On the first of June Frederica transferred herself and a somewhat
reluctant Flora from Payton Street to Lakeville.
"Flora thinks her beau won't go out there to see her," Miss Carter
explained.
"Nonsense!" Fred said. "If he wants to see her he'll come, and if he
doesn't want to see her she'd better find it out now." But she was not
entirely unsympathetic, and told Flora there would be a piano in the
cottage so that the music lessons could be continued--which raised the
cloud a little.
A day or two later Mrs. Holmes called at No. 15 to bid Mrs. Payton
good-by for the summer, and the next week the Childses dropped in, in
the evening, for the same purpose. They all made their annual remark:
"How _can_ you stay in town in the hot weather?" And Mrs. Payton made
her annual reply: "I hate summer resorts. I'm much more comfortable in
my own house." Nobody asked the real question, "How can you stay here
with Morty?" And Mrs. Payton never gave the real explanation: "My life
is perfectly empty except for Mortimore; that's why I stay with him."
When they had all left town Mrs. Payton, who changed her under-flannels
and packed up her winter blankets by the calendar, put the stuffed
furniture into linen covers, and told Anne to keep the shutters bowed
all over the house--except in the ell; the sun was never shut out of the
room with the iron bars over the windows. Then summer sleepiness took
possession of the household. No one disturbed the quiet except when,
occasionally, Arthur Weston, bored and kindly, dropped in to ask for a
cup of tea. He told himself once, after a dull hour of drinking very hot
tea and listening to plaintive details of Freddy's behavior, that he was
going to leave directions in his will to have inscribed upon his
tombstone, "_He seen his duty, and he done it._" It occurred to him that
he would not wait for the tombstone to suggest that same duty to
Frederica....
As the Payton house fell into somnolence, Payton Street woke up. The
air, stagnant between sun-baked brick walls, was a medley of noises that
sometimes sank to a rumbling diapason, or sometimes stabbed the ear in
single discords: the jangle of mule-bells, the bumping of the car on the
switch, the jolt of milk-wagons over the cobblestones. In the
provision-store all day long a parrot vociferated; from the
livery-stable came the monotonous pounding of hoofs, or, when Mr. Baker
sent out a hearse and some funeral hacks, the screech of grating wheels.
Hand-organs came and went. Fruit-dealers cried their
wares--"Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawb--" The ailanthus-shaded
pavements swarmed with shrill-voiced children; they summoned one another
to pull the parrot's tail or to look at the hearse; they assailed the
ice-carts, reveling in the drip from the tail-boards and sucking what
bits of ice they could scrape up. Sometimes they squabbled raucously,
sometimes wept; sometimes, hushing their betraying giggles, crept into
Mrs. Payton's front yard and climbed up on the iron dog "to play
circus"--until Mrs. Payton, always on the watch, discovered them and
sent Miss Carter down to drive them away.
Except for skirmishes with the marauding children, Mrs. Payton's days
were very placid. She worked out new puzzles and dozed through stories
in the magazines. She wrote twice a week dutiful letters to her mother,
pausing occasionally to think of something to say or to listen,
absently, to the swish of the watering-cart along the street; she liked
the wet smell of the watered cobblestones mingling with the heavy odor
of the blossoming ailanthus. There never seemed to be anything to tell
Mrs. Holmes, except that she had been dreadfully busy, and that the
"accommodating" waitress didn't keep her sink clean, and that the
barber's children were very trying. Every fine afternoon, sitting
opposite Miss Carter and Morty, she drove out to the park and home
again. Once she summoned up all her energy and went to Lakeville to
spend a day with Fred. She thought that if she didn't go, Freddy would
believe she preferred to stay with Morty. ("Oh, if I _only_ hadn't told
her I loved him best!" she used to reproach herself.) It was a bitter
thing to Mrs. Payton to pass through Laketon and see the place where a
Payton girl ought to be, "instead of living with all kinds of people in
Lakeville!" When Fred met her at the station and brought her to the ugly
little cottage--its garish interior vivid, now, with yellow
pennons--she tried, for the sake of peace, to restrain her disapproval
of everything she saw, but she couldn't help saying she wondered how
Fred could stand the solferino lamp-shade.
"Hideous," Frederica said, carelessly, "so why look at it? I never look
at our Iron Virgin."
"There is some difference in value," Mrs. Payton reproved her.
"No, only in cost," her daughter said; then saw the color mount into her
mother's face, and gritted her teeth. ("I needn't have said that--but
it's true! Darn it, I _am_ like him!") After that she tried to think of
something pleasant to say, but what was there to talk about?--only the
waitress, and the heat, and the barber's dirty children. Indeed, it
would have been difficult to decide which found that visit to the
bungalow the most trying, the mother or the daughter. Certainly it was a
relief to both of them when it was over.
"Mother came out to the camp and I wasn't a bit nice to her," Fred
bemoaned herself, one day, to Arthur Weston, when he met her entering
No. 15 just as he was leaving it. He turned back and followed her into
the parlor.
"And nobody can be so un-nice as you, when you put your mind on it," he
said, genially.
She laughed. "You never talk through your hat to me; you're straight.
That's why I like you."
"Then you'll like me more, for I'm going to be very straight," he warned
her. He looked about for any kind of a cool seat, but subsided into a
linen-covered feather-bed of a chair, close to the bust of Mr. Andrew
Payton; his eye-glasses on their black ribbon dangling in a thread of
sunshine, sent faint lights back and forth on the ceiling. "Life is very
dull for your mother," he said, fanning himself with his hat; "why don't
you come in oftener?"
Frederica, on the piano-stool, struck a careless octave. "Life dull?
Why, I think it's wildly exciting! As for coming in, I'm too busy."
"Reforming the world? You might begin the reformation by making things
happier here. Happiness is a valuable reformatory agent. You could cheer
Mrs. Payton up, but you prefer 'being busy.'"
Fred colored. He had spoken to her once before in this same peremptory
way, and she had been angry; now she was embarrassed. "I'm on my job.
I've started a suffrage league--"
"There are other people who can start leagues. There is only one person
who can make your mother happy."
"Mr. Weston, the relative value of picture puzzles and the emancipation
of women--"
That made him really indignant; he stopped fanning himself and looked at
her with hard eyes. "The doing of the immediate duty by each individual
woman will emancipate the sex a good deal quicker than talking! You
needn't stop your suffrage work to do your duty as a daughter. Did you
ever hear anything about bearing one another's burdens?"
"Sounds like the Bible," Fred said.
"It is. I commend the book as a course in sociology."
"But," she defended herself, "I _do_ come home quite often. I'm going
to be here to-night. I'm going to a dinner dance at the Country Club,
and I'm coming back here to stay all night."
"Yes, you will come for your own convenience, not your mother's
pleasure. See here, Fred! You once asked me if you were like your
father,"--involuntarily she raised her hand, as if to fend off a
blow--"I had great respect for Mr. Payton in many ways, but he had the
selfishness of power. _So have you._ Whew!" he ended, rising, "I believe
it's a hundred in the shade!"
Fred was silent.
"I am coming out to Lakeville in a day or two. Got my new car yesterday,
and I am burning to display it."
Still she was silent. A watering-cart lumbered by and some children
squealed in a sudden cold splash.
"Until now," he said, "I have believed that you were a good sport."
"And now you think I'm not?"
"You don't seem to know what the word Duty means;--which is another way
of saying that you don't play the game."
"If the game is to make things pleasant for Mortimore, and put picture
puzzles together, I don't care to play it," she said, cockily. She
followed him to the front door and stood there as he went down the
steps. But when he reached the gate she darted after him and clapped a
frank hand on his shoulder. "_You're_ a dead game sport! I don't know
any other man who'd have biffed me right in the face like that."
"I skinned my own knuckles," he admitted, with a droll gesture of
rubbing a bruised hand. "Still, I don't mind, if it does you good."
"Cheer up! Maybe it will," she said, and, laughing, threw a kiss to him
and vanished into the house. He laughed, too--then frowned. "She
wouldn't have kissed her hand to Maitland. I don't count," he thought.
As he walked off, hugging the shady side of the street, he added, "I
_am_ a fool!"
Frederica had not the slightest intention of becoming immediately
domestic, but as she went up-stairs to dress she happened to glance down
the little corridor in the ell, and there, outside Morty's door, was
poor, faithful Miss Carter. Her one night off a week, when Mrs. Baker,
from the livery-stable, took her place, did not suffice to lessen very
much the burden of Morty's perpetual society, and that and the heat had
obviously worn upon her.
"Miss Carter, why don't you go to the theater?" Frederica called to her,
impulsively. "I'll stay with Morty to-night. I suppose we can't get Mrs.
Baker on such short notice?"
"No, she can't come except on her regular night; and you are going to a
dance, Miss Freddy," the tired woman objected, rather faintly.
"Nonsense! I don't care about dancing. Go ahead. Get a ticket for 'Heels
and Toes.' It's corking."
Her mother followed her into her room to thank her. "That's very sweet
of you, Freddy. Not that Morty needs anybody when he once gets to sleep;
so far as that goes, I don't need to go to the expense of having Mrs.
Baker here on Miss Carter's evenings out; but I like to feel there's
some one near, you know."
"It's less lonely for you," Fred said, with unwonted insight.
"Yes," Mrs. Payton agreed, wistfully. "She's somebody to talk to. You
needn't sit in Morty's room; outside the door will do. And I'll sit with
you."
"I want to read, so I'll sit inside by the light."
"Well, don't be nervous. He won't stir."
"I'm not in the least nervous," Fred said; "I'm only--disgusted."
Mrs. Payton's chin quivered. "You ought not to speak so about your
brother. Remember, even if he isn't--bright, he's a _man_, and the head
of the family." Fred looked at her with genuine curiosity; how could she
say a thing like that! "Besides," Mrs. Payton added, "Doctor Davis
always said his intellect was there; it isn't his fault that it is
veiled."
"No, it isn't _his_ fault," Frederica said, significantly. She took her
book into the bare room, which could not be carpeted or curtained
because of the poor, destroying hands that sometimes had to be tied for
fear they would claw and snatch, even at Miss Carter's heavy chair or at
the table, screwed down to the floor. There was a drop-light over the
table, and Frederica turned it on and opened her book; but she did not
read much; the snoring breath from the bed disturbed her. Instead, she
fell to thinking about Howard Maitland--sometimes she was impatient with
herself for thinking of him so constantly! But the warm satisfaction
that took possession of her whenever he came into her mind, was an
irresistible temptation. She did not often speculate upon his feeling
for her. "He's fond of me," she told herself, once in a while,
contentedly. That some time he would tell her he was fond of her was a
matter of course. Just now, she fell to calculating how soon her last
letter would reach him. One from him, acknowledging the receipt of some
suffrage literature, had come that morning. "I don't believe one woman
in fifty has your brains," he had written. Fred smiled; when he came
home in November she would show him those "brains"! Apparently, Mr.
Arthur Weston did not take much stock in them--"He prefers the domestic
virtues," she thought, with a flash of amusement. "I wonder if I'm
domestic enough to suit him, to-night? I suppose he would think it was
better to sit with an idiot than to try to move the world along!" But
the next minute she was contrite. "He can't help being old. I suppose
this is the sort of thing his generation calls 'Duty'!"
She might have reflected further upon the foolishness of the past
generation, if just then Mrs. Payton had not come stealthily along the
hall. She stood in the doorway, raising a cautioning finger.
"Oh, you can't wake him," Frederica said, in her natural voice. But Mrs.
Payton spoke in a whisper.
"Freddy, isn't your cottage damp--so near the lake? There's no surer way
to take cold than--"
"Not a bit damp!"
"Does Flora make good coffee for you?"
"Bully."
"I hope she's more contented. Miss Carter says the whole trouble with
Flora is she wants to get married, but she makes herself so cheap the
men won't look at her."
Fred frowned. That word "cheap" always irritated her.
"Miss Carter is a good woman," Mrs. Payton went on, "but she's a little
coarse once in a while."
"I suppose Flora wants a home of her own," Fred said, yawning; "when
women have no brains they have to marry for homes."
"All women want homes, whether they have brains or not," said Mrs.
Payton; "where would they have their babies if they didn't have homes?
Freddy, it must be very lonely for you in Lakeville. Your Uncle William
is really shocked about it. He says there are no people of our class
there."
"Billy-boy is correct. I had two people of the better class in to supper
last night--_workers_. Mother, one of the things the women's vote is
going to do, besides giving the Floras of the world a chance to be
independent of men, is to obliterate class lines."
"Then it will have to obliterate life," Mrs. Payton whispered. "Women
need men to take care of them. And as for class, God makes a difference
in people. You can't vote God down."
It was so unusual for Mrs. Payton to set her opinion against her
daughter's that Frederica laughed, in spite of herself. Mrs. Payton
laughed a little, too; then they both looked at the bed, but the heavy
breathing went steadily on.
"Your grandmother thinks," Mrs. Payton said, impulsively, "that you
would have more beaux if we lived up on the Hill."
"That's like her."
"Freddy dear, you know I have to stay here on account of Morty? Not that
I'd do more for him than for you--I love you both _just_ the same! But I
couldn't take him up on the Hill."
"'Course you couldn't! Mother, for the Lord's sake, don't listen to
Grandmother! She's one of the type that keeps the world back."
"She doesn't like change, that's all," Mrs. Payton explained. She came
in and sat down at the table.
"Yes; she doesn't like change," Fred agreed. "If Nature had listened to
Grandmother we'd all be protoplasm still. Probably the grandmother of
the first worm that sprouted legs, kicked. No, she couldn't kick," Fred
said, chuckling, "because she didn't have the legs she despised; she
just said, 'It isn't _done_!'"
Mrs. Payton looked perfectly blank.
"I'm going to use that idea in my paper," Fred said, with satisfaction.
"Do you think Howard Maitland likes you to write papers, dear?"
"Likes me to? Why shouldn't he? It wouldn't make a bit of difference to
me whether he did or not, but as he has ordinary garden sense, I am sure
he doesn't dislike it."
"Men," Mrs. Payton said, timidly, "don't like clever women."
"Clever men do."
"Your dear father was clever--but he married me."
The simplicity of that was touching, even to Frederica.
"You were a thousand times too good for him!"
Mrs. Payton was pleased, but she made the proper protest: "Oh, my
_dear_! I had a letter from your grandmother yesterday; she thinks it's
shocking--your living in Lakeville alone."
"Go on!" Frederica said, contemptuously.
"Hush-sh!" Mrs. Payton cautioned her.
Fred shrugged her shoulders. "You can't wake--_That_. Talk about being
shocked,--I suppose it never occurred to Uncle William or Grandmother
that their ideas of what is and isn't shocking, produced That?"
Mrs. Payton shrunk away as if her daughter had struck her; she murmured,
chokingly, some wounded remonstrance, then tiptoed through the shadowy
hall into the sitting-room. At the table, spread with an unfinished game
of Canfield, she sat down, drearily. This was what always happened; they
simply could not get along together! Whenever she held out empty hands,
begging for love, they were slapped. She began to shuffle the cards,
wondering painfully if it was because Freddy was still brooding over
that thing she said about loving Mortimore best. "I'm afraid she's
jealous," Mrs. Payton sighed.
Frederica, alone, reflected upon her mother's assertion that men
disliked clever women. It annoyed her, not because there was any truth
in it, but because it reminded her of Woman's cowardly acquiescence in
Man's estimate of her intelligence. Of course it was all right about
Howard; Howard had sense! But men generally--did they really dislike
clever women? If so, it merely meant that they were afraid of Truth.
They wanted women to be timid, and pretty, and useless: to be slaves and
playthings!--so they fooled them into the belief that silliness was
attractive, and that slavery and virtue were the same thing. It was men
who had taught women to believe that awful thing her mother had said
about Morty's being "the head of the family"; had taught them to believe
that a man--not because he was good, or wise, or strong, but because he
was a _man_--was the one to rule!
"No wonder we are slaves; we've swallowed that lie since Adam. Well,
there'll be none of it in mine!" she said. What was going to be in
"hers"? Business, to begin with. She was going to make a success of her
business. Her books had shown a better month--they should show a still
better month, if she wore her shoes out walking about town to please
clients! Yes, Success! It was not a personal ambition: there was no
self-seeking in Fred Payton; she wanted to succeed because her success
would show what women could do; show that a woman was as able as a
man--as wise, as good ("better! better!" she told herself); show that a
woman could rule, could achieve, could be "the head of the family"! The
thing that was to be "in hers" was work to free women from the shackles
of the old ideals, from content in sex slavery, with all its ignorances
and futilities, its slackness of purpose and shameful timidities, that a
man-made world had called "duties." And Howard, who was not "afraid of
clever women," would help her! A passion of consecration to the woman's
cause rose in her heart like a wave. For the next hour she walked up and
down the dimly lighted room, planning what she was going to do for
women.
It was nearly twelve when Miss Carter's ponderous step told her she was
free. She laughed good-naturedly at the thanks the refreshed woman was
eager to give, but just as she was leaving the room Miss Carter's last
word caught her ear:
"I've had such a pleasant time, Miss Freddy. I'll do my work better for
it."
'Do her work better.'... In her eagerness to do her own work Fred had
never thought very much of other people's; but what a different world it
would be if everybody did their work better! "If every woman did her
best on her job, even if it were only taking care of Mortimores, it
would help things along," she told herself. "It's slackness on the job
that holds the world back." Looked at from that angle, then--the
bettering of Miss Carter's work--perhaps it did count to make things
pleasant at Payton Street? The idea put a new light on Mr. Weston's
call-down. Bearing other people's burdens had seemed not in the least
worth while; but if cheering people up helped them to do their
work--work which, after all, had to be done, somehow!--why, then there
was sense in it. She saw no sense in "cheering" her mother, for her
mother did nothing at all. Frederica had no dutiful illusions; Mrs.
Payton was an absolutely useless human being--and her daughter was
perfectly aware of it. "_She_ has no burden to bear," Fred thought,
carelessly. "But to give old fat Carter a hand by just amusing
her,--that helps the doing of work; and _that_ counts! I'll come in
oftener," she decided.
So, in her own fashion, by a back door, so to speak, Frederica Payton
entered into the old idea of _Duty_.