Chapter XII

Maud departed for New York, radiant in new clothes and expectations of others. She set her house in order and gave Horatia a detailed list of instructions as to what to do on every usual occasion and in every emergency. And Horatia found a surprising pleasure in what she was to undertake. The Williams were to be gone two months and she would have full charge of everything. It would be interesting and stimulating to run a house and supervise the care of children. She liked Maud’s children and she liked the housemaid and the cook. It would be very easy and to Maud’s anxious worries she turned a laughing face and a competent spirit. She stood, with Jackie held by one hand and the baby in her arms, waving good-bye to their parents, and when the car was out of sight took her charges to the nursery with a delightful new feeling of personal responsibility.

After the flat, Maud’s house gave her a sense of expansion. To have her breakfast served daintily at a dining-room table was refreshing after months of getting up hurriedly and getting the milk and orange marmalade and rolls together herself. To come back at night to a comfortable house where there were two or three rooms into which she might wander instead of the small living-room of the flat was restful and to go up to the nursery was the most fun of all. The children were often in bed or just being put to bed by the housemaid and their smiles and chuckles at the sight of Horatia if she arrived in time to give them the finishing touches and tuck them in was one of the nicest happenings of the day. Their helplessness, their recognitions, their constantly growing intelligence, all fascinated her. Mingled with her natural love for them was wonder too and constant speculation. It was not unlikely that in a few years she might have children too, children for whom the responsibility would be always hers. She began to respect Maud, Maud being absent and non-irritant, for this achievement of two children. Two children brought into the world and preserved in perfect health. It was no slight thing. It was a big thing--a big success.

There was further speculation in her mind when she paid her sister’s bills. Dimly she had known that Harvey and Maud spent a great deal of money but she had not guessed how much. Their home was simple and it was not until she had checked over a great sheaf of bills which came in at the end of Maud’s first week of absence that Horatia found that the simplicity was the expensive result of many hands, many shops, many materials all blended smoothly together into a domestic interior. The total of the bills appalled her. She had laughed at Harvey’s insistence on leaving her a sum in the bank, which she declared “would last a year.” At this rate of expenditure she saw that it would possibly last the two months of her sister’s absence. The most unexpected things cost so much--in the kitchen and in the nursery. And a new speculation bordering on worry came to take the place of those first rapturous thoughts about her own children. She and Jim had figured on living on a sum which did not represent a tenth of what her sister was spending. Granted that she could save this and that and cut out this and that expense, could she even then---- She decided that she must ask Jim.

Jim came every evening when she did not go to the office. He was especially tender these days as if he were trying to completely and surely eradicate the scar which Grace had left on Horatia’s mind. They were beautiful, peaceful evenings with the house quiet and full of the spirit of the sleeping children, and sometimes they imagined that it was their house, that they were at home at last.

“Have you any idea how much this costs, Jim,” asked Horatia, “this peace and order and well-keptness?”

“I can only guess at it in horror.”

She told him and he whistled.

“Worse than your guess?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I had some money of my own,” said Horatia, regretfully. “We’ll have to devise ways of making _The Journal_ pay better.”

“If I left _The Journal_ I could get a fairly big salary on some other paper, perhaps.”

“And have your policy dictated by a lot of rotters! No indeed. We’ll stick to _The Journal_. It brought us all our luck. Something will happen. And of course I could live on lots less than Maud can. But I want my house even if it’s only a flat to have dignity too--not to be messy and frumpy. You want that too.”

“I don’t think that I want anything in the world except you and to give you everything I can.”

So they buried the difficulty in words and secretly Langley puzzled over his account books and secretly Horatia made budgets, strange and startling budgets, of household expenses with estimates of the cost of things reduced to minimums which would have shocked Maud or made her laugh. But even then----

The money part did not bother Horatia seriously. It was fun to puzzle and to plan. And for three weeks things ran smoothly. Then the housemaid was sent to the hospital one day for an operation for acute appendicitis, and for a few hours confusion reigned. Horatia, to whom the cook telephoned, left her work to Bob Brotherton and came home in haste. She encouraged the terrified housemaid and got her safely into the ambulance and engaged a nurse for her at the hospital. Then the cook went shakily back to her own work and Horatia started to put the children to bed. She had often done it before, but always before Ellen had laid things out for her and the nursery had been in order and the children fed. She found tonight a nursery in the wildest confusion, two cross children and no supper ready for them. She consulted Anna, the cook. Anna was but temperately helpful. She told Horatia what they had for supper and how to prepare the baby’s food but she did not suggest helping her. Horatia struggled with a maze of dishes, formulas and prohibitions and finally bore the tray up to the nursery. It was an hour and a half before she came down, but then the room was in order and the children in bed and quiet. Anna, who had kept dinner waiting for half an hour, did not seem especially coöperative. Now that the shock of Ellen’s illness was over and a call from the hospital reported her as resting easily, Anna seemed inclined to worry lest she be imposed upon. She told Horatia that Ellen always dressed the children at half-past seven and that she could not both get breakfast and dress them. Also she wondered if she could care for them during the day when Horatia was at the office. Horatia soothed her fears. Maud had left no instructions as to what to do in case one of the servants had appendicitis but Horatia guessed that the best thing was to engage a temporary housemaid. In the morning she promised Anna that should be done.

She was up early to dress and feed the children--but in spite of her early rising she found that she had to eat her own breakfast very hurriedly and then was late at the office because she had to go to three employment agencies. Rather discouraging places, the employment agencies. They showed her long waiting lists of their patrons but promised to do what they could. Horatia had no choice but to be content and so she went to the office and plunging into an exciting day forgot Maud’s household for a while.

But returning that night she was forced into the thick of domestic difficulty again. Anna was distinctly cross. The children were cross. There were many loose ends for Horatia to tie--many duties to perform which seemed especially wearying after her long day at the office.

“Domesticity needs a lot of oiling,” she told Jim.

He made things easy for her in the office but even with a great many things done for her there Horatia found both the office and the domestic burdens heavy. Savagely she spurned a little thought which crawled into her mind at times. “Of course I can manage my house and my work, when I am attacking my own problems. It’s only because this is something I am not used to, something that I have to carry out according to the plans which other people have made for me.” But none the less the thought crawled back again, suggesting that Maud had money and everything to make things easy for her and that even then the care of two children and a household was a heavy task when it was coupled with even eight hours of office work. She did not take that problem to Jim. It was hard to phrase and there seemed no very obvious way to solve it except by her own efforts. They wanted children and a home and she must work. She was doubly sure that she would want to work, especially when Anna’s complaints and the children’s restlessness were forgotten in the busy routine of the office--and yet there were times when just to get up in the morning and go to the office seemed too hard a strain. Suppose that after her marriage she should feel it too hard?

They could not find a new housemaid. The employment agencies seemed futile and advertisements, even in _The Journal_, brought such dilapidated creatures in answer that Horatia could not bear to entrust the children to them. For a few days they tried a trained nurse with whom Anna quarreled bitterly and who finally left because Anna insisted that she should make beds and do the dusting. Anna was continually on the defensive. After a visit to Ellen she felt it rather unfair that she should not have had an attack of appendicitis and have been sent to a pleasant hospital where her meals were brought to her on a tray and she was watched over by nurses. Ellen continued to get better. That was the bright spot. In a few weeks she would be as well as ever and in the meantime, if Anna would only stay, Horatia felt that she could manage. She refused to write Maud that she was having difficulties. Maud had counted on this trip and after all there was nothing very wrong.

“Nothing except that you are wearing out under my eyes,” complained Jim.

But a worse complication came and after it had come, Horatia felt that all had been easy before. Jackie, with the astonishing suddenness of children, had been well when she started for her office in the morning and when she came home at night he was sick and feverish and refused to eat his supper. She put him to bed and consulting Maud’s lists found the name of the baby doctor and summoned him. He was a gentle-voiced, pleasant young man who after one look at the boy developed a frightening air of seriousness and told Horatia to send for a nurse. She asked him if she should telegraph Maud but he shook his head.

“It’s not much use. He’s poisoned somehow--eaten something or some things that he shouldn’t have eaten. The chances are that he will come out all right by tomorrow, but if he doesn’t she couldn’t get here anyhow. You can wait until morning. He will probably be all right. But it will mean prompt work now. Try to get a nurse from the children’s hospital.”

A tangled night. Horatia remembered the coming of the nurse and her own quick confidence that the uniform would help somehow in bringing Jackie through. So much skill surely---- She remembered Jim’s coming and her amazement that his arms could not comfort her--that nothing could help her except the assurances that the poor, tossing, wailing little boy would probably be all right. She heard him cry as they did things to his little body which hurt before they relieved it. She had constant pictures of the way he had looked two days before and she could hear his jolly little laugh. She had an agonized sense of the terrible waste of life there must be when children died. And once she turned to Jim with a frightened cry:

“I can’t bear it, Jim! I tell you I can’t bear it. And what if it were my child? Could it be worse? Dare we risk all that?”

She had a memory of Jim’s great strength and of all the things he did--and how the doctor turned to him and asked things and of Jim’s calmness and readiness, and of one moment when he took a wailing Anna by the shoulders and sent her out of the room. Horatia did not wail. But her face was so white and so full of suffering that Jim kept close beside her ready for a collapse if it should come.

A fight for life is always terrible, but with a child, when the odds are so unequal, it is especially terrible. The doctor and nurse, quiet and coöperative, worked steadily together--hours passed--the cries from the tortured little body became fewer and at last the doctor, coming out into the upper hallway where Jim and Horatia sat together, said those words which have brought such floods of happiness to so many watchers, “He’ll get through all right. In a week he’ll be as fit as ever. Great bit of luck that we caught it in time. In half an hour more he would have had convulsions and it’s hard to get a baby well under those conditions.”

Horatia was weeping silently.

“You’ve had a big strain, Miss Grant. Better get to bed. The nurse will be here all night and tomorrow I’ll send someone to relieve her. In a day or two he won’t need any watching; but while he is so weak it is just as well to give him expert nursing.”

He was gone.

“Will you go to bed, now?”

“I don’t need to go to bed now,” she answered, smiling through her tears. “I’ve strength enough for a lifetime.”

“You’re to go to bed at once,” said Jim. “If you don’t, you will lose your job on _The Journal_. Come, you can lock me out and then go to bed.”

They told Anna about the boy’s safety and Anna characteristically relapsed into a quick account of what she herself had gone through since he had begun to be sick. She admitted that she had given him a piece of mince pie and that he had liked it so well that she had let him have “another sliver.”

“He was pestering me for it.”

Horatia was past reproaches. She turned and went away, around the house with Jim, locking the windows and doors and turning off the lights. Coupled with her relief and happiness was a happiness in doing these domestic things with Jim and a new closeness because they had been through suffering together. At the front door, he took her in his arms.

“I couldn’t have borne it without you, Jim.”

“We can bear anything--together.”

Again that feeling that this might be repeated in their own life together--their own children might go down to the edge of death--suffering might come--but they would have each other. Life could not frighten them.

Then, as if everything had become as hard as possible to test her, and finding her brave under the test, was becoming kinder, the household burdens lightened. Jackie was well--so amazingly well that it was hard to believe that he ever had been sick--Ellen was better and came back to her work and the house slid into order and ease again. And more and more accustomed did Horatia become to the ways of a household and more and more normal did it seem to imagine herself in a household. She absorbed the touch of dogmatism natural to the competent woman who must dogmatize about her household. That was one of the unfortunate results of her adaptability and one bound to have grave consequences. All the things around her were real and true. They were made graver and deeper by the reflection of the things she had learned in the last six months but their truth was not altered. Children were beautiful, homes were beautiful, and love was the most beautiful and basic fact of all. The episode of Grace had become a dulled tragedy and she rarely thought of her previous life in their flat lest she resurrect what had been such an ugly climax to it.