All this had poured from her effortlessly, as if she had been simply pointing out what lay there to see, not as though she were beating her brains to invent it.
They gaped at her breathlessly.
“I wish you would be chairman of the Committee,” said Mr. Prouty deferentially, “and take charge of the campaign for funds.”
Her face which had been for an instant clear and open, clouded and shut. “I’d love to!” she said passionately. “I see it all!” She began to roll her sewing together as though to give herself time to be able to speak more calmly. “But I mustn’t think of it,” she said at last. “I have too much to do at home. It’s all I can manage to get to church and to Guild meeting once a week. I never leave the house for anything else except to go to market. I can take Stephen with me there. Of course, after he starts going to school. …”
Yes, they all knew what a relief it was when the children started going to school, and you could keep the house in some kind of order, and have a little peace.
Their silent, sympathetic understanding brought out from her now something she had not meant to say, something which had been like a lump of lead on her heart, the dread that her only open door, would soon close upon her. “Even for Guild-meetings,” she said, speaking grimly to keep her lips from trembling, “I may have to give them up, too. Mr. Knapp has always been able to make an arrangement to get away from the store an hour and a half earlier on Thursdays to stay with Stephen and the other two after school. But I don’t know whether he will be able to manage that now. Mr. Willing, I mean old Mr. Willing saw no objection. But now. …”
Her voice was harsh and dry; but they all knew why. And she was quite aware of the silent glosses and commentaries she knew them to be supplying mentally. She pinned her roll of sewing together firmly. Nobody could put in a pin with her gesture of mastery. “My first duty is to my home and children,” she said.
“Oh, yes, oh, yes, we all know that, of course.” Mr. Prouty gave to the aphorism a lip-service which scantily covered his bitter objection to it in this case.
“Our circumstances don’t permit us to hire help,” she added, making this resolutely a statement of fact and not a complaint. “I do the washings, you know.”
“I know. Wonderful! Wonderful!” said Mr. Prouty irritably.
“She sets an example to us all, I always tell ’em,” said Mrs. Farnham.
“Yes, indeed you do, Mrs. Knapp!” they all agreed fervently. Evangeline knew that this was their way of trying to make up to her for having a poor stick of a husband. She savored their compassion with a bittersweet mixture of humiliation over her need for it and of triumph that she had drawn this sympathy from them under the appearance of repelling it. “Nobody ever heard me complain!” she was saying to herself.
“Well, I’ll do what I can,” she said, standing up to go. “I’ll think of things. I’ve just thought of another. If we can provide the nurse with dinner every day, that ought to cut down on cash expenses. There are twenty-four members of the Guild. That’d hardly mean more than one dinner a month for each of us. And it would cut off fifteen dollars a month from the money we’d have to provide. And in that way we could keep in closer touch with her. Seeing her every day and hearing about her work, we’d be more apt to cooperate with her right along.”
“Splendid! Simply splendid!” cried Mr. Prouty. “We will be the only parish of our size in the State to have a visiting nurse of our own.” He saw himself at the next diocesan meeting the center of a group of envious clergymen, expounding to them the ingenious devices by which this remarkable result had been achieved. He had had a good deal of this sort of gratification since the Knapps had moved into his parish.
IV
“Who swoon in sleep and awake wearier.”
As he woke up, Lester Knapp heard the words in the air as he so often heard poetry,
“… and awake wearier!”
He was tired to the bone. He would have given anything in the world to turn over, bury his face in the pillow and swoon to sleep again.
And never wake up!
But the alarm-clock had rung, and Evangeline had risen instantly. He heard her splashing in the bathroom now.
With an effort as though he were struggling out of smothering black depths, he sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. Gosh! How little good he seemed to get from his sleep. He was tireder when he woke up than when he went to bed.
On the cot opposite little Stephen lay sleeping as vigorously as he did everything, one tightly clenched small fist flung up on his pillow. What a strong, handsome kid he was. Whatever could be the matter with him to make him act so like the devil? Strange to see a little kid like that, so hateful, seem to
