Part 24 (2/2)
She accepted the fact that Wallace must come and go as best suited his engagements. Her delight in every novel phase of life in the big city fired his own enthusiasm, and it was with great satisfaction that he observed her growing friends.h.i.+p with Mrs. Curley.
There were four or five men in the boarding-house, but they usually disappeared after an early breakfast and did not come back until supper, so that the two women had a long, idle day to themselves.
Henny, the coloured maid, droned and laughed with friends of her own in the kitchen. Mrs. Curley, mighty, deep-voiced, with oily, graying hair and spotted clothes, spent most of the day in a large chair by the open window, and Martie, thinly dressed, wandered about aimlessly. She never tired of the old woman's pungent reminiscences, browsing at intervals on the old magazines and books that were scattered over the house, even going into the kitchen to convulse the appreciative Henny, and make a cake or pudding for dinner.
Summer smouldered in the city. The sun seemed to have been s.h.i.+ning hot and merciless for hours when Martie rose at six, to stand yawning at her window. At nine families began to stream by, to the Park; perspiring mothers pus.h.i.+ng the baby carriages, small children, already eating, staggering before and behind. By ten the streets were deserted, baked, silent, glaring. Martie and Mrs. Curley would establish themselves in a cool back room, as to-day, with a pitcher of iced tea near at hand.
Somehow the hot, empty hours dragged by. At four o'clock the two, with perhaps a friend or two who had come in, would begin to gasp that this was the worst yet. This was awful. The heat had a positive and bra.s.sy quality, there was no air stirring. The children in the Park would drag home in the hot sunset light, tired, dirty, whining, and a breathless evening follow the burning day. Then Martie and Mrs. Curley and mild little Mr. Bull and bellicose Mr. Snow would perhaps sit on the steps until eleven o'clock, exchanging pleasantries with various neighbours, wilted like themselves in the furnace of the day.
Martie liked the sense of extremes, as they all did. In a few months they would be shaking their heads over a blizzard with the same solemn enjoyment. She liked the suddenly darkening sky, the ominous rattle of thunder; ”like boxes being smashed,” she wrote Sally. She fairly sang when the rain began to stream down, was.h.i.+ng, cooling, cleansing.
From the window of the back bedroom she looked down to-day upon a stretch of bare, fenced backyards. Here and there a cat slept in the shade, or moved silently from shadow to shadow. From some of the opposite windows strings of washed garments depended, and upon one fire-escape two girls were curled, talking and reading.
Her hostess was the source of much affectionate amus.e.m.e.nt to Martie, and as the old lady liked nothing so much as an appreciative listener, they got on splendidly. Martie laughed at the older woman's accounts of quarrels, births, and law-suits, thrilled over the details of sudden deaths, murders, and mysteries, and drank in with a genuine dramatic appreciation the vision of a younger, simpler city. No subway, no telephones, no motor cars, no elevated roads--what had New York been like when Mrs. Curley was a bride? Booth and Parepa Rosa and Adelina Patti walked the boards again; the terrible Civil War was fought; the draft riots raged in the streets; the great President was murdered.
There was no old family in the city of whose antecedents Mrs. Curley did not know something. ”The airs of them!” she would say, musing over a newspaper list of ”among those present.” ”I could tell them something!”
Martie did not understand how any woman could really be content with this dark old house, this business, these empty days, but she realized that Mrs. Curley was free to adopt some other mode of living had she pleased. Gradually Martie pieced the old woman's history together; there had been plenty of change, prosperity, and excitement in her life. She had had seven children, only three of whom were living: Mary, a prosperous, big matron whose husband, Joe Cunningham, had some exalted position on the Brooklyn police force; Ralph, who was a priest in California; and George, the youngest, a handsome ne'er-do-well of about twenty-five, who was a ”heart scald.” George floated about his own and neighbouring cities, only coming to see his mother when no other refuge offered.
The four children who had died were quite as much in their mother's thoughts and conversation, and probably more in her prayers, than the living ones. Of ”Curley,” too, Martie heard much. She was able to picture a cheerful, noisy home, full of shouting, dark, untidy-headed children, with an untidy-headed servant, a scatter-brained mother, and an unexacting father in charge. ”Curley” usually went to sleep on the sofa after dinner, and Mrs. Curley's sister, Mrs. Royce, with her children, or her sister-in-law, ”Mrs. Dan,” with hers, came over to pick up the Curleys on the way to a Mission sermon, a church concert, or a meeting of the Women's Auxiliary of the Saint Vincent de Paul.
”... Or else maybe the priest would step in,” said Mrs. Curley, remembering these stirring days, ”or often I'd take Mollie or Katie--G.o.d rest her!--and go over to see the Sisters. But many a night there'd be sickness in the house--Curley had two cousins and an aunt that died on us--and then I'd be there sitting up with the medicines, and talking with this one and that. I was never one to run away from sickness, nor death either for that matter. I'm a great hand with death in the house; there's no sole to my foot when I'm needed! I'll never forget the day that I went over to poor Aggie Lemmon's house--she was a lovely woman who lived round the corner from me. Well, I hadn't been thinking she looked very well for several weeks, do you see?--and I pa.s.sed the remark to my brother Thomas's wife--G.o.d rest her----”
A reminiscence would follow. Martie never tired of them. Whether she was held, just now, in the peaceful, unquestioning mood that precedes a serious strain on mind and body, or whether her old hostess really had had an unusually interesting experience, she did not then or ever decide. She only knew that she liked to sit playing solitaire in the hot evenings, under a restricted cone of light, with Mrs. Curley sitting in the darkness by the window, watching the lively street, fanning herself comfortably, and pouring forth the history of the time Curley gave poor Ralph a ”crule” beating, or of the day Alicia Curley died in convulsions at the age of three.
Martie had hoped to be in her own little home when the baby came, but this was swiftly proven impossible. Wallace's play failed after the wonderful salary had been paid for only eight weeks. He idled about with his wife for a few happy weeks, and then got another engagement with a small comic opera troupe, and philosophically and confidently went on the road. Presently he was home again and in funds, but this time it was only a few days before the next parting.
The golden Indian Summer came, and the city blazed in glorious colour.
Homecoming began; the big houses on the Avenue were opened. Martie never saw the burning leaves of September in later years without a memory of the poignant uneasiness with which she first had walked beneath them, worrying about money, about Wallace's prospects, about herself and her child. Many of her walks were filled with imaginary conversations with her husband, in which she argued, protested, reproached. She was lonely, she was still strange to the city, and she was approaching her ordeal.
Even when he was with her, she missed the old loverlike att.i.tude. She was wistful, gentle, dependent now, and she knew her wistfulness and gentleness and dependence vaguely irritated. But she could not help it; she wanted to touch him, to cling to him, to have him praise and encourage her, and tell her how much he loved her.
Her hour came near, and she went bravely to meet it. Wallace was in Baltimore, playing juvenile roles in a stock company. Martie went alone to the big hospital, and put herself into the hands of a capable but indifferent young nurse, who candidly explained that she had more patients than she could care for without the newcomer. Martie, frightened by the businesslike preparations and the clean, ether-scented rooms, submitted and obeyed with a sick heart. Through the dull quiet of a dark November day the first snow of the season, the first Martie had ever seen, began to flutter. Moving restlessly about her little room, she stopped at the window to look out upon it through a haze of pain.
Heat and hot lights, strange halls, a strange doctor, and early evening in a great operating-room; she had only a dazed impression of them all.
Life roared and crackled about her. She leaped into the offered oblivion with no thought of what it might entail....
After a long while she awakened, in a peaceful dawning, to hear nurses cheerfully chatting, and the boy warmly fussing and grunting in his basket. The little room was flooded with sunlight, sunlight bright on a snowy world, and the young women who had been so casually indifferent to another woman's agony were proudly awake to the charms of the baby.
The coc.o.o.n was lifted; Martie in a tremor of love and tenderness looked down at the scowling, wrinkled little face.
Instantly terror for his safety, for his health, for his immortal soul possessed her. She looked uneasily at Miss Everett, when that nurse bore him away. Did the woman realize what motherhood MEANT? Did she dream the value of that flannel bundle she was so jauntily carrying?
CHAPTER IV
Rain was falling in such sweeping sheets that the windows actually shook under the onslaught; all day long a high wind had raged about the house. Above the noise of the November storm in the warm bas.e.m.e.nt bedroom rose the steady click and purr of the sewing-machine and the chattering of a child's voice, and from outside, on the pavement, was a furious rus.h.i.+ng of coal. The big van had been backed up against the curb, and the cascading black torrent interrupted the pa.s.sers-by.
”Heavens! Was there ever such an uproar!” exclaimed Martie, ceasing her operations at the machine and leaning back in her chair with a long sigh. The lengths of flimsy white curtaining she had been hemming slipped to the floor; she put her hands behind her head, and yawned luxuriously. The room was close, and even at four o'clock there was need of lights; its other occupants were only two, the child who played with the small gray and red stone blocks upon the floor, and the old woman who was peering through her gla.s.ses at the curtaining that lay across her lap, and manipulating it with knotted hands. Mrs. Curley was ”Nana” to little Teddy Bannister now, and this shabby room overlooking a cemented area, and with its windows safeguarded by curved ornamental iron bars from attack from the street, would be his first memory of life.
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