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The Story Of Julia Page

K >> Kathleen Norris >> The Story Of Julia Page



Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.






THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

VOLUME V




THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE


KATHLEEN NORRIS




CHAPTER I


To Emeline, wife of George Page, there came slowly, in her
thirtieth year, a sullen conviction that life was monstrously
unfair. From a resentful realization that she was not happy in her
marriage, Emeline's mind went back to the days of her pert,
precocious childhood and her restless and discontented girlhood,
and she felt, with a sort of smouldering fury, that she had never
been happy, had never had a fair chance, at all!

It took Mrs. Page some years to come to this conclusion, for, if
she was shrewd and sharp among the women she knew, she was, in
essential things, an unintelligent woman, and mental effort of any
sort was strange to her. Throughout her entire life, her mind had
never been truly awakened. She had scrambled through Grammar
School, and had followed it with five years as saleswoman in a
millinery store, in that district of San Francisco known as the
Mission, marrying George Page at twenty-three, and up to that time
well enough pleased with herself and her life.

But that was eight years ago. Now Emeline could see that she had
reached--more, she had passed--her prime. She began to see that
the moods of those early years, however violent and changing, had
been fed upon secret springs of hope, hope vague and baseless
enough, but strong to colour a girl's life with all the brightness
of a thousand dawns. There had been rare potentialities in those
days, anything might happen, something WOULD happen. The little
Emeline Cox, moving between the dreary discomfort of home and the
hated routine of school, might surprise all these dull seniors and
school-mates some day! She might become an actress, she might
become a great singer, she might make a brilliant marriage.

As she grew older and grew prettier, these vague, bright dreams
strengthened. Emeline's mother was an overworked and shrill-voiced
woman, whose personality drove from the Shotwell Street house
whatever small comfort poverty and overcrowding and dirt left in
it. She had no personal message for Emeline. The older woman had
never learned the care of herself, her children, her husband, or
her house. She had naturally nothing to teach her daughter.
Emeline's father occasionally thundered a furious warning to his
daughters as to certain primitive moral laws. He did not tell
Emeline and her sisters why they might some day consent to abandon
the path of virtue, nor when, nor how. He never dreamed of winning
their affection and confidence, or of selecting their friends, and
making home a place to which these friends might occasionally
come. But he was fond of shouting, when Emeline, May, or Stella
pinned on their flimsy little hats for an evening walk, that if
ever a girl of his made a fool of herself and got into trouble,
she need never come near his door again! Perhaps Emeline and May
and Stella felt that the virtuous course, as exemplified by their
parents, was not all of roses, either, but they never said so, and
always shuddered dutifully at the paternal warning.

School also failed with the education of the inner Emeline,
although she moved successfully from a process known as
"diagramming" sentences to a serious literary analysis of "Snow-
Bound" and "Evangeline," and passed terrifying examinations in
ancient history, geography, and advanced problems in arithmetic.
By the time she left school she was a tall, giggling, black-eyed
creature, to be found walking up and down Mission Street, and
gossiping and chewing gum on almost any sunny afternoon. Between
her mother's whining and her father's bullying, home life was not
very pleasant, but at least there was nothing unusual in the
situation; among all the girls that Emeline knew there was not one
who could go back to a clean room, a hospitable dining-room, a
well-cooked and nourishing meal. All her friends did as she did:
wheedled money for new veils and new shoes from their fathers,
helped their mothers reluctantly and scornfully when they must,
slipped away to the street as often as possible, and when they
were at home, added their complaints and protests to the general
unpleasantness.

Had there been anything different before her eyes, who knows what
plans for domestic reform might have taken shape in the girl's
plastic brain? Emeline had never seen one example of real
affection and cooperation between mother and daughters, of work
quickly and skilfully done and forgotten, of a clean bright house
and a blossoming garden; she had never heard a theory otherwise
than that she was poor, her friends were poor, her parents were
poor, and that born under the wheels of a monstrous social
injustice, she might just as well be dirty and discouraged and
discontented at once and have done with it, for in the end she
must be so. Why should she question the abiding belief? Emeline
knew that, with her father's good pay and the excellent salaries
earned by her hard-handed, patient-eyed, stupid young brothers,
the family income ran well up toward three hundred dollars a
month: her father worked steadily at five dollars a day, George
was a roofer's assistant and earned eighty dollars a month, and
Chester worked in a plumber's shop, and at eighteen was paid
sixty-five dollars. Emeline could only conclude that three hundred
dollars a month was insufficient to prevent dirt, crowding,
scolding, miserable meals, and an incessant atmosphere of warm
soapsuds.

Presently she outraged her father by going into "Delphine's"
millinery store. Delphine was really a stout, bleached woman named
Lizzie Clarke, whose reputation was not quite good, although
nobody knew anything definite against her. She had a double store
on Market Street near Eleventh, a dreary place, with dusty models
in the windows, torn Nottingham curtains draped behind them, and
"Delphine" scrawled in gold across the dusty windows in front.
Emeline used to wonder, in the days when she and her giggling
associates passed "Delphine's" window, who ever bought the
dreadful hats in the left-hand window, although they admitted a
certain attraction on the right. Here would be a sign: "Any Hat in
this Window, Two Dollars," surrounded by cheap, dust-grained
felts, gaudily trimmed, or coarse straws wreathed with cotton
flowers. Once or twice Emeline and her friends went in, and one
day when a card in the window informed the passers-by that an
experienced saleslady was wanted, the girl, sick of the situation
at home and longing for novelty, boldly applied for the position.
Miss Clarke engaged her at once.

Emeline met, as she had expected, a storm at home, but she
weathered it, and kept her position. It was hard work, and poorly
paid, but the girl's dreams gilded everything, and she loved the
excitement of making sales, came eagerly to the gossip and joking
of her fellow-workers every morning, and really felt herself to be
in the current of life at last.

Miss Clarke was no better than her reputation, and would have
willingly helped her young saleswoman into a different sort of
life. But Emeline's little streak of shrewd selfishness saved her.
Emeline indulged in a hundred little coarsenesses and
indiscretions, but take the final step toward ruin she would not.
Nobody was going to get the better of her, she boasted. She used
rouge and lip red. She "met fellers" under flaming gas jets, and
went to dance halls with them, and to the Sunday picnics that were
her father's especial abomination; she shyly told vile stories and
timidly used strong words, but there it ended. Perhaps some
tattered remnant of the golden dream still hung before her eyes;
perhaps she still clung to the hope of a dim, wonderful time to
come.

More than that, the boys she knew were not a vicious lot; the
Jimmies and Johnnies, the Dans and Eds, were for the most part
neighbours, no more anxious to antagonize Emeline's father than
she was. They might kiss her good-night at her door, they might
deliberately try to get the girls to miss the last train home from
the picnic, but their spirit was of idle mischief rather than
malice, and a stinging slap from Emeline's hand afforded them, as
it did her, a certain shamed satisfaction.

George Page came into "Delphine's" on a windy summer afternoon
when Emeline had been there for nearly five years. He was a
salesman for some lines of tailored hats, a San Franciscan, but
employed by a New York wholesale house. Emeline chanced to be
alone in the place, for Miss Clarke was sick in bed, and the other
saleswoman away on her vacation. The trimmers, glancing out
through a plush curtain at the rear, saw Miss Cox and the
"drummer" absorbed in a three hours' conversation. From two to
five o'clock they talked; the drummer watching her in obvious
admiration when an occasional customer interrupted, and when Miss
Cox went home the drummer escorted her. Emeline had left the
parental roof some two years before; she was rooming, now, with a
mild and virtuous girl named Regina Lynch, in Howard Street.
Regina was the sort of girl frequently selected by a girl of
Emeline's type for confidante and companion: timid, conventional,
always ready to laugh and admire. Regina consented to go to dinner
with Emeline and Mr. Page, and as she later refused to go to the
theatre, Emeline would not go either; they all walked out Market
Street from the restaurant, and reached the Howard Street house at
about nine o'clock. Regina went straight upstairs, but Emeline and
George Page sat on the steps an hour longer, under the bright
summer moon, and when Emeline went upstairs she woke her roommate
up, and announced her engagement.

George came into the store at nine o'clock the next morning, to
radiantly confirm all that they had said the night before, and
with great simplicity the two began to plan for their future; from
that time they had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every
day; they were both utterly satisfied; they never questioned their
fate. In October George had to go to San Diego, and a dozen little
cities en route, for the firm, and Emeline went, too. They were
married in the little church of Saint Charles in Eighteenth
Street, only an hour or two before they started for San Jose, the
first stop in George's itinerary. Emeline's mother and sisters
came to her wedding, but the men of the family were working on
this week-day afternoon. The bride looked excited and happy,
colour burned scarlet in her cheeks, under her outrageous hat; she
wore a brown travelling gown, and the lemon-coloured gloves that
were popular in that day. Emeline felt that she was leaving
everything unpleasant in life behind her. George was the husband
of her dreams--or perhaps her dreams had temporarily adapted
themselves to George.

But, indeed, he was an exceptionally good fellow. He was handsome,
big, dashingly dressed. He was steady and successful in his work,
domestic in his tastes, and tenderly--and perhaps to-day a little
pityingly--devoted to this pretty, clever girl who loved him so,
and had such faith in him. His life had kept him a good deal among
men, and rather coarse men; he had had to do more drinking than he
cared to do, to play a good deal of poker, to listen to a good
deal of loose talk. Now, George felt a great relief that this was
over; he wanted a home, a wife, children.

The bride and groom had a cloudless three weeks of honeymoon among
a score of little Southern towns--and were scarcely less happy
during the first months of settling down. Emeline was entirely
ignorant of what was suitable or desirable in a home, and George
had only the crude ideals of a travelling man to guide him. They
enthusiastically selected a flat of four handsome, large, dark
rooms, over a corner saloon, on O'Farrell Street. The building was
new, the neighbourhood well built, and filled with stirring,
interesting life. George said it was conveniently near the
restaurant and theatre district, and to Emeline, after Mission
Street, it seemed the very hub of the world. The suite consisted
of a large front drawing-room, connected by enormous folding doors
with a rear drawing-room, which the Pages would use as a bedroom,
a large dining-room, and a dark kitchen, equipped with range and
"water back." There were several enormous closets, and the stairs
and hall, used by the several tenants of the house, were carpeted
richly. The Pages also carpeted their own rooms, hung the stiff
folds of Nottingham lace curtains at the high narrow windows, and
selected a set of the heavily upholstered furniture of the period
for their drawing-room. When Emeline's mother and sisters came to
call, Emeline showed them her gold-framed pictures, her curly-
maple bed and bureau, her glass closet in the dining-room, with
its curved glass front and sides and its shining contents--berry
saucers and almond dishes in pressed glass, and other luxuries to
which the late Miss Cox had been entirely a stranger. Emeline was
intoxicated with the freedom and the pleasures of her new life;
George was out of town two or three nights a week, but when he was
at home the two slept late of mornings, and loitered over their
breakfast, Emeline in a loose wrapper, filling and refilling her
coffee cup, while George rattled the paper and filled the room
with the odour of cigarettes.

Then Emeline was left to put her house in order, and dress herself
for the day--her corsets laced tight at the waist, her black hair
crimped elaborately above her bang, her pleated skirts draped
fashionably over her bustle. George would come back at one o'clock
to take her to lunch, and after lunch they wandered up and down
Kearney and Market streets, laughing and chatting, glad just to be
alive and together. Sometimes they dined downtown, too, and
afterward went to the "Tivoli" or "Morosco's," or even the Baldwin
Theatre, and sometimes bought and carried home the materials for a
dinner, and invited a few of George's men friends to enjoy it with
them. These were happy times; Emeline, flushed and pretty in her
improvised apron, queened it over the three or four adoring males,
and wondered why other women fussed so long over cooking, when men
so obviously enjoyed a steak, baked potatoes, canned vegetables,
and a pie from Swain's. After dinner the men always played poker,
a mild little game at first, with Emeline eagerly guarding a
little pile of chips, and gasping over every hand like a happy
child; but later more seriously, when Emeline, contrary to poker
superstition, sat on the arm of her husband's chair, to bring him
luck.

Luck she certainly seemed to bring him; the Pages would go yawning
to bed, after one of these evenings, chuckling over the various
hands.

"I couldn't see what you drew, George," Emeline would say, "but I
could see that Mack had aces on the roof, and it made me crazy to
have you go on raising that way! And then your three fish hooks!"

George would shout with pride at her use of poker terms--would
laugh all the harder if she used them incorrectly. And sometimes,
sinking luxuriously into the depths of the curly-maple bed,
Emeline would think herself the luckiest woman in the world. No
hurry about getting up in the morning; no one to please but
herself; pretty gowns and an adoring husband and a home beyond her
maddest hopes--the girl's dreams no longer followed her, happy
reality had blotted out the dream.

She felt a little injured, a little frightened, when the day came
on which she must tell George of some pretty well-founded
suspicions of her own condition. George might be "mad," or he
might laugh.

But George was wonderfully soothing and reassuring; more, was
pathetically glad and proud. He petted Emeline into a sort of
reluctant joy, and the attitude of her mother and sisters and the
few women she knew was likewise flattering. Important, self-
absorbed, she waited her appointed days, and in the early winter a
wizened, mottled little daughter was born. Julia was the name
Emeline had chosen for a girl, and Julia was the name duly given
her by the radiant and ecstatic George in the very first hour of
her life. Emeline had lost interest in the name--indeed, in the
child and her father as well--just then; racked, bewildered,
wholly spent, she lay back in the curly-maple bed, the first
little seed of that general resentment against life that was
eventually to envelop her, forming in her mind.

They had told her that because of this or that she would not have
a "hard time," and she had had a very hard time. They had told her
that she would forget the cruel pain the instant it was over, and
she knew she never would forget it. It made her shudder weakly to
think of all the babies in the world--of the schools packed with
children--at what a cost!

Emeline recovered quickly, and shut her resentment into her own
breast. Julie, as she was always called, was a cross baby, and
nowadays the two front rooms were usually draped with her damp
undergarments, and odorous of sour bottles and drying clothes. For
the few months that Emeline nursed the child she wandered about
until late in the day in a loose wrapper, a margin of draggled
nightgown showing under it, her hair in a tumbled knot at the back
of her head. If she had to run out for a loaf of bread or a pound
of coffee, she slipped on a street skirt, and buttoned her long
coat about her; her lean young throat would show, bare above the
lapels of the coat, but even this costume was not conspicuous in
that particular neighbourhood.

By the time Julia was weaned, Emeline had formed the wrapper
habit; she had also slipped back to the old viewpoint: they were
poor people, and the poor couldn't afford to do things decently,
to live comfortably. Emeline scolded and snapped at George, shook
and scolded the crying baby, and loitered in the hall for long,
complaining gossips with the other women of the house.

Time extricated the young Pages from these troubled days. Julia
grew into a handsome, precocious little girl of whom both parents
could be proud. Emeline never quite recovered her girlish good
looks, her face was thin now, with prominent cheek bones; there
was a little frowning line drawn between her eyes, and her
expression was sharp and anxious, but she became more fond of
dress than ever.

George's absences were a little longer in these days; he had been
given a larger territory to cover--and Emeline naturally turned
for society toward her women neighbours. There were one or two
very congenial married women of her own type in the same house,
pleasure-loving, excitable young women; one, a Mrs. Carter, with
two children in school, the other, Mrs. Palmer, triumphantly
childless. These introduced her to others; sometimes half a dozen
of them would go to a matinee together, a noisy, chattering group.
During the matinee Julia would sit on her mother's lap, a small
awed figure in a brief red silk dress and deep lace collar. Julia
always had several chocolates from the boxes that circulated among
her elders, and usually went to sleep during the last act, and was
dragged home, blinking and whining and wretched, by one aching
little arm.

George was passionately devoted to his little girl, and no toy was
too expensive for Julia to demand. Emeline loved the baby, too,
although she accepted as a martyrdom the responsibility of
supplying Julia's needs. But the Pages themselves rather drifted
apart with the years. Both were selfish, and each accused the
other of selfishness, although, as Emeline said stormily, no one
had ever called her that before she was married, and, as George
sullenly claimed, he himself had always been popularity's self
among the "fellows."

In all her life Emeline had never felt anything but a resentful
impatience for whatever curtailed her liberty or disturbed her
comfort in the slightest degree. She had never settled down to do
cheerfully anything that she did not want to do. She had shaken
off the claims of her own home as lightly as she had stepped from
"Delphine's" to the more tempting position of George's wife. Now
she could not believe that she was destined to live on with a man
who was becoming a confirmed dyspeptic, who thought she was a poor
housekeeper, an extravagant shopper, a wretched cook, and worse
than all, a sloven about her personal appearance. Emeline really
was all these things at times, and suspected it, but she had never
been shown how to do anything else, and she denied all charges
noisily.

One night when Julia was about four George stamped out of the
house, after a tirade against the prevailing disorder and some
insulting remarks about "delicatessen food." Emeline sent a few
furious remarks after him, and then wept over the sliced ham, the
potato salad, and the Saratoga chips, all of which she had brought
home from a nearby delicacy shop in oily paper bags only an hour
ago. She wandered disconsolately through the four rooms that had
been her home for nearly six years. The dust lay thick on the
polished wood and glass of the sideboard and glass closet in the
dining-room; ashes and the ends of cigarettes filled half a dozen
little receptacles here and there; a welter of newspapers had
formed a great drift in a corner of the room, and the thick velour
day cover of the table had been pushed back to make way for a
doubled and spotted tablecloth and the despised meal. The kitchen
was hideous with a confusion of souring bottles of milk, dirty
dishes, hardened ends of loaves, and a sticky jam jar or two;
Emeline's range was spotted and rusty, she never fired it now; a
three-burner gas plate sufficed for the family's needs. In the
bedroom a dozen garments were flung over the foot of the unmade
bed, Julia's toys and clothing littered this and the sitting-room,
the silk woof had been worn away on the heavily upholstered
furniture, and the strands of the cotton warp separated to show
the white lining beneath. On the mantel was a litter of medicine
bottles and theatre programs, powder boxes, gloves and slippers,
packages of gum and of cigarettes, and packs of cards, as well as
more ornamental matters: china statuettes and glass cologne
bottles, a palm-leaf fan with roses painted on it, a pincushion of
redwood bark, and a plush rolling-pin with brass screws in it,
hung by satin ribbons. Over all lay a thick coat of dust.

Emeline took Julia in her lap, and sat down in one of the patent
rockers. She remained for a long time staring out of the front
window. George's words burned angrily in her memory--she felt sick
of life.

A spring twilight was closing down upon O'Farrell Street. In the
row of houses opposite Emeline could see slits of gaslight behind
lowered shades, and could look straight into the second floor of
the establishment that flourished behind a large sign bearing the
words, "O'Connor, Modes." This row of bay-windowed houses had been
occupied as homes by very good families when the Pages first came
to O'Farrell Street, but six years had seen great changes in the
block. A grocery and bar now occupied the corner, facing the
saloon above which the Pages lived, and the respectable middle-
class families had moved away, one by one, giving place to all
sorts of business enterprises. Milliners and dressmakers took the
first floors, and rented the upper rooms; one window said "Mme.
Claire, Palmist," and another "Violin Lessons"; one basement was
occupied by a dealer in plaster statuary, and another by a little
restaurant. Most interesting of all to the stageloving Emeline was
the second floor, obliquely opposite her own, which bore an
immense sign, "Gottoli, Wigs and Theatrical Supplies. Costumes of
all sorts Designed and on Hand." Between Gottoli's windows were
two painted panels representing respectively a very angular,
moustached young man in a dress suit, and a girl in a Spanish
dancer's costume, with a tambourine. Gottoli did not do a very
flourishing business, but Emeline watched his doorway by the hour,
and if ever her dreams came back now, it was at these times.

To-night Julia went to sleep in her arms; she was an unexacting
little girl, accustomed to being ignored much of the time, and
humoured, over-indulged, and laughed at at long intervals. Emeline
sat on and on, crying now and then, and gradually reducing herself
to a more softened mood, when she longed to be dear to George
again, to please and content him. She had just made up her mind
that this was no neighbourhood for ideal home life, when George,
smelling strongly of whiskey, but affectionate and repentant, came
in.

"What doing?" asked George, stumbling in the dark room.

"Just watching the cable cars go up and down," Emeline said,
rousing. She set the dazed Julia on her feet, and groped for
matches on the mantel. A second later the stifling odour of block
matches drifted through the room, and Emeline lighted a gas jet.

"Had your supper?" said she, as George sat down and took the child
into his arms.

"Nope," he answered, grinning ashamedly. "Thought maybe you and
I'd go to dinner somewheres, Em."

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