Books: Martie The Unconquered

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"You mean--always let them have their friends at the house, and so
on?" Sally asked slowly.

"Yes, but more than that! Let them feel as much a part of the world
as the boys do. Put them into any work--only make them respect it!"

"Pa might have helped us, only neither you nor I, nor Lyd, ever
showed the least interest in work," Sally submitted thoughtfully.

"Neither did Len--but he MADE Len!"

"Yes, I see what you mean," Sally admitted with an awakening face.
"But we would have thought he was pretty stern, Mart," she added.

"Just as children do when they have to learn to read and write,"
countered Martie. "Don't you see?"

Sally did not see, but she was glad to see Martie's interest. She
told Lydia later that Martie really seemed better and more like her
old self, even in these few days.

With almost all the women of Monroe, Lydia now considered Martie's
life a thing accomplished, and boldly accomplished. To leave home,
to marry, to have children in a strange city, to be honorably
widowed and to return to her father's home, and rear her child in
seclusion and content; this was more than fell to the lot of many
women. Lydia listened with actual shudders to Martie's casually
dropped revelations.

"This John Dryden that I told you about, Lyd--the man who wrote the
play that failed--was anxious for me to go on with the Curley
boarding-house," Martie said one day, "and sometimes now I think I
should have done so."

"Good heavens!" Lydia, smoothing the thin old blankets on Martie's
wide, flat bed, stopped aghast. "But why should you--Pa is more than
willing to have you here!"

"I know, darling. But what really deterred me was not so much Pa's
generosity, but the fact that I would have had to lease the property
for three years; George Curley wanted to be rid of the
responsibility. And to really make the thing a success, I should
have had the adjoining house, too; that would have been about four
thousand rent."

"Four thousand--Martie, you would have been crazy!"

Martie, tinkling pins into a saucer on the bureau, opening the upper
drawer to sweep her brush and comb into it, and jerking the limp
linen scarf straight, only smiled and shrugged in answer. She had
been widowed three months, and already reviving energy and self-
confidence were running in her veins. Already she realized that it
had been a mistake to accept her father's hospitality in the first
panic of being dependent. However graceful and dignified her
position was to the outsider's eye, in this old house in the sunken
block, she knew now that Pa was really unable to offer her anything
more than a temporary relief from financial worry, and that her
chances of finding employment in Monroe as compared to New York were
about one to ten.

Malcolm Monroe had been deeply involved for several years in "the
firm" by which term he and Len referred to their real estate
business together. A large tract of grassy brown meadow, south of
the town, had been in his possession for thirty years; it was only
with the opening of the new "Monroe's Grove" that he had realized
its possibilities, or rather that Len had realized them.

Len had held one or two office positions in Monroe unsatisfactorily
before his twentieth year, and then had persuaded his father to send
him to Berkeley, to the State University. Ma and Lydia had been
proud of their under-graduate for one brief year, then Len was back
again, disgusted with study. After a few months of drifting and
experimenting, the brilliant idea of developing the old south tract
into building sites had occurred to Len, and presently his father
was also persuaded that here was a splendid opportunity. A little
office on Main Street was rented, and its window embellished with
the words "Own a Home in the Monroe Estates." Len really worked
violently for a time; he rode his bicycle back and forth tirelessly.
He married, and moved out into the Estates, and he personally
superintended the work that went on there. Streets and plots were
laid out, trees planted, the fresh muddy roads were edged with
pyramids of brown sewer pipes.

The financial outlay was enormous, unforeseen. Taxes went up,
sidewalks crumbled back into the grass again, the four or five
unfenced little wooden houses that were erected and occupied added
to the general effect of forlornness. The Estates were mortgaged,
and to the old mortgage on the homestead another was added.

Len took Martie out to see the place. Slim little trees were bending
in a sharp April wind; a small woman at the back of one of the small
houses was taking whipping clothes from a line. The streets were
deep in mud; Martie smiled as she read the crossposts: "High
Street," "Maple Avenue," and "Sunset Avenue." Here and there a sign
"Sold" embellished a barren half-acre.

"You've really done wonders, Len," she said encouragingly. "And of
course there's nothing like LAND for making money!"

"Oh, there's a barrel of money in it," he answered dubiously,
kicking a lump of dirt at his feet. They had left the little car at
a comparatively dry crossing, and were walking about. "We've put in
a hundred more trees this year, and I think we'll start another
house pretty soon." And when they got back in the car, his face
flushed from vigorous cranking, he added, "I talked Pa into getting
the car; it makes it look as if we were making money!"

"Of course it does," Martie said amiably. She thought her own
thoughts.

Lydia had nothing but praise for Len; he had worked like a Trojan,
she said. And Pa had been wonderfully patient and good about the
whole thing.

"Pa was telling me the other day that he could have gotten ever so
much money for this place, if he had had it levelled the time the
whole town was," Lydia said, in her curious tone that was
triumphantly complaining, one day.

"I wonder what it's worth, as it stands," mused Martie.

"Oh, Martie, I don't know! I don't know anything about it; he just
happened to say that!"

It was later on this same day that Martie went in to see Miss Fanny,
and put her elbows on the desk, resting her troubled face in her
hands.

"Miss Fanny, sometimes I despair! Heaven knows I have had hard
knocks enough, and yet I never learn," she burst out. "Seven years
ago I used to come in here to you, and rage because I was so
helpless! Well, I've had experience since, bitter experience, and
yet here I am, helpless and a burden still!"

Miss Fanny smiled her wide, admiring smile. Without a word she
reached to a shelf behind her, and handed Martie a familiar old
volume: "Choosing a Life Work." The colour rushed into Martie's face
as she took it.

"I'll read it NOW!" she said simply.

"If you really want to work, Martie," suggested the older woman,
"why don't you come in here with me? Now that we've got the Carnegie
endowment, we have actually appropriated a salary for an assistant."

Martie looked at her thoughtfully, looked backward perhaps over the
long years.

"I will," she said.

CHAPTER II

There was a storm at home over this decision, but Martie weathered
it. Even Sally demurred, observing that people would talk. But one
or two persons approved, and if Martie had needed encouragement, it
would not have been wanting.

One of her sympathizers was Dr. Ben. The two had grown to be good
friends, and Martie's boy was as much at home in the little crowded
garden and the three-peaked house as Sally's children were.

"You're showing your common sense, Martie," said the old man; "stick
to it. I don't know how one of your mother's children ever came to
have your grit!"

"I seem to have brought little enough back from New York," Martie
said a little sadly. "But at least what Monroe thinks doesn't matter
to me any more! People do what they like in the East."

"You're coming on!" Dr. Ben smiled at his velvet wallflowers.

Surprisingly, Joe Hawkes was another ally. He came back in May,
penniless, but full of honours, and with his position in the new
hospital secure. A small, second-hand car, packed with Hawkeses of
all ages, began to be seen in Monroe streets, and Sally grew rosier
and fatter and more childish-looking every day. Sally would never
keep her hair neat, or care for hands or complexion, but evidently
Joe adored her as he had on their wedding day.

"Your father'll have nothing to leave, Martie," Joe said. "What
little the Estates don't eat up must go to Lydia, and if you make a
start here, why, you'll move on to something better!"

"Miss Fanny hasn't moved on to something better," Martie submitted
with a dubious smile.

"Miss Fanny isn't you, Mart. She's gotten a long way for her. You
know her father was the Patterson's hired man, and her mother
actually had town help for a while, when he died. Now they have that
cottage free of debt, and something in the Bank, and Miss Fanny
belongs to the woman's club--that's enough for her. You can do
better, and you will!"

"I like you, Joe!" said Martie at this, quite frankly, and her
brother-in-law's pleasant eyes met hers as he said:

"I like you, too!"

Sally, herself, did not belong to the Woman's Social and Civic Club;
a fact that caused her some chagrin. Rose had actually been
president once, as had May Parker, and among the thirty-six or seven
members she and May were pleasantly prominent.

"I never see Rose, but I should have thought she might elect me to
the club," Sally said to Martie. "Unless, of course," she added,
brightening, "Rose realizes how busy I am, and that it really would
be an extravagance."

"But why do you want to go, Sis? What do they do--sit around and
read papers?"

"Oh, well, they have tea, and they entertain visitors in town. And
they have a historical committee to keep up the fountains and
statues--well, I don't care!" Sally interrupted herself with a
reluctant smile as Martie laughed. "It makes me sick for Rose to
have everything and always be so smug!"

"Oh, Sally Price Hawkes! Look at the children, and look at Joe,
covering himself with glory!"

"Well, I know." Sally looked ashamed. "But sometimes it does seem as
if it wasn't fair!"

"I met Rodney Parker the other day," Martie said thoughtfully. "It
isn't that he wasn't extremely pleasant--not to say flattering! No
one could have been more so. He told me that Rose was in the
hospital, and that they had been so busy since I got to town--I told
you all this? But as we parted my only thought was gratitude to
Heaven that I had never married Rodney Parker!"

Lydia, sitting sewing near by, coloured with shame at the indelicacy
of this, and made her characteristic comment.

"You don't mean that you--ALWAYS felt so, Martie?"

"Always!" Martie echoed healthily. "Why, I was crazy about him."

Lydia visibly shrank.

"He's so LIMITED" Martie continued with spirit. "I'm glad that
things have gone well with them, and that they have a baby at last!
But to sit opposite that pleasant, fat face--he is getting quite
fat!--and hear that complacent voice all the days of my life, those
little puns, and that cheerful way of implying that he is the
greatest man since Alexander--no, I couldn't!"

"He has built Rose a lovely home, and made her a very happy woman,"
Lydia said sententiously.

"Well, I suppose that when I thought of marrying Rod, I thought of
the old house," Martie pursued. "Of course, they HAVE built a nice
home, but the glory for me was the old place! Rose has a big drawing
room, and a big bedroom, and a guest's bath, and pantries and a side
porch--but I like your house better, Sally, with its trees and
flowers and babies!"

"You're just SAYING that!" Sally observed.

"I like civic pride," Martie, who was rambling on in her old
inconsequential way, presently added, "but Rod is merely SMUG. I
happened to mention some building in New York--I didn't know what to
talk to the man about! He immediately told me that the Mason
building down town was reinforced concrete throughout. I said that I
had always missed the orchards in the East, and he said, with such
an unpleasant laugh, 'We lead the world, Martie, you can't get away
from it. Do you suppose I'd stay here one moment if I didn't think
that there is a better chance of making money right here to-day than
anywhere else in the world?'"

She had caught his tone, and Sally disrespectfully laughed.

"Well, I know he is one of our most prominent young men, and Rose
was president of the club, and I suppose we less fortunate people
can talk all we please, they'll be just that much better off than we
are!" Lydia said with a little edge to her voice.

"Because his father is rich, Lyd. If it wasn't for the dear old
Judge, who pioneered and mined and planned and foresaw, where would
Rod be to-day, telling me that HE thought it best that Rose should
nurse the baby, and that he does this and thinks that?"

"Oh, no, Mart, you can't say that. Rodney is really an awfully
clever, steady fellow!" Sally said quickly.

"Sometimes I think we talk lightly about making money," said Lydia,
"but it's not such an easy thing to do!"

Martie coloured.

"Well, I'm making a start!" she said cheerfully. It was Lydia's turn
to colour with resentment; she thought that Martie's acceptance of
Miss Fanny's offer was something only a trifle short of disgrace.

In the pleasant summer mornings Martie walked down town with her
father, as she had done since she came home. But she left him at the
big brick doorway of the Library now, and by the time the fogs had
risen from Main Street, she was tied into her silicia apron and
happily absorbed in her work. She and Miss Fanny tiptoed about the
wide, cool spaces of the airy rooms, whispering, conferring.
Sometimes, in mid-morning, Teddy came gingerly in with Aunt Lydia.

"You're talking out loud, Moth'!"

"Because there's nobody else here, darling!"

Martie would catch the child to her heart with a joyous laugh. She
was expanding like a flower in sunlight. Her work interested her,
she liked to pick books for boys and girls, old women and children.
She liked moving about in a businesslike way--not a casual caller,
but a part of the institution. She had long, whispered
conversations, at the desk, with Dr. Ben, with the various old
friends. Sometimes Sally brought the baby in, and Martie sat Mary on
the desk, and talked with one arm about the soft little body.

Her duties were simple. She mastered them, to Miss Fanny's
amazement, on the very first day, and in a week she felt herself
happily at home.

All Monroe passed before her desk, and every one stopped for a
whispered chat. Martie came to like the wet days, when the rain
slashed down, and the boys, reading at the long table, rubbed wet
shoes together. There was a warmth and brightness and openness about
the Library entirely different from the warmest home. And she took a
deep interest in the members, advised them as to books, and held
good books for them. She studied human nature under her green
hanging-lamp; her eager eyes and brain were never satisfied. Not the
least advantage to her new work was that she could carry home the
new books.

Where the happiness that began to flood her heart and soul came from
had its source she could not tell. Like all happiness, it was made
of little things; elements that had always been in Monroe, but that
she had not seen before. She was splendidly well, as Teddy was, and
their laughter made the days bright in the old house. Also she was
lovely to look upon, and she must have been blind not to know it.
Her tall, erect figure looked its best in plain black; Martie would
never be fat again; her skin was like an apple blossom, white
touched deeply with rose, her eyes, with their tender sadness and
veiled mirth, were more blue than ever. Monroe came to know her
buoyant step, her glittering, unconquered hair, her voice that had
in it tones unfamiliar and charming. She scattered her gay and
friendly interest everywhere; the women said that she had something,
not quite style, better than style, an "air."

One summer day Lydia saw her absorbed in the closely written sheets
of a long letter from New York.

"It's from Mr. Dryden, my friend there." Martie said, in answer to
her mild look of questioning. "Don't you remember that I told you he
had written a play that no manager would produce?"

"You didn't tell ME, dear," Lydia amended, darning industriously.

"Oh, yes, I did, Lyddy! I remember telling you!"

"No, dear, perhaps you thought you did," Lydia persisted.

"Oh, well! Anyway, I wrote and suggested that he try to get it
published instead, and my dear--it's to be published next month.
Isn't that glorious?"

"That is all worn under the arms," Lydia murmured over an old waist
that had been for months in her sewing basket, "I believe I will cut
off the buttons and give it to the poor!"

"The old idiot!" Martie mused over her letter.

"Does his wife encourage this writing, Martie?"

"Adele? She isn't with him now at all. She's left him, in fact. I
believe she wants a divorce."

"Oh?" Lydia commented, in a peculiar tone.

"He wrote me that some weeks ago," Martie explained, suddenly
flushing. "She was a queer, unhappy sort of woman. She and this
doctor of hers had some sort of affair, and the outcome was that she
simply went to friends, and wrote John a hysterical girly-girly sort
of letter--"

"John?"

"Mr. Dryden, that is."

"He must be crushed and heartbroken," Lydia said emphatically.

"Well, no, he isn't," Martie said innocently. "He isn't like other
people. If she wants a divorce--John won't mind awfully. He's
really--really unusual."

"He must be," Lydia said witheringly, and trembling a little with
excitement, "to let his own wife leave him while he writes letters
asking the advice of a--a--another woman who is recently--recently
widowed!"

Martie glanced at her, smiled a little, shrugged her shoulders, and
calmly re-read her letter.

Lydia resumed her work, a flush on her cheeks.

"He can't have much respect for you, Martie," she said quietly,
after a busy silence.

Martie looked up, startled.

"John can't? Oh, but Lyddy, you don't know him! He's such an
innocent goose; he absolutely depends upon me! Why, fancy, he's the
man who wanted me to open the boarding-house so that he and his wife
could live there--he's as simple as that!"

"As simple as what?" Lydia asked with her deadly directness.

"Well--I mean--that if there were anything--wrong in his feeling for
me--" Martie floundered.

"Oh, Martie, Martie, Martie, I tremble for you!" Lydia said sadly.
"A married man, and you a married woman! My dear, can't you see how
far you've drifted from your own better self to be able to laugh
about it?"

"You goose!" Martie kissed the cool, lifeless cheek before she ran
upstairs with her letter. John's straight-forward sentences kept
recurring to her mind through many days. His letter seemed to bring
a bracing breath of the big city. A day or two later she and Teddy
chanced to be held in mid-street while the big Eastern passenger
train thundered by, and she shut her fingers on John's letter in her
pocket, and said eagerly, confidently, "Oh, New York! I wish I was
going back!"

But Lydia wore a grave face for several days, and annoyed and amused
her younger sister with the attitude that something was wrong.

Lydia had changed more than any one of them, Martie thought,
although her life was what it had always been. She had been born in
the old house, and had moved about it for these more than thirty
years almost without an interruption. But in the last six years she
had left girlhood forever behind; she was a prim, quiet, contentedly
complaining woman now, a little too critical perhaps, a little self-
righteous, but kind and good. Lydia's will was always for the
happiness of others: Pa's comfort, Pauline's rights, and the wisest
course for Martie and Sally to take occupied her mind and time far
more than any personal interest of her own. But she had a limited
vision of duty and convention, and even Sally fretted under her
sway. Her father openly transferred his allegiance to Martie, and
Lydia grieved over the palpable injustice without the slightest
appreciation of its cause.

She was infinitely helpful in times of emergency, and would take
charge of Sally's babies, if Sally were ill, or slave in Sally's
nursery if all or any of the children were indisposed. But she was
not so obliging if mere pleasure took Sally away from her maternal
duties. Sally told Martie that there was no asking Lyd to help,
either she did it voluntarily, or wild horses couldn't make her do
it at all.

If her younger sisters entrusted their children to Aunt Lydia, she
was an adoring and indulgent aunt. She loved to open her cookie jar
for their raids, and to have them beg her favours or stories. But if
Lydia had expressed the opinion that it was too cold for the
children to go barefoot, and Martie or Sally revoked the decision,
then Lydia wore a dark, resentful look for hours, and was apt to
vent her disapproval on the children themselves.

"No, get out of my lap, Jimmy. I don't want a boy that runs to his
Mama and doesn't trust his Auntie," Lydia would say patiently,
firmly, and kindly. Martie and Sally, wives for years, were able to
refrain from any comment. To be silent when children are disciplined
is one of the great lessons of marriage.

"But I don't believe that a woman who ever had had a baby COULD
rebuff a child like that," Martie told Sally. "I don't know, though,
some aunts are wonderful! Only that pleasant justice does seem
wasted on a child; it merely stings without being comprehensible in
the least!"

So the younger girls dismissed it philosophically. But it was one of
the results of a life like Lydia's that human intercourse had no
lighter phases for her. She must analyze and suspect and brood.
Wherever a possible slight was hidden Lydia found it. She sometimes
disappeared for a few hours upstairs, and came back with reddened
eyes.

Her father's devotion to Martie she bore with martyred sweetness.
When they laughed together at dinner she listened with downcast
eyes, a faint, pained smile on her lips.

"Would you like Martie to sit in Ma's place, Pa?" she asked one
morning, when she was folding her napkin neatly into the orange-wood
napkin-ring marked "Souvenir of Santa Cruz." Her father's surprised
negative hardly interrupted the account he was giving his youngest
daughter of the law-suit he had won years ago against old man
Thomas. But after breakfast Martie found Lydia crying into one of
the aprons that Were hanging in the side-entry. "It's nothing!" she
gulped as Martie's warm arms went about her. "Only--only I can't
bear to have Ma forgotten already! You heard how Pa spoke-so short
and so cold!"

"Oh, Lyddy, DARLING!" Martie protested, half-amused, half-
sympathetic. Lydia straightened herself resentfully.

"I suppose I'm foolish," she said. "I suppose the best thing for us
all to do is to forget and laugh, and go on as if life and death
were only a JOKE!"

But these storms were rare. Lydia's was a placid life. She was
deeply delighted when her cooking was praised, although she
pretended to be annoyed by it. She was wearing dresses now that had
been hers six years ago; sometimes a blue gingham or a gray madras
was worn a whole season by Lydia without one trip to the tub. She
carried a red and gray parasol that Cliff Frost had given her ten
years ago; her boots were thin, unadorned kid, creased by her narrow
foot; they seemed never to wear out.

As the years went by she quoted her mother more and more. The rather
silent Mrs. Monroe had evidently left a fund of advice behind her.
Nothing was too trivial to be affected by the memory of Ma's
opinion.

"Nice thick cream Williams is giving us," Lydia might say at the
breakfast table. "Dear Ma used to say that good cream was half the
secret of good coffee!" "I remember Ma used to say that marigolds
were rather bold, coarse flowers," she confided to Martie, "and
isn't it true?"

Her appetite for the news of the village was still insatiable; it
was rarely uncharitable, but it never ended. Martie came to
recognize certain tones in Lydia's voice, when she and Alice Clark
or Angela Baxter or young Mrs. King were on the shady side porch.
There was the delicately tentative tone in which she trod upon
uncertain ground: "How do you mean she's never been the same since
last fall, Lou? I don't remember anything special happening to
Minnie Scott last fall." There was a frankly and flatly amazed tone,
in which Lydia might say: "Well, Clara told me yesterday about
Potter Street, and if you'll tell me what POSSESSED that boy, I'll
be obliged to you!" And then there was the tone of incredible
announcement: "Alice, I don't know that I should tell this, because
I only heard it last night, but I haven't been able to think of one
other thing ever since, and I believe I'll tell you; it won't go any
further. Mrs. Hughie Wilson came in here last night, and we got to
talking about old Mrs. Mulkey's death--"

And so on, for perhaps a full hour. Martie, smiling over her
darning, would hear Alice's gratifying, "Well, for pity!" and "Did
you EVER!" at intervals. Sometimes she herself contributed
something, a similar case in New York, perhaps, but the others were
not interested. They knew, without ever having expressed it, that
there is no intimacy like that of a small village, no novelty or
horror that comes so closely home to the people of the Eastern
metropolis as did these Monroe events to their own lives.

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