THE HOME-MAKER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
A MONTESSORI MOTHER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
THE BENT TWIG
THE REAL MOTIVE
FELLOW CAPTAINS
(With Sarah N. Cleghorn)
UNDERSTOOD BETSY
HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
THE DAY OF GLORY
THE BRIMMING CUP
ROUGH-HEWN
RAW MATERIAL

THE
HOME-MAKER

BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY,
IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

THE HOME-MAKER

PART ONE

Chapter 1

I

SHE was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times! Warned him, and begged of him, and implored him to be careful. The children simply paid no attention to what she said. None. She might as well talk to the wind. Hot grease too! That soaked into the wood so. She would never get it clean.

She shook the surplus of water from her scrubbing-brush, sat back on her heels, sprinkled cleaning-powder on the bristles—the second can of cleaning-powder this month, and the price gone up so!—and setting her strong teeth hard, flew at the spots again, her whole body tense with determination.

A sober-faced little boy in clean gingham rompers, with a dingy Teddy-bear in his arms, appeared at the door of the dining-room behind her, looked in cautiously, surveyed his mother’s quivering, energetic back for an instant, and retreated silently without being seen.

She stopped, breathless, dipped her hand into the pail of hot soapy water, and brought out a hemmed, substantial floor-cloth, clean and whole. When, with a quick twist, she had wrung this out, she wiped the suds from the floor and looked sharply at the place she had been scrubbing.

The grease spots still showed, implacably dark against the white wood about them.

Her face clouded, she gave a smothered exclamation and seized the scrubbing-brush again.

In the next room a bell tinkled. The telephone! It always rang when it would bother her most.

She dropped her brush, stood up with one powerful thrust of her body, and went to wipe her hands on the roller-towel which hung, smooth and well-ironed, by the sink.

The bell rang again. Exasperated by its unreasonableness, she darted across the dining-room and snatched the receiver from the hook.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Knapp.”

.......

“Oh, it’s you, Mattie.”

.......

“Oh, all about as usual here, thank you. Helen has one of her awful colds, but not so I have to keep her at home. And Henry’s upset again, that chronic trouble with his digestion. The doctor doesn’t seem to do him any good.”

.......

“No, my eczema is no worse. On my arm now.”

.......

“How could I keep it perfectly quiet? I have to use it! You know I have everything to do. And anyhow I don’t know that’s it’s any worse to use it. I keep it bandaged of course.”

.......

“Oh, Stephen’s well enough. He’s never sick, you know. But into everything! He drives me frantic when I’m flying around and trying to get the work done up; and I don’t know what to do with him when he gets into those tantrums. It’ll be an awful relief to me when he starts to school with the others. Perhaps the teachers can do something with him. I don’t envy them.”

.......

“Mercy, no, Mattie! How can you think of such a thing? I never can take the time for outings! I was right in the midst of scrubbing the kitchen floor when you rang up. I’m way behind in everything. I always am. There’s not a room in the house that’s fit to look at. And I’ve got to make some of those special health-flour biscuits for supper. The doctor said to keep trying them for Henry.”

.......

“How can I go out more and rest more? You know what there is to do. Somebody’s got to do it.”

.......

“Yes, I know that’s what the doctor keeps telling me. I’d just like to have him spend a day in my place and see how he thinks I could manage. Nobody understands! People talk as though I worked the way I do just to amuse myself. What else can I do? It’s all got to be done, hasn’t it?”

.......

“No, it’s nice of you to suggest it, but I couldn’t manage it. It would just waste your time to come round this way and stop. It’s simply out of the question for me to think of going.”

.......

“Well, thank you just the same. I appreciate your thinking of me. I’m sure I hope you have a lovely time.”

An ominous silence in the house greeted her as she hung up the receiver and turned away. What could Stephen be up to, now? She had not heard a sound from him for some time. That was always alarming from Stephen.

“Stephen!” She called quickly and stood listening for an answer, her fine dark brows drawn together tensely.

The house waited emptily with her for the answer which did not come.

“Stephen!” she shouted, turning so that her voice would carry up the stairs.

“Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick—” whispered the little mantelpiece clock hurriedly in the silence.

She was rarely quiet enough to hear that sound, but when it did come to her ears, it always said pressingly, “So much to do! So much to do! So much to do!”

She looked at it and frowned. Half-past two already! And that floor only half scrubbed. What possessed people to call you up on the telephone at all hours? Didn’t anybody realize what she had to do!

“Stephen!” she called irritably, running upstairs. Was there anything more exasperating than to have a child not answer when you called? Helen and Henry had never dreamed of that when they had been his age. It was another one of his naughty tricks, a new one! He had a new one every day. And he always knew just when was the worst possible time to try one on. The water in her scrubbing pail was cooling off all the time and she had just filled up the reservoir of the kitchen stove with cold, so that she couldn’t have another pailful of hot for an hour.

“Stephen!” The thought of the cooling water raised the heat of her resentment against the child.

She looked hastily into the spotless bathroom, the bedroom where Stephen’s smooth white cot stood by his parents’ bed, into Henry’s little dormer-windowed cubby-hole—there! Henry had left his shoes in the middle of the floor again!—into Helen’s room where a great bias fold in the badly made bed deepened the line between her eyes.

Still no Stephen. It was too much. With all she had to do, slaving day and night to keep the house nice for them all who never thought of appreciating it, never any rest or change, her hair getting thinner all the time, simply coming out by handfuls, and she had had such beautiful hair, so many things to do this afternoon while Mattie was out, enjoying herself, riding in a new car, and now everything stopped because of this naughty trick of Stephen’s of not answering.

“Stephen!” she screamed, her face darkly flushed. “Tell me where you are this minute!”

In that tiny house he must be quite within earshot.

But the tiny house sent back not the faintest murmur of response. The echo of her screaming voice died away to a dead silence that closed in on her menacingly and laid on her feverish, angry heart the cold touch of terror.

Suppose that Stephen were not hiding from her! Suppose he had stepped out into the yard a moment and had been carried away. There had been those rough-looking men loitering in the streets yesterday—tramps from the railroad yards.... Oh, and the railroad yards so close! Mrs. Elmore’s little Harry killed there by a freight-train. Or the river! Standing there in the dark upper hall, she saw Stephen’s little hands clutching wildly at nothing and going down under that dreadful, cold, brown water. Stephen, her baby, her darling, the strongest and brightest of them all, her favorite....

She flew down the stairs and out the front door into the icy February air, calling wildly: “Stephen! Stevie! Stevie, darling!”

But the dingy street was quite empty save for a grocer’s wagon standing in front of one of the little clapboarded houses. She ran down to this and asked the boy driving it: “Have you seen Stephen since you turned into the street? You know, little Stephen Knapp?”

“No, I ain’t seen him,” said the boy, looking up and down the street with her.

A thin old woman came out on the front porch of the house next to the Knapp’s.

“You haven’t seen Stephen, have you, Mrs. Anderson?” called Stephen’s mother.

“No, I haven’t see him, Mrs. Knapp. I don’t believe he’d go out this cold day. He’s just hiding on you somewhere. Children will do that, if you let them. If he were my child, Mrs. Knapp, I’d cure him of that trick before he so much as started it—by the shingle method too! I never used to let my children get ahead of me. Once you let them get the start on you with some....”

Mrs. Knapp’s anxious face reddened with resentment. She went back to her own house and shut the door behind her hard.

Inside she began a systematic search of every possible hiding place, racing from one to another, now hot with anger, now cold with fear, sick, sick with uncertainty. She did not call the child now. She hunted him out silently and swiftly.

But there was no Stephen in the house. He must have gone out! Even if he were safe, he would be chilled to the bone by this time! And suppose he were not safe! If only they didn’t live in such an abominable part of the town, so near the railroad yards and the slums! Her anger dropped away. She forgot the barb planted in her vanity by old Mrs. Anderson. As she flung on her wraps, she was shivering from head to foot; she was nothing but loving, suffering, fearing motherhood. If she had seen her Stephen struggling in the arms of a dozen big hoodlums, she would have flown at them like a tigress, armed only with teeth and claws and her passionate heart.

Her hand on the doorknob, she thought of one last place she had not searched. The dark hole under the stairs. She turned to that and flung back the curtain.

Stephen was there, his Teddy-bear clutched in his arms, silent, his round face grim and hard, scowling defiantly at her.

II

When Mother was scrubbing a floor was always a good time for Stephen. She forgot all about you for a while. Oh, what a weight fell off from your shoulders when Mother forgot about you for a while! How perfectly lovely it was just to walk around in the bedroom and know she wouldn’t come to the door any minute and look at you hard and say, “What are you doing, Stephen?” and add, “How did you get your rompers so dirty?”

Stephen stepped about and about in the room, silently, drawing long breaths. The bed, the floor, the bureau, everything looked different to you in the times when Mother forgot about you for a minute. It occurred to Stephen that maybe it was a rest to them, too, to have Mother forget about them and stop dusting and polishing and pushing them around. They looked sort of peaceful, the way he felt. He nodded his head to the bed and looked with sympathy at the bureau.

The lower drawer was a little open. There was something white showing.... Mother didn’t allow you to open her bureau drawers, but that looked like ... it was! He pulled the drawer open and snatched out his Teddy-bear ... his dear, dear Teddy-bear. So that was where she had hidden it!

He sat down on the floor, holding the bear tightly in his arms, wave after wave of relief washing over him in a warm relaxing flood. All his life long, ever since he could remember, more than three years now, he had gone to sleep with his big Teddy in his arms. The sight of the faithful pointed face, like no other face, the friendly staring black eyes, the familiar feel of the dear, woolly body close to him—they were saturated with a thousand memories of peace, with a thousand associations of drowsy comfort and escape from trouble. Days when he had been punished and then shut, screaming furiously, into the bedroom to “cry it out,” he had gone about blindly, feeling for Teddy through his tears, and, exhausted by his shrieking and kicking and anger, had often fallen asleep on the floor, Teddy in his arms, exercising that mystic power of consolation. The groove in Stephen’s brain was worn deep and true; Teddy meant quiet and rest and safety ... and Stephen needed all he could get of those elements in his stormy little life, made up, so much of it, of fierce struggles against forces stronger than he.

The little boy sat on the floor of the quiet room, surrounded by the quiet furniture, resting itself visibly, and hugged his recovered treasure tightly to him, his round cheek pressed hard against the dingy white wool of the stuffed muzzle. He loved Teddy! He loved his Teddy! He was lost in unfathomable peace to have found him again. All the associations of tranquillity, the only tranquillity in Stephen’s life, which had accumulated about Teddy, rose in impalpable clouds about the child. What the smell of incense and the murmur of prayers are to the believer, what the first whiffs of his pipe to the dog-tired woodsman, what a green-shaded lamp over a quiet study table to the scholar, all that and more was Teddy to Stephen. His energetic, pugnacious little face grew dreamy, his eyes wide and gentle. For a moment not only had Mother forgotten about him, but he had forgotten about Mother.

Was it only four days ago that this new bitter phase of Stephen’s struggle for existence had come up? Mother had taken him to call on a lady. They had walked and walked and walked, Stephen’s short legs twinkling fast beside Mother’s long, strong stride, his arm almost pulled out of the socket by the firm grasp on his mittened hand by which she drew him along at her pace. He had been breathless when they arrived, and filled with that ruffled, irritable, nervous fatigue which walking with Mother always gave him. Then, after long and intolerably dull conversation, during which Stephen had been obliged to “sit still and don’t touch things,” the lady had showed them that hideous, pitiable, tragic wreck, which she had said was a washed Teddy-bear. “It suddenly occurred to me, Mrs. Knapp, that the amount of dirt and microbes that creature had been accumulating for two years must be beyond words. Molly drags it around on the floor, as like as not....”

“Yes, just like Stephen with his Teddy,” Stephen’s mother said.

“And once I thought of it, it made me shudder. So I just put it in the tub and washed it. You see it came out all right.”

She held up the dreadful remains, by one limp, lumpy arm, and both the mothers looked at it with interest and approval. Stephen’s horror had been unspeakable. If Mother did that to his Teddy ... his Teddy who was like a part of himself.... The fierce fighting look had come into Stephen’s eyes and under the soft curves of rounded baby flesh he set his jaw.

But he had said nothing to Mother as they tore back across town, Mother in a hurry about getting her supper on time. Mother prided herself on never yet having set a meal on the table a single minute late. He said nothing, partly because he had no breath left over from his wild leaps from curb to paving and from paving to curb; and partly because he had not the slightest idea how to express the alarm, the bleeding grief, within him. Stephen’s life so far had developed in him more capacity for screaming and kicking and biting than for analyzing and expressing his feelings in words.

That night Mother had taken Teddy away—treacherously, while Stephen was asleep. The next morning she announced that now she thought of the dirt and microbes on Teddy it made her shudder and as soon as she found time she would wash him and give him back to Stephen. Stephen had been filled with a silent frenzy every time he thought of it.

But now he had found Teddy, held him again in his arms that had ached for emptiness these three nights past. Stephen’s hot little warrior’s heart softened to love and quiet as he sat there; and presently there came to his calmer mind the plan to go to tell Mother about it. If he told her about it, maybe she wouldn’t take Teddy away and spoil him.

He went downstairs to find Mother, his lower lip trembling a little with his hope and fear, as Mother had not seen it since Stephen was a little tiny baby. Nor did she see it this time.

He went to the kitchen door and looked in, and instantly knew through a thousand familiar channels that it would do no good to tell Mother, then—or ever. The kitchen was full, full to suffocation with waves of revolt, and exasperation, and haste, and furious determination, which clashed together in the air above that quivering, energetic figure kneeling on the floor. They beat savagely on the anxious face of the little boy. He recognized them from the many times he had felt them and drew back from them, an instant reflection of revolt and determination lurid on his own face. How could he have thought, even for a moment, of telling Mother!

He turned away clutching Teddy and looked about him wildly. All around him was the inexorable prison of his warm, clean, well-ordered home. No escape. No appeal. No way to protect what was dear to him! There fell upon him that most sickening and poisonous of human emotions, the sensation of utter helplessness before physical violence. Mother would take Teddy away and do whatever she pleased with him because she was stronger than Stephen. The brute forces of jungle life yelled loud in Stephen’s ears and mocked at his helplessness.

But Stephen was no Henry or Helen to droop, to shrink and quail. He fled to his own refuge, the only one which left him a shred of human dignity: fierce, hopeless, endless resistance: the determination of every brave despairing heart confronted with hopeless odds, at least to sell his safety dear; to fight as long as his strength held out: never, never to surrender of his own accord. Over something priceless, over what made him Stephen, the little boy stood guard savagely with the only weapons he had.

First of all he would hide. He would hold Teddy in his arms as long as he could, and hide, and let Mother call to him all she wanted to, while he braced himself to endure with courage the tortures which would inevitably follow ... the scolding which Mother called “talking to him,” the beating invisible waves of fury flaming at him from all over Mother, which made Stephen suffer more than the physical blows which always ended things, for by the time they arrived he was usually so rigid with hysteria himself that he did not feel them much.

Under the stairs ... she would not think of that for a long time. He crept in over the immaculately clean floor, drew the curtains back of him, and sat upright, cross-legged, holding Teddy to his breast with all his might, dry-eyed, scowling, a magnificent sulphurous conflagration of Promethean flames blazing in his little heart.

Chapter 2

WHEN Lester Knapp stepped dispiritedly out from Willing’s Emporium, he felt, as he usually did, a thin little mittened hand slip into each of his.

“Hello, Father,” said Helen.

“Hello, Father,” said Henry.

“Hello, children,” said Father, squeezing their hands up tightly and looking down into their upturned faces.

“How’s tricks?” he asked, as they stepped off, his lagging step suddenly brisk. “What did the teacher say to that composition, Helen?”

“She said it was fine!” said the little girl eagerly. “She read it out to the class. She said maybe they’d get me to write the play for the entertainment our class is going to give, a history play, you know, something that would bring in Indians and the early settlers and the hiding regicides and what we’ve been studying. I wanted to ask you if you thought I could start it inside one of the houses, the night of an Indian attack, everybody loading muskets and barring the shutters and things, and the old hidden regicide looking out through a crack to see where the Indians were.”

“Oh, that would be great!” cried Henry admiringly, craning his neck around his father to listen. “What’s a regicide?” Henry was three grades behind Helen in school and hadn’t begun on history. His father and sister explained to him, both talking at once. And then they laughed to hear their words clashing together. They swung along rapidly, talking, laughing, interrupting each other, Henry constantly asking questions, the other two developing the imaginary scene, thrilling at the imaginary danger, loading imaginary muskets, their voices chiming out like bells in the cold evening air. Once in a while, Henry, who was small for his age, gave a little animated hop and skip to keep up with the others.

In front of the delicatessen-grocery store at the corner of their street, the father suddenly drew them to a halt. “What was it Mother asked me to bring home with me?” He spoke anxiously, and anxiously the children looked up at him. Suppose he should not be able to remember it!

But he did. It was a package of oatmeal and a yeast-cake. He dragged them triumphantly up from his memory.

They entered the shop and found Aunt Mattie Farnham there, buying ginger cookies and potato salad and boiled ham. “My! I’m ashamed to have you Knapps catch me at this!” she protested with that Aunt Mattieish laugh of hers that meant that she wasn’t really ashamed, or anything but cheerfully ready to make fun of herself. “It’s not Evangeline Knapp who’d be buying delicatessen stuff for her family’s supper at six o’clock at night! We went out in the new Buick this afternoon.... Oh, Lester, she’s a dream, simply a dream! And we went further than we meant. You always do, you know. And of course, being me, there’s not a thing in the house to eat. I put Frank and the children to setting the table while I tore over here. Don’t you tell Evangeline on me, Lester. I tried to get her to go and take Stephen, but she wouldn’t—had biscuits to make for supper and a floor to scrub or something. She never lets things go, as I do. She’s a perfect wonder, Evangeline is, anyhow. An example to us all, I always tell ’em. After I’ve been in your house, I declare, I’m ashamed to set foot in my own!”

While the grocer wrapped up her purchases she stooped her fair smiling face towards Helen to say, “My gracious, honey, how swell we do look in our new coat! Where did Momma buy that for you?”

Helen looked down at it as if to see what coat it was, as if she had forgotten that she wore a coat. Then she said, “She made it, Mother made it, out of an old coat Gramma Houghton sent us. The collar and cuffs are off Cousin Celia’s last-winter one.”

Aunt Mattie was lost in admiration. She turned Helen around to get the effect of the back. “Well, your mother is the wonder!” she cried heartily, again. “I never saw anybody to beat her for style! Give Evangeline Knapp a gunny sack and a horse-blanket and she’ll turn you out a fifty-dollar coat, I always tell ’em. Would anybody but her have dreamed of using that blue and light green together? It makes it look positively as if it came right from Fifth Avenue. I don’t dare buy me a new hat or a suit unless Evangeline says it’s all right. You can’t fool her on style! What did you ever do, Lester Knapp, to deserve such a wife, I’d like to know.”

She laughed again, as Aunt Mattie always did, just for the sake of laughing, gave Henry and Helen each a cookie out of her paper bag, and took up her boughten salad and boughten boiled ham and went off, repeating, “Now, folks, don’t you go and give me away!”

The grocery store seemed very silent after she left. Mr. Knapp bought his yeast-cake and package of oatmeal and they went out without a word. They didn’t feel like talking any more. The children were eating fast on their cookies to finish them before they reached home.

They turned up the walk to the house in silence, stood for some time scraping the snow and mud off their shoes on the wire mat at the foot of the steps and went on their toes up to the cocoa-fiber mat in front of the door.

When they finally opened the door and stepped in, an appetizing odor of hot chocolate and something fresh out of the oven met them. Also the sound of the clock striking half-past six. Good, they were on time. It was very important to be on time. Little Stephen sat on the bottom step of the stairs, waiting for them, his face swollen and mottled, his eyes very red, his mouth clamped shut in a hard line.

“Oh, gee! I bet Stevie’s been bad again!” murmured Henry pityingly. He went quickly to his little brother and tried to toss him up. But the heavy child was too much of a weight for his thin arms. He only succeeded in giving him a great hug. Helen did this too, and laid the fresh, outdoor coolness of her cheek against the little boy’s hot face, glazed by tears. They none of them made a sound.

Lester Knapp stood silently looking at them.

Their mother came to the door, fresh in a well-ironed, clean, gingham house-dress.

“Well, Evie dear, what’s the news from home?” asked Lester, as the children separated and began quickly hanging up their wraps. Stephen slipped off back towards the kitchen.

“Oh, all right,” she said in her dear, well-modulated voice, her eyes on Helen, to whom she now said quietly, with a crescendo effect of patient self-restraint, “Don’t wriggle around on one foot that way to take off your rubbers. Sit down on a chair. No, not that one, it’s too high. This one. Lay down your schoolbooks. You can’t do anything with them under your arm. There are your mittens on the floor. Put them in your pocket and you’ll know where to find them. Unless they’re damp. Are they damp? If they are, take them into the kitchen and put them on the rack to dry.” As the child turned away, she called after her, making her give a nervous jump, “Not too close to the stove, or they’ll burn.”

She turned to Henry now (Stephen had disappeared). He froze to immobility, looking at her out of timid shadowed eyes, as if like a squirrel, he hoped by standing very still to make himself small....

Apparently Henry had taken off his coat and hat satisfactorily and had suitably disposed of his mittens, for, after passing her eyes over his small person in one sweep, she turned away, saying over her shoulder, “I’m just going to put supper on the table. You’ll have time to wash your hands while I dish up the things.”

Henry drew a long breath and started upstairs. His father stood looking after him till with a little start he came to himself and followed.

The supper bell rang by the time their hands and faces were washed. Helen and Henry washed Stephen’s. They did not talk. They kept their attention on what they were doing, rinsing out the wash-basin after they had finished, hanging the towels up smoothly and looking responsibly around them at the immaculate little room before they went downstairs.

The supper was exquisitely cooked, nourishing, light, daintily served. Scalloped potatoes, done to a turn; a broiled beefsteak with butter melting oozily on it; frothing, well-whipped chocolate; small golden biscuits made out of a health-flour.

The children tucked their clean napkins under their chins, spread them out carefully over their clean clothes and, all but Stephen, ate circumspectly.

“Nothing special happened to-day, then?” asked Mr. Knapp in a cheerful voice, looking over at the erect, well-coifed house-mother.

“Just the usual things,” answered Mrs. Knapp, reaching out to push Henry’s plate a little nearer to him. “I haven’t been out anywhere, and nobody has been in. Stephen, don’t eat so fast. Mattie telephoned. Their new car has come. Henry, do sit up straighter. You’ll be positively hunchbacked if you keep stooping over so.”

At the mention of Aunt Mattie and the new car, a self-conscious silence dropped over the older children and their father. They looked down at their plates.

“Helen, did you put salt on your potatoes?” asked her mother. “I don’t put in as much as we like, because the doctor says Henry shouldn’t eat things very salt.”

“I put some on,” said Helen.

“Enough?” asked her mother doubtfully. “You know it takes a lot for potatoes.”

Helen tasted her potatoes, as though she had not till then thought about them. “Yes, there’s enough,” she said.

“Let me taste them,” said her mother, holding out her hand for the plate. After she had tasted them she said, “Why, there’s not nearly enough, they’re perfectly flat. Here, give me that salt-cellar.” She added the salt, tasted the potatoes again and pushed the plate back to Helen, who went on eating with small mouthfuls, chewing conscientiously.

There was another silence.

Mr. Knapp helped himself to another biscuit, and said as he spread it with butter, “Aren’t these biscuits simply great! You’d never know, by the taste, they were good for you, would you?”

Helen looked up quickly with a silent, amused smile. Her eyes met her father’s with understanding mirth.

“Take smaller mouthfuls, Stephen,” said Mrs. Knapp.

Nobody said a word, made a comment, least of all her husband, but she went on with some heat as if in answer to an unspoken criticism. “I know I keep at the children all the time! But how can I help it? They’ve got to learn, haven’t they? It certainly is no pleasure to me to do it! Somebody’s got to bring them up.”

The others quailed in silent remorse before this arraignment. Not so Stephen. He paid no attention whatever to it. His mother often said bitterly that he paid no attention to anything a grown-up said unless you screamed at him and stamped your foot.

“Gimme some more meat,” he said heartily, pushing his plate towards his father.

“Say, ‘Please, Father,’” commanded his mother.

He looked blackly at her, longingly at the steak, decided that the occasion was not worth a battle and said, “Please, father,” in a tone which he contrived, with no difficulty whatever, to make insulting.

His mother’s worn, restrained face took on a deeper shade of disheartenment, but she did not lift the cast-down glove, and the provocative accent of rebellion continued to echo in the room triumphant and unchecked. It did not seem to increase the appetite of the other children. They kept their eyes cast down and made themselves small in their chairs.

It had no effect on Stephen’s enjoyment of his meal. He ate heartily, like a robust lumberman who has been battling with the elements all day and knows he must fortify himself for a continuation of the same struggle to-morrow. The mottled spots on his cheeks blended into his usual healthy red. He stopped eating for a moment to take a long and audible draught out of his mug.

“Don’t make a noise when you drink your milk,” said his mother.

The others ate lightly, sipping at their chocolate, taking tiny mouthfuls of the steak and potatoes.

“Helen’s school composition had quite a success,” said Helen’s father. “They are going to have some dramatics at the school and....”

“What are dramatics?” asked Henry.

“Oh, that’s the general name for plays, comedies, you know, and tragedies and....”

“What is a comedy?” asked Henry. “What is a tragedy?”

“Good Heavens, Henry,” said his father, laughingly, “I never saw anybody in my life who could ask as many questions as you. You wear the life out of me!”

“He doesn’t bother me with them,” said his mother, her inflection presenting the statement as a proof of her superior merit.

Henry shrank a little smaller. His father hastened to explain what a tragedy was and what a comedy was. Another silence fell. Then, “Quite cold to-day,” said Mr. Knapp. “The boys at the office said that the thermometer....” He had tried to stop himself the moment the word “office” was out of his mouth. But it was too late. He stuck fast at “thermometer,” for an instant and then, hurriedly as if quite aware that no one cared how he finished the sentence, he added, “stood at only ten above this morning.”

Mrs. Knapp had glanced up sharply at the word “office” and her eyes had darkened at the pause afterwards. She was looking hard at her husband now, as if his hesitation, as if his accent had told her something. “Young Mr. Willing didn’t get back to-day, did he?” she asked gravely.

Mr. Knapp took a long drink of his hot chocolate. “Yes, he did,” he said at last, setting down his cup and looking humbly at his wife.

“Did they announce the reorganization ... the way he’s going to....” asked Mrs. Knapp. As if she did not know the answer already!

They both already knew everything that was to be asked and answered, but there seemed no escape from going on.

“Yes, they did,” said Mr. Knapp, trying to chew on a mouthful of steak.

“Who did they put in charge of your office?” asked Mrs. Knapp, adding in an aside, “Helen, don’t hold your fork like that.”

“Harvey Bronson,” said Mr. Knapp, trying to make it sound like any other name.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Knapp.

She made no comment on the news. She made it a point never to criticize their father before the children.

Helen’s eyes went over timidly towards her father, sideways under lowered lids. She wished she dared give him a loving look of reassurance to show him how dearly she loved him and sympathized with him because he had not had the advancement they had all hoped for so long, because a younger man and one who was especially mean to Father had been put over his head. Her heart swelled and ached. She would get Father off in a corner after dinner and give him a big silent hug. He would understand.

But as it happened, she did not. Other things happened.

There was almost total silence during the rest of the meal. Mrs. Knapp did not eat another mouthful of food after her husband’s news. The others made a pretense of cutting up food and swallowing it. Helen and Henry cleared off the table and brought in the dessert.

“Be careful about holding the meat-platter straight, Henry,” cautioned his mother. “I scrubbed on those last grease spots till nearly five o’clock this afternoon. It makes it very hard for Mother when you and Helen are careless.” Her voice was carefully restrained.

“How is your eczema, to-night, Eva?” asked her husband.

“Oh, about the same,” she said. She served out the golden preserved peaches, passed the home-made cake, but took none herself. After sitting for a few moments, she pushed back her chair and said: “I don’t care for any dessert to-night. I’ll just go and start on the dishes. You can come out to help when you finish eating.”

Her husband looked up at her, his face pale and shadowed. He tried to catch her eyes. But she averted them, and without a glance at him walked steadily out into the kitchen.

Her presence was still as heavy in the room as though she sat there, brooding over them. They conscientiously tried to eat. They did not look at each other.

They heard her begin to pile up the dishes at the sink, working rapidly as she always did. They heard her step swiftly back towards the kitchen table as though to pick up a dish there. They heard her stop short with appalling abruptness; and for a long moment a silence filled the little house, roaring loudly in their ears as they gazed at each other, across the table. What could have happened?

And then, with the effect of a clap of thunder shaking them to the bone, came a sudden rending outburst of sobs, strangled weeping, the terrifying sounds of an hysteric breakdown.

They rushed out into the kitchen. Mrs. Knapp stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, both hands pressed over her face, trying in vain to restrain the tears which rained down through her fingers, the sobs which convulsed her tall, strong body. From her feet to the dining-room door stretched a fresh line of grease spots. Henry had once more tilted the meat-platter as he carried it.

She heard them come in; she gave a muffled inarticulate cry, half pronounced words they could not understand, and, rushing past them, still shaking with sobs, she ran upstairs to her room. They heard the door shut, the click of the latch loud and distinct in the silent house.

“I want another help of peaches,” said Stephen greedily, taking instant advantage of his mother’s absence. “I like peaches.”

His father thought sometimes that Stephen was like the traditional changeling, hard, heartless, inhuman.

Henry’s face had turned very white. He stood looking dully at his father and sister, his lips hanging half-open. He turned from white to a yellow-green, and a shudder shook him. He whispered hastily, thickly, unintelligibly (but they understood because they had seen those signs many times before), he murmured, his hand clapped over his mouth, his shoulders bowed, “... ’mfraid goin’ be sick,” and ran upstairs to the bathroom.

They followed and found him vomiting, leaning over the bowl, his legs bending and trembling under him. His father put one arm around the thin little body and held his head clumsily with the other hand. Helen stood by, helplessly sympathetic. Henry looked so awfully sick when he had those fits of nausea!

Henry vomited apologetically, as it were, trying feebly not to spatter any of the ill-smelling liquid on the bathroom wall or floor. In an instant’s pause between spasms he rolled his eyes appealingly at Helen, who sprang to his side.

“... ’mfraid got shome shstairs,” he said thickly, the words cut short by another agonizing fit of retching.

Helen darted away. Her father called her back. “What is it? What did Henry say?” he asked anxiously. “I’ll get him his medicine as soon as he is over this. I don’t believe you can reach it. It’s on that highest shelf.” Helen stood up on tiptoe and whispered in her father’s ear, “He said he was afraid he got some on the stairs, and I’m going to wipe it up.”

Her father nodded his instant understanding. The little girl flew to the corner closet where the cleaning cloths were hung and disappeared down the stairs.

The door to the bedroom opened and Mrs. Knapp appeared. Her eyes were still red, and her face very pale; but her expression was of strong, kind solicitude. She came straight into the bathroom where Henry stood, half-fainting, wavering from side to side.

“Oh, poor Henry!” she said. “Here, I’ll take care of him.”

Mr. Knapp stepped back, self-effacingly, and with relief. She picked the child up bodily in her strong arms and carried him into the bedroom where she laid him on the bed. In an instant she had whisked out a basin which she held ready with one hand. “Bring me a wet washcloth, cold,” she said to her husband, “and a glass of water.” When it came she wiped Henry’s lips clean, so that with a sigh of relief he closed his mouth; she held the glass to his lips, “Rinse out your mouth with this, dear. It’ll make you feel better.” When the next spasm came, she supported his forehead firmly, laying his head back on the pillow afterwards; and, sprinkling a little eau-de-cologne on a fresh handkerchief, she wiped the cold sweat from his face.

To lie down had relieved the strain on Henry. The eau-de-cologne had partly revived him. He began to look less ghastly; he began to feel less that this time he was really going to die. He drew strength consciously from his mother’s calm self-possession. Nobody could take care of you like Mother when there was something the matter with you, he thought.

Mother now turned to inspect the contents of the basin. “What ever can have upset Henry this time? I planned that supper specially for him, just the things he usually digests all right.”

A pause. Then, “What can those dark brown crumby lumps be?” she asked aloud. “We didn’t have anything like that for supper.”

Henry rolled his eyes at his father, and then closed them, weakly, helplessly.

His father said from the door, briefly, “We met Mattie when we were at Wertheimer’s and she gave each of the children a cookie.”

“Store cookies?” asked Henry’s mother, more with an exclamation point than a question.

“The regular ginger cookie ... a small one,” said her husband.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Knapp.

Behind Mr. Knapp in the obscurity of the hall, Helen slipped shadow-like, silently as a little mouse, back towards the closet where the cleaning cloths were kept. Her father hoped she had remembered to rinse the cloth well.

Mrs. Knapp sat down by Henry. She laid her hand on his forehead and said, “Mother doesn’t want to be scolding you all the time, Henry, but you must try to remember not to eat things away from home. You know your digestion is very delicate and you know how Mother tries to have just the right things for you here. If I do that, give up everything I’d like to do to stay here and cook things for you, you ought to be able to remember, don’t you think, not to eat other things?”

Her tone was reasonable. Her logic was unanswerable. Henry shrank to even smaller dimensions as he lay helpless on the bed.

She did not say a word to his father about having allowed Henry to eat the cookie. She never criticized their father before the children.

She got up now and put a light warm blanket over Henry. “Do you suppose you could get Stephen to bed, Lester?” she asked, over her shoulder. After he had gone, she sat holding Henry’s cold little frog’s paw in her warm hands till his circulation was normal and then helped him undress and get to bed.

When she went down to the kitchen she found that Helen and her father had tried to finish the evening work. The dishes were washed and put away. Helen was rinsing out the wiping-cloths, and Lester was sweeping. The clock showed a quarter of nine.

She looked sharply at what Helen was doing and plunged towards her with a gesture of impatience. “Mercy, Helen, don’t be so backhanded!” she cried, snatching a dripping cloth from the child’s hands. “I’ve told you a thousand times you can’t wring the water out of anything if you hold it like that!” She wrung the cloths one after another, her practised fingers flying like those of a prestidigitator. “Like that!” she said reprovingly to Helen, shaking them out and hanging them up to dry.

Seeing in Helen’s face no sign of any increase of intelligence about wringing out dishcloths, but only her usual cowed fear of further criticism, she said in a tone of complete discouragement:

“Oh, well, never mind! You’d better get to bed now. I’ll be up to rub the turpentine and lard on your chest by the time you’re undressed.” As the child trod softly out of the kitchen she threw after her like a hand-grenade, “Don’t forget your teeth!”

To her husband she said, taking the broom out of his hand and looking critically back over the floor he had been sweeping, “Don’t wait for me, Lester. I’ve got to change the dressings on my arm before I go to bed.”

“Can’t I help you with that, dear?” asked her husband.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I can manage all right.”

As he went out she was reflecting with a satisfaction that burned like fire that she was not as other women who “took it out” on their families when things went wrong. She never made scenes, not even when she was almost frenzied with irritations. She never lost her self-control—except of course once in a while with Stephen, and then never for more than an instant or two. Until the terrifying but really unavoidable breakdown of this evening, no one had ever seen her weep, heavy and poisonous as were the bitter tears she so frequently held back. She never forgot to say “thank you” and “please.” Her heart swelled with an angry sense of how far beyond criticism she was. Come what might she would do her duty to the uttermost.

She went up to Helen’s room, silently did the necessary things for her cold and kissed her good-night, saying, “Do try to make your bed a little better, dear. There was a great fold across it to-day from one corner to the other.”

Then she went downstairs and stepped about the house, picking up odd things and putting them in place: her usual evening occupation. As she hung up Henry’s muffler which lay on the floor at the foot of the coat-rack in the hall, her eyes fell on Helen’s coat. She looked at it with mingled pride and exasperation. There was not a woman of her acquaintance who could have taken those hopeless old materials and pieced and turned and fitted and made such a stylish little garment. She had always said to herself that no matter how poor they were, she would die before her little girl should feel humiliated for the lack of decent clothes. And yet ... what a strange child Helen was! She had put on that coat as if it had been any coat, as if she didn’t realize what a toilsome effort her mother had made to secure it. But children didn’t realize the sacrifices you made for them.

She had a moment of complete relaxation and satisfaction as she dropped into a chair to feast her eyes on the sofa. What a success it was! Could anybody recognize it for the old wreck which had stood out in front of the junk-shop on River Street all winter! She had seen its lines through its ruin, had guessed at the fine wood under the many coats of dishonoring paint. Every inch of it had been re-created by her hand and brain and purpose.

How sweet of Mattie Farnham to give her that striped velours to cover it with. She never could have afforded anything so fine. What lovely, lovely stuff it was! How she loved beautiful fabrics. Her face softened to dreaminess as she passed her hand gently over the smoothly drawn material and thought with affection of the donor. What a good-hearted girl Mattie was.

Her children would not have recognized her face as she sat there loving the sofa and the rich fabric on it and thinking gratefully of her friend.

But how funny Mattie was about dressing herself! Was there anybody who had less faculty for it? A flicker of amusement—the first she had felt all day—drew her lips into a good-natured smile at the recollection of that awful hat with the pink feather which Mattie had wanted to buy. What a figure of fun she had looked in it! And she knew it! And yet was hypnotized by the dowdy thing. All she had needed was the hint to take the small, dark-blue one that suited her perfectly. How queer she couldn’t think of it herself.

She loved to go shopping with Mattie—with old Mrs. Anderson, with any of the ladies in the Guild who so often asked her advice. It was a real pleasure to help them select the right things. But—her softened face tightened and set—how horribly naughty Stephen was when you tried to take him into shops. Such disgraceful scenes as she had had with him when he got tired and impatient.

The clock behind her struck half-past nine, and she became aware of its ticking once more, its insistent whisper: “So much to do! So much to do! So much to do!”

She was very tired and found she had relaxed wearily into her chair. But she got up with a brisk energetic motion like a prize-fighter coming out of his corner. She detested people who moved languidly and dragged themselves around.

She went into the kitchen and put the oatmeal into the fireless cooker, and after this waited, polishing absent-mindedly the nickel towel-bar of the shining stove, till she heard Lester go out of the bathroom.

Then she went swiftly up the stairs, locked the bathroom door behind her, and began to unwind the bandages from around her upper arm. When it finally came off she inspected the raw patch on her arm. It was crusted over in places, with thick, yellowish-white pus oozing from the pustules. It was spreading. It was worse. It would never be any better. It was like everything else.

She spread a salve on it with practised fingers, wound a fresh bandage about her arm, fastened it firmly and then washed her hands over and over, scrubbing them mercilessly with a stiff brush till they were raw. She always felt unclean to her bones after she had seen one of those frequently recurring eczema eruptions on her skin. She never spoke of them unless some one asked her a question about her health. She felt disgraced by their loathsomeness, although no one but she and the doctor ever saw them. She often called it to herself, “the last straw.”

Her nightgown hung on the bathroom door. They usually dressed and undressed here not to disturb Stephen who still slept in their bedroom, because there was no other corner in the little house for him. And now they would never be able to move to a larger house where they could live decently and have a room apiece, to a better part of town where the children would have decent playmates. Never anything but this....

She began to undress rapidly and to wash. As she combed her dark hair, she noticed again how rapidly it was falling. The comb was full of long hairs. She took them out and rolled them up into a coil. She supposed she ought to save her combings to make a switch against the inevitable time when her hair would be too thin to do up. And she had had such beautiful hair! It had been her one physical superiority, that and her “style.” What good had they ever done her!

She began to think of the frightening moment in the kitchen that evening, when for an instant she had lost her bitterly fought-for self-control, when the taut cable of her will-power had snapped under the strain put upon it. For a wild instant she had been all one inner clamor to die, to die, to lay down the heavy, heavy burden, too great for her to bear. What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming out. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another, full of drudgery. No rest from the constant friction over the children’s carelessness and forgetfulness and childishness! How she hated childishness! And she must try to endure it patiently or at least with the appearance of patience. Sometimes, in black moments like this, it seemed to her that she had such strange children, not like other people’s, easy to understand and manage, strong, normal children. Helen ... there didn’t seem to be anything to Helen! With the exasperation which passivity always aroused in her, Helen’s mother thought of the dumb vacant look on Helen’s face that evening when she had tried to show her how to perform a simple operation a little less clumsily. Sometimes it seemed as though Helen were not all there! And Henry with that nervous habit of questioning everything everybody said and the absent-mindedness which made him do such idiotic things....

A profound depression came upon her. These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity. They never told you that there were moments of arid clear sight when you saw helplessly that your children would never measure up to your standard, never would be really close to you, because they were not your kind of human beings, because they were not your children, but merely other human beings for whom you were responsible. How solitary it made you feel!

And Stephen....

It frightened her to think of Stephen. What could you do for a child who wanted to be bad, and told you so in a loud scream? How could you manage a child whom no arguments touched, who went off like a dynamite bomb over everything and nothing; who was capable of doing as he did this afternoon, rushing right at his own mother in a passion, trying to bite and scratch and tear her flesh like a little wild beast?

And yet she had never spoiled Stephen because he was the baby of the family. She had always been firm with him just as she had with the others. Every one in her circle agreed that she had never spoiled him. What future could there be for Stephen? If he was like this at five, what would he be at fifteen, with all those slum boys at hand to play with? She couldn’t always keep them away from him.

If they could only move to another part of town, the nice part, where the children would have nice playmates! But now she knew they never would. With this last complete failure of poor Lester’s to make good, she touched bottom, knew hopelessness. There never would be anything else for her, never, never! How could Lester take things lying down as he did! When there were all those tragic reasons for his forging ahead? Why didn’t he do as other men did, all other men who amounted to anything, even common laboring men—get on, succeed, provide for his family!

It was not lack of intelligence or education. He had always been crazy about books and education. What good did Lester’s intelligence and education do them? It was just that he didn’t care enough about them to try!

Well, she would never complain. She despised wives who complained of their husbands. She had never said a word against Lester and she never would. Even to-night, at the table, struck down as she had been by that blow, that fatal blow, so casually, so indifferently announced, she had not breathed a word of blame. Not one!

But it was bitter! Bitter! She was fit for something better than scrubbing floors all her life. Her dark face in the mirror looked out at her, blazing. She looked as Stephen did when he was being whipped. She looked wicked. She felt wicked. But she did not want to be wicked. She wanted to be a good Christian woman. She wanted to do her duty. She began to pray, fervently, “O God, help me bear my burdens! God, make me strong to do my duty! God, take out the wild, sinful anger from my heart and give me patience to do what I must do! O God, help me to be a good mother!”

The right spring had been touched. Her children! She must live for her children. And she loved them, she did live for them! What were those little passing moments of exasperation! Nothing, compared to the passion for them which shook her like a great wind, whenever they were sick, whenever she felt how greatly they needed her. And how they did need her! Helen, with her delicate lungs, her impracticality, her helplessness—what could she do without her mother to take care of her? And Stephen—she shuddered to think of the rage into which some women would fly when Stephen was in one of his bad moods. Nobody but his own mother could be trusted to resist the white heat of anger which his furies aroused in the person trying to care for him. And Henry, poor little darling Henry! Who else would take the trouble, day by day, to provide just the right food for him? See what that one cookie had done to him this evening! Why, if Mattie Farnham had the care of that child, she and her delicatessen-store stuff....

Henry’s mother swiftly braided up her thinning hair. Her face was calmer. She was planning what she would give him for lunch the next day.

Chapter 3

“DON’T you want to sit by the window here, Mrs. Farnham?” suggested Mrs. Prouty, the rector’s wife. “The light’ll be better for your sewing. That dark material is hard on the eyes.”

All the Ladies’ Guild understood that Mrs. Farnham was being posted there to give the alarm when Mrs. Knapp turned into the walk leading to the Parish House, and they went on talking with an agreeable sense of security.

“It’s pretty hard on those Willing’s Emporium people, I say,” Mrs. Prouty remarked, “after years of faithful service, to have everything turned topsy-turvy over their heads by a young whippersnapper. They say he’s going to change the store all around too; put the Ladies’ Cloak Department upstairs where the shoes always were; and he’s taken that top floor that old Mr. Willing rented to the Knights of Pythias and is going to add some new departments. A body won’t know where to find a thing! In my opinion he’ll live to regret it.”

They all reflected silently that if the young Mr. Willing had only been an Episcopalian like his defunct uncle, instead of a Presbyterian, Mrs. Prouty might not have taken the change of the Ladies’ Cloak Department quite so hard.

“Poor Mrs. Knapp feels simply terrible about her husband’s not being promoted,” said Mrs. Merritt, the doctor’s wife. “I saw her yesterday at Wertheimer’s for an instant. Not that she said anything. She wouldn’t, you know, not if she died for it. But you could feel it. All over her. And no wonder!”

“Poor thing!” (Mrs. Prouty had acquired the full, solicitous intonation of the parish visitor.) “She has many burdens to bear. Mr. Prouty often says that in these days it is wonderful to see a woman so devoted to her duty as a home-maker. She simply gives up her whole life to her family! Absolutely!”

“The children are such delicate little things, too, a constant care.” Mrs. Merritt snatched the opportunity to display her inside information. “There’s hardly a week that Doctor isn’t called in there for one or another of them. He often tells me that he doesn’t know what to do for them. They don’t seem to have anything to do with! No digestions, no constitutions. Just like their father. All but little Stephen. He’s strong enough!”

“He’s a perfect imp of darkness!” cried old Mrs. Anderson, lifting her thin gray face from her sewing. “I’ve raised a lot of children in my day and seen a lot more, but I never saw such a naughty contrary child as he is in all my born days. Nor so hateful! He never does anything unless it’s to plague somebody by it. The other day, in the last thaw it was, I’d just got my back porch mopped up after the grocer’s boy—you know how he tracks mud in—and I heard somebody fussing around out there, and I opened the door quick, and there was Stephen Knapp lugging over a great pail of mud to dump it on my porch. He’d dumped one already and got it all spread out on the boards. I said, ‘Why, Stephen Knapp, what makes you do such a bad thing?’ I was really paralyzed to see him at it. ‘What makes you be so bad, Stephen?’ I said. And he said—he’s got the hardest, coolest way of saying those wicked things—he said, as cool as you please, ‘’Tause I hate you, Mis’ Anderson, ’tause I hate you.’ And gave me that black look of his....”

Through the tepid, stagnant air of the room flickered a sulphurous zig-zag of passion. The women shrank back from it, horrified and fascinated.

“Mr. Prouty says,” quoted his wife, “that Stephen Knapp makes him think of the old Bible stories about people possessed of the devil. His mother is at her wit’s end. Mr. Prouty says she has asked him to help her with prayer. And Stephen gets worse all the time. And yet she’s always perfectly firm with him, never spoils him. And it’s wonderful, her iron self-control when he is in one of his tempers. I never could keep my temper like that. It can’t be due to anything about the way she manages him, for she never had a particle of trouble with the other two. Well, it’ll be a great relief to her, as she often says, when he goes to school with the others.”

Mrs. Merritt now said, lowering her voice, “You know she has a chronic skin trouble too that she never says anything about.”

“Like St. Paul, Mr. Prouty says.”

“Doctor has tried everything to cure it. Diet. Electricity. X-rays. All the salves in the drugstores. Oh, no,” she explained hastily in answer to an unspoken thought somewhere in the room. “Oh, no, it’s nothing horrid! Her husband is a nice enough man, as far as that goes. Doctor thinks it may be nervous, may be due to....”

“Nervous!” cried Mrs. Mattie Farnham. “Why, it’s a real eruption, discharging pus and everything. I had to help her dress a place on her back once when Stephen was a tiny baby. Nervous!”

“Oh, Doctor doesn’t mean it is anything she could help. He often says that just because you’ve called a thing nervous is no reason for thinking it’s not serious. It’s as real to them, he says, as a broken leg.”

“Well, I’d have something worse than eczema if I had three delicate children to bring up and only that broken reed of a Lester Knapp to lean on,” said Mrs. Prouty with energy. “They tell me that he all but lost his job in the shake-up at Willing’s—let alone not getting advanced. Young Mrs. Willing told Mr. Prouty that her husband told her that he’d be blessed if he knew anything Lester Knapp would be good for—unless teaching poetry, maybe. Young Mrs. Willing is a Churchwoman, you know. It’s only her husband who is a Presbyterian. That’s how she happened to be talking to Mr. Prouty. She was telling him that if it depended on her which church....”

“He’s a nice man, Lester Knapp is,” broke in Mrs. Farnham stoutly. “You know we’re sort of related. His sister married my husband’s brother. The children call me Aunt. When you come to know Lester he’s a real nice man. And he’s a smart man too, in his way. When he was at the State University he was considered one of the best students there, I’ve always heard ’em say. If he hadn’t married so young, he was lotting on being....” Her tone changed suddenly—“Oh, Mrs. Merritt, do you think I ought to hem this or face it?”

“It’d be pretty bungling to hem, wouldn’t it?” Mrs. Merritt responded on the same note, “such heavy material—to turn in the hem, anyhow. Maybe you could feather-stitch it down—oh, how do you do, Mrs. Knapp? So glad to see you out. But then you’re one of the faithful ones, as Mr. Prouty always says.”

They all looked up from their work, smiling earnestly at her, drawing their needles in and out rapidly, and Evangeline Knapp knew from the expression of their eyes that they had been talking of her, of Lester’s failure to make good; that they had been pitying her from their superior position of women whose husbands were good providers.

She resented their pity—and yet it was a comfort to her. She loved coming to these weekly meetings of the Guild, the only outings of her life, and always went home refreshed and strengthened by her contact with people who looked at things as she did. She passed her life in solitary confinement, as home-makers always do, with a man who naturally looked at things from a man’s standpoint (and in her case from a very queer standpoint of his own) and with children who could not in the nature of things share a single interest of hers; it was an inexpressible relief to her to have these weekly glimpses of human beings who talked of things she liked, who had her standards and desires.

She liked women, anyhow, and had the deepest sympathy for their struggle to arrange in a decent pattern the crude masculine and crude childish raw material of their home-lives. She liked too the respect of these women for her, the way they all asked her advice, and saved up perplexities for her to solve. To-day, for instance, she had scarcely taken out her thimble when Mrs. Prouty passed over a sample of blue material to ask whether it was really linen as claimed—when anybody with an eye in her head could see that it was not even a very good imitation. After that, Mrs. Merritt said she had noticed that Paisley effects were coming in. Would it be possible to drape one of those old shawls—she had a lovely one from her grandmother—to make a cloak—to simulate the wide-sleeved effect—without cutting it, you know—of course you wouldn’t want to cut it!

Mrs. Knapp said she would think it over, and as she rapidly basted the collar on the child’s dress she was making, she concentrated her inner vision on the problem. She saw it as though it were there—the great square of richly patterned fabric. She draped it in imagination this way and that. No, that would be too bungling at the neck—perhaps drawn up in the middle....

They felt her absorption and preserved a respectful silence, sewing and glancing up occasionally at her inward-looking face to see how she was progressing. Their own minds were quite relaxed and vacant. Mrs. Knapp had taken up the problem. What need for any one else to think of it? They had such confidence in Mrs. Knapp.

Presently, “I believe you could do it this way, Mrs. Merritt,” she said. “Mrs. Anderson, hand me that piece of sateen, will you, please. See, this is your shawl. You make a fold in the middle, so, half-way up—and catch it between with a....” They laid down their work to give their whole attention to her explanation, their eyes following her fingers, their minds accepting her conclusions without question.

She felt very happy, very warm, very kind. She loved being able to help Mrs. Merritt out this way. Dr. Merritt was such a splendid doctor and so good always to Henry and Helen. And she loved helping somebody to make use of something, to rescue something fine, as she had rescued the sofa. It would be a beautiful, beautiful cloak, especially with Mrs. Merritt’s mink neckpiece made over into a collar, a detail that came into her mind like an inspiration as she talked.

Yes, she was very happy the afternoons when the Guild met.

Mr. Prouty usually brought his rosy-gilled face and round collar into the Guild Room before the group broke up and chatted with the ladies over the cup of tea which ended their meetings. He had something on his mind to-day—that was evident to every one of those married women the instant he stepped into the room. But he did not bring it out at once, making pleasant conversation with the preoccupied dexterity of an elderly clergyman. As he talked, he looked often at Mrs. Knapp’s dark intense face, bent over her work. She never stopped for tea. And when he said in his well-known, colloquial, facetious way, “Ladies, I’ve got a big job for you. Take a brace. I’m going to shoot!” it was towards Mrs. Knapp that he spoke.

He tried to address himself to them all equally as he made his appeal, but unconsciously he turned almost constantly to the keen attentive eyes which never left his for an instant as he talked. He spoke earnestly, partly because he feared lest the Presbyterians might steal a march on him, and partly because of a very real sympathy with the wretched children whose needs he was describing. When he finished, they all waited for Mrs. Knapp to speak.

She said firmly, “There’s just one thing to do. A good visiting nurse attached to our parish work is the only way we could get anywhere. Anything else—baskets of food, volunteer visiting—they never amount to a row of pins.”

The feeble, amateur, fumbling plans which they were beginning to formulate fell to earth. But they were aghast at her.

“A nurse! How ever could we get the money to pay one?”

“Only big-city parishes can hope to....”

“We could if we tried!” she said, quelling them by her accent. She looked around at them with burning eyes. She was like a falcon in a barnyard. “A visiting nurse would cost—let us say a thousand a year.”

“Oh, more than that!” cried Mr. Prouty.

“Not if we supplied her with lodging and heat. Why couldn’t we arrange the little storeroom at the head of the stairs here in the Parish House for a bedroom for her? We could....”

“How could you heat it? There’s no radiator there.”

“There’s a steam-riser goes through that room. I noticed it when we were putting the folding chairs away last week. That would make it warm enough. We could furnish it by contributions, without its costing a cent in cash. Everybody has at least one piece of furniture she could spare from her house—in such a cause. About the pay, now. We have more than four hundred dollars in the Ladies’ Guild Treasury, and next Christmas our Bazaar ought to bring in two hundred more; it always does. We could hire Hunt’s Hall on Union Street for it, and have the bazaar bigger, and make more than two hundred easily. Then, there’s Miss Jelliffe, the music supervisor in the public schools, you know. Now that she’s joined St. Peter’s, I’m very sure she would help us get up some concerts later on. We could give ‘Songs of All Countries’ in costume, with the children. When you have lots of children in a program, you can always sell tickets. Their folks want to see them. And we could get a certain amount from the poor families the nurse visits—perhaps enough to make up the rest of her salary. They’d appreciate the service more if they paid something for it. Folks do.”

All this had poured from her effortlessly, as if she had been simply pointing out what lay there to see, not as though she were beating her brains to invent it.

They gaped at her breathlessly.

“I wish you would be chairman of the Committee,” said Mr. Prouty deferentially, “and take charge of the campaign for funds.”

Her face which had been for an instant clear and open, clouded and shut. “I’d love to!” she said passionately. “I see it all!” She began to roll her sewing together as though to give herself time to be able to speak more calmly. “But I mustn’t think of it,” she said at last. “I have too much to do at home. It’s all I can manage to get to church and to Guild meeting once a week. I never leave the house for anything else except to go to market. I can take Stephen with me there. Of course, after he starts going to school....”

Yes, they all knew what a relief it was when the children started going to school, and you could keep the house in some kind of order, and have a little peace.

Their silent, sympathetic understanding brought out from her now something she had not meant to say, something which had been like a lump of lead on her heart, the dread that her only open door, would soon close upon her. “Even for Guild-meetings,” she said, speaking grimly to keep her lips from trembling, “I may have to give them up, too. Mr. Knapp has always been able to make an arrangement to get away from the store an hour and a half earlier on Thursdays to stay with Stephen and the other two after school. But I don’t know whether he will be able to manage that now. Mr. Willing, I mean old Mr. Willing saw no objection. But now....”

Her voice was harsh and dry; but they all knew why. And she was quite aware of the silent glosses and commentaries she knew them to be supplying mentally. She pinned her roll of sewing together firmly. Nobody could put in a pin with her gesture of mastery. “My first duty is to my home and children,” she said.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes, we all know that, of course.” Mr. Prouty gave to the aphorism a lip-service which scantily covered his bitter objection to it in this case.

“Our circumstances don’t permit us to hire help,” she added, making this resolutely a statement of fact and not a complaint. “I do the washings, you know.”

“I know. Wonderful! Wonderful!” said Mr. Prouty irritably.

“She sets an example to us all, I always tell ’em,” said Mrs. Farnham.

“Yes, indeed you do, Mrs. Knapp!” they all agreed fervently. Evangeline knew that this was their way of trying to make up to her for having a poor stick of a husband. She savored their compassion with a bitter-sweet mixture of humiliation over her need for it and of triumph that she had drawn this sympathy from them under the appearance of repelling it. “Nobody ever heard me complain!” she was saying to herself.

“Well, I’ll do what I can,” she said, standing up to go. “I’ll think of things. I’ve just thought of another. If we can provide the nurse with dinner every day, that ought to cut down on cash expenses. There are twenty-four members of the Guild. That’d hardly mean more than one dinner a month for each of us. And it would cut off fifteen dollars a month from the money we’d have to provide. And in that way we could keep in closer touch with her. Seeing her every day and hearing about her work, we’d be more apt to coöperate with her right along.”

“Splendid! Simply splendid!” cried Mr. Prouty. “We will be the only parish of our size in the State to have a visiting nurse of our own.” He saw himself at the next diocesan meeting the center of a group of envious clergymen, expounding to them the ingenious devices by which this remarkable result had been achieved. He had had a good deal of this sort of gratification since the Knapps had moved into his parish.

Chapter 4

“Who swoon in sleep and awake wearier.”

As he woke up, Lester Knapp heard the words in the air as he so often heard poetry,

“... and awake wearier!”

He was tired to the bone. He would have given anything in the world to turn over, bury his face in the pillow and swoon to sleep again.

And never wake up!

But the alarm-clock had rung, and Evangeline had risen instantly. He heard her splashing in the bathroom now.

With an effort as though he were struggling out of smothering black depths, he sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. Gosh! How little good he seemed to get from his sleep. He was tireder when he woke up than when he went to bed.

On the cot opposite little Stephen lay sleeping as vigorously as he did everything, one tightly clenched small fist flung up on his pillow. What a strong, handsome kid he was. Whatever could be the matter with him to make him act so like the devil? Strange to see a little kid like that, so hateful, seem to take such a satisfaction in raising hell.

Well, there was the furnace fire to fix. He thrust his feet into slippers, put his dressing-gown over his pyjamas and shuffled downstairs, hearing behind him the firm, regular step of Evangeline as she went from the bathroom to the bedroom. On the way down he woke up enough to realize what made life look so specially intolerable that morning; the return of Jerome Willing and his own definite failure to make good in the new organization of the store. The significance of that and all that it foretold stood out more harshly than ever in the pale, dawn-gray of the cold empty kitchen. Oh, hell!

He flung open the cellar door and ran downstairs to run away from the thought. But it was waiting for him, blackly in the coal-bin, luridly in the firebox.

“It looks just about like the jumping-off place for me,” he thought, rattling the furnace-shaker gloomily; “only I can’t jump. Where to?”

Well, anyhow, in the few minutes before breakfast, while his stomach was empty, he was free from that dull leaden mass of misery turning over and over inside him at intervals, which was the usual accompaniment of his every waking hour. That was something to be thankful for.

He strained his lean arms to throw the coal from his shovel well back into the firebox, and leveled it evenly with the long poker. Evangeline always found time to go down to see if he had done it right before he got away after breakfast.

Then he stood for a moment, struck as he often was, by the leaping many-tongued fury of the little pale-blue pointed flames. He looked at them, fascinated by the baleful lustfulness of their attack on the helpless lumps of coal thrown into their inferno.

“The seat of desolation, void of light

Save what the glimmering of those livid flames

Casts, pale and dreadful. Yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible,