The green vase

Chapter I

THE train came to a stop with a jerk that almost threw the passengers to the floor.

" Confound that engineer," Henry Murphy said. " He's nearly knocked us down at every station since we left New York, and I guess this time he just remembered the last minute that the Boston station wasn't located on State Street. Come on, Helen," and then, to a group of fellow-passengers, " Good-bye and good luck to you."

He took his wife's arm and pushed his way across the crowded platform to a cab. While he went with the driver to find their trunk she leaned back somewhat dispiritedly against the worn leather cushions of the carriage. The day was blustering and dismal. Their honeymoon was over. During the first week, at Niagara, she had found herself pitifully unable to share Henry's enthusiasm in the wonder of the place, and at the same time had been thrilled with the realisation that he was somehow, in his splendid young strength, a part of it all. Then had followed a fortnight of ecstatic, if perhaps a little wistful joy in New York. At the Waldorf, at Delmonico's, she had brushed against men and women of the world. And yet she had suffered. To be among them, unnoticed, was not to be of them. To touch them in passing was not like speaking with them, eating with them; and yet, an outsider, she had felt kinship with them. Henry had been interested in them only as he was interested in a play in which he had no wish to take a part. Then, more acutely, as vaguely before they were married, she had wished he was different, not in any specific detail perhaps, but that he might be more obviously a gentleman — like the men in evening clothes who seemed to have so much to say. She had not phrased it so clearly as yet.

Now they had come home. Where they were to live she had no idea. Henry had wanted to surprise her — as though she were a child — and she had been unwilling to spoil the eager joy of his anticipation and had refrained from questions. After all, he would only have rented and they could decide during the coming year where to live. She wanted to be among the people whom her father had known and loved and whom her mother, in their poverty, had lost sight of after his death. Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue were beyond their means, but people were moving out. The Fenway and the Bay State

Road were building up, and she believed it would be an easy matter to persuade Henry to settle there since his sense for financial opportunity was as keen as hers for social. She knew that she was not a " climber." She wanted friends, as she had wanted them all her life — people in whose interests she could really share.

Henry spoke to the coachman, evidently naming a familiar street, and then jumped into the carriage and fell, rather than sat, beside her. He never did things calmly. He was often boisterous in the vitality of his youth, and so, almost roughly, yet with the tenderness that came of great love, he threw his arm over her shoulder and drew her close. "Now, dearest," he said, "home! What a home it will be! Just us two! A thousand times better than wedding tours. No swells to look at our clothes and wonder who the country folks are. Just us two. Aren't you glad, Helen? "

1 Yes," she whispered, " yes, dear," and nestled closer. At that moment, as always when she was alone with him, she shared fully his feelings, let her love shine clear, meeting his as frankly and unreservedly as their eyes met. She delighted in his strength, his touch, his whole-hearted, protecting love. She was willing to let herself sink contentedly into its limitless shelter and to rest, to be unreservedly happy in his care, as he was in the right to care.

She had almost forgotten that they were moving, going home, until she looked out and saw unfamiliar streets. She watched vaguely a moment, then acutely. Their carriage was lumbering along toward the South Boston bridge. Her first impulse was to cry out. Surely he had not taken a house there — or perhaps they were going to Roxbury. She quieted at that. Roxbury was not the Back Bay, but good families still lived there. It would be only temporary, and at any rate she must not disappoint her husband, must not let him see anything but the happiness he so confidently expected. Then they turned to the left, over the bridge. "Where?" she cried involuntarily, "not South Boston?"

Henry looked at her, surprised. " Yes, dear, South Boston. Why not ? We're not social swells and nothing is prettier. You just wait."

" I have never been there," she murmured, but she kept her face away from him, looking unseeingly over the forests of shipping. South Boston. People had silver weddings there, and sometimes the engagement was announced in the papers of a clerk living in Somerville or Charlestown to Miss Murphy of South Boston. Murphy — that was her name now, and perhaps she belonged there. But she did not — she was sure of that — not for long at any rate. The name, Murphy, always troubled her except when she was with Henry, and then, in her admiration for him, she forgot about it. Perhaps there were nice people in South Boston, but she doubted it because they were never mentioned in the society columns, the real society columns where people did not pay and which were not called society to please the politicians whose names and speeches were reported. It was among the political items that their home-coming would be reported. " Henry Murphy, the rising young politician, has just returned from Niagara and New York with his bride, who was a Miss Helen Smith of Cambridge. The young people have taken a house

in Street, South Boston, where they will be

pleased to see their friends." She could not imagine the Elliotts and the Blands and the Sawyers reading that notice — and the combination of Murphy and South Boston made her almost glad.

The carriage was bumping along now over illpaved slum streets where babies and mangy dogs swarmed in the gutters, and where rumpled sheets and turkey-red tableclothes streamed from the windows. Slatternly women with market baskets gossiped on the corners. Helen almost envied them because she was sure they never thought beyond th< day. Happiness there must be on the top rung o: the social ladder. A kind of sordid acceptance then must be on the lowest rung, too, where one mus recognise the impossibility of the climb and when envy would only be for the money that Mrs. De lancy's diamond tiara would bring, not for contac with the lazy men and women who saw it glitter an< came to pass idle, precious words with its owner And all the time Henry had been talking, loving her taking her home, masculinely unconscious that shi was less radiant under the gloomy skies than he For him the time had not yet arrived, if it ever would when he could distinguish between a brave smile anc a joyous one. She did not let him see her eyes.

" It's lucky for us," he was saying as they passec into tree-lined streets where the houses would hav< been suggestive of Beacon Hill had it not been foi the little ugly signs of " Front Room To Let " ir the windows, " that the swells missed seeing wha a really good thing South Boston was. We couk never have come here if folks like that had bough up the land. Are you tired out, love? We are al most home." She had turned to him, and he ha( caught a suggestion of the suffering in her eyes, onb to interpret it wrongly. " Here we are now."

The carriage turned up a sharp, short hill and came to a stop at one side of a shaded but somewhat unkempt park before the door of an old-fashioned, red house with a high stoop and ornate iron railing. In front was a little grass-plot where a few purple crocuses showed their faces. About the whole square ' was an air of respectability, almost of gentility, Helen thought, as she glanced over it, suddenly reassured. And then, in the window of the next house, her eye caught a sign, " Large Front Room To Let."

Henry led her up the steps and hand in hand they passed into the hall. He was too deeply moved to speak, and Helen, when she saw his face, threw her arms around his neck. " Our house," she whispered. " Dearest, how happy we shall be."

The parlour had red walls, red of an almost bloody shade, but touched with magenta where shadows fell across it. The woodwork, heavy all of it, but overshadowed by the huge mantelpiece that tried ineffectually to hide behind an intricate network of jigsaw tracery, was of lifeless black walnut. On the centre of the mantel, crushing all hope of better things, was a fat green vase, up which sprawled red and yellow roses, all in high relief, all shining as though varnished. It was the wedding present from Henry's Uncle John, and Helen had cried when it came. Uncle John was rich and she had hoped that his riches might be associated with good taste. The furniture suited the room, as she realised sadly. It, too, was of black walnut, upholstered in bright green corduroy, and it had obviously been newly revarnished. She sat down on the hard tufted sofa and covered her face with her hands. The sofa was unyielding and she moved to a chair. It was stiff and uncomfortable but from it she could not see the green vase. She was in the grip of despair but knew she could hide her feelings from her husband after he came from superintending the trunks. She only hoped the stairs were long, so that he could not finish quickly. There were coarse lace curtains at the windows, a blue white in colour. She had not noticed them before. They looked like the curtains one bought in shops where furniture is sold on the instalment plan. They were just the hue of a dead body. She thought of tearing them down, and then she heard the front door slam. Henry was coming.

She stood up to meet him, afraid of herself, afraid of her surroundings, but with the same brave smile on her face that he so eagerly mistook for joy. " Well," he cried, " pretty flossy parlour for beginners, ain't it? " She looked at him with staring eyes, the smile still hovering on her lips. Somehow she

HELEN ii

had expected his personality to dominate the room, to push back the ugliness, to sweep her up into his own optimism. And he did dominate, become the moving force of all the surroundings, but not, as she hoped, by crushing them back on themselves. Rather he seemed at the moment to assimilate them to himself, to be himself the ultimate test of vulgarity, finer only because stronger, and through his strength less capable of change. Suddenly she sank down on the inhospitable sofa and shook with great wrenching sobs. She cried because at the moment her dreams were shattered; because she recognised the impossibility of moulding her husband into a type different from that of his birthright; and because, contradicting as he did all her masculine ideals except that of power, she yet loved him.

He was on his knees beside her, his arms around her, talking to her as he might have to a child with a broken toy, very tenderly, with a gentleness she had hardly believed was in him. " Poor little girl. Poor child — tired out and I never knew it. And then, after all the excitement of the trip, coming to a new and strange home. But you'll feel better soon. And I have a surprise for you — a surprise that'll make you very happy, a new wedding present."

" Not another green vase ! " she cried, straightening suddenly and drawing away from him. " I — I couldn't stand that."

He laughed happily, holding both her hands. " No, not another green vase ; I'd forgotten you didn't like that. You'll learn to, I guess. A much bigger, costlier present than that. Uncle John did help with it, though, in a sort of way. See, here's his letter," he added, producing the document from his pocket. " It's what I call a good letter. Read it." He thrust it into her hand, and sitting on the sofa beside her drew her close to him.

" DEAR NEPHEW HENRY," it began. " I am glad you took the straight road to your uncle. Who should you go to quicker? I have been thinking over your plan and have decided to help you. But along with the help here goes a bit of advice from an old man who has been through life, to a young one just beginning. From what you say I opine that you are marrying a sensible young woman like your Aunt Mary was when she and I made up together. Miss Helen has earned her living so she will know how to be economical and keep your house shipshape. She will have no social bee in her bonnet, thank God. The germ of that kind of ambition in a woman is the worst kind of sickness to fight. It is sometimes contagious and then you might as well call in the financial undertaker. But I guess you are safe and I would say Miss Helen was if I did not know the susceptibility of womankind. There is no such thing as being too careful in these matters. Therefore, which is the reason for all this, buy a house where there will be as few chances of contagion as possible. If you buy in the city get away from what the papers call the tide of fashion. Strike into a back water if you can, some place that's just got left out. You never can tell what will happen in a new place if the dam breaks, because any tide is a curious thing and reaches the most unlikely places. But a back water has been tried already and things are apt to keep on pretty steady like. The hill in South Boston is one of such and so are the streets north of Franklin Square. In both you can buy cheap and good, reaping the fruits, so to speak, of the fashion hunters that made a mistake. But I put South Boston first because it's farther from the danger line and because the park will be a fine place for the children to play. Of course there is not much chance of land skyrocketing there, but you will be buying a home, not a wildcat speculation scheme. That is not what I am lending money on, but on a permanent investment, as permanent as marriage itself. I am lending you money to build up a God-fearing, righteous, fruitful home, and after all that's the only thing worth while in the long journey of this life. I want you and Helen to start right and keep right, and nothing is more likely to do it than a bit of land and a tidy home that is your own. Therefore when you need the money your old Uncle will hold the mortgage, believing it will be the soundest investment of his life. God bless you both, my boy. You're just the sort I would have liked my son to be if he had ever been more than a dreamchild, and it's up to you to keep on living up to my ideal of what he would have been.

" Yours affectionately,

" JOHN MURPHY."

Helen read the letter through, dry-eyed and emotionless. " Have you bought the house? " she asked finally, in a hard voice.

" Yes, dear," he answered. " That was the surprise. Isn't Uncle John a wonder. The deed's in your name. How does it feel to be a property owner? Better than writing letters in Stuyvesant and Bond's office, isn't it?"

" Henry," she said quickly, " you're too good to me. I'm not worth it. Shall we go upstairs now? "

He looked vaguely disappointed as he followed her, but could not have told why. He was far from grasping even a suggestion of the undercurrent of her thought, far from seeing that the fulfilment of his brightest dreams was the shattering of hers.

Chapter II

A WEEK later Helen sat before her mirror doing her hair. She was proud of the wonderful masses of it, deep, rich chestnut in colour, and as she drew it back not too tightly, coiling it into a great knot at the back of her neck, she watched the ripples of light that played along it. The sun was shining across her window, and through a golden haze she could look out over the shallow harbour and the marshes to the Dorchester hills, already stained with the warm, soft, green of spring. The call of a fishmonger, made musical by distance, the notes of birds in the trees, the smell, languorous yet deeply irritating, of the earth waking to new life in the hot spring sunshine — all these stirred her more profoundly than she knew, disintegrating the despairing calm that for seven days had only given way before tempests of self-accusing love for her husband. So, as she leaned forward watching herself in the glass, her bare arms resting on the cool marble top of her dressing table, she felt the pain of her defeat acutely resurgent. Bitterly she repeated the hard, common-sense phrases of Uncle John's letter — the house that was his soundest investment because they would live in it, always; the park where the children could play — dirty, South Boston children she saw them, their father's commonness without his redeeming strength; she saw them in school, in college, always dragging on a noisy, colourless existence; saw them married, the girl perhaps to that vulgar boy next door who threw spitballs and whose mother took boarders at sixty cents a day.

In anticipation, for them, she rebelled. It would be better not to have children, and at that her pity reverted to herself. Did not the woman looking back at her from the mirror deserve a better fate than drowning in the slough of South Boston respectability? She was not a vain woman, but she knew the value of her face and figure. There was nothing plebeian in the soft oval of the face, in the deep brown eyes, the firm nose and chin, the small mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. Why should there be? Her poverty had not affected her inheritance of birth. She held up her arms and let the loose sleeves of her dressing sacque fall to the shoulders. There was strength as well as beauty in the pliant lines of her figure. She knew that her body was more than Henry had said — " little, and warm, and soft to cuddle." She thought of it then frankly, as a social asset more potent than jewels and brocades, and yet she longed for the jewels and brocades to hang upon it, longed for them with much the same feeling that a priest has for the diamonds with which he embroiders the robe of the Blessed Virgin. The precious stones do not enhance the value of the object of worship. They seem merely, through the senses, to give a first impulse to the worshippers. Henry loved to have her well dressed — " as well as you can, my dear, without being etxravagant. I want my wife to look well so people can't say I'm stingy, but it would be the ruin of my career to have them think we were trying to put ourselves over them." Was she, then, to be merely an aid to his career, to spend her life being polite to the vulgar wives of vulgar constituents? Perhaps that was a wife's duty, but she had married, partly at least, to escape the grind of duty, but most of all, she knew even in her despair, because she loved Henry Murphy. There was nothing in the whisperings and the pervasive scent of a warm spring day to impel her back to the cold fact of duty. She stepped to the window and stood looking out as her husband so often did, but unlike him, she got no pleasure from the commercial aspect of the scene. When he exclaimed at the lovely tints of the water as a cloud let fall its long, quivering shadow, or pointed out the yellow in the budding woods of the

Dorchester hills, she was sorry, as he was glad, that the water was stained with coal dust, and that under the trees were the squalid huts of hundreds of labourers. So to-day she was only conscious of the harmony of colour, restful after the garish crudity of her house. She was seeking to order her mind, to draw out of the chaos of her dissatisfaction a thread of active purpose. She was not of the stuff which yields weakly to environment, that inertly allows itself to be broken on the wheel of chance. Her ambition was clear — social recognition by the men and the wives of the men whom she had seen daily pass through the office of Stuyvesant and Bond and who had in turn seen her, but not as a lady, merely as an astonishingly pretty secretary who would not accept theatre invitations. It had been ambition and modesty that had made her refuse. She knew that if she had wanted the jewels and fine raiment she could have had them, but she wanted them as symbols, not for themselves. In He.nry she had seen a young man, already well off, prospering in business ; she had heard him spoken of as a coming financier, and — she had fallen in love with him. There was no doubt of that. She loved him first, perhaps, for what he might become, then with proud submission to his splendid strength. Of the nature of that strength her intuition had been at fault. She had conceived it to be the power that conquers and then seeks new conquests. She had found it the power that holds, that fastens its roots firmly in its native soil. In imagination she had harnessed her ambition to Henry's strength, and in reality she found them at odds. The question defined itself quite clearly. She must match her wit against his stolidity. Ultimate success would come very slowly and the waiting would be tedious. She must treasure every chance phrase, every act, every rebuff, until at last she should reach the sensitive pride, the craving for approbation that somewhere underlies the shell of every man. She must not let him suspect her ambition. He would think it the " desire," as Uncle John called it. To her it was a craving for the understanding of those who thought as she instinctively thought. She must foster in Henry's mind the belief that social recognition was only the natural consequence of success. In her husband's absence she felt herself able to accomplish anything.

She fastened her dress and pinned a white bow at her neck, looked at herself once more in the glass, touched her hair, and then wondered whether she had ordered supper. She heard the door open and turned quickly.

" Mrs. Jennings from across the park to call, ma'am," said the maid. She had unkempt hair, wore a black skirt, much spotted, and a soiled blue waist.

" Very well, Rose," she answered, " tell her I shall be down directly. And, Rose, next time, please, knock before you open a door."

She smiled rather grimly as the door slammed. " I wonder whether it is necessary to have maids who are dirty and impudent." Then she followed. The hall was always close because the gas had to be kept burning. The red and blue stained glass panel in the front door admitted little or no light except in the late afternoon, when the sun shone through it fantastically.

In the parlour Mrs. Jennings sat stiffly on one of the green upholstered chairs. Even if she had been of a less uncompromising appearance, Helen thought, she would still have had to be stiff in that chair.

" How do you do," she said. " It is very kind of you to call."

" Not at all, my dear, not at all," Mrs. Jennings responded energetically. " It was my duty to call. We all know each other in the Park. Of course, too, we knew about Mr. Murphy, and Mrs. Davidson knows a lady in Cambridge who said you'd always been well spoken of there, though a little overdressed. It was Mrs. Eusden who told her. Do you happen to know Mrs. Eusden?"

" Yes," Helen said, " I have met her."

" I wish I knew her," said Mrs. Jennings. " Mrs. Davidson is one of the very most perticular ladies in the Park. One of her ancestors by her mother's side came over in the Mayflower, and her grandfather's older brother — much older, of course — was lieutenant in the Revolutionary war with England. It's strange, though," she continued, " this Mrs. Eusden didn't seem to know much about your family. She said there were so many Joneses that you could hardly keep them apart in your mind, though I must say I have known some very nice ones."

" My name was Smith."

' To be sure it was, but no offence. Still it was a natural mistake, and Smith's even commoner than Jones or Murphy."

" Yes, it is."

" Well, you know the old saying, ' a rose by any other name,' so there's no reason why you need to worry. The folks living in the Park don't all of them have fancy names, but they're a different class from the rest of South Boston — with a few exceptions, of course. Ladies like Mrs. Davenant of K. Street, f'r instance, feel misplaced, and I don't mind telling you that when your house was for sale — it is yours, I hear — a good many of us hoped Mrs. D. could be persuaded to take it. Of course, you understand, we don't mind you. We were just afraid some real ordinary folks might get in, and we did want Mrs. Davenant to get what she aimed for. She has quite a walk to see her friends, and of course we don't often care to go to K Street."

"So the Park considers itself very aristocratic?" " Well, now, I wouldn't just say that. Of course we can't help seeing that we're different from the rest of South Boston, but that don't mean we're not democratic. Perhaps some might call us just a little bit sniffy to our neighbours, and I do think of it often that perhaps we ought to do something for them, being placed so different. We might have an annual picnic for them in the park, or fireworks on the Fourth. But then, you see, if we gave a finger they might take a hand. They might even call, and of course we couldn't have that. You understand, don't you."

" Yes, I think I begin to." She remembered blazingly a remark she had not thought much of at the time, a casual remark she had overheard Stephen Bond make to a man leaving his office: " Yes, it's just as I always said. The test of a gentleman is that he should be able to treat his inferiors as though they were equals, and without toadying, to recognise his superiors when he sees them."

" But " — Mrs. Jennings reverted to the charge — " we are in a democratic country and so we try to be democratic. I guess you'll think we are when you hear the ladies talking over the Social Life in the Sunday paper after church. Why, you wouldn't believe it, Mrs. Murphy, the way we despise all those snobs and rich folks in the Back Bay. I guess they wouldn't feel so almighty important if they could hear us talk them over. Why, the way those women drink cocktails and champagne and run around with other peoples' husbands is something scandalous, and then to go and pay the papers to put it all in. Why, it's a disgrace to America, I say."

" They don't pay the papers."

" Don't pay ! Well, I'd like to know. Didn't Mrs. Searles that lives next us have to pay to have a notice of her daughter's engagement to that young Adams of Charlestown put in? And that was real news; the other ain't. Who'd care to know what Mrs. So-and-so wore to the opera. Why should the papers put it in if not for pay? "

" To increase the circulation, I suppose."

" Increase the — well, I never! Who'd ever buy a paper to read that stuff excepting perhaps those that want to see their own names in print. That might help some."

** Don't you read it, Mrs. Jennings? "

" I ? Well, of course, I just take a glance at it, seeing it's lying on the parlour table and I don't want to appear ignorant walking home from church. But that's not saying I'd go out and buy it, and what's more, if the stuff wasn't there I'd never look at it. As it is, I only read it to make myself thankful that I'm not that kind."