Читать книгу The Savage Heart - Diana Palmer - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Chicago was big and brash, and Tess loved to explore it, finding old churches and forts and every manner of modern building. Lake Michigan, lapping at the very edge of the city and looking as big as an ocean, fascinated Tess, who had spent so many of her formative years landlocked in the West.

She rather easily got a nursing position at the hospital in Cook County. Her experience and skill were evident to a number of the physicians, who maneuvered to get her on their services. Since she wasn’t formally trained, however, she was classified a practical nurse.

The matrons who lived at the boardinghouse were less approving. They considered nursing a dreadful profession for a well-brought-up single woman and said so.

Tess took their comments with smiling fortitude, mentally consigning them to the nether reaches. They couldn’t really be blamed, though, considering their upbringing. Change came hard to the elderly.

Fortunately, she discovered a group of women’s rights advocates and joined immediately. She eagerly worked on every plan for a march or a rally aimed at getting the vote for women.

Matt kept a close eye on her. He often saw her as an unbroken filly that no hand was going to tame. He wouldn’t have presumed to try. There was much to admire in Tess, and much to respect.

TESS MADE A GOOD FRIEND right away in Nan Collier, the young wife of a telegraph clerk, who attended suffragist meetings with her. Matt had insisted that she not go out at night unaccompanied. It was the only restriction he’d placed on her, and since she didn’t consider it demeaning, she abided by it. And Nan was good company, too. She wasn’t an educated woman, as Tess was, but she was intelligent and had a kind heart.

As they grew closer, it became obvious to Tess that Nan had problems at home. She never spoke of them, but she made little comments about having to be back at a certain time so that her husband wouldn’t be angry, or about having to be sure that her housework was done properly to keep him happy. It sounded as if any lapse in what her husband considered her most important duties would result in punishment.

It wasn’t until the end of her first month in Chicago that Tess discovered what Nan’s punishment was. She came to a suffragist meeting at a local matron’s house with a split lip and a black eye.

“Nan, what happened?” Tess exclaimed, her concern echoed by half a dozen fierce campaigners for women’s rights. “Did your husband strike you?”

“Oh, no!” Nan said quickly. “Why, this is nothing. I fell down the steps, is all.” She laughed nervously, putting a self-conscious hand to her eye. “I’m so clumsy sometimes.”

“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Tess persisted.

“Yes, I’m sure. But you’re sweet to worry about me, Tess,” Nan said with genuine affection.

“Don’t ever let him start hitting you,” Tess cautioned. “It will only get worse. No man has the right to beat his wife, regardless of what she’s done.”

“I fell down the steps,” Nan repeated, but she didn’t quite meet Tess’s eyes. “Dennis gets impatient with me when I’m slow, especially when those rich friends of his come over, and he thinks I’m stupid sometimes, but he…he wouldn’t hit me.”

Tess had seen too many victims of brutality to be convinced by Nan’s story. Working as a nurse was very informative—too informative sometimes.

She patted the other woman’s shoulder gently. “Well, if you ever need help, I’ll do what I can for you. I promise.”

Nan smiled, wincing as the motion pulled the cut on her lower lip open. She dabbed at it with her handkerchief. “Thanks, Tess, but I’m okay.”

Tess sighed. “Very well, then.”

The meeting was boisterous, as often happened, and some of the opinions voiced seemed radical even to Tess. But the majority of the members wanted only the right to be treated, at least in the polling booth, as equal to men.

“The Quakers have always accepted women as equals,” one woman said angrily. “But our men are still living in the Dark Ages. Most of them look upon us as property. Even the best men think a woman is too ignorant to render an opinion on any matter of public interest.”

“Yes!” came cries of assent.

“Furthermore, we have no control over our own bodies and must bear children again and again, whether we’re able or not. Many of our sisters have died in childbirth. Many others are so overburdened by children that they have no energy for any other pursuit. But if we mention any sort of birth control, especially abstinence, men brand us heretics!”

There were more cries of support.

“We cannot even vote,” the woman continued. “Men treat us either as children or idiots. A woman is looked down upon if she even shops for her own groceries!”

“Or if she works away from the home!” another added.

“It is time, past time, that we demanded the rights to which any man is legally entitled at birth. We must not accept being second-class citizens any longer. We must act!”

“Yes, we must!”

“Yes!”

They were all in agreement that they should march on city hall as soon as possible. A date was set and leaders designated.

“I can’t go,” Nan said with a long sigh. “Dennis will be home all day.” She barely repressed a shudder. “I wouldn’t dare leave the house.”

“You could sneak away,” a woman standing nearby suggested.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Nan said quickly. “He doesn’t even like me coming to one of these meetings each week. I have to be so careful to make sure he doesn’t know how involved I am. So it’s best if he isn’t home when I creep off for a rally or an added meeting.” Her thin shoulders rose and fell as if they bore a heavy burden. “He works an extra job away from the telegraph office on Mondays and Thursdays, and he’s real late getting home, so I can get out and he doesn’t know.”

What a horrible way to have to live, Tess thought. She wondered, not for the first time, what sort of home life poor Nan had. Men could be such brutes!

TESS WAS STILL FUMING about Dennis’s treatment of Nan when she got home. Matt was on his way out, and she met him on the front steps. He looked gloriously handsome in his expensive vested suit. She remembered how his hair used to look hanging straight and clean almost to his waist, and wondered if it was still that long. Since he hid his braid these days, she couldn’t judge the length.

“You work all the time,” she accused gently, smiling.

“I’m addicted to fancy gear,” he teased. “I have to make enough to support my expensive tastes.” His large black eyes went over her, in her neat skirt and blouse under a long overcoat. “Another meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the friend who goes with you?” he asked, frowning when he noted that she was on the street alone.

“On her way home in the carriage I hired,” she explained. “It lets me off first.”

He nodded. “You be careful,” he cautioned. “You’re a daisy back east.”

“I can still shoot a bow and arrow.” She winked. “Skin a deer. Track a cougar.” She leaned closer. “Use a bowie knife.”

“Stop that.”

“Sorry. It slipped out.”

He glowered. “I don’t use it. I threaten to use it.”

“There’s a difference?”

“There certainly is. A very big difference, miss.”

“I’ll reform,” she promised, smiling. There were deep lines around his mouth and nose, and dark circles under his eyes. “Poor Matt. You’re tired to death.”

“I spend long nights watching people I’m hired to watch.” He studied her face under the wide-brimmed felt hat she was wearing. “You don’t look much better.”

“Nursing is a tiring profession, too, Matt. I spent my day sitting with a patient who had a leg amputated. He was knocked down and run over by a carriage. He’s barely my age.”

“Young for such a drastic injury.”

“Yes. And he was a baseball player.”

He grimaced.

“He wants to commit suicide,” she said. “I talk and talk, hoping I’ll dissuade him.”

He touched her cheek. It was cold from the winter wind. “I felt that way myself, once,” he murmured. “Then this pretty little blonde girl came and held my hand while her father dug bullets out of my hide. And soon life grew sweet once more.”

“Did I make you want to live?” she asked. “Really?”

He nodded. “My whole family was dead. I had nothing to look forward to beyond hating the white soldiers or trying to avenge my people. I was in such terrible pain. But the pain grew manageable, and I saw the futility of trying to fight a veritable ocean of whites. What is it you say, better to join than fight them?”

“If the odds are against you.” She liked the feel of his strong, warm fingers on her cheek. She stood very still so that he wouldn’t move them. “Is it so bad, the way you live now?”

He studied her face. “If I were a poor man, it might be. I have too many advantages here to feel sorry for myself.” His eyes narrowed. “Tess, try not to get too embroiled in the women’s movement, will you? Some of these women are very radical.”

“I promise not to go wild with a hatchet in any local bars,” she said demurely. “Does that reassure you?”

“Not a lot,” he said. “Your father worried about you.”

Her pale eyes became sad. “Yes, he did. I miss him terribly. But I couldn’t very well stay on at the reservation. The job was his, not mine.”

“They’d probably have hired you to teach, if you’d asked,” he commented.

“Possibly. Still, there was the persistent lieutenant. What a temptation he presented.”

His brow rose. “Temptation?”

“I was tempted to put a bullet through him,” she clarified. “I was at Wounded Knee, too, Matt. I know he shot women and children and old men.”

His hand slowly lowered. “You should go inside. It’s too cold out here for idle conversation.”

“You can’t imagine how you look when I mention the massacre,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. However painful the memories are for me, I know they’re a hundred times worse for you.”

He gazed down at her with his heart twisting inside him. She was pretty, but her attraction went so far beyond the physical. She had a soft heart and a stubborn independence that made his breath catch. She had, he mused, a savage heart.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“I was thinking how you go headfirst into a fight,” he replied. “And how soft your heart is.” He became solemn. “Don’t wear it on your sleeve, little one,” he said softly. “The world can be a cruel place.”

She saw the lines in his hard face and reached up hesitantly to touch the ones between his dark eyes. He flinched and she jerked her fingers back.

“Sorry!” she cried, flustered.

His expression grew even more grim. “I’m not used to being touched. Especially by women.”

She laughed nervously. “So I noticed!”

He relaxed, but only fractionally. “I’ve grown a shell since I’ve been here,” he confessed. “And now I’m trapped in it. I’m rich and successful. But under it all, I’m still a poor ragged Indian—to people more shortsighted than you are.”

“I’ve only always thought of you as my friend.”

“And I am,” he said solemnly. “I’d do anything for you.”

“I know that.” She drew her old coat closer and smiled up at him, her gaze intent. “I’d do anything for you, too, Matt.”

As she turned away, he suddenly caught her arm and swung her back to him. The unexpected movement made her lose her balance. She fell heavily against him. His hand at her back steadied her, and she rested against him, breathing in soap and cologne and a faint scent of tobacco from the occasional cigar he smoked.

His eyes were turbulent, and the hold he had on her was new and exciting.

A little startled, she asked huskily, “What is it?”

His gaze roamed over her face, then stopped on her mouth. Her lips were full and soft and he wondered not for the first time in their long relationship how they would feel under his. The hunger he felt made his heart race.

“Matt, you’re scaring me,” she said all in one breath.

“Nothing scares you,” he returned. “You walked right into the thick of the wounded, even before the soldiers had stopped hunting the people who escaped the Hotchkiss guns. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her, completely blameless. You and your father were kind…and so courageous.”

The contact with his hard chest was making her knees weak. She bit her lower lip, trying to regain some sort of control over her wandering senses. Her hands pressed gently into the silky stuff of his vest.

“This is…unconventional.”

“Working as a nurse isn’t?”

She punched him in the ribs. “Don’t you start. I get enough guff from those old ladies in there.” She scanned the dark windows of the boardinghouse. Did a curtain move?

“They’re probably clutching the windowsills, dying to see what happens next.”

“What happens next is that you let go of me so that I can get in out of the cold,” Tess said with far more confidence than she felt. Her reaction to Matt’s closeness was surprising and a little frightening. She hadn’t thought herself vulnerable to any man’s touch.

His lean, strong hands moved down to her tiny waist and rested there while he continued to look intently at her.

“You aren’t like any other women I’ve ever known,” he said after a long, breathless silence.

“Do you know a lot of women in Chicago who shoot bows and speak Sioux?”

He shook her gently. “Be serious.”

“I don’t dare.” She laughed. “I have…I have my life planned. I intend to devote it to the women’s movement.”

“Totally?”

She fidgeted in his grasp. “Yes.”

“Have they convinced you that men are superfluous? Or, perhaps, suitable only for the purpose of breeding?”

“Matt!”

“Don’t look so outraged. I’ve heard members of the women’s rights groups say such things. Like the mythical Amazons, they feel that men are good for only one purpose, and that marriage is the first step to feminine slavery.”

“It is,” she said vehemently. “Look around you. Most married women have a child a year. They’re considered loose if they work outside the home. They must bend to the husband’s will without thought of their own comfort or safety. There is nothing to stop a man from beating his wife and children, from gambling away all they own, from drinking from dawn till dusk.... Oh, Matt, can’t you see the terror of this from a woman’s point of view, even a little?”

“Of course I can,” he replied honestly. “But you speak of exceptions, not the rule. Remember, Tess, change is a slow thing in a large society.”

“It won’t happen by itself.”

“I agree. But I also feel that it can’t be forced in any drastic fashion. Such as,” he continued coldly, “taking children away from their parents on the reservations and sending them away to government schools, making it illegal for them to speak their own language—” he paused, smiling now “—even making it illegal to wear their hair long.”

Her hands itched to touch his hair, as she had only once, in the early days of their relationship, when he was teaching her the bow. She searched his dark eyes, a question in her own. “Do you miss the old days?”

He laughed shortly and let her go. “How can I miss something so primitive? Can you really see me in buckskins speaking pidgin English?”

She shook her head. “No, not you,” she said. “You’d be in a warbonnet, painted, on horseback, a bow in hand.”

He averted his head. “I’ll be late. I have to go.”

“Matt, for heaven’s sake, you aren’t ashamed of your heritage?”

“Good night, Tess. Don’t go out alone. It’s dangerous.”

He strode away without a single look over his shoulder. Tess stood and watched him for a moment, shivering in the cold wind. He was ashamed of being Sioux. She hadn’t realized the depth of it until tonight. Perhaps that explained why he rarely went home to South Dakota, why he didn’t speak of his cousins there, why he dressed so deliberately as a rich white man. He hadn’t cut his hair, though, so he might retain a vestige of pride in his background, even if he kept it hidden. She shook her head. So many of his people had been unable to do what he had, to resign themselves to living like whites, and the policies forbidding them their most sacred ceremonies and the comfort of their shamans were slowly killing their souls. It must have been easier for Matt to live in Chicago and fan the fires of gossip about his true background, than to go to the reservation and deal with it.

She recalled the way soldiers and other white men had spoken to him when he lived with her and her father, and she bristled now as she had then at the blows to his enormous pride. Prejudice ran rampant these days. Nativism, they called it. Nobody wanted “foreigners” in this country, to hear white people talk. Tess’s lip curled. The very thought of calling a native American a foreigner made her furious. Out west, one still could hear discussion about eradicating the small remnant of the Indian people by taking away all their remaining lands and forcefully absorbing them into white society, absorbing them and wiping out their own culture in the process.

Did no one realize that it was one hairbreadth from genocide? It turned Tess’s stomach. She’d always felt that the government’s approach to assimilating the Indians was responsible for the high rates of alcoholism, suicide and infant mortality on the reservations.

She turned away from the cold wind and went inside the boardinghouse, her mind ablaze with indignation for Indians and women. Both were downtrodden by white men, both forbidden the vote.

The two old ladies who lived upstairs, Miss Barkley and Miss Dean, gave her a cold stare as she tried to pass quickly by the open door to the parlor where they sat.

“Decent young ladies should not stand in the street with men,” Miss Dean said icily. “Nor should they attend radical meetings or work in hospitals.”

“Someone must tend the sick,” Tess said. “I daresay it might do you both good to come to one of our meetings and hear what your sisters in life are bearing because society refuses to accept women as equals!”

Miss Barkley went pale. “Miss…Meredith,” she gasped, a hand at her throat, “I do not consider myself the equal of a man, nor should I want to!”

“Filthy, sweating brutes,” Miss Dean agreed. “They should all be shot.”

Tess grinned. “There, you see, Miss Dean, you and I have much in common! You simply must come to a meeting with me.”

“Among those radicals?” asked Miss Dean, scandalized.

“They aren’t,” Tess returned. “They’re honest, hardworking girls who want to live life as full citizens of this country. We are a new type of woman. We will never settle back and accept second-class citizenship.”

Miss Barkley was red in the face. “Well, I never!”

Miss Dean held up a hand. “A moment, Clara,” she told her companion. “Miss Meredith presents some interesting arguments. These meetings are open to anyone?”

“Certainly,” Tess said. “You may go with me next Tuesday, if you like, and see what they are about.”

“Ida, don’t you dare!” Miss Barkley fumed.

“I should have gone, were I twenty years younger,” came the reply, and a smile. “But I am too old and set in my ways, Miss Meredith.”

“Tess,” she corrected.

The older woman’s eyes twinkled. “Tess, then. I hope you achieve your goals. My generation will not live to see it, but perhaps yours will eventually gain the vote.”

Tess went to her own room, happily having diverted them from any discussion of her surprising interaction with Matt. It wouldn’t do to have people in the boardinghouse speculate about the two of them. She refused to do any speculating on her own, either. She buried Matt’s odd behavior in the back of her mind and got ready for bed.

Outside the wind was blowing fiercely; snowflakes struck the windowpane. She closed her eyes, hoping for a heavy snowfall. She always felt curiously happy, often content, too, on snowy days.