The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

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"I am not being kept in idleness, as I think you know very well. My time
and energies are given to helping you. I look after your office and your
house. My time is not my own. I devote it to you. I want some
recognition of my services--I want some money."

She leaned back in her chair, answering his exasperated frown with a
straight look, which was, though he did not see it, only a different
sort of anger from his own.

"Well, you won't get it," he said. "You won't get it. When you need
things you can tell me and I'll get them for you. But there's been
altogether too much money spent in this house in years gone by for
trumpery. You know that well enough. What's in that chest out there in
the hall? Trumpery! What's in those bureau drawers upstairs? Truck!
Hundreds of dollars, that might have been put out where it would be
earning something, gone into mere flubdub."

He paused to note the effect of his words and saw that he had scored.
Poor Mrs. Barrington, struggling vaguely and darkly in her own feminine
way for some form of self-expression, had spent her household allowance
many a time on futile odds and ends. She had haunted the bargain
counter, and had found herself unable to get over the idea that a thing
cheaply purchased was an economic triumph. So in drawers and chests and
boxes she had packed her pathetic loot--odds and ends of embroidery, of
dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of
thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and
jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material. Kate remembered it
with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into
her brain. She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered
woman, whose feet had walked so falteringly in her search for the roses
of life. And she said--

But what matter what she said?

Her father and herself were at the antipodes, and they were separated no
less by their similarities than by their differences. Their wistful and
inexpressive love for each other was as much of a blight upon them as
their inherent antagonism. The sun went down that bleak Christmas night
on a house divided openly against itself.

The next day Kate told her father he might look for some one else to run
his house for him. He said he had already done so. He made no inquiry
where she was going. He would not offer her money, though he secretly
wanted her to ask for it. But it was past that with her. The miserable,
bitter drama--the tawdry tragedy, whose most desperate accent was its
shameful approach to farce--wore itself to an end.

Kate took her mother's jewelry, which had been left to her, and sold it
at the local jeweler's. All Silvertree knew that Kate Barrington had
left her home in anger and that her father had shown her the back of
his hand.

IV

Honora Fulham, sitting in her upper room and jealously guarding the
slumbers of Patience and Patricia, her tiny but already remarkable twin
daughters, heard a familiar voice in the lower hallway. She dropped her
book, "The Psychological Significance of the Family Group," and ran to
the chamber door. A second later she was hanging over the banisters.

"Kate!" she called with a penetrating whisper. "You!"

"Yes, Honora, it's bad Kate. She's come to you--a penny nobody else
wanted."

Honora Fulham sailed down the stairs with the generous bearing of a ship
answering a signal of distress. The women fell into each other's arms,
and in that moment of communion dismissed all those little alien
half-feelings which grow up between friends when their enlarging
experience has driven them along different roads. Honora led the way to
her austere drawing-room, from which, with a rigorous desire to
economize labor, she had excluded all that was superfluous, and there,
in the bare, orderly room, the two women--their girlhood definitely
behind them--faced each other. Kate noted a curious retraction in
Honora, an indescribable retrenchment of her old-time self, as if her
florescence had been clipped by trained hands, so that the bloom should
not be too exuberant; and Honora swiftly appraised Kate's suggestion of
freedom and force.

"Kate," she announced, "you look like a kind eagle."

"A wounded one, then, Honora."

"You've a story for me, I see. Sit down and tell it."

So Kate told it, compelling the history of her humiliating failure to
stand out before the calm, adjudging mind of her friend.

"But oughtn't we to forgive everything to the old?" cried Honora at the
conclusion of the recital.

"Oh, is father old?" responded Kate in anguish. "He doesn't seem
old--only formidable. If I'd thought I'd been wrong I never would have
come up here to ask you to sustain me in my obstinacy. Truly, Honora, it
isn't a question of age. He's hardly beyond his prime, and he has been
using all of his will, which has grown strong with having his own way,
to break me down the way most of the men in Silvertree have broken their
women down. I was getting to be just like the others, and to start when
I heard him coming in at the door, and to hide things from him so that
he wouldn't rage. I'd have been lying next."

"Kate!"

"Oh, you think it isn't decent for me to speak that way of my father!
You can't think how it seems to me--how--how irreligious! But let me
save my soul, Honora! Let me do that!"

The girl's pallid face, sharpened and intensified, bore the imprint of
genuine misery. Honora Fulham, strong of nerve and quick of
understanding, embraced her with a full sisterly glance.

"I always liked and trusted you, Kate," she said. "I was sorry when our
ways parted, and I'd be happy to have them joined again. I see it's to
be a hazard of new fortune for you, and David and I will stand by. I
don't know, of course, precisely what that may mean, but we're yours
to command."

A key turned in the front door.

"There's David now," said his wife, her voice vibrating, and she
summoned him.

* * * * *

David Fulham entered with something almost like violence, although the
violence did not lie in his gestures. It was rather in the manner in
which his personality assailed those within the room. Dark, with an
attractive ugliness, arrogant, with restive and fathomless eyes, he
seemed to unite the East and the West in his being. Had his mother been
a Jewess of pride and intellect, and his father an adventurous American
of the superman type? Kate, looking at him with fresh interest, found
her thoughts leaping to the surmise. She knew that he was, in a way, a
great man--a man with a growing greatness. He had promulgated ideas so
daring that his brother scientists were embarrassed to know where to
place him. There were those who thought of him as a brilliant charlatan;
but the convincing intelligence and self-control of his glance
repudiated that idea. The Faust-like aspect of the man might lay him
open to the suspicion of having too experimental and inquisitive a mind.
But he had, it would seem, no need for charlatanism.

He came forward swiftly and grasped Kate's hand.

"I remember you quite well," he said in his deep, vibratory tones. "Are
you here for graduate work?"

"No," said Kate; "I'm not so humble."

"Not so humble?" He showed his magnificent teeth in a flashing but
somewhat satiric smile.

"I'm here for Life--not for study."

"Not 'in for life,' but 'out' for it," he supplemented. "That's
interesting. What is Honora suggesting to you? She's sure to have a
theory of what will be best. Honora knows what will be best for almost
everybody, but she sometimes has trouble in making others see it the
same way."

Honora seemed not to mind his chaffing.

"Yes," she agreed, "I've already thought, but I haven't had time to tell
Kate. Do you remember that Mrs. Goodrich said last night at dinner that
her friend Miss Addams was looking about for some one to take the place
of a young woman who was married the other day? She was an officer of
the Children's Protective League, you remember."

"Oh, that--" broke in Fulham. He turned toward Kate and looked her over
from head to foot, till the girl felt a hot wave of indignation sweep
over her. But his glance was impersonal, apparently. He paid no
attention to her embarrassment. He seemed merely to be getting at her
qualities by the swiftest method. "Well," he said finally, "I dare say
you're right. But--" he hesitated.

"Well?" prompted his wife.

"But won't it be rather a--a waste?" he asked. And again he smiled, this
time with some hidden meaning.

"Of course it won't be a waste," declared Honora. "Aren't women to serve
their city as well as men? It's a practical form of patriotism,
according to my mind."

Kate broke into a nervous laugh.

"I hope I'm to be of some use," she said. "Work can't come a moment too
soon for me. I was beginning to think--"

She paused.

"Well?" supplied Fulham, still with that watchful regard of her.

"Oh, that I had made a mistake about myself--that I wasn't going to be
anything in particular, after all."

* * * * *

They were interrupted. A man sprang up the outside steps and rang the
doorbell imperatively.

"It's Karl Wander," announced Fulham, who had glanced through the
window. "It's your cousin, Honora."

He went to the door, and Kate heard an emphatic and hearty voice making
hurried greetings.

"Stopped between trains," it was saying. "Can stay ten minutes
precisely--not a second longer. Came to see the babies."

Honora had arisen with a little cry and gone to the door. Now she
returned, hanging on to the arm of a weather-tanned man.

"Miss Barrington," she said, "my cousin, Mr. Wander. Oh, Karl, you're
not serious? You don't really mean that you can't stay--not even
over night?"

The man turned his warm brown eyes on Kate and she looked at him
expectantly, because he was Honora's cousin. For the time it takes to
draw a breath, they gazed at each other. Oddly enough, Kate thought of
Ray McCrea, who was across the water, and whose absence she had not
regretted. She could not tell why her thoughts turned to him. This man
was totally unlike Ray. He was, indeed, unlike any one she ever had
known. There was that about him which held her. It was not quite
assertion; perhaps it was competence. But it was competence that seemed
to go without tyranny, and that was something new in her experience of
men. He looked at her on a level, spiritually, querying as to who
she might be.

The magical moment passed. Honora and David were talking. They ran away
up the stairs with their guest, inviting Kate to follow.

"I'll only be in the way now," she called. "By and by I'll have the
babies all to myself."

Yet after she had said this, she followed, and looked into the nursery,
which was at the rear of the house. Honora had thrust the two children
into her cousin's big arms and she and David stood laughing at him.
Another man might have appeared ridiculous in this position; but it did
not, apparently, occur to Karl Wander to be self-conscious. He was
wrapped in contemplation of the babies, and when he peered over their
heads at Kate, he was quite grave and at ease.

Then, before it could be realized, he was off again. He had kissed
Honora and congratulated her, and he and Kate had again clasped hands.

"Sorry," he said, in his explosive way, "that we part so soon." He held
her hand a second longer, gave it a sudden pressure, and was gone.

Honora shut the door behind him reluctantly.

"So like Karl!" she laughed. "It's the second time he's been in my house
since I was married."

"You'd think we had the plague, the way he runs from us," said David.

"Oh," responded Honora, not at all disturbed, "Karl is forever on
important business. He's probably been to New York to some directors'
meeting. Now he's on his way to Denver, he says--'men waiting.' That's
Karl's way. To think of his dashing up here between trains to see my
babies!" The tears came to her eyes. "Don't you think he's fine, Kate?"

The truth was, there seemed to be a sort of vacuum in the air since he
had left--as if he had taken the vitality of it with him.

"But where does he live?" she asked Honora.

"Address him beyond the Second Divide, and he'll be reached. Everybody
knows him there. His post-office bears his own name--Wander."

"He's a miner?"

"How did you know?"

"Oh, by process of elimination. What else could he be?"

"Nothing else in all the world," agreed David Fulham. "I tell Honora
he's a bit mad."

"No, no," Honora laughed; "he's not mad; he's merely Western. How
startled you look, Kate--as if you had seen an apparition."

* * * * *

It was decided that Kate was to stay there at the Fulhams', and to use
one of their several unoccupied rooms. Kate chose one that looked over
the Midway, and her young strength made nothing of the two flights of
stairs which she had to climb to get to it. At first the severity of the
apartment repelled her, but she had no money with which to make it more
to her taste, and after a few hours its very barrenness made an appeal
to her. It seemed to be like her own life, in need of decoration, and
she was content to let things take their course. It seemed probable that
roses would bloom in their time.

No one, it transpired, ate in the house.

"I found out," explained Honora, "that I couldn't be elaborately
domestic and have a career, too, so I went, with some others of similar
convictions and circumstances, into a cooeperative dining-room scheme."

Kate gave an involuntary shrug of her shoulders.

"You think that sounds desolate? Wait till you see us all together. This
talk about 'home' is all very well, but I happen to know--and I fancy
you do, too--that home can be a particularly stultifying place. When
people work as hard as we do, a little contact with outsiders is
stimulating. But you'll see for yourself. Mrs. Dennison, a very fine
woman, a widow, looks after things for us. Dr. von Shierbrand, one of
our number, got to calling the place 'The Caravansary,' and now we've
all fallen into the way of it."

The Caravansary was but a few doors from the Fulhams'; an old-fashioned,
hospitable affair, with high ceilings, white marble mantels, and narrow
windows. Mrs. Dennison, the house-mother, suited the place well. Her
widow's cap and bands seemed to go with the grave pretentiousness of the
rooms, to which she had succeeded in giving almost a personal
atmosphere. There was room for her goldfish and her half-dozen canary
cages as well as for her "cooeperators"--no one there would permit
himself to be called a boarder.

Kate, sensitive from her isolation and sore from her sorrows, had
imagined that she would resent the familiarities of those she would be
forced to meet on table terms. But what was the use in trying, to resent
Marna Cartan, the young Irish girl who meant to make a great singer of
herself, and who evidently looked upon the world as a place of rare and
radiant entertainment? As for Mrs. Barsaloux, Marna's patron and
benefactor, with her world-weary eyes and benevolent smile, who could
turn a cold shoulder to her solicitudes? Then there were Wickersham and
Von Shierbrand, members, like Fulham, of the faculty of the University.
The Applegates and the Goodriches were pleasant folk, rather settled in
their aspect, and all of literary leanings. The Applegates were
identified--both husband and wife--with a magazine of literary
criticism; Mr. Goodrich ran a denominational paper with an academic
flavor; Mrs. Goodrich was president of an orphan asylum and spent her
days in good works. Then, intermittently, the company was joined by
George Fitzgerald, a preoccupied young physician, the nephew of
Mrs. Dennison.

They all greeted Kate with potential friendship in their faces, and she
could not keep back her feeling of involuntary surprise at the absence
of anything like suspicion. Down in Silvertree if a new woman had come
into a boarding-house, they would have wondered why. Here they seemed
tacitly to say, "Why not?"

Mrs. Dennison seated Kate between Dr. von Shierbrand and Marna Cartan.
Opposite to her sat Mrs. Goodrich with her quiet smile. Everyone had
something pleasant to say; when Kate spoke, all were inclined to listen.
The atmosphere was quiet, urbane, gracious. Even David Fulham's exotic
personality seemed to soften under the regard of Mrs. Dennison's
gray eyes.

"Really," Kate concluded, "I believe I can be happy here. All I need is
a chance to earn my bread and butter."

And what with the intervention of the Goodriches and the recommendation
of the Fulhams, that opportunity soon came.

V

A fortnight later she was established as an officer of the Children's
Protective Association, an organization with a self-explanatory name,
instituted by women, and chiefly supported by them. She was given an
inexhaustible task, police powers, headquarters at Hull House, and a
vocation demanding enough to satisfy even her desire for spiritual
adventure.

It was her business to adjust the lives of children--which meant that
she adjusted their parents' lives also. She arranged the disarranged;
played the providential part, exercising the powers of intervention
which in past times belonged to the priest, but which, in the days of
commercial feudalism, devolve upon the social workers.

Her work carried her into the lowest strata of society, and her
compassion, her efficiency, and her courage were daily called upon.
Perhaps she might have found herself lacking in the required measure of
these qualities, being so young and inexperienced, had it not been that
she was in a position to concentrate completely upon her task. She knew
how to listen and to learn; she knew how to read and apply. She went
into her new work with a humble spirit, and this humility offset
whatever was aggressive and militant in her. The death of her mother and
the aloofness of her father had turned all her ardors back upon
herself. They found vent now in her new work, and she was not long in
perceiving that she needed those whom she was called upon to serve quite
as much as they needed her.

Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna Carton, who had been shopping, met Kate one day
crossing the city with a baby in her arms and two miserable little
children clinging to her skirts. Hunger and neglect had given these poor
small derelicts that indescribable appearance of depletion and shame
which, once seen, is never to be confused with anything else.

"My goodness!" cried Mrs. Barsaloux, glowering at Kate through her veil;
"what sort of work is this you are doing, Miss Barrington? Aren't you
afraid of becoming infected with some dreadful disease? Wherever do you
find the fortitude to be seen in the company of such wretched little
creatures? I would like to help them myself, but I'd never be willing to
carry such filthy little bags of misery around with me."

Kate smiled cheerfully.

"We've just put their mother in the Bridewell," she said, "and their
father is in the police station awaiting trial. The poor dears are going
to be clean for once in their lives and have a good supper in the
bargain. Maybe they'll be taken into good homes eventually. They're
lovely children, really. You haven't looked at them closely enough, Mrs.
Barsaloux."

"I'm just as close to them as I want to be, thank you," said the lady,
drawing back involuntarily. But she reached for her purse and gave
Kate a bill.

"Would this help toward getting them something?" she asked.

Marna laughed delightedly.

"I'm sure they're treasures," she said. "Mayn't I help Miss Barrington
take them to wherever they're going, _tante_? I shan't catch a thing,
and I love to know what becomes of homeless children."

Kate saw a look of acute distress on Mrs. Barsaloux's face.

"This isn't your game just now, Miss Cartan," Kate said in her downright
manner. "It's mine. I'm moving my pawns here and there, trying to find
the best places for them. It's quite exhilarating."

Her arms were aching and she moved the heavy baby from one shoulder to
the other.

"A game, is it?" asked the Irish girl. "And who wins?"

"The children, I hope. I'm on the side of the children first and last."

"Oh, so am I. I think it's just magnificent of you to help them."

Kate disclaimed the magnificence.

"You mustn't forget that I'm doing it for money," she said. "It's my
job. I hope I'll do it well enough to win the reputation of being
honest, but you mustn't think there's anything saintly about me,
because there isn't. Good-bye. Hold on tight, children!"

She nodded cheerfully and moved on, fresh, strong, determined, along the
crowded thoroughfare, the people making way for her smilingly. She saw
nothing of the attention paid her. She was wondering if her arms would
hold out or if, in some unguarded moment, the baby would slip from them.
Perhaps the baby was fearful, too, for it reached up its little clawlike
hands and clasped her tight about the neck. Kate liked the feeling of
those little hands, and was sorry when they relaxed and the weary little
one fell asleep.

Each day brought new problems. If she could have decided these by mere
rule of common sense, her new vocation might not have puzzled her as
much as it did. But it was uncommon, superfine, intuitive sense that was
required. She discovered, for example, that not only was sin a virtue in
disguise, but that a virtue might be degraded into a sin.

She put this case to Honora and David one evening as the three of them
sat in Honora's drawing-room.

"It's the case of Peggy Dunn," she explained. "Peggy likes life. She has
brighter eyes than she knows what to do with and more smiles than she
has a chance to distribute. She has finished her course at the parochial
school and she's clerking in a downtown store. That is slow going for
Peggy, so she evens things up by attending the Saturday night dances.
When she's whirling around the hall on the tips of her toes, she really
feels like herself. She gets home about two in the morning on these
occasions and finds her mother waiting up for her and kneeling before a
little statue of the Virgin that stands in the corner of the
sitting-room. As soon as the mother sees Peggy, she pounces on her and
weeps on her shoulder, and after Peggy's in bed and dead with the tire
in her legs, her mother gets down beside the bed and prays some more.
'What would you do, please,' says Peggy to me, 'if you had a mother that
kept crying and praying every time you had a bit of fun? Wouldn't you
run away from home and get where they took things aisier?'"

David threw back his head and roared in sympathetic commendation of
Peggy's point of view.

"Poor little mother," sighed Honora. "I suppose she'll send her girl
straight on the road to perdition and never know what did it."

"Not if I can help it," said Kate. "I don't believe in letting her go to
perdition at all. I went around to see the mother and I put the
responsibility on her. 'Every time you make Peggy laugh,' I said, 'you
can count it for glory. Every time you make her swear,--for she does
swear,--you can know you've blundered. Why don't you give her some
parties if you don't want her to be going out to them?'"

"How did she take that?" asked Honora.

"It bothered her a good deal at first, but when I went down to meet
Peggy the other day as she came out of the store, she told me her mother
had had the little bisque Virgin moved into her own bedroom and that she
had put a talking-machine in the place where it had stood. I told Peggy
the talking-machine was just a new kind of prayer, meant to make her
happy, and that it wouldn't do for her to let her mother's prayers go
unanswered. 'Any one with eyes like yours,' I said to her, 'is bound to
have beaux in plenty, but you've only one mother and you'd better hang
on to her.'"

"Then what did she say?" demanded the interested Honora.

"She's an impudent little piece. She said, 'You've some eyes yourself,
Miss Barrington, but I suppose you know how to make them behave."

"Better marry that girl as soon as you can, Miss Barrington," counseled
David; "that is, if any hymeneal authority is vested in you."

"That's what Peggy wanted to know," admitted Kate. "She said to me the
other day: 'Ain't you Cupid, Miss Barrington? I heard about a match you
made up, and it was all right--the real thing, sure enough.' 'Have you a
job for me--supposing I was Cupid?' I asked. That set her off in a gale.
So I suppose there's something up Peggy's very short sleeves."

The Fulhams liked to hear her stories, particularly as she kept the
amusing or the merely pathetic ones for them, refraining from telling
them of the unspeakable, obscene tragedies which daily came to her
notice. It might have been supposed that scenes such as these would so
have revolted her that she could not endure to deal with them; but this
was far from being the case. The greater the need for her help, the more
determined was she to meet the demand. She had plenty of superiors whom
she could consult, and she suffered less from disgust or timidity than
any one could have supposed possible.

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