Gaslight Sonatas Part 39

He was reading again in stolid profile.

She fell to tapping the broad toe of her shoe, her light, dilated eyes staring above his head. She was spare, and yet withal a roundness left to the cheek and forearm. Long-waisted and with a certain swing where it flowed down into straight hips, there was a bony, Olympian kind of bigness about her. Beneath the washed-out blue shirtwaist dress her chest was high, as if vocal. She was not without youth. Her head went up like a stag's to the pa.s.sing of a band in the street, or a glance thrown after her, or the contemplation of her own freshly washed yellow hair in the sunlight. She wore a seven glove, but her nails had great depth and pinkness, and each a clear half-moon. They were dug down now into her palms.

"For G.o.d's sake, talk! Say something, or I'll go mad!"

He laid his paper across his knee, pushing up his gla.s.ses.

"Sing a little something, Hanna. You're right restless this evening."

"'Restless'!" she said, her face wry. "If I got to sit and listen to that white-faced clock ticking for many more evenings of this winter, you'll find yourself with a raving maniac on your hands. That's how restless I am!" He rustled his paper again. "Don't read!" she cried. "Don't you dare read!"

He sat staring ahead, in a heavy kind of silence, breathing outward and pa.s.sing his hand across his brow.

Her breathing, too, was distinctly audible.

"Lay down a bit, Hanna. I'll cover you--"

"If they land me in the bug-house, they can write on your tombstone when you die, 'Hanna Long Burkhardt went stark raving mad crazy with hucking at home because I let her life get to be a machine from six-o'clock breakfast to eight-o'clock bed, and she went crazy from it.' If that's any satisfaction to you, they can write that on your tombstone."

He mopped his brow this time, clearing his throat.

"You knew when we married, Hanna, they called me 'Silent' Burkhardt. I never was a great one for talking unless there was something I wanted to say."

"I knew nothin' when I married you. Nothin' except that along a certain time every girl that can gets married. I knew nothin' except--except--"

"Except what?"

"Nothin'."

"I've never stood in your light, Hanna, of having a good time. Go ahead.

I'm always glad when you go up-town with the neighbor women of a Sat.u.r.day evening. I'd be glad if you'd have 'em in here now and then for a little sociability. Have 'em. Play the graphophone for 'em. Sing. You 'ain't done nothin' with your singin' since you give up choir."

"Neighbor women! Old maids' choir! That's fine excitement for a girl not yet twenty-seven!"

"Come; let's go to a moving picture, Hanna. Go wrap yourself up warm."

"Movie! Oh no; no movie for me with you snorin' through the picture till I'm ashamed for the whole place. If I was the kind of girl had it in me to run around with other fellows, that's what I'd be drove to do, the deal you've given me. Movie! That's a fine enjoyment to try to foist off on a woman to make up for eight years of being so fed up on stillness that she's half-batty!"

"Maybe there's something showin' in the op'ry-house to-night."

"Oh, you got a record to be proud of, John Burkhardt: Not a foot in that opera-house since we're married. I wouldn't want to have your feelin's!"

His quietude was like a great, impregnable, invisible wall inclosing him.

"I'm not the man can change his ways, Hanna. I married at forty, too late for that."

"I notice you liked my pep, all righty, when I was workin' in the feed-yard office. I hadn't been in it ten days before you were hangin' on my laughs from morning till night."

"I do yet, Hanna--only you don't laugh no more. There's nothin' so fine in a woman as sunshine."

"Provided you don't have to furnish any of it."

"Because a man 'ain't got it in him to be light in his ways don't mean he don't enjoy it in others. Why, there just ain't nothin' to equal a happy woman in the house! Them first months, Hanna, showed me what I'd been missin'. It was just the way I figured it--somebody around like you, singin' and putterin'. It was that laugh in the office made me bring it here, where I could have it always by me."

"It's been knocked out of me, every bit of laugh I ever had in me; lemme tell you that."

"I can remember the first time I ever heard you, Hanna. You was standin"

at the office window lookin' out in the yards at Jerry Sims unloadin' a shipment of oats; and little Old c.o.c.ker was standin' on top of one of the sacks barkin' his head off. I--"

"Yeh; I met Clara Sims on the street yesterday, back here for a visit, and she says to me, she says: 'Hanna Burkhardt, you mean to tell me you never done nothing with your voice! You oughta be ashamed. If I was your husband, I'd spend my last cent trainin' that contralto of yours. You oughtn't to let yourself go like this. Women don't do it no more.' That, from the tackiest girl that ever walked this town. I wished High Street had opened up and swallowed me."

"Now, Hanna, you mustn't--"

"In all these years never so much as a dance or a car-ride as far as Middletown. Church! Church! Church! Till I could scream at the sight of it. Not a year of my married life that 'ain't been a lodestone on my neck!

Eight of' 'em! Eight!"

"I'm not sayin' I'm not to blame, Hanna. A woman like you naturally likes life. I never wanted to hold you back. If I'm tired nights and dead on my feet from twelve hours on 'em, I never wanted you to change your ways."

"Yes; with a husband at home in bed, I'd be a fine one chasin' around this town alone, wouldn't I? That's the thanks a woman gets for bein'

self-respectin'."

"I always kept hopin', Hanna, I could get you to take more to the home."

"The home--you mean the tomb!"

"Why, with the right attention, we got as fine an old place here as there is in this part of town, Hanna. If only you felt like giving it a few more touches that kinda would make a woman-place out of it! It 'ain't changed a whit from the way me and my old father run it together. A little touch here and there, Hanna, would help to keep you occupied and happier if--"

"I know. I know what's comin'."

"The pergola I had built. I used to think maybe you'd get to putter out there in the side-yard with it, trailin' vines; the china-paintin' outfit I had sent down from Cincinnati when I seen it advertised in the _Up-State Gazette_; a spaniel or two from Old c.o.c.ker's new litter, barkin' around; all them things, I used to think, would give our little place here a feelin' that would change both of us for the better. With a more home-like feelin' things might have been different between us, Hanna."

"Keepin" a menagerie of mangy spaniels ain't my idea of livin'."

"Aw, now, Hanna, what's the use puttin' it that way? Take, for instance, it's been a plan of mine to paint the house, with the shutters green and a band of green shingles runnin' up under the eaves. A little encouragement from you and we could perk the place up right smart. All these years it's kinda gone down--even more than when I was a bachelor in it. Sunk in, kinda, like them iron jardinieres I had put in the front yard for you to keep evergreen in. It's them little things, Hanna. Then that--that old idea of mine to take a little one from the orphanage--a young 'un around the--"

"O Lord!"

"I ain't goin' to mention it if it aggravates you, but--but makin' a home out of this gray old place would help us both, Hanna. There's no denyin'

that. It's what I hoped for when I brought you home a bride here. Just had it kinda planned. You putterin' around the place in some kind of a pink ap.r.o.n like you women can rig yourselves up in and--"

"There ain't a girl in Adalia has dropped out of things the way I have, I had a singin' voice that everybody in this town said--"

"There's the piano, Hanna, bought special for it."

"I got a contralto that--"

"There never was anything give me more pleasure than them first years you used it. I ain't much to express myself, but it was mighty fine, Hanna, to hear you."