Chapter 9

He was suddenly sober.

"What's hurting you? One milk toast, waiter; tell them in the kitchen the lady's teeth hurt her. What's up, Sweetness?" And he must lean across the table and imprint a fresh kiss on her lips.

"Don't--don't--don't! For Gawd's sake, don't!" She covered her face with her hands; and such a trembling seized her that they fell pitifully away again and showed her features, each distorted, "You mustn't, Charley! Mustn't do that again, not--not for three months--you--you mustn't."

He leaned across the table; his voice was like sleet--cold, thin, cutting:

"What's the matter--going to quit?"

"No--no--no!"

"Got another guy you like better?"

"Oh! Oh!"

"A queenie can't quit me first and get away with it, kiddo. I may be a soft-fingered sort of fellow, but a queenie can't quit me first and get away with it. Ask 'em about me round here; they know me. If anybody in this little duet is going to do the quitting act first it ain't going to be you. What's the matter? Out with it!"

"Charley, it ain't that--I swear it ain't that!"

"What's hurting you, then?"

"I gotta tell you. We gotta go easy for a little while. We gotta quit doing the rounds for a while till--only for a little while. Three months he said would fix me. A grand old doc he was!

"I been to the clinic, Charley. I hadda go. The cough--the cough was cuttin' me in two. It ain't like me to go keeling like I did. I never said much about it; but, nights and all, the sweats and the cough and the shooting pains was cutting me in two. We gotta go easy for a while, Charley; just--"

"You sick, Sara?" His fatty-white face lost a shade of its animation. "Sick?"

"But it ain't, Charley. On his word he promised it ain't! A grand old doc, with whiskers--he promised me that. I--I am just beginning; but the stitch was in time. It ain't a real case yet, Charley. I swear, on my mother's curl of hair, it ain't."

"Ain't what? Ain't what?"

"It ain't! Air, he said, right living--early hours and all. I gotta get out of the basement. He'll get me a job. A grand old man! Windows open; right living. No--no dancing and all, for a while, Charley. Three months only, Charley; and then--"

"What, I say--"

"It ain't, Charley! I swear it ain't. Just one--the left one--a little sore down at the base--the bottom. Charley, quit looking at me like that! It ain't a real case--it ain't; it ain't!"

"It ain't what?"

"The--the T.B. Just the left one; down at--"

"You--you--" An oath as hot as a live coal dropped from his lips and he drew back, strangling. "You--you got it, and you're letting me down easy. You got it, and it's catching as hell! You got it, you white devil, and--and you're tryin' to lie out of it--you--you--"

"Charley! Charley!"

"You got it, and you been letting me eat it off your lips! You devil, you! You devil, you! You devil, you!"

"Charley, I--"

"I could kill you! Lemme wash my mouth! You got it; and if you got it I got it! I got it! I got it! I--I--"

He rushed from the table, strangling, stuttering, staggering; and his face was twisted with fear.

For an hour she sat there, waiting, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes growing larger in her face. The dish of stew took on a thin coating of grease and the beer died in the glass. The waiter snickered. After a while she paid for the meal out of her newly opened wage envelope and walked out into the air.

Once on the street, she moaned audibly into her handkerchief. There is relief in articulation. Her way lay through dark streets, where figures love to slink in the shadows. One threw a taunt at her and she ran. At the stoop of her rooming house she faltered, half fainting and breathing deep from exhaustion, her head thrown back and her eyes gazing upward.

Over the narrow street stars glittered, dozens and myriads of them.

* * * * *

Literature has little enough to say of the heartaches and the heartburns of the Sara Jukes and the Hattie Krakows and the Eddie Blaneys. Medical science concedes them a hollow organ for keeping up the circulation. Yet Mrs. Van Ness' heartbreak over the death of her Chinese terrier, Wang, claims a first-page column in the morning edition; her heartburn--a complication of midnight terrapin and the strain of her most recent rôle of corespondent--obtains her a suite de luxe in a private sanitarium.

Vivisectionists believe the dog is less sensitive to pain than man; so the social vivisectionists, in problem plays and best sellers, are more concerned with the heartaches and heartburns of the classes. But analysis would show that the sediment of salt in Sara Juke's and Mrs. Van Ness' tears is equal.

Indeed, when Sara Juke stepped out of the street car on a golden Sunday morning in October, her heart beat higher and more full of emotion than Mrs. Van Ness could find at that breakfast hour, reclining on her fine linen pillows, an electric massage and a four-dollar-an-hour masseuse forcing her sluggish blood to flow.

Eddie Blaney gently helped Sara to alight, cupping the point of her elbow in his hand; and they stood huddled for a moment by the roadway while the car whizzed past, leaving them in the yellow and ocher, saffron and crimson countryside.

"Gee! Gee-whiz!"

"See! I told you. And you not wanting to come when I called for you this morning--you trying to dodge me and the swellest Indian summer Sunday on the calendar!"

"Looka!"

"Wait! We ain't started yet, if you think this is swell."

"Oh! Let's go over in them woods. Let's." Her lips were apart and pink crept into her cheeks, effacing the dark rims of pain beneath her eyes. "Let's hurry."

"Sure; that's where we're going--right over in there, where the woods look like they're on fire; but, gee, this ain't nothing to the country places I know round here. This ain't nothing. Wait!"

The ardor of the inspired guide was his, and with each exclamation from her the joy of his task doubled itself.

"If you think this is great, wait--just you wait. Gee, if you like this, what would you have said to the farm? Wait till we get to the top of the hill."

Fallen leaves, crisp as paper, crackled pleasantly under their feet; and through the haze that is October's veil glowed a reddish sun, vague as an opal. A footpath crawled like a serpent through the woods and they followed it, kicking up the leaves before them, pausing, darting, exclaiming.

"I--Honest, Mr. Blaney, I--"

"Eddie!"

"Eddie, I--I never did feel so--I never was so--so--Aw, I can't say it." Tears sprang to her eyes.

"Sure, you never was. I never was, neither, before--before--"

"Before what?"

"Before I had to."

"Had to?"

"Yeh; both of them. Bleedin' all the time. Didn't see nothing but red for 'leven months."

"You!"

"Yeh; three years ago. Looked like Arizona on a stretcher for me."

"You--so big and strong and all!"

He smiled at her and his teeth flashed.

"Gad, little girl, if you got a right to be scared, whatta you think I had? I seen your card over at the clinic last night, and you ain't got no right to have that down-and-out look on you had this morning. If you think you got something to be scared at you looka my old card at the clinic some day; they keep it for show. You oughtta seen me the day I quit the shipping room, right over at the Titanic, too, and then see whether you got something to be scared at."

"You--you used to work there?"

"Six years."

"I--I ain't scared no more, Eddie; honest, I ain't!"

"Gee, I should say not! They ain't even sending you up to the farm."

"No, no! They're going to get me a job. A regular outdoor, on-the-level kind of a job. A grand old doc, with whiskers! I ain't a regular one, Eddie; just the bottom of one lung don't make a regular one."

"Well, I guess not, poor little missy. Well, I guess not."

"Three months he said, Eddie. Three months of right livin' like this, and air and all, and I'll be as round as a peach, he said. Said it hisself, without me asking--that's how scared I was. Round as a peach!"

"You can't beat that gang over there at the clinic, little missy. They took me out of the department when all the spring water I knew about ran out of a keg. Even when they got me out on the farm--a grown-up guy like me--for a week I thought the crow in the rooster was a sidewalk faker. You can't beat that, little missy."

"He's a grand old man, with whiskers, that's going to get me the job. Then in three months I--"

"Three months nothing! That gang won't let you slip back after the three months. They took a extra shine to me because I did the prize-pupil stunt; but they won't let anybody slip back if they give 'em half a chance. When they got me sound again, did they ship me back to the shipping department in the sub-basement? Not muchy! Looka me now, little missy! Clerk in their biggest display; in three months a raise to ninety dollars. Can you beat it? Ninety dollars would send all the shipping clerks of the world off in a faint."

"Gee, it--it's swell!"

"And--"

"Look! Look!"

"Persimmons!" A golden mound of them lay at the base of a tree, piled up against the hole, bursting, brown. "Persimmons! Here; taste one, little missy. They're fine."

"Eat 'em?"

"Sure!"

She bit into one gently; then with appetite.

"M-m-m! Good!"

"Want another?"

"M-m-m--my mouth! Ouch! My m--mouth!"

"Gee, you cute little thing, you! See, my mouth's the same way too. Feels like a knot. Gee, you cute little thing, you--all puckered up and all."

And he must link her arm in his and crunch-crunch over the brittle leaves and up a hillside to a plateau of rock overlooking the flaming country; and from the valley below, smoke from burning mounds of leaves wound in spirals, its pungency drifting to them.

"See that tree there? It's a oak. Look; from a little acorn like this it grew. See, this is a acorn, and in the start that tree wasn't no bigger than this little thing."

"Quit your kiddin'!" But she smiled and her lips were parted sweetly; and always unformed tears would gloze her eyes.

"Here, sit here, little lady. Wait till I spread this newspaper out. Gee! Don't I wish you didn't have to go back to the city by two o'clock, little lady! We could make a great day of it here, out in the country; lunch at a farm and see the sun set and all. Some day of it we could make if--"

"I--I don't have to go back, Eddie."

His face expanded into his widest smile.

"Gee, that's great! That's just great!"

Silence.

"What you thinking of, little lady, sitting there so pretty and all?"

"N-nothing."

"Nothing? Aw, surely something!"

A tear formed and zigzagged down her cheek.

"Nothing, honest; only I--I feel right happy."

"That's just how you oughtta feel, little lady."

"In three months, if--aw, ain't I the nut?"

"It'll be a big Christmas, won't it, little missy, for both of us? A big Christmas for both of us; you as sound and round as a peach again, and me shooting up like a skyrocket on the pay roll."

A laugh bubbled to her lips before the tear was dry.

"In three months I won't be a T.B., not even a little bit."

"Sh-h-h! On the farm we wasn't allowed to say even that. We wasn't supposed to even know what them letters mean."

"Don't you know what they mean, Eddie?"

"Sure I do!" He leaned toward her and placed his hand lightly over hers. "T.B.--True Blue--that's what they mean, little lady."

She could feel the veins in his palm throbbing.

MR. EBERDEEN'S HOUSE[9]

By ARTHUR JOHNSON

From _The Century_

[9] Copyright, 1915, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1916, by Arthur Johnson.

It loomed there, high and large, uncompromised by the gloom of mist about it, unruffled by the easterly gusts that bent the two rows of larches which stretched in deliberate diagonal lines from the street to the corners of its grim façade. Hastings could hear the beating of the sea; it was probably in that chaos of space behind the house. As he stood leaning against one of the tall gate-posts and surveying the scene, he began to feel, almost in spite of himself, in sympathy with it.

A motor drew up near where he stood. Instinctively his attention was directed from it to the green Georgian portal, which at the moment was drawn in to permit somebody to pass out. She was in glaring contrast to her setting; she was fresh and lovely, young and fashionable-looking. She paused on the wide stone step, glanced up at the sky, opened her umbrella, and briskly proceeded down the avenue to the gate. Within a few yards of it she raised her eyes from the puddled gravel and started back at sight of him.

"Jack!" she cried out. "How did you get here? Why didn't you tell me? I am this minute on my way to meet you."

"I'm admiring your summer home, Julia--Julia dear," he said to her, a little constrained. "It's sad and desolate, and everything that I suppose you want it to be. I expected to hate it. I thought that having spent most of my life away from all this, I should have lost every scrap of--tolerance for New England. But ever since I set foot in Rockface--"

"When _did_ you, Jack?" she demanded.

"An hour ago. I've been in the strangest mood ever since."

"Come, now, and tell me about it," she suddenly saw the need to say, walking away from him to dismiss the grinning chauffeur.

Hastings lingered alone in the hall.

"It's much nicer by the fire," Julia called to him impatiently from the next room. And he followed the sound of her voice; he moved slowly over to a chair, opposite her own, and sat down, forgetting to talk. "I vow I'm amused," she exclaimed, "at the way you take it. You've made letters full of fun of me for settling my parents 'on that ugly little Massachusetts point'; you've laid it all down to my 'Middle-Western love of Puritan relics' and 'Eastern culturine,' and scorned my 'romantic inexperience'; and here you come, redolent of Europe, to be as much impressed by our choice as if you were a Montana school-girl!" He smiled back, but it was obvious that he hadn't heard a word. "What's the matter with you, Jacky?" she asked interestedly; "had a bad journey?"

He tried to concentrate his faculties on looking genial and at the same time intelligent.

"It was just like me, Julia," he began, the ghost of cheerfulness on his face. "I took the earliest sort of train, instead of the one I telephoned you I'd take. You see, to have landed at night, after all the years--think of it! And then to go walking around by myself, seeing things crop suddenly up that I hadn't thought of since--well--scarcely since I was born. No wonder I couldn't sleep. This morning, like a stranded idiot, I got out at that little way-station of yours, and realized for the first time that I didn't have a blessed idea where you lived."

"Rockface is about as enormous as a biscuit. Anybody could have told you."

"That's the strangest part of it," recollected Hastings. "You see, I had a curious hunch about it; I felt a little forsaken. I was actually surprised and irritated that somebody--I didn't know who--wasn't waiting to meet me.

"There was something about the place, Julia," he gravely pursued, "made me feel justified in thinking a hospitable welcome was due me ... Oh I don't mean because you were here! But--well--the veil of sea-turn that half-hid the buildings across the square made me feel the need of some kind of greeting--I expected one!--right on the spot! Can you understand? And--instead--the cold east wind blew round me as if I were an outcast.

"I stole down the first crooked street I came to. I stared at the house-fronts, at the little square panes of the sagging window-sashes, at the dingy doors, with those short, steep flights of steps leading down to the side-walks."

Julia sobered to a tentative frown. Jack's eyes were bigger than usual, and he did look, notwithstanding the feverish flush on his cheeks, rather fagged. How she had been counting the days for him to come! It didn't seem possible that the visit which he had been promising for so long to make her should have finally materialized. Wasn't it really an indication,--she pondered while again happily she sized up the situation,--if he took so much trouble for her, that he did, after all, care more perhaps than she had sometimes thought? But what an extraordinary meeting it had been! He had at once launched forth on this extreme discourse. She sat back, and let her eyes rest on him with amused tolerance, her smile attentively adjusted to suit his mood; for her moment's anxiety vanished at further sight of his strong, broad shoulders and the handsome appearance he made in her favorite high-back chair, his firm hands grasping the arms of it.

"You've stayed away from America too long," she said carelessly; "Paris is bad for you."

He leaned forward, his delicately modeled cheekbones emphasized by the firelight, his hair becomingly awry.

"I _knew_ it would all be as it was," he went inspiredly on. "There was a thick clump of hedge, cold and dreary in the mist, that awoke pictures of a prison I used to dread the sight of when I was--I don't know how old. Once I partly thought I must be dreaming; so I put out my hand and touched the wet, sodden picket of an old fence. I looked suspiciously behind me. But there was only an old man behind, fully two hundred yards away. Then the idea came to me that it would be a relief to talk to somebody; I hadn't interchanged a word with any one since I got off the ship. All kinds of impressions, you see, had been accumulating, and they thronged like phantoms about me.

"I wanted to hear myself speak--to see if I could. So I turned, and waited for him to come. The rain was dripping all around; there wasn't another sound anywhere. Now, this is the queerest thing of all: what do you think I said to him?" Jack leaned forward, his eyes darting intensely over her face. "I said: 'Can you tell me the way to Mr. Eberdeen's house?'"

"Mr.--_Eberdeen's_ house!" She stood abruptly up. "Who--who told you," she gasped, "that this was Mr. Eberdeen's house?"

He stood up, too, stepping back from her. "You must have told me," he said, aware of his quivering lips, "in one of your letters. The name came to me--"

"I never told you," she stated emphatically, "I never told any one--for--for--why did you ask such a question of that old man?"

His gaze wandered.

"My throat felt parched from disuse. It took a distinct effort to make the words sound articulate.

"'Sure, now,' answered the old man, while I was still puzzling to explain to myself the question I had asked him, 'but never have I heard it called _that_--not since my father died from the cold he caught drivin' the mare up from Portsville. Ther' was a time, in the days when they talked of it bein' ha'nted, you'd hear folks call it Eberdeen Manor; but not--no, and my father likely's been dead these forty years now--never, Mr. Eberdeen's house!"

"'Mr. Eberdeen--there was such a person, then?'

"'There'll be a time, me boy, when they'll doubt yerself was a living thing.' He straightened his bent body reprehensibly; he shook his head. 'Walk back to the next corner,' he muttered, 'and turn to yer left. It'll be down there ber the cliffs, if nobody's stolen it. Somebody'll sure 'nough be there ter point it out to yer.'

"'I'm a stranger,' I apologized; 'I really didn't know.'

"'_Know!_' he shouted. 'Who was it owned the land this 'ere street runs over? Who built it? Who was it paid fer the church on the hill? Who did fer the sick, and gave to the poor, and got nothin' hisself fer the trouble but grief and loneliness and a broken heart? Wher' did yer come from?'

"And he surveyed me, as if the mere fact of his seeing me for the first time made him doubt my intentions. Still I stood there waiting.

"'What was he like? What did he do? Who was he?' I couldn't help flinging out in my wonderment.

"'As good's'll ever come back from wher' yer've been, or 'll pray fer the like of yer, I reckon. Judge not, I tell yer, that yer be not yerself judged.'

"I tried to smile at the old man.

"'Good-day to yer,' he grumbled, and walked back in the direction from which he had come. I watched until he was lost in the thickness."

Julia looked at Hastings in astonishment. Just another glimmer of anxiety crossed her mind; but any foolish worry she might have had for him was merged in her consciousness of something indeed more staggering.

"Do you think," she brooded, "that it can be true--that--that the house is--_was_--haunted?"

"I had," Jack unresponsively continued--"I couldn't help it--on the way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their narrowness was oppressive."

"I love every inch of it," said Julia, defiantly.

Hastings was silent. He looked at the dry, colorless walls, covered with circuitous lines of crackling old paint.

"Was this furniture here, Julia?" he asked.

"Not this," she exclaimed with pride.

"No wonder," he argued half to himself, "that the next generation preferred black walnut, even with all its grapes and gewgaws! Horrible as it was, it wasn't so orthodox and priggish and mirthless as what came before."

He strayed out into the hall again; he viewed its stateliness, its expurgated elegance. "Well, this has got me, Julia--seriously," he said with a surprised realization that she was standing beside him. "It's--it's immense."

"Oh, _that_," she cried out, "from _you_!" And slowly she stepped closer to say something to him; but she thought better of it. "Don't you think," she just let slip, "I've made it look at least--well--_old_?"

"As only a Westerner could want to make it look." His sense of humor affectionately covered any lack of enthusiasm.

"Come, Jacky," she urged at last, "I'll show you all of it before lunch is ready."

The stairs rose straight in the rear of the hall, directly opposite the main entrance, with its border of finely traceried windows, branching squarely to right and left two thirds of the way up. By the first door above the side whither Julia conducted her guest she stepped fondly back and announced:

"This, Jack, is your room. I hope you will like it."

"Yes," he murmured, distractedly gazing about him.

Despite the freshness of everything, despite the new woolen carpets, with their correct geometric designs, ones Julia had had copied from some battered relics which she had somehow acquired, despite the new chintzes and the recently refinished furniture so deliberately assembled there for the first time, despite the spickness and spanness of each suitably collected detail of the room's decorations, a musty smell in the air caught his breath. The floor swooped reminiscently down toward the right; the boards of it made a stifled creak as he stepped across them. He himself was a little unsteady. The window gave on impenetrable fog. Hastings threw up the sash and peered out into the dampness; he heard the sound of unseen boats groping their ways through the distance; the water lapped and laved below him.

"Jack!" Julia called.

He turned to her, dazed, smiling in that way he had of trying to conceal his consciousness of inattention.

"Of course, it seems plain and spare and--rather humble, after Europe. I know _that_."

As if directed by her words, his eyes swept rapidly over the room.

"It's no use, Julia," he answered; "if you're New England to the core, you can't get free of it. I'd like every drop of New England blood drained out of me, and something--say Hebrew or--or Middle-West," he laughed, "substituted in place of it. To you this is 'pretty' and 'cozy' and--and 'cheerful'; to me--well, it's like an orgy of blue laws; it's the personification of witch-lore--like self-inflicted penance for I don't know what." He glanced at her in excitement, shifting his hands uneasily in and out of his pockets.