Part 17 (1/2)
”You can't deny it! You're tired of me because I'm older than you!”
And he said, between his teeth, ”If you were old enough to have any sense, I wouldn't be tired of you.”
She gave a cry; then stood, the back of her hand against her lips, her eyes wide with terror.
Maurice threw down a book he had been trying to read, got up, plunged into his overcoat, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and, without a word, walked out of the room. A moment later the front door banged behind him. Eleanor, alone, stood perfectly still; she had said foolish things like that many times; she rather liked to say them! But she had not believed them; now, her own words were a boomerang,--they seemed to strike her in the face! _He was tired of her._ Instantly she was alert!
What must she do? She sat down, tense with thought; first of all, she must be sweet to him; she mustn't be cross; then she must try (Mrs.
Newbolt had told her so!) to ”entertain” him. ”I'll read things, and talk to him the way Mrs. Davis does!” She must sew on his b.u.t.tons, and scold poor old O'Brien.... With just this same silent determination she had hurried to act that night on the mountain!
But while she was sitting there in their cheerless room, planning and planning!--Maurice was out, wandering about in the gray afternoon. It had begun to snow, in a fitful, irritating way--little gritty pellets that blew into his face. He had nowhere to go--four o'clock is a dead time to drop in on people! He had nothing to do, and nothing to think of--except the foolish, middle-aged woman, stating, in their dreary third-floor front, an undeniable fact--he was tired of her! Walking aimlessly about in the cold, he said to himself, dully, ”Why _was_ I such an idiot as to marry her?” He was old enough to curse himself for his folly, but he was young enough to suffer, agonies of mortification, and to pity himself, too; pity himself for the mere physical discomfort of his life: the boarding-house table, with its uninteresting food; the worn s.h.i.+rt cuff which was scratching his wrist; and he pitied himself for his spiritual discomfort--when Eleanor called him ”darling” at the dinner table, or exhibited her jealousy before people! ”They're sorry for me--confound 'em!” he thought.... Yet how trivial the cuff was, or even--yes, even the impertinence which was ”sorry” for him!--how unimportant, when compared to a ring of braided gra.s.s, and the smell of locust blossoms, and a lovely voice, rising and falling:
”O Spring!”
”Oh, _d.a.m.n_!” he said to himself, feeling the sc.r.a.pe of worn linen on the back of his hand. Then he fell into certain moody imaginings with which that winter he frequently and harmlessly amused himself. He used to call these flights of fancy ”fool thoughts”; but they were at least an outlet to his smoldering irritation, ”Suppose I should kick over the traces some day?” his thoughts would run; and again, ”Suppose I should be in a theater fire, and 'disappear,' and never come back, and she'd think I was dead,” ”Suppose there should be a war, and I should enlist,” ... and so forth, and so forth. ”Fool thoughts,” of course!--but Maurice is not the only man upon whom a jealous woman has thrust such thoughts, or who has found solace in the impossible! So, now, wandering about in the cold, he amused himself by imagining various ways of ”kicking over the traces”; then, suddenly, it occurred to him that he wanted something to eat. ”By George!” he thought, ”I'll get that girl, Lily, and we'll go and have a good dinner!”
Even in the rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale's letter box, he began to feel a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and gave him a greeting that was almost childlike in its laughing pleasure, his sense of physical well-being was a sort of hitting back at Eleanor.
”Oh,” said little Lily, ”my! Ain't you cold! Why, your hand's just like ice!”
He let her help him off with his coat, and push him into what had been the vanished Batty's chair; then she saw that his feet were wet, and insisted (to his horror) on unlacing his boots and making him put on a pair of slippers.
”But I was going to take you out to dinner,” he remonstrated.
She said: ”Oh no! It's cold. I'll cook something for you, and we'll have our dinner right by that fire.”
”Can you cook?” he said, with admiring astonishment.
”You bet I can!” she said; ”I'll give you a _good_ supper: you just wait!” In her pretty, laughing face was very honest friendliness. ”I 'ain't forgot that time you handed it out to Batty! He had a bruise on his chin for a week!”
”A steak!” he exclaimed, watching her preparations in the tiny closet of a kitchen that opened into her parlor.
She nodded: ”Ain't it luck to have it in the house? A friend of mine gave it to me this afternoon; her father's a butcher; and he's got a dandy shop on the next block; an' Annie run in with it, an' she says”
(Lily was greasing her broiler), ”'there,' she says, 'is a present for you!'”
Maurice insisted upon helping, and was told where to get the dishes and what to put on the table, and that if he opened that closet he'd see the beer. ”I got just one bottle,” she said, chuckling; ”Batty stocked up.
When he lit out, that was all he left behind him.”
”Seen him lately?” Maurice asked.
Lily's face changed. ”I 'ain't seen--anyone, since November,” she said; ”I'm a saleslady at Marston's. But I'll have to get out of this flat when Batty's lease runs out. He took it by the year. He was going to 'settle down,' and 'have a home,'--you know the talk? So he took it for the year. Well, he said I could stay till June. So I'm staying. There!
It's done!” She put the sizzling steak on a platter and pressed b.u.t.ter and pepper and salt into it with an energetic knife and fork. ”I bet,”
she said, ”you wouldn't get a better steak than this at the Mercer House!”
”I bet I wouldn't get one as good,” he a.s.sured her.
As he ate his extremely well-cooked steak, and drank a cup of extremely well-made coffee, and reflected that the pretty, amber-eyed woman who, after the manner of her kind, had already dropped into the friendliness of a nickname, and who waited on him with a sweet deftness, was a reformed character, owing, no doubt, to his own efforts, Maurice, comfortable in mind and body, felt the intense pleasure of punis.h.i.+ng Eleanor by his mere presence in Lily's rooms. For, _if she could know where he was_!... ”Gos.h.!.+” said Maurice. But of course she never would know. He wouldn't think of telling her where he had spent his evening; which shows how far they had drifted apart since that night when he had come home in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, and been so eager to tell her how he had given his coat to the ”poor thing”!
No; if he told Eleanor of Lily, now, there would be no sympathy for a girl who was really trying to keep straight; no impulse to do any ”uplift” work! For that matter, Lily could do something in the way of uplift for Eleanor! ... Look at this tidy, gay little room, and the well-cooked steak, and the bulbs on the window sill! He strolled over and looked at the row of purple hyacinth gla.s.ses, full now of threadlike roots and topped with swelling buds. ”You're quite a gardener,” he said.
”Well, there!” said Lily; ”if I hadn't but ten cents, I'd spend five for a flower!”
After they had washed the dishes together she made him comfortable in the big chair, and even put a blossoming hyacinth on the table beside him, so he could smell it now and then. Then she sat down on a ha.s.sock at his feet, with her back to the fire, and, flecking off the ashes of her cigarette over her shoulder, she talked a friendly trickle of funny stories; Maurice, smoking, too, thought how comfortable he was, and how pleasant it was to have a girl like Lily to talk to. Once or twice he laughed uproariously at some giggling joke. ”She has lots of fun in her,” he reflected; ”and she's a bully cook; and her hair is mighty pretty.... Say, Lily, don't you want to trim my cuff? It's scratching me to death.”