Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman--so
bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street,
from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a
man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street
with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at--in
her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length sealskin
coat in our town, and Ganz' shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes.
Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.
Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round
Christmas time, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent,
dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out
of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set
with flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow
hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her
appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in
the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and
paid in silence, for she was of the class that has no redress. She
owned the House With the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--did
Blanche Devine. And beneath her silks and laces and furs there was a
scarlet letter on her breast.
In a larger town than ours she would have passed unnoticed. She did not
look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much perfumed white
powder, and as she passed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain
heavy scent. Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman's
features look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore
an expression of good-humoured intelligence, and her eyeglasses gave
her somehow a look of respectability. We do not associate vice with
eyeglasses. So in a large city she would have passed for a well-dressed
prosperous, comfortable wife and mother, who was in danger of losing her
figure from an overabundance of good living; but with us she was a town
character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the weak-minded Binns
girl. When she passed the drug-store corner there would be a sniggering
among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and they would leer at each
other and jest in undertones.
So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something resembling a
riot in one of our most respectable neighbourhoods when it was learned
that she had given up her interest in the house near the freight depot
and was going to settle down in the white cottage on the corner and be
good. All the husbands in the block, urged on by righteously indignant
wives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after supper to see if the thing
could not be stopped. The fourth of the protesting husbands to arrive
was the Very Young Husband, who lived next door to the corner cottage
that Blanche Devine had bought. The Very Young Husband had a Very Young
Wife, and they were the joint owners of Snooky. Snooky was
three-going-on-four, and looked something like an angel--only healthier
and with grimier hands. The whole neighbourhood borrowed her and tried
to spoil her; but Snooky would not spoil.
Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar fooling with the furnace. He was
in his furnace overalls--a short black pipe in his mouth. Three
protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband, following
Mrs. Mooney's directions, cautiously descended the cellar stairs,
Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a haze
of pipe-smoke.
"Hello!" he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm. "Come on
down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper. She don't
draw like she ought. 'Long toward spring a furnace always gets balky.
How many tons you used this winter?"
"Oh--ten," said the Very Young Husband shortly. Alderman Mooney
considered it thoughtfully. The Young Husband leaned up against the side
of the cistern, his hands in his pockets. "Say, Mooney, is that right
about Blanche Devine's having bought the house on the corner?"
"You're the fourth man that's been in to ask me that this evening. I'm
expecting the rest of the block before bedtime. She's bought it all
right."
The Young Husband flushed and kicked at a piece of coal with the toe of
his boot.
"Well, it's a darned shame!" he began hotly. "Jen was ready to cry at
supper. This'll be a fine neighbourhood for Snooky to grow up in! What's
a woman like that want to come into a respectable street for anyway? I
own my home and pay my taxes--"
Alderman Mooney looked up.
"So does she," he interrupted. "She's going to improve the place--paint
it, and put in a cellar and a furnace, and build a porch, and lay a
cement walk all round."
The Young Husband took his hands out of his pockets in order to
emphasize his remarks with gestures.
"What's that got to do with it? I don't care if she puts in diamonds for
windows and sets out Italian gardens and a terrace with peacocks on it.
You're the alderman of this ward, aren't you? Well, it was up to you to
keep her out of this block! You could have fixed it with an injunction
or something. I'm going to get up a petition--that's what I'm going--"
Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned the
rest of the threat. He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushed
his sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to a
profitless conversation.
"She's bought the house," he said mildly, "and paid for it. And it's
hers. She's got a right to live in this neighbourhood as long as she
acts respectable."
The Very Young Husband laughed.
"She won't last! They never do."
Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing his
thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes. On
his face was a queer look--the look of one who is embarrassed because he
is about to say something honest.
"Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in the
mayor's office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to go
through a lot of red tape before she got it--had quite a time of it, she
did! And say, kid, that woman ain't so--bad."
The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:
"Oh, don't give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine's a town
character. Even the kids know what she is. If she's got religion or
something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn't she go to
another town--Chicago or some place--where nobody knows her?"
That motion of Alderman Mooney's thumb against the smooth pipebowl
stopped. He looked up slowly.
"That's what I said--the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she wanted
to try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny--ain't it? Said
she wouldn't be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she moved
away, she said, it'd leak out some way sooner or later. It does, she
said. Always! Seems she wants to live like--well, like other women. She
put it like this: She says she hasn't got religion, or any of that. She
says she's no different than she was when she was twenty. She says that
for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be able to
go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the
clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to sass
him with a regular piece of her mind--and then sail out and trade
somewhere else until he saw that she didn't have to stand anything from
storekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing.
She's a smart woman, Blanche is! She's saved her money. God knows I
ain't taking her part--exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor
and me got a little of her history."
A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had been
known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of that seed known
as wild oats. He knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in
spite of his youth! He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked
summer gown on the street.
"Oh, she wasn't playing for sympathy," west on Alderman Mooney in
answer to the sneer. "She said she'd always paid her way and always
expected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was
eighteen--with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap
eating house. The two of 'em couldn't live on that. Then the baby--"
"Good night!" said the Very Young Husband. "I suppose Mrs. Mooney's
going to call?"
"Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down to
monkey with the furnace. She's wild--Minnie is." He peeled off his
overalls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to ascend
the cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on his
sleeve. "Don't say anything in front of Minnie! She's boiling! Minnie
and the kids are going to visit her folks out West this summer; so I
wouldn't so much as dare to say 'Good morning!' to the Devine woman.
Anyway a person wouldn't talk to her, I suppose. But I kind of thought
I'd tell you about her."
"Thanks!" said the Very Young Husband dryly.
In the early spring, before Blanche Devine moved in, there came
stonemasons, who began to build something. It was a great stone
fireplace that rose in massive incongruity at the side of the little
white cottage. Blanche Devine was trying to make a home for herself. We
no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth--we build them for the
warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.
Blanche Devine used to come and watch them now and then as the work
progressed. She had a way of walking round and round the house, looking
up at it pridefully and poking at plaster and paint with her umbrella or
fingertip. One day she brought with her a man with a spade. He spaded up
a neat square of ground at the side of the cottage and a long ridge near
the fence that separated her yard from that of the very young couple
next door. The ridge spelled sweet peas and nasturtiums to our
small-town eyes.
On the day that Blanche Devine moved in there was wild agitation among
the white-ruffled bedroom curtains of the neighbourhood. Later on
certain odours, as of burning dinners, pervaded the atmosphere. Blanche
Devine, flushed and excited, her hair slightly askew, her diamond
eardrops flashing, directed the moving, wrapped in her great fur
coat; but on the third morning we gasped when she appeared out-of-doors,
carrying a little household ladder, a pail of steaming water and sundry
voluminous white cloths. She reared the little ladder against the side
of the house mounted it cautiously, and began to wash windows: with
housewifely thoroughness. Her stout figure was swathed in a grey sweater
and on her head was a battered felt hat--the sort of window-washing
costume that has been worn by women from time immemorial. We noticed
that she used plenty of hot water and clean rags, and that she rubbed
the glass until it sparkled, leaning perilously sideways on the ladder
to detect elusive streaks. Our keenest housekeeping eye could find no
fault with the way Blanche Devine washed windows.
By May, Blanche Devine had left off her diamond eardrops--perhaps it was
their absence that gave her face a new expression. When she went down
town we noticed that her hats were more like the hats the other women in
our town wore; but she still affected extravagant footgear, as is right
and proper for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of her feet. We
noticed that her trips down town were rare that spring and summer. She
used to come home laden with little bundles; and before supper she would
change her street clothes for a neat, washable housedress, as is our
thrifty custom. Through her bright windows we could see her moving
briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; and from the smells that
floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed to be preparing for her
solitary supper the same homely viands that were frying or stewing or
baking in our kitchens. Sometimes you could detect the delectable scent
of browning hot tea biscuit. It takes a brave, courageous, determined
woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself.
Blanche Devine joined the church. On the first Sunday morning she came
to the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at the
vestibule door. They seated her well in the rear. The second Sunday
morning a dreadful thing happened. The woman next to whom they seated
her turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly and
moved to a pew across the aisle. Blanche Devine's face went a dull red
beneath her white powder. She never came again--though we saw the
minister visit her once or twice. She always accompanied him to the door
pleasantly, holding it well open until he was down the little flight of
steps and on the sidewalk. The minister's wife did not call--but, then,
there are limits to the duties of a minister's wife.
She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to
see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden
morning. She wore absurd pale-blue kimonos that made her stout figure
loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The
neighbourhood women viewed these negligées with Puritan disapproval as
they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it
was disgusting--and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily
overcome. Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas; peering anxiously at
the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the
trellis; watering the flower baskets that hung from her porch--was
blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish one of us had
just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and to say in
our neighbourly, small town way: "My, ain't this a scorcher! So early
too! It'll be fierce by noon!" But we did not.
I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. The
summer evenings in our little town are filled with intimate, human,
neighbourly sounds. After the heat of the day it is infinitely pleasant
to relax in the cool comfort of the front porch, with the life of the
town eddying about us. We sew and read out there until it grows dusk. We
call across-lots to our next-door neighbour. The men water the lawns and
the flower boxes and get together in little quiet groups to discuss the
new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bring her cherries
out there when she had canning to do, and pit them there on the front
porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not so effectually that
she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her. The kettle in her
lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries on the porch floor by
her chair, she would pit and chat and peer out through the vines, the
red juice staining her plump bare arms.
I have wondered since what Blanche Devine thought of us those lonesome
evenings--those evenings filled with little friendly sights and sounds.
It is lonely, uphill business at best--this being good. It must have
been difficult for her, who had dwelt behind closed shutters so long, to
seat herself on the new front porch for all the world to stare at; but
she did sit there--resolutely--watching us in silence.
She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to
her. The milkman and the iceman and the butcher boy used to hold daily
conversation with her. They--sociable gentlemen--would stand on her
doorstep, one grimy hand resting against the white of her doorpost,
exchanging the time of day with Blanche in the doorway--a tea towel in
one hand, perhaps, and a plate in the other. Her little house was a
miracle of cleanliness. It was no uncommon sight to see her down on her
knees on the kitchen floor, wielding her brush and rag like the rest of
us. In canning and preserving time there floated out from her kitchen
the pungent scent of pickled crab apples; the mouth-watering,
nostril-pricking smell that meant sweet pickles; or the cloying,
tantalising, divinely sticky odour that meant raspberry jam. Snooky,
from her side of the fence, often used to peer through the pickets,
gazing in the direction of the enticing smells next door. Early one
September morning there floated out from Blanche Devine's kitchen that
clean, fragrant, sweet scent of fresh-baked cookies--cookies with butter
in them, and spice, and with nuts on top. Just by the smell of them your
mind's eye pictured them coming from the oven--crisp brown circlets,
crumbly, toothsome, delectable. Snooky, in her scarlet sweater and cap,
sniffed them from afar and straightway deserted her sandpile to take her
stand at the fence. She peered through the restraining bars, standing on
tiptoe. Blanche Devine, glancing up from her board and rolling-pin, saw
the eager golden head. And Snooky, with guile in her heart, raised one
fat, dimpled hand above the fence and waved it friendlily. Blanche
Devine waved back. Thus encouraged, Snooky's two hands wigwagged
frantically above the pickets. Blanche Devine hesitated a moment, her
floury hand on her hip. Then she went to the pantry shelf and took out a
clean white saucer. She selected from the brown jar on the table three
of the brownest, crumbliest, most perfect cookies, with a walnut meat
perched atop of each, placed them temptingly on the saucer and,
descending the steps, came swiftly across the grass to the triumphant
Snooky. Blanche Devine held out the saucer, her lips smiling, her eyes
tender. Snooky reached up with one plump white arm.
"Snooky!" shrilled a high voice. "Snooky!" A voice of horror and of
wrath. "Come here to me this minute! And don't you dare to touch those!"
Snooky hesitated rebelliously, one pink finger in her pouting mouth.
"Snooky! Do you hear me?"
And the Very Young Wife began to descend the steps of her back porch.
Snooky, regretful eyes on the toothsome dainties, turned away aggrieved.
The Very Young Wife, her lips set, her eyes flashing, advanced and
seized the shrieking Snooky by one writhing arm and dragged her away
toward home and safety.
Blanche Devine stood there at the fence, holding the saucer in her hand.
The saucer tipped slowly, and the three cookies slipped off and fell to
the grass. Blanche Devine followed them with her eyes and stood staring
at them a moment. Then she turned quickly, went into the house and shut
the door.
It was about this time we noticed that Blanche Devine was away much of
the time. The little white cottage would be empty for a week. We knew
she was out of town because the expressman would come for her trunk. We
used to lift our eyebrows significantly. The newspapers and handbills
would accumulate in a dusty little heap on the porch; but when she
returned there was always a grand cleaning, with the windows open, and
Blanche--her head bound turbanwise in a towel--appearing at a window
every few minutes to shake out a dustcloth. She seemed to put an
enormous amount of energy into those cleanings--as if they were a sort
of safety valve.
As winter came on she used to sit up before her grate fire long, long
after we were asleep in our beds. When she neglected to pull down the
shades we could see the flames of her cosy fire dancing gnomelike on the
wall.
There came a night of sleet and snow, and wind and rattling hail--one of
those blustering, wild nights that are followed by morning-paper reports
of trains stalled in drifts, mail delayed, telephone and telegraph wires
down. It must have been midnight or past when there came a hammering at
Blanche Devine's door--a persistent, clamorous rapping. Blanche Devine,
sitting before her dying fire half asleep, started and cringed when she
heard it; then jumped to her feet, her hand at her breast--her eyes
darting this way and that, as though seeking escape.
She had heard a rapping like that before. It had meant bluecoats
swarming up the stairway, and frightened cries and pleadings, and wild
confusion. So she started forward now, quivering. And then she
remembered, being wholly awake now--she remembered, and threw up her
head and smiled a little bitterly and walked toward the door. The
hammering continued, louder than ever. Blanche Devine flicked on the
porch light and opened the door. The half-clad figure of the Very Young
Wife next door staggered into the room. She seized Blanche Devine's arm
with both her frenzied hands and shook her, the wind and snow beating in
upon both of them.
"The baby!" she screamed in a high, hysterical voice. "The baby! The
baby--"
Blanche Devine shut the door and shook the Young Wife smartly by the
shoulders.
"Stop screaming," she said quietly. "Is she sick?"
The Young Wife told her, her teeth chattering:
"Come quick! She's dying! Will's out of town. I tried to get the doctor.
The telephone wouldn't--I saw your light! For God's sake--"
Blanche Devine grasped the Young Wife's arm, opened the door, and
together they sped across the little space that separated the two
houses. Blanche Devine was a big woman, but she took the stairs like a
girl and found the right bedroom by some miraculous woman instinct. A
dreadful choking, rattling sound was coming from Snooky's bed.
"Croup," said Blanche Devine, and began her fight.
It was a good fight. She marshalled her little inadequate forces, made
up of the half-fainting Young Wife and the terrified and awkward hired
girl.
"Get the hot water on--lots of it!" Blanche Devine pinned up her
sleeves. "Hot cloths! Tear up a sheet--or anything! Got an oilstove? I
want a teakettle boiling in the room. She's got to have the steam. If
that don't do it we'll raise an umbrella over her and throw a sheet
over, and hold the kettle under till the steam gets to her that way. Got
any ipecac?"
The Young Wife obeyed orders, whitefaced and shaking. Once Blanche
Devine glanced up at her sharply.
"Don't you dare faint!" she commanded.
And the fight went on. Gradually the breathing that had been so
frightful became softer, easier. Blanche Devine did not relax. It was
not until the little figure breathed gently in sleep that Blanche Devine
sat back satisfied. Then she tucked a cover ever so gently at the side
of the bed, took a last satisfied look at the face on the pillow, and
turned to look at the wan, dishevelled Young Wife.
"She's all right now. We can get the doctor when morning comes--though I
don't know's you'll need him."
The Young Wife came round to Blanche Devine's side of the bed and stood
looking up at her.
"My baby died," said Blanche Devine simply. The Young Wife gave a little
inarticulate cry, put her two hands on Blanche Devine's broad shoulders
and laid her tired head on her breast.
"I guess I'd better be going," said Blanche Devine.
The Young Wife raised her head. Her eyes were round with fright.
"Going! Oh, please stay! I'm so afraid. Suppose she should take sick
again! That awful--awful breathing--"
"I'll stay if you want me to."
"Oh, please! I'll make up your bed and you can rest--"
"I'm not sleepy. I'm not much of a hand to sleep anyway. I'll sit up
here in the hall, where there's a light. You get to bed. I'll watch and
see that everything's all right. Have you got something I can read out
here--something kind of lively--with a love story in it?"
So the night went by. Snooky slept in her little white bed. The Very
Young Wife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one. In the hall,
her stout figure looming grotesque in wall-shadows, sat Blanche Devine
pretending to read. Now and then she rose and tiptoed into the bedroom
with miraculous quiet, and stooped over the little bed and listened and
looked--and tiptoed away again, satisfied.
The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with tales
of snowdrifts and stalled engines. Blanche Devine breathed a sigh of
relief when she saw him from her kitchen window. She watched the house
now with a sort of proprietary eye. She wondered about Snooky; but she
knew better than to ask. So she waited. The Young Wife next door had
told her husband all about that awful night--had told him with tears and
sobs. The Very Young Husband had been very, very angry with her--angry
and hurt, he said, and astonished! Snooky could not have been so sick!
Look at her now! As well as ever. And to have called such a woman! Well,
really he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand that she
must never speak to the woman again. Never!
So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the Young
Husband. Blanche Devine spied them from her sitting-room window, and she
made the excuse of looking in her mailbox in order to go to the door.
She stood in the doorway and the Very Young Wife went by on the arm of
her husband. She went by--rather white-faced--without a look or a word
or a sign!
And then this happened! There came into Blanche Devine's face a look
that made slits of her eyes, and drew her mouth down into an ugly,
narrow line, and that made the muscles of her jaw tense and hard. It was
the ugliest look you can imagine. Then she smiled--if having one's lips
curl away from one's teeth can be called smiling.
Two days later there was great news of the white cottage on the corner.
The curtains were down; the furniture was packed; the rugs were rolled.
The wagons came and backed up to the house and took those things that
had made a home for Blanche Devine. And when we heard that she had
bought back her interest in the House With the Closed Shutters, near the
freight depot, we sniffed.
"I knew she wouldn't last!" we said.
"They never do!" said we.