The milk safely stowed away in the ice-box, I have another look at the roast. I am dipping up spoonfuls of brown gravy and pouring them over the surface of the roast in approved basting style, when there is a rush, a scramble, and two hard bodies precipitate themselves upon my legs so suddenly that for a moment my head pitches forward into the oven. I withdraw my head from the oven, hastily. The basting spoon is immersed in the bottom of the pan. I turn, indignant. The Spalpeens look up at me with innocent eyes.
“You little divils, what do you mean by shoving your old aunt into the oven! It’s cannibals you are!”
The idea pleases them. They release my legs and execute a savage war dance around me. The Spalpeens are firm in the belief that I was brought to their home for their sole amusement, and they refuse to take me seriously. The Spalpeens themselves are two of the finest examples of real humor that ever were perpetrated upon parents. Sheila is the first-born. Norah decided that she should be an Irish beauty, and bestowed upon her a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, at the age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid a little German madchen as ever fooled her parents, and she is a feminine reproduction of her German Dad. Two years later came a sturdy boy, and they named him Hans, in a flaunt of defiance. Hans is black-haired, gray-eyed and Irish as Killarny.
“We’re awful hungry,” announces Sheila.
“Can’t you wait until dinner time? Such a grand dinner!”
Sheila and Hans roll their eyes to convey to me that, were they to wait until dinner for sustenance we should find but their lifeless forms.
“Well then, Auntie will get a nice piece of bread and butter for each of you.”
“Don’t want bread an’ butty!” shrieks Hans. “Want tooky!”
“Cooky!” echoes Sheila, pounding on the kitchen table with the rescued basting spoon.
“You can’t have cookies before dinner. They’re bad for your insides.”
“Can too,” disputes Hans. “Fwieda dives us tookies. Want tooky!” wailingly.
“Please, ple-e-e-ease, Auntie Dawnie dearie,” wheedles Sheila, wriggling her soft little fingers in my hand.
“But Mother never lets you have cookies before dinner,” I retort severely. “She knows they are bad for you.”
“Pooh, she does too! She always says, `No, not a cooky!’ And then we beg and screech, and then she says, `Oh, for pity’s sake, Frieda, give ‘em a cooky and send ‘em out. One cooky can’t kill ‘em.’” Sheila’s imitation is delicious.
Hans catches the word screech and takes it as his cue. He begins a series of ear-piercing wails. Sheila surveys him with pride and then takes the wail up in a minor key. Their teamwork is marvelous. I fly to the cooky jar and extract two round and sugary confections. I thrust them into the pink, eager palms. The wails cease. Solemnly they place one cooky atop the other, measuring the circlets with grave eyes.
“Mine’s a weeny bit bigger’n yours this time,” decides Sheila, and holds her cooky heroically while Hans takes a just and lawful bite out of his sister’s larger share.
“The blessed little angels! ” I say to myself, melting. “The dear, unselfish little sweeties!” and give each of them another cooky.
Back to my typewriter. But the words flatly refuse to come now. I make six false starts, bite all my best finger-nails, screw my hair into a wilderness of cork-screws and give it up. No doubt a real Lady Writer could write on, unruffled and unhearing, while the iceman squashed the cucumbers, and the roast burned to a frazzle, and the Spalpeens perished of hunger. Possessed of the real spark of genius, trivialities like milkmen and cucumbers could not dim its glow. Perhaps all successful Lady Writers with real live sparks have cooks and scullery maids, and need not worry about basting, and gravy, and milkmen.
This book writing is all very well for those who have a large faith in the future and an equally large bank account. But my future will have to be hand-carved, and my bank account has always been an all too small pay envelope at the end of each week. It will be months before the book is shaped and finished. And my pocketbook is empty. Last week Max sent money for the care of Peter. He and Norah think that I do not know.
Von Gerhard was here in August. I told him that all my firm resolutions to forsake newspaperdom forever were slipping away, one by one.
“I have heard of the fascination of the newspaper office,” he said, in his understanding way. “I believe you have a heimweh for it, not?”
“Heimweh! That’s the word,” I had agreed. “After you have been a newspaper writer for seven years—and loved it—you will be a newspaper writer, at heart and by instinct at least, until you die. There’s no getting away from it. It’s in the blood. Newspaper men have been known to inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to write books and become famous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossom into personages, to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remained a part of them, and the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a newspaper office was ever sweet in their nostrils.”
But, “Not yet,” Von Gerhard had said, “It unless you want to have again this miserable business of the sick nerfs. Wait yet a few months.”
And so I have waited, saying nothing to Norah and Max. But I want to be in the midst of things. I miss the sensation of having my fingers at the pulse of the big old world. I’m lonely for the noise and the rush and the hard work; for a glimpse of the busy local room just before press time, when the lights are swimming in a smoky haze, and the big presses downstairs are thundering their warning to hurry, and the men are breezing in from their runs with the grist of news that will be ground finer and finer as it passes through the mill of copy-readers’ and editors’ hands. I want to be there in the thick of the confusion that is, after all, so orderly. I want to be there when the telephone bells are zinging, and the typewriters are snapping, and the messenger boys are shuffling in and out, and the office kids are scuffling in a corner, and the big city editor, collar off, sleeves rolled up from his great arms, hair bristling wildly above his green eye-shade, is swearing gently and smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting each fresh one at the dying glow of the last. I would give a year of my life to hear him say:
“I don’t mind tellin’ you, Beatrice Fairfax, that that was a darn good story you got on the Millhaupt divorce. The other fellows haven’t a word that isn’t re-hash.”
All of which is most unwomanly; for is not marriage woman’s highest aim, and home her true sphere? Haven’t I tried both? I ought to know. I merely have been miscast in this life’s drama. My part should have been that of one who makes her way alone. Peter, with his thin, cruel lips, and his shaking hands, and his haggard face and his smoldering eyes, is a shadow forever blotting out the sunny places in my path. I was meant to be an old maid, like the terrible old Kitty O’Hara. Not one of the tatting-and-tea kind, but an impressive, bustling old girl, with a double chin. The sharp-tongued Kitty O’Hara used to say that being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.
Norah has pleaded with me to be more like other women of my age, and for her sake I’ve tried. She has led me about to bridge parties and tea fights, and I have tried to act as though I were enjoying it all, but I knew that I wasn’t getting on a bit. I have come to the conclusion that one year of newspapering counts for two years of ordinary, existence, and that while I’m twenty-eight in the family Bible I’m fully forty inside. When one day may bring under one’s pen a priest, a pauper, a prostitute, a philanthropist, each with a story to tell, and each requiring to be bullied, or cajoled, or bribed, or threatened, or tricked into telling it; then the end of that day’s work finds one looking out at the world with eyes that are very tired and as old as the world itself.