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
Thus Sally, kneeling among the books, her earnest, pretty, young
face turned toward the doctor, her eyes widely opened, as the
extraordinary jumble of words poured forth. The unpleasant sensation
of their last meeting, the confusing feeling that she was not saying
what Dr. Ben wanted her to say, beset her. She felt a sudden,
dreadful inclination toward tears, although with no clear sense of a
reason for crying.
"I suppose all boys go through their silly stages like measles,"
said Sally rapidly. "And it's only my misfortune and Joe's that his
first love affair had to be me. One reason why I haven't mentioned
it at home is--"
"Then you don't care for Joe?" the old man asked with his serious
smile.
"Oh, Dr. Ben! Of course, I like Joe enormously, he's a dear sweet
boy," Sally answered smoothly. "But you know as well as I do how my
father feels toward the village people in Monroe, and while the
Hawkeses are just as nice as they can be in their way--" again
Sally's flow of eloquence was strangely shaken; she felt as a child
might, caught up in the arm of a much larger person and rushed along
helplessly with only an occasional heartening touch of her feet to
the ground--"after all, that isn't quite our way, is it?" she asked.
If only, thought the nervous little girl who was Sally, if only she
knew what Dr. Ben wanted her to say!
"Why can't ye be honest with me, Sally?" said the doctor. "Ye love
Joe, don't ye?"
Sally's head dropped, the colour rose in her cheeks, and the tears
came. She nodded, and through all her body ran a delicious thrill at
the acknowledged passion.
"Ye've found each other out, in spite of them all!" said the old man
musingly. "And what does his age or yours, or his place or yours,
matter beside that? They've tried to fill you with lies, and you've
found that the lies don't hold water. Well--"
He straightened up suddenly, and began to march about the room.
Sally, kneeling still over the books, tears drying on her cheeks,
watched him.
"Sally," said the doctor, "God made you and Joe Hawkes and your love
for each other. I don't know who made the social laws by which women
govern these little towns, but I suspect it was the devil. You've
been brought up to feel that if you marry a man Mrs. Cy Frost
doesn't ask to her house, you'll be unhappy ever after. But I ask
you, Sally--I ask you as a man old enough to be your father--if you
had your home, your husband, your health, your garden, and your
children, wouldn't you be a far happier woman than--than Lydia say,
or Florence Frost, or all the other girls who sit about this town
waiting for a man with position enough--position, BAH!--to marry?"
Sally's face was glowing.
"Oh, Dr. Ben, _I_ don't care anything about position!" she said, all
her honest innocence in her face.
"Then why do you act as if you did?" he said, well pleased.
"And would you advise me to marry Joe?" she asked radiantly.
"Joe--Tom--Billy, whomever you please!" he answered impatiently.
"But don't be afraid because he doesn't wear silk socks, Sally, or
smoke a monogrammed cigarette. Why, my child, that little polish,
that little fineness, is the woman's gift to her man! These Frosts
and Parkers: it was the coarse strength of their grandfathers that
got them across the plains; it was the women who packed the books in
the horsehair trunks, that read the Bibles and cleaned and sewed and
prayed in the old home way. You don't suppose those old miners and
grocers, who came later to be the city fathers, ever had as much
education as Joe Hawkes, or half as much!"
"I wish my father felt as you do, Doc' Ben," Sally said presently,
the brightness dying from her face. "But Pa will never, never--And
even if there were no other reason, why Joe hasn't a steady job--"
"That brings me to what I really want to say to you to-day, Sally,"
the old man interrupted her briskly. He opened a desk drawer and
took from it a small, old-fashioned photograph. Sally saw a young
woman's form, disguised under the scallops, ruffles, and pleats of
the early seventies, a bright face under a cascade of ringlets, and
a little oval bonnet set coquettishly awry. "D'ye know who that is?"
asked Dr. Ben.
"I--well, yes; I suppose?" murmured Sally sympathetically.
"Yes, it's my wife," he answered. "Mary--Our boy would be thirty.
They went away together--poor girl, poor girl! We wanted a big
family, Sally; we hoped for a houseful of children. And I had her
for only fifteen months--only fifteen months to remember for thirty
years!"
Sally was deeply impressed. She thought it strangely flattering in
Dr. Ben to take her into his confidence in this way, and that she
would tell Martie about it as they walked home.
"No," he said musingly. "I never had a child! And Sally, if I had it
all to do over again, I'd marry again. I'd have sons. That's the
citizen's duty. Some day we'll recognize it, and then you bearers of
children will come into your own. There'll be recognition for every
one of them, we'll be the first nation to make our poor women proud
and glad when a child is coming. It's got to be, Sally."
Sally was listening politely, but she was not interested. She had
heard all this before, many times. Dr. Ben's extraordinary views
upon the value of the family were familiar to every one in Monroe.
But her attention was suddenly aroused by the mention of her own
name.
"Now, supposing that you and Joe take it into your heads to get
married some day," the doctor was saying, "how about children?"
Sally's ready colour flooded her face. She made no attempt to answer
him.
"Would ye have them?" the old man asked impatiently.
"Why--why, Dr. Ben, I don't know!" Sally said in great confusion.
"I--I suppose people DO."
"You suppose people do?" he asked scornfully. "Don't ye KNOW they
do?"
"Well, I don't suppose any girl thinks very much of such things
until she's married," Sally said firmly. "Mama doesn't like us to
discuss--"
"Doesn't your mother ever talk to you about such things?" the old
man demanded.
"Certainly not!" Sally answered with spirit.
"What DOES she talk to you about?" he asked amazedly. "It's your
business in life, after all. She's not taught ye any other. What
does she expect ye to do--learn it all after it's too late to
change?"
"All what?" Sally said, a little frightened, even a little sick. He
stopped his march, and looked at her with something like pity.
"All the needs of your soul and body," he said kindly, "and your
children's souls and bodies. Well! that's neither here nor there.
But the fact is this, Sally: I've no children of my own to raise.
And as ye very well know, I've got my own theories about putting
motherhood on a different basis, a business basis. I want you to let
me pay you--as the State ought to pay you--three hundred a year for
every child you bear. I want to demonstrate to my own satisfaction,
before I try to convince any Government, that if the child-bearing
woman were put on a plane of economic value, her barren, parasite
sister would speedily learn--"
Sally had turned pale. Now she rose in girlish dignity.
"I hope you'll forgive me, Dr. Ben, for saying that I won't listen
to ONE word more. I know you've been thinking about these things so
long that you forget how OUTRAGEOUS they sound! Motherhood is a
sacred privilege, and to reduce it to--"
"So is wifehood, Sally!" the old man interposed soothingly.
"Well," she flashed back, "nobody's PAID for wifehood!"
"Oh, yes, my dear. You can sue a man for not supporting you. It's
done every day!"
"Then--then a man ought to pay the three hundred a year!" countered
Sally.
"Well, I'm with you there. But the world has got to see that before
you can force him." The doctor sighed. "So you won't let me stand
grandfather to your children, Sally?" "Oh, if you WERE their
grandfather'" she answered. "Then you could do as you liked!"
"There you are, the parasite!" he said, smiling whimsically. "You're
your mother's daughter, Sally. Give you the least blood-claim on a
man's money, and you'll push it as far as you can. But offer to pay
you for doing the work God meant you to do and you're cut to the
soul. Well--"
He was still holding forth eloquently on the subject of children and
nations when Martie came back, and Sally, with a scarlet face, was
evidently lost in thoughts of her own.
As the girls walked home, Sally did not repeat to Martie her
conversation with the old doctor, nor for many weeks afterward. But
Martie did not notice her sister's indignant silence, for they met
Rodney Parker coming out of the Bank, and he walked with them to the
bridge, and asked Martie to go with him to see the Poulson Star
Stock Company in a Return Engagement Extraordinary on the following
night.
Martie was conscious of passing a milestone in her emotional life on
the evening of this day, when she said to herself that she loved
Rodney Parker. She admitted it with a sort of splendid shame, as she
went about her usual household occupations, passing from the hot
pleasantness of the kitchen to the cool, stale odours of the dining
room; running upstairs to light the bathroom-and hall-gas for her
father and brother, and sometimes stepping for a moment into the
darkness of the yard to be alone with her enchanted thoughts.
All the young Monroes regarded their father's temperamental
shortcomings with stoicism, so that it was in no sense resentfully
that she faced the inevitable preliminaries that night.
"Pa," said she cheerfully over the dessert, "you don't mind if I go
to the show with Rodney to-morrow, do you?"
"This is the first I've heard of any show," Malcolm said stiffly,
glancing at his wife. Mrs. Monroe patiently told him what she knew
of it. "Why, no, I suppose there is no reason you shouldn't go," he
presently said discontentedly.
"Oh, thank you, Pa!" Martie said, with a soaring heart. He looked at
her dispassionately.
"Your sisters and your brother are going, I suppose?" Malcolm asked,
glancing about the circle. Martie told herself she might have known
he was not done with the subject so easily.
"I'm not--because I haven't the price!" grinned Leonard. His mother
and Lydia laughed.
"I don't suppose Martie proposes going alone with young Parker?"
Malcolm asked in well-assumed amazement.
"Why, Pa--I don't see why NOT" Mrs. Monroe protested weakly.
Her husband was magnificent in his surprise. He looked about in a
sort of royal astonishment.
"Don't you, my dear?" he asked politely. "Then permit me to say that
_I_ DO."
Martie sat dumb with despair.
"Certainly Martha may go, if Leonard and one of her sisters go; not
otherwise," said Malcolm. He retired to his library, and Martie had
to ease her boiling heart by piling the dinner dishes viciously, and
question no more.
However, she consoled herself, there was something rather dignified
in this arrangement, after all; Len was presentable, and she was
always the happier for being with Sally. She washed her only gloves,
pressed her suit, and spent every alternate minute during the next
day anxiously inspecting her chin where an ugly pimple threatened to
form. The family was again at dinner when Len broached a change of
plan.
"Can I go up to Wilson's to-night, Pa?" he asked. Martie flashed him
a glance.
"I suppose so, for a little while," Malcolm said tolerantly. The
girls looked at each other.
"But I thought you were going to the Opera House with us?" Martie
exclaimed.
"Well, now you know I ain't," Len answered airily.
"I am not, Len," corrected his mother. Martie gave him a look of
hate.
"Len says he promised to go to Wilson's," Lydia said placatingly.
"So I thought perhaps Sally and I would go with you--I'm sorry,
Martie!"
For Martie's breast was heaving dangerously.
"Pa, didn't you say Len was to go with us?" she asked with desperate
calm.
"I said SOME ONE was to go," Malcolm said, disapproving of her
vehemence. "I confess I cannot see why it must be Len!"
"Because--because when a man asks a girl to go out with him he
doesn't ask the whole FAMILY!" Martie muttered in a fury. Her lip
trembled, and she got to her feet. "It doesn't matter in the least,"
she said in a low, shaking voice, "because I am not going myself!"
Flashing from the room, she ran upstairs. She flung herself across
her bed, and cried stormily for ten minutes. Then she grew calmer,
and lay there crying quietly, and shaken by only an occasional long
sob. It was during this stage that Lydia came into the room, and
sitting down beside Martie's knees, patted her hand soothingly.
Lydia's weak acceptance of the younger sister's distaste for her
company gave Martie a sort of shamed heart-sickness.
"Don't!" said she huskily, jerking her arm away.
But Lydia was not to be rebuffed, and Martie was but nineteen, after
all, and longing for the happiness she had denied. An hour later,
all the prettier for her tears, she met Rodney at the hall door, the
boy making no sign of disappointment when Lydia and Sally joined
them.
"But say, Martie," he said at once, "I've got only the two seats!"
"Oh, that's all right!" Lydia said quickly and cautiously. "We don't
have to SIT together!"
Martie's mood brightened and she flushed like a rose when the boy
said eagerly:
"Say, listen, Martie. My sister Ida's going to-night, and one or two
others, and Mrs. Cliff Frost is going to chaperon us afterward; ask
your mother if that's all right."
The girl wasted no time on her mother, but crossed to the library
door.
"Pa," said she without preamble, "Mrs. Cliff Frost is chaperoning
some of them after the theatre tonight. Can I go?"
"Go where? Shut that door," her father said, half turning.
"Oh--I don't know; to the hotel, I suppose."
"Yes," her father said in a dry voice. "Yes," he added unwillingly.
"Go ahead."
So the evening was a great success; one of the memorable times.
Martie and Rodney walked ahead of her sisters down town, the boy
gallantly securing the girls' tickets before he and Martie went up
the aisle to their own seats. All Monroe was in the Opera House.
Martie bowed and smiled radiantly. Rodney's sister and Mrs. Frost
and a strange man presently returned her smile.
"Rod--wouldn't you rather be with your own family?"
"Well--what do you think?"
The enchantment of it, the warmth and stimulus of his admiration,
his absorbed companionship, how they changed the world for Martie!
There was a witchery in the air, the blood ran quick in her veins.
The dirty big hall, with its high windows, was fairyland; the
whispering crowd, Rodney's nearness, and the consciousness of her
own youth and beauty, her flushed cheeks and loosened bronze hair,
acted upon Martie like strong wine. She grew lovely beneath his very
eyes; she was nineteen, and she loved!
They talked incessantly, elaborating the simple things they said
with a by-play of eyes and hands, making the insignificant words
rich with lowered tones, with smiles and the meeting of eyes. He
told Martie of his college days; borrowing episodes at random from
the lives of other men, men whom he admired. Martie believed it all,
believed that he had written the Junior Farce, that he had been
president of his class, that the various college societies had
disputed for his membership. In return, she spun her own romances,
flinging a veil of attractive eccentricity over her father's
character, generously giving Lydia an anonymous admirer, and
painting the dreary old mansion of North Main Street as a sort of
enchanted prison with her pretty restless self as captive therein.
The two exchanged brief French phrases, each believing the other to
have a fair command of the language, and Martie even quoted poetry,
to which Rodney listened in intense silence, his eyes fixed upon
hers.
Suddenly the house was darkened and the curtain rose. The play was
"The Sword of the King," a drama that seemed to Martie well suited
to her own exalted mood. She thought the whole company wonderful,
the leading lady especially gifted. She learned with awe that Rodney
had known Wallace Bannister, the leading man, more or less
intimately for years. An aunt of his lived in Pittsville and the two
had met as boys and later had been classmates for the brief period
Bannister had remained at the Leland Stanford University. Martie
wrapped her beauty-starved young soul in the perfect past, when men
wore ruffles and buckles and capes, and were all gallantry and
courage, and when women were beautiful and desired. Between the acts
the delicious exchange of confidences between herself and Rodney
went on; they nibbled Bonestell's chocolates from a striped paper
bag as they talked, and when the final curtain fell on a ringing
line there were real tears of pleasure in Martie's eyes.
"Oh, Rodney--this is LIVING!" she whispered, as they filed slowly
out.
Sally and Lydia had considerately disappeared. Mrs. Clifford Frost
was waiting for them at the door, and Martie, with quick tact, fell
into conversation with the kindly matron, walking at her side down
the crowded street, and leaving Rodney to follow with the others.
Little Ruth Frost had had some trouble fearfully resembling
diphtheria, and Martie's first interested question was enough to
enlist the mother's attention. The girl did not really notice the
others in the party.
They crossed muddy Main Street, passed Wilkins's Furniture and
Coffin Parlours, and went into the shabby French restaurant known as
Mussoo's. The little eating house, with its cheap, white-painted
shop window, looking directly upon the sidewalk, its pyramid of
oyster shells cascading from a box set by the entrance, its jangling
bell that the opening door set to clanging, its dingy cash register,
damp tablecloths, and bottles of red catsup, was not a place to
which Monroe residents pointed with pride. Martie would ordinarily
have passed it as one unaware of its existence.
But it seemed a thoroughly daring and exciting thing to come here
to-night; quite another thing from going to the hotel for vanilla
ice cream and chocolate--even supposing the hotel had kept its
dining room open for a change, after the six o'clock supper--or to
Bonestell's for banana specials. This--this was living! Martie
established herself comfortably in the corner, slipped off her coat,
smiled lazily at Rodney's obvious manipulation of the party so that
he should be next her, played with her hot, damp, blackened knife
and fork, and was in paradise.
Ida Parker was in the party, and Florence Frost. The men were
Clifford Frost, a pleasant young man getting stout and bald at
forty; Billy Frost, a gentle little lad of fifteen who was lame;
Rodney, and a rosy-cheeked, black-moustached Dr. Ellis from San
Francisco, whose occasional rather simple and stupid remarks were
received with great enthusiasm by Ida and Florence.
In this group Martie shone. She had her own gift for ready nonsense,
and she was the radiant element that blended the varied types into a
happy whole. She skilfully ignored Rodney; Billy, Mary, Cliff, and
even Dr. Ellis were drawn into her fun. Rodney glowed. "Isn't she
great?" he said to Mary Frost in an aside.
A large bowl of small crackers was set before them, damp squares of
strong butter on small nicked plates, finally a bowl of pink,
odorous shrimps. These were all gone when, after a long wait, the
fried oysters came smoking hot, slipped straight from the pan to the
plates. Martie drank coffee, as Mary did; the others had thick
goblets of red wine. With the hot, warming food, their gaiety waxed
higher; everybody felt that the party was a great success.
The bell on the door reverberated, and a man came in alone, and
looked about undecidedly for a seat.
"Hello!" said Rodney. "There's Wallace Bannister!"
The young actor joined them. And this, to Martie, was one of the
most thrilling moments of her life. He quite openly wedged his way
in to sit on the other side of her; he said that he could see they
didn't need the gaslight when Miss Monroe was along. Rodney said she
was Brunhilde, and Bannister's comment was that she could save wig
bills with that hair! Florence said eagerly that she loved
Brunhilde--let's see, what opera did that come in? It was the Ring,
anyway. The spirits of the group rose every second.
Ah, this was living--thought Martie. Oysters and wine and a real
actor, a man who knew the world, who chattered of Portland, Los
Angeles, and San Francisco as if they had been Monroe and
Pittsville. It was intoxicating to hear him exchanging comments with
Rodney; no, he hadn't finished "coll." "I'm a rolling stone, Miss
Monroe; we actor-fellows always are!" He was "signed up" now; he
gave them a glimpse of a long, typewritten contract. Martie ventured
a question as to the leading lady.
"She's a nice woman," said Wallace Bannister generously. "I like to
play against Mabel. Jesse Cluett, her husband, is in the play; and
his kid, too, her stepson--Lloyd--he's seventeen. Ever try the
profession, Miss Monroe?"
Martie flushed a pleased disclaimer. But the tiny seed was sown,
nevertheless. She liked the question; she was even vaguely glad that
Mrs. Cluett was forty and a married woman.
Wallace Bannister was older than Rodney, thirty or thirty-two,
although even off the stage he looked much younger. He had dipped
into college work in a dull season, amusing himself idly in the
elementary classes of French and English where his knowledge in
these branches gave him immediate prominence--and drifting away in a
road company after only a few months of fraternity and campus
popularity. His mother and father were both dead; the latter had
been a theatrical manager in a small way, sending little stock
companies up and down the coast for one-night stands.
Bannister was tall, well-built, and handsome. His cheeks had a fresh
fullness, and his black hair was as shining as wet coal. He was
eager and magnetic; musical, literary, or religious, according to
the company in which he found himself. Martie's thrilled interest
firing him to-night, he exerted himself: told stories in Chinese
dialect, in brogue, and with an excellent Scotch burr; he went to
the rickety piano, and from the loose keys, usually set in motion by
a nickel in the slot, he evoked brilliant songs, looking over his
shoulder with his sentimental bold eyes at the company as he sang.
And Martie said to herself, "Ah--this IS life!"
Rodney took her home, the clock in the square booming the half hour
after midnight as they went by. And at the side door he told her to
look up at the Dipper throbbing in the cool sky overhead. Martie
knew what was coming, but she looked innocently up, and went to
sleep for the first time in her life with a man's kiss still
tingling on her smiling lips.
The cold November weather might have been rosy June; the dull
routine of the Monroe home a life rich and full for Martie now. She
sang like a lark, feeding the chickens in the foggy mornings; she
dimpled at her own reflection in the mirror; she walked down town as
if treading the clouds. Anything interested her, everything
interested her. Mrs. Harry Locker, born Preble, said that Martie
just seemed inspired, the way she talked when old lady Preble died.
Miss Fanny, in the Library, began to entertain serious hopes that
the girl would take the Cutter system to heart, and make a clever
understudy at the old desk. Sally, watching, dreamed and yearned of
Martie's distinction, Martie's happiness; Lydia prayed. Malcolm
Monroe, as became a man of dignity, ignored the whole affair, but
Len, realizing that various advantages accrued, befriended his
sister, and talked to Rodney familiarly, as man to man.
"I can't stand that fresh kid!" said Rodney of Len. Martie shrugged
without speaking. She owed Len no allegiance. Had it suited Rodney
to admire Len, Martie would have been a loyal sister. As it was, she
would not risk a difference with Rodney for any one like Len. She
was embarked now upon a vital matter of business. Had a few hundreds
of dollars been involved, Malcolm Monroe would have been at her
elbow, advising, commending. As it was, her happiness, her life, her
children, her whole future might be jeopardized or secured with no
sign from him. Interference from her mother or sisters would have
been considered indelicate. So Martie stood alone.
Immediately after the theatre party, the question of a series of
dances again arose, and Martie somewhat hesitatingly repeated her
offer of the Monroe house for the first. Rodney's friend, Alvah
Brigham, was to come to the Parker family for Thanksgiving; the
dance was to be on Friday night, and a large picnic to Brewster's
Woods on Saturday. They would take a lunch, build a fire for their
coffee, and have the old school-day programme of singing and games.
For the dance, the two big parlours and the back room must be
cleared; that was simple enough. Angela Baxter would be at the piano
for the music; sufficient, if not extraordinary, and costing only
two dollars. The supper would be sandwiches, cake, coffee, and
lemonade: Monroe's invariable supper. Rodney thought ices necessary,
and suggested at least a salad. Martie and Sally considered the
salad.
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