Part 26 (1/2)

”Well, that's just trying out the radiators,” Martie said hearteningly.

”It won't last. Did you get caught?”

”Sister did; I got home just before it started. It seems to me we're having rain early this year--”

”We had had two inches at this time last year,” said old Colonel Fox.

Martie knew that this unpromising avenue would lead him immediately to Chickamauga; she slipped into the dining room and began to carve.

Aurora was rus.h.i.+ng about with b.u.t.ter-plates, her cousin Lyola, engaged merely for the dinner-hour, was filling gla.s.ses. A moment later the entire household a.s.sembled for the meal. Mrs. Fox, a gentle, bony old lady, with clean, cool hands, and with a dowdy little yoke of good lace in the neck of her old silk, smiled about her sadly. Mrs. Winch.e.l.l was a plump little woman who always burst out laughing as a preliminary to speech. Her daughter was eye-gla.s.sed, pretty, capable, a woman who realized perfectly, at twenty-six, that she had no charm whatever for men. She realized, too, that Mrs. Bannister, with her bronze hair and quick speech, was full of it, and envied the younger woman in a bloodless sort of way. Her brother, known as ”Win,” had already had a definite repulse from Mrs. Bannister, and nothing was too bad for the snubbed suitor to intimate about her in consequence. Win had never seen ”this husband of hers”; Win thought she looked ”a little gay, all right.” He had a much more successful friends.h.i.+p with Adele, who slapped his hand and told him he was the ”limit.”

To-night one of the clerks from the top floor, shaking out his napkin, called gaily to Mrs. Bannister that this was his birthday. It was characteristic of her kindly relations.h.i.+p that she came immediately to his table. Now why hadn't he told her yesterday? He should have had a cake, and chicken-pie, because he had once said chicken was his favourite ”insect.” He was twenty-eight? He seemed such a boy!

She went back to her place, determining that she would set out a little supper of cake and crackers and cheese for him to find when his room-mate and he came in tired and wet from their theatre that night.

She looked at Teddy; would he keep a birthday in a boarding-house some day with only the housekeeper to mother him?

”We're betting that you're younger than I am, Mrs. Bannister!”

”You win.” She smiled at him frankly. ”I'm not yet twenty-four!” Martie was conscious of a little pang as she met his surprised almost pitying look.

”I think that talk about ages was just a little undignified,” said Edna Winch.e.l.l later that night.

”Yes, I do, too!” her mother answered quickly.

”There's something about that girl we don't understand, you bet,”

contributed the son. ”When I went down for a match she was just getting a special delivery letter, and she looked as if she was going to drop.

You mark my words--it had something to do with that mysterious husband of hers!”

For the boarding-house had never seen Wallace, who held the whole place in bitter scorn. He resented the fact of Martie's position there; the fact of her having made herself useful to old Mrs. Curley represented a difference in their point of view. When, in Teddy's first year, regular letters and a regular remittance from Wallace ceased to appear, Martie had gone through an absolute agony of worry. Her husband was then on the road, and she was not even sure that her letters reached him.

Alone except for the baby, in the freezing, silent cold of the city, she had pondered, planned, and fretted for day after weary day. The one or two acquaintances she had made in Wallace's profession would have advised her not to worry, n.o.body ever was turned out for board in these days. But Martie was too proud to appeal to them for counsel, and for other but even stronger reasons she could not confide in Mrs. Curley.

So pa.s.sed the first Christmas alone, doubly sad because it reminded her of the Christmas a year before, when they had been so happy and so prosperous in San Francisco.

In snowy February, however, Mrs. Curley herself had unconsciously offered a solution. She wanted to go to her daughter in Brooklyn for a fortnight. ”Run the house for me, that's the good girl,” she said to Martie. ”You can do it as good as I can, any day of the world! Aurora knows what the menus for the week are and all you've got to do is to do the ordering and show the rooms to folks that come looking for them.”

Martie had been feeling a little more comfortable about her overdue board, because Wallace, playing in stock in Los Angeles, had sent her one hundred dollars early in the year. It was not enough, but it sufficed to pay a comfortable installment on her bill, and to keep her in money for another week or two. But she was sick of waiting and worrying, and she seized the opportunity to be helpful. Chance favoured her, for during the old woman's visit the daughter in Brooklyn fell ill, and it was mid-March before the mother came home again. By that time the trembling Martie had weathered several storms, had rented the long-vacant front room, and was more brisk and happy than she had been for months, than she had ever been perhaps. So the arrangement drifted along. There was no talk of a salary then, but in time Martie came to ask for such money as she needed--for Teddy's rompers, for gingham dresses for summer, for stationery and stamps--and it was always generously accorded.

”Get good things while you're about it,” Mrs. Curley would say. ”You buy for the ragman when you buy trash. This lad here,” she would indicate the splendid Teddy, with his loose dark curls and his creamy skin, ”he wants to look elegant, so that the girls will run after him!”

Martie felt more free to obey her because the business was in a steadily improving condition. This fancy for keeping a few ”paying guests” had become a sort of expensive luxury for the solitary woman, whose children no longer needed her, and who would not live with any of them. Mrs. Curley was not entirely dependent upon her boarding-house, but she had never been reconciled to the actual loss of money in the business. She liked to have other persons about, she having no definite interests of her own, and the new arrangement suited her perfectly: an attractive young woman to help her, a baby to lend a familiar air to the table, and money enough to pay all bills and have something left over.

Amazingly, the money flowed in. Martie told them one night at dinner that she had always fancied a boarding-house was a place where a slap-heeled woman climbed bleak stairs to tell starving geniuses that their rent was overdue. Mrs. Curley had laughed comfortably at the picture.

”You can always make money feeding people,” she had a.s.serted. John had given Martie a serious look after his laugh.

”Geniuses don't HAVE to starve,” he had submitted thoughtfully.

”There's always plenty of work in the world, if people will do it!”

Adele had added. ”Dear me, I often wonder if the people who talk charity--charity--charity--realize that it's all two thirds laziness and dirt. I don't care HOW poor I was, I know that I would keep my little house nice; you don't have to have money to do that! But you'll always hear this talk of the unemployed--when any employer will tell you the hard thing is to get trustworthy men! The other day Ethel was asking me to join some society or other--take tickets for an actors'

benefit, I think it was--and I begged to be excused. I told her we didn't have any money to spare for that sort of thing! Genius, indeed!

Why don't they get jobs?”