Books: Martie The Unconquered

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But it was a comfortable room; once the dining room, it had been
changed and papered and carpeted for its present tenants when
Martie, as housekeeper of the boarding-house, had decided to move
the dining room into the big, useless rear parlour upstairs. She and
Teddy had privacy here; they had plenty of room, and the feet that
crisped by on the sidewalk, the noises from the kitchen behind her,
and the squeaking of rats about the basement entrance at night
annoyed her not at all. She had her own telephone here, her own
fireplace, and she was comfortably accessible for the maids--there
were two maids now--for the butcher and ice-man. Between her and
the kitchen was a small dark space, named by herself the "Cold
Lairs," where she had a wash-stand and a small bath-tub. A bead of
gas burned here night and day, but if Teddy ever became REALLY
naughty he was to be placed in here as punishment and the gas turned
out entirely. Teddy had never deserved this terrible fate, but he
did not like the Cold Lairs, where his little crash wash-rag and his
tiny toothbrush glimmered at him in the half-light, and where he
always smelled the raw smell of the lemon his mother kept to whiten
her hands.

He idolized his mother; they had a separate game for every hour and
every undertaking of his happy day. He climbed out of his crib, in
his little faded blue pajamas, for uproarious tumbling and pillow-
fighting every morning. Then it was seven o'clock, and she told him
a story while she dressed, and recited poems and answered his
questions. There was a game about getting all the tangles out of his
hair, the father and mother tangles, and the various children, and
even the dog and cat. Then for months it was a game to have her go
on washing Teddy's face as long as he cried, and stop short when he
stopped, so that after a while he did not cry at all. But by that
time he could spell "Hot" and "Cold" from the faucets, and could
clean out the wash-stand with great soaping and scrubbing all by
himself.

Then he and Mother went into the big dark kitchen, where Henny and
Aurora were yawning over the boarders' breakfasts, Henny perhaps
cutting out flat little biscuit, and Aurora spooning out prunes from
a big stone jar with her slender brown thumb getting covered with
juice. His mother stirred the oatmeal, and, if it were summer,
sometimes quickly and suspiciously tasted the milk that was going
into all the little pitchers. Then they went upstairs.

The boarders had their meals at little separate tables now, and the
"family," which was Mother and Nana, and Aunt Adele and Uncle John,
were together at the largest table at the back where the serving and
carving were done, and where the big shiny percolator stood. Teddy
knew all the boarders--old Colonel and Mrs. Fox from the big
upstairs bedroom, and Miss Peet and her sister, the school-teachers,
from the hall-room on that floor, and the Winchells, mother and
daughter and son, in the two front rooms on the third floor, and the
two clerks in the back room. Uncle John and Aunt Adele had the
pleasant big back room on the middle floor, and Nana existed darkly
in the small room that finished that floor. The persons who filled
his world, if they went away to the country at all in summer, went
only for a fortnight, and this gave Mother only the time she needed
to have their blankets washed and their rooms papered and the
woodwork cleaned before their return.

Of them all, of course he liked Uncle John and Aunt Adele best, as
Mother did. He had seen Aunt Adele kiss his mother, and often she
and Uncle John would get into such gales of laughter at dinner that
even Nana, even Teddy, in his high-chair, would laugh violently in
sympathy. All the boarders were kind to Teddy, but Uncle John was
much more than kind. He brought Teddy toys from Broadway, sombreros
and moccasins and pails. He was never too tired when he came home at
night to take Teddy into his lap, and murmur long tales of giants
and fairies. And on long, wet Sundays he had been known to propose
trips to the Zoo and the Aquarium.

Flanking his own picture on his mother's bureau was a photograph of
a magnificent person in velvet knickerbockers and a frilled shirt
with a cocked hat under his arm. This was Daddy, Teddy's mother told
him; he must remember Daddy! But Teddy could not remember him.

"Darling--don't you remember Muddy taking you down to a train, and
don't you remember the big man that carried you and bought you a
sand-machine?"

"Where is my sand-machine, Moth'?" the little boy would demand
interestedly.

"But Teddy, my heart, you were a big boy then, you were long past
two. CAN'T you remember?"

No use. When Wallace came back he must make the acquaintance of his
son all over again. Martie would sigh, half-vexed, half-amused.

"Aren't they the queer little things, Adele? He remembers his sand-
machine and doesn't remember his father!"

"Oh, I don't know, Martie. That was just after we came, you know.
And I remember thinking that Teddy was a mere baby then!"

"Well, Wallace may be back any day now." Martie always sighed deeply
over the courageous phrase. Wallace had followed a devious course in
these years of the child's babyhood. Short engagements, failures,
weeks on the road, some work in stock companies in the lesser
cities--it was a curious history. He had seen his wife at long
intervals, sometimes with a little money, once or twice really
prosperous and hopeful, once--a dreadful memory--discouraged and
idle and drinking. This was the last time but one, more than a year
ago. Then had come the visit when she had met him, and he had given
Teddy the sand toy. Martie had clung to her husband then; he had not
looked well; he would never make anything of this wretched
profession, she had pleaded. She was doing well at the boarding-
house; he could stay there while he looked about him for regular
work.

But Wallace was "working up" a new part, and it was going to be a
great hit, he said. Every one was crazy about it. He would not go to
the boardinghouse; he said that his wife's work there was the
"limit." For his three days in town he lived with a fellow-actor at
a downtown hotel, and Martie had a curious sense that he did not
belong to her at all. There was about him the heavy aspect and
manner of a man who has been drinking, but he told her that he was
"all to the wagon." His associate, a heavy, square-jawed man with a
dramatic manner, praised Wallace's professional and personal
character highly. Martie, deeply distressed, saw him go away to try
the new play and went back to her own life.

This was in a bitter January. Now Teddy, building houses on the
floor, had passed his third enchanting birthday, and winter was upon
the big city again. Martie awaited it philosophically. Her coal was
in, anyway, or would be in, in another hour, and if the coal-
drivers' strike came to pass she might sleep in the comfortable
consciousness that no one under her roof would suffer. Her clean
curtains would go up this week; it had been an endless job; it was
finished.

"And the next thing on the programme is Thanksgiving!" she said
between two yawns

"Most of them goes out for that," said Mrs. Curley. "But the Colonel
and her will stay. Nice to be them that never had to ask the price
of turkey-meat this ten years!"

"Oh, well--we don't have it but twice a year!" Martie was folding
the new curtains; presently she gave the neat pile a brisk,
condensing slap with the flat of her hand. "There now, look what
your smart Nana and Mother did, Ted!" she boasted. "And come here
and give hims mother seventeen kisses and hugs, you darling,
adorable, fat, soft, little old monkey!" The last words were
smothered in the fine, silky strands under Teddy's dark, thick mop,
on his soft little neck. He submitted to the tumbling and hugging,
trying meanwhile to keep one eye upon the ship he had been building
from an upturned chair.

Breathless, Martie looked up from the embrace to see a pretty
smiling woman standing in the doorway, a wet raincoat over one arm,
and a wet hat balanced on her hand.

"Hello, people!" said the newcomer. "I'm drenched. I don't believe
this can keep up, it's frightful."

"Hello, Adele!" Martie said, setting Teddy on his feet. "Come in,
and spread those things on the heater. Sit there where your skirts
will get the heat. How was the matinee?"

"It was killing," said Mrs. Dryden, establishing herself comfortably
by the radiator. She was a slender, bright-eyed woman of perhaps
thirty, whose colouring ran to cool browns: clear brown eyes, brown
hair prettily dressed, a pale brown skin under which a trace of red
only occasionally appeared. To-day her tailor-made suit was brown,
and about her throat was a narrow boa of some brown fur. "Here,
Teddy, take these to your mother," she added, extending a crushed
box half full of chocolates. "The place was PACKED," she went on,
crunching. "And, my dear!--coming out we were right CLOSE to Doris
Beresford, in the most divine coat I ever laid eyes on! I suppose
they all like to have an idea of what's going on at the other
theatres. I don't believe she uses one bit of make-up; wonderful
skin! There was such a mob in the car it was something terrible. A
man crushed up against Ethel; she said she thought he'd break her
arm! I got a seat; I don't know how it is, but I always do. We'd
been running, and I suppose my colour was high, and a man got up
IMMEDIATELY. Nice--I always thank them. I think that's the least you
can do. Ethel said he sat and stared at me all the way up to Fifty-
ninth, where he got off. He was an awfully nice-looking fellow; I'll
tell you what he looked like: a young doctor. Don't you know those
awfully CLEAN-looking men---"

Martie, now changing Teddy's little suit for dinner, let the stream
run on unchecked. Mrs. Curley, who did not particularly fancy Mrs.
Dryden, had gone upstairs, but Martie really liked to listen to
Adele. Presently she turned on the lights, and led Teddy into the
Cold Lairs, to have his face washed. Adele reached for the evening
paper, and began to peruse it idly. When Martie came out of the
bath-room, it was to hear a knock at the door.

"It's John!" predicted Adele. A moment later her husband came into
the room. Like his wife, he was cold and wet and rosy from the
street, but he had evidently been upstairs, for he wore his old
house-coat and dry slippers, and had brushed his hair. He was
younger than Adele by three or four years, but he looked like a boy
of twenty; squarely built, not tall, but giving an impression of
physical power nevertheless. Martie had first thought his face odd,
then interesting; now she found it strangely attractive. His eyes,
between sandy lashes and under thick sandy brows, were of a sea-blue
in colour, his head was covered with a cap of thick, lustreless,
sand-coloured hair. Something odd, elfin, whimsical, in his crooked
smile lent an actual charm to his face, for Martie at least. She
told him he looked like Pan.

Early in their acquaintance she had asked him if he were not a Dane,
not a Norwegian, if he had not viking blood? She said that he
suggested sagas and berserkers and fjords--"not that I am sure what
any of those words mean!" His answering laugh had been as wild as a
delighted child's. No; he was American-born, of an English father
and an Irish mother, he said. He had never been abroad, never been
to college, never had any family that he remembered, except Adele.
He had meant to be a "merchant sailor"--a term he seemed to like,
although it conveyed only a vague impression to Martie--but his
lungs hadn't been strong. So he went to Arizona and loafed. And
there he met Adele; her mother kept the boarding-house in which he
lived, in fact, and there they were married. Adele had a glorious
voice and she wanted to come to New York to cultivate it. And then
Adele had been ill.

His voice fell reverently when he spoke of this illness. Adele had
nearly died. What the hope that had also really died at this time
meant to him, Martie could only suspect when she saw him with Teddy.
Adele herself told her that she was never strong enough for new
hopes.

"We couldn't afford it, of course; so perhaps it was just as well,"
said Adele one day when she and Martie had come to be good friends,
and were confidential. "I felt terribly for a while, because I have
a wonderful way with children; I know that myself. They always come
to me--funniest thing! Dr. Poole was saying the other day that I had
a remarkable magnetism. I said, 'I don't know about THAT,'--and I
don't, Martie! I don't think I'm so magnetic, do you--'BUT,' I said,
'I really do seem to have a hold on children!' Jack loves children,
too, but he spoils them. I don't believe in letting children run a
house; it isn't good for them, and it isn't good for you. Let them
have their own toys and treat them as kindly as possible, but---"

John Dryden was a salesman in a furniture house; perhaps the city's
finest furniture house. Martie suspected that his pleasant, half-
shy, yet definite manner, made him an excellent salesman. He talked
to her about his associates, whom he took upon their own valuations,
and deeply admired. This one was a "wizard" at figures, and that one
had "a deuce of a manner with women." John chuckled over their
achievements, but she knew that he himself must be the secret wonder
of the place. He might be more or less, but he was certainly not a
typical furniture salesman. Sometimes the manager took him to lunch;
Martie wondered if he quoted the queer books he read, and made the
staid echoes of the club to which they went awake to his pagan
laughter.

His extraordinarily happy temperament knew sudden despairs, but they
were usually because he had made a "rotten mistake," or because he
was "such a fool" about something. He never complained of the stupid
daily round; perhaps it was not stupid to him, who always had a book
under his arm, and to whom the first snow and the first green leaves
were miracles of delight every year. He treated Adele exactly as if
she had been an engaging five-year-old, and she had charming
childish mannerisms for him alone. He pacified her when she fretted
and complained, and was eagerly grateful when her mood was serene.
Her prettiness and her little spoiled airs, Martie realized
surprisedly, were full of appeal for him.

"You don't mean that--you don't mean that!" he would say to her when
she sputtered and raged. He listened absently to her long
dissertation upon the persons--and for Adele the world was full of
them--who tried to cheat her, or who were insolent to her, and to
whom she was triumphantly insolent in return. She found Martie much
more sympathetic as a listener.

Toward Martie, too, John soon began to display a peculiar
sensitiveness. At first it was merely that she spurred his sense of
humour; he began to test the day's events by her laughter. After
that her more general opinions impressed him; he watched her at
dinner and accepted eagerly her verdict upon political affairs or
the books and plays of the hour. She noticed, and was a little
touched to notice, that he quoted her weeks after she had expressed
herself. He brought her books and they disagreed and argued about
them. In summer, with Adele languid under her parasol, and Teddy
enchanting in white, they went to the park concerts, or to the
various museums, and wrangled about the new Strauss and Debussy, and
commented upon the Hals canvases and the art of Meissonier and
Detaille.

This evening he had a book for her from the Public Library; he had
been dipping into it on the elevated train.

"Which ticket is this on, John?"

"Yours."

"Well, then, you paid my dues on the other! How much?"

"Six cents."

She showed him the six coppers on her white palm.

"You were an angel to do it. Listen; do you want to read this when
I'm through?"

"Well, if you think so."

"Think so?--Carlyle's 'Revolution'? Of course you ought to! Adele,
isn't he ignorant?"

"I read that in High School," smiled Adele. "It's awfully good."

"Mis' Ban'ster," Aurora was at the door, "Hainy was cuttin' open the
chickens f' t'morrer, and she says one of 'em give an awful queer
sort of POP--!"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake!" Martie started kitchenward. John Dryden
gave a laugh of purest joy; Aurora was one of his delights. "We
always say we're going to read aloud in the evenings," she called
back. "Now here's a chance--a wet evening, and Adele and I with
oceans of sewing!"

She went from the kitchen upstairs, finding the various boarders
quietly congregating in the hall and parlour, awaiting the opening
of the dining-room door. Adele had gone up to her room, but Teddy
and John were roaming about. Rain still slashed and swished out of
doors. The winter was upon them.

"Seems to be such a smell of PAINT," said the younger Miss Peet.

"Well, that's just trying out the radiators," Martie said
hearteningly. "It won't last. Did you get caught?"

"Sister did; I got home just before it started. It seems to me we're
having rain early this year--"

"We had had two inches at this time last year," said old Colonel Fox.
Martie knew that this unpromising avenue would lead him immediately
to Chickamauga; she slipped into the dining room and began to carve.
Aurora was rushing about with butter-plates, her cousin Lyola,
engaged merely for the dinner-hour, was filling glasses. A moment
later the entire household assembled for the meal. Mrs. Fox, a
gentle, bony old lady, with clean, cool hands, and with a dowdy
little yoke of good lace in the neck of her old silk, smiled about
her sadly. Mrs. Winchell was a plump little woman who always burst
out laughing as a preliminary to speech. Her daughter was eye-
glassed, pretty, capable, a woman who realized perfectly, at twenty-
six, that she had no charm whatever for men. She realized, too, that
Mrs. Bannister, with her bronze hair and quick speech, was full of
it, and envied the younger woman in a bloodless sort of way. Her
brother, known as "Win," had already had a definite repulse from
Mrs. Bannister, and nothing was too bad for the snubbed suitor to
intimate about her in consequence. Win had never seen "this husband
of hers"; Win thought she looked "a little gay, all right." He had a
much more successful friendship with Adele, who slapped his hand and
told him he was the "limit."

To-night one of the clerks from the top floor, shaking out his
napkin, called gaily to Mrs. Bannister that this was his birthday.
It was characteristic of her kindly relationship that she came
immediately to his table. Now why hadn't he told her yesterday? He
should have had a cake, and chicken-pie, because he had once said
chicken was his favourite "insect." He was twenty-eight? He seemed
such a boy!

She went back to her place, determining that she would set out a
little supper of cake and crackers and cheese for him to find when
his room-mate and he came in tired and wet from their theatre that
night. She looked at Teddy; would he keep a birthday in a boarding-
house some day with only the housekeeper to mother him?

"We're betting that you're younger than I am, Mrs. Bannister!"

"You win." She smiled at him frankly. "I'm not yet twenty-four!"
Martie was conscious of a little pang as she met his surprised
almost pitying look.

"I think that talk about ages was just a little undignified," said
Edna Winchell later that night.

"Yes, I do, too!" her mother answered quickly.

"There's something about that girl we don't understand, you bet,"
contributed the son. "When I went down for a match she was just
getting a special delivery letter, and she looked as if she was
going to drop. You mark my words--it had something to do with that
mysterious husband of hers!"

For the boarding-house had never seen Wallace, who held the whole
place in bitter scorn. He resented the fact of Martie's position
there; the fact of her having made herself useful to old Mrs. Curley
represented a difference in their point of view. When, in Teddy's
first year, regular letters and a regular remittance from Wallace
ceased to appear, Martie had gone through an absolute agony of
worry. Her husband was then on the road, and she was not even sure
that her letters reached him.

Alone except for the baby, in the freezing, silent cold of the city,
she had pondered, planned, and fretted for day after weary day. The
one or two acquaintances she had made in Wallace's profession would
have advised her not to worry, nobody ever was turned out for board
in these days. But Martie was too proud to appeal to them for
counsel, and for other but even stronger reasons she could not
confide in Mrs. Curley. So passed the first Christmas alone, doubly
sad because it reminded her of the Christmas a year before, when
they had been so happy and so prosperous in San Francisco.

In snowy February, however, Mrs. Curley herself had unconsciously
offered a solution. She wanted to go to her daughter in Brooklyn for
a fortnight. "Run the house for me, that's the good girl," she said
to Martie. "You can do it as good as I can, any day of the world!
Aurora knows what the menus for the week are and all you've got to
do is to do the ordering and show the rooms to folks that come
looking for them."

Martie had been feeling a little more comfortable about her overdue
board, because Wallace, playing in stock in Los Angeles, had sent
her one hundred dollars early in the year. It was not enough, but it
sufficed to pay a comfortable installment on her bill, and to keep
her in money for another week or two. But she was sick of waiting
and worrying, and she seized the opportunity to be helpful. Chance
favoured her, for during the old woman's visit the daughter in
Brooklyn fell ill, and it was mid-March before the mother came home
again. By that time the trembling Martie had weathered several
storms, had rented the long-vacant front room, and was more brisk
and happy than she had been for months, than she had ever been
perhaps. So the arrangement drifted along. There was no talk of a
salary then, but in time Martie came to ask for such money as she
needed--for Teddy's rompers, for gingham dresses for summer, for
stationery and stamps--and it was always generously accorded.

"Get good things while you're about it," Mrs. Curley would say. "You
buy for the ragman when you buy trash. This lad here," she would
indicate the splendid Teddy, with his loose dark curls and his
creamy skin, "he wants to look elegant, so that the girls will run
after him!"

Martie felt more free to obey her because the business was in a
steadily improving condition. This fancy for keeping a few "paying
guests" had become a sort of expensive luxury for the solitary
woman, whose children no longer needed her, and who would not live
with any of them. Mrs. Curley was not entirely dependent upon her
boarding-house, but she had never been reconciled to the actual loss
of money in the business. She liked to have other persons about, she
having no definite interests of her own, and the new arrangement
suited her perfectly: an attractive young woman to help her, a baby
to lend a familiar air to the table, and money enough to pay all
bills and have something left over.

Amazingly, the money flowed in. Martie told them one night at dinner
that she had always fancied a boarding-house was a place where a
slap-heeled woman climbed bleak stairs to tell starving geniuses
that their rent was overdue. Mrs. Curley had laughed comfortably at
the picture.

"You can always make money feeding people," she had asserted. John
had given Martie a serious look after his laugh.

"Geniuses don't HAVE to starve," he had submitted thoughtfully.

"There's always plenty of work in the world, if people will do it!"
Adele had added. "Dear me, I often wonder if the people who talk
charity--charity--charity--realize that it's all two thirds laziness
and dirt. I don't care HOW poor I was, I know that I would keep my
little house nice; you don't have to have money to do that! But
you'll always hear this talk of the unemployed--when any employer
will tell you the hard thing is to get trustworthy men! The other
day Ethel was asking me to join some society or other--take tickets
for an actors' benefit, I think it was--and I begged to be excused.
I told her we didn't have any money to spare for that sort of thing!
Genius, indeed! Why don't they get jobs?"

"Jobs in a furniture store, eh, John?" Martie smiled. The man
answered her smile sturdily.

"It isn't so rotten!" he said.

Her letters to-night, for there were two in the special delivery
stamped envelope, were from Lydia and Sally. Sally had written often
to her sister during the years, and Martie was fairly in touch with
Monroe events: the young Hawkeses had three babies now, and Grace
had twins. Rose had been ill, and had lost her hopes a second time,
but she was well now, and she and Rodney had been to New York.
People said that the Parkers were coining money, and Rose had
absolutely everything she wanted. Colonel Frost was dead. Miss Frost
looked like death--Martie had smiled at the old phrase--and Grandma
Kelly was dead; Father Martin was quoted as saying that she was a
saint if ever there was one. George Patterson had been sued by a
girl in Berkeley, and Monroe was of the opinion that the Pattersons
never would hold up their heads again. Pa and Len were in some real
estate venture together, Len had talked Pa into it at last. And
finally, Sally and the children were well, and Joe wrote her every
day.

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