After which there was a pause in the conversation.
“Do you think you can live at all comfortably on a teacher’s salary, dear?” he asked, and she told him she would rather live uncomfortably on a teacher’s salary than luxuriously on a broker’s.
“It’s such noble work, Gerald — the very highest in the world. Even doctors are only tinkers, you see, but teachers build!”
Daisy was quite in earnest in her admiration, and together they announced their intentions to her parents. Her father was well pleased. He was fond of Gerald, and not fond of Richard Armstrong; also he felt that his little girl would be quite safe with her cousin. Mrs. Briggs received the news with as good a grace as she was able to muster, and, in spite of her disappointment, with a certain vague relief. She liked Gerald, too, in her heart, and, after all, Daisy was twenty-eight.
Miss Yale highly approved. “My best congratulations to both of you young people. You show good sense, Daisy; I always thought you had it. And if you never do anything better than lead several thousand boys in the right direction, Mr. Battlesmith, why that’s a very commendable job.”
To Margaret, harried and strained in her maze of feelings, this union was pure joy. Her fondness for Daisy was genuine, and she was relieved and glad to watch her quiet happiness. To see the light and wonder of their love shining across the broad base of friendship and long acquaintance gave her a pleasure so keen that it hurt, hurt in unavoidable contrast with her own strange case.
Newcome jested with them both in pleasant fashion, but Armstrong seemed vaguely to resent any man’s winning any woman while he, Armstrong, was still unsatisfied. He paid fierce court to Margaret, so that she began to look forward eagerly to the visit’s approaching end.
When the foils arrived Armstrong said nothing of his plans at first, but got Newcome to practice with him, early and late, getting home with his thudding button triumphantly. Daisy and Gerald came upon them one morning, stamping and lunging, with the rustling clash of steel, and the girl exulted hugely.
“Oh!” she cried. “Now we’ll get Margaret to try — I do so want to see her fence.”
Margaret, when found, declined. She was not fond of fencing — she had no costume — she much preferred to watch. Daisy’s gymnasium suit was promptly offered, and Newcome, watching, wondered whether he had better “fall upon his sword” in such wise as to break it, or if she really did object to the trial. Miss Yale appeared, brisk and interested, and rather urged her on. “You’re a fine fencer, Margaret, and you know it. Why not show us?” And Mr and Mrs. Briggs came bustling up, she politely disapproving, he profoundly impressed and eager for the fray.
“Just the thing! Just the thing!” he cried. “I see that Newcome is no match for you — eh, Armstrong?”
Armstrong stood quietly, bending the foil, its button against his shoe.
“I’m quite at Dr. Yale’s service,” he said. “It will be an honor to cross swords with her — but of course if she does not wish to —— —” His eyes met hers, longing, dominant, fiercely desirous, and his firm lips wore a little close-held smile.
Then came a flying patter of little feet along the turf, and Dorothy burst upon them. “Is it a duel — a real duel?” she cried delightedly.
“Not a bit of it, Dollykins,” said Newcome, swinging her to his shoulder. “I’ve been standing here and letting Dr. Armstrong punch holes in me, and now they want Dr. Yale to take my place.”
Dolly, from on high, surveyed the scene proudly.
“Do it, sister,” she commanded. “Please do it! And punch holes in him! You can!”
Whether it was the child’s wish, or Armstrong’s repressed smile, or sheer desperation among the conflicting impulses within her, Margaret suddenly agreed to try. She went off with Daisy, promptly reappearing in blouse and knickers, firm and light of foot, swift, graceful, sure. She scorned to make apologies, but Miss Yale had forestalled her in her absence.
“The girl hasn’t touched a foil in a year to my knowledge,” she explained. “So if our friend here does get in on her, there’s plenty of excuse. But I’m not worried about that—”
Armstrong could not for the life of him have told whether love or rage was strongest in him. His cool opponent, her face hidden by the wires, her dress unfamiliar, her attitudes and action precisely those with which he was used to combat, seemed in no way the woman he loved, but an enemy. The presence of Gerald Battlesmith, that happy lover, and of Daisy, whom he long had thought of as his if he chose to ask, Mr. Briggs’s friendly jeers, Miss Yale’s relentless scrutiny, even little Dorothy’s clapped hands and “Hit him, Margaret — hit him!” — wrought him to a furious determination. His wrist was strong, his eye keen, his foot steady, and he pressed fiercely to the attack.
But ten years of youth and clean habits count much in fencing, and while Margaret had no recent practice, she had had four seasons of it under the best teachers in Europe. If he was hot, she was cold; that still, concentrated mastery which held her hand firm when another life trembled beneath it held it now. She also felt that more was at stake than appeared, and gave her whole mind to the affair. She touched him once, and he paled under the light pressure. He touched her, and a dark flush rose to his face. Then there were a few breathless moments, the steel playing like fireworks between them, and then, with lightning swiftness and a wiry clatter, he stood disarmed, looking in dumb amazement at his fallen weapon.
She stood at attention, waiting for him; but Armstrong, without a word, walked over to his foil, broke it across his knee, and tossed the pieces into the ravine.
“Congratulations, Dr. Yale,” he said in a somewhat strained voice, bowed to the group and walked away among the trees.
They were all silent but Dolly, who rushed to the victor and threw her arms about her in keen delight.
“I knew you would! I knew you would!” she cried in triumph. “You dear, splendid sister!”
Margaret looked down at the little face turned up at her with such rapturous admiration, and her lip quivered. She stooped to kiss the child, and turned toward the house with her. Newcome picked up the masks and foil, and followed silently. They all drifted back, trying with pleasant chatter to cover Armstrong’s behavior.
“I’m astonished at him,” persisted Mr. Briggs. “To be such a bad loser! I’m sure it’s an honor—” he made a courtly bow to Margaret, “to be beaten at such hands.”
“You surely are a wonder!” Gerald told her. And Daisy cried:
“Oh, I’m so glad you did it, Margaret — I’m so glad!”
But Margaret was not glad. She walked as one in a dream, a bad dream that grew more and more oppressive. That she should fight with the man she once had loved, with their child crying her on to the assault — it was too dreadful.
“Cheer up, my dear girl,” Miss Yale urged that night. “We’re going Saturday. He goes tomorrow I understand— ‘called away suddenly’ — good thing! I guess you’ve seen the last of him, my dear. We’ll have one restful day on the mountain, and then — home!”
But Margaret did not cheer up. She felt no elation. Dorothy’s innocent triumph in her victory seemed almost wicked. He was her father.
She could not sleep that night.
Across the tangled web of feeling in which she found herself, a new thread was weaving itself from day to day, of a color so pure and brilliant that all the rest looked soiled and dim, a beautiful but inharmonious thread that matched with nothing there.
She drowsed at last, and fell to dreaming in terms of the same metaphor, seeing herself vainly trying to mend a terrible rent in a fair robe with that bright thread, and finding it tear out of the old cloth and leave a gap greater than before.
They were to climb Mount Huykill the next day, an easy trip, to which Dolly had looked forward with lively enthusiasm.
“I can walk all I want to,” she explained to Margaret. “And when I’m tired I can ride on the donkey — and if I get awfully tired Dr. Newcome will carry me — won’t you, Dr. Newcome?”
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br /> The excursion up Mount Huykill had been postponed to wait the full moon, and to this last day on account of previous cloudy weather, for the exhibition was to give them not only a view into Canada and across Lake Champlain, with Vermont and New Hampshire and their immeasurable beauties of river, lake and mountain around about, but the most sublime spectacle the world can offer — the moon and sun facing each other across the earth.
A night on the peak had no terrors for any of them; there was plenty of balsam fir for couches — Margaret made a wry face as she heard them extolling its attractions. Their hostess had no great fondness for the trip, but she would not for a moment admit less vigor than Miss Yale, and Miss Yale fairly ramped in the ease with which she ascended mountains.
“Where are your lanterns, Laura?” she demanded, casting a careful eye over the preparations.
“Why, Aunt Mary,” laughed Daisy. “What do we want of lanterns? We’re going to stay up all night, you know — and there’s a full moon!”
Miss Yale made no further protest, but being a somewhat opinionated lady, she carefully tucked into her rucksack and Margaret’s a small electric pocket lamp.
It was by no means a hard climb, shaded for the most part, and winding gently upward over sidelong slopes that hardly suggested ascension.
“I don’t call it climbing unless I have to use my hands,” Miss Yale airily explained, and flitted on in the lead as if she were fifteen instead of fifty.
Margaret would have been with her if she had not preferred to walk with Dolly, though indeed Dolly’s young ambition was almost equal to her adoptive mother’s and kept her well to the front.
A certain lightheartedness among the party seemed to show Dr. Armstrong as not greatly missed. Dolly indeed confided to Margaret:
“I’m glad he’s gone — aren’t you, sister?”
Her mother turned the question aside. The child’s plain lack of liking for her father half-grieved, half-pleased her. To her straightforward disciplined mind it was most disturbing and unpleasant to be pushed and pulled this way and that by feelings she could not disentangle enough to pass judgment on. She looked forward eagerly to her work. There was something she was sure of, safe in, something which gave her the joy of power and the comfort of service.
Newcome, stepping out cheerfully under a heavy load, ranged alongside her in a downward dip of the trail that sent Dolly scampering with the leader.
“I wonder if you women who have real work know how to sympathize with the women who don’t,” he said.
Margaret smiled at him gratefully. The world of fact and thought he talked of, the large impersonality and free, respectful equality with which he met her, was an unceasing delight to her. Armstrong’s manner, even when most anxious to please, kept always in sight the fact that she was a woman and he a man. Newcome reached across the gulf as if they were both too tall to mind it. If she had felt, sometimes, beneath his wide area of pleasant friendliness some touch of deeper concord, or if he did, it was mutually ignored.
“Most women work pretty hard, I think, too hard indeed — don’t they?”
“Oh, they’re busy enough, and tired enough,” he answered, “but not with real work. I was thinking of the rest to the mind of having one large area fully trained and developed, and clean flushed with power. To have one part of you that is normal and in smooth running order, no matter what may be tangling up the other parts.”
“Is that why men stand trouble better than women — if they do?” she asked.
He laughed with her. “If they do, indeed! As if they did! It is what makes them able to bear it at all — that and the conviction of superiority.”
He had to go then and lay violent hands on the donkey, which had reached a brook that some inner conviction assured him he could not cross. Moral suasion, bribery and physical violence were used on him in vain, and at length they had to tie him to a tree and leave him to solitary meditation on a light local diet, while they divided up the rugs and blankets between them.
The last part of the climb was steeper; even Miss Yale had to put forth a hand now and then, being heavily laden; and Dolly was carried over the dangerous part by Dr. Newcome, who left her in perfect happiness, the first on the peak by a full minute, and came back for his burden of food and clothing.
Margaret thanked him warmly. “Some men would have taken the load up first and made Dolly wait,” she said.
“Dolly wait! You couldn’t make her,” he cheerfully replied. “I think she clearly inherits from her adoptive mother’s disposition.”
They reached the top, tired but happy, and sat some time gazing as far as the still hazy distance would allow. Then there was much gathering of wood to burn and fir boughs for the beds. Two camps were laid, Miss Yale quite particular about the careful thatching of the fanlike boughs, Newcome and Gerald pitching theirs down in larger if less shapely heaps, while Mr. Briggs exhibited his skill in the building of a safe and efficacious bonfire.
They enjoyed their supper to the full, perhaps a little past that measure, but were forced to admit disappointment in the sunset. Doubtless it did occur, at the time set in the calendar, but a regiment of level gray clouds lay low across the west and hid it all. The rising of the moon was also obscured on the other side. They could see the pale, silvery glimmer of it here and there, but no full-orbed majesty of light.
“Never mind,” Daisy cheerfully suggested. “We can use our imaginations a little, and in the morning it will be glorious.”
Quite good-tempered and happy they sat about the blaze and told stories, so wrapped in dancing firelight that they forgot to look for stars — and then of a sudden, upturned faces, questioning hands stretched out — a sudden scramble to their feet — it was raining.
“It’s only a shower,” protested Mrs. Briggs, as if it could not presume to be anything else; but Jupiter Pluvius seemed quite indifferent to their needs or wishes, and the soft shower soon deepened into a steady settled rain. Then rose Miss Yale in serene triumph with her electric light.
“They won’t hold out long enough to get us home,” she said, “but they’ll help us arrange for the night.”
Descent in that velvet darkness was impossible — they must stay where they were. Margaret lent her light to Dr. Newcome, and the new-cut boughs were dragged partly into the only sort of shelter the rocky top afforded — a yardwide flat-bottomed crevice with a few bare poles stretched across it. A double blanket was laid across the poles and weighted down with stones; the women all crawled into this long bunk and lay there, spoon-fashion, in two overlapping rows, while the men sat outside and kept up the transplanted fire.
Mr. Briggs, who was subject to physical disabilities, not helped by a long chill wetting, grumbled in spite of himself. Gerald was helpful, but quite worried about Daisy, anxious to go down and get lanterns. He did try it a little way, but the electric spotlight made the dense darkness darker. He nearly lost his life in the one dangerous stretch of trail, and came back subdued, nursing a wrenched finger.
But Dr. Newcome seemed to find the occasion one of sustained hilarity. He heated stones in the fire and tucked them at the feet of the packed ladies in that long hard couch. They lay still perforce, because there was no room to move, but no one slept save Dorothy. She was warm in Margaret’s arms, pillowed on Margaret’s heart, and not all the cramped discomfort of that granite bed could mar the mother’s happiness.
“Are you dry in there?” inquired Gerald, hearing Daisy giggle irrepressibly.
“Dry!” she answered gleefully. “It runs down beneath us like a brook. It drips down the walls in sheets. And the blanket hangs in pools — positive pools — and in the middle of each pool there is a round, unbroken stream that comes straight down on us. Dry!” And she giggled again.
Newcome produced from inner pockets various remedies and stimulants. “We shan’t catch cold,” he assured them all. “No influenza germs on Huykill Peak, I warrant you. But here’s something for you, Mr. Briggs, that’ll make you feel a b
it easier, I think. And here are some lozenges if anybody wants saccharine comfort; good peppermint won’t hurt anybody. Anything you’d like out of my pharmacy, Mrs. Briggs? Miss Daisy? Miss Yale? Dr. Yale?”
More cheering than his peppermints were the stories he told. As the slow, wet night wore on, and the stones and twigs seemed to grow harder hourly, he produced an unfailing series of jokes and anecdotes, interspersed now and then by contributions from Mr. Briggs and Gerald.
Gray and cloudy was the light that came at last. No setting moon shone upon that hasty breakfast; no rising sun glorified it. But the hot coffee gladdened their hearts, and the swift descent warmed them. A chastened spirit moved the damp donkey to bring home all the bedding in patience, and their baskets were light on their backs. Dolly held to Miss Yale’s hand and hopped gaily beside.
“I think you’d better run a bit,” suggested Newcome to Margaret. “You look rather chilly yet.”
“Good idea!” She smiled gratefully at his thoughtfulness and was off with long, light steps. He kept beside her where the path allowed, behind her when it was narrow, and watched with a satisfying pleasure her perfect ease of motion as the downward miles flew beneath their feet. The sun came out at last; gold light and green shade flickered over her bright hair; the air was sweet and stirring; the woods dripped in diamond and emerald, and they raced down the glittering path like happy children.
12. Questions
When Richard Armstrong had planned to draw Dr. Yale with a fencing bout his motives were somewhat mixed. Her easy proficiency in so many lines had at first piqued, then irritated, and at last quite infuriated him. His love for her, intense and increasing, had in it no submissiveness. The more he loved her, the more he longed to conquer her. Submission, to his mind, was the woman’s part. He saw himself, somehow, somewhere, coming out overwhelmingly ahead, and then, from heights of achievement, lifting her to his breast.
The usual easy ground of supremacy — professional standing — was undermined by her own. In vain did he assure himself that it was but temporary, the passing interest of a heart-hurt girl, to be relinquished when the heart was whole again. Even at that, to have made the position she had at her age was a record of which any man might be proud. If a girl could do that on the side, what might not an earnest woman do as a lifework?
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 65
