Martie, the Unconquered Part 19

"Time f'r 'nother round c.o.c.ktails!" Jesse said. Martie turned to her husband.

"Wallace! Don't order any more. Not until we've had some solid food, anyway. Can't you see that we don't need them?"

"What is it, dear?" Wallace moved his eyes heavily to look at her. His face was flushed, and as he spoke he wet his lips with his tongue.

"Whatever you say, darling," he said earnestly. "You have only to ask, and I will give you anything in my power. Let me know what you wish----"

"I want you not to drink any more," Martie said distressedly.

"Why not, Martie--why not, li'l girl?" Wallace asked her caressingly.

He put his arm about her shoulders, breathing hotly in her face. "Do you know that I am crazy about you?" he murmured.

"If you are," Martie answered, with an uncomfortable glance about for watching eyes, "please, please----!"

"Martie," he said lovingly, "do you think I am drinking too much?"

"Well--well, I think you have had enough, Wallace," she stammered.

"Dearie, I will stop if you say so," he answered, "but you amuse me. I am just as col' sober----" And, a fresh reinforcement of c.o.c.ktails having arrived, he drank one off as he spoke, setting down the little empty gla.s.s with a long gasp.

After that the long evening was an agony to Martie. Mabel laughed and screamed; wine was spilled; the food was wasted and wrecked. Wallace's face grew hotter and hotter. Jesse became sodden and sleepy; champagne packed in a bucket of ice was brought, and Martie saw Wallace's gold pieces pay for it.

It was not an unusual scene. She had looked on at just such scenes, taking place at the tables all about her, more than once in the last few weeks. Even now, this was not the only group that had dined less wisely than well. But the shame of it, the fear of what might happen before Wallace was safely at home in bed, sickened Martie to the soul.

She went to the dressing room with Mabel, who was sick. Presently they were all out in a drizzling rain, stumbling their way up the hill and blundering aboard a street car. Two nice, quiet women on the opposite seat watched the group in shocked disgust; Martie felt that she would never hold up her head again. Wallace fell when they got off, and his hat rolled in the mud. Martie tried to help him, somehow got him upstairs to his room, somehow got him into bed, where he at once fell asleep, and snored.

It was just eleven o'clock. Martie washed her face, and brushed her hair, and sat down, in a warm wrapper, staring gloomily at the unconscious form on the bed. She could hear Mabel and Jesse laughing and quarrelling in the room adjoining. Presently Mabel came in for the baby, who usually slept in Martie's room during the earlier part of the night, so that his possible crying would not disturb Bernadette.

"Poor Wallace--he is all in, down and out!" Mabel said, settling herself to nurse the baby. She looked flushed and excited still, but was otherwise herself. "He certainly was lit up like a battles.h.i.+p," she added in an amused voice; "as for me, I'm ashamed of myself--I'm always that way!"

Martie's indignant conviction was that Mabel might indeed be ashamed of herself, and this airy expression of what should have been penitence too deep for words, gave her a curious shock.

"They all do it," said Mabel, smiling after a long yawn, "and I suppose it's better to have their wives with 'em, than to have 'em go off by themselves!"

"They all SHOULDN'T do it!" Martie answered sombrely.

"Well, no; I suppose they shouldn't!" Mabel conceded amiably. She carried the baby away, and Martie sat on, gazing sternly at the unconscious Wallace.

Half an hour pa.s.sed, another half hour. Martie had intended to do some serious thinking, but she found herself sleepy.

After a while she crept in beside her husband, and went to sleep, her heart still hot with anger.

But when the morning came she forgave him, as she was often to forgive him. What else could she do? The sunlight was streaming into their large, shabby bedroom, cable cars were rattling by, fog whistles from the bay penetrated the soft winter air. Martie was healthily hungry for breakfast, Wallace awakened good natured and penitent.

"You were a darling to me last night, Mart," he said appreciatively.

Martie had not known he was awake. She turned from her mirror, regarding him steadily between the curtains of her s.h.i.+ning hair.

"And you're a darling not to rub it in," Wallace pursued.

"I WOULD rub it in," Martie said in a hurt voice, "if I thought it would do any good!"

Wallace sat up, and pressed his hands against his forehead.

"Well, believe me--that was the last!" he said fervently. "Never again!"

"Oh, dearest," Martie said, coming to sit beside him, "I hope you mean that!" That he did mean it, they both believed.

Half an hour later, when they went out to breakfast, she was in her happiest mood. The little cloud, in vanis.h.i.+ng, had left the sky clearer than before. But some little quality of blind admiration and faith was gone from her wifeliness thereafter.

In December the stock company had a Re-engagement Extraordinary, and Martie got her first part. It was not much of a part--three lines--but she approached it with pa.s.sionate seriousness, and when the first rehearsal came, rattled off her three lines so glibly that the entire jaded company and the director enjoyed a refres.h.i.+ng laugh. At the costumier's, in a fascinating welter of tarnished and shabby garments, she selected a suitable dress, and Wallace coached her, made up her face, and prompted her with great pride. So the tiny part went well, and one of the papers gave a praising line to "Junoesque Miss Salisbury." These were happy days. Martie loved the odorous, dark, crowded world behind the scenes, loved to be a part of it. This was living indeed!

And Sally was expecting a baby! Martie laughed aloud from sheer excitement and pleasure when the news came. It was almost like having one herself; in one way even more satisfactory, because she was too busy now to be interrupted. She spent the first money she had ever earned in sending Sally a present for the baby; smiling again whenever she pictured Sally was showing it to old friends in Monroe: "From Martie; isn't it gorgeous?"

The weeks fled by. Wallace began to talk of moving to New York. It was always their dream. Instinctively they wanted New York. Their talk of it, their plans for it, were as enthusiastic as they were ignorant, if Wallace could only get the chance to play on Broadway! That seemed to both of them the goal of their ambition. Always hopeful of another part, Martie began to read and study seriously. She had much spare time, and she used it. From everybody and everything about her she learned: a few German phrases from the rheumatic old man whose wife kept the lodging house; Juliet's lines and the lines of Lady Macbeth from Mabel's shabby books; and something of millinery from the little Irishwoman who kept a shop on the corner, with "Elise" written across its window. She learned all of Wallace's parts, and usually Mabel's as well. Often she went to the piano in the musty parlour of the Geary Street house and played "The Two Grenadiers" and "Absent." She brimmed with energy; while Wallace or Mabel wrangled with the old costumier, Martie was busily folding and smoothing the garments of jesters and clowns and Dolly Vardens. She had a curious instinct for trade terms; she could not buy a yard of veiling without an eager little talk with the saleswoman; the chance phrase of a conductor or the woman in the French laundry amused and interested her.

Away from all the repressing influences of her childhood, healthy and happy, she met the claims of the new state with a splendid and unthinking pa.s.sion. To yield herself generously and supremely was the only natural thing; she had no dread and no regret. From the old life she brought to this hour only an instinctive reticence, so that Mabel never had the long talks and the short talks she had antic.i.p.ated with the bride, and never dared say a word to Martie that might not have been as safely said to Bernadette.

CHAPTER II

On A hot Sunday in early March Martie came back from church to find Wallace gone. She had had no breakfast, but had stopped on the way home to get six enormous oranges in a paper bag. The heat had given her a stupid headache, and she felt limp and tired. It was delicious to undress, to climb into the smoothed bed, and to sink back against the pillows.

A bulky newspaper, smelling of printer's ink, was on the chair beside her bed, but Martie did not open it for a while. Serious thoughts held her. Opening her orange, she said to herself, with a little flutter at her heart, that it must be so. She was going to have a baby!

Fear and pride shook her. It seemed a tremendous thing; not at all like the other babies other women had been having since time began. She could not believe it--of herself, Martie Monroe, who had been an ignorant girl only a few months ago!

Yet she had been vaguely suspecting the state of affairs for more than a week; when morning after morning found her languid and weary, when Wallace's fork crus.h.i.+ng an egg-yolk had given her a sudden sensation of nausea. She felt so stupid, so tired all the time. She could not sleep at night; she could hardly stay awake in the daytime.

Her eyes were heavy now. She glanced indifferently at the newspaper, smiled a contented little smile, and, murmuring, "I wonder--I wonder--"

and fell into delicious sleep.

She slept for a long time. Wallace, coming in at two o'clock, awakened her. Afternoon sunlight was streaming into the room, which was scented with the decaying sweetness of orange peel. Dazed and stupid, yet dreamily content, Martie smiled upon him. He hated Sunday rehearsals: she could see that he was in a bad mood, and his obvious effort to think of her and to disguise his own feeling touched her.

"Tired?" she asked affectionately. "Isn't it hot?"

"How are you?" Wallace questioned in turn. "You felt so rotten yesterday."

He sat down beside her, and pushed the dark hair from his big forehead, and she saw that his face was damp and pale.

"Fine!" she a.s.sured him, laying her hand over his.

They remained so for a full minute, Wallace staring gloomily at nothing, Martie's eyes idly roving about the room. Then the man reached for a section of the paper, glanced at it indifferently, and flung it aside.

"There wasn't any rehearsal this morning," he observed after a pause.

He cleared his throat self-consciously before speaking and Martie, glancing quickly at him, saw that he intended the statement to have a significance.