The rural individual, riding for the first time on a descending
elevator, experiences a sensation that leads to a fixed preference for
stairs. It is a peculiar sensation. It may be reproduced in less degree
psychologically. For instance, the boy on his way to the woodshed with
his father and a razor-strop knows it; the young man about to announce
to her father his ambition to become a son-in-law is acquainted with it.
It comes to many people as they approach the unknown, the dreaded, the
long-sought-after. It is a mingling of excitement, apprehension,
anticipation, and the three of them do not mingle in peace. They seem,
indeed, to have a most lively and troublesome time of it in the region
known as the pit of the stomach.
As Jim left his room to go down to his first breakfast at the Widow
Stickney’s table he experienced an unmistakable attack of it. Marie
Ducharme was the cause. Doubtless they would breakfast together. He was
a bit apprehensive as to how it would go off. There was a certain amount
of curiosity-incited anticipation of a second meeting with her, a second
opportunity to glimpse her queer, disturbed, turbulent personality. Let
there be no error here—Jim Ashe was not drawn toward Marie Ducharme.
Quite the contrary. She was not at all the sort of person who would
attract him; and her present frame of mind was not such as to magnetize
any healthy young man. But she was a girl; she was a step beyond the
ordinary; she had a personality that one could not encounter and escape
unaffected. That was all.
He hesitated for a moment in the hall, and then entered the dining-room,
where the widow and Marie Ducharme were already at the table.
“Right here, Mr. Ashe,” said the widow; “take this here chair with the
arms and the cushion into it. It’ll seem sort of queer to see a man
settin’ into it agin. My first used it and my second used it.”
“And you keep it in case it might be needed again,” said Jim, gravely.
The widow shook her head. “’Tain’t nothin’ but a memento no more.
Husbands is all right, but enough’s enough. What a body can want of more
’n two is more ’n I can see. Let me make you acquainted with Miss
Ducharme, Mr. Ashe.”
Miss Ducharme nodded coldly.
“Cream ’n’ sugar?” asked the widow.
“Some cream, a good deal of sugar, and a little coffee,” said Jim,
stealing a look at the young woman. She was stirring her coffee, a
process which appeared to require concentration. Jim didn’t blame her
for stirring it or for doing anything else which would bring to public
attention a hand as graceful and shapely as hers. Her face, beneath a
stack of blackest hair, was expressionless.
“Mr. Ashe hain’t goin’ to bite you, Marie,” said the widow, with a note
of exasperation in her voice. Jim was glad he had not taken a swallow of
coffee, for he could not have been responsible for consequences.
Miss Ducharme raised her eyes slowly, looked for an instant into Jim’s
eyes. “Nobody’s going to bite me if I can help it,” she said.
“Mrs. Stickney is right,” said Jim, “I’m not vicious. I almost never
bite strangers. Still, I might wear a muzzle if it would help matters.”
Miss Ducharme made no reply save a faint movement of her
shoulders—inherited from an ancestor who had served Frontenac. She
finished her coffee and toast and egg slowly, arose silently, and left
the room. The widow looked after her a moment with compressed lips.
“Sometimes,” she said, “she’s that cantankerous my hand fairly itches to
come against her ear. Seems she might ’a’ acted a leetle prettier,
bein’s you’re a stranger and this is your first meal.”
“Don’t let it worry you, Mrs. Stickney.”
“Worry me! Huh! ’Tain’t worry that ails me, it’s bein’ that provoked
with her. She’s lived with me since her folks died. She was fifteen
then. I couldn’t make her out as a child and a Philadelphy lawyer
couldn’t make her out as a woman. She’s been gittin’ worse. Marie’s a
good girl, Mr. Ashe—better ’n a lot of these mealy-mouthed,
bowin’-and-scrapin’ ones—and Lord knows she’s smarter. Too dum smart, I
call her, for her own good. But she’s queer. Kind of knurly. She don’t
appear to like folks, somehow.”
“Possibly, Mrs. Stickney, the trouble is that she doesn’t like herself.”
“She gits on my mind. Sometimes I’m afeard she’s goin’ to mess up what
chances of happiness she’s got. She sets and thinks too much, and some
of the things she says would fair shock you out of your shoes. If I
thought she meant ’em, old as she is I’d take her acrost my knee and see
if a slipper wouldn’t change her point of view some.”
“Anyhow, I’ll promise not to quarrel with her, Mrs. Stickney,” said Jim,
rising. He felt it was not altogether ethical to discuss Miss Ducharme
thus freely. The widow seemed to have no such scruples. Indeed, she was
willing at all times and seasons to discuss anybody, absent or present,
and to put into frank and expressive terms her thoughts concerning them.
The widow was no gossip, no backbiter, but a woman of opinions and a
nimble tongue undeterred by fear or favor.
“A husband’s what she needs,” said she. “One with enough disposition to
go so far’s to lay his hand on her if she went past his patience. I mind
my first husband shakin’ me once. I was young, then, with notions.
Dun’no’s anythin’ ever done me so much good. ’Tain’t considered proper
no more—but if there was more shakin’s there’d be fewer divorcin’s.”
“Perhaps our men are deteriorating under the influences of modern life,”
Jim suggested, with a twinkle in his eye. “The headship of the family is
passing to the other sex.”
“Then men ought to be up and doin’ somethin’ about it,” said the widow.
“I wouldn’t give shucks for a man that let a woman run him. All this
here talk about emancipatin’ wimmin makes me sick to my stummick. Wimmin
don’t need emancipatin’. What they need is bossin’. I’ve been a woman
consid’able of a spell and I calc’late I ought to know.”
“I think my grandmother would agree with you if she were living.”
“Of course. I’m grandmother to six. My idee is that wimmin don’t git
settled and sensible till they turn sixty.”
“I’m in favor of giving the vote to all grandmothers.”
“It would fetch consid’able sense into elections,” said the widow.
“Don’t hurry off. I like to talk—maybe you’ve noticed it.”
“And enjoyed it,” said Jim, passing through the door.
Miss Ducharme was putting on her hat in the hall. Jim’s first thought
was to pass on without pause; his second and better thought was to
parley.
“I’m waving a flag of truce, Miss Ducharme,” he said. “Can’t we declare
an armistice for ten minutes to bury our dead?”
“I have no war with you,” she replied, with no interest. “I simply don’t
like you. Why should we talk about it?”
“There’ll be no trouble on that score,” said Jim, smiling. He rather
enjoyed her acerbity. “You see, I’m not exactly fond of you. But we’re
living under the same roof and eating at the same table. If we could
agree on a truce or a pretense that we are not distasteful to each
other—merely while we’re in the house—it might make Mrs. Stickney’s
life a bit more joyous. I assure you that if I had known you lived here
I shouldn’t have intruded.”
“Mrs. Stickney has a right to take whatever boarders she chooses.”
“I’m not asking you to be friends—” Jim stopped. He was conscious of
that feeling of sudden determination, of that urge to quick action which
had come upon him several times since his arrival in Diversity, of that
spirit which had earned for him among his workmen the name of Sudden
Jim. So he cut off his sentence and started another.
“I’m going to be your friend, whether you like it or not. Possibly I
shall even like you. You seem to need friends, if what you said to me
the other day is an indication of what is really going on inside you.
The matter is out of your hands. You said absurd things; things
dangerous for any young woman to say, even if she knows in her heart
they’re ridiculous.”
“They were not absurd. I meant them. You had no business to be there to
hear—to know. You let me talk when I was unstrung. You spied—it
amounted to that.”
“Let it stand that way. I do know and I’m going to meddle. You hate
Diversity because it isn’t New York City. You talk recklessly to a
stranger. The sum of the matter is that you are steering for a big
unpleasantness. If you don’t like things as they are, what is the sense
of putting in your time making them worse? Pretty soon you’ll talk and
think and gloom yourself into doing something that’ll smash the china.
So I’m going to meddle. Of course I don’t know you, and I haven’t any
personal interest in you. But I’m interested in you as a sociological
specimen. As such I’m going to be polite to you, and as entertaining as
possible while we’re at Mrs. Stickney’s table. I shall expect you to be
humanly polite to me. Do you understand?”
She looked at him queerly, almost apprehensively. When she replied her
voice was low, not cold, not friendly. Jim’s will had encountered her
will and been the stronger.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ll be reasonably decent—so Mrs. Stickney won’t lose her appetite?”
“Yes. In the house. But nowhere else. And I shall hate you—hate you.”
“That’s enough for a beginning.”
“And don’t you dare to watch me. Don’t dare to pry into my affairs.
Don’t dare to interfere with me in any way.”
“Miss Ducharme, if you fell into the river it would be only human for me
to fish you out. Drowning isn’t the worst thing there is. Folks who
would jump into the water after you would stand by and let trouble come
to you which would make you wish you could drown. A man has the right to
interfere. Humanity gives it to him. It’s silly to think I have the
right to save your life from a physical danger, but haven’t the right to
save you from the other kind. You say it’s none of my business. It is my
business. What threatens any human being is the business of every other
human being, if he weren’t too lazy or too hidebound or too conventional
to admit it. You have brains—or you wouldn’t be in the state of mind
you are. You know logic when you meet it face to face—and that was
logic. The trouble with you is ambition that has fermented in the can.”
“You are a bumptious young man,” she said, hotly. “You’re full of
school-book theories. What do you know about a woman? About her
problems? What do you know about anything? You haven’t lived yet. I’m a
dozen years older than you—in knowing what the world is. You talked
idealistic nonsense the other day about the good there is in the world;
you’re talking idealistic nonsense to-day. You’re a cub altruist. What
you think is humanitarianism is merely impertinence. Altruism is just a
word in the dictionary.”
“I knew you had brains,” said Jim, “and I’ll bet you disagree with Mrs.
Stickney about woman’s sphere. She says every woman ought to be bossed
by a man—and shouldn’t be allowed the vote till she’s a grandmother.”
“I don’t agree. A woman is an individual, complete—she needs no man for
a complement. Her abilities are as great, her potentialities as strong,
She has the right to own herself, to guard herself, to reach out for the
life she wants as a man does. Because her risk in life is greater she
has the right to more than equality; she has the right to special
privilege and special protection. She has the right to demand that she
be put in a condition where she can protect her treasures, material,
physical, spiritual. And how can she do it as things are? Less than half
the world—in trousers—holds the majority in captivity, exercising the
rights of conquerors. You make laws to bind us. Men make laws respecting
the peculiar problems of women—when men know less of women and their
problems than they do of the mound-builders. We don’t ask to make your
laws—only men can make laws for men; but we do demand to make our own
laws. We demand that weapons be placed in our hands for our own defense.
With some of the theories I do not agree, but I do insist that women
should not be left—in the condition they are now—as the women of a
sacked city, at the mercy of the conquerors.”
“You have thought, haven’t you? Perhaps not altogether healthily, but
keenly. Dinner-table conversations won’t be trite.”
“Thought! What has there been to do in Diversity but think? And the more
I think, the more I comprehend, the worse the handcuffs cut into my
wrists. Some day it will become unendurable.”
“And then,” Jim said, “I shall jump into the water after you. We’ll take
altruism out of the dictionary for that one time, anyhow.”
She said nothing, moved toward the door.
“Our agreement is sealed?” he asked. “We are to act toward each other
like ordinarily polite human beings while we are in the house?”
“Yes,” she said over her shoulder.
“Are we to shake hands on it?”
“No,” she said, sharply, and went out, carrying herself lightly, with
splendid poise, eye-delighting grace.
Jim felt a tinge of regret that her face was not lovely. With the
intellect that was hers, he thought gravely, with her beauty of line and
motion, beauty of face would have made her a miracle. But she was no
miracle. She was a small, over-burdened, vainly protesting girl who had
fought her way alone to such ideals as she possessed. With her will she
thought she had molded her own soul. She did not know that souls are
never subject to finite processes; she did not know that each soul is a
single drop from the great ocean of Divinity, coming to us in such
purity as the great ocean possesses, to be made more pure or to be
defiled by our acts—but never to be altered by our wills. One day would
come when she would call up her soul before her and know it as she did
not know it now.
Jim’s final thought on the matter was that Marie was not a modern woman,
not an advanced woman, but a primitive woman, an atavism, fighting as
her remotest mother must have fought for the very right to be.