MORNING
• • •
MRS. JACK AND THE MAID
• • •
At this moment, as Mrs. Jack stood there by her bed, her maid servant, Molly, knocked at the door and entered immediately, bearing a tray with a tall silver coffee pot, a small bowl of sugar lumps, a cup, and saucer and a spoon. The maid put the tray down on a little table beside the bed, saying in a thick Irish voice:
“Good maar-nin’, Mrs. Jack.”
“Oh, Hello, Molly!” the woman answered, crying out in the eager and surprised and rather bewildered tone with which she usually responded to a greeting. “How are you?—Hah?”—clapping her hand to one ear as she phrased this conventional question, as if she was really eagerly concerned, but immediately adding: “Isn’t it going to be a nice day? Did you ever see a more beautiful morning in your life?”
“Oh, beautiful, Mrs. Jack,” Molly answered. “Beautiful!” The maid’s voice had a solemn and almost reverential tone of agreement as she answered, but there was in it the undernote of something sly, furtive, sullen and Irish, and the other woman looking at her swiftly now saw the maid’s eyes, sullen, drunken, inflamed, and irrationally choleric, staring back at her. The maid’s voice was respectful and even unctuously submissive in its agreement but her bleared and angry looking eyes stared back with a sullen and drunken rancour, a resentfulness, whose bold, wilful and wicked defiant glance seemed to be directed not so much at her mistress as at the general family of the earth. Or, if her angry eye did swelter with a glare of spite more personal and direct, her resentment was instinctive, blind and stubborn—it just smouldered in her with an ugly truculence, and she did not know the reason for it. Certainly, it was not based on any feeling of class inferiority, for she was Irish and a papist to the bone, and where social dignities were concerned she had no doubt at all on which side condescension lay.
She had served this woman and her family for more than twenty years, and it must be admitted (for her present defection was a recent one) that she had swindled them, stolen from them, lied to (and for) them, and grown slothful on their bounty with a very affectionate devotion and warmth of old Irish feeling—but she had never doubted for a moment that they would all ultimately go to hell, together with the other pagans and all alien heathen tribes whatever.
Meanwhile, she had done herself pretty well among these prosperous infidels for some twenty years, fattening herself up in a cushy job, wearing the scarcely worn garments of two of the best dressed women on the earth and seeing to it that the constable who came to woo her several times a week should lack for nothing in the way of food and drink to spur him on to fresh accomplishment in the exercise in which, it seemed to her, he excelled—or, as she would have put it, “a [?].”
Meanwhile she had feathered her nest snugly to the tune of several thousand dollars, and kept the old folks back in Clare or Cork or wherever it was she came from, faithfully furnished with a glittering and lascivious chronicle, sprinkled with pious interjections of regret and deprecation and appeals to the Virgin to watch over her and guard her among such infidels of this brave new world that had such pickings in it. No—decidedly this truculent resentment which smouldered in her eye had nothing to do with caste: she had lived here for twenty years a kind of female Marco Polo enjoying the bounty of a very good superior sort of heathen, and growing used and tolerant to almost all their sinful customs, but she had no doubt where the true way and the true light was, and that she would one day find her way back into the more civilized and Christian precincts of her own kind.
Neither did the grievance in the maid’s hot eye come from a sense of poverty, the stubborn silent anger of the poor against the rich, the feeling that good decent people like herself must fetch and carry all their lives for lazy idle wasters, that she must drudge with roughened fingers all day long in order that this fine lady might smile brightly and keep beautiful. No, the maidservant knew full well that there was no task in all the household range of duties—whether of serving, mending, cooking, cleaning or repairing, which her mistress could not do far better and with more dispatch than she.
And she knew further that every day in the great city which roared all about her own dull ears this other woman was going back and forth with the energy of a dynamo, a shining needle flashing through the million repetitions of the earth’s dull web, buying, ordering, fitting, cutting, and designing—now on the scaffolds with the painters, beating them at their own business in immense, draughty and rather dismal rooms where her designs were hammered into substance, now sitting cross-legged among great bolts of cloth and plying a needle with a defter finger than any on the dully flashing little hands of the peaked and pallid tailors all about her, now searching and prying about indefatigably through a dozen gloomy little junk shops until she unearthed triumphantly out of the tottering heaps of junk the exact small ornament which she must have—always after her people, always good humoredly but formidably pressing on, keeping the affair in hand, and pushing it to its conclusion (enforcing the structure, the design, the rich incomparable color of her own life on the incompetent chaos of inept lives and actions all about her) in spite of the laziness, carelessness, vanity, stupidity, indifference and faithlessness of the people with which she had to work—painters, actors, shifters, bankers, union bosses, lighters, tailors and costumers, producers and directors—the whole immense motley, and for the most part shabbily inept and tawdry crew which carried on the crazy and precarious affair that is known as “the show business.”
No: the maid had seen enough of the hard world in which her mistress daily strove and conquered to convince herself that even if she had possessed any of the immense talent and knowledge that her mistress had to have, she did not have in all her lazy body as much energy, resolution, and power as the other woman carried in the tip of her little finger. And this knowledge, so far from arousing any feeling of resentment in her, only gave her a feeling of self-satisfaction, a gratified feeling that her mistress, not herself, was really the working woman and that, enjoying the same food, the same drink, the same shelter—yes! even the same clothing as her mistress—she would not swap places with her for any thing on earth.
Yes, the maid knew that she was fortunate, and had no cause for complaint: yet her grievance, ugly and perverse, glowered implacably in her inflamed and mutinous eye. And she could not have found a word or reason for that grievance, but as the two women stood there, it scarcely needed any word. The reason for it was printed into their flesh, legible in everything they did, in every act and move they made. It was not against the other woman’s wealth, authority, and position that the maid’s rancour was directed, but against something much more personal and indefinable—against the very tone and quality of the other woman’s life. For there had come over the maid’s life in the past year a distempered sense of failure, and frustration, an angry discontent, an obscure but powerful feeling that her life had somehow gone awry and dissonant, and was growing into a sterile and fruitless age without ever having come to any ripeness. And she was goaded, baffled, and tormented, as so many people have been, by a sense of having missed something splendid and magnificent in life, without knowing at all what it was. But whatever it was, the other woman seemed marvelously somehow to have found it and enjoyed it to the full, and this obvious fact, which she could plainly see, but could not define, goaded the maid almost past endurance.
Both women were about the same age, and so nearly the same size that the maid could wear any of her mistress’ garments without alteration. But if they had been creatures from separate planetary systems, if each had been formed, filled and given life by a completely different protoplasm, the physical differences between them could not have been more extreme.
The maid was not an ill-favored woman. She had a mass of fairly abundant red-brown hair, coarsely woven and clean looking, brushed over from the side. Her face, had it not been for the distempered and choleric look which drink and her own baffled and incoherent fury had now given it, would have been a pleasant and attractive one. It had in it the warmth, and a trace of that wild fierceness, which belongs to something mad, red, and lawless in nature, at the same time coarse and delicate, murderous, tender, savagely ebullient like a lawless chemistry, which so many women of her race have had. Moreover, she still had a trim figure, which wore neatly the well-cut skirt of rough green plaid which her mistress had given her (for, because of her long service, her position in the household as a kind of unofficial captain to the other maids was recognized, and she was usually not required to wear maid’s uniform).
But where the figure of the mistress was at once rich and delicate, small of bone and fine of line and yet lavishly opulent and seductive, packed as it was from top to toe with juice and sweetness (so that the woman when one looked at her jolly, glowing, marvelously delicate face and figure was not only “good enough to eat,” but of such a maddening and appetizing succulence, such wholesome relish that it was with difficulty one restrained himself from leaping upon her and devouring her then and there), the figure of the maid was by contrast almost thick and clumsy-looking, no longer young, no longer living, and no longer fresh and fertile, but already heavied, thickened, dried and hardened by the shock, the wear, the weight, the slow inexorable accumulations of the intolerable days, the merciless years that take from people everything, and from which there is no escape. “No—no escape, except for her” the maid was thinking bitterly, with a dull and tongueless rancour, a feeling of inarticulate outrage, “—and for her, for her, there was never anything but triumph, there was never anything but an outrageous and constantly growing success. And why? Why?”
It was here upon this question that her spirit halted like a wild beast, baffled by a sheer and solid blank of wall. Had they not both drawn the nurture of their lives from the same earth? Had they not breathed the same air, eaten the same food, been clothed by the same garments, and sheltered by the same walls? Had she not had as much, as good, of everything as her mistress—yes! Even of love, she thought with a contemptuous bitterness, for she had seen the other woman’s lovers come and go for twenty years, and if that was what it took to keep a woman young she thought, she had had as many and as good herself.
Yet here she stood, baffled and confused, glowering sullenly with an ugly and truculent eye into the shining face of the other woman’s glorious success—and she saw it, she knew it, she felt its outrage but she had no word to voice the sense that sweltered in her an intolerable wrong. Instead, she stood there stiffened and thickened by the same years that had given the other woman an added grace and suppleness, her skin dried and sallowed by the same lights and weathers that had added health and lustre to the radiant beauty of the other one, her body stunned and deadened of its youth and freshness by the merciless collisions of ten thousand furious days which had served only to pack the other woman to her red rose lip with health and sweetness, energy and joy—and the end of it all was that she was being devoured by the same qualities the other woman fed upon, that she was growing old on the same earth, beneath the same impartial sky, whereon the other woman grew more beautiful day by day, that time whose grey and cancerous tongs was feeding like an adder on her life had yielded to this woman all that it had of richness, strangeness, beauty, that there was pulsing in her constantly a wild and dissonant chemistry of ruin, hatred, and defeat, that fed the sullen flames of her distempered eye, while—in the other woman there coursed forever a music of health and joy, an exquisite balance of power and control, of ecstasy and temperance, a pulse, a flame, a star!—an exquisite confluence of all the forces of a rare and subtle beauty which was as vital as the omnipotent and everlasting earth, yet poised more sweetly than a bird in flight.
And all of this—the tidal flood of this all conquering ever growing beauty had found its well spring somehow in the hard and dismal rock of stony life from which her own ruined flesh and baffled soul had drawn no provender but an acrid and unwholesome dust. Oh, it was true, staring her in the face with an incontrovertible and overwhelming evidence, established by a literal and cruel comparison, so that the story of her ruin and the other woman’s glory was written down in lip, cheek, eye, in every line and movement of the figure, and in the very chemistry of the blood which brought to one an ugly jungled dissonance, and to the other the singing and triumphant music of beauty and success, until the other woman’s victory was evident with every breath she drew, and not only the color of her life, the health and radiance of her soul, seemed to shine out, with a charitable but merciless benignity upon the warped and blackened spirit of the maid, but the very texture of her flesh, the weave of her hair, the rose of her lip, the living satin of her skin, the spittle of her mouth, together with all combining sinews, nerves and tissues, juices, fibres, jellies, marrows, the whole warm integument of pulsing flesh that bound her life together seemed of a finer, rarer substance than the maid had ever known.
Yes, she saw it, she knew it, cruelly and terribly true past the last atom of hope and disbelief, and as she stood there before her mistress with the weary distemper of her mutinous eye, enforcing by a stern compulsion the qualities of obedience, and respect into her voice and into the composed humility of her face which betrayed her effect nakedly in the mottled and choleric color of her cheeks and jaws, she saw that the other woman read the secret of her envy and frustration plainly and pitied her because of it. And for this she hated her, because pity seemed to her the final and intolerable indignity.
And, in fact, although the kind, jolly and eager look on the other woman’s lovely face had not changed a bit since she had greeted the maid, her eye had read instantly and with a merciless and deadly precision, every minute sign of fever, envy and inchoate mutiny, the unwholesome dissonant fury that was raging in the woman, mind and body, and at this moment, with a strong emotion of pity, wonder and regret, she was thinking:
“She’s been at it again: this is the third time in a week that she’s been drunk. I wonder what it is, I wonder what it is that happens to that kind of person,” she thought, without knowing clearly what it was she understood by “that kind of person,” but feeling the detached, momentary, and half-indifferent regret and curiosity that people of a powerful, rich and decisive character may feel when they pause for a moment from the brilliant and productive exercise of an energy and talent that has crowned their life with a triumphant ease and success almost every step of the way, and note suddenly, and with surprise, that most of the other people in the world are groping, reeling, fumbling, blindly and wretchedly about, eking out from day to day, the inept and wretched progress of grey lives, that are so utterly lacking in any individual distinction, character, or talent that each seems to be rather a small, grey and flabby particle of some immense and vicious life-substance than a living and beautiful creature who is able to feel and to inspire the whole intolerable music of love, beauty, joy, passion, pain and death, of wild regret, exultancy, desire and depthless sorrow, which men have felt and made immortal on the earth.
And now, the mistress, with a strong emotion of discovery and surprise, was feeling this as she looked at the servant who had lived with her familiarly for more than twenty years, and as she now for the first time reflected closely on the kind of life the other woman might have had:
“What is it?” she kept thinking. “What’s gone wrong with her? She never used to be this way, it’s all happened in the last six months. And Molly used to be so pretty, too,” she thought. “Why—when she first came to us twenty years ago she was really a very handsome girl,”—and she started with a memory of surprise—“Isn’t it a shame!” she thought indignantly, “That she should let herself go to seed like this—a girl who’s had the chances that she’s had! I wonder why she never married—she used to have a half dozen of those big policemen on the string, they were mad about her, she could have had her pick of them!”
And suddenly, as she stood there looking kindly at the servant, the woman’s breath, foul, stale and sour with a rank whiskey stench was blown upon her, and she got suddenly a rank body smell, an old odor of pit and crotch, strong, hairy, female and unwashed. She frowned slightly with a feeling of revulsion that was almost like a physical pain, and her rosy and delicate face began to burn more deeply with a hot excited glow of shame, embarrassment, and acute distaste.
“God! But she stinks!” she thought, with a feeling of horror and disgust. “You could cut the smell around her with an axe! The nasty bitches!” she thought suddenly, now including all her servants in a feeling of indignant contempt. “I’ll bet they never wash—and here they are all day long with nothing to do, and they could at least keep clean! My God! You’d think these people would be so damned glad to be here in this lovely place with the fine life that we’ve made for them, that they would be a little proud of it and try to show that they appreciate it—but no!—What trash they are—the lazy, lying, thieving sluts! They’re just not good enough!” she thought scornfully, and for a moment her fine and delicate mouth was disfigured slightly at one corner by an expression, almost racial in its contempt and arrogance, and certainly common to people of her race.
It was an expression which had in it not only the qualities of contempt and scorn, but also a quality that was too bold and naked in its sneering arrogance, as if it was too eager to flaunt and brandish its insolent contempt into the face of any passer by. And although this ugly look, so full of pride and scorn, and a lewd and cynical materialism, rested only for a second, and almost imperceptibly, about the edges of the woman’s mouth, it did not sit well on her lovely face, and for just a moment it gave her fine, strong and sensitive mouth a coarse touch of something ugly, loose and sensual. Then it was gone. But the maid had seen it, and that swift look, with all it carried of contempt and arrogance, had stung and whipped her frenzied spirit to the quick.
“Oh, yes, my fine lady!” she was thinking. “It’s too good for the likes of us, you are, isn’t it? Oh my, no, but we’re very fine, aren’t we? What with our fine clothes and our evening gowns, and our forty pairs of hand made shoes—Jesus! now! Ye’d think she was some kind of centipede to see the different pairs of shoes she’s got—and our silk petticoats and step-ins that we have made in Par-is, now—yes!—that makes it very fine, doesn’t it—it’s not as if we ever did a little private [fucking] on the side, like ordinary people, is it?—Oh my, no! We are gathered together wit a friend fer a little elegant an’ high-class entertainment durin’ the course of the evenin’—What’s this I heard her say to him?—‘Yer face is so delicate,—it’s like an angel’s!’ Jesus! now! But aint that nice!—His face! God, it’s the first time, that I ever knew of anyone to keep his face buttoned in his britches!—But maybe that’s the way they do it now, in high society!—But if it’s some poor girl without an extra pair of drawers to her name, it’s different, now! It’s ‘Oh! you nasty thing! I’m disgusted wit you! I believe ye’re no better than a common whore!’ Yes! An’ there’s many a fine lady livin’ on Park Avenoo right now who’s no better, if the truth was told—That I know and could swear to—So just take care, my lady, not to give yerself too many airs, for it wouldn’t take me long to pull ye down a peg or two when I got started,” she thought with a rancourous triumph.
“Ah! If I told all that I know of you—wit yer angels and their faces and ‘He’s simply mad about me little Edith,’ and ‘Molly, if anyone calls when I’m not here I wish ye’d take the message yerself—Mr. Jack doesn’t like to be disturbed’—Jesus! From what I’ve seen there’s none of them who likes to be disturbed. It’s live and let live wit them, no questions asked an’ the devil take the hindmost, so long as ye do it in yer leisure hours, but if ye’re twenty minutes late fer dinner, it’s where the hell have ye been and what’s to become of us when ye neglect yer family in this way? Sure,” she thought, warming with a flush of humor and a more tolerant and liberal spirit, “It’s a queer world, ain’t it?—And these are the queerest of the lot! Thank God, I was brought up like a Christian in the Holy Church, and still have grace enough be ashamed when I have sinned! But, then—” and now, as often happens with people of strong but disordered feeling, she was already sorry for her flare of ugly temper, and her affections were running warmly in a different direction—
“But, then, God knows, there’s not a better-hearted sort of people in the world—there’s no one I’d rather work for, than Mrs. Jack, they’d give ye everything they have, if they like ye—I’ve been here twenty years next April and in all that time no one has ever been turned away from the door who needed food. Sure, there’s far worse who go to Mass six days a week—yes, and would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes if they got the chance. It’s a good home we’ve been given here—as I keep tellin’ all the rest of ’em,” she thought with virtuous content, “and Molly Fogarty’s not the one to turn and bite the hand that’s feedin’ her—no matter what the rest of them may do!”
* * * * *
All this had passed in the minds and hearts of the two women with the speed of light, the instancy of thought. Meanwhile, the maid, having set the tray down on a little table by the bedside, had gone to the windows, lowered one of them and raised the shades to admit more light, slightly adjusted the curtains, and was now in the bath room drawing the water for her mistress’ bath, an activity signalized at first by the sound of thick tumbling waters, and later by a sound more quiet and sustained as she reduced the flow and tempered the boiling fluid to a moderate heat.
While this was going on, the other woman had seated herself on the edge of her bed, crossed her legs briskly in a strong, jaunty and yet graceful movement, poured out a cup of the black steaming coffee from the tall silver pot, opened the newspaper which lay folded on the tray, and now, as she drank her coffee, she was staring with a blank troubled frown at the headlines of the paper, meanwhile slipping one finger in and out of a curious and ancient ring which she wore on her right hand. It was an action which she performed unconsciously, but with great speed and deftness—a single swift and nervous movement of her hand which, when she was with people, always indicated in her a statement of impatience, nervousness, or strained attention and when she was alone, indicated the swift and troubled reflection of a mind that was rapidly collecting itself for a decisive action.
And now, her first emotions of regret, pity, and curiosity having passed, the more practical necessity of some vigorous and immediate action was pressing at her.
“He’s been furious about it—That’s where Fritz’s liquor has been going,” she thought. “She’s got to stop it. If she keeps on at the rate she’s going she’ll be no good for anything in another month or two—God! I could kill her for being such a fool!” she thought furiously. “What gets into these people, anyway?”—Her small and lovely face now red with anger and determination, the space between her troubled eyes cleft deeply by a frown, she determined suddenly to speak plainly and sternly with the maid without any more delay.
And, this decision being made, the woman was conscious instantly of a feeling of great relief and certitude, almost of happiness. For indecision was alien to the temper of her soul, and the knowledge of the maid’s delinquency had been nagging at her conscience for some time: now, with a feeling of surprise and relief, she wondered why she had ever hesitated. Yet, when the maid came back into the room again, and paused before going out for a moment as if waiting for further orders, and looking at her with a glance that now seemed affectionate and warm, she was conscious of a feeling of acute embarrassment and regret, as she began to speak to her and, to her surprise, she found herself beginning in a hesitant and almost apologetic tone, “Oh, Molly!” she said rapidly in a sharp and somewhat excited tone, as she slipped the ring swiftly on and off her finger—“There’s something I want to speak to you about—”
“Yes, Mrs. Jack,” Molly answered humbly, and paused respectfully.
“It’s something Miss Edith wanted me to ask you,” she went on quickly, somewhat timidly, discovering to her amazement that she was beginning her stern warning and reproof in quite a different way from the way she had intended.
Molly waited in an attitude of studious and respectful attention.
“I wonder if you or any of the other girls remember seeing a dress Miss Edith had,” she said and went on quickly—“One of those dresses she brought back last year from Paris. It had a funny grey-green kind of color and she used to wear it in the morning when she went to business. Do you remember?” she said sharply, clapping her hand to her ear, “Hah?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Molly with a solemn wondering air. “I’ve seen it, Mrs. Jack.”
“Well, Molly, she can’t find it. It’s gone.”
“Gone?” said Molly, staring at her with a stupid and astonished look.
But even as she spoke the other woman saw a furtive ghost of a smile, thin, evil, Irish and corrupt, at the corner of the servant’s mouth, in her sly and sullen humor, and a look of triumph in her eye, and she thought instantly:
“Yes! She knows where it is! Of course she knows! They’ve taken it!—Of course, they’ve taken it!—the lying sluts! It’s perfectly disgraceful and I’m not going to stand it any longer!”—and a wave of angry indignation, hot, swift and choking boiled up in her, flushing the delicate rose color of her face a thick and angry red.
“Yes, gone! It’s gone, I tell you!” she said angrily to the staring maid. “What’s become of it? Where do you think it’s gone to?” she asked bluntly.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Jack,” Molly answered in a slow, wondering tone. “Miss Edith must have lost it.”
“Lost it! Oh, Molly, don’t be stupid!” she cried furiously. “How could she lose it? She’s been nowhere. She’s been here all the time—and the dress was here, too, hanging in the closet, up to a week ago! How can you lose a dress?” she cried impatiently. “Is it just going to crawl off your back and walk away from you when you’re not looking?” she said sarcastically. “You know she didn’t lose it! Someone’s taken it!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Molly said with a dutiful acquiescence. “That’s what I think, too. Someone must have sneaked in here when all of yez was out an’ taken it. Ah, I tell ye,” she remarked with a regretful movement of the head, “It’s got so nowadays ye never know who to trust and who not to,” she remarked sententiously. “A friend of mine who works fer some big people up at Rye was tellin’ me just the other day about a man who came there wit some new kind of a floor-mop that he had to sell—ast to try it out an’ show ‘em how it worked upon their floors, ye know, an’ a finer, cleaner lookin’ boy, she says, ye wouldn’t see again in yer whole life-time. ‘And my God!’ she says—I’m tellin’ ye just the way she told it to me, Mrs. Jack—‘I couldn’t believe me own ears when they told me later what he’d done! If he’d been me own brother I couldn’t have been more surprised,’ she says.—Well, it just goes to show ye that—”
“Oh, Molly, for heaven’s sake!”—the other woman cried with an angry and impatient gesture—“Don’t talk such rot to me! Who could come in here without you knowing it? You girls are here all day long, there’s only the elevator and the service entrance, and you see everyone who comes here—and besides, if anyone ever took the trouble to break in, you know he wouldn’t stop with just one dress. He’d be after money or jewelry, or something valuable that he could sell.”
“Well, now, I tell ye,” Molly said, “that man was here last week to fix the frigidaire—I says to May at the time—‘I don’t like the look of him. There’s something in his face that I don’t like, you keep your eye on him,’ I says, ‘because—’”
“Molly!”—At the sharp, stern warning in her mistress’s voice, the maid paused suddenly, looked sharply at her, and then was silent, with a dull, sullen flush of shame and truculence upon her face. For a moment the other woman stared at her with a burning and indignant look. Then she burst out on her plainly, with an open blazing anger before which the maid stood sullenly, hostile, silent and resentful.
“Look here!” the other woman broke out furiously. “I think it’s a dirty shame the way you girls are acting! We’ve been fine to you! Molly, there are no girls in this town who’ve been treated better than you have.”
“Don’t I know it, Mrs. Jack,” Molly cried in a lilting and earnest tone—“Haven’t I always said the same? Wasn’t I saying the same thing meself to Annie just the other day? ‘Sure,’ I says, ‘but we’re the lucky ones! There’s no one in the world I’d rather work for than Mrs. Jack. Twenty years,’ I says, I’ve been here, and in all that time,’ I says, ‘I’ve never heard a cross word from her. They’re the best people in the world,’ I says, ‘and any girl who gets a job wit them is lucky,’” she cried richly. “Sure, haven’t I lived with ye all like ye was me own family? Don’t I know ye all—Mister Jack an’ Miss Edith and Miss Alma and Mr. Ernie—Wouldn’t I get down on me knees right now an’ scrub me fingers to the bone if it would help ye any—?”
“Oh, scrub your fingers to the bone!” the other woman cried impatiently. “Who’s asking you to scrub your fingers to the bone? Lord, Molly, you girls have had it pretty soft. There’s mighty little scrubbing that you’ve had to do!” she said. “It’s the rest of us who scrub,” she cried. “We go out of here every morning—six days in the week—and work like hell-”
“Don’t I know it, Mrs. Jack?” Molly cried. “Wasn’t I sayin’ to May just the other day—”
“Oh, damn what you said to May!” the woman said. For a brief moment she looked at the servant with a straight, burning face of indignation. Then she spoke more quietly to her. “Molly, listen to me,” she now said. “We’ve always given you girls everything you ever asked for. You’ve had the best wages anyone can get for what you do. And you’ve lived here with us just the same as the rest of us—you’ve had the same food, the same shelter—yes! even the same clothes—” she cried, “for you know very well that—”
“Sure,” Molly interrupted in a richly sentimental tone. “It hasn’t been like I was workin’ here at all! Ye couldn’t have treated me any better if I’d been one of the family!”
“Oh, one of the family my eye!” the other said impatiently. “Don’t make me laugh! There’s no one in the family—unless maybe it’s my daughter Alma—who doesn’t do more in a day than you girls do in a week! You’ve lived the life of Riley here!—The life of Riley!” she repeated, almost comically, and then stood there looking at the other woman for a moment, a formidable little dynamo trembling with her indignation, slowly clenching and unclenching her small hands at her sides. “Good heavens, Molly!” she burst out in a furious tone. “It’s not as if we ever begrudged you anything! It’s not as if we ever denied you anything you asked for! It’s not the value of the dress—you know very well that Edith would have given it to you if you had gone to her and asked her for it. But—oh! It’s intolerable! Intolerable!” She stormed out suddenly in a furious and uncontrollable anger. “That you should have no more sense or decency than to do a thing like that to people who have always been your friends!”
“Sure, and do you think I’d be the one who’d do a thing like that?” cried Molly in a trembling voice. “Is it me ye’re accusin,’ Mrs. Jack, when I’ve lived here wit yez almost twenty years? Sure, they could take me right hand”—in her rush of feeling she raised and held the member up, “and drop it from me arm before I’d take a button that belonged to one of yez. And that’s God’s truth,” she added solemnly. “I swear it to ye as I hope to live and be forgiven for me sins. Yes, I’ll swear it to ye,” she declared more passionately as the other woman started to speak—“that I never took a pin or penny that belonged to one of yez—and so help me God, that’s true! And yes! I’ll swear it to ye by everything that’s holy!” she now cried, tranced in a kind of ecstasy of sacred vows.—“By the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead”—
“Ah! Molly!” the other woman cried with a furious and impatient exclamation, turning angrily away, and, in spite of her indignation, breaking into a short and angry laugh at the extravagance of the servant’s oaths as she thought with a bitter, scornful and contemptuous humor: “God! There’s not an honest bone in her whole body—yet she’ll swear a thousand oaths and thinks that makes an honest woman out of her! Yes! And will stay stinking drunk all night and go to Mass next morning if she has to crawl to get there—and cross herself with holy water—and listen to the priest say words she cannot understand—and come out glorified—to steal from us all day! What strange and magic things these oaths and ceremonies are!” she thought. “They give a kind of life to people who have none of their own. They make a kind of truth for people who have found none for themselves. Love, beauty, everlasting truth, salvation—all that we hope and suffer for on earth is in them for these people, all that we have to do with our own blood and labor, and by the ambush of our soul, is done for them, somehow” she thought ironically, “if they can only swear to it ‘by the soul an’ spirit of me blessed mother who is dead!—’”
“—And, so help me God, by all the Blessed Saints, and by the Holy Virgin, too,” she heard Molly’s voice intoning, and instantly she turned upon her with a movement of furious and exasperated impatience.
“Molly, for God’s sake, have a little sense!” she cried. “What is the use of all this swearing by the saints and virgins, and getting up and going out to Mass, when all you do is come back home to swill down Mr. Jack’s whiskey? Yes, and to lie and steal from the people who have been the best friends that you ever had!” she cried out bitterly, and seeing the old and mutinous look which had returned now to the maid’s sullen and distempered eye, she went on with an almost pleading earnestness: “Molly, for God’s sake, try to have a little wisdom! Is this all you’ve been able to get from life?—To come in here and sneer and lie, and blow your stinking breath on me, when all we’ve ever done has been to help you?”—The woman’s voice was trembling with her passionate and open anger, and yet one would instantly have known, had he heard her, that her anger was something more than personal, that she was speaking not so much because she felt the maid had lied to her and stolen from her sister, but because she felt that the maid had betrayed and insulted something decent and inviolable in life—a faith and integrity in human feeling that she felt should be kept and honored everywhere. And this fine, bold, passionate quality of indignation was so plainly and earnestly written down in every feature of her face, and in every line and member of her vital and determined little figure, that it somehow made the woman wonderful. For it was plain that she would have spoken out without fear or favor to anyone, and at any place and time, as she had spoken to the maid, if she had seen some cut of cruelty, injustice or dishonor; yet it was also evident that she was in no way a quarrelsome or officious woman, but as kind, happy, and liberal in her nature as anyone could be.
Finally, the very sight of her as she stood there would have been sufficient to evoke a whole human faith again, a belief in a high, rare, and wonderful value of human dignity—and with a strength and truth in her which was so much greater than anything in the maid that it soared triumphantly above the maid’s sullen figure, establishing victoriously and forever above the servant’s feeble sneer the reality of beauty, joy, and glorious and abundant living on the earth. And it was this quality, that sprang and flourished from the everlasting earth, that the maid had seen and hated dumbly in her rancourous and barren soul, and that made the woman wonderful.
This quality of exultancy, energy, and joy which this woman had is not only the most rare and wonderful thing in the world, it is also so familiar and living a possession that when people see it, even though they have never seen it before, they feel instantly not only its power and beauty, but they feel that they have known it forever, that it belongs to them, and that everyone should be a part of it. Yet not one person in ten thousand has it; when he has, it is scarcely too much to say that nothing else matters. People will want to be near him, to feel the power, joy, and beauty of his presence, to live in the world of ecstasy and magic that springs to life everywhere around him and that lives in everything he touches. What is this quality? From where does it come? Where does it go? In what kind of people does it live? It seems to be a power that is completely arbitrary and indifferent to human choice. It chooses, rather than is chosen, and one finds it as often in brutal, ignorant and indifferent men, as in people distinguished by their talent or intelligence.
One finds it sometimes in the heavy shambling figure of a man with the brutal and battered face of a vagabond: as he swings along at a shambling step he will carelessly thrust one hand into the pocket of his shapeless coat, draw forth a cigarette, light it briefly between a cupped palm and hard and twisted mouth, and then walk on, with a wire of acrid smoke expiring slowly from his nostrils. Yet this simple and familiar gesture will not only awaken in the beholder an overpowering desire to smoke, but that man has somehow discovered tobacco again: all the joy, the pungent fragrance, the relish and the deep content that the first man who ever smoked must have known has been revived in the wink of an eye by the gesture of a tramp.
In the same way a workman tearing the thick and glutinous halves of a meat sandwich between his blackened fingers may awaken an almost intolerable hunger in the spectator as the finest chef on earth could never do; an old man sitting at the throttle of a mighty locomotive as he steams slowly past, by his one gloved hand of curving, his lean and somewhat withered applecheeks, his glint of demon hawkeyes on the rail, may evoke in the beholder a sense of glory, power, and joy, a music of space and ecstasy, an instant vision of the whole vast structure of the earth, the sleeping woods, the great dark continent of night, and new lands, morning, and a shining city, as all the eightlocked driving wheels and flashing pistons in the world could never do.
And these examples, as bright as beings in a shining water, as literal as morning, as incontrovertible as the savage thirst and hunger with which we nailed them to the walls of our fierce memory could be multiplied, as everybody knows, indefinitely, but to no advantage, for everyone has seen them, everyone has known them for himself, and we all know this radiant and exultant power has struck like lightning everywhere on earth, and has been chosen as its rare agents the most obscure and humble people as often as the most renowned. Certainly it had never made its dwelling in a richer earth than in this woman, for it seemed to inhabit not only every atom of her flesh, but to be part of the whole radiance and energy of her spirit, so that it was in everything she did, everything she touched, everything she said, and if she had done, said, or touched nothing, it would have been with her, and around her, filling the very silence with the presence of its exultancy and joy: For this reason, she brought magic with her everywhere.