He had taken her home and was leaving, when a carriage passed him. He could hear the voices of the occupants--the brisk accents of Mrs. Barsaloux, and the slow, honey-rich tones of Marna. He had never dreamed that he could do such a thing, but he ran forward with an almost frantic desire to rest his eyes upon the girl's face, and he was beside the curb when the carriage drew up at the door of the house where Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna lodged. He flung open the door in spite of the protests of the driver, who was not sure of his right to offer such a service, and held out his hand to Mrs. Barsaloux. That lady accepted his politeness graciously, and, weary and abstracted, moved at once toward the house-steps, searching meantime for her key. Fitzgerald had fifteen seconds alone with Marna. She stood half-poised upon the carriage-steps, her hand in his, their eyes almost on a level. Then he said an impossible and insane thing. It was wrung out of his misery, out of his knowledge of her loveliness.
"I've lost you!" he whispered. "Do you know that to-night ended my happiness?"
Mama's lips parted delicately; her eyes widened; her swift Celtic spirit encompassed his grief.
"Oh!" she breathed. "Don't speak so! Don't spoil my beautiful time!"
"Not I," he retorted sharply, speaking aloud this time. "Far be it from me! Good-bye."
Mrs. Barsaloux heard him vaguely above the jangling of coins and keys and the rushing of a distant train.
"You're not going to leave town, are you, Dr. Fitzgerald?" she inquired casually. "I thought your good-bye had a final accent to it."
She was laughing in her easy way, quite unconscious of what was taking place. She had made an art of laughing, and it carried her and others over many difficult places. But for once it was powerless to lessen the emotional strain. Mysteriously, Fitzgerald and Marna were experiencing a sweet torment in their parting. It was not that she loved him or had thought of him in that way at all. She had seen him often and had liked his hearty ways, his gay spirits, and his fine upstanding figure, but he had been as one who passed by with salutations. Now, suddenly, she was conscious that he was a man to be desired. She saw his wistful eyes, his avid lips, his great shoulders. The woman in her awoke to a knowledge of her needs. Upon such a shoulder might a woman weep, from such eyes might a woman gather dreams; to allay such torment as his might a woman give all she had to give. It was incoherent, mad, but not unmeaning. It had, indeed, the ultimate meaning.
He said nothing more; she spoke no word. Each knew they would meet on the morrow.
The next night, Kate Barrington, making her way swiftly down the Midway in a misty gloom, saw the little figure of Marna Cartan fluttering before her. It was too early for dinner, and Kate guessed that Marna was on her way to pay her a visit--a not rare occurrence these last few weeks. She called to her, and Marna waited, turning her face for a moment to the mist-bearing wind.
"I was going to you," she said breathlessly.
"So I imagined, bright one."
"Are you tired, Kate, mavourneen?"
"A little. It's been a hard day. I don't see why my heart isn't broken, considering the things I see and hear, Marna! I don't so much mind about the grown-ups. If they succeed in making a mess of things, why, they can take the consequences. But the kiddies--they're the ones that torment me. Try as I can to harden myself, and to say that after I've done my utmost my responsibility ends, I can't get them off my mind. But what's onyourmind, bright one?"
"Oh, Kate, so much! But wait till we get to the house. It's not a thing to shriek out here on the street."
The wind swept around the corner, buffeting them, and Kate drew Marna's arm in her own and fairly bore the little creature along with her. They entered the silent house, groped through the darkened hall and up the stairs to Kate's own room.
"Honora isn't home, I fancy," she said, in apology for the pervading desolation. "She stays late at the laboratory these nights. She says she's on the verge of a wonderful discovery. It's something she and David have been working out together, but she's been making some experiments in secret, with which she means to surprise David. Of course she'll give all the credit to him--that's her policy. She's his helpmate, she says, nothing more."
"But the babies?" asked Marna with that naïveté characteristic of her. "Where are they?"
"Up in the nursery at the top of the house. It will be light and warm there, I think. Honora had a fireplace put in so that it would be cheerful. I always feel sure it's pleasant up there, however forbidding the rest of the house may look."
"Mary has made a great difference with it since she came, hasn't she? Of course Honora couldn't do the wonderful things she's doing and be fussing around the house all the time. Still, she might train her servants, mightn't she?"
"Well, there aren't really any to train," said Kate. "There's Mrs. Hays, the nurse, a very good woman, but as we take our meals out, and are all so independent, there's no one else required, except occasionally. Honora wouldn't think of such an extravagance as a parlor maid. We're a community of working folk, you see."
Marna had been lighting the candles which Kate usually kept for company; and, moreover, since there was kindling at hand, she laid a fire and touched a match to it.
"I must have it look homey, Kate--for reasons."
"Do whatever it suits you to do, child."
"But can I tell you what it suits me to do, Kate?"
"How do I know? Are you referring to visible things or talking in parables? There's something very eerie about you to-night, Marna. Your eyes look phosphorescent. What's been happening to you? Is it the glory of last night that's over you yet?"
"No, not that. It's--it's a new glory, Kate."
"A new glory, is it? Since last night? Tell me, then."
Kate flung her long body into a Morris chair and prepared to listen. Marna looked about her as if seeking a chair to satisfy her whim, and, finding none, sank upon the floor before the blaze. She leaned back, resting on one slight arm, and turned her dream-haunted face glowing amid its dark maze of hair, till her eyes could hold those of her friend.
"Oh, Kate!" she breathed, and made her great confession in those two words.
"A man!" cried Kate, alarmed. "Now!"
"Now! Last night. And to-day. It was like lightning out of a clear sky. I've seen him often, and now I remember it always warmed me to see him, and made me feel that I wasn't alone. For a long time, I believe, I've been counting him in, and being happier because he was near. But I didn't realize it at all--till last night."
"You saw him after the opera?"
"Only for half a minute, at the door of my house. We only said a word or two. He whispered he had lost me--that I had killed him. Oh, I don't remember what he said. But we looked straight at each other. I didn't sleep all night, and when I lay awake I tried to think of the wonderful fact that I had made my debut, and that it wasn't a failure, at any rate. But I couldn't think about that, or about my career. I couldn't hold to anything but the look in his eyes and the fact that I was to see him to-day. Not that he said so. But we both knew. Why, we couldn't have lived if we hadn't seen each other to-day."
"And you did?"
"Oh, we did. He called me up on the telephone about two o'clock, and said he had waited as long as he could, and that he'd been walking the floor, not daring to ring till he was sure that I'd rested enough after last night. So I told him to come, and he must have been just around the corner, for he was there in a minute. I wanted him to come in and sit down, but he said he didn't believe a house could hold such audacity as his. So we went out on the street. It was cold and bleak. The Midway was a long, gray blankness. I felt afraid of it, actually. All the world looked forbidding to me--except just the little place where I walked with him. It was as if there were a little warm beautiful radius in which we could keep together, and live for each other, and comfort each other, and keep harm away."
"Oh, Marna! And you, with a career before you! What do you mean to do?"
"I don't know what to do. We don't either of us know what to do. He says he'll go mad with me on the stage, wearing myself out, the object of the jealousy of other women and of love-making from the men. He--says it's a profanation. I tried to tell him it couldn't be a profanation to serve art; but, Kate, he didn't seem to know what I meant. He has such different standards. He wanted to know what I was going to do when I was old. He said I'd have no real home, and no haven of love; and that I'd better be the queen of his home as long as I lived than to rule it a little while there on the stage and then--be forgotten. Oh, it isn't what he said that counts. All that sounds flat enough as I repeat it. It's the wonder of being with some one that loves you like that and of feeling that there are two of you who belong--"
"How do you know you belong?" asked Kate with sharp good sense. "Why, bright one, you've been swept off your feet by mere--forgive me--by mere sex."
That glint of the eyes which Kate called Celtic flashed from Marna.
"Mere sex!" she repeated. "Mere sex! You're not trying to belittle that, are you? Why, Kate, that's the beginning and the end of things. What I've always liked about you is that you look big facts in the face and aren't afraid of truth. Sex! Why, that's home and happiness and all a woman really cares for, isn't it?"
"No, it isn't all she cares for," declared Kate valiantly. "She cares for a great many other things. And when I said mere sex I was trying to put it politely. Is it really home and lifelong devotion that you two are thinking about, or are you just drunk with youth and--well, with infatuation?"
Marna turned from her to the fire.
"Kate," she said, "I don't know what you call it, but when I looked in his eyes I felt as if I had just seen the world for the first time. I have liked to live, of course, and to study, and it was tremendously stirring, singing there before all those people. But, honestly, I can see it would lead nowhere. A few years of faint celebrity, an empty heart, a homeless life--then weariness. Oh, I know it. I have a trick of seeing things. Oh, he's the man for me, Kate. I realized it the moment he pointed it out. We could not be mistaken. I shall love him forever and he'll love me just as I love him."
"By the way," said Kate, "who is he? Someone from the opera company?"
"Who is he? Why, he's George Fitzgerald, of course."
"Mrs. Dennison's nephew?"
"Certainly. Who else should it be?"
"Why, he's a pleasant enough young man--very cheerful and quite intelligent--but, Marna--"
Marna leaped to her feet.
"You're not in a position to pass judgment upon him, Kate. How can you know what a wonderful soul he has? Why, there's no one so brave, or so humble, or so sweet, or with such a worship for women--"
"For you, you mean."
"Of course I mean for me. You don't suppose I'd endure it to have him worshiping anybody else, do you? Oh, it's no use protesting. I only hope that Mrs. Barsaloux won't."
"Yes, doesn't that give you pause? Think of all Mrs. Barsaloux has done for you; and she did it with the understanding that you were to go on the stage. She was going to get her reward in the contribution you made to art."
Marna burst into rippling laughter.
"I'll give her something better than art, Kate Crosspatch. I'll give her a home--and I'll name my first girl after her."
"Marna!" gasped Kate. "You do go pretty fast for a little thing."
"Oh, I'm Irish," laughed Marna. "We Irish are a very old people. We always knew that if you loved a man, you had to have him or die, and that if you had him, you'd love to see the look of him coming out in your sons and daughters."
Suddenly the look of almost infantile blitheness left her face. The sadness which is inherent in the Irish countenance spread over it, like sudden mist over a landscape. The ancient brooding aspect of the Celts was upon her.
"Yes," she repeated, "we Irish are very old, and there is nothing about life--or death--that we do not know."
Kate was not quite sure what she meant, but with a sudden impulse she held out her arms to the girl, who, with a low cry, fled to them. Then her bright bravery melted in a torrent of tears.
They had met like flame and wind. It was irrational and wonderful and conclusive. But after all, it might not have come to quite so swift a climax if Marna, following Kate's advice, had not confided the whole thing to Mrs. Barsaloux.
Now, Mrs. Barsaloux was a kind woman, and one with plenty of sentiment in her composition. But she believed that there were times when Love should not be given the lead. Naturally, it seemed to her that this was one of them. She had spent much money upon the education of this girl whom she had "assumed," as Marna sometimes playfully put it. Nothing but her large, active, and perhaps interfering benevolence and Mama's winning and inexplicable charm held the two together, and the very slightness of their relationship placed them under peculiar obligations to each other.
"It's ungrateful of you," Mrs. Barsaloux explained, "manifestly ungrateful! It's your rôle to love nothing but your career." She was not stern, merely argumentative.
"But didn't you expect me ever to love any one?" queried Marna.
Mrs. Barsaloux contemplated a face and figure made for love from the beginning, and delicately ripened for it, like a peach in the sun.
"But you could have waited, my dear girl. There's time for both the love and the career."
Marna shook her head slowly.
"George says there isn't," she answered with an irritating sweetness. "He says I'm not to go on the stage at all. He says--"
"Don't 'he says' me like that, Marna," cried her friend. "It sounds too unutterably silly. Here you are with a beautiful talent--every one agrees about that--and a chance to develop it. I've made many sacrifices to give you that chance. Very well; you've had your trial before the public. You've made good. You could repay yourself and me for all that has been involved in your development, and you meet a man and come smiling to me and say that we're to throw the whole thing over because 'he says' to."
Marna made no answer at all, but Mrs. Barsaloux saw her settle down in the deep chair in which she was sitting as if to huddle away from the storm about to break over her.
"She isn't going to offer any resistance," thought the distressed patron with dismay. "Her mind is completely made up and she's just crouching down to wait till I'm through with my private little hurricane."
So, indeed, it proved. Mrs. Barsaloux felt she had the right to say much, and she said it. Marna may or may not have listened. She sat shivering and smiling in her chair, and when it was fit for her to excuse herself, she did, and walked out bravely; but Mrs. Barsaloux noticed that she tottered a little as she reached the door. She did not go to her aid, however.
"It's an infatuation," she concluded. "I must treat her as if she had a violent disease and take care of her. When people are delirious they must be protected against themselves. It's a delirium with her, and the best thing I can do is to run off to New York with her. She can make her next appearance when the opera company gets there. I'll arrange it this afternoon."
She refrained from telling Marna of her plans, but she went straight to the city and talked over the situation with her friend the impresario. He seemed anything but depressed. On the contrary, he was excited--even exalted.
"Spirit her away, madam," he advised. "Of course she will miss her lover horribly, and that will be the best thing that can happen to her. Why did not the public rise to her the other night? Not because she could not sing: far from it. If a nightingale sings, then Miss Cartan does. But she left her audience a little cold. Let us face the facts. You saw it. We all saw it. And why? Because she was too happy, madam; too complaisant; too uninstructed in the emotions. Now it will be different. We will take her away; we will be patient with her while she suffers; afterward she will bless us, for she will have discovered the secret of the artist, and then when she opens her little silver throat we shall have SONG."
Mrs. Barsaloux, with many compunctions, and with some pangs of pure motherly sympathy, nevertheless agreed.
"If only he had been a man above the average," she said, as she tearfully parted from the great man, "perhaps it would not have mattered so much."
The impresario lifted his eyebrows and his mustaches at the same time and assumed the aspect of a benevolent Mephistopheles.
"The variety of man, madam," he said sententiously, "makes no manner of difference. It is the tumult in Miss Marna's soul which I hope we shall be able to utilize"--he interrupted himself with a smile and a bow as he opened the door for his departing friend--"for the purposes of art."
Mrs. Barsaloux sat in the middle of her taxi seat all the way home, and saw neither street, edifice, nor human being. She was looking back into her own busy, confused, and frustrated life, and was remembering certain things which she had believed were buried deep. Her heart misgave her horribly. Yet to hand over this bright singing bird, so exquisite, so rare, so fitted for purposes of exposition, to the keeping of a mere male being of unfortunate contiguity, to permit him to carry her into the seclusion of an ordinary home to wait on him and regulate her life according to his whim, was really too fantastic for consideration. So she put her memories and her tendernesses out of sight and walked up the stairs with purpose in her tread.
She meant to "have it out" with the girl, who was, she believed, reasonable enough after all.
"She's been without her mother for so long," she mused, "that it's no wonder she's lacking in self-control. I must have the firmness that a mother would have toward her. It would be the height of cruelty to let her have her own way in this."
If the two could have met at that moment, it would have changed the course of both their lives. But a trifle had intervened. Marna Cartan had gone walking; and she never came back. Only, the next day, radiantly beautiful, with fresh flowers in her hands, Marna Fitzgerald came running in begging to be forgiven. She tried to carry the situation with her impetuosity. She was laughing, crying, pleading. She got close to her old friend as if she would enwrap her in her influence. She had the veritable aspect of the bride. Whatever others might think regarding her lost career, it was evident that she believed the great hour had just struck for her. Her husband was with her.
"Haven't you any apology to make, sir?" poor Mrs. Barsaloux cried to him. He looked matter-of-fact, she thought, and as if he ought to be able to take a reasonable view of things. But she had misjudged. Perhaps it was his plain, everyday, commercial garments which deceived her and made her think him open to week-day arguments; for at that moment he was really a knight of romance, and at Mrs. Barsaloux's question his eyes gleamed with unsuspected fires.
"Who could be so foolish as to apologize for happiness like ours?" he demanded.
"Aren't you going to forgive us, dear?" pleaded Marna.
But Mrs. Barsaloux couldn't quite stand that.
"You sound like an old English comedy, Marna," she said impatiently. "You're of age; I'm no relation to you; you've a perfect right to be married. Better take advantage of being here to pack your things. You'll need them."
"You mean that I'm not expected to come here again,tante?"
"I shall sail for France in a week," said Mrs. Barsaloux wearily.
"For France,tante? When did you decide?"
"This minute," said the lady, and gave the married lovers to understand that the interview was at an end.
Marna went weeping down the street, holding on to her George's arm.
"If she'd been Irish, she'd have cursed me," she sobbed, "and then I'd have had something to go on, so to speak. Perhaps I could have got her to take it off me in time. But what are you going to do with a snubbing like that?"
"Oh, leave it for the Arctic explorers to explain. They're used to being in below-zero temperature," George said with a troubled laugh. "I'm sure I can't waste any time thinking about a woman who could stand out against you, Marna, the way you are this day, and the way you're looking."
"But, George, she thinks I'm a monster."
"Then there's something wrong with her zoology. You're an--"
"Don't call me an angel, dear, whatever you do! There are some things I hate to be called--they're so insipid. If any one called me an angel I'd know he didn't appreciate me. Come, let's go to Kate's. She's my court of last appeal. If Kate can't forgive me, I'll know I've done wrong."
Kate was never to forget that night. She had come in from a day of difficult and sordid work. For once, the purpose back of all her toil among the people there in the great mill town was lost sight of in the sheer repulsiveness of the tasks she had had to perform. The pathos of their temptations, the terrific disadvantages under which they labored, their gray tragedies, had some way lost their import. She was merely a dreadfully fagged woman, disgusted with evil, with dirt and poverty. She was at outs with her world and impatient with the suffering involved in the mere living of life.
Moreover, when she had come into the house, she had found it dark as usual. The furnace was down, and her own room was cold. But she had set her teeth together, determined not to give way to depression, and had made her rather severe toilet for dinner when word was brought to her by the children's nurse that Dr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald desired to see her. For a moment she could not comprehend what that might mean; then the truth assailed her, took her by the hand, and ran her down the stairs into Mama's arms.
"But it's outrageous," she cried, hugging Marna to her. "How could you be so willful?"
"It's glorious," retorted Marna. "And if I ever was going to be willful, now's the time."
"Right you are," broke in George. "What does Stevenson say about that? 'Youth is the time to be up and doing.' You're not going to be severe with us, Miss Barrington? We've been counting on you."
"Have you?" inquired Kate, putting Marna aside and taking her husband by the hand. "Well, you are your own justification, you two. But haven't you been ungrateful?"
Marna startled her by a bit of Dionysian philosophy.
"Is it ungrateful to be happy?" she demanded. "Would anybody have been in the right who asked us to be unhappy? Why don't you call us brave? Do you imagine it isn't difficult to have people we love disapproving of us? But you know yourself, Kate, if we'd waited forty-eight hours, I'd have been dragged off to live with my career."
She laughed brightly, sinking back in her chair and throwing wide her coat. Kate looked at her appraisingly, and warmed in the doing of it.
"You don't look as if you were devoted to a career, she admitted.
"Oh," sighed Fitzgerald, "I only just barely got her in time!"
"And now what do you propose doing?"
"Why, to-morrow we shall look for a place to live--for a home."
"Do you mean a flat?" asked Kate with a flick of satire.
"A flat, or anything. It doesn't matter much what."
"Or where?"
"It will be on the West Side," said the matter-of-fact Fitzgerald.
"And who'll keep house for you? Must you find servants?"
"Why, Kate, we're dreadfully poor," cried Marna excitedly, as if poverty were a mere adventure. "Didn't you know that? I shall do my own work."
"Oh, we've both got to work," added Fitzgerald.
He didn't say he was sorry Marna had to slave with her little white hands, or that he realized that he was doing a bold--perhaps an impious--thing in snatching a woman from her service to art to go into service for him. Evidently he didn't think that way. Neither minded any sacrifice apparently. The whole of it was, they were together. Suddenly, they seemed to forget Kate. They stood gazing at each other as if their sense of possession overwhelmed them. Kate felt something like angry resentment stir in her. How dared they, when she was so alone, so weary, so homeless?
"Will you stay to dinner with me?" she asked with something like asperity.
"To dinner?" they murmured in vague chorus. "No, thanks."
"But where do you intend to have dinner?"
"We--we haven't thought," confessed Marna.
"Oh, anywhere," declared Fitzgerald.
Marna rose and her husband buttoned her coat about her.
They smiled at Kate seraphically, and she saw that they wanted to be alone, and that it made little difference to them whether they were sitting in a warm room or walking the windy streets. She kissed them both, with tears, and said:--
"God bless you."
That seemed to be what they wanted. They longed to be blessed.
"That's what Aunt Dennison said," smiled Fitzgerald.
Then Kate realized that now the exotic Marna would be calling the completely domesticated Mrs. Dennison "aunt." But Marna looked as if she liked that, too. It was their hour for liking everything. As Kate opened the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers, laughing, ran down the stairs together. They were, in their way, outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion. But now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back like a song.
Kate wrapped her old coat about her and made her solitary way to Mrs. Dennison's depressed Caravansary.
There was no question about it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's trouble, and she counted as friends all who turned to her, or all whom she was called upon to serve.
A fortnight after Mama's marriage, an interesting episode came Kate's way. Mrs. Barsaloux had introduced to the Caravansary a Mrs. Leger whom she had once met on the steamer on her way to Brindisi, and she had invited her to join her during a stay in Chicago. Mrs. Barsaloux, however, having gone off to France in a hot fit of indignation, Mrs. Leger presented herself with a letter from Mrs. Barsaloux to Mrs. Dennison. That hospitable woman consented to take in the somewhat enigmatic stranger.
That she was enigmatic all were quick to perceive. She was beautiful, with a delicate, high-bred grace, and she had the manner of a woman who had been courted and flattered. As consciously beautiful as Mary Morrison, she bore herself with more discretion. Taste governed all that she said and did. Her gowns, her jewels, her speech were distinguished. She seemed by all tokens an accomplished worldling; yet it was not long before Kate discovered that it was anything but worldly matters which were consuming her attention.
She had come to Chicago for the purpose of adjusting her fortune,--a large one, it appeared,--and of concluding her relations with the world. She had decided to go into a convent, and had chosen one of those numerous sisterhoods which pass their devotional days upon the bright hill-slopes without Naples. She refrained from designating the particular sisterhood, and she permitted no discussion of her motives. She only said that she had not been born a Catholic, but had turned to Mother Church when the other details of life ceased to interest her. She was a widow, but she seemed to regard her estate with quiet regret merely. If tragedy had entered her life, it must have been subsequent to widowhood. She had a son, but it appeared that he had no great need of her. He was in the care of his paternal grandparents, who were giving him an education. He was soon to enter Oxford, and she felt confident that his life would be happy. She was leaving him an abundance; she had halved her fortune and was giving her share to the convent.
If she had not been so exquisite, so skilled in the nuances of life, so swift and elusive in conversation, so well fitted for the finest forms of enjoyment, her renunciation of liberty would not have proved so exasperating to Kate. A youthful enthusiasm for religion might have made her step understandable. But enthusiasm and she seemed far apart. Intelligent as she unquestionably was, she nevertheless seemed to have given herself over supinely to a current of emotions which was sweeping her along. She looked both pious and piteous, for all of her sophisticated manner and her accomplishments and graces, and Kate felt like throwing a rope to her. But Mrs. Leger was not in a mood to seize the rope. She had her curiously gentle mind quite made up. Though she was still young,--not quite eighteen years older than her son,--she appeared to have no further concern for life. To the last, she was indulging in her delicate vanities--wore her pearls, walked in charming foot-gear, trailed after her the fascinating gowns of the initiate, and viewed with delight the portfolios of etchings which Dr. von Shierbrand chanced to be purchasing.
She was glad, she said, to be at the Caravansary, quite on a different side of the city from her friends. She made no attempt to renew old acquaintances or to say farewell to her former associates. Her extravagant home on the Lake Shore Drive was passed over to a self-congratulatory purchaser; the furnishings were sold at auction; and her other properties were disposed of in such a manner as to make the transfer of her wealth convenient for the recipients.
She asked Kate to go to the station with her.
"I've given you my one last friendship," she said. "I shall speak with no one on the steamer. My journey must be spent in preparation for my great change. But it seems human and warm to have you see me off."
"It seems inhuman to me, Mrs. Leger," Kate cried explosively. "Something terrible has happened to you, I suppose, and you're hiding away from it. You think you're going to drug yourself with prayer. But can you? It doesn't seem at all probable to me. Dear Mrs. Leger, be brave and stay out in the world with the other living people."
"You are talking of something which you do not understand," said Mrs. Leger gently. "There is a secret manna for the soul of which the chosen may eat."
"Oh!" cried Kate, almost angrily. "Are these your own words? I cannot understand a prepossession like this on your part. It doesn't seem to set well on you. Isn't there some hideous mistake? Aren't you under the influence of some emotional episode? Might it not be that you were ill without realizing it? Perhaps you are suffering from some hidden melancholy, and it is impelling you to do something out of keeping with the time and with your own disposition."
"I can see how it might appear that way to you, Miss Barrington. But I am not ill, except in my soul, which I expect to be healed in the place to which I am going. Try to understand that among the many kinds of human beings in this world there are the mystics. They have a right to their being and to their belief. Their joys and sorrows are different from those of others, but they are just as existent. Please do not worry about me."
"But you understand so well how to handle the material things in the world," protested Kate. "You seem so appreciative and so competent. If you have learned so much, what is the sense of shutting it all up in a cell?"
"Did you never read of Purun Bhagat," asked Mrs. Leger smilingly, "who was rich with the riches of a king; who was wise with the learning of Calcutta and of Oxford; who could have held as high an office as any that the Government of England could have given him in India, and who took his beggar's bowl and sat upon a cavern's rim and contemplated the secret soul of things? You know your Kipling. I have not such riches or such wisdom, but I have the longing upon me to go into silence."
The lips from which these words fell were both tender and ardent; the little gesticulating hands were clad in modish, mouse-colored suede; orris root mixed with some faint, haunting odor, barely caressed the air with perfume. Kate looked at her companion in despair.
"I must be an outer barbarian!" she cried. "I can imagine religious ecstasy, but you are not ecstatic. I can imagine turning to a convent as a place of hiding from shame or despair. But you are not going into it that way. As for wishing to worship, I understand that perfectly. Prayer is a sort of instinct with me, and all the reasoning in the world couldn't make me cast myself out of communion with the unknown something roundabout me that seems to answer me. But what you are doing seems, as I said, so obsolete."
"I am looking forward to it," said Mrs. Leger, "as eagerly as a girl looks forward to her marriage. It is a beautiful romance to me. It is the completely beautiful thing that is going to make up to me for all the ugliness I have encountered in life."
For the first time a look of passion disturbed the serenity of the high-bred, conventional face.
Kate threw out her hands with a repudiating gesture.
"Well," she said, "in the midst of my freedom I shall think of you often and wonder if you have found something that I have missed. You are leaving the world, and books, and friends, and your son for some pale white idea. It seems to me you are going to the embrace of a wraith."
Mrs. Leger smiled slowly, and it was as if a lamp showed for a moment in a darkened house and then mysteriously vanished.
"Believe me," she reiterated, "you do not understand."
Kate helped her on the train, and left her surrounded by her fashionable bags, her flowers, fruit, and literature. She took these things as a matter of course. She had looked at her smart little boots as she adjusted them on a hassock and had smiled at Kate almost teasingly.
"In a month," she said, "I shall be walking with bared feet, or, if the weather demands, in sandals. I shall wear a rope about my waist over my brown robe. My hair will be cut, my head coiffed. When you are thinking of me, think of me as I really shall be."
"So many things are going to happen that you will not see!" cried Kate. "Why, maybe in a little while we shall all be going up in flying-machines! You wouldn't like to miss that, would you? Or your son will be growing into a fine man and you'll not see him--nor the woman he marries--nor his children." She stopped, breathing hard.
"It is like the sound of the surf on a distant shore," smiled Mrs. Leger. "Good-bye, Miss Barrington. Don't grieve about me. I shall be happier than you can know or dream."
The conductor swung Kate off the train after it was in motion.
So, among other things, she had that to think of. She could explain it all merely upon the hypothesis that the sound of the awakening trumpets--the trumpets which were arousing woman from her long torpor--had not reached the place where this wistful woman dwelt, with her tender remorses, her delicate aversions, her hunger for the indefinite consolations of religion.
Moreover, she was beginning to understand that not all women were maternal. She had, indeed, come across many incidents in her work which emphasized this. Good mothers were quite as rare as good fathers; and it was her growing belief that more than half of the parents in the world were undeserving of the children born to them. Also, she realized that a child might be born of the body and not of the spirit, and a mother might minister well to a child's corporeal part without once ministering to its soul. It was possible that there never had been any bond save a physical one between Mrs. Leger and her son. Perhaps they looked at each other with strange, uncomprehending eyes. That, she could imagine, would be a tantalization from which a sensitive woman might well wish to escape. It was within the realm of possibility that he was happier with his grandmother than with his mother. There might be temperamental as well as physical "throwbacks."
Kate remembered a scene she once had witnessed at a railway station. Two meagre, hard-faced, work-worn women were superintending the removal of a pine-covered coffin from one train to another, and as the grim box was wheeled the length of a long platform, a little boy, wild-eyed, gold-haired, and set apart from all the throng by a tragic misery, ran after the truck calling in anguish:--
"Grandmother! Grandmother! Don't leave me! I'm so lonesome, grandmother! I'm so afraid!"
"Stop your noise," commanded the woman who must have been his mother. "Don't you know she can't hear you?"
"Oh, maybe she can! Maybe she can," sobbed the boy. "Oh, grandmother, don't you hear me calling? There's nobody left for me now."
The woman caught him sharply by the arm.
"I'm left, Jimmy. What makes you say such a thing as that? Stay with mother, that's a good boy."
They were lifting the box into the baggage-car. The boy saw it. He straightened himself in the manner of one who tries to endure a mortal wound.
"She's gone," he said. He looked at his mother once, as if measuring her value to him. Then he turned away. There was no comfort for him there.
Often, since, Kate had wondered concerning the child. She had imagined his grim home, his barren days; the plain food; the compulsory task; the kind, yet heavy-handed, coarse-voiced mother. She was convinced that the grandmother had been different. In the corner where she had sat, there must have been warmth and welcome for the child. Perhaps there were mellow old tales, sweet old songs, soft strokings of the head, smuggled sweets--all the beautiful grandmotherly delights.
Since Kate had begun to write, a hundred--a thousand--half-forgotten experiences had come back to her. As they returned to her memory, they acquired significance. They related themselves with other incidents or with opinions. They illustrated life, and however negligible in themselves, they attained a value because of their relation to the whole.
It was seldom that she felt lonely now. Her newly acquired power of self-expression seemed to extend and supplement her personality. August von Shierbrand had said that he wished to marry her because she completed him. It had occurred to her at the time--though she suppressed her inclination to say so--that she was born for other purposes than completing him, or indeed anybody. She wished to think of herself as an individual, not as an addendum. But, after all, she had sympathized with the man. She was beginning to understand that that "solitude of the soul," which one of her acquaintances, a sculptor, had put into passionate marble, was caused from that sense of incompletion. It was not alone that others failed one--it was self-failure, secret shame, all the inevitable reticences, which contributed most to that.
She fell into the way of examining the men and women about her and of asking:--
"Is he satisfied? Is she companioned? Has this one realized himself? Is that one really living?"
She remembered one person--one only--who had given her the impression of abounding physical, mental, and spiritual life. True, she had seen him but a moment--one swift, absurd, curiously haunting moment. That was Karl Wander, Honora's cousin, and the cousin of Mary Morrison. They were the children of three sisters, and from what Kate knew of their descendants' natures, she felt these sisters must have been palpitating creatures.
Yes, Karl Wander had seemed complete--a happy man, seething with plans, a wise man who took life as it came; a man of local qualities yet of cosmopolitan spirit--one who would not have fretted at his environment or counted it of much consequence, whatever it might have been.
If she could have known him--
But Honora seldom spoke of him. Only sometimes she read a brief note from him, and added:--
"He wishes to be remembered to you, Kate."
She did not hint: "He saw you only a second." Honora was not one of those persons who take pleasure in pricking bubbles. She perceived the beauty of iridescence. If her odd friend and her inexplicable cousin had any satisfaction in remembering a passing encounter, they could have their pleasure of it.
Kate, for her part, would not have confessed that she thought of him. But, curiously, she sometimes dreamed of him.
At last Ray McCrea was coming home. His frequent letters, full of good comment, announced the fact.
"I've been winning my spurs, commercially speaking," he wrote. "The old department heads, whom my father taught me to respect, seem pleased with what I have done. I believe that when I come back they will have ceased to look on me as a cadet. And if they think I'm fit for responsibilities, perhaps you will think so, too, Kate. At any rate, I know you'll let me say that I am horribly homesick. This being in a foreign land is all very well, but give me the good old American ways, crude though they may be. I want a straightforward confab with some one of my own sort; I want the feeling that I can move around without treading on somebody's toes. I want, above all, to have a comfortable entertaining evening with a nice American girl--a girl that takes herself and me for granted, and isn't shying off all the time as if I were a sort of bandit. What a relief to think that you'll not be accompanied by a chaperon! I shall get back my self-respect once I'm home again with you nice, self-confident young American women."
"It will be good to see him, I believe," mused Kate. "After all, he always looked after me. I can't seem to remember just how much pleasure I had in his society. At any rate, we'll have plenty of things to talk about. He'll tell me about Europe, and I'll tell him about my work. That ought to carry us along quite a while."
She set about making preparations for him. She induced Honora to let her have an extra room, and she made her fine front chamber into a sitting-room, with a knocker on the door, and some cheerful brasses and old prints within. She came across oddities of this sort in her Russian and Italian neighborhoods, but until now she had not taken very much interest in what she was inclined to term "sublimated junk."
Mary Morrison took an almost vicious amusement in Kate's sudden efforts at aesthetic domestication, and Marna Fitzgerald--who was delighted--considered it as a frank confession of sentiment. Kate let them think what they pleased. She presented to their inspection--even Mary was invited up for the occasion--a cheerful room with a cream paper, a tawny-colored rug, some comfortable wicker chairs, an interesting plaster cast or two, and the previously mentioned "loot." Mary, in a fit of friendliness, contributed a Japanese wall-basket dripping with vines; Honora proffered a lamp with a soft shade; and Marna took pride in bestowing some delicately embroidered cushions, white, and beautiful with the beauty of Belfast linen.
It did not appear to occur to Kate, however, that personal adornment would be desirable, and it took the united efforts of Marna and Mary to persuade her that a new frock or two might be needed. Kate had a way of avoiding shabbiness, but of late her interest in decoration had been anything but keen. However, she ventured now on a rather beguiling dress for evening--a Japanese crêpe which a returned missionary sold her for something more than a song. Dr. von Shierbrand said it was the color of rust, but Marna affirmed that it had the hue of copper--copper that was not too bright. It was embroidered gloriously with chrysanthemums, and she had great pleasure in it. Mary Morrison drew from her rainbow collection a scarf which accentuated the charm of the frock, and when Kate had contrived a monk's cape of brown, she was ready for possible entertainments--panoplied for sentiment. She would make no further concessions. Her practical street clothes and her home-made frocks of white linen, with which she made herself dainty for dinner at Mrs. Dennison's, had to serve her.
"I'm so poor," she said to Marna, "that I feel like apologizing for my inefficiency. I'm getting something now for my talks at the clubs, and I'm paid for my writing, too. Now that it's begun to be published, I ought to be opulent presently."
"You're no poorer than we," Marna said. "But of course there are two of us to be poor together; and that makes it more interesting."
"Love doesn't seem to be flying out of your window," smiled Kate.
"We've bars on the windows," laughed Marna. "Some former occupant of the flat put them on to keep the babies from dashing their brains out on the pavement below, and we haven't taken them off." She blushed. "No," responded Kate with amoue; "what was the use?"
Unfortunately McCrea, the much-expected, had not made it quite plain when he was to land in New York. To be sure, Kate might have consulted the steamer arrivals, but she forgot to do that. So it happened that when a wire came from Ray saying that he would be in Chicago on a certain Saturday night in mid-May, Kate found herself under compulsion to march in a suffrage procession.
David Fulham thought the circumstance uproariously funny, and he told them about it at the Caravansary. They made rather an annoying jest of it, but Kate held to her promise.
"It's an historic event to my mind," she said with all the dignity she could summon. "I wouldn't excuse myself if I could. And I can't. I've promised to march at the head of a division. We hope there'll be twenty thousand of us."
Perhaps there were. Nobody knew. But all the city did know that down the broad boulevard, in the mild, damp air of the May night, regiment upon regiment of women marched to bear witness to their conviction and their hope. Bands played, choruses sang, transparencies proclaimed watchwords, and every woman in the seemingly endless procession swung a yellow lantern. The onlookers crowded the sidewalks and hung from the towering office buildings, to watch that string of glowing amber beads reaching away to north and to south. College girls, working-girls, home-women, fine ladies, efficient business women, vague, non-producing, half-awakened women,--all sorts, all conditions, black, white, Latin, Slav, Germanic, English, American, American, American,--they came marching on. They were proud and they were diffident; they were sad and they were merry; they were faltering and they were enthusiastic. Some were there freely, splendidly, exultantly; more were there because some force greater than themselves impelled them. Through bewilderment and hesitancy and doubt, they saw the lights of the future shining, and they fixed their eyes upon the amber lanterns as upon the visible symbols of their faith; they marched and marched. They were the members of a new revolution, and, as always, only a portion of the revolutionists knew completely what they desired.
At the Caravansary there had been sharp disapproval of the whole thing. The men had brought forth arguments to show Kate her folly. Mrs. Dennison, Mrs. Goodrich, and Mrs. Applegate had spoken gentle words of warning; Honora had vaguely suggested that the matter was immaterial; Mary Morrison had smiled as one who avoided ugliness; and Kate had laughingly defied them.
"I march!" she had declared. "And I'm not ashamed of my company."
It was, indeed, a company of which she was proud. It included the names of the most distinguished, the most useful, the most talented, the most exclusive, and the most triumphantly inclusive women in the city.
"Poor McCrea," put in Fulham. "Aren't you making him ridiculous? He'll come dashing up here the moment he gets off the train. As a matter of fact, he'll be half expecting you to meet him. You're making a mistake, Miss Barrington, if you'll let a well-meaning fellow-being say so. You're leaving the substance for the shadow."
"I've misled you about Ray, I'm afraid," Kate said with unexpected patience. "He hasn't really any right to expect me to be waiting, and I don't believe he will. Come to think of it, I don't know that I want to be found waiting."
"Oh, well, of course--" said Fulham with a shrug, leaving his sentence unfinished.
"Anyway," said Kate flushing, "I march!"
They told her afterward how McCrea had come toof-toofing up to the door in a taxi, and how he had taken the steps two at a time.
"He wrung my hand," said Honora, "and got through the preliminary amenities with a dispatch I never have seen excelled. Then he demanded you. 'Is she upstairs?' he asked. 'May I go right up? She wrote me she had a parlor of her own.' 'She has a parlor,' I said, 'but she isn't in it.' He balanced on the end of a toe. 'Where is she?' I thought he was going to fly. 'She's out with the suffragists,' I said. I didn't try to excuse you. I thought you deserved something pretty bad. But I did tell him you'd promised to go and that you hadn't known he was coming that day. 'She's in that mess?' he cried. 'I saw the Amazon march as I came along. You don't mean Kate's tramping the streets with those women!' 'Yes, she is,' I said, 'and she's proud to do it. But she was sorry not to be here to welcome you.' 'Sorry!' he said; 'why, Mrs. Fulham, I've been dreaming of this meeting for months.' Honestly, Kate, I was ashamed for you. I asked him in. I told him you'd be home before long. But he would not come in. 'Tell her I--I came,' he said. Then he went."
It was late at night, and Kate was both worn and exhilarated with her marching. Honora's words let her down considerably. She sat with tears in her eyes staring at her friend.
"But couldn't he see," she pleaded, "that I had to keep my word? Didn't he understand how important it was? I can see him to-morrow just as well."
"Then you'll have to send for him," said Honora decisively. "He'll not come without urging."
She went up to bed with a stern aspect, and left Kate sitting staring before her by the light of one of Mary's foolish candles.
"They seem to think I'm a very unnatural woman," said Kate to herself. "But can't they see how much more important it was that the demonstration should be a success than that two lovers should meet at a certain hour?"
The word "lovers" had slipped inadvertently into her mind; and no sooner had she really recognized it, looked at it, so to speak, fairly in the face, than she rejected it with scorn.
"We're just friends," she protested. "One has many friends."
But her little drawing-room, all gay and fresh, accused her of deceiving herself; and a glimpse of the embroidered frock reminded her that she was contemptibly shirking the truth. One did not make such preparations for a mere "friend." She sat down and wrote a note, put stamps on it to insure its immediate delivery, and ran out to the corner to mail it. Then she fell asleep arguing with herself that she had been right, and that he ought to understand what it meant to give one's word, and that it could make no difference that they were to meet a few hours later instead of at the impetuous moment of his arrival.
She spent the next day at the Juvenile Court, and came home with the conviction that there ought to be no more children until all those now wandering the hard ways of the world were cared for. She was in no mood for sweethearting, yet she looked with some covert anxiety at the mail-box. There was an envelope addressed to her, but the superscription was not in Ray's handwriting. The Colorado stamp gave her a hint of whom it might have come from, and ridiculously she felt her heart quickening. Yet why should Karl Wander write to her? She made herself walk slowly up the stairs, and insisted that her hat and gloves and jacket should be put scrupulously in their places before she opened her letter. It proved not to be a letter, after all, but only a number of photographs, taken evidently by the sender, who gave no word of himself. He let the snow-capped solitary peaks utter his meanings for him. The pictures were beautiful and, in some indescribable way, sad--cold and isolate. Kate ran her fingers into the envelope again and again, but she could discover no note there. Neither was there any name, save her own on the cover.
"At least," said Kate testily, "I might have been told whom to thank."
But she knew whom to thank--and she knew with equal positiveness that she would send no thanks. For the gift had been a challenge. It seemed to say: "I dare you to open communication with me. I dare you to break the conscious silence between us!"
Kate did not lift the glove that had been thrown down. She hid the photographs in her clock and told no one about them.
At the close of the third day a note came from Ray. Her line, he said, had followed him to Lake Forest and he had only then found time to answer it. He was seeing old friends and was very much occupied with business and with pleasure, but he hoped to see her before long. Kate laughed aloud at the rebuff. It was, she thought, a sort of Silvertree method of putting her in her place. But she was sorry, too,--sorry for his hurt; sorry, indefinitely and indescribably, for something missed. If it had been Karl Wander whom she had treated like that he would have waited on her doorstep till she came, and if he had felt himself entitled to a quarrel, he would have "had it out" before men and the high gods.
At least, so she imagined he would have done; but upon consideration there were few persons in the world about whom she knew less than about Karl Wander. It seemed as if Honora were actually perverse in the way she avoided his name.