Читать книгу White Banners - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 6

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MARCIA roused at nine with an oppressive sense of guilt such as a sentry might feel when caught asleep at his post. But no one came to reproach her. The house was very quiet.

She always depended on the children to waken her early. This morning there hadn't been a peep out of them. They must have been stealthily whisked away before they had had a chance to make a noise. That, she reflected, would be some more of this mysterious Hannah's doings. Hannah, for some unknown reason, had determined to make herself indispensable, though why she had decided it might be to her advantage to share their plight was a riddle that would take a lot of explaining.

Marcia sleepily conceded that if it really was the woman's ambition to become so useful they couldn't part with her, she was already well on the way towards success. One might try valiantly to be indignant over Hannah's obstinate generosity, but it was a sweet relief to know that somebody—no matter who or why—had temporarily shouldered the irksome load.

That the canny creature had managed to take Paul into camp was to have been expected. Marcia hoped Hannah would not consider this a feather in her cap, seeing how easily Paul could be taken in by almost anybody. Under her direction, doubtless—Marcia could reconstruct the self-assured tone in which the calm orders had been issued—Paul had slipped quietly out of the house to his eight-fifty class in Elizabethan Drama, after having breakfasted without haste or confusion. Paul would like that, nor was he the sort to worry over the future consequences of putting himself this much deeper into Hannah's debt.

Marcia interlaced her fingers behind her curly head and stared wide-eyed at the dingy ceiling. It wasn't exactly as if Paul was insensitive to debt. The humiliations of it hurt him. He was always very much subdued after a telephone conversation in which some impatient credit manager ruthlessly raked him over the coals. But after a pensive half-hour he would bob up like a cork. Knowing he was worried and wounded, she would go to him and sit on the arm of his chair. And he would look up brightly smiling, rub his cheek fondly against her arm, and say, "Listen—I'll read you something funny." She wished she had the same capacity for such prompt and painless recovery from a raw insult. There wasn't, she reflected with a deep sigh, very much bounce left in her. Paul was certainly a marvel of resilience, or else he was a master at concealing his thoughts, and she didn't think he was the latter. In fact, he was almost childishly frank. You could read him like a book. He was transparent as glass.

The oddest feature of his character was his undefeatable hope that things would soon be better for them. He had been nourishing himself on that faith ever since they were married. He had always talked about their predicament as if it was some sort of unforeseen emergency which ought to ease up by the tenth of the month at the latest. Every day since their honeymoon—on borrowed money, as she discovered six months later when he was savagely dunned for it—Paul had been counselling her to be patient and of good cheer. They wouldn't always be poor, no, sir-ee! Something would turn up. Once, ostensibly in jest but privately a little annoyed by his frequent use of this classic phrase, she had ventured to hint at the similarity between his optimism and that of Mr Wilkins Micawber. After that, he usually beat a hasty retreat when he found himself about to recite this article of his creed, but he was apt at devising the equivalents of it. Something would turn up. He believed that with a faith as bland as it was foolish and as dangerous as it was pathetic.

It wasn't as if he had just sat there serenely waiting for some benevolent angel to hand him a cornucopia. He had tried to do something to encourage Fortune to consider his need, rigged a little workshop in the attic, spent weary hours over clumsy models laboriously whittled out with flimsy tools. Sometimes Marcia would go up to show her interest. He would be humped over the bench, intently squinting at his product as if he had now arrived at the strategic moment, far too absorbed to stop even to value her good wishes. He would smile absently and wave her away—and she would answer his smile as courageously as possible. Then she would tiptoe down the attic stairs and cry her eyes out for him. Her throat ached now at the remembrance. Some days he would come home from the library with an armful of books about patents and sit up to all hours with them. He would abandon one project for another, casually dismissing the task he had toiled over for weeks and bravely taking on a fresh one with a cheerfulness that simply broke one's heart. Marcia wiped her eyes with the corner of the sheet. It was a darned shame! That's what it was! And things were never going to be any different. Paul's salary would never be very much larger than it was now.

Grimacing ironically at the mirror, Marcia sat at her vanity table and spent more than the usually allotted time with her hair. It was about the only thing she had left now to remind her of what she ought to look like, and she found comfort in concentrating her attention on it for a while, sweeping the brush through its spun gold almost caressingly. Paul had always been so proud of it.

And then, because she was playing the grand lady this morning, she drew on the pink négligé that he had given her on her birthday in June. They hadn't been able to pay the grocery bill in full that month or any part of the butcher's bill, but she couldn't summon the courage to chide him. Every time she had worn it, Marcia had experienced an uncomfortable feeling that the expensive garment wasn't really hers. It probably belonged by rights to the butcher, because she invariably thought of him whenever she looked at it. This would be an appropriate occasion to put it on. The voluntary assistance she was receiving wasn't rightfully hers either. She knew they would have all that to pay for sooner or later. High-grade service like this didn't just fall into your lap by magic. In the long run, the most expensive way to acquire anything was to get it for nothing. She pinned up her yellow hair and went leisurely down the stairs.

Wallie, with his hair wetted and sleeked back off his forehead, giving him a detestable smart-alecky expression, was sitting at his little table by the fire so industriously engaged with his crayons that he barely glanced up when he mumbled, "'Lo, Mummy", in preoccupied response to his mother's twice-repeated greeting. And how was her little boy's cold this morning? Marcia wondered, a query he answered promptly and fully with a resounding sneeze. Roberta was asleep in her perambulator on the other side of the grate, her thumb in her little rosebud of a mouth, as usual.

As she passed through the dining-room, Marcia noted that her place at the table was laid. It was a strange sensation to be cared for so thoroughly, somewhat perplexing but undeniably enjoyable. It was too good to be true, certainly too good to last very long.

Hannah had mounted the ironing-board on the backs of two kitchen chairs and was taking much pains with one of Roberta's little dresses. She smiled a salute.

"Sorry I overslept," apologized Marcia. "Someone should have called me." She realized, in her unpremeditated choice of "someone", that she was still bracing herself against an admission of Hannah into the household.

"Are you ready for your breakfast, ma'am?" asked Hannah pleasantly.

"I'll get it. All I want is a cup of coffee and a piece of toast... You're taking more trouble than I do with Roberta's clothes."

"You would if you had the time, ma'am. What a sweet baby she is!"

"I wish I could make her stop sucking her thumb."

"All babies do, more or less, don't they?" inquired Hannah serenely. "Perhaps they have some good reason for it, ma'am."

"What—for instance?" Marcia wondered. The woman was so capable. She might have an explanation. "And I wish," added Marcia kindly enough, "you wouldn't tag all your remarks to me with 'ma'am'. I'm not accustomed to it. If you're going to do my ironing without wages, I don't care to be cast for the part of the duchess."

"Thank you, ma'am," stammered Hannah. "As for Roberta's thumb, it has been so long since I was a baby that I've forgotten. But I think that Nature knows what she's up to, most of the time."

"I wonder," doubted Marcia. "I see Wallie's cold is no better. I must telephone Doctor Bowen to come and look at him."

Hannah peeled Roberta's fluffy white dress off the ironing-board and patted it down smoothly in a fresh place.

"Didn't he ever have a cold before?" she asked casually.

"Dozens! One right after another. Spring, summer, fall, and winter. He has been known to have two or three at the same time."

"You always have the doctor?" inquired Hannah, amused.

"Of course! A cold is dangerous if you let it run on. You can't depend much on your wise old Mother Nature."

"What does the doctor prescribe?"

"Oh, he doesn't usually give Wallie any medicine; tells me to keep him warm and see that he has plenty of liquids."

"Well, can't we do that?" asked Hannah placidly. "Not much use hiring the doctor to come here and say it over again. That four dollars would go a long way towards a ton of coal, if we're to keep the child warm. We are about out, you know."

It was an odd thing, thought Marcia, what shocking impertinencies this woman could commit without leaving you the slightest loophole for a suitable retort. And it was always done with a disarming smile that made it difficult for you to become indignant.

"Yes," said Marcia, subdued, "I must order some coal this morning." Her face was perplexed. She wondered whether their coal-dealer would consent to send out any more until they had paid something on their old bill. Paul had said he would talk to him about it. It would be unpleasant. He always postponed such humiliations as long as possible.

"You needn't worry about Wallie. He will be all right. I gave him a big dose of castor oil awhile ago." Hannah's calm report replied that any thought about sending for the doctor could now be prudently dropped.

"Did you have much trouble getting him to take it?" asked Marcia, pouring her coffee. "He does hate it so terribly."

Hannah smiled reminiscently and admitted that there had been "quite a struggle". Marcia knitted her brows and pictured the little fellow frightened and overpowered by this domineering creature who seemed bent on having her own way with all of them. "But I wouldn't give much," Hannah went on, "for a child who would take castor oil without some sort of fight. I'd expect him to wind up in a house for the feeble-minded."

"I hope you didn't have to be rough with him," said Marcia. "He's very sensitive. Did you hold his hands? Did he cry?"

For some time Hannah was much occupied with her ironing and the tardiness of her reply brought a deepening expression of concern into Marcia's eyes.

"No," she said at length, "he didn't cry and I didn't have to hold his hands. When I saw how much he objected to the nasty stuff, I stood him up here on the table and talked to him about you. I told him how sweet you were to him—and to everybody—and how you were so very tired that we mustn't make a noise, and if he didn't get over his cold you would have to sit up at night with him when you were sick yourself and ought to be in bed—and a lot more things like that." There was a long pause. "And so"—Hannah's voice lowered—"he took it."

Marcia's eyes grew misty.

"I didn't see him take it," continued Hannah, bending over her task. "I put a big spoonful in orange juice and set the glass down on the table, and I said, 'There it is, Wallie. Hannah's not going to make you take it—and Hannah's not even going to watch you do it.'" The iron kept on making deft little jabs into the ruffles, Hannah's eyes intent on her work. "And then I left him alone, and pretty soon I came back—and he had taken it."

"And what would you have done if he hadn't?" inquired Marcia, frankly stirred by the report of her son's bravery.

"Oh—I would have started all over again, I suppose, and promised to bake him some animal cookies, or some such bribe as that. I'm glad I didn't have to. It's so—so glorious, don't you think, when you find they've good, sound stuff in them?"

Marcia's pride shone in her eyes. She was quiet for a moment and then remarked, with a little perplexity, "But you just said a child was probably feeble-minded who would consent to take castor oil without a struggle. I hope you don't think Wallie is."

"Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, Mrs Ward. I told you there was a battle. Wallie put up a big fight, no doubt about that, but it was on the inside, where all fights ought to take place.... No"—she went on, half in soliloquy—"Wallie gave himself a dose of something more important than castor oil. He's a very stout little fellow."

"And now you're going to make him the cookies," said Marcia childishly.

"Not to-day," confided Hannah. "It's ever so much better if he can learn to fight battles without promises of pay." She tipped the iron up on its stern, and with one plump bare arm akimbo, proceeded to elucidate her theory. "That's what ails so many people, Mrs Ward. When they were little tots they took their castor oil because somebody was going to make animal cookies for them. And then, later on, every time they do something fine and big and nobody comes running up the next minute with animal cookies, they go into tantrums and say, 'I say! What's the good taking nasty medicine if there aren't any animal cookies?'"... Hannah took up the iron again. "No—we mustn't spoil this lad if we can help it. He's a thoroughbred, you know. And they take a lot of handling."

"You're funny," observed Marcia, rather surprised to find that she had made the thought audible.

"So they tell me," admitted Hannah, "but"—she hung Roberta's dress on the drying-rack and reached into the basket for another tiny garment—"but, anyway, Wallie got his castor oil, and that's the main thing." She hesitated, as if waiting for some rejoinder, and added, "Isn't it?"

"No," replied Marcia thoughtfully, "I don't think that's the main thing at all. And neither do you. I agree about the importance of playing the game without bribes. I know I've been peevish, plenty of times, because I wasn't paid off promptly for some little voluntary hardship."

"You do pretty well, Mrs Ward—if I may say so."

Marcia flushed a little and was annoyed at the very considerable pleasure she was experiencing in having been commended by her new maid. She knew she had no business being affected, one way or the other, by Hannah's opinions. It was impertinent of the woman to offer comments of this kind. Nevertheless, it was comforting. And on what grounds could Marcia Ward predict any snobbishness?

"Thank you, Hannah," she said gratefully. "You have been very kind to us. I can't quite understand it. Just why?"

Hannah ironed diligently for some time, and then replied as from a distance, "You took me in, Mrs Ward, when I was a—when you didn't know me, or really want me."

"I'm afraid I didn't do it very graciously. Certainly nothing I have done for you entitles me to any—any animal cookies." They both laughed a little, and Marcia was rather glad now that she hadn't told Paul about Hannah's baby. At least she had been able to do that much for her: she had kept her secret. She wondered if it might not ease Hannah's mind to know that. Rather childishly she ventured upon the topic while it was fresh in her mind. "By the way—I've been meaning to tell you that I haven't said anything to Mr Ward about your baby."

Hannah plied her iron industriously for a while and then inquired without looking up, "Why didn't you?"

Marcia was slightly nettled. She declared to herself that she had never met anyone who could so utterly destroy a conversation and leave you sitting with the wreck of it in your hands—and no place to put it. She had a notion to say "Because I feared it might embarrass you to know that Mr Ward knew." But this would imply that Hannah really ought to be embarrassed, no matter who did or didn't know about the baby. After sparring mentally with several tentative replies, and finding something the matter with all of them, she said feebly, "I just didn't—that's all." And left the room.