The Price She Paid

The Price She Paid.

by David Graham Phillips.

I

HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one--the end of a lifelong fraud which never had been suspected, and never would be. With the world, with his acquaintances and neighbors, with his wife and son and daughter, he pa.s.sed as a generous, warm-hearted, good-natured man, ready at all times to do anything to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever thought or done a single thing except for his own comfort. Like all intensely selfish people who are wise, he was cheerful and amiable, because that was the way to be healthy and happy and to have those around one agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished them to do. He told people, not the truth, not the unpleasant thing that might help them, but what they wished to hear. His family lived in luxurious comfort only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort. His wife and his daughter dressed fashionably and went about and entertained in the fashionable, expensive way only because that was the sort of life that gratified his vanity. He lived to get what he wanted; he got it every day and every hour of a life into which no rain ever fell; he died, honored, respected, beloved, and lamented.

The clever trick he had played upon his fellow beings came very near to discovery a few days after his death. His widow and her son and daughter-in-law and daughter were in the living-room of the charming house at Hanging Rock, near New York, alternating between sorrowings over the dead man and plannings for the future. Said the widow:

"If Henry had only thought what would become of us if he were taken away!"

"If he had saved even a small part of what he made every year from the time he was twenty-six--for he always made a big income," said his son, Frank.

"But he was so generous, so soft-hearted!" exclaimed the widow. "He could deny us nothing."

"He couldn"t bear seeing us with the slightest wish ungratified," said Frank.

"He was the best father that ever lived!" cried the daughter, Mildred.

And Mrs. Gower the elder and Mrs. Gower the younger wept; and Mildred turned away to hide the emotion distorting her face; and Frank stared gloomily at the carpet and sighed. The hideous secret of the life of duplicity was safe, safe forever.

In fact, Henry Gower had often thought of the fate of his family if he should die. In the first year of his married life, at a time when pa.s.sion for a beautiful bride was almost sweeping him into generous thought, he had listened for upward of an hour to the eloquence of a life insurance agent. Then the agent, misled by Gower"s effusively generous and unselfish expressions, had taken a false tack. He had descanted upon the supreme satisfaction that would be felt by a dying man as he reflected how his young widow would be left in affluence. He made a vivid picture; Gower saw--saw his bride happier after his death than she had been during his life, and attracting a swarm of admirers by her beauty, well set off in becoming black, and by her independent income. The generous impulse then and there shriveled to its weak and shallow roots. With tears in his kind, clear eyes he thanked the agent and said:

"You have convinced me. You need say no more. I"ll send for you in a few days."

The agent never got into his presence again. Gower lived up to his income, secure in the knowledge that his ability as a lawyer made him certain of plenty of money as long as he should live. But it would show an utter lack of comprehension of his peculiar species of character to imagine that he let himself into the secret of his own icy-heartedness by ceasing to think of the problem of his wife and two children without him to take care of them. On the contrary, he thought of it every day, and planned what he would do about it--to-morrow. And for his delay he had excellent convincing excuses. Did he not take care of his naturally robust health? Would he not certainly outlive his wife, who was always doctoring more or less? Frank would be able to take care of himself; anyhow, it was not well to bring a boy up to expectations, because every man should be self-supporting and self-reliant. As for Mildred, why, with her beauty and her cleverness she could not but make a brilliant marriage. Really, there was for him no problem of an orphaned family"s future; there was no reason why he should deny himself any comfort or luxury, or his vanity any of the t.i.tillations that come from social display.

That one of his calculations which was the most vital and seemed the surest proved to be worthless. It is not the weaklings who die, after infancy and youth, but the strong, healthy men and women. The weaklings have to look out for themselves, receive ample warning in the disastrous obvious effects of the slightest imprudence. The robust, even the wariest of them, even the Henry Gowers, overestimate and overtax their strength. Gower"s downfall was champagne. He could not resist a bottle of it for dinner every night. As so often happens, the collapse of the kidneys came without any warning that a man of powerful const.i.tution would deem worthy of notice. By the time the doctor began to suspect the gravity of his trouble he was too far gone.

Frank, candidly greedy and selfish--"Such a contrast to his father!"

everyone said--was married to the prettiest girl in Hanging Rock and had a satisfactory law practice in New York. His income was about fifteen thousand a year. But his wife had tastes as extravagant as his own; and Hanging Rock is one of those suburbs of New York where gather well-to-do middle-cla.s.s people to live luxuriously and to delude each other and themselves with the notion that they are fashionable, rich New Yorkers who prefer to live in the country "like the English." Thus, Henry Gower"s widow and daughter could count on little help from Frank--and they knew it.

"You and Milly will have to move to some less expensive place than Hanging Rock," said Frank--it was the living-room conference a few days after the funeral.

Mildred flushed and her eyes flashed. She opened her lips to speak--closed them again with the angry retort unuttered. After all, Frank was her mother"s and her sole dependence. They could hope for little from him, but nothing must be said that would give him and his mean, selfish wife a chance to break with them and refuse to do anything whatever.

"And Mildred must get married," said Natalie. In Hanging Rock most of the girls and many of the boys had given names taken from Burke"s Peerage, the Almanac de Gotha, and fashionable novels.

Again Mildred flushed; but her eyes did not flash, neither did she open her lips to speak. The little remark of her sister-in-law, apparently so harmless and sensible, was in fact a poisoned arrow. For Mildred was twenty-three, had been "out" five years, and was not even in the way to become engaged. She and everyone had a.s.sumed from her lovely babyhood that she would marry splendidly, would marry wealth and social position. How could it be otherwise? Had she not beauty? Had she not family and position? Had she not style and cleverness? Yet--five years out and not a "serious" proposal. An impudent poor fellow with no prospects had asked her. An impudent rich man from fashionable New York had hung after her--and had presently abandoned whatever dark projects he may have been concealing and had married in his own set, "as they always do, the miserable sn.o.bs," raved Mrs. Gower, who had been building high upon those lavish outpourings of candy, flowers, and automobile rides. Mildred, however, had accepted the defection more philosophically. She had had enough vanity to like the attentions of the rich and fashionable New Yorker, enough good sense to suspect, perhaps not definitely, what those attentions meant, but certainly what they did not mean. Also, in the back of her head had been an intention to refuse Stanley Baird, if by chance he should ask her. Was there any substance to this intention, sprung from her disliking the conceited, self-a.s.sured sn.o.b as much as she liked his wealth and station? Perhaps not. Who can say? At any rate, may we not claim credit for our good intentions--so long as, even through lack of opportunity, we have not stultified them?

With every natural advantage apparently, Mildred"s failure to catch a husband seemed to be somehow her own fault. Other girls, less endowed than she, were marrying, were marrying fairly well. Why, then, was Mildred lagging in the market?

There may have been other reasons, reasons of accident--for, in the higher cla.s.s matrimonial market, few are called and fewer chosen. There was one reason not accidental; Hanging Rock was no place for a girl so superior as was Mildred Gower to find a fitting husband. As has been hinted, Hanging Rock was one of those upper-middle-cla.s.s colonies where splurge and social ambition dominate the community life. In such colonies the young men are of two cla.s.ses--those beneath such a girl as Mildred, and those who had the looks, the manners, the intelligence, and the prospects to justify them in looking higher socially--in looking among the very rich and really fashionable. In the Hanging Rock sort of community, having all the sn.o.bbishness of Fifth Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the sn.o.bbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities, beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a coa.r.s.e and brutal materialism, a pa.s.sion for money, for luxury, for display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst. No one can live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some impossible combination of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a young man who would have appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of his appreciation.

This combination did not happen. In Mildred"s generation and set there were only the two cla.s.ses of men noted above. The men of the one of them which could not have attracted her accepted their fate of mating with second-choice females to whom they were themselves second choice.

The men of the other cla.s.s rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions, hung about the rich people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island, and would as soon have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to wife as of exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces.

Having attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them there. Hanging Rock denounced them as sn.o.bs, for Hanging Rock was virtuously eloquent on the subject of sn.o.bbishness--we human creatures being never so effective as when a.s.sailing in others the vice or weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal a.s.sociation with it.

But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban society were approved, were envied. And Hanging Rock was most gracious to them whenever it got the chance.

In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various cla.s.ses of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who are full of the poison of sn.o.bbishness. She had been born and bred in an environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a kitchen-garden with onions. She knew nothing else. The secret intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the more astonishing--and the more significant. From time to time in any given environment you will find some isolated person, some personality, with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-cla.s.s community you come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all about her from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world, Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained something of these dream flowers sown in the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or play or perhaps by some casually read and soon forgotten article in magazine or newspaper. We have the habit of thinking only weeds produce seeds that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere. The truth is that fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity. Pull away at the weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not so. Though you may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if you but clear a little s.p.a.ce of its weeds--which you have been planting and cultivating.

Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she had not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including herself, predicted for her and expected of her. On the contrary, it was the most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying men who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their sn.o.bbishness ordered. And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the Countess of Waring-- But he was profoundly afraid of them; so, it is idle to speculate about him.

What did men see when they looked at Mildred Gower? Usually, when men look at a woman, they have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense of something feminine. That, and nothing more. Afterward, through some whim or some thrust from chance they may see in her, or fancy they see in her, the thing feminine that their souls--it is always "soul"--most yearns after. But just at first glance, so colorless or conventionally colored is the usual human being, the average woman--indeed every woman but she who is exceptional--creates upon man the mere impression of pleasant or unpleasant petticoats. In the exceptional woman something obtrudes. She has astonishing hair, or extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a man like a magnet; or it is the allure of a peculiar smile or of a figure whose sinuosities as she moves seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance in masculine nerves. Further, the possession of one of these signal charms usually causes all her charms to have more than ordinary potency. The sight of the man is so bewitched by the one potent charm that he sees the whole woman under a spell.

Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a slender and well-formed figure, had a face of the kind that is called lovely; and her smile, sweet, dreamy, revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness delicate animation. She had an abundance of hair, neither light nor dark; she had a fine clear skin. Her eyes, gray and rather serious and well set under long straight brows, gave her a look of honesty and intelligence. But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly healthy and vital red. She had beauty, she had intelligence. But it was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh, with their ever-changing, ever-fascinating line expressing in a thousand ways the pa.s.sion and poetry of the kiss.

Of all the men who had admired her and had edged away because they feared she would bewitch them into forgetting what the world calls "good common sense"--of all those men only one had suspected the real reason for her physical power over men. All but Stanley Baird had thought themselves attracted because she was so pretty or so stylish or so clever and amusing to talk with. Baird had lived intelligently enough to learn that feminine charm is never general, is always specific. He knew it was Mildred Gower"s lips that haunted, that frightened ambitious men away, that sent men who knew they hadn"t a ghost of a chance with her discontentedly back to the second-choice women who alone were available for them. Fortunately for Mildred, Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter a woman discriminatingly, did not tell her the secret of her fascination. If he had told her, she would no doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would inevitably have lost it.

To go on with that important conference in the sitting-room in the handsome, roomy house of the Gowers at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower eagerly seized upon his wife"s subtly nasty remark. "I don"t see why in thunder you haven"t married, Milly," said he. "You"ve had every chance, these last four or five years."

"And it"ll be harder now," moaned her mother. "For it looks as though we were going to be wretchedly poor. And poverty is so repulsive."

"Do you think," said Mildred, "that giving me the idea that I must marry right away will make it easier for me to marry? Everyone who knows us knows our circ.u.mstances." She looked significantly at Frank"s wife, who had been wailing through Hanging Rock the woeful plight of her dead father-in-law"s family. The young Mrs. Gower blushed and glanced away. "And," Mildred went on, "everyone is saying that I must marry at once--that there"s nothing else for me to do." She smiled bitterly. "When I go into the street again I shall see nothing but flying men. And no man would come to call unless he brought a chaperon and a witness with him."

"How can you be so frivolous?" reproached her mother.

Mildred was used to being misunderstood by her mother, who had long since been made hopelessly dull by the suffocating life she led and by pain from her feet, which never left her at ease for a moment except when she had them soaking in cold water. Mrs. Gower had been born with ordinary feet, neither ugly nor pretty and entirely fit for the uses for which nature intended feet. She had spoiled them by wearing shoes to make them look smaller and slimmer than they were. In steady weather she was plaintive; in changeable weather she varied between irritable and violent.

Said Mildred to her brother: "How much--JUST how much is there?"

"I can"t say exactly," replied her brother, who had not yet solved to his satisfaction the moral problem of how much of the estate he ought to allow his mother and sister and how much he ought to claim for himself--in such a way that the claim could not be disputed.

Mildred looked fixedly at him. He showed his uneasiness not by glancing away, but by the appearance of a certain hard defiance in his eyes. Said she:

"What is the very most we can hope for?"

A silence. Her mother broke it. "Mildred, how CAN you talk of those things--already?"

"I don"t know," replied Mildred. "Perhaps because it"s got to be done."

This seemed to them all--and to herself--a lame excuse for such apparent hardness of heart. Her father had always been SENDER-HEARTED--HAD NEVER SPOKEN OF MONEY, OR ENCOURAGED HIS FAMILY IN SPEAKING OF IT.

A LONG AND PAINFUL SILENCE. THEN, THE WIDOW ABRUPTLY:

"YOU"RE SURE, Frank, there"s NO insurance?"

"Father always said that you disliked the idea," replied her son; "that you thought insurance looked like your calculating on his death."

Under her husband"s adroit prompting Mrs. Gower had discovered such a view of insurance in her brain. She now recalled expressing it--and regretted. But she was silenced. She tried to take her mind of the subject of money. But, like Mildred, she could not. The thought of imminent poverty was nagging at them like toothache. "There"ll be enough for a year or so?" she said, timidly interrogative.

"I hope so," said Frank.

Mildred was eying him fixedly again. Said she: "Have you found anything at all?"

"He had about eight thousand dollars in bank," said Frank. "But most of it will go for the pressing debts."

"But how did HE expect to live?" urged Mildred.