get these needless frills and fads? Why must she cram her life so full of petty plans and worries and titty-tatty little jobs? For the Lord’s sake, leave their clothes alone! And why these careful little rules for every minute of their day, for their washing, their dressing, their eating, their napping, their play and the very air they breathed! He crumpled his paper impatiently. She was always talking of being old-fashioned. Well then, why not be that way? Let her live as her grandmother had, up there in the mountain farmhouse. She had not been so particular. With one hired girl she had thought herself lucky. And not only had she cooked and sewed, but she had spun and woven too, had churned and made cheese and pickles and jam and quilts and even mattresses. Once in two months she had cut Roger’s hair, and the rest of the time she had let him alone, except for something really worth while—a broken arm, for example, or church. She had stuck to the essentials!… But Edith was not old-fashioned, nor was she alive to this modern age. In short, she was neither here nor there!

  Then from the nursery above, her smallest boy was heard to cry. With a little sigh of weariness, quickly she rose and went upstairs, and a few moments later to Roger’s ears came a low, sweet, soothing lullaby. Years ago Edith had asked him to teach her some of his mother’s cradle songs. And the one which she was singing to-night was a song he had heard when he was small, when the mountain storms had shrieked and beat upon the rattling old house and he had been frightened and had cried out and his mother had come to his bed in the dark. He felt as though she were near him now. And as he listened to the song, from the deep well of sentiment which was a part of Roger Gale rose memories that changed his mood, and with it his sense of proportions.

  Here was motherhood of the genuine kind, not orating in Cooper Union in the name of every child in New York, but crooning low and tenderly, soothing one little child to sleep, one of the five she herself had borne, in agony, without complaint. How Edith had slaved and sacrificed, how bravely she had rallied after the death of her husband. He remembered her a few hours ago on the bed upstairs, spent and in anguish, sobbing, alone. And remorse came over him. Deborah’s talk at dinner had twisted his thinking, he told himself. Well, that was Deborah’s way of life. She had her enormous family and Edith had her small one, and in this hell of misery which war was spreading over the earth each mother was up in arms for her brood. And, by George, of the two he didn’t know but that he preferred his own flesh and blood. All very noble, Miss Deborah, and very dramatic, to open your arms to all the children under the moon and get your name in the papers. But there was something pretty fine in just sitting at home and singing to one.

  “All right, little mother, you go straight ahead. This is war and panic and hard times. You’re perfectly right to look after your own.”

  He would show Edith he did not begrudge her this use of her small property. And more than that, he would do what he could to take her out of her loneliness. How about reading aloud to her? He had been a capital reader, during Judith’s lifetime, for he had always enjoyed it so. Roger rose and went to his shelves and began to look over the volumes there. Perhaps a book of travel…. Stoddard’s “Lectures on Japan.”

  Meanwhile Edith came into the room, sat down and took up her sewing. As she did so he turned and glanced at her, and she smiled brightly back at him. Yes, he thought with a genial glow, from this night on he would do his part. He came back to his chair with a book in his hand, prepared to start on his new course.

  “Father,” she said quietly. Her eyes were on the work in her lap.

  “Yes, my child, what is it?”

  “It’s about John,” she answered. And with a movement of alarm he looked at his daughter intently.

  “What’s the matter with John?” he inquired.

  “He has tuberculosis,” she said.

  “He has no such thing!” her father retorted. “John has Pott’s Disease of the spine!”

  “Yes, I know he has,” she replied. “And I’m sorry for him, poor lad. But in the last year,” she added, “certain complications have come. And now he’s tubercular as well.”

  “How do you know? He doesn’t cough—his lungs are sound as yours or mine!”

  “No, it’s—” Edith pursed her lips. “It’s different,” she said softly.

  “Who told you?” he demanded.

  “Not Deborah,” was the quick response. “She knew it, I’m certain, for I find that she’s been having Mrs. Neale, the woman who comes in to wash, do John’s things in a separate tub. I found her doing
it yesterday, and she told me what Deborah had said.”

  “It’s the first I’d heard of it,” Roger put in.

  “I know it is,” she answered. “For if you’d heard of it before, I don’t believe you’d have been as ready as Deborah was, apparently, to risk infecting the children here.” Edith’s voice was gentle, slow and relentless. There was still a reflection in her eyes of the tenderness which had been there as she had soothed her child to sleep. “As time goes on, John is bound to get worse. The risk will be greater every week.”

  “Oh, pshaw!” cried her father. “No such thing! You’re just scaring yourself over nothing at all!”

  “Doctor Lake didn’t think I was.” Lake was the big child specialist in whose care Edith’s children had been for years. “I talked to him to-day on the telephone, and he said we should get John out of the house.”

  Roger heartily damned Doctor Lake!

  “It’s easy to find a good home for the boy,” Edith went on quietly, “close by, if you like—in some respectable family that will be only too thankful to take in a boarder.”

  “How about the danger to that family’s children?” Roger asked malignantly.

  “Very well, father, do as you please. Take any risk you want to.”

  “I’m taking no risk,” he retorted. “If there were any risk they would have told me—Allan and Deborah would, I mean.”

  “They wouldn’t!” burst from Edith with a vehemence which startled him. “They’d take the same risk for my children they would for any street urchin in town! All children are the same in their eyes—and if you feel as they do—”

  “I don’t feel as they do!”

  “Don’t you? Then I’m telling you that Doctor Lake said there was very serious risk—every day this boy remains in the house!” Roger rose angrily from his chair:

  “So you want me to turn him out! To-night!”

  “No, I want you to wait a few days—until we can find him a decent home.”

  “All right, I won’t do it!”