XII
Elizabeth had gone abroad feeling that she might escape the dissatisfaction that possessed her. This dissatisfaction was so very indefinite that she could not dignify it as a positive trouble, but she took it with her over Europe wherever she went, and she finally decided that it would give her no peace until she took it home again. She could not discuss it with her mother, for Mrs. Ward was impatient of discussion. She could do no more than feel Elizabeth’s dissatisfaction, and she complained of it both abroad and at home. She told her husband and her son that Elizabeth had practically ruined their trip, that Elizabeth hadn’t enjoyed it herself, nor allowed her to enjoy it. Elizabeth, however, if unable to realize the sensations she had anticipated in their travels, gave her mother unexpected compensation by recalling and vivifying for her after they had returned in the fall, all their foreign experiences, so that they enjoyed them in retrospect. Ward, indeed, said that Elizabeth had seen everything there was to see in Europe. He only laughed when Elizabeth declared that, now she was at home again, she intended to do something; just what, she could not determine.
“Perhaps I’ll become a stenographer or a trained nurse.”
“The idea!” exclaimed Mrs. Ward. “To talk like that! You should pay more attention to your social duties.”
“Why?” demanded Elizabeth, looking at her mother with clear, sober eyes.
Mrs. Ward, in her habitual avoidance of reasons, could not think of one instantly.
“You owe it to your station,” she declared presently, and then, as if this were, after all, a reason, she added, “that’s why.”
Dick showed all the manly indignation of an elder brother.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Bess,” he said in the husky voice he had acquired. He had not changed; he bore himself importantly, wore a scowl, dressed extravagantly, and always in the extreme of the prevailing fashion; he seemed to have an intuition in such matters; he wore a new collar or a new kind of cravat two weeks in advance of the other young men in town, and they did not seem to follow him so much as he seemed to anticipate them. He lunched at the club, and Elizabeth divined that he spent large sums of money, and yet he was constant in his work; he was always at the Trust Company’s office early; he did not miss a single day. No, Dick had not changed; nothing had changed, and this thought only increased Elizabeth’s discontent, or vague uneasiness, or vague dissatisfaction, or whatever it was.
“I don’t know what it is,” she confided to Marriott the first time she saw him. “I ought to be of some use in the world, but I’m not—Oh, don’t say I am,” she insisted when she caught his expression; “don’t make the conventional protest. It’s just as I told you before I went away, I’m useless.” She glanced over the drawing-room in an inclusive condemnation of the luxury represented by the heavy furniture, the costly bric-à-brac, and all that. Her face wore an expression of weariness. She knew that she had not expressed herself. What she was thinking, or, rather, what she was feeling was, perhaps, the disappointment that comes to a spirited, imaginative, capable girl, who by education and training has developed ambitions and aspirations toward a real, full, useful life, yet who can do nothing in the world because the very conditions of that existence which give her those advantages forbid it. Prepared for life, she is not permitted to live; an artificial routine called a “sphere” is all that is allowed her; she may not realize her own personality, and, in time, is reduced to utter nothingness.
“By what right—” she resumed, but Marriott interrupted her.
“Don’t take that road; it will only make you unhappy.”
“Before I went abroad,” she went on, ignoring the warning, “I told you that I would do something when I came back—something to justify myself. That’s selfish, isn’t it?” She ended in a laugh. “Well, anyway,” she resumed, “I can look up the Koerners. You see the Koerners?”
“I haven’t tried that case yet,” Marriott said with a guilty expression.
“How dreadful of you!”
“Reproach me all you can,” he said. “I must pay some penance. But, you know—I—well, I didn’t try it at the spring term because Ford wanted to go to Europe, and then—well—I’m going to try it right away—soon.”
The next morning, as Marriott walked down town, he determined to take up the Koerner case immediately. It was one of those mild and sunny days of grace that Nature allows in the mellow autumn, dealing them out one by one with a smile that withholds promise for another, so that each comes to winter-dreading mortals as a rare surprise. The long walk in the sun filled Marriott with a fine delight of life; he was pleased with himself because at last he was to do a duty he had long neglected. He sent for Koerner, and the old man came on a pair of new yellow crutches, bringing his wife and his enormous pipe.
“Well, Mr. Koerner,” said Marriott, “I’m glad you’re about again. How are you getting along?”
“Vell, ve get along; I bin some goodt yet, you bet. I can vash—I sit up to dose tubs dere undt help der oldt voman.”
Marriott’s brows knotted in a perplexity that took on the aspect of a mild horror. It required some effort for him to realize this old man sitting with a wash-tub between his knees; the thought degraded the leonine figure. He wished that Koerner had not told him, and he hastened to change the subject.
“Your case will come on for trial now,” he said; “we must talk it over and get our evidence in shape.”
“Dot bin a long time alreadty, dot trial.”
“Yes, it has,” said Marriott, “but we’ll get to it now in two weeks.”
“Yah, dot’s vat you say.”
He puffed at his pipe a moment, sending out the thin wreaths of smoke in sharp little puffs. The strong face lifted its noble mask, the white hair—whiter than Marriott remembered it the last time—glistening like frost.
“You vait anoder year and I grow out anoder leg, maybe,” Koerner smoked on in silence. But presently the thin lips that pinched the amber pipe-stem began to twitch, the blue eyes twinkled under their shaggy-white brows; his own joke about his leg put him in good humor, and he forgot his displeasure. Marriott felt a supreme pity for the old man. He marveled at his patience, the patience everywhere exhibited by the voiceless poor. There was something stately in the old man, something dignified in the way in which he accepted calamity and joked it to its face.
Marriott found relief in turning to the case. As he was looking for the pleadings, he said carelessly:
“How’s Gusta?”
And instantly, by a change in the atmosphere, he felt that he had made a mistake. Koerner made no reply. Marriott heard him exchange two or three urgent sentences with his wife, in his harsh, guttural German. When Marriott turned about, Koerner was smoking in stolid silence, his face was stone. Mrs. Koerner cast a timid glance at her husband, and, turning in embarrassment from Marriott, fluttered her shawl about her arms and gazed out the windows. What did it mean? Marriott wondered.
“Well, let’s get down to business,” he said. He would ask no more questions, at any rate. But as he was going over the allegations of the petition with Koerner, finding the usual trouble in initiating the client into the mysteries of evidence, which are as often mysteries to the lawyers and the courts themselves, he was thinking more of Gusta than of the case. Poor Gusta, he thought, does the family doom lie on her, too?