"Wallie, have you any money for the laundry?"

"Oh, Lord! How much is it?"

"Two dollars and thirteen cents; four weeks now."

"Well, when does he come?"

"To-day."

"Well, you tell him that I'll step in to-morrow and pay the whole thing. I'm going to see Richards to-day; I won't be home to dinner."

"But I thought you were going to see that man in the Bronx, about the moving picture job to-morrow?"

"Yes, I am. What about it?"

"Nothing. Only, Wallie, if you have dinner with Mr. Richards and all those men, you know--you know you may not feel like--like getting up early to-morrow!" Martie, hesitating in the doorway with the baby, wavered between tact and truth.

"Why don't you say I'll be drunk, while you're about it?"

The ugly tone would rouse everything that was ugly in response.

"Very well, I WILL say that, if you insist!" The slamming door ended the conversation; Martie trembled as she put the child to bed.

Presently Isabeau would come to her to say noncommittally, but with watchful, white-rimmed eyes, that Mist' Bans'ter he didn' want no breakfuss, he jus' take hisse'f off. For the rest of the day, Martie carried a heart of lead.

Mentally, morally, physically, the little family steadily descended.

With Martie too ill to do more than drag herself through the autumn days, Wallace idle and ugly, Isabeau overworked and discontented, and bills acc.u.mulating on every side, there was no saving element left.

Desperately the wife and mother plodded on; the children must have milk and bread, the rent-collector must be pacified if not satisfied.

Everything else was unimportant. Her own appearance mattered nothing, the appearance of the house mattered nothing. She pinned the children's clothing when their b.u.t.tons disappeared; she slipped a coat wearily over her house-dress, and went to the delicatessen store five minutes before dinner-time. She was thin enough now,--Martie, who had always longed to be thin. Sometimes, sitting on the side of an unmade bed, with a worn little shirt of Ted's held languidly in her hands, she would call the maid.

"Isabeau! Hasn't Teddy a clean shirt?"

"No, MA'AM! You put two them shirts in yo' basket 'n' says how you's going to fix 'em!"

"I must get at those shirts," Martie would muse helplessly. "Come, Ted, look what you're doing! Pay attention, dear!"

"Man come with yo meat bill, Mis' Ban'ster," Isabeau might add, lingering in the doorway. "Ah says you's OUT."

"Thank you, Isabeau." Perhaps Martie would laugh forlornly. "Never mind--things must change! We can't go on THIS way!"

Suddenly, she was ill. Without warning, without the slip or stumble or running upstairs that she was quite instinctively avoiding, the accident befell. Martie, sobered, took to her bed, and sent Isabeau flying for Dr. Converse, the old physician whose pleasant wife had often spoken to Teddy in the market. Strange--strange, that she who so loved children should be reduced now to mere thankfulness that the little life was not to be, mere grat.i.tude for an opportunity to lie quiet in bed!

"For I suppose I should stay in bed for a few days?" Martie asked the doctor. Until she was told she might get up. Very well, but he must remember that she had a husband and two children to care for, and make that soon.

Dr. Converse did not smile in answer. After a while she knew why. The baffling weakness did not go, the pain and restlessness seemed to have been hers forever. Day after day she lay helpless; while Isabeau grumbled, Margar fretted, and Teddy grew noisy and unmanageable.

Wallace was rarely at home, the dirt and confusion of the house rode Martie's sick brain like a nightmare. She told herself, as she lay longing for an appetizing meal, an hour's freedom from worry, that there was a point beyond which no woman might be expected to bear things, that if life went on in this way she must simply turn her face to the wall and die.

Ghost-white, she was presently on her feet. The unbearable had been borne. She was getting well again; ridden with debts, and as shabby and hopeless as it could well be, the Bannister family staggered on. Money problems buzzed about Martie's eyes like a swarm of midges: Isabeau had paid this charge of seventy cents, there was a drug bill for six dollars and ten cents--eighty cents, a dollar and forty cents, sixty-five cents--the little sums cropped up on all sides.

Martie took pencil and paper, and wrote them all down. The hideous total was two hundred and seventeen dollars on the last day of October.

But there would be rent again on the eleventh--

Her bright head went suddenly down on her arms. Oh, no--no--no! It couldn't be done. It was all too hard, too bewildering--

Suddenly, looking at the pencilled sums, the inspiration came. Was it a memory of those days long ago in Monroe, when she had calculated so carefully the cost of coming on to the mysterious fairyland of New York? As carefully now she began to count the cost of going home.

It was five years since she had seen her own people; and in that time she had carried always the old resentful feeling that she would rather die than turn to Pa for help! But she knew better now; her children should not suffer because of that old girlish pride.

Her mother was gone. Len and his wife, one of the lean, tall Gorman girls, were temporarily living with Pa in the old place. Sally had four children, Elizabeth, Billy, Jim, and Mary, and lived in the old Mussoo place near Dr. Ben. Joe Hawkes was studying medicine, Lydia kept house for Pa, of course, and Sally and her father were reconciled. "We just started talking to each other when Ma was so ill," wrote Sally, "and now he thinks the world and all of the children."

All these changes had filtered to Martie throughout the years. Only a few weeks ago a new note had been sounded. Pa had asked Sally if she ever heard of her sister; had said that Mary Hawkes was like her Aunt Martie, "the cunningest baby of them all."

Wild with hope, Sally had written the beloved sister. It was as if all these years of absence had been years of banishment to Sally. Martie recognized the unchanging Monroe standard.

She got Sally's letter now, and re-read it. If Pa could send her a few hundreds, if she could get the children into Lydia's hands, in the old house in the sunken garden, if Teddy and Margar could grow up in the beloved fogs and sunshine, the soft climate of home, then how bravely she could work, how hopefully she could struggle to get a foothold in the world for them! She wrote simply, lovingly, penitently, to her father--She was convalescent after serious illness; there were two small children; her husband was out of work; could he forgive her and help her? In the cold, darkening days, she went about fed with a secret hope, an abounding confidence.

But she held the letter a fortnight before sending it. If her father refused her, she was desperate indeed. Planning, planning, planning, she endured the days. Wallace was not well; wretched with grippe, he spent almost the entire day in bed when he was at home, dressing at four o'clock and going out of the house without a farewell. Sometimes, for two or three nights a week, Martie did not know where he was; his friends kept him in money, and made him feel himself a deeply wronged and unappreciated man. She could picture him in bars, in cafes, in hot hotel rooms seriously talking over a card-table, boasting, threatening.

She dismissed Isabeau Eato with a promise that the girl accepted ungraciously.

"If I had the money Isabeau, you should have it; you know that!"

"Yas'm. Hit's what dey all says'm."

"You SHALL have it," Martie promised, with hot cheeks. She breathed easier when the girl was gone. She told the grocer that she had written her father, and that his bills should be paid; she reminded the big rosy man that she had been ill. He listened without comment, cleaning a split thumb-nail. The story was not a new one.

No answer came to her letter, and a sick suspicion that no answer would come began to trouble her. December was pa.s.sing. Teddy was careful to tell her just what he wanted from Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve she asked Wallace, as he was silently going out, for some money.

"I want to get Ted SOMETHING for Christmas, Wallie."

"What does he want?"

"Well, of course he wants a coaster and skates, but that's absurd. I thought some sort of a gun--he's gun-mad, and perhaps a book of fairy-tales."

With no further comment her husband gave her a five-dollar-bill, and went on his way. She saw that he had other bills, and went impulsively after him.

"Wallie! Could you let me have a little more? I do need it so!"

Still silent, he took the little roll from his pocket, and gave her another five dollars. She saw still a third, and a one dollar bill.

But this was more than her wildest hopes. Joyfully, she went, shabby and cold, through the happy streets. She walked four blocks to a new market, and bought bread and b.u.t.ter and salt codfish and a candy cane.

She went into a department store, leaving Teddy to watch the coach on the sidewalk, and got him the gun and the book. She gave her grocer four, her butcher three dollars, with a "Merry Christmas!" Did both men seem a little touched, a little pitying, or was it just the holiday air? The streets were crowded, the leaden sky low and menacing; they would have a white Christmas.

Teddy hung up his stocking at dark. The big things, he explained, would have to go on the floor.

"What big things, my heart?" Martie was toasting bread, eying the browned fish cakes with appet.i.te.

"Well, the coaster or the skates!" he elucidated off-hand.

His mother's breast rose on a long sigh. She came to put one arm about him, as she knelt beside him on the floor.