For Geraldine's Career

Chapter I

I STOOD in the street before the house, the friendly crowd of neighbors surging about me, wrapping my night-gowned figure with additional shawls and comforters, and watched the destruction of my home proceed. The flames were roaring now through the lower stories of the ancient wooden pile, and out of the upper windows the smoke poured in black, acrid clouds. I had been dragged from a smoke-drugged stupor, and even yet, in the chill air of the April midnight, my faculties were benumbed. I watched the ineffective streams of water playing over the walls of the house with but little realization of what was happening. Then suddenly, all at once, a terrifying recollection returned to me.

“Geraldine! Geraldine!” I cried frantically. “Oh, where is Geraldine? Geraldine2”

Mrs. Tyson from next door put her motherly hand on my shoulder.

“Why, Amy,” she crooned, “don't you remember? Geraldine went with your pa an' ma to Boston Tuesday2”

“Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” I shrieked again, breaking from her kindly grasp. “Oh, will nobody do anything? Jerry's at home—she came back last night—she's in her room in the L2 Will nobody2 Oh, let me go, let me go!” For some one was trying to restrain me as I started to break through the line the firemen had drawn about the yard.

They held me back firmly, and I struggled as one struggles in a nightmare, straining muscles, overcharging arteries, against the impossible. I gasped my prayers to be allowed to try to rescue my sister, I offered fantastic rewards to whomever would perform the service for me. But the friendly clamor about me was all to the effect that I was probably mistaken; that Geraldine had gone away two days before with our parents; that even if she were in the house, it was hopeless to try to rescue her. And then, through the maddening inaction, the futile argument as to Geraldine's whereabouts, the cruel restraint of the hands laid upon me, there came rushing Dirkman Kidder. I spied him as he cleft a rough way through the crowd.

“Oh, Dirk, Dirk!” I called, managing to wrench myself free of the detaining hands. “Geraldine is inside! Jerry came home last night! They won't let me2 She's in her room! Oh, Dirk, Dirk!” And I promptly collapsed upon his shoulder.

When I recovered consciousness, I was lying on the fresh spring grass in Mrs. Tyson's front yard, my face upturned to the incredible, high, white tranquillity of the moon. All my life, the sensation of that moment has remained with me. To see, above the black and lurid confusion, a thing so marvelously still, so gloriously, austerely remote and beautiful—it was a miracle, and a miracle strangely comforting and calming. Then I moved my head, tried to raise myself upon my elbow, and found the exertion too great. One of the Tyson girls was bending over me on the second, obliterating the silver majesty on high, and pouring brandy between my lips. I sputtered, choked, and demanded, between gasps: “Geraldine?”

“It's all right. Dirk got her out,” Florence Tyson assured me, and her voice was heavenly music in my ears, and her plain face transfigured with celestial light. “She wasn't even overcome with the smoke as you were, poor dear! You see, the main part of the house must have been smoldering a long time before the flames burst, but the L didn't catch until after the fire was blazing in the main part. So Jerry's all right. She's gone to bed at the Mayburys'.”

“Dirk?” I questioned her weakly.

“A little singed,” she replied, smiling. “He's lost an ambrosial lock or two, and half an eyebrow. But he's all right. Now you're to come in to bed. Mother's got one ready for you. The firemen have the fire under control, and there's no sense in any more excitement.”

“Father and mother?” I suggested.

“Dirk has telephoned them; they'll be down on the early train to-morrow.”

Then I permitted myself to be put to bed in the room Mrs. Tyson had got ready for me by the simple and hospitable process of moving her own belongings from it. To my own astonishment, I soon fell asleep and forgot for the time to think upon what the destruction of the house would mean to our family, already too poor for comfort. If I thought of anything, as the drowsiness of sleep began to overtake me, it was of little Jerry, asleep in the Mayburys' across the street, and of Dirk. I remember that I told myself it was quite impossible now to refuse to marry Dirk, if he continued to want to marry me. The old objection that he was some years distant from the ability to support a wife would, it seemed to my slumberous and grateful mind, have to give way to the fact that he had saved my young sister's life.

Our house had stood for many generations on the main street of Salesport, decorously distant from the region that we were accustomed to call, somewhat too grandiloquently, “the business section.” The fact that we owned it had robbed poverty of much of its oppression. We used to say, mother and I, that when father's practice reached the absolutely vanishing point toward which it had long been tending, we could let rooms; though I am sure I do not know to whom we expected to let them, Salesport being a town of notoriously home-owning proclivities. We used also to assure ourselves, on the days when the income seemed smallest, that “if the worst came to the worst,” we could raise enough vegetables in the gardens back of the house to sustain life; and with a roof over our heads, sufficient nourishment for our stomachs, and plenty of love in our hearts, what more could we ask?

Such was the simple creed in which mother had raised me. I used sometimes to think that I would not find it impossible to ask more if I gave rein to my imagination—new rugs for the living room, for example; a complete set of china, matched, uncracked, unnicked; a few new dresses that did not have their origin in our Philadelphia cousin's cast-off clothing. I thought I should like travel, study, luxurious hotels, theaters, strange people2 Oh, by allowing my fancy to range, I could think of numerous things that I could be taught to ask beyond a roof, moderately waterproof, above my head, food for my body, and the domestic affections for my spiritual nourishment!

Sometimes, when I voiced these heresies to mother, she would sigh, and sometimes she would smile. And very often she would answer: “Well, perhaps John will make a great fortune for us, or Jerry's fingers will play us all into affluence.”

1 had more faith in Geraldine's fingers than I had in John's practice. John was entirely the son of his father and mother—an impractical person with high ideals rather than material ambitions, a youth who accepted the theory that a roof, a due amount of food, labor, and love, constituted all that a man could justly demand in the world. Jerry, flashing her brilliant, pliant, wonderful young fingers up and down the scales, had not yet reached an age when a definite philosophy of life could be demanded of her. But in so far as her instinctive acts forecast her later philosophy, I felt considerably greater hope of her than of John.

However, whatever the future, the present seemed dark enough on the April morning when I looked across the lawn dividing the Tyson place from ours, and marked the charred remnants of our home.

Illustration: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” I shrieked again. “Oh, will nobody do anything? Will nobody2 Oh, let me go, let me go!”

“It's awful, isn't it, Amy?” sighed Mrs. Tyson, coming to the window beside me, and viewing the desolation. “I do hope your pa has kept the insurance up. When Mr. Tyson died2” And she rambled off into a familiar tale of her late husband's neglect to pay his life-insurance premium, and of the disastrous effect of his thoughtlessness upon his heirs.

I didn't listen, because I knew the story by heart, and also because of the sudden constriction of fear in my throat. It would be so exactly like father to have neglected the insurance! Indeed, from the moment when the possibility was suggested to me, I was sure beyond doubt that he had neglected it, and that the charred timbers upon which I was looking represented a total loss.

Jerry came out of the Mayburys' as I stood staring at the ruins and savoring, in anticipation, the taste of a coming poverty worse than any I had known. Her bright head shone in the April sunlight—Jerry's hair is of that particularly glorious red that makes all other colors, even gold, seem dead and dull. She was then a long-legged, thin sixteen, but there was the promise of coming grace in her adolescent angularity. She wore a leaf-green dress that I recognized as one of the youngest Maybury girl's. It was becoming to Jerry, and I thought, with proprietary pride, that the child always managed to look well. She came into the Tysons' hall and called me; her voice in speaking was lovely—round, rich, thrilling, with cadences and trills most musical.

When I came out of the dining room to meet her, her eyes were shining with excitement.

“Oh, Amy!” she cried ecstatically. “Isn't it heavenly? Just think of being rid of that old ark! Now we can build a comfortable modern house, can't we?”

“With what?” I demanded, Mrs. Tyson's gloomy suggestion in mind.

“Why, with the insurance. The Mayburys were talking of it at breakfast. Their house only cost eight thousand dollars, and it's ten times more comfortable than ours. Why, Amy!” She turned upon me sharply. “Why do you look like that? You don't think2 Oh, it isn't possible that father could have been so careless?” She had read the meaning of my expression.

“Of course, we can't tell until he comes down,” I replied. “But—well, there's no use denying it would be just the sort of thing to happen in our family.”

“Just like our family! You mean it would be just like father!” retorted Geraldine with an asperity unbecoming her years. “It wouldn't be like me—I have too much sense for such a stupid piece of business! And it wouldn't be like you, A; you have too much conscience. But father!” She shrugged her thin young shoulders beneath her borrowed frock and dismissed the subject.

“The furniture insurance has been kept up, anyway,” she informed me after a second's sullen pause. “Mother did that—I hounded her into it after the Deweys' house went. I couldn't bear to think of the piano being gone. I shall be glad to get a new one,” she added placidly. “That was always a tin-pan sort of thing. I don't suppose Cousin Judith would have sent it otherwise.”

“But if everything has gone to smash,” I said, trying to prepare her mind for disagreeable possibilities, “they may not be able to replace your piano right away.”

She turned her head toward me and looked her unmitigated astonishment. “But, A,” she informed me, “the piano represents my career—I've got to have a piano! Besides”—her eyes darkened ominously—“the piano is mine. Cousin Judith gave it to me!”

And then we saw our parents walking rapidly up the street, and we ran through the hall and out on to the sidewalk to greet them. Mother caught us both tightly to her bosom. Father patted our shoulders tremulously, after he had looked for signs of injury on our faces.

“My darlings, safe!” cried mother.

“How did it start?” asked father.

“Have you kept the insurance up?” demanded Geraldine.

It was Geraldine who received the first reply. Mother and father turned blanching faces upon each other. The poor, impractical babes in the wood had not put the question to each other before!

“Mary, did you2 Why, when was it due?” cried father resentfully, boisterously, as if by an angry noise he could alter the disagreeable fact and make it flee, acknowledging itself falsehood.

“In February,” faltered mother. “Why, John, don't you remember? You were going to take the Lyons' bill for that and your life-insurance premium.”

Father drooped his gray head. Mother's large, anxious eyes turned loyally from the sight of his self-reproachful misery, but Geraldine's sharp, accusing regard never wavered.

“Well, thank Heaven you managed the furniture insurance yourself, mother!” she said at last, with something hard and contemptuous on her fresh lips. “If only you had managed the whole thing!”

Mother rebuked her; mother never let us forget what was due to our father. But he, more just, said: “Don't scold the child, Mary. She's quite right. I2 Oh, it's unbelievable, it's preposterous, that a man could neglect such a thing!”

“It don't think so,” cried mother warmly. “Why, the house has stood for two hundred years without catching fire—why on earth should you expect it to catch now? In this way? Unexpectedly, out of the clear sky?” Mother spoke with indignation, as if the conflagration had shown very bad and unusual manners in not sending out announcements of its intentions two weeks in advance. And then she added her familiar consolation: “Anyway, we're all together. We've got one another.”

“And there's that little cottage down on Water Street,” said father, cheerful immediately under her soothing. “We can go into that for the present. Those Czernas haven't paid any rent for three months, anyway, and I have given them notice to quit.”

“Go into the Water Street cottage?” cried Jerry, shrill for once in her life, and italizing all her words. “Into the cottage you rented to those immigrants?” Stern accusation blazed from her brown eyes.

Father and mother both seemed to apologize for the necessity. And, somehow, though investigation revealed the fact that it was Geraldine's candle, set unguarded upon a shelf in the bathroom where the curtains might reach it, that had conspired with a change in the wind to set our home afire, the whole family was in the attitude of apologizing to her for the unpleasant privations that she would be forced to undergo as a result of our temporary homelessness. The house, she told us firmly, should have been wired for electricity long ago.

It was, I suppose, characteristic of the general improvidence and impracticality of the family, that my parents should rejoice, a week later, when Dirkman Kidder and I walked into the Tysons' and announced that we were engaged to be married. Dirk had proposed to me that afternoon down at the cove. There are times still, when the wind is from the east, and brings with it briny odors of waves and wet sand and driftwood rotting to its salty death, that I can relive the whole foolish, young scene—Dirk with his singed eyebrows and his burned forelock, I with my toil-grimed hands.

He had come to the Water Street cottage, which I was trying to restore to the Salesport standard of cleanliness before we should move in, and had commanded me, with all the lordliness of twenty-three, to give up work and to come walk with him. I was glad enough to obey. The Czerna tribe had left the cottage in an indescribable condition, and I was immersed in such homely labors as kalsomining, painting, and scrubbing. I washed my face in the iron sink behind the kitchen door, called to the plumbers who were installing a bathroom on the floor above—the sole recognition of any social differences between the Czernas and the Alcotts—put on my hat, and went to walk with Dirk.

The sky was lightly overcast with gray; a moist wind blew in from the sea beyond the line of the islands that fringe the Salesport harbor and shut it in from the great breakers. I can close my eyes now and see the whole scene again—the shingled sand of the beach rolling back to the craggy granite, the rocks pricked with the green of hardy, stunted trees, and behind them the softer, more shimmering color of the early leaves in the woods that, on our favored coast, come down to meet the sea with only the little wall of rough-toothed rocks between. Ever since we were children and had first gone wading and fishing and botanizing together, Dirk and I had known this particular indentation of the shore, where an arm of the bay crept far inland, between the sands and the scrub-grown rocks, and lost itself in a sluggish tide creek in the meadows back of Salesport.

When we had walked to the cove on this particular April afternoon, we sat silent for a while. I was resting mind and body. My muscles were relaxed after the unaccustomed labors of the day; my thoughts gave up for the time the harassing discussion of what the Alcott family was going to do. I ceased to ask myself if there was no way in which the threatened withdrawal of John, now a junior, from Johns Hopkins could be averted. I ceased to ask myself how Geraldine's piano lessons were to be continued. I loafed, basking in the soft air, and basking, too, in the sense of Dirk's admiration and affection.

“Well, A,” he said, after a while—he had called me “A” since our school days, when all my exercises were signed with that noncommittal initial—“well, A, when do you think you'll marry me?”

It was not an unprecedented query. Dirk had begun telling me that he was in love with me when he had come home from Princeton two years before. The statement had never made any difference in the affectionate intimacy in which we passed the periods between his declarations—Dirk was not addicted to the more disconcerting manifestations of ardor. In fact, he had always made his assertion as to his own feelings, and asked for an expression of mine, with a calm, matter-of-fact, take-it-for-granted air of finality that robbed the situation of seriousness Sometimes, when I was moved to laughter at his preposterous attitude, he grew for a moment serious, and there were intimations of passionate possibilities in his blue eyes.

But to-day, when he asked the absurd question, instead of laughing, I felt an inclination to tears. For the first time in my twenty-two years I wanted to be married—Heaven forgive me if the desire was rather for a refuge than for a mate! But I was so worn with the struggle to live—genteelly, as beseemed the Alcotts—on next-to-nothing a year! I was so tired of the indolent, slipshod methods of my father, who had allowed an originally good practice to drift from him! I was even tired of the beautiful idealism of my mother with her “since-we-have-one-another, what does bread and meat matter?” philosophy.

It would be an exquisite relief to drop the burden of thought for my household, and to watch some strong, competent person pick it up—for my sake! It would be the balm of perfect peace to know that never again would I be obliged to consider how John could struggle through the medical school, or how Geraldine could be well trained, or father's bills collected, or mother's wardrobe renewed. But Dirk was no richer than I, and he was very little older. The woman who married him must take his making on her shoulders along with whatever load she already bore. I knew that well enough—and yet—and yet—it was very sweet, druggingly, languorously sweet—to feel love infolding one!

“When do you expect to be able to support a wife?” I replied crudely, mercenarily, but impersonally, to Dirk's question, when I had shaken off the moment's yearning for a cessation of worry in his arms. He looked up at me quickly, sharply, from a stick he was whittling. His blue eyes darkened, glowed.

“Amy!” he cried. “Amy, do you mean2”

“I don't mean anything,” I told him hastily, a little frightened by the atmosphere my words had evoked about us, as the magicians waving hands evoke a thunderous darkness in the theaters. “Except to call your attention to the fact that you aren't really playing fair in asking a woman to marry you.”

“I'll be admitted to the bar next fall,” he protested; he was reading law, in somewhat desultory fashion, I thought, in his uncle's Boston office.

“You've told me a dozen times that you had no bent at all toward the law,” I reminded him.

“That's true enough. But I don't find that I have a very strong bent toward any form of labor yet. But all that I need, A, to make me a hard-working, prosperous citizen, is to have you care for me. I could work as hard as the next fellow if I had anything—any one—to work for! Ah, Amy—you do care a little, don't you?”

His voice was wheedling, caressing, irresistible. He had come close to my side, and a strange weakness shook me; he caught my hand, and I could feel the throbbing of his pulses, and my own began to beat crazily in unison with his.

“Oh, Dirk, let me go!” I whispered, struggling to withdraw my hand. But he held it fast.

“I'll never let you go!” he answered, low-toned, passionate, compelling, a man—or so it seemed to me—and no longer the boy who had been my playmate for so many years. Well—I was strangely content to have it so. My head sank back upon his shoulder. He kissed me, and it seemed to me that the gates of paradise swung open before us.

By and by, when we came back to earth again, we talked—practically, I think we called it! We planned how Dirk was to work hard, was to read diligently, was to be admitted to practice at the earliest possible moment, was to command such a good position in his uncle's office that at the end of a year and a half we could be married. He told me how little we could live upon, and I told him that we could live on even less than that little. And then, through the late afternoon, which persisted softly gray and was shot with no sunset gleams, we went back to the Tysons', where father and mother were quartered until the Water Street cottage should be made habitable, and we told our news.

As I said, it was characteristic of our hopelessly impractical way of looking at things that both my parents were as happy as if I had come telling some tale of worldly triumph. They both liked Dirk—as much, I think, because they had known his forbears as for his own lazy, honest, lovable sake. And mother said that she thought the happiest marriages were those for which the young people had had to work and wait; and she prattled very sweetly about the beauty of the engaged period of a girl's life. And father opined that we would be as happy as he and mother had been, and he was sure that there could be no better happiness than that. And then he went back to his game of solitaire, which our tidings had interrupted.

Jerry, strolling in from the Mayburys', in whose hospitable house she was domiciled, and looking very nearly pretty in a brown wool frock made over for her from one of the youngest Maybury girl's, heard the news with less enthusiasm than my parents. She opened her fresh young lips upon some startled exclamation, changed it into a whistle, came and sat on the arm of my chair, kissed me under the ear, and told us merrily that she resented the affair.

“You know I can't get along without A, Dirk,” she informed my lover.

“Don't blame you,” answered Dirk. “Feel that way about her myself. However—I'll let you share her—a little!”

“And besides,” she continued, looking with merry impertinence at him, “I had half intended to marry you myself.”

I laughed at the thought of the long-legged little girl's intending anything in a matrimonial line; mother rebuked her, with a blush for her flippancy; and Dirk reddened. He was only a boy, and he seemed singularly boyish under her gay attack.

“However, I suppose it's all right if you're going to be in the family,” pursued Miss Geraldine. She shot a long, unformed, girlish arm out at him. “I'm glad!” she concluded seriously, as he took her hand and shook it.

And then she relieved the strain of too long a stretch of sentiment by inquiring how soon the cottage would be in readiness for father's shingle on its front door and her new piano in the front room. I gave the information a little heavily—I kept wishing that the five hundred dollars that was to be spent out of the scant furniture insurance might have gone to John in Baltimore. Poor John! He had accepted the disagreeable situation gallantly enough. I forget now what various and uncongenial tasks he found to do in order that he might not be obliged to give up his studies. But I remember what Jerry said when I bemoaned his necessities somewhat.

Illustration: Some of our poor foreign neighbors, lolling on their fences, smiled their understanding, swarthy smiles, and shrugged their shoulders over the dullness of the young in America.

“Of course, it's disagreeable for John,” she said. She was perched on the edge of her bed in the tiny room under the eaves of the cottage. The bed had been a contribution from one of father's few remaining patients of means—a lady who was discarding brass and iron in favor of mahogany four-posters at the dictation of a new æsthetic sense; I had enameled the white frame, and had made the bright chintz cover for it myself, and it looked very fresh and pretty in the room whose uneven walls I had kalsomined a misty bluish-gray. “But, after all, A, medicine is a profession—it isn't a gift. It can be pursued under difficulties—especially by a man. Now music”—she looked dreamily out through the little dormer window upon the leaves of an apple tree burgeoning in the yard—“music is different.”

Downstairs I heard Dirk's whistle. He had entered the house with easy informality. I answered the signal.

“Come on for a walk, A,” he called to me.

“Wait half an hour, and I will,” I replied. “I've got the dishes to do.”

“Come now, please. I have something to tell you.”

“Won't it be true at the end of half an hour?” I demanded as I ran down to the kitchen, catching a long apron from a hook in my own cubby-hole, as I ran.

“Maybe not!” he retorted. “Man is a faithless animal, and it may be that I shall not love you in half an hour.” He stood at the foot of the stairs and caught me and kissed me as I ran down.

“Was that all you had to tell?” I scoffed.

“No—there's something else. But that's the most important. Come on. Take off that pinafore, or whatever you call it, put on your hat, and come.”

I protested that I could do nothing of the sort. I had to do the dinner dishes. In Salesport we dined plebeianly in the middle of the day and supped at night—or at any rate we did on Water Street.

“Why can't Jerry do the dishes?” he grumbled.

I laughed. “You dare to suggest dishes to an up-and-coming young pianist!” I advised him. “Why, stupid, don't you know that a 'performer' must consider her hands almost beyond everything else on the footstool? Have you never read of Paderewski's care of his hands? Why, I think each finger is specially and separately insured!”

“Well, Geraldine isn't quite in his class yet, is she? I must say, A, that I think it a terrible mistake for you and your mother to let the child impose upon you all so! She'll grow up a selfish, useless, little creature.”

“Nonsense!” I answered hurriedly, the more vehemently, perhaps, because he voiced an occasional dread of my own. “Nonsense! She'll be more useful than twenty dishwashers—and selfishness isn't a matter of occupation.”

I hurried past him to the kitchen and wrought diligently among the soapy, steaming pans, and the soiled dishes. In the division of labor that had followed upon the dismissal of the one servant we had allowed ourselves on Main Street, I had taken over the daily housework, and mother the sewing and mending. A woman came twice a week for the laundry work and the heavy cleaning. I trembled sometimes to think how shortly even that assistance might be taken from us. It was certain that new patients of the paying class had not begun to follow our removal into these quarters. Father had more time than ever to play his solitaire and read his French philosophers!

When I had thrown the last dish hastily into its pantry and had hung the dish towels on their rods, I washed my hands, doffed my gingham apron, and joined Dirk, moodily pacing the front hall. As usual, our walk was in the direction of the cove. The fresh beauty of the May day, the sense of his nearness and of our destined companionship, were pleasant to me. If it had been a weakness of the flesh rather than a desire of the heart that had flung me, one tired, enervated day, into Dirk's waiting arms, surely there was growing up within me a very satisfactory dependence upon him!

“Amy,” he began abruptly—and then I knew he had something serious to say to me, for “A” was my everyday name from him—“Amy, Uncle Clifton says I'll never make a lawyer.” He paused, and there went out of the spring day some of its beauty. “But,” he hurried on, watching my face, “he thinks that I'll make something else just as good—only provided you aren't averse to leaving Salesport.”