Читать книгу The Foolish Virgin - Jr. Thomas Dixon - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Her kitchenette was a model of order and cleanliness. The carpenter who built its neat cupboard and fitted the drawers beneath the tiny gas range, had outdone himself in its construction. He had given the wood-work four coats of immaculate white paint without extra charge. Mary had insisted on paying for it, but he waved the proffered money aside with a gesture that spoke louder than words:

“Pooh! That's nothing to what I'd like to do for you.”

She was not surprised when he called the following Saturday and stood at her door awkwardly fumbling his hat, trying to ask her to spend the afternoon and evening at Coney Island with him. There was no mistaking the manner in which he made this request.

She had refused him as gently as possible—a big, awkward, good-natured, ignorant boy he was, with the eyes of a St. Bernard dog. He apologized for his presumption and never repeated the offense.

Somehow her conquests had all been in this class.

The tall, blushing German youth from the butcher's around the corner had been slipping extra cuts into her bundle and making awkward advances until she caught him red-handed with a pound of lamb chops which he failed to explain. She read him a lecture on honesty that discouraged him. It was not so much what she said, as the way she said it, that wounded his sensitive nature.

The ice man she had not yet entirely subdued. Tony Bonelli had the advantage of pretending not to understand her orders of dismissal. He merely smiled in his sad Italian way and continued to pack her ice-box so full the lid would never close.

She was reminded at every turn tonight of these futile conquests of the impossible. They all smelled of the back stairs and the kitchen. Her people had been slaveholders in the old regime of southern Kentucky. A kindly tolerant contempt for the pretensions of a servant class was bred in the bone of her being.

And yet their tribute to her beauty had its compensations. It was the promise of triumph when he for whom she waited should step from the throng and lift his hat. Just how he was going to do this without a breach of the proprieties of life, she couldn't see. It would come. It must come. It was Fate.

In twenty minutes her coffee-pot was boiling, the lamb chops broiled to perfection and she was seated before the dainty, snow-white table, the kitten softly begging at her feet. Half an hour later, every dish and pot and pan was back in its place in perfect order. She prided herself on her mastery of the details of cooking and the most economical administration of every dollar devoted to housekeeping. She studied cooking in the best schools the city afforded. She meant to show her Knight a thing or two in this line when the time came. His wife would not be an ignorant slattern, the victim of incompetent servants. No servant could fool her. She would know the business of the house down to its minutest detail.

Not that she loved dish-washing and pot-polishing and scrubbing. It was simply a part of the Game of Life she must play in the ideal home she would build. There was no drudgery in it for this reason. She was a soldier on the drill grounds preparing for the battle on the successful issue of which hung her happiness and the happiness of the one of whom she dreamed. She might miss some of the dangerous fun which Jane Anderson could enjoy without a scratch, but she would make sure of the fundamental things which Jane would never stop to consider.

She threw herself on the couch in her favorite position against the pillows, drew the kitten into her arms and hugged him violently.

“It's all right, Mr. Thomascat; we'll show them,” she purred softly. “We'll see who wins at last, the eagle who soars or the little wren in the hedge close beside the garden wall—we'll see, Kitty—we'll see!”

The room was still, the noise of the street-cars below muffled with the first soft blanket of snow. The street lamps flickered in the wind with a pale subdued light that scarcely brought out the furnishings of her nest. She was in the habit of dreaming in this window for hours with only the light from the lamps on the street.

The Square, deserted by its tramp lovers, lay white and still and cold. The old battle with the Blue Devils was on again within. The fight with Jane had been easy. She had always found it easy to face temptation in the concrete. The moment Satan appeared in human shape she was up in arms and ready for the fray. It was this silent hour she dreaded when the defenses of the soul were down.

There was no use to lie to herself. She was utterly lonely and heartsick.

She had guarded the portals of life with religious care—with a care altogether unnecessary as events had proved. There had been no crush of rude men to assault her. Only an awkward carpenter, a butcher's boy and the ice man! It was incredible. Of all the men whose restless feet pressed the pavements of New York, not one, save these three, had apparently cared whether she lived or died.

The men whom she met in her duties in the schoolroom she had found utterly devoid of imagination and beneath contempt. They had each been obviously on guard against the machinations of the female of the species. They had, each of them, shown plainly their fear and hatred of women teachers. The feeling was mutual. God knows she had no desire to encroach on their domain any longer than absolutely necessary.

Perhaps she was making a mistake. The thought was strangling. Only the girl who waived conventions in the rushing tide of the modern city's life seemed to live at all. The others merely existed. Jane Anderson lived! There could be no mistake about that. She had mastered the ugly mob. Its cruel loneliness was to her a thing unknown. But Jane was an exception—the one woman in a thousand who could defy conventions and yet keep her soul and body clean.

The offer she had made had proved a terrible temptation. The artist who had asked with such eagerness to use her head for his portrait of the Madonna on the canvas he was executing for the new cathedral, had long appealed to her vivid imagination. Two prints of his famous work hung on her walls. She had always wished to know him. He had married a Southern girl.

That was just the point—he WAS married!

No girl could afford to be shut up alone in a studio with a fascinating married man for three hours—or half an hour. What if she should fall in love with him at first sight! Such things had happened. They could happen again. Only tragedy could be the end of such an event. It was too dangerous to consider for a moment.

She would have consented had it been possible for Jane to chaperon her. That would have been obviously ridiculous. No artist with any self-respect would tolerate such a reflection on his honesty. No girl could afford to confess her fears in this brazen fashion.

The necessity for her refusal had depressed her beyond any experience she had passed through in the dreary desert of the past five years.

She lifted the sleeping kitten and whispered passionately:

“Am I a silly fool, Kitty? Am I?”

The tears came at last. She lay back on the pillows and let them pour down her cheeks without protest or effort at self-control. Every nerve of her strong, healthy body ached for the love and companionship of men which she had denied herself with an iron will. At nineteen it had been easy. The sheer animal joy in life had been enough. With the growth of each year the ache within had become more and more insistent. With each ripening season of body and mind, the hunger of love had grown more and more maddening. How long could she keep up this battle with every instinct of her being?

She rose at last, determined to go to Jane, confess that she had been a fool, and step out into the new world, New York's world, and begin to live.

She seized her hat and furs and put them on with feverish haste.

“God knows it's time I began—I'll be an old maid in another year and dry up—ugh!”

She looked in the quaint oval mirror that hung beside her door and lifted her head with a touch of pride.

She had reached the street and started for the Broadway car before she suddenly remembered that Jane was “dining with a dangerous man.”

She couldn't turn back to that little room tonight without new courage. Her decision was instantaneous. She couldn't surrender to the flesh and the devil by yielding to Jane.

She would go to prayer-meeting!

Religion had always been a very real thing in her life. Her father was a Methodist presiding elder. She would have gone to the meeting tonight in the first place but for the snow. Dr. Craddock, the new sensational pastor of the Temple, was giving a series of Wednesday-night talks that had aroused wide interest and drawn immense crowds.

His theme tonight was one that promised all sorts of sensations—“The Woman of the Future.” The only trouble with the Doctor was that the substance of his discourses sometimes failed to make good the startling suggestions of his titles. No matter—she would go. She felt a sense of righteous pride infighting her way to the church through the first storm of the winter.

In spite of the snow the church was crowded. The subject announced had evidently touched a vital spot in modern life. More people were thinking about “The Woman of the Future” than she had suspected. The crowd sat with eager, upturned faces.

The first half-hour's prayer and song service had just begun. Mary joined in the singing of the stirring evangelistic hymns with enthusiasm. Something in their battle-cry melody caught her spirit instantly tonight and her whole being responded. In ten minutes she was a good shouting Methodist and supremely happy without knowing why. She never paused to ask. Her nature was profoundly religious and she had been born and bred in the atmosphere of revivals. Her father was an aggressive evangelist both in his character and methods of work, and she was his own daughter—a child of emotion.

The individuals in the eager crowd which packed the popular church meant nothing to her personally. They had passed before her unseeing eyes Sunday after Sunday the past five years as mere shadows of an unknown world which swallowed them up the moment they reached the street. She had never seen the inside of one of their homes. Not one of them had drawn close enough to her to venture an invitation.

Two of the stewards she knew personally—one a bricklayer, the other a baker on Eighth Avenue. The preacher she had met in a purely formal way as the bishop of the flock. She liked Dr. Craddock. He was known in the ministry as a live wire. He was a man of vigorous physique—just turning fifty, magnetic, eloquent and popular with the masses.

Mary was curious tonight as to what the preacher would say on “The Woman of the Future.” The Methodist Church had been a pioneer in the modern Feminist movement, having long ago admitted women to the full ordination of the ministry. Craddock, however, had been known for his conservatism in the woman movement. He abhorred the idea of woman's suffrage as a dangerous revolution and the fact that he consented to treat the topic at all was a reluctant confession of its menacing importance.

With keen interest, the girl saw him rise at last. A breathless hush fell on the crowd. He walked deliberately to the edge of the platform and gazed into the faces of the people.

“I have often been asked,” he slowly began, “where I get my sermons.” He paused and laughed. “I'll be perfectly honest with you. Sometimes I get them from the Bible—sometimes from the book of life. The genesis of this talk tonight is very definite. I found it in the liquid depths of a little girl's eyes. She asked a simple question that set me thinking—not only about the subject of her query but on the vaster issues that grew out of it. She looked up into my face the other night after my call for volunteers for the new mission we are beginning in the slums of the East Side, and asked me if the girls were not going to be given the chance to do something worth while in this church's work.

“I couldn't honestly answer her off-hand and in my groping I forgot the child and her question. I saw a vision—a vision of that broader, nobler future toward which human civilization is now swiftly moving.

“I say deliberately that it is swiftly moving, because the progress of the world during the last fifty years has been greater than in any five hundred years of the past.

“The older I grow the stronger becomes my conviction that the problems of the age in which we now live cannot be solved by masculine brain and brawn alone. The problems of the city and the nation and the great fundamental social questions that involve the foundations of modern life will find no solution until the heart and brain of woman are poured into the crucible of our test.

“They talk about a woman's sphere As though it had a limit: There's not a place in earth or heaven, There's not a task to mankind given, There's not a blessing or a woe, There's not a whisper yes or no, There's not a life, or death, or birth That has a feather's weight of worth Without a woman in it!

“The difference between a man and a woman is one that makes them the complementary parts of a perfect unit. God made man in His own image—male and female. The person of God therefore combines these two elements unseparated. The mind of God is both male and female. In man we have the strength which lifts and tugs and fights the elements. This is the aspect turned primarily toward matter. In woman we have the finer qualities of the Spirit turned toward the source of all spirit in God. The idea of a masculine deity is a false assumption of the Dark Ages. God is both male and female.

“I used to wonder why Jesus Christ was a man, until I realized that the Incarnation expressed the depth of human need. God stooped lower in assuming the form of man. The form of the divine revelation through Jesus Christ was determined solely by this depth of human need——”

For half an hour in impetuous eloquence, in telling incidents wet with tears and winged with hope, he held his listeners in a spell. It was not until the burst of applause which greeted his closing sentence had died away that Mary Adams realized that another landmark had toppled before the onrushing flood of modern Feminism. The conservatism of Doctor Craddock had yielded at last to the inevitable. He, too, had joined the ranks of the prophets who preach of a Woman's Day of Emancipation.

And yet it never occurred to her that this fact had the slightest bearing on her personal outlook on life. On the contrary she felt in the spiritual elation of the triumphant eloquence of her favorite preacher a renewal of her simple religious faith. At the bottom of that religion lay the foundation of life itself—her conception of marriage as the supreme and only expression of woman's power in the world.

She walked back to her home on the Square, in a glow of ecstatic emotion.

Surely God had miraculously saved her this night from the wiles of the Devil! No matter what this eloquent discourse had meant to others, it had renewed her faith in the old-fashioned woman and the old-fashioned ways of the old-fashioned home. Her vision was once more clear. She was glad Jane Anderson had come to put her to the test. She had been tried in the fires of hell and came forth unscorched.

She stood beside her window dreaming again of the home she would build when her Knight should stand before her revealed in beauty no words could describe. The moon was shining now in solemn glory on the white-shrouded Square. Temptation had only strengthened the fiber of her soul. She knelt in the moonlight beside her couch and prayed that God should ever keep her faith serene. She rose with a sense of peace and joy. God would hear and answer the cry of her heart. The City might be the Desert—it was still God's world and not a sparrow that twittered in those bare trees or chattered on her window-ledge in the morning could fall to the ground without His knowledge. God had put this deathless passion in her heart; He could not deny it expression. She could bide His time. If the day of her deliverance were near, it was good. If God should choose to try her faith in loneliness and tears, it was His way to make the revelation of glory the more dazzling when it came.

She drew the covering about her warm young body with the firm faith that her hour was close at hand, and fell asleep to dream of her Knight.