The day Gertrude received Avery's letter about bill number 408, she asked her father what the bill was about. He looked at her in surprise, and then at his wife. "I don't know anything about it, child," he said; "Why?"
Gertrude drew from her pocket Avery's letter and read that part of it. Her father's face clouded.
"What business has he to worry you with his dirty political work? I infer from what he says that it is a bill that I've only heard mentioned once or twice. The sort of thing they do in secret sessions and keep from the newspapers in the main. That is, they are only barely named in the paper and under a number or heading which people don't understand. I'm disgusted with Avery—perfectly!" Gertrude was surprised, but with that ignorance and absolute sincerity of youth, she appealed to her mother.
"Mamma, do you see any reason why, from that letter, papa should be vexed with Mr. Avery? It seemed to me to have just the right tone; but I am sorry he did not tell me just what the bill is."
"You let me catch him telling you, if it's what I think it is," retorted her father, rather hotly. "It's not fit for your ears. Good women have no business with such knowledge and—"
Mrs. Foster held up a warning finger to her daughter, but the girl had not been convinced.
"Don't good men know such things, papa? Don't such bills deal with people in a way which will touch women, too? I can't see why you put it that way. If a bill is to be passed into a law, and it is of so vile a nature as you say and as this letter indicates, in whose interest is it to be silent or ignorant? Do you want such a bill passed? Would mamma or I?"
Her father laughed, and rose from the table. "It is in the interest of nothing good. No, I should say if you or your mother, or any other respectable mother at all, were in the Legislature, no such bill would have a ghost of a chance; but—"
Gertrude's eyes were fixed upon her father. They were very wide open and perplexed.
"Then it can be only in the interest of the vilest and lowest of the race that good men keep silent, and prefer to have good women ignorant and helpless in such—" she began; but her father turned at the door and said, nervously and almost sharply, "Gertrude, if Avery has no more sense than to start you thinking about such things, I advise you to cut his acquaintance. Such topics are not fit for women; I am perfectly disgusted with—"
As he was passing out of the dining-room, John Martin entered the street door and faced him. "Hello, Martin! Glad to see you! The ladies are still at luncheon; won't you come right in here and join them in a cup of chocolate?"
He was heartily glad of the interruption, and felt that it was very timely indeed that Mr. Martin had dropped in.
"No, I can't take off my top-coat. Get yours. I want you to join me in a spin in the park. I've got that new filly outside." Mr. Foster ran up-stairs to get ready for the drive, and the ladies insisted that a cup of hot chocolate was the very thing to prepare Mr. Martin for the nipping air. He was a trifle ill at ease. He wanted to speak of Selden Avery, and he feared if he did so that he would say the wrong thing. He had come to-day, partly to have a talk with his friend Foster about certain gossip he had heard. Fate took the reins.
In rising, Gertrude had dropped Avery's letter. John Martin was the first to see it. He laughingly offered it to her with the query: "Do you sow your love letters about that way, Miss Gertrude?"
"Gertrude's love letters take the form of political speeches just now, and bills and committee reports and the like," laughed her mother. "Her father was just showing his teeth over that one, He thinks women have no—"
"Mr. Martin, tell me truly," broke in the girl, "tell me truly, don't you think that we are all equally interested in having only good laws made? And don't you think if a proposed measure is too bad for good women even to be told what it is, that it is bad enough for all good people to protest against?"
"How are they going to protest if they don't know what it is?" laughed Martin. "Well, Miss Gertrude, I believe that is the first time I ever suspected you to be of Celtic blood. But what dreadful measure is Avery advocating now?" he smiled. "Really, I shouldn't have believed it of Avery!"
"What!" exclaimed Mr. Poster, entering with his top-coat buttoned to the chin, and his driving-hat in hand. Gertrude still held the letter. "No, nor should I have believed it of Avery. It was an outrageous thing for him to do. What business has Gertrude or Katherine with his disgusting old bills. Just before you came in I advised Gertrude to cut him entirely, and—"
Mrs. Foster was trying to indicate to her husband that he was off the track, and that Mr. Martin did not understand him; but he had the bit in his teeth and went on. "You agree with me now, don't you? What do you think of his mentioning such things to Gertrude?" He reached over and took the letter from his daughter's hand, and read a part of the obnoxious paragraph.
John Martin's face was a study. He glanced at the two ladies, and then fixed his eyes upon Gertrude's father.
"Good Gad!" he said, slowly and almost below his breath. "If I were in your place I should shoot him. The infamous—" He checked himself, and the two men withdrew. Gertrude and her mother waved at them from the window, and then the girl said: "I intend to know what that bill is. What right have men to make laws that they themselves believe are too infamous for good women even to know about? Don't you believe if all laws or bills had to be openly discussed before and with women, it would be better, mamma? I do."
Her mother's cheek was against the cold glass of the window. She was watching the receding forms. Presently she turned slowly to her daughter and said, in a trembling tone:—
"Such bills as this one," she drew a small printed slip from her bosom and handed it to Gertrude, "such bills as that would never be dreamed of by men if they knew they must pass the discussion of a pure girl or a mother—never! Their only chance is secret session, and the fact that even men like your—like Mr. Martin and—and—" she was going to say "your father," but the girl pressed her hand and she did not. "That even such as they—for what reason heaven only knows—think they are serving the best interests of the women they love by a silence which fosters and breeds just such measures as—"
Gertrude was reading the queer, blind phraseology of the bill. Katherine had watched her daughter's face as she talked, and now the girl's lips were moving and she read audibly: "be, and is hereby enacted, that henceforth the legal age in the state of New York whereat a female may give consent to the violation of her own person shall be reduced to ten years."
Gertrude dropped the paper in her lap and looked up like a frightened, hunted creature. "Great God!" she exclaimed, with an intensity born of a sudden revelation. "Great God! and they call themselves men! And other men keep silence—furnish all the soil and nurture for infamy like that! Those who keep silence are as guilty as the rest! Those who try to prevent women from knowing—oh, mamma!" Her eyes were intense. She sprang to her feet; "and John Martin, who thinks he lovesmeis one of those men! Knowing such a bill as that is pending, his indignation is aroused, not at the bill, not at the men who try to smuggle it through, not at the awful thing it implies, but that so strict a silence is not kept that such aswemay not know of it! He blames Selden Avery for coming to me—to us—with his splendid chivalry, and sharing with us his horror, making us the confidants of that inner conscience which sees, in the intended victims of this awful bill, his little sisters and yours and mine!" There were indignant tears in her eyes. She closed them, and her white lips were drawn tense. Presently she asked, without opening her eyes: "Mamma, do you suppose if you, instead of Mr. Avery, were chairman of that committee, that such a bill as that would ever have been presented? Do you suppose, if any mother on earth held the veto power, that such a bill would ever disgrace a statute book? Are there enough men, even of a class who generally go to the Legislature, who, in spite of their fatherhood, in spite of the fact that they have little sisters, are such beasts as to pass a bill like that? A ten-year-old girl! A mere baby! And—oh, mamma! it is too hideous to believe, even of—such a bill could never pass. Never on earth! Surely, Ettie Berton, poor little thing, has the only father living who is capable of that!"
Mrs. Foster opened her lips to say that several states already had the law, and that one had placed the age at seven; but she checked herself. Her daughter's excitement was so great, she decided to wait. The experience of the past few months had awakened the fire in the nature of this strong daughter of hers. She had seen the cool, steady, previously indifferent, well-poised girl stirred to the very depths of her nature over the awful conditions of poverty, ignorance, and vice she had, for the first time, learned to know. Gertrude had become a regular student of some of the problems of life, and she had carried her studies into practical investigation. It had grown to be no new thing for her to take Francis, or Ettie, or both, when she went on these errands, and the study of their points of view—of the effect of it all upon their ignorance-soaked minds, had been one of the most touching things to her. Their imaginations were so stunted—so embryonic, so undeveloped that they saw no better way. To them, ignorance, poverty, squalor, and vice were a necessary part of life. Wealth, comfort, happiness, ambition were, naturally and rightly, perquisites, some way, some how, of the few.
"God rules, and all is as he wishes it or it would not be that way," sagely remarked Francis King, one day. It had startled Gertrude. Her philosophy, her observation, her reason, and her religion were in a state of conflict just then. She had alway supposed that she was an Episcopalian with all that this implied. She was beginning to doubt it at times.
Mrs. Foster looked at her daughter now, as she sat there flushed and excited. She wondered what would come of it all. She had always studied this daughter of hers, and tried to follow the girl's moods. Now she thought she would cut across them.
"Gertrude, you may put that bill with your letter. Mr. Avery mailed it to me. Of course he meant that I should show it to you if I thought best. I did think best, but now—but—I don't want you to excite yourself too—" She broke off suddenly. Her daughter's eyes were upon her in surprise. Mrs. Foster laughed a little nervously, and kissed the girl's hand as it lay in her own. "It seems rather droll for your gay little mother to caution you against losing control of yourself, doesn't it?" she asked. "You who were always all balance wheel, as your father says. But—"
"Mamma, don't you think Mr. Avery did perfectly right to send me that letter and this to you?" broke in Gertrude, as if she had not heard the admonition of her mother, and had followed her own thoughts from some more distant point.
"Perfectly," said her mother. "He was evidently deeply disturbed by the bill. He felt that you were, and should be, his confidant. He simply did not dream of hiding it from you, I believe. It was the spontaneous act of one who so loves you that his whole life—all of that which moves him greatly—must, as a matter of course, be open to you. I thought that all out when the bill came addressed to me. He—" The girl kissed her in silence.
"You have such splendid self-respect, Gertrude. Most of us—most women—have none. We do not expect, do not demand, the least respect that is real from men. They have no respect for our opinions, and so upon all the real and important things of life, they hold out to us the sham of silence as more respectful than candor. And we—most of us—are weak enough to say we like it. Most of us—"
Gertrude slipped down upon a cushion at the feet of her mother, and put her young, strong arms about the supple waist. She had of late read from time to time so much of the unrest and scorn back of the gay and compliant face of her mother. "Mamma, my real mamma," she said, softly, "I
"Men of your father's generation did not want mental comrades in their wives, Gertrude. They—"
"A telegram, Miss Gertrude," said James, drawing aside the portiere.
"The bill has been rushed through. Passed. Nineteen majority. Avery." Gertrude read it and handed it to her mother, and both women sat as if stunned by a blow.
At the close of the Legislature, John Berton, professional starter, and his friend and ally, the father of Francis King, had returned to the city. Francis had grown, so her father thought, more handsome and less agreeable than ever. Her eyes were more dissatisfied, and she was, if possible, less pliant. She and Ettie Berton were working now in a store, and Francis said that she did not like it at all. The money she liked. It helped her to dress more as she wished, and then it had always cut Francis to the quick to be compelled to ask her father for money whenever she needed it, even for car fare.
She had lied a good many times. Her whole nature rebelled against lying, but even this was easier to her than the status of dependence and beggary, so she had lied often about the price of shoes, or of a hat or dress, that there might be a trifle left over as a margin for her use in other ways. Her father was not unusually hard with her about money, only that he demanded a strict accounting before he gave it to her.
"What in thunder do you want of money?" he would ask, more as a matter of habit than anything else. "How much 'll it take? Humph! Well, I guess you'll have to have it, but—" and so the ungracious manner of giving angered and humiliated her.
"Pa, give me ten cents; I want it fer car fare. Thanks. Now fork over six dollars; I got to get a dress after the car gets me to the store," was Ettie Berton's method. Her father would pretend not to have the money, and she would laugh and proceed to rifle his pockets. The scuffle would usually end in the girl getting more than she asked for, and was no unpleasant experience to her, and it appeared to amuse her father greatly. It was not, therefore, the same motive which actuated the two when they decided to try their fortunes as shop girls. The desire to be with Francis, to be where others were, for the sight and touch of the pretty things, for new faces and for mild excitement, were moving causes with Ettie Berton. The money she liked, too; but if she could have had the place without the money or the money without the place, her choice would have been soon made. She would stay at the store. That she was a general favorite was a matter of course. She would do anything for the other girls, and the floorwalkers and clerks found her always obedient and gaily willing to accept extra burdens or to change places. For some time past, however, she had been on a different floor from the one where Francis presided over a trimming counter, and the girls saw little of each other, except on their way to and from the store.
At last this changed too, for Francis was obliged to remain to see that the stock of her department was properly put away. At first Ettie waited for her, but later on she had fallen into the habit of going with a child nearer her own age, a little cash girl. Ettie was barely fourteen, and her new friend a year or two younger. At last Francis King found that the motherless child had invited her new friends home with her, and had gone with them to their homes.
As spring came on, Ettie went one Sunday to Coney Island, and did not tell Francis until afterward. She said that she had had a lovely time, hut she appeared rather disinclined to talk about it. At the Guild one Wednesday evening, after the class began again in the fall, Francis King told Gertrude this, and asked her advice. She said: "It's none o' my business, and she don't like me much any more, but I thought maybe I had ought to tell you, for—for—since I been in the store, I've learnt a good deal about—about things; an' Ettie she don't seem to learn much of anything."
"Is Ettie still living at her cousin's?" asked Gertrude.
"Yes," said Francis, scornfully, "but she 'bout as well be livin' by herself. Her cousin's always just gaddin' 'round tryin' t' get married. I never did see such an awful fool. Before Et's pa went to the Legislature, we all did think he was goin' t' marry her, but now—"
"Legislative honors have turned his head, have they?" smiled Gertrude, intent on her own thoughts in another direction. She was not, therefore, prepared for the sudden fling of temper in the strange girl beside her. "Yes, it has; 'n if it don't turn some other way before long, I'll break his neck for him.Iain't marryin' a widower if I do like Ettie."
In spite of herself, Gertrude started a little. She looked at Francis quite steadily for a moment, and then said: "Could you and Ettie come to my house and spend the day next Sunday? I'm glad you told me of Ettie's—of—about the change in her manner toward you."
"Don't let on that I told you anything," said Francis, as they parted.
Since they had been in the store they had not gone regularly to the weekly evening Guild meetings, and Gertrude had seen less of them. She was surprised, however, on the following Sunday, to see the strange, mysterious change in Ettie. A part of her frank, open, childish manner was gone, and yet nothing more mature had taken its place. There would be flashes of her usual manner, but long silences, quite foreign to the child, would follow. At the dinner table she grew deadly ill, and had to be taken up stairs. Gertrude tucked a soft cover about her on the couch in her own room, and gave her smelling salts and a trifle of wine. The child drank the wine but began to cry.
"Oh, don't cry, Ettie," said Gertrude, stroking her hair gently. "You'll be over it in a little while. I think our dining-room is much warmer than yours, and it was very hot to-day. Then your trying to eat the olives when you don't like them, might easily make you sick. You'll be all right after a little I'm sure. Don't cry."
"That's the same kind of wine I had that day at Coney Island," she said, and Gertrude thought how irrelevant the remark was, and how purely of physical origin were the tears of such a child.
"Would you like a little more?" asked Gertrude, smiling.
Ettie shivered, and closed her eyes.
"No; I don't like it. I guess it ain't polite to say so, but—Oh, of coursemaybeI'd like it if I was well, but it made me sick that time, an' so I don't like it now when Iamsick." She laughed in a childish way, and then she drew Gertrude's face down near her own. "Say, I'll tell you the solemn truth. It made me tight that day. He told me so afterwards, n' I guess it did."
Here was a revelation, indeed. Gertrude stroked the fluffy hair, gently. She was trying to think of just the right thing to say. It was growing dark in the room. Ettie reached up again and drew Gertrude's face down. "Say," she whispered, "you won't be mad at me for that, will you? He told me I wasn't to blab to anybody; but it always seems as if you wouldn't be mad at me, and"—she began to weep again.
"Don't cry," said Gertrude, again, gently. "Of course I am not angry with you. I am sorry it happened, but—Ettie, who ishe?" Ettie sobbed on, and held her arms close about Gertrude's neck. Again the older girl said, with lips close to the child's ear:
"Don't you think it would be better to tell me who 'he' is? Is he so young as to not know better than to advise you that way, dear?"
"He's forty," sobbed Ettie, "an' he's rich, an' he's got a girl of his own as big as me. I saw her one day in the store. He's the cashier."
Gertrude shivered, and the child felt the movement.
"Don't you ever, ever tell," she panted, "or he'll kill me—and so would pa."
"Oh, he would, would he?" exclaimed Francis, who had stolen silently into the room and had stood unobserved in the darkness. "The cashier! the mean devil! I always hated his beady eyes, and he tried his games on me! But I'll kill him before he shall go—do you any real harm, Ettie! I will! I will! Why didn't you tell me? I watched for a while and then I thought—I thought he had given it up. Oh, Ettie, Ettie!" The tall form of the girl seemed to rise even higher in the darkness, and one could feel the fire of her great eyes. Her hands were clenched and her muscles tense.
Ettie was sobbing anew, and Gertrude, holding her hand, was stroking the moist forehead and trying to quiet her.
"Oh, Fan! Oh, Fan! I didn't want you to know," sobbed the child, with pauses between her words. "He said nobody needn't ever know if I'd do just's he told me. He said—but when pa came home I was so scared, an' I'm sick most all the time, an'—an', oh, if I wasn't so awful afraid to die I'd wisht Iwasdead!"
"Dead!" gasped Francis, grasping Ettie's wrist and pulling her hand from her face in a frenzy of the new light that was dawning upon her half-dazed but intensely stimulated mental faculties. She half pulled the smaller girl to her feet.
"Dead! Ettie Berton, you tell me the God's truth or I'll tear him to pieces right in the store. You tell me the God's truth! has he—done anything awful to you?" A young tiger could not have seemed more savage, and Ettie clung with her other arm to Gertrude.
"No! No! No!" she shrieked, and struggled to free herself from the clutch upon her wrist. Then with the pathetic superstition and ignorance of her type: "Cross my heart I Hope I may die!" she added, and as Francis relaxed her grasp upon the wrist, Ettie fell in an unconscious little heap upon the floor.
Francis was upon her knees beside her in an instant, and Gertrude was about to ring for a light and for her mother when Francis moaned: "Oh, send for a doctor, quick. Send for a doctor! She was lying and she crossed her heart. She will die! She will die!"
But Ettie Berton did not die. Perhaps it would have been quite as well for her if she had died before the impotent and frantic rage of her father had still further darkened the pathetically appealing, love-hungry little heart, whose every beat had been a throbbing, eager desire to be liked, to please, to acquiesce; to the end that she should escape blame, that she might sail on the smooth and pleasant sea of general praise and approval.
Alas, the temperament which had brought her the dangerous stimulus of praise, for self-effacement, had joined hands with opportunity to wreck the child's life—and no one was more bitter in his denunciation than her father's friend and her aforetime admirer—Representative King. "If she was a daughter o' mine I'd kill her," he repeated to his own household day after day. "She sh'd never darkenmydoor agin. That's mighty certain. It made me mad the other day to hear Berton talk about takin' her back home. The old fool! What does he want of her? An' what kind of an example that I'd like t' know t' set t' decent girls? I told him right then an' there if he let his soft heart do him that a'way I was done with him for good an' all, n' if I ketch you a goin' up there t' see her agin, you can just stay away from here, that's all!" This last had been to Francis, and Francis had shut her teeth together very hard, and the glitter in her eyes might have indicated to a wiser man that it was not chiefly because of his presence there that this daughter cared to return to her home after her clandestine visits to Ettie Berton. A wiser man, too, might have guessed that the prohibition would not prohibit, and that poor little Ettie Berton would not be deserted by her loyal friend because of his displeasure.
"I have told her that she may live with us by and by," said Gertrude to Seldon Avery one afternoon; "but that is no solution of the problem. And besides it is her father's duty to care for her and to do it without hurting the child's feelings, too. Can't you go to him and have a talk with him? You say he seems a kind-hearted, well-meaning, easily-led man. Beside, he has no right to blame her. He has done more than any one else in this state to make the path of the cashier easy and smooth. If it were not for poor little Ettie I should be heartily glad of it all—of the lesson for him. Can't you go to him and to that Mr. King and make them see the infamy of their work, and force them to undo it? Can't you? Is there no way?"
Avery had gone. He argued in vain. "Why do you blame the cashier," he had said to Berton. "He has committed no legal offence. Our laws say he has done no wrong. Then why blame him? Why blame Ettie? She is a mere yielding, impulsive child, and, surely, if he has done no wrong she has not. If—"
"Now look a-here, Mr. Avery," said John Berton, hotly, "I know what you're a-hittin' at an' you can jest save your breath. I didn't help pass that law t' apply tomygirl, n' you know it damned well. I ain't in no mood just now t' have you throw it up to me that she was about the first one it ketched, neather. How was I a-goin' to know that? That there bill wasn't intended t' apply t'mygirl, I tell you. An' then she hadn't ought to a said she went with him willin'ly, either. If she hadn't a said that we could a peppered him, but as it is he's all right, an—"
"That is what the law contemplates, isn't it?—for other girls, of course, not for yours," began Avery, whose natural impulses of kindness and generosity he was holding back.
"Now you hold on!" exclaimed Berton, feebly groping about for a reply. "You know I never got up that bill. You know mighty well the man that got it up an' come there an' lobbied for it, was one o'yourown kind—a silk stocking.
"You know I only started it 'n' sort o' fathered it forhim. I ain't no more to blame than the others. Go 'n talk t' them. I've had my dose. Go 'n talk t' King. He says yet that it's a mighty good bill—but I ain't so damned certain as I was. It don't look 's reasonable t' me's it did last session." Avery left him, in the hope that a little later on he would conclude that his present attitude toward his daughter might undergo like modification, with advantage to all concerned. It was early in the evening, and Avery concluded to step into a workingman's club on his way to his lodgings. He had no sooner entered the door, than someone recognized him as the candidate of a year ago. There was an immediate demand that he give them a speech. He had had no thought of speaking, but the opening tempted him, and the hand clapping was indent. The chairman introduced him as "the only kid-glove member in the last Legislature who didn't sell his soul, to monopoly, and put a mortgage on his heavenly home at the behest of Wall Street."
The applause which met this sally was long sustained, and the laughter, while hearty, was not altogether pleasant of tone. Avery stood until there was silence. Then he began with a quiet smile.
"Mr. Chairman and gentlemen." He paused, and looked over the room again. "I beg your pardon. I am accustomed to face men only. Mr. Chairman,ladiesand gentlemen." There was a ripple of laughter over the room. "Let me say how glad I am to make that amendment, and how glad I shall be, for one, when I am able to make it in the body to which I have the honor to belong—the Legislature." Some one said: "ah, there," but he did not pause. "You labor men have taken the right view of it in this club. There is not a question, not one, in all the domain of labor or legislation which does not strike at woman's welfare as vitally as it does at man's; not one." There was feeble applause. "But I will go further. I will say, there is not only not an economic question which is notasvital to her, but it is farmorevital than it is to man. The very fact of her present legal status rests upon the other awful fact of her absolute financial dependence upon men." Someone laughed, and Avery fired up. "This one fact has made sex maniacs of men, and peopled this world with criminals, lunatics, and liars! This one fact! This one fact!"
His intensity had at last forced silence, and quieted those members who were at first inclined to take as a gallant joke his opening remarks. "Let me take a text, for what I want to say to you on the economic question, from the Bible.
"Oh, give us a rest!"
"Suffer little children!"
"Remember the Sabbath day!" and like derisive calls, mingled with a laugh and distinct hisses. The gavel beat in vain; Avery waited. At last there was silence, and he said: "I was not joking. The fact that you all know me as a freethinker misled you; but although I did say that I wished to take as a sort of text a passage from the Bible, I was in earnest. This is the text: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty.' Again there was a laugh, with a different ring to it, and clapping of hands.
"I think that I may assume," he went on, "that no audience before which I am likely to appear, will suspect me of accepting the Bible as altogether admirable. Some of the prophets and holy men of old, as I read of their doings in the scriptures, always impress me as having been long overdue at the penitentiary."
There was laughter and applause at this sally, and the intangible something which emanates from an audience which tells a speaker that he now has a mental grasp upon his hearers, made itself felt. The slight air of resentment which arose when he had said that he should refer for his authority to the Bible subsided, and he went on.
"But notwithstanding these facts and opinions, one sometimes finds in the Bible things that are true. Sometimes they are not only true, but they are also good. Again they are good in fact, in sentiment, and in diction. Now when this sort of conjunction occurs, I am strongly moved to drop for the time such differences as I may have with other portions and sentiments, and give due credit where credit is due.
"Therefore, when I find in the tenth chapter of Proverbs this: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty,' I shake hands with the author, and travel with him for this trip at least. The prophet does not say that their destruction is ignorance, or vice, or sin, or any of the ordinary blossoms of poverty which it is the fashion to refer to as its root. He tells us the truth—the destruction of the pooristheirpoverty.
"And who are the poor? Are they not those who, in spite of their labor, their worth, and their value to the state as good citizens are still dependent upon the good-will—the charity, I had almost said—of someone else who has power over the very food they have earned a hundred times over, and the miserable rags they are allowed to wear instead of the broadcloth they have earned? Are they not those who, because of economic conditions, are suppliants where they should be sovereign citizens, dependents where they should be free and independent and self-respecting persons?"
"Right you are!" "Drive it home!" came with the applause from the audience.
"Are they not those who must obey oppressive laws made by those who legislate against the helpless and in favor of the powerful? Are they not those whose voices are silenced by subjection, whose wishes and needs are trampled beneath the feet of the controlling class?"
The applause was ready now and instant. Avery paused. There was silence. "And who are these?" he asked, and paused again.
"What class of people more than any other—more than all others—fits and fills each and every one of these queries?" "Laboring men!" shouted several. "All of us!" "No," said Avery, "you are wrong. To all of you—to all so-called laboring men they do apply; but more than to these, in more insidious ways, do they apply to laboring women. To all women, in fact; for no matter how poor a man is, his wife and daughters are poorer; no matter how much of a dependent he is, the woman is more so, for she is the dependent of a dependent, the serf of a slave, the chattel of a chattel! The suppliant, not only for work and wage, but the suppliant at the hands of sex power for equality with even the man who is under the feet and the tyranny of wealth. They share together that tyranny and poverty, but he thrusts upon her alone the added outrage of sex subjugation and legal disability." He paused, and held up his hand. Then he said, slowly, making each word stand alone:—
"And I tell you, gentlemen, with my one term's experience in the Legislature and what it has taught me—I tell you that there is no outrage which wealth and power can commit upon man that it cannot and does not commit doubly upon woman! There is no cruelty upon all this cruel earth half so terrible as the tyranny of sex! And again, I tell you that to woman every man is a capitalist in wealth and in power, and I reiterate:—the destruction of the poor is theirpoverty.It has been doubly woman's destruction. Her absolute financial dependence upon men has given him the power and—alas, that I should be compelled to say it!—the will, to deny her all that is best and loftiest in life, and even to crush out of her the love of liberty and the dignity of character which cares for the better things. Look at her education! Look at the disgraceful 'annexes' and side shifts which are made to prevent our sisters from acquiring even the same, or as good, an education as we claim for ourselves. Look—" He paused and lowered his voice. "Look at the awful, the horrible, the beastly laws we pass for women, while we carefully keep them in a position where they cannot legislate for themselves. Do you know there is no law in any state—and no legislature would dare try to pass one—which would bind a ten-year-old boy to any contract which he might have been led, driven, or coaxed into, or have voluntarily made, if that contract should henceforth deprive him of all that gives to him the comforts, joys, or decencies of life! All men hold that such a boy is not old enough to make such a contract. That any one older than he, who leads him into a crime or misdemeanor, or the transfer of property, or his personal rights and liberty, is guilty of legal offence. The boy is without blame, and his contract is absolutely void—illegal. But in more than one state we hold that a little girl of ten may make the most fatal contract ever made by or for woman, and that she is old enough to be held legally responsible for her act and for her judgment. The one who leads her into it, though he be forty, fifty, or sixty years old, is guiltless before the law. I tell you, gentlemen, there is no crime possible to humanity that is as black as that infamous law, sought to be re-enacted by our own state at this very time, and which has already passed one house!" He explained, as delicately as he could, the full scope and meaning of the bill. Surprise, consternation, swept over the room. Men, a few of whom had heard of the bill before, but had given it scant attention, saw a horror and disgust in the eyes of the women which aroused for the first time in their minds, a flickering sense of the enormity of such a measure. No one present was willing that any woman should believe him guilty of approving such legislation, and yet Avery impressed anew upon them that the bill had passed one house with a good majority. On his way out of the room, a tall girl stepped to his side.
For the moment he had not recognized her. It was Francis King. She looked straight at him.
"Did my father vote for that bill?" she asked, without a prelude of greeting. Avery hesitated.
"Oh, is it you, Miss King?" he asked, "I did not see you before. Do you come here often?"
"Not very," she said, still looking at him, and with fire gathering in her eyes. "Did my father vote for that bill?" she repeated.
"Ah—I—to tell you the truth," began Avery, but she put out her hand and caught firm hold of his arm.
"Did my father vote for that bill?" she insisted, and Avery said: —"Yes, I'm sorry to say, he did, Miss King; but—so many did, you know. The fact is—"
Her fingers grasped his arm like a vice, and her lips were drawn. "Did Ettie's pa?" she demanded.
Avery saw the drift of her thought.
"God forgive him! yes," he said, and his own eyes grew troubled and sympathetic.
"God may forgave him if he's a mind to," exclaimed Francis, "but I don't want no such God around me, if he does. Any God that wants to forgive men for such work as that ain't fit to associate with no other kind of folksbutsuch men; but I don't mean to allow a good little girl like Ettie to live in the same house with a beast if I know it. She shan't go home again now, not if her pa begs on his knees. He ain't fit to wipe her shoes. 'N my pa!" she exclaimed, scornfully. "My pa talkin' about Ettie being bad, and settin' bad examples for decent girls! Him a talkin'! Him livin' in the same house with my little sister 'n me! Him!" The girl was wrought to a frenzy of scorn, and contempt, and anger. They had passed out with the rest into the street.
"Shall I walk home with you?" asked Avery. "Are you alone?"
"Yes, I'm alone," she said, with a little dry sob. "I'm alone, an' I ain't goin' home any more. Not while he lives there. It's no decent place for a girl—living in the house with a man like that. I ain't goin' home. I'm goin' to—" It rushed over her brain that she had no other place to go. She held her purse in her hand; it had only two dollars and a few cents in it. She had bought her new dress with the rest. Her step faltered, but her eyes were as fiery and as hard as ever.
"You'd better go home," said Avery, softly. "It will only be the harder for you, if you don't. I'm sorry—"
She turned on him like a tigress. They were in Union Square now. "Evenyouthink it is all right for good girls to be under the control and live with men like that! Evenyouthink I ought to go home, an' let him boss me an' make rules fer me, an' me pretend to like it an believe as he does, an' look up to him, an' think his way's right an' best! Evenyou!"
"No, no," said Avery, softly. "You must be fair, Miss King. I don't think it's right; but—but—I said it was best just now, for—what else can you do?" The girl was facing him as they stood near the fountain in the middle of the square.
"That's just what I was meaning to show to-night when I said what I did to the club, of the financial dependence of women; it is their destruction; it destroys their self-respect; it forces them to accept a moral companionship which they'd scorn if they dared; it forces them to seem to condone and uphold such things themselves; it forces them to be the companions and subordinates of degraded moral natures, that hold wives and daughters to a code which they will not apply to themselves, and which they seek to make void for other wives and daughters; it—" "You told me to go home," she said, stubbornly. "I'm not goin'! I make money enough to live on. I always spent it on—on things to wear; but—but I can live on it, an' I'm goin' to. I ain't goin' to live in the house with no such a man. He ain'tfitto live with. I won't tell ma an' the girls—yet; not till—"
She paused, and peered toward the clock in the face of the great stone building across the street. "Do you think it's too late fer me t' talk a minute with Miss Gertrude?" she asked, with her direct gaze, again. "She'd let me stay there one night, I guess, n' she'd tell me—I c'd talk to her some."
"If you won't go home," he said, slowly, "I suppose it would be best for you to go there, but—it is rather late. Go home for to-night, Miss Francis! I wish you would. Think it over to-night, please. Let me take you home to-night. Go to Miss Gertrude to-morrow, and talk it over." His tone had grown gentle and more tender than he knew. He took the hand she had placed on his arm in his own, and tried to turn toward her street. She held stubbornly back. "For my sake, to please me—because I think it is best—won't you go home to-night?" She looked at him again, and a haze came in her eyes. She did not trust herself to speak, but she turned toward her own street, and they walked silently down the square. His hand still held her own as it lay on his arm.
"Thank you," he said, and pressed her fingers more firmly for an instant and then released them. He had taken his glove off in the hall and had not replaced it. When they reached the door of her father's house, she suddenly grasped his ungloved hand and kissed it, and ran sobbing up the steps and into the house without a word.
"Poor girl," thought Avery, "she is not herself to-night. She has never respected nor loved her father much, but this was a phase of his nature she had not suspected before. Poor child! I hope Gertrude—" and in the selfishness of the love he bore for Gertrude, he allowed his thoughts to wander, and it did not enter his mind to place anything deeper than a mere emotional significance upon the conduct of the intense, tall, dark-eyed girl who had just left him.
He did not dream that at that moment she lay face down on her bed sobbing as if her heart would break, and yet, that a strange little flutter of happiness touched her heart as she held her gloved hand against her flushed cheek or kissed it in the darkness. It was the hand Avery had held so long within his own, as it lay upon his arm. At last the girl drew the glove off, and going to her drawer, took out her finest handkerchief and lay the glove within, wrapping it softly and carefully. She was breathing hard, and her face was set and pained. At two o'clock she had fallen asleep, and under her tear-stained cheek there was a glove folded in a bit of soft cambric. Poor Francis King! The world is a sorry place for such as you, and even those who would be your best friends often deal the deadliest wounds. Poor Francis King! Has life nothing to offer you but a worn glove and a tear-stained bit of cambric? Is it true? Need it be true? Is there no better way? Have we built your house with but one door, and with no window? Smile at the fancies of your sleep, child; to-morrow will bring memory, reality, and tears. You are a woman now. Yesterday you were but an unformed, strong-willed girl. Poor Francis King! sleep late to-morrow, and dream happily if you can. Poor Francis King, to-morrow is very near!
Gertrude!" called out her mother to the girl, as she passed the library door. "Gertrude! come in, your father and I wish to talk with you."
"Committee meeting?" laughed Gertrude, as she took a seat beside her father. It had grown to be rather a joke in the family to speak of Mr. Avery's calls as committee meetings, and Mr. Foster had tried vainly to tease his daughter about it.
"In my time," he would say, "we did not go a courting to get advice. we went for kisses. I never discussed any more profound topic with my sweetheart than love—and perhaps poetry and music. Sometimes, as I sit and listen to you two, I can't half believe that you are lovers. It's so perfectly absurd. You talk about everything on earth. It's a deal more like—why I should have looked upon that sort of thing as a species of committee meeting, in my day."
Gertrude had laughed and said something about thinking that love ought to enter into and run through all the interests of life, and not be held merely as a thing apart. All women had a life to live. All would not have the love. So the first problem was one of life and its work. The love was only a phase of this. But her father had gone on laughing at her about her queer love-making.
"Committee meeting?" asked she, again, as she glanced at her father, smiling dryly. Her mother answered first.
"Yes—no—partly. Your father wanted to speak to you about—he thinks you should not be seen with, or have those girls—You tell her yourself, dear," she said, appealing to her husband. Mr. Foster was fidgeting about in his chair; he had not felt comfortable before. He was less so now, for Gertrude had turned her face full upon him, and her hand was on his sleeve.
"'Well, there's nothing to tell, Gertrude," he said. "I guess you can understand it without a scene. I simply don't want to see those girls—that King girl and her friend—about here any more. It won't do. It simply won't do at all. You'll be talked about. Of course, I know it is all very kind of you, and all that, and that you don't mean any harm; but men always have drawn, and they always will draw, unpleasant conclusions. They may sympathize with that sort of girls, but they simply won't stand having their own women folks associate with them. The test of the respectability of a woman, is whether a man of position will marry her or not. A man's respectable if he's out of jail. A woman if she is marriageable or married. Now, unfortunately, that little Berton girl is neither the one nor the other, and its going to make talk if you are seen with her again. She must stay away from here, too."
There had come a most unusual tone of protest into his voice as he went on, but he had looked steadily at a carved paper knife, which he held in his hand, and with which he cut imaginary leaves upon the table. There was a painful silence. Gertrude thought she did not remember having ever before heard her father speak so sharply. She glanced at her mother, but Katherine Foster had evidently made up her mind to leave this matter entirely in the hands of her husband.
"Do you mean, papa, that you wish me to tell that child, Ettie Berton, not to come here any more, and that I must not befriend her?" asked Gertrude, in an unsteady voice.
"Befriend her all you've a mind to," responded her father, heartily. "Certainly. Of course. But don't have her come here, and don't you be seen with her, nor the other one again. You can send James or Susan —better not send Susan though—send James with money or anything you want to give her. Your mother tells me you are paying the Berton girl's board. That's all right if you want to, but—your mother has told me the whole outrageous story, and that cashier ought to be shot, but—"
"But instead of helping make the public opinion which would make him less, and Ettie more, respectable, you ask me to help along the present infamous order of things! Oh, papa! don't ask that of me! I have never willingly done anything in my life that I knew you disapproved. Don't ask me to help crush that child now, for I cannot. I cannot desert her now. Don't ask that of me, papa. Why do men—even you good men—make it so hard, so almost impossible for women to be kind to each other? What has Ettie done that such as we should hold her to account. She is a mere child. Fourteen years old in fact, but not over ten in feeling or judgment. She has been deceived by one who fully understood. She did not. And yeteven youask me to hold her responsible! Oh, papa, don't!" She slipped onto her father's knee and took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead. She had never in her life stood against her father or seemed to criticise him before. It hurt her and it vexed him. A little frown came on his face. "Katherine," he said, turning to his wife, "I wish you'd make Gertrude understand this thing rationally.Youalways have." Mrs. Foster glanced at her daughter and then at her husband. She smiled.
"I always have, what dear?" she asked.
"Understood these things as I do—as everyone does," said her husband. "You never took these freaks that Gertrude is growing into, and—"
The daughter winced and sat far back on her father's knee. Her mother did not miss the action. She smiled at the girl, but her voice was steady, and less light than usual.
"No, I never took freaks, as you say, but what I thought of things, or how I may or may not have understood them, dear, no one ever inquired, no one ever cared to know. That I acted like other people, and acquiesced in established opinions, went without saying. That was expected of me. That I did. Gertrude belongs to another generation, dear. She cannot be so colorless as we women of my time—"
Her husband laughed.
"Colorless, is good, by Jove!Youcolorless indeed!" He looked admiringly at his wife. "Why, Katherine, you have more color and more sense now than any half dozen girls of this generation. Colorless indeed!" Mrs. Foster smiled. "Don't you think my cheerful, easy reflection of your own shades of thought or mind have always passed current as my own? Sometimes I fancy that is true, and that—it is easier and—pleasanter all around. But—" she paused. "It was not my color, my thought, my opinions, myself. It was an echo, dear; a pleasant echo of yourself which has so charmed you. It was not I."
Gertrude felt uneasy, and as if she were lifting a curtain which had been long drawn. Her father turned his face towards her and then toward her mother.
"In God's name what does all this mean?" he asked. "Are you, the most level-headed woman in the world, intending to uphold Gertrude in this—suicidal policy—her—this—absurd nonsense about that girl?"
Gertrude's eyes widened. She slowly arose from his knee. The revelation as to her father's mental outlook was, to her more sensitive and developed nature, much what the one had been to Francis King that night at the club.
"Oh, papa," she said softly. "I am so sorry for—so sorry—for us all. We seem so far apart, and—"
"John Martin agrees with me perfectly," said her father, hotly. "I talked with him to-day. He—"
Gertrude glanced at her mother, and there was a definite curl upon her lip. "Mr. Martin," she said slowly, "is not a conscience for me. He and I are leagues apart, papa. We—"
"More's the pity," said her father, as he arose from his chair. He moved toward the door.
"I've said my say, Gertrude. It's perfectly incomprehensible to me what you two are aiming at. But what I know is this: you mustdomy way in this particular case, think whatever you please. You know very well I would not ask it except for your own good. I don't like to interfere with your plans, but—you must give that girl up." He spoke kindly, but Gertrude and her mother sat silent long after he had gone. The twilight had passed into darkness. Presently Katherine's voice broke the silence:—
"Shall you float with the tide, daughter, or shall you try to swim up stream?" She was thinking of the first talk they had ever had on these subjects, nearly two years ago now, but the girl recognized the old question. She stood up slowly and then with quick steps came to her mother's side.
"Don't try to swim with me, mamma. It only makes it harder for me to see you hurt in the struggle. Don't try to help me any more when the eddies come. Float, mamma; I shall swim. I shall! I shall! And while my head is above the waves that poor little girl shall not sink."
She was stroking Katherine's hair, and her mother's hand drew her own down to a soft cheek.
"Am I right, mother?" she asked, softly. "If you say I am right, it is enough. My heart will ache to seem to papa to do wrong, but I can bear it better than I could bear my own self-contempt. Am I right, mamma?"
Her mother drew her hand to her lips, and then with a quick action she threw both arms about the girl and whispered in her ear: "I shall go back to the old way. Swim if you can, daughter. You are right. If only you are strong enough. That is the question. If only you are strong enough. I am not. I shall remain in the old way." There was a steadiness and calm in her voice which matched oddly enough with the fire in her eyes and the flush on her cheeks.
"Little mother, little mother," murmured Gertrude, softly, as she stroked her mother's hand. Then she kissed her and left the room. "With her splendid spirit, thatsheshould be broken on the wheel!" the girl said aloud to herself, when she had reached her own room. She did not light the gas, but sat by the window watching the passers-by in the street.
"Why should papa have sent me to college," she was thinking, "where I matched my brains and thoughts with men, if I was to stifle them later on, and subordinate them to brains I found no better than my own? Why should my conscience be developed, if it must not be used; if I must use as my guide the conscience of another? Why should I have a separate and distinct nature in all things, if I may use only that part of it which conforms to those who have not the same in type or kind? I will do what seems right to myself. I shall not desert—"
She laid her cheek in her hand and sighed. A new train of thought was rising. It had never come to her before.
"It is my father's money. He says I may send it, but I may not—it is my father's money. He has the right to say how it may be used, and—and—" (the blood was coming into her face) "I have nothing but what he gives me. He wants a pleasant home; he pays for it. Susan and James, and the rest, he hires to conduct the labor of the house. If they do not do it to please him—if they are not willing to—they have no right to stay, and then to complain. For his social life at home he has mamma and me. If he wants—" She was walking up and down the room now. "Have we a right to dictate? We have our places inhishome. We are not paid wages like James and Susan, but—but—we are given what we have; we are dependent. He has never refused us anything—any sum we wanted—but he can. It is in his power, and really we do not know but that he should. Perhaps we spend too much. We do not know. What can he afford? I do not know. What canIafford?" She spread her hands out before her, palms up, in the darkness. She could see them by the flicker of the electric light in the street.
"They are empty," she said, aloud, "and they are untrained, and they are helpless. They are a pauper's hands." She smiled a little at the conceit, and then, slowly: "It sounds absurd, almost funny, but it is true. A pauper in lace and gold! I am over twenty-two. I am as much a dependent and a pauper as if I were in a poorhouse. Love and kindness save me! They have not saved Ettie, nor Francis. When the day came they were compelled to yield utterly, or go. They can work, and I? I am a dependent. Have I a right to stand against the will and pleasure of my father, when by doing so I compel him to seem to sustain and support that which he disapproves? Have I a right to do that?"
She was standing close to the window now, and she put her hot face against the glass. "The problem is easy enough, if all think alike—if one does not think at all; but now? I cannot follow my own conscience and my father's too. We do not think alike. Is it right that I should, to buy his approval and smiles, violate my own mind, and brain, and heart? But is it right for me to violatehissense of what is right, while I live upon the lavish and loving bounty which he provides?" And so, with her developed conscience, and reason, and individuality, Gertrude had come to face the same problem, which, in its more brutal form, had resulted so sorrowfully for the two girls whom she had hoped to befriend. The ultimate question of individual domination of one by another, with the purse as the final appeal—and even this strong and fortunate girl wavered. "Shall I swim, after all? Have I the right to try?" she asked herself.