"Don't swear," she returned reprovingly.
"Oh, I know," he said, "but it's enough to make any one swear.
We've never had anything but rotten luck here.
I'm going to go, and maybe if I get anything we can all move.
We'd be better off if we'd get some place where people don't know us.
We can't be anything here."
Mrs. Gerhardt listened with a strong hope for a betterment of their miserable life creeping into her heart.
If Bass would only do this.
If he would go and get work, and come to her rescue, as a strong bright young son might, what a thing it would be!
They were in the rapids of a life which was moving toward a dreadful calamity.
If only something would happen.
"Do you think you could get something to do?" she asked interestedly.
"I ought to," he said.
"I've never looked for a place yet that I didn't get it.
Other fellows have gone up there and done all right.
Look at the Millers."
He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked out the window.
"Do you think you could get along until I try my hand up there?" he asked.
"I guess we could," she replied.
"Papa's at work now and we have some money that, that—" she hesitated, to name the source, so ashamed was she of their predicament.
"Yes, I know," said Bass, grimly.
"We won't have to pay any rent here before fall and then we'll have to give it up anyhow," she added.
She was referring to the mortgage on the house, which fell due the next September and which unquestionably could not be met.
"If we could move away from here before then, I guess we could get along."
"I'll do it," said Bass determinedly. "I'll go."
Accordingly, he threw up his place at the end of the month, and the day after he left for Cleveland.
CHAPTER XI
The incidents of the days that followed, relating as they did peculiarly to Jennie, were of an order which the morality of our day has agreed to taboo.
Certain processes of the all-mother, the great artificing wisdom of the power that works and weaves in silence and in darkness, when viewed in the light of the established opinion of some of the little individuals created by it, are considered very vile.
We turn our faces away from the creation of life as if that were the last thing that man should dare to interest himself in, openly.
It is curious that a feeling of this sort should spring up in a world whose very essence is generative, the vast process dual, and where wind, water, soil, and light alike minister to the fruition of that which is all that we are.
Although the whole earth, not we alone, is moved by passions hymeneal, and everything terrestrial has come into being by the one common road, yet there is that ridiculous tendency to close the eyes and turn away the head as if there were something unclean in nature itself.
"Conceived in iniquity and born in sin," is the unnatural interpretation put upon the process by the extreme religionist, and the world, by its silence, gives assent to a judgment so marvelously warped.
Surely there is something radically wrong in this attitude.
The teachings of philosophy and the deductions of biology should find more practical application in the daily reasoning of man. No process is vile, no condition is unnatural.
The accidental variation from a given social practice does not necessarily entail sin.
No poor little earthling, caught in the enormous grip of chance, and so swerved from the established customs of men, could possibly be guilty of that depth of vileness which the attitude of the world would seem to predicate so inevitably.
Jennie was now to witness the unjust interpretation of that wonder of nature, which, but for Brander's death, might have been consecrated and hallowed as one of the ideal functions of life.
Although herself unable to distinguish the separateness of this from every other normal process of life, yet was she made to feel, by the actions of all about her, that degradation was her portion and sin the foundation as well as the condition of her state.
Almost, not quite, it was sought to extinguish the affection, the consideration, the care which, afterward, the world would demand of her, for her child.
Almost, not quite, was the budding and essential love looked upon as evil.
Although her punishment was neither the gibbet nor the jail of a few hundred years before, yet the ignorance and immobility of the human beings about her made it impossible for them to see anything in her present condition but a vile and premeditated infraction of the social code, the punishment of which was ostracism.
All she could do now was to shun the scornful gaze of men, and to bear in silence the great change that was coming upon her.
Strangely enough, she felt no useless remorse, no vain regrets.
Her heart was pure, and she was conscious that it was filled with peace.
Sorrow there was, it is true, but only a mellow phase of it, a vague uncertainty and wonder, which would sometimes cause her eyes to fill with tears.
You have heard the wood-dove calling in the lone stillness of the summertime; you have found the unheeded brooklet singing and babbling where no ear comes to hear.
Under dead leaves and snow-banks the delicate arbutus unfolds its simple blossom, answering some heavenly call for color.
So, too, this other flower of womanhood.
Jennie was left alone, but, like the wood-dove, she was a voice of sweetness in the summer-time.