Part 7

“Well, Uncle,” she said, “is there any noos?”

It was then that old Sam really lost his temper.

“Noos!” he said. “Noos! Drat the girl! What noos should there be? Sixty-nine year’ I live in these ’ere parts, hoein’ and weedin’ and thinnin’, and mindin’ Charlie Hodge’s sheep. Am I one o’ these ’ere story-book folk havin’ noos ’appen to me all the time? Ain’t it enough, ye silly, dab-faced zany, to earn enough to buy a bite o’ some’at to eat and a glass o’ beer and a place to rest a’s head o’night without always wantin’ noos, noos, noos! I tell ’ee it’s this that leads ’ee to ’alf the troubles in the world. Devil take the noos!”

And turning his back on her, he went fuming up the hill.

_Collier’s, The National Weekly_

“MOMMA”

BY

RUPERT HUGHES

“MOMMA”[4]

By RUPERT HUGHES

Momma was sick, right sick. Momma was awful sick! Momma looked like she was going to die any minute. And she didn’t care if she did. She up and as good as told Poppa that.

Poppa was scared almost to death when he realized it. He was all alone with her, and had none of the children to talk to about it; though, for the matter of that, Momma and Poppa had never told the children about their own ailments. And now the children had growed up and vamoosed. All that was left of the fact that there ever had been any children round the place was the two old names Momma and Poppa that the old folks had caught by contagion and got to calling each other by from hearing themselves called them by the children when they were children.

Momma and Poppa had been drifting down life like a pair of old mud turtles floating south on an old log. And now all of a sudden one of them felt that the other’n was going to roll off into the muddy water and sink downward, backward, dead!

Perhaps the poor turtles know and grieve and mourn to the full capacity of their tight shells.

But Poppa was a human, gifted with sympathy. He was old acquaintances with grief of every sort, a pitiful postgraduate in all a man knows who has been a lover, a husband, and a father, and has seen children born from one pain and ache to another and another, who has seen some of his own little children die, or pray for death in the long procession of disappointments and thwarted hopes that begin with the first irretrievable rattle lost over the edge of the crib, and pass on to the rainy holidays, the sunny schooldays, the warm Christmases, cracked dolls, lost games, indignities from parents who misunderstand and spank, from sweethearts who misunderstand and flirt, and so on and so forth to the dreary, shabby campfollower sorrows that trudge along at the tail end of the parade.

Poppa’s habit had been to take things as they come, because, as somebody said, that’s the only way they come. He had grown so jaded with existence that he became a veteran Horatio, who, as Will Shakespeare said, “fortune’s buffets and rewards hast ta’en with equal thanks.”

Nothing had excited him much of late at the store, at home, at church, the lodge, or in the newspapers. As he had worn what seemed to be the same suit of clothes for years, so his face had worn the same suit of expressions. It was hard to tell his smile from his scowl. Funny things all had a touch of misfortune in them for somebody, and sad things were all kind of funny, so the same twitch at the muscles about his mouth served for an acknowledgment of everything unusual.

But now, when Momma almost wisht she was dead, that last dreadful word twitched Poppa’s very heart. He felt as if in the calm slumber of habitude somebody had reached into his breast and given his heart a yank. And it shivered and rattled as an old doorbell clamors pulled hard at midnight by somebody crying: “Wake up! Your house is on fire!”

* * * * *

Poppa woke up. Instinct told him that he must save Momma and himself from the incredible disaster of her death. His business worries had kept him from noticing the little symptoms of her decline, though she had stopped quarreling with him, and had simply quarreled with life, with everything: the food, the neighbors, her clothes, the weather, her stummick, her head, her eyes, her feet, her hands, her appetite, her looks--she even complained of her looks!

And now, as if scales had been scraped off his eyes, Poppa saw that Momma didn’t look good. She didn’t look a bit good. She looked something scandalous.

Poppa belonged to a lodge, and he had gone to numberless funerals. Yet he had hardly even imagined that some day his fellow members might in turn come to his house, all dressed up with sashes and plumes and swords, to march alongside the black wagon that should carry his one woman in a box to a ditch.

As if some one had set a moving picture going against the wall of his own sitting room, he saw the whole thing, and he shuddered back from it with a cry that struck inward and cut downward and stuck. He had a fishbone in his throat.

He became suddenly young and arrantly afraid. He wanted to run to his wife and cling to her and beg her not to think of such things. But he had given up the habit of hugging Momma or taking her into his lap or sitting on the arm of her chair since the ancient days when the first child began to take notice.

He wanted to go back to the old ways, but it would have looked foolish, and the two frumps had been afraid of each other’s love for years and years.

He did nothing and said nothing; but he did a heap of thinking. “Heap” was the word, for his thoughts were like a pile of dead leaves, tarnished, crumpled brown leaves that had been green and radiant and breathing once.

His thoughts were a heap of autumnal rubbish set on fire. Red torment ran through them, and they writhed and twisted as if a new life had come back to them just that they might suffer a little more.

The terror stung him to a determination. “I’ll call the doctor,” he said. He rose from his chair and shuffled to the telephone. Momma ran after him and dragged his hands down, crying: “I don’t want to see that old fool. I’ll go jump in the river if you send for him. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.”

“When a woman’s too sick to see the doctor,” Poppa said, “it’s high time somebody called him in.”

He backed round and bunted her away with the minimum of grace and the maximum of devotion, and held her at a distance until he got the number.

Momma flopped helplessly into a chair and cried like a petulant little girl, while Poppa ordered the doctor to put on his shoes and come right over.

She was still pouting like a little girl when Dr. Noxon came. Her lips were pushed out and her chin was purse-drawn when he asked her what was the matter of her. He held her wrist in one hand and his watch in the other, glanced at her tongue, and in a lowered voice asked one or two very personal questions.

Poppa did most of the talking, while Dr. Noxon nodded and said: “I see, I see.” As might have been expected, he left two sets of pills, one kind to be taken after each meal and before retiring, and another kind of pill to be taken on arising and every three hours.

Momma could hardly keep from laughing in the old owl’s face, and as soon as he closed the door she bust right out. It was not a nice laugh--hysterics like. She whooped: “I’ve seen that old nuisance leave those same fool pills on those same fool pieces of paper since we first came to Carthage and called him in. Everybody that ever took ’em has died, and I guess it’s my turn! And I don’t care!”

Her laughter ended in the wild weeping of a young girl, and Poppa was almost distracted. She went to bed all wore out, but she couldn’t sleep.

She kept him awake worse when she laid still trying not to wake him than she did when she thrashed about and groaned.

* * * * *

That was a long night, and Poppa entertained a whole herd of nightmares without falling asleep, or, if he did, he didn’t know it and it didn’t do him a mite of good.

He waited a day or two to see what effect Dr. Noxon’s immemorial pills would have. They had even less effect than he expected they would.

The third day he took the almost sacrilegious step of seeing one of the other doctors. Dr. Champe refused to call since Mrs. Lundy was known to be one of Dr. Noxon’s regular customers, a life member in his pill association.

But Poppa threatened to brain Champe if he didn’t see Momma, and he consented to see her if she would call after dark. Poppa had to drive her there “like a pig to market,” he said, and he was more wore out than what she was.

Dr. Champe gave spoon medicines. They were bittersweet and sticky, and had no effect whatever except to cause a brief ague of nausea and leave a nasty taste on the tongue.

A third doctor tried massage, another electricity. Momma even flirted with science--science with a capital S. But the optimism that was ladled out to her made her sicker than Dr. Champe’s sticky sweet medicine. She was in one of those moods when a cheerful word or a smile is a deadly insult.

The last doctor in town advised a trip, a change of climate and environment. Momma ridiculed the idea, but Poppa telegraphed their married daughter in Terre Haute that Momma was coming, and he fairly boosted her on the train.

Momma was dismal and ashamed of being dumped as a burden on a daughter she had always babied even after Hattie (now Mrs. Fred Eppes) had babies of her own. So the reunion lacked the delight that belonged to the occasion.

Hattie hugged her mother hard and squealed: “Why, Momma, you’re looking fine!”

Momma was doleful enough to remember her own woes, and she groaned: “You just say that! I don’t feel a bit good and I’m a sight! Don’t show me to any of your swell Terra Hut friends, for I’ll disgrace you.”

Hattie had hard sledding before her. Her mother did not even want to cheer up. She wanted to be sick, and she doubled her misery by bewailing the fact that she couldn’t throw off her gloom. She tried to smile once or twice, but Hattie begged her not to.

Since Momma would neither go calling nor receive callers, she was not easy to entertain. She was ashamed of her shabby clothes and her dowdy appearance, and so was Hattie.

Hattie would not admit it, though she did say that Poppa, with all his money, ought to dress her up better. Poor Poppa had tried to. The average American husband does not often get the chance to complain of his wife’s thrift in clothes, but Mr. Lundy, little as he noticed such things, had finally urged Momma to spend a little more money on duds now that the children were buying their own. But his well-meant hints had only depressed her the more, and she had retorted that he was sick and tired of her and her old face.

He had dropped the subject. Hattie had no better success. All that she succeeded in accomplishing was a round of the Terre Haute physicians--especially of those frightful personages known as “specialists.” Each of these found his specialty in Momma, and went after it. One of them got away with a large number of her teeth before she could fight him off.

Others offered to remove various parts of her, but she declined to be separated from any more of her fixtures.

She reduced Hattie’s general practitioner almost to nervous prostration, and at last, in order to get her off his hands and off her daughter’s nerves, he casually recommended a New York specialist, Dr. Courtneidge, who had the monopoly on a very abstruse operation dealing with the pancreas or something that Momma didn’t even know she had.

She was quite overawed at finding herself the proud possessor of such a thing. She felt like an old watch that has suddenly learned it has had jewelled movements all these years. But after a few hours of being interested in herself she slumped again and said she guessed she’d take her old pancreas back to Carthage with her. She’d got along with it so far, and, seeing as she’d denied herself a trip to New York all her life for fun, she certainly wa’nt going all that ways to let a doctor poke a knife into her.

Hattie fumed and bullied in vain for a day or two, then she fired off a telegram to Poppa to come over at once.

* * * * *

Poppa was putting through a big land deal and the telegram nearly jolted him out of his wits. He would not wait to extend his option. He ran down to the station and swung on a train just pulling out. He did not even stop for the collar, toothbrush, and nightgown that constituted his usual going-away equipment.

He spent a horrible night in the smoking car, sleeping among his distorted limbs like a wrecked grasshopper. At Terre Haute he took a taxicab to Hattie’s house, and was in such a mental and facial disarray when he rang the bell that the maid who answered it slammed the door on him and ran to tell her mistress that there was a crazy man on the porch.

Hattie peeked through the little side window and recognized her father, and flung open the door and her arms to him.

He expected to find Momma on her deathbed, but she was at breakfast, crying into her rolled oats.

“What on earth is the matter of you, Momma?” he gasped.

“Nothing’s the matter of me,” she snapped. “What on earth’s the matter of you? Had your breakfast? Sed-down! And--Hattie, could you ask your girl to fry him a negg--turned over, you remember; and if the coffee’s out, here you can have the rest of mine.”

Poppa sank into a chair and consented to break his fast while the news was broken to him. The word “pancreas” dazed him. It sounded like something for breakfast till Hattie explained. Then he was convinced. There is something about a new word that solves all mysteries for most people, and Poppa was very much like most people.

When Hattie had explained that Dr. Appleyard himself had settled upon the pancreas and its malfunctioning, or something like that, as the secret of Momma’s indomitable obscurities, Poppa set his jaw.

“When’s first train to N’York?” he asked.

“I’m not goin’, I tell you,” Momma pealed. “I’m not goin’ one step.”

“You are goin’!” Poppa stormed. “Why ain’t you goin’?”

“Because it costs too much money.”

That is a thing a man likes to say for himself. He cannot endure to hear anyone else tell it to him. It is insulting. When the children were young, Momma had always said it first when she wanted to make sure of his consenting to an expenditure. Things she would never have browbeaten or wept out of him into permitting, she could always force him to force her to accept by that approach--using the word “force” as card tricksters do when they deftly permit you to drag from them the one card that will work the trick.

But now Momma was not stacking the cards. She had economized for so many decades that money had become a thing sacrosanct. Unwittingly she had dealt Poppa the deadliest humiliation in her power, for he was what Carthage people called “rich”; he had lands and lands in his own and Momma’s name, and big sums out on mortgages.

A standard of living that had been forced on him by his early poverty had sufficed him in his gradual wealth.

A new suit of clothes was a nuisance. Extra servants were like unwelcome guests that never went home. The simplest food everlastingly repeated was all his stomach craved.

Momma would as soon have had the measles as a limousine, and jewels on her fingers would have crippled her like inflammatory rheumatism. The changing styles of Paris interested her as much as the tides of Barnegat. She had not changed the manner of wearing her hair since she was a mother for the first time, and her dresses were made by a sewing woman who was more interested in the gossip of the families she moved among than in the daily hints from Paris.

With money pouring in in amounts whose importance neither husband nor wife ever thought of translating into luxuries, and seeping out in a slow trickle, the old couple had come near to being misers without dreaming of stinginess.

This last big land deal of Poppa’s had brought him to a sudden realization that he was a pretty big fellow. The banks had begun to turn to him with opportunities for large turnovers, and bonds were offered him in bundles.

And so when Momma implied that a trip to New York, to save her life maybe, was beyond his means, he was hurt and enraged, and in his anger he rose to an eloquence of gallantry he never would have achieved in a more temperate mood.

“Too much money, hey? You think you can’t afford it, do you? Well, let me tell you that I can afford to send you to any town that anybody else can afford to go to. And if that old pankers doctor has got any patients at tall besides millionaires, and if he don’t charge more’n a hundred thousand dollars a patient, you can have the best operation he’s got in his shop.”

Momma braced up a bit at this and gave Hattie a proud look as much as to say: “You haven’t married the only successful man in the world, Mrs. Eppes.” But she shook her head.

“You ain’t goin’ to bankrupt yourself shippin’ me to any doctor, for I’m not worth it. And that’s all there is about it.”

“Not worth it?” Poppa cried with the fervor, if not the rhetoric, of a Romeo. “Well, if you ain’t worth it, I’d like to know who is? All I got is none too much to spend on you. And if I had ten times as much, what’d it be worth if I lost you, Momma?”

This was so poetic and beautiful that Momma had to get mad or break down and beller, so she put up a big fight.

“Oh, that’s all very well for you to say, but what it comes down to is: You’re sending me away to die like a dawg outside somewheres; you want to treat me the way they do the old rats that they give a poison to that guarantees they don’t die in the house.”

“Aw, Momma!” was all Poppa could groan. But Hattie lit into her mother with all the vigor of a true and dutiful American child.

“Why, Momma Lundy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You must be out of your mind to talk thataway when Poppa is so nice and so worried.”

“That’s right! Pick on me!” Momma moaned, taking unfair refuge in cowardly tears. “But I notice nobody is offering to go to New York with me.”

Hattie spoke first. “I’d go in a minute if I could leave the children, but with little Eddie having his tonsils removed to-morrow and Fannie’s chicken pox just coming out--”

Poppa sighed. “I’ll go, of course, if you want me to.”

Momma saw the reluctance in his assent, and, though she knew that he had some strong business reason behind it, her cantankerous mood took umbrage at it. “What’d I tell you? Well, I will go. I’ll go all by myself, to some lonely old hotel, and if I never come back nobody will know the difference.”

“Of course you shan’t go by yourself, honey,” Poppa protested. “I was only thinkin’ that if I could go home for a while I could set my business to rights and prob’ly close up a big deal I had on when I got Hattie’s wire. If I was to put that through, it would net me a couple o’ thousand, and that would go a long ways toward paying for your operation, most likely; and then I could come on and be with you whilst you was convalescing; and then, if anything was to happen to me, the business would be all right and I’d leave you and the children fixed.”

This was the simple, humble statement of his mind in the matter; that solemn devotion to his work that makes a priestcraft and an art of business. Like all successful creators, he consecrated himself to his work and sacrificed himself to its completion. No poet or sculptor could have a holier or purer ambition for perfection and a flawless conclusion, and there was no more thought of selfishness or greed.

Momma understood and loved him, but the disease in her soul took offense at everything; and, though she realized the unselfishness of his motive, she took a perverse delight in distorting it.

Then ensued one of those duels in which each took the wrong side with a kind of devoted insincerity. Poppa frantically declared that he would go and nothing should stop him, and she as frantically declared that if he went she wouldn’t.

Momma insisted that she hadn’t a friend on earth or in New York, and she would rather go back and die in her own bed than die alone in New York.

This reminded her distraught husband that she did have a friend in New York, her old playmate, Ella Jemison, who had married Sam Killip and gone to New York and fortune.

“Oh, yes, I’m likely to ask rich folks like her to take me in!” Momma sobbed. “She wouldn’t look at me. She’s forgotten she ever knew me, though we are kind of second cousins by marriage.”

“Well, her husband hasn’t forgot he ever knew me,” Poppa snapped. “Didn’t I have a letter from him only the other day, and didn’t he say his wife asked to be kindly remembered to you?”

“Sam Killip wrote to you!” Momma cried. “How’d rich folks like him come to write to you?”

Poppa winced again at being a prophet without honor in his own home. “Oh, I guess he ain’t the only rich folks in the world. He said he saw I was a director in the Third National Bank, and he wanted to enlarge his capital, and he could offer me a chance to git in on the ground floor of a patent locomotive stoker he was pushing. He said he was a little short of cash.”

“Sam Killip short of cash!”

“Rich folks are always short of cash,” Poppa explained. “That’s why they’re rich. The minute they git any cash they put it into something and make it work. I was going to tell Sam I couldn’t see my way clear, but if Ella will look after you a little I’ll help him out.”