Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
Phases of an Inferior Planet
CHAPTER XVI
"I am getting old," said Mariana. She was sitting before the mirror, and as she spoke she rose and leaned forward in closer inspection. "This line," she added, dolefully, rubbing her forehead, "is caused by the laundress, this by the departure of the nurse, and this by the curdling of the baby's milk."
Anthony crossed over and stood behind her. "I would give my right arm to smooth them away," he said.
Mariana fastened the collar of her breakfast sacque and looked back at him from the glass. She did not reply. Not that she would not have liked to say something affectionate, but that she felt the effort to be pleasant to be physically beyond her. Her life of the last few weeks had taught her that demonstrative expressions are an unnecessary waste of energy.
There was a rap at the door, and she opened it and took the milk-bottle from the dairy-man. After setting a cupful upon the little gas-stove, she raised the window and placed the remainder upon the fire-escape. "I am afraid," she remarked, "that I will have to try one of those innumerable infant foods. One can never be sure that the milk is quite fresh."
Anthony tied a cravat which was particularly worn, put on a coat which was particularly shiny across the shoulders, and went into the adjoining room to set the table. He boiled the coffee, took in the baker's rolls from a tray on the threshold, and put on a couple of eggs. Then he called Mariana.
She came, sat down at the table, and lifted the coffee-pot. She looked hollow-eyed and haggard, and her hand shook slightly. "I am so weak," she said, fretfully. "I can't get my strength. I just go dragging about."
Anthony looked at her in sudden pain. "If there were a speculating devil around who took stock in souls," he said, "I am sure we might offer him an investment. People are fools to think there is any happiness without money."
"Or any decency," added Mariana. Then the baby cried, and she took it up and brought it to the table, holding it upon her knee as she ate. Her appetite failed, and she pushed her plate away.
"The egg is so white," she said, pettishly, "I can't eat it." Then her voice choked. "I – I sometimes wish I were dead," she added, and went to pour the baby's milk into its bottle.
Mariana's strength did not return. As the months passed she grew more listless, her pallor deepened, and the shadows under her eyes darkened to a purplish cast. The incessant round of minor cares clouded her accustomed sunniness of temper, and her buoyant step gave place to a languid tread. It was as if the inexorable hand of poverty had crushed her beneath its weight.
Algarcife, coming in from his more systematic employment, would marvel vaguely at her unresponsiveness. His tenderness would recoil in pained surprise as he felt her indifference to his caress, and her long silences while he sat beside her. "Mariana," he would begin, "won't you talk to me?" and Mariana would rouse herself with a start. "But what is there to say?" she would ask, and sink back into stillness. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to understand that at such times she was but undergoing the inevitable reaction from long months of physical and mental suffering – that the energy which she had expended in supplying the drains upon her nature had left her incapable of further effort. He did not know that emotion with a woman is so largely regulated by nervous conditions, that complete exhaustion of body and mind is apt to repress, not the fund of affection, but its outward manifestations. In his passionate desire to shield Mariana, he had kept from her knowledge the financial stress into which her prolonged illness had plunged him. He had watched his growing indebtedness silently, and had reduced his personal expenses to a minimum while he sought to supply her with comforts. But from the immediate needs and anxieties of her own life he had not been able to guard her. The gnawing fears for the child, the nights when she awoke from needed sleep to lean over its crib and soothe it with lullabies, the weary hours in the day when she walked with aching head back and forth, he could not prevent, nor could he restore to her the health which she had lost. That the vein of iron which lay beneath the surface lightness of her nature had developed through responsibility, he saw clearly, but he also saw that she lived her life in apparent unrepining, not because of a rational acceptance of the order of things, but because illness and toil had for the time overthrown her æsthetic intuitions. To recall her as she had been during the first months of their marriage, white, fresh, and exquisite in attire, and then to look at her in a faded wrapper, her heavy hair disordered, her lips compressed, was to know that Mariana as she was to-day was not Mariana in a normal state. That it could not last, he knew. That with the first wave of returning vigor her longing for dramatic effects and the small requirements of existence would reawaken, he admitted unhesitatingly. She would grow vital again, she would demand with passionate desire the satisfaction of her senses – she would crave music, color, light, all the sensuous fulness of life. And where would she find it?
One day, as he came in to luncheon, he found her playing with the baby, a flash of brightness upon her face.
He looked at her and smiled.
"It is company for you, isn't it, dearest?"
Mariana's smile passed.
"I don't have time to think about that part," she returned. "I am always working. When I've got her all nice and fresh, and laid her on the bed, she begins to cry for her bottle. Then, while I am heating the milk, she cries to be walked, and, by the time the bottle is ready, she is so red in the face she can't drink it, and she spills it all over herself. Then I begin and go through it all again."
"What a little beast she is," said Algarcife, surveying the baby with parental displeasure. "What a pity she isn't a Japanese! Japanese babies never cry." Then he grew serious. "I sometimes wonder how you stand it," he added. "Here, give me the little devil!"
Mariana rescued the baby's rattle from its throat and laid it in the crib. It screamed, and she took it up again.
"There is a good deal in having to," she replied.
Algarcife walked to the window and stood looking down into the street. His brow was gloomy. Suddenly he faced her. "Are you sorry that you married me, Mariana?"
Mariana did not impulsively negative the question, as he had half expected. She even appeared to consider it. Then she slowly shook her head.
"I should have been more unhappy if I hadn't," she answered.
"It would have been a confounded sight better if you had never seen me."
But Mariana put the child down and fell into his outstretched arms.
"No, no," she said; "but I am tired – so tired."
Anthony picked her up and laid her on the bed. Then he threw a shawl over her. "I am going to take an hour off and discipline your tyrant," he said. "Go to sleep." He lifted the baby and went towards the door. "You aren't such a black-hearted chap, after all, are you, Isolde?"
The baby cuddled against his shoulder, and he passed into the next room, closing the door after him.
Mariana lay upon the bed and thought. Her eyes were wide open, and she stared fixedly at the ceiling, watching the fluctuations of light that chased across its plastered surface. It was a relief to be absolutely alone, to be freed from the restraint which the presence of another thinking entity necessitated. She drew the shawl closer about her and pressed her cheek upon the pillow. The contact of the cotton was exciting to her fevered flesh. In the dim train of association it brought back to her an illness in her childhood, and she recalled her first sensations of headache and fatigue. They had come upon her as she was playing in an open meadow, and, before toiling to the house, she had stopped beside the reedy brook and knelt to drink, while the cool, fresh notes of the bobolinks sounded about her. She remembered it all now as she lay amid the noise of the city. The roar of the elevated road was silenced, and she heard the bobolinks again. She saw the emerald sweep of the wheat fields, undulating in golden lights and olive shadows. She saw the stagnant ice pond, with the overhanging branches of willows and the whir of the parti-colored insects. She smelt the pungent sweetness of the wild rose and the subtle odor of the trumpet-flower, glowing amid its luxuriant foliage like a heart of fire.
Then she raised her head and surveyed the room in which she lay. She saw the garish daylight streaming in a flood of dust and sunshine through the narrow window. She saw the lack of grace that surrounded her, emphasized by a crowd of trivial details. She saw the tall, painted wardrobe with its bulging doors and the bandboxes upon the top, the cheap bureau with its gaping drawers, and the assortment of shoes half-hidden under it. She saw her work-basket, overflowing with stockings to be darned and small slips to be mended.
With a stifled sob she turned from it all, pressing her face against the pillow. The heritage of yearning for vivid beauty and sharp, sweet odors surged upon her. "I can't be poor!" she cried, passionately. "I can't be poor!"
But as the spring came, Mariana regained something of her old vigor, and it was in April of that year that Mr. Nevins painted the portrait which was exhibited some six months later, and with which began his rising fortunes. It represented her in the blue wrapper, holding the sleeping Isolde upon her knee, that soft and pensive stillness in her eyes. Within a couple of months after its appearance, Mr. Nevins had received orders for similar portraits from a dozen mothers, and had taken his position in the art world as the popular baby specialist.
Mariana had enjoyed the portrait and the sittings. They diverted her thoughts from the groove of the ordinary and gratified to a small extent her social instinct. When it was finished, and Mr. Nevins no longer came, she relapsed into listlessness. It was the friction of the outside world she needed. Hers was not the nature to develop through stagnation. In barren soil she wilted and grew colorless, while at the touch of sunshine she expanded and put forth her old radiance.
Anthony, watching her, would become oppressed at times with the thought that this thin and fragile woman, dragging through her irksome round of duties, anæmic and hollow-eyed, might by the magic of wealth and ease mature into a passionate, lithe, and gracious creature, of which she was now the wraith – and yet which even now she suggested. For the furnace through which she had passed, in robbing her of freshness and bloom, had been unable to destroy her vague and ineffable charm.
"She is a woman ruined," he said, bitterly, and he said it with a dull aching in his heart. To him Mariana, emaciated and unresponsive, was still the Mariana to be possessed and held with burning desire. The small clashes of temper, the long silences, the apparent indifference, had been powerless to weaken the force of his love. It was still indomitable.
One night, upon going to his room, he found her in her night-gown kneeling on the hearth-rug. From her breathing he knew that she was asleep, and it was a moment before he aroused her. In the dim light she resembled a marble figure of prayer, her cheek resting upon her hand, the lashes fallen over the violet circles beneath her eyes.
Beside the bed, the baby lay in its little crib, the restless fists lying upon its breast, a fine moisture shining like dew upon the infantile face. He stood looking at it, a thrill shooting into his heart. For the first time he realized with acuteness a positive feeling for the child – realized that it was his as well as Mariana's, that it had a claim upon him other than the claim of Mariana, that he was not only the husband of a woman, but the father of a child.
Bending over the crib, he touched with one finger the crumpled rose-leaf hands, with the soft indentation around the wrist as if left by a tightly drawn cord.
He smiled slightly. Then he crossed over and kissed Mariana. She opened her eyes, yawned, stretched her arms above her head, and rose.
"I have really been asleep," she said.
"You were so tired," answered Algarcife, and his voice was limpid with tenderness. "It kills me that you should work so, Mariana."
Mariana rested against him for an instant. Then she went to the crib, and, raising the baby's head, smoothed its pillow. As she laid it down again she pressed the cover carefully over its arms; then, throwing herself into bed, she fell asleep with a sigh.
CHAPTER XVII
With the closing session, Algarcife lost his position at the Bodley College. He had published, for a mere pittance, a series of articles upon the origin of sex, and, as a result, he was requested to deliver his resignation to the principal of the institution. A man holding such views, it was argued, was an unsuitable instructor for sixty-one young women. So the instructorship was transferred to a divinity student who was casually looking into science, and Algarcife was dismissed.
Upon receiving his dismissal, he descended into the street and walked slowly homeward. His first sensation was one of anger – blind anger against the blindness of the universe. It seemed incredible that a premium should be set upon commonplaceness, that modern civilization should demand of a man that he shape his mind by an artificial process after the minds of semi-savage ancestors. Was thought to be forever prostrate beneath the feet of superstition? Was all boldness of inquiry, all mental advancement along other than given lines, to be branded in the nineteenth century by the odium theologicum as it had been branded in the time of Bruno?
Then there followed a wave of personal bitterness which in its turn was succeeded by a flood-tide of indifference.
Going home, he found Mariana in nervous despair. The baby, who had been unwell for several days, had been suddenly threatened with convulsions. Upon the doctor's arrival, he had predicted a dangerous teething, and had insisted upon Isolde leaving town before the beginning of hot weather.
"I am so miserable," said Mariana, moistening a towel to remove the traces of milk that she had upset upon her wrapper. "What can we do?" With a feverish gesture she brushed her heavy and disordered hair from her brow and shook her head helplessly. "Monday is the first of June," she added.
Anthony listened almost stolidly. When he spoke there was a dogged decision in his voice. "The money must be had," he answered. "God knows, I believe I'd steal it if I'd half a chance!"
"Then we'd all go to prison," remarked Mariana, ruefully, as she measured the coffee into the coffee-pot.
Algarcife smiled with a quick sense of humor. "At any rate, a livelihood would be insured," he returned. "Honest industry is the only thing that goes a-begging in this philanthropic century." Then, as Mariana returned to the baby, he drank his coffee in silence and went out. As a beginning, he secured an order to write hygienic articles for a Sunday newspaper. Then he called upon Father Speares and found that he was out of town, and even in his desperation was conscious of a sensation of relief at the thought that Father Speares was beyond appeal. But the sensation was reactionary, and, upon consulting the weather bulletin and finding that a change in temperature was expected, he wrote a letter, which he left at the clergyman's house.
"How is Isolde?" he asked of Mariana an hour later.
Mariana smiled and raised her finger warningly. "Much brighter to-day," she answered, "and sleeping sweetly."
Anthony bent over the crib, holding his breath as he watched the child. He noticed that she looked thinner; the blue veins showed in a delicate tracery upon the forehead, and the crease around the tiny wrists was less deep.
Mariana, serious and careworn, leaned upon the opposite side.
"What do you think?" she whispered.
"Only a little pale," he replied; "all children are when teething, I suppose."
They went into the next room and sat down, leaving the door ajar.
"The doctor was here again," began Mariana, playing with the folds of her gown. "June is the dangerous month – he says so."
Algarcife raised his eyes and looked at her.
"I wrote to Father Speares to-day," he said.
For a moment Mariana was silent, a flush rising to her brow. Then she rose and came over to his side, putting her arms about his neck.
"My poor love," she murmured. Anthony drew her down upon the sofa beside him.
"It was tough," he said, slowly, "but – how I hate to tell you, Mariana! – there is something else."
Mariana flinched sharply.
"Surely he has not refused?" she exclaimed.
"He is away, but the College has given me notice."
Mariana did not answer, but she grew white and her lips trembled. Then she flung her arms out upon the sofa and laid her head upon them. Her sobs came short and fast.
"Mariana!"
She lifted her head and choked back her tears, sitting cold and stiff beside him.
"If it were only ourselves," she said; "but the baby – what will become of the baby?"
There was a strained note of cheerfulness in Algarcife's voice.
"Don't cry," he said, laying his hand upon her shoulder. "I must get the money. Father Speares will lend it to me. We will pull through all right, never fear."
Mariana rested her head upon his arm and looked up at him.
"How ill you look!" she said. "My poor boy!"
Then the baby cried, and she went back to it. As Algarcife rose from the sofa, he was seized with a sudden swimming in his head, and, to steady himself, leaned against the mantel. The objects in the room seemed to whirl in a tangle before him, and his vision was obscured by a vaporous fog, while a tumultuous ringing sounded in his ears. But in a moment it passed, and he was himself again.
"Biliousness," he remarked, and started out in search of stray journalistic work. He found it easier to obtain than he had supposed, and, with his usual precision of method, calculated that by working fifteen hours a day he might, provided the supply of work continued, make up the amount which he would lose with the loss of the Bodley College.
After a week of such work, he became optimistic in mind and correspondingly depressed in body. "If my brains didn't get so sluggish," he said to Mariana, "the work would be nothing; but caffeine will remedy that." And he returned to the use of the drug, silencing Mariana's remonstrances with a laugh.
"My dear girl, if I didn't take something to keep me awake, I'd fall asleep in my chair at ten o'clock, and the subscribers to the evening issue would never learn the hygienic value of regular hours and a sufficient amount of recreation."
"But you will wreck yourself," urged Mariana.
"Nonsense. This caffeine is going to take Isolde and yourself to the country."
"And you?"
"I – oh, don't worry about me! I am all right."
And he would begin work with a pretence of alacrity, keeping to it until drowsiness warned him of physical exhaustion, when he would pause, stretch himself, measure his dose of caffeine, and, lifting his pen, dog away until past midnight.
It was an afternoon shortly after this that Mariana came to him flushed and expectant.
"Signor Morani sent for me," she explained. "I left Isolde with a daughter of the laundress and went. He has offered me an engagement in a comic opera."
Algarcife started and looked up.
"It seems that the manager heard me sing one day when I was at my lesson. He liked my dramatic power, Signor Morani says. At any rate, one of his troupe has given out, and he offers me the part."
"But, Mariana – "
Mariana did not look at him, but went rapidly on, as if waiving possible objections.
"We need the money. It might take Isolde away – and it is a chance. I am so young, you see – and – "
"Mariana!" cried Algarcife, sharply. There was a note in his voice which caused her to shrink away as if he had struck her. "Mariana," he put out his hand in protest, "you shall not do it. I will not let you. I could not bear it."
Mariana tapped her foot upon the floor impatiently. "I believe it is a child's part," she said.
"You shall not do it," he said, passionately.
Mariana turned her eyes upon him.
"But the money?"
"Oh, we will arrange it. I will leave The Gotham and take a room down-town, and you and Isolde shall go."
"Very well," said Mariana, sullenly, and left the room.
The next few days brought a wave of heat, and Algarcife made arrangements to send Mariana and the child away. He gave notice at The Gotham, and secured a room upon Fourth Street, and in spare moments assisted Mariana with the packing. Then there was some delay in the payment for the articles he had written, and Mariana's departure was postponed. "Get your things ready," said Algarcife, when the heat grew more intense and Isolde drooped. "The moment that the money arrives, you can start. It was due a week ago."
So Mariana continued her packing with nervous hands. She was divided between anxiety for Anthony and anxiety for the child, and she was profoundly depressed on her own account.
"If it wasn't for Isolde, I wouldn't go a step," she declared, standing before a trunk into which she was putting cans of baby's milk. "I feel as if I could weep gallons of tears – only I haven't time."
Miss Ramsey, who was rocking Isolde, smiled encouragingly. "The change will do you good," she responded, "and I am sure you need it. You are quite ghastly."
Mariana sighed and looked at herself in the glass. "I suppose so," she remarked, a little wistfully. "I might be thirty."
And she went on packing. "Of course we may not leave for weeks," she explained, "and yet I feel driven. The uncertainty is horrible."
But Algarcife, coming in at dusk, found her more cheerful. She kissed him with something of her old warmth, and talked almost animatedly while he ate his supper.
"I shall miss you so," she said, "and yet I do wish we could get off. Isolde has been very fretful all day, and is badly broken out with heat. She has just fallen asleep."
After supper Mariana went to bed, and Anthony returned to work. He had an article to do upon the moral effects of the bicycle, which was to be handed in in the morning, and this, with some additional work, would keep him writing far into the night. With a strong feeling of distaste he took up his pen, and his repugnance increased with every line. In a moment he rose, threw off his coat, and applied himself with dull determination. It was warm to oppression, and the noises of the city came distinctly through the open window. The elevated road grated upon him as if it were running along his nervous system, and he started at the shrill sounds which rose at intervals above the monotonous roar of the streets.
He had been writing some hours, and it was twelve o'clock when the door opened and Mariana came in. She was barefooted and in her night-gown. Her face shone gray in the lamplight, and there were heavy circles under her eyes. She spoke rapidly.
"The baby is ill," she said. "You must find a doctor. She can't breathe."
In an instant Algarcife had passed her and was bending over the crib. The child was lying upon its back, staring with a mute interrogation at vacancy. There was a purple tinge over its face, and its breath came shortly.
"In a moment," said Anthony, and, taking up his hat, went out.
Within half an hour he returned, followed by the doctor, a well-meaning young fellow, fresh from college and wholly in earnest.
He looked at the child, spoke soothingly to Mariana, wrote a prescription, which he himself had filled at the nearest druggist's, gave a multitude of directions, sat an hour, and departed with the assurance that he would return at daybreak.
"She looks easier now," said Anthony, with a nervous tremor in his voice. "It must have been the heat."
Mariana, with tragic eyes, was fanning the little, flushed face, crooning a negro lullaby which she had treasured from her own childhood. The wavings of the palm-leaf fan cast a grotesque shadow that hovered like a gigantic hand above the baby's head, and, with the flitting of the shadow, the wistful little plantation melody went on. Ever since the birth of Isolde, Mariana had sung that song, and it fell upon Anthony's ears with an acute familiarity, like the breaking of happier associations against a consciousness of present pain.
"Ba! ba! black sheep. Where yo' lef' yo' lamb?
Way down yonder in de val-ley.
De birds an' de butterflies a-peckin' out its eyes,
An' de po' little thing cries: 'Mammy.'"
As Algarcife looked down upon the small and motionless body, he felt a sudden tightening of his heart. The infantile hands, with their waxen look of helplessness, caused him to draw his breath as he turned away, and to wonder how Mariana could sit there hour after hour, crooning the negro song and waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan.
And yet her figure in its pallid outline against the dim light was photographed upon his brain, and it was Mariana at that moment that he loved with the love more abundant, and that in the after-years he found it hardest to forget.
He saw her with the reddish glow from the night-lamp upon her profile, her drooping body in the shadow, the fixed look of pain upon her face softened by the look which fell upon the sick child. He saw the child lying mute and motionless, the wide eyes staring, the small hands folded, the soft rings of flaxen hair wet and dark with perspiration, and the moisture lying upon the fragile little chest which the gown left bare; and he saw it all shadowed and lightened by the wavings of Mariana's fan.
Beyond this he saw the homely and disordered room, the articles dropped hastily as if in the start of sudden anxiety, the half-packed trunk with the piles of clothes upon the floor beside it, the tiny socks with the impress of the feet just learning to stand, the battered India-rubber doll with the crocheted frock of bright-hued worsteds, and at Mariana's hand the medicines which the doctor had left.
All these things were one with Mariana and himself. They were the heritage of their marriage, the memories which must always be inviolate – memories that could be shared by none other, could be undone by no stretch of time. In that atmosphere of common pain, which is more powerful both to sever and to unite than the less trenchant atmosphere of joy, he felt his heart leap into an invisible communion with the heart of Mariana. At that moment he was conscious of an additional sense-perception in the acuteness of his sympathy. He returned to his desk and took up his pen. The articles must be finished, and yet between himself and the unwritten page rose the vision of the still room, the pallid woman, and the sick child. The wavings of Mariana's fan seemed to obscure the light, and in his nervous tension he convinced himself that he heard the difficult breathing of a dying child – his child and Mariana's.
He swallowed an added dose of caffeine and looked at the page before him. The last written words stared him in the face and seemed so alien to his present train of thought as to have emanated from another person. He wondered what that other person's completion of the sentence would have been.
"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." What in thunder had that to do with the effects of the bicycle? And what beastly rot it was. One might as well state that to be comfortable is the first duty of the damned.
"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." He wrote on with the feeling that he was existing as an automaton, that while his hand was executing the result of some reflex action, his thinking entity was in the still room behind the closed door.
But with the absence of personality his senses were rendered doubly acute, and he seemed to see the rhythm of the atmospheric waves about him, while his ears were responsive to every sound in the night without – hearing them, not in a confused discord, but in distinct differentiation of note and key. Once his gaze encountered the grinning skull above the mantel, and, to his giddy senses, it seemed to wink with its hollow sockets. He found himself idly wondering if the skull had caught the trick of winking from its former accompaniment of flesh, and was forced to pull his thoughts together with a jerk. Then there came one of those sudden attacks of vertigo to which he had become subject, and he laid aside his pen and closed his eyes. "Too much caffeine," he muttered. But when it passed he went on again.
As the day broke he finished his articles, placed them in envelopes, stamped and addressed them, and rose to his feet. He blew out the lamp, and the faint odor of heated oil caused him a sensation of nausea. Crossing to the window, he raised the shade and stood inhaling the insipidity of atmosphere which is the city imitation of the freshness of a country morning. Without, a sombre, neutral-toned light flooded the almost deserted streets. In the highest heaven a star was still visible, and the vaguest herald of dawn flaunted itself beyond the chimney-pots.
As he lifted the shade he noticed that his hand trembled and that his head was unusually light. That massive sense of loneliness which the transition hour from darkness to day begets in the on-looker oppressed him with the force of an estrangement of hope. Such an impression had been produced upon him a hundred times by the breaking of dawn after a sleepless night.
He turned away and opened the door softly.
The night-lamp was still burning, but the beginning of the morrow washed with a faint grayness the atmosphere. The objects he had dwelt upon the night before were magnified in size, and in an instant the unpacked trunks, the rubber doll, and the bottles of medicine obtruded themselves upon his vision.
Mariana was still sitting as he had left her, waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan. He wondered vaguely if she had sat thus since midnight. Then he laid his hand upon her shoulder.
"Mariana, you must lie down." And as he stooped nearer he saw that the child was dead.
