At about four o'clock on a windy, warm September afternoon, four girls came out of the post-office of Monroe, California. They had loitered on their way in, consciously wasting time; they had spent fifteen minutes in the dark and dirty room upon an absolutely unnecessary errand, and now they sauntered forth into the village street keenly aware that the afternoon was not yet waning, and disheartened by the slow passage of time. At five they would go to Bonestell's drug store, and sit in a row at the soda counter, and drink effervescent waters pleasingly mingled with fruit syrups and an inferior quality of ice cream. Five o'clock was the hour for "sodas," neither half-past four nor half-past five was at all the same thing in the eyes of Monroe's young people. After that they would wander idly toward the bridge, and separate; Grace Hawkes turning toward the sunset for another quarter of a mile, Rose Ransome opening the garden gate of the pretty, vine-covered cottage near the bridge, and the Monroe girls, Sarah and Martha, in a desperate hurry now, flying up the twilight quiet of North Main Street to the long picket fence, the dark, tree-shaded garden, and the shabby side-doorway of the old Monroe house.
Three of these girls met almost every afternoon, going first to each other's houses, and later wandering down for the mail, for some trivial errand at drug store or dry-goods store, and for the inevitable ices. Rose Ransome was not often with them, for Rose was just a little superior in several ways to her present companions, and frequently spent the afternoon practising on her violin, or driving, or walking with the Parker girls and Florence Frost, who hardly recognized the existence of Grace Hawkes and the Monroes. The one bank in Monroe was the Frost and Parker Bank; there were Frost Street and Parker Street, the Frost Building and the Parker Building. May and Ida Parker and Florence Frost had gone to Miss Bell's Private School when they were little, and then to Miss Spencer's School in New York.
But even all this might not have accounted for the exclusive social instincts of the young ladies if both families had not been very rich. As it was, with prosperous fathers and ambitious mothers, with well-kept, old-fashioned homes, pews in church, allowances of so many hundred dollars a year, horses to ride and drive, and servants to wait upon them, the three daughters of these two prominent families considered themselves as obviously better than their neighbours, and bore themselves accordingly. Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker had come to California as young men, in the seventies; had cast in their lot with little Monroe, and had grown rich with the town. It was a credit to the state now; they had found it a mere handful of settlers' cabins, with one stately, absurd mansion standing out among them, in a plantation of young pepper and willow and locust and eucalyptus trees.
This was the home of Malcolm Monroe, turreted, mansarded, generously filled with the glass windows that had come in a sailing vessel around the Horn. Incongruous, pretentious, awkward, it might to a discerning eye have suggested its owner, who was then not more than thirty years old; a tall, silent, domineering man. He was reputed rich, and Miss Elizabeth—or "Lily"—Price, a pretty Eastern girl who visited the Frosts in the winter of 1878, was supposed to be doing very well for herself when she married him, and took her bustles and chignons, her blonde hair with its "French twist," and her scalloped, high-buttoned kid shoes to the mansion on North Main Street.
Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size; schools, churches, post-office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard, and a winery had come to Monroe. There was the Town Hall, a plain wooden building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street, a jail. The Interurban Trolley "looped" the town once every hour.
All these had helped to make Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker rich. They, like Malcolm Monroe, had married, and had built themselves homes. They had invested and re-invested their money; they had given their children advantages, according to their lights. Now, in their early fifties, they were a power in the town, and they felt for it a genuine affection and pride, a loyalty that was unquestioning and sincere. In the kindly Western fashion these two were now accorded titles; Cyrus, who had served in the Civil War, was "Colonel Frost," and to Graham, who had been a lawyer, was given the titular dignity of being "Judge Parker."
Malcolm Monroe kept pace with neither his old associates nor with the times. His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in the town that had been named for his father frequently wavered. He was in everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the sheep of the old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers meant so much to this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat and grapes and apple trees. Monroe came to laugh at "old Monroe's" pigheadedness. He fought the town on every question for improvements, as it came up. The bill for pavements, the bill for sewerage, the bill for street lights, the high school bill, found in him an enemy as the years went by. He denounced these innovations bitterly. When the level of Main Street was raised four feet, "old Monroe" almost went out of his senses, and the home site, gloomily shut in now by immense trees, and a whole block square, was left four feet below the street level, so that there must be built three or four wooden steps at all the gates. The Monroe girls resented this peculiarity of their home, but never said so to their father.
Rose Ransome, the pretty, neat little daughter of a pretty, neat little widow, was cultivated eagerly by the Monroes, and patronized kindly by the Frost and Parker girls. She had lived all of her twenty years in Monroe, and was too conscientious and amiable to snub the girls supposedly beneath her, and too merry, ladylike, and entertaining to be quite ignored by the richer group. So she brightly, obligingly, and gratefully lunched and drove, read and walked, and practised music with May and Ida and Florence, when they wanted her, and when they did not, or when Eastern friends visited them, or there was for some reason no empty seat in the surrey, she turned back to the company of Grace Hawkes and of Sally and Martie Monroe. Rose admitted frankly to her mother that with the latter group she had "more fun," but that with her more elevated friends she enjoyed, of course, "nicer times." Politically she steered a diplomatic middle course between the two, implying, with equal readiness, that she only associated with the poor Monroes because Uncle Ben made her, or that she accepted invitations from the Frost and Parker faction simply to be amiable.
Sally Monroe, innocent, simple, unexacting at twenty-one, really believed Rose to be the sweetly frank and artless person she seemed, but Martie, two years younger, had her times of absolutely detesting Rose. Sally was never jealous, but Martie burned with a fierce young jealousy of all life: of Rose, with her dainty frocks and her rich friends, her curly hair and her violin; of Florence Frost's riding horse; of Ida Parker's glib French; of her own brother, Leonard Monroe, with his male independence; of the bare-armed women who leaped on the big, flat-backed horses in the circus; of the very Portuguese children who rode home asleep of a summer afternoon, in fragrant loads of alfalfa.
To-day she was vaguely smarting at Grace's news: Grace was going to work. She, like the Monroe girls, had often discussed the possibilities of this step, but opportunities were not many, and the idle, pleasant years drifted by with no change. But Ellie Hawkes, Grace's big sister, who had kept books in the box factory for three years, was to be married now; a step down for Ellie—for her "friend" was only Terry Castle, a brawny, ignorant giant employed by the Express Company—but a step up for Grace. She would be a wage-earner; her pretty, weak face grew animated at the thought, and her shrill voice more shrill.
Martie Monroe had no real desire to work in the box factory, to walk daily the ugly half mile that lay between it and her home, to join the ranks of toilers that filed through the poorer region of town every morning. But like all growing young things she felt a desperate, undefined need. She could not know that self-expression is as necessary to natures like hers as breath is to young bodies. She could only grope and yearn and struggle in the darkness of her soul.
She was nineteen, a tall, strong girl, already fully developed, and handsome in a rather dull and heavy way. Her hands and feet were beautifully made, her hair, although neglected, of a wonderful silky bronze, and her skin naturally of the clear creamy type that sometimes accompanies such hair. But Martie ruined her skin by injudicious eating; she could not resist sweets; natural indolence, combined with the idle life she led, helped to make her too fat. Now and then, in the express office, in the afternoon, the girls got on the big freight scales, and this was always a mortification to Martie. Terry Castle and Joe Hawkes would laugh as they adjusted the weights, and Martie always tried to laugh, too, but she did not think it funny. Martie might have seemed to her world merely a sweet, big, good-natured tomboy, growing into an eager, amusing, ignorant young woman, too fond of sleeping and eating.
But there was another Martie—a sensitive, ambitious Martie—who despised idleness, dependence, and inaction; who longed to live a thousand lives—to conquer all the world; a Martie who was one day a great singer, one day a wartime nurse, one day a millionaire's beautiful bride, the mother of five lovely children, all carefully named. She would waken from her dreams almost bewildered, blinking at Sally or at her mother in the surprised fashion that sometimes made folk call Martie stupid, humbly enough she thought of herself as stupid, too. She never suspected that she was really "dreaming true," that the power and the glory lay waiting for the touch of her heart and hand and brain. She never suspected that she was to Rose and Grace and Sally what a clumsy young swan would be in a flock of bustling and competent ducks. Martie did not know, yet, where her kingdom lay, how should she ever dream that she was to find it?
Rose was going back to stay with her cousin in Berkeley to-morrow, it was understood, and so had to get home early this afternoon. Rose, as innocent as a butterfly of ambition or of the student's zeal, had finished her first year in the State University and was to begin her second to-morrow.
Monroe's shabby Main Street seemed less interesting than ever when Rose had tripped away. A gusty breeze was blowing fitfully, whisking bits of straw and odds and ends of paper about. The watering cart went by, leaving a cool wake of shining mud. Here and there a surrey, loaded with stout women in figured percales, and dusty, freckled children, started on its trip from Main Street back to some outlying ranch.
As the three girls, arms linked, loitered across the square, Dr. Ben Scott—who was Rose Ransome's mother's cousin and was regarded as an uncle—came out of the Court House and walked toward his buggy. The dreaming white mare roused as she heard his voice, and the old brown-and-white setter sprang into the seat beside him.
"Howdy, girls!" said the old man, his big loose figure bulging grotesquely over the boundaries of the seat. "Father pretty well?"
"Well enough, Doc' Ben, but not pretty!" Martie said, laughing. The doctor's eyes twinkled.
"They put a tongue in your head, Martie, sure enough!" he said, gathering up the reins.
"It was all they did put, then!" Martie giggled.
The girls all liked Doc' Ben. A widower, rich enough now to take only what practice he pleased, simple in his tastes, he lived with his old servant, his horse and cow, his dog and cat, chickens and bees, pigeons and rabbits, in a comfortable, shabby establishment in an unfashionable part of town. Monroe described him as a "regular character." His jouncing, fat figure—with tobacco ash spilled on his spotted vest, and stable mud on his high-laced boots—was familiar in all her highways and byways. His mellow voice, shot with humorous undertones even when he was serious, touched with equal readiness upon Plato, the habits of bees, the growth of fungus, fashions, Wordsworth, the Civil War, or the construction of chimneys. He was something of a philosopher, something of a poet, something of a reformer.
Martie, watching him out of sight, said to herself that she really must go down soon and see old Dr. Ben, poke among his old books, feed his pigeons, and scold him for his untidy ways. The girl's generous imagination threw a veil of romance over his life; she told Sally that he was like some one in an English story.
After he had gone, the girls idled into the Town Library, a large room with worn linoleum on the floor, and with level sunlight streaming in the dusty windows. At the long table devoted to magazines a few readers were sitting; others hovered over the table where books just returned were aligned; and here and there, before the dim bookcases that lined the walls, still others loitered, now and then picking a book from the shelves, glancing at it, and restoring it to its place. The room was warm and close with the smell of old books. The whisking of pages, and occasionally a sibilant whisper, were its only sounds. From the ceiling depended signs, bearing the simple command: "Silence"; but this did not prevent the girls from whispering to the energetic, gray-haired woman who presided at the desk.
"Hello, girls!" said Miss Fanny Breck cheerfully, in the low tone she always used in the library. "Want anything to read? You don't? What are you reading, Martie?"
"I'm reading 'Idylls of the King,'" Sally said.
"I've got 'Only the Governess,'" added Grace.
"I didn't ask either of you," Miss Breck said with the brisk amused air of correction that made the girls a little afraid of her. "It's Martie here I'm interested in. I'm going to scold her, too. Are you reading that book I gave you, Martie?"
Martie, as Grace and Sally turned away, raised smiling eyes. But at Miss Fanny's keen, kindly look she was smitten with a sudden curious inclination toward tears. She was keenly sensitive, and she felt an undeserved rebuke.
"Don't like it?" asked the librarian, disposing of an interruption with that casual ease that always fascinated Martie. To see Miss Fanny seize four books from the hands that brought them into her range of vision, flip open the four covers with terrific speed, manipulate various paper slips and rubber stamps with energy and certainty, vigorously copy certain mysterious letters and numbers, toss the discarded books into a large basket at her elbow and then, for the first time, as she handed the selected books to the applicant, glance up with her smile and whispered "Good afternoon," was a real study in efficiency.
"I don't understand it," Martie smiled.
"Did you read it?" persisted the older woman.
"Well—not much." Martie had, in fact, hardly opened the book, an excellent collection of some twenty essays for girls under the general title "Choosing a Life Work."
"Listen. Why don't you study the Cutter system, and familiarize yourself a little with this work, and come in here with me?" asked Miss Fanny, in her firm, pushing voice.
"When?" Martie asked, considering.
"Well—I can't say when. I'm no oracle, my dear. But some day the grave and reverend seigneurs on my Board may give me an assistant, I suppose."
"Oh—I know—" Martie was vague again. "What would I get?"
Miss Fanny's harsh cheeks and jaw stiffened, her eyes half closed, as she bit her lip in thought.
"Fifteen, perhaps," she submitted.
Martie dallied with the pleasing thought of having fifteen dollars of her own each month.
"But can't Miss Fanny make you feel as if you were back in school?" she asked, when the girls were again in Main Street. "I'd just as lieves be in the lib'ary as anywheres," she added.
"I'd rather be in the box factory," Grace said. "More money."
"More work, too!" Martie suggested. "Come on, let's go to Bonestell's!"
Other persons of all ages were in the drug store, seated on stools at the high marble counter, or at the little square cherry tables in the dim room at the rear. Drugs were a lesser consideration than brushes, stationery, cameras, candy, cigars, post cards, gum, mirrors, celluloid bureau sets, flower seeds, and rubber toys and rattles, but large glass flagons of coloured waters duly held the corners of the show windows on the street, and dusty and fly-specked cards advertising patent medicines overlapped each other.
The three girls nodded to various acquaintances, and, as they slid on to seats at the counter, greeted the soda clerk familiarly. This was Reddy Johnson, a lean, red-headed youth in a rather dirty white jacket buttoned up to the chin. Reddy was assisted by a blear-eyed little Swedish girl of about sixteen, who rushed about blindly with her little blonde head hanging. He himself did not leave the counter, which he constantly mopped with a damp, mud-coloured rag. He plunged the streaked and sticky glasses into hot water, set them on a dripping grating to dry, turned on this faucet of sizzling soda, that of rich slow syrup, beat up the contents of glasses with his long-handled spoon, slipped them into tarnished nickelled frames, and slid them deftly before the waiting boys and girls. Hot sauce over this ice cream, nuts on that, lady fingers and whipped cream with the tall slender cups of chocolate for the Baxter girls, crackers with the tomato bouillon old Lady Snow was noisily sipping; Reddy never made a mistake.
Presently he, with a swift motion, set a little plate of sweet crackers before the girls. These were not ordinarily served with five-cent orders, and the three instantly divided them, concealing the little cakes in their hands, and handing the tell-tale plate back to the clerk. A wise precaution it proved, for a moment later "old Bones," as the proprietor of the establishment was nicknamed, sauntered through the store. In a gale of giggles the girls went out, stealthily eating the crackers as they went. This adventure was enough to put them in high spirits; Martie indeed was so easily fired to excitement that the crossing of wits with Dr. Ben, the personal word with Miss Fanny, and now Reddy's gallantry, had brightened her colour and carried her elation to the point of effervescence. Sparkling, chattering, flushed under her shabby summer hat, Martie sauntered between her friends straight to her golden hour.
Face to face they came with a tall, loosely built, well-dressed young man, with a straw hat on one side of his head. Such a phenomenon was almost unknown in the streets of Monroe, and keenly conscious of his presence, and instantly curious as to his identity, the girls could not pass him without a provocative glance. "Stunning!" said each girl in her heart. "Who on earth—?"
Suddenly he blocked their way.
"Hello, Sally! Hello, Martie! Too proud to speak to old friends?"
"Why—it's Rodney Parker!" Martie said in her rich young voice. "Hello, Rodney!"
All four shook hands and laughed joyously. To Rodney the circumstance, at the opening of his dull return home, was welcome; to the girls, nothing short of delight. He was so handsome, so friendly, and in the four years he had been at Stanford University and the summers he had spent in hunting expeditions or in eastern visits to his aunt in New York, he had changed only to improve!
Even in this first informal greeting it was Martie to whom he devoted his special attention. Sally was usually considered the prettier of the two, but Martie was lovely to-night. Rodney turned with them, and they walked to the bridge together. Sally and Grace ahead.
The wind had fallen with the day, the air was mild and warm, and in the twilight even Monroe had its charm. Flowers were blooming in many dooryards, yellow light streamed hospitably across the gravelled paths, and in the early darkness women were waiting in porches or by gates, and whirling hoses over the lawns were drawing all the dark, hidden perfumes into the damp night air.
"You've not changed much, Martie—except putting up your hair. I mean it as a compliment!" said Rodney, eagerly, in his ready, boyish voice.
"You've changed a good deal; and I mean that as a compliment, too!" Martie returned, with her deep laugh.
His own broke out in answer. He thought her delightful. The creamy skin, the burnished hair that was fanned into an aureole under her shabby hat, the generous figure with its young curves, had helped to bring about in Rodney Parker a sweet, irrational surrender of reason. He had never been a reasonable boy. He knew, of course, that Martie Monroe was not in his sisters' set, although she was a perfectly NICE girl, and to be respected. Martie was neither one thing nor the other. With Grace, indeed, who was frankly beneath the Parkers' notice, he might have had almost any sort of affair; even one of those affairs of which May and Ida must properly seem unaware. He might have flirted with Grace, have taken her about and given her presents, in absolute safety. Grace would have guessed him to be only amusing himself, and even confident Rodney, his mother's favourite and baby, would never have attempted to bring Grace Hawkes home as his sisters' equal.
But with Martie there was a great difference. The Monroes had been going down slowly but steadily in the social scale, yet they were Monroes, after all. Lydia Monroe had been almost engaged to Clifford Frost, years ago, and still, at all public affairs, the Monroes, the Parkers, and the Frosts met as old friends and equals. Indeed, the Parker girls and Florence Frost had been known to ask the girls' only brother, Leonard Monroe, to their parties, young as he was, men being very scarce in Monroe, and Leonard, although his sisters were not asked, had gone.
So that when Rodney Parker stopped Martie Monroe on the way home, and fell to flattering and teasing her, and walked beside her to the bridge, he quite innocently plunged himself into social hot water, and laid a disturbing touch upon the smooth surface of the girl's life.
They talked of trivialities, laughing much. Rodney asked her if she remembered the dreadful day when they had been sent up to apologize to the French teacher, and Martie said, "Mais oui!" and thrilled at the little intimate memory of disgrace shared.
"And are you still such a little devil, Martie?" he asked, bringing his head close to hers.
"That I'll leave you to find out, Rod!" she said laughingly.
"Well—that's one of the things I'm back here to find out!" he answered gaily.
Yes, he was back to stay; he was to go into the Bank. He confidently expected to die of the shock and Martie must help him bear it. Martie promised to open an account. His Dad might let him have a car, if he behaved himself; did Martie like automobiles? Martie knew very little about them, but was sure she could honk the horn. Very well; Martie should come along and honk the horn.
How did they come to be talking of dancing? Martie could not afterward remember. Rodney had a visit promised from a college friend, and wondered rather disconsolately what might be arranged to amuse him. Fortnightly dances—that was the thing; they ought to have Friday Fortnightlies.
The very word fired the girl. She heard the whine of violins, the click of fans, the light shuffle of satin-clad feet. Her eyes saw dazzling lights, shifting colours, in the dull September twilight.
"You could have one at your house," Rodney suggested.
"Of course we could! Our rooms are immense," Martie agreed eagerly.
"To begin—say the last Friday in October!" the boy said. "You look up the date, and we'll get together on the lists!"
Get together on the lists! Martie's heart closed over the phrase with a sort of spasm of pleasure. She and Rodney conferring—arranging! The bliss—the dignity of it! She would have considered anything, promised anything.
Grace was gone now, and generous little Sally still ahead of them in the shadows. Martie said a quick, laughing good-night, and ran to join her sister just before Sally opened the side gate. It was now quite dark.
The two girls crossed the sunken garden where clumps of flowers bloomed dimly under the dark old trees, gave one apprehensive glance at the big house, which showed here and there a dully lighted window, and fled noiselessly in at the side door. They ran through a wide, bare, unaired hallway, and up a long flight of unlighted stairs that were protected over their dark carpeting by a worn brown oilcloth.
Sally, and Martie breathless, entered an enormous bedroom, shabbily and scantily furnished. The outline of a large walnut bedstead was visible in the gloom, and the dark curtains that screened two bay windows. Across the room by a wide, dark bureau, a single gas jet on a jointed brass arm had been drawn out close to the mirror, and by its light a slender woman of twenty-seven or eight was straightening her hair. Not combing or brushing it, for the Monroe girls always combed their hair and coiled it when they got up in the morning, and took it down when they went to bed at night. Between times they only "straightened" it.
As the younger girls came in, and flung their hats on the bed, their sister turned on them reproachfully.
"Martie, mama's furious!" she said. "And I do think it's perfectly terrible, you and Sally running round town at all hours like this. It's after six o'clock!"
"I can't help it if it is!" Martie said cheerfully. "Pa home?"
She asked the all-important question with more trepidation than she showed. Both she and Sally hung anxiously on the reply.
"No; Pa was to come on the four-eleven, and either he missed it, or else something's kept him down town," Lydia said in her flat, gentle voice. "Len's not home either ..."
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow!" Martie ejaculated piously, with her gay, wild laugh. "Tell Lyd who we met, Sally!" she called back, as she ran downstairs.
She dashed through the dining room, noting with gratitude that dear old Lyd had set the table in spite of her disapproval. Beyond the big, gloomy room was an enormous pantry, with a heavy swinging door opening into a large kitchen. In this kitchen, in the dim light from one gas jet, and in the steam from sink and stove, Mrs. Monroe and her one small servant were in the last hot and hurried stages of dinner-getting.
Martie kissed her mother's flushed and sunken cheek; a process to which Mrs. Monroe submitted with reproachful eyes and compressed lips.
"I don't like this, Martie!" said her mother, shaking her head. "What were you and Sally doing to be so late?"
"Oh, nothing," Martie said ashamedly. "I'm awf'ly sorry. I had no idea what time it was!"
"Well, I certainly will have Pa speak to you, if you can't get into the house before dark!" Mrs. Monroe said in mild protest. "Lyd stopped her sewing to set the table."
"Len home?" Martie, now slicing bread, asked resentfully.
"No. But a boy is different," Mrs. Monroe answered as she had answered hundreds of times before. "Not that I approve of Len's actions, either," she added. "But a man can take care of himself, of course! Len's always late for meals," she went on. "Seems like he can't get it through his head that it makes a difference if you sit down when things are ready or when they're all dried up. But Pa's late anyway to-night, so it doesn't matter much!"
Martie carried the bread on its ugly, heavy china plate in to the table, entering from the pantry just as her father came in from the hall.
"Hello, Pa!" said the girl, placing the bread on the wrinkled cloth with housewifely precision.
Malcolm Monroe gave his youngest daughter glance of lowering suspicion. But there was no cause for definite question, and Martie, straightening the salt-cellars lovingly, knew it.
"Where's your sister?" her father asked discontentedly.
"Upstairs, straightening her hair for dinner, I THINK." Martie was sweetly responsive. "But I can find out, Pa."
"No matter. Here, take these things." Martie carried away the overcoat and hat, and hung them on the hat rack in the hall.
"Joe Hawkes wants to know if you wish to pay him for driving you up, Pa," Sally said, coming in from the steps. Dutifully, meekly, she stood looking at her father. Lydia, coming in from the kitchen, gave him a respectful yet daughterly kiss. Singly and collectively there was no fault to be found with the Monroe girls to-night, even by the most exacting parent.
"Your sister said you were upstairs, Sally," Malcolm said, narrowing his eyes.
"So I was, Pa, but I came down to light the hall gas, and while I was there Joe came to the door," Sally answered innocently.
"H'm! Well, you tell him to charge it." Malcolm sat down by the fireplace. There was no fire, the evening was not cold enough for one. He began to unlace his shoes. "Brother home?" he asked, glancing from Lydia, who was filling the water glasses from a glazed china pitcher, to Martie, who was dragging and pushing six chairs into place.
"Not yet—no, sir!" the two girls said together unhesitatingly. Leonard could take care of himself under his father's displeasure. Martie added solicitously, "Would you like your slippers, Pa? I know where they are; by the chestard."
He did not immediately answer, being indeed in no mood for a civil response, and yet finding no welcome cause for grievance. He sat, a lean, red-faced man, with a drooping black moustache, a high-bridged nose, and grizzled hair, looking moodily about him.
"Get them—get them; don't stand staring there, Martie!" he burst out suddenly. Martie caught up his shoes and dashed upstairs.
She went into the large, vault-like apartment that had been her mother's bedroom for nearly thirty years. To a young and ardent nature, facing the great question of loving and mating, any place less indicative of the warmth and companionship of marriage could hardly have been imagined. The bedstead of heavy redwood was wide, flat, and hard. It was flanked by a marble-topped table and a chair. There were two large, curtained bay windows in this room, too, a faded carpet, a wash-stand with two pallid towels on the rack, several other stiff-backed chairs, and a large bureau with a square mirror and a brown marble slab. Over this slab a thin strip of fringed scarf was laid, and on the scarf stood a brown satin box, with the word "Gloves" painted over the yellow roses that ornamented its cover.
This was all. Mrs. Monroe kept in the box an odd castor, an empty cologne bottle, a new corset string, five coat buttons, a rusty pair of scissors, an old jet bar-brooch whose pin was gone, and various other small odds and ends. She had but one pair of gloves, of black shiny kid, somewhat whitened at the finger-tips, and worn only to church or to funerals. They were a sort of institution, "my gloves," and were kept in the bureau drawer. They distinguished her state from that of Belle, the maid, who had no gloves at all.
Opposite the bureau, but because of the enormous size of the room, some twenty-five feet away, was the "chestard" the high "chest of drawers" that had won its name from the children's contracted pronunciation. This bleak article of furniture contained the smaller pieces of Malcolm Monroe's wardrobe, which matched in plainness and ugliness that of his wife. Stiff white collars caught and rasped when the shallow upper drawer was opened; the middle drawers were filled with brownish gray flannels, and shirts stiff-bosomed and limp of sleeves. But if a curious Martie, making the bed, or putting away the "wash," ever cautiously tugged out the lowest drawer, she found it so loaded with papers, old account books, and bundles of letters as to awe her young soul. These meant nothing to Martie, and the drawer was heavy to open noiselessly and awkward to close in haste, yet at intervals now and then she liked to peep at its mysterious contents.
To-night, however, Martie gave it neither glance nor thought. She picked up her father's slippers and ran downstairs again, going to kneel before him and put them on his feet. As she did so her young warm hand felt the cool, slender length of his foot in the thin stocking, and she was conscious of repugnance that even the slightest contact with her father always caused her. There was a definite antagonism between Malcolm and his youngest daughter, suspected by neither. But Martie knew that she did not like the faint odour of his moustache, his breath, and his skin, on those rather infrequent occasions when he kissed her, and her father was well aware that in baffling him, evading him, and anticipating him, Martie was more annoying than the three other children combined.
"Where's your son?" asked the man of the house, as the dinner, accompanied by his wife, came in from the kitchen.
"I don't know, Pa," Mrs. Monroe said earnestly yet soothingly. "Come, girls. Come, Pa!"
Malcolm rose stiffly, and went to his place.
"He comes and goes as if his father's house was a hotel, does he?" he asked, as one merely curious. "Is that the idea?"
"Why, no, Pa." Mrs. Monroe was serving an uninteresting meal on heavy plates decorated in toneless brown. Soda crackers and sliced bread were on the table, and a thin slice of butter on a blue china plate. The teaspoons stood erect in a tumbler of red pressed glass. The younger girls had old, thin silver napkin rings; their mother's was of orange-wood with "Souvenir of Santa Cruz" painted on it; and Lydia and her father used little strips of scalloped and embroidered linen. Lydia had read of these in a magazine and had made them herself, and as her daughterly love swept over all the surface ugliness of his character, she alone among his children sometimes caught a glimpse of her father's heart. She had an ideal of fatherhood, had gentle, silent, useless Lydia—formed upon the genial, sunshiny type of parent popular in books, and she cast a romantic veil over disappointed, selfish, crossgrained Malcolm Monroe and delighted in little daughterly attentions to him. She sat next to him at table, and put her own kindly interpretation upon his moods.
"I confess I don't understand your tactics with that boy!" he said now irritably.
"Well, he came in after school, and asked could he go out with the other boys, and I didn't feel you would disapprove, Pa," Mrs. Monroe said in a worried voice. "Do eat your dinner before it gets all cold! Lenny'll be here. You'll get one of your bad headaches ... here he is!"
For, to the great relief of his mother and sisters, Leonard Monroe really did break in from the hall at this point, flinging his cap toward the hat rack with one hand as he opened the door with the other. A big, well-developed boy of seventeen was Lenny, dearest of all her children to his mother, her son and her latest-born, and the secret hope of his father's heart.
"Say—I'm awful sorry to be so late. Gosh! I ran all the way home. I thought you'd be on the late train, Pa, and I waited to walk up with you!" said Lenny, falling upon cooling mutton, boiled potatoes glazed and sticky, and canned corn.
"Where did you wait?" his father asked, laying one of his endless traps for an untruth.
"Bonestell's," Lenny answered, perceiving and evading it.
"Young Hawkes drove me up," Malcolm said in a mollified tone.
"Oh?" Lenny's mouth opened innocently. "That's the way I missed you!"
The inevitable ill-temper on their father's part being partly dissipated by this time, the girls were free to begin a conversation. Martie's happiness was flooding her spirit like a golden tide; she was conscious, under all the sordid actualities of a home dinner, that something sweet—sweet—sweet—had happened to her. She bubbled news.
Grace Hawkes actually was going to work Monday—Rose was going back to visit Alma—they had met Doc' Ben, hadn't they, Sally? Oh, and Rodney Parker was home!
"Lucky stiff!" Lenny commented in reference to Rodney.
"He's awfully nice!" Martie said eagerly. "He walked up with us!"
"With us—with YOU!" Sally corrected archly.
"What time was that?" their father asked suddenly.
"About—oh, half-past four or five. Sally and I went down for the mail."
"Rodney Parker ..." Leonard began. "Say, mama, this is all cold," he interrupted himself to say coaxingly.
"I'll warm it for you, Babe," Lydia said, rising as her mother began to rise, and reaching for the boy's plate.
"Don't call me BABE!" he protested.
His older sister gave his rough head a good-natured pat as she passed him.
"You're all the baby we have, Lenny—and he was an awfully sweet baby, wasn't he, ma?" she said.
"Rodney Parker's going to be in the Bank; I bet he doesn't stay," Leonard resumed. "Could you get me into the Bank, Pa?"
"Dear me—I remember that boy as such a handsome baby, before you were born, Martie," her mother said. "And to think he's been through college!"
"I wish I could go to college, you bet!" observed Lenny. His father shot him a glance.
"Your grandfather was a college graduate, my son, and as you know only an accident cut short my own stay at my alma mater—hem!" he said pompously. "I have no money to throw away; yet, when you have decided upon a profession, you need only come to your father with a frank, manly statement of your plans, and what can be done will be done; you know that." He wiped his moustache carefully, and glanced about, meeting the admiring gaze of wife and daughters.
"If you've got any sense, you'll go, Len," Martie said. "I wish you'd let me go study to be a trained nurse, Pa! Miss Fanny wants me to go into the lib'ary. I bet I could do it, and I'd like it, too ..."
"And speaking of your grandfather reminds me," Malcolm said heavily, "that one of the things that delayed me to-day was a matter that came up a week or two ago. When the town buys the old Archer ranch as a Park, they propose to put twelve thousand dollars into improvements—"
"Oh, joy!" said Martie. "Excuse me, Pa!"
"The trolley will pass it," her father pursued, "the Park being almost exactly half-way between Monroe and Pittsville. Now Pittsville ..."
"What do you bet they get all the glory?" Martie flashed. "Their Woman's Club..." Her voice fell: "I DO beg your pardon, Pa!" she said again contritely.
"I can discuss this with your mother," Malcolm said in majestic patience.
"Oh, no! PLEASE, Pa!"
Her father studied her coldly, while the table waited with bated breath.
"Pittsville," he resumed in a measured voice, without moving his eyes from his third daughter, "is, as usual, making a very strong and a most undignified claim for the Park. They wish it to be known as the Pittsville Casino. But Selwyn told me to-day that our people propose to take a leading share of the liability and to call the Park the Monroe Grove."
He paused. His listeners exchanged glances of surprise and gratification.
"Not that there's a tree there now!" Martie said cheerfully.
It was an unfortunate speech, breaking irreverently as it did upon this moment of exaltation. Lydia hastily came to Martie's relief.
"Pa! ISN'T that splendid—for Grandfather Monroe! I think that's very nice. They know what this town would have amounted to without HIM! All those fine reference books in the library—and files and files of bound magazine's! And didn't he give the property for the church?"
Every one present was aware that he had; there was enthusiastic assent about the table.
"They propose," Malcolm added as a climax, "to erect a statue of Leonard Monroe in a prominent place in that Park; my gift."
"Pa!" said a delighted chorus. The girls' shining eyes were moist.
"It was Selwyn's idea that there should be a fund for the cost of the statue," their father said. "But as the town will feel the added taxation in any case, I propose to make that my gift. The cost is not large, the time limit for paying it indefinite."
"Twenty thousand dollars?" Martie, who had a passion for guessing, ventured eagerly.
"Not so much." But Malcolm was pleased to have the reality so much more moderate than the guess. "Between two and three thousand."
"Some money!" Leonard exclaimed. He grinned at Martie contemptuously. "TWENTY!" said he.
"Your sister naturally has not much idea of the value of money," Malcolm said, with what was for him rare tolerance. "Yes, it is a large sum, but I can give it, and if my townspeople turn to me for this tribute to their most distinguished pioneer ..."
During the rest of the meal no other subject was discussed.
The evening was bright with memories and dreams for Martie. When a large dish of stewed apples in tapioca had been eaten, the whole family rose and left the room, and Belle, the little maid, came in wearily, alone, to attack the disordered table. For two hours the sound of running water and the dragging of Belle's heavy feet would be heard in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Belle's mother, in a small house down in the village, would keep looking at the clock and wondering whatever had become of Belle, and Belle's young man would loiter disconsolately at the bridge, waiting.
The three Monroe girls and their mother went into the parlour, Malcolm going across the hall to a dreary library, where he had an old-fashioned cabinet desk, and Lenny gaining a reluctant consent to his request to go down to "Dutch's" house, where he and Dutch would play lotto.
"Why doesn't Dutch Harrison ever come here to play lotto?" Martie asked maliciously. "You go to Dutch's because it's right down near Bonestell's and Mallon's and the Pool Parlour!" Leonard shot her a threatening glance, accepted a half-permission, snatched his cap and was gone.
The parlour was large, cold, and uncomfortable, its woodwork brown, its walls papered in dark green. Lydia lighted the fire, and as Leonard had made his escape, Belle brought up a supplementary hodful of coal. Martie lighted two of the four gas jets, and settled down to solitaire. Sally read "Idylls of the King." Lydia and her mother began to sew, the older woman busy with mending a hopelessly worn table-cloth, the younger one embroidering heavy linen with hundreds of knots. Lydia had been making a parasol top for more than a year. They gossiped in low, absorbed tones of the affairs of friends and neighbours; the endless trivial circumstances so interesting to the women of a small town.
There were two gas jets, also on hinged arms, beside the white marble fireplace, and one of these Sally lighted, taking her father's comfortable chair. A hood of thin plum-coloured flannel, embroidered in coloured flowers, was on the mantel, with shells, two pink glass vases, and a black marble clock. On the old square piano, where yellowing sheets of music were heaped, there was a cover of the same flannel. Albums and gift books, Schiller's "Bell" with Flaxman plates, and Dante's "Inferno" with Dore's illustrations—lay on the centre table; Martie pushed them back for her game.
She looked a mere overgrown, untidy girl, to whose hair, belt, finger-nails, and shoes she might have attended with advantage. But Martie was a bride to-night, walking the realm of Romance.
She had never had an admirer, nor had Sally. Neither girl admitted it, but it was true. Poor Lydia had had a taste of the joy of life, and a full measure of the sorrow, seven years ago, when Clifford Frost, twelve years her senior, at thirty-one the perfect match, had singled her out for his favour. Martie and Sally could remember how pleasantly exciting it was to have Cliff Frost so much at the house, how Lydia laughed and bloomed! Lydia had been just Sally then: her age, and her double.
What had gone wrong, the younger girls sometimes wondered. Pa had been pompous, of course; Cliff had not been made exactly comfortable, here by this marble mantel. Lydia had quavered out her happy welcome, her mother had fluttered and smiled. And Cliff had given her candy, and taken her to the Methodist Bazaar and the Elks' Minstrels, and had given her a fan. The candy was eaten long ago, and the dance music and the concerts long forgotten in the village, but Lydia still had the fan.
For a year, for two, for three, the affair went on. There was a cloud in the sky before Mary Canfield came to visit Mrs. Frost, but with her coming, joy died in Lydia's heart. Mary was made for loving; Mary's mother and father and aunts and cousins all made it easy for any man to fall in love with her. Mary danced, played the piano, chattered French, changed from one pretty frock to another, tirelessly. In short, Mary was a marketable product, and Lydia was not.
Cliff came to tell Lydia that he and Mary were to be married, and that she had always been his best pal, and that their friendship had been one of the sweetest things in his life. He kissed her in brotherly fashion when he went away. Mary, lovely in bridal silks, came to call on Lydia a few months later, and to this day when she met faded, sweet Miss Monroe, the happy little wife and mother would stop in street or shop and display little Ruth's charms, and chat graciously for a few minutes. She always defended Lydia when the Frost and Parker factions lamented that the Monroe girls were inclined to be "common."
Martie thought of none of these things to-night. She thought of Rodney Parker, and her heart floated upon clouds of rose-coloured delight. Dreamily manipulating the cards, she remembered that twilight meeting. "Are you still a little devil, Martie ... I'm going to find out." Again they were walking slowly toward the bridge. "How many people have told you you've grown awfully pretty, Martie? ... You and I'll get together on the lists. ..."
The girl stopped, with arrested fingers and absent eyes. The rapture of remembering thrilled her young body like a breath of flame blown against her. She breathed with deep, slow respirations, holding her breath with a risen breast, and letting it go with a long sigh. Now and then she looked with an ashamed and furtive glance from her mother's gray head and Lydia's busy fingers to Sally's absorbed face under the opaque white globe of the gaslight, almost as if she feared that the enchantment that held heart and brain would be visible to watching eyes.
"Mind you," Lydia was saying in a low tone, "Flora said that Lou acted very queer, from the very moment she went in—Lou asked her if she wanted to look at poor Mr. Lowney, and Flora went in, and he was all laid out, with flowers and all, in that upstairs room where Al died. Grandma Lowney was there, and—oh, quite a few others, coming and going, Mrs. Mallon and the Baxter girls. Flora only stayed a minute, and when she and Lou went out, she says, 'Lou, has Annie Poett been here since he was taken sick?' and Lou began to cry and said that her mother answered the telephone when Annie called up last week, and it seems Annie asked was Joe Lowney sick and Mrs. King said 'No.'"
"For heaven's sake!" Mrs. Monroe said, incredulous and absorbed.
"Well, that's what Flora said. But mind you, Ma, on Tuesday night little Hildegarde King went to the door, and she says that Annie Poett came in and went upstairs—Lou was dishing supper, you know the Allens and Mrs. Gorman were there for the funeral, and they were all at table—and, by the way, Flora says that Lou says that Lizzie Alien was there in that house for three days—that is, it was nearly three days, for they stayed for supper Wednesday night—and that Lizzie never raised her hand to ONE THING, just did nothing but sit around and cry, and say what a good brother Joe was!"
"Did you ever!" commented Mrs. Monroe.
"Anyway, nobody got up from the table, and all they had for it was Hildegarde's word, and she wasn't sure it was Annie. Grandma Lowney was asleep—they'd gotten her to lie down; she took more care of Joe than any one else, you know, and she sat up both nights. Clara Baxter says she looks awful; she doesn't believe she'll get over it."
"I shouldn't wonder!" said Mrs. Monroe with a click of commiseration.
"Lou told Flora that the night Joe was dying, Grandma broke out and said to Paul King that if Joe hadn't gone with him out to Deegan Point two weeks ago, he never would have had that chill. But Flora says ..."
The low voices went on and on, even after Malcolm Monroe came in, thoroughly tired and a little chilly, to take his own chair by the fire. Sally, deposed, came to sit opposite Martie, and idly watched the solitaire.
"Isn't Rodney Parker nice?" Sally whispered cautiously, after a while.
"I think he is!" Martie answered hardily; but the happy colour came to her cheeks.
"I'll bet all the girls go crazy about him!" Sally submitted.
A faint pang of jealousy, a vague sense of helplessness, seized upon Martie. He had been so cordially gay and delightful with her; would he be that with all the girls? Would Florence Frost, three years older than he, fall a victim to his charm as quickly as she, Martie, had fallen? Martie had mentioned Florence Frost this afternoon, and by subtle, instinctive, girlish reasoning had found consolation in his reply. "She's my sister's friend; she's awfully smart, you know—books and all that!" Rodney honestly felt an entire indifference to this admirable young neighbour, and Martie understood his remark as meaning exactly that.
She went on with her patience, the particular game known as the "Idle Year." Sometimes Sally touched or mentioned a card. Sometimes, as a final problem presented itself, the girls consulted as to the wisdom of this play or that. Between games Martie shuffled vigorously, and they talked more freely.
"I think he's crazy about you," said Sally.
"Oh, Sally, don't be such a fool!"
"I'm not fooling. Look at the way he turned back and walked with us, and he never took his eyes off you!" Sally, somewhat dashed for an instant by Martie's well-assumed scorn, gained confidence now, as the new radiance brightened her sister's face. "Why, Mart," she said boldly, "there is such a thing as love at first sight!"
Love at first sight! Martie felt a sort of ecstatic suffocation at the words. An uncontrollable smile twitched at her mouth, she recommenced her game briskly. Her heart was dancing.
"Lissun; do you suppose Ma would ever let us have a party here?" Martie presently ventured.
Sally pursed her lips and shook a doubtful head.
"Oh, but, Sally, I don't mean a real party, of course. Just about twenty—" Martie began.
"Lemonade and cake?" Sally supplied.
"Well—coffee and sandwiches, Rodney seemed to think. And punch."
"Punch! Martie! You know Pa never would."
"I don't see why not," Martie said discontentedly, slapping down her cards noisily. Sally spoke only the truth, yet it was an irritating truth, and Martie would have preferred a soothing lie.
"What about music for dancing?" Sally asked, after a thoughtful interval.
"Angela Baxter," Martie said with reviving hope.
"But she charges two dollars; at least she did for the Baptist euchre."
"Well—that's not so much!"
"We could make those cute brown-bread sandwiches Rose had," Sally mused, warming to the possibility. "And use the Canton set. Nobody in town has china like ours, anyway!"
"Oh, Sally," Martie was again fired, "we could have creamed chicken and sandwiches—that's all anybody ever wants! And it's so much sweller than messy sherbets and layer cake. And we could decorate the rooms with greens—"
"Our rooms are lovely, anyway!" Sally stated with satisfaction.
"Why, with the folding doors open, and fires in both grates, they would be perfectly stunning!" Martie spoke rapidly, her colour rising, her blue eyes glittering like stars. "Of course, the back room isn't furnished, but we could scatter some chairs around in there; we'll need all the room for dancing, anyway!"
"We couldn't dance on this carpet," Sally submitted, perplexed, as she glanced at the parlour's worn floor-covering.
"No, but we could in the back room—that floor's bare—and in the hall," Martie answered readily. "You see it's the first of a sort of set of dances; the next would be at the Frosts' or the Barkers', and it would mean that we were right in things—"
"Oh, it would be lovely if we could do it!" Sally agreed with a sigh. "Play the Queen on here, Martie, and then you'll have a space."
"Do you propose to play that game much longer, girls?" their father asked, looking patiently over his book.
"Are we disturbing you, Pa?" Martie countered politely.
"Well—but don't stop on my account. Of course the sound of cards and voices isn't exactly soothing. However, go on with your game—go on with your game! If I can't stand it, I'll go back to the library."
"Oh, no, Pa, it's too cold in there; this is the time of year you always get that cold in your nose," Mrs. Monroe said pleadingly.
"I was going right up, anyway," Sally said with an apologetic air and a glance toward the door.
"I'll go, too!" Martie jumbled the cards together, and rose. "It's nearly ten, anyway."
A moment later she and Sally went out of the room together. But while Sally went straight upstairs, to light the bedroom gas, fold up the counterpane, and otherwise play the part of the good sister she was, Martie noiselessly opened the side door and stepped out for a breath of the sweet autumn night.
There was a spectacularly bright moon, somewhere; Martie could not see it, but beyond the sunken garden she caught glimpses of silvery brightness on the roofs of Monroe. Even here, under the dark trees, pools of light had formed and the heavy foliage was shot with shafts of radiance. A strong wind was clicking the eucalyptus leaves together, and carrying bits of rubbish here and there about the yard. Martie could hear voices, the barking of dogs, and the whine of the ten o'clock trolley, down in the village.
The gate slammed. Leonard came in.
"Pa tell you to watch for me?" he asked fearfully.
"No." Martie, sitting on the top step and hugging her knees, answered indifferently. "It's not ten yet. What you been doing?"
"Oh, nothing!" Len passed her and went in.
As a matter of fact, he had called for his chum, sauntered into the candy store for caramels, joined the appreciative group that watched a drunken man forcibly ejected from Casserley's saloon, visited the pool room and witnessed a game or two, gone back into the street to tease two hurrying and giggling girls with his young wit, and drifted into a passing juggler's wretched and vulgar show. This, or something like this, was what Len craved when he begged to "go out for a while" after dinner. It was sometimes a little more entertaining, sometimes less so; but it spelled life for the seventeen-year-old boy.
He could not have described this to Martie, even had he cared to do so. She would not have understood it. But she felt a vague yearning, too, for lights and companionship and freedom, a vague envy of Leonard.
The world was out there, beyond the gate, beyond the village. She was in it, but not of it. She longed to begin to live, and knew not how. Ten years before she had been only a busy, independent, happy little girl; turning to her mother and sister for advice, obeying her father without question. But Pa and Lydia, and Len with his egotism, and Ma with her trials, were nothing to Martie now. In battle, in pestilence, or after a great fire, she would have risen head and shoulders above them all, would have worked gloriously to reestablish them. She supposed that she loved them dearly. But so terrible was the hunger of her heart for her share of life—for loving, serving, planning, and triumphing—that she would have swept them all aside like cobwebs to grasp the first reality flung her by fate.
Not to stagnate, not to smother, not to fade and shrink like Lydia—like Miss Fanny at the library, and the Baxter girls at the post-office! Every healthy young fibre of Martie's soul and body rebelled against such a fate, but she could not fully sense the barriers about her, nor plan any move that should loosen her bonds. Martie believed, as her parents believed, that life was largely a question of "luck." Money, fame, friends, power, to this man; poverty and obscurity and helplessness to that one. Wifehood, motherhood, honour and delight to one school girl; gnawing, restless uselessness to the next. "I only hope you girls are going to marry," their mother would sometimes say plaintively; "but I declare I don't know who—with all the nice boys leaving town the way they do! Pa gives you a good home, but he can't do much more, and after he and I go, why, it will be quite natural for you girls to go on keeping house for Len—I suppose."
Martie's sensitive soul writhed under these mournful predictions. Dependence was bitter to her, Len's kindly patronage stung her only a little less than his occasional moods of cheerful masculine contempt. He meant to take care of his sisters, he wasn't ever going to marry. Pa needn't worry, Len said. The house was mortgaged, Martie knew; their father's business growing less year by year; there would be no great inheritance, and if life was not satisfying now, when she had youth and plenty, what would it be when Pa was gone?
It was all dark, confusing, baffling, to ignorant, untrained nineteen. The sense of time passing, of opportunities unseen and ungrasped, might well make Martie irritable, restless, and reckless. Happiness and achievement were to be bought, but she knew not with what coinage.
To-day the darkness had been shot by a gleam of living light. Through Rodney Parker's casual gallantries Martie's eyes looked into a new world. It was a world of loving, of radiant self-confidence and self-expression. Martie saw herself buying gowns for the wedding, whisking in and out of Monroe's shops, stopped by affectionate and congratulatory friends. She was dining at Mrs. Barker's, dignified, and yet gracious and responsive, too. Dear old Judge Parker was being courteous to her; Mrs. Parker advising Rodney's young wife. There were grandchildren running over the old place. Martie remembered the big rooms from long-ago red-letter days of her childhood. How she would love her home, and what a figure of dignity and goodness Mrs. Rodney Parker would be in the life of the town.
Oh, dear God—it was not so much to ask! People were getting married all the time; Rodney Parker must marry some one. Lydia was unwed, Sally had no lover; but out of so rich and full a world could not so much be spared to Martie? Oh, how good she would be, how generous to Pa and the girls, how kind to Ida and May!
Martie bowed her head on her knees. If this one thing might come her way, if it might be her fate to have Rodney Parker love her, to have the engagement and the wedding follow in their happy order, she would never ask more of God; gaining so much she would truly be good, she would live for others then!
When she raised her face it was wet with tears.
The next morning, when the younger girls came down to breakfast, they found only the three women in the kitchen. An odour of coffee hung in the air. Belle was scraping burned toast at the sink, the flying, sooty particles clinging to wet surfaces everywhere. Lydia sat packing cold hominy in empty baking-powder tins; to be sliced and fried for the noon meal. Mrs. Monroe, preferring an informal kitchen breakfast to her own society in the dining room, was standing by the kitchen table, alternating swallows from a saucerless cup of hot coffee with indifferent mouthfuls of buttered cold bread. She rarely went to the trouble of toasting her own bread, spending twice the energy required to do so in protests against the trouble.
Lydia had breakfasted an hour ago. Sally and Martie sliced bread, pushed forward the coffee pot, and entered a spirited claim for cream. It was Saturday morning, when Leonard slept late. Pa was always late. Lydia was anxious to save a generous amount of cream for the sleepers.
"Len often takes a second cup of coffee when he's got lots of time," Lydia said.
"Well, I don't care!" Martie said, suddenly serious. "I'm going to take my coffee black, anyway. I'm getting too fat!"
"Oh, Martie, you are not!" Sally laughed.
"That's foolish—you'll just upset your health!" her mother added disapprovingly.
Martie's only answer was a buoyant kiss. She and Sally carried their breakfast into the dining room, where they established themselves comfortably at one end of the long table. While they ate, dipping their toast in the coffee, buttering and rebuttering it, they chattered as tirelessly as if they had been deprived of each other's society and confidence for weeks.
The morning was dark and foggy, and a coal fire slumbered in the grate, giving out a bitter, acrid smell. Against the windows the soft mist pressed, showing a yellow patch toward the southeast, where the sun would pierce it after a while.
Malcolm Monroe came downstairs at about nine o'clock, and the girls gathered up their dishes and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Not that Ma would not, as usual, prepare their father's toast and bacon with her own hands, and not that Lydia would not, as usual, serve it. The girls were not needed. But Pa always made it impossible for them to be idle and comfortable over their own meal. If he did not actually ask them to fetch butter or water, or if he could find no reasonable excuse for fault-finding, he would surely introduce some dangerous topic; lure them into admissions, stand ready to pursue any clue. He did not like to see young girls care-free and contented; time enough for that later on! And as years robbed him of actual dignities, and as Monroe's estimate of him fell lower and lower, he turned upon his daughters the authority, the carping and controlling that might otherwise have been spent upon respectful employees and underlings. He found some relief for a chafed and baffled spirit in the knowledge that Sally and Martie were helpless, were bound to obey, and could easily be made angry and unhappy.
Lydia, her father's favourite, came in with a loaded tray, just as Len, slipping down the back stairs, was being stealthily regaled by his mother on a late meal in the kitchen. Len had no particular desire for his father's undiluted company.
"Good morning, Pa!" Lydia said, with a kiss for his cool forehead. "Your paper's right there by the fire; there's quite a fog, and it got wet."
Hands locked, she settled herself opposite him, and revolved in her mind the terms in which she might lay before him the younger girls' hopes. It was part of Lydia's concientiousness not to fail them now, even though she secretly disapproved of the whole thing.
"Pa," she began bravely, "you wouldn't mind the girls having some of their friends in some evening, would you? I thought perhaps some night when you were down in the city—"
"Your idea, my dear?" Malcolm said graciously.
"Well—Martie's really." Lydia was always scrupulously truthful.
His face darkened a little. He pursed his lips.
"Dinner, eh?"
"Oh, no, Pa! Just dancing, or—" Lydia was watching him closely, "or games," she substituted hurriedly. "You see the other girls have these little parties, and our girls—" her voice fell.
"Such an affair costs money, my dear!"
"Not much, Pa!"
His eyes were discontentedly fixed upon the headlines of his paper, but he was thinking.
"Making a lot of work for your mother," he protested, "upsetting the whole house like a pack of wolves! Upon my word, I can't see the necessity. Why can't Sally and Martie—"
"But it's only once in a long while, Pa," Lydia urged.
"I know—I know! Well, you ask Martie to speak to me about it in a day or two. Now go call your mother."
For the gracious permission Lydia gave him an appreciative kiss, leaving him comfortable with his fire, his newspaper, and his armchair, as she went on her errand.
"Pa was terribly sweet about the dance," she told Martie and Sally.
Belle was now deep in breakfast dishes, and the two girls had gone out into the foggy dooryard with the chickens' breakfast. A flock of mixed fowls were clucking and pecking over the bare ground under the willows. Martie held the empty tin pan in one hand, in the other was a half-eaten cruller. Sally had turned her serge skirt up over her shoulders as a protection against the cool air, exposing a shabby little "balmoral."
"Oh, Lyd, you're an angel!" Martie said, holding the cruller against Lydia's mouth. But Lydia expressed a grateful negative with a shake of her head; she never nibbled between meals.
She retailed the conversation with her father. Martie and Sally became fired with enthusiasm as they listened. An animated discussion followed. Grace was a problem. Dared they ignore Grace? There was a lamentable preponderance of girls without her. All their lists began and ended with, "Well, there's Rodney and his friends—that's two—"
The day was as other days, except to Martie. When the chickens were fed, she and Sally idled for perhaps half an hour in the yard, and then went into the kitchen. Belle, sooty and untidy, had paused at the kitchen table, with her dustpan resting three feet away from the cold mutton that lay there. Mrs. Monroe's hair was in some disorder, and a streak of black from the stove lay across one of her lean, greasy wrists. The big stove was cooling now, ashes drifted from the firebox door, and an enormous saucepan of slowly cooking beans gave forth a fresh, unpleasant odour. At all the windows the fog pressed softly.
"Are you going down town, Sally?" the mother asked.
"Well—I thought we would. We can if you want!" said Sally.
"If you do, I wish you'd step into Mason & White's, and ask one of the men there if they aren't ever going to send me the rest of my box of potatoes."
"All right!" Martie and Sally put their hats on in the downstair hall, shouted upstairs to Lydia for the shoes, and sauntered out contentedly into the soft, foggy morning. The Monroe girls never heard the garden gate slam behind them without a pleasant yet undefined sense of freedom. The sun was slowly but steadily gaining on the fog, a bright yellow blur showed the exact spot where shining light must soon break through. Trees along the way dripped softly, but on the other side of the bridge, where houses were set more closely together, and gardens less dense, sidewalks and porches were already drying.
The girls walked past the new, trim little houses and the clumsy, big, old-fashioned ones, chattering incessantly. Their bright, interested eyes did not miss the tiniest detail. The village, sleepier than ever on the morning of the half-holiday, was full of interest to them.
Mrs. Hughie Wilson was sweeping her garden path, and called out to them that the church concert had netted 327 dollars; wasn't that pretty good?
A few steps farther on they met Alice Clark, who kept them ten minutes in eager, unimportant conversation. Her parting remark sent the Monroe girls happily on their way.
"I hear Rodney Parker's home—don't pretend to be surprised, Martha Monroe. A little bird was telling me that I'll have to go up North Main Street for news of him after this!"
"Who do you s'pose told her we met Rod Parker?" Martie grinned as they went on.
"People see everything! Oh, Martie," said Sally earnestly, "I do hope you are going to marry; no, don't laugh! I don't mean Rod, of course, I'm not such a fool. But I mean some one."
"You ought to marry first, Sally; you're the older," Martie said, with averted eyes and a sort of delicious shame.
"Oh, I don't mind that, Martie, if only we begin!" Sally answered fervently. "When I think of what the next ten years MEAN for us, it just makes me sick! Either we'll marry and have our own homes and children, or we'll be like Alice, and the Baxters, and Miss Fanny—"
"I'd just as soon have a good job like Miss Fanny," Martie said hardily. "She gets sixty a month."
"Well, I wouldn't!" Sally protested in a sudden burst. "Being in an office would KILL me, I think! I just couldn't do it! But I believe I COULD manage a little house, and children, and I'd like that! I wouldn't mind being poor—I never really think of being anything else—but what I'm so afraid of is that Len'll marry and we'll just be—just be AUNTS!"
Such vehemence was not usual to Sally, and as her earnestness brought her to a full stop on the sidewalk, the two sisters found themselves facing each other. They burst into a joyous laugh, as their eyes met, and the full absurdity of the conversation became apparent.
Still giggling, they went on their way, past the old smithy, where a pleasant breath of warmth and a splendid ringing of hammers came from the forge, and past the new garage of raw wood with the still-astonishing miracle of a "horseless carriage" in its big window, pots of paint and oil standing inside its door, and workmen, behind a barrier of barrels and planks, laying a cement sidewalk in front. They passed the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, its unwashed windows jammed with pyramids of dry-looking chocolates, post cards, and jewellery, and festoons of trashy embroidery, and the corner fruit stands heaped with tomatoes and sprawling grapes. At the Palace Candy Store a Japanese boy in his shirt-sleeves was washing the show window, which was empty except for some rumpled sheets of sun-faded pink crepe paper. By the door stood two large wooden buckets for packing ice cream. The ice and salt were melted now, and the empty moulds, still oozing a little curdled pink cream, were floating in the dirty water.
"Why aren't you girls at home sewing for the poor?" demanded a pleasant voice over their shoulders. The girls wheeled about to smile into the eyes of Father Martin. A tall spare old man, with enormous glasses on his twinkling blue eyes, spots and dust on his priestly black, and a few teeth missing from his kindly, big, homely mouth, he beamed upon them.
"Well, how are ye? And your mother's well? Well, and what are ye buying—trousseaux?"
"We're just looking, Father," Martie giggled. "Looking for husbands first, and then clothes!"
Laughing, the girls walked with him across the street to Mallon's Hardware Emporium, where baskets of jelly glasses were set out on the damp sidewalk, with enamel saucepans marked "29c." and "19c." in black paint, carpet sweepers, oil stoves, and pink-and-blue glass vases. They went on to the shoe shop, to the grocery, to the post-office, past the express office, where Joe Hawkes sat whittling in the sun. They paused to study with eager interest the flaring posters on the fences that announced the impending arrival of Poulson's Star Stock Company, for one night only, in "The Sword of the King." They discovered with surprise that it was nearly twelve o'clock, bought five cents' worth of rusty, sweet, Muscat grapes, to be eaten on the way home, and turned their faces toward the bridge.
But the morning, for Martie, had held its golden moment. When they passed the Bank, Sally had been dreaming, as Sally almost always was, but Martie's eyes had gone from shining gold-lettered window to window, and with that new, sweet suffocation at her heart she had found the object of her searching—the satiny crest of Rodney Parker's sleek hair, the fresh-coloured profile that had been in her waking and sleeping thoughts since yesterday. He was evidently hard at work; indeed he was nervous and discouraged, had Martie but known it; he did not look up.
But Martie did not want him to look up. She wanted only the stimulation to her thoughts that the sight of him caused, the enchanting realization that he was there. She had a thrilling vision of herself entering that bank, a privileged person, "young Mrs. Rodney." Old Judge Parker coming out of his private office with his hands full of papers would nod to her with his fatherly smile, Rodney grin the proud yet embarrassed grin of a man confronted in office hours by his women-folk.
Suddenly Martie decided that she would begin to save money. She and Sally had jointly fallen heir to a young Durham cow when Cousin Sally Buckingham died, and the cow being sold for thirty-five dollars, exactly seventeen dollars and fifty cents had been deposited in the bank in each girl's name. This was four years ago; neither one ever dreamed of touching the precious nest-egg; to them it represented wealth. Len had no bank account, nor had Mama nor Lydia. All Martie's dreams of the future began, included, or ended on the expenditure of this sum. It bought text books, wedding veils, railway tickets in turn. Now she thought that if she saved another dollar, and went into the Bank duly to deposit it, Rodney must see her, might even wait upon her; it would be a perfectly legitimate way of crossing his line of vision.
The Monroes had plenty of spending money; for although their father was strongly opposed to the idea of making any child of his a definite allowance, he allowed them to keep the change whenever they executed small commissions for him, and to wheedle from him stray quarter and half dollars. Lydia had only to watch for the favourable moment to get whatever she asked, and with Leonard he was especially generous. Martie knew that she could save, if she determined to do so. She imagined Rodney's voice: "Bringing more money in? You'll soon be rich at this rate, Martie!"
A few days later Rodney Parker walked home from the village with Martie Monroe again. Meeting her in Bonestell's, he paid for her chocolate sundae, and on their way up Main Street they stopped in the Library, so that Miss Fanny saw them. Every one saw them: first of all generous little Sally, who was to meet Martie in Bonestell's, but who, perceiving that Rodney had joined her there, slipped away unseen, and, blindly turning over the ribbons on Mason's remnant counter, prayed with all her heart that Rodney would continue to fill her place.
They walked up Main Street, Martie glancing up from under her shabby hat with happy blue eyes, Rodney sauntering contentedly at her side.
How much he knew, how much he had done, the girl thought, with an ache of hopeless admiration. Almost every sentence opened a new vista of his experience and her ignorance. She did not suspect that he meant it to be so; she only felt dazzled by the easy, glancing references he made to men and books and places.
They stopped at the railroad track to watch the eastward-bound train thunder by. Five hours out of San Francisco, its passengers looked quite at home in the big green upholstered seats. Bored women looked idly out upon little Monroe, half-closed magazines in their hands. Card-playing men did not glance up as the village flashed by. On the platform of the observation car the usual well-wrapped girl and pipe-smoking young man were carrying on the usual flirtation. Martie saw the train nearly every day, but never without a thrill. She said to herself, "New York!" as a pilgrim might murmur of Mecca or of Heaven.
"That's a good train," said Rodney. "Let's see, this is Wednesday. They'll be in New York Sunday night. Awful place on Sunday—no theatres, no ball games, no drinks—"
"I could manage without theatres or ball games," Martie laughed. "But I must have my whisky!"
"It sounded as if I meant that, but you know me!" he laughed back. "Lord, how I'd like to show you New York. Wouldn't you love it! Broadway—well, it's a wonder! There's something doing every minute. You'd love the theatres—"
"I know I would!" Martie assented, glowing.
"My aunt lives there; she has an apartment right on the Park, at West Ninetieth," Rodney said. "Her husband has scads of money," the boy pursued. "You'll have to go on, Martie, there's no two ways about it."
"And Delmonico's?" the girl suggested eagerly. "I've heard of Delmonico's!"
"Delmonico's is where the wedding parties go. Of course, if you say so, Martie—"
That was one of the sweet and thrilling things to remember. And there were other things to make Martie's heart dance as she set the dinner table. But she wondered if she should have asked him in.
Martie stopped short, salt-cellars in her hand. How could she—with Pa's arrival possible at any moment. Besides she had asked him, as they lingered laughing at the gate. That was all right—it was late, anyway. He had gaily refused, and she had not pressed him. And, wonderful thought, they were going walking on Sunday.
Monroe boys and girls usually walked on Sunday. They walked up the track to the Junction, or up between bare fields past the Poor House to the Cemetery. When a young man hired a phaeton at Beetman's, and took his girl for a drive on Sunday, it was a definite avowal of serious attachment. In that case they usually had their Sunday supper at the home of the young man's mother, or married sister, or with some female relative whose sanction upon their plans was considered essential.
Rodney Parker was not quite familiar with this well-established precedent. His sisters were not enough of the village to be asked either to walk or drive with the local swains, and he had been away for several years. For two Sundays he walked with Martie, and then he asked her to drive.
For the girl, these weeks were suffused with a tremulous and ecstatic delight beyond definition, beyond words. What she would not have dared to hope, she actually experienced. No need to boast before Sally and Grace and Florence Frost. They saw: the whole village saw.
Martie bloomed like a rose. She forgot everything—Pa, Len, the gloomy home, the uncertain future—for joy. That her old hat was shabby and her clothes inappropriate meant nothing to Martie; ignorant, unhelped, she stumbled on her way alone. Nobody told her to pin her bronze braids more trimly, to keep her brilliant skin free from the muddying touch of sweets and pastries, to sew a hook here and catch a looping hem there. Nobody suggested that she manicure her fine big hands, or use some of her endless leisure to remove the spots from her blue silk dress.
More; the family dared take only a stealthy interest in Martie's affair, because of Malcolm's extraordinary perversity and Len's young scorn. Malcolm, angered by Lydia's fluttered pleasure in the honour Rodney Parker was doing their Martie, was pleased to assume a high and mighty attitude. He laughed heartily at the mere idea that the attentions of Graham Parker's son might be construed as a compliment to a Monroe, and sarcastically rebuked Lydia when, on a Sunday afternoon, she somewhat stealthily made preparations for tea. Martie and Rod were walking, and Martie, before she went, had said something vague about coming back at half-past four.
Lydia, abashed, gave up her plan for tea. But she did what she could for Martie, by inveigling her father into a walk. Martie and Rod came into an empty house, for Sally was out, no one knew where, and Mrs. Monroe had gone to church where vespers were sung at four o'clock through the winter.
Martie's colour was high from fast walking in the cold wind, her eyes shone like sapphires, and her loosened hair, under an old velvet tam-o'-shanter cap, made a gold aureole about her face. Rodney, watching her mount the little hill to the graveyard with a winter sunset before her, had called her "Brunhilde," and he had been talking of grand opera as they walked home.
Enchanted at finding the house deserted, she very simply took him into the kitchen. The kettle was fortunately singing over a sleeping fire; Rodney sliced bread and toasted it, while Martie, trying to appear quite at her ease, but conscious of awkward knees and elbows just the same, whisked from pantry to kitchen busily, disappearing into the dining room long enough to lay the tea cups and plates at one end of the big table.
Only a few moments before the little feast was ready, Lydia came rather anxiously into the kitchen. She greeted Rodney smilingly, seizing the first opportunity for an aside to say to Martie:
"Pa's home, Mart. And he doesn't like your having Rod out here. I walked him up to the Tates', but no one was home except Lizzie. Shame! He saw Rodney's cap in the hall—he's in the dining room." Aloud she said cheerfully: "I think this is dreadful—making you work so hard, Rod. Come—tea's nearly ready. You and I'll wait for it in the dining room, like the gentleman and lady we are!"
"Oh, I'm having a grand time!" Rodney laughed. But he allowed himself to be led away. A few minutes later Martie, with despair in her heart, carried the loaded tray into the dining room.
Her father, in one of his bad moods, was sitting by the empty fireplace. The room, in the early autumn twilight, was cold. Len had come in and expected his share of the unfamiliar luxury of tea, and more than his share of the hot toast.
Rodney, unaffected by the atmosphere, gaily busied himself with the tray. Lydia came gently in with an armful of light wood which she laid in the fireplace.
"There is no necessity for a fire," Malcolm said. "I wouldn't light that, my dear."
"I thought—just to take the chill off," Lydia stammered.
Her father shook his head. Lydia subsided.
"We shall be having supper shortly, I suppose?" he asked patiently, looking at a large gold watch. "It's after half-past five now."
"But, Pa," Lydia laughed a little constrainedly, "we never have dinner until half-past six!"
"Oh, on week days—certainly," he agreed stiffly. "On Sundays, unless I am entirely wrong, we sit down before six."
"Len," Martie murmured, "why don't you go make yourself some toast?"
"Don't have to!" Len laughed with his mouth full.
"Here—I'll go out and make some more!" Rodney said buoyantly, catching up a plate. Lydia instantly intervened; this would not do. Pa would be furious. Obviously Martie could not go, because in her absence Pa, Rodney, and Len would either be silent, or say what was better unsaid. Lydia herself went out for a fresh supply of toast.
Martie was grateful, but in misery. Lydia was always slow. The endless minutes wore away, she and Rodney playing with their empty plates, Len also waiting hungrily, her father watching them sombrely. If Len hadn't come in and been so greedy, Martie thought in confused anger, tea would have been safely over by this time; if Pa were not there glowering she might have chattered at her ease with Rodney, no tea hour would have been too long. As it was, she was self-conscious and constrained. The clock struck six. Really it WAS late.
The toast came in; Sally came in demurely at her mother's side. She had rushed out of the shadows to join her mother at the gate, much to Mrs. Monroe's surprise. Conversation, subdued but general, ensued. Martie walked boldly with Rodney to the gate, at twenty minutes past six, and they stood there, laughing and talking, for another ten minutes.
When she went in, it was to face unpleasantness. Her mother, with her bonnet strings dangling, was helping Lydia hastily to remove signs of the recent tea party. Sally was in the kitchen; Len reading opposite his father.
"Come here a minute, Martie," her father called as I the girl hesitated in the hallway. Martie came in and eyed him. "I would like to know what circumstances led to young Parker's being here this afternoon?" he asked.
"Why—we were walking, and I—I suppose I asked him, Pa."
"You SUPPOSE you asked him?"
"Well—I DID ask him."
"Oh, you DID ask him; that's different. You had spoken to your mother about it?"
"No." Martie swallowed. "No," she said again nervously. There was a silence while her father eyed her coldly.
"Then you ask whom you like to the house, do you? Is that the idea? You upset your mother's and your sister's arrangement entirely at your own pleasure?" he suggested presently.
"I didn't think it was so much to ask a person to have a cup of tea!" Martie stammered, with a desperate attempt at self-defense. She felt tears pressing against her eyes. Lydia would have been meek, Sally would have been meek, but Martie's anger was her nearest weapon. It angered her father in turn.
"Well, will you kindly remember in future that your ideas of what to ask, and what not to ask, are not the ideas by which this house is governed?" Malcolm asked magnificently.
"Yes, sir." Martie stirred as if to turn and go.
"One moment," Malcolm said discontentedly. "You thoroughly understand me, do you?"
"Yes, sir." Martie's eyes met Len's discreetly raised over the edge of his book and full of reproachful interest. She went into the kitchen.
The spell of a nervous silence which had held the dining room was broken. Mrs. Monroe and Lydia talked in low tones as they went to and fro; Len shifted his position; Sally coming in with a plate of sliced bread hummed contentedly. Martie appeared in her usual place at supper, not too subdued to win a laugh even from her father with some vivacious imitation of Miss Tate rallying the children for Sunday School. Happiness was bubbling like a spring in her heart.
After dinner, the dishes being piled in the sink to greet Belle on Monday morning, she went to the piano and crashed into "Just a Song at Twilight," and "Oh, Promise Me," and "The Two Grenadiers." These and many more songs were contained in a large, heavy album entitled "Favourite Songs for the Home." Martie had a good voice; not better than Sally's or Lydia's, but Sally and Lydia rarely sang. Martie had sung to her own noisy accompaniment since she was a child; she loved the sound of her own voice. She had a hunger for accomplishment, rattled off the few French phrases she knew with an unusually pure accent, and caught an odd pleasing word or an accurate pronunciation eagerly on the few occasions when lecturers or actors in Monroe gave her an opportunity.
To-night her father, in his library, heard the sweet, true tones of her voice in "Lesbia" and "Believe Me," and remembered his mother singing those same old songs. But when a silence followed he remembered only faulty Martie, awkwardly making Rodney Parker welcome at the most inconvenient time her evil genius could have suggested, and he presently went into the sitting room with the familiar scowl on his face.
On the next Sunday Rodney hired a Roman-nosed, rusty white horse at Beetman's, and for two hours he and Martie drove slowly about. They drove up past the Poor House to the Cemetery, and into the Cemetery itself, where black-clad forms were moving slowly among the graves. The day was cold, with a bleak wind blowing; the headstones looked bare and forlorn.
At half-past three, driving down the Pittsville road, back toward Monroe, Rodney said:
"Why don't you come and have tea at our house, Martie?"
Martie's heart rose on a great spring.
"Why—would your mother—" She stopped short, not knowing quite how to voice her hesitation. Had she expressed exactly what was in her mind she might have said: "First, won't your mother and sisters snub me? And secondly, is it quite correct, from a conventional standpoint, for me to accept your casual invitation?"
"Sure. Mother'll be delighted—come on!" Rodney urged.
"I'd love to!" Martie agreed.
"You know, the beauty about you, Martie, is that you're such a good pal," Rodney said enthusiastically as he drove on. "I've always wanted a pal. You and I like the same things; we're both a little different from the common run, perhaps—I don't want to throw any flowers at us, but that's true—and it's wonderful to me that living here in this hole all your life you're so up-to-date—so darned intelligent!"
This was nectar to Martie's soul. But she had never been indulged so recklessly in personalities before, and she did not quite know how to meet them. She wanted to say the right thing, to respond absolutely to his mood; a smile, half-deprecating, half-charmed, fluttered on her lips when Rodney talked in this fashion, but even to herself her words seemed ill-chosen and clumsy. A more experienced woman, with all of Martie's love and longing surging in her heart, would have vouchsafed him just that casual touch of hand on hand, that slight, apparently involuntary swerve of shoulder against shoulder that would have brought the boy's arms about her, his lips to hers.
It was her business in life to make him love her; the only business for which her mother and father had ever predestined her. But she knew nothing of it, except that no "nice" girl allowed a boy to put his arm about her or kiss her unless they were engaged. She knew that girls got into "trouble" by being careless on these matters, but what that trouble was, or what led to it, she did not know. She and Sally innocently believed that some mysterious cloud enveloped even the most staid and upright girl at the touch of a man's arm, so that of subsequent events she lost all consciousness. A girl might attract a man by words and smiles to the point of wishing to marry her, but she must never permit the slightest liberties, she must indeed assume, to the very day of her marriage, that the desire for marriage lived in the heart of the man alone.
Martie never dreamed that the youth and sex within her had as definite a claim on her senses as hunger had in the hour before dinner time, or sleep had when she nodded over her solitaire at night. But she drank in enchantment with Rodney's voice, his laughter, his nearness, and the night was too short for her dreams or the days for her happiness.
They left the Roman-nosed horse and the surrey at Beetman's livery stable, a damp and odorous enclosure smelling of wet straw, and with the rear quarters of nervous bay horses stirring in the stalls. The various men, smoking and spitting there in the Sunday afternoon leisure, knew Martie and nodded to her; knew who her companion was.
Martie and Rodney walked down South California Street, into the town's nicest quarter, and passed the old-fashioned wooden houses, set far back in bare gardens: the Wests' with its wooden palings; the Clifford Frosts', with a hooded baby carriage near the side door; and the senior Frosts', a dark red house shut in by a dark red fence. The Barkers' house was the last in the row, rambling, ugly, decorated with knobs and triangles of wood, with many porches, with coloured glass frames on its narrow windows, yet imposing withal, because of its great size and the great trees about it. Martie had not been there since her childhood, in the days before Malcolm Monroe's attitude on the sewer and street-lighting questions had antagonized his neighbours, in the days when Mrs. Frost and Mrs. Parker still exchanged occasional calls with Martie's mother.
The girl found strangely thrilling Rodney's familiarity here. He crossed the porch, opened the unlocked front door, and led Martie through a large, over-furnished hall and a large, stately drawing room. The rugs, lamps, chairs, and tables all belonged to entirely different periods, some were Mission oak, some cherry upholstered in rich brocade; there was a little mahogany, some maple, even a single handsome square chair of teakwood from the Orient. On the walls there were large crayon portraits made from photographs of the girls, and there were cushions everywhere, some of fringed leather, some of satin painted or embroidered, some of cigar ribbons of clear yellow silk, some with college pennants flaunting across them.
Beyond this room was another large one, looking out on the lawn and the shabby willows at the side of the house. Into this room the more favoured one had been casting off its abandoned fineries for many years. There were more rugs, pillows, lamps, and chairs in here, but it was all more shabby, and the effect was pleasanter and softer. Ida's tea table stood by the hearth, with innovations such as a silver tea-ball, and a porcelain cracker jar decorated with a rich design in the minutely cut and shellacked details of postage stamps. A fire winked sleepily behind the polished steel bars of the grate, the western window was full of potted begonias and ferns, the air was close and pleasantly scented with the odour of a good cigar.
Judge Parker, a genial man looking more than his fifty-five years, sat alone, smoking this cigar, and Martie, greeting him prettily, was relieved to find that she must not at once face the ladies of the house. Rather uncertainly she took off her hat, but did not remove the becoming blue sweater. She sat erect in a low, comfortable armchair whose inviting curves made her rigid attitude unnatural and difficult, and talked to the Judge. The old man liked all fresh young girls, and laughing with her, he vaguely wondered in his hospitable heart why Monroe's girls were not more often at the house.
Ida and May, tall, colourless young women, presently came down. They noticed Martie's shoe-lacings and the frill of muddy petticoat, the ungloved hands and the absurdity of her having removed her hat, and told Rodney about these things later. At the time they only made her uncomfortable in quiet little feminine ways; not hearing her when she spoke, asking her questions whose answers must surely embarrass her.
Tea came in. Martie smiled at Carrie David, who brought it. She liked Carrie, who was the Hawkes' cousin, but did not quite think she should speak to her here. Carrie, who was a big, gray-haired woman of fifty, was in the room only a moment after all.
Judge Parker, amiably under the impression that young people were happier alone, went away to walk down Main Street, glancing at the sky and greeting his townspeople in his usual genial fashion. May poured the tea, holding Rodney in conversation the while. Ida talked to Martie in a vivacious, smiling, insincere way, difficult to follow.
Martie listened sympathetically, more than half believing in the bright picture of social triumphs and San Francisco admirers that was presented her, even though she knew that Ida was twenty-six, and had never had a Monroe admirer. Dr. Ben had once had a passing fancy for May's company; May was older than Ida, and, though like her physically, was warmer and more human in type. But even this had never been a recognized affair; it had died in infancy, and the Parker girls were beginning to be called old maids.
Rodney walked with Martie to the gate when she left, but no farther, and as she went on her way, uncomfortable thoughts were uppermost in her mind. Martie had never driven with a young man before, and so had no precedent to guide her, but she wondered if Rodney should not have gone with her to her own gate. Perhaps she had stayed too long—another miserable possibility. And how "snippy" Ida and May had been!
Still, Monroe had seen her driving with Rodney, and she had had tea at the Parkers'! So much was gain. She had almost reached the shabby green gate that led into the sunken garden when Sally, flying up behind her in the dusk, slipped a hand through her arm. Martie, turning with a start and a laugh, saw Joe Hawkes, ten feet away, smiling at her.
"Hello, Joe!" she said, a little puzzled. Not that it was not quite natural for Sally to stop and speak to Joe, if she wanted to; Joe had been a familiar figure in their lives since they were children. But—
But Sally was laughing and panting in a manner new and incomprehensible. She caught Martie by both hands. All three, young and not understanding themselves or life, stood laughing a little vaguely in the sharp winter dusk. Joe was a mighty blond giant, only Martie's age, and younger, except in inches and in sinews, than his years. He had a sweet, simple face, rough, yellow hair, and hairy, red, clumsy hands. A greater contrast to gentle little Sally, with her timid brown eyes and the bloodless quiet of manner that was like her mother and like Lydia, could hardly have been imagined.
"Where've you been?" Martie asked.
"We've been to church!" dimpled Sally with a glance at Joe.
The pronoun startled Martie.
"We were up in the organ loft," Joe contributed with his half-laughing, half-nervous grin.
Still bewildered, Martie followed her sister into the dark garden, after a good-night nod to Joe, and went into the house. Their father reluctantly accepted the girls' separate accounts of the afternoon: Sally had been in church, Martie had driven about with Rod and had gone to tea at his house. Lydia fluttered with questions. Who was there? What was said? Malcolm asked Martie where Rodney had left her.
"At the gate, Pa," the girl responded promptly.
All through the evening her eyes kept wandering in disapproval toward Sally. Joe Hawkes!—it was monstrous. That stupid, common lout of a boy—nearly two years her junior, too.
They were undressing, alone in their room, when she spoke of the matter.
"Sally," said she, "you didn't really go sit in the choir with Joe Hawkes, did you?"
"Well—yes, in a way," Sally admitted, adding indulgently, "he's SUCH an idiot!"
"How do you mean?" Martie asked sharply. For Sally to flush and dimple and give herself the airs of a happy woman over the calf-like attentions of this clumsy boy of nineteen was more than absurd, it was painful. "Sally—you couldn't! Why, you oughtn't even to be FRIENDS with Joe Hawkes!" she stammered. "He gets—I suppose he gets twenty dollars a month."
"On, no; more than that!" Sally said, brushing her fine, silky, lifeless hair. "He gets twenty-five from the express company, and when he meets the trains for Beetman he gets half he makes."
Martie stood astounded at her manner. That one of the Monroe girls should be talking thus of Joe Hawkes! What mattered it to Sarah Price Monroe how much Joe Hawkes made, or how? Joe Hawkes—Grace's insignificant younger brother! Sally saw her consternation.
"Now listen, Mart, and don't have a fit," she said, laughing. "I'm not any crazier over Joe than you are. I know what Pa would say. I'm not likely to marry any one on thirty dollars a month, anyway. But listen, Joe has always liked me terribly—"
"I never knew it!" Martie exclaimed.
"No; well, neither did I. But last year when he broke his leg I used to go in and see him with Grace, and one day she left the room for a while, and he sort of—broke out—"
"The GALL!" ejaculated Martie.
"Oh, no, Mart—he didn't mean it that way. Really he didn't. He just wanted—to hold my hand, you know—and that. And he never thinks of money, or getting married. And, Mart, he's so GRATEFUL, you know, for just a moment's meeting, or if I smile at him, going out of church—"
"I should think he might be!" Martie interpolated in fine scorn.
"Yes, I know how you feel, Martie," Sally went on eagerly, "and that's true, of course. I feel that way myself. But you don't know how miserable he makes himself about it. And does it seem wrong to you, Mart, for me just to be kind to him? I tell him—I was telling him this afternoon—that some day he'll meet some nice sweet girl younger than he, and that he'll be making more money then—you know—"
Her voice faltered. She looked wistfully at her sister.
"But I can't see why you let a big dummy like that talk to you at all!" Martie said impatiently after a short silence. "What do you care what he thinks? He's got a lot of nerve to DARE to talk to you that way. I—well, I think Pa would be wild!"
"Oh, of course he would," Sally agreed in a troubled voice. "And I know how you feel, Martie, with Joe's aunt working for the Parkers, and all," she added. "I'll—I'll stop it. Truly I will. I'm only doing it to be considerate to Joe, anyway!"
"You needn't do anything on my account," Martie said gruffly. "But I think you ought to stop it on your own. Joe is only a kid, he doesn't know beans—much less enough to really fall in love!"
She lay awake for a long time that night, in troubled thought. Cold autumn moonlight poured into the room; a restless wind whined about the house. The cuckoo clock struck eleven—struck twelve.
At all events she HAD gone driving with Rodney; she HAD had tea at the Parkers'—
"I honestly think that some of us ought to go down to-night and see Grandma Kelly," said Lydia at luncheon a week later. November had come in bright and sunny, but with late dawns and early twilights. Rodney Parker's college friend having delayed his promised visit, the agitating question of the Friday Fortnightly had been temporarily laid to rest, but Martie saw him nearly every day, and family and friends alike began to change in their attitude to Martie.
"I'll go," she and Sally said together—Martie, because she was in a particularly amiable mood; Sally, perhaps because old Mrs. Kelly was Joe Hawkes's grandmother.
"Well, I wish you would, girls," their mother said in her gentle, complaining voice. "She's a dear old lady—a perfect saint about getting to church in all weathers! And while Pa doesn't care much about having you so intimate with the Hawkeses, he was saying this morning that Grandma Kelly is different. She was my nurse when all four of you were born, and she certainly was interested and kind."
"We can go down about seven," Lydia said, "and not stay too long. But I suppose 'most every one in Monroe will run in to wish her many happy returns. Tom David's wife will come in from Westlake with Grandma's great-grandchildren, I guess, and all the others will be there."
"That houseful alone would kill me, let alone having the whole tribe stream in, if I were seventy-eight!" Martie observed. "But I'd just as soon go. We'll see how we feel after dinner!"
And after dinner, the night being fresh and sweet, and the meal early concluded because Malcolm was delayed in Pittsville and did not return for dinner, the three Monroes pinned on their hats, powdered their noses, and buttoned on their winter coats. Any excitement added to her present ecstatic mood was enough to give Martie the bloom of a wild rose, and Sally had her own reasons for radiance. Lydia alone, walking between them, was actuated by cool motives of duty and convention and sighed as she thought of the heat and hubbub of the Hawkes's house, and the hour that must elapse before they were back in the cool night again.
The Hawkeses had always lived in one house in Monroe. It was a large, square, cheap house near the bridge, with a bare yard kept shabby by picking chickens, and a fence of struggling pickets. Behind the house, which had not been painted in the memory of man, was a yawning barn which had never been painted at all. In the yard were various odds and ends of broken machinery and old harness; a wagon-seat, on which Grandma sometimes sat shelling beans or peeling potatoes in the summer afternoons; old brooms, old saucepans, and lengths of rope, clotted with mud. Fuchsia and rose-bushes languished in a tipsy wire enclosure near the front door.
To-night, although the yard presented a rather dismal appearance in the early winter dark, the house was bursting with hospitality and good cheer. From every one of the bare high windows raw gushes of light tunnelled the gloom outside, and although the cold outside had frosted all the glass, dim forms could be seen moving about, and voices and laughter could be heard.
Martie briskly twisted the little rotary bell-handle that was set in the centre of the front door, and before its harsh noise had died away, the door was flung open and the Monroe sisters were instantly made a part of the celebration. Hilarious members of the family and their even more hilarious friends welcomed them in; the bare hallway was swarming with young persons of both sexes; girls were coming down the stairs, girls going up, and the complementary boys lined the wall, or, grinning, looked on from the doorways.
The front room on the left, usually a bedroom, was used for a smoking room to-night; the dining-room door had been locked, but on the right two doors gave entrance to the long parlours, and here were older men, older women—Mrs. Hawkes, big, energetic, perspiring all over her delighted face; Carrie David, wild with hospitable excitement; and Joe Hawkes, Senior, a lean little eager Irishman, quite in his glory to-night. Throned on a sort of dais, in the front bay window, was Grandma Kelly, a little shrivelled beaming old woman, in a crumpled, shining, black satin gown. Her hair was scanty, showing a wide bald parting, and to hear in all the confusion she was obliged occasionally to cup one hand behind her ear, but her snapping eyes were as bright as a monkey's and her lips, over toothless gums, worked constantly with a rotary motion as she talked and laughed. On each side of her were grouped other old ladies—Mrs. Sark, Mrs. Mulkey, Mrs. Hansen, and Mrs. Mussoo—her friends since the days, fifty years before, when they had crossed the plains in hooded wagons, and fought out their simple and heroic destinies on these strange western prairies.
They had borne children, comforting and caring for each other in the wilderness; they had talked of wolves and of Indians while trusting little hands caught their knees and ignorant little lips pulled at their breasts; they had known fire and flood and famine, crude offense and cruder punishment; they had seen the Indians and the buffalo go with the Missions and the sheep; they had followed the gold through its sensational rise to its sensational fall, and had held the wheat dubiously in their fingers before ever California's dark soil knew it—had wondered whether the first apple trees really might come to blossom and bear where the pines were cleared away.
And now, with the second and third generation, had come schools and post-offices, cable cars and gaslight; villages were cities; crossroads were towns. At seventy-eight, Grandma Kelly was far from ready for her nunc dimittis. Great days had been, no doubt, but great days were also to be. Children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren kept the house swarming with life, and she could never have enough of it.
The air, never too fresh in the Hawkes's house, was hot and charged with odours of cheap cologne, of powder, of human bodies, and of perspiration-soaked garments. The very gaslights screamed above the din as if they found it contagious. Large crayon portraits decorated the walls, that of the late Mr. Kelly having attached to its frame the sheaf of wheat that had lain on his coffin. On the walls also were the large calendars of insurance companies, and one or two china plaques in plush frames. A bead portiere hung between the two parlours, constantly clicking and catching as the guests swarmed to and fro. All the chairs in the house had been set about the walls, and all were occupied. A disk on the phonograph was duly revolving, in charge of a hysterical girl in blue silk and a flushed, humorous young man, but the music was almost unheard.
Whatever their attitude toward this merrymaking had previously been, the Monroe girls were instantly drawn into the spirit of the occasion. Martie and Sally were dragged upstairs, where they left hats and coats, were taken downstairs again with affectionate, girlish arms about their waists; and found themselves laughing and shouting with the rest. Towed through the boiling crowd to Grandma, they kissed the cool, soft old face. They greeted the other old women with pretty enthusiasm.
Lydia meanwhile had decorously delivered her message of good wishes and had drifted to a chair against the wall, where matrons greeted her eagerly and where, in her own way, she began to enjoy herself. Sentiment, hospitality, gaiety filled the air.
"Isn't Grandma wonderful?" said all the voices, over and over. "I think she's wonderful! Mrs. Hawkes had a dinner for just the five old ladies, you know. Wasn't that sweet? The family had to have their dinner earlier—just the five old ladies. Wasn't that a cute idea? Ellen said they looked perfectly dear, all together! Mary Clute couldn't get here from San Francisco, you know, but she sent Grandma a tea-pot cover—the cutest thing! Did you see the Davids' baby? It's upstairs, I guess; it's a darling little thing! Think of it, three great-grandchildren! Oh, I do, too; I think it's a lovely party—I think the rooms look lovely—I think it was an awfully cute idea!"
The oldest David grandchild, becoming sodden with sleepiness, climbed into Lydia's lap. Sally, after exchanging a conscious undertone with young Joe, slipped through the dining-room door with him, and happily joined the working forces in the kitchen. In her mind Sally knew that the Hawkeses were but homely folk; she knew that any Monroe should shrink from this hot and noisy kitchen. But Sally's heart welcomed the eager bustle, the tasks so imperative that her timid little entity was entirely forgotten, the talk that was friendly and affectionate and comprehensible.
Joe and she laughed over piecing tablecloths together for the long table, and kept a jingling ripple of laughter accompanying the jingling of plated spoons and the thick glasses. Ellen and Grace, as the family debutantes, were inside with the company, but Carrie and Min, the married daughters, were here, with old Mrs. Crowley, who never missed an occasion of this kind, Mrs. Mulkey's daughter Annie Tate, Gertie Hansen, and an excited fringe of children too young to dance and too old to be sent off to bed.
As it was the custom for the more intimate friends to bring a cake, a pan of cookies, or a great jug of strong lemonade to such an affair, there was more food than twice this surging group of men, women, and children could possibly consume, so that the boys and girls could keep their mouths full of oily, nutty, walnut wafers and broken bits of layer cake without any conscientious scruples. One of the large kitchen tables was entirely covered with plates bearing layer cakes, with chocolate, maple, shining white, and streaky orange icings, or topped with a deadly coating of fluffy cocoa-nut. On the floor half a dozen ice cream freezers leaked generously; at the sink, Mrs. Rose, who had been Minnie Hawkes, was black and sticky to the elbows with lemon juice.
Meanwhile Martie, more in tune with the actual jollity than either of her sisters, was warming to her most joyous mood. Her costume of thin white waist and worn serge skirt might have been considered deficient in a more formal assembly, but here it passed without comment; the girls' dresses varied widely, and no one seemed any the less gay. Grace had a long streamer of what appeared to be green window-net tied loosely about a worn pink satin slip; Elsa Prout wore the shepherdess costume she had made for the Elks' Hallowe'en Dance, and Mrs. Cazley, sitting with her back against the wall, wore her widow's bonnet with its limp little veil falling down to touch her fresh white shirtwaist. Martie improved her own costume by pinning a large pink tissue-paper rose against her high white stock, and fastening another in her bronze hair; the girls laughed appreciatively at her audacity; a vase of the paper roses had been in the parlour for years. Youth and excitement did the rest.
Here, where her motives could not be misunderstood, where her presence indeed was to be construed as adding distinction and dignity to the festivities, Martie could be herself. She laughed, she flirted with the common yet admiring boys, she paid charming attention to the old women. A rambling musical programme was presently set in motion; Martie's voice led all the voices. She was presently asked to sing alone, and went through "Believe Me" charmingly, putting real power and pathos into the immortal words. Returning, flushed and happy in a storm of clapping, to her place between Al Lunt and Art Carter on the sofa, she kept those appreciative youths in such convulsions of laughter that their entire neighbourhood was sympathetically affected. Carl Polhemus, who played the organ at church, had begun a wandering improvisation on the piano, evidently so taken with certain various chords and runs that he could not resist playing them passionately over and over. A dangerous laugh, started among the younger set, began to strangle and stifle his audience. Martie, looking straight ahead of her, gave only an occasional spasmodic heave of shoulders and breast, but her lips were compressed in an agony, and her eyes full of tears. From the writhing boys on each side of her came frequent smothered snorts.
In upon this scene came old Dr. Ben, who had worked hand in hand with Grandma Kelly in the darkened rooms where many of these hilarious youngsters had drawn their first breath. Although the infatuated musician did not stop at this interruption, many of his listeners rose to greet the newcomer, and the tension snapped.
Dr. Ben sat down next to the old lady, and the room, from which the older guests were quietly disappearing, was enthusiastically cleared for dancing. The air, close already, became absolutely insufferable now; the men's collars wilted, the girls' flushed faces streamed perspiration. But the cool side-porch was accessible, and the laughter and noise continued unabated.
Quietly crossing the dark backyard for his horse and buggy at ten o'clock, Dr. Ben came upon Joe Hawkes sitting on the shadowy steps with—he narrowed his eyes to make sure—yes, with little Sally Monroe. The old man formed his lips into a slow, thoughtful whistle as he busied himself with straps and buckles. Slowly, thoughtfully, he climbed into his buggy.
"Sally!" he called, sitting irresolute with the reins in his hands.
The opaque spot that was Sally's gown did not stir in the shadows.
"Sally!" he called again. "I see ye, and Joe Hawkes, too. Come here a minute!"
She went then, slowly into the clear November moonlight.
"What is it, Doc' Ben?" she asked, in a rather thick voice and with a perceptible gulp. Even in this light he could see her wet lashes glitter.
For a minute he did not speak, fat hands on fat knees. Sally, innocent, loving, afraid, hung her head before him.
"Like Joe, do ye, Sally?" said the mild old voice.
"I—" Sally's voice was almost inaudible—"why, I don't know, Doc, Ben," she faltered. "My mother—my father—" she stopped short.
"Your father and mother, eh?" Dr. Ben repeated musingly, as if to himself.
"I couldn't like—any one—if it was to make all the people who love me unhappy, I suppose," Sally said in her mild, prim voice, with an effort at lightness. "No happiness could come of that, could it, Doctor?"
To this dutiful expression the doctor made no immediate answer, observing in a dissatisfied tone, after a pause: "That sounds like your mother, or Lydia."
Sally, leaning against the shabby cushions of the carriage, looked down in silent distress.
"There never could be anything serious between Joe Hawkes and I," she said presently, with a little unnatural laugh. She was not quite sure of her pronoun. She looked anxiously at Dr. Ben's face. It was still troubled and overcast. Sally wondered uncomfortably if he would tell her mother that she was seeing Joe frequently. As it chanced, she and Joe had more than once encountered the old man on their solitary walks and talks. She thought, in her amiable heart, that if she only knew what Dr. Ben wanted her to say she would say it; or what viewpoint he expected her to take she would assume it.
"Joe and I were helping Mrs. David," she submitted timidly, "and we came out to sit in the cool."
"Don't be a hypocrite, Sally," the doctor said absently. Sally laughed with an effort to make the conversation seem all a joke, but she was puzzled and unhappy. "Well," said the doctor suddenly, gathering up his reins and rattling the whip in its socket as a gentle hint to the old mare, "I must be getting on. I want you to come and see me, Sally. Come to-morrow. I want to talk to you."
"Yes, sir," Sally answered obediently. She would have put out her tongue for his inspection then and there if he had suggested it.
When the old phaeton had rattled out of the yard she went back to the shadows and Joe. She was past all argument, all analysis, all reason, now. She hungered only for this: Joe's big clean young arms about her; Joe's fresh lips, with their ignorant passion, against hers. For years she had known Joe only by sight; a few months ago she had been merely amused and flattered by the boy's crudely expressed preference; even now she knew that for a Monroe girl, at twenty-one, to waste a thought on a Hawkes boy of nineteen was utter madness. But a week or two ago, walking home from church with her mother and herself on Sunday night, Joe had detained her for a moment under the dooryard trees—had kissed her. Sally was like a young tiger, tamed, petted, innocuous, whose puzzled lips have for the first time tasted blood. Every fibre in her being cried for Joe, his bashful words were her wisdom, his nearness her very breath and being.
She clung to him now, in the dark kitchen porch, in a fever of pure desire. Their hearts beat together. Sally's arms were bent against the boy's big chest, as his embrace crushed her; they breathed like runners as they kissed each other.
A moment later they went back into the kitchen to scoop the hard-packed ice cream into variegated saucers and enjoy unashamedly such odd bits of it as clung to fingers or spoon. The cakes had all been cut now, enormous wedges of every separate variety were arranged on the plates that were scattered up and down the long stretch of the table in the dining room. The dancers and all the other guests filed out to enjoy the supper, the room rang with laughter and screamed witticisms. A popular feature of the entertainment was the mottoes, flat scalloped candies of pink and white sugar, whose printed messages caused endless merriment among these uncritical young persons. "Do You Love Me?"; "I Am A Flirt"; "Don't Kiss Me"; "Oh, You Smarty," said the mottoes insinuatingly, and the revellers read them aloud, exchanged them, secreted them, and even devoured them, in their excessive delight.
Presently they all toasted Grandma Kelly in lemonade. The old lady, with Lydia and some of the older women, was enjoying her cake and cream in the parlour, but tears of pride and joy came to her eyes when the young voices all rose with lingering enjoyment on "Silver Threads Among the Gold," and there was a general wiping of eyes at "She's a Jolly Good Fellow" which followed it. Then some of the girls rushed in to kiss her once more, and, as it was now nearly twelve o'clock, Lydia called her sisters, and they said their good-nights.
Walking home under a jaded moon, yawning and cold in the revulsion from hours of excitement and the change from the heated rooms to the cold night air, Lydia was complacently superior; they were certainly warm-hearted, hospitable people, the Hawkeses, and she was glad that they, the Monroes, had paid Grandma the compliment of going. Sally, hanging on Lydia's arm, was silent. Martie, on her other arm, was smilingly reminiscent. "That Al Lunt was a caution," she observed. "Wasn't Laura Carter's dance music good? Wasn't that maple walnut cake delicious?" She had eaten goodness knows how much ice cream, because she sat at table between Reddy Johnson and Bernard Thomas, and every time Carrie David or any one asked them if they wanted any more ice cream, Bernie had put their saucers in his lap, and told Carrie that they hadn't had any yet.
Len suddenly came up behind his sisters, frightening them with a deep "Boo!" before he emerged from the blackness to join them.
"Javva good time?" he asked, adding carelessly, "I was there."
"Yes, you were!" Martie said incredulously. "You wish you were!"
"Honest, I was," Len said. "Honest I was, Lyd."
"Well, you weren't there until pretty late, Len," Lydia said in mild disapproval.
"Lissun," Len suggested pleadingly. "Tell Pa I brought you girls home from Hawkes's—go on! Lissun, Lyd, I'll do as much for you some time—"
"Oh, Len, how can I?" Lydia objected.
"Well, I went in, honest, early in the evening," the boy asserted eagerly. "But I can't stand those boobs and roughnecks, so I went down town for a while. Then I came back and waited until you girls came out of the gate. I'll cross my heart and hope to die if I didn't!"
"If Pa asks me—" Lydia said inexorably.
For a few moments they all walked together in the dark. Then Len said suddenly:
"Say, Mart, I saw Rod Parker to-night. He was down town, and he asked me how my pretty sister was!"
"Did he?" Martie spoke carelessly, but her heart leaped.
"He talked a lot about you," went on Len, "he's going to call you up in the morning about something."
"Oh—?" Martie mused. "I shouldn't wonder if it was about a dance we were talking about," she said thoughtfully. She was quite acute enough to see perfectly that Len was trying to enlist her silence in his cause should their father make a general inquiry, and philosophical enough to turn his mood to her own advantage. "Lissun, Len," said she, "if I try to have a party you'll get the boys you know to come, won't you? There are always too many girls, and I want it to go off nicely. You will, won't you?"
"Sure I will," Len promised heartily. He and his sister perfectly understood each other.
They all went quietly upstairs; Len to dreamless sleep, Sally to thrilled memories of Joe—Joe—Joe, and Martie to shifting happy thoughts of the evening and its little triumphs, thoughts that always came back to Len's talk with Rodney. Rodney had asked Len for his pretty sister.
Lydia lay wide awake for a long time. There was no doubt of it now; she and her mother had told each other several times during the last month or two that there was still doubt. But she was not mistaken to-night in thinking that Len's breath was strong from something alcoholic, that Len's eager, loose-lipped speech, his unusual manner—She went over and over the words she would use in telling her mother all about it in the morning. The two women would carry heavy hearts on Len's account for the whole cold, silent day. But they would not tell Pa—no, there was nothing sufficiently serious as yet to tell Pa!
Martie and Sally loitered through the village, past the post-office and the main shops and down through the poorer part of the town. They entered a quiet region of shabby old houses, turned into a deserted lane, and opened the picket gate before Dr. Ben's cottage. The little house in winter stood in a network of bare vines; in summer it was smothered in roses, and fuchsias, marguerites, hollyhocks, and geraniums pressed against the fence. Marigolds, alyssum, pansies, and border pinks flourished close to the ground, with sweet William, stock, mignonette, and velvet-brown wallflowers. Dr. Ben had planted all these himself, haphazard, and loved the resulting untidy jumble of bloom, with the lilac blossoms rustling overhead, birds nesting in his willow and pepper trees, and bees buzzing and blundering over his flowers.
The house was not quite definite enough in type to be quaint; it presented three much-ornamented gables to the lane, its windows were narrow, shuttered inside with dark brown wood. At the back-between the house and the little river, and shut away from the garden by a fence—were a little barn, decorated like the house in scalloped wood, and various small sheds and out-houses and their occupants.
Here lived the red cow, the old white mare, the chickens and pigeons, the rabbits and bees that had made the place fascinating to Monroe children for many years. Martie said to herself to-day that she always felt like a child when she came to Dr. Ben's, shut once more into childhood's world of sunshine and flowers and happy companionship with animals and the good earth.
To-day the old man, with his setter Sandy, was busy with his bookshelves when the girls went in. Two of the narrow low bay windows that looked directly out on the level of the kitchen path were in this room; the third, the girls knew, was a bedroom. Upstairs were several unused rooms full of old furniture and piles of magazines, and back of the long, narrow sitting room were a little dining room with Crimson Rambler roses plastered against its one window, and a large kitchen in which old Mis' Penny reigned supreme.
Here in the living room were lamps, shabby chairs, an air-tight stove, shells, empty birds' nests, specimens of ore, blown eggs, snakeskins, moccasins, wampum, spongy dry bees' nests, Indian baskets and rugs, ropes and pottery, an enormous Spanish hat of yellow straw with a gaudy band, and everywhere, in disorderly cascades and tumbled heaps, were books and pamphlets and magazines.
Dr. Ben welcomed them eagerly and sent Martie promptly to the kitchen to interview Mis' Penny on the subject of tea. The girls were quite at home here, for the old doctor was Rose Ransome's mother's cousin, and through their childhood the little gabled house had been the favourite object of their walks. Sally, alone with her host, began to help him in his hopeless attempt to get his library in order.
"The point is this, Sally," said Dr. Ben suddenly, after a few innocuous comments on the weather and the health of the Monroe family had been exchanged. "Have you and Joe Hawkes come to care for each other?"
Sally flushed scarlet. She had been thinking hard—for Sally, who was not given to thought—in the hours since the party for Grandma Kelly. Now she began readily, with a great air of frankness.
"I'll tell you, Dr. Ben. I know you feel as if I was trying to hide something from Ma and Pa, and it's worried me a good deal, too. But the truth is, I've known Joe all my life, and he's only a boy, of course—ever so much younger than I am—and he has just gotten this notion into his head. Of course, it's perfectly ridiculous—because naturally I am not going to throw my life away in any such fashion as that! But Joe thinks now that he will never smile again—"
Thus Sally, kneeling among the books, her earnest, pretty, young face turned toward the doctor, her eyes widely opened, as the extraordinary jumble of words poured forth. The unpleasant sensation of their last meeting, the confusing feeling that she was not saying what Dr. Ben wanted her to say, beset her. She felt a sudden, dreadful inclination toward tears, although with no clear sense of a reason for crying.
"I suppose all boys go through their silly stages like measles," said Sally rapidly. "And it's only my misfortune and Joe's that his first love affair had to be me. One reason why I haven't mentioned it at home is—"
"Then you don't care for Joe?" the old man asked with his serious smile.
"Oh, Dr. Ben! Of course, I like Joe enormously, he's a dear sweet boy," Sally answered smoothly. "But you know as well as I do how my father feels toward the village people in Monroe, and while the Hawkeses are just as nice as they can be in their way—" again Sally's flow of eloquence was strangely shaken; she felt as a child might, caught up in the arm of a much larger person and rushed along helplessly with only an occasional heartening touch of her feet to the ground—"after all, that isn't quite our way, is it?" she asked. If only, thought the nervous little girl who was Sally, if only she knew what Dr. Ben wanted her to say!
"Why can't ye be honest with me, Sally?" said the doctor. "Ye love Joe, don't ye?"
Sally's head dropped, the colour rose in her cheeks, and the tears came. She nodded, and through all her body ran a delicious thrill at the acknowledged passion.
"Ye've found each other out, in spite of them all!" said the old man musingly. "And what does his age or yours, or his place or yours, matter beside that? They've tried to fill you with lies, and you've found that the lies don't hold water. Well—"
He straightened up suddenly, and began to march about the room. Sally, kneeling still over the books, tears drying on her cheeks, watched him.
"Sally," said the doctor, "God made you and Joe Hawkes and your love for each other. I don't know who made the social laws by which women govern these little towns, but I suspect it was the devil. You've been brought up to feel that if you marry a man Mrs. Cy Frost doesn't ask to her house, you'll be unhappy ever after. But I ask you, Sally—I ask you as a man old enough to be your father—if you had your home, your husband, your health, your garden, and your children, wouldn't you be a far happier woman than—than Lydia say, or Florence Frost, or all the other girls who sit about this town waiting for a man with position enough—position, BAH!—to marry?"
Sally's face was glowing.
"Oh, Dr. Ben, I don't care anything about position!" she said, all her honest innocence in her face.
"Then why do you act as if you did?" he said, well pleased.
"And would you advise me to marry Joe?" she asked radiantly.
"Joe—Tom—Billy, whomever you please!" he answered impatiently. "But don't be afraid because he doesn't wear silk socks, Sally, or smoke a monogrammed cigarette. Why, my child, that little polish, that little fineness, is the woman's gift to her man! These Frosts and Parkers: it was the coarse strength of their grandfathers that got them across the plains; it was the women who packed the books in the horsehair trunks, that read the Bibles and cleaned and sewed and prayed in the old home way. You don't suppose those old miners and grocers, who came later to be the city fathers, ever had as much education as Joe Hawkes, or half as much!"
"I wish my father felt as you do, Doc' Ben," Sally said presently, the brightness dying from her face. "But Pa will never, never—And even if there were no other reason, why Joe hasn't a steady job—"
"That brings me to what I really want to say to you to-day, Sally," the old man interrupted her briskly. He opened a desk drawer and took from it a small, old-fashioned photograph. Sally saw a young woman's form, disguised under the scallops, ruffles, and pleats of the early seventies, a bright face under a cascade of ringlets, and a little oval bonnet set coquettishly awry. "D'ye know who that is?" asked Dr. Ben.
"I—well, yes; I suppose?" murmured Sally sympathetically.
"Yes, it's my wife," he answered. "Mary—Our boy would be thirty. They went away together—poor girl, poor girl! We wanted a big family, Sally; we hoped for a houseful of children. And I had her for only fifteen months—only fifteen months to remember for thirty years!"
Sally was deeply impressed. She thought it strangely flattering in Dr. Ben to take her into his confidence in this way, and that she would tell Martie about it as they walked home.
"No," he said musingly. "I never had a child! And Sally, if I had it all to do over again, I'd marry again. I'd have sons. That's the citizen's duty. Some day we'll recognize it, and then you bearers of children will come into your own. There'll be recognition for every one of them, we'll be the first nation to make our poor women proud and glad when a child is coming. It's got to be, Sally."
Sally was listening politely, but she was not interested. She had heard all this before, many times. Dr. Ben's extraordinary views upon the value of the family were familiar to every one in Monroe. But her attention was suddenly aroused by the mention of her own name.
"Now, supposing that you and Joe take it into your heads to get married some day," the doctor was saying, "how about children?"
Sally's ready colour flooded her face. She made no attempt to answer him.
"Would ye have them?" the old man asked impatiently.
"Why—why, Dr. Ben, I don't know!" Sally said in great confusion. "I—I suppose people DO."
"You suppose people do?" he asked scornfully. "Don't ye KNOW they do?"
"Well, I don't suppose any girl thinks very much of such things until she's married," Sally said firmly. "Mama doesn't like us to discuss—"
"Doesn't your mother ever talk to you about such things?" the old man demanded.
"Certainly not!" Sally answered with spirit.
"What DOES she talk to you about?" he asked amazedly. "It's your business in life, after all. She's not taught ye any other. What does she expect ye to do—learn it all after it's too late to change?"
"All what?" Sally said, a little frightened, even a little sick. He stopped his march, and looked at her with something like pity.
"All the needs of your soul and body," he said kindly, "and your children's souls and bodies. Well! that's neither here nor there. But the fact is this, Sally: I've no children of my own to raise. And as ye very well know, I've got my own theories about putting motherhood on a different basis, a business basis. I want you to let me pay you—as the State ought to pay you—three hundred a year for every child you bear. I want to demonstrate to my own satisfaction, before I try to convince any Government, that if the child-bearing woman were put on a plane of economic value, her barren, parasite sister would speedily learn—"
Sally had turned pale. Now she rose in girlish dignity.
"I hope you'll forgive me, Dr. Ben, for saying that I won't listen to ONE word more. I know you've been thinking about these things so long that you forget how OUTRAGEOUS they sound! Motherhood is a sacred privilege, and to reduce it to—"
"So is wifehood, Sally!" the old man interposed soothingly.
"Well," she flashed back, "nobody's PAID for wifehood!"
"Oh, yes, my dear. You can sue a man for not supporting you. It's done every day!"
"Then—then a man ought to pay the three hundred a year!" countered Sally.
"Well, I'm with you there. But the world has got to see that before you can force him." The doctor sighed. "So you won't let me stand grandfather to your children, Sally?"
"Oh, if you WERE their grandfather!" she answered. "Then you could do as you liked!"
"There you are, the parasite!" he said, smiling whimsically. "You're your mother's daughter, Sally. Give you the least blood-claim on a man's money, and you'll push it as far as you can. But offer to pay you for doing the work God meant you to do and you're cut to the soul. Well—"
He was still holding forth eloquently on the subject of children and nations when Martie came back, and Sally, with a scarlet face, was evidently lost in thoughts of her own.
As the girls walked home, Sally did not repeat to Martie her conversation with the old doctor, nor for many weeks afterward. But Martie did not notice her sister's indignant silence, for they met Rodney Parker coming out of the Bank, and he walked with them to the bridge, and asked Martie to go with him to see the Poulson Star Stock Company in a Return Engagement Extraordinary on the following night.
Martie was conscious of passing a milestone in her emotional life on the evening of this day, when she said to herself that she loved Rodney Parker. She admitted it with a sort of splendid shame, as she went about her usual household occupations, passing from the hot pleasantness of the kitchen to the cool, stale odours of the dining room; running upstairs to light the bathroom-and hall-gas for her father and brother, and sometimes stepping for a moment into the darkness of the yard to be alone with her enchanted thoughts.
All the young Monroes regarded their father's temperamental shortcomings with stoicism, so that it was in no sense resentfully that she faced the inevitable preliminaries that night.
"Pa," said she cheerfully over the dessert, "you don't mind if I go to the show with Rodney to-morrow, do you?"
"This is the first I've heard of any show," Malcolm said stiffly, glancing at his wife. Mrs. Monroe patiently told him what she knew of it. "Why, no, I suppose there is no reason you shouldn't go," he presently said discontentedly.
"Oh, thank you, Pa!" Martie said, with a soaring heart. He looked at her dispassionately.
"Your sisters and your brother are going, I suppose?" Malcolm asked, glancing about the circle. Martie told herself she might have known he was not done with the subject so easily.
"I'm not—because I haven't the price!" grinned Leonard. His mother and Lydia laughed.
"I don't suppose Martie proposes going alone with young Parker?" Malcolm asked in well-assumed amazement.
"Why, Pa—I don't see why NOT" Mrs. Monroe protested weakly.
Her husband was magnificent in his surprise. He looked about in a sort of royal astonishment.
"Don't you, my dear?" he asked politely. "Then permit me to say that I DO."
Martie sat dumb with despair.
"Certainly Martha may go, if Leonard and one of her sisters go; not otherwise," said Malcolm. He retired to his library, and Martie had to ease her boiling heart by piling the dinner dishes viciously, and question no more.
However, she consoled herself, there was something rather dignified in this arrangement, after all; Len was presentable, and she was always the happier for being with Sally. She washed her only gloves, pressed her suit, and spent every alternate minute during the next day anxiously inspecting her chin where an ugly pimple threatened to form. The family was again at dinner when Len broached a change of plan.
"Can I go up to Wilson's to-night, Pa?" he asked. Martie flashed him a glance.
"I suppose so, for a little while," Malcolm said tolerantly. The girls looked at each other.
"But I thought you were going to the Opera House with us?" Martie exclaimed.
"Well, now you know I ain't," Len answered airily.
"I am not, Len," corrected his mother. Martie gave him a look of hate.
"Len says he promised to go to Wilson's," Lydia said placatingly. "So I thought perhaps Sally and I would go with you—I'm sorry, Martie!"
For Martie's breast was heaving dangerously.
"Pa, didn't you say Len was to go with us?" she asked with desperate calm.
"I said SOME ONE was to go," Malcolm said, disapproving of her vehemence. "I confess I cannot see why it must be Len!"
"Because—because when a man asks a girl to go out with him he doesn't ask the whole FAMILY!" Martie muttered in a fury. Her lip trembled, and she got to her feet. "It doesn't matter in the least," she said in a low, shaking voice, "because I am not going myself!"
Flashing from the room, she ran upstairs. She flung herself across her bed, and cried stormily for ten minutes. Then she grew calmer, and lay there crying quietly, and shaken by only an occasional long sob. It was during this stage that Lydia came into the room, and sitting down beside Martie's knees, patted her hand soothingly. Lydia's weak acceptance of the younger sister's distaste for her company gave Martie a sort of shamed heart-sickness.
"Don't!" said she huskily, jerking her arm away.
But Lydia was not to be rebuffed, and Martie was but nineteen, after all, and longing for the happiness she had denied. An hour later, all the prettier for her tears, she met Rodney at the hall door, the boy making no sign of disappointment when Lydia and Sally joined them.
"But say, Martie," he said at once, "I've got only the two seats!"
"Oh, that's all right!" Lydia said quickly and cautiously. "We don't have to SIT together!"
Martie's mood brightened and she flushed like a rose when the boy said eagerly:
"Say, listen, Martie. My sister Ida's going to-night, and one or two others, and Mrs. Cliff Frost is going to chaperon us afterward; ask your mother if that's all right."
The girl wasted no time on her mother, but crossed to the library door.
"Pa," said she without preamble, "Mrs. Cliff Frost is chaperoning some of them after the theatre tonight. Can I go?"
"Go where? Shut that door," her father said, half turning.
"Oh—I don't know; to the hotel, I suppose."
"Yes," her father said in a dry voice. "Yes," he added unwillingly. "Go ahead."
So the evening was a great success; one of the memorable times. Martie and Rodney walked ahead of her sisters down town, the boy gallantly securing the girls' tickets before he and Martie went up the aisle to their own seats. All Monroe was in the Opera House. Martie bowed and smiled radiantly. Rodney's sister and Mrs. Frost and a strange man presently returned her smile.
"Rod—wouldn't you rather be with your own family?"
"Well—what do you think?"
The enchantment of it, the warmth and stimulus of his admiration, his absorbed companionship, how they changed the world for Martie! There was a witchery in the air, the blood ran quick in her veins. The dirty big hall, with its high windows, was fairyland; the whispering crowd, Rodney's nearness, and the consciousness of her own youth and beauty, her flushed cheeks and loosened bronze hair, acted upon Martie like strong wine. She grew lovely beneath his very eyes; she was nineteen, and she loved!
They talked incessantly, elaborating the simple things they said with a by-play of eyes and hands, making the insignificant words rich with lowered tones, with smiles and the meeting of eyes. He told Martie of his college days; borrowing episodes at random from the lives of other men, men whom he admired. Martie believed it all, believed that he had written the Junior Farce, that he had been president of his class, that the various college societies had disputed for his membership. In return, she spun her own romances, flinging a veil of attractive eccentricity over her father's character, generously giving Lydia an anonymous admirer, and painting the dreary old mansion of North Main Street as a sort of enchanted prison with her pretty restless self as captive therein. The two exchanged brief French phrases, each believing the other to have a fair command of the language, and Martie even quoted poetry, to which Rodney listened in intense silence, his eyes fixed upon hers.
Suddenly the house was darkened and the curtain rose. The play was "The Sword of the King," a drama that seemed to Martie well suited to her own exalted mood. She thought the whole company wonderful, the leading lady especially gifted. She learned with awe that Rodney had known Wallace Bannister, the leading man, more or less intimately for years. An aunt of his lived in Pittsville and the two had met as boys and later had been classmates for the brief period Bannister had remained at the Leland Stanford University. Martie wrapped her beauty-starved young soul in the perfect past, when men wore ruffles and buckles and capes, and were all gallantry and courage, and when women were beautiful and desired. Between the acts the delicious exchange of confidences between herself and Rodney went on; they nibbled Bonestell's chocolates from a striped paper bag as they talked, and when the final curtain fell on a ringing line there were real tears of pleasure in Martie's eyes.
"Oh, Rodney—this is LIVING!" she whispered, as they filed slowly out.
Sally and Lydia had considerately disappeared. Mrs. Clifford Frost was waiting for them at the door, and Martie, with quick tact, fell into conversation with the kindly matron, walking at her side down the crowded street, and leaving Rodney to follow with the others. Little Ruth Frost had had some trouble fearfully resembling diphtheria, and Martie's first interested question was enough to enlist the mother's attention. The girl did not really notice the others in the party.
They crossed muddy Main Street, passed Wilkins's Furniture and Coffin Parlours, and went into the shabby French restaurant known as Mussoo's. The little eating house, with its cheap, white-painted shop window, looking directly upon the sidewalk, its pyramid of oyster shells cascading from a box set by the entrance, its jangling bell that the opening door set to clanging, its dingy cash register, damp tablecloths, and bottles of red catsup, was not a place to which Monroe residents pointed with pride. Martie would ordinarily have passed it as one unaware of its existence.
But it seemed a thoroughly daring and exciting thing to come here to-night; quite another thing from going to the hotel for vanilla ice cream and chocolate—even supposing the hotel had kept its dining room open for a change, after the six o'clock supper—or to Bonestell's for banana specials. This—this was living! Martie established herself comfortably in the corner, slipped off her coat, smiled lazily at Rodney's obvious manipulation of the party so that he should be next her, played with her hot, damp, blackened knife and fork, and was in paradise.
Ida Parker was in the party, and Florence Frost. The men were Clifford Frost, a pleasant young man getting stout and bald at forty; Billy Frost, a gentle little lad of fifteen who was lame; Rodney, and a rosy-cheeked, black-moustached Dr. Ellis from San Francisco, whose occasional rather simple and stupid remarks were received with great enthusiasm by Ida and Florence.
In this group Martie shone. She had her own gift for ready nonsense, and she was the radiant element that blended the varied types into a happy whole. She skilfully ignored Rodney; Billy, Mary, Cliff, and even Dr. Ellis were drawn into her fun. Rodney glowed. "Isn't she great?" he said to Mary Frost in an aside.
A large bowl of small crackers was set before them, damp squares of strong butter on small nicked plates, finally a bowl of pink, odorous shrimps. These were all gone when, after a long wait, the fried oysters came smoking hot, slipped straight from the pan to the plates. Martie drank coffee, as Mary did; the others had thick goblets of red wine. With the hot, warming food, their gaiety waxed higher; everybody felt that the party was a great success.
The bell on the door reverberated, and a man came in alone, and looked about undecidedly for a seat.
"Hello!" said Rodney. "There's Wallace Bannister!"
The young actor joined them. And this, to Martie, was one of the most thrilling moments of her life. He quite openly wedged his way in to sit on the other side of her; he said that he could see they didn't need the gaslight when Miss Monroe was along. Rodney said she was Brunhilde, and Bannister's comment was that she could save wig bills with that hair! Florence said eagerly that she loved Brunhilde—let's see, what opera did that come in? It was the Ring, anyway. The spirits of the group rose every second.
Ah, this was living—thought Martie. Oysters and wine and a real actor, a man who knew the world, who chattered of Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as if they had been Monroe and Pittsville. It was intoxicating to hear him exchanging comments with Rodney; no, he hadn't finished "coll." "I'm a rolling stone, Miss Monroe; we actor-fellows always are!" He was "signed up" now; he gave them a glimpse of a long, typewritten contract. Martie ventured a question as to the leading lady.
"She's a nice woman," said Wallace Bannister generously. "I like to play against Mabel. Jesse Cluett, her husband, is in the play; and his kid, too, her stepson—Lloyd—he's seventeen. Ever try the profession, Miss Monroe?"
Martie flushed a pleased disclaimer. But the tiny seed was sown, nevertheless. She liked the question; she was even vaguely glad that Mrs. Cluett was forty and a married woman.
Wallace Bannister was older than Rodney, thirty or thirty-two, although even off the stage he looked much younger. He had dipped into college work in a dull season, amusing himself idly in the elementary classes of French and English where his knowledge in these branches gave him immediate prominence—and drifting away in a road company after only a few months of fraternity and campus popularity. His mother and father were both dead; the latter had been a theatrical manager in a small way, sending little stock companies up and down the coast for one-night stands.
Bannister was tall, well-built, and handsome. His cheeks had a fresh fullness, and his black hair was as shining as wet coal. He was eager and magnetic; musical, literary, or religious, according to the company in which he found himself. Martie's thrilled interest firing him to-night, he exerted himself: told stories in Chinese dialect, in brogue, and with an excellent Scotch burr; he went to the rickety piano, and from the loose keys, usually set in motion by a nickel in the slot, he evoked brilliant songs, looking over his shoulder with his sentimental bold eyes at the company as he sang. And Martie said to herself, "Ah—this IS life!"
Rodney took her home, the clock in the square booming the half hour after midnight as they went by. And at the side door he told her to look up at the Dipper throbbing in the cool sky overhead. Martie knew what was coming, but she looked innocently up, and went to sleep for the first time in her life with a man's kiss still tingling on her smiling lips.
The cold November weather might have been rosy June; the dull routine of the Monroe home a life rich and full for Martie now. She sang like a lark, feeding the chickens in the foggy mornings; she dimpled at her own reflection in the mirror; she walked down town as if treading the clouds. Anything interested her, everything interested her. Mrs. Harry Locker, born Preble, said that Martie just seemed inspired, the way she talked when old lady Preble died. Miss Fanny, in the Library, began to entertain serious hopes that the girl would take the Cutter system to heart, and make a clever understudy at the old desk. Sally, watching, dreamed and yearned of Martie's distinction, Martie's happiness; Lydia prayed. Malcolm Monroe, as became a man of dignity, ignored the whole affair, but Len, realizing that various advantages accrued, befriended his sister, and talked to Rodney familiarly, as man to man.
"I can't stand that fresh kid!" said Rodney of Len. Martie shrugged without speaking. She owed Len no allegiance. Had it suited Rodney to admire Len, Martie would have been a loyal sister. As it was, she would not risk a difference with Rodney for any one like Len. She was embarked now upon a vital matter of business. Had a few hundreds of dollars been involved, Malcolm Monroe would have been at her elbow, advising, commending. As it was, her happiness, her life, her children, her whole future might be jeopardized or secured with no sign from him. Interference from her mother or sisters would have been considered indelicate. So Martie stood alone.
Immediately after the theatre party, the question of a series of dances again arose, and Martie somewhat hesitatingly repeated her offer of the Monroe house for the first. Rodney's friend, Alvah Brigham, was to come to the Parker family for Thanksgiving; the dance was to be on Friday night, and a large picnic to Brewster's Woods on Saturday. They would take a lunch, build a fire for their coffee, and have the old school-day programme of singing and games.
For the dance, the two big parlours and the back room must be cleared; that was simple enough. Angela Baxter would be at the piano for the music; sufficient, if not extraordinary, and costing only two dollars. The supper would be sandwiches, cake, coffee, and lemonade: Monroe's invariable supper. Rodney thought ices necessary, and suggested at least a salad. Martie and Sally considered the salad.
"Lord, I wish we could have a punch," Rodney complained. The girls laughed.
"Oh, Rod—Pa would explode!"
"Darn it," the boy mused, "I don't see WHY. He's not a teetotaler." "Well, I know," Martie conceded. "But that's different, of course! No—we can't have punch. I don't know how to make it, anyway—" She was hardly following her own words. Under them lay the wonderful consciousness that Rodney Parker was here at the house, sitting on the porch steps on a warm November morning, as much at home as Leonard himself. The sun was looking down into the dark garden, damp paths were drying in sudden warmth after a rain.
In such an hour and such a mood, Martie felt absolutely confident that the dance would be a great success. More; it seemed to her in the heartening morning sunlight that it would be the first of many such innocent festivities, and that before it was over—before it was over, she and Rodney might have something wonderful to tell the girls and boys of Monroe.
But in the long winter afternoons her confidence waned a little, and at night, dreaming over her cards, she began to have serious misgivings. Then the old house seemed cold and inhospitable and the burden of carrying a social affair to success fell like a dreadful weight on the girl's soul. Mama, Lydia, and Sally would cooperate to the best of their power, of course; Pa and Len might be expected to make themselves as annoying as possible.
Supper, decorations, even the question of gowns paled before the task of making a list of guests. Sally and Martie early realized that they must inevitably hurt the feelings and disappoint the trust of more than one old friend. Mrs. Monroe and Lydia grew absolutely sick over the necessity.
"Ma, this is just for the younger set," Martie argued. "And if people like Miss Fanny and the Johnsons expect to come to it, why, it's ridiculous, that's all!"
"I know, dear, but it's the first party we have given in YEARS" her mother said plaintively, "and one hates to—"
"What I've DONE" said Martie in a worried tone, "is write down all the POSSIBLE boys in Monroe, even counting Len and Billy Frost, and Rod, and Alvah Brigham. Then I wrote down all the girls I'd like to ask if I COULD, and there were about fourteen too many. So now I'm scratching off all the girls I CAN—"
"I do think you ought to ask Grace Hawkes!" Lydia said firmly and reproachfully.
"Well, I can't!" Martie answered quickly. "So it doesn't matter what you think! I beg your pardon, Lyd," she added penitently, laying her hand on Lydia's arm. "But you know Rodney's sisters would die if Grace came!"
"Well, I think it's a mistake to slight Grace," Lydia persisted.
Martie studied her pencilled list gloomily for a few seconds.
"Sometimes I wish we weren't having it!" she said moodily.
"Oh, Martie, when we've always said we'd give ANYTHING to entertain as other people do!" Sally exclaimed. "I DO think that's unreasonable!"
Martie made no answer. She was looking at a memorandum which read: "Invitations—cream—Angela—stamps—illusion—slippers."
As the days went by the thought of the dance grew more and more troublesome. The details of the affair were too strange to be entered into with any confidence, any rush of enthusiasm and spontaneity. Every hour brought her fresh cause for worry.
Nothing went well. The thought of her dress worried her. She had conceived the idea of a black gown ornamented with cretonne roses, carefully applied. She and Sally cut out the flowers, and applied them with buttonhole stitch, sewing until their fingers were sore, their faces flushed, and their hair in frowsy disorder. It was slow work. Miss Pepper, the seamstress, engaged for one day only to do the important work on both Sally's and Martie's gown, kept postponing, as she always did postpone, the day, finally appointing the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day. Pa's cousin, a certain Mrs. Potts, wrote from Portland that she was coming down for the holiday, and Sally and Martie could have wept at the thought of the complication of having her exacting presence in the house. Worse than this Pa, who was to have gone to San Francisco on business on Friday morning—whose decision to do so had indeed been one of Martie's reasons for selecting this date for the affair—suddenly changed his plan. He need not go until December, he said.
Leonard, who at first had been faintly interested in the proceedings, later annoyed his sisters by intimating that he would not be present at the dance. Martie and Sally did not want him for any social qualities he possessed, but he was a male; he would at least help to offset the alarming plurality of females.
Acceptances came promptly from the young women of Monroe, even from Ida and May Parker. Florence Frost regretted; she was smitten even now with the incurable illness that would end her empty life a few years later. Such men as Martie and Sally had been able to list as eligible—the new young doctor from the Rogers building, little Billy Frost, the Patterson boys, home from college for Thanksgiving, Reddy Johnson, and Carl Polhemus—answered not at all, as is the custom with young men. Sally and Martie did not like the Patterson boys; George was fat and stupid; Arthur at eighteen sophisticated and blase, with dissipated eyes; both were supercilious, and the girls did not really believe that they would come. Still, there was not much to lose in asking them.
There had been a debate over Reddy Johnson's name; but Reddy was a wonderful dancer. So he was asked, and Martie went so far as to say that had Joe Hawkes possessed an evening suit, he and Grace might have been asked, too. As it was, Sally and Martie hoped they would not meet Grace until the affair was over.
They fumed and fussed over the list until they knew it by heart. They wondered who would come first, how soon they should begin dancing, how soon serve supper. Mrs. Monroe thought supper should be served at half-past ten. Martie groaned. Oh, they couldn't serve supper until almost midnight, she protested.
Dinner was at noon on Thanksgiving Day, and the Monroes, sated and overwarm, were sitting about the fire when Rodney Parker and his friend, Alvah Brigham, came to take Martie and Sally walking. The girls were sewing at the endless roses; but they jumped up in a flutter, and ran for hats and sweaters. They did not exchange a word, nor lose a second, while they were upstairs, running down again immediately to end the uncomfortable silence that held the group about the fire.
It was a cold, bleak day, and the pure air was delicious to Martie's hot cheeks after the close house. She had immediately taken possession of Alvah; Sally and Rodney followed. They took the old bridge road, which the girls loved for the memory of bygone days, when they had played at dolls' housekeeping along the banks of the little Sonora, climbed the low oaks, and waded in the bright shallow water. Even through to-day's excitement Martie had time for a memory of those long-ago summer afternoons, and she said to herself with a vague touch of pain that it would of course be impossible to have with any man the serene communion of those days with Sally.
Mr. Brigham was a pale, rather fat young man with hair already thinning. He did not have much to say, but he was always ready to laugh, and Martie saw that he had cause for laughter. She rattled on recklessly, anxious only to avoid silence; hardly conscious of what she said. The effect of the cool, fresh air was lost upon Martie to-day; she was fired to fever-pitch by Rodney's nearness.
He had not ever said anything exactly loverlike, she said to herself, with a sort of breathless discontent, when she was setting the table for a cold supper that night. But he had brought his friend to them after all! She must not be exacting. She had so much—
"I beg your pardon, Cousin Allie?" she stammered. Her obnoxious relative, a stout, moustached woman of fifty, warming her skirts at the fire, was smiling at her unkindly.
"You always was a great one to moon, Martha!" said Mrs. Potts, "I's asking you what you see in that young feller to make such a to-do about?"
"Then you don't like him?" Martie countered, laughing. Mrs. Potts bridled. Her favourite attitude toward life was a bland but suspicious superiority; she liked to be taken seriously.
"I didn't say I didn't like him," she answered, accurately, a little nettled. "No, my dear, I didn't say that. No. I wouldn't say that of any young man!" she added thoughtfully.
Smiling a dark smile, she looked into the fire. Martie, rather uncomfortable, went on with her task.
"He's seemed to admire our Mart in a brotherly sort of way since the very beginning," Lydia explained, anxious as usual to say the kind thing, and succeeding as usual in saying the one thing that could hurt and annoy. "He's quite a boy for the girls, but we think our Martie is too sensible to take him seriously, yet awhile!" And Lydia gave her sister a smile full of sweet significance.
"HOPE she is!" Mrs. Potts said heavily. "For if that young feller means business I miss MY guess!"
"Oh, for pity's sake—can't a man ask a girl to go walking without all this fuss!" Martie burst out angrily. "I NEVER heard so much—crazy—silly—talk—about—nothing!"
The last words were only an ashamed mumble as she disappeared kitchenward.
"H'm!" said Mrs. Potts, eying Lydia over her glasses. "Kinder touchy about him just the same. Well! what's he to that young feller used to come see you, Lydia? Ain't the Frosts and the Parkers kin?"
"I really think she's the most detestable old woman that ever was!" Martie said, when the three girls were going to bed that night. Lydia, loitering in her sister's room for a few minutes, made no denial.
"Well, by this time to-morrow night the party will be nearly over!" yawned Sally.
Martie looked at the clock. A quarter past eleven. What would be happening at quarter past eleven to-morrow night?
The girls awakened early, and were early astir. A rush of preparation filled the morning, so soothing in its effect upon nerves and muscles that Martie became wild with hope. The parlours looked prettier than the girls had ever seen them; the pungent sweetness of chrysanthemums and evergreen stealing into the clean, well-aired spaces, and bowls of delicious violets sending out currents of pure perfume. Martie swept, straightened, washed gas globes, shook rugs. She gathered the flowers herself, straightening the shoulders that were beginning to ache as she arranged them with wet, cool fingers. Sally was counting napkins, washing china and glass. Belle dragged through the breakfast dishes. Lydia was capably mixing the filling for sandwiches. Outside, the morning was still; fog dripped from the trees. Sometimes the sudden sputtering chuckle of disputing chickens broke the quiet; a fish cart rattled by unseen, the blare of the horn sending Mrs. Monroe with a large empty platter to the gate.
At two o'clock Lydia and Martie walked down town for the last shopping. Martie was aware, under the drumming excitement in her blood, that she was already tired. But to buy bottled cherries for the lemonade, olives for the sandwiches, and flat pink and white mint candies was exhilarating, and Reddy Johnson's cheery "See you to-night, Martie!" made her blue eyes dance with pleasure. After all, a dance was no such terrible matter!
They were in Mason and White's, seated at a counter, in consultation over a purchase of hairpins, when two gloved hands were suddenly pressed over Martie's eyes, and a joyous voice said "Hello!" The next instant Rose's eyes were laughing into hers.
"Rose Ransome!" Martie and Lydia said together. The two younger girls began to chatter eagerly.
Why, when had she gotten home? Only this morning. And oh, it did seem so good to be home! And how was everybody? And how was college? Oh, fine! And was she still at the same house? Oh, yes! And so poor old Mrs. Preble was dead? Uncle Ben had felt so badly—
"Say, Rose, we're having a sort of party to-night," Martie said awkwardly, and with a certain hesitation. Details followed. Rose, as pretty as a bird in her little checked suit and feathered hat, listened with bright interest. "Why can't you come?" Martie finished eagerly. "The more the merrier!"
"Well—no." Rose hesitated prettily. "My first evening at home, you know—I think I hadn't better. I'd love to, Martie. And about the picnic to-morrow; that I CAN do! What'll I bring?"
"Rose is a sweet little thing," Lydia said, when the sisters were walking home again. "I'm sorry she can't come to-night; she has a way of making things GO."
Martie did not answer. She was mentally, for the hundredth time, putting on the black gown with the pink roses stitched all about the flounce, and piling up her bronze hair.
The short afternoon waned, fog closing in the village again with the dark. Martie and Sally came down to supper with thin little crepe wrappers over their crisp skirts and best stockings and slippers. Both girls had spent the late afternoon in bathing, taking last stitches, laughing and romping over the upper floor, but the blazing colour in their faces now was as much from nervous fatigue as from excitement. Neither was hungry, nor talkative, and Mrs. Potts and their father monopolized the conversation.
Len was sulky because he had played his usual game badly this evening, and chance failing him had favoured the girls. He had asked to be excused from the party, to their deep but unexpressed indignation, and had almost won his father's consent to a request to go down town a while, when a casual inquiry from Malcolm as to what he intended to do down town inspired Len to a reminiscent chuckle and an artless observation that gee! he might get a chance to sit outside of the hotel and watch Colonel Frost's new automobile for him, if the Colonel, as was usual, came down to the monthly meeting of the Republican Club.
For a few seconds Malcolm did not sense the full indignity of his son's position as groom for Cyrus Frost. When he did, Leonard had a bad quarter of an hour, and was directed to get into his Sunday suit, make himself as useful and agreeable to his sisters as was possible, and let his father hear no more of this nonsense about old Frost and his automobile.
Chuckling over this turn of events, the girls went upstairs to finish dressing. Sally, in an old pink gown, freshly pressed, was pretty; but Martie, turning flushed and self-conscious from the dim old mirror, was quite lovely. The black gown made her too-generous figure seem almost slender; the cretonne roses glowed richly against the black, and Martie's creamy skin and burnished hair were all the more brilliant for the contrast. Her heart rose buoyantly as she realized the success of the gown, and she ran downstairs with sudden gay confidence in herself and her party.
Her father and mother, with Mrs. Potts, had considerately disappeared. Malcolm had gone down town; the ladies, wrapped in shawls, were gossiping in Mrs. Potts's vaultlike chamber. Lydia was moving about in the downstairs rooms.
"Oh, Martie, Rose telephoned," Lydia said as her sister came in, "and she says that Mr. Rice and her mother say she must come up to-night, if it's only for a little while. She's going to bring her violin."
"Oh, that's good," Martie answered absently, sitting down to play "The Two Grenadiers" with great spirit. "There's some one now, Lyd!" she added in a half panic, as the doorbell rang. Lydia, her colour rising suddenly, went to the door, raising her hand above as she passed under the gaslight to turn the lights to their full brilliancy. The first arrival was Angela Baxter, with her music roll under her arm. She kissed Lydia, and went upstairs with Sally.
Then there were other feet on the porch: in came the German girls and Laura Carter, hooded in knitted fragile scarfs, and wrapped in pale blue and pink circular capes edged narrowly with fluffy eiderdown. Elmer King, hoarsely respectful, and young Potter Street followed. Martie, taking the girls upstairs, called back to them that she would send Len down. While they were all in Lydia's room, laying off wraps and powdering noses, Maude Alien came up, and "Dutch" Harrison's older sister Kate, and Amy Scott, and Martie was so funny and kept them all in such roars of laughter that Sally was conscious of a shameless wish that this was what Monroe called a "hen party," with no men asked. Then they could have games, Proverbs and even Hide-the-Thimble, and every one would feel happy and at home.
When they went down Robert Archer, a quiet mild young man who was in the real estate business, had come; and he and Elmer and Potter were sitting silently in the parlour. Martie and Sally and the other girls went in, and every one tried to talk gaily and naturally as the young men stood up, but there seemed to be no reason why they should not all sit down, and, once seated, it seemed hard to talk. What Martie said was met with a nervous glimmer of laughter and a few throaty monosyllables.
Sally wanted to suggest games, but did not dare. Martie, and indeed every one else, would have been glad to play Proverbs and Twenty Questions, but she did not quite like to begin anything so childish at a real dance. She looked at the clock: just nine. The evening was yet young.
Suddenly Angela Baxter stopped murmuring to Lydia, and began to rattle a quick two step from the piano. Robert Archer, sitting next to Martie, asked her at once to dance, and Potter Street asked Sally, but both girls, glancing self-consciously at their guests, declined, and the young men subsided. So nobody danced the first dance, and after it there was another lull. Then Martie cheerfully asked Angela for a waltz, and said bravely:
"Come on, some of you, DO dance this! I can't because I'm hostess."
At this there was some subdued laughter, and immediately the four young men found partners, and two of the girls danced together. Then little Billy Frost came in, and after him, as fresh and sweet as her name, came Rose with the Monroe's only dentist, Bruce Tate. Dr. Tate was a rather heavy young man, flirtatious and conceited.
Rose put her violin on the piano, and explained that she had met Rodney Parker that afternoon, "hadn't seen him for YEARS!" and that he had talked her into coming. No—she wouldn't play until later laughed Rose; now she wanted to dance.
The hours that followed seemed to Martie like years. She never forgot them. She urged her guests into every dance with almost physical force; she felt for the girls who did not dance a nervous pity. Ida and May came in: neither danced, nor was urged to dance. They went home at ten o'clock. It was immediately afterward that Rodney came with his friend. Martie met them in the hall, ready for the intimate word, the smile that should make all this tiresome business of lights and piano and sandwiches worth while. Rodney was a little flushed and noisy, Alvah red-faced, breathing and speaking a little thickly. They said they were thirsty.
"Lemonade?" Martie suggested confidently.
Rodney glanced quickly at his friend. "Oh, Gawd!" said Mr. Brigham simply.
Then they were in the hot parlour, and Martie was introducing them to a circle that smiled and said "Pleased to meet choo," over and over. Alvah would not dance, remarking that he hated dancing. And Rodney—Rodney had eyes for no one but Rose. Martie saw it, every one saw it.
Rose was at her best to-night. She knew college songs that Rodney and Alvah knew, she dimpled and coquetted with the pretty confidence of a kitten. She stood up, dainty and sweet in her pink gown, and played her violin, with the gaslight shining down into her brown eyes, and her lace sleeve slipping back and forth over her white arm as the bow whipped to and fro.
Rodney did not leave her side, except for a dance with Martie and one with Sally. After a while he and Rose went out to sit on the stairs. Alvah grew noisy and familiar, and Martie did not know quite how to meet his hilarity, although she tried. She was afraid the echoes of his wild laugh would greet her father's ears, if he had come in and was upstairs, and that Pa might do something awful.
The evening wore on. Lydia looked tired, and Sally was absolutely mute, listening politely to Robert Archer's slow, uninteresting narration of the purchase of the Hospital site. Martie felt as if she had been in this dreadful gaslight forever; she watched the clock.
At eleven they all went out to the dining room, and here the first real evidences of pleasure might be seen on the faces of the guests. Now Lydia, too, was in her favourite element, superintending coffee cups, while Sally, alert again, cut the layer cakes. The table looked charming and the sandwiches and coffee, cream and olives, were swiftly put in circulation. Under the heartening rattle of cutlery and china every one talked, the air was scented with coffee, the room so warm that two windows by general consent were opened to the cool night.
Martie took her share of the duties of hospitality as if in an oppressive dream. Rodney sat beside her, and Rose on his other side. To an outsider Martie might have seemed her chattering self, but she knew—and Sally knew—that the knife was in her heart. She said good-night to Rodney brightly, and kissed Rose. Rodney was to take Rose home because, as she explained to Martie in an aside, it was almost on his way, and it seemed a shame to take Dr. Tate so far.
"I've been scolding Rod terribly; those boys had highballs or something before they came here," Rose said, puckering her lips and shaking her head as she carefully pinned a scarf over her pretty hair. "So silly! That's what we were talking about on the stairs."
She tripped away on Rodney's arm. Alvah, complaining of a splitting head, went off alone. Somehow the others filtered away; Angela Baxter, who was to spend the night with Lydia, piled the last of the dishes with Lydia in the kitchen. Sally, silent and yawning, sank into an armchair by the dying fire. Martie, watching the lanterns, and hearing the voices die away after the last slamming of the gate, stood on the dark porch staring into the night. The trees scarcely showed against a heavy sky, a restless wind tossed their uppermost branches; a few drops of rain fell on a little gust of air. The night was damp and heavy; it pressed upon the village almost like a soft, smothering weight. Martie felt as if she could hear the world breathe.
With miserable, dry eyes, she looked up at the enveloping blackness; drops of rain on her burning face, a chill shaking her whole body in the thin gown. Martie wanted to live no longer; she longed to press somehow into that great silent space, to cool her burning head and throbbing heart in those immeasurable distances on distances of dark. She did not want to go back into the dreadful house, where the chairs were pushed about, and the table a wreck of wilted flowers and crumbs, where the air was still laden with the odour of coffee and cigarettes. She did not want to reclaim her own shamed and helpless little entity after this moment of escape.
Her own pain and mortification—ah, she could have borne those. But to have Lydia and Sally and Len and all Monroe sorry for her ...
Martie did not sleep that night. She tossed in a restless agony of remembering, and the pitiable party seemed a life-failure, as she lay thinking of it in the dark, a colossal blunder never to be obliterated. They were unlucky—the Monroes. They never could do things like other people.
Early in the cold dawn she heard the quiet slop and spatter of rain. Thank God there could be no picnic to-day! Exhausted, she slept.
Whatever Lydia, her mother, and Sally agreed between themselves the next day they never told, but there was a conspiracy immediately on foot. Little was said of the party, and nothing of Rodney Parker, for many days. And if Martie in her fever of hurt pride was not openly grateful, at least they knew her benefited by the silence. Rose had no such compunction.
On the afternoon of the long rainy Saturday that was to have been filled with a picnic, Rose telephoned. She just wanted to see how every one was—and say what a lovely time she'd had! Ida Parker had just telephoned, and Rose was going up there at about four o'clock to stay for dinner, just informally, of course. She would go back to Berkeley to-morrow night, but she hoped to see the girls in the meantime.
Silently, heavily, Martie went on wiping the "company" dishes, carrying them into the pantry shelves where they had been piled untouched for years, and where they would stand again unused for a long, long time. Sally was tired, and complained of a headache. Lydia was irritatingly cheerful and philosophical. Len had disappeared, as was usual on Saturday, and Mrs. Monroe and Mrs. Potts were talking in low tones over the sitting-room fire. Outside, the rain fell and fell and fell.
Martie thought of Rose, laughing, pink-cheeked, discarding her neat little raincoat with Rodney's help at four o'clock, at the Parkers' house, and bringing her fresh laughter into their fire. She thought of her at six—at seven—and during the silent two hours when she brooded over her cards.
Coming out of church the next morning, Rose rejoiced over the clear bath of sunlight that followed the rain. "Rod is going to take me driving," she told Martie. "I like him ever so much; don't you, Martie?"
Alice Clark, coming in for a chat with Lydia late that afternoon, added the information that when little Rose Ransome left the city at four o'clock, Rod Parker and that fat friend of his went, too. Escorting Rose—and he and Rose would have tea in the city before he took her to Berkeley—Martie thought.
That was the beginning, and now scarcely a day passed without its new sting. The girl was not conscious of any instinct for bravery; she did not want to be brave, she wanted to draw back from the rack—to escape, rather than to endure. A first glimpse of happiness had awakened fineness in her nature; she had been generous, sweet, ambitious, only a few weeks ago. She had given new thought to her appearance, had carried her big frame more erectly. All her bigness, all her capacity for loving and giving she would have poured at Rodney's feet; his home, his people, his hopes, and plans—these would have been hers.
Repulsed, this gold of youth turned to brass; through long idle days and wakeful nights Martie paid the cruel price for a few hours of laughter and dreaming. She was not given another moment of hope.
Not that she did not meet Rodney, for in Monroe they must often meet. And when they met he greeted her, and they laughed and chatted gaily. But she was not Brunhilde now, and if Sally or Lydia or any one else was with her she knew he was not sorry.
In the middle of December Rose's mother, the neat little widow who was like an older Rose, told Sally that Rose was not going back to college after Christmas. Quietly, without comment, Sally told this to Martie when they were going to bed that night.
Martie walked to the window, and stood looking out for a long time. When she came back to Sally her face was pale, her breast moving stormily, and her eyes glittering.
"They're engaged, I suppose?" Martie said.
Sally did not speak. But her eyes answered.
"Sally," said her sister, in a voice thick with pain, as she sat down on the bed, "am I to blame? Could I have done differently? Why does this come to Rose, who has everything NOW, and pass me by? I—I don't want to be like—like Lyd, Sally; I want to live! What can I do? Oh, my GOD," said Martie, rising suddenly and beginning to walk to and fro, with her magnificent mane of hair rolling and tumbling about her shoulders as she moved, "what shall I do? There is a world, out there, and people working and living and succeeding in it—and here I am, in Monroe—dying, dying, DYING of longing! Sally ..." and with tears wet on her cheeks, and her mouth trembling, she came close to her sister. "Sally," whispered Martie unsteadily, "I care for—him. I wanted nothing better. I thought—I thought that by this time next year we might—we might be going to have a baby—Rodney and I."
She flung back her head, and went again to the window. Sally burst into bitter crying.
"Oh, Martie—Martie—I know! I know! My darling, splendid, glorious sister—so much more clever than any one else, and so much BETTER! I think it'll break my heart!"
And in each other's arms, nineteen and twenty-one wept together at the bitterness of life.
The days wore by, and Rose came smiling home for Christmas, and early in the new year Martie and Sally were asked to a pink luncheon at the Ransome cottage, finding at each chair two little tissue-paper heart-shaped frames initialled "R. P." and "R. R." with kodak prints of Rose and Rodney inside. The Monroe girls gave Rose a "linen shower" in return, and the whole town shared the pleasure of the happy pair.
Martie had enough to think of now. Not even the thoughts of the prospective bride could dwell more persistently on her own affairs than did Martie's thoughts. Rose, welcome at the Parkers', envied and admired even by Ida and May and Florence; Rose, prettily buying her wedding finery and dashing off apt little notes of thanks for her engagement cups and her various "showers"; Rose, fluttering with confidences and laughter to the admiring Rodney, with the diamond glittering on her hand; these and a thousand other Roses haunted Martie. Lydia and her mother admired and marvelled with the rest. Lydia it was who first brought home the news that the young Parkers were to be married at Easter, Sally learned from Rose's own lips that they were to spend a week in Del Monte as honeymoon.
The Monroe girls still wandered down town on weekday mornings, loitering into the post-office, idling an hour away in the Library, drifting home to mutton stew or Hamburg steak when the clock in the town hall struck twelve. Sometimes Martie watched the big eastern trains thunder by, looking with her wistful young blue eyes at the card-playing men and the flushed, bored young women with their heads resting on the backs of their upholstered seats. Sometimes she stopped at the little magazine stand outside of Carlson's cigar store; her eye caught by a photograph on the cover of a weekly: "Broadway at Forty-Second," or "Night Lights from the Singer Building," or the water-front silhouette that touches like the sight of a beloved face even some hearts that know it not. She wanted to do something, now that it was certain that she would not marry. Slowly, and late, Martie's soul was awakening.
She asked her father if she might go to work. Certainly she might, her father said lifelessly. Well, what should she do?—the girl persisted.
"Ah, that's quite another thing!" Malcolm said, with his favourite air of detecting an inconsistency. "You want to work? Well and good, go ahead and do it! But don't expect me to tell you what to do. Your mother may have some idea. Your grandmother—and she was the loveliest woman I ever knew!—was content to be merely a lady, something I wish my daughters knew a little more about. Her beautiful home, her children and servants, her friends and her church—that was her work! She didn't want to push coarsely out into the world. However, if you do, go ahead! I confess I am tired of seeing the dark, ugly expression you've worn lately, Martie. Go your own way!"
Armed with this ungracious permission, Martie went down to see Miss Fanny, talked with Grace, and even, meeting him on a lonely walk, climbed into the old phaeton beside Dr. Ben, and asked his advice. Nothing definite resulted, yet Martie was the happier for the new interest. Old Father Martin talked to her of her plans one day, and presently put her in communication with a certain widow, Mrs. O'Brien, of San Francisco, who wanted an intelligent young woman to go with her to New York to help with the care and education of two little O'Briens.
This possibility fired Martie and Sally to fever-heat, and they hoped and prayed eagerly while it was under discussion. New York at last! said Martie, who felt that she had been waiting endless years for New York. But Mrs. O'Brien, it seemed, wanted some one who would be able to begin French and German and music lessons for little Jane and Cora, and the question of Martie's fitness was settled.
Still she was happier, and when Easter came, and the Monroe girls were bidden to Rose's wedding, it was with a new and charming gravity in face and manner that Martie went.
The ceremony took place in the comfortable parlours of the Ransome house; the pretty home wedding possible because Rodney was not a Catholic. Just like Rose's luck—instead of being married in the bare, big church, thought Martie, at whose age the religious side of the question did not appear important. Dr. Ben gave his young cousin away, and Rose's mother, whose every thought since the fatherless child was born had been for the girl's good, who had schemed and worked and prayed for twenty years that Rose might be happy, that Rose might have music and languages, travel and friends, had her reward when the lovely little Mrs. Parker flung her fragrant arms about her, and gave her her first kiss.
Rose looked her prettiest, just becomingly pale, becomingly merry, becomingly tearful. Her presents, on view upstairs, were far finer than any Monroe had seen since Cliff Frost was married. Rodney was the usual excited, nervous, laughing groom. The wedding supper was perfection, and the young people danced when Father Martin was gone, and when the bride and groom had dashed away to the ten-o'clock train.
It was all over. Rose had everything, as usual, and Martie had nothing.
Easter was in early April that year, and the sweet, warm month was dying away when one afternoon Miss Fanny, always hopeful for this dreaming helpless young creature so full of big faults and big possibilities, detained Martie in the Library for a little dissertation upon card catalogues. Martie listened with her usual enthusiastic interest. Yes—she understood; yes, she understood.
"There's your telephone, Miss Fanny!" said she, in the midst of a demonstration. The older woman picked up the instrument.
"It's for you, Martie. It's Sally," she said, surprised. "Sally!" Martie did not understand. She had left Sally at the bridge, and Sally was to go on to the Town Hall for Pa, with a letter.
"Hello, Martie!" said a buoyant yet tremulous voice. "Martie—this is Sally. I'm over at Mrs. Hawkes's. Martie—I'm married!"
"Married!" echoed Martie stupidly, eyeing the listening Miss Fanny bewilderedly.
"Yes—to Joe. Lissun—can't you come right over? I'll tell you all about it!"
Martie put back the receiver in a state of utter stupefaction. Fortunately the Library was empty, and after telling Miss Fanny the little she knew, she went out into the sweet, hot street. The town was in a tent of rustling new leaves; lilacs were in heavy flower. Roses and bridal-wreath and mock-orange trees were in bloom. Rank brown grass stood everywhere; the fruit blossoms were gone, tall buttercups were nodding over the grass.
At the Hawkes's house there were laughter and excitement. Sally, rosier and more talkative than even Martie had ever seen her before, was the heroine of the hour. When Martie came in, she flew toward her in an ecstasy, and with laughter and tears the tale was told. She and Joe had chanced to meet on the Court House steps, Sally coming out from the task of delivering a letter from Pa to Judge Parker, Joe going in with a telegram for Captain Tate. And almost without words from the lilac-scented, green-shaded street they had gone into the License Bureau; and almost without words they had walked out to find Father Martin. And now they were married! And the thin old ring on Sally's young hand had belonged to Father Martin's mother.
Martie was too generous not to respond to her sister's demand, even if she had not been completely carried away by the excitement about her.
Mrs. Hawkes, tears of joy in her eyes, yet smiles shining through them, was brewing tea for the happy pair. Minnie Hawkes's Rose was making toast when she was not jumping up and down half mad with delight. Ellen Hawkes, now Mrs. Castle, was setting the table. Grandma Kelly was quavering out blessings, and Joe's older brother, Thomas, who worked at night, and had been breakfasting at four o'clock, when the young pair burst in, rushed out to the bakery to come back triumphantly with a white frosted cake.
"It's a fair cake," said Mrs. Hawkes in the babel. "But you wait—I'll make you a cake!"
"And you know, Joe and I between us just made up the dollar for the license!" laughed Sally.
"Say, listen," said Ellen suddenly, "you folks have got to take our house for a few days; how about that, Mother? You and Joe can start housekeeping there like Terry and me. How about it, Mother? We'll come here!"
"But, Sally—not to tell me!" Martie said reproachfully.
"Oh, darling—I did that deliberately!" her sister answered earnestly. "I'm going to telephone Pa, and I know he'll be wild. And I DIDN'T want you to be in it! You'll have enough—poor Martie!"
Already the shadow of the old house was passing from her. With what gaiety she went about the old room, thought Martie, stopped by Mrs. Hawkes's affectionate arms for a kiss, stopping to kiss Grandma Kelly of her own free will. Sally had no sense of social values; she loved to be here, admired, loved, busy.
"Think of the priest giving her his mother's own ring!" said the women over and over. "It'll bring you big luck, Sally!"
They all sat down at the table, and Terry and John Healey came in to rejoice, and the Healey baby awoke, and Grace came in from work. When Martie left there was talk of supper; everybody was to stay for supper.
Walking home in the late spring twilight, Martie felt a certain satisfaction. Sally was happy, and they would be good to her, and she would be better off than Lydia, anyway. Joe as a husband was perfectly absurd, of course, but Joe certainly did love Sally. Monroe would buzz, but Martie had heard Monroe buzzing for a long time now, and after the first shock, had found herself unhurt. Curiously, Sally's plunge into a new life seemed to free her own hands.
"Now I am going to get out!" said Martie, opening her own gate.
When Malcolm Monroe came home that night it was to a well-sustained hurricane of tears and protest. Mrs. Monroe and Lydia shed genuine tears, and Martie and Len added diplomatically to the hubbub. Pa must suspect no one of sympathy for the shameless Sally.
"To think, Pa, after all we've done for her!" sobbed Mrs. Monroe, and Lydia, wiping her nose and shaking her head, kept saying with reproachful firmness: "I can't believe it of Sally! Why shouldn't she tell one of us. To stand up and be married all alone!"
Her father took the news exactly as might have been expected. While there was hope of convicting Martie or Lydia of complicity, he questioned them sharply and sternly. When this was gone, he swiftly worked himself into such a passion as his children had rarely seen before. Sally and Joe were solemnly denounced, disinherited, and abandoned. And any child of his who spoke to either should share their fate.
"Oh, Papa—don't!" quavered Lydia, as her father strode to the Bible, and with horrible precision inked from the register the record of Sally's birth. Mrs. Monroe looked terrified, and even Leonard was pale. But Martie, to her own amazement, found a sudden calm scorn in her heart. What a silly thing to do, just because poor little Sally married the boy she loved. How dared Pa call himself a Christian while he regarded Sally's downward step from a mere social level a disgrace! And how cruel he was, playing upon poor Ma's and Lydia's feelings just for his own satisfaction.
"You understand me, don't you, Martie?" he asked grimly.
"I suppose so." An ugly smile curved Martie's lips. Her lids were half lowered.
"Well—remember it. And never any one of you mention your sister's name to me again!"
"No, Pa," said four fervent voices. Then they had dinner.
The next day the three women packed up Sally's things; Lydia and her mother in tears, but Martie strangely content. Something had happened at all events. She put Sally's baby sash and collar and other treasured rubbish in the package, with two scribbled lines pinned to them: "Praying for you, darling. Pa is furious. The slipper is for luck. Your M."
And then the eventless days began to wheel by again. Rose came home, and came to see Martie, and Martie dined at the Parkers'. Rodney, though obviously blind to all women but his wife, was cordial and gallant to the guest and Rose took her up to her pretty, frilly bedroom, so that Martie might take off her hat and coat, and told Martie that Rod was the neatest man she had ever seen, such a fusser about his bath and his clothes. On Rose's bureau was a big photograph of Rodney in a silver frame, and on Rodney's high dresser a charming photograph of Rose in her wedding gown. When she was putting on her hat four hours later to be driven home by Rodney, Martie heard Rose's wifely voice in the hall: "You are a darling to do this, Rod!" The tone was that in which a man is praised by his women for a hard duty cheerfully done. Martie was not surprised when Rose merrily confided to her that Rod wanted his wife to go along—the silly!—and accompanied them on the short drive.
She did not see much of the young Parkers after that, nor did she expect to be counted among their intimate friends. She began to drift into the public kindergarten in the mornings, to help Miss Malloy with the unruly babies. And she missed Sally more every day.
Sally and Joe had gone to Pittsville immediately after their wedding; Joe having received a dazzling offer of forty dollars a month for two summer months from the express company there.
But when Sally had been married six weeks, Martie heard her voice one day when the younger sister was passing the Hawkes's house. Instantly she entered the gate, her heart beating high. Sally's dear, unforgettable voice! And Sally's slender shoulders and soft, loose hair!
The girls were in each other's arms, laughing and crying as they clung together. Martie thought she had never seen her sister look so well, or seem so sweet and gay. There were a thousand questions on each side to ask; Martie poured out the home news. Sally and Joe were housekeeping in three rooms, and it was more FUN! And Sally really cooked him wonderful dinners; his father and mother had come over to one, and wasn't it good? Mrs. Hawkes enthusiastically agreed.
Of course, they had hardly ANYTHING, bubbled Sally, only two saucepans and one frying pan and the coffee pot. But it was more FUN! And in the evenings they walked around Pittsville, and went to the ten-cent theatre, or bought candy and divided it. COULDN'T Martie come some time to dinner?
"Pa," said Martie simply. Sally's bright face clouded. She sent a kiss to Ma and darling Lyd. She and Joe would come back to Monroe in September, and then she would come see Pa and make him forgive her. Tell him she still loved him!
Martie delivered none of these airy messages. She secretly marvelled at the happiness that could blind Sally to a memory of Pa, and Pa's stubbornness.
"Listen, Martie," said Sally, when for a moment the sisters were alone, "it wasn't so sudden as you think, my marrying Joe!" She stopped, interrupted by some thought, and added impulsively, "Isn't it STRANGE, Mart, that we might have missed each other; it makes us both just SHIVER to think of it! Well"—and with a visible effort the little wife brought herself down from a roseate cloud to realities again—"if—if Lyd had married Cliff Frost," she said uncertainly, "I never should have DARED marry Joe!"
"Or if I had married Rodney Parker, Sally?" Martie added steadily.
"Well—" The colour flew to Sally's face. "As it was," she went on a little hurriedly, "I just—couldn't bear to go on and on, it made me desperate! And I thought Pa and Ma's way is no good, our house never seems to have much happiness in it—and I'm going to get OUT! There never was a place like this for good times, and babies, and jokes, and company to dinner!" smiled Sally, looking about the Hawkeses' parlour triumphantly.
But then Sally was born devoid of a social sense, mused Martie, walking home. What would life be without it—she wondered. No affectations, no barriers, no pretenses—
"Flout me not, Sweet!" said some one at her side. She looked up into the beaming eyes of Wallace Bannister. "Don't you remember me—I'm the city feller that came here breakin' all hearts awhile back!"
"You idiot!" Martie laughed, too. "I thought you were miles away!"
"Well, judging by your expression, darling, you were miles away, too," said the irrepressible Wallace. "How are you, Brunhilde? Ich liebe dich! Yes'm, we ought to be miles away, but to tell you the honest truth, the season is simply ROTTEN here on the coast. We've bust up, for the moment, but dry those tears. Here's my contract for seven weeks in San Francisco—seven plays. Sixty bones per week; pretty neat, what? We begin rehearsing in July, open August eighth, and if it's a go, go on indefinitely. The Cluetts and I are in this—the rest of the company's gone flooey. Meanwhile, I have three weeks to wait, and I'm staying with my aunt in Pittsville studying like mad."
"And what are you doing in Monroe?" Martie said contentedly, as they wandered along.
"I came here a week ago to change some shoes," said Wallace, "and I saw you. So to-day I came and made you a formal call."
"You did NOT!" Martie ejaculated, laughing.
"Why didn't I? I fell down eleven steps into your garden, knocked on the front door, knocked on the side door, talked to some one called 'Ma,' talked to some one called 'Lydia,' and learned that Miss Martha Brunhilde Monroe was out for a sashay. There!"
"Well—for goodness sake!" Martie was conscious of flushing. From that second she grew a little self-conscious. He was a funny creature. He would have been unusually handsome, she thought, if it were not for a certain largeness—it was not quite coarseness—of feature. He would have been extraordinarily charming, decided Martie, but for that same quality in his manner; recklessness, carelessness. She knew he was not always telling the truth; these honours, these affairs, these fascinating escapades were not all his own. His exaggerated expressions of affection for herself were only a part of this ebullient sense of romance. But he was amusing.
"Bon soir, papillon!" he said at her gate. "How about a meet to-morrow? Tie a pink scarf to thy casement if thy jailer sleeps. Seriously, leave us meet, kid. Leave us go inter Bonestell's with the crowd—watto? I'll wait for youse outside the Library at three."
"With the accent on the WAIT," said Martie significantly. But she did not think of Rodney that evening. She thought of Sally and of Wallace Bannister.
Fortunately for her, it did not occur to her father to cross-examine her on any other event of the day except the circumstance that she had been seen walking with an unknown young man. This was food for much advice.
"I don't like it, my daughter," said Malcolm, rubbing his shins together and polishing his glasses as he sat by the fire. "I don't like it at all. I don't like this tendency to permit familiarities with this young man and that young man—all very well for a while, but not the sort of thing a young man chooses in a WIFE."
Martie, looking at him respectfully, as she placed a red Queen on a black King, felt in her heart that she would like to kill him.
The next afternoon she decided to clean the chicken house, one of the tasks in which her strange nature delighted. To splash about with hose and broom, tip over the littered drinking trough, wash cobwebs from the windows with a well-directed stream of water; in these things Martie found some inexplicable satisfaction. She went upstairs after luncheon to get into old clothes, came down half an hour later with her best hat on, walked straight out of the gate and down town.
Wallace was waiting, elated at her punctuality. Martie explaining her fear that some one might report their meeting to her father, they waited openly at Masset's corner, boarded the half-past three o'clock trolley, and went to Pittsville.
Pittsville was two miles away, but this adventure had all the charm of foreign travel to Martie. Every house interested her, the main street of the little town might have been Broadway in New York. The people looked different, she said. She and Wallace laughed their way through the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, enjoyed a Floradora Special composed of bananas, ice cream, nuts, whipped cream, maple syrup, and cherries, and finally bought six cream puffs and carried them to Sally.
Sally's delight was almost tearful. She led Martie rapturously over her domain: the little bedroom spotless and sunshiny in the summer afternoon; the microscopic kitchen scented with the baked apples that HAD burned a little and the cookies that would NOT brown; the living-and-dining room that was at once so bare and so rich. It was a home, Martie realized dimly, and Sally was a person at last. The younger sister peeped interestedly into spice-tins and meat safe; three eggs were in a small yellow bowl, two thin slices of bacon on a plate. In the bread box was half a loaf of bread and one cut slice.
"Sally, it must be fun!" said Martie. "All this doll's house for six dollars a month!"
"Oh—fun!" Sally was rapturous beyond words. She gave them pale, hot cookies; the cream puffs would delight Joe.
The three laughed and feasted happily; Martie with a new sense of freedom and independence that exhilarated her like wine.
"Find us a nice little place like this, sister," said Wallace. "Martie loves me, Sarah. Their lips met in one long, rapturous kiss. The end."
The girls laughed joyously. Martie went home at five, Wallace accompanying her. She told her father that night that she had been in the Library.
The next day she did clean the chicken house, and did go down to spend the afternoon with Miss Fanny. But freedom danced in her veins; on the third afternoon she and Wallace took a long walk, and stopped to see Dr. Ben, and, sitting on two barrels behind the old railway station, ate countless cherries and apricots. Again—and again—they went to Pittsville. Sally was in their confidence and feasted them in the little flat or went with them on their innocent expeditions.
From their third meeting, it was cheerfully taken for granted that Wallace and Martie belonged to each other. Martie never knew what he really felt, any more than he dreamed of the girlish amusement and distrust in which she held him. They flirted only, but they swiftly found life uninteresting when apart. They never talked of marriage, yet every time they parted it was reluctantly, and never without definite plans for another immediate meeting. Wallace began to advise Martie not to eat the rich things that made her sick; Martie counselled him about his new suit, and listened, uneasy and ashamed, to a brief, penitential reference to "crazy" things he had done, as a "kid." He promised her never to drink again and incidentally told her that his real name was Edward Tenney. Suddenly they found the plural pronoun: we must do that; that doesn't interest us; Pa must not suspect our affair.
"The Cluetts are going to be in Pittsville," said Wallace one day. "I want you to meet them. You'll like Mabel; she's got two little kids. She and Jesse have been married only six years. And they'll like you, too; I've told 'em you're my girl!"
"Am I?" said Martie huskily. They were alone in Sally's little house, and for answer he put his arms about her. "Do you love me, Wallace?" she asked.
The question, the raised blue eyes, fired him to sudden passion. They kissed each other blindly, with shut eyes. After that, whenever they might, they kissed, and sometimes Martie, ignorant and innocent, wondered why the memory of his hot lips worried her a little.
There was nothing wrong in kissing! Martie still said to herself that of course they would not marry; yet when she was with Wallace she loved the evidences of her power over him, and seemed unable, as he was unable, to keep from the constant question: "Do you love me?"
In late June the Cluetts—pretty faded Mabel, her two enormous babies, her stepson Lloyd, and Jesse, the husband and father—all came to Pittsville for a few days' leisure before rehearsals began. Lloyd was a "light juvenile," off as well as on the stage. Jesse played father, judge, guardian, prime minister, and old family doctor in turn. Mabel, rouged and befrilled, still made an attractive foil for Wallace as the hero. Martie liked them all; their chatter of the fairyland of the stage, their trunks plastered with labels, their fine voices, their general air of being incompetent children adrift in a puzzling world. Deep laughter stirred within her when they spoke of business or of finance.
They talked frankly, in their three cheap rooms at the "Pittsville White House," before Wallace's girl. Jesse was pompous; Lloyd boyishly fretful; Mabel, patient, sympathetic, discouraged, and sanguine by turns. Martie was enraptured by the babies: Bernadette, a crimped heavy little brunette of five, and Leroy delicious at three months in limp little flannel wrappers.
"I'll tell you what, Miss Monroe—I'm going to call you Martha—" said Mabel, "I'm just about sick of California. I'm not a Californian; little old New York for mine. I first seen the light of day at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, and I wish to the good Lord I was there now. You'll never get a fair deal in Frisker, if any one should ride up on a bike and ask you, dear. We were doing very good last fall when little Mister Man here decided to join the party—after that I was simply no good! The box receipts have fell off steadily since we put that awful girl in. Don't leave that heavy child paralyze your limbs—she'll set there forever like an immidge, if you go on telling her stories!"
"I am amused—genuinely amused at the circumstances under which you find us, Miss Monroe," said Jesse Cluett with a dignified laugh. "And my friends in the East would be equally surprised. Professional pride brought me West, the pride of a man whose public demands one or two favoured parts from him, year after year. My three or four successes were a great gratification to me; not only the public, but my fellow actors at the Lambs, assured me that my future was MADE. 'Made?—no,' I said. 'No. I have no wish to become a one-part man.' To John Drew I said—I met him going into the Club-'H'ar you, Jesse?' he said. ... Oh, yes; we are warm friends, old friends. I played for two years with John Drew. Very brilliant actor—in some ways. And that is only one instance of the enthusiastic appreciation to which I am accustomed. ... Are we going to eat, my dear?" For Mrs. Cluett, who in her hospitable enthusiasm over Martie had taken a little spirit lamp from the washstand and placed a full kettle over the flame, was now looking about her in a vague, distressed sort of way.
"It's going out," said she blankly. Philosophically, Jesse put his wide-brimmed hat over his loose curls and, straightening his shoulders, walked mincingly out for alcohol with the younger men. Mrs. Cluett spread a small, spotted fringed cloth on a trunk, setting on it a cut and odorous lemon a trifle past its prime and a sticky jar of jam. Martie continued to cuddle Leroy and tell Bernadette a fairy tale. She found the crowded, tawdry bedroom delightfully cosy, especially when the men came back with graham crackers and cheese and spongy, greasy bakery doughnuts.
They all laughed when Wallace asked for the rat-trap's delight; and when Lloyd dropped a cruller on the floor and thumped his heel to show its weight; and when Wallace said: "Don't jam or jar Miss Monroe, Jesse!" But when, in retort for this latest witticism, Martie said: "Put your hand where it hurts, Wallace, and show Mama"; the laughter changed to actual shrieks of mirth; Jesse indulging in a deep "ha-ha-ha!" and Mabel hammering her heels madly together and sobbing put faintly that she should die—she should simply DIE!
Martie almost missed the five o'clock trolley, but Wallace pushed her upon the moving platform at the last possible moment, and she laughed and gasped blindly half the way home, accepting his help with her disordered hair and hat. When she finally raised her face, and somewhat shamefacedly eyed the one or two other occupants of the car, she saw Rose sitting opposite, a neat and interested Rose in her trousseau tailor-made.
Uncomfortable, Martie bowed, and Rose responded sweetly, presently patting the seat beside her with an inviting glove. Somewhat surprised at this unexpected graciousness, Martie and her escort crossed the car.
"No, MRS.—not Miss!" Rose contradicted Wallace merrily, looking up at him prettily. "I know I'm not very imposing, but I'm a really truly old married lady!"
"This is Mrs. Rodney Parker, Wallace," Martie said. Instantly she was pleasantly conscious that her easy use of this actor's name was a surprise to Rose, and for the first time a definite pride in possession seized her. He might not be perfection, but he was hers.
"Is that so!" Wallace exclaimed, with new interest in eyes and voice. "Gosh—what fun we had that night! Do you remember the night we had oysters, and sat in that little place gassing for two hours? You know," said he, in a confidential aside to Rose, "Martie's a wonder when she gets started!"
"Isn't she?" Rose responded politely. "That was before I met my husband, I think," she added, "or rather re-met him, for years ago Mr. Parker and I——"
But Wallace, amused by the discussion that had arisen between the conductor and a Chinese who was getting on the car, interrupted abruptly to call Martie's attention to the affair, and Rose's reminiscence was lost. She said, with her good-byes, that Mr. Bannister must come and dine with them.
"Gosh, I see myself!" ejaculated Wallace ungratefully, as he walked with Martie to the gate. "I never could stand that ass Parker!"
"Don't you think she's very pretty, Wallace?"
"Oh, I don't know! I don't care much for those dolly women. I like red hair and big women, myself. Listen, Martie. To-morrow——"
No more was said of Rose. Martie wondered why she liked to hear Rodney Parker called an ass.
Malcolm Monroe came home for luncheon every day except Wednesday, which made Wednesday for the women of the family the easy day of the week. Their midday meal, never elaborate or formal, was less formal and even simpler on this day; conversation was more free, and time less considered.
For several days after Sally's extraordinary marriage Mrs. Monroe had wept continually, and even her always mild and infrequent attempts at conversation had been silenced. Later, she and Lydia had long and mournful discussions of the event, punctuating them with heavy sighs and uncomprehending shaking of their heads. That a Monroe in her senses could stoop to a Hawkes was a fact that would never cease to puzzle and amaze, and what the town was saying and thinking in the matter was an agonized speculation to Mrs. Monroe and Lydia. "Socially, of course," said Lydia, "we will never hold up our heads again!"
But as the days went by and the divorce of the young Mulkeys, and the new baby at Mrs. Hughie Wilson's, and the Annual Strawberry Festival and Bazaar for the Church Debt came along to make the gossip about Sally and Joe of secondary interest, Sally's mother and sister revived. They came to take a bitter-sweet satisfaction in the sympathy and interest that were shown on all sides.
Martie was not often at home in these days. "She fairly lives at the Library, and she takes long walks, I imagine, Ma," Lydia said once. "You know Martie misses—she's lonely. And then—there was, of course, the feeling about Rodney. It's just Martie's queer way of righting herself."
But on the hot Wednesday morning that brought in July Martie, with a clear conscience, was baking gingerbread. She had improved in manner and habit, of late, displaying an unwonted interest in the care of herself and her person, and an unwonted energy in discharging domestic duties.
She was buttering pans vigorously, and singing "The Two Grenadiers," when Lydia came into the kitchen.
"Martie, Pa just came in the gate. Isn't that maddening! We'll have to give him something canned; he hates eggs. Can't you make some drop cakes of that batter so they'll be done?"
"Sure I can!" Martie snatched a piece of paper to butter. "But what brings him home?"
"Why, I haven't the faintest——" Lydia was beginning, when her father's voice came in a shout from the dining room:
"Martie—Martie—MARTIE!"
Terror seized Martie, her mouth watered saltly, her knees touched, and a chill shook her. The hot day turned bleak. She and Lydia exchanged a sick look before Martie, trembling, crossed the pantry, littered by Lydia's silver polish and rags, and went in to face the furious old man on the hearthrug. Malcolm was quivering so violently that his own fear seemed to be that he would lose his voice before he had gained his information. Martie was vaguely conscious that her mother, frightened and pale, was in the room, and that Len had come to the hall doorway.
"Martie," said her father, breathing hard, "where were you yesterday afternoon?"
"At Alice Clark's Five Hundred with Lyd——" the girl was beginning innocently. He cut her short with an impatient shake of the head.
"I don't mean yesterday! Where were you on Monday?"
"Monday? Why, Mama and I walked down to Bonestell's."
"Yes, we did, Pa! Yes, we did!" quavered Mrs. Monroe. "Oh, Pa, WHAT IS IT?"
"And then what did you do?" he pursued blackly, turning to his wife.
"Why—why, Martie said she was going to go over to Pittsville and back, just for the ride—just to stay on the trolley, Pa!" explained his wife.
"Martie," thundered her father, "when you went to Pittsville you saw your sister, didn't you?"
Martie's head was held erect. She was badly frightened, but conscious through all her fear that there was a certain satisfaction in having the blow fall at last.
"Yes, sir," she gulped; she wet her lips. "Yes, sir," she said again.
"You admit it?" said Malcolm, his eyes narrowing.
Lydia, pale and terrified, had come in from the kitchen. Now she suddenly spoke.
"Oh, Pa, don't—don't blame Martie for that! You know what the girls always were to each other—I don't mean to be impertinent, Pa—do forgive me!—but Martie and Sally always——"
"One moment, Lydia," said her father, with a repressive gesture, the veins blue on his forehead. "JUST—ONE—MOMENT." And, panting, he turned again to Martie. "Yes, and who else did you see in Pittsville?" he whispered, his voice failing.
Martie, breathing fast, her bright eyes fixed upon him with a sort of fascination, did not answer.
"I'll tell you who you saw," said Malcolm at white heat. "I'll tell you! You met this young whippersnapper Jackanapes—what's his name—this young one-night actor——"
"Do you mean Mr. Wallace Bannister?" Martis asked with a sort of frightened scorn.
Lydia and her mother gasped audibly in the silence. Malcolm moved his eyes slowly from his youngest daughter's face to his wife's, to Lydia's, and back to Martie again. For two dreadful moments he studied her, an ugly smile touching his harsh mouth.
"You don't deny it," he said, after the interval, in a shaking voice. "You don't deny that you've been disobeying me and lying to me for weeks? Now I tell you, my girl—there's been enough of this sort of thing going on in this family. You couldn't get the man you wanted, so, like your sister, you pick up——"
Martie laughed briefly and bitterly. The sound seemed to madden him. For a moment he watched her, his head dropped forward like a menacing animal.
"Understand me, Martie," he said. "I'll break that spirit in you—if it takes the rest of my life! You'll laugh in a different way! My God—am I to be the laughing-stock of this entire town? Is a girl your age to——"
"Pa!" sobbed Mrs. Monroe. "Do what you think best, but don't—DON'T excite yourself so!"
Her clutching fingers on his arm seemed to soothe in through all his fury. He fell silent, still panting, and eying Martie belligerently.
"You—go to your room!" he commanded, pointing a shaking finger at her. "Go upstairs with your sister, Lydia, and bring me the key of her door. When I decide upon the measure that will bring this young lady quickest to her senses, I'll let her know. Meanwhile——"
"Oh, Pa, you needn't lock Martie in," quivered Lydia, "she'll stay—won't you, Martie?"
Martie, like a young animal at bay, stood facing them all for a breathless moment. In that time the child that had been in her, through all these years of slow development, died. Anger went out of her eyes, and an infinite sadness filled them. A quick tremble of her lips and a flutter at her nostrils were the only signs she gave of the tears she felt rising. She flung one arm about her mother and kissed the wet, faded cheek.
"Good-bye, Ma," she said quickly. In another instant she had crossed to the entrance hall, blindly snatched an old soft felt hat from the rack, caught up Len's overcoat, and slipped into it, and was gone. Born in that moment of unreasoning terror, her free soul went with her.
The streets were flooded with hot summer sunshine, the sky almost white. Not a breeze stirred the thick foliage of the elm trees on Main Street as Martie walked quickly down to the Bank.
It was Rodney Parker who gave her her money; the original seventeen dollars and fifty cents had swelled to almost twenty-two dollars now. Martie hardly saw the gallant youth who congratulated her upon her becoming gipsy hat; mechanically she slipped her money into a pocket, mechanically started for the road to Pittsville.
Five minutes later she boarded the half-past twelve o'clock trolley, coming in excited and exultant upon Sally who was singing quietly over a solitary luncheon. The girls laughed and cried together.
"The funny thing is, I am as free as air!" Martie exclaimed, her cheeks glowing from the tea and the sympathy and the warm room. "But I never knew it! If Pa had gotten on that trolley, I think I would have fainted with shock. But what could he do? I am absolutely FREE, Sally—with twenty-one dollars and eighty-one cents!"
"I wish you had a husband——" mused Sally.
"I'd rather have a job," Martie said with a quick, bright flush nevertheless. "But I think I know how to get one. Mrs. Cluett is going to be playing steadily now, and after this engagement they're going to try very hard to get booked in New York. She's got to have SOME ONE to look out for the children."
"But Martie——" Sally said timidly, "you'd only be a sort of servant——"
"Well, that's the only thing I know anything about," Martie answered simply. "It might lead to something——"
"Then you and Wallace aren't——?" Sally faltered. "There's nothing serious——?"
Martie could not control the colour that swept up to the white parting of her hair, but her mouth showed new firmness as she answered gravely:
"Sally—I don't know. Of course, I like him—how could I help it? We're awfully good chums; he's the best chum I ever had. But he never—well, he never asked me. Sally"—Martie rested her elbows on the table, and her chin on her hands—"Sally, would you marry him?"
"If I loved him I would," said Sally.
"Yes, but did you KNOW you loved Joe?" Martie asked. Sally was silent.
"Well—not so much—before—as after we were married," she said hesitatingly, after a pause.
Martie suddenly sprang up.
"Well, I'm going to see Mrs. Cluett!"
"I'll go, too," said Sally, "and we'll stop at the express office and tell Joe!"
Mrs. Cluett was alone with her children when the callers went in, and even Martie's sensitive heart could have asked no warmer reception of her plan.
The little actress kissed Sally, and kissed Martie more than once, brimming over with interest and sympathy.
"Dearie, it ain't much of a start for you, but it is a start!" said Mabel warmly over the head of the nursing baby. "And you'll get your living and your railroad fares out of it, anyway! It'll be an ackshal godsend to Mr. Cluett and me, for the children have took to you something very unusual. We'll have elegant times going around together, and you'll never be sorry."
These cheering sentiments Jesse echoed when he came in with Lloyd a few minutes later.
"Much depends upon our future contracts, Miss Monroe," said he, "but I will go so far as to say this. Should you some time desire to try the calling that Shakespeare honoured, the opportunity will not be lacking!"
This threw Sally, Martie, and Mabel into transports. It now being after three o'clock tea was proposed.
And now Martie busied herself happily as one belonging to the little establishment. Sally had taken rapturous possession of Leroy. Mabel lighted the alcohol lamp. Martie, delayed by the affectionate Bernadette, shook out the spotted cloth, and cut the stale cake.
They were all absorbed and chattering when Wallace Bannister opened the door. At sight of him Martie straightened up, the long knife in one hand, Bernadette's sticky little fingers clinging to the other. The news was flung at him excitedly. Martie had left home—she was never going back—she had only twenty dollars and an old coat and hat—she was going to stay with Mabel for the present——
"What's this sweet dream about staying with Mabel?" Wallace said, bewildered, reproachful, definite. He came over to Martie and put one arm about her. "Look here, folks," he said, almost indignantly, "Martie's my girl, aren't you, Martie? We're going to be married right now, this afternoon; and hereafter what I do, she does—and where I go, she goes!"
The love in his eyes, the love in all their watching faces, Martie never forgot. Like a great river of warmth and sunshine it lifted her free of her dry, thirsty girlhood; she felt the tears of joy pressing against her eyes. There was nothing critical, nothing calculating, nothing repressing here; her lover wanted her, just as she stood, penniless, homeless, without a dress except the blue gingham she wore!
The glory of it lighted with magic that day and the days to come. They laughed over the pretty gipsy hat, over Len's coat, over the need of borrowing Mabel's brush and comb. With Joe and Sally, they all dined together, and wandered about the village streets in the summer moonlight; then Martie went to bed, too happy and excited to sleep, in Bernadette's room, wearing a much-trimmed nightgown of Mabel's. It had been decided that the marriage should take place in San Francisco, Wallace sensibly suggesting that there would be less embarrassing questioning there, and also that Martie's money might be spent to better advantage in the city.
Martie's trunk came to Sally's house the next morning, unaccompanied by message or note, and three days later Martie wrote her mother a long letter from a theatrical boarding-house in Geary Street, sending a copy of the marriage certificate of Martha Salisbury Monroe to Edward Vincent Tenney in Saint Patrick's Church, San Francisco, and observing with a touch of pride that "my husband" was now rehearsing for an engagement of seven weeks at sixty dollars a week. There was no answer.
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