In her own way she worked even harder than he, and it was a heart-breaking thought that with it all she was not making a success of the place. Though money was coming in fast, it flowed out still faster through her incompetent fingers. The problem of how to make things pay was a black beast which she fought by day and wrestled with in nightly dreams, and the more she fought and wrestled the more it grinned and dug its malignant claws into her heart. Even courage and ardour cannot overcome inexperience and triumph over disability. Despair came often to sit with her and whispered that this was not her place, and here would never be laurels for her. But she did not want laurels for herself--only for Westenra; and the more despair filled her the more she loved her big difficult Irishman, whose nerves and torment and prevision for the rottenness of life's rewards nearly drove her crazy.
Bills were another burden heavy in the bearing. Like all good men, Westenra was "tight with money." He never said a word when Val with heaving heart produced her weekly pile, large as a roll of drugget, but what he left unsaid during the short interval between sighting the sum total and producing his cheque-book would have filled a library.
They were always double what they should have been, those bills, and triple what they would have been with an experienced woman at the head of things: he knew it and she knew it; and they thought of the stolid, lumpy German, and sometimes they spoke of her and of red robins that were no good as ballast! And she felt as if she were drawing his heart's blood, and so did he. Not that he was mean--far from it; only he realised that his was not the money-making head, and he suffered from the fear all brain-workers know--that their money-making capacity may give out at any time.
"Simple people like you and me can never make fortunes, Val," he would say sadly, "the only thing for us is to hang on tight to what we have come by so hardly." But when he adjured her earnestly to "try and economise," her face became as haggard as if he had thrust a dagger into her, so that he made haste to add:
"I know you do, darling. It is only that I 've got into the habit of saying it--forgive me!"
She forgave him gladly, and lay awake more than ever thinking out impractical plans for economising. She hated to take the dollars that he had sweated for as only doctors and treadmill prisoners can sweat, to bestow them on insolent cooks who stole, housemaids who drank and shirked their duties, tradesmen who took advantage of her "English accent" to charge her twice as much as they would charge other people.
When she found that almost every good American housekeeper defeats the dishonesty of servants by doing her own marketing, she shouldered the business too, and made acquaintance with Baumgarten's Market, a huge place where everything save groceries could be obtained for household consumption. Some of the darkest hours of her life were spent at Baumgarten's. It was there, sitting upon a high chair before the meat and poultry counter awaiting her turn to be served, that she most keenly realised her defeat. All around her, good American wives were examining the grain of beef and the breasts of chickens. Poor Val could never understand how they extracted information from the process. She herself always got the toughest meat and the oldest birds for the highest prices. She knew nothing of the breasts of chickens and never would know anything. She, who could write a mile long passage from the classics and never forget a poet's inspired word, found it impossible to remember from day to day the price of sugar, and how much she ought to pay for butter. Information like that simply passed through her head like an express train through a tunnel. She never got the bargains other women got. She was the victim of every sharper, and was "done" on every side. On a desert island she would have been a treasure. In a civilised city, battling with extraordinary conditions on a professional man's income, she was a failure, and the knowledge deepened day by day and was bitter as gall. She fought on with the courage of the desperate and the doomed, but despair was in her heart and her eyes, and sometimes Westenra saw it there, and thought she hated this life to which he had brought her. He saw that she was a round peg in a square hole, and the last woman in the world for the practical life she pursued with the ardour of a doomed squirrel. The knowledge never interfered with his affection for her, but it sometimes interfered with his nerves. It was a bad dream from which they only woke up at night, for then together for a few hours a natural reaction from the strain of the day took place, and they would laugh like two children over the cares and problems of the day. The night nurses, passing up- and down-stairs, often wondered what it was the doctor and his wife found so amusing when they were shut up in their rooms together. The fact was that in the practical affairs of life they were no more than children, either of them, for all their brains and experience. It is often so with gifted people. Of course, Westenra knew his business as a doctor--none better, but the business of being a practical and responsible husband and head of a household was a sealed book to him, just as the problem of how to become the successful manageress of a private nursing home was one that Val would never solve. But if she could not defeat the cares that the day brought, she could at least be extremely humorous over her mistakes and failures, and the valiant spirit of her that was ready to get up from one day's knock-out blows and face the same round next morning, could not but appeal to the chivalry in Westenra, as well as awaken his own sense of humour.
CHAPTER VI
KISSES AND CROSSES
"For 'Im and 'E and 'It
(An' Two an' One makes Three)."
KIPLING.