Chapter 20
ON the evening of the day when Mrs. Knapp was informed that she would be put in Miss Flynn’s place Helen and her father celebrated by making an omelette with asparagus tips (Mother’s favorite supper dish) and Henry was sent scurrying out to bring back a brick of mixed vanilla and chocolate from Angelotti’s Ice-Cream Parlor. They did not play whist that evening. They just sat around and talked it over and admired Mother and heard again and again about the thrice-blessed events in the family of Miss Flynn’s niece, which led to her retirement. “Of course it’s terribly, terribly sad!” Mother reminded them. “Those poor little children left without their mother! Nothing—nothingcan ever make up to them for such a loss.”
But this decent observation cast no shade over the rejoicings. Miss Flynn was but a remote and disagreeable legend to the children; and she had been a particularbête-noirefor Lester in the old days. As for her utterly unknown niece—no, Mother could not make that shadowy death cast anything but sunshine into their lives. They went on planning all the more energetically about thethings they could do if they could have a Ford and go off to the country together for picnics on Sundays—even Father! They talked about which college Helen would like to attend. They talked about which kind of bicycle Henry liked the best.
The children joined in the talk till nine o’clock, and long after they were in bed with their lights out they could hear the distant murmur of Father’s and Mother’s voices going on planning, such a friendly, cheerful, easy sort of murmur. Helen could not remember when she had ever heard Father and Mother talk together like that. It was like music in her ears. The last thought she had before she fell asleep was, “I am so happy! I never was so happy!”
Her mother fell asleep on the same thought. Apparently the excitement of it was too much for her, for she woke up suddenly, to hear the clock strike three, and found she could not get to sleep again because at once, in a joyful confusion, her mind was filled with a rush of happy thoughts, “I am to have Miss Flynn’s place. Three thousand a year. And a bonus! In a year or so I ought to be making four thousand.”
Four thousand dollars!They had never had more than eighteen hundred. Her thoughts vibrated happily between plans of what they could do here at the house and plans of what she would do inthe reorganization of the department at the store. For some time, as she lay awake, her mind was as active and concrete and concentrated on her work as ever in the store; she was planning a system of post-card notices to customers when something especially suited to one or another came in:—“Dear Mrs. Russell: Among the new things in the department which have just come in from New York are some smocked, hand-made children’s dresses that look exactly like your little Margery....” “Dear Miss Pelman: Do you remember the suit you did not buy because of the horizontal trimming on the skirt? Mr. Willing found in New York last week the same suit without that line. I am laying it aside till you can drop in to look at it.”
She wondered if she could let her salesgirls send out such cards too. No, it must be done with great discretion—above all must not seem too urgent. People didn’t like to feel they were being hunted down.
She stepped about mentally among the innumerable details of her plans with her usual orderly mastery of them, her usual animated interest in them, her usual unquestioning acceptance of them as important. From them she went on to plans for a series of educational talks to her salesgirls about the fabrics and styles and fine points of their merchandise. She wished she could do the samething for the girls in the Ladies’ Waist and Sweater Department. There were some such bright girls there, but so ignorant of their business. They’d pick it up in no time if they had the chance, if she were allowed to....
Why! With a tremor all over her, she wondered if some time she might not be not only head of her own department, but superintendent for all that floor. By a flash of prescience she suddenly knew as she lay there alone in the quiet that the road to advancement lay open before her, that she could step along surely and steadily to success and take her dearly loved children with her, working for them with all her might, profoundly thankful to be able to give them what she had always so tragically and impotently wished them to have.
The wideness of this thought, the blackness of the night, the unwonted prone passivity of her energetic body, all wrought upon her to a strange softness of mood. She felt almost like a girl again ... dreaming.
And that made her think of Lester. He had been in her mind more than usual of late, as she had learned more about the lives of the other women employed in the store. She was one of the older employees and almost at once the younger women had leaned on her, turned to her with confidences, and asked her advice as the women of her churchhad always done. But these were rougher, rawer lives into which she now looked. That haggard-eyed Mrs. Hemp, in the kitchen-ware department, what a horrible picture she had drawn of her relations with her husband. “He’s going with one of the girls in the collar-factory now, Mrs. Knapp. I wouldn’t put up with it a minute if it weren’t for the children. That man was unfaithful to me, Mrs. Knapp, six months after we were married, and my first baby on the way. And it’s been a new girl for him ever since whenever he got tired of the old one.” And Margaret Donahue, she that read novels on the sly, but never would look at a man, what had she said? “They make me sick,” she declared briefly with an expression on her young face which Mrs. Knapp would have given a good deal not to have seen. “I’d no more let a man come near me than a toad. I’ve seen too much of what Papa does to Mama.”
And the woman who scrubbed the floors, that evening she had come to beg Mrs. Knapp to let her sleep at the store, under a counter, in the toilet-room, anywhere, so she would not have to go home. “You’re a married woman yourself, Mrs. Knapp,” she had said. “You know what men are like. Judd is in one of his crazy spells! I’m afraid to go home till he gets over it. Honest I am, Mrs. Knapp. Let me stay here! I don’t care where! I’ll sit up all night in a chair if you’ll only let me stay.”
Eva had brought her home and let her sleep on a mattress on the floor in her own room. She had felt an immense horrified pity for her; but she had hated her for that phrase, “You are a married woman, Mrs. Knapp. You know what men are like!” Did she think for a minute that Lester Knapp was that kind of a brute! Couldn’t she see bylookingat him that he was a million times too fine to ... she hated the woman again to-night as she thought of it, and the thought brought up before her all that Lester had been to her.
No woman could have better reason than she to trust the delicacy, the warm loving-heartedness, the self-control, the innate decency of a man. They had been married for fourteen years, and from the sweet, sweet early days of their young honeymoon when, ignorant and innocent both of them, they had stumbled their way towards each other, she had never known a single instant of this poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and hate and endured violence which these other women apparently took for granted as the inevitable relationship of husband and wife. How good Lester had been to her! She had not appreciated it. She had not really thought of it. It had never occurred to her that he might be anything else.
And how good to the children! Never an impatient word, like most men. He was the best fatherin the world. Not another man she knew could have endured it to be so shut up with the children. How faithfully he had tried to take her place, now that she could not be in her rightful position with them. What lovely memories the children would have of their father, always! Was it possible he was of the same flesh and blood as Ellen O’Hern’s father who never, so Ellen said, passed one of his children without aiming a blow at it.
The overflowing of this affection for Lester which had been slowly rising for weeks; her deep thankfulness for what she would be able to do for the children ... she found herself trembling in her bed. She felt an impulsive longing to share her emotion with Lester, to put her arms about his neck and let him know that she did not take his loyalty, his gentleness, his faithfulness, his fineness, so coldly for granted as she had seemed. She had been so unhappy about their hideous poverty. That was all. It was abominable to be poor! It brought out the worst in every one. When you were distracted with worry about money, you simply weren’t yourself.
Warm and flushed, she sprang out of bed, lighted a candle and went softly downstairs in her slippered feet. Neither Lester nor Stephen woke as she went into the room, and she stood for an instant gazing down at them. Stephen was beautiful andstrong, sleeping with both rounded arms flung up over his head. Lester was looking almost like a boy in the abandon of his sleep, like the fine, true-hearted, sensitive boy to whom she had given herself as a girl.
But that boy had been vibrant with life from his head to his heels. And now half of his body lay dead. From the first it had been appalling to Evangeline to see that helpless, frozen immobility. How splendidly he had endured it, without a complaint! But she had seen from his eagerness to-night, as they talked of the possibility of having a Ford, how imprisoned he had felt, how wild with pleasure it made him to think he would be able to get out of these four walls. She would never have been as patient as he! If she had been condemned to that death-in-life of half her body, not able even to turn over in bed without waking up to a nightmare of struggle, her legs like so much stone....
Had she made a sound? Had the light of the candle disturbed him a little?
Without waking, Lester drew a long breath, turned over easily in bed, drew up his knees with a natural, flexible motion, threw his arm out over the covers, and dropped off to profound sleep once more.
Everybody at the store was sure, the next day,that Mrs. Knapp was coming down with some serious malady. She was not only extremely pale and shaken by shivers that ran all over her. It was worse. She had a look of death-like sickness that frightened the girls in her department. They sent for Mr. Willing to come.
When he did, he gave one look at Mrs. Knapp’s pinched face and stooped shoulders and ordered her home at once. “You’re coming down with the flu, Mrs. Knapp. Everybody’s having it. Now it doesn’t amount to anything this year if you take it quick. But it’s foolishness to try to keep on your feet. You get right home, take some quinine and some aspirin, and give yourself a sweat. You’ll be all right. But don’t wait a minute.”
Without a word, Mrs. Knapp put on her wraps and went out of the store. She did not turn homeward. She dared not go home and face Lester and the children till she had wrestled with those awful questions and had either answered them or been killed by them.
Where could she go to be alone? She decided that she would walk straight ahead of her out into the country. No, that would not do. Everybody knew her. They would comment on it. They would ask her questions. She felt that she would burst into shrieks if any one asked her a question just then.
As she hesitated, she saw over the roofs of the houses the spire of St. Peter’s pointing upward, and with a rush her heart turned towards the quiet and solitude of the church. Thank Heaven, it was always kept open.
She hurried down a side-street and, pushing open the heavy door, stumbled forward into the hushed, dusky, empty building. She felt her way to the nearest pew, knelt down and folded her hands as if to pray. She tried with all her might to pray. But could not.
The raging unrest and turmoil in her heart rose up in clashing waves and filled the church with its clamor. It was in vain that she tried to combat it with odds and ends of prayers which came into her mind with the contact of the pew, with the familiar atmosphere of church.
“Almighty and most merciful Father....”
Lester was better!
“Oh, God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in....”
Lester would get well ... would get well!
“God be merciful to us and bless us and show us the....”
And then.... And then....
“No! No! No!” she cried out aloud, passionately, and pressed her trembling hands over her mouth, frightened.
She was a wicked woman. God be merciful to me, a sinner. She had no heart. She did not want her husband to get well. She did not want to go home and live with her children.
But she must. She must! There was no other way. Like a person shut up suddenly in an airless prison, she ran frantically from one locked door to another, beating her hands on them, finding them sullenly strong, not even shaken on their cruel steel hinges as she flung herself against them. If Lester got well, of course he could not stay at home and keep house and take care of the children ... no able-bodied man ever did that. What would people say? It was out of the question. People would laugh at Lester. They would laugh at her. They would not admire her any more. What would people say if she did not go back at once to the children? She who had always been so devoted to them, she whom people pitied now because she was forced to be separated from them. Every one had heard her say how hard it was for a mother to be separated from her....
For one instant, an instant she never forgot, Evangeline knew for the first, the only time in her life, a gust of cold, deadly contempt for herself. It nearly killed her, she who had tried so hard all her life to keep her self-respect, she who had been willing to pay any price so that in her own eyes she mightbe always in the right. Yes, it nearly killed her.
But it did not reconcile her to the inevitable nor bow her spirit in resignation. Never before had she been asked to pay any such price as this.
She couldn’t! She couldn’t! She stood stock-still in her prison cell and wrung her hands in revolt. She simply could not. After having known something else, she could not go back to the narrow, sordid round of struggle with intolerable ever-renewed drudgery, to the daily, hourly contact with the children’s forgetfulness, carelessness, foolishness ... to Stephen’s horrible tempers ... with no outlet ... no future ... poverty for them all, always.
Poverty! It came down suffocatingly over her head like a smothering blanket thrown and twisted hard by an assailant who had sprung upon her out of the dark. She had thought herself safe from that long, slow starvation. To go back to it, to the raging, helpless narrowness of an income tragically too small, to rise up and lie down with that leaden care, to drag it about all day like a ball and chain ... she could never endure it now that she knew that it was not in the least inevitable, knew how easy it was to avoid it, knew that if Lester were only willing to care a little more, to try a little harder, to put his mind on it really and truly, togive his heart to itas she did....
All her old burning impatience with Lester was there, boiling up in clouds from the cauldron of her heart.
Through those turbid clouds she had a glimpse of a woman, touched and moved, standing by a man’s bedside and blessing him silently for his faithfulness, his gentleness, his fineness ... but those figures were far away, flat and unreal, like something in a made-up picture. They were but an added irritation. She hated the thought of them as a creature in flames would hate the recollection of a running brook.
Poverty ... isolation, monotony, stagnation, killing depression over never-ending servile tasks ...poverty!
There was no way out. She knew that now. But she could not endure it. She never could endure it again. She would hate Lester. She would kill herself and the children.
She had sunk lower and lower till now she was crouching in a heap, panting, her bent arms over her face as if beaten down by relentless blows which she could no longer even try to parry.
What could she do? Her native energy rose up blindly, staggering, like a courageous fighter who has been knocked out but does not know it. What could shedo? With a terrible effort, she strove to rise to a higher level than this mere brute suffering.She tried—yes, she really tried for a moment to think what was the right thing to do. She tried again to pray, to ask God to show her what was the right thing for a good woman to do—but she could not pray.
“Grant, O Lord, I beseech thee ... pour into our hearts such....” No, she could not pray. She could not command her mind to any such coherence as prayer. Whirling snatches of the thoughts which had filled her mind incessantly since the night before were blown across her attention like birds driven before a tornado—“The place for a mother is with her children—” How many times she had heard that—and said it. She was a bad woman to rebel so against it. And it would do her no good to rebel. What else could she do? Around and around the cell she tore, beating her hands on those locked doors. Some one had to stay and keep house and take care of the children and make the home. And if Lester were cured he couldn’t. No able-bodied man could do such work, of course. Nobody ever heard of such a thing. Men had to make the living. What would people say? They would laugh. They would make fun of the children. And of Lester. And of her. They would think of course she ought to want to do it. Every one had heard her say how hard it was for a.... And they couldn’t go away to another city, somewhere else,where no one knew them. Her one chance was here, here!
But all at once with a final roar the tumult swept off and went beating its way into the distance, out of the church and her heart. There was a dead, blank silence about her, through which there came to her a clear, neat, compact thought, “But perhaps Lester will not get well. Perhaps he will not get well.”
A deep bodeful hush filled her heart. It was as though she had suddenly gone deaf to all the noises of the world, to everything but that one possibility. She was straighter now, no longer crouched and panting. She was on her knees, her hands clasped, her head decently bent, in the familiar attitude of Sunday morning.
At last she was praying.
A moment later she was running out of the church as though a phantom had risen beside her and laid a skeleton hand on her shoulder ... she had not been praying that Lester ... no, it was notpossiblethat she had been praying that her husband would not get well!
But soon she walked more quietly, more at her usual pace. After all she had nothing to go on, nothing to be sure of, nothing really to make her think it very likely that Lester would....