(PART IV.)
At this point there came an interruption in the person of the doctor who
had been called. He was very red in the face, and as he prepared to take
Hulda’s temperature he asked of her husband, “What is all this ruction
about? How many more times must I witness these scenes? Why don’t you
give the girl up? Some day she’ll stick a knife in your back, and then
she will be sent to prison for life.”
“Glory be to God!” shouted the “architect”. “Ain’t the woman me wife?”
“You ought to be ashamed to tell it,” said the doctor. “You, with one
leg in the grave and the other on the brink. I am going to send her to
the hospital now, and you are to leave her there. The girl is too young
to be married to an old fellow like you.”
“I’m only 34,” replied the Vickingstadt.
“You’re a cheerful idiot of a liar,” retorted the doctor.
In the end two men came with a stretcher, and Hulda was taken from her
husband’s house, never to return to live with him again. The medico
followed, banging the door behind him.
“He’s of me own race,” said “Mickey” Vickins, “an’ he do be mad to see
how young me wife is, because ‘blood is thicker than water’ an’ he hates
to hear the lads laughin’ at me misfortunes. We of the Irish race do be
very outspoken with each other, an’ that’s why we get the name of being
such fighters; but I observe that we can’t beat the Dutch, bad luck to
them. Well, she’s gone, and ’tis a rest I’ll be after havin’ now,” said
he, “for the floor is that hard that me bones ache.”
He had peace in his home after this, but he received letters from
Culebra telling him he must support his wife. One day Hulda returned and
rifled his boxes in the hope of procuring the deeds to his property,
but, instead, she found his citizenship papers, correspondence school
diploma and an honorable discharge from the United States Army. These
she tore into shreds and left them where her husband could readily find
them. She had taken up her residence at the home of her brother-in-law
in Colon, and many evil tongues were wagging. The “boys” teased the
Vickingstadt, and he was terribly crushed as a result, for he disliked
to hear Hulda criticised. “God forgive her,” he would say, “I tried to
be an ideal man. I was lovin’, an’ she said I was too lovin’. I never
tasted a drop of liquor, an’ she said that wasn’t natural. I never
smoked or chewed tobacco, an’ she said she’d rather have me do both,
because smokin’ and chewin’ was good for the breath. Now, what do you
think of that? ’Tis a hard thing to understand the ladies, bad cess to
them. I never could understand them.”
I had been given an opportunity to review this international marriage
exhaustively, and I decided that neither Hulda nor the “architect” were
to blame. It was poverty that forced the girl to seek a husband in a
foreign land, and it was an undeveloped sense of the artistic and
romantical that lured the Vickingstadt from his proper sphere.
Circumstances helped, as you will have perceived. Hulda’s one aim now
was to have her husband dismissed from the service, so she wrote letters
to Culebra accusing him of having starved her. He sent canceled checks
to prove that he gave her more money than the average man gives his
wife, and it became necessary for an inspector to investigate the affair
for the good of every one. The latter was wise in his day and
generation, and he reported to Culebra that Mrs. Brian McVickins did not
love her husband. Two clerks had been kept busy attending to the
contradictory reports of the pair, and, in order to lighten expenses for
the Canal Commission, Brian McVickins was requested to resign.
About this time he came to me and informed me that he was the father of
a little girl. “But, shure, ’tis pots and pans they threw at me whin I
wint to see the little creature. May the Lord forgive them. The doctor
tells me that she’s the dead spit of me, an’ ’tis take her away I would,
only poor Hulda won’t have anything else to love after I’m gone.”
He spoke with that assurance with which married men are apt to speak
when referring to their wives, and he appeared to think that I thought
him much beloved by Hulda. He hated to acknowledge defeat in the game of
love, because he possessed the vanity common to his sex. I made no
comment, and he rambled on: “The law doesn’t expect me to do anything
for her at all, at all, but I’ll always be after sindin’ a little money
for the poor child, an’ ’tis glad I am that she looks like me, instead
of like the Dutch, bad luck to them. It’s the Lord that will bless you
for the kind words you said about the matter, and ’tis never a word you
said against the poor, misguided gurl. The poor gurl ain’t been to blame
at all, at all; ’twas the vanity of me in middle age wantin’ a young
colleen with golden hair and a slim figure for a wife. May the Lord
forgive me.”
With that, he thanked me for the counsel I had given him, which, as a
matter of fact, he had never taken, and, after wringing my hand until it
hurt, went his way with bowed head. Six months before, he was a dapper
little man, with a quick, light step, and he did not look a day older
than fifty, but now his eyes were sunken, his cheeks were wrinkled, and
he had the general air of a man who was terribly tired. I have not heard
from him since.
Soon after this, Hulda departed for the United States. Unaccompanied and
carrying her baby and a suitcase, she walked up the steamer’s ladder
with tired tread and an air that suggested trouble. Friends of her
husband who stood upon the pier shook their heads and said sadly, “‘Tis
a goldurned shame, for she shure was a good-looker when “Mickey” brought
her down.”
Her eyes were now red and tired-looking, her cheeks were hollow and her
mouth had the expression of bitterness that comes from disappointment.
One might easily picture her looking for a cheap room and having the
rooming-house women conjecture that she had never been married. She
would look for work, too, and, notwithstanding her accomplishments, she
would probably find it in some one’s kitchen. In her shabby maternity
dress of cheap gingham she was a sorry contrast to the gay passengers
who ran hither and thither, frantically waving farewells to their
friends on the dock. She alone sat apart and hugged her child to her
breast. “A tragic figure,” observed a man with a pitying smile. As the
ship pulled out, a kindly sunbeam fell upon her, and for a moment
lighted up the golden tints in her still beautiful hair.