Part 14

Emily might like this novel-writing--and sometimes she thought it would do Martha good to get this resentment all out of her mind, expressed in words--of she might disapprove--for certainly Martha was working as she had never worked before to Emily's knowledge--which couldn't be good for her shattered nerves. But she was helpless. She knew if she commanded Martha to stop it, Martha would refuse. She had a call now; she had a mission in life. Somebody had to tell the truth. And men, of course, didn't even know what truth was, and they wouldn't tell it if they did know. Oh, they did make her sick at her stomach! Emily had to register her protest at times against Martha's description of what she was writing.

"It's NOT a nice novel, I know that. I never intended it should be; but I'll tell you right now, it's a lot nicer than things are in this world, mammie!"

In February Bob began writing of their coming home. He threatened--that was the word Martha used--to come down and see them. Emily would have welcomed him; she was lonely and unhappy. She said miserably to herself more than once that what she needed was some wise and sympathetic person with whom she might talk over Martha's plight. If Bob was neither wise nor sympathetic, he was always solicitous and tender at heart. And Martha was often irritable and unreasonable, and sometimes unconsciously cruel. She seemed at times to look upon her mother as one of the wrongs life had done her. One afternoon they were standing together at the end of the pier, looking at the opalescent sea and the flowery clouds about the sunset.

She had begun, apropos of nothing but her constant musings, "Mother, wasn't there something funny about Grandma Kenworthy?"

"Funny? No. What do you mean?"

"But she was terribly religious, wasn't she?"

"She was--religious, certainly."

"But wasn't she sort of fanatical?"

"No, she wasn't! Don't you remember her? She was the dearest old thing that I ever knew--the most companionable woman."

"But somebody told me--or, anyway, I heard she used to pray, when she was poor, and she used to believe her prayers were answered, too."

"Well, that doesn't prove she was--funny. You meant--not quite right in her mind, didn't you?"

"Yes. And people say--it's all sort of the same thing, being too religious--or--you know--like me, mammie."

"Martha! She was as sane as any woman! What could she do but pray? She hadn't any health. She hadn't any money for her little boys. All that woman went through--if she hadn't had a strong mind, she would have gone crazy! She must have been far better balanced than most women, let me tell you. And look here, child----"

"Well?"

"Why do you go on thinking about insanity? Don't you see you only did what every woman does? After all, every woman who ever bore a child submitted to the preliminaries. Didn't she, now?"

"Preliminaries! My God, mother! How you do talk! You're so high and holy you never know what I mean! Sometimes I feel as if there was a gulf between us--a great wide ocean!"

"Oh, Martha!"

"I do. You can't understand, mammie, you're so good. I don't know how you could have had a child like me!"

That statement explained a good deal of Martha's conduct. She had been acting exactly as if she had been acutely and unhappily conscious of her separation from her mother, and Emily tried to reason her out of it.

"We are infinitely nearer each other than we were last summer, child!"

But that was an unfortunate way of putting it. "Oh, don't say last summer to me, _please_!" Martha cried.

A day or two later she announced, dryly: "There's no use of my writing away at that novel. I don't know how. But I'm going to learn how. It isn't so easy as I thought. I'm going to start in at the University of Chicago the first of April. I'm going to study English."

She plainly wasn't asking permission; she wasn't going to tolerate advice; she had made up her mind. And Emily, who had been wondering what in the world to suggest for the immediate future, was relieved. It might be a very good thing. It would be so great a change of life; it would supply new food for thought. She had not the vaguest idea that the novel would ever come to completion.

She said, "Well, that's an idea. But you must come home for a few days, child! To get your things, at least."

"No, I don't want to. You can send them to me, if I need anything. I never want to go back to that house again as long as I live!"

"Well, if you feel that way----"

"You mean I ought to go back, so people won't talk, so they won't suspect anything?"

"I didn't mean any such thing! People don't suspect you of anything. Get that idea out of your head!"

"I don't see why they shouldn't!" she retorted, cynically. She was so unhappy, so abrupt and almost brutal, that Emily forgot her good resolutions, after she was in bed that night, and just wept. She had to go home without her child. In spite of all that she had planned to prevent such a climax, Martha hated that house now more vindictively than her mother had ever hated it. It wasn't Bob, either, that had driven her away from it; it wasn't Bob that had alienated her from her mother; it was just luck, it was fate. There was no appeal. "It's because I stood by her through all this that she can't stand the sight of me now!" Emily wept. "She's left me. She's going to a hotel in Chicago alone, to get away from me."

The day of their departure Martha was all but intolerably irritable. Emily's patience was almost at an end. She wasn't sure but that her daughter needed at this late date a thoroughly good spanking; but she held her peace. It was fortunate indeed that Emily had cultivated a good grasp on the peace of her mind, for that day she clung to it desperately. And then it nearly got away from her, more than once. However, as they were getting into their train at New Orleans, Martha began, abruptly:

"Look here, mother, it does make me sore to have you act as if I couldn't go to a hotel and take care of myself without you. Don't you think I've learned my lesson yet? Do you think I'm as much of a fool yet as I was last summer? What can hurt a girl alone in a hotel but men? I'm as safe as if I was in a desert, or locked in a cell. If all the men in Chicago were on the bridge, and I got a chance, I'd push them into the river, filthy little rats! I'd watch them sink. I should think you'd understand that by now. But you've been good to me, I know that. And if it will make you any happier, I'll go to the Y.W.C.A. and stay there till I get a flat. Does that satisfy you?"

It was so magnificent a concession that Emily blinked. "Oh yes, I think that would be much better. I'd like that, Martha."

"All right, then. _I_ won't like it; lots of old cats there; but I don't want you to be worrying about me. I can take care of myself, I should hope."

_Chapter Eight_

Wherever Emily went, at home again, she was beset by loquacious pilgrims returned from a winter in the South or in the West. At every gathering of women, the hum and babble held to that subject.

"Well, my brothers have cleared three hundred thousand on their Florida deals. And we're selling our house and leaving in October. After all, as I said to John, what's the use of slaving at housework in Illinois when you can get colored girls in Florida to do your work?"

"Well, I'd rather freeze scrubbing floors in Illinois than have those horrid black women slopping around my house. Do you know, Emily, what one of them actually said to me? There were no knobs or handles or anything on the bureau drawers in my room. Shiftless things! And when I protested, the maid said: 'Well, you don't need no handles. Leave a stocking hanging out, and give it a jerk and the drawer will come open.' I wouldn't stay in that hotel a day longer. I just told Peter I'd stood enough. That's why we went to Daytona."

"I can tell you a place where everything isn't swimming in cold grease. They have a Northern cook. Deliver me from Southern fried cooking."

"And I found that all the cream that was to be had was shipped in from Kentucky. That's three or four hundred miles. Imagine a town that has to ship in cream! They have to paint their cows, or something, and it don't agree with them."

"Well, if you'd gone to California in the first place. We've got our rooms reserved for next year. The view is superb. It scarcely rains at all there."

"I never was so sick of glare in my life. I just thought, let me get back to Illinois. That's good enough for me."

"The trouble with them is, they won't tip enough. It pays to hand out money, on the coast, to be comfortable."

And then they would turn upon Emily, to insist gluttonously upon details of Martha's health. She had acquired a skill in suave evasion that surprised her continually. It had all worked out very well, she would tell them. Martha was much better. She hadn't her color back, but that would come. Of course, Emily had thought it would have been better for her not to go back into college so soon; but she was so ambitious. After she had fallen behind her classmates in her college, she thought she would stay nearer home, in Chicago. So lucky that they had the quarter system in the university there. And if Martha didn't seem able to do the work, Emily would take her out at once. It was easier to keep an eye on her health if she studied in Chicago, and she was living just now at the Y.W.C.A. No one could detect a flaw in the Kenworthy respectability. "Why should I suppose anyone suspects us of anything?" Emily asked herself. "I've just got that habit from Martha!"

She wanted every single passing day that spring to go and see her daughter. And every day she had to remind herself that her daughter was not anxious to be reminded of her folly. Her letters were short and not frequent. And then she wrote briefly that she had taken a room in an apartment of May Bissel's. Emily pondered that information dejectedly. Martha must be a very lonely girl if she had been forced back on to May Bissel for comradeship, for certainly at home she would have scorned her.

She abased herself to seek out Mrs. Bissel, to make inquiry about the news. Mrs. Bissel gushed and reassured her. May hadn't an apartment alone. No, indeed! Her mother wouldn't allow that, not for a moment. She and two other girls had a sitting room and two bedrooms which they rented by the month in the apartment of a grammar-school teacher. This Miss Curtis used her kitchen from six-thirty until seven-thirty in the morning, and allowed the girls to use it for their breakfast for an hour after seven-thirty. They had their lunches and their dinners out. Miss Curtis kept an eye on May. Not that May tolerated any real chaperonage, of course, but Mrs. Bissel felt always that, if May really got sick, or anything happened to her, Miss Curtis would be there to let her mother know. Miss Curtis was a thoroughly dependable woman, and she came from a town in western Iowa where Mrs. Bissel's sister lived.

And that was all the comfort Emily had. Every day she said to herself time and again: "No, I must not go. She doesn't want to see me; she told me so flatly." Finally--it seemed finally--though it was only six low-spirited weeks after they had parted in Chicago, Martha wrote and asked her mother to come and see her. The letter was not affectionate; it was scarcely cordial. Either Martha was ashamed of the way she was treating her mother, or she was intolerably lonely. Emily didn't know which.

When she saw the place her daughter of the painted room was living in, she marveled at her endurance. It was an apartment building which had been got ready hastily and cheaply for the Columbian Exposition. On the second floor front was a muddily tempestuous living room which Martha shared with the two girls. She showed it to her mother contemptuously. "Imagine sitting in a place like this. The art student did it--the one whose place I took. When they offer anybody a chair, they dump its contents out on to the floor. They're simply pigs." Out of this front room a tiny front bedroom opened, which was Martha's. It was the most comfortable room in the house. "I bought those curtains and the bedspread; but feel them, mammie. They've been up three weeks now, and they're grimy. That smoke comes in from across the street." She spoke dispiritedly. Behind the living room was a bedroom with one window which the two girls shared; behind that, off a dark hall, another bedroom, rented to a "medic"; behind that, the dining room where Miss Curtis lived; behind that, the kitchen. It was only at second sight that the bathroom seemed disgusting. It was all dark, smoke discolored, meager.

Her work in the university wasn't bad, she said. She wrote a theme every day, and it was good practice. She had to read a lot of trash in her literature courses. "I have to read every day a novel some silly flea or other wrote." (Males had been pigs a few months ago in her estimation. They had shrunk to rats, and now what less could they become than fleas? Emily wondered.) "I don't finish them. I get too sick. They revolt me. I tabulate them. Look, mammie!" She showed Emily a large notebook. "Here's seventeen what they call great novelists, and only two of them know anything, really. If they show any signs of knowing the difference between men and women, I put them in this column. 'Brass-tackers' I call them. Funny they're both Russian, isn't it? All the rest of the idiots are here." She had labeled them "Preliminaries," because they think that's all there is to it. "Oh, mammie, you must read _Crime and Punishment_. Dostoieffsky knew. That poor little Sonia, mother! I'll lend you this. She just covered herself up with a green shawl and shuddered when she came in. You could just see her shudder, if you were in that room." But in that room on Fifty-seventh Street no one saw Emily Kenworthy shuddering. "And that!" Martha pointed scornfully to a volume of Wells. "They make me read even _that_ sort of stuff. You wait till people read my novel; I'll bet you they'll begin to see through those men. Why does Wells have all his maternal women sort of freaks, or something, and all his heroines not maternal? There's a reason, believe me!"

"Are you still working on the novel?"

Martha turned on her indignantly. "Well, I like _that_! What did you think I was putting up with this filthy place for?"

Emily suggested timidly at least occasional week-ends at home.

"Don't talk to me about that!" Martha pleaded.

Emily went back thoroughly discouraged. Was that any place of healing for the child? It was no change, if Martha was to go on working on that volume of hate. She was as hard as ever; she was thinner and she was yellow. All the comfort Emily found was in saying over and over to herself a line which had no connection in her mind with anything. She thought vaguely perhaps it came from the Bible. "What wound did ever heal but by degrees?" She tried often to think of what followed; of another wording for it. It was that line, which she felt she was not saying correctly, that she lived by. And sometimes, there in her living room, she thought of Mr. Fairbanks' unfortunate daughter. Her wound, he said, had never healed; it had corrupted and poisoned her. "I spoiled her," Emily would muse. "She's been taken away from me; I've got to stand aside." And then she would say again, because she couldn't help it, "What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"

She went on despising life. She would not desist from protesting against it. She said, "If only Martha had quarreled with Bob, I could go to her, sometimes. I could live with her in Chicago. I don't suppose she will come back to this house now, if I should die. I never thought she would hate both me and the house. I must do something now, to keep from thinking. I better adopt a child for a while. I ought to write and ask somebody to come and stay with me this summer. There's that old Miss Jenson; but Bob would never stand her. Or we might do over all the rooms downstairs. If Martha would only come and help me. But if she would come and help me, I wouldn't need to do it! I believe I'll try hybridizing hemorocalis. Or what in the world will I do? If only I had had a house full of children! If Bob would only take an hour or two off, now and then! I've got to settle down to this. I mustn't fuss because Martha can't endure the sight of me. It's my own fault. I spoiled her, some way. But I never meant to! ... Thank God, it's time to clean house!"

But now, as always, she entered that festival with no high-hearted challenge to mess and accumulation. She followed Maggie from room to room loyally but without enthusiasm. The idea of leaving the abandoned painted room stagnant never entered the head of the old servant. She attacked it so furiously that Emily hadn't the heart to say to her that all her burnishings would be futile. She shut its door at last with the feeling of spineless hope she had when she looked, for some justifiable reason, at the baby clothes she had folded away. There they were, all ready at hand, in case she ever by some good luck might need them again--not that there was much hope, of course. She loitered along after Maggie into the next battlefield.

And then, when it was all done, when on the newly painted veranda every summer chair had its freshest garments tied on, Emily, being finished with dust, washed her hair one day and dried it in the sun in the garden, remembering how Martha always protested against the waste of time which so much long thick hair took for drying. It seemed almost as if the spring and weather, pleased with the way the brown hair rippled in its dampness, laid a trap to catch the little girl who had played in that garden. For then a shower came up, after noon, and passed over, and the sun came out with a dazzling soft afternoon brilliance. In the blossoming apple trees orioles were calling, and robins were hopping about in the wet petals below them. The grass was all young, and heavenly green, and the air had a soft and glittering cleanness. It was an afternoon to make even the dull feel that to forget its very quality was to have lived in vain. Emily had played about in the garden all the afternoon. She came into the house to get some labels stowed away in a drawer in her desk. She sat down and began sorting them----

And into the living room, bareheaded, laden with coats and bags, walked Miss Martha.

She came in quietly, as if it had been an ordinary coming. She was bringing some one to her mother.

"This is Miss Curtis, mother," she explained. "We drove out. It was such a nice day. I suppose you can put us up? Gee! It smells good here! How long till supper? We're starved, mammie. Sit down, Miss Curtis, I'll bring the things in myself!"

Emily saw a large and flabby-looking woman, in a nondescript tan-colored coat and a small black hat, who might have been fifty. She pulled off her hat and apologized for the untidiness of her stringy hair, and good reason she had for apologizing. She had a rather fine square face; she had kindly eyes. But the most impressive thing about her was her utter weariness.

And Martha came in again, with more bags and parcels.

"Can't we have asparagus for supper, if I go out and cut it?" she asked.

Miss Curtis was eager to get out into the garden. There was not a moment to be lost. The immortal afternoon was wearing away. They would only run up to their rooms.

"Can I have the little guest room, mammie?" Martha had asked. "I want her to have the big one."

And presently there she was, just as if nothing had happened, coming out of the house and down the path towards her mother and Miss Curtis, under the willow tree, bareheaded and carrying the very old colander and the very old knife she had used for cutting asparagus ever since, as a little girl, she had been allowed that privilege.

"You've never eaten asparagus unless you've cut it," she was explaining to her guest. "Ten minutes from the garden to the kettle, that's when it's good, really."

She was better, Emily said to herself. She was subdued; she was thoughtful of her guest. She had ceased, for the moment, to rail. She was showing Miss Curtis all the garden. The asparagus had already been cut once that day, for Bob was fond of it. But there was enough just for two. And this warm rain would bring more on by to-morrow. And she took what she had found into the house, and returned to show her wild-flower bed.

"Look what a little cultivation does for violets here. They aren't really modest, under mossy stones. They're only starved. They get swanky enough when you give them a place to grow," she said. "And look at the Dutchman's breeches! And here's my old jack-in-the-pulpit. And look at the peonies! Gee, mammie! Mrs. Benton will be budding all over the county before long." She made Miss Curtis admire her willow tree, and the clear water gurgling along beneath it.

"You're a glutton for education, Martha," Miss Curtis sighed, "to be living with me in the city when you might be out here at home!" And she went in to get ready for supper.

Left alone for a moment with her mother, Martha stood sniffling.

"I had forgotten it smelled so good, so clean!" she said, wistfully. "I simply hate Chicago. It's just sickening when spring comes. Everybody goes out of town for week-ends. All the teachers go down to the dunes, and bring nice little mossy things back with them, mammie. That's why I came out here. They wanted Miss Curtis to go with them; and she wanted to, too. But she can't afford it; it costs two or three dollars, she says. It would cost me ten!--to go away for a week-end. She's such a good old dear, isn't she, mammie? I tried to get her to go some place with me for the week-end. But she wouldn't hear of me paying the bills. I did want her to get away. And then she said I could come down and visit her school; and I did. My God! mammie! If you could see that room of hers on a spring afternoon. Close is no word for it. Smelling of all the dirty little wops that have never been bathed in their lives. All wiggling and squirming and wanting to get out of doors, of course. I tell you I could hardly stand it for an hour. And to see her sticking shut up in there, day after day, for six years! It made me so mad! I just made up my mind to bring her out here for the week-ends. That wouldn't cost her even the price of a bed. I went and bought a car, and she hadn't an excuse left. I'm going to put her to bed after supper. She's ready to collapse. She had a chill the other evening, she was so done up. We had to get the doctor. If you'd seen that room, you'd wonder why she isn't dead. Isn't she a sort of nice old thing, mammie?"

"It is for this woman's sake she has come home," Emily was trying not to think. "She never realizes _I'm_ lonely. I'm only her mother, after all!"

"I'm sure she needs a change, Martha. Are you still getting her suppers?"

"You wait till you see what a good cook I'm getting to be! There is stuff you can get to eat for thirty cents, if you hunt round. Oh!" exclaimed Martha Kenworthy. "There's dad home. I heard the car stop," she sighed.

In the living room she confronted him.

"Hello, kiddo!" he cried. "You here?" He looked at Emily, and then he grew cordial. He knew _he_ couldn't have made his wife's face shine so. "It's pretty good to see you again!" He kissed her. "You drove down? Did you borrow the car from the fire department? Whose is it?"

"It's mine," said Martha.

"No!"

"Yes, it's mine."

"Huh! I'd have given you one at wholesale."