Half Portions Part 3

"It's the way he died that comforts me," said Aunt Sophy.

"What difference does that make! What difference does that make!"

This is the letter that made a difference to Aunt Sophy. You will have to read it to understand, though you are likely to skip letters on the printed page. You must not skip this.

AMERICAN RED CROSS (CROIX ROUGE AMeRICAINE)

MY DEAR MRS. BALDWIN:

I am sure you must have been officially notified, by now, by the U.S. War Dept. of the death of your son Lieut. Eugene H.

Baldwin. But I want to write you what I can of his last hours. I was with him much of that time as his nurse. I'm sure it must mean much to a mother to hear from a woman who was privileged to be with her boy at the last.

Your son was brought to our hospital one night badly ga.s.sed from the fighting in the Argonne Forest. Ordinarily we do not receive ga.s.sed patients, as they are sent to a special hospital near here. But two nights before the Germans wrecked this hospital, so many ga.s.sed patients have come to us.

Your son was put in the officers' ward where the doctors who examined him told me there was absolutely no hope for him, as he had inhaled the gas so much that it was only a matter of a few hours. I could scarcely believe that a man so big and strong as he was could not pull through.

The first bad attack he had, losing his breath and nearly choking, rather frightened him, although the doctor and I were both with him. He held my hand tightly in his, begging me not to leave him, and repeating, over and over, that it was good to have a woman near. He was propped high in bed and put his head on my shoulder while I fanned him until he breathed more easily. I stayed with him all that night, though I was not on duty. You see, his eyes also were badly burned. But before he died he was able to see very well. I stayed with him every minute of that night and have never seen a finer character than he showed during all that dreadful fight for life. He had several bad sinking attacks that night and came through each one simply because of his great will power and fighting spirit. After each attack he would grip my hand and say, "Well, we made it that time, didn't we, nurse? And if you'll only stay with me we'll win this fight." At intervals during the night I gave him sips of black coffee which was all he could swallow. Each time I gave it to him he would ask me if I had had some. That was only one instance of his thoughtfulness even in his suffering. Toward morning he asked me if he was going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed all his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand. He seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in bed and shaking his fist, he said: "Then by the Lord I'll fight for it!" We kept him alive for three days, and actually thought we had won when on the third day....

But even in your sorrow you must be very proud to have been the mother of such a son....

I am a Wisconsin girl--Madison. When this is over and I come home will you let me see you so that I may tell you more than I can possibly write?

MARIAN KING.

It was in March, six months later, that Marian King came. They had hoped for it, but never expected it. And she came. Four people were waiting in the living room of the big Baldwin house overlooking the river. Flora and her husband, Adele and Aunt Sophy. They sat, waiting. Now and then Adele would rise, nervously, and go to the window that faced the street.

Flora was weeping with audible sniffs. Baldwin sat in his chair frowning a little, a dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. Only Aunt Sophy sat quietly, waiting.

There was little conversation. None in the last five minutes. Flora broke the silence, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief as she spoke.

"Sophy, how can you sit there like that? Not that I don't envy you. I do. I remember I used to feel sorry for you. I used to say, 'Poor Sophy.' But you unmarried ones are the happiest, after all. It's the married woman who drinks the cup to the last bitter drop. There you sit, Sophy, fifty years old, and life hasn't even touched you. You don't know how cruel life is."

Suddenly, "There!" said Adele. The other three in the room stood up and faced the door. The sound of a motor stopping outside. Daniel Oakley's hearty voice: "Well, it only took us five minutes from the station.

Pretty good."

Footsteps down the hall. Marian King stood in the doorway. They faced her, the four--Baldwin and Adele and Flora and Sophy. Marian King stood a moment, uncertainly, her eyes upon them. She looked at the two older women with swift, appraising glance. Then she came into the room, quickly, and put her two hands on Aunt Sophy's shoulders and looked into her eyes straight and sure.

"You must be a very proud woman," she said. "You ought to be a very proud woman."

APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL

Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar in strict accordance with Article I, Section 1, Unwritten Rules for House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of What's-Her-Name mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone through the ceremony twice a year.

Furniture on the porch, woollens on the line, mattresses in the yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, flapped, shaken, or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.

And boxes--oh, above all, boxes: pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencillings on one end; cryptic, that is, to any one except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long, slim box. Another stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents under "Sip Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as Hosey's fis.h.i.+ng tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valance.

The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fis.h.i.+ng these ten years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pinky's rose-cretonne room had lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow chested (she'd need to be with that decolletage), carrying feather fan.

You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.

Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.

Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be.

That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically, that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--in tolerance and understanding and humanness--until now, as you talked with them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins and closets for all your worries and confidences.

But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago,"

complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood floored, s.p.a.cious, light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, aesthetic, educational, and spiritual progress of the entire family as clearly as if a sociologist had charted it.

Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the labyrinthian scrolls of her s.e.xtuple gold frame, was rouged like a soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster household--had thought these ma.s.sive atrocities the last word in artistic ornament. By the time she reached her soph.o.m.ore year, Pinky had prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining room. Then, two years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living room and the dining room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.

Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with them for the vacations. Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the cheeks as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting place in a nondescript back chamber known as the sewing room. Then the new sleeping porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in the attic.

One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove.

Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C.

Brewster's _bete noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace.

"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: "Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know what's got into her."

By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Miz' Merz by-the-day, you understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves, and left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this relentless and expert crew.

Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened and its contents revealed, Miz' Merz would say: "You keepin' this, Miz'

Brewster?"

"That? Oh, dear, yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie."

Yet, why in the name of all that's ridiculous did she treasure the funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _pa.s.se_ than a last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) pa.s.sed by unbrightened by covetousness.

The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth b.a.l.l.s, and dust, and the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic.

Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz's recital of her husband's relations' latest flagrancy.

"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own fam'ly to look out fur,' I says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swas.h.i.+ngs, and much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the second-floor hallway, a young, clear voice calling, then the same footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard.

Pinky's arms were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise.

Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished:

"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--"

"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all smudged, too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor trips into the country.

"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat they're--why, it's a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father."