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II Love is of man’s life a thing apart

’Tis woman’s whole existence.

In the main I agree with Byron. But with the provision that circumstances—society—call it what you will, have brought about this state of things, and not that woman is more prone to love by nature than is man.

Woman has been, and is still to a deplorable extent, in the position of a cat or a dog whose chief aim in life is the seeking out of a master. There are good masters and bad masters. The former generously sugar-coat the pill of her servitude, but the fact remains the same.

With the common human unwillingness to face un¬ flattering truths, woman by a series of logical somersaults has arrived at the point where she herself believes that this quest for bread and meat and bed is something mystical, irrational, sublime.

What is more important, she has succeeded in blinding man to the real situation.

I have often speculated upon the nature of woman and the sum of my speculations is that she has sold her spir¬ itual birthright for a mess of quite ordinary pottage.

How much more intriguing the real woman than the pale, milk-and-water myth which she for good reasons has allowed to gain currency!

Even in this confidence game by which she acquires her living, what consummate art, what genius for organiza¬ tion, what Machiavellian purpose she has displayed.

Chastity, duty, the sanctity of the home—these and many of our most impressive ideals are the direct out¬ growth of her determination to gain security for life. For she is strong enough to sacrifice the present to future advantage.

She keeps her secret well, but in subtle, almost uncon¬ scious ways it is revealed. Who has not heard her lauding her own or some other’s husband as a “good provider”; who has not heard some man contemned for “failure to provide”!

And she is unmerciful in her vengeance on those rebels in the ranks who adventurously prefer the pleasure of the moment to their lasting good. Such lack of business acu¬ men, she holds, is dangerous to herself and can be properly punished only by ostracism. That is, unless the rebel has an assured income from other sources and indulges in her adventures from selfish or philanthropical motives. Then it is called eccentricity or something of the sort, and countenanced, if never quite forgiven.

Such being the case, any attempt to portray the inner life of a woman must of necessity deal to greater or less extent with this emotion, so marvelously compounded of various instincts and motives, that we call love.

And as any attempt to write honestly of oneself calls for endless probing of mind and heart, so to understand the results of that probing, one must go back into past experiences for the key. . . . Or so I think, because there are many things in my own life that seem to prove the theory correct. There seems little relation, for ex¬ ample, between the step that led me to my pale green alcove and a vicious slap which I once administered to my mother when she tried to switch me; and yet, the line of connection is clear. Perhaps it goes beyond the slap to some potential, hereditary slap! . . . Who can say?

How I yearn for more knowledge by which I might understand! But that is crying aloud in a wilderness.

WINDOWS FACING WEST BOOK ONE

I

Father was a small town merchant. He attended church regularly and never gave me any pocket money.

“What you have to have,” he would say, “you can get at the store and charge it.”

My mother I remember dimly as one might recall a wailing, minor strain in music. She died when I was sixteen.

I should like to go on record as having loved her, but I can not say that such was the case. There was always an instinctive hostility between us.

In many ways she was a good woman, but intensely self-centered. Her principal topics of conversation were my father’s infidelity and parsimonious outlook, and my own lack of gratitude to herself.

I have no doubt that tune would have mellowed her, nor do I doubt that her complaints were justified, but there is no tolerance in youth and I pursued my own way more ruthlessly after each fresh attack.

Too indolent mentally to make the slight effort neces¬ sary to cultivate acquaintances of her own age, she labored for a number of years under the misapprehension that she 15 could successfully demand my company at any and all times that she desired.

It is a trait that I have observed in many women, espe¬ cially those who are unhappily married—and very moral.

But I was markedly unsentimental, and her close clingings only served to make me impatient to escape.

Suffice it, that at eleven I made my declaration of inde¬ pendence and for the first time began to enjoy the society of my peers.

n

During the eighteen years that I spent in X- I

formed only one friendship that approached intimacy. This was with a girl whom I shall call Marion—Marion Fairley. Our natures supplemented each other nicely. For whereas I was extremely precocious mentally with little sense about the more practical aspects of life, Marion had acquired a vast fund of what might be called expe¬ dient information. It is owing to her that I first began to inquire into people’s motives which before I had ac¬ cepted on their own account with a naive faith in human goodness that now seems incredible.

Marion was a strange mixture of shrewdness, sly malice, tolerance and bigotry. No one could hope to escape the lashings of her nimble tongue . . . and yet, were they lashings? It was as if the doings of other people inter¬ ested her so greatly that she could never leave off dis¬ cussing them. ^

IT

She would come into my bedroom, black eyes flashing, a subdued excitement in her whole bearing, and begin demurely but with eagerness:

“Do you know something . . or, “What do you think . . . 99

Inveterate gossips usually start with some such formula. Why, I have never discovered.

She was repeatedly irritated with me for my frank display of boredom on occasions when this personal gossip became too long drawn out. I have always been too self-centered to concern myself with the business of other people, unless I care for them, and I must confess that this trait in Marion gave me a tremendous sense of superiority.

Naturally it was she who explained to me the great mystery. And if for some years she bullied me mildly— patronized is the better word—because of my abysmal ignorance, I did not regard it as too high a price to pay.

Head close to mine, voice dropped to a sibilant whisper, she put to flight the horde of vague conjectures flocking my mind by a plain and most detailed account of how babies come to be.

“But that is beautiful,” I cried when she had done.

“Beautiful! It*s nasty” Marion retorted with an air of finality and laughed when I gravely shook my head.

Ill

In trying to recall that misty time of childhood it is astonishing to what an extent the so-called significant happenings are blotted out. What remains is an oddly assorted lot of incidents, often nothing more than extraordinarily vivid pictures.

Thus my sole recollections of an early journey with my mother are summed up in these two impressions:

Myself in a new dress, standing on the platform of the train as we waved goodby to my father. The dress was blue with tiny gilt buttons (I was inordinately proud of those buttons), arranged in clusters on the blouse. From . under the roll brim of a new hat, my hair descended in a silky, burnished cascade to my waist. Carefully I settled it so that two thick swirls fell over my shoulders and formed a frame for my pale little face which no amount of excitement could tinge with color. But my eyes, I saw with some inner vision, were dark as a pool in the woods.

Self-complacent, not a little priggish, I stood there con¬ sciously posing and tolerantly surveying my father. I even wondered vaguely how he came to be the father of such fragile loveliness as I knew myself to embody. In a seedy business suit with trousers which obscured his shde heels, a once-green tie now showing unnatural black dis¬ colorations, a shabby hat concealing his “bald spot and shadowing the furtive little eyes which now held an anx¬ ious, strained expression, he presented anything but a romantic figure.

Then a great compassion swept over me and out of the magnanimity induced by my new clothes I blew him a kiss.

He gulped with surprise and awkwardly waved a large, white hand.

I liked to think that his anxious expression was due to concern for our welfare, but even then I knew my father.

He would Be fifteen minutes late in opening the store.

In a station “rest room” I sat on a hard bench beside a little old lady. The room was deserted but for us. My mother, always subject to train sickness, had become so violently ill that she had been forced to lie down during our half hour’s wait in this city whose name I can not recall.

It was the business of the little old lady to keep me from the room beyond where my mother lay. It was my fanatical determination to escape her and flee thither.

The little lady terrified me.

It was hot and she flapped excitedly with a palmleaf fan of gigantic dimensions. I do not remember her face, only this fan and her voice, which responded to my arguments in a disturbed swish like the noise of her fanning.

The air smelled strongly of carbolic disinfectant.

So long as I sat quietly rigid, without protest, the little old lady seemed inert, heedless of my presence. But a move, a word, and she became vitalized. Furiously the palmleaf fan billowed the stale air about my face. “Swish, swish,” went the expostulating voice.

Her fanning was a spell from which I could not escape.

IV

When a man is described as penurious, there is at once called to mind a picture of a penny-counting individual who buys only the cheapest goods and whose family lives in a shabby, ill-furnished house, crying for new paint and new fences.

This is, of course, one type.

My father was, more truly penurious.

Such conduct as I have described above would have appeared to him the most wanton extravagance.

Our house, in shape a perfect square with a small porch in front, stood on a corner lot near the center of town. Each of its rooms was an outside room and contained two large windows. Downstairs there were four rooms: par¬ lor, spare bedroom, dining room and kitchen. There was no hall. The entrance door opened into the parlor, behind which was the dining room, reached by sliding doors. Dining room and kitchen were connected by a swinging door. In the right wall of the parlor was a door which led into the spare room.

A stairway in the parlor ended in a narrow hall above with a window at front and back.

Opening on the hall were four rooms, square like those on the first floor, and exactly of a size. My mother’s and my father’s rooms on opposite sides at the front, my room at the back just across the hall from the combined bath¬ room and linen closet.

The house was finished throughout in a dust-defying tan calsomine. The woodwork was light, the maple floors were always scrupulously clean (as was the entire house), and polished to a degree. The parlor floor was covered by a “drugget” or art-square; by the side of each bed a thick grass rug was neatly placed. With these exceptions the floors were bare.

The prevailing atmosphere was that of a hospital minus the whiteness.

My father was impatient of dust-gathering articles, so we possessed few of those knick-knacks that give atmos¬ phere to a home. The furniture, though of good, plain lines and solidly built (he bought for life), was of one finish, a brilliant golden oak,—a light veneer being, in his opinion, less indicative of wear than a dark one.

Our fare was plain but very wholesome (sickness would have been expensive). We rarely had meat except in the winter when vegetables were very scarce—and more rarely still, desserts.

One of my earliest recollections is of asking my father for a penny with which to buy an “all day sucker,” as they were called.

“A penny,” he exclaimed. “Why, do you know that a penny is all it takes to send one of my bills to people. And for that penny they send me back a great deal of money. Besides, you mustn’t eat candy. . . . Mrs. May, you must forbid Gretchen from eating candy. It will ruin her teeth and then there’ll be a big dentist’s bill to pay.”

My mother and me he regarded much as a farmer re¬ gards his stock. We were investments and it was up to him to make us pay. He gave us the best of care so that we might not cause him to pay more for his neglect than it would cost him to keep us in good condition.

Also, he was a leading citizen in the community. It would never do to let it be thought that he could not afford to provide properly for wife and child.

Every item of household affairs came under his super¬ vision. Even the clothes which my mother and I wore were selected by him—and selected with an eye to dura¬ bility. As I have said, he gave me no pocket money and I am sure my mother was in a similar predicament, so we were helpless to follow our own desires. We must look well, otherwise it might lose him a measure of esteem, but we must look well at a minimum cost.

His own appearance gave him little concern. I can not remember ever having seen him in a new suit. When one of the shoddy, ill-fitting affairs which he habitually wore arrived at such a state of disrepair that he was forced to discard it, it was replaced by another from some mysterious source, but little less disreputable than the former. He never wasted money. When I made my first appearance, his business was already so firmly established that he was known all over the section as a “solid” man. He could afford small eccentricities. Indeed, I have al¬ ways suspected that his shabby clothes were somewhat consciously assembled with an idea of putting at their ease the large number of his rural customers who might have fought shy of a too-citified merchant. For once good business coincided with his deepest instincts.

Twice a year the clothes question came up. Twice a year my mother, timid but defiant, would present him with a list which she had gone over and over until it contained nothing but what she regarded as essentials. Twice a year we enjoyed the spectacle of that suave, white hand drawing decisive lines through this item and that item, with a lightning-like rapidity computing costs and reduc¬ ing costs commenting thus, in his silky voice—(there is always something of the eunuch in storekeepers) :

“Gingham dresses for Gretchen . . . Hm! Percale is just as durable and less expensive.”

Out “gingham,” in “percale”!

I despised him, but could not refrain from a grudging admiration of his undoubted genius for economy.

On one of these occasions there was an item that called for puckered brow and meditative pencil tapping. Mother had inserted in her section of the budget an item: Pink organdie for princess dress.

We who remember the princess dress can visualize yet its lucid gores, seductively following the lines of the figure to the knees . . . the flamboyant whirl in which it terminated.

When he reached this item my father paused in his reading aloud, glanced at mother, sitting there in tight-lipped determination, considered and then spoke:

“Organdie . . . shoddy, unreliable material. . . . If it doesn’t split at the first wearing, it’s flimsy and bodi¬ less after the first washing. . . . Now Linen ...”

“Well, a pink linen might look well,” my mother yielded, grateful for this tolerant acceptance of a frivolous sug¬ gestion.

“Linen, yes . . . linen is trustworthy,” my father continued. “The initial cost is not much greater, and the wearing qualities are trebled. . . . But, pink . . . colored linen is never satisfactory. . .

He considered again—came to a decision.

“It’s a foolish style, scarcely good for a season. But,” he regarded my mother’s rather corpulent figure and smiled faintly, “in your case, my dear, the gores would not be so narrow as to prevent their being used after the style has gone out. . . . So a white linen might not be an extravagance. When you have finished wearing the dress,” he ended complacently, “you could make table napkins for everyday use out of the sections.”

The pencil glided through “pink organdie,” substituted “white linen.”

On the whole, it is remarkable that my mother lived as long as she did.

Any woman would rather her husband beat her than have him interfere constantly in household matters usually admitted to be sacred to her. The former is less humiliat¬ ing, less of a nervous strain.

y

I never saw my father display anger but on two occasions.

As a rule he sidled about the house, noiseless, imper¬ turbable, poking his large white nose into every corner— observing everything, jotting frequent memoranda in a battered red leather notebook as he conceived changes whereby expenses might be still further reduced; or else, working at his interminable budgets, never quite so ab¬ sorbed that he lost sight of what went on about him.

I knew little or nothing of his life outside. There was a mysterious farm from which our vegetables, eggs, milk, butter and fresh meat were supplied. There was the store to which my mother and I, neatly dressed in our durable clothes, made rare pilgrimages. But the sight of my father, a tallish, loosely built shadow, delving silently and swiftly into the recesses piled deep with enticing fab¬ rics, only served to increase the mystery with which my childish fancy surrounded him.

Several times each year he went on business trips from which he would return more complacent than ever—one

could almost see him licking his chops-. After these

excursions he showed an inclination to queer outbursts of facetiousness.

Upon his return mother regularly spent two days in bed with a sick headache. She would insist upon having a doctor. It was her most effective way of retaliating.

I entered public school when I was five, although the age set by law was six. However, as my father pointed out, I could read and write, and there was no reason for my staying at home wearing out things when I could be in school. A little judicious pressure applied to the schoolboard (most of the members owed him money) and the matter was arranged to the satisfaction of every one, including myself.

I still recall my absurd delight in the desks and seats which were stained a dark cherry red. I was no less delighted with the big roomful of boys and girls for being a little afraid of them.

Exhilarating possibilities of companionship opened be¬ fore me, though it was to be many years before I was per¬ mitted to enjoy that companionship outside of school hours.

On the whole, that first year at school made small impression on me.

There was a little girl whom I admired fervently, but from afar. Her hair was curly and flaxen, her clothes a marvel of daintiness and fragility. Even her stout coldweather dresses and wraps possessed a picturesque quality that was my envy and despair. How I hated my own brown coat of everlasting cloth when Alice appeared in a dark green fairy garment, her flaxen curls snuggled against its big cape-collar edged with fur! We never came to know each other. Why, I can not think because her glance sought mine many times across the big room. Perhaps even then I had some obscure hesitation in putting my dreams to the test. A deity should never be accosted, nor an ideal attained.

The little boy who sat opposite me was very fat with freckles and impish eyes. I distrusted him profoundly. He looked the sort of person who would laugh at one.

Our teacher was busy at the blackboard, the class intent on some seatwork, when he leaned over to me.

“I’ll bet you a hundred dollars you won’t take off your clothes and go stand up on the platform,” he observed in a whisper.

I considered, then shook my head decisively.

“No, I won’t,” I whispered back.

That evening in talking to mother who always inquired minutely into each day’s happenings, I mentioned the incident. Instantly I regretted having done so. Her face flamed and she flew into a passion of rage which seemed groundless to me.

“The common little beast,” she repeated over and over, in tones vibrant with resentment.

“But, mother,” I tried to soothe her, “I wasn’t going to do it.”

My efforts at pacifying her had no effect.

Nothing would do but that I must repeat my story to father.

By this time, having obtained such gratifying results, I was feeling very self-important and gave my account with sly gusto. Father questioned me closely, nodded once or twice and abruptly left the house without comment.

The next day the little boy was absent. He continued absent throughout the rest of that year.

It was only during the next year when he again took his place in the first grade that I realized even dimly the methods employed by my father.

The school-house stood at one end of the principal

street in X-. It was flanked by extensive playgrounds,

one for the boys, one for the girls.

Under a big tree on the girls’ side some of the older pupils were teaching me the game of “stick frog” which involves the throwing of a pocket knife from various positions of the hands so that its blade is buried in the earth sufficiently to hold the knife upright.

It was a mild day in early spring and we had all shed our coats. A gentle rain the night before had moistened the turf just enough to render conditions most favorable for the game.

With the open knife held by its point in my left hand, my arms crossed in front, right over left, right hand clutching left ear, I was just preparing for a difficult throw, inelegantly termed “hugging the sow” when I saw an agitated figure descending upon me from the street.

It was the first time I had seen my father at the school.

Breathless with fury, he seized the knife from my limp fingers and jerked me to my feet.

“Don’t you know,” he panted, “that you will get pneu¬ monia and be sick for weeks with trained nurses and doc¬ tors and all sorts of expense if you sit on this wet ground! And, as if that wasn’t enough, you must amuse yourself with a butcher knife! Is this what I’m paying taxes to have you taught?”

One dire possibility after another fell from his lips, each more expensive than the previous, while I stood there miserably—too terrified for speech.

At the time, I attributed his discovery of me to my “hard luck.” Since then, I have arrived at a different conclusion.

He seemed to possess the self-preservative instinct to an abnormal degree. In the most uncanny way he could scent out active or latent danger to his vital self, his bank account.

The second fit of rage into which I saw him plunged occurred when I was nine.

Our house was never one of those to which people are naturally attracted. It was forbidding in its bare clean¬ liness. Neighbors, though they respected my mother, could never simulate real friendliness. Her fretful jeal¬ ous spirit repelled them.

But our relations were invited in regular order to pay us a week’s visit, one each year. Most of them patronized me, and those I did not actively dislike, I ignored.

My cousin Lillian, or Lagi, as she preferred to be called, was a revelation to my naive mind. She was a sophis¬ ticated little piece, not pretty but attractive in a sparkling, provocative way, and the vain possessor of many beautiful dresses.

I hated her.

It was not that she had things such as I had always longed for, but that she openly sneered at my wardrobe and referred in no doubtful terms to the superiority of her own.

Matters came to a climax two days before her departure.

We were going to a birthday party that Saturday afternoon. Arrayed in my best dress which in summer was always a white voile, I was standing before the mir¬ ror in my bedroom trying my leghorn hat at various angles in an effort to achieve something of Lagi’s own distinction, when the door opened and Lagi appeared on her way to the bathroom—she never began dressing until I was quite ready to start, and the long waits this habit of hers necessitated was perhaps not the least part of my grievance against her.

At sight of me Lagi theatrically smothered a snicker.

“My dear Gretchen, where do you buy your clothes?”

Hot with resentment, I gave her the superfluous infor¬ mation that my mother made them.

“What are you going to wear,” I asked quickly, depos¬ iting my leghorn hat on the bureau.

“Oh, just a little old lace dress mother brought me from Fifth Avenue in New York City. . . . That’s where all the society women buy their clothes.”

In profound silence I automatically brushed my hair.

“Go down and look at it, if you want to,” she offered with pharasaical kindness, “it’s laid out on the bed.”

She surveyed me again, again the wicked, mocking light flashed in her eyes—and she was gone.

To the sound of running water and a too-well remem¬ bered snicker, I went downstairs. The door to the spare room drew me irresistibly.

A fluff of white lace and cherry colored ribbon, the “little old” dress greeted me. So beautiful it was that I gasped in sheer hopelessness.

A monumental distaste for my own voile with its sub¬ stantial cluny trimming came rushing over me anew, as I examined the cunningly fashioned silk flowers, the ribbon bows of Lagi’s party dress.

Then something primitive and Hun-like superimposed. This loveliness which I had been worshipping must be blotted out, because it was Lagi’s. In a frenzied search my eye fell on her manicure scissors. ... A dozen scalloped rents and the sacrilege was complete.

In a more peaceful mood, I left the house and traversed the hot length of the street to Marion’s house, where the birthday party was to be.

Never before had my physical self suffered violation. At the first sting of the switch in mother’s hand, all the furious self-respect in me flared up. I should have killed her, had it been possible. As it was, I enjoyed hugely the impact of my hand on her flabby cheek. Too shocked to continue her assault, she pronounced a religious text something about young eagles and eyes—and left the room with dignity, no doubt to condole with Lagi.

It must have been twelve o’clock when I was awakened by the cover over me being violently thrown back and a series of blows which I could not at first realize, even, so cruelly violent they were.

The blows ceased, the cover was switched back. Out of the darkness over me came a silky voice that I knew.

“That may teach you not to destroy thirty dollar dresses.”

I do not think I cried out. I was too stunned. That night my mind refused to accept the hideous fact.

But in the morning when I awoke, stiff and sore, and perceived that my father’s hand descending flail-like on my tender skin had left on my thigh the impression of its long fingers in raised welts that looked like blisters, but Were hard; there was born in me the hatred of him which I have never outgrown.

What a mass of unpleasant things I am relating about him. And yet, he had his good qualities, no doubt. It is onty that they were not exercised in the privacy of his home.

He was a regular church-goer—scrupulously honest and an incredibly hard worker.

And, after all, there are many domestic tyrants who m public are hailed as benevolent—many shrews whom their chance acquaintances call blessed.

VI

It was during my father’s absence on one of his business trips that mother exhibited the first symptoms of a disease which finally proved fatal.

For several days she had complained of not feeling well, but I was so accustomed to her plaints that I attached no importance to her present indisposition, especially as she kept at work, steadily refusing to go to bed.

We expected father on Friday. Thursday night I re¬ tired early in the hope of being able to finish a book (which I had borrowed from Marion Fairley) before his return.

About nine o’clock I heard mother’s somewhat pon¬ derous tread on the stairs and switched off my bedside light. She mounted to the top, breathing heavily and giving vent to frequent, gusty sighs which caused me to shrug my shoulders impatiently. Mother had always enjoyed acting the martyr.