XI
Gertrude!" called out her mother to the girl, as she passed the library door. "Gertrude! come in, your father and I wish to talk with you."
"Committee meeting?" laughed Gertrude, as she took a seat beside her father. It had grown to be rather a joke in the family to speak of Mr. Avery's calls as committee meetings, and Mr. Foster had tried vainly to tease his daughter about it.
"In my time," he would say, "we did not go a courting to get advice. we went for kisses. I never discussed any more profound topic with my sweetheart than love – and perhaps poetry and music. Sometimes, as I sit and listen to you two, I can't half believe that you are lovers. It's so perfectly absurd. You talk about everything on earth. It's a deal more like – why I should have looked upon that sort of thing as a species of committee meeting, in my day."
Gertrude had laughed and said something about thinking that love ought to enter into and run through all the interests of life, and not be held merely as a thing apart. All women had a life to live. All would not have the love. So the first problem was one of life and its work. The love was only a phase of this. But her father had gone on laughing at her about her queer love-making.
"Committee meeting?" asked she, again, as she glanced at her father, smiling dryly. Her mother answered first.
"Yes – no – partly. Your father wanted to speak to you about – he thinks you should not be seen with, or have those girls – You tell her yourself, dear," she said, appealing to her husband. Mr. Foster was fidgeting about in his chair; he had not felt comfortable before. He was less so now, for Gertrude had turned her face full upon him, and her hand was on his sleeve.
"'Well, there's nothing to tell, Gertrude," he said. "I guess you can understand it without a scene. I simply don't want to see those girls – that King girl and her friend – about here any more. It won't do. It simply won't do at all. You'll be talked about. Of course, I know it is all very kind of you, and all that, and that you don't mean any harm; but men always have drawn, and they always will draw, unpleasant conclusions. They may sympathize with that sort of girls, but they simply won't stand having their own women folks associate with them. The test of the respectability of a woman, is whether a man of position will marry her or not. A man's respectable if he's out of jail. A woman if she is marriageable or married. Now, unfortunately, that little Berton girl is neither the one nor the other, and its going to make talk if you are seen with her again. She must stay away from here, too."
There had come a most unusual tone of protest into his voice as he went on, but he had looked steadily at a carved paper knife, which he held in his hand, and with which he cut imaginary leaves upon the table. There was a painful silence. Gertrude thought she did not remember having ever before heard her father speak so sharply. She glanced at her mother, but Katherine Foster had evidently made up her mind to leave this matter entirely in the hands of her husband.
"Do you mean, papa, that you wish me to tell that child, Ettie Berton, not to come here any more, and that I must not befriend her?" asked Gertrude, in an unsteady voice.
"Befriend her all you've a mind to," responded her father, heartily. "Certainly. Of course. But don't have her come here, and don't you be seen with her, nor the other one again. You can send James or Susan – better not send Susan though – send James with money or anything you want to give her. Your mother tells me you are paying the Berton girl's board. That's all right if you want to, but – your mother has told me the whole outrageous story, and that cashier ought to be shot, but – "
"But instead of helping make the public opinion which would make him less, and Ettie more, respectable, you ask me to help along the present infamous order of things! Oh, papa! don't ask that of me! I have never willingly done anything in my life that I knew you disapproved. Don't ask me to help crush that child now, for I cannot. I cannot desert her now. Don't ask that of me, papa. Why do men – even you good men – make it so hard, so almost impossible for women to be kind to each other? What has Ettie done that such as we should hold her to account. She is a mere child. Fourteen years old in fact, but not over ten in feeling or judgment. She has been deceived by one who fully understood. She did not. And yet even you ask me to hold her responsible! Oh, papa, don't!" She slipped onto her father's knee and took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead. She had never in her life stood against her father or seemed to criticise him before. It hurt her and it vexed him. A little frown came on his face. "Katherine," he said, turning to his wife, "I wish you'd make Gertrude understand this thing rationally. You always have." Mrs. Foster glanced at her daughter and then at her husband. She smiled.
"I always have, what dear?" she asked.
"Understood these things as I do – as everyone does," said her husband. "You never took these freaks that Gertrude is growing into, and – "
The daughter winced and sat far back on her father's knee. Her mother did not miss the action. She smiled at the girl, but her voice was steady, and less light than usual.
"No, I never took freaks, as you say, but what I thought of things, or how I may or may not have understood them, dear, no one ever inquired, no one ever cared to know. That I acted like other people, and acquiesced in established opinions, went without saying. That was expected of me. That I did. Gertrude belongs to another generation, dear. She cannot be so colorless as we women of my time – "
Her husband laughed.
"Colorless, is good, by Jove! You colorless indeed!" He looked admiringly at his wife. "Why, Katherine, you have more color and more sense now than any half dozen girls of this generation. Colorless indeed!" Mrs. Foster smiled. "Don't you think my cheerful, easy reflection of your own shades of thought or mind have always passed current as my own? Sometimes I fancy that is true, and that – it is easier and – pleasanter all around. But – " she paused. "It was not my color, my thought, my opinions, myself. It was an echo, dear; a pleasant echo of yourself which has so charmed you. It was not I."
Gertrude felt uneasy, and as if she were lifting a curtain which had been long drawn. Her father turned his face towards her and then toward her mother.
"In God's name what does all this mean?" he asked. "Are you, the most level-headed woman in the world, intending to uphold Gertrude in this – suicidal policy – her – this – absurd nonsense about that girl?"
Gertrude's eyes widened. She slowly arose from his knee. The revelation as to her father's mental outlook was, to her more sensitive and developed nature, much what the one had been to Francis King that night at the club.
"Oh, papa," she said softly. "I am so sorry for – so sorry – for us all. We seem so far apart, and – "
"John Martin agrees with me perfectly," said her father, hotly. "I talked with him to-day. He – "
Gertrude glanced at her mother, and there was a definite curl upon her lip. "Mr. Martin," she said slowly, "is not a conscience for me. He and I are leagues apart, papa. We – "
"More's the pity," said her father, as he arose from his chair. He moved toward the door.
"I've said my say, Gertrude. It's perfectly incomprehensible to me what you two are aiming at. But what I know is this: you must do my way in this particular case, think whatever you please. You know very well I would not ask it except for your own good. I don't like to interfere with your plans, but – you must give that girl up." He spoke kindly, but Gertrude and her mother sat silent long after he had gone. The twilight had passed into darkness. Presently Katherine's voice broke the silence: —
"Shall you float with the tide, daughter, or shall you try to swim up stream?" She was thinking of the first talk they had ever had on these subjects, nearly two years ago now, but the girl recognized the old question. She stood up slowly and then with quick steps came to her mother's side.
"Don't try to swim with me, mamma. It only makes it harder for me to see you hurt in the struggle. Don't try to help me any more when the eddies come. Float, mamma; I shall swim. I shall! I shall! And while my head is above the waves that poor little girl shall not sink."
She was stroking Katherine's hair, and her mother's hand drew her own down to a soft cheek.
"Am I right, mother?" she asked, softly. "If you say I am right, it is enough. My heart will ache to seem to papa to do wrong, but I can bear it better than I could bear my own self-contempt. Am I right, mamma?"
Her mother drew her hand to her lips, and then with a quick action she threw both arms about the girl and whispered in her ear: "I shall go back to the old way. Swim if you can, daughter. You are right. If only you are strong enough. That is the question. If only you are strong enough. I am not. I shall remain in the old way." There was a steadiness and calm in her voice which matched oddly enough with the fire in her eyes and the flush on her cheeks.
"Little mother, little mother," murmured Gertrude, softly, as she stroked her mother's hand. Then she kissed her and left the room. "With her splendid spirit, that she should be broken on the wheel!" the girl said aloud to herself, when she had reached her own room. She did not light the gas, but sat by the window watching the passers-by in the street.
"Why should papa have sent me to college," she was thinking, "where I matched my brains and thoughts with men, if I was to stifle them later on, and subordinate them to brains I found no better than my own? Why should my conscience be developed, if it must not be used; if I must use as my guide the conscience of another? Why should I have a separate and distinct nature in all things, if I may use only that part of it which conforms to those who have not the same in type or kind? I will do what seems right to myself. I shall not desert – "
She laid her cheek in her hand and sighed. A new train of thought was rising. It had never come to her before.
"It is my father's money. He says I may send it, but I may not – it is my father's money. He has the right to say how it may be used, and – and – " (the blood was coming into her face) "I have nothing but what he gives me. He wants a pleasant home; he pays for it. Susan and James, and the rest, he hires to conduct the labor of the house. If they do not do it to please him – if they are not willing to – they have no right to stay, and then to complain. For his social life at home he has mamma and me. If he wants – " She was walking up and down the room now. "Have we a right to dictate? We have our places in his home. We are not paid wages like James and Susan, but – but – we are given what we have; we are dependent. He has never refused us anything – any sum we wanted – but he can. It is in his power, and really we do not know but that he should. Perhaps we spend too much. We do not know. What can he afford? I do not know. What can I afford?" She spread her hands out before her, palms up, in the darkness. She could see them by the flicker of the electric light in the street.
"They are empty," she said, aloud, "and they are untrained, and they are helpless. They are a pauper's hands." She smiled a little at the conceit, and then, slowly: "It sounds absurd, almost funny, but it is true. A pauper in lace and gold! I am over twenty-two. I am as much a dependent and a pauper as if I were in a poorhouse. Love and kindness save me! They have not saved Ettie, nor Francis. When the day came they were compelled to yield utterly, or go. They can work, and I? I am a dependent. Have I a right to stand against the will and pleasure of my father, when by doing so I compel him to seem to sustain and support that which he disapproves? Have I a right to do that?"
She was standing close to the window now, and she put her hot face against the glass. "The problem is easy enough, if all think alike – if one does not think at all; but now? I cannot follow my own conscience and my father's too. We do not think alike. Is it right that I should, to buy his approval and smiles, violate my own mind, and brain, and heart? But is it right for me to violate his sense of what is right, while I live upon the lavish and loving bounty which he provides?" And so, with her developed conscience, and reason, and individuality, Gertrude had come to face the same problem, which, in its more brutal form, had resulted so sorrowfully for the two girls whom she had hoped to befriend. The ultimate question of individual domination of one by another, with the purse as the final appeal – and even this strong and fortunate girl wavered. "Shall I swim, after all? Have I the right to try?" she asked herself.
XII
When Francis King told Mr. Avery that she could and would leave her father's home and live upon the money she earned, and had heretofore looked upon as merely a resource to save her pride, she did not take into consideration certain very important facts, not the least of which was, perhaps, that her presence at the store was not wholly a pleasant thing for the cashier to contemplate under existing circumstances.
Francis King was not a diplomat. The cashier was not a martyr. These two facts, added to the girl's scornful eyes, rendered the position in the trimming department far less secure than she had grown to believe.
So when she came to the little room which Gertrude Foster had provided as a temporary home for Ettie Berton, she felt that she came as a help and protector and not at all as a possible encumbrance.
"I've had a terrible blow-out with pa," she said, bitterly. "I can't go home any more if I wanted to – and I don't want to. I told him what I thought of him, and of your – and of the kind of men that make mean laws they are ashamed to have their own folks know about and live by. He was awful mad. He said laws was none o' my business, and he guessed men knew best what was right an' good for women."
"Of course they do," said Ettie with her ever ready acquiescence. "I reckon you didn't want t' deny that, did you Fan? You 'n your pa must a' shook hands for once anyhow," she laughed. "How'd it feel? Didn't you like agreein' with him once?" Francis looked at the child – this pitiful illustration of the theory of yielding acquiescence; this legitimate blossom of the tree of ignorance and soft-hearted dependence; this poor little dwarf of individuality; this helpless echo of masculine measures, methods, and morals – and wondered vaguely why it was that the more helpless the victim, the more complete her disaster, the more certain was she to accept, believe in, and support the very cause and root of her undoing.
Francis King's own mental processes were too disjointed and ill-formulated to enable her to express the half-formed thoughts that came to her. Her heart ached for her little friend to whom to-day was always welcome, and to whom to-morrow never appeared a possibility other than that it would be sunshiny, and warm, and comfortable.
Francis saw a certain to-morrow which should come to Ettie, far more clearly than did the child herself, and seeing, sighed. Her impulse was to argue the case hotly with Ettie, as she had done with her father; but she looked at her face again, and then, as a sort of safety-valve for her own emotion, succinctly said: "Ettie Berton, you are the biggest fool I ever saw."
Ettie clapped her hands.
"Right you are, says Moses!" she exclaimed, laughing gleefully, "and you like me for it. Folks with sense like fools. Sense makes people so awful uncomfortable. Say, where'd you get that bird on your hat? Out 'o stock? Did that old mean thing make you pay full price? Goodness! how I do wish I could go back t' store!"
"Ettie, how'd you like for me to come here an live with you? Do you 'spose Miss Gertrude would care?"
"Hurrah for Cleveland!" exclaimed Ettie, springing to her feet and throwing her arms about Francis. "Hurrah for Grant! Gracious, but I'm glad! I'm just so lonesome I had to make my teeth ache for company," she rattled on. "Miss Gertrude 'll be glad, too. She said she wisht I had somebody 't take care of me. But, gracious! I don't need that. They ain't nothing to do but just set still n' wait. It's the waitin' now that makes me so lonesome. I want t' hurry 'n get back t' the store, 'n – "
She noticed Francis's look of surprise, not unmixed with frank scorn; but she did not rightly interpret it.
"My place ain't gone is it, Fan?" she asked, in real alarm. "He said he'd keep it for me."
"Ettie Berton, you are the biggest fool I ever saw," said Francis, again, this time with a touch of hopelessness and pathos in her voice, and at that moment there was a rap at the door. It was one of the cash girls from the store. She handed Francis a note, and while Ettie and the visitor talked gaily of the store, Francis read and covered her pale face with her trembling hands. She was discharged "owing to certain necessary changes to be made in the trimming department." She went and stood by the window with her back to the two girls. She understood the matter perfectly, and she did not dare trust herself to speak. It could not be helped, she thought, and why let Ettie know that she had brought this disaster upon her friend, also. Francis was trying to think. She was raging within herself. Then it came to her that she had boldly asserted that she would help protect and support Ettie. Now she was penniless, helpless, and homeless herself. There were but two faces that stood out before her as the faces of those to whom she could go for help and counsel, and she was afraid to go to even these. She was ashamed, humiliated, uncertain.
She supposed that Gertrude Foster could help her if she would. She had that vague miscomprehension of facts which makes the less fortunate look upon the daughters of wealth and luxury and love as possessed of a magic wand which they need but stretch forth to compass any end. She did not dream that at that very moment Gertrude Foster was revolving exactly the same problem in her own mind, and reaching out vainly for a solution. "What shall I do? what ought I to do? what can I do?" were questions as real and immediate to Gertrude, in the new phase of life and thought which had come to her, as they were to Francis in her extremity. It is true that the greater part of the problem in Francis's mind dealt with the physical needs of herself and her little friend, and with her own proud and fierce anger toward her father and the cashier. It is also true that these features touched Gertrude but lightly; but the highest ideals, beliefs, aspirations, and love of her soul were in conflict within her, and the basis of the conflict was the same with both girls. Each had, in following the best that was within herself, come into violent contact with established prejudice and prerogative, and each was beating her wings, the one against the bars of a gilded cage draped lovingly in silken threads, and the other was feeling her helplessness where iron and wrath unite to hold their prey.
The other face that arose before Francis brought the blood back to her face. She had not seen him since she had kissed his hand that night, and she wondered what he thought of her. She felt ashamed to go to him for help. She had talked so confidently to him that night of her own powers, and of her determination that Ettie should not again live under the same roof, and be subject to the will of the father whom she insisted was a disgrace to the child. "I reckon he could get me another place to work – in a store," she thought. "But – " She shook her head, and a fierce light came into her eyes. She had learned enough to know that a girl who had left home under the wrath of her father, would best not appeal for a situation under the protection and recommendation of a young gentleman not of her own caste or condition in life. She thought of all this and of what it implied, and it seemed to her that her heart would burst with shame and rage.
Was she not a human being? Were there not more reasons than one why another human unit should be kind to her and help her? If she were a boy all this shame would be lifted from her shoulders, all these suspicions and repression and artificial barriers would be gone. She wondered if she could not get a suit of men's clothes, and so solve the whole trouble. No one would then question her own right of individual and independent action or thought. No one would then think it commendable for her to be a useless atom, subordinating her whole individuality to one man, to whose mental and moral tone she must bend her own, until such time as he should turn her over to some other human entity, whereupon she would be required to readjust all her mental and moral belongings to accommodate the new master. How comfortable it would be, she thought, to go right on year after year, growing into and out of herself. Expanding her own nature, and finding the woman of to-morrow the outcome of the girl of yesterday. She had once heard a teacher explain about the chameleon with its capacity to adjust itself to and take on the color of other objects. It floated into her mind that girls were expected to be like chameleons. Instead of being John King's daughter, with, of course, John King's ideas, status and aspirations, or William Jones's wife – now metamorphosed into a tepid reflex of William Jones himself – she thought how pleasant it would be to continue to be Francis King, and not feel afraid to say so. The idea fascinated her. Yes, she would get a suit of men's clothes, and henceforth have and feel the dignity of individual responsibility and development. She slipped out of the room and into the street. She thought she would order the clothes as if "for a brother just my size." She could pay for a cheap suit. She paused in front of a shop window, and the sight of her own face in a glass startled her. She groaned aloud. She knew as she looked that she was too handsome to pass for a man. It was a woman's face. Then, too, how could she live with and care for Ettie? "No, I'll have to go to them for help," she said, desperately to herself, and turning, faced Selden Avery coming across the street. The color flew into her face, but she saw at a glance that he did not think of their last meeting – or, at least, not of its ending. "I was just wishing I could see you and Miss Gertrude," she said, bluntly, her courage coming back when he paused, recognizing that she wished to speak further with him than a mere greeting.
"Were you?" he said, smiling. "Our thoughts were half-way the same then, for I was wishing to see her, too."
She thought how pleasant and soft his voice was, and she tried to modify the tones of her own.
"I was goin't' ask you – her – what to do about – about something," she said, falteringly.
"So was I," he smiled back, showing his perfect teeth. "She will have to be very, very wise to advise us both, will she not? Shall we go to her now? And together? Perhaps our united wisdom may solve both your problem and mine. Three people ought to be three times as wise as one, oughtn't they?"