FOR LIFE
The kitchen of the Bogart House was a pleasant room whose two doors
opened out into a tidy latticed vegetable garden and whose outer
arrangement of entry and drying yard were of the "save steps"
description. Sard and her mother had worked these things out together,
for at college, under one of the few strong souls and true brains
that are still left unmartyred in American colleges, the girl had
learned practical ideals of what should be the attitude of the employer
to those who toil for his comfort. It was Sard who had the kitchen
walls painted a sunshiny yellow, selected pretty rag rugs and placed
bookshelves and good reading lights in the room; it was she who had
insisted upon the lattices and ladyslippers and morning-glory vines.
All with the sense of her own pleasure in them, though none of the
people the Bogarts employed seemed to care much for these things. The
young daughter of the house soon began to realize that any bright
sport-hat she herself wore, the set of her skirts, the make of her
shoes, interested Dora and Maggie better than the books she tried to
discuss with them. The name of Edith Cavell did not thrill them as did
the name of the most recent screen actress. They cared only, it seemed,
to catch up with the joy and pleasure of the life ahead of them. They
seemed always to feel that the very stuff of life was arrayed against
them--and sometimes they had reason.
Now as the girl pushed aside the swinging door of the old-fashioned
"butler's pantry," she was half prepared for the interrupted Irish
sentences, the hot questions and answers.
"Is it justice, I ask you; is it justice? To take him now--only
nineteen. When he's sort of wild and notional by nature and traps set
for him? Maybe he dunnit--maybe he dunnit, but he keeps saying he ain't
done it. Oh, my God, my God, I don't know."
The girl stood before the two women in the kitchen, the cook who, like
Sard, wiped her hands and silently handed her the ordering list.
"Thank you, Maggie," said Sard; then, her forehead drawing together,
"Dora, is there anything new?"
The waitress with a gesture of dumb inability to answer, turned away,
and Sard, no asperity in her voice, saw that it was to a resolutely
turned back that she was speaking.
"She blames me, somehow," the girl sighed, "as if I could help it!"
"Please put the north room to air. Miss Gerould arrives late in the
afternoon--I think there isn't a waste-paper basket in the room, so,
Dora, will you hunt one up, and see to all the electric bulbs, won't
you? And towels, the little embroidered ones----" Sard waited, half
contemplating, thinking of reproof for the back turned so rudely and
obstinately toward her direction, then she looked at the slight,
slender figure in its gray gown, the apron tied so carefully and
delicately, the capless, pretty hair, and was conscious suddenly of
someone young like herself. Through this veil of youth she saw what
kind of sorrow it was that bowed the head of the woman standing there;
something that she did not know was the most glorious passion in the
world beat up through Sard's heart into her brain; it was the passion
for humanity, for justice and fairness for all. "Why should I be
giving orders to her when she is suffering? Supposing Dunstan were in
trouble and--and shame, and I had to take orders from the very people
that----Dora--Dora," the girl persisted, "is there nothing I can do?"
There was no answer, only dry coughing sobs. The cook turned. "Ah,
don't bother your head with it all, dear. It ain't nothing to
you--only, Gawd help the poor thing! Er course," said the cook somewhat
bitterly, "we're all under this law; the boy done wrong; he done awful,
and they'll be able to prove it against him, and your papa--well," the
cook sighed, "only he's young, a rill smart curly-headed young feller
and his chanst is gorn."
Then cook, with a curious rising howl, turned away herself.
Wiping her eyes, the young waitress stonily piling up the silver on the
tray, let drop a fork. The girl stood there looking at it. Sard tried
to comfort her.
"It--it is Human Sorrow," she said awkwardly. "I think we--we don't
understand sorrow as well as we ought to and I am quite powerless but
Miss Aurelia and I care, Dora."
The girl said it tremulously; already she was feeling the awful
gulf between a person who suffers tragedy and that other who stands
by longing to help. Also Sard knew a kind of shame--for it seemed
treachery to her father and the equity he maintained, to say more. What
could words do? It was Sard's first experience of the great naked fact
of human sorrow and shame; she knew that the only person who could help
Dora would be someone who had been through a wave of tragedy like hers.
"Words," thought Sard hotly, "are disgusting. We bandy them about and
pile them up like money. We exchange them like coin of the realm." The
young girl, clean and defiant of emotion as a young animal, had no
mature power, that amazing power borne through sorrow and sympathy, the
strange power of the healing touch, else she would have touched Dora's
bowed head, put a comforting hand on the heaving shoulder. She stood
silent, then once more said, helplessly, "Dora, don't you believe me,
that I do truly care?"
Suddenly there was a curious half shriek, the terrible leap of human
emotion through the breaking discipline of lips and eyes--"Oh, I know
you care----Oh, Miss Sard--but they'll jug him just the same--for
life--for _life!_ His chanst is gorn."
Dora's voice then sank to a kind of moaning soliloquy. "Oh, yes, that's
what they all tell me; he's killed a man, or they say he has "--the
woman shot a haggard look into the girl's face. "I've thought and
thought and I know from reading the papers and all that almost any
rich man's son would get off," she said it bitterly, "but that isn't
it--it's something else, it's that he's only done wrong once, and now
he's got to live and die with the worst--oh," moaned Dora passionately,
"they'd ought to be laws to save them that's got wrong into them, not
to smash 'em. For life, for _life!"_
No great poet could have crammed into one sentence the thing that the
weeping girl crammed into these words--"for life." Gently Sard closed
the door and, hardly knowing what she did, tiptoed back toward the
front of the house. She looked out on the late spring foliage, on the
tulips and Japanese maples a-quiver with June, on the purple fleur de
lis and peonies, dewy with color against the long sparkling ribbon of
the morning river ... against all that virginal clean growth with its
rapturous aspiration toward the sky that feeds it, the girl heard the
poor human cry, "For _life_--for life!"
So this was actually happening! Life, a smooth velvet delicious thing
was going on in the front of Sard's home--music, pleasure, ease and
beauty, while in the back part of it life was labor and anguish and
shame! This was the law under which Sard's parents and their friends
had lived contentedly, it was the law under which she was expected
to live contentedly. "I never will," whispered the girl fiercely, "I
never, never will; these are not my laws, _I_ am not 'under' the law."
Sard, slowly leaving the kitchen, came upon her aunt. Miss Aurelia,
with the finest and lightest of dusters, was performing various
rituals with the legs of table and chairs; now she moved one
thin hand in swirls over the piano top. "A piano collects dust so
strangely," she explained, as if the piano were a sentient thing that
made dust-collecting its object. "I've always been so glad to do the
dusting," remarked Miss Aurelia for the hundredth time, "he--your
father, of course, never notices but she--we--not that I want to
criticise your mother, that would be impossible, only she-we--at that
time--that is to say--in any emergency I would naturally; of course,
some servants were careful and others not. I had once," said Miss
Aurelia, with the air of beginning a new subject, "I had an--an aunt,"
she whispered the thing mysteriously, "she--er--hated dust----Sard,
you're twisting your ring--you look--is anything wrong?"
Sard, motioning toward the kitchen, spoke in a low voice. "Aunt Reely,
that boy, Terence O'Brien, is Dora's only brother; she helped educate
him; there isn't anyone but those two----Isn't it too terrible?"
Miss Aurelia lifted a lamp off the table, dusted where it had been and
put it back again; in doing so the silk shade toppled and fell. Miss
Aurelia, frowning and gasping, treated the incident like a catastrophe,
something to be met with firmness and an intake of breath. When she had
solemnly adjusted all as it had been again, she took up the subject
of dust. "It's the open fires," she remarked gloomily; "sometimes I
think we should never have--a land where there is no dust, that is how
I always think of Heaven! Yes, Sard, I know that--er--she--he, of
course, it was a regular murder, such as you read about, he is, you
see, a criminal, my dear, and that, of course, makes you--me--us feel a
natural revulsion." Miss Aurelia stood up; the sunlight fell upon her
gown of a rather sentimental blue with white ruffles, her fair white
skin was noticeable even in the bald morning light, her rabbity mouth
somehow too full of teeth, paused unctuously, with drama on the subject
in hand.
Sard, strumming a few chords on the piano, looked thoughtfully at her
aunt. "Shall I bring in some of those big Japanese iris?" she asked.
"Minga's coming to-night, did I tell you? I want things to look jolly.
The old dear hasn't been here since that holiday week before Mother"
--Sard never could finish the sentence--"Mother died. Do you suppose
Father will let us have the small sedan altogether? Minga is used to
her own car; she fusses with any machine they've got."
Something that had been hanging on Miss Aurelia's mind hung there
still; this slangy sort of talk, the planning for Minga Gerould's visit
Aunt Aurelia hailed with delight. This was more as it should be, better
than Sard's behavior since she had remained home from college after her
mother's death. It was the kind of thing, some of it, that Miss Aurelia
had grown to believe in while she deprecated it. American young girls,
of course, came of a nobly material race, everyone avowed that America
was very great and the fact of the young people having no manners
and no respect for age and no morals and no loyalty to life--well,
Miss Aurelia thought it was only the other countries who were jealous
who said such things. American young girls came of a nobly material
race. Americans were so practical, so anxious to get ahead--everyone
seemed so anxious that the young people shouldn't be high-brow. But
then Sard had a queer, Miss Aurelia thought almost common, way of
noticing servants and poor people, their troubles and all that. It
wasn't good or even religious to think too much. For instance, the new
man on the place. Miss Aurelia didn't think it quite nice or "young"
to be interested in him. Miss Aurelia had often spoken to a fat, calm
friend, Mrs. Spoyd, about these things, and Mrs. Spoyd had sighed, "I
know what you mean, dear. Did you hear about the little Gringlon girl?
Well, of course, it may not be true. I heard it from their dressmaker,
but it seems she noticed everything and--er--was crazy for all kinds
of information. No, dear, of course, Sard ought not to be noticing
anything but a good time at her age. Girls should only be interested in
a good time. They shouldn't be interested in--er--unpleasant things."
So Miss Aurelia overlooked the slang. It was all right for Sard to be
a little slangy; so much better than sitting up in that tower room and
thinking about murderers. It would make her more "popular" to have
Minga Gerould go to dances and such things with her. "America is a
wonderful country," said Miss Aurelia to herself, "and I think it is
our 'popularity.' Have you ever noticed," to Mrs. Spoyd, "how awful
it is for an American girl or man not to be popular? Don't you think
that our great men like Theodore Roosevelt and--er--Barnum, are just as
popular in Heaven as here?
"I think God meant us to be--er--popular, don't you? Just see," added
Miss Aurelia with a flash of insight, "how unpopular all of our
statesmen have been who have been in any way unique or--er--unusual.
Americans, the good, patriotic kind, have always been very popular."
"Yes, I always feel so sorry for a young girl who isn't popular,"
purred Mrs. Spoyd.
"I wouldn't worry about that boy, dear, now," advised Miss Aurelia,
with all the mature effects of voice and manner of the person who
is not truly grown up. "We do all we can to make the prisoners what
they should be, and I have heard that many tramps--er--like to go
to prison." She stood up, sighing. "There--this room at last looks
respectable;" her narrow, rather smoky-dull eyes roved over Sard. "Why
don't you put on your turquoise sweater and tam, the pretty one with
the blue pompom? I will look after everything. No, dear, I don't think
you'd better use the car without asking Brother."
"Will you ask him?" said Sard shyly.
"_I_ ask?" Miss Aurelia said nervously. "Why--you--he--I--don't you
think, Sard,"--with a kind of reproachful righteousness--"don't you
think it ought to come from you, his daughter? Now I must see about the
laundry."
Sard was accustomed to these cheerful little exits made with the
bustling manner of one with much business on hand. When Miss Aurelia
wanted to evade anything----Suddenly it flashed over the girl, "Why,
she's always like that, she--she--never meets anything; she wouldn't
discuss it with me that morning I tried to talk with her about Colter.
She has pretended all along she didn't know about Colter, and now, with
Dora crying there, red-eyed while she serves the meals, she tried not
to know that--why," Sard's eyes opened, "I'm old, she's young."
"I ought to be her aunt," said the young girl to herself. "I ought to
be sending her in a picture hat with an organdy dress and blue sash to
meet Minga."
The girl stood motionless in the center of the floor, thinking. When
youth begins to think and to think clearly and hard with its brave
young mind, it is time for the world to take notice--Sard frowning at
the floor, spoke aloud:
"Yes--that's living Under the Law," she said slowly, "I see what
Dora meant; we live under a made law, we don't build up on it, away
from it, to a better law; we just live, cramped, confined, ignorant,
stupid, under it--Under the Law, that's it!!!" Sard laughed a little
wonderingly. "I shall meet Minga this afternoon and we will go motoring
and laughing over the country roads and Dunce will come home and we'll
all eat fudge and dance to the Victrola to-night, and one or two of the
bunch will come in and we'll play Rookie and Cheat and Toddle Top, and
then at nine o'clock Minga will want a nut sundae, and we'll all pile
into a machine and slew around to Dingman's and eat sundaes and then
hoot along the roads until a tire pops and we think it time to go to
bed, because under the law that is our privilege.
"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her
brother, who, she says, is Under the Law----" Sard looked out of the
open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple
and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing
at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard
slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up;
surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out
of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into
her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other
Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law."