In spite of the surprising discovery in his office of a young woman of
such a disquieting, galvanic quality, it must not be supposed that
Mr. Claude Ditmar intended to infringe upon a fixed principle. He had
principles. For him, as for the patriarchs and householders of Israel,
the seventh commandment was only relative, yet hitherto he had held
rigidly to that relativity, laying down the sound doctrine that women
and business would not mix: or, as he put it to his intimates, no
sensible man would fool with a girl in his office. Hence it may be
implied that Mr. Ditmar's experiences with the opposite sex had been on
a property basis. He was one of those busy and successful persons who
had never appreciated or acquired the art of quasi-platonic amenities,
whose idea of a good time was limited to discreet excursions with
cronies, likewise busy and successful persons who, by reason of having
married early and unwisely, are strangers to the delights of that higher
social intercourse chronicled in novels and the public prints. If one
may conveniently overlook the joys of a companionship of the soul, it
is quite as possible to have a taste in women as in champagne or
cigars. Mr. Ditmar preferred blondes, and he liked them rather stout,
a predilection that had led him into matrimony with a lady of this
description: a somewhat sticky, candy-eating lady with a mania for card
parties, who undoubtedly would have dyed her hair if she had lived. He
was not inconsolable, but he had had enough of marriage to learn that it
demands a somewhat exorbitant price for joys otherwise more reasonably
to be obtained.
He was left a widower with two children, a girl of thirteen and a boy
of twelve, both somewhat large for their ages. Amy attended the only
private institution for the instruction of her sex of which Hampton
could boast; George continued at a public school. The late Mrs. Ditmar
for some years before her demise had begun to give evidence of certain
restless aspirations to which American ladies of her type and situation
seem peculiarly liable, and with a view to their ultimate realization
she had inaugurated a Jericho-like campaign. Death had released Ditmar
from its increasing pressure. For his wife had possessed that admirable
substitute for character, persistence, had been expert in the use
of importunity, often an efficient weapon in the hands of the female
economically dependent. The daughter of a defunct cashier of the
Hampton National Bank, when she had married Ditmar, then one of the
superintendents of the Chippering and already a marked man, she had
deemed herself fortunate among women, looking forward to a life of
ease and idleness and candy in great abundance,--a dream temporarily
shattered by the unforeseen discomfort of bringing two children into
the world, with an interval of scarcely a year between them. Her parents
from an excess of native modesty having failed to enlighten her on this
subject, her feelings were those of outraged astonishment, and she was
quite determined not to repeat the experience a third time. Knowledge
thus belatedly acquired, for a while she abandoned herself to the
satisfaction afforded by the ability to take a commanding position
in Hampton society, gradually to become aware of the need of a more
commodious residence. In a certain kind of intuition she was rich.
Her husband had meanwhile become Agent of the Chippering Mill, and
she strongly suspected that his prudent reticence on the state of his
finances was the best indication of an increasing prosperity. He
had indeed made money, been given many opportunities for profitable
investments; but the argument for social pre-eminence did not appeal
to him: tears and reproaches, recriminations, when frequently applied,
succeeded better; like many married men, what he most desired was to be
let alone; but in some unaccountable way she had come to suspect that
his preference for blondes was of a more liberal nature than at first,
in her innocence, she had realized. She was jealous, too, of his
cronies, in spite of the fact that these gentlemen, when they met her,
treated her with an elaborate politeness; and she accused him with
entire justice of being more intimate with them than with her, with whom
he was united in holy bonds. The inevitable result of these tactics
was the modern mansion in the upper part of Warren Street, known as the
“residential” district. Built on a wide lot, with a garage on one side
to the rear, with a cement driveway divided into squares, and a wall of
democratic height separating its lawn from the sidewalk, the house may
for the present be better imagined than described.
A pious chronicler of a more orthodox age would doubtless have deemed it
a judgment that Cora Ditmar survived but two years to enjoy the glories
of the Warren Street house. For a while her husband indulged in a
foolish optimism, only to learn that the habit of matrimonial blackmail,
once acquired, is not easily shed. Scarcely had he settled down to the
belief that by the gratification of her supreme desire he had achieved
comparative peace, than he began to suspect her native self-confidence
of cherishing visions of a career contemplating nothing less than the
eventual abandonment of Hampton itself as a field too limited for her
social talents and his business ability and bank account--at which
she was pleased to hint. Hampton suited Ditmar, his passion was the
Chippering Mill; and he was in process of steeling himself to resist,
whatever the costs, this preposterous plan when he was mercifully
released by death. Her intention of sending the children away to acquire
a culture and finish Hampton did not afford,--George to Silliston
Academy, Amy to a fashionable boarding school,--he had not opposed, yet
he did not take the idea with sufficient seriousness to carry it out.
The children remained at home, more or less--increasingly less--in the
charge of an elderly woman who acted as housekeeper.
Ditmar had miraculously regained his freedom. And now, when he made
trips to New York and Boston, combining business with pleasure, there
were no questions asked, no troublesome fictions to be composed.
More frequently he was in Boston, where he belonged to a large and
comfortable club, not too exacting in regard to membership, and here he
met his cronies and sometimes planned excursions with them, automobile
trips in summer to the White Mountains or choice little resorts to spend
Sundays and holidays, generally taking with them a case of champagne and
several bags of golf sticks. He was fond of shooting, and belonged to a
duck club on the Cape, where poker and bridge were not tabooed. To his
intimates he was known as “Dit.” Nor is it surprising that his attitude
toward women had become in general one of resentment; matrimony he
now regarded as unmitigated folly. At five and forty he was a vital,
dominating, dust-coloured man six feet and half an inch in height,
weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, and thus a trifle fleshy. When
relaxed, and in congenial company, he looked rather boyish, an aspect
characteristic of many American business men of to-day.
His head was large, he wore his hair short, his features also proclaimed
him as belonging to a modern American type in that they were not
clear-cut, but rather indefinable; a bristling, short-cropped moustache
gave him a certain efficient, military look which, when introduced to
strangers as “Colonel,” was apt to deceive them into thinking him an
army officer. The title he had once received as a member of the staff
of the governor of the state, and was a tribute to a gregariousness
and political influence rather than to a genius for the art of war. Ex
officio, as the agent of the Chippering Mill and a man of substance to
boot, he was “in” politics, hail fellow well met with and an individual
to be taken into account by politicians from the governor and member of
congress down. He was efficient, of course; he had efficient hands and
shrewd, efficient eyes, and the military impression was deepened by his
manner of dealing with people, his conversation being yea, yea and nay,
nay,--save with his cronies and those of the other sex from whom he had
something to gain. His clothes always looked new, of pronounced patterns
and light colours set aside for him by an obsequious tailor in Boston.
If a human being in such an enviable position as that of agent of the
Chippering Mill can be regarded as property, it might be said that Mr.
Claude Ditmar belonged to the Chipperings of Boston, a family still
owning a controlling interest in the company. His loyalty to them and
to the mill he so ably conducted was the great loyalty of his life. For
Ditmar, a Chippering could do no wrong. It had been the keen eye of Mr.
Stephen Chippering that first had marked him, questioned him, recognized
his ability, and from the moment of that encounter his advance had
been rapid. When old Stephen had been called to his fathers, Ditmar's
allegiance was automatically, as it were, transferred to the two sons,
George and Worthington, already members of the board of directors.
Sometimes Ditmar called on them at their homes, which stood overlooking
the waters of the Charles River Basin. The attitude toward him of the
Chipperings and their wives was one of an interesting adjustment of
feudalism to democracy. They were fond of him, grateful to him, treating
him with a frank camaraderie that had in it not the slightest touch of
condescension, but Ditmar would have been the first to recognize that
there were limits to the intimacy. They did not, for instance--no doubt
out of consideration--invite him to their dinner parties or take him to
their club, which was not the same as that to which he himself belonged.
He felt no animus. Nor would he, surprising though it may seem,
have changed places with the Chipperings. At an early age, and quite
unconsciously, he had accepted property as the ruling power of the
universe, and when family was added thereto the combination was nothing
less than divine.
There were times, especially during the long winters, when life became
almost unbearable for Janet, and she was seized by a desire to run away
from Fillmore Street, from the mills, from Hampton itself. Only she
did not know where to go, or how to get away. She was convinced of
the existence in the world of delightful spots where might be found
congenial people with whom it would be a joy to talk. Fillmore Street,
certainly, did not contain any such. The office was not so bad. It is
true that in the mornings, as she entered West Street, the sight of the
dark facade of the fortress-like structure, emblematic of the captivity
in which she passed her days, rarely failed to arouse in her sensations
of oppression and revolt; but here, at least, she discovered an outlet
for her energies; she was often too busy to reflect, and at odd moments
she could find a certain solace and companionship in the river, so
intent, so purposeful, so beautiful, so undisturbed by the inconcinnity,
the clatter and confusion of Hampton as it flowed serenely under the
bridges and between the mills toward the sea. Toward the sea!
It was when, at night, she went back to Fillmore Street--when she
thought of the monotony, yes, and the sordidness of home, when she let
herself in at the door and climbed the dark and narrow stairway, that
her feet grew leaden. In spite of the fact that Hannah was a good
housekeeper and prided herself on cleanliness, the tiny flat reeked with
the smell of cooking, and Janet, from the upper hall, had a glimpse of
a thin, angular woman with a scrawny neck, with scant grey hair tightly
drawn into a knot, in a gingham apron covering an old dress bending
over the kitchen stove. And occasionally, despite a resentment that fate
should have dealt thus inconsiderately with the family, Janet felt pity
welling within her. After supper, when Lise had departed with her best
young man, Hannah would occasionally, though grudgingly, permit Janet to
help her with the dishes.
“You work all day, you have a right to rest.”
“But I don't want to rest,” Janet would declare, and rub the dishes the
harder. With the spirit underlying this protest, Hannah sympathized.
Mother and daughter were alike in that both were inarticulate, but Janet
had a secret contempt for Hannah's uncomplaining stoicism. She loved
her mother, in a way, especially at certain times,--though she often
wondered why she was unable to realize more fully the filial affection
of tradition; but in moments of softening, such as these, she was filled
with rage at the thought of any woman endowed with energy permitting
herself to be overtaken and overwhelmed by such a fate as Hannah's:
divorce, desertion, anything, she thought, would have been
better--anything but to be cheated out of life. Feeling the fires of
rebellion burning hotly within her,--rebellion against environment and
driving necessity she would glance at her mother and ask herself whether
it were possible that Hannah had ever known longings, had ever been
wrung by inexpressible desires,--desires in which the undiscovered
spiritual was so alarmingly compounded with the undiscovered physical.
She would have died rather than speak to Hannah of these unfulfilled
experiences, and the mere thought of confiding them to any person
appalled her. Even if there existed some wonderful, understanding being
to whom she might be able thus to empty her soul, the thought of the
ecstasy of that kenosis was too troubling to be dwelt upon.
She had tried reading, with unfortunate results,--perhaps because no
Virgil had as yet appeared to guide her through the mysteries of that
realm. Her schooling had failed to instil into her a discriminating
taste for literature; and when, on occasions, she had entered the Public
Library opposite the Common it had been to stare hopelessly at rows of
books whose authors and titles offered no clue to their contents.
Her few choices had not been happy, they had failed to interest and
thrill...
Of the Bumpus family Lise alone found refuge, distraction, and
excitement in the vulgar modern world by which they were surrounded, and
of whose heedlessness and remorselessness they were the victims. Lise
went out into it, became a part of it, returning only to sleep and
eat,--a tendency Hannah found unaccountable, and against which even
her stoicism was not wholly proof. Scarce an evening went by without an
expression of uneasiness from Hannah.
“She didn't happen to mention where she was going, did she, Janet?”
Hannah would query, when she had finished her work and put on her
spectacles to read the Banner.
“To the movies, I suppose,” Janet would reply. Although well aware that
her sister indulged in other distractions, she thought it useless to add
to Hannah's disquietude. And if she had little patience with Lise, she
had less with the helpless attitude of her parents.
“Well,” Hannah would add, “I never can get used to her going out nights
the way she does, and with young men and women I don't know anything
about. I wasn't brought up that way. But as long as she's got to work
for a living I guess there's no help for it.”
And she would glance at Edward. It was obviously due to his inability
adequately to cope with modern conditions that his daughters were forced
to toil, but this was the nearest she ever came to reproaching him. If
he heard, he acquiesced humbly, and in silence: more often than not he
was oblivious, buried in the mazes of the Bumpus family history, his
papers spread out on the red cloth of the dining-room table, under the
lamp. Sometimes in his simplicity and with the enthusiasm that demands
listeners he would read aloud to them a letter, recently received from
a distant kinsman, an Alpheus Bumpus, let us say, who had migrated to
California in search of wealth and fame, and who had found neither.
In spite of age and misfortunes, the liberal attitude of these western
members of the family was always a matter of perplexity to Edward.
“He tells me they're going to give women the ballot,--doesn't appear to
be much concerned about his own womenfolks going to the polls.”
“Why shouldn't they, if they want to?” Janet would exclaim, though she
had given little thought to the question.
Edward would mildly ignore this challenge.
“He has a house on what they call Russian Hill, and he can watch the
vessels as they come in from Japan,” he would continue in his precise
voice, emphasizing admirably the last syllables of the words “Russian,”
“vessels,” and “Japan.” “Wouldn't you like to see the letter?”
To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his
passion, she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently
handing it on to Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus's trembling
calligraphy, pondered over his manifold woes. Alpheus's son, who had had
a good position in a sporting goods establishment on Market Street, was
sick and in danger of losing it, the son's wife expecting an addition to
the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged. Alpheus, a veteran of
the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his reminiscences,
but the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters of solid
worth, and so far had refused to publish them.... Janet, as she read,
reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures,
of disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father's perennial interest
in failures,--provided they were those of his family; and the next
evening, as he wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in
turn was pouring out his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion
by no means unpleasurable, to this sympathetic but remote relative the
story of his own failure!
If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which
haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to
a back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of
flotsam and jetsam had collected. Or, to find perhaps an even more
striking illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and
Fillmore Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to
Glendale, the Italian settlement on the road leading to the old New
England village of Shrewsbury. Janet sometimes walked there, alone or
with her friend Eda Rawle. Disintegration itself--in a paradoxically
pathetic attempt at reconstruction--had built Glendale. Human
hands, Italian hands. Nor, surprising though it may seem, were these
descendants of the people of the Renaissance in the least offended by
their handiwork. When the southern European migration had begun and real
estate became valuable, one by one the more decorous edifices of the old
American order had been torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy
to the bare hills of Glendale, there to enter into new combinations
representing, to an eye craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of
a mental indigestion, of a colour scheme crying aloud to heaven for
retribution. Standing alone and bare amidst its truck gardens, hideous,
extreme, though typical of the entire settlement, composed of fragments
ripped from once-appropriate settings, is a house with a tiny body
painted strawberry-red, with scroll-work shutters a tender green;
surmounting the structure and almost equalling it in size is a sky-blue
cupola, once the white crown of the Sutter mansion, the pride of old
Hampton. The walls of this dwelling were wrested from the sides of
Mackey's Tavern, while the shutters for many years adorned the parsonage
of the old First Church. Similarly, in Hampton and in Fillmore Street,
lived in enforced neighbourliness human fragments once having their
places in crystallized communities where existence had been regarded as
solved. Here there was but one order,--if such it may be called,--one
relationship, direct, or indirect, one necessity claiming them all--the
mills.
Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human
planks torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which
is to say they were dominated by obsessions. Edward's was the Bumpus
family; and Chris Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced
that the history of mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by
women. Perhaps he was right, but the conviction was none the less
an obsession. He came from a little village near Wittenburg that has
scarcely changed since Luther's time. Like most residents of Hampton who
did not work in the mills, he ministered to those who did, or to those
who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in his barber
shop on Faber Street.
The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride,
preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood
by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season
compelled a certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little
dining-room grew unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the
front steps shared in common with the household of the barber. It is
true that the barber's wife was a mild hausfrau who had little to say,
and that their lodgers, two young Germans who worked in the mills, spent
most of their evenings at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling
a strong odour of bay rum, would arrive promptly at quarter past eight,
take off his coat, and thus, as it were stripped for action, would turn
upon the defenceless Edward.
“Vill you mention one great man--yoost one--who is not greater if the
vimmen leave him alone?” he would demand. “Is it Anthony, the conqueror
of Egypt and the East? I vill show you Cleopatra. Und Burns, and
Napoleon, the greatest man what ever lived--vimmen again. I tell you
there is no Elba, no St. Helena if it is not for the vimmen. Und vat
vill you say of Goethe?”
Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.
“He is great, I grant you,” Chris would admit, “but vat is he if the
vimmen leave him alone? Divine yoost that.” And he would proceed to cite
endless examples of generals and statesmen whose wives or mistresses had
been their bane. Futile Edward's attempts to shift the conversation
to the subject of his own obsession; the German was by far the more
aggressive, he would have none of it. Perhaps if Edward had been willing
to concede that the Bumpuses had been brought to their present lowly
estate by the sinister agency of the fair sex Chris might conditionally
have accepted the theme. Hannah, contemptuously waving a tattered palm
leaf fan, was silent; but on one occasion Janet took away the barber's
breath by suddenly observing:--“You never seem to think of the women
whose lives are ruined by men, Mr. Auermann.”
It was unheard-of, this invasion of a man's argument by a woman, and
by a young woman at that. He glared at her through his spectacles, took
them off, wiped them, replaced them, and glared at her again. He did not
like Janet; she was capable of what may be called a speaking silence,
and he had never been wholly unaware of her disapproval and ridicule.
Perhaps he recognized in her, instinctively, the potential qualities of
that emerging modern woman who to him was anathema.
“It is somethings I don't think about,” he said.
He was a wizened little man with faience-blue eyes, and sat habitually
hunched up with his hands folded across his shins.
“Nam fuit ante Helenam”--as Darwin quotes. Toward all the masculine
residents of Fillmore Street, save one, the barber's attitude was one
of unconcealed scorn for an inability to recognize female perfidy. With
Johnny Tiernan alone he refused to enter the lists. When the popular
proprietor of the tin shop came sauntering along the sidewalk with nose
uptilted, waving genial greetings to the various groups on the steps,
Chris Auermann's expression would suddenly change to one of fatuous
playfulness.
“What's this I hear about giving the girls the vote, Chris?” Johnny
would innocently inquire, winking at Janet, invariably running his hand
through the wiry red hair that resumed its corkscrew twist as soon as
he released it. And Chris would as invariably reply:--“You have the
dandruffs--yes? You come to my shop, I give you somethings....”
Sometimes the barber, in search of a more aggressive adversary than
Edward, would pay visits, when as likely as not another neighbour with
profound convictions and a craving for proselytes would swoop down on
the defenceless Bumpuses: Joe Shivers, for instance, who lived in one
of the tenements above the cleaning and dyeing establishment kept by the
Pappas Bros., and known as “The Gentleman.” In the daytime Mr. Shivers
was a model of acquiescence in a system he would have designated as one
of industrial feudalism, his duty being to examine the rolls of cloth as
they came from the looms of the Arundel Mill, in case of imperfections
handing them over to the women menders: at night, to borrow a vivid
expression from Lise, he was “batty in the belfry” on the subject of
socialism. Unlike the barber, whom he could not abide, for him the
cleavage of the world was between labour and capital instead of man
and woman; his philosophy was stern and naturalistic; the universe--the
origin of which he did not discuss--just an accidental assemblage of
capricious forces over which human intelligence was one day to triumph.
Squatting on the lowest step, his face upturned, by the light of the arc
sputtering above the street he looked like a yellow frog, his eager eyes
directed toward Janet, whom he suspected of intelligence.
“If there was a God, a nice, kind, all-powerful God, would he permit
what happened in one of the loom-rooms last week? A Polak girl gets her
hair caught in the belt pfff!” He had a marvellously realistic gift
when it came to horrors: Janet felt her hair coming out by the roots.
Although she never went to church, she did not like to think that no God
existed. Of this Mr. Shivers was very positive. Edward, too, listened
uneasily, hemmed and hawed, making ineffectual attempts to combat Mr.
Shivers's socialism with a deeply-rooted native individualism that
Shivers declared as defunct as Christianity.
“If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic
system, why do you not rise, then? Why do I not rise? I'm as good as
Ditmar, I'm better educated, but we're all slaves. What right has a man
to make you and me work for him just because he has capital?”
“Why, the right of capital,” Edward would reply.
Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable
romanticism and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in
spite of the fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised
over her a paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored
intellectual realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush
the little man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role
Shivers had appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict
Shivers of idealism. Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than
atheism, something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed
because he was unable adequately to express this feeling.
“You can't change human nature, Mr. Shivers,” Edward would insist in his
precise but ineffectual manner. “We all want property, you would accept
a fortune if it was offered to you, and so should I. Americans will
never become socialists.”
“But look at me, wasn't I born in Meriden, Connecticut? Ain't that
Yankee enough for you?” Thus Mr. Shivers sought blandly to confound him.
A Yankee Shades of the Pilgrim fathers, of seven, generations of
Bumpuses! A Yankee who used his hands in that way, a Yankee with a nose
like that, a Yankee with a bald swathe down the middle of his crown and
bunches of black, moth-eaten hair on either side! But Edward, too polite
to descend to personalities, was silent....
In brief, this very politeness of Edward's, which his ancestors would
have scorned, this consideration and lack of self-assertion made him the
favourite prey of the many “characters” in Fillmore Street whose sanity
had been disturbed by pressure from above, in whose systems had lodged
the germs of those exotic social doctrines floating so freely in the
air of our modern industrial communities.... Chester Glenn remains for
a passing mention. A Yankee of Yankees, this, born on a New Hampshire
farm, and to the ordinary traveller on the Wigmore branch of the
railroad just a good-natured, round-faced, tobacco-chewing brakeman who
would take a seat beside ladies of his acquaintance aid make himself
agreeable until it was time to rise and bawl out, in the approved manner
of his profession, the name of the next station. Fillmore Street knew
that the flat visored cap which his corporation compelled him to wear
covered a brain into which had penetrated the maggot of the Single
Tax. When he encountered Mr. Shivers or Auermann the talk became
coruscating..
Eda Rawle, Janet's solitary friend of these days, must also be
mentioned, though the friendship was merely an episode in Janet's life.
Their first meeting was at Grady's quick-lunch counter in Faber Street,
which they both frequented at one time, and the fact that each had
ordered a ham sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a confection--new to
Grady's--known as a Napoleon had led to conversation.
Eda, of course, was the aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would
not be repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she
boarded with a Welsh family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding,
commonplace, resembling--as Janet thought--a horse, possessing, indeed
many of the noble qualities of that animal, she might have been thought
the last person in the world to discern and appreciate in Janet the
hidden elements of a mysterious fire. In appearance Miss Rawle was of a
type not infrequent in Anglo-Saxon lands, strikingly blonde, with high
malar bones, white eyelashes, and eyes of a metallic blue, cheeks of an
amazing elasticity that worked rather painfully as she talked or smiled,
drawing back inadequate lips, revealing long, white teeth and vivid
gums. It was the craving in her for romance Janet assuaged; Eda's was
the love content to pour out, that demands little. She was capable of
immolation. Janet was by no means ungrateful for the warmth of such
affection, though in moments conscious of a certain perplexity and
sadness because she was able to give such a meagre return for the wealth
of its offering.
In other moments, when the world seemed all disorder and chaos,--as Mr.
Shivers described it,--or when she felt within her, like demons, those
inexpressible longings and desires, leaping and straining, pulling her,
almost irresistibly, she knew not whither, Eda shone forth like a light
in the darkness, like the beacon of a refuge and a shelter. Eda had
faith in her, even when Janet had lost faith in herself: she went to Eda
in the same spirit that Marguerite went to church; though she, Janet,
more resembled Faust, being--save in these hours of lowered vitality--of
the forth-faring kind.... Unable to confess the need that drove her, she
arrived in Eda's little bedroom to be taken into Eda's arms. Janet was
immeasurably the stronger of the two, but Eda possessed the masculine
trait of protectiveness, the universe never bothered her, she was one of
those persons--called fortunate--to whom the orthodox Christian virtues
come as naturally as sun or air. Passion, when sanctified by matrimony,
was her ideal, and now it was always in terms of Janet she dreamed of
it, having read about it in volumes her friend would not touch,
and never having experienced deeply its discomforts. Sanctified or
unsanctified, Janet regarded it with terror, and whenever Eda innocently
broached the subject she recoiled. Once Eda exclaimed:--“When you do
fall in love, Janet, you must tell me all about it, every word!”
Janet blushed hotly, and was silent. In Eda's mind such an affair was a
kind of glorified fireworks ending in a cluster of stars, in Janet's a
volcanic eruption to turn the world red. Such was the difference between
them.
Their dissipations together consisted of “sundaes” at a drug-store, or
sometimes of movie shows at the Star or the Alhambra. Stereotyped on
Eda's face during the legitimately tender passages of these dramas was
an expression of rapture, a smile made peculiarly infatuate by that
vertical line in her cheeks, that inadequacy of lip and preponderance of
white teeth and red gums. It irritated, almost infuriated Janet, to whom
it appeared as the logical reflection of what was passing on the screen;
she averted her glance from both, staring into her lap, filled with
shame that the relation between the sexes should be thus exposed
to public gaze, parodied, sentimentalized, degraded.... There were,
however, marvels to stir her, strange landscapes, cities, seas, and
ships,--once a fire in the forest of a western reserve with gigantic
tongues of orange flame leaping from tree to tree. The movies brought
the world to Hampton, the great world into which she longed to fare,
brought the world to her! Remote mountain hamlets from Japan, minarets
and muezzins from the Orient, pyramids from Egypt, domes from Moscow
resembling gilded beets turned upside down; grey houses of parliament by
the Thames, the Tower of London, the Palaces of Potsdam, the Tai Mahal.
Strange lands indeed, and stranger peoples! booted Russians in blouses,
naked Equatorial savages tattooed and amazingly adorned, soldiers and
sailors, presidents, princes and emperors brought into such startling
proximity one could easily imagine one's self exchanging the time of
day! Incredible to Janet how the audiences, how even Eda accepted
with American complacency what were to her never-ending miracles; the
yearning to see more, to know more, became acute, like a pain, but even
as she sought to devour these scenes, to drink in every detail, with
tantalizing swiftness they were whisked away. They were peepholes in
the walls of her prison; and at night she often charmed herself to sleep
with remembered visions of wide, empty, treeshaded terraces reserved for
kings.
But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was
thrilled to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium.
Emerging from the vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see
the slushy street, her eyes shone with a silver light like that of a
mountain lake in a stormy sunset. And they walked in silence until Janet
would exclaim:
“Oh Eda, wouldn't you love to travel!”
Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was
powerless to detect, and which did not become values until they had
passed through Janet. One “educative” reel they had seen had begun with
scenes in a lumber camp high in the mountains of Galicia, where grow
forests of the priceless pine that becomes, after years of drying and
seasoning, the sounding board of the Stradivarius and the harp. Even
then it must respond to a Player. Eda, though failing to apply
this poetic parallel, when alone in her little room in the Welsh
boarding-house often indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that
man, hidden in the mists of the future, whose destiny it would be to
awaken her friend. Hampton did not contain him,--of this she was sure;
and in her efforts to visualize him she had recourse to the movies,
seeking him amongst that brilliant company of personages who stood so
haughtily or walked so indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of
the screen.
By virtue of these marvels of the movies: Hampton ugly and sordid
Hampton!--actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge. Were
not the strange peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton? She saw
them arriving at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered,
ticketed like dumb animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours
many of them were presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel
of Faber Street. She sought to summon up in her mind the glimpses she
had had of the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine
their lives in that earlier environment. Sometimes she wandered, alone
or with Eda, through the various quarters of the city. Each quarter had
a flavour of its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old
nor to the new, yet partaking of both: a difference in atmosphere to
which Janet was keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the north,
one felt a sort of ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be
permitted: the tenements here were clean and not too crowded, the
scroll-work on their superimposed porches, like that decorating the
Turnverein and the stem Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic
inheritance: The Belgians were to the west, beyond the base-ball park
and the car barns, their grey houses scattered among new streets beside
the scarred and frowning face of Torrey's hill. Almost under the hill
itself, which threatened to roll down on it, and facing a bottomless,
muddy street, was the quaint little building giving the note of foreign
thrift, of socialism and shrewdness, of joie de vivre to the settlement,
the Franco-Belgian co-operative store, with its salle de reunion above
and a stage for amateur theatricals. Standing in the mud outside, Janet
would gaze through the tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets
prepared for each household laid in neat rows beside the counter; at
the old man with the watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered
cheeks who spoke no English, whose duty it was to distribute the baskets
to the women and children as they called.
Turning eastward again, one came to Dey Street, in the heart of Hampton,
where Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim, sole testimony of the
departed Hibernian glories of a district where the present Irish rulers
of the city had once lived and gossiped and fought in the days when the
mill bells had roused the boarding-house keepers at half past four of a
winter morning. Beside the hall was a corner lot, heaped high with hills
of ashes and rubbish like the vomitings of some filthy volcano; the
unsightliness of which was half concealed by huge signs announcing the
merits of chewing gums, tobaccos, and cereals. But why had the departure
of the Irish, the coming of the Syrians made Dey Street dark, narrow,
mysterious, oriental? changed the very aspect of its architecture? Was
it the coffee-houses? One of these, in front of which Janet liked
to linger, was set weirdly into an old New England cottage, and had,
apparently, fathomless depths. In summer the whole front of it lay
open to the street, and here all day long, beside the table where
the charcoal squares were set to dry, could be seen saffron-coloured
Armenians absorbed in a Turkish game played on a backgammon board, their
gentleness and that of the loiterers looking on in strange contrast with
their hawk-like profiles and burning eyes. Behind this group, in the
half light of the middle interior, could be discerned an American
soda-water fountain of a bygone fashion, on its marble counter
oddly shaped bottles containing rose and violet syrups; there was
a bottle-shaped stove, and on the walls, in gilt frames, pictures
evidently dating from the period in American art that flourished when
Franklin Pierce was President; and there was an array of marble topped
tables extending far back into the shadows. Behind the fountain was
a sort of cupboard--suggestive of the Arabian Nights, which Janet had
never read--from which, occasionally, the fat proprietor emerged bearing
Turkish coffee or long Turkish pipes.
When not thus occupied the proprietor carried a baby. The street swarmed
with babies, and mothers nursed them on the door-steps. And in this
teeming, prolific street one could scarcely move without stepping on a
fat, almond eyed child, though some, indeed, were wheeled; wheeled in
all sorts of queer contrivances by one another, by fathers with
ragged black moustaches and eagle noses who, to the despair of mill
superintendents, had decided in the morning that three days' wages would
since to support their families for the week.... In the midst of the
throng might be seen occasionally the stout and comfortable and not too
immaculate figure of a shovel bearded Syrian priest, in a frock coat
and square-topped “Derby” hat, sailing along serenely, heedless of the
children who scattered out of his path.
Nearby was the quarter of the Canadian French, scarcely now to be called
foreigners, though still somewhat reminiscent of the cramped little
towns in the northern wilderness of water and forest. On one corner
stood almost invariably a “Pharmacie Francaise”; the signs were in
French, and the elders spoke the patois. These, despite the mill pallor,
retained in their faces, in their eyes, a suggestion of the outdoor
look of their ancestors, the coureurs des bois, but the children spoke
English, and the young men, as they played baseball in the street or in
the corner lots might be heard shouting out derisively the cry of the
section hands so familiar in mill cities, “Doff, you beggars you, doff!”
Occasionally the two girls strayed into that wide thoroughfare not
far from the canal, known by the classic name of Hawthorne, which the
Italians had appropriated to themselves. This street, too, in spite of
the telegraph poles flaunting crude arms in front of its windows, in
spite of the trolley running down its middle, had acquired a character,
a unity all its own, a warmth and picturesqueness that in the lingering
light of summer evenings assumed an indefinable significance. It was not
Italy, but it was something--something proclaimed in the ornate, leaning
lines of the pillared balconies of the yellow tenement on the second
block, in the stone-vaulted entrance of the low house next door, in
fantastically coloured walls, in curtained windows out of which leaned
swarthy, earringed women. Blocking the end of the street, in stern
contrast, was the huge Clarendon Mill with its sinister brick pillars
running up the six stories between the glass. Here likewise the
sidewalks overflowed with children, large-headed, with great, lustrous
eyes, mute, appealing, the eyes of cattle. Unlike American children,
they never seemed to be playing. Among the groups of elders gathered for
gossip were piratical Calabrians in sombre clothes, descended from Greek
ancestors, once the terrors of the Adriatic Sea. The women, lingering in
the doorways, hemmed in by more children, were for the most part squat
and plump, but once in a while Janet's glance was caught and held by a
strange, sharp beauty worthy of a cameo.
Opposite the Clarendon Mill on the corner of East Street was a provision
store with stands of fruit and vegetables encroaching on the pavement.
Janet's eye was attracted by a box of olives.
“Oh Eda,” she cried, “do you remember, we saw them being picked--in the
movies? All those old trees on the side of a hill?”
“Why, that's so,” said Eda. “You never would have thought anything'd
grow on those trees.”
The young Italian who kept the store gave them a friendly grin.
“You lika the olives?” he asked, putting some of the shining black fruit
into their hands. Eda bit one dubiously with her long, white teeth, and
giggled.
“Don't they taste funny!” she exclaimed.
“Good--very good,” he asserted gravely, and it was to Janet he turned,
as though recognizing a discrimination not to be found in her companion.
She nodded affirmatively. The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her
sense of adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in
the grove; she glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and
well formed, with remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the
olives themselves. It surprised her that she liked him, though he was an
Italian and a foreigner: a certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to
her--a quality lacking in many of her own countrymen.
And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,--only she did not know how
to begin,--when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with
him in soft, liquid tones that moved her....
Sometimes on these walks--especially if the day were grey and
sombre--Janet's sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more
poignant, charged with presage. These feelings, vague and unaccountable,
she was utterly unable to confide to Eda, yet the very fear they
inspired was fascinating; a fear and a hope that some day, in all
this Babel of peoples, something would happen! It was as though the
conflicting soul of the city and her own soul were one....