CHAPTER XV
The Paysons and the Kemps, together with the rest of the world, were to be tossed about now like straws in a storm. But Mrs. Carrie Payson, reading the paper next morning in the dining room window, after breakfast, was the dispassionately interested spectator. Though this was a manless household it received its morning and evening paper regularly. You saw Mrs. Payson in that. She had no patience with women who did not read the newspapers. Sometimes when Belle said, "What wedding?" or "What murder?" or "What sale?" Mrs. Payson would exclaim, "For heaven's sake, don't you read the papers! How do you expect to know what's going on!"
Mrs. Payson knew what was going on. She knew the price of coal, and the whereabouts of the Cingalese troops, and the closing Steel quotations, and whether duvetyne was going to be good this winter, and how much the Claflin estate amounted to, and why the DeWitts dropped their divorce proceedings. More than this, she read aloud extracts from these items and commented thereon. She was the kind of woman who rarely breakfasts in a kimono. When she did it was so restrained and somber in cut and colour that the Nipponese would have failed to recognise its origin. Her white hair was primly dressed. Through spectacles worn at a rakish angle and set rather low down on her nose she surveyed the antics of the world and pronounced upon them as a judge upon a day's grist of cases. To one who preferred to get the first-page news first-hand it was a maddening practice.
"I see they predict a coal famine. I don't know what we'll do in this house. If I didn't know I'd practically have to give it away I'd sell and move into a flat out south.... They're going to wear those capes again next winter. I should think they'd freeze in 'em. Though I remember we used to wear them altogether—dolmans, we called them. I see your friend Winnie Steppler has gone to France for her paper. Woman of her age! I should think she'd stay home.... H'm! Ben Gartz is captain of the Manufacturing Jewelers' Liberty Loan committee.... What time did you come in last night, Lottie? I didn't hear you." Aunt Charlotte, breakfasting across the table, looked up.
Lottie poured herself another cup of coffee. She was drinking a great deal of coffee lately; using it frankly as a stimulant. "About midnight."
"Did you have a nice time?"
"Interesting," Lottie said, gravely. She sensed that her mother was listening intently behind the newspaper. "Did you mean what you just said about wanting to sell the house and moving into a flat out south?"
Mrs. Payson's spectacles showed, half-moons, above the paper's horizon. "I might. Hulda's going to marry that man. He doesn't want to go to war. They say you can't get a girl now for less than fifteen dollars a week. Fifteen! Well! I see myself! And now this coal shortage—and a four-story house. Still, we'd need a pretty big apartment."
Lottie made her tone casual. "You ought to marry off Jeannette—and me."
She knew that Ben Gartz leaped from a position of doubt to one of hope in her mother's mind. She knew, too, that her mother could no more force herself to speak of this hope than she could wear a pink silk and lace negligee. She would have considered both, somehow, indecent. She turned a page of the paper, elaborately careless. "I'd move out of this barn fast enough if there was only Charlotte and me to keep it up for."
Lottie laughed a little. "You'd have to have a special room for Ole Bull, and your walnut bed and the hall hatrack. No modern flat——"
"I'd sell them. For that matter, I might even take rooms in a hotel, and give up housekeeping altogether. It's too hard these days."
"Why mama, you talk as if you had it all planned out! You know perfectly well you couldn't get along without me."
"Oh, couldn't I! I'd like to know why not! Jeannette thinks more of my comfort this minute than you do." She folded the sheets of the paper into an untidy mass and slapped the crumpled whole down on the breakfast table.
"You oughtn't to expect Jeannette to act as a sort of unpaid companion."
"Companion! I'm not in my dotage yet. I don't need a companion, paid or unpaid. I don't need anybody for that matter. You're not so terribly important. Don't think it. I'd manage to live without you, very well."
"Do you really mean that, mama?"
At her tone Mrs. Payson stopped, one hand out-stretched toward the pantry door. "That I could get along without you? I certainly——"
"That if I hadn't been here to run the electric and take you to market and shopping when you or Aunt Charlotte needed clothes, or hats, or corsets—you wouldn't have missed me? All these years?"
"I'd have got along. So would your Aunt Charlotte. Nobody's so important that the world can't get along without them. I'd have managed."
"I suppose you would," Lottie said, dully. "I suppose you would."
Her mother passed into the kitchen. Aunt Charlotte, across the table, reached for the mangled newspaper and began to smooth it out sheet by sheet, and to fold it painstakingly into its original creasings. At the apprehensive look in her eyes Lottie smiled reassuringly, got up and came round to her. She patted the shrivelled cheek. "Don't look so disappointed in your maiden niece, Charlotte Thrift. She isn't as desperate as that. Don't think it."
"Well, just for a minute——" there was relief in her voice—"I thought—but you've got some plan in your head?"
"Yes."
"Don't let anybody stop you then, whatever it is. Don't let anybody stop you. It's your last chance, Lottie."
The pantry door swung open. "What's her last chance?" demanded Mrs. Payson, entering. She had a way of making timely—or untimely—entrances with the precision of a character in a badly written play.
"Oh, nothing." Aunt Charlotte smiled and nodded coquettishly and her sister thought of Ben Gartz, as Aunt Charlotte had meant she should. Lottie knew this. At the knowledge a hot little flame of wrath swept over her.
Then for three weeks the household went about its business. Lottie sewed at the Red Cross shop; Aunt Charlotte knitted; Mrs. Payson talked Liberty Bonds, managed her household, protested at the increased cost of living, berated Belle for what she termed her extravagance, quizzed Henry about his business at the Friday night family dinner. At the end of the month Hulda left to marry her unmartial Oscar. Though she and Mrs. Payson had carried on guerilla warfare for years, Hulda, packing her trunk, wept into the crochet-edged trousseau and declared that Mrs. Payson had been, of all mistresses, the kindest. Mrs. Payson, on her part, facing the prospect of breaking in a pert new incompetent at a weekly wage far beyond that of the departing and highly capable Hulda, forgave her everything, including her weakness for coffee. She even plied her with a farewell cup of that black brew as Hulda, dressed for departure, sat waiting red-eyed in the kitchen for the drayman.
With the advent of a new maid Jeannette began to take her meals with the family. Somehow the kitchen was no longer the place for Jeannette. She had acquired a pretty manner, along with a certain comeliness of feature and figure. It had been a sudden blossoming. Hers were the bright-eyed assurance, the little upward quirk at the corners of the mouth, the preenings and flutterings of the duckling who is transformed miraculously into a swan. Jeannette had a "boy friend." Jeannette had invitations for every night in the week (censored by Mrs. Payson). Jeannette went to the War Camp Community dances on Saturday nights at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Club and was magically transformed from a wall-flower into a rose. Jeannette, the erstwhile plain, bloomed into beauty—the beauty that comes of being told one is beautiful and desirable. She danced expertly and gracefully (private sessions with Charley had accomplished this) and she had endless patience with the wistful lads from the near-by naval training station and camps who swarmed into the city on leave, seeking diversion where they could find it. At these carefully supervised Community affairs Jeannette danced with boys from Texas and boys from Massachusetts; boys from Arizona and Kansas and Ohio and Washington. But though she danced with them all with indefatigable patience and good-humour it was Nebraska's step that perfectly matched her own after the first few weeks and it was Nebraska who took her home at a gallop in order not to overstay his shore leave. Nebraska was an embryo ensign. He talked of the sea as only a boy can who has known but the waves of the wheat rippling before the wind across miles of inland prairie. When Lottie suggested that Jeannette invite Nebraska to dinner on Sunday Mrs. Payson, surprisingly enough, agreed. They made conversation.
"And where is your home?"
"I'm from Nebraska, ma'am."
"Oh, Nebraska!"
"Yes, ma'am."
"How do you like Chicago?"
"I like it fine." A quick glance at Jeannette. "Everybody here is certainly grand."
Now that Jeannette was regularly at dinner the silences that had tortured Lottie's nerves were banished quite. The girl chattered endlessly but engagingly, too. One of the girls at the office had gone and got married during the noon hour—did you see the parade on Michigan to-day?—that actress with the Liberty Loan speaker at the corner of Monroe and State had given a signed photograph with every bond purchased—there was a fur coat in Olson's window for only one hundred and fifty—all the girls were going to buy those short fur coats this winter.
"Mercy on us!" from Aunt Charlotte. Jeannette and Aunt Charlotte were great friends. Aunt Charlotte's room had, for Jeannette, something of the attraction of a museum. In it were all those treasures accumulated by a lonely woman throughout almost half a century of living in one house. Ribbons, flowers, buttons, photographs, scraps of lace, old hats, mounds of unused handkerchiefs and bottles of perfume and boxes of time-yellowed writing paper representing the birthdays and Christmases of years; old candy boxes; newspaper clippings; baby pictures of Lottie, Belle, Charley; family albums. There was always a bag of candy of the more durable sort—hard peppermints, or fruit drops. And, treasured of all, the patchwork silk quilt. When Belle and Lottie were little girls the patchwork quilt had been the covering of convalescence during the milder periods of childhood indispositions. At very sight of its prismatic folds now Lottie was whisked back twenty-five years to days of delicious languor on the sitting room sofa, the silk quilt across her knees, cups of broth and quivering rosy gelatines to tempt the appetite, and the button box for endless stringing and unstringing.
To-day, as Lottie passed Aunt Charlotte's room just before dinner she saw her sitting by the window with the silk quilt in her lap. Of late it had been packed away in one of the room's treasure boxes and brought out only for purposes of shaking and dusting.
Lottie entered and stood over Aunt Charlotte as she sat there in her chair by the window looking out on the ornate old houses across the way. "I haven't seen it in years." She passed her fingers over the shining surface of the silk and satin. Frayed squares and triangles marred many of the blocks now. A glistening butterfly still shone in yellow silk in one corner; a spider wove an endless web in another. Time had mellowed the vivid orange and purple and scarlet and pink until now the whole had the vague softness and subdued gleam of an ancient Persian carpet or an old cathedral window.
Aunt Charlotte looked down at it. One tremulous finger traced the pattern of wheels and circles and blocks. "I always thought I'd give it to the first one of the family that married. But Belle—of course not, in that grand apartment. For awhile I thought Charley and that young lad—I'd have liked to tell them how I came to make it. The boy would have liked to hear it. Jesse Dick. He'd have understood. But he's gone to war again. Jesse Dick has gone to war again. Oh, dear! Why didn't Charlotte marry him before he went?"
"She's wandering a little," Lottie thought, with a pang. "After all, she's very old. We haven't realised." Aloud she said, smiling, "And how about me, Charlotte Thrift? You're forgetting your old niece entirely."
"No, I haven't forgotten you, Lottie. I think I got it out because of you to-day. A curious feeling. Something's going to happen. I've lived a long time, Lottie. Nearly seventy-six years. Old maids usually don't live that long. Did you know that? Short-lived, they are—unmarried women. Here I am, nearing seventy-six. And every now and then I get the feeling—that unsettled feeling as if something might still happen in my life. I don't know. It's like listening for a bell to ring. Something's going to happen."
Lottie looked at her strangely, almost fearfully. She stooped, suddenly, and gathered Aunt Charlotte and the silk quilt into her arms. "Oh, Aunt Charlotte! Aunt Charlotte! I've done something terrible. I'm scared, I'm——"
"Lot-tie!" from the foot of the stairs. "Lottie! What's the matter with you and Aunt Charlotte! Dinner's waiting."
"You don't say!" Aunt Charlotte stood up facing Lottie, suddenly alert, vitalised. "You don't say!" Something about the commonplaceness of her expression of approval seemed to restore Lottie's balance. "Don't let her scare you. They always try and if you're weak you give in. But don't you. Don't you!" A sudden suspicion—"It isn't that pink fat man!"
"Ben? No. It's something I never thought I'd——"
"What's it matter? Only don't give in." She propelled her almost fiercely ahead of her to the stairway and down to the dining room. It was as though she feared Lottie would change her mind if they paused on the way. All through dinner Aunt Charlotte glowed and beamed upon her. Occasionally she shook her head vehemently to convey encouragement to the silent Lottie.
Jeannette was full of plans for the evening. "If we don't start early we won't get there in time for the first show and then we'll have to stand and wait. They say it's a wonderful picture. The man who takes the part of the Kaiser looks exactly like him." Evidently she and Mrs. Payson were going Hunning among the films.
Aunt Charlotte looked up from her dessert. "I thought you wanted me to show you that new block stitch this evening." Jeannette's knitting was more ambitious than expert.
"I do. But I've got a date with my girl friend to go to the movie first." She grinned at the stately white-haired companion of her revels and the two giggled like school girls. Jeannette's rollicking peasant humour appealed to Mrs. Payson. She seemed to draw new life from the abounding health and spirits of Jeannette.
They had eaten their dessert. In another moment they would leave the table. Jeannette and Mrs. Payson would get their wraps and clank off in the old electric toward the Arcadia. Lottie sat back in her chair and gave a little indrawn gasp like a swimmer who plunges into icy water.
"I had my first inoculation to-day, and my vaccination."
The minds of the three other women at the table, busy with their own small projects, refused to grasp the meaning of this statement thrust so suddenly upon them. "Vaccination?" Mrs. Payson had caught this one familiar word and now held it dully, awaiting an explanation.
"I'm going to France two weeks from to-day," said Lottie. She braced herself, one hand clutching her napkin tight as if that would sustain her.
But there was no storm. Not yet. Mrs. Carrie Payson's will refused to accept the message that her ears had flashed to her brain.
"Don't be silly, Lottie," she said. She brushed a cooky crumb from the front of her waist.
Lottie leaned forward. "Mama, don't you understand? I'm going to France. I'm going in two weeks. I've signed. It's all arranged. I'm going. In two weeks."
"Oh golly!" cried Jeannette, "how perfectly grand!" Aunt Charlotte's hand was weaving nervous palsied circles on the tablecloth, round and round. She champed her teeth as always when she was terribly excited. But Mrs. Payson sat suddenly waxen and yellow. You saw odd lines etched in her face that had not been there a moment before. She stared at Lottie. The whites of her eyes showed below the iris.
"This is a stroke," Lottie said to herself in a moment of hideous detachment. "She's going to have a stroke, and I've done it."
The red surged up into Mrs. Payson's face. "Well, you're not going, that's all. You're not going."
"Yes I am, mama," Lottie said then, quietly.
"And I say you won't. France! What for! What for!"
Aunt Charlotte stood up, her face working, her head shaking. She pointed a lean aspen finger at her sister. "Carrie Thrift, don't you stand in the way of her going. Don't you! Don't you!"
Even then Mrs. Payson's middle-class horror of being overheard by the servant in the kitchen triumphed over her anger. "Come on into the sitting room. I'm not going to have that girl listening." She went to the swinging door. "We're through, Liela. You can clear off." She eyed the girl sharply before the door swung back.
They marched into the sitting room in silence.
In the two weeks that followed Mrs. Payson never once relaxed her opposition. Yet she insisted on accompanying Lottie throughout the orgy of shopping that followed—scouring the stores for such commonplace articles as woollen stockings, woollen underwear, heavy shoes, bed socks, flannel bloomers, soap, hot water bag, candles, sugar, pins, needles. Sometimes her mother barely spoke to Lottie for hours. Yet strangely enough, Lottie had twice heard her say to a sympathetic clerk when she did not know Lottie was listening: "Yes, they are for my daughter who's going to France.... Yes, it is hard, but we've got to do our share." There had even been a ring of pride in her voice. Lottie heard her speaking at the telephone. "We'll miss her; but they need her more than we do." One could almost call it bragging.
She had a strangely detached feeling about it all. When Henry spoke gravely of U-boats she felt immune, as when one hears of typhus in China. This person who was going to France was not Lottie Payson at all—Lottie Payson, aged thirty-three, of Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. This was some new, selfish, driven being to whom all the old familiar things and people—the house, the decrepit electric, Aunt Charlotte, her mother, Emma Barton—were remote and inconsequential.
She and Charley had had one brief honest moment together. "I wanted to go too," Charley had said. "I do still. But I'm not going. I want to see Jesse. I want him so much that sometimes I find myself doing things that I thought only women in novels did. Stretching out my arms to him in the dark.... The girls of my sort who are going are going for the excitement of it—for the trip, you might almost say. Oh, I know a lot of women—thousands—are moved by the finest kind of patriotism. But—well, for example, that pretty Olive Banning who's in our advertising department. She's going. She says all the men are over there."
The night before leaving, Lottie Payson suffered that agony of self-reproach and terror which unaccustomed travellers feel who are leaving all that is dear and safe and familiar. She lay there in bed in her quiet room and great waves of fear and dread swept over her—not fear of what she was going to, but of what she was leaving behind.
She sat up in bed. Listened. If only she might hear some sound to break the stillness—the grinding of a Cottage Grove avenue car—the whistle of an Illinois Central train. Suddenly she swung her legs over the side of the bed, thrust her feet into slippers and stole down the hall to her mother's room. She wanted to talk to her. She'd be awake; awake and sitting up, alone and fearful, just as she herself was. Her mother's door was open. The room was dark, quite. Lottie peered in, sure of a little breathless silence that should precede her mother's whispered, "Is that you, Lottie?" But from within the room came a sleeper's breathing, deep, full, regular. Her mother was asleep. Her mother was asleep! The knowledge hurt her, angered her. She ought to be awake—awake and fearful. Lottie leaned against the doorsill and pitied herself a little. An occasional strangled snore came from the bed. "I should have gone years ago," Lottie told herself.
She turned back to her room, not taking the trouble to tiptoe now. Past Aunt Charlotte's room.
"Lottie! Is that you?"
Lottie groped in the darkness for the bed and that shrill whisper. "Yes. I—I couldn't sleep.——"
"I should think not. Come here to Auntie." That was what she had always said in the first years, long ago, when Lottie and Belle were children, afraid or hurt. "Come here to Auntie." Her hand was on Lottie's shoulder, warm and comforting. "Child alive, you haven't got a thing around you! Here, get the silk quilt. It's over the foot of the bed. I didn't put it away."
"I've got it." Lottie hunched it gratefully about her chilly shoulders. They were talking in guilty whispers. Lottie huddled at the side of the bed. "I can't go, Aunt Charlotte. I can't go."
"Fiddlesticks! That's the middle of the night talking. Wait till you've had a cup of coffee at eight to-morow morning and see how you feel about going."
Lottie knew she was right. Yet she must justify her own terror. "It isn't fair to Jeannette. I've been thinking of her."
Great-aunt Charlotte snickered a little. "Never you mind about Jeannette."
"But I do. I brought her here. I'm responsible——"
"Listen to me, Lottie. I went up to Jeannette's room a few nights ago to bring her that little brooch I gave her. The garnet one. She was standing in front of the mirror in her nightgown—don't say a word to your ma—you know how Jeannette always brushes her hair and leaves it loose when she goes to bed? Well, there she was, doing it different ways to see which was most becoming in bed. I saw her. And tying it with a big pink bow." She snickered again, wickedly.
"Why Aunt Charlotte Thrift?"
"Yesma'am! She'll probably marry that boy before he's off for service. And stay right on here until he comes back. So don't you worry about her being a human sacrifice, Lottie Payson. It's the Jeannettes that make the world go round. They don't stop to think. They just act."
Lottie went back to bed feeling reassured, almost light-hearted. Next morning at breakfast her mother said, "I didn't close my eyes all night."
They made a good-sized group at the station. Her mother, Aunt Charlotte, Jeannette, Belle, Henry, Charley, of course. Then, all The Girls. And Emma Barton was there. Winnie Steppler was in France for her syndicate of papers sending back stories about the Kansas and Nebraska and Wyoming lads in Paris—the best stories of her career. And Ben Gartz was at the station. He was there in spats, and a check suit, and what is known as a trench coat, with a belt and full skirt; and a little green soft hat with a tiny scarlet feather stuck in the band, toward the back. He had regained some of his former weight, and though he was dapper and spruce he looked plump and pink-jowled and prime. Surprisingly young, too. It was said that, quite outside the flourishing wrist-watch business, he had just made a little fortune in War Steel. He joked with Charley. "You little rascal!" Lottie heard him say; and Charley had laughed and looked arch. When he came over to Lottie his admiring eyes were still on Charley's slim young figure. "That little niece of yours is a card! She's a wonder, that kid." Ben and The Girls had brought books, candy, flowers, magazines. Ben had taken the name of the New York hotel at which she was to stop overnight. She saw, in anticipation, more books, flowers, candy. She wished he wouldn't. Effie Case's eyes were red. Lottie wished that the train would start. They were standing round, with nothing more to say. How old Henry looked. What a dear he was. Fine. Too fine and good.
The train gave a tremendous jerk. She stood on the car steps, looking down on them. They, on the platform, waved hands, handkerchiefs, their faces upturned to her.
"Cable the minute you land."
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"
"If you see Vernon Hatch tell him——"
"Stationed at Nancy I think—or maybe it's Soissons."
"Woollen stockings when you get——"
"Good-bye!... 'Bye!"
The train gathered speed. They dwindled. Ben Gartz, standing just beside Charley, took hold of her arm above the elbow and leaning over her looked down into her face, laughing and saying something. Dimly, Lottie saw the little group turning away. Ben's arm still grasped Charley's, proprietorially.
A wave of fear and apprehension so violent as to be almost dizzying swept over Lottie. "Wait a minute!" she cried to the astonished porter who was carrying in bags and boxes piled on the car platform. "Wait a minute!"
"Too late now, lady. Ef yo' fo'got som'hum Ah kin sen' yo' wiah at Elkhart. Elkhart's nex' stop, lady."