An Anarchist Woman

by Hutchins Hapgood

The feeling that everybody was against her, that she was on the road to being what the world calls an outcast, gave to her life an element of sullenness and of despair. Perhaps this added depth to her dissipation, but it took away from it all quality of joy as well as of peace. If her sensuality and her despair had been all there was in her, or if these had constituted her main characteristics, this story would never have been written. Perhaps another tale might have been told, but it would have been the story of a submerged class, not prostitutes, white slaves; and then it would have been the story of a submerged class, not of an individual temperament.

What was it that kept Marie in all really essential ways out of this class of social victims? It was because, in the first place, of the fact that her nature demanded something better than what the life of the prostitute afforded. And it was natural that the greater quality of personality that she possessed should attract the kind of love and social support needed essentially to justify to herself her instincts. When she was very young Marie secured the genuine love of two strong and remarkable personalities; and at a later time, there gathered about these three, other people who enlarged the group, which gave to each member of it the social support needed to remove essential despair and desperate self-disapproval.

One of these two persons so necessary to Marie's larger life was a woman whom she had met several years previous to this point in the story.

This woman was a cook, Katie by name. She was born in Germany, and her young girlhood was spent in the old country. She had only a rudimentary education, and even now speaks broken English. But she was endowed with a healthy, independent nature, a spontaneous wit, and a strong demand to take care of something and to love.

As natural as a young dog, she never thought of resisting a normal impulse. Her life as a girl in Germany was as free and untrammelled as a happy breeze. She lived in a little garrison town in the South, and the German soldiers did no essential harm to her and the other young girls of the place. These things were deemed laws of nature in her community. What would have been dreadful harm to a young American girl was only an occasional moment of anxiety to her. It never occurred to her that it was possible to resist a man. "I had to," she said, very simply, and did not seem to regret it any more than that she was compelled to eat. She is also very fond of her food.

She came to America and worked as cook in private families. She was capable and strong and was never out of a job. She never took any "sass" from her mistress; in this respect she was quite up to date among American "help."

At the time she first met Marie she had been working for a family several years, and had reduced her employer to a state of wholesome awe. She remained, like a queen, in the kitchen, whence she banished all objectionable intruders. Her mistress had a married daughter, also living in the house, who at first was wont to give orders to Katie, and to interfere with her generally. One day Katie drove her out of the kitchen with a volley of broken English. The daughter complained to the mother, who took Katie's side. "You don't belong in the kitchen," she said to her indignant daughter.

This episode filled Katie with contempt for her mistress.

"She ought to have taken her daughter's side against me," she said, "you bet I would have, if I had been in her place."

The daughter had two young children. It was to take care of them that Marie came into the household. Marie's mistress liked to stay in bed and read novels, and this experience is the one described by Marie in an earlier chapter, how she locked herself and the children in the store-room and read her mistress's books.