His Family by Ernest Poole (popular ebook readers txt) 📕

“I’d be sorry to see you do it,” he said. “I’d miss you up in the mountains.”

“Oh, we’d come up in the summer,” she answered. “I wouldn’t miss the mountains for worlds!”

Then they talked of summer plans. And soon again Edith’s smooth pretty brows were wrinkling absorbedly. It was hard in her planning not to be sure whether her new baby would come in May or early June. It was only the first of April now. While she talked her father watched her. He liked her quiet fearlessness in facing the ordeal ahead. Into the bewildering city he felt her searching anxiously to find good things for her small brood, to make every dollar count, to keep their little bodies strong, to guard their hungry little souls from many things she thought were bad. Of all his daughters, he told himself, she was the one most like his wife.

While she was talking Bruce came in. Of medium height and a wiry build, his quick kindly smile of greeting did not conceal the fine tight lines about his mouth and between his eyes. His small trim moustache was black, but his hair already showed streaks of gray although he was not quite thirty-eight, and as he lit a cigarette his right hand twitched perceptibly.

Bruce Cunningham had married just after he left law school. He had worked in a law office which took receiverships by the score, and through managing bankrupt concerns by slow degrees he had made himself a financial surgeon. He had set up an office of his own and was doing splendidly. But he worked under fearful tension. Bruce had to deal with bankrupts who had barely closed their eyes for weeks, men half out of their minds from the strain, the struggle to keep up their heads in those angry waters of finance which Roger vaguely pictured as a giant whirlpool. Though honest enough in his own affairs, Bruce showed a genial relish for all the tricks of the savage world which was as the breath to his nostrils. And at times he appeared so wise and keen he made Roger feel like a child. But again it was Bruce who seemed the child. He seemed to be so naive at times, and Edith had him so under her thumb. Roger liked to hear Bruce’s stories of business, when Edith would let her husband talk. But this she would not often do, for she said Bruce needed rest at night. She reproved him now for staying so late, she wrung from him the fact that he’d had no supper.

“Well, Bruce,” she exclaimed impatiently, “now isn’t that just like you? You’re going straight home⁠—that’s where you’re going⁠—”

“To be fed up and put to bed,” her husband grumbled good-naturedly. And while she made ready to bundle him off he turned to his father-in-law.

“What do you think’s my latest?” he asked, and he gave a low chuckle which Roger liked. “Last week I was a brewer, today I’m an engineer,” he said. “Can you beat it? A building contractor. Me.” And as he smoked his cigarette, in laconic phrases he explained how a huge steel construction concern had gone to the wall, through building skyscrapers “on spec” and outstripping even the growth of New York. “They got into court last week,” he said, “and the judge handed me the receivership. The judge and I have been chums for years. He has hay fever⁠—so do I.”

“Come, Bruce, I’m ready,” said his wife.

“I’ve been in their office all day,” he went on. “Their general manager was stark mad. He hadn’t been out of the office since last Sunday night, he said. You had to ask him a question and wait⁠—while he looked at you and held onto his chair. He broke down and blubbered⁠—the poor damn fool⁠—he’ll be in Matteawan in a week⁠—”

“You’ll be there yourself if you don’t come home,” broke in Edith’s voice impatiently.

“And out of that poor devil, and out of the mess his books are in, I’ve been learning engineering!”

He had followed his wife out on the steps. He turned back with a quick appealing smile:

“Well, good night⁠—see you soon⁠—”

“Good night, my boy,” said Roger. “Good luck to the engineering.”

“Oh, father dear,” cried Edith, from the taxi down below. “Remember supper Sunday night⁠—”

“I won’t forget,” said Roger.

He watched them start off up the street. The night was soft, refreshing, and the place was quiet and personal. The house was one of a dozen others, some of red brick and some of brown stone, that stood in an uneven row on a street but a few rods in length, one side of a little triangular park enclosed by a low iron fence, inside of which were a few gnarled trees and three or four park benches. On one of these benches his eye was caught by the figure of an old woman there, and he stood a moment watching her, some memory stirring in his mind.

Occasionally somebody passed. Otherwise it was silent here. But even in the silence could be felt the throes of change; the very atmosphere seemed charged with drastic things impending. Already the opposite house line had been broken near the center by a high apartment building, and another still higher rose like a cliff just back of the house in which Roger lived. Still others, and many factory lofts, reared shadowy bulks on every hand. From the top of one an enormous sign, a corset pictured forth in lights, flashed out at regular intervals; and from farther off, high up in the misty haze of the night, could be seen the gleaming pinnacle where hour by hour that great bell slowly boomed the time away. Yes, here the old was passing. Already the tiny parklet was like the dark bottom of a pit, with the hard sparkling modern town towering on every side, slowly pressing, pressing in and glaring down with yellow eyes.

But Roger noticed none