A handmaid of the Lord

Chapter I I

TN the nineties men bore with their shrewish wives A rather more than they have come to do, and that was why Veronika Pearse carried as one of her earliest mem¬ ories the sound of fragile breaking glass, one of her mother’s favorite culminations of rage being to hurl lamp chimneys down the stairs. Later it was electric light burners, though these were broken more seldom because of the attendant explosion of sound. She remembered many a night when, with all the globes unscrewed from their sockets, the house would be in utter darkness for hours, darkness broken by the pounding, scolding voice of her mother and by sudden freakish and terrible dis¬ plays of hysteria. Years after, the sound of heels on wooden stairways always made Veronika a little faint. The staircase in the Pearse house was uncarpeted, and the sudden fast impact of her mother’s high heels as she hurried down the stairs was a sound memory as dis¬ tinct as that of the tinkle of glass fragments. Veronika always hurried for the broom when the lamp chimneys 9 broke, even when she was only six. She was continually trying to cling to the edge of order, picking up the articles that her mother threw about, putting things back in their places. Her fat, serious, little face was always pale as if from shock, and the brown freckles on her snub nose stood out distinctly.

Mrs. Pearse was one of the hundreds of married viragos who in those times was given her head and con¬ sidered an act of God and an affliction. Perhaps, hidden somewhere in the privacy of their married life, she did have a grievance against the mild and somewhat paunchy Doctor Pearse. He had given her, during some inter¬ ludes in their unhappiness, three children, gifts for which she steadily blamed him. There may have been some¬ thing, some suspected or even actual unfaithfulness dur¬ ing the time she was carrying her children, a happening not at all unlikely, considering that Doctor Pearse had presumably been younger and more vigorous than his children remembered him and must have been cruelly af¬ fronted by the grudging disgust with which in even her milder moments his wife regarded the basis of marriage. There undoubtedly had been warnings against men given to her before marriage through unclean mouths and ugly stories told her about the opportunities offered to doctors for illicit relations. Mixed with all the corruption of her thoughts were the fixed ideas of a mind which had ceased to develop, that women were badly treated, that men were lazy and that between them was natural warfare. Undoubtedly too there was physical debility influencing her shrewishness, illness never diagnosed, for she had a vast distrust of doctors as well as a terrible prudery. In her furies these things came out. Quarrels always started from a stated assumption that her husband was not treating her well, that she wouldn’t be his slave any longer. As she scolded she ignited further thoughts and misconceptions until her rage was beyond her own con¬ trol. The torrent of her mother’s words hit against Veronika’s consciousness like rain against a pane of glass. But with the sights, the sounds of fury, the occasional dangers of it when rage forgot all reason, she was marked. Her passion for order and decorum had its origin in those childish days of disorder and wretched¬ ness. Her apprehension of disagreement between people must have come from that time too, along with ridiculous things such as being inordinately greedy.

The Pearse children were always hungry or stuffed because there was no such thing as an order of meals in their experience. It was usually impossible for Mrs. Pearse to remain quiescent during a meal even if she had prepared it. The sight of her husband, his most casual remark, could set on fire the resentment that al¬ ways lay smoldering in her. When being a woman ceased to be a shame to her it became a grievance. A kind of perverted feminism steamed in her all the time. Men had “the best time.” They got out of the house when the work was to be done, went to offices, put their feet on the desks and flirted with nurses and stenographers while women stayed at home and slaved for men. She never forgave men for her labor pains. She never for¬ gave her husband for being able to sleep while the chil¬ dren were sick, for instinctively she could not sleep though she might feel her children were nuisances. She denounced the entire male sex and possibly was secretly avid for the kind of experience she had been denied. Perhaps she felt, without articulation, that she had never found anything in the relation of man and woman except pain and responsibility, and she was jealous of the fact that other people might have happier experience.

Slightly educated, educated out of the simplicity of the class of women who took life as it was, and not advanced far enough to think through to reasonable or fair solutions she was to her children a specter of un¬ reason. They never were deceived in their clear little minds as to the cause of unrest in their home. Bound¬ less was their sympathy for their father.

He probably had slightly the best of the situation. There was every excuse for his dropping into a warm restaurant and having supper—he could always say a patient had detained him and as he would not be be¬ lieved anyhow, it hardly mattered. And when he stayed away the children were not sorry. They coveted hours of peace and meals they prepared and ate together. At the grocery they would buy chocolate marshmallow cookies and big cans of prepared baked beans. Then with an air of cookery Veronika would drop the can solemnly into steaming hot water while Lily peeled the potatoes. Veronika’s greatest childhood pleasure was to mix up beans and potatoes and butter and eat the mess luxuriously while she read a book.

They would feast. Those were banquets, those gourmandish meals in the warm kitchen, with peace in the house. Veronika never quite separated physical comfort from mental peace.

But if they had strain and discomfort, at least the Pearse children escaped the twitterings which surround so many children. They got at life young and a sense of fact, grim as fascinating, humorous as terrible, came to them early. They never had any illusions about life’s being equable. To them existence was an escape from quarrels, a continual attempt to rectify disharmony. They formulated strategies to meet things as they came, had philosophies which were an odd blend of super¬ stition and observation, melancholy and childish hope. One knew, for example, that it was a long road that had no turning, that it was always darkest just before dawn. Add to that the digestion of a few romances, in which magical and thrilling improvement in circumstances comes just before conclusion and the shrewd knowledge that after a particular battle peace reigned for a time in their household, and there was an excellent working philosophy. Also there was the knowledge that the Bronte sisters had died young and suffered unjustly. The girls loved the Brontes and felt kinship to them on a basis of nat¬ ural melancholy.

There was of course the comic phase. Somebody up¬ setting something unexpectedly on some one else or more rarely their mother in a humorous mood when some weight of oppression seemed to lift from her mind and she was like a mischievous girl with a taste for practical jokes. Holidays worked partial magic too. There was some¬ thing in Mrs. Pearse’s German heredity which reverenced a holiday. She respected no church and no holyday but she had a respect for Thanksgiving and Christmas. There were presents and stockings and nervous festivity, but the thing the children liked best was the night before Thanksgiving or Christmas with the smell of wet turkey and onion and bread dressing pervading the kitchen. An¬ ticipation was the most joyful emotion they ever had, for on the holiday things invariably went more or less askew.

They were heathen. The theory of prayer they found once in a while about them in the minds of other chil¬ dren, in the precepts of the Sunday School teacher when they were packed off to the nearest church occasionally. They realized that their attendance at Sunday School was dependent primarily on having new clothes or clothes in order, and while money was not scarce in the household it was so wretchedly administered that the children rarely had a whole church costume ready. But once in a while they went, and got an impression of religion from the drone of the minister or Sunday School superintendent, from the alternate fulsomeness or humility of the hymns which they early learned to parody. It was their mother who sent them to Sunday School in sudden flares of respectability, but it was their father who once in a while asserted himself and took them to the white board church five blocks away, to a ritual called Mass. They did not feel proud of attendance there. The people who knelt around them were mostly foreigners, or Irish women sighing over rosaries. The ritual was unex¬ plained, and in their hearts the girls were ashamed of being branded as Roman Catholics. Once when a priest came to call and their mother was insulting to him they stood behind the pantry door in scared giggles—and they created their own God. God took place in their scheme of things as a person who had rather fooled the Bronte girls (who were always taken in by him) and as one from whom favors might be wrung by certain propitia¬ tions. They both prayed with an eye on results, and when they prayed for a peaceful night and their mother raged they naturally suspected Deity.

There were old medical books all over the house, and sprinkled among these a large supply of minor classics, standard sets of the world’s best oratory and the world’s best essays and the world’s best humor, mixed with a few Greek and French translations. Erudition had slipped by their father, but he loved the signs of it and he loved to read. They all read, even Tom, as naturally as they breathed.

Many things that they met in books were incompre¬ hensible to them, but they were usually content to let the loose ends of thought fly. Their mother had given them extremely healthy bodies and surrounded them with so much excitement that they never sought juvenile sala¬ ciousness. Veronika’s first excited sense of sex came not in the whispers of school children, which she never was invited to share, but in the thrilling experiences of some of the ladies in a book of English and Scottish ballads. She was fully informed by these, which were unexpurgated, that there was always great concern about the bed the lady slept in and with whom. But imaginings carried her no farther.

Far more important was the catching of the infrequent street car to get them to High School on time. The school was so far from their home that the car was a necessity. But a race it was—against fate and against time! A tragic adventure every morning of their lives was the attempt of the girls to catch the car. With Tom it was different. His clothes were bought by his father and he had things ready most of the time. He drove through the disorder of the house regardless of anything except that he was going to meet some of his friends on a certain car. But Lily and Veronika were blocked by dozens of things—by the fact that their mother had promised to iron a petticoat early and hadn’t done it, by a shoe lace breaking (there were never extra shoe laces in that house), by their father coming down¬ stairs and asking for his breakfast, which one of them must try to prepare with an eye on the clock—by the difficulty of getting breakfast themselves for themselves. Their father had forbidden them to go to school with¬ out it, but he had no idea of how often they did so. Their mother was always flurried by the exigency of keeping any appointments on time, and a flurry with her changed almost always into a temper. And also they hampered themselves. They were, both of them, unskillful with their hands. Often and often Veronika choked down a piece of toast, saying over and over in her mind, “God, let me catch the car—God, let me catch the car.”

Sometimes she and Lily were successful and with the other children sought places in the warm front of the jerking, one-horse street car, pushing forward as far as they could, Lily’s face blond and sweet and plaintive under her brown felt hat and Veronika always looking a little absurd, the freckles cruelly evident in the strong morning light with no rise of color in her face to soften its blotchiness, the puff of her cheeks turning her pathos into comedy and her sleek, long thin hair edging her face without framing it. She was conscious of her unattractiveness, but the contrast of herself with those about her never bothered her. Even early she was filled with such tremendous ambition, such dreams, that her mind leapt carelessly over the minor differences between herself and her companions. That was where she branched from Lily, for Lily wanted to have the same things that the people around her had. Lily was eager for a red wool coat or a new serge dress, while Veronika paraded her soul and her body in imaginings that became possibilities only to her.

To battle and to dream were her accomplishments.

It was cold country. For nine months of the year the body needed extra protection. For nine months of the year one might expect the winds bringing snow or rain or merely the chilling song of their own restlessness. Around the little city lay the gaping wounds that were open pit mines, their orifices still trodden red clay. A truck farm struggled here and there—a dairy, but for the most part it was waste land with the gray rocks showing through the thin sod at intervals, a land where pines and spruces were natural habitants. Vegetation needed strength to survive. Barren, often bleak country, without the grandeur of mountains or the peace of plains, but courageous, unbroken as if it turned a surly refusal to the plow and the harrow. It exacted strength and scorned frailty. The children who played in its snowdrifts were hard, red-cheeked youngsters. In such a place if the imagination does not starve it turns to fantasy and wild adventures and hard-earned shelter from the storm. Winds singing around the corner of the dark house, soughing pines, give no grace to fancy, and when the storm is within as well as without, when the darkness is charged with anger and hate and fear, the easy temper does not survive. Malison belongs to the storm.

Mrs. Pearse hated Valhalla. She had hoped that her husband would settle in the milder farming country of Ohio, where she had been brought up. But to Valhalla he had come and there been rooted by the hundreds of threads which hold a doctor to the lives of his patients. It had been a village when he had come. It became a city in name, with street car lines stretching through it, and a stray factory or two rearing ugly wooden bulks.

Mostly it was still tributary to the mine and dominated by the mine. The mine called for and received hun¬ dreds of men, recruited from other places, other coun¬ tries, who brought little allegiance to it—only their strength. The traditions they held, the memories locked in their minds never were given to Valhalla. They lived in parts of the city which became peculiarly their own, and some of them had families and some of them, living there only for a season or so, had no home but the bed in the boarding house, the saloon and later the cheap movie house. Now and then in a fierce flare, some pas¬ sion came to light—some one murdered his wife and there was a rough newspaper story of an amour, succulent enough if it had been a tale of Americans, but draped in the foreign nomenclature, located in the shack of some miner, it became, except to some imaginative reporter, only another instance of the way “the miners live.”

The miners did not belong to the city life. They had never even heard of the Pearse domestic scandal. But they made their impression on Veronika. She never thought of them, in childhood at least, in any humani¬ tarian way. She never thought of them as romantic. But they were there, part of the roughness of life, part of the scene of red clay and spruce tree, uncouth looking men whose eyes met hers occasionally as she stared at them, passing some of them on street or road, and whose eyes told her nothing except vaguely that life wasn’t all beer and skittles—which indeed she already knew.

Chapter II

I N the kitchen Veronika struggled to fix the sink. It refused to drain, and she sat beneath it with a monkeywrench unscrewing bolts. She wanted the kitchen to be clean before any one got home, and the sink had gone back on her at the last minute. Above her head the paint peeled off the wall, leaving white patches with smoky brown flakes of paint clinging. The kitchen was shabby and in ill repair. But Veronika, conscious of achievement, saw none of that. She was glad for the order around her, because of the white floor that she had scrubbed and the new oilcloth on the table that was im¬ maculate and the pan of potatoes that were peeled and lay in clear water preserving their whiteness. She toiled at the sink and wondered when her mother would come downstairs, and if Lily was having a good time at Daisy’s party, and if Tom would have his picture in the paper to-morrow if the S.H.S. won the basketball game to-day. She had a way of rounding up her family in her mind. She always worried about them and took idle and useless responsibility for them, hardly justified by the two years difference in age between her and Tom and the scant year and a half between her and her sister, who was younger.

Mrs. Pearse had gone to her room and locked the door. She did that sometimes for half a day at a time. When she came out she would have written a couple of letters in her extravagant curlicued handwriting with intolerable pale ink, letters to her sister Minnie and her sister Rose. Letters were very important to her. Or she would have 19 elaborately frizzed her hair, or perhaps done nothing at all except sit and rock and read the daily newspaper. She never read anything else.

Veronika could hear her stirring now and made haste with her operation. When her mother came into the kitchen it was the signal for interference with every activ¬ ity. She loosened the joint and scooped out the rubbish accumulated in it. Then with lye and boiling water she cleaned it. It was not a pleasant task, but like every fun¬ damental necessity it gave her pleasure. The water ran through beautifully at last and she watched it with sat¬ isfaction.

Outside the afternoon was closing in. Snow had be¬ gun to fall again, filling in the deep trenches dug along the sidewalk to the street. It was a rough, driven snow coming slantingly along. Veronika thought of Lily’s new seven dollar velvet hat. It would be spotted and Lily would be wretched. She glanced at the alarm clock on the side of the cutting board. Past four. If it kept up like this it would be drifted in entirely before night. Drifts meant isolation for another twenty-four hours. And yet the snugness of the half dark kitchen captured her. Outside the snow beating on the three great pines which stood at the back of the house, and within the glow of the fire coming through the open slats in the door of the coal range. Her mind drew off a little to look at the pictures. That strange double power of act¬ ing in the drama of life, even as she observed it, had already become Veronika’s. She stood at the window, her blue and white checked apron tied around her waist, its ample folds revealing the slimness of the sixteenyear-old girl figure who watched the snow drive past, dim¬ ming the barren landscape.

Her mother’s heels clicked on the stairs and the door to the kitchen opened. Veronika did not turn. She knew all the familiar beginnings of her mother’s sentences. Still less did she wish to see the tight-drawn face, the bright half-hysteric eyes which she imagined behind her. But Mrs. Pearse opened no attack. She went to the cup¬ board and took out the canister of tea, making herself busy with the kettle and the stove lids, rattling every¬ thing. There was a fierce busyness about her mother’s activities that Veronika detested. Everything she touched seemed to make an unnecessary clatter.

“More snow,” said Mrs. Pearse, “we might as well be dead and in our graves as in this place. I’m not going to stand it. I’m going to put on my hat and out I go.”

“Why don’t you?” asked Veronika ironically.

“Make fun of me—go as far as you like. Only un¬ derstand I brought you into the world. Your father didn’t. While he was running the streets with other women—”

“Oh, shut up—” said Veronika. “I’ve been working here all afternoon. You can’t come down here and fight.”

“Where’s your father? Was that him at the phone?”

Veronika did not answer.

“Was that your father at the phone, I said?”

“Well—you better call him up and tell him his mother’s dead.”

Veronika wheeled.

“What are you talking about?”

“His mother’s dead.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I heard it. He got a telegram this morning. I took it.”

“And this is the first time you’ve tried to reach him.”

“Yes, it is. He’d have been running off East to have a good time. I know him. Running off to have meals on dining cars and deserting his family without a cent.”

Veronika’s mind went into quick action. She had little notion of propriety except that her father should be told.

She understood in a flash why her mother had been secluded all day in her room. She was keeping the knowledge of the death secret until the Eastern train was gone. It left at four o’clock. She had no idea whether her father would go East or not. The thought worried her. She too felt it a waste of money with ten tons of coal delivered this morning and their cost bandied about. However, instinct told her that her father should know.

He was not at his office when she tried to reach him. Her mother listening to Veronika’s efforts called shrilly:

“Off with some hussy—that’s where he is.”

“You fiend—you,” said Veronika mechanically, and kept on with her efforts. He called her finally from the Blakes, where there was to be a baby in whose birth he was assisting. Veronika gave him the news with an attempt at softening. Her grandmother meant nothing to her, and she felt her father’s agitation a little silly.

Get Doctor Morse and send him over here quick, Ronny,” he said, “and I’m coming home.”

That disturbed Veronika’s plans of course. She had expected that he would not be home for supper. How¬ ever, she found Doctor Morse and got him headed for the Blakes’ house, where he was to help “bring” Mrs. Blake s baby, about which, in spite of her father’s pro¬ fession, Veronika had limited information and mental pictures very much out of drawing.

“What’s he coming home for?” asked her mother. “Lazy loafer. Just an excuse. Everybody knew the old woman was about to die anyhow."”

But the thing that surprised her daughter was that in Mrs. Pearse’s tone was a note of concern about some¬ thing—death perhaps. She was slightly and surprisingly hushed for some reason.

Lily came in, vastly worried about the hat. She took it off and mopped it tenderly, wondering if the spots of snow would come out, bemoaning them.

“Isn’t it a shame whenever I get anything decent that something like that has to happen? Why do we never have any luck?”

“Did you have a good time?” asked Veronika.

“Oh, good enough—the girls were sort of mean—I’ve got to have a. party, Ronny.”

“How can you have a party when your father doesn’t give me enough to buy clothes?”

They knew that was nonsense, but it was rubbed into them so much that it stuck in part. Neither girl paid any attention to the remark, but it recalled to Veronika the thing she had forgotten in the excitement about Lily’s hat.

“Grandmother Pearse’s dead—father got a telegram.”

“Is she?”

“Um—father’s coming home. He seemed awfully sorry. I hope,” added Veronika severely to her mother, “that for once you’ll have the decency to leave him alone when his mother lies dead in her grave. Let him have his sorrow in peace.”

“Much he’ll sorrow—” answered her mother.

It was half past five. Supper had to be made. Veron¬ ika and Lily went to the kitchen bickering about who should do this or that. Lily hated to get her hands in onions. She had little fastidiousnesses that Veronika lacked. So that it was Veronika who made the pudgy meat balls out of Hamburger steak and Lily who peeled the potatoes, a huge apron tied over her official best dress of brown rajah silk, her eyes still melancholy from dis¬ appointments at the party. Secretly Veronika ached for her. She was always aching for some one. She hated to have any one hurt, especially unexpectedly hurt, be¬ cause she knew too accurately how it felt. But there was no sentimentality in her manner. Expressed affection was absurd and caresses beyond measure silly.

She tried a more subtle form of consolation.

"I suppose Ellie Lewis was falling all over the boys as usual, with the pink silk ruffles sticking out all over her/’

That was it. Ellie Lewis was Lily’s object of envy. So, if you made her absurd, it restored Lily’s self-respect. She giggled.

“She does make an awful fool of herself. But she has everything. There she was, called for by that crazy¬ looking chauffeur of theirs, offering to take all the boys home with her. Lights in the car inside—it looked like an advertisement.”

Silly show-off stuff,” said Veronika, patting the meat ball fiercely in her instant comprehension of the fact that Lily had probably had to trudge off home alone with the snow falling on her beloved velvet hat, while Ellie waved her embryonic lovers into the limousine.

Lily was depressed beyond cheering. She sighed that she might as well take off her dress now and went up¬ stairs, and Veronika opened an enthralling library book called “The Pasteboard Crown,” which had been luring her, laid it open on the pantry shelf, and proceeded to set the table and read alternately, completely forgetful of Lily and her father.

He came in a little later. Ronny heard the car run into the garage, the bang of the door and her father’s steps down the driveway toward the house. It was a little driveway and a little car. The garage had been a barn when Dr. Pearse had paid his calls with a horse and buggy, but, like everything else the Pearses owned, it stamped them as belonging to a class with pretensions.

The outer kitchen door flew open with a flurry of wind, and the Doctor stamped in snow laden even in the passage from the garage to the house.

Her first aghast and embarrassed amazement came from the fact that he looked as though he had been crying. She did not know what to say.

“Snowing hard, isn’t it?” she said.

“Good girl to get Doctor Morse so quickly,” answered her father, unheeding. “Where’s your mother?”

Veronika shrugged.

“She’s been hiding all day.”

“Kept me from getting off to-night, didn’t she? Well, I wired—it’s all right. I’ll get off to-morrow and that will be in time.”

“You’re going East?” gasped Veronika.

Her father looked at her curiously as if apprehending suddenly how little grounding she had had in human emotion.

“Poor little savage,” he said. “Yes, Ronny, I’m going, and I’m thinking seriously of taking you and Lily along.”

Mrs. Pearse, who had been, as often, listening, con¬ fronted them.

“So that’s it?” she cried. “That’s the idea. The old woman’s not dead at all. Just planning to take my chil¬ dren away from me. I’d like to see you take them, that’s all, mister. I’d just like to see you.”

“Well, you will,” he answered. “Veronika, I want you and Lily to get your clothes together and get ready to start with me to-morrow.”

A violent paroxysm came over the woman’s face.

“What do you mean?” she cried. “Do you think I’m going to get their clothes ready ?”

“But we haven’t any clothes ready,” Veronika ob¬ jected, “we couldn’t, father.”

“You will,” said the doctor, in a tone out of which everything seemed to have drained with which Veronika was familiar, “you will if you go naked.”

The night was a night of madness. Supper, attempted, was abandoned by almost every one. On the table the balls of Hamburger steak, fried into fat-laden hardness, were hacked at by first one and then another. Dr. Pearse went upstairs and his wife followed him. He had a habit of retreating into silence. Perhaps in those silences he actually did not hear her.