WHERE EAST MEETS WEST
The considerate thoughtfulness of Rosenblatt relieved Paulina of
the necessity of collecting these monthly dues, to her great joy,
for it was far beyond her mental capacity to compute, first in
Galician and then in Canadian money, the amount that each should pay;
and besides, as Rosenblatt was careful to point out, how could she
deal with defaulters, who, after accumulating a serious indebtedness,
might roll up their blankets and without a word of warning fade away
into the winter night? Indeed, with all her agent's care, it not
unfrequently happened that a lodger, securing a job in one of the
cordwood camps, would disappear, leaving behind him only his empty
space upon the floor and his debt upon the books, which Rosenblatt
kept with scrupulous care. Occasionally it happened, however, that,
as in all bookkeeping, a mistake would creep in. This was unfortunately
the case with young Jacob Wassyl's account, of whose perfidy Paulina
made loud complaints to his friends, who straightway remonstrated
with Jacob upon his return from the camp. It was then that Jacob's
indignant protestations caused an examination of Rosenblatt's books,
whereupon that gentleman laboured with great diligence to make
abundantly clear to all how the obliteration of a single letter had
led to the mistake. It was a striking testimony to his fine sense of
honour that Rosenblatt insisted that Jacob, Paulina, and indeed the
whole company, should make the fullest investigation of his books and
satisfy themselves of his unimpeachable integrity. In a private
interview with Paulina, however, his rage passed all bounds, and it
was only Paulina's tearful entreaties that induced him to continue to
act as her agent, and not even her tears had moved him had not Paulina
solemnly sworn that never again would she allow her blundering crudity
to insert itself into the delicate finesse of Rosenblatt's financial
operations. Thenceforward all went harmoniously enough, Paulina toiling
with unremitting diligence at her daily tasks, so that she might make
the monthly payments upon her house, and meet the rapacious demands of
those terrible English people, with their taxes and interest and legal
exactions, which Rosenblatt, with meritorious meekness, sought to satisfy.
So engrossed, indeed, was that excellent gentleman in this service that
he could hardly find time to give suitable over-sight to his own building
operations, in which, by the erection of shack after shack, he sought to
meet the ever growing demands of the foreign colony.
Before a year had gone it caused Rosenblatt no small annoyance that
while he was thus struggling to keep pace with the demands upon his
time and energy, Paulina, with lamentable lack of consideration,
should find it necessary to pause in her scrubbing, washing, and
baking, long enough to give birth to a fine healthy boy. Paulina's
need brought her help and a friend in the person of Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
who lived a few doors away in the only house that had been able to
resist the Galician invasion. It had not escaped Mrs. Fitzpatrick's
eye nor her kindly heart, as Paulina moved in and out about her duties,
that she would ere long pass into that mysterious valley of life and
death where a woman needs a woman's help; and so when the hour came,
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with fine contempt of "haythen" skill and efficiency,
came upon the scene and took command. It took her only a few moments
to clear from the house the men who with stolid indifference to the
sacred rights of privacy due to the event were lounging about. Swinging
the broom which she had brought with her, she almost literally swept them
forth, flinging their belongings out into the snow. Not even Rosenblatt,
who lingered about, did she suffer to remain.
"Y're wife will not be nadin' ye, I'm thinkin', for a while.
Ye can just wait till I can bring ye wurrd av y're babby,"
she said, pushing him, not unkindly, from the room.
Rosenblatt, whose knowledge of English was sufficient to
enable him to catch her meaning, began a vigorous protest:
"Eet ees not my woman," he exclaimed.
"Eat, is it!" replied Mrs. Fitzpatrick, taking him up sharply.
"Indade ye can eat where ye can get it. Faith, it's a man ye are,
sure enough, that can niver forget y're stomach! An' y're wife
comin' till her sorrow!"
"Eet ees not my--" stormily began Rosenblatt.
"Out wid ye," cried Mrs. Fitzpatrick, impatiently waving her
big red hands before his face. "Howly Mother! It's the wurrld's
wonder how a dacent woman cud put up wid ye!"
And leaving him in sputtering rage, she turned to her duty,
aiding, with gentle touch and tender though meaningless words,
her sister woman through her hour of anguish.
In three days Paulina was again in her place and at her work,
and within a week her household was re-established in its normal
condition. The baby, rolled up in an old quilt and laid upon her
bed, received little attention except when the pangs of hunger
wrung lusty protests from his vigorous lungs, and had it not been
for Mrs. Fitzpatrick's frequent visits, the unwelcome little human
atom would have fared badly enough. For the first two weeks of its
life the motherly-hearted Irish woman gave an hour every day to the
bathing and dressing of the babe, while Irma, the little girl of
Paulina's household, watched in wide-eyed wonder and delight;
watched to such purpose, indeed, that before the two weeks had gone
Mrs. Fitzpatrick felt that to the little girl's eager and capable
hands the baby might safely be entrusted.
"It's the ould-fashioned little thing she is," she confided to her
husband, Timothy. "Tin years, an' she has more sinse in the hair outside
av her head than that woman has in the brains inside av hers. It's aisy
seen she's no mother of hers--ye can niver get canary burrds from owls'
eggs. And the strength of her," she continued, to the admiring and
sympathetic Timothy, "wid her white face and her burnin' brown eyes!"
And so it came that every day, no matter to what depths the
thermometer might fall, the little white-faced, white-haired
Russian girl with the "burnin'" brown eyes brought Paulina's
baby to be inspected by Mrs. Fitzpatrick's critical eye.
Before a year had passed Irma had won an assured place in
the admiration and affection of not only Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
but of her husband, Timothy, as well.
But of Paulina the same could not be said, for with the passing months
she steadily descended in the scale of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's regard.
Paulina was undoubtedly slovenly. Her attempts at housekeeping--if
housekeeping it could be called--were utterly contemptible in the eyes
of Mrs. Fitzpatrick. These defects, however, might have been pardoned,
and with patience and perseverance might have been removed, but there
were conditions in Paulina's domestic relations that Mrs. Fitzpatrick
could not forgive. The economic arrangements which turned Paulina's
room into a public dormitory were abhorrent to the Irish woman's sense
of decency. Often had she turned the full tide of her voluble invective
upon Paulina, who, though conscious that all was not well--for no one
could mistake the flash of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's eye nor the stridency of
her voice--received Mrs. Fitzpatrick's indignant criticism with a
patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her
efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as
domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as
charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the
colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with
Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite
unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a
little to discover during the progress of her missionary labours that
even Anka, of whose goodness she was thoroughly assured, did not
appear to share her horror of Paulina's moral condition. It was the
East meeting the West, the Slav facing the Anglo-Saxon. Between their
points of view stretched generations of moral development. It was not
a question of absolute moral character so much as a question of moral
standards. The vastness of this distinction in standards was beginning
to dawn upon Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and she was prepared to view Paulina's
insensibility to moral distinctions in a more lenient light, when a
new idea suddenly struck her:
"But y're man; how does he stand it? Tell me that."
The two Galician women gazed at each other in silence.
At length Anka replied with manifest reluctance:
"She got no man here. Her man in Russia."
"What!" exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick in a terrible voice.
"An' do ye mane to say! An' that Rosenblatt--is he not her husband?
Howly Mother of God," she continued in an awed tone of voice,
"an' is this the woman I've been havin' to do wid!"
The wrath, the scorn, the repulsion in her eyes, her face, her
whole attitude, revealed to the unhappy Paulina what no words
could have conveyed. Under her sallow skin the red blood of shame
slowly mounted. At that moment she saw herself and her life as
never before. The wrathful scorn of this indignant woman pierced
like a lightning bolt to the depths of her sluggish moral sense
and awakened it to new vitality. For a few moments she stood silent
and with face aflame, and then, turning slowly, passed into her
house. It was the beginning of Paulina's redemption.