“We’ve had a fight with the nurse about it,” said the other man, gnawing at a very light mustache as he leaned against the door, “but Great Scott, Rivers, we’ve got to do something. I would have murdered anybody whose child cried like this one. We’ve been complained of as it is. That’s paregoric, isn’t it?”
“It was, but the bottle’s empty,” said Rivers, who was standing on the rung of a chair, holding out a vial now and then from an inner recess to read the name on it. “That’s another empty bottle—and here’s another empty bottle—and, this is—another. Bottle of sewing machine oil. Prescription for neuralgia, 178, 902, empty. Bottle of glycerine—confound the thing! the cork was out of it; get my handkerchief for me out of my pocket, will you? Prescription for hair tonic; empty bottle—another empty prescription bottle—dregs of cough medicine. What in thunder does Bess want with all these empty bottles? I’m awfully sorry, Parker, but we don’t seem to have the stuff you want, or any other, for that matter.”
“Never mind,” said Parker. “I’ll ride down to the village and get some. I’d have gone there first, but the tire of my wheel wants blowing up.”
“I’d lend you my wheel, but it’s at the shop,” called Rivers as they disappeared out of the door.
He put the bottles back, upsetting, as he did so, a package of some white powder, out of which ran three cockroaches. As he stooped to gather it up again in the paper he disturbed a half-eaten peach which he remembered leaving there the night before, and a small colony of ants that had made their dwelling in it scuttled cheerily around. He uttered an exclamation of disgust, and shut the door of the butler’s pantry upon them. The whole house seemed given up to a plague of insects, utterly unknown in the reign of its careful mistress. In spite of screens, small stinging mosquitoes whizzed out from everything he touched; spiders hung down from webs in the ceiling, and a moth had flown from his closet that very morning. He kept the blinds and windows closed while he was away all day; he had begun by leaving them open, but a slanting shower had made havoc in his absence and also flooded the cellar through the open cellar door. It had not dried up since, and he was sure that there were fleas down there.
There was a deadly hot damp and silence in the dining-room and parlor as he came through them, and the same unnatural atmosphere in the rooms above as he drearily invaded them for a clean collar. Every place was shut up and in order; the tops of the dressing tables even were bare save for the clean towel laid over each. His own room was in an ugly, disheveled confusion, and though his windows were open, no air came through the wire screens. He opened a closet door inadvertently, and the sight of a pink kimono of his wife’s, and the hats of the two little boys hanging up neatly beside it, emphasized his solitude. His latent idea of spending the rest of the evening at home was gone from him—he felt that he could not get out of this accursed house quickly enough, although he had not made up his mind where to go; he did not feel up to cheering the sick man in the next street, or equal to a gentle literary conversation with the two elderly ladies beyond who had known his mother. He wanted to go somewhere where he could smoke and have some pleasing light drink for refreshment, and be cheered and amused himself.
The Callenders! If he only had his wheel—it was nine o’clock now, and the place was away over on the other side of town. Never mind, he would go, and chance their being at home and out of bed when he got there. Anything to get away from this loathsome place, although coming back to it again seemed suddenly an impossible horror. He wondered if he were getting ill. The night before—
As he walked, the shadows of the moonlight lengthened his long legs, and their dragging strides. His face, with its short brown beard and the hollows under his dark eyes, was bent forward. He figured out anew the income there would be from his insurance money, and how it might be supplemented for Bess and the children. Clearly, he would have to earn more before he died. And oh, the burden, the burden, the burden was his! The thought leaped out like a visible thing. Her sweet presence, her curling hair, her dimples, her loving feminine inconsequence, with the innocent, laughing faces of the little boys, overlaid the daily care for him, but with these appointed Lighteners of Life away it loomed up into a hideously exaggerated specter that seemed to have always had its hand upon his fearsome heart, and only pressed a little closer upon him now in this hot windless night. Even his wilted collar partook of the tragic; he might as well have kept on the first one.
“Hello! Hello! Where are you going? This is the place.” A shout of laughter accompanied the words. “Come up, brother, we’ve been waiting for you!”
He looked up to see that he was in front of Callender’s house, and that the piazza, a large square end of which was screened off into a room, held a company in jovial mood, under moonlight as bright as day. The women were in white, with half bare neck and arms, rocking and fanning themselves, and the men in tennis shirts and belts, two of them smoking pipes, and the other a cigar. A tray, holding a large crystal bowl and glasses, stood on a bamboo table at one side, half shielded by jars of palms whose spiked shadows carpeted the floor and projected themselves across the white dress and arms of Mrs. Callender, while she held the door open with one hand, and half welcomed, half dragged him in with the other, amid a chorus of voices,