The Vehement Flame Part 23

He had bought a box of roses, and, looping two fingers through its strings, he walked twice around the block past the ugly apartment house before he could make up his mind to enter. He wondered whether Lily had died? Women do die, sometimes. "Of course I don't want anything to happen to her; but--" Then he wondered, with a sudden pang of hope, if anything had happened to--_It_? "They're born dead, sometimes!"

Nothing wrong in wishing that, for the Thing would be better off dead than alive. He wished he was dead himself! ... The third time he came to the apartment house the string of the box was cutting into his fingers, and that made him stop, and set his teeth, and push open the door of the vestibule. He touched the b.u.t.ton under the name "Dale," and called up, huskily, "Is Miss--Mrs. Dale in?" A brisk voice asked his name. "A friend of Mrs. Dale's," he said, very low. There seemed to be a colloquy somewhere, and then he was told to "come right along!" He turned to the stairway, and as he walked slowly up, it came into his mind that this was the way a man might climb the scaffold steps: Step... Step... Step--his very feet refusing! Step... Step--and Lily's door. The nurse, who met him on the landing, said Mrs. Dale would be glad to see him....

She was in bed, very white and radiant, and with a queer, blanketed bundle on one arm; if she was, as the nurse said, "glad to see him," she did not show it. She was too absorbed in some gladness of her own to feel any other kind of gladness. As Maurice handed her the box of roses, she smiled vaguely and said. "Why, you're real kind!" Then she said, eagerly, "He was born the day the pink hyacinth came out! Want to see him?" Her voice thrilled with joy. Without waiting for his answer--or even giving a look at the roses the nurse was lifting out of their waxed papers, she raised a fold of the blanket and her eyes seemed to feed on the little red face with its tightly shut eyes and tiny wet lips.

Maurice looked--and his heart seemed to drop, shuddering, in his breast.

"How nasty!" he thought; but aloud he said, stammering, "Why it's--quite a baby."

"You may hold him," she said; there was a pa.s.sionate generosity in her voice.

Maurice tried to cover his recoil by saying, "Oh, I might drop it."

Lily was not looking at him; it seemed as if she was glad not to give up the roll of blankets, even for a minute. "He's perfectly lovely. He's a reg'lar rascal! The doctor said he was a wonderful child. I'm going to have him christened Ernest Augustus; I want a swell name. But I'll call him Jacky." She strained her head sidewise to kiss the red, puckered flesh, that looked like a face, and in which suddenly a little orifice showed itself, from which came a small, squeaking sound. Maurice, under the shock of that sound, stood rigid; but Lily's feeble arms cuddled the bundle against her breast; she said, "Sweety--Sweety--Sweety!"

The young man sat there speechless.... This terrible squirming piece of flesh--was part of himself! "I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!"

he was thinking. He got up and said: "Good-by. I hope you--"

Lily was not listening; she said good-by without lifting her eyes from the child's face.

Maurice stumbled out to the staircase, with little cold thrills running down his back. The experience of recognizing the significance of what he had done--the setting in motion that stupendous and eternal _Exfoliating_, called; Life; the seeing a Thing, himself, separated from himself! himself, going on in spite of himself!--brought a surge of engulfing horror. This elemental shock is not unknown to men who look for the first time at their first-born; instantly the feeling may disappear, swallowed up in love and pride. But where, as with Maurice, there is neither pride nor love, the shock remains. His organic dismay was so overwhelming that he said to himself he would never see Lily again--because he would not see It!--which was, in fact, "_he_," instead of the girl Lily had wanted. But though his spiritual disgust for what he called, in his own mind, "the whole hideous business," did not lessen, he did, later, through the pressure of those heavy words, "my own fault," go to see Lily--she had taken a little house out in Medfield--just to put down on the table, awkwardly, an envelope with some bills in it. He didn't inquire about It, and he got out of the house as quickly as possible.

Lily had no resentment at his lack of feeling for the child; the baby was so entirely hers that she did not think of it as his, too. This sense of possession, never menaced on Maurice's part by even a flicker of interest in the little thing, kept them to the furtive and very formal acquaintance of giving and receiving what money he could spare--or, oftener, _couldn't_ spare! As a result, he thought of Jacky only in relation to his income. Every time some personal expenditure tempted him, he summed up the child's existence in four disgusted and angry words, "I can't afford it." But it was for Lily's sake, not Jacky's, that he economized! He was wretchedly aware that if it had not been for Jacky, Lily might still be a "saleslady" at Marston's, earning good wages. Instead, she was taking lodgers--and it was not easy to get them!--so that she could be at home and look after the baby.

Maurice aged ten years in that first winter of rigid and unexplainable penuriousness, and of a secrecy which meant perilous skirtings of downright lying; for Eleanor occasionally asked why they had so little money to spend? He had requested a raise--and not mentioned to Eleanor the fact that he had got it. When she complained because his salary was so low, he told her Weston was paying him all he was worth, and he _wouldn't_ strike for more! "So it's impossible to go to housekeeping,"

he said--for of course she continued to urge housekeeping, saying that she couldn't understand why they had to be so economical! But he refused, patiently. To be patient, Maurice did not need, now, to remind himself of the mountain and her faithfulness to him; he had only to remind himself of the yellow-brick apartment house, and his faithlessness to her. "I've got to be kind, or I'd be a skunk," he used to think. So he was very kind. He did not burst out at her with irritated mortification when she telephoned to the office to know if "Mr. Curtis's headache was better";--he had suffered so much that he had gone beyond the self-consciousness of mortification;--and he walked with her in the park on Sunday afternoons to exercise Bingo; and on their anniversary he sat beside her in the gra.s.s, under the locust tree, and watched the river--their river, which had brought Lily into his life!--and listened to the lovely voice:

"O thou with dewy locks who lookest down!"

CHAPTER XIII

The next fall, however, the boarding did come to an end, and they went to housekeeping. It was Mrs. Houghton who brought this about. Edith was to enter Fern Hill School in the fall, and her mother had an inspiration: "Let her board with Eleanor and Maurice! The trolley goes right out to Medfield, and it will be very convenient for her. Also, it will help them with expenses," Mrs. Houghton said, comfortably.

"But why can't she live at the school?" Edith's father objected, with a troubled look; somehow, he did not like the idea of his girl in that pathetic household, which was at once so conscious and so unconscious of its own instability! "Why does she have to be with Eleanor and Maurice?"

Henry Houghton said.

"Eleanor has the refinement that a hobbledehoy like Edith needs," Mrs.

Houghton explained; "and I think the child will have better food than at Fern Hill. School food is always horrid."

"But won't Eleanor's dullness afflict Buster?" he said, doubtfully; then--because at that moment Edith banged into the room to show her shuddering mother a garter snake she had captured--he added, with complacent subtlety, "as for food, I, personally, prefer a dinner of herbs with an _interesting_ woman, than a stalled ox and Eleanor."

Which caused Edith to say, "Is Eleanor uninteresting, father?"

"Good heavens, no!" said Mr. Houghton, with an alarmed look; "_of course_ she isn't! What put such an idea into your head?" And as Buster and her squirming prize departed, he told his Mary that her daughter was destroying his nervous system. "She'll repeat that to Eleanor," he groaned.

His wife had no sympathy for him; "You deserve anything you may get!"

she said, severely; and proceeded to write to Eleanor to make her proposition. If they cared to take Edith, she said, they could hire a house and stop boarding--"which is dreadful for both of your digestions; and I will be glad if this plan appeals to you, to feel that Edith is with anyone who has such gentle manners as you."

Eleanor, reading the friendly words at the boarding-house breakfast table, said quickly to herself, "I don't want her... She would monopolize Maurice!" Then she hesitated; "He would be more comfortable in a house of his own... But Edith? Oh, I _don't_ want her!"

She turned to show the letter to Maurice, but he was sitting sidewise, one arm over the back of his chair, in vociferous discussion with a fellow boarder. "No, sir!" he was declaring; "if they revise the rules again, they'll revise the guts out of the whole blessed game; they'll make it all muscle and no mind."

"But football isn't any intellectual stunt," the other boarder insisted.

"It _is_--to a degree. The old flying wedge--"

"Maurice!" Eleanor said again; but Maurice, impa.s.sioned about "rules,"

didn't even hear her. She gave his arm a little friendly shake.

"Maurice! You are the limit, with your old football!"

He turned, laughing, and took the letter from her hand. As he read it, his face changed sharply. "But Fern Hill is in Medfield!" he exclaimed.

"I suppose she could take the trolley almost to the school grounds,"

Eleanor conceded, reluctantly.

"Why can't she live out there? It's a boarding school, isn't it?" (She might meet Lily on the car!)

For a moment she accepted his decision with relief; then the thought of his comfort urged her: "I know of an awfully attractive house, with a garden. Little Bingo could hide his bones in it."

"No," he said, sharply; "it wouldn't do. I don't want her."

Instantly Eleanor was buoyantly ready to have Edith ... he "_didn't want her_!" When Maurice rose from the table she went to the front door with him, detaining him--until the pretty school-teacher was well on her way down the street;--with tender charges to take care of himself. Then, in the darkness of the hall, with Maurice very uneasy lest some one might see them, she kissed him good-by. "If we could afford to keep house without taking Edith," she said, "I'd rather not have her. (Kiss me again--no-body's looking!) But we can't. So let's have her."

"In two years I'll have my own money," he reminded her; "this hard sledding is only temporary." But she looked so disappointed that he hesitated; after all, if she wanted a house so much he ought not to stand in the way. Poor Eleanor hadn't much fun! And, as far as he was concerned, he would like to have Edith around. "It's only the Medfield part of it I don't like," he told himself. Yet Lily, on Maple Street, a mile from Fern Hill, was a needle in a haystack! (And even if Edith should ever see her, she wouldn't know her.) ... "If you really want to have her," he told Eleanor, "go ahead."

So that was how it happened that Edith burst in upon Eleanor's dear domesticity of two. Maurice, having once agreed to his wife's wish, was rather pleased at the prospect. "It will help on money," he thought; "another hundred a year will come in handy to Lily. And it will be sort of nice to have Buster in the house."

Lily had not said she must have another hundred. She did not even think so. "_I_ can swing it!" Lily had said, st.u.r.dily. And she did; but of course, as Maurice, to his intense discomfort, knew only too well, it was hard to swing it. Even with what help he could give her, she couldn't possibly have got along if she had not been astonishingly efficient and thrifty, always looking at both sides of a cent! "I ain't smoking any more," Lily said once; "well, 'tain't _only_ to save money; but I don't want Jacky to be getting any funny ideas!" (this when "Ernest Augustus" was only a few months old!) She had a tiny house on Maple Street, with a sun-baked front yard, in which a few shrubs caught the dust on their meager foliage; and she had a border of pansies in the shade under the bay window;--"I _must_ have flowers!" Lily said, apologetically;--and she had three roomers, and she had sc.r.a.ped the locality for mealers. She would have made more money if she had not fed her boarders so well. "But there!" said Lily; "if I give 'em nice food, they'll stay!" But, all the same, Maurice knew that two or three dollars more a week would "come in handy." His sense of irritated responsibility about her made him long for that twenty-fifth birthday which would bring him his own money. For, in spite of Lily's thriftiness, her expenses, as well as her toil, kept increasing, and Maurice, cursing himself whenever he thought that but for him she would be "on easy street" at Marston's, had begun the inevitable borrowing. The payment of the interest on his note was a tax on his salary; yet not so taxing as the necessity of being constantly on guard against some careless word which might make Eleanor ask questions about that salary.

But Eleanor asked very few questions about anything so practical as income. Her interest in money matters, now, in regard to Edith, was merely that Edith was a means to an end--Maurice could have his own home! The finding a house, under Mrs. Newbolt's candid guidance--and Maurice's worried reminders that he couldn't "afford" more than so much rent!--gave Eleanor the pleasantest summer she had had since that first summer when, in the meadow, she and Maurice had watched the clouds, and the locust blossoms, and told each other that nothing in heaven or earth, or the waters under the earth, could part them...

The old house they finally secured was in an unfashionable locality; there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street, and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also the discovery in the parlor, behind a monstrous air-tight stove, of a bricked-up fireplace (which he promptly tore open), all combined to make undertakers and tailors, as neighbors, unimportant! On the rear of the house was an iron veranda--roped with wistaria; below, inclosed in a crumbling brick wall, was the back yard--"_Garden_, if you please!" Maurice announced--for Bingo's bones. Clumps of Madonna lilies had bloomed here, and died, and bloomed again, for almost a century; the yard was shaded by a silver poplar, which would gray and whiten in the wind in hot weather, or delicately etch itself against a wintry sky. A little path, with moss between the bricks and always damp in the shadow of the poplar, led from the bas.e.m.e.nt door to an iron gate; through its rusty bars one could see, a block away, the slipping gleam of the river, hurrying down from "their meadow," to disappear under the bridge. Maurice said he would build a seat around the poplar, "... and we'll put a table under it, and paint it green, and have tea there in the afternoon! Skeezics will like that."

"Edith looks healthy," said Mrs. Newbolt; "my dear father used to say he liked healthy females. Old-fashioned word--females. Well, I'm afraid dear father liked 'em too much. But my dear mother--she was a Dennison--pretended not to see it. She had sense. Great thing in married life, to have sense, and know what not to see! Pity Edith's not musical.

Have you a cook? I believe she'd have caught you, Maurice, if Eleanor hadn't got in ahead! I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo. Here, Bingo!"

Bingo, silky and snarly, climbed on to her steeply sloping black-satin lap, ate the chocolate drop--keeping all the while a liquid and adoring eye upon his mistress--then slid down and ran to curl up on Eleanor's skirt.

By September the moving and seat building were accomplished--the last not entirely on Edith's account; it was part of Maurice's painstaking desire to do something--anything!--for "poor Eleanor," as he named her in his remorseful thought. There was never a day--indeed, there was not often an hour!--when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind. So he tried, in all sorts of anxious ways, to please her. He almost never saw Lily; but the thought of her often brought Eleanor a box of candy or a bunch of violets. Such expenditures were slightly easier for him now, because he had had another small raise,--which this time he had told Eleanor about. On the strength of it he said to himself that he supposed he ought to give Lily a little something extra? So on the day when Mrs.

Houghton and Edith were to arrive in Mercer, he went out to Medfield to tell Jacky's mother that she might count on a few dollars more each month. The last time he had seen her, Lily had told him that Jacky "was fussing with his teeth something fierce. I had to hire a little girl from across the street," she said, "to take him out in the perambulator, or else I couldn't 'tend to my cooking. It costs money to live, Mr.

Curtis," Lily had said, "and eggs are going up, awful!" She had never gone back to the familiarity of those days when she called him "Curt."

That he, dull and preoccupied, still called her Lily gave her, somehow, such a respectful consciousness of his superiority that she had hesitated to speak of anything so intimate as eggs... "Yes, I must give her something extra," Maurice thought, remembering the "cost" of living.

"Talk about paying the piper! I bet _I'm_ paying him, all right!"

He was to meet Mrs. Houghton at seven-thirty that night, and it occurred to him that if he told Eleanor he had some extra work to do at his desk he could wedge this call in between office hours and the time when he must go to the station--("and they call me 'G. Washington'!") He felt no special cautiousness in going out to Maple Street; the few people he knew in Mercer did not frequent this locality, and if any of them should chance to see him--a most remote possibility!--why, was he not in the real-estate business, and constantly looking at houses? On this particular afternoon, jolting along in the trolley car, he grimly amused himself with the thought of what he would do if, say, Eleanor herself should see him turning that infernally shrill bell on Lily's door. It was a wild flight of imagination, for Eleanor never would see him--never could see him! Eleanor, who only went to Medfield when their wedding anniversary came round, and she dragged him out to sit by the river and sentimentalize! He thought of the loveliness of that past June--and the contrasting and ironic ugliness of the present September.... Now, the little secret house in the purlieus of Mercer's smoke and grime; then, the river, and the rippling tides of gra.s.s and clover, and the blue sky--and that a.s.s, lying at the feet of a woman old enough to be his mother!

He laughed as he swung off the car--then frowned; for he saw that to reach Lily's door he would have to pa.s.s a baby carriage standing just inside the gate. He didn't glance into the carriage at the roly-poly youngster. He never, on the rare occasions when he went to see Lily, looked at his child if he could avoid doing so--and she never asked him to. Once, annoyed at Jacky's shrill noisiness, he had protested, frowning: "Can't you keep it quiet? It needs a spanking!" After that indifferent criticism ("For _I_ don't care how she brings it up!") Lily had not wanted him to see her baby. She could not have said just why--perhaps it was fear lest Maurice would notice his growing perfection--but when Jacky's father came she kept Jacky in the background! On this September afternoon she said, as she opened the door: