A Pair of Silk Stockings, Page 2

  ‘For the reason that it is more easy to obtain employment. For reasons that you would not understand,’ she continued, with a shrug of the shoulders that expressed some defiance and a sudden disregard for consequences. ‘Life is not all couleur de rose, Mees McEndairs; you do not know what life is, you!’ And drawing a handkerchief from an apron pocket she mopped an imaginary tear from the corner of her eye, and blew her nose till it glowed again.

  Georgie could hardly recall the words or actions with which she quitted Mademoiselle’s presence. As much as she wanted to, it had been impossible to stand and read the woman a moral lecture. She had simply thrown what disapproval she could into her hasty leave-taking, and that was all for the moment. But as she drove away, a more practical form of rebuke suggested itself to her not too nimble intelligence – one that she promised herself to act upon as soon as her home was reached.

  When she was alone in her room, during an interval between her many engagements, she then attended to the affair of Mlle Salambre.

  Georgie believed in discipline. She hated unrighteousness. When it pleased God to place the lash in her hand she did not hesitate to apply it. Here was this Mlle Salambre living in her sin. Not as one who is young and blinded by the glamour of pleasure, but with cool and deliberate intention. Since she chose to transgress, she ought to suffer, and be made to feel that her ways were iniquitous and invited rebuke. It lay in Georgie’s power to mete out a small dose of that chastisement which the woman deserved, and she was glad that the opportunity was hers.

  She seated herself forthwith at her writing table, and penned the following note to her furnishers:

  MESSRS. PUSH & PRODEM.

  Gentlemen – Please withdraw from Mademoiselle Salambre all work of mine, and return same to me at once – finished or unfinished.

  Yours truly,

  GEORGIE McENDERS.

  2

  On the second day following this summary proceeding, Georgie sat at her writing table, looking prettier and pinker than ever, in a luxurious and soft-toned robe de chambre that suited her own delicate colouring, and fitted the pale amber tints of her room decorations.

  There were books, pamphlets and writing material set neatly upon the table before her. In the midst of them were two framed photographs, which she polished one after another with a silken scarf that was near.

  One of these was a picture of her father, who looked like an Englishman, with his clean-shaved mouth and chin, and closely-cropped side whiskers, just turning grey. A good-humoured shrewdness shone in his eyes. From the set of his thin, firm lips one might guess that he was in the foremost rank in the interesting game of ‘push’ that occupies mankind. One might further guess that his cleverness in using opportunities had brought him there, and that a dexterous management of elbows had served him no less. The other picture was that of Georgie’s fiancé, Mr Meredith Holt, approaching more closely than he liked to his forty-fifth year and an unbecoming corpulence. Only one who knew beforehand that he was a viveur could have detected evidence of such in his face, which told little more than that he was a good-looking and amiable man of the world, who might be counted on to do the gentlemanly thing always. Georgie was going to marry him because his personality pleased her; because his easy knowledge of life – such as she apprehended it – commended itself to her approval; because he was likely to interfere in no way with her ‘work’. Yet she might not have given any of these reasons if asked for one. Mr Meredith Holt was simply an eligible man, whom almost any girl in her set would have accepted for a husband.

  Georgie had just discovered that she had yet an hour to spare before starting out with the committee of four to further investigate the moral condition of the factory-girl, when a maid appeared with the announcement that a person was below who wished to see her.

  ‘A person? Surely not a visitor at this hour?’

  ‘I left her in the hall, miss, and she says her name is Mademoiselle Sal-Sal – ’

  ‘Oh, yes! Ask her to kindly walk up to my room, and show her the way, please, Hannah.’

  Mademoiselle Salambre came in with a sweep of skirts that bristled defiance, and a poise of the head that was aggressive in its backward tilt. She seated herself, and with an air of challenge waited to be questioned or addressed.

  Georgie felt at ease amid her own familiar surroundings. While she made some idle tracings with a pencil upon a discarded envelope, she half turned to say:

  ‘This visit of yours is very surprising, madam, and wholly useless. I suppose you guess my motive in recalling my work, as I have done.’

  ‘Maybe I do, and maybe I do not, Mees McEndairs,’ replied the woman, with an impertinent uplifting of the eyebrows.

  Georgie felt the same shrinking which had overtaken her before in the woman’s presence. But she knew her duty, and from that there was no shrinking.

  ‘You must be made to understand, madam, that there is a right way to live, and that there is a wrong way,’ said Georgie with more condescension than she knew. ‘We cannot defy God’s laws with impunity, and without incurring His displeasure. But in His infinite justice and mercy He offers forgiveness, love and protection to those who turn away from evil and repent. It is for each of us to follow the divine way as well as may be. And I am only humbly striving to do His will.’

  ‘A most charming sermon, Mees McEndairs!’ mademoiselle interrupted with a nervous laugh; ‘it seems a great pity to waste it upon so small an audience. And it grieves me, I cannot express, that I have not the time to remain and listen to its close.’

  She arose and began to talk volubly, swiftly, in a jumble of French and English, and with a wealth of expression and gesture which Georgie could hardly believe was natural, and not something acquired and rehearsed.

  She had come to inform Miss McEnders that she did not want her work; that she would not touch it with the tips of her fingers. And her little, gloved hands recoiled from an imaginary pile of lingerie with unspeakable disgust. Her eyes had travelled nimbly over the room, and had been arrested by the two photographs on the table. Very small, indeed, were her worldly possessions, she informed the young lady; but as Heaven was her witness – not a mouthful of bread that she had not earned. And her parents over yonder in France! As honest as the sunlight! Poor, ah! for that – poor as rats. God only knew how poor; and God only knew how honest. Her eyes remained fixed upon the picture of Horace McEnders. Some people might like fine houses, and servants, and horses, and all the luxury which dishonest wealth brings. Some people might enjoy such surroundings. As for her! – and she drew up her skirts ever so carefully and daintily, as though she feared contamination to her petticoats from the touch of the rich rug upon which she stood.

  Georgie’s blue eyes were filled with astonishment as they followed the woman’s gestures. Her face showed aversion and perplexity.

  ‘Please let this interview come to an end at once,’ spoke the girl. She would not deign to ask an explanation of the mysterious allusions to ill-gotten wealth. But mademoiselle had not yet said all that she had come there to say.

  ‘If it was only me to say so,’ she went on, still looking at the likeness, ‘but, cher maître! Go, yourself, Mees McEndairs, and stand for a while on the street and ask the people passing by how your dear papa has made his money, and see what they will say.’

  Then shifting her glance to the photograph of Meredith Holt, she stood in an attitude of amused contemplation, with a smile of commiseration playing about her lips.

  ‘Mr Meredith Holt!’ she pronounced with quiet, supressed emphasis – ‘ah! c’est un propre, celui là! You know him very well, no doubt, Mees McEndairs. You would not care to have my opinion of Mr Meredith Holt. It would make no difference to you, Mees McEndairs, to know that he is not fit to be the husband of a self-respecting barmaid. Oh! you know a good deal, my dear young lady. You can preach sermons in merveille!’

  When Georgie was finally alone, there came to her, through all her disgust and indignation, an indefinable uneasine
ss. There was no misunderstanding the intention of the woman’s utterances in regard to the girl’s fiancé and her father. A sudden, wild, defiant desire came to her to test the suggestion which Mademoiselle Salambre had let fall.

  Yes, she would go stand there on the corner and ask the passers-by how Horace McEnders made his money. She could not yet collect her thoughts for calm reflection; and the house stifled her. It was fully time for her to join her committee of four, but she would meddle no further with morals till her own were adjusted, she thought. Then she quitted the house, very pale, even to her lips that were tightly set.

  Georgie stationed herself on the opposite side of the street, on the corner, and waited there as though she had appointed to meet some one.

  The first to approach her was a kind-looking old gentleman, very much muffled for the pleasant spring day. Georgie did not hesitate an instant to accost him:

  ‘I beg pardon, sir. Will you kindly tell me whose house that is?’ pointing to her own domicile across the way.

  ‘That is Mr Horace McEnders’ residence, Madame,’ replied the old gentleman, lifting his hat politely.

  ‘Could you tell me how he made the money with which to build so magnificent a home?’

  ‘You should not ask indiscreet questions, my dear young lady,’ answered the mystified old gentleman, as he bowed and walked away.

  The girl let one or two persons pass her. Then she stopped a plumber, who was going cheerily along with his bag of tools on his shoulder.

  ‘I beg pardon,’ began Georgie again; ‘but may I ask whose residence that is across the street?’

  ‘Yes’um. That’s the McEnderses.’

  ‘Thank you; and can you tell me how Mr McEnders made such an immense fortune?’

  ‘Oh, that ain’t my business; but they say he made the biggest pile of it in the Whisky Ring.’

  So the truth would come to her somehow! These were the people from whom to seek it – who had not learned to veil their thoughts and opinions in polite subterfuge.

  When a careless little newsboy came strolling along, she stopped him with the apparent intention of buying a paper from him.

  ‘Do you know whose house that is?’ she asked him, handing him a piece of money and nodding over the way.

  ‘W’y, dats ole MicAndrus’ house.’

  ‘I wonder where he got the money to build such a fine house.’

  ‘He stole it; dats w’ere he got it. Thank you,’ pocketing the change which Georgie declined to take, and he whistled a popular air as he disappeared around the corner.

  Georgie had heard enough. Her heart was beating violently now, and her cheeks were flaming. So everybody knew it; even to the street gamins! The men and women who visited her and broke bread at her father’s table, knew it. Her co-workers, who strove with her in Christian endeavour, knew. The very servants who waited upon her doubtless knew this, and had their jests about it.

  She shrank within herself as she climbed the stairway to her room.

  Upon the table there she found a box of exquisite white spring blossoms that a messenger had brought from Meredith Holt, during her absence. Without an instant’s hesitation, Georgie cast the spotless things into the wide, sooty fireplace. Then she sank into a chair and wept bitterly.

  The Story of an Hour

  Knowing that Mrs Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

  It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of ‘killed.’ He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

  She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

  There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

  She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

  There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

  She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

  She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

  There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.

  Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will – as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.

  When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: ‘free, free, free!’ The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

  She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.

  She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and grey and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

  There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

  And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

  ‘Free! Body and soul free!’ she kept whispering.

  Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. ‘Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.’

  ‘Go away. I am not making myself ill.’ No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

  Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

  She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There wa
s a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

  Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

  But Richards was too late.

  When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills.

  Nég Créol

  At the remote period of his birth he had been named César François Xavier, but no one ever thought of calling him anything but Chicot, or Nég, or Maringouin. Down at the French market, where he worked among the fishmongers, they called him Chicot, when they were not calling him names that are written less freely than they are spoken. But one felt privileged to call him almost anything, he was so black, lean, lame, and shrivelled. He wore a head-kerchief, and whatever other rags the fishermen and their wives chose to bestow upon him. Throughout one whole winter he wore a woman’s discarded jacket with puffed sleeves.

  Among some startling beliefs entertained by Chicot was one that ‘Michié St Pierre et Michié St Paul’ had created him. Of ‘Michié bon Dieu’ he held his own private opinion, and not a too flattering one at that. This fantastic notion concerning the origin of his being he owed to the early teaching of his young master, a lax believer, and a great farceur in his day. Chicot had once been thrashed by a robust young Irish priest for expressing his religious views, and at another time knifed by a Sicilian. So he had come to hold his peace upon that subject.

  Upon another theme he talked freely and harped continuously. For years he had tried to convince his associates that his master had left a progeny, rich, cultured, powerful, and numerous beyond belief. This prosperous race of beings inhabited the most imposing mansions in the city of New Orleans. Men of note and position, whose names were familiar to the public, he swore were grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or, less frequently, distant relatives of his master, long deceased. Ladies who came to the market in carriages, or whose elegance of attire attracted the attention and admiration of the fishwomen, were all des ’tites cousines to his former master, Jean Boisduré. He never looked for recognition from any of these superior beings, but delighted to discourse by the hour upon their dignity and pride of birth and wealth.