Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  “Forever and ever,” she agreed, her hand in his. Then she said suddenly, “But oh, my mother — my more-than-mother! It’s going to be hard for her!”

  Newcome smiled his hearty, friendly smile. “Why, I thought,” he said, persuasively, “that as this house is so big, and even better situated than mine, that maybe she’d let us have our offices here, together. There’s lots of room on the ground floor. And I thought further that all things considered, perhaps she’d let me board here too. Then we shouldn’t have to upset anything.”

  Margaret drew back and looked at him with a face of such radiant adoration that he fairly caught his breath.

  “Oh!” she breathed. “If there is anything that I can do — in all my life — to make you happy!”

  “There is something you can do right now,” he softly suggested, “that will give me a piece of heaven. Marjorie — my Marjorie! You haven’t kissed me yet!”

  And she gave him heaven.

  WON OVER

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 1

  Why should unoffending children be forced to carry on from age to age the names of their ancestors and collateral relatives?

  That was one of the first large questions which formed itself, vaguely, in the inquiring mind of Esther Ella Challis. She did not see it quite as widely, nor express it as fully, having in view only her own case and that of her friend Algernon Edward Hughes, who hated his name more deeply far than she hated hers. She had heard him insist on “Jerry,” passionately insist, securing that name by force of arms whenever possible; but he could not thrash the big boys, nor the little ones, nor all those of his own size at once, so they called him “Algy” in drawling, tender tones, and “Al-ger-nonny,” and even “Eddy-nonny,” with all the other variations possible to ingenious youth.

  She came upon him one day, actually blubbering in the depths of the backyard, behind the big tree, after the big boys’ jeering chorus as they tramped across the lot beyond. Algernon Edward was only eight.

  “Say — Jerry—” she suggested, “here’s a cookie.” He was comforted by the cookie, and by the willing concession of the name preferred.

  Seeing him calmer, she remarked: “They named me after aunts, two of ‘em, great aunts. I think it’s mean.”

  He eyed her, still sullen, over the serrated fraction of brown cookie. “Mine’s after my father. I hate it,” he admitted.

  “When I grow up and have children I’m going to name ’em new,” she ventured dreamily. Esther Ella always escaped from the positive troubles of the present by solacing herself with a rosy future, but Jerry found no comfort in her remote purposes. He made his protest with his fists, and in due time passed out of Esther Ella’s range entirely, growing up to contented manhood as “A. E. Hughes,” and even in later years condemning his own son to the same burden. But she remained questioning.

  That was when they lived in Mendon.

  Esther Ella was a lonesome child. Her mother was a stern-faced widow, having buried no one knew what dreams of hopeful youth, what sad realities, with the young husband who had died so soon. Some of her friends said that the time was well chosen; even some of his friends privately agreed that it was just as well Challis dropped out so early. He had been admittedly a disappointment to many, both in literature and general behavior. Mrs. Challis never admitted it. She erected a suitable monument, wore suitable mourning, showed, if not wild grief, at least a lasting sorrow. To her daughter she said little as to what she had lost, but the child used to sit long, studying her father’s portraits, early ones in the big album, the last one or two more modern and expensive, the least satisfactory of all, on the south wall in the parlor.

  He was handsomer than her mother, that was clear. She liked the bright, sweet, little boy face of him, standing brave though stiff in an attitude evidently dictated by others. She felt a stir of warm admiration for the one that looked straight at you, and had such an impressive little mustache — all the later ones were clean-shaved. Naturally she had no means of reading either the boy’s promise or the man’s fulfillment, but she let her empty little heart fill and run over with love for the father she never knew. If he had lived, she thought, she could have sat in his lap after supper; he would have liked to hold her; she would have felt the strong, warm arms around her; he would have let her kiss him; he would have said: “My little girl!”

  She had long cherished a secret longing to be called “my little girl,” but her mother never called her anything but “Esther Ella.” Not that Mrs. Challis was unkind, or even lacking in affection. The sleeping child never knew how close her mother held her, what tender names she murmured, under breath, in the dark hours. Once or twice she did waken, dreamily, to that sweet surprise, and after that she tried her determined little best to keep awake till mother came. But a healthy child can hardly remain awake from half past seven to ten or eleven o’clock, even with the aid of pins.

  If she had had a brother or a sister to play with, or if her careful mother, as aristocratic as she was poor, had allowed her to play with the neighbors’ children, there would have been less loneliness and less dreaming. Even the associations of school life were rigidly sifted and scrutinized; she must not accept invitations to parties because she could not return them; she must not go to this little girl’s house because they were too “common,” nor to that one’s because they were too “rich.”

  Mrs. Challis’s distinguished relatives paid her no attention whatever, being permanently displeased with her marrying what they pleased to describe as a “low-bred newspaper man.” Even Aunt Esther and Aunt Ella, beyond each sending a book at Christmas to the young namesake, seemed indifferent to the compliment paid them. But in spite of years of coldness the watchful mother always hoped that someday her sister who had married so well, or her brother, who was somewhat recognized even in New York, or the aunts themselves, would “take up” Esther Ella. So she watched over her studies and associates as carefully as might be, and if she could not afford to give her the society she approved, she would at least not allow any that she disapproved.

  Little Malina Peckham, whose father taught Latin in the school, and whose mother apparently had as hard a life as Mrs. Challis, was at times allowed to come and play. Esther Ella was not at all fond of Malina, but anyone was better than no one.

  “She is an extremely well-behaved little girl,” said Mrs. Challis, “and most appreciative.”

  Malina did appreciate the cookies; there were none at home.

  That was in Saunderstown.

  When Esther Ella began to realize life at all clearly, being at the advanced age of sixteen, they went to live in Springfield, Massachusetts. Aunt Esther and Aunt Ella, at last wearied of “companions,” and having previously exhausted more acceptable relatives, had offered Mrs. Challis a “home,” and Mrs. Challis had accepted the offer — for the child’s sake.

  The house was big and old with a stationary atmosphere of fifty years’ standing. The sisters had inherited it when they were twenty-five, and made no changes since. They were hale old ladies, wearing costumes of evident cost, if not of evident beauty. Pious were they, with the religious habits of an untroubled lifetime; one inclined to learning, the other to missionaries, both with the opinions of their long-deceased parents and early teachers still dominating every thought.

  Mrs. Challis heaved a long sigh of relief when she was left in the big back bedroom that would be henceforth hers — hers always — if she was wise and careful. She knew her aunts well.

  Esther Ella also heaved a long sigh, but not of relief, as the door of her room closed upon her. This, her mother said, would be “h
ome” now, and always — if she was “good.”

  It was a small room, low-ceilinged, with a visible rafter on the side, cluttered with old furniture, valuable, no doubt, but not, to the girl’s eyes, pretty. There was a deal of curtain and valance, of stuffed chair and high-piled bed. There was a bookcase, before which she dropped eagerly on the floor. Row after row she read the titles, but with all her passionate delight in reading she turned away with another long sigh. This room, she judged, must have been sacred to visiting missionaries.

  Disappointed in the bookcase she went to the window, opened it, leaned out. Ah — this was better! A garden, a real garden, such as she had read of and seen pictures of, but never seen before. Box! Somehow she knew the smell from description. Big, old box hedges along the graveled walks. Roses — she smelled them clearly, white ones she could see — roses in beds, on arbors, up against her very wall. Yes, by reaching as far as she dared, she could touch a cool, soft cluster of crimson ramblers. Trees, too, tall and shadowy, giving an air of mystery and guardianship. In a far corner she caught a glint of reflected light, the faint tinkle of a fountain, and above, higher than the great elms, shining down on her with all the witchery of eternal romance, a soul-stirring, brilliant moon.

  She set her chin on her crossed arms and looked and looked. A moon like that always made her heart leap with the hope, almost the promise, of joy. With such a moon still shining on the world something must happen, sometime.

  Nothing did, however. If possible, less even than before. Esther Ella, to be sure, was now being educated with the utmost accuracy and precision. Her school was a small one, an exquisite product of the intellectual inbreeding of New England. The teachers, the books, the pupils, were so thoroughly “select” that a composite photograph might have been taken of either group with clear results. The girl’s eager mind was cautiously supplied with the diet deemed suitable for her age, sex and station, and trained in a series of faultless exercises. Her home reading, if she found time for any, was also supervised. In association with the young ladies who studied and recited beside her, she found as the most daring soul an intellectual rebel who had read Aurora Leigh.

  Mrs. Challis showed a ceaseless anxiety to have her daughter “do well,” a restrained pride in observing that she did “do well,” both in school and in such company as they saw from time to time, industry and patience in preparing her wardrobe, and more self-restraint and heroism than was suspected in maintaining her position in the household— “for the child’s sake.” That position was by no means easy for any woman, much less for a Livingstone.

  These two sisters, who had lived together as joint mistresses of the big, old house for so long, had never yet agreed on any single detail of its management. It was theirs, indivisibly, with a rigidly tied-up income to maintain it and them; but each, in the nascent housewifery of her individual soul, longed to manage it in her own way. That the original furnishings should remain, honored and well-preserved, was undisputed, but where each piece should stand, and when, how, by whom, each article should be cleaned — these points remained open to discussion from year to year, from decade to decade.

  In the matter of food a still broader field was open. Members of the same family, the same church, the same social circle, may yet differ as widely as the poles in the matter of dietetics. When it is said that Miss Esther Livingstone was a fixed believer in the “Salisbury treatment,” and Miss Ella Livingstone a vegetarian in general, with fluctuations toward “unfired food” and Fletcherism, enough perhaps appears to indicate the amenities of household management in their behalf.

  Mrs. Challis was acting housekeeper, without either sister ever ceasing to order when it pleased her. She must engage servants with care and pains, to find them discharged at a moment’s notice, or leaving with startling suddenness on their own initiative. She was, of course, the table and parlor companion, treated almost as a child herself, and Esther Ella as a babe in arms; but after the babe was sent to bed the mother must remain, busy with tireless fingers, or perhaps reading aloud from books of soporific tediousness, or of such stimulating incentive to argument that the sisters would wrestle over them till welcome bedtime.

  Mrs. Challis felt in her conscientious heart that she earned the “home” that was offered her, but she begrudged no effort, no endurance, to hold this precious “setting” for her child.

  Now Esther Ella had to love something. Her first love in the school was the teacher of mathematics, a grave, remote, pale young lady, with a soft wreath of fine black hair. Her eyes were blue, clear blue, and gentle, and the girl wove fiery romances about her in the wide spaces of her young imagination. Very shyly and gently she pressed closer, and when the teacher, scarcely more than a girl herself, quite frankly met her friendly advances, it was as if a queen had accepted tribute and granted audience. Of the audience, however, little came. Miss Lester turned out to be a young woman of extremely moderate ambitions, teaching school as a stopgap, and hoping only, in a delicate, undefined way, to “marry well.”

  Esther Ella was vaguely disappointed.

  Her next enthusiasm was for the music teacher, Sara Holliwell, not overhandsome, but possessed of a fine figure and a finer voice, who sang in the choir and was of a highly devotional temperament. In her society the earnest girl grew deeply religious, took a class in Sunday school, attended all services both Sundays and weekdays, began to feel a “vocation” for joining some sisterhood. But when Miss Holliwell quite patently flirted with the unmarried tenor, and also with the married basso, and then, when even schoolgirls had heard of her gaieties, suddenly eloped with a very ordinary young man who belonged to a brass band, her young admirer’s heart cooled almost to a stone.

  The girls she could not fully feel at home with. They knew more than she did, in their uninterrupted course of schooling, but they had read less, and thought, apparently, not at all. The repressive habits of her girlhood counted also, though no present objections were made to her having intimate friends among these extremely select young ladies.

  It was quite a pleasure to Esther Ella to find in the beginning of her second year a familiar face in the classroom — that of Malina Peckham. Malina appeared there in a period of temporary glory, her mother having come into a small legacy, and disappeared the next season, owing to the rapid exhaustion of said legacy in her father’s unskillful handling. While she stayed she was, at first, a source of considerable comfort to Esther Ella, who had a hidden capacity for staunch devotion which life so far had not encouraged. But in spite of her sense of established friendship and the protective tenderness she soon developed for the newcomer because the other girls unanimously disliked her, it soon became painfully apparent that Malina was not a “nice girl.” She strove to curry favor with the daughters of wealthy parents; she flattered the teachers and took advantage of them at every point possible; she picked up school gossip as “pigeon peas” and retailed it broadcast with skillful twists and turns of her own contriving.

  She clung like a limpet to Esther Ella, praising her “wonderful brain,” prophesying great things of her in the future, laying an unerring finger on the most secret chord in the girl’s heart — a never-told ambition to “do something,” to “be somebody” — and twanging it till it thrilled again.

  It was a good brain, though not in the least wonderful. The compositions she presented were quite the best of the class; others, not brought forward, were still better. Malina begged to hear them, listened in rapt silence, volubly admired. When her own last effort in the same line for the spring examinations showed so many earmarks of Esther Ella’s work that even the teacher suspected borrowing, Malina stoutly denied it. Most of the girls were eager for her downfall; even the teachers were not sorry to have a tangible fault to show in a pupil not at all popular among them. But Esther Ella, called upon to state whether or not Miss Peckham had appropriated her work, stood quite pale but determined, feeling as she had once when she rescued a most unattractive kitten from a crew of yelling boys.

/>   No, she said, not a paragraph, not a sentence, not a phrase, not an idea, of her work appeared in Malina’s.

  This was rigidly true, but it was also true that Malina’s product was so near to the originals that several of Esther Ella’s best papers could never be used, in that school at least.

  Afterward Malina assured her with tears of gratitude that she had never seen such nobility, such generosity, such magnanimity, in her life.

  “It’s your style that did it,” she said. “I never dreamed of imitating you, but your style is so impressive that it influenced me in spite of myself — I couldn’t get away from it.”

  Next fall Malina was not there.

  Seventeen, eighteen — Esther Ella “finished” in the Soper Academy for Young Ladies, and faced the bitterest denial of her life.

  She wanted to go to college.

  No one ever knew how much she wanted it. Grown people, old people, seemed to want things as they want their meals at the usual hour, and get right over it if disappointed, as one does if one misses lunch — not thinking of food again until dinnertime. But young people want things with the passionate hunger, the burning thirst, of the shipwrecked, dying slowly. And their disappointments bite as with acid, leaving scars.

  To be eighteen, to be ambitious, to have a keen, active, willing brain, eager for larger work, to view the knowledge of the world as a banquet, and the possibilities of life among other students as a paradise of romance and excitement, to know that this may happen now, only now, and never again, and then be denied it — this is hard to bear at eighteen.

  She was good to look at, if one knew much of “points” in human beauty. Not the round, pink type, blossoming richly at an early age, and then, as life passes, steadily falling away from that fresh bloom into a formless softness of well-girded flesh, or unintelligent wrinkles; but the kind that lasts half a lifetime in full power, and then — if the life has been well spent — leaves a strong and gentle splendor behind it. A tall girl, well-proportioned, with good features, a clear, dark skin and brooding eyes; eyes that looked weary for so young a face; the mouth a little set, a little sad, perhaps, but mouths may mend, with time.