Summer smouldered in the city. The sun seemed to have been shining hot and merciless for hours when Martie rose at six, to stand yawning at her window. At nine families began to stream by, to the Park; perspiring mothers pushing the baby carriages, small children, already eating, staggering before and behind. By ten the streets were deserted, baked, silent, glaring. Martie and Mrs. Curley would establish themselves in a cool back room, as to-day, with a pitcher of iced tea near at hand.
Somehow the hot, empty hours dragged by. At four o'clock the two, with perhaps a friend or two who had come in, would begin to gasp that this was the worst yet. This was awful. The heat had a positive and brassy quality, there was no air stirring. The children in the Park would drag home in the hot sunset light, tired, dirty, whining, and a breathless evening follow the burning day. Then Martie and Mrs. Curley and mild little Mr. Bull and bellicose Mr. Snow would perhaps sit on the steps until eleven o'clock, exchanging pleasantries with various neighbours, wilted like themselves in the furnace of the day.
Martie liked the sense of extremes, as they all did. In a few months they would be shaking their heads over a blizzard with the same solemn enjoyment. She liked the suddenly darkening sky, the ominous rattle of thunder; "like boxes being smashed," she wrote Sally. She fairly sang when the rain began to stream down, washing, cooling, cleansing.
From the window of the back bedroom she looked down to-day upon a stretch of bare, fenced backyards. Here and there a cat slept in the shade, or moved silently from shadow to shadow. From some of the opposite windows strings of washed garments depended, and upon one fire-escape two girls were curled, talking and reading.
Her hostess was the source of much affectionate amusement to Martie, and as the old lady liked nothing so much as an appreciative listener, they got on splendidly. Martie laughed at the older woman's accounts of quarrels, births, and law-suits, thrilled over the details of sudden deaths, murders, and mysteries, and drank in with a genuine dramatic appreciation the vision of a younger, simpler city. No subway, no telephones, no motor cars, no elevated roads—what had New York been like when Mrs. Curley was a bride? Booth and Parepa Rosa and Adelina Patti walked the boards again; the terrible Civil War was fought; the draft riots raged in the streets; the great President was murdered. There was no old family in the city of whose antecedents Mrs. Curley did not know something. "The airs of them!" she would say, musing over a newspaper list of "among those present." "I could tell them something!"
Martie did not understand how any woman could really be content with this dark old house, this business, these empty days, but she realized that Mrs. Curley was free to adopt some other mode of living had she pleased. Gradually Martie pieced the old woman's history together; there had been plenty of change, prosperity, and excitement in her life. She had had seven children, only three of whom were living: Mary, a prosperous, big matron whose husband, Joe Cunningham, had some exalted position on the Brooklyn police force; Ralph, who was a priest in California; and George, the youngest, a handsome ne'er-do-well of about twenty-five, who was a "heart scald." George floated about his own and neighbouring cities, only coming to see his mother when no other refuge offered.
The four children who had died were quite as much in their mother's thoughts and conversation, and probably more in her prayers, than the living ones. Of "Curley," too, Martie heard much. She was able to picture a cheerful, noisy home, full of shouting, dark, untidy-headed children, with an untidy-headed servant, a scatter-brained mother, and an unexacting father in charge. "Curley" usually went to sleep on the sofa after dinner, and Mrs. Curley's sister, Mrs. Royce, with her children, or her sister-in-law, "Mrs. Dan," with hers, came over to pick up the Curleys on the way to a Mission sermon, a church concert, or a meeting of the Women's Auxiliary of the Saint Vincent de Paul.
"... Or else maybe the priest would step in," said Mrs. Curley, remembering these stirring days, "or often I'd take Mollie or Katie—God rest her!—and go over to see the Sisters. But many a night there'd be sickness in the house—Curley had two cousins and an aunt that died on us—and then I'd be there sitting up with the medicines, and talking with this one and that. I was never one to run away from sickness, nor death either for that matter. I'm a great hand with death in the house; there's no sole to my foot when I'm needed! I'll never forget the day that I went over to poor Aggie Lemmon's house—she was a lovely woman who lived round the corner from me. Well, I hadn't been thinking she looked very well for several weeks, do you see?—and I passed the remark to my brother Thomas's wife—God rest her——"
A reminiscence would follow. Martie never tired of them. Whether she was held, just now, in the peaceful, unquestioning mood that precedes a serious strain on mind and body, or whether her old hostess really had had an unusually interesting experience, she did not then or ever decide. She only knew that she liked to sit playing solitaire in the hot evenings, under a restricted cone of light, with Mrs. Curley sitting in the darkness by the window, watching the lively street, fanning herself comfortably, and pouring forth the history of the time Curley gave poor Ralph a "crule" beating, or of the day Alicia Curley died in convulsions at the age of three.
Martie had hoped to be in her own little home when the baby came, but this was swiftly proven impossible. Wallace's play failed after the wonderful salary had been paid for only eight weeks. He idled about with his wife for a few happy weeks, and then got another engagement with a small comic opera troupe, and philosophically and confidently went on the road. Presently he was home again and in funds, but this time it was only a few days before the next parting.