Chapter XI: Part FOUR: Realities (2)

Jack nodded and turned back to the steaming city. Milly, reflecting with a sigh that her husband was usually like this in the spring, sank back into her chair and opened _Life_. For several weeks after that parting she heard nothing from Jack, although she wrote with what for her was great promptness. Then she received a brief letter that contained the astonishing news of his having left the magazine. "There have been changes in the new management," he wrote, "and it seemed best to get out." But neither Billman nor Fredericks had felt obliged to leave the magazine, she learned from Hazel.

She could not understand. She telegraphed for further details and urged him to join her at once and take his vacation. He replied vaguely that some work was detaining him in the city, and that he might come later. "The city isn't bad," he said. And with that Milly had to content herself.... The summer place filled rapidly, and she was occupied with immediate interests. She said to Hazel,--"It's so foolish of Jack to stay there in that hot city when he might be comfortably resting here with us!" Hazel made no reply, and Milly vaguely wondered if she knew more about the situation on the magazine than she would tell.

It was in August, in a sweltering heat which made itself felt even beside the Maine sea, that a telegram came from Clive Reinhard, very brief but none the less disturbing. "Your husband here ill--better come." The telegram was dated from Caromneck,--Reinhard's place on the Sound....

By the time Milly had made the long journey her husband was dead. Reinhard met her at the station in his car. She always remembered afterwards that gravelly patch before the station, with its rows of motor-cars waiting for the men about to arrive from the city on the afternoon trains, and Reinhard's dark little face, which did not smile at her approach.

"He was sick when he came out," he explained brusquely; "don't believe he ever got over that last attack of grippe.... It was pneumonia: the doctor said his heart was too weak."

It was the commonplace story of the man working at high pressure, often under stimulants, who has had the grippe to weaken him, so that when the strain comes there is no resistance, no reserve. He snaps like a sapped reed.... The tears rolled down Milly's face, and Reinhard looked away. He said nothing, and for the first time Milly thought him hard and unsympathetic. When the car drew up before his door, he helped her down and silently led the way to the darkened room on the floor above, then left her alone with her dead husband.

* * * * *

When a woman looks on the face of her dead comrade, it should not be altogether sad. Something of the joy and the tenderness of their intimacy should rise then to temper the sharpness of her grief. It was not so with Milly. It was wholly horrible to plunge thus, as it were, from the blinding light of the full summer day into the gloom of death. Her husband's face seemed shrunken and pallid, but curiously youthful. Into it had crept again something of that boyish confidence--the joyous swagger of youth--which he had when they sat in the Chicago beer-garden. It startled Milly, who had not recalled those days for a long time. Underneath his mustache the upper lip was twisted as if in pain, and the sunken eyes were mercifully closed. He had gone back to his youth, the happy time of strength and hope when he had expected to be a painter....

Milly fell on her knees by his side and sobbed without restraint. Yet her grief was less for him than for herself,--rather, perhaps, for them both. Somehow they had missed the beautiful dream they had dreamed together eight years before in the beer-garden. She realized bitterly that their married life, which should have been so wonderful, had come to the petty reality of these latter days. So she sobbed and sobbed, her head buried on the pillow beside his still head--grieved for him, for herself, for life. And the dead man lay there on the white bed, in the dim light, with his closed eyes, that mirage of recovered youth haunting his pale cheeks.

When she left him after a time, Reinhard met her in the hall. She was not conscious of the swift, furtive glance he gave her, as if he would discover in her that last intimacy with her husband. When he spoke, he was very gentle with her. He was about to motor into the city to make some arrangements and would not return until the morning, leaving to her the silent house with her dead. She was conscious of all his kindness and delicate forethought, and mumbled her thanks. He had already notified Bragdon's older brother, who was coming from the Adirondacks and would attend to all the necessary things for her. As he turned to leave, Milly stopped him with a half question,--

"I didn't know Jack was visiting you."

The novelist hastened to reply:--

"You see he had promised to do another book for me, and came out to talk it over. That was last Saturday."

"Oh!"

"He was not well then," he added, and then he went.

* * * * *

He never told her--she never knew--that he had run across Bragdon quite by accident one day of awful heat, and stopped to exchange a few words with an old friend he had not seen for some time. Bragdon had the limp appearance of a man thoroughly done by the heat, and also to the novelist's keen eye the mentally listless attitude of the man who has been done by life before his time,--the look of one who knows he is not "making good" in the fight. That was what had tortured the lip beneath the mustache.

So on the spur of the moment he had suggested to the artist the new book, though he knew that his publisher would demur. For his fame had raised him altogether out of Bragdon's class. But it was the only tangible way of putting out that helping hand the artist so obviously needed just then. Bragdon had hesitated, as if he knew the motive prompting the offer, then accepted, and the two had motored out of the city together that evening. Even then the artist had a high fever....

* * * * *

That night Milly lived over like a vivid nightmare her married life down to the least detail,--the time of golden hopes and aspirations, Paris and Europe, her disillusionment, the futile scurry of their life in New York, which she realized was a compromise without much result.... It ended in a choke rather than a sob. There was so little left!

In the morning Reinhard reappeared with her brother-in-law. She remembered little of what was done afterwards, in the usual, ordered way, until after the brief service and the journey to the grave she was left alone in their old home. She had wished to be alone. So Hazel Fredericks took Virginia to the Reddons and left Milly for this night and day to collect herself from her blow and decide with her brother-in-law's help just what she should do.

VI

THE SECRET

The large "studio" room of the apartment had an unfamiliar air of disorderliness about it. Bragdon's easel was there and his uncleaned palette. Also a number of canvases were scattered about. These last weeks, after he had left the magazine--voluntarily as Milly now learned--he had got together all his painter's things and worked in the empty apartment. When Milly began to pick up the odds and ends, she was surprised at the number of canvases. A few of them she recognized as pictures he had attempted in his brief vacations. Almost everything was unfinished--merely an impression seized here and there and vigorously dashed down in color, as if the artist were afraid of losing its definite outline in the rush and interruption of his life. Nothing was really finished she saw, as she turned the canvases back to the wall, one by one. Tears started to her eyes again. The tragedy of life was like the tragedy of death--the incomplete! The nearest thing to a finished picture was the group done in Brittany of herself, Yvonne, and the baby on the gleaming sands, which he had tried to get ready for the New York exhibition on their return. That had the superficial finish of mechanical work from which the creator's inspiration has already departed. With a sigh she turned it to the wall with the others, and somehow she recalled what Reinhard has said once about her husband.

"He had more of the artist in him than any of us when he was in college--what has become of it?"

The remark stabbed her now. What had he done with his gift--what had they made of it?...

She came to the last things,--the canvas he had been working on the day his friend had found him. The touch of fever was in it,--a grotesque head,--but it was as vivid as fresh paint. Yes, he had been one who could see things! She had a sense of pride in the belief.

Another of Reinhard's sayings came back to her,--

"It's all accident from the very beginning in the womb what comes to any of us, and most of all whether we catch on in the game of life, whether we fit!"

The novelist himself, she knew, had not "caught on" at first. He had confessed to her that he had almost starved in New York, writing stories that nobody would read and few publishers could be induced to print--then. They were the uttermost best he had in him, and some had been successful since, but they didn't fit then. Suddenly he arrived by accident. A slight thing he had done caught the fancy of an actress, who had a play made out of it, in which she was a great success. A sort of reflected glory came to the author of the story, and the actress with unusual generosity paid him a good sum of money. From that first touch of golden success he had become a different man. His new and popular period set in when he wrote stories about rich and childish boys and girls and their silly love affairs. Hazel Fredericks and her set affected to despise them, but they were immensely popular.

If he had sold himself, as his critics said, he had made a sharp bargain with the devil. He had become prosperous, well-known, envied, invited. Milly had always admired his intelligence in grasping his chance when it came.

She remembered now another story about the popular novelist. He had never married, and the flippant explanation of the fact was that he was under contract with his publishers not to marry until he was fifty in order not to impair his popularity among his bonbon-eating clientèle, who wrote him intimate, scented letters. But she knew the truth. She had the story from the sister of the girl, whom she had met in Paris. The girl was poor and trying to paint; they met in the garret-days when Reinhard "was writing to please himself," as they say. The two were obviously deeply in love, and only their common poverty, it was supposed, prevented the marriage. It was still desperate love when the fortunate accident befell Reinhard that led him out of obscurity to fame. It was then that the affair had been broken off. The sister found the poor girl in tears with a horrible resolve to throw herself away. (Later she married a rich man, and was very happy with him, the sister averred.) Milly had always felt that Reinhard must have been "hard" with this poor girl,--he would not let his feeling for her stand in the way of his career. Now she understood better why he would have none of her sex except as buyers of his wares. She admired him and disliked him for it all at once. That was what Jack should have done with her. But he was too tender-hearted, too much the mere man.... Oh, well, these artists with their needs and their temperaments!

Slowly Milly went over all the sketches, one by one. It was like a fragmentary diary of the life she had lived beside and not looked at closely while it was in being. She was surprised there were so many recent ones--all unfinished. She could not recall when he had done them or where. It proved that Bragdon had never really given up the idea of painting. The desire had stung him all the time, and every now and then he must have yielded to it, stealing away from the piffling duties of the magazine office--spat on popular art, so to speak--and shut himself away somewhere to forget and to do. Milly remembered certain unexplained absences, which had mystified her at the time and aroused suspicions that he "was having another affair." On his returns he had been morose and dispirited. Evidently the mistress he had wooed in this intermittent and casual fashion had not been kind. But the desire had never left him,--the urge to paint, to create. And during these last desperate days when, fevered, he was stumbling towards his end, he had seized the brush and gone back to his real work....

At last she had reached the bottom of the pile--the Brittany sketches. These she looked over as one might views of a past episode in life. The memories of those foreign days rushed over her with a sad sort of joy. There, they had been completely happy--at least she thought so now--until that hateful woman had taken her husband from her. She had almost forgotten the Russian baroness. Now with a start of fresh interest she thought of the portrait and wondered where it was,--the masterful picture of the one who had ruined her happiness. She looked through the clutter again, thinking that it was probably with the Russian wherever she was. But the portrait was there with the rest, wrapped carefully in a piece of old silk.

With eager hands Milly undid the cover of the picture and dragged it forward to the light. It was as if an old passion had burst from the closet of the past. There she was, long, lean, cruel,--posed on her haunches with upturned smiling face,--"The woman who would eat." She lived there on the canvas, eternally young and strong. Milly could admire the mastery of the painting even in the swell of her hatred for the woman who had taken her lover-husband from her. He was young when he had done that,--barely twenty-seven. A man who could paint like that at twenty-seven ought to have gone far. Even Milly in the gloom of her prejudiced soul felt something like awe for the power in him, which seemingly justified the wrong he had done her. Even Milly perceived the tragic laws stronger than herself, larger than her little world of domestic moralities. And thus, gazing on her husband's masterpiece, she realized that her hatred for the woman who she believed had done her the greatest wrong one woman can do another was not real. It was not the Baroness Saratoff who had cheated her: it was life itself! She no longer felt eager to know whether they had been lovers,--as the saying is, had "deceived" her. For this ghostly examination of her husband's work convinced her that Jack did not belong to her, never had,--the stronger, better part of him. She had lived for eight years, more or less happily, with a stranger. She understood now that domestic intimacy, the petty exchanges of daily life, even the habit of physical passion, cannot make two souls one....

She turned at last from the picture with weariness, a heavy heart. It had all been wrong, their marriage, and still more wrong their going on with it "in the brave way." Well, _he_ was done with the mistake at last, and he could not be sorry. She was almost glad for him.

* * * * *

Her brother-in-law had asked her to look through her husband's papers for an insurance policy he thought Jack had taken on his advice. In the old desk Bragdon had used there was a mass of letters and bills, a great many unpaid bills, some of which she had given him months and months before and had supposed were paid. There were two letters in an odd foreign hand that she knew instantly must be the Russian woman's. The first was dated from the _manoir_ at Klerac on the evening of their sudden departure. Milly hesitated a moment as if she must respect the secrets of the dead, then with a last trace of jealousy tore it open and read the lines:--

... "So you have decided--you are going back. You will give up all
that you have won, all that might be yours,--and ours. I knew it
would be so. The puritan in you has won the day,--the weak side.
You will never be content with what you are doing, never. I have
seen far enough within your soul to know that.... I ask nothing for
myself--I have had enough,--no, not that,--but more than I could
hope. But for you, who have the great power in you, it is not
right. You cannot live like that.... Some day you will be glad as I
am that we were not little people, but drank life when it was at
our lips."

Milly dropped the letter and stared blankly at the dark wall opposite. What it revealed did not come to her with shock, because she had always felt sure that it had been so. What startled her was the realization for the first time how much the experience had meant to both,--the examination of the picture and the silence of death enabled her to understand that. He had had the strength--or was it rather weakness?--to do "the right thing," to renounce love and fulfilment and fame because of her and their child. It came over her in a flash that she could not have done as much. Give up love that was strong and creative--no, never, not for all the right and convention on the earth. Any more than the Russian woman would have given it up! Women were braver than men sometimes.

She folded the letter and put it back in its envelope with a curious feeling of relief, a sort of gladness that he had had even the little there was--those few days of fulfilment, of the diviner other life which with all the years between them they had failed to grasp.

It was the most generous, the most genuine, the most humiliating moment of Milly's life. Yes, she was glad that in all the drab reality of their life,--in spite of the bills, the worry, the defeat,--he had had his great moments of art and love. They were not stolen from her: such moments cannot be stolen from anybody. She wished that he might only know how freely she was glad,--not forgave him, because forgiveness had nothing to do with it. She understood, at last, and was glad. If he should come back to life now by some miracle, she would have the courage after this self-revelation to leave him, to send him back, if not to her,--at least to his great work. Only that, too, might now be too late--alas!

With a quiet dignity that was new, Milly opened the other letter. It was dated only a few weeks before from some small place in Russia. Madame Saratoff explained briefly that she was now living with her children on her mother's estate in central Russia, and she described the life there in its perfect monotony, like the flat country, with its half animal people. "I live like one of those eastern people," she wrote, "dreaming of what has been in my life." She had heard accidentally of the American from some one who had met him in New York. He was no longer painting, she understood, but engaged in other work. That was sad. It was a mistake always not to do that which one could do with most joy. In the whirlpool of this life there was so much waste matter, so little that was complete and perfect, that no one with power had the right not to exercise it.

She sent this letter with the picture he had made of her. It belonged more to him than to her because he had created it--the man's part--while she had merely offered the accidental cause,--the woman's share. And further she wished to torture him always with this evidence of what once had been in him; not with _her_ face,--that doubtless had already faded from his mind. But no other one had he fixed eternally by his art as he had hers. Of that she was sure. "Farewell."

It was cold; it was cruel. And it must have burned the artist like acid on his wound. The letters should have gone with him to his grave....

With a sense of finality,--that this was the real end, the end of her marriage,--Milly did up the letters carefully and folded the piece of old silk about the portrait. They must be returned to the Baroness Saratoff. And now for the first time since they had met and married, everything seemed clear and settled between her and her husband. She was left with her little girl "to face life," as the saying is.

And Milly bravely turned her face towards life.

VII

BEING A WIDOW

Many times during the ensuing months Milly had occasion to recall the remark of a clever woman she had once heard. "There's no place in modern society for the widow." She came to believe that the Suttee custom was a frank and on the whole a merciful recognition of the situation. Every one was kind to her,--unexpectedly, almost embarrassingly kind, as is the way with humanity. But Milly knew well enough that no one can live for any considerable period on sympathy and the kindness of friends. The provoking cause for any emotion must be renewed constantly.

It would have been much easier, of course, if her husband had left her and his child "comfortably off," or even with a tiny income. Instead, there were the bills, which seemed to shower down like autumn leaves from every quarter. The kindly brother-in-law, who undertook to straighten out affairs, became impatient, then severe towards the end. What had they done with their money? For Bragdon until the last weeks had been earning a very fair income. Nothing seemed paid. On the apartment only the first thousand dollars had been paid, and all the rest was mortgage and loan from him. Even the housekeeping bills for the year before had not been fully settled. (It seemed that one had merely to live with a false appearance of prosperity to secure easy credit, in a social system that compels only the very poor to pay on the nail.)

Milly could not explain the condition of their affairs. She had no idea they were "so far behind." She was sure that she had given Jack most of the bills and supposed that he had taken care of them. She protested that she had always been economical, and she thought she had been, because there were so many more things she wanted,--things that all their friends seemed to have. When confronted by the figures showing that they had spent seven, nine, eleven thousand dollars a year,--and yet had many unpaid bills,--she could not believe them and stammered,--"I know I'm not a good manager--not really. But all that! You must be mistaken." Then the business man showed his irritation. Figures did not lie: he wished every woman could be taught that axiom at her mother's knee....

"We lived so simply," Milly protested. "Just two maids most of the time,--three this winter, but," etc. In the end the brother-in-law gathered up all the unsettled bills and promised to pay them. He would not have his brother's name tarnished. And he arranged for an advantageous lease of the apartment from the first of the next month, so that after paying charges and interest there would be a little income left over for Milly. Here he stopped and made it clear to Milly that although he should do what he could for his brother's child, she must see what she could do for herself, and what her own people offered her. Big Business had been disturbed of late. He was obliged to cut his own expenses. First and last he had done a good deal for Jack. His wife called Milly "extravagant"--Milly had never found her congenial. In the end Milly felt that her brother-in-law was "hard," and she resolved that neither she nor her child should ever trouble him again.

She had already written her father of her bereavement, and received promptly from Horatio a long, rambling letter, full of warm sympathy and consolation of the religious sort. "We must remember, dear daughter, that these earthly losses in our affections are laid upon us for our spiritual good," etc. Milly smiled at the thoroughness with which her volatile father had absorbed the style of the Reverend Herman Bowler of the Second Presbyterian. To Milly's surprise, there was not a word of practical help, beyond a vague invitation,--"I hope we shall see you some day in our simple home in Elm Park. Josephine, I'm sure, will welcome you and my granddaughter."

Milly very much doubted whether the hard-featured Josephine would welcome her husband's widowed daughter. In fact she saw the fear of Josephine in her father's restrained letter. She contemplated a return to Chicago as a last resort, but it was sad to feel that she wasn't wanted....

At this point Milly began to reproach her husband for failing to leave her and his child with resources. "He ought to have made some sort of provision for his family--every man should," she said to herself. There was manifest injustice in this "man-made world," where a good wife could be left penniless with a child to care for.

Milly always thought of herself as "a good wife," by which she meant specifically that she had been a chaste and faithful wife. That was what the phrase in its popular use meant, just as "a good woman" meant merely "a pure woman." If any one had questioned Milly's virtue as a wife, she would have felt outraged. If any one had said that she was a bad wife, or at least an indifferent wife, she would have felt insulted. A girl who gave herself to a man, lived with him for eight of her best years, bore him a child and had been faithful to him in body, must be "a good wife," and as such deserved a better fate of society than to be left penniless. All her friends said it was a very hard situation.

* * * * *

These same friends were endeavoring to do their best for her, pricked by sympathy with her evident need. If it had not been for a cheque for two thousand dollars, which Clive Reinhard sent her, "in payment for your husband's work on the new contract," Milly would soon have been without a dollar in her purse. She took Reinhard's cheque thankfully, without suspecting her right to it. Others might suspect. For there was no contract, no illustrations made--nothing but the novelist's recognition of a need. The cheque was merely one of the ways he took of squaring himself with his world.

When Milly's women friends heard of it, they said with one voice,--"Thank heaven! If Clive Reinhard would only marry Milly--he ought to!"

Which merely meant that, as he was a rich bachelor who had amassed money by exploiting the sentimental side of their sex, there would be a poetic justice in his chivalrously stepping into the breach and looking after his dead friend's helpless widow. It would make up for "the others," they said, and were enthusiastic over their sentimental plan.

"Milly would make a charming hostess in that big country place of Clive's. It would give her a free hand. What Milly has always wanted is a free hand--she has the ability. And Clive is getting pudgy and set. He ought to marry--he's too dreadfully selfish and self-centred," etc.

Mrs. Montgomery Billman took the affair specially in charge. Of course a decent time must elapse after poor Jack's death, but meanwhile there was no harm in bringing the two together. The masterful wife of the Responsible Editor conceived the scheme of having a private exhibition and sale of Bragdon's work, and that took many interviews and much discussion on Sunday evenings when the hostess tactfully left the two to themselves before the fire, while she retired "to finish my letters." When she returned, however, she found them dry-eyed and silent or chatting about some irrelevant commonplace. The private exhibition came off during the winter in the "Bunker's Barn," as they called the big Riverside Drive house. A good many cards were scattered about in literary and artistic and moneyed circles; tea was poured by the ladies interested; Milly appeared in her widow's black, young and charming. A number of people came and a few bought. Mrs. Billman contented herself with the sketch of a magazine cover representing a handsome woman and a young boy, which was said to resemble herself and her son. On the whole the sale would have been a dreary failure if it had not been for Bunker's liberal purchases and Reinhard's taking all that was unsold "to dispose of privately among Jack's friends."

The hard truth was that Jack Bragdon had not shaken the New York firmament, certainly had not knocked a gilt star from its zenith. At thirty-two he was just a promising failure, one of the grist that the large city eats annually. And his friends were not powerful enough to make up for his lack of _réclame_. "He had a gift--slight though. Nothing much done--charming fellow--died just as he was starting, poor chap!" so the words went. If the portrait of the Russian had been there, the tone might have been less patronizing; but Milly had already sent this off on its long journey.

The practical result was fifteen hundred dollars, of which Bunker contributed a thousand, and various convenient sums that dribbled in opportunely from the novelist, "whenever he was able to make a sale." (A good many of Jack Bragdon's things ultimately will come under the hammer when the Reinhard house is broken up.)

And that romance which Milly's friends had staged came to nothing. Reinhard called on her often, was very kind to her, and really solicitous for her welfare; he also was charming to little Virginia, who called him Uncle Clive; and he had both at his country place for long visits,--abundantly chaperoned. Nothing could have been "nicer" than the novelist's attitude to his friend's widow, all the women declared, and it must have been _her_ fault--or else that "other affair" had gone deeper with him than any one supposed.

Milly herself was not averse to entertaining a new "hope." Her marriage seemed so utterly dead that she felt free to indulge in a new sentiment. But the novelist looked at her out of his beady, black eyes,--indulgently, kindly,--but through and through, as if he had known her before she was born and knew the worth of every heart-beat in her.... Gradually beneath that scalping gaze she grew to dislike him, almost to hate him for his indifference. "He must be horrid with women," she said to Hazel, who admitted that "there have been stories--a man living by himself, as he does!"

And so this solution came to naught.

* * * * *

Milly was "up against it again," as she said to herself. Her small bank-account was fast melting away. (She had her own sheaf of bills that she had not cared to present to her brother-in-law, and she found that a penniless widow has poor credit.) Collectors came with a disagreeable promptness and followed her with an unerring scent through her various changes of residence. It became known among her friends that "Milly must really do something."

The competent wife of the Responsible Editor thought it ought not to be difficult to find something of "a social nature" for Milly to do. "Your gift is people," she said flatteringly. "Let me think it over for a day or two, and I'm sure the right idea will come to me."

She promptly turned the problem over to Mrs. Bunker, with whom she still maintained amicable relations. That lady in due time wrote Milly a note and asked her to call the next morning. Milly went with humbled pride, but with a misgiving due to her previous experiences in the parasitic field of woman's work. When after many preambles and explanations, punctuated by "like that, you know," "all that sort of thing," "we'll have to see," etc., the good lady got to her offer, it sounded like a combination of lady-housekeeper and secretary. With considerable decision Milly said that she did not feel qualified for the work, but Mrs. Bunker was most kind; she would consider her offer and let her know, and left. She had decided already. The memory of her work for Eleanor Kemp,--the humiliation and the triviality of this form of disguised charity,--had convinced her, and Eleanor Kemp was a lady and a friend and a competent person, all of which Mrs. Howard Bunker was not. "I'd scrub floors first," Milly said stoutly, and straightway despatched a ladylike refusal of the proffered job.

("I thought you said she was in great need," Mrs. Bunker telephoned Mrs. Billman in an injured tone of voice. "She is!" "Well, you wouldn't think so," the Bunkeress flashed back. "It's so hard to help that sort. You know, the kind that have been ladies!" "I know," the Editress rejoined, without the glimmer of a smile.)

* * * * *

The only one of all Milly's friends beside the novelist who came promptly to the rescue at this crisis was Marion Reddon,--the one Milly had seen least of since she had been thoroughly launched in New York. Marion with her puritan directness went to the point at once.

"What you want is a place to stay in while you look around. You and Virginia come to us. The hang-out, as Sam calls it, isn't large, but there's always room somehow."

Milly demurred at first, but later when Marion Reddon was obliged to depart hurriedly for the south because one of the children was threatened with tuberculosis, she gratefully accepted the offer of the Reddons' apartment during their absence. She moved from the boarding-house where she had been staying between visits to the top floor of the flimsy building behind Grant's Tomb in which the Reddons had perched themselves latterly. Virginia was obliged to leave her school where "the very nicest children all went," which was a keen regret to Milly, for she had already formed ambitions for her daughter. The contrast of her own pretty apartment with the shabby, worn rooms of the Reddon flat brought home to her, as nothing else had, her precarious situation. And she set herself vigorously to meet it.

VIII

THE WOMAN'S WORLD

Milly's most intimate friend was Hazel Fredericks. That restless, keen young woman, after experimenting variously in settlement work, hygiene for the poor, and immigration, had concentrated her interests on the woman movement then coming more and more into notice. The agitation for the suffrage, it seemed to her, was the effective expression of all advanced, radical ideas for which she had always worked. Her activity in the movement had brought her into close relations with some of the local leaders, among whom were a few women socially prominent, as everybody knows. (In this way she had eclipsed her old rival, Mrs. Billman, who had kept to Art and Society.) Hazel was on intimate terms with a very rich young married woman, who lived apart from her husband, "for the very best of reasons, my dear," and who spoke in private houses on the Cause.

In those happier days when Milly still had her own little place in the world, she had rather made fun of Hazel's views and imputed them to social ambition. "She wants to be talked about," she said. But since the experience of widowhood, Milly was changing her mind and listened much more attentively to all that Hazel had to say about "the woman movement,"--the "endowment of motherhood," the "necessity for the vote,"--and read "What Forty Thousand Women Want," "Love and Marriage," and other handbooks of the Cause.

One of the theories with which Milly most heartily agreed was that the labor of women in the home should be paid just as the labor of men. Milly felt that she had a valid claim for a number of years' wages still due her. This and other subjects she talked over with Hazel and became fired with enthusiasm for the Cause. Now, in her need of work, she asked,--

"Why shouldn't I do something for the movement?"

"I've been thinking of that," Hazel replied, with a shade of hesitation in her voice.

"You said there were paid secretaries and organizers."

"Yes--there are some, and we need more."

She did not explain that there were hundreds of eager young women, college graduates and social workers, younger and much better informed and more modern than Milly,--in a word, trained women. She did not wish to discourage Milly, and believed she had enough influence with Mrs. Laverne (the pretty married worker) and with Mrs. Exeter, the social leader most prominently identified with the Cause, to work Milly into some paid place. So she said reflectively,--

"There's to be a most important meeting of the leaders in the movement at Mrs. Exeter's, and I'll see what I can do."

With a laughing "Votes for Women" and "For a Woman's World," the two friends kissed and parted. Shortly afterwards a card came to Milly from a very grand person in the social world, a name that is quite familiar wherever newspapers penetrate. The card invited Mrs. John Bragdon to take part in a meeting of those interested in the Woman Forward Movement on the evening of the twentieth, at which addresses would be made by certain well-known people. The last name on the list of speakers was that of Mrs. Stanfield Fredericks. Milly was much excited. She was eager to go to the meeting, if for no better reason than from a natural curiosity to see the famous house, so often the theme of newspaper hyperbole. Also she was anxious to hear Hazel talk. But she doubted the propriety of her going anywhere so early in her widowhood. While she was debating this point with herself the telephone rang and Hazel Fredericks asked if she had received the card.

"You're going, of course?"

There followed a long feminine discussion over the propriety of accepting, the dress to be worn, etc. Hazel insisted that this occasion was not really social, but business, and steadily bore down Milly's scruples. "There'll be a great crush. It won't make any difference what you wear--nobody'll know!"

Milly went. She had to bribe the raw Swedish servant to remain in that evening with little Virginia, and she went to the expense of a cab in order not to arrive at the grand house in a sloppy and tousled condition. It was in many respects a thrilling experience. Once inside the glassed vestibule on the marble steps, Milly felt that she would not have missed it for a great deal. In the first place she enjoyed seeing the solemn liveried men servants, one of whom proffered pamphlet literature of the suffrage cause on a large silver tray. (The little books were sold at a good price, and Milly dropped another dollar or two in acquiring stuff that she could have had for nothing from Hazel Fredericks, whose apartment ran over with this "literature.")

Having supplied herself with the ammunition of the Cause, she followed the throng into the celebrated ball-room hung with beautiful old tapestries and with a ceiling stolen bodily from a French château. For a time the richness and the gayety of the scene sufficiently occupied Milly's attention. After the sombre experiences through which she had been and her present drab environment, it all seemed like fairyland. She tried to guess who the important-looking people were. A few were already known to her by sight, and others she recognized from their newspaper portraits. There was a majority of elegantly dressed women, and a minority of amused or bored-looking men.

At last the gathering was hushed by the voice of the hostess,--a plump and plethoric person, who said wheezily that in assembling here to-night there were two objects in view: first, to hear cheering words of wisdom from the leaders of the Cause, and secondly, to show the world that the cultivated and leisure classes were for the Emancipation of Woman. It was a democratic movement, she observed, and the toiling sisters most in need of the vote were not with them to-night. But all effective revolts, she asserted, started from above, among the aristocrats. They must rouse the womanhood of the nation, the common womanhood that now slumbered in ignorant content, to a sense of their wrongs, their slavery. She murmured _noblesse oblige_ and sat down. Thereat a little bespectacled lady bobbed up at her side and began reading a poem in a low, intense voice. There were interminable verses. The well-dressed, well-dined men and women in the audience began to show signs of restlessness and boredom, although they kept quiet in a well-bred way. One lone man with a lean, humorous face, who was jammed into the corner beside Milly, looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. She could not help smiling back, but immediately recomposed her face to seriousness.

The verses ended after a time, as all things must end, and the speeches followed,--the first by a very earnest, dignified woman,--a noted worker among the poor,--who argued practically that this man-governed world was a failure, from the point of view of the majority, the unprotected workers, and therefore women should be permitted to do what they could to better things. There was a slight murmur of appreciation--rather for herself than for her argument--when she sat down. She was followed by a pompous little man, who made a legal speech with lumbering attempts at humor. Milly was much impressed by the long list of legal disabilities he cited which women suffered in this "man-made world," and which she had not hitherto suspected. The man by her side was yawning, and Milly felt like reproving him.

After the pompous judge came the star of the performance,--the pretty little woman who was separated from her husband. She was very becomingly dressed, much excited apparently, and swayed to and fro as she talked. Sometimes she closed her eye in a frenetic vision of women's wrongs, then suddenly opened them wide upon her audience with flashing indignation, as old-fashioned actresses once did. After the dull pleas of the preceding speakers, based on general principles and equity, this was an impassioned invective against the animal man. One felt that hers was a personal experience. The low, degraded nature of the sex that had, by physical force, usurped the rule of the universe was dramatically exposed. Milly glowed with sympathy while she listened, though she could not explain why, as her experience with men had not been with lechers, drunkards, wife-beaters. The men she had known had been on the whole a fairly clean, hard-working, kindly lot, yet she knew instinctively, as she often said, that "All men are alike," by which she meant tyrannical and corrupt in regard to women.... The audience listened closely to the speaker. No doubt their interest was increased by the gossip every one knew,--how her husband had struck her at a restaurant, how he had dragged her by the hair, cut her with a bottle from her own dressing-table, etc. Milly noticed that Hazel Fredericks and the settlement worker kept their heads lowered disapprovingly. The man next her twisted his quizzical face into a smile, and turning to Milly as the speaker stopped, amid a burst of applause, said frankly and simply as to an old friend,--

"Whew--what rot!"

Milly could not help smiling back at the engaging stranger, but she protested stoutly,--

"I don't think so!"

Before they could extend their remarks, the next speaker, a rich widow well-known for her large charities, was addressing the audience in low, earnest tones. Her theme was taken from the poet's verses: she pleaded for the full emancipation of Woman as man's equal comrade in the advance of the race. It was a vague, poetic rhapsody, disconnected in thought, and made slight impression on Milly. The last speaker was Hazel Fredericks. Her subject was the intellectual equality of women with men and their right to do their own thinking. Milly recognized many of the pat phrases and all the ideas which were current in the magazine set where she had lived,--woman's self-expression and self-development, etc. It was the most carefully prepared of all the addresses and very well delivered, and it made an excellent impression, though it contained nothing original either in thought or in expression. Like Milly's famous graduation essay on Plato it was a masterpiece of skilful quotation, but in this case the theft was less obvious and the subject was certainly fresher.

There was the usual movement of relieved humanity after it has been talked to for two hours, and then the hostess rose again, and in her languid drawl announced that all who felt interested in the Cause were requested to sign the "Roster" and give their addresses, so that they might be kept in touch with the movement. The "Roster" was a very handsome gilt-edged, blue levatine-bound book, which was carried about in the crowded room by a footman, another man carrying a gold inkstand and pen.

The stranger beside Milly murmured in her ear,--

"So Society has taken up the Cause!"

"I'm afraid," Milly replied with an arch smile, "you don't take us quite seriously."

"Don't think it for one moment!" he retorted. "I don't believe I have ever taken anything so seriously in all my life as Women."

"In what way?"

"In every way."

He resumed in a moment, more seriously,--

"Frankly, I don't believe much is accomplished for your Cause by this sort of thing!"

His gesture included comprehensively the gorgeous room, the gorgeous assembly of socially elect, the speakers, and the liveried servants who were now approaching their corner with the "Roster."

"But you have to start things somehow," Milly rejoined, remembering Hazel's arguments. "Social prestige counts in everything."

"Is that what you need--social prestige?... I don't believe one of those women who talked, including the poet, ever earned a dollar in her life!" and with a glance about the room he added, "nor any woman in this room."

"Oh, yes--I have myself!" Milly replied promptly and proudly.

The man looked at her sharply.

"And that doesn't make any difference," she continued with a superior air; "you men are always trying to bring things down to dollars and cents."

"You'll admit it's a tangible basis of discussion."

"I've no doubt if they only had their rights many of them ought to be paid a great deal for what they've done for you men."

"I mean that not one has ever done anything really productive in her life--has added anything to the world's supply of necessities," he continued with masculine arrogance.

"Oh?" Milly protested.

"Not even children!" he added triumphantly, and glanced at the names on his programme. "I don't believe they could produce a child among 'em."

Milly knew that the women speakers of the evening happened all to be childless women. One of them was not married, another was a widow, a third separated from her husband, and of the others at least one--Hazel--had deliberately evaded maternity.

"That may not be their fault!" Milly retorted with meaning.

"True," the man admitted. "But I'd like to hear something on the question from Mothers."

"Having children isn't the only thing women are good for," Milly suggested.

"It's one mighty fine thing, though!"

(Milly could never understand why men, as a rule, were so enthusiastic over women who had children.)

"Aren't we getting away from the subject?" she suggested.

Their talk was interrupted by the presence of the solemn footman with the book of irreproachable names. To Milly's surprise her unknown companion grasped the pen and scrawled beneath her signature a name that looked like "A. Vanniman," with the address of a well-known club. So he was a single man!

"How could you do that?" Milly demanded accusingly.

"Why not? I want women to vote, just as soon and as often as they like. Then they'll know how little there is in the vote and maybe get down to brass tacks."

"You don't really believe in women," Milly remarked coquettishly.

"I don't believe in this sort of flummery, no.... I want to hear from the waitresses, the clerks, the factory girls--the seven or eight millions of women who are up against it every day of their lives to earn a living. I want to hear what _they_ have to say about suffrage and the rights of women--what _they_ want? Did you ever ask them?"

"No-o," Milly admitted, and then recalled another of Hazel's arguments. "All those women need the vote, of course, to make laws to help them earn their living. But they haven't the time to agitate and organize. They are not educated--not expressive."

"Not expressive!" the man exclaimed. "I wish you and all these good women here could listen to my stenographer for ten minutes on what women need. She knows the game!"

Milly did not approve of her companion's sentiments: he clearly belonged to the large class of prejudiced males whose indifference the Cause had to combat. But he had an interesting face and was altogether an attractive specimen of his species. She wondered who he might be. It seemed to her that "Vanniman" had a familiar sound, and she believed he was some man of importance in the city.

There was a general drift towards the supper room. But Milly hesitated. She had promised Hazel to join her after the speaking and be introduced to some of the leaders,--especially to the pretty young woman who had denounced Man,--in the hope that a paid position could be found for her. At first she could not find her friend, and then she saw Hazel surrounded by a number of important-looking men and women, talking very earnestly with them, and a sudden timidity came over her in the midst of this distinguished gathering.

"We'd better get something to eat," her unknown acquaintance suggested. He had waited for her, and she felt relieved to have some one to speak to. "It makes one fearfully hungry to listen to a lot of talk, don't you think?"

So Milly went out to supper with the agreeable stranger.

"No," he resumed, after presenting her with a comforting beaker of champagne, "I've every sympathy with the woman with a job or with the woman who wants a job. All this silly talk about the sexes makes me tired. Man or woman, the job's the thing."

"Yes!" Milly assented with heartfelt emphasis.

"What every one needs is something to do, and women must be trained like men for their jobs."

He began to talk more seriously and entertainingly on the economic changes in modern society that had produced the present state of unrest and readjustment. He sketched quite feelingly what he called the old-fashioned woman, with her heavy duties and responsibilities in the pioneer days. "The real pillar of Society--and often a domestic slave, God bless her!" he said. "But her granddaughter has become either a parasite, or another kind of slave,--an industrial slave. And the vote isn't going to help her in either case."

Milly wondered in which class she fell. She didn't like the word "parasite,"--it sounded like a disease,--and yet she was afraid that was what she was.

"I think that I must be going," Milly said at last. She noticed that the rooms were fast emptying after the food had been devoured, and she could see Hazel nowhere. She would call her up in the morning and congratulate her on her speech. And so with a nod to the stranger she went for her wraps. But she found him again in the vestibule, and wondered if he had waited for her to come down.

"What's the name?" he asked, as the servant came forward to call her carriage.

"I haven't any cab," Milly replied bravely. It was her custom these days Cinderella-like to dispense with a return cab.

"But it's raining," the man protested. "You must let me set you down at your home."

A private hansom had drawn up to the curb before the awning. "Where?" he insisted.

"It's an awful way out," Milly faltered; "just take me to the nearest subway station."