CHAPTER XIX
The Girls all came to see the baby. They exclaimed and cooed andah'd andoh'd. "Of course it's wonderful and all. But it is a big responsibility, Lottie. How in the world did you happen——"
"Well, you know, after St. Mihiel, when the Germans were retreating and our boys were advancing——"
She was asked to lecture before some of the women's clubs, but declined.
Beck Schaefer, grown a trifle too plump now in the rôle of Mrs. Sam Butler, insisted on holding the struggling Claire. "I never can tell whether I like a baby or not until I've held it—her. 'Scuse. Though this one certainly is a darling. Come to your Aunt Beck, sweetie. Oh, Lottie! Look at her! She put her little hand right up on my cheek! S'e is a tunnin' ol' sin, izzen s'e!" This last addressed directly to the object of her admiration. "Sam and I want to adopt a baby. That's what comes of marrying late. Though I suppose you heard about Celia. Imagine! But he looks just like Orville. Good thing he's a boy. I don't see why you didn't take a boy, while you were about it. Though, after all, when you've brought up a girl you know where she is, but a boy! Well! They leave you and then where are you! They don't even thank you for your trouble. And girls are such fun to dress. Oh,whatdid you think of Ben Gartz marrying a chorus girl! Didn't you nearly die! I saw her in the Pompeiian Room with him one night after the theatre. She's a common looking little thing and young enough to be his daughter. She was ordering things under glass. Poor Ben. He was awfully sweet on you, Lottie, at one time. What happened, anyway?"
Against the doctor's orders and the nurse's advice and manœuverings, Mrs. Payson had insisted on seeing the baby immediately on Lottie's entering the house. They prepared Lottie. "It can't be much worse for her to see you—and the baby—now than not to see you. She's so worked up that we can't do anything with her anyway. But don't argue; and don't oppose her in anything. Lie, if you have to, about sending the baby away."
"Away! Oh! no!"
"But Lottie, you don't understand how sick she is. Any shock might——"
Lottie had scarcely divested herself of hat and wraps when she entered her mother's bedroom, the child in her arms. Mrs. Payson's eyes were on the door—had been from the moment she heard the flurry of homecoming downstairs. As Lottie stood in the doorway a moment the sick woman's eyes dilated. She made as though to sit up. The nurse took the child from Lottie as she bent over to kiss her mother. Then, suddenly, she dropped to her knees at the side of the bed. "Oh, mama, it's so good to be home." She took one of the flaccid hands in her own firm vital grasp.
"H'm. Well, that's some good come of your leaving, anyway. You look handsome, Lottie. How've you got your hair done?"
"Just as I always had it, mama."
"Your face looks fuller, somehow. Let's see the young one."
The nurse turned and leaned over the bed. But at this final test of her good nature Claire, travel worn, bewildered, hungry, failed them. She opened wide her mouth, lurched in muscular rebellion, and emitted a series of ear-piercing screams against the world; against this strange person in white who held her; against that which stared at her from the bed.
"There!" exclaimed Mrs. Payson. "Take it away. I knew it. Don't you think for one minute I'm going to have any foreign baby screaming around this house, sick as I am. Not for a minute. I hope you're satisfied, Lottie. Running an orphan asylum in this house. Well, I've still got something to say."
But strangely enough she had little to say, after that. She showed small interest in the newcomer and they kept the baby out of the sick room. The little world of her bedside interested the sick woman more. She fancied them all in league against her. She would call Lottie to her bedside and send the nurse out of the room on some pretext or other that deceived no one.
"Lottie, come here. Listen. That woman has got to go. Why, she won't let me get up! I'm perfectly well."
"But perhaps you haven't quite got your strength, mama. You know it takes a while."
"I'll never get my strength back lying here. Was I ever a person to stay in bed?"
"No, mama. You've always been wonderful."
"A lot of thanks I've got for it, too. Now, Lottie, you see that I get another doctor. This man's a fool. He doesn't understand my case. Palavering young hand-holder, that's what he is."
"Don't you think you'd better try him a little longer? He hasn't had time, really."
"Time! I've been three mortal months in this bed. You're like all the rest of them. Glad if I died. Well, I'm not going to please you just yet. You'll see me up to-morrow, early."
They had heard this threat so regularly and so often that they scarcely heeded it now; or, if they did, only to say, soothingly, "We'll see how you feel by to-morrow, shall we?"
So that when, finally, she made good her threat the nurse came in early one morning from where she slept in the alcove just off the big front bedroom to find her half-lying, half-sitting in the big chair by the window. She had got up stealthily, had even fumbled about in bureau and closet for the clothes she had not worn in months. In one hand she grasped her corsets. She had actually meant to put them on as she had done every morning before her illness, regarding corsetless kimonoed women with contempt. She must have dragged herself up to the chair by an almost super-human effort of will. So they found her. A born ruler, defying them all to the last.
Charley came home for the funeral. She was not to rejoin the Krisiloff company until its arrival in Chicago for the two-weeks' engagement there. "If ever," said Henry Kemp privately to Lottie. "I don't think she's so crazy about this trouping any more. You ought to have heard her talking about the fresh eggs at breakfast this morning. I asked her what she'd been eating on the road and she said, 'Vintage oofs.'"
Mrs. Carrie Payson's funeral proved an enlightening thing. There came to it a queer hodge-podge of people; representatives of Chicago's South Side old families who had not set foot in the Prairie Avenue house in half a century; real estate men who had known her in the days of her early business career; Brosch, the carpenter and contractor, with whom she had bickered and bartered for years; some of the Polish and Italian tenants from over Eighteenth Street way; women in shawls of whom Lottie had never heard, and who owed Mrs. Payson some unnamed debt of gratitude. Lottie wondered if she had ever really understood her mother; if the indomitability that amounted almost to ruthlessness had not been, after all, a finer quality than a certain fluid element in herself, in Aunt Charlotte, in Charley, which had handicapped them all.
Aunt Charlotte mourned her sister sincerely; seemed even to miss her tart-tongued goading. No one to find fault with her clothes, her habits, her ideas, her conversation. Lottie humoured her outrageously. The household found itself buying as Mrs. Payson had bought; thinking as she had thought; regulating its hours as they had been regulated for her needs. Her personality was too powerful to fade so soon after the corporeal being had gone.
More easily than any of them Aunt Charlotte had accepted the advent of the French baby. To her the sound and sight of a baby in the old Prairie Avenue house seemed an accustomed and natural thing. She had a way of mixing names, bewilderingly. Often as not she called Claire "Lottie," or Charley "Claire." She clapped her hands at the baby and wagged her head at her tremulously, and said, "No, no, no! Auntie punish!" and "Come to Auntie Charlotte," exactly as she had done forty years before to Belle. Once she put the child down on the floor for a moment and Claire began to wriggle her way down the faded green stream of the parlor carpet river, and to poke a finger into the sails of the dim old ships and floral garlands, just as Lottie and Belle had done long ago.
There was much talk of selling the old house; but it never seemed to amount to more than talk. In proper time Claire was cutting her teeth and soothing her hot swollen gums on the hard surface of Ole Bull's arms, just as Belle and Lottie had done before her. This only, of course, when Aunt Charlotte was holding her. Lottie and Charley both put down the practice as highly unhygienic.
"Fiddlesticks! You and Belle did it with all your teeth. And you're living."
Charley came daily—often twice daily—to see the baby. She was fascinated by her, made herself Claire's slave, insisted on trundling her up and down Prairie Avenue in the smart English pram, though Lottie said she much preferred to have her sleep or take her airing in the back garden undisturbed. Charley and Aunt Charlotte opposed this. Charley said, "Oh, but look how ducky she is in that bonnet! Everybody stops to look at her, and then I brag. Yesterday I told a woman she was mine. I expected her to say, 'And you so young!' but she didn't."
Aunt Charlotte said, "This new fad of never talking to babies and never picking 'em up! It makes idiots of them. How can you ever expect them to learn anything? Lie there like wooden images. Or else break their hearts crying, when all they want is a little petting.... Her want her ol' Auntie to p'ay wis her, yes her does, doesn't her?" to the baby.
Claire was one of those fair, rose-leaf babies, and possessed, at eight months, of that indefinable thing known as style. She was the kind of baby, Charley said, that looks dressy in a flannel nightgown. "Those French gals," Charley explained. "Chic. That's what she's got. Haven't you,ma petite? Ma bébé—or is itmon bébé, Lotta? I get so mixed." Charley's was the American college girl's French, verbless, scant, and faltering. She insisted on addressing Claire in it, to that young person's wide-eyed delight. "Tu est mon chou—ma chou—say, Lotta, you're a girl that's been around. Do they really call each other cabbages over there?"
One of the big bedrooms on the second floor had been cleared and refurnished as a nursery. Here, almost nightly at six o'clock, you found Lottie, Charley, and Aunt Charlotte. The six o'clock bottle was a vital affair. It just preceded sleeping time. It must be taken quietly for some dietetic reason. The three women talked low, in the twilight, watching Claire in her small bed. Claire lay rolling her eyes around at them ecstatically as she pulled at the bottle. She exercised tremendous suction and absorbed the bottle's contents almost magically unless carefully watched.
This evening the talk centred on the child, as always. Trivial talk, and yet vital.
"She's growing so I'll have to let her hems down again. And some new stockings. The heels of those she has come under the middle of her foot."
"Look at her Lotta! She's half asleep. There, now she's awake again and pulling like mad. Swoons off and shows the whites of her eyes and then remembers and goes at it again. Now she's—I never saw such a snoozey old thing. Sleeps something chronic, all day and all night. What good are you, anyway, h'm?"
Aunt Charlotte grew reminiscent. "Time you and Belle were babies you wore long dresses—great long trailing bunchy things, and yards and yards of petticoats—flannel and white. It used to take the girl hours to do 'em up. Nowadays, seems the less they put on 'em the healthier they are."
Charley was seated cross-legged on the floor, her back against a fat old armchair. "How about the babies in France, Lotta? I suppose they're still bundling them up over there. What did the Coot have on when they found her, h'm?"
Lotta rose to take the empty bottle away, gently. Claire's eyes were again showing two white slits.
Aunt Charlotte, in the window chair, leaned forward. Her tremulous forefinger made circles, round and round, on her black-silk knee. "Yes, Lotta. Now what did she have on, poor little forlorn lamb!"
"Why—I don't remember, Aunt Charlotte." She tucked the coverlet in at the sides of the crib firmly. Claire was sound asleep now, her two fists held high above her head, as a healthy baby sleeps. Lottie stood a moment looking down at the child. The old, old virgin in the chair by the window and the young girl seated cross-legged on the floor watched her intently. Suddenly the quiet peaceful air of the nursery was electric. The child made a little clucking sound with tongue and lips, in her sleep. Charley sat forward, her eyes on Lottie.
"Lotta, do you remember my five—my five——" she broke off with a half-sob. Then she threw up her head. "I'll have them yet."
It was then Aunt Charlotte put into brave words the thought that was in the minds of the three women. "Don't you want to tell us about him, Lottie? Don't you?"
For one instant terror leaped into Lottie's eyes as they went from Aunt Charlotte's face to Charley's. But at what they saw there the terror faded and in its place came relief—infinite relief. "Yes."
"Well, then, just you do."
But Lottie hesitated yet another moment, looking at them intently. "Did you both know—all the time." Aunt Charlotte nodded. But Charley shook her head slightly. "Not until just now, Lotta ... something in your face as you stood there looking down at her."
Lottie came away from the crib, sat down in a low chair near Aunt Charlotte. Charley scuttled crab-wise over to her across the floor and settled there against her, her arm flung across Lottie's knee. The old Prairie Avenue house was quiet, quiet. You could hear the child's regular breathing. Lottie's voice was low, so that the baby's sleep might not be disturbed, yet clear, that Aunt Charlotte might hear. They could have gone downstairs, or to another chamber, but they did not. The three women sat in the dim room.
"We met—I met him—in Paris, the very first week. He had gone over there in the beginning as a correspondent. Then he had come all the way back to America and had enlisted for service. He hated it, as every intelligent man did. But he had to do it, he said. We—liked each other right away. I'd never met a man like that before. I didn't know there were any. Oh, I suppose I did know; but they had never come within my range. He had only a second-lieutenancy. There was nothing of the commander about him. He always said so. He used to say he had never learned to 'snap into it' properly. You know what I mean? He was thirty-seven. Winnie Steppler introduced us. She had known him in his Chicago cub reporter days. He went to New York, later. Well, that first week, when I was waiting to be sent out, he and Winnie and I—she met me in Paris, you know, when I came—went everywhere together and it was glorious. I can't tell you. Paris was being shelled but it refused to be terrorised. The streets and the parks and the restaurants were packed. You've no idea what it was, going about with him. He was like a boy about things—simple things, I mean—a print in a window, or a sauce in a restaurant, or a sunset on the Bois. We used to laugh at nothing—foolish, wonderful, private jokes like those families have that are funny to no one outside the family. The only other person I'd ever known like that was a boy at school when I went to Armour. I haven't seen him since I was eighteen, and he's an important person now. But he had that same quality. They call it a sense of humour, I suppose, but it's more than that. It's the most delightful thing in the world, and if you have it you don't need anything else.... Four months later he was wounded. Not badly. He was in the hospital for six weeks. In that time I didn't see him. Then he went back into it but he wasn't fit. We used to write regularly. I don't know how I can make you understand how things were—things——"
Charley looked up at her. "I know what you mean. The—the state of mind that people got into over there—nice people—nice girls. Is that what you mean?"
"Yes. Do you know?"
"Well, I can imagine——"
"No, you can't. The world was rocking and we over there were getting the full swing of it. It seemed that all the things we had considered so vital and fundamental didn't matter any more. Life didn't count. A city to-day was a brick-heap to-morrow. Night and day were all mixed up. Terror and work. Exhaustion and hysteria. A lot of us were girls—women, I mean—who had never known freedom. Not license—freedom. Ordinary freedom of will, or intellect, or action. Men, too, who had their noses to the grindstone for years. You know there's a lot more to war than just killing, and winning battles, and patching people up. It does something to you—something chemical and transforming—after you've been in it. The reaction isn't always noble. I'm just trying to explain what I mean. There were a lot of things going around—especially among the older and more severe looking of us girls. It's queer. There was one girl—she'd been a librarian in some little town up in Michigan. She told me once that there were certain books they kept in what they called 'The Inferno,' and only certain people could have them. They weren't on the shelves, for the boys and girls, or the general public. When she spoke of them she looked like a librarian. Her mouth made a thin straight line. You could picture her sitting in the library, at her desk, holding that pencil they use with a funny little rubber stamp thing attached to it, and refusing to allow some school-girl to take out 'Jennie Gerhardt.' She was discharged and sent home for being what they called promiscuous.... I just wanted you to know how things were.... He got three days' leave. Winnie Steppler was in Paris at the time. I was to try for leave—I'd have gone A. W. O. L. if I hadn't got it—and we three were to meet there. Winnie had a little two-room flat across the river. She'd been there for almost a year, you know. She made it her headquarters. The concierge knew me. When I got there Robert was waiting for me. Winnie had left a note. She had been called to Italy by her paper. I was to use her apartment. We stayed there together.... I'm not excusing it. There is no excuse. They were the happiest three days of my life—and always will be.... There are two kinds of men, you know, who make the best soldiers. The butcher-boy type with no nerves and no imagination. And the fine, high-strung type that fears battle and hates war and who whips himself into courage and heroism because he's afraid he'll be afraid.... He hated to go back, though he never said so.... He was killed ten days later.... I went to Switzerland for a while when.... Winnie was with me.... She was wonderful. I think I should have died without her.... I wanted to at first.... But not now. Not now."
Stillness again. You heard only the child's breathing, gentle, rhythmical.
Aunt Charlotte's wavering tremulous forefinger traced circles round and round on her knee—round and round. The heavy black brows were drawn into a frown. She looked an age-old seeress sitting there in her black. "Well." She got up slowly and came over to the crib. She stood there a moment. "It's a brave lie, Lottie. You stick to it, for her. A topsy-turvy world she's come into. Perhaps she'll be the one to work out what we haven't done—we Thrift girls. She's got a job ahead of her. A job."
Lottie leaned forward in the darkness. "I'll never stand in her way. She's going to be free. I know. I'll never hamper her. Not in word, or look, or thought. You'll see."
"You probably will, Lottie. You're human. But I won't be here to see. Not I. And I'm not sorry. I've hardly been away from the spot where I was born, but I've seen the world. I've seen the world.... Well...."
She went toward the door with her slow firm step, putting each foot down flat; along the hall she went, her black silk skirts making a soft susurrus. Lottie rose, opened a window to the sharp spring air. Then, together, she and Charley tiptoed out, stopping a moment, hand in hand at the crib. The nursery room was quiet except for the breathing of the child.
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed. Chapter XVIII used twice. The second occurrence changed to Chapter XIX.]
Books by
EDNA FERBER
Buttered Side DownCheerful, by RequestEmma McChesney & Co.Dawn O'HaraFanny HerselfHalf PortionsPersonality PlusRoast Beef MediumThe Girls
With Newman Levy
$1200 A Year