CHAPTER III
It was a submissive enough little figure that they had hustled home through the crowded streets, up the front stoop and into the brick house on Wabash Avenue. Crushed and rumpled.
The crudest edge of the things they said to her was mercifully dulled by the time it penetrated her numbed consciousness. She hardly seemed to hear them. At intervals she sobbed. It was more than a sob. It was a dry paroxysm that shook her whole body and jarred her head. Her handkerchief, a wet gray ball, she opened, and began to stare at its neatly hemstitched border, turning it corner for corner, round and round.
Who was he? Who was he?
She told them.
At each fresh accusation she seemed to shrink into smaller compass; to occupy less space within the circle of her outstanding hoop-skirts, until finally she was just a pair of hunted eyes in a tangle of ringlets, handkerchief, and crinoline. She caught fragments of what they were saying ... ruined her life ... brought down disgrace ... entire family ... never hold head up ... common lout like a Dick ... Dick!... Dick!...
Once Charlotte raised her head and launched a feeble something that sounded like "... Hendrik Hudson," but it was lost in the torrent of talk. It appeared that she had not only ruined herself and brought lifelong disgrace upon her parents' hitherto unsullied name, but she had made improbable any future matrimonial prospects for her sister Carrie—then aged eight.
That, unfortunately, struck Charlotte as being humorous. Racked though she was, one remote corner of her mind's eye pictured the waspish little Carrie, in pinafore and strapped slippers, languishing for love, all forlorn—Carrie, who still stuck her tongue out by way of repartee. Charlotte giggled suddenly, quite without meaning to. Hysteria, probably. At this fresh exhibition of shamelessness her parents were aghast.
"Well! And you can laugh!" shouted Isaac Thrift through the soft and unheeded susurrus of his wife's Sh-sh-sh! "As if I hadn't enough trouble, with this war"—it sounded like a private personal grievance—"and business what it is, and real estate practically worth——"
"Sh-sh-sh! Carrie will hear you. The child mustn't know of this."
"Know! Everyone in town knows by now. My daughter running after a common soldier in the streets—a beggar—worse than a beggar—and kissing him like a—like a——"
Mrs. Thrift interrupted with mournful hastiness. "We must send her away. East. For a little visit. That would be best, for a few months."
At that Isaac Thrift laughed a rather terrible laugh. "Away! Thatwouldgive them a fine chance to talk. Away indeed, madam! A few months, h'm? Ha!"
Mrs. Thrift threw out her palms as though warding off a blow. "Isaac! You don't mean they'd think—Isaac!"
Charlotte regarded them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
Her mother looked at her. Charlotte raised her own tear-drenched face that was so mutely miserable, so stricken, so dumbly questioning. Marred as it was, and grief-ravaged, Mrs. Thrift seemed still to find there something that relieved her. She said more gently, perhaps, than in any previous questioning:
"Why did you do it, Charlotte?"
"I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it."
Isaac Thrift snorted impatiently. Hetty Thrift compressed her lips a little and sighed. "Yes, but why did you do it, Charlotte? Why? You have been brought up so carefully. How could you do it?"
Now, the answer that lay ready in Charlotte's mind was one that could have explained everything. And yet it would have explained nothing; at least nothing to Hetty and Isaac Thrift. The natural reply on Charlotte's tongue was simply, "Because I love him." But the Thrifts did not speak of love. It was not a ladylike word. There were certain words which delicacy forbade. "Love" was one of them. From the manner in which they shunned it—shrank from the very mention of it—you might almost have thought it an obscenity.
Mrs. Thrift put a final question. She had to. "Had you ever kissed him before?"
"Oh, no!" cried Charlotte so earnestly that they could not but believe. Then, quiveringly, as one bereaved, cheated, "Oh, no! No! Never! Not once.... Not once."
The glance that Mrs. Thrift shot at her husband then was a mingling of triumph and relief.
Isaac Thrift and his wife did not mean to be hard and cruel. They had sprung from stern stock. Theirs was the narrow middle-class outlook of members of a small respectable community. According to the standards of that community Charlotte Thrift had done an outrageous thing. War, in that day, was a grimmer, though less bloody and wholesale, business than it is to-day. An army whose marching song is Where Do We Go From Here? attaches small significance to the passing kiss of an hysterical flapper, whether the object of the kiss be buck private or general. But an army that finds vocal expression in The Battle Cry of Freedom and John Brown's Body is likely to take its bussing seriously. The publicly kissed soldier on his way to battle was the publicly proclaimed property of the kissee. And there in front of the Court House steps, in full sight of her world—the Addison Canes, the Thomas Holcombs, the Lewis Fullers, the Clapps—Charlotte Thrift, daughter of Isaac Thrift, had run after, had thrown her arms about, and had kissed a young man so obscure, so undesirable, so altogether an unfitting object for a gently-bred maiden's kisses (public or private) as to render valueless her kisses in future.
Of Charlotte's impulsive act her father and mother made something repulsive and sinister. She was made to go everywhere, but was duennaed like a naughty Spanish princess. Her every act was remarked. Did she pine she was berated and told to rouse herself; did she laugh she was frowned down. Her neat little escritoire frequently betrayed traces of an overhauling by suspicious alien fingers. There was little need of that after the first few days. The news of Jesse Dick's death at Donelson went almost unnoticed but for two Chicago households—one out Hardscrabble way, one on Wabash Avenue. It was otherwise as unimportant as an uprooted tree in the path of an avalanche that destroys a village. At Donelson had fallen many sons of Chicago's pioneer families; young men who were to have carried on the future business of the city; boys who had squired its daughters to sleigh-rides, to dances, to church sociables and horseback parties; who had drilled with Ellsworth's famous Zouaves. A Dick of Hardscrabble could pass unnoticed in this company.
There came to Charlotte a desperate and quite natural desire to go to his people; to see his mother; to talk with his father. But she never did. Instinctively her mother sensed this (perhaps, after all, she had been eighteen herself, once) and by her increased watchfulness made Hardscrabble as remote and unattainable as Heaven.
"Where are you going, Charlotte?"
"Just out for a breath of air, mother."
"Take Carrie with you."
"Oh, mother, I don't want——"
"Take Carrie with you."
She stopped at home.
She had no tangible thing over which to mourn; not one of those bits of paper or pasteboard or linen or metal over which to keen; nothing to hold in her two hands, or press to her lips or wear in her bosom. She did not even possess one of those absurd tintypes of the day showing her soldier in wrinkled uniform and wooden attitude against a mixed background of chenille drapery and Versailles garden. She had only her wound and her memory and perhaps these would have healed and grown dim had not Isaac Thrift and his wife so persistently rubbed salt in the one and prodded the other. After all, she was little more than eighteen, and eighteen does not break so readily. If they had made light of it perhaps she would soon have lifted her head again and even cast about for consolation.
"Moping again!"
"I'm not moping, father."
"What would you call it then?"
"Why, I'm just sitting by the window in the dusk. I often do. Even before—before——"
"There's enough and to spare for idle hands to do, I dare say. Haven't you seen to-day's paper nor heard of what's happened again at Manassas that you can sit there like that!"
She knew better than to explain that for her Jesse Dick died again with the news of each fresh battle.
She became curiously silent for so young a girl. During those four years she did her share with the rest of them; scraped lint, tore and rolled bandages, made hospital garments, tied comforters, knitted stockings and mittens, put up fruit and jellies and pickles for the soldiers. Chicago was a construction camp. Regiments came marching in from all the states north. Camp Douglas, south of Thirty-first Street, was at first thick with tents, afterward with wooden barracks. Charlotte even helped in the great Sanitary Fairs that lasted a week or more. You would have noticed no difference between this girl and the dozens of others who chirped about the flag-decked booths. But there was a difference. That which had gone from her was an impalpable something difficult to name. Only if you could have looked from her face to that of the girl of the old photograph—that girl in the sweeping habit, with the plume, and the rose held carelessly in one hand—you might have known. The glow, the bloom, the radiance—gone.
People forget, gradually. After all, there was so little to remember. Four years of war change many things, including perspective. Occasionally some one said, "Wasn't there something about that older Thrift girl? Charlotte, isn't it? Yes. Wasn't she mixed up with a queer person, or something?"
"Charlotte Thrift! Why, no! There hasn't been a more self-sacrificing worker in the whole—wait a minute. Now that you speak of it, I do believe there was—let's see—in love with a boy her folks didn't approve and made some kind of public scene, but just what it was——"
But Isaac and Hetty Thrift did not forget. Nor Charlotte. Sometimes, in their treatment of her, you would have thought her still the eighteen-year-old innocent of the photograph. When Black Crook came to the new Crosby Opera House in 1870, scandalizing the community and providing endless food for feminine (and masculine) gossip, Charlotte still was sent from the room to spare her maidenly blushes, just as though the past ten years had never been.
"I hear they wear tights, mind you, without skirts!"
"Not all the way!"
"Not an inch of skirt. Just—ah—trunks I believe they call them. A horrid word in itself."
"Well, really, I don't know what the world's coming to. Shouldn't you think that after the suffering and privation of this dreadful war we would all turn to higher things?"
But Mrs. Thrift's caller shook her head so emphatically that her long gold filigree earrings pranced. "Ah, but they do say a wave of immorality always follows a war. The reaction it's called. That is the word dear Dr. Swift used in his sermon last Sunday.
"Reactions are all very well and good," retorted Mrs. Thrift, tartly, "but they don't excuse tights, I hope."
Her visitor's face lighted up eagerly and unbeautifully. She leaned still closer. "I hear that this Eliza Weathersby, as she's called, plays the part of Stalacta in a pale blue bodice all glittering with silver passamenterie; pale blue satin trunks, mind you! And pale blue tights with a double row of tiny buttons all down the side of the l——"
Again, as ten years before, Mrs. Thrift raised signaling eyebrows. She emitted an artificial and absurd, "Ahem!" Then—"Charlotte, run upstairs and help poor Carrie with her English exercise."
"She's doing sums, mother. I saw her at them not ten minutes ago."
"Then tell her to put her sums aside. Do you know, dear Mrs. Strapp, Carrie is quite amazing at sums, but I tell her she is not sent to Miss Tait's finishing school under heavy expense to learn to do sums. But she actually likes them. Does them by way of amusement. Can add a double column in her head, just like her father. But her English exercise is always a sorry affair.... M-m-m-m.... There, now, you were saying tiny buttons down the side of the leg——" Charlotte had gone.
When the war ended Charlotte was twenty-two. An unwed woman of twenty-two was palpably over-fastidious or undesirable. Twenty-five was the sere and withered leaf. And soon Charlotte was twenty-five—twenty-eight—thirty. Done for.
The patchwork silk quilt, laid aside unfinished in '61, was taken up again in '65. It became quite famous; a renowned work of art. Visitors who came to the house asked after it. "And how is the quilt getting on, dear Charlotte?" as a novelist is sounded about an opus with which he is struggling or a painter his canvas. Mrs. Hannan, the Lake Street milliner, saved all her pieces for Charlotte. Often there was a peck of them at a time. The quilt was patterned in blocks. Charlotte, very serious, would explain to the caller the plan of the block upon which she was at the moment engaged.
"This one has a purple satin center, you see. I always think purple is so rich, don't you? Then the next row will be white uncut velvet. Doesn't it have a sumptuous sound! Next blue velvet and the last row orange-colored silk." (No; not the same piece. Carrie had never relinquished her booty.) "Now, this next block is to be quite gay. It is almost my favorite. Cherry satin center—next, white velvet again—next, green velvet—and last, pink satin. Don't you think it will be sweet! I can scarcely wait until I begin that block."
The winged sweep of the fine black brows was ruffled by a frown of earnest concentration as she bent intently over the rags and scraps of shimmering stuffs. Her cheated fingers smoothed and caressed the satin surfaces as tenderly as though they lingered on a baby's cheek.
When, finally, it was finished—lined with turkey red and bound with red ribbon—Charlotte exhibited it at the Fair, following much persuasion by her friends. It took first prize among twenty-five silk quilts. A day of great triumph for Charlotte Thrift. The prize was a basket worth fully eight dollars.