Headpiece for “Her Own Life”HER OWN LIFE
Headpiece for “Her Own Life”
BY ALLAN UPDEGRAFF
SHE paid the landlady five dollars from a plump little purse of gold mesh.
“And I’m expecting a—a gentleman to see me within the next half-hour,” she said.
“Certainly, ma’am; I’ll show him right into the drawring-room and call you. I hope you’ll like the surroundings, ma’am; I have nobody in my house but the most refined—”
“Oh, I’m sure I shall. Good day.”
She sat on the edge of the bed in the furnished room she had just rented, and her face had the look of the girl’s face in a little autotype of “The Soul’s Awakening through Books” that hung on the wall opposite her. At lasthersoul was awake; she could hear it whispering, whispering in her bosom. Or was that sound merely the exultation of her excited heart?
At any rate, her soul was awake. She knew it, she could feel it, and it made her tingle. At last she had broken her bonds, she had proclaimed herself a real person in a real world. Her doll existence and her doll-self were further behind than the doll’s house she had left. She was free—free to be herself, free to live her own life as her own desires decreed.
“Free! free!” she repeated under her breath. “Free!”
Her very presence gave a glamour to the shabby little room, so palpitating with life was she, so dainty and pretty and sweet, and so palpably young. The coils of her bright-brown hair were smooth and artfully simple, as only the fingers of an expert hair-dresser could have made them; her clear-skinned, brunette coloring showed the fine hand of nature given every chance to produce its best; the delicate, dark curves of her eyebrows, the carmine bows of her lips, the changing, liquid velvet of her gold-brown eyes, were masterpieces of the same supreme artist. She was as fair as an April morning that has somehow strayed into the luxuriance of June.
Suddenly she realized that the air in the little room was close, that the single tall window was closed top and bottom. With a quick rustle of silken draperies, she fluttered over to it and threw it wide. The sounds that came in were not the metallic tenor shriek of the “elevated,” the rumbling of wagons on cobblestones, the whining of surface cars: they were voices of the world. She held out her arms to them before returning to her perch on the bed.
There was such a dazzling host of things to be done that she could not begin to do anything. Her two big cowhide suitcases, standing in rather disdainful opulence beside the shabby chiffonier, invited her to unpack; but she dismissed the invitation with a toss of her head. How could she desecrate her first hour of freedom by putting clothing into bureau drawers? A mote-filled streak of sunshine, oblique with late afternoon, offered more congenial occupation. She let her eyes rest on it, and dreamed. It was palegolden, like hope, like the turrets of castles in Spain, like the wealth awaiting claimants at the foot of a rainbow. For a long time she looked into it, and her face put off its first flush of exultation for the wistful doubtfulness of reverie.
There was a knock at her door.
“Yes?” she answered.
“Your gentleman friend is a-waiting for you in the drawring-room, ma’am,” announced the landlady’s voice from outside.
“All right; thank you. I’ll be right down,” she said.
She arose in a small flutter of excitement, and patted her faultless hair before the mirror, turning her head this way and that. Gone was her doubtfulness, her wistfulness; she had brightened like a mirror when a lamp is brought into the room. The warm color in her cheeks deepened, and her eyes felicitated their doubles in the mirror. Lightly she fluttered down the broad stairway to the tiled hall below. At the entrance to the parlor she paused a moment, then swept back the heavy curtain with such an air as one might use in unveiling a statue.
A man, sitting in the big Turkish rocking-chair between the front windows, rose hastily to his feet. He was a compact, short-statured, middle-aged man, with a look of grave alertness behind the friendly set of his face.
“Mrs. Wendell?” he murmured, coming forward.
“And so you,” she said, still poising between the curtains, “are Ames Hallton!” Immediately she laughed. “That sounds like melodrama,” she exclaimed. “I’m very glad to see you.”
They shook hands. Her eyes continued to regard him with the puzzled interest that wonderful objects frequently inspire when seen closely. There was a faint shadow of disappointment on her face, but she did not allow it to linger.
“It was kind—it was awf’ly kind of you to come,” she said. “Sha’n’t we sit down? Do you know, I almost thought you wouldn’t come.”
“Your letter was very interesting,” he returned dryly.
“I tried to make it that way—so interesting that you just couldn’t keep from coming.” She folded her hands in her brown-silk lap and gravely bowed her head so that light from the window could bring out the copper tints in her hair. She felt the judicial expression of the gray eyes watching her, and chose the simplest means of making partizans of them. “I was quite desperate, and after I’d read your ‘Love’s Ordeal’ I knew you were the one person who could help me.”
“Have you already left your husband?” he inquired.
She winced a little, and her brows protested. “You remind me of a surgeon,” she said; “but that’s what I need—that’s what attracted me to you in your book. It’s all so calm and simple and scientific. It made me realize for the first time what I was—it and Ibsen’s ‘Doll’s House.’ I was nothing but a plaything, a parasite, a mistress, a doll.” She bowed her head in shame. The warm color flooding her cheeks was as flawless as that in the finest tinted bisque.
“What you say is very, very interesting,” murmured Hallton; and she knew from his changed tone that the fact of her beauty had at last been borne in upon him.
With renewed confidence, almost with boldness, she lifted her head and continued: “You see, I was married when I was only eighteen—just out of boarding-school. I was already sick of hearing about love; everybody made love to me.”
“Of course,” said Hallton, slightly sarcastic.
“I couldn’t help that, could I?” she complained, turning the depths of her gold-brown eyes full upon him.
He lowered his own eyes and pursed his lips.
“No, of course not,” he admitted. “And then, when you realized that you were—inconveniently situated, you decided to imitateNorain the ‘Doll’s House,’ and get out? Is that it?”
“Well, yes; but—”
“So you explained to your husband how you felt, and left him?”
“I didn’t exactly explain; my thoughts seemed to be all mixed up: I thought it would be better to write, after I’d thought a little more.” Again she allowed the glory of her eyes to be her best apologist. “I was going to write as soon as I’d had a talk with you. You see, I came away only two hours ago, and Harry—my husband—will just think I’ve gone to visit somewhere.” Her beauty made aconfident appeal that he would sanction her position.
But Hallton looked out of the window.
“And what do you expect to do to earn your living,” he asked, “now that you’ve decided to quit being a parasite?”
It was cruelly unfamiliar ground, this necessity he put upon her of answering questions with mere words; she had become accustomed to use glances as a final statement of her position, as a full and sufficient answer for any question that a man could ask her. Nevertheless, she drew herself together and addressed Hallton’s unappreciative profile:
“My husband will give me an allowance, I’m sure, until I decide on some suitable occupation; or, if he is mean enough not to, there’ll be alimony or—or something like that, won’t there?” Her eyebrows began to arch a little as Hallton continued to look out of the window, and her lips lost some of their softness. “That is one of the things I wished to speak to you about,” she explained. “I thought perhaps I might take up writing, and I thought you might tell me the best way to begin.”
Hallton put one hand to his forehead.
“However, of course the most important thing,” she resumed steadily, “is for me to live my own life. That’s what I’ve come to realize: I must express myself, I must be free. Why, I didn’t know I had a soul until I found myself alone a short time ago in the little room that I had rented myself, all for myself. I’ve been a chattel—yes, a chattel!” Her voice quavered; she hesitated, waiting for at least a glance of encouragement.
“I hoped you’d understand, that you’d advise me,” she murmured. “I’m afraid I’m frightfully helpless; I’ve always been that way.”
“My God! yes, madam!” he exploded, facing her; “I should think you were!”
She made no reply; she did not even show surprise by a change of expression; she simply sat up very straight and faced him with the look of clear-eyed intelligence that she had found best suited to situations utterly beyond her comprehension. She waited, calm-browed, level-eyed, judicious-mouthed, for him to explain, to apologize.
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
Her silence demanded more.
“I was rather overcome; I was about to take a cheap, narrow view of your—your dilemma,” he explained. “I was about to say that your troubles were as common as dirt, and that you were wrong to take them so idealistically, and not to realize the simplest fundamentals, of—. Women are going through a period of readjustment just now, of course. Your troubles probably aren’t much greater than those of any woman, or man, who goes out to hunt a job. You don’t need to smash things, to kick up a row.”
She watched, with the penetrating gaze of a Muse, his half-disgusted attempts to be polite. She had not the slightest idea what he was driving at; she merely understood that only his regard for her beauty and womanhood kept him from saying wild, irrational things. It occurred to her that he might be mentally unbalanced; geniuses often were.
“Look here,” he continued, growing increasingly excited under her look of beautiful, understanding aloofness, “wouldn’t it be a good thing if you decided, before beginning to live your own life, just what sort of life your own life is—what you want to make of it? You’re breaking away from a beastly artificial environment; aren’t you afraid you’ll have as hard a time as, say, a pet canary turned out to make a living among the sparrows? Besides, canaries are quite as useful as sparrows.”
“I hardly think,” she said with great determination, “that I can be compared to a pet canary; and I’ll have to ask you to be more considerate in referring to my husband. He may not understand me, but he is kind, and as good as he knows—”
“Excuse me,” interrupted Hallton, putting his hand to his forehead; “but I have no recollection of referring to your husband at all.”
“You spoke of my breaking away from him,” she said, “and you called him a beastly artificial—I won’t repeat what you said.” The delicate curves of her cheeks warmed with the memory of the unfamiliar appellation, with faint doubt as to her first idea of its value.“However, that’s neither here nor there. I wish to ask you a simple, straightforward question, Mr. Hallton: do you, or do you not, think it is right for persons to live their own lives?”
For a moment she thought she had succeeded in bringing him back to a humble consideration of her case; he looked at her with something like consternation in his face, his alert, gray eyes blinking rapidly. Light from the window made her massed hair a soft, golden glimmer above the sweet, injured, girlish seriousness of her face; her lips softened, curved downward, like a troubled child’s.
But Hallton turned from her to look out of the window.
“Your own life, your own life!” he exploded again. “Why, you great, big, beautiful doll, that’s your own life—a doll’s life! When is a doll not a doll?” He got out of his chair and jerked his coat together at the throat. His lower jaw protruded; he looked through rather than at her, and his eyes were sick and tired. “Even your talk is the talk of an automaton; you haven’t an idea without a forest of quotation-marks around it,” he said. “If you weren’t so good-looking, you’d be a private in that big brigade of female nincompoops who write their soul-troubles to the author of the latest successful book. Your beauty removes you from that class—at least as long as I look at you.”
He bowed to her, with an expression slightly resembling a sneer.
“Your beauty makes you a temptation; for you’d soon be looking for another cage, or another doll’s house, and any man might be glad to feed you. If I weren’t so busy, and you weren’t so devoid of character, common sense, everything else that—”
“Oh, you brute!” she cried, recoiling from the crassly material admiration in his eyes. “How dare you speak to me like that?”
“Perfect!” He bowed with his hand on his heart. “I press the button, and you utter the absolutely obvious remarks. You are a masterpiece—such a doll as would grace any home of the middle of the last century. And my advice to you is to go back to your home and to your devoted husband. I take it for granted that he is devoted: the prices which you mechanical beauties command usually include devotion by the bucketful. But perhaps I’m unnecessarily harsh because I see you slipping through my fingers. Good day, Mrs. Wendell; and good luck!”
She saw him go with a feeling that the universe had suddenly been inverted and that she was scrambling around amid a Noah’s ark load of displaced properties. It was not so much that he had disturbed her ideals, her plans, her dream of freedom, but that he could have treated her so cavalierly; that he could have been so impolite, so unreasonable, so brutal; that he could so completely have failed to understand her—that was what left her as dazed and terrified as a lost child.
“Oh, he is a cad, a perfect beast!” she gasped to herself as she fled up the broad stairway to her room.
She threw herself down on the hard little bed, crumpled silks, crumpled hair, crumpled rose-petals of cheeks, crumpled pansies-and-dew of eyes. All her sweetness and delicacy wilted and drooped and quivered in the cold, gathering gloom of the little room. The city snarled and rumbled and hissed and groaned outside, and its great composite voice was the voice of loneliness incarnate.
“Oh, there’s no one to take care of me!” she sobbed suddenly, and burst into a flood of tears.
Tailpiece for “Her Own Life”
Half-tone plate engraved by H. DavidsonA CORNER OF THE TABLEFROM THE PAINTING BY CHARLES CHABAS(EXAMPLES OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH ART)❏LARGER IMAGE
Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
A CORNER OF THE TABLE
FROM THE PAINTING BY CHARLES CHABAS
(EXAMPLES OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH ART)
❏LARGER IMAGE