Saturday's Child Part 79

Every cent must be counted in these days. Susan and Billy laughed long afterward to remember that on many a Sunday they walked over to the little General Post Office in Mission Street, hoping for a subscription or two in the mail, to fan the dying fires of the "Protest" for a few more days. Better times came; the little sheet struck roots, carried a modest advertis.e.m.e.nt or two, and a woman's column under the heading "Mary Jane's Letter" whose claims kept the editor's wife far too busy.

As in the early days of her marriage all the women of the world had been simply cla.s.sified as wives or not wives, so now Susan saw no distinction except that of motherhood or childlessness. When she lay sick, feverish and confused, in the first hours that followed the arrival of her first-born, she found her problem no longer that of the individual, no longer the question merely of little Martin's crib and care and impending school and college expenses. It was the great burden of the mothers of the world that Susan took upon her shoulders. Why so much strangeness and pain, why such ignorance of rules and needs, she wondered. She lay thinking of tired women, nervous women, women hanging over midnight demands of colic and croup, women catching the little forms back from the treacherous open window, and s.n.a.t.c.hing away the dangerous bottle from little hands---!

"Miss Allen," said Susan, out of a silence, "he doesn't seem to be breathing. The blanket hasn't gotten over his little face, has it?"

So began the joyous martyrdom. Susan's heart would never beat again only for herself. Hand in hand with the rapture of owning the baby walked the terror of losing him. His meals might have been a special miracle, so awed and radiant was Susan's face when she had him in her arms. His goodness, when he was good, seemed to her no more remarkable than his badness, when he was bad. Susan ran to him after the briefest absences with icy fear at her heart. He had loosened a pin--gotten it into his mouth, he had wedged his darling little head in between the bars of his crib---!

But she left him very rarely. What Susan did now must be done at home.

Her six-days-old son asleep beside her, she was discovered by Anna cheerfully dictating to her nurse "Mary Jane's Letter" for an approaching issue of the "Protest." The young mother laughed joyfully at Anna's concern, but later, when the trained nurse was gone, and the warm heavy days of the hot summer came, when fat little Martin was restless through the long, summer nights with teething, Susan's courage and strength were put to a hard test.

"We ought to get a girl in to help you," Billy said, distressedly, on a night when Susan, flushed and excited, refused his help everywhere, and attempted to manage baby and dinner and house una.s.sisted.

"We ought to get clothes and china and linen and furniture,--we ought to move out of this house and this block!" Susan wanted to say. But with some effort she refrained from answering at all, and felt tears sting her eyes when Billy carried the baby off, to do with his big gentle fingers all the folding and pinning and b.u.t.toning that preceded Martin's disappearance for the evening.

"Never mind!" Susan said later, smiling bravely over the dinner table, "he needs less care every day! He'll soon be walking and amusing himself."

But Martin was only staggering uncertainly and far from self-sufficient when Billy Junior came laughing into the family group. "How do women DO it!" thought Susan, recovering slowly from a second heavy drain on nerves and strength.

No other child, of course, would ever mean to her quite what the oldest son meant. The first-born is the miracle, brought from Heaven itself through the very gates of death, a pioneer, merciless and helpless, a little monarch whose kingdom never existed before the day he set up his feeble little cry. All the delightful innovations are for him,--the chair, the mug, the little airings, the remodeled domestic routine.

"Pain in his poor little tum!" Susan said cheerfully and tenderly, when the youthful Billy cried. Under exactly similar circ.u.mstances, with Martin, she had shed tears of terror and despair, while Billy, shivering in his nightgown, had hung at the telephone awaiting her word to call the doctor. Martin's tawny, finely shaped little head, the grip of his st.u.r.dy, affectionate little arms, his early voyages into the uncharted sea of English speech,--these were so many marvels to his mother and father.

But it had to be speedily admitted that Billy had his own particular charm too. The two were in everything a sharp contrast. Martin's bright hair blew in loose waves, Billy's dark curls fitted his head like a cap. Martin's eyes were blue and grave, Billy's dancing and brown.

Martin used words carefully, with a nice sense of values, Billy achieved his purposes with stamping and dimpling, and early coined a tiny vocabulary of his own. Martin slept flat on his small back, a muscular little viking drifting into unknown waters, but drowsiness must always capture Billy alive and fighting. Susan untangled him nightly from his covers, loosened his small fingers from the bars of his crib.

She took her maternal responsibilities gravely. Billy Senior thought it very amusing to see her, b.u.t.tering a bowl for bread-pudding, or running small garments through her machine, while she recited "The Pied Piper"

or "Goblin Market" to a rapt audience of two staring babies. But somehow the sight was a little touching, too.

"Bill, don't you honestly think that they're smarter than other children, or is it just because they're mine?" Susan would ask. And Billy always answered in sober good faith, "No, it's not you, dear, for I see it too! And they really ARE unusual!"

Susan sometimes put both boys into the carriage and went to see Georgie, to whose group a silent, heavy little boy had now been added.

Mrs. O'Connor was a stout, complacent little person; the doctor's mother was dead, and Georgie spoke of her with sad affection and reverence. The old servant stayed on, tirelessly devoted to the new mistress, as she had been to the old, and pa.s.sionately proud of the children. Joe's practice had grown enormously; Joe kept a runabout now, and on Sundays took his well-dressed wife out with him to the park.

They had a circle of friends very much like themselves, prosperous young fathers and mothers, and there was a pleasant rivalry in card-parties, and the dressing of little boys and girls. Myra and Helen, colored ribbons tying their damp, straight, carefully ringletted hair, were a nicely mannered little pair, and the boy fat and sweet and heavy.

"Georgie is absolutely satisfied," Susan said wistfully. "Do you think we will ever reach our ideals, Aunt Jo, as she has hers?"

It was a summer Sat.u.r.day, only a month or two after the birth of William Junior. Susan had not been to Sausalito for a long time, and Mrs. Carroll was ending a day's shopping with a call on mother and babies. Martin, drowsy and contented, was in her arms. Susan, luxuriating in an hour's idleness and gossip, sat near the open window, with the tiny Billy. Outside, a gusty August wind was sweeping chaff and papers before it; pa.s.sers-by dodged it as if it were sleet.

"I think there's no question about it, Sue," Mrs. Carroll's motherly voice said, cheerfully. "This is a hard time; you and Billy are both doing too much,--but this won't last! You'll come out of it some day, dear, a splendid big experienced woman, ready for any big work. And then you'll look back, and think that the days when the boys needed you every hour were short enough. Character is the one thing that you have to buy this way, Sue,--by effort and hardship and self-denial!"

"But after all," Susan said somberly, so eager to ease her full heart that she must keep her voice low to keep it steady, "after all, Aunt Jo, aren't there lots of women who do this sort of thing year in and year out and DON'T achieve anything? As a means to an end," said Susan, groping for words, "as a road--this is comprehensible, but--but one hates to think of it as a goal!"

"Hundreds of women reach their highest ambitions, Sue," the other woman answered thoughtfully, "without necessarily reaching YOURS. It depends upon which star you've selected for your wagon, Sue! You have just been telling me that the Lords, for instance, are happier than crowned kings, in their little garden, with a state position a.s.sured for Lydia.

Then there's Georgie; Georgie is one of the happiest women I ever saw!

And when you remember that the first thirty years of her life were practically wasted, it makes you feel very hopeful of anyone's life!"

"Yes, but I couldn't be happy as Mary and Lydia are, and Georgie's life would drive me to strong drink!" Susan said, with a flash of her old fire.

"Exactly. So YOUR fulfilment will come in some other way,--some way that they would probably think extremely terrifying or unconventional or strange. Meanwhile you are learning something every day, about women who have tiny babies to care for, about housekeeping as half the women of the world have to regard it. All that is extremely useful, if you ever want to do anything that touches women. About office work you know, about life downtown. Some day just the use for all this will come to you, and then I'll feel that I was quite right when I expected great things of my Sue!"

"Of me?" stammered Susan. A lovely color crept into her thin cheeks and a tear splashed down upon the cheek of the sleeping baby.

Anna's dearest dream was suddenly realized that summer, and Anna, lovelier than ever, came out to tell Sue of the chance meeting with Doctor Hoffmann in the laboratory that had, in two short minutes, turned the entire current of her life. It was all wonderful and delightful beyond words, not a tiny cloud darkened the sky.

Conrad Hoffmann was forty-five years old, seventeen years older than his promised wife, but splendidly tall and strong, and--Anna and Susan agreed--STRIKINGLY handsome. He was at the very top of his profession, managed his own small surgical hospital, and maintained one of the prettiest homes in the city. A musician, a humanitarian, rich in his own right, he was so conspicuous a figure among the unmarried men of San Francisco that Anna's marriage created no small stir, and the six weeks of her engagement were packed with affairs in her honor.

Susan's little sons were presently taken to Sausalito to be present at Aunt Anna's wedding. Susan was nervous and tired before she had finished her own dressing, wrapped and fed the beribboned baby, and slipped the wriggling Martin into his best white clothes. But she forgot everything but pride and pleasure when Betsey, the bride and "Grandma" fell with shrieks of rapture upon the children, and during the whole happy day she found herself over and over again at Billy's side, listening to him, watching him, and his effect on other people, slipping her hand into his. It was as if, after quiet months of taking him for granted, she had suddenly seen her big, clever, gentle husband as a stranger again, and fallen again in love with him.

Susan felt strangely older than Anna to-day; she thought of that other day when she and Billy had gone up to the big woods; she remembered the odor of roses and acacia, the fragrance of her gown, the stiffness of her rose-crowned hat.

Anna and Conrad were going away to Germany for six months, and Susan and the babies spent a happy week in Anna's old room. Betsey was filling what had been Susan's position on the "Democrat" now, and cherished literary ambitions.

"Oh, why must you go, Sue?" Mrs. Carroll asked, wistfully, when the time for packing came. "Couldn't you stay on awhile, it's so lovely to have you here!"

But Susan was firm. She had had her holiday; Billy could not divide his time between Sausalito and the "Protest" office any longer. They crossed the bay in mid-afternoon, and the radiant husband and father met them at the ferry. Susan sighed in supreme relief as he lifted the older boy to his shoulder, and picked up the heavy suitcase.

"We could send that?" submitted Susan, but Billy answered by signaling a carriage, and placing his little family inside.

"Oh, Bill, you plutocrat!" Susan said, sinking back with a great sigh of pleasure.

"Well, my wife doesn't come home every day!" Billy said beaming.

Susan felt, in some subtle climatic change, that the heat of the summer was over. Mission Street slept under a soft autumn haze; the hint of a cool night was already in the air.

In the dining-room, as she entered with her baby in her arms, she saw that a new table and new chairs replaced the old ones, a ruffled little cotton house-gown was folded neatly on the table. A new, hooded baby-carriage awaited little Billy.

"Oh, BILLY!" The baby was bundled unceremoniously into his new coach, and Susan put her arms about her husband's neck. "You OUGHTN'T!" she protested.

"Clem and Mrs. Cudahy sent the carriage," Billy beamed.

"And you did the rest! Bill, dear--when I am such a tired, cross apology for a wife!" Susan found nothing in life so bracing as the arm that was now tight about her. She had a full minute's respite before the boys' claims must be met.

"What first, Sue?" asked Billy. "Dinner's all ordered, and the things are here, but I guess you'll have to fix things---"

"I'll feed baby while you give Mart his milk and toast," Susan said capably, "then I'll get into something comfortable and we'll put them off, and you can set the table while I get dinner! It's been a heavenly week, Billy dear," said Susan, settling herself in a low rocker, "but it does seem good to get home!"

The next spring all four did indeed go up to the woods, but it was after a severe attack of typhoid fever on Billy Senior's part, and Susan was almost too much exhausted in every way to trust herself to the rough life of the cabin. But they came back after a month's gypsying so brown and strong and happy that even Susan had forgotten the horrors of the winter, and in mid-summer the "Protest" moved into more dignified quarters, and the Olivers found the comfortable old house in Oakland that was to be a home for them all for a long time.

Oakland was chosen because it is near the city, yet country-like enough to be ideal for children. The house was commonplace, shabby and cheaply built, but to Susan it seemed delightfully roomy and comfortable, and she gloried in the big yards, the fruit trees, and the old-fashioned garden. She cared for her sweet-pea vines and her chickens while the little boys tumbled about her, or connived against the safety of the cat, and she liked her neighbors, simple women who advised her about her plants, and brought their own babies over to play with Mart and Billy.

Certain old interests Susan found that she must sacrifice for a time at least. Even with the reliable, capable, obstinate personage affectionately known as "Big Mary" in the kitchen, they could not leave the children for more than a few hours at a time. Susan had to let some of the old friends go; she had neither the gowns nor the time for afternoon calls, nor had she the knowledge of small current events that is more important than either. She and Billy could not often dine in town and go to the theater, for running expenses were heavy, the "Protest" still a constant problem, and Big Mary did not lend herself readily to sudden changes and interruptions.

Entertaining, in any formal sense, was also out of the question, for to be done well it must be done constantly and easily, and the Oliver larder and linen closet did not lend itself to impromptu suppers and long dinners. Susan was too concerned in the manufacture of nourishing puddings and soups, too anxious to have thirty little brown stockings and twenty little blue suits hanging on the line every Monday morning to jeopardize the even running of her domestic machinery with very much hospitality. She loved to have any or all of the Carrolls with her, welcomed Billy's business a.s.sociates warmly, and three times a year had Georgie and her family come to a one o'clock Sunday dinner, and planned for the comfort of the O'Connors, little and big, with the greatest pleasure and care. But this was almost the extent of her entertaining in these days.

Isabel Furlong had indeed tried to bridge the gulf that lay between their manners of living, with a warm and sweet insistence that had conquered even the home-loving Billy. Isabel had silenced all of Susan's objections--Susan must bring the boys; they would have dinner with Isabel's own boy, Alan, then the children could all go to sleep in the Furlong nursery, and the mothers have a chat and a cup of tea before it was time to dress for dinner. Isabel's car should come all the way to Oakland for them, and take them all home again the next day.

"But, angel dear, I haven't a gown!" protested Susan.

"Oh, Sue, just ourselves and Daddy and John's mother!"