Chapter 9

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_ CHAPTER IX

"Doggonit, I liked that cap. It was a good one," said Father, in a tone of settled melancholy.

"Well, it wa'n't much of a cap," said Mother, "but I do know how you feel."

They sat in their tremendously varnished and steam-heated room on the second floor of daughter Lulu's house, and found some occupation in being gloomy. For ten days now they had been her guests. Lulu had received them with bright excitement and announced that they needn't ever do any more work, and were ever so welcome--and then she had started to reform them. It may seem a mystery as to why a woman whose soul was composed of vinegar and chicken feathers, as was Lulu Appleby Hartwig's, should have wanted her parents to stay with her. Perhaps she liked them. One does find such anomalies. Anyway, she condescendingly bought them new hats. And her husband, a large, heavy-blooded man, made lumbering jokes at their expense, and expected them to laugh.

"The old boy still likes to play the mouth-organ--nothing like these old codgers for thinking they're still kids," Mr. Hartwig puffed at dinner, then banged his fist and laughed rollingly. He seemed surprised when Father merely flushed and tightened his tie. For all his gross body, Mr. Hartwig was sensitive--so sensitive that he was hurt when people didn't see the humor of his little sallies.

The Hartwigs' modest residence was the last word in cement and small useless side-tables and all modern inconveniences. The furnace heat made you sneeze, and the chairs, which were large and tufted, creaked. In the dining-room was an electrolier made of seven kinds of inimical colored glass, and a plate-rack from which were hung department-store steins. On the parlor table was a kodak album with views of Harry in every stage of absurdity. There was a small car which Mr. Hartwig drove himself. And there was a bright, easy, incredibly dull social life; neighbors who went out to the country club to watch the tennis in summer, and played "five hundred" every Saturday evening in the winter.

Like a vast proportion of the inhabitants of that lonely city, New York, the Applebys were unused to society. It is hard to tell which afflicted them more--sitting all day in their immaculate plastered and varnished room with nothing useful to do or being dragged into the midst of chattering neighbors who treated them respectfully, as though they were old.

Mother begged daughter to be permitted to dust or make beds; Father suggested that he might rake the lawn. But Lulu waggled her stringy forefinger at them and bubbled, "No, no! What would the neighbors think? Don't you suppose that we can afford to have you dear old people take a rest? Why, Harris would be awfully angry if he saw you out puttering around, Father. No, you just sit and have a good rest."

And then, when they had composed to a spurious sort of rest the hands that were aching for activity, the Applebys would be dragged out, taken to teas, shown off, with their well-set-up backs and handsome heads, as Lulu's aristocratic parents.

"My father has been a prominent business man in New York for many years, you know," she would confide to neighbors.

While the prominent business man longed to be sitting on a foolish stool trying shoes on a fussy old lady.

But what could he do? In actual cash Mother and he had less than seven dollars in the world.

By the end of two weeks Father and Mother were slowly going mad with the quiet of their room, and Lulu was getting a little tired of her experiment in having a visible parental background. She began to let Mother do the sock-darning--huge uninteresting piles of Harris Hartwig's faded mustard-colored cotton socks, and she snapped at Father when he was restlessly prowling about the house, "My head aches so, I'm sure it's going to be a sick headache, and I do think you might let me have a nap instead of tramping and tramping till my nerves get so frazzled that I could just shriek."

With this slight damming of her flowing fount of filial love, Lulu combined a desire to have them appear as features at a musicale she was to give, come Saturday evening. Mother was to be in a "dear ducky lace cap" and Father in a frilled shirt and a long-tailed coat which Harris Hartwig had once worn in theatricals, the two of them presiding at the refreshments table.

"Like a prize Persian cat and a pet monkey," Father said.

Against this indignity they frettingly rebelled. Father snarled, "Good Lord! I'm not much older than your precious dumpling of a Harris." It was the snarl of a caged animal. Lulu had them; she merely felt misunderstood when they protested.

Friday morning. The musicale was coming next day, and Lulu had already rehearsed them in their position as refreshment ornaments. Father had boldly refused to wear the nice, good frilled shirt and "movie-actor coat" during the rehearsal.

"Very well," said Lulu, "but you will to-morrow evening."

Father wasn't sure whether Lulu would use an ax or chloroform or tears on him, but he was gloomily certain that she would have him in the shameless garments on Saturday evening.

There was a letter for him on the ten o'clock morning mail. He didn't receive many letters--one a month from Joe Tubbs relating diverting scandal about perfectly respectable neighbors, or an occasional note from Cousin George Henry of Stamford. Lulu was acutely curious regarding it; she almost smelled it, with that quivering sharp-pointed nose of hers that could tell for hours afterward whether Father had been smoking "those nasty, undignified little cigarettes--why don't you smoke the handsome brier pipe that Harris gave you?" She brightly commented that the letter was from Boston. But Father didn't follow her lead. He defensively tucked the letter in his inside coat pocket and trotted up-stairs to read it to Mother.

It was from the Boston agency in whose hands he had left the disposal of the tea-room lease and of their furniture. The agency had, they wrote, managed to break the lease, and they had disposed of the tables and chairs and some of the china. They inclosed a check for twenty-eight dollars.

With the six dollars and eighty-three cents left from their capital the Applebys were the possessors of almost thirty-five dollars!

"Gee! if we only had two or three times that amount we could run away and start again in New York, and not let Lulu make us over into a darned old elderly couple!" Father exulted.

"Yes," sighed Mother. "You know and I know what a fine, sweet, womanly woman Lulu has become, but I do wish she hadn't gone and set her heart on my wearing that lace cap. My lands! makes me feel so old I just don't know myself."

"And me with a granddaddy outfit! Why, I never will dast to go out on the streets again," complained Father. "I never did hear of such a thing before; they making us old, and we begging for a chance to be young, and sitting here and sitting here, and--"

He looked about their room, from the broad window with its resolutely stiff starched net curtains to the very new bureau and the brass bed that looked as though no one had ever dared to sleep in it. He kicked at one of the dollar-ninety-eight-cent rugs and glared at the expanse of smirkingly clean plaster, decorated with an English sporting print composed by an artist who was neither English nor sporting.

"Say," continued Father, "I don't like this room. It's too--clean. I don't dast to wear slippers in it."

"Why, Father, it's a nice room!" marveled Mother. Then, with an outburst of frankness: "Neither do I! It feels like I never could loosen my stays and read the funnies in the last night's paper. Oh, you needn't to look at me so! Many's the time I did that when you were away at the store and I didn't have to sit up and look respectable."

They laughed, both of them, with tender tears. He came to sit on the arm of her rocker and pat her hand.

He said, quietly, very quietly indeed: "Mother, we're getting to be real adventurous. Nothing very old about us, I guess! We're going to sneak right smack out of this house, this very day, and run away to New York, and I'll get a job and we'll stick right there in little old New York for the rest of our lives, so help me Bob!"

"Yes," she said, "yes. I'd like to. But what--uh--what lie could we tell Lulu?"

"Why, Mother, how you talk! Do you know what St. Peter would say to you if he heard you talk about lying? He'd up and jam his halo down over his ears and he'd say, 'You can't come in here, Sarah Jane Appleby. You're a liar. And you know what you can do, don't you? You can go--'"

"Now you see here, Seth Appleby, I just won't have you cursing and swearing and being sacrilegious. I sh'd think you'd be ashamed, man of your age that ought to know better, acting up like a young smarty and cursing and swearing and--"

"And cursing and swearing. Don't forget to put that in, Mother."

He was delighted. It was the first time since September that Mother had scolded him. She was coming back to life again. He tickled her under the chin till she slapped viciously at his finger, then he crowed like a rooster till a shame-faced smile chased away her lively old-dame wrath and, shaking her head with a pretense of disgust, she said, comfortably, "I declare I never did see such a man, not in all my born days." She let him take her hand again, and their expression, half smiles, half musing, was like the sunshine of a calm late afternoon. They were happy. For they knew that, as soon as they should have debated and worried and planned and fussed in a manner appropriate to the great event, they would run away from the overheated respectability of "Lulu's pretty little home."

With enough agony of literary effort to have composed a war article and a column of Household Hints, they sinfully devised a letter for Lulu in which they stated that "a dear old friend, you would not remember him as we have met him since you were married, writes us from Boston that he is sick, and we are going to him, we are stealing out this way because we don't want you to trouble about it, with party coming on to-morrow even'g, know you are so kind you would take all sort of trouble if knew we were going, so just slip away & hope party is great success, Your loving Father & Mother. P.S., May not be back for some time as friend may need us."

In the wreck of their fortunes the Applebys had lost their own furniture, down to the last beloved picture. They had only a suit-case and a steamer-trunk, the highly modern steamer-trunk which Father had once bought for a vacation trip to West Skipsit and the Tubbses. But it required manoeuvering to get even this light baggage to the station.

Mother went nosing about till she discovered that Lulu was going calling that afternoon. Father hired an expressman, who was to be ready to come the instant he telephoned.

Lulu went out at three, and Father stole down-stairs to telephone. But the maid had taken a fancy to dusting the living-room, where the telephone lived. In all her domestic history the maid had never done that before--attest many sarcastic remarks of Lulu.

They had planned to catch the four-o'clock train for New York. Half-past three now. The maid was polishing the silver in the dining-room, which was separated from the living-room only by an open arch. Father dared not telephone, lest she instantly send for Lulu.

Mother tiptoed down and the runaways plotted in whispers. Upon which conspiracy Lulu brightly entered through the front door.

For a second Father had a wild, courageous desire to do the natural thing, to tell Lulu that they were going. But he quailed as Lulu demanded: "Have you tried on the coat and frilled shirt for to-morrow evening yet, papa? You know there may have to be some alterations in them. I'm sure mama won't mind making them, will you, mama! Oh, you two will be so cute and dear, I know everybody will love you, and it will give such a homey, old-fashioned touch that--"

"No, I haven't tried it on yet, and I ain't sure I'm a-going--" Father gallantly attempted.

Lulu glared at him and said, in a voice of honey and aloes, "I'm sure, papa dear, I don't ask very much of you, and when I do ask just this one little thing that I'm sure anybody else would be glad to help me with and me doing my very best to make you happy--"

No! No, no! Father didn't tell her they were going to New York. He was glad enough to escape up-stairs without having the monkey coat tried on him by force.

Their suit case and steamer-trunk stood betrayingly in the middle of the room. With panting anxiety, heaving and puffing, the two domestic anarchists lifted the steamer-trunk, slipped it under the bed and kicked the suit-case into the closet, and sat down to wait for the next train to New York, which left at eleven P. M.

At dinner--such a jolly family dinner, with Mr. Hartwig carving and emitting little jokes, with Harry whining about his homework and Lulu telling the maid what an asphyxiated fool she was to have roasted the lamb too long-- Father was highly elaborate in his descriptions of how he had tried on the tail-coat and found it to be a superb fit. As the coat was the personal theatricals-equipment of Mr. Harris Hartwig, who was shaped like the dome of the county court-house, Lulu looked suspicious, but Harry was discovered making bread pills, and she was so engaged in telling him what she thought--Lord, what a thinker the little woman was!--that she forgot to follow the subject.

Out of this life of roast lamb and lies, domesticity and evasions, the Applebys plunged into a tremor of rebellious plotting. They sat in their room, waiting for the Hartwigs to go to bed. Every five minutes Father tiptoed to the door and listened.

At five minutes past ten he shook his fingers with joy. He heard the Hartwig family discursively lumbering up to bed. He stood at the door, unmoving, till the house was quiet, while Mother nervously hung their farewell note on the electric light, and slipped into her overcoat and the small black hat that was no longer new and would scarce be impressive to Matilda Tubbs now.

They had decided to abandon the steamer-trunk, though Mother made a bundle of the more necessary things. The second the house was quiet Father was ready. He didn't even have to put on an overcoat--he hadn't any worth putting on. His old overcoat had finally gone to seed and was the chief thing abandoned with the steamer-trunk. He turned up his coat-collar and slung his muffler about his neck, put his brown slouch-hat impudently on one side of his white head, and stood rejuvenated, an adventurer.

Just below their window was the roof of the low garage, which was built as part of the house. Father opened the window, eased out the suit-case, followed it, and gave his hand to Mother, who creakingly crawled out with her bundle. It was an early November evening, chilly, a mist in the air. After their day in the enervating furnace heat the breeze seemed biting, and the garage roof was perilously slippery. Mother slid and balanced and slid on the roof, irritably observing, "I declare to goodness I never thought that at my time of life I'd have to sneak out of a window on to a nasty slippery shed-roof, like a thief in the night, when I wanted to go a-visiting."

"H'sh!" demanded Father. "They'll hear us and lug us back."

"Back nothing!" snapped Mother. "Now that I've been and gone and actually snook out of a window and made a common gallivanting old hex out of myself this way, I wouldn't come back not if Lulu and Harry and that lump of a Harris Hartwig was all a-hanging on to my pettiskirts and trying to haul me back."

"Oof-flumpf."

This last sound was made by the soft mud beside the garage as Mother landed in it. She had jumped from the roof without once hesitating, and she picked up her bundle and waited quite calmly till Father came flying frog-like through the mist.

They hadn't many minutes to wait for the New York train, but they were anxious minutes. Lest Lulu or the lordly Harris Hartwig descend on them, they nervously lurked in the dark doorway of the baggage-room. With no overcoat, Father shivered--and hid the shiver.

The engine came, glaring in through the mist; the train seemed impatient, enormous, dwarfing the small station. The prodigal parents hastily tugged suit-case and bundle aboard. They found a seat together. They fussily tucked away their luggage. He held her hand firmly, concealing the two hands with a fold of her overcoat.... You have seen old folk, quite simple and rustic old folk who are apparently unused to travel, sit motionless for hour after hour of train-travel, and you have fancied that they were unconscious of life, of speed, of wonder? So sat Father and Mother, but they were gloriously conscious of each other, and now and then, when he was sure that no one was looking, he whispered: "Old honey, there's nothing holding us apart now no more. We're partners again, and Lord! how we'll fight! I'll go in and I'll take Pilkings's business clean away from him, I will! Old honey, we're free again! And we're going to see--New York! Lord! I just can't believe it!"

"Yes--why--why, it's our real honeymoon!"

Not till they had ridden for an hour did she demand, "Seth, what _are_ we going to do in New York?"

"Why, fiddle! I swear I don't know! But--we'll find something. I guess if we can bamboozle a modern fash'nable daughter we won't be afraid of just New York."

"No!"

Till four in the morning the Applebys sat unmoving, awake and happy. When the train passed the row on row of apartment-houses that mean New York no youngster first seeing the infinitely possible city, and the future glory it must hold for him, was ever more excited than the invading Innocents. _

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Read previous: Chapter 8

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