Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter?. Gardener Helen Hamilton
aspect; where not only the edge of sentiment is dulled by dire necessity, but where the sentiment itself is buried utterly beneath the incrustations of an ignorance that is too dumb and abject to learn, and a poverty that is too insistent to recognize its own ignorance and degradation.
"Won't you set down?" inquired Mrs. Spillini, as with a sudden movement she slid the small corpse onto the floor under the edge of the table. "I'd a' ast you before, but – "
"O, don't!" exclaimed the girl; but before her natural impulse to stoop and gather up the small bundle had found action possible, John Martin had placed it on the table.
"Oh, Lord; don't!" exclaimed the woman, in sudden dismay. "The boarders'd kick if they was to see it there. Boarders is different from the family. We could ate affen the table afther, but boarders – boarders'd kick."
"Could – do you think of anything else we could do for you?" inquired Gertrude, faintly, as she held open the door and tried to think she was not dizzy and sick from the dreadful, polluted air, and the shock of the revelation, with all that it implied, before her.
Four dirty faces, and as many ragged bodies, were too close to her for comfort. There was a vile stew cooking on the stove. The air was heavy and foul with it Gertrude distinctly felt the greasy moisture on her kid gloves as they touched each other.
"No, I don't know's they's anything more you can do," replied the passive, hopeless wreck of what it was almost sacrilege to call womanhood. "I don't know's they's anything more you could do unless you could let the boarders come in now. They ain't got but a little over ten minutes to eat in an' dinner's ready," she replied, as she lifted the pot of steaming stuff into the middle of the table and laid two tin plates, a large knife and a bunch of iron forks and spoons beside it.
"Turn that chair to the wall," she added sharply to one of the children, who hastened to obey the command. "They'll all have to stand up to it this time. I ain't a goin' to shift that baby round no more till it's buried, now that I kin bury it. Take this side of the table, Pete. I don't feel like eatin.' You kin have my place 'n the ole man ain't here. Let go of that tin cup, you trillin' young one. All the coffee they is, is in that. Have a drink, Mike?" she asked, passing the coveted cup to the second boarder. Gertrude was half-way down the dark hallway, and John Martin held her arm firmly lest she step into some unseen trap or broken place in the floor.
When they reached the street door she turned to him with wide eyes.
"Great God," she moaned, "and people go to church and pray and thank God – and collect rent from such as they! Men offer premiums to mothers and fathers for large families of children – to be brought up like that? In a world where that is possible! Oh, I think it is wicked, wicked, wicked, to allow it – any of it – all of it! How can you?"
John Martin looked hopeless and helpless.
"I don't," he said, in pathetic self-defense, feeling somehow that the blame was personal.
"Oh, I don't mean you!" she exclaimed, almost impatiently. "I mean all who know it – who have known and understood it all along. How could men allow it? How dared they? And to think of encouraging such people to marry – to bring into a life like that such swarms of helpless children. Oh, the sin and shame and outrage of it!"
John Martin was dazed that she should look upon it as she did. He was surprised that she spoke so openly. He did not fully comprehend the power and force of real conviction and feeling overtaken in a sincere and fearlessly frank nature by such a knowledge for the first time.
"I should not have brought you here," he said, feebly, as they entered the waiting carriage which her mother had insisted she should take if she would go "slumming," as she had expressed it.
She turned an indignant face upon him.
"Why?" she demanded.
He tried to say something about a shock to her nerves, and such sights and knowledge being not for women.
"I had begun to feel that he respected me – believed in me – wanted, in truth and not merely in name, to share life with me," she thought, "but he does not: it is all a sham. He wants someone who shall not share life with him – not even his mental life."
"You would come here with papa, would you not?" she asked, presently. "You would talk over, look at, think of the problems of life with him," – her voice began to tremble.
"Certainly," he said, "but that is different. It – "
"Yes, it is different; quite different. You love papa, and it would be a pain to you to keep your mental books locked up from him. You respect papa, and you would not be able to live a life of pretense with him. You – "
"Gertrude! Oh, darling! I love you. I love you. You know that," he said, grasp ing both her hands and covering them with kisses. She snatched them away, and covered her face with them to hide the tears which were a surprise and shock to herself.
"I should not have taken her there," he thought. "I'm a great fool."
He did not at all comprehend the girl's point of view, and she resented his. He could not imagine why, and her twenty years of inexperience in handling such a view of life as had suddenly grown up within her, made her unable to express quite fully why she did resent his assumption that she should not be allowed to use her heart or brain beyond the limits set for their exercise by conventional theory. She could not express in words why she felt insulted and outraged in her self-respect that he should assume that life was and should be led by her, upon a distinctly different and narrower plane than his own. She knew that she could not accept his explanation, that it was his intense love that wished to shield her from knowledge of all that was ugly – of all the deeper and sadder meanings of human experience; but she felt unequal to making him understand by any words at her command how far from her idea of an exalted love such an assumption was.
That he should sincerely believe that as a matter of course much that was and should be quite common in his own life should be kept from, covered up, blurred into indistinction to her, came to her with a shock too sudden and heavy for words. She had built an exalted ideal of absolute mental companionship between those who loved. She had always thought that one day she should pass through the portals of some vast building by the side of a husband to whom all within was new as it would be to her. She had fancied that neither spoke; that both read the tablets of architecture – and of human legend on every face – so nearly alike that by a glance of the eye she could say to him, "I know what you are thinking of all this. It stirs such or such a memory. It strikes the chord that holds these thoughts or those." But she read as plainly now that this man who thought he loved her, whom she had grown to feel she might one day love, had no such conception of a union of lives. To him marriage would mean a physical possession of a toy more or less valuable, more or less to be cherished or to be set under a glass case, whenever his real life, his real thoughts, his deeper self were stirred. These were to be kept for men – his mentally developed equals. She understood full well that if she could have said this to him he would have been shocked, would have resented such a contemptuous interpretation of what he truly believed to be a wholly respectful love, offered upon wholly respectful terms. But to her, it seemed the mere tossing down of a filbert to a pretty kitten, that it might amuse him for a few moments with its graceful antics. When he tired of the kitten, or bethought him of the serious duties of life, he could turn the key and count on finding the amusing little creature to play with again next day in case he cared to relax himself with a sight of its gambols. She resented such a view of the value of her life. She was humiliated and indignant. The perfectly apparent lack of comprehension on his part of any lapse of respect in attitude toward her, the entire unconsciousness of the insult to her whole nature, in his assumption of a divine right of individual growth and development to which she had no claim, stung her beyond all power of speech. The very fact that he had no comprehension of the affront himself, added to it its utterly hopeless feature. The love of a man offered on such terms is an insult, she said, over and over to herself; but aloud she said nothing.
She had heard, vaguely, through her tumult of feeling, his terms of endearment, his appeals to her tenderness and – alas! unfortunately for him – his apologies for having taken her to such a place. She became distinctly aware of these latter first and it steadied her.