C7. An Etude For Emma
If you listen long enough, and earnestly enough, and with ear
sufficiently attuned to the music of this sphere there will come
to you this reward: The violins and oboes and 'cellos and
brasses of humanity which seemed all at variance with each other
will unite as one instrument; seeming discords and dissonances
will blend into harmony, and the wail and blare and thrum of
humanity's orchestra will sound in your ear the sublime melody of
that great symphony called Life.
In her sunny little private office on the twelfth floor of the
great loft-building that housed the T. A. Buck Company, Emma
McChesney Buck sat listening to the street-sounds that were
wafted to her, mellowed by height and distance. The noises,
taken separately, were the nerve-racking sounds common to a busy
down-town New York cross-street. By the time they reached the
little office on the twelfth floor, they were softened, mellowed,
debrutalized, welded into a weird choirlike chant first high,
then low, rising, swelling, dying away, rising again to a dull
roar, with now and then vast undertones like the rumbling of a
cathedral pipe-organ. Emma knew that the high, clear tenor note
was the shrill cry of the lame "newsie" at the corner of Sixth
Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. Those deep, thunderous bass
notes were the combined reverberation of nearby "L" trains,
distant subway and clanging surface cars. That sharp staccato
was a motorman clanging his bell of warning. These things she
knew. But she liked, nevertheless, to shut her eyes for a moment
in the midst of her busy day and listen to the chant of the city
as it came up to her, subdued, softened, strangely beautified.
The sound saddened even while it filled her with a certain
exaltation. We have no one word for that sensation. The German
(there's a language!) has it--Weltschmerz.
As distance softened the harsh sounds to her ears, so time and
experience had given her a perspective on life itself. She saw
it, not as a series of incidents, pleasant and unpleasant, but as
a great universal scheme too mighty to comprehend--a scheme that
always worked itself out in some miraculous way.
She had had a singularly full life, had Emma McChesney Buck. A
life replete with work, leavened by sorrows, sweetened with
happiness. These ingredients make for tolerance. She saw, for
example, how the capable, modern staff in the main business
office had forged ahead of old Pop Henderson. Pop Henderson had
been head bookkeeper for years. But the pen in his trembling
hand made queer spidery marks in the ledgers now, and his figure
seven was very likely to look like a drunken letter "z." The
great bulk of his work was done by the capable, comely Miss Kelly
who could juggle figures like a Cinquevalli. His shaking,
blue-veined yellow hand was no match for Miss Kelly's cool, firm
fingers. But he stayed on at Buck's, and no one dreamed of
insulting him with talk of a pension, least of all Emma. She saw
the work-worn pathetic old man not only as a figure but as a
symbol.
Jock McChesney, very young, very handsome, very successful,
coming on to New York from Chicago to be married in June, found
his mother wrapped in this contemplative calm. Now, Emma
McChesney Buck, mother of an about-to-be-married son, was also
surprisingly young and astonishingly handsome and highly
successful. Jock, in a lucid moment the day before his wedding,
took occasion to comment rather resentfully on his mother's
attitude.
"It seems to me," he said gloomily, "that for a mother whose
only son is about to be handed over to what the writers call the
other woman, you're pretty resigned, not to say cheerful."
Emma glanced up at him as he stood there, so tall and straight
and altogether good to look at, and the glow of love and pride in
her eyes belied the lightness of her words.
"I know it," she said, with mock seriousness, "and it worries
me. I can't imagine why I fail to feel those pangs that mothers
are supposed to suffer at this time. I ought to rend my garments
and beat my breast, but I can't help thinking of what a stunning
girl Grace Galt is, and what a brain she has, and how lucky you
are to get her. Any girl--with the future that girl had in the
advertising field--who'll give up four thousand a year and her
independence to marry a man does it for love, let me tell you.
If anybody knows you better than your mother, son, I'd hate to
know who it is. And if anybody loves you more than your
mother--well, we needn't go into that, because it would have to
be hypothetical, anyway. You see, Jock, I've loved you so long
and so well that I know your faults as well as your virtues; and
I love you, not in spite of them but because of them.
"Oh, I don't know," interrupted Jock, with some warmth, "I'm
not perfect, but a fellow----"
"Perfect! Jock McChesney, when I think of Grace's feelings when
she discovers that you never close a closet door! When I
contemplate her emotions on hearing your howl at finding one seed
in your orange juice at breakfast! When she learns of your
secret and unholy passion for neckties that have a dash of red in
'em, and how you have to be restrained by force from----"
With a simulated roar of rage, Jock McChesney fell upon his
mother with a series of bear-hugs that left her flushed, panting,
limp, but bright-eyed.
It was to her husband that Emma revealed the real source of her
Spartan calm. The wedding was over. There had been a quiet
little celebration, after which Jock McChesney had gone West with
his very lovely young wife. Emma had kissed her very tenderly,
very soberly after the brief ceremony. "Mrs. McChesney," she
had said, and her voice shook ever so little; "Mrs. Jock
McChesney!" And the new Mrs. McChesney, a most astonishingly
intuitive young woman indeed, had understood.
T. A. Buck, being a man, puzzled over it a little. That night,
when Emma had reached the kimono and hair-brushing stage, he
ventured to speak his wonderment.
"D'you know, Emma, you were about the calmest and most serene
mother that I ever did see at a son's wedding. Of course I
didn't expect you to have hysterics, or anything like that. I've
always said that, when it came to repose and self-control, you
could make the German Empress look like a hoyden. But I always
thought that, at such times, a mother viewed her new
daughter-in-law as a rival, that the very sight of her filled her
with a jealous rage like that of a tigress whose cub is taken
from her. I must say you were so smiling and urbane that I
thought it was almost uncomplimentary to the young couple. You
didn't even weep, you unnatural woman!"
Emma, seated before her dressing-table, stopped brushing her hair
and sat silent a moment, looking down with unseeing eyes at the
brush in her hand.
"I know it, T. A. Would you like to have me tell you why?"
He came over to her then and ran a tender hand down the length of
her bright hair. Then he kissed the top of her head. This
satisfactory performance he capped by saying:
"I think I know why. It's because the minister hesitated a
minute and looked from you to Grace and back again, not knowing
which was the bride. The way you looked in that dress, Emma, was
enough to reconcile any woman to losing her entire family."
"T. A., you do say the nicest things to me."
"Like 'em, Emma?"
"Like 'em? You know perfectly well that you never can offend me
by making me compliments like that. I not only like them; I
actually believe them!"
"That's because I mean them, Emma. Now, out with that reason!"
Emma stood up then and put her hands on his shoulders. But she
was not looking at him. She was gazing past him, her eyes
dreamy, contemplative.
"I don't know whether I'll be able to explain to you just how I
feel about it. I'll probably make a mess of it. But I'll try.
You see, dear, it's just this way: Two years ago--a year ago,
even--I might have felt just that sensation of personal
resentment and loss. But somehow, lately, I've been looking at
life through--how shall I put it?--through seven-league glasses.
I used to see life in its relation to me and mine. Now I see it
in terms of my relation to it. Do you get me? I was the
soloist, and the world my orchestral accompaniment. Lately, I've
been content just to step back with the other instruments and let
my little share go to make up a more perfect whole. In those
years, long before I met you, when Jock was all I had in the
world, I worked and fought and saved that he might have the
proper start, the proper training, and environment. And I did
succeed in giving him those things. Well, as I looked at him
there to-day I saw him, not as my son, my property that was going
out of my control into the hands of another woman, but as a link
in the great chain that I had helped to forge--a link as strong
and sound and perfect as I could make it. I saw him, not as my
boy, Jock McChesney, but as a unit. When I am gone I shall still
live in him, and he in turn will live in his children. There!
I've muddled it--haven't I?--as I said I would. But I think"--
And she looked into her husband's glowing eyes.--"No; I'm sure
you understand. And when I die, T. A.----"
"You, Emma!" And he held her close, and then held her off to
look at her through quizzical, appreciative eyes. "Why, girl, I
can't imagine you doing anything so passive."
In the busy year that followed, anyone watching Emma McChesney
Buck as she worked and played and constructed, and helped others
to work and play and construct, would have agreed with T. A.
Buck. She did not seem a woman who was looking at life
objectively. As she went about her home in the evening, or the
office, the workroom, or the showrooms during the day, adjusting
this, arranging that, smoothing out snarls, solving problems of
business or household, she was very much alive, very vital, very
personal, very electric. In that year there came to her many
letters from Jock and Grace--happy letters, all of them, some
with an undertone of great seriousness, as is fitting when two
people are readjusting their lives. Then, in spring, came the
news of the baby. The telegram came to Emma as she sat in her
office near the close of a busy day. As she read it and reread
it, the slip of paper became a misty yellow with vague lines of
blue dancing about on it; then it became a blur of nothing in
particular, as Emma's tears fell on it in a little shower of joy
and pride and wonder at the eternal miracle.
Then she dried her eyes, mopped the telegram and her lace jabot
impartially, went across the hall and opened the door marked "T.
A. BUCK."
T. A. looked up from his desk, smiled, held out a hand.
"Girl or boy?"
"Girl, of course," said Emma tremulously, "and her name is
Emma McChesney."
T. A. stood up and put an arm about his wife's shoulders.
"Lean on me, grandma," he said.
"Fiend!" retorted Emma, and reread the telegram happily. She
folded it then, with a pensive sigh, "I hope she'll look like
Grace. But with Jock's eyes. They were wasted in a man. At any
rate, she ought to be a raving, tearing beauty with that father
and mother."
"What about her grandmother, when it comes to looks! Yes, and
think of the brain she'll have," Buck reminded her excitedly.
"Great Scott! With a grandmother who has made the T. A. Buck
Featherloom Petticoat a household word, and a mother who was the
cleverest woman advertising copy-writer in New York, this young
lady ought to be a composite Hetty Green, Madame de Stael,
Hypatia, and Emma McChesney Buck. She'll be a lady wizard of
finance or a----"
"She'll be nothing of the kind," Emma disputed calmly. "That
child will be a throwback. The third generation generally is.
With a militant mother and a grandmother such as that child has,
she'll just naturally be a clinging vine. She'll be a reversion
to type. She'll be the kind who'll make eyes and wear pale blue
and be crazy about new embroidery-stitches. Just mark my words,
T. A."
Buck had a brilliant idea.
"Why don't you pack a bag and run over to Chicago for a few days
and see this marvel of the age?"
But Emma shook her head.
"Not now, T. A. Later. Let the delicate machinery of that new
household adjust itself and begin to run smoothly and sweetly
again. Anyone who might come in now--even Jock's mother--would
be only an outsider."
So she waited very patiently and considerately. There was much
to occupy her mind that spring. Business was unexpectedly and
gratifyingly good. Then, too, one of their pet dreams was being
realized; they were to have their own house in the country, at
Westchester. Together they had pored over the plans. It was to
be a house of wide, spacious verandas, of fireplaces, of
bookshelves, of great, bright windows, and white enamel and
cheerful chintz. By the end of May it was finished, furnished,
and complete. At which a surprising thing happened; and yet, not
so surprising. A demon of restlessness seized Emma McChesney
Buck. It had been a busy, happy winter, filled with work. Now
that it was finished, there came upon Emma and Buck that
unconscious and quite natural irritation which follows a long
winter spent together by two people, no matter how much in
harmony. Emma pulled herself up now and then, horrified to find
a rasping note of impatience in her voice. Buck found himself,
once or twice, fairly caught in a little whirlpool of ill temper
of his own making. These conditions they discovered almost
simultaneously. And like the comrades they were, they talked it
over and came to a sensible understanding.
"We're a bit ragged and saw-edged," said Emma. "We're getting
on each other's nerves. What we need is a vacation from each
other. This morning I found myself on the verge of snapping at
you. At you! Imagine, T. A.!"
Whereupon Buck came forward with his confession.
"It's a couple of late cases of spring fever. You've been tied
to this office all winter. So've I. We need a change. You've
had too much petticoats, too much husband, too much cutting room
and sales-room and rush orders and business generally. Too much
Featherloom and not enough foolishness." He came over and put a
gentle hand on his wife's shoulder, a thing strictly against the
rules during business hours. And Emma not only permitted it but
reached over and covered his hand with her own. "You're tired,
and you're a wee bit nervous; so g'wan," said T. A., ever so
gently, and kissed his wife, "g'wan; get out of here!"
And Emma got.
She went, not to the mountains or the seashore but with her face
to the west. In her trunks were tiny garments--garments pink-
ribboned, blue-ribboned, things embroidered and scalloped and
hemstitched and hand-made and lacy. She went looking less
grandmotherly than ever in her smart, blue tailor suit, her
rakish hat, her quietly correct gloves, and slim shoes and softly
becoming jabot. Her husband had got her a compartment, had laden
her down with books, magazines, fruit, flowers, candy. Five
minutes before the train pulled out, Emma looked about the little
room and sighed, even while she smiled.
"You're an extravagant boy, T. A. I look as if I were equipped
for a dash to the pole instead of an eighteen-hour run to
Chicago. But I love you for it. I suppose I ought to be ashamed
to confess how I like having a whole compartment just for myself.
You see, a compartment always will spell luxury to me. There
were all those years on the road, you know, when I often
considered myself in luck to get an upper on a local of a branch
line that threw you around in your berth like a bean in a tin can
every time the engineer stopped or started."
Buck looked at his watch, then stooped in farewell. Quite
suddenly they did not want to part. They had grown curiously
used to each other, these two. Emma found herself clinging to
this man with the tender eyes, and Buck held her close,
regardless of train-schedules. Emma rushed him to the platform
and watched him, wide-eyed, as he swung off the slowly moving
train.
"Come on along!" she called, almost tearfully.
Buck looked up at her. At her trim, erect figure, at her clear
youthful coloring, at the brightness of her eye.
"If you want to get a reputation for comedy," he laughed,
"tell somebody on that train that you're going to visit your
granddaughter."
Jock met her at the station in Chicago and drove her home in a
very dapper and glittering black runabout.
"Grace wanted to come down," he explained, as they sped along,
"but they're changing the baby's food or something, and she
didn't want to leave. You know those nurses." Emma felt a
curious little pang. This was her boy, her baby, talking about
his baby and nurses. She had a sense of unreality. He turned to
her with shining eyes. "That's a stunning get-up, Blonde.
Honestly, you're a wiz, mother. Grace has told all her friends
that you're coming, and their mothers are going to call. But,
good Lord, you look like my younger sister, on the square you
do!"
The apartment reached, it seemed to Emma that she floated across
the walk and up the stairs, so eagerly did her heart cry out for
a glimpse of this little being who was flesh of her flesh.
Grace, a little pale but more beautiful than ever, met them at
the door. Her arms went about Emma's neck. Then she stood her
handsome mother-in-law off and gazed at her.
"You wonder! How lovely you look! Good heavens, are they
wearing that kind of hat in New York! And those collars! I
haven't seen a thing like 'em here. `East is east and West is
west and----' "
"Where's that child?" demanded Emma McChesney Buck. "Where's
my baby?"
"Sh-sh-sh-sh!" came in a sibilant duet from Grace and Jock.
"Not now. She's sleeping. We were up with her for three hours
last night. It was the new food. She's not used to it yet."
"But, you foolish children, can't I peek at her?"
"Oh, dear, no!" said Grace hastily. "We never go into her
room when she's asleep. This is your room, mother dear. And
just as soon as she wakes up--this is your bath--you'll want to
freshen up. Dear me; who could have hung the baby's little shirt
here? The nurse, I suppose. If I don't attend to every little
thing----"
Emma took off her hat and smoothed her hair with light, deft
fingers. She turned a smiling face toward Jock and Grace
standing there in the doorway.
"Now don't bother, dear. If you knew how I love having that
little shirt to look at! And I've such things in my trunk! Wait
till you see them."
So she possessed her soul in patience for one hour, two hours.
At the end of the second hour, a little wail went up. Grace
vanished down the hall. Emma, her heart beating very fast,
followed her. A moment later she was bending over a very pink
morsel with very blue eyes and she was saying, over and over in a
rapture of delightful idiocy:
"Say hello to your gran-muzzer, yes her is! Say, hello,
granny!" And her longing arms reached down to take up her
namesake.
"Not now!" Grace said hastily. "We never play with her just
before feeding-time. We find that it excites her, and that's bad
for her digestion."
"Dear me!" marveled Emma. "I don't remember worrying about
Jock's digestion when he was two and a half months old!"
It was thus that Emma McChesney Buck, for many years accustomed
to leadership, learned to follow humbly and in silence. She had
always been the orbit about which her world revolved. Years of
brilliant success, of triumphant execution, had not spoiled her,
or made her offensively dictatorial. But they had taught her a
certain self-confidence; had accustomed her to a degree of
deference from others. Now she was the humblest of the
satellites revolving about this sun of the household. She
learned to tiptoe when small Emma McChesney was sleeping. She
learned that the modern mother does not approve of the holding of
a child in one's arms, no matter how those arms might be aching
to feel the frail weight of the soft, sweet body. She who had
brought a child into the world, who had had to train that child
alone, had raised him single-handed, had educated him, denied
herself for him, made a man of him, now found herself all
ignorant of twentieth century child-raising methods. She learned
strange things about barley-water and formulae and units and
olive oil, and orange juice and ounces and farina, and
bath-thermometers and blue-and-white striped nurses who view
grandmothers with a coldly disapproving and pitying eye.
She watched the bathing-process for the first time with wonder as
frank as it was unfeigned.
"And I thought I was a modern woman!" she marveled. "When I
used to bathe Jock I tested the temperature of the water with my
elbow; and I know my mother used to test my bath-water when I was
a baby by putting me into it. She used to say that if I turned
blue she knew the water was too cold, and if I turned red she
knew it was too hot."
"Humph!" snorted the blue-and-white striped nurse, and rightly.
"Oh, I don't say that your method isn't the proper one," Emma
hastened to say humbly, and watched Grace scrutinize the
bath-thermometer with critical eye.
In the days that followed, there came calling the mothers of
Grace's young-women friends, as Jock had predicted. Charming
elderly women, most of them, all of them gracious and friendly
with that generous friendliness which is of the West. But each
fell into one of two classes--the placid, black-silk, rather
vague woman of middle age, whose face has the blank look of the
sheltered woman and who wrinkles early from sheer lack of
sufficient activity or vital interest in life; and the wiry,
well-dressed, assertive type who talked about her club work and
her charities, her voice always taking the rising inflection at
the end of a sentence, as though addressing a meeting. When they
met Emma, it was always with a little startled look of surprise,
followed by something that bordered on disapproval. Emma, the
keenly observant, watching them, felt vaguely uncomfortable. She
tried to be politely interested in what they had to say, but she
found her thoughts straying a thousand miles away to the man whom
she loved and who loved her, to the big, busy factory with its
humming machinery and its capable office staff, to the tasteful,
comfortable, spacious house that she had helped to plan; to all
the vital absorbing, fascinating and constructive interests with
which her busy New York life was filled to overflowing.
So she looked smilingly at the plump, gray-haired ladies who
came a-calling in their smart black with the softening
lace-effect at the throat, and they looked, smiling politely,
too, at this slim, erect, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed woman with
the shining golden hair and the firm, smooth skin, and the alert
manner; and in their eyes was that distrust which lurks in the
eyes of a woman as she looks at another woman of her own age who
doesn't show it.
In the weeks of her stay, Emma managed, little by little, to take
the place of second mother in the household. She had tact and
finesse and cleverness enough even for that herculean feat.
Grace's pale cheeks and last year's wardrobe made her firm in her
stand.
"Grace," she said, one day, "listen to me: I want you to get
some clothes--a lot of them, and foolish ones, all of them.
Babies are all very well, but husbands have some slight right to
consideration. The clock, for you, is an instrument devised to
cut up the day and night into your baby's eating- and
sleeping-periods. I want you to get some floppy hats with roses
on 'em, and dresses with ruffles and sashes. I'll stay home and
guard your child from vandals and ogres. Scat!"
Her stay lengthened to four weeks, five weeks, six. She had the
satisfaction of seeing the roses blooming in Grace's cheeks as
well as in her hats. She learned to efface her own personality
that others might shine who had a better right. And she lost
some of her own bright color, a measure of her own buoyancy. In
the sixth week she saw, in her mirror, something that caused her
to lean forward, to stare for one intent moment, then to shrink
back, wide-eyed. A little sunburst, hair-fine but undeniable,
was etched delicately about the corners of her eyes. Fifteen
minutes later, she had wired New York thus:
Home Friday. Do you still love me? EMMA.
When she left, little Emma McChesney was sleeping, by a curious
coincidence, as she had been when Emma arrived, so that she could
not have the satisfaction of a last pressure of the lips against
the rose-petal cheek. She had to content herself with listening
close to the door in the vain hope of catching a last sound of
the child's breathing.
She was laden with fruits and flowers and magazines on her
departure, as she had been when she left New York. But, somehow,
these things did not seem to interest her. After the train had
left Chicago's smoky buildings far behind, she sat very still for
a long time, her eyes shut. She told herself that she felt and
looked very old, very tired, very unlike the Emma McChesney Buck
who had left New York a few weeks before. Then she thought of T.
A., and her eyes unclosed and she smiled. By the time the train
had reached Cleveland the little lines seemed miraculously to
have disappeared, somehow, from about her eyes. When they left
the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station she was a
creature transformed. And when the train rolled into the great
down-town shed, Emma was herself again, bright-eyed, alert,
vibrating energy.
There was no searching, no hesitation. Her eyes met his, and his
eyes found hers with a quite natural magnetism.
"Oh, T. A., my dear, my dear! I didn't know you were so
handsome! And how beautiful New York is! Tell me: Have I grown
old? Have I?"
T. A. bundled her into a taxi and gazed at her in some alarm.
"You! Old! What put that nonsense into your head? You're
tired, dear. We'll go home, and you'll have a good rest, and a
quiet evening----"
"Rest!" echoed Emma, and sat up very straight, her cheeks pink.
"Quiet evening! T. A. Buck, listen to me. I've had nothing but
rest and quiet evenings for six weeks. I feel a million years
old. One more day of being a grandmother and I should have died!
Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stop at Fifth
Avenue this minute and buy a hat that's a thousand times too
young for me, and you're going with me to tell me that it isn't.
And then you'll take me somewhere to dinner--a place with music
and pink shades. And then I want to see a wicked play,
preferably with a runway through the center aisle for the chorus.
And then I want to go somewhere and dance! Get that, dear?
Dance! Tell me, T. A.--tell me the truth: Do you think I'm old,
and faded, and wistful and grandmotherly?"
"I think," said T. A. Buck, "that you're the most beautiful,
the most wonderful, the most adorable woman in the world, and the
more foolish your new hat is and the later we dance the better
I'll like it. It has been awful without you, Emma."
Emma closed her eyes and there came from the depths of her heart
a great sigh of relief, and comfort and gratification.
"Oh, T. A., my dear, it's all very well to drown your identity
in the music of the orchestra, but there's nothing equal to the
soul-filling satisfaction that you get in solo work."
Edna Ferber's short story: An Etude For Emma
-THE END-
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