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Title: The Dwelling Place of Light, V1
Author: Winston Churchill
Release Date: January, 2003 [Etext #3646]
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NOTE: This author is a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill the Prime Minister
of England during World War II.
THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT
BY WINSTON CHURCHILL
1917
VOLUME 1.
CHAPTER I
In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to boast,
a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered, the helpless--
and there are many--are torn from the parent rock, crushed, rolled smooth, and
left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward Bumpus severed and rolled
from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite of seemingly stable and lasting
things, into shifting shale; surrounded by fragments of cliffs from distant
lands he had never seen. Thus, at five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper
of the leviathan Chippering Mill in the city of Hampton.
That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an historic
river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times to be a
hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him, and to the
world of order and standards and religious sanctions into which he had been
born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For a long time he had clung to
the institution he had been taught to believe was the rock of ages, the
Congregational Church, finally to abandon it; even that assuming a form
fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the edifice three blocks distant from
Fillmore Street which he had attended for a brief time, some ten years before,
after his arrival in Hampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent
and bewildered Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age,
to compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of rounded,
knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the minister was
sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, he aroused in Edward Bumpus
an inherent prejudice that condemned the stage. Half a block from this
tabernacle stood a Roman Catholic Church, prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting
an eternal permanence amidst the chaos which had succeeded permanence!
There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward Bumpus and his
wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on his way to the
mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preserved all the outward
semblance of the old Order that once had seemed so enduring and secure. He
hesitated to join the decorous and dwindling congregation,--the remains of a
social stratum from which he had been pried loose; and--more irony--this
street, called Warren, of arching elms and white-gabled houses, was now the
abiding place of those prosperous Irish who had moved thither from the
tenements and ruled the city.
On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Dolton had
Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rooted there
since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen he would have
told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history of a family that by
right of priority and service should have been destined to inherit the land,
but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien. The God
of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found
wanting. Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long
static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent,
but in spite of youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a
sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may
prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one. Experience
even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For more than twenty years
after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship in a Dolton mercantile
establishment before he felt justified in marrying Hannah, the daughter of
Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishment amalgamated with a rival--and
Edward's services were no longer required. During the succession of precarious
places with decreasing salaries he had subsequently held a terrified sense of
economic pressure had gradually crept over him, presently growing strong
enough, after two girls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of the family
....It would be painful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the
slipping into shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had
now for some dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowning brick
wall bordering the canal,--a position obtained for him by a compassionate but
not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in life and knew the agent of
the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar. Thus had virtue failed to hold its
own.
One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates staring
at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on the opposite bank of the
canal that reflection might have brought a certain degree of enlightenment. It
was not so. The fog of Edward's bewilderment never cleared, and the unformed
question was ever clamouring for an answer--how had it happened? Job's cry.
How had it happened to an honest and virtuous man, the days of whose forebears
had been long in the land which the Lord their God had given them? Inherently
American, though lacking the saving quality of push that had been the making of
men like Ditmar, he never ceased to regard with resentment and distrust the
hordes of foreigners trooping between the pillars, though he refrained from
expressing these sentiments in public; a bent, broad shouldered, silent man of
that unmistakable physiognomy which, in the seventeenth century, almost wholly
deserted the old England for the new. The ancestral features were there, the
lips--covered by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise formation that
emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and sallow cheeks, the
grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the corners. But for all its
ancestral strength of feature, it was a face from which will had been
extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism, the indomitable hardness it
should have proclaimed, and which have been so characteristically embodied in
Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but
always neat.
Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a certain
transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almost amounting to an
obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have slipped downward in the
social scale. It was the Bumpus Family in America. He collected documents
about his ancestors and relations, he wrote letters with a fine, painful
penmanship on a ruled block he bought at Hartshorne's drug store to distant
Bumpuses in Kansas and Illinois and Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer,
the original immigrant, of Dolton. Many of these western kinsmen answered: not
so the magisterial Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom
likewise he had ventured to address,--to the indignation and disgust of his
elder daughter, Janet.
"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.
"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"
"How many generations?"
"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.
Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.
"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of Ebenezer's
time, haven't you?"
Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but his ardour
for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy--his own--had become his religion,
and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday mornings poring over papers
of various degrees of discolouration, making careful notes on the ruled block.
This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had somehow
been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was also a comfort.
It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of sympathy of his daughters
and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the situation more grimly: she was a logical
projection in a new environment of the religious fatalism of ancestors whose
God was a God of vengeance. She did not concern herself as to what all this
vengeance was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or
later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,--a round of household duties
she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had
been the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an
incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,--which Hannah had not. But she kept
the little flat with its worn furniture,--which had known so many journeys--as
clean as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to
her satisfaction she would sally forth to Bonnaccossi's grocery and provision
store on the corner to do her bargaining in competition with the Italian
housewives of the neighborhood. She was wont, indeed, to pause outside for a
moment, her quick eye encompassing the coloured prints of red and yellow
jellies cast in rounded moulds, decked with slices of orange, the gaudy boxes
of cereals and buckwheat flour, the "Brookfield" eggs in packages.
Significant, this modern package system, of an era of flats with little storage
space. She took in at a glance the blue lettered placard announcing the
current price of butterine, and walked around to the other side of the store,
on Holmes Street, where the beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were
filled, in the autumn, with cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.
With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly lowering
levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that in Fillmore
Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so. Her unbetrayed regret was
for the loss of what she would have called "respectability"; and the giving up,
long ago, in the little city which had been their home, of the servant girl had
been the first wrench. Until they came to Hampton they had always lived in
houses, and her adaptation to a flat had been hard--a flat without a parlour.
Hannah Bumpus regarded a parlour as necessary to a respectable family as a
wedding ring to a virtuous woman. Janet and Lise would be growing up, there
would be young men, and no place to see them save the sidewalks. The fear that
haunted her came true, and she never was reconciled. The two girls went to the
public schools, and afterwards, inevitably, to work, and it seemed to be a part
of her punishment for the sins of her forefathers that she had no more control
over them than if they had been boarders; while she looked on helplessly, they
did what they pleased; Janet, whom she never understood, was almost as much a
source of apprehension as Lise, who became part and parcel of all Hannah deemed
reprehensible in this new America which she refused to recognize and
acknowledge as her own country.
To send them through the public schools had been a struggle. Hannah used to
lie awake nights wondering what would happen if Edward became sick. It worried
her that they never saved any money: try as she would to cut the expenses down,
there was a limit of decency; New England thrift, hitherto justly celebrated,
was put to shame by that which the foreigners displayed, and which would have
delighted the souls of gentlemen of the Manchester school. Every once in a
while there rose up before her fabulous instances of this thrift, of Italians
and Jews who, ignorant emigrants, had entered the mills only a few years before
they, the Bumpuses, had come to Hampton, and were now independent property
owners. Still rankling in Hannah's memory was a day when Lise had returned
from school, dark and mutinous, with a tale of such a family. One of the
younger children was a classmate.
"They live on Jordan Street in a house, and Laura has roller skates. I don't
see why I can't."
This was one of the occasions on which Hannah had given vent to her
indignation. Lise was fourteen. Her open rebellion was less annoying than
Janet's silent reproach, but at least she had something to take hold of.
"Well, Lise," she said, shifting the saucepan to another part of the stove, "I
guess if your father and I had put both you girls in the mills and crowded into
one room and cooked in a corner, and lived on onions and macaroni, and put four
boarders each in the other rooms, I guess we could have had a house, too. We
can start in right now, if you're willing."
But Lise had only looked darker.
"I don't see why father can't make money--other men do."
"Isn't he working as hard as he can to send you to school, and give you a
chance?"
"I don't want that kind of a chance. There's Sadie Howard at school--she don't
have to work. She liked me before she found out where I lived..."
There was an element of selfishness in Hannah's mania for keeping busy, for
doing all their housework and cooking herself. She could not bear to have her
daughters interfere; perhaps she did not want to give herself time to think.
Her affection for Edward, such as it was, her loyalty to him, was the logical
result of a conviction ingrained in early youth that marriage was an
indissoluble bond; a point of views once having a religious sanction, no less
powerful now that--all unconsciously--it had deteriorated into a superstition.
Hannah, being a fatalist, was not religious. The beliefs of other days, when
she had donned her best dress and gone to church on Sundays, had simply lapsed
and left--habits. No new beliefs had taken their place....
Even after Janet and Lise had gone to work the household never seemed to gain
that margin of safety for which Hannah yearned. Always, when they were on the
verge of putting something by, some untoward need or accident seemed to arise
on purpose to swallow it up: Edward, for instance, had been forced to buy a new
overcoat, the linoleum on the dining-room floor must be renewed, and Lise had
had a spell of sickness, losing her position in a flower shop. Afterwards,
when she became a saleslady in the Bagatelle, that flamboyant department store
in Faber Street, she earned four dollars and a half a week. Two of these were
supposed to go into the common fund, but there were clothes to buy; Lise loved
finery, and Hannah had not every week the heart to insist. Even when, on an
occasional Saturday night the girl somewhat consciously and defiantly flung
down the money on the dining-room table she pretended not to notice it. But
Janet, who was earning six dollars as a stenographer in the office of the
Chippering Mill, regularly gave half of hers.
The girls could have made more money as operatives, but strangely enough in the
Bumpus family social hopes were not yet extinct.
Sharply, rudely, the cold stillness of the winter mornings was broken by
agitating waves of sound, penetrating the souls of sleepers. Janet would stir,
her mind still lingering on some dream, soon to fade into the inexpressible, in
which she had been near to the fulfilment of a heart's desire. Each morning,
as the clamour grew louder, there was an interval of bewilderment, of
revulsion, until the realization came of mill bells swinging in high cupolas
above the river,--one rousing another. She could even distinguish the bells:
the deep-toned, penetrating one belonged to the Patuxent Mill, over on the west
side, while the Arundel had a high, ominous reverberation like a fire bell.
When at last the clangings had ceased she would lie listening to the overtones
throbbing in the air, high and low, high and low; lie shrinking, awaiting the
second summons that never failed to terrify, the siren of the Chippering Mill,-
-to her the cry of an insistent, hungry monster demanding its daily food, the
symbol of a stern, ugly, and unrelenting necessity.
Beside her in the bed she could feel the soft body of her younger sister
cuddling up to her in fright. In such rare moments as this her heart melted
towards Lise, and she would fling a protecting arm about her. A sense of
Lise's need of protection invaded her, a sharp conviction, like a pang, that
Lise was destined to wander: Janet was never so conscious of the feeling as in
this dark hour, though it came to her at other times, when they were not
quarreling. Quarreling seemed to be the normal reaction between them.
It was Janet, presently, who would get up, shivering, close the window, and
light the gas, revealing the room which the two girls shared together. Against
the middle of one wall was the bed, opposite this a travel-dented walnut bureau
with a marble top, with an oval mirror into which were stuck numerous magazine
portraits of the masculine and feminine talent adorning the American stage, a
preponderance of the music hall variety. There were pictures of other artists
whom the recondite would have recognized as "movie" stars, amazing yet veridic
stories of whose wealth Lise read in the daily press: all possessed limousines-
-an infallible proof, to Lise, of the measure of artistic greatness. Between
one of these movie millionaires and an ex-legitimate lady who now found
vaudeville profitable was wedged the likeness of a popular idol whose
connection with the footlights would doubtless be contingent upon a triumphant
acquittal at the hands of a jury of her countrymen, and whose trial for murder,
in Chicago, was chronicled daily in thousands of newspapers and followed by
Lise with breathless interest and sympathy. She was wont to stare at this lady
while dressing and exclaim:--
"Say, I hope they put it all over that district attorney!"
To such sentiments, though deeply felt by her sister, Janet remained cold,
though she was, as will be seen, capable of enthusiasms. Lise was a truer
daughter of her time and country in that she had the national contempt for law,
was imbued with the American hero-worship of criminals that caused the
bombardment of Cora Wellman's jail with candy, fruit and flowers and
impassioned letters. Janet recalled there had been others before Mrs. Wellman,
caught within the meshes of the law, who had incited in her sister a similar
partisanship.
It was Lise who had given the note of ornamentation to the bedroom. Against
the cheap faded lilac and gold wall-paper were tacked photo-engravings that had
taken the younger sister's fancy: a young man and woman, clad in scanty bathing
suits, seated side by side in a careening sail boat,--the work of a popular
illustrator whose manly and womanly "types" had become national ideals.
There were other drawings, if not all by the same hand, at least by the same
school; one, sketched in bold strokes, of a dinner party in a stately
neo-classic dining-room, the table laden with flowers and silver,
the bare-throated women with jewels. A more critical eye than Lise's,
gazing upon this portrayal of the Valhalla of success, might have detected in
the young men, immaculate in evening dress, a certain effort to feel at home,
to converse naturally, which their square jaws and square shoulders belied.
This was no doubt the fault of the artist's models, who had failed to live up
to the part. At any rate, the sight of these young gods of leisure, the
contemplation of the stolid butler and plush footmen in the background never
failed to make Lise's heart beat faster.
On the marble of the bureau amidst a litter of toilet articles, and bought by
Lise for a quarter at the Bagatelle bargain counter, was an oval photograph
frame from which the silver wash had begun to rub off, and the band of purple
velvet inside the metal had whitened. The frame always contained the current
object of Lise's affections, though the exhibits--as Janet said--were subject
to change without notice. The Adonis who now reigned had black hair cut in the
prevailing Hampton fashion, very long in front and hanging down over his eyes
like a Scottish terrier's; very long behind, too, but ending suddenly, shaved
in a careful curve at the neck and around the ears. It had almost the
appearance of a Japanese wig. The manly beauty of Mr. Max Wylie was of the
lantern-jawed order, and in his photograph he conveyed the astonished and
pained air of one who has been suddenly seized by an invisible officer of the
law from behind. This effect, one presently perceived, was due to the high,
stiff collar, the "Torture Brand," Janet called it, when she and her sister
were engaged in one of their frequent controversies about life in general: the
obvious retort to this remark, which Lise never failed to make, was that Janet
could boast of no beaux at all.
It is only fair to add that the photograph scarcely did Mr. Wylie justice. In
real life he did not wear the collar, he was free and easy in his manners, sure
of his powers of conquest. As Lise observed, he had made a home-run with her
at Slattery's Riverside Park. "Sadie Hartmann was sure sore when I tangoed off
with him," she would observe reminiscently ....
It was Lise's habit to slight her morning toilet, to linger until the last
minute in bed, which she left in reluctant haste to stand before the bureau
frantically combing out kinks of the brown hair falling over her shoulders
before jamming it down across her forehead in the latest mode. Thus occupied,
she revealed a certain petulant beauty. Like the majority of shop-girls, she
was small, but her figure was good, her skin white; her discontented mouth gave
her the touch of piquancy apt to play havoc with the work of the world. In
winter breakfast was eaten by the light of a rococo metal lamp set in the
centre of the table. This was to save gas. There was usually a rump steak and
potatoes, bread and "creamery" butterine, and the inevitable New England
doughnuts. At six thirty the whistles screeched again,--a warning note, the
signal for Edward's departure; and presently, after a brief respite, the heavy
bells once more began their clamour, not to die down until ten minutes of
seven, when the last of the stragglers had hurried through the mill gates.
The Bumpus flat included the second floor of a small wooden house whose owner
had once been evilly inspired to paint it a livid clay-yellow--as though
insisting that ugliness were an essential attribute of domesticity. A bay ran
up the two stories, and at the left were two narrow doorways, one for each
flat. On the right the house was separated from its neighbour by a narrow
interval, giving but a precarious light to the two middle rooms, the diningroom
and kitchen. The very unattractiveness of such a home, however, had certain
compensations for Janet, after the effort of early rising had been surmounted,
felt a real relief in leaving it; a relief, too, in leaving Fillmore Street,
every feature of which was indelibly fixed in her mind, opposite was the blind
brick face of a warehouse, and next to that the converted dwelling house that
held the shop of A. Bauer, with the familiar replica of a green ten-cent
trading stamp painted above it and the somewhat ironical announcement--when
boar frost whitened the pavement--that ice-cold soda was to be had within, as
well as cigars and tobacco, fruit and candy. Then came a tenement, under which
two enterprising Greeks by the name of Pappas--spelled Papas lower down--
conducted a business called "The Gentleman," a tailoring, pressing, and dyeing
establishment. Janet could see the brilliantined black heads of the two
proprietors bending over their boards, and sometimes they would be lifted to
smile at her as she passed. The Pappas Brothers were evidently as happy in
this drab environment as they had ever been on the sunny mountain slopes of
Hellas, and Janet sometimes wondered at this, for she had gathered from her
education in the Charming public school that Greece was beautiful.
She was one of the unfortunate who love beauty, who are condemned to dwell in
exile, unacquainted with what they love. Desire was incandescent within her
breast. Desire for what? It would have been some relief to know. She could
not, like Lise, find joy and forgetfulness at dance ,halls, at the "movies," at
Slattery's Riverside Park in summer, in "joy rides" with the Max Wylies of
Hampton. And beside, the Max Wylies were afraid of her. If at times she
wished for wealth, it was because wealth held the magic of emancipation from
surroundings against which her soul revolted. Vividly idealized but unconfided
was the memory of a seaside village, the scene of one of the brief sojourns of
her childhood, where the air was fragrant with the breath of salt marshes,
where she recalled, through the vines of a porch, a shining glimpse of the sea
at the end of a little street....
Next to Pappas Brothers was the grey wooden building of Mule Spinners' Hall,
that elite organization of skilled labour, and underneath it the store of
Johnny Tiernan, its windows piled up with stoves and stovepipes, sheet iron and
cooking utensils. Mr. Tiernan, like the Greeks, was happy, too: unlike the
Greeks, he never appeared to be busy, and yet he throve. He was very proud of
the business in which he had invested his savings, but he seemed to have other
affairs lying blithely on his mind, affairs of moment to the community, as the
frequent presence of the huge policemen, aldermen, and other important looking
persons bore witness. He hailed by name Italians, Greeks, Belgians, Syrians,
and "French"; he hailed Janet, too, with respectful cheerfulness, taking off
his hat. He possessed the rare, warm vitality that is irresistible. A native
of Hampton, still in his thirties, his sharp little nose and twinkling blue
eyes proclaimed the wisdom that is born and not made; his stiff hair had a
twist like the bristles in the cleaning rod of a gun.
He gave Janet the odd impression that he understood her. And she did not
understand herself!
By the time she reached the Common the winter sun, as though red from exertion,
had begun to dispel the smoke and heavy morning mists. She disliked winter,
the lumpy brown turf mildewed by the frost, but one day she was moved by a
quality, hitherto unsuspected, in the delicate tracery against the sky made by
the slender branches of the great elms and maples. She halted on the pavement,
her eyes raised, heedless of passers-by, feeling within her a throb of the
longing that could be so oddly and unexpectedly aroused.
Her way lay along Faber Street, the main artery of Hampton, a wide strip of
asphalt threaded with car tracks, lined on both sides with incongruous edifices
indicative of a rapid, undiscriminating, and artless prosperity. There were
long stretches of "ten foot" buildings, so called on account of the single
story, their height deceptively enhanced by the superimposition of huge and
gaudy signs, one on top of another, announcing the merits of "Stewart's
Amberine Ale," of "Cooley's Oats, the Digestible Breakfast Food," of
graphophones and "spring heeled" shoes, tobacco, and naphtha soaps. "No, We
don't give Trading Stamps, Our Products are Worth all You Pay." These "ten
foot" stores were the repositories of pianos, automobiles, hardware, and
millinery, and interspersed amongst them were buildings of various heights; The
Bagatelle, where Lise worked, the Wilmot Hotel, office buildings, and an
occasional relic of old Hampton, like that housing the Banner. Here, during
those months when the sun made the asphalt soft, on a scaffolding spanning the
window of the store, might be seen a perspiring young man in his shirt sleeves
chalking up baseball scores for the benefit of a crowd below. Then came the
funereal, liver-coloured, long-windowed Hinckley Block (1872), and on the
corner a modern, glorified drugstore thrusting forth plate glass bays--two on
Faber Street and three on Stanley--filled with cameras and candy, hot water
bags, throat sprays, catarrh and kidney cures, calendars, fountain pens,
stationery, and handy alcohol lamps. Flanking the sidewalks, symbolizing and
completing the heterogeneous and bewildering effect of the street were long
rows of heavy hemlock trunks, unpainted and stripped of bark, with crosstrees
bearing webs of wires. Trolley cars rattled along, banging their gongs, trucks
rumbled across the tracks, automobiles uttered frenzied screeches behind
startled pedestrians. Janet was always galvanized into alertness here, Faber
Street being no place to dream. By night an endless procession moved up one
sidewalk and down another, staring hypnotically at the flash-in and flash-out
electric, signs that kept the breakfast foods and ales, the safety razors,
soaps, and soups incessantly in the minds of a fickle public.
Two blocks from Faber Street was the North Canal, with a granite-paved roadway
between it and the monotonous row of company boarding houses. Even in bright
weather Janet felt a sense of oppression here; on dark, misty mornings the
stern, huge battlements of the mills lining the farther bank were menacing
indeed, bristling with projections, towers, and chimneys, flanked by heavy
walls. Had her experience included Europe, her imagination might have seized
the medieval parallel,--the arched bridges flung at intervals across the water,
lacking only chains to raise them in case of siege. The place was always
ominously suggestive of impending strife. Janet's soul was a sensitive
instrument, but she suffered from an inability to find parallels, and thus to
translate her impressions intellectually. Her feeling about the mills was that
they were at once fortress and prison, and she a slave driven thither day after
day by an all-compelling power; as much a slave as those who trooped in through
the gates in the winter dawn, and wore down, four times a day, the oak treads
of the circular tower stairs.
The sound of the looms was like heavy rain hissing on the waters of the canal.
The administrative offices of a giant mill such as the Chippering in Hampton
are labyrinthine. Janet did not enter by the great gates her father kept, but
walked through an open courtyard into a vestibule where, day and night, a
watchman stood; she climbed iron-shod stairs, passed the doorway leading to the
paymaster's suite, to catch a glimpse, behind the grill, of numerous young men
settling down at those mysterious and complicated machines that kept so
unerring a record, in dollars and cents, of the human labour of the operatives.
There were other suites for the superintendents, for the purchasing agent; and
at the end of the corridor, on the south side of the mill, she entered the
outer of the two rooms reserved for Mr. Claude Ditmar, the Agent and general-
in-chief himself of this vast establishment. In this outer office, behind the
rail that ran the length of it, Janet worked; from the window where her
typewriter stood was a sheer drop of eighty feet or so to the river, which ran
here swiftly through a wide canon whose sides were formed by miles and miles of
mills, built on buttressed stone walls to retain the banks. The prison-like
buildings on the farther shore were also of colossal size, casting their
shadows far out into the waters; while in the distance, up and down the stream,
could be seen the delicate web of the Stanley and Warren Street bridges, with
trolley cars like toys gliding over them, with insect pedestrians creeping
along the footpaths.
Mr. Ditmar's immediate staff consisted of Mr. Price, an elderly bachelor of
tried efficiency whose peculiar genius lay in computation, of a young Mr.
Caldwell who, during the four years since he had left Harvard, had been
learning the textile industry, of Miss Ottway, and Janet. Miss Ottway was the
agent's private stenographer, a strongly built, capable woman with immense
reserves seemingly inexhaustible. She had a deep, masculine voice, not
unmusical, the hint of a masculine moustache, a masculine manner of taking to
any job that came to hand. Nerves were things unknown to her: she was granite,
Janet tempered steel. Janet was the second stenographer, and performed,
besides, any odd tasks that might be assigned.
There were, in the various offices of the superintendents, the paymaster and
purchasing agent, other young women stenographers whose companionship Janet,
had she been differently organized, might have found congenial, but something
in her refused to dissolve to their proffered friendship. She had but one
friend,--if Eda Rawle, who worked in a bank, and whom she had met at a lunch
counter by accident, may be called so. As has been admirably said in another
language, one kisses, the other offers a cheek: Janet offered the cheek. All
unconsciously she sought a relationship rarely to be found in banks and
business offices; would yield herself to none other. The young women
stenographers in the Chippering Mill, respectable, industrious girls, were
attracted by a certain indefinable quality, but finding they made no progress
in their advances, presently desisted they were somewhat afraid of her; as one
of them remarked, "You always knew she was there." Miss Lottie Meyers, who
worked in the office of Mr. Orcutt, the superintendent across the hall,
experienced a brief infatuation that turned to hate. She chewed gum
incessantly, Janet found her cheap perfume insupportable; Miss Meyers, for her
part, declared that Janet was "queer" and "stuck up," thought herself better
than the rest of them. Lottie Meyers was the leader of a group of four or five
which gathered in the hallway at the end of the noon hour to enter animatedly
into a discussion of waists, hats, and lingerie, to ogle and exchange
persiflages with the young men of the paymaster's corps, to giggle, to relate,
sotto voce, certain stories that ended invariably in hysterical laughter.
Janet detested these conversations. And the sex question, subtly suggested if
not openly dealt with, to her was a mystery over which she did not dare to
ponder, terrible, yet too sacred to be degraded. Her feelings, concealed under
an exterior of self-possession, deceptive to the casual observer, sometimes
became molten, and she was frightened by a passion that made her tremble--a
passion by no means always consciously identified with men, embodying all the
fierce unexpressed and unsatisfied desires of her life.
These emotions, often suggested by some hint of beauty, as of the sun glinting
on the river on a bright blue day, had a sudden way of possessing her, and the
longing they induced was pain. Longing for what? For some unimagined
existence where beauty dwelt, and light, where the ecstasy induced by these was
neither moiled nor degraded; where shame, as now, might not assail her. Why
should she feel her body hot with shame, her cheeks afire? At such moments she
would turn to the typewriter, her fingers striking the keys with amazing
rapidity, with extraordinary accuracy and force,--force vaguely disturbing to
Mr. Claude Ditmar as he entered the office one morning and involuntarily paused
to watch her. She was unaware of his gaze, but her colour was like a crimson
signal that flashed to him and was gone. Why had he never noticed her before?
All these months, for more than a year, perhaps,--she had been in his office,
and he had not so much as looked at her twice. The unguessed answer was that
he had never surprised her in a vivid moment. He had a flair for women, though
he had never encountered any possessing the higher values, and it was
characteristic of the plane of his mental processes that this one should remind
him now of a dark, lithe panther, tensely strung, capable of fierceness. The
pain of having her scratch him would be delectable.
When he measured her it was to discover that she was not so little, and the
shoulder-curve of her uplifted arms, as her fingers played over the keys,
seemed to belie that apparent slimness. And had he not been unacquainted with
the subtleties of the French mind and language, he
might have classed her as a fausse maigre. Her head was small, her hair like a
dark, blurred shadow clinging round it. He wanted to examine her hair, to see
whether it would not betray, at closer range, an imperceptible wave,--but not
daring to linger he went into his office, closed the door, and sat down with a
sensation akin to weakness, somewhat appalled by his discovery, considerably
amazed at his previous stupidity. He had thought of Janet--when she had
entered his mind at all--as unobtrusive, demure; now he recognized this
demureness as repression. Her qualities needed illumination, and he, Claude
Ditmar, had seen them struck with fire. He wondered whether any other man
had been as fortunate.
Later in the morning, quite casually, he made inquiries of Miss Ottway, who
liked Janet and was willing to do her a good turn.
"Why, she's a clever girl, Mr. Ditmar, a good stenographer, and conscientious
in her work. She's very quick, too.
"Yes, I've noticed that," Ditmar replied, who was quite willing to have it
thought that his inquiry was concerned with Janet's aptitude for business.
"She keeps to herself and minds her own affairs. You can see she comes of good
stock." Miss Ottway herself was proud of her New England blood. "Her father,
you know, is the gatekeeper down there. He's been unfortunate."
"You don't say--I didn't connect her with him. Fine looking old man. A friend
of mine who recommended him told me he'd seen better days ...."
CHAPTER II
In spite of the surprising discovery in his office of a young woman of such a
disquieting, galvanic quality, it must not be supposed that Mr. Claude Ditmar
intended to infringe upon a fixed principle. He had principles. For him, as
for the patriarchs and householders of Israel, the seventh commandment was only
relative, yet hitherto he had held rigidly to that relativity, laying down the
sound doctrine that women and business would not mix: or, as he put it to his
intimates, no sensible man would fool with a girl in his office. Hence it may
be implied that Mr. Ditmar's experiences with the opposite sex had been on a
property basis. He was one of those busy and successful persons who had never
appreciated or acquired the art of quasi-platonic amenities, whose idea of a
good time was limited to discreet excursions with cronies, likewise busy and
successful persons who, by reason of having married early and unwisely, are
strangers to the delights of that higher social intercourse chronicled in
novels and the public prints. If one may conveniently overlook the joys of a
companionship of the soul, it is quite as possible to have a taste in women as
in champagne or cigars. Mr. Ditmar preferred blondes, and he liked them rather
stout, a predilection that had led him into matrimony with a lady of this
description: a somewhat sticky, candy-eating lady with a mania for card
parties, who undoubtedly would have dyed her hair if she had lived. He was not
inconsolable, but he had had enough of marriage to learn that it demands a
somewhat exorbitant price for joys otherwise more reasonably to be obtained.
He was left a widower with two children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of
twelve, both somewhat large for their ages. Amy attended the only private
institution for the instruction of her sex of which Hampton could boast; George
continued at a public school. The late Mrs. Ditmar for some years before her
demise had begun to give evidence of certain restless aspirations to which
American ladies of her type and situation seem peculiarly liable, and with a
view to their ultimate realization she had inaugurated a Jericho-like campaign.
Death had released Ditmar from its increasing pressure. For his wife had
possessed that admirable substitute for character, persistence, had been expert
in the use of importunity, often an efficient weapon in the hands of the female
economically dependent. The daughter of a defunct cashier of the Hampton
National Bank, when she had married Ditmar, then one of the superintendents of
the Chippering and already a marked man, she had deemed herself fortunate among
women, looking forward to a life of ease and idleness and candy in great
abundance,--a dream temporarily shattered by the unforeseen discomfort of
bringing two children into the world, with an interval of scarcely a year
between them. Her parents from an excess of native modesty having failed to
enlighten her on this subject, her feelings were those of outraged
astonishment, and she was quite determined not to repeat the experience a third
time. Knowledge thus belatedly acquired, for a while she abandoned herself to
the satisfaction afforded by the ability to take a commanding position in
Hampton society, gradually to become aware of the need of a more commodious
residence. In a certain kind of intuition she was rich. Her husband had
meanwhile become Agent of the Chippering Mill, and she strongly suspected that
his prudent reticence on the state of his finances was the best indication of
an increasing prosperity. He had indeed made money, been given many
opportunities for profitable investments; but the argument for social pre-
eminence did not appeal to him: tears and reproaches, recriminations, when
frequently applied, succeeded better; like many married men, what he most
desired was to be let alone; but in some unaccountable way she had come to
suspect that his preference for blondes was of a more liberal nature than at
first, in her innocence, she had realized. She was jealous, too, of his
cronies, in spite of the fact that these gentlemen, when they met her, treated
her with an elaborate politeness; and she accused him with entire justice of
being more intimate with them than with her, with whom he was united in holy
bonds. The inevitable result of these tactics was the modern mansion in the
upper part of Warren Street, known as the "residential" district. Built on a
wide lot, with a garage on one side to the rear, with a cement driveway divided
into squares, and a wall of democratic height separating its lawn from the
sidewalk, the house may for the present be better imagined than described.
A pious chronicler of a more orthodox age would doubtless have deemed it a
judgment that Cora Ditmar survived but two years to enjoy the glories of the
Warren Street house. For a while her husband indulged in a foolish optimism,
only to learn that the habit of matrimonial blackmail, once acquired, is not
easily shed. Scarcely had he settled down to the belief that by the
gratification of her supreme desire he had achieved comparative peace, than he
began to suspect her native self-confidence of cherishing visions of a career
contemplating nothing less than the eventual abandonment of Hampton itself as a
field too limited for her social talents and his business ability and bank
account--at which she was pleased to hint. Hampton suited Ditmar, his passion
was the Chippering Mill; and he was in process of steeling himself to resist,
whatever the costs, this preposterous plan when he was mercifully released by
death. Her intention of sending the children away to acquire a culture and
finish Hampton did not afford,--George to Silliston Academy, Amy to a
fashionable boarding school,--he had not opposed, yet he did not take the idea
with sufficient seriousness to carry it out. The children remained at home,
more or less--increasingly less--in the charge of an elderly woman who acted as
housekeeper.
Ditmar had miraculously regained his freedom. And now, when he made trips to
New York and Boston, combining business with pleasure, there were no questions
asked, no troublesome fictions to be composed. More frequently he was in
Boston, where he belonged to a large and comfortable club, not too exacting in
regard to membership, and here he met his cronies and sometimes planned
excursions with them, automobile trips in summer to the White Mountains or
choice little resorts to spend Sundays and holidays, generally taking with them
a case of champagne and several bags of golf sticks. He was fond of shooting,
and belonged to a duck club on the Cape, where poker and bridge were not
tabooed. To his intimates he was known as "Dit." Nor is it surprising that
his attitude toward women had become in general one of resentment; matrimony he
now regarded as unmitigated folly. At five and forty he was a vital,
dominating, dust-coloured man six feet and half an inch in height, weighing a
hundred and ninety pounds, and thus a trifle fleshy. When relaxed, and in
congenial company, he looked rather boyish, an aspect characteristic of many
American business men of to-day.
His head was large, he wore his hair short, his features also proclaimed him as
belonging to a modern American type in that they were not clear-cut, but rather
indefinable; a bristling, short-cropped moustache gave him a certain efficient,
military look which, when introduced to strangers as "Colonel," was apt to
deceive them into thinking him an army officer. The title he had once received
as a member of the staff of the governor of the state, and was a tribute to a
gregariousness and political influence rather than to a genius for the art of
war. Ex officio, as the agent of the Chippering Mill and a man of substance to
boot, he was "in" politics, hail fellow well met with and an individual to be
taken into account by politicians from the governor and member of congress
down. He was efficient, of course; he had efficient hands and shrewd,
efficient eyes, and the military impression was deepened by his manner of
dealing with people, his conversation being yea, yea and nay, nay,--save with
his cronies and those of the other sex from whom he had something to gain. His
clothes always looked new, of pronounced patterns and light colours set aside
for him by an obsequious tailor in Boston.
If a human being in such an enviable position as that of agent of the
Chippering Mill can be regarded as property, it might be said that Mr. Claude
Ditmar belonged to the Chipperings of Boston, a family still owning a
controlling interest in the company. His loyalty to them and to the mill he so
ably conducted was the great loyalty of his life. For Ditmar, a Chippering
could do no wrong. It had been the keen eye of Mr. Stephen Chippering that
first had marked him, questioned him, recognized his ability, and from the
moment of that encounter his advance had been rapid. When old Stephen had been
called to his fathers, Ditmar's allegiance was automatically, as it were,
transferred to the two sons, George and Worthington, already members of the
board of directors. Sometimes Ditmar called on them at their homes, which
stood overlooking the waters of the Charles River Basin. The attitude toward
him of the Chipperings and their wives was one of an interesting adjustment of
feudalism to democracy. They were fond of him, grateful to him, treating him
with a frank camaraderie that had in it not the slightest touch of
condescension, but Ditmar would have been the first to recognize that there
were limits to the intimacy. They did not, for instance--no doubt out of
consideration--invite him to their dinner parties or take him to their club,
which was not the same as that to which he himself belonged. He felt no
animus. Nor would he, surprising though it may seem, have changed places with
the Chipperings. At an early age, and quite unconsciously, he had accepted
property as the ruling power of the universe, and when family was added thereto
the combination was nothing less than divine.
There were times, especially during the long winters, when life became almost
unbearable for Janet, and she was seized by a desire to run away from Fillmore
Street, from the mills, from Hampton itself. Only she did not know where to
go, or how to get away. She was convinced of the existence in the world of
delightful spots where might be found congenial people with whom it would be a
joy to talk. Fillmore Street, certainly, did not contain any such. The office
was not so bad. It is true that in the mornings, as she entered West Street,
the sight of the dark facade of the fortress-like structure, emblematic of the
captivity in which she passed her days, rarely failed to arouse in her
sensations of oppression and revolt; but here, at least, she discovered an
outlet for her energies; she was often too busy to reflect, and at odd moments
she could find a certain solace and companionship in the river, so intent, so
purposeful, so beautiful, so undisturbed by the inconcinnity, the clatter and
confusion of Hampton as it flowed serenely under the bridges and between the
mills toward the sea. Toward the sea!
It was when, at night, she went back to Fillmore Street--when she thought of
the monotony, yes, and the sordidness of home, when she let herself in at the
door and climbed the dark and narrow stairway, that her feet grew leaden. In
spite of the fact that Hannah was a good housekeeper and prided herself on
cleanliness, the tiny flat reeked with the smell of cooking, and Janet, from
the upper hall, had a glimpse of a thin, angular woman with a scrawny neck,
with scant grey hair tightly drawn into a knot, in a gingham apron covering an
old dress bending over the kitchen stove. And occasionally, despite a
resentment that fate should have dealt thus inconsiderately with the family,
Janet felt pity welling within her. After supper, when Lise had departed with
her best young man, Hannah would occasionally, though grudgingly, permit Janet
to help her with the dishes.
"You work all day, you have a right to rest."
"But I don't want to rest," Janet would declare, and rub the dishes the harder.
With the spirit underlying this protest, Hannah sympathized. Mother and
daughter were alike in that both were inarticulate, but Janet had a secret
contempt for Hannah's uncomplaining stoicism. She loved her mother, in a way,
especially at certain times,--though she often wondered why she was unable to
realize more fully the filial affection of tradition; but in moments of
softening, such as these, she was filled with rage at the thought of any woman
endowed with energy permitting herself to be overtaken and overwhelmed by such
a fate as Hannah's: divorce, desertion, anything, she thought, would have been
better--anything but to be cheated out of life. Feeling the fires of rebellion
burning hotly within her,--rebellion against environment and driving necessity
she would glance at her mother and ask herself whether it were possible that
Hannah had ever known longings, had ever been wrung by inexpressible desires,--
desires in which the undiscovered spiritual was so alarmingly compounded with
the undiscovered physical. She would have died rather than speak to Hannah of
these unfulfilled experiences, and the mere thought of confiding them to any
person appalled her. Even if there existed some wonderful, understanding being
to whom she might be able thus to empty her soul, the thought of the ecstasy of
that kenosis was too troubling to be dwelt upon.
She had tried reading, with unfortunate results,--perhaps because no Virgil had
as yet appeared to guide her through the mysteries of that realm. Her
schooling had failed to instil into her a discriminating taste for literature;
and when, on occasions, she had entered the Public Library opposite the Common
it had been to stare hopelessly at rows of books whose authors and titles
offered no clue to their contents. Her few choices had not been happy, they
had failed to interest and thrill...
Of the Bumpus family Lise alone found refuge, distraction, and excitement in
the vulgar modern world by which they were surrounded, and of whose
heedlessness and remorselessness they were the victims. Lise went out into it,
became a part of it, returning only to sleep and eat,--a tendency Hannah found
unaccountable, and against which even her stoicism was not wholly proof.
Scarce an evening went by without an expression of uneasiness from Hannah.
"She didn't happen to mention where she was going, did she, Janet?" Hannah
would query, when she had finished her work and put on her spectacles to read
the Banner.
"To the movies, I suppose," Janet would reply. Although well aware that her
sister indulged in other distractions, she thought it useless to add to
Hannah's disquietude. And if she had little patience with Lise, she had less
with the helpless attitude of her parents.
"Well," Hannah would add, "I never can get used to her going out nights the way
she does, and with young men and women I don't know anything about. I wasn't
brought up that way. But as long as she's got to work for a living I guess
there's no help for it."
And she would glance at Edward. It was obviously due to his inability
adequately to cope with modern conditions that his daughters were forced to
toil, but this was the nearest she ever came to reproaching him. If he heard,
he acquiesced humbly, and in silence: more often than not he was oblivious,
buried in the mazes of the Bumpus family history, his papers spread out on the
red cloth of the dining-room table, under the lamp. Sometimes in his
simplicity and with the enthusiasm that demands listeners he would read aloud
to them a letter, recently received from a distant kinsman, an Alpheus Bumpus,
let us say, who had migrated to California in search of wealth and fame, and
who had found neither. In spite of age and misfortunes, the liberal attitude
of these western members of the family was always a matter of perplexity to
Edward.
"He tells me they're going to give women the ballot,--doesn't appear to be much
concerned about his own womenfolks going to the polls."
"Why shouldn't they, if they want to?" Janet would exclaim, though she had
given little thought to the question.
Edward would mildly ignore this challenge.
"He has a house on what they call Russian Hill, and he can watch the vessels as
they come in from Japan," he would continue in his precise voice, emphasizing
admirably the last syllables of the words "Russian," "vessels," and "Japan."
"Wouldn't you like to see the letter?"
To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his passion,
she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently handing it on to
Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus's trembling calligraphy, pondered over his
manifold woes. Alpheus's son, who had had a good position in a sporting goods
establishment on Market Street, was sick and in danger of losing it, the son's
wife expecting an addition to the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged.
Alpheus, a veteran of the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his
reminiscences, but the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters
of solid worth, and so far had refused to publish them.... Janet, as she read,
reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures, of
disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father's perennial interest in
failures,--provided they were those of his family; and the next evening, as he
wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in turn was pouring out
his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion by no means unpleasurable, to
this sympathetic but remote relative the story of his own failure!
If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which
haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a back eddy
of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam and jetsam had
collected. Or, to find perhaps an even more striking illustration of the
process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore Street in particular, one had
only to take the trolley to Glendale, the Italian settlement on the road
leading to the old New England village of Shrewsbury. Janet sometimes walked
there, alone or with her friend Eda Rawle. Disintegration itself--in a
paradoxically pathetic attempt at reconstruction--had built Glendale. Human
hands, Italian hands. Nor, surprising though it may seem, were these
descendants of the people of the Renaissance in the least offended by their
handiwork. When the southern European migration had begun and real estate
became valuable, one by one the more decorous edifices of the old American
order had been torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy to the bare
hills of Glendale, there to enter into new combinations representing, to an eye
craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of a mental indigestion, of a colour
scheme crying aloud to heaven for retribution. Standing alone and bare amidst
its truck gardens, hideous, extreme, though typical of the entire settlement,
composed of fragments ripped from once-appropriate settings, is a house with a
tiny body painted strawberry-red, with scroll-work shutters a tender green;
surmounting the structure and almost equalling it in size is a sky-blue cupola,
once the white crown of the Sutter mansion, the pride of old Hampton. The
walls of this dwelling were wrested from the sides of Mackey's Tavern, while
the shutters for many years adorned the parsonage of the old First Church.
Similarly, in Hampton and in Fillmore Street, lived in enforced neighbourliness
human fragments once having their places in crystallized communities where
existence had been regarded as solved. Here there was but one order,--if such
it may be called,--one relationship, direct, or indirect, one necessity
claiming them all--the mills.
Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human planks
torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which is to say
they were dominated by obsessions. Edward's was the Bumpus family; and Chris
Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced that the history of
mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by women. Perhaps he was right,
but the conviction was none the less an obsession. He came from a little
village near Wittenburg that has scarcely changed since Luther's time. Like
most residents of Hampton who did not work in the mills, he ministered to those
who did, or to those who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in
his barber shop on Faber Street.
The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride,
preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood by
which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled a
certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little dining-room grew
unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared in common
with the household of the barber. It is true that the barber's wife was a mild
hausfrau who had little to say, and that their lodgers, two young Germans who
worked in the mills, spent most of their evenings at a bowling club; but
Auermann himself, exhaling a strong odour of bay rum, would arrive promptly at
quarter past eight, take off his coat, and thus, as it were stripped for
action, would turn upon the defenceless Edward.
"Vill you mention one great man--yoost one--who is not greater if the vimmen
leave him alone?" he would demand. "Is it Anthony, the conqueror of Egypt and
the East? I vill show you Cleopatra. Und Burns, and Napoleon, the greatest
man what ever lived--vimmen again. I tell you there is no Elba, no St. Helena
if it is not for the vimmen. Und vat vill you say of Goethe?"
Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.
"He is great, I grant you," Chris would admit, "but vat is he if the vimmen
leave him alone? Divine yoost that." And he would proceed to cite endless
examples of generals and statesmen whose wives or mistresses had been their
bane. Futile Edward's attempts to shift the conversation to the subject of his
own obsession; the German was by far the more aggressive, he would have none of
it. Perhaps if Edward had been willing to concede that the Bumpuses had been
brought to their present lowly estate by the sinister agency of the fair sex
Chris might conditionally have accepted the theme. Hannah, contemptuously
waving a tattered palm leaf fan, was silent; but on one occasion Janet took
away the barber's breath by suddenly observing:--
"You never seem to think of the women whose lives are ruined by men, Mr.
Auermann."
It was unheard-of, this invasion of a man's argument by a woman, and by a young
woman at that. He glared at her through his spectacles, took them off, wiped
them, replaced them, and glared at her again. He did not like Janet; she was
capable of what may be called a speaking silence, and he had never been wholly
unaware of her disapproval and ridicule. Perhaps he recognized in her,
instinctively, the potential qualities of that emerging modern woman who to him
was anathema.
"It is somethings I don't think about," he said.
He was a wizened little man with faience-blue eyes, and sat habitually hunched
up with his hands folded across his shins.
"Nam fuit ante Helenam"--as Darwin quotes. Toward all the masculine residents
of Fillmore Street, save one, the barber's attitude was one of unconcealed
scorn for an inability to recognize female perfidy. With Johnny Tiernan alone
he refused to enter the lists. When the popular proprietor of the tin shop
came sauntering along the sidewalk with nose uptilted, waving genial greetings
to the various groups on the steps, Chris Auermann's expression would suddenly
change to one of fatuous playfulness.
"What's this I hear about giving the girls the vote, Chris?" Johnny would
innocently inquire, winking at Janet, invariably running his hand through the
wiry red hair that resumed its corkscrew twist as soon as he released it. And
Chris would as invariably reply:--
"You have the dandruffs--yes? You come to my shop, I give you somethings...."
Sometimes the barber, in search of a more aggressive adversary than Edward,
would pay visits, when as likely as not another neighbour with profound
convictions and a craving for proselytes would swoop down on the defenceless
Bumpuses: Joe Shivers, for instance, who lived in one of the tenements above
the cleaning and dyeing establishment kept by the Pappas Bros., and known as
"The Gentleman." In the daytime Mr. Shivers was a model of acquiescence in a
system he would have designated as one of industrial feudalism, his duty being
to examine the rolls of cloth as they came from the looms of the Arundel Mill,
in case of imperfections handing them over to the women menders: at night, to
borrow a vivid expression from Lise, he was "batty in the belfry" on the
subject of socialism. Unlike the barber, whom he could not abide, for him the
cleavage of the world was between labour and capital instead of man and woman;
his philosophy was stern and naturalistic; the universe--the origin of which he
did not discuss--just an accidental assemblage of capricious forces over which
human intelligence was one day to triumph. Squatting on the lowest step, his
face upturned, by the light of the arc sputtering above the street he looked
like a yellow frog, his eager eyes directed toward Janet, whom he suspected of
intelligence.
"If there was a God, a nice, kind, all-powerful God, would he permit what
happened in one of the loom-rooms last week? A Polak girl gets her hair caught
in the belt pfff!" He had a marvellously realistic gift when it came to
horrors: Janet felt her hair coming out by the roots. Although she never went
to church, she did not like to think that no God existed. Of this Mr. Shivers
was very positive. Edward, too, listened uneasily, hemmed and hawed, making
ineffectual attempts to combat Mr. Shivers's socialism with a deeply-rooted
native individualism that Shivers declared as defunct as Christianity.
"If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic system, why
do you not rise, then? Why do I not rise? I'm as good as Ditmar, I'm better
educated, but we're all slaves. What right has a man to make you and me work
for him just because he has capital?"
"Why, the right of capital," Edward would reply.
Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable romanticism and
sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in spite of the fact that
Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised over her a paradoxical fascination,
suggesting as he did unexplored intellectual realms. She despised her father
for not being able to crush the little man. Edward would make pathetic
attempts to capture the role Shivers had appropriated, to be the practical
party himself, to convict Shivers of idealism. Socialism scandalized him,
outraged, even more than atheism, something within him he held sacred, and he
was greatly annoyed because he was unable adequately to express this feeling.
"You can't change human nature, Mr. Shivers," Edward would insist in his
precise but ineffectual manner. "We all want property, you would accept a
fortune if it was offered to you, and so should I. Americans will never become
socialists."
"But look at me, wasn't I born in Meriden, Connecticut? Ain't that Yankee
enough for you?" Thus Mr. Shivers sought blandly to confound him.
A Yankee Shades of the Pilgrim fathers, of seven, generations of Bumpuses! A
Yankee who used his hands in that way, a Yankee with a nose like that, a Yankee
with a bald swathe down the middle of his crown and bunches of black, moth-
eaten hair on either side! But Edward, too polite to descend to personalities,
was silent....
In brief, this very politeness of Edward's, which his ancestors would have
scorned, this consideration and lack of self-assertion made him the favourite
prey of the many "characters" in Fillmore Street whose sanity had been
disturbed by pressure from above, in whose systems had lodged the germs of
those exotic social doctrines floating so freely in the air of our modern
industrial communities .... Chester Glenn remains for a passing mention. A
Yankee of Yankees, this, born on a New Hampshire farm, and to the ordinary
traveller on the Wigmore branch of the railroad just a good-natured, round-
faced, tobacco-chewing brakeman who would take a seat beside ladies of his
acquaintance aid make himself agreeable until it was time to rise and bawl out,
in the approved manner of his profession, the name of the next station.
Fillmore Street knew that the flat visored cap which his corporation compelled
him to wear covered a brain into which had penetrated the maggot of the Single
Tax. When he encountered Mr. Shivers or Auermann the talk became coruscating..
Eda Rawle, Janet's solitary friend of these days, must also be mentioned,
though the friendship was merely an episode in Janet's life. Their first
meeting was at Grady's quick-lunch counter in Faber Street, which they both
frequented at one time, and the fact that each had ordered a ham sandwich, a
cup of coffee, and a confection--new to Grady's--known as a Napoleon had led to
conversation.
Eda, of course, was the aggressor; she was irresistibly drawn, she would not be
repulsed. A stenographer in the Wessex National Bank, she boarded with a Welsh
family in Spruce Street; matter-of-fact, plodding, commonplace, resembling--as
Janet thought--a horse, possessing, indeed many of the noble qualities of that
animal, she might have been thought the last person in the world to discern and
appreciate in Janet the hidden elements of a mysterious fire. In appearance
Miss Rawle was of a type not infrequent in Anglo-Saxon lands, strikingly
blonde, with high malar bones, white eyelashes, and eyes of a metallic blue,
cheeks of an amazing elasticity that worked rather painfully as she talked or
smiled, drawing back inadequate lips, revealing long, white teeth and vivid
gums. It was the craving in her for romance Janet assuaged; Eda's was the love
content to pour out, that demands little. She was capable of immolation.
Janet was by no means ungrateful for the warmth of such affection, though in
moments conscious of a certain perplexity and sadness because she was able to
give such a meagre return for the wealth of its offering.
In other moments, when the world seemed all disorder and chaos,--as Mr. Shivers
described it,--or when she felt within her, like demons, those inexpressible
longings and desires, leaping and straining, pulling her, almost irresistibly,
she knew not whither, Eda shone forth like a light in the darkness, like the
beacon of a refuge and a shelter. Eda had faith in her, even when Janet had
lost faith in herself: she went to Eda in the same spirit that Marguerite went
to church; though she, Janet, more resembled Faust, being--save in these hours
of lowered vitality--of the forth-faring kind .... Unable to confess the need
that drove her, she arrived in Eda's little bedroom to be taken into Eda's
arms. Janet was immeasurably the stronger of the two, but Eda possessed the
masculine trait of protectiveness, the universe never bothered her, she was one
of those persons--called fortunate--to whom the orthodox Christian virtues come
as naturally as sun or air. Passion, when sanctified by matrimony, was her
ideal, and now it was always in terms of Janet she dreamed of it, having read
about it in volumes her friend would not touch, and never
having experienced deeply its discomforts. Sanctified or unsanctified, Janet
regarded it with terror, and whenever Eda innocently broached the subject she
recoiled. Once Eda exclaimed:--
"When you do fall in love, Janet, you must tell me all about it, every word!"
Janet blushed hotly, and was silent. In Eda's mind such an affair was a kind
of glorified fireworks ending in a cluster of stars, in Janet's a volcanic
eruption to turn the world red. Such was the difference between them.
Their dissipations together consisted of "sundaes" at a drug-store, or
sometimes of movie shows at the Star or the Alhambra. Stereotyped on Eda's
face during the legitimately tender passages of these dramas was an expression
of rapture, a smile made peculiarly infatuate by that vertical line in her
cheeks, that inadequacy of lip and preponderance of white teeth and red gums.
It irritated, almost infuriated Janet, to whom it appeared as the logical
reflection of what was passing on the screen; she averted her glance from both,
staring into her lap, filled with shame that the relation between the sexes
should be thus exposed to public gaze, parodied, sentimentalized, degraded....
There were, however, marvels to stir her, strange landscapes, cities, seas, and
ships,--once a fire in the forest of a western reserve with gigantic tongues of
orange flame leaping from tree to tree. The movies brought the world to
Hampton, the great world into which she longed to fare, brought the world to
her! Remote mountain hamlets from Japan, minarets and muezzins from the
Orient, pyramids from Egypt, domes from Moscow resembling gilded beets turned
upside down; grey houses of parliament by the Thames, the Tower of London, the
Palaces of Potsdam, the Tai Mahal. Strange lands indeed, and stranger peoples!
booted Russians in blouses, naked Equatorial savages tattooed and amazingly
adorned, soldiers and sailors, presidents, princes and emperors brought into
such startling proximity one could easily imagine one's self exchanging the
time of day! Incredible to Janet how the audiences, how even Eda accepted with
American complacency what were to her never-ending miracles; the yearning to
see more, to know more, became acute, like a pain, but even as she sought to
devour these scenes, to drink in every detail, with tantalizing swiftness they
were whisked away. They were peepholes in the walls of her prison; and at
night she often charmed herself to sleep with remembered visions of wide,
empty, treeshaded terraces reserved for kings.
But Eda, however complacent her interest in the scenes themselves, was thrilled
to the marrow by their effect on Janet, who was her medium. Emerging from the
vestibule of the theatre, Janet seemed not to see the slushy street, her eyes
shone with a silver light like that of a mountain lake in a stormy sunset. And
they walked in silence until Janet would exclaim:
"Oh Eda, wouldn't you love to travel!"
Thus Eda Rawle was brought in contact with values she herself was powerless to
detect, and which did not become values until they had passed through Janet.
One "educative" reel they had seen had begun with scenes in a lumber camp high
in the mountains of Galicia, where grow forests of the priceless pine that
becomes, after years of drying and seasoning, the sounding board of the
Stradivarius and the harp. Even then it must respond to a Player. Eda, though
failing to apply this poetic parallel, when alone in her little room in the
Welsh boarding-house often indulged in an ecstasy of speculation as to that
man, hidden in the mists of the future, whose destiny it would be to awaken her
friend. Hampton did not contain him,--of this she was sure; and in her efforts
to visualize him she had recourse to the movies, seeking him amongst that
brilliant company of personages who stood so haughtily or walked so
indifferently across the ephemeral brightness of the screen.
By virtue of these marvels of the movies Hampton ugly and sordid Hampton! --
actually began for Janet to take on a romantic tinge. Were not the strange
peoples of the earth flocking to Hampton? She saw them arriving
at the station, straight from Ellis Island, bewildered, ticketed like dumb
animals, the women draped in the soft, exotic colours many of them were
presently to exchange for the cheap and gaudy apparel of Faber Street. She
sought to summon up in her mind the glimpses she had had of the wonderful lands
from which they had come, to imagine their lives in that earlier environment.
Sometimes she wandered, alone or with Eda, through the various quarters of the
city. Each quarter had a flavour of its own, a synthetic flavour belonging
neither to the old nor to the new, yet partaking of both: a difference in
atmosphere to which Janet was keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the
north, one felt a sort of ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be
permitted: the tenements here were clean and not too crowded, the scroll-work
on their superimposed porches, like that decorating the Turnverein and the stem
Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic inheritance: The Belgians were to
the west, beyond the base-ball park and the car barns, their grey houses
scattered among new streets beside the scarred and frowning face of Torrey's
hill. Almost under the hill itself, which threatened to roll down on it, and
facing a bottomless, muddy street, was the quaint little building giving the
note of foreign thrift, of socialism and shrewdness, of joie de vivre to the
settlement, the FrancoBelgian co-operative store, with its salle de reunion
above and a stage for amateur theatricals. Standing in the mud outside, Janet
would gaze through the tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets prepared
for each household laid in neat rows beside the counter; at the old man with
the watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered cheeks who spoke no
English, whose duty it was to distribute the baskets to the women and children
as they called.
Turning eastward again, one came to Dey Street, in the heart of Hampton, where
Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim, sole testimony of the departed Hibernian
glories of a district where the present Irish rulers of the city had once lived
and gossiped and fought in the days when the mill bells had roused the
boarding-house keepers at half past four of a winter morning. Beside the hall
was a corner lot, heaped high with hills of ashes and rubbish like the
vomitings of some filthy volcano; the unsightliness of which was half concealed
by huge signs announcing the merits of chewing gums, tobaccos, and cereals.
But why had the departure of the Irish, the coming of the Syrians made Dey
Street dark, narrow, mysterious, oriental? changed the very aspect of its
architecture? Was it the coffee-houses? One of these, in front of which Janet
liked to linger, was set weirdly into an old New England cottage, and had,
apparently, fathomless depths. In summer the whole front of it lay open to the
street, and here all day long, beside the table where the charcoal squares were
set to dry, could be seen saffron-coloured Armenians absorbed in a Turkish game
played on a backgammon board, their gentleness and that of the loiterers
looking on in strange contrast with their hawk-like profiles and burning eyes.
Behind this group, in the half light of the middle interior, could be discerned
an American soda-water fountain of a bygone fashion, on its marble counter
oddly shaped bottles containing rose and violet syrups; there was a bottle-
shaped stove, and on the walls, in gilt frames, pictures evidently dating from
the period in American art that flourished when Franklin Pierce was President;
and there was an array of marble topped tables extending far back into the
shadows. Behind the fountain was a sort of cupboard--suggestive of the Arabian
Nights, which Janet had never read--from which, occasionally, the fat
proprietor emerged bearing Turkish coffee or long Turkish pipes.
When not thus occupied the proprietor carried a baby. The street swarmed with
babies, and mothers nursed them on the door-steps. And in this teeming,
prolific street one could scarcely move without stepping on a fat, almond eyed
child, though some, indeed, were wheeled; wheeled in all sorts of queer
contrivances by one another, by fathers with ragged black moustaches and eagle
noses who, to the despair of mill superintendents, had decided in the morning
that three days' wages would since to support their families for the week ....
In the midst of the throng might be seen occasionally the stout and comfortable
and not too immaculate figure of a shovel bearded Syrian priest, in a frock
coat and square-topped "Derby" hat, sailing along serenely, heedless of the
children who scattered out of his path.
Nearby was the quarter of the Canadian French, scarcely now to be called
foreigners, though still somewhat reminiscent of the cramped little towns in
the northern wilderness of water and forest. On one corner stood almost
invariably a "Pharmacie Francaise"; the signs were in French, and the elders
spoke the patois. These, despite the mill pallor, retained in their faces, in
their eyes, a suggestion of the outdoor look of their ancestors, the coureurs
des bois, but the children spoke English, and the young men, as they played
baseball in the street or in the corner lots might be heard shouting out
derisively the cry of the section hands so familiar in mill cities, "Doff, you
beggars you, doff!"
Occasionally the two girls strayed into that wide thoroughfare not far from the
canal, known by the classic name of Hawthorne, which the Italians had
appropriated to themselves. This street, too, in spite of the telegraph poles
flaunting crude arms in front of its windows, in spite of the trolley running
down its middle, had acquired a character, a unity all its own, a warmth and
picturesqueness that in the lingering light of summer evenings assumed an
indefinable significance. It was not Italy, but it was something--something
proclaimed in the ornate, leaning lines of the pillared balconies of the yellow
tenement on the second block, in the stone-vaulted entrance of the low house
next door, in fantastically coloured walls, in curtained windows out of which
leaned swarthy, earringed women. Blocking the end of the street, in stern
contrast, was the huge Clarendon Mill with its sinister brick pillars running
up the six stories between the glass. Here likewise the sidewalks overflowed
with children, large-headed, with great, lustrous eyes, mute, appealing, the
eyes of cattle. Unlike American children, they never seemed to be playing.
Among the groups of elders gathered for gossip were piratical Calabrians in
sombre clothes, descended from Greek ancestors, once the terrors of the
Adriatic Sea. The women, lingering in the doorways, hemmed in by more
children, were for the most part squat and plump, but once in a while Janet's
glance was caught and held by a strange, sharp beauty worthy of a cameo.
Opposite the Clarendon Mill on the corner of East Street was a provision store
with stands of fruit and vegetables encroaching on the pavement. Janet's eye
was attracted by a box of olives.
"Oh Eda," she cried, "do you remember, we saw them being picked--in the movies?
All those old trees on the side of a hill?"
"Why, that's so," said Eda. "You never would have thought anything'd grow on
those trees."
The young Italian who kept the store gave them a friendly grin.
"You lika the olives?" he asked, putting some of the shining black fruit into
their hands. Eda bit one dubiously with her long, white teeth, and giggled.
"Don't they taste funny!" she exclaimed.
"Good--very good," he asserted gravely, and it was to Janet he turned, as
though recognizing a discrimination not to be found in her companion. She
nodded affirmatively. The strange taste of the fruit enhanced her sense of
adventure, she tried to imagine herself among the gatherers in the grove; she
glanced at the young man to perceive that he was tall and well formed, with
remarkably expressive eyes almost the colour of the olives themselves. It
surprised her that she liked him, though he was an Italian and a foreigner: a
certain debonnair dignity in him appealed to her--a quality lacking in many of
her own countrymen.
And she wanted to talk to him about Italy,--only she did not know how to
begin,--when a customer appeared, an Italian woman who conversed with him in
soft, liquid tones that moved her ....
Sometimes on these walks--especially if the day were grey and sombre--Janet's
sense of romance and adventure deepened, became more poignant, charged with
presage. These feelings, vague and unaccountable, she was utterly unable to
confide to Eda, yet the very fear they inspired was fascinating; a fear and a
hope that some day, in all this Babel of peoples, something would happen! It
was as though the conflicting soul of the city and her own soul were one....
CHAPTER III
Lise was the only member of the Bumpus family who did not find uncongenial such
distractions and companionships as were offered by the civilization that
surrounded them. The Bagatelle she despised; that was slavery--but slavery out
of which she might any day be snatched, like Leila Hawtrey, by a prince
charming who had made a success in life. Success to Lise meant money.
Although what some sentimental sociologists might call a victim of our
civilization, Lise would not have changed it, since it produced not only Lise
herself, but also those fabulous financiers with yachts and motors and town and
country houses she read about in the supplements of the Sunday newspapers. It
contained her purgatory, which she regarded in good conventional fashion as a
mere temporary place of detention, and likewise the heaven toward which she
strained, the dwelling-place of light. In short, her philosophy was that of
the modern, orthodox American, tinged by a somewhat commercialized Sunday
school tradition of an earlier day, and highly approved by the censors of the
movies. The peculiar kind of abstinence once euphemistically known as
"virtue," particularly if it were combined with beauty, never failed of its
reward. Lise, in this sense, was indeed virtuous, and her mirror told her she
was beautiful. Almost anything could happen to such a lady: any day she might
be carried up into heaven by that modern chariot of fire, the motor car, driven
by a celestial chauffeur.
One man's meat being another's poison, Lise absorbed from the movies an element
by which her sister Janet was repelled. A popular production known as "Leila
of Hawtrey's" contained her creed,--Hawtrey's being a glittering metropolitan
restaurant where men of the world are wont to gather and discuss the stock
market, and Leila a beautiful, blonde and orphaned waitress upon whom several
of the fashionable frequenters had exercised seductive powers in vain. They
lay in wait for her at the side entrance, followed her, while one dissipated
and desperate person, married, and said to move in the most exclusive circles,
sent her an offer of a yearly income in five figures, the note being reproduced
on the screen, and Leila pictured reading it in her frigid hall-bedroom. There
are complications; she is in debt, and the proprietor of Hawtrey's has
threatened to discharge her and in order that the magnitude of the temptation
may be most effectively realized the vision appears of Leila herself, wrapped
in furs, stepping out of a limousine and into an elevator lifting her to an
apartment containing silk curtains, a Canet bed, a French maid, and a
Pomeranian. Virtue totters, but triumphs, being reinforced by two more visions
the first of these portrays Leila, prematurely old, dragging herself along
pavements under the metallic Broadway lights accosting gentlemen in evening
dress; and the second reveals her in the country, kneeling beside a dying
mother's bed, giving her promise to remain true to the Christian teachings of
her childhood.
And virtue is rewarded, lavishly, as virtue should be, in dollars and cents, in
stocks and bonds, in pearls and diamonds. Popular fancy takes kindly to rough
but honest westerners who have begun life in flannel shirts, who have struck
gold and come to New York with a fortune but despising effeteness; such a one,
tanned by the mountain sun, embarrassed in raiment supplied by a Fifth Avenue
tailor, takes a table one evening at Hawtrey's and of course falls desperately
in love. He means marriage from the first, and his faith in Leila is great
enough to survive what appears to be an almost total eclipse of her virtue.
Through the machinations of the influential villain, and lured by the false
pretence that one of her girl friends is ill, she is enticed into a mysterious
house of a sinister elegance, and apparently irretrievably compromised. The
westerner follows, forces his way through the portals, engages the villain, and
vanquishes him. Leila becomes a Bride. We behold her, at the end, mistress of
one of those magnificent stone mansions with grilled vestibules and negro
butlers into whose sacred precincts we are occasionally, in the movies,
somewhat breathlessly ushered--a long way from Hawtrey's restaurant and a hall-
bedroom. A long way, too, from the Bagatelle and Fillmore Street--but to Lise
a way not impossible, nor even improbable.
This work of art, conveying the moral that virtue is an economic asset, made a
great impression on Lise. Good Old Testament doctrine, set forth in the Book
of Job itself. And Leila, pictured as holding out for a higher price and
getting it, encouraged Lise to hold out also. Mr. Wiley, in whose company she
had seen this play, and whose likeness filled the plush and silver-plated frame
on her bureau, remained ironically ignorant of the fact that he had paid out
his money to make definite an ambition, an ideal hitherto nebulous in the mind
of the lady whom he adored. Nor did Lise enlighten him, being gifted with a
certain inserutableness. As a matter of fact it had never been her intention
to accept him, but now that she was able concretely to visualize her Lochinvar
of the future, Mr. Whey's lack of qualifications became the more apparent. In
the first place, he had been born in Lowell and had never been west of
Worcester; in the second, his salary was sixteen dollars a week: it is true she
had once fancied the Scottish terrier style of hair-cut abruptly ending in the
rounded line of the shaven neck, but Lochinvar had been close-cropped. Mr.
Wiley, close-cropped, would have resembled a convict.
Mr. Wiley was in love, there could be no doubt about that, and if he had not
always meant marriage, he meant it now, having reached a state where no folly
seems preposterous. The manner of their meeting had had just the adventurous
and romantic touch that Lise liked, one of her favourite amusements in the
intervals between "steadies" being to walk up and down Faber Street of an
evening after supper, arm in arm with two or three other young ladies, all
chewing gum, wheeling into store windows and wheeling out again, pretending the
utmost indifference to melting glances cast in their direction. An exciting
sport, though incomprehensible to masculine intelligence. It was a principle
with Lise to pay no attention to any young man who was not "presented," those
venturing to approach her with the ready formula "Haven't we met before?" being
instantly congealed. She was strict as to etiquette. But Mr. Wiley, it
seemed, could claim acquaintance with Miss Schuler, one of the ladies to whose
arm Lise's was linked, and he had the further advantage of appearing in a large
and seductive touring car, painted green, with an eagle poised above the hood
and its name, Wizard, in a handwriting rounded and bold, written in nickel
across the radiator. He greeted Miss Schuler effusively, but his eye was on
Lise from the first, and it was she he took with, him in the front seat,
indifferent to the giggling behind. Ever since then Lise had had a motor at
her disposal, and on Sundays they took long "joy rides" beyond the borders of
the state. But it must not be imagined that Mr. Whey was the proprietor of the
vehicle; nor was he a chauffeur,--her American pride would not have permitted
her to keep company with a chauffeur: he was the demonstrator for the Wizard,
something of a wizard himself, as Lise had to admit when they whizzed over the
tarvia of the Riverside Boulevard at fifty or sixty miles an hour with the
miner cut out--a favourite diversion of Mr. Whey's, who did not feel he was
going unless he was accompanied by a noise like that of a mitrailleuse in
action. Lise, experiencing a ravishing terror, hung on to her hat with one
hand and to Mr. Wiley with the other, her code permitting this; permitting him
also, occasionally, when they found themselves in tenebrous portions of
Slattery's Riverside Park, to put his arm around her waist and kiss her. So
much did Lise's virtue allow, and no more, the result being that he existed in
a tantalizing state of hope and excitement most detrimental to the nerves.
He never lost, however,--in public at least, or before Lise's family,--the fine
careless, jaunty air of the demonstrator, of the free-lance for whom seventy
miles an hour has no terrors; the automobile, apparently, like the ship, sets a
stamp upon its votaries. No Elizabethan buccaneer swooping down on defenceless
coasts ever exceeded in audacity Mr. Wiley's invasion of quiet Fillmore Street.
He would draw up with an ear-splitting screaming of brakes in front of the
clay-yellow house, and sometimes the muffler, as though unable to repress its
approval of the performance, would let out a belated pop that never failed to
jar the innermost being of Auermann, who had been shot at, or rather shot past,
by an Italian, and knew what it was. He hated automobiles, he hated Mr. Wiley.
"Vat you do?" he would demand, glaring.
And Mr. Wiley would laugh insolently.
"You think I done it, do you, Dutchie--huh!"
He would saunter past, up the stairs, and into the Bumpus dining-room, often
before the family had finished their evening meal. Lise alone made him
welcome, albeit demurely; but Mr. Wiley, not having sensibilities, was proof
against Hannah's coldness and Janet's hostility. With unerring instinct he
singled out Edward as his victim.
"How's Mr. Bumpus this evening?" he would genially inquire.
Edward invariably assured Mr. Wiley that he was well, invariably took a drink
of coffee to emphasize the fact, as though the act of lifting his cup had in it
some magic to ward off the contempt of his wife and elder daughter.
"Well, I've got it pretty straight that the Arundel's going to run nights,
starting next week," Lise's suitor would continue.
And to save his soul Edward could not refrain from answering, "You don't say
so!" He feigned interest in the information that the Hampton Ball Team, owing
to an unsatisfactory season, was to change managers next year. Mr. Wiley
possessed the gift of gathering recondite bits of news, he had confidence in
his topics and in his manner of dealing with them; and Edward, pretending to be
entertained, went so far in his politeness as to ask Mr. Wiley if he had had
supper.
"I don't care if I sample one of Mis' Bumpus's doughnuts," Mr. Wiley would
reply politely, reaching out a large hand that gave evidence, in spite of
Sapolio, of an intimacy with grease cups and splash pans. "I guess there's
nobody in this burg can make doughnuts to beat yours, Miss Bumpus."
If she had only known which doughnut he would take; Hannah sometimes thought
she might have been capable of putting arsenic in it. Her icy silence did not
detract from the delights of his gestation.
Occasionally, somewhat to Edward's alarm, Hannah demanded: "Where are you
taking Lise this evening?"
Mr. Wiley's wisdom led him to be vague.
Oh, just for a little spin up the boulevard. Maybe we'll pick up Ella Schuler
and one or two other young ladies."
Hannah and Janet knew very well he had no intention of doing this, and Hannah
did not attempt to conceal her incredulity. As a matter of fact, Lise
sometimes did insist on a "party."
"I want you should bring her back by ten o'clock. That's late enough for a
girl who works to be out. It's late enough for any girl."
"Sure, Mis' Bumpus," Wiley would respond easily.
Hannah chafed because she had no power to enforce this, because Mr. Wiley and
Lise understood she had no power. Lise went to put on her hat; if she skimped
her toilet in the morning, she made up for it in the evening when she came home
from the store, and was often late for supper. In the meantime, while Lise was
in the bedroom adding these last touches, Edward would contemptibly continue
the conversation, fingering the Evening Banner as it lay in his lap, while Mr.
Wiley helped himself boldly to another doughnut, taking--as Janet observed--
elaborate precautions to spill none of the crumbs on a brown suit, supposed to
be the last creation in male attire. Behind a plate glass window in Faber
Street, belonging to a firm of "custom" tailors whose stores had invaded every
important city in the country, and who made clothes for "college" men, only the
week before Mr. Wiley had seen this same suit artistically folded, combined
with a coloured shirt, brown socks, and tie and "torture" collar--lures for the
discriminating. Owing to certain expenses connected with Lise, he had been
unable to acquire the shirt and the tie, but he had bought the suit in the hope
and belief that she would find him irresistible therein. It pleased him, too,
to be taken for a "college" man, and on beholding in the mirror his broadened
shoulders and diminished waist he was quite convinced his money had not been
spent in vain; that strange young ladies--to whom, despite his infatuation for
the younger Miss Bumpus, he was not wholly indifferent--would mistake him for
an undergraduate of Harvard,--an imposition concerning which he had no
scruples. But Lise, though shaken, had not capitulated.....
When she returned to the dining-room, arrayed in her own finery, demure,
triumphant, and had carried off Mr. Whey there would ensue an interval of
silence broken only by the clattering together of the dishes Hannah snatched
up.
"I guess he's the kind of son-in-law would suit you," she threw over her
shoulder once to Edward.
"Why?" he inquired, letting down his newspaper nervously.
"Well, you seem to favour him, to make things as pleasant for him as you can."
Edward would grow warm with a sense of injustice, the inference being that he
was to blame for Mr. Wiley; if he had been a different kind of father another
sort of suitor would be courting Lise.
"I have to be civil," he protested. He pronounced that, word "civil"
exquisitely, giving equal value to both syllables.
"Civil!" Hannah scoffed, as she left the room; and to Janet, who had followed
her into the kitchen, she added: "That's the trouble with your father, he's
always be'n a little too civil. Edward Bumpus is just as simple as a child,
he's afraid of offending folks' feelings .... Think of being polite to that
Whey!" In those two words Hannah announced eloquently her utter condemnation
of the demonstrator of the Wizard. It was characteristic of her, however, when
she went back for another load of dishes and perceived that Edward was only
pretending to read his Banner, to attempt to ease her husband's feelings. She
thought it queer because she was still fond of Edward Bumpus, after all he had
"brought on her."
"It's Lise," she said, as though speaking to Janet, "she attracts 'em.
Sometimes I just can't get used to it that she's my daughter. I don't know who
she takes after. She's not like any of my kin, nor any of the Bumpuses."
"What can you do?" asked Edward. "You can't order him out of the house. It's
better for him to come here. And you can't stop Lise from going with him--
she's earning her own money...."
They had talked over the predicament before, and always came to the same
impasse. In the privacy of the kitchen Hannah paused suddenly in her energetic
rubbing of a plate and with supreme courage uttered a question.
"Janet, do you calculate he means anything wrong?"
"I don't know what he means," Janet replied, unwilling to give Mr. Wiley credit
for anything, "but I know this, that Lise is too smart to let him take
advantage of her."
Hannah ruminated. Cleverness as the modern substitute for feminine virtue did
not appeal to her, but she let it pass. She was in no mood to quarrel with any
quality that would ward off disgrace.
"I don't know what to make of Lise--she don't appear to have any
principles...."
If the Wiley affair lasted longer than those preceding it, this was because
former suitors had not commanded automobiles. When Mr. Wiley lost his
automobile he lost his luck--if it may be called such. One April evening,
after a stroll with Eda, Janet reached home about nine o'clock to find Lise
already in their room, to remark upon the absence of Mr. Wiley's picture from
the frame.
"I'm through with him," Lise declared briefly, tugging at her hair.
"Through with him?" Janet repeated.
Lise paused in her labours and looked at her sister steadily. "I handed him
the mit--do you get me?"
"But why?"
"Why? I was sick of him--ain't that enough? And then he got mixed up with a
Glendale trolley and smashed his radiator, and the Wizard people sacked him. I
always told him he was too fly. It's lucky for him I wasn't in the car."
"It's lucky for you," said Janet. Presently she inquired curiously: "Aren't
you sorry?"
"Nix." Lise shook her head, which was now bowed, her face hidden by hair.
"Didn't I tell you I was sick of him? But he sure was some spender," she
added, as though in justice bound to give him his due.
Janet was shocked by the ruthlessness of it, for Lise appeared relieved, almost
gay. She handed Janet a box containing five peppermint creams--all that
remained of Mr. Wiley's last gift.
One morning in the late spring Janet crossed the Warren Street bridge, the
upper of the two spider-like structures to be seen from her office window,
spanning the river beside the great Hampton dam. The day, dedicated to the
memory of heroes fallen in the Civil War, the thirtieth of May, was a legal
holiday. Gradually Janet had acquired a dread of holidays as opportunities
never realized, as intervals that should have been filled with unmitigated
joys, and yet were invariably wasted, usually in walks with Eda Rawle. To-day,
feeling an irresistible longing for freedom, for beauty, for adventure, for
quest and discovery of she knew not what, she avoided Eda, and after gazing
awhile at the sunlight dancing in the white mist below the falls, she walked
on, southward, until she had left behind her the last straggling houses of the
city and found herself on a wide, tarvia road that led, ultimately, to Boston.
So read the sign.
Great maples, heavy with leaves, stood out against the soft blue of the sky,
and the sunlight poured over everything, bathing the stone walls, the thatches
of the farmhouses, extracting from the copses of stunted pine a pungent,
reviving perfume. Sometimes she stopped to rest on the pine needles, and
walked on again, aimlessly, following the road because it was the easiest way.
There were spring flowers in the farmhouse yards, masses of lilacs whose purple
she drank in eagerly; the air, which had just a tang of New England sharpness,
was filled with tender sounds, the clucking of hens, snatches of the songs of
birds, the rustling of maple leaves in the fitful breeze. A chipmunk ran down
an elm and stood staring at her with beady, inquisitive eyes, motionless save
for bas quivering tail, and she put forth her hand, shyly, beseechingly, as
though he held the secret of life she craved. But he darted away.
She looked around her unceasingly, at the sky, at the trees, at the flowers and
ferns and fields, at the vireos and thrushes, the robins and tanagers gashing
in and out amidst the foliage, and she was filled with a strange yearning to
expand and expand until she should become a part of all nature, be absorbed
into it, cease to be herself. Never before had she known just that feeling,
that degree of ecstasy mingled with divine discontent .... Occasionally,
intruding faintly upon the countryside peace, she was aware of a distant
humming sound that grew louder and louder until there shot roaring past her an
automobile filled with noisy folk, leaving behind it a suffocating cloud of
dust. Even these intrusions, reminders of the city she had left, were
powerless to destroy her mood, and she began to skip, like a schoolgirl,
pausing once in a while to look around her fearfully, lest she was observed;
and it pleased her to think that she had escaped forever, that she would never
go back: she cried aloud, as she skipped, "I won't go back, I won't go back,"
keeping time with her feet until she was out of breath and almost intoxicated,
delirious, casting herself down, her heart beating wildly, on a bank of ferns,
burying her face in them. She had really stopped because a pebble had got into
her shoe, and as she took it out she looked at her bare heel and remarked
ruefully:--
"Those twenty-five cent stockings aren't worth buying!"
Economic problems, however, were powerless to worry her to-day, when the sun
shone and the wind blew and the ferns, washed by the rill running through the
culvert under the road, gave forth a delicious moist odour reminding her of the
flower store where her sister Lise had once been employed. But at length she
arose, and after an hour or more of sauntering the farming landscape was left
behind, the crumbling stone fences were replaced by a well-kept retaining wall
capped by a privet hedge, through which, between stone pillars, a driveway
entered and mounted the shaded slope, turning and twisting until lost to view.
But afar, standing on the distant crest, through the tree trunks and foliage
Janet saw one end of the mansion to which it led, and ventured timidly but
eagerly in among the trees in the hope of satisfying her new-born curiosity.
Try as she would, she never could get any but disappointing and partial
glimpses of a house which, because of the mystery of its setting, fired her
imagination, started her to wondering why it was that some were permitted to
live in the midst of such beauty while she was condemned to spend her days in
Fillmore Street and the prison of the mill. She was not even allowed to look
at it! The thought was like a cloud across the sun.
However, when she had regained the tarvia road and walked a little way the
shadow suddenly passed, and she stood surprised. The sight of a long common
with its ancient trees in the fullness of glory, dense maples, sturdy oaks,
strong, graceful elms that cast flickering, lacy shadows across the road filled
her with satisfaction, with a sense of peace deepened by the awareness, in the
background, ranged along the common on either side, of stately, dignified
buildings, each in an appropriate frame of foliage. With the essence rather
than the detail of all this her consciousness became steeped; she was naturally
ignorant of the great good fortune of Silliston Academy of having been spared
with one or two exceptions--donations during those artistically lean years of
the nineteenth century when American architecture affected the Gothic, the
Mansard, and the subsequent hybrid. She knew this must be Silliston, the seat
of that famous academy of which she had heard.
The older school buildings and instructors' houses, most of them white or
creamy yellow, were native Colonial, with tall, graceful chimneys and classic
pillars and delicate balustrades, eloquent at once of the racial inheritance of
the Republic and of a bygone individuality, dignity, and pride. And the modern
architect, of whose work there was an abundance, had graciously and intuitively
held this earlier note and developed it. He was an American, but an American
who had been trained. The result was harmony, life as it should proceed, the
new growing out of the old. And no greater tribute can be paid to Janet Bumpus
than that it pleased her, struck and set exquisitely vibrating within her
responsive chords. For the first time in her adult life she stood in the
presence of tradition, of a tradition inherently if unconsciously the innermost
reality of her being a tradition that miraculously was not dead, since after
all the years it had begun to put forth these vigorous shoots....
What Janet chiefly realized was the delicious, contented sense of having come,
visually at least, to the home for which she had longed. But her humour was
that of a child who has strayed, to find its true dwelling place in a region of
beauty hitherto unexplored and unexperienced, tinged, therefore, with
unreality, with mystery,--an effect enhanced by the chance stillness and
emptiness of the place. She wandered up and down the Common, whose vivid green
was starred with golden dandelions; and then, spying the arched and shady
vista of a lane, entered it, bent on new discoveries. It led past one of the
newer buildings, the library--as she read in a carved inscription over the
door--plunged into shade again presently to emerge at a square farmhouse,
ancient and weathered, with a great square chimney thrust out of the very
middle of the ridge-pole,--a landmark left by one of the earliest of
Silliston's settlers. Presiding over it, embracing and protecting it, was a
splendid tree. The place was evidently in process of reconstruction and
repair, the roof had been newly shingled, new frames, with old-fashioned, tiny
panes had been put in the windows; a little garden was being laid out under the
sheltering branches of the tree, and between the lane and the garden, half
finished, was a fence of an original and pleasing design, consisting of pillars
placed at intervals with upright pickets between, the pickets sawed in curves,
making a line that drooped in the middle. Janet did not perceive the workman
engaged in building this fence until the sound of his hammer attracted her
attention. His back was bent, he was absorbed in his task.
"Are there any stores near here?" she inquired.
He straightened up. "Why yes," he replied, "come to think of it, I have seen
stores, I'm sure I have."
Janet laughed; his expression, his manner of speech were so delightfully
whimsical, so in keeping with the spirit of her day, and he seemed to accept
her sudden appearance in the precise make-believe humour she could have wished.
And yet she stood a little struck with timidity, puzzled by the contradictions
he presented of youth and age, of shrewdness, experience and candour, of
gentility and manual toil. He must have been about thirty-five; he was
hatless, and his hair, uncombed but not unkempt, was greying at the temples;
his eyes--which she noticed particularly--were keen yet kindly, the irises
delicately stencilled in a remarkable blue; his speech was colloquial yet
cultivated, his workman's clothes belied his bearing.
"Yes, there are stores, in the village," he went on, "but isn't it a holiday,
or Sunday--perhaps--or something of the kind?"
"It's Decoration Day," she reminded him, with deepening surprise.
"So it is! And all the storekeepers have gone on picnics in their automobiles,
or else they're playing golf. Nobody's working today."
"But you--aren't you working?" she inquired.
"Working?" he repeated. "I suppose some people would call it work. I--I
hadn't thought of it in that way."
"You mean--you like it," Janet was inspired to say.
"Well, yes," he confessed. "I suppose I do."
Her cheeks dimpled. If her wonder had increased, her embarrassment had flown,
and he seemed suddenly an old acquaintance. She had, however, profound doubts
now of his being a carpenter.
"Were you thinking of going shopping?" he asked, and at the very ludicrousness
of the notion she laughed again. She discovered a keen relish for this kind of
humour, but it was new to her experience, and she could not cope with it.
"Only to buy some crackers, or a sandwich," she replied, and blushed.
"Oh," he said. "Down in the village, on the corner where the cars stop, is a
restaurant. It's not as good as the Parker House in Boston, I believe, but
they do have sandwiches, yes, and coffee. At least they call it coffee."
"Oh, thank you," she said.
"You'd better wait till you try it," he warned her.
"Oh, I don't mind, I don't want much." And she was impelled to add: "It's such
a beautiful day."
"It's absurd to get hungry on such a day--absurd," he agreed.
"Yes, it is," she laughed. "I'm not really hungry, but I haven't time to get
back to Hampton for dinner." Suddenly she grew hot at the thought that he
might suspect her of hinting. "You see, I live in Hampton," she went on
hurriedly, "I'm a stenographer there, in the Chippering Mill, and I was just
out for a walk, and--I came farther than I intended." She had made it worse.
But he said, "Oh, you came from Hampton!" with an intonation of surprise, of
incredulity even, that soothed and even amused while it did not deceive her.
Not that the superior intelligence of which she had begun to suspect him had
been put to any real test by the discovery of her home, and she was quite sure
her modest suit of blue serge and her $2.99 pongee blouse proclaimed her as a
working girl of the mill city. "I've been to Hampton," he declared, just as
though it were four thousand miles away instead of four.
"But I've never been here before, to Silliston," she responded in the same
spirit: and she added wistfully, "it must be nice to live in such a beautiful
place as this!"
"Yes, it is nice," he agreed. "We have our troubles, too,--but it's nice."
She ventured a second, appraising glance. His head, which he carried a little
flung back, his voice, his easy and confident bearing--all these contradicted
the saw and the hammer, the flannel shirt, open at the neck, the khaki trousers
still bearing the price tag. And curiosity beginning to get the better of her,
she was emboldened to pay a compliment to the fence. If one had to work, it
must be a pleasure to work on things pleasing to the eye--such was her
inference.
"Why, I'm glad you like it," he said heartily. "I was just hoping some one
would come along here and admire it. Now--what colour would you paint it?"
"Are you a painter, too?"
"After a fashion. I'm a sort of man of all work--I thought of painting it
white, with the pillars green."
"I think that would be pretty," she answered, judicially, after a moment's
thought. "What else can you do?"
He appeared to be pondering his accomplishments.
"Well, I can doctor trees," he said, pointing an efficient finger at the
magnificent maple sheltering, like a guardian deity, the old farmhouse. "I put
in those patches."
"They're cement," she exclaimed. "I never heard of putting cement in trees."
"They don't seem to mind."
"Are the holes very deep?"
"Pretty deep."
"But I should think the tree would be dead."
"Well, you see the life of a tree is right under the bark. If you can keep the
outer covering intact, the tree will live."
"Why did you let the holes get so deep?"
"I've just come here. The house was like the tree the shingles all rotten, but
the beams were sound. Those beams were hewn out of the forest two hundred and
fifty years ago."
"Gracious!" said Janet. "And how old is the tree?"
"I should say about a hundred. I suppose it wouldn't care to admit it."
"How do you know?" she inquired.
"Oh, I'm very intimate with trees. I find out their secrets."
"It's your house!" she exclaimed, somewhat appalled by the discovery.
"Yes--yes it is," he answered, looking around at it and then in an
indescribably comical manner down at his clothes. His gesture, his expression
implied that her mistake was a most natural one.
"Excuse me, I thought--" she began, blushing hotly, yet wanting to laugh again.
"I don't blame you--why shouldn't you?" he interrupted her. "I haven't got
used to it yet, and there is something amusing about--my owning a house. When
the parlour's finished I'll have to wear a stiff collar, I suppose, in order to
live up to it."
Her laughter broke forth, and she tried to imagine him in a stiff collar....
But she was more perplexed than ever. She stood balancing on one foot, poised
for departure.
"I ought to be going," she said, as though she had been paying him a formal
visit.
"Don't hurry," he protested cordially. "Why hurry back to Hampton?"
"I never want to go back!" she cried with a vehemence that caused him to
contemplate her anew, suddenly revealing the intense, passionate quality which
had so disturbed Mr. Ditmar. She stood transformed. "I hate it!" she
declared. "It's so ugly, I never want to see it again."
"Yes, it is ugly," he confessed. "Since you admit it, I don't mind saying so.
But it's interesting, in a way." Though his humorous moods had delighted her,
she felt subtly flattered because he had grown more serious.
"It is interesting," she agreed. She was almost impelled to tell him why, in
her excursions to the various quarters, she had found Hampton interesting, but
a shyness born of respect for the store of knowledge she divined in him
restrained her. She was curious to know what this man saw in Hampton. His
opinion would be worth something. Unlike her neighbours in Fillmore Street, he
was not what her sister Lise would call "nutty"; he had an air of fine sanity,
of freedom, of detachment,--though the word did not occur to her; he betrayed
no bitter sense of injustice, and his beliefs were uncoloured by the obsession
of a single panacea. "Why do you think it's interesting?" she demanded.
"Well, I'm always expecting to hear that it's blown up. It reminds me of
nitro-glycerine," he added, smiling.
She repeated the word.
"An explosive, you know--they put it in dynamite. They say a man once made it
by accident, and locked up his laboratory and ran home--and never went back."
"I know what you mean!" she cried, her eyes alight with excitement. "All those
foreigners! I've felt it that something would happen, some day, it frightened
me, and yet I wished that something would happen. Only, I never would have
thought of--nitro-glycerine."
She was unaware of the added interest in his regard. But he answered lightly
enough:--
"Oh, not only the foreigners. Human chemicals--you can't play with human
chemicals any more than you can play with real ones--you've got to know
something about chemistry."
This remark was beyond her depth.
"Who is playing with them?" she asked.
"Everybody--no one in particular. Nobody seems to know much about them, yet,"
he replied, and seemed disinclined to pursue the subject. A robin with a worm
in its bill was hopping across the grass; he whistled softly, the bird stopped,
cocking its head and regarding them. Suddenly, in conflict with her desire to
remain indefinitely talking with this strange man, Janet felt an intense
impulse to leave. She could bear the conversation no longer, she might burst
into tears--such was the extraordinary effect he had produced on her.
"I must go,--I'm ever so much obliged to you," she said.
"Drop in again," he said, as he took her trembling hand .... When she had
walked a little way she looked back over her shoulder to see him leaning idly
against the post, gazing after her, and waving his hammer in friendly fashion.
For a while her feet fairly flew, and her heart beat tumultuously, keeping time
with her racing thoughts. She walked about the Common, seeing nothing, paying
no attention to the passers-by, who glanced at her curiously. But at length as
she grew calmer the needs of a youthful and vigorous body became imperative,
and realizing suddenly that she was tired and hungry, sought and found the
little restaurant in the village below. She journeyed back to Hampton
pondering what this man had said to her; speculating, rather breathlessly,
whether he had been impelled to conversation by a natural kindness and
courtesy, or whether he really had discovered something in her worthy of
addressing, as he implied. Resentment burned in her breast, she became
suddenly blinded by tears: she might never see him again, and if only she were
"educated" she might know him, become his friend. Even in this desire she was
not conventional, and in the few moments of their contact he had developed
rather than transformed what she meant by "education." She thought of it not
as knowledge reeking of books and schools, but as the acquirement of the
freemasonry which he so evidently possessed, existence on terms of
understanding, confidence, and freedom with nature; as having the world open up
to one like a flower filled with colour and life. She thought of the robin, of
the tree whose secrets he had learned, of a mental range including even that
medley of human beings amongst whom she lived. And the fact that something of
his meaning had eluded her grasp made her rebel all the more bitterly against
the lack of a greater knowledge ....
Often during the weeks that followed he dwelt in her mind as she sat at her
desk and stared out across the river, and several times that summer she started
to walk to Silliston. But always she turned back. Perhaps she feared to break
the charm of that memory ....
CHAPTER IV
Our American climate is notoriously capricious. Even as Janet trudged homeward
on that Memorial Day afternoon from her Cinderella-like adventure in Silliston
the sun grew hot, the air lost its tonic, becoming moist and tepid, white
clouds with dark edges were piled up in the western sky. The automobiles of
the holiday makers swarmed ceaselessly over the tarvia. Valiantly as she
strove to cling to her dream, remorseless reality was at work dragging her
back, reclaiming her; excitement and physical exercise drained her vitality,
her feet were sore, sadness invaded her as she came in view of the ragged
outline of the city she had left so joyfully in the morning. Summer, that most
depressing of seasons in an environment of drab houses and grey pavements, was
at hand, listless householders and their families were already, seeking refuge
on front steps she passed on her way to Fillmore Street.
It was about half past five when she arrived. Lise, her waist removed, was
seated in a rocking chair at the window overlooking the littered yards and the
backs of the tenements on Rutger Street. And Lise, despite the heaviness of
the air, was dreaming. Of such delicate texture was the fabric of Janet's
dreams that not only sordid reality, but contact with other dreams of a
different nature, such as her sister's, often sufficed to dissolve them. She
resented, for instance, the presence in the plush oval of Mr. Eustace
Arlington; the movie star whose likeness had replaced Mr. Wiley's, and who had
played the part of the western hero in "Leila of Hawtrey's." With his burning
eyes and sensual face betraying the puffiness that comes from over-indulgence,
he was not Janet's ideal of a hero, western or otherwise. And now Lise was
holding a newspaper: not the Banner, whose provinciality she scorned, but a
popular Boston sheet to be had for a cent, printed at ten in the morning and
labelled "Three O'clock Edition," with huge red headlines stretched across the
top of the page:--
"JURY FINDS IN MISS NEALY'S FAVOR."
As Janet entered Lise looked up and exclaimed:--
"Say, that Nealy girl's won out!"
"Who is she?" Janet inquired listlessly.
"You are from the country, all right," was her sister's rejoinder. "I would
have bet there wasn't a Reub in the state that wasn't wise to the Ferris breach
of promise case, and here you blow in after the show's over and want to know
who Nelly Nealy is. If that doesn't beat the band!"
"This woman sued a man named Ferris--is that it?"
"A man named Ferris!" Lise repeated, with the air of being appalled by her
sister's ignorance. "I guess you never heard of Ferris, either--the biggest
copper man in Boston. He could buy Hampton, and never feel it, and they say
his house in Brighton cost half a million dollars. Nelly Nealy put her damages
at one hundred and fifty thousand and stung him for seventy five. I wish I'd
been in court when that jury came back! There's her picture."
To Janet, especially in the mood of reaction in which she found herself that
evening, Lise's intense excitement, passionate partisanship and approval of
Miss Nealy were incomprehensible, repellent. However, she took the sheet,
gazing at the image of the lady who, recently an obscure
stenographer, had suddenly leaped into fame and become a "headliner," the
envied of thousands of working girls all over New England. Miss Nealy, in
spite of the "glare of publicity" she deplored, had borne up admirably under
the strain, and evidently had been able to consume three meals a day and give
some thought to her costumes. Her smile under the picture hat was coquettish,
if not bold. The special article, signed by a lady reporter whose sympathies
were by no means concealed and whose talents were given free rein, related how
the white-haired mother had wept tears of joy; how Miss Nealy herself had been
awhile too overcome to speak, and then had recovered sufficiently to express
her gratitude to the twelve gentlemen who had vindicated the honour of American
womanhood. Mr. Ferris, she reiterated, was a brute; never as long as she lived
would she be able to forget how she had loved and believed in him, and how,
when at length she unwillingly became convinces of his perfidy, she had been
"prostrated," unable to support her old mother. She had not, naturally, yet
decided how she would invest her fortune; as for going on the stage, that had
been suggested, but she had made no plans. "Scores of women sympathizers" had
escorted her to a waiting automobile....
Janet, impelled by the fascination akin to disgust, read thus far, and flinging
the newspaper on the floor, began to tidy herself for supper. But presently,
when she heard Lise sigh, she could contain herself no longer.
"I don't see how you can read such stuff as that," she exclaimed. "It's--it's
horrible."
"Horrible?" Lise repeated.
Janet swung round from the washbasin, her hands dripping.
"Instead of getting seventy five thousand dollars she ought to be tarred and
feathered. She's nothing but a blackmailer."
Lise, aroused from her visions, demanded vehemently "Ain't he a millionaire?"
"What difference does that make?" Janet retorted. "And you can't tell me she
didn't know what she was up to all along--with that face."
"I'd have sued him, all right," declared Lise, defiantly.
"Then you'd be a blackmailer, too. I'd sooner scrub floors, I'd sooner starve
than do such a thing--take money for my affections. In the first place, I'd
have more pride, and in the second place, if I really loved a man, seventy five
thousand or seventy five million dollars wouldn't help me any. Where do you
get such ideas? Decent people don't have them."
Janet turned to the basin again and began rubbing her face vigorously--ceasing
for an instance to make sure of the identity of a sound reaching her ears
despite the splashing of water. Lise was sobbing. Janet dried her face and
hands, arranged her hair, and sat down on the windowsill; the scorn and anger,
which had been so intense as completely to possess her, melting into a pity and
contempt not unmixed with bewilderment. Ordinarily Lise was hard, impervious
to such reproaches, holding her own in the passionate quarrels that
occasionally took place between them yet there were times, such as this, when
her resistance broke down unexpectedly, and she lost all self control. She
rocked to and fro in the chair, her shoulders bowed, her face hidden in her
hands. Janet reached out and touched her.
"Don't be silly," she began, rather sharply, "just because I said it was a
disgrace to have such ideas. Well, it is."
"I'm not silly," said Lise. "I'm sick of that job at the Bagatelle " sob--
"there's nothing in it--I'm going to quit--I wish to God I was dead! Standing
on your feet all day till you're wore out for six dollars a week--what's there
in it?"--sob--"With that guy Walters who walks the floor never lettin' up on
you. He come up to me yesterday and says, `I didn't know you was near sighted,
Miss Bumpus' just because there was a customer Annie Hatch was too lazy to wait
on"--sob--"That's his line of dope--thinks he's sarcastic--and he's sweet on
Annie. Tomorrow I'm going to tell him to go to hell. I'm through I'm sick of
it, I tell you"--sob--"I'd rather be dead than slave like that for six
dollars."
"Where are you going?" asked Janet.
"I don't know--I don't care. What's the difference? any place'd be better than
this." For awhile she continued to cry on a ridiculously high, though subdued,
whining note, her breath catching at intervals. A feeling of helplessness, of
utter desolation crept over Janet; powerless to comfort herself, how could she
comfort her sister? She glanced around the familiar, sordid room, at the
magazine pages against the faded wall-paper, at the littered bureau and the
littered bed, over which Lise's clothes were flung. It was hot and close even
now, in summer it would be stifling. Suddenly a flash of sympathy revealed to
her a glimpse of the truth that Lise, too, after her own nature, sought beauty
and freedom! Never did she come as near comprehending Lise as in such moments
as this, and when, on dark winter mornings, her sister clung to her, terrified
by the siren. Lise was a child, and the thought that she, Janet, was powerless
to change her was a part of the tragic tenderness. What would become of Lise?
And what would become of her, Janet?... So she clung, desperately, to her
sister's hand until at last Lise roused herself, her hair awry, her face
puckered and wet with tears and perspiration.
"I can't stand it any more--I've just got to go away anywhere," she said, and
the cry found an echo in Janet's heart....
But the next morning Lise went back to the Bagatelle, and Janet to the mill....
The fact that Lise's love affairs had not been prospering undoubtedly had
something to do with the fit of depression into which she had fallen that
evening. A month or so before she had acquired another beau. It was
understood by Lise's friends and Lise's family, though not by the gentleman
himself, that his position was only temporary or at most probationary; he had
not even succeeded to the rights, title, and privileges of the late Mr. Wiley,
though occupying a higher position in the social scale--being the agent of a
patent lawn sprinkler with an office in Faber Street.
"Stick to him and you'll wear diamonds--that's what he tries to put across,"
was Lise's comment on Mr. Frear's method, and thus Janet gained the impression
that her sister's feelings were not deeply involved. "If I thought he'd make
good with the sprinkler I might talk business. But say, he's one of those
ginks that's always tryin' to beat the bank. He's never done a day's work in
his life. Last year he was passing around Foley's magazine, and before that he
was with the race track that went out of business because the ministers got
nutty over it. Well, he may win out," she added reflectively, "those guys
sometimes do put the game on the blink. He sure is a good spender when the
orders come in, with a line of talk to make you holler for mercy."
Mr. Frear's "line of talk" came wholly, astonishingly, from one side of his
mouth--the left side. As a muscular feat it was a triumph. A deaf person on
his right side would not have known he was speaking. The effect was secretive,
extraordinarily confidential; enabling him to sell sprinklers, it ought to have
helped him to make love, so distinctly personal was it, implying as it did that
the individual addressed was alone of all the world worthy of consideration.
Among his friends it was regarded as an accomplishment, but Lise was critical,
especially since he did not look into one's eyes, but gazed off into space, as
though he weren't talking at all.
She had once inquired if the right side of his face was paralyzed.
She permitted him to take her, however, to Gruber's Cafe, to the movies, and
one or two select dance halls, and to Slattery's Riverside Park, where one
evening she had encountered the rejected Mr. Wiley.
"Say, he was sore!" she told Janet the next morning, relating the incident with
relish, "for two cents he would have knocked Charlie over the ropes. I guess
he could do it, too, all right."
Janet found it curious that Lise should display such vindictiveness toward Mr.
Wiley, who was more sinned against than sinning. She was moved to inquire
after his welfare.
"He's got one of them red motorcycles," said Lise. "He was gay with it too--
when we was waiting for the boulevard trolley he opened her up and went right
between Charlie and me. I had to laugh. He's got a job over in Haverhill you
can't hold that guy under water long."
Apparently Lise had no regrets. But her premonitions concerning Mr. Frear
proved to be justified. He did not "make good." One morning the little office
on Faber Street where the sprinklers were displayed was closed, Hampton knew
him no more, and the police alone were sincerely regretful. It seemed that of
late he had been keeping all the money for the sprinklers, and spending a good
deal of it on Lise. At the time she accepted the affair with stoical
pessimism, as one who has learned what to expect of the world, though her moral
sense was not profoundly disturbed by the reflection that she had indulged in
the delights of Slattery's and Gruber's and a Sunday at "the Beach" at the
expense of the Cascade Sprinkler Company of Boston. Mr. Frear inconsiderately
neglected to prepare her for his departure, the news of which was conveyed to
her in a singular manner, and by none other than Mr. Johnny Tiernan of the tin
shop,--their conversation throwing some light, not only on Lise's
sophistication, but on the admirable and intricate operation of Hampton's city
government. About five o'clock Lise was coming home along Fillmore Street
after an uneventful, tedious and manless holiday spent in the company of Miss
Schuler and other friends when she perceived Mr. Tiernan seated on his steps,
grinning and waving a tattered palm-leaf fan.
"The mercury is sure on the jump," he observed. "You'd think it was July."
And Lise agreed.
"I suppose you'll be going to Tim Slattery's place tonight," he went on. "It's
the coolest spot this side of the Atlantic Ocean."
There was, apparently, nothing cryptic in this remark, yet it is worth noting
that Lise instantly became suspicious.
"Why would I be going out there?" she inquired innocently, darting at him a
dark, coquettish glance.
Mr. Tiernan regarded her guilelessly, but there was admiration in his soul; not
because of her unquestioned feminine attractions,--he being somewhat amazingly
proof against such things,--but because it was conveyed to him in some
unaccountable way that her suspicions were aroused. The brain beneath that
corkscrew hair was worthy of a Richelieu. Mr. Tiernan's estimate of Miss Lise
Bumpus, if he could have been induced to reveal it, would have been worth
listening to.
"And why wouldn't you?" he replied heartily. "Don't I see all the pretty young
ladies out there, including yourself, and you dancing with the Cascade man.
Why is it you'll never give me a dance?"
"Why is it you never ask me?" demanded Lise.
"What chance have I got, against him?"
"He don't own me," said Lise.
Mr. Tiernan threw back his head, and laughed.
"Well, if you're there to-night, tangoin' with him and I come up and says,
`Miss Bumpus, the pleasure is mine,' I'm wondering what would happen."
"I'm not going to Slattery's to-night," she declared having that instant
arrived at this conclusion.
"And where then? I'll come along, if there's a chance for me."
"Quit your kidding," Lise reproved him.
Mr. Tiernan suddenly looked very solemn:
"Kidding, is it? Me kiddin' you? Give me a chance, that's all I'm asking.
Where will you be, now?"
"Is Frear wanted?" she demanded.
Mr. Tiernan's expression changed. His nose seemed to become more pointed, his
eyes to twinkle more merrily than ever. He didn't take the trouble, now, to
conceal his admiration.
"Sure, Miss Bumpus," he said, "if you was a man, we'd have you on the force to-
morrow."
"What's he wanted for?"
"Well," said Johnny, "a little matter of sprinklin'. He's been sprinklin' his
company's water without a license."
She was silent a moment before she exclaimed:--
"I ought to have been wise that he was a crook!"
"Well," said Johnny consolingly, "there's others that ought to have been wise,
too. The Cascade people had no business takin' on a man that couldn't use but
half of his mouth."
This seemed to Lise a reflection on her judgment. She proceeded to clear
herself.
"He was nothing to me. He never gave me no rest. He used to come 'round and
pester me to go out with him--"
"Sure!" interrupted Mr. Tiernan. "Don't I know how it is with the likes of
him! A good time's a good time, and no harm in it. But the point is " and
here he cocked his nose--"the point is, where is he? Where will he be
tonight?"
All at once Lise grew vehement, almost tearful.
"I don't know--honest to God, I don't. If I did I'd tell you. Last night he
said he might be out of town. He didn't say where he was going." She fumbled
in her bag, drawing out an imitation lace handkerchief and pressing it to her
eyes.
"There now!" exclaimed Mr. Tiernan, soothingly. "How would you know? And he
deceivin' you like he did the company--"
"He didn't deceive me," cried Lise.
"Listen," said Mr. Tiernan, who had risen and laid his hand on her arm. "It's
not young ladies like you that works and are self-respecting that any one would
be troublin', and you the daughter of such a fine man as your father. Run
along, now, I won't be detaining you, Miss Bumpus, and you'll accept my
apology. I guess we'll never see him in Hampton again...."
Some twenty minutes later he sauntered down the street, saluting acquaintances,
and threading his way across the Common entered a grimy brick building where a
huge policeman with an insignia on his arm was seated behind a desk. Mr.
Tiernan leaned on the desk, and reflectively lighted a Thomas-Jefferson-Five-
Cent Cigar, Union Label, the excellencies of which were set forth on large
signs above the "ten foot" buildings on Faber Street.
"She don't know nothing, Mike," he remarked. "I guess he got wise this
morning."
The sergeant nodded....
CHAPTER V
To feel potential within one's self the capacity to live and yet to have no
means of realizing this capacity is doubtless one of the least comfortable and
agreeable of human experiences. Such, as summer came on, was Janet's case.
The memory of that visit to Silliston lingered in her mind, sometimes to flare
up so vividly as to make her existence seem unbearable. How wonderful, she
thought, to be able to dwell in such a beautiful place, to have as friends and
companions such amusing and intelligent people as the stranger with whom she
had talked! Were all the inhabitants of Silliston like him? They must be,
since it was a seat of learning. Lise's cry, "I've just got to go away,
anywhere," found an echo in Janet's soul. Why shouldn't she go away? She was
capable of taking care of herself, she was a good stenographer, her salary had
been raised twice in two years,--why should she allow consideration for her
family to stand in the way of what she felt would be self realization?
Unconsciously she was a true modern in that the virtues known as duty and self
sacrifice did not appeal to her,--she got from them neither benefit nor
satisfaction, she understood instinctively that they were impeding to
growth. Unlike Lise, she was able to see life as it is, she did not expect of
it miracles, economic or matrimonial. Nothing would happen unless she made it
happen. She was twenty-one, earning nine dollars a week, of which she now
contributed five to the household,--her father, with characteristic
incompetence, having taken out a larger insurance policy than he could
reasonably carry. Of the remaining four dollars she spent more than one on
lunches, there were dresses and underclothing, shoes and stockings to buy, in
spite of darning and mending; little treats with Eda that mounted up; and
occasionally the dentist--for Janet would not neglect her teeth as Lise
neglected hers. She managed to save something, but it was very little. And
she was desperately unhappy when she contemplated the grey and monotonous vista
of the years ahead, saw herself growing older and older, driven always by the
stern necessity of accumulating a margin against possible disasters; little by
little drying up, losing, by withering disuse, those rich faculties of
enjoyment with which she was endowed, and which at once fascinated and
frightened her. Marriage, in such an environment, offered no solution;
marriage meant dependence, from which her very nature revolted: and in her
existence, drab and necessitous though it were, was still a remnant of freedom
that marriage would compel her to surrender....
One warm evening, oppressed by such reflections, she had started home when she
remembered having left her bag in the office, and retraced her steps. As she
turned the corner of West Street, she saw, beside the canal and directly in
front of the bridge, a new and smart-looking automobile, painted crimson and
black, of the type known as a runabout, which she recognized as belonging to
Mr. Ditmar. Indeed, at that moment Mr. Ditmar himself was stepping off the end
of the bridge and about to start the engine when, dropping the crank, he walked
to the dashboard and apparently became absorbed in some mechanisms there. Was
it the glance cast in her direction that had caused him to delay his departure?
Janet was seized by a sudden and rather absurd desire to retreat, but Canal
Street being empty, such an action would appear eccentric, and she came slowly
forward, pretending not to see her employer, ridiculing to herself the idea
that he had noticed her. Much to her annoyance, however, her embarrassment
persisted, and she knew it was due to the memory of certain incidents, each in
itself almost negligible, but cumulatively amounting to a suspicion that for
some months he had been aware of her: many times when he had passed through the
outer office she had felt his eyes upon her, had been impelled to look up from
her work to surprise in them a certain glow to make her bow her head again in
warm confusion. Now, as she approached him, she was pleasantly but rather
guiltily conscious of the more rapid beating of the blood that precedes an
adventure, yet sufficiently self-possessed to note the becoming nature of the
light flannel suit axed rather rakish Panama he had pushed back from his
forehead. It was not until she had almost passed him that he straightened up,
lifted the Panama, tentatively, and not too far, startling her.
"Good afternoon, Miss Bumpus," he said. "I thought you had gone."
"I left my bag in the office," she replied, with the outward calmness that
rarely deserted her--the calmness, indeed, that had piqued him and was leading
him on to rashness.
"Oh," he said. "Simmons will get it for you." Simmons was the watchman who
stood in the vestibule of the office entrance.
"Thanks. I can get it myself," she told him, and would have gone on had he not
addressed her again. "I was just starting out for a spin. What do you think
of the car? It's good looking, isn't it?" He stood off and surveyed it,
laughing a little, and in his laugh she detected a note apologetic, at variance
with the conception she had formed of his character, though not alien, indeed,
to the dust-coloured vigour of the man. She scarcely recognized Ditmar as he
stood there, yet he excited her, she felt from him an undercurrent of something
that caused her inwardly to tremble. "See how the lines are carried through."
He indicated this by a wave of his hand, but his eyes were now on her.
"It is pretty," she agreed.
In contrast to the defensive tactics which other ladies of his acquaintance had
adopted, tactics of a patently coy and coquettish nature, this self-collected
manner was new and spicy, challenging to powers never as yet fully exerted
while beneath her manner he felt throbbing that rare and dangerous thing in
women, a temperament, for which men have given their souls. This conviction of
her possession of a temperament,--he could not have defined the word, emotional
rather than intellectual, produced the apologetic attitude she was quick to
sense. He had never been, at least during his maturity, at a loss with the
other sex, and he found the experience delicious.
"You like pretty things, I'm sure of that," he hazarded. But she did not ask
him how he knew, she simply assented. He raised the hood, revealing the
engine. "Isn't that pretty? See how nicely everything is adjusted in that
little space to do the particular work for which it is designed."
Thus appealed to, she came forward and stopped, still standing off a little
way, but near enough to see, gazing at the shining copper caps on the
cylinders, at the bright rods and gears.
"It looks intricate," said Mr. Ditmar, "but really it's very simple. The
gasoline comes in here from the tank behind--this is called the carburetor, it
has a jet to vaporize the gasoline, and the vapour is sucked into each of these
cylinders in turn when the piston moves--like this." He sought to explain the
action of the piston. "That compresses it, and then a tiny electric spark
comes just at the right moment to explode it, and the explosion sends the
piston down again, and turns the shaft. Well, all four cylinders have an
explosion one right after another, and that keeps the shaft going." Whereupon
the most important personage in Hampton, the head of the great Chippering Mill
proceeded, for the benefit of a humble assistant stenographer, to remove the
floor boards behind the dash. "There's the shaft, come here and look at it."
She obeyed, standing beside him, almost touching him, his arm, indeed, brushing
her sleeve, and into his voice crept a tremor. "The shaft turns the rear
wheels by means of a gear at right angles on the axle, and the rear wheels
drive the car. Do you see?"
"Yes," she answered faintly, honesty compelling her to add: "a little."
He was looking, now, not at the machinery, but intently at her, and she could
feel the blood flooding into her cheeks and temples. She was even compelled
for an instant to return his glance, and from his eyes into hers leaped a flame
that ran scorching through her body. Then she knew with conviction that the
explanation of the automobile had been an excuse; she had comprehended almost
nothing of it, but she had been impressed by the facility with which he
described it, by his evident mastery over it. She had noticed his hands, how
thick his fingers were and close together; yet how deftly he had used them,
without smearing the cuffs of his silk shirt or the sleeves of his coat with
the oil that glistened everywhere.
"I like machinery," he told her as he replaced the boards. "I like to take
care of it myself."
"It must be interesting," she assented, aware of the inadequacy of the remark,
and resenting in herself an inarticulateness seemingly imposed by inhibition
connected with his nearness. Fascination and antagonism were struggling within
her. Her desire to get away grew desperate.
"Thank you for showing it to me." With an effort of will she moved toward the
bridge, but was impelled by a consciousness of the abruptness of her departure
to look back at him once--and smile, to experience again the thrill of the
current he sped after her. By lifting his hat, a little higher, a little more
confidently than in the first instance, he made her leaving seem more gracious,
the act somehow conveying an acknowledgment on his part that their relationship
had changed.
Once across the bridge and in the mill, she fairly ran up the stairs and into
the empty office, to perceive her bag lying on the desk where she had left it,
and sat down for a few minutes beside the window, her heart pounding in her
breast as though she had barely escaped an accident threatening her with
physical annihilation. Something had happened to her at last! But what did it
mean? Where would it lead? Her fear, her antagonism, of which she was still
conscious, her resentment that Ditmar had thus surreptitiously chosen to
approach her in a moment when they were unobserved were mingled with a
throbbing exultation in that he had noticed her, that there was something in
her to attract him in that way, to make his voice thicker and his smile
apologetic when he spoke to her. Of that "something-in-her" she had been aware
before, but never had it been so unmistakably recognized and beckoned to from
without. She was at once terrified, excited--and flattered.
At length, growing calmer, she made her way out of the building. When she
reached the vestibule she had a moment of sharp apprehension, of paradoxical
hope, that Ditmar might still be there, awaiting her. But he had gone....
In spite of her efforts to dismiss the matter from her mind, to persuade
herself there had been no significance in the encounter, when she was seated at
her typewriter the next morning she experienced a renewal of the palpitation of
the evening before, and at the sound of every step in the corridor she started.
Of this tendency she was profoundly ashamed. And when at last Ditmar arrived,
though the blood rose to her temples, she kept her eyes fixed on the keys. He
went quickly into his room: she was convinced he had not so much as glanced at
her.... As the days went by, however, she was annoyed by the discovery that
his continued ignoring of her presence brought more resentment than relief, she
detected in it a deliberation implying between them a guilty secret: she hated
secrecy, though secrecy contained a thrill. Then, one morning when she was
alone in the office with young Caldwell, who was absorbed in some reports,
Ditmar entered unexpectedly and looked her full in the eyes, surprising her
into answering his glance before she could turn away, hating herself and hating
him. Hate, she determined, was her prevailing sentiment in regard to Mr.
Ditmar.
The following Monday Miss Ottway overtook her, at noon, on the stairs.
"Janet, I wanted to speak to you, to tell you I'm leaving," she said.
"Leaving!" repeated Janet, who had regarded Miss Ottway as a fixture.
"I'm going to Boston," Miss Ottway explained, in her deep, musical voice.
"I've always wanted to go, I have an unmarried sister there of whom I'm very
fond, and Mr. Ditmar knows that. He's got me a place with the Treasurer, Mr.
Semple."
"Oh, I'm sorry you're going, though of course I'm glad for you," Janet said
sincerely, for she liked and respected Miss Ottway, and was conscious in the
older woman of a certain kindly interest.
"Janet, I've recommended you to Mr. Ditmar for my place."
"Oh!" cried Janet, faintly.
"It was he who asked about you, he thinks you are reliable and quick and
clever, and I was very glad to say a good word for you, my dear, since I could
honestly do so." Miss Ottway drew Janet's arm through hers and patted it
affectionately. "Of course you'll have to expect some jealousy, there are
older women in the other offices who will think they ought to have the place,
but if you attend to your own affairs, as you always have done, there won't be
any trouble."
"Oh, I won't take the place, I can't!"Janet cried, so passionately that Miss
Ottway looked at her in surprise. "I'm awfully grateful to you," she added,
flushing crimson, "I--I'm afraid I'm not equal to it."
"Nonsense," said the other with decision. "You'd be very foolish not to try
it. You won't get as much as I do, at first, at any rate, but a little more
money won't be unwelcome, I guess. Mr. Ditmar will speak to you this
afternoon. I leave on Saturday. I'm real glad to do you a good turn, Janet,
and I know you'll get along," Miss Ottway added impulsively as they parted at
the corner of Faber Street. "I've always thought a good deal of you."
For awhile Janet stood still, staring after the sturdy figure of her friend,
heedless of the noonday crowd that bumped her. Then she went to Grady's Quick
Lunch Counter and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk, which she consumed
slowly, profoundly sunk in thought. Presently Eda Rawle arrived, and noticing
her preoccupation, inquired what was the matter.
"Nothing," said Janet....
At two o'clock, when Ditmar returned to the office, he called Miss Ottway, who
presently came out to summon Janet to his presence. Fresh, immaculate, yet
virile in his light suit and silk shirt with red stripes, he was seated at his
desk engaged in turning over some papers in a drawer. He kept her waiting a
moment, and then said, with apparent casualness:--
"Is that you, Miss Bumpus? Would you mind closing the door?"
Janet obeyed, and again stood before him. He looked up. A suggestion of
tenseness in her pose betraying an inner attitude of alertness, of defiance,
conveyed to him sharply and deliciously once more the panther-like impression
he had received when first, as a woman, she had come to his notice. The
renewed and heightened perception of this feral quality in her aroused a sense
of danger by no means unpleasurable, though warning him that he was about to
take an unprecedented step, being drawn beyond the limits of caution he had
previously set for himself in divorcing business and sex. Though he was by no
means self-convinced of an intention to push the adventure, preferring to leave
its possibilities open, he strove in voice and manner to be business-like; and
instinct, perhaps, whispered that she might take alarm.
"Sit down, Miss Bumpus," he said pleasantly, as he closed the drawer.
She seated herself on an office chair.
"Do you like your work here?" he inquired.
"No," said Janet.
"Why not?" he demanded, staring at her.
"Why should I?" she retorted.
"Well--what's the trouble with it? It isn't as hard as it would be in some
other places, is it?"
"I'm not saying anything against the place."
"What, then?"
"You asked me if I liked my work. I don't."
"Then why do you do it?" he demanded.
"To live," she replied.
He smiled, but his gesture as he stroked his moustache implied a slight
annoyance at her composure. He found it difficult with this dark, self-
contained young woman to sustain the role of benefactor.
"What kind of work would you like to do?" he demanded.
"I don't know. I haven't got the choice, anyway," she said.
He observed that she did her work well, to which she made no answer. She
refused to help him, although Miss Ottway must have warned her. She acted as
though she were conferring the favour. And yet, clearing his throat, he was
impelled to say:--
"Miss Ottway's leaving me, she's going into the Boston office with Mr. Semple,
the treasurer of the corporation. I shall miss her, she's an able and reliable
woman, and she knows my ways." He paused, fingering his paper knife. "The
fact is, Miss Bumpus, she's spoken highly of you, she tells me you're quick and
accurate and painstaking--I've noticed that for myself. She seems to think you
could do her work, and recommends that I give you a trial. You understand, of
course, that the position is in a way confidential, and that you could not
expect at first, at any rate, the salary Miss Ottway has had, but I'm willing
to offer you fourteen dollars a week to begin with, and afterwards, if we get
along together, to give you more. What do you say?"
"I'd like to try it, Mr. Ditmar," Janet said, and added nothing, no word of
gratitude or of appreciation to that consent.
"Very well then," he replied, "that's settled. Miss Ottway will explain things
to you, and tell you about my peculiarities. And when she goes you can take
her desk, by the window nearest my door."
Ditmar sat idle for some minutes after she had gone, staring through the open
doorway into the outer office....
To Ditmar she had given no evidence of the storm his offer had created in her
breast, and it was characteristic also that she waited until supper was nearly
over to inform her family, making the announcement in a matter-of-fact tone,
just as though it were not the unique piece of good fortune that had come to
the Bumpuses since Edward had been eliminated from the mercantile establishment
at Dolton. The news was received with something like consternation. For the
moment Hannah was incapable of speech, and her hand trembled as she resumed the
cutting of the pie: but hope surged within her despite her effort to keep it
down, her determination to remain true to the fatalism from which she had
paradoxically derived so much comfort. The effect on Edward, while somewhat
less violent, was temporarily to take away his appetite. Hope, to flower in
him, needed but little watering. Great was his faith in the Bumpus blood, and
secretly he had always regarded his eldest daughter as the chosen vessel for
their redemption.
"Well, I swan!" he exclaimed, staring at her in admiration and neglecting his
pie, "I've always thought you had it in you to get on, Janet. I guess I've
told you you've always put me in mind of Eliza Bumpus--the one that held out
against the Indians till her husband came back with the neighbours. I was just
reading about her again the other night."
"Yes, you've told us, Edward," said Hannah.
"She had gumption," he went on, undismayed. "And from what I can gather of her
looks I calculate you favour her--she was dark and not so very tall--not so
tall as you, I guess. So you're goin'" (he pronounced it very slowly) "you're
goin' to be Mr. Ditmar's private stenographer! He's a smart man, Mr. Ditmar,
he's a good man, too. All you've got to do is to behave right by him. He
always speaks to me when he passes by the gate. I was sorry for him when his
wife died--a young woman, too. And he's never married again! Well, I swan!"
"You'd better quit swanning," exclaimed Hannah. "And what's Mr. Ditmar's
goodness got to do with it? He's found-out Janet has sense, she's willing and
hard working, he won't" (pronounced want) "he won't be the loser by it, and
he's not giving her what he gave Miss Ottway. It's just like you, thinking
he's doing her a good turn."
"I'm not saying Janet isn't smart," he protested, "but I know it's hard to get
work with so many folks after every job."
"Maybe it ain't so hard when you've got some get-up and go," Hannah retorted
rather cruelly. It was thus characteristically and with unintentional
sharpness she expressed her maternal pride by a reflection not only upon
Edward, but Lise also. Janet had grown warm at the mention of Ditmar's name.
"It was Miss Ottway who recommended me," she said, glancing at her sister, who
during this conversation had sat in silence. Lise's expression, normally
suggestive of a discontent not unbecoming to her type, had grown almost sullen.
Hannah's brisk gathering up of the dishes was suddenly arrested.
"Lise, why don't you say something to your sister? Ain't you glad she's got
the place?"
"Sure, I'm glad," said Lise, and began to unscrew the top of the salt shaker.
"I don't see why I couldn't get a raise, too. I work just as hard as she
does."
Edward, who had never got a "raise" in his life, was smitten with compunction
and sympathy.
"Give 'em time, Lise," he said consolingly. "You ain't so old as Janet."
"Time!" she cried, flaring up and suddenly losing her control. "I've got a
picture of Waiters giving me a raise I know the girls that get raises from
him."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Hannah declared. "There--you've spilled
the salt!"
But Lise, suddenly bursting into tears, got up and left the room. Edward
picked up the Banner and pretended to read it, while Janet collected the salt
and put it back into the shaker. Hannah, gathering up the rest of the dishes,
disappeared into the kitchen, but presently returned, as though she had
forgotten something.
"Hadn't you better go after her?" she said to Janet.
"I'm afraid it won't be any use. She's got sort of queer, lately--she thinks
they're down on her."
"I'm sorry I spoke so sharp. But then--" Hannah shook her head, and her
sentence remained unfinished.
Janet sought her sister, but returned after a brief interval, with the news
that Lise had gone out.
One of the delights of friendship, as is well known, is the exchange of
confidences of joy or sorrow, but there was, in Janet's promotion, something
intensely personal to increase her natural reserve. Her feelings toward Ditmar
were so mingled as to defy analysis, and several days went by before she could
bring herself to inform Eda Rawle of the new business relationship in which she
stood to the agent of the Chippering Mill. The sky was still bright as they
walked out Warren Street after supper, Eda bewailing the trials of the day just
ended: Mr. Frye, the cashier of the bank, had had one of his cantankerous fits,
had found fault with her punctuation, nothing she had done had pleased him.
But presently, when they had come to what the Banner called the "residential
district," she was cheered by the sight of the green lawns, the flowerbeds and
shrubbery, the mansions of those inhabitants of Hampton unfamiliar with
boardinghouses and tenements. Before one of these she paused, retaining Janet
by the arm, exclaiming wistfully:
"Wouldn't you like to live there? That belongs to your boss."
Janet, who had been dreaming as she gazed at the fagade of rough stucco that
once had sufficed to fill the ambitions of the late Mrs. Ditmar, recognized it
as soon as Eda spoke, and dragged her friend hastily, almost roughly along the
sidewalk until they had reached the end of the block. Janet was red.
"What's the matter?" demanded Eda, as soon as she had recovered from her
surprise.
"Nothing," said Janet. "Only--I'm in his office."
"But what of it? You've got a right to look at his house, haven't you?"
"Why yes,--a right," Janet assented. Knowing Eda's ambitions for her were not
those of a business career, she was in terror lest her friend should scent a
romance, and for this reason she had never spoken of the symptoms Ditmar had
betrayed. She attempted to convey to Eda the doubtful taste of staring point-
blank at the house of one's employer, especially when he might be concealed
behind a curtain.
"You see," she added, "Miss Ottway's recommended me for her place--she's going
away."
"Janet!" cried Eda. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Well," said Janet guiltily, "it's only a trial. I don't know whether he'll
keep me or not."
"Of course he'll keep you," said Eda, warmly. "If that isn't just like you,
not saying a word about it. Gee, if I'd had a raise like that I just couldn't
wait to tell you. But then, I'm not smart like you."
"Don't be silly," said Janet, out of humour with herself, and annoyed because
she could not then appreciate Eda's generosity.
"We've just got to celebrate!" declared Eda, who had the gift, which Janet
lacked, of taking her joys vicariously; and her romantic and somewhat medieval
proclivities would permit no such momentous occasion to pass without an
appropriate festal symbol. "We'll have a spree on Saturday--the circus is
coming then."
"It'll be my spree," insisted Janet, her heart warming. "I've got the
raise...."
On Saturday, accordingly, they met at Grady's for lunch, Eda attired in her
best blouse of pale blue, and when they emerged from the restaurant, despite
the torrid heat, she beheld Faber Street as in holiday garb as they made their
way to the cool recesses of Winterhalter's to complete the feast. That
glorified drug-store with the five bays included in its manifold functions a
department rivalling Delmonico's, with electric fans and marble-topped tables
and white-clad waiters who took one's order and filled it at the soda fountain.
It mattered little to Eda that the young man awaiting their commands had
pimples and long hair and grinned affectionately as he greeted them.
"Hello, girls!" he said. "What strikes you to-day?"
"Me for a raspberry nut sundae," announced Eda, and Janet, being unable to
imagine any more delectable confection, assented. The penetrating odour
peculiar to drugstores, dominated by menthol and some unnamable but ancient
remedy for catarrh, was powerless to interfere with their enjoyment.
The circus began at two. Rather than cling to the straps of a crowded car they
chose to walk, following the familiar route of the trolley past the car barns
and the base-ball park to the bare field under the seared face of Torrey's
Hill, where circuses were wont to settle. A sirocco-like breeze from the
southwest whirled into eddies the clouds of germladen dust stirred up by the
automobiles, blowing their skirts against their legs, and sometimes they were
forced to turn, clinging to their hats, confused and giggling, conscious of
male glances. The crowd, increasing as they proceeded, was in holiday mood;
young men with a newly-washed aspect, in Faber Street suits, chaffed
boisterously groups of girls, who retorted with shrill cries and shrieks of
laughter; amorous couples strolled, arm in arm, oblivious, as though the place
were as empty as Eden; lady-killers with exaggerated square shoulders, wearing
bright neckties, their predatory instincts alert, hovered about in eager search
of adventure. There were men-killers, too, usually to be found in pairs, in
startling costumes they had been persuaded were the latest Paris models,--
imitations of French cocottes in Hampton, proof of the smallness of our modern
world. Eda regarded them superciliously.
"They'd like you to think they'd never been near a loom or a bobbin!" she
exclaimed.
In addition to these more conspicuous elements, the crowd contained sober
operatives of the skilled sort possessed of sufficient means to bring hither
their families, including the baby; there were section-hands and foremen,
slashers, mule spinners, beamers, French-Canadians, Irish, Scotch, Welsh and
English, Germans, with only an occasional Italian, Lithuanian, or Jew. Peanut
and popcorn men, venders of tamales and Chile-con-carne hoarsely shouted their
wares, while from afar could be heard the muffled booming of a band. Janet's
heart beat faster. She regarded with a tinge of awe the vast expanse of tent
that rose before her eyes, the wind sending ripples along the heavy canvas from
circumference to tent pole. She bought the tickets; they entered the circular
enclosure where the animals were kept; where the strong beams of the sun, in
trying to force their way through the canvas roof, created an unnatural,
jaundiced twilight, the weirdness of which was somehow enhanced by the hoarse,
amazingly penetrating growls of beasts. Suddenly a lion near them raised a
shaggy head, emitting a series of undulating, soul-shaking roars.
"Ah, what's eatin' you?" demanded a thick-necked youth, pretending not to be
awestricken by this demonstration.
"Suppose he'd get out!" cried Eda, drawing Janet away.
"I wouldn't let him hurt you, dearie," the young man assured her.
"You!" she retorted contemptuously, but grinned in spite of herself, showing
her gums.
The vague feeling of terror inspired by this tent was a part of its
fascination, for it seemed pregnant with potential tragedies suggested by the
juxtaposition of helpless babies and wild beasts, the babies crying or staring
in blank amazement at padding tigers whose phosphorescent eyes never left these
morsels beyond the bars. The two girls wandered about, their arms closely
locked, but the strange atmosphere, the roars of the beasts, the ineffable,
pungent odour of the circus, of sawdust mingled with the effluvia of animals,
had aroused an excitement that was slow in subsiding. Some time elapsed before
they were capable of taking a normal interest in the various exhibits.
"`Adjutant Bird,'" Janet read presently from a legend on one of the
compartments of a cage devoted to birds, and surveying the somewhat dissolute
occupant. "Why, he's just like one of those tall mashers who stay at the
Wilmot and stand on the sidewalk,--travelling men, you know."
"Say-isn't he?" Eda agreed. "Isn't he pleased with himself, and his feet
crossed!"
"And see this one, Eda--he's a 'Harpy Eagle.' There's somebody we know looks
just like that. Wait a minute--I'll tell you--it's the woman who sits in the
cashier's cage at Grady's."
"If it sure isn't!" said Eda.
"She has the same fluffy, light hair--hairpins can't keep it down, and she
looks at you in that same sort of surprised way with her head on one side when
you hand in your check."
"Why, it's true to the life!" cried Eda enthusiastically. "She thinks she's
got all the men cinched,--she does and she's forty if she's a day."
These comparisons brought them to a pitch of risible enjoyment amply sustained
by the spectacle in the monkey cage, to which presently they turned. A
chimpanzee, with a solicitation more than human, was solemnly searching a
friend for fleas in the midst of a pandemonium of chattering and screeching and
chasing, of rattling of bars and trapezes carried on by their companions.
"Well, young ladies," said a voice, "come to pay a call on your relations--have
ye?"
Eda giggled hysterically. An elderly man was standing beside them. He was
shabbily dressed, his own features were wizened, almost simian, and by his
friendly and fatuous smile Janet recognized one of the harmless obsessed in
which Hampton abounded.
"Relations!" Eda exclaimed.
"You and me, yes, and her," he answered, looking at Janet, though at first he
had apparently entertained some doubt as to this inclusion, "we're all
descended from them." His gesture triumphantly indicated the denizens of the
cage.
"What are you giving us?" said Eda.
"Ain't you never read Darwin?" he demanded. "If you had, you'd know they're
our ancestors, you'd know we came from them instead of Adam and Eve. That
there's a fable."
"I'll never believe I came from them," cried Eda, vehement in her disgust.
But Janet laughed. "What's the difference? Some of us aren't any better than
monkeys, anyway."
"That's so," said the man approvingly. "That's so." He wanted to continue the
conversation, but they left him rather ruthlessly. And when, from the entrance
to the performance tent, they glanced back over their shoulders, he was still
gazing at his cousins behind the bars, seemingly deriving an acute pleasure
from his consciousness of the connection....
CHAPTER VI
Modern business, by reason of the mingling of the sexes it involves, for the
playwright and the novelist and the sociologist is full of interesting and
dramatic situations, and in it may be studied, undoubtedly, one phase of the
evolution tending to transform if not disintegrate certain institutions
hitherto the corner-stones of society. Our stage is set. A young woman,
conscious of ability, owes her promotion primarily to certain dynamic feminine
qualities with which she is endowed. And though she may make an elaborate
pretense of ignoring the fact, in her heart she knows and resents it, while at
the same time, paradoxically, she gets a thrill from it,--a sustaining and
inspiring thrill of power! On its face it is a business arrangement;
secretly,--attempt to repudiate this as one may,--it is tinged with the colours
of high adventure. When Janet entered into the intimate relationship with Mr.
Claude Ditmar necessitated by her new duties as his private stenographer her
attitude, slightly defiant, was the irreproachable one of a strict attention to
duty. All unconsciously she was a true daughter of the twentieth century, and
probably a feminist at heart, which is to say that her conduct was determined
by no preconceived or handed-down notions of what was proper and lady-like.
For feminism, in a sense, is a return to atavism, and sex antagonism and sex
attraction are functions of the same thing. There were moments when she
believed herself to hate Mr. Ditmar, when she treated him with an aloofness, an
impersonality unsurpassed; moments when he paused in his dictation to stare at
her in astonishment. He, who flattered himself that he understood women!
She would show him!--such was her dominating determination. Her promotion
assumed the guise of a challenge, of a gauntlet flung down at the feet of her
sex. In a certain way, an insult, though incredibly stimulating. If he
flattered himself that he had done her a favour, if he entertained the notion
that he could presently take advantage of the contact with her now achieved to
make unbusinesslike advances--well, he would find out. He had proclaimed his
desire for an able assistant in Miss Ottway's place--he would get one, and
nothing more. She watched narrowly, a l'affut, as the French say, for any
signs of sentiment, and indeed this awareness of her being on guard may have
had some influence on Mr. Ditmar's own attitude, likewise irreproachable.... A
rather anaemic young woman, a Miss Annie James, was hired for Janet's old
place.
In spite of this aloofness and alertness, for the first time in her life Janet
felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import. Hitherto the
mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom and draining her
energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of meaningless documents and
rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus and a motive, the Corporation
began to take on significance, and she flung herself into the work with an
ardour hitherto unknown, determined to make herself so valuable to Ditmar that
the time would come when he could not do without her. She strove to memorize
certain names and addresses, lest time be lost in looking them up, to
familiarize herself with the ordinary run of his correspondence, to recall what
letters were to be marked "personal," to anticipate matters of routine, in
order that he might not have the tedium of repeating instructions; she acquired
the faculty of keeping his engagements in her head; she came early to the
office, remaining after hours, going through the files, becoming familiar with
his system; and she learned to sort out his correspondence, sifting the
important from the unimportant, to protect him, more and more, from numerous
visitors who called only to waste his time. Her instinct for the detection of
book-agents, no matter how brisk and businesslike they might appear, was
unerring--she remembered faces and the names belonging to them: an individual
once observed to be persona non grata never succeeded in passing her twice. On
one occasion Ditmar came out of his office to see the back of one of these
visitors disappearing into the corridor.
"Who was that?" he asked.
"His name is McCalla," she said. "I thought you didn't want to be bothered."
"But how in thunder did you get rid of him?" he demanded.
"Oh, I just wouldn't let him in," she replied demurely.
And Ditmar went away, wondering.... Thus she gtudied him, without permitting
him to suspect it, learning his idiosyncrasies, his attitude toward all those
with whom daily he came in contact, only to find herself approving. She was
forced to admit that he was a judge of men, compelled to admire his adroitness
in dealing with them. He could be democratic or autocratic as occasion
demanded; he knew when to yield, and when to remain inflexible. One morning,
for instance, there arrived from New York a dapper salesman whose jauntily tied
bow, whose thin hair--carefully parted to conceal an incipient baldness--whose
wary and slightly weary eyes all impressively suggested the metropolitan
atmosphere of high pressure and sophistication from which he had emerged. He
had a machine to sell; an amazing machine, endowed with human intelligence and
more than human infallibility; for when it made a mistake it stopped. It was
designed for the express purpose of eliminating from the payroll the skilled
and sharp-eyed women who are known as "drawers-in," who sit all day long under
a north light patiently threading the ends of the warp through the heddles of
the loom harness. Janet's imagination was gradually fired as she listened to
the visitor's eloquence; and the textile industry, which hitherto had seemed to
her uninteresting and sordid, took on the colours of romance.
"Now I've made up my mind we'll place one with you, Mr. Ditmar," the salesman
concluded. "I don't object to telling you we'd rather have one in the
Chippering than in any mill in New England."
Janet was surprised, almost shocked to see Ditmar shake his head, yet she felt
a certain reluctant admiration because he had not been swayed by blandishments.
At such moments, when he was bent on refusing a request, he seemed physically
to acquire massiveness,--and he had a dogged way of chewing his cigar.
"I don't want it, yet," he replied, "not until you improve it." And she was
impressed by the fact that he seemed to know as much about the machine as the
salesman himself. In spite of protests, denials, appeals, he remained firm.
"When you get rid of the defects I've mentioned come back, Mr. Hicks--but don't
come back until then."
And Mr. Hicks departed, discomfited....
Ditmar knew what he wanted. Of the mill he was the absolute master, familiar
with every process, carrying constantly in his mind how many spindles, how many
looms were at work; and if anything untoward happened, becoming aware of it by
what seemed to Janet a subconscious process, sending for the superintendent of
the department: for Mr. Orcutt, perhaps, whose office was across the hall--a
tall, lean, spectacled man of fifty who looked like a schoolmaster.
"Orcutt, what's the matter with the opener in Cooney's room?"
"Why, the blower's out of order."
"Well, whose fault is it?"....
He knew every watchman and foreman in the mill, and many of the second hands.
The old workers, men and women who had been in the Chippering employ through
good and bad times for years, had a place in his affections, but toward the
labour force in general his attitude was impersonal. The mill had to be run,
and people to be got to run it. With him, first and last and always it was the
mill, and little by little what had been for Janet a heterogeneous mass of
machinery and human beings became unified and personified in Claude Ditmar. It
was odd how the essence and quality of that great building had changed for her;
how the very roaring of the looms, as she drew near the canal in the mornings,
had ceased to be sinister and depressing, but bore now a burden like a great
battle song to excite and inspire, to remind her that she had been snatched as
by a miracle from the commonplace. And all this was a function of Ditmar.
Life had become portentous. And she was troubled by no qualms of logic, but
gloried, womanlike, in her lack of it. She did not ask herself why she had
deliberately enlarged upon Miss Ottway's duties, invaded debatable ground in
part inevitably personal, flung herself with such abandon into the enterprise
of his life's passion, at the same time maintaining a deceptive attitude of
detachment, half deceiving herself that it was zeal for the work by which she
was actuated. In her soul she knew better. She was really pouring fuel on the
flames. She read him, up to a certain point--as far as was necessary; and
beneath his attempts at self-control she was conscious of a dynamic desire that
betrayed itself in many acts and signs,--as when he brushed against her; and
occasionally when he gave evidence with his subordinates of a certain shortness
of temper unusual with him she experienced a vaguely alarming but delicious
thrill of power. And this, of all men, was the great Mr. Ditmar! Was she in
love with him? That question did not trouble her either. She continued to
experience in his presence waves of antagonism and attraction, revealing to her
depths and possibilities of her nature that frightened while they fascinated.
It never occurred to her to desist. That craving in her for high adventure was
not to be denied.
On summer evenings it had been Ditmar's habit when in Hampton to stroll about
his lawn, from time to time changing the position of the sprinkler, smoking a
cigar, and reflecting pleasantly upon his existence. His house, as he gazed at
it against the whitening sky, was an eminently satisfactory abode, his wife was
dead, his children gave him no trouble; he felt a glow of paternal pride in his
son as the boy raced up and down the sidewalk on a bicycle; George was manly,
large and strong for his age, and had a domineering way with other boys that
gave Ditmar secret pleasure. Of Amy, who was showing a tendency to stoutness,
and who had inherited her mother's liking for candy and romances, Ditmar
thought scarcely at all: he would glance at her as she lounged, reading, in a
chair on the porch, but she did not come within his range of problems. He had,
in short, everything to make a reasonable man content, a life nicely compounded
of sustenance, pleasure, and business,--business naturally being the greatest
of these. He was--though he did not know it--ethically and philosophically
right in squaring his morals with his occupation, and his had been the good
fortune to live in a world whose codes and conventions had been carefully
adjusted to the pursuit of that particular brand of happiness he had made his
own. Why, then, in the name of that happiness, of the peace and sanity and
pleasurable effort it had brought him, had he allowed and even encouraged the
advent of a new element that threatened to destroy the equilibrium achieved? an
element refusing to be classified under the head of property, since it involved
something he desired and could not buy? A woman who was not property, who
resisted the attempt to be turned into property, was an anomaly in Ditmar's
universe. He had not, of course, existed for more than forty years without
having heard and read of and even encountered in an acquaintance or two the
species of sex attraction sentimentally called love that sometimes made fools
of men and played havoc with more important affairs, but in his experience it
had never interfered with his sanity or his appetite or the Chippering Mill: it
had never made his cigars taste bitter; it had never caused a deterioration in
the appreciation of what he had achieved and held. But now he was experiencing
strange symptoms of an intensity out of all proportion to that of former
relations with the other sex. What was most unusual for him, he was alarmed
and depressed, at moments irritable. He regretted the capricious and
apparently accidental impulse that had made him pretend to tinker with his
automobile that day by the canal, that had led him to the incomparable idiocy
of getting rid of Miss Ottway and installing the disturber of his peace as his
private stenographer.
What the devil was it in her that made him so uncomfortable? When in his
office he had difficulty in keeping his mind on matters of import; he would
watch her furtively as she went about the room with the lithe and noiseless
movements that excited him the more because he suspected beneath her outward
and restrained demeanour a fierceness he craved yet feared. He thought of her
continually as a panther, a panther he had caught and could not tame; he hadn't
even caught her, since she might escape at any time. He took precautions not
to alarm her. When she brushed against him he trembled. Continually she
baffled and puzzled him, and he never could tell of what she was thinking. She
represented a whole set of new and undetermined values for which he had no
precedents, and unlike every woman he had known--including his wife--she had an
integrity of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and
social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating an
intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she had
magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere. In an
astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the habit of talking things over
with her; naturally not affairs of the first importance, but matters such as
the economy of his time: when, for instance, it was most convenient for him to
go to Boston; and he would find that she had telephoned, without being told, to
the office there when to expect him, to his chauffeur to be on hand. He never
had to tell her a thing twice, nor did she interrupt--as Miss Ottway sometimes
had done--the processes of his thought. Without realizing it he fell into the
habit of listening for the inflections of her voice, and though he had never
lacked the power of making decisions, she somehow made these easier for him
especially if, a human equation were involved.
He had, at least, the consolation--if it were one--of reflecting that his
reputation was safe, that there would be no scandal, since two are necessary to
make the kind of scandal he had always feared, and Miss Bumpus, apparently, had
no intention of being the second party. Yet she was not virtuous, as he had
hitherto defined the word. Of this he was sure. No woman who moved about as
she did, who had such an effect on him, who had on occasions, though
inadvertently, returned the lightning of his glances, whose rare laughter
resembled grace notes, and in whose hair was that almost imperceptible kink,
could be virtuous. This instinctive conviction inflamed him. For the first
time in his life he began to doubt the universal conquering quality of his own
charms,--and when such a thing happens to a man like Ditmar he is in danger of
hell-fire. He indulged less and less in the convivial meetings and excursions
that hitherto had given him relaxation and enjoyment, and if his cronies
inquired as to the reasons for his neglect of them he failed to answer with his
usual geniality.
"Everything going all right up at the mills, Colonel?" he was asked one day by
Mr. Madden, the treasurer of a large shoe company, when they met on the marble
tiles of the hall in their Boston club.
"All right. Why?"
"Well," replied Madden, conciliatingly, "you seem kind of preoccupied, that's
all. I didn't know but what the fifty-four hour bill the legislature's just
put through might be worrying you."
"We'll handle that situation when the time comes," said Ditmar. He accepted a
gin rickey, but declined rather curtly the suggestion of a little spree over
Sunday to a resort on the Cape which formerly he would have found enticing. On
another occasion he encountered in the lobby of the Parker House a more
intimate friend, Chester Sprole, sallow, self-made, somewhat corpulent, one of
those lawyers hail fellows well met in business circles and looked upon askance
by the Brahmins of their profession; more than half politician, he had been in
Congress, and from time to time was retained by large business interests
because of his persuasive gifts with committees of the legislature--though
these had been powerless to avert the recent calamity of the women and
children's fifty-four hour bill. Mr. Sprole's hair was prematurely white, and
the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes were not the result of legal
worries.
"Hullo, Dit," he said jovially.
"Hullo, Ches," said Ditmar.
"Now you're the very chap I wanted to see. Where have you been keeping
yourself lately? Come out to the farm to-night,--same of the boys'll be
there." Mr. Sprole, like many a self-made man, was proud of his farm, though
he did not lead a wholly bucolic existence.
"I can't, Ches," answered Ditmar. "I've got to go back to Hampton."
This statement Mr. Sprole unwisely accepted as a fiction. He took hold of
Ditmar's arm.
"A lady--eh--what?"
"I've got to go back to Hampton," repeated Ditmar, with a suggestion of
truculence that took his friend aback. Not for worlds would Mr. Sprole have
offended the agent of the Chippering Mill.
"I was only joking, Claude," he hastened to explain. Ditmar, somewhat
mollified but still dejected, sought the dining-room when the lawyer had gone.
"All alone to-night, Colonel?" asked the coloured head waiter, obsequiously.
Ditmar demanded a table in the corner, and consumed a solitary meal.
Very naturally Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of
it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in Hampton, the
self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of
the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an
insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man--a man for whom she had
achieved a delicious contempt. And the knowledge that she, if she chose, could
sway and dominate him by the mere exercise of that strange feminine force
within her was intoxicating and terrifying. She read this in a thousand signs;
in his glances; in his movements revealing a desire to touch her; in little
things he said, apparently insignificant, yet fraught with meaning; in a
constant recurrence of the apologetic attitude--so alien to the Ditmar formerly
conceived--of which he had given evidence that day by the canal: and from this
attitude emanated, paradoxically, a virile and galvanic current profoundly
disturbing. Sometimes when he bent over her she experienced a commingled
ecstasy and fear that he would seize her in his arms. Yet the tension was not
constant, rising and falling with his moods and struggles, all of which she
read--unguessed by him--as easily as a printed page by the gift that dispenses
with laborious processes of the intellect. On the other hand, a resentment
boiled within her his masculine mind failed to fathom. Stevenson said of John
Knox that many women had come to learn from him, but he had never condescended
to become a learner in return--a remark more or less applicable to Ditmar. She
was, perforce, thrilled that he was virile and wanted her, but because he
wanted her clandestinely her pride revolted,divining his fear of scandal and
hating him for it like a thoroughbred. To do her justice, marriage never
occurred to her. She was not so commonplace.
There were times, however, when the tension between them would relax, when some
incident occurred to focus Ditmar's interest on the enterprise that had
absorbed and unified his life, the Chippering Mill. One day in September, for
instance, after an absence in New York, he returned to the office late in the
afternoon, and she was quick to sense his elation, to recognize in him the
restored presence of the quality of elan, of command, of singleness of purpose
that had characterized him before she had become his stenographer. At first,
as he read his mail, he seemed scarcely conscious of her presence. She stood
by the window, awaiting his pleasure, watching the white mist as it rolled over
the floor of the river, catching glimpses in vivid, saffron blurs of the lights
of the Arundel Mill on the farther shore. Autumn was at hand. Suddenly she
heard Ditmar speaking.
"Would you mind staying a little while longer this evening, Miss Bumpus?"
"Not at all," she replied, turning.
On his face was a smile, almost boyish.
"The fact is, I think I've got hold of the biggest single order that ever came
into any mill in New England," he declared.
"Oh, I'm glad," she said quickly.
"The cotton cards--?" he demanded.
She knew he referred to the schedules, based on the current prices of cotton,
made out in the agent's office and sent in duplicate to the selling house, in
Boston. She got them from the shelf; and as he went over them she heard him
repeating the names of various goods now become familiar, pongees, poplins,
percales and voiles, garbardines and galateas, lawns, organdies, crepes, and
Madras shirtings, while he wrote down figures on a sheet of paper. So complete
was his absorption in this task that Janet, although she had resented the
insinuating pressure of his former attitude toward her, felt a paradoxical
sensation of jealousy. Presently, without looking up, he told her to call up
the Boston office and ask for Mr. Fraile, the cotton buyer; and she learned
from the talk over the telephone though it was mostly about "futures"--that
Ditmar had lingered for a conference in Boston on his way back from New York.
Afterwards, having dictated two telegrams which she wrote out on her machine,
he leaned back in his chair; and though the business for the day was ended,
showed a desire to detain her. His mood became communicative.
"I've been on the trail of that order for a month," he declared. "Of course it
isn't my business to get orders, but to manage this mill, and that's enough for
one man, God knows. But I heard the Bradlaughs were in the market for these
goods, and I told the selling house to lie low, that I'd go after it. I knew I
could get away with it, if anybody could. I went to the Bradlaughs and sat
down on 'em, I lived with 'em, ate with 'em, brought 'em home at night. I
didn't let 'em alone a minute until they handed it over. I wasn't going to
give any other mill in New England or any of those southern concerns a chance
to walk off with it--not on your life! Why, we have the facilities. There
isn't another mill in the country can turn it out in the time they ask, and
even we will have to go some to do it. But we'll do it, by George, unless I'm
struck by lightning."
He leaned forward, hitting the desk with his fist, and Janet, standing beside
him, smiled. She had the tempting gift of silence. Forgetting her twinge of
jealousy, she was drawn toward him now, and in this mood of boyish exuberance,
of self-confidence and pride in his powers and success she liked him better
than ever before. She had, for the first time, the curious feeling of being
years older than he, yet this did not detract from a new-born admiration.
"I made this mill, and I'm proud of it," he went on. "When old Stephen
Chippering put me in charge he was losing money, he'd had three agents in four
years. The old man knew I had it in me, and I knew it, if I do say it myself.
All this union labour talk about shorter hours makes me sick--why, there was a
time when I worked ten and twelve hours a day, and I'm man enough to do it yet,
if I have to. When the last agent--that was Cort--was sacked I went to Boston
on my own hook and tackled the old gentleman--that's the only way to get
anywhere. I couldn't bear to see the mill going to scrap, and I told him a
thing or two,--I had the facts and the figures. Stephen Chippering was a big
man, but he had a streak of obstinacy in him, he was conservative, you bet. I
had to get it across to him there was a lot of dead wood in this plant, I had
to wake him up to the fact that the twentieth century was here. He had to be
shown--he was from Boston, you know--" Ditmar laughed--"but he was all wool and
a yard wide, and he liked me and trusted me.
"That was in nineteen hundred. I can remember the interview as well as if it
had happened last night--we sat up until two o'clock in the morning in that
library of his with the marble busts and the leather-bound books and the double
windows looking out over the Charles, where the wind was blowing a gale. And
at last he said, `All right, Claude, go ahead. I'll put you in as agent, and
stand behind you.' And by thunder, he did stand behind me. He was quiet, the
finest looking old man I ever saw in my life, straight as a ramrod, with a
little white goatee and a red, weathered face full of creases, and a skin that
looked as if it had been pricked all over with needles--the old Boston sort.
They don't seem to turn 'em out any more. Why, I have a picture of him here."
He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a photograph. Janet gazed at it
sympathetically.
"It doesn't give you any notion of those eyes of his," Ditmar said,
reminiscently. "They looked right through a man's skull, no matter how thick
it was. If anything went wrong, I never wasted any time in telling him about
it, and I guess it was one reason he liked me. Some of the people up here
didn't understand him, kow-towed to him, they were scared of him, and if he
thought they had something up their sleeves he looked as if he were going to
eat 'em alive. Regular fighting eyes, the kind that get inside of a man and
turn the light on. And he sat so still--made you ashamed of yourself. Well,
he was a born fighter, went from Harvard into the Rebellion and was left for
dead at Seven Oaks, where one of the company found him and saved him. He set
that may up for life, and never talked about it, either. See what he wrote on
the bottom--'To my friend, Claude Ditmar, Stephen Chippering.' And believe me,
when he once called a man a friend he never took it back. I know one thing,
I'll never get another friend like him."
With a gesture that gave her a new insight into Ditmar, reverently he took the
picture from her hand and placed it back in the drawer. She was stirred,
almost to tears, and moved away from him a little, as though to lessen by
distance the sudden attraction he had begun to exert: yet she lingered, half
leaning, half sitting on the corner of the big desk, her head bent toward him,
her eyes filled with light. She was wondering whether he could ever love a
woman as he loved this man of whom he had spoken, whether he could be as true
to a woman. His own attitude seemed never to have been more impersonal, but
she had ceased to resent it; something within her whispered that she was the
conductor, the inspirer.. ..
"I wish Stephen Chippering could have lived to see this order," he exclaimed,
"to see the Chippering Mill to-day! I guess he'd be proud of it, I guess he
wouldn't regret having put me in as agent."
Janet did not reply. She could not. She sat regarding him intently, and when
he raised his eyes and caught her luminous glance, his expression changed, she
knew Stephen Chippering had passed from his mind.
"I hope you like it here," he said. His voice had become vibrant,
ingratiating, he had changed from the master to the suppliant--and yet she was
not displeased. Power had suddenly flowed back into her, and with it an
exhilarating self-command.
"I do like it," she answered.
"But you said, when I asked you to be my stenographer, that you didn't care for
your work."
"Oh, this is different."
"How?"
"I'm interested, the mill means something to me now you see, I'm not just
copying things I don't know anything about."
"I'm glad you're interested," he said, in the same odd, awkward tone. "I've
never had any one in the office who did my work as well. Now Miss Ottway was a
good stenographer, she was capable, and a fine woman, but she never got the
idea, the spirit of the mill in her as you've got it, and she wasn't able to
save me trouble, as you do. It's remarkable how you've come to understand, and
in such a short time."
Janet coloured. She did not look at him, but had risen and begun to straighten
out the papers beside her.
"There are lots of other things I'd like to understand," she said.
"What?" he demanded.
"Well--about the mill. I never thought much about it before, I always hated
it," she cried, dropping the papers and suddenly facing him. "It was just
drudgery. But now I want to learn everything, all I can, I'd like to see the
machinery."
"I'll take you through myself--to-morrow," he declared.
His evident agitation made her pause. They were alone, the outer office
deserted, and the Ditmar she saw now, whom she had summoned up with ridiculous
ease by virtue of that mysterious power within her, was no longer the agent of
the Chippering Mill, a boy filled with enthusiasm by a business achievement,
but a man, the incarnation and expression of masculine desire desire for her.
She knew she could compel him, if she chose, to throw caution to the winds.
"Oh no!" she exclaimed. She was afraid of him, she shrank from such a
conspicuous sign of his favour.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because I don't want you to," she said, and realized, as soon as she had
spoken, that her words might imply the existence of a something between them
never before hinted at by her. "I'll get Mr. Caldwell to take me through."
She moved toward the door, and turned; though still on fire within, her manner
had become demure, repressed. "Did you wish anything more this evening?" she
inquired.
"That's all," he said, and she saw that he was gripping the arms of his
chair....
CHAPTER VII
Autumn was at hand. All day it had rained, but now, as night fell and Janet
went homeward, the white mist from the river was creeping stealthily over the
city, disguising the familiar and sordid landmarks. These had become
beautiful, mysterious, somehow appealing. The electric arcs, splotches in the
veil, revealed on the Common phantom trees; and in the distance, against the
blurred lights from the Warren Street stores skirting the park could be seen
phantom vehicles, phantom people moving to and fro. Thus, it seemed to Janet,
invaded by a pearly mist was her own soul, in which she walked in wonder,--a
mist shot through and through with soft, exhilarating lights half disclosing
yet transforming and etherealizing certain landmark's there on which, formerly,
she had not cared to gaze. She was thinking of Ditmar as she had left him
gripping his chair, as he had dismissed her for the day, curtly, almost
savagely. She had wounded and repelled him, and lingering in her was that
exquisite touch of fear--a fear now not so much inspired by Ditmar as by the
semi-acknowledged recognition of certain tendencies and capacities within
herself. Yet she rejoiced in them, she was glad she had hurt Ditmar, she would
hurt him again. Still palpitating, she reached the house in Fillmore Street,
halting a moment with her hand on the door, knowing her face was flushed,
anxious lest her mother or Lise might notice something unusual in her manner.
But, when she had slowly mounted the stairs and lighted the gas in the bedroom
the sight of her sister's clothes cast over the chairs was proof that Lise had
already donned her evening finery and departed. The room was filled with the
stale smell of clothes, which Janet detested. She flung open the windows. She
took off her hat and swiftly tidied herself, yet the relief she felt at Lise's
absence was modified by a sudden, vehement protest against sordidness. Why
should she not live by herself amidst clean and tidy surroundings? She had
begun to earn enough, and somehow a vista had been opened up--a vista whose end
she could not see, alluring, enticing.... In the dining-room, by the cleared
table, her father was reading the Banner; her mother appeared in the kitchen
door.
"What in the world happened to you, Janet?" she exclaimed.
"Nothing," said Janet. "Mr. Ditmar asked me to stay--that was all. He'd been
away."
"I was worried, I was going to make your father go down to the mill. I've
saved you some supper."
"I don't want much," Janet told her, "I'm not hungry."
"I guess you have to work too hard in that new place," said Hannah, as she
brought in the filled plate from the oven.
"Well, it seems to agree with her, mother," declared Edward, who could always
be counted on to say the wrong thing with the best of intentions. "I never saw
her looking as well--why, I swan, she's getting real pretty!"
Hannah darted at him a glance, but restrained herself, and Janet reddened as
she tried to eat the beans placed before her. The pork had browned and
hardened at the edges, the gravy had spread, a crust covered the potatoes.
When her father resumed his reading of the Banner and her mother went back into
the kitchen she began to speculate rather resentfully and yet excitedly why it
was that this adventure with a man, with Ditmar, made her look better, feel
better,--more alive. She was too honest to disguise from herself that it was
an adventure, a high one, fraught with all sorts of possibilities, dangers, and
delights. Her promotion had been merely incidental. Both her mother and
father, did they know the true circumstances,--that Mr. Ditmar desired her, was
perhaps in love with her--would be disturbed. Undoubtedly they would have
believed that she could "take care" of herself. She knew that matters could
not go on as they were, that she would either have to leave Mr. Ditmar or--and
here she baulked at being logical. She had no intention of leaving him: to
remain, according to the notions of her parents, would be wrong. Why was it
that doing wrong agreed with her, energized her, made her more alert, cleverer,
keying up her faculties? turned life from a dull affair into a momentous one?
To abandon Ditmar would be to slump back into the humdrum, into something from
which she had magically been emancipated, symbolized by the home in which she
sat; by the red-checked tablecloth, the ugly metal lamp, the cherry chairs with
the frayed seats, the horsehair sofa from which the stuffing protruded, the
tawdry pillow with its colours, once gay, that Lise had bought at a bargain at
the Bagatelle.... The wooden clock with the round face and quaint landscape
below--the family's most cherished heirloom--though long familiar, was not so
bad; but the two yellowed engravings on the wall offended her. They had been
wedding presents to Edward's father. One represented a stupid German peasant
woman holding a baby, and standing in front of a thatched cottage; its
companion was a sylvan scene in which certain wooden rustics were supposed to
be enjoying themselves. Between the two, and dotted with flyspecks, hung an
insurance calendar on which was a huge head of a lady, florid, fluffy-haired,
flirtatious. Lise thought her beautiful.
The room was ugly. She had long known that, but tonight the realization came
to her that what she chiefly resented in it was the note it proclaimed--the
note of a mute acquiescence, without protest or struggle, in what life might
send. It reflected accurately the attitude of her parents, particularly of her
father. With an odd sense of detachment, of critical remoteness and contempt
she glanced at him as he sat stupidly absorbed in his newspaper, his face
puckered, his lips pursed, and Ditmar rose before her--Ditmar, the embodiment
of an indomitableness that refused to be beaten and crushed. She thought of
the story he had told her, how by self-assertion and persistence he had become
agent of the Chippering Mill, how he had convinced Mr. Stephen Chippering of
his ability. She could not think of the mill as belonging to the Chipperings
and the other stockholders, but to Ditmar, who had shaped it into an expression
of himself, since it was his ideal. And now it seemed that he had made it hers
also. She regretted having repulsed him, pushed her plate away from her, and
rose.
"You haven't eaten anything," said Hannah, who had come into the room. "Where
are you going?"
"Out--to Eda's," Janet answered....
"It's late," Hannah objected. But Janet departed. Instead of going to Eda's
she walked alone, seeking the quieter streets that her thoughts might flow
undisturbed. At ten o'clock, when she returned, the light was out in the
diningroom, her sister had not come in, and she began slowly to undress,
pausing every now and then to sit on the bed and dream; once she surprised
herself gazing into the glass with a rapt expression that was almost a smile.
What was it about her that had attracted Ditmar? No other man had ever noticed
it. She had never thought herself good looking, and now--it was astonishing!--
she seemed to have changed,and she saw with pride that her arms and neck were
shapely, that her dark hair fell down in a cascade over her white shoulders to
her waist. She caressed it; it was fine. When she looked again, a radiancy
seemed to envelop her. She braided her hair slowly, in two long plaits,
looking shyly in the mirror and always seeing that radiancy....
Suddenly it occurred to her with a shock that she was doing exactly what she
had despised Lise for doing, and leaving the mirror she hurried her toilet, put
out the light, and got into bed. For a long time, however, she remained
wakeful, turning first on one side and then on the other, trying to banish from
her mind the episode that had excited her. But always it came back again. She
saw Ditmar before her, virile, vital, electric with desire. At last she fell
asleep.
Gradually she was awakened by something penetrating her consciousness,
something insistent, pervasive, unescapable, which in drowsiness she could not
define. The gas was burning, Lise had come in, and was moving peculiarly about
the room. Janet watched her. She stood in front of the bureau, just as Janet
herself had done, her hands at her throat. At last she let them fall, her head
turning slowly, as though drawn, by some irresistible, hypnotic power, and
their eyes met. Lise's were filmed, like those of a dog whose head is being
stroked, expressing a luxuriant dreaminess uncomprehending, passionate.
"Say, did I wake you?" she asked. "I did my best not to make any noise--honest
to God."
"It wasn't the noise that woke me up," said Janet.
"It couldn't have been."
"You've been drinking!" said Janet, slowly.
Lise giggled.
"What's it to you, angel face!" she inquired. "Quiet down, now, and go bye-
bye."
Janet sprang from the bed, seized her by the shoulders, and shook her. She was
limp. She began to whimper.
"Cut it out--leave me go. It ain't nothing to you what I do--I just had a
highball."
Janet released her and drew back.
"I just had a highball--honest to God!"
"Don't say that again!" whispered Janet, fiercely.
"Oh, very well. For God's sake, go to bed and leave me alone--I can take care
of myself, I guess--I ain't nutty enough to hit the booze. But I ain't like
you--I've got to have a little fun to keep alive."
"A little fun!" Janet exclaimed. The phrase struck her sharply. A little fun
to keep alive!
With that same peculiar, cautious movement she had observed, Lise approached a
chair, and sank into it,--jerking her head in the direction of the room where
Hannah and Edward slept.
"D'you want to wake 'em up? Is that your game?" she asked, and began to fumble
at her belt. Overcoming with an effort a disgust amounting to nausea, Janet
approached her sister again, little by little undressing her, and finally
getting her into bed, when she immediately fell into a profound slumber.
Janet, too, got into bed, but sleep was impossible: the odour lurked like a
foul spirit in the darkness, mingling with the stagnant, damp air that came in
at the open window, fairly saturating her with horror: it seemed the very
essence of degradation. But as she lay on the edge of the bed, shrinking from
contamination, in the throes of excitement inspired by an unnamed fear, she
grew hot, she could feel and almost hear the pounding of her heart. She rose,
felt around in the clammy darkness for her wrapper and slippers, gained the
door, crept through the dark hall to the dining-room, where she stealthily lit
the lamp; darkness had become a terror. A cockroach scurried across the
linoleum. The room was warm and close, it reeked with the smell of stale food,
but at least she found relief from that other odour. She sank down on the
sofa.
Her sister was drunk. That in itself was terrible enough, yet it was not the
drunkenness alone that had sickened Janet, but the suggestion of something
else. Where had Lise been? In whose company had she become drunk? Of late,
in contrast to a former communicativeness, Lise had been singuarly secretive as
to her companions, and the manner in which her evenings were spent; and she,
Janet, had grown too self-absorbed to be curious. Lise, with her shopgirl's
cynical knowledge of life and its pitfalls and the high valuation at which she
held her charms, had seemed secure from danger; but Janet recalled her
discouragement, her threat to leave the Bagatelle. Since then there had been
something furtive about her. Now, because that odour of alcohol Lise exhaled
had destroyed in Janet the sense of exhilaration, of life on a higher plane she
had begun to feel, and filled her with degradation, she hated Lise, felt for
her sister no strain of pity. A proof, had she recognized it, that immorality
is not a matter of laws and decrees, but of individual emotions. A few hours
before she had seen nothing wrong in her relationship with Ditmar: now she
beheld him selfish, ruthless, pursuing her for one end, his own gratification.
As a man, he had become an enemy. Ditmar was like all other men who exploited
her sex without compunction, but the thought that she was like Lise, asleep in
a drunken stupor, that their cases differed only in degree, was insupportable.
At last she fell asleep from sheer weariness, to dream she was with Ditmar at
some place in the country under spreading trees, Silliston, perhaps--Silliston
Common, cleverly disguised: nor was she quite sure, always, that the man was
Ditmar; he had a way of changing, of resembling the man she had met in
Silliston whom she had mistaken for a carpenter. He was pleading with her, in
his voice was the peculiar vibrancy that thrilled her, that summoned some
answering thing out of the depths of her, and she felt herself yielding with a
strange ecstasy in which were mingled joy and terror. The terror was
conquering the joy, and suddenly he stood transformed before her eyes,
caricatured, become a shrieking monster from whom she sought in agony to
escape.... In this paralysis of fear she awoke, staring with wide eyes at the
flickering flame of the lamp, to a world filled with excruciating sound--the
siren of the Chippering Mill! She lay trembling with the horror of the
dreamspell upon her, still more than half convinced that the siren was Ditmar's
voice, his true expression. He was waiting to devour her. Would the sound
never end?...
Then, remembering where she was, alarmed lest her mother might come in and find
her there, she left the sofa, turned out the sputtering lamp, and ran into the
bedroom. Rain was splashing on the bricks of the passage-way outside, the
shadows of the night still lurked in the corners; by the grey light she gazed
at Lise, who breathed loudly and stirred uneasily, her mouth open, her lips
parched. Janet touched her.
"Lise--get up!" she said. "It's time to get up." She shook her.
"Leave me alone--can't you?"
"It's time to get up. The whistle has sounded."
Lise heavily opened her eyes. They were bloodshot.
"I don't want to get up. I won't get up."
"But you must," insisted Janet, tightening her hold. "You've got to--you've
got to eat breakfast and go to work."
"I don't want any breakfast, I ain't going to work any more."
A gust of wind blew inward the cheap lace curtains, and the physical effect of
it emphasized the chill that struck Janet's heart. She got up and closed the
window, lit the gas, and returning to the bed, shook Lise again.
"Listen," she said, "if you don't get up I'll tell mother what happened last
night."
"Say, you wouldn't--!" exclaimed Lise, angrily.
"Get up!" Janet commanded, and watched her rather anxiously, uncertain as to
the after effects of drunkenness. But Lise got up. She sat on the edge of the
bed and yawned, putting her hand to her forehead.
"I've sure got a head on me," she remarked.
Janet was silent, angrier than ever, shocked that tragedy, degradation, could
be accepted thus circumstantially. Lise proceeded to put up her hair. She
seemed to be mistress of herself; only tired, gaping frequently. Once she
remarked:--
"I don't see the good of getting nutty over a highball."
Seeing that Janet was not to be led into controversy, she grew morose.
Breakfast in Fillmore Street, never a lively meal, was more dismal than usual
that morning, eaten to the accompaniment of slopping water from the roofs on
the pavement of the passage. The indisposition of Lise passed unobserved by
both Hannah and Edward; and at twenty minutes to eight the two girls, with
rubbers and umbrellas, left the house together, though it was Janet's custom to
depart earlier, since she had farther to go. Lise, suspicious, maintained an
obstinate silence, keeping close to the curb. They reached the corner by the
provision shop with the pink and orange chromos of jellies in the window.
"Lise, has anything happened to you?" demanded Janet suddenly. "I want you to
tell me."
"Anything happened--what do you mean? Anything happened?"
"You know very well what I mean."
"Well, suppose something has happened?" Lise's reply was pert, defiant.
"What's it to you? If anything's happened, it's happened to me--hasn't it?"
Janet approached her.
"What are you trying to do?" said Lise. "Push me into the gutter?"
"I guess you're there already," said Janet.
Lise was roused to a sudden pitch of fury. She turned on Janet and thrust her
back.
"Well, if I am who's going to blame me?" she cried. "If you had to work all
day in that hole, standing on your feet, picked on by yaps for six a week, I
guess you wouldn't talk virtuous, either. It's easy for you to shoot off your
mouth, you've got a soft snap with Ditmar."
Janet was outraged. She could not restrain her anger.
"How dare you say that?" she demanded.
Lise was cowed.
"Well, you drove me to it--you make me mad enough to say anything. Just
because I went to Gruber's with Neva Lorrie and a couple of gentlemen--they
were gentlemen all right, as much gentlemen as Ditmar--you come at me and tell
me I'm all to the bad." She began to sob. "I'm as straight as you are. How
was I to know the highball was stiff? Maybe I was tired--anyhow, it put me on
the queer, and everything in the joint began to tango 'round me--and Neva came
home with me."
Janet felt a surge of relief, in which were mingled anxiety and resentment:
relief because she was convinced that Lise was telling the truth, anxiety
because she feared for Lise's future, resentment because Ditmar had been
mentioned. Still, what she had feared most had not come to pass. Lise left
her abruptly, darting down a street that led to a back entrance of the
Bagatelle, and Janet pursued her way. Where, she wondered, would it all end?
Lise had escaped so far, but drunkenness was an ominous sign. And "gentlemen"?
What kind of gentlemen had taken her sister to Gruber's? Would Ditmar do that
sort of thing if he had a chance?
The pavement in front of the company boarding-houses by the canal was plastered
with sodden leaves whipped from the maples by the driving rain in the night.
The sky above the mills was sepia. White lights were burning in the loom
rooms. When she reached the vestibule Simmons, the watchman, informed her that
Mr. Ditmar had already been there, and left for Boston.
Janet did not like to acknowledge to herself her disappointment on learning
that Ditmar had gone to Boston. She knew he had had no such intention the
night before; an accumulated mail and many matters demanding decisions were
awaiting him; and his sudden departure seemed an act directed personally
against her, in the nature of a retaliation, since she had offended and
repulsed him. Through Lise's degrading act she had arrived at the conclusion
that all adventure and consequent suffering had to do with Man--a conviction
peculiarly maddening to such temperaments as Janet's. Therefore she
interpreted her suffering in terms of Ditmar, she had looked forward to
tormenting him again, and by departing he had deliberately balked and cheated
her. The rain fell ceaselessly out of black skies, night seemed ever ready to
descend on the river, a darkness--according to young Mr. Caldwell--due not to
the clouds alone, but to forest fires many hundreds of miles away, in Canada.
As the day wore on, however, her anger gradually gave place to an extreme
weariness and depression, and yet she dreaded going home, inventing things for
herself to do; arranging and rearranging Ditmar's papers that he might have
less trouble in sorting them, putting those uppermost which she thought he
would deem the most important. Perhaps he would come in, late! In a world of
impending chaos the brilliantly lighted office was a tiny refuge to which she
clung. At last she put on her coat and rubbers, faring forth reluctantly into
the wet.
At first when she entered the bedroom she thought it empty, though the gas was
burning, and them she saw Lise lying face downward on the bed. For a moment
she stood still, then closed the door softly.
"Lise," she said.
"What?"
Janet sat down on the bed, putting out her hand. Unconsciously she began to
stroke Lise's hand, and presently it turned and tightened on her own.
"Lise," she said, "I understand why you--" she could not bring herself to
pronounce the words "got drunk,"--"I understand why you did it. I oughtn't to
have talked to you that way. But it was terrible to wake up and see you."
For awhile Lise did not reply. Then she raised herself, feeling her hair with
an involuntary gesture, regarding her sister with a bewildered look, her face
puckered. Her eyes burned, and under them were black shadows.
"How do you mean--you understand?" she asked slowly. "You never hit the
booze."
Even Lise's language, which ordinarily offended her, failed to change her
sudden impassioned and repentant mood. She was astonished at herself for this
sudden softening, since she did not really love Lise, and all day she had hated
her, wished never to see her again.
"No, but I can understand how it would be to want to," Janet said. "Lise, I
guess we're searching--both of us for something we'll never find."
Lise stared at her with a contracted, puzzled expression, as of a person
awaking from sleep, all of whose faculties are being strained toward
comprehension.
"What do you mean?" she demanded. "You and me? You're all right--you've got
no kick coming."
"Life is hard, it's hard on girls like us--we want things we can't have."
Janet was at a loss to express herself.
"Well, it ain't any pipe dream," Lise agreed. Her glance turned involuntarily
toward the picture of the Olympian dinner party pinned on the wall. "Swells
have a good time," she added.
"Maybe they pay for it, too," said Janet.
"I wouldn't holler about paying--it's paying and not getting the goods,"
declared Lise.
"You'll pay, and you won't get it. That kind of life is--hell," Janet cried.
Self-centered as Lise was, absorbed in her own trouble and present physical
discomfort, this unaccustomed word from her sister and the vehemence with which
it was spoken surprised and frightened her, brought home to her some hint of
the terror in Janet's soul.
"Me for the water wagon," she said.
Janet was not convinced. She had hoped to discover the identity of the man who
had taken Lise to Gruber's, but she did not attempt to continue the
conversation. She rose and took off her hat.
"Why don't you go to bed?" she asked. "I'll tell mother you have a headache
and bring in your supper."
"Well, I don't care if I do," replied Lise, gratefully.
Perhaps the most disconcerting characteristic of that complex affair, the human
organism, is the lack of continuity of its moods. The soul, so called, is as
sensitive to physical conditions as a barometer: affected by lack of sleep, by
smells and sounds, by food, by the weather--whether a day be sapphire or
obsidian. And the resolutions arising from one mood are thwarted by the
actions of the next. Janet had observed this phenomenon, and sometimes, when
it troubled her, she thought herself the most inconsistent and vacillating of
creatures. She had resolved, far instance, before she fell asleep, to leave
the Chippering Mill, to banish Ditmar from her life, to get a position in Boston,
whence she could send some of her wages home: and in the morning, as she made her
way to the office, the determination gave her a sense of peace and unity. But the
northwest wind was blowing. It had chased away the mist and the clouds, the smoke
from Canada. The sun shone with a high brilliancy, the elms of the Common cast
sharp, black shadow-patterns on the pavements, and when she reached the office
and looked out of his window she saw the blue river covered with quicksilver
waves chasing one another across the current. Ditmar had not yet returned to
Hampton. About ten o'clock, as she was copying out some figures for Mr. Price,
young Mr. Caldwell approached her. He had a Boston newspaper in his hand.
"Have you seen this article about Mr. Ditmar?" he asked.
"About Mr. Ditmar? No."
"It's quite a send-off for the Colonel," said Caldwell, who was wont at times
to use the title facetiously. "Listen; `One of the most notable figures in the
Textile industry of the United States, Claude Ditmar, Agent of the Chippering
Mill.'" Caldwell spread out the page and pointed to a picture. "There he is,
as large as life."
A little larger than life, Janet thought. Ditmar was one of those men who, as
the expression goes, "take" well, a valuable asset in semi-public careers; and
as he stood in the sunlight on the steps of the building where they had "snap-
shotted" him he appeared even more massive, forceful, and preponderant than she
had known him. Beholding him thus set forth and praised in a public print, he
seemed suddenly to have been distantly removed from her, to have reacquired at
a bound the dizzy importance he had possessed for her before she became his
stenographer. She found it impossible to realize that this was the Ditmar who
had pursued and desired her; at times supplicating, apologetic, abject; and
again revealed by the light in his eyes and the trembling of his hand as the
sinister and ruthless predatory male from whom--since the revelation in her
sister Lise she had determined to flee, and whom she had persuaded herself she
despised. He was a bigger man than she had thought, and as she read rapidly
down the column the fascination that crept over her was mingled with
disquieting doubt of her own powers: it was now difficult to believe she had
dominated or could ever dominate this self-sufficient, successful person, the
list of whose achievements and qualities was so alluringly set forth by an
interviewer who himself had fallen a victim.
The article carried the implication that the modern, practical, American
business man was the highest type as yet evolved by civilization: and Ditmar,
referred to as "a wizard of the textile industry," was emphatically one who had
earned the gratitude of the grand old Commonwealth. By the efforts of such
sons she continued to maintain her commanding position among her sister states.
Prominent among the qualities contributing to his success was openmindedness,
"a willingness to be shown," to scrap machinery when his competitors still
clung to older methods. The Chippering Mill had never had a serious strike,--
indication of an ability to deal with labour; and Mr. Ditmar's views on labour
followed: if his people had a grievance, let them come to him, and settle it
between them. No unions. He had consistently refused to recognize them.
There was mention of the Bradlaugh order as being the largest commission ever
given to a single mill, a reference to the excitement and speculation it had
aroused in trade circles. Claude Ditmar's ability to put it through was
unquestioned; one had only to look at him,--tenacity, forcefulness,
executiveness were written all over him.... In addition, the article contained
much material of an autobiographical nature that must--Janet thought--have been
supplied by Ditmar himself, whose modesty had evidently shrunk from the cruder
self-eulogy of an interview. But she recognized several characteristic
phrases.
Caldwell, watching her as she read, was suddenly fascinated. During a trip
abroad, while still an undergraduate, he had once seen the face of an actress,
a really good Parisian actress, light up in that way; and it had revealed to
him, in a flash, the meaning of enthusiasm. Now Janet became vivid for him.
There must be something unusual in a person whose feelings could be so intense,
whose emotions rang so true. He was not unsophisticated. He had sometimes
wondered why Ditmar had promoted her, though acknowledging her ability. He
admired Ditmar, but had no illusions about him. Harvard, and birth in a social
stratum where emphasis is superfluous, enabled him to smile at the reporter's
exuberance; and he was the more drawn toward her to see on Janet's flushed face
the hint of a smile as she looked up at him when she had finished.
"The Colonel hypnotized that reporter," he said, as he took the paper; and her
laugh, despite its little tremor, betrayed in her an unsuspected, humorous
sense of proportion. "Well, I'll take off my hat to him," Caldwell went on.
"He is a wonder, he's got the mill right up to capacity in a week. He's agreed
to deliver those goods to the Bradlaughs by the first of April, you know, and
Holster, of the Clarendon, swears it can't be done, he says Ditmar's crazy.
Well, I stand to lose twenty-five dollars on him."
This loyalty pleased Janet, it had the strange effect of reviving loyalty in
her. She liked this evidence of Dick Caldwell's confidence. He was a self-
contained and industrious young man, with crisp curly hair, cordial and
friendly yet never intimate with the other employer; liked by them--but it was
tacitly understood his footing differed from theirs. He was a cousin of the
Chipperings, and destined for rapid promotion. He went away every Saturday, it
was known that he spent Sundays and holidays in delightful places, to return
reddened and tanned; and though he never spoke about these excursions, and put
on no airs of superiority, there was that in his manner and even in the cut of
his well-worn suits proclaiming him as belonging to a sphere not theirs, to a
category of fortunate beings whose stumbles are not fatal, who are sustained
from above. Even Ditmar was not of these.
"I've just been showing a lot of highbrows through the mill," he told Janet.
"They asked questions enough to swamp a professor of economics."
And Janet was suddenly impelled to ask:--
"Will you take me through sometime, Mr. Caldwell?"
"You've never been through?" he exclaimed. "Why, we'll go now, if you can
spare the time."
Her face had become scarlet.
"Don't tell Mr. Ditmar," she begged. "You see--he wanted to take me himself."
"Not a word," Caldwell promised as they left the office together and went
downstairs to the strong iron doors that led to the Cotton Department. The
showing through of occasional visitors had grown rather tiresome; but now his
curiosity and interest were aroused, he was conscious of a keen stimulation
when he glanced at Janet's face. Its illumination perplexed him. The effect
was that of a picture obscurely hung and hitherto scarcely noticed on which the
light had suddenly been turned. It glowed with a strange and disturbing
radiance....
As for Janet, she was as one brought suddenly to the realization of a miracle
in whose presence she had lived for many years and never before suspected; the
miracle of machinery, of the triumph of man over nature. In the brief space of
an hour she beheld the dirty bales flung off the freight cars on the sidings
transformed into delicate fabrics wound from the looms; cotton that only last
summer, perhaps, while she sat typewriting at her window, had been growing in
the fields of the South. She had seen it torn by the balebreakers, blown into
the openers, loosened, cleansed, and dried; taken up by the lappers, pressed
into batting, and passed on to the carding machines, to emerge like a wisp of
white smoke in a sliver and coil automatically in a can. Once more it was
flattened into a lap, given to a comber that felt out its fibres, removing with
superhuman precision those for the finer fabric too short, thrusting it forth
again in another filmy sliver ready for the drawing frames. Six of these
gossamer ropes were taken up, and again six. Then came the Blubbers and the
roving frames, twisting and winding, the while maintaining the most delicate of
tensions lest the rope break, running the strands together into a thread
constantly growing stronger and finer, until it was ready for spinning.
Caldwell stood close to her, shouting his explanations in her ear, while she
strained to follow them. But she was bewildered and entranced by the
marvellous swiftness, accuracy and ease with which each of the complex
machines, fed by human hands, performed its function. These human hands were
swift, too, as when they thrust the bobbins of roving on the ringspinning
frames to be twisted into yarn. She saw a woman, in the space of an instant,
mend a broken thread. Women and boys were here, doffer boys to lift off the
full bobbins of yarn with one hand and set on the empty bobbins with the other:
while skilled workmen, alert for the first sign of trouble, followed up and
down in its travels the long frame of the mule-spinner. After the spinning,
the heavy spools of yarn were carried to a beam-warper, standing alone like a
huge spider's web, where hundreds of threads were stretched symmetrically and
wound evenly, side by side, on a large cylinder, forming the warp of the fabric
to be woven on the loom. First, however, this warp must be stiffened or
"slashed" in starch and tallow, dried over heated drums, and finally wound
around one great beam from which the multitude of threads are taken up, one by
one, and slipped through the eyes of the loom harnesses by women who sit all
day under the north windows overlooking the canal--the "drawers-in" of whom
Ditmar had spoken. Then the harnesses are put on the loom, the threads
attached to the cylinder on which the cloth is to be wound. The looms absorbed
and fascinated Janet above all else. It seemed as if she would never tire of
watching the rhythmic rise and fall of the harnesses,--each rapid movement
making a V in the warp, within the angle of which the tiny shuttles darted to
and fro, to and fro, carrying the thread that filled the cloth with a swiftness
so great the eye could scarcely follow it; to be caught on the other side when
the angle closed, and flung back, and back again! And in the elaborate
patterns not one, but several harnesses were used, each awaiting its turn for
the impulse bidding it rise and fall!... Abruptly, as she gazed, one of the
machines halted, a weaver hurried up, searched the warp for the broken thread,
tied it, and started the loom again.
"That's intelligent of it," said Caldwell, in her ear. But she could only nod
in reply.
The noise in the weaving rooms was deafening, the heat oppressive. She began
to wonder how these men and women, boys and girls bore the strain all day long.
She had never thought much about them before save to compare vaguely their
drudgery with that from which now she had been emancipated; but she began to
feel a new respect, a new concern, a new curiosity and interest as she watched
them passing from place to place with indifference between the whirling belts,
up and down the narrow aisles, flanked on either side by that bewildering,
clattering machinery whose polished surfaces continually caught and flung back
the light of the electric bulbs on the ceiling. How was it possible to live
for hours at a time in this bedlam without losing presence of mind and
thrusting hand or body in the wrong place, or becoming deaf? She had never
before realized what mill work meant, though she had read of the accidents.
But these people--even the children--seemed oblivious to the din and the
danger, intent on their tasks, unconscious of the presence of a visitor, save
occasionally when she caught a swift glance from a woman or girl a glance,
perhaps, of envy or even of hostility. The dark, foreign faces glowed, and
instantly grew dull again, and then she was aware of lurking terrors, despite
her exaltation, her sense now of belonging to another world, a world somehow
associated with Ditmar. Was it not he who had lifted her farther above all
this? Was it not by grace of her association with him she was there, a
spectator of the toil beneath? Yet the terror persisted. She, presently,
would step out of the noise, the oppressive moist heat of the drawing and
spinning rooms, the constant, remorseless menace of whirling wheels and cogs
and belts. But they?... She drew closer to Caldwell's side.
"I never knew--" she said. "It must be hard to work here."
He smiled at her, reassuringly.
"Oh, they don't mind it," he replied. "It's like a health resort compared to
the conditions most of them live in at home. Why, there's plenty of
ventilation here, and you've got to have a certain amount of heat and moisture,
because when cotton is cold and dry it can't be drawn or spin, and when it's
hot and dry the electricity is troublesome. If you think this moisture is bad
you ought to see a mill with the old vapour-pot system with the steam shooting
out into the room. Look here!" He led Janet to the apparatus in which the
pure air is forced through wet cloths, removing the dust, explaining how the
ventilation and humidity were regulated automatically, how the temperature of
the room was controlled by a thermostat.
"There isn't an agent in the country who's more concerned about the welfare of
his operatives than Mr. Ditmar. He's made a study of it, he's spent thousands
of dollars, and as soon as these machines became practical he put 'em in. The
other day when I was going through the room one of these shuttles flew off, as
they sometimes do when the looms are running at high speed. A woman was pretty
badly hurt. Ditmar came right down."
"He really cares about them," said Janet. She liked Caldwell's praise of
Ditmar, yet she spoke a little doubtfully.
"Of course he cares. But it's common sense to make 'em as comfortable and
happy as possible--isn't it? He won't stand for being held up, and he'd be
stiff enough if it came to a strike. I don't blame him for that. Do you?"
Janet was wondering how ruthless Ditmar could be if his will were crossed....
They had left the room with its noise and heat behind them and were descending
the worn, oaken treads of the spiral stairway of a neighbouring tower. Janet
shivered a little, and her face seemed almost feverish as she turned to
Caldwell and thanked him.
"Oh, it was a pleasure, Miss Bumpus," he declared. "And sometime, when you
want to see the Print Works or the Worsted Department, let me know--I'm your
man. And--I won't mention it."
She did not answer. As they made their way back to the office he glanced at
her covertly, astonished at the emotional effect in her their tour had
produced. Though not of an inflammable temperament, he himself was stirred,
and it was she who, unaccountably, had stirred him: suggested, in these
processes he saw every day, and in which he was indeed interested, something
deeper, more significant and human than he had guessed, and which he was unable
to define....
Janet herself did not know why this intimate view of the mills, of the people
who worked in them had so greatly moved her. All day she thought of them. And
the distant throb of the machinery she felt when her typewriter was silent
meant something to her now--she could not say what. When she found herself
listening for it, her heart beat faster. She had lived and worked beside it,
and it had not existed for her, it had had no meaning, the mills might have
been empty. She had, indeed, many, many times seen these men and women, boys
and girls trooping away from work, she had strolled through the quarters in
which they lived, speculated on the lands from which they had come; but she had
never really thought of them as human beings, individuals, with problems and
joys and sorrows and hopes and fears like her own. Some such discovery was
borne in upon her. And always an essential function of this revelation,
looming larger than ever in her consciousness, was Ditmar. It was for Ditmar
they toiled, in Ditmar's hands were their very existences, his was the
stupendous responsibility and power.
As the afternoon wore, desire to see these toilers once more took possession of
her. From the white cupola perched above the huge mass of the Clarendon Mill
across the water sounded the single stroke of a bell, and suddenly the air was
pulsing with sounds flung back and forth by the walls lining the river.
Seizing her hat and coat, she ran down the stairs and through the vestibule and
along the track by the canal to the great gates, which her father was in the
act of unbarring. She took a stand beside him, by the gatehouse. Edward
showed a mild surprise.
"There ain't anything troubling you--is there, Janet?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"I wanted to see the hands come out," she said.
Sometimes, as at present, he found Janet's whims unaccountable.
"Well, I should have presumed you'd know what they look like by this time.
You'd better stay right close to me, they're a rough lot, with no respect or
consideration for decent folks--these foreigners. I never could see why the
government lets 'em all come over here." He put on the word "foreigners" an
emphasis of contempt and indignation, pathetic because of its peculiar note of
futility. Janet paid no attention to him. Her ears were strained to catch the
rumble of feet descending the tower stairs, her eyes to see the vanguard as it
came from the doorway--the first tricklings of a flood that instantly filled
the yard and swept onward and outward, irresistibly, through the narrow gorge
of the gates. Impossible to realize this as the force which, when distributed
over the great spaces of the mills, performed an orderly and useful task! for
it was now a turbid and lawless torrent unconscious of its swollen powers,
menacing, breathlessly exciting to behold. It seemed to Janet indeed a torrent
as she clung to the side of the gatehouse as one might cling to the steep bank
of a mountain brook after a cloud-burst. And suddenly she had plunged into it.
The desire was absurd, perhaps, but not to be denied,--the desire to mix with
it, feel it, be submerged and swept away by it, losing all sense of identity.
She heard her father call after her, faintly--the thought crossed her mind that
his appeals were always faint,--and then she was being carried along the canal,
eastward, the pressure relaxing somewhat when the draining of the side streets
began.
She remembered, oddly, the Stanley Street bridge where the many streams met and
mingled, streams from the Arundel, the Patuxent, the Arlington and the
Clarendon; and, eager to prolong and intensify her sensations, hurried thither,
reaching it at last and thrusting her way outward until she had gained the
middle, where she stood grasping the rail. The great structure was a-tremble
from the assault, its footpaths and its roadway overrun with workers, dodging
between trolleys and trucks,--some darting nimbly, dinner pails in hand, along
the steel girders. Doffer boys romped and whistled, young girls in jaunty,
Faber Street clothes and flowered hats, linked to one another for protection,
chewed gum and joked, but for the most part these workers were silent, the
apathy of their faces making a strange contrast with the hurry, hurry of their
feet and set intentness of their bodies as they sped homeward to the tenements.
And the clothes of these were drab, save when the occasional colour of a hooded
peasant's shawl, like the slightly faded tints of an old master, lit up a group
of women. Here, going home to their children, were Italian mothers bred
through centuries to endurance and patience; sallow Jewesses, gaunt, bearded
Jews with shadowy, half-closed eyes and wrinkled brows, broad-faced
Lithuanians, flat-headed Russians; swarthy Italian men and pale, blond Germans
mingled with muddy Syrians and nondescript Canadians. And suddenly the bridge
was empty, the army vanished as swiftly as it came!
Janet turned. Through the haze of smoke she saw the sun drop like a ball of
fire cooled to redness, whose course is spent. The delicate lines of the upper
bridge were drawn in sepia against crimson-gilt; for an instant the cupola of
the Clarendon became jasper, and far, far above floated in the azure a cloud of
pink jeweller's cotton. Even as she strove to fix these colours in her mind
they vanished, the western sky faded to magenta, to purple-mauve; the corridor
of the river darkened, on either side pale lights sparkled from the windows of
the mills, while down the deepened blue of the waters came floating iridescent
suds from the washing of the wools. It was given to her to know that which an
artist of living memory has called the incommunicable thrill of things....
CHAPTER VIII
The after-effects of this experience of Janet's were not what ordinarily are
called "spiritual," though we may some day arrive at a saner meaning of the
term, include within it the impulses and needs of the entire organism. It left
her with a renewed sense of energy and restlessness, brought her nearer to high
discoveries of mysterious joys which a voice out of the past called upon her to
forego, a voice somehow identified with her father! It was faint, ineffectual.
In obeying it, would she not lose all life had to give? When she came in to
supper her father was concerned about her because, instead of walking home with
him she had left him without explanation to plunge into the crowd of workers.
Her evident state of excitement had worried him, her caprice was beyond his
comprehension. And how could she explain the motives that led to it? She was
sure he had never felt like that; and as she evaded his questions the something
within her demanding life and expression grew stronger and more rebellious,
more contemptuous of the fear-precepts congenial to a nature timorous and less
vitalized.
After supper, unable to sit still, she went out, and, filled with the spirit of
adventure, hurried toward Faber Street, which was already thronging with
people. It was bright here and gay, the shops glittered, and she wandered from
window to window until she found herself staring at a suit of blue cloth hung
on a form, beneath which was a card that read, "Marked down to $20." And
suddenly the suggestion flashed into her mind, why shouldn't she buy it? She
had the money, she needed a new suit for the winter, the one she possessed was
getting shabby...but behind the excuse of necessity was the real reason
triumphantly proclaiming itself--she would look pretty in it, she would be
transformed, she would be buying a new character to which she would have to
live up. The old Janet would be cast off with the old raiment; the new suit
would announce to herself and to the world a Janet in whom were released all
those longings hitherto disguised and suppressed, and now become insupportable!
This was what the purchase meant, a change of existence as complete as that
between the moth and the butterfly; and the realization of this fact, of the
audacity she was resolved to commit made her hot as she gazed at the suit. It
was modest enough, yet it had a certain distinction of cut, it looked
expensive: twenty dollars was not cheap, to be sure, but as the placard
announced, it had the air of being much more costly--even more costly than
thirty dollars, which seemed fabulous. Though she strove to remain outwardly
calm, her heart beat rapidly as she entered the store and asked for the
costume, and was somewhat reassured by the comportment of the saleswoman, who
did not appear to think the request preposterous, to regard her as a
spendthrift and a profligate. She took down the suit from the form and led
Janet to a cabinet in the back of the shop, where it was tried on.
"It's worth every bit of thirty dollars," she heard the woman say, "but we've
had it here for some time, and it's no use for our trade. You can't sell
anything like that in Hampton, there's no taste here, it's too good, it ain't
showy enough. My, it fits you like it was made for you, and it's just your
style--and you can see it wants a lady to wear it. Your old suit is too tight-
-I guess you've filled out some since you bought it."
She turned Janet around and around, patting the skirt here and there, and then
stood off a little way, with clasped hands, her expression almost rapturous.
Janet's breath came fast as she gazed into the mirror and buttoned up the coat.
Was the woman's admiration cleverly feigned? this image she beheld an illusion?
or did she really look different, distinguished? and if not beautiful--
alluring? She had had a momentary apprehension, almost sickening, that she
would be too conspicuous, but the saleswoman had anticipated that objection
with the magical word "lady."
"I'll take it," she announced.
"Well, you couldn't have done better if you'd gone to Boston," declared the
woman. "It's one chance in a thousand. Will you wear it?"
"Yes," said Janet faintly.... "Just put my old suit in a box, and I'll call
for it in an hour."
The woman's sympathetic smile followed her as she left the shop. She had an
instant of hesitation, of an almost panicky desire to go back and repair her
folly, ere it was too late. Why had she taken her money with her that evening,
if not with some deliberate though undefined purpose? But she was ashamed to
face the saleswoman again, and her elation was not to be repressed--an elation
optically presented by a huge electric sign on the farther side of the street
that flashed through all the colours of the spectrum, surrounded by running
fire like the running fire in her soul. Deliciously self-conscious, her gaze
fixed ahead, she pressed through the Wednesday night crowds, young mill men and
women in their best clothes, housewives and fathers of families with children
and bundles. In front of the Banner office a group blocked the pavement
staring up at the news bulletin, which she paused to read. "Five Millionaire
Directors Indicted in New York," "State Treasurer Accused of Graft," "Murdock
Fortune Contested by Heirs." The phrases seemed meaningless, and she hurried
on again.... She was being noticed! A man looked at her, twice, the first
glance accidental, the second arresting, appealing, subtly flattering,
agitating--she was sure he had turned and was following her. She hastened her
steps. It was wicked, what she was doing, but she gloried in it; and even the
sight, in burning red letters, of Gruber's Cafe failed to bring on a revulsion
by its association with her sister Lise. The fact that Lise had got drunk
there meant nothing to her now. She gazed curiously at the illuminated,
orange-coloured panes separated by curving leads, at the design of a harp in
green, at the sign "Ladies' Entrance"; listened eagerly to the sounds of voices
and laughter that came from within. She looked cautiously over her shoulder, a
shadow appeared, she heard a voice, low, insinuating....
Four blocks farther down she stopped. The man was no longer following her.
She had been almost self-convinced of an intention to go to Eda's--not quite.
Of late her conscience had reproached her about Eda, Janet had neglected her.
She told herself she was afraid of Eda's uncanny and somewhat nauseating flair
for romance; and to show Eda the new suit, though she would relish her friend's
praise, would be the equivalent of announcing an affair of the heart which she,
Janet, would have indignantly to deny. She was not going to Eda's. She knew
now where she was going. A prepared but hitherto undisclosed decree of fate
had bade her put money in her bag that evening, directed her to the shop to buy
the dress, and would presently impel her to go to West Street--nay, was even
now so impelling her. Ahead of her were the lights of the Chippering Mill, in
her ears was the rhythmic sound of the looms working of nights on the Bradlaugh
order. She reached the canal. The white arc above the end of the bridge cast
sharp, black shadows of the branches of the trees on the granite, the thousand
windows of the mill shone yellow, reflected in the black water. Twice she
started to go, twice she paused, held by the presage of a coming event, a
presage that robbed her of complete surprise when she heard footsteps on the
bridge, saw the figure of a man halting at the crown of the arch to look back
at the building he had left, his shoulders squared, his hand firmly clasping
the rail. Her heart was throbbing with the looms, and yet she stood
motionless, until he turned and came rapidly down the slope of the arch and
stopped in front of her. Under the arc lamp it was almost as bright as day.
"Miss Bumpus!" he exclaimed.
"Mr. Ditmar" she said.
"Were you--were you coming to the office?"
"I was just out walking," she told him. "I thought you were in Boston."
"I came home," he informed her, somewhat superfluously, his eyes never leaving
her, wandering hungrily from her face to her new suit, and back again to her
face. "I got here on the seven o'clock train, I wanted to see about those new
Blubbers."
"They finished setting them up this afternoon," she said.
"How did you know?"
"I asked Mr. Orcutt about it--I thought you might telephone."
"You're a wonder," was his comment. "Well, we've got a running start on that
order," and he threw a glance over his shoulder at the mill. "Everything going
full speed ahead. When we put it through I guess I'll have to give you some of
the credit."
"Oh, I haven't done anything," she protested.
"More than you think. You've taken so much off my shoulders I couldn't get
along without you." His voice vibrated, reminding her of the voices of those
who made sentimental recitations for the graphophone. It sounded absurd, yet
it did not repel her: something within her responded to it. "Which way were
you going?" he inquired.
"Home," she said.
"Where do you live?"
"In Fillmore Street." And she added with a touch of defiance: "It's a little
street, three blocks above Hawthorne, off East Street."
"Oh yes," he said vaguely, as though he had not understood. "I'll come with
you as far as the bridge--along the canal. I've got so much to say to you."
"Can't you say it to-morrow?"
"No, I can't; there are so many people in the office--so many interruptions, I
mean. And then, you never give me a chance."
She stood hesitating, a struggle going on within her. He had proposed the
route along the canal because nobody would be likely to recognize them, and her
pride resented this. On the other hand, there was the sweet allurement of the
adventure she craved, which indeed she had come out to seek and by a strange
fatality found--since he had appeared on the bridge almost as soon as she
reached it. The sense of fate was strong upon her. Curiosity urged her, and,
thanks to the eulogy she had read of him that day, to the added impression of
his power conveyed by the trip through the mills, Ditmar loomed larger than
ever in her consciousness.
"What do you want to say?" she asked.
"Oh, lots of things."
She felt his hand slipping under her arm, his fingers pressing gently but
firmly into her flesh, and the experience of being impelled by a power stronger
than herself, a masculine power, was delicious. Her arm seemed to burn where
he touched her.
"Have I done something to offend you?" she heard him say. "Or is it because
you don't like me?"
"I'm not sure whether I like you or not," she told him. "I don't like seeing
you--this way. And why should you want to know me and see me outside of the
office? I'm only your stenographer."
"Because you're you--because you're different from any woman I ever met. You
don't understand what you are--you don't see yourself."
"I made up my mind last night I wouldn't stay in your office any longer," she
informed him.
"For God's sake, why?" he exclaimed. "I've been afraid of that. Don't go--I
don't know what I'd do. I'll be careful--I won't get you talked about."
"Talked about!" She tore herself away from him. "Why should you get me talked
about?" she cried.
He was frightened. "No, no," he stammered, "I didn't mean--"
"What did you mean?"
"Well--as you say, you're my stenographer, but that's no reason why we
shouldn't be friends. I only meant--I wouldn't do anything to make our
friendship the subject of gossip."
Suddenly she began to find a certain amusement in his confusion and penitence,
she achieved a pleasurable sense of advantage, of power over him.
"Why should you want me? I don't know anything, I've never had any advantages-
-and you have so much. I read an article in the newspaper about you today--Mr.
Caldwell gave it to me--"
"Did you like it?" he interrupted, naively.
"Well, in some places it was rather funny."
"Funny? How?"
"Oh, I don't know." She had been quick to grasp in it the journalistic lack of
restraint hinted at by Caldwell. "I liked it, but I thought it praised you too
much, it didn't criticize you enough."
He laughed. In spite of his discomfort, he found her candour refreshing. From
the women to whom he had hitherto made love he had never got anything but
flattery.
"I want you to criticize me," he said.
But she went on relentlessly:--
"When I read in that article how successful you were, and how you'd got
everything you'd started out to get, and how some day you might be treasurer
and president of the Chippering Mill, well--" Despairing of giving adequate
expression to her meaning, she added, "I didn't see how we could be friends."
"You wanted me for a friend?" he interrupted eagerly.
"I couldn't help knowing you wanted me--you've shown it so plainly. But I
didn't see how it could be. You asked me where I lived--in a little flat
that's no better than a tenement. I suppose you would call it a tenement.
It's dark and ugly, it only has four rooms, and it smells of cooking. You
couldn't come there--don't you see how impossible it is? And you wouldn't care
to be talked about yourself, either," she added vehemently.
This defiant sincerity took him aback. He groped for words.
"Listen!" he urged. "I don't want to do anything you wouldn't like, and
honestly I don't know what I'd do if you left me. I've come to depend on you.
And you may not believe it, but when I got that Bradlaugh order I thought of
you, I said to myself 'She'll be pleased, she'll help me to put it over.'"
She thrilled at this, she even suffered him, for some reason unknown to
herself, to take her arm again.
"How could I help you?"
"Oh, in a thousand ways--you ought to know, you do a good deal of thinking for
me, and you can help me by just being there. I can't explain it, but I feel
somehow that things will go right. I've come to depend on you."
He was a little surprised to find himself saying these things he had not
intended to say, and the lighter touch he had always possessed in dealing with
the other sex, making him the envied of his friends, had apparently abandoned
him. He was appalled at the possibility of losing her.
"I've never met a woman like you," he went on, as she remained silent. "You're
different--I don't know what it is about you, but you are." His voice was low,
caressing, his head was bent down to her, his shoulder pressed against her
shoulder. "I've never had a woman friend before, I've never wanted one until
now."
She wondered about his wife.
"You've got brains--I've never met a woman with brains."
"Oh, is that why?" she exclaimed.
"You're beautiful," he whispered. "It's queer, but I didn't know it at first.
You're more beautiful to-night than I've ever seen you."
They had come almost to Warren Street. Suddenly realizing that they were
standing in the light, that people were passing to and fro over the end of the
bridge, she drew away from him once more, this time more gently.
"Let's walk back a little way," he proposed.
"I must go home--it's late."
"It's only nine o'clock."
"I have an errand to do, and they'll expect me. Good night."
"Just one more turn!" he pleaded.
But she shook her head, backing away from him.
"You'll see me to-morrow," she told him. She didn't know why she said that.
She hurried along Warren Street without once looking over her shoulder; her
feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground, the sound of music was in her ears,
the lights sparkled. She had had an adventure, at last, an adventure that
magically had transformed her life! She was beautiful! No one had ever told
her that before. And he had said that he needed her. She smiled as, with an
access of tenderness, in spite of his experience and power she suddenly felt
years older than Ditmar. She could help him!...
She was breathless when she reached the shop in Faber Street.
"I hope I haven't kept you waiting," she said.
"Oh no, we don't close until ten," answered the saleswoman. She was seated
quietly sewing under the lamp.
"I wonder whether you'd mind if I put on my old suit again, and carried this?"
Janet asked.
The expression of sympathy and understanding in the woman's eyes, as she rose,
brought the blood swiftly to Janet's face. She felt that her secret had been
guessed. The change effected, Janet went homeward swiftly, to encounter, on
the corner of Faber Street, her sister Lise, whose attention was immediately
attracted by the bundle.
"What have you got there, angel face?" she demanded.
"A new suit," said Janet.
"You don't tell me--where'd you get it? at the Paris?"
"No, at Dowling's."
"Say, I'll bet it was that plain blue thing marked down to twenty!"
"Well, what if it was?"
Lise, when surprised or scornful, had a peculiarly irritating way of whistling
through her teeth.
"Twenty bucks! Gee, you'll be getting your clothes in Boston next. Well, as
sure as I live when I went by that window the other day when they first knocked
it down I said to Sadie, `those are the rags Janet would buy if she had the
ready.' Have you got another raise out of Ditmar?"
"If I have, it isn't any business of yours," Janet retorted. "I've got a right
to do as I please with my own money."
"Oh sure," said Lise, and added darkly: "I guess Ditmar likes to see you look
well."
After this Janet refused obstinately to speak to Lise, to answer, when they
reached home, her pleadings and complaints to their mother that Janet had
bought a new suit and refused to exhibit it. And finally, when they had got to
bed, Janet lay long awake in passionate revolt against this new expression of
the sordidness and lack of privacy in which she was forced to live, made the
more intolerable by the close, sultry darkness of the room and the snoring of
Lise.
In the morning, however, after a groping period of semiconsciousness during the
ringing of the bells, the siren startled her into awareness and alertness. It
had not wholly lost its note of terror, but the note had somehow become
exhilarating, an invitation to adventure and to life; and Lise's sarcastic
comments as to the probable reasons why she did not put on the new suit had
host their power of exasperation. Janet compromised, wearing a blouse of china
silk hitherto reserved for "best." The day was bright, and she went rapidly
toward the mill, glorying in the sunshine and the autumn sharpness of the air;
and her thoughts were not so much of Ditmar as of something beyond him, of
which he was the medium. She was going, not to meet him, but to meet that.
When she reached the office she felt weak, her fingers trembled as she took off
her hat and jacket and began to sort out the mail. And she had to calm herself
with the assurance that her relationship with Ditmar had undergone no change.
She had merely met him by the canal, and he had talked to her. That was all.
He had, of course, taken her arm: it tingled when she remembered it. But when
he suddenly entered the room her heart gave a bound. He closed the door, he
took off his hat, and stood gazing at her--while she continued arranging
letters. Presently she was forced to glance at him. His bearing, his look,
his confident smile all proclaimed that he, at least, believed things to be
changed. He glowed with health and vigour, with an aggressiveness from which
she shrank, yet found delicious.
"How are you this morning?" he said at last--this morning as distinguished
from all other mornings.
"I'm well, as usual," she answered. She herself was sometimes surprised by her
ability to remain outwardly calm.
"Why did you run away from me last night?"
"I didn't run away, I had to go home," she said, still arranging the letters.
"We could have had a little walk. I don't believe you had to go home at all.
You just wanted an excuse to get away from me."
"I didn't need an excuse," she told him. He moved toward her, but she took a
paper from the desk and carried it to a file across the room.
"I thought we were going to be friends," he said.
"Being friends doesn't mean being foolish," she retorted. "And Mr. Orcutt's
waiting to see you."
"Let him wait."
He sat down at his desk, but his blood was warm, and he read the typewritten
words of the topmost letter of the pile without so much as grasping the meaning
of them. From time to time he glanced up at Janet as she flitted about the
room. By George, she was more desirable than he had ever dared to imagine! He
felt temporarily balked, but hopeful. On his way to the mill he had dwelt with
Epicurean indulgence on this sight of her, and he had not been disappointed.
He had also thought that he might venture upon more than the mere feasting of
his eyes, yet found an inspiring alleviation in the fact that she by no means
absolutely repulsed him. Her attitude toward him had undergone a subtle
transformation. There could be no doubt of that. She was almost coquettish.
His eyes lingered. The china silk blouse was slightly open at the neck,
suggesting the fullness of her throat; it clung to the outline of her
shoulders. Overcome by an impulse he could not control, he got up and went
toward her, but she avoided him.
"I'll tell Mr. Orcutt you've come," she said, rather breathlessly, as she
reached the door and opened it. Ditmar halted in his steps at the sight of the
tall, spectacled figure of the superintendent on the threshold.
Orcutt hesitated, looking from one to the other.
"I've been waiting for you," he said, after a moment, "the rest of that lot
didn't come in this morning. I've telephoned to the freight agent."
Ditmar stared at him uncomprehendingly. Orcutt repeated the information.
"Oh well, keep after him, get him to trace them."
"I'm doing that," replied the conscientious Orcutt.
"How's everything else going?" Ditmar demanded, with unlooked-for geniality.
"You mustn't take things too hard, Orcutt, don't wear yourself out."
Mr. Orcutt was relieved. He had expected an outburst of the exasperation that
lately had characterized his superior. They began to chat. Janet had escaped.
"Miss Bumpus told me you wanted to see me. I was just going to ring you up,"
Ditmar informed him.
"She's a clever young woman, seems to take such an interest in things," Orcutt
observed. "And she's always on the job. Only yesterday I saw her going
through the mill with young Caldwell."
Ditmar dropped the paper-weight he held.
"Oh, she went through, did she?"
After Orcutt departed he sat for awhile whistling a tune, from a popular
musical play, keeping time by drumming with his fingers on the desk.
That Mr. Semple, the mill treasurer, came down from Boston that morning to
confer with Ditmar was for Janet in the nature of a reprieve. She sat by her
window, and as her fingers flew over the typewriter keys she was swept by
surges of heat in which ecstasy and shame and terror were strangely commingled.
A voice within her said, "This can't go on, this can't go on! It's too
terrible! Everyone in the office will notice it--there will be a scandal. I
ought to go away while there is yet time--to-day." Though the instinct of
flight was strong within her, she was filled with rebellion at the thought of
leaving when Adventure was flooding her drab world with light, even as the mill
across the waters was transfigured by the heavy golden wash of the autumn sun.
She had made at length the discovery that Adventure had to do with Man, was
inconceivable without him.
Racked by these conflicting impulses of self-preservation on the one hand and
what seemed self-realization on the other, she started when, toward the middle
of the afternoon, she heard Ditmar's voice summoning her to take his letters;
and went palpitating, leaving the door open behind her, seating herself on the
far side of the desk, her head bent over her book. Her neck, where her hair
grew in wisps behind her ear, seemed to burn: Ditmar's glance was focussed
there. Her hands were cold as she wrote.... Then, like a deliverer, she saw
young Caldwell coming in from the outer office, holding a card in his hand
which he gave to Ditmar, who sat staring at it.
"Siddons?" he said. "Who's Siddons?"
Janet, who had risen, spoke up.
"Why, he's been making the Hampton `survey.' You wrote him you'd see him--
don't you remember, Mr. Ditmar?"
"Don't go!" exclaimed Ditmar. "You can't tell what those confounded reformers
will accuse you of if you don't have a witness."
Janet sat down again. The sharpness of Ditmar's tone was an exhilarating
reminder of the fact that, in dealing with strangers, he had come more or less
to rely on her instinctive judgment; while the implied appeal of his manner on
such occasions emphasized the pleasurable sense of his dependence, of her own
usefulness. Besides, she had been curious about the `survey' at the time it
was first mentioned, she wished to hear Ditmar's views concerning it. Mr.
Siddons proved to be a small and sallow young man with a pointed nose and
bright, bulbous brown eyes like a chipmunk's. Indeed, he reminded one of a
chipmunk. As he whisked himself in and seized Ditmar's hand he gave a confused
impression of polite self-effacement as well as of dignity and self-assertion;
he had the air of one who expects opposition, and though by no means desiring
it, is prepared to deal with it. Janet smiled. She had a sudden impulse to
drop the heavy book that lay on the corner of the desk to see if he would jump.
"How do you do, Mr. Ditmar?" he said. "I've been hoping to have this
pleasure."
"My secretary, Miss Bumpus," said Ditmar.
Mr. Siddons quivered and bowed. Ditmar, sinking ponderously into his chair,
seemed suddenly, ironically amused, grinning at Janet as he opened a drawer of
his desk and offered the visitor a cigar.
"Thanks, I don't smoke," said Mr. Siddons.
Ditmar lit one for himself.
"Now, what can I do for you?" he asked.
"Well, as I wrote you in my letter, I was engaged to make as thorough an
examination as possible of the living conditions and housing of the operatives
in the city of Hampton. I'm sure you'd be interested in hearing something of
the situation we found."
"I suppose you've been through our mills," said Ditmar.
"No, the fact is--"
"You ought to go through. I think it might interest you," Ditmar put a slight
emphasis on the pronoun. "We rather pride ourselves on making things
comfortable and healthy for our people."
"I've no doubt of it--in fact, I've been so informed. It's because of your
concern for the welfare of your workers in the mills that I ventured to come
and talk to you of how most of them live when they're at home," replied
Siddons, as Janet thought, rather neatly. "Perhaps, though living in Hampton,
you don't quite realize what the conditions are. I know a man who has lived in
Boston ten years and who hasn't ever seen the Bunker Hill monument."
"The Bunker Hill monument's a public affair," retorted Ditmar, "anybody can go
there who has enough curiosity and interest. But I don't see how you can
expect me to follow these people home and make them clean up their garbage and
wash their babies. I shouldn't want anybody to interfere with my private
affairs."
"But when you get to a point where private affairs become a public menace?"
Siddons objected. "Mr. Ditmar, I've seen block after block of tenements ready
to crumble. There are no provisions for foundations, thickness of walls, size
of timbers and columns, and if these houses had been deliberately erected to
make a bonfire they couldn't have answered the purpose better. If it were not
for the danger to life and the pity of making thousands of families homeless, a
conflagration would be a blessing, although I believe the entire north or south
side of the city would go under certain conditions. The best thing you could
do would be to burn whole rows of these tenements, they are ideal breeding
grounds for disease. In the older sections of the city you've got hundreds of
rear houses here, houses moved back on the lots, in some extreme cases with
only four-foot courts littered with refuse,--houses without light, without
ventilation, and many of the rooms where these people are cooking and eating
and sleeping are so damp and foul they're not fit to put dogs in. You've got
some blocks with a density of over five hundred to the acre, and your average
density is considerably over a hundred."
"Are things any worse than in any other manufacturing city?" asked Ditmar.
"That isn't the point," said Siddons. "The point is that they're bad, they're
dangerous, they're inhuman. If you could go into these tenements as I have
done and see the way some of these people live, it would make you sick the
Poles and Lithuanians and Italians especially. You wouldn't treat cattle that
way. In some households of five rooms, including the kitchen, I found as many
as fourteen, fifteen, and once seventeen people living. You've got an alarming
infant death-rate."
"Isn't it because these people want to live that way?" Ditmar inquired. "They
actually like it, they wouldn't be happy in anything but a pig-sty--they had
'em in Europe. And what do you expect us to do? Buy land and build flats for
them? Inside of a month they'd have all the woodwork stripped off for
kindling, the drainage stopped up, the bathtubs filled with ashes. I know,
because it's been tried."
Tilted back in his chair, he blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, and his
eyes sought Janet's. She avoided them, resenting a little the assumption of
approval she read in them. Her mind, sensitive to new ideas, had been keenly
stimulated as she listened to Siddons, who began patiently to dwell once more
on the ill effect of the conditions he had discovered on the welfare of the
entire community. She had never thought of this. She was surprised that
Ditmar should seem to belittle it. Siddons was a new type in her experience.
She could understand and to a certain extent maliciously enjoy Ditmar's growing
exasperation with him; he had a formal, precise manner of talking, as though he
spent most of his time presenting cases in committees: and in warding off
Ditmar's objections he was forever indulging in such maddening phrases as,
"Before we come to that, let me say a word just here." Ditmar hated words.
His outbursts, his efforts to stop the flow of them were not unlike the futile
charges of a large and powerful animal harassed by a smaller and more agile
one. With nimble politeness, with an exasperating air of deference to Ditmar's
opinions, Mr. Siddons gave ground, only to return to the charge; yet, despite a
manner and method which, when contrasted to Ditmar's, verged on the ludicrous,
Mr. Siddons had a force and fire of his own, nervous, almost fanatical: when he
dwelt on the misery he had seen, and his voice trembled from the intensity of
his feeling, Janet began to be moved. It was odd, considering the struggle for
existence of her own family, that these foreigners had remained outside the
range of her sympathy.
"I guess you'll find," Ditmar had interrupted peremptorily, "I guess you'll
find, if you look up the savings banks statistics, these people have got
millions tucked away. And they send a lot of it to the other side, they go
back themselves, and though they live like cattle, they manage to buy land.
Ask the real estate men. Why, I could show you a dozen who worked in the mills
a few years ago and are capitalists to-day."
"I don't doubt it, Mr. Ditmar," Siddons gracefully conceded. "But what does it
prove? Merely the cruelty of an economic system based on ruthless competition.
The great majority who are unable to survive the test pay the price. And the
community also pays the price, the state and nation pay it. And we have this
misery on our consciences. I've no doubt you could show me some who have grown
rich, but if you would let me I could take you to families in desperate want,
living in rooms too dark to read in at midday in clear weather, where the
husband doesn't get more than seven dollars a week when the mills are running
full time, where the woman has to look out for the children and work for the
lodgers, and even with lodgers they get into debt, and the woman has to go into
the mills to earn money for winter clothing. I've seen enough instances of
this kind to offset the savings bank argument. And even then, when you have a
family where the wife and older children work, where the babies are put out to
board, where there are three and four lodgers in a room, why do you suppose
they live that way? Isn't it in the hope of freeing themselves ultimately from
these very conditions? And aren't these conditions a disgrace to Hampton and
America?"
"Well, what am I to do about it?" Ditmar demanded.
"I see that these operatives have comfortable and healthful surroundings in the
mill, I've spent money to put in the latest appliances. That's more than a
good many mills I could mention attempt."
"You are a person of influence, Mr. Ditmar, you have more influence than any
man in Hampton. You can bring pressure to bear on the city council to enforce
and improve the building ordinances, you can organize a campaign of public
opinion against certain property owners."
"Yes," retorted Ditmar, "and what then? You raise the rents, and you won't get
anybody to live in the houses. They'll move out to settlements like Glendale
full of dirt and vermin and disease and live as they're accustomed to. What
you reformers are actually driving at is that we should raise wages--isn't it?
If we raised wages they'd live like rats anyway. I give you credit for
sincerity, Mr. Siddons, but I don't want you to think I'm not as much
interested in the welfare of these people as you and the men behind you. The
trouble is, you only see one side of this question. When you're in my
position, you're up against hard facts. We can't pay a dubber or a drawing
tender any more than he's worth, whether he has a wife or children in the mills
or whether he hasn't. We're in competition with other mills, we're in
competition with the South. We can't regulate the cost of living. We do our
best to make things right in the mills, and that's all we can do. We can't
afford to be sentimental about life. Competition's got to be the rule, the
world's made that way. Some are efficient and some aren't. Good God, any man
who's had anything to do with hiring labour and running a plant has that
drummed into him hard. You talk about ordinances, laws--there are enough laws
and ordinances in this city and in this state right now. If we have any more
the mills will have to shut down, and these people will starve--all of 'em."
Ditmar's chair came down on its four legs, and he flung his cigar away. "Send
me a copy of your survey when it's published. I'll look it over."
"Well, what do you think of the nerve of a man like that?" Ditmar exploded,
when Mr. Siddons had bowed himself out. "Comes in here to advise me that it's
my business to look out for the whole city of Hampton. I'd like to see him up
against this low-class European labour trying to run a mill with them. They're
here one day and there the next, they don't know what loyalty is. You've got
to drive 'em--if you give 'em an inch they'll jump at your throat, dynamite
your property. Why, there's nothing I wouldn't do for them if I could depend
on them, I'd build 'em houses, I'd have automobiles to take 'em home. As it
is, I do my best, though they don't deserve it,--in slack seasons I run half
time when I oughtn't to be running at all."
His tone betrayed an effort of self-justification, and his irritation had been
increased by the suspicion in Janet of a certain lack of the sympathy on which
he had counted. She sat silent, gazing searchingly at his face.
"What's the matter?" he demanded. "You don't mean to say you agree with that
kind of talk?"
"I was wondering--" she began.
"What?"
"If you were--if you could really understand those who are driven to work in
order to keep alive?"
"Understand them! Why not?" he asked.
"Because--because you're on top, you've always been successful, you're pretty
much your own master--and that makes it different. I'm not blaming you--in
your place I'd be the same, I'm sure. But this man, Siddons, made me think.
I've lived like that, you see, I know what it is, in a way."
"Not like these foreigners!" he protested.
"Oh, almost as bad," she cried with vehemence, and Ditmar, stopped suddenly in
his pacing as by a physical force, looked at her with the startled air of the
male who has inadvertently touched off one of the many hidden springs in the
feminine emotional mechanism. "How do you know what it is to live in a
squalid, ugly street, in dark little rooms that smell of cooking, and not be
able to have any of the finer, beautiful things in life? Unless you'd wanted
these things as I've wanted them, you couldn't know. Oh, I can understand what
it would feel like to strike, to wish to dynamite men like you!"
"You can!" he exclaimed in amazement. "You!"
"Yes, me. You don't understand these people, you couldn't feel sorry for them
any more than you could feel sorry for me. You want them to run your mills for
you, you don't want to know how they feel or how they live, and you just want
me--for your pleasure."
He was indeed momentarily taken aback by this taunt, which no woman in his
experience had had the wit and spirit to fling at him, but he was not the type
of man to be shocked by it. On the contrary, it swept away his irritation, and
as a revelation of her inner moltenness stirred him to a fever heat as he
approached and stood over her.
"You little--panther!" he whispered. "You want beautiful things, do you?
Well, I'll give 'em to you. I'll take care of you."
"Do you think I want them from you?" she retorted, almost in tears. "Do you
think I want anybody to take care of me? That shows how little you know me. I
want to be independent, to do my work and pay for what I get."
Janet herself was far from comprehending the complexity of her feelings.
Ditmar had not apologized or feigned an altruism for which she would indeed
have despised him. The ruthlessness of his laugh--the laugh of the red-blooded
man who makes laws that he himself may be lawless shook her with a wild appeal.
"What do I care about any others--I want you!" such was its message. And
against this paradoxical wish to be conquered, intensified by the magnetic
field of his passion, battled her self-assertion, her pride, her innate desire
to be free, to escape now from a domination the thought of which filled her
with terror. She felt his cheek brushing against her hair, his fingers
straying along her arm; for the moment she was hideously yet deliciously
powerless. Then the emotion of terror conquered--terror of the unknown--and
she sprang away, dropping her note-book and running to the window, where she
stood swaying.
"Janet, you're killing me," she heard him say. "For God's sake, why can't you
trust me?"
She did not answer, but gazed out at the primrose lights beginning to twinkle
fantastically in the distant mills. Presently she turned. Ditmar was in his
chair. She crossed the room to the electric switch, turning on the flood of
light, picked up her tote-book and sat down again.
"Don't you intend to answer your letters?" she asked.
He reached out gropingly toward the pile of his correspondence, seized the
topmost letter, and began to dictate, savagely. She experienced a certain
exultation, a renewed and pleasurable sense of power as she took down his
words.
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Dwelling Place of Light, V1
by Winston Churchill