V
Mrs. Champney envisaged her life as divided into epochs, each one with its own significance and its own memories. There was her childhood, there was her girlhood. There were the early days of her married life, when she and her husband had been alone. There were the crowded and anxious and wonderful years when her children had been little. There was the beginning of her widowhood, overshadowed with anguish and loneliness, yet with a dark beauty of its own. There was her tranquil middle age, and there was her business life.
She had begun it on Tuesday, and this was Friday. It had lasted four days, yet it seemed to her quite as long as all the years of her youth. It seemed a lifetime in itself, in which she had acquired a new and bitter wisdom.
The train stopped at her station, and, with a crowd of other home-going commuters, Mrs. Champney got out and hurried up the steps to the street, to catch a trolley car; but she was not quick enough. By the time she got there the car was full, and she drew back and let it go. She never was quick enough any more. She seemed to have been transferred into a world of terrific speed and vigor, where she was hopelessly outdistanced, hopelessly old and weary and slow.
She had thought, until this week, that she was a fairly intelligent and energetic woman. She had even had her innocent little vanities; but now, standing on the corner and looking after the car—
“I’m a silly, doddering old thing!” she said to herself, with a trembling lip.
She remembered all the dreadful defeats and humiliations of the week. She remembered how slow she had been about wrapping up things and making change—how curt she had been with some of the wealthiest and most important customers—how stupid she had been about understanding the Polish and Italian women who brought in their work. She remembered the weary patience of Miss Elliott, who managed the shop. Miss Elliott was not more than twenty-eight, but she had been to Mrs. Champney like a discouraged but long-suffering teacher with a very trying child.
“Doddering!” Mrs. Champney repeated.
She was alone on the corner. In this new world nobody waited for anything. Those who, like herself, had missed the car, had at once set off on foot; and Mrs. Champney decided to do so herself. It was less than a mile—a pleasant walk in the soft April dusk.
This walk might have been specially designed by Miss Elliott to teach Mrs. Champney another lesson; only it was a lesson that she had already learned. She really needed no further demonstration of the fact that she was fifty and utterly tired and miserable. It was superfluous, it was cruel, and it made her angry. When she reached the street where Robert’s little house stood, her heart was hot and bitter with resentment.
“If they’d only let me alone!” she thought. “I don’t want any one to speak to me or look at me. I know I’m unreasonable. I want to be unreasonable. I want to be let alone!”
But of course she couldn’t be. Nobody can be let alone except those who would give all the world for a little tiresome interference. Molly saw at once how tired she was, and wanted her to lie down and have dinner brought up to her. Robert, by saying nothing at all, was still more difficult to endure.
“I’m not particularly tired, Molly, thank you,” said Mrs. Champney, with great politeness.
What she wanted to do was to stamp her foot and cry:
“Let me alone! Let me alone! Tomorrow is Saturday, and the next day is Sunday. You can talk to me on Sunday. Let me alone now!”
She sternly repressed all this. She sat down at the table and tried to eat her dinner. She forced herself to remain in the sitting room until ten o’clock.
“In a week or two I’ll go away and get a room for myself,” she thought, “where I can be as tired as I like!”
When the clock struck ten, she sat still and counted up to five hundred, so that she wouldn’t seem like a tired person in a dreadful hurry to get to bed. Then she rose, said good night to Robert and Molly, and went upstairs.
Even then she would not slight or omit any detail of her routine. She washed, rubbed cold cream into her hands, braided her hair, folded her clothes neatly, ready for the morning, and knelt down to say her prayers. Then she turned out the light, opened the window, and got into bed; and she was so glad to be there, so glad to lay her tired gray head on the pillow, that she cried.
She was ashamed of this weakness, and meant to struggle against it; but sleep came before she had driven it away—a heavy and sorrowful sleep, colored with the mist of tears.
She slept. Then she sighed, and stirred in her sleep. Something was coming through into the shadowy world of dreams—something imperious and menacing. She didn’t want to wake up, but something was forcing her to do so. She heard something calling.
She sat up suddenly. It was a child’s voice calling “Mother!”—a sound which would, she thought, have reached her even in heaven.
“Mother! Mother! I want you!” It was Bobbetty screaming that, and no one answered him. “I want you, mother!”
“What’s the matter with Molly?” thought Mrs. Champney in a blaze of anger.
She got out of bed and hurried barefooted across the room. That baby voice was filling the whole house, the whole world, with its heartbreaking cry:
“Mother! Mother!”
Mrs. Champney went out into the hall, and there she found Robert and Molly standing in the dim light outside Bobbetty’s door—Molly with her magnificent hair hanging loose about her shoulders, her face quite desperate, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter?” cried Mrs. Champney.
“Hush!” whispered Robert. “Dr. Pinney said we weren’t to take him up—said it was nothing but temper. I went in to see, and he’s perfectly all right. He simply wants Molly to take him up.”
“But he’s—so little!” sobbed Molly, in a smothered voice.
“Mother! I want you, mother!” shrieked Bobbetty.
Molly made a move forward, but Robert clutched her arm. He, too, was pale and desperate.
“No, Molly!” he said. “Dr. Pinney told us definitely—”
“Bah!” cried Mrs. Champney, in a tone that amazed both of them. “Dr. Pinney, indeed!”
She opened the door of Bobbetty’s room, went in, snatched him out of his crib, and carried him off, past his speechless parents, and into her own room.