Usury

For five minutes, ever since the voices in the kitchen had begun, Miss Cora MacAllister had been uneasy. Now, as the unfamiliar male voice boomed out, Miss Cora moved her slippered feet from their footstool and rose. That was not the voice of Lizzie’s steady follower; this was not his evening. Lizzie had no other gentlemen friends. Moreover, the tone of the sounds from the kitchen had an ominous quality, unlike the tone of an evening call. Miss Cora walked quickly through the dining room, and pushed open the door into the kitchen.

The girl by the stove turned, with a frightened “Agh!” Her hat had slipped back from her face, and her cloak was unfastened. Miss Cora glanced from her distorted face to the man standing just inside the outer door.

“What is it, Lizzie? Who’s that man?” Miss Cora’s small gray head had an agitated jerk as she gazed at him, a man in a checked suit, with heavy eyebrows almost meeting in a pale, insignificant face. As Miss Cora looked back at Lizzie, she saw dull, painful red mount from the girl’s throat up to the smooth brown hair.

“He followed me.” Lizzie shrank away from Miss Cora. “I been telling him to go away.”

“You see, ma’am,”—the man thrust a hand into his pocket—“here’s the way ’tis—”

“Don’t you speak to her!” Lizzie’s voice broke into a gasp. “Don’t you!”

“Is he somebody you know, Lizzie?” Miss Cora demanded. The swaying of the door as her shoulder touched it relieved her. She might escape, if he became violent! Still—in her own kitchen—

“Sure!” The man leaned against the table, crossing one yellow shoe over the other. “Sure, she knows me. Ask her!”

“What do you mean, sir, by annoying a lady in this manner?” Miss Cora’s thin voice bit at him sharply. She didn’t like his pale, sneering eyes. “If Lizzie doesn’t wish to see you, you may go at once!”

“They ain’t no call to get excited, lady. I ain’t seen Lizzie here fer some time, and I got a good offer to make her. What’s more, I got a right to make it. See!”

“Right!” Lizzie’s hands twisted together at her breast. “Right! You!”

“Don’t twist your hands that way!” exclaimed Miss Cora. “Tell me what he means. Shall I send for the police?”

“Now, ma’am!” The man stepped forward alertly. “Like’s not you don’t know. But Lizzie here, she can’t be too particular. An’ all I want is to make her a decent woman, I want to marry her. She’d ought to be glad, ’stead of stirring up a row. I got a right to her.”

Cora drew her small figure erect, a flash of premonition trembling through her.

“Lizzie”—she began, but the girl hurled herself toward the man, her hands quivering in angry gestures, so that he retreated before her.

“Right!” she cried. “What rights you got? You got through with me once, three years back. Do you get your rights from that? Say?”

Miss Cora pressed her lips together; she saw Lizzie and the man from the vortex of a sickening whirl. A street brawl had been transplanted to her respectable kitchen! What had every one told her when she took the girl! And there was the man who had ruined Lizzie. Miss Cora sat down suddenly in the low chair near the cupboards. Lizzie turned; the rage had drained out of her, leaving her haggard, with terrified eyes.

“That’s him,” she said. “Him what ran off when I asked him to get me out of the trouble he’d made for me—and me only sixteen.”

“Lady, it was this way.” The man spoke almost jauntily. “I lost my job, see? And I went looking for another. And I lost track of her, see? I always meant to do the fair thing by her. I been a-looking for her. Now I just found her again. I got a job, and any feller needs a wife. She’d ought to marry me. Now ain’t that all there is to it?”

“He’s lying!” whispered Lizzie fiercely. “He ain’t ever looked for me, no more’n for any other girls he got wrong.”

“But—how did you find her?” Miss Cora sat stiffly away from the back of her chair, her brows drawn together. She was trying frantically to pigeon-hole what was happening; to drive it into some corner of her brain, where she would know how to act. As soon as she could classify things, she knew what to do. Only once in all her life had she met an unprecedented event, and acted otherwise than in accordance with her neat principles. Tonight was a result of that act! “How did he find you if he wasn’t hunting for you?” she repeated.

“Three years I’ve been a-looking—”

“You lie!” exclaimed Lizzie. “Miss Cora, he ain’t looked a minute in his life. He came out here from the city to work in that new factory. Last week I thought I saw him, but I says to myself, couldn’t be him. I wouldn’t have it be him. And then—tonight he follows me here, and I couldn’t get away. Right up to the porch he follows, sneaking behind, and when I opens the door, there he is, putting his hand on me. Marry him! I’d kill myself dead first.”

Lizzie’s wrath seemed to make her round, young body expand; her head was back, and the cords stood out along her soft throat. Miss Cora felt old and small as she looked up at the girl. She pushed her chair back and stood up. She could manage things better from her feet.

“This is the man, then? The father of your baby?”

Lizzie nodded, her body drooping again. “But there wasn’t any baby—” she defended herself. “It was dead—always.”

“You see, ma’am—” The man addressed himself to Miss Cora; his voice dropped to a confidential tone. “You see, she belongs to me. I’ll make her a respectable woman again.”

“You—” Lizzie laughed. “You make a woman respectable!”

Miss Cora looked steadily at the man. There was truth in his coarse arguing. Marriage was the way in which such mistakes as Lizzie’s were remedied. She flushed when he said, slyly, as though he saw her thought:

“I’ll make her a good husband, ma’am, and no one’ll have a word to throw agin her.”

“Who has now?” cried Lizzie, “I’m a decent woman. You got round me with your soft words when I was such a baby I didn’t know what you meant by them. Then when I needed you—where was you? It’s too late now.”

“Maybe you’re foolin’ another fellow into thinking he’s got a good piece of goods in yuh?”

Lizzie’s eyes sought Miss Cora’s for a moment; they were imploring, panic-widened eyes.

“Eh?” The man snarled as he saw the glance. “That’s it, is it? Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll tell him what sorts you are. You can’t do nothing for yourself but marry me.”

“There’s one thing you don’t seem to realize,” said Miss Cora with heat. Lizzie’s glance drove her to say something at once. “If you should get Lizzie as a wife, you’d be having much more than you deserve—or any other man. You’re in no position to speak as if you were doing her a favor. You’re a man ten years older than she is, and you got her into trouble. If you are ready to be a man—which you weren’t three years ago—” Miss Cora felt her cheeks prickling; she wasn’t accustomed to say such things to men—“If you are, that’s no more than your duty.”

“I never meant her no harm, ma’am.”

“You caused her a great deal of suffering,” said Miss Cora severely. “It’s not to be wondered at that she doesn’t wish to see you.” Slowly Miss Cora had been growing aware of the direction which principle and right demanded that she take, and she was uncomfortable. The man, as a concrete embodiment of that direction, was unpleasing. She wished he would go. “Now—” she announced—“Now you may go. I wish to talk with Lizzie. And you may return—tomorrow is Sunday—Monday night.”

“No!” Lizzie’s voice was desperate, “Don’t let him come back!”

“Hush, child,” said Miss Cora. “I’ll see him. You have a good position, sir?”

“Two-fifty a day, ma’am, and regular work. I can—”

Miss Cora interrupted his ingratiating whine.

“Good night, then. You may come back at seven-thirty Monday. Don’t you come before then.”

The man backed slowly toward the door, his eyes on Lizzie, who stood quite rigid, her face turned away.

“If it’s another fellow—” he began. Then his eyes shifted to Miss Cora, and he bowed awkwardly. “You’ll show her what’s the decent thing to do, ma’am,” he finished.

Miss Cora waited until she heard his footsteps on the stone walk in front of the house before she looked at Lizzie. The girl’s face was drawn and hard; she looked as she had the day Miss Cora first saw her, when her sister, Miss Cora’s washerwoman, was turning her out. Lizzie had come from the city a few days before the baby was born. Her sister had railed at her a week, and then driven her out. She had to keep her own character, didn’t she, if she went on washing for respectable people? Miss Cora had shrunk from her as an abandoned woman; then, strangely enough, the desperate young eyes had caught at the heart beneath the rigid code of the spinster, and Miss Cora had taken the girl home to her neat, lonely house. To her protesting friends she had said that she needed a maid, a companion, and she was old enough not to be contaminated. Moreover, she might be able to reform the girl.

“Let’s go into the sitting room,” she said, after a moment. “You take off your coat, and we can sit down and talk.”

“You don’t want me to marry him!” Lizzie’s words burst out almost inarticulately. “He—he’s bad!”

“Not so bad as we’ve thought, Lizzie, if he didn’t mean to desert you. If he’s been looking for you—”

“Him! He just happens to see me. He never looked—”

“Then why should he want to marry you now?” Miss Cora brightened as she put that question. It seemed to prove her point.

“I dunno. Maybe I’m better looking. Maybe I looked sort of happy—and he thought he’d fix that. He’s that bad!”

Miss Cora made a doubtful little clucking sound; Lizzie was nice appearing.

“I might o’ known I was having more’n I deserved. Oh, Miss Cora!” Lizzie’s breathing tore through her words. “You send him away—he’d go if you made him—He can’t hurt Roy—’cause I told him—same’s you said I should—You—you won’t make me marry—him—”

“Lizzie, my dear child—” Miss Cora was almost gasping, herself—“Of course I won’t make you. But if you see it’s the right thing to do—won’t you do it?”

“It ain’t right! How could it be, and me hating him!”

“You felt that way tonight. But you want to be a good woman, don’t you? And here’s the man who was the same as married to you once—could you go on and marry Roy now and feel it was right?”

“’T wouldn’t make me a good woman, marrying him wouldn’t. I’d be wanting to kill him—Oh, I can’t!” Lizzie threw her arm across her eyes and turned to lean against the wall. Under the folds of the rough coat which she still wore, Miss Cora could see the girl’s body tremble.

“Lizzie—It seems to me that this is a chance for you to show that you are good. If it seems hard, that may be God’s punishment for doing wrong. If that man wants to make up to you what he did, I’m afraid I think you ought to—You did love him once, before you knew Roy—”

“I never loved him—not lovin’ like—I didn’t know anything—and he showed me attention—and I thought I was smart, catching an older fellow—Now, there’s Roy—” Lizzie whirled on Miss Cora. “You know how I’d cut myself to pieces for him. I—I could o’ been a good wife to him—and now—Oh, my God!”

Miss Cora was aware of the beginning of fierce surrender in Lizzie’s last words. The girl would heed her, then, as she had heeded her ever since Miss Cora had started to help her struggle up from the abyss of despair where she had been thrust. For a moment Miss Cora had a cold little fear; suppose she should misdirect Lizzie. But only for a moment; she was sure there could be no two ways out of this affair, no two right ways. If it seemed difficult, it was so much the surer to be right. The world was made that way. She was fond of Lizzie, and proud of the wholesome, capable woman into which the girl had developed. Probably she had been too proud of her, and this was a test for her, too.

“Miss Cora—” Lizzie faced her again, quiet except for fingers which gripped into the palms, relaxed, and gripped again with a passionate regularity. “Miss Cora, doesn’t seem ’sif I could o’ done anything bad enough to have to marry that—”

“Don’t think just of yourself, Lizzie. Think of what’s right to do.”

“It’s me what’ll have to get married, Miss Cora. Am I bad? Have you been a-thinking I was bad all the time I been here with you I—I’ve tried—”

“No, no, child!” Miss Cora clasped her thin hands together so that the old knuckles stood out. “We haven’t thought about it—except for the time you had to tell Roy. Why, I’ve forgotten it months at a time.”

“And Roy—he said ’twas me now he was wanting—oh, he wouldn’t let me—”

The flash of white hope in Lizzie’s face frightened Miss Cora, and she flung out a stern answer:

“Roy’s a good man, and he’ll do what you think is right.”

As she saw Lizzie’s face settle again into stiff hopelessness, she added:

“You must decide what to do, what to tell Roy before he comes tomorrow.”

“If—if ’twas just something to do and be done with—maybe I’d see how I could do it. But getting married—day—and night! Miss Cora! and the little house me and Roy planned—Why, it’s Saturday next week I was goin’ to marry—”

“Lizzie, you’ve got to put your mind to what you ought to do, not what you want to do. I’m afraid we’ve been careless—going along as if you’d never done anything you might have to pay for.”

“Why don’t he have to pay? Why do I have to pay all the rest of my life for one thing I done wrong? Roy ain’t done a thing—and he’ll have to pay—”

“It’s hard for me, too.” Miss Cora looked up at Lizzie piteously. “I’ve been glad to think you were going to marry Roy, and I’ve liked helping you get ready. I’ve liked thinking about how happy you would be.”

“Oh, I can’t give him up, Miss Cora! I can’t!”

“Don’t you suppose—you might grow to like this man—you must have liked him some, once. And anyway, if you married him, you’d have your duty to him as a wife.”

Lizzie lifted her eyes to Miss Cora’s, in a final entreaty. Miss Cora felt as if she were pushing away the fingers of a drowning woman from the piece of driftwood that might save her.

“It’s the only thing to do, Lizzie,” she said, and her voice sounded fatuous in her own ears.

The girl moved slowly past her. Miss Cora watched her in silence until she pushed open the door into the next room. Then she cried out,

“Where are you going?”

Lizzie stopped, without turning. “Upstairs.”

“What for, Lizzie? What are you going to do?”

“I got to think what to tell Roy—”

The door swung shut, and Miss Cora brushed away the tears which burned against her eyelids. Lizzie took things hard. Perhaps by morning she would be more resigned. It was late; she felt very weary. Why couldn’t the man have come a week later, she thought suddenly! Then he would have been too late. She drew a little breath at her temerity in questioning the ways of Providence. As she often said, things would all come out for the best in the end. Her slippers scuffling slightly on the floor, she moved across to the door, locked it, snapped out the lights, and went slowly into her sitting room.

Her morris-chair drawn up near the reading lamp, the magazine, the footstool, all were just as she had left them. She stared at them with a certain disgust, as though she suspected their comfort of some lurking sin. Perhaps her friends, and her own instincts for that matter, had been right; perhaps you couldn’t harbor a woman who had gone wrong without trouble. But the girl had never had a chance in her desperate young years until she had come to Miss Cora’s. Since then—Miss Cora sighed. She would be lonely after Lizzie had gone. And just because the girl had loyalty to her—and self-respect—a desire to be good—there she was upstairs, suffering. Miss Cora shivered; the room had grown cold. She must go to bed herself.

She climbed the stairs slowly. The excitement of the evening had stiffened her old knees. At the door of Lizzie’s room she paused. There was no light inside, and no sound. With a tightening of her lips against a sigh, she went on into her own chamber. She undressed, hung her garments carefully in their places in the closet, folded back the stiff counterpane, and snapped on the night light; then she tiptoed back to Lizzie’s door. After listening for a moment, she called, “Lizzie.” She thought she heard a faint movement, but there was no answer. She returned to her own room, and climbed into her large bed. She lay motionless; her eyelids ached with her effort to keep them closed. She kept hearing the silence behind Lizzie’s door, a heavy, heart-breaking silence. Once she sat up in bed, thinking that she must open that door. But she lay down again; there was nothing she could say. Finally, when the gray light of a winter morning came faintly in to soften the curious shadows thrown by the night light, Miss Cora fell asleep.

She woke early in the morning, and when she heard Lizzie descending the stairs, she turned her face against the pillow with a little mumbled prayer of gratefulness. Perhaps everything would seem better, now that morning had come. Whatever she had feared vaguely, nothing had happened.

Later, when she went down stairs, and Lizzie looked up from the silver she was laying at Miss Cora’s place with a good morning, Miss Cora assured herself, in spite of the girl’s haggard face, that everything would be all right now. Lizzie brought the toast and coffee without raising her eyes. Miss Cora wondered what the girl was thinking, and decided, somewhat wistfully, that she couldn’t ask her, if she didn’t wish to talk. The silence bothered Miss Cora; she was fond of the friendly casual chatter the two usually had. Constraint held her, as if she were wishing to speak out in church.

When it was time for her to dress for church, she was glad. She had been trying to read her Bible, but for once the book seemed to have nothing to offer as proof that she was making Lizzie do the right thing. She read through the verses, “Let him who is without guilt—” But they gave her no sustenance. Perhaps the minister would help. Only a few weeks ago he had preached on the “joyous difficulty of right-doing.”

After church she would dine with the old friends with whom she always dined the last Sunday of the month. She knew what they would say if she asked them; they would agree with her. They had objected to her taking in Lizzie, but they would agree with her now. For some reason that thought disturbed her.

She couldn’t manage the hooks at the collar of her gray silk. Lizzie appeared from her room so immediately after Miss Cora called, that the latter wondered whether she had been waiting for a summons.

“You’re not dressed, Lizzie?” She could see nothing of the girl’s face in the mirror, just the blue gingham morning dress.

“No. I—I guess I won’t go to church.”

How cold Lizzie’s fingers were! They fumbled at the hooks, halted, as though Lizzie was thinking of something else, was trying to say something.

“You remember I’m going to dinner with the Forrests?”

“Yes, Miss Cora.”

Miss Cora turned quickly. “Lizzie,” she said, catching the girl’s hand. “Do you want something?”

Lizzie shook her head.

“You won’t be lonesome?” Miss Cora looked down at her hand; old as it was, with the ridges of veins faintly underlined with blue along the back; it had more warmth than the firm white hand it clung to. “You don’t think you better come to church?”

“No, I can’t.” Lizzie raised her free hand to her forehead, pushed back her hair, drew her fingers down to her lips for a moment. “I—I don’t feel right to go. But—Miss Cora—” The hand in Miss Cora’s jerked—“You won’t be very late?”

“No, Lizzie. If you want me, I could even say to the Forrests that I couldn’t come. Although they would think it strange—”

“No—no—it’s just—you’ll be home this afternoon before Roy comes? I’m frightened to tell him.”

Miss Cora blinked rapidly against the tears which came. Sunday afternoons had been such beautiful hours for Lizzie, with Roy coming out from the city—Oh, wasn’t it all too bad!

“I’ll be back very early.” She sniffled a little. “I—I must go now, or I’ll be late.”

She wanted to throw her arms about Lizzie, to comfort her; but the suffering had walled up around the girl until she could not even touch her hand again.

“Don’t bother to come down stairs,” she said.

As she pinned on her hat in the hall below, she heard the door into Lizzie’s room close softly.

Church that morning gave Miss Cora none of her usual glow at a pleasant duty properly performed. The sermon on foreign missions made her wonder whether teaching heathen what was right ever filled the missionaries with distress and confusion like hers. Later, at dinner, for the first time in her life, the comfort of the Forrest family seemed a thing so secure, so in accordance with rule, that it felt unreal. When, in the early dusk of the afternoon she stepped down from the car in which Mr. Forrest had driven her home, and walked up to her front door, she tried to rally her convictions about her for protection against the fear that besieged her.

She opened the door, and found the house warm, silent, just as she always found it. Then as she stood drawing off her gloves, she heard a voice, a slow, struggling voice.

“She says I’d ought to. She took me. Everybody treated me ’sif I was dirt, and she took me. She says I got to do it. If I’m a good woman. I got to be a decent woman. Roy! I couldn’t be your wife—’f I was a bad one. You—you’re too good. I—I wouldn’t let you marry a bad woman. You ought to gone away when I told you what I was.”

“Do you want to marry him?”

“I’d rather first kill myself dead. Don’t look at me like that!”

Lizzie’s voice had the terrifying quality of a suppressed scream. Miss Cora put out her hand to the wall to steady herself against the lurching of the floor. She must go out into the dining room; she felt as if she couldn’t lift her feet.

“I tell you it isn’t right, then!” Roy’s voice called out, lashing Miss Cora erect. “’Tisn’t right, that’s all.”

“If you been bad once, you never get over it, seems.” Lizzie’s voice dropped to its monotone again. “You pay for it ’slong’s you live.”

“You ain’t bad. You’re the best girl I ever knew. You—why, I can’t tell you, Lizzie! You—You’re going to marry me—you’re my woman. Ain’t we got it all planned? You—Lizzie!”

“No—No! You—you can’t touch me—Oh-h!”

“Lizzie, you thought ’twas all right to marry me, didn’t you? You been planning on it?”

“I—I always knew I wasn’t good enough for you.”

“That ain’t sense—if you love me—and you do!”

Miss Cora had reached the door into the small dining room. Lizzie, seated by the table, had thrown back her head to look up at the man standing in front of her. The white glory in the girl’s face made Miss Cora throw up her hand across her eyes.

“’F I didn’t love you, ’twouldn’t make no difference ’bout my being good. I love you—so I got to be good’s I can—”

“You love me—so you’re going to let him have you—going to have children by him—”

“Maybe I’ll die!” cried Lizzie. She flung her arms against her body, clutching at her breasts. “In here it feels ’sif I’d die.”

“You don’t think it’s right! You’re doing it just because she said to!”

“I don’t know. She says—”

“She’s an old woman—how does she know? She never had a man—what right’s she got to tell you—”

“Hush!” Lizzie had seen Miss Cora. Her eyes startlingly wide, with great dark circles about them, the girl pushed back her chair, and retreated along the edge of the table. The man turned, his round face flushed up to his sandy hair. Miss Cora noticed mechanically that he wore the new suit Lizzie had helped him buy, and the tie she herself had given him for Christmas.

“You think I’m an old woman—” Miss Cora tried to steady her thin voice. “And that I don’t know. Don’t you see it isn’t just what I think? It’s what is right?”

“You’ll excuse me, Miss MacAllister—” Miss Cora saw his usual manner of shy friendliness struggling a moment against the great rush of emotion within him—and whirling off in the flood. “How do you know what’s right? Who told you?” His hands shot out in awkward, right-angled gestures; they were square-fingered, slow, honest hands, like the boy himself. “You’re higher up than us—more learning—but who told you what’s right?”

“Lizzie knows, too. Her conscience tells her.”

“Lizzie’s conscience ain’t telling her nothing but what you told her. She never did anything so bad as trying to give a woman to a man she hated. What for?”

“Roy, when people make mistakes, they always have to suffer—but it comes out—it comes out in the end—” Miss Cora’s voice wavered off into silence. She couldn’t remember how it came out in the end.

“Mistakes? Who made ’em? Lizzie? A kid working in a pickle factory and living with a mean sister. Who helped her? Along comes this pimp—and shows her a little fun—and then—’cause who tells her what he’s after, huh?—he gets her. What ought to happen to him? ’Stead of that, you’d give him my Lizzie. Mistakes? Who’s making ’em?”

Miss Cora put her hands up to her ears, as if the words hurt her there, instead of deep within her heart. Then she heard Lizzie’s voice, faint and from some great distance, and she lowered her hands. Past the square shoulders of the man she could see Lizzie’s face.

“Roy,” she was saying, “Roy!” And the boy turned, an imploring humility coloring his assertiveness. “You mustn’t talk like that. Miss Cora—she’s good—she—knows what respectable folks think—she ought to know—”

Miss Cora felt her old heart beating very slowly; all her principles had hurried there, and lay in a cold, inert mass, against which she could scarcely breathe. She watched curiously the color draining out of the boy’s neck, leaving just a line of chafed red above his Sunday collar. She knew that his face would be white, too, when he turned to her again. It was, with sandy eyebrows bristling against its chalkiness.

“She’ll do what you say is right,” he said, haltingly. “I—I’d kill that skunk before I’d let him touch her. You—you don’t want her to have children to him, do you? Maybe I ain’t very good—but I’d be good to her—”

Miss Cora, clasping her hands stiffly before her, walked rigidly past Roy, around the table to Lizzie.

“Lizzie—” she cleared her throat. “Lizzie, you are doing this because I say to, not because you think it is right?”

Lizzie’s fingers were twisting a bit of the table cloth; except for a slight contracting of her eyelids, she gave no sign that she had heard.

“I can’t make you.” Miss Cora tried to push her voice out; it sounded queer and frightened. “I can’t be sure I know what you should do. I thought I knew—but I can’t be sure. I can’t tell you what to do. Go ahead—as you want to.”

Lizzie’s hand closed over the table edge.

“You mean I won’t be a bad woman—” she whispered.

“I hope not. Roy’s right. I’m an old woman. I don’t know.”

She watched the pale, tremulous light beating up into the clay despair of Lizzie’s face.

After all, real love was a good thing.

“God will let me take the blame,” she said softly.