Part 6

“He wouldn’t go—he said he wasn’t doing the kindergarten act any more. Hang it, I don’t blame him. A man objects to being made a fool of before people, and he’s tired of it. Here he goes off again to-morrow for two weeks, and she with no more heart than—”

“Where is he now?” asked Mrs. Belmore.

“Upstairs in my room, smoking.”

“_Smoking!_ I thought he’d promised her solemnly not to.”

“Yes, he did; but he says he doesn’t care a—red apple; he’s going to have some comfort out of the day. I’ve left him with a box of cigars; good ones, too. He’s having the time of his life.”

“O—o—h!” said Mrs. Belmore with the rapt expression of one who sees beyond the veil. When she spoke it was with impressive slowness. “When you hear me come downstairs with Edith and go in the parlor, you wait a moment and then bring him down—_with his cigar_—into the library. Do you understand?”

“No,” said Mr. Belmore.

“Oh, Herbert! If she sees him _smoking_—! There’s no time to lose, for I have to get tea to-night. When I call you, leave him and come at once, do you hear? Don’t stop a minute—just come, before they get a chance to follow.”

“You bet I’ll come,” said Mr. Belmore, “like a bird to its—I will, really, petty.”

That he nearly knocked her down by his wildly tragic rush when she called from the back hall—“Herbert, please come at once! I can’t turn off the water,” was a mere detail—they clung to each other in silent laughter, behind the enshrouding porti—res, not daring to move. The footfall of the deserted Edith was heard advancing from the front room to the library, and her clear and solemn voice, as of one actuated only by the lofty dictates of duty, penetrated distinctly to the listeners.

“Alan Wilson, is it possible that you are _smoking?_ Have you broken your promised word?”

“Well, they’re at it, at last,” said Mr. Belmore, relapsing into a chair in the kitchen with a sigh of relief, and drawing a folded newspaper from his pocket. “I wouldn’t be in his shoes for a farm.”

“Oh, it will be all right now,” said Mrs. Belmore serenely. She added with some irrelevancy, “I’ve left the children to undress each other; they’ve been _so_ good. It’s been such a different day, though, from what we had planned.”

“It’s too bad that you have to get the tea.”

“Oh, I don’t mind that a bit.”

She had tucked up the silken skirt of her gown and was deftly measuring out coffee—after the swift, preliminary shaking of the fire with which every woman takes possession of a kitchen—pouring the water into the coffee-pot from the steaming kettle, and then vibrating between the kitchen closet and the butler’s pantry with the quick, capable movements of one who knows her ground thoroughly. “Really, it isn’t any trouble. Margaret leaves half of the things ready, you know. If you’ll just lift down that dish of salad for me—and the cold chicken is beside it. I hate to ask you to get up, but—Thank you. How good the coffee smells! I know you always like the coffee I make.”

“You bet I do,” said Mr. Belmore with fervor. “Say, petty, you don’t think you could come out now and take a look at the garden? I’m almost sure the peas are beginning to show.”

“No, I’m afraid there isn’t time. We’ll have to give it up for this Sunday.” She paused for a great effort. “If you’d like to go by yourself, dear—”

“Wouldn’t you mind?”

She paused again, looking at him with her clear-eyed seriousness.

“I don’t think I mind now, but I might—afterwards.”

If he had hesitated, it was for a hardly appreciable second. “And I don’t want to go,” he protested stoutly, “it wouldn’t be the same thing at all without you.”

——“Everything is ready now,” said his wife. “Though I do hate to disturb Edith and Alan. I’ll just run up and hear the children say their prayers before I put those things on the table. If you would just take a look at the furnace—” it was the sentence Mr. Belmore had been dreading—“and then you can come up and kiss the children good night.”

Mr. Belmore, on his way up from stoking, caught a glimpse projected from the parlor mirror through an aperture in the doorway which the porti—res had left uncovered. The reflection was of a girl, with tear-stained face and closed eyes, her head upon a young man’s shoulder, while his lips were touchingly pressed to her hair. The picture might have been called “After the Storm,” the wreckage was so plainly apparent. As Mr. Belmore turned after ascending the flight of stairs he came full in sight of another picture, spread out to view in the room at the end of the hall. He stood unseen in the shadow regarding it.

His wife sat in a low chair near one of the two white beds; little Dorothy’s crib was in their room, beyond. The three children were perched on the foot of the nearest bed, white-gowned, with rosy faces and neatly brushed hair. While he looked, the youngest child gave a birdlike flutter and jump, and lighted on the floor, falling on her knees, with her bowed head in the mother’s lap, her hands upraised. As she finished the murmured prayer, helped by the tender mother-voice, she rose and stood to one side, in infantine seriousness, while the next one spread her white plumes for the same flight, waiting afterwards in reverent line with the first as the third hovered down.

It was plain to see from the mother’s face that she had striven to put all earthly thoughts aside in the performance of this sacred office of ministering to innocence; her eyes must be holy when her children’s looked up at her on their way to God.

This was the little inner chapel, the Sanctuary of Home, where she was priestess by divine right. It would have been an indifferent man, indeed, who had not fallen upon his knees in spirit, in company with this little household of faith, in mute recognition of the love and peace and order that crowned his days.

He kissed the laughing children as they clung to him, before she turned down the light. When she came out of the room he was waiting for her. He put his arm around her as he said, with the darling tenderness that made her life,

“Come along, old sweetness. We’ve got to go down and stir up those lunatics again. Call _that_ ‘the happiest time of your life!’ _We_ know better than that, don’t we, petty? I’ll tell you what it is: I’ll go to church with you next Sunday, if you say so!”

In the Married Quarters

In the Married Quarters

MR. BROOKTON RIVERS watched the spark at the end of his cigar as he held the short stub between his thumb and forefinger. It was going out. While he had had that cigar to smoke his mind had been at rest, for he knew that he was going to sit in that particular angle in the piazza until he finished it, which would be about half-past eight. After that—what?

He threw away the cigar and leaned meditatively forward to catch a glimpse of the moon as it rose over the patch of straggling woods next to the Queen Anne cottage opposite him. It showed a deserted piazza, and a man and his wife and two small children walking past it. The man walked with the heavy, shuffling steps of a laborer, and the woman, in a white shirt-waist and a dragging skirt, held one child by the hand, while the other, in tiny trousers, toddled bow-leggedly behind. As they vanished down the street, two silent men on bicycles sped past, their little lamps twinkling in the shadows; then half a dozen more, laughing and calling to each other, then a swiftly driven buggy that sent the dust flying up on the vines that were already laden with it. The prevailing smell of the humid night was of damp weeds. It was also very hot.

There were no lights in the house opposite, nor in the one next to it, or in the one next to that, nor were there any, as he knew without seeing, in either of the houses next to his own. From farther down the street came the sound of a jangling piano, obstructed intermittently by the loud, unvaried barking of a melancholy dog. From nearer by the persistent wail of a very young infant, protesting already against existence in such a hot world, became more and more unbearable each instant. Mr. Rivers absent-mindedly killed three feasting mosquitoes at a blow, and rose to his feet with determination. He could stay here no longer. Should he go out, or retire to his room in the doubtful comfort of extreme negligee, and read?

It will, of course, be evident to the meanest suburban intelligence that the month was August, and that Mrs. Rivers was away, as were most of her immediate neighbors, enjoying a holiday by either mountains or seashore. Rivers could see in imagination how glorious this moonlight became as the waves rolled into its path and broke there on the wet sands into a delicious rush and swirl of silvery sparkling foam. He could smell the very perfume of the sea, and feel the cold breath that the water exhales with one’s face close down by it, no matter how warm the night. It had been a pretty bad day in town. He was glad, very glad, that Elizabeth had the change. She needed it. He had said this stoutly to himself many times in the last six weeks, and knew that it was true. She had protested against going, and only yielded at last for the children’s sake and in wifely obedience to lawful masculine authority. He had insisted on sleeping in the house alone, in defiance of her pleading, alleging an affinity for his own bed, his own belongings, and an individual bath tub. A woman came once a week to sweep and straighten up the house. He had repeatedly declared there would be really nothing to do after business hours but to go around and enjoy himself. He had made her almost envious of these prospective joys. He would take little trips to Manhattan Beach with “the boys” and go to Bronxville to see Tom Westfield, as he had been meaning to for five years, and visit the roof garden with the Danas, who were on from St. Louis, and take dinner at the Café Ruritania. On the between nights he would visit the neighbors. All these things he had done, more or less disappointingly, but what should he do to-night?

“I beg your pardon, Rivers, but have you any paregoric in the house? We’ve got to get something to quiet the baby.”

A tall, thin, wearied-looking young man had come up the steps, hidden by the vines in which dwellers in a mosquito country are wont to picturesquely embower themselves, defiant of results.

“Why, how are you, Parker?” said Rivers cordially. “Paregoric is it that you want? Come inside, and we’ll have a look for it, old man.” He led the way, scratching matches as he went to relieve the darkness, dropping them on the floor as they went out, and finally lighting the gas in the butler’s pantry.

“My wife keeps the medicines on the top shelf here to be out of the way of the children,” he explained. “I don’t know about the paregoric, though. I seem to remember that she didn’t believe much in using it for babies.”

“We’ve had a fight with the nurse about it,” said the other man, gnawing at a very light mustache as he leaned against the door, “but Great Scott, Rivers, we’ve got to do something. _I_ would have murdered anybody whose child cried like this one. We’ve been complained of as it is. That’s paregoric, isn’t it?”

“It was, but the bottle’s empty,” said Rivers, who was standing on the rung of a chair, holding out a vial now and then from an inner recess to read the name on it. “That’s another empty bottle—and here’s _another_ empty bottle—and, this is—another. Bottle of sewing machine oil. Prescription for neuralgia, 178, 902, empty. Bottle of glycerine—confound the thing! the cork was out of it; get my handkerchief for me out of my pocket, will you? Prescription for hair tonic; empty bottle—another empty prescription bottle—dregs of cough medicine. What in thunder does Bess want with all these empty bottles? I’m awfully sorry, Parker, but we don’t seem to have the stuff you want, or any other, for that matter.”

“Never mind,” said Parker. “I’ll ride down to the village and get some. I’d have gone there first, but the tire of my wheel wants blowing up.”

“I’d lend you my wheel, but it’s at the shop,” called Rivers as they disappeared out of the door.

He put the bottles back, upsetting, as he did so, a package of some white powder, out of which ran three cockroaches. As he stooped to gather it up again in the paper he disturbed a half-eaten peach which he remembered leaving there the night before, and a small colony of ants that had made their dwelling in it scuttled cheerily around. He uttered an exclamation of disgust, and shut the door of the butler’s pantry upon them. The whole house seemed given up to a plague of insects, utterly unknown in the reign of its careful mistress. In spite of screens, small stinging mosquitoes whizzed out from everything he touched; spiders hung down from webs in the ceiling, and a moth had flown from his closet that very morning. He kept the blinds and windows closed while he was away all day; he had begun by leaving them open, but a slanting shower had made havoc in his absence and also flooded the cellar through the open cellar door. It had not dried up since, and he was sure that there were fleas down there.

There was a deadly hot damp and silence in the dining-room and parlor as he came through them, and the same unnatural atmosphere in the rooms above as he drearily invaded them for a clean collar. Every place was shut up and in order; the tops of the dressing tables even were bare save for the clean towel laid over each. His own room was in an ugly, disheveled confusion, and though his windows were open, no air came through the wire screens. He opened a closet door inadvertently, and the sight of a pink kimono of his wife’s, and the hats of the two little boys hanging up neatly beside it, emphasized his solitude. His latent idea of spending the rest of the evening at home was gone from him—he felt that he could not get out of this accursed house quickly enough, although he had not made up his mind where to go; he did not feel up to cheering the sick man in the next street, or equal to a gentle literary conversation with the two elderly ladies beyond who had known his mother. He wanted to go somewhere where he could smoke and have some pleasing light drink for refreshment, and be cheered and amused himself.

The Callenders! If he only had his wheel—it was nine o’clock now, and the place was away over on the other side of town. Never mind, he would go, and chance their being at home and out of bed when he got there. Anything to get away from this loathsome place, although coming back to it again seemed suddenly an impossible horror. He wondered if he were getting ill. The night before—

As he walked, the shadows of the moonlight lengthened his long legs, and their dragging strides. His face, with its short brown beard and the hollows under his dark eyes, was bent forward. He figured out anew the income there would be from his insurance money, and how it might be supplemented for Bess and the children. Clearly, he would have to earn more before he died. And oh, the burden, the burden, the burden was his! The thought leaped out like a visible thing. Her sweet presence, her curling hair, her dimples, her loving feminine inconsequence, with the innocent, laughing faces of the little boys, overlaid the daily care for him, but with these appointed Lighteners of Life away it loomed up into a hideously exaggerated specter that seemed to have always had its hand upon his fearsome heart, and only pressed a little closer upon him now in this hot windless night. Even his wilted collar partook of the tragic; he might as well have kept on the first one.

“Hello! Hello! Where are you going? This is the place.” A shout of laughter accompanied the words. “Come up, brother, we’ve been waiting for you!”

He looked up to see that he was in front of Callender’s house, and that the piazza, a large square end of which was screened off into a room, held a company in jovial mood, under moonlight as bright as day. The women were in white, with half bare neck and arms, rocking and fanning themselves, and the men in tennis shirts and belts, two of them smoking pipes, and the other a cigar. A tray, holding a large crystal bowl and glasses, stood on a bamboo table at one side, half shielded by jars of palms whose spiked shadows carpeted the floor and projected themselves across the white dress and arms of Mrs. Callender, while she held the door open with one hand, and half welcomed, half dragged him in with the other, amid a chorus of voices,

“Come in, come in, you’re one of us.”

“If you let a mosquito in—Take that chair by Mrs. Weir if you feel up to it; she wants to be entertained.”

“I feel up to anything—now,” said Rivers, taking with alacrity the seat allotted to him, after shaking hands with pretty Mrs. Waring, who lived next door, and her cousin, Mrs. Weir. “Same old crowd, I see.”

The laughter broke out anew as his wandering eyes took tally of the group, and he said, “Where’s Callender? and Weir? What’s the joke?”

“Oh, don’t ask for any woman’s husband or any man’s wife,” said Mrs. Callender despairingly, with her graceful figure reclining back in the low chair. “Can’t you see that we’re all detached?” Her charming smile suddenly broke forth. “It’s really too absurd.”

“No!” said Rivers, a light dawning on him. “Nichols, you don’t mean that you are on the waiting list too?”

Mr. Nichols, a large man with a grizzled head, nodded and helped himself to the contents of the suggestive bowl. “The missus and the kids went off last week; I’m detained for a while longer. As for Callender; he got a summons from the company, and he’s half way to Chicago by this time, I hope. I came over on purpose to tell his last words to his wife, who didn’t want them.”

“Ned had already brought them,” said Mrs. Callender, turning to the tall, quiet man of the cigar, Mr. Atwood, who was her brother. “It’s such a mercy that he happened to come on, or I’d have been here all alone.”

“Looks like it,” said Mr. Porter, a stout fair gentleman with a cool gray eye, a bald head, and a gurgling laugh. “What do you think, Rivers, these girls here”—he waved his hand—“had been counting on seeing the whole lot of us to-night, and brewed that lemonade on purpose.”

“Everyone has come now but the Martindales,” said Mrs. Weir, a little woman with loosely piled dark hair, and a gentle, winning voice, occasionally diversified with a surprising shriek of laughter.

“The Martindales! Why, they only returned this evening—I met them on the boat,” said Rivers.

“Yes, we know that, but one of them will be over here just the same,” said Mrs. Callender placidly. “They’ll want to see what we’re doing. Do somebody pay a little attention to Mrs. Waring; she hasn’t said a word for half an hour. I believe she’s hoping that Henry’ll be too homesick to stay away.”

“Not quite,” said Mrs. Waring with a little tremble of her lower lip.

“Nice, kind little woman you are,” said Porter severely. “Want to enjoy yourself thinking how unhappy Waring is. Well, I’m _glad_ he went, and I hope he’ll stay until he’s well; if any man needed a change, he did.”

“He would have taken me with him if I could have left the children,” murmured Mrs. Waring.

“Yes, the children win every time,” said Porter with easy philosophy. “You think you’re important, my brothers, until you’re confronted with your own offspring, and then you’re not in it.”

“I don’t see,” said Mr. Nichols, filling his pipe again, “why a man’s family should stay in town and broil because he has to. It wouldn’t be any satisfaction to _me_, I know that. My little girls write to me every day.”

“I remember,” said Rivers, leaning forward, “once when Bess and I took a trip together we had to come home just when the fishing was at its height, because she imagined what it would be like if a menagerie broke loose and a tiger got at little Brook when he was asleep in his crib. She said she knew it was perfectly absurd, but she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. So we came home.”

He laughed tenderly at the reminiscence, and the other men laughed with him, but the women, even Mrs. Callender, who had no children, were serious, and Mrs. Weir said, as if speaking for the rest,

“Yes, one does feel that way sometimes.”

The men looked at each other and nodded, as in the presence of something known of old, something to be smiled at, and yet reverenced. The fierce maternal impulses of his wife were divine to Rivers, he loved her the more for her foolishness; it seemed fitting, and all he could expect, that the children should be her passion, as she was his. If he had once dreamed that it would be otherwise, he knew better now. Women were to be taken care of and loved for their very limitations, even if one bore a little sense of loss and soreness forever in one’s own heart. What could they know?

“Why don’t you take a vacation, Mr. Rivers?” asked Mrs. Weir later as the others had fallen into general conversation. “You look as if _you_ needed it. Mr. Nichols says it was dreadful in town to-day; forty-seven heat prostrations.”

“Oh, I can’t get off,” said Rivers with unconscious weariness in his voice. “It makes an awful lot of difference when you’re running the business yourself. If I were working for somebody else I’d take my little two weeks the way my own clerks do, without caring a hang what became of the concern in my absence. I thought I was going to get up to Maine over the Fourth, and after all I couldn’t leave in time. It’s quite a journey, you know. Bess and the boys were as disappointed as I was,” he added conscientiously. “But they’re getting along finely. Sam and Jack are learning to swim, she says—pretty good for little shavers of five and six! They’re as brown as Indians. She says—” he began to laugh as he repeated confidentially some anecdotes of their prowess to which Mrs. Weir apparently listened with the deeply interested attention that is balm to the family exile, only asking him after a while irrelevantly, as he pushed back the hair from his forehead,

“How did you get that ugly cut on your temple?”

Even in the moonlight she could see his face flush.

“Oh, come, Rivers,” said Atwood, who was passing, “make up some story, for the credit of mankind.”

“Then you might as well have the truth, I suppose,” said Rivers, laughing, yet embarrassed. “It’s really nothing, though; I felt dizzy and queer when I went to bed last night. I suppose it was just the heat, and I have had a good deal to carry in a business way lately. I found myself at daylight this morning lying on the floor with my head by the edge of the bureau, and I don’t know in the least how I got there. I have a faint memory that I started to go for some water. I’m all right to-day, though; it hasn’t bothered me a bit.”

“No, of course not,” said Mrs. Weir encouragingly. “And you don’t mind staying alone?” she dropped her voice.

“Oh, no, not at all. Only—I don’t mind telling _you_—” he looked at her with strange eyes—“I _hate_ the house! It’s got all the plagues of Egypt in it. And all the hours I’ve spent alone there are shut up in it too. I know just how it’s going to be when I open that front door and walk in.”

“Stay here to-night,” said Mrs. Weir smoothly. “Stay here with Mr. Atwood; Mrs. Callender will be delighted to have you.”

“Oh, I can’t, possibly,” said Rivers with decision. “I didn’t even lock the front door when I came away. I only remembered it a moment ago. And I won’t really mind a bit after I’m once back there—it’s only the plunge. You’re awfully good to me, Mrs. Weir,” he added gratefully; but he wanted his wife—he did not want to be confidential with anyone but her. No matter what enjoyment he had in this brief hour, it was bound to fail him at the end. One of the dearest pleasures of married life is the going home together after the outside pleasuring is over.