Part 6 (1/2)
”So there we were, thrown out into the harsh world, shelterless and almost moneyless. But we all three put our little capital together, amounting to about eleven dollars, went down town, and hired a furnished room. We managed to live a week on this capital, and then Terry p.a.w.ned his watch, which gave us five dollars. Gertrude soon disappeared with an old roue and went out of our lives. Terry and I kept along as best we could. Kate helped us as much as we would allow her to, and sometimes paid for our room, and I would sometimes eat at her house.
”During this period I was in a curious state of mind and body. Living in the midst of so-called vice, I was at first both attracted and repelled.
Yet my strongest feeling was a hatred of the life I had formerly led, and I was determined not to go back to it, happen what might. I should probably have gone much farther than I did, had it not been for my love for Terry, which made me feel that I did not want to throw myself entirely away. So I did not know whether to go into the game entirely or keep out of it. Terry did not try to influence me, but seemed to watch me, to make me feel that he would stand by me in any event.
”For a time we were both of us dazed and stunned by our sudden change in life. The change was much greater for Terry than for me. I don't know what his thoughts and feelings at that time were. They must have been terrible. For years he had lived, for the most part with his family, a quiet, studious life, the life of contemplation; and now he was suddenly plunged into the roar and din, with an ignorant and disreputable girl on his hands whom he would not desert. We were certainly on the verge of destruction. The inevitable would have happened, for no other choice was left me, and I should have drifted with the current and Terry would do and could do nothing.
”Just at the crucial moment, Terry met an old friend who offered him a political job, organising republican workingmen's clubs, and Terry accepted it. No one can understand how bitter this was to Terry. To work for a political organisation was to him great degradation. He did it for my sake, for the thirty-five dollars a week, so that I could be free to live as I wanted. I did not realise at the time how much his sensitive nature suffered, and I took poor advantage of the freedom his money and character gave me. What an intolerable burden I must have been to him, and yet he never even intimated a desire to leave me!
”I had an opportunity now to satisfy my desire for pleasure. Terry put no obstacles in my way. Yet the cup already tasted bitter. I tried to deny to myself that this life of pleasure was an illusion, and so I plunged into the most reckless debaucheries: I really would be ashamed to tell you of the things I did. I had affairs with all sorts of men, many of whom I did not know whether I liked or hated--seeking always excitement, oblivion. I frequented cafes where the women and men of the town were to be found, and made many acquaintances. Two or three of them proposed marriage to me. They no doubt wanted to 'save' me, and thought I was a prost.i.tute. I did not care to disabuse them on the subject: in fact I don't know whether I was what they called me or not.
”This life lasted only two or three months, but it seems like so many years to me. At the end of that time Terry's work was over, and we left down town and roomed with a respectable radical family. My health had broken down. I weighed only a hundred pounds, although three months earlier I had weighed one hundred and forty. My beautiful, healthy body had wasted away. Ah! how proud I used to be of this body of mine! how I used to glory in the vigorous, shapely limbs, the well-moulded b.r.e.a.s.t.s and throat. But all this pa.s.sed away before my youth had pa.s.sed away.”
Marie here pathetically omits to state the immediate cause of her ill health--a long and terrible experience in the hospital, the result of her excesses, during which time Terry was the only one to care for her, from which place she came broken in health, thin and pale, with large, dark, sad eyes, looking as she did when I first met her.
CHAPTER VIII
_The Rogues' Gallery_
”My terrible experiences during these months,” continued Marie, ”had at least the advantage of bringing me nearer to him who was and is the inspirer of whatever is worthy or good in me. It helped me to appreciate him, and surely everything I suffered, everything I may still suffer, is not too much to pay for that. He has made for me an ideal, and, without that, life is but a sorry, sorry thing. During those wild months I, of course, thought little of those things, those wonderful new things which I had heard of from him, but now, when we were living quietly with our anarchist friends, and the surroundings were in harmony with the mood for thought, my interest awakened. I read a great deal and listened attentively to the talk of the people around me, and slowly my ideas became more and more clear.
”It took a long time for me to learn, to really understand what the others were interested in. I did not dare to ask Terry too many questions, especially there, where everybody admired him and looked up to him so. A new shyness came over me when I began to see him in the light of a philosopher and a poet. He seemed so far above me and I felt myself so small and unworthy. But it was not long before I really began to feel a strong interest in all that was said, in all these social theories, in these ideas about the proletaire, about art and literature; and I began to read books in a far different spirit from what I used--I began to see in them truth about life, and to love this truth, whatever it was. And I loved the freedom of the talk, and, above all, I loved the feeling that from the highest point of view I was not an outcast, and that the people who seemed to me the best did not so regard me. It helped to give me the self-respect which every human being needs, I think.
”I thought for a long time that I was very lucky indeed to get admitted into this atmosphere. And, indeed, I know I _was_ lucky, but there came a time when, for a while, I was very unhappy, not in the society of the radicals--I always loved that--but among these particular people, because they could not, after all, rid themselves of some conservative prejudices. After a while I began to see that even those enlightened people really had contempt for what I had been, or for my ignorance, perhaps for both.
”This family, with whom we were staying, was supposed to have broad and liberal ideas, and its members prided themselves on the fact that they really put their theories into practice. Their home was run on a sort of communistic basis, and the men and women who lived there were not tied to each other by any legal bonds, for they believed in freedom of love.
They never made much noise about their ideas, or rather their practice, and were what you might call refined or cultured anarchists.
”Terry and I had nothing in a worldly way, and we lived there on 'charity,' so to speak, though that word was, of course, never used. We did, however, what work there was to be done in the household, trying in this way to give some compensation in return for a bed to sleep on and the simple food necessary to keep our bodies alive.
”Now, after a while, I began to feel crushed, oppressed in this home, among these cold, cold, refined people, although they were anarchists.
They could not help showing me their contempt: they made me feel inferior. They never said one word that indicated such a feeling, but I could feel it by their att.i.tude, by the att.i.tude even of the little child in the house. They looked upon me much in the same way as my former mistress used, when I was the servant in the house, except that they were bound by their theories to give me a nominal respect and to try charitably to improve my mind and make of me a philosophical anarchist.
”It was painful to me to see these people, who were so humane, who could not bear to see the lowly oppressed, who could not bear to have injustice done, to see these people pa.s.s me by in insulting silence, look at me with cold, unsympathetic eyes! How it hurt me, not to receive the word of encouragement from the kind look of people I looked up to!
So I crawled into my sh.e.l.l and did not go about much with the others. I think I was forgotten by nearly everybody for days at a time. Terry shared the room with me, and brought me food, as I grew more and more unable to eat with the cold superior ones. He brought me tobacco, too, and here it was, sitting all day alone, that I began the cigarette habit: if it had not been for that, I think I should have gone mad.
”I never ceased to love Terry, but I had a bitter feeling against him, too. He was always kind and good to me, but he spent most of his time with his intellectual friends, and I began to feel that even he was being 'charitable' to me. So after much misery and despair, I accepted a proposal of marriage from a friend of my wild days and fled with him to St. Louis. He took me to the home of his sisters and parents, where I lived in peace and quiet for three weeks, recovered some of my health and strength, and was able to review my past and think of my future; and reflect on my coming marriage.
”The people I was with now were kind and sympathetic. They did not know about my past life--only my prospective husband knew--he, of course, knew all. The others thought I was a poor shop-girl, tired and overworked. They were refined people, fairly well-to-do, rather bourgeois, but with good hearts, and so innocent that they believed everything their son told them, and received me as a daughter and sister.
”Perhaps my nature is perverse, I don't know; but as soon as I got a little rest and peace, I began to think of what I had left and especially of Terry. It was not only my love for him that called, but what my life with him had been and would be if I returned--a life that was not a commonplace life, a life of intelligence and freedom. Already I was bored by the quiet goodness of the people I was with, and I wanted 'something doing'!
”I saw Terry again as I had seen him first, with the glamour of ardent love, the love that overleaps all barriers and, if only for an instant, stands face to face with love, unhesitating, tumultuous, and triumphant.
The memory of even one perfect moment can never leave us, even if life be ever so dark and harsh and bitter, there will always be that single ray of light to illumine the darkness, and keep our steps from utter and complete stumbling.
”I thought of Terry day and night, and grew so melancholy that my new found friends were alarmed and suggested hastening the marriage, in order to let me go South with my husband. This alarmed me terribly and I begged that no such step should be taken. With much inward trembling, I proposed that the marriage should be postponed and that I return to Chicago. They would not listen to this, and I could see in their honest faces the deepest amazement and a kind of suspicion. So I took refuge in tears, pleading ill-health and offering no more suggestions.
”That same day I wrote Terry a long letter, in which I told him that I still loved him, could not forget him, but had taken this step in desperation because I could no longer endure living among these people in Chicago, his friends, but not mine; that here in St. Louis I had found a certain measure of peace and quiet which had lately been disturbed by the realisation that soon I must decide to take a step which would perhaps separate us two irrevocably, that I longed more than words could tell to see him, to look into his face. I could never go back, I wrote, to that life I had been living, because what I had learned from him of what life is and what makes it worth living, had made that thing impossible for me. So, I wrote, I could not go back, and how, without him, could I go forward? So here I was, weak, perplexed, and I begged him to write me, to advise me what to do.