"Sure an' I'd like to die meself if dyin' wasn't so costly," remarked
Mrs. Spillini, as she gazed with tear-stained eyes at the little body
that occupied the only chair in the dismal room. "Do the best we kin,
buryin' the baby is goin' to cost more than we made all winter out o'
all three boarders. Havin' the baby cost a dreadful lot altogether, an'
now it's dyin's a dreadful pull agin."
Gertrude Foster opened her Russian leather purse and Mrs. Spillini's
eyes brightened shrewdly. There was no need for the hesitancy and choice
of words that gave the young girl so much care and pain. Familiarity
with all the mean and gross of life from childhood until one is the
mother of six living and four dead children, does not leave the finest
edge of sentiment and pride upon the poverty-cursed victims of fate.
"If you would allow me to leave a mere trifle of money for you to use
for the baby, I don't--it is only--" began Gertrude; but the ready hand
had reached out for the money and a quick "Thanky mum; much obliged" had
ended the transaction.
"I shall not tell mamma _that"_, thought Gertrude, and she did not look
at John Martin. It was her first glimpse into a grade of life to which
all things, even birth and death, take on a strictly commercial aspect;
where not only the edge of sentiment is dulled by dire necessity, but
where the sentiment itself is buried utterly beneath the incrustations
of an ignorance that is too dumb and abject to learn, and a poverty that
is too insistent to recognize its own ignorance and degradation.
"Won't you set down?" inquired Mrs. Spillini, as with a sudden movement
she slid the small corpse onto the floor under the edge of the table.
"I'd a' ast you before, but--"
"O, don't!" exclaimed the girl; but before her natural impulse to stoop
and gather up the small bundle had found action possible, John Martin
had placed it on the table.
"Oh, Lord; don't!" exclaimed the woman, in sudden dismay. "The
boarders'd kick if they was to see it _there_. Boarders is
different from the family. We could ate affen the table afther, but
boarders--boarders'd kick."
"Could--do you think of anything else we could do for you?" inquired
Gertrude, faintly, as she held open the door and tried to think she was
not dizzy and sick from the dreadful, polluted air, and the shock of the
revelation, with all that it implied, before her.
Four dirty faces, and as many ragged bodies, were too close to her for
comfort. There was a vile stew cooking on the stove. The air was heavy
and foul with it Gertrude distinctly felt the greasy moisture on her kid
gloves as they touched each other.
"No, I don't know's they's anything _more_ you can do," replied
the passive, hopeless wreck of what it was almost sacrilege to call
womanhood. "I don't know's they's anything more you could _do_ unless
you could let the boarders come in now. They ain't got but a little over
ten minutes to eat in an' dinner's ready," she replied, as she lifted
the pot of steaming stuff into the middle of the table and laid two tin
plates, a large knife and a bunch of iron forks and spoons beside it.
"Turn that chair to the wall," she added sharply to one of the children,
who hastened to obey the command. "They'll _all_ have to stand up to it
this time. I ain't a goin' to shift that baby round no more till it's
buried, now that I _kin_ bury it. Take this side of the table, Pete. I
don't feel like eatin.' You kin have my place 'n the ole man ain't here.
Let go of that tin cup, you trillin' young one. All the coffee they is,
is in that. Have a drink, Mike?" she asked, passing the coveted cup to
the second boarder. Gertrude was half-way down the dark hallway, and
John Martin held her arm firmly lest she step into some unseen trap or
broken place in the floor.
When they reached the street door she turned to him with wide eyes.
"Great God," she moaned, "and people go to church and pray and thank
God--and collect rent from such as they! Men offer premiums to mothers
and fathers for large families of children--to be brought up like that?
In a world where that is possible! Oh, I think it is wicked, wicked,
wicked, to allow it--any of it--all of it! How can you?"
John Martin looked hopeless and helpless.
"I don't," he said, in pathetic self-defense, feeling somehow that the
blame was personal.
"Oh, I don't mean you!" she exclaimed, almost impatiently. "I mean all
who know it--who have known and understood it all along. How could men
allow it? How dared they? And to think of encouraging such people to
marry--to bring into a life like that such swarms of helpless children.
Oh, the sin and shame and outrage of it!"
John Martin was dazed that she should look upon it as she did. He was
surprised that she spoke so openly. He did not fully comprehend the
power and force of real conviction and feeling overtaken in a sincere
and fearlessly frank nature by such a knowledge for the first time.
"I should not have brought you here," he said, feebly, as they entered
the waiting carriage which her mother had insisted she should take if
she would go "slumming," as she had expressed it.
She turned an indignant face upon him.
"Why?" she demanded.
He tried to say something about a shock to her nerves, and such sights
and knowledge being not for women.
"I had begun to feel that he respected me--believed in me--wanted, in
truth and not merely in name, to share life with me," she thought, "but
he does not: it is all a sham. He wants someone who shall _not_ share
life with him--not even his mental life."
"You would come here with papa, would you not?" she asked, presently.
"You would talk over, look at, think of the problems of life with
him,"--her voice began to tremble.
"Certainly," he said, "but that is different. It--"
"Yes, it is different; quite different. You love papa, and it would be a
pain to you to keep your mental books locked up from him. You respect
papa, and you would not be able to live a life of pretense with him.
You--"
"Gertrude! Oh, darling! I love you. I love you. You know that," he said,
grasp ing both her hands and covering them with kisses. She snatched
them away, and covered her face with them to hide the tears which were a
surprise and shock to herself.
"I should not have taken her there," he thought. "I'm a great fool."
He did not at all comprehend the girl's point of view, and she resented
his. He could not imagine why, and her twenty years of inexperience in
handling such a view of life as had suddenly grown up within her, made
her unable to express quite fully why she did resent his assumption that
she should not be allowed to use her heart or brain beyond the limits
set for their exercise by conventional theory. She could not express
in words why she felt insulted and outraged in her self-respect that he
should assume that life was and should be led by her, upon a distinctly
different and narrower plane than his own. She knew that she could not
accept his explanation, that it was his intense love that wished to
shield her from knowledge of all that was ugly--of all the deeper and
sadder meanings of human experience; but she felt unequal to making
him understand by any words at her command how far from her idea of an
exalted love such an assumption was.
That he should sincerely believe that as a matter of course much that
was and should be quite common in his own life should be kept from,
covered up, blurred into indistinction to her, came to her with a shock
too sudden and heavy for words. She had built an exalted ideal of
absolute mental companionship between those who loved. She had always
thought that one day she should pass through the portals of some vast
building by the side of a husband to whom all within was new as it would
be to her. She had fancied that neither spoke; that both read the
tablets of architecture--and of human legend on every face--so nearly
alike that by a glance of the eye she could say to him, "I know what you
are thinking of all this. It stirs such or such a memory. It strikes the
chord that holds these thoughts or those." But she read as plainly now
that this man who thought he loved her, whom she had grown to feel she
might one day love, had no such conception of a union of lives. To him
marriage would mean a physical possession of a toy more or less
valuable, more or less to be cherished or to be set under a glass case,
whenever his real life, his real thoughts, his deeper self were stirred.
These were to be kept for men--his mentally developed equals. She
understood full well that if she could have said this to him he would
have been shocked, would have resented such a contemptuous
interpretation of what he truly believed to be a wholly respectful love,
offered upon wholly respectful terms. But to her, it seemed the mere
tossing down of a filbert to a pretty kitten, that it might amuse him
for a few moments with its graceful antics. When he tired of the kitten,
or bethought him of the serious duties of life, he could turn the key
and count on finding the amusing little creature to play with again next
day in case he cared to relax himself with a sight of its gambols. She
resented such a view of the value of her life. She was humiliated and
indignant. The perfectly apparent lack of comprehension on his part of
any lapse of respect in attitude toward her, the entire unconsciousness
of the insult to her whole nature, in his assumption of a divine right
of individual growth and development to which she had no claim, stung
her beyond all power of speech. The very fact that he had no
comprehension of the affront himself, added to it its utterly hopeless
feature. The love of a man offered on such terms is an insult, she said,
over and over to herself; but aloud she said nothing.
She had heard, vaguely, through her tumult of feeling, his terms of
endearment, his appeals to her tenderness and--alas! unfortunately for
him--his apologies for having taken her to such a place. She became
distinctly aware of these latter first and it steadied her. They had
reached Washington Square.
"Yes, that revelation in Mulberry Street was a horrible shock to me,"
she said, looking at him for the first time since they had entered the
carriage; "but, do you know, I think there are more shocking things than
even that done in the name of love every day--things as heartless and
offensively uncomprehending of what is fine and true in life as that
wretched woman's conduct with the lifeless form of her baby."
He recognized a hard ring in her voice, but her eyes looked kind and
gentle.
"How do you mean?" he asked, touching her hand as it lay on her empty
purse in her lap.
"I don't believe I could ever make you understand what I mean, we are so
hopelessly far apart," she said, a little sadly. "That an explanation
is necessary--that is the hopeless part. That that poor woman did not
comprehend that her conduct and callousness were shocking--_that_ was
the hopeless part. To make you understand what I mean would be like
making her understand all the hundreds of awful things that her conduct
meant to us. If it is not in one's nature to comprehend without words,
then words are useless."
His vehement protests stirred her sympathy again.
"You say that love brings people near together. Do you know I am
beginning to think that nothing could be a greater calamity than that?
Drawn together by a love that rests on a physical basis for those who
refuse to allow it root in a common sympathy and a community of thought
it must fail sooner or later. A humbled acceptance of the crumbs of
her husband's life, or a resentful endurance of it, may result from
the accursed faithfulness or the pitiful dependence of wives, but
surely--surely no greater calamity could befall her and no worse fate
lie in wait for him."
Her lover stared at her, pained and puzzled. When they reached her door
he grasped her hand.
"I thought you loved me last night, and I went away in an ecstasy of
hope. Today--"
"Perhaps I do love you," she said; "but I do not respect you, because
you do not respect me." He made a quick sound of dissent, but she
checked him. "You do not respect womanhood; you only patronize
women--you only patronize me. I could not give you a right to do that
for life. Good-bye. Don't come in this time. Wait. Let us both think."
"Let us both think," he repeated, as he started down the street.
"Think! Think what? I had no idea that Gertrude would be so utterly
unreasonable. It is a girl's whim. She'll get over it, but it is
deucedly uncomfortable while it lasts."
"Mamma," said Gertrude, when she reached her mother's pretty room on the
third floor. "Mamma, do you suppose if a girl really and truly loved a
man that she would stop to think whether he had a high or a low estimate
of womanhood?"
The girl's mother looked up startled. She was quite familiar with what
she had always termed the "superhumanly aged remarks" of her daughter,
but the new turn they had taken surprised her.
"I don't believe she would, Gertrude. Why? Are you imagining yourself
in love with some man who is not chivalrous toward women?" Mrs. Foster
smiled at the mere idea of her daughter caring much for any man. She
thought she had observed her too closely to make a mistake in the
matter.
Gertrude evaded the first question.
"I once heard a very brilliant man say--what I did not then
understand--that chivalry was always the prelude to imposition. I
believe I don't care very especially for chivalry. Fair play is better,
don't you think so?" She did not pause for a reply, but began taking off
her long gloves.
"Which would you like best from papa, flattery or square-toed, honest
truth?"
Her mother laughed.
"Gertrude, you are perfectly ridiculous. The institution of marriage, as
now established, wouldn't hang together ten minutes if your square-toed,
honest truth, as you call it, were to be tried between husbands and
wives. Most wives are frightened nearly to death for fear they will
become acquainted with the truth some day. They don't want it. They were
not--built for it." Gertrude began to move about the room impatiently.
Her mother smiled at her and went on: "Don't you look at it that way?
No? Well, you are young yet. Wait until you've been married three
years--"
The girl turned upon her with an indignant face. Then suddenly she threw
her arms about her mother's neck.
"Poor mamma, poor mamma," she said. "Didn't you find out for three years
_after?_ How did you bear it? I should have committed suicide. I--"
"Oh, no you wouldn't!" said her mother, with a bitter little inflection.
"They all talk that way. Girls all feel so, if they know enough to feel
at all--to think at all. They rage and wear out their nerves--as you are
doing now, heaven knows why--and the beloved husband calls a doctor
and buys sweets and travels with the precious invalid, and never once
suspects that he is at the bottom of the whole trouble. It never dawns
upon him that what she is dying for is a real and loyal companionship,
such as she had fondly dreamed of, and not at all for sea air. It
doesn't enter his mind that she feels humiliated because she knows that
a great part of his life is a sealed book to her, and that he wishes to
keep it so."
She paused, and her daughter stroked her cheek. This was indeed a
revelation to the girl. She had been wholly deceived by her mother's gay
manner all these years. She was taking herself sharply to task now.
"But by and by when she succeeds in killing all her self-respect; when
she makes up her mind that the case is hopeless, and that she must
expect absolutely no frankness in life beyond the limits of conventional
usage prescribed for purblind babies; after she arrives at the point
where she discovers that her happiness is a pretty fiction built on air
foundation--well, daughter, after that she--she strives to murder all
that is in her beyond and above the petty simpleton she passes for--and
she succeeds fairly well, doesn't she?"
There was a cynical smile on her lips, and she made an elaborate bow to
her daughter.
"Oh, mamma, I beg your pardon!" exclaimed the girl, almost frightened.
"I truly beg your pardon! If--you--I--"
Her mother looked steadily out of the window. Then she said, slowly,
"How did you come to find all this out _before_ you were married, child?
Have I not done a mother's duty by you in keeping you in ignorance, so
far as I could, of all the struggles and facts of life--of--"
The bitter tone was in her voice again. Gertrude was hurt by it, it was
so full of self-reproach mingled with self-contempt. She slipped her arm
about her mother's waist.
"Don't, mamma," she said. "Don't blame yourself like that. I'm sure you
have always done the best possible--the--"
Her mother laughed, but the note was not pleasant.
"Yes, I always did the lady-like thing,--nothing. I floated with the
tide. Take my advice, daughter,--float. If you don't, you'll only
tire yourself trying to swim against a tide that is too strong for you
and--and nothing will come of it. Nothing at all." The girl began to
protest with the self-confidence of youth, but her mother went on. She
had taken the bit in her teeth to-day and meant to run the whole race.
"Do you suppose I did not know about the Spillini family? About the
thousands of Spillini families? Do you suppose I did not know that the
rent of ten such families--their whole earnings for a year--would be
spent on--on a pretty inlaid prayer-book like this?" She tapped the
jeweled cross and turned it over on her lap. The girl's eyes were wide
and almost fear-filled as she studied her handsome care-free mother in
her new mood.
"Did you really suppose I did not know that this gem on the top of the
cross is dyed with the life-blood of some poor wretch, and that this one
represents the price of the honor of a starving girl?" She shivered, and
the girl drew back. "Did you fancy me as ignorant and as--happy--as
I have talked? Don't you know that it is the sole duty of a well-bred
woman to be ignorant--and happy? Otherwise she is morbid!" She
pronounced the word affectedly, and then laughed a bitter little laugh.
"Don't, mamma," said the girl, again. "I quite understand now, quite--"
She laid her head on her mother's bosom and was silent. Presently she
felt a tear drop on her hair. She put her hand up to her mother's cheek
and stroked it.
"The game went against you, didn't it, mamma?" she said softly. "And you
were not to blame." She felt a little shiver run over her mother's frame
and a sob crushed back bravely that hurt her like a knife. Presently two
hands lifted the girl's face.
"You don't despise me, daughter? In my position the price of a woman's
peace is the price of her own self-respect. I did not lose the game. I
gave it up!"
Gertrude kissed her on eyes and lips. "Poor mamma, poor mamma," she said
softly, "I wonder if I shall do the same!" For the first time since she
entered the room, the daughter appeared to appeal for, rather than to
offer, sympathy and strength. Her mother was quick to respond.
"If you never learn to love anyone very much, daughter, you may hope
to keep your self-respect. If you do you will sell it all--for his.
And--and--"
"Lose both at last?" asked the girl, hoarsely. Katherine Foster closed
her eyes for a moment to shut out her daughter's face.
"Will you ever have had his?" she asked, with her eyes still closed.
"Do men ever truly respect their dupes or their inferiors? Do you truly
respect anyone to whom you are willing to deny truth, honor, dignity?
Is it respect, or only a tender, pitying love we offer an intellectual
cripple--one whose mental life we know to be, and desire to keep,
distinctly below our own? Do--" She opened her eyes and they rested on
an onyx clock. She laughed. "Come, daughter," she said, "it is time to
dress for the Historical Club's annual dinner. You know I am one of the
guests of honor to-day. They honor me so truly that I am not permitted
to join the club or be ranked as a useful member at all. My work they
accept--flatter me by praising in a lofty way; but I can have no status
with them as an historian--I am a woman!"
Gertrude sprang to her feet. Her eyes flashed fire.
"Don't go! I wouldn't allow them to--" The door opened softly. Mr.
Foster's face appeared.
"Why, dearie, aren't you ready for the Historical Club? I wouldn't have
you late for anything. You know I, as the vice-president, am to respond
to the toast on, 'Woman: the highest creation, and God's dearest gift to
mankind.' It wouldn't look well if you were not there."
"No, dear," she said, without glancing at Gertrude. "It would not look
well. I'll be ready in a minute. Will you help me, Gertrude?"
"Yes," said the girl, and her deft fingers flew at the task. When the
door closed behind her mother and the carriage rolled away, she threw
herself face down on the bed and ground her teeth. "Shall I float, or
try to swim up stream?" she said, to herself. "Will either one pay for
what it will cost? Shall--"
"Miss Gertrude, dinner is served," said the maid; and she went to the
table alone.
"To think that a visit to the Spillini family should have led to all
this," she thought, and felt that life, as it had been, was over for
her.