Books: Martie The Unconquered

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After Teddy and his mother had lunched, if Wallace was free, they
all went out together. He was devoted to the boy, and broke
ruthlessly into his little schedule of hours and meals for his own
amusement. Or he and Martie went alone to a matinee. But when he was
playing in vaudeville, even if he lived at home, he must be at the
theatre at four and at nine. Often on Sunday afternoons he went out
to meet his friends, to drift about the theatrical clubs and hotels,
and dine away from home.

Then Martie would take Teddy out, happy times for both. They went to
the library, to the museums, to the aquarium and the Zoo. Martie
came to love the second-hand book-stores, where she could get George
Eliot's novels for ten cents each, a complete Shakespeare for
twenty-five. She drank in the passing panorama of the streets: the
dripping "L" stations, the light of the chestnut dealer, a blowing
flame in the cold and dark, the dirty powder of snow blowing along
icy sidewalks, and the newspapers weighted down at corner stands
with pennies lying here and there in informal exchange. Cold, rosy
faces poured into the subway hoods, warm, pale faces poured out, wet
feet slipped on the frozen rubbish of the sidewalks, little
salesgirls gossiped cheerfully as they dangled on straps in the
packed cars.

Often Martie and Teddy had their supper at Childs', in the clean
warm brightness of marble and nickel-plate. Teddy knew their
waitress and chattered eagerly over his rice and milk. Martie had a
sandwich and coffee, watching the shabby fingers that fumbled for
five-cent tips, the anxious eyes studying the bill-of-fare, the pale
little working-women who favoured a supper of butter cakes and lemon
meringue pie after the hard day.

She would go home to find the breakfast dishes waiting, the beds
unmade, the bathroom still steamed from Wallace's ablutions. Teddy
tucked away for the night, she would dream over a half-sensed book.
Why make the bed she was so soon to get into? Why wash the dishes
now rather than wait until she was in her comfortable wrapper? She
went back to her old habit of nibbling candy as she read.

The jolly little Bohemian suppers she had foreseen never became a
reality. Wallace hated cheap food; he was done with little
restaurants, he said. More than that, among his friends there did
not seem to be any of those simple, busy, gifted artists to whose
acquaintance Martie had looked forward. The more distinguished
members of his company he hardly knew; the others were semi-
successful men like himself, women too poor and too busy to waste
time or money, or other women of a more or less recognized looseness
of morals. Martie detested them, their cologne, their boasting,
their insinuations as to the personal lives of every actor or
actress who might be mentioned. They had no reserves, no respect for
love or marriage or parenthood; they told stories entirely beyond
her understanding, and went about eating, drinking, dressing, and
dancing as if these things were all the business of life.

Wallace's favourite hospitality was extended to six silent,
overdressed, genial male friends, known as "the crowd." These he
frequently asked to dinner on Sunday nights, a hard game of poker
always following. Martie did not play, but she liked to watch her
husband's hands, and during this winter he attributed his phenomenal
good luck to her. He never lost, and he always parted generously
with such sums as he won. He loved his luck; the envious comments of
the other players delighted him; the good dinner, and the presence
of his beautiful wife always put him in his best mood. They called
him "Three deuces Wallie," and Martie's remark that his weight was
also "Two--two--two" passed for wit.

She took his winnings without shame. It was to take them, indeed,
that she endured the long, silent evening, with its incessant
muttering and shuffling and slapping of cards. The gas whined and
rasped above their heads, the air grew close and heavy with smoke.
Ash-trays were loaded with the stumps and ashes of cigars; sticky
beer glasses ringed the bare table. But Martie stuck to her post. At
one o'clock it would all be over, and Wallace, carrying a glass of
whisky-and-soda to his room, would be undressing between violent
yawns and amused recollections.

"Some of that comes to me, Wallie. I have the rent coming this
week!"

"Sure. Take all you want, old girl. You're tired, aren't you?"

"Tired and cold." Martie's circulation was not good now, and she
knew why. Her meals had lost their interest, and sometimes even
Teddy's claims were neglected. She was sleepy, tired, heavy all the
time. "When I see a spoon lying on the dining-room floor, and
realize that it will lie there until I pick it up I could scream!"
she told Wallace.

"It's a shame, poor old girl!"

"Oh, no--it's all right." She would blink back the tears. "I'm not
sorry!"

But she was sorry and afraid. She resented Wallace's easy sympathy,
resented the doctor's advice to rest, not to worry, his mild
observation that a good deal of discomfort was inevitable.

Early in the new year she began to agitate the question of a dinner
to the Drydens. Wallace, who had taken a fancy to Adele, agreed
lazily to endure John's company, which he did not enjoy, for one
evening. But he obstinately overruled Martie on the subject of a
dinner at home.

"Nix," said Wallace flatly. "I won't have my wife cooking for
anybody!"

"But Wallace--just grape-fruit and broilers and a salad! And they'll
come out and help cook it. You don't know how informally we did
things at Grandma's!"

"Well, you're not doing things informally now. It would be different
if you had a couple of servants!"

"But it may be years before we have a couple of servants. Aren't we
ever going to entertain, until then?"

"I don't know anything about that. But I tell you I won't have them
thinking that we're hard up. I'll take them to a restaurant
somewhere, and show that little boob a square meal!"

He finally selected an oppressively magnificent restaurant where a
dollar-and-a-half table-d'hote dinner was served.

"But I'd like to blow them to a real dinner!" he regretted.

"Oh, Wallace, I'm not trying to impress them! We'll have more than
enough to eat, and music, and a talk. Then we can break up at about
ten, and we'll have done the decent thing!"

The four were to meet at half-past six, but both Adele and Wallace
were late, and John and Martie had half an hour's talk while they
waited. Martie fairly bubbled in her joy at the chance to speak of
books and poems, ideals and reforms again. She told him frankly and
happily that she had missed him; she had wanted to see him so many
times! And he looked tired; he had had grippe?

"Always motherly!" he said, a smile on the strange mouth, but no
corresponding smile in the faunlike eyes.

Wallace arrived in a bad mood, as Martie instantly perceived. But
Adele, radiant in a new hat, was prettily concerned for his cold and
fatigue, and they were quickly escorted to a table near the
fountain, and supplied with cocktails. Cheered, Wallace demanded the
bill-of-fare, "the table-d'hote, Handsome!" said he to the
appreciative waiter.

The man lowered his head and murmured obsequiously. The table-d'hote
dinner was served only on the balcony, sir.

This caused a halt in the rising gaiety. The group looked a little
blank. They were established here, the ladies had surrendered their
wraps, envious late-comers were eying their table. Still Martie did
not hesitate. She straightened back in her chair, and pushed her
hands at full length upon the table, preliminary to rising.

"Then we'll go up!" she said sensibly. But Wallace demurred. What
was the difference! They would stay here.

The difference proved to be about twenty dollars.

"I hope it was worth it to you!" Wallace said bitterly to his wife
at breakfast the next day. "Twenty-six dollars the check was. It was
worth about twenty-six cents to me!"

"But, Wallie, you didn't have to order wine!"

"I didn't expect to order it, and if that boob had had the sense to
know it, it was up to him to pay for it!"

"Why, he's a perfect babe-in-the-woods about such things, Wallie!
And none of us wanted it!" Martie tried to speak quietly, but at the
memory of the night before her anger began to smoulder. Wallace had
deliberately urged the ordering of wine, John quite as innocently
disclaimed it. Adele had laughed that she could always manage a
glass of champagne; Martie had merely murmured, "But we don't need
it, Wallie; we've had so much now!"

"We couldn't sit there holding that table down all evening," Wallace
said now. Martie with a great effort kept silence. Opening his
paper, her husband finished the subject sharply. "I want to tell you
right now, Mart, that with me ordering the dinner, it was up to him
to pay for the wine! Any man would know that! Ask any one of the
crowd. He's a boob, that's all, and I'm done with him!"

Martie rose, and went quietly into the kitchen. There was nothing to
say. She did not speak of the Drydens again for a long while. Her
own condition engrossed her; and she was not eager to take the
initiative in hospitality or anything else.

In April Wallace went on the road again for eleven weeks, and Martie
and Ted enjoyed a delicious spring together. They spent hours on the
omnibuses, hours in the parks. Spring in the West was cold, erratic;
spring here came with what a heavenly wash of fragrance and heat! It
was like a re-birth to abandon all the heavy clothing of the winter,
to send Teddy dancing into the sunshine in socks and galatea and
straw hat again!

Martie's son was almost painfully dear to her. Every hour of his
life, from the helpless days in the big hospital, through creeping
and stammering and stumbling, she had clung to his little phases
with hungry adoration, and that there was a deep sympathy between
their two natures she came to feel more strongly every day. They
talked confidentially together, his little body jolting against hers
on the jolting omnibus, or leaning against her knees as she sat in
the Park. She lingered in the lonely evening over the ceremony of
his bath, his undressing, his prayers, and the romping that was
always the last thing. For his sake, her love went out to meet the
newcomer; another soft little Teddy to watch and bathe and rock to
sleep; the reign of double-gowns and safety-pins and bottles again!
Writing Wallace one of the gossipy, detailed letters that
acknowledged his irregular checks, she said that they must move in
the fall. They really, truly needed a better neighbourhood, a better
nursery for "the children."

One hot, heavy July morning she fell into serious musing over the
news of Grandma Curley's death. Her son, a spoiled idler of forty,
inherited the business. He wanted to know if Mrs. Bannister could
come back. The house had never prospered so well as under her
management. She could make her own terms.

The sun was pouring into East Twenty-sixth Street, flashing an ugly
glaring reflection against the awnings. At nine, the day was burning
hot. Teddy, promised a trip to the Zoo, was loitering on the shady
steps of the houses opposite, conscious of clean clothes, and of a
holiday mood. The street was empty; a hurdy-gurdy unseen poured
forth a brassy flood of sound. Trains, on the elevated road at the
corner, crashed by. Martie had been packing a lunch; she went slowly
back to the cut loaf and the rapidly softening butter.

"Happy, Teddy?" she asked, when they had found seats in the train,
and were rushing over the baking stillness of the city.

"Are you, Moth'?" he asked quickly.

She nodded, smiling. But, for some reasons vaguely defined, she was
heavy-hearted. The city's endless drama of squalor and pain was all
about her; she could not understand, she could not help, she could
not even lift her own little problem out of the great total of
failures! All day long the sense of impotence assailed her.

Wallace was at home, when they came back, heavily asleep across his
bed. Martie, with firmly shut lips, helped him into bed, and made
the strong coffee for which he longed. After drinking it, he gave
her a resentful, painstaking account of his unexpected return. His
face was flushed, his voice thick. She gathered that he had lost his
position.

"He came right up to me before Young, d'ye see? He put it up to me.
'Nelson,' I says, 'Nelson, this isn't a straight deal!' I says. 'My
stuff is my stuff,' I says, 'but this is something else again.'
'Wallie,' he says, 'that may be right, too. But listen,' he says. I
says, 'I'm going to do damn little listening to you or Young!' I
says, 'Cut that talk about my missing rehearsals--'"

The menacing, appealing voice went on and on. Martie watched him in
something far beyond scorn or shame. He had not shaved recently, his
face was blotched.

"What else could I do, Mart?" he asked presently. She answered with
a long sigh:

"Nothing, I suppose, Wallace."

After a while he slept heavily. The afternoon was brassy hot. Women
manipulated creaking clotheslines across the long double row of
backyards; the day died on a long, gasping twilight. Martie let
Teddy go to the candy store for ten cents' worth of ice cream for
his supper. She made herself iced tea, and deliberately forced
herself to read. To-night she would not think. After a while she
wrote her letter of regret to George Curley.

The situation was far from desperate, after all. Wallace had a
headache the next day, but on the day after that he shaved and
dressed carefully, assured his wife that this experience should be
the last of its type, and began to look for an engagement. He had
some money, and he insisted upon buying her a thin, dark gown, loose
and cool. He carried Teddy off for whole afternoons, leaving Martie
to doze, read, and rest; and learning that she still had a bank
account of something more than three hundred dollars--left from
poker games and from her old bank account--she engaged a stupid,
good-natured coloured girl to do the heavy work. Isabeau Eato was
willing and strong, and for three dollars a week she did an
unbelievable amount of drudgery. Martie felt herself fortunate, and
listened to the crash of dishes, the running of water, and the swish
of Isabeau's broom with absolute satisfaction.

One broiling afternoon she was trying to read in the darkened dining
room. Heat was beating against the prostrate city in metallic waves,
but since noon there had been occasional distant flashes toward the
west, and faint rumblings that predicted the coming storm. In an
hour or two the streets would be awash, and white hats and flimsy
gowns flying toward shelter; meanwhile, there was only endurance.
She could only breathe the motionless leaden air, smell the dry,
stale odours of the house, and listen to the thundering drays and
cars in the streets.

Wallace had gone to Yonkers to see a moving picture manager; Isabeau
had taken Teddy with her on a trip to the Park. Sitting back in a
deep chair, with her back to the dazzling light of the window,
Martie closed her book, shut her eyes, and fell into a reverie.
Expense, pain, weakness, helplessness; she dreaded them all. She
dreaded the doctor, the hospital, the brisk, indifferent nurses; she
hated above all the puzzled realization that all this cost to her
was so wasted; Wallace was not sorry for the child's coming, nor was
she; that was all. No one was glad. No one praised her for the slow
loss of days and nights, for dependence, pain, and care. Her
children might live to comfort her; they might not. She had been no
particular comfort to her own father--her own mother--

Tears slipped through her closed lids, and for a moment her lips
quivered. She struggled half-angrily for self-control, and opened
her book.

"Martie?" said a voice from the doorway. She looked up to see John
Dryden standing there.

The sight of the familiar crooked smile, and the half-daring, half-
bashful eyes, stirred her heart with keen longing; she needed
friendship, sympathy, understanding so desperately! She clung
eagerly to his hands.

He sat down beside her, and rumpled his hair in furious
embarrassment and excitement, studying her with a wistful and
puzzled smile. She did not realize how her pale face, loosely massed
hair, and black-rimmed eyes impressed him.

"John! I am so glad! Tell me everything; how are you, and how's
Adele?"

Adele was well. He was well. His wife's sister, Mrs. Baker of
Browning, Indiana, was visiting them. Things were much the same at
the office. He had not been reading anything particularly good.

She laughed at his sparse information.

"But, John--talk! Have you been to any lectures lately? What have
you been doing?" she demanded.

"I've been thinking for days of what we should talk about when we
saw each other," he said, laughing excitedly. "But now that I'm here
I can't remember them!"

The sense his presence always gave her, of being at ease, of being
happily understood, was enveloping Martie. She was as comfortable
with John as she might have been with Sally, as sure of his
affection and interest. She suddenly realized that she had missed
John of late, without quite knowing what it was she missed.

"You're going on with your writing, John?"

"Oh"--he rumpled his hair again--"what's the use?"

"Why, that's no way to talk. Aren't you doing ANYTHING?"

"Not much," he grinned boyishly.

"But, John, that's sheer laziness! How do you ever expect to get out
of the groove, if you don't make a start?"

"Oh, damn it all, Martie," he said mildly, with a whimsical smile,
"what's the use? I suppose there isn't a furniture clerk in the city
that doesn't feel he is fit for great things!"

"You didn't talk like this last year," Martie said, in
disappointment and reproach. John looked at her uneasily, and then
said boldly:

"How's Ted?"

"Sweet." Martie laid one hand on her breast, and drew a short,
stifled breath. "Isn't it fearful?" she said, of the heat.

John nodded absently: she knew him singularly unaffected by anything
so trivial as mere heat or cold. He was fingering a magazine
carelessly, suddenly he flung it aside.

"I am writing something, of course!" he confessed. "But it seems
sort of rotten, to me."

"But I'm glad!" she said, with shining eyes.

"I work at it in the office," John added. "And what is it?"

"You know what it is: you suggested it!"

"_I_ did?"

"You said it would make a good play."

Martie's thin cheek dimpled, she widened her eyes.

"I don't remember!"

"It was when I was reading Strickland's 'Queens.' You said that this
one's life would make a good play."

"Oh, I do dimly remember!" She knotted her brows. "Mary--Mary
Isabelle--an Italian girl?--wasn't it?"

"Mary Beatrice," he corrected simply.

"Of course! And does it work up pretty well?"

"Fine!"

"How much have you done, John?"

"Oh, not much!"

"Oh, John, for heaven's sake--you will drive me insane!" she laughed
joyously, laying her hand over his. "Tell me about it." She laughed
again when he drew some crumpled pages from his pocket. But he was
presently garrulous, sketching his plan to her, reading a passage
here and there, firing her with his own interest and delight. He had
as little thought of boring her as she of being bored, they fled
together from the noise and heat of the city, and trod the Dover
sands, and rode triumphant into the old city of London at the King's
side.

"I'm not a judge--I wish I was," she said finally. "But it seems to
me extraordinary!"

He silently folded the sheets, and put them away. Glancing at his
face, she saw that its thoughtful look was almost stern. Martie
wondered if she had said something to offend him.

When he sat down beside her again, she again laid her hand on his.

"What is it, John?" she asked anxiously.

"Nothing!" he said, with a brief glance and smile.

"I've made you cross?"

"You!" His dark gaze was on the floor, his hands locked. For a full
minute there was silence in the room. Then he looked up at her with
a disturbing smile. "I am human, Martie," he said simply.

The note was so new in their relationship that Martie's heart began
to hammer with astonishment and with a curious thrilling pleasure.
There was nothing for her to say. She could hardly believe that he
knew what he implied, or that she construed the words aright. He was
so different from all other men, so strangely old in many ways, so
boyish in others. A little frightened, she smiled at him in silence.
But he did not raise his eyes to meet her look.

"I did not think that when I was thirty I would be a clerk in a
furniture house, Martie!" he said sombrely, after awhile.

"You may not be!" she reminded him hearteningly. And presently she
added: "I did not think that I would be a poor man's wife on the
upper East Side!"

He looked up then with a quick smile.

"Isn't it the deuce?" he asked.

"Life is queer!" Martie said, shrugging.

"I was up in Connecticut last week," John said, "and I'll tell you
what I saw there. I went up to that neighbourhood to buy some old
furniture for an order we were filling--I was there only a few
hours. I found a little old white house, on a river bank, with big
trees over it. It was on a foundation of old stones, that had been
painted white, and there was an orchard, with a stone wall. The man
wanted eighteen hundred dollars for it."

"Is THAT all?" Martie asked, amazed.

"That's all. I sat there and talked to him for awhile."

"Well?" said Martie, as he stopped.

"Well, nothing," he answered, after a moment's pause. "Only I've
been thinking about it ever since--what it would be to live there,
and write, and walk about that little farm! Funny, isn't it?
Eighteen hundred dollars--not much, only I'll never have it. And you
are another poor man's wife--only not mine! Do you believe in God?"

"You know I do!" she answered, laughing, but a little shaken by his
seriousness.

"You think GOD manages things this way?"

"John, don't talk like a high school boy!"

"I suppose it sounds that way," he said mildly, and he rose suddenly
from his chair. "Well, I have to go!" He looked at her keenly. "But
you don't look very well, Martie," he said. "You've no colour at
all. Is it the weather?"

"John, what a baby you are!" But Martie was amazed, under her flush
of laughter, at his simplicity. Could it be possible that he did not
know? "I am expecting something very precious here one of these
days," she said. He looked at her with a polite smile, entirely
uncomprehending. "Surely you know that we--that I--am going to have
another baby, John?" she asked.

She saw the muscles of his face stiffen, and the blood rise. He
looked at her steadily. A curious silence hung between them.

"Didn't you know?" Martie pursued lightly.

"No," he said at last thickly, "I didn't know." He gave her a look
almost frightening in its wildness; shot to the heart, he might have
managed just such a smile. He made a frantic gesture with his hands.
"Of course--" he said at random. "Of course--a baby!" He walked
across the room to look at a picture on the wall. "That's rather--
pretty!" he said in a suffocating voice. Suddenly he came back, and
sat close beside her; his face was pale. "Martie," he said
pitifully, "it's dangerous for you--you're not strong, and if you--
if you die, you know---You look pale now, and you're so thin. I
don't know anything about it, but I wish it was over!"

Tears sprang to Martie's eyes, but they were tears of exquisite joy.
She laid a warm hand over his.

"Why, John, dear, there's no danger!"

"Isn't there?" he asked doubtfully.

"Not the least, you goose! I'm ever so glad and proud about it--
don't look so woe-begone!"

Their hands were tightly locked: her face was radiant as she smiled
up at him.

"It all works out, John--the furniture clerking, you know, and the
being poor, and all that!"

"Sure it does!"

"Other people have succeeded in spite of it, I mean, so why not you
and I?"

"Of course, they're not BORN rich and successful," he submitted
thoughtfully.

"Look at Lincoln--and Napoleon!" Martie said hardily.

John scowled down at the hand he held.

"Well, it's easier for some people than others," he stated firmly.
"Lincoln may have had to split rails for his supper--what DO you
split rails for, anyway?" he interrupted himself to ask, suddenly
diverted.

"Fences, I guess!" Martie offered, on a gale of laughter.

"Well, whatever it was. But I don't see what they needed so many
fences for! But anyway, being poor or rich doesn't seem to matter
half as much as some other things! And now I'm going. Good-bye,
Martie."

"And write me, John, and send me books!" she urged, as he turned
away.

He was at the door: meditating with his hand on the knob, and his
back turned to her. Martie watched him, expecting some parting word.
But he did not even turn to smile a farewell. He let himself quietly
out without another glance, and was gone. A moment later she heard
the outer door close.

She sat on, in the darkening room, her book forgotten. The storm was
coming fast now. Women in the backyards were drawing in their
clothes-lines with a great creaking and rattling, and the first rush
of warm, sullen drops struck the dusty dining-room window. Curtains
streamed, and pictures on the wall stirred in the damp, warm wind.

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