"Why--"
"And--they scare you so--he"d pretend I had pneumonia, like Sam"s sister--he"d frighten me so--I just have a summer cold. I--I"ll be all right to-morrow, deary. Oh no, no, _please_ don"t, please don"t get a doctor. Can"t afford it--can"t--"
Pneumonia! At the word, which brought the sterile bitterness of winter into this fetid August room, Una was in a rigor of fear, yet galvanized with belief in her mother"s bravery. "My brave, brave little mother!"
she thought.
Not till Una had promised that she would not summon the doctor was her mother quieted, though Una made the promise with reservations. She relieved the pain in her mother"s side with ice compresses--the ice chipped from the pitiful little cake in their tiny ice-box. She freshened pillows, she smoothed sheets; she made hot broth and bathed her mother"s shoulders with tepid water and rubbed her temples with menthol. But the fever increased, and at times Mrs. Golden broke through her shallow slumber with meaningless sentences, like the beginning of delirium.
At midnight she was panting more and more rapidly--three times as fast as normal breathing. She was sunk in a stupor. And Una, brooding by the bed, a crouched figure of mute tragedy in the low light, grew more and more apprehensive as her mother seemed to be borne away from her. Una started up. She would risk her mother"s displeasure and bring the doctor. Just then, even Doctor Smyth of the neighborhood practice and obstetrical habits seemed a miracle-worker.
She had to go four blocks to the nearest drug-store that would be open at this time of night, and there telephone the doctor.
She was aware that it was raining, for the fire-escape outside shone wet in the light from a window across the narrow court. She discovered she had left mackintosh and umbrella at the office. Stopping only to set out a clean towel, a spoon, and a gla.s.s on the chair by the bed, Una put on the old sweater which she secretly wore under her cheap thin jacket in winter. She lumbered wearily down-stairs. She prayed confusedly that G.o.d would give her back her headache and in reward make her mother well.
She was down-stairs at the heavy, grilled door. Rain was pouring. A light six stories up in the apartment-house across the street seemed infinitely distant and lonely, curtained from her by the rain. Water splashed in the street and gurgled in the gutters. It did not belong to the city as it would have belonged to brown woods or prairie. It was violent here, shocking and terrible. It took distinct effort for Una to wade out into it.
The modern city! Subway, asphalt, a wireless message winging overhead, and Una Golden, an office-woman in eye-gla.s.ses. Yet sickness and rain and night were abroad; and it was a clumsily wrapped peasant woman, bent-shouldered and heavily breathing, who trudged unprotected through the dark side-streets as though she were creeping along moorland paths.
Her thought was dulled to everything but physical discomfort and the illness which menaced the beloved. Woman"s eternal agony for the sick of her family had transformed the trim smoothness of the office-woman"s face into wrinkles that were tragic and ruggedly beautiful.
- 7
Again Una climbed the endless stairs to her flat. She unconsciously counted the beat of the weary, regular rhythm which her feet made on the slate treads and the landings--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, landing, turn and--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven--over and over. At the foot of the last flight she suddenly believed that her mother needed her this instant. She broke the regular thumping rhythm of her climb, dashed up, cried out at the seconds wasted in unlocking the door. She tiptoed into the bedroom--and found her mother just as she had left her. In Una"s low groan of gladness there was all the world"s self-sacrifice, all the fidelity to a cause or to a love. But as she sat unmoving she came to feel that her mother was not there; her being was not in this wreck upon the bed.
In an hour the doctor soothed his way into the flat. He "was afraid there might be just a little touch of pneumonia." With breezy fatherliness which inspirited Una, he spoke of the possible presence of pneumococcus, of doing magic things with Romer"s serum, of trusting in G.o.d, of the rain, of cold baths and digitalin. He patted Una"s head and cheerily promised to return at dawn. He yawned and smiled at himself. He looked as roundly, fuzzily sleepy as a bunny rabbit, but in the quiet, forlorn room of night and illness he radiated trust in himself. Una said to herself, "He certainly must know what he is talking about."
She was sure that the danger was over. She did not go to bed, however.
She sat stiffly in the bedroom and planned amus.e.m.e.nts for her mother.
She would work harder, earn more money. They would move to a cottage in the suburbs, where they would have chickens and roses and a kitten, and her mother would find neighborly people again.
Five days after, late on a bright, cool afternoon, when all the flats about them were thinking of dinner, her mother died.
- 8
There was a certain madness in Una"s grief. Her agony was a big, simple, uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader--alarming, it was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a school-teacher relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to exercise her full power of emotion.
Una evoked an image of her mother as one who had been altogether good, understanding, clever, and unfortunate. She regretted every moment she had spent away from her--remembered with scorn that she had planned to go to the theater the preceding Sat.u.r.day, instead of sanctifying the time in the Nirvana of the beloved"s presence; repented with writhing agony having spoken harshly about neglected household duties.
She even contrived to find it a virtue in her mother that she had so often forgotten the daily tasks--her mind had been too fine for such things.... Una retraced their life. But she remembered everything only as one remembers under the sway of music.
"If I could just have another hour, just one hour with her, and feel her hands on my eyes again--"
On the night before the funeral she refused to let even Mrs. Sessions stay with her. She did not want to share her mother"s shadowy presence with any one.
She lay on the floor beside the bed where her mother was stately in death. It was her last chance to talk to her:
"Mother ... Mother ... Don"t you hear me? It"s Una calling. Can"t you answer me this one last time? Oh, mother, think, mother dear, I can"t ever hear your voice again if you don"t speak to me now.... Don"t you remember how we went home to Panama, our last vacation? Don"t you remember how happy we were down at the lake? Little mother, you haven"t forgotten, have you? Even if you don"t answer, you know I"m watching by you, don"t you? See, I"m kissing your hand. Oh, you did want me to sleep near you again, this last night-- Oh, my G.o.d! oh, my G.o.d! the last night I shall ever spend with her, the very last, last night."
All night long the thin voice came from the little white-clad figure so insignificant in the dimness, now lying motionless on the comforter she had spread beside the bed, and talking in a tone of ordinary conversation that was uncanny in this room of invisible whisperers; now leaping up to kiss the dead hand in a panic, lest it should already be gone.
The funeral filled the house with intruders. The drive to the cemetery was irritating. She wanted to leap out of the carriage. At first she concentrated on the cushion beside her till she thought of nothing in the world but the faded bottle-green upholstery, and a ridiculous drift of dust in the tufting. But some one was talking to her. (It was awkward Mr. Sessions, for shrewd Mrs. Sessions had the genius to keep still.) He kept stammering the most absurd plat.i.tudes about how happy her mother must be in a heaven regarding which he did not seem to have very recent or definite knowledge. She was annoyed, not comforted. She wanted to break away, to find her mother"s presence again in that sacred place where she had so recently lived and spoken.
Yet, when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds--nothing, blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone.
In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she was hungry, and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions"s invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen.
The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried to sing. At that Una wept, "She never will hear poor d.i.c.kie sing again."
Instantly she remembered--as clearly as though she were actually listening to the voice and words--that her mother had burst out, "Drat that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just tries to wake me up." Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself, "Oh, but mother didn"t mean--"
But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and lay among them, meditating on her future.
For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: "Why can"t I really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself to it? There"s women--in real estate, and lawyers and magazine editors--some of them make ten thousand a year."
So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to conquer this new way of city-dwelling.
"Maybe I can find out if there"s anything in life--now--besides working for T. W. till I"m sc.r.a.pped like an old machine," she pondered. "How I hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!"
She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the problem of the hopeless women in industry.
She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old, who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, "Why, since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?"
Part II
THE OFFICE
CHAPTER IX
The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be n.o.ble. But mostly it is a sterile n.o.bility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son"s comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.
Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una"s resistance to the cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness. It was the round of unessentials which all office-women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning--pa.s.sion in black, even to the black-edged face-veil.... Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning, and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.
She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.
Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses" flat, but the good people bored her with their a.s.sumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth a.s.sertion that "it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy" aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother"s memory.
Her half-hysterical fear of the city"s power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.
Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people--marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean s.p.a.ce, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison--as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day"s business life.
Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard. A crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.
Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city"s culture and graciousness, there were advertis.e.m.e.nts of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling"s virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth.