Part 1

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

By

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN

Author of "What is Socialism?" etc.

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY NEW YORK

_All Rights Reserved_

Published August, 1910 Second Printing, November, 1910 Third Printing, December, 1910 Fourth Printing, January, 1911 Fifth Printing, February, 1911 Sixth Printing, February, 1911 Seventh Printing, March, 1911 Eighth Printing, March, 1911 Ninth Printing, April, 1911 Tenth Printing, April, 1911 Eleventh Printing, June, 1911 Twelfth Printing, July, 1911 Thirteenth Printing, August, 1911 Fourteenth Printing, October, 1911 Fifteenth Printing, February, 1912 Sixteenth Printing, April, 1912

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.

TO ANDREW JOHN KAUFFMAN (1840-1899)

"O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! Somewhere, surely, afar, In the sounding labor-house vast Of being, is practiced that strength, Zealous, beneficent, firm!"

CAVEAT EMPTOR

This story is intended for three classes of readers, and no more. It is intended for those who have to bring up children, for those who have to bring up themselves, and for those who, in order that they may think of bettering the weaker, are, on their own part, strong enough to begin that task by bearing a knowledge of the truth.

For it is the truth only that I have told. Throughout this narrative there is no incident that is not a daily commonplace in the life of the underworld of every large city. If proof were needed, the newspapers have, during the last twelvemonth, proved as much. I have written only what I have myself seen and myself heard, and I set it down for none but those who may profit by it.

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.

NEW YORK CITY, _16th June, 1910_

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

I

"AS IF THE SPRING WERE ALL YOUR OWN"

The local weather-prophets--the cape-coated Mennonites and the bearded Amishmen, who came into the town to market--had said, with choral unanimity, that the spring would be brief and sudden, and the summer parching and intense.

Already, though April had but dawned, the pink arbutus had bloomed and withered, and the pale first violets were peeping, purple and fragrant, among the lush grass of the front yards on Second Street. The annual oriole was a full fortnight ahead of his time in opening his summer-house in the hickory-tree on the Southwarks' lawn; and up in the droning study-room of the high-school, where all the windows were wide to the lazy sunlight, Miss England had begun, this week, to direct the thoughts of her dwindling senior-class toward the subjects of their graduation essays.

Swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal, Mary Denbigh, the morning-session ended, turned from the graveled walk before the school-grounds into the little town's chief thoroughfare.

Nobody had ever called her pretty, but her light serge skirt had that day been lengthened to her ankles, and Mary was wholly conscious of the new tokens of her growth. Lithe, strong-limbed and firm-bodied, of peasant stock and peasant vigor, youth and health and the open country air were not factors sufficiently unfamiliar to combine in a charm that would attract admiration in her own community. Only a jaded city-gaze--and a well-trained city-gaze at that--would have seen in the blue eyes, the red mouth, the straight nose, pink cheeks, and abundant russet hair, any promise worthy of fulfillment,--could have detected the flower in the bud; and that such a gaze should, on this day of all days, have been leveled in the girl's direction was, perhaps, only one of those grim jests of a Fate that loves to play upon the harmony between man and nature, and that here observed the coming of a human spring that must be brief and sudden, a human summer parching and intense.

The usual group of idle residents and idling commercial drummers were sitting at the plate-glass window of the hotel as she went by, but the girl did not see them. Passing among objects of long familiarity, she saw, in fact, nothing until, in a side-street, she heard a rapid step behind her, was covered by an approaching shadow and, half-turning, found someone, a stranger, at her side.

"How d'y'do, liddle girl?"

Mary looked up; but she was quite too startled to observe anything save that the speaker--she could not have told whether he were man or boy--was at once dark and rosy, smiling and serious, hat in hand, and, beyond all speculation, no citizen of her own borough.

"I don't know you," she said.

She flushed quickly, and strode forward. It was, she knew, no uncommon thing for the girls of her acquaintance to be "picked up," as they called the process, by some fellow-townsman that had never been formally presented to them; but the process was, as she also knew, one that lost its propriety when extended to aliens.

The present alien was, nevertheless, not easily to be dismissed. He fell into her gait, and walked facilely beside her.

"I beg your _par_don," he said in the humblest and most unobjectionable tones. "I don't mean to be _rude_ to you, honest, I don't. I'm a traveling-man, you see----"

Mary was striding rapidly ahead, her full mouth now drawn firm, her blue eyes fixed on the vanishing-point.

"I don't care what you are," she answered.

"All righd," he pleaded. "All I vant now is a chanc't to _exblain_. I've chust started out traveling for my fader, who's a big distiller in N'York. I've got to stay in this hole for a vhile, un' I'm not used to the _bees_ness, un' I'm lonesome, un' I only vondered if you vouldn't go vith me to a moving-picture show, or something, this evening."

The best way to deal with such a situation is a way that is easiest for the inexperienced and the unpolished. Mary was both. For the first time since he had begun to walk beside her, she now, coming to a defiant stop, faced her annoyer.

"I don't know you," she repeated. "I've told you that onc't, and you'd better not make me tell you any more still. I live the second door round the coming corner, and my pop is a puddler an' weighs two hundred and ten pounds!"

Again she wheeled and again resumed her homeward march; and this time she walked alone. If she heard, dimly, behind her a confused murmur of response, she did not hesitate to learn whether the words were expressions of further apology or new-born dismay, and when she ran, flushed and panting, up the three wooden steps to the two-story brick house that was her home, though she could not then deny herself one backward glance, that glance revealed to her only an empty corner. The pursuit had ended.

She flung open the light door that was never locked by day, walked down the short, darkened hall, past the curtain of the equally darkened parlor, through the dining-room with its pine table covered by a red cotton cloth, and so into the small, crowded kitchen, where her mother fretted and clattered above the highly polished range.

Mrs. Denbigh was a little Pennsylvania-German woman, whom a stern religion and a long life of hard work had not intellectually enlarged. In spite of the fact that she had borne eight children, of whom Mary was the seventh, her sympathies had failed to broaden, and her equally religious and equally hard-working Welsh husband used often to remark to her, during his one-monthly evening of intoxication, that he was glad indeed she was to have no more progeny, since, somehow or other, she "seemed to git wuss tempered with every innocent youngling as koom to 'un." Whether this criticism was or was not precise, it is at least true that much drudgery had not improved the weary woman's temper; that the long years before her husband rose to his present wages--years during which his wife had not only kept a house and reared a family, but had also added to the communal income by night-work as a dress-maker--had left her gray and stooped and hatchet-faced; and that, though of a race in which the maternal instinct runs almost to a passion, her patience with her remaining pair of home-biding children was frequently fragile and short.

Just now she looked up, a spoon in one hand and a pan in the other, her forehead damp, as always, with sweat, and her harassed eyes momentarily bright with anger.

"Where on earth have you been, anyways?" she shrilly inquired of Mary.

The girl's face instantly hardened from the excitement of her recent adventure to the sullenness behind which she always took refuge in these more usual domestic crises. What she might have confessed had she come home to a less overworked mother, it is, obviously, vain to conjecture; what she actually did was to lock within her breast the story that had been trembling on her red lips, and what she replied to Mrs. Denbigh's question was an ungracious:

"Been at school. Where d'you think?"

The mother straightened up as far as her long-stooped shoulders would permit.

"Think?" she echoed. "I guess I can guess still where you was. 'Less you was kep' in, you had ought t' been home five minutes ago, an' nobody's kep' in only five minutes. You've been flirtin' with some idiot of a boy on the street-corner yet--that's about what you've been doin'!"

It was a random shot, and one fired from no previous knowledge, but the girl at once realized that, had any neighbor chanced to see what had actually occurred, this parental construction would appear to have some foundation in fact. The thought was enough to seal the locked gate in her breast.

"That ain't so!" she said, with childish fury. "I come straight home, like I always do. If you want me to help more with the work than I do help, why don't you let me quit school? I don't want to go any more, anyhow."

There are some families in which the passing of the lie is no such uncommon or serious offense, and the Denbigh _ménage_ was one of them. It was, therefore, upon the latter portion of Mary's speech that her mother, at this time, seized.

"You'll go to school as long as your pop and me say you must!" she retorted.

"You let our Etta quit when she was in the grammar school," expostulated Mary, with an appeal to the precedent of the successfully married sister, who was now a next-door neighbor. "You let her quit then, and now I'm in the high."

Had Mrs. Denbigh's rejoinder been in accordance with the facts, she would have said that all she wanted to do was to give her daughter as much of an education as was compatible with the proper conduct of the Denbigh domestic economy. But tired women are no more apt to indulge in analytical exposition than are tired men, and so it chanced that her next speech, accompanied by a gesture that raised the cooking-spoon aloft, was a torrent of words unexpectedly interrupted.

"In the high?" she repeated. "Well, I know where you'll be in one minute, still, if you don't right away----"

She brought the spoon forward with a mighty swoop, but its parabola, in crossing the stove, sent it into violent contact with the pot that held the stew destined for the noon dinner. The pot was balanced on the edge of an aperture in the stove whence the lid had been removed. The vessel fell, and its contents belched upon the burning coals.

Mrs. Denbigh gave one look at the steaming ruin, and then seized the already retreating Mary. The girl's struggles, her cries, the dignity of the newly lengthened skirt, avail nothing. A dozen times the mother's arm descended in stinging castigation, and then she hurried her daughter into the hall.

"You git right back to school!" she ordered. "I don't care if you're a half-hour early--you're mostly late enough. You've spoiled your own dinner and mine and little Sallie's, so you don't git nothin' to eat still till evening. You'll go to school, and you'll keep on goin' till your pop an' me tells you to quit!"

Mary looked at the woman without a word, and then, still without a word, passed through the front door and banged it behind her.

But she did not walk in the direction of the school; she was not going to school. The rebel-spirit of youth choked her, and turned her feet, almost without will of her own, toward the river.

She crossed the railroad tracks, came to the disused towpath and followed it for a mile beyond the town. Far westward she went, "walking," as she would have said, "her madness down," and, hungry though she now was, she did not rest until at last, as late as three o'clock in the afternoon, she sat on a rock at the point where the Susquehanna curves between the sheer precipice of Chicques on the Lancaster County side and the hooded nose of the high hill they call the Point, upon the other.

The flood of rebellion had ceased, but a steady and enduring stream of resolution remained.

Across the sweep of eddies she saw the nearer hills already shedding the browns and blacks of winter's bared limbs and pine branches for the tenderer green of a gentler season. The cultivated portions of the summits were already rich with coming life. Behind her rolled the Donegal Valley, where the crops were even then germinating. Birds were mating in the sap-wet trees beside the water, and from the flowering seeds there came the subtle, poignant scent of a warm April.

Something--something new and nameless and wonderful--rose in her throat and left her heart hammering an answer to the new world around her. She was glad--glad in spite of all her anger and her hunger; glad that she had not told her mother of the boy--for he must have been a boy--whom she had, after all, so needlessly reprimanded; but glad, above everything else, for some reason, for some intoxication that she might neither then nor ever after completely understand.

Her cheeks glowed a deeper pink; her blue eyes glistened; she opened her red mouth to the seductive sun and, with a sweep of her firm hands, flung loose her russet hair to the breeze. Looking out at the distant fields, she sprang to her feet again and walked, swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal.

The fields reminded her of the rural prophets. It was evident, she thought, that they were right: this year's was to be a spring brief and sudden, a summer parching and intense.

II

A DEED OF TRUST

Mary Denbigh could not remember the day when the holy estate of matrimony had not been held up to her by others as the whole destiny of woman and had not presented itself as the natural, the easy, the sole path of escape from filial servitude.

She belonged, as has been intimated, to a race in which motherhood is an instinctive passion and an economic necessity, and she was born into a class in which not to marry is socially shameful and materially precarious. When she was very small, her own dolls were her own children and her playmates' dolls her children-in-law, and, when she grew older, she had always before her the sedulously maintained illusion of emancipation worn by those girls, but a few years her seniors, who had given up the drudgery of childhood, which she hated, for the drudgery of wifehood, which they loftily concealed. A young wife was a superior being, whose condition was not at all to be judged by the known condition of one's mother, and all the other and more intimate relations of marriage remained, to the uninitiate, a charmed mystery. If it seems strange to us that this mystery and this innocence remained to Mary at sixteen, the reflection rests not upon her from whom the secret kept its secrecy, but upon us to whom the innocence appears remarkable.

From a house that exacted everything and forgave nothing, a narrow house, which she could not see as simply an inevitable result of conditions as wide as the world, the girl looked out to that wonderful house next door where her sister had, only three years before, been taken as a bride. This sister was now an elegant person, who said "fore-head," "of-ten," and "a-gain," but Mary could remember Etta, in gingham frock and apron, performing the tasks that were now enforced upon Mary herself. And she could now observe--as, indeed, her sister's wholly conscious pride well intended that she should observe--Etta in clothes that were beyond the reach of an unmarried daughter of Owen Denbigh; Etta going to dances forbidden to a Denbigh maid. When she climbed reluctantly to bed at ten o'clock, Etta's lights blazed always wide awake, and when she rose in the gray of the morning, Etta's shutters were luxuriously closed.

Every dawn Mary must pack her father's dinner-bucket, as Etta used to pack it, before Owen started for the mill. That done, and the hurried breakfast eaten, she must make her own bed and wash the dishes before she set out for school. At noon there were more dishes, and only every other evening, before sitting down to detested study by the kerosene lamp in the dining-room, was she relieved of still more dish-washing by the growing, and apparently too favored, younger sister, Sallie.

The evening that followed Mary's truant walk along the river was one of those when she should have been granted this modicum of relief, but now, after the brief five o'clock supper, tow-headed Sallie set up a wail as the table was cleared.

"What's the matter with you now?" demanded Mrs. Denbigh, her harassed eyes blinking in the lamplight, and her hatchet-face more than commonly sharp.

"I ain't feelin' good," said Sallie. "I'm tired; I'm sick; I don't want to wash no dishes."

Mrs. Denbigh shot a glance through the double-doorway to the littered parlor; but the face of her unattentive husband was hidden behind the crinkling sheets of the _Daily Spy_, gripped by one great, grimy fist, while the stubby forefinger of the other hand spelled out the short syllables of the personal-column, facetiously headed "Our Card-Basket." His huge bulk bulged over all the edges of the uncomfortable patent armchair in which he was sitting: a picture of gorged contentment, there was as yet no help to be expected from him.

It was Mary, experienced in such attacks, who made ready to defend the law.

"You ain't sick," she declared.

"I am, too!" sniffed Sallie. "I'm awful sick!"

"Get out: you et more'n I did. You just want to make me do the work, an' I won't, 'cause it's your turn. So there!"

Mary's homecoming had, as it happened, not been the signal for a renewal of hostilities between her mother and herself. The former had just then been too hard at work to have either energy or thought in that direction, and throughout the evening meal the girl had deemed it wise to maintain a reticence calculated to keep her in the domestic background. Now, however, she had impulsively come forward, and the step at once brought her to Mrs. Denbigh's attention.

"After what you done this noon," she said to Mary, "you'd better keep your mouth shut. Go and wash them dishes!"

But Mary knew that she had now gone too far to retreat.

"It wasn't my fault the stew was spilled," she protested; "and anyhow, you did lick me onc't for that. Sallie just wants to shove her work off on me."

"I don't," blubbered Sallie. "I'll do 'em some evenin' when it's your turn."

"Yes," Mary sneered, "I know how you will."

"I will--I will--I will so!"

Sallie's voice rose to a shrill shriek, and then suddenly broke off in the middle of a note: there was a sound of elephantine stirring from the parlor, and the feared master of the house, moved at last from his lethargy, rolled into the double doorway and seemed nearly to block it.

One of the young reporters of _The Spy_ had once remarked--not in print--that Owen Denbigh resembled nothing so much as the stern of an armored cruiser seen from a catboat. How much of the covering of his powerful frame was fat and how much muscle is matter for conjecture; his life in the iron mills had certainly given him a strength at least approaching the appearance, and had blackened his large hands, reddened his big face, and grayed his bristling hair and his fiercely flaring mustache.

"Whad's ahl this devil's racket?" he shouted, in the voice he used in triumphing over the turmoil of the puddling-furnace.

Both children quailed before him, each prepared regardless of its merits, for acquittal or condemnation, as he might decide the issue. Even Mrs. Denbigh drew back and set her lips to silence.

The giant raised a threatening hand.

"Be ye ahl gone deef?" he demanded. "Whad's ahl this devil's racket fur?"

In a panic of self-preservation, the two girls began at once to clamor forth their woes.

"Sallie won't wash the dishes!" cried Mary.

"I'm sick," sobbed Sarah, "an' mom says Mary must wash 'em because she upset the stew this noon-time!"

In the merits of any case brought before him, the household Solomon was as little interested as if he had been the judge of a law-court. His years of overwork had limited his sense of a just division of toil among others, and his long oppression by task-masters had made himself a merciless task-master. Like the men that had driven him, he delighted most in driving those who were the hardest to drive. Sallie was too young to furnish appreciable resistance, but in the awakening Mary he now saw something that approached worthy opposition. He turned first to his wife.

"Did you tell 'er," he inquired, his stubby forefinger leveled at Mary--"did you tell 'er to wash 'un?"

Mrs. Denbigh bowed her sweating forehead in timid assent.

Then the father looked again at the offender.

"Wash 'un!" he ordered, and marched back to his parlor, his armchair, and his evening paper.

Mary knew her father too well not to know also the price of disobedience. Sullenly, but without hesitation, she retreated to the little kitchen and took up her uncongenial task.

Girlhood, then, must be denied much of its claim to recreation; the social machine was pitiless. Young life was a period of menial service from which the sole escape was marriage, whether to stranger or to friend. That a stranger should harm her was, to Mary--as it is to most girls of her age and environment--an idea unentertained: strangers were too few, and the world of moral fact too closely shut and guarded. Boys she had always been cautioned against in vague generalities; but she understood that they were prohibited because their company was a delectable luxury reserved for older and marriageable girls whose younger sisters were needed only to help in the household tasks.