The Locusts' Years

by Mary H. Fee

The Locusts’ Years

Chapter I

When a man has reached the point where he can reflect, with cynical satisfaction, upon the brutality of organized society, and can contemplate unmoved one of its victims; and when the cause of his reflections is a woman not over thirty, whose worth and refinement are obvious to any reader of faces, that man either must possess a coarse-grained and cruel nature, or he must be very highly civilized.

No shade of doubt could have entered Judge Alexander Barton’s mind as to which of these adjectives applied to him. He would have repudiated the faintest hint that a taint of coarseness or cruelty could lie in him. His was one of those eminent political personalities which bubble up from the great caldron of American democracy. He had convictions and principles of a high order. They appeared frequently in the shape of addresses to young men’s political and reading clubs, or in a “few remarks” at church socials, where a programme of songs and recitations was followed by the distribution of home-made cakes and candies, and of uninspiriting beverages. It was sometimes remarked of him in that other world which he frequented that his conscientiousness in attending these mild-flavored symposia was the indisputable evidence of his fitness to adorn the roster of the Philippine judiciary. For to whom may we look for an example, if not to the interpreters of the law, whose position vests them with dignity, social and official? From whom may we demand the utterance of lofty principles and of high convictions, if not from the very men whose business it is to punish the unhappy wretches whose actions have declared their principles, expressed or otherwise, of the flimsiest?

Judge Barton was also frequently extolled as the pattern of American democracy, as, indeed, he was. Nothing could have been more catholic than his handshake, nothing more finely measured than the appreciation which it conveyed of the recipient’s relation to himself: to the veteran of the Army of the Philippines, it was hearty, and bespoke the comrade in arms; to the struggling young civil-service employee, it was encouraging, and it hinted, ever so delicately, that the inspiration for great ambitions ought to lie in the example of living statesmen; to the clergy and to the members of the Educational Department, who fairly swarm in the Philippines, it was fraternal and spoke confidentially of the tie which linked them in a great work; and to the effervescing spume from the Pacific coast, which is knocking about Manila, loud in vituperation of the change from democratic to bureaucratic society—to that segment of Young America whose disposition to criticise existing institutions led to the happy phrase “undesirable citizens”—the Judge’s democratic cordiality always embodied a hope that their mutual relations might continue forever harmonious, and it even intimated that no act on his part could make them otherwise.

The cause of the Judge’s highly civilized musings was one of those undesirable citizens of the feminine gender; and, if you ask how anything proper in the feminine gender may be classed as an undesirable citizen, there can only be cited an opinion from the Judge himself—one of those ex-cathedra sentiments which he held as infallible—that any one who refuses to accept pleasantly a situation which he is powerless to remedy, and who continues a quarrel which is futile and which can result only disastrously to its single champion, that person is, primarily, inefficient, and, secondarily, insane; either of which states is undesirable. Furthermore, there is nothing so repellent to a man as the feminine weakness which enlists his sympathy, and, at the same time, challenges the terms on which it is given. To find the shivering wretch on whom you would bestow an alms repudiating your charity and mutely reproaching you for the condition of things which makes you donor and him recipient—in such a metaphor, perhaps, the Judge might have condensed the musings which a month’s illness and the daily opportunity of studying Miss Ponsonby had bred.

The young woman who had received so much of His Honor’s valuable consideration did not look a very formidable antagonist in a quarrel with organized society. She stood at an open window of the hospital, gazing down on a convalescent-strewn lawn, where a military band was delighting the sick with a Christmas Eve concert. Her tall figure was very slender—so slender, in fact, as to make it quite evident that the blue cotton nurse’s dress which she wore was the survival of a plumper epoch. She was not a beautiful woman, nor was she even a pretty one, though she was far from being ugly. Her eyes were gray and kind, with well arched brows. Her nose was slightly aquiline, with sensitive nostrils. A rather low forehead, a broad mouth, and a shapely head covered with brown hair, were attributes which she shared with any number of women. What particularly marked her was a delicate grace of manner, an emanation of fastidiousness in every glance and movement, a reserve which at times became almost stiffness; in short, a distinction which, in happier circumstances, might have made her envied, but which in the mixture of a pioneer community served only to isolate her.

For at least two weeks of convalescence, Judge Barton had amused himself with the attempt to determine why Miss Ponsonby’s charm and distinction should be assets of so little practical value to her. His decision was that, in appearance most distinguished, she was singularly lacking in the unconscious self-confidence which usually accompanies distinction; that, a most feminine creature in many respects, she was unfemininely distrustful of her power over men. There was, in her perfectly dignified attitude toward the other sex, and in the absence of all coquetry, a sort of proud abdication of feminine rights. She resigned all a woman’s natural claim upon man’s emotional nature; and the keen analyst who had studied her so closely fancied that he could detect a repressed challenge of man’s superiority. He classified her (with a kind of shrugging pity) as one of those women of whom all men speak respectfully and many men admiringly, but who grow old and plain and bitter, unsought among their more frivolous sisters. At the same time, he admitted an attraction which had kept him bidding indirectly for her notice.

Miss Ponsonby’s impassive reserve with men was so wholly a confession, and, at the same time, so proud a disclaimer of the usual meek attitude of unpopular women, that it not only irritated the man who could analyze her, but it provoked his curiosity and led him into attempt after attempt to sting her into speech and unconscious revelations. And whenever he did so and retired, foiled, with the consciousness of having given an unmanly stab to weakness, his man’s desire to think well of himself made him put the blame upon her.

On the afternoon of that particular day, Miss Ponsonby’s feminine characteristics were in possession. She leaned rather languidly against the window frame, and her bodily fatigue, and a self-conscious forlornness which she strove habitually to conceal, were quite evident. Every movement betrayed the woman pushed beyond her strength; every sensitive, quivering line of her face hinted at emotions rioting under a repressed exterior.