CHAPTER XIII

On the first of June Frederica transferred herself and a somewhat reluctant Flora from Payton Street to Lakeville.

"Flora thinks her beau won't go out there to see her," Miss Carter explained.

"Nonsense!" Fred said. "If he wants to see her he'll come, and if he doesn't want to see her she'd better find it out now." But she was not entirely unsympathetic, and told Flora there would be a piano in the cottage so that the music lessons could be continued—which raised the cloud a little.

A day or two later Mrs. Holmes called at No. 15 to bid Mrs. Payton good-by for the summer, and the next week the Childses dropped in, in the evening, for the same purpose. They all made their annual remark: "How can you stay in town in the hot weather?" And Mrs. Payton made her annual reply: "I hate summer resorts. I'm much more comfortable in my own house." Nobody asked the real question, "How can you stay here with Morty?" And Mrs. Payton never gave the real explanation: "My life is perfectly empty except for Mortimore; that's why I stay with him."

When they had all left town Mrs. Payton, who changed[Pg 146] her under-flannels and packed up her winter blankets by the calendar, put the stuffed furniture into linen covers, and told Anne to keep the shutters bowed all over the house—except in the ell; the sun was never shut out of the room with the iron bars over the windows. Then summer sleepiness took possession of the household. No one disturbed the quiet except when, occasionally, Arthur Weston, bored and kindly, dropped in to ask for a cup of tea. He told himself once, after a dull hour of drinking very hot tea and listening to plaintive details of Freddy's behavior, that he was going to leave directions in his will to have inscribed upon his tombstone, "He seen his duty, and he done it." It occurred to him that he would not wait for the tombstone to suggest that same duty to Frederica....

As the Payton house fell into somnolence, Payton Street woke up. The air, stagnant between sun-baked brick walls, was a medley of noises that sometimes sank to a rumbling diapason, or sometimes stabbed the ear in single discords: the jangle of mule-bells, the bumping of the car on the switch, the jolt of milk-wagons over the cobblestones. In the provision-store all day long a parrot vociferated; from the livery-stable came the monotonous pounding of hoofs, or, when Mr. Baker sent out a hearse and some funeral hacks, the screech of grating wheels. Hand-organs came and went. Fruit-dealers cried their wares—"Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawb—" The ailanthus-shaded pavements swarmed with shrill-voiced children; they summoned one another to pull the parrot's tail or to look at the hearse; they assailed the ice-carts,[Pg 147] reveling in the drip from the tail-boards and sucking what bits of ice they could scrape up. Sometimes they squabbled raucously, sometimes wept; sometimes, hushing their betraying giggles, crept into Mrs. Payton's front yard and climbed up on the iron dog "to play circus"—until Mrs. Payton, always on the watch, discovered them and sent Miss Carter down to drive them away.

Except for skirmishes with the marauding children, Mrs. Payton's days were very placid. She worked out new puzzles and dozed through stories in the magazines. She wrote twice a week dutiful letters to her mother, pausing occasionally to think of something to say or to listen, absently, to the swish of the watering-cart along the street; she liked the wet smell of the watered cobblestones mingling with the heavy odor of the blossoming ailanthus. There never seemed to be anything to tell Mrs. Holmes, except that she had been dreadfully busy, and that the "accommodating" waitress didn't keep her sink clean, and that the barber's children were very trying. Every fine afternoon, sitting opposite Miss Carter and Morty, she drove out to the park and home again. Once she summoned up all her energy and went to Lakeville to spend a day with Fred. She thought that if she didn't go, Freddy would believe she preferred to stay with Morty. ("Oh, if I only hadn't told her I loved him best!" she used to reproach herself.) It was a bitter thing to Mrs. Payton to pass through Laketon and see the place where a Payton girl ought to be, "instead of living with all kinds of people in Lakeville!" When Fred met her at the station and brought her to the ugly little cottage—its garish interior[Pg 148] vivid, now, with yellow pennons—she tried, for the sake of peace, to restrain her disapproval of everything she saw, but she couldn't help saying she wondered how Fred could stand the solferino lamp-shade.

"Hideous," Frederica said, carelessly, "so why look at it? I never look at our Iron Virgin."

"There is some difference in value," Mrs. Payton reproved her.

"No, only in cost," her daughter said; then saw the color mount into her mother's face, and gritted her teeth. ("I needn't have said that—but it's true! Darn it, I am like him!") After that she tried to think of something pleasant to say, but what was there to talk about?—only the waitress, and the heat, and the barber's dirty children. Indeed, it would have been difficult to decide which found that visit to the bungalow the most trying, the mother or the daughter. Certainly it was a relief to both of them when it was over.

"Mother came out to the camp and I wasn't a bit nice to her," Fred bemoaned herself, one day, to Arthur Weston, when he met her entering No. 15 just as he was leaving it. He turned back and followed her into the parlor.

"And nobody can be so un-nice as you, when you put your mind on it," he said, genially.

She laughed. "You never talk through your hat to me; you're straight. That's why I like you."

"Then you'll like me more, for I'm going to be very straight," he warned her. He looked about for any kind of a cool seat, but subsided into a linen-covered feather-bed of a chair, close to the bust of Mr. Andrew Payton;[Pg 149] his eye-glasses on their black ribbon dangling in a thread of sunshine, sent faint lights back and forth on the ceiling. "Life is very dull for your mother," he said, fanning himself with his hat; "why don't you come in oftener?"

Frederica, on the piano-stool, struck a careless octave. "Life dull? Why, I think it's wildly exciting! As for coming in, I'm too busy."

"Reforming the world? You might begin the reformation by making things happier here. Happiness is a valuable reformatory agent. You could cheer Mrs. Payton up, but you prefer 'being busy.'"

Fred colored. He had spoken to her once before in this same peremptory way, and she had been angry; now she was embarrassed. "I'm on my job. I've started a suffrage league—"

"There are other people who can start leagues. There is only one person who can make your mother happy."

"Mr. Weston, the relative value of picture puzzles and the emancipation of women—"

That made him really indignant; he stopped fanning himself and looked at her with hard eyes. "The doing of the immediate duty by each individual woman will emancipate the sex a good deal quicker than talking! You needn't stop your suffrage work to do your duty as a daughter. Did you ever hear anything about bearing one another's burdens?"

"Sounds like the Bible," Fred said.

"It is. I commend the book as a course in sociology."

"But," she defended herself, "I do come home quite[Pg 150] often. I'm going to be here to-night. I'm going to a dinner dance at the Country Club, and I'm coming back here to stay all night."

"Yes, you will come for your own convenience, not your mother's pleasure. See here, Fred! You once asked me if you were like your father,"—involuntarily she raised her hand, as if to fend off a blow—"I had great respect for Mr. Payton in many ways, but he had the selfishness of power. So have you. Whew!" he ended, rising, "I believe it's a hundred in the shade!"

Fred was silent.

"I am coming out to Lakeville in a day or two. Got my new car yesterday, and I am burning to display it."

Still she was silent. A watering-cart lumbered by and some children squealed in a sudden cold splash.

"Until now," he said, "I have believed that you were a good sport."

"And now you think I'm not?"

"You don't seem to know what the word Duty means;—which is another way of saying that you don't play the game."

"If the game is to make things pleasant for Mortimore, and put picture puzzles together, I don't care to play it," she said, cockily. She followed him to the front door and stood there as he went down the steps. But when he reached the gate she darted after him and clapped a frank hand on his shoulder. "You're a dead game sport! I don't know any other man who'd have biffed me right in the face like that."

"I skinned my own knuckles," he admitted, with a[Pg 151] droll gesture of rubbing a bruised hand. "Still, I don't mind, if it does you good."

"Cheer up! Maybe it will," she said, and, laughing, threw a kiss to him and vanished into the house. He laughed, too—then frowned. "She wouldn't have kissed her hand to Maitland. I don't count," he thought. As he walked off, hugging the shady side of the street, he added, "I am a fool!"

Frederica had not the slightest intention of becoming immediately domestic, but as she went up-stairs to dress she happened to glance down the little corridor in the ell, and there, outside Morty's door, was poor, faithful Miss Carter. Her one night off a week, when Mrs. Baker, from the livery-stable, took her place, did not suffice to lessen very much the burden of Morty's perpetual society, and that and the heat had obviously worn upon her.

"Miss Carter, why don't you go to the theater?" Frederica called to her, impulsively. "I'll stay with Morty to-night. I suppose we can't get Mrs. Baker on such short notice?"

"No, she can't come except on her regular night; and you are going to a dance, Miss Freddy," the tired woman objected, rather faintly.

"Nonsense! I don't care about dancing. Go ahead. Get a ticket for 'Heels and Toes.' It's corking."

Her mother followed her into her room to thank her. "That's very sweet of you, Freddy. Not that Morty needs anybody when he once gets to sleep; so far as that goes, I don't need to go to the expense of having Mrs.[Pg 152] Baker here on Miss Carter's evenings out; but I like to feel there's some one near, you know."

"It's less lonely for you," Fred said, with unwonted insight.

"Yes," Mrs. Payton agreed, wistfully. "She's somebody to talk to. You needn't sit in Morty's room; outside the door will do. And I'll sit with you."

"I want to read, so I'll sit inside by the light."

"Well, don't be nervous. He won't stir."

"I'm not in the least nervous," Fred said; "I'm only—disgusted."

Mrs. Payton's chin quivered. "You ought not to speak so about your brother. Remember, even if he isn't—bright, he's a man, and the head of the family." Fred looked at her with genuine curiosity; how could she say a thing like that! "Besides," Mrs. Payton added, "Doctor Davis always said his intellect was there; it isn't his fault that it is veiled."

"No, it isn't his fault," Frederica said, significantly. She took her book into the bare room, which could not be carpeted or curtained because of the poor, destroying hands that sometimes had to be tied for fear they would claw and snatch, even at Miss Carter's heavy chair or at the table, screwed down to the floor. There was a drop-light over the table, and Frederica turned it on and opened her book; but she did not read much; the snoring breath from the bed disturbed her. Instead, she fell to thinking about Howard Maitland—sometimes she was impatient with herself for thinking of him so constantly! But the warm satisfaction that took possession of her[Pg 153] whenever he came into her mind, was an irresistible temptation. She did not often speculate upon his feeling for her. "He's fond of me," she told herself, once in a while, contentedly. That some time he would tell her he was fond of her was a matter of course. Just now, she fell to calculating how soon her last letter would reach him. One from him, acknowledging the receipt of some suffrage literature, had come that morning. "I don't believe one woman in fifty has your brains," he had written. Fred smiled; when he came home in November she would show him those "brains"! Apparently, Mr. Arthur Weston did not take much stock in them—"He prefers the domestic virtues," she thought, with a flash of amusement. "I wonder if I'm domestic enough to suit him, to-night? I suppose he would think it was better to sit with an idiot than to try to move the world along!" But the next minute she was contrite. "He can't help being old. I suppose this is the sort of thing his generation calls 'Duty'!"

She might have reflected further upon the foolishness of the past generation, if just then Mrs. Payton had not come stealthily along the hall. She stood in the doorway, raising a cautioning finger.

"Oh, you can't wake him," Frederica said, in her natural voice. But Mrs. Payton spoke in a whisper.

"Freddy, isn't your cottage damp—so near the lake? There's no surer way to take cold than—"

"Not a bit damp!"

"Does Flora make good coffee for you?"

"Bully."

[Pg 154]

"I hope she's more contented. Miss Carter says the whole trouble with Flora is she wants to get married, but she makes herself so cheap the men won't look at her."

Fred frowned. That word "cheap" always irritated her.

"Miss Carter is a good woman," Mrs. Payton went on, "but she's a little coarse once in a while."

"I suppose Flora wants a home of her own," Fred said, yawning; "when women have no brains they have to marry for homes."

"All women want homes, whether they have brains or not," said Mrs. Payton; "where would they have their babies if they didn't have homes? Freddy, it must be very lonely for you in Lakeville. Your Uncle William is really shocked about it. He says there are no people of our class there."

"Billy-boy is correct. I had two people of the better class in to supper last night—workers. Mother, one of the things the women's vote is going to do, besides giving the Floras of the world a chance to be independent of men, is to obliterate class lines."

"Then it will have to obliterate life," Mrs. Payton whispered. "Women need men to take care of them. And as for class, God makes a difference in people. You can't vote God down."

It was so unusual for Mrs. Payton to set her opinion against her daughter's that Frederica laughed, in spite of herself. Mrs. Payton laughed a little, too; then they both looked at the bed, but the heavy breathing went steadily on.

[Pg 155]

"Your grandmother thinks," Mrs. Payton said, impulsively, "that you would have more beaux if we lived up on the Hill."

"That's like her."

"Freddy dear, you know I have to stay here on account of Morty? Not that I'd do more for him than for you—I love you both just the same! But I couldn't take him up on the Hill."

"'Course you couldn't! Mother, for the Lord's sake, don't listen to Grandmother! She's one of the type that keeps the world back."

"She doesn't like change, that's all," Mrs. Payton explained. She came in and sat down at the table.

"Yes; she doesn't like change," Fred agreed. "If Nature had listened to Grandmother we'd all be protoplasm still. Probably the grandmother of the first worm that sprouted legs, kicked. No, she couldn't kick," Fred said, chuckling, "because she didn't have the legs she despised; she just said, 'It isn't done!'"

Mrs. Payton looked perfectly blank.

"I'm going to use that idea in my paper," Fred said, with satisfaction.

"Do you think Howard Maitland likes you to write papers, dear?"

"Likes me to? Why shouldn't he? It wouldn't make a bit of difference to me whether he did or not, but as he has ordinary garden sense, I am sure he doesn't dislike it."

"Men," Mrs. Payton said, timidly, "don't like clever women."

[Pg 156]

"Clever men do."

"Your dear father was clever—but he married me."

The simplicity of that was touching, even to Frederica.

"You were a thousand times too good for him!"

Mrs. Payton was pleased, but she made the proper protest: "Oh, my dear! I had a letter from your grandmother yesterday; she thinks it's shocking—your living in Lakeville alone."

"Go on!" Frederica said, contemptuously.

"Hush-sh!" Mrs. Payton cautioned her.

Fred shrugged her shoulders. "You can't wake—That. Talk about being shocked,—I suppose it never occurred to Uncle William or Grandmother that their ideas of what is and isn't shocking, produced That?"

Mrs. Payton shrunk away as if her daughter had struck her; she murmured, chokingly, some wounded remonstrance, then tiptoed through the shadowy hall into the sitting-room. At the table, spread with an unfinished game of Canfield, she sat down, drearily. This was what always happened; they simply could not get along together! Whenever she held out empty hands, begging for love, they were slapped. She began to shuffle the cards, wondering painfully if it was because Freddy was still brooding over that thing she said about loving Mortimore best. "I'm afraid she's jealous," Mrs. Payton sighed.

Frederica, alone, reflected upon her mother's assertion that men disliked clever women. It annoyed her, not because there was any truth in it, but because it reminded her of Woman's cowardly acquiescence in Man's estimate of her intelligence. Of course it was all right about[Pg 157] Howard; Howard had sense! But men generally—did they really dislike clever women? If so, it merely meant that they were afraid of Truth. They wanted women to be timid, and pretty, and useless: to be slaves and playthings!—so they fooled them into the belief that silliness was attractive, and that slavery and virtue were the same thing. It was men who had taught women to believe that awful thing her mother had said about Morty's being "the head of the family"; had taught them to believe that a man—not because he was good, or wise, or strong, but because he was a man—was the one to rule!

"No wonder we are slaves; we've swallowed that lie since Adam. Well, there'll be none of it in mine!" she said. What was going to be in "hers"? Business, to begin with. She was going to make a success of her business. Her books had shown a better month—they should show a still better month, if she wore her shoes out walking about town to please clients! Yes, Success! It was not a personal ambition: there was no self-seeking in Fred Payton; she wanted to succeed because her success would show what women could do; show that a woman was as able as a man—as wise, as good ("better! better!" she told herself); show that a woman could rule, could achieve, could be "the head of the family"! The thing that was to be "in hers" was work to free women from the shackles of the old ideals, from content in sex slavery, with all its ignorances and futilities, its slackness of purpose and shameful timidities, that a man-made world had called "duties." And Howard, who was not "afraid of clever women," would help her! A passion of consecration to[Pg 158] the woman's cause rose in her heart like a wave. For the next hour she walked up and down the dimly lighted room, planning what she was going to do for women.

It was nearly twelve when Miss Carter's ponderous step told her she was free. She laughed good-naturedly at the thanks the refreshed woman was eager to give, but just as she was leaving the room Miss Carter's last word caught her ear:

"I've had such a pleasant time, Miss Freddy. I'll do my work better for it."

'Do her work better.'... In her eagerness to do her own work Fred had never thought very much of other people's; but what a different world it would be if everybody did their work better! "If every woman did her best on her job, even if it were only taking care of Mortimores, it would help things along," she told herself. "It's slackness on the job that holds the world back." Looked at from that angle, then—the bettering of Miss Carter's work—perhaps it did count to make things pleasant at Payton Street? The idea put a new light on Mr. Weston's call-down. Bearing other people's burdens had seemed not in the least worth while; but if cheering people up helped them to do their work—work which, after all, had to be done, somehow!—why, then there was sense in it. She saw no sense in "cheering" her mother, for her mother did nothing at all. Frederica had no dutiful illusions; Mrs. Payton was an absolutely useless human being—and her daughter was perfectly aware of it. "She has no burden to bear," Fred thought, carelessly. "But to give old fat Carter a hand by just amusing her,—that[Pg 159] helps the doing of work; and that counts! I'll come in oftener," she decided.

So, in her own fashion, by a back door, so to speak, Frederica Payton entered into the old idea of Duty.