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The considerate
thoughtfulness of Rosenblatt relieved Paulina of
the necessity of collecting these monthly dues, to her great joy,
for it was far beyond her mental capacity to compute, first in
Galician and then in Canadian money, the amount that each should
pay; and besides, as Rosenblatt was careful to point out, how could
she deal with defaulters, who, after accumulating a serious
indebtedness, might roll up their blankets and without a word of
warning fade away into the winter night? Indeed, with all her
agent's care, it not unfrequently happened that a lodger, securing
a job in one of the cordwood camps, would disappear, leaving behind
him only his empty space upon the floor and his debt upon the
books, which Rosenblatt kept with scrupulous care. Occasionally it
happened, however, that, as in all bookkeeping, a mistake would
creep in. This was unfortunately the case with young Jacob
Wassyl's account, of whose perfidy Paulina made loud complaints to
his friends, who straightway remonstrated with Jacob upon his
return from the camp. It was then that Jacob's indignant
protestations caused an examination of Rosenblatt's books,
whereupon that gentleman laboured with great diligence to make
abundantly clear to all how the obliteration of a single letter had
led to the mistake. It was a striking testimony to his fine sense
of honour that Rosenblatt insisted that Jacob, Paulina, and indeed
the whole company, should make the fullest investigation of his
books and satisfy themselves of his unimpeachable integrity. In a
private interview with Paulina, however, his rage passed all
bounds, and it was only Paulina's tearful entreaties that induced
him to continue to act as her agent, and not even her tears had
moved him had not Paulina solemnly sworn that never again would she
allow her blundering crudity to insert itself into the delicate
finesse of Rosenblatt's financial operations. Thenceforward all
went harmoniously enough, Paulina toiling with unremitting
diligence at her daily tasks, so that she might make the monthly
payments upon her house, and meet the rapacious demands of those
terrible English people, with their taxes and interest and legal
exactions, which Rosenblatt, with meritorious meekness, sought to
satisfy. So engrossed, indeed, was that excellent gentleman in
this service that he could hardly find time to give suitable over-
sight to his own building operations, in which, by the erection of
shack after shack, he sought to meet the ever growing demands of
the foreign colony.
Before a year had gone
it caused Rosenblatt no small annoyance that
while he was thus struggling to keep pace with the demands upon his
time and energy, Paulina, with lamentable lack of consideration,
should find it necessary to pause in her scrubbing, washing, and
baking, long enough to give birth to a fine healthy boy. Paulina's
need brought her help and a friend in the person of Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
who lived a few doors away in the only house that had been able to
resist the Galician invasion. It had not escaped Mrs. Fitzpatrick's
eye nor her kindly heart, as Paulina moved in and out about her
duties, that she would ere long pass into that mysterious valley of
life and death where a woman needs a woman's help; and so when the
hour came, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with fine contempt of "haythen" skill
and efficiency, came upon the scene and took command. It took her
only a few moments to clear from the house the men who with stolid
indifference to the sacred rights of privacy due to the event were
lounging about. Swinging the broom which she had brought with her,
she almost literally swept them forth, flinging their belongings out
into the snow. Not even Rosenblatt, who lingered about, did she
suffer to remain.
"Y're wife will not be
nadin' ye, I'm thinkin', for a while. Ye
can just wait till I can bring ye wurrd av y're babby," she said,
pushing him, not unkindly, from the room.
Rosenblatt, whose
knowledge of English was sufficient to enable him
to catch her meaning, began a vigorous protest:
"Eet ees not my woman,"
he exclaimed.
"Eat, is it!" replied
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, taking him up sharply.
"Indade ye can eat where ye can get it. Faith, it's a man ye are,
sure enough, that can niver forget y're stomach! An' y're wife
comin' till her sorrow!"
"Eet ees not my--"
stormily began Rosenblatt.
"Out wid ye," cried
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, impatiently waving her big
red hands before his face. "Howly Mother! It's the wurrld's
wonder how a dacent woman cud put up wid ye!"
And leaving him in
sputtering rage, she turned to her duty, aiding,
with gentle touch and tender though meaningless words, her sister
woman through her hour of anguish.
In three days Paulina
was again in her place and at her work, and
within a week her household was re-established in its normal
condition. The baby, rolled up in an old quilt and laid upon her
bed, received little attention except when the pangs of hunger
wrung lusty protests from his vigorous lungs, and had it not been
for Mrs. Fitzpatrick's frequent visits, the unwelcome little human
atom would have fared badly enough. For the first two weeks of its
life the motherly-hearted Irish woman gave an hour every day to the
bathing and dressing of the babe, while Irma, the little girl of
Paulina's household, watched in wide-eyed wonder and delight;
watched to such purpose, indeed, that before the two weeks had gone
Mrs. Fitzpatrick felt that to the little girl's eager and capable
hands the baby might safely be entrusted.
"It's the ould-fashioned
little thing she is," she confided to her
husband, Timothy. "Tin years, an' she has more sinse in the hair
outside av her head than that woman has in the brains inside av
hers. It's aisy seen she's no mother of hers--ye can niver get
canary burrds from owls' eggs. And the strength of her," she
continued, to the admiring and sympathetic Timothy, "wid her white
face and her burnin' brown eyes!"
And so it came that
every day, no matter to what depths the
thermometer might fall, the little white-faced, white-haired
Russian girl with the "burnin'" brown eyes brought Paulina's baby
to be inspected by Mrs. Fitzpatrick's critical eye. Before a year
had passed Irma had won an assured place in the admiration and
affection of not only Mrs. Fitzpatrick, but of her husband,
Timothy, as well.
But of Paulina the same
could not be said, for with the passing
months she steadily descended in the scale of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's
regard. Paulina was undoubtedly slovenly. Her attempts at
housekeeping--if housekeeping it could be called--were utterly
contemptible in the eyes of Mrs. Fitzpatrick. These defects,
however, might have been pardoned, and with patience and
perseverance might have been removed, but there were conditions in
Paulina's domestic relations that Mrs. Fitzpatrick could not
forgive. The economic arrangements which turned Paulina's room
into a public dormitory were abhorrent to the Irish woman's sense
of decency. Often had she turned the full tide of her voluble
invective upon Paulina, who, though conscious that all was not
well--for no one could mistake the flash of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's eye
nor the stridency of her voice--received Mrs. Fitzpatrick's
indignant criticism with a patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
despairing of success in her efforts with Paulina, called in the
aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as domestic in the New West Hotel where
Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as charwoman two days in the week, had
become more or less expert in the colloquial English of her
environment. Together they laboured with Paulina, but with little
effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite unconscious, of moral
shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a little to discover
during the progress of her missionary labours that even Anka, of
whose goodness she was thoroughly assured, did not appear to share
her horror of Paulina's moral condition. It was the East meeting
the West, the Slav facing the Anglo-Saxon. Between their points of
view stretched generations of moral development. It was not a
question of absolute moral character so much as a question of moral
standards. The vastness of this distinction in standards was
beginning to dawn upon Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and she was prepared to
view Paulina's insensibility to moral distinctions in a more
lenient light, when a new idea suddenly struck her:
"But y're man; how does
he stand it? Tell me that."
The two Galician women
gazed at each other in silence. At length
Anka replied with manifest reluctance:
"She got no man here.
Her man in Russia."
"What!" exclaimed Mrs.
Fitzpatrick in a terrible voice. "An' do ye
mane to say! An' that Rosenblatt--is he not her husband? Howly
Mother of God," she continued in an awed tone of voice, "an' is
this the woman I've been havin' to do wid!"
The wrath, the scorn,
the repulsion in her eyes, her face, her
whole attitude, revealed to the unhappy Paulina what no words could
have conveyed. Under her sallow skin the red blood of shame slowly
mounted. At that moment she saw herself and her life as never
before. The wrathful scorn of this indignant woman pierced like a
lightning bolt to the depths of her sluggish moral sense and
awakened it to new vitality. For a few moments she stood silent
and with face aflame, and then, turning slowly, passed into her
house. It was the beginning of Paulina's redemption. |
