From the Housetops

by George Barr McCutcheon

"Be patient, my dear," said Mrs. Tresslyn, wiping a fine moisture from her upper lip, where it had appeared with Anne's astounding observation. "You will not have to wait much longer. Be—"

Anne faced her, an unmistakable sneer on her lips. "I'm used to waiting," she said huskily.

"She has waited a year and more," said George aggressively, glowering at his mother. It was a significant but singularly unhappy remark.

For the first time in their lives, they saw their mother in tears. It was so incomprehensible that at first both Anne and her brother laughed, not in mirth, but because they were so stupefied that they did not know what they were doing, and laughter was the simplest means of expressing an acute sense of embarrassment. Then they stood aloof and watched the amazing exposition, fascinated, unbelieving. It did not occur to either of them to go to the side of this sobbing woman whose eyes had always been dry and cold, this mother who had wiped away their tears a hundred times and more with dainty lace handkerchiefs not unlike the one she now pressed so tightly to her own wet cheeks. They could not understand this thing happening to her. They could not believe that after all their mother possessed the power to shed tears, to sob as other women do, to choke and snivel softly, to blubber inelegantly; they had always looked upon her as proof against emotion. Their mother was crying! Her back was toward them, evidence of a new weakness in her armour. It shook with the effort she made to control the cowardly spasmodic sobs. And why was she in tears? What had brought this amazing thing to pass? What right had she to cry?

They watched her stupidly as she walked away from them toward the window. They were not unfeeling; they simply did not know how to act in the face of this marvel. They looked at each other in bewilderment. What had happened? Only the moment before she had been as cold and as magnificently composed as ever she had been, and now! Now she was like other people. She had come down to the level of the utterly commonplace. She was just a plain, ordinary woman. It was unbelievable.

They did not feel sorry for her. A second time, no doubt, would find them humanly sympathetic, troubled, distressed, but this first time they could only wonder, they could only doubt their senses. It would have been most offensive in them to have let her see they noticed anything unusual in her behaviour. At least that is the way they felt about it in their failure to understand.

For five minutes Mrs. Tresslyn stood with her back to them. Gradually the illy-stifled sobs subsided and, as they still looked on curiously, the convulsive heaving of her shoulders grew less perceptible, finally ceasing altogether. Her tall figure straightened to its full, regal height; her chin went up to its normal position; her wet handkerchief was stuffed, with dignified deliberateness, into the gold mesh bag. A minute more to prove that she had completely mastered her emotions, and then she faced her children. It was as if nothing had happened. She was the calm and imperious mother they had always known. Involuntarily, Anne uttered a deep sigh of relief. George blinked his eyes and also fell to wondering if they had served him honestly, or if, on the other hand, he too had merely imagined something incredible.

They did not question her. The incident was closed. They were never to ask her why she had wept in their presence. They were never to know what had moved her to tears. Instinctively and quite naturally they shrank from the closer intimacy that such a course would involve. Their mother was herself once more. She was no longer like other women. They could not be in touch with her. And so they were never to know why she had cried. They only knew that for a brief space she had been as silly as any ordinary mortal could be, and they were rather glad to have caught her at it.

Years afterward, however, George was to say to Anne: "Queer thing, wasn't it, that time she cried? Do you remember?" And Anne was to reply: "I've never forgotten it. It was queer."

Nor did Mrs. Tresslyn offer the slightest explanation for her conduct. She did not even smile shamefacedly, as any one else certainly would have done in apology. She was, however, vaguely pleased with her children. They had behaved splendidly. They were made of the right stuff, after all! She had not been humbled.