Una, bringing home the palsying weariness of the day's drudgery, would find a cheery welcome-and the work not done; no vegetables for dinner, no fresh boric-acid solution prepared for washing her stinging eyes.
Nor could Una herself get the work immediately out of the way, because her mother was sure to be lonely, to need comforting before Una could devote herself to anything else or even wash away the sticky office grime.... Mrs. Golden would have been shocked into a stroke could she have known that while Una was greeting her, she was muttering within herself, "I do wish I could brush my teeth first!"
If Una was distraught, desirous of disappearing in order to get hold of herself, Mrs. Golden would sigh, "Dear, have I done something to make you angry?" In any case, whether Una was silent or vexed with her, the mother would manage to be hurt but brave; sweetly distressed, but never quite tearful. And Una would have to kiss her, pat her hair, before she could escape and begin to get dinner (with her mother helping, always ready to do anything that Una's doggedly tired mind might suggest, but never suggesting novelties herself).
After dinner, Mrs. Golden was always ready to do whatever Una wished-to play cribbage, or read aloud, or go for a walk-not a long walk; she was so delicate, you know, but a nice little walk with her dear, dear daughter.... For such amusements she was ready to give up all her own favorite evening diversions-namely, playing solitaire, and reading and taking nice little walks.... But she did not like to have Una go out and leave her, nor have naughty, naughty men like Walter take Una to the theater, as though they wanted to steal the dear daughter away. And she wore Una's few good frocks, and forgot to freshen them in time for Una to wear them. Otherwise, Mrs. Golden had the unselfishness of a saint on a marble pillar.
Una, it is true, sometimes voiced her irritation over her mother's forgetfulness and her subsequent pathos, but for that bitterness she always blamed herself, with horror remembered each cutting word she had said to the Little Mother Saint (as, in still hours when they sat clasped like lovers, she tremblingly called her).
§ 3
Mrs. Golden's demand of Una for herself had never been obvious till it clashed with Walter's demand.
Una and Walter talked it over, but they seemed mutely to agree, after the evening of Mrs. Golden and conversation, that it was merely balking for him to call at the flat. Nor did Una and Mrs. Golden discuss why Mr. Babson did not come again, or whether Una was seeing him. Una was accustomed to say only that she would be "away this evening," but over the teapot she quoted Walter's opinions on Omar, agnosticism, motor magazines, pipe-smoking, Staten Island, and the Himalayas, and it was evident that she was often with him.
Mrs. Golden's method of opposition was very simple. Whenever Una announced that she was going out, her mother's bright, birdlike eyes filmed over; she sighed and hesitated, "Shall I be alone all evening-after all day, too?" Una felt like a brute. She tried to get her mother to go to the Sessionses' flat more often, to make new friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability. She clung to Una and to her old furniture as the only recognizable parts of her world. Often Una felt forced to refuse Walter's invitations; always she refused to walk with him on the long, splendid Saturday afternoons of freedom. Nor would she let him come and sit on the roof with her, lest her mother see them in the hall and be hurt.
So it came to pass that only in public did she meet Walter. He showed his resentment by inviting her out less and less, by telling her less and less frankly his ambitions and his daily dabs at becoming a great man. Apparently he was rather interested in a flour-faced actress at his boarding-house.
Never, now, did he speak of marriage. The one time when he had spoken of it, Una had been so sure of their happiness that she had thought no more of that formality than had his reckless self. But now she yearned to have him "propose," in the most stupid, conventional, pink-romance fashion. "Why can't we be married?" she fancied herself saying to him, but she never dared say it aloud.
Often he was abstracted when he was with her, in the office or out. Always he was kindly, but the kindliness seemed artificial. She could not read his thoughts, now that she had no hand-clasp to guide her.
On a hot, quivering afternoon of early July, Walter came to her desk at closing-hour and said, abruptly: "Look. You've simply got to come out with me this evening. We'll dine at a little place at the foot of the Palisades. I can't stand seeing you so little. I won't ask you again! You aren't fair."
"Oh, I don't mean to be unfair-"
"Will you come? Will you?"
His voice glared. Regardless of the office folk about them, he put his hand over hers. She was sure that Miss Moynihan was bulkily watching them. She dared not take time to think.
"Yes," she said, "I will go."
§ 4
It was a beer-garden frequented by yachtless German yachtsmen in shirt-sleeves, boating-caps, and mustaches like muffs, but to Una it was Europe and the banks of the Rhine, that restaurant below the Palisades where she dined with Walter.
A placid hour it was, as dusk grew deeper and more fragrant, and they leaned over the terrace rail to meditate on the lights springing out like laughing jests incarnate-reflected lights of steamers paddling with singing excursionists up the Hudson to the storied hills of Rip Van Winkle; imperial sweeps of fire that outlined the mighty city across the river.
Walter was at peace. He spared her his swart intensity; he shyly quoted Tennyson, and bounced with cynicisms about "Sherbert Souse" and "the Gas-bag." He brought happiness to her, instead of the agitation of his kisses.
She was not an office machine now, but one with the village lovers of poetry, as her job-exhaustion found relief in the magic of the hour, in the ancient music of the river, in breezes which brought old tales down from the Catskills.
She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the twilight, absently pleating the coarse table-cloth, trying to sip the saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing more.... And she had so manoeuvered their chairs that the left side of her face, the better side, was toward him!
But Walter grew restless. He stared at the German yachtsmen, at their children who ate lumps of sugar dipped in claret, and their wives who drank beer. He commented needlessly on a cat which prowled along the terrace rail. He touched Una's foot with his, and suddenly condemned himself for not having been able to bring her to a better restaurant. He volubly pointed out that their roast chicken had been petrified-"vile restaurant, very vile food."
"Why, I love it here!" she protested. "I'm perfectly happy to be just like this."
As she turned to him with a smile that told all her tenderness, she noted how his eyes kept stealing from the riverside to her, and back again, how his hands trembled as he clapped two thick glass salt-shakers together. A current of uneasiness darted between them.
He sprang up. "Oh, I can't sit still!" he said. "Come on. Let's walk down along the river."
"Oh, can't we just sit here and be quiet?" she pleaded, but he rubbed his chin and shook his head and sputtered: "Oh, rats, you can't see the river, now that they've turned on the electric lights here. Come on. Besides, it'll be cooler right by the river."
She felt a menace; the darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming, but terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding that she could only obey him.