Phoebe and the Heart of Toil

HOEBE was growing up. Mrs. Martin traced the process in a series of baffling reserves and of more baffling confidences. Phoebe was beginning to have pronounced views on the interior decoration of the house. Also she developed dissatisfaction with her mother's style of dressing and she wrote every evening in a diary which promised to be as long as the Congressional Record.

"Mother," she said abruptly one morning, "I do wish there was something I could do to be of more use in the world. Sometimes I think I'm not making the most of my opportunities. And nowadays everybody ought to do something special with their lives, don't you think so?"

Mrs. Martin's brow wrinkled. She always took her children seriously at first. Sometimes she laughed at them afterwards. Mr. Martin always laughed anyway. It depended on his mood whether he paid any further attention.

"Why don't you take a Sunday-school class?" Mrs. Martin asked after a considering pause.

"Oh mother!" Phoebe's tone throbbed through every gradation of injured pride. "I don't mean anything like that. I mean taking up nursing or singing at prison concerts, or lugging flowers to sick children's hospitals or visiting poor people in the slums. I'd like to do something seriously worth while." "I can't think of anything," Mrs. Martin said tranquilly, but in her firmest tone of conviction, "that would worry your father more than to have you working in the slums—unless it was visiting prisons."

"Oh don't worry about what father says—I'll take care of him," Phoebe declared airily. "Of course he makes a fuss at first, no matter what I do, but I always bring him round."

When Phoebe made statements like this, Mrs. Martin was vaguely troubled. She herself exercised a wise, wifely diplomacy, exoterically gentle, esoterically inflexible; but it never  occurred to her that Mr. Martin was not the head of his own house. And as for saying to herself that she would "bring him round"—sometimes she wondered if when Phoebe married, she would have the proper respect for her husband.

"Yes," Phoebe went on meditatively, "I've been thinking of this for a long time. I wonder—" She stopped as if with a dazzling inspiration. "I know what I'll do. I'll go over and see Mrs. Warburton. You know she does so much charity work."

With Phoebe to think was to act. Her impetuous exit from the house was only equaled in bustle and determination by her cyclonic return.

"Oh I'm so glad I went over," she said breathlessly. "Mrs. Warburton says she's going to have a tea next week that she says will help me a lot. There's a Mr. Witherspoon going to speak on Applied Socialism. Mr. Witherspoon is a young man and just think, mother, he gives up his whole life to the poor. He lives in a little room in the slums and does things to help people. He doesn't exactly give them money, you understand—he helps them to help themselves. He's especially successful in his work with women. Mrs. Warburton says she doesn't know another young man who's assisted so many high-minded girls to find themselves. She said that was what the trouble with me was—I hadn't found myself. She showed me his picture—she's got a lot of them—mostly profiles. He's awfully interesting-looking. Then she wrote off a long list of books that he'd given her to read. She hasn't had any time to read them herself yet, but I'm going to look them all through for her and pick out what would be most likely to interest her."

All that afternoon, Phoebe pored over a pile of undusted-looking books from the Public Library.

"Phoebe's got an idea she'd like to do some charity work," Mrs. Martin said cautiously to her husband that night. Mrs. Martin was always feeling a tentative way ahead for her iconoclastic children—always blazing a new trail through the pathless forests of paternal conservatism. "I don't know exactly what it is she wants. I guess she doesn't know herself. She's going to a tea at Mrs. Warburton's next week. A socialist man's going to speak.  Phoebe says she wants to be of some use in the world."

"Set her to cleaning up the attic," Mr. Martin growled, his eye riveted to his paper.

"No, it isn't anything like that she wants," Mrs. Martin said placidly. "She says she's had unusual opportunities and she feels she isn't being fair if she doesn't share them with those that haven't had them. You can't imagine how grown-up she seemed to me Edward, talking like that. I do hope that she isn't going to be a strong-minded woman. If she  turned out to be one of those suffragettes, it would be a dreadful disappointment to me."

"She'll be strong-handed if she keeps on," Mr. Martin said. "When I came down to-night, she and Ernest were boxing in the Playroom."

"Boxing!" Mrs. Martin repeated in a horrified tone. "Boxing! Edward Martin what do you mean?"

"I mean boxing." Mr. Martin said with emphasis. "She had Tug's gloves on and Ernest had his own gloves on and they were going at each other like a pair of tiger cubs. Phoebe's remarkably active. You see she's taller than Ernest and quick as a cat. Ernest's stronger of course but they're pretty well matched."

"Boxing!" Mrs. Martin said for the third time. "Well, I do think I have the strangest children any woman ever had."

"Listen to that racket!" Mr. Martin said, smiling broadly. "Tug Warburton must be up there now."

On the day of the tea, Phoebe appeared before her mother—a vision of shining girlhood, a little touched with wistfulness. But what she surveyed in the hall-mirror, was a carefully managed effect in brown—severe brown suit, feathered brown hat, soft brown furs.

"How do I look, mother? " she asked complacently.

"Very well." Mrs. Martin spoke without apparent enthusiasm but inwardly she was proud. "She's a stylish-looking girl," she said to herself. "She's what people call chic. I never was stylish. I guess I'd rather she'd have that air than a Grecian nose."

But Phoebe did not need a Grecian nose, Her own was small, spirited, piquant. Perhaps its outline was only pretty but the brows above it were beautiful and the lips below a deep red and delicately curved. And her chin gave a flower-petal finish to the soft oval of her face. Gray eyes that alternately dreamed and sparkled, an amber-olive skin which glowed with soft flushes of color when she spoke or laughed, hair that rippled and shone, a tall, lithe, strong-looking girl-figure—that was Phoebe,

It is possible that Mr. Witherspoon noticed some of this. Certainly at the close of his "causerie," he talked with Phoebe at least fifteen minutes longer than with anybody else.

"Say, Phoeb, ain't that long-haired stiff they've got over to Warburton's the limit?" Ernest asked that night at dinner. "Tug says he's the worst bug they've had yet—long hair, flossy clothes—Tug says he's even caught him shining his finger-nails."

"I suppose you mean Mr. Witherspoon," Phoebe said with that elaborate stateliness which always preceded a squabble with Ernest. "Mr. Witherspoon has the most lovely hair I ever saw. Mrs. Warburton says he has to wear it long because his head is so small that he looks queer with short hair. Besides it falls forward and makes a kind of background for his profile just like the pictures of Daudet. The effect is very artistic in a photograph. And as for his hands— well, Em Martin, how you've got the nerve to even say the word hands"

Ernest, rapidly concealing his hands in his napkin, dropped almost with a thump from the conversation.

"Mr. Witherspoon is one of the most delightful men I ever met." Phoebe turned an eclipsing shoulder on her brother, concentrating thereby the full light of her countenance on her mother. She was still stately.

Mrs. Martin had an uncomfortable feeling that her girl had suddenly become thirty. "He believes just the things I do," Phoebe went on. "He says that nobody in the world ought to work all the time or play all the time. He says it is just as much privilege to work as to play. He says as things are now the proportion must be left to the individual conscience, although the universal conscience is being developed slowly. He says everybody owes some service to his race and generation."

The family had a chance that night to see Mr. Witherspoon at closer range. After dinner Mrs. Warburton telephoned that she was going to bring her guest for a call. From the standpoint of the many, it was not a successful social event. Early in the evening, Ernest and Tug, first exchanging signals as obvious as elaborate, disappeared upstairs. After the generalities of greeting, Mr. Martin relapsed into a yes-and-no civility. At Phoebe's first move towards the tea-table, he slipped out of the conversation and into the back library.

Mr. Witherspoon did not seem to mind this masculine defection. He sat in the becoming glow of the yellow piano-lamp, manipulating his chocolate-cup with a charming grace. At one side sat handsome, fussy Mrs. Warburton, beaming with the pride of ownership and panting mentally in the wake of his phrases. At the other side sat Mrs. Martin  her hand shading her brow, her sweet, faded face, soft with sympathy. In front, wide-eyed, her lips parted as if she drank from the Pierian Spring, sat Phoebe. Mr. Witherspoon shone.

The next day was Saturday. Phoebe appeared at breakfast in her simplest gown and with linen collars and cuffs, severely plain. She had wet her hair, parted it in the middle and brought it down in ugly smoothness over her ears. To her mother's great relief, it dried before breakfast was over. Soon all kinds of little claw-like curls had pulled loose from the pins and hung in a golden-brown fringe over her forehead and in her neck. This minimized the effect of the collars and cuffs surprisingly.

At nine, Mrs. Martin heard her at the telephone.

"No, Tug," she said with the gentle firmness of those who are consecrated to high ideals. I don't feel like canoeing today. I have a great deal of important reading that I must do. No, I don't know when I can go. I expect to be very busy—yes, even during the vacation. No, I can't tell you about it. It's a secret—I haven't even spoken to my father and mother yet. But I doubt if I have any leisure from now on."

Mrs. Martin continued to wonder, but she did not question. Phoebe spent the entire bright day indoors, reading John Stuart Mill on "The Subjection of Women."

As they were arising from dinner that evening, Phoebe addressed her father with sombre dignity. "I would like to speak with you alone."

"What about?" Mr. Martin asked with the tact of fathers.

"It's a secret, father," Phoebe said with a proud, pale patience.

"I bet she's going to brace him for that new tennis-racket," Ernest grumbled. "And she'll get it too," he added grimly.

Only Mrs. Martin knew that the hour had struck.

Phoebe was closeted with her father for twenty minutes. She emerged with an air of gentle meekness, much belied by a triumphant sparkle in her eye. She went immediately to her room.

Mr. Martin came out of the star-conference, a red, a wrathful, a palpably beaten man.

"What do you suppose she's up to now, mother?" he groaned. The pronoun "she" on Mr. Martin's lips never meant anybody but Phoebe.

"Of course it's something about this socialist business," Mrs. Martin said. She was as undisturbed as Mr. Martin was crestfallen. "She wants to come in and work in the office during her spring vacation," Mr. Martin jerked out.

Mrs. Martin's embroidery-needle stopped in mid-air. "Work in the—her spring vacation—well, of all—if that isn't—" She stopped short and impaled her husband on a look of withering inquiry. "Of course you refused her?" she demanded.

"No, not exactly," he faltered. "But I didn't say she could, either."

"That means she'll do it. Edward Martin, you are wax in that child's hands." Mrs. Martin spoke with an air of detachment as though neither of the two people were related to her.

Mr. Martin sprang to his own defense. "Well, she said she would cry her eyes out if I didn't let her, and she cried some as it was. And if I didn't want her in my office, couldn't I get her in some other office? Would I give her a recommendation? And when I thought how she might have to work and how they might treat her—well, the long and the short of it was—I—I— well, I didn't say no. But will you tell me—" All the heat went out of Mr. Martin's voice. He was being patient with the whole world, as one for whom all cause and effect had become an inextricable tangle—"—will you tell me why she wants to do it?"

"Oh a lot of things," Mrs. Martin answered vaguely, feeling a timid way through a problem in psychology too subtle for her. "She wants to be of some use in the world—and all those dusty books she's been reading—and that socialist man, Mr. Witherspoon."

"That puppy!" Mr. Martin muttered.

"Oh Edward," Mrs. Martin remonstrated. "I think you're very unjust there. He seems to have a much higher aim in life than most young men. I'd like you to hear him talk of the suffering in the slums—women whose husbands beat them and little babies left alone all day in garrets."

"I'd like to see him go to work for a week."

"What people are in the office now?" Mrs. Martin asked.

Mr. Martin looked at her in silence. So night a man appear who sees his strongest ally deserting him at his moment of greatest need. "You don't think she'll really put it through," he said hopelessly.

Mrs. Martin made a little "tchk!" "That shows how much you know Phoebe."

"Oh I guess 1 know her as well as anybody," Mr. Martin answered. "There's Brackett, of course, and the two stenographers, Miss McCarthy and Miss Nelson. Ford, Morris and McIntyre come in to make reports. And there's the new office-boy—Mullaney—who's about the toughest-talking specimen I ever saw. I haven't discharged him yet because I haven't got the nerve. But the last two or three days, he certainly has been the limit—smart as a whip too."

"But he wouldn't say anything—unpleasant—to his employer's daughter, would he?" Mrs. Martin asked in instant alarm.

"That's it. Phoebe doesn't want to be known as my daughter. She wants to go anonymously. She wants to go as—what was that name—Jane Jones. She says she doesn't want to be deferred to—or favored—she says she just wants a chance to feel the beat of the great heart of toil."

"That's one of Mr. Witherspoon's phrases," Mrs. Martin said casually.

"Mutt!" Mr. Martin ejaculated.

Mrs. Martin sighed. "I was counting on getting Phoebe's spring dress-making done this vacation. As it is, I've engaged Miss Symonds for a week. She'll have to come just the same. I don't dare put her off again—with all the demand there is for her. We'll have to try on evenings."

But Mr. Martin was not listening. "Who does she take it from?" he asked in a stony voice.

"You!" Mrs. Martin retorted. "I guess you'll have to let her try it now, Ed. With Phoebe, things must run their course. Once she's made up her mind, nothing short of death itself will stop her—and she doesn't get that from the Brookses either. Make it hard for her, and she'll stay till the last gun's fired. Make it easy for her to start in, and there's some hope she'll quit. But don't be too easy when she goes to work."

Mr. Martin took hope. "I'll crowd all I can on her. If she stays it won't be because she likes it."

There followed a period of domestic upheaval in the Martin family.

For a week before her vacation, Phoebe spent all her leisure toiling on two dresses which represented her idea—gathered from the women's magazines—of the uniform appropriate to the woman in industry.

Then vacation began and Phoebe went to work.

Every morning, she caught the eight o'clock local to Boston, provisioned always with one lunch-basket, one badly printed socialistic pamphlet, one dusty socialistic book. She always returned at half-past six with the lunch-basket conspicuously empty, the pamphlet noticeably dog-eared and the book-mark, without which she apparently floated anchorless and uncharted on a sea of phrases, advanced one chapter in the dusty book. Sometimes she met Mr. Witherspoon going or coming, and it was obvious that her resolution gained fresh impetus from the contact.

Mrs. Martin was preoccupied and irritated. She missed her daughter, and the dress-making was progressing but slowly. Phoebe read a dusty book even while Miss Symonds squatted on the floor to hang her skirts.

Mr. Martin simmered in that state of general depression which manifests itself with men whenever things go wrong, "in the office."

Tug Warburton had disappeared. Ernest, alone, adapted himself philosophically to the situation. He was not an atom interested in his sister's experiment. That was why, perhaps, Phoebe's characteristic perversity took the form of confiding her experiences exclusively to him. She spent her evenings with him in the big room at the top of the house, formerly called the Playroom, now invariably termed the Gym.

Time had been when both Phoebe's and Ernest's toys cluttered it in an equal disorder, But since Phoebe grew to the acquisition of girlish Lares,, mysterious and carefully prized, she had retreated with them to the secret fastness of a big chamber on the floor below.

Ernest had reached that stage when his sole object in life was to cultivate every muscle in his body. To himself, Ernest confessed a motto—"the healthy mind in the healthy body." The sporting page in the paper had become the most enthralling of printed documents to him, and his mother was always coming across stray numbers of magazines devoted to the cause of physical culture. All kinds of muscle-distending apparatus littered the Gym. Chest-weights ornamented one expanse of wall and a punching-bag another. Dumb-bells of varying weights tripped the unsuspecting visitor. Indian clubs, fencing foils, boxing-gloves decorated the mantel. Ernest could be found at almost any hour of his leisure in the midst of all this, exercising. Sometimes, nowadays, it crossed Phoebe's mind that Ernest might turn out good-looking after all.

"I like it ever so much, Ern," she said abruptly the second night, "though I have to work awfully hard. Everybody is so kind to me in the office—especially the men. Not that the girls aren't—Miss Nelson is simply dandy—only they seem a little curious about me. That nice old Mr. Brackett is a perfect dear, And every one of them will stop their work any time to show me about things. But there's an office-boy there named Joe Mullaney and if he isn't tough. Why tough's no name for him. He's taken the greatest dislike to me. He just loathes and abominates me—I don't know why. Now Ern Martin, if you ever breathe a word of I to father or mother"

Ernest was busy smashing vigorous arcs in the atmosphere with a pair of five-pound dumb-bells. He did not speak for a moment and Phoebe saw from his fixed expression that he was counting.

"Aw cut it out!" he gasped, changing to the Indian clubs. "What would I be saying anything about it for?"

Downstairs Mr. Martin was saying, "Oh yes, she got along pretty well today.She put only one typewriter out of commission and I guess she didn't ask Brackett to sharpen her pencil more than twenty-five times."

"That boy Joe Mullaney is the meanest, hatefullest horridest thing I ever saw, Ern," was Phoebe's next confidence. "You see it occurred to me today to ask some questions of the proletariat and put the answers down in a note-book. Mr. Witherspoon says that a human document is always the most valuable kind of contribution to sociology and besides he says—well, anyway, I asked Miss Nelson and Miss McCarthy and Mr. Brackett everything that occurred to me about the business world and they were just as nice as they could be. Then I started on Joe. But he wouldn't give me a straight answer to anything. And after I got through, he looked at me in the most insulting way and said, 'Say, when did you escape from the College Settlement?' Isn't that disgusting?"

But Ernest's answer was lost in the noise of a whirlwind encounter with the punching-bag.

"She's taking to asking questions," Mr. Martin reported that night. "Brackett said that she asked him no less than two hundred.  And she puts the answers down in a little book. I should think they'd all hate her. Queer though everybody seems to enjoy having her there. Well of course Phoebe has—" For a moment his mood of constant disapproval seemed to struggle with his natural pride as father. "Of course Phoebe has a way with her. Brackett stays a half hour every night and corrects all her mistakes."

"What do you think that boy Joe did today, Ern?" Phoebe asked a few evenings later. "You see it occurred to me that I'd make my investigations more scientific by writing out a series of questions all alike for everybody on the force to answer. Then I could cognate—cognate—" Phoebe's eye had the uncertain look of one who is not sure she had succeeded in a daring mental verbal flight, "—no,—collate—anyway, I mean compare them. I spent my whole lunch-hour typewriting lists and everybody was just lovely about answering them—except Joe. One question was, 'What was your object in embarking in a mercantile career?' And he wrote, 'To buy silk stockings for our little pet-elephant, Gussie.' Now wouldn't that make your blood boil?"

"Sure," Ernest agreed unenthusiastically, "Say, Phoebe, want to put on the gloves with me?"

Mr. and Mrs. Martin, sitting in domestic dejection, smiled in spite of themselves as cheerful sounds of punches and scrambles, of yells of triumph and shrieks of derision came floating down to them.

"If she'll only keep that up," Mr. Martin said once, "we may be able to keep her out of a sanatorium."

Mrs. Martin, depending much on her husband for courage in these Phoebeless days, took heart of grace from the fact that Phoebe certainly did keep it up. Regularly every night the sound of a bout came to them. But Phoebe showed no signs of giving up her work. A week went by, eight days, nine days, ten.

On the eleventh day, something broke. Phoebe left as usual at a quarter to eight. At half-past nine, she came marching into the house, head erect, cheeks flaming. Mrs. Martin looked up, too startled to speak.

"I've resigned my job, mother," Phoebe said crisply, "Where's Ern?"

Mrs. Martin crushed back her, "What under the canopy—" and answered, "Upstairs."

Phoebe ran up to the Gym, two steps at a time. Mrs. Martin heard her eager voice in an endless recital. It deepened sometimes—Mrs. Martin knew then that she was indignant. It broke into little sparkles of laughter. And by that token, Mrs. Martin knew that the took situation was not too serious.

Upstairs, Phoebe was going full-tilt. "Don't you ever tell anybody what I'm going to tell you now, Ern Martin, as long as you live. If you ever breathe a word to Tug Warburton— It's about that boy, Joe Mullaney. Just after I got into the office today, I was left all alone with him. Father had gone out. Mr. Brackett was upstairs. Miss Nelson was sick and didn't come in anyway and Miss McCarthy had a visitor in the outer office. I said to him, 'Joe, I want you to post this letter, please.' He didn't say anything but he came over as if to take the letter. But when he got up close to me, he said, 'I don't take no orders from you, nor nobody like you—see!' Now it wasn't so much what he said as the perfectly insulting way he said it. After a week of what I'd stood from him, too. Even then I don't see how I ever came to do it. But he bent straight toward me with his chin out and—and—and I was so hopping mad that before I knew what I was doing—what do you think I did?"

Ernest grunted.

"I hit him. How I could do such a thing will always—but of course it's because I've been boxing so much nights with you. You see I've sort of got into the habit. I never was so ashamed—but it knocked him down."

"Gee!" said Ernest. He came over and sat down by his sister, his eyes lighted with interest. "Did you really knock him down?"

"Yes," Phoebe faltered, "you see coming like that when he wasn't prepared"

"Good girl!" Ernest applauded. "What did he do?"

"He jumped up and came toward me like a—like a—a I don't know what. I was awfully frightened. But I didn't run. I stood and waited for him. And just before he got up to me, he stopped and glared at me as if he'd like to kill me. Then he turned and walked out of the office without looking at me. Well, I felt awful. In the first place my hand hurt—it's a very different thing with the gloves off, Ern Martin. And in the second place, I was afraid I'd hurt him. And then I was ashamed. Think of a girl hitting a person she doesn't know"

"Was it right on the jaw?" Ernest interrupted with a growing excitement.

"Right on the point."

"What kind of a punch was it?" Ernest asked in the severe tone of the pedagogue.

"I don't know whether it was an upper cut or a left hook," Phoebe said impatiently.

"Did he come back?"

"Well, listen to me—I'm telling it as fast as I can. In a few moments I heard the door open. I was so mad that I wouldn't look up. I heard him coming over toward my desk but I wouldn't have taken any notice of him for a farm down East. Oh, but I was nervous. I could feel him coming all up and down my spine. Well, he walked round in front of my desk. I could see that he was carrying something in the hand back of him. I thought it was a knife or a revolver and, oh mercy, wasn't I scared! But I didn't budge or look up. Suddenly he reached over and dropped what he had on my desk. What do you think it was?"

"What?"

"An orange. And he said, 'Gee, I din't know you had a punch like that up your sleeve. Pretty good for a girl!' And he looked at me —well, Ern, he looked at me as if he'd never seen a girl like me in his life. And then we sat down and had a talk and I asked him why he hated me so. And he said it was because I looked so much like society girls who go down into the slums during Lent to make people do things they don't want to do. He said he'd seen all kinds of—'uplifters,' he called them, and nobody knows what he'd suffered from the wrong kind making him plant window boxes and go to the Art Museum on free days. And he said that he wanted to get my job for his sister and it made him perfectly sick when he heard somebody else had  it. He said that he determined to make it just as hard for me as he could."

"The son of a gun!" said Ernest, entirely without elegance but with considerable force, "I'll lay for him tomorrow and punch the head off him."

"Now you keep quiet, Ern. I like that boy. He's all right. He works days and goes to a gym nights. I wouldn't have you hurt him for the world. Besides he is the champion bantam-weight of the Michael P. Larrigan Association."

"I bet I could lick him," Ernest boasted.

"You do and I'll tell father. I told him what my real name was and how interested I was to hear the beat of the great heart of toil. And I told him that I'd see that his sister got some position in the place. And then I thought it all over and I made up my mind that the best thing for me to do was to quit. So I went in to father, got him to give Joe's sister a chance, resigned my job and came home. And now all I'm wondering is if they'll ever be able to teach that girl how to do my work."

"Mother," Phoebe said that day at lunch, "I don't think that a girl who has a good home and doesn't have to support herself should take the bread out of the mouth of a poor girl who does—do you?"

"No," was all Mrs. Martin said. But the question explained much to her.

Mrs. Martin went out early in the afternoon. On her return, she peeped into her daughter's room. Phoebe, wearing a long, rose-figured, blue-banded kimono, sat, one foot buried under her, in the midst of a pile of couch-cushions. From the cover of her book, a female of a winning blonde pulchritude smiled archly at the world at large. Mrs. Martin recognized one of the month's best sellers.

Later, Mrs. Martin heard Phoebe at the telephone. "Is that you, Tug? I was just thinking how I'd like to go out canoeing this afternoon. Mr. Witherspoon engaged! My goodness! An heiress. He has money, too, hasn't he? Oh, he hasn't. Oh, I see—if somebody had made the right will. Well, I'm sure I congratulate him with all my heart. All right—at four. I'll be ready."

Mrs. Martin sighed a long sigh of relief. The zeit-geist [sic] had finished with Phoebe. "What next I wonder?" Mrs. Martin said to Mr. Martin.

"She certainly had a very refining influence on that tough office-boy, Mullaney," Mr. Martin said to Mrs. Martin.

"Gee, but I'd like to have given that office-boy his!" Ernest said to himself. "Say, don't get another bug like that for a while, will you?" Tug Warburton said to Phoebe.