Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter?

III

Sure an' I'd like to die meself if dyin' wasn't so costly," remarked Mrs. Spillini, as she gazed with tear-stained eyes at the little body that occupied the only chair in the dismal room. "Do the best we kin, buryin' the baby is goin' to cost more than we made all winter out o' all three boarders. Havin' the baby cost a dreadful lot altogether, an' now it's dyin's a dreadful pull agin."

Gertrude Foster opened her Russian leather purse and Mrs. Spillini's eyes brightened shrewdly. There was no need for the hesitancy and choice of words that gave the young girl so much care and pain. Familiarity with all the mean and gross of life from childhood until one is the mother of six living and four dead children, does not leave the finest edge of sentiment and pride upon the poverty-cursed victims of fate.

"If you would allow me to leave a mere trifle of money for you to use for the baby, I don't – it is only – " began Gertrude; but the ready hand had reached out for the money and a quick "Thanky mum; much obliged" had ended the transaction.

"I shall not tell mamma that", thought Gertrude, and she did not look at John Martin. It was her first glimpse into a grade of life to which all things, even birth and death, take on a strictly commercial aspect; where not only the edge of sentiment is dulled by dire necessity, but where the sentiment itself is buried utterly beneath the incrustations of an ignorance that is too dumb and abject to learn, and a poverty that is too insistent to recognize its own ignorance and degradation.

"Won't you set down?" inquired Mrs. Spillini, as with a sudden movement she slid the small corpse onto the floor under the edge of the table. "I'd a' ast you before, but – "

"O, don't!" exclaimed the girl; but before her natural impulse to stoop and gather up the small bundle had found action possible, John Martin had placed it on the table.

"Oh, Lord; don't!" exclaimed the woman, in sudden dismay. "The boarders'd kick if they was to see it there. Boarders is different from the family. We could ate affen the table afther, but boarders – boarders'd kick."

"Could – do you think of anything else we could do for you?" inquired Gertrude, faintly, as she held open the door and tried to think she was not dizzy and sick from the dreadful, polluted air, and the shock of the revelation, with all that it implied, before her.

Four dirty faces, and as many ragged bodies, were too close to her for comfort. There was a vile stew cooking on the stove. The air was heavy and foul with it Gertrude distinctly felt the greasy moisture on her kid gloves as they touched each other.

"No, I don't know's they's anything more you can do," replied the passive, hopeless wreck of what it was almost sacrilege to call womanhood. "I don't know's they's anything more you could do unless you could let the boarders come in now. They ain't got but a little over ten minutes to eat in an' dinner's ready," she replied, as she lifted the pot of steaming stuff into the middle of the table and laid two tin plates, a large knife and a bunch of iron forks and spoons beside it.

"Turn that chair to the wall," she added sharply to one of the children, who hastened to obey the command. "They'll all have to stand up to it this time. I ain't a goin' to shift that baby round no more till it's buried, now that I kin bury it. Take this side of the table, Pete. I don't feel like eatin.' You kin have my place 'n the ole man ain't here. Let go of that tin cup, you trillin' young one. All the coffee they is, is in that. Have a drink, Mike?" she asked, passing the coveted cup to the second boarder. Gertrude was half-way down the dark hallway, and John Martin held her arm firmly lest she step into some unseen trap or broken place in the floor.

When they reached the street door she turned to him with wide eyes.

"Great God," she moaned, "and people go to church and pray and thank God – and collect rent from such as they! Men offer premiums to mothers and fathers for large families of children – to be brought up like that? In a world where that is possible! Oh, I think it is wicked, wicked, wicked, to allow it – any of it – all of it! How can you?"

John Martin looked hopeless and helpless.

"I don't," he said, in pathetic self-defense, feeling somehow that the blame was personal.

"Oh, I don't mean you!" she exclaimed, almost impatiently. "I mean all who know it – who have known and understood it all along. How could men allow it? How dared they? And to think of encouraging such people to marry – to bring into a life like that such swarms of helpless children. Oh, the sin and shame and outrage of it!"

John Martin was dazed that she should look upon it as she did. He was surprised that she spoke so openly. He did not fully comprehend the power and force of real conviction and feeling overtaken in a sincere and fearlessly frank nature by such a knowledge for the first time.

"I should not have brought you here," he said, feebly, as they entered the waiting carriage which her mother had insisted she should take if she would go "slumming," as she had expressed it.

She turned an indignant face upon him.

"Why?" she demanded.

He tried to say something about a shock to her nerves, and such sights and knowledge being not for women.

"I had begun to feel that he respected me – believed in me – wanted, in truth and not merely in name, to share life with me," she thought, "but he does not: it is all a sham. He wants someone who shall not share life with him – not even his mental life."

"You would come here with papa, would you not?" she asked, presently. "You would talk over, look at, think of the problems of life with him," – her voice began to tremble.

"Certainly," he said, "but that is different. It – "

"Yes, it is different; quite different. You love papa, and it would be a pain to you to keep your mental books locked up from him. You respect papa, and you would not be able to live a life of pretense with him. You – "

"Gertrude! Oh, darling! I love you. I love you. You know that," he said, grasp ing both her hands and covering them with kisses. She snatched them away, and covered her face with them to hide the tears which were a surprise and shock to herself.

"I should not have taken her there," he thought. "I'm a great fool."

He did not at all comprehend the girl's point of view, and she resented his. He could not imagine why, and her twenty years of inexperience in handling such a view of life as had suddenly grown up within her, made her unable to express quite fully why she did resent his assumption that she should not be allowed to use her heart or brain beyond the limits set for their exercise by conventional theory. She could not express in words why she felt insulted and outraged in her self-respect that he should assume that life was and should be led by her, upon a distinctly different and narrower plane than his own. She knew that she could not accept his explanation, that it was his intense love that wished to shield her from knowledge of all that was ugly – of all the deeper and sadder meanings of human experience; but she felt unequal to making him understand by any words at her command how far from her idea of an exalted love such an assumption was.

That he should sincerely believe that as a matter of course much that was and should be quite common in his own life should be kept from, covered up, blurred into indistinction to her, came to her with a shock too sudden and heavy for words. She had built an exalted ideal of absolute mental companionship between those who loved. She had always thought that one day she should pass through the portals of some vast building by the side of a husband to whom all within was new as it would be to her. She had fancied that neither spoke; that both read the tablets of architecture – and of human legend on every face – so nearly alike that by a glance of the eye she could say to him, "I know what you are thinking of all this. It stirs such or such a memory. It strikes the chord that holds these thoughts or those." But she read as plainly now that this man who thought he loved her, whom she had grown to feel she might one day love, had no such conception of a union of lives. To him marriage would mean a physical possession of a toy more or less valuable, more or less to be cherished or to be set under a glass case, whenever his real life, his real thoughts, his deeper self were stirred. These were to be kept for men – his mentally developed equals. She understood full well that if she could have said this to him he would have been shocked, would have resented such a contemptuous interpretation of what he truly believed to be a wholly respectful love, offered upon wholly respectful terms. But to her, it seemed the mere tossing down of a filbert to a pretty kitten, that it might amuse him for a few moments with its graceful antics. When he tired of the kitten, or bethought him of the serious duties of life, he could turn the key and count on finding the amusing little creature to play with again next day in case he cared to relax himself with a sight of its gambols. She resented such a view of the value of her life. She was humiliated and indignant. The perfectly apparent lack of comprehension on his part of any lapse of respect in attitude toward her, the entire unconsciousness of the insult to her whole nature, in his assumption of a divine right of individual growth and development to which she had no claim, stung her beyond all power of speech. The very fact that he had no comprehension of the affront himself, added to it its utterly hopeless feature. The love of a man offered on such terms is an insult, she said, over and over to herself; but aloud she said nothing.

She had heard, vaguely, through her tumult of feeling, his terms of endearment, his appeals to her tenderness and – alas! unfortunately for him – his apologies for having taken her to such a place. She became distinctly aware of these latter first and it steadied her. They had reached Washington Square.

"Yes, that revelation in Mulberry Street was a horrible shock to me," she said, looking at him for the first time since they had entered the carriage; "but, do you know, I think there are more shocking things than even that done in the name of love every day – things as heartless and offensively uncomprehending of what is fine and true in life as that wretched woman's conduct with the lifeless form of her baby."

He recognized a hard ring in her voice, but her eyes looked kind and gentle.

"How do you mean?" he asked, touching her hand as it lay on her empty purse in her lap.

"I don't believe I could ever make you understand what I mean, we are so hopelessly far apart," she said, a little sadly. "That an explanation is necessary – that is the hopeless part. That that poor woman did not comprehend that her conduct and callousness were shocking —that was the hopeless part. To make you understand what I mean would be like making her understand all the hundreds of awful things that her conduct meant to us. If it is not in one's nature to comprehend without words, then words are useless."

His vehement protests stirred her sympathy again.

"You say that love brings people near together. Do you know I am beginning to think that nothing could be a greater calamity than that? Drawn together by a love that rests on a physical basis for those who refuse to allow it root in a common sympathy and a community of thought it must fail sooner or later. A humbled acceptance of the crumbs of her husband's life, or a resentful endurance of it, may result from the accursed faithfulness or the pitiful dependence of wives, but surely – surely no greater calamity could befall her and no worse fate lie in wait for him."

Her lover stared at her, pained and puzzled. When they reached her door he grasped her hand.

"I thought you loved me last night, and I went away in an ecstasy of hope. Today – "

"Perhaps I do love you," she said; "but I do not respect you, because you do not respect me." He made a quick sound of dissent, but she checked him. "You do not respect womanhood; you only patronize women – you only patronize me. I could not give you a right to do that for life. Good-bye. Don't come in this time. Wait. Let us both think."

"Let us both think," he repeated, as he started down the street. "Think! Think what? I had no idea that Gertrude would be so utterly unreasonable. It is a girl's whim. She'll get over it, but it is deucedly uncomfortable while it lasts."

"Mamma," said Gertrude, when she reached her mother's pretty room on the third floor. "Mamma, do you suppose if a girl really and truly loved a man that she would stop to think whether he had a high or a low estimate of womanhood?"

The girl's mother looked up startled. She was quite familiar with what she had always termed the "superhumanly aged remarks" of her daughter, but the new turn they had taken surprised her.

"I don't believe she would, Gertrude. Why? Are you imagining yourself in love with some man who is not chivalrous toward women?" Mrs. Foster smiled at the mere idea of her daughter caring much for any man. She thought she had observed her too closely to make a mistake in the matter.

Gertrude evaded the first question.

"I once heard a very brilliant man say – what I did not then understand – that chivalry was always the prelude to imposition. I believe I don't care very especially for chivalry. Fair play is better, don't you think so?" She did not pause for a reply, but began taking off her long gloves.

"Which would you like best from papa, flattery or square-toed, honest truth?"

Her mother laughed.

"Gertrude, you are perfectly ridiculous. The institution of marriage, as now established, wouldn't hang together ten minutes if your square-toed, honest truth, as you call it, were to be tried between husbands and wives. Most wives are frightened nearly to death for fear they will become acquainted with the truth some day. They don't want it. They were not – built for it." Gertrude began to move about the room impatiently. Her mother smiled at her and went on: "Don't you look at it that way? No? Well, you are young yet. Wait until you've been married three years – "

The girl turned upon her with an indignant face. Then suddenly she threw her arms about her mother's neck.

"Poor mamma, poor mamma," she said. "Didn't you find out for three years after? How did you bear it? I should have committed suicide. I – "

"Oh, no you wouldn't!" said her mother, with a bitter little inflection. "They all talk that way. Girls all feel so, if they know enough to feel at all – to think at all. They rage and wear out their nerves – as you are doing now, heaven knows why – and the beloved husband calls a doctor and buys sweets and travels with the precious invalid, and never once suspects that he is at the bottom of the whole trouble. It never dawns upon him that what she is dying for is a real and loyal companionship, such as she had fondly dreamed of, and not at all for sea air. It doesn't enter his mind that she feels humiliated because she knows that a great part of his life is a sealed book to her, and that he wishes to keep it so."

She paused, and her daughter stroked her cheek. This was indeed a revelation to the girl. She had been wholly deceived by her mother's gay manner all these years. She was taking herself sharply to task now.

"But by and by when she succeeds in killing all her self-respect; when she makes up her mind that the case is hopeless, and that she must expect absolutely no frankness in life beyond the limits of conventional usage prescribed for purblind babies; after she arrives at the point where she discovers that her happiness is a pretty fiction built on air foundation – well, daughter, after that she – she strives to murder all that is in her beyond and above the petty simpleton she passes for – and she succeeds fairly well, doesn't she?"

There was a cynical smile on her lips, and she made an elaborate bow to her daughter.

"Oh, mamma, I beg your pardon!" exclaimed the girl, almost frightened. "I truly beg your pardon! If – you – I – "

Her mother looked steadily out of the window. Then she said, slowly, "How did you come to find all this out before you were married, child? Have I not done a mother's duty by you in keeping you in ignorance, so far as I could, of all the struggles and facts of life – of – "

The bitter tone was in her voice again. Gertrude was hurt by it, it was so full of self-reproach mingled with self-contempt. She slipped her arm about her mother's waist.

"Don't, mamma," she said. "Don't blame yourself like that. I'm sure you have always done the best possible – the – "

Her mother laughed, but the note was not pleasant.

"Yes, I always did the lady-like thing, – nothing. I floated with the tide. Take my advice, daughter, – float. If you don't, you'll only tire yourself trying to swim against a tide that is too strong for you and – and nothing will come of it. Nothing at all." The girl began to protest with the self-confidence of youth, but her mother went on. She had taken the bit in her teeth to-day and meant to run the whole race.

"Do you suppose I did not know about the Spillini family? About the thousands of Spillini families? Do you suppose I did not know that the rent of ten such families – their whole earnings for a year – would be spent on – on a pretty inlaid prayer-book like this?" She tapped the jeweled cross and turned it over on her lap. The girl's eyes were wide and almost fear-filled as she studied her handsome care-free mother in her new mood.

"Did you really suppose I did not know that this gem on the top of the cross is dyed with the life-blood of some poor wretch, and that this one represents the price of the honor of a starving girl?" She shivered, and the girl drew back. "Did you fancy me as ignorant and as – happy – as I have talked? Don't you know that it is the sole duty of a well-bred woman to be ignorant – and happy? Otherwise she is morbid!" She pronounced the word affectedly, and then laughed a bitter little laugh.

"Don't, mamma," said the girl, again. "I quite understand now, quite – " She laid her head on her mother's bosom and was silent. Presently she felt a tear drop on her hair. She put her hand up to her mother's cheek and stroked it.

"The game went against you, didn't it, mamma?" she said softly. "And you were not to blame." She felt a little shiver run over her mother's frame and a sob crushed back bravely that hurt her like a knife. Presently two hands lifted the girl's face.

"You don't despise me, daughter? In my position the price of a woman's peace is the price of her own self-respect. I did not lose the game. I gave it up!"

Gertrude kissed her on eyes and lips. "Poor mamma, poor mamma," she said softly, "I wonder if I shall do the same!" For the first time since she entered the room, the daughter appeared to appeal for, rather than to offer, sympathy and strength. Her mother was quick to respond.

"If you never learn to love anyone very much, daughter, you may hope to keep your self-respect. If you do you will sell it all – for his. And – and – "

"Lose both at last?" asked the girl, hoarsely. Katherine Foster closed her eyes for a moment to shut out her daughter's face.

"Will you ever have had his?" she asked, with her eyes still closed. "Do men ever truly respect their dupes or their inferiors? Do you truly respect anyone to whom you are willing to deny truth, honor, dignity? Is it respect, or only a tender, pitying love we offer an intellectual cripple – one whose mental life we know to be, and desire to keep, distinctly below our own? Do – " She opened her eyes and they rested on an onyx clock. She laughed. "Come, daughter," she said, "it is time to dress for the Historical Club's annual dinner. You know I am one of the guests of honor to-day. They honor me so truly that I am not permitted to join the club or be ranked as a useful member at all. My work they accept – flatter me by praising in a lofty way; but I can have no status with them as an historian – I am a woman!"

Gertrude sprang to her feet. Her eyes flashed fire.

"Don't go! I wouldn't allow them to – " The door opened softly. Mr. Foster's face appeared.

"Why, dearie, aren't you ready for the Historical Club? I wouldn't have you late for anything. You know I, as the vice-president, am to respond to the toast on, 'Woman: the highest creation, and God's dearest gift to mankind.' It wouldn't look well if you were not there."

"No, dear," she said, without glancing at Gertrude. "It would not look well. I'll be ready in a minute. Will you help me, Gertrude?"

"Yes," said the girl, and her deft fingers flew at the task. When the door closed behind her mother and the carriage rolled away, she threw herself face down on the bed and ground her teeth. "Shall I float, or try to swim up stream?" she said, to herself. "Will either one pay for what it will cost? Shall – "

"Miss Gertrude, dinner is served," said the maid; and she went to the table alone.

"To think that a visit to the Spillini family should have led to all this," she thought, and felt that life, as it had been, was over for her.

Aloud she said: —

"James, the berries, please, and then you may go."

And James told Susan that in his opinion the man that got Miss Gertrude was going to get the sweetest, simplest, yieldingest girl he ever saw except one, and Susan vowed she could not guess who that one was.

But apparently James did not wholly believe her, for he essayed to sportively poke her under the chin with an index finger that very evidently had seen better days prior to having come into violent contact with a base-ball, which, having a mind and a curve of its own, had incidentally imparted an eccentric crook to the unfortunate member.

"Don't you dast t'touch me with that old pot-hook, er I'll scream," exclaimed Susan, dodging the caress. "I don't see no sense in a feller gettin' hisself all broke up that a way," and Susan, from the opposite side of the butler's table, glanced admiringly at her own shapely hand, albeit the wrist might have impressed fastidious taste as of too robust proportions, and the fingers have suggested less of flexibility than is desirable.

But to James the hand was perfect, and Susan, feeling her power, did not scruple to use it with brutal directness. She had that shivering dislike for deformity which, is possessed by the physically perfect, and she took it as a private grievance that James should have taken the liberty to break one of his fingers without her knowledge and consent. Until he had met her, James had carried his distorted member as a badge of honor. No warrior had worn more proudly his battle scars. For, to James, to be a catcher in a base-ball club was honor enough for one man, and he had never dreamed of a loftier ambition. He had grown to keep that mutilated finger ever to the fore as a retired general might carry an empty sleeve. It gave distinction and told of brave and lofty achievement, so James thought.

Susan had modified his pride in the dislocated digit, but he had not yet learned to keep it always in the background. It had several times before interfered with his love-making, and James was humble.

"Oh, now, Susie, don't you be so hard on that there old base-ball finger! I didn't know it was a-going to touch your lovely dimple," and he held the offending member behind his back, as he slowly circled around the table towards the haughty Susan. "By gum! I b'lieve I left a mark on your chin. Lemme see." She thought she understood the ruse, but when he kissed her she pretended deep indignation and flounced out of the room, but the look on her face caused James to drop his left eyelid over a twinkling orb and shake his sides with satisfaction as he removed the dishes after Miss Gertrude had withdrawn from the dining-room.

IV

The visit to the Spillini family had, indeed, led to strange complications and far-reaching results. No one who had known young Seldon Avery and his social life would ever have suspected him, or any member of his set, of a desire to take part in what, by their club friends or favorite reviews, was usually alluded to as the "dirty pool of politics." For the past decade political advancement, at least in New York, had grown to be looked upon by many as a mere matter of purchase and sale, and as quite beneath the dignity of the more refined and cultured men. It had been heralded as a vast joke, therefore, when young Selden Avery, the representative of one of the most cultured families and the honored son of an honored ancestry, had suddenly announced himself as a candidate for the Assembly. His club friends guyed him unmercifully. "We never did believe that you were half as good as you pretended to be, Avery," said one of them, the first time he appeared at the club after his nomination, "but I don't believe a man of us ever suspected you of the depths of depravity that this implies. What ever did put such a ridiculous idea into such a level and self-respecting head? Out with it!"