Phases of an Inferior Planet

He looked up from his task to bestow a morose greeting.

"We have invited you to weep with us," he remarked. "The gentle pronoun 'us,' which you may have observed, is due, not to my sympathetic nature, but to the fact that I have lost a wager upon the rejected one to Mr. Paul – "

"Who is also among the prophets," broke in Mr. Nevins, with a declamatory wave of his hand. "For behold, he prophesied, and his prophecy it came to pass! For he spake, saying, 'The "Andromeda," she shall be barren of honor, and lo! in one hour shall she be made desolate, and her creator shall put dust upon his head and rend his clothes, yet shall it avail not – '"

"Shut up, Nevins!" roared Ardly, seating himself at the table beside Mariana. "As if everybody didn't know that Mr. Paul's prophecy was obliged to come to pass! Did you ever see a pessimist who wasn't infallible as a soothsayer? It beats a special revelation all hollow."

"Please don't be irreverent," remonstrated Mariana. "I am sure I am awfully sorry about the 'Andromeda,' and I believe that if Mr. Nevins had taken my advice and lightened those shadows – "

"Or mine, and lengthened that thigh," broke in Ardly.

"Or mine, and shortened the fingers," added Miss Freighley.

"Or mine, and never painted it," in a savage whisper from Algarcife.

Mr. Nevins silenced the quartet with promptness. "Hang it all!" he exclaimed, crossly; "between most of your suggestions for art's sake, and Mr. Paul's suggestions for decency's sake, there wouldn't be a blamed rag of her left."

"On the contrary," commented Mr. Paul, "an additional rag or two would be decidedly advantageous."

Mariana raised her finger, with an admonishing shake of the head.

"Out upon you for a Philistine!" she said. "I haven't heard such profanity since I showed my colored mammy a 'Venus de Milo,' and her criticism was, 'Lor', child! nakedness ain't no treat to me!'"

Mr. Nevins laughed uproariously, and filled Mariana's glass, while Algarcife glared from across the table.

"I should like to paste that motto in every studio in New York," returned Mr. Paul. "It was the healthful sentiment of a mind undepraved by civilization."

"What a first-rate censor you would make!" smiled Ardly, good-naturedly – "the fitting exponent of a people who see nastiness in a box of colors and evil in everything."

Mr. Paul bore the charge with gravity. "Yes, I keep my eyes well open," he responded, complacently.

Algarcife leaned across the table, and discussed woman's suffrage with Miss Ramsey. Mariana flushed and smiled, and glanced from Nevins to Ardly and back again.

Mr. Sellars, who had been engrossed by his salad, took up the cue.

"Oh, the world isn't to blame if we see it through a fog!" he said. "Excellent salad."

"Thanks," drawled Mr. Nevins, amicably. "I cut it up, and Ardly made the dressing. The cutting up is the part that tells."

"But why didn't you bring it to me?" asked Mariana. "I should have liked to help you." Then she raised her glass. "Health to 'Andromeda' and confusion to her enemies!"

There followed a wild clashing of glasses and a series of hoarse hurrahs from Mr. Nevins. After which Mariana was borne tumultuously to the piano, where she sang a little French song about love and fame.

Then Mr. Sellars sang an Irish ballad, and Nevins volunteered the statement that, after hearing Ardly, anybody who didn't mistake his nose for his mouth would be a relief.

"You don't listen," protested Ardly. "We have an excellent system," he explained. "We sometimes spend a musical evening, and when Nevins sings I look through the portfolio for my pieces, and when I sing he looks for his."

That night when Mariana went up to her room she was in exuberant spirits. In a whirl of energy she pirouetted before the mirror. Then she stopped suddenly, grew white, and swayed forward.

"I can't stand excitement," she said, and before Anthony could reach her she fell a limp heap upon the floor. Algarcife dashed into the adjoining room and returned with a flask of brandy. Then he undressed her, wrapped her in a dressing-gown, and, drawing off her shoes and stockings, chafed her cold feet. Mariana was too exhausted to protest, and allowed herself to be lulled to sleep like a child.

For several weeks after this she was nervous and unstrung. She grew hollow-eyed, the shadows deepened, and her sunniness of temper gave place to an unaccustomed melancholy. She had learned that a new life was quickening within her, and she experienced a blind and passionate fear of inevitable agony. She feared herself, she feared suffering, and she feared the fate of the unborn life. One evening she threw herself into Anthony's arms. "It is the inevitableness," she said. "If I knew that it might not happen, I could bear it better. But nothing can prevent it, and I am afraid – afraid."

Algarcife grew white. "I am afraid for you," he answered.

"And the child? We shall be responsible for it. The thought maddens me. We are so poor, and it seems to me that it is wrong. I feel as if I had committed a sin – as if I were forcing something into the world to fight with poverty and discomforts. It may even hate us for bringing it. I almost hope it will die."

"We will make it a happy child."

"But doesn't it frighten you?"

Algarcife smiled. "Not as much as you do, you bodiless bit of eccentricity."

"All the same, I feel as if it were a sin," said Mariana. "Mill says – "

Anthony laughed aloud and caught her to him. "So you are turning my own weapons upon me," he said. "For the sake of domestic harmony, don't quote Mill to me, Mariana."

CHAPTER XV

In the autumn the child was born. Mariana, dissolved in nervous hysteria in the beginning, rallied when the time drew on, and faced the final throes triumphantly. For several months beforehand she sat and waited with desperate resignation. Her existence, hedged in by the four walls of her room and broken only by the strolls she took with Algarcife after night-fall, exasperated her resentment against social enactments, and she protested bitterly.

"A woman is treated as if she were in disgrace," she said, "and forced to shun the light, when, in reality, she is sacrificing herself for the continuance of the race, and should be respected and allowed to go about in a right and natural manner. I believe all this indecency started with those old scriptural purifications, and I wish it hadn't."

But when the days passed, her lamentations gave place to serenity of speech, and her expression became almost matronly. Dramatically she was stifling her æsthetic aversion and adjusting herself to her part.

When it was over, and she lay still and etherealized among the pillows, she was conscious only of an infinite restfulness. It was as if the travail through which she had passed had purged her of all capacity for sensation, and the crying of the new-born child fell upon her ear like the breaking of faint and far-off waves of sound.

From Anthony's caress she turned with a gesture of annoyance, and, in a vague association of ideas, she wondered if a man who had climbed from hell to heaven would be gratified by a draught of milk-and-water. She seemed to stand aloof and far off upon some ice-crowned summit, where the air was too rarefied to support the growth of human passions. She felt that she had become a pure intelligence, and that the appeal of her flesh no longer retarded her ascent. The elemental values of life were obscured by the shadows of indifference. Love existed only as an intangible and forced illusion, passion as a disease of the blood. While her still and inert body lay freed from pain, her mind was singularly strong and clear. The limitations of a personality seemed no longer to encompass her. She imagined she saw as God saw, sustained by pulseless repose, seeing, not feeling, the swing of the universe. She wondered if the time would ever come when she would descend from this altitude and take up again the substance of self, when her senses would again enmesh her.

Some one came across the room and laid a bundle upon the bed beside her, but she did not look at it. Then her hand was lifted and a glass put to her lips, and the faint odor of chloroform which hung about her faded before the fresher odor of digitalis. The child cried at her side, and the first sensation she felt was one of irritation.

"Take it away," she said, fretfully, and fainted.

With her returning vigor, Mariana's normal nature reasserted itself. The first day that she was able to sit propped up among the pillows she had the child brought to her, and looked at it critically, half in curiosity, half in tenderness.

"Did you ever see one with quite such a screwed-up face?" she inquired, dubiously, of the nurse who hovered about.

"Plenty, ma'am; most of 'em are like that – all puckers and wrinkles."

"It might be a thousand years old," continued Mariana, "or a hickory-nut." Then she added: "I don't feel as if it belonged to me at all. I don't care for it in the least."

"That'll come."

"I hope so," answered Mariana, "and I am sorry that it is a girl. It will have so much to bear. I wonder if I looked like that when I was a baby. I declare, it is positively green. What is the matter with it?"

"Just the shadow from the blind, ma'am."

The baby lay upon its back, with half-closed, indistinguishable eyes, slobbering over one red fist. It looked old and wizened, as if oppressed by the understanding that it had entered upon the most perilous of mundane transmigrations. It had cried only once, and that was upon its entrance into the predestined conditions. There was something almost uncanny in its imperturbability, suggesting, as it did, that it had been awed into silence by the warning finger of fate.

"Poor little thing," said Mariana. She leaned over it and stroked the smooth, round head, from which the soft hair was rubbing off, leaving it preternaturally bald. "What a mite!" She encircled it within the curve of her arm and lay looking up at the ceiling. "How strange it all is!" she thought. "It was only yesterday that I was a child myself – and now my first and last and only born is here alive." Then she frowned. It seemed inexplicable to her that women went on travailing and giving birth. That a woman who had once known the agony of maternity should consent to bear a second or third or fourth child struck her as ridiculous. She closed her eyes and laughed. Suddenly she felt a clammy clutch upon her finger and looked down. The baby's eyes were open, and it was staring straight ahead at the cloud of dust and sunshine that flooded the room. The red fist had left its mouth and fastened upon her hand.

Mariana smiled.

"Its eyes are blue!" she cried, "just like turquoises. Look, nurse! Oh, my dear, poor, ugly little baby!"

A rush of tenderness choked her words, and she lay silent and rapt, her hand responding to the weak grasp upon her finger. In some way she felt changed and tremulous. That invincible instinct of motherhood, which was a forced and abnormal product of her temperament, pulsed from her heart to her answering veins. She experienced in its fulness the sense of guardianship upon which rests the first intuitive recognition of the maternal responsibility. Her emotion welled forth to meet the appeal of the helplessness beside her, and she extended her fragile arm as if in the act of giving shelter. When Algarcife came in some hours later he found her lying asleep, her hand still upon the small, soft head of the child. In the noonday light the intense, opaline pallor of her face was startling.

In quick alarm he leaned over her, listening for the rise and fall of her breathing. It came softly, with a still insistence, like the ripple of a faint wind upon rose leaves. The heavy lashes resting upon her cheeks accentuated the entire absence of color, and the violet tones rising in the shadows of mouth and chin lent to her face the look of one in a trance or in death. It was as if the scarlet current in her blood had, by some necromancer's magic, been transfused from pale violets. Her gown was open at the throat, and he marked the same bloodlessness and hints of bluish shadows in her cold breast. He saw it also in the fragile curve of her uncovered arm and in the marble-like beauty of her hands.

"Mariana," he whispered.

She turned slowly towards him and unclosed her eyes.

"Give me something," she said; "brandy – a great deal."

He brought it to her and raised her on his arm as she drank it.

"I was dreaming," she said, fretfully. "I dreamed that I was falling – falling past the earth, past millions of worlds – past a great many apple orchards, and they were all in bloom. But, somehow, I never reached the bottom. There wasn't any bottom."

"You are stronger now?" he questioned, almost wistfully.

"Not a bit," returned Mariana, peevishly. "I am so – so – so weak." Then she laughed softly. "Do you know that brandy makes me think of my childhood, and a great goblet of mint-julep, with the crushed ice all frosted on the glass. My father was famous for his mint-juleps. I wish I had one now."

"Shall I make it for you?"

"Oh, it wouldn't be the same! I should never like one that didn't have the ice frosted on the glass." She grew weakly reminiscent. "Once, when I was a little child," she said, "I was dressed up in a nice white frock and red sash, and sent out on the sidewalk to play, and I grew tired and wandered off and got lost. I went a long way, and at last I came to the city almshouse. I was going up the steps when I looked into a bar-room across the way, and saw a gentleman with a very red face drinking a toddy. I went over and asked him if he were related to my father, and he said he supposed not, but he took me in behind the screen and sat me upon a table and offered me a taste of toddy, and I said, 'No, thank you. I have plenty of that at home.'"

Then she turned over and went to sleep, while Algarcife sat beside her and held her hand. His gaze ravished her with its fierce tenderness. His life and heart and brain seemed bound up and enshrined in the sleeping woman who lay in that death-like pallor, with the child at her side. He followed the sweep of the loosened and disordered hair that fell in a heavy braid across the pillow. He lingered, unsatisfied, upon the worn and emaciated face, in which there was none of the material beauty of flesh and blood. With an impassioned ardor he studied the defects of outline, the thin and irregular features, the hollows of the blue-veined temples, the firm and accentuated chin. Now there was none of that bewildering illumination of expression left, which in moments of intensity was like a fleeting search-light thrown across her face, forever changing in tone and color. She lay rapt and wan and pallid – a woman overthrown.

His glance fell upon the child in the hollow of her arm, and he bent to look at it. He was conscious of no feeling for it as his own, but of a general feeling of pity for it as a helpless animal. He supposed the other would come later, and in the meantime Mariana was sufficient.

Then, as he sat there, a harassed look crept into his eyes, and he frowned impatiently. Mariana's illness had entirely exhausted the small fund he had accumulated, and he knew that the next few years would bring a hand-to-hand, disastrous conflict with want. For himself he cared little, but for Mariana and the child he experienced a blind and bitter disgust at his own impotence. Working night and day, as he did, and preserving his hold upon the Bodley College, which was at best an uncertain reef, he knew that he could manage to wring from the world but a bare subsistence. He felt resentful of the fact that all his knowledge, all his years of study, all his scientific value would weigh for nothing in the struggle for bread against a moderate capacity for fulfilling the dictates of other men. This ruthless waste of energy exasperated him in its inevitable assault upon his theories of life. He looked at his hands – thin and virile hands, with knotted knuckles and square-cut finger-tips – the hands of a nervous, impracticable temperament. Of a sudden he felt himself as helpless to contend with existing conditions as the baby lying within the crook of Mariana's arm. For an instant his natural irascibility of temper seemed to have overborne the bounds of his reserve. That extreme sensitiveness to minor irritants became painful in its acuteness. He saw in it the effects of the nervous exhaustion which followed in the wake of uncongenial mental work combined with the stress of financial worries, and withdrew the curb of will. For the moment he regretted his old life – regretted his freedom and the solitude which had surrounded him even amid the tumult of the city. He reproached himself that he had not allowed Mariana to live her life as it pleased her, unhampered by the obligations he had permitted her to assume. Then he recalled her as she came to him that September night, the letter fluttering in her hand, and it seemed to him that he was not wholly responsible – that something mightier than himself had manipulated their destinies. To his dark and embittered mood there appeared a certain humor in the thought that they were puppets in the hands of the grim comedian Time. And then the scientific tenor of his mind, which contrasted saliently with his nervous temperament, reasserted itself, and he traced in vague outline the inviolable sequence of cause and effect, upon which his own and the world's revolutions hung. Again he fortified himself with a philosophic acceptance of the authoritative "must" of those unconquerable forces which we call fate.

With a returning gentleness he loosened Mariana's hand and went back to his work.

When Mariana grew strong enough to wear a blue wrapper and sit in a rocking-chair beside the window, she began working upon dainty garments for the baby. With characteristic extravagance she embroidered a hundred roses upon a white carriage-robe which would probably not survive the first laundering. She made tiny bags for powdered orris-root, and scattered them among the tucked and ruffled cambric, and that faint suggestion of fresh violets was extended from herself to the child.

One day, Miss Ramsey, coming in on her way up-stairs, found her tearing up a linen petticoat to make night-slips for the baby, whom she had called "Isolde."

Miss Ramsey remonstrated. She had been a faithful servitor during Mariana's convalescence, and she felt that she had earned the right to interpose. "My dear Mariana," she said, "what are you doing? Cotton at ten cents a yard would do equally well."

"But I couldn't make the little thing sleep in cotton," answered Mariana, "and I haven't any money, so I cut up a few of my things. It must be well cared for. I really couldn't have a child that wasn't nice and clean."

Miss Ramsey smiled.

"Do you think," she asked, "that it would know the difference between cotton and linen? Besides, I've always heard that cotton was more healthful."

Mariana threaded her needle and bent her head.

"It is in the blood," she returned. "My grandmother couldn't bear to be touched by anything but silk. She lived upon her plantations and owned a great many slaves, and she could afford it. Everything, from her night-caps to her chemises, was made of soft white silk. I have one of her chemises, and it is all hand-sewed, with a fall of real lace around the bosom. My mother inherited the taste, and she never wore cotton stockings, even when she couldn't afford meat but twice a week. I am just like her, only she was proud of it and I am ashamed of it."

"But you have overcome it," said Miss Ramsey.

Mariana laughed.

"I can't. Anthony says luxury is bred in my bone, but then he doesn't even care for comforts. I believe he had just as soon eat turnip-salad on a plain deal table as sweetbreads on Irish damask."

"Life teaches us the pettiness of such things," said Miss Ramsey. "When one isn't sure one will get a dinner at all, one is not apt to worry about the possible serving. By-the-way, Mr. Nevins wants to paint the baby when it gets a little larger."

Mariana looked delighted.

"Of course he shall," she said; then she took the child from the nurse's arms and gave it into Miss Ramsey's. "Feel how light she is," she continued. "I know she isn't very pretty, but she is beautifully formed – nurse says so – and did you ever see one with quite so much expression?"

Miss Ramsey held it upon her knee, patting its flexible back with one timid hand. "I really believe it notices things," she said. "It is looking straight at you."

"Of course it does," Mariana answered. "Of course it knows its own blessed little mamma – doesn't it, Isolde?"

The child whimpered and squirmed upon Miss Ramsey's knee.

"Take it, nurse," said Mariana. "It doesn't look nice when it cries."

A week later Mr. Speares came, and was introduced to the baby as it lay in its crib. He leaned over it in the helpless inattention of a man who has a mortal terror of a human being during the first stages of its development.

"It looks very pleasant," he said, finally.

Mariana lifted the child and held it against her shoulder. Had Mr. Nevins seen her in her light-blue gown, with the soft look in her eyes, he would have seized the opportunity and used it to advantage.

"Look at her eyes," she said. "Is she like Anthony used to be?"

Mr. Speares examined it critically. "I don't observe it," he replied; "but I don't suppose its features are quite formed as yet. It will be easier to trace a likeness later on."

Mariana laughed and smoothed the long dress with her frail, blue-veined hand. "The nurse says it is like me," she returned, good-humoredly. "I say it is like Anthony, and Anthony says it is like the original primate."

CHAPTER XVI

"I am getting old," said Mariana. She was sitting before the mirror, and as she spoke she rose and leaned forward in closer inspection. "This line," she added, dolefully, rubbing her forehead, "is caused by the laundress, this by the departure of the nurse, and this by the curdling of the baby's milk."

Anthony crossed over and stood behind her. "I would give my right arm to smooth them away," he said.

Mariana fastened the collar of her breakfast sacque and looked back at him from the glass. She did not reply. Not that she would not have liked to say something affectionate, but that she felt the effort to be pleasant to be physically beyond her. Her life of the last few weeks had taught her that demonstrative expressions are an unnecessary waste of energy.

There was a rap at the door, and she opened it and took the milk-bottle from the dairy-man. After setting a cupful upon the little gas-stove, she raised the window and placed the remainder upon the fire-escape. "I am afraid," she remarked, "that I will have to try one of those innumerable infant foods. One can never be sure that the milk is quite fresh."

Anthony tied a cravat which was particularly worn, put on a coat which was particularly shiny across the shoulders, and went into the adjoining room to set the table. He boiled the coffee, took in the baker's rolls from a tray on the threshold, and put on a couple of eggs. Then he called Mariana.

She came, sat down at the table, and lifted the coffee-pot. She looked hollow-eyed and haggard, and her hand shook slightly. "I am so weak," she said, fretfully. "I can't get my strength. I just go dragging about."

Anthony looked at her in sudden pain. "If there were a speculating devil around who took stock in souls," he said, "I am sure we might offer him an investment. People are fools to think there is any happiness without money."

"Or any decency," added Mariana. Then the baby cried, and she took it up and brought it to the table, holding it upon her knee as she ate. Her appetite failed, and she pushed her plate away.

"The egg is so white," she said, pettishly, "I can't eat it." Then her voice choked. "I – I sometimes wish I were dead," she added, and went to pour the baby's milk into its bottle.

Mariana's strength did not return. As the months passed she grew more listless, her pallor deepened, and the shadows under her eyes darkened to a purplish cast. The incessant round of minor cares clouded her accustomed sunniness of temper, and her buoyant step gave place to a languid tread. It was as if the inexorable hand of poverty had crushed her beneath its weight.

Algarcife, coming in from his more systematic employment, would marvel vaguely at her unresponsiveness. His tenderness would recoil in pained surprise as he felt her indifference to his caress, and her long silences while he sat beside her. "Mariana," he would begin, "won't you talk to me?" and Mariana would rouse herself with a start. "But what is there to say?" she would ask, and sink back into stillness. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to understand that at such times she was but undergoing the inevitable reaction from long months of physical and mental suffering – that the energy which she had expended in supplying the drains upon her nature had left her incapable of further effort. He did not know that emotion with a woman is so largely regulated by nervous conditions, that complete exhaustion of body and mind is apt to repress, not the fund of affection, but its outward manifestations. In his passionate desire to shield Mariana, he had kept from her knowledge the financial stress into which her prolonged illness had plunged him. He had watched his growing indebtedness silently, and had reduced his personal expenses to a minimum while he sought to supply her with comforts. But from the immediate needs and anxieties of her own life he had not been able to guard her. The gnawing fears for the child, the nights when she awoke from needed sleep to lean over its crib and soothe it with lullabies, the weary hours in the day when she walked with aching head back and forth, he could not prevent, nor could he restore to her the health which she had lost. That the vein of iron which lay beneath the surface lightness of her nature had developed through responsibility, he saw clearly, but he also saw that she lived her life in apparent unrepining, not because of a rational acceptance of the order of things, but because illness and toil had for the time overthrown her æsthetic intuitions. To recall her as she had been during the first months of their marriage, white, fresh, and exquisite in attire, and then to look at her in a faded wrapper, her heavy hair disordered, her lips compressed, was to know that Mariana as she was to-day was not Mariana in a normal state. That it could not last, he knew. That with the first wave of returning vigor her longing for dramatic effects and the small requirements of existence would reawaken, he admitted unhesitatingly. She would grow vital again, she would demand with passionate desire the satisfaction of her senses – she would crave music, color, light, all the sensuous fulness of life. And where would she find it?