Books: Martie The Unconquered
K >>
Kathleen Norris >> Martie The Unconquered
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 | 20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27
Martie loved her sister, and they came to understand each other's
ways perfectly. Teddy was happy with Aunt Lyd when his mother was at
the Library, and Lydia liked her authority over the child and his
companionship. There was no peace in the old house, for all her
silent meekness, unless Lydia's curious sense of justice was
satisfied, and Martie took pains to satisfy it.
One memorable day, just before Christmas, Martie opened a small
package, to find John Dryden's book. She was in the Library when
Miss Fanny came in with the mail, and her hand trembled as she cut
the strings. The flimsy tissue paper jacket blew softly over her
hand; a dark blue book, slim, dignified: "Mary Beatrice."
He had not autographed it, but then John would never think of doing
so. Martie smiled her motherly smile at the memory of his childish
dependence upon her suggestions as to the smaller points of living.
Her letter of congratulation began to run through her mind as she
turned the title page.
Suddenly her heart stopped beating. She wet her lips and glanced
about. Miss Fanny had gone into the coat-room; nobody was near.
Oh, madman, madman! He had dedicated it to her! A detected felony
could not have given Martie a more sinking sensation than she
experienced at the sight.
Her initials: M. S. B.--she need puzzle only a second over the
selection, for her letters to him were always signed, "Martha
Salisbury, Bannister." And under the initials, this:
Even as to Caesar, Cassar's toll, To God what in us is divine; So to
your soul above my soul Whatever life finds good in mine. Martie
read the four lines as many times, then she lifted the page to her
cheek, and held it there, shutting her eyes, and drawing a deep,
ecstatic breath.
"Oh, John, JOHN, how wonderful of you!" she whispered, her heart
rising on a swift, triumphant flight. Ah, this was something to have
brought from the long years; this counted in that inner tribunal of
hers.
After awhile she began to turn the pages, wishing that she were a
better judge of all these phrases. The play was short: three brief
acts.
"I think it's wonderful!" Martie decided. "I KNOW it is!"
For the little volume, even at this first quick glimpse, was stamped
with something fiery and strange. Martie's eyes drifted here and
there; presently fell upon the lines that brought the frightened
little Italian princess, fresh from her convent, to the strange
coast of England, and to the welcome of the strange King, her
prospective husband's brother. The words were simplicity's self,
like all inspired words, yet they brought the colour to Martie's
face, and a yearning pain to her heart. Youth and love in all their
first gold glory were captured here, and something of youth and
glory seemed to flood the Library throughout the quiet winter
afternoon.
The hours droned on, Martie, moving noiselessly about, and touching
the switch that suddenly lighted the dim big room, paused at the
window to look down upon Monroe. An early twilight was creeping into
the village street, and the drug-store windows glowed with globes of
purple and green. The shops were already disguised under bushy
evergreens; wreaths of red and green paper made circles of steam
against the show windows. Silva, of the fruit market opposite, was
selling a Christmas tree from the score that lay at the curb, to a
stout country woman, whose shabby, well-wrapped children watched the
transaction breathlessly from a mud-spattered surrey. The Baxter
girls went by, Martie saw them turn into the church yard, and
disappear into the swinging black doors, "for a little visit."
Nothing dramatic or beautiful in the scene: a little Western village
street, on the eve of Christmas Eve, but to-night it was lighted for
Martie with poetry and romance. The thought of a slim, dark-blue
book with its four magic lines thrilled in her heart like a song.
"Christmas day after to-morrow!" she said to Fanny, "don't you love
Christmas?"
But she knew that her real Christmas joy had come to-day.
The December kitchen was gas-lighted long before she got there, and
Pauline was deep in calm preparation for dinner. Pauline was a
Canadian girl, and if her work ever confused or fatigued her, at
least she never betrayed the fact. There never were pots and pans
awaiting cleaning in Pauline's sink, there never was a teaspoonful
of flour spilled upon her biscuit board. Her gingham cuffs were
always starched and stiff, her colourless hair smooth. She was a
silent, dun-coloured creature, whose most violent expression was an
occasional deep, unctuous laugh at Mrs. Bannister's nonsense.
Pauline did not prepare a meal in a series of culminating
convulsions, with hair rumpling, face reddening, and voice rising
every passing minute. She moved a shining pot forward on a shining
stove, she took plates of inviting cold things from the safe, and
lifted a damp napkin from her pats of butter. Then she said, in an
uninterested voice: "You might tell your p'pa, Miss Lydia--"
Humble as her business was, she had been taught it well. Martie,
insatiable on this particular topic, sometimes questioned Pauline.
She was given a meagre picture of a farmhouse on Prince Edward's
Island, of a stern, exacting, loving mother who "licked" daughters
and sons alike with a "trace-end" for any infractions of domestic
rule. Of snows so lasting and deep that housewives buried their
brown linens in October, and found them again, snowy white, on the
April grass. Pauline's mother, dying of "a shock," had been the
devoted daughter's charge for eleven hard years, then Pauline had
married at thirty, only to be made a widow, by a lumber jam, at
thirty-two. So it was fortunate that she could cook, for she was a
plain woman, and what the country folk call "dumb," meaning dull,
and unresponsive, and unambitious.
To-night there was a little unusual clutter in the big, hot, clean
kitchen; Lydia was making sandwiches for the Girls' Sodality
Christmas Tree at the large table. Two or three empty cardboard
boxes stood waiting the neatly trimmed and pressed bread: Lydia did
this sort of thing perfectly. At the end of the table, his cheeks
glowing, and his dark mop in a tumble, Teddy was watching in deep
fascination.
The room had the charm that use and simplicity lend to any room.
There was nothing superfluous here, and nothing assumed. Martie knew
every crack in the yellow bowl that held a crinkled rice-pudding;
the broom had held that corner for thirty years; for thirty years
the roller towel had dangled from that door. She and Len and Sally
had seen their mother go to the broom for a straw, to test baking
cake, a hundred times; their sticky little faces had been dried a
hundred times on the towel.
But to-night a new, homely sweetness seemed to permeate the place.
Martie had left the slim, dark-blue book upstairs in her bureau
drawer, but her mood of exquisite lightheartedness she had not laid
aside. She sat down in the kitchen rocker, and Teddy climbed into
her lap, and, while she talked with Lydia, distracted her with
little kisses, with small hands squeezing her cold cheeks, and with
the casual bumping of his hard little head against her face.
"I declare it begins to feel Christmassy, Lyd! Did you get down town
to see the stores? I never saw anything like Bonestell's in my life.
It's cold, too--but sort of bracing cold! We had both the stoves
going all day; we had to light the lights at four! It was rather
nice, everybody coming in to say 'Merry Christmas!'"
"The children had their closing exercises at school this morning,"
Lydia contributed, "and afterward Sally and I walked down town, with
all the children. She expects Joe to-morrow. She wanted Billy and
Jim to get in a nap, so I brought Ted home."
"And I took a long nap!" Teddy whispered in his mother's ear.
"I don't know what possesses the child to whisper that way!" Lydia
said, annoyed.
"He just said that he had a nap, Lyd, I think he didn't want to
interrupt."
"Oh, he got a good nap in," Lydia admitted, pacified, "if you're
really going to take him to-night, I've laid out his clean things."
"I saw them on the bed, Lyd--you're a darling!"
"Am I going?" Teddy asked, with a bounce.
"Is Aunt Sally going to take the children?" Martie temporized. But
Teddy knew from her tone that he was safe. Indeed, his mother loved
the realization that she was his court of last appeal, that it was
to her memory of authority abused that his happiness was entrusted.
It was her joy to explain, to adjust, to reconcile, the little
elements of his life. She taught him the rules of simplicity and
industry and service as another mother might have taught him his
multiplication table. Teddy might have poverty and discouragement to
face some day, but life could never be all dark to him while his
mother interpreted it.
She took him upstairs now, to dress for the great occasion of the
Sodality Christmas tree, and dressed herself, prettily, as well. But
before she turned out the gas, and followed the galloping small boy
downstairs, she opened her bureau drawer.
And again the slim book was in her hands, and again her dazzled eyes
were reading the few words that gave her new proof that John had not
forgotten.
For a few minutes she stood dreaming; dreaming of the old boarding-
house, and the little furniture clerk with his eager, faun-like
smile. And for the first time she let her fancy play with the
thought of what life might be for the woman John Dryden loved.
But she put the book and the thought quickly away, her cheeks
burning, and went down to the homely, inviting odours of supper, of
Pauline's creamed salmon and fluffy rolls. Her father sat beside the
fire, in a sort of doze, his long, lean hands idly locked, his
glasses pushed up on his lead-coloured forehead.
Martie kissed him, catching the old faint unpleasant smell of breath
and moustache as she did so, helped him to the table, and tied
Teddy's napkin under the child's round, firm chin. She talked of
anything and everything, of Christmas surprises, and Christmas
duties--
And all the while her heart sang. When with Teddy on one side, and
Lydia leaning on the free arm, she was walking through the winter
darkness her feet wanted to dance on the cold, hard earth.
"It's Christmas--Christmas--Christmas!" she laughed, when the little
boy commented upon her gaiety. Lydia found the usual damper for her
mood.
"Very different for you from last Christmas, poor Mart!" she
observed, with a long sigh.
Martie was sobered. They went into the church for a moment's prayer,
and Teddy wriggled against her in the dark, and managed to get a
little arm about her neck, for he knew that she was crying. The
revulsion had come, and Martie, tears running down her face in the
darkness, was only a lonely woman again, unsuccessful, worried,
trapped in a dull little village, missing her baby!
Women were coming and going on the altar, trimming it with odorous
green for Christmas. There was a pungent smell of evergreen in the
air. About the confessionals there was a constant shuffle,
whispering and stirring; radiators hissed and clanked, the big doors
creaked and swung windily.
Sally and her whispering tribe were just in front of them; presently
they all went out into the cold, and across a bare yard to the
lights and warmth and noise and music of the Sodality Hall. Sally
saw that Martie had been crying, and when they were seated together
in one of the rows of chairs against the wall, with their laps full
of children's coats, she touched the hidden hurt.
"Martie, dearest, I'm so sorry!"
"I know!" Martie blinked and managed a smile.
"I'll be glad for you when this first Christmas is over!" Sally said
earnestly.
Martie's answering look was full of gratitude: she thought it
strangely touching to see the blooming little mother deliberately
try to bring her gay Christmas mood into tune with sorrow and loss.
Sally's beautiful Elizabeth was one of the Christmas angels in the
play to-night, and Sally's pride was almost too great to bear. Billy
was sturdily dashing about selling popcorn balls, and Jim was
staggering to and fro flirting with admiring Sodality girls. The
young Hawkeses were at their handsome best, and women on all sides
were congratulating Sally.
What could Sally dream, Martie mused, of a freezing Eastern city
packed under dirty snow, of bitter poverty, of a tiny, gold-crowned
girl in a shabby dressing-gown, of a coaster wrapped in wet paper,
and delivered in a dark, bare hall? Sally's serene destiny lay here,
away from the damp, close heat under which milk poisoned and babies
wilted, away from the icy cold that caught shuddering flesh and
blood under its solid pall. These friendly, chattering women were
Sally's world, these problems of school and rent and food were
Sally's problems.
But Martie knew now that she was not of Monroe, that she must go
back. She was not Sally, she was not Rose; she had earned her entry
into a higher school. Those Eastern years were not wasted, she must
go on now, she must go on--to what?--to what?
And with New York her thoughts were suddenly with John, and Sally,
glancing anxiously at her, saw that she was smiling. Martie did not
notice the look: she was far away. She saw the Christmas tree, and
the surging children, through a haze of dreams.
Mysterious, enviable, unattainable--thought the Sodality girls,
eying the black-clad figure, with its immaculate touches of white at
wrists and throat. Mrs. Bannister had run away with an actor and had
lived in New York, and was a widow, they reminded each other, and
thrilled. She never dreamed that they made her a heroine and a
model, quoted her, loitered into the Library to be enslaved afresh
by her kind, unsmiling advice. She felt herself far from the
earliest beginnings of real achievement: to them, as to herself ten
years ago, she was a person romantic and exceptional--a somebody in
Monroe!
Somebody brought her Jim, sweet and sleepy, and he subsided in her
lap. Len's wife sank into a neighbouring chair, to express worried
hopes that the March baby would be a boy, a male in the Monroe line
at last. Rose fluttered near, with pleasant plans for a dinner
party. Martie's thought were with a slim, dark-blue book, safe in
her bureau drawer.
She wrote John immediately. There was no answer, but she realized
that the weeks that went on so quietly in Monroe were bringing him
rapidly to fame and fortune.
"Mary Beatrice" was an instantaneous success. It was not quite
poetry, not quite drama, not quite history. But its combination of
the three took the fancy, first of the critics, then of the public.
It was read, quoted, and discussed more than any other book of the
year. Martie found John's photograph in all the literary magazines,
and saw his name everywhere. Interviews with him frequently stared
at her from unexpected places, and flattering prophecies of his
future work were sounded from all sides. Three special performances
of "Mary Beatrice," and then three more, and three after that, were
given in New York, and literary clubs everywhere took up the book
seriously for study.
Well, Martie thought, reviewing the matter, it was not like one's
dreams, but it was life, this curious success that had come to the
husband of a woman like Adele, the odd, inarticulate little clerk in
a furniture store. She wondered if it had come in time to save the
divorce, wondered where John was living, what change this
extraordinary event had made in his life.
Her own share in it came to seem unreal, as all the old life was
unreal. Gradually, what Monroe did and thought and felt began to
seem the real standard and the old life the false. Martie agreed
with Lydia that the little Eastman girl had a prettier voice than
any she had ever heard in New York; she agreed with Rose that the
Woman's Club was really more up-to-date than it was possible for a
club to be in the big Eastern city.
"I know New York," smiled Rose, "and of course, I love it. Rod and I
have been there twice, and we do have the best times! And I admit
that Tiffany's and the big shops and so on, well, of course, they're
wonderful! We stayed there almost three weeks the last time, and we
just WENT every moment of the time--"
Martie, leaning on the desk before her and smiling vaguely, was not
listening. The other woman's words had evoked a sudden memory of the
early snows and the lights in the Mall, of the crashing elevated
trains with chestnut-sellers' lights blowing beneath them, of summer
dawns, when the city woke to the creeping tide of heat, and of
autumn afternoons, when motor cars began to crowd the Avenue, and
leaves drifted--drifted--in the Park. To Rose she answered duly:
"You must have had great fun!" But to herself she said: "Ah, you
don't know MY New York!"
CHAPTER III
One wet January night Malcolm came home tired and cross to find his
younger daughter his only company for dinner. Lydia had been sent
for in haste, by Mrs. Harry Kilroy, whose mother was not expected to
live, said the panting messenger, thereby delicately intimating that
she WAS expected to die. Teddy was as usual at Aunt Sally's.
Martie coaxed the fire to a steady glow, and seated herself opposite
her father with a curiosity entirely unmixed with the old
apprehension. Pa was unmistakably upset about something.
Under her pleasant questioning it came out. Old Tate and Cliff Frost
had come into the office of the Monroe Estates that afternoon to
make him an offer for the home site. Martie could see that her
father regretted that Lydia and Lydia's horrified protests were
missing.
"I looked them in the eye," said Malcolm, wiping his moustache
before he gave her an imitation of his own scorn, "and I said,
'Gentlemen, before the home that was my father's, and will be my
son's, passes from my hands, those hands will be dust!'"
"But why do they want it?" asked Martie after duly applauding this
sentiment.
She was rapidly thinking. The old house was mortgaged, and doubly
mortgaged. It was useless to the average buyer, for besides the fact
that the neighbourhood was no longer Monroe's best, it was four feet
below street level. It was surrounded by useless shabby barns and
outhouses, it was five times too large for the diminished family,
and, in case of Pa's death--and Pa was nearly seventy--it must fetch
what it might, for between Len's constant need of money for the
Estates, and Lydia's mild helplessness, there could be no holding it
for a fair price.
"For the new High School--for the new High School!" her father said
impatiently. For perhaps twenty years he had had occasional offers
for the property, and had always scornfully refused them.
"Yet I think that's rather touching, Pa," Martie said.
"What's touching?" he asked suspiciously, after a moment in which he
obviously tried to see any touching aspect in the affair.
"Why, to have the Monroe High School on the old Monroe site!" Martie
said innocently. "Of course Mr. Tate and Cliff Frost know what it
means to you, and yet I suppose they realize that the neighbourhood
is changing, and that those shops have come in, this side of the
bridge, and that, even if we lived here ten years more, we couldn't
twenty. I agree with your decision, Pa, of course; but at the same
time, I see that no other plot in Monroe would be so fitting!"
Malcolm stirred his tea, raised the cup, and drank off the hot fluid
with great gusto. A faint frown darkened his brow.
"And, pray, where would the family live?" he asked presently.
"Where we ought to be now," Martie answered promptly. "In the
Estates. I have been thinking lately, Pa, that nothing would give
that development such prestige as to have you there! Put up as
pretty a house as you choose, build a drive, and put in a handsome
fence, but be Malcolm Monroe of the Monroe Estates!"
Always captured by phrases, she saw him tug at his moustache to hide
a smile.
"Well!" he said presently. "Well! You astonish me. But yes, I see
your point. I must candidly admit you have a point there. With
another attractive home there--yes, there is something in that. But
I had supposed that you girls had a sentiment for this old place,"
he added almost reproachfully.
"And so we have!" Martie answered quickly. "But it is one thing to
sell this place in small lots, Pa, and have it chopped into shops
and shanties, and another to have a three-hundred-thousand-dollar
building go in here. The new High School on the old Monroe place;
you'll admit there's a great difference?"
Had her bombastic father always been so easily influenced? Martie
wondered, remembering the old storms and the old stubbornness. It
was true, some persons couldn't do things; other persons could.
Lydia and Ma would have goaded him into an obstinacy that no later
judgment could dispel, and after his death Monroe would have
lamented that he had left next to nothing, for the place had to go
for taxes and interest overdue, and Lydia and Ma would have settled
themselves comfortably on Len for life.
"All the difference in the world," Malcolm said, now deep in
thought.
"You could send a letter to the Zeus," Martie added presently,
"saying that you had never even considered such a step before, but
that to sell for educational purposes was--you know!--was in accord
with the spirit of your father--that sort of thing!"
"And so it was!" he answered warmly.
"A few ready thousands would be the making of the Estates, now,"
said Martie, "but naturally the town need know nothing of that!"
Malcolm shrugged a careless assent, and silently finished his pie.
"Your sister Lydia--" he began suddenly, shaking his head.
"Yes, Lyd will object," Martie assented, as his voice stopped. "Lyd
is a conservative, Pa. She has very little of the spirit that
brought Grandfather Monroe here; she doesn't, in the Estates, see
property that will be just as beautiful and just as valuable as
anything in Monroe in a few years. Why, Pa, you must remember the
days when our trees in the yard here were only saplings?"
"Remember?" he echoed impressively. "Why, I remember Monroe as the
field between two sheep-ranches. There was not a blade of wheat, not
a fruit tree--"
He was well started. Martie listened to an hour's complacent
reminiscence. At eight o'clock he went to his study, but came back a
moment later, with his glasses pushed up on his lead-coloured
forehead, to say that the sum old Tait mentioned would clear the
mortgage, build a handsome house, and perhaps leave a bit over for
Martie and her boy. At nine he appeared again, to say that he would
deed the new house to Lydia, who would undoubtedly take the change a
little hard--a little hard!
"Yes," said old Malcolm thoughtfully, from the doorway, glancing,
with his spectacles still on his forehead, at the pencilled list he
had in his hand. "Yes, I believe I have hit upon the solution! I--
believe--I--have--hit--it!"
Old Mrs. Sark having fulfilled her family's mournful expectations,
Lydia stayed for the funeral, and was so deeply absorbed and
satisfied by her position in the Kilroy house that she returned home
still impressive, consolatory, and crushed in manner.
She sat beside Martie on the front steps, in the warm March
twilight, retailing the events of the last three days, and living
again their moments of grief and stress.
"I know I was a consolation to them, Mart--of course, there's little
enough one can do! But yesterday morning--I sat up both nights; I
declare I don't know where the strength comes from--yesterday
morning, before the funeral, I went up to Louis Kilroy--I never saw
a grown man take a thing so hard--and I said, 'Louis, you must come
and have a cup of hot, strong coffee!' Bessie was there, and I must
say she seemed as devoted to Grandma as if she'd been her own
daughter, and she came and took my hands, and she said, 'Lydia, I
never will forget all you've done for us!' Well," Lydia went on,
with a sad little deprecatory shrug, "I didn't do much. But it was
somebody THERE, you know! Somebody to do the plain little everyday
things that MUST be done, whether death is in the house, or not!"
And Lydia sighed in weary content. "Carrie David says she believes
Tom'll go next--"she was pursuing mournfully, when Martie
interrupted.
"Say, Lyd dear, we've been having great times since you were away--I
didn't have a chance to say a word to you at the funeral--but the
school board, or the city fathers, or some one, has made Pa an offer
for the house!"
"What house?" Lydia asked interestedly.
"THIS one." Martie began to chew the fresh sprout of a yellow
banksia rose.
"This one!" Lydia's mouth remained a little open, her eyes were
wild.
"Yes; this whole tract. They'll fill it in; they want if for the new
High School."
"Well--" Lydia tossed her head loftily. "Of course, Pa told them--?"
"Yes, he did tell them, as he always has--that nothing would
persuade him to part with it!"
"WELL!" said Lydia, breathing again.
"But he's been thinking it over, Lyd, and he's really seriously
reconsidering it. You see the instant Pa dies, the Bank will
foreclose, for neither you nor I have a cent, and Len is tied up for
years with the Estates--"
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 | 20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27