Her kitchenette was a model of order and cleanliness. The carpenter
who built its neat cupboard and fitted the drawers beneath the tiny
gas range, had outdone himself in its construction. He had given the
wood-work four coats of immaculate white paint without extra charge.
Mary had insisted on paying for it, but he waved the proffered money
aside with a gesture that spoke louder than words:
“Pooh! That's nothing to what I'd like to do for you.”
She was not surprised when he called the following Saturday and stood
at her door awkwardly fumbling his hat, trying to ask her to spend the
afternoon and evening at Coney Island with him. There was no mistaking
the manner in which he made this request.
She had refused him as gently as possible--a big, awkward, good-natured,
ignorant boy he was, with the eyes of a St. Bernard dog. He apologized
for his presumption and never repeated the offense.
Somehow her conquests had all been in this class.
The tall, blushing German youth from the butcher's around the corner
had been slipping extra cuts into her bundle and making awkward advances
until she caught him red-handed with a pound of lamb chops which he
failed to explain. She read him a lecture on honesty that discouraged
him. It was not so much what she said, as the way she said it, that
wounded his sensitive nature.
The ice man she had not yet entirely subdued. Tony Bonelli had the
advantage of pretending not to understand her orders of dismissal. He
merely smiled in his sad Italian way and continued to pack her ice-box
so full the lid would never close.
She was reminded at every turn tonight of these futile conquests of the
impossible. They all smelled of the back stairs and the kitchen. Her
people had been slaveholders in the old regime of southern Kentucky. A
kindly tolerant contempt for the pretensions of a servant class was bred
in the bone of her being.
And yet their tribute to her beauty had its compensations. It was the
promise of triumph when he for whom she waited should step from the
throng and lift his hat. Just how he was going to do this without a
breach of the proprieties of life, she couldn't see. It would come. It
must come. It was Fate.
In twenty minutes her coffee-pot was boiling, the lamb chops broiled to
perfection and she was seated before the dainty, snow-white table, the
kitten softly begging at her feet. Half an hour later, every dish and
pot and pan was back in its place in perfect order. She prided herself
on her mastery of the details of cooking and the most economical
administration of every dollar devoted to housekeeping. She studied
cooking in the best schools the city afforded. She meant to show her
Knight a thing or two in this line when the time came. His wife would
not be an ignorant slattern, the victim of incompetent servants. No
servant could fool her. She would know the business of the house down to
its minutest detail.
Not that she loved dish-washing and pot-polishing and scrubbing. It was
simply a part of the Game of Life she must play in the ideal home she
would build. There was no drudgery in it for this reason. She was a
soldier on the drill grounds preparing for the battle on the successful
issue of which hung her happiness and the happiness of the one of
whom she dreamed. She might miss some of the dangerous fun which Jane
Anderson could enjoy without a scratch, but she would make sure of the
fundamental things which Jane would never stop to consider.
She threw herself on the couch in her favorite position against the
pillows, drew the kitten into her arms and hugged him violently.
“It's all right, Mr. Thomascat; we'll show them,” she purred softly.
“We'll see who wins at last, the eagle who soars or the little wren in
the hedge close beside the garden wall--we'll see, Kitty--we'll see!”
The room was still, the noise of the street-cars below muffled with the
first soft blanket of snow. The street lamps flickered in the wind with
a pale subdued light that scarcely brought out the furnishings of her
nest. She was in the habit of dreaming in this window for hours with
only the light from the lamps on the street.
The Square, deserted by its tramp lovers, lay white and still and cold.
The old battle with the Blue Devils was on again within. The fight with
Jane had been easy. She had always found it easy to face temptation in
the concrete. The moment Satan appeared in human shape she was up in
arms and ready for the fray. It was this silent hour she dreaded when
the defenses of the soul were down.
There was no use to lie to herself. She was utterly lonely and
heartsick.
She had guarded the portals of life with religious care--with a care
altogether unnecessary as events had proved. There had been no crush of
rude men to assault her. Only an awkward carpenter, a butcher's boy
and the ice man! It was incredible. Of all the men whose restless
feet pressed the pavements of New York, not one, save these three, had
apparently cared whether she lived or died.
The men whom she met in her duties in the schoolroom she had found
utterly devoid of imagination and beneath contempt. They had each
been obviously on guard against the machinations of the female of the
species. They had, each of them, shown plainly their fear and hatred of
women teachers. The feeling was mutual. God knows she had no desire to
encroach on their domain any longer than absolutely necessary.
Perhaps she was making a mistake. The thought was strangling. Only the
girl who waived conventions in the rushing tide of the modern city's
life seemed to live at all. The others merely existed. Jane Anderson
lived! There could be no mistake about that. She had mastered the ugly
mob. Its cruel loneliness was to her a thing unknown. But Jane was an
exception--the one woman in a thousand who could defy conventions and
yet keep her soul and body clean.
The offer she had made had proved a terrible temptation. The artist who
had asked with such eagerness to use her head for his portrait of the
Madonna on the canvas he was executing for the new cathedral, had long
appealed to her vivid imagination. Two prints of his famous work hung on
her walls. She had always wished to know him. He had married a Southern
girl.
That was just the point--he WAS married!
No girl could afford to be shut up alone in a studio with a fascinating
married man for three hours--or half an hour. What if she should fall
in love with him at first sight! Such things had happened. They could
happen again. Only tragedy could be the end of such an event. It was too
dangerous to consider for a moment.
She would have consented had it been possible for Jane to chaperon
her. That would have been obviously ridiculous. No artist with any
self-respect would tolerate such a reflection on his honesty. No girl
could afford to confess her fears in this brazen fashion.
The necessity for her refusal had depressed her beyond any experience
she had passed through in the dreary desert of the past five years.
She lifted the sleeping kitten and whispered passionately:
“Am I a silly fool, Kitty? Am I?”
The tears came at last. She lay back on the pillows and let them pour
down her cheeks without protest or effort at self-control. Every nerve
of her strong, healthy body ached for the love and companionship of men
which she had denied herself with an iron will. At nineteen it had been
easy. The sheer animal joy in life had been enough. With the growth of
each year the ache within had become more and more insistent. With each
ripening season of body and mind, the hunger of love had grown more
and more maddening. How long could she keep up this battle with every
instinct of her being?
She rose at last, determined to go to Jane, confess that she had been
a fool, and step out into the new world, New York's world, and begin to
live.
She seized her hat and furs and put them on with feverish haste.
“God knows it's time I began--I'll be an old maid in another year and
dry up--ugh!”
She looked in the quaint oval mirror that hung beside her door and
lifted her head with a touch of pride.
She had reached the street and started for the Broadway car before she
suddenly remembered that Jane was “dining with a dangerous man.”
She couldn't turn back to that little room tonight without new courage.
Her decision was instantaneous. She couldn't surrender to the flesh and
the devil by yielding to Jane.
She would go to prayer-meeting!
Religion had always been a very real thing in her life. Her father was a
Methodist presiding elder. She would have gone to the meeting tonight
in the first place but for the snow. Dr. Craddock, the new sensational
pastor of the Temple, was giving a series of Wednesday-night talks that
had aroused wide interest and drawn immense crowds.
His theme tonight was one that promised all sorts of sensations--“The
Woman of the Future.” The only trouble with the Doctor was that the
substance of his discourses sometimes failed to make good the startling
suggestions of his titles. No matter--she would go. She felt a sense of
righteous pride infighting her way to the church through the first storm
of the winter.
In spite of the snow the church was crowded. The subject announced had
evidently touched a vital spot in modern life. More people were thinking
about “The Woman of the Future” than she had suspected. The crowd sat
with eager, upturned faces.
The first half-hour's prayer and song service had just begun.
Mary joined in the singing of the stirring evangelistic hymns with
enthusiasm. Something in their battle-cry melody caught her spirit
instantly tonight and her whole being responded. In ten minutes she was
a good shouting Methodist and supremely happy without knowing why. She
never paused to ask. Her nature was profoundly religious and she had
been born and bred in the atmosphere of revivals. Her father was an
aggressive evangelist both in his character and methods of work, and she
was his own daughter--a child of emotion.
The individuals in the eager crowd which packed the popular church meant
nothing to her personally. They had passed before her unseeing eyes
Sunday after Sunday the past five years as mere shadows of an unknown
world which swallowed them up the moment they reached the street. She
had never seen the inside of one of their homes. Not one of them had
drawn close enough to her to venture an invitation.
Two of the stewards she knew personally--one a bricklayer, the other a
baker on Eighth Avenue. The preacher she had met in a purely formal way
as the bishop of the flock. She liked Dr. Craddock. He was known in the
ministry as a live wire. He was a man of vigorous physique--just turning
fifty, magnetic, eloquent and popular with the masses.
Mary was curious tonight as to what the preacher would say on “The Woman
of the Future.” The Methodist Church had been a pioneer in the modern
Feminist movement, having long ago admitted women to the full ordination
of the ministry. Craddock, however, had been known for his conservatism
in the woman movement. He abhorred the idea of woman's suffrage as a
dangerous revolution and the fact that he consented to treat the topic
at all was a reluctant confession of its menacing importance.
With keen interest, the girl saw him rise at last. A breathless hush
fell on the crowd. He walked deliberately to the edge of the platform
and gazed into the faces of the people.
“I have often been asked,” he slowly began, “where I get my sermons.” He
paused and laughed. “I'll be perfectly honest with you. Sometimes I get
them from the Bible--sometimes from the book of life. The genesis of
this talk tonight is very definite. I found it in the liquid depths of
a little girl's eyes. She asked a simple question that set me
thinking--not only about the subject of her query but on the vaster
issues that grew out of it. She looked up into my face the other night
after my call for volunteers for the new mission we are beginning in the
slums of the East Side, and asked me if the girls were not going to be
given the chance to do something worth while in this church's work.
“I couldn't honestly answer her off-hand and in my groping I forgot the
child and her question. I saw a vision--a vision of that broader, nobler
future toward which human civilization is now swiftly moving.
“I say deliberately that it is swiftly moving, because the progress of
the world during the last fifty years has been greater than in any five
hundred years of the past.
“The older I grow the stronger becomes my conviction that the problems
of the age in which we now live cannot be solved by masculine brain
and brawn alone. The problems of the city and the nation and the great
fundamental social questions that involve the foundations of modern life
will find no solution until the heart and brain of woman are poured into
the crucible of our test.
“They talk about a woman's sphere As though it had a limit: There's not
a place in earth or heaven, There's not a task to mankind given, There's
not a blessing or a woe, There's not a whisper yes or no, There's not a
life, or death, or birth That has a feather's weight of worth Without a
woman in it!
“The difference between a man and a woman is one that makes them
the complementary parts of a perfect unit. God made man in His own
image--male and female. The person of God therefore combines these two
elements unseparated. The mind of God is both male and female. In man we
have the strength which lifts and tugs and fights the elements. This is
the aspect turned primarily toward matter. In woman we have the finer
qualities of the Spirit turned toward the source of all spirit in God.
The idea of a masculine deity is a false assumption of the Dark Ages.
God is both male and female.
“I used to wonder why Jesus Christ was a man, until I realized that
the Incarnation expressed the depth of human need. God stooped lower
in assuming the form of man. The form of the divine revelation through
Jesus Christ was determined solely by this depth of human need----”
For half an hour in impetuous eloquence, in telling incidents wet with
tears and winged with hope, he held his listeners in a spell. It was not
until the burst of applause which greeted his closing sentence had died
away that Mary Adams realized that another landmark had toppled before
the onrushing flood of modern Feminism. The conservatism of Doctor
Craddock had yielded at last to the inevitable. He, too, had joined the
ranks of the prophets who preach of a Woman's Day of Emancipation.
And yet it never occurred to her that this fact had the slightest
bearing on her personal outlook on life. On the contrary she felt in the
spiritual elation of the triumphant eloquence of her favorite preacher
a renewal of her simple religious faith. At the bottom of that religion
lay the foundation of life itself--her conception of marriage as the
supreme and only expression of woman's power in the world.
She walked back to her home on the Square, in a glow of ecstatic
emotion.
Surely God had miraculously saved her this night from the wiles of the
Devil! No matter what this eloquent discourse had meant to others, it
had renewed her faith in the old-fashioned woman and the old-fashioned
ways of the old-fashioned home. Her vision was once more clear. She was
glad Jane Anderson had come to put her to the test. She had been tried
in the fires of hell and came forth unscorched.
She stood beside her window dreaming again of the home she would build
when her Knight should stand before her revealed in beauty no words
could describe. The moon was shining now in solemn glory on the
white-shrouded Square. Temptation had only strengthened the fiber of her
soul. She knelt in the moonlight beside her couch and prayed that God
should ever keep her faith serene. She rose with a sense of peace and
joy. God would hear and answer the cry of her heart. The City might be
the Desert--it was still God's world and not a sparrow that twittered in
those bare trees or chattered on her window-ledge in the morning could
fall to the ground without His knowledge. God had put this deathless
passion in her heart; He could not deny it expression. She could bide
His time. If the day of her deliverance were near, it was good. If God
should choose to try her faith in loneliness and tears, it was His way
to make the revelation of glory the more dazzling when it came.
She drew the covering about her warm young body with the firm faith that
her hour was close at hand, and fell asleep to dream of her Knight.