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Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Chapter 8 |
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_ CHAPTER VIII If the excursions to the probate court and the trust company had roused expectations of change in their condition, they were to be disappointed. From that afternoon when they turned into Church Street on their return from the Washington Trust Company, the monotony and drudgery of their former life settled down on them with an even greater insistence. The dusty ROOMS FOR RENT sign was tucked into the front window with its usual regularity, for do what she could, Mrs. Clark could not attain that pinnacle of the landlady's aspirations, a houseful of permanent roomers. The young men were inconstant, the middle-aged liable to matrimony, the old to death, and all to penury or change of occupation and residence. So the old fight went on as before during all the twenty-three years of the widow Clark's married life,--a fight to exist in a dusty, worn, and shabby fashion, with a file of roomers tramping out the stair carpet, spotting the furniture, and using up the linen. To be sure, two great drains upon income no longer troubled her,--Clark's Field and the Veteran. With these encumbrances removed she could make ends meet. After a few weeks she forgot her doubts about the wisdom of following Judge Orcutt's advice and placing her interest in the estate together with her niece's in care of the trust company. The manager of the livery-stable, who was the nearest thing to permanency the house knew, shook his head over her folly in trusting a trust company, but the speculators and their lawyers let her severely alone, knowing that they had been outwitted and flitting to other schemes. The Square seemed to accept the fresh eclipse of the Clark estate after its false appearance of coming to a crisis. And the character of the Square was fast changing with all else these busy years. It was no longer a neighborhood center of gossip. There were new faces--and many foreign ones--in the rows of shops. The neighborhood was deteriorating, or evolving, as you happened to look at it. The Washington Trust Company seemed to have quite forgotten the existence of the Clark women except for the occasional appearance in the mail of an oblong letter addressed in type to Mrs. Ellen Trigg Clark, which bore in its upper left-hand corner a neat vignette of the trust building. Adelle studied these envelopes carefully, not to say tenderly, with something of the emotion that the trust company's home had roused in her the only time she had been within its doors. The vignette, which represented a considerable Grecian temple, she thought "pretty," and the neat, substantial-looking envelope suggested a rich importance to the communication within that also pleased the girl. She knew that it had to do with her remotely. Yet there was never anything thrilling in these communications from the trust company. They were signed by Mr. Gardiner and curtly informed Mrs. Clark of certain meaningless facts or more often curtly inquired for information,--"Awaiting your kind reply," etc., or merely requested politely another example of the widow's signature. They were models of brief, impersonal, business communications. If Adelle had ever had any experience of personal relationship she might have resented these perfunctory epistles from her legal guardian, but for all she knew that was the way all people treated one another. Evidently her legal guardian had no desire for any closer personal contact with its ward, and she waited, not so much patiently as pensively, for it to demonstrate a more lively interest in her existence.... Meanwhile there was debate in the Church Street house about a matter that more closely touched the young girl. She had graduated from the Everitt School the preceding June and would naturally be going on now into the high school with her better conditioned schoolmates. But she herself, though not averse to school, had suggested that she should stay at home and help her aunt in the house or find a place in one of the shops in the Square where she might earn a little money. Mrs. Clark, who has been described as a realist, might have favored this practical plan, had it not been that Adelle was a Clark--all that was left of them, in fact. The widow had lived so long under the shadow of the Clark expectations that she could not easily escape from their control now that she was alone. A Trigg, of course, under similar circumstances would have gone into a shop at once, but a Clark ought to have a better education in deference to her expectations. The heiress of Clark's Field must never conclude her education with the grades.... So finally it was decided that Adelle should enter the high school for a year, at any rate, and to that end a new school dress of sober blue serge was provided, made by Adelle with her aunt's assistance. These days Adelle rose at an early hour to do the chamber work while her aunt got breakfast, then changed her dress, looked hurriedly over her lessons, gobbled her breakfast, and with her books and a tin lunch-box strapped together set forth to walk the mile and a half to the high school in order to save car-fare. There she performed her daily tasks in a perfunctory, dead manner, not uncommon. Once an exasperated teacher had demanded testily,-- "Miss Clark, don't you ever think?" The timid child had answered seriously,-- "Yes, sometimes I think." Whereat the class tittered and Adelle had a mild sensation of dislike for the irascible teacher, who reported in "teachers' meeting" that Adelle Clark was as nearly defective as a child of her years could be and be "all right," and that the grades ought not to permit such pupils to graduate into the high school. Indeed, algebra, Caesar, and Greek history were as nearly senseless to Adelle Clark as they could be. They were entirely remote from her life, and nothing of imagination rose from within to give them meaning. She learned by rote, and she had a poor memory. It was much the same, however, with English literature or social science or French, subjects that might be expected to awaken some response in the mind of a girl. The only subject that she really liked was dancing, which the gymnasium instructor taught. Adelle danced very well, as if she were aware of being alive when she danced. But even the athletic young woman who had the gymnasium classes reported that Adelle Clark was too dull, too lifeless, to succeed as a dancer or athletic teacher. These public guardians of youth may or may not have been right in their judgments, but certainly as yet the girl had not "waked up".... Adelle's high-school career was interrupted in January, just as she had turned fifteen, by her aunt's sickness. For the first time in forty years, as the widow told the doctor, she had taken to her bed. "Time to make up for all the good loafing you have missed," the young doctor joked cheaply in reply, not realizing the hardship of invalidism, with a houseful of roomers, in a small back bedroom near enough to the center of activities for the sick woman to know all that happened without having the strength to interfere. It was only the grippe, the doctor said, advising rest, care, and food. It would be a matter of a week or two, and Adelle was doing her best to take her aunt's place in the house and also nurse her aunt. But Mrs. Clark never left her bed until she was carried to the cemetery to be laid beside the Veteran in the already crowded lot. The grippe proved to be a convenient name to conceal a general breaking-up, due to years of wearing, ceaseless woman's toil without hope, in the disintegrating Clark atmosphere that ate like an acid into the consciousness even of plain Ellen Trigg, with her humble expectations from life. Adelle was much moved by the death of her aunt, the last remaining relative that she knew of, though the few people who saw her at this time thought she "took it remarkably well." They interpreted her expressionless passivity to a lack of feeling. As a matter of fact, she had been much more attached to her aunt than to any one she had ever known. The plain woman, who had no pretensions and did her work uncomplainingly because it was useless to complain, had inspired the girl with respect and given her what little character she had. Ellen Clark was a stoic, unconsciously, and she had taught Adelle the wisdom of the stoic's creed. The girl realized fully now that she was alone in life, alone spiritually as well as physically, and though she did not drop tears as she came back to the empty Church Street house from the cemetery,--for that was not the thing to do now: it was to get back as soon as possible and set the house to rights as her aunt would have done so that the roomers should not be put out any further,--her heart was heavy, nevertheless, and she may even have wondered sadly what was to become of her. That was the question that disturbed the few persons who had any interest in the Clark women,--the manager of the livery-stable among them. It was plainly not the "proper thing" for the girl to continue long in a house full of men, and irresponsible men at that. Adelle was not aware what was the "proper thing," but she felt herself inadequate to keeping up the establishment unaided by her aunt, although that is what she would have liked to do, go on sweeping and making beds and counting out the wash and making up the bills, with or without school. But the liveryman hinted to her on her return from the funeral that she ought to go immediately to some friend's house, or have some married woman stay with her until her future had been determined upon. Adelle knew of no house where she could make such a visit, nor of any one whom she could invite to stay with her. It may seem incredible, as it did to Mr. Lovejoy, that "folks could live all their lives in Alton like the Clarks" and have no relatives or friends to lean upon in an emergency. But the truth is that when a family begins to go down in this world, after having some pretensions, it is likely to shed social relations very fast instead of acquiring new ones. A family in a settled social equilibrium (rarely the case in America), or one that is going up in the human scale, is apt to acquire connections, quite apart from the accidents of birth and social gifts, because the mental attitude is an open and optimistic one, attracting to itself humanity instead of timidly withdrawing into itself. Strength attracts and weakness repels in the long run here as elsewhere. The Clarks, who had never been considerable or numerous, had in the course of three generations gradually lost their hold upon the complex threads of life, shiftlessly shedding relationships as the Veteran had done, or proudly refusing inferior connections as Addie had, until the family was left solitary in the person of this one fifteen-year-old girl, in whom the social habit seemed utterly atrophied. Of course, Adelle could have appealed to her aunt's pastor, but it never occurred to her to do that or to make use of any other social machinery. She went back to the Church Street house, occupied her old room, and for the next few days continued the catlike routine of her life as nearly as she could under the changed conditions. Mr. Lovejoy, who continued to be the one most concerned in her welfare, induced her to write a crude little note to the "Washington Trust Company, Dear Sirs," notifying them of the demise of her aunt. The livery-stable man, who was a widower and not beyond middle age, which does not necessarily mean in his class that the wife is dead and buried, but merely permanently absent for one reason or another, might have thrown sentimental eyes upon the girl if she had been different, more of a woman. "She'll likely enough be an heiress some of these days," he said to his employer, old John Pike. Pike was an old resident of Alton and had known all the Clarks. He grunted as if he had heard that song before. "That's what they used to say of her mother, Addie Clark," he remarked, remembering Addie's superior air towards his son. "Well," his manager continued, "I see that trust company's got its signs up all over the Field." "'T ain't the first time there's been signs there," Pike retorted, eyeing a succulent cigar he had succeeded in extracting from an inner pocket, "nor the last either, I expect!" "It looks as if they meant business this time." "They can't get no title," Pike averred, for he banked with the River National, which was now quite bearish on Clark's Field. After a pause the old liveryman asked with a broad smile,--"Why don't you go in for the heiress, Jim?" (Mr. Lovejoy was accounted "gay," a man to please the ladies.) "Me! I never thought of it--she's nothing but a girl. The old one pleased me better--she was a smart woman!" "The girl's got all the property, ain't she?" "I suppose so." "Well, then, you get two bites from the same cherry." The manager made no advances to the girl, however, and for that we must consider Adelle herself as chiefly responsible. For, as a woman, or rather the hope of a woman, she was uninteresting,--still a pale, passive, commonplace girl. What womanhood she might expect was slow in coming to her. Even with the halo of the Clark inheritance she could arouse slight amorous interest in any man. And thus Adelle's insignificance again saved her--shall we say?--from the mean fate of becoming the prey of this "roomer." "No man will ever take the trouble to marry that girl," Mr. Love joy remarked to his employer, "unless she gets her fortune in hard cash." In which prophecy the widower was wrong. _ |
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