Books: Martie The Unconquered

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He himself escorted them over the office, through large spaces
filled with desks, past closed doors, through a lunch-room and a
library. Respectful greetings met them on all sides. Martie was glad
she had on her wedding suit, and the new hat that had been in a
department store on Sixth Avenue yesterday afternoon. Mr. Trowbridge
called Mrs. Bannister's attention to a certain desk. When they went
back to the privacy of his own office, he asked her if she would
like to come to use that desk, say on Monday?

"There's a bunch of confidential letters there now, for you to
answer," he said. "Then there are always articles to change, or cut,
or adapt. Also our Miss Briggs, in the 'My Own Money Club,' needs
help. We may ask you sometimes to take home a bunch of stories to
read; we may ask you to do something else!"

"I'll address envelopes or stoke the furnace!" said Martie, bright
tears in her smiling eyes. "I don't know whether I'm worth all that
money," she added, "for it doesn't seem to me that anybody in the
world really EARNS as much as twenty dollars a week, but I'll try to
be! I'm twenty-eight years old, and I've been waiting all my life
for this chance!"

"Well, even at that age, you may have a year or two of usefulness
left, if your health is spared you." the editor said. They parted
laughing, and Martie went out into the wonderful, sunny, hospitable
city as gay as Teddy was. Oh, how she would work, how she would
work! She would get down to the office first of all; she would wear
the trimmest suits; she would never be cross, never be tired, never
rebel at the most flagrant imposition! She would take the cold baths
and wear the winter underwear that kept tonsilitis at bay; she would
hire a typewriter, and keep on with her articles. If ever a woman in
the world kept a position, then Martie would keep hers!

And, of course, women did. There was that pretty, capable woman who
came into Mr. Trowbridge's office, and was introduced as the
assistant editor. Coolly dressed, dainty and calm, she had not
suggested that the struggle was too hard. She had smilingly greeted
Martie, offered a low-voiced suggestion, and vanished unruffled and
at peace.

"Why, that's what this world IS," Martie reflected. "Workers needing
jobs, and jobs needing workers." And suddenly she hit upon the
keynote to her new philosophy. "MEN don't worry and fidget about
keeping their jobs, and _I_'M not going to. I'm just as necessary
and just as capable as if I were--say, Len. If Len came on here for
a job I wouldn't worry myself sick about his ever getting it!"

What honeymoon would have been half so thrilling, she reflected, as
this business of getting herself and Teddy suitably established? Her
choice, not made until Sunday afternoon, fell upon a quiet boarding-
house on West Sixty-first Street. It was kept by a kindly Irishwoman
who had children younger and older than Teddy, and well-disposed
toward Teddy, and it was only half a block from the Park. At first
Mrs. Gilfogle said she would charge nothing at all for the child; a
final price for the two was placed at fifteen dollars a week. Martie
suspected that the young Gilfogles would accompany Teddy and herself
on their jaunts occasionally, and would help him scatter his stone
blocks all over her floor on winter nights. But the luncheon for
which they stayed was exceptionally good, and she was delighted with
her big back room.

"I'm alone wid the two of thim to raise," said Mrs. Gilfogle. "I
know what it is. He died on me just as I got three hundred dollars'
worth of furniture in, God rest him. I didn't know would I ever pay
for it at all, with Joe here at the breast, and Annie only walking.
But I've had good luck these seven years! You'll not find elegance,
but at that you'll never go hungry here. And you lost the child,
too?--that was hard."

"My girl would be three," Martie said wistfully. And suddenly
reminded, she thought that she would take Teddy and go to see the
old Doctor and Mrs. Converse.

That they welcomed her almost with tears of joy, and that her
improved appearance and spirits gave them genuine parental delight
was only a part of her new experience. Mrs. Converse wanted her to
settle down with Teddy in her old room. Martie would not do that;
she must be near the subway, she said, but she promised them many a
Sunday dinner-hour.

"And that Mrs. Dryden got divorced, but she never married again,"
marvelled the old lady mildly.

"Oh, she didn't marry her doctor, then?"

"No, I think somebody told Doctor that she couldn't. Wasn't she just
the kind of woman who could spoil the lives of two good men?
Somebody told Doctor that the doctor was reconciled to his wife, and
they went away from New York, but I don't know."

Martie wondered. She thought that she would look up the doctor's
name in the telephone book, anyway, and perhaps chance an anonymous
telephone call. Suppose she asked for Mrs. Cooper, and Adele
answered?

But before she did so, she met Adele. She had held her new position
for six weeks then, and Indian Summer was giving way to the
delicious coolness of the fall. Martie was in a department store,
Teddy beside her, when a woman came smiling up to her, and laid a
hand on her arm. She recognized a changed Adele. The beauty was not
gone, but it seemed to have faded and shrunk upon itself; Adele's
bright eyes were ringed with lead, the old coquetry of manner was
almost shocking.

"Martie," said Adele, "this is my sister, Mrs. Baker."

Mrs. Baker, a big wholesome woman, who looked, Martie thought, as if
she might have a delicate daughter, married young, and a husband
prominent in the Eastern Star, and be herself a clever bridge
player, and a most successful hostess and guest at women's hilarious
lunch-eons, looked at the stranger truculently. She was a tightly
corseted woman, with prominent teeth, and a good-natured smile.
Martie felt sure that she always had good clothes, and wore white
shoes in summer, and could be generous without any glimmering of a
sense of justice. She was close to fifty.

"How do, Mrs. Bannister," she said heartily. "I've heard Adele
mention your name. How do you think she looks? I think she looks
like death. How do, dear?" she added to Teddy. "Are you mama's boy?
I don't live in New York like you do; I live in Browning, Indiana.
Don't you think that's a funny place to live? But it's a real pretty
place just the same."

"Have you had your lunch?" Adele was asking. "We haven't. I was kept
by the girl at the milliner's--"

It was one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Martie was free to lunch
where she pleased. She was free even to sit down with a woman whose
name was under a cloud. They all crowded into an express elevator,
and sat down at a table in the restaurant on the twelfth floor.

Presently the unreality of it faded from Martie's uppermost
consciousness and she began to enjoy herself. To sit with the wife
of a Mystic Shriner, and the woman who had done what Adele had done,
and whose husband incidentally was deeply devoted to herself, was
not according to Monroe. But she was in New York!

"I guess I was a silly girl, misled by a man of the world," Adele
was saying in her old, complaining, complacent voice. "I know I was
a fool, Martie, but don't men do that sort of thing all the time,
and get over it? Why should us women pay all the time? You know as
well as I do that John Dryden was just as queer as Dick's hatband; I
was hungering, as a girl will, for pleasure and excitement--"

"It was a dirty crime, the way that doctor acted," Mrs. Baker
contributed, her tone much pleasanter than her words. "He must have
been a skunk, if you ask me. Adele here was wrong, Mrs. Bannister;
you and I won't quarrel about that. But Adele wasn't nothing but a
child at heart--"

"I believed anything he told me!" Adele drawled, playing with her
knife and fork, her lashes dropped.

"Dryden," the loyal sister continued majestically, "threw her over
the second he got a chance; that's what she got for putting up with
HIM for all those years! And then, if you please, this other feller
discovers that he can't get rid of his wife. I came on then," she
said warmly as Martie murmured her sympathy, "and I says to Adele,
throw the whole crowd of them down. Billy Baker and I have plenty,
and my daughter--Ruby, she's a lovely girl and she's married an
elegant feller whose people own about all the lumber interests in
our part of the country--she doesn't need anything from us. But if
you ask me, it's just about killed Adele," she went on frankly,
glancing at her sister, "she looks like a sick girl to me. We came
on two or three days ago, to see a specialist about her, and I
declare I'll be glad to get her back."

"What has become of Dr. Cooper?" Martie felt justified in asking.

"He lost all the practice he ever had, they say," Mrs. Baker said
viciously. "And good enough for him, too! His wife won't even see
him, and he lives at some boarding-house; and serve him right!"

"And Jack's book such a success!" Adele said, widening her eyes at
Martie. "Do you ever see him?"

"He's got a great friend in Dean Silver, the novelist," Martie
answered composedly. "I believe they're abroad."

"The idea!" Adele said lifelessly. She was playing with her
bracelets now, and looked about her in an aimless way.

"Well, if this little girl has any sense she'll let the past be the
past," remarked the optimistic Mrs. Baker. "There's a fellow out our
way, Joe Chase; he's got a cattle ranch. You never heard of him?
He's a di'mond in the rough, if you ask me, but he's been crazy
about Adele ever since she first visited me. He'd give her anything
in God's world."

"But I think I'd die of loneliness winters!" Adele said, with the
smile of a petted child.

So there was a third man eager to sacrifice his life to her, Martie
marvelled. Adele would consider herself a martyr if she succumbed to
the wiles of the rough diamond; she would puzzle and distress him in
his ranch-house; she would Fret and exact and complain. Probably one
of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who
would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and
worship him blindly. But no; he must yearn for this neurotic,
abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her barren brain
and body.

"Isn't it funny how unlucky I am, Martie?" Adele asked at parting.
"If you'll tell me why one woman has to have so much bad luck, and
others just sail along on the top of the wave, I'll be obliged to
you!" She came close to Martie, her faded, bitter little face
flushing suddenly. "Now this Mrs. Cooper," she said in a low tone,
"her father was a shoe manufacturer, and left her half a million
dollars. Of course, it's a SNAP for her to say she'll do this, and
say she'll do that! She says it's for the children she refuses the
divorce, but the real reason is she wants him back. She can live in
New York--"

Adele's voice trailed off disconsolately. Martie felt a genuine pang
of sympathy for the unhappy little creature whose one claim had been
of sex, and who had made her claim so badly.

"Write me now and then!" she said warmly.

"Oh, I will!" Adele stretched up to kiss the taller woman, and Mrs.
Baker kissed her, too. Martie went away smiling; over all its waste
and suffering life was amusing, after all.

Would John, with his irregular smile and his sea-blue eyes and his
reedy voice, also come back into her life some day? She could not
say. The threads of human intercourse were tangled enough to make
living a blind business at best, and she had deliberately tangled
the web that held them even more deeply than life had done. Before
he himself was back from long wandering, before he learned that she
was in the city, and that there had been no second marriage, months,
perhaps years, must go by.

Martie accepted the possibility serenely. She asked nothing better
than work and companionship, youth and health, and Teddy. Every day
was a separate adventure in happiness; she had never been happy
before.

And suppose this was only the beginning, she wondered. Suppose real
achievement and real success lay ahead? Suppose she was one of the
women to whom California would some day point with pride? Deep in
her singing heart she suspected that it was true. How it was to come
about she could only guess. By her pen, of course. By some short
story suddenly inspired, or by one of her flashing articles on the
women's problems of the day. She was not a Shakespeare, not a George
Eliot, but she had something for which the world would pay.

Nine years since the September when Rodney Parker had flashed into
her world; a long nine years. Sitting under her green-shaded reading
lamp, Martie reviewed them, for herself, and for Sally. She and
Sally had thought of Dr. Ben as only an amiable theorist then, but
there had been nothing theoretical about the help he had given Sally
and Joe with their problem.

Martie had solved her own alone. Rodney, Pa, Wallace, and John had
all entered into it, but no one of them had helped her. It was in
spite of them rather than because of them that she was sitting here
poised, established, needed at last. She saw her life to-night as a
long road, climbing steadily up from the fields and valleys,
mounting, sometimes in storm, and sometimes in fog, but always
mounting toward the mountains. Rose and Adele and Lydia were content
with the lowlands, the quiet, sunny plains below. She must have the
heights.

There were other women seeking that rising road; perhaps she might
help them. Love and wifehood and motherhood she had known, now she
would know the joy of perfected expression, the fulfillment of the
height. She dedicated herself solemnly, joyfully, to the claim of
the years ahead. Ten years ago she might have said that at twenty-
eight the best of a woman's life was over. Now she knew that she had
only begun to live.

THE END

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