Chapter IV: Part 4

Momma braced up a bit at this and gave Hattie a proud look as much as to say: “You haven’t married the only successful man in the world, Mrs. Eppes.” But she shook her head.

“You ain’t goin’ to bankrupt yourself shippin’ me to any doctor, for I’m not worth it. And that’s all there is about it.”

“Not worth it?” Poppa cried with the fervor, if not the rhetoric, of a Romeo. “Well, if you ain’t worth it, I’d like to know who is? All I got is none too much to spend on you. And if I had ten times as much, what’d it be worth if I lost you, Momma?”

This was so poetic and beautiful that Momma had to get mad or break down and beller, so she put up a big fight.

“Oh, that’s all very well for you to say, but what it comes down to is: You’re sending me away to die like a dawg outside somewheres; you want to treat me the way they do the old rats that they give a poison to that guarantees they don’t die in the house.”

“Aw, Momma!” was all Poppa could groan. But Hattie lit into her mother with all the vigor of a true and dutiful American child.

“Why, Momma Lundy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You must be out of your mind to talk thataway when Poppa is so nice and so worried.”

“That’s right! Pick on me!” Momma moaned, taking unfair refuge in cowardly tears. “But I notice nobody is offering to go to New York with me.”

Hattie spoke first. “I’d go in a minute if I could leave the children, but with little Eddie having his tonsils removed to-morrow and Fannie’s chicken pox just coming out--”

Poppa sighed. “I’ll go, of course, if you want me to.”

Momma saw the reluctance in his assent, and, though she knew that he had some strong business reason behind it, her cantankerous mood took umbrage at it. “What’d I tell you? Well, I will go. I’ll go all by myself, to some lonely old hotel, and if I never come back nobody will know the difference.”

“Of course you shan’t go by yourself, honey,” Poppa protested. “I was only thinkin’ that if I could go home for a while I could set my business to rights and prob’ly close up a big deal I had on when I got Hattie’s wire. If I was to put that through, it would net me a couple o’ thousand, and that would go a long ways toward paying for your operation, most likely; and then I could come on and be with you whilst you was convalescing; and then, if anything was to happen to me, the business would be all right and I’d leave you and the children fixed.”

This was the simple, humble statement of his mind in the matter; that solemn devotion to his work that makes a priestcraft and an art of business. Like all successful creators, he consecrated himself to his work and sacrificed himself to its completion. No poet or sculptor could have a holier or purer ambition for perfection and a flawless conclusion, and there was no more thought of selfishness or greed.

Momma understood and loved him, but the disease in her soul took offense at everything; and, though she realized the unselfishness of his motive, she took a perverse delight in distorting it.

Then ensued one of those duels in which each took the wrong side with a kind of devoted insincerity. Poppa frantically declared that he would go and nothing should stop him, and she as frantically declared that if he went she wouldn’t.

Momma insisted that she hadn’t a friend on earth or in New York, and she would rather go back and die in her own bed than die alone in New York.

This reminded her distraught husband that she did have a friend in New York, her old playmate, Ella Jemison, who had married Sam Killip and gone to New York and fortune.

“Oh, yes, I’m likely to ask rich folks like her to take me in!” Momma sobbed. “She wouldn’t look at me. She’s forgotten she ever knew me, though we are kind of second cousins by marriage.”

“Well, her husband hasn’t forgot he ever knew me,” Poppa snapped. “Didn’t I have a letter from him only the other day, and didn’t he say his wife asked to be kindly remembered to you?”

“Sam Killip wrote to you!” Momma cried. “How’d rich folks like him come to write to you?”

Poppa winced again at being a prophet without honor in his own home. “Oh, I guess he ain’t the only rich folks in the world. He said he saw I was a director in the Third National Bank, and he wanted to enlarge his capital, and he could offer me a chance to git in on the ground floor of a patent locomotive stoker he was pushing. He said he was a little short of cash.”

“Sam Killip short of cash!”

“Rich folks are always short of cash,” Poppa explained. “That’s why they’re rich. The minute they git any cash they put it into something and make it work. I was going to tell Sam I couldn’t see my way clear, but if Ella will look after you a little I’ll help him out.”

This put a new face on the matter. Instead of going to New York as a decrepit, friendless villager, imploring the pity of an old acquaintance, on whom her only claim was old acquaintanceship, she was offered a chance to float in on her as a bearer of rich gifts. She climbed evenly and thought of the Three Wise Men.

“I’d go there as a kind of a Mrs. Magi then?”

“Yes! Exactly! And I guess she’d treat you like a grand duchess, or something.”

“Oh, no, I don’t see how I could,” Momma sighed, slumping again, too deeply dejected to reach out and pluck the golden apple.

But Poppa had more insight than anyone suspected, and he had caught the glint of interest in Momma’s eye. It was the first sparkle he had seen there for weeks, and, though it had been quenched at once, it emboldened him to tyranny. He got to his feet and left the house with a maddening mysteriousness.

He was inspired to the amazing audacity of calling Mr. Killip on the long-distance telephone. He went to the hotel so that Momma could not interrupt him. When he had his New York victim by the ear he told him the whole story, and Killip, who was still human though a New Yorker, was as effusive in welcoming Momma as in accepting Poppa’s additional offer of money enough to stoke the stoker project to a hearty glow.

Poppa went back and told Momma what he had done, and told her to pack up. Her next obstacle was:

“But I got no clo’es here. I’ll have to go home and pack, and I just ain’t got the strength.”

“You got no clothes at home either,” Hattie put in. “You can go downtown with me and get you some decent things. You can’t go to New York looking like an old farmer.”

* * * * *

This was the wrong note. Momma broke her moorings again.

“I told you you was ashamed of me. I’m not fit to be seen in Terra Hut, let alone in New York. I’m simply not going to New York to make an exhabition of myself and make Ellar Killip turn up her nose at me.”

This battle had lasted only a few hours longer when a telegram arrived from Ella herself:

_Overjoyed dearest Mattie to learn that you will visit New York
though greatly distressed to learn of your indisposition you must
come to us of course just let me know the train and I will meet you
whatever the hour. I know Dr. Courtneidge very well and he is an old
darling. Love to you and your husband from us both._ ELLA.

The gracious warmth of this brought tears to the eyes of the poor derelict, but she masked her sniffle in a sniff.

“Where’d she learn all those swell words?”

Hattie told her mother, as usual, that she ought to be ashamed of herself, and Momma was.

She prolonged her resistance to the point where Poppa grew desperate enough to groan.

“Well, you do as you’re a mind to. Seein’ you’re strong enough to fight forever, you go home and run the business and I’ll go to the hospital my own self.”

“Run the business! That’s all you think of!” she retorted with a sublime non sequitur. “Put me on the cattle train and ship me off to the slaughter house. Ella still loves me, anyway, even if nobody else does, and she’ll see to it I get decently buried, and that’s all I got a right to expect.”

Poppa dashed out and bathed his hot head in cold water before he went to the ticket office. He nearly bit the head off the agent, just to show that he had some manhood left.

He was never quite the same man again after he got Momma on the train at last. He bade her a despondent farewell, feeling sure that he would never see her again. And, in a sense, he never did....

* * * * *

Going to the city for the first time in her life, especially at such a time in her life, was an adventure and a half for Momma.

In spite of the fact that she was advancing toward the knives of a surgeon who was her forlorn hope, she could not but feel a certain elation. She was experiencing what Victor Hugo called a “new shudder.”

She was almost more afraid of Ella Killip and her splendor than of the pancreatic specialist. She was fairly smothered with dread of facing the woman she had not seen since Ella was a gangling, noisy, small-town tomboy, all freckles and giggles and gawkiness.

She foresaw Ella as a sort of vast and glittering Queen Victoria, fattened on rich food and studded with jewels. She saw herself as a shabby farm wife whom Ella would probably give one glance and flee from with disdain.

When she reached New York at last, her first struggle was with a red-capped ruffian who tried to steal her valise. Her next struggle was with her terror of the meeting with Ella. If she had known how to get a train back to Carthage, she would have taken it. But the crowd hustled her up the platform and she lugged a soul heavier than her rusty hand bag.

No one had met her at the train, and she was morbid enough to hope that Ella had missed her. But inside the station she found a crowd held back by a rope, and paused to stare at the staring eyes.

She saw no one that suggested the Ella she had planned, but a tall slim creature, dressed like an actress, in glistening silk, came forward hesitantly. She looked young, and yet she didn’t. Her hair was hidden by a hat whose brim seemed to have been flourished by the impatient, whimsical stroke of a painter’s brush.

From this dressmaker’s model came a voice that startled the valise from Momma’s hand, for the voice came out of childhood, and it was the voice of Ella. It sang a new tune, but it was the old voice. It said timidly, tentatively: “Mattie? Is it you?”

Momma’s soft old knees caved in, and she sat on the valise as she whimpered: “This is me, but you’re never Ellar!”

“Oh, yes, I am, my dear,” said Ella with a good laugh as she hoisted Momma to her feet. “I’m the same old sixpence.”

“You look more like your own daughter, if you have one.”

“Oh, I have one--three, in fact. But--come along, you old dear.”

She nodded to a red cap, who took the valise and followed her as she led Momma through the station. Momma’s dazed eyes supposed they were taking a short cut through a cathedral.

The Killip limousine was marvelous, but she expected marvels. She was a trifle disappointed when she reached Ella’s home. She had expected to drive through a royal park to a palace. But she was put down at a house built jam in among a lot of other houses.

It was not half the size of Momma’s house and had no yard at all except a small patch at the back.

In place of a double row of stiff-necked butlers up a grand staircase, there was one very pleasant young man at the door and an awfully nice hired girl in cap and apron. Very friendly she was too, and helped Momma in the most folksy way up to her room.

* * * * *

Ella came along, and when the maid was sent for tea she petted Momma and stuffed a pillow in her back and then drew a chair close up and said: “Now, Mattie dear, tell me all about it. What on earth is the trouble, you poor soul?”

But Momma was so embarrassed by the numberless disparities between herself and this strange creature who had started life with even less advantage that she could not be at ease.

She was dazed by the brilliance of Ella, by her blithe yet haughty carriage, her young skin, slim deft hands, youthful alertness, her fashionable voice, her fashionable politeness.

She saw that Ella’s hair was white, now that her hat was off; but her hair was ironed and fluted and polished and dressed as for a fancy dress ball.

Momma summed up her bewildered homage, if it was homage, in one helpless query:

“What makes you powder your hair, Ella?”

Ella laughed aloud. A little of the old boisterousness broke through the years of control.

“As my boys would say: ‘Whaddaya mean, “powder my hair”?’ That’s my own poor old gray wool, damn it!”

Ella’s swear word even had a fashionable fillip! Momma had never sworn in her life, or, that is, hardly ever; certainly not with a smile. When she had needed profane words, she had used stupid old-womanish expletives.

But Ella’s casual objurgation broke the ice magically. There is nothing that clears the air of formality like a little damn.

Momma was so numb that it merely startled her from her torpor. She laughed the first laugh that had been shaken out of her dust bin of a soul for six weeks.

After that the two old women were themselves again, two girls who had parted and gone round the world two opposite ways and come together at last to exchange experiences. Their costumes and their dialects had changed with their travel, but their hearts were as of old.

Momma had to hear first of Ella’s amazing experiences. This desire itself was a miracle of change; she had already forgotten herself for a while.

Ella’s husband came home before Ella had finished her Arabian Nights’ Entertainment and he was pleasantly surprised and surprising. He had expected Mattie to be more ill than she was and he had not expected her to look at all like his own wife. He knew only too well how expensive Ella’s looks were and how different a life she led from the women of the old home town.

The dinner was simple but “awful tasty,” as Mattie proclaimed. She was astounded to find herself eating with relish. But the service was irresistible. The amiable gentleman who handed the plates around and took them away was so solicitous about suggesting to her the best morsels that she could not insult him by refusing anything or break his heart by leaving an untouched plate for him to carry away.

Sam Killip was eager to know about all the friends and enemies of his youth and remembered so well the people and the nooks and the scraps of those good old days that the dinner went by like a wedding feast.

Fortunately the Killip children were away at schools and house parties and Momma was not subjected to the inspection of a generation that found even Ella Killip old-fashioned and conservative. When Ella said she had given up trying to keep up with the youngsters, Momma laughed her to scorn with a quaint phrase: “Oh, yes, to hear you tell it!”

After dinner Sam had a meeting of some charitable board, and Ella and Mattie settled down for a confab. Ella neglected to mention that she had sent her opera box to friends of hers, and she made no allusion to the fact that it was the first performance of a new rôle for Caruso, and she would have given an eyetooth to hear him.

She spread Momma out on what she called a chaise longue. Momma said it was the only comfortable sofa she’d ever laid on and she was going to have one like it if it busted Poppa. Momma was already planning for the future! And thinking of it in terms of comfort!

She was reluctant to discuss her famous illness, but Ella insisted on knowing the worst.

“Well, it simply baffled all the doctors,” Momma said in a tone not altogether boastless. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a kind of gener’l gone-ness. I got no heart for anything--no appatite for my vittles, no int’rest in the house or church work or the heathen or the fambly. I don’t want to go to bed nights and I don’t want to get up mornings. Always been a fiend on housekeepin’, but I don’t much care now whether things are in their place or not. Dust don’t worry me like it used to. I’m all dusty myself. No special aches or pains, but I just don’t feel good anywheres.

“Want to cry all the time and I don’t know why. Hate to go outdoors and hate to stay in. Poppa drives me nearly crazy with everything he does and says, but I drive myself crazier still. I ain’t friends with myself or anybody. Want to die and can’t bear the thought of that either.

“It’s just a kind of all wrongness everywhere, if you can make anything out of that.”

To her amazement, Ella said: “I know just how you feel and you’ve come to the right place to be cured.”

* * * * *

It was not altogether pleasant to have Ella claim a share in Momma’s wonderful disease and to speak so off-handedly of its cure. But instead of rebuking Ella for presuming and for minimizing the crisis, Momma felt relieved and before long she was yawning nobly and confessing that she could not keep her eyes open. Ella went to her room with her and saw her bestowed, then kissed her good night and left her. Momma noted that her valise had been unpacked, her bed opened, her nightgown and slippers laid out, a water bottle set by the reading lamp on a little table by the bedhead, and a dozen little thoughtfulnesses executed in her behalf.

When she was in her old nightgown, which was modeled on the potato-bag pattern, and had said her prayers, she crept into the disgracefully fine linen sheets and slept in luxurious oblivion for nine good hours.

She did not know that Ella had sneaked into her own room, dressed swiftly, and stolen out to the opera, where she stood up, and that she went to a supper and there danced a while before she sneaked home.

Momma had her breakfast in bed at Ella’s previous order and wandered about the house for hours before Ella had rung for her breakfast and sent for Momma.

Ella was a sight. She looked like one of those immor’l French kings’ favorites. She had on a lace boudoir cap and a silk nightgown, very deckolett, and a “breakfast jacket” (of all things!) of satin and lace.

She did look handsome. Momma had always hated to have even Poppa see her before breakfast. She began to be a little eager for her cure.

“When do I go to see this Dr. Courtneidge?”

Ella hesitated a moment, then spoke with a certain sternness:

“There are two or three things that have to be done first, Mattie dear. I’m always a beast up till noon, so you mustn’t be surprised if I’m brutally frank now. Dr. Courtneidge is a very fussy and snappy old gentleman. He has only swells for patients and he’s very particular.”

“Don’t he treat poor folks at tall?” Momma gasped.

“Oh, yes, he has free clinics and hospitals and all that and does half his work for nothing. That’s why he’s so particular with his pay patients. You’ve got to go through a course of sprouts and buy some things or you’ll never get near him.

“His reception room is full of people, and you’d feel terribly embarrassed to wait there till he gets round. So you really must have some of this year’s clothes and a 1920 hat. And your hair--you mustn’t be offended, Mattie, dear, but really your hair and your skin! He’d give you one glance and send you away without an examination even. You see, I know him.

“And then the examination, Mattie dear--well, you know what that’s like. And in the hospital--well! I saw the nightgown laid out on your pillow and that sort of thing would simply frighten the doctor to death. He really couldn’t operate.”

“I’m not looking to marry the old fool,” Momma mumbled. “I got one husband a’ready.”

“I know, my dear Mattie, but your one husband put you in my charge and I’m going to see you through. My masseuse is coming to my house this morning. She’s downstairs now, I imagine, and I’m going to have her begin on you. When she’s finished, my hairdresser, François, will get to work on that dear old poll of yours and take off about forty years of age. Then we’ll have lunch and go shopping.”

Momma was choked with wrath, but Ella would neither fight nor plead. She just bullied her with laughter, and Momma, feeling like a convict unjustly imprisoned, set her jaws and resolved to go through with the sentence. She revolted, however, at the insolence of the masseuse--and her exclamations of horror at the neglect of a “skin that had never really been cleaned.”

But the wretch silenced Momma’s indignation with the indignity of smeared cold cream, and smothered her with hot towels and cold towels, and with lotions of every odor and smart.

Momma would not speak to her as she left, but when she scowled at the mirror, she gazed at the new face aghast it flung back at her. The dull parchment of her skin had become a living integument with a kind of dreamy radiance alive in it.

Momma felt bewitched. She would have sworn that the image in the looking-glass smiled first at her and nodded, compelling her to smile back and nod in return. She hung there fascinated, understanding a little of what Narcissus felt when he looked first in the pool.

Then a quiet Frenchman was shown in. He overawed Momma by his dignity and his dexterity. She dared not slap his face when he spoke of her hair as a crime. He called it a “cream,” but she understood his shoulders.

And then he attacked her poor head with ferocious familiarity. If Poppa had ever caught him, and her, he’d certainly have shot them both.

Momma was in for it, however, and she actually permitted this strange man, this appalling foreigner, to take down her hair, drench it, soap it, souse her head in water, pour curious smelly things over her scalp, and rinse them out, massage her occiput, comb and pull and torture and iron her hair and dress it on top of her astounded skull in what he called a “French twist.” She spent a whole hour of “feeling like a shirt in a steam laundry,” as she afterward expressed it. Then he brandished before her a mirror and uttered a triumphant cry of something that sounded like:

“Ah, my damn, walla, walla!”

Momma blushed vermilion and felt as immoral as she looked. Yet not at all remorseful, somehow. Fortunately Franswa dashed out to prepare the hair of Ella, leaving Momma to ponder her new face and her new hair with a new soul.

She felt that, in Hattie’s formula, she ought to be ashamed of herself, but, to save her immortal being, she could not.

Only one thing she was sure of, and that was that that head and that hair did not belong on top of that old dress of hers. Her one “best dress” was the one worst dress she had ever seen.

When at length she saw Ella, Ella screamed with delight at the transformation and said something that rimed:

_Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be._

The afternoon was spent in shopping for what Ella called “landjerree.”

Until she had the proper underpinnings, Ella simply refused to buy Mattie the new dress and hat she was already clamoring for.

The amount of Poppa’s money that Ella spent on silken shamelessness dazed Momma, but Ella would not be checked, and Momma was too childishly interested in the new doll rags to make more than a show of resistance.

Ella said: “If your husband has money enough to waste ten thousand dollars on my husband’s foolish investments, he has money enough to buy you some decent underclothes.”

“Did you say ‘decent’?” was Momma’s feeble disclaimer, but she barely muttered it.

That night, on a plea of going to bed early, Momma locked herself in her room and tried on the new things. She nearly died of palpitation of the heart when she stood up in silk stockings, satin mules, and in a new streamline corset that gave her a figure! A heroic figure indeed, but a shape, a contour, that was not altogether an insult to the Creator who fashioned it. Momma had to give it a religious significance to live through it.

* * * * *

And why not? What instinct is more deeply implanted in womanhood than the immemorial insatiable lust for pretty things? It has resisted the immemorial insatiable lust of preachers and satirists for insulting it, of economists and hardworking men for denouncing it. It has been called every contemptuous and cruel name in every language. Laws have been made against it innumerably, in vain. And it has flourished as unconquerably as violets in moss, as perfume in hyacinths, as bright plumage in birds, and ornate sunsets in western skies.

The weavers of silk and the needlers of laces, the designers of gowns and of hats have kept up their beautiful careers despite the thunders of self-styled virtue and the slanders of all times.

Poets and prosers and painters who have turned less beautiful lines and have married less beautiful colors, and the critics who have celebrated their achievements, have looked down with disdain on those who have devoted their inspirations and their toil to the creation of felicitous decorations for the living body.

But the women have known better. They never have despised the artists who improved them and enhanced them; and by hook or by crook they have kept those artists alive and blessed them with fame.

And again why not? The pietists and the Puritans who cannot forgive women for trying to be beautiful, do they not belie their own gods in their own barbaric praise of ugliness?

“O Justice, what crimes are committed in thy name!” And, O Beauty, what crimes in thine! Yet beauty shall not die nor the love of ornament, and those who hate them cannot prove their right to cast a stone. Frightful extravagances and cruelties are the result of the hunger for beauty and the feeding of that appetite, but this is true of every other religion and law and ideal.

If everybody who dressed plainly and lived without luxury, gave all he saved or she did not spend to the poor, their miserliness might be justified, but everybody knows that this is not so.

Beauty is generous. She who is pleased with herself is already hospitable, and until the millennium is here those who have not the energy or the wile to get fine clothes and wear them well may content themselves as best they can by watching the well-bedecked go by.

And who is he so mean of soul that he would decree the extinction of the custom women have of making themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible? And what benefits would the vandal confer on bedulled mankind?

Momma at least at last was not of that humor. She had become a girl again at heart. She could never be again the gracile nymph who had turned the heads of Carthage swains with her flesh of apple-blossom hue, her fleecy hair in its ribbons, and her gay body in its winsome fabrics.

But she could be a splendid white-haired matron; and that age has a nobler beauty and a grander charm than even youth can give, youth so common and so helpless in its grace.

When Momma walked by chance in front of the long cheval glass, she fell back with a sob of fear and shame. But she approached again and studied herself. She stood up straight, lifting her head proudly on her throat, her torso on her hips; holding herself stalwart as an empress.

And she thanked God for what He had given her, and promised Him she would take better care of the chalice of her soul. And a happiness possessed her like a benediction.

* * * * *

The next day she went forth to buy dresses, not mere tents to hide her shapeless body under, colored bags to cover her lumps and bulges from the casual and unlingering eye, but exquisite masterpieces from skilled looms, piously accepting the human form and developing its graces.

Ella was not fool enough to put kittenish anachronisms of dress on Momma. She made her look herself at her supreme.

And the slithy mannequins who stood about raved over the miracle that had been accomplished in turning the dowdy peasant that entered the shop into a high-bred dowager who smiled upon an approving mirror.

Momma’s only grief was that she could not wear any of the gowns out on the street at once. She had a frantic desire to prance up Fifth Avenue without delay. But there were alterations to make, and she must wait.

And so must Dr. Courtneidge.

She took the delay as her punishment for having put off so long the day of her at-one-ment with her better self.

The afternoon was spent among the milliners. Glistening countesses in black satin came and went with hats like coronets. They set them daintily on Momma’s turreted hair and lifted them away again. Momma sat up so straight that she felt taller sitting down than she had seemed hitherto reaching for a pantry shelf.

It was unbelievable how much it changed her face to change her hat. She cowered in horror from beneath some of the brims, but others so caught her up into the clouds that they amounted to translation--apotheosis almost.

In spite of Ella’s cries of protest, she bought five of the costliest and wore one of them away.

She went to bed prostrated. But it was the prostration of a girl come home from a great ball, worn out with rapture and pursued by remembered music.

* * * * *

Poppa had not heard a word of Momma since the telegram she sent him saying that she had arrived and been met and was awful tired and discouraged.

When no letters came he was sure that she was up to her old trick of concealing the worst from him as long as possible. He was sure that she was in the hospital, delirious with pain and on her way to the grave. His heart went mad with visions of her loss and of the dismal life without her.

On another of his impulses he took a train for New York, sending a brief telegram to Ella.

He got off the train in much the desolate mood that had dejected Momma when she arrived. He also resisted the redcap and trudged dolefully to the line where people waited behind the rope. And up to him also came a gorgeous creature whom he did not recognize until he heard the ancient voice.

“Poppa, don’t you know me?”

The voice was Momma’s, but since when was she a tsarina off the throne? He, too, dropped his handbag and collapsed. And she lifted him and murmured as she kissed him:

“Don’t you like me?”

“I don’t know you,” he faltered.

But he kissed her suave and fragrant cheek again and looked into the gleaming eyes of the bride he remembered out of the long ago.

Then he began to laugh in great gulps of blissful anguish, like a boy who has found on the Christmas tree a richer gift than he had ever dreamed of, or dared to ask.

Momma cried too. But such a different wail from the wails he had heard from her of late!

Finally Poppa thought that he must give credit for the redemption where it was due.

“That Dr. Courtneidge is certainly a wonder. What on earth did he do to you?”

“I haven’t seen him yet,” said Momma. “And I’m not goin’ to. I’ve taken what Ella calls the ‘hat cure’ and all the other clothes cures. And they haven’t cost much more than old Courtneidge would have charged.”

Poppa felt very uneasy walking along with Momma in all her glittering glory. He had always loved her. Now he felt proud of her with the goodly pride of a man who has the luck to get a beautiful wife and the brains to keep her beautiful.

The only fly in the great bowl of ointment was himself, his shabby self. He confessed as much.

“I’m ashamed to be seen with you, Momma.”

“You won’t be after I get through taking you to the tailor’s and the other places I’m goin’ to take you to. This is our second honeymoon, Poppa. We didn’t have any trousseau at tall before, but we’re going to make up for it now. I think I’ll telegraph for Hattie and give her a look, just so’s to hear her say: ‘Why, Momma, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!’”

“I guess you’d oughta, at that,” Poppa guffawed.

And as she swept into Ella’s limousine like a Roman empress entering a chariot. Momma tittered:

“I am! I’m so ashamed of myself, I’m proud of it!”

_Cosmopolitan Magazine_

BACK PAY

BY

FANNIE HURST

BACK PAY[5]

By FANNIE HURST

I set out to write a love-story, and for the purpose sharpened a bright-pink pencil with a glass ruby frivolously at the eraser end.

Something sweet. Something dainty. A candied rose-leaf after all is the bitter war-lozenges. A miss. A kiss. A golf-stick. A motor-car. Or, if need be, a bit of khaki, but without one single spot of blood or mud, and nicely pressed as to those fetching peg-top trouser effects where they wing out just below the skirt-coat. The oldest story in the world told newly. No wear out to it. Editors know. It’s as staple as eggs or printed lawn or ipecac. The good old-fashioned love story with the above-mentioned miss, kiss and, if need be for the sake of timeliness, the bit of khaki, pressed.

Just my luck that, with one of these most salable tales in the world at the tip of my pink pencil, Hester Bevins should come pounding and clamoring at the door of my mental reservation, quite drowning out the rather high, the lipsy, and, if I do say it myself, distinctly musical patter of Arline. That was to have been her name. Arline Kildane. Sweet, don’t you think, and with just a bit of wild Irish rose in it?

But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little, elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to blow my pitch-pipe for a minor key.

Not that Hester’s isn’t one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks younger than love--and how often the two are interchangeable!

There is another Hester in fiction who wore a literal scarlet letter, but she is sprung from the brain of genius, from whence all immortal brain-children are born. My poor Hester is of far less fertile gray matter, but here she is as she is.

If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two charges.

She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was honestly what she was.

“If the wages of sin is death,” she said to a road-house party of roysterers one dawn, “then I’ve quite a bit of back pay coming to me.” And joined in the shout that rose off the table.

I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and disintegrate as those of women of Hester’s stripe? Their yesterdays are entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.

For the first seventeen years of her life, she lived in what we might call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants. Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station, a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a green slant of terrace. You know--the kind that first establishes a ten-o’clock curfew for its young, its dance-halls, and motion-picture theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant vice undergrowth.

Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even stopping to pick up the child or leave a license-number, was reared--no; grew up, is better--in the home of an aunt. A blond aunt with many gold teeth and many pink and blue wrappers.

Whatever Hester knew of the kind of home that fostered her, it left apparently no welt across her sensibilities. It was a rather poor house, an unpainted frame in a poor street, but there was never a lack of gaiety or, for that matter, any pinching lack of funds. It was an actual fact that, at thirteen, cotton or lisle stockings brought out a little irritated rash on Hester’s slim young legs, and she wore silk. Abominations, it is true, at three pair for a dollar, that sprung runs and would not hold a darn, but, just the same, they were silk. There was an air of easy _camaraderie_ and easy money about that house. It was not unusual for her to come home from school at high noon and find a front-room group of one, two, three, or four guests, almost invariably men. Frequently these guests handed her out as much as half a dollar for candy-money, and not another child in school reckoned in more than pennies.

Once, a guest, for reasons of odd change, I suppose, handed her out thirteen cents. Outraged perhaps at the meanness of the sum, and with an early and deep-dyed superstition of thirteen, she dashed the coins out of his hand and to the four corners of the room, escaping in the guffaw of laughter that went up.

Often her childish sleep in a small top room with slanting sides would be broken upon by loud ribaldry that lasted into dawn, but never by word, and certainly not by deed, was she to know from her aunt any of its sordid significance.

Literally, Hester Bevins was left to feather her own nest. There were no demands made upon her. Once, in the little atrocious front parlor of horsehair and chromo, one of the guests, the town baggage-master, to be exact, made to embrace her, receiving from the left rear a sounding smack across cheek and ear from the aunt.

“Cut that! Hester, go out and play! Whatever she’s got to learn from life, she can’t say she learned it in my house.”

There were even two years of high school, and at sixteen, when she went, at her own volition, to clerk in Finley’s two story department store on High Street, she was still innocent, although she and Gerald Fishback were openly sweethearts.

Gerald was a Thor. Of course, you are not to take that literally; but if ever there was a carnification of the great god himself, then Gerald was in his image. A wide streak of the Scandinavian ran through his make-up, although he had been born in Middletown, and from there had come recently to the Finley Dry Goods Company as an accountant.

He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream. Hester was one of them.

It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little gazelle smelling up at the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore a crisp percale shirt-waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points to them.

They were in the very heart of Wallach’s Grove, under a natural cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions of soda-water and beer-bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet. He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picnickers’ immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him.

“Tickle-tickle!” she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig.

He caught at her hand.

“Hester,” he said, “marry me.”

She felt a foaming through her until her finger-tips sang.

“Well, I like that!” was what she said, though, and flung up a pointed profile that was like that same gazelle’s smelling the moon.

He was very darkly red, and rose to his knees to clasp her about the waist. She felt like relaxing back against his blondness and feeling her fingers plow through the great double wave of his hair. But she did not.

“You’re too poor,” she said.

He sat back without speaking for a long minute.

“Money isn’t everything,” he said finally, and with something gone from his voice.

“I know,” she said, looking off; “but it’s a great deal if you happen to want it more than anything else in the world.”

“Then, if that’s how you feel about it, Hester, next to wanting you, I want it, too, more than anything else in the world.”

“There’s no future in bookkeeping.”

“I know a fellow in Cincinnati who’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar man. Hester? Dear?”

“A week?”

“Why, of course not, dear--a month.”

“Faugh!” she said, still looking off.

He felt out for her hand, at the touch of her reddening up again.

“Hester,” he said, “you’re the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most maddening, the most--the most everything girl in the world! You’re not going to have an easy time of it, Hester, with your--your environment and your dangerousness, if you don’t settle down--quick, with some strong fellow to take care of you. A fellow who loves you. That’s me, Hester. I want to make a little home for you and protect you. I can’t promise you the money--right off, but I can promise you the bigger something from the very start. From the very start, Hester. Dear?”

She would not let her hand relax to his.

“I hate this town,” she said.

“There’s Cincinnati. Maybe my friend could find an opening there.”

“Faugh!”

“Cincinnati dear, is a metropolis.”

“No, no! You don’t understand. I hate littleness. Even little metropolises. Cheapness. I hate little towns and little spenders and mercerized stockings and cotton lisle next to my skin, and machine-stitched nightgowns--ugh; it scratches!”

“And I--I just love you in those starchy white shirt-waists, Hester. You’re beautiful.”

“That’s just the trouble. It satisfies you, but it suffocates me. I’ve got a pink-crêpe-de-Chine soul. Pink crêpe de Chine--you hear?”

He sat back on his heels.

“It--is it true, then, Hester that--that you’re making up with that Jewish traveling salesman from New York?”

“Why!” she said, coloring. “Why, I’ve only met him twice walking up High Street evenings!”

“But it _is_ true, isn’t it, Hester?”

“Say, who was answering your questions this time last year?”

“But it _is_ true, isn’t it, Hester? Isn’t it?”

“Well, of all the nerve!”

But it was.

* * * * *

The rest tells glibly. The Jewish salesman, who wore blue-and-white-striped soft collars with a bar pin across the front, does not even enter the story. He was only a stepping-stone. From him, the ascent, or descent, or whatever you choose to call it, was quick and sheer.

Five years later, Hester was the very private, the very exotic, manicured, coiffured, scented, svelted, and strictly _de-luxe_ chattel of one Charles G. Wheeler, of New York city and Rosencranz, Long Island, vice-president of the Standard Tractor Company, a member of no clubs but of the Rosencranz church, three lodges, and several corporations.

You see, there is no obvious detail lacking. Yes; there was an apartment. “Flat” it becomes under their kind of tenancy, situated on the windiest bend of Riverside Drive and minutely true to type from the pale-blue and brocade Verni Martin parlor of talking-machine, mechanical piano, and cellarette built to simulate a music cabinet, to the pink-brocaded bedroom with a _chaise longue_ piled high with a small mountain of lace pillowettes that were liberally interlarded with paper-bound novels, and a spacious, white-marble adjoining bathroom with a sunken tub, rubber-sheeted shower, white-enamel weighing scales and over-loaded medicine-chest of cosmetic array in frosted bottles, sleeping-, headache-, sedative powders, _et al._ There were also a negro maid, two Pomeranian dogs, and last, but by no means least, a private telephone enclosed in a hall closet and lighted by an electric bulb that turned on automatically to the opening of the door.

There was nothing sinister about Wheeler. He was a rather fair exponent of that amazing genus known as “typical New Yorker,” a roll of money in his pocket, and a roll of fat at the back of his neck. He went in for light checked suits, wore a platinum-and-Oriental-pearl chain across his waistcoat, and slept at a Turkish bath once a week; was once named in a large corporation scandal, escaping indictment only after violent and expensive skirmishes, could be either savage or familiar with waiters, wore highly manicured nails, which he regarded frequently in public, white-silk socks only, and maintained, on a twenty-thousand-a-year scale in the decorous suburb of Rosencranz, a decorous wife and three children, and, like all men of his code, his ethics were strictly double-decked. He would not permit his nineteen-year-old daughter Marion so much as a shopping-tour to the city without the chaperonage of her mother or a friend, forbade in his wife, a comely enough woman with a white unmarcelled coiffure and upper arms a bit baggy with withering flesh, even the slightest of shirt-waist V’s unless filled in with net, and kept up, at an expense of no less than fifteen thousand a year--thirty the war-year that tractors jumped into the war-industry class--the very high-priced, -tempered, -handled, and -stepping Hester of wild-gazelle charm.

Not that Hester stepped much. There were a long underslung roadster and a great tan limousine with yellow-silk curtains at the call of her private telephone.

The Wheeler family used, not without complaint, a large open car of very early vintage, which in winter was shut in with flapping curtains with isinglass peepers, and leaked cold air badly.

On more than one occasion they passed on the road--these cars. The long tan limousine with the shock-absorbers, foot-warmers, two brown Pomeranian dogs, little case of enamel-top bottles, fresh flowers, and outside this little jewel-case interior, smartly exposed, so that the blast hit him from all sides, a chauffeur in uniform that harmonized nicely with the tans and yellows. And then the grotesque caravan of the Azoic motor-age, with its flapping curtains and ununiformed youth in visored cap at the wheel.

There is undoubtedly an unsavory aspect to this story. For purpose of fiction, it is neither fragrant nor easily digested. But it is not so unsavory as the social scheme which made it possible for those two cars to pass thus on the road, and, at the same time, Charles G. Wheeler to remain the unchallenged member of the three lodges, the corporations, and the Rosencranz church, with a memorial window in his name on the left side as you enter, and again his name spelled out on a brass plate at the end of a front pew.

No one but God and Mrs. Wheeler knew what was in her heart. It is possible that she did not know what the world knew, but hardly. That she endured it is not admirable, but then there were the three children, and, besides, she lived in a world that let it go at that. And so she continued to hold up her head in her rather poor, mute way, rode beside her husband to funerals, weddings, and to the college commencement of their son at Yale. Scrimped a little, cried a little, prayed a little in private, but outwardly lived the life of the smug in body and soul.

But the Wheelers’ is another story, also a running social sore; but it was Hester, you remember, who came sobbing and clamoring to be told--and so back to her.

As Wheeler once said of her, she was a darn-fine clotheshorse. There was no pushed-up line of flesh across the middle of her back, as the corsets did it to Mrs. Wheeler. She was honed to the ounce. The white-enameled weighing scales, the sweet oils, the flexible fingers of her masseur, the dumb-bells, the cabinet, salt-water, needle-spray, and vapor-baths saw to that. Her skin, unlike Marion Wheeler’s, was unfreckled, and as heavily and tropically white as a magnolia leaf, and, of course, she reddened her lips, and the moonlike pallor came out more than ever.

As I said, she was frankly what she was. No man looked at her more than once without knowing it. To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul. The wells of her eyes were muddy with it.

But withal, she commanded something of a manner, even from Wheeler. He had no key to the apartment. He never entered her room without knocking. There were certain of his friends she would not tolerate, from one or another aversion, to be party to their not infrequent carousals. Men did not always rise from their chairs when she entered a room, but she suffered few liberties from them. She was absolutely indomitable in her demands.

“Lord!” ventured Wheeler, upon occasion across a Sunday-noon, lace-spread breakfast-table, when she was slim and cool-fingered in orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat, pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. “Say, aren’t these Yvette bills pretty steep?

“One midnight-blue-and-silver gown $485.00
One blue-and-silver head bandeau 50.00
One serge-and-satin trotteur gown 275.00
One ciel-blue tea-gown 280.00

“Is that the cheapest you can drink tea? Whew!”

She put down her coffee-cup which she usually held with one little finger poised elegantly outward as if for flight.

“You’ve got a nerve!” she said, rising and pushing back her chair. “Over whose ticker are you getting quotations that I come cheap?”

He was immediately conciliatory, rising also to enfold her in an embrace that easily held her slightness.

“Go on,” he said. “You could work me for the Woolworth Building in diamonds if you wanted it badly enough.”

“Funny way of showing it! I may be a lot of things, Wheeler, but I’m not cheap. You’re darn lucky that the war is on and I’m not asking for a French car.”

He crushed his lips to hers.

“You devil!” he said.

There were frequent parties. Dancing at Broadway cabarets. All-night joy rides, punctuated with road-house stop-overs and not infrequently, in groups of three or four couples, ten-day pilgrimages to showy American spas.

“Getting boiled out,” they called it. It was part of Hester’s scheme for keeping her sveltness.