CAPTAIN LEW GOLDEN would have saved any foreign observer a
great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect
type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in
Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been "captain" of anything
except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title
because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with
lawsuits.
He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar,
but no tie. On warm days he appeared on the street in his
shirt-sleeves, and discussed the comparative temperatures of the
past thirty years with Doctor Smith and the Mansion House
'bus-driver. He never used the word "beauty" except in reference to
a setter dog-beauty of words or music, of faith or rebellion, did
not exist for him. He rather fancied large, ambitious, banal,
red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he straggled
home, and remarked that they were "nice." He believed that all
Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His
entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he
never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and
he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of
the Republican party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but
kind, and almost quixotically honest.
He believed that "Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for
anybody."
This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his
daughter Una.
Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to
be vaguely discontented; not enough to make them toil at the
acquisition of understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a
comfortable semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read
novels with a conviction that she would have been a romantic person
"if she hadn't married Mr. Golden-not but what he's a fine man and
very bright and all, but he hasn't got much imagination or any,
well, romance!"
She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and
Captain Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to
callers. She attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club,
and desired to learn French, though she never went beyond borrowing
a French grammar from the Episcopalian rector and learning one
conjugation. But in the pioneer suffrage movement she took no
part-she didn't "think it was quite ladylike." ... She was a poor
cook, and her house always smelled stuffy, but she liked to have
flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of body, genuinely
gracious of manner. She really did like people, liked to give
cookies to the neighborhood boys, and-if you weren't impatient with
her slackness-you found her a wistful and touching figure in her
slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage,
a Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she
still retained at fifty-five.
She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and
mother-sympathetic, forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She
never demanded; she merely suggested her desires, and, if they were
refused, let her lips droop in a manner which only a brute could
withstand.
She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.
Una Golden was a "good little woman"-not pretty, not noisy,
not particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of
things; naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had
common sense and unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact
idealist, with a healthy woman's simple longing for love and life.
At twenty-four Una had half a dozen times fancied herself in love.
She had been embraced at a dance, and felt the stirring of a desire
for surrender. But always a native shrewdness had kept her from
agonizing over these affairs.
She was not-and will not be-a misunderstood genius, an
undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly
duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the
theatrical world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly
commonplace, small-town girl. But she was a natural executive and
she secretly controlled the Golden household; kept Captain Golden
from eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged
with too much reading of poppy-flavored novels.
She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were
too respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit
her to go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had
graduated from the high school-in white ribbons and heavy new boots
and tight new organdy-to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone
to gossip-parties and unmethodically read books from the town
library-Walter Scott, Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Mrs. Humphry Ward, How to Know the Birds, My Year in the Holy Land,
Home Needlework, Sartor Resartus, and Ships that Pass in the Night.
Her residue of knowledge from reading them was a disbelief in
Panama, Pennsylvania.
She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a
mother and wife, who would entertain the Honiton Embroidery Circle
twice a year.
Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess
of balladry. She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed
likely to be nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown
derby. She was fluid; indeterminate as a moving cloud.
Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor
grave handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her
"Puss," and want to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you
noted Una at all, when you met her, you first noted her gentle
face, her fine-textured hair of faded gold, and her rimless
eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear. These glasses made a
business-like center to her face; you felt that without them she
would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as her spirited
eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that you
regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips, and the
thick ankles which she considered "common," she was rather anemic.
Her cheeks were round, not rosy, but clear and soft; her lips a
pale pink. Her chin was plucky and undimpled; it was usually
spotted with one or two unimportant eruptions, which she kept so
well covered with powder that they were never noticeable. No one
ever thought of them except Una herself, to whom they were tragic
blemishes which she timorously examined in the mirror every time
she went to wash her hands. She knew that they were the result of
the indigestible Golden family meals; she tried to take comfort by
noticing their prevalence among other girls; but they kept
startling her anew; she would secretly touch them with a worried
forefinger, and wonder whether men were able to see anything else
in her face.
You remembered her best as she hurried through the street
in her tan mackintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high
up, and one of those modest round hats to which she was addicted.
For then you were aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round
her school-mistress eye-glasses, her gentle air of respectability,
and her undistinguished littleness.
She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as
the type of beauty which most captivated men, though every year she
was more shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men.
That a woman's business in life was to remain respectable and to
secure a man, and consequent security, was her unmeditated
faith-till, in 1905, when Una was twenty-four years old, her father
died.
Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a
number of debts, and eleven hundred dollars in lodge insurance. The
funeral was scarcely over before neighbors-the furniture man, the
grocer, the polite old homeopathic doctor-began to come in with
bland sympathy and large bills. When the debts were all cleared
away the Goldens had only six hundred dollars and no income beyond
the good name. All right-minded persons agree that a good name is
precious beyond rubies, but Una would have preferred less honor and
more rubies.
She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she
scarcely grieved for her father. She took charge of
everything-money, house, bills.
Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that,
however slack and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored
her and encouraged her in her gentility, her pawing at culture.
With an emerging sincerity, Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed
his gossipy presence-and at the same time she was alive to the
distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and
look wan. She sobbed on Una's shoulder; she said that she was
lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked for work.
One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is
that of unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times
you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity,
all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a
small income, and a shabby security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five.
The daughter ages steadily. At forty she is as old as her
unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and pathetically hopeful of being
a pianist or a nurse; never quite reconciled to spinsterhood,
though she often laughs about it; often, by her insistence that she
is an "old maid," she makes the thought of her barren age
embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and "wants to
keep in touch with her daughter's interests," only, her daughter
has no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she
stubbornly insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or
be content to stay alone, had she acquired "interests," she might
have meant something in the new generation; but the time for revolt
passes, however much the daughter may long to seem young among
younger women. The mother is usually unconscious of her
selfishness; she would be unspeakably horrified if some brutal soul
told her that she was a vampire. Chance, chance and waste, rule
them both, and the world passes by while the mother has her games
of cards with daughter, and deems herself unselfish because now and
then she lets daughter join a party (only to hasten back to
mother), and even "wonders why daughter doesn't take an interest in
girls her own age." That ugly couple on the porch of the
apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house-the mother a mute,
dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a
mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and
real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother
at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition
beyond the one at home. They are all examples of the
mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most touching, most
destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs all the
generations to come, because mother has never been trained to
endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees
nothing by herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice....
There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If
they were wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and
belonged to a club and tried to keep youthful at parties. If
middle-class, daughter taught school, almost invariably. If poor,
mother did the washing and daughter collected it. So it was marked
down for Una that she should be a teacher.
Not that she wanted to be a teacher! After graduating from
high school, she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the
small white district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road.
She hated the drive out and back, the airless room and the foul
outbuildings, the shy, stupid, staring children, the jolly little
arithmetical problems about wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount
of time that notoriously inefficient workmen will take to do "a
certain piece of work." Una was honest enough to know that she was
not an honest teacher, that she neither loved masses of other
people's children nor had any ideals of developing the new
generation. But she had to make money. Of course she would teach!
When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs.
Golden always ended by suggesting, "I wonder if perhaps you
couldn't go back to school-teaching again. Everybody said you were
so successful. And maybe I could get some needlework to do. I do
want to help so much."
Mrs. Golden did, apparently, really want to help. But she
never suggested anything besides teaching, and she went on
recklessly investing in the nicest mourning. Meantime Una tried to
find other work in Panama.
Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long
hill-slopes. But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole
cosmos. She knew somebody in every single house. She knew just
where the succotash, the cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept
in each of the grocery-stores, and on market Saturdays she could
wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its
possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out
beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia
and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such
methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge
insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach
like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It
was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was
facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word
"feminist" meant.
This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:
She could-and probably would-teach in some hen-coop of
pedagogy.
She could marry, but no one seemed to want her, except old
Henry Carson, the widower, with catarrh and three children, who
called on her and her mother once in two weeks, and would propose
whenever she encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She
had only to sit beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down
beside his. But she positively and ungratefully didn't want to
marry Henry and listen to his hawking and his grumbling for the
rest of her life. Sooner or later one of The Boys might propose.
But in a small town it was all a gamble. There weren't so very many
desirable young men-most of the energetic ones went off to
Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish had been
married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was
hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at
thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the
prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony
off the list as a commercial prospect.
She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution,
or any of that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted
to small-town women. But she really couldn't afford to do any of
these; and, besides, she had no talent for music of a higher grade
than Sousa and Victor Herbert; she was afraid of lawyers; blood
made her sick; and her voice was too quiet for the noble art of
elocution as practised by several satin-waisted, semi-artistic
ladies who "gave readings" of Enoch Arden and Evangeline before the
Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual Chautauqua.
She could have a job selling dry-goods behind the counter
in the Hub Store, but that meant loss of caste.
She could teach dancing-but she couldn't dance particularly
well. And that was all that she could do.
She had tried to find work as office-woman for Dr.
Mayberry, the dentist; in the office of the Panama Wood-Turning
Company; in the post-office; as lofty enthroned cashier for the Hub
Store; painting place-cards and making "fancy-work" for the Art
Needlework Exchange.
The job behind the counter in the Hub Store was the only
one offered her.
"If I were only a boy," sighed Una, "I could go to work in
the hardware-store or on the railroad or anywhere, and not lose
respectability. Oh, I hate being a woman."
Una had been trying to persuade her father's old-time
rival, Squire Updegraff, the real-estate and insurance man, that
her experience with Captain Golden would make her a perfect
treasure in the office. Squire Updegraff had leaped up at her
entrance, and blared, "Well, well, and how is the little girl
making it?" He had set out a chair for her and held her hand. But
he knew that her only experience with her father's affairs had been
an effort to balance Captain Golden's account-books, which were
works of genius in so far as they were composed according to the
inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their
elaborate discussion of giving Una a job.
It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately
down the short street, between the two-story buildings and the rows
of hitched lumber-wagons. Nellie Page, the town belle, tripping by
in canvas sneakers and a large red hair-ribbon, shouted at her, and
Charlie Martindale, of the First National Bank, nodded to her, but
these exquisites were too young for her; they danced too well and
laughed too easily. The person who stopped her for a long curbstone
conference about the weather, while most of the town observed and
gossiped, was the fateful Henry Carson. The village sun was
unusually blank and hard on Henry's bald spot to-day. Heavens! she
cried to herself, in almost hysterical protest, would she have to
marry Henry?
Miss Mattie Pugh drove by, returning from district school.
Miss Mattie had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had
grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she
have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school unless she
married Henry?
"I won't be genteel! I'll work in The Hub or any place
first!" Una declared. While she trudged home-a pleasant,
inconspicuous, fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field
daisy-a cataract of protest poured through her. All the rest of her
life she would have to meet that doddering old Mr. Mosely, who was
unavoidably bearing down on her now, and be held by him in long,
meaningless talks. And there was nothing amusing to do! She was so
frightfully bored. She suddenly hated the town, hated every evening
she would have to spend there, reading newspapers and playing cards
with her mother, and dreading a call from Mr. Henry Carson.
She wanted-wanted some one to love, to talk with. Why had
she discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had
tried to kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was
young, and she wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she
who was herself so young. And she would grow old here unless some
one, one of these godlike young men, condescended to recognize her.
Grow old among these streets like piles of lumber.
She charged into the small, white, ambling Golden house,
with its peculiar smell of stale lamb gravy, and on the old broken
couch-where her father had snored all through every bright Sunday
afternoon-she sobbed feebly.
She raised her head to consider a noise overhead-the faint,
domestic thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its
rhythm. The machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors
dropped on the floor-the most stuffily domestic sound in the world.
The airless house was crushing her. She sprang up-and then she sat
down again. There was no place to which she could flee. Henry
Carson and the district school were menacing her. And meantime she
had to find out what her mother was sewing-whether she had again
been wasting money in buying mourning.
"Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and
I've got to go and scold you," Una agonized. "Oh, I want to earn
money, I want to earn real money for you."
She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book.
She pounced on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una
scratched it open excitedly.
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New
York. Mr. Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They
lived in a flat and went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy
soul whom Una trusted.
"Why don't you," wrote Mrs. Sessions, "if you don't find
the kind of work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New
York and taking stenography? There are lots of chances here for
secretaries, etc."
Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and
straightened her mother's red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone
for an exquisite throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself
that she had made a decision.
She would go to New York, become a stenographer, a
secretary to a corporation president, a rich woman, free,
responsible.
The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly
gave her a feeling of power, of already being a business woman.
She galloped up-stairs to the room where her mother was
driving the sewing-machine.
"Mumsie!" she cried, "we're going to New York! I'm going to
learn to be a business woman, and the little mother will be all
dressed in satin and silks, and dine on what-is-it and peaches and
cream-the poem don't come out right, but, oh, my little mother,
we're going out adventuring, we are!"
She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in
her mother's lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest
wrinkly tissue-paper.
"Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has some one sent for
us? Is it the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she say in it?"
"She suggested it, but we are going up independent."
"But can we afford to?... I would like the draymas and
art-galleries and all!"
"We will afford to! We'll gamble, for once!"
