Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




It was, of course, the old difference of the generations; but it
was more marked because these two generations had never spoken
the same language, therefore quiet, sympathetic disagreement was
impossible. It was impossible, too, because the actual fact was
that neither her belief nor his disbelief were integral to their
lives. Her creed was a barbarous anthropomorphism, which had
created an offended and puerile god--a god of foreign missions
and arid church-going and eternal damnation. The fear of her god
(such as he was) would, no doubt, have protected her against
certain physical temptations, to which, as it happened, her
temperament never inclined; but he had never safeguarded her from
the temptation of cutthroat competition, or even of business
shrewdness which her lawyer showed her how to make legal. Blair,
on the contrary, had long ago discarded the naive brutalities of
Presbyterianism; church-going bored him, and he was not
interested in saving souls in Africa. But, like most of us--like
his mother, in fact, he had a god of his own, a god who might
have safeguarded him against certain intellectual temptations;
cheating at cards, or telling the truth, if the truth would
compromise a woman. But as he had no desire to cheat at cards,
and the women whom he might have compromised did not need to be
lied about, his god was of as little practical value to him as
his mother's was to her. So they were neither of them speaking of
realities when Mrs. Maitland said: "What do you believe? What
have you got instead of God?"

"Honor," Blair said promptly. "What do you mean by honor?" she
said, impatiently.

"Well," her son reflected, "there are things a man simply can't
do; that's all. And that's honor, don't you know. Of course,
religion is supposed to keep you from doing things, too. But
there's this difference: religion, if you pick pockets--I speak
metaphorically; threatens you with hell. Honor threatens you with
yourself." As he spoke he frowned, as if a disagreeable idea had
occurred to him.

His mother frowned, too. That hell and a man's self might be the
same thing had never struck Sarah Maitland. She did not
understand what he meant, and feeling herself at a disadvantage,
retaliated with the reproof she might have administered to a boy
of fifteen: "You don't know what you are talking about!"

The man of twenty-five laughed lazily. "Your religion is very
amusing, my dear mother."

Her face darkened. She took her elbow from the mantelpiece, and
seemed uncertain what to do. Blair sprang to open the door, but
she made an irritated gesture. "I know how to open doors," she
said. She threw a brief "good-night" to Elizabeth, and turned a
cheek to Nannie for the kiss that had fallen there, soft as a
little feather, in all the nights of all the years they had lived
together. "'Night, Blair," she said shortly; then hesitated, her
hand on the door-knob. There was an instant when the command
_"Go to church!"_ trembled upon her lips, but it was not
spoken. "I advise you," she said roughly, "to get over your
conceit, and try to get some religion into you. Your father and
your grandfather didn't think they could get along without it;
they went to church! But you evidently think you are so much
better than they were that you can stay away,"

The door slammed behind her. Blair whistled. "Poor dear mother!"
he sighed; and turned round to listen to the two girls. "Can you
be ready to start on the first?" Elizabeth was asking Nannie,
evidently trying to cover up the awkwardness of that angry exit.

"Start where?" Blair asked.

"Why, East! You know. I told you ages ago," Nannie explained.
"Elizabeth and I are going to stay with Mrs. Richie at the
seashore."

"You never said a word about it," Blair said disgustedly. His
annoyance knew no disguise. "I call it pretty shabby for you two
to go off! What's going to happen to me?"

"Business, Blair, business!" Elizabeth mocked. But Nannie was
plainly conscience-stricken. "I'll not go, if you'd rather I
didn't, Blair."

"Nonsense!" her brother said shortly, "of course you must go,
but--" He did not finish his thought, whatever it was; he went
back to the piano and began to drum idly. His face was sharply
annoyed. That definition of his god which he had made to his
mother, had aroused a nameless uneasiness. It occurred to him
that perhaps he was "picking a pocket," in finding such emphatic
satisfaction in Elizabeth's society. Now, abruptly, at the news
of her approaching absence, the uneasiness sharpened into faintly
recognizable outlines.

He struck a jarring chord on the piano, and told himself not to
be a fool. "She's mighty good fun. Of course I shall miss her or
any other girl, in this Godforsaken hole! That's all it amounts
to. Anyhow, she's dead in love with David." Sitting there in the
hot dusk, listening to the voices of the girls, Blair felt
suddenly irritated with David. "Darn him, why does he go off and
leave her in this way? Not but what it is all right so far as I
am concerned; only--" Then, wordlessly, his god must have accused
him, for he winced. "I am _not_, not in the least!" he said.
The denial confessed him to himself, and there was an angry bang
of discordant octaves. The two girls called out in dismay.

"Oh, _do_ stop!" Elizabeth said. Blair got up from the
piano-stool and came over to them silently. His thoughts were in
clamoring confusion. "I am _not_," he said again to himself.
"I like her, but that's all." There was a look of actual panic on
his lazily charming face. He glanced at Elizabeth, who, her head
on Nannie's shoulder, was humming softly: "'Oh, won't it be
joyful--joyful-joyful--'" and clenched his hands.

He was very silent as he walked home with her that night. When
they reached her door, Elizabeth looked up at the closed shutters
of Mrs. Richie's house, and sighed. "How dreary a closed house
looks!" she said. "I almost wish Uncle would rent it, but he
won't. _I_ think he is keeping it for Mrs. Richie to live in
when David and I settle down in Philadelphia."

Blair was apparently not interested in Mrs. Richie's future. "I
wish," he said, "that I'd gone to Europe this summer."

"Well, that's polite, considering that Nannie and I have spent
our time making it agreeable for you."

"I stayed in Mercer because I thought I'd like a summer with
Nannie," he defended himself; he was just turning away at the
foot of the steps, but he stopped and called back: "with Nannie-
_and you."_

Elizabeth, from the open door, looked after him with frank
astonishment. "How long since Nannie and I have been so much
appreciated?"

"I think I began to appreciate you a good while ago, Elizabeth,"
he said, significantly; but she did not hear him. "Perhaps it's
just as well she's going," he told himself, as he went slowly
back to the hotel. "Not that I'm smitten; but I might be. I can
see that I might be, if I should let myself go." But he was
confident that allegiance to his god would keep him from ever
letting himself go.

The girls went East that week, and when they did, Blair took no
more meals in the office-dining-room.

It was a very happy time that the inland girls spent with Mrs.
Richie, in her small house on the Jersey shore. It happened that
neither of them had ever seen the ocean, and their first glimpse
of it was a great experience. Added to that was the experience,
new to both of them, of daily companionship with a serene nature.
Mrs. Richie was always a little remote, a little inclined to keep
people at arm's-length; there were undercurrents of sadness in
her talk, and she was perhaps rather absorbed in her own supreme
affair, maternal love. Also, her calm outlook upon heavenly
horizons made the affairs of the girls seem sometimes
disconcertingly small, and to realize the smallness of one's
affairs is in itself an experience to youth. But in spite of the
ultimate reserves they felt in her, Mrs. Richie was sympathetic,
and full of soft gaieties, with endless patience for people and
events. Elizabeth's old uneasy dislike of her had long since
yielded to the fact that she was David's mother, and so must be,
and in theory was, loved. But the love was really only a faint
awe at what she still called "perfection"; and during the two
months of living under the same roof with her, Elizabeth felt at
times a resentful consciousness that Mrs. Richie was afraid of
that ungovernable temper, which, the girl used to say,
impatiently, "never hurts anybody but myself!" Like most high-
tempered people, Elizabeth, though penitent and more or less
mortified by her outbursts of fury, was always a little
astonished when any one took them seriously; and Mrs. Richie took
them very seriously.

Nannie, being far simpler than Elizabeth, was less impressed by
Mrs. Richie than by her surroundings;--the ocean, the whole gamut
of marine sights and happenings; Mrs. Richie's housekeeping; the
delicate food and serving (what would Harris have thought of that
table!)-all these things, as well as David's fortnightly visits,
and Elizabeth's ardors and gay coldnesses, were delights to
Nannie. Both girls had an absorbingly good time, and when the
last day of the last week finally arrived, and Mr. Robert
Ferguson appeared to escort them home, they were both of them
distinctly doleful.

"Every perfect thing stops!" Elizabeth sighed to David. They had
left the porch, and gone down on to the sands flooded with
moonlight and silence. The evening was very still and warm, and
the full blue pour of the moon made everything softly unreal,
except the glittering path of light crossing the breathing, black
expanse of water. David had hesitated when she had suggested
leaving the others and coming down here by themselves,--then he
had looked at Nannie, sitting between Robert Ferguson and his
mother, and seemed to reassure himself; but he was careful to
choose a place on the beach where he could keep an eye on the
porch. He was talking to Elizabeth in his anxious way, about his
work, and how soon his income would be large enough for them to
marry. "The minus sign expresses it now," he said; "I could kick
myself when I think that, at twenty-six, my mother has to pay my
washwoman!" Their engagement had continued to accentuate the
difference in the development of these two; David's manhood was
more and more of the mind; Elizabeth's womanhood was most
exquisitely of the body. When he spoke of his shame in being
supported by his mother, she leaned her cheek on his shoulder,
careless of the three spectators on the porch, and said softly,
"David, I love you so that I would like to scrub floors for you."
He laughed; "I wouldn't like to have you scrub floors, thank you!
Why in thunder don't I get ahead faster," he sighed. Then he told
her that the older men in the profession were "so darned mean,
even the big fellows, 'way up," that they kept on practising when
they could just as well sit back on their hind legs and do
nothing, and give the younger men a chance.

"They are nothing but money-grabbers," Elizabeth agreed, burning
with indignation at all successful physicians. "But David, we can
live on very little. Corn-beef is very cheap, Cherry-pie says.
So's liver."

Up on the porch the conversation was quite as practical as it was
down by the moonlit water:

"Elizabeth is to have a little bit of money handed over to her on
her next birthday," Mr. Ferguson was saying; then he twitched the
black ribbon of his glasses and brought them tumbling from his
nose; "it's an inheritance from her father."

"Oh, how exciting!" said Nannie. "Will it make it possible for
them to be married any sooner?"

"They can't marry on the interest on it," he said, with his
meager laugh; "it's only a nest-egg."

Mrs. Richie sighed. "Well, of course they must be prudent, but I
am sorry to have them wait. It will be some time before David's
practice is enough for them to marry on. He is so funny in
planning their housekeeping expenses," she said, with that
mother-laugh of mockery and love. "You should hear the economies
they propose!" And she told him some of them. "They make endless
calculations as to how little they can possibly live on. You
would never suppose they _could_ be so ignorant as to the
cost of things! Of course I enlighten them when they deign to
consult me. I do wish David would let me give him enough to get
married on," she ended, a little impatiently.

"I think he's right not to," Robert Ferguson said.

"David is so queer about money," Nannie commented; and rose,
saying she wanted to go indoors to the lamplight and her book.

"Pity Blair hasn't some of David's 'queerness,'" Mr. Ferguson
barked, when she had vanished into the house.

Mrs. Richie looked after her uneasily, missing her protecting
presence. But in Mr. Ferguson's matter-of-fact talk he seemed
just the same harsh, kind, unsentimental neighbor of the last
seventeen years; "he's forgotten his foolishness," she thought,
and resigned herself, comfortably, to Nannie's absence. "Does
Elizabeth know about the legacy?" she asked.

"No, she hasn't an idea of it. I was bound that the expectation
of money shouldn't spoil her."

"Well," she jeered at him, "I do hope you are satisfied
_now_, that she is not spoiled by money or anything else!
How afraid you were to let yourself really love the child--poor
little Elizabeth!"

"I had reason," he insisted doggedly. "Life had played a trick on
me once, and I made up my mind not to build on anybody again,
until I was sure of them." Then, without looking at her, he said,
as if following out some line of thought, "I hope you have come
to feel that you will marry me, Mrs. Richie?"

"_Oh!_" she said, in dismay.

"I don't see why you can't make up your mind to it," he
continued, frowning; "I know"--he stopped, and put on his glasses
carefully with both hands--"I know I am a bear, but--"

"You are not!"

"Don't interrupt. I am. But not at heart. Listen to me, at my
age, talking about 'hearts'!" They both laughed, and then Mr.
Ferguson gave a snort of impatience. "Look at those two
youngsters down there, engaged to be married, and swearing by the
moon that nobody ever loved as they do. How absurd it is! A man
has to be fifty before he knows enough about love to get
married."

"Nonsense!"

"I cannot take youth seriously," he ruminated; "its behavior,
yes; that may be serious enough! Youth is always firing the
Ephesian dome; but youth itself, and its opinions, always seem to
me a little ridiculous. Yet those two infants seem to think that
they have discovered love! Well," he interrupted himself, in
sudden somber memory, "I felt that way once myself. And yet
_now_, I know--"

Mrs. Richie said hurriedly something about its being too damp for
Elizabeth on the sand. "Do call them in!"

He laughed. "No; you don't need 'em. I won't say any more--to-
night."

"Here they come!" Mrs. Richie said in a relieved voice.

A minute before, David, looking up at the porch, and discovering
Nannie's absence, had said, "Let's go in." "Oh, must we?"
Elizabeth said, reluctantly. "I'd so much rather sit down here
and have you kiss me." But she came, perforce, for David, in his
anxiety not to leave his mother alone with Mr. Ferguson, was
already halfway up the beach.

"Do tell Elizabeth about the money now," Mrs. Richie said.

"I will," said Robert Ferguson; but added, under his breath, "I
sha'n't give up, you know." Mrs. Richie was careful not to hear
him.

"Elizabeth!" she said, eagerly. "Your uncle has some news for
you." And Mr. Ferguson told his niece briefly, that on her
birthday in December she would come into possession of some money
left her by her father.

"Don't get up your expectations, it's not much," he said,
charily, "but it's something to start on."

"Oh, Uncle! how splendid!" she said, and caught David's hand in
both of hers. "David!"--her face was radiantly unconscious of the
presence of the others: "perhaps we needn't wait two years?"

"I'm afraid it won't make much difference." David spoke rather
grimly; "I must be able to buy your shoestrings myself, you know,
before we can be married."

Elizabeth dropped his hand, and the dimple straightened in her
cheek.

Mrs. Richie smiled at her. "Young people have to be prudent, dear
child."

"How much money shall I have, Uncle?" Elizabeth asked coldly.

He told her. "Not a fortune; but David needn't worry about your
shoestrings."

"Yes, I will," he broke in, with a laugh. "She'll have to go
barefoot, if I can't get 'em for her!"

Elizabeth exclaimed, with angry impatience, and Robert Ferguson,
chuckling, struck him lightly on the shoulder. "Look out you
don't fall over backward trying to stand up straight!" he said.

The possibility of an earlier wedding-day was not referred to
again. The next morning they all went up to town together in the
train, and Elizabeth, who had recovered from her momentary
displeasure, did no more than cast glowing looks at David--
lovely, melting looks of delicate passion, as virginal as an
opening lily--looks that said, "I wish we did not have to wait!"
For her part, she would have been glad "to go barefoot," if only
they might the sooner tread the path of life together.

When they got into Mercer, late in the evening, who should meet
them at the station but Blair. Robert Ferguson, with obvious
relief, immediately handed his charges over to the young man with
a hurried explanation that he must see some one on business
before going to his own house. "Take the girls home, will you,
Blair?" Blair said that that was what he was there for. His
method of taking them home was to put Nannie into one carriage,
and get into another with Elizabeth, who, a little surprised,
asked where Nannie was.

"It would delay you to go round to our house first," Blair
explained. "You forget we live in the slums. And Nannie's in a
hurry, so I sent her directly home. She doesn't mind going by
herself, you know. Look here, you two girls have been away an
abominably long time! I've been terribly lonely--without Nannie."

He had indeed been lonely "without Nannie." In these empty,
meaningless weeks at the Works, Blair Maitland had suddenly
stumbled against the negations of life. Hitherto, he had known
only the easy and delightful assents of Fate; this was his first
experience with the inexorable _No_. A week after the girls
went East, he admitted to himself that, had David been out of the
way, he would undoubtedly have fallen in love with Elizabeth. "As
it is, of course I haven't," he declared. Night after night in
those next weeks, as he idled moodily about Mercer's streets, or,
lounging across the bridge, leaned on the handrail and watched
the ashes from his cigar flicker down into the unseen current
below, he said the same thing: "I am not in love with her, and I
sha'n't allow myself to be. I won't let it go any farther. But
David is no man for a girl like Elizabeth to marry." Then he
would fall to thinking just what kind of man Elizabeth ought to
marry. Such reflections proved, so he assured himself, how
entirely he knew that she belonged to David. Sometimes he
wondered sullenly whether he had not better leave Mercer before
she came back? Perhaps it was his god who made this suggestion;
if so, he did not recognize a divine voice. He always decided
against such a course. It would be cowardly, he told himself, to
keep away from Elizabeth. "I will see her when she gets home,
just as usual. To stay away might make her think that I was--
afraid. And I am not in the least, because I am not in love with
her, and I shall not allow myself to be." He was perfectly sure
of himself, and perfectly sincere, too; what lover has ever
understood that love has nothing to do with volition!

Now, alone with her in the old depot carriage, his sureness
permitted him to say, significantly,

``I have been terribly lonely--without Nannie.''

``I thought you were absorbed in business cares,'' she told him
drolly. ``How do you like business, Blair, really?''

``Loathe it,'' he said succinctly. ``Elizabeth, come and take
dinner with us to-morrow evening?''

``Oh, Nannie's had enough of me. She's been with me for nearly
two months.''

``I haven't been with you for two months. Be a good girl, and do
some missionary work. Slumming is the fashion, you know. Come and
cheer me up. It's been fiendishly stupid without you.''

She laughed at his sincerely gloomy voice.

``Come,'' he urged; ``we'll have dinner in the back parlor. Do
you remember that awful dinner-party?'' He laughed as he spoke,
but--being 'sure';--in the darkness of the shabby hack he looked
at her intently. . . . Oh, if David were only out of the way!

``Remember it? I should think I did!'' There was no telltale
flicker on her smooth cheek; even in the gloom of the carriage he
could see that the dark amber of her eyes brimmed over with
amusement, and the dimple deepened entrancingly. ``How could I
forget it? Didn't I wear my first long dress to that dinner-
party--oh, and my six-button gloves?''

``I--'' said Blair, and paused. ``I remember other things than
the gloves and long dress, Elizabeth.'' (Why shouldn't he say as
much as that? He was certain of himself, and David was certain of
her, so why not speak of what it gave him a rapturous pang to
remember?)

But at his words the color whipped into her cheek; her clear
brows drew together into a slight frown. ``How is your mother,
Blair?'' she said coldly. "Oh, very well. Can you imagine Mother
anything but well? The heat has nearly killed me, but Mother is
iron."

"She's perfectly wonderful!"

"Yes; wonderful woman," he agreed carelessly. "Elizabeth, promise
you'll come to-morrow evening?"

"Cherry-pie would think it was horrid in me not to stay with her,
when I've been away so long."

"I think it's horrid in you not to stay with me."

She laughed; then sighed. "David is working awfully hard, Blair."

"Darn David!" he retorted, laughing. "So am I, if that's any
reason for your giving a man your society."

"You! You couldn't work hard to save your life."

"I could, if I had somebody to work for, as David has."

"You'd better get somebody," she said gaily.

"I don't want any second-bests," he declared.

"Donkey!" Elizabeth said good-naturedly. But she was a little
surprised, for whatever else Blair was, he was not stupid--and
such talk is always stupid. That it had its root in anything
deeper than chaffing never occurred to her. They were at her own
door by this time, and Blair, helping her out of the carriage,
looked into her face, and his veins ran hot.

The next morning, when he went to see Nannie, he was absorbed and
irritable. "Girls are queer," he told her; "they marry all kinds
of men. But I'll tell you one thing: David is the last man for a
girl like Elizabeth. He is perfectly incapable of understanding
her."

That was the first day that he did not assure himself that he
"was not in love."




CHAPTER XVII

That autumn, with its heats and brown fogs and sharp frosts, was
the happiest time in Sarah Maitland's life--the happiest time, at
least, since those brief months of marriage;--_Blair was in the
Business!_ "If only his father could see him!" she used to say
to herself. Of course, she had moments of disappointment; once or
twice moments of anger, even; and once, at any rate, she had a
moment of fright. She had summoned her son peremptorily to go
with her to watch a certain experiment. Blair appeared,
shrinking, bored, absent-minded, nearly an hour later than the
time she had set. That put her in a bad humor to start with; but
as they were crossing the Yards, her irritation suddenly deepened
into dismay: Blair, his lip drooping with disgust at the sights
and sounds about him, his hands in his pockets, was lounging
along behind her, and she, realizing that he was not at her side,
stopped and looked back. He was standing still, looking up, his
eyes radiant, his lips parted with delight.

"What is it?" she called. He did not hear her; he stood there,
gazing at three white butterflies that were zigzagging into a
patch of pale blue sky. How they had come into this black and
clamorous spot, why they had left their fields of goldenrod and
asters farther down the river, who can say? But here they were,
darting up and up, crossing, dipping, dancing in the smoky
sunshine that flooded thinly the noisy squalor of the Yards.
Blair, looking at them, said, under his breath, in pure delight,
"Yes, just like the high notes. A flight of violin notes!"

"Blair!" came the impatient voice; "what's the matter with you?"

"Nothing, nothing."

"I was just going to tell you that a high silicon pig--"

"My dear mother," he interrupted wearily, "there is something
else in the world than pig. I saw three butterflies--"

"Butterflies!"

She stood in the cinder pathway in absolute consternation. Was
her son a fool? For a moment she was so startled that she was not
even angry. "Come on," she said soberly; and they went into the
Works in silence.

That evening, when he dropped into supper, she watched him
closely, and by and by her face lightened a little. Of course, to
stop and gape up into the air was silly; but certainly he was
talking intelligently enough now,--though it was only to
Elizabeth Ferguson, who happened to be taking supper with them.
Yes, he did not look like a fool. "He _has_ brains," she
said to herself, frowning, "but why doesn't he use 'em?" She
sighed, and called out loudly, "Harris! Corn-beef!" But as she
hacked off a slab of boiled meat, she wondered why on earth
Nannie asked Elizabeth to tea so often, and especially why she
asked her on those evenings when Blair happened to be at home.
"Elizabeth is such a little blatherskite," she reflected, good-
naturedly, "the boy doesn't get a chance to talk to me!" Then it
occurred to her that perhaps he came because Elizabeth came? for
it was evident that she amused him. Well, Sarah Maitland had no
objection. To secure her son for her dingy supper table she was
willing to put up with Elizabeth or any other girl. But certainly
Nannie invited her very often. "I'll come in to-night, if you'll
invite Elizabeth," Blair would bribe her. And Nannie, like Mrs.
Maitland herself, would have invited anybody to gain an hour of
her brother's company.

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