Books: Roast Beef, Medium

E >> Edna Ferber >> Roast Beef, Medium

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"--and full-length mirrors, and wonderful folding table-shelf
gimcracks in the kitchen, and--"

T. A. Buck did not look up. But, "Oh, Chicago!" he might have been
heard to murmur, as only a New-Yorker can breathe those two words.

"Don't 'Oh, Chicago!' like that," mimicked Emma McChesney. "I've lain
awake nights dreaming of a home I once saw there, with the lake in the
back yard, and a couple of miles of veranda, and a darling vegetable-
garden, and the whole place simply honeycombed with bathrooms, and
sleeping-porches, and sun-parlors, and linen-closets, and--gracious, I
wonder what's keeping Jock!"

T. A. Buck wrenched his eyes from his stick. All previous remarks
descriptive of his eyes under excitement paled at the glow which
lighted them now. They glowed straight into Emma McChesney's eyes and
held them, startled.

"Emma," said T. A. Buck quite calmly, "will you marry me? I want to
give you all those things, beginning with the lake in the back yard
and ending with the linen-closets and the sun-parlor."

And Emma McChesney, standing there in the middle of the dining-room
floor, stared long at T. A. Buck, standing there in the center of the
living-room floor. And if any human face, in the space of seventeen
seconds, could be capable of expressing relief, and regret, and alarm,
and dismay, and tenderness, and wonder, and a great womanly sympathy,
Emma McChesney's countenance might be said to have expressed all those
emotions--and more. The last two were uppermost as she slowly came
toward him.

"T. A.," she said, and her voice had in it a marvelous quality, "I'm
thirty-nine years old. You know I was married when I was eighteen and
got my divorce after eight years. Those eight years would have left
any woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take
up life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound,
and sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and
brood over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it
destroyed by its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank
God! I said then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned
forever, for me. And now--"

There was something almost fine in the lines of T. A. Buck's too
feminine mouth and chin; but not fine enough.

"Now, Emma," he repeated, "will you marry me?"

Emma McChesney's eyes were a wonderful thing to see, so full of pain
were they, so wide with unshed tears.

"As long as--he--lived," she went on, "the thought of marriage was
repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I
picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that seemed
to waver and dance"--she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment--
"'McChesney--Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven years.
Funeral to-day from Howland Brothers' chapel. Aberdeen and Edinburgh
papers please copy!'"

[Illustration: "'Emma.' he said, 'will you marry me?'"]

T. A. Buck took the hand that covered her eyes and brought it gently
down.

"Emma," he said, "will you marry me?"

"T. A., I don't love you. Wait! Don't say it! I'm thirty-nine, but I'm
brave and foolish enough to say that all these years of work, and
disappointment, and struggle, and bitter experience haven't convinced
me that love does not exist. People have said about me, seeing me in
business, that I'm not a marrying woman. There is no such thing as
that. Every woman is a marrying woman, and sometimes the light-
heartedest, and the scoffingest, and the most self-sufficient of us
are, beneath it all, the marryingest. Perhaps I'm making a mistake.
Perhaps ten years from now I'll be ready to call myself a fool for
having let slip what the wise ones would call a 'chance.' But I don't
think so, T. A."

"You know me too well," argued T. A. Buck rather miserably. "But at
least you know the worst of me as well as the best. You'd be taking no
risks."

Emma McChesney walked to the window. There was a little silence. Then
she finished it with one clean stroke. "We've been good business
chums, you and I. I hope we always shall be. I can imagine nothing
more beautiful on this earth for a woman than being married to a man
she cares for and who cares for her. But, T. A., you're not the man."

And then there were quick steps in the corridor, a hand at the door-
knob, a slim, tall figure in the doorway. Emma McChesney seemed to
waft across the rooms and into the embrace of the slim, tall figure.

"Welcome--home!" she cried. "Sketch in the furniture to suit
yourself."

"This is going to be great--great!" announced Jock. "What do you know
about the Oriental potentate down-stairs! I guess Otis Skinner has
nothing on him when it comes--Why, hello, Mr. Buck!" He was peering
into the next room. "Why don't you folks light up? I thought you were
another agent person. Met that one down in the hail. Said he'd be
right up. What's the matter with him anyway? He smiles like a
waxworks. When the elevator took me up he was still smiling from the
foyer, and I could see his grin after the rest of him was lost to
sight. Regular Cheshire. What's this? Droring-room?"

[Illustration: "'Welcome home!' she cried. 'Sketch in the furniture to
suit yourself'"]

He rattled on like a pleased boy. He strode over to shake hands with
Buck. Emma McChesney, cheeks glowing, eyed him adoringly. Then she
gave a little suppressed cry.

"Jock, what's happened?"

Jock whirled around like a cat. "Where? When? What?"

Emma McChesney pointed at him with one shaking finger. "You! You're
thin! You're--you're emaciated. Your shoulders, where are they? Your--
your legs--"

Jock looked down at himself. His glance was pride. "Clothes," he said.

"Clothes?" faltered his mother.

"You're losing your punch, Mother? You used to be up on men's rigging.
All the boys look like their own shadows these days. English cut. No
padding. No heels. Incurve at the waist. Watch me walk." He flapped
across the room, chest concave, shoulders rounded, arms hanging limp,
feet wide apart, chin thrust forward.

"Do you mean to tell me that's your present form of locomotion?"
demanded his mother.

"I hope so. Been practising it for weeks. They call it the juvenile
jump, and all our best leading men have it. I trailed Douglas
Fairbanks for days before I really got it."

And the tension between T. A. Buck and Emma McChesney snapped with a
jerk, and they both laughed, and laughed again, at Jock's air of
offended dignity. They laughed until the rancor in the heart of the
man and the hurt and pity in the heart of the woman melted into a bond
of lasting understanding.

"Go on--laugh!" said Jock. "Say, Mother, is there a shower in the
bathroom, h'm?" And was off to investigate.

The laughter trailed away into nothingness. "Jock," called his mother,
"do you want your bedroom done in plain or stripes?"

"Plain," came from the regions beyond. "Got a lot of pennants and
everything."

T. A. Buck picked up his stick from the corner in which it stood.

"I'll run along," he said. "You two will want to talk things over
together." He raised his voice to reach the boy in the other room.
"I'm off, Jock."

Jock's protest sounded down the hall. "Don't leave me alone with her.
She'll blarney me into consenting to blue-and-pink rosebud paper in my
bedroom."

T. A. Buck had the courage to smile even at that. Emma McChesney was
watching him, her clear eyes troubled, anxious.

At the door Buck turned, came back a step or two. "I--I think, if you
don't mind, I'll play hooky this time and run over to Atlantic City
for a couple of days. You'll find things slowing up, now that the
holidays are so near."

"Fine idea--fine!" agreed Emma McChesney; but her eyes still wore the
troubled look.

"Good-by," said T. A. Buck abruptly.

"Good--" and then she stopped. "I've a brand-new idea. Give you
something to worry about on your vacation."

"I'm supplied," answered T. A. Buck grimly.

"Nonsense! A real worry. A business worry. A surprise."

Jock had joined them, and was towering over his mother, her hand in
his.

T. A. Buck regarded them moodily. "After your pajama and knickerbocker
stunt I'm braced for anything."

"Nothing theatrical this time," she assured him. "Don't expect a show
such as you got when I touched off the last fuse."

An eager, expectant look was replacing the gloom that bad clouded his
face. "Spring it."

Emma McChesney waited a moment; then, "I think the time has come to
put in another line--a staple. It's--flannel nightgowns."

"Flannel nightgowns!" Disgust shivered through Buck's voice. "_Flannel
nightgowns!_ They quit wearing those when Broadway was a cow-path."

"Did, eh?" retorted Emma McChesney. "That's the New-Yorker speaking.
Just because the French near-actresses at the Winter Garden wear silk
lace and sea-foam nighties in their imported boudoir skits, and just
because they display only those frilly, beribboned handmade affairs in
the Fifth Avenue shop-windows, don't you ever think that they're a
national vice. Let me tell you," she went on as T. A. Buck's demeanor
grew more bristlingly antagonistic, "there are thousands and thousands
of women up in Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Oregon, and
Alaska, and Nebraska, and Dakota who are thankful to retire every
night protected by one long, thick, serviceable flannel nightie, and
one practical hot-water bag. Up in those countries retiring isn't a
social rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain,
full, roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A.
Buck Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after
knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork."

The moody look was quite absent from T. A. Buck's face now, and the
troubled look from Emma McChesney's eyes.

"Well," Buck said grudgingly, "if you were to advise making up a line
of the latest models in deep-sea divers' uniforms, I suppose I'd give
in. But flannel nightgowns! In the twentieth century--flannel night--"

"Think it over," laughed Emma McChesney as he opened the door. "We'll
have it out, tooth and nail, when you get back."

The door closed upon him. Emma McChesney and her son were left alone
in their new home to be.

"Turn out the light, son," said Emma McChesney, "and come to the
window. There's a view! Worth the money, alone."

Jock switched off the light. "D' you know, Blonde, I shouldn't wonder
if old T. A.'s sweetish on you," he said as he came over to the
window.

"Old!"

"He's forty or over, isn't he?"

"Son, do you realize your charming mother's thirty-nine?"

"Oh, you! That's different. You look a kid. You're young in all the
spots where other women of thirty-nine look old. Around the eyes, and
under the chin, and your hands, and the corners of your mouth."

In the twilight Emma McChesney turned to stare at her son. "Just where
did you learn all that, young 'un? At college?"

And, "Some view, isn't it, Mother?" parried Jock. The two stood there,
side by side, looking out across the great city that glittered and
swam in the soft haze of the late November afternoon. There are
lovelier sights than New York seen at night, from a window eyrie with
a mauve haze softening all, as a beautiful but experienced woman is
softened by an artfully draped scarf of chiffon. There are cities of
roses, cities of mountains, cities of palm-trees and sparkling lakes;
but no sight, be it of mountains, or roses, or lakes, or waving palm-
trees, is more likely to cause that vague something which catches you
in the throat.

It caught those two home-hungry people. And it opened the lips of one
of them almost against his will.

"Mother," said Jock haltingly, painfully, "I came mighty near coming
home--for good--this time."

His mother turned and searched his face in the dim light.

"What was it, Jock?" she asked, quite without fuss.

The slim young figure in the jumping juvenile clothes stirred and
tried to speak, tried again, formed the two words: "A--girl."

Emma McChesney waited a second, until the icy, cruel, relentless hand
that clutched her very heart should have relaxed ever so little. Then,
"Tell me, sonny boy," she said.

"Why, Mother--that girl--" There was an agony of bitterness and of
disillusioned youth in his voice.

Emma McChesney came very close, so that her head, in the pert little
close-fitting hat, rested on the boy's shoulder. She linked her arm
through his, snug and warm.

"That girl--" she echoed encouragingly.

And, "That girl," went on Jock, taking up the thread of his grief,
"why, Mother, that--girl--"

THE END

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