“Thirty-one years ago last June, my husband left me with the nineteen-year-old daughter of my Norwegian landlady. You couldn’t exactly blame him, of course. Trudie was as pretty as the girl on the cover of the most expensive candy box you ever saw, and as unscrupulous as Messalina—and I wasn’t either.
“I was much too busy being sick and miserable and cross and sorry for myself to be anything else at all, so he walked off with Trudie and nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot and left me with a six-weeks-old baby and a gold wedding ring that wasn’t exactly gold. And my landlady wouldn’t give me even one day’s grace rent free, because she was naturally a little put out by her daughter’s unceremonious departure, and quite frankly held me to blame for it, as she said a girl who couldn’t hold her own man wasn’t likely worth her board and keep.
“So, just like the lady in the bad melodramas, I wrapped my baby up in a shawl and started out to find work at the factory. Of course I didn’t find it. It was a slack season at the factories, and I looked like a sick little scarecrow, and I hadn’t even money for car fare. I spent the first evening of my career as a breadwinner begging for pennies on the more prominent street corners. It’s one way to get bread.
“In the next twenty years I tried a great many other ways of getting it, including, on two occasions, stealing it. But that was only the first year; after that we always had bread, though often there wasn’t enough of it, and generally it was stale, and frequently there wasn’t anything to put on it.
“When people talk about the fear of poverty, I wonder whether they have the remotest idea of what they’re talking about. I wasn’t rich when I married Dan; I was the daughter of a not oversuccessful lawyer, and I thought that we were quite poor, because often we went through periods where pot roast instead of chicken played a prominent part in the family diet, and my best dress had to be of tarlatan instead of taffeta, and I possessed only two pairs of kid gloves that reached to my elbow, and one that reached to my shoulder.
“I was very, very sorry for myself during those periods, and used to go around with faintly pink eyes and a strong sense of martyrdom. I wasn’t at all a noble character. I liked going to cotillions at night and staying in bed in the morning, and wringing terrified proposals from callow young men who were completely undone by the combination of moonlight and mandolin playing. Besides playing the mandolin, I could make two kinds of candy and feather-stitch quite well and dance the lancers better than anyone in town—and I knew most of Lucile by heart. Thus lavishly equipped for the exigencies of holy matrimony, I proceeded to elope with Mr. Daniel Ives.
“I won’t bother you much with Dan. He was the leading man in a stock company that came to our town, and three weeks after he saw me sitting worshipping in the front row we decided that life without each other would be an empty farce and shook the dust of that town from our heels forever. It was very, very romantic, indeed, for the first six days—and after that it wasn’t so romantic.
“Because I, who could feather-stitch so nicely, was a bad cook and a bad manager and a bad housewife and a bad sport—a bad wife, in short. I wasn’t precisely happy, and I thought that it was perfectly safe to be all those things, because it simply never entered my head that one human being could get so tired of another human being that he could quietly walk out and leave her to starve to death. And I was as wrong about that, as I’d been about everything else.
“I’m telling you all this not to excuse myself, but simply to explain, so that you will understand a little, perhaps, what sent my feet hurrying across the meadow path, what brought them back to the flower room at ten o’clock that night. I think that two people went to meet Madeleine Bellamy in the cottage that night—a nice, well-behaved little white-headed lady and the wilful, spoiled, terrified girl that the nice old lady thought that she had killed thirty years ago. It’s only fair to you that I should explain that, because of what I’m going to ask you to decide. And it is only fair to myself that I should say this.
“For twenty years I was too cold, too hot, too tired and sick and faint ever to be really comfortable for one moment. And I won’t pretend that I looked forward with equanimity to surrendering one single comfort or luxury that had finally come to make life beautiful and gracious. But that wasn’t why I killed Madeleine Bellamy. I ask you to believe that.
“The real terror of poverty isn’t that we ourselves suffer. It is that we are absolutely and utterly powerless to lift one finger to protect and defend those who are dearest to us in the world. Judge Carver, when Pat was sick when he was a baby I didn’t have enough money to get a doctor for him; I didn’t have enough money to get medicine. When I went to work I had to leave him with people who were vile and filthy and debased in body and soul, because they were the only people that I could afford to leave him with.
“Once when I came home I couldn’t wake him up, and the woman who was
