She described her mother who had died when Angela was twelve—a pathetic, inadequate creature; the descendant of women who had owned many slaves to minister to their most trivial requirements: “She could hardly put on her own stockings and shoes,” smiled Angela, as she pictured that mother.
She described her father, George Benjamin Maxwell—a charming, but quite incorrigible spendthrift. She said: “He lived in past glories, Stephen. Because he was a Maxwell—a Maxwell of Virginia—he wouldn’t admit that the Civil War had deprived us all of the right to spend money. God knows, there was little enough of it left—the War practically ruined the old Southern gentry! My grandma could remember those days quite well; she scraped lint from her sheets for our wounded soldiers. If Grandma had lived, my life might have been different—but she died a couple of months after Mother.”
She described the eventual cataclysm, when the home had been sold up with everything in it, and she and her father had set out for New York—she just seventeen and he broken and ailing—to rebuild his dissipated fortune. And because she was now painting a picture of real life, untinged by imagination, her words lived, and her voice grew intensely bitter.
“Hell—it was hell! We went under so quickly. There were days when I hadn’t enough to eat. Oh, Stephen, the filth, the unspeakable squalor—the heat and the cold and the hunger and the squalor. God, how I hate that great hideous city! It’s a monster, it crushes you down, it devours—even now I couldn’t go back to New York without feeling a kind of unreasoning terror. Stephen, that damnable city broke my nerve. Father got calmly out of it all by dying one day—and that was so like him! He’d had about enough, so he just lay down and died; but I couldn’t do that because I was young—and I didn’t want to die, either. I hadn’t the least idea what I could do, but I knew that I was supposed to be pretty and that good-looking girls had a chance on the stage, so I started out to look for a job. My God! Shall I ever forget it!”
And now she described the long, angular streets, miles and miles of streets; miles and miles of faces all strange and unfriendly—faces like masks. Then the intimate faces of would-be employers, too intimate when they peered into her own—faces that had suddenly thrown off their masks.
“Stephen, are you listening? I put up a fight, I swear it! I swear I put up a fight—I was only nineteen when I got my first job—nineteen’s not so awfully old, is it, Stephen?”
Stephen said: “Go on,” and her voice sounded husky.
“Oh, my dear—it’s so dreadfully hard to tell you. The pay was rotten, not enough to live on—I used to think that they did it on purpose, lots of the girls used to think that way too—they never gave us quite enough to live on. You see, I hadn’t a vestige of talent, I could only dress up and try to look pretty. I never got a real speaking part, I just danced, not well, but I’d got a good figure.” She paused and tried to look up through the gloom, but Stephen’s face was hidden in shadow. “Well then, darling—Stephen, I want to feel your arms, hold me closer—well then, I—there was a man who wanted me—not as you want me, Stephen, to protect and care for me; God, no, not that way! And I was so poor and so tired and so frightened; why sometimes my shoes would let in the slush because they were old and I hadn’t the money to buy myself new ones—try to think of that, darling. And I’d cry when I washed my hands in the winter because they’d be bleeding from broken chilblains. Well, I couldn’t stay the course any longer, that’s all. …”
The little gilt clock on the desk ticked loudly. Tick, tick! Tick, tick! An astonishing voice to come from so small and fragile a body. Somewhere out in the garden a dog barked—Tony, chasing imaginary rabbits through the darkness.
“Stephen!”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Have you understood me?”
“Yes—oh, yes, I’ve understood you. Go on.”
“Well then, after a while he turned round and left me, and I just had to drag along as I had done, and I sort of crocked up—couldn’t sleep at night, couldn’t smile and look happy when I went on to dance—that was how Ralph found me—he saw me dance and came round to the back, the way some men do. I remember thinking that Ralph didn’t look like that sort of man; he looked—well, just like Ralph, not a bit like that sort of man. Then he started sending me flowers; never presents or anything like that, just flowers with his card. And we had lunch together a good few times, and he talked about that other man who’d left me. He said he’d like to go out with a horsewhip—imagine Ralph trying to horsewhip a man! They knew each other quite well, I discovered; you see, they were both in the hardware business. Ralph was out after some big contract for his firm, that was why he happened to be in New York—and one day he asked me to marry him, Stephen. I suppose he was really in love with me then, anyhow I thought it was wonderful of him—I thought he was very broad-minded and noble. Good God! He’s had his pound of flesh since; it gave him the hold over me that he wanted. We were married before we sailed for Europe. I wasn’t in love, but what could I do? I’d nowhere to turn and my health was crocking; lots of our girls ended up in the
