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The Precipice: A Novel, a novel by Elia W. Peattie |
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Chapter 3 |
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_ CHAPTER III It was sweet to awaken in the old room. Through the open window she could see the fork in the linden tree and the squirrels making free in the branches. The birds were at their opera, and now and then the shape of one outlined itself against the holland shade. Kate had been commanded to take her breakfast in bed and she was more than willing to do so. The after-college lassitude was upon her and her thoughts moved drowsily through her weary brain. Her mother, by an unwonted exercise of self-control, kept from the room that morning, stopping only now and then at the door for a question or a look. That was sweet, too. Kate loved to have her hovering about like that, and yet the sight of her, so fragile, so fluttering, added to the sense of sadness that was creeping over her. After a time it began to rain softly, the drops slipping down into the shrubbery and falling like silver beads from the window-hood. At that Kate began to weep, too, just as quietly, and then she slept again. Her mother coming in on tiptoe saw tears on the girl's cheek, but she did not marvel. Though her experience had been narrow she was blessed with certain perceptions. She knew that even women who called themselves happy sometimes had need to weep. * * * * * The little pensive pause was soon over. There was no use, as all the sturdier part of Kate knew, in holding back from the future. That very afternoon the new life began forcing itself on her. The neighbors called, eager to meet this adventurous one who had turned her back on the pleasant conventions and had refused to content herself with the Silvertree Seminary for Young Ladies. They wanted to see what the new brand of young woman was like. Moreover, there was no one who was not under obligations to be kind to her mother's daughter. So, presently the whole social life of Silvertree, aroused from its midsummer torpor by this exciting event, was in full swing. Kate wrote to Honora a fortnight later:--
"How long can I stand it, Honora, my dear old defender of freedom? The classrooms are mine no more; the campus is a departed glory; I shall no longer sing the 'Alma Mater' with you when the chimes ring at ten. The whole challenge of the city is missing. Nothing opposes me, there is no task for me to do. I must be supine, acquiescent, smiling, non-essential. I am like a runner who has trained for a race, and, ready for the speeding, finds that no race is on. But I've no business to be surprised. I knew it would be like this, didn't I? the one thing is to ¸make and keep mummy happy. She needs me _so_ much. And I am happy to be with her. Write me often--write me everything. Gods, how I'd like a walk and talk with you!"
Kate answered his letters, for it was pleasant to have a masculine correspondent. It provided a needed stimulation. Moreover, in the back of her mind she knew that he presented an avenue of escape if Silvertree and home became unendurable. It seemed piteous enough that her life with her parents should so soon have become a mere matter of duty and endurance, but there was a feeling of perpetually treading on eggs in the Barrington house. Kate could have screamed with exasperation as one eventless day after another dawned and the blight of caution and apprehension was never lifted from her mother and Martha. She writhed with shame at the sight of her mother's cajolery of the tyrant she served--and loved. To have spoken out once, recklessly, to have entered a wordy combat without rancor and for the mere zest of tournament, to have let the winnowing winds of satire blow through the house with its stale sentimentalities and mental attitudes, would have reconciled her to any amount of difference in the point of view. But the hushed voice and covertly held position afflicted her like shame. Were all women who became good wives asked to falsify themselves? Was furtive diplomacy, or, at least, spiritual compromise, the miserable duty of woman? Was it her business to placate her mate, and, by exercising the cunning of the weak, to keep out from under his heel? There was no one in all Silvertree whom the discriminating would so quickly have mentioned as the ideal wife as Mrs. Barrington. She herself, no doubt, so Kate concluded with her merciless young psychology, regarded herself as noble. But the people in Silvertree had a passion for thinking of themselves as noble. They had, Kate said to herself bitterly, so few charms that they had to fall back on their virtues. In the face of all this it became increasingly difficult to think of marriage as a goal for herself, and her letters to McCrea were further and further apart as the slow weeks passed. She had once read the expression, "the authentic voice of happiness," and it had lived hauntingly in her memory. Could Ray speak that? Would she, reading his summons from across half the world, hasten to him, choose him from the millions, face any future with him? She knew she would not. No, no; union with the man of average congeniality was not her goal. There must be something more shining than that for her to speed toward it. However, one day she caught, opportunely, a hint of the further meanings of a woman's life. Honora provided a great piece of news, and illuminated with a new understanding, Kate wrote:--
"You write me that something beautiful is going to happen to you. I can guess what it is and I agree that it is glorious, though it does take my breath away. Now there are two of you--and by and by there will be three, and the third will be part you and part David and all a miracle. I can see how it makes life worth living, Honora, as nothing else could--nothing else! "Mummy wouldn't like me to write like this. She doesn't approve of women whose understanding jumps ahead of their experiences. But what is the use of pretending that I don't encompass your miracle? I knew all about it from the beginning of the earth. "This will mean that you will have to give up your laboratory work with David, I suppose. Will that be a hardship? Or are you glad of the old womanly excuse for passing by the outside things, and will you now settle down to be as fine a mother as you were a chemist? Will you go further, my dear, and make a fuss about your house and go all delicately bedizened after the manner of the professors' nice little wives--go in, I mean, for all the departments of the feminine profession? "I do hope you'll have a little son, Honora, not so much on your account as on his. During childhood a girl's feet are as light as a boy's bounding over the earth; but when once childhood is over, a man's life seems so much more coherent than a woman's, though it is not really so important. But it takes precisely the experience you are going through to give it its great significance, doesn't it? "What other career is there for real women, I wonder? What, for example, am I to do, Honora? There at the University I prepared myself for fine work, but I'm trapped here in this silly Silvertree cage. If I had a talent I could make out very well, but I am talentless, and all I do now is to answer the telephone for father and help mummy embroider the towels. They won't let me do anything else. Some one asked me the other day what colors I intended wearing this autumn. I wanted to tell them smoke-of-disappointment, ashes-of-dreams, and dull-as-wash-Monday. But I only said ashes-of-roses. "'Not all of your frocks, surely, Kate,' one of the girls cried. 'All,' I declared; 'street frocks, evening gowns, all.' 'But you mustn't be odd,' my little friend warned. 'Especially as people are a little suspicious that you will be because of your going to a co-educational college.' "I thought it would be so restful here, but it doesn't offer peace so much as shrinkage. Silvertree isn't pastoral--it's merely small town. Of course it is possible to imagine a small town that would be ideal--a community of quiet souls leading the simple life. But we aren't great or quiet souls here, and are just as far from simple as our purses and experience will let us be. "I dare say that you'll be advising me, as a student of psychology, to stop criticizing and to try to do something for the neighbors here--go in search of their submerged selves. But, honestly, it would require too much paraphernalia in the way of diving-bells and air-pumps. "I have, however, a reasonable cause of worry. Dear little mummy isn't well. At first we thought her indisposition of little account, but she seems run down. She has been flurried and nervous ever since I came home; indeed, I may say she has been so for years. Now she seems suddenly to have broken down. But I'm going to do everything I can for her, and I know father will, too; for he can't endure to have any one sick. It arouses his great virtue, his physicianship." * * * * * A week later Kate mailed this:-- "I am turning to you in my terrible fear. Mummy won't answer our questions and seems lost in a world of thought. Father has called in other physicians to help him. I can't tell you how like a frightened child I feel. Oh, my poor little bewildered mummy! What do you suppose she is thinking about?" * * * * * Then, a week afterward, this--on black-bordered paper:--
"She's been gone three days. To the last we couldn't tell why she fell ill. We only knew she made no effort to get well. I am tormented by the fear that I had something to do with her breaking like that. She was appalled--shattered--at the idea of any friction between father and me. When I stood up for my own ideas against his, it was to her as sacrilegious as if I had lifted my hand against a king. I might have capitulated--ought, I suppose, to have foregone everything! "There is one thing, however, that gives me strange comfort. At the last she had such dignity! Her silence seemed fine and brave. She looked at us from a deep still peace as if, after all her losing of the way, she had at last found it and Herself. The search has carried her beyond our sight. "Oh, we are so lonely, father and I. We silently accuse each other. He thinks my reckless truth-telling destroyed her timid spirit; I think his twenty-five years of tyranny did it. We both know how she hated our rasping, and we hate it ourselves. Yet, even at that hour when we stood beside her bed and knew the end was coming, he and I were at sword's points. What a hackneyed expression, but how terrible! Yes, the hateful swords of our spirits, my point toward his breast and his toward mine, gleamed there almost visibly above that little tired creature. He wanted her for himself even to the last: I wanted her for Truth--wanted her to walk up to God dressed in her own soul-garments, not decked out in the rags and tags of those father had tossed to her. "She spoke only once. She had been dreaming, I suppose, and a wonderful illuminated smile broke over her face. In the midst of what seemed a sort of ecstasy, she looked up and saw father watching her. She shivered away from him with one of those apologetic gestures she so often used. 'It wasn't a heavenly vision,' she said--she knew he wouldn't have believed in that--'it was only that I thought my little brown baby was in my arms.' She meant me, Honora,--think of it. She had gone back to those tender days when I had been dependent on her for all my well-being. My mummy! I gathered her close and held her till she was gone, my little, strange, frightened love. "Now father and I hide our thoughts from each other. He wanted to know if I was going to keep house for him. I said I'd try, for six months. He flew in one of his rages because I admitted that it would be an experiment. He wanted to know what kind of a daughter I was, and I told him the kind he had made me. Isn't that hideous? "I've no right to trouble you, but I must confide in some one or my heart will break. There's no one here I can talk to, though many are kind. And Ray--perhaps you think I should have written all this to him. But I wasn't moved to do so, Honora. Try to forgive me for telling you these troubles now in the last few days before your baby comes. I suppose I turn to you because you are one of the blessed corporation of mothers--part and parcel of the mother-fact. It's like being a part of the good rolling earth, just as familiar and comforting. Thinking of you mysteriously makes me good. I'm going to forget myself, the way you do, and 'make a home' for father. "Your own KATE."
"I'm one who needs explanations all along the road. Why? Why? Why? That is what my soul keeps demanding. Why couldn't I go back to Chicago with Ray McCrea? He was down here the other day, but I wouldn't let him say the things he obviously had come to say, and now he's on his way abroad and very likely we shall not meet again. I feel so numb since mummy died that I can't care about Ray. I keep crying 'Why?' about Death among other things. And about that horrid gulf between father and me. If we try to get across we only fall in. He has me here ready to his need. He neither knows nor cares what my thoughts are. So long as I answer the telephone faithfully, sterilize the drinking-water, and see that he gets his favorite dishes, he is content. I have no liberty to leave the house and my restlessness is torture. The neighbors no longer flutter in as they used when mummy was here. They have given me over to my year of mourning--which means vacuity. "Partly for lack of something better to do I have cleaned the old house from attic to cellar, and have been glad to creep to bed lame and sore from work, because then I could sleep. Father won't let me read at night--watches for signs of the light under my door and calls out to me if it shows. It is golden weather without, dear friend, and within is order and system. But what good? I am stagnating, perishing. I can see no release--cannot even imagine in what form I would like it to come. In your great happiness remember my sorrow. And with your wonderful sweetness forgive my bitter egotism. But truly, Honora, I die daily."
"Go down to Silvertree, Lena, there's a dear," begged her old schoolmate. But Lena was working for her doctor's degree and could not spare the time. The holidays came on, and Mrs. Fulham tried to imagine her friend as being at last broken to her galling harness. Surely there must be compensations for any father and daughter who can dwell together. Her own Christmas was a very happy one, and she was annoyed with herself that her thoughts so continually turned to Kate. She had an uneasy sense of apprehension in spite of all her verbal assurances to Lena that Kate could master any situation. * * * * * What really happened in Silvertree that day changed, as it happened, the course of Kate's life. Sorrow came to her afterward, disappointment, struggle, but never so heavy and dragging a pain as she knew that Christmas Day. She had been trying in many unsuspected ways to relieve her father's grim misery,--a misery of which his gaunt face told the tale,--and although he had said that he wished for "no flubdub about Christmas," she really could not resist making some recognition of a day which found all other homes happy. When the doctor came in for his midday meal, Kate had a fire leaping in the old grate with the marble mantel and a turkey smoking on a table which was set forth with her choicest china and silver. She had even gone so far as to bring out a dish distinctly reminiscent of her mother,--the delicious preserved peaches, which had awaked unavailing envy in the breasts of good cooks in the village. There was pudding, too, and brandy sauce, and holly for decorations. It represented a very mild excursion into the land of festival, but it was too much for Dr. Barrington. He had come in cold, tired, hungry, and, no doubt, bitterly sorrowful at the bottom of his perverse heart. He discerned Kate in white--it was the first time she had laid off her mourning--and with a chain of her mother's about her neck. Beyond, he saw the little Christmas feast and the old silver vase on the table, red with berries. "You didn't choose to obey my orders," he said coldly, turning his unhappy blue eyes on her. "Your orders?" she faltered. "There was to be no fuss and feathers of any sort," he said. "Christmas doesn't represent anything recognized in my philosophy, and you know it. We've had enough of pretense in this house. I've been working to get things on a sane basis and I believed you were sensible enough to help me. But you're just like the rest of them--you're like all of your sex. You've got to have your silly play-time. I may as well tell you now that you don't give me any treat when you give me turkey, for I don't like it." "Oh, dad!" cried Kate; "you do! I've seen you eat it many times! Come, really it's a fine dinner. I helped to get it. Let's have a good time for once." "I have plenty of good times, but I have them in my own way." "They don't include me!" cried Kate, her lips quivering. "You're too hard on me, dad,--much too hard. I can't stand it, really." He sat down to the table and ran his finger over the edge of the carving-knife. "It wouldn't cut butter," he declared. "Martha, bring me the steel!" "I sharpened it, sir," protested Martha. "Sharpened it, did you? I never saw a woman yet who could sharpen a knife." He began flashing the bright steel, and the women, their day already in ashes, watched him fascinatedly. He was waiting to pounce on them. They knew that well enough. The spirit of perversity had him by the throat and held him, writhing. He carved and served, and then turned again to his daughter. "So I'm too hard on you, am I?" he said, looking at her with a cold glint in his eye. "I provide you with a first-class education, I house you, clothe you, keep you in idleness, and I'm too hard on you. What do you expect?" "Why, I want you to like me," cried Kate, her face flushing. "I simply want to be your daughter. I want you to take me out with you, to give me things. I wanted you to give me a Christmas present. I want other things, too,--things that are not favors." She paused and he looked at her with a tightening of the lips. "Go on," he said. "I am not being kept in idleness, as I think you know very well. My time and energies are given to helping you. I look after your office and your house. My time is not my own. I devote it to you. I want some recognition of my services--I want some money." She leaned back in her chair, answering his exasperated frown with a straight look, which was, though he did not see it, only a different sort of anger from his own. "Well, you won't get it," he said. "You won't get it. When you need things you can tell me and I'll get them for you. But there's been altogether too much money spent in this house in years gone by for trumpery. You know that well enough. What's in that chest out there in the hall? Trumpery! What's in those bureau drawers upstairs? Truck! Hundreds of dollars, that might have been put out where it would be earning something, gone into mere flubdub." He paused to note the effect of his words and saw that he had scored. Poor Mrs. Barrington, struggling vaguely and darkly in her own feminine way for some form of self-expression, had spent her household allowance many a time on futile odds and ends. She had haunted the bargain counter, and had found herself unable to get over the idea that a thing cheaply purchased was an economic triumph. So in drawers and chests and boxes she had packed her pathetic loot--odds and ends of embroidery, of dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material. Kate remembered it with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into her brain. She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered woman, whose feet had walked so falteringly in her search for the roses of life. And she said-- But what matter what she said? Her father and herself were at the antipodes, and they were separated no less by their similarities than by their differences. Their wistful and inexpressive love for each other was as much of a blight upon them as their inherent antagonism. The sun went down that bleak Christmas night on a house divided openly against itself. The next day Kate told her father he might look for some one else to run his house for him. He said he had already done so. He made no inquiry where she was going. He would not offer her money, though he secretly wanted her to ask for it. But it was past that with her. The miserable, bitter drama--the tawdry tragedy, whose most desperate accent was its shameful approach to farce--wore itself to an end. Kate took her mother's jewelry, which had been left to her, and sold it at the local jeweler's. All Silvertree knew that Kate Barrington had left her home in anger and that her father had shown her the back of his hand. _ |
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