The parasite : a novel

Part I I

From his advantageous point of view on the piazza Arthur Randall, musingly observant, could overlook the lawn where the summer guests of his sister, Mrs. McCord, were gathered for five o’clock tea, and he found himself uncommonly interested in watching the pairs or groups scattered about under the beautiful old trees or in the few weather-worn summer-houses that dotted the wide green space, while a negro butler and two maids in trim black and white served tea, cake, and daintily thin sandwiches. Interested? Well, so long as they let him alone and did not insist upon including him as part of the scene. To contemplate this domestic and social picture was, he said to himself, to consider, really, a large area of life which it typified, the graceful, esthetically-gowned women representing the whole class of leisure-loving, pleasure-seeking, non-producing feminine parasites of modern society; the comfortable, well-groomed, well-fed men standing for the conservatism which finds present conditions so satisfactory (to its own class) that its face is set with invincible resolution against any change or “ progress” which would in the least disturb its well-being or its power.

In one respect, however, he reflected, the group before him was not typically modern; there was not present here, nor ever would be at his conservative sister’s old southern home, any representative of the nowveaw riche hordes who in these days so successfully scaled the ramparts which of old had guarded inherited rank from the aggressions of vulgar money-makers. Money-making had a social value now-a-days that it had not had in the past. In a few localities, however, society still seemed able to hold itself aloof from the depredations of “ upstarts” —among them, notably, the old city in Maryland which for one hundred and fifty years had been the home of Arthur Randall’s forbears and which was famous throughout the State for its generations of distinguished, exclusive, and genuinely superior society; a society which had given to the State three governors, two United States senators, one eminent judge and two “ delightful” novelists. Strangely enough, its “great” men had all come from its “old families ”’—which in the minds of the old families was an irrefutable argument (in spite of numerous American examples to the contrary) in favor of keeping “pure” their blood. All of which, to our much-travelled young Judge Arthur Randall, had its humorous aspect by contrast with the deeply intrenched and more justifiable caste of the older countries across the water.

“ Beechlands,” as his sister’s summer home was named, was an old colonial stone mansion on Chesapeake Bay, five miles from the aforesaid distinguished Maryland city. Most of the old families of this city had their summer homes out here on the Bay, the distance from the city making just a pleasant automobile ride, for the men of the families, to and from their offices. So that, during no part of the year could these choice people escape from each other. Not that they wished to—being complacently unaware of their need of contact with fresh, new life, and serenely unconscious of the medizvalism of their opinions, oer rather prejudices, on most things in the universe. This, at least, was the view of them held by Judge Randall, detached, as he felt himself, temperamentally and intellectually, from his elder sister’s world, in spite of the fact that it had been his world, too, all his life long— the difference being that in his case its influences had been counteracted or supplemented by travel; and by that other wider universe created for him from his omnivorous reading, in which, indeed, he did really live and move and have his essential being.

“J see you have your old school friend, Madam Amy Tyson, here, haven’t you?—and her daughter,” he remarked to his sister, who, upon his appearing on the piazza fifteen minutes ago, had, as soon as possible, left her guests to greet him, for he had but just arrived from Eastport for the week-end.

Something of the innate fineness of this young Southern gentleman of blood and culture had been at once manifest in the subtly exquisite courtesy with which he had risen to meet his sister and make her comfortable in an easy chair in the shade.

Mrs. McCord’s devotion to her brother, six years younger than herself, hardly less deep than her love for her own two grown sons, had never been shaken through all the shock and strain, upon her profoundly conventional soul, of his radicalism not only in thought but in deed, and of his one terrible misstep, taken four years ago, to the very brink of ruin.

A plain, small, dark woman of forty, of insignificant appearance, there was yet an air about her, a native dignity, that set her apart as of no common stock. Reserved and rather cold in manner, there was nevertheless in her bearing towards those she cared for a graciousness, an undemonstrative tenderness, that made them in turn almost worship her. Her friendships, limited in kind and number, were not superficial, but vital and life-long. Her prejudices, ingrained in the fibre of her, were unshaken by travel, by reading, by experience. True to herself and sincere in every relation in life, she was a strange compound of nobility, fineness, narrowness, and ignorance.

Unlike his sister, Judge Randall was tall and of very substantial build, though he had what was known in his county as “the Randall cameo features.” In his boyhood and early manhood he had been rather ashamed of being so good-looking; in later years more serious troubles had overshadowed this lighter affliction. The rather excessive refinement of his features, however,’ did not counteract their strength, for his really splendid head, his gray eyes with their extraordinarily clear, deep light, gave him, with his fine physique, an arresting look of power, both physical and spiritual—a power which, at the age of thirty-four, had not only landed him, through the practice of the law, on the Supreme Bench of his State, but had made him its foremost citizen. Nor was this look of power diminished by the unmistakable melancholy of his countenance, the mark set upon him by the tragic experience of four years ago, an experience which had left him, while still so young a man, embittered, cynical, spiritually frozen, save for one live coal which still burned in his otherwise torpid heart.

“Tt is so odd, isn’t it, to see babyish little Amy Tyson with a grown daughter!” his sister answered his query, smiling, as she sipped her tea. “ And Catherine looks such a huge girl beside her dainty small mother, doesn’t she?”

“ She’s a handsome young animal, by Jupiter! ” replied Randall, who was given at times to a vigorous bluntness of speech which seemed oddly at variance with his old-fashioned courtliness of manner and “the Randall cameo features””—as though a strain of primeval savagery in him revolted at its long enslavement to civilization.

“ What a way to speak of a girl!” Mrs. McCord affectionately protested, her shining countenance and her whole attitude towards her brother betraying her pride in and adoration of him.

“ That’s all she is, Sally.”

“Oh, no, dear! Why, how could Catherine Tyson be anything else than exquisite in every way, with such blood as she has ?—and such an unmistakable look of race! And as you’ve not seen her since she was a child, you can’t possibly know such a dreadful thing as you said!”

“ There, there, I didn’t mean what you suppose. What, by the way,” he demanded with a short laugh, “do you suppose? ”

“You imply that she is coarse! ”

“Tf she satisfies your hypersevere standards, my dear, as to what a young girl ought to be, she’s indeed a model of propriety. Tl admit that on your word without proof!”

“But what led you to think, as you so brutally remarked, dear, that she’s an ‘ animal’?”

“Therein, I suspect, lies her only value. It is a value of a kind. She’s well-rounded, soft and cool and smooth and beautiful. A prize-animal, too, as to breeding—nothing left to desire in that line. Her spiritual values, however, are, I should judge, purely negative. She’s merely not anything she ought not to be.”

“Oh, Arthur! Catherine Tyson is one of the most positive characters I’ve ever known! Wait until you’ve talked with her just two minutes! I can’t think where you see what you say!” she cried, really puzzled as she followed the direction of his gaze across the lawn to where the very beautiful and rather haughty looking young woman in question sipped tea as she lounged in a deep willow chair, with Mrs. McCord’s eldest son sprawled on the grass at her feet.

“Can you imagine, Sally, that truly elegant looking girl doing anything worth doing? She’s the most relaxed individual I ever saw! Just look at her—repose in every muscle; absolute repose.”

“That is her charm, Arthur—the charm that stamps her for what she so pre-eminently is—a gentlewoman.”

“Exactly. The culmination of generations of cultivation; the ripe fruit followed by the tree’s stagnation; the beautiful autumn hue preceding decay.”

“ What nonsense you talk, dear! ”

“She’s worse than her futile mother! Your friend Amy, I remember, was never known to finish anything she’d begun, from a piece of embroidery to a magazine story—and had a way of going about dropping things— her sewing, her magazine, her jewelry, any old thing !— but this daughter of hers, I surmise, would not go so far as to begin anything!”

“Youre mistaken! She’s not only a very efficient girl, with a strong will and plenty of common sense— she’s her mother’s right-hand man. Poor little Amy looks up to her big daughter in awe and takes her advice about everything.”

“ Yes—yes,” he dismissed the subject indifferently, “JT should judge the girl to be quite a personality; ” and though his sister could not reconcile this admission with his not recanting his aspersions as to her “negative” quality, she was so used to her inability to make Arthur’s inconsistencies hang together, that she usually did not try. “ A strong personality gone to waste,” he added reflectively. “ Might have amounted to something if she had not been born an heiress to a great fortune.”

“ Not gone to waste,” his sister demurred. “She fills her proper place beautifully and will continue to fill and grace it all her life, I am sure!. You'll change your opinion when you talk to her. Amy, by the way,” she remarked, with a little indulgent laugh for the folly of her frivolous old school friend, “has been lauding you to Catherine to such a degree that I’m afraid she’s inspired the poor girl with a mortal aversion to you! which, however,” she added reassuringly, “she'll of course get over quickly enough when she sees and knows you.”

“ Gods, Sally! If I’d known you had all these people here, even my homesickness for my boy would not have tempted me to spend the week-end here! I’d have had Bappis come to me over Sunday,” he said, and it was noticeable how even a casual mention of his little son softened the hard lines of his face. “ Why didn’t you warn me?”

“The truth is I wanted you to meet Catherine Tyson. I think she has bloomed out so beautifully.”

“But why should you want me to meet her?”

Leaning sidewise against the arm of her chair to bring herself nearer to him, she answered confidentially, “ Dear! I see no reason why you should not find happiness again! ”

A slight astonishment stirred the rather stony serenity which was habitual with him. “‘ Happiness?’ ‘ Find? it with Catherine Tyson? Sally!” He turned a speculative gaze upon her. “How my life has revolutionized your views if you can be plotting for me matrimonially!”

“My views are what they’ve always been. I’m not given to changing my views with every new book I read as you seem to do, dearie! But your experience,” she added, coloring sensitively at touching upon the sore and hateful subject, “is simply too exceptional to come under ordinary rules.”

“From present appearances I should be cutting out your Ned, my dear!” he shrugged his square shoulders.

“Not only Ned, but all the young men of the neighborhood! Catherine has them all,at her feet. And she is so beautifully indifferent ! ”

“She can afford to be,’ he granted. “ And,’ he

‘placidly added, “she can continue to be, for me.”

“T have never known a woman to be indifferent to you, Arthur, if you thawed enough to notice her.”

“That’s your view of your wonderful brother! But, Sally,” he added a bit coldly, “don’t waste yourself plotting matrimony for me! Even if I were not incapable (after what V’ve been through) of caring for a woman enough to marry her—do you forget that there’s Bappis —and—and Laura?”

“ She is not to be considered!” his sister—her color deepening—hastily replied; and it was evident that both she and Randall shrank before this redoubtable theme, though Mrs. McCord’s look and tone showed also that she could hate as strongly as she could love.

“You must know that most women,” Randall insisted, his face gone a shade pale, “‘ would have a prejudice against marrying me while Laura lives—not to mention Bappis.”

“ Most women of to-day have no prejudice whatever against marrying a divorced man when he is—well, the kind of man you are—good-looking, charming, reasonably well-off, and with a rising reputation!”

“You strangely overlook the fact that any woman who considered me would at least want to know the cause of my divorce!”

“We could certainly satisfy her on that score,” she quickly answered, though her tone was by no means so confident as her words.

“If she could be too easily satisfied, she’d hardly be a woman 1’d place over Bappis. And he’s another impediment, of course, to my thinking of marrying.”

“Tt’s for his sake you'll have to marry. It’s the only solution of the Bappis problem. Bappis must have a mother, a home.”

“ A step-mother ? ”

“He couldn’t drive away a step-mother as he does every nurse and housekeeper you employ. You, too, need a home, Arthur, which you’ve found you can’t have without a mistress for it. There isn’t anything you have not tried in the way of housekeepers, from reduced gentlewomen to negro mammies! ‘The reduced gentlewomen were the worst, weren’t they? I don’t see what’s left for you but matrimony. You'd be much more comfortable!”

“And you actually imagine that my marrying that luxurious, seductive maiden out yonder would find Bappis less motherless than he is now? Ha!” he laughed almost sardonically, a quick fire in his eyes. “ Believe me, I shall protect my boy from such a fate as that! Why, I’d as soon give him for a step-mother that other young parasite I see you still have hanging on here—that impecunious distant cousin of your husband who’s always sponging on you—what’s her name? ‘The demure looking girl that’s pouring tea out yonder.”

“Joan? Yes, she’s still ‘hanging on.’ She always does until I tell her I need her room for a few weeks and present her with a mileage book to go to another distant cousin’s. But, poor child, what else is she to do?”

“Work for her living. She’d far better, than work so hard at being a parasite.”

“ Hubert offered her a position once in his office, but she didn’t seem to want it. She, and her mother, too, I understand, have a mortal dread of sinking in the social scale through their poverty. That’s why she hangs on so desperately here and elsewhere. But we don’t mind having her. She’s so unobtrusive, one hardly knows she’s about. Now there’s a ‘negative’ individual—talking about ‘negative’ people. But young as she is, she’s nevertheless rather useful here. She tries tobe, so that she may have more of a foothold, you know; I always find when she has gone that I miss the odds and ends she’s constantly doing for me, though I confess I don’t miss her conversation or any other brilliant quality!”

“A sycophant too, poor worm! The worst of her is (as I happened to learn recently) that her poor delicate mother does work for a living—and very hard too—to keep this Joan in finery for her round of visits! Rather base of the girl, I say, Sally!”

“But what does her mother do?” Sally inquired, astonished. “I never met her but once, and then she seemed to me to have even less back-bone than Joan. I don’t see how she could ever earn a dollar! I’ve often wondered how Joan managed to dress so well on the little they must certainly have. But of course if her mother helps out by working! Do you know what she does?”

He laughed. “Writes verses and ‘sentiments’ for valentines and birthday cards. Sometimes she sells them and sometimes she does not. A young lawyer of Annapolis whom she recently employed to collect a bad debt on commission from one of these valentine publishers asked my advice, and, when he found I knew who she was, he confided to me that her case was pathetic; that she spent every dollar she earned on her ‘society daughter,’ as he called this Joan, and nearly starved herself.”

“Oh, but, Arthur, I can’t think Joan is such a wretch! She is really a very sweet girl.”

“Sally, dear, the way you can’t see flaws in your friends !—even in your caitiff of a brother! Well, it’s a very amiable trait, sister! As for Joan Laird’s mother— I saw her myself for a few minutes in her lawyer’s office, and she seemed to me a frail little wreck of a woman. It’s a shame for the girl to prey upon her! She ought instead to be taking care of her! ”

“Of course she ought! But about Bappis, Arthur— he does need a step-mother! For you know you are really foolish about your boy! It isn’t wise for you to forbid his being disciplined—effectually disciplined—by those who have the care of him. It has got to the point, dear, when neither servants nor relatives can stand it—though I hate to say such unpleasant things to you! ” she pleaded.

“My ‘foolishness’ about my boy, Sally, is my one saving grace—the raft to which I’ve clung ever since he was born, to save myself from being submerged entirely ! ”

“But your love ought not to blind you to his welfare, Arthur, dear.”

THE PARASITE WwW

“Tt is my love which I trust to guide me in the matter of his welfare.” ,

“T admit it does guide you in your own dealings with him, for when you are by you certainly do make him behave bimeelf. But the moment you are gone—well!” she gasped, “it’s battle, murder and sudden death !—war, pestilence ale famine !—for the rest of us!”

For three reasons Judge Randall never took his sister’ 8 complaints of his son so seriously as he might otherwise have done; first, he did not share her conviction that a well-behaved child is a cowed child; secondly, her deep and bitter resentment against the child’s mother (once her loved friend whom, had the offending husband been any one but her idolized brother, Sally would have considered outrageously sinned against rather than sinning) made it impossible for her to feel affection for the boy that so strongly resembled the hated woman who had refused forgiveness to Arthur Randall; thirdly, Arthur junior (or “ Bappis” as his father had always called him, after his infant effort to pronounce the capital city Annapolis) was too decided a character to get on peaceably with so dominating a personality as his Aunt Sally. Arthur, senior, himself, got on with her only by never contradicting her or arguing with her if he could avoid it. Assertive people, unless their assertions took the form of her own convictions, never got on with Mrs. McCord.

“T’m afraid,” he gravely answered her just now, “ that in leaving Bappis on your hands this summer, Sally, I am imposing on your unselfish kindness to me. But,” he “added, frowning back a look almost of tears, “I’ve been 2 hard-pushed to know what to do with the little man! Very hard-pushed—or I should not have afflicted you—knowing how you feel towards him—how you can’t help feeling!”

“ Dear!” she remorsefully laid her hand on his, “ there is nothing, nothing too much for me to do for you! It isn’t that. Only—if you would give me leave to discipline the child in my own way, when he needs it fh

Randall shook his head. “No doubt ’m unreasonable —hbut I can’t permit it. One must love a child to be just to him—especially a child so aggressive, positive and altogether difficult as Bappis. And then, the way he is knocked about from pillar to post, and left, for the most part, to the mercy of unscrupulous and sometimes cruel servants (the latter has happened, as you know), I can’t have any one ‘effectually’ punishing the boy for faults which are wholly the results of his unfortunate environment.”

“Then,” said his sister, who, for a high-strung, sensitive woman, was at times strangely obtuse, “ rather than have things go on this way, you'd better, for the boy’s own good, send him—to—to his mother!”

Arthur Randall bit his lip hard before he answered. He realized how this suggestion measured her growing aversion to the boy.

“That would mean, you know, that I give him up absolutely—probably never to see him again i

“ She. still asks that?”

“Demands it. Thinks any contact with me polluting to her son! And I’d cut off my right hand—yes, my head—before I would part with him so absolutely!”

He rose abruptly to relieve her of her tea-cup, his face cold and set. “I see your Catherine Tyson is strolling up here—so T’ll go and find Bappis. He was sleeping when I got here. He'll be having his bath by now.”

“Not yet. The whole house knows it when Bappis has his bath !—because, if you please, he doesn’t like his nurse; so he kicks her, floods the bath-room with water and raises Bedlam generally! The new nurse girl who came last Sunday has, by the way, given notice.”

“Oh, confound her! I thought she seemed really promising. Well!” he drew a long, hard breath, “ well, well! Ill go and bathe him myself. And you'll hear no noise of battle!”

He turned away, just as Catherine Tyson, followed by Ned McCord, reached the piazza steps.

“Any way,” thought his sister, “I have at least succeeded in putting the marriage idea into his head. It ts the only thing for him to do and I shall try my best to bring it about! He'll be much better off in every way. And I hope the step-mother he gives Bappis will be the sort Bappis needs—the sort the little tyrant can’t knock down and jump on! Catherine Tyson would so perfectly fill the bill!”

II

Ir was no wonder that Bappis, at the age of six, was an insurgent of the first water against every form of coercion save his father’s; for he had been obliged during the past four years to fight his way like a Bonaparte through a small army of well-meaning but not always wise or loving relatives and a large army of unprincipled nursemaids; so that he had now arrived at the conviction, uneomfortable for himself and others, that every hand save his father’s was against him and that the advent of a newcomer in his small world was the signal for him to battle.

Judge Randall’s first sight of his little son to-day as he was undergoing the last stages of his afternoon toilet in the bath-room, the donning of a fresh white Russian blouse, gave him a startled impression of a change in his aspect, a more child-like happiness in his face, a more erect carriage of his little frame, a generally stronger, more wholesome hue from head to foot, than he had worn two weeks ago when Randall had last seen him. In view of the interview he had just had. with his sister he was the more surprised. And contrary to Sally’s predictions, and it must be confessed to his own questioning astonishment, he found the boy quite cheerfully submissive under his nurse’s hands.

“Obber! Oh, Obber!” he greeted his father ecstatically—this name having been his baby attempt at “ Arthur,” as he had been wont to hear his mother call his father; another of those relies of his infancy which his doting father had never let him drop. “ Obber, I can spell three new words that Tante Joan taught me! Here on the faucets—H-O-T, cold; C-O-L-D, hot; and here on this pipe—W-A-S-T-E—shirt-waist!” he triumphantly brought out after an instant’s hesitation.

“<Tante Joan,’ Bappis?”

“Yes, she says she’ll be my aunt so’s we can be more intimate.”

“ Ah?” This was indeed an unheard-of phase—Bappis welcoming, apparently, to intimacy a would-be relative— the friendly overtures of his kin being usually repulsed with suspicion and without ceremony. What did it mean?

* But when I’m Red Wing, the Indian Chief, then she’s my squaw and her name is Gold Tooth because she has a gold tooth in the back of her mouth. Oh, we have lots ‘of fun! I like Tante Joan better than any of the other boys—except,” he piously added, “of course Jesus! Obber!” he suddenly demanded anxiously, “I can stay here all summer, can’t I? I have such a great time here!”

Not within his memory had Judge Randall been accosted, after a two weeks’ separation from his boy, with other than a passionate pleading to be taken with his father from the place where, at the time, he happened to be sojourning.

“Ts it all because of ‘ Tante Joan,’ ” he asked incredulously, “that you have such ‘a great time’? ”

“Oh, yes! She always comes up with me when I have to go to bed, unless Aunt Sally needs her for something, and she tells me stories, and every morning I go to her room and get into her bed and she tells me stories again. We're very intimate. We're a tribe—an Indian tribe. You may join our tribe, Obber!”

“Thank you for the honor, Bappis. And if you really want to stay here, you'll have to be very careful, you know, to make no trouble for Aunt Sally. You must not fight your nurse and howl when she washes and dresses you and

“Yes,” broke in the black nurse girl sullenly, - in spite of the awe felt before her employer, “he nearly tears the clothes off of me when I take him from Miss Joan to scrub him! He won’t behave unless Miss Joan will come along too and stay by while he’s bein’ washed. The only reason you all didn’t hear him holler to-day was that Miss Joan told him if he hollered she would not tell him any yarns to-night after he was in bed. She couldn’t come along up this afternoon because Mrs. McCord needed her to pour tea. And anyhow, when Mrs. McCord saw you'd got here, Judge, she said Miss Joan wasn’t to play with Bappis so much and humor him so much while you're here—it gets him too spoilt. Oh, if it wasn’t for Miss Joan’s holding him down with her wheedlin’ of him, Td have left before this!”

“Tl be glad when you do go, you old Cassy!” retorted Bappis. “ And I only act spoilt when Tante Joan isn’t with me, not when she is! And I wish you were drownded dead!”

“Tut, tut, Bappis! Apologize to Cassy saseasae lua don’t let me hear you speak to her so again! ”

The boy obeyed at once, glibly and perfunctorily pronouncing the oft-exacted formula of apology. He was always perfectly docile with his father. Randall had long since proved to himself that the child could be governed alone through his affections. Without actual brutality it was impossible to cow him.

“What kinds of stories does your new ‘aunt’ tell you?” he asked.

“Oh—h,” drawled Bappis, “about Siegfried and Hiawatha and Columbus and Hercules and Perseus and George Washington and all the heroes.”

“She learns him to be so wonderful intelligent!” the maid volunteered.

“ Cassy,” Bappis patronizingly admonished her, “ you should say teaches him, not learns him.”

“La, Bappis, J ain’t one of them Four Hundred—it don’t matter how J talk my grammar!”

Randall laughed, patted Bappis’ head and presently went away to dress for dinner.

He reflected, as he shaved and dressed, upon “the wonderful ways of Providence” in turning to such good account the little parasite’s efforts to so ingratiate herself with her hostess as to make herself an almost indispensable adjunct in a comfortable and even luxurious home to which she had no sort of title.

“ Now why wouldn’t the damsel be happier,” he idly speculated, “in finding some sort of a legitimate job at governessing or even child’s nursing—anything, I should think, would be better for her than this sponging around on people that don’t really want her and imposing on that frail mother of hers!”

It was not, he decided, that she was incompetent, for she seemed to have an aptitude, at least, in dealing with a child—seeing how she actually governed Bappis without his knowing he was governed. And it was not that she was lazy, for no one who regularly employed her on a salary would exact half the really hard service he had seen her render voluntarily for her mere board and the tolerant, amiable contempt of those she served. She worked so very, much harder eluding self-support than ever she’d have ‘to work at it! It must be that she suffered from the old-fashioned Southern false pride about a woman’s working for her living—but why didn’t the poor little fool see that her present career manifested such a very lamentable lack of proper pride and self-respect? And she did not seem to have any false pride about her mother’s working for money!