I
By September the United States had welcomed most of its heroes home.
Nora, sitting in her history lectures, observed a new group of men,
shabby some of them, with army shoes and often the army flannel shirt
completing a civilian costume of a shiny coat strained at the shoulders
and trousers threatening collapse in the seat. There was sturdiness and
hardness about most of these men, as if, having conquered fear, hunger,
disease, and vice, they asserted an animal vigor which set them apart
from other men. But there were cripples too; legs and arms missing.
Crutches and canes tapped in the hallways and lecture rooms. In the
faces of some there was strain, suffering, a transparent pallor. They
collected in little groups in the rear of Nora’s history classes,
talking together in low tones, deliberately closing the exchange of
their experiences not only to the women, but equally to the married men
and the fledglings fresh from college.
But from the first day, Nora detected a new spirit in the University.
Even the professors were changed. The old droning tones had disappeared.
They may have been frightened last year or only disheartened. Or were
they, like actors roused to play their best before a good audience,
conscious of the men sitting in the back rows?
Never before had places of learning been crowded with so serious a
student body as in the fall of 1919. Perhaps they never will be again.
At last there seemed to be earnest concentration upon education, a
hunger for new ideas and enlightenment. Every man returning from France
seemed sure of one thing—that for the complications of life, stripped
now of its former vapid American idealism, he must know more. In the
tensity of the classroom Nora built up these speculations.
Among the history lecturers was Professor Nicholson, with grey hair
straggling over a face that had a curious, unconquerable youth. In what
the other professors said one found the same new note of radicalism
creeping in, subtle generally and evasive, but there for the discerning.
They, too, made frequent comparisons with modern events, clarifying and
interpreting both old and new. But, in spite of these resemblances, he
stood out above them. The first day she could not quite catch the
difference. Was it a closer reality he reached, a more intense
experience?
The women around Nora whispered that Professor Nicholson had been
studying in England when war was declared. At once he offered himself as
an ambulance driver. Later he enlisted as a private. He had seen hard
fighting in the Argonne drive, been wounded. Nora wondered how much
these women knew. He was a small man, slight, almost delicate, and the
eyes and sensitive mouth did not suggest ambulances or shell fire. But
the nose, large, aggressive, riding over the fine lines of the rest of
the face, was not that of a dreamer. One of Nora’s neighbors repeated
what a man who had studied under him before the war had told her. He was
just the usual scholar then, a good lecturer, but all brilliant theory
like the others. The war had changed him.
The opening lectures in a course dealing with nineteenth-century England
pictured manufacturing and agricultural England before the Industrial
Revolution. The vividness of phrase, the pictorial and dramatic effect,
were unforgettable. Miss Steele’s conception of the historian, a kind of
recording angel, looking back, seeing in the present both the past
and the future, but not a cruel recording angel—pitying,
understanding—Professor Nicholson seemed like that.
Behind Nora sat a unique specimen of graduate student, handsome,
fashionably dressed, his well-set-up figure and lean muscular frame
suggesting a steady programme of games and exercise rather than hard
work. From his conversations with his companion Nora pieced together
those first days a fairly complete biography. He had been studying at
Oxford when the war broke out, offered himself for British service at
once, and was later transferred to an American regiment. But he
described a machine-gun attack in the style of a tennis match, a polo
game, or a drag-hunt. Fighting was the duty of a gentleman, disagreeable
sometimes, but a game, an adventure.
In the basement room of the library Nora, snatching a cup of tea,
watched a man at the same table turning over the pages of a green paper
pamphlet as he sipped coffee. On the chair beside him were crutches. She
remembered that he was in one of her classes. As he read here and there,
he scowled and muttered to himself, unconscious of her watching him.
Something about the peace conference, Nora gathered from a chapter
heading.
‘Have you found something good about the war?’ she asked him at last.
He looked up, still scowling. ‘What every one will be thinking five
years from now.’
She looked at the author, the most famous of British dramatists. ‘I’d
like to get the book,’ she said.
‘I brought it back with me. You can’t get it here.’
‘I’d like to read it,’ she persisted.
‘You wouldn’t like it. No woman would.’
‘Do you think all women have the same opinions?’
‘Well—they’re idealists. They wouldn’t care for this straight stuff.
I’ve been home six months.’ He laughed.
‘I don’t pretend to know anything about the war. I’ve heard nothing from
any man who was actually there. I watch all of you talking together——’
‘If you’d like to read this—I’m through with it.’
She thanked him, and he hobbled away.
The book gave Nora a new boldness. She came to her classes late, the
seats in front all filled by the women who strove daily for those
closest to the lecturer. A vacant chair was to be found only in the rear
of the room. The men were talking. She caught stray words,
unintelligible slang, foreign phrases.
‘I can’t—I can’t believe it was for nothing,’ a strained voice said
behind her. ‘Being wounded—suffering the way some of us have—all for
nothing.’ The other men were silent. ‘I won’t believe it,’ he concluded
in the same grey tones.
How could a woman know what these men thought except by the crime of
eavesdropping? If she could only talk to them. Between them and her was
an invisible wall, stronger than stone and mortar.
Another time she heard; ‘But it all ends the same way. It was hell, but
not one of us would have missed it. Nothing in the end. Months wasted.
Everything here gone to the bow-wows. But those who didn’t get into the
scrap are outside. They know it. They don’t belong to our generation.’
Professor Nicholson had finished his introductory lectures. He was now
plunged into the intricacies of a new age, with its machinery in
factories, its locomotives and steamships. The classes were set to
drawing steam engines and spinning-jennies. When they had recovered from
the first bewilderment, they visited a cotton mill in New Jersey,
located in a gaunt town where smelly canals, a river stagnant with
refuse, and tenement houses built of a gloomy native stone swarmed with
the children whose parents were employed in the mill. It was not a
cheerful introduction. The mill itself was almost overpowering to those
who had never seen the textile industry at first hand. The smells, the
terrible heat in some of the rooms, the thundering noises were a
revelation of the heights to which human endurance could be stretched.
The preparing rooms were the most revolting. American cotton, the
dirtiest and the poorest on the market, was a tough proposition, some of
the men said. They got together and talked with Professor Nicholson, in
spite of the noise, when the foreman walked ahead. Nora tried to push
herself near them.
She caught a reference to the steel strike, which now made newspaper
headlines. The noise shut out the rest. Men talking together about vital
things, the facts without sentimentality, what happened from day to day,
and women on the outside exchanging the same twaddle. It was hopeless,
unfair, but what could she do about it?
A woman sticking close to her kept repeating: ‘I think it’s
dreadful—dreadful. I never knew it was like this. The only mill I’ve
ever been in was a flour mill—such a nice clean place.’
In the carding-room cotton fluff drifted like snow over the hair of the
girls, their faces stolid, almost inhuman. The atmosphere in which they
toiled eight hours daily had a stench like burned salad oil. The air
vibrated with the continuous screeching roar of the machinery. But when
the foreman’s back was turned, the girls’ lips moved.
Professor Nicholson afterward described the Apex Mill as above the
average, with good lighting, a fairly modern ventilating system, and
excellent vacuum apparatus for clearing the cotton fluff out of the air.
Although it wasn’t ideal, the general management was decent. The
problems of shifting foreign labor and competition with the Southern
cotton mills, with lax State laws and child labor, complicated the
policy of many employers. Nora remembered the reforming zeal of Ellen
Standish and her obdurate father. Perhaps Ellen had not been entirely
fair with him. The professor seemed to be straining himself for an
almost superhuman fairness, a little dark man near Nora remarked.
The lectures on industrial England were soon crowded with men. Extra
chairs had to be brought in. Professor Nicholson, his clear voice racing
over swift sentences, presented his material by running comments on
contemporary problems. He quoted novels Nora had never read, eloquent
with the misery of adjustment, the exploitation of the helpless, the
greed of capitalists whom the new era had given sudden power. He read
lines from a poet Nora thought she knew. This was the stuff men wanted
in a university. Some of the women were bewildered by the mechanical
terms and scientific conceptions.
‘Is this history?’ one of them inquired of Nora.
At the close of the hour the men in the back seats crowded around the
lecture platform. They got very much excited over the discussion of
issues raised, their voices loud, their eyes and arms enforcing what
they said. From chance phrases one guessed that they were fighting the
war all over again. These men transformed all they heard into their own
experience. As all roads lead to Rome, so did all history for them speak
in what they themselves had seen. And Nora on the outside could only
gnash her teeth in silent rage.
Nora sought out Professor Nicholson in his office. She was not satisfied
with her courses, she explained. They were too narrow, not giving her
the sweep of vision she must have. He listened while she reviewed what
she had studied, what she had tried to do the year before.
‘You’ve got a big job——nineteenth-century England,’ he commented when
she was through.
‘I know—I know very well. But I want to really understand—why England
was what she was—the attitude of other countries to her—all of it. I’ve
started——’
He advised her to go to literature. English—she knew fairly well. But
German and French——
‘Of course I’m outlining a job for life,’ he smiled, the baffling
freshness in his face. Freshness—youth—it was ideas, fresh ideas, caring
for them more than for life, which made a man look like Professor
Nicholson.
‘That’s what I want,’ she gasped eagerly, ‘a real job.’
Nora met the crippled soldier again in the basement refreshment room and
returned his book.
‘I agree with you,’ she began.
‘Really?’ His tone was almost rude.
As she was trying to frame a reply, another man sat down beside him.
‘Well, Perkins. How goes it?’
Mr. Perkins attempted an awkward introduction. ‘My friend John Harper.’
‘Nora Deming,’ she helped him. ‘Mr. Perkins and I have been talking
about the war.’
‘That’s what he and I talk about, too,’ the stranger said. He had a way
of looking straight at one when he talked that was a little
disconcerting at first. He was a graduate student in economics like
Perkins, he informed her. He had decided when he got out of the army
that he didn’t want to go back into business.
‘I was one of these efficiency experts,’ he said. ‘Office manager for
the Zenith Rubber Company. I enlisted because I got bored stiff making
patriotic speeches.’
He and Perkins laughed, and Nora, after a moment, joined them. Mr.
Harper was the first young business man she had ever known. One of the
new school strange to her. The business men in Maronac, even Eleanor’s
father at the Dry Docks, were leisurely in speech and action. The young
man evidently rushed things through. He spoke rapidly, examining his
listener with his restless eyes, never entirely serious, however.
Nora came upon the two men in the same place the following day. Mr.
Harper was starting a story.
‘I was telling about a German prisoner brought in by some men in our
company. He got down on his knees to the captain. A butcher with ten
children, he said. Fat as a sausage—middle-aged. We let him go. He
started off—looking back at us like a—a rat. Then he began to run. The
lines were so close together we could watch him almost up to his own
gang. All safe. He turned. Waved to us. His deliverers.’ The story was
interrupted by laughter. ‘Then he—he went right up in the air. Blown to
bits—pieces of him going straight up. We’d stuck a bomb with a time-fuse
in Fritz’s pocket. It went off just the right minute—inside his own
lines.’
Both men were laughing.
‘Do you think that’s a funny story?’ Nora inquired in amazement, looking
first at one and then at the other.
They were now roaring with laughter. ‘Killing,’ Mr. Harper explained.
‘Let me tell you the game we played with Hun prisoners that jumped on
the running-board of our staff car. We stepped on the gas and shot them
off like bottles in a row.’
Nora rose. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t learned war humor yet,’ she said.
Evidently a new kind had developed. A man limping across the campus
remarked to his companion, ‘They say the main advantage of a wooden leg
is that you can hold up your sock with a carpet tack. But even better—I
don’t have to change the sock on my game foot. It can be regarded as
more or less permanent.’
II
On Sunday afternoon Nora was invited to Professor Nicholson’s to tea. A
stuffy, overheated room filled with people, too much furniture, and an
overdressed, gushing woman fussing about among her guests. In the
confusion Nora discerned two or three graduate students grouped around
Professor Nicholson. Mrs. Nicholson at once began describing to Nora her
terrible sufferings while her husband was in France.
‘I never thought I’d live through it. The days—the nights worse. Of
course he didn’t have to go. But I never complained.’ She finished with
a grimace, intended for a smile, which made Nora inwardly shudder. ‘I
suppose you’re crazy about my husband. All his students are. It’s all I
hear—how wonderful he is.’
She then turned to the woman on the other side, evidently an old friend,
and began an exchange of gossip, mentioning some of Nora’s professors,
in a high-pitched voice.
Before Nora left, she had a few moments with Professor Nicholson. He
expressed regret that he had been unable to talk with her, hoped to see
her again soon to hear how she was getting on. Then she left, dismissed
with another grimace from her hostess, and a hard throaty sound
caricaturing laughter.
On her way back to the dormitory Nora met Mr. Harper, who asked if he
might join her. After a few preliminary remarks, he began to talk of
himself. In the midst of his economic studies he was trying to get
caught up with the new books. His friend Perkins was a great reader. But
both he and Perkins floundered in places. In the realm of ideas, the
discussion of contemporary problems, they felt safe enough. But all this
art stuff——
Nora in a spirit of mischief advised him to read ‘The Tragic Muse.’
‘James, you know,’ she explained.
‘Is that he-man stuff?’
‘I don’t know. It depends on the man, you see——’
‘All this diagnosis of the soul since the war. I’m not much for that.
Wells—in those first books. He started me going—that man.’
‘But did he carry you very far? I like my ideas dished out straight. Not
lost in all his verbiage.’
‘Of course Shaw,’ went on Mr. Harper; ‘there’s the giant of the crowd.
And I’m reading Tolstoy.’
He hovered at the door of the women’s hall until Nora had to ask him in.
He looked around with his appraising glance. She could see that he was
amused. He settled himself on the nearest sofa, not quite at ease, but
making a pretense of boldness, as the graduate women filed past slowly
enough to make an examination of him and Nora sitting there.
‘It was the army that got me out of business,’ he was finally
explaining. ‘Queer how it was, too. I was on to all the tricks. They’re
the same ones. The only difference is that business is efficient. Things
move along. In the army it was an unholy mess. I never wasted time
hating the Germans. They were a devilish smart crowd—a lot o’ them. But
the colonel of our outfit—when he wasn’t drunk——’
‘I understand,’ Nora said.
‘Well—lugging him out of one scrape after another——Orders one day. All
off the next. What my poor men had to stand—I was swearing blue devils
most o’ the time. Old Jack we called him—old Jack loved power. To make
us hop around just to see us hop—that was the man. I got some of my old
stuff handed back to me. Business organization—it means driving men
under you. I was good at it. But the army got under my skin. I couldn’t
come back and see men scared to death—white-collar slaves—jumping around
when I snapped my fingers. If I go into business again—I won’t be a
slave-driver. I haven’t got it thought out yet. But in a year here——You
ought to hear Doctor Lewis lecture. Industrial Problems. It’s great
stuff. The man knows what he’s talking about. He can’t fool me.’
The dinner bell rang, and Mr. Harper rose. ‘D’you ever get out of this
place?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Nora assured him.
‘Could you—would you give me the pleasure—a show or something——’
III
Everywhere Nora went she met John Harper, always correctly dressed and
with something new to talk over. In the dingy basement room, up in the
history stacks where she foraged around for books, and in the
reading-room used by economics as well as by history students. His
energy carried him everywhere. When she left the library before dinner,
he, too, was ready to leave for the day. At first she regarded these
encounters as accidental. Then something in the way he looked at her, a
new softness in his sharply darting eyes, made her self-conscious and
shy.
‘Can’t we have dinner somewhere?’ he suggested, standing on the steps of
the dormitory. Inside Nora knew a business meeting was awaiting her.
‘Thanks very much. Yes, I should like to. But I must hurry to my
meeting now.’ The closing of the door gave her a sense of relief, of
escape.
Three solemn young men on a sofa balancing tea-cups were facing two
women in the parlor. Nora, the vice-president of the Women’s History
Club, arriving late, was being introduced by Miss Stark, the president,
a very energetic woman, to what she learned was the executive committee
of the Men’s History Club.
‘I feel so sorry for all these young girls coming to New York and never
meeting any of you young men here at Knickerbocker,’ Miss Stark was
saying.
One of the young men looked interested, a second cautious, the third,
also the president, alarmed.
‘I didn’t come to Knickerbocker to meet young women,’ he declared, with
a candor Nora could not help admiring.
As the discussion developed, she had a confused recollection of Miss
Stark’s theory that the two societies devoted to historical studies
should become one.
‘It doesn’t seem fair for us women to miss the lively discussions you
men have,’ the secretary, Miss Fleet, said, with a smile which swept
over the trio on the sofa. Miss Fleet in Missouri, Nora suspected, had a
way with men.
‘Our meetings are very dull,’ the interested young man observed.
‘Perhaps the young women would liven them up for you,’ Miss Stark
ventured.
‘Scholarly discussions are never lively,’ the president remarked, with
finality, looking around him as if he wanted to escape.
‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea for the two clubs to join, Miss
Deming?’
Nora started. Miss Stark was looking to her support.
‘I—I hadn’t thought of it before. I don’t know. But the men don’t seem
to want it.’ Her glance was directed toward the president. He appeared a
little flustered.
Miss Stark drew herself up proudly in her high-backed chair. ‘I never
knew before there was sex in history.’
‘There’s sex in everything,’ the president said firmly. Then, reaching
for a battered hat, he rose and shook hands solemnly with Miss Stark,
concluding with a stiff jerk of a bow. The cautious young man was beside
him. The enthusiastic young man was still talking to Miss Fleet about
the book he was writing, but, when they were close to the door, he, too,
scuttled away.
‘Why didn’t you help me out?’ Miss Stark turned upon Nora.
The women’s club was stupid enough. But whether the addition of men
would help it any was uncertain. An unwieldy organization, trying
clumsily to be wise, or, better still, according to Miss Stark, to be
sociable, did not attract Nora.
It was clear enough the men didn’t want the women. Men serious about
their work usually preferred to keep to themselves. They could be
violent with their own sex, if they had to be. But with women—that
outworn chivalry. It would always keep men and women apart. Chivalry may
have gone along well enough when fair ladies kept to their bowers behind
castle walls. But now, when women were getting into everything, a man
had to look out. If he could fight her like another man——But he could
only despise her and wish she’d stay in her place.
And what women studying history at Knickerbocker had anything to
contribute to the men’s discussions? Was there anything that they really
yearned to have dragged out into the fierce light of real mental combat?
Around Nora daily buzzed girls from every State in the Union, many of
them, as Miss Stark had hinted, crazy to meet young men. They were open
about declaring, for any one to hear, just why they had come to
Knickerbocker University. Studying was an excuse for being in New York.
New York was crowded with young men, they had thought back home. But
once in the great city, tucked away in a woman’s hall, with the matron’s
experienced eye upon them, existence had no immediate flame. They joked
before Nora about sitting beside the good-looking men at lectures. They
asked them the time, borrowed their newspapers, appealed to them when
their fountain pens went dry. But graduate students were nuts—most of
them—and even the handsomer ones hadn’t a cent. Far more alluring the
hall just across the street, that wide, relentless barrier. The girls
had recently been experimenting with lamp signals. Two or three gathered
in one room. Then they began turning a study-lamp off and on in a new
kind of wig-wagging game. A quick response from Knickerbocker
undergraduates. Between them a code was developed. Meetings were
arranged on near-by corners. One girl returned from a Greenwich Village
dance at six in the morning. The matron was growing suspicious. The
older women in the dormitory must have told tales.
Women past their first youth have so little sympathy with the adventures
of their own sex. There was Miss Johnston on Nora’s corridor. She had
become a joke, a kind of tradition. No one knew how many years she had
been studying at Knickerbocker. She had long ago taken every course
offered by the history department. A new series of lectures roused her
like a small boy hearing a fire-engine. Off once more. One more subject
to conquer. She was engulfed in some vast scheme in which she wandered
over anthropological wastes and historic dawns to prove her theory. Her
book, when it was done, might run into three volumes. Once she had hoped
to crowd it down into two. In all this she was supported by the earnings
of an elderly uncle, who had once dreamed of scholarship and had got
stranded in business. His niece read on year after year—miles and miles
of books—and told him all about her latest and best conclusion.
Then there was Anna Downing, waiting day by day for the arrival of her
brother’s body from France. He had been a captain, a much-loved older
brother. Her face fell into deeper grey lines, she drank more cups of
coffee, and her eyes glittered uncomfortably for those who talked to
her. Only last year she had been the wittiest of Nora’s neighbors.
Alice Conway was a poet. At least she wrote verse and studied
philosophy, a not infrequent combination. She had recently got the
notion that the dormitory women were making derogatory remarks behind
her back—saying her mind was affected. She wanted them to know she was
as sane as anybody. If she found the person who started the story about
her not being quite right——
All of the women Nora knew studied too much, with the conscientiousness
they should have outgrown with pigtails. Their chief satisfaction was in
recounting how many pages they read daily, how many consecutive hours
they toiled in the library, how late they sat up over their work. They
admitted that they were always tired—nothing seemed worth while. If they
went to a symphony concert, the music shot nervous pains all through
their bodies, like an electric shock. And the theatre—what they had
looked forward to more than anything else—probably they had been too
tired to go.
Why do women cling to the phantom—that most deceptive phantom—the joy
one finds in the play of the mind? They cling to it long after all other
hopes are gone. Happiness or intelligence in women—which is rarer? Do
any women have both? The Brontë sisters—genius and wretchedness. What
they did—walled around with the stony barriers of a limited experience.
Elizabeth Barrett—but was she really intelligent? George Eliot—getting
revenge for the stiff provincial conscience of Marian Evans by
tormenting poor little Hetty Sorrel. And the women of power.
Catharine of Russia—Queen Elizabeth in England—giants both of
them—relentless—using men for their own determined ends. But when were
they happy?
The little blonde girl from Tennessee worked harder than any one. At
least the strain bore down upon her more. She had gone to a very poor
college. She realized that now. Most of the time she didn’t know what
the professor was talking about—just chaos. She read sentences in
reference books again and again, but she couldn’t make them out. What
was the matter with her? She appealed to Nora. At night her throat ached
so. She couldn’t sleep. Maybe she ought to go home. But no, she couldn’t
do that.
One night all of Nora’s floor was roused past midnight. People rushing
back and forth. The poor little thing from Tennessee had jumped out of
her window. She was dead when they found her on the pavement below.
IV
John Harper said women couldn’t stand the strain of too much study—at
least not many of them.
‘They go straight off,’ he said, seated across the table from Nora in an
Italian restaurant south of the Square, not unlike the one where Nora
and Mary Howe listened to the poetic raptures of Eddie Gaston that night
so long ago. ‘The reason, clearly enough, is that they don’t really want
to study. Now if you force yourself to do a thing—put on the screws
tight—there’s trouble. Like this poor girl you told me about. Collapse.’
Mr. Harper, with none of Helen’s agile psychological terms, had the
latest theories.
‘Yes,’ Nora agreed, ‘but what about the women who really prefer the
intellectual life to everything else—their professional career whatever
it may be? What of them?’
‘Let them have it,’ he declared generously. ‘They’re the minority.’ He
looked across at Nora with his disconcerting directness. ‘Is that what
you prefer?’
Nora blushed, looked down at her plate. ‘I—I don’t know. But my
friends—several of them who have already done splendid work—it’s the
first rank—competing with men——’
‘Women in business—really good ones—I met them once in a while. But they
were hard. And at Knickerbocker—well——’
‘The good ones are there. Not many, of course. But how many really good
men are there either?’
Nora took John Harper one Sunday afternoon to have tea with Helen
Spring. They got on famously together.
‘He’s a real man,’ Helen observed to Nora afterward. ‘I like him. I’m
glad you’re meeting men up there at the University.’ She sighed. ‘After
a whole week of women——But, of course, that’s my job.’
Helen had taken her first position, a good one she was told by her
superiors, in a home for fallen girls, concealed under the euphemistic
name ‘Rest Cottage.’ But its inmates never rested. They were like caged
lionesses waiting to escape back to their old life. They put on the
proper conversions. They told Helen sobbing stories of early
temptations, cruel parents, poverty. All that was true enough. But their
emotion didn’t conceal their hatred of the peace of Rest Cottage, where
they were safe, well fed, and employed in tasks designed to be
unexciting and corrective.
To a scientist convinced that the new psychology will immediately
minister to a mind diseased, Rest Cottage was discouraging. But one
found there every form of mental variety. It was a remarkable
laboratory. The inmates, properly pigeonholed by the staff of
psycho-analysts, were a most satisfying group of individuals for
scientific purposes.
Helen’s speech during the first experiments in her new job was an almost
unintelligible jargon to laity like Nora. Simple introverts and
extraverts, objective extraverts and introverts, emotional introverts
and subjective extraverts. It was as bad as old Polonius and his
classification of plays. ‘“Pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”’ jeered
Nora. ‘“Manics, dementia præcox, paranoiacs,”’ she recited.
‘You keep quiet,’ Helen threatened, starting off next on libidos, which
were equally various—collective, unconscious, desexualized, introverted,
extraverted, excessive—many more.
But gradually the job got hold of Helen. She wanted to cure those poor
creatures. When all the analyzing was done, what next? They didn’t want
to be different. Gradually Helen suspected what they did want. The
husband of one of the psychologists knew what they wanted most. To the
pretty, lively ones, he gave it. One of Helen’s patients confided that
he felt sorry for the girls. He was such an affectionate man, she added.
All the time he encouraged his wife to go on with her remarkable cures.
It was a terrible mess. And Helen, knowing all that horror, had to keep
quiet.
Then Zoe Ryder refused to go on any more cases. She’d starve first. But
before beginning the process of starvation, described as painless by
those who have tried its early stages, Zoe borrowed money of all her
friends. The money she used for her new business venture of making
lamp-shades. Out of scraps of silk she contrived boudoir lamps of every
color and design—as delicate as flowers. Parchment and paper, cretonnes,
chintzes—she contrived an endless variety. They were all charming.
Before Christmas she had more orders than she could fill. But sitting in
a little back room in Greenwich Village making lamp-shades got tiresome
long before spring. For a change Zoe lived in luxury and ease, sat in
Washington Square, and began to write a play, with all the neighborhood
Italian children swarming around her. A friend got her the offer of
being a permanent nurse to a delicate child, but Zoe would not listen to
flattery about her magic ways with children. She made the rounds of her
friends a second time, less successfully, but still she got enough to
keep the play going. She would never make another lamp-shade. She
quarrelled with Helen, who made the suggestion. A tea-room in the
Village, where only creative artists came, was now her great ambition.
If she could get the necessary capital——In the meantime actors were
begging her for parts in her new play. She was a pathological case,
Helen stated, scolding Amelia for lending her more money.
Vicky’s Lady Needleworkers had been out on strike all winter. Vicky told
them to hold firm. They hung on, eating less and less, trying to stretch
out the union relief fund to the utmost of its capacity. Then they came
to Vicky, who had been leading their fight so valiantly. They couldn’t
pay her salary. They reminded her that last year they paid every cent.
Three thousand dollars. But Vicky couldn’t live without money. She would
have to resign. Her mother and brother, still keeping guard from the
windows of a Park Avenue apartment hotel, might have tided her over. But
that would have meant the regular life appropriate to those regions. The
needleworkers were sorry. She had lent elegance to their cause—a real
lady and all. It was too much to expect she’d keep on with them. But
they’d hoped——
Amelia was furious at Vicky’s desertion of these plucky fighters.
‘She’ll never get another job at three thousand dollars a year because
she was born a lady,’ commented Helen sagely. ‘She’s lazy—untrained.’
‘And dishonest,’ added Amelia. ‘She’s tried to conceal the fact that
she’s been living with Max Goldberg all winter. If she’d been honest
about it——’
‘Well,’ Helen excused her, ‘she knew he’d tire of her soon. He generally
demands more intelligence than she’s got to show. Don’t be too hard,
Amelia.’
When Nora told John Harper about Miss Hamilton’s treachery to the
needleworkers, he was much amused.
‘What else did you expect? There’s no one so keen about money as those
who have had it. Your friend is a good business woman. No nonsense about
her. I respect her. She’ll come out on top. And the needleworkers—when
the trades get rid of their snobbery and sentiment, they won’t need
ladies to manage their scraps for ’em.’
There was something hard and relentless about John Harper. Was it only
masculinity? Nora had known too few men to be sure. If only—something
about him—not quite. How disgusting she was! How narrow and stupid! She
revolted from her own thoughts.
While Vicky looked for a new job, Amelia used the bits of leisure left
her by the Labor College in getting Tony married off to somebody. She
was bored with Tony—not only Tony, but all Italians. They were
materialistic—at least on American soil. The Russians were her next
hope—the only people who in the twentieth century still have souls.
‘Well,’ sighed Amelia as the sixteen-year-old bride of Antonio d’Angelo
floated out of the church under a canopy of bridal veil and orange
blossoms beside her beautiful new husband, ‘I kept him out of the gang.
She can take care of him now.’
Amelia was busy soliciting funds for a new colony of rare spirits to be
started in the country, providing a combination of intellectual and
manual labor, and in connection a school for the poor, Russians
preferred.
‘Hasn’t that been tried before?’ asked Nora. ‘Some of the colony don’t
work. Others get tired of one another and start fighting.’
‘All of us will dress in grey—a neutral shade,’ Amelia persisted,
thinking only of her newest enterprise.
When the news of Garrison Smith’s marriage to an English socialist came,
Amelia had just been informed that the son of a fabulously rich father
had inherited more than a million dollars to lay at the feet of the
colony. Amelia had no time for anything else. Garrison was hardly
mentioned.
‘It’s a blessing she’s got this other thing,’ breathed Helen. ‘Don’t say
anything against her colony, Nora. You’ve got your young man caught. I
can see that.’
‘Helen!’ warned Nora, turning crimson. Nora had brought Mr. Harper down
to tea again. ‘Don’t you say that. If you do, I’ll never—never see him
again.’
‘Don’t be a fool, my child.’
The rush of events warned Nora that John Harper must soon be reckoned
with. This determined young man, who had been successful in everything
else he had undertaken, was in love with Nora. Any one could see it. It
burst out of him everywhere like a riotous flood, Helen, looking
straight at Nora with a defiant air, told her.
Nora began placing obstacles in the way of his frequent invitations, but
somehow he climbed over them. Often she was relieved when he did.
Dinners in quiet restaurants away from the noise and the smell of the
cafeteria, surrounded by people without the scars of intellectual
struggles, examining a menu card with no thrifty eyes on the price list,
spinning away from dinner to the theatre in a taxi without watching the
expensive revolutions of the metre, enjoying a play or a concert
unhampered by the cramped discomfort of balcony heights—were luxuries
Nora had come to count upon during the winter. More than that was the
stimulation of talking to a man with vigorous opinions, whose
prejudices, even if they were irritating, were at least never feminine.
There was the new sensation of not having to look out for one’s self, to
cross the street with no fear of cars darting out of unexpected corners,
to walk along a dark passage without even a shiver of trepidation, to
escape in companionship one’s own doubts.
‘But you can’t go on this way forever,’ warned Helen, who had studied
all of the uncertain ways of men and women.
Nora and John Harper, walking home briskly from the theatre, crossed the
park. Under the trees, with their lacy shadows over the path, there was
escape from the glare of the lights and the steady traffic, a thin
quietness with a lazy, pleasant hum beneath it. Nora did not see the
lovers on the benches locked in heavy, passionate embraces, nor the
homeless men slinking off to a dark corner to find a bed away from the
policeman’s beat. She paused close to the Japanese cherry trees in the
height of blossoming.
‘How sweet—sweet,’ she murmured, turning to her companion.
They stood breathing in the scented spring air. She took a step forward,
but strong arms held her back, enclosed her.
‘At last—my darling,’ he breathed close to her cheek. He was crushing
her against him with his rough, masculine strength, outraging some blind
fighting instinct in her.
‘No—no!’ She tried to free herself, trembling with rage.
‘I love you,’ he went on, not releasing her, pressing his lips against
hers. ‘My proud little girl.’
‘No,’ she repeated, pulling herself away with a quick wrench, clenching
her lips against the sobs in her throat.
‘You mean you don’t care for me?’
She began to walk rapidly, faster and faster, gathering speed, almost
running over the ground. If she could get back on the crowded pavements,
with people passing and lights, she would be safe.
‘You don’t need to be afraid of me,’ the voice beside her was saying.
They went the rest of the way in silence, she still sweeping over the
terrifying stretch of streets like a home-bound swallow, he stalking
beside her with hard, pounding strides. At the door of the women’s
dormitory, she said a quick good-night.
In her room she was eager to turn out her light, to hide herself away in
the darkness. How dared he? she kept repeating to herself. Lying in bed,
she trembled all over. A chill seized her, coming out in icy drops on
her forehead, making her lips chatter, her fingers stiffen, her feet
dead weights. Then she was burning up with fever. This man had done
something to her—battered down the outer fortifications of her woman’s
world, made her, for the first time, afraid—afraid because she was a
woman.
She knew now why she had run away—locked herself up in this room high
above the city streets. She must save herself. If he had urged her—held
out against her battling opposition—something inside might have
crumpled, and she——That was what it meant to be a woman—weak,
surrendering to brute force.
But she had saved herself. They didn’t match. She knew. They didn’t
belong to each other.
Toward morning, with the dawn making timid grey shadows in her room,
Nora was calm enough to go back over everything. There had been doubts
from the start. He was too well dressed, too sure of himself, too
self-consciously correct. And too—too hard. Almost the first time she
met him he affected her like shiny new furniture in shop windows. She
had tried to remember his finer qualities, his kindness and generosity.
But those things dear to her, which made the delicate flavor to life,
did not exist for him. No—no—they could never belong to each other.
The morning light danced over the white paper on Nora’s study table, the
cover on the bureau, the expanse of mirror, the walls. There were
flickers of dawn, then the sunshine at last in her face. Drawing up the
covers, she hid herself away from the hard brightness of the day, and
wept.