CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was the end of October. The trees in the parks and along the Palisades were bare, but the sun still shone and children danced in the streets to the music of the hurdy-gurdies. On Fifth Avenue, women in costly furs drove from shop to shop, buying greedily. Starved through their long summer with the mountains and the sea, they bought laces and jewels and still more costly furs. Down in the restaurants of the foreign quarters, the proprietors had taken in the little tables and dismantled the artificial gardens. The husbands of the women in costly furs now dined at home or in their uptown clubs.
Everywhere people settled to their winter's work. The strikers and manufacturers were locked in a death grip, and Jean often sat up half the night with Rachael. Rachael was whiter and more flamelike than ever. She never mentioned Tom, but Jean knew that he had married a girl of his own faith and that Rachael knew.
Then, on the fifteenth the manufacturers capitulated. With almost all their demands granted the strikers went back to work. No jubilant mass meeting marked the victory. Worn with the long fight the workers went back quietly. Jean felt as if something had gone out of her life. The settlement left vacant hours, and she wanted something to fill every moment. For the thought of Gregory was always waiting, ready to slip in.
From dreading ever to see him again, Jean had passed through hours when nothing else mattered, dizzy hours when she juggled with excuses for communicating with him and persuaded herself that it was the perfectly natural thing to do. And there were hours, lying awake at night, when she did not think of herself at all, but went round and round the endless circle of Gregory's motives. That he had shared her fear never entered Jean's mind, for so deep and hidden was the longing to believe that he cared, that not even Jean's analysis dragged it to light. One impossible reason after another Jean grasped and held for a little while, and then it slipped away. He was busy. He meant to ring up or write or come—and didn't. Summer and winter were two different worlds in New York. He had been bored and lonely then; now his days were full.
Jean held to this firmly, and, as the weeks slipped away, succeeded in believing it. Still, she was glad when Mary at last stopped mentioning him. Shortly after Thanksgiving, Jean and the doctor made up the list of invitations to the tea, with which, in what now seemed another life, they had threatened Gregory. Dr. Mary jabbed her pencil through his name, which headed the old list made up that hot June night.
"It's your business, of course, Jean, and you can do as you like; butIwouldn't ask him, for anything. I don't believe it will make any difference, and we have Fenninger. It's really going to look terribly imposing, the building plans and the lot diagram, too."
"I don't want to ask him. Fenninger will be the whole show and more."
But, a week later, as Jean moved through the crowded rooms, explaining the same things over and over, receiving congratulations and the more substantial promises of checks, her eyes kept wandering to the door. And she knew she was hoping that somehow Gregory would come. There was no way that he could know, and yet——For what seemed interminable lengths of time Jean kept her back deliberately to the door, and then, when she was sure that it did not matter to her at all, turned, and for one brief second—so vividly was he in her imagining—saw him with his badly fitting clothes and the happy twinkle in his eyes.
When the last guest had gone, Mary dropped into a chair and groaned.
"It was a success all right, but thank God it's over. Jean, that is my idea of Hell."
Jean was looking out to the bare trees of the Park. It was empty, and bits of paper blew in a gusty wind about the paths. A leaden sky hung low and the arc-light was not yet lit. Jean shivered.
"It's mine, too," she said, and the tears suddenly welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
"Why, Jean, what on earth is the matter?"
Jean brushed at the tears and tried to smile. "I suppose I've been more worried about this going off well than I knew.It'sfinished, too; nothing left but to build now. It's rather like a death somehow."
Dr. Mary looked thoughtfully at Jean's back. It was not at all like Jean to cry because a piece of work was successfully finished. In fact, she had never seen Jean cry before.
"I shouldn't wonder if you didn't need a rest, Mrs. Herrick, in spite of that energy of yours. I don't believe you had a decent, leisurely meal all those last weeks of the strike. Will you take one?"
For a moment Jean did not know whether she was going to laugh or burst into an uncontrollable fit of crying. She turned away from the window.
"Certainly not. I never felt better in my life. It's partly these candles. I hate the things. They always look like funerals or a church. Let's have some practical, plebeian light."
She switched on the electricity and then went round blowing out the candles. By the time they were all out, Jean had worked up a disgust of herself that deceived the doctor.
"It's not less work that I need, but more. I haven't had a fight with Pedloe for a month, and the strike's so terribly settled I feel as if there was never going to be another dispute worth mentioning between capital and labor for the rest of my natural life."
"Cheer up. Society is beautifully rotten yet. Besides, just think of that talk you're scheduled for on—Municipal Housekeeping, I believe you said, Mrs. Herrick?"
"Garbage, Dr. MacLean, garbage, flies and infant mortality."
They laughed. "Jean, really we women are a scream, though no man would draw that out of me with red-hot pincers. Why, in the name of common sense, has everything got to be Housekeeping?"
"Because we've been locked up so long that we're afraid of the open. And we haven't got over the idea that we have to placate men, even yet, with a suffrage organization in every State. They still like to think of us, running between the cradle and the stove, so every mortal thing we do we've got to hitch up some way to a home. Decent milk, and the regulation of food prices, and garbage, divorce, child labor, widows' pensions, are all 'National Housekeeping,' and it sounds as if we had only moved into a larger house."
"Is that what you're going to tell them to-morrow? If it is, I'm going to stay right here and go, even if Third Cousin Nelly never speaks to me again. And she won't. I slipped out of it for Thanksgiving, and she's only got this one turkey left."
"You can go and eat it in peace, for I wouldn't have you at the meeting if you begged me on your knees. There are depths of depravity and duplicity in me that you have never guessed. You've never seen me being gracious."
"You weren't so bad to-day."
"Not a circumstance. A mere nothing to what I shall accomplish on Tuesday."
They smoked in silence for a while, and then Dr. Mary said suddenly:
"Some day I am going to write an article on the Biological Why of Women's Faith in Each Other."
"Outline it now. Maybe I can incorporate some of it in the talk."
"I can't. I don't know myself. It's not written yet. But it is funny, isn't it, how women in the aggregate do annoy one, and yet at bottom each one of the mass has the same qualities of the individual woman, who keeps our faith burning. I once went to a conference of women physicians, and it almost drove me wild. There's something about my own sex en masse that depresses me dreadfully. And yet, each one of those doctors was an able woman, and I would have enjoyed an hour with her more than with any man I had ever met."
"I know. I believe in my congress idea, but sometimes I wish I could put it over without ever having to go near anybody. Trade Unions and Consumers' Leagues and things like that aren't so bad, but these clubs!—And yet it is just where most of the energy is going to waste. They always make me feel like an overgrown, gawky boy, and as if all my clothes were on wrong."
A few days later, as Jean stood on the raised dais waiting for the well-bred clapping to cease, she almost wished she had urged Mary to come. She could never do it justice, never.
The perfectly appointed clubrooms were crowded with beautiful gowned women all looking toward her in polite interest. There was no enthusiasm and no inattention. Beneath their interest in her as a public person, was a restrained curiosity as to her as a woman. Jean had long ago become used to being considered a growing force in her world, but she knew these women had gauged to a cent the price of the furs she had laid off in the anteroom and that the simple way she did her hair, in a rather tight wad at the nape of her neck, was in some way connected in their minds with indifference to masculine interest or inability to capture it.
The applause ceased and the room rustled to silence. They sat waiting, their white gloved hands graceful in their laps, their chins raised, their well kept, unvital bodies in repose. Seen so, from the dais, they all looked bewilderingly alike, as if many artists had faithfully copied a model, varying as little as possible. Jean wondered what they would do if she should begin:
"'Licensed prostitutes,' I am here this afternoon——"
She smiled. All the faces below smiled, one large smile cut up into pieces.
Half way down the room, behind one of the pieces of the smile, Mabel Dawson sized her up.
"Conceited as they're made. Because we know how to do our hair she thinks we're feeble-minded."
Jean began to talk simply and convincingly in a way that held her hearers but annoyed Mabel Dawson exceedingly.
"I don't wonder that her husband brought another woman into the house, if she always explained things to him as if he were two years old." Mabel then lost the drift of Jean's talk altogether while she tried to trace the marks of suffering on her face.
Sitting well down to the front and looking lovely in a soft lavender creation, Margaret Allen's mind was busy with the same problem. She too was searching Jean's face for lines of suffering and could not find them. A woman with Jean's past ought to look more as if she had gathered up the broken threads and gone on. But Jean must be the kind of woman who either never broke threads, or if she did, ripped out the ravelings and wove new ones. There was nothing sad about her. In fact her superb physique and very evident efficiency were rather hard. She would always know exactly what she wanted and just how to get it. She would walk straight to her point, in the low-heeled shoes that just missed being square-toed and common-sense.
A patter of hands broke in on Margaret's cogitations. She listened for a few moments. Jean was really making the subject interesting. A vague envy began to crystallize at the back of Margaret's mind. She did not want to dispose of garbage, but there were many things, in the last twelve years, that she had wanted to do and had had to let go because of Gregory and Puck. The chemicalization passed from envy of Jean to annoyance with Gregory. It never occurred to him that she had given up anything. She was never sure that he did not think she was a little stupid. His tolerance of The Fortnightly was insulting, and yet women like Jean Herrick thought it was worth while.
The meeting came to an end with sincere applause. Women gathered about and begged for another talk, and proved by their questions a real desire to do things besides hold meetings. Then two maids wheeled in tea, and gossip bubbled up.
Holding her cup and the last crumbs of rich cake, Jean succeeded in drawing to one side. Almost hidden behind an alabaster statue on an ebony pedestal, she was studying the faces about her, when a soft voice startled her so that she almost dropped the cup on the velvet rug.
"Oh, Mrs. Herrick, I just couldn't not speak to you." Margaret often gave her sentences small twists that ornamented them. Jean smiled.
"Was the urge as great as that, really?'
"Yes, indeed. That was a wonderful talk! Besides, I almost feel as if we were old friends already. I'm terribly interested in the tenements."
Jean's smile deepened but she looked puzzled. She met such a lot of women like this, and was always forgetting them. Margaret might even have been at the tea or sent a check.
Margaret laughed. "No, you haven't met me somewhere and forgotten, though I shouldn't mind a bit if you had. I am Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Gregory Allen."
Jean's fingers closed on the saucer. From a long way off she heard the words dropping between herself and the woman before her:
"I am very glad."
The same power that dropped the words, lifted her hand, and Margaret's came to meet it.
"I was terribly interested, and so glad that Mr. Allen was connected with the tenements. It's so much more real than just ordinary houses, more human and broader, you know. Sometimes I tell him he'll petrify in all those angles and concrete, without the personal touch."
Jean grasped her brain and set it down outside, as she might have lifted a screaming child and put it firmly in a chair. She would deal with it later.
"There are dozens of things I would like to talk over with you. Couldn't I presume on the acquaintance we haven't really got yet, and ask you to take pot-luck with us? Now, please don't say you've got something desperately interesting to interfere."
For years Jean remembered that moment, and the way in which Margaret Allen receded, became more and more indistinct, almost vanished. But not quite. Just at the moment she was dropping beyond the horizon an icy hand clutched Jean's heart and Margaret was close again, smiling and waiting for an answer.
"I'm sorry, but I'm really very busy. Winter is one long rush in this kind of work."
"I know. It must be; that's why I'm not going to try and force you to anything formal, just ourselves, and if you have a meeting afterwards you can run away. We shall understand."
Jean felt as if she were in the grip of some small, persistent animal that would never let go.
"Any night you say, Mrs. Herrick. But I'm just not going to let you off." Her pretty lips curved in childish pleading. And Margaret suddenly assumed a reality of her own. This was the woman whom Gregory Allen had loved and married, whose life was bound to his, whose babbling was always in his ears.
Jean almost laughed. She and Mary had paraded their bag of tricks, their broader viewpoint, their richer personalities. He had been interested, as he might have been interested in a play above the summer level of Broadway, and had gone back to his home, to the stifling life which evidently did not stifle him at all. Not all the big problems, the genuine human needs that she had struggled with for the last two months, had dulled the memory of that dinner when his need had called so sharply to her, when she had wanted to take his head in her arms and comfort him. And those moments in Rachael's room, when she had been caught up and almost swept away by the biggest force that had ever touched her life. And he? During these two months he had been quite contentedly listening to this senseless chatter. He must have been, since he had made no effort to escape it even for the brief visit that common decency demanded.
"How about to-morrow, then? Don't you think you might just squeeze us in?"
"If you will really understand and excuse me right after." She would go and free herself from this power. She would go and see Gregory Allen and this woman in the home they had made together. Pride and her own sense of humor would do the rest.
"Indeed we shall. How about seven o'clock? Or is that a little late? I can make it six-thirty if you'd rather?"
"Oh, no. Seven is quite all right."
Margaret wrote the address with a gold pencil she took from her handbag. For a moment Jean felt linked to Margaret by her inability to say that she already knew the number.
"I'll give you the 'phone, too, in case anything should happen, but don't let anything, please."
"No, I won't." Jean took the slip, and at the same moment the chairman glided up and began scolding Margaret for monopolizing Mrs. Herrick. Jean was led away, and for another half hour she answered questions. Then Margaret was before her again, delicious in a coat with fur cuffs and a collar that framed her face like a huge leaf.
"Au revoir, until to-morrow at seven."
Margaret caught the envious glance of the chairman and made an intimate little motion of farewell to Jean.
It was over at last, and Jean was walking along briskly in the coming night. She was going to see Gregory Allen again. She was going to sit at his table, with his wife and child, and talk of general things. She was going to grasp this haunting power that held her days and crush it. She would not be afraid after she had seen him there in his own world.
"I suppose she will tell him to-night—'Oh, Gregory, Mrs. Herrick is dining with us to-morrow.'"
Jean smiled. He would be surprised. She could see his eyes widen in that childish fashion that had come to make her feel——
"You fool. You unspeakable fool." Jean's scorn of herself before these vivid pictures of a man, who had never given her the slightest right to think he had any of her at all, lashed her pride to anger.
"You're thirty-four, you idiot. Suppose you do love him? What of it? Maybe you won't after to-morrow night."
All the way down in the Subway the refrain beat in Jean's ears:
"Maybe you—won't. May-be you—won't. Mebbe youwon't. Mebbeyouwon't."
She let herself into Dr. Mary's empty apartment, and then telephoned Martha that she had to work late. In the morning it would be different, but to-night she could not describe the meeting, and Martha was always interested in every detail.