A SECOND START IN LIFE
With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her room,
turned and locked the door after she had entered, and took off her hat
and wraps and put them away in the closet. Her head was still carried
high and her eyes were defiant and dark in the marble-like pallor of her
face. Except for her burning eyes and the scarlet line of her tightly
closed lips, she looked as still and as cold as a statue.
"I'd rather die than have them know that it made any difference," she
thought. "I'd rather die than have them know that I cared." Then sinking
into a chair by the dressing-table, she laid her head on her arm and
wept tears, not of wounded love, but of deep and passionate anger.
She had spoiled her life! Because of her mad and headstrong folly, she
had spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven! Had she been the
veriest fool she couldn't have done worse--she who had thought herself
so sensible, so strong, so efficient! Jane couldn't have done worse, and
yet she had always despised Jane for her weakness. But she had been as
weak as Jane, she had been as unreasonable, she had been as incredibly
sentimental and silly. And even in her folly she had irretrievably
failed. She had made her choice, and yet she had not been able to keep
the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her--here was the
sharpest sting--a man had tired of her after a few months--had tired of
her while she was still deeply in love with him. Her humiliation, while
she sat there strangling her sobs, was so intense that it ran in little
flames over her body. At the moment she was not angry with George, she
was not even angry with Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering
violence of her nature was aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of
her own weakness. This emotion, which was so profound, so torrential, in
its force that it seemed to shake the depths of her being, left room for
no other feeling--for no other thought in her consciousness. She had but
one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it in its
beginning.
Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while she
wiped her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute gesture. No,
she was not crushed; she would not allow herself even to be hurt. Her
lot might be as sordid as Jane's, but she would make it different by the
strength and the effectiveness of her resistance. She would never submit
as Jane submitted; she would never become, through sheer inertia, a part
of the ugliness that enveloped her. Thanks to the vein of iron in her
soul she would never--no, not if she died fighting--become one of the
victims of life.
Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold water; and
she was still drying them before the mirror when the children came in,
flushed and blooming, with their hands in Miss Polly Hatch's. What
splendid children they were, she thought, looking wistfully at their
eager faces. Any father, any mother in the world, might be proud of
them. Fanny, the elder, was like an angel in her white fur coat and
pert little cap, with her short golden curls like bunches of yellow silk
on her shoulders, and her blue eyes, as grave as a philosopher's,
beaming softly under her thick jet-black lashes. She was not
particularly bright; she was, for her age, an unconscionable snob; but
no one could deny that she was as beautiful as an angel to look at.
"Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn't," she said coolly
as she examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had put down on
the table. "I needn't kiss people if I don't want to, need I? Archibald
doesn't like to kiss either. He's naughty about it sometimes when ladies
ask him to. He doesn't like scratchin'. Isn't it funny to call kissing,
'scratchin'? He told me Miss Polly scratched him and he didn't like it.
He is afraid of her because she is so ugly. Why are you ugly, Miss
Polly? Couldn't you help it? Did God make you ugly just for fun? Why
doesn't he make everybody pretty? I would if I were God. What is God's
last name? Archibald says it is Walker. Is it Walker, mamma, and how
does Archibald know? Who told him--"
When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with the nurse,
she went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at Archibald, who
stood stolidly at his mother's knee, biting deep bites into a red apple
Miss Polly had given him. He was not a handsome child, even Gabriella
admitted that his spectacles spoiled his appearance; but he was
remarkably intelligent for his four years, and he was so strong and
sturdy that he had never had a day's illness in his life. His face was
unusually thoughtful and expressive, and his eyes, in spite of the
disfiguring glasses, were large, brown, and beautiful, with something of
the luminous softness of Cousin Jimmy's. Though she could not remember
her father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him,
and Miss Polly declared, with conviction, that he was "already his
living image." Of the two children, for some obscure reason which she
could not define and which was probably rooted in instinct, Gabriella
had the greater tenderness for her son; and though she denied this
preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had both commented
upon it. Even his temper, which was uncontrollable at times, endeared
him to her, and the streak of savage in his nature seemed to awaken some
dim ancestral memories in her brain.
"Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny," said his mother,
after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a minute. While
she did so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her whole universe had
dwindled down to her children. Of all her happiness only her children
remained to her.
"Don't want to run," replied Archibald with beaming good humour. In his
passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was possible.
"But Fanny is waiting for you."
"Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton." That was
another of his eccentricities. Just as he had insisted that God's "last
name was Walker," so he had begun of his own accord, and for no visible
reason, to call nurse "Mutton." He was always fitting names of his own
invention to persons; and in his selection he was guided by a principle
so obscure that Gabriella had never been able to discover its origin.
Thus his grandmother from the first had been "Budd," and he had
immediately started to call Miss Polly "Pang."
"Don't you want to go back to the Park, Archibald? You must finish your
walk."
"Will the poor boy be there?" He never forgot anything. It was quite
probable that he would inquire for "the poor boy" a year hence.
"Perhaps. You might take him an apple and a penny."
He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his mother's and
one on Miss Polly's knee.
"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided against the
suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any nurse, and Fanny
wouldn't like him to have hers. I'll take Pang."
"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss Polly
lives so far away she can't stay very long."
He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's
commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as far
away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about the poor
boy needing shoes?"
"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul," remarked Miss
Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the hall to the
nursery. "The more I study him the curiouser he seems to me. If he wan't
so quick about some things you might think his wits were sort of
addled--but they ain't, are they? Now, whatever do you reckon put the
notion in his head to call me 'Pang?"
All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with
amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above the
ruddy creases in her cheeks.
"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself. But
don't you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear you say
so."
"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and there
ain't any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first time I ever
saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is exactly like yo' pa
to be makin' up all kinds of foolish names out of nothin'. Yo' pa used
to call me Poll Parrot, that he did."
"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She saw him
in the mountains last summer."
"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit well,
Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall had before
she came down with heart complaint. The doctors were fussin' over her
for weeks before they could find out what the trouble was, but I said
all along it wan't nothin' in the world but a bruised heart, and sure
enough that was just what they found out was the matter. You ain't had a
feelin' of heart burn after you eat, have you? Sometimes it don't take
you that way, though; you just begin to have palpitations when you go up
and down stairs and then you start to wakin' up in the night with
shortness of breath. That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know I
nursed her till she died, and I've seen her get right black in the face
when she stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting
on old Mrs. Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run
down so her son Arthur--I call him Arthur to his face because I used to
sew there when he wan't more'n knee high--well, Arthur said she'd have
to have somebody to wait on her every minute and she thought she'd
rather have Lydy than anybody else because Lydy was always so handy in a
sickroom. That was six months ago, and Lydy's been stayin' on there ever
since. She says there ain't anybody on earth like Mr. Arthur, and she
never could make out why you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had an eye
for anybody but you, and he's got yo' picture--the one in the white
dress--on his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the
time. That ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a
girl in Arthur in little ways, wan't there?"
"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and not until
Miss Polly answered her, was she aware that she had spoken aloud. In her
spiritual reaction from the grosser reality of passion, the delicacy and
remoteness of Arthur's love borrowed the pious and mystic qualities of
religious worship. She had seen the sordid and ugly sides of sex; and
she felt now a profound disgust for the emotion which drew men and women
together--for the light in the eyes, the touch of the lips, the clinging
of the hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now
the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted
love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was
liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she
had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now,
utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life?
What is the thing that really counts, after all? What is the possession
that makes all the striving worth while in the end? At twenty-seven love
is over for me, and if love is over, what remains to fill the rest of
my life? There must be something else--there must be a reality somewhere
which is truer, which is profounder, than love." This, she knew, was the
question which neither tradition nor custom could answer. Religion,
perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her
generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a possible
solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance, facts,
experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover; and it was
just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a guide. Faith she had
had in her cradle--faith in life, faith in love, faith in herself; and
it was faith that had brought her to this bleak disenchantment of
spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now, not faith; she wanted truth, not
illusion.
"Well, you never can tell about a thing like that," Miss Polly was
saying in her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing the pattern
of a dress or the stitching of a seam. "It was feelin', I reckon, and
feelin' is one of the things nobody can count on. But you did mighty
well, even if you didn't marry Arthur. I saw Mr. George downtown
yesterday, when I went around to Stern's to match the edging for a baby
dress, and I thought to myself I'd seldom seen a handsomer piece of
flesh than he was. He was walkin' along up Fifth Avenue with Florrie
Spencer--I'll always call her Florrie Spencer I don't care how many
times she marries--and everybody in the street turned right plumb round
to look at 'em. She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a
fit as her dress was! One of them trailin' black things that fit as
tight as wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet. She was
holdin' up her skirts to show her feet, I reckon, and her collar was so
high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her head to look at Mr.
George. But I never saw anybody with more style--no, not if it was that
Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the Sunday papers. I declare
Florrie's waist didn't look much bigger round than the leg of that
table--honestly it didn't--and her hat was perched on a bandeau so high
that you could see the new sort of way she'd gone and had her hair
crimped--they call it Marcellin' up here, don't they?"
"Was she with George?" asked Gabriella indifferently.
"They were goin' to some restaurant or another for tea, I reckon, and
they certainly were a fine-lookin' pair. I wish you could have seen 'em.
Not that you wouldn't have been a match for 'em," she added consolingly.
"You and Mr. George look mighty well when you're together. You're just
on a level, and if you could manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite
at the waist, and hold yo'self with that bend out at the back the way
Florrie does, you'd have pretty near as fine a figure as she has. Ain't
it funny," she added irrelevantly, "but I was just studyin' last night
about the way yo' ma used to say that all yo' folks married badly. I
reckon she got that idea along of yo' pa's kin. You don't recollect much
about 'em, but one of yo' pa's brothers married a woman who went clean
deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him. Then there was yo'
Cousin Nelly Harrison--she married badly, or only middlin' well anyway.
There certainly was a lot of 'em when you come to think--not countin'
Jane and Mr. Charley, and I can't help what happens," she concluded
sentimentally, "I ain't ever goin' back on Mr. Charley--not after the
way he sent me two loads of coal the winter I was laid up with
rheumatism and couldn't work. Well, it's about time for me to be goin',
Gabriella. If you want me for anything, you just drop me a line to say
so. William's children are gettin' so big, I can come out for the day
'most any time now, and if William's courtin' goes on all right, I
reckon he won't be wantin' me much longer. He's been waitin' on a young
woman right steady for more'n six months, and it wouldn't surprise me a
bit if something was to come of it befo' summer."
"Then you'd go South again, wouldn't you?" There was a wistful sound in
Gabriella's voice as she put the question. Miss Polly was a tiresome
person, but at least she was faithful, and long habit had established a
bond of tolerance, if not of affection, between them. In the last few
months Gabriella had grown to look upon her as the one living
association with her childhood, and she was so lonely that she dreaded
to sever the single tie with the past that still remained to her. "I
believe she'd work her fingers to the bone for me, and, of course, she
can't help being so garrulous," she thought.
"I reckon I will, if it comes to that, but I'd hate like anything to
leave you and the children," answered Miss Polly. "I feel somehow as if
I belonged up here with you all, and I've grown real fond of Archibald."
"Yes, I'd hate to give you up," said Gabriella, as she let her go and
turned back again into the room. Her brain had worked quickly while Miss
Polly was talking, and the undercurrent of gossip had helped, rather
than retarded, the clearness and rapidity of her thoughts. All her
weakness, all her anger had passed. She saw the situation without
exaggeration and without illusion, for she had made her decision in the
few minutes between the entrance and the departure of the seamstress.
The embittering memories of her life with George were submerged in the
invigorating waves of energy that flooded her being. Her inert body
responded to the miraculous restoration of her spirit; and, while she
walked swiftly from the door to the window, she had a sensation of
lightness and ease as if she had just awakened from a refreshing sleep.
For seven years all the strength of her character had been drained by
the supreme function of motherhood; but now her children had ceased to
need the whole of her life, and she was free to belong at least in part
to herself--free to enter unrestricted into the broader human
activities. And, above all, she was free from George. She had escaped
from the humiliating bondage of her marriage; for, since he had broken
the tie between them, she realized with a strange, an almost unnatural,
exhilaration, how little except duty--how little except the bare legal
husk of the marriage contract--still held her to him. She had loved him
once, but she loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that
she would not allow her life to be spoiled because of a single mistake.
Seven years were lost out of her youth, it was true, but those years had
given her her children, and so they were not wasted in spite of the
mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered. Judged simply as a
machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven than she had been at
twenty, and a part of this value lay in her deeper knowledge of life.
She had had her adventure, and she was cured forever of adventurous
desires. Her imagination, as well as her body, was firmer, harder, more
disciplined than it had been in her girlhood; and if her vision of the
universe was less sympathetic, it was also less sentimental. The bluest
eyes in the world, she told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy
to-day, nor could the wildest romance quicken her pulses.
A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the street,
and while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with the
swiftness of light, a memory of the evening when she had broken her
engagement to Arthur. All her life he had loved her, and, but for an
accident, she might have married him. If she had not seen George at
Florrie's party--if she had not seen him under a yellow lantern, with
the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz floating from the arbour of
roses at the end of the garden--if this had not happened, she would have
married Arthur instead of George, and her whole life would have been
different. Because of a single instant, because of a chance meeting, she
had wrecked the happiness of three lives. Now, when the bloom had
dropped from her love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered
leaves and bare stems in her hands and find any fragrance about them; it
was impossible for her to understand how or why she had followed so
fleeting an impulse. People had told her that love lasted forever, yet
she knew that her emotion for George was so utterly dead that there was
no warmth left in the ashes. It had all been so vivid once, and now it
was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting after the blue and white
hyacinths.
From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths, Arthur's face
floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured, with its look of
detached culture, of nameless distinction. She recalled the colour of
his eyes, as clear and cool as running water, his sensitive lips under
the thin, brown moustache, and his slender, aristocratic hands, with
their touch as soft and as tender as a woman's. "He had intellect--he
had culture--I suppose these are the things that really matter," she
thought, for George, she knew, possessed neither of these qualities.
And, as she remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness, but
by a passionate gratitude. He had loved her, and by loving her, he had
saved her pride from defeat. In the hour of her deepest humiliation, she
found comfort in the knowledge of his bleeding heart, of his tragic and
beautiful loyalty; for though she was strong enough to live without
love, she was not strong enough to live with the thought that no man had
ever loved her.
For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the comforting
memory of Arthur's devotion--with the image of her photograph on his
bureau and the single rose in the vase he kept always before it. "But
for an accident I might have loved him," she said, and the thought of
this love which might have been sent a wave of sweetness to her heart.
"I might have loved him and been happy." The vision was so dangerously
beautiful that she put it resolutely away from her, and told herself,
with an effort to be philosophical, that there was no use whatever in
regretting the past, and since love was over for her, she must set her
mind to solve the problem of work. "I've got my life to live," she said
with stoical calmness, "and however bad it is I've nobody to blame for
it but myself."
Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she changed her
dress, and went out to ask for a position as designer, saleswoman, or
milliner in the house of Dinard.
The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with the
remains of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown, nodded her
false golden locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when she heard the
explanation of young Mrs. Fowler's afternoon call.
"But, no, it ees impossible," she protested, forgetting her foreign
shrug and preserving with difficulty the trace of an accent. Then,
becoming suddenly natural as she realized that no immediate profit was
to be derived from affectation, she added decisively, "you have no
training, and I have quite as many salesladies as I need at this season.
Not that you are not chic," she hastened to conclude, "not that you
would not in appearance be an adornment to any establishment."
"I am willing to do anything," said Gabriella, pressing her point with
characteristic tenacity. "I want to learn, you know, I want to learn
everything I possibly can. You yourself told me that I had a natural
gift for designing, and I am anxious to turn it to some account. I
believe I can make a very good milliner, and I want to try."
"But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this? Surely
no one would want to earn her living unless she was obliged to."
For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the knowledge so
patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural suspicion of
human nature. She had got on, as she observed in confidential moments,
by believing in nobody; and this skepticism, which was fundamental and
rooted in principle, had inspired her behaviour not only to her patrons,
but to her husband, her children, her domestic servants, her
tradespeople, and the policeman at the corner. Thirty years ago she had
suspected the entire masculine world of amorous designs upon her person;
to-day, secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and publicly
acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of
equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse. And if
she distrusted men, she both distrusted and despised women. She
distrusted and despised them because they were poor workers, because
they were idlers by nature, because they allowed themselves to be
cheated, slighted, underpaid, underfed, and oppressed, and, most of all,
she despised them because they were the victims of their own emotions.
Love was all very well, she was accustomed to observe, as a pleasurable
pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit, when it began to impair the
appetite and to affect the quality and the quantity of one's work, then
a serious person would at once contrive to get rid of the passion. And
Madame prided herself with reason upon being a strictly serious person.
She had been through the experience of love innumerable times; she had
lost four husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was
still living.
In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained and
carpeted in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes flowering
magnificently from white and gold jardinières, six arrogant young women,
in marvellously fitting gowns of black satin, strolled back and forth
all day long, or stood gracefully, with the exaggerated curve of the
period, awaiting possible customers. Though they were as human within as
Madame Dinard--and beneath her make-up she was very human
indeed--nothing so variable as an expression ever crossed the waxlike
immobility of their faces; and while they trailed their black satin
trains over the rich carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and
velvets which covered the white and gold tables, they appeared to float
through an atmosphere of eternal enchantment. Watching them, Gabriella
wondered idly if they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could ever
let down those elaborate and intricate piles of hair. Then she overheard
the tallest and most arrogant of them remark, "I'm just crazy about him,
but he's dead broke," and she realized that they also belonged to the
unsatisfied world of humanity.
Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came rustling
back, and sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair, which was too
small to contain the whole of her ample person. Though she had spoken
quite sharply at the telephone, her voice was mellifluous when she
attuned it to Gabriella.
"That gown is perfect on you," she remarked in honied accents. "It was
one of my best models last season, and as I said before, Madame, you are
so fortunate as to wear your clothes with a grace." She was urbane, but
she was anxious to be rid of her, this young Mrs. Fowler could see at a
glance. "Your head is well set on your shoulders, and that is rare--very
rare! It would surprise you to know how few women have heads that are
well set on their shoulders. Yes, I understand. You wish to learn, but
not to make a living. That is very good, for the only comfortable way
for a woman to make her living is to marry one--a man is the only
perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood. I tell this to my daughter,
who wishes to go on the stage. If you are looking for pleasure, that is
different, but when you talk of a living--well, there is but one way to
insure it, and that is to marry a man who is able to provide it--either
as allowance or as alimony. The best that a woman can do gives her only
bread and meat--an existence, not a living. Only a man can provide one
with the essential things--with clothes and jewels and carriages and
trips to Europe. These are the important things in life, and what woman
was ever able to procure these except from a man?"
Her face, so thickly covered with rouge and liquid powder that it was as
expressionless as a mask, turned its hollow eyes on a funeral which was
slowly passing in the street; and though her creed was hardly the kind
to fortify one's spiritual part against the contemplation of death, she
surveyed the solemn procession as tranquilly as any devoted adherent of
either religion or philosophy could have done. Not a shadow passed over
her fantastic mockery of youth as she glanced back at her visitor.
"But you have worked--you have supported yourself," insisted Gabriella
with firmness.
"Myself and six children, to say nothing of three husbands. Yes, I
supported three of my four husbands, but what did I get out of it?"
replied Madame, shrugging her ample shoulders. "What was there in it for
me? Since we are talking freely, I may say that I have worked hard all
my life, and I got nothing out of it that I couldn't have got with much
less trouble by a suitable marriage. Of course this is not for my girls
to hear. I don't tell them this, but it is true nevertheless. Men should
do the work of the world, and they should support women; that is how God
intended it, that is according to both nature and religion; any priest
will say as much to you." And she, who had defied both God and Nature,
wagged her false golden head toward the funeral procession.
"Yet you have been successful. You have built up a good business. The
work has repaid you."
"A woman's work!" She snapped her gouty fingers with a playful gesture.
"Does a woman's work ever repay her? Think of the pleasures I have
missed in my life--the excursions, the theatres, the shows. All these I
might have had if I hadn't shut myself up every day until dark. And now
you wish to do this! You with your youth, with your style, with your
husband!"
She protested, she pleaded, she reasoned, but in the end Gabriella won
her point by the stubborn force of her will. Madame would take her for a
few weeks, a few months, a few years, as long as she cared to stay and
gave satisfaction. Madame would have her taught what she could learn,
would discover by degrees the natural gifts and the amount of training
already possessed by young Mrs. Fowler. Young Mrs. Fowler, on the other
hand, must "stand around" when required in the showrooms (it was just
here that Gabriella won her victory); she must assist at the ordering of
gowns, at the selections, and while Madame's patrons were fitted, young
Mrs. Fowler must be prepared to assume graceful attitudes in the
background and to offer her suggestions with a persuasive air.
Suggestions, even futile ones, offered in a charming voice from a
distinguished figure in black satin had borne wonderful results in
Madame's experience.
"I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler. You may not believe it, but I was
once slenderer than you are--my waist measured only nineteen inches and
my bust thirty-six--just the figure a man most admires. The result was,
you see, that I have had four husbands, though it is true that I
supported three of them, and it is always easy to marry if one provides
the support. Men are like that. It is their nature. Yes, I began that
way with little training, but much natural talent, and a head full of
ideas. If one has ideas it is always possible to become a success, but
they are rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches. And I had
charm, though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear. But
I made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of
ten, and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle, but
by ideas. They were once plentiful, and now they are so scarce," she
broke off with a sigh of resignation which seemed to accept every fact
of experience except the fact of age. "It was a hard life, but it was
life, after all. One is not put here to be contented, or one would dread
death too much for the purpose of God." In spite of her uncompromising
materialism, she was not without an ineradicable streak of superstition
which she would probably have called piety.
"I am ready to begin at once--to-morrow," said Gabriella, and she added
without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive feeling that to
explain a statement is to weaken it, "and I should like to be called by
my maiden name while I am here--just Mrs. Carr, if you don't mind."
To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with sincerity. For
her own part she would have preferred to speak of her saleswoman as
young Mrs. Fowler; but she reflected comfortably that many of her
patrons would know young Mrs. Fowler by sight at least, and to the
others she might conveniently drop a word or two in due season. To drop
a word or two would provide entertainment throughout the length of a
fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery of the situation had its charm
for the romantic Irish strain in her blood. The prospect of securing
both entertainment and mystery at the modest expenditure of fifteen
dollars a week impressed her as very good business, for she combined in
the superlative degree the opposite qualities of romance and economy. To
be sure, except for the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she
provided, young Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest
salary; but there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility that she
might turn out to be gifted, and Madame would then be able to use her
inventiveness to some purpose before the gifted one discovered her
value. In any case, Madame was at liberty to discharge her with a day's
notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for three months even
should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a positive talent for
dressmaking. And if young Mrs. Fowler could do nothing else, Madame
reflected as they parted, she could at least receive customers and
display models with an imposing, even an aristocratic, demeanour.
To receive Madame's customers and display Madame's models were the last
occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able to penetrate
Madame's frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect her prudent schemes
for the future; but the girl was sick of her dependence on George's
father, and, in the revolt of her pride, she would have accepted any
honest work which would have enabled her to escape from the insecurity
of her position. Of her competence to earn a living, of her ability to
excel in any work that she undertook, of the sufficiency and soundness
of her resources, she was as absolutely assured as she had been when she
entered the millinery department of Brandywine & Plummer. If Madame,
starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native
abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the
capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with the
certainty of moderate success. It was not, when one considered it, the
life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world began, had
ever lived exactly the life of his choice? Many women, she reflected
stoically, were far worse off than she, since she started not only with
a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with
Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the
world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable.
That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished
applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for
an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of
ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her
marriage to George.
In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats
ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to
inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array. "I wonder what makes them
buy so many they can't sell?" she said half aloud to the model at which
she was gazing. "Nobody would wear these hats--certainly nobody who
could afford to buy Parisian models. I could design far better hats
than these, I myself, and if I were the head of the house I should never
have accepted any of them, no matter who bought them. I suppose, after
all, it's the fault of the buyer, but it's a waste--it's not economy."
Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich feather
from the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed the august
French name emblazoned in gold on the lining. "Everything isn't good
that comes from Paris," she thought, with a shrug which was worthy of
Madame at her best. "Why, I wonder, can't Americans produce 'ideas'
themselves? Why do we always have to depend on the things the French
send over to us? Half the hats and gowns Madame has aren't really good,
and yet she makes people pay tremendous prices for things she knows are
bad and undistinguished. All that ought to be changed, and if I ever
succeed, if I ever catch on, I am going to change it." An idea, a whole
flock of ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on
the green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew
would shortly be "marked down," august French name included, from forty
to fifteen and from fifteen to five dollars. Her constructive
imagination was at work recreating the business, and she saw it in fancy
made over and made right from the bottom--she saw Madame's duplicity
succeeded by something of Brandywine & Plummer's inflexible honesty, and
the flimsy base of the structure supplanted by a solid foundation of
credit. For she had come often enough to Dinard's to discern the
slipshod and unsystematic methods beneath the ornate and extravagant
surface. Her naturally quick powers of observation had detected at a
glance conditions of which the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. To
sell gowns and hats at treble their actual value, to cajole her
customers into buying what they did not want and what did not suit them,
to give inferior goods, inferior workmanship, inferior style wherever
they would be accepted, and to get always the most money for the least
possible expenditure of ability, industry, and honesty--these were the
fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered, beneath
Madame's flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity. Brandywine &
Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not fashionable in
the way that the establishment of a New York dressmaker and milliner
must be fashionable; but the standard of excellence in all things
excepting style was far higher in the old Broad Street house in the
middle 'nineties than it was at Madame Dinard's during the early years
of the new century. Quality had been essential in every hat that went
from Brandywine & Plummer's millinery department; and Gabriella,
deriving from a mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected
instinctively the cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a
customer complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame
had made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out,
she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could not
survive many incidents of that deplorable sort. To be sure, such
material would not have been supplied to Mrs. Pletheridge, or even to
the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was always particular and
very often severe; but here again, since this cheap hat had been sold at
a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame's business philosophy.
On the whole, there were many of Madame's methods which might be
improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway
into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preëminently
designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement. The
tawdriness she particularly disliked--the trashy gold and ivory of the
decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never
removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in the
summer.
While she was crossing the street a man joined her; and glancing up as
soon as she was clear of the traffic, she saw that it was Judge
Crowborough. In the last seven years her dislike for him had gradually
disappeared, and though she had never found him attractive, she had
grown to accept the general estimate of his character and ability. A man
so gifted ought not to be judged as severely as poorer or less actively
intelligent mortals; and as long as other men did not judge him, she
felt no inclination to usurp so unfeminine a prerogative. He had always
been kind to her, and she understood now from his manner that he meant
to be still kinder. It occurred to her at once that he knew of George's
infatuation for Florrie, and that he was chivalrously extending to
George's wife a sympathy which he would probably have withheld in such
circumstances from his own. Had it been possible she would have liked to
explain to him that in her case his sympathy was not needed; but she
realized, with resentment, that one of her most galling burdens would be
the wasted pity which her unfortunate situation would inspire in the
friends of the family. Social conventions made it impossible for her to
tell the world, including Judge Crowborough, that George's infidelity
was a matter of slight importance to her, since it struck only at her
pride, not at her heart. Her pride, it is true, had suffered sharply for
an hour; but so superficial was the wound that the distraction of
seeking work had been almost sufficient to heal it.
"A most extraordinary day for January," remarked the judge as they
reached a corner. "You hardly need your furs, the air is so mild."
Overhead small, birdlike clouds drifted in flocks across a sky of
changeable brightness, and the wind, blowing past the tray of a flower
vendor at the corner, was faintly scented with violets. It was one of
those rare days when happiness seems as natural as the wind or the
sunlight, when the wildest dreams appear not too wild to come true in
reality, when one hopes by instinct and believes, not with the reason,
but with the blood. To Gabriella, forgetting her humiliation, it was a
day when life for the sake of the mere act of living--when life, in
spite of disappointment and loss and treachery and shame, was enough to
set the heart bounding with happiness. For she was one of those who
loved life, not for what it brought to her of pleasure, but for what it
was in itself.
"Yes, it is a lovely afternoon," she answered, and added impulsively:
"It is good to be alive, isn't it?" She had forgotten George, but even
if she had remembered him, it would have made little difference. For six
years, not for a few hours, George had been lost to her; and in six
years one has time to forget almost anything.
The judge's answer to this was a look which penetrated like a flash of
light into her brain. By this light she read all that he thought of
her, and she saw that he was divided between admiration of her spirit
and an uneasy suspicion of its perfect propriety. Tier offence, she
knew, was that, being by all the logic of facts an unhappy wife, she
should persist so stubbornly in denying the visible evidence of her
unhappiness. Had her denial been merely a pretence, it would, according
to his code, have appeared both natural and womanly; but the conviction
that she was sincere, that she was not lying, that she was not even
tragically "keeping up an appearance," increased the amazement and
suspicion with which he had begun to regard her. He walked on
thoughtfully at her side, fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray
moustache, and bending his sleepy gaze on the pavement. When he was
thinking, he always looked as if he were falling asleep, and he seldom
made a remark, even to a woman, without thinking it over. Into his small
steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled puffs of skin,
there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors'
meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his
loose mouth under the drooping ends of his moustache. His ungainly body,
with its curious suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning power,
straightened suddenly as if in reaction from certain destructive
processes within his soul. Though he was only just passing his prime, he
had lived so rapidly that he bore already the marks of age in his face
and figure.
"Yes, it's good to be alive," he assented, for there was nothing in
either his philosophy or his experience to contradict this simple
statement. "I've always maintained, by the way, that happiness is the
chief of the virtues."
For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her candid eyes
to his, she answered: "Happiness and courage. I put courage
first--before everything."
Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and the
slightly cynical smile--the smile of one who has examined everything and
believes in nothing--fade from his lips. She had touched some chord deep
down within him of which he had long ago forgotten even the
existence--some echoed harmony of what had been perhaps the living faith
of his youth.
"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what it was
that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.
At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments, holding her
hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on her. The suspicion
and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she understood all at once
why people still trusted him, still liked him, notwithstanding his
reputation, notwithstanding even his repulsiveness. He was all that--he
was immoral, he was repulsive--but he was something else also--he was
human.
When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old atmosphere
had returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old horror of
impending calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to mount the
steps, to go to her room, to inquire in a natural voice for the
children. It was imaginary, of course, she assured herself, but it was
very vivid as long as it lasted. Then she noticed that the usual order
of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang, Burrows came, with a
hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her waiting. Mrs. Fowler's
fur scarf hung on the massive oak post of the staircase; the cards in
the little tray on the hail table were scattered about; and the petals
of a yellow chrysanthemum were strewn over the carpet.
Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared embarrassed when
she questioned him, and spurred by a sharp foreboding, she ran up the
stairs to her mother-in-law's sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling
voice wailed in a tone of remonstrance:
"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"
"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"
"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he has just
gone out again. I have never seen him so deeply moved--so--so
indignant--" Mrs. Fowler broke off, bit her lip nervously, and paused
while she tried to swallow her sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side,
and in her hands she held a pair of half-soiled white gloves, which she
smoothed out on her knee, as if she were hardly aware of what she was
doing. In her blue eyes, so like George's, there was an agonizing terror
and suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the lips; and this
pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows beneath
her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.
"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she asked
gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear it."
"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He--George, I mean--had
given him his promise not to see Florrie again, and it seems that he--he
broke it. There has been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that
Archibald could be so angry. He was terrible--and he is ill anyway and
in great trouble about his financial affairs. I have been worried to
death about him for weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown
that he can't stave off the crash any longer, and now--this--this--" She
broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her hands, which even
in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been
manicured since the morning. "George has gone--we think he has gone off
with Florrie," she cried, "and he--he will never come back as long as
Archibald lives."
She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts of her
nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband. It was not
that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not sympathize; but
the fact remained that Gabriella was only George's wife to her, while
George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul.
Though her choice was not deliberate, though it was unconscious and
instinctive--nevertheless, she had chosen. At the crucial moment
instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not with her
judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being.
Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to
secure George's happiness by sacrificing the right to the wrong, she
would have made that sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and
without regret.
"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured face.
"Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"
While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to enter, and
listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs, the heavy,
laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his strength, she
remembered vividly, as if she were living it over again, the night she
had waited by her fire to tell George that his first child was to be
born. Many thoughts passed through her mind, and at last these thoughts
resolved themselves into a multitude of crowding images--all distinct
and vivid images of George's face. She saw his face as she had first
seen and loved it, with its rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like
wells of romance she had once thought, its look of poetry and emotion
which had covered so much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw
him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over
her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had
parted from her that morning--flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but
still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had been
over so long that she had even ceased to regret it--for she was not by
nature one of the women who could wear mourning for a lifetime.
The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the first
sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the discovery that he
was the one of them who had suffered most. He looked an old man; his
gentle scholar's face had taken an ashen hue; and his eyes were the eyes
of one who has only partially recovered from the blow that has
prostrated him.
"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand on her
shoulder.
She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself, but for
him. "You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly. "You mustn't
take it like this. You must try to get over it. For all our sakes you
must try to get over it." The irony of it all--that she should be
consoling her husband's father for her husband's desertion of her--did
not appear to her until long afterwards. At the time she thought only
that she--that somebody--must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.
"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly. "Let me
give you a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk."
There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new
deference. For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown
his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first time he had
opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and he had conquered
her. In spite of her anguish, something of the romantic expectancy of
her first love had returned to her heart and it showed in her softened
voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which held a pathetic
and startled brightness. He had triumphed in honour; and if her defeat
had not involved George, she could almost have gloried in the
completeness of her surrender.
He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to his
surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered over him
with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the moment in the
shadow of memory. While he sipped the wine, he waited until Burrows'
footsteps had passed down the staircase, and then said with his usual
quietness:
"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't tell you
while you were so worried about George, but there is something else--"
She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of relief.
"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh, Archibald, I
don't care--I don't care!"
"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and--" He broke off
as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly after a moment: "I am
too old to begin again. I'd like to go back home--to go back to the
South for my old age. Yes, I'm old."
But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about his neck
and her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never cared," she
said in a voice that was almost exultant. "We can be happy on so
little--happier than we've ever been in our lives--just you and I to
grow old together. We can go home to Virginia--to some small place and
be happy. Happiness costs so little."
Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her room,
noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the children were
sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner under a dark shade, and
the nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn, was lying on the table in
the circle of green light, which was as soft as the glimmer of a
glow-worm in a thicket. In their two little beds, separated by a strip
of white rug, the children were sleeping quietly, with a wonderful
freshness, like the dew of innocence, on their faces. Frances lay on her
back, very straight and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly
under her dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden
curls spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her
miniature features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite
prettiness of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal
loveliness there was something gnome-like in the dark sturdiness of
Archibald, who slept on his side, with his fists pressed tightly under
the pillow, and the frown produced by near-sightedness still wrinkling
his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he showed already the promise
of character in his face, and his personality, which was remarkably
developed for a child of his age, possessed a singular charm. He was the
kind of child people describe as "unlike other children." His
temperament was made up of surprises, and this quality of unexpectedness
inspired in his mother a devotion that was almost tragic in its
intensity. Never had she loved the normal Frances Evelyn as she loved
Archibald.
As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green light, a
wave of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them suddenly as
fatherless, impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on her untried
labour for their lives and their happiness. Then, before the anxiety
could take possession of her mind, she put it from her, and whispered,
"Courage!" as she turned away and went out of the room.