The Iron Woman

The Iron Woman.

by Margaret Deland.

CHAPTER I

"Climb up in this tree, and play house!" Elizabeth Ferguson commanded. She herself had climbed to the lowest branch of an apple-tree in the Maitland orchard, and sat there, swinging her white-stockinged legs so recklessly that the three children whom she had summoned to her side, backed away for safety. "If you don"t," she said, looking down at them, "I"m afraid, perhaps, maybe, I"ll get mad."

Her foreboding was tempered by a giggle and by the deepening dimple in her cheek, but all the same she sighed with a sort of impersonal regret at the prospect of any unpleasantness. "It would be too bad if I got mad, wouldn"t it?" she said thoughtfully. The others looked at one another in consternation.

They knew so well what it meant to have Elizabeth "mad," that Nannie Maitland, the oldest of the little group, said at once, helplessly, "Well."

Nannie was always helpless with Elizabeth, just as she was helpless with her half-brother, Blair, though she was ten and Elizabeth and Blair were only eight; but how could a little girl like Nannie be anything but helpless before a brother whom she adored, and a wonderful being like Elizabeth?--Elizabeth! who always knew exactly what she wanted to do, and who instantly "got mad," if you wouldn"t say you"d do it, too; got mad, and then repented, and hugged you and kissed you, and actually cried (or got mad again), if you refused to accept as a sign of your forgiveness her new slate-pencil, decorated with strips of red- and-white paper just like a little barber"s pole! No wonder Nannie, timid and good-natured, was helpless before such a sweet, furious little creature! Blair had more backbone than his sister, but even he felt Elizabeth"s heel upon his neck. David Richie, a silent, candid, very stubborn small boy, was, after a momentary struggle, as meek as the rest of them. Now, when she commanded them all to climb, it was David who demurred, because, he said, he spoke first for Indians tomahawking you in the back parlor.

"Very well!" said the despot; "play your old Indians! I"ll never speak to any of you again as long as I live!"

"I"ve got on my new pants," David objected.

"Take "em off!" said Elizabeth. And there is no knowing what might have happened if the decorous Nannie had not come to the rescue.

"That"s not proper to do out-of-doors; and Miss White says not to say "pants.""

Elizabeth looked thoughtful. "Maybe it isn"t proper," she admitted; "but David, honest, I took a hate to being tommy-hocked the last time we played it; so please, _dear_ David! If you"ll play house in the tree, I"ll give you a piece of my taffy." She took a little sticky package out of her pocket and licked her lips to indicate its contents;--David yielded, shinning up the trunk of the tree, indifferent to the trousers, which had been on his mind ever since he had put them on his legs.

Blair followed him, but Nannie squatted on the ground content to merely look at the courageous three.

"Come on up," said Elizabeth. Nannie shook her little blond head.

At which the others burst into a shrill chorus: ""Fraid-cat!

"fraid-cat! "fraid-cat!" Nannie smiled placidly; it never occurred to her to deny such an obviously truthful t.i.tle.

"Blair," she said, continuing a conversation interrupted by Elizabeth"s determination to climb, "Blair, _why_ do you say things that make Mamma mad? What"s the sense? If it makes her mad for you to say things are ugly, why do you?"

""Cause," Blair said briefly. Even at eight Blair disliked both explanations and decisions, and his slave and half-sister rarely pressed for either. With the exception of his mother, whose absorption in business had never given her time to get acquainted with him, most of the people about Blair were his slaves.

Elizabeth"s governess, Miss White--called by Elizabeth, for reasons of her own, "Cherry-pie"--had completely surrendered to his brown eyes; the men in the Maitland Works toadied to him; David Richie bl.u.s.tered, perhaps, but always gave in to him; in his own home, Harris, who was a cross between a butler and a maid-of-all-work, adored him to the point of letting him make candy on the kitchen stove--probably the greatest expression of affection possible to the kitchen; in fact, little Elizabeth Ferguson was the only person in his world who did not knuckle down to this pleasant and lovable child. But then, Elizabeth never knuckled down to anybody! Certainly not to kind old Cherry- pie, whose timid upper lip quivered like a rabbit"s when she was obliged to repeat to her darling some new rule of Robert Ferguson"s for his niece"s upbringing; nor did she knuckle down to her uncle;--she even declared she was not at all afraid of him! This was almost unbelievable to the others, who scattered like robins if they heard his step. And she had greater courage than this; she had, in fact, audacity! for she said she was willing--this the others told each other in awed tones--she said she had "just as lieves" walk right up and speak to Mrs. Maitland herself, and ask her for twenty cents so she could treat the whole crowd to ice-cream! That is, she would just as lieves, _if she should happen to want to_. Now, as she sat in the apple-tree swinging her legs and sharing her taffy, it occurred to her to mention, apropos of nothing, her opinion of Mrs.

Maitland"s looks:

"I like Blair"s mother best; but David"s mother is prettier than Blair"s mother."

"It isn"t polite to brag on mothers," said David, surveying his new trousers complacently, "but I know what I think."

Blair, jouncing up and down on his branch, agreed with unoffended candor. ""Course she"s prettier. Anybody is. Mother"s ugly."

"It isn"t right to say things like that out of the family,"

Nannie observed.

"This _is_ the family. You"re going to marry David, and I"m going to marry Elizabeth. And I"m going to be awfully rich; and I"ll give all you children a lot of money. Jimmy Sullivan--he"s a friend of mine; I got acquainted with him yesterday, and he"s the biggest puddler in our Works. Jimmie said, "You"re the only son,"

he said, "you"ll get it all." "Course I told him I"d give him some," said Blair.

At this moment Elizabeth was moved to catch David round the neck, and give him a loud kiss on his left ear. David sighed. "You may kiss me," he said patiently; "but I"d rather you"d tell me when you want to. You knocked off my cap."

"Say, David," Nannie said, flinging his cap up to him, "Blair can stand on his head and count five. You can"t."

At this David"s usual admiration for Blair suffered an eclipse; he grew very red, then exploded: "I--I--I"ve had mumps, and I have two warts, and Blair hasn"t. And I have a real dining-room at my house, and Blair hasn"t!"

Nannie flew to the rescue: "You haven"t got a real mother. You are only an adopted."

"Well, what are you?" David said, angrily; "you"re nothing but a Step."

"I haven"t got any kind of a mother," Elizabeth said, with complacent melancholy.

"Stop fighting," Blair commanded amiably; "David is right; we have a pigsty of a dining-room at our house." He paused to bend over and touch with an ecstatic finger a flake of lichen covering with its serpent green the damp, black bark in the crotch of the old tree. "Isn"t that pretty?" he said.

"You ought not to say things about our house," Nannie reproved him. As Blair used to say when he grew up, "Nannie was born proper."

"Why not?" said Blair. "They know everything is ugly at our house. They"ve got real dining-rooms at their houses; they don"t have old desks round, the way we do."

It was in the late sixties that these children played in the apple-tree and arranged their conjugal future; at that time the Maitland house was indeed, as poor little Blair said, "ugly."

Twenty years before, its gardens and meadows had stretched over to the river; but the estate had long ago come down in size and gone up in dollars. Now, there was scarcely an acre of sooty green left, and it was pressed upon by the yards of the Maitland Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks. Grading had left the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above the level of a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally fetlock-deep in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly paved sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence--a row of black and rusted spears, spotted under their tines with innumerable gray coc.o.o.ns. (Blair and David made constant and furtive attempts to lift these spears, socketed in crumbling lead in the granite base, for of course there could be nothing better for fighting Indians than a real iron spear.) The orchard behind the house had been cut in two by a spur track, which brought jolting gondola cars piled with red ore down to the furnace. The half dozen apple-trees that were left stretched gaunt arms over sour, gra.s.sless earth; they put out faint flakes of blossoms in the early spring, and then a fleeting show of greenness, which in a fortnight shriveled and blackened out of all semblance of foliage. But all the same the children found it a delightful place to play, although Blair sometimes said sullenly that it was "ugly." Blair hated ugly things, and, poor child! he was a.s.sailed by ugliness on every side. The queer, disorderly dining-room, in which for reasons of her own Mrs. Maitland transacted so much of her business that it had become for all practical purposes an office of her Works, was perhaps the "ugliest" thing in the world to the little boy.

"Why don"t we have a real dining-room?" he said once; "why do we have to eat in a office?"

"We"ll eat in the kitchen, if I find it convenient," his mother told him, looking at him over her newspaper, which was propped against a silver coffee-urn that had found a clear s.p.a.ce on a breakfast table cluttered with papers and ledgers.

"They have a bunch of flowers on the table up at David"s house,"

the little boy complained; "I don"t see why we can"t."

"I don"t eat flowers," Mrs. Maitland said grimly.

"I don"t eat papers," Blair said, under his breath; and his mother looked at him helplessly. How is one to reply to a child of eight who makes remarks of this kind? Mrs. Maitland did not know; it was one of the many things she did not know in relation to her son; for at that time she loved him with her mind rather than her body, so she had none of those soft intuitions and persuasions of the flesh which instruct most mothers. In her perplexity she expressed the sarcastic anger one might vent upon an equal under the same circ.u.mstances:

"You"d eat nothing at all, young man, let me tell you, if it wasn"t for the "papers," as you call "em, in this house!" But it was no wonder that Blair called it ugly--the house, the orchard, the Works--even his mother, in her rusty black alpaca dress, sitting at her desk in the big, dingy dining-room, driving her body and soul, and the bodies and souls of her workmen--all for the sake of the little, shrinking boy, who wanted a bunch of flowers on the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And poor little proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to make peace. Nannie"s perplexities had begun very far back. Of course she was too young when her father married his second wife to puzzle over that; but if she did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague young widower who painted pictures n.o.body bought, and was as unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an iron-works was a matter of inheritance--why such a man wanted to marry Miss Sarah Blair was beyond anybody"s wisdom. It is conceivable, indeed, that he did not want to.

There were rumors that after the death of Nannie"s mother, Herbert Maitland had been inclined to look for consolation to a certain Miss Molly Wharton (she that afterward married another widower, Henry Knight); and everybody thought Miss Molly was willing to smile upon him. Be that as it may, he suddenly found himself the husband of his late partner"s daughter, a woman eight years older than he, and at least four inches taller; a silent, plain woman, of devastating common sense, who contradicted all those femininities and soft lovelinesses so characteristic, not only of his first wife but of pretty Molly Wharton also.

John Blair, the father of the second Mrs. Maitland, an uneducated, extremely intelligent man, had risen from puddling to partnership in the Maitland Works. There had been no social relations between Mr. Maitland, Sr., and this new member of the firm, but the older man had a very intimate respect, and even admiration for John Blair. When he came to die he confided his son"s interests to his partner with absolute confidence that they would be safe. "Herbert has no gumption, John," he said; "he wants to be an "artist." You"ve got to look after him." "I will, Mr. Maitland, I will," said John Blair, snuffling and blowing his nose on a big red pocket-handkerchief. He did look after him. He put Herbert"s affairs ahead of his own, and he made it clear to his daughter, who in business matters was, curiously enough, his right-hand man, that "Maitland"s boy" was always, as he expressed it, "to have the inside track."

"I ain"t bothering about you, Sally; I"ll leave you enough. And if I didn"t, you could scratch gravel for yourself. But Maitland"s boy ain"t our kind. He must be taken care of."

When John Blair died, perhaps a sort of faithfulness to his wishes made his Sally "take care" of Herbert Maitland by marrying him. "His child certainly does need a mother," she thought;--"an intelligent mother, not a goose." By and by she told Herbert of his child"s need; or at any rate helped him to infer it. And somehow, before he knew it, he married her. By inheritance they owned the Works between them; so really their marriage was, as the bride expressed it, "a very sensible arrangement"; and any sensible arrangement appealed to John Blair"s daughter. But after a breathless six months of partnership--in business if in nothing else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year- old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed him that there was nothing for him to do but die-- so that there might be room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; n.o.body who saw her in those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration, but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under like circ.u.mstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as Mrs. Maitland"s religion had never been more than church-going and contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel anything else. Not even her baby"s little clinging hands, or his milky lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to nurse him.

She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naive conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but duty to offer to her child.

Nannie"s puzzles began then. "Why don"t Mamma hug my baby brother?" she used to ask the nurse, who had no explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland"s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy"s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word "uggy," accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother.

Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, "No, no! No, no!" at which she would push him roughly from her knee, and fall into hurt silence. Once, when he was five years old, she came in to dinner hot from a morning in the Works, her moist forehead grimy with dust, and bent over to kiss him; at which the little boy wrinkled up his nose and turned his face aside.

"What"s the matter?" his mother said; and called sharply to the nurse: "I won"t have any highfalutin" business in this boy! Get it out of him." Then resolutely she took Blair"s little chin in her hand--a big, beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. "Get over your airs!" she said, and sat down and ate her dinner without another word to Blair or any one else. But the next day, as if to purchase the kiss he would not give, she told him he was to have an "allowance." The word had no meaning to the little fellow, until she showed him two bright new dollars and said he could buy candy with them; then his brown eyes smiled, and he held up his lips to her. It was at that moment that money began to mean something to him. He bought the candy, which he divided with Nannie, and he bought also a present for his mother,--a bottle of cologne, with a tiny calendar tied around its neck by a red ribbon. "The ribbon is pretty," he explained shyly. She was so pleased that she instantly gave him another dollar, and then put the long green bottle on her painted pine bureau, between two of his photographs.

In the days when the four children played in the orchard, and had lessons with Miss White, in the school-room in Mr. Ferguson"s garret, and were "treated" by Blair to candy or pink ice-cream-- even in those days Mercer was showing signs of what it was ultimately to become: the apotheosis of materialism and vulgarity. Iron was entering into its soul. It thought extremely well of itself; when a new mill was built, or a new furnace blown in, it thought still better of itself. It prided itself upon its growth; in fact, its complacency, its ugliness and its size kept pace with one another.

"Look at our output," Sarah Maitland used to brag to her general manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; "and look at our churches! We have more churches for our size than any town west of the Alleghanies."

"We need more jails than any town, east or west," Mr. Ferguson retorted, grimly.