Broken Necks/The Policewoman’s Daughter

I

It was not like Agatha to do this sort of thing. If you had told her mother that Agatha was waiting alone in a dismal parlor of a more or less sinister hotel for a man whom she had been forbidden to see at all, she, the mother, would have swooned. And Mrs. Orman was not a swooning woman. She was, on the contrary, one of those ladies who seem inhabited by the souls of the hippopotamus, the eagle, the blue-nosed mandril, and the Peruvian hummingbird. There was about her a spectacular equilibrium. Her exits and her entrances were all fraught with the circumstance of maneuvers. She gave forth an air of esthetic gloom, and before her most people felt an unreasonable, an overwhelming, a paralyzing chill, as before some itinerant altar place.

Any further words concerning Mrs. Orman must not be viewed as digressions, but as direct and illuminating reflections upon Agatha. Widowed at thirty, Mrs. Orman had concentrated upon Agatha. She had surrounded, embraced, engulfed her daughter. If Mrs. Orman was a Frankenstein, Agatha was a marionette in her image. Together they moved through a suspicious and unholy world, Agatha enveloped in the sanctity her parent exuded, the parent with a shrewd and terrifying eye fastened upon Life. There was nothing in the phenomena of this Life which could have startled her eye. If God Himself had appeared before Mrs. Orman in a pillar of fire while she was powdering her nose in the bathroom, she would not have swooned. She would have removed her shoes with a precise and religious gesture. She would have thought first of her fire insurance, secondly of the Life to Come, and thirdly of Agatha and the possible effect of the apparition upon her. But in this particular instance Mrs. Orman would have swooned, for, as has been intimated in a general way, she had personally superintended Agatha’s most intimate conduct for twenty years. The matter had been even more important than the personal superintending of Agatha’s mind. She had fitted her for life. She had purged her of sin. Her merest glance was a cathartic for devils. Since childhood she had impressed upon her that public reference to any parts of a young woman’s body except her heels, her nose, and the back of her head, was immoral. She had protected her from the sight and sound of men who swore, women who were about to have babies, statues which struggled to disprove the general notion that human beings ended at the ankles and recommenced at the neck, children who were persistently asking embarrassing questions, and all literary works which were not rebound once a year in art craft covers and offered for sale at department stores as suitable Christmas gifts.

She had done all these things and Agatha had grown up to be a credit to her mother. Other mothers, when they looked upon and listened to Agatha, would shake Mrs. Orman solemnly by the hand and murmur, "How did you do it?" They referred to that young lady’s delicately belligerent innocence, to her cloistral poise and her unsullied mind. They pointed out to Mrs. Orman that such attainments in an age when society was disporting itself in the guise of a hoochy-koochy-verein were nothing short of miracles.

She had done all these things, and from the time Agatha had passed eighteen she had redoubled her doing, her superintending.

With a firm though benevolent hand she had guided her daughter through that period which is usually such a nightmare to sensitive mothers, the period of the second, third, and fourth adolescences, when the female young begins to pose in front of mirrors, when it desires to marry a man with broad shoulders and a loud past, when it desires to be free, when it craves to hold hands, when it is full of subtle dreams.

In short, Mrs. Orman steered her child past all those intricate pitfalls which beset the unsullied at eighteen.

She had done these things efficiently, comprehensively, successfully, had Mrs. Orman, and yet, in the third month of her twentieth year Agatha waited in a back-street rendezvous for a prohibited admirer, and a singular calm was in her heart. And, such is the whimsical skein of the fates, at that particular moment Mrs. Orman was reclining in her inviolate home with a cold in her head and a sweet consciousness in her heart that Agatha was engaged in patriotic duties in a Red Cross shop.

II

Agatha had not yet removed her raincoat or her gloves. She was slightly out of breath. She had hurried because the sky looked as if it were going to rain, and now she was fully ten minutes early. She had found the place without difficulty. Fred had given her grave and explicit directions, and 3 o’clock was the hour he had set.

Agatha removed her raincoat. She removed her gloves. She sat down in a fat, bumpy chair and sighed. A little shiver trickled through her heart—just one little no-account shiver. It was followed by a glow which made her feel as if a warm pink light had been turned full upon her.

Under the influence of this glow Agatha felt herself thinking in the distance. That is, she experienced the sensation of one far removed from some turbulent phenomenon but who is yet a part of it. This double consciousness interested her. So also did the realization of her calm. She had looked forward to more violent emotions. She had expected to weep, to fall to her knees and pray, to think with great wrenching thoughts of her policewoman of a mother. Such disturbances would have been logical.

But instead of tumult, instead of those sinister lacerations which she had fearfully imagined, there was only calm. Little things about the sordid, unpleasant room focused themselves vividly for her. She noted with the temporary preoccupation of one who is emotionless the sepia print of a small lake with a boat leaning toward the horizon. It was in a decent brown frame. A red and green pin-cushion ball, which hung suspended by a dusty ribbon from a gilt gas-jet attracted her eyes.

She looked at her watch and found it was 3 o’clock.

She opened the back of the thing idly and looked upon a small photograph of her mother with an expression which might be called curious. The familiar features, the never-to-be-forgotten expression, conjured up for her a world upon which she looked as a stranger—a vivid, intimate and yet alien world.

Fred would arrive at any moment. She turned her eyes toward the window and saw that the sky had grown much darker and that the flurrying whisper of rain was in the air. It was as if a great bat had spread its crooked wings out over the streets. As the darkness increased, Agatha felt the depressing room settle back into a cozy intimacy. There was an eeriness in the gloom outside—as if it were the ghost of some unburied night walking the roof tops blind and unaware.

A languor came to Agatha and with it a faint giddiness. She stretched herself out in the chair. Soon to her ears drifted the first intermittent tattoo of the rain upon the window. Agatha thought of Fred. She was in love with him. Her thoughts of him for the past month had been, as they were now, like aimless summer clouds floating enchantingly through her brain. She would end by murmuring to herself, "Aggie, Aggie, I love you, I love you." This declaration addressed to herself was like water to parched lips. It confused her brain, it released exquisite little vespari tumults in her blood, and brought delicious little whirlpools into her heart.

She sat there and thought of Fred, her thoughts presenting themselves to her without sequence or volition. She kept thinking of how her mother had disapproved of Fred from the first. He played the violin. It was true that he came from an entirely presentable family, but in addition to playing the violin, he had black hair and slim fingers and once he had referred to Mischa Elman as being too passionate a performer to be an artist, and twice he had told anecdotes about an actress who had committed suicide, and three times Mrs. Orman had surprised him gazing upon Agatha in the unmistakable manner of a young man aware of more than the back of her head. Agatha acquired a clairvoyance in regard to her mother. She thought of the past in words which might well have been her mother’s words. She detached herself and looked upon Fred as her mother had and she found herself ruminating upon the fact that he was a man to be discouraged, removed.

The task was no new one for her mother. She had removed parlor ruffians of this type before. And her removal of Mr. Carr, the same being Fred, had been almost a masterpiece. By devious subtleties she had poisoned Agatha’s mind against him, revealing as she did, the basic indecency of his profession. She produced other young men whose red cheeks and firm business air contrasted almost maliciously with the lackadaisical unmanliness of the violinist. And at the psychological moment she had caused Fred to disappear from the pristine pastures in which her daughter browsed, a process requiring merely an instruction or two to the maid who answered the door and telephone bells.

III

With the rain now hammering persistently upon the windows, Agatha sat and thought of how curious it was that she should be waiting for this same Fred, curious though somehow natural. She did not seek to explain the matter to herself. She realized dimly that she had stepped out of one life into another, that she had passed through impregnable walls with the ease with which one walks out of a shadow. She pon- dered gently upon her own past. She marveled vaguely over the elation a man had given her by kiss- ing her and protesting he loved her. She felt a sort of unemotional dislike for her mother, and the sense of freedom, self-will, revolt became suddenly an in- toxicant which caused her to tremble.

It must have come from her father, this strength. Her father had died when she was a girl. The thought of him produced again the little no-account shiver. It was the probability of his spiritual existence which distressed her for the moment. What if he were in the room with her now? It was fifteen minutes past 3 o’clock. Agatha sat up abruptly in the manner of one who sees a ghost. Where was Fred? She pattered to the window and looked out on the rain and the long darkly shining street. In the distance a figure moved, but it was going the other way. She addressed herself suddenly with, "Aggie, Aggie, I love you," and a panic keener than usual suffused her. For no reason at all she walked to the door and opened it quietly. The hall leading to the office was dark and deserted. She felt lonely. She desired to weep. She began to think that calamities had overtaken Fred, that signs had fallen upon his lovely head, automobiles hurled him out of his path, street cars mangled him. She walked up and down and repeated aloud, as if talking to another person in the room, "I must be calm!"

Reseating herself in the chair near the window she launched her mind into a familiar reverie. She rehearsed the events of the recent past. She kept repeating that she was loved romantically; she juggled with memories. Now and then a lyric emotion seized upon her and caused her to murmur almost fiercely, "Aggie, Aggie, I love you."

Everything was vague. She reached after half-defined images, gave herself over to dim and lovely phantoms, and now and then relapsed into a tender interlude in which she pictured Fred kissing her hand with spiritual humbleness.

But gradually behind the reverie, as behind a curtain which might rise at any moment, a terrible premonition took form. It was 3:30. She should have to leave in an hour. Her mother expected her home from the Red Cross shop at 5. She peered into the rain-washed street, penetrating rain-swirled distances with her eyes. The premonition that Fred was not coming, that she was to be in some hideous way betrayed, deserted, chilled her now with its unmistakable presence. The confusion fled from her thought and left her staring bewildered, struggling desperately against another confusion which was invading her.

Things which she had looked upon as the furniture of an alien land, things of her past, began to pop, into terrible focus. The figure of her mother began to materialize before her. She beheld the familiar and dreadful face gazing at her out of the rain. And the voice of her mother began to echo in her, each tremendous inflection, each awful modulation. It was as the voice of God overtaking one who has turned his face toward Hell. With a horror-breeding distinctness it said to her, "Agatha, come home."

Agatha arose and swayed. The room had become abruptly a strange, intimidating place. Things unseen lurked in its corners.

With quick, nervous hands Agatha smoothed her hair. She had no conscious thought, only an increasingly persistent urge as though hands were seeking to hurl her about, to tear her away. She put her raincoat on and seized her gloves. She looked around for something else. "Fred, Fred," she kept murmuring in a frightened way. Standing poised for flight, Agatha turned and rushed to the window.

IV

She collapsed in the chair and wept, and as she wept she cast a furtive tear-blurred glance at her watch. It was 3:45. Her tears continued to flow. Behind them the name "Fred" still rapped at her brain, fainter and fainter. Hate and fury spent themselves slowly in sobs.

As the tears began to roll more gently from her eyes, she felt a vague purifying presence creeping into her. This presence whispered to her that she had been providentially saved. It informed her in a sweet, soothing manner that God had rescued her from the clutches of a perfidious wretch.

The process which went on in Agatha was not so simple and immediate as it would appear. There were relapses, dangerous intermissions, during which protests formed and conjectures, amiable ones, raised their shining heads. But it was a steady process, requiring in all twenty minutes and a great outlay of tears. During this process, out of the chaos that had possessed her at 3:45, a new calm gradually was forming, a calm sweet and lovely as the silence of a Sabbath morning.

Slowly Agatha surrendered herself to it. She began to feel benedictions dropping upon her. She thought of her father’s spirit, and raised her face bravely to the empty room and smiled.

The process achieved a sort of acceleration. It now proceeded to bring a peace into her heart, a beneficent, triumphant peace, and with this new calm came a tender adjustment as of one very tired and sinking back into a familiar embrace. It was the embrace of virtue, of the sense of innocence. "Mother, mother," she murmured, and the peace vanished and in its place came a great burning, a flame that caused her heart to writhe and wrenched little gasps from her lips. This was shame.

She wept again, violently, tumultuously, and murmured, "Mother, mother."

At each repetition of the magic word new flames reared their tongues in her soul. She gave herself over to this part of the process with a penitential fury, whipping her agonies with the deliberate remembrance of her sins.

Finally the process was complete. She arose trembling and put on her gloves. She felt the guidance of some great light in which her soul was bathing as in some wonderful prophylactic. She contemplated Fred coldly and with a vast hardness. She perceived his vileness. These were revelations, the final apocalypse given her by the process. She sank to her knees and raising her eyes she prayed. Her voice shook less and less as in answer to her words a joy came dancing into her being, the joy of a soul liberated. More than that—the joy of a darkness, a catastrophe averted. She stood up and without a glance at her watch, without a look out of the window, walked forth from the room. Her feet flew down the stairs in the acceleration of one running from horror-laden places.

V

She reached the street and the rain enveloped her in its long grey threads. "Agatha," she murmured to herself, "you are going home."

There was happiness in the thought, and thankfulness. She loved her mother. The love she had for her mother clothed her about as an armor. She walked on with the step of a crusader marching upon Holy Land.

She walked until she came to the car line and here she stopped. No car was in sight. As she stood in the downpour waiting, her thoughts traveled impatiently to her home. She longed for it with the nostalgia of one in an alien country. She had other emotions, firm, hard emotions. She understood her mother with an acute clarity of understanding. She understood why her mother fought against all the insidious manifestations of evil. Previously she had not understood the matter clearly. The force of her understanding caused her to bite her lip and gaze with a prodigious frown upon a lone tree which decorated the corner.

The dim outlines of the car appeared through the rain. Agatha watched them and wondered about something. In the midst of this new and altogether incomprehensible wondering Agatha opened her mouth and cried, "Oh!" with the tips of her fingers against her teeth. It was Tuesday!

The thought struck a blow at her brain. It actually made her reel. She stared with her mouth open at nothing in particular and then began to laugh. It was a quick, hysterical laughter. She was still laughing when the car, with a great noise and spurting of water from the tracks beneath, drew to a stop in front of her.

"Tuesday!" Agatha addressed the car. There was something in this word which was unbelievable. The conductor looked at her curiously, when she handed him her nickel. Agatha collapsed into a seat next a fat man. She felt a desire to tell him it was Tuesday. She felt an equally insane desire to announce the fact to the fourteen people in the car. Instead she chuckled to herself and murmured very low, "Aggie, Aggie, I love you, oh, I love you!"

The appointment had been for tomorrow.