United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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already modest sowing of bachelor wild oats, a sowing pathetically hampered by his small salary. So Jean Atkins was left face to face with the decay of her life, her husband, home and son lost, and her body no longer responding to her treatments. After two years she was still confused and at a loss to account for her uselessness. This particular Sunday was no different from its immediate pre¬ decessors. Whetting her dull spirits upon the possibility that some¬ one at church might invite her for dinner, Mrs. Atkins made the supreme effort. Up came the body; heavy and misshapen; the vast stomach settling down upon thin, flabby thighs. Grotesque, she stood trying not to see the decay of her body. She could put on her good corsets, her near-silk dress, her synthetic silk stockings, and it wouldn’t look so bad. She shook her head to clear away the surg¬ ing consciousness of lonesomeness, uselessness and decay. After all did the priest not say she was atoning for Man’s Sin? Suddenly devout, she lumbered over to the closet muttering to herself . . . “Hail Mary, Mother of Jesus . . Hail Mary, Mother . . . Mother.” II. The room might have belonged to a man whose life had been made rich and mellow through the possession of good books, whole shelves of them; but it didn’t. It belonged to a woman and now she was sitting at the desk, writing nervously on a pad of paper . . . The room was pregnant with sadness. Mary’s soft brown eyes gave back a deep copper glow to the log fire. The room was one in which work had been done ... It had that spirit of . . . amiability that dull oak and brown leather gives forth .... Mary was still absorbed in the dull fire, when John Thatcher came quietly in, watched her for a moment, then spoke. “Mary,” he said, . Suddenly the woman threw down her pen. “Oh, hell, what would he say?” Roger looked up from his paper. Hello, probably.” “Smarty. Oh, well, what do I care? I’m sick of writing stories anyway. I’m through.” “Tut, tut. Imagine Western Canada ' s most famous woman novel¬ ist saying that. Let’s see, what was it Lamboume of the Press said? Quote: Elizabeth Warren has a n intellectual intensity which re¬ minds one of the better male novelists, Lloyd Douglas for instance. Her characters make an appeal to our intellect and not to our emo¬ tions. Miss Warren’s latest novel, ‘Jane Watkins, Author,’ will sat¬ isfy the most exacting taste. Unquote.” Impatiently Elizabeth rose and walked to the window. “Oh, stop, Roger. Lambourne always was a fool. There are moments [16]

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RIPE FRUIT So may’st thou live, till, like ripe fruit, thou drop Into thy mother’s lap, or he with ease Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature. P. L. XI. I. M rs. Atkins lay in bed, staring apathetically at the b rown patch on the ceiling, and vaguely trying to adjust her neat soul to the squalor of a back-room in a thirt-rate rooming-house. Just my luck to have a room under the lavatory. As her eyes followed the brown stain down the wallpaper, her mind sought about for an incentive to heave her body out of the bed, trying to form a plan out of a vast idleness. A glimpse of Mrs. Atkins fifteen years before this Sunday morning would have led one to believe that violent catastrophe had brought her downfall. This was not the case. Mrs. Atkins was only one of many middle-class women whose lives had ceased with the departure of their husbands and children. Back in that era known to her as “when Jim was alive,” Jean Atkins had been something of a zealot in the performance of her wifely duties. Her dusting and mopping was fervent. She outdid her wifely neighbors in lacy aprons and in profusion of rosettes on her bed-throws and curtains. Nor were her efforts devoted to her home to the exclusion of her person. In the glow of her enthusiasm, she seized upon every opportunity to make herself the Model Wife, as conceived by Hollywood and American advertising companies. She watched her diet, gave herself facials to discourage the wrinkles; was careful to cry when the cookies burned; bought negligees trimmed with imitation ostrich feathers; and rubbed deodorant into her armpits every night. Lest it appear that Mrs. Atkins was inter¬ ested only in things of the flesh, it must be added that she never missed a Sunday mass, and confessed regularly. In her more devout moments she liked to think of herself as tending her body as one would tend something foul, in the hope of making it more acceptable in the sight of God. Usually she didn’t worry about justifying her preoccupation, but just went on perfecting herself. This little idyll came to an end as idylls will. Jim Atkins, a line¬ man for the Street Railway Company, was killed while repairing some wires in an electric storm. The Company lawyer did not con¬ sider the catastrophe unusual, so Mrs. Atkins received only a small pension. Her son, a bookkeeper in Regina, showed an understandable reluctance to allow the presence of a doting mother to interrupt his [15]

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when even I know I’m writing sentimental rot. This life is stifling me. “I’ve done all my living between the covers of books. I’ve turned myself into an unsexed old bluestocking. I should have mar¬ ried and had eleven children.” “Well, Betty, you had your choice twenty-five years ago, and I, personally, think you chose right.” “Why, Roger Knight, what are you saying!” “I guess this is pretty strong, but thirty years’ friendship ought to protect me, so I’m going to tell you the truth. Twenty-five years ago I asked you to marry me but you wouldn’t give me an answer. You wanted to dabble round in Art for a while. For three years I hung around like a sick cat and then, in disgust, I married a woman who looked as though she didn’t even know what tragedy was. She didn’t, but she soon learned what bridge was, and gossiping over back fences. Just the same I think I made a good swop. God, I feel for you artistic women and the men you get hold of. You never get in touch with life. Look at yourself. M.A. ’28, two years in an office, then twenty odd years of this, varied by school-teachers’ expeditions into the Trossachs and the Alps. Not a breath of fresh air! If you had married me I would have been afraid to act like a normal man, for fear your imagination would squeeze a fat check from some publisher out of my love-making. I would have had to deal with hysterical wives, kids brought up to be geniuses. You would have dragged Hamlet to meals, into bed at night. Heaven preserve me from that! Gambling debts and offended neighbors are nothing compared to it.” No longer was there anything out in the shadow which took Elizabeth’s attention. “I knew you never forgave me for not marry¬ ing me.” “Oh, forget it, Betty. I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s the problem that confronts any modem woman capable of education. It’s the bloody generosity with which the male animal has thrown open a new and forbidden world of emotions to the female, with¬ out supplying the scale of values, or expecting it all to make any difference in a woman. Betty, you are a damn good example of the results of higher education for women. You’re an extreme case and easy to analyze, an anarchy of emotions and not one atom of ethics in your whole virgin body. Just keep on with your stories and don’t let Eve get the upper hand as she did tonight. You’ll be happiest that way. Well I’d better be off or Bertha will be suing you for alienation of affection. She has always suspected you. She doesn’t know you.” [17]