As she heard Ray coming up the stairs, she tossed some more wood on the fire and lighted the candles in her Russian candlesticks.
"It's what any silly girl would do!" she admitted to herself disgustedly.
Well, there was his rap on the foolish imitation Warwick knocker. Kate flung wide the door. He stood in the dim light of the hall, hesitating, it would seem, to enter upon the evening's drama. Tall, graceful as always, with a magnetic force behind his languor, he impressed Kate as a man whom few women would be able to resist; whom, indeed, it was a sort of folly, perhaps even an impiety, to cast out of one's life.
"Kate!" he said, "Kate!" The whole challenge of love was in the accent.
But she held him off with the first method of opposition she could devise.
"My name!" she admitted gayly. "I used to think I didn't like it, but I do."
He came in and swung to the door behind him, flinging his coat and hat upon a chair.
"Do you mean you like to hear me say it?" he demanded. He stood by the fire which had begun to leap and crackle, drawing off his gloves with a decisive gesture.
She saw that she was not going to be able to put him off. The hour had struck. So she faced him bravely.
"Sit down, Ray," she said.
He looked at her a moment as if measuring the value of this courtesy.
"Thank you," he said, almost resentfully, as he sank into the chair she placed for him.
So they sat together before the fire gravely, like old married people, as Kate could not help noticing. Yet they were combatants; not as a married couple might have been, furtively and miserably, but with a frank, almost an exhilarating, sense of equally matched strength, and of their chance to conduct their struggle in the open.
"It's come to this, Kate," he said at length. "Either I must have your promise or I stay away entirely."
"I don't believe you need to do either," she retorted with the exasperating manner of an elder sister. "It's an obsession with you, that's all."
"What man thinks he needs, he does need," Ray responded sententiously. "It appears to me that without you I shall be a lost man. I mean precisely what I say. You wouldn't like me to give out that fact in an hysterical manner, and I don't see that I need to. I make the statement as I would make any other, and I expect to be believed, because I'm a truth-telling person. The fairest scene in the world or the most interesting circumstance becomes meaningless to me if you are not included in it. It isn't alone that you are my sweetheart--the lady of my dreams. It's much more than that. Sometimes when I'm with you I feel like a boy with his mother, safe from all the dreadful things that might happen to a child. Sometimes you seem like a sister, so really kind and so outwardly provoking. Often you are my comrade, and we are completely congenial, neuter entities. The thing is we have a satisfaction when we are together that we never could apart. There it is, Kate, the fact we can't get around. We're happier together than we are apart!"
He seemed to hold the theory up in the air as if it were a shining jewel, and to expect her to look at it till it dazzled her. But her voice was dull as she said: "I know, Ray. I know--now--but shall we stay so?"
"Why shouldn't we, woman? There's every reason to suppose that we'd grow happier. We want each other. More than that, we need each other. With me, it's such a deep need that it reaches to the very roots of my being. It's my groundwork, my foundation stone. I don't know how to put it to make you realize--"
He caught a quizzical smile on her face, and after a moment of bewilderment he leaped from his chair and came toward her.
"God!" he half breathed, "why do I waste time talking?"
He had done what her look challenged him to do,--had substituted action for words,--yet now, as he stretched out his arms to her, she held him off, fearful that she would find herself weeping on his breast. It would be sweet to do it--like getting home after a long voyage. But dizzily, with a stark clinging to a rock of integrity in herself, she fought him off, more with her militant spirit than with her outspread, protesting hands.
"No, no," she cried. "Don't hypnotize me, Ray! Leave me my judgment, leave me my reason. If it's a partnership we're to enter into, I ought to know the terms."
"The terms, Kate? Why, I'll love you as long as I live; I'll treasure you as the most precious thing in all the world."
"And the winds of heaven shall not be allowed to visit my cheek too roughly," she managed to say tantalizingly.
He paused, perplexed.
"I know I bewilder you, dear man," she said. "But this is the point: I don't want to be protected. I mean I don't want to be made dependent; I don't want my interpretations of life at second-hand. I object to having life filter through anybody else to me; I want it, you see, on my own account."
"Why, Kate!" It wasn't precisely a protest. He seemed rather to reproach her for hindering the onward sweep of their happiness--for opposing him with her ideas when they might together have attained a beautiful emotional climax.
"I couldn't stand it," she went on, lifting her eyes to his, "to be given permission to do this, that, or the other thing; or to be put on an allowance; or made to ask a favor--"
He sank down in his chair and folded across his breast the arms whose embrace she had not claimed.
"You seem to mean," he said, "that you don't want to be a wife. You prefer your independence to love."
"I want both," Kate declared, rising and standing before him. "I want the most glorious and abounding love woman ever had. I want so much of it that it never could be computed or measured--so much it will lift me up above anything that I now am or that I know, and make me stronger and freer and braver."
"Well, that's what your love would do for me," broke in McCrea. "That's what the love of a good woman is expected to do for a man."
"Of course," cried Kate; "but is that what the love of a good man is expected to do for a woman? Or is it expected to reconcile her to obscurity, to the dimming of her personality, and to the endless petty sacrifices that ought to shame her--and don't--those immoral sacrifices about which she has contrived to throw so many deceiving, iridescent mists of religion? Oh, yes, we are hypnotized into our foolish state of dependence easily enough! I know that. The mating instinct drugs us. I suppose the unborn generations reach out their shadowy multitudinous hands and drag us to our destiny!"
"What a woman you are! How you put things!" He tried but failed to keep the offended look from his face, and Kate knew perfectly well how hard he was striving not to think her indelicate. But she went on regardlessly.
"You think that's the very thing I ought to want to be my destiny? Well, perhaps I do. I want children--of course, I want them."
She stopped for a moment because she saw him flushing with embarrassment. Yet she couldn't apologize, and, anyway, an apology would avail nothing. If he thought her unwomanly because she talked about her woman's life,--the very life to which he was inviting her,--nothing she could say would change his mind. It wasn't a case for argument. She walked over to the fire and warmed her nervous hands at it.
"I'm sorry, Ray," she said finally.
"Sorry?"
"Sorry that I'm not the tender, trusting, maiden-creature who could fall trembling in your arms and love you forever, no matter what you did, and lie to you and for you the way good wives do. But I'm not--and, oh, I wish I were--or else--"
"Yes, Kate--what?"
"Or else that you were the kind of a man I need, the mate I'm looking for!"
"But, Kate, I protest that I am. I love you. Isn't that enough? I'm not worthy of you, maybe. Yet if trying to earn you by being loyal makes me worthy, then I am. Don't say no to me, Kate. It will shatter me--like an earthquake. And I believe you'll regret it, too. We can make each other happy. I feel it! I'd stake my life on it. Wait--"
He arose and paced the floor back and forth.
"Do you remember the lines from Tennyson's 'Princess' where the Prince pleads with Ida? I thought I could repeat them, but I'm afraid I'll mar them. I don't want to do that; they're too applicable to my case."
He knew where she kept her Tennyson, and he found the volume and the page, and when he had handed the book to her, he snatched his coat and hat.
"I'm coming for my answer a week from to-night," he said. "For God's sake, girl, don't make a mistake. Life's so short that it ought to be happy. At best I'll only be able to live with you a few decades, and I'd like it to be centuries."
He had not meant to do it, she could see, but suddenly he came to her, and leaning above her burned his kisses upon her eyes. Then he flung himself out of the room, and by the light of her guttering candles she read:--
"Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height.What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang).In height and cold, the splendor of the hills?But cease to move so near the Heavens, and ceaseTo glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine,To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;And come, for Love is of the valley, come thou downAnd find him; by the happy threshold, heOr hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,Or red with spirted purple of the vats,Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walkWith Death and Morning on the Silver Horns,Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,Nor find him dropped upon the firths of ice,That huddling slant in furrow-cloven fallsTo roll the torrent out of dusky doors;But follow; let the torrent dance thee downTo find him in the valley; let the wildLean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leaveThe monstrous ledges there to slope, and spillTheir thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,That like a broken purpose waste in air;So waste not thou; but come; for all the valesAwait thee; azure pillars of the hearthArise to thee; the children call, and IThy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,The moan of doves in immemorial elms,And murmuring of innumerable bees."
She read it twice, soothed by its vague loveliness. She could hear, however, only the sound of the suburban trains crashing by in the distance, and the honking of the machines in the Plaisance. None of those spirit sounds of which Ray had dreamed penetrated through her vigorous materialism. But still, she knew that she was lonely; she knew Ray's going left a gray vacancy.
"I can't think it out," she said at last. "I'll go to sleep. Perhaps there--"
But neither voices nor visions came to her in sleep. She awoke the next morning as unillumined as when she went to her bed. And as she dressed and thought of the full day before her, she was indefinably glad that she was under no obligations to consult any one about her programme, either of work or play.
Kate had dreaded the expected solitude of the next night, and it was a relief to her when Marna Fitzgerald telephoned that she had been sent opera-tickets by one of her old friends in the opera company, and that she wanted Kate to go with her.
"George offers to stay home with the baby," she said. "So come over, dear, and have dinner with us; that will give you a chance to see George. Then you and I will go to the opera by our two independent selves. I know you don't mind going home alone. 'Butterfly' is on, you know--Farrar sings."
She said it without faltering, Kate noticed, as she gave her enthusiastic acceptance, and when she had put down the telephone, she actually clapped her hands at the fortitude of the little woman she had once thought such a hummingbird--and a hummingbird with that one last added glory, a voice. Marna had been able to put her dreams behind her; why should not her example be cheerfully followed?
When Kate reached the little apartment looking on Garfield Park, she entered an atmosphere in which, as she had long since proved, there appeared to be no room for regret. Marna had, of course, prepared the dinner with her own hands.
"I whipped up some mayonnaise," she said. "You remember how Schumann-Heink used to like my mayonnaise? And she knows good cooking when she tastes it, doesn't she? I've trifle for desert, too."
"But it must have taken you all day, dear, to get up a dinner like that," protested Kate, kissing the flushed face of her friend.
"It took up the intervals," smiled Marna. "You see, my days are made up of taking care of baby,andof intervals. How fetching that black velvet bodice is, Kate. I didn't know you had a low one."
"Lowandhigh," said Kate. "That's the way we fool 'em--make 'em think we have a wardrobe. Me--I'm glad I'm going to the opera. How good of you to think of me! So few do--at least in the way I want them to."
Marna threw her a quick glance.
"Ray?" she asked with a world of insinuation.
To Kate's disgust, her eyes flushed with hot tears.
"He's waiting to know," she answered. "But I--I don't think I'm going to be able--"
"Oh, Kate!" cried Marna in despair. "How can you feel that way? Just think--just think--" she didn't finish her sentence.
Instead, she seized little George and began undressing him, her hands lingering over the firm roundness of his body. He seemed to be anything but sleepy, and when his mother passed him over to her guest, Kate let him clutch her fingers with those tenacious little hands which looked like rose-leaves and clung like briers. Marna went out of the room to prepare his bedtime bottle, and Kate took advantage of being alone with him to experiment in those joys which his mother had with difficulty refrained from descanting upon. She kissed him in the back of the neck, and again where his golden curls met his brow--a brow the color of a rose crystal. A delicious, indescribable baby odor came up from him, composed of perfumed breath, of clean flannels, and of general adorability. Suddenly, not knowing she was going to do it, Kate snatched him to her breast, and held him strained to her while he nestled there, eager and completely happy, and over the woman who could not make up her mind about life and her part in it, there swept, in wave after wave, like the south wind blowing over the bleak hills, billows of warm emotion. Her very finger-tips tingled; soft, wistful, delightful tears flooded her eyes. Her bosom seemed to lift as the tide lifts to the moon. She found herself murmuring inarticulate, melodious nothings. It was a moment of realization. She was learning what joys could be hers if only--
Marna came back into the room and took the baby from Kate's trembling hands.
"Why, dear, you're not afraid of him, are you?" his mother asked reproachfully.
Kate made no answer, but, dropping a farewell kiss in the crinkly palm of one dimpled hand, she went out to the kitchen, found an apron, and began drawing the water for dinner and dropping Marna's mayonnaise on the salad. She must, however, have been sitting for several minutes in the baby's high chair, staring unseeingly at the wall, when the buzzing of the indicator brought her to her feet.
"It's George!" cried Marna; and tossing baby and bottle into the cradle, she ran to the door.
Kate hit the kitchen table sharply with a clenched hand. What was there in the return of a perfectly ordinary man to his home that should cause such excitement in a creature of flame and dew like Marna?
"Marna with the trees' lifeIn her veins a-stir!Marna of the aspen heart--"
George came into the kitchen with both hands outstretched.
"Well, it's good to see you here," he declared. "Why don't you come oftener? You make Marna so happy."
That proved her worthy; she made Marna happy! Of what greater use could any person be in this world? George retired to prepare for dinner, and Marna to settle the baby for the night, and Kate went on with the preparations for the meal, while her thoughts revolved like a Catherine wheel.
There were the chops yet to cook, for George liked them blazing from the broiler, and there was the black coffee to set over. This latter was to fortify George at his post, for it was agreed that he was not to sleep lest he should fail to awaken at the need and demand of the beloved potentate in the cradle; and Marna now needed a little stimulant if she was to keep comfortably awake during a long evening--she who used to light the little lamps in the windows of her mind sometime after midnight.
They had one of those exclamatory dinners where every one talked about the incomparable quality of the cooking. The potatoes were after a new recipe,--something Spanish,--and they tasted deliciously and smelled as if assailing an Andalusian heaven. The salad waspiquante; the trifle vivacious; Kate's bonbons were regarded as unique, and as for the coffee, it provoked Marna to quote the appreciative Talleyrand:--
"Noir comme le diable,Chaud comme l'enfer,Pur comme un ange,Doux comme l'amour."
Other folk might think that Marna had "dropped out," but Kate could see it written across the heavens in letters of fire that neither George nor Marna thought so. They regarded their table as witty, as blessed in such a guest as Kate, as abounding in desirable food, as being, indeed, all that a dinner-table should be. They had the effect of shutting out a world which clamored to participate in their pleasures, and looked on themselves as being not forgotten, but too selfish in keeping to themselves. It kept little streams of mirth purling through Kate's soul, and at each jest or supposed brilliancy she laughed twice--once with them and once at them. But they were unsuspicious--her friends. They were secretly sorry for her, that was all.
After dinner there was Marna to dress.
"Naturally I haven't thought much about evening clothes since I was married," she said to Kate. "I don't see what I'm to put on unless it's my immemorial gold-of-ophir satin." She looked rather dubious, and Kate couldn't help wondering why she hadn't made a decision before this. Marna caught the expression in her eyes.
"Oh, yes, I know I ought to have seen to things, but you don't know what it is, mavourneen, to do all your own work and care for a baby. It makes everything you do so staccato! And, oh, Kate, I do get so tired! My feet ache as if they'd come off, and sometimes my back aches so I just lie on the floor and roll and groan. Of course, George doesn't know. He'd insist on our having a servant, and we can't begin to afford that. It isn't the wages alone; it's the waste and breakage and all."
She said this solemnly, and Kate could not conceal a smile at her "daughter of the air" using these time-worn domestic plaints.
"You ought to lie down and sleep every day, Marna. Wouldn't that help?"
"That's what George is always saying. He thinks I ought to sleep while the baby is taking his nap. But, mercy me, I just look forward to that time to get my work done."
She turned her eager, weary face toward Kate, and her friend marked the delicacy in it which comes with maternity. It was pallid and rather pinched; the lips hung a trifle too loosely; the veins at the temples showed blue and full. Kate couldn't beat down the vision that would rise before her eyes of the Marna she had known in the old days, who had arisen at noon, coming forth from her chamber like Deirdre, fresh with the freshness of pagan delight. She remembered the crowd that had followed in her train, the manner in which people had looked after her on the street, and the little furore she had invariably awakened when she entered a shop or tea-room. As Marna shook out the gold-of-ophir satin, dimmed now and definitely out of date, there surged up in her friend a rebellion against Marna's complete acquiescence in the present scheme of things. But Marna slipped cheerfully into her gown.
"I shall keep my cloak on while we go down the aisle," she declared. "Nobody notices what one has on when one is safely seated. Particularly," she added, with one of her old-time flashes, "if one's neck is not half bad. Now I'm ready to be fastened, mavourneen. Dear me, itisrather tight, isn't it? But never mind that. Get the hooks together somehow. I'll hold my breath. Now, see, with this scarf about me, I shan't look such a terrible dowd, shall I? Only my gloves are unmistakably shabby and not any too clean, either. George won't let me use gasoline, you know, and it takes both money and thought to get them to the cleaners. Do you remember the boxes of long white gloves I used to have in the days whentanteBarsaloux was my fairy godmother? Gloves were an immaterial incident then. 'Nevermore, nevermore,' as our friend the raven remarked. Come, we'll go. I won't wear my old opera cloak in the street-car; that would be too absurd, especially now that the bullion on it has tarnished. That long black coat of mine is just the thing--equally appropriate for market, mass, or levee. Oh, George, dear, good-bye! Good-bye, you sweetheart. I hate to leave you, truly I do. And I do hope and pray the baby won't wake. If he does--"
"Come along, Marna," commanded Kate. "We mustn't miss that next car."
They barely were in their seats when the lights went up, and before them glittered the Auditorium, that vast and noble audience chamber identified with innumerable hours of artistic satisfaction. The receding arches of the ceiling glittered like incandescent nebulae; the pictured procession upon the proscenium arch spoke of the march of ideas--of the passionate onflow of man's dreams--of whatever he has held beautiful and good.
Kate yielded herself over to the deep and happy sense of completion which this vast chamber always gave her, and while she and Marna sat there, silent, friendly, receptive, she felt her cares and frets slipping from her, and guessed that the drag of Mama's innumerable petty responsibilities was disappearing, too. For here was the pride of life--the power of man expressed in architecture, and in the high entrancement of music. The rich folds of the great curtain satisfied her, the innumerable lights enchanted her, and the loveliness of the women in their fairest gowns and their jewels added one more element to that indescribable thing, compacted of so many elements,--all artificial, all curiously and brightly related,--which the civilized world calls opera, and in which man rejoices with an inconsistent and more or less indefensible joy.
The lights dimmed; the curtain parted; the heights above Nagasaki were revealed. Below lay the city in purple haze; beyond dreamed the harbor where the battleships, the merchantmen and the little fishing-boats rode. The impossible, absurd, exquisite music-play of "Madame Butterfly" had begun.
Oh, the music that went whither it would, like wind or woman's hopes; that lifted like the song of a bird and sank like the whisper of waves. Vague as reverie, fitful as thought, yearning as frustrate love, it fluttered about them.
"The new music," whispered Marna.
"Like flame leaping and dying," responded Kate.
They did not realize the passage of time. They passed from chamber to chamber in that gleaming house of song.
"This was the best of all to me," breathed Marna, as Farrar's voice took up the first notes of that incomparable song of woven hopes and fears, "Some Day He'll Come." The wild cadences of the singer's voice, inarticulate, of universal appeal, like the cry of a lost child or the bleating of a lamb on a windy hill,--were they mere singing? Or were they singing at all? Yes, the new singing, where music and drama insistently meet.
The tale, heart-breaking for beauty and for pathos, neared its close. Oh, the little heart of flame expiring at its loveliest! Oh, the loyal feet that waited--eager to run on love's errands--till dawn brought the sight of faded flowers, the suddenly bleak apartment, the unpressed couch! Then the brave, swift flight of the spirit's wings to other altitudes, above pain and shame! And like love and sorrow, refined to a poignant essence, still the music brooded and cried and aspired.
What visions arose in Marna's brain, Kate wondered, quivering with vicarious anguish. Glancing down at her companion's small, close-clasped hands, she thought of their almost ceaseless toil in those commonplace rooms which she called home, and for the two in it--the ordinary man, the usual baby. And she might have had all this brightness, this celebrity, this splendid reward for high labor!
The curtain closed on the last act,--on the little dead Cio-Cio-San,--and the people stood on their feet to call Farrar, giving her unstintedly of theirbravas. Kate and Marna stood with the others, but they were silent. There were large, glistening tears on Marna's cheeks, and Kate refrained from adding to her silent singing-bird's distress by one word of appreciation of the evening's pleasure; but as they moved down the thronged aisle together, she caught Marna's hand in her own, and felt her fingers close about it tenaciously.
Outside a bitter wind was blowing, and with such purpose that it had cleared the sky of the day's murk so that countless stars glittered with unwonted brilliancy from a purple-black heaven. Crowded before the entrance were the motors, pouring on in a steady stream, their lamps half dazzling the pedestrians as they struggled against the wind that roared between the high buildings.
Though Marna was to take the Madison Street car, they could not resist the temptation to turn upon the boulevard where the scene was even more exhilarating. The high standing lights that guarded the great drive offered a long and dazzling vista, and between them, sweeping steadily on, were the motor-cars. Laughing, talking, shivering, the people hastened along--the men of fashion stimulated and alert, their women splendid in furs and cloaks of velvet while they waited for their conveyances; by them tripped the music students, who had been incomparably happy in the highest balcony, and who now cringed before the penetrating cold; among them marched sedately the phalanx of middle-class people who permitted themselves an opera or two a year, and who walked sedately, carrying their musical feast with a certain sense of indigestion;--all moved along together, thronging the wide pavement. The restaurants were awaiting those who had the courage for further dissipation; the suburban trains had arranged their schedules to convenience the crowd; and the lights burned low in the hallways of mansions, or apartments, or neat outlying houses, awaiting the return of these adventurers into another world--the world of music. All would talk of Farrar. Not alone that night, nor that week, but always, as long as they lived, at intervals, when they were happy, when their thoughts were uplifted, they would talk of her. And it might have been Marna Cartan instead of Geraldine Farrar of whom they spoke!
"Marna of the far quest" might have made this "flight unhazarded"; might have been the core of all this fine excitement. But she had put herself out of it. She had sold herself for a price--the usual price. Kate would not go so far as to say that a birthright had been sold for a mess of pottage, but Ray McCrea's stock was far below par at that moment. Yet Ray, as she admitted, would not doom her to a life of monotony and heavy toil. With him she would have the free and useful, the amusing and excursive life of an American woman married to a man of wealth. No, her programme would not be a petty one--and yet--
"Do take a cab, Marna," she urged. "My treat! Please."
"No, no," said Marna in a strained voice. "I'll not do that. A five-cent ride in the car will take me almost to my door; and besides the cars are warm, which is an advantage."
It was understood tacitly that Kate was the protector, and the one who wouldn't mind being on the street alone. They had but a moment to wait for Marna's car, but in that moment Kate was thinking how terrible it would be for Marna, in her worn evening gown, to be crowded into that common conveyance and tormented with those futile regrets which must be her so numerous companions.
She was not surprised when Marna snatched her hand, crying:--
"Oh, Kate!"
"Yes, yes, I know," murmured Kate soothingly.
"No, you don't," retorted Marna. "How can you? It's--it's the milk."
There was a catch in her voice.
"The milk!" echoed Kate blankly. "What milk? I thought--"
"Oh, I know," Marna cried impatiently. "You thought I was worrying about that old opera, and that I wanted to be up there behind that screen stabbing myself. Well, of course, knowing the score so well, and having hoped once to do so much with it, the notes did rather try to jump out of my throat. But, goodness, what does all that matter? It's the baby's milk that I'm carrying on about. I don't believe I told George to warm it." Her voice ceased in a wail.
The car swung around the corner, and Kate half lifted Marna up the huge step, and saw her go reeling down the aisle as the cumbersome vehicle lurched forward. Then she turned her own steps toward the stairs of the elevated station.
"The milk!" she ejaculated with commingled tenderness and impatience. "Then that's why she didn't say anything about going behind the scenes. I thought it was because she couldn't endure the old surroundings and the pity of her associates of the opera-days. The milk! I wonder--"
What she wondered she did not precisely say; but more than one person on the crowded elevated train noticed that the handsome woman in black velvet (it really was velveteen, purchased at a bargain) had something on her mind.
Kate slept lightly that night. She had gone to bed with a sense of gentle happiness, which arose from the furtive conviction that she was going to surrender to Ray and to his point of view. He could take all the responsibility if he liked and she would follow the old instincts of woman and let the Causes of Righteousness with which she had allied herself contrive to get along without her. It was nothing, she told herself, but sheer egotism for her to suppose that she was necessary to their prosperity.
She half awoke many times, and each time she had a vague, sweet longing which refused to resolve itself into definite shape. But when the full morning came she knew it was Ray she wanted. She couldn't wait out the long week he had prescribed as a season of fasting and prayer before she gave her answer, and she was shamelessly glad when her superior, over there at the Settlement House, informed her that she would be required to go to a dance-hall at South Chicago that night--a terrible place, which might well have been called "The Girl Trap." This gave Kate a legitimate excuse to ask for Ray's company, because he had besought her not to go to such places at night without his escort.
"But ought I to be seeing you?" he asked over the telephone in answer to her request. "Wouldn't it be better for my cause if I stayed away?"
In spite of the fact that he laughed, she knew he was quite in earnest, and she wondered why he hadn't discerned her compliant mood from her intonations.
"But I had to mind you, hadn't I?" she sent back. "You said I mustn't go to such places without you."
From her tone she might have been the most betendriled feminine vine that ever wrapped a self-satisfied masculine oak.
"Oh, I'll come," he answered. "Of course I'll come. You knew you had only to give me the chance."
He was on time, impeccable, as always, in appearance. Kate was glad that he was as tall as she. She knew, down in her inner consciousness, that they made a fine appearance together, that they stepped off gallantly. It came to her that perhaps they were to be envied, and that they weren't--or at least that she wasn't--giving their good fortune its full valuation.
She told him about her dinner with the Fitzgeralds and about the opera, but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the episode of Marna's wistful tears when she heard the music, and her amazingvolte-faceat remembering the baby's feeding-time. She would have loved to spin out the story to him--she could have deepened the colors just enough to make it all very telling. But she wasn't willing to give away the reason for her changed mood. It was enough, after all, that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm he held it in a clasp that asserted his right to keep it.
They were happy to be in each other's company again. Kate had to admit it. For the moment it seemed to both of them that it didn't matter much where they went so long as they could go together. They rode out to South Chicago on the ill-smelling South Deering cars, crowded with men and women with foreign faces. One of the men trod on Kate's foot with his hobnailed shoe and gave an inarticulate grunt by way of apology.
"He's crushed it, hasn't he?" asked Ray anxiously, seeing the tears spring to her eyes. "What a brute!"
"Oh, it was an accident," Kate protested. "Any one might have done it."
"But anyone except that unspeakable Huniack would have done more than grunt!"
"I dare say he doesn't know English," Kate insisted. "He'll probably remember the incident longer and be sorrier about it than some who would have been able to make graceful apologies."
"Not he," declared Ray. "Don't you think it! Bless me, Kate, why you prefer these people to any others passes my comprehension. Can't you leave these people to work out their own salvation--which to my notion is the only way they ever can get it--and content yourself with your own kind and class?"
"Not variety enough," retorted Kate, feeling her tenderness evaporate and her tantalizing mood--her usual one when she was with Ray--come back. "Don't I know just what you, for example, are going to think and say about any given circumstances? Don't I know your enthusiasms and reactions as if I'd invented 'em?"
"Well, I know yours, too, but that's because I love you, not because you're like everybody else. I wish you were rather more like other women, Kate. I'd have an easier time."
"If we were married," said Kate, with that cheerful directness which showed how her sentimentality had taken flight, "you'd never give up till you'd made me precisely like Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Johnson. Men fall in love with women because they're different from other women, and then put in the first years of their married life trying to make them like everybody else. I've noticed, however, that when they've finished the job, they're so bored with the result that they go and look up another 'different' woman. Oh, I know!"
He couldn't say what he wished in reply because the car filled up just then with a party of young people bound for a dance in Russell Square. It always made Kate's heart glow to think of things like that--of what the city was trying to do for its people. These young people came from small, comfortable homes, quite capacious enough for happiness and self-respect, but not large enough for a dance. Very well; all that was needed was a simple request for the use of the field-house and they could have at their disposal a fine, airy hall, well-warmed and lighted, with an excellent floor, charming decorations, and a room where they might prepare their refreshments. All they had to pay for was the music. Proper chaperonage was required and the hall closed at midnight. Kate descanted on the beauties of the system till Ray yawned.
"Think how different it is at the dance-hall where we are going," she went on, not heeding his disinclination for the subject. "They'll keep it up till dawn and drink between every dance. There's not a party of the kind the whole winter through that doesn't see the steps of some young girl set toward destruction. Oh, I can't see why it isn't stopped! If women had the management of things, it would be, I can tell you. It would take about one day to do it."
"That's one of the reasons why the liquor men combine to kill suffrage," said Ray. "They know it will be a sorry day for them when the women get in. Positively, the women seem to think that's all there is to politics--some moral question; and the whole truth is they'd do a lot of damage to business with their slap-dash methods, as they'd learn to their cost. When they found their pin-money being cut down, they'd sing another tune, for they're the most reckless spenders in the world, American women are."
"They're the purchasing agents for the most extravagant nation in the world, if you like," Kate replied. "Men seem to think that shopping is a mere feminine diversion. They forget that it's what supports their business and supplies their homes. Not to speak of any place beyond our own town, think of the labor involved in buying food and clothing for the two million and a half human beings here in Chicago. It's no joke, I assure you."
"Joke!" echoed Ray. "A good deal of the shopping I've seen at my father's store seems to me to come under the head of vice. The look I've seen on some of those faces! It was ravaging greed, nothing less. Why, we had a sale the other day of cheap jewelry, salesmen's samples, and the women swarmed and snatched and glared like savages. I declare, when I saw them like that, so indecently eager for their trumpery ornaments, I said to myself that you'd only to scratch the civilized woman to get at the squaw any day."
Kate kept a leash on her tongue. She supposed it was inevitable that they should get back to the old quarrel. Deep down in Ray, she felt, was an unconquerable contempt for women. He made an exception of her because he loved her; because she drew him with the mysterious sex attraction. It was that, and not any sense of spiritual or intellectual approval of her, which made him set her apart as worthy of admiration and of his devoted service. If ever their lives were joined, she would be his treasure to be kept close in his personal casket,--with the key to the golden padlock in his pocket,--and he would all but say his prayers to her. But all that would not keep him from openly discountenancing her judgment before people. She could imagine him putting off a suggestion of hers with that patient married tone which husbands assume when they discover too much independent cerebration on the part of their wives.
"I couldn't stand that," she inwardly declared, as she let him think that he was assisting her from the car. "If any man ever used that patient tone to me, I'd murder him!"
She couldn't keep back her sardonic chuckle.
"What are you laughing at?" he asked irritatedly.
"At the mad world, master," she answered.
"Where is this dance-hall?" he demanded, as if he suspected her of concealing it.
The tone was precisely the "married" one she had been imagining, and she burst out with a laugh that made him stop and visibly wrap his dignity about him. Nothing was more evident than that he thought her silly. But as she paused, too, standing beneath the street-lamp, and he saw her with her nonchalant tilt of her head,--that handsome head poised on her strong, erect body,--her force and value were so impressed upon him that he had to retract. But she was provoking, no getting around that.
At that moment another sound than laughter cut the air--a terrible sound--the shriek of a tortured child. It rang out three times in quick succession, and Kate's blood curdled.
"Oh, oh," she gasped; "she's being beaten! Come, Ray."
"Mix up in some family mess and get slugged for my pains? Not I! But I'll call a policeman if you say."
"Oh, it might be too late! I'm a policeman, you know. Get the patrol wagon if you like. But I can't stand that--"
Once more that agonized scream! Kate flashed from him into the mesh of mean homes, standing three deep in each yard, flanking each other with only a narrow passage between, and was lost to him. He couldn't see where she had gone, but he knew that he must follow. He fell down a short flight of steps that led from the street to the lower level of the yard, and groped forward. He could hear people running, and when a large woman, draping her wrapper about her, floundered out of a basement door near him, he followed her. She seemed to know where to go. The squalid drama with the same actors evidently had been played before.
Mid-length of the building the woman turned up some stairs and came to a long hall which divided the front and rear stairs. At the end of it a light was burning, and Kate's voice was ringing out like that of an officer excoriating his delinquent troops.
"I'm glad you can't speak English," he heard her say, "for if you could I'd say things I'd be sorry for. I'd shrivel you up, you great brute. If you've got the devil in you, can't you take it out on some one else beside a little child? You're her father, are you? She has no mother, I suppose. Well, you 're under arrest, do you understand? Tell him, some of you who can talk English. He's to sit in that chair and never move from it till the patrol wagon comes. I shall care for the child myself, and she'll be placed where he can't treat her like that again. Poor little thing! Thank you, that's a good woman. Just hold her awhile and comfort her. I can see you've children of your own."
Ray found the courage at length to peer above the heads of the others in that miserable, crowded room. The dark faces of weary men and women, heavy with Old-World, inherited woe, showed in the gloom. The short, shaking man on the chair, dully contrite for his spasm of rage, was cringing before Kate, who stood there, amazingly tall among these low-statured beings. Never had she looked to Ray so like an eagle, so keen, so fierce, so fit for braving either sun or tenebrous cavern. She dominated them all; had them, who only partly understood what she said, at her command. She had thrown back her cloak, and the star of the Juvenile Court officer which she wore carried meaning to them. Though perhaps it had not needed that. Ray tried to think her theatrical, to be angry at her, but the chagrin of knowing that she had forgotten him, and was not caring about his opinion, scourged his criticisms back. She had lifted from the floor the stick with its leathern thong with which the man had castigated the tender body of his motherless child. She held it in her hand, looking at it with the angry aversion that she might have turned upon a venomous serpent. Then slowly, with unspeakable rebuke, she swung her gaze upon the wretch in the chair. For a moment she silently accused him. Then he dropped his head in his hands and sobbed. He seemed in his voiceless way to say that he, too, had been castigated by a million invisible thongs held in dead men's hands, and that his soul, like his child's body, was hideous with welts.
Kate turned to Ray.
"Is the patrol wagon on its way?" she inquired.
"I--I--didn't call it," he stammered.
"Please do," she said simply.
He went out of the room, silently raging, and was grateful that one of the men followed to show him the patrol box. He waited outside for the wagon to come, and when the officers brought out the shaking prisoner, he saw Kate with them carrying the child in her arms.
"I must go to the station," she said to Ray, in a matter-of-fact tone that put him far away from her. "So I'll say good-night. It wouldn't be pleasant for you to ride in the wagon, you know. I'll be quite all right. One of the officers will see me safe home. Anyway, I shall have to go to the dance-hall before the evening's over."
"Kate!" he protested.
"Oh, I know," she said to him apart softly while the others concerned themselves with assisting the blubbering Huniack into the wagon, "you think it isn't nice of me to be going around like this, saving babies from beatings and young girls from much worse. You think it isn't ladylike. But it's what the coming lady is either going to do or see done. It's a new idea, you understand, Ray. Quite different from the squaw idea, isn't it? Good-night!"
An officer stood at the door of the wagon waiting for her. He touched his hat and smiled at her in a comradely fashion, and she responded with as courteous a bow as she ever had made to Ray.
The wagon drove off.
"I've been given my answer," said Ray aloud. He wondered if he were more relieved or disappointed at the outcome. But really he could neither feel nor think reasonably. He went home in a tumult, dismayed at his own sufferings, and in no condition to realize that the old ideas and the new were at death grips in his consciousness.