The Preliminaries Part 11

"I do not feel so, Marvel," Mrs. Charleroy answered steadily.

"What _right_ has she?" the girl stormed. "What right, I wish to know?

To summon me like this! Didn't she throw us away, father and me, once {170} and for all? You can't recall a thing like that! Why should she think she could take me back any more than father? Influence me, indeed! She does n't know the A B C of influence! I am made--done--finished. Such as I am, she has had no hand in me. If the outcome is creditable, thanks are due to you and father and the Herr Gott. Oh, I know the things that have gone to my making! I don't talk about them much, perhaps, but I know!"

Mrs. Charleroy sat very still, regarding her stepdaughter anxiously.

She was a woman of the most benignant of all the elder types: slight, but strong; her brown hair parted smoothly, and brought back from a high full forehead; she had a firm chin, with a tense, sweet mouth, and large, thoughtful, gray-blue eyes.

{171}

"Are you quite sure you are completely finished, dear? I would n't dare affirm that of myself."

"If there were no other reasons--why, even if I wanted to go," Marvel went on, "there is my work. I have accepted a position in the English department. They are depending upon me. I am ready, and there is no one to take my place."

"You are mistaken there. Miss Anderson would be glad to retain the position for a year. Something has happened to her arrangements for foreign study, and I heard it intimated the other day that she regretted resigning when she did. She would be delighted to stay on.

You could, I think, come back to the position next year. I believe you could arrange with Professor Axtell."

"O Evelyn! Why do you wish to {172} make my going easy? Don't you see I can't bear it?"

"I don't know how to say what I wish," said the elder woman wistfully.

"If I remind you that after all she is your mother, I am afraid it will not mean to you what it does to me."

"Certainly I think that, as between us two, the fact no longer carries obligation from me to her!" said Marvel steadily.

"O Marvel! You are hard!"

"No! I am just."

"Justice is never so simple as that," returned Evelyn Charleroy. "But even if it were, your father--I--would rather see you merciful. It would be more like you, Marvel!"

Marvel set the line of her red lips. "I do not wish to go, not even to live up to your idea of me!"

"Marvel, listen to me a moment. I {173} may not be able to make you understand--but I must try. This is the thing I must make you know. The reactions upon the spirit of the ties of the flesh are, simply, the most miraculous things in all this miraculous world. I am not preaching. I am just telling you what I know. This business of being a child, a parent, a husband, a wife,--no creature can escape that net of human relations.h.i.+ps wholly. It is there, right there, that we are knotted fast to the whole unseen order of things. What we make of those ties determines what we substantially are. Oh, if you could see it as I see it! This is the real reason, the strongest one of all, for our wis.h.i.+ng you to go. You must not throw away the chance it is--the chance of finding out what you are to each other. You must concede something for the sake of learning that!"

{174}

"It is n't the mother after the flesh, but the mother after the spirit, to whom are due the great concessions!" cried the girl, "and, Evelyn, _that_ is you!"

"Marvel--there is still another reason. It may appeal to you more."

Evelyn Charleroy's agitated face, the tumult of her eyes, startled her stepdaughter. She could not bear disturbance of that dear serenity.

"Child!--Do you suppose it was an easy thing for me to come into your father's life and take your mother's place while she still lived?

There were months of doubt. There was hesitation that was agony to us both--but in the end--I came. Thus far the thing has seemed to justify itself. It has seemed to work for peace, for blessedness, to us all. I have felt no wrong, have been refused no inner sanction. {175} And yet, I tell you, I am still uncertain of my right to all that your mother threw away, and I do not, even yet, entirely defend my action in taking it! You have been our comfort, our greatest blessing, because it has seemed to be well for you. But, don't you see, if you fail us now; if we have made you selfish; if, through us, you have come to ignore that elemental tie; if you lose out of life whatever it may hold for you, we--we shall doubt our right--we shall be less sure--" The woman's voice fluttered and fell on silence suddenly.

"O Evelyn!" the girl cried out in sharp distress, "don't, don't look like that! Dearest, don't dare to feel like that! There is no need! I won't be horrid! I'll do anything on earth that you and father really wis.h.!.+"

{176}

III

CHICAGO, _November fifth_.

PRECIOUS FATHER AND EVELYN:-- I know all my letters thus far have been rather no-account. They were just to let you know that I was well, and interested, and getting used to things. I loath the city so that I think I must be a country mouse. Every time I go down in the Elevated, past all the grimy, slimy, hideous back buildings, something in me turns over and revolts. I want to be within reach of red leaves, and wheat-stubble, and fat quail running in the roadside gra.s.s. Did the little red and yellow chrysanthemums do well this year? How about that marigold border I planted in the kitchen garden?

However, I am going to have a most instructive winter. It was crude of me {177} to think it, but because mother's friends are mostly different kinds of reformers, I expected to find them dubs and scrubs. It seems droll for people who can't live the normal human life successfully to set themselves up to say that therefore it's all wrong, and they will show us a better way to play the game. But only a few of these are that kind of reformers, and they're not dubby and scrubby at all! Some of them are just reformers from the teeth out. They're merely amusing themselves.

Mother is n't playing, however. She's tremendously in earnest. Being a reformer is n't fattening. She keeps back no pound of flesh. She is so thin and tense and nervous, so obsessed with her own ideas, that it worries me some times. I feel as if I lived perpetually in the room with an electric fan. I have {178} been to her cla.s.ses several times. She has a certain eager eloquence, a real appeal, that will always gain her a hearing. I wish she could keep her neckties straight, but that is a trifle.

Do you remember old Mrs. Knowles saying that she loved to sit at the window and "see the people going pro and con in the street?" That is my present occupation! These people do a tremendous amount of "going pro and con" in the world of the mind. I have been hearing a vast deal of feminist discussion, owing to the appearance of some new books in that line. Can you see why, if nature has spent some thousands of years making women "anabolic, or conservers of energy,"

they should try to reverse the process in a decade and become even as men, who are "katabolic, or dispensers of energy," just because a stray thinker {179} supposes it would make them more interesting if they all had a business life and dispensed that energy downtown? It seems to me ill-advised to defy nature wholesale. I am willing to work for bread, or for the love of work--but not to oblige illogical theorists!

I'm glad I don't have to reconcile all the different views I hear!

One person will argue that woman's work in the home is so complicated and taxing that it all ought to be done for her by specialists, while she goes downtown and becomes some other kind of specialist herself. This is the school of thought to which mother belongs. One or two of its leaders are terribly clever--and mother is rapturously sure that wisdom was born with them! She is so happy to be advocating and expounding their ideas! I find this disciples.h.i.+p pathetic. One does n't deny that they {180} have visions,--mother has them also,--but to me their visions are not divine or beautiful.

The next person will be a reactionary, and say that we are going straight to destruction because some women are thrown into industrial compet.i.tion with men.

A third will be sure that, because modern life with all its industrial developments outside the home has drawn many women away from home life, therefore all women ought to be thrown out of their homes in a bunch and hustle for themselves in the market-place.

There's no longer anything to do at home, and if they stay there they will get fat and lazy and parasitic. I argued about this half the evening with an apple-faced youth of twenty-five who is still supported by his mother. You would have supposed, to {181} hear him, that feminine hands and feet were going to atrophy and fall off from disuse, and that we should turn into some kind of chubby white grub with mouths perpetually demanding to be fed.

I don't deny that there are indolent women in the world, but I certainly never saw any parasites in the college set at Powelton.

Somebody will have to "show me" before I can get up any heat of conviction on the subject!

No longer anything to do at home! It has kept me so busy putting one attenuated little reformer-lady's flat to rights and training a cook for her that I have n't had a minute, yet, to see about those courses I meant to take at the University! I shall get around to them presently, I hope.

Mother took the flat before I {182} arrived, and the packers brought her furniture from storage and unpacked it, and set it about according to their fancy, and cleaned up the mess and departed. We moved our trunks out the next morning. Mother went up and down and to and fro, as unsettled as the Cat that Walked. Finally she demanded of me, "Marvel, what ails this flat?" and I said, "Why, mother, the colors are all wrong and it is n't cozy."

She threw up her hands in despair. "Is coziness to be the end of our living?" she demanded; and I said, "It is."

You see, she can explain adorably about beauty in the home, but she had n't known any better than to leave the tinting to the kalsominer.--"Kalsomine is his business. He ought to know better than I," she said. She has such blind faith in specialists,--There {183} resulted a red dining-room, a terrible green living-room, and dark lavender bedrooms! No wonder poor little mother was miserable!

Getting it put right was messy, deplorable, and expensive beyond words; but it is all nice tans now, with charming chintz draperies and chair-covers. I did the upholstering myself, and it is n't half bad.

Mother does n't like ugly things, nor get them of her own free will, but she is obsessed to accept the advice of everybody who pretends to be a specialist, and they "do" her frightfully. It is one of the penalties of being a Superwoman.

Getting a cook required diplomacy. It is a point of honor with mother to take meals in restaurants or buy delicatessen stuff. She was in the hospital two months with inflammation of the liver last winter, and dyspepsia makes {184} half her days hideous. If people will live on indigestible ideas, instead of home cooking, I'm afraid it's what they must expect! I freely admit that I can't combat mother's ideas, as ideas,--I'm not clever enough,--but she does n't know how to be comfortable, which is to be efficient. She is rabidly against kitchens, but arithmetic demonstrates that here, in Chicago, this winter, it will cost less, and be more healthful to have a maid for the season instead of dragging ourselves out in the snow to eat thirty-cent breakfasts and fifty-cent luncheons and seventy-five cent dinners, and pay a woman for coming to clean. I argue that, so long as the Redeemed Form of Society has n't arrived, we are n't disloyal to it by doing this!

Myra Ann has learned to make Evelyn's beef-tea and mutton-broth.

{185} Mother needs them badly. Then I discovered that eggs have always disagreed with her, but she went right on eating them because she thought them an "ideal food," and that if her stomach was n't sufficiently standardized to appreciate them, it ought to be! I call that heroic, if it is droll. Idiosyncrasy is something for which mother's creed makes no allowance. We now have an attractive set of eggless breakfasts.--Does all this sound like a model house keeper writing to a domestic journal? Evelyn knows I have a little right to throw bouquets at myself, for I was n't born a housekeeper--but housekeepers _can_ be made!

Seems to me, if you ought to standardize an individual's diet, as mother thinks, similar arguments apply to his clothes, his features, his body, his mind, his soul. There's no logical place to {186} stop. Yet we know that diversity, not similarity, is the end nature is always seeking in evolution. Of course, if you are going to buck all the natural laws, that's different!

My country brain gets tired in such a menagerie of ideas. In our own life at home, there is comfort, peace, sufficient stimulus, development; this life is exciting, but barren of something that I will call soil to grow in, because I don't know any better word. Of course it is great fun for me to come in contact with so many different kinds of minds and hear them emit their theories. Only, somehow, the theorists lack reality to me. Do I make myself clear?

I hope this will give you a notion of what I'm doing and thinking, and that you'll know I'm really having a beautiful time. I miss you both {187} horribly, though. I will tell about some of the people in my next letter. I'm acting as mother's secretary just now. She really needs one, and it's interesting work.

Ever and always, Your loving child, MARVEL.