MRS. OAKLEY
Betty, when she stepped on board the boat for Marseilles, had had no
definite plan of action. She had been caught up and swept away by an
over-mastering desire for escape that left no room in her mind for
thoughts of the morrow. It was not till the train was roaring its way
across southern France that she found herself sufficiently composed to
review her position and make plans.
She would not go back. She could not. The words she had used in her
letter to Mr. Scobell were no melodramatic rhetoric. They were a plain
and literal statement of the truth. Death would be infinitely
preferable to life at Mervo on her stepfather's conditions.
But, that settled, what then? What was she to do? The gods are
businesslike. They sell; they do not give. And for what they sell they
demand a heavy price. We may buy life of them in many ways: with our
honor, our health, our independence, our happiness, with our brains or
with our hands. But somehow or other, in whatever currency we may
choose to pay it, the price must be paid.
Betty faced the problem. What had she? What could she give? Her
independence? That, certainly. She saw now what a mockery that fancied
independence had been. She had come and gone as she pleased, her path
smoothed by her stepfather's money, and she had been accustomed to
consider herself free. She had learned wisdom now, and could understand
that it was only by sacrificing such artificial independence that she
could win through to freedom. The world was a market, and the only
independent people in it were those who had a market value.
What was her market value? What could she do? She looked back at her
life, and saw that she had dabbled. She had a little of most
things--enough of nothing. She could sketch a little, play a little,
sing a little, write a little. Also--and, as she remembered it, she
felt for the first time a tremor of hope--she could use a typewriter
reasonably well. That one accomplishment stood out in the welter of her
thoughts, solid and comforting, like a rock in a quicksand. It was
something definite, something marketable, something of value for which
persons paid.
The tremor of hope did not comfort her long. Her mood was critical, and
she saw that in this, her one accomplishment, she was, as in everything
else, an amateur. She could not compete against professionals. She
closed her eyes, and had a momentary vision of those professionals,
keen of face, leathern of finger, rattling out myriads of words at a
dizzy speed. And, at that, all her courage suddenly broke; she drooped
forlornly, and, hiding her face on the cushioned arm-rest, she began to
cry.
Tears are the Turkish bath of the soul. Nature never intended woman to
pass dry-eyed through crises of emotion. A casual stranger, meeting
Betty on her way to the boat, might have thought that she looked a
little worried,--nothing more. The same stranger, if he had happened to
enter the compartment at this juncture, would have set her down at
sight as broken-hearted beyond recovery. Yet such is the magic of tears
that it was at this very moment that Betty was beginning to be
conscious of a distinct change for the better. Her heart still ached,
and to think of John even for an instant was to feel the knife turning
in the wound, but her brain was clear; the panic fear had gone, and she
faced the future resolutely once more. For she had just remembered the
existence of Mrs. Oakley.
* * * * *
Only once in her life had Betty met her stepfather's celebrated aunt,
and the meeting had taken place nearly twelve years ago. The figure
that remained in her memory was of a pale-eyed, grenadier-like old
lady, almost entirely surrounded by clocks. It was these clocks that
had impressed her most. She was too young to be awed by the knowledge
that the tall old woman who stared at her just like a sandy cat she had
once possessed was one of the three richest women in the whole wide
world. She only remembered thinking that the finger which emerged from
the plaid shawl and prodded her cheek was unpleasantly bony. But the
clocks had absorbed her. It was as if all the clocks in the world had
been gathered together into that one room. There had been big clocks,
with almost human faces; small, perky clocks; clocks of strange shape;
and one dingy, medium-sized clock in particular which had made her cry
out with delight. Her visit had chanced to begin shortly before eleven
in the morning, and she had not been in the room ten minutes before
there was a whirring, and the majority of the clocks began to announce
the hour, each after its own fashion--some with a slow bloom, some with
a rapid, bell-like sound. But the medium-sized clock, unexpectedly
belying its appearance of being nothing of particular importance, had
performed its task in a way quite distinct from the others. It had
suddenly produced from its interior a shabby little gold man with a
trumpet, who had blown eleven little blasts before sliding backward
into his house and shutting the door after him. Betty had waited in
rapt silence till he finished, and had then shouted eagerly for more.
Just as the beginner at golf may effect a drive surpassing that of the
expert, so may a child unconsciously eclipse the practised courtier.
There was no soft side to Mrs. Oakley's character, as thousands of
suave would-be borrowers had discovered in their time, but there was a
soft spot. To general praise of her collection of clocks she was
impervious; it was unique, and she did not require you to tell her so,
but exhibit admiration for the clock with the little trumpeter, and she
melted. It was the one oasis of sentiment in the Sahara of her mental
outlook, the grain of radium in the pitchblende. Years ago it had stood
in a little New England farmhouse, and a child had clapped her hands
and shouted, even as Betty had done, when the golden man slid from his
hiding-place. Much water had flowed beneath the bridge since those
days. Many things had happened to the child. But she still kept her old
love for the trumpeter. The world knew nothing of this. The world, if
it had known, would have been delighted to stand before the clock and
admire it volubly, by the day. But it had no inkling of the trumpeter's
importance, and, when it came to visit Mrs. Oakley, was apt to waste
its time showering compliments on the obvious beauties of the queens of
the collection.
But Betty, ignoring these, jumped up and down before the dingy clock,
demanding further trumpetings, and, turning to Mrs. Oakley, as one
possessing influence, she was aware of a curious, intent look in the
old lady's eyes.
"Do you like that clock, my dear?" said Mrs. Oakley.
"Yes! Oh, yes!"
"Perhaps you shall have it some day, honey."
Betty was probably the only person who had been admitted to that room
who would not, on the strength of this remark, have steered the
conversation gently to the subject of a small loan. Instead, she ran to
the old lady, and kissed her. And, as to what had happened after that,
memory was vague. There had been some talk, she remembered, of a dollar
to buy candy, but it had come to nothing, and now that she had grown
older and had read the frequent paragraphs and anecdotes that appeared
in the papers about her stepfather's aunt, she could understand why.
She knew now what everybody knew of Mrs. Oakley--her history, her
eccentricities, and the miserliness of which the papers spoke with a
satirical lightness that seemed somehow but a thin disguise for what
was almost admiration.
Mrs. Oakley was one of two children, a son and a daughter, of a Vermont
farmer. Of her early life no records remain. Her public history begins
when she was twenty-two and came to New York. After two years'
struggling, she found a position in the firm of one Redgrave. Those who
knew her then speak of her as a tall, handsome girl, hard and intensely
ambitious. From contemporary accounts she seems to have out-Nietzsched
Nietzsche. Nietzsche's vision stopped short at the superman. Jane
Scobell was a superwoman. She had all the titanic selfishness and
indifference to the comfort of others which marks the superman, and, in
addition, undeniable good looks and a knowledge of the weaknesses of
men. Poor Mr. Redgrave had not had a chance from the start. She married
him within a year. Two years later, catching the bulls in an unguarded
moment, Mr. Redgrave despoiled them of a trifle over three million
dollars, and died the same day of an apoplectic stroke caused by the
excitement of victory. His widow, after a tour in Europe, returned to
the United States and visited Pittsburg. Any sociologist will support
the statement that it is difficult, almost impossible, for an
attractive widow, visiting Pittsburg, not to marry a millionaire, even
if she is not particularly anxious to do so. If such an act is the
primary object of her visit, the thing becomes a certainty. Groping
through the smoke, Jane Redgrave seized and carried off no less a
quarry than Alexander Baynes Oakley, a widower, whose income was one of
the seven wonders of the world. In the fullness of time he, too, died,
and Jane Oakley was left with the sole control of two vast fortunes.
She did not marry again, though it was rumored that it took three
secretaries, working nine hours a day, to cope with the written
proposals, and that butler after butler contracted clergyman's sore
throat through denying admittance to amorous callers. In the ten years
after Alexander Baynes' death, every impecunious aristocrat in the
civilized world must have made his dash for the matrimonial pole. But
her pale eyes looked them over, and dismissed them.
During those early years she was tempted once or twice to speculation.
A failure in a cotton deal not only cured her of this taste, but seems
to have marked the point in her career when her thoughts began to turn
to parsimony. Until then she had lived in some state, but now,
gradually at first, then swiftly, she began to cut down her expenses.
Now we find her in an apartment in West Central Park, next in a
Washington Square hotel, then in a Harlem flat, and finally--her last,
fixed abiding-place--in a small cottage on Staten Island.
It was a curious life that she led, this woman who could have bought
kingdoms if she had willed it. A Swedish maid-of-all-work was her only
companion. By day she would walk in her little garden, or dust, arrange
and wind up her clocks. At night, she would knit, or read one of the
frequent reports that arrived at the cottage from charity workers on
the East Side. Those were her two hobbies, and her only
extravagances--clocks and charity.
Her charity had its limitations. In actual money she expended little.
She was a theoretical philanthropist. She lent her influence, her time,
and her advice, but seldom her bank balance. Arrange an entertainment
for the delectation of the poor, and you would find her on the
platform, but her name would not be on the list of subscribers to the
funds. She would deliver a lecture on thrift to an audience of factory
girls, and she would give them a practical example of what she
preached.
Yet, with all its limitations, her charity was partly genuine. Her mind
was like a country in the grip of civil war. One-half of her sincerely
pitied the poor, burned at any story of oppression, and cried "Give!"
but the other cried "Halt!" and held her back, and between the two she
fell.
* * * * *
It was to this somewhat unpromising haven of refuge that Betty's mind
now turned in her trouble. She did not expect great things. She could
not have said exactly what she did expect. But, at least, the cottage
on Staten Island offered a resting-place on her journey, even if it
could not be the journey's end. Her mad dash from Mervo ceased to be
objectless. It led somewhere.