Life and Gabriella
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER II
A SECOND START IN LIFE
With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her room, turned
and locked the door after she had entered, and took off her hat and wraps and
put them away in the closet. Her head was still carried high and her eyes were
defiant and dark in the marble-like pallor of her face. Except for her burning
eyes and the scarlet line of her tightly closed lips, she looked as still and as
cold as a statue.
"I'd rather die than have them know that it made any difference," she
thought. "I'd rather die than have them know that I cared." Then sinking into a
chair by the dressing-table, she laid her head on her arm and wept tears, not of
wounded love, but of deep and passionate anger.
She had spoiled her life! Because of her mad and headstrong folly, she had
spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven! Had she been the veriest fool
she couldn't have done worse—she who had thought herself so sensible, so strong,
so efficient! Jane couldn't have done worse, and yet she had always despised
Jane for her weakness. But she had been as weak as Jane, she had been as
unreasonable, she had been as incredibly sentimental and silly. And even in her
folly she had irretrievably failed. She had made her choice, and yet she had not
been able to keep the thing she had chosen. George had tired of her—here was the
sharpest sting—a man had tired of her after a few months—had tired of her while
she was still deeply in love with him. Her humiliation, while she sat there
strangling her sobs, was so intense that it ran in little flames over her body.
At the moment she was not angry with George, she was not even angry with
Florrie. It was as if all the slumbering violence of her nature was aroused to a
burning and relentless hatred of her own weakness. This emotion, which was so
profound, so torrential, in its force that it seemed to shake the depths of her
being, left room for no other feeling—for no other thought in her consciousness.
She had but one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it in its
beginning.
Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while she wiped
her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute gesture. No, she was not
crushed; she would not allow herself even to be hurt. Her lot might be as sordid
as Jane's, but she would make it different by the strength and the effectiveness
of her resistance. She would never submit as Jane submitted; she would never
become, through sheer inertia, a part of the ugliness that enveloped her. Thanks
to the vein of iron in her soul she would never—no, not if she died
fighting—become one of the victims of life.
Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold water; and she
was still drying them before the mirror when the children came in, flushed and
blooming, with their hands in Miss Polly Hatch's. What splendid children they
were, she thought, looking wistfully at their eager faces. Any father, any
mother in the world, might be proud of them. Fanny, the elder, was like an angel
in her white fur coat and pert little cap, with her short golden curls like
bunches of yellow silk on her shoulders, and her blue eyes, as grave as a
philosopher's, beaming softly under her thick jet-black lashes. She was not
particularly bright; she was, for her age, an unconscionable snob; but no one
could deny that she was as beautiful as an angel to look at.
"Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn't," she said coolly as she
examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had put down on the table. "I
needn't kiss people if I don't want to, need I? Archibald doesn't like to kiss
either. He's naughty about it sometimes when ladies ask him to. He doesn't like
scratchin'. Isn't it funny to call kissing, 'scratchin'? He told me Miss Polly
scratched him and he didn't like it. He is afraid of her because she is so ugly.
Why are you ugly, Miss Polly? Couldn't you help it? Did God make you ugly just
for fun? Why doesn't he make everybody pretty? I would if I were God. What is
God's last name? Archibald says it is Walker. Is it Walker, mamma, and how does
Archibald know? Who told him—"
When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with the nurse, she
went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at Archibald, who stood stolidly
at his mother's knee, biting deep bites into a red apple Miss Polly had given
him. He was not a handsome child, even Gabriella admitted that his spectacles
spoiled his appearance; but he was remarkably intelligent for his four years,
and he was so strong and sturdy that he had never had a day's illness in his
life. His face was unusually thoughtful and expressive, and his eyes, in spite
of the disfiguring glasses, were large, brown, and beautiful, with something of
the luminous softness of Cousin Jimmy's. Though she could not remember her
father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him, and Miss
Polly declared, with conviction, that he was "already his living image." Of the
two children, for some obscure reason which she could not define and which was
probably rooted in instinct, Gabriella had the greater tenderness for her son;
and though she denied this preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had
both commented upon it. Even his temper, which was uncontrollable at times,
endeared him to her, and the streak of savage in his nature seemed to awaken
some dim ancestral memories in her brain.
"Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny," said his mother,
after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a minute. While she did
so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her whole universe had dwindled down
to her children. Of all her happiness only her children remained to her.
"Don't want to run," replied Archibald with beaming good humour. In his
passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was possible.
"But Fanny is waiting for you."
"Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton." That was
another of his eccentricities. Just as he had insisted that God's "last name was
Walker," so he had begun of his own accord, and for no visible reason, to call
nurse "Mutton." He was always fitting names of his own invention to persons; and
in his selection he was guided by a principle so obscure that Gabriella had
never been able to discover its origin. Thus his grandmother from the first had
been "Budd," and he had immediately started to call Miss Polly "Pang."
"Don't you want to go back to the Park, Archibald? You must finish your
walk."
"Will the poor boy be there?" He never forgot anything. It was quite probable
that he would inquire for "the poor boy" a year hence.
"Perhaps. You might take him an apple and a penny."
He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his mother's and one
on Miss Polly's knee.
"I'll take Pang to nurse him," he said when he had decided against the
suggestion of the apple and the penny. "He hasn't any nurse, and Fanny wouldn't
like him to have hers. I'll take Pang."
"But Pang isn't a nurse, dear. There, now, run to Fanny. Miss Polly lives so
far away she can't stay very long."
He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother's commands,
stopping only once at the door to ask if "Pang lived as far away as God and
could she manage to get a message to Him about the poor boy needing shoes?"
"I declare I can't make out that child to save my soul," remarked Miss Polly
as he shut the door carefully and ran down the hall to the nursery. "The more I
study him the curiouser he seems to me. If he wan't so quick about some things
you might think his wits were sort of addled—but they ain't, are they? Now,
whatever do you reckon put the notion in his head to call me 'Pang?"
All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with amusement
while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above the ruddy creases in
her cheeks.
"I can't imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself. But don't
you think he is like father, Miss Polly? I love to hear you say so."
"That child? Why, he's the very spit of yo' pa, Gabriella, and there ain't
any two ideas about it. I thought so the very first time I ever saw him, and now
that I come to think of it, it is exactly like yo' pa to be makin' up all kinds
of foolish names out of nothin'. Yo' pa used to call me Poll Parrot, that he
did."
"Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him. She saw him in
the mountains last summer."
"So she told me when I was down home. You ain't looking a bit well,
Gabriella. You've got exactly the look Miss Letty Marshall had before she came
down with heart complaint. The doctors were fussin' over her for weeks before
they could find out what the trouble was, but I said all along it wan't nothin'
in the world but a bruised heart, and sure enough that was just what they found
out was the matter. You ain't had a feelin' of heart burn after you eat, have
you? Sometimes it don't take you that way, though; you just begin to have
palpitations when you go up and down stairs and then you start to wakin' up in
the night with shortness of breath. That's the way my Aunt Lydy had it. You know
I nursed her till she died, and I've seen her get right black in the face when
she stooped to pick up a pin. It's her daughter Lydy that's waiting on old Mrs.
Peyton now. You know Mrs. Peyton was feelin' kind of run down so her son
Arthur—I call him Arthur to his face because I used to sew there when he wan't
more'n knee high—well, Arthur said she'd have to have somebody to wait on her
every minute and she thought she'd rather have Lydy than anybody else because
Lydy was always so handy in a sickroom. That was six months ago, and Lydy's been
stayin' on there ever since. She says there ain't anybody on earth like Mr.
Arthur, and she never could make out why you didn't marry him. He ain't ever had
an eye for anybody but you, and he's got yo' picture—the one in the white
dress—on his bureau and he keeps a rose in a vase before it all the time. That
ain't much like a man, but then there always was a heap of a girl in Arthur in
little ways, wan't there?"
"I wonder why I didn't marry him?" said Gabriella softly; and not until Miss
Polly answered her, was she aware that she had spoken aloud. In her spiritual
reaction from the grosser reality of passion, the delicacy and remoteness of
Arthur's love borrowed the pious and mystic qualities of religious worship. She
had seen the sordid and ugly sides of sex; and she felt now a profound disgust
for the emotion which drew men and women together—for the light in the eyes, the
touch of the lips, the clinging of the hands. Once she had idealized these
things into love itself; now the very memory of them filled her with repulsion.
She still wanted love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it
was liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she had
accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now, utterly
disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life? What is the thing
that really counts, after all? What is the possession that makes all the
striving worth while in the end? At twenty-seven love is over for me, and if
love is over, what remains to fill the rest of my life? There must be something
else—there must be a reality somewhere which is truer, which is profounder, than
love." This, she knew, was the question which neither tradition nor custom could
answer. Religion, perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of
her generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a possible
solution of the problem of life. She wanted substance, facts, experience; she
wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover; and it was just here that religion
hopelessly failed her as a guide. Faith she had had in her cradle—faith in life,
faith in love, faith in herself; and it was faith that had brought her to this
bleak disenchantment of spirit. No, she wanted knowledge now, not faith; she
wanted truth, not illusion.
"Well, you never can tell about a thing like that," Miss Polly was saying in
her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing the pattern of a dress or the
stitching of a seam. "It was feelin', I reckon, and feelin' is one of the things
nobody can count on. But you did mighty well, even if you didn't marry Arthur. I
saw Mr. George downtown yesterday, when I went around to Stern's to match the
edging for a baby dress, and I thought to myself I'd seldom seen a handsomer
piece of flesh than he was. He was walkin' along up Fifth Avenue with Florrie
Spencer—I'll always call her Florrie Spencer I don't care how many times she
marries—and everybody in the street turned right plumb round to look at 'em.
She's prettier than she ever was, ain't she? And such a fit as her dress was!
One of them trailin' black things that fit as tight as wax over the hips and
flares out all round the feet. She was holdin' up her skirts to show her feet, I
reckon, and her collar was so high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her
head to look at Mr. George. But I never saw anybody with more style—no, not if
it was that Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the Sunday papers. I
declare Florrie's waist didn't look much bigger round than the leg of that
table—honestly it didn't—and her hat was perched on a bandeau so high that you
could see the new sort of way she'd gone and had her hair crimped—they call it
Marcellin' up here, don't they?"
"Was she with George?" asked Gabriella indifferently.
"They were goin' to some restaurant or another for tea, I reckon, and they
certainly were a fine-lookin' pair. I wish you could have seen 'em. Not that you
wouldn't have been a match for 'em," she added consolingly. "You and Mr. George
look mighty well when you're together. You're just on a level, and if you could
manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite at the waist, and hold yo'self with
that bend out at the back the way Florrie does, you'd have pretty near as fine a
figure as she has. Ain't it funny," she added irrelevantly, "but I was just
studyin' last night about the way yo' ma used to say that all yo' folks married
badly. I reckon she got that idea along of yo' pa's kin. You don't recollect
much about 'em, but one of yo' pa's brothers married a woman who went clean
deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him. Then there was yo' Cousin Nelly
Harrison—she married badly, or only middlin' well anyway. There certainly was a
lot of 'em when you come to think—not countin' Jane and Mr. Charley, and I can't
help what happens," she concluded sentimentally, "I ain't ever goin' back on Mr.
Charley—not after the way he sent me two loads of coal the winter I was laid up
with rheumatism and couldn't work. Well, it's about time for me to be goin',
Gabriella. If you want me for anything, you just drop me a line to say so.
William's children are gettin' so big, I can come out for the day 'most any time
now, and if William's courtin' goes on all right, I reckon he won't be wantin'
me much longer. He's been waitin' on a young woman right steady for more'n six
months, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if something was to come of it befo'
summer."
"Then you'd go South again, wouldn't you?" There was a wistful sound in
Gabriella's voice as she put the question. Miss Polly was a tiresome person, but
at least she was faithful, and long habit had established a bond of tolerance,
if not of affection, between them. In the last few months Gabriella had grown to
look upon her as the one living association with her childhood, and she was so
lonely that she dreaded to sever the single tie with the past that still
remained to her. "I believe she'd work her fingers to the bone for me, and, of
course, she can't help being so garrulous," she thought.
"I reckon I will, if it comes to that, but I'd hate like anything to leave
you and the children," answered Miss Polly. "I feel somehow as if I belonged up
here with you all, and I've grown real fond of Archibald."
"Yes, I'd hate to give you up," said Gabriella, as she let her go and turned
back again into the room. Her brain had worked quickly while Miss Polly was
talking, and the undercurrent of gossip had helped, rather than retarded, the
clearness and rapidity of her thoughts. All her weakness, all her anger had
passed. She saw the situation without exaggeration and without illusion, for she
had made her decision in the few minutes between the entrance and the departure
of the seamstress. The embittering memories of her life with George were
submerged in the invigorating waves of energy that flooded her being. Her inert
body responded to the miraculous restoration of her spirit; and, while she
walked swiftly from the door to the window, she had a sensation of lightness and
ease as if she had just awakened from a refreshing sleep. For seven years all
the strength of her character had been drained by the supreme function of
motherhood; but now her children had ceased to need the whole of her life, and
she was free to belong at least in part to herself—free to enter unrestricted
into the broader human activities. And, above all, she was free from George. She
had escaped from the humiliating bondage of her marriage; for, since he had
broken the tie between them, she realized with a strange, an almost unnatural,
exhilaration, how little except duty—how little except the bare legal husk of
the marriage contract—still held her to him. She had loved him once, but she
loved him no longer, and she resolved passionately that she would not allow her
life to be spoiled because of a single mistake. Seven years were lost out of her
youth, it was true, but those years had given her her children, and so they were
not wasted in spite of the mistakes she had made, of the shame she had suffered.
Judged simply as a machine she was of greater value at twenty-seven than she had
been at twenty, and a part of this value lay in her deeper knowledge of life.
She had had her adventure, and she was cured forever of adventurous desires. Her
imagination, as well as her body, was firmer, harder, more disciplined than it
had been in her girlhood; and if her vision of the universe was less
sympathetic, it was also less sentimental. The bluest eyes in the world, she
told herself sternly, could not trouble her fancy to-day, nor could the wildest
romance quicken her pulses.
A wagon, filled with blue and white hyacinths, passed by in the street, and
while she watched it, there flashed into her mind, with the swiftness of light,
a memory of the evening when she had broken her engagement to Arthur. All her
life he had loved her, and, but for an accident, she might have married him. If
she had not seen George at Florrie's party—if she had not seen him under a
yellow lantern, with the glow in his eyes, and a dreamy waltz floating from the
arbour of roses at the end of the garden—if this had not happened, she would
have married Arthur instead of George, and her whole life would have been
different. Because of a single instant, because of a chance meeting, she had
wrecked the happiness of three lives. Now, when the bloom had dropped from her
love, it was impossible for her to gather the withered leaves and bare stems in
her hands and find any fragrance about them; it was impossible for her to
understand how or why she had followed so fleeting an impulse. People had told
her that love lasted forever, yet she knew that her emotion for George was so
utterly dead that there was no warmth left in the ashes. It had all been so
vivid once, and now it was as dull and colourless as the dust drifting after the
blue and white hyacinths.
From the trail of dust and the fragrance of the hyacinths, Arthur's face
floated up to her, grave, gentle, and thin-featured, with its look of detached
culture, of nameless distinction. She recalled the colour of his eyes, as clear
and cool as running water, his sensitive lips under the thin, brown moustache,
and his slender, aristocratic hands, with their touch as soft and as tender as a
woman's. "He had intellect—he had culture—I suppose these are the things that
really matter," she thought, for George, she knew, possessed neither of these
qualities. And, as she remembered Arthur, she was stirred, not by tenderness,
but by a passionate gratitude. He had loved her, and by loving her, he had saved
her pride from defeat. In the hour of her deepest humiliation, she found comfort
in the knowledge of his bleeding heart, of his tragic and beautiful loyalty; for
though she was strong enough to live without love, she was not strong enough to
live with the thought that no man had ever loved her.
For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the comforting memory of
Arthur's devotion—with the image of her photograph on his bureau and the single
rose in the vase he kept always before it. "But for an accident I might have
loved him," she said, and the thought of this love which might have been sent a
wave of sweetness to her heart. "I might have loved him and been happy." The
vision was so dangerously beautiful that she put it resolutely away from her,
and told herself, with an effort to be philosophical, that there was no use
whatever in regretting the past, and since love was over for her, she must set
her mind to solve the problem of work. "I've got my life to live," she said with
stoical calmness, "and however bad it is I've nobody to blame for it but
myself."
Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she changed her dress,
and went out to ask for a position as designer, saleswoman, or milliner in the
house of Dinard.
The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with the remains
of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown, nodded her false golden
locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when she heard the explanation of young Mrs.
Fowler's afternoon call.
"But, no, it ees impossible," she protested, forgetting her foreign shrug and
preserving with difficulty the trace of an accent. Then, becoming suddenly
natural as she realized that no immediate profit was to be derived from
affectation, she added decisively, "you have no training, and I have quite as
many salesladies as I need at this season. Not that you are not chic," she
hastened to conclude, "not that you would not in appearance be an adornment to
any establishment."
"I am willing to do anything," said Gabriella, pressing her point with
characteristic tenacity. "I want to learn, you know, I want to learn everything
I possibly can. You yourself told me that I had a natural gift for designing,
and I am anxious to turn it to some account. I believe I can make a very good
milliner, and I want to try."
"But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this? Surely no one
would want to earn her living unless she was obliged to."
For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the knowledge so
patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural suspicion of human
nature. She had got on, as she observed in confidential moments, by believing in
nobody; and this skepticism, which was fundamental and rooted in principle, had
inspired her behaviour not only to her patrons, but to her husband, her
children, her domestic servants, her tradespeople, and the policeman at the
corner. Thirty years ago she had suspected the entire masculine world of amorous
designs upon her person; to-day, secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and
publicly acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of
equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse. And if she
distrusted men, she both distrusted and despised women. She distrusted and
despised them because they were poor workers, because they were idlers by
nature, because they allowed themselves to be cheated, slighted, underpaid,
underfed, and oppressed, and, most of all, she despised them because they were
the victims of their own emotions. Love was all very well, she was accustomed to
observe, as a pleasurable pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit, when it began
to impair the appetite and to affect the quality and the quantity of one's work,
then a serious person would at once contrive to get rid of the passion. And
Madame prided herself with reason upon being a strictly serious person. She had
been through the experience of love innumerable times; she had lost four
husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was still living.
In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained and carpeted
in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes flowering magnificently
from white and gold jardinières, six arrogant young women, in marvellously
fitting gowns of black satin, strolled back and forth all day long, or stood
gracefully, with the exaggerated curve of the period, awaiting possible
customers. Though they were as human within as Madame Dinard—and beneath her
make-up she was very human indeed—nothing so variable as an expression ever
crossed the waxlike immobility of their faces; and while they trailed their
black satin trains over the rich carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and
velvets which covered the white and gold tables, they appeared to float through
an atmosphere of eternal enchantment. Watching them, Gabriella wondered idly if
they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could ever let down those elaborate
and intricate piles of hair. Then she overheard the tallest and most arrogant of
them remark, "I'm just crazy about him, but he's dead broke," and she realized
that they also belonged to the unsatisfied world of humanity.
Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came rustling back, and
sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair, which was too small to contain the
whole of her ample person. Though she had spoken quite sharply at the telephone,
her voice was mellifluous when she attuned it to Gabriella.
"That gown is perfect on you," she remarked in honied accents. "It was one of
my best models last season, and as I said before, Madame, you are so fortunate
as to wear your clothes with a grace." She was urbane, but she was anxious to be
rid of her, this young Mrs. Fowler could see at a glance. "Your head is well set
on your shoulders, and that is rare—very rare! It would surprise you to know how
few women have heads that are well set on their shoulders. Yes, I understand.
You wish to learn, but not to make a living. That is very good, for the only
comfortable way for a woman to make her living is to marry one—a man is the only
perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood. I tell this to my daughter, who
wishes to go on the stage. If you are looking for pleasure, that is different,
but when you talk of a living—well, there is but one way to insure it, and that
is to marry a man who is able to provide it—either as allowance or as alimony.
The best that a woman can do gives her only bread and meat—an existence, not a
living. Only a man can provide one with the essential things—with clothes and
jewels and carriages and trips to Europe. These are the important things in
life, and what woman was ever able to procure these except from a man?"
Her face, so thickly covered with rouge and liquid powder that it was as
expressionless as a mask, turned its hollow eyes on a funeral which was slowly
passing in the street; and though her creed was hardly the kind to fortify one's
spiritual part against the contemplation of death, she surveyed the solemn
procession as tranquilly as any devoted adherent of either religion or
philosophy could have done. Not a shadow passed over her fantastic mockery of
youth as she glanced back at her visitor.
"But you have worked—you have supported yourself," insisted Gabriella with
firmness.
"Myself and six children, to say nothing of three husbands. Yes, I supported
three of my four husbands, but what did I get out of it?" replied Madame,
shrugging her ample shoulders. "What was there in it for me? Since we are
talking freely, I may say that I have worked hard all my life, and I got nothing
out of it that I couldn't have got with much less trouble by a suitable
marriage. Of course this is not for my girls to hear. I don't tell them this,
but it is true nevertheless. Men should do the work of the world, and they
should support women; that is how God intended it, that is according to both
nature and religion; any priest will say as much to you." And she, who had
defied both God and Nature, wagged her false golden head toward the funeral
procession.
"Yet you have been successful. You have built up a good business. The work
has repaid you."
"A woman's work!" She snapped her gouty fingers with a playful gesture. "Does
a woman's work ever repay her? Think of the pleasures I have missed in my
life—the excursions, the theatres, the shows. All these I might have had if I
hadn't shut myself up every day until dark. And now you wish to do this! You
with your youth, with your style, with your husband!"
She protested, she pleaded, she reasoned, but in the end Gabriella won her
point by the stubborn force of her will. Madame would take her for a few weeks,
a few months, a few years, as long as she cared to stay and gave satisfaction.
Madame would have her taught what she could learn, would discover by degrees the
natural gifts and the amount of training already possessed by young Mrs. Fowler.
Young Mrs. Fowler, on the other hand, must "stand around" when required in the
showrooms (it was just here that Gabriella won her victory); she must assist at
the ordering of gowns, at the selections, and while Madame's patrons were
fitted, young Mrs. Fowler must be prepared to assume graceful attitudes in the
background and to offer her suggestions with a persuasive air. Suggestions, even
futile ones, offered in a charming voice from a distinguished figure in black
satin had borne wonderful results in Madame's experience.
"I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler. You may not believe it, but I was once
slenderer than you are—my waist measured only nineteen inches and my bust
thirty-six—just the figure a man most admires. The result was, you see, that I
have had four husbands, though it is true that I supported three of them, and it
is always easy to marry if one provides the support. Men are like that. It is
their nature. Yes, I began that way with little training, but much natural
talent, and a head full of ideas. If one has ideas it is always possible to
become a success, but they are rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches.
And I had charm, though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear.
But I made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of ten,
and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle, but by ideas.
They were once plentiful, and now they are so scarce," she broke off with a sigh
of resignation which seemed to accept every fact of experience except the fact
of age. "It was a hard life, but it was life, after all. One is not put here to
be contented, or one would dread death too much for the purpose of God." In
spite of her uncompromising materialism, she was not without an ineradicable
streak of superstition which she would probably have called piety.
"I am ready to begin at once—to-morrow," said Gabriella, and she added
without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive feeling that to explain a
statement is to weaken it, "and I should like to be called by my maiden name
while I am here—just Mrs. Carr, if you don't mind."
To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with sincerity. For her
own part she would have preferred to speak of her saleswoman as young Mrs.
Fowler; but she reflected comfortably that many of her patrons would know young
Mrs. Fowler by sight at least, and to the others she might conveniently drop a
word or two in due season. To drop a word or two would provide entertainment
throughout the length of a fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery of the
situation had its charm for the romantic Irish strain in her blood. The prospect
of securing both entertainment and mystery at the modest expenditure of fifteen
dollars a week impressed her as very good business, for she combined in the
superlative degree the opposite qualities of romance and economy. To be sure,
except for the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she provided, young
Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest salary; but there was,
on the other hand, a remote possibility that she might turn out to be gifted,
and Madame would then be able to use her inventiveness to some purpose before
the gifted one discovered her value. In any case, Madame was at liberty to
discharge her with a day's notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for
three months even should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a positive
talent for dressmaking. And if young Mrs. Fowler could do nothing else, Madame
reflected as they parted, she could at least receive customers and display
models with an imposing, even an aristocratic, demeanour.
To receive Madame's customers and display Madame's models were the last
occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able to penetrate Madame's
frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect her prudent schemes for the future;
but the girl was sick of her dependence on George's father, and, in the revolt
of her pride, she would have accepted any honest work which would have enabled
her to escape from the insecurity of her position. Of her competence to earn a
living, of her ability to excel in any work that she undertook, of the
sufficiency and soundness of her resources, she was as absolutely assured as she
had been when she entered the millinery department of Brandywine & Plummer.
If Madame, starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native
abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the capable and
industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with the certainty of
moderate success. It was not, when one considered it, the life which one would
have chosen, but who, since the world began, had ever lived exactly the life of
his choice? Many women, she reflected stoically, were far worse off than she,
since she started not only with a modicum of business experience (for surely the
three months with Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a
knowledge of the world and a social position which she had found to be fairly
marketable. That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and
undistinguished applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did
not for an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of
ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her marriage to
George.
In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats ornamented
the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to inspect, with a critical
eye, the dingy array. "I wonder what makes them buy so many they can't sell?"
she said half aloud to the model at which she was gazing. "Nobody would wear
these hats—certainly nobody who could afford to buy Parisian models. I could
design far better hats than these, I myself, and if I were the head of the house
I should never have accepted any of them, no matter who bought them. I suppose,
after all, it's the fault of the buyer, but it's a waste—it's not economy."
Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich feather from
the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed the august French name
emblazoned in gold on the lining. "Everything isn't good that comes from Paris,"
she thought, with a shrug which was worthy of Madame at her best. "Why, I
wonder, can't Americans produce 'ideas' themselves? Why do we always have to
depend on the things the French send over to us? Half the hats and gowns Madame
has aren't really good, and yet she makes people pay tremendous prices for
things she knows are bad and undistinguished. All that ought to be changed, and
if I ever succeed, if I ever catch on, I am going to change it." An idea, a
whole flock of ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on
the green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew would
shortly be "marked down," august French name included, from forty to fifteen and
from fifteen to five dollars. Her constructive imagination was at work
recreating the business, and she saw it in fancy made over and made right from
the bottom—she saw Madame's duplicity succeeded by something of Brandywine &
Plummer's inflexible honesty, and the flimsy base of the structure supplanted by
a solid foundation of credit. For she had come often enough to Dinard's to
discern the slipshod and unsystematic methods beneath the ornate and extravagant
surface. Her naturally quick powers of observation had detected at a glance
conditions of which the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware. To sell gowns and
hats at treble their actual value, to cajole her customers into buying what they
did not want and what did not suit them, to give inferior goods, inferior
workmanship, inferior style wherever they would be accepted, and to get always
the most money for the least possible expenditure of ability, industry, and
honesty—these were the fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered,
beneath Madame's flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity. Brandywine &
Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not fashionable in the way
that the establishment of a New York dressmaker and milliner must be
fashionable; but the standard of excellence in all things excepting style was
far higher in the old Broad Street house in the middle 'nineties than it was at
Madame Dinard's during the early years of the new century. Quality had been
essential in every hat that went from Brandywine & Plummer's millinery
department; and Gabriella, deriving from a mother who worked only in fine linen,
rejected instinctively the cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior. She had heard a
customer complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame had made
to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out, she had decided
that the most prosperous house in New York could not survive many incidents of
that deplorable sort. To be sure, such material would not have been supplied to
Mrs. Pletheridge, or even to the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was
always particular and very often severe; but here again, since this cheap hat
had been sold at a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame's business
philosophy.
On the whole, there were many of Madame's methods which might be improved;
and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway into the street,
she had convinced herself that she was preëminently designed by Nature to
undertake the necessary work of improvement. The tawdriness she particularly
disliked—the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the artificial
rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets
which were not taken up in the summer.
While she was crossing the street a man joined her; and glancing up as soon
as she was clear of the traffic, she saw that it was Judge Crowborough. In the
last seven years her dislike for him had gradually disappeared, and though she
had never found him attractive, she had grown to accept the general estimate of
his character and ability. A man so gifted ought not to be judged as severely as
poorer or less actively intelligent mortals; and as long as other men did not
judge him, she felt no inclination to usurp so unfeminine a prerogative. He had
always been kind to her, and she understood now from his manner that he meant to
be still kinder. It occurred to her at once that he knew of George's infatuation
for Florrie, and that he was chivalrously extending to George's wife a sympathy
which he would probably have withheld in such circumstances from his own. Had it
been possible she would have liked to explain to him that in her case his
sympathy was not needed; but she realized, with resentment, that one of her most
galling burdens would be the wasted pity which her unfortunate situation would
inspire in the friends of the family. Social conventions made it impossible for
her to tell the world, including Judge Crowborough, that George's infidelity was
a matter of slight importance to her, since it struck only at her pride, not at
her heart. Her pride, it is true, had suffered sharply for an hour; but so
superficial was the wound that the distraction of seeking work had been almost
sufficient to heal it.
"A most extraordinary day for January," remarked the judge as they reached a
corner. "You hardly need your furs, the air is so mild."
Overhead small, birdlike clouds drifted in flocks across a sky of changeable
brightness, and the wind, blowing past the tray of a flower vendor at the
corner, was faintly scented with violets. It was one of those rare days when
happiness seems as natural as the wind or the sunlight, when the wildest dreams
appear not too wild to come true in reality, when one hopes by instinct and
believes, not with the reason, but with the blood. To Gabriella, forgetting her
humiliation, it was a day when life for the sake of the mere act of living—when
life, in spite of disappointment and loss and treachery and shame, was enough to
set the heart bounding with happiness. For she was one of those who loved life,
not for what it brought to her of pleasure, but for what it was in itself.
"Yes, it is a lovely afternoon," she answered, and added impulsively: "It is
good to be alive, isn't it?" She had forgotten George, but even if she had
remembered him, it would have made little difference. For six years, not for a
few hours, George had been lost to her; and in six years one has time to forget
almost anything.
The judge's answer to this was a look which penetrated like a flash of light
into her brain. By this light she read all that he thought of her, and she saw
that he was divided between admiration of her spirit and an uneasy suspicion of
its perfect propriety. Tier offence, she knew, was that, being by all the logic
of facts an unhappy wife, she should persist so stubbornly in denying the
visible evidence of her unhappiness. Had her denial been merely a pretence, it
would, according to his code, have appeared both natural and womanly; but the
conviction that she was sincere, that she was not lying, that she was not even
tragically "keeping up an appearance," increased the amazement and suspicion
with which he had begun to regard her. He walked on thoughtfully at her side,
fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray moustache, and bending his sleepy
gaze on the pavement. When he was thinking, he always looked as if he were
falling asleep, and he seldom made a remark, even to a woman, without thinking
it over. Into his small steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled
puffs of skin, there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors'
meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his loose mouth
under the drooping ends of his moustache. His ungainly body, with its curious
suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning power, straightened suddenly as if in
reaction from certain destructive processes within his soul. Though he was only
just passing his prime, he had lived so rapidly that he bore already the marks
of age in his face and figure.
"Yes, it's good to be alive," he assented, for there was nothing in either
his philosophy or his experience to contradict this simple statement. "I've
always maintained, by the way, that happiness is the chief of the virtues."
For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her candid eyes to
his, she answered: "Happiness and courage. I put courage first—before
everything."
Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and the slightly
cynical smile—the smile of one who has examined everything and believes in
nothing—fade from his lips. She had touched some chord deep down within him of
which he had long ago forgotten even the existence—some echoed harmony of what
had been perhaps the living faith of his youth.
"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what it was that
he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.
At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments, holding her hand
in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on her. The suspicion and the
cynicism had gone from his face, and she understood all at once why people still
trusted him, still liked him, notwithstanding his reputation, notwithstanding
even his repulsiveness. He was all that—he was immoral, he was repulsive—but he
was something else also—he was human.
When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old atmosphere had
returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old horror of impending
calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to mount the steps, to go to her
room, to inquire in a natural voice for the children. It was imaginary, of
course, she assured herself, but it was very vivid as long as it lasted. Then
she noticed that the usual order of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang,
Burrows came, with a hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her waiting. Mrs.
Fowler's fur scarf hung on the massive oak post of the staircase; the cards in
the little tray on the hail table were scattered about; and the petals of a
yellow chrysanthemum were strewn over the carpet.
Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared embarrassed when she
questioned him, and spurred by a sharp foreboding, she ran up the stairs to her
mother-in-law's sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling voice wailed in a tone
of remonstrance:
"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"
"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"
"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he has just gone
out again. I have never seen him so deeply moved—so—so indignant—" Mrs. Fowler
broke off, bit her lip nervously, and paused while she tried to swallow her
sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side, and in her hands she held a pair of
half-soiled white gloves, which she smoothed out on her knee, as if she were
hardly aware of what she was doing. In her blue eyes, so like George's, there
was an agonizing terror and suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the
lips; and this pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows
beneath her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.
"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she asked
gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear it."
"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He—George, I mean—had given
him his promise not to see Florrie again, and it seems that he—he broke it.
There has been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that Archibald could be so
angry. He was terrible—and he is ill anyway and in great trouble about his
financial affairs. I have been worried to death about him for weeks. He says
things are going so badly downtown that he can't stave off the crash any longer,
and now—this—this—" She broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her
hands, which even in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had
been manicured since the morning. "George has gone—we think he has gone off with
Florrie," she cried, "and he—he will never come back as long as Archibald
lives."
She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts of her
nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband. It was not that she
did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not sympathize; but the fact remained
that Gabriella was only George's wife to her, while George was flesh of her
flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul. Though her choice was not deliberate,
though it was unconscious and instinctive—nevertheless, she had chosen. At the
crucial moment instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not
with her judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being.
Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to secure
George's happiness by sacrificing the right to the wrong, she would have made
that sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and without regret.
"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured face. "Oh,
Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"
While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to enter, and
listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs, the heavy, laborious
tread of a man who is uncertain of his strength, she remembered vividly, as if
she were living it over again, the night she had waited by her fire to tell
George that his first child was to be born. Many thoughts passed through her
mind, and at last these thoughts resolved themselves into a multitude of
crowding images—all distinct and vivid images of George's face. She saw his face
as she had first seen and loved it, with its rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes,
like wells of romance she had once thought, its look of poetry and emotion which
had covered so much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw him as he had
looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after her first
child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted from her that
morning—flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but still boyish, still charming.
Well, it was all over now. It had been over so long that she had even ceased to
regret it—for she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for
a lifetime.
The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the first sight of
his face brought home to her with a shock the discovery that he was the one of
them who had suffered most. He looked an old man; his gentle scholar's face had
taken an ashen hue; and his eyes were the eyes of one who has only partially
recovered from the blow that has prostrated him.
"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand on her
shoulder.
She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself, but for him.
"You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly. "You mustn't take it like
this. You must try to get over it. For all our sakes you must try to get over
it." The irony of it all—that she should be consoling her husband's father for
her husband's desertion of her—did not appear to her until long afterwards. At
the time she thought only that she—that somebody—must make the tragedy easier
for him to bear.
"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly. "Let me give you
a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk."
There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new deference.
For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown his strength to her,
not his gentleness; for the first time he had opposed his will to hers in the
cause of justice, and he had conquered her. In spite of her anguish, something
of the romantic expectancy of her first love had returned to her heart and it
showed in her softened voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which
held a pathetic and startled brightness. He had triumphed in honour; and if her
defeat had not involved George, she could almost have gloried in the
completeness of her surrender.
He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to his
surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered over him with the
touching solicitude of one who is living for the moment in the shadow of memory.
While he sipped the wine, he waited until Burrows' footsteps had passed down the
staircase, and then said with his usual quietness:
"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't tell you while
you were so worried about George, but there is something else—"
She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of relief.
"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh, Archibald, I don't
care—I don't care!"
"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and—" He broke off as if
he were too tired to go on, and added slowly after a moment: "I am too old to
begin again. I'd like to go back home—to go back to the South for my old age.
Yes, I'm old."
But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about his neck and
her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never cared," she said in a
voice that was almost exultant. "We can be happy on so little—happier than we've
ever been in our lives—just you and I to grow old together. We can go home to
Virginia—to some small place and be happy. Happiness costs so little."
Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and passing her room,
noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the children were
sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner under a dark shade, and the
nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn, was lying on the table in the circle of
green light, which was as soft as the glimmer of a glow-worm in a thicket. In
their two little beds, separated by a strip of white rug, the children were
sleeping quietly, with a wonderful freshness, like the dew of innocence, on
their faces. Frances lay on her back, very straight and prim even in sleep, with
the sheet folded neatly under her dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast,
and her golden curls spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her
miniature features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite prettiness
of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal loveliness there was
something gnome-like in the dark sturdiness of Archibald, who slept on his side,
with his fists pressed tightly under the pillow, and the frown produced by
near-sightedness still wrinkling his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he
showed already the promise of character in his face, and his personality, which
was remarkably developed for a child of his age, possessed a singular charm. He
was the kind of child people describe as "unlike other children." His
temperament was made up of surprises, and this quality of unexpectedness
inspired in his mother a devotion that was almost tragic in its intensity. Never
had she loved the normal Frances Evelyn as she loved Archibald.
As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green light, a wave
of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them suddenly as fatherless,
impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on her untried labour for their lives
and their happiness. Then, before the anxiety could take possession of her mind,
she put it from her, and whispered, "Courage!" as she turned away and went out
of the room.