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THE LOCUSTS' YEARS
By
MARY HELEN FEE
Author of
A Woman's Impressions of the Philippines, etc.
Illustrated by
Charles Sarka
Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1912
To my Brother
THE LOCUSTS' YEARS
CHAPTER I
When a man has reached the point where he can reflect, with cynical
satisfaction, upon the brutality of organized society, and can
contemplate unmoved one of its victims; and when the cause of his
reflections is a woman not over thirty, whose worth and refinement
are obvious to any reader of faces, that man either must possess a
coarse-grained and cruel nature, or he must be very highly civilized.
No shade of doubt could have entered Judge Alexander Barton's mind as
to which of these adjectives applied to him. He would have repudiated
the faintest hint that a taint of coarseness or cruelty could lie in
him. His was one of those eminent political personalities which bubble
up from the great caldron of American democracy. He had convictions
and principles of a high order. They appeared frequently in the shape
of addresses to young men's political and reading clubs, or in a "few
remarks" at church socials, where a programme of songs and recitations
was followed by the distribution of home-made cakes and candies,
and of uninspiriting beverages. It was sometimes remarked of him in
that other world which he frequented that his conscientiousness in
attending these mild-flavored symposia was the indisputable evidence
of his fitness to adorn the roster of the Philippine judiciary. For to
whom may we look for an example, if not to the interpreters of the law,
whose position vests them with dignity, social and official? From
whom may we demand the utterance of lofty principles and of high
convictions, if not from the very men whose business it is to punish
the unhappy wretches whose actions have declared their principles,
expressed or otherwise, of the flimsiest?
Judge Barton was also frequently extolled as the pattern of American
democracy, as, indeed, he was. Nothing could have been more catholic
than his handshake, nothing more finely measured than the appreciation
which it conveyed of the recipient's relation to himself: to the
veteran of the Army of the Philippines, it was hearty, and bespoke the
comrade in arms; to the struggling young civil-service employee, it was
encouraging, and it hinted, ever so delicately, that the inspiration
for great ambitions ought to lie in the example of living statesmen; to
the clergy and to the members of the Educational Department, who fairly
swarm in the Philippines, it was fraternal and spoke confidentially
of the tie which linked them in a great work; and to the effervescing
spume from the Pacific coast, which is knocking about Manila, loud in
vituperation of the change from democratic to bureaucratic society--to
that segment of Young America whose disposition to criticise existing
institutions led to the happy phrase "undesirable citizens"--the
Judge's democratic cordiality always embodied a hope that their mutual
relations might continue forever harmonious, and it even intimated
that no act on his part could make them otherwise.
The cause of the Judge's highly civilized musings was one of those
undesirable citizens of the feminine gender; and, if you ask how
anything proper in the feminine gender may be classed as an undesirable
citizen, there can only be cited an opinion from the Judge himself--one
of those ex-cathedra sentiments which he held as infallible--that any
one who refuses to accept pleasantly a situation which he is powerless
to remedy, and who continues a quarrel which is futile and which can
result only disastrously to its single champion, that person is,
primarily, inefficient, and, secondarily, insane; either of which
states is undesirable. Furthermore, there is nothing so repellent
to a man as the feminine weakness which enlists his sympathy, and,
at the same time, challenges the terms on which it is given. To find
the shivering wretch on whom you would bestow an alms repudiating
your charity and mutely reproaching you for the condition of things
which makes you donor and him recipient--in such a metaphor, perhaps,
the Judge might have condensed the musings which a month's illness
and the daily opportunity of studying Miss Ponsonby had bred.
The young woman who had received so much of His Honor's valuable
consideration did not look a very formidable antagonist in a quarrel
with organized society. She stood at an open window of the hospital,
gazing down on a convalescent-strewn lawn, where a military band was
delighting the sick with a Christmas Eve concert. Her tall figure
was very slender--so slender, in fact, as to make it quite evident
that the blue cotton nurse's dress which she wore was the survival
of a plumper epoch. She was not a beautiful woman, nor was she even
a pretty one, though she was far from being ugly. Her eyes were gray
and kind, with well arched brows. Her nose was slightly aquiline,
with sensitive nostrils. A rather low forehead, a broad mouth, and a
shapely head covered with brown hair, were attributes which she shared
with any number of women. What particularly marked her was a delicate
grace of manner, an emanation of fastidiousness in every glance and
movement, a reserve which at times became almost stiffness; in short,
a distinction which, in happier circumstances, might have made her
envied, but which in the mixture of a pioneer community served only
to isolate her.
For at least two weeks of convalescence, Judge Barton had amused
himself with the attempt to determine why Miss Ponsonby's charm and
distinction should be assets of so little practical value to her. His
decision was that, in appearance most distinguished, she was singularly
lacking in the unconscious self-confidence which usually accompanies
distinction; that, a most feminine creature in many respects, she
was unfemininely distrustful of her power over men. There was, in her
perfectly dignified attitude toward the other sex, and in the absence
of all coquetry, a sort of proud abdication of feminine rights. She
resigned all a woman's natural claim upon man's emotional nature; and
the keen analyst who had studied her so closely fancied that he could
detect a repressed challenge of man's superiority. He classified her
(with a kind of shrugging pity) as one of those women of whom all
men speak respectfully and many men admiringly, but who grow old and
plain and bitter, unsought among their more frivolous sisters. At
the same time, he admitted an attraction which had kept him bidding
indirectly for her notice.
Miss Ponsonby's impassive reserve with men was so wholly a confession,
and, at the same time, so proud a disclaimer of the usual meek
attitude of unpopular women, that it not only irritated the man
who could analyze her, but it provoked his curiosity and led him
into attempt after attempt to sting her into speech and unconscious
revelations. And whenever he did so and retired, foiled, with the
consciousness of having given an unmanly stab to weakness, his man's
desire to think well of himself made him put the blame upon her.
On the afternoon of that particular day, Miss Ponsonby's feminine
characteristics were in possession. She leaned rather languidly
against the window frame, and her bodily fatigue, and a self-conscious
forlornness which she strove habitually to conceal, were quite
evident. Every movement betrayed the woman pushed beyond her strength;
every sensitive, quivering line of her face hinted at emotions rioting
under a repressed exterior.
If her very apparent dejection aroused no compunction in the Judge
(he being so highly civilized) it evoked an ardent sympathy from the
young man in the next bed; for, in those days, not even the potency of
a Judge's title could have commanded a private room in the hospital. As
a next best expedient, Judge Barton had been placed in a small room
opening from the main ward, and containing but two beds. The exigencies
of an overcrowded surgical ward made it necessary that the second bed
should be occupied by a young pearl fisher, with a crushed chest,
who had been taken off a wrecked lorcha. His magnificent physique,
and the face of a Greek statue, would have lured from a woman a more
complimentary description than the term "young ruffian" which Judge
Barton had instantly but inaudibly fastened upon him. "Young ruffian"
is perhaps an exaggerated phrase to describe the beauty and insouciance
which, in a male, may be qualified by a hat too far on one side. The
Judge had never seen Collingwood in his hat, but he divined just the
angle which the young man's taste approved.
Collingwood was gradually recovering, but he was still unable to
move without the assistance of a nurse or of one of the Filipino
attendants. He had the black hair, the pink and white skin, and,
the cameo-cut profile of a Celtic ancestry, modified by his father's
union with a woman of Tennessee pioneer stock. His eyes, which should
have been the Irishman's blue, were a steadfast brown. His frame
was a little more massive than his father's had been; the Irishman's
blarney had merged into the chaff of the Westerner; but enough of Irish
humor remained to lend flavor to the practical, hard-headed sense
which he had inherited from the mountaineer side of the family. His
speech was cheery and careless, yet shrewd; lacking in polish, yet not
uncouth. He was not uneducated, and took an innocent satisfaction in
having credentials to show for that fact, being a graduate of a small
high-school in one of the Middle States. The Judge had found him a
not uninteresting companion, for he was outspoken, a born lover of
adventure, and a born money-maker, if the Judge ever knew one.
However, Collingwood himself interested Judge Barton far less than
did the growth of an emotion in the young man which the dignitary
had covertly watched enlarge from an expansive gratitude to absorbing
affection. The "young ruffian" had fallen head over ears in love with a
woman whose critical faculties and fastidious instincts might well have
shaken the courage of a more pretentious suitor; and he enjoyed the
ruffian's usual advantage of being sensitive to material difficulties
only. If he felt the distinction in Miss Ponsonby's manner, it was
not as something which separated her from him, but as something which
made her only more desirable. He mistook her reserve for shyness; her
proud detachment, for meekness. He was aflame to seize the woman who
not only appealed to his senses, but who stirred ambitions of which
he was hardly conscious, and to bear her away from her overtasked
life. He wished to play King Cophetua to the beggar maid; and he was
saved from appearing supremely ridiculous only by his sincerity and
by freedom from all self-consciousness in his desire.
It was so natural that a young ruffian should fall in love with
probably the first gentlewoman with whom he had come into frequent
association, that the Judge wasted no particular attention on
Collingwood's side of the case. What really interested that gentleman
was Miss Ponsonby's attitude. For, as he put it to himself, there was
a woman with an undeniable personality, engaged in a dumb squabble
with society because she could not obtain a recognition of that
personality; and the only admirer and partisan she could muster was
a young ruffian so far removed from atmospheric influences that he
had not recognized that she was a personality; a man who would not
have known what was meant by the word. She might have been the young
woman who despatches telegrams from the lobby of a first-class hotel,
so far as Collingwood's assumption that she belonged to his world was
concerned. Her nurse's apron and cap were to him the indisputable
evidences of his right to claim her for his friend or for his
sweetheart, provided, of course, that the attraction was mutual;
and that her taste might be influenced by any other standard than his
own, he had no suspicion. Judge Barton had even detected at times the
tacit overture for a class combination, the assumption that they of
the toilers needed no chance civility from one temporarily thrown
into their society. That the situation daily developing under his
observant eyes must be humiliating to Miss Ponsonby, Judge Barton had
not the least doubt. But he was sufficiently human to hope that the
hour of Collingwood's discomfiture (for of that also he had no doubt)
might be delayed until he, the Judge, was ready to leave the hospital,
and to find some other amusement than that of watching a proud woman's
struggle with her femininity.
Collingwood, quite unconscious of the Judge's observant eye, lay
watching Miss Ponsonby with an alertness which contrasted strangely
with his maimed body. There was, in his slightly dilated nostril and
in the glow of his eye, the suggestion of a horse which pricks forward
its ears and accelerates its pace as it nears home; and perhaps some
latent instinct of domesticity lay at the bottom of the man's rather
inexplicable fancy for Miss Ponsonby.
It was inexplicable, not only through the social gulf which actually
divided them, but through the fact that she had never been a man's
woman, and that all Collingwood's previous attachments had been for
the type of woman who is adored by the opposite sex. Miss Ponsonby
was not diffident under his advances, nor was she overwhelmed by a
man's favor, little as she had enjoyed of it. Attention of a sort
she had had, because the position of the relatives who had brought
her up was such that any member of their household had to be taken
into consideration; but from the time she had left the shelter of
their roof, she had received from men an indifference as profound as
it was respectful. Collingwood's very open admiration was the first
tracery upon a page which was humiliatingly blank.
It had begun--his admiration--on his first night in the hospital,
when he lay a bandaged mummy, racked with pain, a mounting fever
adding its torments to the closeness of a muggy, tropical night. There
were memories of its sufferings mingled with gentle ministrations,
of touches soothing to his worn body, of a feeling of helplessness
and dependence upon this gentleness, which carried him back to his
half-forgotten childhood, and washed, as clean as his school-boy's
slate, a philosophy of life acquired in numerous love affairs with
the young ladies of hotel lobbies, and of restaurant check stands.
The impression remained overnight and increased by reason of the
succession of another nurse, who prided herself upon her jollity,
and believed that her patients needed cheering up. Collingwood was
in such a condition that jollity was an affront to him. He endured
the cheerful lady as best he could, and counted the long hours till
four o'clock brought back his madonna.
The word had no part in Collingwood's vocabulary; but it is applicable
because it expresses the quality of worship which he had injected into
an otherwise very mundane emotion. Collingwood, who was as innocent as
a babe of social traditions, who was an American democrat through and
through, and believed that all men are equal, save as the possession
of "the price" enables one man to command more of this world's
goods than another, was unable to account for the elements in Miss
Ponsonby's nature which whetted his desires, by any of the threads
which contributed to the fabric of his philosophy; and he explained
them by imputing to the lady the rare and peculiar quality of goodness.
Goodness! There you have the weak point in the arch of man's
philosophical structure, the thing which at once embodies his
highest ideal and his most human distaste, the thing over which he
has rhapsodized in poetry, which he has exalted into a theology,
and which he has ruthlessly crucified whenever he has met it in the
flesh. Collingwood supposed that Miss Ponsonby's delicate rejection of
his advances (a rejection qualified by some feeling which a lover's
instinct had to interpret to his advantage) originated in goodness,
in a final struggle of the etherealized feminine nature before
it submitted to its incarnation and became bound in the flesh. He
thought the delicate self-restraint with which she met the caprices and
fretfulness of her wards was founded on heavenly patience. He imagined
that her occasional snubs of Judge Barton were the outcroppings of
an inward shrinking from a passion to which she could not respond;
for, loverlike, he assumed that all men must feel as he did about
his divinity and he could not perceive the undercurrent of patronage
in the Judge's not infrequent gallantries, which was like an acid on
Miss Ponsonby's quivering nerves.
It was a delicious situation. Judge Barton rubbed his hands in
enjoyment of it, and you must admit that he had some justification
in the lady's persistent refusal to make the best of his somewhat
generous efforts to establish friendly relations. Oh, yes, it was a
delicious situation; and the only one element in it which the Judge
never suspected was that secret response to the young man's tenderness
which the lover himself had divined, which whetted him in spite of
studied rebuffs, and which, his alleged democracy notwithstanding,
all Judge Barton's class instincts would have unhesitatingly pronounced
unseemly--as, indeed, the young woman herself regarded it.