In spite of the surprising discovery in his office of a young woman of
such a disquieting, galvanic quality, it must not be supposed that Mr.
Claude Ditmar intended to infringe upon a fixed principle. He had
principles. For him, as for the patriarchs and householders of Israel,
the seventh commandment was only relative, yet hitherto he had held
rigidly to that relativity, laying down the sound doctrine that women and
business would not mix: or, as he put it to his intimates, no sensible
man would fool with a girl in his office. Hence it may be implied that
Mr. Ditmar's experiences with the opposite sex had been on a property
basis. He was one of those busy and successful persons who had never
appreciated or acquired the art of quasi-platonic amenities, whose idea
of a good time was limited to discreet excursions with cronies, likewise
busy and successful persons who, by reason of having married early and
unwisely, are strangers to the delights of that higher social intercourse
chronicled in novels and the public prints. If one may conveniently
overlook the joys of a companionship of the soul, it is quite as possible
to have a taste in women as in champagne or cigars. Mr. Ditmar preferred
blondes, and he liked them rather stout, a predilection that had led him
into matrimony with a lady of this description: a somewhat sticky,
candy-eating lady with a mania for card parties, who undoubtedly would
have dyed her hair if she had lived. He was not inconsolable, but he had
had enough of marriage to learn that it demands a somewhat exorbitant
price for joys otherwise more reasonably to be obtained.
He was left a widower with two children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of
twelve, both somewhat large for their ages. Amy attended the only private
institution for the instruction of her sex of which Hampton could boast;
George continued at a public school. The late Mrs. Ditmar for some years
before her demise had begun to give evidence of certain restless
aspirations to which American ladies of her type and situation seem
peculiarly liable, and with a view to their ultimate realization she had
inaugurated a Jericho-like campaign. Death had released Ditmar from its
increasing pressure. For his wife had possessed that admirable substitute
for character, persistence, had been expert in the use of importunity,
often an efficient weapon in the hands of the female economically
dependent. The daughter of a defunct cashier of the Hampton National
Bank, when she had married Ditmar, then one of the superintendents of the
Chippering and already a marked man, she had deemed herself fortunate
among women, looking forward to a life of ease and idleness and candy in
great abundance,--a dream temporarily shattered by the unforeseen
discomfort of bringing two children into the world, with an interval of
scarcely a year between them. Her parents from an excess of native
modesty having failed to enlighten her on this subject, her feelings were
those of outraged astonishment, and she was quite determined not to
repeat the experience a third time. Knowledge thus belatedly acquired,
for a while she abandoned herself to the satisfaction afforded by the
ability to take a commanding position in Hampton society, gradually to
become aware of the need of a more commodious residence. In a certain
kind of intuition she was rich. Her husband had meanwhile become Agent of
the Chippering Mill, and she strongly suspected that his prudent
reticence on the state of his finances was the best indication of an
increasing prosperity. He had indeed made money, been given many
opportunities for profitable investments; but the argument for social
pre-eminence did not appeal to him: tears and reproaches, recriminations,
when frequently applied, succeeded better; like many married men, what he
most desired was to be let alone; but in some unaccountable way she had
come to suspect that his preference for blondes was of a more liberal
nature than at first, in her innocence, she had realized. She was
jealous, too, of his cronies, in spite of the fact that these gentlemen,
when they met her, treated her with an elaborate politeness; and she
accused him with entire justice of being more intimate with them than
with her, with whom he was united in holy bonds. The inevitable result of
these tactics was the modern mansion in the upper part of Warren Street,
known as the "residential" district. Built on a wide lot, with a garage
on one side to the rear, with a cement driveway divided into squares, and
a wall of democratic height separating its lawn from the sidewalk, the
house may for the present be better imagined than described.
A pious chronicler of a more orthodox age would doubtless have deemed it
a judgment that Cora Ditmar survived but two years to enjoy the glories
of the Warren Street house. For a while her husband indulged in a foolish
optimism, only to learn that the habit of matrimonial blackmail, once
acquired, is not easily shed. Scarcely had he settled down to the belief
that by the gratification of her supreme desire he had achieved
comparative peace, than he began to suspect her native self-confidence of
cherishing visions of a career contemplating nothing less than the
eventual abandonment of Hampton itself as a field too limited for her
social talents and his business ability and bank account--at which she
was pleased to hint. Hampton suited Ditmar, his passion was the
Chippering Mill; and he was in process of steeling himself to resist,
whatever the costs, this preposterous plan when he was mercifully
released by death. Her intention of sending the children away to acquire
a culture and finish Hampton did not afford,--George to Silliston
Academy, Amy to a fashionable boarding school,--he had not opposed, yet
he did not take the idea with sufficient seriousness to carry it out. The
children remained at home, more or less--increasingly less--in the charge
of an elderly woman who acted as housekeeper.
Ditmar had miraculously regained his freedom. And now, when he made trips
to New York and Boston, combining business with pleasure, there were no
questions asked, no troublesome fictions to be composed. More frequently
he was in Boston, where he belonged to a large and comfortable club, not
too exacting in regard to membership, and here he met his cronies and
sometimes planned excursions with them, automobile trips in summer to the
White Mountains or choice little resorts to spend Sundays and holidays,
generally taking with them a case of champagne and several bags of golf
sticks. He was fond of shooting, and belonged to a duck club on the Cape,
where poker and bridge were not tabooed. To his intimates he was known as
"Dit." Nor is it surprising that his attitude toward women had become in
general one of resentment; matrimony he now regarded as unmitigated
folly. At five and forty he was a vital, dominating, dust-coloured man
six feet and half an inch in height, weighing a hundred and ninety
pounds, and thus a trifle fleshy. When relaxed, and in congenial company,
he looked rather boyish, an aspect characteristic of many American
business men of to-day.
His head was large, he wore his hair short, his features also proclaimed
him as belonging to a modern American type in that they were not
clear-cut, but rather indefinable; a bristling, short-cropped moustache
gave him a certain efficient, military look which, when introduced to
strangers as "Colonel," was apt to deceive them into thinking him an army
officer. The title he had once received as a member of the staff of the
governor of the state, and was a tribute to a gregariousness and
political influence rather than to a genius for the art of war. Ex
officio, as the agent of the Chippering Mill and a man of substance to
boot, he was "in" politics, hail fellow well met with and an individual
to be taken into account by politicians from the governor and member of
congress down. He was efficient, of course; he had efficient hands and
shrewd, efficient eyes, and the military impression was deepened by his
manner of dealing with people, his conversation being yea, yea and nay,
nay,--save with his cronies and those of the other sex from whom he had
something to gain. His clothes always looked new, of pronounced patterns
and light colours set aside for him by an obsequious tailor in Boston.
If a human being in such an enviable position as that of agent of the
Chippering Mill can be regarded as property, it might be said that Mr.
Claude Ditmar belonged to the Chipperings of Boston, a family still
owning a controlling interest in the company. His loyalty to them and to
the mill he so ably conducted was the great loyalty of his life. For
Ditmar, a Chippering could do no wrong. It had been the keen eye of Mr.
Stephen Chippering that first had marked him, questioned him, recognized
his ability, and from the moment of that encounter his advance had been
rapid. When old Stephen had been called to his fathers, Ditmar's
allegiance was automatically, as it were, transferred to the two sons,
George and Worthington, already members of the board of directors.
Sometimes Ditmar called on them at their homes, which stood overlooking
the waters of the Charles River Basin. The attitude toward him of the
Chipperings and their wives was one of an interesting adjustment of
feudalism to democracy. They were fond of him, grateful to him, treating
him with a frank camaraderie that had in it not the slightest touch of
condescension, but Ditmar would have been the first to recognize that
there were limits to the intimacy. They did not, for instance--no doubt
out of consideration--invite him to their dinner parties or take him to
their club, which was not the same as that to which he himself belonged.
He felt no animus. Nor would he, surprising though it may seem, have
changed places with the Chipperings. At an early age, and quite
unconsciously, he had accepted property as the ruling power of the
universe, and when family was added thereto the combination was nothing
less than divine.
There were times, especially during the long winters, when life became
almost unbearable for Janet, and she was seized by a desire to run away
from Fillmore Street, from the mills, from Hampton itself. Only she did
not know where to go, or how to get away. She was convinced of the
existence in the world of delightful spots where might be found congenial
people with whom it would be a joy to talk. Fillmore Street, certainly,
did not contain any such. The office was not so bad. It is true that in
the mornings, as she entered West Street, the sight of the dark facade of
the fortress-like structure, emblematic of the captivity in which she
passed her days, rarely failed to arouse in her sensations of oppression
and revolt; but here, at least, she discovered an outlet for her
energies; she was often too busy to reflect, and at odd moments she could
find a certain solace and companionship in the river, so intent, so
purposeful, so beautiful, so undisturbed by the inconcinnity, the clatter
and confusion of Hampton as it flowed serenely under the bridges and
between the mills toward the sea. Toward the sea!
It was when, at night, she went back to Fillmore Street--when she thought
of the monotony, yes, and the sordidness of home, when she let herself in
at the door and climbed the dark and narrow stairway, that her feet grew
leaden. In spite of the fact that Hannah was a good housekeeper and
prided herself on cleanliness, the tiny flat reeked with the smell of
cooking, and Janet, from the upper hall, had a glimpse of a thin, angular
woman with a scrawny neck, with scant grey hair tightly drawn into a
knot, in a gingham apron covering an old dress bending over the kitchen
stove. And occasionally, despite a resentment that fate should have dealt
thus inconsiderately with the family, Janet felt pity welling within her.
After supper, when Lise had departed with her best young man, Hannah
would occasionally, though grudgingly, permit Janet to help her with the
dishes.
"You work all day, you have a right to rest."
"But I don't want to rest," Janet would declare, and rub the dishes the
harder. With the spirit underlying this protest, Hannah sympathized.
Mother and daughter were alike in that both were inarticulate, but Janet
had a secret contempt for Hannah's uncomplaining stoicism. She loved her
mother, in a way, especially at certain times,--though she often wondered
why she was unable to realize more fully the filial affection of
tradition; but in moments of softening, such as these, she was filled
with rage at the thought of any woman endowed with energy permitting
herself to be overtaken and overwhelmed by such a fate as Hannah's:
divorce, desertion, anything, she thought, would have been
better--anything but to be cheated out of life. Feeling the fires of
rebellion burning hotly within her,--rebellion against environment and
driving necessity she would glance at her mother and ask herself whether
it were possible that Hannah had ever known longings, had ever been wrung
by inexpressible desires,--desires in which the undiscovered spiritual
was so alarmingly compounded with the undiscovered physical. She would
have died rather than speak to Hannah of these unfulfilled experiences,
and the mere thought of confiding them to any person appalled her. Even
if there existed some wonderful, understanding being to whom she might be
able thus to empty her soul, the thought of the ecstasy of that kenosis
was too troubling to be dwelt upon.
She had tried reading, with unfortunate results,--perhaps because no
Virgil had as yet appeared to guide her through the mysteries of that
realm. Her schooling had failed to instil into her a discriminating taste
for literature; and when, on occasions, she had entered the Public
Library opposite the Common it had been to stare hopelessly at rows of
books whose authors and titles offered no clue to their contents. Her few
choices had not been happy, they had failed to interest and thrill...
Of the Bumpus family Lise alone found refuge, distraction, and excitement
in the vulgar modern world by which they were surrounded, and of whose
heedlessness and remorselessness they were the victims. Lise went out
into it, became a part of it, returning only to sleep and eat,--a
tendency Hannah found unaccountable, and against which even her stoicism
was not wholly proof. Scarce an evening went by without an expression of
uneasiness from Hannah.
"She didn't happen to mention where she was going, did she, Janet?"
Hannah would query, when she had finished her work and put on her
spectacles to read the Banner.
"To the movies, I suppose," Janet would reply. Although well aware that
her sister indulged in other distractions, she thought it useless to add
to Hannah's disquietude. And if she had little patience with Lise, she
had less with the helpless attitude of her parents.
"Well," Hannah would add, "I never can get used to her going out nights
the way she does, and with young men and women I don't know anything
about. I wasn't brought up that way. But as long as she's got to work for
a living I guess there's no help for it."
And she would glance at Edward. It was obviously due to his inability
adequately to cope with modern conditions that his daughters were forced
to toil, but this was the nearest she ever came to reproaching him. If he
heard, he acquiesced humbly, and in silence: more often than not he was
oblivious, buried in the mazes of the Bumpus family history, his papers
spread out on the red cloth of the dining-room table, under the lamp.
Sometimes in his simplicity and with the enthusiasm that demands
listeners he would read aloud to them a letter, recently received from a
distant kinsman, an Alpheus Bumpus, let us say, who had migrated to
California in search of wealth and fame, and who had found neither. In
spite of age and misfortunes, the liberal attitude of these western
members of the family was always a matter of perplexity to Edward.
"He tells me they're going to give women the ballot,--doesn't appear to
be much concerned about his own womenfolks going to the polls."
"Why shouldn't they, if they want to?" Janet would exclaim, though she
had given little thought to the question.
Edward would mildly ignore this challenge.
"He has a house on what they call Russian Hill, and he can watch the
vessels as they come in from Japan," he would continue in his precise
voice, emphasizing admirably the last syllables of the words "Russian,"
"vessels," and "Japan." "Wouldn't you like to see the letter?"
To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his
passion, she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently
handing it on to Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus's trembling
calligraphy, pondered over his manifold woes. Alpheus's son, who had had
a good position in a sporting goods establishment on Market Street, was
sick and in danger of losing it, the son's wife expecting an addition to
the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged. Alpheus, a veteran of
the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his reminiscences, but
the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters of solid
worth, and so far had refused to publish them.... Janet, as she read,
reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures,
of disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father's perennial interest in
failures,--provided they were those of his family; and the next evening,
as he wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in turn was
pouring out his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion by no means
unpleasurable, to this sympathetic but remote relative the story of his
own failure!
If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which
haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a
back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam
and jetsam had collected. Or, to find perhaps an even more striking
illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore
Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to Glendale, the
Italian settlement on the road leading to the old New England village of
Shrewsbury. Janet sometimes walked there, alone or with her friend Eda
Rawle. Disintegration itself--in a paradoxically pathetic attempt at
reconstruction--had built Glendale. Human hands, Italian hands. Nor,
surprising though it may seem, were these descendants of the people of
the Renaissance in the least offended by their handiwork. When the
southern European migration had begun and real estate became valuable,
one by one the more decorous edifices of the old American order had been
torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy to the bare hills of
Glendale, there to enter into new combinations representing, to an eye
craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of a mental indigestion, of a
colour scheme crying aloud to heaven for retribution. Standing alone and
bare amidst its truck gardens, hideous, extreme, though typical of the
entire settlement, composed of fragments ripped from once-appropriate
settings, is a house with a tiny body painted strawberry-red, with
scroll-work shutters a tender green; surmounting the structure and almost
equalling it in size is a sky-blue cupola, once the white crown of the
Sutter mansion, the pride of old Hampton. The walls of this dwelling were
wrested from the sides of Mackey's Tavern, while the shutters for many
years adorned the parsonage of the old First Church. Similarly, in
Hampton and in Fillmore Street, lived in enforced neighbourliness human
fragments once having their places in crystallized communities where
existence had been regarded as solved. Here there was but one order,--if
such it may be called,--one relationship, direct, or indirect, one
necessity claiming them all--the mills.
Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human
planks torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which
is to say they were dominated by obsessions. Edward's was the Bumpus
family; and Chris Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced
that the history of mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by
women. Perhaps he was right, but the conviction was none the less an
obsession. He came from a little village near Wittenburg that has
scarcely changed since Luther's time. Like most residents of Hampton who
did not work in the mills, he ministered to those who did, or to those
who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in his barber
shop on Faber Street.
The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride,
preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood
by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled
a certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little dining-room grew
unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared in
common with the household of the barber. It is true that the barber's
wife was a mild hausfrau who had little to say, and that their lodgers,
two young Germans who worked in the mills, spent most of their evenings
at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling a strong odour of bay
rum, would arrive promptly at quarter past eight, take off his coat, and
thus, as it were stripped for action, would turn upon the defenceless
Edward.
"Vill you mention one great man--yoost one--who is not greater if the
vimmen leave him alone?" he would demand. "Is it Anthony, the conqueror
of Egypt and the East? I vill show you Cleopatra. Und Burns, and
Napoleon, the greatest man what ever lived--vimmen again. I tell you
there is no Elba, no St. Helena if it is not for the vimmen. Und vat vill
you say of Goethe?"
Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.
"He is great, I grant you," Chris would admit, "but vat is he if the
vimmen leave him alone? Divine yoost that." And he would proceed to cite
endless examples of generals and statesmen whose wives or mistresses had
been their bane. Futile Edward's attempts to shift the conversation to
the subject of his own obsession; the German was by far the more
aggressive, he would have none of it. Perhaps if Edward had been willing
to concede that the Bumpuses had been brought to their present lowly
estate by the sinister agency of the fair sex Chris might conditionally
have accepted the theme. Hannah, contemptuously waving a tattered palm
leaf fan, was silent; but on one occasion Janet took away the barber's
breath by suddenly observing:--"You never seem to think of the women
whose lives are ruined by men, Mr. Auermann."
It was unheard-of, this invasion of a man's argument by a woman, and by a
young woman at that. He glared at her through his spectacles, took them
off, wiped them, replaced them, and glared at her again. He did not like
Janet; she was capable of what may be called a speaking silence, and he
had never been wholly unaware of her disapproval and ridicule. Perhaps he
recognized in her, instinctively, the potential qualities of that
emerging modern woman who to him was anathema.
"It is somethings I don't think about," he said.
He was a wizened little man with faience-blue eyes, and sat habitually
hunched up with his hands folded across his shins.
"Nam fuit ante Helenam"--as Darwin quotes. Toward all the masculine
residents of Fillmore Street, save one, the barber's attitude was one of
unconcealed scorn for an inability to recognize female perfidy. With
Johnny Tiernan alone he refused to enter the lists. When the popular
proprietor of the tin shop came sauntering along the sidewalk with nose
uptilted, waving genial greetings to the various groups on the steps,
Chris Auermann's expression would suddenly change to one of fatuous
playfulness.
"What's this I hear about giving the girls the vote, Chris?" Johnny would
innocently inquire, winking at Janet, invariably running his hand through
the wiry red hair that resumed its corkscrew twist as soon as he released
it. And Chris would as invariably reply:--"You have the dandruffs--yes?
You come to my shop, I give you somethings...."
Sometimes the barber, in search of a more aggressive adversary than
Edward, would pay visits, when as likely as not another neighbour with
profound convictions and a craving for proselytes would swoop down on the
defenceless Bumpuses: Joe Shivers, for instance, who lived in one of the
tenements above the cleaning and dyeing establishment kept by the Pappas
Bros., and known as "The Gentleman." In the daytime Mr. Shivers was a
model of acquiescence in a system he would have designated as one of
industrial feudalism, his duty being to examine the rolls of cloth as
they came from the looms of the Arundel Mill, in case of imperfections
handing them over to the women menders: at night, to borrow a vivid
expression from Lise, he was "batty in the belfry" on the subject of
socialism. Unlike the barber, whom he could not abide, for him the
cleavage of the world was between labour and capital instead of man and
woman; his philosophy was stern and naturalistic; the universe--the
origin of which he did not discuss--just an accidental assemblage of
capricious forces over which human intelligence was one day to triumph.
Squatting on the lowest step, his face upturned, by the light of the arc
sputtering above the street he looked like a yellow frog, his eager eyes
directed toward Janet, whom he suspected of intelligence.
"If there was a God, a nice, kind, all-powerful God, would he permit what
happened in one of the loom-rooms last week? A Polak girl gets her hair
caught in the belt pfff!" He had a marvellously realistic gift when it
came to horrors: Janet felt her hair coming out by the roots. Although
she never went to church, she did not like to think that no God existed.
Of this Mr. Shivers was very positive. Edward, too, listened uneasily,
hemmed and hawed, making ineffectual attempts to combat Mr. Shivers's
socialism with a deeply-rooted native individualism that Shivers declared
as defunct as Christianity.
"If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic
system, why do you not rise, then? Why do I not rise? I'm as good as
Ditmar, I'm better educated, but we're all slaves. What right has a man
to make you and me work for him just because he has capital?"
"Why, the right of capital," Edward would reply.
Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable romanticism
and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in spite of the
fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised over her a
paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored intellectual
realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush the little
man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role Shivers had
appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict Shivers of
idealism. Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than atheism,
something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed because
he was unable adequately to express this feeling.
"You can't change human nature, Mr. Shivers," Edward would insist in his
precise but ineffectual manner. "We all want property, you would accept a
fortune if it was offered to you, and so should I. Americans will never
become socialists."
"But look at me, wasn't I born in Meriden, Connecticut? Ain't that Yankee
enough for you?" Thus Mr. Shivers sought blandly to confound him.
A Yankee Shades of the Pilgrim fathers, of seven, generations of
Bumpuses! A Yankee who used his hands in that way, a Yankee with a nose
like that, a Yankee with a bald swathe down the middle of his crown and
bunches of black, moth-eaten hair on either side! But Edward, too polite
to descend to personalities, was silent....
In brief, this very politeness of Edward's, which his ancestors would
have scorned, this consideration and lack of self-assertion made him the
favourite prey of the many "characters" in Fillmore Street whose sanity
had been disturbed by pressure from above, in whose systems had lodged
the germs of those exotic social doctrines floating so freely in the air
of our modern industrial communities .... Chester Glenn remains for a
passing mention. A Yankee of Yankees, this, born on a New Hampshire farm,
and to the ordinary traveller on the Wigmore branch of the railroad just
a good-natured, round-faced, tobacco-chewing brakeman who would take a
seat beside ladies of his acquaintance aid make himself agreeable until
it was time to rise and bawl out, in the approved manner of his
profession, the name of the next station. Fillmore Street knew that the
flat visored cap which his corporation compelled him to wear covered a
brain into which had penetrated the maggot of the Single Tax. When he
encountered Mr. Shivers or Auermann the talk became coruscating..
Eda Rawle, Janet's solitary friend of these days, must also be mentioned,
though the friendship was merely an episode in Janet's life. Their first
meeting was at Grady's quick-lunch counter in Faber Street, which they
both frequented at one time, and the fact that each had ordered a ham
sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a confection--new to Grady's--known as a
Napoleon had led to conversation.
Eda, of course, was the aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would
not be repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she boarded
with a Welsh family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding,
commonplace, resembling--as Janet thought--a horse, possessing, indeed
many of the noble qualities of that animal, she might have been thought
the last person in the world to discern and appreciate in Janet the
hidden elements of a mysterious fire. In appearance Miss Rawle was of a
type not infrequent in Anglo-Saxon lands, strikingly blonde, with high
malar bones, white eyelashes, and eyes of a metallic blue, cheeks of an
amazing elasticity that worked rather painfully as she talked or smiled,
drawing back inadequate lips, revealing long, white teeth and vivid gums.
It was the craving in her for romance Janet assuaged; Eda's was the love
content to pour out, that demands little. She was capable of immolation.
Janet was by no means ungrateful for the warmth of such affection, though
in moments conscious of a certain perplexity and sadness because she was
able to give such a meagre return for the wealth of its offering.
In other moments, when the world seemed all disorder and chaos,--as Mr.
Shivers described it,--or when she felt within her, like demons, those
inexpressible longings and desires, leaping and straining, pulling her,
almost irresistibly, she knew not whither, Eda shone forth like a light
in the darkness, like the beacon of a refuge and a shelter. Eda had faith
in her, even when Janet had lost faith in herself: she went to Eda in the
same spirit that Marguerite went to church; though she, Janet, more
resembled Faust, being--save in these hours of lowered vitality--of the
forth-faring kind .... Unable to confess the need that drove her, she
arrived in Eda's little bedroom to be taken into Eda's arms. Janet was
immeasurably the stronger of the two, but Eda possessed the masculine
trait of protectiveness, the universe never bothered her, she was one of
those persons--called fortunate--to whom the orthodox Christian virtues
come as naturally as sun or air. Passion, when sanctified by matrimony,
was her ideal, and now it was always in terms of Janet she dreamed of it,
having read about it in volumes her friend would not touch, and never
having experienced deeply its discomforts. Sanctified or unsanctified,
Janet regarded it with terror, and whenever Eda innocently broached the
subject she recoiled. Once Eda exclaimed:--"When you do fall in love,
Janet, you must tell me all about it, every word!"
Janet blushed hotly, and was silent. In Eda's mind such an affair was a
kind of glorified fireworks ending in a cluster of stars, in Janet's a
volcanic eruption to turn the world red. Such was the difference between
them.
Their dissipations together consisted of "sundaes" at a drug-store, or
sometimes of movie shows at the Star or the Alhambra. Stereotyped on
Eda's face during the legitimately tender passages of these dramas was an
expression of rapture, a smile made peculiarly infatuate by that vertical
line in her cheeks, that inadequacy of lip and preponderance of white
teeth and red gums. It irritated, almost infuriated Janet, to whom it
appeared as the logical reflection of what was passing on the screen; she
averted her glance from both, staring into her lap, filled with shame
that the relation between the sexes should be thus exposed to public
gaze, parodied, sentimentalized, degraded.... There were, however,
marvels to stir her, strange landscapes, cities, seas, and ships,--once a
fire in the forest of a western reserve with gigantic tongues of orange
flame leaping from tree to tree. The movies brought the world to Hampton,
the great world into which she longed to fare, brought the world to her!
Remote mountain hamlets from Japan, minarets and muezzins from the
Orient, pyramids from Egypt, domes from Moscow resembling gilded beets
turned upside down; grey houses of parliament by the Thames, the Tower of
London, the Palaces of Potsdam, the Tai Mahal. Strange lands indeed, and
stranger peoples! booted Russians in blouses, naked Equatorial savages
tattooed and amazingly adorned, soldiers and sailors, presidents, princes
and emperors brought into such startling proximity one could easily
imagine one's self exchanging the time of day! Incredible to Janet how
the audiences, how even Eda accepted with American complacency what were
to her never-ending miracles; the yearning to see more, to know more,
became acute, like a pain, but even as she sought to devour these scenes,
to drink in every detail, with tantalizing swiftness they were whisked
away. They were peepholes in the walls of her prison; and at night she
often charmed herself to sleep with remembered visions of wide, empty,
treeshaded terraces reserved for kings.
But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was
thrilled to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium.
Emerging from the vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see the
slushy street, her eyes shone with a silver light like that of a mountain
lake in a stormy sunset. And they walked in silence until Janet would
exclaim:
"Oh Eda, wouldn't you love to travel!"
Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was
powerless to detect, and which did not become values until they had
passed through Janet. One "educative" reel they had seen had begun with
scenes in a lumber camp high in the mountains of Galicia, where grow
forests of the priceless pine that becomes, after years of drying and
seasoning, the sounding board of the Stradivarius and the harp. Even then
it must respond to a Player. Eda, though failing to apply this poetic
parallel, when alone in her little room in the Welsh boarding-house often
indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that man, hidden in the mists
of the future, whose destiny it would be to awaken her friend. Hampton
did not contain him,--of this she was sure; and in her efforts to
visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that
brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so
indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of the screen.
By virtue of these marvels of the movies: Hampton ugly and sordid
Hampton!--actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge. Were not
the strange peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton? She saw them
arriving at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered, ticketed
like dumb animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours many of
them were presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel of Faber
Street. She sought to summon up in her mind the glimpses she had had of
the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine their lives in
that earlier environment. Sometimes she wandered, alone or with Eda,
through the various quarters of the city. Each quarter had a flavour of
its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old nor to the new,
yet partaking of both: a difference in atmosphere to which Janet was
keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the north, one felt a sort of
ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be permitted: the tenements
here were clean and not too crowded, the scroll-work on their
superimposed porches, like that decorating the Turnverein and the stem
Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic inheritance: The Belgians
were to the west, beyond the base-ball park and the car barns, their grey
houses scattered among new streets beside the scarred and frowning face
of Torrey's hill. Almost under the hill itself, which threatened to roll
down on it, and facing a bottomless, muddy street, was the quaint little
building giving the note of foreign thrift, of socialism and shrewdness,
of joie de vivre to the settlement, the Franco-Belgian co-operative
store, with its salle de reunion above and a stage for amateur
theatricals. Standing in the mud outside, Janet would gaze through the
tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets prepared for each
household laid in neat rows beside the counter; at the old man with the
watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered cheeks who spoke no
English, whose duty it was to distribute the baskets to the women and
children as they called.
Turning eastward again, one came to Dey Street, in the heart of Hampton,
where Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim, sole testimony of the departed
Hibernian glories of a district where the present Irish rulers of the
city had once lived and gossiped and fought in the days when the mill
bells had roused the boarding-house keepers at half past four of a winter
morning. Beside the hall was a corner lot, heaped high with hills of
ashes and rubbish like the vomitings of some filthy volcano; the
unsightliness of which was half concealed by huge signs announcing the
merits of chewing gums, tobaccos, and cereals. But why had the departure
of the Irish, the coming of the Syrians made Dey Street dark, narrow,
mysterious, oriental? changed the very aspect of its architecture? Was it
the coffee-houses? One of these, in front of which Janet liked to linger,
was set weirdly into an old New England cottage, and had, apparently,
fathomless depths. In summer the whole front of it lay open to the
street, and here all day long, beside the table where the charcoal
squares were set to dry, could be seen saffron-coloured Armenians
absorbed in a Turkish game played on a backgammon board, their gentleness
and that of the loiterers looking on in strange contrast with their
hawk-like profiles and burning eyes. Behind this group, in the half light
of the middle interior, could be discerned an American soda-water
fountain of a bygone fashion, on its marble counter oddly shaped bottles
containing rose and violet syrups; there was a bottle-shaped stove, and
on the walls, in gilt frames, pictures evidently dating from the period
in American art that flourished when Franklin Pierce was President; and
there was an array of marble topped tables extending far back into the
shadows. Behind the fountain was a sort of cupboard--suggestive of the
Arabian Nights, which Janet had never read--from which, occasionally, the
fat proprietor emerged bearing Turkish coffee or long Turkish pipes.
When not thus occupied the proprietor carried a baby. The street swarmed
with babies, and mothers nursed them on the door-steps. And in this
teeming, prolific street one could scarcely move without stepping on a
fat, almond eyed child, though some, indeed, were wheeled; wheeled in all
sorts of queer contrivances by one another, by fathers with ragged black
moustaches and eagle noses who, to the despair of mill superintendents,
had decided in the morning that three days' wages would since to support
their families for the week .... In the midst of the throng might be seen
occasionally the stout and comfortable and not too immaculate figure of a
shovel bearded Syrian priest, in a frock coat and square-topped "Derby"
hat, sailing along serenely, heedless of the children who scattered out
of his path.
Nearby was the quarter of the Canadian French, scarcely now to be called
foreigners, though still somewhat reminiscent of the cramped little towns
in the northern wilderness of water and forest. On one corner stood
almost invariably a "Pharmacie Francaise"; the signs were in French, and
the elders spoke the patois. These, despite the mill pallor, retained in
their faces, in their eyes, a suggestion of the outdoor look of their
ancestors, the coureurs des bois, but the children spoke English, and the
young men, as they played baseball in the street or in the corner lots
might be heard shouting out derisively the cry of the section hands so
familiar in mill cities, "Doff, you beggars you, doff!"
Occasionally the two girls strayed into that wide thoroughfare not far
from the canal, known by the classic name of Hawthorne, which the
Italians had appropriated to themselves. This street, too, in spite of
the telegraph poles flaunting crude arms in front of its windows, in
spite of the trolley running down its middle, had acquired a character, a
unity all its own, a warmth and picturesqueness that in the lingering
light of summer evenings assumed an indefinable significance. It was not
Italy, but it was something--something proclaimed in the ornate, leaning
lines of the pillared balconies of the yellow tenement on the second
block, in the stone-vaulted entrance of the low house next door, in
fantastically coloured walls, in curtained windows out of which leaned
swarthy, earringed women. Blocking the end of the street, in stern
contrast, was the huge Clarendon Mill with its sinister brick pillars
running up the six stories between the glass. Here likewise the sidewalks
overflowed with children, large-headed, with great, lustrous eyes, mute,
appealing, the eyes of cattle. Unlike American children, they never
seemed to be playing. Among the groups of elders gathered for gossip were
piratical Calabrians in sombre clothes, descended from Greek ancestors,
once the terrors of the Adriatic Sea. The women, lingering in the
doorways, hemmed in by more children, were for the most part squat and
plump, but once in a while Janet's glance was caught and held by a
strange, sharp beauty worthy of a cameo.
Opposite the Clarendon Mill on the corner of East Street was a provision
store with stands of fruit and vegetables encroaching on the pavement.
Janet's eye was attracted by a box of olives.
"Oh Eda," she cried, "do you remember, we saw them being picked--in the
movies? All those old trees on the side of a hill?"
"Why, that's so," said Eda. "You never would have thought anything'd grow
on those trees."
The young Italian who kept the store gave them a friendly grin.
"You lika the olives?" he asked, putting some of the shining black fruit
into their hands. Eda bit one dubiously with her long, white teeth, and
giggled.
"Don't they taste funny!" she exclaimed.
"Good--very good," he asserted gravely, and it was to Janet he turned, as
though recognizing a discrimination not to be found in her companion. She
nodded affirmatively. The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her sense
of adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in the
grove; she glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and well
formed, with remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the olives
themselves. It surprised her that she liked him, though he was an Italian
and a foreigner: a certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to her--a
quality lacking in many of her own countrymen.
And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,--only she did not know how to
begin,--when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with him
in soft, liquid tones that moved her ....
Sometimes on these walks--especially if the day were grey and
sombre--Janet's sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more
poignant, charged with presage. These feelings, vague and unaccountable,
she was utterly unable to confide to Eda, yet the very fear they inspired
was fascinating; a fear and a hope that some day, in all this Babel of
peoples, something would happen! It was as though the conflicting soul of
the city and her own soul were one....