II
The train bumped along for several hours. Mrs. Brownley read, her book adjusted at a proper distance from her leveled eye-glasses. Helen and Margaret fell into one of those interminable conversations on what was worth while a woman’s doing. They were unexcited, but at Mohawk, Mrs. Thorstad arrived thirty minutes early at the railroad station, with Mrs. Watson’s car, which she had commandeered. Mrs. Watson had also offered lunch but at the last minute her Hilda had become sick and thrown her into such confusion that Mrs. Thorstad, brightly rising to the occasion, had taken lunch upon herself and even now Freda was putting a pan of scalloped potatoes into the oven and anxiously testing the baking ham.
It had fallen naturally to Mrs. Thorstad to arrange the meeting in Mohawk, Mrs. Brownley writing her that she need not consider it a partisan meeting, that its object was merely educative, to explain to the women what the Republican party meant. And Mrs. Thorstad had few scruples about using her influence to get as large a group together for the meeting as she could. To have these three celebrities for a whole day had been a matter of absorbing thought to her. They were to have a luncheon at her home, then to have an afternoon meeting at the Library and a further meeting in the evening. Mrs. Thorstad knew she could get a crowd out. She always could.
Freda had not minded getting lunch. She didn’t mind cooking, especially when they could lay themselves out in expense as was considered proper to-day. But she hated meeting these strange, serious-minded women. She had looked in the glass at herself and decided several times that she was altogether out of place. She had tried to bribe her mother into pretending she was a servant. But that was in vain. So Freda had put on the black taffeta dress which she had made from a Vogue pattern and was hoping they had missed their train.
Coming to the kitchen door her mother called her and she went in reluctantly. Then she saw Helen and her face lit up with interest. Her mother had said Mrs. Flandon was nice looking but she had pictured some earnest looking youngish woman. This—this picture of soft gray fur and dull gold hair! She was like a magazine cover. She was what Freda had thought existed but what she couldn’t prove. And it was proven.
Speeding on the heels of her delight came shyness. She shook hands awkwardly, trying to back out immediately. But Helen did not let her go at once.
“We are a lot of trouble, I’m afraid, Miss Thorstad.”
“Oh, no you’re not. It’s not a bit of trouble. I’ll have lunch ready soon, but it will be very simple,” said Freda.
Her voice, thought Freda, is like her clothes. It’s luxurious.
The lunch was ready soon and to the visitors it was very pleasant as they went into the little dining-room. It was so small that the chairs on one side had to be careful not to back up against the sideboard. The rug was worn to thinness but the straight curtains at the windows, which did not shut out the sun, were daffodil yellow and on the table the little pottery bowl with three blossoming daffodils picked out the same note of defiant sunlight again. Helen looked around her appreciatively.
Freda served them quietly, slipping into her own chair, nearest the door to the kitchen, only after the dishes were all in place and every one eating. She took her own plate from her mother absently. The others were talking. She listened to them, the throaty, assured voice of Mrs. Brownley, Miss Duffield’s clear, definite tones and the voice of Mrs. Flandon, with a note of laughter in it always, as if she mocked at the things she said. Yet always with light laughter.
“Are you interested in all this political business?” asked Mrs. Flandon of her, suddenly.
“No,” said Freda, “Not especially. But mother is, so I hear a great deal of it.”
Her mother laughed a little reprovingly.
“Freda has been too busy to give these things time and thought.”
“How are you busy? At home?”
She let her mother answer that.
“Freda graduated from the Normal last year. We hoped there would be a teaching opening here for her but as there wasn’t, we persuaded her to stay home with us and take a little special work at the Normal.”
Helen kept her eyes on the girl’s face. Keenly sensitive to beauty as she was, she had felt that it was the girl rather than the mother who created the atmosphere of this house with which she felt in sympathy. She wanted to talk to her. As the meal progressed she kept her talking, drew her out little by little, and confidence began to come back to Freda’s face and frankness to her tongue.
“She’s beautiful,” thought Helen, “such a stunning creature.”
But it was later that she got the key to Freda.
They were in the living room and she picked up some of the books on the table. They interested her. It was a kind of reading which showed some taste and contemporary interest. There was the last thin little gray-brown “Poetry,” there was “The Tree of Heaven,” “Miss Lulu Bett,” Louis Untermeyer’s poems. Those must be Freda’s. There was also what you might expect of Mrs. Thorstad. Side by side lay the “Education of Henry Adams” and “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”
“Of course the mother reads those,” thought Helen, “after she’s sure they’re so much discussed that they’re not dangerous any longer. But the mother never reads ‘Poetry.’”
“Your daughter likes poetry?” she asked Mrs. Thorstad.
“She reads a great deal of it. I wish I could make her like more solid things. But of course she’s young.”
Mrs. Flandon went out to the kitchen where Freda was vigorously clearing up.
“You’re doing all the work,” she protested.
“Very sketchily,” confessed Freda, “I can cook better than I clear up, mother tells me.”
“That may be a virtue,” said Helen. She stood leaning against the door, watching Freda.
“Who reads poetry with you?”
“Father—sometimes. Oh, you mustn’t think because you see some things I’m reading that I’m that sort. I’m not at all. I’m really not clever especially. I just like things. All kinds of things.”
“But what kinds?”
“Just so they are alive, that’s all I care. So I scatter—awfully. I can’t get very much worked up about women in politics. It seems to me as if women were wasting a lot of time sometimes.”
“You are like me—a natural born dilettante.”
“Are you that?” asked Freda. Her shyness had gone. Here was some one to whom she could talk.
“I’m afraid I am. I like things just as you do—if they’re alive. It’s a bad way to be. It’s hard to concentrate because some new beautiful thing or emotion keeps dragging you off and destroys your continuity. And in this world of earnest women—”
“You criticize yourself. You feel that you don’t measure up to the women who do things. I know. But don’t you think, Mrs. Flandon, that something’s being lost somewhere? Aren’t women losing—oh, the quality that made poets write such things about them—I don’t know, it’s partly physical—they aren’t relaxed—”
She stood, pouring her words out in unfinished phrases as if trying desperately to make a confession or ask her questions before anything interrupted, her face lit up with eagerness, its fine, unfinished beauty diffused with half-felt desires. As she stopped, Helen let her stop, only nodding.
“I know what you mean. You’re right. It’s all mixed up. It’s what is puzzling the men too. We must talk, my dear.”
Helen was quite honest about that. She meant to talk with Freda. But there was no time that afternoon. In the Library club-room, crowded with women who had come at Mrs. Thorstad’s bidding for a “fresh inspiration,” Helen found her hands full. She gave her talk, toning it up a bit because she saw that Freda was expecting things of her and so wandering off the point a little. But the charm that Margaret wanted was in action and Margaret, quickly sensing the possibilities of Mrs. Thorstad’s town, settled down to some thorough organization work.
It was after the meeting that night that Helen saw Freda again. And then not in the hall. She had noticed the girl slip out after her own talk, as Mrs. Brownley rose to “address” the meeting, and wondered where she was going. To her discomfiture she had found that she was billeted on Mrs. Watson for the night as befitted their respective social dignities, and that Margaret was to spend the night at the Thorstad house.
But it was from Mrs. Watson’s spare room window that she saw Freda.
The skating rink, a square of land, flooded with water and frozen, lay below. As she went to pull down the shade in her bed-room window—she had escaped from Mrs. Watson as promptly as possible—Helen’s eyes fell on the skaters, skimming swiftly about under arc lights which, flickering bright and then dim, made the scene beautiful. And then she saw Freda. She was wearing the red tam-o’-shanter which Mrs. Flandon had already seen and a short red mackinaw and as she flashed past under the light, it was unmistakably she—not alone. There was a young man with her.
Helen watched her come and go, hands crossed with her partner, watched the swing of her graceful body as it swayed so easily towards the man’s and was in perfect tune with it.
“That’s one way you get the alive and beautiful, is it?” thought Helen.
Then, after a little, by some signal, the rink was declared closed. The skaters, at the sides of the rink, sat on little benches and took off their skates. The young man knelt beside Freda and loosened the straps, a pretty bit of gallantry in the moonlight.
He had her arm. They were going home, walking a little more close to each other than was necessary, looking up, bending down. Helen could almost feel what they were feeling, excitement, vigor, intimacy. A little shiver went over her as she pulled down the shade at last and looked around at the walls with their brown scrolls and mottoed injunction to
“Sleep sweetly in this quiet room,
Oh, thou, whoe’er thou art.”