The Empty Sack Part 14

"Then I'll prove to you that it's so."

Though he could not do this, she went with him in the end. She was not won; she was not more moved by his suit than she had been at other times; she still shrank from the scar on his brow and the touch of his tremendous hands. But she was afraid of letting him go, of dropping back into the horror of no lover in the studio and no money to bring home. To do this thing would save her from that emptiness, even if it led to something worse. Worse would be easier to bear than returning to nothing but a void; and so slowly, reluctantly, with anguish in her heart, she let herself be helped into the shabby vehicle.

An hour or so later, Teddy reached home. He arrived breathless, because he had run nearly all the way from the street-car. In the empty s.p.a.ces of Indiana Avenue he felt himself conspicuous. He knew it was fancy, that no hint of his folly could have come to this quiet suburb, and that his theft could not possibly be discovered as yet, even by those most concerned. But he was not used to a guilty conscience. Already in imagination he saw himself tried, sentenced, and serving a long sentence at Bitterwell, of which he had once seen the grim gray walls.

"G.o.d! I'd shoot myself first!" was his comment to himself, as he hurried past the trim gra.s.splots where care-free men in shirt sleeves were watering their bits of lawn.

It was Pansy who first knew that something was amiss. At sound of his hand on the door k.n.o.b she had come scampering, with little silvery yelps, and had suddenly been checked by the atmosphere he threw out.

Pansy knew what wrongdoing was; she knew the pangs of remorse. She had once run away from being shut up in the coalbin, her fate when the family went to the movies, and had been lost for half a day. The agony of being adrift and the joy of seeing Gussie come whistling and calling down the Palisade Walk formed the great central escapade in Pansy's memory. For days afterward, whenever the family spoke of it, she would stand with forepaws planted apart, and head hanging dejectedly, aware that no terms could be scathing enough fully to cover her guilt.

And here was Teddy in the same state of mind. Pansy had learned that the great race could suffer; but she hadn't supposed that it could get into sc.r.a.pes like herself. All she could do on second thoughts was to creep forward timidly, raise herself on her hind legs, with her paws against his shin, and tell him that whatever the trouble was she had been through it all.

He paid her no attention because, as he looked into the living room, Gladys was seated at a table, crying, her hands covering her face. At the same time Gussie was peac.o.c.king up and down the room, saying things to her little sister that were apparently not comforting. Now that Gussie, at Madame Corinne's request, had "put up" her hair, her great beauty was apparent. Her face had not the guileless purity of Jennie's, but it had more intellectual vigor and much more fire.

Gladys was Teddy's pet, as she was her father's. Of the three girls, she was the plain one, a little red-haired, snub-nosed thing, with some resemblance to Pansy, and a heart of gold. Teddy went over and laid his hand on her fiery crown.

"Say, poor little kiddie, what's the matter?"

"It's my feet," Gladys moaned.

"And she thinks that learning the millinery at three-fifty per is all jazz and cat-step," Gussie declared, grandly. "Well, let her try it and see. She's welcome. My soul and body! Corinne would blow her across the river when she got into a temper. I say that if you're a cash girl you've got to take the drawbacks of a cash girl, and what's the use of kicking? If you're on your feet, you're on your feet. Rub 'em with oil and buck up. That's what I say."

"It's all very well for you to talk, spit-cat," Gladys retorted. "All you've got to do is to play with ribbons as if you were dressing a doll.

If you had to run like Pansy every time some stuck-up thing calls, '_Ca-ash!_'-"

Gussie undulated her person and her outstretched arms in sheer joy of the dancing step as she strutted up and down.

"That's right, old girl. Blame it on me. I'm always the one that's in the wrong in this house. If Master Teddy lets a gla.s.s fall and breaks it, as he did last night, I pushed it out of his hand on purpose, though I'm in the next room. All the same, I say, 'Buck up,' and I don't care who says different. Sniffing won't cure your feet or give you a brother like Fred Inglis who can pay for a woman to do all the heavy work, and his mother hardly lifting a hand."

Teddy pa.s.sed on to the kitchen to see if his mother was there.

She was seated at a table with a ham bone before her, and from it was paring the last rags of the meat. He tried to take his old-time tone of gayety.

"h.e.l.lo, ma! At it again? What are you giving us for supper? Something good, I'll bet."

Lizzie went on working without lifting her eyes. She didn't even smile.

Teddy sensed something new in the way of care, as Pansy had sensed it in him. He stood at a little distance, waiting for the look that had never failed to welcome him, but which this time didn't come.

"What's the matter, ma? Has anything gone wrong?"

Putting down the ham, Lizzie raised her eyes, though with no light in them.

"It's nothing so very wrong, dear, but I haven't told your sisters because it's no use to worry them if-"

"What is it, ma? Out with it."

She told him. If it was necessary to go without a hot meal between Wednesday and Sat.u.r.day, of course it could be done; but even on Sat.u.r.day the gas people would demand fifteen dollars on account before the gas would be turned on again. There were just two possibilities: The father might come home with the news that he had found a job, or Teddy might have-she didn't believe it, but he had talked of saving for a new suit of clothes-Teddy might have fifteen dollars laid away.

He turned his back and walked out of the kitchen. He did it so significantly that it seemed to the mother there could be only one meaning to the act. He had saved the money and resented being robbed of it. She knew he was something of a c.o.xcomb, and had always been proud that he could look so neat. He had only two suits, a common one and a best one, but even the common one was as brushed and pressed and stylish as if he had a valet. Nevertheless, his great activity and his love of rough-and-tumble skylarking made him hard on clothes in the sense of wear, and the common one was growing shiny at the seams and thin where there was most attrition. A new suit was an urgent necessity; so that if he had a few dollars put away toward getting it, it would be no wonder if it hurt him to be asked to give them up.

But Teddy had no few dollars put away. When the fund for the new suit could be counted otherwise than in pennies, some special need had always swept it into the family treasury. Teddy had let it go without a sigh.

He would have let it go without a sigh to-day, only that he had nothing saved. Being naturally of a loving, care-taking disposition, it meant more to him that Gussie or Gladys should have a new pair of shoes than that he should be able to emulate Fred Inglis in ordering a suit at Love's.

Having left the kitchen, he did not go farther than the living room, where, Gussie having taken herself upstairs, Gladys was drying her eyes.

He merely walked to the end of the room, his hands in his pockets, as he stared above one of the hydrangea trees into Indiana Avenue. The windows being open, the voices of playing children mingled with the even-song of birds. To Teddy, there was mockery in these cheerful sounds. There was mockery in the westering May sunshine, mockery in the groups of girls, bareheaded and arm in arm, as they strolled toward Palisade Walk; mockery in the ruddy-faced men who watered their shrubs and gra.s.s; mockery in the ap.r.o.ned women who came to windows or doors in the intervals of preparing supper. It all spoke of a homey comfort and content, with no bluff behind it. In the Follett house all was bluff-and misery.

Somehow, for reasons he couldn't fathom, the cutting off of the gas from the range seemed the last humiliation. In the matter of food, if one thing was too dear, you could eat another. So it was in the whole round of essentials in living. You could get a subst.i.tute or you could go without. But for heat there was no subst.i.tute, and you couldn't go without it. It ranked with clothes and shelter as a necessity even among savages. And yet here they were, a civilized family, living in a civilized house, in a suburb of New York, deprived of what even Micmacs could have at will. It was one of the happenings that could never have been foreseen as possibilities.

His hands being in his pockets, Teddy fingered the twenty-dollar bill.

He did this unconsciously, merely because it was there. It did occur to him to wish it was his own; but his wishes went no farther.

They had gone no farther when he swung on his heel to go back to the kitchen. He must tell his mother that he didn't have fifteen dollars put away. He hadn't done so at once merely because his emotions had been too strong for him.

He pulled his burly figure down the length of the room as one who has to drag himself along. If he had only been Fred Inglis, he would have handed his mother a sheaf of bills with instructions to buy all she wanted. Why couldn't he, Teddy Follett, do the same? He was, as Gussie phrased it, a great big fellow of twenty-one-and his value was only eighteen per. He had proved that to his own satisfaction, for in secretly trying to unearth a better place he had been offered less than he got at Collingham & Law's.

What were the shackles that bound him? Were they of his own creation, or were they forced on him by the world outside? He was as industrious as his father had been, and, except for a tendency to do his work with a broad grin, just as wholehearted. If good intentions had commercial value, both father and son should have been rated high; but here was his father a bit of old junk, while he himself, having reached man's estate, having served his country, having tacitly offered himself to the limit of his strength, was rewarded with a wage on which he could hardly live, to say nothing of helping others live.

Madly, wildly, these thoughts churned in his mind as he lurched down the room toward the kitchen, while Pansy watched him with a look into which she was putting all her soul.

He knew what he would say. He would say: "Ma, it's no go. I haven't a red cent. We've got to eat cold and wash cold till Sat.u.r.day, anyhow.

We'll not look farther ahead than that. When Sat.u.r.day comes, we'll see."

But, on the threshold of the kitchen, he saw something which brought a new sensation. In free fights while in the navy he had thought he had seen red; but he had never seen red like this. He had never supposed it possible that this torrent of wrath, tenderness, and pity should rise within himself, a fountain spouting at the same time both sweet water and bitter.

His mother was seated at the table, crying. The ham bone was before her, the rags of meat on the plate, and the knife on top of them. But she, like Gladys a few minutes previously, had covered her face with her hands, while her shoulders rocked.

In all his twenty-one years Teddy had never seen his mother cry. He had cried; the girls had cried; his father had very nearly cried; but his mother never. The strong spirit had grieved in strong ways, but not in this way. Now it seemed as if all the griefs she had laid up since the days when she was Lizzie Scarborough had heaped themselves to the point at which these strange, harsh, unnatural tears were their only a.s.suagement.

Teddy was down on his knees beside her, his arm flung round her neck.

"Ma! Good old ma! Dear old ma! Don't cry! For G.o.d's sake don't cry! Stop _crying_, ma!" he shouted, in an imploring pa.s.sion as strange, harsh, and unnatural as her own. "Here's the money I had saved for my new clothes. Take it and go and pay something on the gas bill. There! There!

Stop! For G.o.d's sake! For your little boy's sake! I love you, ma. Only stop! There! That's better! Calm down, ma! Everything will be all right, and I'll-I'll get the new clothes by and by."

But in his heart he was saying, "To h.e.l.l with Collingham & Law's!" as he laid the bill before her.

CHAPTER VIII

Jennie cried herself to sleep that Wednesday night, and, in the morning, cried herself awake. She was in no doubt as to the motive of her tears; she was sorry for having put a gulf between her and the man she loved by marrying one she didn't care for.

Why she didn't care for him was beyond her power of a.n.a.lysis. He was good and kind and tender; he was rocklike and steady and strong. In a forceful way he was almost handsome, and some day he would be rich. But there was the fact that, her heart being given to the one man, her nerves shuddered at the other. The explanation she used to give, that the lividness of the scar on his forehead frightened her, was no longer tenable, since the mark tended to fade out. The other infirmity, his limp, was also less conspicuous, for, though he would never walk as if his foot had not been crushed, he walked as well as many other men. It wasn't these peculiarities; it wasn't any one thing in itself; it was simply that she didn't love him and never would.

Whereas, she did love another man. She loved his violet eyes, his brown mustache, his flashing teeth, his selfishness, his cruelty. She loved his system of starving her out, his habit of keeping her in anguish. Too much reasonableness was hard for her to a.s.similate, like too much water to a portulaca.