CHAPTER V
§ 1
When Martin went on his honeymoon to Atlantic City, he had taken his annual two weeks’ vacation. During the hot weather of summer, therefore, he and Jeannette were obliged to remain in the sweltering city. But Jeannette did not mind the heat. Adventuring in married life was too utterly absorbing; she loved her new home, and each day found new delight in managing it. She and her husband considered themselves deliriously happy. Nights on which they did not go to the theatre, they roamed the bright upper stretches of Broadway, sauntered along Riverside Drive as far as Grant’s Tomb, or meandered into the Park, where electric lights cast a theatrical radiance on trees and shrubbery. On Sundays they made excursions to the beaches, and one week-end they went to Coney Island on Saturday afternoon and stayed the night at the Manhattan Beach Hotel. Jeannette long remembered the glorious planked steak they enjoyed for dinner on that occasion, sitting at a little table by the porch railing, listening to the big military band, while all about them a gay throng chatted and laughed at other tables, and crowds surged up and down the boardwalk as the Atlantic thundered a dull rhythmical bourdon to the stirring music of trumpet and drum.
Her mother departed the first of August for Canada. The concert tour having been finally decided upon,—without the violinist,—every day or so cards arrived from Mrs. Sturgis post-marked “Montreal,” “Quebec,” “Toronto.” The venture could hardly be considered a financial success, she wrote, but she and the girls were having just too wonderful a time! The Canadians were extraordinarily hospitable!
Alice, Roy, and the baby returned from Freeport the last of September; she expected to be confined early in November. The Devlins visited them one Sunday during the last weeks of their stay on Long Island, and Jeannette wondered how her sister could be happy in such an environment. The room the Beardsleys occupied was under the roof and, during the day, like an oven. Etta, Alice told her, woke up sometimes as early as five or five-thirty, and nothing would persuade the child to go to sleep again. As soon as she was awake, she began to fret, and her wails disturbed the other boarders at that hour. Either father or mother would find it necessary to get up, dress, and wheel the child out in her carriage, pushing her around and around the block until she could be brought safely back to the house. On Sundays when breakfast was not until nine o’clock, these hours of the early silent mornings were a long, wearisome, hungry trial. Jeannette thought the food at the boarding-house was markedly meager, and Alice had to admit that as the season was drawing to a close, there were evidences of retrenchment on the part of the landlady, but at first, she assured her sister, the table had been plentiful and good. The effect of all this upon Jeannette had been a determination to order her own life along safer lines. Two or three times Alice had come up to the city during the summer to spend the night. On these occasions Roy slept at his own flat in the Bronx, as there was only a narrow couch available at the Devlins’. To this Martin had been relegated, and the two sisters occupied the bed together. Alice was very large. It worried Jeannette; she was once more full of apprehensions. She made up her mind that for herself she did not want a baby for a long time, not until she and Martin were out of debt, and had saved something so that she could be sure of a certain amount of comfort and care.
Martin’s attitude about money distressed her. He did not seem to take the matter of their finances with sufficient seriousness. He was ever urging her to engage a maid to attend to the dish-washing and clean up after dinner. He hated kitchen work, himself, and equally hated to have his wife do it. When he finished his dinner and rose from the table, rolling a cigar about between his teeth and filling his mouth with good, strong inhalations of satisfying tobacco smoke, he felt contented, replete, ready for talk and relaxation. To have Jeannette disappear into the kitchen and begin banging around out there with pans and rattling dishes annoyed him. He could not bring himself to help her; something in him rebelled at such work. His wife readily understood how he felt; she sympathized with him, and did not want him to help her, but she had her own aversion to letting the dishes stand over night and having them to do after breakfast the following day. It took the best part of her morning, and meant she could never get downtown until afternoon. But Martin was willing to concede nothing; he answered her arguments by reiterating his advice to her to hire a girl.
“Good God, Jan,” he would say in characteristic vigorous fashion, “she would cost you fifteen or twenty dollars a month, and then you could get out as early as you wanted to in the mornings and we could have our evenings together.”
It was just that fifteen or twenty dollars a month which Jeannette wanted to save to pay on her bills. She had inherited a sense of frugality; it worried her to be in debt. Martin, on the other hand, was blandly indifferent. He was willing to deny himself very little, his wife often felt, to help her contribute to the “till.” They had many arguments about the matter but never reached a conclusion. Their creditors,—they owed a little less than three hundred dollars,—were kept satisfied by a small remittance each month but something more always had to be charged. Jeannette was baffled. She talked it over with Alice. The Beardsleys lived more simply than the Devlins; they did not entertain nor go out to dinner so often nor to the theatre, and they paid only half as much rent. Their whole scale of expenditure was more economical. That was the answer, of course. When Jeannette told Martin they were living beyond their means, he grew angry.
“Damn it,” he answered her, “if there is one thing I hate more than another, it’s a piker! What do you want to crab about the bills for? Haven’t we got everything we want? Aren’t we getting along all right? Who’s kicking?”
Jeannette heaved a sigh of weariness. Some day before long she would have to persuade him to her way of thinking.