Undertow Part 2

"Rent, thirty-five," Nancy began, after an interlude. Bert, who had secured a large sheet of clean paper, made a neat entry, "Rent, $35."

"You make such nice, firm figures, mine are always wavy!" observed Nancy irrelevantly, at this. This led nowhere.

"Now one quarter of that rent ought to come out every week," Bert submitted presently. "Eight dollars and a half must be put aside every week."

"Out of this, too?" Nancy asked, touching the money on the table.

"Well, that's all that's left of half my salary, drawn in advance,"

Bert said, pondering. "Yes, you see--we pay a month in advance on the first!"

"And what have we besides this, Bee? Your Aunt Mary's check, and--and what else?"

"Aunt Mary's hundred, which will certainly take care of the freight bills," Bert calculated, "and that's all, except this."

"But, Bert--but, Bert--all that money we had in Boston?"

Bert pointed to the table.

"You behold the remainder."

"Weren't we the extravagant wretches!" mused Nancy.

"Taxis--tea-parties--breakfast upstairs--silly pink silk stockings for Nancy, a silly pongee vest for Bert--"

"But oh, what a grand time!" her husband finished unrepentantly.

"Wasn't it!" Nancy agreed dreamily. But immediately she was businesslike again. "However, the lean years have set in," she announced. "I'll have to count on a dollar a week laundry--laundry and rent nine dollars and a half; piano and telephone at the rate of three dollars a month--that's a dollar and a half more; milk, a quart of milk and half a pint of cream a day, a dollar and seventy-five cents more; what does that leave, Bert?"

"It leaves twelve dollars and twenty-five cents," said Bert.

"But what about your lunches, dearest?"

"Gos.h.!.+ I forgot them," Bert stated frankly. "I'll keep 'em under fifteen cents a day," he added, "call it a dollar a week!"

"You can't!" protested Nancy, with a look of despair.

"I can if I've got to. Besides, we'll be off places, Sundays, and I'll come home for lunch Sat.u.r.day, and you'll feed me up."

"But, Bert," she began again presently, "I'll have to get ice, and car fares, and drugs, and soap, and thread, and b.u.t.ter, and bread, and meat, and salad-oil, and everything else in the world out of that eleven-fifty!" Bert was frowning hard.

"You can't have the whole eleven-fifty," he told her reluctantly, "I can walk one way, to Forty-Eighth Street, but I can't walk both. I'll have to have some car fare. And my office suit has got to be pressed about once every two weeks--"

"And newspapers!" added Nancy, dolefully. "Seven cents more!" And they both burst into laughter. "But, Bee," she said presently, ruffling his hair, as she sat on the arm of his chair, "really I do not know what we will do in case of dentist's bills, or illness, or when our clothes wear out. What do people do? Is thirty-five too much rent, or what?"

"I'm darned if I know what they do!" Bert mused.

Chapter Five

They both were destined to learn how it was managed, and being young and healthy and in love, they learned easily, and with much laughter and delight. Bert's share was perhaps the easier, for although he manfully walked to his office, polished his own shoes, and ate a tiresome and unsatisfying lunch five days a week, he had his reward on the sixth and seventh days, when Nancy petted and praised him.

Her part was harder. She never knew what it was to be free from financial concern. She fretted and contrived until the misspending of five cents seemed a genuine calamity to her, She walked to cheap markets, and endured the casual scorn of cheap clerks. She ironed Bert's ties and pressed his trousers, saving car fares by walking, saving hospitality by letting her old friends see how busy and absorbed she was, saving food by her native skill and ingenuity.

But they lived royally, every meal was a triumph, every hour strangely bright. Of cooking meat, especially the more choice cuts, Nancy did little this year, but there was no appetizing combination of vegetables, soups, salads, hot breads, and iced drinks that she did not try. Bert said, and he meant it, that he had never lived so well in his life, and certainly the walls of the little apartment in the "George Eliot" were packed with joy. When their microscopic accounts balanced at the end of the week, they celebrated with a table-d'hote dinner down town--dinners from which they walked home gloriously happy, Nancy wondering over and over again HOW the restaurateurs could manage it, Bert, over his cigar, estimating carefully: "Well, Sweet, there wasn't much cost to that soup, delicious as it was, and I suppose they buy that sole down at the docks, in the early morning..."

When Nancy had learned that she could live without a telephone, and had cut down the milk bill, and limited Bert to one b.u.t.ter ball per meal, she found she could manage easily. In August they gave two or three dinners, and Nancy displayed her pretty table furnis.h.i.+ngs to "the girls," and gave them the secret of her iced tea. She told her husband that they got along because he was "so wonderful"; she felt that no financial tangle could resist Bert's neatly pencilled little calculations, but Bert praised only her--what credit to him that he did not complain, when he was the most fortunate man in the world?

They came to be proud of their achievement. Nancy had Buckley Pearsall, Bert's chief, and his wife, to dinner, and kindly Mrs. Pearsall could not enough praise the bride and her management. Later the Pearsalls asked the young Bradleys down to their Staten Island home for a week-end. "And think of the pure gain of not buying a thing for three days!" exulted Nancy, thereby convulsing her lord. She brought back late corn, two jars of Mrs. Pearsall's preserved peaches, a great box of grapes to be made into jelly, and a basket of tomatoes. Bert said that she was a grafter, but he knew as well as she that Nancy's pleasure in taking the gifts had given Mrs. Pearsall a genuine joy.

With none of the emergencies they had dreaded, and with many and unexpected pleasures, the first winter went by. Sometimes Bert got a theatre pa.s.s, sometimes old friends or kinspeople came to town, and Bert and Nancy went to one of the big hotels to dinner, and stared radiantly about at the bright lights, and listened to music again, and were whirled home in a taxicab.

"That party cost your Cousin Edith about twenty-five dollars," Nancy, rolling up her hair-net thoughtfully, would say late at night, with a suppressed yawn. "The dinner check was fourteen, and the tickets eight--it cost her more than twenty-five dollars! Doesn't that seem wicked, Bert? And all that delicious chicken that we hardly touched--dear me, what fun I could have with twenty-five dollars! There are so many things I'd like to buy that I never do; just silly things, you know--nice soaps and powders, and fancy cheeses and an alligator pear, and the kind of toilet water you love so--don't you remember you bought it in Boston when we honeymooned?"

Perhaps a shadow would touch Bert's watching face, and he would come to put an arm about her and her loosened cloud of hair.

"Poor old girl, it isn't much fun for you! Do you get tired of it, Nancy?"

"Bert," she said, one night in a mood of gravity and confidence that he loved, and had learned to watch for, "I never get tired. And sometimes I feel sure that the most wonderful happiness that ever is felt in this world comes to two people who love each other, and who have to make sacrifices for each other! I mean that. I mean that I don't think riches, or travel, or great gifts and achievements bring a greater happiness than ours. I think a king, dying," smiled Nancy, trying not to be too serious, "might wish that, for a while at least, he had been able to wear shabby shoes for the woman he loved, and had had years of poking about a great city with her, and talking and laughing and experimenting and working over their problem together!"

Bert kissed the thoughtful eyes, but did not speak.

"But just the same," Nancy presently went on, "sometimes I do get--just a little frightened. I feel as if perhaps we had been a little too brave. When your cousins, and mine, ask us how we do it, and make so much of it, it makes me feel a little uneasy. Suppose we really aren't able to swing it ...?"

Bert knew how to meet this mood, and he never failed her. He put his arm about her, tonight, and gave her his sunniest smile.

"We could pay less rent, dear."

This fired Nancy. Of course they could. She had seen really possible places, in inaccessible neighbourhoods, which rented far more reasonably. She had seen quite sunny and clean flats for as little as fourteen and sixteen dollars a month. Her housekeeping abilities awakened to the demand. What did she and Bert care about neighbourhoods and the casual dictates of fas.h.i.+on? They were a world in themselves, and they needed no other company.

"Everyone said that we'd never get this far," Bert reminded her hearteningly. She was immediately rea.s.sured, and fell to enthusiastic planning for Christmas.

Chapter Six

It was their first Christmas, and they spent it alone together. Bert and Nancy knew that they would not spend another Christmas alone, and the shadowy hope for April lent a new tone even to their gayety, and deepened the exquisite happiness of the dark, s...o...b..und day. The tiny house was full of laughter, for Bert had given his wife all the little things she had from time to time whimsically desired. The fancy cheeses, and the perfumes and soaps, made her laugh and laugh as she unwrapped them. There were fuzzy wash-cloths--a particular fancy of hers--and new library paste and new hair-pins, and a can-opener that made her exclaim: "Bert, that was cute of you!" and even an alligator pear. A bewildered look came into Nancy's eyes as she went on investigating her bulging stocking--gloves, and silk hosiery, and new little enamelled pins for her collars, and the piano score of the opera she so loved--where had the money come from?

"My firm gave us each ten," Bert explained, grinning.

"And you spent it ALL on me!" Nancy said, stricken. "You poked about and got me every blessed thing I ever wanted in this world--you darling!"

"Why not?" he asked. "You're the only thing I have, Nance! And such LITTLE things, dear."

"It isn't the things--it's your thinking of them," Nancy said. "And eating wretched lunches while you planned them! You make me cry--and meanwhile, my beloved little chicken will roast himself dry!"