The Innocents Part 6

Aside from his personal desires, what were they going to do? They had left, in actual money, less than fifty dollars.

Father did not become querulous, but day by day he became more dependent on Mother's cheer as October opened, as chilly rains began to shut them in the house. When she was not busy, and he was not cutting wood or forlornly pecking away at useless cleanings of the cold and empty tea-room, they talked of what they would do. Father had wild plans of dashing down to New York, of seeing young Pilkings, of getting work in some other shoe-store. But he knew very little about other stores. He was not so much a shoe-clerk as a Pilkings clerk. It had been as important a part of his duties, these many years, to know what to say to Mr. Pilkings as to know what to show to customers. Surely when Pilkings, senior, was well he would remember his offer to keep the job open.

Mother cautiously began to suggest her plan. She spoke fondly of their daughter Lulu, of their grandson Harry, of how estimable and upright a citizen was their son-in-law, Mr. Harris Hartwig of Saserkopee, New York. As Father knew none of these suggestions to have any factual basis whatever his clear little mind was bored by them. Then, after a stormy evening when the fire was warm and they had cheered up enough to play cribbage, Mother suddenly plumped out her plan--to go to Saserkopee and live with daughter till something turned up.

Father shrank. He crouched in his chair, a wizened, frightened, unhappy, oldish man. "No, no, no, no!" he cried. "She is a good girl, but she would badger us to death. She wouldn't let us do one single thing our way. She always acts as though she wanted to make you all over, and I love you the way you are. I'd rather get a job cooking on a fishing schooner than do that."

But he knew Mother's way of sticking to an idea, and he began to persuade himself that Saserkopee was a haven of refuge. Whenever they seemed to be having a peaceful discussion of Lulu Hartwig's canary-yellow sweater, they were hearing her voice, wondering if they could tolerate its tw.a.n.gy comments the rest of their lives.

If the weather was clear they sat out in the rose-arbor as though they were soon to lose it. The roses were dead, now, but a bank of purple asters glowed by the laurel-bushes, and in the garden plucky pansies withstood the chill. They tried to keep up a pretense of happiness, but always they were listening--listening.

There were two or three October days when the sea was blue and silver, sharply and brightly outlined against the far skyline where the deep blue heavens modulated to a filmy turquoise. Gulls followed the furrows of the breakers. Father and Mother paced the edge of the cliff or sat sun-refreshed in the beloved arbor. Then a day of iron sea, cruelly steel-bright on one side and sullenly black on the other, with broken rolling clouds, and sand whisking along the dunes in shallow eddies; rain coming and the breakers pounding in with a terrifying roar and the menace of illimitable power. Father gathered piles of pine-knots for the fire, whistling as he hacked at them with a dull hatchet--tr.i.m.m.i.n.g them, not because it was necessary, but because it gave him something energetic to do. Whenever he came into the kitchen with an armful of them he found Mother standing at the window, anxiously watching the flurries of sand and rain.

"Be a fine night to sit by the fire," he chirruped. "Guess we'll get out the old mouth-organ and have a little band-concert, admission five bucks, eh?" Something of the old command was in his voice. Mother actually needed his comfort against the black hours of storm!

Though they used a very prosaic stove for cooking, the old farm-house fireplace still filled half the back of the kitchen, and this had become the center of their house. Neither of them could abide the echoing emptiness and shabby grandeur of the tea-room. Before the fireplace they sat, after a supper at which Father had made much of enjoying fish chowder, though they had had it four times in eight days. Cheaper. And very nourishing.

The shutters banged, sand crashed against the panes, rain leaked in a steady drip down one corner of the room, and the sea smashed unceasingly. But Father played "My Gal's a High-born Lady" and "Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl Is the Right Little Girl for Me,"

and other silly, cheerful melodies which even the hand-organs had forgotten.

There was a sense of glaring mounting light through the window which gave on the cliff.

"I wonder what that is," Mother shuddered. "It's like a big fire. I declare it seems as though the whole world was coming to an end to-night." She turned from the window and shivered over the embers, in her golden-oak rocker which Father had filled with cushions.

He kissed her boyishly and trotted over to the window. The fact that they were alone against the elements, with no apartment-house full of people to share the tumultuous night, weakened her, but delighted him.

He cried out, with a feeling of dramatic joy.

There was a fire below, on the beach, where there should be nothing but sand and the terror of the storm. The outer edge of the cliff was outlined by the light.

"It's a wreck!" he whooped. "It's the life-savers! Mother, I'm going down. Maybe there's something I can do. I want to do something again!

Maybe some poor devil coming ash.o.r.e in the breeches buoy--help him ash.o.r.e-- Don't suppose I could row--"

He darted at the closet and yanked out his ineffectual city raincoat and rubbers, and the dreary wreck of what had once been his pert new vacation traveling-cap.

"No, no, don't, please don't!" Mother begged. "You couldn't do anything, and I don't dast to go out--and I'm afraid to stay here alone."

But Father was putting on his raincoat. "I'll just run down and see--be right back."

"Don't go a step farther than the top of the cliff," she wailed.

He hesitated. He wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be in the midst of heroic effort. The G.o.ds had set the stage for epic action that night, and his spirit was big with desire for bigness. It was very hard to promise to put goloshes upon his winged feet.

But Mother held out her hands. "Oh, I need you, Seth. You'll stay near me, won't you?"

There may have been lordly deeds in the surf that night--men gambling their lives to save strangers and aliens. One deed there certainly was--though the movies, which are our modern minstrelsy, will never portray it. While he strained with longing to go down and show himself a man--not just a scullion in an unsuccessful tea-room--Father stood on the edge of the cliff and watched the life-savers launch the boat, saw them disappear from the radius of the calcium carbide beach-light into the spume of surf. He didn't even wait to see them return. Mother needed him, and he trotted back to tell her all about it.

They went happily to bed, and she slept with her head cuddled on his left shoulder, his left arm protectingly about her.

It was still raining when they awoke, a weary, whining drizzle. And Father was still virile with desire of heroism. He scampered out to see what he could of the wreck.

He returned, suddenly. His voice was low and unhappy as he demanded, "Oh, Mother, it's-- Come and see."

He led her to the kitchen door and round the corner of the house. The beloved rose-arbor had been wrecked by the storm. The lattice-work was smashed. The gray bare stems of the crimson ramblers drooped drearily into a sullen puddle. The green settee was smeared with splashed mud.

"They couldn't even leave us that," Father wailed, in the voice of a man broken. "Oh yes, yes, yes, I'll go to Lulu's with you. But we won't stay. Will we! I will fight again. I did have a little gumption left last night, didn't I? Didn't I? But--but we'll go there for a while."

CHAPTER IX

"Doggonit, I liked that cap. It was a good one," said Father, in a tone of settled melancholy.

"Well, it wa'n't much of a cap," said Mother, "but I do know how you feel."

They sat in their tremendously varnished and steam-heated room on the second floor of daughter Lulu's house, and found some occupation in being gloomy. For ten days now they had been her guests. Lulu had received them with bright excitement and announced that they needn't ever do any more work, and were ever so welcome--and then she had started to reform them. It may seem a mystery as to why a woman whose soul was composed of vinegar and chicken feathers, as was Lulu Appleby Hartwig's, should have wanted her parents to stay with her. Perhaps she liked them. One does find such anomalies. Anyway, she condescendingly bought them new hats. And her husband, a large, heavy-blooded man, made lumbering jokes at their expense, and expected them to laugh.

"The old boy still likes to play the mouth-organ--nothing like these old codgers for thinking they're still kids," Mr. Hartwig puffed at dinner, then banged his fist and laughed rollingly. He seemed surprised when Father merely flushed and tightened his tie. For all his gross body, Mr.

Hartwig was sensitive--so sensitive that he was hurt when people didn't see the humor of his little sallies.

The Hartwigs' modest residence was the last word in cement and small useless side-tables and all modern inconveniences. The furnace heat made you sneeze, and the chairs, which were large and tufted, creaked. In the dining-room was an electrolier made of seven kinds of inimical colored gla.s.s, and a plate-rack from which were hung department-store steins. On the parlor table was a kodak alb.u.m with views of Harry in every stage of absurdity. There was a small car which Mr. Hartwig drove himself. And there was a bright, easy, incredibly dull social life; neighbors who went out to the country club to watch the tennis in summer, and played "five hundred" every Sat.u.r.day evening in the winter.

Like a vast proportion of the inhabitants of that lonely city, New York, the Applebys were unused to society. It is hard to tell which afflicted them more--sitting all day in their immaculate plastered and varnished room with nothing useful to do or being dragged into the midst of chattering neighbors who treated them respectfully, as though they were old.

Mother begged daughter to be permitted to dust or make beds; Father suggested that he might rake the lawn. But Lulu waggled her stringy forefinger at them and bubbled, "No, no! What would the neighbors think?

Don't you suppose that we can afford to have you dear old people take a rest? Why, Harris would be awfully angry if he saw you out puttering around, Father. No, you just sit and have a good rest."

And then, when they had composed to a spurious sort of rest the hands that were aching for activity, the Applebys would be dragged out, taken to teas, shown off, with their well-set-up backs and handsome heads, as Lulu's aristocratic parents.

"My father has been a prominent business man in New York for many years, you know," she would confide to neighbors.

While the prominent business man longed to be sitting on a foolish stool trying shoes on a fussy old lady.

But what could he do? In actual cash Mother and he had less than seven dollars in the world.

By the end of two weeks Father and Mother were slowly going mad with the quiet of their room, and Lulu was getting a little tired of her experiment in having a visible parental background. She began to let Mother do the sock-darning--huge uninteresting piles of Harris Hartwig's faded mustard-colored cotton socks, and she snapped at Father when he was restlessly prowling about the house, "My head aches so, I'm sure it's going to be a sick headache, and I do think you might let me have a nap instead of tramping and tramping till my nerves get so frazzled that I could just shriek."

With this slight damming of her flowing fount of filial love, Lulu combined a desire to have them appear as features at a musicale she was to give, come Sat.u.r.day evening. Mother was to be in a "dear ducky lace cap" and Father in a frilled shirt and a long-tailed coat which Harris Hartwig had once worn in theatricals, the two of them presiding at the refreshments table.

"Like a prize Persian cat and a pet monkey," Father said.

Against this indignity they frettingly rebelled. Father snarled, "Good Lord! I'm not much older than your precious dumpling of a Harris." It was the snarl of a caged animal. Lulu had them; she merely felt misunderstood when they protested.

Friday morning. The musicale was coming next day, and Lulu had already rehea.r.s.ed them in their position as refreshment ornaments. Father had boldly refused to wear the nice, good frilled shirt and "movie-actor coat" during the rehearsal.

"Very well," said Lulu, "but you will to-morrow evening."

Father wasn't sure whether Lulu would use an ax or chloroform or tears on him, but he was gloomily certain that she would have him in the shameless garments on Sat.u.r.day evening.