what I mean, Begee. Life's like a story or an editorial. You don't go
on blindly putting down words without knowing what you're aiming at.
You know the points you want to make and you make them. You have your
climax before you begin."
"Good Lord! Do you believe that?"
"Yes. I think I do. I know it sounds terribly high-falutin but lots of
things do when you really get them in words. Life isn't just a jumbled
mess. It must make for something. If it isn't a road we build going
along, what on earth is it?"
Herrick's hands dropped from Jean's shoulders.
"It's a pendulum. That's all it is, at the best. That's all, Jean. We
swing through the arc, back and forth, from one higher point to another
and through all the lowest points between. When we reach one end of
the arc we are pushed back and do it all over again, and after a while
the arc grows shorter, and we hang there at the will of--what? Fate or
chance or our own limitations."
"Oh no, Begee, no. No. You're tired and you don't really believe it
yourself. It's a corking good image and we'll get it into the novel
somewhere, only Robert won't say it. But as philosophy, it doesn't
swing. I'm _not_ hung on a wire by Fate or anything else and when I get
to the end of my arc I _can_ go higher. Which may be bad mathematics or
physics or whatever it is, but it's good sense and gets things done in
this world."
Jean laughed as she laid hold of Herrick's shoulders and shook him
gently.
"It's you who are the baby. That's what you are. A baby that gets a
spiritual tummy-ache every time he strikes a snag."
Jean was very near now, smiling into his eyes, and Herrick could feel
the cool, firm strength of her.
"Am I?"
"Certainly, not a doubt of it. A baby that can scarcely walk. But never
mind, when he gets to the end of his arc, mother'll come and push him
along. Mother's a grand pusher and she adores it."
"Is she?" Herrick's voice broke and he groped for Jean with trembling
hands. "Prove it--prove it." His breath came hot against her cheek as
he seized her in his arms and crushed her mouth against his.
"Wake up, wake up," he panted, and through the anger and nausea that
seemed to be dragging her out of consciousness, Jean heard him. Years
afterwards she could recall the feel of each word as if it were a stone
that was hitting her, and the feel of Herrick's unshaven chin against
hers.
With all her force she tried to push him away. But, blind with his long
suppression, Herrick only held her closer. Not till the edge of his
hunger dulled did his hold loosen. Taking Jean's chin in his hand, he
turned her face up. Instantly his arms dropped.
For a moment Herrick refused to believe the look in her eyes. Then a
wave of anger swept over him, flooding his face and neck to a deep red.
"Well, we're married, aren't we?"
"If that's marriage, no." Jean stepped back out of range of this thing
that had taken every scrap of her self-respect and ripped it off as
if it were a cloak, that had held her, against her will, at its own
pleasure. "Don't you ever kiss me like that again--ever. Do you hear?"
Herrick said nothing. He went over to the window and leaned his
forehead on the cold glass. He had acted like a brute, but it didn't
matter. Nothing mattered. He had shocked Jean, but that didn't matter,
either. It didn't matter whether she was shocked or needed shocking or
didn't need it. Nothing in the whole world mattered at all.
Slowly Jean came and stood beside him.
"Please, Franklin," she said in a low hurried tone, "don't kiss me like
that ever again. I hate it."
"All right." Herrick spoke from his folded arms without looking up.
Jean stood where she was for a moment and then went back to the couch.
She took up her book and tried to read, but the words made no sense.
Herrick still stood at the window and the typewriter was covered on the
desk.
It was as if a murder had been committed in the room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Late in December the rains set in. Heavy gray clouds hung low over the
city's hills, pressing all the joy and color from life, flattening the
world to a monotone of black umbrellas.
At New Year there was an interval of pleasant weather and then more
rain, steady, deliberate, endless rain. The street cars were crowded
with damp people, all trying to keep as far as possible from each
other, all peevish and nervous under the strain. Gutters broke and
streams of water ran everywhere. The streets were rivers of thick,
black mud and buildings reeked with the odor of woolen clothing drying
in steam heat. From the middle of January to the middle of February the
world woke in the morning to rain and went to bed at night with the
rain steadily pouring in long, gray lines from the leaden sky.
Against the background of the rain, Jean's days ran together in a
blur. She created a false enthusiasm and, under this self-imposed
stimulus, got so many words on paper. Sometimes she wondered how long
she would be able to keep it up. She thought now more and more often
of Pat steadily plodding in her mountain school, and of her mother,
trotting through each day's task, every crevice of her life filled with
the knowledge that she could do no more than she was doing, nor do it
better. Most of all she thought of Dr. Mary, buoyant and vital among
her people, holding to her purpose and working toward it surely. She
wondered whether Dr. Mary would remember her if she went.
There had been no mention at all of the night that Herrick had stood
long at the window with his face in his arms. The thing that had been
killed had been decently buried, so decently buried that it might never
have existed at all. Herrick worked spasmodically on a short story, but
he rarely worked in the evenings. They often went to the theater, and
at long intervals to Flop's. Once Jean had quite enjoyed herself and
they had gone again the following Sunday, but the out-of-town visitors
had gone away and it was duller, more noisy, less sincere than ever.
Through the four worst Sundays of rain Herrick wrote and when he had
finished went over the result with Jean. They haggled each point with a
desperate show of interest. When Jean said a scene did not ring true,
she explained very elaborately and carefully and Herrick listened and
argued and in the end usually agreed. Jean often thought of Robert as
some one who had died far away in the jungle.
In March the fury of the rain lessened, wore itself out in a succession
of damp, drizzling days almost harder to stand than the steady
downpour. Then the hills stood out once more softly green and clear
against the blue sky. With the coming of spring, Herrick gave up his
pretense of winter. The unfinished short story went into the waste
basket. Jean was glad and the tension of her nerves relaxed.
It was a lovely day in May, when Jean's work brought her close to home
about one o'clock and she decided to do the writing in the studio
instead of going back to the noisy office. As she opened the door she
pushed back an envelope of the gray paper that Pat used. Jean pounced
on it and without waiting to take off her things, tore it open. There
were only a few sentences on a half sheet:
"Will be down on the sixteenth.
"Train gets in about three. Don't meet me or upset your day in any way.
"Leave the key where I can find it. I like doormats best."
Pat was coming.
For the moment Jean could grasp nothing else. Pat was coming. She would
be here in that very room. They would talk. It was years since they had
talked. No, not years. Not quite two yet, since she and Pat had sat
together and swung their feet from the sink board of the Girls' Rest
Hall, and she had been almost hysterical because there was nothing in
the world but teaching. Jean's eyes filled with tears and she dabbed
angrily at them.
"You old fool! What do you expect? To feel the same always? No doubt
Pat feels older and has changed a lot too."
But the idea of Pat's having changed frightened Jean. Pat must not have
changed. She must be just the same sane, practical, efficient Pat. She
would be. And she was coming, coming on the sixteenth and the sixteenth
was to-day.
The next moment Jean was pounding out her interview on the machine. It
was done in a space of time unsurpassed even by the concentration of
Mr. Thompson. Jean sent a messenger with it to the office and began
cleaning the studio. By half past two the place was so clean that Jean
could not find another thing to do, not even rearrange for the fourth
time a vase of roses. She took a book to the window seat and sat down.
"Now you compose your mind and act like a rational human. She won't get
here any sooner if you flutter about like a demented hen. 'Flutter like
a demented hen'--it must be the effect of Pat's coming!"
By sheer will Jean succeeded in sitting still, but no effort could
keep her attention on the print. Her thoughts got away from her and
ran back down the months, fetching up in days she and Pat had spent
together; in graduation day, that seemed so many years behind her; and
courses they had taken together, that for some reason seemed closer
now, than when she had taken them.
In the glow of Pat's coming, forgotten things became recent and clear,
while recent things seemed unreal and far away. In this inversion, the
past winter, with the strained atmosphere between herself and Herrick,
blurred into a memory of some very disagreeable period she had lived
through long ago. Perhaps that unobtrusive, ever present third presence
that had moved so silently between them through the long weeks of rain,
and against whom she was ever on her guard, was not so real as she had
fancied. She had accepted the thing she did not want to believe and
believed it for fear of being a coward in not facing it.
"I'm an idiot, and a conceited one at----"
"Haven't a doubt about it, old girl. Didn't I always say so?"
Jean tumbled from the window seat and Pat's arms closed about her.
"Oh Pat--_Pat_."
They stood so for a moment. Then they separated, Pat wiped her eyes and
they grinned foolishly at each other.
"I knew I'd be glad. But I didn't know I'd be like this. I guess I've
been suppressing all the way down in the train, in case you'd changed a
lot, and you haven't changed a bit, not a single bit."
"What did you expect? After all it's only two years, even if it seems a
million."
"I guess I was trying to do one of mummy's tricks, get all primed up
just because I didn't want to. Jean, if you had changed, I'd have
busted on the spot."
"Well, you can stay whole then because I haven't. Now get off those
things. I feel as if you had dropped in for ten minutes."
"I haven't, so get rid of any such hopes. I am going to stay a week or
more. I don't care whether it's convenient or not. During the day I
shall be out on my deep and serious mission, but I expect the evenings.
Oh Jeany, do tell me what he's like. I've been expiring for months. You
never did describe him to me, you know, and I was too delicate to ask.
He might have only one eye or be bald. Is he?"
"No. He's neither lame, halt nor blind and I won't tell you a thing
until you get those things off and I make some tea."
When Jean had drawn the tea table close to the window that looked out
across the tops of the roofs to the crown of the Berkeley Hills, Pat
demanded:
"Now, go clear back to the beginning and tell me everything. Your
letters on the subject were the most unsatisfactory things ever penned
by the hand of man. Get out that mental searchlight and turn on the
analysis. Why did you fall in love? How does it feel? Were you swept
off your feet or did you just get dragged under? Begin."
"I don't know, Patsy. Honestly, I don't know."
"Good Heavens! If that isn't the most Jeanesque performance ever! Here
you can spend years rooting about in your soul for the whys and the
wherefores of some silly thing that doesn't have a why or a wherefore,
and for a big thing like getting married, you don't know why you did
it! It sounds to me as if you had fallen so head over heels into the
sea of love that you blinded yourself."
"No, I don't think I did that." There was no answering laughter in
Jean's eyes and the twinkle vanished from Pat's. "We had a lot in
common and used to have such glorious days out of doors together and
he wanted to write and I believed I could help him. He'd always been
alone and no one had ever taken any interest in the things he cared
most deeply about until we met, and it seemed to me, from the very
first moment, as if I had known him always."
"That's a symptom, I've always heard." Pat's tone brought Jean from a
path in which she seemed to be wandering by herself.
"I mean that I didn't lose my head and go around raving like Alma
Perkins did when she was engaged to Porter. Do you remember the
spectacle she made of herself? Of course, I loved Franklin. I wouldn't
have married him if I hadn't, would I?"
"No, I don't suppose you would," Pat answered, after an imperceptible
pause. "How did mummy take it?"
This time Jean laughed. "Pat, it really was funny. Mummy was divided
between being grateful to Franklin for being a 'burden' and dislike of
him personally."
"Doesn't she like him? Didn't she ever?"
"No. And you should have seen the wedding breakfast. Not even in the
days when she wasn't sure whether you were 'a good influence' did you
ever inspire such food."
"Why didn't she like him?"
"I don't believe she really knows. I was silly enough to describe the
first evening I went out with him and the people I met. When she saw
him, she said he had 'the flesh and the devil' written all over him.
You know how she condemns people to death on a technicality?"
"Haven't you got a picture of It? I'll die before I see It."
"Oh no you won't. But I'll 'phone in a few moments and tell It to come
home early. We usually eat out, but we won't to-night. I want to talk
and talk and talk. Now, tell me what you've been doing and what you
expect to do, for you haven't been so very explicit yourself."
"Well, in comparison to turning my life inside out as you have done,
mine's very tame."
"Well, go on."
"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. I've been trying to see if I
couldn't raise the personal standards of some of the people in my
mountain fastness. That's all. It's kind of hard to explain if you
don't know the conditions. You see, most people think of the country
and country children as I did when I first went up there. I expected
them to be behind city children in some ways but I did not expect them
to be ahead of them in the ways they are. Jean, there's more rubbish
talked about the morality and health of the country than a million
books on the subject could get rid of in a million years. The purity
of the country is a myth! There are just as many underfed, subnormal,
dead, inert objects of pity among my people, big as well as little, as
there ever was in a congested city slum. Why, it took my breath away.
I just wouldn't believe it at first. I was all filled up on this 'pure
air' and 'God's out of doors' dope until I wasn't fit to teach a goat.
But I got it banged into me at last. That's why I'm here."
"Elucidate. You've jumped a few steps that my 'logical mind' needs. Why
does the immorality and stupidity of a mountain district school bring
you to town?"
"Because I want to talk to a woman I've never seen, but from reading
everything she ever wrote and every report she ever made before all
the societies there are and aren't, I have come to feel that she knows
everything on earth that's worth while knowing. She may have struggled
with bovine intellects in a mountain district school or she may not,
but I know she'll have something worth saying. Ergo, I come."
"Pat, as I have remarked many a time and oft, you are the joy of my
soul. Now who on earth but you would be so unspeakably efficient as to
come down here--I see I can't flatter myself that I had anything to do
with it--in order to consult an ideal on something she probably doesn't
know anything about? Idealism and efficiency go hand in hand."
"I don't care. Laugh if you like."
"Who is this prodigy? May I go and sit outside and listen to the pearls
of wisdom?"
"'Listen to pearls of wisdom.' Not so bad! Well, the name of this
remarkable woman is Dr. Mary Mac Lean."
"_What?_"
"Don't you like it? Sounds like a good, common-sense Scotch name to me.
Not in the same class with Jean Norris or Patricia Farnsworth, but no
doubt quite respectable in its way."
"Dr. Mary? My Dr. Mary!"
"Yours? What do you, married parasite, Bohemian newspaper woman, know
about Dr. Mary?"
"More than you do."
And Jean related in detail her one visit to the Hill Neighborhood House.
"And you needn't think that you are going up there alone. I've been
thinking about her and wanting to go terribly, but I let such a long
time go by and then it seemed rather--oh, I don't know. I just haven't
been."
"Well, we're going and we're going now. If I can't see Franklin right
away, at least I can see her, and they're the two people I'm most
excited about at the present moment. 'Phone your husband instantly and
come along."
Jean got Herrick on the 'phone and astonished him more than he had been
astonished for a long time by demanding that he come home to dinner and
come early. She would give no reason but chuckled happily as he had not
heard her chuckle for months.
Herrick went back and sat a long while at his desk without doing
anything. Then he telephoned to Flop, whom he had met accidentally
early in the afternoon, that he would not be able to help in the
celebration of Magnolia's birthday, as he had promised. After which, he
smiled and wrote five hundred words of very good editorial.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"I am certainly glad." Dr. Mary, as she came padding across the big
living room, saw only Jean. "I thought you were a 'promiser,' and I
loathe 'promisers,' almost as much as I do people who really forget me."
"No, indeed I did not forget you. I think it was because I remembered
you so well that I didn't come. I got to thinking how busy you must be
and--and----"
"You must have been rather busy yourself. The name they announced
wasn't Norris. Is it you?"
For the first time she perceived Pat and looked inquiringly from her to
Jean.
"Yes. The Herrick is for me. I was married shortly after I interviewed
you. Did you read the interview? I didn't call you anything, although I
assure you it was a temptation. You have Mr. Herrick to thank for that.
He pruned down my finest flights."
"Sensible man. Oh yes, I read it. I thought of memorizing it, you
worded it so much better than I ever did myself. But let's go into my
den. I always like to have friendly chats in little rooms. Big places
make me feel official."
"She's a dear," whispered Pat, as they followed the doctor to a small
room at the end of the hall.
Deep in her leather chair, the doctor lit a cigarette and beamed at the
two young women before her.
"Are you a newspaper woman too, Miss Farnsworth?"
"Nothing so exciting. A school teacher, and a country one at that."
"Let me congratulate and condole, may I, both at once?"
"You've taught, too!"
"Does that give me so completely away? Yes, I've taught, but it was
many years ago, in an interim between college and medical when I was
trying to earn money to put myself through."
"But you haven't forgotten."
"Not a thing. It makes me uncomfortable yet to think of some of the
mistakes I made, the big opportunities I let get by. I suppose I did
not have the right stuff in me for a teacher. I started so full of hope
and plans, although I knew it was not to be my life work, but I let my
enthusiasm die down. I let all kinds of small, personal things dull the
edge."
"But it's so difficult to keep the edge sharp. Sometimes I think that
living close to the earth and animals makes one like them."
"I don't know but that you're right. Only that never occurred to me
then. Perhaps I went at things too violently, but when I couldn't wake
them up, well--I just let them sleep."
"And they've been asleep ever since, at least mine have. I'm afraid I
can never wake them up."
Pat's voice was grave with her deep interest and Jean glimpsed the
scope of teaching as she had never before.
"Oh, yes, you can. Because you realize that there is something
underneath; I didn't. I called it emptiness, when it was really
desperate shyness and fear of new things, a kind of deep, perverted
faithfulness to all they have ever known."
"I've thought that, sometimes--and then my light goes out again. I
started a kind of library when I first went up, but all that the girls
and women seem to care about--the men never read at all--are love
stories, the sillier the better. Anything else is something going
on away off in another world. It does not concern them and never
will. Why, some of my people had, until recently, never even heard
of suffrage or sex hygiene or minimum wages, and they don't care or
understand when I try to explain. They accept their lives like the
weather. To the men the crops are good or bad, and the women have good
husbands or bad husbands and that's all. The boys and girls marry young
and the babies begin coming right away. For a few years the children
seem to be eager and interested and then, somehow, it leaks away. I've
only been teaching two years but I can see it, as if I had been there a
hundred. And I want to do something. I want to get those who come to me
started right. Perhaps, even with little children of six or seven, if
some of us could get the seed planted----"
Pat broke off, as if the physical strength for explanation had
broken under the terrific weight of the indifference with which she
was struggling. Jean looked at her and a coldness settled about her
own heart. It was so real to Pat and so worth while, something into
which she could pour the whole warmth of herself. Jean pictured the
last woman whom she had interviewed, with a scheme for saving stray
dogs; and Thompson's long harangue with the Art Department about the
illustrations.
"You're right, absolutely right," Dr. Mary went on; "it is the century
of the child. There's our biggest chance, especially for you younger
women, and so few see it. But there's hope. After all, we are beginning
to creep in this field. In the next ten years, I hope, we'll at least
get on our knees. Maybe in twenty we'll be able to walk."
"It's so maddeningly slow."
"It's like creeping paralysis, only going the other way. We are not
getting deader, but more alive, at the same speed. But if we hang on
to our patience we'll get something done."
Pat leaned forward. "I wish you would speak at the next state
institute. Maybe a few of us would get up on our knees a little sooner."
Dr. Mary laid her hand over Pat's. "Thank you. There's nothing that
makes me feel so unworthy and humble and grateful as meaning something
to other women. I love 'em, every one of them, the young, brave,
fearless women. Society's been asleep for ages, but it's waking up. It
needs us, in other ways than it thought it did, and we'll be there with
the goods."
Jean drew deeper into her chair. At the motion Dr. Mary turned.
"I'm not even going to apologize, Mrs. Herrick, for absorbing all the
conversation. You know what I am when I get started."
She grinned at Pat. "When Mrs. Herrick came to interview me, she didn't
get a chance to say a thing. I talked all the time."
"It was the only real hour I've had in the whole newspaper business,"
Jean said slowly, "and I wish I had never come."
Pat started as if Jean had called to her for help and the little doctor
said sharply:
"You don't like interviewing?"
"I despise it! It's the most futile, useless round of senseless rush
that was ever invented to waste one's days. It means nothing at all to
the one who does it or to any one else. It's just words, words, and
more words."
For several moments Dr. Mary said nothing, but sat looking at Jean with
an odd look in her small, bright eyes.
"If I am rude, you must pardon me, Mrs. Herrick, but why do you do it,
if you feel that way?"
It was Jean now who was silent, but Pat knew that she was trying to
find the right words for something that meant very much to her.
"Because," she said, at length, "I should go mad doing nothing at all."
Dr. Mary smoked her cigarette to the end in a silence that Pat recalled
afterwards as one of the longest and tensest five minutes she had ever
spent. Then the little doctor said in her brisk, off-hand fashion:
"If salary is no particular object to you, Mrs. Herrick, I could find
a place for you here. We're starting so many things and are overworked
as it is. We can't pay much, and as you have had no experience
before, the committee may kick at giving anything. But I believe the
laborer is worth his hire always, and have never found volunteer work
satisfactory. If you would like to try for a couple of months--it's
better all around to have it probationary--I can use you."
Twice Jean's lips opened but the words would not come.
"Well, since silence gives consent, I take it that you will try it."
"I shall be very glad."
"Then it's settled. Let me see; I suppose you'll have to give the paper
some kind of notice?"
"No. The managing editor never recognizes any such obligation when the
work isn't satisfactory. And it's only the other way round. I'd like to
begin with you right away."
"You can if you want to. It's your own affair. We're in the throes of
the summer camp and two of our regular workers will be away for the
next three months attending to that. How about next Monday?"
"Perfect," Jean said, trying to keep her voice steady.
"Now we'll have some tea."
Dr. Mary touched the bell and a few moments later a maid brought in the
tea things. The doctor had a fund of stories, humorous, pathetic, all
human, and she told them well. It was almost six when she rang for the
maid to take away the cups and then it was too late to show Pat over
the building.
"Never mind. You'll come again and very soon, and I shall not let you
escape without explaining every detail."
She dropped Pat's hand and turned to Jean.
"Monday, then?"
"Monday." They smiled quietly as if they were sealing a contract.
Out in the street Pat drew a deep breath.
"Well! If you ask me, I recommend that as about the quickest thing I
ever saw pulled off. You go up to introduce me, and come out with a new
life work. I believe you've got it at last, Jean."
"I think I have, Pat. I feel as if something had clicked into place
inside."
She stopped and looked at Pat with real fear. "Pat, suppose you hadn't
come! I wouldn't have gone. I'd left it too long. I feel as if you'd
rescued me from something and--as if you'd come just in time."
"Little trick of mine," Pat answered lightly, but her eyes clouded and
she slipped her hand into Jean's arm and held it there.
They did not speak again until they were almost at the studio door.
"We used to think we knew an awful lot, didn't we, Jean?"
Jean nodded.
Upstairs they found Herrick. Pat's first impression was very much what
Jean's had been the day Herrick had walked into the library and found
her sniffing the grass. Of a big man, strong but rather lazy, with
something frank and winning and clean about him, and nice eyes. And the
next was surprise that he was so different from what she had pictured
he would be, and that never would she have picked him out as the man
Jean would marry.
"This is Pat."
Herrick came forward and they shook hands heartily.
"I am awfully glad. I've heard of you, you know, until I was almost
jealous. When did you get in?"
"About half an hour before I 'phoned you," Jean answered.
Herrick turned to Jean.
"I wondered what the wonderful surprise was. I never could have guessed
it."
Pat felt something in him change, but before she could be sure, he was
talking pleasantly again.
Herrick went out and brought in things for dinner and they all cooked
together. Pat and Jean did most of the talking but Herrick seemed to
enjoy their reminiscences. From time to time, however, Pat caught a
heaviness in his eyes as they rested on Jean, and she decided that
there had been some slight quarrel before her arrival and that Herrick
had not been able to forget it. In spite of his gentle manner and kind
eyes, he might bear a grudge a long while.
The dinner was a jolly one. Jean looked as Herrick had not seen her
look since they raced hand in hand, against the wind, over the hills.
Half way through, Herrick turned to Pat.
"I think you'll have to come and live with us, Pat. You're a regular
tonic." Under the gayety of his tone, Pat felt the resentment. She
wondered what it was they had quarreled about and whether Jean had
altogether forgotten it. It wasn't like Jean to forget anything that
really mattered or, remembering, to pretend she did not.
"Oh, I can't flatter myself that I am responsible." Pat made no
pretense of not understanding. "It is----"
She glanced at Jean and Jean nodded. They had decided to say nothing
about Jean's new work until the black coffee was reached. Then Pat was
to spring the surprise in the form of a toast, but now at Jean's nod,
she continued:
"It's not my influence at all. Jean has a new job."
Herrick turned quickly. "Have you left the paper?"
"Yes. Thompson doesn't know it yet, but he will by to-morrow. If he
makes a great row I'll get him one more interview so he won't be
behind, but on Monday I take a real job."
"Doing what?"
"I'm going to work with Dr. Mary."
"At the Hill House?"
"Yes. I feel as if a hand had reached out from the blue and rescued me.
I'm going to work."
Again Herrick's face changed so that Pat wondered whether she had been
quite right about him in either of her estimates. He looked older,
heavier and rather bored.
"Yes," he said quietly, "I think that is your work."
For a moment Jean and Herrick looked at each other.
"I think it is and I expect to be very happy in it."
"I hope you will."
Herrick filled all three glasses and cried gayly:
"To the Poor, God bless 'em."
Pat stayed ten days. Sometimes she went with Jean on cases and
sometimes she was out all day on work of her own. But every evening the
three met for dinner in the studio and afterwards Jean and Pat talked
social and educational reforms. At first Herrick listened, not quite
grasping the vital import of these things to them; then, one night, he
asked Jean, with a lurking smile that annoyed even Pat, whether she
really expected to make over the world.
"No," Jean answered shortly, "I don't; but I'm going to patch at it as
long as I have strength in my body."
"The leopard won't change his spots, you know, no matter how many kind
ladies dab at him with their social paints."
"Then they will be cut out or burned out," Jean said in such a still
voice that Pat stared. But Jean and Herrick were looking straight into
each other's eyes and did not notice.
"Poor leopard, he'll die under such treatment."
"I don't know that that would be such a loss to the rest of the animals
if he did."
"No. I don't suppose it would," Herrick said after a pause, in a voice
controlled only by the need to maintain a pretense before Pat.
Pat picked up the table of statistics she and Jean had been discussing
and studied it closely. For a moment there was not a sound. Then
Herrick went over to the couch with a book and Jean took up the
argument again.
Herrick never joined the conversation after that evening but it seemed
to Pat that he was always listening and she felt that Jean felt it too.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One day in September when Jean had been working almost four months, Dr.
Mary came to her with an open letter in her hand.
"Jean, I'm going to give you this case, because I feel in my backbone
that it's out of the usual run, and that's saying a good deal, with
some of those we've had lately, isn't it?"
"It certainly is. Perhaps I won't be able to handle it."
"I'll take a chance. It's because I believe you can, better than any
one else, that I am turning it over. No one has done a thing on it yet.
It's brand new."
Jean took the letter. It was written on ruled paper in a fairly good
hand.
"DR. MARY MACLEAN--Please come to see me as soon as possible.
AMELIA GORMAN."
"Well, at least Amelia seems used to giving orders."
"No information furnished. No request made. I'd like to go myself if I
had the time. I thought first of turning it over to the C.O.S. of that
district but, somehow, the woman interests me. Do you want it?"
Jean was already putting on her hat. Mary smiled.
"I know, Mary, but I haven't gotten over that first rushed feeling yet,
in spite of all your warning. I'm always sure that everything will go
to pot if I don't get to a case the very minute I hear of it."
"I hope you never will, not really. When that goes I can't imagine a
worse work than this to be in. You'd better take some money with you,
she's likely to need most anything."
An hour later Jean rang the bell of a shabby, two-story house out on
the Mission Road. The house stood a little back in a dusty, parched
patch of ground, where a few wilting geraniums struggled against the
dust-laden wind that blew always over the bare hills. A half-grown girl
opened the door. She seemed parched by the ceaseless wind and her dry
hair looked as if it had never been quite free of the dust.
"Does Mrs. Gorman live here?"
"Back room. She ain't Mrs." The girl stood staring while Jean knocked
on a door at the end of the dark hall.
"Come in."
It was a small room and held only a single bed, a child's crib, a
broken dresser and a chair. An emaciated woman sat up in bed and looked
at Jean with the calmest look of appraisal that had ever summed her up.
"You're from the Hill House. It wouldn't be anybody else. Are you Dr.
Mary MacLean?"
"No, I'm not Dr. McLean. She had to go out of town. My name is Herrick."
"Miss or Mrs.?"
"Mrs."
"I'm glad of that." The woman's voice was perfectly detached, as if
something bigger than a personal desire in the matter directed her.
Jean drew the chair to the side of the bed and sat down.
"Have you any children?" the woman asked abruptly.
"No. I have no children."
"Do you want them?"
For some reason it was impossible to resent this woman's questioning.
She did it so calmly, so deliberately, as if each question were the
end of a long line of thought, important to her. Jean felt herself grow
warm and uncomfortable.
"I don't--think very much about it."
There was another long pause, in which Jean listened to the wind and to
some one moving in the room above. Suddenly a child's voice broke out
in angry protest: "I won't!--I won't!" There was a mild scuffle, a door
slammed, then silence. The woman continued to listen for a moment. She
turned back again to Jean.
"I did," she said, in her odd way of continuing her own line of
thought. "I wanted a child. That's him we just heard. Mamie don't mean
to be mean but she ain't any brighter than she has to be and she don't
understand. That's why I wrote to Dr. MacLean. I don't know whether
you'll understand, seein' you never wanted one, but I'll have to tell
you, since you was the one she sent and mebbe there won't be time to
send another. I ain't always as strong as I am to-day, and there won't
be many more days, weak or strong."
"You mustn't talk like that. You can't----"
The woman turned her dark eyes to Jean and a faint smile touched them.
"There ain't no call to talk that way to me. I don't want no cheerin'
up. The time's past for that. I fought it all out here alone and now I
got my plan ready. I didn't send for no one to tell me I ain't goin' to
die, because I know I am. If it wasn't for Jimmie I'd be glad, laughin'
glad to go. It's him I'm goin' to tell you about."
For a while she seemed to forget Jean altogether and then she began
again, in a flat, even voice, choosing only the thread of her story, as
if she were used to husbanding her small strength.
"Did you ever live in a room like this? Get up in the mornin' in it and
go to bed at night in it, and sit all the evenin' in it, so that your
thoughts soak into it and you can feel them rush out at you the minute
you open the door? You can never get away. And there don't seem to be
nothing in the whole wide world but yourself. It's a terrible thing.
"I used to lay in bed at night and _feel_ myself shut up in my cell,
and then I got to thinkin' about all the other people in the world shut
up in their cells and none of us could get out or talk through to one
another, millions of us locked up tight.
"Hundreds of times I said to myself, 'If that's all there is to it, why
go on?' But I could never come round to the picture of killing myself.
Once I tried but I didn't get very far. And then I begun wonderin'
why it was that I didn't do the job straight through; wonderin' and
wonderin', until one night, like an earthquake, it hit me sudden. It
was all the people behind me, clear back to Adam and Eve, holdin'
me here, all the men and women that had loved each other and hated
each other and had children and kept things going. And if I killed
myself--it would be like takin' one of the girl's jobs in the factory
to finish so she could draw her pay and then not doin' it.
"Mebbe you won't understand, but you'll have to take it the way I say,
for I saw it as clear as I see you in that chair. We was put here to
keep things goin'. And I was goin' to stop 'em. There wouldn't be any
_me_ after I was dead and all them people back of me was goin' to drop
out of things, just like I had killed 'em. Did you ever think like
that?"
Jean shook her head. Before the fire of loneliness that had seared this
woman, she could not speak.
"We're all different, I guess. But I got so I couldn't bear the thought
of dyin' and bein' ended, without ever havin' had nothin' and leavin'
nothin' and so--I had a baby."
Jean felt as if the wind outside had torn its way into the room.
"You decided, made up your mind to have a baby, and had one?"
"It seems kind of queer, mebbe, when you say it like that, but it was
all simple after I'd been thinkin' about it. Lots of things are queer
when you first think about 'em, but after a while you get used to 'em.
It's like strangers you meet and get to know after a bit real well."
Jean looked away to the houses crouching on the windswept hill.
"He lived in the same house. He was the only man that ever asked me to
go any place with him or tried to kiss me. You see I was twenty-seven
then, almost twenty-eight. There was never no talk about marryin'. He
went away before Jimmie was born, a long time before. I think he was
afraid somebody'd find out. He was always kind of scared of people. He
sent some money for awhile and then he stopped. I didn't care about the
money. I can always get work, and as soon as Jimmie was old enough to
leave, I got a job in another place."
From under the pillow she took a bit of folded newspaper and handed
it to Jean. It was a clipping a month old, a condensed account of a
political fight in a small town in the southern part of the state. It
said that the fight had been won by the adherents of Mayor James H.
Martin, who could always be relied on to stand on the side of law and
order.
"He always said he was goin' to get into politics some day and he did.
I wouldn't bother now, because he ain't had none of the joy of Jimmie,
but I haven't more than a few weeks, days mebbe. It's cancer, like
mother had and grandmother and Aunt Sarah, and I want to know that
Jimmie won't have to go to an institution. He can't be so terrible poor
if he's Mayor and he'll do something for Jimmie. Maybe he'll be kind
of afraid at first but if you make him promise, he'll keep it. I'll
give you some letters he wrote and Jimmie's picture. Will you go?"
Evidently she had used up all her strength, for she lay back now,
wasted and white, with her eyes closed. Jean tried to speak and
couldn't. It was all so tangled, so thwarted, so stark and bare. It was
like the rickety house in which the woman lived, and the parched hills.
Jean felt as if the thick dust was choking her. The woman opened her
eyes.
"You don't understand very well, do you?"
"No, not very." Jean tried to say she did, but the naked honesty of the
other compelled the same from her. "I can understand how you must have
been lonely but----"
The woman shook her head. "No, that's just what you don't, or you would
understand it all."
Her hands, white from illness, took Jean's. "But you're kind and it
don't matter much. I wanted the Doctor because she was awfully good to
one of the girls that worked with me once, and when I was thinking of
somebody, I remembered her."
Jean forced back the sob in her throat. "I'll go to-night if there's a
train."
The sick woman smiled gratefully. "You _are_ kind," she said again.
"And--there's not many that's kind when they don't understand."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jean propped her note to Herrick on the desk where he would be sure to
see it as soon as he came in, and caught the six-fifteen train.
When Herrick came at half past six he found the note, read it three
times and tore it into bits.
"Taking the six-fifteen to Belgrave on a case. May be away a few
days.
JEAN."
It was eight before Herrick stopped pacing up and down the studio, took
his hat and went out.
Giuseppe's was crowded. The air reeked with smoke and the heavy odor of
highly seasoned food. Not a place at the long table was vacant. Flop
was denouncing the low standards of American art, exemplified in the
flat failure of a recent exhibit of his own, and the others pounded the
table in the old way and shouted their approval. Flop caught sight of
Herrick first, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and then, with a
shout:
"Well, I'll be damned! Look who's here," got up and dragged Herrick
forward as if the latter had been trying to get away.
"Boy Blue! Franklin! Herrick!"
The racket was deafening. The Outlanders jumped on chairs to see what
was happening. Flop corraled a waiter hurrying by with a demijohn of
wine and took it way from him.
"This is on the house, Pietro. We drink to the return of the lost
sheep."
A waiter brought Herrick a chair. He took it, and walking deliberately
about the table, placed it next to The Kitten's. There was much
laughing and some quick looks interchanged and The Kitten shrugged as
if the matter did not concern her in the least, and continued to talk
to another man across Herrick's back. The enthusiasm, diverted for a
moment from its channel, went back. The Kitten finished what she had
been saying and was forced at last to meet Herrick's eyes. She tried
to hold the contempt in them, but it was useless. The corners of her
scarlet lips trembled. Herrick's hand took hers under the table.
"Don't be silly, Kittycat. We wouldn't keep it up, you know...."
Two hours later The Bunch went singing up the hill to Flop's. Herrick
and The Kitten turned down a side street. Herrick walked with the
light, springing step that had reminded Jean of the earth and wide
spaces. The Kitten skimmed along beside him, clinging to his arm. At
the foot of the stairs he lifted her, and carried her up. He put her in
the Morris chair and knelt beside her. Every motion was a repetition of
the last time he had knelt so. It was all exactly the same, even to the
bar of light from the street lamp, and the fine, tired lines about The
Kitten's mouth.
The Kitten bent and lifted his face from her knees.
"Why did you do it, Boy?"
"I don't know, Kitten."
She drew his head to her shoulder and stroked his hair quietly. There
was no claim in her touch, no insistence, only peace. The Kitten was
weary, too.
"Tell me about it," she said at last.
Herrick smiled. "She's straightening out all the misery and sin and
ugliness in the world, Kittycat, and it keeps her rather busy."
They talked for a while of Jean and the little doctor and the futile,
foolish tasks at which they labored.
"It makes me tired to think of so much energy." The Kitten yawned.
"I'm glad I have no 'work.' I wouldn't 'improve' a single living human
being, even if I could, not even you, Boy Blue."
"Most wise Kitty." Herrick drew her to him and kissed her passionately.
The next day they slipped away for the week-end to the cabin on the
Portuguese ranch where he and Jean had spent their honeymoon.
"It was the first place we ever went, Boy, and I want to go there
again," insisted The Kitten. After a moment's hesitation Herrick agreed.
The dairyman and his wife showed no surprise. They were as dark, as
silent as ever. The woman wore the same bright red skirt and the same
dirty white waist. She brought food to the cabin as she had brought
it before, without a word. There was the same full, silver moonlight
brimming the bowl of the little canyon, and the same quiet cows
wandering over the hills.
They stayed two days and went back. Herrick wondered what he would say
if Jean had already returned, and gravitated, according to his mood,
from a lie he knew would not deceive her, to the truth.
But Jean had not come. Nor did she come the next day, nor the next. For
the Mayor of Belgrave had a cold. Years afterwards, Herrick speculated
sometimes, what his life would have been, if James Martin, Mayor of
Belgrave, had not had a cold.
But the Mayor did have a cold, and not even Jean's most Machiavellian
tricks succeeded in getting at him. In a small neat house, behind a
small neat lawn, a small, neat wife guarded his civilian privacy and
Jean was forced to wait until the fourth day, when protected by an
overcoat and neck muffler, in spite of the glorious fall sunshine,
Mayor Martin again took up his official duties. Almost as soon as
the office was opened, Jean forced herself beyond the secretary and
confronted the Mayor, small and neat like his wife and the baby Jean
had seen being aired on the lawn.
In words as few and stark as Amelia Gorman's she presented the case.
"Now, what I suggest, Mr. Martin, is that you send to us monthly
fifteen dollars, for which we can board your child in a respectable
family. When he is fourteen, if he shows promise of making more than
a grammar school education advisable, this amount to be increased to
twenty. He can make up the rest himself until he graduates from some
technical school. In the event of your dying before he has reached the
earning age, this amount is to be continued. You can arrange it as a
bequest to us and need not mention the child."
The little man sat staring at Jean. Behind his flat, frightened eyes,
she could see the procession of his small hopes, running to their
death. He would do as she asked because he could think of no way of
escaping with the dignity that befitted his office. He would cover
his terror under the cloak of his mayoralty and submit to supporting
his child, as he might have contributed to the erection of a public
library. But for all the rest of his life he would enjoy the memory
of this morning. Once the danger of publicity was removed, he would
come to regard himself as a bold, bad man of the world, and from
the pinnacle of his knowledge of evil look down upon the sober,
uninteresting members of his town and of the church, where he went
every Sunday morning in a neat black hat.
"Well, Mr. Martin?"
Jean gathered up her gloves and handbag and rose. He reached out as if
forcibly to detain her, almost as if he expected, should he refuse,
that she would go through the town with a bell, proclaiming him in
public.
"Of course, I wish you and your office, to understand that I do this
through no legal, or, I may say, moral compulsion."
He was like a vicious terrier taking a last nip at some one's leg,
before being dragged away on a rope. "I have many demands made on me,
both public and private, and my income is not large."
"Fifteen is not much, Mr. Martin, for food and clothes and schooling.
You will find later that your present baby will require all of that."
At the mention of the baby, the Mayor frowned.
"I never shirk an opportunity, Mrs. Herrick, to make another happy. I
will remit the amount to you monthly by check. It is to be booked as a
contribution to your work."
"Certainly, Mr. Martin."
The Mayor escorted Jean to the elevator, rang the bell for her and,
as she stepped in, bowed elaborately. Jean chuckled. Already he was
assuming the manners of the bold, bad man.
The train got in about eight. Jean went straight to the studio, after
finding that Dr. Mary would not be back until the morning. It was dark,
and when Jean turned on the light she saw that the dust was thick
on everything. Herrick had evidently not straightened it out since
she left. It looked forlorn and struck through the exhilaration of
Jean's mood unpleasantly. As always, successful accomplishment gave
Jean a sense of physical well-being that she enjoyed as deeply and as
consciously as ever Martha did her moods of spiritual exaltation.
When she had put away her things, she turned off the light and
stretched out on the couch. Through the open window she could see the
stars, and their peace quieted the inner excitement that had held her
ever since she left Mayor Martin's office. She had done a good piece of
work with which Dr. Mary would be pleased and because of which Amelia
Gorman would die happier. But beyond this, the thread of her action
stretched down the years, binding together lives of which she knew
nothing. At a moment's notice she had entered these lives, just as she
might go to the window and call a stranger into the studio, and never
would life be the same to these strangers as if she had not done the
thing she had. The Mayor would grow old and die, a different man than
he would have been if every month he had not sent fifteen dollars for
the support of Amelia's child. And all the lives he touched would react
to this secret check. Jimmie would grow up in some workman's family
and their lives and his would be altered. She remembered how once she
had thought of each person, weaving before his own loom, deliberately
choosing or rejecting the threads that Life offered. Now she saw
myriads upon myriads weaving before a high loom whose frame was lost in
the immensity of time and distance.
She started as the door opened and Herrick entered. He did not see her,
but came over to the empty fireplace and stood leaning his elbows on
the mantel shelf. He looked tired and there were lines about his mouth.
Compunction for she knew not what seized Jean and she rose quickly.
"Begee!"
Herrick whirled. Jean had been the last person in his mind.
"You!" he demanded stupidly, and instantly recognized that his tone
gave the natural meeting the proportions of drama.
Jean laughed. "Sure. Who else?"
"Your note, you know, wasn't very illuminating. I didn't know whether
you were going for a day or a month."
"I know. But I was so excited and I didn't know myself exactly."
Jean saw that her abrupt going had hurt Herrick and she tried to make
up now. She came closer and laid a hand on his.
"I'll make some chocolate and then I'll tell you all about it. It would
make a perfectly ripping story."
Herrick looked down on Jean's hand resting upon his and it seemed to
him something disconnected from both of them. He wished she would take
it away. To his jangled nerves it was a real weight, pressing heavily
upon him. It was force, that strong, white hand, a mechanical force for
pushing obstacles from her path. It would push him and her mother and
all who did not see things as she saw them, all but the fat, mannish
little doctor with her stupid generalities. With the merest touch of
those firm, cool fingers it would push The Kitten into oblivion.
"A corking story?"
Jean resented Herrick's mechanical interest but tried not to show it.
She had been wrong and had said so and it was trivial of him to let the
memory rankle.
"Wait till you hear it. It's a regular Thomas Hardy novel. It ought to
be set in the granite hills of Devon."
While they drank the chocolate, Jean told him of the woman propped on
her pillows in the miserable room, with the wind blowing over the stony
hills; of the frightened Mayor with his overwhelming respectability.
Her eyes glowed and the strong, white hands moved in unusual gestures,
as if from the slough of human weakness and suffering into which they
were plunged, she was drawing quivering bodies and setting them on a
stage. Herrick's bitterness saw none of the drama, only Jean's own
safety from any suffering. There she sat, glowing with interest in her
"case," a stupid, everyday matter of seduction. She could work up a
tragedy about a scrubwoman overcome by physical desire. But for him,
for his needs, for The Kitten, for Flop, for any one whose way of life
was different, whose clothes did not please her, whose manner did not
suit her, she had no sympathy and no understanding. Herrick laughed.
"It's a scream, simply a scream! A lot of women puttering about,
fiddling with the forces of Nature and getting paid for it!"
Jean's face went white.
"I might have known," she said and sought for words that would hurt him
most, "that you could not possibly grasp the spiritual significance."
Herrick's face flushed and his eyes were two black slits as he bent
across the table.
"You're a fool, Jean, you and Dr. Mary and all the other dead, marble
women she has trailing in her train."
It seemed afterwards to Herrick that they stood for hours looking at
each other across the table, before Jean turned, and without a word
went the length of the studio and closed and locked the bedroom door
behind her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the months that followed there were whole weeks when Herrick
despised Jean for her blindness; when he hated her for the calm, filled
order of her days; when he wanted to go and lay his head in her lap and
be comforted.
What would Jean do if he told her?
She would answer as she would to any cry of distress. In a scientific,
impersonal way she would even be happy at her ability to help. For the
time he would be her favorite "case." She would probe into his feeling
for The Kitten and into The Kitten's and decide what was to be done.
When she had analyzed it all, she would ask him what he wanted to do.
What did he want?
From considering the abstract possibility of his wife's action, Herrick
came down to Jean herself. Picture after picture of her flashed before
him. Jean in the Sundays before their marriage. Jean as she had looked
in the moonlight, beside the driftwood fires. Jean on the Sunday
mornings when they used to argue about the novel. Did she ever think
of it now? It was months since they had even mentioned it. Had she
forgotten this thing that had once seemed the motive of her days? Had
her interest ever been real, or had it only filled an empty space? In
the mazes of his own nature Herrick groped and could find no answer.
After almost three years of marriage Herrick knew less of Jean than he
had the first day in the library.
Would she go on forever as they were going now? They had never
referred in any way to the night that Jean had come back from Belgrave.
It might never have been, for all the outward difference it had made in
their lives. Only Jean never again mentioned a case nor did she ever
ask him to come on Sunday afternoons to The Hill House where she poured
for the neighborhood teas that she and Dr. Mary had instituted for the
winter.
On Sundays Herrick went to Flop's. Jean made no comment, except
sometimes to inquire about various people, with a forced interest that
exasperated Herrick. As for The Bunch, they never asked about Jean.
Behind the banner of "personal freedom," Herrick and The Kitten marched
unquestioned. As indifferent as the rest, Vicky had gone back to the
country. The Kitten had refused to go with him.
The long rains ended and spring came again. The air was clean and soft,
and fluffy white clouds sailed over the hills, once more cameo-clear
against the blue. Herrick and Jean saw even less of each other than
through the winter. They ate together in the mornings and then went
their ways. The paper was changing hands and Herrick spoke of the new
proprietor and the future policy. Dr. Mary and Jean were drawing up a
pamphlet on the evil conditions resulting from bad housing, and now
that the actual gathering of statistics was over, and the work had
widened to include quarrels with political bosses, with the Board of
Health and Building Commissions, Jean was in her glory. The breakfasts
were calm meals, unruffled, impersonal and dead.
The darkest spot in this third summer of Jean's married life was
Martha. The small face was thinner and whiter and, for the first time
in Jean's memory, her mother moved slowly about the house. Jean went as
often as she could and frequently found her sitting on the porch behind
the screen of roses, her hands idle in her lap. Twice, tiptoeing in
unexpectedly, Jean had found her mother lying down, her eyes closed in
such utter weariness that Jean's heart had stopped beating for a moment
in a terrible fear.
But each time Martha had insisted that it was only the heat and
promised faithfully that she would take more rest.
"Mummy, it's really selfish of you not to let me help. I know half a
dozen women who would be glad to come over and work for their home and
a very small salary, and I could spare it so easily."
"Now, Jeany, don't be silly." At this point Martha always got up
briskly and began preparing tea. "In all the years that I've kept
house, I've never had a maid."
"Which is no reason at all," Jean insisted. "You know, Martha Norris,
that once you see the error of your ways the trouble's over. You used
to tell me that yourself when I was a little girl."
"Maybe I did. But the cases aren't the same."
"Why not?" It was the oldest form of dispute they had, Jean quoting her
mother's own words and Martha insisting the cases were not the same.
"It is the same, exactly. You're not well, or else you're getting lazy.
Which is it? It must be one."
"Not at all. You're just talking to hear yourself, Jeany. You always
were fond of that silly arguing that pins people down to a yes or no."
"Oh, mummy, you're such a fake. You get so terribly philosophic when
you want to slip out of a thing. But now listen to me. I won't scold
you any more. But I'm going to watch you precisely as if you were a
'case' and I'll give you till the tenth of July and not one day longer.
If you look the way you do now you're going to the country, if I have
to take you there by force. Do you hear?"
Martha smiled. "Yes, dear, I hear."
It was an afternoon at the end of June and Martha and Jean were in the
clean, darkened kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Bees buzzed
in the garden outside and the old pine was sweetly fragrant in the
warmth. There was something very positive and real about this peace
and clean orderliness, so that Jean wondered whether, after all, this
silent strength was an accident of her mother's nature, or whether the
quiet little figure, trotting on its mechanical round of duty, had not
achieved it, at perhaps a price no one guessed.
Jean watched her as she beat up a pan of the tea biscuits that no
remonstrance of Jean's had been able to stop.
"I'd have to make something for supper and I might just as well make
these."
And as always she had her way. Jean listened to the bees and watched
the deft hands at their work. It was so precisely as it had always been
and yet somehow it was different. Jean's mind wandered lazily about the
problem. What was different? Why did it no longer annoy her? It had
once.
She remembered the day of graduation when all her fine enthusiasm to
fill her life with work and beauty had died at the sight of Martha
dishing up the roast. And the day when she had heard of the library
work and Martha had gone on making apple pies. And now she was making
tea biscuits and pretending that nothing was the matter with her, when
Jean could see that it was a strain to lift the heavy mixing bowl and
that tiny drops of perspiration appeared at the corners of Martha's
mouth. She was ill and no doubt she knew it.
Jean got up and took the mixing bowl away from her.
"Mummy, you're all in. You can scarcely stand. You've got to tell me
what's the matter."
"Now, Jeany----" But Martha's eyes fell before her daughter's. "I
don't feel quite so strong as usual, but it's the heat. It's the
warmest June we've had for years."
"It's nothing of the kind. It's not a bit hotter than it always is. And
if you feel like this now, what will you be in July? I don't believe
I'll give you till the tenth. I have a good mind to cart you off to a
doctor this very minute."
"Now, Jean daughter, I appreciate your interest and all the rest of it,
but remember I am not a case. I won't be packed off to a doctor."
"I wish you were, I'd straighten you out in two minutes. You're really
a very simple proposition. I'd close this place, send you to a nice
quiet country house where you would have nothing to do but eat lovely
food cooked by some one else, and get fat."
"I should hate to get fat and there's no place nicer or quieter than
this."
"But, mummy, you need a change."
"Well," Martha took the bowl away from Jean and went on with her
mixing, "I haven't said that I wouldn't take that, have I? You always
were the most impatient child. I suppose you want me to put on my hat
this minute and leap on a train."
"I certainly would, but I can't imagine you 'leaping' at anything
unless it was particularly disagreeable. For the second time, listen
to your daughter, who has had much experience managing many families
and can surely manage one small mother. Next week Mary and I are going
to locate a new summer camp for mothers. We're going to take the train
and get off wherever it looks good to us and tramp and ride around till
we find the exact spot. It's going to be glorious. I've been looking
forward to it for months. I'd just bundle you along, too, but you
wouldn't enjoy it, and besides it's going to be awfully strenuous. What
you need is rest. But I won't budge a step unless you're fixed first,
do you hear? If you don't go to a doctor and get some kind of tonic and
promise to do exactly as he says, I'll stay right here and work without
a day's vacation. There, now will you do as I say?"
"What's Franklin going to do, while you and Doctor traipse about?"
"I don't know. He said something about taking a vacation himself once,
but he hasn't said anything very lately."
"Jean, I don't want to annoy you or interfere in any way with your
life. You're a married woman and must manage your affairs. But, I've
never seen any happiness come of a husband and wife having separate
interests and not knowing what the other's going to do. Not that I've
seen much happiness come of any married life. But if you do the best
you can, you can't do any more and you can't have it on your conscience
that the fault was yours."
Jean laughed. After all, if there was any change it must be in herself,
for certainly Martha was the same as ever.
"Mummy, times have changed. No modern husband and wife clamp on each
other's backs in the good old-fashioned way. Marriage isn't a pond in
which you both drown, hanging madly to each other."
"What is it?"
"It's--it's a mutual arrangement. If you have the same interests and
ambitions, you work them out together and if you haven't, why, each one
works out his own."
Even as Jean spoke, she wondered when she had come to formulate this
theory so decidedly. She remembered the night in the studio when she
had promised to marry Herrick and life had seemed to her like a river
in which they would both swim on together side by side. But the current
had come between and now they were the width of the stream apart.
"You could always word things better than I, Jean, but sometimes it
seems to me that that's all there is to them. They don't mean much when
you get right down to the bottom of them. How can two people, 'whom
God has joined together,' work out their lives apart? It's like the
nonsense you and Pat used to talk, just as if you could do with life
anything you happened to feel like. We weren't put in this world to
follow every whim and there's no bigger whim-killer than the state of
holy matrimony."
Martha stopped, cut the biscuits and laid each one carefully in the
pan. When she had put them in the gas oven she began clearing up the
table. Jean had gone back to her chair and sat looking absently into
the garden.
"I don't believe, mummy," she said at last, "that anything that makes
you feel smothered is right, no matter what holy state it belongs
in. If that isn't 'wrapping your talent in a napkin,' then what is?
Franklin doesn't care whether a hundred people live in a room or not.
He doesn't think it matters whether people live like intelligent humans
or like animals. He doesn't think that any one can change any one else
or make the world a bit better."
A look of pain crossed Martha's face. "It's an awful way to believe,
Jeany. I hate to think----"
"Then must I give up my beliefs and take things as they are?"
Martha wiped the last grain of flour from the table, washed out the
cloth and hung it on the rack to dry.
"Some women should never marry."
Jean looked quickly at her mother and then away. After a moment she
said gayly:
"All of which has nothing to do with the question in hand, Mummy
Norris, and that is that you go to the doctor and get a tonic or I'll
come and take you myself."
Martha agreed that she would go, and the subject of "holy matrimony"
and "separate interests" was dropped.
But as Jean crossed back to the city she decided that she would ask
Herrick what his vacation plans were and, if possible, arrange her own
to meet them.
Herrick was leaving the studio as Jean entered. He stared in such
surprise that Jean felt uncomfortable.
"I knocked off early this afternoon and went over to mummy's," she
explained. "She hasn't been well and I've been worried. I thought maybe
we might go to dinner somewhere, or we could have it here."
Herrick's first surprise gave way to amusement. After all, there was
something amusing in Jean's self-centered density. For months they had
come and gone without inquiring about each other's engagements and now,
because the notion seized her, Jean assumed the possibility of acting
as if they were in the habit of knowing each other's whereabouts every
moment of the day. The amusement deepened as Jean stood without taking
off her things, apparently waiting for him to decide.
Herrick had promised to take The Kitten to a Syrian restaurant that had
just opened, and every moment that he delayed increased the possibility
of The Kitten herself appearing. She often came for him if he were a
little late, although Herrick had begged her not to. She liked the
excitement of the risk she ran in meeting Jean, but she always claimed
that she came because she loved the studio.
Herrick stood undecided. A meal with Jean would be a restful thing.
There would be no emotional demands, no insistence. And The Kitten was
getting very insistent. At first, the renewal of her little, cuddling
pleas to be assured of his love had thrilled him and made him feel
alive. Her fits of childish rage had amused him, just as in the old
days. Besides, he could always bring her to time by leaving her for
a while. The sense of power was pleasant. But the monotony of its
exertion was beginning to weary him.
To-night she would be very insistent. From the first warm days of
spring she had been begging him to go for a week to the Portuguese
ranch and Herrick did not want to go. She had been through almost all
her bag of tricks. She had been the petted, teasing child, the angry
woman, the commanding mistress. There was one left. To-night she would
be the alluring, giving-all, asking-nothing lover. For that reason she
had chosen a new setting. In the isolation of the Syrian restaurant
they would be alone. She would wear the dress he liked best, a thin,
black clinging thing, and a hat that threw kind shadows on the small
face. Against the background of sawdust floor, of strange, dark men who
came to eat, she would stand out, fragile and completely his.
Jean saw the hesitation, the uncertainty in his eyes.
"Never mind, if you have another engagement. I'll go down to the
delicatessen and get something. I don't suppose there's anything in the
house to eat."
Jean smiled. She couldn't help thinking of Martha and what a heinous
crime it would be to have a house and nothing to eat in it.
"We aren't very good housekeepers, are we?"
"No, there's nothing; but the shops aren't closed yet. It would be
rather nice to eat here."
After all there was a touch of excitement in being invited to picnic
unexpectedly with one's own wife.
"I was only going to eat with Crane. He's been taking the cure again
and isn't quite sure of himself. He hates to eat alone. I'll 'phone him
and bring some stuff up with me."
Herrick ran whistling down the stairs.
The Kitten was angry and Herrick was very tender. But it couldn't be
helped. Crane was his boss and if he would have delirium tremens at
inconvenient moments, there was nothing that Herrick could do about it.
Herrick was patient. He called her soft love names and promised a week
at the Portuguese ranch. The Kitten relented. She was reasonable. She
understood. She said low, sweet things that came lightly across the
wire and touched Herrick in a caress.
Herrick and Jean got supper together. The strangeness of doing this
once familiar thing made them a little shy. They sought for things
to say that would not show the realization of this strangeness. The
sensation was new and exquisite to Herrick. It was pregnant with
possibility. He mashed potatoes vigorously and sensed a possible new
relationship waiting beyond the interlude of supper. What it might be
he did not know. He did not want to know. He was tired of moods that he
understood, reactions that he could bring about at a touch. To-night he
had no wish to rouse Jean to the depths of physical passion that had
been his aim in the old days when they had gotten supper together. It
was not in her, and to-night he did not care. He was weary of storms,
smothered at moments beyond endurance by the clinging of The Kitten's
arms. He would leave everything to Jean. He would do nothing, lead
nowhere, make no effort. He would follow, drugged to a sensuous peace
by his own inaction.
When the things were cooked, Herrick laid the cloth at the end of the
big table in the studio. He brought up a chair for Jean and with a
flourish handed her to it. He was like a boy starting on a new trip,
happy and excited. And, as always, Herrick looked the part. His whole
body seemed keyed to a greater physical firmness. His eyes had the
light that had been in them so often when they used to eat their
sandwiches in the rock coves by the sea.
Jean saw and wondered and felt unsure. Was it her own blind, sweeping
judgments that had stripped Herrick of all that of which she had once
been so sure? To-night he looked and felt as he had on the night he had
told her of his lonely boyhood and she had held out her hands to him.
Hadn't she changed at all since the days when she and Pat had settled
the questions of which they knew nothing? Did she still sit off on her
cloud and play her golden flute while people struggled along in the
dust below? Did she?
Jean talked of Crane, the pity of his wasted days, while the shuttle
of analysis wove back and forth in memory, behind her words. Had she
condemned as lack of purpose and sincerity what, after all, might well
be a concomitant of that very sweetness and boyishness that had called
to her? It was that which had called, Jean was very sure. And the
claiming hands that were always trying to hold her, to touch her when
she was near, the hunger of Herrick's kiss? It was the groping of a
child that didn't want to be alone.
They ate slowly and sat on after the last drop of coffee was drained
from the percolator. Herrick had asked Jean about the pamphlet and was
helping her with details of publishing and distribution. With a paper
and pencil he was making calculations, while Jean leaned across the
table, her elbows on the cloth, her chin in her palms. She and Dr. Mary
had gone over this ground but she saw instantly that Herrick knew much
more about it than they did. It amused Jean, this new humility that met
her at every turn to-night.
"I guess there are some things, just a few, that men can do best."
And she chuckled in the old, childish way that had always delighted
Herrick. It was such a ridiculous, delightful, childish chuckle for a
woman of Jean's size. It had always given Herrick in the early days
one of those double sensations, two contrasting emotions, that pricked
his sense as a pungent spice pricks a jaded palate. It made Jean half
woman and half imp.
The pencil quivered a little, but Herrick did not look up. Instinct
warned him to go on with the serious business of calculation.
"There," he announced, "if you'll be content with just ordinary paper
you ought to be able to get a thousand for----"
The door opened suddenly and The Kitten came in. She stood quite
still, while Herrick sat motionless, the pencil poised over the paper,
his lips parted on the word. Every drop of color left his face and
then rushed back in a deep red that swelled the veins of his neck and
congested his eyes. He rose heavily and the pencil rolled away under
the table.
The Kitten closed the door and came toward the table. A few feet away
she stopped. Jean noticed mechanically the scarlet of her mouth in the
dead whiteness of her face. It was like a wound, and when she spoke her
voice was high and cutting, like the crackling of tin that had torn the
wound.
"So this is why you lied?" She looked at Herrick and Jean's eyes
followed. His flushed face was heavy and ugly, and he looked
unspeakably foolish, staring back with his lips parted. Jean thought
of her father, standing in the bar of sunlight, and of her mother
shrinking from him. In a strange, unreal calm, she thought how odd it
was that she should have the same picture of her father and her husband.
She rose, with a detached feeling of not belonging here and at the same
time of being called on to do something, perform some unpleasant social
duty, that should have fallen to the lot of the hostess, who wasn't
herself at all.
"We've just finished dinner," she said quietly, "and there's not a
thing left. But I can make you some coffee."
The Kitten turned from Herrick and looked at her directly. The heavy
lids lowered and her eyes went slowly from the crown of Jean's head to
her feet, in a look that drew Jean's body after it into the mire.
Jean stepped back quickly. There was no pretense or misunderstanding
now.
The Kitten grinned. "Didn't you know it, really? I was always sure you
guessed. It's been such a long time before you--even."
Clearest of all the thoughts whirling in Jean's brain was the knowledge
that she felt no anger, nor was she stunned. With no warning this thing
had come upon her and there was no slightest doubt in her. Instead,
there was a kind of relief, grotesque but real, and as if she had
discovered at last the source of some annoyance that had long puzzled
her. Her brain seemed to be running in layers, streams of thought all
perfectly distinct. One layer was concerned with herself and Herrick,
from the first night they had eaten with The Bunch and The Kitten had
stared so rudely across the table. Her first vivid picture of The
Kitten had been across a table and now she was seeing her again across
a table. And another stream bore Herrick apart from The Bunch, alone
with her in the days before their marriage, and the things she had
believed and the things that had really been true. There was a stream
for Herrick and herself running through the last eighteen months, with
all sorts of landmarks coming to the surface. And there was the stream
of her own present calm, with the feeling that it was impossible that
she should feel this way, that it must be a false strength which would
fail in a moment and leave her at the mercy of this woman with the
white face and the scarlet mouth and the malicious eyes under their
lowered lids.
"No," Jean said, "I didn't know." The calm was broken for a moment
by a spark of cold anger at the insincerity of the question, or its
implication.
The Kitten shrugged and turned to Herrick. She was trembling with anger
now and it made her look like a fierce, small animal at bay.
Jean's calm was swept aside in a wave of physical nausea. She could not
stand there and see them quarrel. She moved to Herrick.
"Will you go? Please go. Quick! Now!"
"If you wish." Grotesque in his consideration, pitiful in his relief,
Herrick went. They heard his step echo and die in the silence below.
Jean and The Kitten stood looking at each other. Before Jean's calm,
The Kitten's anger crumbled. Jean went slowly back to her place at the
table and sat down again. Her brain seemed the only living thing about
her. She had a problem to solve, but the problem concerned the woman
before her more than it concerned herself. There was something she was
going to do, but she couldn't do it until she had talked to The Kitten,
and she didn't know just how to begin. She sat with her chin in her
palms, as she had sat while Herrick made calculations about the cost of
the pamphlet.
"Didn't you really know?" It was The Kitten who broke the silence at
last. "He always said you didn't, but I never believed it."
"Did you think that I would have gone on just the same?"
"I didn't know. You never loved him. What difference would it make?"
The Kitten waited a moment and added more kindly, as if she were making
something very clear to a child. "Vicky has loved other women; he's
always having an affair of some kind, and I don't say anything. You
see, I don't love him."
Jean did not move. She sat rigid as if the least movement would
precipitate her into the abyss The Kitten was opening before her.
"You thought I knew--and--would go on just the same?"
The thing rose, a barricade to further thought. Jean tried to get by
it, push it aside, go on to the end, but somehow she could not get any
further. She was living in a world, among people who believed things
like that. Men and women lived that way. People she knew lived that
way. Not "cases," but friends, people she had eaten with, to whose
houses she had gone, people whom she had been anxious to meet once,
friends of her husband, of the man she had married.
Jean closed her eyes. It made her sick, physically sick to look at the
little figure across the table, the hungry, contemptuous eyes, the fine
lines etched by unsatisfied desire in the smooth skin. They did not
belong in the same world, they did not speak the same language, and
there they sat in Jean's home, at Jean's table, and talked of Jean's
husband.
"You needn't look at me like that." The Kitten leaned across the table,
so near that Jean saw clearly the smooth texture of her skin and the
flecks of black in her eyes. "I don't see that you have such a lot to
be proud of. I loved Franklin, I have always loved him, long before you
came into his life at all. I loved him and I gave. You don't love him;
you never did, and yet you married him. You took. You sold yourself
for what? So you wouldn't have to teach school, to get away from that
bromide mother, the whole monotonous round! A great motive, wasn't it?
Oh, he's told me all about it?"
She spoke in quick, panting breaths, as if the words were coming faster
than she could utter them. Jean felt as if little pellets of mud were
being flung in her face. She moved now, pushing her chair away.
The Kitten laughed. "Oh, don't mind me, you can go clear over to the
end of the room if you like. You have always acted like that, you know.
It amused us terribly at first. You were so funny! You tried so hard
to be nice to me and The Tiger and the rest of us, but you couldn't
quite make it, could you? We were so awfully muddy and you were so
clean. Clean! Good God, you're not clean, you're empty. Why, I wouldn't
be you, you cold, dead thing, not for all the pain it would save me.
You----"
Jean rose. The mud no longer came in pellets; it flowed, a black,
sticky stream.
"I think you have said enough. After all, there really is nothing to be
said."
She came slowly about the table and stood before The Kitten. She could
almost hear the beating of The Kitten's heart, under the stubby hands
pressed so tightly over it.
"Well," demanded The Kitten, "what are you going to do?"
"Do?" echoed Jean blankly. "Why, I'm going away."
"You're going away! You're going to give him up, without any more
fight than this! You're going to swallow every single thing I've said,
without asking him? I say, how do you know it's the truth? How do you
know it's not all a lie, except my loving him?"
"I don't know," but as she spoke Jean felt something drop from her
eyes. With no warning this thing had come upon her and there was no
doubt in her. Like the sucking blackness at the bottom of the well, it
had always been there.
The Kitten smiled. "He must have had a hell of a time with you. Poor
Boy Blue."
Mechanically Jean put on her things, the things she had thrown down
when she came in and found Herrick just leaving. It was queer to put
them on again, the things that had not changed at all, while she had
been on such a long journey and come back. The Kitten was watching,
fascinated into silence by the ordinary movements of Jean pinning on
her hat, gathering up her gloves and handbag. When she was quite ready,
Jean turned to The Kitten. She felt no anger or disgust now. Instead,
she was sorry for the little thing, so eager, so avid, so unsure.
"You can tell him," she said slowly, "that I shall be at the Hill
House. I don't want him to come. Please tell him that. But if there's
anything to be discussed, he can write. I don't see what it can be, but
I suppose he will want to."
"Oh, yes, he'll write."
Then, for no reason at all, the two women smiled faintly, as if they
were speaking of a child. And, always afterward, Jean remembered The
Kitten as she looked smiling above the greasy dishes.