26 Tales out of time
It is not my intention to run through the whole, colourful catalogue, but I hope I may be pardoned for retelling two or three of these stories: the two or three that really exceed fiction in melodrama, needless tragedy, and twisted humour.
There was Bessie, who, for several weeks after her baby was born gave me music lessons, because my aunt thought it would settle her mind, and that I might as well benefit by the healing process. Bessie came from Port Arthur. She was a fragile, softspoken young woman, with fair hair and the wide blue eyes which are supposed to be so appealing to men. She had a fairly good education, and was an excellent musician. Her people were the sort we usually call the salt of the earth. Decent, respectable, hard-working people. Bessie’s story reads like something out of Dickens at his most lacrimal inventiveness, yet it was impossible to doubt her.
Bessie was the only daughter in a family of several sons. Her father worshipped her, and her brothers, who had paid for her musical instruction, were immensely proud of her. Yet it was they who unwittingly paved the way for her tragic experience.
One day they brought home a mining engineer, a young fellow to whom they had taken a fancy, and who wanted lodgings in some decent house. He came on a visit, and remained over a year. That he should have repaid the kindly regard of the family, and Bessie’s affection, as he did, is nothing new in human affairs, but the way he made his escape deserves mention.
Employed as he was, it was not unusual for him to be away for several weeks at a time. After one such absence, Bessie, in fear and trembling, confessed her predicament. But of course there was nothing for her to fear! Certainly not. Was he not her lover?
How ashamed she was, to have doubted him! How she wept in his comforting arms! Once again, all was well with the world. Even when, a few days later, he left again, she accepted his smiling reassurance in perfect faith. He had a job to finish, but when that was done they’d be married, and go away somewhere. Twice he repeated his flying visit, each time augmenting the golden promises. Then, silence.
Weeks of silence, while fear turned her blood to ice, and every night to sleepless misery. What was she to do? To whom could she turn? To her brothers, who were so proud of her? To her father, in whose eyes she was still a little child? To her mother, who would suffer the most, believing that she had failed in maternal guidance? Night after night Bessie struggled with her terror, not quite believing the dark intuition of her heart.
Then, one morning, she stole up to her lover’s room, where some of his clothes still hung in the closet, and his trunk stood under the north wall. With rising alarm, she thought, perhaps the trunk was empty? For a glance told her that the clothes in the press were discards. No, the trunk was not empty. When she shoved it, in sudden anger, it didn’t budge.
‘And that,’ sobbed poor Bessie, ‘was what frightened me out of my wits. It was too heavy! Even before I pried the lock, I seemed to know what was in it. Oh God, I don’t know how he could do it. I don’t. I really don’t’—And then she fixed me with her wide child’s eyes swimming in tears. ‘The tray was full of stones! Stones, from the fields where he made love to me.’
So now those flying trips were explained: trips to remove his valuables, without arousing suspicion. The rest of the tale came out in broken phrases, both of us frankly crying. There was nothing now to be done except to tell her mother, and the mother, of course, had to inform the father. Poor Bessie could hardly go on from there. Her father had been so crushed, so utterly broken, and then had flown into such a towering rage.
He would set the law on the scoundrel! He would have him tarred and feathered! Oh, any number of mad threats fumed on his lips. But, in the end, the poor parents knew that none of this would benefit their daughter. What they did decide upon, was to send Bessie away, before her brothers discovered the truth. And here she was, presumably visiting a relative. When the baby was born, a good home was to be found for it, and she herself would return to pick up the broken pattern of her life. Oh, yes, she was sure that that was best. That nothing else was possible under the circumstances.
What she failed to consider, what they all had failed to consider, was Bessie’s unspoiled, normal instincts. The moment the baby was born, she refused to be parted from it. The very thought made her clutch it to her breast in wildest agitation. She refused to give it up. Rather than part with it, she would never go home, but somehow would fend for herself where she was.
My aunt wired for the mother, not to dissuade Bessie from a natural course, but to give them the opportunity to hatch a fresh scheme. And, pathetic enough it was. Bessie’s mother was to pretend she had adopted the child of a relative, who had just died in Wisconsin, and Bessie herself was not to come home for several weeks. (Since becoming acquainted with her home town, I’ve often wondered if anybody was fooled.)
Well, that was better than nothing. The baby would be hers to love. ‘Oh, my sweet!’ she wept, hugging the little creature. ‘I can’t ever be your mummy—but I’ll love you—love you.’
The baby had to be weaned, and that night Bessie cried herself sick. It was after this that my aunt decided she should give me music lessons. To take her mind off the child. But the baby had only to send up a thread of sound, and away Bessie flew, nothing caring how I murdered the scales. How vividly her memory lingers. How often have I longed to know the end of the story.
***
Then there was Catherine, whose story not only touched me at this time, but was to unfold yet another chapter some years later. It is not an easy tale to tell, for the rock on which Cathy’s happiness grounded was religious prejudice, always a touchy subject. And I should like it understood that my rambles amongst people of all shades of faith have convinced me that the score of kindly people is the same in all of them. That the thoroughly unreasonable person is so, not because of his faith, but by nature.
Cathy’s father, a prosperous business man, was the sort of household tyrant we have come to associate with the Victorian age—a paragon, with no lovable weaknesses. The kind of man who neither smokes, nor drinks, nor lets himself believe that he ever cast a lingering—not to say lascivious—glance at a pretty ankle. He was a pillar in the Presbyterian Church, blessed his bread before eating, and, quite naturally, expected his wife and daughter to render thanks to Almighty God for such a flawless husband and father.
He was liberal with money, and maintained a good home. In other words, he had all the easy virtues, but not an ounce of actual charity, not even a glimmer of spiritual grace. Everything he did was right, and whatever he believed was beyond a single point of difference. His church was his God.
Until Cathy met Jim no occasion had ever risen to threaten the sway of that Presbyterian authority. Jim was a Catholic, and Jim had the audacity to love Cathy with a most unreasonable tenacity. But what really threw papa into violent fits was the discovery that his own child, his flesh and blood, his pretty, carefully reared Cathy, returned this outrageous affection. There were tears and battles, and more tears and battles. Cathy’s mamma, the meek sort of woman such men always choose with unerring good sense, tried a little mild argument.
Jim was such a nice boy. Indeed, there was nothing the least wrong with him, except his religion. And, after all, was he responsible for the delusions of his parents? Well, what of it? roared papa. If a man had small-pox, he was not responsible, yet one did not endanger life by contact with him. Was Cathy, the apple of his eye to risk even worse infection? No more arguments, please! Not a word!
Love is no respecter of religions. Cathy simply flew to Jim in secret, and the hopelessness of their case increased their need of each other. That they reacted unwisely is no reflection upon their innate decency. They were both very young, very much tormented by a multiplicity of emotions. For Jim was just as judiciously steeped in his particular brand of loyalty as Cathy. He was a devout Catholic, and his sisters, much older than he, were equally devout, but, as the final sequel will demonstrate, had also a sense of duty that Cathy’s father could not have exercised.
It was a thoroughly miserable mess. The kind of mess good people provoke and doubtless will continue to provoke so long as their goodness is tangled in sectarian creeds. When the inevitable consequences of all this useless struggle had to be faced, Jim very sensibly decided that they should be married at once. Cathy confided in her mother, and then the real battle began.
It was impossible! Quite impossible, moaned the thoroughly frightened mother. Papa would never survive such a shock. Only last year they had lost their elder daughter, and all papa’s affection centred in Cathy. It would kill him if she married against his will—and, moreover, how could she think that this—this other horrible thing, wouldn’t be just as insupportable, even though they did marry?
I must confess that, if Cathy’s mother had not herself repeated this part of the tale in an agony of grief and self-reproach, I might have come to doubt it. For, quite frankly, I have never been able to understand this, how human beings can believe that God, the Spirit of Life, can possibly be served by the destruction of his creatures. But the mother so worked upon Cathy that she consented to be sent away. They told the father she had an offer of a secretarial job in Duluth. So, here she was, in one of my aunt’s little rooms, eating out her heart and whiling away the endless hours writing to Jim, and, of course, to papa, who had to be told how the job progressed. Jim paid her expenses. That’s another thing I’ve noticed about piety. It seldom quarrels with the sources of money.
Cathy was a handsome, robust-looking girl, but appearances are seemingly deceptive. In the sixth month she began to develop serious symptoms. Aunt called in a specialist, who diagnosed her trouble. Diseased kidney, said he, which was the worst possible report under the circumstances.
Aunt at once decided that Cathy should be taken to the general hospital, where she would receive the necessary supervision and treatment. But, in spite of every care, she grew steadily worse, and before the month was up her condition was so critical that my aunt, who was still the go-between, sent for the mother and notified Jim he might expect a wire any moment.
A few days later Cathy died, giving premature birth to twins. Now, thought my aunt, indignantly, the wretched father will realize the enormity of his wrong-headedness. The poor young things might just as well have had a happy year or two. But, she was wrong. Overwhelmed though she was with her own loss, Cathy’s mother thought first and foremost of papa. Never, never, must he discover the circumstances of his daughter’s death. It would kill him. He felt so intensely, and his heart was so bad. Cathy’s death he could accept, as an act of God—but not—not the image of Cathy as the mother of illegitimate children! Utterly disgusted, aunt let her weep. Weep and pray.
The practical details she attended to herself, helped to some extent by Jim, who bore the brunt of all the expenses, though so numbed by grief it was pitiful to see.
The end of it was that Cathy returned home in solemn state, to be buried from the Presbyterian Church, and the little scraps of humanity were taken over by my aunt. What a fight she made to save them! Tiny, blue, under-developed, they had no more gotten a lease on life than they developed a severe cold that every minute threatened to cut off breathing.
Night and day, she watched them, in the end applying artificial respiration, and I don’t know what else. Futile, said the doctor, utterly futile! But one of the children survived, and grew to be a pretty little girl for whom my aunt formed so deep an attachment she wanted to adopt her.
But that was not to be. And here I must borrow from the future to end the tale. Jim, who obviously could do nothing about the baby without casting reflection upon the memory of Cathy, compromised with his conscience by sending the odd donation for little Ruby’s maintenance. Of course, my aunt acknowledged these gifts by reporting the child’s progress. Now, as fate would have it, Jim had received such a letter from her just as he was leaving on a visit to his elderly maiden sisters, who lived in Seattle. As spinsters will, the sisters decided to renovate their brother’s wardrobe while he was with them, and, in emptying the pockets of a coat, before sending it to the cleaner, they came upon a letter with a mystifying return address: ‘Haldor Olson, Midwife, Private Hospital, Duluth, Minn.’
What on earth could Jim be doing with such a letter? The temptation was too much for them, they opened the letter, and discovered Ruby. What their reactions were, or what sort of struggle ensued, I cannot, of course, say. But what their final decision was, I know only too well, for by the time all this took place I was living with my aunt and doing her correspondence. The sisters wrote that it was clearly their duty to give the child a happy, proper home.
‘Now I like that!’ cried my aunt.’ A couple of old maids understand the needs of an infant better than I! Especially a baby like Ruby, whose emotions are bound to be unstable. Tell the good women all I want from them is permission to adopt the child.’
Letters flew back and forth. But again the vexatious question of faith popped up. The aunts refused to relinquish the child they had never seen, and could not possibly love, because my aunt, who thought the world of Ruby, was a Protestant. No, they could not think of it. They were setting forth at once, to fetch their little niece. It was a matter of conscience, of Christian duty, against which the lesser claims of materialism were of no avail.
‘Religion!’ snorted my aunt. ‘The stupid women! Well—no doubt they meant to be kind. Oh, my poor little Ruby!’
But now to go back. Fortunately, these cases had not always a purely tragic flavour. For instance, a tall, dazed-looking individual presented herself at the hospital one wintry day. She wasn’t so well, she said. She had a tumour, she thought, some kind of swelling, anyway, that gave her a misery. So? Well, there were other hospitals for such ailments, explained my aunt, as seriously as she could. Oh, sure, but Jenny had taken a fancy to come here. A bit of rest might be all she required. To get off her feet, and be quiet.
Then she started to cry, in a soundless way. ‘Now, now! That won’t do!’ boomed my aunt. ‘I expect I can handle that tumour, all right.’
The tumour, in due course, made its appearance as an eight-pound boy. Even then, Jenny clung to her defences. It was most astonishing. It was that. She really couldn’t understand it—unless it was that the son of the house slipped up the back stairs, one night.
‘Well,’ chuckled my aunt, ‘the thing to do now, is to let the son of the house slip down to a lawyer’s office, and sign a cheque for the tumour’s maintenance.’
