by Ernest Poole
“Very well, father—it’s your house, not mine.”
For a few moments longer she sat at her sewing, while her father walked the floor. Then abruptly she rose, her eyes brimming with tears, and left the room. And he heard a sob as she went upstairs.
“Now she’ll shut herself up with her children,” he reflected savagely, “and hold the fort till I come to terms!” Rather than risk a hair on their heads, Edith would turn the whole world out of doors! He thought of Deborah and he groaned. She would have to be told of this; and when she was, what a row there would be! For Johnny was one of her family. He glanced at the clock. She’d be coming home soon. Should he tell her? Not to-night! Just for one evening he’d had enough!
He picked up the book he had meant to read—Stoddard’s “Lectures on Japan.” And Roger snorted wrathfully. By George, how _he’d_ like to go to Japan—or to darkest Africa! Anywhere!
CHAPTER XXIX
But later in the evening, when Allan and Deborah came in, Roger, who in the meantime had had a good hour in Japan and was somewhat relaxed and soothed, decided at once this was the time to tell her and have done with it. For Deborah was flushed with triumph, the meeting had been a huge success. Cooper Union had been packed to the walls, with an overflow meeting out on the street; thousands of dollars had been pledged and some big politicians had promised support; and men and women, rich and poor, had volunteered their services. She started to tell him about it, but noticed his troubled expression and asked him what was on his mind.
“Oh, nothing tremendous,” Roger said. “I hate to be any damper to-night. I hadn’t meant to tell you to-night—but I think I will now, for you look as though you could find a solution for anything.”
“Then I must look like an idiot,” his daughter said good-humoredly. “What is it?” she demanded.
“It’s about John.” Her countenance changed.
“Oh. Is he worse?”
“Edith thinks he is—and she says it’s not safe.”
“I see—she wants him out of the house. Tell me what she said to you.” As he did so she listened intently, and turning to Allan at the end, “What do you say to this, Allan?” she asked. “Is there any real risk to the children?”
“A little,” he responded. “As much as they take every day in the trolley going to school.”
“They never go in the trolley,” Deborah answered dryly. “They always go on the top of the ‘bus.” She was silent for a moment. “Well, there’s no use discussing it. If Edith feels that way, John must go. The house won’t be livable till he does.”
Roger looked at her in surprise. He felt both relieved and disappointed. “John’s only one of thousands to her,” he told himself aggrievedly. “He isn’t close to her, she hasn’t room, she has a whole mass meeting in her head. But I haven’t, by George, I like the boy—and I’m the one who will have to tell him to pack up and leave the house! Isn’t it the very devil, how things all come back on me?”
“Look here, father,” Deborah said, “suppose you let me manage this.” And Roger’s heavy visage cleared.
“You mean you’ll tell him?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and he’ll understand it perfectly. I think he has been expecting it. I have, for a good many weeks,” she added, with some bitterness. “And I know some people who will be glad enough to take him in. I’ll see that he’s made comfortable. Only—” her face clouded.
“It has meant a lot to him, being here,” her father put in gruffly.
“Oh, John’s used to getting knocks in this world.” Her quiet voice grew hard and stern. “I wasn’t thinking of John just now. What frightens me at times like this is Edith,” she said slowly. “No, not just Edith—motherhood. I see it in so many mothers these days—in the women downtown, in their fight for their children against all other children on earth. It’s the hardest thing we have to do—to try to make them see and feel outside of their own small tenement homes—and help each other—pull together. They can’t see it’s their only chance! And all because of this mother love! It’s so blind sometimes, like an animal!” She broke off, and for a moment she seemed to be looking deep into herself. “And I suppose we’re all like that, we women are,” she muttered, “when we marry and have children. If the pinch is ever hard enough—”
”You wouldn’t be,” said Allan. And a sudden sharp uneasiness came into Roger’s mind.
“When are you two to be married?” he asked, without stopping to think. And at once he regretted his question. With a quick impatient look at him, Allan bent over a book on the table.
“I don’t know,” Deborah answered. “Next spring, I hope.” The frown was still on her face.
“Don’t make it too long,” said her father brusquely. He left them and went up to bed.
* * * * *
Deborah sat motionless. She wished Allan would go, for she guessed what was coming and did not feel equal to it to-night. All at once she felt tired and unnerved from her long exciting evening. If only she could let go of herself and have a good cry. She locked her hands together and looked up at him with impatience. He was still at the table, his back was turned.
“Don’t you know I love you?” she was thinking fiercely. “Can’t you see it—haven’t you seen it—growing, growing—day after day? But I don’t want you here to-night! Why can’t you see you must leave me alone? Now! This minute!”
He turned and came over in front of her, and stood looking steadily down.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “how well you understand yourself.”
“I think I do,” she muttered. With a sudden twitching of her lip she looked quickly up at him. “Go on, Allan—let’s talk it all over now if you must!”
“Not if you feel like that,” he said. At his tone of displeasure she caught his hand.
“Yes, yes, I want to! Please!” she cried. “It’s better—really! Believe me, it is—”
He hesitated a moment, his wide generous mouth set hard, and then in a tone as sharp as hers he demanded, “Are you sure you’ll marry me next spring? Are you sure you hope you will next spring? Are you sure this sister of yours in the house, on your nerves day and night, with this blind narrow motherhood, this motherhood which frightens you—isn’t frightening you too much?”
“No—a little—but not too much.” Her deep sweet voice was trembling. “You’re the one who frightens me. If you only knew! When you come like this—with all you’ve done for me back of you—”
“Deborah! Don’t be a fool!”
“Oh, I know you say you’ve done nothing, except what you’ve been glad to do! You love me like that! But it’s just that love! Giving up all your practice little by little, and your reputation uptown—all for the sake of me, Allan, me!”
“You’re wrong,” he replied. “Compared to what I’m getting, I’ve given up nothing! Can’t you see? You’re just as narrow in your school as Edith is right here in her home! You look upon my hospital as a mere annex to your schools, when the truth of it is that the work down there is a chance I’ve wanted all my life! Can’t you understand,” he cried, “that instead of your being in debt to me it’s I who am in debt to you? You’re a suffragist, eh, a feminist—whatever you want to call it! All right! So you want to be equal with man! Then, for God’s sake, why not begin? Feel equal! I’m no annex to you, nor you to me! It has happened, thank God, that our work fits in—each with the other!”
He stopped and stared, seemed to shake himself; he walked the floor. And when he turned back his expression had changed.
“Look here, Deborah,” he asked, with an appealing humorous smile, “will you tell me what I’m driving at?”
Deborah threw back her head and laughed, and her laughter thrilled with relief. “How sure I feel now that I love him,” she thought.
“You’ve proved I owe you nothing!” she cried. “And that men and women of our kind can work on splendidly side by side, and never bother our poor little heads about anything else—even marriage!”
“Because,” she said, “when I marry you I’m going to have you all to myself—for weeks and weeks as we planned before! And afterwards, with a wonderful start—and with the war over, work less hard and the world less dark and gloomy—we’re going to find that at last we can live! But this winter it couldn’t be like that. This winter we’ve got to go on with our work—and without any more silly worries or talk about whether or not we’re in love. For we are!” Her upturned face was close to his, and for some moments nothing was said, “Well?” she asked. “Are you satisfied?”
“No—I want to get married. But it is now a quarter past one. And I’m your physician. Go straight to bed.”
She stopped him a minute at the front door:
“Are you sure, absolutely, you understand?”
He told her he did. But as he walked home he reflected. How tense she had been in the way she had talked. Yes, the long strain was telling. “Why was she so anxious to get me out of the house,” he asked, “when we were alone for the first time in days? And why, if she’s really sure of her love, does she hate the idea that she’s in my debt?”
He walked faster, for the night was cold. And there was a chill, too, in this long waiting game.
* * * * *
Roger heard Deborah come up to bed, and he wondered what they had been talking about. Of the topic he himself had broached—each other, love and marriage?
“Possibly—for a minute or two—but no more,” he grumbled. “For don’t forget there’s work to discuss, there’s that mass meeting still on her mind. And God knows a woman’s mind is never any child’s play. But when you load a mass meeting on top—”
Here he yawned long and noisily. His head ached, he felt sore and weak—”from the evening’s entertainment my other daughter gave me.” No, he was through, he had had enough. They could settle things to suit themselves. Let Edith squander her money on frills, the more expensive the better. Let her turn poor Johnny out of the house, let her give full play to her motherhood. And if that scared Deborah out of marrying, let her stay single and die an old maid. He had worried enough for his family. He wanted a little peace in his house.
Drowsily he closed his eyes, and a picture came into his mind of the city as he had seen it only a few nights before. It had been so cool, so calm and still. At dusk he had been in the building of the great tower on Madison Square; and when he had finished his business there, on an impulse he had gone up to the top, and through a wide low window had stood a few moments looking down. A soft light snow was falling; and from high up in the storm, through the silent whirling flakes, he had looked far down upon lights below, in groups and clusters, dancing lines, between tall phantom buildings, blurred and ghostly, faint, unreal. From all that bustle and fever of life there had risen to him barely a sound. And the town had seemed small and lonely, a little glow in the infinite dark, fulfilling its allotted place for its moment in eternity. Suddenly from close over his head like a brazen voice out of the sky, hard and deafening and clear, the great bell had boomed the hour. Then again had come the silence, and the cool, soft, whirling snow.
Like a dream it faded all away, and with a curious smile on his face presently Roger fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXX
And now he felt the approach at last of another season of quiet, one of those uneventful times which come in family histories. As he washed and dressed for dinner, one night a little later, he thought with satisfaction, “How nicely things are smoothing out.” His dressing for dinner, as a rule, consisted in changing his low wing collar and his large round detachable cuffs; but to-night he changed his cravat as well, from a black to a pearl gray one. He hoped the whole winter would be pearl gray.
The little storm which Edith had raised over John’s presence in the house had been allayed. Deborah had talked to John, and had moved him with his belongings to a comfortable sunny room in the small but neat apartment of a Scotch family nearby. And John had been so sensible. “Oh, I’m fine, thank you,” he had answered simply, when in the office Roger had asked him about his new home. So that incident was closed. Already Edith was disinfecting John’s old room to her heart’s content, for George was to occupy it now. She was having the woodwork repainted and a new paper put on the walls. She had already purchased a small new rug, and a bed and a bureau and one easy chair, and was making a pair of fresh pretty curtains. All right, let her do it—if only there could be peace in the house.
With his cravat adjusted and his thick-curling silver hair trim from having just been cut by “Louis” over at the Brevoort, Roger went comfortably down to his dinner. Edith greeted him with a smile.
“Deborah’s dining out,” she said.
“Very well,” he replied, “so much the better. We’ll go right in—I’m hungry. And we’ll have the evening to ourselves. No big ideas nor problems. Eh, daughter?” He slipped his hand in hers, and she gave it a little affectionate squeeze. With John safely out of the way, and not only the health of her children but their proper schooling assured, Edith was herself again, placid, sweet and kindly. And dinner that night was a cheerful meal. Later, in the living room, as Roger contentedly lit his cigar, Edith gave an appreciative sniff.
“You do smoke such good cigars, father,” she said, smiling over her needle. And glancing up at her daughter, “Betsy, dear,” she added, “go and get your grandfather’s evening paper.”
In quiet perusal of the news he spent the first part of his evening. The war did not bother him to-night, for there had come a lull in the fighting, as though even war could know its place. And times were better over here. As, skipping all news from abroad his eye roved over the pages for what his business depended upon, Roger began to find it now. The old familiar headliness were reappearing side by side—high finance exposures, graft, the antics and didos cut up by the sons and daughters of big millionaires; and after them in cheery succession the Yale-Harvard game, a new man for the Giants, a new college building for Cornell, a new city plan for Seattle, a woman senator in Arizona and in Chicago a “sporting mayor.” In brief, all over the U.S.A., men and women old and new had risen up, to power, fame, notoriety, whatever you chose to call it. Men and women? Hardly. “Children” was the better word. But the thought did not trouble Roger to-night. He had instead a heartening sense of the youth, the wild exuberance, the boundless vigor in his native land. He could feel it rising once again. Life was soon to go on as before; people were growing hungry to see the names of their countrymen back in the headlines where they belonged. And Roger’s business was picking up. He was not sure of the figure of his deficit last week—he had always been vague on the book-keeping side—but he knew it was down considerably.
When Betsy and George had gone to bed, Roger put down his paper.
“Look here, Edith,” he proposed, “how’d you like me to read aloud while you sew?” She looked up with a smile of pleased surprise.
“Why, father dear, I’d love it.” At once, she bent over her needle again, so that if there were any awkwardness attending this small change in their lives it did not reveal itself in her pretty countenance. “What shall we read?” she affably asked.
“I’ve got a capital book,” he replied. “It’s about travel in Japan.”
“I’d like nothing better,” Edith replied. And with a slight glow of pride in himself Roger took his book in hand. The experiment was a decided success. He read again the next night and the next, while Edith sat at her sewing. And so this hour’s companionship, from nine to ten in the evening, became a regular custom—just one hour and no more, which Roger spent with his daughter, intimately and pleasantly. Yes, life was certainly smoothing out.
Edith’s three older children had been reinstated in school. And although at first, when deprived of their aid, she had found it nearly impossible to keep her two small boys amused and give them besid
es the four hours a day of fresh air they required, she had soon met this trouble by the same simple process as before. Of her few possessions still unsold, she had disposed of nearly all, and with a small fund thus secured she had sent for Hannah to return. The house was running beautifully.
Christmas, too, was drawing near. And though Roger knew that in Edith’s heart was a cold dread of this season, she bravely kept it to herself; and she set about so determinedly to make a merry holiday, that her father admiring her pluck drew closer still to his daughter. He entered into her Christmas plans and into all the conspiracies which were whispered about the house. Great secrets, anxious consultations, found in him a ready listener.
So passed three blessed quiet weeks, and he had high hopes for the winter.
CHAPTER XXXI
If there were any cloud upon his horizon, it was the thought of Laura. She had barely been to the house since Edith had come back to town; and at times, especially in the days when things had looked dark for Roger, he had caught himself reproaching this giddy-gaddy youngest child, so engrossed in her small “ménage” that apparently she could not spare a thought for her widowed sister. Laura on her return from abroad had brought as a gift for Edith a mourning gown from Paris, a most alluring creation—so much so, in fact, that Edith had felt it simply indecent, insulting, and had returned it to her sister with a stilted note of thanks. But Roger did not know of this. There were so many ways, he thought, in which Laura might have been nice to Edith. She had a gorgeous limousine in which she might so easily have come and taken her sister off on little trips uptown. But no, she kept her car to herself. And from her small apartment, where a maid whom she had brought from Rome dressed her several times each day, that limousine rushed her noiselessly forth, gay and wild as ever, immaculate and elegant, radiant and very rich. To what places did she go? What new friends was she making? What was Laura up to?
He did not like her manner, one evening when she came to the house. As he helped her off with her cloak, a sleek supple leopard skin which fitted her figure like a glove, he asked,