Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




"I shall never love you," she told him. "I will always love you!
But I will not make you unhappy. Let me be your servant; that's
all I ask."

"I love David. I will always love him."

He had been silent at that; then broke again into a cry for
mercy. "I don't care if you do love him! Don't destroy me,
Elizabeth."

He had had still one other weapon: _they were married_.
There was no getting round that. The thing was done; except by
Time and the outrageous scandal of publicity, it could not be
undone. But this weapon he had not used, knowing perfectly well
that the idea of public shame would be, just then, a matter of
indifference to Elizabeth?-perhaps even a satisfaction to her, as
the sting of the penitential whip is a satisfaction to the
sinner. All he said was summed up in three words: "Don't destroy
me."

There was no reply. She had fallen into a silence which
frightened him more than her words. It was then that he went out
for that walk on the creaking snow, in the sunshine and fierce
wind, taking the bag of nuts along for the squirrels. Elizabeth,
alone, her head on her arms on the table, went over and over his
threats and entreaties, until it seemed as if her very mind was
sore. After a while, for sheer weariness, she left the tangle of
motives and facts and obligations, and began to think of David.
It was then that she moaned a little under her breath.

Twice she had tried to write to him to tell him what had
happened. But each time she cringed away from her pen and paper.
After all, what could she write? The fact said all there was to
say, and he knew the fact by this time. When she said that, her
mind, drawn by some horrible curiosity, would begin to speculate
as to how he had heard the fact? Who told him? What did he say?
How did he--? and here she would groan aloud in an effort
_not_ to know "how" he took it! To save herself from this
speculation which seemed to dig into a grave, and touch and
handle the decaying body of love, she would plan what she should
say to him when, after a while, "to-morrow," perhaps, she should
be able to take up her pen: "David,--I was out of my head. Think
of me as if I were dead." . . . "David,--I don't want you to
forgive me. I want you to hate me as I hate myself." . . .
"David,--I was not in my right mind--forgive me. I love you just
the same. But it is as if I were dead." Again and again she had
thought out long, crying, frightened letters to him; but she had
not written them. And now she was beginning to feel, vaguely,
that she would never write them. "What is the use? I am dead."
The idea of calling upon him to come and save her, never occurred
to her. "I am dead," she said, as she sat there, her face hidden
in her arms; "there is nothing to be done."

After a while she stopped thinking of David and the letter she
had not been able to write; it seemed as if, when she tried to
make it clear to herself why she did not write to him, something
stopped in her mind--a cog did not catch; the thought eluded her.
When this happened--as it had happened again and again in these
last days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amazement, that
this irremediable catastrophe was out of all proportion to its
cause. It was monstrous that a crazy minute should ruin a whole
life--two whole lives, hers and David's. It was as if a pebble
should deflect a river from its course, and make it turn and
overflow a landscape! It was incredible that so temporary a thing
as an outbreak of temper should have eternal consequences. She
gasped, with her face buried in her arms, at the realization--
which comes to most of us poor human creatures sooner or later--
that sins may be forgiven, but their results remain. As for sin--
but surely that meaningless madness was not sin? "It was
insanity," she said, shivering at the memory of that hour in the
toll-house--that little mad hour, that brought eternity with it!
She had had other crazy hours, with no such weight of
consequence. Her mind went back over her engagement: her love,
her happiness--and her tempers. Well, nothing had come of them.
David always understood. And still further back: her careless,
fiery girlhood--when the knowledge of her mother's recreancy,
undermining her sense of responsibility by the condoning
suggestion of heredity, had made her quick to excuse her lack of
self-control. Her girlhood had been full of those outbreaks of
passion, which she "couldn't help"; they were all meaningless,
and all harmless, too; at any rate they were all without results
of pain to her.

Suddenly it seemed to her, as she looked across the roaring gulf
that separated her from the past, that all her life had been just
a sunny slope down to the edge of the gulf. All those "harmless"
tempers which had had no results, had pushed her to this result!

Her poor, bright, shamed head lay so long and so still on her
folded arms that one looking in upon her might have thought her
dead. Perhaps, in a way, Elizabeth did die then, when her heart
seemed to break with the knowledge that it is impossible to
escape from yesterday. "Oh," she said, brokenly, "why didn't
somebody tell me? Why didn't they stop me?" But she did not dwell
upon the responsibility of other people. She forgot the easy
excuse of 'heredity.' This new knowledge brought with it a vision
of her own responsibility that filled her appalled mind to the
exclusion of everything else. It is not the pebble that turns the
current--it is the easy slope that invites it. All her life
Elizabeth had been inviting this moment; and the moment, when it
came, was her Day of Judgment. What she had thought of as an
incredible injustice of fate in letting a mad instant turn the
scales for a whole life, was merely an inevitable result of all
that had preceded it. When this fierce and saving knowledge came
to her, she thought of Blair. "I have spoiled my own life and
David's life. I needn't spoil Blair's. He said if I left him, it
would destroy him.... Perhaps if I stay, it will be my
punishment. I can never be punished enough."

When Blair came home, she was standing with her forehead against
the window, her dry eyes watching the dazzling white world.

Coming up behind her, he took her hand and kissed it humbly. She
turned and looked at him with somber eyes.

"Poor Blair," she said.

And Blair, under his breath, said, "Thank God!"




CHAPTER XXIV

The coming back to Mercer some six weeks later was to Blair a
miserable and skulking experience. To Elizabeth it was almost a
matter of indifference; there is a shame which goes too deep for
embarrassment. The night they arrived at the River House, Nannie
and Miss White were waiting for them, tearful and disapproving,
of course, but distinctly excited and romantic. After all,
Elizabeth was a "bride!" and Cherry-pie and Nannie couldn't help
being fluttered. Blair listened with open amusement to their
half-scared gossip of what people thought, and what the
newspapers had said, and how "very displeased" his mother had
been; but Elizabeth hardly heard them. At the end of the call,
while Blair was bidding Nannie tell his mother he was coming to
see her in the morning. Miss White, kissing her "lamb" good
night, tried to whisper something in her ear: "_He_ said to
tell you--" "No--no--no,--I can't hear it; I can't bear it yet!"
Elizabeth broke in; she put her hands over her eyes, shivering so
that Cherry-pie forgot David and his message, and even her
child's bad behavior.

"Elizabeth! you've taken cold?"

Elizabeth drew away, smiling faintly. "No; not at all. I'm tired.
Please don't stay." And with the message still unspoken, Miss
White and Nannie went off together, as fluttering and frightened
as when they came.

The newspaper excitement which had followed the announcement of
the elopement of Sarah Maitland's son, had subsided, so there was
only a brief notice the morning after their arrival in town, to
the effect that "the bride and groom had returned to their native
city for a short stay before sailing for Europe." Still, even
though the papers were inclined to let them alone, it would be
pleasanter, Blair told his wife, to go abroad.

"Well," she said, dully. Elizabeth was always dull now. She had
lifted herself up to the altar, but there was no exaltation of
sacrifice; possibly because she considered her sacrifice a
punishment for her sin, but also because she was still physically
and morally stunned.

"Of course there is nobody in Mercer for whose opinion I care a
copper," Blair said. They were sitting in their parlor at the
hotel; Elizabeth staring out of the window at the river, Blair
leaning forward in his chair, touching once in a while, with
timid fingers, a fold of her skirt that brushed his knee. "Of
course I don't care for a lot of gossiping old hens; but it will
be pleasanter for you not to be meeting people, perhaps?" he said
gently.

There was only one person whom he himself shrank from meeting--
his mother. And this shrinking was not because of the peculiar
shame which the thought of Mrs. Richie had awakened in him that
morning in the woods, when the vision of her delicate scorn had
been so unbearable; his feeling about his mother was sheer
disgust at the prospect of an interview which was sure to be
esthetically distressing. While he was still absent on what the
papers called his "wedding tour," Nannie had written to him
warning him what he might expect from Mrs. Maitland:

"Mamma is terribly displeased, I am afraid, though she hasn't
said a word since the night I told her. Then she said very severe
things--and oh, Blair, dear, why _did_ you do it the way you
did? I think Elizabeth was perfectly--" The unfinished sentence
was scratched out. "You _must_ be nice to Mamma when you
come home," she ended.

"She'll kick," Blair said, sighing; "she'll row like a puddler!"
In his own mind, he added that, after all, no amount of kicking
would alter the fact. And again the little exultant smile came
about his lips. "As for being 'nice,' Nannie might as well talk
about being '_nice_' to a circular saw," he said, gaily. His
efforts to be gay, to amuse or interest Elizabeth, were almost
pathetic in their intensity. "Well! the sooner I'll go, the
sooner I'll get it over!" he said, and reached for his hat;
Elizabeth was silent. "You might wish me luck!" he said. She did
not answer, and he sighed and left her.

As he loitered down to Shantytown, lying in the muddy drizzle of
a midwinter thaw, he planned how soon he could get away from the
detestable place. "Everything is so perfectly hideous," he said
to himself, "no wonder she is low-spirited. When I get her over
in Europe she'll forget Mercer, and--everything disagreeable."
His mind shied away from even the name of the man he had robbed.

At his mother's house, he had a hurried word with Nannie in the
parlor: "Is she upset still? She mustn't blame Elizabeth! It was
all my doing. I sort of swept Elizabeth off her feet, you know.
Well--it's another case of getting your tooth pulled quickly.
Here goes!" When he opened the dining-room door, his mother
called to him from her bedroom: "Come in here," she said; and
there was something in her voice that made him brace himself.
"I'm in for it," he said, under his breath.

For years Sarah Maitland's son had not seen her room; the sight
of it now was a curious shock that seemed to push him back into
his youth, and into that old embarrassment which he had always
felt in her presence. The room was as it had been then, very bare
and almost squalid; there was no carpet on the floor, and no hint
of feminine comfort in a lounge or even a soft chair. That
morning the inside shutters on the lower half of the uncurtained
windows were still closed, and the upper light, striking cold and
bleak across the dingy ceiling, glimmered on the glass doors of
the bookcases behind which, in his childhood, had lurked such
mysterious terrors. The narrow iron bed had not yet been made up,
and the bedclothes were in confusion on the back of a chair; the
painted pine bureau was thick with dust; on it was the still
unopened cologne bottle, its kid cover cracked and yellow under
its faded ribbons, and three small photographs: Blair, a baby in
a white dress; a little boy with long trousers and a visored cap;
a big boy of twelve with a wooden gun. They were brown with time,
and the figures were almost undistinguishable, but Blair
recognized them,--and again his armor of courage was penetrated.

"Well, Mother," he said, with great directness and with at least
an effort at heartiness, "I am afraid you are rather disgusted
with me."

"Are you?" she said; she was sitting sidewise on a wooden chair--
what is called a "kitchen chair"; she had rested her arm along
its back, and as Blair entered, her large, beautiful hand,
drooping limply from its wrist, closed slowly into an iron fist.

"No, I won't sit down, thank you," he said, and stood, lounging a
little, with an elbow on the mantelpiece. "Yes; I was afraid you
would be displeased," he went on, good-humoredly; "but I hope you
won't mind so much when I tell you about it. I couldn't really go
into it in my letter. By the way, I hope my absence hasn't
inconvenienced you in the office?"

"Well, not seriously," she said dryly. And he felt the color rise
in his face. That he was frightfully ill at ease was obvious in
the elaborate carelessness with which he began to inquire about
the Works. But her only answer to his meaningless questions was
silence. Blair was conscious that he was breathing quickly, and
that made him angry. "Why _am_ I such an ass?" he asked
himself; then said, with studied lightness, that he was afraid he
would have to absent himself from business for still a little
longer, as he was going abroad. Fortunately--here the old
sarcastic politeness broke into his really serious purpose to be
respectful; fortunately he was so unimportant that his absence
didn't really matter. "You _are_ the Works, you know,
Mother."

"You are certainly unimportant," she agreed. He noticed she had
not taken up her knitting, though a ball of pink worsted and a
half-finished baby sock lay on the bureau near her; this unwonted
quiet of her hands, together with the extraordinary solemnity of
her face, gave him a sense of uneasy astonishment. He would
almost have welcomed one of those brutal outbursts which set his
teeth on edge by their very ugliness. He did not know how to
treat this new dignity.

"I would like to tell you just what happened," he began, with a
seriousness that matched her own. "Elizabeth had made up her mind
not to marry David Richie. They had had some falling out, I
believe. I never asked what; of course that wasn't my business.
Well, I had been in love with her for months; but I didn't
suppose I had a ghost of a chance; of course I wouldn't have
dreamed of trying to--to take her from him. But when she broke
with him, why, I felt that I had a--a right, you know."

His mother was silent, but she struck the back of her chair
softly with her closed fist: her eyebrow began to lift ominously.

"Well; we thought--I mean I thought; that the easiest way all
round was to get married at once. Not discuss it, you know, with
people; but just--well, in point of fact, I persuaded her to run
off with me!" He tried to laugh, but his mother's face was rigid.
She was looking at him closely, but she said nothing. By this
time her continued silence had made him so nervous that he went
through his explanation again from beginning to end. Still she
did not speak. "You see, Mother," he said, reddening with the
discomfort of the moment, "you see it was best to do it quickly?
Elizabeth's engagement being broken, there was no reason to wait.
But I do regret that I could not have told you first. I fear you
felt--annoyed."

"Annoyed?" For a moment she smiled. "Well, I should hardly call
it 'annoyed.'" Suddenly she made a gesture with her hand, as if
to say, stop all this nonsense! "Blair," she said, "I'm not going
to go into this business of your marriage at all. It's done."
Blair drew a breath of astonished relief. "You've not only done a
wicked thing, which is bad; you've done a fool thing, which is
worse. I have some sort of patience with a knave, but a fool--
'annoys' me, as you express it. You've married a girl who loves
another man. You may or may not repent your wickedness--you and I
have different ideas on such subjects; but you'll certainly
repent your foolishness. When you are eaten up with jealousy of
David, you'll wish you had behaved decently. I know what I'm
talking about"--she paused, looking down at her fingers picking
nervously at the back of the chair; "I've been jealous," she said
in a low voice. Then, with a quick breath: "However, wicked or
foolish, or both, it's _done_, and I'm not going to waste my
time talking about it."

"You're very kind," he said; he was so bewildered by this
unexpected mildness that he could not think what to say next. "I
very much appreciate your overlooking my not telling you about it
before I did it. The--the fact was," he began to stammer; her
face was not reassuring; "the fact was, it was all so hurried, I--
"

But she was not listening. "You say you mean to go to Europe;
how?"

"How?" he repeated. "I don't know just what you mean. Of course I
shall be sorry to leave the Works, but under the circumstances--"

"It costs money to go to Europe. Have you got any?"

"My salary--"

"How can you have a salary when you don't do any work?"

Blair was silent; then he said, frowning, something about his
mother's always having been so kind--

"Kind?" she broke in, "you call it kind? Well, Blair, I am going
to be kind now--another way. So far as I'm concerned, you'll not
have one dollar that you don't earn."

He looked perfectly uncomprehending.

"I've done being 'kind,' in the way that's ruined you, and made
you a useless fool. I'm going to try another sort of kindness.
You can work, my son, or you can starve." Her face quivered as
she spoke.

"What do you mean?" Blair said, quietly; his embarrassment fell
from him like a slipping cloak; he was suddenly and ruthlessly a
man.

She told him what she meant. "This business of your marrying
Elizabeth isn't the important thing; that's just a symptom of
your disease. It's the fact of your being the sort of man you
are, that's important." Blair was silent. Then Sarah Maitland
began her statement of the situation as she saw it; she told him
just what sort of a man he was: indolent, useless, helpless,
selfish. "Until now I've always said that at any rate you were
harmless. I can't say even that now!" She tried to explain that
when a man lives on money he has not earned, he incurs, by merely
living, a debt of honor;--that God will collect. But she did not
know how to say it. Instead, she told him he was a parasite;--
which loathsome truth was like oil on the flames of his slowly
gathering rage. He was a man, she said, whose business in life
was to enjoy himself. She tried to make clear to him that after
youth,--perhaps even after childhood,--enjoyment, as the purpose
of effort, was dwarfing. "You are sort of a dwarf, Blair," she
said, with curiously impersonal brutality. Any enjoyment, she
insisted, that was worthy of a man, was only a by-product, as you
might call it, of effort for some other purpose than enjoyment.
"One of our puddlers enjoys doing a good job, I guess;--but that
isn't why he does it," she said, shrewdly. Any man whose sole
effort was to get pleasure is, considering what kind of a world
we live in, a poor creature. "That's the best that can be said
for him," she said; "as for the worst, we won't go into that. You
know it even better than I do." Then she told him that his best,
which had been harmlessness, and his worst, which they "would not
go into"--were both more her fault than his. It was her fault
that he was such a poor creature; "a pithless creature; I've made
you so!" she said. She stopped, her face moving with emotion.
"I've robbed you of incentive; I see that now. Any man who has
the need of work taken away from him, is robbed. I guess
enjoyment is all that is left for him. I ask your pardon." Her
humility was pitiful, but her words were outrageous. "You are
young yet," she said; "I _think_ what I am going to do will
cure you. If it doesn't, God knows what will become of you!" It
was the cure of the surgeon's knife, ruthless, radical; it was,
in fact, kill or cure; she knew that. "Of course it's a gamble,"
she admitted, and paused, nibbling at her finger; "a gamble. But
I've got to take it." She spoke of it as she might of some
speculative business decision. She looked at him as if imploring
comprehension, but she had to speak as she thought, with
sledgehammer directness. "It takes brains to make money--I know
because I've made it; but any fool can inherit it, just as any
fool can accept it. I'm going to give you a chance to develop
some brains. You can work or you can starve. Or," she added
simply, "you can beg. You have begged practically all your life,
thanks to me."

If only she could have said it all differently! But alas!
yearning over him with agonized consciousness of her own wrong-
doing, and with singular justice in regard to his, she approached
his selfish heart as if it were one of her own "blooms," and she
a great engine which could mold and squeeze it into something of
value to the world. She flung her iron facts at him, regardless
of the bruises they must leave upon that most precious thing, his
self-respect. Well; she was going to stop her work of
destruction, she said. Then she told him how she proposed to do
it: he had had everything--and he was nothing. Now he should have
nothing, so that he might become something.

There was a day, many years ago, when this mother and son,
standing together, had looked at the fierce beauty of molten
iron; then she had told him of high things hidden in the seething
and shimmering metal--of dreams to be realized, of splendid
toils, of vast ambitions. And as she spoke, a spark of vivid
understanding had leaped from his mind to hers. Now, her iron
will, melted by the fires of love, was seething and glowing,
dazzlingly bright in the white heat of complete self-
renunciation; it was ready to be poured into a torturing mold to
make a tool with which he might save his soul! But no spark of
understanding came into his angry eyes. She did not pause for
that; his agreement was a secondary matter. The habit of success
made her believe that she could achieve the impossible--namely,
save a man's soul in spite of himself; "make," as she had told
Robert Ferguson, "a man of her son." She would have been glad to
have his agreement, but she would not wait for it.

Blair listened in absolute silence. "Do I understand," he said
when she had finished, "that you mean to disinherit me?"

"I mean to give you the finest inheritance a young man can have:
_the necessity for work!_--and work for the necessity. For,
of course, your job is open to you in the office. But it will be
at an honest salary after this; the salary any other unskilled
man would get."

"Please make yourself clear," he said laconically; "you propose
to leave me no money when you die?"

"Exactly."

"May I ask how you expect me to live?"

"The way most decent men live--_by work_. You can work; or
else, as I said, you can starve. There's a verse in the Bible--
you don't know your Bible very well; perhaps that's one reason
you have turned out as you have; but there's a verse in the Bible
that says if a man won't work, he sha'n't eat. That's the best
political economy I know. But I never thought of it before," she
said simply; "I never realized that the worst handicap a young
man can have in starting out in life is a rich father--or mother.
Ferguson used to tell me so, but somehow I never took it in."

"So," he said--he was holding his cane in both hands, and as he
spoke he struck it across his knees, breaking it with a
splintering snap; "so, you'll disinherit me because I married the
girl I love?"

"No!" she said, eager to make herself clear; "no, not at all!
Don't you understand? (My God! how can I make him understand?) I
disinherit you to make a man of you, so that your father won't be
ashamed of you--as I am. Yes, I owe it to your father to make a
man of you; if it can be done."

She rose, with a deep breath, and stood for an instant silent,
her big hands on her hips, her head bent. Then, solemnly: "That
is all; you may go, my son."

Blair got on to his feet with a loud laugh--a laugh singularly
like her own. "Well," he said, "I _will_ go! And I'll never
come back. This lets me out! You've thrown me over: I'll throw
you over. I think the law will have something to say to this
disinheritance idea of yours; but until then--take a job in your
Works? I'll starve first! So help me God, I'll forget that you
are my mother; it will be easy enough, for the only womanly thing
about you is your dress"--she winced, and flung her hand across
her face as if he had struck her. "If I can forget that I am your
son, starvation will be a cheap price. We've always hated each
other, and it's a relief to come out into the open and say so. No
more gush for either of us!" He actually looked like her, as he
hurled his insults at her. He picked up his coat and left the
room; he was trembling all over.

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