Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
Phases of an Inferior Planet
CHAPTER XII
In an up-town block, a stone's-throw west of Fifth Avenue, stands the Church of the Immaculate Conception. It is a newly erected structure of gray stone, between two rows of expressionless tenements, and, despite the aggressive finality emphasized in its architecture, wearing a general air of holding its ground by sheer force of stolidity.
The interior of the church is less suggestive of modernity, and bears, on the whole, a surface relationship to a mediæval cathedral. The purple light filtering through the stained-glass windows is, in its essential quality, a European importation, and the altar-piece is a passable reproduction of a painting of Murillo's.
More than fifty years ago the church, then an unpretentious building of red brick, endowed neither with rood-screen nor waxen candles, had called to its rectorship the Reverend Clement Speares, a youthful leader of the ritualistic element in Episcopalianism. Father Speares heard the call and accepted the charge, and within a dozen years he had succeeded in trebling the number of his congregation, and in exchanging the red-brick building for the present Church of the Immaculate Conception, with its mystic light of mediævalism.
The congregation, of that class who toil not, neither spin, but before whose raiment Easter lilies falter, was fashionable, and also wealthy. The single-hearted zeal which its priest had put into fifty years of service had failed to wean his flock from a taste for the flesh-pots. In return for the generosity with which they supported their place of worship and its appurtenances, they claimed the indefeasible right to regulate their own attire and to reserve their pews from the encroachment of aliens. They were willing to erect a mission chapel in the slums, but they submitted to no trespassing upon the exclusiveness of their accustomed preserves.
Father Speares, who, had his temporal power been in proportion to his ecclesiastical influence, would have thrown open the Holy of Holies to the beggar in the street, and have knelt with equal charity between the Pharisees and Publicans, resigned himself to the recognition of spiritual caste, and devoted his days to Fifth Avenue and his evenings to the Bowery.
To his honor be it said that he made no more valiant stand for the salvation of the one than of the other. A soul was a soul to him, and personal cleanliness a matter of taste.
He was a man of resolute convictions and unswerving purpose. If he did not possess eloquence of speech, he possessed sincerity of mind, which is quite as rare, and very nearly as effective. He had a benevolent countenance combined with a sympathetic manner, and the combination exercised a charm over those of his hearers who attended his church in the endeavor to narcotize troublesome nerves. Unconsciously, by his adoption of celibacy from the mother church, he had borrowed from the elder faith the powerful weapon of romanticism, exciting the imaginative qualities, while he emphasized the maxim of the right of private judgment by rejecting the dogma of papal infallibility.
But since the Church of the Immaculate Conception had risen into being with Father Speares, there was an Ishmaelitish rumor afloat that with Father Speares it would pass away. Father Speares himself was not insensible to the danger, and with the fervor of an enthusiast he labored to perpetuate the ceremonials his soul loved. With the force of a revelation there was borne upon him the conception that on him and his successors rested the mission to impel the conservative wing of Episcopalianism into that assimilation to Roman Catholicism whose resultant is the Ritualistic movement. Unto this end he had spent more than fifty years of labor. At the close of the nineteenth century he stood a picturesque and pathetic figure, combating with a mediæval eloquence the advancing spirit of his time, a representative of the lost age of faith lingering far into the new-found age of rationalism.
When Anthony Algarcife, a young orphan, had been sent to him, he had taken the child into his confidence.
"I will help you," the boy had said, enthusiastically – "I will help you." And he rolled up his little shirt-sleeves in the desire to settle spiritual differences in the good old fashion of physical force.
Father Speares had smiled and patted him upon the shoulder. "Please God, you shall, my boy!" he had answered, and had made the child a white-robed acolyte, that he might ignite by youthful hands the fires of faith.
Anthony had been a disappointment, he had said, but of the bitterness of the disappointment he had made no mention. Beneath his teaching he had seen the young mind unfold and expand strenuously, and then, while his eager eyes were watching, he had seen it shoot from him and beyond his grasp, trampling his cherished convictions beneath ruthless feet.
"It is all rubbish," Anthony had declared in the first intolerance of his youth. "The mental world is filled with a lot of decaying theology, which has been accumulating for centuries. It remains for us to sweep it away."
"And you would sweep me with it," said Father Speares, a little bitterly.
"The ground must be cleared," returned Anthony. "You are sitting upon the rubbish, as a miser in Pompeii might have sat upon his gold while Vesuvius overflowed. It is wiser to flee and leave hoarded treasure to be ingulfed. That the rubbish was once sound theology, I grant, but it has crumbled, and its usefulness of a thousand years ago will not it save from the ash-heap of outgrown ideas to-day."
Father Speares sighed and set his lips. "The boy is young," he said, with the yearning self-deception of age. "It will pass, and he will return the stronger for his wandering."
But the event had not borne out his prophecy. It did not pass, and Anthony did not return.
"It is my head," he explained, half irritably. "There is a wall of scepticism surrounding my brain, through which only the toughest facts may penetrate. I am minus the faculty of credulity."
"Or reverence," Father Speares added, reproachfully. "You regard spiritual things as a deaf man regards sound or a blind man sight."
Anthony's irritation triumphed.
"Or as a man awake regards a dream," he suggested. "The film of superstition has cleared from my eyes, and I see. The truth is that I regard all religions exactly as you regard all except the one which you inherited. An accident of birth has made you a Christian instead of a Moslem or a Brahman, that is all."
"And a twist of the mind has made you an atheist."
"As you please – atheist, agnostic, sceptic, what you will. It only means that you offer me an irrational assumption, and I reject it. It is the custom of you theologians to fit ugly epithets to your opponents, whereas the denial of Christianity no more argues atheism than the denial of Confucianism does. It merely proves that a man refuses to acknowledge any one of the gods which men have created, and that he leaves the ultimate essence outside his generalizations. Such a man has learned the first lesson in knowledge – the lesson of his own ignorance."
"And has missed the greater lesson of the wisdom of God."
Algarcife shrugged his shoulders.
"It is no use," he said; "I can't believe, and I wouldn't if I could."
So he had gone from Father Speares into the world. Virile, strenuous, and possessed with intellectual passion, he had closed the doors of his mind upon commonplaces, and with the improvidence from which mental stamina failed to redeem him had wedded himself to poverty and science.
Five years after leaving Father Speares's roof he returned with Mariana at his side.
"We have come to be married," he announced.
Father Speares gasped and suggested prudence. "It is unwise," he remonstrated – "it is utterly unwise."
"I agree with you," admitted Anthony. "It is unwise, and we know it; but there is nothing else to be done – is there, Mariana?"
Mariana looked into Father Speares's face and smiled.
"Of course you are right," she said, "and we are very foolish, but – but there really isn't anything else to do."
And Father Speares was silenced. He looked at the license a little ruefully, read the service, and sent them off with a benediction.
"God knows, I wish you happiness," he assured Mariana when she kissed him.
Several months later, meeting Algarcife on Broadway, he repeated the words.
"I am happy," returned Algarcife, emphatically. "Mariana is an angel."
"I am glad to hear it," said Father Speares, and he sighed irrelevantly. "A good woman is a jewel of rare value."
The term "good woman," applied to Mariana, gave Anthony a sense of unfitness. Mariana was certainly a jewel, but, somehow, it had never occurred to him to look upon her as a "good woman."
"She is very charming," he remarked, quietly.
Father Speares was regarding him critically. "You are not looking well," he said. "Is it work or worry?"
Algarcife shook his head impatiently. "I – oh, I am all right," he rejoined. "A little extra work, that's all."
"Your book?"
Algarcife's face contracted, and the harassed expression about his mouth deepened.
"No, not my book," he answered, hastily. "I've put that aside for a while. I am trying a hand at bread-winning."
"With satisfactory results, I hope."
Anthony's laugh was slightly constrained.
"Why, certainly! Am I the man to fail?"
"I don't know," commented Father Speares – "I don't know. I never thought of you in that light, somehow. But if I can help you, remember that you were once my boy."
Anthony held out his hand quickly, his voice trembling.
"You are generous – generous as you have always been, but – I am all right."
They parted, Algarcife turning into a cross street. He walked slowly, and the harassed lines did not fade from his mouth. He seemed to have grown older within the last few months, and the fight he was making had bowed his shoulders and sown the seeds of future furrows upon his face.
At the corner he bought a box of sardines and a pound of crackers for Mariana, who liked a late supper. Then he crossed to The Gotham and ascended the stairs.
He found Mariana in a dressing-sack of pink flannel, sitting upon the bed, and engaged in manufacturing an opera-bonnet out of a bit of black gauze and a few pink rose-buds. She was trying it on as he entered, and, catching sight of him, did not remove it as she raised her hand warningly. "Tell me if it is becoming before you kiss me," she commanded, pressing her thimble against her lips.
Anthony drew back and surveyed her.
"Of course it is," he replied; "but what is it, anyway?"
Mariana laughed and leaned towards him.
"A bonnet, of course; not a coal-scuttle or a lamp-shade."
Then she took it from her head and held it before her, turning it critically from side to side.
"Don't you think it might have a few violets against the hair, just above the left temple? I am sure I could take some out of my last summer's hat."
She left the bed and stood upon a chair, to place the bonnet in a box upon the top of the wardrobe. "As a scientific problem it should interest you," she observed. "I created it out of nothing."
Anthony caught her as she descended from the chair.
"As a possible adornment for your head it interests me still more," he replied.
"Because you haven't been married long enough to discover what an empty little head it is?"
"Because it is the dearest head in the world, and the wisest. But what a thriftless house-keeper, not to have set the table!" A door had been cut into his study, and he glanced through. "Do you think you are still below Mason and Dixon's line, where time is not recognized?"
"I forgot it," said Mariana; "but there isn't any bread, so you must go after it. Oh, you didn't get sardines again, did you? I said potted ham – and it is really a very small chicken they sent us."
"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr. Speares – "
"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.
"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"
"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have gone into the Church – honestly, I mean – how pleased he would have been, dearest."
"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet institution."
Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been poor."
"Do you find it so hard?"
"I hate it – for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."
"My beloved!"
"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the washer-woman comes and there isn't any money – and I should like to have some gloves – "
"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"
Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days because I didn't have any."
"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"
"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.
She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the glass her eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.
"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the brush; "there it is."
Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political economy. I am glad it interests you."
"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it, for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise – and it is becoming."
"But you like Mill?"
"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."
CHAPTER XIII
Anthony and Mariana founded their life together upon well-worn principles. They accepted in its entirety the fallacy that love is a self-sustaining force, independent of material conditions.
"So long as we love each other," Mariana declared, "nothing matters."
And Anthony upheld this declaration. To Algarcife those first months of intimate association were inexpressibly fresh and inspiriting. That acute sense of nearness to Mariana supplied what had been a void in his existence, and he looked back upon the time he had spent without her as a colorless stretch of undifferentiated days.
And yet, with a feminine presence beside him, work was less easy. In the evenings, when Mariana followed him to his study and seated herself in a rocking-chair beneath the lamplight, he sometimes experienced a vague recognition of its inappropriateness. He found the old absorption to have grown intractable, and the creak of Mariana's rocker, or the low humming of her voice, was sufficient to surprise in him that repressed irascibility from which he had never been able to shake himself free. Even in the midst of his passionate delight in her, a profound melancholy would seize him at times, and he would find the cravings of his intellectual nature harassed by the superficial tenor of his daily employment. Again, as Mariana sat in the lamplight, her swift fingers busy with some useless bit of millinery, he would regard her with a sudden tightening of his pulses, and a thrill of fear at the prospect of a coming separation. The droop of her head, the contour of her face where the bone of her chin was accentuated by thinness, the soft line of throat above the full collar, the nimbus of hair shining in the light, the fall of her skirt, the slender slippered feet, aroused in him a tumultuous sense of possession. He would turn from his writing to rest upon her a warm and magnetic glance, before which her lowered lashes would be lifted, her pensive lips break into a smile.
Then, again, the instinct for solitude, which his years of study had intensified, would reawaken, and the creaking of the rocker would act as an irritant upon his nerves.
It was at such a moment that Mariana had looked up and spoken, the bright inflection of her voice aggravating the interruption.
"Anthony!"
Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.
"When did you begin to love me?"
The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. "In the beginning," he answered; then he frowned, his tone grew captious. "I can't, Mariana," he protested – "I really can't. I must get this work over."
"You are always working."
"Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve."
"It is horrible to be poor."
"We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few dollars the poorer."
"You never talk to me. You are always working."
She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.
"Mariana!"
Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands. Her face was upturned, her head supported by the back of the chair. He could see the violet shadow which rested like a faint suffusion where the heavy hair swept from behind her ear.
Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated across the pallor of her face.
"Of course I know you are working for me," she said, "but I had rather have less labor and more love."
"I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it in your ear."
"But I like to hear it."
"I love you. Now be quiet."
Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. "Let me help you," she said. "It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while you are killing yourself. Let me help you."
Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his embrace. He kissed her with sudden passion.
"You help me by living," he said, "by breathing, by being near me, by giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a life – without you, now that I have had you, I should go to pieces – absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years. But we must live, and I must work."
He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in passionate elation, picked up Mill's Political Economy, and fell to studying.
It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money in a yard or so of white linen and a mass of colored silks, and wove a garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a dinner-table. When it was finished she was seized with a fit of sanguineness, and as she rinsed it in a dozen different waters to insure whiteness, she calculated what the annual products of her labor would amount to. "If I manage to do one a month," she remarked, pressing the centre-piece lightly between her moistened hands, "and say I get about fifteen dollars for each one, I should soon have quite a little income; twelve times fifteen is – how much, Anthony?"
"More than I am going to let you work for," replied Algarcife. "Your eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover. It is the very last."
Mariana placed one finger to her lips, and then applied it lightly to the iron she held in her hand. "I do hope I won't scorch it," she observed. "Oh, do give me that blanket! It must be ironed on a blanket to make the flowers stand out. Aren't they natural?"
She lifted her heated face and glanced at him for approbation.
"I feel like plucking them," returned Algarcife. "Don't tire yourself. Good-bye." And he passed into the next room and closed the door.
Mariana ironed the centre-piece, wrapped it in yellow tissue-paper, and carried it to an exchange for women's work around the corner. It was placed in a glass-case amid a confusion of similar articles, where it languished for the space of several months. At the end of that time she redeemed it.
The failure of the enterprise precipitated an attack of hysteria, which spent itself in Anthony's arms and left her resigned and exhausted.
"I can't do anything to help you," she observed, hopelessly. "I hoped to clear at least fifteen dollars from that centre-piece, and, instead, I lost five. I shall always be an encumbrance."
"You are my beloved counsellor."
"My love isn't of much use, and you never take my advice."
"But I like to listen to it."
Mariana rested her head upon his shoulder and closed her eyes.
"I am only a luxury," she said, "like wine or cigars, but it wouldn't be pleasant to dispense with me, would it?"
"It would be death."
She sighed contentedly, her hand wandered across his brow. There was a faint, magnetic force in her finger-tips which left a burning sensation like that caused by a slightly charged electric current.
"I made you marry me, you know," she remarked, complacently, "so I am glad you don't regret it."
"Nonsense," remonstrated Algarcife, his lips upon her hair, the warm contact of her body inducing a sense of nearness. "I married you by force. I quite took your breath away. If you had resisted, I should have had you whether or no."
"Oh, but I did make you," returned Mariana. "But there was nothing else to do. I couldn't possibly have gone home, and I did love you so distractedly."
"As you do now."
"As I do now. Of course I must have known that rushing to you that night with the letter was just like a proposal of marriage."
"It was, rather," concluded Algarcife.
"But you needn't have married me unless you wanted to," urged Mariana. "There was Mr. Paul – "
Anthony laughed. "I was a vicarious sacrifice," he declared, "to insure the peace of Mr. Paul."
The next day Algarcife received an unexpected sum of money, and they agreed to celebrate their rising fortunes by a night at the opera. It was "Tannhauser," and Mariana craved music.
"I am afraid it is improvident," Anthony, whom the opera bored, remarked, dubiously; then looking into Mariana's wistful face, he recanted. "It doesn't matter," he added. "A little extravagance won't affect the probability of future starvation. We will go."
And they went. Mariana wore her freshest gown and the little bonnet with the knot of violets above the left temple. She was in her gayest mood, which was only dampened in a slight degree by the odor of the benzine clinging to her newly cleaned gloves.
As she leaned against the railing in the fifth gallery, gazing plaintively down into the pit, she looked subtle and seductive – like a creation in half-tones, swept by fugitive lights and shadows. The pallor of her face was intensified, her radiant lips compressed, and the green flame in her glance scintillated beneath luxurious lashes. Anthony, fastening upon her contented eyes, wondered at the singular charm which she radiated. Small, slight, insignificant, and charged with imperfections as she was, her very imperfections possessed the fascination of elusiveness. Her radiance was intensified in the memory by the plainness succeeding it; the sensitive curve of her nostrils was heightened in effect by the irregularity of feature, and the angular distinctness of the bones of her chin emphasized the faint violet shadows suffusing the hollows. Had her charm been less impalpable it would have lost its power. The desire of beauty might have satiated itself in a dozen women, or of amativeness in a dozen others, but Mariana fascinated instinctively, and her spell was without beginning in a single attribute and without end in possession.
As she sat there in the fifth gallery, drinking with insatiable thirst the swelling harmony, her emotional nature, which association with Algarcife had somewhat subdued, was revivified, and she pressed Anthony's responsive hand in exaltation. The music reverberating round her brought in its train all those lurid dreams which she had half forgotten, and the dramatic passion awoke and burned her pulses. She felt herself invigorated, swept from the moorings of the commonplace, and subverted by the scenic intensity before her. She felt taller, stronger, fuller of unimpregnated germs of power, and, like an infusion of splendid barbaric blood, there surged through her veins a flame of color. With a triumphant crash of harmonious discord, she felt that the artistic instinct was stimulated from its supineness, and the desire to achieve was aglow within her. The electric lights beneath the brilliant ceiling, the odor of hot-house flowers, the music sweeping upward and bearing her on its swelling tide, acted upon her overwrought sensibilities like an intoxicant. She drew near to Anthony; her lips quivered.
"Oh, if it would last," she said – "if it would last!"
But it did not last, and when it was over Mariana pressed her hand to her brow like one in pain. The return to reality jarred upon her vibrant nerves, and she became aware of shooting throbs in her temples, and of the depressing moisture in the atmosphere.
"I am faint," she complained. "I must have something – anything."
"It is all that clashing and banging," responded Anthony. "What a relief silence is!"
They bought ale and cheese and crackers from a grocery at the corner, and carried the parcels to their room. Mariana let down her hair, put on her dressing-gown, and threw herself upon the hearth-rug. She felt weak and hungry. "If there were only a fire," she lamented regretfully, stretching her hands towards the register; after which she opened the paper-bags and ate ravenously.
In the night she awoke with a start and a sob. She reached out moaningly in the darkness. Her hands were trembling and the neck of her gown was damp and chill. "I believe I shall go mad," she said, desperately.
Anthony struck a match, lighted the candle, and looked at her. He laid a cool hand upon her forehead.
"What is it?" he asked. "Are you nervous? Have you been dreaming?"
"No, no," cried Mariana, rolling her head upon the pillow, "but I want music. I want art. There is so much that is beautiful, and I want something."
She wept hysterically. Anthony got up and made her a cup of tea, which she could not drink because it was smoked.
But on the morrow she was herself again. As she was arranging her hair she laughed and chattered gayly, and the effect of the previous evening was shown only in a tendency to break into song. Before drinking her coffee she turned to the piano and trilled an Italian aria, the fingers of one hand wandering over the key-board in a careless accompaniment.
During the day her buoyancy was unfailing. She took up her studies zealously, and the morning devoted to Mill was rich in results. Her acuteness of apprehension was a continual marvel to Algarcife's steadier perception, and he regarded with deference the quickness with which she grasped the general drift of unstudied social problems. An exaggerated example of feminine intuition he ascribed unhesitatingly to a profundity of intellectual ability. That Mariana was adapting herself to his theories of life, he recognized and accepted. There was relief in the thought that his influence over her was weightier than the appeal of her art. With adolescent egotism, he convinced himself that he was shaping and perfecting a mental energy into channels other than the predestined ones; and while Mariana was matured into a palpitant reflection of his own image, he believed that he was liberating an intellect enthralled by superficialities. But, in truth, the stronger force was assimilating to itself the weaker, and the comradeship existing in their love was perfect in smoothness and finish. The opinions which Anthony radiated Mariana reflected, and they presented to the world proof of a domestic unity complete in its harmony.
