Part 17 (1/2)
”But it's a dog's life, after all,” reflected Sam, again after the fas.h.i.+on of all traveling men. ”Any fellow on the road earns his salary these days, you bet. I used to think it was all getting up when you felt like it, and sitting in the big front window of the hotel, smoking a cigar and watching the pretty girls go by. I wasn't wise to the packing, and the unpacking, and the rotten train service, and the grouchy customers, and the canceled bills, and the grub.”
Pearlie nodded understandingly. ”A man told me once that twice a week regularly he dreamed of the way his wife cooked noodle-soup.”
”My folks are German,” explained Sam. ”And my mother--can she cook!
Well, I just don't seem able to get her potato pancakes out of my mind.
And her roast beef tasted and looked like roast beef, and not like a wet red flannel rag.”
At this moment Pearlie was seized with a brilliant idea. ”To-morrow's Sunday. You're going to Sunday here, aren't you? Come over and eat your dinner with us. If you have forgotten the taste of real food, I can give you a dinner that'll jog your memory.”
”Oh, really,” protested Sam. ”You're awfully good, but I couldn't think of it. I----”
”You needn't be afraid. I'm not letting you in for anything. I may be homelier than an English suffragette, and I know my lines are all b.u.mps, but there's one thing you can't take away from me, and that's my cooking hand. I can cook, boy, in a way to make your mother's Sunday dinner, with company expected, look like Mrs. Newlywed's first attempt at 'riz'
biscuits. And I don't mean any disrespect to your mother when I say it.
I'm going to have noodle-soup, and fried chicken, and hot biscuits, and creamed beans from our own garden, and strawberry shortcake with real----”
”Hus.h.!.+” shouted Sam. ”If I ain't there, you'll know that I pa.s.sed away during the night, and you can telephone the clerk to break in my door.”
The Grim Reaper spared him, and Sam came, and was introduced to the family, and ate. He put himself in a cla.s.s with Dr. Johnson, and Ben Brust, and Gargantua, only that his table manners were better. He almost forgot to talk during the soup, and he came back three times for chicken, and by the time the strawberry shortcake was half consumed he was looking at Pearlie with a sort of awe in his eyes.
That night he came over to say good-bye before taking his train out for Ishpeming. He and Pearlie strolled down as far as the park and back again.
”I didn't eat any supper,” said Sam. ”It would have been sacrilege, after that dinner of yours. Honestly, I don't know how to thank you, being so good to a stranger like me. When I come back next trip, I expect to have the Kid with me, and I want her to meet you, by George!
She's a winner and a pippin, but she wouldn't know whether a porterhouse was stewed or frapped. I'll tell her about you, you bet. In the meantime, if there's anything I can do for you, I'm yours to command.”
Pearlie turned to him suddenly. ”You see that clump of thick shadows ahead of us, where those big trees stand in front of our house?”
”Sure,” replied Sam.
”Well, when we step into that deepest, blackest shadow, right in front of our porch, I want you to reach up, and put your arm around me and kiss me on the mouth, just once. And when you get back to New York you can tell your girl I asked you to.”
There broke from him a little involuntary exclamation. It might have been of pity, and it might have been of surprise. It had in it something of both, but nothing of mirth. And as they stepped into the depths of the soft black shadows he took off his smart straw sailor, which was so different from the sailors that the boys in our town wear. And there was in the gesture something of reverence.
Millie Whitcomb didn't like the story of the homely heroine, after all.
She says that a steady diet of such literary fare would give her blue indigestion. Also she objects on the ground that no one got married--that is, the heroine didn't. And she says that a heroine who does not get married isn't a heroine at all. She thinks she prefers the pink-cheeked, G.o.ddess kind, in the end.
XI
SUN DRIED
There come those times in the life of every woman when she feels that she must wash her hair at once. And then she does it. The feeling may come upon her suddenly, without warning, at any hour of the day or night; or its approach may be slow and insidious, so that the victim does not at first realize what it is that fills her with that sensation of unrest.
But once in the clutches of the idea she knows no happiness, no peace, until she has donned a kimono, gathered up two bath towels, a spray, and the green soap, and she breathes again only when, head dripping, she makes for the back yard, the sitting-room radiator, or the side porch (depending on her place of residence, and the time of year).
Mary Louise was seized with the feeling at ten o'clock on a joyous June morning. She tried to fight it off because she had got to that stage in the construction of her story where her hero was beginning to talk and act a little more like a real live man, and a little less like a clothing store dummy. (By the way, they don't seem to be using those pink-and-white, black-mustachioed figures any more. Another good simile gone.)
Mary Louise had been battling with that hero for a week. He wouldn't make love to the heroine. In vain had Mary Louise striven to instill red blood into his watery veins. He and the beauteous heroine were as far apart as they had been on Page One of the typewritten ma.n.u.script. Mary Louise was developing nerves over him. She had bitten her finger nails, and twisted her hair into corkscrews over him. She had risen every morning at the chaste hour of seven, breakfasted hurriedly, tidied the tiny two-room apartment, and sat down in the unromantic morning light to wrestle with her stick of a hero. She had made her heroine a creature of grace, wit, and loveliness, but thus far the hero had not once clasped her to him fiercely, or pressed his lips to her hair, her eyes, her cheeks. Nay (as the story-writers would put it), he hadn't even devoured her with his gaze.