*****
Of the days which followed, South could never give a complete account. A stranger to sorrow, almost, indeed, to every ruinous emotion, the scenes he witnessed seemed to alter the spacing of the hours so that no two were of a length.
The noise and crush of daily life were suddenly muted, as though death had closed a door and shut them out; and within, behind the bolted silence of despair, were tears, sad talk, mourning darkness, and the melancholy business of the dead, haunted, as with pale marsh lights, by the pitiful inquisition in the dead eyes which he had closed.
His consolation, in that dreary time, was that he bore half the burden of its grief.
The earl knew nothing of his son’s death but what the doctors could tell him, for Lady Veynes, with a curious, but to her a natural, discretion had kept the motive of her movements a secret even from her maid.
So the two chief agents in the tragedy carried the weight of it between them, and alone heard the inquest verdict of “an overstrained heart,” with the desolate knowledge of all it meant—South with dry eyes, so dry that their color seemed faded, and hers so wet that they seemed mixed with their tears.
He had feared once, only once, that she would forget the righteous necessities of her secret, and admit another, with cruel penitence, to its miserable pale.
It was on her first entry to the room where the body was lying, the earl sitting by it, his face almost as gray and sharp as that of the dead. One of his hands was on his son’s, the other crept presently to Rosamond’s golden hair. She had dropped on her knees beside the bed, her eyes buried in the coverlet, her arms flung out across it, moaning an inarticulate torrent of useless tenderness, and penitence, and despair. Her head was shaken by its sorrow like a yellow leaf, but the old man’s grief ran silently, as a stream that dries upon its stones.
That was the one occasion when South had distrusted the charity and shrewdness of her discretion; after that his doubts were at rest. She was everything a woman could be who would not sink her duties in sorrow, and South often wondered what the earl would have done without her.
He had beside ample reason for surprise. Her delicate little performance as a woman of affairs for the benefit of the lawyers, her equally fine and far more difficult personation before the family as lady paramount, were revelations of an ability he had been indisposed to admit.
He called it mummery to himself, but there was a dreary earnestness and effort in it which gave his slight the lie. He would not see the whiteness of her face, or the sorrow in her clouded eyes; and for a curious reason, because her grief left him, and it seemed with deliberate intention, in the cold.
She bore it with a certain stiffness of control as a burden she was too proud to share, yet which bent her into measured steps.
But South, who felt himself almost an accessory to her fate, could better have endured complaint; he would sooner have been hated, so he told himself.
So, since that memorable morning when she had flung a crumb of toast across the table at the gravity on his face, gray as it was with its news, and, afterward, in anguish and self-contempt, laid her sobbing head among the breakfast things, South had doubted everything about her but her charm.
Yet her sorrow proved, as he was finally to discover, exceedingly sincere; it outlasted even his demands upon it; but it lived, as all her clouds, in a windy sky; and broke, and blew over.
Ere that, however, or the lightening of her widow’s crape, a fresh link was welded from her life, which gave the sad earl a joy in his old age, and a despot to Veynes Court.
South used to run down, sometimes, on the summer evenings, to watch Lady Veynes, the earl and his grandson playing like three children in the dappled sunlight on the lawn.
Or, at least, if there were other reasons for his appearance, he was not on thinking terms with them.
Lady Veynes was. She thought, moreover, that his visits were far too few.
STRANGE when you passed me with him in the crowd,That twixt us two the selfsame thought should be:“So thiswasshe!” your long glance spake aloud;And I, to my own heart, “So thisisshe!”Theodosia Garrison.
STRANGE when you passed me with him in the crowd,That twixt us two the selfsame thought should be:“So thiswasshe!” your long glance spake aloud;And I, to my own heart, “So thisisshe!”Theodosia Garrison.
STRANGE when you passed me with him in the crowd,That twixt us two the selfsame thought should be:“So thiswasshe!” your long glance spake aloud;And I, to my own heart, “So thisisshe!”
Theodosia Garrison.
Conversations With Egeria, by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
I
IT is delightful to talk to a bishop,” smiled Egeria; “it immediately becomes a serious duty to be frivolous.”
“And why, pray?” The bishop looked slightly bewildered.
“To afford you the pleasures of contrast. To convince you from the start that one woman does not seek priestly counsel, nor intend to bore you with the vagaries of her soul.”
The bishop smiled benignly, deprecatingly and yet comprehendingly. He even shook his head in paternal and playful admonition.
“Oh, I know us,” Egeria assured him. “A woman, if she is young, is always either occupied with her heart or her soul. When the one absorbs her the other doesn’t. When she’s in love she forgets all about her soul. When she’s out of love she turns to it again. Then she yearns for incense, altar lights and a pale, young priest, who is willing to devote time and prayer to assuaging her spiritual doubts. She doesn’t care in the least to be spiritually directed by any well-fed, commonplace parson with a fat wife and a pack of rosy children. No, no, a wistful young ascetic, with hollows under his eyes—wan and worn with fasting and vigils. She is perfectly aware that he has ultimately not the ghost of a show; but she is entirely willing that he shall have a run for his money. In fact, she hopes that the struggle may be keen and prolonged. To play a game fish which is putting up the fight of its life is infinitely more exciting than to languidly reel in the line and secure a victim which has not made the least resistance.”
The bishop smiled tolerantly, tapping his finger tips together. “Doubtless correct, doubtless correct. Your astuteness and intellectual acumen have always elicited my admiration.”
A sparkle of annoyance brightened Egeria’s eyes.
“Checkmate,” she murmured, with a little bow of deference.
The bishop raised his brows innocently.
“Oh, you know,” continued Egeria, resentfully, “that there is one compliment a woman never forgives, and that is a tribute to her intellect at the expense of her power of attraction. If the lure the serpent taught her is vain, then is her destiny barren, her desire unfulfilled.”
“You deserved it,” laughed the bishop; “but, dear lady, have you ever paused to consider what a debt of gratitude the world owes us? When I listen to the outpourings of overcharged feminine hearts, and read the diaries, confessions and novels of innumerable women, I am forced to the conclusion that the church thoroughly understood one of the first needs of a woman’s heart when it established the confessional. Then man, with his restless, protesting conscience, did his best to estrange you from the consolation, and, in consequence, some eccentric, undisciplined creature now and again voices to the world the disorganized, hysterical feminine emotions which should have been discreetly sobbed into the ecclesiastical ear, decently entombed in the silence of the confessional.”
There was a faint wrinkle of displeasure in Egeria’s brow. “Admitted, admitted”—hastily—“and thank you kindly, dear bishop, for your little criticism of us. It makes it quite possible for me to discuss the clergy if I wish. Now I can ask, without being impertinent, a question which has long puzzled me. Why is it that you prelates and the princes of the church are almost invariably tolerant, delightfully broad-minded and free from bias, while the rank and file are so frequently strenuous and discomposing? For instance, last summer I was thrown, through force of circumstances, with a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered preacher, who always spoke of himself as ‘a minister of the gospel.’ Whenever his dyspepsia was especially severe he informed his parishioners that he had girded on his armor and was prepared to rebuke evil in high places, and that he would be recalcitrant to his trust if he did not lift up his voice to condemn civic rottenness and social degeneracy. His wife was ‘an estimable lady,’ with the figure of a suburbanite who only wears stays in the evening, and a pronounced taste for the clinging perfume of moth balls. No children having blessed their union, they decided to adopt some definite aim in life. They were talking it over once when I was present.
“‘There are the sick and the poor; I am sure there are plenty of them,’ suggested the lady.
“Her husband looked at her scornfully, and coldly remarked thatthatfield was full of reapers.
“‘Oh, you mean to stand up openly in the pulpit and rebuke the rich men who make their money in queer ways!’ she exclaimed, excitedly.
“‘And offend half my wealthy parishioners by branding them as thieves on insufficient evidence?’ he thundered. ‘Are you insane?’
“Finally, however, being a shrewd creature, he solved the problem and incidentally won for himself a great deal of gratuitous advertising. They organized a society for the suppression of bridge—aware that the public loves sensational details regarding women of position; the insidious cocktail—the public delights to know that the social leaders look too often upon the wine when it’s red; ostracising divorcées—women thus having the sanction of Heaven for attacking their own sex. Oh, it was a holy crusade in a teapot, and made him quite famous; and, bishop, what do you think was the motto of the organization?”
The bishop shook his head. Mild curiosity was in his eyes; but the shake of his head was distinctly reproving.
“The watchword chosen,” chuckled Egeria, “was, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Now, bishop, tell me, please, what makes the difference between his type of man and yours?”
A humorous twinkle shone in the bishop’s eye, then he leaned forward and whispered one word in Egeria’s ear: “Money.”
She laughed, and then returned to her muttons. “But, really, quite under the rose, do you not become fearfully bored sometimes by the various manifestations of the feminine temperament?”
“It may be a trifle self-conscious, a little inclined to regard itself pathologically,” admitted the bishop, with caution.
“It is frequently yellow,” said Egeria. decisively. “Why don’t you clergymen and novelists occasionally tell us the truth?”
“We must fill our churches and sell our books, I suppose,” returned the bishop, half whimsically, half regretfully. “What would you say, Lady Egeria, if we put you in orders, and disregarding St. Paul’s advice, let you occupy the pulpit? Would you thunder denunciations at poor, defenseless women?”
“I’d have a fine time,” cried Egeria her eyes alight. “I would do what you sermonizers and novel writers haven’t the courage to do—just tell them the truth about themselves. Chide them for their frivolities and extravagances and vanities? Not I. They don’t care a straw for that. No, no, I should have a new evangel and a new text. It should be: ‘Play the gamegamely, and don’t whine if you lose.’ Now, bishop, confess that you never meet a strange woman that you do not observe a speculative gleam in her eye which long experience has taught you to interpret as: ‘How soon can I tell him my troubles?’”
“Poor ladies! You have so many,” sighed the bishop, sympathetically.
“Of course we have, we multiply them by three. To sedulously observe all tragic and harrowing anniversaries is a part of our religion. ‘It’s just five years ago to-day since Edwin left me for another,’ she says, mournfully, and then, shrouding herself in gloom, lives over each poignant, past moment. If anyone ask the cause of her dejected demeanor, she murmurs, in a sad, sweet voice: ‘It is an anniversary. Would you like to hear of my grief?’
“But what does a man do? He says: ‘Jove! It’s just a year ago to-morrow since Jemima was run down by an automobile. I must keep myself well amused or it may be a depressing occasion.’
“Seriously, bishop, if I were you, I’d have a phonograph in my study, and the moment a woman set foot within the door it should begin that good old hymn: ‘Go bury thy sorrow, the world hath its share.’”
“But what can the poor things do,” asked the bishop, “if they may not turn to their clergyman for consolation and comfort?”
“Twang on Emerson’s iron string: ‘Trust thyself.’ Why always twine about a pole, like a limp pea vine, and flop on the ground the minute the upholding stick is withdrawn? Imagine the emotions of the pole, if it were sentient! At first it would say: ‘Delicate, dainty pea vine, lean on me, the clasp of your myriad tendrils fills me with rapture. How sweet is your adorable dependence!’ But in time: ‘Oh! stifling, smothering pea vine, I am suffocated by your deadening passivity. Would I could tear myself free from your throbbing tendrils.’”
“You evidently believe in the dead burying their dead,” said the bishop, meditatively.
“No sounder philosophy was ever enjoined on a living world. Let the dead—dead pasts, dead lives, dead loves, dead memories—bury their dead. Ah, bishop, the great art of life is the art of forgetting.”
“You, Madame Egeria, are inclined to philosophize.”
“Sir, do not remind me of it! When we offer sacrifices at the altar of laughter, you may look for gray hairs and crows’ feet. Tears and passion belong to youth: that season of fleeting and exquisite joys, of tragic and fugitive griefs, of tempestuous and restless longings. Youth, with the passionate voice of Maurice de Guerin, cries eternally: ‘The road of the wayfarer is a joyous one. Ah, who shall set me adrift upon the waters of the Nile?’”
“And in maturity we learn to fold our hands and stop our ears and take refuge in the commonplace.” The bishop’s tone was tinged with bitterness.
“Ah, no, no!” Egeria was vehement. “We learn that the Nile, with its dream-haunted shores, flows by our door; that wherever a patch of sunlight falls is beauty, wherever a morning-glory blows is art.”
The bishop fell in with her mood. “That is it. Maturity is nothing if it is not expansion.
“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,More life and fuller life.”
“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,More life and fuller life.”
“’Tis life of which our nerves are scant.’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,More life and fuller life.”
He loved to quote.
“Yes,” exclaimed Egeria, “‘more life, fuller life, more work, more play, more experience, more of the dreams that scale the stars, more of the splendid, inexorable life of earth. But”—looking at him doubtfully—“we are getting horribly didactic and prosy, and we are a thousand miles away from the feminine temperament.”
“Is there anything left of it?” inquired the bishop, mildly.
Egeria ignored him. “You have only expressed yourself guardedly, while I have talked and talked,” she complained.
“I shall be equally fluent.” Thetwinkle shone again in his eye. “But my opinion is given in confidence. I throw myself on your discretion.”
“Assuredly,” murmured Egeria.
“Very well, then”—lowering his voice—“I am like the old Englishman who said: ‘I have always found a most horrid, romantic perverseness in your sex. To do and to love what you should not is meat, drink and vesture to you all.’ And I also knowthat—
“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”
“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”
“Every day her dainty hands make life’s soiled temple clean,And there’s a wake of glory where her spirit pure hath been.At midnight through the shadow-land her living face doth gleam,The dying kiss her shadow, and the dead smile in their dream.”
THE lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,Shines on her silver lip and overflows.They lean and love for all the world to see,But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the heightOf yon magnolia, warblest all aloneThy liquid litany of heart-delight,While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee—Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!Margaret Houston.
THE lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,Shines on her silver lip and overflows.They lean and love for all the world to see,But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the heightOf yon magnolia, warblest all aloneThy liquid litany of heart-delight,While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee—Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!Margaret Houston.
THE lily lifts her bridal whiteness up,And leans a list’ning to th’ impassioned rose,The dewdrop answer trembles in her cup,Shines on her silver lip and overflows.They lean and love for all the world to see,But thou, my love, thou leanest no more to me!
Oh, mocking-bird, that bosomed in the heightOf yon magnolia, warblest all aloneThy liquid litany of heart-delight,While the pure moon steps slowly tow’rd her throne.Lo! Thou hast lured all joy to soar with thee,And thou, my love, thou sing’st no more to me.
Oh, one white star in all the blue abyss!Oh, trembling star that lookest on my pain!So shook my soul beneath his parting kiss,So waits my heart, alone and all in vain.Oh, Night, sweet Night, I bare my grief to thee—Oh, world, far off, give back my love to me!
Margaret Houston.
Ellen Berwick, by Anne O'Hagan
B
BEFORE I went away from Agonquitt I was not, even by the most egotistic stretch of my imagination, a very important or an overwhelmingly popular person in the community. The girls from the village did not swarm out to the farm to see me; they did not hang upon my words with reverent attention. Even during the two years when I was at college, my holidays were not periods of public rejoicing; my clothes were not copied or my style of hairdressing regarded with imitative admiration.
But ever since I went to New York the attitude of my acquaintances has changed. At first I was touched and flattered by the interest which all my old companions took in me when I came home; gradually, however, it glimmered upon my consciousness that it was not myself, but the glamour of the great city, which drew them—as though the atmosphere of New York were a tangible thing, and shreds of it clung to me through the long journey down into this remote country. I think I was a little more touched, though not so flattered, when I learned this; there is something pathetic to the initiated in the eager wonderment and awe of the neophyte.
Sometimes the girls have asked my advice, confiding to me their yearnings to leave home, to make “careers” for themselves in the world. And when I try—as perhaps I too often do—to discourage them, they look at me reproachfully, mutely accusing me of a selfish refusal to share with them pleasures and glories. They talk of the theaters, the opera, books, pictures, the glittering press of life, as though a ticket to New York insured one these things. I talk of loneliness and discomfort, of the pinch of poverty. They speak of enlarged horizons; and I of the hall bedrooms which would bound the outlook of most of them. They glow with the thought of new friendships; and I dash their ardor with tales of isolation, of snubs in the effort to escape isolation, of tawdry relationships begun for the sake of mere companionship. But their eyes are always full of incredulity. And sometimes, remembering the delights which were no less a part of my life in the big city than the depression, remembering the wholesome joy of work, the natural pride of feeling oneself an integral part of the great onward-pressing stream of life; yes, and remembering the sweet and the bitter-sweet that came to me there, I wonder if my prohibitive wisdom is not a little hypocritical. Would I myself forego any of my New York experiences?
Sometimes it has seemed to me that my own adventures—or lack of adventures—set down as plainly and truthfully as I can recall them, might be of more illuminating, perhaps—perhaps—of more deterrent, effect than all my spoken generalizations. For though my existence had its peculiar features, rose to its individual climaxes, yet in the main it was typical—the duplicate in most essentials of that of thousands and thousands of young women, not greatly gifted, who come to New York to seek their fortunes.
I shall never forget how the whole thing came about. I was in the poultry yard, doctoring some of my chickens for the pip, when I heard a great puffing and chugging in the road. It wasthe Hennens’ automobile, and instead of dashing past the house, scattering terror before it, it snorted itself to a standstill before our old carriage block. I knew that mother’s annual ordeal was before her, and I half laughed as I went on forcing the broilers’ throats open.
Mother hated the yearly visitation of Mrs. Hennen with all the intensity of her very gentle, very proud nature. Thirty-five years before she and Letitia Bland had been the rival belles of the Agonquitt region, and the legend was that Letty Bland had taken to her bed for three days when mother’s engagement to father was made known, and that she went to visit relatives in Eastport at the time of the marriage. After a triumph like that, no wonder mother hated the magnificent summer descent upon her of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, widow of the oil-field king, mother of George Hennen, the banker, broker, yachtsman and what not; of Mrs. Letitia Hennen, owner of the feudal castle on the shore three miles from the village, whose splendors put to utter rout the modest opulence of all the rest of Agonquitt’s summer colony. I was always sorry for mother at the season of her recurrent Nemesis, and yet I was always amused at the thought of time’s revenges.
To-day, when I had finished doctoring the broilers, I strolled into the house and greeted the great lady. She was a kind, stout, motherly soul—very gorgeous in raiment, very imposing in a white pompadour; her good-natured, round face always looked forth half bewilderedly between the effort of her dressmaker and that of her hairdresser. This time her eyes were frankly wet as she took my hand and patted it.
“And so you’ve lost your dear father,” she said. “And you’ve come home from college—what a pity, my dear! And you’ve been down to Bangor and learned stenography—what a brave girl you are, your father’s own daughter—and you’re selling broilers to the hotel; why not to me, my child?”
Mother’s cheeks were pink with badly suppressed mortification, her eyes sparkled, her lips were on the quivering point.
“Thank you ever so much, Mrs. Hennen,” I interposed, hastily, before mother could say anything, “but the Agonquitt House contracted for them all. Next year——”
“But I must do something for you,” the dear, kind lady blundered on. “It’s all too sad; it’s too like your dear father’s own case. You’ve heard how he had to come back from college to take charge of the farm when his father had the stroke, and he—your father, I mean, dear, not your grandfather—had so wanted to be——”
“Of course Ellen knows all about that,” interrupted mother, icily. “And I would have done anything to spare her the sacrifice”—her voice grew human again—“but——”
“I’m sure she knows everything there is to know already”—Mrs. Hennen beamed, benignly. “And stenography! My, my! Doesn’t it make you feel ignorant, Marietta? And so you’re going to get a position in Bangor or Portland, your mother says, in the fall?”
I nodded. Mrs. Hennen looked at me with an air of silly, puzzled admiration. Suddenly she clapped her hands—the fingers were like little bleached sausages in the tight, white gloves.
“The very thing!” she cried. “You shall be George’s private secretary. His Miss O’Dowd is going to be married in October. The very thing! I’ll speak to him to-night.”
She puffed up, the kind lady, and kept saying, “Not a word, not a word; I won’t hear a word against it; not a word, Marietta, not one, Ellen, my dear.” And she panted off, leaving mother on the verge of tears, and me quivering with excitement.
“A favor from Letty Bland I will not endure!” mother proclaimed. “I will not endure her patronage.” Then she broke down entirely and sobbed: “Oh, I can’t stand in your way, my poor little girl, and I can’t bear to let you go so far from me.”
The end of the whole matter was that the close of September found me on the way to New York, warmly clad inthe clothes over which mother had reddened her pretty eyes and pricked her pretty fingers, an emergency fund of a hundred and twenty-five dollars—those blessed broilers!—in a chamois bag between my excellent woolens and my stout muslins, a room in the Margaret Louisa Home engaged for me for any period up to a month. Our clergyman’s wife had recommended that refuge, and mother’s premonitions of battle, murder and sudden death for me grew a little less insistent when she had been finally convinced that I could go almost without change of cars from the safety of Agonquitt to that most evangelical of shelters.
Oh, the tremors, the breathlessness, the excitement, of that journey! Oh, the fairly dizzy rapture and pain of it! I had a vision of streets brilliant with lights, of a press of carriages, of shops, flowers, buildings; of unknown faces, each one the possibility of interest, the invitation to adventure, and I exulted. Then I saw the big, square house where I had been born, shabbily in need of paint; the lonely fields sloping away from it, the woods of yellow birch and pine, the lonely blue reaches of our Northern bays, and my mother sitting in her poor black frock alone by the fire in the early evening. Then I strangled sobs behind my clinched teeth.
My journey from Agonquitt had been broken by one night’s stay in Portland with our second cousins. Mother regarded a sleeping car as an unpermissible atrocity—and wider experience compels me to share her views—and I made the trip by daylight stages. No one had paid any particular attention to me; no adventure had paused by my chair in the car. Nothing happened until I emerged from the train into the murky, glittering evening at the Grand Central Station. Then for a few minutes I was really dazed.
I had spurned the assistance of porters, being forewarned of tips, and I carried my bag through the yard toward the street. There I gasped and nearly reeled. Never had I heard such a clamor, or seen such a whirl and tangle of lights, such recklessness of darting figures, such insistent greed of beckoning fingers and whips.
“Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The maddening din rang in my ears. “Keb, keb, keb, keb!” The arms, the eyes, all echoed the cry. “Keb, keb, keb, keb——” Beyond the barricade of that shout there was tempest, turmoil, clatter; I turned and fled backward toward the train yard, which seemed to me calm and sane now, though a few minutes before it had been a smoking, roaring understudy for Purgatory. Never could I breast that tumultuous tide of madness without.
Another train was unloading. I was jostled by a great many persons who had evidently determined to reach the bedlam on the sidewalk in less than half a second. I dodged. I looked for a uniform which might remain stationary long enough for me to reach it. I saw one—baggage man, carriage starter, train announcer, I didn’t know or care what—I made a sidewise dash for him and collided violently with a dress-suit case, whose owner towered several feet above. He muttered an apology, I muttered an excuse, and then we both stopped, to the damming of the torrential haste behind us.
“Ellen Berwick!”
“Bob Mathews!”
Never had human face seemed to me so friendly as this one. Never had words sounded so honey-sweet as my name ejaculated by a voice which, if not lately familiar, was at least friendly and recognizable. The Agonquitt stamp was already the hall mark of worth, of excellence, in my mind. And Robert Mathews was Dr. Mathews’ son; no amount of Beaux-Arts-ing it, no amount of rising-young-architect-ing it, could alter that blessed fact.
“Where are you going? Why are you here? Where is your mother? Oh, you are, are you? To the Maggie Lou! Why do I call it that? It’s a pet name for an excellent institution given by its intimate admirers. The George Hennens—you——”
Questioning, answering, tossing information back and forth as a Japanese juggler might balls, he somehow managedat the same time to deposit me and my bag in a cab. I breathed a sigh of relief to think that it was the driver’s problem and not mine safely to cross the noisy flood in front of the station.
Sometimes since then I have marveled at the chance which caused me, just down from Maine, to collide with Bob Mathews, just in from New Rochelle. But I have learned that it is a miracle of frequent occurrence that newcomers to Babylon should run upon acquaintances. It is only the old residents who go abroad day after day and see no familiar face.
Should I have gone back to Agonquitt in despair of Forty-second Street if I had not met Bob? I suppose not. But how meeting him simplified the problem of reaching the Margaret Louisa!
“I’ve a dinner engagement with a fellow at the club to-night, or I should carry you off to dine with me,” said Bob, as the cab drew up in front of the brownstone building between the home-rushing roar of Broadway and the early evening glitter of Fifth Avenue. “But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’ll cut away early and see you before bedtime. I know some girls who keep bachelor’s hall in a Harlem flat, but they used to live in boarding houses, and I’ll telephone them for a list of addresses and bring it around to you.”
The door of the evangelical shelter swung open before me. I am not a timid person, but a chill crept up my backbone. There was something depressing in the air of prim rectitude that pervaded the hall. But Bob was gone, and my bag—by the way, it had looked old-fashioned and shabby beside his in the cab—stood within the portals.
I don’t know why I should have expected the woman at the desk to beam upon me, or to have a brass band ready with a pæan announcing that Ellen Berwick had come to town to conquer fortune. But her politeness was so impersonal, her civility so thinly cloaked herennui, that I had difficulty in controlling the quiver of my lips. How friendly and dear the Agonquitt station suddenly seemed, with the neighbors clustered on the platform with their little last gifts!
“Oh, yes,” said the lady at the desk—“Berwick. Your pastor and Mrs. Hennen recommended you.” I felt that I was being weighed for a housemaid’s position, and the blood tingled behind my ears, but she went on indifferently: “Your trunk must be sent to the trunk room within twenty-four hours.”
“It—it can’t have reached here yet,” I murmured.
“Within twenty-four hours from the time when it does come.” I felt that I had been guilty of levity.
“I thought,” I faltered, “since this is only a temporary—er—stopping place, that I wouldn’t entirely unpack——”
“Within twenty-four hours. You need not unpack entirely. If it is ever necessary for you to get anything out of your trunk while you are here, you may be admitted to the trunk room. Jenkins, 44.”
“When is dinner?” My question trailed between the desk and Jenkins, the elevator man, who miraculously preserved an air of jauntiness as he lounged at the door of his wire cage. I made up my mind to ask him how he did it.
“Going on now.” The elevator slammed upon me, and I was borne aloft to a room of exquisite order and freshness. But either I saw double or there were two white beds, two oak bureaus, two oak wardrobes,two——
“This can’t be my room,” I protested.
“Oh, yes, miss,” declared the maid to whom I had now been delivered. “No more single rooms left. A lovely lady has this one with you. You’ll like her.”
“But I don’t want——”
The chambermaid passed lightly over the question of my desires. The door closed firmly upon my protests, and I proceeded to remove the marks of travel from my clothes and person.
Oh, the Olympian indifference of the lady at the desk to my plea for a room by myself! In two seconds it reduced me from a state of angry protest to oneof humble gratitude that I had obtained any shelter at all. Oh, the big dining rooms, with the narrow tables, and women, women, women, packed along them! Oh, the hum of feminine voices, the shrill of feminine laughter, the weariness of feminine faces! Never shall I forget how dreary my own sex seemed to me when I had my first sight of it, massed, unindividualized, hard working, poor, tired. I was suddenly appalled at the number of us in New York—homeless, laboring, impoverished; for to dine at the Maggie Lou was tacit proclamation of all these things.
The food was excellent—plain, homely, plentiful. It was handed dexterously over one’s shoulders and planted firmly and noisily on the table. There was danger in unexpected movements while the waitresses scurried up and down the narrow aisles between the tables, as a young woman opposite me discovered. She leaned forward at a critical moment in her discourse to emphasize the statement that “the fleece-lined cotton were quite as warm as the woolen”; and she jarred the waitress’ busy arm by her vivacity, receiving a stream of yellow squash down her back as penalty.
At a desk, commanding an excellent view of both exits from the dining room, a lady sat with the same somewhat morose expression of countenance which I was beginning to believe the universal New York badge. (Later I corrected this opinion. It is only the women doomed to constant dealing with their sisters in the mass who acquire it.) This particular woman had the presumably pleasant task of receiving the money of the diners. In return she gave them cards, without which egress would have been impossible, for other disillusioned persons guarded the doors, and only the surrender of the oily piece of pasteboard enabled one to escape. During the whole period of my incarceration—I was about to say—in the Margaret Louisa I used to linger about the dining room hoping that some day some reckless, abandoned soul would attempt to flee without the delivery of her card. But it never happened. Meekly, automatically, we all paid, received the token of payment, and slipped out into the wide halls.
The parlor was a most inviting room, mellow in tint, comfortable in the cut of the chairs and sofas, and inviting with magazines and pictures. I wandered into it after my first dinner in New York. I turned the pages of the magazines, I looked at the pictures on the walls, and I wondered with all my powers of bewilderment why every other woman who entered the apartment should immediately sit stiffly down, clasp her hands in her lap or against her stomach, and gaze at me reprovingly. As the number of these women grew, I became convicted in my mind of indecorous conduct, though I was only turning the pages of theNorth American Review. The rustle of the leaves sounded noisy, blatant even, in the ominous stillness. Suddenly I understood why.
A stout lady in widow’s weeds cleared her throat twice, warningly, and the after-dinner prayer meeting was upon us. TheNorth American Reviewslid from my guilty fingers, and I almost lost my balance as I stooped to recover the magazine. Then I composed my features, folded my own hands and listened to the leader of the meeting. Once I raised my eyes, and through the door that led into the hall I saw Bob Mathews standing. He was staring into the parlor with an expression of arrested protest and strangled mirth upon his nice, homely face. At that precise moment the worthy leader was besieging the throne of grace with intercessions for “the one new come among us,” and I felt vulgarly prominent.
It did not last long, that prayer meeting, and when it was over there was a little gentle conversation. The leader had just advanced to me with a smile of professional kindness when Bob bore down upon me. She withdrew, disapproval squaring her shoulders. My unfortunate caller and I retired to the remotest corner of the room and conversed in guilty whispers, alternatedwith sudden trumpet blasts of sound as we realized that our subdued manner was unnecessary and open to suspicion. All the others sat around and looked at us. They were all quite sure, I think, that the list of boarding houses with which Bob furnished me on departing was a document of very sinister import.
The next morning, armed with this list and with one furnished by the uninterested lady at the office, I set out in search of a permanent abode. In Agonquitt I had seemed to myself a person of the furthest reaching prudence because I had left for New York a whole fortnight earlier than my engagement as Mr. Hennen’s stenographer required. The two weeks were to be devoted to “settling comfortably” and to “learning the city thoroughly.” By the end of the first forenoon I asked myself bitterly if a year—if a lifetime—would suffice for either of these results.
I had told six landladies that the hall bedroom I sought was for myself alone, and I had been banished at once, without further parley, from their presences. I was discouraged to learn that spinsterhood, which we in Agonquitt regard as a state normal, admirable and even a little high-minded, was frowned upon here. The number of front doors that closed upon me because I could lay claim to no husband!
I have never satisfactorily solved the problem of the average landlady’s dislike for the single woman. Is the married boarder less addicted to bathroom laundry work? Does she consume less gas in the front hall and the parlor? Is she not so apt to keep the wearied purveyor of her meals and lodgings from the folding bed which adorns the front drawing room with a pretense of being a curio cabinet during the day? Or is it merely that even in these strenuous days of wage-earning women, a husband seems to the mediæval-minded landlady a guarantee of payment securer than any number of salaried positions? I don’t know. I only know that my first forenoon’s search for a habitation was rendered uncommonly difficult because I could not assure six gimleteyed landladies in rusty black that I was “wooed an’ married an’ all.”
There were other ladies—a considerable number of them, too—who gave one look at my cloth turban, made by Miss Milly, our Agonquitt milliner; and at my reefer, which Miss Keziah, who goes out by the day, had helped mother to make; and smilingly shook their heads. These informed me, interposing their plump persons between me and their stairways, as though they feared a forcible entrance on my part, that they had nothing which would suit me—nothing under twenty dollars a week. At first this abashed me, for ten dollars was the utmost which I could allow for lodgings and meals; and I departed, gurgling apologetically in my throat. Later, anger began to stir my pulses, and I gave these haughty ones level glance of scorn for level glance of scorn, and said: “Ah, I am looking for a suite of two rooms and bath; breakfast upstairs, of course; you have nothing of that sort?” And we separated in mutual incredulity and respect.
During that day and the soul-racking, foot-blistering days that followed, I gained a fairly clear idea of what I might hope for in a boarding house for the small sum which I was prepared to spend. The cheaper places were, of course, the least attractive; the halls seemed dingier, the odor of dreary, bygone dinners more pervasive in them; the servants were more slatternly, the landladies themselves more rusty, dusty and depressing. There were innumerable parlors furnished in upholstery that made up in accumulated dust and aroma for what it had lost in freshness of color during the years of its service; there were folding beds of every sort; there were lace curtains, and there were pier glasses between the long front windows. Then, somewhere up on the top floor, there was a hall bedroom without a closet, without heat; but “the last lady”—marvelously adaptable female!—had always found the hooks under the cambric curtain on the door an ample refuge for her gowns, and as for the temperature,she had been compelled to keep her window open during most of the winter before, so intense was the heat from the hall. She had moved, apparently, in search of a harder spiritual discipline than she could obtain among such comfortable surroundings. Certainly there was no other reason for her leaving.
Sometimes, departing from the lists furnished me, I stumbled upon wonderful places where “cozy corners” greatly prevailed, and where the landladies wore trailing negligées of soiled pink or blue instead of the tight-fitting black uniform of the other houses. Whenever such a meeting inadvertently occurred, the gorgeous landlady and I were always as eager as civility would permit to see the last of each other.
Then there were other places—airy, clean and bright, with parlors guiltless of any suggestion of the folding bed, with graceful furnishings, efficient servants, cheerful landladies. But these were always either “full”—I don’t wonder—or what they had left was far beyond my humble means.
I wandered through the unhomelike splendors of the woman’s hotel, by and by. Here at least there would be no question of boarding house parlor etiquette—there were successions of charming, big, airy, handsomely fitted-out parlors; there were tea rooms, there were libraries and writing rooms. The bedrooms themselves—simple, sunny, clean—- were charming, with their chintz-frilled cots and their substantially made wooden pieces. Here I could live, by a pretty rigid system of economy, for nine dollars a week—four for my tiny bedroom, five for my breakfasts and dinners. I would have to share the sparkling white and nickel bathroom with only two others.
I was not one of those haughty souls who revolted at the rule forbidding masculine callers above the parlor floors; in the first place, I had not been long enough in New York to know that young women ever did receive callers save in drawing rooms of some description, and in the second, I didn’t expect any callers for a long time. Once Robert Matthews saw me safely settled, I knew that his neighborly kindness would dwindle; and he was my only possible visitor at present. No, one might be very comfortable at the woman’s hotel, I was sure—if one could overcome a prejudice against being one of a mass. I had been long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a number.
However, though I had made up my mind to the boarding house, I did not come to it. And that was because of the unwelcome other occupant of the room at the Margaret Louisa. She had proved to be a wholesome, graceful, rather tall woman of thirty-three or so. She had none of my rustic air of sullen doubt when she met strangers. She was polite, uninquisitive, even uninterested. Her attitude was the perfection of civil indifference; she would have been an ideal woman to occupy the opposite section on a transcontinental train, or the other berth in a transatlantic stateroom, for she was perfectly considerate, unfamiliar and impersonal. She told me that she had just come from a summer abroad—she was a teacher of some handicraft in a trade school for girls—and that she was staying at the Margaret Louisa until “the doctor was through redecorating the house.”
“Of course everyone makes fun of the Maggie Lou,” she said, “but I find it an admirable refuge. It is in the center of the town; it’s clean, cheap and respectable; it charges a fair price for the accommodations it offers, so that there’s no taint of philanthropy about it—though sometimes the managers seem to forget that. One doesn’t come here for society. Once one knowsits little red-tape rules, and how to keep them from interfering with one’s personal liberty, it’s a very comfortable place.”
It developed that a woman physician of Miss Putnam’s acquaintance had a small house on West Eleventh Street, the upper floors of which she let to women lodgers.
“Of course she knows us all,” said Miss Putnam. “It’s really very convenient. There aren’t more than six of us; we are absolutely independent, without being brutally isolated. Dr. Lyons serves us all with breakfast in our rooms, and leaves us to solve the luncheon-dinner problem for ourselves. It’s a charming, old-fashioned house, and she has furnished it in character.”
I sighed bitterly. Dr. Lyons’ six lodgers paid her five dollars and a half a week for their rooms and their simple breakfasts—as little as I should have to pay at the huge caravansary which I was even then considering—and they had a home! I could have wept over the inequalities of life.
Later I wept in very truth. Robert had sent me a note inviting me to a glee-club concert. I had accepted the invitation. Then I had rubbed my aching body with witch hazel—it’s no small athletic feat to climb to the top of twenty-seven New York houses in one day—and I had lain down to rest. A little before seven I bethought me of clothes. The black silk which mother had made for me, with its pretty chemisette and cuffs of real Val and Indian mull, and my black net hat with white roses, lay in the trunk in the trunk room. I made up my mind to swallow a hasty dinner, invade the cellar and carry my poor little finery upstairs after dinner, so as to be ready for Bob at eight. At seven-fifteen, having eaten all that I could in the banging, crowded, steaming dining room, I approached the office and made known my wish to go to the trunk room.
“Trunk room closes at seven,” snapped the waitress of destiny.
Nor could any tale of my needs, any indignation concerning the high-handed retention of my property, move her from that statement. I went to my room and wept with rage. Bob impressed me nowadays as a stylish youth. How would he like taking me to a musicale in a short black skirt, a reefer and that dumpy turban?
Upon my fit of pettishness in came Miss Putnam. She was politely absorbed in her own chiffonier for a while. Then she turned to me with a comical air of balancing the fear of intrusiveness against a friendly desire to help.
“Is it—can I do anything for you?” she asked finally.
“You can tell that wretched martinet downstairs what I think of her, if you have sufficient command of language,” I rejoined, wiping my eyes furiously. Then I told her my tale of woe. She laughed. Then she hesitated and blushed.
“I’m just home from Paris, as I told you,” she said. “I’m not going out tonight. And I knew the Margaret Louisa well enough to unpack for an emergency. We’re about of a height—would you think me desperately impertinent if—if——”
And she actually offered to lend me some clothes. And I—I, Ellen Berwick, of Agonquitt, where all borrowing is regarded as criminally unthrifty, and where the borrowing of finery would seem degenerately frivolous as well—I went to that musicale at the Waldorf in an absolute confection of heavy black lace over white silk, and a hat all white tulle and roses and jet! Robert whistled rudely as he saw me.
“Is this the way they do things in Agonquitt now?” he asked.
And from something I overheard him saying to a lovely young matron-patroness in a peach-colored crêpe, I gathered that he had somewhat apologetically prepared her to be kind to a nice little rustic from his old home. Thus clothes, as adornments and not merely coverings, made their first distinct appeal to me; it was the voice of New York, if I had only known it.
I blessed Theresa Putnam that evening, but how much more did I bless her when toward the end of the fortnight she burst into our joint abode withsomething less than her usual calm of manner, and cried:
“Clorinda Dorset isn’t coming back to the Medical School this year. Do you want to meet Dr. Lyons? For if you do, and you like her and she likes you——”
I did not let her finish.
“Do you mean that there’s a chance for me in the Eleventh Street house?” I demanded. I had been to seven boarding houses in furthest Harlem that day and had heard seven boarding house keepers declare that the time from One Hundred and Eighteenth Street to Wall was twenty minutes!
By the next morning my trunk had been rescued from the cave of the trunks, and stood, unstrapped and unlocked, in my sloping-roofed, attic room in the old-fashioned house of Dr. Lyons. The sunlight poured in through two dormer windows. There were dimity curtains at them. There was a blue-and-white, hit-or-miss rag rug on the floor. There was a fireplace; there were old-fashioned chairs that might have come out of an Agonquitt attic; there was a plain table, with blotters on it and bookshelves above; there was a cot covered with an old homespun blue-and-white cover. There were potted geraniums and primroses on the wide window shelves. I sat down and fairly rocked in my delight.
“An attic!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I didn’t believe there was one in all New York. And a rag carpet——”
But the language of jubilation failed.
Well, my fortnight of grace was ended. I was housed, by a kindly miracle and no skill of my own, comfortably, charmingly, not expensively. I was a lucky young woman!
I polished my boots to the highest pitch of brilliancy, I set my stock on at the most accurate angle, and I proceeded to Mr. George Hennen’s office to gladden his heart with the information that I had arrived.
He received me with some embarrassment—a good-looking, slender, boyish man with an inattentive manner.
“I had meant to write,” he murmured. “Really, it has been unpardonable. But I didn’t know until last week, and—it is really unpardonable.”
A cold chill gripped me. Was I not to have the position, after all? I sat very rigid, my fingers frozen in their stiff calfskin gloves.
“What is it, Mr. Hennen?” I asked. “Please tell me quickly.”
“Oh, of course it can be arranged. I had meant to ask you to defer coming until the first of December. Miss O’Dowd’s wedding has been postponed until Christmas. But——”
Returning waves of warmth lapped me. After all, I was not to go penniless and positionless back to Agonquitt.
“Oh, is that all?” I cried, in relief. “I think I can put in the two months to excellent advantage, Mr. Hennen.”
“Do you, really?” He brightened. “Are you—er—prepared—er——”
“Oh, quite,” I said, stiffly, though the emergency fund on my chest no longer seemed the oppressive weight it once had.
“If not——” he floundered, evidently groping with some idea for my relief.
I felt the color tingle in my cheeks. My mother’s hatred of “Letitia Bland’s” favors seemed to stiffen my neck.
“Oh, but I am,” I declared. Then the door opened simultaneously with a rap. From the Axminster and rosewood splendors of the outer office a man entered—tall, broad, lithe. His eyes, even in that first flash of them upon me, I knew to be gay, and his smooth-shaven lips had lines of laughter about them. He glanced at me with a momentary pause in his entrance.
“Beg pardon, George. Ferritt said you were alone.”
“It’s all right. Don’t go, Archie. I want you to meet Miss Berwick. Miss Berwick, Mr. Charter—the other member of the firm. Miss Berwick’s going to take Miss O’Dowd’s place, you remember, Archie?”
“Very much more than that, I think,” said Mr. Charter, smiling. And though there was something in the cool appraisal of his manner, in the implied familiar compliment and criticism of his words, which made me flush with displeasure,yet when I met his mirthful, amused regard, I could not but smile in answer.
There was a little more talk, and I went out, leaving my address with Mr. Hennen. There was an agreeable sense of buoyancy and exhilaration in the air. I could not fix my mind upon the gloomy fact that I was to be without employment and without salary for two months; I was only very sure that I should like the work in the office of Hennen & Charter, when I was admitted to it. Meantime, I had a hazy recollection of all sorts of tempting advertisements which I had seen in the papers, asking for the services of just such able-bodied, well-educated young women as myself. To be an adventurer in industry for two months might be amusing; it might be profitable. And at the end of it there was the office of Hennen & Charter glowing like a comfortable beacon for me.
It was fortunate for my peace of mind that I could not forecast the future, and had no premonition of my initial experience as a laboring person. I was profoundly convinced of my ability to “take care of myself”; I had a high respect for my own judgment. Had anyone suggested to me that my arrogant self-confidence would nearly land me in court and almost cover me with notoriety, I should have dismissed the suggestion with a laugh.