CHAPTER XXI

It was extraordinary how much better Mrs. Payton was in the next few weeks. Every day she sat in the entry outside Mortimore's door, and hour after hour she and Miss Carter talked about Flora. Sometimes Mortimore was troublesome, and laughed or bellowed—and then his mother retreated; when he quieted down, she returned, and took up the story just where it had been interrupted. After each detail had been recited, and they had finally buried poor Flora, rehearsing every incident of the funeral, they would reach the question of the disposition of her possessions. Miss Carter had packed them up, and knew just how valueless they were—"except that lovely collar you gave her. Now I think that is too good for the Salvation Army!"

At this point the discussion was apt to become heated, Miss Carter contending that Flora's things should be sent to one of the negro schools in the South, and Mrs. Payton standing firmly for the Salvation Army. Frederica, asked to decide between them, said, briefly, "Burn 'em."

"Wouldn't that be wasteful?" Mrs. Payton objected, gently.

She was very gentle to Fred now. Her daughter's statement about being "in love" had been a very great[Pg 229] shock to her, not because of its "indelicacy," painful as that was, but because it awoke in her an entirely new idea: Freddy was unhappy! It had never occurred to Mrs. Payton that Freddy could be unhappy about anything—Freddy, who was always so strong and self-sufficient! That she should suffer, made her mother feel nearer to her than she had since Frederica was little, and had scarlet fever, and Mrs. Payton hadn't taken off her clothes for four days and four nights. So, when her daughter's drooping lip expressed what she thought of that endless gossiping about Death outside Mortimore's door, Mrs. Payton was very gentle, and only said that it would be wasteful to burn Flora's things. Then she tried to explain that she sat near Morty to cheer Miss Carter. (Freddy must not think it was on Morty's account! It would be too dreadful if now, "on top of everything else," she should be brooding over those impatient words, repented of the minute they were spoken!)

But Fred displayed no signs of brooding over anything. She took up her interest in Life just where it had paused for a moment at the touch of Love. But before she settled down into the commonplaces, of real estate, and dances, and league work, she had that Pause out with herself....

She told her mother that she was going to the bungalow to put things to rights. (This was about five days after Flora's death.) "Everything is just as we left it. She hadn't even washed the dishes. And I left a few things there that I must bring home."

"Take Anne to help you."

[Pg 230]

"Anne would have a fit—she's so superstitious! No; I don't need anybody."

"I'll go with you," Mrs. Payton ventured.

Fred was frankly amused at the suggestion. "You! No; much obliged, but I don't want any one."

Mrs. Payton did not urge; back in her mind there was a dim memory of a time when she, too, had been alive—and suffered, and wanted to be alone. She said something, hesitatingly, to this effect to Arthur Weston, who dropped in that morning to know how they were getting along.

"Freddy has gone out to that awful place, to pack up," she said; "I'm sure it's very damp, and I'm terribly afraid she'll take cold. But she would go. Sometimes a person likes to be by themselves," she ended.

He was surprised at such understanding; but he only said, quietly, that he would drive out late in the afternoon and bring her home in his car. "She can have eight hours to herself," he said. (He had had some hours to himself in the last few days; hours of pacing up and down his library—saying over and over, "If Maitland isn't in love with her, why shouldn't I at least tell her that I—? No! I have no chance. But if she should forget him? No, no. I mustn't think of it!")

For the eight hours alone Frederica had been thirsting:

Solitude.

Lapping—lapping—lapping water.

Wind in the branches.

Shadows traveling across distant hills.

And no human face! No human sound!

[Pg 231]

So, with Zip under her arm, she took the early train to Lakeville.

From the station she walked along the sandy road where dead leaves had begun to fill the wheel-ruts, down to the huddle of boarded-up cottages on the shore. The last time she had gone over that road, how thick the fog had been! Now, the lake was a placid white shimmer against the horizon's brooding haze, and the glimmering October sunshine lay like gilt on the frosted ferns and brakes. She did not meet a single soul. Except for Zip, dashing along in front of her, or an occasional crow cawing, and flapping from one tree-top to another, there was only the wide silence of the sky. The sense of getting away from people gave her a feeling of relief that was almost physical.

When she reached Lakeville the sight of Sunrise Cottage was like a blow; she stopped short, and caught her breath. The lamp Howard had left outside the house had fallen over—perhaps a squirrel had upset it; the solferino shade was in fragments; leaves had blown up on the porch. But the flinching was only for a moment—then she turned the key in the lock.

The bungalow, with its shut-up smell, was just as they had left it, except that, in some indescribable way, it had lost the air of human habitation. Perhaps because Death had been there. In the faint draught from the open door a sheet of music slipped from the piano to the floor and some ashes blew out of the fireplace. The cottage was absolutely silent.

Frederica felt cold between her shoulders. She did not[Pg 232] want to go in, she did not want to have to turn her back on the stairs that led up to the vacant rooms—Flora's room! She shivered; set her lips and entered—but she left the door open behind her into the living world.

The emptiness of the house clamored in her ears. She found herself looking, with a sort of fascination, at the disorder of the chairs—which stood just as Howard had pushed them aside when they brought Flora in. On the arm of the morris chair was a brass plate heaped with cigarette-ashes. For some obscure reason those ashes seemed to her unendurable—how they had glowed, and faded, and glowed again, filling the room with warm and lazy smoke, while she and Howard—She lifted the little tray and threw the ashes, almost with violence, into the fireplace. The movement broke the spell that had held her there looking at things—at the learned books, filmed with dust, at the half-burned candles, at the withered roses on the table. Zip nosed about at that water-soaked spot on the rug, and she spoke to him sharply; then went over and closed the piano.

After that, it was easier to go out to the kitchen, though there was still a tremor at the thought of those empty rooms overhead. Spread out on the table were the cards, just as Flora had left them. In the sink was the clutter of unwashed dishes.... Fred drew a long breath, opened all the windows, lighted a fire in the stove, and went to work.

Of course the exertion of packing and cleaning was a relief. There was a great deal to do. So much that she felt at first that she should need another day to get[Pg 233] through with it. But her capability was never more marked—by noon she began to see the end. She ate her luncheon walking about, holding a sandwich in one hand and packing books with the other. She had arranged with her landlord to send a van to the cottage for the piano, and it was also to carry her things back to town; she had thought of every detail. It was the way she did all her work—drawing up leases, or talking to women's clubs, or, of late, "making things pleasant" at Payton Street. Even now, shrinking from the work that must be done up-stairs, where it was all so empty—so full of Flora!—she was efficient, methodical, thorough. She scanted nothing. Yet no amount of busyness dulled the ache of misery which had goaded her out here to be alone—but she was impatient at herself for feeling the ache.

It was so unreasonable to be miserable!

When everything was done—the kitchen tidied, books and clothing and personal odds and ends packed, even the little white curtains in the empty rooms up-stairs, all limp and stringy from the creeping October fogs, pressed and folded and put away—it was still early afternoon. But there was no train into town until five; she would give herself up to the silence.

She went out on the porch and sat down on the lowest step in the sunshine. Zip ran about, chased a squirrel, then, curling up on her skirt, went to sleep. Sometimes she rubbed his ears, sometimes stared out over the lake—

She had been refused. "I am hard hit," she admitted, and her face quivered. However, she could stand being hit! She could take her medicine, and not make faces.[Pg 234] Arthur Weston had said that about her, and she liked to remember it.

Suddenly her mind veered away into all sorts of unrelated things. Queer that Howard cared so much for shells. He had found that pearl in a shell; the pearl that she had thought—oh, what a fool she had been!—was meant for her. That old seed-pearl set of her mothers', pin and ear-rings, would make a dandy pendant. She believed she'd ask her mother for it. Except on this shell-digging business, how entirely Howard and she agreed about everything! Few men and girls were so in accord, mentally. Imagine Howard trying to talk to any of the girls of her set—even to Laura—as he talked to her! Why, Laura would be dumb when he got on the things that were worth-while. He had once said that he would rather talk to her than any girl he knew; no—it was to "any man" he knew. For a moment the old pride rose—then fell. She almost wished he had said to "any girl." Well; no girl—or man, either—could have done better than she did on that poster scheme. Howard would say so when she would tell him about it, and she was going to tell him; she was going to talk to him just as she had always talked—about everything on earth! She must; or else he would think that she was ... hard hit; and that she simply couldn't bear! The poster scheme reminded her of some league work she had neglected in these five days of tingling emptiness, and she frowned. "Gracious! I must attend to that," she said. She did not know it, but her bruised mind was fleeing for shelter into trivialities. Suddenly she took her purse out of[Pg 235] her pocket, thrust a thumb and finger into the place where she kept her visiting-cards, and took out a burnt match. She looked at it for a moment with a grunt of bitter laughter; then, finding a little stick, dug a hole in the path, laid the match in, covered it, and stepped on it, hard.

"That is the end," she said.

After a while she realized that she was cold, and went back into the house and kindled a fire. She sat down on a hassock, and stretched out her hands to the blaze. The sunshine came through the uncurtained window and laid a finger on the soot on the chimney back; its faint iridescence caught her eye. Was it only Monday night that she and Howard had sat here by the fire, and he had kicked the logs together on the andirons, and the sparks had caught in the soot and spread and spread in marching rosettes? Why, it seemed years! It was then that she had—asked him.

She wasn't ashamed of it! She had proposed and been refused. "He thought it was stunning in me to do it; he said so! He feels as I do about the equality of men and women in this kind of thing, as well as everything else. Of course, he may have said so just to—to make it easier for me? If I thought that—"

The blood rushed into her face. She would not think that! It would be unendurable to think he had not been sincere. "He felt it was perfectly all right for me to be the one to speak. And it was!"

Of course it was. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. She herself had once refused an offer of[Pg 236] marriage, and certainly the rejected suitor had not seemed to suffer any pangs of shame! He had displayed a rather mean anger: "He wanted my money, and he was hopping mad when he couldn't get it. I didn't want to get anything. I only wanted to give! So why don't I brace up? I had a right to 'give.'"

She was quite certain that she had a right, so why was she so miserable? So—ashamed.

In spite of herself she said the word. She had shied away from it, and refused to utter it, a dozen times; but at last, here, alone, she had to tell herself the truth.

She was ashamed.

It is only when Truth speaks to us, as in the cool of the day the Voice of God spoke in the Garden, that the human creature knows he is ashamed. Not to feel Shame is to be deaf to that Voice. Frederica was not deaf; but the Voice was very faint, very wandering and indirect. She could hardly hear it. It spoke first in her vague wish that Howard had said he would rather talk to her than any "girl" he knew; and then it spoke in the wonder whether a man does like to be "asked."

"If he doesn't, it's just idiotic tradition. It belongs to the days of slavery!"

But how did the tradition grow up that a woman mustn't ask a man to marry her? She tried to remember something Arthur Weston once said about men being "born hunters." Her lip drooped, angrily; "Rot!" she said; "when it comes to love, a woman has as much at stake as a man. No, she has more at stake! She has the child. Queer," she thought, "the woman is always the[Pg 237] one who sticks to the child." She wondered if that was because women pay such a price for children? It occurred to her, with a sense of having made a discovery, that all through nature, the mother cares for her offspring just in proportion to what it costs her to bring it into the world.

She rolled Zip over on his back and pulled his ears, her mind dwelling, with the ancient resentment of her sex, upon the unfairness of nature—for the father pays no price! "I wonder if that explains desertion? I wonder if men desert girls, after they've got them into trouble, simply because the child costs them nothing? But how the girls stick to the babies, poor things! They hardly ever go off on their own bat. And yet" (thus the Voice was speaking!), "the child needs a father to take care of it, as much as a mother, so the man and the woman ought to keep together.... But he's the one who goes off! It ought to be tit for tat! Women ought to do the deserting," she said, passionately; but a moment later came the cynical admission: "Men wouldn't mind being 'deserted.' They'd probably like it. They ought to be made to be constant. When we get the vote, we'll make laws to stop their 'deserting'!"

Then she wavered; as far as laws go, there were enough now. The fact was, men were naturally faithless! "I hate men," she said, between her set teeth. Arthur Weston was right, they were "hunters." They are constant—in pursuit. "We ought to keep them on the hot-foot, then they'd be more keen to stay with us!" In a flash came the rest of Weston's comment: "They won't bag the game, if it perches on their fists." Her face reddened[Pg 238] violently. She had come, head on, against a biological fact, namely, that reluctance in the woman makes for permanence in the man.

Reluctance!...

Her mother's tiresome talk about "cheapness" was suddenly intelligible. How foolish the word had sounded! Yet, perhaps, under its foolishness lay a primitive fact: that the welfare of the child demands a permanent relation between the father and the mother. But in proportion as she is "cheap," he is temporary, and the relationship is jeopardized!

She did not put it into words, but she realized, amazed, that woman, whether she knows it or not, acts upon this old race knowledge. For the child's sake, she tries, by every sort of lure, to hold man to permanence which she will herself acquire by the fierce welding of agony. The surest "lure" is based upon the fact that man pursues that which flees; but all the lures spring from Nature's purpose to safeguard the child by giving it the care of two instead of one. For the "child" is the most important thing in the world!

Fred was thinking hard. Sometimes she put a stick on the fire, and once she got up and paced about the room. It came over her, with a rush of surprise, that all the talk of what girls must and mustn't do, "all the drivel about 'propriety'!" was based on this same Race instinct.

She saw that for a girl to love a man, unasked, is neither ignoble nor immodest. It is divine to love—always! Such love is a jewel, worn unseen above a girl's heart; to offer it, is to take it out of its white shelter and[Pg 239] fling it into hands that, not having sought it, will soon let it drop between indifferent fingers. She saw how this Race instinct has gradually—and oh, so painfully, oh, so foolishly, with failure, and agony, and tragic absurdities of convention, taught women the value of the reticence of modesty.

Taught them that they must not be "cheap"!

It came to her that it was the business of women like herself—the "new" women, who are going to set Woman free!—it was their business to discard the absurdities, but keep the beauties and dignities; for beauty and dignity are "lures," too. "They attract. I suppose that is what Grandmother means by 'charm,'" she reflected; "she said I hadn't any." Her face suddenly scorched; to discover a temperamental deficiency made her wince; it was like discovering a physical blemish. She understood, now, what Arthur Weston meant when he "rowed" about her being in the apartment alone with Howard. She had been "cheap." She had "perched on his fist." He had had no inclination to bag the game....

It was all very loose and incoherent thinking; she caught at one fact, only to find it contradicted by another fact. But in all her mental confusion one anguished wish stood fast:

"Oh, if I only hadn't asked him!"

In her futile shame, her head fell on her knees and she caught her breath in a sort of sob—then sat upright, listening intently: a motor! Howard? In spite of reason, a leap of hope made her gasp.

She rose quickly, and stood, her hand over her lips[Pg 240]—waiting.... Then she saw the car, and her heart seemed to drop in her breast; it was only Arthur Weston.

He came in, saying, cheerfully, he had heard she was packing, and had come out to bring her back to town. "We can load the tonneau with anything you want to take home," he said; "I suppose you haven't any tea for a wayfarer?" He was very matter-of-fact; he saw the tremor and heard the catch in the breath.

There was some tea, she said—but no cream; she would boil some water.

He sat down, and she waited on him, getting herself in hand, even to the extent of some pitiful little impertinences. Then, by and by, they carried her things out to the auto. "My landlord is going to send for the piano," she said; "all I have to do is to close the shutters."

He went about with her, helping her, teasing her, and scolding her because she was tired. When everything was done, and they were just leaving the house, she paused abruptly, and her hands went up to her eyes.

"Poor Flora!"

He was standing beside her, gentle and pitying, longing to draw those shaking hands down from her hidden face: "You were always good to her," he said.

"No!" she said, in a smothered voice; "no." Then, suddenly, she turned toward him and sank against his shoulder. He felt the sob that shook her from head to foot. Instinctively, his arms went about her, and he held her close to him; he was silent, but he trembled and those passionate and sensitive eyebrows twitched with pain. It was only for a moment that he felt her [Pg 241]sobbing weight—then she flung her head up, her face quivering and smeared with tears. "What a liar I am! I'm not crying about Flora at all. I'm just—unhappy. That's all."

He took her hand and held it to his lips, silently.

"I'm tired," she said; "—no! no! I won't lie—I won't lie! I'm not tired. I've been a fool! That's all. A fool."

"We all have to be fools, Fred, before we can be wise."

She had drawn away from him, with a broken laugh. "You don't know anything about it! You don't know what it's like to be a fool!"

"Don't I? I was a very big fool myself, once. But I'm so wise now that I'm glad of all the blows my folly gave me then. I'll tell you about it, one of these days."

He told her as they drove back to town. "And," he ended, "I can see that the best thing that ever happened to me was to have Kate jilt me."