Books: Martie The Unconquered

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Two little clouds spoiled the long-awaited glory of going to New
York for Martie, when early in July she and Wallace really arranged
to go. One was the supper he gave a night or two before they left to
various young members of the Hawkes family, Reddy Johnson, and one
or two other men. Martie thought it was "silly" to order wine and to
attempt a smart affair in the dismal white dining room of the hotel;
she resented the opportunity Wallace gave her old friends to see him
when he was not at his best. She scolded him for incurring the
unnecessary expense.

The second cloud lay in the fact that, without consulting her, he
had borrowed money from Rodney Parker. This stung Martie's pride
bitterly.

"Wallace, WHY did you?" she asked with difficult self-control.

"Oh, well; it was only a hundred; and he's coining money," Wallace
answered easily. "I breezed into the Bank one day, and he was
boasting about his job, and his automobile. He took out his bank
book and showed me his balance. And all of a sudden it occurred to
me I might make a touch. I told him about Dawson." He looked at his
wife's dark, resentful face. "Don't you worry, Mart," he said. "YOU
didn't borrow it!"

Martie silently resuming her packing reflected upon the irony of
life. She was married, she was going to New York. What a triumphant
achievement of her dream of a year ago! And yet her heart was so
heavy that she might almost have envied that old, idle Martie,
wandering under the trees of Main Street and planning so hopefully
for the future.

On the day before she left, exhilarated with the confusion, the new
hat she had just bought, the packed trunks, she went to see her
mother. It was a strange hour that she spent in the old sitting
room, in the cool, stale, home odours, with the home pictures, the
jointed gas brackets under which she had played solitaire and the
square piano where she had sung "The Two Grenadiers." Outside, in
the sunken garden, summer burgeoned fragrantly; the drawn window
shades bellied softly to and fro, letting in wheeling spokes of
light, shutting down the twilight again. Lydia and her mother, like
gentle ghosts, listened to her, reproving and unsympathetic.

"Pa is angry with you, Martie, arid who can blame him?" said Lydia.
"I'm sure I never heard of such actions, coming from a girl who had
loving parents and a good home!"

This was the mother's note. Lydia was always an echo.

"It isn't as if you hadn't had everything, Mart. You girls had
everything you needed--that party at Thanksgiving and all! And
you've no idea of the TALK in town! Pa feels it terribly. To think
that other girls, even like Rose, who had no father, should have so
much more sense than OUR girls."

Martie talked of Sally's baby. "Named for you, Ma," she told her
mother. And with sudden earnestness she added: "WHY don't you go see
it some day? It's the dearest baby I ever saw!"

Mrs. Monroe, who had a folded handkerchief in her bony, discoloured
fingers, now pressed it to her eyes, shaking her head as she did so.
Lydia gave Martie a resentful look, and her mother a sympathetic
one, before she said primly:

"If Sally Monroe wanted Ma and me to go see her and her baby, why
didn't she marry some man Pa could have been proud of, and have a
church wedding and act in a way becoming to her family?"

To this Martie had nothing to say. She left messages of love for Len
and for her father. Her mother and sister came with her for good-
byes to the old porch with its peeling dark paint and woody rose-
vines.

"Pa said at noon that you had 'phoned you wanted to come say good-
bye," said her mother mildly. "I hope you'll always be happy,
Martie, and remember that we did our best for you. If you're a good
girl, and write some day and ask Pa's forgiveness, I think he may
come 'round, because he was always a most affectionate father to his
children."

The toneless, lifeless voice ceased. Martie kissed Lydia's
unresponsive warm cheek, and her mother's flat soft one. She walked
quickly down the old garden, through the still rich green, and
smelled, as she had smelled a thousand times before, the velvety
sweetness of wallflowers. As she went, she heard her sister say, in
a quick, low tone:

"Look, Ma--there's Angela Baxter with that man again. I wonder who
on earth he is?"

CHAPTER III

The big train moved smoothly. Martie, her arm laid against the
window, felt it thrill her to her heart. She smiled steadily as she
watched the group on the platform, and Sally, Joe, and all the
others who had come to say good-bye smiled steadily back. Sometimes
they shouted messages; but they all were secretly anxious for the
train to move, and Martie, for all her smiling and nodding, was in a
fever to be gone.

They vanished; all the faces she knew. The big train slid through
Monroe. Martie had a last glimpse of Mason and White's--of the
bridge--of the winery with its pyramids of sweet-smelling purple
refuse. Outlying ranches, familiar from Sunday walks and drives,
slipped by. Down near the old Archer ranch, Henry Prout was driving
his mother into town. The surrey and the rusty white horse were
smothered in sulphurous dust. It seemed odd to Martie that Henny was
driving Mrs. Prout into town with an air of actual importance; Henny
was clean, and the old lady had on cotton gloves and a stiff gray
percale. Yet they were only going to hot little Monroe. Martie was
going to New York!

All her life she remembered the novelty and delight of the trip.
Wallace was at his best; the new hat had its share in the happy
recollection. The dining car, the berths, the unchanging routine of
the day--all charmed her.

She watched her first thunder storm in Chicago with awed pleasure.
The hour came, when, a little jaded, feeling dirty and tumbled,
feeling excited and headachy and nervous, Martie saw her neighbours
in the car begin to straighten garments and gather small
possessions. They were arriving!

She was silent, as first impressions jumbled themselves together in
her tired brain. Wallace, at her elbow, was eager with information.

"Look, Mart--this is the Grand Central. They're going to tear all
this down! Look--that's the subway--those hoods, where the people
are going down! See over that way--this is Forty-Second Street, one
of the biggest cross-streets there is--and over that way is
Broadway! We can't take the subway, I wish we could--you wait until
you see the expresses! But I'll tell you what we'll do, we'll go
over and take a 'bus, on the Avenue--see, here's a Childs'--see,
there's the new Library! Climb right up on the 'bus, if you get a
chance, because then we can see the Park!"

Bewildered, dirty, tired, she stumbled along at his side, her eyes
moving rapidly over the strange crowds, the strange buildings, the
strange streets and crossings. That must be an elevated train
banging along; here was a park, with men packed on the benches, and
newspapers blowing lazily on the paths. And shops in all the
basements--why had no one ever told her that there were shops in all
the basements? And a placid church facade breaking this array of
trimmed windows and crowded little enterprises! It was hot: she felt
her forehead wet, her clothes seemed heavy and sticky, and her head
ached dully.

"Howd' you like it?" Wallace asked enthusiastically.

"I love it, sweetheart!"

Wallace, frankly embarrassed for money, took her at once to Mrs.
Curley's big boarding-house in East Seventieth Street, where the
Cluetts had stayed.

Mabel had told Martie that "Grandma Curley" was a "character." She
was a plain, shrewd, kindly old woman, who lived in an old
brownstone house that had been acquired after his death, Martie
learned, for a bad debt of her husband's making. She liked everybody
and believed in nobody; smiling a deep, mysterious smile when her
table or her management was praised. She eyed Martie's fresh beauty
appraisingly, immediately suspected her condition, was given the
young wife's unreserved confidence, and, with a few brief pieces of
advice, left her new boarders entirely to their own devices.
Wallace's daring compliments fell upon unhearing ears; she would not
lower her prices for anybody, she said. They could have the big room
for eighteen, or the little one for fourteen dollars a week.

"Sixteen for the big one! You know you like our looks," said
Wallace.

"I'd be losing money on it, Mr. Bannister. You can take it or leave
it, just as you like."

He was a little daunted by her firmness, but in the end he told
Martie that eighteen was cheap enough, and as she scattered her
belongings about, his wife gave a happy assent. It was fun to be
married and be boarding in New York.

She was too confused, too excited, to eat her dinner. They were both
in wild spirits; and went out after dinner to take an experimental
ride on the elevated train. That evening the trunk came, and Martie,
feeling still in a whirl of new impressions, unpacked in the big
bare bedroom; as pleased as a child to arrange her belongings in the
empty bureau or hang them in the shallow closet. She had been
looking forward, for five hot days, to the pleasure of a bath and a
quiet bed. The bath was not to be had; neither faucet in the
bathroom ran hot; but the bed was deliciously comfortable, and
Martie tumbled into it with only one thought in her head:

"Anyway, whatever happens now--I'm here in New York!"

The first few days of exploration were somewhat affected by the fact
that Wallace had almost no money; yet they were glorious days,
filled with laughter and joy. The heat of summer had no terrors for
Martie as yet, she was all enthusiasm and eagerness. They ate butter
cakes and baked apples at Child's, they bought fruit and ice cream
bricks and walked along eating them. All New York was eating, and
panting, and gasping in the heat. They went to Liberty Island, and
climbed the statue, and descended into the smothering subway to be
rushed to the Bronx Zoo.

And swiftly the city claimed Martie's heart and mind and body,
swiftly she partook of its freedom, of its thousand little pleasures
for the poor, of its romance and pathos and ugliness and beauty.
Even to the seasoned New Yorkers she met, she seemed to hold some
key to what was strange and significant.

Italian women, musing bareheaded and overburdened in the cars,
Rabbis with their patriarchal beards, slim saleswomen who wore
masses of marcelled curls and real Irish lace, she watched them all.
She drank in the music of the Park concerts, she dreamed in the
libraries, she eagerly caught the first brassy mutter of the thunder
storms.

"If five million other people can make a living here, can't we?" she
amused Wallace by asking with spirit.

"There's something in that!" he assured her.

A day came when Wallace shaved and dressed with unusual care, and
went to see Dawson. Hovering about him anxiously at his toilet, his
wife had reminded him bravely that if Dawson failed, there were
other managers; Dawson was not the only one! The great thing was
that he was HERE, ready for them.

Dawson, however, did not fail him. Wallace came back buoyantly with
the contract. He had been less than a week in New York, and look at
it! Seventy-five dollars a week in a new play. Rehearsals were to
start at once.

The joy that she had always felt awaited her in New York was
Martie's now! She told Wallace that she had KNOWN that New York
meant success. She went to his rehearsals, feeling herself a proud
part of the whole enterprise, keenly appreciative of the theatre
atmosphere. When he went away with his company in late August,
Martie saw him off cheerfully, moved to a smaller room, and began to
plan for his return, and for the baby. She was in love with life--
she wrote Sally.

"You're lucky our climate don't affect you no more than it does,"
observed Mrs. Curley comfortably. "I suffer considerable from the
heat, myself; but then, to tell you the honest truth, I'm fleshy."

"I like it!" Martie answered buoyantly. "The thunder storms are
delicious! Why, at home the gardens are as dry as bones, now, and
look at Central Park--as green as ever. And I love the hurdy-gurdies
and the awnings and the elevated trains and the street markets!"

"I like the city," said the old woman, with a New Yorker's approval
of this view. "My daughter wants me to go down and open a house in
Asbury; she has a little summer place there, with a garage and all.
But I tell her there's almost nobody in the house now, and we get a
good draf' through the rooms. It's not so bad!"

"It's better for me," said the young wife, "because of the
uncertainty of Mr. Bannister's plans."

"They're all uncertain--men," submitted Mrs. Curley thoughtfully.
"That is, the nice ones are," she added. "You show me a man whose
wife isn't always worrying about him and I'll show you a fool!"

"Which was Mr. Curley?" Martie asked, twinkling. For she and his
relict were the only women in the big boarding-house during the hot
months, and they had become intimate.

"Curley," said his widow solemnly, "was one of God's own. A better
father seven children never had, nor a better neighbour any man!
He'd be at his place in church on a Sunday be the weather what it
might, and that strong in his opinions that the boys would ask him
this and that like the priest himself! I'm not saying, mind you,
that he wouldn't take a drop too much, now and then, and act very
harshly when the drink was on him, but he'd come out of it like a
little child---"

She fell into a reverie, repeating dreamily to herself the words "a-
-little--child---" and Martie, dreaming, too, was silent.

The two women were in one of the cool back bedrooms. For hot still
blocks all about the houses were just the same; some changed into
untidy flats, some empty, some with little shops or agencies in
their basements, and some, like this one, second-class boarding-
houses. On Second and Third avenues, under the elevated trains, were
miles of shops; all small shops, crowded upon each other. Every
block had its two or three saloons, its meat market, its delicacy
store, its tiny establishments where drygoods and milk and shoes and
tobacco and fruit and paints and drugs and candies and hats were
sold, and the women who drifted up and down all morning shopping
usually patronized the nearest store. In the basements were smaller
stores where ice and coal and firewood and window-glass and tinware
might be had, and along the street supplementary carts of fruit and
vegetables were usually aligned, so that, especially to
inexperienced eyes like Martie's, the whole presented a delightfully
distracting scene.

She accepted the fact that Wallace must come and go as best suited
his engagements. Her delight in every novel phase of life in the big
city fired his own enthusiasm, and it was with great satisfaction
that he observed her growing friendship with Mrs. Curley.

There were four or five men in the boarding-house, but they usually
disappeared after an early breakfast and did not come back until
supper, so that the two women had a long, idle day to themselves.
Henny, the coloured maid, droned and laughed with friends of her own
in the kitchen. Mrs. Curley, mighty, deep-voiced, with oily, graying
hair and spotted clothes, spent most of the day in a large chair by
the open window, and Martie, thinly dressed, wandered about
aimlessly. She never tired of the old woman's pungent reminiscences,
browsing at intervals on the old magazines and books that were
scattered over the house, even going into the kitchen to convulse
the appreciative Henny, and make a cake or pudding for dinner.

Summer smouldered in the city. The sun seemed to have been shining
hot and merciless for hours when Martie rose at six, to stand
yawning at her window. At nine families began to stream by, to the
Park; perspiring mothers pushing the baby carriages, small children,
already eating, staggering before and behind. By ten the streets
were deserted, baked, silent, glaring. Martie and Mrs. Curley would
establish themselves in a cool back room, as to-day, with a pitcher
of iced tea near at hand.

Somehow the hot, empty hours dragged by. At four o'clock the two,
with perhaps a friend or two who had come in, would begin to gasp
that this was the worst yet. This was awful. The heat had a positive
and brassy quality, there was no air stirring. The children in the
Park would drag home in the hot sunset light, tired, dirty, whining,
and a breathless evening follow the burning day. Then Martie and
Mrs. Curley and mild little Mr. Bull and bellicose Mr. Snow would
perhaps sit on the steps until eleven o'clock, exchanging
pleasantries with various neighbours, wilted like themselves in the
furnace of the day.

Martie liked the sense of extremes, as they all did. In a few months
they would be shaking their heads over a blizzard with the same
solemn enjoyment. She liked the suddenly darkening sky, the ominous
rattle of thunder; "like boxes being smashed," she wrote Sally. She
fairly sang when the rain began to stream down, washing, cooling,
cleansing.

From the window of the back bedroom she looked down to-day upon a
stretch of bare, fenced backyards. Here and there a cat slept in the
shade, or moved silently from shadow to shadow. From some of the
opposite windows strings of washed garments depended, and upon one
fire-escape two girls were curled, talking and reading.

Her hostess was the source of much affectionate amusement to Martie,
and as the old lady liked nothing so much as an appreciative
listener, they got on splendidly. Martie laughed at the older
woman's accounts of quarrels, births, and law-suits, thrilled over
the details of sudden deaths, murders, and mysteries, and drank in
with a genuine dramatic appreciation the vision of a younger,
simpler city. No subway, no telephones, no motor cars, no elevated
roads--what had New York been like when Mrs. Curley was a bride?
Booth and Parepa Rosa and Adelina Patti walked the boards again; the
terrible Civil War was fought; the draft riots raged in the streets;
the great President was murdered. There was no old family in the
city of whose antecedents Mrs. Curley did not know something. "The
airs of them!" she would say, musing over a newspaper list of "among
those present." "I could tell them something!"

Martie did not understand how any woman could really be content with
this dark old house, this business, these empty days, but she
realized that Mrs. Curley was free to adopt some other mode of
living had she pleased. Gradually Martie pieced the old woman's
history together; there had been plenty of change, prosperity, and
excitement in her life. She had had seven children, only three of
whom were living: Mary, a prosperous, big matron whose husband, Joe
Cunningham, had some exalted position on the Brooklyn police force;
Ralph, who was a priest in California; and George, the youngest, a
handsome ne'er-do-well of about twenty-five, who was a "heart
scald." George floated about his own and neighbouring cities, only
coming to see his mother when no other refuge offered.

The four children who had died were quite as much in their mother's
thoughts and conversation, and probably more in her prayers, than
the living ones. Of "Curley," too, Martie heard much. She was able
to picture a cheerful, noisy home, full of shouting, dark, untidy-
headed children, with an untidy-headed servant, a scatter-brained
mother, and an unexacting father in charge. "Curley" usually went to
sleep on the sofa after dinner, and Mrs. Curley's sister, Mrs.
Royce, with her children, or her sister-in-law, "Mrs. Dan," with
hers, came over to pick up the Curleys on the way to a Mission
sermon, a church concert, or a meeting of the Women's Auxiliary of
the Saint Vincent de Paul.

"... Or else maybe the priest would step in," said Mrs. Curley,
remembering these stirring days, "or often I'd take Mollie or Katie-
-God rest her!--and go over to see the Sisters. But many a night
there'd be sickness in the house--Curley had two cousins and an aunt
that died on us--and then I'd be there sitting up with the
medicines, and talking with this one and that. I was never one to
run away from sickness, nor death either for that matter. I'm a
great hand with death in the house; there's no sole to my foot when
I'm needed! I'll never forget the day that I went over to poor Aggie
Lemmon's house--she was a lovely woman who lived round the corner
from me. Well, I hadn't been thinking she looked very well for
several weeks, do you see?--and I passed the remark to my brother
Thomas's wife--God rest her---"

A reminiscence would follow. Martie never tired of them. Whether she
was held, just now, in the peaceful, unquestioning mood that
precedes a serious strain on mind and body, or whether her old
hostess really had had an unusually interesting experience, she did
not then or ever decide. She only knew that she liked to sit playing
solitaire in the hot evenings, under a restricted cone of light,
with Mrs. Curley sitting in the darkness by the window, watching the
lively street, fanning herself comfortably, and pouring forth the
history of the time Curley gave poor Ralph a "crule" beating, or of
the day Alicia Curley died in convulsions at the age of three.

Martie had hoped to be in her own little home when the baby came,
but this was swiftly proven impossible. Wallace's play failed after
the wonderful salary had been paid for only eight weeks. He idled
about with his wife for a few happy weeks, and then got another
engagement with a small comic opera troupe, and philosophically and
confidently went on the road. Presently he was home again and in
funds, but this time it was only a few days before the next parting.

The golden Indian Summer came, and the city blazed in glorious
colour. Homecoming began; the big houses on the Avenue were opened.
Martie never saw the burning leaves of September in later years
without a memory of the poignant uneasiness with which she first had
walked beneath them, worrying about money, about Wallace's
prospects, about herself and her child. Many of her walks were
filled with imaginary conversations with her husband, in which she
argued, protested, reproached. She was lonely, she was still strange
to the city, and she was approaching her ordeal.

Even when he was with her, she missed the old loverlike attitude.
She was wistful, gentle, dependent now, and she knew her wistfulness
and gentleness and dependence vaguely irritated. But she could not
help it; she wanted to touch him, to cling to him, to have him
praise and encourage her, and tell her how much he loved her.

Her hour came near, and she went bravely to meet it. Wallace was in
Baltimore, playing juvenile roles in a stock company. Martie went
alone to the big hospital, and put herself into the hands of a
capable but indifferent young nurse, who candidly explained that she
had more patients than she could care for without the newcomer.
Martie, frightened by the businesslike preparations and the clean,
ether-scented rooms, submitted and obeyed with a sick heart. Through
the dull quiet of a dark November day the first snow of the season,
the first Martie had ever seen, began to flutter. Moving restlessly
about her little room, she stopped at the window to look out upon it
through a haze of pain.

Heat and hot lights, strange halls, a strange doctor, and early
evening in a great operating-room; she had only a dazed impression
of them all. Life roared and crackled about her. She leaped into the
offered oblivion with no thought of what it might entail....

After a long while she awakened, in a peaceful dawning, to hear
nurses cheerfully chatting, and the boy warmly fussing and grunting
in his basket. The little room was flooded with sunlight, sunlight
bright on a snowy world, and the young women who had been so
casually indifferent to another woman's agony were proudly awake to
the charms of the baby. The cocoon was lifted; Martie in a tremor of
love and tenderness looked down at the scowling, wrinkled little
face.

Instantly terror for his safety, for his health, for his immortal
soul possessed her. She looked uneasily at Miss Everett, when that
nurse bore him away. Did the woman realize what motherhood MEANT?
Did she dream the value of that flannel bundle she was so jauntily
carrying?

CHAPTER IV

Rain was falling in such sweeping sheets that the windows actually
shook under the onslaught; all day long a high wind had raged about
the house. Above the noise of the November storm in the warm
basement bedroom rose the steady click and purr of the sewing-
machine and the chattering of a child's voice, and from outside, on
the pavement, was a furious rushing of coal. The big van had been
backed up against the curb, and the cascading black torrent
interrupted the passers-by.

"Heavens! Was there ever such an uproar!" exclaimed Martie, ceasing
her operations at the machine and leaning back in her chair with a
long sigh. The lengths of flimsy white curtaining she had been
hemming slipped to the floor; she put her hands behind her head, and
yawned luxuriously. The room was close, and even at four o'clock
there was need of lights; its other occupants were only two, the
child who played with the small gray and red stone blocks upon the
floor, and the old woman who was peering through her glasses at the
curtaining that lay across her lap, and manipulating it with knotted
hands. Mrs. Curley was "Nana" to little Teddy Bannister now, and
this shabby room overlooking a cemented area, and with its windows
safeguarded by curved ornamental iron bars from attack from the
street, would be his first memory of life.

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