The Brimming Cup

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The clock struck nine as they finished this, and Neale heard the stir and shifting of chairs. Paul said, "Mother, Mr. Welles and I have fixed it up, that he's going to put us to bed tonight, if you'll let him." Amused surprise from Marise: Mr. Welles' voice saying he really would like it, never had seen any children in their nightgowns except in the movies; Paul saying, "Gracious! We don't wear nightgowns like women. We wear pajamas!"; Mark's voice crying, "We'll show you how we play foot-fight on the rug. We have to do that barefoot, so each one can tickle ourselves;" as usual, no sound from Elly probably still reveling in the proudness of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

A clatter of feet on the stairs, the chirping voices muffled by the shutting of a door overhead, and Eugenia's voice, musical and carefully modulated, saying, "Well, Marisette, you look perfectly worn out with fatigue. You haven't looked a bit well lately, anyhow. And I'm not surprised. The way those children take it out of you!"

"Damn that woman!" thought Neale. That sterile life of hers had starved out from her even the capacity to understand a really human existence when she saw it. Not that she had ever seemed to have any considerable seed-bed of human possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the pension, that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread had all been wound off, and there was only the bare wooden spool left.

"It's not surprising that Mrs. Crittenden gets tired," commented Marsh's voice. "She does the work of four or five persons."

"Yes," agreed Eugenia, "I don't know how she does it . . . cook, nurse, teacher, housekeeper, welfare-worker, seamstress, gardener . . ."

"Oh, let up, let up!" Neale heard Marise say, with an impatience that pleased him. She must have been at the piano as she spoke, for at once there rose, smiting to the heart, the solemn, glorious, hopeless chords of the last part of the Pathetic Symphony. Heavens! How Marise could play!

When the last dull, dreary, beautiful note had vibrated into silence, Eugenia murmured, "Doesn't that always make you want to crawl under the sod and pull the daisies over you?"

"Ashes, ashes, not daisies," corrected Marsh, dreamily.

There was, thought Neale listening critically to their intonations, a voluptuous, perverse pleasure in despair which he found very distasteful. Despair was a real and honest and deadly emotion. Folks with appetites sated by having everything they wanted, oughtn't to use despair as a sort of condiment to perk up their jaded zest in life. "Confounded play-actors!" he thought, and wondered what Marise's reaction to them was.

He foresaw that it was going to be too much for his patience to listen to them. He would get too hot under the collar and be snappish, afterwards. Luckily he was in the library. There were better voices to listen to. He got up, ran his forefinger along a shelf, and took down a volume of Trevelyan, "Garbaldi and the Thousand." The well-worn volume opened of itself at a familiar passage, the description of the battle of Calatafimi. His eye lighted in anticipation. There was a man's book, he thought. But his pipe was out. He laid the book down to light it before he began to read. In spite of himself he listened to hear what they were saying now in the next room. Eugenia was talking and he didn't like what she was saying about those recurrent dreams of Marise's, because he knew it was making poor Marise squirm. She had such a queer, Elly-like shyness about that notion of hers, Marise had. It evidently meant more to her than she had ever been able to make him understand. He couldn't see why she cared so much about it, hated to have it talked about casually. But he wasn't Eugenia. If Marise didn't want it talked about casually, by George he wasn't the one who would mention it. They'd hardly ever spoken of them, those dreams, even to each other. People had a right to moral privacy, if they wanted it, he supposed, even married women. There was nothing so ruthless anyhow as an old childhood friend, to whom you had made foolish youthful confidences and who brought them out any time he felt like it.