# The Saturday Evening Post/The Revolt of the Bookkeeper

Extracted from The Saturday Evening Post, 8 July 1922, pp. 8, 9, 116–118. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
The Revolt of the Bookkeeper
By ALICE DUER MILLER
ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES R. PRESTON
THE senior partner had the reputation of being a hard man, and yet—or perhaps we should on that account—he had a sentimental streak in him. He was fond of poetry—and not good poetry either, and he would often cut out a piece of newspaper verse and carry it for months in his pocketbook with his railway passes, and if it wore well he would have it printed on a neat card and distributed to a few appreciative friends.
It was the title, The Revolt of the Bookkeeper, that had attracted him, for he himself had begun life as a bookkeeper. He had read the verses two days before on the back page of his evening paper, and he found that they kept coming back to him:
I'll see Kashmir, and touch at Madagascar;
I'll know my way through Venice and Stamboul;
I'll watch the white stars blaze above the desert,
And vines festooned about a tropic pool.
Funnily enough they were just the places Howieson had always wanted to go to, and their names on a printed page made him restless. He found he was asking himself that question which every successful business man—and Howieson was very successful—spends his waking hours trying to avoid, namely: Is business an end in itself or a means to an end, and if a means to an end, what is that end, and when is it reached?
“That's it,” he said to himself as he turned in through the revolving doors of his office building, and he so nearly said it aloud that the s sounded faintly sibilant. “I might die any day without having seen Peking or Delphi or Stamboul or the South Seas, I believe I'll just take a year or so off.”
He knew he would do nothing of the kind. His wife was not strong, his daughter was to be married in the spring, and his son, still in college, was giving him serious anxiety.
He was thinking about Delphi, Teneriffe and the midnight sun as he entered his office, but no one would have suspected it. Neat, inclined to be heavy, with a shrewd gray eye and an upper lip like a tombstone, no one would have believed that he was thinking of anything but bills of sale.
His secretary was opening and classifying the morning mail,
“Good morning, Miss Maulle,” he said.
He hung up his hat and coat, and took a quick glance at a large colored photograph of the Grand Cañon, all purples and pink, which hung over his desk.
“Good morning, Mr. Howieson,” said Miss Maulle without looking up. “I see you've cut out that poem of Jack Roe's.”
She had been with the firm for twenty-five years, and had been the recipient of more than one of her employer's favorite poems in her day.
“What's that?” said Mr. Howieson crossly. But his crossness only meant that he did not understand.
“Roe,” said Miss Maulle. “You know—that romantic-looking boy in the accounting department.”
Illustration: She Went Straight to the Mother, and Came Back With the Baby—the Littlest One—in Her Arms
“I did not know we had a poet in the accounting department or that you had an eye for romantic-looking boys,” said her employer; and he took the little clipping from under a paper weight where he had left it the night before, and read it all through again. The fellow certainly had an instinct for the right places. Cintra, now—that was a lovely spot. He'd been there himself. “You say he works for us?”
“He did. He's leaving today.” Miss Maulle spoke as one whose patience with mankind was almost exhausted.
“Where's he going?”
“Now, is there a place called Dominica?” said Miss Maulle. “Well, that's where. So silly, just as he gets a start with a firm like this one. I wish I might tell him from you that you think he's doing a silly thing.”
“I'll tell him myself,” said the senior partner. “Send him here when you've finished the mail.”
It was all very well, he thought, as he penciled memoranda and signed his name, for a successful man of fifty-five, with his work practically done, to think of slipping away on a voyage of discovery, but it was quite different for a youngster to throw away his chances at the beginning. It was the difference between a traveler and a tramp. Howieson grew a little angry thinking about it. Stamboul—just where was Stamboul? When Miss Maulle had gone he looked it up in the encyclopedia. Ah, yes: “More exactly, the older portions of Constantinople, southwest of the Golden Horn.”
The Golden Horn! He looked up. Roe was already in the room.
He did not look much over twenty; he was a slim boy, and yet he had evidently once been even slimmer, for his plain dark clothes were tight and too short in the sleeves. He had large dark eyes set so far apart that you saw too much of them in profile, as you see the eyes of an Egyptian bas-relief. He leaned against the door jamb as a faun might lean against a tree, looking as a poet ought to look.
“Ah, Roe,” said Howieson, “I've been reading your verses.”
Jack smiled a slow embarrassed smile to mitigate the fact that he was not in the least embarrassed.
“I suppose it seems pretty foolish to you,” he said.
This answer annoyed the senior partner. He did not wish to appear as a man to whom all adventure seemed foolish; indeed, he was not such a man.
He drew his head sharply to one side.
“You young people,” he said, “you don't think anyone over fifty has any human feelings at all. I don't consider it at all foolish to feel that way. I envy you your gift. But I do think it foolish to act on the feeling.”
“To me it would seem foolish not to act on the feeling,” answered the young man. He had a pleasant, quiet voice.
“I understand; I understand exactly,” said Howieson. “You are probably living in an uncomfortable boarding house; working here from nine to five at something that doesn't interest you a particle; nothing to do after business hours but a moving-picture show. Not life at all, you say; but life comes out of it. I know; I've been through it. Ten years of a worse grind than you ever had—but at the end of it, success. And that's a pretty heady draft, young man.” There was a pause, and Howieson added, “Haven't you anything to say to that?”
Jack nodded, but didn't speak.
“Aren't you going to say it?”
Jack shook his head.
“Why not?”
“It would be horrible of me to answer you really,” he said.
This reply concentrated Mr. Howieson's attention. It was not what he had expected.
“You mean you think you have so much the best of the argument? Is that it?”
“Yes,” said the younger man slowly. “If I can't make you see how I feel there's no use in our talking at all; and if I can make you see—why, it would wreck you.”
“Wreck me?” answered Howieson mildly. “Oh, I don't think it would quite do that.”
“It was watching you, sir, that made me see I must get away at once; seeing you coming here on the stroke of 9:30 every day, not leaving until five, always getting ready to live and never living, always securing your financial future, and by the time you get it secured—— I said to myself, 'The very best and most wonderful thing that could happen to a man in this situation would be to grow to be like Mr. Howieson—to lose even the desire to be free—and that's the worst bondage of all.'”
“Look here, young man, you're a little bit irritating,” said the senior partner, “with your assumption that because a man doesn't do a thing he has no desire to do it. There's a difference, let me tell you, between being free and being a damned fool. Freedom! What's that kind of freedom going to get you?”
“This,” answered Roe eagerly, with a gesture toward the senior partner himself: “I've been in this office almost two years, and this is the first time I've had a chance to talk to you, and now we are speaking to each other like human beings. That's because I'm free.”
“Oh, come, not entirely,” answered Howieson. “It's partly because I'm a fairly kind man, and I don't like to see a young fellow like you doing something that I know is wrong. Yours isn't an original idea, you know. I don't believe any young man ever started in business without wanting to do just what you are doing—wanting to sidestep his responsibilities—wanting to run away from life.”
“Run into life.”
Howieson shook his head. “You're throwing away your future.”
“I'm getting a present, though—something most people never have.”
“For one thing, you are making it impossible that you should ever marry.”
Roe's young face set. “I shall never marry,” he said.
Howieson allowed himself another of his temperate smiles. “Every man thinks that—until he falls in love.”
There was another pause, at this, but a different kind of pause; it was full of Roe's evident intention to speak.
“I am in love,” he said after a few seconds; “more in love than anyone you ever saw.”
“With someone you can't marry?”
Roe shook his head, and his eyes drew up with a sort of horror. “Not that, but I think marriage is the most dreadful thing. I wouldn't ask the woman I love to go through that for anything in the world. That's one reason I'm going away—to get rid of the temptation.”
“You admit it is a temptation?”
Roe nodded. “Oh, yes. I've said to myself that our marriage would be different from other people's—but, of course, I know it wouldn't be. Mr. Howieson, I don't live in a boarding house; I board with my married sister. She's older than I am; she and my brother-in-law were in love—it was the first romance I ever saw. It was fine, it was real—a wild honest attraction between two very different people. And now—if you could see them—they are just a sort of featureless amalgam—not too smooth. She's more interested in the children than she is in Phil, and he doesn't even listen to what she says. Every evening I hear them having the same conversation: 'I told you that yesterday, Philip.' 'No, my dear, you didn't. You tell these things to the children at lunch, and you think you tell them to me.' 'I did tell you, but you never listen to a word I say.' All marriages are like that. I dare say,” the boy added almost wistfully, “that even you are like that at home.”
The senior partner looked very grave, and then smiled. “I am,” he said; “I am exactly like that. But what of it?”
“I'd rather murder my girl than drag her through that. I'd much rather leave her.”
“What are you getting a week here? Fifty?”
Jack nodded.
“If you stay I'll make it seventy-five.”
Jack shook his head. “Thank you, sir, but I wouldn't be any happier here on seventy-five, or a hundred and seventy-five. I go South this evening. My boat—it's a tramp steamer—sails from Mobile on Saturday—Hayti, Dominica—the Magdalena River—the emerald mines the Andes——”
“Get out of here then,” said the senior partner, not unkindly. “You make me tired.”
“I make you restless,” said Roe. “You want to come with me, and you can't.”
“Of course I can't,” said Howieson sternly “I have a directors' meeting in five minutes.”
“Good-by,” said Roe. “Maybe we'll meet some day. I'll watch for you in Curagao or Valparaiso.”
“I'll hold the place open twenty-four hours,” answered Howieson.
They parted with a smile.
The meeting of the board was an unusually stormy one. The chairman, who was generally so reasonable and courteous, displayed temper on being outvoted in a small matter, and said it was no pleasure to him to manage the company—especially if he were not free to act—he'd far rather resign and take a trip round the world. He was calmed only by a motion giving him full power and raising his salary three thousand dollars a year.
But Jack Roe, finishing his last day's work on a stool in the accounting department, never knew of this remote consequence of his own impulse to freedom.
At five he left the office—a free man. It had been snowing all day. Snow already carpeted the city, so that the noise of traffic was quieted, and Jack could hear the whistles of boats on the two rivers, blinded by the storm The Woolworth Building, lighted throughout its gigantic height, was like a pattern in the sky. Snow, Roe thought was becoming to New York. If he were never to see it again he would like to think of it like this—clean and quiet and immense.
He went across the street to a telegraph office and sent the following message:
    My train will go through your station without stopping at 7:45 this evening. Please be standing under the light so that I can see you.
It was directed to Miss Millicent Talbot, at a small town in New Jersey.
He felt a little ashamed of himself for sending that telegram.
Yesterday he had resolved not to send it, but his conversation with Howieson had in some way weakened his resolution. He now felt the necessity of once more fixing his eyes upon her—of photographing every line, so that it would serve him for the rest of his life.
Illustration: A Harvest Moon, Beginning to Wane, Shone on a Marble-Edged Pool, and on an Marble Bench on Which They Sat, and on a Black Hedge of Cedars Behind Them
But the trouble was, he could not now be sure she would get his message in time. He ought to have sent it earlier if he had been going to send it at all. He could have gone without a word, but he couldn't bear uncertainty; he couldn't bear it, he thought, if when he looked out at the station she wasn't there—under the light
They had parted forever five months before, after an acquaintance short in time but complete in understanding. A harvest moon, beginning to wane, shone on a marble-edged pool, and on a marble bench on which they sat, and on a black hedge of cedars behind them. The smell of honeysuckle came to them in solid waves of perfume, and inside the lighted house an orchestra was playing a syncopated waltz. He loved her, they loved each other; and he had been able to tell her, as if his spirit had been speaking directly to hers, that he would always love her, and that he would never see her again. Thus they could always hold each other—pure and young and passionately in love. People died for romance; how much easier to part for it! She had understood him perfectly, and though she had said nothing he had felt acquiescence in every breath she drew.
It was because that parting had been perfect that he felt no desire to speak to her—only to see her as his train went by. The lines of the English poet, which he had quoted to her that night, were always in his mind:
He loses her who gains her,
Who watches day by day
The dust of time that stains her,
The griefs that leave her gray,
The flesh that still enchains her
Whose grace has pa sed away.
Oh, happier he who gains not
The love some seem to gain:
The joys that custom stains not Shall still with him remain; The loveliness that wanes not,
The love that cannot wane.
He went back to his sister's to get his bag and say good-by. It was a crowded hour in the little flat, Philip had just come in, and the children were waiting for supper—impatiently. Jack heard the elder one beating his spoon on his platter.
Going to his room to pack, Jack could hear through the open doors that his sister and her husband were talking about life insurance. They had been discussing it with decreasing amenity for two years. A smile touched with contempt crept over Jack's face as he listened, drawing two ties through his hand as he stood. He knew so exactly what each one was going to say. Phil was going to say that if he put aside the same amount of money he could invest it better than the life-insurance company; and Grace's reply was perfectly familiar—“Yes, but you don't put it aside.”
Jack remembered the day that Phil had sailed for France. They had been only engaged then. Grace had been wonderfully calm and brave until he was gone, and then Jack had seen all her despair and terror—her conviction that she could not go on living if anything happened to Phil. She had not thought of life insurance in those days. Now she would say she owed it to the children. Well, there it was—that was what marriage did to love.
He patted his nephew on the head to avoid kissing his milk-streaked face, and bade an affectionate good-by to his sister. She disapproved intensely of his going.
“But you'll be back before the year's out,” she said.
He smiled and did not contradict her. She did not suspect how much she had had to do with his resolution to go. Phil shook him warmly by the hand, but Jack could see that his mind was still struggling with the life-insurance problem.
Something more than an hour later his train, a little behind time, was approaching Millie's station. He left his seat and went to the platform. It was bitterly cold, and the wind was blowing a hurricane. He leaned out, holding his hat on. It was hard to see through the snow. He scanned the whole length of the deserted platform. No one was there; the light stood alone. She hadn't come.
He went back to his seat with a heart like lead. He was in a day coach. Grace and Mr. Howieson might think him improvident, but he had saved a little money to start him on his travels, and he was not going to spend any of it on a Pullman berth; he was going to sit up all night. Fortunately the train wasn't crowded. He had a seat to himself—at least he had had when he went to the platform. When he came back he found it occupied by a child—a little boy of four, slightly cross-eyed, and evidently prepared to be friendly.
Removing one hand from his mouth he rubbed it lovingly along the plush of the seat.
“I'm going to Washington,” he said boastfully. “Where are you going to?”
The child was repulsive to Jack, but he would no more have allowed this fact to appear than he would have shown it to a cripple. At the same time he had no intention whatsoever of entering into relations with him.
“I'm going to Mobile,” he answered.
At once the child, casting off all pretense of being interested in any movements but his own, began repeating: “I'm going to Washington, to Washington. That's my mother.”
He pointed back, where Jack saw a foreign-looking woman, bareheaded, hawk-faced, her large tragic face calm as a statue, until it suddenly broke up into a furrowed, ugly, wrinkled irritability at something which a child smaller than the first one had done to annoy her. With a shock of surprise Jack saw that she was holding a still smaller one in her arms under her shawl. He averted his eyes, and taking the four-year-old by the hand he started him on his way down the aisle.
“You had better go back to your mother,” he said.
An elderly woman in black satin and gold beads, across the aisle, stopped his progress.
“Now aren't you a fine boy?” she said.
Feminine admiration had its wonted effect. The child at once began to wave his head from side to side, to jump up and down, exclaiming loudly: “I'm going to Washington, to Washington.”
Jack glanced about, expecting to read his own disgust in other faces, but everywhere he saw smiles and softened glances. He slumped down in his seat and stared out at the flying snowflakes, lit an instant by cones of light streaming from the windows.
All the agony of renunciation, all the homesickness and loneliness of his going came over him now. She had not come; she was letting him go unsatisfied, he who asked so little. He would have braved night and storm for her sake. Or perhaps she hadn't received his message; or perhaps she had tried to come and had failed. Something maternal in him woke, and made him hope that she was safe and warm at home—not struggling toward the station, too late.
The train was slowing down for its first stop, for though it ignored Millicent's little town it was not a through express. The passengers were beginning to leave, shuffling down the aisle toward the back door. He watched them as they went. “How terrible most human beings are,” he thought. “Ugly; misshapen.” The new-comers began to enter by the front door. They were no better.
And suddenly, like a miracle performed before him in that dark shabby car, he saw Millicent walking down the aisle toward him, her small face showing like ivory and coral above her dark furs. For a few seconds she did not see him, and when she did her expression hardly changed, only her eyes grew suddenly dark and immense.
He stepped forward to meet her, and as he did so the child from the seat behind slipped into his place, so that as Jack turned to let Millicent go in before him the child was already seated, tilting his face up at them with an expression oddly mingled of impudence and an intense desire to please.
Again Jack took him kindly by the hand and started him back to his owner.
“Yes, we know,” he said firmly, “you are going to Washington.”
Then he sank sideways in the seat beside Millicent and looked at her—with a joy too deep for smiles.
After an appreciable period of silence he said, “N. B. Remember never to curse God and die, because something beyond your wildest dreams may be just round the corner.”
She explained that she had been going to visit an aunt in Baltimore, and had only changed her train by a few hours in order to give them this meeting.
So first they talked like friends. He told her all about his interview with Howieson, and how the great man had read his verses and had offered him seventy-five dollars a week. And Millicent thought he must be a nice man, and she had read the verses, too, and understood that he was going, even before she got his telegram.
And then they began to play like children, telling each other stories, and imagining what it would be like if some day Millicent sailed into the harbor of Dominica on a yacht—the yacht of her millionaire husband. Former husband, Millicent suggested.
“And I'll row out in a boat all full of roses and oranges and hibiscus and pineapples, and that stupid man you married won't understand why I insist on giving it for nothing—like an offering on a shrine.”
“And if I ask you on board?”
“Oh, I wouldn't come, but I'll look up at you as you lean over to see my boat, and you'll know I'm saying, 'I love you. I love you—just as much as ever.'”
And then as their time grew shorter they began to talk like lovers, telling each other how each was to the other the only one, and would remain so, whatever life brought to them; and how they were wise and strong and wonderful to dare to part; and how they would not even kiss, but just look and look, and go.
This last conversation was so absorbing that they did not notice that the train had stopped and showed no disposition whatsoever to go on again. To them the cessation of sound and motion was part of a world that they had ceased to observe.
A brakeman came through with a lantern, and the cross-eyed child greeted him with the accustomed information, but neither Jack nor Millicent noticed the brakeman's somewhat sinister reply, “I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry.”
At last the car began to grow cold, very cold, so that Millicent's little feet were chilled; and that brought Jack back to reality. He went forward to find the conductor and order more steam turned in the car.
In a few minutes he came back, hardly able to suppress his joy.
“My darling,” he whispered as he slid into the seat beside her, “it's too much—too wonderful! We've run into a drift; we're snowed up at least till morning. Give me your hand. We are going to have a long quiet night sitting here side by side.”
Millicent turned her pretty eyes upon him and smiled at the radiant prospect. But, alas, he deceived himself. The night was to be long but not quiet; nor were the lovers to spend it sitting side by side.
A wailing presently sounded in their ears, at first fitfully, but soon growing louder, more continuous, more desperate; the terrible persistent cry of a sick baby. Millie suddenly started to her feet.
“I can't stand that!” she said.
Jack, thoroughly in accord with her, supposed she meant to move into another car; instead she went straight to the mother, and came back with the baby—the littlest one—in her arms.
To Roe's surprise he found himself moved by the sight of his Millie walking down the aisle of the car with her arm crooked to hold a wailing, dark-skinned baby. The baby was repugnant to him, yet Millie stirred him as she had never done before.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked coldly.
She answered, as if babies were commonplace occurrences in everyone's experience, that she was going to keep it warm in her furs, so that the mother could take care of the next larger one under her shawl. In moving the baby about, Millicent had knocked her hat crooked, which gave her a strange, rollicking appearance. One of her chief charms was the simple perfection of her appointments. Jack did not like to see her with her hat over one eye, and yet he did not like to tell her about it, either, when she was busy getting the baby settled. So he simply averted his eyes, and as he did so they fell once more upon the baby.
“Are they all as awful as that?” he said.
Millicent just glanced at it, as if its personal appearance made no difference.
“No,” she answered; “I think it's rather unusually ugly, poor little thing. Jack, I'm afraid you'll have to go and see if there's a doctor on the train; it seems to be really ill.”
Jack jumped up with alacrity, eager to oblige Millie, and not sorry to remove himself from the proximity of the baby. He was ashamed to admit it, but his dream was disturbed. The last few hours they would ever spend together, and yet Millie was thinking more of that baby than of him—and it was such an ugly little creature.
The only doctor on the train was an elderly man comfortably sleeping in a Pullman chair. He did not seem eager to exercise his art, but he grew more interested when he saw Millicent. He assumed the child to be hers, and evidently thought her a helpless, beautiful, inexperienced young mother. Jack could not bear anyone to suppose his lovely girl had any connection whatsoever with that hideous child, but when he began to explain to the doctor Millie kicked him. She told him later that the doctor was the kind of man who would take more interest in the baby if he thought it was hers. Jack felt ashamed of disliking the baby so intensely, and went out on the platform to smoke a cigarette.
He was summoned thence by the information that the trouble with the baby was hunger—milk must be obtained. Jack had already noticed the lights of a farmhouse not very far away across a field. He volunteered to go and get some—having first assured himself that the train would not get into motion without him.
Now sinking into snow to his waist, now stubbing his toe against bare stones, he made slow progress toward the light, and at last knocked on the door. It instantly opened, and a woman, tall and monstrously fat, stood in the lighted square. She was without eyebrows or eyelashes, and what little hair grew on her head was gathered into a small knot on the exact summit. She was so large, she towered so high above Jack, that he felt a mild amusement at seeing that she held a club in her right hand.
“I wonder,” he said politely, “if you could let me have a little milk.”
She gave a guttural exclamation and attempted to shut the door, but he inserted his foot in the opening—an action that did not increase her cordiality. She said that if there were any milk in the house she would not give it to tramps who came begging at that hour of the night.
“It isn't for myself,” said Jack, “but we have a sick baby on that stalled train, and it seems rather likely to die if it isn't fed.”
“A baby!” cried the woman.
And suddenly she changed completely. From a menacing ogress she changed into a friendly mass of humanity. She opened the door, led him to the stove, and began hurrying to and fro on her large flat, felt-slippered feet, looking for a bottle that he could slip in his pocket. His wife must be nearly crazy, stalled in the snow; but they'd get the train out by morning; he hardly looked old enough to be a father. She remembered when she was first married——
He thought to himself, as he sat waiting, and only half listening, that this was a species of insanity in women—this exaggerated interest in babies; it was like a secret religious cult, with a password. The old woman was evidently desperately poor, and yet he could hardly get her to take money for the milk, and after she had accepted it, she presented him with two apples. They parted like old friends.
When he got back to the car Millie had just a moment to greet him as a hero before it developed that the milk was no use to the baby unless it could be heated.
“That will be very difficult,” said the doctor.
Millie rolled her lovely eyes up at him under the dissipated hat.
“You can think of some way, can't you, Jack?” she said.
“Certainly,” he answered, glad to show that a poet has more invention than a scientist. “There must be a fire in the engine.” He wanted to sit down and demand Millie's undivided attention while he described to her the transformation in the ogress. Instead he started instantly for the engine.
Everyone knows that locomotive engineers are men not to be approached unadvisedly or lightly, and an engineer with his train in difficulties is especially formidable. This one was just climbing back into his cab after a consultation with the conductor, and swung round quickly, aware of Jack just behind him. He had a handsome, heavy square head, like a Roman emperor, thick eyebrows and an implacable eye.
He looked down at Jack, and surprised to find his glance did not drive off the intruder, he said, “Well, sir?”
Jack knew that tone well; he had heard Mr. Howieson use it. It meant: Nothing can excuse the enormity you are committing, but I am willing to hear your excuse.
“I have some milk here I should like to heat,” said Jack.
“My engine isn't a cookstove,” said the engineer, and continued his ascent
“We have a baby back in one of the cars who seems rather likely to die,” replied Jack.
And immediately the engineer was transformed—not melted as the ogress had been, but galvanized into action. He leaned down and took the bottle from Roe's hand, shouted to his fireman, “Here, Pete, let this set by the boiler.” Then he turned and looked down at Jack with a different eye “Come in and warm yourself,” he said “You look hardly old enough to be married.”
Jack was surprised to hear himself saying, “I suppose you have children yourself?”
“Six,” said the engineer.
He was not a garrulous man; Jack saw at once he was not going to talk about the children, but that in the little silence that followed he was thinking of them intensely. Then he looked at Jack and smiled; it was a charming smile, and Jack could not help smiling back, although a little ashamed of having won it under the false pretense of fatherhood. Then Pete came back with the bottle.
When Jack got back to the car the baby was worse. Millie and the doctor had cast off all sense of decency.
“I'm not conventional,” Jack found himself saying to himself, “but really——”
The heated bottle was snatched from him. “Do you think she'll take it?” asked Millie tremulously.
“Yes—though she may not retain it,” said the doctor.
This hint was not lost upon the baby—she did not retain it. It would, in fact, be impossible to print all that happened to that baby and her guardians in the course of the next two hours. Jack, who had supposed that at his sister's he had known all the horrors there were to know about children, found that he had not so much as brushed the subject with the wing of his thought. Even his aloof attitude left him. He ceased to be a spectator. Once he found himself patting the shoulder of the weeping mother; once, for a long time, he held the cross-eyed child on his lap, keeping him quiet with a hastily invented story of snow fairies. These things he did, not from pity, but from a sense that they were inevitable, that he and Millie were united in a struggle to save the life of a baby, a struggle probably unintelligent, but about which no one had any choice.
And all the time the lines of one of the wisest of modern writers were running through his head:
My dear, these things are life: And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.
Dominica and the tropic seas began to look as pale and meaningless to him as the fairy tale he was telling—and it was a pretty tale.
Suddenly it came to him that his plan for living had been just pretty—like a picture by Bouguereau, like a poem by Adelaide Ann Procter, like an opera in the earliest manner of Verdi. Good heavens! He had always hated the romantic schools in the arts, and yet in his own life had been willing——
“Go on, go on!” said the sleepy child.
But Jack could not go on. He sat staring down at the child as if he saw him for the first time.
Just at dawn the train began to move, preceded by two snowplows, like an empress with an escort. The baby was saved, sleeping in the arms of its legitimate mother. The doctor, who by this time had discovered that the child did not belong to Jack and Millicent, was still unable to disabuse his mind of the belief that they were married. He paused at the door to bid good-by to Jack.
“I'll look after them in Washington,” he said. “Your wife tells me that you and she are getting off at Baltimore. Fine woman—your wife—looks facts right in the face—only thing that matters in my experience—good night—or rather good morning—look at that green in the east.” And he went forward to doze once again in his Pullman chair.
Jack turned and looked at Millie, who had sunk back into the seat, leaning her head against the woodwork of the window frame.
Her little face was pale and thin and almost plain, and yet so poignant, so real, so good—like a good little child's. He broke off; he couldn't think about it, for at the sight of her something rose within him—a great wave of the emotion that lies behind both romance and reality, so that for the moment there seemed to be no difference between them. He went to Millie and put his arms about her.
“Oh, Millie, my darling,” he said, “how could I ever think I was going to be able to leave you? I shall telegraph Howieson I'll take his three hundred a month. Will you give up all your lovely dreams of beauty and romance, and just marry me? Don't you think Fate gave us a hint when it sent you to visit your aunt in Baltimore?”
There was an alarming little silence. Millie let her forehead rest against his collar bone, but she said nothing. Jack thought: “Of course this night has meant just the opposite to her; it's shown her the horror and the ugliness of life as she had never seen it before, my poor little Millie.”
Then he heard her draw her breath to speak.
“Dearest,” she said gently, “I haven't any aunt in Baltimore.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 81 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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