Loe raamatut: «Her Infinite Variety», lehekülg 3

V

AS they entered the Senate chamber, Vernon heard the lieutenant-governor say: “And the question is: Shall the resolution be adopted? Those in favor will vote ‘aye,’ those opposed will vote ‘no,’ when their names are called; and the secretary will call the—”

“Mr. President!” Vernon shouted. There was no time now to retreat; he had launched himself on the sea of glory. A dozen other senators were on their feet, likewise demanding recognition.

“The senator from Cook,” said the lieutenant-governor.

Vernon stood by his desk, arranging complacently the documents Miss Greene had given him. Once or twice he cleared his throat and wiped his lips with his handkerchief. The other senators subsided into their seats, and, seeing that they themselves were not then to be permitted to speak, and like all speakers, not caring to listen to the speeches of others, they turned philosophically to the little diversions with which they whiled away the hours of the session—writing letters, reading newspapers, smoking. Vernon glanced around. Maria Greene was sitting precariously on the edge of a divan. Her face was white and drawn. She gave a quick nod, and a smile just touched her fixed lips. And then Vernon began. He spoke slowly and with vast deliberation; his voice was very low. He outlined his subject with exquisite pains, detail by detail, making it clear just what propositions he would advance. His manner was that of the lawyer in an appellate court, making a masterly and purely legal argument; when it was done, the Senate, if it had paid attention—though it seldom did pay attention—would know all about the question of woman-suffrage.

In his deliberation, Vernon glanced now and then at Maria Greene. Her eyes were sparkling with intelligent interest. As if to choose the lowest point possible from which to trace the rise and progress of legislation favorable to women, Vernon would call the attention of the Senate, first, to the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court In re Bradwell, 55 Ill. 525. That was away back in 1869, when the age was virtually dark; and that was the case, gentlemen would remember, just as if they all kept each decision of the court at their tongues’ ends, in which the court held that no woman could be admitted, under the laws of Illinois, to practise as an attorney at law. But,—and Vernon implored his colleagues to mark,—long years afterward, the court of its own motion, entered a nunc pro tunc order, reversing its own decision in the Bradwell case. Vernon dilated upon the importance of this decision; he extolled the court; it had set a white milestone to mark the progressing emancipation of the race. Then, briefly, he proposed to outline for them the legislative steps by which woman’s right to equality with man had been at least partly recognized.

He fumbled for a moment among the papers on his desk, until he found one of the pamphlets Miss Greene had given him, and then he said he wished to call the Senate’s attention to the Employment Act of 1872, the Drainage Act of 1885, and the Sanitary District Act of 1890. Vernon spoke quite familiarly of these acts. Furthermore, gentlemen would, he was sure, instantly recall the decisions of the courts in which those acts were under review, as for instance, in Wilson vs. Board of Trustees, 133 Ill. 443; and in Davenport vs. Drainage Commissioners, 25 Ill. App. 92.

Those among the senators who were lawyers, as most of them were, looked up from their letter writing at this, and nodded profoundly, in order to show their familiarity with Vernon’s citations, although, of course, they never had heard of the cases before.

“This recognition of woman’s natural right,” Vernon shouted, “this recognition of her equality with man, can not be overestimated in importance!” He shook his head fiercely and struck his desk with his fist. But then, having used up all the facts he had marked in Miss Greene’s pamphlets, he was forced to become more general in his remarks, and so he began to celebrate woman, ecstatically. He conjured for the senators the presence of their mothers and sisters, their sweethearts and wives; and then, some quotations fortunately occurring to him, he reminded them that Castiglione had truly said that “God is seen only through women”; that “the woman’s soul leadeth us upward and on.” He recounted the services of women in time of war, their deeds in the days of peace, and in the end he became involved in an allegory about the exclusion of the roses from the garden.

The senators had begun to pay attention to him as soon as he talked about things they really understood and were interested in, and now they shouted to him to go on. It was spread abroad over the third floor of the State House that some one was making a big speech in the Senate, and representatives came rushing over from the House. The correspondents of the Chicago newspapers came over also to see if the Associated Press man in the Senate was getting the speech down fully. All the space on the Senate floor was soon crowded, and the applause shook the desks and made the glass prisms on the chandeliers jingle. The lieutenant-governor tapped from time to time with his gavel, but he did it perfunctorily, as though he enjoyed the applause himself, as vicariously expressing his own feelings; his eyes twinkled until it seemed that, were it not for certain traditions, he would join in the delighted laughter that made up most of the applause.

Once a page came to Vernon with a glass of water, and as he paused to wipe his brow and to sip from the glass, he glanced again at Maria Greene. Her face was solemn and a wonder was growing in her eyes. Beside her sat old “Doc” Ames, scowling fiercely and stroking his long white beard. There were sharp cries of “Go on! Go on!”

But Vernon, not accustomed to thinking on his feet, as talkers love to phrase it, and having stopped, could not instantly go on, and that awkward halt disconcerted him. He was conscious that the moments were slipping by, and there were other things—many other things—that he had intended to say; but these things evaded him—floated off, tantalizingly, out of reach. And so, for refuge, he rushed on to the conclusion he had half formed in his mind. The conclusion was made up mostly from a toast to which he had once responded while in college, entitled “The Ladies.” The words came back to him readily enough; he had only to apply them a little differently and to change his figures. Thus it was easy to work up to a panegyric in which Illinois stood as a beautiful woman leading her sister states up to new heights of peace, of virtue and of concord. He had a rapt vision of this woman, by her sweet and gentle influence settling all disputes and bringing heaven down to earth at last.

The Senate was in raptures.

“This is the face,” he cried, “‘that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium!' … 'she is wholly like in feature to the deathless goddesses!’” So he went on. “‘Age can not wither, nor custom stale, her infinite variety.’”

He was growing weary. He already showed the impressive exhaustion of the peroration. He had sacrificed a collar and drunk all the water from his glass. He fingered the empty tumbler for a moment, and then lifted it on high while he said:

 
“’I filled this cup to one made up
Of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex
The seeming paragon—
Her health! and would on earth there stood
Some more of such a frame,
That life might be all poetry,
And weariness a name.’”
 

When he had done, there was a moment’s stillness; then came the long sweep of applause that rang through the chamber, and while the lieutenant-governor rapped for order, men crowded around Vernon and wrung his hand, as he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. And then the roll was called. It had not proceeded far when there was that subtile change in the atmosphere which is so easily recognized by those who have acquired the sense of political aeroscepsy; the change that betokens some new, unexpected and dangerous manœuver. Braidwood had come over from the House. His face, framed in its dark beard, was stern and serious. He whispered an instant to Porter, the Senate leader. Porter rose.

“Mr. President,” he said.

The lieutenant-governor was looking at him expectantly.

“The gentleman from Cook,” the lieutenant-governor said.

“Mr. President,” said Senator Porter, “I move you, sir, that the further discussion of the resolution be postponed until Wednesday morning, one week from to-morrow, and that it be made a special order immediately following the reading of the journal.”

“If there are no objections it will be so ordered,” said the lieutenant-governor.

Bull Burns shouted a prompt and hoarse “Object!”

But the lieutenant-governor calmly said:

“And it is so ordered.”

The gavel fell.

VI

AFTER the adjournment Vernon sought out Maria Greene and walked with her down Capitol Avenue toward the hotel. He was prepared to enjoy her congratulations, but she was silent for a while, and before they spoke again “Doc” Ames, striding rapidly, had caught up with them. He was still scowling.

“I was sorry you didn’t finish your speech as you intended, sir,” he said, with something of the acerbity of a reproach.

“Why,” began Vernon, looking at him, “I—”

“You laid out very broad and comprehensive ground for yourself,” the old man continued, “but unfortunately you did not cover it. You should have developed your subject logically, as I had hopes, indeed, in the beginning, you were going to do. An argument based on principle would have been more to the point than an appeal to the passions. I think Miss Greene will agree with me. I am sorry you did not acquaint me with your intention of addressing the Senate on this important measure; I would very much have liked to confer with you about what you were going to say. It is not contemplated by those in the reform movement that the charms of woman shall be advanced as the reason for her right to equal suffrage with man. It is purely a matter of cold, abstract justice. Now, for instance,” the doctor laid his finger in his palm, and began to speak didactically, “as I have pointed out to the House, whatever the power or the principle that gives to man his right to make the law that governs him, to woman it gives the same right. In thirty-seven states the married mother has no right to her children; in sixteen the wife has no right to her own earnings; in eight she has no separate right to her property; in seven—”

Vernon looked at Miss Greene helplessly, but she was nodding her head in acquiescence to each point the doctor laid down in his harsh palm with that long forefinger. Vernon had no chance to speak until they reached the hotel. She was to take the midday train back to Chicago, and Vernon had insisted on going to the station with her. Just as she was about to leave him to go up to her room she said, as on a sudden impulse:

“Do you know that the women of America, yes, the people of America, owe you a debt?”

Vernon assumed a most modest attitude.

“If we are successful,” she went on, “the advocates of equal suffrage all over the United States will be greatly encouraged; the reform movement everywhere will receive a genuine impetus.”

“You will be down next Wednesday when the resolution comes up again, won’t you?” asked Vernon.

“Indeed, I shall,” she said. “Do you have any hopes now?”

“Hopes?” laughed Vernon. “Why certainly; we’ll adopt it. I’ll give my whole time to it between now and then. If they don’t adopt that resolution I’ll block every other piece of legislation this session, appropriations and all. I guess that will bring them to time!”

“You’re very good,” she said. “But I fear Mr. Porter’s influence.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of him. You trust it to me. The women will be voting in this state next year.”

“And you shall be their candidate for governor!” she cried, clasping her hands.

Vernon colored; he felt a warm thrill course through him, but he waved the nomination aside with his hand. He was about to say something more, but he could not think of anything quickly enough. While he hesitated, Miss Greene looked at her watch.

“I’ve missed my train,” she said, quietly.

Vernon grew red with confusion.

“I beg a thousand pardons!” he said. “It was all my fault and it was certainly very stupid of me.”

“It’s of no importance. Where must I go to reserve space on the night train?” said Miss Greene.

Vernon told her, and proffered his services. He was now delighted at the philosophical way in which she accepted the situation—it would have brought the average woman, he reflected, to tears—and then he went on to picture to himself the practical results in improving women’s characters that his new measure, as he had already come to regard it, would bring about.

VII

MARIA GREENE would not let Vernon attend to her tickets; she said it was a matter of principle with her; but late in the afternoon, when they had had luncheon, and she had got the tickets herself, she did accept his invitation to drive. The afternoon had justified all the morning’s promise of a fine spring day, and as they left the edges of the town and turned into the road that stretched away over the low undulations of ground they call hills in Illinois, and lost itself mysteriously in the country far beyond, Miss Greene became enthusiastic.

“Isn’t it glorious!” she cried. “And to think that when I left Chicago last night it was still winter!” She shuddered, as if she would shake off the memory of the city’s ugliness. Her face was flushed and she inhaled the sweet air eagerly.

“To be in the country once more!” she went on.

“Did you ever live in the country?” Vernon asked.

“Once,” she said, and then after a grave pause she added: “A long time ago.”

The road they had turned into was as soft and as smooth as velvet now that the spring had released it from the thrall of winter’s mud. It led beside a golf links, and the new greens were already dotted with golfers, who played with the zest they had accumulated in the forbidding winter months. They showed their enthusiasm by playing bare-armed, as if already it were the height of summer.

As the buggy rolled noiselessly along, Vernon and Miss Greene were silent; the spell of the spring was on them. To their right rolled the prairies, that never can become mere fields, however much they be tilled or fenced. The brown earth, with its tinge of young green here and there, or its newly ploughed clods glistening and steaming in the sun, rolled away like the sea. Far off, standing out black and forbidding against the horizon, they could see the ugly buildings of a coal shaft; behind, above the trees that grew for the city’s shade, the convent lifted its tower, and above all, the gray dome of the State House reared itself, dominating the whole scene. The air shimmered in the haze of spring. Birds were chirping in the hedges; now and then a meadow-lark sprang into the air and fled, crying out its strange staccato song as it skimmed the surface of the prairies. Vernon idly snapped the whip as he drove along; neither of them seemed to care to speak. Suddenly they heard a distant, heavy thud. The earth trembled slightly.

“What’s that?” said Miss Greene, in some alarm. “It couldn’t have been thunder.”

“No,” said Vernon, “it was the miners, blasting.”

“Where?”

“Down in the ground underneath us.”

She gave him a strange look which he did not comprehend. Then she turned and glanced quickly at the black breakers of the coal shaft, half a mile away; then at the golf-players.

“Do the mines run under this ground?” she asked, sweeping her hand about and including the links in her gesture.

“Yes, all over here, or rather under here,” Vernon said. He was proud of his knowledge of the locality. He thought it argued well that a legislator should be informed on all questions. Maria thought a moment, then she said:

“The golfers above, the miners below.”

Vernon looked at her in surprise. The pleasure of the spring had gone out of her eyes.

“Drive on, please,” she said.

“There’s no danger,” said Vernon reassuringly, clucking at his horse, and the beast flung up its head in a spasmodic burst of speed, as livery-stable horses will. The horse did not have to trot very far to bear them away from the crack of the golf-balls and the dull subterranean echoes of the miners’ blasts, but Vernon felt that a cloud had floated all at once over this first spring day. The woman sitting there beside him seemed to withdraw herself to an infinite distance.

“You love the country?” he asked, feeling the need of speech.

“Yes,” she said, but she went no farther.

“And you once lived there?”

“Yes,” she said again, but she vouchsafed no more. Vernon found a deep curiosity springing within him; he longed to know more about this young woman who in all outward ways seemed to be just like the women he knew, and yet was so essentially different from them. But though he tried, he could not move her to speak of her own life or its affairs. At the last he said boldly:

“Tell me, how did you come to be a lawyer?”

Miss Greene turned to meet his inquisitive gaze.

“How did you?” she asked.

Vernon cracked his whip at the road.

“Well—” he stammered. “I don’t know; I had to do something.”

“So did I,” she replied.

Vernon cut the lazy horse with the whip, and the horse jerked the buggy as it made its professional feint at trotting.

“I did not care to lead a useless life,” he said. “I wanted to do something—to have some part in the world’s work. The law seemed to be a respectable profession and I felt that maybe I could do some good in politics. I don’t think the men of my class take as much interest in politics as they should. And then, I’d like to make my own living.”

“I have to make mine,” said Maria Greene.

“But you never thought of teaching, or nursing, or—well—painting or music, or that sort of thing, did you?”

“No,” she replied; “did you?”

Vernon laughed at an absurdity that needed no answering comment, and then he hastened on:

“Of course, you know I think it fine that you should have done as you have. You must have met with discouragements.”

She laughed, and Vernon did not note the bitterness there was concealed in the laugh; to him it seemed intended to express only that polite deprecation demanded in the treatment of a personal situation.

“I can sympathize with you there,” said Vernon, though Miss Greene had not admitted the need of sympathy. Perhaps it was Vernon’s own need of sympathy, or his feeling of the need of it, that made him confess that his own family and friends had never sympathized with him, especially with what he called his work in politics; he felt, at any rate, that he had struck the right note at last, and he went on to assure her how unusual it was to meet a woman who understood public questions as well as she understood them. And it may have been his curiosity that led him to inquire:

“How did your people feel about your taking up the law?”

Miss Greene said that she did not know how her people felt, and Vernon again had that baffled sense of her evading him.

“I’ve felt pretty much alone in my work,” he said. “The women I know won’t talk with me about it; they won’t even read the newspapers. And I’ve tried so hard to interest them in it!”

Vernon sighed, and he waited for Miss Greene to sigh with him. He did not look at her, but he could feel her presence there close beside him. Her gloved hands lay quietly in her lap; she was gazing out over the prairies. The light winds were faintly stirring her hair, and the beauty of it, its warm red tones brought out by the burnishing sun, suddenly overwhelmed him. He stirred and his breath came hard.

“Do you know,” he said, in a new confidence, “that this has been a great day for me? To meet you, and to know you as I think I do know you now! This morning, when I was speaking, I felt that with you to help me, I could do great things.”

Miss Greene drew in her lips, as if to compress their fullness; she moved away on the seat, and raised her hand uneasily and thrust it under her veil to put back a tress of hair that had strayed from its fastening. Vernon saw the flush of her white cheeks come and go. Her eyebrows were drawn together wistfully, and in her blue eyes, that looked far away through the meshes of her dotted veil, there was a little cloud of trouble. She caught her lip delicately between the edges of her teeth. Vernon leaned slightly forward as if he would peer into her face. For him the day had grown suddenly hot, the spring had developed on the instant the oppressive heat of summer. He felt its fire; he could see its intensity vibrating in the air all about him, and he had a sense as of all the summer’s voices droning in unison. The reins drooped from his listless fingers; the horse moped along as it pleased.