The traveling men on the veranda craned their necks to watch her out of sight
From the night of the charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty dollars—the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the town's history—he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather, and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning, still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the Princess had her hat retrimmed with her old plumes the fall after her wedding, bought no new clothes, and wore her giddy spring jacket, thin as it was, all winter, and after the second baby came no human being ever saw her in anything but a wrapper, except when she was on Main Street.
The neighbours said she wore a wrapper so that she could have free use of her lungs, for when Red and the Princess opened a family debate, the neighbours had to shut the doors and windows and call in the children. Notwithstanding all the names that she called him in their lung-testing events, there was no question about her love for the man. For, after the first year of her marriage, though she lost interest in her clothes and ceased calling for the "fashion leaf" at the dress-goods counter in the White Front, and let her hair go stringy, we around our office knew that the Princess was only a child, who some way had lost interest in her old toys. When God gives babies to children, the children forget their other dolls, and the Princess, when the babies came, put away her other dolls, and played with the toys that came alive. And she spanked them and fondled them and scolded them with the same empty-headed vanity that she used to devote to her clothes.
Red Martin was one of the Princess's dearest dolls, and she and the babies were his toys; but, being a boy, he did not care for them so much with the paint rubbed off, yet he did not neglect them. Instead, he neglected himself. When the babies began to put grease spots on his clothes, he did not clean them, and about the time his wife quit powdering, when she came to Main Street, he stopped wearing collars. She grew fat and frowsy, and her chief interest in life seemed to be to over-dress her children, and sometimes Red Martin encouraged her by bringing home the most extravagant suits for the boys, and sometimes he abused her when the bills came in for things which she had bought for the children, and asked why she did not buy something half-way respectable-looking to wear herself. After each of their furious quarrels she would go over the neighbourhood the next day and tell the neighbours that her mother had married her to a gambler, and ask them what a gambler's wife could expect. If any neighbour woman agreed with Mrs. Martin about her husband or her position Mrs. Martin would become angry and flounce out of the house, but if the women spoke kindly of her husband she would berate him and weep, and assure them that she had refused the banker, or the proprietor of the Bee Hive, or anyone else who seemed to make her story possible.
By the time that the third baby was old enough to carry his baby sister and the fifth baby was in the crib, Red Martin's face had begun to grow purple. He lost the gambling-room which was once his pride; it was operated by a youth with a curly black moustache, whose clothes recalled the days of Red's triumph. Red was only a dealer, and his trousers were frayed at the bottom and he shaved but once a week. Then the Princess used to come slinking up Main Street at night carrying a pistol under her coat to use if she found the woman with him. Who the woman was the neighbours never knew, but the Princess gave them to understand that they would be surprised if she told them. It was her vanity to pretend that the woman was a society leader, as she called her, but the boys around the poker-dive knew that Red Martin's days as a heart-breaker were gone. For what whisky and cocaine and absinthe could do for Red to hurry his end they were doing, but a man is a strong beast, and it takes many years to kill him. Also, the Lord saves men like Red for horrible examples, letting them live long that He may not have to waste others; but women seem to have God's pity and He takes them out of their misery more quickly than He takes men. With the coming of the seventh baby the Princess died. When the news came to the office that she was gone we were not sorry, for life had held little for her. Her looks were gone; her health was gone; her dreams were smudged out—pitiful and wretched and sordid as they were, even at the best. Yet for all that George Kirwin took down to the funeral a wreath which the office force bought for her.
To know George Kirwin casually one would say he never saw anything but the types and machinery in the back room of our office. When he went among strangers he seemed to be looking always at his hands or studying his knees, and his responses to those whom he did not know were "yea, yea," and "nay, nay"; but that night he told us more about the funeral of the Princess than all the reporters on the paper would have learned. He told us how the pitiful little parlour with its advertising chromos and its soap-prize lamp was filled with the women who always come to funerals in our town—funerals being their only diversion; how they sat in the undertaker's chairs with their handkerchiefs carefully folded and in their hands during the first part of the service, waiting for Brother Hopper to tell about his mother's death, which he never fails to do at funerals, though the elders have spoken to him about it, as all the town knows; how Red Martin, shaved for the occasion, and, in a borrowed suit of clothes, stood out by the well and did not come into the house during the services; how only the elder children sat in the front room with the other mourners, and how the prattle of the little ones in the kitchen ran through the parson's prayer with heart-breaking insistence.
George seemed to think that the poverty-stricken little makeshifts to bring beauty into the miserable home and keep up the appearance of a kind of gentility—perhaps for the children—was the best thing he ever knew about the Princess, and he said that he was glad that he went to the funeral for the geraniums in the crêpe paper covered tomato cans, the cheap lace curtains at the windows, and the hair-wreath inheritance from the Swaneys, made him think that the best of the Princess might have survived all the rack and calamity of the years.