Part 28 (2/2)
”I should think,” Norma said, ”that Aunt Alice could almost be moved----?”
”Oh, she would be!” Annie agreed, with her quick, superior definiteness.
”That's the very question. Whether the north Atlantic pa.s.sage, say in May, when it oughtn't to be so hard, would be too much for her. Of course it would tire her and shake her cruelly, no doubt of that. But Hendrick even talks of some sort of balanced bed--on the hammock idea--and Miss Slater would see that everything that was humanly possible was done. I believe it could be managed. Then she would be met by one of those big, comfortable English ambulances, at Southampton, and taken right to her apartment, or hotel, or whatever Chris arranges.”
”Not so much harder,” Norma ventured, ”than the trip to Newport, after all.”
”Well, she didn't go to Newport last summer,” Annie said, ”but she is certainly better now than she was then, and I believe it could be done; I really do. We're not talking a great deal about it, because nothing is settled, but if it becomes definite, I shall certainly advise it.”
Norma drank her tea, and listened, and threw in an occasional word. When the other women rose to go, she rose, too, perhaps half-hoping that Annie would hold her for a more intimate word. But Annie quite suavely and indifferently included her in her general farewells, and Norma had cordial good-byes from the two young women, and even a vague invitation from the older Mrs. Thayer to come and see her, when Katrina was gone.
Then she was walking down the Avenue, with her head and heart in a confused whirl of bitterness and disappointment. The three quarters of an hour in Aunt Annie's big, dim, luxurious palace had been like a dose of some insidious poison.
The very atmosphere of richness and service and idleness, the beauty of wide s.p.a.ces and rich tones, the ma.s.sed blossoms and dimmed lights, struck sharply upon senses attuned to Aunt Kate's quick voice, Rose's little house with its poverty and utility, and Wolf's frank enjoyment of his late and simple dinner. The conversation, with its pleasant a.s.sumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness, burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor. No, they were normal pleasant girls whose code it was to be generous to maids and underlings, to speak well of their neighbours, to pay their bills and keep their promises.
”They make me _tired_!” she tried to tell herself, walking briskly, and filling her lungs with the sweet fresh air. It was twilight, and the north-bound tide of traffic was halting and rus.h.i.+ng, halting and rus.h.i.+ng, up the Avenue; now held motionless at a crossing, now flowing on in mad haste, the lumbering omnibuses pa.s.sing each other, little hansoms threading the ma.s.s, and foot pa.s.sengers scampering and withdrawing, and risking all sorts of pa.s.sages between. The distance was luminous and blue, and lights p.r.i.c.ked against it as against a scarf of gauze.
Oh, it was sickening--it was sickening--to think that life was so grim and hard for the thousands, and so unnecessarily, so superlatively beautiful for the few! What had Mary Bishop and Katrina ever done, that they should travel in private cars, fling aside furs that had cost as much as many a man's yearly salary, chatter of the plantation near the beach at Hawaii, or of reaching Saint James's for the January Drawing-Room!
Norma stopped to give twenty-five cents to an old Italian organ grinder, and worked him into her theme as she went on. Why _should_ he look so grateful for her casual charity, he, seventy years old, Katrina and Mary averaging less than twenty!
She reached Aunt Kate's flat in a thorough temper, angry, headachy, almost feverish after the rich scones and the rich tea, and the even less wholesome talk. The apartment house seemed, as indeed it was, grimy and odorous almost to squalor, and Aunt Kate almost hateful in her cheerfulness and energy. This was Wednesday, and on Wednesday evenings she was always happy, for then Wolf and Norma came to dinner with her.
To-night, busily manipulating pans and pots, she told Norma that she had rented the two extra bedrooms of the apartment to three young trained nurses, ideal tenants in every way.
”They'll get their breakfasts here, and--if I'm away--there's no reason why they shouldn't cook themselves a little dinner now and then,” said Aunt Kate, in her rich, motherly voice. ”They were tickled to death to get the two rooms for twenty dollars, and that makes my own rent only seventeen more. I asked them if that was too much, and they said, no, they'd expected to pay at least ten apiece.”
Norma listened, unsympathetic and gloomy. It was all so petty and so poor--trained nurses, and apple pie, and Aunt Kate renting rooms, and Wolf eager to be promoted to factory manager.
She wanted to go back--back to the life in which Annie really noticed her, gave her luncheons, included her. She wanted to count for something with Mary and Katrina and Leslie; she wanted to talk to Chris about his possible amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p; she wanted them all to agree that Norma's wit and charm more than made up for Norma's lack of fortune. While she brushed her hair, in the room that would shortly accommodate two of the three little nurses, she indulged in an unsatisfying dream in which she went to London with Alice--and that autocratic little Lady Donnyfare.
Lady Donnyfare! She would be ”your ladys.h.i.+p!” Nineteen years old, and welcomed to the ancestral mansion as her little ladys.h.i.+p!
Norma set the dinner table for three, with jerks and slams that slightly relieved her boiling heart. She got the napkins from the sideboard drawer, and reached for the hand-painted china sugar bowl that was part of a set that Aunt Kate had won at a fair. She set the blue tile that she had given Aunt Kate on a long-ago Christmas where the brown Rebecca teapot would stand, and cut a square slice of b.u.t.ter from the end of the new pound for the blue gla.s.s dish. And all the time her heart was bursting with grief and discontent, and she was beginning to realize for the first time the irrevocable quality of the step she had taken, and just how completely it had shut her off from the life for which she thirsted.
Wolf came in, hungry, dirty, radiantly happy, with a quick kiss for his mother and an embrace for his wife into which her slender figure and cloudy brown head almost disappeared. Lord, he was starving; and Lord, he was dead; and Lord, it was good to get home, said Wolf, his satisfaction with life too great to leave room for any suspicion of his wife's entire sympathy.
She told them, over the meal, of Mary and Katrina, in whom their interest was of a simple and amazed quality that Norma resented, and of Chris's prospect, which did awaken some comment from Mrs. Sheridan.
They were a clever family, she said.
But now Wolf, bursting with long suppression, suddenly took the floor with his own great news. Voorhies, the fifty-year-old manager of the California plant, had been drifting about the Newark factory for several days, and Wolf had talked with him respectfully, as a man of twenty-five, whose income is three thousand a year, may talk to a six-thousand-dollar manager, and to-day Voorhies, and Jim Palmer, the Newark manager, and Paul Stromberg, the vice-president, had taken Wolf to lunch with them, apparently casually, apparently from mere friendliness. But Voorhies had asked him if he had ever seen the West; and Stromberg had said that he understood Sheridan's family consisted merely of a young wife, and Palmer had chanced to drop carelessly the fact that Mr. Voorhies was not going back to California----!
That was all. But it was enough to send Wolf back to his work with his head spinning. California--and a managers.h.i.+p of a mine--and six thousand! It must be--it must be--that he had been mentioned for it, that they had him in mind! He wasn't going even to think of it--and Norma mustn't--but Lord, it meant being picked out of the ranks; it meant being handed a commission on a silver platter!
Norma tried not to be cold, tried to rise to the little he asked of her, as audience. And she had the satisfaction of knowing that he noticed nothing amiss in her manner, and of seeing him go off to sleep, when they had made the long trip home, with his head in a whirl of glorious hopes. But Norma, for the first time since her marriage, cried herself to sleep.
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