Wayside Courtships Part 40

"Oh! Do you think I'll get my divorce?"

"Certainly, without question."

"Can I wait and go back with you?"

"I shall not return for several days. Perhaps you couldn't bear the wait in this little town; it's not much like the city."

"Oh, dear! But I can't go about alone. I hate these men, they stare at me so! I wish I was a man. It's awful to be a woman, don't you think so?

Please don't laugh."

The young lawyer was far from laughing, but this was her only way of defending herself. These pert, birdlike ways formed her s.h.i.+eld against ridicule and misprision.

He said slowly, "Yes, it's an awful thing to be a woman, but it's an awful responsibility to be a man."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that we are responsible as the dominant s.e.x for every tragic, incomplete woman's life."

"Don't you blame Mrs. Sh.e.l.lberg?" she said, forcing him to a concrete example with savage swiftness.

"No. She had a poor father and a poor husband, and she must earn her own living some way."

"She could cook, or nurse, or something like that."

"It isn't easy to find opportunity to cook or nurse. If it were as easy to earn a living in a pure way as it is in a vicious way all men would be rich and virtuous. But what had you planned to do after your divorce?"

"Oh, I'm going to travel for two years. Then I'll try to settle down."

"What you need is a good husband and a little cottage where you'd have to cook your own food--and tend the baby."

"I wouldn't cook for any man living," she broke in, to express her bitterness that he could so coldly dispose of her future. "Oh, this terrible train! Can't it go faster? If I'd realized what a trip this was, I wouldn't have started."

"This is the route you all go," he replied with grim humor, and his words pictured a ceaseless stream of divorcees.

She resented his cla.s.sing her with the rest, but she simply said: "You despise me, don't you? But what can we do? You can't expect us to live with men we hate, can you? That would be worse than Mrs. Sh.e.l.lberg."

"No, I don't expect that of you. I'd issue a divorce coupon with every marriage certificate, and done with it," he said, in desperate disgust.

"Then this whole cursed business would be done away with. It isn't a question of our laxity of divorce laws," he said, after a pause, "it's a question of the senseless severity of the laws in other States. That's what throws this demoralizing business into our hands here."

"It pays, don't it? I know I've paid for everything I've had."

"Yes, that's the demoralizing thing. It draws a gang of conscienceless attorneys here, and it draws us who belong here off into dirty work, and it brings us into contact with men and women--I'm sick of the whole business."

She had hardly followed him in his generalizations. She brought him back to the personal.

"You're sick of me, I know you are!" She leaned her head on the window pane. Her eyes closed. "Oh, I wish my heart would stop beating!" she said, in a low tone.

Allen, sitting so close behind them, was forced to hear her, so piercingly sweet was her voice. He trembled for fear some one else might hear her. It seemed like profanation that any one but the woman's G.o.d should hear this outcry of a quivering, writhing soul.

She faced her companion again. "You're the only man I know, now, that I respect, and you despise me."

"No, I don't; I pity you."

"That's worse. I want you to help me. Oh, if you could go with me, or if I could be with you!" Her gloved hands strained together in the agony of her desire.

His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile even about the eyes. He knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the pa.s.sion of a woman.

"Our home is yours, just as long as you can bear the monotony of our simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and unmistakable in its sincerity.

She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her head, and they rode in silence.

After they left the car, Allen sat with savage eyes and grimly set mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of l.u.s.tful, remorseless men, s.n.a.t.c.hing at her in selfish, b.e.s.t.i.a.l desire.

It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless--that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.

He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life but--he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his responsibility. He followed her on her downward path till he saw her stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances--alone and without hope; still pet.i.te, still dainty in spite of all, still with flashes of wit, and then----

He shuddered. "O my G.o.d! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?"

On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes debating whether he should tell the story to his wife or not. As the little ones grew weary, the noise of the autumn wind--the lonely, woeful, moaning prairie wind--came to his ears and he shuddered. His wife observed it.

"What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?"

"Oh, no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he took his little girl into his arms and held her close.

IV. THE Pa.s.sING STRANGER.

This was the story the mystic told:

It was about eleven o'clock of an October night. The street was one of the worst of the city, but it was Monday--one of its quiet nights.

The saloons flared floods of feverish light upon the walk, and breathed their terrible odors, like caverns leading downward into h.e.l.l. Restless, loitering crowds moved to and fro, with rasping, uncertain footsteps, out of which the click of health had gone.

Policemen occasionally showed themselves menacingly, and the crowd responded to their impact by action quickened, like a python touched with a red-hot rod.

It was nearly time to close, and the barkeepers were beginning to betray signs of impatience with their most drunken customers.

A dark, tall man in cloak and fez moved slowly down the street. His face was serene but somber. In pa.s.sing the window of a brilliantly lighted drinking place he stopped and looked in.

In the small stall, near the window and behind the counter, sat three women and two men. All had mugs of beer in their hands. The women were all young, and one of them was handsome. They were dressed nattily, jauntily, in modish, girlish hats, and their dainty jackets fitted closely to their slight figures.

Their liquor had just been served, and their voices were ringing with wild laughter. Their white teeth shone from their rouged faces with a mirth which met no answering smile from the strange young man without.

He stood like a shadow against the pane.

The smile on the face of the youngest girl stiffened into a strange contortion. Her eyes looked straight ahead into the eyes of the stranger.