The invitation to walk in the parade had not been given easily. Fred had
forced herself to ask Laura, for very shame at the ache of resentment
which neither reason, nor her old habit of affection for her cousin,
could conquer. Laura's refusal gave her a sort of angry satisfaction.
"_Of course!_ What could you expect? She's a sweet little thing, but she
has no mind to speak of. Poor Howard! She must bore him to death." As
for Howard's not liking parades,--well, that was queer. He never had
quite realized their value; probably because he hadn't really thought
about them. She would talk it over with him sometime, and make him
understand. She was not in the least annoyed with Howard, but it was all
she could do to hide her contempt for Laura; "Why _do_ women grovel so
before men? It makes me perfectly sick!" Even when Laura, with the old,
puppy-like devotion, offered, one morning, to go with her to Hazelton
where Fred was to address the strikers, it was not easy to be cordial.
"I'll tag around after you, and clap," Laura said.
"Howard willing?" Fred said, sarcastically.
Laura laughed: "I haven't asked him. He's in Cincinnati. Won't be home
until this afternoon."
"I suppose you wouldn't go if he wasn't?"
"I suppose I wouldn't," Laura said, simply.
Fred's lip drooped. But she only said, good-naturedly, "Come along!"
They went to Hazelton by trolley, Fred having vetoed Laura's limousine:
"It's too much 'Lady Bountiful.' Your gasolene for a week would pay a
girl's board for a month."
In the long ride, spinning and jouncing through the countryside until
they reached the squalid outskirts of the little town, Frederica
listened to Laura's talk of Europe--and Howard. Of Paris frocks--and
Howard. Of the voyage home--and Howard.
"I won't be horrid, I _won't_! I love her just exactly the same--" Fred
was saying to herself, staring out of the window at the flying
landscape, at the woods where the leafless trees were showing the haze
of swelling buds, at the snow, melting in the frozen furrows. "Yes...."
"No...." "Really?" she would say, when sometimes Laura's chatter paused.
("Oh, how bored Howard must be by this sort of thing!" she thought. She
couldn't help remembering how differently she had talked to Howard--the
big things, the real things! "Poor old Howard!") Once there was quite a
long pause, and Fred stopped watching the racing landscape and looked at
Laura. It was then that Laura softly told her a piece of news:
"Of course, Howard's awfully pleased. He wants a girl, but I want a
boy."
Frederica was silent for a moment: then, very gentle and tender, "I'm
awfully glad," she said, and squeezed Laura's hand.
Then the chatter began again, and Fred looked out of the window at the
snow melting on slopes that faced the sun.
The hall in Hazelton where the strikers were awaiting Frederica was
terribly hot and stuffy, and packed with women crowding so closely about
the melon-shaped iron stove that the air was stifling with the smell of
scorching clothes. It occurred to Laura, opening a window
surreptitiously, that the girls were here as much for the sake of the
glowing stove as for the chance to hear Fred. She watched her cousin
with shrinking admiration. What she said did not particularly interest
her, but Frederica's intimacy with the girls made her wonder. "She
_touches_ them!" Laura thought, with a quiver of disgust.
When Fred had made her speech--which Laura vociferously applauded--they
all trooped out into the street, but paused while Frederica (Laura
skulking behind her) stood in the doorway for a further harangue.
Unfortunately--because the knot of listening girls obstructed the
sidewalk--a police officer, shoving them out of the way, happened to
show some rudeness to a little Italian, who, in return, jabbering
shrilly, struck at the man's patient and restraining arm, which caused
him to gather her two delicate wrists in one big, vise-like hand, and
hold her, a little, kicking, struggling creature, who made about as much
impression on his large blue bulk as a sparrow might make upon a
locomotive.
"There, now, keep quiet, sissy," he said, wearily.
But Catalina kicked harder than ever, and the officer shook her, gently.
It was at that moment that Fred's eye fell upon him.
"I'll stop that!" she said, between shut teeth.
"Oh, Fred, don't do anything," Laura entreated,--but Fred was at the
man's side.
Her anger disconcerted him. "It's against the law to obstruct the
sidewalk," he explained.
"I had no hand in making the law, and therefore I shall not obey it!"
"Better can that talk, and keep it for the Court," said the man,
beginning to get red in the face. To which Frederica retorted by telling
him her opinion of men in general and policemen in particular.
A man can stand kicks from little feet, but "lip"--after a certain point
of forbearance has been reached, is another matter. Fred punctuated her
remonstrances by putting an abrupt hand on his arm, and instantly there
was an unseemly scuffle, in which Laura, running out from the shelter of
the doorway, tried to draw Fred away. The result was that before they
really knew what had happened, the little Italian, Miss Frederica
Payton, and Mrs. Howard Maitland found themselves in a patrol-wagon
rumbling and jouncing along over the icy Belgian blocks, a taciturn man
in a blue coat sitting in the doorway of the van to prevent any possible
leap to liberty.
The whole thing was so sudden that the cousins were perfectly
bewildered. Even as they were being hustled into the wagon, a crowd had
gathered, springing up, apparently, out of the ground. There had been a
sea of faces--good natured, amused, unconcerned faces; a medley of
voices, jeering and hooting, or raucously sympathetic; a vision of the
striking girls--for whose cause they were there!--forsaking them,
melting away, fleeing around corners and up side-streets; then, the
jolting along through the noon emptiness of the streets, toward the
station-house.
Frederica, getting her breath, after the suddenness of it all, grew very
much excited. She scented the fray--the contest between man-made laws
and unconsulted woman! It occurred to her--though Laura said, in
despairing tones, "Oh, Fred, _please_ don't"--to fling some suffrage
literature into the street over the head of the officer; she did it
until he told her to "set still, you!" At which Catalina, hearing her
defender reproved, kicked him, causing him to turn around and grab her
ankle; he held it in one great paw, and whistled, absently.
Fred was furious. "Don't touch that girl's ankle!" she said.
"Shut up," he replied, calmly; and, oblivious of both of them, still
holding Catalina's little kicking feet, he began to talk over his
shoulder to the driver of the van about the price of cucumbers. "Here,
you!" he interrupted himself--"stop biting, sissy! Gee! this chippy has
teeth--" and he poked Catalina, playfully, with his club. Frederica
whitened with rage, but Catalina lapsed suddenly into such abject fright
that when they reached their destination she had to be lifted out of the
wagon, and pushed--not too gently--up the steps into the station-house.
Laura, who got out next, was shaking so that the officer put a friendly
hand under her elbow to assist her. Frederica followed the other two,
her head high with anger and interest.
In the station-house, the receiving-room, with its one dirt-incrusted
window, was dark, even at one o'clock--perhaps because, shoulder-high on
the long-unwashed paint, was a dado of grime left by innumerable
cringing backs. There was one back against it now; a drunken man, with
wabbling head and glassy, half-shut eyes, was whining and sobbing, and
trying to keep on his legs. When the sergeant asked his name, he
answered by a hiccough which the officer, as indifferent and efficient
as a cog in some slowly revolving and crushing wheel, translated into
"Thomas Coney." "Come, stop crying; be a perfect gentleman, Tommy, be a
perfect gentleman!" he said, yawning. And, curiously enough, Tommy
straightened up and swallowed his sobs.
"Look at him!" Fred whispered to Laura; "he's getting hold of himself! I
suppose that's his idea of a perfect gentleman."
Laura, rigid with misery, made no answer. When Thomas had been disposed
of--watched by Frederica's intent eyes--she and Laura, whose knees were
plainly shaking, and Catalina, who was sobbing and calling upon God,
lined up in front of the sergeant's desk. Frederica answered the usual
questions with brief directness; her attitude toward the big, bored
officer was distinctly friendly and confidential; as he closed the
blotter, she began to tell him that she had been urging the girls to
demand the bal-- Before she could finish the word, she found herself, to
her angry amazement, being moved along toward the corridor.
"But--stop! I have not finished. And I want to telephone, and--"
"What number?"
Both girls spoke at once, Frederica giving Mr. Weston's number, and
Laura, stammering with apprehension that Howard might not go directly
home from the train, naming her own house. "Ask Mr. Weston to hunt
Howard up," she implored her cousin. The telephoning was fruitless, as
neither gentleman could be found.
"You can try 'em again over at the House of Detention," the man said,
not unkindly. "Move on! Move on!"
They moved on, in spite of themselves, assisted by the impersonal
pressure of an officer's hand on Fred's shoulder--Laura shivering all
over, Fred's face red with displeasure at the affront of not being
listened to, Catalina perfectly happy and inclined to giggle.
"You'll make Mr. Weston find Howard?" Laura said, in a frantic whisper,
as they walked across the courtyard to the little jail back of the
station-house. "Oh, I was going to meet him,--and I am _here_!"
Fred shrugged her shoulders: "Why did you come, if you mind it so?
(Married women are awfully poor sports," she thought.)
"Do you think I'd funk and leave you?" Laura retorted; and Fred's face
softened.
"Howard will be so upset--" Laura said, quivering.
"Nonsense! He'll see the fun of it," Fred assured her. In matters of
this kind, she understood Howard better than little Lolly ever could....
Her face was glowing with excitement! This meant something to the Cause!
An old phrase ran through her mind, "The blood of the martyrs is the
seed,"--"I tell you what, Laura," she said, under her breath, "this
ridiculous business is the seed of a big thing; it has given me a great
idea: _let women refuse to obey the laws, until they are allowed to make
them!_"
"This way," said the officer, and herded them into the receiving-room of
the House of Detention. The next few minutes stung even Fred's
aplomb--they were searched! The indignity of hands passing down her
figure--hands not rough, not unkind, not insulting, merely
mechanical,--made her unreasonably, but quite furiously, angry. Laura
was a little shocked, but her dignity was simple and unshaken. Catalina,
her dirty, streaky face puffed with crying, laughed loudly with
amusement.
"This is abominable!" Fred said, her voice shaking. The matron, making
notes on a pad, paid no attention to the protest. It was all in the
day's work--human wreckage washed up out of the gutter, rose in this
bleak, stone-lined room every day; rose, flooded into the surrounding
cells, where it vociferated, wept, pleaded, stood rigid with fury and
shame, or else collapsed into sodden slumber. Then, by and by, it ebbed
away. And the next day, and the next, the same drift and ruin of
humanity flooded in and drifted out.
After further telephoning had been promised by the matron, the three
girls were placed in a cell. Catalina at once flung herself full length
on the bench that ran along two sides of it; Fred sat down and took out
her note-book. "I mustn't forget one incident," she told herself. The
experience had penetrated below the theatrical consciousness of
martyrdom, and roused a primitive anger, not for herself, or the other
two (of whom, to tell the truth, she thought very little), but against
the wastefulness of a system which permitted this wreckage to sweep in
and sweep out--unchecked, unchanged, over and over. She saw, as she had
never seen before, the righteousness of woman's demand that she should
have a hand in the making and the administering of Law. She was
impressed, not so much by the injustice of leaving the punishment of
women to men, as by the irrationality of it.
"There ought to have been a woman in that station-house," she said; "and
there ought to be women police officers and judges. Just wait till we
get the vote, Laura--_we'll_ stop this idiocy! That's what it is:
idiocy, not justice."
Laura was not concerned about terms; she stood, tense and trembling,
gripping the iron bars of the door. "Howard will be so upset, and Father
will be dreadfully angry!"
"Oh, yes," Fred agreed, carelessly, "Uncle William will have a fit, of
course. But I'll bet on Howard! Mother will almost die of it, I'm
afraid," she said, her face sobering; "I'm sorry about that. But, of
course, Laura, that's the penalty of progress. We--you and I and
Howard--are moving the world, and the old people have got to get out of
the way or get run over!"
Laura was silent.
"The thing that hits me hardest," said Frederica, "is the way women
won't stand together. Every one of those girls took to their heels."
"Oh, _when_ will Howard come?" said Laura, with a sobbing breath. She
was not sorry she had stood by Fred when all the rest of them "took to
their heels," only--"I'll die if he doesn't come soon!" she thought,
shaking very much. Once she glanced over her shoulder at Frederica, who
was straining her eyes (the cell was lighted only from the hall) over
her note-book, and she felt a faint thrill of admiration. Imagine,
making notes at such a moment!
The afternoon passed; hours--hours--hours.
"Oh, when will somebody come?" Laura said, in a whisper. Frederica had
put up her note-book, and seemed absorbed in thought. Catalina was
asleep.
There came a sound of voices in the outer court, and again Laura
clutched at the iron bars. (She had been at the grating ever since the
lock was turned upon them.)
"It's Howard!"
Even Fred was moved to stand up and peer out into the whitewashed
corridor--then both girls shrank back; a drunken negress was being
pulled along over the flagstones of the passage to the receiving-room; a
few minutes later, she was pulled back again, and they heard the clang
of a cell door; then yells, then evidently sickness; then cries upon God
and the devil, and a torrent of unspeakably vile invective. Even Fred
quailed before it, and Laura clung to her in such a paroxysm of fear
that they neither of them heard the hurrying feet outside on the
flagging--then the lock was flung out, and Howard caught his wife in his
arms.
"I just got word," he said, hoarsely; "Weston caught me at the club. My
darling!"
The tears were in his eyes and his face was as white as Laura's. Behind
him, Arthur Weston looked grimly over his head at Frederica.
"I had to chase him all around town," he said, "or we'd have been here
before. And it's taken time to bail you out."
"I'm sorry to have bothered you," Fred said; "but it's been an awfully
valuable experience to Laura and me. _I_ wouldn't have missed it for
anything!"
The matron, faintly interested, was standing by to see the end of it.
"Them swells will learn something," she whispered, to her assistant; "I
guess that thin one ain't bad. I thought she was. Well, good-by, ma'am,"
she said, listlessly; and went back to work on a piece of dingy
embroidery until the next dumping of human rubbish should claim her
attention.
Out in the courtyard Frederica made a little delay. Where was Catalina
to go? What was she to do? "Out on bail? Does that mean she's got to
come back here again?"
"It means that she's got to report at the municipal criminal court," Mr.
Weston instructed her; "and so have you and Laura, unless I can patch
things up."
"Good!" Fred said, eagerly, "I wanted to know the end of this silly
business!"
She got into the limousine, where Laura, still very white, had been
placed by Howard, who put an unabashed arm about her. His impatience at
Fred's delay was obvious.
"Mr. Weston! for the Lord's sake, shut her up!" he said, angrily.
Frederica, sitting down beside him, gave him an astonished look. "It
was I who was talking, not Catalina," she explained; "I was telling her
what to do. Of course I couldn't go away and leave her to shift for
herself. Howard, this has been a great experience!"
Howard's jaw set: "Laura, dear," he whispered, "it's all right. Don't
shake so, Kitty! It's all right. Mr. Weston will fix it up so you
needn't go to court."
"You see," Fred began, volubly, "it all happened because of the
policeman's rudeness to that poor little Catalina; Laura and I had to
protect her, and--"
"Look here"--Howard turned a fierce face upon her--"you can make a fool
of yourself, all you want to, but I'll thank you not to drag my wife
into your damned nonsense!"
Frederica stared at him, open-mouthed.
"Maitland," the other man said, gravely, "I am sure you will apologize
for that."
Howard's hand clenched over his little Laura's; he swallowed, and set
his teeth. "If I have been rude, I apologize. But the fact remains; Fred
ought not to have dragged Laura into any such disgusting and indecent
business!"
"Oh, Howard!" Laura protested; "she didn't. I did it myself. It wasn't
Fred's fault."
Frederica was silent, but Weston saw her face fall into lines of haggard
amazement. As they went spinning along back to town, Howard gave himself
up to whispering to Laura. Arthur Weston asked one or two questions, and
Frederica told him, briefly, just what had caused the disturbance that
ended in the "interesting experience." For the most part no one spoke.
At the Maitland house, Howard almost lifted his little wife out of the
car; he was quivering with pain at her pain--at the thought that her
ears had heard the moans of Life, that her eyes had seen its filth and
horror; he was so angry at Frederica that he could not trust himself
even to look at her. Of course he made no farewells. He closed the door
of the limousine with a bang, and said, through the open window:
"Mr. Weston, do anything, _any_thing! so that Laura won't be dragged
into it. Any amount of money, of course! And the newspapers--good Lord!
Can we fix them?"
"I'll see what can be done," Weston said; and the car spun away.
Frederica turned a bewildered face upon him. She stammered a little:
"He didn't"--her voice fell to an astonished whisper--"_understand_."
They scarcely spoke until they reached the Payton house; it was dusk
when they went up the steps together and rung the front-door bell. ("I
am coming in to explain things to your mother," he said, quietly.) But
as they stood waiting for the door to be opened, Frederica, looking at
him with miserable eyes, made a gesture of finality.
"_I never knew him_," she said.
As they heard the feet of the parlor-maid coming through the hall, she
gripped his arm with her trembling hand:
"Arthur," she said, in a whisper; "just think! I asked--I asked him to
marry me. And this is what he is!"