She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of
violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November
day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were
autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity
graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion
and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the
Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the
latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a
bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so
constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else
of her you knew that she was going out to them.
She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their
protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she
mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself
chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting
in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of
lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the
convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her
standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of
passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes
only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her
off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers,
by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach,
which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She
sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares
on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of
friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and
sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying.
But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone
over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began
to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the
women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.
It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge.
Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to
form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of
violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her
dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which
presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too
confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she
does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger
than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November
one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would
have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden;
one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for
joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to
their children in New York or Boston.
The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that
hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.
The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
all, as time passed.
It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
birds like her.
From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
feather remained a touching question.
There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather
with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress
of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of
any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken
innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures
to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else;
she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with
them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were
seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which
others wore; but she was not often seen without them.
There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was
seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light
within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their
cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in
faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or
through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then
heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been
equally sorrowful to learn.
Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used
for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment
of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she
seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept;
but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not
confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At
the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have
been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not
solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice
if not of desert.
For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to
be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be
good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the
worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to
her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The
cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less
with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars
and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot
whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering
up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking
dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
and it had doubtless come to that.
One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.