Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman's Courage

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as she had given up many before. He was irresponsible, but he was hers and she loved him.

"I am so sleepy," she said, stifling a yawn, "that I feel as if I could cry."

Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the fearless directness of Gabriella. She had learned not to answer back when she knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet when her inner spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned to hold her tongue when a veritable torrent of words rose to her lips. And these lessons, which George's temper and her own reason had taught her, remained with her in the future, long after she had forgotten George and the severity of her schooling.

There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that first day and night stretched through the winter and well into the beginning of spring. Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds, she discovered that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the chief end of life was to keep up an appearance; here also the supreme effort, the best energies, were devoted to a sham—to a thing which had no actual existence. Though Mrs. Fowler was rich beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be. She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking effort to make two ends meet without a visible break. Her small economies, to Gabriella's surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr's; and though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl, there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in Mrs. Carr's household. Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied herself a hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in her coffee and bought her butter from a grocer below Washington Square, took quite as a matter of course the fact that she must, as she put it, "pay off social scores." Though they ate the simplest food in the market for six days of the week, on the seventh, hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the lower rooms and champagne flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian glasses on the round table. To be sure, Mrs. Fowler's gown may have been two seasons old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had picked up during her summers abroad; and her pearls—the string was short, but really good, for she had matched it in Paris—shone, rich and costly, around her still beautiful neck. After one of these dinners the family lived on scraps and looked at fading flowers for days, while Mrs. Fowler, with the air of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs before the little French writing-desk in her room, and patiently added accounts from morning till night. A strained look would come into her plump, firm face, three little wrinkles would appear between her eyebrows, and her blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark and anxious. Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the unpaid bills laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation:

"I don't see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills," and, after changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her grocer to reason. On one of these days she took Gabriella (they went in the stage because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt for bargains in underwear, and, to the girl's astonishment, her mother-in-law, who presented so opulent an appearance on the surface, purchased for herself a supply of cheap and badly made chemises and nightgowns. As she grew to know Mrs. Fowler better, she found that the expenditures of that redoubtable woman, in spite of her naturally delicate tastes, were governed by one of the most elementary principles of economy. Through long habit she had acquired a perception as unerring as instinct, and this perception enabled her to tell exactly where extravagance was useful and where it failed in its effect. She had learned to perfection never to spend money on things that did not show a result. An appearance was what she strove for, and one's chemises and nightgowns, however exquisite in themselves, could not very well contribute to one's external appearance. "Of course I like good underclothes," she remarked cheerfully to her daughter-in-law, "but, after all, nobody sees them."

This was so different from the poverty-stricken point of view of Gabriella's childhood, that the girl puzzled over it afterwards when she sat in her corner of the stage. Mrs. Carr had kept up an appearance, too, she reflected, but, like the old maids on the floor above, she had kept it up even to herself. Perhaps the difference lay in the immense gulf which divided the appearance of Hill Street from the appearance of the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler was obliged by the public opinion she obeyed to appear affluent, while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to appear destitute. On the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the safe middle distance between the two exacting standards of living.

But, though she might disapprove of her mother-in-law's philosophy, there was no question about her fervent admiration for her disposition. It was Mrs. Fowler's habit to appear "sweet," and never once did Gabriella see her lose her temper, never once, no matter how hard the day or how exasperating the accounts, did she show so much as a passing hint of irritability. Her temper was so angelic that it was the more surprising George should not have inherited a trace of it.

If George had not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as time went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness of his father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house, Gabriella had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection which his wife, for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired. She respected him for his calm strength, against which the boisterous moods of George reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a child, and she liked him for his unfailing courtesy, for his patience, for his gentleness, which made her feel that he was, in spite of the material nature of his occupation, the only member of the household who possessed even a glimmer of spirituality. All day long, and the greater part of the night, he thought about money, and yet he had escaped the spiritual corruption which the ceaseless pursuit of wealth had produced in the other rich men whom Gabriella met in his house. It was as if some subtle alchemy in his soul had transmuted the baser qualities into the pure gold of character; and sometimes the girl wondered if the fact that he worked not for himself but for others had preserved him from the grosser contamination of money. For he seemed to think of himself so little, that after three months in his house, Gabriella was still ignorant of his interests apart from his work, except, of course, his absorbing interest in the morning papers. From the time he got up at seven o'clock until he went to bed punctually on the stroke of ten, he appeared to order his life with the single purpose of giving as little trouble as was compatible with living at all. His tastes were the simplest; he drank only boiled water; he ate two eggs and a roll with his coffee at breakfast; he spent hardly a third as much on his clothes as George spent; and beyond an occasional visit to his club in the evening, he seemed to have absolutely no recreation. His life was in the stock market, and it was a life of almost monastic simplicity and self-sacrifice. If he had any pleasure, except the pleasure of providing his wife with the money for her dinner parties, which bored him excruciatingly, Gabriella had never discovered it. "He asks so little for himself that it is pathetic," she remarked to George one night, when Mr. Fowler had gone upstairs, carrying the evening papers to bed with him.

"Oh, well, he gets what he asks for," retorted George indifferently, "and that's more than the rest of us can say."

George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for weeks; and for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day telling him that she expected a child in the autumn. All her efforts to soothe had merely exasperated him; and there were days when her presence worked him into a fit of nervous irritability. After four months of marriage prolonged boredom had replaced the passionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why this should be so she was too well-balanced emotionally to understand. She saw only the outward evidences of change, of gradual disillusionment; and though at first she wept a little while she wondered, she ended by drying her tears and attributing his casual indifference and his explosive violence alike to some obscure disturbing condition of health. Every evening, except when there were guests, he spent at his club; he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled with complaint about the number and the size of his bills. He treated these bills as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had leaped, without reason for being, out of a malign world to assail him. As yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should be obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver paper weight on the little white and gold desk.