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Title: Women
Author: Tarkington, Booth
Language: English
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B O O K S B Y
B O O T H T A R K I N G T O N
ALICE ADAMS
BEASLEY’S CHRISTMAS PARTY
BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN
CHERRY
CONQUEST OF CANAAN
GENTLE JULIA
HARLEQUIN AND COLUMBINE
HIS OWN PEOPLE
IN THE ARENA
MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE
PENROD
PENROD AND SAM
RAMSEY MILHOLLAND
SEVENTEEN
THE BEAUTIFUL LADY
THE FASCINATING STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES
THE FLIRT
THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA
THE GUEST OF QUESNAY
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
THE MAN FROM HOME
THE MIDLANDER
THE TURMOIL
THE TWO VANREVELS
WOMEN
WOMEN
BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &
COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COPYRIGHT,
1924, 1925, BY BOOTH TARKINGTON.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREAMBLE ................................... vii
CHAPTER
I. MRS. DODGE AND MRS. CROMWELL....... 1
II. A LADY ACROSS THE STREET........... 15
III. PERVERSITY OF A TELEPHONE.......... 24
IV. A GREAT MAN’S WIFE................. 33
V. ONE OF MRS. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTERS... 47
VI. SALLIE EALING...................... 63
VII. NAPOLEON WAS A LITTLE MAN.......... 79
VIII. MRS. DODGE’S ONLY DAUGHTER......... 90
IX. MRS. DODGE’S HUSBAND............... 104
X. LILY’S ALMOST FIRST ENGAGEMENT..... 110
XI. MRS. CROMWELL’S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER.. 126
XII. HER HAPPIEST HOUR.................. 142
XIII. HEARTBREAK......................... 164
XIV. MRS. DODGE’S NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR... 172
XV. MRS. DODGE DECLINES TO TELL........ 182
XVI. MRS. LESLIE BRAITHWAITE’S HUSBAND.. 206
XVII. “DOLLING”.......................... 216
XVIII. LILY’S FRIEND ADA.................. 223
XIX. PARENTS IN DARKNESS................ 246
XX. DAMSEL DARK, DAMSEL FAIR........... 254
XXI. MRS. CROMWELL’S NIECE.............. 263
XXII. WALLFLOWER......................... 275
XXIII. THE STRANGE MIRROR................. 290
XXIV. TRANSFIGURATION.................... 297
XXV. GLAMOUR CAN BE KEPT................ 309
XXVI. DESERT SAND........................ 314
XXVII. MIRACULOUS ACCIDENT................ 327
XXVIII. A PUBLIC MOCKERY................... 345
XXIX. MRS. CROMWELL’S OLDEST DAUGHTER.... 362
XXX. MRS. CROMWELL’S SONS-IN-LAW........ 400
XXXI. THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER............. 410
PREAMBLE
“BUT why not?” Mrs. Dodge said, leading the “Discussion” at the Woman’s
Saturday Club after the reading of Mrs. Cromwell’s essay, “Women as
Revealed in Some Phases of Modern Literature.” “Why shouldn’t something
of the actual life of such women as ourselves be the subject of a book?”
Mrs. Dodge inquired. “Mrs. Cromwell’s paper has pointed out to us that
in a novel a study of women must have a central theme, must focus upon a
central figure or ‘heroine,’ and must present her as a principal
participant in a centralized conflict or drama of some sort, in relation
to a limited group of other ‘characters.’ Now, so far as I can see, my
own life has no such centralizations, and I’m pretty sure Mrs.
Cromwell’s hasn’t, either, unless she is to be considered merely as a
mother; but she has other important relations in life besides her
relations to her three daughters, just as I have others besides that I
bear to my one daughter. In fact, I can’t find any central theme in Mrs.
Cromwell’s life or my own; I can’t find any centralized drama in her
life or mine, and I doubt if many of you can find such things in yours.
Our lives seem to be made up of apparently haphazard episodes, some
meaningless, others important, and although we do live principally with
our families and friends and neighbours, I find that people I hardly
know have sometimes walked casually into my life, and influenced it, and
then walked out of it as casually as they came in. All in all, I can’t
see in our actual lives the cohesion that Mrs. Cromwell says is the
demand of art. It appears to me that this very demand might tend to the
damage of realism, which I take to mean lifelikeness and to be the most
important demand of all. So I say: Why shouldn’t a book about women, or
about a type of women, take for its subject some of the actual thoughts
and doings of women like ourselves? Why should such a book be
centralized and bound down to a single theme, a single conflict, a
single heroine? The lives of most of us here consist principally of our
thoughts and doings in relation to our children, our neighbours, and the
people who casually walk into our lives and our children’s and
neighbours’ lives and out again. It seems to me a book about us should
be concerned with all of these almost as much as with ourselves.”
“You haven’t mentioned husbands,” Mrs. Cromwell suggested. “Wouldn’t
they——”
“They should be included,” Mrs. Dodge admitted. “But I would have
husbands and suitors represented in their proper proportion; that is to
say, only in the proportion that they affect _our_ thoughts and doings.
In challenging the rules for centralization that you have propounded,
Mrs. Cromwell, I do not propose that all rules of whatever nature should
be thrown over. One in particular I should hold most advisable.”
“What rule is it?” a member of the club inquired, for at this point Mrs.
Dodge paused and the expression of her mouth was somewhat grim.
“It is that a book about women should not be too long,” Mrs. Dodge
replied. “Especially if it should be by a man, he would be wise to use
brevity as a means of concealing what he doesn’t know. And besides,” she
added, more leniently, “by brevity, he might hope to placate us a
little. It might be his best form of apology.”
W O M E N
I
MRS. DODGE AND MRS. CROMWELL
WE LEARNED in childhood that appearances are deceitful, and our
subsequent scrambling about upon this whirling globe has convinced many
of us that the most deceptive of all appearances are those of peace. The
gentlest looking liquor upon the laboratory shelves was what removed the
east wing of the Chemical Corporation’s building on Christmas morning;
it was the stillest Sunday noon of a drowsy August when, without even
the courtesy of a little introductory sputtering, the gas works blew up;
and both of these disturbances were thought to be peculiarly outrageous
because of the previous sweet aspects that prevented any one from
expecting trouble. Yet those aspects, like the flat calm of the summer
of 1914, should have warned people of experience that outbreaks were
impending.
What could offer to mortal eye a picture of more secure placidity than
three smiling ladies walking homeward together after a club meeting? The
particular three in mind, moreover, were in a visibly prosperous
condition of life; for, although the afternoon was brightly cold, their
furs afforded proof of expenditures with which any moderate woman would
be satisfied, and their walk led them into the most luxurious stretch of
the long thoroughfare that was called the handsome suburb’s finest
street. The three addressed one another in the caressively amiable tones
that so strikingly characterize the élite of their sex in converse; and
their topic, which had been that of the club paper, was impersonal. In
fact, it was more than impersonal, it was celestial. “Sweetness and
Light: Essay. Mrs. Roderick Brooks Battle”—these were the words printed
in the club’s year book beneath the date of that meeting, and Mrs.
Roderick Brooks Battle was the youngest of the three placid ladies.
“You’re all so sweet to say such lovely things about it,” she said, as
they walked slowly along. “I only wish I deserved them, but of course,
as everyone must have guessed, it was all Mr. Battle. I don’t suppose I
could write a single connected paragraph without his telling me how, and
if he hadn’t kept helping me I just wouldn’t have been ready with any
paper at all. Never in the world!”
“Oh, yes, you would, Amelia,” the elder of the two other ladies assured
her. “For instance, dear, that beautiful thought about the ‘bravery of
silence’—about how much nobler it is never to answer an attack—I
thought it was the finest thought in the whole paper, and I’m sure that
was your own and not your husband’s, Amelia.”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Cromwell,” Mrs. Battle returned, and although her manner
was deferential to the older woman she seemed to be gently shocked;—her
voice became a little protesting. “I could never in the world have
experienced a thought like that just by myself. It was every bit Mr.
Battle’s. In fact, he almost as much as dictated that whole paragraph to
me, word for word. It seemed a shame for me to sit up there and appear
to take the credit for it; but I knew, of course, that everybody who
knows us the least bit intimately would understand I could never write
anything and it was all Mr. Battle.”
“My dear, you’ll never persuade us of it,” the third lady said. “There
were thoughts in your paper so characteristically feminine that no one
but a woman could possibly——”
“Oh, but _he_ could!” Mrs. Battle interrupted with an eagerness that was
more than audible, for it showed itself vividly in her brightened eyes
and the sudden glow of pink beneath them. “That’s one of the most
wonderful things about Mr. Battle: his intellect is just as feminine as
it is masculine, Mrs. Dodge. He’s absolutely—well, the only way I can
express it is in his own words. Mr. Battle says no one can be great who
isn’t universal in his thinking. And you see that’s where he excels so
immensely;—Mr. Battle is absolutely universal in his thinking. It seems
to me it’s one of the great causes of Mr. Battle’s success; he not only
has the most powerful reasoning faculties I ever knew in any man but
he’s absolutely gifted with a woman’s intuition.” She paused to utter a
little murmur of fond laughter, as if she herself had so long and
helplessly marvelled over Mr. Battle that she tolerantly found other
people’s incredulous amazement at his prodigiousness natural but
amusing. “You see, an intellect like Mr. Battle’s can’t be comprehended
from knowing other men, Mrs. Dodge,” she added. “Other men look at
things simply in a masculine way, of course. Mr. Battle says that’s only
seeing half. Mr. Battle says women live on one hemisphere of a globe and
men on the other, and neither can look round the circle, but from the
stars the whole globe is seen—so that’s why we should keep our eyes
among the stars! I wanted to work that thought into my paper, too. Isn’t
it beautiful, the idea of keeping our eyes among the stars? But he said
there wasn’t a logical opening for it, so I didn’t. Mr. Battle says we
should never use a thought that doesn’t find its own logical place. That
is, not in writing, he says. But don’t you think it’s wonderful—that
idea of the globe and the two hemispheres and all?”
“Lovely,” Mrs. Dodge agreed. “Yet I don’t see how it proves Mr. Battle
has a feminine mind.”
“Oh, but I don’t mean just that alone,” Mrs. Battle returned eagerly.
“It’s the thousand and one things in my daily contact with him that
prove it. Of course, I know how hard it must be for other women to
understand. I suppose no one could hope to realize what Mr. Battle’s
mind is like at all without the great privilege of being married to
him.”
“And that,” Mrs. Cromwell remarked, “has been denied to so many of us,
my dear!”
Mrs. Dodge laughed a little brusquely, but the consort of the marvellous
Battle was herself so marvellous that she merely looked preoccupied. “I
know,” she said, gravely, while Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell stared with
widening eyes, first at her and then at each other. “How often I’ve
thought of it!” she went on, her own eyes fixed earnestly upon the
distance where, in perspective, the two curbs of the long, straight
street appeared to meet. “It grows stranger and stranger to me how such
a miracle could have happened to a commonplace little woman like me! I
never shall understand why I should have been the one selected.”
Thereupon, having arrived at her own gate, it was with this thought that
she left them. From the gate a path of mottled flagstones led through a
smooth and snowy lawn to a house upon which the architect had chastely
indulged his Latin pleasure in stucco and wrought iron; and as Mrs.
Battle took her way over the flagstones she received from her two
friends renewed congratulations upon her essay, as well as expressions
of parting endearment; and she replied to these cheerfully; but all the
while the glowing, serious eyes of the eager little brown-haired woman
remained preoccupied with the miracle she had mentioned.
Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge went on their way with some solemnity, and
were silent until the closing door of the stucco house let them know
they were out of earshot. Then Mrs. Cromwell, using a hushed voice,
inquired: “Do you suppose she ever had a painting made of the
Annunciation?”
“The Annunciation?” Mrs. Dodge did not follow her.
“Yes. When the miracle was announced to her that she should be the wife
of Roderick Brooks Battle. Of course, she must have been forewarned by
an angel that she was ‘the one selected.’ If Battle had just walked in
and proposed to her it would have been too much for her!”
“I know one thing,” Mrs. Dodge said, emphatically. “I’ve stood just
about as much of her everlasting ‘Mr. Battle says’ as I intend to! You
can’t go anywhere and get away from it; you can hear it over all the
chatter at a dinner; you can hear it over fifty women gabbing at a
tea—‘Mr. Battle says this,’ ‘Mr. Battle says that,’ ‘Mr. Battle says
this _and_ that’! When Belloni was singing at the Fortnightly Afternoon
Music last week you could hear her ‘Mr. Battle says’ to all the women
around her, even during that loud Puccini suite, and she treed Belloni
on his way out, after the concert, to tell him Mr. Battle’s theory of
music. She hadn’t listened to a note the man sang, and Belloni
understands about two words of English, but Amelia kept right on Mr.
Battle-says-ing him for half an hour! For my part, I’ve had all I can
stand of it, and I’m about ready to do something about it!”
“I don’t see just what one could do,” Mrs. Cromwell said, laughing
vaguely.
“_I_ do!” her companion returned. Then both were silent for a few
thoughtful moments and wore the air of people who have introduced a
subject upon which they are not yet quite warm enough to speak plainly.
Mrs. Cromwell evidently decided to slide away from it, for the time
being, at least. “I don’t think Amelia’s looking well,” she said. “She’s
rather lost her looks these last few years, I’m afraid. She seems pretty
worn and thin to me;—she’s getting a kind of skimpy look.”
“What else could you expect? She’s made herself the man’s slave ever
since they were married. She was his valet, his cook, and his
washerwoman night and day for years. I wonder how many times actually
and literally she’s blacked his boots for him! How could you expect her
_not_ to get worn out and skimpy-looking?”
“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Cromwell admitted;—“but all that was in their
struggling days, and she certainly doesn’t need to do such things now. I
hear he has twenty or thirty houses to build this year, and just lately
an immense contract for two new office buildings. Besides, he’s generous
with her; she dresses well enough nowadays.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “They’d both see to that for _his_
credit; but if he comes in with wet feet you needn’t tell me she doesn’t
get down on her knees before him and take off his shoes herself. I know
her! Yes, and I know him, too! Rich or poor, she’d be his valet and
errand girl just the same as she always was.”
“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “But it seems to me her most important
office for him is the one she’s just been filling.”
“Press agent? I should say so! She may stop blacking his boots, but
she’ll never stop that. It’s just why she makes me so confounded tired,
too! She thinks she’s the only woman that ever got married!”
“Amelia _is_ rather that way,” the other said, musingly. “She certainly
never seems to realize that any of the rest of us have husbands of our
own.”
“‘Mr. Battle can’t be comprehended from knowing other men!’” Here Mrs.
Dodge somewhat bitterly mimicked the unfortunate Amelia’s eager voice.
“‘Other men look at things in simply a masculine way!’ ‘I know how hard
it must be for other women to understand a god like my husband just from
knowing their own poor little imitation husbands!’”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Cromwell protested. “She didn’t quite say that.”
“But isn’t it what she meant? Isn’t it exactly what she felt?”
“Well—perhaps.”
“It does make me tired!” Mrs. Dodge said, vigorously, and with the
repetition she began to be more than vigorous. Under the spell of that
rancour which increases in people when they mull over their injuries,
she began to be indignant. “For one thing, outside of the shamelessness
of it, some of the rest of us could just possibly find a few
enthusiastic things to say of our husbands if we didn’t have some regard
for not boring one another to death! I’ve got a fairly good husband of
my own I’d like to mention once in a while, but——”
“But, of course, you’ll never get the chance,” Mrs. Cromwell
interrupted. “Not if Amelia’s in your neighbourhood when you attempt
it.”
“What I _can’t_ understand, though,” Mrs. Dodge went on, “is her never
having the slightest suspicion what a nuisance it is. I should think the
man himself would stop her.”
But Mrs. Cromwell laughed and shook her head. “In the first place, of
course, he agrees with her. He thinks Amelia’s just stating facts—facts
that ought to be known. In the second, don’t you suppose he understands
how useful her press-agenting is to him?”
“But it isn’t. It makes us all sick of him.”
“Oh, it may have that effect on you and me, Lydia, but I really
wonder——” Mrs. Cromwell paused, frowning seriously, then continued:
“Of course, he’d never take such a view of it. He instinctively knows
it’s useful, but he’d never take the view of it that——”
“The view of it that what?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, as her friend paused
again.
“Why, that it may be actually the principal reason for his success. When
he left the firm that employed him as a draughtsman and started out for
himself, with not a thing coming in for him to do, don’t you remember
that even then everybody had the impression, somehow, that he was a
genius and going to do wonders when the chance came? How do you suppose
that got to be the general impression except through Amelia’s touting it
about? And then, when he did put up a few little houses, don’t you
remember hearing it said that they represented the first real
Architecture with a capital ‘A’ ever seen in the whole city? Now, almost
nobody really _knows_ anything about architecture, though we all _talk_
about it as glibly as if we did, and pretty soon—don’t you
remember?—we were all raving over those little houses of Roderick
Brooks Battle’s. What do you suppose made us rave? We must have been
wrong, because Amelia says now that Battle thinks those first houses of
his were ‘rather bad’—he’s ‘grown so tremendously in his art.’ Well,
since they were bad, what except Amelia made us think then that they
were superb? And look at what’s happened to Battle these last few years.
In spite of Amelia’s boring us to death about him, isn’t it true that
there’s somehow a wide impression that he’s a great man? Of course there
is!”
“And yet,” Mrs. Dodge interposed, “he’s not done anything that proves
it. Battle’s a good architect, certainly, but there are others as good,
and he’s not a bit better as an architect than Mr. Cromwell is as a
lawyer or than my husband is as a consulting engineer.”
“Not a bit,” Mrs. Cromwell echoed, carrying on the thought she had been
following. “But Mr. Dodge and Mr. Cromwell haven’t had anybody to go
about, day after day for years, proclaiming them and building up a
legend about them. Nobody has any idea that they’re great men, poor
things! Don’t you see where that puts you and me, Lydia?”
“No, I don’t.”
“My dear!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed. “Why, even Battle himself didn’t
know that he was a great man until he married Amelia and _she_ believed
he was—and _told_ him he was—and started her long career of going
about making everybody else sort of believe it, too.”
“I think it’s simply her own form of egoism,” said the emphatic Mrs.
Dodge. “She’d have done exactly the same whoever she married.”
“Precisely! It’s Amelia’s way of being in love—she’s a born idolizer.
But you didn’t answer me when I asked you where that puts _us_.”
“You and me?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, frowning.
“Don’t you see, if she’d married my husband, for instance, instead of
Battle, everybody’d be having the impression by this time that Mr.
Cromwell is a great man? He’d have felt that way himself, too, and I’m
afraid it would give him a great deal of pleasure. Haven’t we failed as
wives when we see what Amelia’s done for _her_ husband?”
“What an idea!” The two ladies had been walking slowly as they
talked;—now they came to a halt at their parting place before Mrs.
Cromwell’s house, which was an important, even imposing, structure of
the type called Georgian, and in handsome conventional solidity not
unlike the lady who lived in it. Across the broad street was a newer
house, one just finished, a pinkish stucco interpretation of
Mediterranean gaiety, and so fresh of colour that it seemed rather a
showpiece, not yet actually inhabited though glamoured with brocaded
curtains and transplanted arbor vitæ into the theatrical semblance of a
dwelling in use. Mrs. Dodge glanced across at it with an expression of
disfavour. “I call the whole thing perfectly disgusting!” she said.
II
A LADY ACROSS THE STREET
MRS. CROMWELL also looked at the new house; then she shook her head.
“It’s painful, rather,” she said, and evidently referred to something
more than the house itself.
“Outright disgusting!” her friend insisted. “I suppose he’s there as
much as ever?”
“Oh, yes. Rather more.”
“Well, I’ll say one thing,” Mrs. Dodge declared; “Amelia Battle won’t
get any sympathy from me!”
“Sympathy? My dear, you don’t suppose she dreams she needs _sympathy_!
Doesn’t she show the rest of us every day how she pities us because
we’re not married to Roderick Brooks Battle?”
“Yes, and that’s what makes me so furious. But she _will_ need
sympathy,” Mrs. Dodge persisted, with a dark glance at the new house
across the street. “She will when she knows about that!”
“But maybe she’ll never know.”
“What!” Mrs. Dodge laughed scornfully. “My dear, when a woman builds a
man into a god he’s going to assume the privileges of a god.”
“And behave like the devil?”
“Just that,” Mrs. Dodge returned, grimly. “Especially when his idolater
has burnt up her youth on his altar and her friends begin to notice
she’s getting a skimpy look. What chance has a skimpy-looking slave
against a glittering widow rich enough to build a new house every time
she wants to have tête-à-têtes with a godlike architect?”
“But she’s only built one,” Mrs. Cromwell cried, protesting.
“So far!” her pessimistic companion said; then laughed at her own
extravagance, and became serious again. “I think Amelia ought to know.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, she ought,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “In the first place, she ought to
be saved from making herself so horribly ridiculous. Of course, she’s
always been ridiculous; but the way she raves about him when _he’s_
raving about another woman—why, it’s _too_ ridiculous! In the second
place, if she knew something about the Mrs. Sylvester affair now it
might help her to bear a terrific jolt later.”
“What terrific jolt, Lydia?”
“If he leaves her,” Mrs. Dodge said, gravely. “If Mrs. Sylvester decides
to make him a permanent fixture. Men do these things nowadays, you
know.”
“Yes, I know they do.” Mrs. Cromwell looked as serious as her friend
did, though her seriousness was more sympathetically a troubled one than
Mrs. Dodge’s. “Poor Amelia! To wear her youth out making a man into such
a brilliant figure that a woman of the Sylvester type might consider him
worth while taking away from her——”
“_Look!_” Mrs. Dodge interrupted in a thrilled voice.
A balustraded stone terrace crossed the façade of the new house, and two
people emerged from a green door and appeared upon the terrace. One was
a man whose youthful figure made a pleasing accompaniment to a fine and
scholarly head;—he produced, moreover, an impression of success and
distinction obvious to the first glance of a stranger, though what was
most of all obvious about him at the present moment was his devoted,
even tender, attention to the woman at his side. She was a tall and
graceful laughing creature, so sparklingly pretty as to approach the
contours and colours of a Beauty. Her rippling hair glimmered with a
Venetian ruddiness, and the blue of her twinkling eyes was so vivid that
a little flash of it shot clear across the street and was perceptible to
the two observant women as brightest azure.
Upon her lovely head she had a little sable hat, and, over a dress of
which only a bit of gray silk could be glimpsed at throat and ankle, she
wore a sable coat of the kind and dimensions staggering to moderate
millionaires. She had the happy and triumphant look of a woman confident
through experience that no slightest wish of hers would ever be denied
by anybody, herself distinctly included; and, all in all, she was
dazzling, spoiled, charming, and fearless.
Certainly she had no fear of the two observant women, neither of their
opinion nor of what she might give them cause to tell;—that sparkle of
azure she sent across the intervening street was so carelessly amused it
was derisive, like the half nod to them with which she accompanied it.
She and her companion walked closely together, absorbed in what they
were saying, her hand upon his arm; and, when they came to the terrace
steps, where a closed foreign car waited, with a handsome young
chauffeur at the wheel and a twin of him at attention beside the door,
she did a thing that Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell took to be final and
decisive.
Her companion had evidently offered some light pleasantry or witticism
at which she took humorous offense, for she removed her white-gloved
hand from his arm and struck him several times playfully upon the
shoulder—but with the last blow allowed her hand to remain where it
was; and, although she might have implied that it was to aid her
movement into the car, the white fingers could still be seen remaining
upon the shoulder of the man’s brown overcoat as he, moving instantly
after her, took his seat beside her in the gray velvet interior. Thus,
what appeared to be a playful gesture protracted itself into a caress,
and a caress of no great novelty to the participants.
At least, it was so interpreted across the street, where Mrs. Dodge gave
utterance to a sound vocal but incoherent, and Mrs. Cromwell said “Oh,
_my_!” in a husky whisper. The French car glided by them, passing them
as they openly stared at it, or indeed glared at it, and a moment later
it was far down the street, leaving them to turn their glares upon each
other.
“That settles it,” Mrs. Dodge gasped. “It ought to have been a gondola.”
“A gondola?”
“A Doge’s wife carrying on with a fool poet or something;—she always
has that air to me. What a comedy!”
Mrs. Cromwell shook her head; her expression was of grief and shock.
“It’s tragedy, Lydia.”
“Just as you choose to look at it. The practical point of view is that
it’s going to happen to Amelia, and pretty soon, too! Some day before
long that man’s going to walk in and tell her she’s got to step aside
and let him marry somebody else. Doesn’t what we just saw prove it? That
woman did it deliberately in our faces, and she knows we’re friends of
his wife’s. She deliberately showed us she didn’t care what we saw. And
as for him——”
“He didn’t see us, I think,” Mrs. Cromwell murmured.
“_See_ us? He wouldn’t have seen Amelia herself if she’d been with
us—and she might have been! That’s why I say she ought to know.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’d like to——”
“_Somebody_ ought to,” Mrs. Dodge said, firmly. “Somebody ought to tell
her, and right away, at that.”
“Oh, but——”
“Oughtn’t she to be given the chance to prepare herself for what’s
coming to her?” Mrs. Dodge asked, testily. “She’s made that man think
he’s Napoleon, and so she’s going to get what Napoleon’s wife got. I
think she ought to be warned at once, and a true friend would see to
it.”
In genuine distress, Mrs. Cromwell shrank from the idea. “Oh, but I
could never——”
“Somebody’s _got_ to,” Mrs. Dodge insisted, implacably. “If you won’t,
then somebody else.”
“Oh, but you—you wouldn’t take such a responsibility, would you?
You—you _wouldn’t_, would you, Lydia?”
The severe matron, Lydia Dodge, thus flutteringly questioned, looked
more severe than ever. “I shouldn’t care to take such a burden on my
shoulders,” she said. “Looking after my own burdens is quite enough for
me, and it’s time I was on my way to them.” She moved in departure, but
when she had gone a little way, spoke over her shoulder, “_Some_body’s
got to, though! Good-bye.”
Mrs. Cromwell, murmuring a response, entered her own domain and walked
slowly up the wide brick path; then halted, turned irresolutely, and
glanced to where her friend marched northward upon the pavement. To Mrs.
Cromwell the outlines of Mrs. Dodge, thus firmly moving on, expressed
something formidable and imminent. “But, Lydia——” the hesitant lady
said, impulsively, though she knew that Lydia was already too distant to
hear her. Mrs. Cromwell took an uncertain step or two, as if to follow
and remonstrate, but paused, turned again, and went slowly into her
house.
A kind-hearted soul, and in a state of sympathetic distress for Amelia
Battle, she was beset by compassion and perplexity during what remained
of the afternoon; and her husband and daughters found her so preoccupied
at the dinner-table that they accused her of concealing a headache. But
by this time what she concealed was an acute anxiety; she feared that
Lydia’s sense of duty might lead to action, and that the action might be
precipitate and destructive. For Mrs. Cromwell knew well enough that
Amelia’s slavery was Amelia’s paradise—the only paradise Amelia knew
how to build for herself—and paradises are, of all structures, the most
perilously fragile.
Mrs. Cromwell was the more fearful because, being a woman, she
understood that more than a sense of duty would impel Lydia to action:
Lydia herself might interpret her action as the prompting of duty, but
the vital incentive was likely to be something much more human; for
within the race is a profound willingness to see a proud head lowered,
particularly if that head be one that has displayed its pride. Amelia
had displayed hers too long and too gallingly for Lydia’s
patience;—Lydia had “really _meant_ it,” Mrs. Cromwell thought,
recalling the fierceness of Mrs. Dodge’s “I’ve had all I can stand of
it!” that afternoon. A sense of duty with gall behind it is indeed to be
feared; and the end of Mrs. Cromwell’s anxieties was the conclusion that
Amelia’s paradise of slavery was more imminently threatened by the
virtuous Lydia than by that gorgeous pagan, Mrs. Sylvester.
III
PERVERSITY OF A TELEPHONE
THE troubled lady began to wish devoutly that the sight of Mrs.
Sylvester caressing Mr. Battle had not shocked her into a fluttering and
indecisive state of mind;—she should have discussed the event more
calmly with Lydia; should have argued against anything precipitate;—and
so, as soon as she could, after her preoccupied dinner, she went to the
telephone and gave Mrs. Dodge’s number.
Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were dining in town, she was informed; they were
going to the theatre afterward and were not expected to return until
midnight. This blank wall at once increased Mrs. Cromwell’s inward
disturbance, for she was a woman readily tortured by her imagination;
and in her mind she began to design terrible pictures of what might now
be happening in the house of the Battles. Until she went to the
telephone she thought it unlikely that Lydia had acted with such
promptness; but after receiving through the instrument the information
that no information was to be had for the present, Mrs. Cromwell became
certain that Mrs. Dodge had already destroyed Amelia’s peace of mind.
She went away from the telephone, then came back to it, and again sat
before the little table that bore it; but she did not at once put its
miraculous powers into operation. Instead, she sat staring at it, afraid
to employ it, while her imaginings became more piteous and more
horrifying. Amelia had no talk except “Mr. Battle says”; she had no
thought except “Mr. Battle thinks”; she had no life at all except as
part of her husband’s life; and if that were taken away from her, what
was left? She had made no existence whatever of her own and for herself,
and if brought to believe that she had lost him, she was annihilated.
If the great Battle merely died, Amelia could live on, as widows of the
illustrious sometimes do, to be his monument continually reinscribed
with mourning tributes; but if a Venetian beauty carried him off in a
gondola, Amelia would be so extinct that the act of self-destruction
might well be thought gratuitous;—and yet Mrs. Cromwell’s imagination
pictured Amelia in the grisly details of its commission by all the usual
processes. She saw Amelia drown herself variously; saw her with a razor,
with a pistol, with a rope, with poison, with a hat-pin.
Naturally, it became impossible to endure such pictures, and Mrs.
Cromwell tremulously picked up the telephone, paused before releasing
the curved nickel prong, but did release it, and when a woman’s voice
addressed her, “What number, please?” she returned the breathless
inquiry: “Is that you, Amelia?” Then she apologized, pronounced a
number, and was presently greeted by the response: “Mr. Roderick
Battle’s residence. Who is it, please?”
“Mrs. Cromwell. May I speak to Mrs. Battle?”
“I think so, ma’am.”
In the interval of silence Mrs. Cromwell muttered, “I _think_ so” to
herself. The maid wasn’t certain;—that was bad; for it might indicate a
state of prostration.
“Yes?” said the little voice in the telephone. “Is it Mrs. Cromwell?”
Mrs. Cromwell with a great effort assumed her most smiling and
reassuring expression. “Amelia? Is it you, Amelia?”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to tell you again what a lovely impression your essay
made on me, dear. I’ve been thinking of it ever since, and I felt you
might like to know it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cromwell.”
“Lydia Dodge and I kept on talking about it after you left us this
afternoon,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, beaming fondly upon the air above
the telephone. “We both said we thought it was the best paper ever read
at the club. I—I just wondered if—if Lydia called you up to tell you
so, too. Did she?”
“No. No, she didn’t call me up.”
“Oh, didn’t she? I just thought she might have because she was so
enthusiastic.”
“No. She didn’t.”
Mrs. Cromwell listened intently, seeking to detect emotion that might
indicate Amelia’s state of mind, but Amelia’s voice revealed nothing
whatever. It was one of those voices obscured and dwindled by the
telephone into dry little metallic sounds; language was communicated,
but nothing more, and a telegram from her would have conveyed as much
personal revelation. “No, Mrs. Dodge didn’t call me up,” she said again.
Mrs. Cromwell offered some manifestations of mirth, though she intended
them to express a tender cordiality rather than amusement; and the
facial sweetness with which she was favouring the air before her became
less strained; a strong sense of relief was easing her. “Well, I just
thought Lydia _might_, you know,” she said, continuing to ripple her
gentle laughter into the mouthpiece. “She was so enthusiastic, I just
thought——”
“No, she didn’t call me up,” the small voice in the telephone
interrupted.
“Well, I’m gl——” But Mrs. Cromwell checked herself sharply, having
begun too impulsively. “I hope I’m not keeping you from anything you
were doing,” she said hastily, to change the subject.
“No, I’m all alone. Mr. Battle is spending the evening with Mrs.
Sylvester.”
“What!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed, and her almost convivial expression
disappeared instantly; her face became a sculpture of features only. “He
is?”
“Yes. He’s finishing the interior of her new house. With important
clients like that he always interprets them into their houses you know.
He makes a study of their personalities.”
“I—see!” Mrs. Cromwell said. Then, recovering herself, she was able to
nod pleasantly and beam again, though now her beaming was rigidly
automatic. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. I just wanted to tell you again
how immensely we all admired your beautiful essay, and I thought
possibly Lydia might have called you up to say so, too, because she
fairly raved over it when we were——”
“No.” The metallic small voice said; and it informed her for the fourth
time: “She didn’t call me up.” Then it added: “She came here.”
“No!” Mrs. Cromwell cried.
“Yes. She came here,” the voice in the instrument repeated.
“She _did_?”
“Yes. Just before dinner. She came to see me.”
“Oh, my!” Mrs. Cromwell murmured. “What did she say?”
“She was in great trouble about Mr. Dodge.”
“What?”
“She was in a tragic state,” the impersonal voice replied with perfect
distinctness. “She was in a tragic state about her husband.”
“About John _Dodge_?” Mrs. Cromwell cried.
“Yes. She was hurried and didn’t have time to tell me any details,
because they had a dinner engagement in town, and he kept telephoning
her they’d be disgraced if she didn’t come home and dress; but that’s
what she came to see me about. It seems he’s been misbehaving himself
over some fascinating and unscrupulous woman, and Mrs. Dodge thinks he
probably intends to ask for a divorce and abandon her. She was in a most
upset state over it, of course.”
“_Amelia!_” Mrs. Cromwell shouted the name at the mouthpiece.
“Yes. Isn’t it distressing?” was the response. “Oh course, I won’t
mention it to anybody but you. I supposed you knew all about it since
you’re her most intimate friend.”
Mrs. Cromwell made an effort to speak coherently. “Let me try to
understand you,” she said. “You say that Lydia Dodge came to you this
afternoon——”
“It was really evening,” the voice interrupted, in correction. “Almost
seven. And their engagement was in town at half past. That’s why he kept
calling her up so excitedly.”
“And she told you,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, “Lydia Dodge told you that
her husband, John Dodge, was philandering with——”
“There was no doubt about it whatever,” the voice interrupted. “Some
friends of hers had seen an actual caress exchanged between Mr. Dodge
and the other woman.”
“_What!_”
“Yes. That’s what she told me.”
“Wait!” Mrs. Cromwell begged. “Lydia Dodge told you that John Dodge——”
“Yes,” the voice of Amelia Battle replied colourlessly in the telephone.
“It seems too tragic, and it was such a shock to me—I never dreamed
that people of forty or fifty had troubles like that—but it was what
she came here to tell me. Of course, she didn’t have time to tell me
much, because she was so upset and Mr. Dodge was in such a hurry for her
to come home. I never dreamed there was anything but peace and happiness
between them, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” gasped Mrs. Cromwell. “But Amelia——”
“That’s all I know about it, I’m afraid.”
“Amelia——”
“Probably she’ll talk about it to you pretty soon,” Amelia said, at the
other end of the wire. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you before she did
me; you really know her so much better than I do. I’m afraid I’ll have
to go now. One of Mr. Battle’s assistants has just come in and I’m doing
some work with him. It was lovely of you to call me up about the little
essay, but, of course, that was _all_ Mr. Battle. Good-night.”
Mrs. Cromwell sat staring at the empty mechanism in her hand until it
rattled irritably, warning her to replace it upon its prong.
IV
A GREAT MAN’S WIFE
SHE had a restless night, for she repeatedly woke up with a start, her
eyes opening widely in the darkness of her bedroom; and each time this
happened she made the same muffled and incomplete exclamation: “Well, of
all——!” Her condition was still as exclamatory as it was anxiously
expectant when, just after her nine-o’clock breakfast the next morning,
she went to her Georgian drawing-room window and beheld the sterling
figure of Mrs. Dodge in the act of hurrying from the sidewalk to the
Georgian doorway. Mrs. Cromwell ran to admit her; brought her quickly
into the drawing room. “Lydia!” she cried. “What on earth _happened_?”
For, even if telephones had never been invented, the early caller’s
expression would have made it plain that there had been a happening.
“I’d have called you up last night,” the perturbed Lydia began;—“but we
didn’t get back till one o’clock, and it was too late. In all my life I
never had such an experience!”
“You don’t mean at the theatre or——”
“No!” Mrs. Dodge returned, indignantly. “I mean with that woman!”
“With Amelia?”
“With Amelia Battle.”
“But _tell_ me,” Mrs. Cromwell implored. “My dear, I’ve been in such a
state of perplexity——”
“Perplexity!” her friend echoed scornfully, and demanded: “What sort of
state do you think _I’ve_ been in? My dear, I went to her.”
“To Amelia?”
“To Amelia Battle,” Mrs. Dodge said. “I went straight home after I left
you yesterday; but I kept thinking about what we’d seen——”
“You mean——” Mrs. Cromwell paused, and glanced nervously through the
glass of the broad-paned window beside which she and her guest had
seated themselves. Her troubled eyes came to rest upon the pinkish
Italian villa across the street. “You mean what we saw—over there?”
“I mean what was virtually an embrace between Roderick Brooks Battle and
Mrs. Sylvester under our eyes,” Mrs. Dodge said angrily. “And she looked
us square in the face just before she did it! I also mean that both of
them showed by their manner that such caresses were absolutely familiar
and habitual—and that was all _I_ needed to prove that the talk about
them was only too well founded. So, when I’d thought it over and
over—Oh, I didn’t act in haste!—I decided it was somebody’s absolute
_duty_ to prepare Amelia for what I plainly saw was coming to her. Did
you ever see anything show more proprietorship than Mrs. Sylvester’s
fondling of that man’s shoulder? So, as you had declared _you_ wouldn’t
go, and although it was late, and Mr. Dodge and I had an important
dinner engagement, I made up my mind it had to be done immediately and I
went.”
“But what did you _tell_ her?” Mrs. Cromwell implored.
“Never,” said Mrs. Dodge, “never in my life have I had such an
experience! I tried to begin tactfully; I didn’t want to give her a
shock, and so I tried to begin and lead up to it; but it was difficult
to begin at all, because I’d scarcely sat down before she told me my
husband had got home and had telephoned to see if I’d reached her house,
and he’d left word for me to come straight back home because he was
afraid we’d be late for the dinner—and all the time I was trying to
talk to her, her maid kept coming in to say he was calling up again, and
then I’d have to go and _beseech_ him to let me alone for a minute—but
he wouldn’t——”
Mrs. Cromwell was unable to wait in patience through these
preliminaries. “Lydia! What did you _tell_ her?”
“I’m trying to explain it as well as I can, please,” her guest returned,
irritably. “If I didn’t explain how crazily my husband kept behaving you
couldn’t possibly understand. He’d got it into his head that we _had_ to
be at this dinner on time, because it was with some people who have
large mining interests and——”
“Lydia, _what_ did you——”
“I told you I tried to be tactful,” said Mrs. Dodge. “I tried to lead up
to it, and I’ll tell you exactly what I said, though with that awful
telephone interrupting every minute it was hard to say _anything_
connectedly! First, I told her what a deep regard both of us had for
her.”
“Both of you? You mean you and your husband, Lydia?”
“No, you and me. It was necessary to mention you, of course, because of
what we saw yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “Well, go on.”
“I told her,” Mrs. Dodge continued, complying. “I said nobody could have
her interests more at heart than you and I did, and that was why I had
come. She thanked me, but I noticed a change in her manner right there.
I thought she looked at me in a kind of bright-eyed way, as if she were
on her guard and suspicious. I _thought_ she looked like that, and now
I’m _sure_ she did. I said, ‘Amelia, I want to put a little problem to
you, just to see if you think I’ve done right in coming.’ She said,
‘Yes, Mrs. Dodge,’ and asked me what the problem was.”
“And what was it, Lydia?”
“My dear, will you let me tell you? I said in the kindest way, I said,
‘Amelia, just for a moment let us suppose that my husband were not true
to me; suppose he might even be planning to set me aside so that he
could marry another woman; and suppose that two women friends of mine,
who had my interests dearly at heart, had seen him with this other
woman; and suppose her to be a fascinating woman, and that my friends
saw with their own eyes that my husband felt her fascination so deeply
that anybody could tell in an instant he was actually in love with
her;—and, _more_ than that,’ I said, ‘suppose that these friends of
mine saw my husband actually exchanging a caress with this woman, and
saw him go off driving with her, with her hand on his shoulder and he
showing that he liked it there and was used to having it
there;—Amelia,’ I said, ‘Amelia, what would you think about the
question of duty for those two friends of mine who had seen such a
thing? Amelia,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you think it was the true duty of one
or the other of them to come and tell me and warn me and give me time to
prepare myself?’ That’s what I said to her.”
“And what did she——”
“She jumped right up and came and threw her arms around me,” said Mrs.
Dodge in a strained voice. “I never had such an experience in my life!”
“But what did she _say_?”
“She said, ‘You poor _thing_!’” Mrs. Dodge explained irascibly. “She
didn’t ‘say’ it, either; she shouted it, and she kept on shouting it
over and over. ‘You poor _thing_!’ And when she wasn’t saying that, she
was saying she’d never _dreamed_ Mr. Dodge was that sort of a man, and
she made such a commotion I was afraid the neighbours would hear her!”
“But why didn’t you——”
“I _did_!” Mrs. Dodge returned passionately. “I told her a _hundred_
times I didn’t mean Mr. Dodge; but she never gave me a chance to finish
a word I began; she just kept taking on about what a terrible thing it
must be for me, and how dreadful it was to think of Mr. Dodge
misbehaving like that—I tell you I never in my _life_ had such an
experience!”
“But why didn’t you _make_ her listen, at least long enough to——”
Mrs. Dodge’s look was that of a person badgered to desperation. “I
_couldn’t_! Every time I opened my mouth she shouted louder than I did!
She’d say, ‘You poor thing!’ again, or some more about Mr. Dodge, or
she’d want to know if I didn’t need ammonia or camphor, or she’d offer
to make beef _tea_ for me! And every minute my husband was making an
idiot of himself ringing the Battles’ telephone again. You don’t seem to
understand what sort of an experience it was at _all_! I tell you when I
finally had to leave the house she was standing on their front steps
shouting after me that she’d never tell anybody a thing about Mr. Dodge
unless I wanted her to!”
“It’s so queer!” Mrs. Cromwell said, bewildered more than ever. “If I’d
been in your place I know I’d never have come away without making her
understand I meant her husband, not mine!”
“‘Making her understand!’” Mrs. Dodge repeated, mocking her friend’s
voice—so considerable was her bitterness. “You goose! You don’t suppose
she didn’t understand _that_, do you?”
“You don’t think——”
“Absolutely! She had been expecting it to happen.”
“What to happen?”
“Somebody’s coming to warn her about Mrs. Sylvester. She did the whole
thing deliberately. Absolutely! She understood I was talking about
Battle as well as you do now. Of course,” said Mrs. Dodge, “of _course_
she understood!”
Then both ladies seemed to ponder, and for a time uttered various sounds
of marvelling; but suddenly Mrs. Cromwell, whose glance had wandered to
the window, straightened herself to an attentive rigidity. Her guest’s
glance followed hers, and instantly became fixed; but neither lady
spoke, for a sharply outlined coincidence was before them, casting a
spell upon them and holding them fascinated.
Across the street a French car entered the driveway of the stucco house,
and a Venetian Beauty descended, wrapped in ermine too glorious for the
time and occasion. Out of the green door of the house eagerly came upon
the balustraded terrace a dark man, poetic and scholarly in appearance,
dressed scrupulously and with a gardenia, like a bridegroom’s flower, in
his coat. In his hand he held an architect’s blue print; but for him and
for the azure-eyed lady in ermine this blue print seemed not more
important, nor less, than that book in which the two lovers of Rimini
read no more one day. They glanced but absently at the blue print; then
the man let it dangle from his hand while he looked into the lady’s eyes
and she into his; and they talked with ineffable gentleness together.
Here was an Italian episode most romantic in its elements: a Renaissance
terrace for the trysting place of a Renaissance widow and a great man,
two who met and made love under the spying eyes of female _sbirri_
lurking in a window opposite; but it was Amelia Battle who made the
romantic episode into a realistic coincidence. In a vehicle needful of
cleansing and polish she appeared from down the long street, sitting in
the attentive attitude necessary for the proper guidance of what bore
her, and wearing (as Mrs. Cromwell hoarsely informed Mrs. Dodge) “her
market clothes.” That she was returning from a market there could be no
doubt; Amelia had herself this touch of the Renaissance, but a
Renaissance late, northern, and robust. Both of the rear windows of her
diligent vehicle framed still-life studies to lure the brush of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lowland painters: the green tops of
sheaved celery nodded there; fat turnips reposed in baskets; purple
ragged plumes of beets pressed softly against the glass; jugs that
suggested buttermilk and cider, perhaps both, snugly neighboured the
hearty vegetables, and made plain to all that the good wife in the
forward seat had a providing heart for her man and her household.
The ladies in the Georgian window were truly among those who cared to
look. “Oh, _my_!” Mrs. Cromwell whispered.
Amelia stopped her market machine and jumped out in her market clothes
at the foot of the driveway, where stood Mrs. Sylvester’s French car in
the care of its two magnificent young men. There was an amiable
briskness, cheerful and friendly, in the air with which Amelia trotted
up the terrace steps and joined the romantic couple standing beside the
balustrade. The three entered into converse.
Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge became even more breathless; and then, with
amazement, and perhaps a little natural disappointment, they saw that
the conversation was not acrimonious—at least, not outwardly so. They
marked that Amelia, smiling, took the lead in it, and that she at once
set her hand upon her husband’s arm—and in a manner of ownership so
masterful and complete that the proprietorship assumed by Mrs. Sylvester
in the same gesture, the preceding day, seemed in comparison the
temporary claim of a mere borrower. And Mrs. Cromwell marked also a kind
of feebleness in the attitude of the Venetian Beauty: Mrs. Sylvester was
smiling politely, but there was a disturbed petulance in her smile.
Suddenly Mrs. Cromwell perceived that beside Amelia, for all Amelia’s
skimpiness, Mrs. Sylvester looked ineffective. With that, glancing at
the sturdy figure of Lydia Dodge, Mrs. Cromwell came to the conclusion
that since Amelia had been too much for Lydia, Amelia would certainly be
too much for Mrs. Sylvester.
“Look!” said Lydia.
Amelia and her husband were leaving the terrace together. Battle walked
to the “sedan” with her and held the door open for her; she climbed to
the driver’s seat and seemed to wait, with assurance, for him to do more
than hold the door. And at this moment the seriousness of his expression
was so emphasized that it was easily visible to the Georgian window,
though only his profile was given to its view as he looked back, over
his shoulder, at the glazing smile of the lady upon the terrace. He
seemed to waver, hesitating; and then, somewhat bleakly, he climbed into
the “sedan” beside his wife.
“_Open it!_” Mrs. Dodge was struggling with a catch of the Georgian
window.
“What for?”
“She’s shouting again! I’ve _got_ to hear her!” Mrs. Dodge panted; and
the window yielded to her exertions.
Amelia’s attitude showed that she was encouraging her machine to begin
operations, while at the same time she was calling parting words to Mrs.
Sylvester. “Good-bye!” Amelia shouted. “Mr. Battle says he’s been _so_
inspired by your sympathy in his work! Mr. Battle says that’s _so_
necessary to an architect! Mr. Battle says _no_ artist can ever even
_hope_ to do anything great without it! Mr. Battle says——”
But here, under the urging of her foot, the engine burst into a
shattering uproar: ague seized the car with a bitter grip; convulsive
impulses of the apparatus to leap at random were succeeded by more
decorous ideas, and then the “sedan” moved mildly forward; the
vegetables nodded affably in the windows, and the Battles were borne
from sight.
“I see,” said Lydia Dodge, moving back to her chair. “I understand now.”
“You understand what?” her hostess inquired, brusquely, as she closed
the Georgian window.
“I understand what I just saw. I can’t tell you exactly how or why, but
it was plainly _there_—in Roderick Brooks Battle’s look, in his
slightest gesture. We were absolutely mistaken to think it possible.
He’ll never ask Amelia to step aside: he’ll never leave her. And however
much he philanders, _she’ll_ never leave _him_, either. She’ll go
straight on the way she’s always gone. _He’s_ shown us that, and _she’s_
shown us that.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Cromwell inquired; “why is it? You say you
understand.”
“It’s because he knows that between his Venetian romance and his press
agent he’s got to take the press agent. He’s had sense enough to see he
mightn’t be a great man at all without his press agent—and he’d rather
keep on being a great man. And Amelia knows she’s getting too
skimpy-looking to get a chance to make a great man out of anybody
_else_; so she wouldn’t let me tell her about him, because she’s going
to stick to him!”
At this Mrs. Cromwell made gestures of negation and horror, though in
the back of her mind, at that moment, she was recalling her yesterday’s
thought that Lydia’s sense of duty was really Lydia’s pique. “Lydia
Dodge!” she cried, “I won’t listen to you! Don’t you know you’re taking
the lowest, unchristianest, vilest possible view of human nature?”
Mrs. Dodge looked guilty, but she decided to offer a plea in excuse.
“Well, I suppose that may be true,” she said. “But sometimes it does
seem about the only way to understand people!”
V
ONE OF MRS. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTERS
IN THE spacious suburb’s most opulent quarter, where the houses stood in
a great tract of shrubberies, gardens, and civilized old woodland
groves, there were many happily marriageable girls; and one, in
particular, was supremely equipped in this condition, for she had what
the others described as “the best of everything.” In the first place,
they said, Anne Cromwell had “looks”; in the second place, she had
“money,” and in the third she had “family,” by which they meant the
background prestiges of an important mother and several generations of
progenitors affluently established upon this soil.
Sometimes they added a word or two about her manners, though a
middle-aged listener might not have divined that the allusion was to
manners.
“She manages wonderf’ly,” they said. Amiably reserved, and never an
eager contestant in the agonizing little competitions that necessarily
engage maidens of her age, she was not merely fair but generous to her
rivals. “She can afford to be!” they cried, thus paying tribute. Her
fairness prevailed, too, among her suitors: not one could say she
favoured him more than another; but like a young princess, as politic as
she was well bred and genuinely kind, she showed an impartial
friendliness to everybody.
Even without her background she was the most noticeable young figure in
the suburb, but never because she did anything to make herself
conspicuous. At the Green Hills Country Club the eye of a stranger,
watching the dancing on a summer night, would not immediately
distinguish an individual from the mass. As the dancers went lightly
interweaving over the floor of a roofless pavilion, where the foliage of
great beech trees hung trembling above white balustrades and Venetian
lamps, the spectator’s first glance from the adjoining veranda caught
only the general aspect of carnival: the dancers were like a confusion
of gaily coloured feathers blowing and whirlpooling across a dim
tapestry. But presently, as he looked, rhythms and shifting designs
would appear in the sparkling fluctuation; points of light would
separate themselves, taking individual contour, and the brightest would
be a lovely girl’s head of “gold cooled in moonlight.”
Then it would be observed that toward this bright head darker ones
darted and zigzagged through the crowd more frequently than toward any
other, as the ardent youths plunged to “cut in”; and when the music
stopped the lovely girl was not for an instant left to the single
devotion of her partner. Other girls, as well as the young men, flocked
about her, and wherever she moved there seemed to be something like a
retinue. Thus the first question of the stranger, looking on, came to be
expected as customary—almost inevitable, “Who is that?” The reply was
as invariable, delivered with the amused condescension of a native
receiving tribute to his climate or public monuments. “That’s what
visitors always ask first. It’s Anne Cromwell.”
Mrs. Cromwell, sitting among contemporaries on the veranda that
overlooked the dancing-floor, had often heard both the question and the
answer, and although she was one of those mothers known as “sensible,”
she never heard either without a natural thrill of pride. But she was
tactful enough to conceal her feeling from the mothers of other girls,
and usually laughed deprecatingly, implying that she knew as well as any
one how little such ephemeral things signified. Anne had her own
deprecating laughter for tributes, and the most eager flatterer could
not persuade her to the air of accepting them seriously; so that both
mother and daughter, appearing to set no store by Anne’s triumphs,
really made them all the more secure. It was a true instinct guiding
them, the same that prevailed with Cæsar when thrice he refused the
crown; for what hurts our little human hearts, when we watch a
competitor’s triumph, is his pride and his pleasure in it. If he can
persuade us that it brings him neither we will not grudge it to him, but
may help him to greater.
Moreover, both Anne and her mother believed themselves to be entirely
genuine in their deprecation of Anne’s preëminence, and, when they were
alone together, talked tributes over with the same modest laughter they
had for them in company. Yet Mrs. Cromwell never omitted to tell Anne of
any stranger’s “Who is that?” nor of all the other pleasing things said
to her, or in her hearing, of her daughter. And, on her own part, Anne
laughed and told of the like things that had been said to her, or that
she had overheard.
“Of course, it doesn’t mean anything,” she would add. “I just thought
I’d tell you.”
For the truth was that Anne’s triumphs were the breath of life to both
mother and daughter, and they were doomed to make the ancient discovery
that our dearest treasures are those that are threatened.
The threat was perceived by Mrs. Cromwell upon one of those summer
nights so exquisite that we call them “unreal,” because they belong to
perished romance, and we have learned to imagine that what is real must
be unlovely. Only the relics of a discredited sentimental epoch could go
forth under the gold-pointed canopy of such a night, and sigh because
the stars are ineffable. Mrs. Cromwell was such a relic, and, being in
remote attendance upon her daughter at the country club, she had gone
after dinner to walk alone upon the links in the starlight. In an
old-fashioned mood, she naturally wanted to get away from the dance
music of the open-air pavilion; but, when she returned, her shadow from
the rising moon preceded her, and she decided that even the tomtoms and
war horns of the young people’s favourite “orchestra” could never
entirely ruin the moon. Then, instead of joining any of the groups upon
the veranda, she went to an easy chair, aloof in a shadowy corner, where
she could see the dancers and be alone to watch Anne.
She looked down a little wistfully. Only a year or so ago she had thus
watched her oldest daughter, Mildred, now a matron, and in time she
would probably see her youngest, the schoolgirl, Cornelia, dancing here.
But Anne, though the mother strove not to know it, was her dearest, and
the period of eligible maidenhood, like any other period, is not long.
Mrs. Cromwell was wistful because she thought it would not be really
long before Anne might sit here to watch the maiden dancing of a
daughter of her own.
The pavilion was a little below the level of the veranda, and almost at
once her eye found the dominant fair head it sought. Anne was talking as
she danced, smiling serenely, a graceful young figure, shapely and tall,
with a hint of the contented ampleness that would come later, as it had
come to her mother. Mrs. Cromwell, seeing Anne’s smile, smiled too, in
her seclusion, and with the same serenity; though an enemy might have
said that these two smiles partook of the same complacency. However, at
that moment Mrs. Cromwell could not have imagined the existence of an
enemy: she had no conception that there could be in the world such a
thing as an enemy to herself or to her daughter.
She was a little sorry that Anne wasn’t dancing with young Harrison
Crisp. She liked to see Anne dancing with any “nice boy,” but best of
all with young Crisp, and this was not only because the two were
harmoniously matched as dancers, as well as in other ways, but because
the mother had comprehended that this young man might prove to be her
daughter’s preference for more than dancing. Mrs. Cromwell was not
anxious to see Anne married; she wished her to prolong the pretty time
of girlhood; but any mother must have been pleased to see so splendid a
young man place himself at her daughter’s disposal. Mrs. Cromwell
wondered where he was this evening, and she had just begun to look for
him among the dancers when strangers intruded upon her retreat.
She heard unfamiliar voices behind her, and then a small group of
middle-aged people drew up wicker chairs to the veranda railing that
overlooked the dancing-floor. Mrs. Cromwell gave them a side glance and
perceived that they were visitors, “put up” at the club, for this was an
organization closely guarded, and she knew all of the members. The
newcomers sat near her, and though she would have preferred her
seclusion to remain secluded, she could not help waiting, with a little
motherly satisfaction, to hear them speak of her Anne, as strangers
inevitably must.
And presently she smiled in the darkness, thinking herself rewarded; for
a man’s voice, deeply impressed, inquired: “Who _is_ that wonderful
girl?”
In the light of the moment’s impending revelation, the mother’s smile
upon Mrs. Cromwell’s half-parted lips, as she waited for the reply,
becomes a little pathetic.
“Why, it’s _Sallie_, of course!”
This strange answer arrested Mrs. Cromwell’s smile, of which reluctant
and mirthless vestiges remained for a moment or two before vanishing
into the contours that mark an astounded disapproval. Then she slowly
turned her head and looked at these queer visitors, and her strong
impression was that the two middle-aged women and their escort, a stout
elderly man in white flannels, were “very ordinary looking people.”
Their chairs were within a dozen feet of hers, but they sat in profile
to her, and possibly were unaware of her, or were aware of her but
vaguely. For strangers in a strange place are often subject to such an
illusion of detachment as these displayed, and seem to feel that they
may speak together as freely as if they alone understood language. But,
of course, to Mrs. Cromwell’s way of thinking, the greater illusion of
the present group was in believing that somebody named Sallie was a
wonderful girl. She failed to identify this pretender: none of her
friends had a daughter named Sallie, and Anne had never spoken of any
Sallie.
“I declare I didn’t recognize her!” the elderly man said, chuckling.
“Who’d have thought it? Sallie!”
The woman who sat next him laughed triumphantly. “I don’t wonder you
didn’t recognize her,” she said. “It’s six years since you saw her, and
she was only fourteen then. I guess she’s changed _some_—what?”
“Well, ‘some’!” he agreed. “She makes the rest of ’em look like
flivvers.”
The second of the two women tapped his head with her fan. “George, I
guess you never thought you’d be the uncle of a peach like that!”
“Well, I’m not as surprised to be the uncle of a peach,” he said, with
renewed chuckling, “as I am to see you the aunt of one! I’m kind of
surprised to have Jennie, here, turn out to be the mother of one, too.
You certainly never showed any such style as that when you were young,
Jennie! Why, there ain’t a girl in that whole bunch to hold a candle to
her! She’s a two-hundred-carat blazer and makes the rest of ’em look
like what you see on a ten-cent-store counter! You heard me yourselves:
the very first thing I said was, ‘Who _is_ that wonderful girl?’ And I
didn’t even know it was Sallie. I guess that shows!”
Sallie’s mother laughed excitedly. “Oh, we’re used to it, George! She’s
never gone a place these last three years she didn’t put it all over the
other girls in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! The boys go crazy over her
as soon as they see her, even the ones that are engaged to other girls,
and a few that are married to the other girls, too! We’ve had some funny
times, I tell you, George!”
“I expect so!” he chuckled. “I guess you’re fixing for her to pick a
good one, all right, Jennie!”
“She don’t need me to do any fixing for her,” Sallie’s mother explained,
gaily. “She’s got a mighty good head on her, and I guess she knows she
can choose anything she decides she wants. Look at her now.” She laughed
in loud triumph as she spoke, and pointed to the pavilion.
Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes followed the direction of the pointing forefinger
and saw a stationary nucleus among the swirl of dancers—a knot of young
men gathered round a girl and engaged in obvious expostulation. The
disagreement was so pronounced, in fact, as to resemble a dispute; for
it involved more gesturing than is usually displayed in the mere
arguments of members of the northern races;—“cutting in” to dance with
this girl was apparently a serious matter.
She was a laughing, slender creature, with hints of the glow of rubies
in the corn-silk brown of her hair; and the apple-green thin silk of her
sparse dancing dress was the right complement for her dramatic
vividness. Brilliant eyed, her face alive with little ecstasies of
merriment as the debaters grew more and more emphatic, she might well
have made an observer think of “laughing April on the hills”—an April
with July in her hair and a ring of solemn young fauns disputing over
her.
She did not allow their disagreement to reach a crisis, however, though
the fauns were so earnest as to seem to threaten one;—she placed a slim
hand upon the shoulder of her interrupted partner, whose arm had been
all the while tentatively about her waist, and began to dance with him.
But over her shoulder as she went, she flung a look and a word to the
defeated, who dispersed thoughtfully, with the air of men not by any
means abandoning their ambitions.
Then the coronal of ruby-sprinkled hair was seen shuttling rhythmically
among the dancers; and such a glowing shuttle the eye of a spectator
must follow. This pagan April with her flying grace in scant apple-green
emerged from the other dancers as the star emerges from the other actors
in a play; and only mothers of other girls could have failed to perceive
that any stranger’s first question must inevitably be, “Who is _that?_”
Mrs. Cromwell had no such perception;—her glance, a little annoyed,
sought her daughter and easily found her. Anne was dancing with young
Hobart Simms, long her most insignificant and humblest follower. Mrs.
Cromwell thought of him as “one of the nice boys”; but she also thought
of him as “poor little Hobart,” for only two things distinguished him,
both unfortunate. His father had lately failed in business, so that of
all the “nice boys,” Hobart was the poorest; but, what was more to the
point in Mrs. Cromwell’s reflections just then, of all the “nice boys”
he was the shortest. He was at least four inches shorter than Anne, and
it seemed to the mother that the contrast in height made Anne look too
large and somehow too placid. Mrs. Cromwell wanted Anne to be kind, but
she decided to warn her against dancing with Hobart: there are contrasts
that may bring even the most graceful within the danger of looking a
little ridiculous.
Anne was at her best when she danced with the tall and romantically dark
Harrison Crisp; but unfortunately this delinquent had been discovered:
he was the triumphing partner who had carried off the young person
called Sallie. Mrs. Cromwell might have put it the other way, however:
she might have looked upon the episode as the carrying off of young
Crisp by this froward Sallie.
Sallie’s mother appeared to take this view, herself. “Look at that!” she
cried. “Look at the state she’s got that fellow in she’s dancing with!
Look at the way he’s _looking_ at her, will you!” And again she gave
utterance to the loud and excitedly triumphant laugh that not only
offended the ears of Mrs. Cromwell but disquieted her more than she
would have thought possible, half an hour earlier. It seemed to her that
she had never before heard so offensive a laugh.
“Did you ever see anything to beat it?” Sallie’s mother inquired
hilariously. “He looks at her that way the whole time—except when she’s
dancing with somebody else. Then he stands around and looks at her as if
he had an awful pain! She’s got him so he won’t dance with anybody else.
It’s a scream!” And here, in her mirthful excitement, she slapped the
stout uncle’s knee; for Sallie’s mother made it evident that she was one
of those who repeat their own youth in the youth of a daughter, and
perhaps in a daughter’s career fulfil their own lost ambitions. She
became more confidential, though her confidential air was only a
gesture; she leaned toward her companions, but did not take the trouble
to lower her voice.
“He’s been to the house to see her four times since Monday. Last week he
had her auto riding every single afternoon. The very day he _met_ her he
sent her five pounds of——”
“Who is he?” the uncle inquired. “He’s a fine _looking_ fellow, all
right, but is he——”
Sallie’s mother took the words out of his mouth. “_Is_ he?” she cried.
“I guess you’ll _say_ he is! Crisp Iron Works, and his father’s made him
first vice-president and secretary already—only two years out of
college!”
“Sallie like him?”
“She’s got ’em _all_ going,” the mother laughed;—“but he’s the king. I
guess she don’t mind keeping him standing on his head awhile though!”
Again she produced the effect of lowering her voice without actually
lowering it. “They say he was sort of half signed up for somebody else.
When we first came here you couldn’t see anything but this Anne
Cromwell. She’s one of these highbrow girls—college and old family and
everything—and you’d thought she was the whole place. Sallie only
needed about three weeks!” And with that Sallie’s mother was so highly
exhilarated that she must needs slap George’s knee once more. “Sallie’s
got her in the back row to-night, where she belongs!”
The aunt and uncle joined laughter with her, and were but vaguely aware
that the lady near them had risen from her easy chair. She passed by
them, bestowing upon them a grave look, not prolonged.
“Who’s all that?” the stout uncle inquired, when she had disappeared
round a corner of the veranda. “Awful big dignified looking party, _I’d_
call her,” he added. “Who is she?”
“There’s a lot of that highbrow stuff around here,” said Sallie’s
mother;—“but, of course, I don’t get acquainted as fast as Sallie. I
don’t know who she is, but probably I’ll meet her some day.”
If Mrs. Cromwell had overheard this she might have responded, mentally,
“Yes—at Philippi!” For it could be only on the field of battle that she
would consent to meet “such rabble.” She said to herself that she
dismissed them and their babblings permanently from her mind; and,
having thus dismissed them, she continued to think of nothing else.
Her old-fashioned mood was ruined; so was the moon, and so was her
evening. She went home early, and sent her car back to wait for Anne.
VI
SALLIE EALING
IT DID not wait so long as it usually did: Anne came home early, too, at
eleven; though the dancing would go on until one, and it was her habit
to stay as long as the musicians did. Distant throbbings of dance music
from across the links came in at the girl’s open window as she undressed
in her pretty room; but she listened without pleasure, for perhaps she
felt something unkind in these far-away sounds to-night—something
elfish and faintly jeering.
Her mother, coming in, and smiling as she always did when she came for
their after-the-party talks, saw that Anne looked serious: her eyes were
grave and evasive.
“Did you get tired—or anything, Anne?”
“It wasn’t very exciting—just the same old crowd that you always see
there, week after week. I thought I might as well get to bed a little
early.”
“That’ll please your father,” Mrs. Cromwell assured her. “I noticed you
danced several times with young Hobart Simms. You were dancing with him
when I left, I think.”
“Yes?” Anne said, inquiringly, but she did not look toward her mother.
She stood facing her dressing-table, apparently preoccupied with it. “I
shouldn’t?”
“‘Shouldn’t?’” Mrs. Cromwell echoed, laughing indulgently. “He’s
commonplace, perhaps, but he’s a nice boy, and everybody admires the
plucky way he’s behaved about his father’s failure. I only thought——”
she hesitated.
“Yes?”
“I only thought—well, he _is_ a little shorter than you——”
“I see,” Anne said; and with that she turned eyes starry with emotion
full upon her mother. The look was almost tragic, but her voice was
gentle. “Did we seem—ridiculous?”
“No, indeed! Not at all.”
“I think we did,” Anne murmured and looked down at the dressing-table
again. “Well—it doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t be so fanciful,” Mrs. Cromwell said. “You couldn’t look
ridiculous under any circumstances, Anne.”
“I understand,” said Anne. “You don’t think I danced with Hobart Simms
because I _wanted_ to, do you, Mother?”
“No, it was because you’re kind,” Mrs. Cromwell returned, comfortingly;
then continued, in a casual way, “It just happened you were with poor
little Hobart during the short time I was looking on. I suppose you
weren’t _too_ partial to him, dear. You danced with all the rest of the
customary besiegers, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” Anne said, wearily. In profile to her mother, she
stood looking down upon the dressing-table, her hands moving among
little silver boxes and trumperies of ivory and jade and crystal; but
those white and shapely hands, adored by the mother, were doing nothing
purposeful and were only pretending to be employed—a signal to mothers
that daughters wish to be alone but do not know how to put the wish into
tactful words. Mrs. Cromwell understood; but she did not go.
“I’m glad you danced with all of ’em,” she said. “You did dance with
them all, did you, Anne?”
“I guess so.”
“I’m glad,” the mother said again, and then, as in a musing
afterthought, she added, “I only looked on for a little while. I suppose
Harrison was there?”
The daughter’s hands instantly stopped moving among the pretty trifles
on the dressing-table; she was still from head to foot; but she spoke in
a careless enough tone. “Harrison Crisp? Yes. He was there.” And then,
as if she must be scrupulously honest about this impression, she added,
“At least, I _think_ he was.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed, enlightened. “Anne, didn’t you dance with
him at _all_?”
“With Harrison?” the girl asked, indifferently. “No; I don’t believe I
did, now I come to think of it.”
“Didn’t he ask you at all?”
Anne turned upon her with one of those little gasps that express the
exasperated weariness of a person who makes the same explanation for the
hundreth time. “Mother! If he didn’t ask me, isn’t that the same as not
asking me ‘at all’? What’s the difference between not dancing with a
person and not dancing with him ‘at all’? What’s the use of making such
a commotion about it? Dear me!”
The unreasonableness of this attack might have hurt a sensitive mother;
but Mrs. Cromwell was hurt only for her daughter:—petulance was not
“like” Anne, and it meant that she was suffering. Mrs. Cromwell was
suffering, too, but she did not show it.
“What in the world was Harrison doing all evening?” she asked. “It seems
strange he didn’t come near you.”
“There’s no city ordinance compelling every man in this suburb to ask me
to dance. I don’t know what he was doing. Dancing with that girl from
nowhere, probably.”
“With whom?”
“Nobody you know,” Anne returned, impatiently. “A girl that’s come here
lately. He seemed to be unable to tear himself away from her long enough
to even say ‘How-dy-do’ to anybody else. He’s making rather an
exhibition of himself over her, they say.”
“I heard something of the kind,” her mother said, frowning. She seated
herself in a cushioned chair near the dressing-table. “Is she a
commonish girl named Sallie something?”
“Yes, she is,” Anne replied, and added bitterly: “Very!” Having reached
this basis, they found that they could speak more frankly; and both of
them felt a little relief. Anne sat down, facing her mother. “She’s a
perfectly horrible girl, Mother—and that’s what he seems to like!”
“I happened to hear a little about her,” Mrs. Cromwell said. “I noticed
some relatives of hers who were there—her mother was one—and they were
distinctly what we call ‘common.’ I was so surprised to find such people
put up as guests at the club that before I came home I asked some
questions about them. The mother and daughter have come here to live,
and they’re apparently quite well-to-do. Their name is Ealing, it
seems.”
“Yes,” said Anne. “Sallie Ealing.”
“What surprised me most,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, “I learned that
they’d not only been given guests’ cards for the club, but had actually
been put up for membership.”
“Yes,” Anne said huskily. “It’s Harrison. He did it himself and he’s got
about a dozen people to second them. Several of the girls thought it
their duty to tell me about that to-night.”
“You poor, dear child!” the mother cried; but her compassion had an
unfortunate effect, for the suave youthful contours of the lovely face
before her were at once threatened by the malformations of anguish: Anne
seemed about to cry vociferously, like a child. She got the better of
this impulse, however; but she stared at her mother with a luminous
reproach; and the light upon the dressing-table beside her shone all too
brightly upon her lowered eyelids, where liquid glistenings began to be
visible.
“Oh, Mamma!” she gasped. “What’s the matter with me?”
“The matter with you?” her mother cried. “You’re perfect, Anne! What do
you mean?”
Anne choked, bit her lip, and again controlled herself, except for the
tears that kept forming steadily and sliding down from her eyes as she
spoke. “I mean, why do I mind it so much? Why do I care so about what’s
happening to me now? I never minded anything in my life before, that I
remember. I was sorry when Grandpa died, but I didn’t feel like _this_.
Have I been too happy? Is it a punishment?”
Her mother seized her hands. “‘Punishment’? No! You poor lamb, you’re
making much out of nothing. Nothing’s happened, Anne.”
“Oh, but it has!” Anne cried, and drew her hands away. “You don’t
_know_, Mamma! It’s been coming on ever since that girl first came to
one of the summer dances, a month ago! Mamma, to-night, if it hadn’t
been for little Hobart Simms, there were times when I’d have been
stranded! Absolutely! It’s such a horribly helpless feeling, Mamma. I
never knew what it was before—but I know now!”
“But you _weren’t_ ‘stranded,’ dear, you see.”
“I might have been if I hadn’t come away,” Anne said, and her tears were
heavier. “Mamma, what can I do? It’s so unfair!”
“You mean this girl is unfair?”
“No; she only does what she thinks will give her a good time.” There was
sturdiness in Anne’s character; she was able to be just even in this
crisis of feeling. “You can’t blame her, and it wouldn’t do any good if
you did. I mean it’s unfair of human nature, I guess. I honestly never
knew that men were so stupid and so—so _soft_! I mean it’s unfair that
a girl like this Sallie Ealing can turn their heads.”
“I just caught a glimpse of her,” Mrs. Cromwell said. “What is she
like?”
“She’s awful. The only thing she hasn’t done is bob her wonderful hair,
but she’s too clever about making the best of her looks to do that. She
smokes and drinks and ‘talks sex’ and swears.”
“Good heavens!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed. “And such a girl is put up for
membership at our quiet old family country club.”
Anne shook her head, and laughed tearfully. “She’ll never be blackballed
for that, Mamma! Nobody thinks anything about those things any more; and
besides, she only does them because she thinks they’re ‘what goes.’
_They_ aren’t what’s made the boys so wild over her!”
“Then what has?”
“Oh, it’s so crazy!” Anne cried. “I could imagine little boys of seven
or even ten, being caught that way, at a children’s party, but to see
grown _men_!”
“Anne!” Mrs. Cromwell contrived to smile, though rather dismally. “How
are these ‘grown men’ caught by Miss Sallie Ealing?”
“Why, just by less than _nothing_, Mamma! Of course, she’s got a kind of
style and anybody’d notice her anywhere, but what makes you notice her
so much is her being so triumphant: the men are all rushing at her every
instant, and that makes you look at her more than you would. But what
_started_ them to rushing and what keeps them going is the thing I feel
I can never forgive them for. Mamma, I feel as if I could never respect
a man again!”
“Remember your father,” Mrs. Cromwell said indulgently. “Your
father——”
“No; if a man like Harrison Crisp can become just a girl’s slave on that
account——” Anne interrupted herself. “Why, it’s like Circe’s cup!” she
cried. “I suppose that meant Circe’s kiss, really.”
“They don’t do that, do they, Anne?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “It’s not that at first, anyhow.”
“Well, how does she enslave them?”
“It’s like this, Mamma. The first time I ever saw her, I was dancing
with Harrison, and he happened to point her out to me. He’d just met her
and didn’t take any interest in her at all. He really didn’t. Well, a
minute or two later she danced near us and spoke to him over her
partner’s shoulder as they passed us. ‘I heard something terrible about
you!’ was what she said, and she danced on away, looking back at him
over her shoulder. Pretty soon someone cut in and took me away, and
Harrison went straight and cut in and danced with Sallie Ealing almost
all the rest of the evening. The next day he and I were playing over the
course and when we finished she was just starting out from the club in a
car with one of the boys. She called back to Harrison, ‘I dreamed about
you last night!’ and he was terribly silly: he kept calling after her,
‘What was the dream?’ And she kept calling back, ‘I’ll _never_ tell
you!’ Mamma, that’s what she does with them _all_.”
“Tells them she’s dreamed about them?”
“No,” Anne said. “That’s just a sample of her ‘line.’ When she dances
near another girl and her partner, she’ll say to the other girl’s
partner, ‘Got something _queer_ to tell you,’ or ‘I _heard_ something
about you last night,’ or ‘Wait till you _hear_ what I know about
_you_,’ or something like that; and, of course, he’ll get rid of the
girl he’s with as soon as he can and go to find out. She almost never
passes a man at a dance, or on the links, without either calling to him
if he’s not near her, or whispering to him if he is. It’s always some
absolutely silly little mystery she makes up about him—and almost her
whole stock in trade is that she’s heard something about ’em, or thought
something curious about ’em, or dreamed about ’em. It’s always something
about _them_, of course. Then they follow her around to find out, and
she doesn’t tell ’em, so they keep _on_ following her around, and she
gets them so excited about themselves that then they get excited about
_her_—and she makes ’em think she’s thinking about them
mysteriously—and they get so they can’t _see_ anybody but Sallie
Ealing! They don’t know what a cheap bait she’s caught ’em with,
Mamma;—they don’t even guess she’s _used_ bait! That’s why I don’t feel
as if I could ever respect a man again. And the unfairness of it is so
_strange_! The rest of us could use those tricks if we were willing to
be that cheap and that childish; but we can’t even tell the men that we
wouldn’t stoop to do it! We can’t do anything because they’d think we’re
jealous of her. What _can_ we do, Mamma?”
Mrs. Cromwell sighed and shook her head. “I’m afraid a good many
generations of girls have had their Sallie Ealings, dear.”
“You mean there isn’t anything we can do?” Anne asked, and she added,
with a desolate laugh, “I just said that, myself. But _men_ do things
when they feel like this, don’t they, Mamma? Why is it a girl can’t? Why
do I have to sit still and see men I’ve respected and looked up to and
thought so wise and fine—why do I have to sit still and see them
hoodwinked and played upon and carried off their feet by such silly
little barefaced tricks, Mamma? And why don’t they see what it is,
themselves, Mamma? Any girl or woman—the very stupidest—can see it,
Mamma, so why doesn’t the cleverest man? Are men _all_ just _idiots_,
Mamma? Are they?”
This little tumult of hurried and emotional questions pressed upon the
harassed mother for but a single reply. “Yes, dear,” she said. “They
are. It’s a truth we have to find out, and the younger we are when we
find out, the better for us. We have to learn to forgive them for it and
to respect them for the intelligence they show in other ways—but about
the Sallie Ealings and what we used to call ‘women’s wiles,’ we have to
face the fact that men are—well, yes—just idiots!”
“_All_ men, Mamma?”
“I’m afraid so!”
“And there’s nothing to do about it?”
“I don’t quite say that,” Mrs. Cromwell returned thoughtfully. “There’s
one step I shall certainly be inclined to take. I’m certain these Ealing
people would _not_ make desirable members of the club and I——”
“No, no!” Anne cried, in terrified protest. “You mustn’t try to have
them blackballed, Mamma. You couldn’t do a single thing about it that
Harrison would hear of, because he’s proposed them himself, and he’d
insist on knowing where the opposition came from. Don’t you see what
he’d think? It would look that way to everybody else, too. Don’t you
_see_, Mamma?”
Mrs. Cromwell was forced to admit her helplessness to help her daughter
even by this stroke of warfare. “It’s true, I’m afraid, Anne. But what
an outrageous thing it is! We can’t even take measures to protect a good
old family institution like the Green Hills club from people who’ll
spoil it for us—and all because a silly boy was made sillier by a
tricky girl’s telling him she’d dreamed about him!”
“Yes,” Anne said, while new tears sidled down her cheeks;—“he must have
been silly all the time. I didn’t think he was—not until this
happened—but he must have been, since it _could_ happen.” She put out a
hand to her mother’s. “Mamma,” she said, piteously, “why does any one
have to care what a silly person does? If he’s silly and I know it, why
does it matter to me what he does? Why don’t I get over it?”
And with that, the sobbing she had so manfully withheld could be
withheld no longer. Her mother soothed her in a mother’s way, but found
nothing to say that could answer the daughter’s question. They had an
unhappy half-hour before Anne was able to declare that she was ashamed
of herself and apologize for “making such an absurd scene”; but after
that she said she was “all right,” and begged her mother to go to bed.
Mrs. Cromwell complied, and later, far in the night, came softly to
Anne’s door and listened.
Anne’s voice called gently, “Mother?”
The door was unlocked, and Mrs. Cromwell went in. “Dearest, I’ve been
thinking. You and I might take a trip somewhere abroad perhaps. Would
you like to?”
“We can’t. We can’t even do that. Don’t you see if we went now it would
look as if I couldn’t stand it to stay here? We can’t do anything,
Mother!”
Mrs. Cromwell bent over the bed. “Anne, this isn’t serious, dear. It
will pass, and you’ll forget it.”
“No. I think I must have idealized men, Mother. I believe I thought in
my heart that they’re wiser than we are. _Are_ they _all_ such fools,
Mother? That’s what I can’t get over. If you were in my place and Papa
not engaged to you yet, and he saw Sallie Ealing and she tried for
him—oh, Mamma, do you think that even _Papa_——”
Mrs. Cromwell responded with a too impulsive honesty; she gave it as her
opinion that Sallie would have found Mr. Cromwell susceptible. “I’m
afraid so, Anne,” she said. “Perhaps this Ealing girl’s way would be too
crude for him now, at his age, but I shouldn’t like him to be exposed to
her system in the hands of Madame de Staël, for instance. Somewhere in
the world there may be a man who wouldn’t feel any fascination in it,
but if there is he’d be a ‘superman,’ and we aren’t likely to meet him.
You must go to sleep now.”
“I’ll try to, Mother,” the unhappy girl said obediently. “I’ll _try_ not
to think.”
VII
NAPOLEON WAS A LITTLE MAN
ON AN afternoon of June sunshine, a week later, Mrs. Cromwell sat with a
book beside one of the long windows of her drawing-room. The window was
open, and just outside it a grass terrace, bordered by a stone
balustrade, overlooked the lawn that ran down to the shady street. Anne
reclined in a wicker _chaise longue_ upon the terrace, protected by the
balustrade and a row of plants from the observation of the highway. She,
also, had a book; but it lay upon her lap in the relaxed grasp of a
flaccid hand. Her eyes were closed, though she was not asleep; and the
mother’s frequent side glances took anxious and compassionate note of
darkened areas beneath the daughter’s eyelids, of pathetic shapings
about her mouth.
The street was lively with motorists on the way to open country, for it
was Saturday, and the automobiles were signalling constantly; but among
all the signals, so alike, there was one that Anne recognized. Suddenly
she opened her eyes, drew herself up, and looked across the top of the
balustrade at a shining gray car just then approaching. It was a long,
fleet-looking thing, recognizably imported, and impressive in its
intimations of power, yet it selfishly had seats for but two people. One
was not occupied; and in the other reclined a figure appropriate to the
fine car, for, like the car, the figure was long, fleet-looking, and
powerful. The young man was bareheaded; his dark hair shone in the
sunlight, and his hands were gracefully negligent, but competent, upon
the wheel. One of them gave Anne a cordial though somewhat preoccupied
wave of greeting.
She waved in return, but did not smile; then she sank back in her chair
and closed her eyes again. Her mother sent a hard glance down the street
after the disappearing car, looked at Anne, and breathed a deep,
inaudible sigh.
A moment later a straw hat upon a head of short sandy hair appeared
above the balustrade and little Hobart Simms came up the stone steps
that led from the lawn to the terrace. “I hope I’m not disturbing a
nap,” he said, apologetically.
Mrs. Cromwell was sorry to see him. There are times when the intrusions
of the insignificant are harder to bear than those of the important, and
she felt that Anne’s suffering would be the greater for the strain of
talking to this bit of insignificance in particular. However, both
mother and daughter gave the youth a friendly enough greeting; he sat
down in a chair near Anne, and Mrs. Cromwell returned her eyes to her
book.
“It’s such a fine day,” Hobart said, fanning himself with his straw hat.
“I thought maybe after I get my breath you might like to take a walk,
maybe.”
“I believe not,” Anne said, smiling faintly. “How did you lose your
breath, Hobart?”
“Hurrying,” he explained. “I’m working with the receiver that’s in
charge of my father’s business, you know. As soon as I found he wasn’t
coming this afternoon I left. I hurried because I was afraid you’d be
out somewhere. We haven’t any car, you know;—they’re in the receiver’s
hands, too.”
“I’m so sorry, Hobart.”
“Not at all,” he returned, cheerfully. “It’s a good thing. There are
lots of families that ought to learn how to use a sidewalk again. It’s
doing all of our family good. We’d got like too many other people; we’d
got to believing the only place where we could walk was a golf course.
Bankruptcy’s been a great thing for my father—I believe it’ll add ten
years to his life.”
Anne laughed and Mrs. Cromwell was pleased, for although the laugh was
languid, it was genuine. The mother’s glance passed from her daughter to
the caller and lingered with some favour upon his shrewd and cheerful
face. Perhaps it was just as well that he had come, if he could amuse
Anne a little.
“I never heard of any one who took that view before,” the girl said.
“It’s pretty plucky of you, I think.”
“Not at all,” he said. “We’re all of us having a great time. Never had
to do anything we didn’t want to before, and it’s such a novelty it’s
more fun than Christmas. If it hadn’t happened I doubt if I’d ever have
found out that I like to work.”
“But you did work, Hobart.”
“Yes,” he said, dryly. “For my father. This is a pretty good receiver
we’ve got, and he’s showed me the difference between working for my
father and working for other people.” He paused and chuckled. “Best
thing ever happened to me!”
Anne did not hear him. The automobile signal that had caught her
attention a little while before was again audible from the street, and
she had turned to look. The long, gray, foreign car came slowly by,
moving flexibly through a momentary clustering of other machines, and it
seemed to guide itself miraculously, for the driver had no apparent
interest in where it went. His attention was all upon the occupant of
the seat that had been vacant a few minutes before;—upon her he gazed
with such aching solicitude that he could be known for a lover at a
distance all round about him of fifty paces and more. And not only he,
but his companion also seemed enclosed within the spell that comes upon
lovers, shutting out the world from them; for, as he gazed upon her, so
she likewise gazed receptively upon him. But, being a girl, she was in
fact aware of certain manifestations in the world outside the spell,
which he was not, and she knew that she was observed from a Georgian
terrace.
She detached her eyes from Harrison’s long enough to wave her slim hand,
and received in return a beaming smile from Anne, across the balustrade,
and a wave of the hand most cordial. Harrison remained in his trance,
incapable of making or receiving any salutation, and Hobart Simms,
looking after the car as it passed northward, did not see how bleak and
blank Anne looked as she sank back in her chair.
He laughed. “Poor old Harry Crisp!” he said. “He didn’t even see us, so
it’s all up with him. It’s too bad: he might have got something out of
life; but it’s all over now.”
“I don’t follow you, I’m afraid,” Anne said, coldly, in a tired voice.
“No? Well, in the first place, he’s working for his father. That’s bad,
but it can be got over. What’s really fatal, he’s going to marry that
Miss Ealing. I’ve heard it rumoured, and after looking at ’em just now I
see it’s true. That’s something he can’t get over.”
“Can’t he?” Anne’s tired voice was a little tremulous. “You mean he’ll
always be in love with her? I should think that rather desirable if
they’re to marry.”
“Oh, he’ll get over _that_,” Hobart said, briskly. “I mean he’ll never
get over his having married Miss Ealing.”
Anne looked puzzled; but she did not try to make him be more explicit.
Instead, she asked indifferently, “Don’t you call her ‘Sallie,’ Hobart?
I thought all the men called her ‘Sallie’ by this time. She’s been here
several weeks.”
“No, I don’t,” he answered. “I haven’t called her anything, in fact.”
“What? Didn’t she take the trouble to fascinate you, Hobart?”
He laughed. “You’d hardly think she would, but she did—a little. I
don’t suppose you could say she went out of her way to do it, or took
any trouble, exactly; but she did invite me to join, as it were.”
Anne was more interested. Since the passing of Harrison Crisp’s car she
had been leaning back in her long chair, but now she sat upright and
looked frowningly at her caller.
“‘Invited you to join?’” she said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she invited me to get on the bandwagon,” he explained. “Not
right up on a front seat, of course; but anyhow I was given a ticket to
hang on behind somewhere.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Probably you don’t,” Hobart said, and he looked thoughtful. “You’re
always so above the crowd, Anne, probably you wouldn’t understand Miss
Ealing’s invitations. You see I’m in a pretty good position to see
things that you wouldn’t, so to speak. Of course, strangers never pay
any attention to the little shrimps in a crowd, and when Miss Ealing did
pay me a slight attention I wasn’t so grateful as I should have been;—I
thought it was pretty funny.”
“‘Funny’!” Anne exclaimed. “Why?”
“Because it only showed her up, you see. Of course, it didn’t mean she
had any interest in me; it only meant she had a use for me. She already
had most of the rest of ’em excited about her; but she’s a real
collector and she wanted the _whole_ collection—even me! You see, the
girl that makes ’em _all_ think she’s thinking about them isn’t thinking
about _any_ of ’em, of course. She’s only thinking about herself, like
any other selfish little brute.”
“Hobart!”
“Of course, I don’t mean to say she gave me a pressing invitation to
join,” he explained, laughing cheerfully at himself. “Naturally, that
couldn’t be expected. The big, hand-painted, gilt-edged card was for
Harrison Crisp, of course; and then there were a number of handsomely
engraved ones for tall eligibles. She just slipped me a little one
printed on soft paper—a sort of handbill, you know, when she was
delivering ’em around to the residue.”
Anne’s languor had vanished now. She stared at him incredulously.
“Hobart Simms,” she cried, “what do you mean by ‘handbills’?”
“It’s simple enough,” he began. “That is, it is to me. Taller men with
fathers that aren’t in the hands of a receiver wouldn’t have much of a
chance to understand it, I imagine. She’s made a real stir in our little
Green Hills midst with her handbills and——”
Anne interrupted sharply: “I asked you what you meant by her
‘handbills.’”
“Yes; I’m trying to tell you, but it’s so ridiculous I’m afraid you
won’t be able to see what I mean. It’s like this: she’ll be passing you,
for instance, dancing with some other man, or hanging to his arm, and
she’ll whisper to you quickly over his shoulder, ‘I _heard_ something
about you,’ or, ‘I’ve found _out_ something about you,’ or, maybe,
‘Can’t you even _look_ at me?’ Something like that, you know,—and
you’re supposed to get excited and follow up the mystery. You’re
supposed to wonder just how much she _is_ thinking about you, you see.
That’s what I mean by her handbills, because if you _don’t_ get excited,
but look around a little, you’ll notice she’s passing ’em pretty freely.
That’s why I thought it was funny when she even gave me one!”
“Hobart!” Anne cried, and her voice was free and loud, “Hobart Simms!”
“Yes?” he said, inquiringly, not comprehending the vehemence of her
exclamation.
Anne did not respond at once. Instead, she sat staring at him, and her
mother marked how a small glow of red came into the daughter’s cheek.
Then Mrs. Cromwell also stared at little Hobart Simms; and for the first
time noticed what a good profile he had and what a well-shaped head.
Slowly and wonderingly the daughter’s eyes turned to meet the mother’s,
and each caught the marvel of the other’s thought: that it was this
unconsidered little Hobart Simms who fitted Mrs. Cromwell’s definition
of a “superman.”
“Why, yes,” Anne said, slowly. “If you really care to go for a walk, I’d
like to go with you, Hobart.”
Mrs. Cromwell watched them as they went forth, outwardly the most
ill-assorted couple in her sight that day; for Hobart was a full “head”
the shorter. They talked amiably together as they went, however, and
Mrs. Cromwell’s heart was lightened by the sound of Anne’s laughter,
which came back to her even when the two had gone but a little distance.
The mother’s heart might have known less relief, that afternoon, had she
suspected this walk to be the beginning of “anything serious.” And yet,
had she been a good soothsayer and seeress she might well have been
pleased; for not many years were to pass before Hobart Simms’s
electrified fellow citizens were to remind one another frequently that
Napoleon was a little man, too.
VIII
MRS. DODGE’S ONLY DAUGHTER
THAT capable and unsentimental matron, Mrs. Dodge, was engaged in the
composition of an essay for the Woman’s Saturday Club (founded 1882) and
the subject that had been assigned to her was “Spiritual Life and the
New Generation.” Her work upon it moved slowly because the flow of her
philosophical thinking met constant interference, due to an anxiety of
her own connected with the New Generation, though emphatically not (in
her opinion) with its Spiritual Life. Anxiety always makes philosophy
difficult; but she sat resolutely at her desk whenever her apprehensions
and her general household duties permitted; and she was thus engaged
upon a springtime morning a week before her “paper” was to be presented
for the club’s consideration.
She wrote quotations from Ruskin, Whitman, Carlyle, and Schopenhauer,
muttering pleasantly to herself that the essay was “beginning to sound
right well”; but, unfortunately for literature, the window beside her
desk looked down upon the street. Nothing in the mild activities of “the
finest suburb’s finest residential boulevard” should have stopped an
essay, and yet a most commonplace appearance there stopped Mrs. Dodge’s.
Her glance, having wandered to the window, became fixed in a widely
staring incredulity; then rapidly narrowed into most poignant distaste.
She dropped her pen, and from her parted lips there came an outcry
eloquent of horror.
Yet what she saw was only a snub-nosed boy shambling up the brick path
to her front door, walking awkwardly, and obviously in a state of
embarrassment.
At the same moment Mrs. Dodge’s only daughter, Lily, aged eighteen,
standing at a window of the drawing-room downstairs, looked forth upon
precisely the same scene; but discovered no boy at all upon the brick
path. Where her mother saw a snub-nosed boy shambling, Lily beheld a
knight of Arthur’s court, bright as the sun and of such grace that he
came toward the house like a bird gliding in a suave curve before it
lights. Merlin wafted him; she had no consciousness that feet carried
him; no consciousness that he wore feet at all. She knew only that this
divine bird of hers was coming nearer and nearer to her, while her heart
melted within her.
Then, investing him with proper human feet for the purpose of her
desire, she wanted to throw herself down before the door, so that he
would step upon her as he entered. But, instead, she ran to admit him,
and, gasping, took him by the hand, led him into the drawing-room,
moaned, and cast herself upon his bosom, weeping.
“They want to separate us!” she sobbed. “Forever! But you have come to
me!”
Upstairs, her mother set a paperweight upon the manuscript of “Spiritual
Life and the New Generation,” realizing at once that emotional conflict
was to occupy her for the next hour or so, if not longer. She descended
fiercely to the drawing-room, where the caller, rosy as fire, removed
his arm from Lily’s waist, and would have stepped away from her. But
Lily moaned, “No!” and clung to him.
“Stand away from my daughter!” Mrs. Dodge said. “Explain what you mean
by daring to come here.”
“I—I want to,” he stammered. “That’s just what I—it’s what I came for.
I—I want to——”
But Mrs. Dodge interrupted him. “Did you understand me? I said, ‘Stand
away from my daughter!’”
“I would,” he said, deferentially. “I would, but—but——”
He was unable to explain in words a difficulty that was too evident
without them: the clinging Lily resisted his effort to detach himself,
and it was clear that in order to obey her mother’s command he would
need assistance. This, however, was immediately forthcoming.
“Lily!” Mrs. Dodge rushed upon her; but Lily clung only the more
tragically.
“No, no!” she moaned. “This is my place and it is my right!”
Mrs. Dodge set really violent hands upon her, and unmistakably there
hovered a possibility, in the imminent future, that Lily would not only
be removed from her lover but would also get a shaking. Rather than be
seen under such undignified circumstances, she succumbed upon a sofa,
weeping there. “You _see_,” she wailed;—“you _see_ how they treat me!”
“Now, before you march out of here,” her mother said to the intruder,
“you explain how you dared to come.”
“Well, that’s what I came for,” he responded. “I wanted to explain.”
“You make it perfectly clear in one stroke,” Mrs. Dodge said. “You came
here to explain why you came here!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Brilliant!” she cried. “But I hadn’t looked for better. I think you may
trouble yourself to take your instant departure, Mr. Oswald Osborne!”
As she pronounced this name, which she did with oppressive distinctness,
the young man winced as at the twinge of an old wound reopened. “I don’t
think that’s fair,” he said, plaintively.
“It isn’t ‘fair’ for me to choose whom I care to see in my own house?”
Mrs. Dodge inquired with perfect hypocrisy, for she knew what he meant.
“I’m talking about ‘Oswald’,” he explained. “I can’t help my name, and I
don’t think it’s fair to taunt me with it. My parents did have me
christened ‘Oswald,’ I admit; but they were sorry when I got older and
they saw how I felt about it and what it would do to me. You know as
well as I do, Mrs. Dodge, I’ve struggled pretty long to get people to
quit calling me ‘Oswald,’ and almost everybody calls me Crabbe now. It
isn’t a very good middle name, but anyhow it’s better than——”
“Good heavens!” Mrs. Dodge interrupted. “Are you going to stand here all
morning talking about your _name_? I’m afraid you overlook the
circumstance that you’ve been requested to leave my house.”
“I know it,” he said, apologetically. “But it really isn’t fair to call
me ‘Oswald’ any more, when practically nobody else does, and that’s what
threw me off. What I came here for, I had to see Lily.”
“_I_ had to see _you_!” Lily cried from the sofa. “If I hadn’t, I should
have died!” And at a scornful look from her mother, she passionately
insisted upon the accuracy of this view. “Oh, yes, I should, Mamma! You
don’t _know_ what you and Papa have been putting me through! You don’t
_know_ what it does to me! You don’t know what it’s making me suffer!
You don’t understand!”
“I understand too much, unfortunately,” the mother retorted. “I
understand that you’ve got yourself into such a hysterical state over a
young man who couldn’t possibly buy a pair of shoes for you—or for
himself!—and that your father and I daren’t let you step out of the
house alone for fear you’ll try to run away with him again.”
Young Mr. Osborne protested with some heat. “Why, I’m not barefooted,
Mrs. Dodge!” he said. “What I came here to say this morning is right on
the point you’re discussing. You and Mr. Dodge haven’t once been fair to
me during the whole trouble we’ve had about this matter, and when you
say I couldn’t even give Lily a pair of shoes——”
“Could you?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, breathing deeply. “Am I misinformed by
my husband? I seem to recall he told me that when you and Lily were
eloping last week—in a borrowed car—he overtook you at a refilling
station, where she was offering her watch and rings for gasoline.”
“I didn’t ask her to,” Crabbe Osborne said, flushing deeper. “I admit
she offered ’em, but I was arguing about it with her when Mr. Dodge got
there. Anyhow, the gas man wouldn’t take ’em.”
“Oh, he should have!” Lily moaned. “Then we wouldn’t have all this to go
through. We’d have been out of it all. We’d have been together for
always!”
“Would you?” her mother asked, with a hard laugh. “Just how would you
have obtained a marriage license, since there weren’t enough funds for
gasoline?”
“I had that all thought out,” the young man replied. “We were going to
stop and get married at Saline. I’ve got a cousin living in Saline, and
I could have borrowed as much as we needed from him. He’d have trusted
me, because he knows I’d pay him back.”
“And would you?” Mrs. Dodge inquired.
This brought a protest from both of the afflicted lovers. Young Mr.
Osborne said, “Oh, look here, Mrs. Dodge,” and swallowed, but Lily made
a real outcry. She sprang up, facing her mother angrily.
“Shame!” she cried. “You taunt him with his poverty! Has he ever
pretended for one moment to be a rich man? If he had, there might be
some point to your taunts, but you know he hasn’t. From the very first I
defy you to say he hasn’t been absolutely frank about it! I do, Mamma! I
defy you to say so!”
“Sit down,” said her mother.
“‘Sit down?’ I won’t, Mamma; I won’t sit down! Indeed, I won’t, and you
haven’t any right to make me! You and Papa order me to do this; you
order me to do that; you order me to do everything; but the time’s past
when I obeyed you like a Myrmidon. I don’t trust your wisdom any more,
Mamma; nor Papa’s, either—not since you’ve tried to keep me an absolute
prisoner and won’t let Crabbe even step inside the yard!”
“‘Inside the yard?’” Mrs. Dodge said. “It strikes me he’s rather farther
than that.” She turned upon the perplexed young man. “How many times do
you usually have to be requested to leave a house?”
“Why, I expect to go,” he responded, feebly. “I do expect to go, Mrs.
Dodge. I think I have a right to explain, though, and if you’d just
listen a minute——”
“Very well. I’ll give you a minute.”
“It’s like this,” he said. “I know you and Mr. Dodge object to me as—as
a son-in-law——”
“We do, indeed!”
“Well, you see,” he went on, “that’s just the injustice of it. I’m
twenty-two-and-a-half years old, and while I admit I’ve had considerable
trouble in some of the positions I’ve filled in a business way, why, you
can’t expect hard luck to keep on being against me forever. It’s bound
to turn, Mrs. Dodge. Luck doesn’t always run just one way, not by any
means. My own father said last night he wouldn’t be surprised if I’d get
hold of something pretty soon that would interest me so much I’d do
mighty well at it. Well, he’s been prejudiced against me a good long
while now, and I thought if he had faith in me to say as much as that,
it was certainly time for other people to begin to show a little faith
in me, too. What I came here for this morning, Mrs. Dodge, was to tell
Lily about my father saying that to me. I thought she ought to know
about it. You see, Father speaking that way started me to thinking, and
I’ve realized with the positions I’ve held so far I couldn’t get myself
interested in the work. That’s just exactly what’s been the main
difficulty. So I wanted to tell Lily I’ve made up my mind I’m going to
look for a position where the work _will_ interest me. I thought if she
knew I’d taken this stand on the question——”
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Dodge interrupted, “I believe the minute I agreed to
listen is up. I must remind you of my request to leave this house.”
“Well—” he said, uncertainly, “if you put it like that——”
“I do, if you please.”
“Well——” he said, again, and took a step toward the door, but was
detained by Lily, who made an impassioned effort to reach him in spite
of the fact that her large and solid mother instantly placed herself
between them.
“You sha’n’t go!” Lily cried. “If you do, I’ll go with you. I’ll die if
you leave me! I will, Mamma!”
“Stop that!” Mrs. Dodge commanded, and again found herself in the
predicament of a lady who is compelled to use force. Lily struggled,
and, unable to pass, looked agony upon her lover, wept at him over her
mother’s shoulder, and also extended an imploring arm and hand toward
him above this same impediment.
“You mustn’t leave me!” she begged, hoarsely. “I can’t _stand_ it! Take
me _away_ with you!” And to this she added a word that her mother found
incredible, even though Mrs. Dodge had been through some amazing scenes
lately, and thought the utmost of Lily’s extravagance already within her
experience. Yet the mother might have been wiser here, might have
understood that for a girl of Lily’s emotional disposition, and in
Lily’s condition of tragic love, no limits whatever may be set.
To Lily herself the word she used was not extravagant at all; it was
merely her definition of Crabbe Osborne. As he went toward the door Lily
saw a brightness moving with him, an effulgence that would depart with
him and leave but darkness when he had passed the threshold. No doubt
the true being of young Crabbe was neither as Mrs. Dodge conceived it
nor as Lily saw it;—no earthly intellect could have defined just what
he was: nor, for that matter, can any earthly intellect say what
anything is, since all of our descriptive words express nothing more
than how the things appear to ourselves; and our descriptions,
therefore, are all but bits of autobiography. Thus, Lily’s word really
expressed not Crabbe but her own condition, and that was what shocked
her mother. Yet Lily sincerely believed that the word described Crabbe;
and, in her opinion, since her lover’s effulgence was divine, this word
was natural, moderate, and peculiarly accurate.
“Take me away with you,” she wailed; and then, in a voice beset with
tears, she hoarsely called him, “Angel”!
“Oh, murder!” cried Mrs. Dodge. And she was inspired to turn upon Crabbe
Osborne a look that expressed in full her critical thought of Lily’s
term for him.
Unquestionably he found himself in difficulties. Called “angel” in the
presence of a third party, he may have been hampered by some sense of
personal inadequacy. He produced a few sounds in his throat, but nothing
in the way of appropriate response; and under the circumstances the
expression of Mrs. Dodge was not long to be endured by any merely human
being.
“I guess maybe—maybe I better be stepping along,” he murmured, and
acted upon the supposition that his guess was a correct one.
Lily cried, “No! Don’t _leave_ me!” And piteously she used her strange
word for him again; but her mother held her fast until after the closing
of the front door was heard. “Oh, Heaven!” Lily wailed, “won’t you even
let me go and watch him till he’s out of sight? Won’t you even let me
_look_ at him?”
“No, I won’t!”
Upon this the daughter slid downward from the mother’s grasp and cast
herself upon the floor. “He’s gone!” she sobbed. “Oh, he’s gone! He’s
gone, and you drove him out! You drove him! You did! You drove him!”
“Get up from there,” Mrs. Dodge said, fiercely. “Be quiet! Do you want
the servants to hear you?”
“What do _I_ care who hears me? You drove him! You drove him, Mamma! You
did! You _drove_ him!”
IX
MRS. DODGE’S HUSBAND
“SPIRITUAL Life and the New Generation” lay meekly upon Mrs. Dodge’s
desk for all the rest of that day, and nothing was added to it. Late in
the afternoon Lily consented to take a little beef tea and toast in her
room; but she was still uttering intermittent gurgles, like sobs too
exhausted for a fuller expression, when her mother brought her tray to
her—or perhaps Lily merely renewed the utterance of these sounds at
sight of her mother—and all in all the latter had what she called “a
day indeed of it!”
So she told Mr. Dodge upon his arrival from his office that evening.
“_Haven’t_ I, though!” she added, and gave him so vivid an account that,
although he was tired, he got up from his easy chair and paced the
floor.
“It comes back to the same old, everlasting question,” he said, when she
had concluded. “What does she _see_ in him? What on earth makes her act
like that over this moron? There’s the question I don’t believe anybody
can answer. She’s always been a fanciful, imaginative girl, but until
this thing came over her she appeared to be fairly close to normal. Of
course, I supposed she’d fall in love some day, but I thought she’d have
a few remnants of reason left when she did. I’ve heard of girls that
acted like this, but not many; and I never dreamed ours would be one of
that sort. I’d like to know what other parents have done who’ve had
daughters get into this state over some absolutely worthless cub like
Crabbe Osborne.”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Dodge said, helplessly. “I’d ask ’em if I did. I’m
sure I’m at my wits’ end about it.”
“We both are. I admit I haven’t the faintest idea how to do anything
more intelligent than we’ve been doing—and yet I see where it’s going
to end.”
“Where, Roger? Where do you think it’s going to end?”
“They’ve tried twice now,” he said, gloomily. “Last time, if the idiot
had taken the precaution to see that there was plenty of gas in his
borrowed car before they started, they’d have been married. Some day
before long he’ll borrow _enough_ gas, and then she’s going to slip out
and meet him again, and they will.”
“No, no!” his wife protested. “I can’t bear to hear you say so.”
“It’ll happen, just the same,” he assured her, grimly. “Nothing on earth
that we’ve done has been able to make her see this cub except as an
angel—a persecuted angel. She really meant it when she called him
that;—on my soul, I believe she did! We’ve told her the truth about him
over and over till the repetition makes us sick. What effect does it
have on her? We’ve told her what his own father said about him, that
he’s ‘absolutely no good on earth and never will be!’ What help was
that? Then we tried having other people tell her their opinions of
Crabbe. It only made her hate the other people. We’ve tried indulgence;
we made the greatest effort to interest her in other things; we’ve tried
to get her interested in other young men; we’ve tried giving her
anything she wanted; we’ve tried to get her to travel; offered her
Europe, Asia, and the whole globe; and then when she wouldn’t go and
everything else we tried was no good, we tried taking the whole thing as
a joke—making good-natured fun of this cub; trying to make her see him
as ridiculous—and the end of that was her first attempt to run away
with him! Well, she did it again, and if we keep on as we’re going
she’ll do it _again_! What’s our alternative? I ask you!”
His wife could only moan that she didn’t know;—her mind as well as her
emotion was exhausted, she said; and the only thing she could suggest
now was that he should try to get Lily to come down to dinner. He
assented gloomily, “Well, I’ll see, though it makes me sick to listen to
her when she’s like this,” and went upstairs to his daughter’s room.
After he had knocked repeatedly upon the door, obtaining only the
significant response of silence, he turned the knob, found himself
admitted into darkness, and pressed a button upon the wall just inside
the door. The light, magically instantaneous, glowed from the
apricot-coloured silk shades of two little lamps on slender tables, one
at each side of the daintily painted bed;—and upon the soft green
coverlet, with her fair and delicate head upon the lace pillow, lay his
daughter. With hands pressed palm to palm upon her breast, her attitude
was that of a crusader’s lady in stone upon a tomb; and the closed eyes,
the exquisite white profile, thin with suffering, the slender, long
outline of her figure, could not fail to touch a father’s heart. For the
wasting of long-drawn anguish was truly sculptured there, even though
the attitude might have been a little calculated.
“Lily,” he said, gently, as he approached the bed, “your mother wants to
know if you wouldn’t like to come down to dinner.”
The dark eyelids remained as they were; but the pale lips just moved.
“No, thank you.”
“You won’t?”
“No.”
“Then shall we send your dinner up to you, Lily?”
“No, thank you,” she whispered.
He had come into the room testily, in a gloomy impatience; but she
seemed so genuinely in pain and so pathetically fragile a contestant
against her solid mother and against his own robust solidity that
suddenly he lost every wish to chide her, even every wish to instruct
her. He became weak with compassion, and the only wish left in him was
the wish to make her happier. He sat down upon a painted little chair
beside the bed.
“Lily, child,” he said, huskily, “for pity’s sake, what is it you want?”
And again the pathetic lips just moved.
“You know, Papa.”
There was something in the whispered word “Papa” that cried to him of
sweetness under torture, and cried of it with so keen a sound that he
groaned aloud. “O, baby girl!” he said, succumbing then and there, when
he had least expected such a thing to happen to him. “We _can’t_ let you
suffer like this! Don’t you know we’ll do anything on earth to make you
happy?”
“No. You wouldn’t do the one thing—Papa?”
“I said anything,” he groaned.
X
LILY’S ALMOST FIRST ENGAGEMENT
WHEN he came downstairs to his wife, five minutes later, he told her
desperately to what he had consented.
“There isn’t any alternative,” he said, in his defence against Mrs.
Dodge’s outcry. “It was going to happen anyhow, in spite of everything
we could do, and she’s grown so _thin_—I hadn’t realized it, but she’s
lost heaven knows how many pounds! You don’t want the child to _die_, do
you? Well, when I saw her there, so worn and stricken, it came over me
what _that_ alternative would mean to us! When it comes to risking her
life, I give up. I’d give my own life to keep her from marrying this
idiot, but not hers! There’s only one thing for us to do, and we’ve got
to go through with it.”
“I can’t!”
“Yes, you can,” he told her, angrily. “And since we’ve got to do it
we’ll do it right. Not another word to her from either of us in
dispraise of her idiot. On the contrary! And he’s to be asked to dinner
to-morrow night, and as often as she wants him afterward. Blast him,
I’ll put him into my own office and try my darnedest to make it a job
that’ll interest him. They can be married as soon as he’s saved enough
to pay his own way. I’ll give her enough for hers. We’re beaten, Lydia.
There’s nothing else to do.”
She protested despairingly, and in continued despair finally surrendered
her “better judgment,” as she called it, to his weakness. Thus, after a
painful evening of argument, they went unhappily to their uneasy beds,
but woke in the morning determined to be thoroughbreds in the manner of
their acceptance of Oswald Crabbe Osborne as their daughter’s betrothed.
Their encounter with him, when he came to dinner that evening in this
recognized capacity, was an almost overwhelming trial of their gameness;
but they succeeded in presenting the semblance of a somewhat strained
beaming upon him, and were rewarded by the sight of a fading daughter
blossoming again.
For Lily was radiant: her eyes and cheeks glowed; her feet danced; she
was all light and love and gaiety. At the table she laughed at every
nothing, caressed her father, patted her mother’s cheek again and again,
and from her eyes poured sunshine upon her lover across the centrepiece
of roses.
Crabbe received the sunshine with complacency, for he was accustomed to
it; and although his position in regard to her father and mother was a
novelty, he appeared to accept their change of front as something he had
confidently expected all along. That is to say, he took it as a simple
and natural matter, of course, and was not surprised to be shown every
consideration by his former opponents.
In truth, they showed him more consideration than he was able to
perceive. As was already well known to them, he had not the equipment
for what is often spoken of as general conversation; his views upon
religious, political, scientific, or literary subjects were tactfully
not sought, because of his having omitted to acquire the information
sometimes held to be a necessary preliminary to the formation of
views;—in fact, as Lily’s parents were previously aware, he lacked even
those vagrant symptoms of ambition, the views without the information.
Therefore, Mr. and Mrs. Dodge kept the talk at first as weatherly, and
then as personal, as they could make it, hoping he might shine a little,
or at least that some faint spark might come from him to brighten their
own impressions of him. They wanted to force themselves to like him;
they had genuine yearnings to think better of him than had been their
habit; but although they strove within themselves to attain these ends,
they cannot be thought to have succeeded. The nearest Crabbe came to
giving them a spark was when he spoke of his father; and even that
apparent momentary gleam was not a happy one.
“He’s well,” Crabbe said, replying to Mrs. Dodge’s inquiry. “He’s
usually well enough. He takes pretty good care of his health and all. I
guess he’s a good deal surprised; but probably not enough to make him
sick.”
“Isn’t he?” Mr. Dodge said, and he laughed hopefully, for it seemed to
him that here was an unexpected hint of humour, something he had never
attributed to the young man. “What would surprise him as much as that?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Crabbe replied. “But he told me once he always
got sick if anything surprised him too much. He says it injures his
digestion. What he’s surprised about now, it was when I told him about
Lily’s telephoning me this morning you were going to find me a position
that would interest me. He certainly said he was surprised.”
Mr. Dodge’s expectations collapsed, though his expression remained
indomitably genial. “I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll surprise him more by
showing him how well you get on at the work.”
“I know I will,” Crabbe returned, simply. “I mean I’m certain to if it
_is_ interesting. It’s just like I’ve been telling Lily: the only reason
I ever had any trouble at all in business, it’s because the luck’s been
all one way so far;—it kept against my getting anything to do that had
any possibilities in it. But it’ll be different from now on, I guess.
All anybody needs to do for me, Mr. Dodge, is to find me a position
where I’ll feel some use in getting my brain to work.”
Mr. Dodge said he was sure of it, gave his attention to his plate for a
few moments, and then, with the gallant assistance of his wife, returned
to the weather. Later, when they were alone together in the library,
where they could hear from the drawing-room the pretty sound of Lily’s
prattling, and, at brief intervals, her happy laughter, the parents
faced their misery.
“It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across
these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in
your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people
you come in contact with. And to think you’ve got to take such a case
into your _family_!”
“It’s your idea!” his wife reminded him.
“It isn’t! It’s not my idea; it’s a monstrous delusion that’s got hold
of our girl and that we failed to show her _is_ a delusion. Well, since
we couldn’t show her it is, and since opposing her in it was injuring
her health, what’s left for us to do but to act as if it were a reality?
It isn’t my idea to treat this moron as an angel and take him into our
family: it’s the dreadful necessity that her delusion has forced upon
us.”
“Thank you for not ending with, ‘Isn’t that logical?’” she said. “I’ve
been under such a strain, keeping my face cordial at the table, I don’t
believe I could have stood it!”
“Under a strain?” he echoed. “I should say so!” He gave her a
commiserating and comradelike pat upon her shoulder as he passed behind
her to get a book from the shelves. “We’ve both been under a strain,
Lydia, and I’m afraid we’ve got to go on being under it.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s the prospect—for the rest of our lives!”
“I’m afraid so.” Then, with grave faces, they settled down to their
books, or, at least, tried to settle down to them, but looked into vague
and troubled distance more than they read;—ever and anon, as Lily’s
merriment was made ripplingly vocal in the drawing-room, the silence of
the library would become intensified and then be broken by a mother’s
sigh. But at ten o’clock the front door was heard to close with soft
reluctance; and Lily left upon the air a trail of dance music in slender
soprano as she skipped down the hall and into the library. She threw her
arms about her mother, then about her father, kissing them in turn.
“Now you’ve let yourselves begin to know him,” she cried, “isn’t he
wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful, Mamma? Isn’t he wonderful, Papa?”
The two thoroughbreds proved of what stuff heroism is made. They said
Crabbe was wonderful. . . . Upon an evening two weeks later, Mr. Dodge,
again alone with his wife in the library, reverted to this opinion. “I
think Crabbe Osborne is more than wonderful,” he said. “I think he’s
unique. I hate to be premature, but he’s been in my office for several
days now, and, though they don’t say it, I can see that everyone there
agrees with me. He couldn’t possibly have a duplicate.”
“Isn’t he ‘interested’ in anything you’ve offered him? Hasn’t he been
able to get his ‘brain’ to work?”
“Not yet,” Mr. Dodge replied. “He’s a little discouraged about it, I’m
afraid.”
“But you aren’t, are you?” She made this inquiry with a pointedness not
wasted upon him, for he had already perceived the indications that
thenceforth in their private hours, until death did them part, he was to
be the defender of their acceptance of Crabbe Osborne. Mrs. Dodge
adopted her husband’s policy, but could not relinquish her attitude of
having been forced to it.
“I’m not discouraged about my daughter’s health and spirits,” he
retorted, a little sharply. “I’m not discouraged about having done the
right thing. The ‘right thing’? How often do I have to tell you it was
the _only_ thing? Look what it’s done for Lily. She was literally pining
away. How many weeks was it that we never once saw her smile? How many
dozens and dozens of miserable, agonizing scenes did we have with her?
How long was it that every day was only another of weeping and
outcries—and untouched food on trays outside her door—and tears on
untouched food on the table when she did come to the dining-room? I tell
you, this house was nothing but a nightmare!”
“And how would you define most of our dinners during the last
fortnight?”
He winced, but continued to defend himself. “At least we’ve reduced the
nightmare. If our dinners with the moron are nightmares for us, they
aren’t for Lily. Only two of us suffer, where it was nightmare for all
three of us before. And it’s been easier for us this second week than it
was the first one.”
“Not for me,” his wife said, dismally. “The more I see of him the more
terrible it is to think of him as permanent.”
“But can’t you think only of Lily?”
“Indeed, I can! I’m doing just that!”
“Well, then,” he urged, “think of the difference in her these two weeks
have made. Now she’s interested in everything, happy in everything. How
many times did we try to get her to go to the country club dances and be
with the other young people of the kind she liked and enjoyed before
this spell came upon her? She said she ‘hated the horrible old place!’
because Crabbe Osborne couldn’t go there.”
“He didn’t mind that,” Mrs. Dodge remarked. “He went anyhow until they
sent him a note reminding him he wasn’t a member. That was why Lily said
she hated it and we couldn’t get her to go any more. I was surprised she
decided to go to-night, since she knows he can’t be there.”
“There’s the very point I’m making,” her husband said. “Two weeks ago
we’d both have thought it was the last thing in the world she’d consent
to do, and this evening we didn’t even suggest it to her; she went of
her own volition, and cheerfully, too! I ask you if that doesn’t show
she’s a different creature. And isn’t it better for two to suffer than
three?”
“I ask _you_,” she returned, sharply: “How short sighted are you? We’re
giving her a recess from pain, yes; but what are we thrusting her into?
When she does see him as he is, and finds herself bound to him for life,
isn’t she going to turn to us then, when it’s too late, and say: ‘Why
didn’t you save me?’”
“Oh, Lord!” the father groaned, and his gesture was that of a man who
has tried to make the best of his misery, but abandons the effort. “I
don’t know! I can’t see! When you put it like that, I don’t know whether
we’re doing right or wrong.” He paced the library floor, walking
heavily, his head down. “It’s a miserable thing any way you look at it,”
he said. “I did have just one slight alleviation: it seemed to me I bore
it a little better, having him at the dinner-table this week, than I did
the week before. It seemed to me maybe it might be because I was getting
to like him a little, perhaps.”
“No,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “It was because he was here five times
the first week and only three the second.”
“Is that so?” He stopped his pacing and stood still. “So she asked him
five times the first week and only three the second. Doesn’t that look
as if maybe——”
“No, I’m afraid not,” his wife interrupted, unhesitatingly destroying
this obscure germ of hope. “When you give a child a toy it’ll play with
it more at first than it will later. That doesn’t mean the child won’t
cry if you try to take the toy away, does it?”
“No, I suppose not.” He had relapsed into gloom again. “And I suppose my
poor little alleviation was——”
“Your ‘alleviation,’” Mrs. Dodge informed him, “was in the diminished
number of the acute attacks—three instead of five—and not because you
began to feel any affection for the disease itself.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “And I’m afraid you’ve found the
correct definition for what afflicts us.” He sank into a chair,
unhappily limp and relaxed, his arms hanging flaccidly over the arms of
the chair. “Crabbe Osborne is our disease,” he said. “It’s a disease the
more awful because when a child gets it the parents get it, too, and
when they give the child an opiate they only stop her pain for a little
while; and then the child and the parents, all three of ’em, have got to
have the disease for the rest of their lives! And the greatest mystery
of it all is that an absolutely chance boy, with no malice, no harm in
him—a mere drifting bit of flesh and nothing, that we’d never heard of
a year ago—that a meaningless thing like Crabbe Osborne should do all
this to us!”
“It isn’t,” she said. “He has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s
Lily’s imagination. Her imagination was in the state to get the disease,
and it just happened this boy was the nearest thing at a crucial moment.
It might as well have happened to be someone else.”
“If it _had_ only been any one else!” Mr. Dodge exclaimed. “I’m willing
to agree with you, though: Crabbe just happened to be the fatal microbe.
Well, he’s done for us, that’s sure!”
Mrs. Dodge glanced sidelong at him—she was making intermittent efforts
to read, and a table and a lamp were between them. “‘Done for us?’ Well,
you said there was no alternative, didn’t you? It’s your policy, isn’t
it?”
“I suppose so,” he groaned. “I suppose so, Lydia.” Then, shaking his
head ruefully, and with a grunt of desolate laughter in his throat, he
said: “I know, of course, that you’re going to lash me with it—my
‘policy’—for the rest of our lives!”
But this was a prediction unfulfilled, for they had missed a clew that
was in their hands; or, more accurately, it had been in their mouths,
and they had actually spoken it. A toy withheld becomes the universe to
a child, and a lover withheld is life and death; but toys and lovers
freely given are another matter. What Mr. and Mrs. Dodge failed to see
was the significant relation of five to three.
. . . The gloomy parents, despondently communing, were still in the
library at midnight when Lily came home. They heard her laughter outside
before the latchkey turned in the lock of the front door; and then, with
the opening of the door, her voice sounded in a gay chattering like a
run of staccato notes in an aria of spring. Accompanying it,
interrupting it, there was heard a ’cello obbligato, a masculine voice,
young and lively, and this short duet closed with Lily’s “See you
day-after-to-morrow!”
She came dancing into the library, all white fur and flying silk.
“Oh, you mustn’t!” she cried. “You dear things, you mustn’t sit up for
me!”
“We didn’t,” her mother said. “We were just reading. Who was it that
brought you home? I asked your Aunt Sarah——”
“Oh, no! Aunt Sarah was there, but I didn’t want to trouble her to come
out of her way.” Lily seated herself lightly on the arm of her mother’s
chair, letting one cheerful foot swing and resting an affectionate hand
upon Mrs. Dodge’s shoulder. “Freddie Haines brought me home. He’s a nice
boy.”
“Is he?”
“I like him awf’ly,” said Lily. “I danced with lots of others, though,
too. I didn’t want ’em to think I was only going to dance with nobody
but Fred.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Freddie Haines is considerate,” said Lily. “He doesn’t mind my being an
old engaged girl at all.” Upon this she looked across to meet her
father’s frowning glance, and laughed. “Oh, Fred won’t tell; he’s never
going to mention it. I didn’t forget I promised you to keep it under
cover until we’re ready to have it announced. I haven’t told any one but
Fred, and I’m not going to.” Here she jumped down from her mother’s
chair, took an apple daintily from a bowl on the table, and skipped to
the door, laughing reminiscently. “He didn’t take it seriously, anyhow!”
she said as she went out. Then, humming a dance tune, she ran upstairs
to her bed.
In the library the astounded parents gazed long upon each other, and the
longer they gazed the wider were their eyes.
“Well, at least there’s this much to be said for me,” Lily’s father
said, finally;—“when we decided to adopt my policy——”
“Your what?” cried Mrs. Dodge. “Your policy!”
He perceived that his policy was about to be claimed by another—not
instantly, nor brazenly, but nevertheless with a slowly growing
assurance that in time would browbeat him.
To-night his wife said, “Your _policy_!” The day would come when she
would say, “_Your_ policy?”
XI
MRS. CROMWELL’S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER
CORNELIA CROMWELL, having passed her sixteenth birthday anniversary, had
begun to think seriously about life and books, and was causing her
parents some anxiety. She declined a birthday party, although in former
years such festivals had obviously meant to her the topmost of her
heart’s desire; and she expressed her reasons for this refusal in a
baffling manner. “I simply don’t care to have one,” she said, coldly.
“Isn’t that enough?” Then, being further pressed, and informed that this
repeated explanation of hers was one of those not uncommon explanations
that do not explain, she said with visibly increasing annoyance:
“Frankly, it would be a useless expense, because I don’t care to have a
party.”
“She’s so queer lately,” her mother complained to Cornelia’s married
sister Mildred. “She won’t go to other girls’ parties either. Of course,
it isn’t desirable often, while she’s still in school, but there are a
few she really ought to go to, especially now, during the holidays. She
simply refuses—says she ‘doesn’t care to.’ It isn’t natural, and I
don’t know what to make of it, she’s grown so moody.”
“Don’t you think young girls nearly all get like that sometimes?”
Mildred suggested. “Perhaps somebody hurt her feelings at the last party
she did go to.” She laughed reminiscently. “I remember when I was about
her age I was terribly anxious to please that funny little Paul
Thompson, who used to live next door. He danced with me twice at
somebody’s birthday party, and I felt perfectly uplifted about it. Then
I overheard him talking to another boy, not thinking I was near him. He
said his mother had told him he must be polite to me or he wouldn’t have
done it, and he certainly never would again, no matter what his mother
said, because I’d walked all over his new pumps. It just crushed me, and
I know I moped around the house for days afterward; but I wouldn’t tell
you what was the matter. It’s the most terribly sensitive age we go
through, Mamma, and I just _couldn’t_ have told you. Perhaps there’s
been a Paul Thompson for Cornelia.”
“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned. “I’m sure there isn’t, and that nobody’s
hurt her feelings. She came home from the last party she went to, a
couple of months ago, in a perfect gale of high spirits; she’d had a
glorious time. Then, a week or two later, when I spoke of arranging for
her birthday, she got very moody—wouldn’t hear of any such thing; and
she’s been so ever since. Your father’s getting cross about it and
thinks we ought to do something.”
“You don’t suppose—you don’t suppose she’s fallen in love? It does
happen, you know, Mamma—even at fifteen and sixteen.”
“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned decidedly. “I’m certain it isn’t that.
She’s sensible about the boys she knows, and she’s never shown the
slightest sentimentality. I’ve thought over all those things, and it
isn’t any of them. Nothing’s the matter with her health either; so there
just isn’t any reason at all for a change in her. Yet she _has_
changed—completely. In the space of a few weeks—you might almost say a
few days—instead of being the bright, romping, responsive girl she’s
always been, she’s become so silent and remote you’d think the rest of
her family were mere distant and rather inferior acquaintances. It’s
mysterious and extremely uncomfortable. Your father thinks we ought to
send her away to school where she’d have a complete change, and I’ve had
some correspondence about it with Miss Remy of your old school. I think
perhaps——”
Mrs. Cromwell stopped speaking, her attention arrested by the sound of a
door opening and closing. She listened for a moment, then whispered:
“There! She’s just come in. See for yourself.”
The two ladies were sitting in a room that opened upon the broad central
hallway of the house, and their view of that part of the black-and-white
marble-floored hall just beyond the open double doors was unimpeded.
Here appeared in profile the subject of their discussion, a plump
brunette demoiselle, rosy-cheeked and far from uncomely, but weightily
preoccupied with her own thoughts.
She did not even glance into the room where sat her mother and sister,
though the doorway was so wide that she must have been conscious of
them;—she was going toward the stairway at the other end of the hall,
and would have passed without offering any greeting, if her mother’s
voice, a little strained, had not checked her.
“Cornelia!”
The girl paused unwillingly. “Yes?”
“Don’t you see who’s here?”
“Yes.” Cornelia nodded vaguely in the direction of her sister. “How do
you do,” she said, not smiling. “I’m glad to see you.”
“Is that all you have to say?” Mrs. Cromwell inquired.
“Yes, Mamma, if you please. May I go now? There’s something important I
want to attend to.”
“What is it?”
“Something important.”
“You told us that,” her mother returned. “What is it?”
Cornelia’s voice expressed the strained tolerance of a person who has
already reported, over and over, all the known facts in a case. “Mamma,
I explained that it’s something important. Would you mind letting me
go?”
“No! Do!” her mother replied crisply, and, when Cornelia had
disappeared, turned again to her oldest daughter, and with widespread
hands made the gesture of one displaying strange stuff for inspection.
“You see? That’s what she’s like all the time.”
“What do you suppose it is she says is so important?”
Mrs. Cromwell laughed ruefully. “That’s all you’d ever find out about it
from her. If I ask her again at lunch what it was, she’ll do just what
she did then. Her expression will show that she finds me a very trying
person, and she’ll either say, ‘Nothing,’ or else, ‘It was something I
wanted to attend to.’ And if we should follow her up to her room now, we
shouldn’t learn any more about it. She’d probably be just pottering at
her dressing-table or looking out of the window. That’s all we’d find
her doing.”
In this surmise Mrs. Cromwell was correct;—if she and Mildred had
ascended to Cornelia’s room, they would have found her either
rearranging the silver and porcelain trifles on her dressing-table, or
else standing at the window near her desk and looking down pensively
upon the suburban boulevard below. That is to say, by the time they
opened the door she would have been doing one of those two things:
Cornelia was quick of hearing.
What they would have found her doing, if they could have entered her
room without any forewarning sound of footsteps, however, was another
matter. While her mother and sister continued to wonder about her
downstairs, Cornelia went to her small desk of dull mahogany and seated
herself before it, but, having done that, did nothing else for a minute
or two;—instead, she sat listening, a precaution due to the possibility
that her mother might indeed prove so curious as to follow up recent
inquiries in person.
Then she opened the desk, and after a final glance at her closed door,
took from about her neck, beneath the collar of her brown silk blouse, a
tiny key upon a fragile gold chain of links as slim as thin wire. With
the key she unlocked a drawer inside the desk, and as she did this her
expression altered;—the guarded look vanished, and there came in its
place a tenderness, wistful and yet so keen that the colour in her
cheeks heightened and her softened eyes grew lustrous.
She took first from the drawer a little notebook bound in black leather,
and opened it. All the pages were blank except the first one, upon which
she had lately written the opening sentence of a novel that she intended
to offer the world when the work had been secretly completed. She read
the sentence over fondly and yet with some perplexity. It was this:
Gregory Harlford had just fallen out of his airplane at a height
of 7000 feet and as he possessed no parachute he realized that
only a miracle could save him from being dashed to pieces at the
end of his descent.
That was the original form of the sentence, but Cornelia had made an
alteration. She had scratched out “7000” and replaced it with “5000.”
To-day she looked at the latter figure thoughtfully for some time, and,
having drawn a line through it, wrote “1000” above it. Then, for a few
moments, she had an encouraged look and seemed about to begin a second
sentence, but did not do so. Instead, she rested her elbow upon the desk
and her chin upon her hand; and as she continued her study of the
opening of her novel, her air of being encouraged gave way to a renewed
bafflement. It was not that the opening sentence displeased her;—on the
contrary. Yet whenever she wished to add another and get on with the
story, she came to one of those inexplicable blank gaps in the creative
mind, one of those flat stops that so often set even the most willing
novelists to walking the floor or the links.
She was sure that if she could once surmount the difficulty of the
second sentence, the rest would flow easily from her. Gregory Harlford
was to be the hero of her story, and she had in her mind’s eye a
remarkably definite portrait of him, which she wished to include in the
novel; but she felt that under the circumstances a description of his
person and attributes would be out of place in the second sentence.
There was a vague but persistent impediment somewhere;—inspiration
failed to make an appearance, and, after waiting almost fifteen minutes
for it, she sighed, pushed the little book away and turned to the other
contents of the drawer.
There were several queer items: the stub of an almost entirely consumed
lead pencil; an odd bit of broken amber, not quite cylindrical, and half
of an old shoe-lace. There were also a dozen dried violets, a flattened
rosebud, and a packet of small sheets of note paper whereon appeared
cryptic designs—line drawings most curious. These enigmas were what now
occupied Cornelia.
[Illustration: ABSOLUTELY PERFECT]
They were her own handiwork; nobody had even seen any of them, and they
were of different ages. The oldest of the designs had been drawn long,
long ago;—that is to say, long, long ago, according to Cornelia’s sense
of the passage of time. For she was sixteen now, and she had made the
first of the queer drawings four eternal years earlier, when she was
only a child.
It appeared to be the representation in profile of a steep stairway, or
perhaps a series of superimposed cliffs, each with a small shelf at its
base. Beginning at the bottom of the sheet of paper, this stairway, or
series of cliffs, rose to a small plateau or summit near the top; and
upon each step, or shelf of cliff, there was drawn one of those little
figures children call “men”;—the body is emaciated to the extent that
it becomes a single straight line, the arms and legs being similar
lines, and the head a round black dot.
In Cornelia’s drawing, each of these little figures was labelled, a name
having been written beside it; and in some cases a descriptive word or
two had been added beneath the name. Thus, under the name “Georgie P.”,
which evidently belonged to the figure occupying the lowest step or
shelf, there appeared in faded purple ink a phrase of qualified
admiration, “Half Handsome.” Another expression of an enthusiasm limited
by a defect in its subject seemed to refer to “Harold,” midway in the
ascent—“Terribly Good Looking But Stingy.” However, the figure upon the
summit, named in full, “William Peterson McAvoy,” was obviously the
symbol of a being without flaw, for here Cornelia had carefully printed,
all in capital letters: “ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.”
[Illustration: Too Snooty.]
Yet, in the next drawing, which, like all the others, was of the same
stairway, or series of cliffs, with little “men” upon the steps or
ledges, a sharp disaster had befallen this figure adorning with its
perfection the summit of the first design. Cornelia had drawn a straight
line from the summit down to the bottom of the page; and evidently this
straight line indicated a precipice of catastrophical dimension. At the
foot of it lay the dot and five lines representing the head, body, and
members of William Peterson McAvoy, again thus denominated, and near by
was written the simple explanation, “Too Snooty.” The summit was bare.
In a subsequent design, done when Cornelia was thirteen, the half
handsome Georgie P., who had sometimes occupied one step and sometimes
another, finally made his appearance upon the summit, though without any
other explanatory tribute than a date: “Sept. 16th.” But Georgie P. did
not long remain in his high position. A drawing made only a week later
depicted him miserably upon his back at the foot of the precipice, and
beside him Cornelia had written: “Perfectly Odious. Well only another
dream shattered.”
All of the drawings were dated and thus proved that they were made at
irregular intervals;—sometimes two or three months had elapsed between
them; sometimes three or four would be produced within a week; and the
figures upon the steps or ledges varied in name and relative position as
greatly, though one or two of the names appeared upon all of the designs
except the last and most recent one. This had been drawn only a month
ago, and was interestingly different from its predecessors.
One thing that made it different was the fact that it contained a
Mister. In the others there were Georgies and Harolds and Williams and
Toms and Johnnies; but now, for the first time, with unique dignity,
appeared “Mr. Bromley,” neither a Mister nor a Bromley having been seen
upon any previous step or ledge. Moreover, this début of his was
unprecedented. Instead of occupying one ledge and then another,
sometimes ascending, sometimes descending, before reaching the final
elevation, Mr. Bromley made his first appearance strikingly upon the
summit. More than this, the ledges below him were unoccupied;—the lofty
plateau alone was inhabited. The Harolds and Johnnies and Georgies were
gone utterly from the picture, as if unworthy to be seen at all upon a
mountain crowned with this supreme Mister.
[Illustration: Mr. Bromley.]
For the cliffs, or stairway, meant a mountain to Cornelia;—she thought
of the drawings as a mountain; and she called the little packet, kept in
the locked drawer, “My Mountain.” Her mountain was her own picture of
her heart and of the impressions made upon it;—no wonder she kept it
locked away! And now it was a deeper secret than ever, for in its
present state it glorified the one name alone, and would have told her
world everything. Mr. Bromley was the “English Professor,” aged
forty-three, at the boarding-school where she was a day scholar; and not
long ago he had told her she ought to think “less about candy and more
about books and life.” That was what was the matter with Cornelia;—she
had begun her novel immediately, and spent a great deal of time in her
room, thinking about life and Mr. Bromley.
Mr. Bromley was the hero of the novel and Cornelia thought of him as
Gregory Harlford. The general public would never have supposed Mr.
Bromley to be an aviator, and he had no claim, in fact, to be thought
anything so dashing, though he was fond of chess and still played tennis
sometimes. Nevertheless, he seemed to be a quietly resourceful man, one
who would find a way out of almost any difficulty, and it was strange
that he remained so long suspended in mid-air, in Cornelia’s story, even
after the vacancy beneath him had been reduced to a thousand feet. For,
after looking over her mountain, Cornelia again took up the little
leather-bound notebook and renewed the struggle for a second sentence.
Nothing resulted, and, sighing, she gave over the effort and performed a
little daily ceremonial of hers, placing side by side in a row her
mementoes of Mr. Bromley—the stub of the pencil he had used, the worn
shoe-lace he had broken and carelessly tossed aside, the rosebud she had
once asked him to smell, the violets that had dropped from his coat
lapel, and the fragment of the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, broken when
it fell from his pocket upon the stone steps of the school building.
Dreamily, she put them all in a row, touching them gently, one after the
other; then she leaned her elbows upon the desk and, with her chin in
her hands, thought about life and books in a general way for several
minutes.
After that, as the air was warm in the room, she went to the window and
opened it. Looking down moodily, she saw her sister Mildred departing.
“Going home to mess around with the baby,” Cornelia thought. “That’s her
life. How strange she can be contented with it!”
A large red open car went by, sending forth upon the wintry air some
cheerful cadences of song as it passed;—young gentlemen collegians
merrymaking not indecorously in this holiday time. Cornelia looked down
upon the manly young faces, rosy with the wind. “How terrible!” she
murmured, dreamily. For they were no part of her mountain; her sister’s
baby had nothing to do with Mr. Bromley; neither had the song from the
big red car; both were dross.
A negro rattled by upon an ash cart drawn by a lively mule. The negro
whistled piercingly to a friend in the distance, and the mule’s splendid
ears stood high and eager; he was noble in action, worthy of all
attention. Cornelia could not bear him. “Oh, dear!” she said, probably
thinking of his master, who was proud of him. “What lives these people
lead!”
She was in the act of turning away from this barren window when
something far down the street caught her attention. It was the figure of
a thin, somewhat middle-aged gentleman in gray clothes, approaching
slowly upon the sidewalk. For a moment Cornelia was uncertain; then
there appeared for an instant, beneath the rim of his soft hat, twin
sparklings of reflected light. They vanished, but Cornelia needed no
further proof that the gentleman in gray wore the eyeglasses that
completed her identification of him.
She said, “_Oh!_” in a loud voice, and clapped her joined hands over her
mouth to stifle this too-eloquent revelation. Then the bright eyes above
the joined hands semicircled impulsively to the bed, where lay her hat
and coat as she had tossed them when she came into the room. The impulse
that made her look at them increased overwhelmingly; she seized them,
put them on hurriedly; opened her door with elaborate caution, tiptoed
to a back stairway, descended it noiselessly, and a moment later left
the house by a rear door. No one had seen her except the cook’s cat.
XII
HER HAPPIEST HOUR
THUS Cornelia saved herself from replying to intrusive questions about
where she was going, and why; but in her impulsive haste she had
forgotten something. Upon her desk, upstairs, lay her heart’s secret,
her mountain, all in loose sheets of paper. Beside the desk was an open
window;—she had left the door open, too, and this was a breezy day.
Such was instantly her condition at sight of Mr. Bromley; and with no
thought but to have more sight of him, she flitted across the back yard
and through an alley gate, leaving calamity brooding behind her.
Mr. Bromley, returning homeward with a book under his arm, after his
morning’s browsing in the suburban public library, was not surprised to
see one of his pupils emerge from a cross-street before him, since this
was the neighbourhood in which most of the school’s day scholars lived;
but he wondered why Cornelia Cromwell was so deeply preoccupied. She
seemed to look toward him, though vaguely, and he lifted his hand to his
hat; but before he could complete his salutation she looked away,
apparently unconscious of him. She was walking in a rather elderly
manner, with her head inclined forward and her hands meditatively
clasped behind her—the right posture for an engrossed statesman
philosopher, but not frequently expected of sixteen. At the corner she
turned northward upon the boulevard sidewalk, Mr. Bromley’s own
direction, and went pensively on before him, some thirty yards or so in
advance.
His gait was slow, for that was his thoughtful habit; and the distance
between them, like Cornelia’s attitude, remained unvaried until the next
cross-street was reached. Here, without altering that scholarly attitude
of hers by a hair’s-breadth, she walked straight into what was the
proper path and right-of-way demanded by an oncoming uproarious taxicab.
With his hoarse warning signal and with his own hoarse voice, the driver
raved; she heeded him not. So, taking his life in his hands, he saved
her by charging into the curbstone. The wheels providentially mounted
and bore him fairly upon the sidewalk;—he crashed down again to the
pavement of the boulevard and roared onward, biblically oratorical about
women, let hear him who would.
Mr. Bromley rushed forward and seized Cornelia’s arm. “Miss Cromwell!”
She looked up, smiling absently. “Do you think there was any danger?”
she asked. “I didn’t notice.”
“Good gracious!” he cried. “Don’t you know you can’t cross streets
_any_where, these days, without looking to see what’s coming? What was
the matter with you?”
“The matter?” she repeated, vaguely, as she began to walk onward with
him. “Why, nothing.”
“I mean: What on earth were you thinking of to step right in front of
a——”
“Oh, that? Yes,” she said, gently. “I see what you mean now, Mr.
Bromley. I was thinking about life.”
“You were, indeed?”
“And books,” she added.
“Well, I wouldn’t!” he said, for he had long since forgotten his advice
to her in the matter. “If I were you, I’d put my mind more upon street
crossings, especially during pedestrian excursions.”
She accepted the reproof meekly, not replying, and for some moments
walked beside him in silence. Then she said gravely: “I believe I
haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”
“What?”
She repeated it: “I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t do anything of the kind.”
“You did, Mr. Bromley.”
“I certainly did not,” he said, astonished that she seemed genuinely to
believe such a thing. “The taxicab was banging around all over the
sidewalk by the time I reached you.”
“No,” she insisted. “I heard you call my name, and then you took hold of
me. If you hadn’t, I’d have gone straight on.”
“Well, you’d have been all right to go straight on, because by that time
the taxicab was twenty or thirty feet away.”
“No, I’d have been killed,” she said. “If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have
been killed absolutely.”
He stared at her, perplexed, though he knew that people often retain but
a confused recollection of exciting moments, even immediately after
those moments have passed. Then, with this thought in his mind, he was a
little surprised to find that she simultaneously had it in her mind,
too.
“Maybe you were a little excited to see a person in danger,” she said.
“It might have got you mixed up or something. When things happen so
quickly, it’s hard to remember exactly what _did_ happen. You may not
know it, but you saved my life, Mr. Bromley.”
He laughed. “I didn’t; but if you insist on thinking so, I suppose
there’s no harm.”
This seemed to content her; she nodded her head, smiled sunnily, then
became grave again. “And to think you’d risk your own life to save—even
mine!” she murmured.
“That’s merely absurd, Miss Cromwell. By not the remotest possibility
could it be conceived that I placed myself in any jeopardy whatever.”
“Well”——she returned, indefinitely, but seemed to reserve the right to
maintain her own conviction in the matter. “I think ‘jeopardy’ is a
beautiful word, Mr. Bromley,” she added, after a moment’s silence. “I
mean, whether you admit you were in jeopardy or not, it’s a word I think
ought to be used oftener because it’s got such a distinguished kind of
sound.” She repeated it softly, to herself. “Jeopardy.” Then, in a
somewhat louder voice, but as if merely offering a sample sentence in
which this excellent word appeared to literary advantage, she murmured:
“He placed his life in jeopardy—for me.”
“I didn’t!” her companion said, sharply. “The word is extremely
inappropriate in any such connection.”
“I just used it to see how it would sound,” Cornelia explained. “I mean,
whether you did get in jeopardy or anything, or not, on my account, Mr.
Bromley, I was just seeing how it would sound if I said it. I mean, like
this.” And she began to repeat, “He placed his life in jeopardy——”
“Please oblige me,” Mr. Bromley interrupted. “Don’t say it again.”
His tone was brusque, and she looked up inquiringly to find him frowning
with annoyance. She decided to change the subject.
“Do you care much for Christmas, Mr. Bromley?” she asked, in the key of
polite small talk. “It strikes me as terribly tiresome, myself. I’m
positively looking forward to the next school term.”
“Are you?”
“Yes—and oh! there was something I thought of the other day I wanted to
ask you. Are you a Republican or a Democrat, Mr. Bromley?”
“Neither.”
“That’s so much more distinguished,” Cornelia said. “I mean it seems so
much more distinguished not to be in politics. Do you believe in woman
suffrage?”
“No.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and made a serious decision instantly. “I’m
never going to vote, myself. The more I think about books and life, Mr.
Bromley, the less I care about—about”—she hesitated, having begun the
sentence without foreseeing its conclusion—“well, about things in
general and everything,” she finally added.
The gentleman beside her looked puzzled; but Cornelia was unaware of the
sweeping vagueness of her remark. She was not in a condition to take
note of such details, her consciousness being too preoccupied with the
fact that she was walking with him who dwelt upon the summit of her
mountain—walking with him and maintaining a conversation with him upon
an intellectual footing, so to speak. And as she felt that a special
elegance was demanded by the occasion, she made her voice a little
artificial and obliterated our alphabet’s least fashionable consonant
from her enunciation entirely.
She waved a pretty little ungloved hand in a gesture of airy languor.
“Most things seem such a baw, don’t you think?” she said.
“Bore?” he inquired, correctly interpreting her effort. “They certainly
shouldn’t seem so to you, at your age.”
“My _age_?” she echoed, and gave forth an affected little scream. “Don’t
talk to me about my _age_! Why, half the time I feel I’m at least a
hundred.”
Her companion’s reception of the information was somewhat dry. “Not much
_more_, I trust,” he said, and looked hopefully forward into the
distance as if to some goal or terminus of this excursion.
But Cornelia’s exaltation was too high for her to be aware of any slight
appearances that might lower it. “Indeed I do,” she insisted. “Why, when
I look at the classes of younger girls that have come into the school in
the years and years I’ve been there, I feel a thousand. I do,
positively, I do assure you.”
From beneath a plaintive brow, Mr. Bromley’s eyes continued to search
the distance hopefully, and he made no response.
Then, as he still remained silent, Cornelia did what most people do when
their ebulliences are received without encouraging comment—she eased
herself by a series of repetitions, enthusiastic at first, but tapering
in emphasis until she had settled down again into the casual. “It’s the
positive fact; these younger girls _do_ make me feel a
thousand—positively, I do assure you! You mayn’t believe it, but it’s
the mere simple truth, I do assure you. It is, I do——” She checked
herself, being about to say “I do assure you” again; and although her
own ability to use the phrase charmed her, she feared that too much of
it might appear to indicate a lack of versatility. She coughed
delicately, as a proper bit of punctuation for the unfinished
sentence;—then, as further punctuation, uttered sounds resembling a
courteous kind of laughter, to signify amusement caused by her own
remarks, and thus gradually reached a point where she could regard the
episode as closed.
Having successfully passed this rather difficult point, she looked up at
him with the air of a person suddenly overtaken by a belated thought
that should have arrived earlier. “Oh, by the by,” she said, “I suppose
I ought to’ve asked this sooner, but I expect I forgot it because I was
a little excited about your risking your li——”
“I did nothing of the kind,” he interrupted, promptly and sharply. “What
is it you wanted to ask me?”
“Well, it was this, Mr. Bromley. We got to walking along together after
you saved—after I nearly got run over—and I didn’t even ask you where
you’re going.”
“I’m on my way to lunch at the Blue Tea Room.”
“You—you _are_?” Cornelia said in a strange tone. An impulse, rash and
sudden, had affected her throat.
She had never before been quite alone with the solitary inhabitant of
her mountain’s summit; she had never before walked with him. Her walking
was upon air, moreover. She was self-conscious, yet had no consciousness
of walking—the rather, she floated in the crystal air of great
altitudes; and, rapt in the transcendent presence beside her, she became
intoxicated by the experience.
Cornelia had fallen in love with Mr. Bromley sublimely, instantly, upon
that day when he told her to think about books and life;—there seemed
to be no other reason, though her own explanation defined him as the
only man who had ever spoken to her inner self—and now that she found
herself alone with him for the first time, she could not bear for that
time to be brief. She was already expected at home for lunch, and she
knew that her unexplained absence might cause more than mere comment in
her domestic circle. Her impulse was, therefore, something more than
indiscreet, taking all circumstances and the strictness of her mother
into account. But the exciting moment had prevailed with Cornelia before
she took anything into account.
“To lunch at the Blue Tea Room?” she cried. “Why, Mr. Bromley, so am I!
That’s just where I was going. Isn’t that _queer_? Why, we can have
lunch together.”
The hopeful gleam passed out of Mr. Bromley’s expression, though perhaps
the bright eyes looking up at him so eagerly were able to interpret his
gloom as merely the thoughtfulness habitual to a scholar. His was not a
practical mind; he had no thought that Cornelia’s lunching with him
might have any result save to spoil the cozy hour he had planned for
himself with his book as a table companion. To him she was one of the
hundred pupils at the school—a little girl who had lately developed odd
mannerisms and airy affectations, for no reason except that many little
girls seemed to pass through such phases—and so far as his interest in
her as an individual human being was concerned, Cornelia might as well
have been eight years old as sixteen. He saw nothing, except that he
would have to listen to her instead of reading his book, for, since she
meant to lunch at the Blue Tea Room, she would probably talk to him
anyhow, whether they sat at the same table or not.
“Ah—if such be the case, very well,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Very
well, Miss Cromwell.” Then he added hastily, “I mean to say”—and paused
hoping to think of something that might avoid the proposed tête-à-tête;
but he failed. “I mean to say—ah—if you wish, Miss Cromwell.”
“_Do_ I!” she exclaimed, breathlessly; but the radiant face she showed
him only gave him the idea that she was probably excited by the prospect
of waffles.
Yet, when waffles—the Blue Tea Room’s specialty—were placed, as a
second course, upon the small blue-and-white painted table between her
and Mr. Bromley, Cornelia showed no avidity for them. She had resumed
her elegant manner, and but toyed with the food. Her elegance, indeed,
was almost oppressive to her companion;—she told the blue-aproned
waitress, whose cultivation was betokened by horn-rimmed spectacles,
that forgetting to bring butter was a “dreadful baw.” She said “baw” as
frequently as she could, in fact; and she appeared to view the people at
the other tables through a frigid though invisible lorgnette.
Her disdain of them as plebeians, beings unknown and not to be known,
was visible in her expression;—so much so that it made Mr. Bromley
uncomfortable; and here was a small miracle in its way; for in reality
she did not see the other people in the room at all distinctly. They
were only blurred planes of far-away colour to her; she was but dimly
aware of their outlines, and failed to recognize two of them whom she
knew very well.
For Cornelia all life and light centred upon the little painted table at
which she sat with Mr. Bromley. The world to her was like a shadowy room
at sunset, when through a window a last shaft from the rosy sun
illumines one spot alone, making it glorious, and all else dim and
formless. Mr. Bromley and she sat together in this golden glow, an aura
that shimmered out to nothing all round about them, so that there was no
definite background; and for anything more than two or three feet away
she was astigmatic.
Elation sweet as music possessed her. She was not only lunching at a
restaurant with a Distinguished Man, quite as if she were a prima donna
in Paris, but that Distinguished Man was Mr. Bromley—Mr. Bromley
himself, pale with studious wisdom, yet manly, and incomparably more
exciting than the symbol of him drawn with five lines and a dot upon her
mountain. She had sometimes trembled when she looked at that emaciated
symbol: What wonder could there be that she became a little too elegant,
that her laughter rang a little too loudly, or that she showed herself
disdainful of lowly presences in a dim background, now, when she sat
facing her Ideal made actual in all his beauty?
Beauty it was, in good faith, to Cornelia, and, so far as she was
concerned, Praxiteles, experimenting to improve Mr. Bromley, could only
have marred him. There was gray in his hair, but it was not emphasized,
since he was an ashen blond; and for Cornelia—unaware of his actual
years and content to remain so—he had no age, he had only perfection.
So beautiful he was in the rosy light with which she encircled him.
“Aren’t you going to eat your waffles, now you’ve got ’em?” he asked, a
little querulously.
“Waffles?” she said, as if she knew of none and the word were strange to
her. “Waffles?”
“Aren’t you going to eat them? I supposed that was why you came here.”
She looked down at her plate, appeared surprised to find it occupied,
and uttered a courtesy laughter with such grace it seemed almost that
she sang the diatonic scale. This effect was so pronounced, indeed, that
several people at other tables turned—again—to look at her, and Mr.
Bromley reddened. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You mean these waffles. Yes,
indeed!” And here she repeated her too musical laughter, accompanying it
with several excited gestures of amazement as she exclaimed, “_Imagine_
my not noticing them when they’re absolutely my favourite food!
Absolutely they are, my dear man, I do assure you!”
Then, having touched a waffle with her fork, she set the fork down,
placed her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands and gazed
upon her companion lustrously. “Mr. Bromley,” she said, “how did your
father and mother happen to choose ‘Gregory’ for your first name? Were
you named for somebody else, or did they just have kind of an
inspiration to call you Gregory.”
“I was named for an uncle,” he replied briefly.
“How beautiful!” she murmured.
“What?”
“It’s a beautiful name,” she said, and, not changing her attitude,
continued to gaze upon him.
“Why in the world don’t you eat your food?” he asked, impatiently. He
had become but too well aware that Cornelia was attracting a covertly
derisive attention; and he began to think her a bothersomely eccentric
child. Following her noticeable elegance and her diatonic laughter, her
dreamy attitude in the presence of untouched waffles was conspicuous,
and he was annoyed in particular by the interest with which two
occupants of a table against the opposite wall were regarding him and
Cornelia.
One of these interested persons was another of his pupils, a girl of
Cornelia’s age. He could not fail to note how frequently she glanced at
him, and after each glance whispered seriously with her mother across
their table; then both would stare surreptitiously at him and his rapt
vis-à-vis. There was something like a disapproving surveillance—even
something inimical—in their continuing observation, he thought; nor was
he remote from the truth in this impression.
Cornelia’s schoolmate was enjoying herself, excited by what she had
easily prevailed upon a nervous mother to see as a significant
contretemps. Moreover, the daughter had just imparted to the mother a
secret known to half the school, but not to Mrs. Cromwell.
“Crazy about him!” the schoolmate whispered. “Absolutely! She picked up
the stub of his pencil and kept it, and a piece of an old broken pipe.
We teased her, and she got red and ran away. She won’t speak to us for
days if we say anything about him she doesn’t like. Everybody knows
she’s simply frantic. Did you ever see such airs as she’s been putting
on, and did you hear her calling him her ‘dear man’ and talking about ‘I
do assure you’? And then looking at him like _that_—the poor smack!”
“I never in all my life saw anything like it!” the mother returned, her
brow dark and her eyes wide. “She looked straight at us and never made
the slightest sign when we bowed to her! The idea of as careful a woman
as Mrs. Cromwell allowing her daughter to get into such a state, in the
first place, is very shocking to me; and in the second, to permit her to
come here, at her age, and lunch in public with a man she’s in such a
state _about_—a man supposed to be her teacher and old enough to be
almost her grandfather—I simply can’t imagine what she means by it.”
The schoolmate giggled. “Cornelia’s mother? Don’t you believe it. Mrs.
Cromwell doesn’t know a thing about it.”
“Then she _ought_ to know, and immediately. If one of my daughters
behaved like that, I should certainly be thankful to any one who
informed me of it. I certainly——”
“_Look!_” the schoolmate whispered, profoundly stirred. “Look at her
_now_!”
Cornelia was worth the look thus advised. Under repeated pressure to
dispose of her waffles, she had made some progress with them, but now
with the plate removed and a cooling sherbet substituted before her, she
had resumed her rapt posture, her elbows upon the table, her chin upon
her hands, her wistful bright eyes fixed upon the face of the
uncomfortable gentleman opposite her.
“Was your uncle a very distinguished man, Mr. Bromley?” she asked. “I
mean the one they named you ‘Gregory’ after.”
“Not in any way,” he said. He had finished his own lunch, and moved back
slightly but significantly in his chair. “Hadn’t you better eat your
sherbet?” he suggested. “I believe it’s about time for me to go.”
She sighed, lowered her eyes, and obediently ate the sherbet; but ate it
so slowly that by the time she had finished it they were alone in the
room except for a waitress, who made her own lingering conspicuous.
“Now, then,” Mr. Bromley said, briskly, “if you’ve quite concluded
your——”
“But I haven’t had any coffee,” Cornelia interrupted. “I always have a
small cup after lunch.”
“Does your mother——”
“Mamma?” she said, appearing greatly surprised. “Oh, dear, yes. She
takes it herself.”
He resigned himself, and the waitress brought the little cup; but as
Cornelia conveyed the contents to her lips entirely by means of the
accompanying tiny spoon, and her care not to be injured by hot liquid
was extreme, he thought that never in his life had he seen any person
drink an after-dinner cup of coffee so slowly. And, all the while,
Cornelia, silent, seemed to be dreamily yet completely engrossed with
this long process of consumption; her lowered eyes were always upon the
tiny spoon. The impatient Mr. Bromley sat and sat, and finally lost his
manners so far as to begin a nervous tapping upon the rugless floor with
the sole of his right shoe.
This was the oddest child in the world, he thought. A little while ago
she had looked at him with so intent a curious dreaminess that she had
annoyed him; now she seemed to have forgotten him in her epicurean
absorption in half a gill of coffee. And so he frowned, and shifted in
his chair and tapped the floor with his shoe, and did not know that the
tapping had grown rhythmical. For, though her eyes were lowered and her
lips were silent, Cornelia was keeping time to it with a song. Each tap
of Mr. Bromley’s foot was a syllable of the song.
The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me;
I count them over, every one apart——
. . . But at last her pearls were gone; the little cup was empty. “Now,”
he said, “if you’ve finished, Miss Cromwell——” And he pushed back his
chair decisively, rising as he did so.
Still she sat and did not look up, but with her eyes upon the empty cup,
she asked: “Would you let this be my lunch, Mr. Bromley? Would you mind
if I charged it to Papa?”
“Nonsense,” he said. He had already paid the waitress. “Ah—if you
intend remaining here——”
“No, I’m coming,” she said, meekly. “I just——” She rose, and as she
did she looked up at him radiantly, facing him. “You—you’ve been ever
so nice to me, Mr. Bromley.”
Her cheeks were glowing, her lifted happy eyes were all too worshipfully
eloquent; and for a moment, as the two stood there, Mr. Bromley felt a
strange little embarrassment, this time not an annoyed embarrassment.
Who can know what is in a young girl’s heart? Suddenly, to his own
surprise, he felt a slight, inexplicable emotion;—something in
Cornelia’s look pleased him and even touched him. Just for the five or
six seconds that he knew this feeling, something mysterious, something
charming, seemed about to happen.
“No,” he said. “It’s you who were nice to me. I—I’ve enjoyed
it—truly.”
She drew a deep breath. “Have you _really_?” she cried. And with that,
she turned and ran to the door, all sixteen. But, with the door open,
she called back to him over her shoulder, “I’m glad it’s Friday, Mr.
Bromley.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s only till Monday when school begins!”
XIII
HEARTBREAK
SHE RAN out of the door and to the street, where she turned northward,
away from home, with her cheeks afire and her heart still singing; but
what it sang now was, “Monday! Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday—Monday again!” All through the year she would see him on every
one of those days. Cornelia was happy.
She was altogether happy; and she had just spent the happiest hour of
her life. Other happy hours she might know, and many different kinds of
happiness, but never again an hour of such untouched happiness as this.
Happiness unshadowed cannot come often after childhood, and sixteen is
one of the years that close childhood.
She was too happy to be with any one except herself; she could not talk
to any one except herself; and so her feet bore her lightly to the open
country outside the suburban town, and here, pleased with the bracing
winter wind upon her face, she walked and walked—and her walking was
more like dancing. She did not come home until the twilight of the short
day had begun to verge into dusk; and, when she entered the house she
went quickly up to her own room without seeing anybody on the way. In
her heart she was singing gaily, “Monday! Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday——”
But as she pressed the light on at a lamp upon her dressing-table,
something disquieted her. She flew to her open desk, and, breathless,
clasped both hands about her throat, for before her was her sacred
mountain, but not as she had left it. The little papers had blown about
the room. Someone had closed the window, and gathered the drawings
together. Someone had left a paperweight upon them. Someone had seen the
mountain.
The door opened behind her, as Cornelia stood staring at this violation,
and she turned to face her mother.
Mrs. Cromwell closed the door, but she did not sit down or even advance
farther into the room. “Cornelia, where have you been all day?”
“What? Nowhere in particular.”
“Where did you lunch?”
“What? Nowhere in particular.”
“Cornelia!”
“Yes, Mamma.” Cornelia had resumed her armour; her look was moody and
her tone fatigued.
“Cornelia, I am asking you where you lunched.”
“I said, ‘Nowhere in particular,’ Mamma.”
“I know you did.” And upon this Mrs. Cromwell’s voice trembled a little.
“I wish you to tell me the truth, Cornelia.”
Cornelia stood before her, apparently imperturbable, with passive eyes
evasive; and Mrs. Cromwell, not knowing that her daughter’s knees were
trembling, began to speak with the severity she felt.
“Cornelia, your father and I have been talking in the library, and we’ve
made up our minds this sort of thing must come to a stop.”
“What sort of thing?”
“This rudeness of yours, this moodiness and secretiveness.”
“I’m not secretive.”
“You are. You’re an entirely changed girl. Last year you’d no more have
done what you’re doing now than you’d have flown!”
“What am I doing now?”
“You’re standing there trying to deceive me,” Mrs. Cromwell answered
sharply. “But I’m not deceived any longer, Cornelia; I’ve learned the
truth. We knew that a change had come over you, and you were moody and
indifferent toward your family, but we did at least suppose your mind
was on your books. But to-day——”
“To-day!” Cornelia cried out suddenly, her look of moodiness all gone.
She pointed to her desk. “Were _you_ in here to-day after I went out?
Did you——”
“You left your door open and your window, and those sheets of paper were
blowing clear out into the hall. Naturally, I——”
“Mamma!” Cornelia’s voice was loud now, and her finger trembled
violently as she pointed to the mountain. “Mamma, did you—did you——”
Mrs. Cromwell laughed impatiently. “Naturally, as I picked them up I
couldn’t very well help seeing what they were and drawing certain
conclusions.”
“You _dared_!” Cornelia cried, fiercely. “Mamma, you _dared_!”
“Cornelia, you will please not speak to me in that tone. I’m very glad
it happened because, though of course I shouldn’t take those little
drawings of yours seriously, and they’re of no significance worth
mentioning, there was one of them that did shed a light on something I
heard later in the afternoon.”
“What? What did you hear?”
Mrs. Cromwell came a step nearer her, gravely. “Cornelia, you needn’t
have tried to deceive me about where you went when you slipped out of
the house before lunch and caused me so much anxiety. I telephoned and
telephoned——”
Cornelia interrupted; her shaking finger still pointed to the desk: “I
don’t care to hear this. What I want to know is how you dared—how you
_dared_ to——”
“Cornelia, you must not ask your mother how she ‘dares’ to do anything.
We know where you lunched, and you might have guessed that you couldn’t
do such a thing without our hearing of it. A lady who saw you came
straight here to know if it was by my consent, and I’m very grateful to
her for it. In conjunction with the drawing I’d just seen, which
surprised me greatly, to say the least, what this lady told me was a
shock to me, as it is to your father, too, Cornelia. To think that you’d
deceive us like this—to say nothing of the indiscretion of a
schoolmaster who is supposed to be in _charge_ of——”
“Mr. Bromley?” Cornelia cried. “Do you mean Mr. Bromley?”
“I certainly do. I think his conduct——”
“I asked him,” Cornelia interrupted fiercely. “I saw him from the window
and I ran down and walked ahead of him, and almost got run over by a
taxicab on purpose, and he saved me, and I asked him to let me have
lunch with him and told him I was going there anyway. Mamma, don’t you
dare——” Her voice broke; she gulped and choked; her trembling was but
too visible now. “Mamma, if you ever dare say anything against Mr.
Bromley——”
“I agree that we may quite as well leave him out of it,” her mother
said, sharply. “Your own excitement is all the evidence I need that your
father and I have been wise in the decision we’ve just come to.”
Something ominous in this arrested Cornelia’s anger; and she stared at
her mother incredulously. “‘Decision’?” she repeated, slowly. “What
‘decision’?”
“We’re going to put you into Miss Remy’s school on the Hudson,” Mrs.
Cromwell said. “Your father’s already engaged a drawing-room for us on
the afternoon train to-morrow. I’m going with you, and you’ll begin the
new term there on Monday.”
Cornelia still stared. “No——” she said. “No, Mamma, no——”
Mrs. Cromwell was touched, seeing the terror that gathered in her
child’s eyes. “You’ll love it there after a little while, dear. You may
think it’s pleasant to stay here, but after you’ve been there a week or
so, it’s such a lovely place that you——”
But Cornelia threw herself down passionately at her mother’s feet. “No!
No! _No!_” she sobbed, over and over again; and in this half-articulate
anguish, Mrs. Cromwell read and understood Cornelia’s secret indeed. She
was compassionate, yet all the more confirmed in her belief that the
decision just made with her husband was a wise one.
Cornelia could bring no eloquence to alter her fate. “No! No! _No!_” was
only her protest against what she understood was inevitable, though, as
she wept brokenly upon her pillow that night, she thought of one
resource that would avoid the inevitable, so desperate she was. But she
decided to live, and found living hardest when she was on her way to the
train next day, and the route chosen by her father’s chauffeur cruelly
passed the Blue Tea Room.
On the train, thinking of the flying miles that so bitterly lengthened
between her and that sacred little blue-painted room, she came to the
end of the song her heart had chanted there in time to a tapping
foot;—it was the refrain of the car wheels upon the humming rails all
that aching way:
I tell each bead unto the end and there
A cross is hung.
XIV
MRS. DODGE’S NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR
AT FIVE o’clock upon a February afternoon the commodious rooms on the
lower floor of Mrs. Cromwell’s big house resounded with all the noise
that a hundred women unaided by firearms could make. A hundred men,
gathered in a similar social manner, if that were possible, might either
be quiet or produce a few uproariously bellowing groups, a matter
depending upon the presence or absence of noisy individuals; but a
hundred habitually soft-voiced women, brought together for a brief
enjoyment of one another’s society and a trifling incidental repast,
must almost inevitably abandon themselves to that vocal rioting
ultimately so helpful to the incomes of the “nerve specialists.”
The strain, of course, is not put upon the nerves by the overpitched
voices alone. At times during Mrs. Cromwell’s “tea” the face of almost
every woman in the house was distressed by the expression of caressive
animation maintained upon it. The most conscientious of the guests held
this expression upon their faces from the moment they entered the house
until they left it; they went about from room to room, from group to
group, shouting indomitably; and, without an instant’s relaxation, kept
a sweet archness frozen upon their faces, no matter how those valiant
faces ached.
Men may not flatter themselves in believing it is for them that women
most ardently sculpture their expressions. A class of women has traduced
the rest: those women who are languid where there are no men. The women
at Mrs. Cromwell’s “tea,” with not a man in sight, so consistently
moulded their faces that the invitations might well have read, “From
Four to Six: a Ladies’ Masque.”
What gave most truly the colour of a masquerade was the unmasking. This,
of course, was never general, nor at any time simultaneous, except with
two or three; yet, here and there, withdrawn a little to the side of a
room, or near a corner, ladies might be seen who wore no expression at
all, or else looked jaded or even frostily observant of the show.
Sometimes clubs of two seemed to form temporarily, the members unmasking
to each other, exhibiting their real faces in confidence, and joining in
criticism of the maskers about them. At such times, if a third lady
approached, the two would immediately resume their masks and bob and
beam; then they might seem to elect her to membership; whereupon all
three would drop their masks, shout gravely, close to one another’s
ears, then presently separate, masking again in facial shapings designed
to picture universal love and jaunty humour.
But among the hundred merrymakers there was one of whom it could not be
said that she was masked; yet, strange to tell, neither could it be said
of her that she was not masked; for either she wore no mask at all or
wore one always. Her face at Mrs. Cromwell’s was precisely as it was
when seen anywhere else; though where it seemed most appropriately
surrounded was in church.
Calm, pale, the chin uplifted a little, with the slant of the head
always more toward heaven than earth, this angelic face was borne high
by the straight throat and slender figure like the oriflamme upon its
staff; and so it passed through the crowd of shouting women, seeming to
move in a spiritual light that fell upon them and illuminated them, yet
illuminated most the uplifted face that was its source. Moreover, upon
the lips the exquisite promise of a smile was continuously hinted; and
the hint foreshadowed how fine the smile would be: how gentle, though a
little martyred by life, and how bravely tolerant.
The beholder waited for this promised heavenly smile, but waited in
vain. “You always think she’s just going to until you see her often
enough to find she never does,” a broad-shouldered matron explained to
two of her friends at Mrs. Cromwell’s. The three had formed one of the
little clubs for a temporary unmasking and were lookers-on for the
moment. “It’s an old worn-out kind of thing to say,” the sturdy matron
continued;—“but I never can resist applying it to her. Nobody can ever
possibly be so good as Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite looks. I’ll even risk
saying that nobody can ever possibly be so good as she seems to behave!”
“Oh, Mrs. Dodge!” one of the others exclaimed. “But isn’t behaviour the
final proof? My husband says conduct is the only test of character.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the brusque Mrs. Dodge
returned. “When we do anything noble, it’s in spite of our true
character; that’s what makes it a noble thing to do. I’ve lived next
door to that woman for five years, and, though I seldom exchange more
than a word with her, I can’t help having her in my sight pretty often.
She always looks noble and she always sounds noble. Even when she says,
‘Isn’t it a lovely day,’ she sounds noble—and, for my part, I’m sick
and tired of her nobility!”
“But my husband says——”
“I don’t care what Mr. Battle says,” Mrs. Dodge interrupted. “The
woman’s a nuisance!”
“To me,” said the third of the group, gravely, “that sounds almost like
sacrilege. I’ve always felt that even though Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite is
still quite a young woman, she’s the focus of spiritual life for this
whole community. I think the people here generally look upon her as the
finest inspiration we have among us.”
“I know they do,” Mrs. Dodge said, irritably. “That’s one reason I think
she’s a pest. People are always trying to live up to her, and it makes
cowards and hypocrites of ’em. Look at her now!”
Mrs. Braithwaite had reached the hostess, who was shouting in concert
with several new arrivals; but when Mrs. Braithwaite appeared, the
voices of all this group were somewhat lowered (though they could not be
lowered much and hope to be audible) and, what was more remarkable, Mrs.
Cromwell’s expression and her manner were instantly altered
perceptibly:—so were the expressions and manners of the others about
her, as Mrs. Dodge vindictively pointed out.
“Look at that!” she said. “Every one of those poor geese is trying to
look like _her_;—they feel they have to seem as noble as she is!
Instinctively they’re all trying to take on her hushed sweetness. Nobody
dares be natural anywhere near her.”
“But that’s because of the affection people feel for her,” Mrs. Battle
explained. “Don’t you feel——”
“Affection your grandmother!” the brusque lady interrupted. “What are
you talking about?”
“Well, reverence, then. Perhaps that’s the better word for the feeling
people have about her. They know how much of her life she gives to good
works. She’s at the head of——”
“Yes, she certainly is!” Mrs. Dodge agreed, bitterly. “She’s the head
and front of every uplifting movement among us. You can’t open your mail
without finding benefit tickets you have to buy for some good cause
she’s chairman of. She’s always the girl that passes the hat: she’s the
one that makes us feel like selfish dogs if we don’t give till it hurts!
She’s the star collector, all right!”
“Well, oughtn’t we to be grateful that she takes such duties upon
herself?”
“Do we ever omit any of our gratitude? Why, the papers are full of it:
‘It is the sense of this committee that, except for the noble,
unflagging, and self-sacrificing devotion of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite,
this fund could never have reached the generous dimensions necessary for
the carrying on of this work. Therefore, be it resolved that the thanks
of this entire organization’—and so forth. And, as a matter by the way,
you never hear whether she gave any of the fund herself.”
“She gives time. She gives energy. Mr. Battle says, ‘Who gives himself
gives all.’ Mrs. Braithwaite gives herself.”
“Yes, she does,” Mrs. Dodge agreed. “It’s her form of recreation!”
Her two auditors stared at her incredulously, so that she could plainly
see how shocked they were; but, before either of them spoke, a beautiful
change in look and manner came upon them. Both of them elevated their
chins a little, so that their faces slanted more toward heaven than
toward earth; both of them seemed about to smile angelically, but
stopped just short of smiling; a purified softness came into their eyes;
and, altogether, by means of various other subtle little manifestations,
the two ladies began to look noble.
Mrs. Dodge had turned her back toward the group about the hostess, but
without looking round she understood what the change in her two
companions portended. “Good-bye, ladies of Shalott,” she said. “The
curse has come upon you!” And she moved away, just as the ennobled two
stepped forward to meet Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite in her approach to them.
“Clever of me!” Mrs. Dodge thought, with some bitterness. “Getting
myself the reputation of a ‘dangerous woman’!” For she understood well
enough that she would do no injury to Mrs. Braithwaite in attacking
her;—on the contrary, the injury would inevitably be to the assailant;
and yet Mrs. Dodge could not forbear from a little boomerang practice at
this shining and impervious mark. The reason, unfortunately, was
personal, as most reasons are: Mrs. Dodge had come to the “tea” in an
acute state of irritation that had been increasing since morning. In
fact, she had begun the day with a breakfast-table argument of which
Mrs. Braithwaite was the subject.
Mr. Dodge made the unfortunate admission that he had recently sent Mrs.
Braithwaite a check for a hundred dollars, his subscription to the
Workers’ Welfare League; and he was forced into subsequent admissions:
he had no interest in the Workers’ Welfare League, and could give no
reason for sending a check to it except that Mrs. Braithwaite had
written him appealing for a subscription. She was sure he wouldn’t like
to miss the chance to aid in so splendid a movement, she said. Now, as
Mrs. Braithwaite had previously written twice to Mrs. Dodge in almost
the same words, and as Mrs. Dodge had twice replied declining to make a
donation, the argument (so to call it) on Mrs. Dodge’s part was a heated
one. It availed her husband little to protest that he had never heard of
Mrs. Braithwaite’s appeals to his wife; Mrs. Dodge was too greatly
incensed to be reasonable.
Later in the day she was remorseful, realizing that she had taken poor
Mr. Dodge for her anvil because he was within reach, and what she really
wanted to hammer wasn’t. Her remorse applied itself strictly to her
husband, however, and she had none for her feeling toward the lady next
door. Mrs. Dodge and her neighbour had never discovered any point of
congeniality: Mrs. Braithwaite’s high serenity, which Mrs. Dodge called
suavity, was of so paradoxical a smoothness that Mrs. Dodge said it
“rubbed the wrong way from the start.” The uncongeniality had increased
with time until it became a settled dislike, so far as Mrs. Dodge was
concerned; and now, after Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s successful appeal to
Mr. Dodge for what Mr. Dodge’s wife had refused, the dislike was
rankling itself into a culmination not unlike an actual and lusty
hatred.
Mrs. Dodge realized her own condition;—she knew hatred is bad for the
hater; but she could not master the continuous anger within her.
Fascinated, she watched Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite at the “tea”; could not
help watching her, although, as the victim of this fascination admitted
to herself in so many words, the sight was “poison” to her. Nor was the
poison alleviated by the effect of Mrs. Braithwaite upon the other
guests: everywhere the angelic presence moved about the capacious rooms
it was preceded and followed by deference. And when Mrs. Braithwaite
joined a woman or a group of women, Mrs. Dodge marked with a hot eye how
that woman or group of women straightway hushed a little and looked
noble.
XV
MRS. DODGE DECLINES TO TELL
MRS. DODGE went home early. “I oughtn’t to have come,” she told her
hostess, confidentially, in parting. “I try to be a Christian sometimes,
but this is one of the days when I think Nero was right.”
“But what——”
“I may tell you—some day,” Mrs. Dodge promised, and gloomily went her
way.
At dinner that evening she was grim, softening little when her husband
plaintively resumed his defence. Lily inquired why her mother was of so
dread a countenance.
“Me,” Mr. Dodge explained. “It began at breakfast before you were up,
and it’s the old culprit, Lily.”
“I guessed that much,” Lily said, cheerfully. “I haven’t been falling in
love with anybody foolish for three or four months now; and that’s the
only thing _I_ ever do to make her look like this, so I knew it must be
you. What you been up to?”
“Aiding in good causes,” he answered, sighing. “She hates me for helping
the Workers, Lily. Our next-door neighbour appealed to Cæsar, over your
mother’s head. I’ve explained two or three hundred times that I didn’t
know there’d been any previous request to her; but she hates my wicked
plotting just the same.”
“No. I only hate your weakness,” Mrs. Dodge said, not relaxing her
severity. “You were so eager to please that woman you couldn’t even wait
to consult your wife. Her writing to you and ignoring what I’d twice
written her was the rudest thing I’ve ever had done to me, and your
donation puts you in the position of approving of it. She did it because
she’s furious with me, and so——”
But Lily interrupted her. “Mamma!” she exclaimed. “Why, you’re talking
just ridiculously! Everybody knows Mrs. Braithwaite couldn’t be
‘furious.’ Not with anybody!”
“Couldn’t she? Then why did she do such an insulting thing to me? Don’t
you suppose she knows it’s insulting to show she can get a poor silly
husband to do something his wife has declined to do? Is there a cattier
trick in the whole cattish repertoire? She did it because she’s the
slyest puss in this community and she knows I know it, and hates me for
it!”
Lily stared in the blankest surprise. “Why, it just sounds like
anarchy!” she cried. “I never heard you break out like that before
except when you were talking about some boy I liked! When did you get
this way about Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite?”
“I’ve never liked her,” Mrs. Dodge said. “Never! I’ve always suspected
she was a whited sepulchre, and now I’ve got proof of it.”
“Proof? That’s quite a strong word, Lydia,” Mr. Dodge reminded her.
“Thank you!” she said. “I mean exactly what I’m saying. Mrs. Braithwaite
did this thing to me out of deliberate spitefulness; and she did it
because she knows what I think of her.”
“But you said you had ‘proof’ that she’s a ‘whited sepulchre,’” he said.
“The word ‘proof’——”
“May we assume that it means reliable evidence reliably confirmed?” Mrs.
Dodge asked, with satirical politeness. “Suppose you’ve done something
disgraceful and another person happens to know you did it. Then suppose
you play a nasty trick on this other person. Wouldn’t it be proof that
you hate him because he knows you did the disgraceful thing?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” Mr. Dodge said, uncomfortably. “When
did I ever do this disgraceful thing you’re talking about? If it’s
actually disgraceful to subscribe a hundred dollars to the Workers——”
“I’m not talking of that,” his wife said. “I’ll try to put it within
reach of your intellect. Suppose I know Mrs. Braithwaite to be a whited
sepulchre; then if she does an insulting thing to me, isn’t that proof
she’s furious with me for finding her out?”
“No,” he answered. “It might incline one to think that she resented your
poor opinion of her, but it doesn’t prove anything at all.”
“Doesn’t it? You wouldn’t say so if you knew what I know!”
Lily’s eyes widened in hopeful eagerness.
“How exciting!” she cried. “Mamma, _what_ do you know about Mrs.
Braithwaite?”
“Never mind!”
“But you said——”
“I said, ‘Never mind’!”
“But I do mind!” Lily insisted. “You haven’t got any right to get a
person’s interest all worked up like that and then just say, ‘Never
mind’!”
“That’s all I _shall_ say, however,” Mrs. Dodge informed her stubbornly,
and kept to her word, though Lily continued to press her until the meal
was over. Mr. Dodge made no effort to aid his daughter in obtaining the
revelation she sought;—he appeared to be superior to the curiosity that
impelled her; but this appearance of superiority may have been only an
appearance: he may have foreseen that his wife would presently be a
little more explicit about what she had implied against their neighbour.
In fact, Lily had no sooner gone forth upon some youthful junketing,
immediately after dinner, than symptoms of forthcoming revelation were
manifested. Mr. Dodge’s physician allowed him one cigar a day, and it
had just begun to scent the library.
“I suppose, of course, you’re condemning me for a reckless talker,” Mrs.
Dodge said. “You assume that I’m willing to hint slander against a woman
with only my own injury for a basis, instead of facts.”
“On the contrary, Lydia,” he returned, mildly, “I know you wouldn’t have
said what you did unless you have something serious to found it on.”
Probably she was a little mollified, but she did not show it. “So you
give me that much credit?” she asked, sourly. “I imagine it’s because
you’re just as curious as Lily and hope to hear what I wouldn’t tell
her. Well, I’m not going to gratify your curiosity.”
“No?” He picked up a magazine from the table beside his chair, and began
to turn over the pages. “Oh, very well!”
“I _am_ going to tell you _something_, though,” she said. “It’s because
I think you ought to be told at least _part_ of what I know. It may be
good for you.”
“For me?” he inquired, calmly, though he well understood what she was
going to say next.
“Yes; you might find it wiser to consult your wife next time, even when
you’re dealing with people you think are saints.”
“Why, I don’t think Mrs. Braithwaite’s a saint,” he protested. “She
_looks_ rather like one—a pretty one, too—and the general report is
that she _is_ one; but I don’t know anything more than that about her.
She happens to be a neighbour; but we’ve never had the slightest
intimacy with her and her husband. We’ve never been in their house or
they in ours; I bow to her when I see her and sometimes exchange a few
words with her across the hedge between our two yards, usually about the
weather. I don’t think anything about her at all.”
“Then it’s time you did,” Mrs. Dodge said with prompt inconsistency.
“All right. What do you want me to think about her, Lydia?”
“Nothing!” she said, sharply. “Oh, laugh if you want to! I’ll tell you
just this much: I found out something about her by pure accident; and I
decided I’d never tell anybody in the world—not even you. I’m not the
kind of person to wreck anybody’s life exactly; and I decided just to
bury what I happened to find out. What’s more, I’d have kept it _all_
buried if she’d had sense enough to let me alone. I wouldn’t even have
told you that I know something about her.”
“It’s something really serious?”
“‘Serious’?” she said. “No, it’s not ‘serious.’ It’s ruinous.”
Mr. Dodge released a sound from his mouth. “Whee-ew!” Whistled, not
spoken, it was his characteristic token that he found himself impressed.
“You’ve certainly followed the right course, Lydia. Mrs. Leslie
Braithwaite’s standing isn’t just a high one; it’s lofty. I shouldn’t
care to be the person who blasts that statue off its
pedestal;—sometimes statues crush the blasters when they fall. I’m glad
you kept your information to yourself.” He paused, and then, being
morally but an ordinary man, he added, “Not—not that I see any
particular harm in your confiding in my discretion in such a matter.”
“Didn’t I explain I’m not confiding in your discretion?” Mrs. Dodge
returned. “Lately, I don’t believe you have any. I’ve told you this much
so that next time you won’t be so hasty in sending checks to women who
are merely using you to annoy your wife.”
He sighed. “There’s where you puzzle me, Lydia. If you found out
something ruinous about Mrs. Braithwaite, as you say, and if she knows
you did—you intimated she knows it, I think?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I should think you’d be the last person in the world she’d want to
annoy. I should think she’d do everything on earth to please you and
placate you. She’d want to keep you from telling. That’s the weak point
in your theory, Lydia.”
“It isn’t a theory. I’m speaking of facts.”
“But if she knows you’re aware of what might ruin her,” he insisted,
“she would naturally be afraid of you. Then why would she do a thing
that might infuriate you?”
“Because she’s a woman,” said Mrs. Dodge. “And that’s something you’ll
never understand!”
“But even a woman would behave with some remnants of caution, under the
circumstances, wouldn’t she?”
“Some women might. Mrs. Braithwaite doesn’t because she’s so sure of her
lofty position she thinks she can deliberately insult me and I won’t
dare to do anything about it. She wanted to show me that she isn’t
afraid of me.”
Mr. Dodge looked thoughtfully at that point upon his long cigar where a
slender ring of red glow intervened between the adhering gray ash and
the brown tobacco. “Well, at least she shows a fiery heart,” he said.
“In a way, you’d have to consider her action quite the sporting thing.
You mean she’s sent you a kind of declaration of war, don’t you?”
“If you want to look at it that way. I don’t myself. I take it just as
she meant it, and that’s as a deliberate insult.”
“But it isn’t an ‘insult’ if she only meant it to show she isn’t afraid
of you, Lydia.”
“It is, though,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “What she means is derision of me.
It’s the same as if she said: ‘Here’s a slap in the face for you. I have
the satisfaction of humiliating you as your punishment for knowing what
you do know about me, and you can’t retaliate, because you aren’t
important enough to be able to injure me!’ It’s just the same as if
she’d said those words to me.”
“It seems quite a message,” he observed. “Of course, I can’t grasp it
myself because I haven’t any conception of this ruinous proceeding of
hers. You were the only witness, I assume?”
“There was a third person present,” Mrs. Dodge said, stiffly. “But not
as a witness.”
“Then what was the third person present doing?”
Mrs. Dodge looked at him with severity, as if she reproved him for
tempting her to do something wrong; then she took from a basket in her
lap a square piece of partly embroidered linen and gave it her
attention, not relaxing this preoccupation where her husband began to
repeat his question.
“What was the third person——”
“I heard you,” Mrs. Dodge interrupted, frowning at her embroidery. “If I
told you that much I’d be virtually telling the whole thing; and I’ve
decided not to do that, even under her deliberate provocation. If I let
myself be provoked into telling, I’d be as small as she is, so you
needn’t hope to get another word out of me on the subject. The only
answer I’ll make to your question is that the third person present was
not her husband.”
“Oh!” Mr. Dodge said, loudly, and, in his sudden enlightenment, whistled
“Whee-ew!” again. “So _that’s_ it!”
“Not at all,” she said. “You needn’t jump to conclusions, and you’ll
never know anything more about it from me. The only way you could ever
know about it would be through her husband’s making a fuss and its
getting into the papers or something.”
“I see,” Mr. Dodge said, apparently not much discouraged. “And, since
it’s something he hasn’t _yet_ made any fuss about, it’s evidently
because he doesn’t know.”
“_He!_” Mrs. Dodge cried, and, in her scorn of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s
consort, dropped the embroidery into the basket and stared fiercely at
Mr. Dodge; though it was really at an invisible Mr. Braithwaite that she
directed this glare of hers. Apparently the unfortunate gentleman was
one of those mere husbands whose existence seems either to amuse or to
incense the wives of more dominant men: Mrs. Dodge certainly appeared to
be incensed. “That miserable little pale shadow of a man!” she cried.
“His name’s Leslie Braithwaite, but do you ever hear him spoken of
except as ‘Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’? He goes down to his
little brass-rod works at eight o’clock every morning and gets money for
her until six in the evening. Then he comes home and works on the
account books of her uplifts until bedtime. If they go out, he stands
around with her wrap over his arm and doesn’t speak unless you ask him a
question. If you do, he begins his answer by saying, ‘My wife informs
me’—How could that poor little creature know anything about anything?”
“But _you_ know,” Mr. Dodge persisted. “You _do_ know, do you, Lydia?”
“I know what I know,” she replied, and resumed her preoccupation with
the embroidery.
“But you couldn’t substantiate it by another witness, I take it,” he
said, musingly. “That is, she feels safe against you because if you
should ever decide to tell what you know, she would deny it and put you
in the position of an accuser without proofs. It would simply be your
word against hers, and she’d have the sympathy that goes to the party
attacked and also the advantage of her wide reputation for lofty
character and——”
“Go on,” his wife interrupted. “Amuse yourself all you like; you’ll not
find out another thing from me. Perhaps, if you should ever spend the
morning at home digging around in our flower border along the hedge
between her yard and ours, you might happen to hear her talking to her
chauffeur, and in that case you might get to know something more.
Otherwise, I don’t see how you ever will.”
“Lydia!”
“What?”
“I’m not going to dig in any flower border! I’m not going to spy around
any hedge just to——”
“Neither did I!” she cried, indignantly. “Did you ever know me to do any
spying?”
“Certainly not. But you said——”
“I said ‘If you _happen_ to.’ You don’t suppose I hid and listened
deliberately? I was down on my hands and knees planting tulip bulbs, and
the thick hedge was between us. That’s how it happened, and why, she
never _dreamed_ anybody was near her. I didn’t even hear her come in
that part of the yard until I heard her speaking right by me, on the
other side of the hedge. Please don’t be quite so quick to think your
wife would be willing to spy on another woman.”
“I didn’t,” Mr. Dodge protested, hastily. “What did she say to the
chauffeur?”
“That,” his wife replied, severely, “is something you’ll never hear from
me!”
“From whom shall I hear it, then?”
“I’ve just told you how you might hear it,” she said, plying her needle
and seeming to give it all her attention.
“But I can’t spend my time in the tulip bed, Lydia.”
“That’s not what I meant. I said, ‘If her husband ever makes such a fuss
that it gets into the papers.’”
“If he does, I might find out what she said to the chauffeur?”
“Oh, maybe,” Mrs. Dodge said; and she gave him a sidelong glance of some
sharpness, then quickly seemed to be busy again with her work.
“I don’t make it out at all,” the puzzled gentleman complained.
“Apparently you overheard Mrs. Braithwaite saying something to her
chauffeur that would be ruinous to her if it were known—something that
might cause her husband to make a public uproar if he had heard it
himself. Is that it?”
Mrs. Dodge began to hum fragmentarily to herself and seemed concerned
with nothing in the world except the selection of a proper spool of
thread from her basket.
“Is that it, Lydia?”
“You’ll never find out from me,” she said, searching anxiously through
the basket. “Anyhow, I shouldn’t think you’d need to ask such simple
questions.”
“So that _is_ it! What you heard her say to her chauffeur would ruin her
if people knew about it. Was she talking to the chauffeur about her
husband?”
“Good gracious!” Mrs. Dodge cried, derisively. “What would she be
talking to anybody about _that_ poor little thing for? She never does. I
don’t believe anybody ever heard her mention him in her life!”
“Then was she talking to the chauffeur about some other man?”
“Of all the ideas! If a woman were in love with a man not her husband,
do you think she’d tell her servants about it? Besides, they’ve only had
this chauffeur about two weeks. Have you noticed him?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Dodge. “I’ve seen him sitting in their car in front of
the house several times, and I was quite struck with him. He seemed to
be not only one of the handsomest young men I ever saw, but to have
rather the look of a gentleman.”
“So?” Mrs. Dodge said, inquiringly; and her tone was the more
significant because of her appearing to be wholly preoccupied with her
work-basket. “You noticed _that_, did you?”
“You don’t mean to say——”
“I don’t mean to say anything at all,” she interrupted, crisply. “I’ve
told you that often enough for you to begin to understand it.”
“All right, I do. Well, when she’d said whatever she did say to the
chauffeur, what happened?”
“Oh, that,” she returned, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you. I got up
and looked at her over the hedge. I wasn’t going to stay there and
listen—and I certainly wasn’t going to crawl away on my hands and
knees! I just looked at her quietly and turned away and came into the
house.”
“What did she do?”
“She was absolutely disconcerted. Her face just seemed to go all to
pieces;—it didn’t look like _her_ face at all. She was frightened to
death, and I never saw anything plainer. That’s one reason she hates me
so—because I saw her looking so afraid of me and she couldn’t help it.
Of course, as soon as I got into the house I looked out through the lace
curtains at a window—you could hardly expect me not to—and I saw her
just going back into her own house by the side door. She’d braced up and
looked all stained-glass Joan of Arc again by that time.”
Mr. Dodge sat waggling his head and muttering in wonder. “Of all the
curious things!” he said. “Human nature is so everlastingly full of
oddities it’s always turning up new ones that you sit and stare at and
can’t believe are real. There they are, right before your eyes, and yet
they’re incredible. What did she say to the chauffeur?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Dodge said, reprovingly. “That’s what I _can’t_ tell
you.” And she added, “I should think you could guess it, anyhow.”
“Was there——” He paused a moment, pondering. “Did she use any
specially marked terms of endearment in addressing him?”
“No,” Mrs. Dodge replied, returning her attention to her work;—“not
terms.”
“Oh,” he said. “Just one term, then. She used a single term of
endearment in addressing him. Is that correct?”
Again Mrs. Dodge became musical: she hummed a cheerful tune, but her
face was overcast with a dour solemnity.
“So she did!” her husband exclaimed. “Did she call him ‘dear’?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“‘Dearest’?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Not,” he said, incredulously, “not—‘_darling_’?”
Mrs. Dodge instantly resumed her humming.
“By George!” her husband cried. “Why, that’s just awful! What else did
she say to him besides calling him ‘darling’?”
“I didn’t say she said anything else,” Mrs. Dodge returned, primly. “The
rest wasn’t so important, anyhow, and she was speaking in a low voice. I
thought the rest of it was, ‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.’ I
couldn’t be sure because I didn’t hear it distinctly.”
“But you _did_ distinctly hear her call him ‘darling’?”
“What I heard distinctly,” Mrs. Dodge replied, “I heard distinctly.”
“So what Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite said to the chauffeur was this:
‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance, darling’?”
“You must draw your own conclusions,” she advised him, severely.
“I do—rather!” he returned, and in a marvelling tone slowly pronounced
their neighbour’s name, “Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite! Of all the women in
the world, Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite! And when you rose up, and she saw
you, she just went all to pieces and didn’t say a word?”
“I told you.”
“What did the handsome chauffeur do?”
“Just stood there.”
“It’s beyond anything!” Mr. Dodge’s amazement was not abated;—he shook
his head and uttered groaning sounds of pessimistic wonderment. “I
suppose the true meaning of the saying, ‘It’s the unexpected that
happens,’ is that life is always teaching us to accept the incredible.
How long ago was it?”
“A week ago yesterday.”
“Have you seen her since?”
“I never talk to her or she to me. We say, ‘How do you do? What lovely
weather!’ and that’s all we ever do say. We haven’t even any neighbourly
contact through congenial servants, because of our having coloured
people;—hers are white. I haven’t caught a glimpse of her since it
happened until this afternoon, when she came to Mrs. Cromwell’s tea. Of
course, she knew I was looking at her, and she knew perfectly what I was
thinking—particularly about her insult to me in making such a goose of
my husband.”
“But, Lydia——”
“She was having the time of her life over that!”
“Well,” he said, reflectively, “leaving out the question of whether or
not I was a goose especially, and considering her without personal bias,
I must say that under the circumstances she’s shown a mighty picturesque
intricacy of character, as well as a pretty dashing kind of hardihood.
If, as you believe, she sent her note to me as really a derisive
taunt—a gauntlet flung at you with mocking laughter—and all the while
she knows you know of her philandering with a good-looking varlet——”
“She’s a bad woman!” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed, angrily. “That’s all there is
to it, and you needn’t be so poetical about her!”
“Good gracious, Lydia, I wasn’t——”
“Never mind! We can talk of her just as well without any references to
gauntlets and mocking laughter and varlets. That is, if you insist upon
talking about her at all. For my part, I prefer just to keep her
entirely out of my mind.”
“Very well,” he assented, meekly. “I don’t know that I can keep anything
so singular out of my mind; but I won’t speak of it if it annoys you.
What else shall we talk of?”
“Anything in the world except that detestable woman,” Mrs. Dodge
replied. Then, after some moments of silence over her embroidery, she
added abruptly, “Of course, _you_ don’t think she’s detestable!”
“I only said——”
“‘Picturesque’ was what you said. ‘Dashing’ was another thing you said.
You’re quite fascinated with her derisive gauntlets and her mocking
laughter! Dear _me_, if that isn’t like men!”
“But I only——”
“Oh, murder!” Mrs. Dodge moaned, interrupting him. “I thought you said
you weren’t going to _talk_ about her any more!”
At this he showed spirit enough to laugh. “You know well enough we’re
both going to keep on talking about her, Lydia. What do you intend to
do?”
“About what?” Mrs. Dodge looked surprised. “About _her_, you mean? Why,
naturally, I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing, and that’s
nothing whatever except to hold my peace;—I don’t descend to the level
of feuds with intriguing women. She gave me a clew, though, this
afternoon.”
“What sort of a clew, Lydia?”
“I don’t suppose a man could understand, but I’ll try to give you a
glimmering. When she wrote that note to you, there was one thing she
hadn’t thought of. She thought of it this afternoon at that tea: it
struck her all of a sudden that I could make things a little unpleasant
for her if I took the notion to. She just happened to remember that Mrs.
Cromwell is my most intimate friend, and that she is the grandest old
rock-bottomed mountain this community can boast. That woman all at once
remembered, and got afraid I might tell my friends.”
“How do you know she did?”
“That’s what a man couldn’t see. I knew it by a lot of little things I
couldn’t put into words if I tried, but principally I knew it by
watching her manner with Mrs. Cromwell.”
“You mean she tried to ingratiate herself?” he asked. “Her manner was
more winsome or flattering than usual?”
“No, not exactly. Not so open—you couldn’t understand—but it was
perfectly clear to me she was having the time of her life thinking of
what she’d done to me through my husband’s weakness, when all at once
she thought of my influence with the Cromwells. Well, she’s afraid of
it, and it made her wish she hadn’t gone quite so far with me. She’d
give a whole lot to-night, I’ll wager, if she’d been just a little less
picturesque with her gauntlet throwing and her mocking laughter! You
asked me what I was going to do and I told you ‘Nothing.’ But _she’ll_
do something. She’s afraid, and she’ll make a move of some sort. You’ll
see.”
“But what? What could she do?”
“I don’t know, but you’ll see. You’ll see before long, too.”
“Well, I’m inclined to hope so,” he said. “It would certainly be
interesting; but I doubt her making any move at all. I’m afraid you
won’t turn out to be a good prophet.”
On the contrary, he himself was a poor prophet; for sometimes destiny
seems to juggle miraculously with coincidences in order to attract our
attention to the undiscovered laws that produce them. In fact, Mr. Dodge
was so poor a prophet—and so near to intentional burlesque are the
manners of destiny in its coincidence juggling—that at this moment Mrs.
Leslie Braithwaite’s husband had just rung the Dodges’ front door bell.
Two minutes later a mulatto housemaid appeared in the doorway of the
library and produced a sensational effect merely by saying, “Mrs.
Braithwaite and Mr. Braithwaite is calling. I showed ’em into the
drawing-room.”
She withdrew, and the staggered couple, after an interval of incoherent
whispering, went forth to welcome their guests.
XVI
MRS. LESLIE BRAITHWAITE’S HUSBAND
MRS. BRAITHWAITE was superb;—at least, that was Mr. Dodge’s impersonal
conception of her. Never before had he seen sainthood so suavely
combined with a piquant beauty, nor an evening gown of dull red silk and
black lace so exquisitely invested with an angelic presence. For
to-night this lady looked not only noble, she looked charming; and
either his wife had made a grotesque mistake or he stood before an
actress unmatched in his experience. She began talking at once, in her
serene and sweet contralto voice—a beautiful voice, delicately hushed
and almost imperceptibly precise in its pronunciation. “It seemed to us
really rather absurd, Mrs. Dodge, that you and your husband should be
our next-door neighbours for so long without even having set foot in our
house or we in yours. And as Mr. Dodge has lately been so generous to my
poor little Workers’ Welfare League—the unhappy creatures do need help
so, and the ladies of the committee were so touched by your kindness,
Mr. Dodge—we thought we’d just make that an excuse to call, even thus
informally and for only a few minutes. We wanted to express the thanks
of the League, of course, and we thought it was about time to say we
aren’t really so unneighbourly as we may have seemed—and we hope you
aren’t, either!”
“No, indeed,” Mr. Dodge responded with a hasty glance of sidelong
uneasiness at his wife. Her large face was red and rather dismayingly
fierce as she sat stiffly in the stiffest chair in the Dodges’
white-walled, cold, and rigidly symmetrical drawing-room; but she said,
“No, indeed,” too, though not so heartily as her husband did. In fact,
she said it grimly; yet he was relieved, for her expression made him
fear that she would say nothing at all.
“One of the things I find to regret about modern existence,” Mrs.
Braithwaite continued, in her beautiful voice, “is the disappearance of
neighbourliness even in a quiet suburban life like yours and ours. Of
course, this is anything but a new thought, yet how concretely our two
houses have illustrated it! So it did seem time, at last, to break the
ice, especially as I have good reason to think that just these last few
days you must have been thinking of me as quite a naughty person, Mrs.
Dodge.”
Mrs. Dodge stared at her; appeared to stare not only with astounded eyes
but with a slowly opening mouth. “What? What did you say?” she asked,
huskily.
“I’m afraid you’ve been thinking of me as rather naughty,” the serene
caller said, and her ever promised smile seemed a little more
emphatically promised than it had been. “I ought to confess to you that
as a collector for my poor little Workers’ League I’m terribly
unscrupulous. It’s such a struggling little organization, and the need
of help is so frightfully pressing, I may as well admit I haven’t any
scruples at all how I get money for it. Yet, of course, I know I ought
to apologize for asking Mr. Dodge to contribute to a cause that you
didn’t feel particularly interested in yourself.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Dodge said, and to her husband’s consternation she added
formidably: “Is _that_ what you’re talking about!”
No disastrous effect was visible, however. Mrs. Braithwaite nodded
sunnily. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me for the sake of the happiness the
money brought to a pitiful little family—the father hasn’t had any work
for eight months; there are four young children and one just born. If
you could see their joy when——”
“I dare say!” Mrs. Dodge interrupted. “I’m glad it did _some_ good!”
“I was sure you’d feel so.” Mrs. Braithwaite glanced gently at her host,
whose face was a remarkable study of geniality in conflict with
apprehension;—then her gaze returned to her hostess. “I wanted to make
my peace not only for myself,” she added, “but for your husband. I’m
sure you’re going to forgive him, Mrs. Dodge.”
Innocently, Mr. Dodge supposed this to be intended as a kindly effort on
his behalf and in the general interests of amiability. He was surprised,
therefore, and his apprehensions of an outbreak on the part of his wife
were little abated, when he perceived that its effect upon her was far
from placative. Her ample figure seemed to swell; she was red but grew
redder; her action in breathing became not only visible but noticeable;
to his appalled vision she seemed about to snort forth sparks. For
several perilous moments she did not speak;—then, after compressing her
lips tightly, she said: “Mr. Dodge sent you his check upon my direction,
of course. Naturally, he consulted me. I told him that since you had
twice solicited me for a subscription it would be best for us to send
you some money and be done with it.”
Mrs. Braithwaite uttered a soothing sound as of amused relief. “That’s
so much nicer,” she said. “I was afraid you might have been annoyed with
both of us—with both poor Mr. Dodge and myself—but that exculpates us.
I’m so very glad.” She turned to the perturbed host. “I was _so_ afraid
I’d involved you, Mr. Dodge—perhaps quite beyond forgiveness.”
“Not at all—not at all,” he said, removing his gaze with difficulty
from his wife’s face. “Oh, no. Everything—everything’s been perfectly
pleasant,” he floundered, and Mrs. Dodge’s expression did not reassure
him that he was saying the right thing. “Perfectly—pleasant,” he
repeated, feebly.
“I _so_ hoped it would be,” Mrs. Braithwaite said. “I hoped Mrs. Dodge
wouldn’t be _very_ hard on you for aiding in such a good cause.”
“No,” he returned, nervously. “No, she—she wasn’t. She proved to be
entirely—ah—amiable, of course.” And again he was dismayed by Mrs.
Dodge’s expression.
“Of course,” Mrs. Braithwaite agreed, sunnily, with only the quickest
and sweetest little fling of a glance at her hostess, “I was _sure_
she’d forgive you. Well, at any rate, we’ve both made our peace with her
now and established the _entente cordiale_, I hope.” She turned toward
her husband and spoke his name gently, in the tone that is none the less
a command to the obedient follower: “Leslie.” It was apparently her
permission for him to prepare himself for departure; but it may also
have been a signal or command for him to do something else;—Mr. Dodge
noticed that it brought an oddly plaintive look into the eyes of the
small and dark Braithwaite.
Throughout the brief but strained interview he had been sitting in one
of the Dodges’ rigid chairs as quietly as if he had been a well-behaved
little son of Mrs. Braithwaite’s, brought along to make a call upon
grown people. He was slender as well as short; of a delicate, almost
fragile, appearance; and in company habitually so silent, so
self-obliterative that it might well have been a matter of doubt whether
he was profoundly secretive or of an overwhelming timidity. But as he
sat in the Dodges’ slim black chair, himself rather like that chair,
with his trim, thin little black legs primly uncrossed and his small
black back straight and stiff, there were suggestions that he was more
secretive than timid. Under his eyes were semicircles of darkness, as if
part of what he secreted might have been a recent anguish, either
physical or mental. Moreover, if he had been in reality the well-trained
little boy his manners during this short evening call had suggested,
those semicircles under his eyes would have told of anguish so acute
that the little boy had wept.
When his wife said “Leslie,” he swallowed; there came into his eyes the
odd and plaintive look his host had noticed—it was the look now not of
a good little boy but of a good little dog, obedient in a painful task
set by the adored master—and he stood up immediately.
“We really must be running,” his wife said, rising, too. “This was just
our funny little effort to break the ice. I do hope it has, and that
you’ll both come in to see us some evening. I _do_ hope you’ll _both_
come.” She put an almost imperceptible stress on the word “both” as she
moved toward the door; then said “Leslie” again. He was still standing
beside his chair.
“Ah—” he said; then paused and coughed. “I—I wonder——”
“Yes?” his host said, encouragingly.
“I—that is, I was going to say, by the way, I wonder if you happen to
know of a good chauffeur, Mr. Dodge.”
At this, Mrs. Dodge’s breathing became audible as well as visible, there
fell a moment of such silence.
“A—a chauffeur? No,” Mr. Dodge said. “No, I don’t think I do. We
haven’t one ourselves; we do our own driving. A chauffeur? No. I’m
afraid I don’t know of any.”
“I see,” Braithwaite returned. “I just happened to ask. We’ve—ah—lost
the man we’ve had lately. He was a very good driver and we haven’t
anybody to take his place.”
Mrs. Dodge spoke sepulchrally as she rose from her chair. “That’s too
bad,” she said, and, to her husband’s relief, stopped there, adding
nothing.
“Yes,” Braithwaite assented. “He was a very good driver indeed; but he
was a college graduate and only yesterday he found another position,
tutoring, and left us. He was a very good man—Dolling.”
“What?” Mr. Dodge said. “Who?”
“Dolling,” Braithwaite replied; and followed his wife to the door. “I
just happened to mention his name: Dolling. I—I didn’t address you as
‘darling,’ Mr. Dodge, though I see how you might easily have thought I
did. The man’s name was Dolling. I shouldn’t like you to think I’d take
the liberty of calling _you_——”
But here he was interrupted by such an uproarious shout of laughter from
his host that his final words were lost. Mr. Dodge’s laughter continued,
though it was interspersed with hearty expressions of hospitality and
parting cheer, until the callers had passed the outer threshold and the
door had closed behind them. Then the hilarious gentleman returned from
the hall to face a wife who found nothing in the world, just then, a
laughing matter.
“The worst thing you did,” she assured him, “was to be so fascinated
that you told her I’d been amiable to you about your sending that
check—just after I said I knew all about it _before_ you sent it and
had _told_ you to send it! That was a pleasant position to put your wife
in, wasn’t it?”
“Lydia!” he shouted, still outrageous in his mirth. “Let’s forget that
part of it and remember only Dolling!”
“All right,” she said, and her angry eyes flashed. “Suppose his name
_was_ Dolling. What was she talking to him about rosemary and
remembrance for?”
“I don’t know, and it doesn’t seem important. The only thing I can get
my mind on is your keeping to yourself so solemnly the scandalous
romance of Dolling!” And becoming more respectably sober, for a time, he
asked her: “Don’t you really see a little fun in it, Lydia?”
“What!” she cried. “Do you? After you saw that wretched little man of
hers stand up there and recite his lesson like a trained monkey? Did you
look at _her_ while he was performing? She stood in the doorway and held
the whip-lash over him till he finished! And if this idol of yours is so
innocent and pure, why did she go all to pieces the way she did when she
saw me that morning by the hedge?”
“Why, don’t you see?” he cried. “Of course she saw you thought she’d
called the man ‘darling’! She knew you didn’t know his name was Dolling.
Isn’t it plain to you _yet_?”
“No!” his wife said, vehemently. “It isn’t plain to me and it never will
be!”
XVII
“DOLLING”
AGAINST all reason she persisted in a sinister interpretation of her
lovely neighbour’s conduct;—never would Mrs. Dodge admit that Mr. Dodge
had the right of the matter, and after a time she complained that she
found his continued interest in it “pretty tiresome.”
“You keep bringing it up,” she said, “because you think you’ve had a
wretched little triumph over me. It’s one of those things that never can
be settled either way, and I don’t care to talk of it any more. If you
want to occupy your spare thoughts I have a topic to offer you.”
“What topic?”
Mrs. Dodge shook her head in a certain way. “Lily.”
“Oh, dear me!” he said. “It isn’t happening again?”
She informed him that it was, indeed. Lily’s extreme affections were
once more engaged. “We’re in for it!” was the mother’s preface, as she
began the revelation; and, when she concluded, her husband sorrowfully
agreed with her.
“It’s awful now and will be worse,” he said; and thus his “spare
thoughts” became but too thoroughly occupied. In his growing anxiety
over his daughter, he ceased to think of his neighbours;—the handsome
chauffeur passed from his mind. Then abruptly, one day, as the wandering
searchlight of a harboured ship may startlingly clarify some obscure
thing upon the shore, a chance conjuncture illuminated for him most
strangely the episode of Dolling.
He was lunching with a younger member of his firm in a canyon restaurant
downtown, and his attention happened to become concentrated upon a
debonair young man who had finished his lunch and was now engaged in
affable discussion with the pretty cashier. He was one of those young
men, sometimes encountered, who have not only a strong masculine beauty,
but the look of talent, with both the beauty and the talent belittled by
an irresponsible twinkle of the eye. Standing below the level of the
cashier’s desk, which was upon a platform, there was something about him
that suggested a laughing Romeo; and, in response, the cashier was
evidently not unwilling to play a flippant Juliet. She tossed her head
at him, tapped his cheek with a pencil, chattering eagerly; she blushed,
laughed, and at last looked yearningly after him as he went away. Mr.
Dodge also looked; for the young man was Dolling, once Mrs. Leslie
Braithwaite’s chauffeur.
“Fine little bit of comedy, that,” the junior member of Mr. Dodge’s firm
remarked, across their small table. “Talked her into giving him credit
for his lunch. She’ll have to make it up out of her own pocket until he
pays her. Of course, he’s done it before, and she knows him.
Characteristic of that fellow;—he’s a great hand to put it over with
the girls!”
“Do you know him, Williams?” Mr. Dodge asked, a little interested.
“Know him? Lord, yes! He was in my class at college till he got fired in
sophomore year. Every now and then he comes to me and I have to stake
him. He’s a reporter just now; but it’s always the same—whether he’s
working or not, he never has any money. He can do anything: act, sing,
break horses, drive an airplane, any kind of newspaper work—publishes
poetry in the papers sometimes, and he’s not such a bad poet, either, at
that. But he’s just one of these natural-born drifters—too good looking
and too restless. He never holds a job more than a couple of months.”
“I suppose not,” Mr. Dodge said, absently. “I suppose he’s tried a good
many.”
“Rather!” Williams exclaimed. “I’ve got him I don’t know how many,
myself. The last time I did he was pretty well down and out, and the
best I could get for him was a chauffeur’s job for a little cuss I
happened to know in the brass trade—Braithwaite. Lives out your way
somewhere, I think. O’Boyle _took_ it all right; it was chauff or
starve!”
“I beg your pardon. Who took what?”
“O’Boyle,” said Williams. “Charlie O’Boyle, the man we’re talking
about—the chap that was just conning the cashier yonder. I was telling
you he took a job as chauffeur for a family out your way in the
suburbs.”
“Yes, I understood,” Mr. Dodge returned, with more gravity than Williams
expected as a tribute to this casual narrative. “You said this O’Boyle
became a chauffeur to some people named Braithwaite and that you
obtained the position for him. I merely wondered—I suppose when you
recommended this O’Boyle to Mr. Braithwaite you—ah—you mentioned his
name? I mean to say: you introduced O’Boyle as O’Boyle.”
“Well, naturally,” Williams replied, surprised and a little nettled.
“Why wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t expect people to take on a man for a family
job like that and not tell ’em his _name_, would I? I don’t see what
you——”
“Nothing,” Mr. Dodge said, hurriedly. “Nothing at all. It was a
ridiculous question. My mind was wandering to other things, or I
shouldn’t have asked it. We’d better get down to business, I suppose.”
But that was something his wandering mind refused to do; nor would it
under any consideration or pressure “get down to business” during the
rest of that afternoon. He went home early, and, walking from his
suburban station in the first twilight of a gray but rainless November
day, arrived at his own gate just as the Braithwaites’ closed car drew
up at the curb before the next house.
An elderly negro chauffeur climbed down rustily from his seat at the
wheel and opened the shining door; Mrs. Braithwaite stepped gracefully
down, and, with her lovely saint’s face uplifted above dark furs, she
crossed the pavement, entered the low iron gateway, and walked up the
wide stone path that led through the lawn to the house. On the opposite
side of the street a group of impressed women stopped to stare, grateful
for the favouring chance that gave them this glimpse of the great lady.
Mr. Braithwaite descended from the car and followed his wife toward the
house. He did not overtake her and walk beside her; but his
insignificant legs beneath his overcoat kept his small feet moving in
neat short steps a little way behind her.
Meanwhile, the pausing neighbour gazed at them and his open mouth showed
how he pondered. It was not upon this strange woman, a little of whose
strangeness had so lately been revealed to him, that he pondered most,
nor about her that he most profoundly wondered. For, strange as the
woman seemed to him, far stranger seemed the little creature pattering
so faithfully behind her up the walk.
In so helpless a fidelity Mr. Dodge felt something touching; and
perhaps, too, he felt that men must keep men’s secrets. At all events,
he made a high resolve. It would be hard on Mrs. Dodge, even unfair to
her; but then and there he made up his mind that for the sake of Mrs.
Leslie Braithwaite’s husband he would never tell anybody—and of all the
world he would never tell Mrs. Dodge—what he had learned that day about
Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’s loyalty.
XVIII
LILY’S FRIEND ADA
INDOORS Mr. Dodge too quickly found other matter to occupy his mind.
Mrs. Dodge hurried down the stairs to set before him an account of a new
phase in Lily’s present romance, and they began their daily discussion
of their daughter’s beglamoured condition. In a way this was a strange
thing for them to do, because, like many other fathers and mothers in
such parental mazes, they realized that they struggled with a mystery
beyond their comprehension. Lily’s condition was something about which
they really knew nothing, and least of all did they guess what part her
dearest girl-friend had in it.
Lily had formed with the sturdy Ada Corey one of those friendships that
sometimes suggest to observers an unworthy but persistent thought upon
the profundity of girlish vanity. So often is a beautiful girl’s best
girl-friend the precise companion piece to set off most abundantly the
charms of the beauty, or, if both girls of a pair be well-favoured, so
frequently is one dark and the other fair, and each the best obtainable
background for the other, that the spectator is almost forced to suppose
many such intimacies to be deliberately founded upon a pictorial basis.
But this is not to say that these decorative elections to friendship are
unaccompanied by genuine fondness; and although Lily Dodge found her
background in the more substantial Ada, she found also something to lean
upon and cling to and admire. For Lily was one of those girls we call
ethereal, because they do not seem intended to remain long in a world
their etherealness makes appear gross. They usually do remain as long as
other people do, yet their seeming almost poised for a winging departure
brings them indulgences and cherishings not shown to that stouter,
self-reliant type to which Ada Corey was thought to belong.
Late on that same gray but rainless November afternoon, Ada, herself,
spoke of this elaborate difference between them. “I don’t see why _you_
worry, Lily,” she said. “I believe you could get away with anything!
You’re the kind that can.”
“Oh, not _this_!” Lily protested, in a wailing whisper. No one was near
them; but in her trouble she seemed to fear the garrulity of even the
old forest trees of the park through which the two were taking an
autumnal stroll. “Nobody in the world could get out of such a miserable
state of things as I’ve got myself into _now_, Ada.”
But this was by no means Miss Corey’s first experience of her friend’s
confidences of despair. “I wouldn’t bother about it at all, if I were
you, Lily,” she said, cheerfully. “I wouldn’t give it a thought.”
“You wouldn’t?” Lily cried, feebly, and her incredulity was further
expressed by her feet, which refused to bear her onward in so amazed a
condition. She halted, facing her companion in a stricken manner. “You
wouldn’t give it a thought? When I’ve just told you that this time it’s
_three_!”
“No,” Ada returned, stoutly. “I wouldn’t. If I were _you_, I wouldn’t. I
wouldn’t even if it were four!”
Lily moaned, and in a hopeless appeal for a higher witness to such
folly, cast her eyes to heaven—or at least to as much of the dimming
sky as roofed over the tattered brown foliage above her. “You wouldn’t
give it a thought! Not even if there were four of ’em.” Then, as the
woodland spot where they had stopped was somewhat secluded and apart
from the main-travelled roads of the park, Lily felt at liberty to lean
against a tree and apply a hand to her forehead in an excellent gesture
of anguish. “I’m a goner this time, Ada,” she murmured. “I’m a goner!”
“You aren’t anything of the kind,” Miss Corey assured her. “I tell you
it’s not worth bothering about.”
“Oh!” Lily uttered a sound of indignation, dropped the dramatic little
hand, and spoke sharply. “You stand there, Ada Corey, and tell me that
if such a thing happened to you, you wouldn’t give it a thought?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did! You just said——”
“No; I said if I were _you_,” Ada explained. “A thing like this wouldn’t
happen to me.”
“Why wouldn’t it? It might happen to anybody,” Lily returned, quickly.
“Suppose it did happen to you? Do you mean to tell me that if three
separate, individual men all pretty nearly considered themselves
practically almost engaged to be married to you at the same time, you
wouldn’t give it a thought? You wouldn’t bother about it at _all_?”
“I said I wouldn’t if I were _you_,” Ada insisted.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“For just the reason I told you. Because you’re the kind that can get
away with anything.”
“But I can’t!” Lily cried. “I’m _always_ in some sort of miserable mess
or other.”
“Yes, pretty often,” her friend assented. “But it’s always a new one,
and nobody ever does anything about the old one, so why should you care?
You’ll write one of these three boys a little weepy note, and you’ll
have a little weepy scene with another, and that’ll leave only the one
you like the best, and——”
“But I don’t,” Lily interrupted, piteously. “I don’t absolutely _know_ I
like him as much as I thought I did, either.”
“What!” Ada cried. “Not even _him_?”
“How can anybody ever be absolutely certain? I mean certain enough to
get married. You know it’s a thing you’ve got to look at pretty
seriously, Ada—getting actually _married_.”
But for the moment Ada did not seem to be sympathetic;—she was staring
wide-eyed at her friend. “So you’re going to wriggle out of it with all
three of them.”
“But maybe I can’t,” Lily moaned. “Suppose they insisted? Suppose they
just wouldn’t _let_ me?”
“Has there ever been anything anybody wouldn’t let you do?”
Lily moaned again. “You mean I’m spoiled. You mean people let me make
’em miserable. Oh, it’s true, Ada! I do wish I could be more like you.”
“Like me?” Ada laughed shortly. “You wouldn’t for the world.”
“Yes, I would.” Lily took her friend’s hand in her own. “I’d give
anything in the world to be like you. You don’t _know_ what a trouble I
am to my mother and father! They’re always in some kind of stew or other
over me, and I can’t help it, because I’m always getting myself into
such fearful messes. You never trouble _your_ family; you’re always a
comfort to ’em. You aren’t romantic and imaginative and sentimental and
fly-off-the-handle, the way I am. You’re steady and reliable, and people
always know exactly where to find you.”
But upon this, Ada looked puzzled. “Is that so?” she asked, gravely. “Is
that how I seem to you, Lily?”
“To me? Good heavens! Don’t you know that’s the way everybody thinks of
you? Everybody knows you’re dependable;—you’re what they call ‘so
satisfactory,’ Ada. Your family and everybody else know you’ll never do
anything reckless or susceptible or dreamy. Nobody on earth knows what
_I’ll_ do, because I don’t myself. Just _look_ at the difference between
us!”
With that, as if the bodily contrast of the two expressed the contrast
in character she had in mind, Lily extended her arms sidewise from her
in an emotional gesture inviting an inspection of herself foredoomed to
be damning; then pointed dramatically at Ada. “Just look at you and then
look at me,” she cried. “See what a _terrible_ difference it is!”
She dropped her arms to her sides, submitting her case to an invisible
jury, who might well have returned a verdict that at least the outward
difference was pleasant rather than terrible. In the twilight beneath
the trees the fair-haired and ethereal Lily, in her slim gray dress,
seemed to be made of a few wisps of mist and a little gold. About her
was a plaintive grace, not a quality of her dark-eyed and more
substantial companion; yet both girls were comely; both were of the
peach-bloom age that follows the awkward years; each had a grace of her
own; and neither had cause to be disturbed by anything wherein she was
unlike the other. Yet, as it happened, both were so disturbed.
Ada’s gravity had increased. “You’re all wrong about it, Lily,” she
said. “I’d give anything in the world to be like you.”
“What!” Lily cried. “You wouldn’t! Why?”
“Because of what I said. You can get away with anything, and people
expect it. But if _I_ ever did anything queer it would upset everybody.
There’d be no end to it.”
“But you never _will_!” Lily almost shouted.
“Won’t I?” Ada returned, her gravity not relaxing. “What makes you so
sure?”
“Why, you simply couldn’t! _My_ life is just one long eternal succession
of queernesses. I _never_ do anything rational; I don’t seem to know
_how_; but you’re never anything but sensible, Ada. You’ll fall in love
sensibly some day—not like me, but with just one man at a time—and
he’ll be exactly the person your family’ll think you ought to be in love
with. And you’ll have a nice, comfortable wedding, without any of the
ushers misbehaving because you wouldn’t marry _him_ instead;—and then
you’ll bring up a large family to go to church every Sunday and take an
interest in missionary work and everything. Don’t you see how much _I_
ought to be like that, and how much you really are that? Don’t you,
Ada?”
Ada shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t quite seem so,” she said. Then,
beginning to stroll onward, continuing their walk, she looked even more
serious than before, and inquired: “What are you going to wear to-morrow
night?”
Lines almost tragic appeared upon Lily’s forehead, and her previously
mentioned troubles seemed of light account compared to this one. “Oh,
dear!” she wailed. “That’s _another_ thing that’s been on my mind all
day. I haven’t the least idea. What would you?”
She was still hopelessly preoccupied with the problem when she reached
home, after parting with Ada at the park gates; and in her own pretty
room she went to one of her two clothes’-closets even before she went to
a mirror. Frowning, she looked over her party dresses.
The slim, tender-coloured fabrics, charming even though unoccupied, hung
weightlessly upon small, shoulderlike shapes of nickeled wire; and as
she restlessly slid the hangers to and fro along the groved central rail
that held them, she produced a delicate swish and flutter among the
silks and chiffons before her, so that they were like a little pageant
of pretty ghosts of the dances to which their young mistress had worn
them. Lily approved of none of them, however; and, hearing her mother’s
firm step approaching the open door of the room, behind her, she said,
desperately, without turning, “I haven’t got a thing, Mamma; I haven’t
got a single thing!”
Mrs. Dodge, that solid matron, so inexplicably unlike her daughter, came
into the room breathing audibly after an unusually hurried ascent of the
stairs. “Lily,” she said, in the tone of one who still controls an
impending emotion, “Lily, you must never do this to me again. I can’t
stand it.”
“Do what to you again?” Lily inquired, absently, not turning from her
inspection. “I haven’t got a thing I could wear to-morrow night, Mamma.
Absolutely, I don’t see how I can go unless——”
“_Lily!_” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed in a tone so eloquently vehement as to
command a part of her daughter’s attention. “Listen to me!”
Lily half turned, holding forth for exhibition a dress she had removed
from its hanger. “What’s the matter, Mamma? This pale blue chiffon is
absolutely the only thing I haven’t worn so often I just couldn’t face
anybody in again; but it never _was_ a becoming——”
“Lily, put down that dress and listen to me!”
“I’m sure it won’t do,” the daughter said, regretfully; but she obeyed
and hung the dress over the back of a chair. Then she turned to her
dressing-table mirror and began to remove her small hat. “Are you upset
or anything, Mamma?”
“Upset? No! I’m indignant,” Mrs. Dodge explained, fiercely. “If you ever
do such a thing to me again——”
“What? Why, I haven’t even seen you since lunch time, Mamma. How could I
have been doing anything to you when I wasn’t anywhere around to _do_
it?”
“You know well enough what you did to me! You broke three separate
engagements with three separate——”
But Lily’s light laughter interrupted. “Oh, did the poor things call
up?” she asked, and seemed to be pleasantly surprised. “Well, my not
being here might be doing something to _them_, maybe,” she added,
reflectively;—“but I don’t see how it was doing anything to _you_,
Mamma.”
“You don’t? You break three separate engagements without a word, and
leave me here to explain it; and then you say that wasn’t doing anything
to me!”
“But I didn’t leave you to do it. I didn’t even know you were going to
be home this afternoon. I just thought maybe they’d call up and find I
was out, and that’d be the end of it. What in the world did you go to
the telephone _for_, Mamma?”
“Because two of them asked for me.”
“Did they? What for?”
“To ask where you _were_,” Mrs. Dodge said, explosively. “Each of ’em
kept me about fifteen minutes.”
“That was very inconsiderate,” Lily observed. “Especially as I hadn’t
absolutely promised either of ’em I’d go. I only said to call up about
three and _probably_ I would. I don’t think they ought to have kept you
so——”
“That isn’t what I’m complaining of,” her mother interrupted, grimly.
“It was disagreeable, especially as I was unable to give either of them
any information and they both seemed to think I could if they kept _at_
me long enough! It was trying, but it was bearable. What I refuse to
have happen again, though, is what has been happening all the rest of
the afternoon.”
Lily proved herself strangely able to divine her mother’s meaning
without further explanation. Pink at once became noticeable upon her
cheeks. “Oh, goodness!” she said. “Price didn’t come _in_, did he?”
“For two and one-half hours,” Mrs. Dodge replied, slowly and harshly.
“For that length of time this afternoon I have been favoured with the
society and conversation—the continuous conversation, I may say—of Mr.
Price Gleason. I am strong enough to bear certain things, but not strong
enough to bear certain other things, and I want to tell you that this is
something you must never do to me again.”
Lily sank into a chair, staring widely. “Oh, goodness!” she said. “When
did he go?”
“Not until about five minutes before you came in.”
“What did he say?”
“What didn’t he?” Mrs. Dodge returned. “He had time enough!”
Upon this Lily’s expression, grown grave, became tenderly compassionate.
“Was he—was he _terribly_ hurt with me, Mamma?”
“Well, I shouldn’t say so—no. No, I don’t think he was just what one
might call stricken. At first he seemed rather depressed—but not for
long. I don’t think that young man will ever be much depressed about
anything while he has a listener. All he asks of life is an audience.”
“He talks beautifully,” Lily said, with the dreamy look her mother knew
so well. “Don’t you think he does, Mamma? What did he talk about?”
“About nothing,” Mrs. Dodge answered cruelly. “I mean, of course, about
himself.”
“Mamma!” Lily cried, quickly, and her sensitive face showed the pain she
felt. “That isn’t kind, and it isn’t fair!”
“Isn’t it? I never in my life listened to such a conceited and
unveracious rigmarole as that young man favoured me with this afternoon.
I did everything a Christian woman could to show him I wanted him to go,
but he never stopped. You _can’t_ interrupt him when he’s wound up like
that, and he’s always wound up. He makes an oration of it; he stands up,
gestures like an actor, and walks around and up and down when he tells
you how he’s done all the great things he almost believes in himself
when he’s talking about ’em. I never knew such a story-teller in my
life!”
“Mamma!”
“I never did,” Mrs. Dodge said. “He told me he’d killed three men in
Mexico.”
“But, Mamma, it’s true! He did! He was prospecting for silver mines and
all sorts of things in Mexico.”
“I don’t believe a word of it, Lily;—it sounded much too much like
‘adventure stories.’ I don’t think he did it; I think he read it. He
said he killed those three men because they tried to ‘jump his claim,’
while he was away on a visit to his friend, the President of Mexico, and
that afterward the President made him a general in the Mexican Army, and
he fought in seven battles and was wounded twelve times. That was five
years ago, so he must have been a general when he was about nineteen. In
all my life I never heard——”
“If you please, Mamma!” Lily interrupted. “I’d rather not hear you
accuse him of such things. I prefer——”
“Good gracious!” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed. “I can’t see why you’re so
sensitive about him when you deliberately broke an engagement with him
this very afternoon without a word of explanation.”
“That’s an entirely different matter,” Lily said, primly. “I _had_ to do
that.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I couldn’t go with one of ’em without hurting both the others
terribly.”
“But why didn’t you make some excuse?”
“Because I couldn’t think of anything I was sure would be satisfactory,
or that they mightn’t find out,” Lily explained, seriously; and she
added, “I had to put that _off_.”
“Until when?”
“Until I get time to think it out, Mamma. So you see it didn’t mean I
care any less for Price. It only meant I was in a perplexing position.”
She rose, facing her mother gravely. “I like him much better than the
others, Mamma, and I don’t think it’s considerate of you to speak so
unkindly of him.” Here Lily’s lip began to tremble a little. “I think he
talks wonderfully, and it’s every word true about Mexico, and I think
you and Papa ought to respect my feeling for him.”
“Your father?” Mrs. Dodge cried. “You know perfectly well what your
father thinks of him.”
But Lily ignored this interpolation, and continued, “It seems to me it
was very unkind of you to sit there just coldly criticizing him in your
mind all afternoon when he was doing his best to entertain you. He meant
nothing except kindness to _you_, and you were sitting there all the
time coldly crit——”
“Yes, I was,” her mother interrupted. “I was certainly sitting there!
But I wasn’t coldly criticizing him in my mind; you’re wrong about that.
After two hours of it, my mental criticism was getting pretty warm,
Lily. In fact, I think it would have scorched me if I hadn’t finally got
rid of him.”
“Got rid of him?” Lily repeated, slowly. “Mamma—you—you weren’t——”
She left the sentence eloquently unfinished.
“Certainly I wasn’t rude to him,” Mrs. Dodge returned, sharply. “I
showed him the patience of an angel as long as I could, and then I
merely mentioned something I wish I’d thought of long before; and he
picked up his plush hat and yellow gloves and went home.”
“That’s as unjust as everything else you say of him. It isn’t plush;
it’s velours,” Lily said. Then she asked ominously: “Mamma, what was it
you merely mentioned?”
“I told him it was getting to be about your father’s usual time of
returning for dinner; that was all.”
“_All!_” Lily cried. “When you _knew_ that Papa wrote him to stop coming
here, and Price never does come any more when Papa’s here.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “I’ll admit he’s that sensitive! Your
father’s letter was courteous—but clear.”
“Courteous!” Lily echoed, and she became tragically rigid. She breathed
visibly; her eyes were luminous with suffering and indignation; her
sweet and searching little silver carillon of a voice became tremulous
and loud. “It was unspeakable! I never knew Papa had such brutality in
him. And _you_—I thought you were my friend, Mamma; but now I _see_
what you did this afternoon! Price told you the story of his life
because he was _defending_ himself; he was trying to make you understand
him. And all the while he was trying to, you sat there coldly critical,
and then insulted him by telling him Papa might come in. You did, Mamma!
You did! That’s just what it amounted to.”
“You consider it’s an insult to a young man to tell him that your father
may be arriving home presently?”
“Under the circumstances,” Lily returned, bitterly, and quite correctly,
“it certainly was a deadly insult. And you say he isn’t sensitive!
Nobody understands how sensitive he is! And to think he has to undergo
such humiliations for me—all for me!” With that, becoming every moment
more emotionally dramatic, Lily turned to a silver-framed photograph
upon her desk, and addressed it, extending her arms to it in piteous
appeal. “Oh!” she cried, “when I think of all you have to go through for
my sake—for _me_——”
“Lily!” her mother shouted. “Stop it! Stop that nonsense this instant.
Good heavens! your father and I both thought you were getting over it.
We thought you’d begun to see the truth about Price Gleason for
yourself. What on earth has started you all _up_ again?”
This was a singular question for Mrs. Dodge to be asking, since she
herself was the origin of the renewal she thus lamented. Lily had indeed
begun to question her own feeling for the romantic Gleason, as she had
confessed to Ada within that very hour. Moreover, there had crept upon
her lately some faint and secret little shadows of doubt in regard to
the tale of Mexican slaughter and other tremendous narratives included
by this new Othello as elements of his wooing. Left to herself, Lily
might have found her doubt increasing; but her mother had changed all
that in a few minutes.
Mrs. Dodge believed she had been accurately describing an unpleasantly
absurd and erratic young egoist who had trespassed upon her time, her
patience, and her credulity until she at last thought of a fortunate
device to get rid of him; but this was not the picture she had painted
upon her daughter’s mind. What Mrs. Dodge really made Lily see was a
darkly handsome poet adventurer, eloquently telling the story of his
life, not to a stirred Desdemona such as she herself had been, but to a
cynical matron who sat in frosty judgment, disbelieving him, and then
put humiliation upon him. Lily’s pale doubts of him vanished; Mrs. Dodge
had made her his champion, with all ardours renewed.
Moreover, no one in the throes of a championing emotion likes to be
asked, “What on earth has started you all _up_ again?” Perhaps Lily
resented this most of all, for the expression taken by her resentment
was the one best calculated to dismay the questioner. “I’m not precisely
‘started _up_’ again, if you please, Mamma,” she said, suddenly icy, as
she turned from the photograph. “It is time you and Papa both understood
clearly. I have never stopped caring for Price. I have never cared for
any one else.” And, having heard herself say it, she straightway
believed it.
Mrs. Dodge uttered a dismal cry. “Oh, murder!” she said. “We’ve got it
_all_ to go through again!”
“You cannot change me,” Lily informed her. “Nothing you could possibly
say will ever change me.”
“But you know what he is!” Mrs. Dodge wailed, despairingly. “Your own
father says there isn’t a word of truth in his whole body, and besides
that, didn’t he inherit four thousand dollars from his great-aunt and
spend almost every cent of it the day after he got it on an automobile,
and then smash the automobile to pieces after a very wild party? You
know he did, Lily! He’s irresponsible and he’s dissipated, too;
everybody knows he is; and that’s why Mr. Corey didn’t want him to come
to _their_ house any more than your father wants him to come to ours. He
was interested in Ada Corey before he began to come to see you, Lily.”
“I know all about it,” Lily said with dignity. “He told me, of course,
that he’d had a friendship with Ada; and so did she. But Mr. Corey
behaved so outrageously to him, they both thought it would be better to
give it up.”
“Ada’s father and mother saw what that young man is, Lily,” Mrs. Dodge
said, gravely. “They told Ada it was their wish that she shouldn’t
receive him or encourage him in any way; and she listened to them and
saw that they were right, and she obeyed them, Lily.”
“Yes,” said Lily;—“she’s that sort of a girl. I’m not, Mamma.”
Mrs. Dodge’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I know you’re not,” she
said, simply, out of much experience.
But at this Lily threw her arms about her. “Mamma!” she cried. “I wish I
_could_ be like Ada! I know how I trouble you, and I’d give anything to
be a steady, philosophical, obedient, comfortable daughter! Oh, I _do_
wish I could!”
“Then why can’t you do as she did about this young man, dear? Why can’t
you see the truth about him as everybody else sees it? There aren’t any
fathers and mothers of girls in the whole place that don’t feel the same
way about him. He may seem fascinating to a few susceptible girls who
haven’t any experience, but he’s just a bad sort of joke to everyone
else. Why can’t you be as sensible as——”
But the moment of melting had passed. When her mother spoke of young Mr.
Gleason as just a bad sort of joke, Lily stepped away from her,
trembling. “Mamma,” she said, “I wish you never to speak of him to me
again until you have learned to respect both him and myself.”
Mrs. Dodge stared helplessly; then, hearing her husband closing the
front door downstairs, she made gestures as of wringing her hands, but
said nothing, and went down to relieve herself by agitating Mr. Dodge
with the painful narrative.
XIX
PARENTS IN DARKNESS
UPON its conclusion, he went so far as to pace the floor of the library,
and make what his wife called an attack upon herself.
“I’ve done everything anybody could,” she protested in defence. “How
could _I_ help it if he _has_ been here a few times when you weren’t in
the house? It’s all very simple for _you_! You merely write him a letter
and then sit in your office, miles away, and expect me to do the rest!
You don’t have to go through the scenes with Lily when it comes to
keeping him out. I believe it would be better, instead of making an
attack on your wife, if you’d put your mind on what’s to be done about
it.”
He shook his head gloomily. “I’m not so sure it was wise to write him
that letter. I’m not sure we haven’t been mistaken in our whole policy
with Lily.”
“Well, you’ve always overruled me,” Mrs. Dodge returned, defensively.
“What mistake do you think you’ve made?”
“I think we’ve probably been wrong from the start,” he said. “Looking
back over all our struggles with Lily, it’s begun to seem to me that we
never once accomplished anything whatever by opposing her.”
“What! Don’t you realize that she’s still a child, and that children
have to be opposed for their own good?”
“Not when they’re nineteen, and it’s opposition about their love affairs
or their friendships,” he returned, frowning; and he continued to walk
up and down the room, his hands clasped behind him. “I mean open
opposition, of course. I’ve begun to believe it never does the slightest
good.”
“Why doesn’t it?” she asked, challengingly. “Are mothers and fathers
supposed to sit aside with folded hands and calmly watch their children
ruin their lives?”
He shook his head again, and sighed. “Sometimes it seems to me that
fathers and mothers might just as well do that very thing. Certainly you
and I could have saved ourselves a great waste of voice and
gesticulation ever since Lily’s babyhood if we’d never opposed her. And
so far as I can see, results would have been just the same. Suppose we
go on struggling with her about this Gleason nuisance; trying to keep
him away from her, arguing with her, and all the rest of it. Will it
change her in the slightest? Will it do any good to anybody?”
“You mean to say that we have no effect whatever upon our own child?”
“No,” he answered. “We _might_ have an effect. That’s just what I’m
afraid of.”
“You mean we shouldn’t keep on telling Lily the _truth_ about Price
Gleason?” his wife cried, incredulously.
“Yes; I’ve almost come to that conclusion. It doesn’t seem to her to be
the truth about him when we tell it. She only sees it as an attack on
him. We spoil our own cause by making her his defender, and a defender
can’t help idealizing what he defends. I’ve come to believe that’s where
we parents make a lot of our worst mistakes—we’re always throwing our
children into the camp of our enemies. And in particular, when a girl is
showing signs of being in love with a worthless young _poseur_, like
this Gleason, I believe that all our denouncing and arguing and bossing
only puts a glamour about the fellow in the girl’s eyes, and makes her
more certain she’s in love with him and wants to marry him.”
“Why, no,” Mrs. Dodge returned, triumphantly demolishing him at a
stroke. “Look at Ada Corey. Her father and mother told her the truth
about Price Gleason and declined to let her see him. That was enough for
Ada. She just quietly gave him up.”
“I know—I know,” Mr. Dodge admitted; but clung to his point. “Ada isn’t
like most girls of her age. I understand her, because she’s sensible,
and I _don’t_ understand most of ’em—particularly my own daughter; but
I’ve grown pretty sure of one thing and that is this: If we want to
throw Lily into this bounder’s arms, we’ll keep on telling her the truth
about him. Our one chance is to let her alone and see if she won’t find
it out for herself.”
“In other words, you intend to revoke our whole policy toward him?”
“In a manner, yes, I believe we should,” Mr. Dodge admitted. “I don’t go
so far as to say I mean to tell Lily I consent to his coming to the
house again; but I propose that we stop mentioning him at all in her
presence, and that if she speaks of him we say nothing in dispraise of
him. That is, from now on we’re no longer actively and openly opposing
her; and if you’re going with her to that country club affair to-morrow
night, and he’s there, I suggest that you do and say nothing to make her
think you object to her being with him. Let her dance with him all she
wants.”
“It won’t work,” Lily’s mother predicted ominously. “Ada Corey’s father
took the right course; he simply put his foot down and that ended the
matter. Why can’t you do as Mr. Corey did?”
Mr. Dodge uttered sounds of rueful laughter. “I’ve put my foot down with
Lily so many times I’ve worn the sole off my shoe. Remember, too, it’s
not so long ago since she cured herself of another infatuation because
you thought it would be better for us to withdraw our opposition.”
“That was utterly different, and the whole Osborne affair was a mere
childish absurdity. Lily’s older now, and you’re proposing a terribly
dangerous thing.”
“Nevertheless, let’s try it. What else _can_ we do but try it?”
“I suppose we’ve got to, since you’ve made up your mind,” his wife said,
stubbornly. “But I consent to it under protest. She’s absolutely
infatuated, and we’re throwing her straight in his arms. You’ll see!”
This tragic prophecy of hers was in a fair way to be fulfilled almost
immediately, she thought, the next evening, as she sat in the little
gallery of the Blue Hills Country Club ballroom and looked down upon the
dancers. The radiant Lily danced again and again with the picturesque
Gleason; and her posture, as they moved gracefully together, was
significant—her vivid, delicate face was always uplifted, so that her
happy eyes, sweetly confident, seemed continuously engaged with pretty
messages to her partner. The poetically handsome Price, on his part,
bent his dark head above her ardently; and a stranger would have guessed
them at first sight to be a pair newly betrothed. In fact, Mrs. Dodge
was disquieted by much such a guess of her own, and her heart sank as
she watched them. Moreover, while her heart sank, her indignation rose.
This, then, was the result of Mr. Dodge’s new policy! And she wished
that he had been beside her to see its result—and to hear her opinion
of it!
Her guess, however, like that of the supposititious stranger, was not
quite accurate. Lily was not engaged to Mr. Gleason—not “absolutely”
so, to report her own feeling in the matter. But she would have admitted
being “almost”—almost engaged—that night. The Mexican hero had never
definitely proposed marriage, any more than she had felt herself
prepared for a definite consent to such a proposal; but his every
persuasive word and look and all her own reciprocal coquetry pointed to
that end. And as the evening continued and they danced and danced
together, murmuring little piquancies to each other meanwhile, the
haziness implied in “almost” seemed more and more on the point of being
dispersed. Lily preferred that it be not quite; but her partner was
“wonderful” to look up to, and to listen to as she looked. He had warmly
appreciative dark eyes and a stirring mellow voice; and he danced, if
not like a Mordkin, then at least like a Valentino, which may sometimes
be preferable. All in all, she might have been swept away if he had
pressed the sweeping.
She was the happier because he did not—the indefinite “almost” was so
much pleasanter and more exciting—and she had what she defined as a
simply magnificent time. Now and then she knew, in an untroubled, hazy
way, that a mute doomfulness hovered above her in the gallery; but she
felt that her mother was behaving excellently—most surprisingly,
too—in not interfering at all. The one thing to bother Lily—and that
only a little, and because it puzzled her—came at the very end of the
evening. It was something her friend Ada said to her as they were alone
together in the corner of a cloakroom, preparing to go home after the
last dance.
XX
DAMSEL DARK, DAMSEL FAIR
“DIDN’T I tell you that you could get away with anything?” Ada said.
“Weren’t all three of ’em just as wild about you to-night as if you
hadn’t done it?”
“Done what?”
“Skipped out to walk with me and didn’t leave any word behind, when
you’d made engagements with all of ’em.” And then, as Lily’s flushed and
happy face showed a complete vagueness upon the matter, Ada exclaimed,
“Good gracious! Yesterday!”
Lily remembered, but as one remembers things of long ago. “Oh, that?”
she said, dreamily. “It wasn’t anything.”
Ada looked at her sharply and oddly; and Lily afterward recalled the
strangeness of this look. Ada’s eyes, usually placid, were wide and
lustrous; her colour was high, and she seemed excited. “Have you done
anything to get out of being practically almost engaged to any of them?”
she whispered, leaning close. “If you haven’t, you don’t need to worry
anyhow, Lily.”
She spoke hurriedly, all in a breath, then kissed Lily’s cheek quickly
and whispered, “I’m sorry!” She ran out into the crowded hallway,
drawing her cloak about her as she ran.
“Why, what in the world——” Lily began, but Ada was already out of
hearing, and disappeared immediately among the homeward-bound dancers
near the outer doors. Lily followed, but could catch not even a glimpse
of her, though she found an opportunity to say good-night—again—to Mr.
Gleason, who was departing.
“Good-night, but never good-bye, I hope,” he said, with a fervour
somewhat preoccupied. “You’ve been _beautiful_ to me. I hope you’ll
always be my friend.” And with the air of a person pressed for time, he
touched her hand briefly and passed on. Lily attributed his haste to the
approach of her mother, who was ponderously bearing down upon them; but
this interpretation may have been a mistaken one. Mr. Gleason had much
on his mind at the moment, and Mrs. Dodge carefully withheld herself
from joining her daughter until he had gone.
. . . Mr. Dodge had not retired to bed; he was smoking in the library
when the two ladies of his household returned from their merrymaking.
Lily kissed him enthusiastically, while his wife stood by, pure granite.
“You’ve had a jolly evening, Lily?”
“Beautiful!” she said. “Oh, simply magnificent!” And she ran upstairs to
bed.
That is to say, she was on her way to bed, and she ran up the stairs as
far as the landing; but there she paused. The acoustic properties of the
house were excellent, and from the stairway landing one could hear
perfectly what was said in the library when the library door was open.
What stopped Lily was the bitter conviction in her mother’s voice.
“Do you see?” Mrs. Dodge demanded. “Do you see what you’re _doing_? It’s
just as I told you it would be. Absolutely!”
“Oh, no!” he protested. “This much isn’t a fair trial. You haven’t given
it a chance.”
“Haven’t I?” Mrs. Dodge laughed satirically. “It’s had chance enough to
show where it’s certain to end. Don’t you see that for yourself?”
“No. What makes you think I should?”
“I’ll tell you.” But before going on to relate her impressions of the
evening, Mrs. Dodge had a deterrent thought. She stood silent a moment,
then went to the door and called softly upward, “Lily?”
“Yes, Mamma. I’m just going up to bed,” Lily said, diplomatically, and
proceeded upon her way as her mother closed the library door.
Lily wondered if they were talking about her, though she was unable to
see how giving something a fair trial could have anything to do with
her. She could no longer hear the words her parents were uttering,
though the sound of their voices still came to her in the upper hall,
and it was evident that they were beginning a spirited discussion. Her
father’s voice sounded protestive, her mother’s denunciatory, and Lily
decided that they probably weren’t talking about her at all. She was in
high spirits and laughed to herself over their earnestness—older people
got excited and argued so over such dull matters, she thought. It would
be a terrible thing ever to get middle-aged like that!
She never would be like that, she said to herself as she undressed.
Never! Such a thing couldn’t happen. “To be like Mamma and not care much
what you wear, or anything, and with a good dry old husband at home—and
all so dusty and musty and _settled_—and not able to _look_ at another
man—I could never in the world be like that! Ada Corey could, but I
couldn’t. I’d a thousand times rather die!”
And with the thought of Ada she remembered Ada’s rather enigmatic
remarks to her in the cloakroom and the queer look Ada had given her.
The recollection of that oddly sharp look disturbed her, and, when she
had gone to bed, kept her awhile from sleeping. There had been something
appealing in that look, too, something excitedly reticent, as of strange
knowledge withheld, and yet something humble and questing. And what in
the world had she meant by saying, “I’m sorry!” as she ran out of the
room.
Lily had to give it up, at least for that night, but she made up her
mind to call Ada on the telephone early in the morning and reproach her
for keeping people awake by suddenly becoming mysterious. Of course,
though, the explanation would be simple, and the mystery would turn out
to be nothing of any importance. Ada never knew any exciting secrets and
probably hadn’t intended to be mysterious at all. Having come to this
conclusion, Lily let her thoughts go where they wanted to go, though
they were not so much thoughts as pictures and dreamy echoes of
sounds—pictures of dark and tender eyes bent devotedly upon hers,
dreamy echoes of a mellow voice murmuring fond things to the lilting
accompaniment of far-away dance music. So, finally, she slept, and slept
smiling.
A coloured maid tapped at her door in the morning, and, being bidden to
enter, came in and brought to Lily’s bedside a note addressed in Ada’s
hand.
“Must been lef’ here in the night-time, Miss Lily, or else awful early
this morn’. It was stickin’ under the front door when I went to bring in
the newspaper.”
Lily read the note.
It was the only thing we could do, Lily, to keep my people from
guessing what was really going on. We didn’t mean to let it go
on so long, but we had to wait until we could save up enough to
start with. Of course, I know everybody will say I’m hopelessly
mad and reckless, and my family will be terribly upset. I _told_
you I wished I were like you. If it were you, you could get away
with a thing like this and after a day or so nobody would think
anything about it, but I know how awful and different it will
seem to everybody because _I’m_ the one that does it!
I’m glad you told me it didn’t really mean anything serious to
you—I was sure it wouldn’t. I hope you won’t feel I ought to
have given you my confidence, and I _would_ have given it if it
hadn’t been such a serious matter. Besides, the real truth is,
Lily, our whole friendship seemed to be centred on your affairs
and you, never on me or mine. You were so interested in the
confidences you made to me, you never even seemed to think I had
any to make of my own and you never invited any. Please don’t
take this for criticism—and _please_ wish me happiness!
Lily dressed hurriedly; Ada had indeed mystified and disturbed her now;
and she was eager to get to the telephone downstairs and find out what
in the world this strange communication portended. But as she passed the
dining-room door on her way to the little telephone table in the hall,
her mother called to her. Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were at breakfast.
“Not now, Mamma. I’ll come in a moment. I want to telephone to Ada
first.”
“Lily,” her father said, urgently, “I wouldn’t.”
His tone arrested her, and she paused near the doorway.
“You wouldn’t telephone to Ada?” she asked, nervously. “Why wouldn’t
you?”
“Ada’s not there,” he said, gravely. “Come here, Lily.”
She came in slowly, looking at him with an appealing apprehension; and
his own look, in return, was compassionate. He held a morning paper in
his hand, and moved as if to offer it to her, then withheld it. “Wait,”
he said. “Your mother and I both think her family have behaved
foolishly. If they’d shown a little more discretion—but she’s the sort
of girl nobody’d have dreamed would be up to this sort of thing, and I
suppose they must have been terribly upset. Of course, they might have
known the papers would get it, though, when they began calling up the
police to look for her and stop the——”
“Police!” Lily gasped. “Papa! What are you _talking_ about?”
“Ada Corey,” he said. “She never came home from the dance last night.
She’s run away with that crazy young Price Gleason. They eloped from the
Country Club, and the paper says they were married at a village squire’s
office about an hour afterward.”
With that, not looking at her, but at his plate, he offered her the
newspaper. Lily did not take it. She stared at it, wholly incredulous;
then she reddened with sudden high colour, and, remembering Ada’s queer
look of last night, needed not even the confirmation of the queerer
letter just read to understand that the thing was true.
She said nothing, but after a moment went to her chair at the table,
and, although he did not look at her, Mr. Dodge had a relieved
impression that she was about to sit down and eat her breakfast in a
customary manner. Then his wife rose suddenly and moved as if to go to
her.
“Let me _alone_!” Lily gasped. She ran out of the door and up to her own
room.
She felt that she could not live. No one _could_ live, she thought, and
bear such agony. The dimensions of her anger, too great to be contained,
were what agonized her.
“To think of their daring to make me a mere blind!” she cried out to her
mother, when Mrs. Dodge followed her. “To think they _dared_! It’s the
treachery of it—the _insolence_ of it! I can’t _live_ and be made a
mere blind! I _can’t_, Mamma!”
XXI
MRS. CROMWELL’S NIECE
IN THE meantime, touching these mothers and daughters, there was a
figure not thus far appeared among them, yet destined to be for a while
their principal topic and interest. She was, indeed, at this time, a
lonely figure, a niece of Mrs. Cromwell’s but not well known to her and
living a day’s rail journey to the westward. On the November day of Lily
Dodge’s agony this niece of Mrs. Cromwell’s was as agonized as Lily.
Each thought herself the unhappiest soul in the world, and yet, with
greater wisdom, each might have known that no girl can ever think
herself the unhappiest but that, at the same time, other
girls—somewhere—will be thinking the same thing and suffering as
sadly. The lonely niece’s tragedy was as dark as Lily’s, but came about
in a different way.
The group of girls who had happened to meet at the corner of Maple
Street and Central Avenue that morning was like the groups their mothers
had sometimes formed, years before, on the same corner. This is to say,
it was not unlike any other group of young but marriageable maidens
pausing together by chance at a corner in the “best residence section”
of a town of forty or fifty thousand inhabitants, anywhere in the land.
Three of these seven girls were on their way homeward from ‘downtown’;
three were strolling in the opposite direction; and the seventh, seeing
the two parties meet and begin their chatter with loud outcries, had
come hurrying from a quiet old house near by to join them. The six made
a great commotion. Their laughter whooped on the whirling autumn wind
that flapped their skirts about them; their gesturing hands fluttered
like the last leaves of the agitated shade trees above them; their
simultaneous struggles for a hearing, shattering the peace of the
comfortable neighbourhood, were not incomparable to the disorderly
uproar of a box of fireworks prematurely exploding on the third of July.
The seventh girl, who had come across the lawn of the quiet old house on
the corner to join them, also shouted, begging to be told the cause of
so much vociferation.
“What’s happened? What on earth’s the matter?” she cried, going from one
to another of the clamorous damsels and trying to make herself heard.
“What is it? What’s going on? What’s it all _about_?”
One or two took cognizance of her with a nod and a hasty greeting,
“Hello, Elsie,” but found no more time for her; and the rest paid no
attention whatever to her or to her eager inquiries. They were too busy
shouting, “But listen, my dear!” or “I never in all my _life_!” or “My
dear, you never _saw_ anything like it!” though the smallest of them, a
pretty brunette with the most piercing voice of all, did at last begin
an explanatory response to the repeated entreaties of this Elsie. “Paul
Reamer said——” But, as if realizing the waste of so much energy upon a
person unconcerned in the matter, she immediately turned to the others,
shrieking, “_Listen!_ For Heaven’s sake, _listen_! He said he’d be along
before we got halfway _home_! He said——”
Then even the small brunette’s remarkable voice was merged in the
conglomerate disturbance, and Elsie was no wiser than before. She
continued to go from one girl to another, shouting, “What _about_ Paul
Reamer? What’s he _done_? What _about_ him?” But for all the response
she got she might have been both invisible and inaudible.
The uproar the six girls were making had no coherence; it accomplished
nothing; it was merely a happy noise; and yet it seemed to be about
something that concerned the six and was understood by them—something
that had nothing to do with the seventh girl and could not be understood
by her. The six were not hostile to her; they were merely unaware of
her, or, at least, in their excitement, too dimly aware of her to pay
any heed to her.
So, presently, she gave over her efforts and stood silent, a little
apart from the shouting group and smiling; but her smiling was only an
expression of hers, not a true token of feeling within. She wished to go
on making her share of the noise; but a persistently disregarded
questioner must always become at last a mere onlooker. Thus, Elsie found
herself excluded from the merriment she had come to join; and she felt
obliged to maintain a lively and knowing look upon her face, so that
passers-by might not think her an outsider, for she did not know how to
go away with any grace or comfort. Excluded, she could only stand near
the congenial, vociferous six and try to look included—a strain upon
her facial expression. The strain became painful as she still lingered
and the merry group grew merrier; but what pained her more was her
regret that she had rushed out so hopefully to meet an exclusion she
should have known enough to expect.
She might have known enough to expect it because this was an old
familiar experience of hers, an experience so much worse than customary
that it was invariable. And another familiar old experience, or phase of
this one, was repeated as she stood there, smiling and somewhat glassily
beaming, trying to look knowing and included.
From down the street there came swiftly into nearer view an open touring
car, driven by a slender young gentleman of a darkly handsome yet
sprightly aspect; and upon this the six clamoured far beyond all
clamours they had made before. The debonair motorist steered his machine
to the curb, close to them, jumped out, was surrounded by the
vociferators, and added his own cheerful shoutings to theirs.
What they all meant to convey was for the most part as unknown to Elsie
Hemingway as if they gabbled Arabic, though the name “Paul” was
prevalent over the tumult, amidst which the owner of it was seized by
his coat lapels, his shoulders, even by his chin, and entreated to
“listen!” Finally, however, some sort of coherent communication seemed
to be established among them, and the young man emerged from the group,
though the small girl with the piercing voice still clung to one of his
coat pockets. “Call up Fred!” she screamed. “Tell him we won’t wait one
instant!”
He detached himself. “Elsie, can I use your telephone?” he asked, but
evidently regarded the question as unimportant, for he was already upon
his way and did not pause.
“Oh, _do_!” she cried, enthusiastically, glad to seem a part of the
mystery at last, and she turned to go with him. “Do you want to call up
Fred Patterson to bring his car? Are you getting up a party, Paul?
What’s the——”
He had rushed ahead of her and was at the open front door of the house.
“Where do you keep it?” he called back to her.
“Wait! It’s in the back hall. Wait till I show you,” she cried; but he
ran into the house, found the telephone, and was busy with it before she
reached him.
“Did you get Fred’s number?” she asked, eagerly.
He was smiling and his eyes were bright with anticipations that seemed
to concern not Elsie but the instrument before him. He did not look at
her or seem even to hear her, but moved the nickeled prong up and down
impatiently.
“Can’t you get him?” Elsie inquired, and she laughed loudly. Her air was
that of a person secretly engaged with another upon a jocular enterprise
bound to afford great entertainment. “Old Fred _is_ the slowest old
poke, isn’t he? Suppose _I_ try, Paul.”
Young Mr. Reamer’s eyes wandered to her and lost their lustre, becoming
dead with absent-mindedness immediately. He said nothing.
“Let me try to get that funny old Fred,” Elsie urged in the same eager
voice; and she stretched forth a hand for the instrument.
Upon this he moved his shoulder in her way, turning from her, and at the
same time a small voice crackled in the telephone. Mr. Reamer’s
brightness of expression returned instantly. “You bet it’s me!” he said.
“And if you don’t hurry up here in that old tin boat of yours, you’re
going to get killed! The whole gang’s out here on the curbstone, simply
raving, right in front of Elsie Hemingway’s.”
“I believe it _is_ Fred!” Elsie exclaimed. “I believe you’ve got him
after all. Does he say——”
“You better hurry!” the young man said to the mouthpiece as he dropped
the receiver into its hook. Then, as he turned toward the door, he
seemed to become conscious, though vaguely, that he was not alone. “Much
’bliged, Elsie,” he said. “Goo’bye!”
“Wait. Wait just a minute, Paul.”
“What for?”
“Fred isn’t on his way yet, I don’t suppose,” she said, timidly.
“Let’s—let’s wait in Papa’s library till he comes. There are some
pretty interesting books in there I’d like to show you. Papa’s great on
bindings and old editions. Wouldn’t you like to see some of ’em?”
“Well, another day maybe,” he answered, obviously surprised. “You see
Mamie Ford and all the girls are out there, and I——”
“Wait,” she begged, for he was in motion to depart. “Aren’t you ever
coming to see me again, Paul?”
“What?” He appeared to have no comprehension of her meaning.
“Aren’t you ever coming to see me again?” She laughed lightly, yet there
was a tremor in her voice. “I don’t believe you’ve been in our house for
over two years, Paul.”
“Oh, yes, I have,” he returned. “I must have been here a whole lot in
that much time. G’bye, Elsie; the girls are——”
But again she contrived to detain him. “Wait. When will you come to see
me again, Paul?”
“Oh, almost any time.”
“But when? What day?”
This urgency, though gentle, bothered him, and he wished he hadn’t
thought of using Elsie’s telephone. He was a youth much sought, as he
had reason to be pleasantly aware, and life offered him many more
interesting vistas than the prospect of an afternoon or an evening or a
substantial part of either, to be spent tête-à-tête with Elsie
Hemingway. Pressed to give a definite reason why such a prospect
dismayed him, he might have been puzzled. Elsie wasn’t exactly a bore;
she wasn’t bad-looking, and nobody disliked her. Probably he would have
fallen back upon an explanation that would have been satisfactory enough
to most of the young people with whom he and Elsie had “grown up.” Elsie
was “just Elsie Hemingway,” he would have said, implying an otherwise
unexplainable something inherent in Elsie herself, and nothing
derogatory to the Hemingway family.
“_When_ will you come, Paul?”
“Why—why, right soon, Elsie. Honestly I will. I’ll try to, that is.
Honestly I’ll——”
“Paul, it’s true you haven’t been here in over two years.” Elsie’s voice
trembled a little more perceptibly. “The last time you were here was
when you came to Mother’s funeral. You had to come then, because you had
to bring your mother.”
“Oh, no,” he said, a little shocked at this strange reference. “I was
gl—— I mean I wanted to come. I’ll come again, too, some day, before
long. I must run, Elsie. The girls——”
“You won’t say when?” She spoke gravely, looking at him steadily, and
there was more in her eyes than he saw, for he was not interested in
finding what was there, or in anything except in his escape to the
gaiety outdoors.
He laughed reassuringly. “Oh, sometime before very long. I’ll honestly
try to get ’round. Honestly, I will, Elsie. Listen!”
There were shriekings of his name from the street and lawn. “G’bye! I’m
coming!” he shouted, and dashed out of the house to meet the vehement
demand for him. He was asked at the top of several voices “what on
earth” he’d been doing all that time; but no one even jocularly
suggested Elsie as a cause of his delay.
When he had gone, she went to the front door and closed it, keeping
herself out of sight; then she stood looking through the lace curtain
that covered the glass set into the upper half of the door. The amiable
youth she had called “old Fred,” accompanied by a male comrade, was just
arriving in a low car wherein they reclined almost at full length rather
than sat. The small but piercing Miss Ford leaped to join them, and the
other girls, screaming, each trying to make her laughter dominant, piled
themselves into Paul Reamer’s car. Both machines trembled into motion at
once, and swept away, carrying a great noise with them up the echoing
street.
Elsie stood for a little while looking heavily out at nothing; then she
went slowly up the old, carpeted stairway to her own room, where she did
a singular thing. She took a hand mirror from her dressing-table, looked
searchingly into the glass for several long and solemn minutes, then
dropped down upon her bed and wept. She might have been a beauty
discovering the first gray hair.
It was strange that she should look into a mirror and then weep because,
if the glass was honest with her, its revelation should have been in
every detail encouraging. The reflection showed lamenting gray eyes, but
long-lashed and vividly lustrous; it showed a good white brow and a neat
nose and a shapely mouth and chin. No one could have asked a mirror to
be coloured a pleasanter tan brown than where it reflected Elsie’s
rippling hair; and as for the rest of her, she was neither angular nor
awkward, neither stout nor misshapen in any way, but the contrary. Yet
this was not the first time she had done that strange thing;—she had
come too often silently to her room, looked into her mirror, and then
fallen to long weeping.
XXII
WALLFLOWER
THE FIRST time she had done it she was only twelve; but even then her
reason for it was the same. At the end of a children’s party she
realized that she had been miserable, and that she was never anything
except miserable at parties. She always looked forward to them; always
thought for days about what she would wear; always set forth in a tremor
of excitement; and then, when she was there, and the party in full
swing, she spent the time being wretched and trying to look happy, so
that no one would guess what she felt. She had always the same
experience: in the games the children played, if two leaders chose
“sides,” she was the last to be chosen, except when she was ignored and
left out altogether, which sometimes happened. When they danced she
usually had no partners except upon the urgency of mothers or
hostesses;—the boys rushed to all the other girls and came lagging to
Elsie only in duty or in desperation. So at last, being twelve, she
realized what had been happening to her—and came home to look secretly
into her mirror and then to weep.
As she grew older, and her group with her, nothing changed; she was a
wallflower. The other girls were all busy with important little
appointments—“dates” they called them—Elsie had none. With the
liveliest eagerness the others talked patteringly about things that were
meaningless to her; and when she tried to talk that way, too, she failed
shamefully. She tried to laugh with them, and as loudly as they did,
when she had no idea what they were laughing about; and for a long time
she failed to understand that usually they were laughing about nothing.
On summer evenings the boys and girls clustered on other verandas, not
hers; and, sitting alone, she would hear the distant frolicking and
drifts of song. At dances for her sixteen and seventeen-year-old
contemporaries, everything was as it had been when she was twelve. Even
when her mother, guessing a little of the truth, tried to help her, and,
in spite of failing health, worked hard at “entertaining” for Elsie, the
entertaining failed of its object;—Elsie was not made “popular.”
“_Why_ not?” she had passionately asked herself a thousand times. “_Why_
do they despise me so?”
Yet she knew that they did not even despise her. At times they did
despise one of their group, usually a girl; for it seems to be almost a
necessity, in an intimate circle of young people, that from time to time
there shall be a member whom the rest may privately denounce, and in
gatherings vent their wit upon more or less openly.
During the greater part of her seventeenth year the dashing Mamie Ford
had been in this unfortunate position without any obvious cause. The
others were constantly busy “talking” about her, finding new faults or
absurdities in her; snubbing her and playing derisive practical jokes
upon her—for it is true that youth is cruel; self-interest takes up so
much room. Elsie envied her, for at least Mamie was in the thick of
things; and the centre of the stew. That was better than being a mere
left-outer, Elsie thought; and Mamie fought, too, and had her own small
faction, whereas a left-outer has nothing to fight except the vacancy in
which she dwells—a dreary battling. Mamie’s unpopularity passed, for no
better reason than it had arrived;—she was now, at nineteen, the very
queen of the roost, and Elsie, wondering why, could only conclude that
it was because Mamie made so much noise.
Elsie had long ago perceived that, of the girls she knew, those who made
the loudest and most frequent noises signifying excitement and hilarity
were the ones about whom the boys and, consequently, the other girls,
most busily grouped themselves. Naturally, the simple males went where
vivacious sound and gesture promised merriment; and of course, too, a
crowd naturally gathers where something seems to be happening. So far as
Elsie could see, the whole art of general social intercourse seemed to
rest on an ability to make something appear to be happening where
nothing really was happening.
What had always most perplexed her was that the proper method of doing
this seemed to be the simplest thing in the world, and was,
nevertheless, in her own hands an invariable failure. She had watched
Mamie Ford at dances and at dinners where Mamie was the life of the
party, and she observed that in addition to shouting over every nothing
and laughing ecstatically without the necessity of being inspired by any
detectable humour, Mamie always offered every possible evidence—flushed
face, sparkling eyes, and unending gesticulations—that she was having a
genuinely uproarious “good time” herself. Elsie had tried it; she had
tried it until her face ached; but she remained only an echo outside the
walls. Nobody paid any attention to her.
Therefore she had no resource but to infer what she had inferred to-day,
when the merry impromptu party whirled away without a thought of
including her, and when Paul Reamer had so carelessly evaded her
urgency—her shameless urgency, as she thought, weeping upon her
coverlet. This inference of hers could be only that she had some
mysterious ugliness, some strange stupidity, and it was this she sought
in her mirror, as she had sought it before. It evaded her as it always
did; but she knew it must be there.
“What is _wrong_ about me?” she murmured, tasting upon her lips the
bitter salt of that inquiry. “They couldn’t always treat me like this
unless there’s _something_ wrong about me.”
She was sure that the wrong thing must be with herself. The Hemingways
were one of the “old families”;—they had always taken a creditable part
in the life of the town, and the last man of them, her father, owned and
edited the principal newspaper of the place. Elsie had no prospect of
riches, but she was not poor; and other girls with less than she were
“popular.” Therefore the wrong thing about her could be identified in
nothing exterior. Moreover, when she pursued her search for the vital
defect she could not attribute it to tactlessness; for that has some
weight, and she was weightless. She danced well, she dressed as well as
any of the girls did, and her father told her that she “talked well,”
too;—he said this to her often, during the long evenings she spent with
him in his library. Yet he was the only one who would listen to her,
and, though she adored him, he was not the audience she most wanted. She
“talked well”; but even by pleading she could not get Paul Reamer to
spend five minutes with her.
No wonder! Paul was the great beau of the town, and she the girl least
of all like a belle. And, remembering his plain consciousness of this
contrast, almost ludicrously expressed in his surprise that she should
try to detain him with her for even a few minutes, she shivered as she
wept. She hated herself for begging of him; she hated herself for having
run out of the house to try for the thousandth time to be one of a
“crowd” that didn’t want her; she hated herself for “hanging around
them,” laughing and pretending that she was one of them, when anybody
could see she wasn’t. She hated herself for having something wrong about
her, and for not being able to find out what it was; she hated herself,
and she hated everything and everybody—except her father.
. . . At dinner that evening he reproached her for being pale. “I don’t
believe you take enough exercise,” he suggested.
“Yes, I do. I took a long walk this afternoon. I walked four or five
miles.”
“Did you?” He smiled under his heavy old-fashioned, gray lambrequin of a
moustache, and his eyeglasses showed a glint of humorous light. “That
doesn’t sound as if you went with a _girl_ companion, Elsie! Four or
five miles, was it?”
“I went alone,” she said, occupied with her plate.
His humorous manifestations vanished and he looked somewhat concerned.
“Is that so? It might have been jollier the other way, perhaps. I
sometimes think I monopolize you too much, young woman. For instance,
you oughtn’t to spend all your evenings with me. You ought to keep up
your contemporary friendships more than you do, I’m afraid. Why don’t
you ask the girls and boys here to play with you sometimes?”
“I don’t want them.”
“Would you like to give a dance—or anything?”
“No, Papa.”
He sighed. “I’m afraid your young friends bore you, Elsie.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t that exactly. I just——” She left the
sentence unfinished.
“You just don’t take much interest in ’em,” he laughed.
“Well—maybe.” Still occupied with the food before her, though her being
occupied with it meant no hearty consumption of it, she seemed to admit
the charge. “Something like that.”
“It shouldn’t be so,” he said. “From the little I see of ’em I shouldn’t
spot any of ’em for a lofty intellect precisely, but young people of
that sort in a moderate-sized city like this usually do seem to older
people just a pack of incomprehensible gigglers and gabblers. I suppose
you never hear much from ’em except personalities and pretty slim jokes,
and it may get tiresome for a girl as solid on the Napoleonic Period as
you are.” He paused to chuckle. “I don’t suppose you hear much
discussion of Madame de Rémusat among ’em, do you?”
“No.”
“What I’m getting at,” he went on;—“you oughtn’t to think too much
about intellectual fodder or be bored with people your own age because
they can’t offer it.”
At that she glanced wanly at him across the table. “I’m not, Papa. They
don’t bore me.”
“Then I can’t understand your not seeing more of ’em. It isn’t normal,
and you’re missing a lot of the rightful pleasures of youth. It’s
natural for youth to seek youth, and not to devote all its time to an
old codger like me. I believe you need a change.” He looked at her
severely and nodded. “I’m serious.”
“What change?”
“Your aunt Mildred’s written me again about your visiting there,” he
said. “Your cousin Cornelia finished her school last year. Now she’s
home from eight months abroad and they really want you.”
“Oh, no,” Elsie said, quietly, and looked again at her plate.
“Why not?”
“I don’t care to go, Papa.”
“Why don’t you?”
Her lip quivered a little, but she controlled it, and he saw no sign of
emotion. “Because I wouldn’t have a good time.”
“I’d like to know why you wouldn’t,” he returned a little testily. “Your
aunt Mildred is the best sister I had. She’s a pretty fine person,
Elsie, and she’s always wanted to know you better. She says Cornelia’s
turned out to be a lovely young woman, and they both want you to come.
She’s sure you’ll like Cornelia.”
“Maybe I would,” Elsie said, moodily. “That isn’t saying Cornelia’d like
me.”
“Of all the nonsense!” he cried, and he laughed impatiently. “How could
she help liking you? Everybody likes you, of course. Mildred says
Cornelia has a mighty nice circle of young people about her; they have
such jolly times, it’s fun just watching ’em, Mildred says; and she
enjoys entertaining a lot. They have that big house of theirs, and
they’re near enough the city to go in for the theatre when they want to
and——”
“I know,” Elsie interrupted. “They’re great people, and it’s a big,
fashionable suburb and everything’s grand! I’m not dreaming of going,
Papa.”
“Aren’t you? Well, I’m dreaming of making you,” he retorted. “You
haven’t been there since you were a little girl, and your aunt says it’s
shameful to treat her as if she lived in China, when it’s really only a
night or day’s run on a Pullman. They want you to come, and they expect
to give you a real splurge, Elsie.”
“No, no,” she said, quickly; and if he could have seen her downcast eyes
he might have perceived that they were terrified. “Let’s don’t talk of
it, Papa.”
“Let’s do,” he returned, genially. “I suppose you think that because
you’re bored by this little set of young people of yours, here, you’ll
be bored by Cornelia’s friends. I don’t know, but I’d at least guess
that they might be a little more metropolitan, though of course young
people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays.”
“Yes,” Elsie said in a low voice. “I’m sure they would be.”
“More metropolitan, you mean?”
“No,” Elsie said. “I mean they’d be the same as these are here.”
“Well, at least you might give ’em a try. They might prove to be
more——”
“No,” Elsie said again. “They’d be just the same.”
This was the cause of the obstinacy that puzzled and even provoked him
during a week of intermittent arguing upon the matter. Elsie was sure
that one thing he said was only too true: “Young people are pretty much
the same the world over nowadays”; and in her imagination she could
conjure up no picture of herself occupying among her cousin Cornelia
Cromwell’s friends a position different from that she held among her
own. They would be polite to her for the first hour or so, she knew, and
then they would do to her what had always been done to her. They would
treat her as a weightless presence, invisible and inaudible, a
left-outer.
Her aunt and Cornelia would expect much of her; and they would be kind
in their disappointment; but they would have her on their hands and
secretly look forward to the relief of her departure. Elsie could
predict it all, and in sorry imaginings foresee the weariness of her
aunt and cousin as they would daily renew the task of privately goading
reluctant young men and preoccupied girls to appear conscious that she
was a human being, not air. The visit would mean only a new failure, a
new one on a grander scale than the old failure at home. The old one was
enough for her; she was used to it, and the surroundings at least were
familiar. The more her father urged her, the more she was terrified by
what he urged.
“I’ve made up my mind to compel you,” he told her one evening in the
library. “I’m serious, Elsie.”
She did not look up from her book, but responded quietly: “I’m twenty.
Women are of age in this state at eighteen, Papa.”
“Are they? I wrote your aunt yesterday that you’re coming.”
“I wrote her yesterday, too. I told her I couldn’t.”
“No other explanation?”
“Of course I said you needed me to run the house, Papa.”
“I didn’t bring you up to tell untruths,” he said. “You’ve learned, it
seems; but this one won’t do you any good. You’re going, Elsie, and if
you want some new dresses or hats or things you’d better be ordering
’em. You don’t seem to understand I really mean it.”
She dropped her book in her lap and sighed profoundly. “What for?” she
asked. “Why do you make such a point of it?”
“Because I’ve been watching you and thinking about you, and I don’t
believe I’m doing my duty by you. Not as”—his voice showed
feeling—“not as your mother would have me do it. Sometimes you cheer up
and joke with me, but I don’t believe you’re happy.”
“But I _am_.”
“You’re not,” he returned with conviction. “And the reason is, you lead
too monotonous a life. A monotonous life suits elderliness, but it isn’t
normal for youth. Really, you’re getting to lead the life of a recluse,
and I won’t have it. If these provincial young people here bore you so
that you won’t run about and play with them as the other girls do, why
then you’ve got to try a different kind of young people.”
“But you said young people were all the same, Papa, the world over; and
it’s true.”
“At least,” he insisted, “your cousin Cornelia’s will have different
faces, and you’re going to go and look at ’em. Elsie, you’re _not_
having a good time, and one way or another I’ve got to make you. You
need a new view of some kind; you’ve got to be shaken out of this hermit
habit you’ve fallen into.”
“Papa, please,” she said, appealingly. “I don’t want to go. Don’t make
me. Please!”
At this he rose from his chair and came to her and took one of her hands
in his. The room was warm, and she sat near the fire; but the slender
hand he held was cold. “Elsie, I want you to,” he said. “I don’t want to
think your mother might reproach me for not making you do what seems
best for you. Let me wire your aunt to-morrow you’ll come next week.”
Her lower lip moved pathetically, and along her eyelids a liquid
tremulousness twinkled too brightly. “I couldn’t——” she began.
“Don’t tell me that any more, Elsie.”
“No,” she said, meekly. “I meant I couldn’t get ready until week after
next, Papa—or the week after that. I couldn’t go before December. Not
before then, please, Papa.”
He patted her hand and laughed; pleased that she would be obedient;
touched that she was so reluctant to leave him. “That’s the girl! You’ll
have a glorious time, Elsie; see if you don’t!” he said, and, looking
down tenderly upon her shining eyes, never suspected the true anguish
that was there.
XXIII
THE STRANGE MIRROR
IT WAS still there, and all the keener, when Elsie dressed before the
French mirror in the big and luxurious bedchamber to which she had been
shown on her arrival at her aunt’s house.
“Mrs. Cromwell and Miss Cornelia had an engagement they couldn’t break.
They said for me to say they’re sorry they couldn’t be here when you
came,” a maid told her. “Mrs. Cromwell said tell you she’s giving a
dinner for you and Miss Cornelia this evening. It’s set for early
because they’re going to theatricals and dancing somewheres else
afterward, so she thought p’raps you better begin dressing soon as your
trunk gets here. They’ll have to dress in a hurry, theirselves, so you
may not see ’em till dinner.”
But Elsie did not have to wait that long. Half an hour later, when she
had begun to dress, Cornelia rushed in, all fur and cold rosy cheeks.
She embraced the visitor impetuously. “D’you mind bein’ hugged by a
bear?” she asked. “I couldn’t wait even to take off my coat, because I
remembered what an awf’ly nice _little_ thing you were! Do you know we
haven’t seen each other for nine years?” She stepped back with her hands
upon Elsie’s shoulders. “I’ve got to fly and dress,” she said. “_My_ but
you’re lovely!”
With that, she turned and scurried out of the room, leaving behind her a
mingled faint scent of fur and violets, and the impression upon Elsie
that this cousin of hers was the prettiest girl she had ever seen.
Cornelia’s good looks terrified her the more. Probably there were other
girls as pretty as that among Cornelia’s friends, the people she was to
meet to-night. And Cornelia’s rush into the room, her flashing greeting,
so impulsive, and her quick flight away were all flavoured with that
dashingness with which Elsie felt she could never compete. “_My_, but
you’re lovely!” was sweet of Cornelia, Elsie thought. But girls usually
said things like that to their girl visitors—especially when the
visitors had just arrived. Besides, anybody could see that Cornelia was
as kind as she was pretty.
“_My_, but you’re lovely!” was pleasant to hear, even from an impulsive
cousin, yet it was of no great help to Elsie. She went on with her
dressing, looking unhappily into the glass and thinking of what irony
there had been in her father’s persistence. “To _make_ me have a ‘good
time’!” she thought. “As if I wouldn’t have had one at home, if I could!
But of course he didn’t know that.”
She was so afraid of what was before her, and so certain she was
foredoomed, that during this troubled hour she learned the meaning of an
old phrase describing fear; for she was indeed “sick with apprehension.”
She took some spirits of ammonia in a glass of water as a remedy for
that sickness. “Oh, Papa!” she moaned. “What have you done to me?”
The maid who had brought her to her room reappeared with a bouquet of
rosebuds and lilies of the valley, to be worn. “It’s from one of the
gentlemen that’s coming to dinner, Miss Cornelia said. He sent two.
Pr’aps I could pin it on for you.”
Elsie let her render this service, and when it was done the woman smiled
admiringly. “It certainly becomes you,” she said. “I might say it looks
like you.”
Elsie regarded her with a stare so wide and blank that the maid thought
her probably haughty. “Excuse me, ma’am. Could I be of any more
assistance?”
“No, thank you,” Elsie said, still staring, and turned again to the
mirror as the flatterer left the room.
The bouquet was beautiful, and, before the evening was over, the unknown
gentleman who had sent it would be of a mind that the joke was on him,
Elsie thought. The misplaced blarney of an Irishwoman had amazed but not
cheered her; and the clock on the mantel-shelf warned her that the time
was ten minutes before seven. She took some more ammonia.
The next moment into the room came her aunt, large, decorously
glittering, fundamentally important. She was also warm-hearted, and she
took her niece in her arms and kissed her as if she wanted to kiss her.
Then she did as Cornelia had done—held her at arm’s length and looked
at her. “You dear child!” she said. “I’ve wanted so long to get hold of
you. A man never knows how to bring up a girl; she has to do it all
herself. You’ve done it excellently, I can see, Elsie. You have lovely
taste; that’s just the dress I’d have picked out for you myself. And to
think I haven’t seen you since your dear mother left us! Cornelia hasn’t
seen you for much longer than that—you and she haven’t had a glimpse of
each other since you were ten or eleven years old.”
“Yes,” Elsie said. “I saw her a little while ago.” She gulped feebly,
and by a great effort kept her voice steady. “Aunt Mildred, how proud of
her you must be! I want to tell you something: I think Cornelia is the
very prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
Mrs. Cromwell took her hands from her niece’s shoulders, and, smiling,
stepped backward a pace and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Cornelia’s
very pretty, but she isn’t _that_ pretty.”
“I think she is.”
“No.” Mrs. Cromwell laughed; then became serious. She swept a look over
her niece from head to foot—the accurately estimating scrutiny of an
intelligent and experienced woman who is careful to be an honest mother.
“Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class,” she said, quietly.
Then she turned to the door. “Come down to the drawing-room a minute or
so before seven,” she said, and was gone.
Elsie stood, cataleptic.
The words seemed to linger upon the stirred air of the spacious room.
“Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” Cornelia’s mother had not
intended to be satirical; she had been perfectly serious and direct, and
she had really meant that Cornelia, not Elsie, was of the lower class of
prettiness. Here were three dumfounding things in a row: “_My_, but
you’re lovely!” “It certainly becomes you—I might say it looks like
you.” “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” The third was the
astounding climax that now made the first two almost—almost convincing!
Elsie rushed to the long mirror and in a turmoil of bewilderment gazed
and gazed at what she saw there. And as she looked, there slowly came a
little light that grew to be a sparkling in those startled eyes of hers;
her lips parted; breathlessly she smiled a little;—then, all in a
flash, radiantly. For what she saw in the mirror was charming. No fear
of hers, no long experience of neglect, could deny it; and at last she
was sure that whatever the wrong thing about her was, it could be
nothing she would ever see in a mirror. She was actually what at home
she had sometimes suspected and then believed impossible.
She was beautiful—and knew it!
Marvelling, trembling with timid and formless premonitions of rapture,
she stood aglow in the revelation. She leaned closer to the mirror and
spoke to it in a low voice, almost brokenly: “_My_, but you’re lovely—I
might say it looks like you—of course she isn’t in your class!”
Then, with new and strange stars in her eyes, this sudden Cinderella
went out of her room and down the wide stairway, dazed but not afraid.
The miracle had already touched her.
Her uncle met her at the doorway of the drawing-room. “This is not
little Elsie!” he said. “Why, good heavens, your father didn’t write us
his Elsie had grown up into anything like _you_!”
Immediately he took her upon his arm and turned to cross the room with
her, going toward the dozen young people clustered about Cornelia.
But Cornelia came running to her cousin. “You’re dazzling!” she
whispered, and it was obvious that Cornelia’s friends had the same
impression. They stopped talking abruptly as Elsie entered the room, and
they remained in an eloquent state of silence until Cornelia began to
make their names known to the visitor. Even after that, they talked in
lowered voices until they went out to the dining-room.
XXIV
TRANSFIGURATION
THEY were livelier at the table, but not nearly so noisy as Mamie Ford
and Paul Reamer and their intimates would have been at a dinner party at
home, Elsie thought; though this was but a hasty and vague comparison
flitting through her mind. She was not able to think definitely about
anything for a time: she was too dazzled by being dazzling. Her clearest
thought was an inquiry: Was this she, herself, and, if she was indeed
Elsie Hemingway, were these queer, kind, new people now about her quite
sane?
The tall young man with the long face who sat at her left talked to her
as much as he could, being hampered by the circumstance that the
fair-haired short young man on her right did his best to talk to her all
the time, except when she spoke. Then both of them listened with
deference; and so did a third young man directly across the table from
her. More than that, she could not look about her without encountering
the withdrawing glances of other guests of both sexes, though some of
these glances, not from feminine orbs, were in no polite flurry to
withdraw, but remained thoughtfully upon her as long as she looked their
way. _Could_ it be Elsie Hemingway upon whom fond eyes of youth thus so
sweetly lingered?
Too centred upon the strange experience to think much about these
amazing people except as adjuncts to her transfiguration, she
nevertheless decided that she liked best the tall gentleman at her left.
He was not so young as the others, appearing to be as far advanced
toward middle-age as twenty-seven—or possibly even twenty-nine—and she
decided that his long, irregular face was “interesting.” She asked him
to “straighten out the names” of the others for her, hoping that he
would straighten out his own before he finished.
He began with Lily Dodge. “_Our_ prettiest girl,” he explained, honestly
unconscious of what his emphasis implied. “That is, she’s been generally
considered so since your cousin Anne was married. The young man on Miss
Dodge’s right and in such a plain state of devotion is named Henry
Burnett just now.”
“Just now? Does his name change from time to time?”
“Poor Henry’s doesn’t, no; nor the condition in which Miss Dodge keeps
him—probably because she likes to win golf tournament cups with him. I
mean, the next time you see her at a dinner the man beside her in that
state may have another name. _She_ changes ’em.”
“I see,” Elsie said. She looked absently at Miss Dodge, not aware that
there could be anything in common between them, much less that in a
manner they had shared a day of agony, no great while past. “She seems
very lovely.”
“In her own way, yes,” her neighbour returned without enthusiasm. “The
man on her left——”
Elsie laughed and interrupted. “What I meant to get at—if you don’t
mind—was the name of the man on _my_ left!”
“Of course you wouldn’t have caught it,” he said. “You naturally
wouldn’t remember, hearing it spoken with the others.”
“No,” she said. “Yet I think I do remember that Cornelia spoke it a
little more impressively than she did any of theirs.”
“That’s only because I’m in her father’s firm. The most junior member,
of course. They use me as a waste-basket.”
“As what?”
“A waste-basket. When Mr. Cromwell and the really important partners
discover some bits of worthless business cluttering up the office they
fill me up with it. Every good office has a young waste-basket, Miss
Hemingway.”
“But you haven’t yet told me this one’s name.”
“Harley.”
He laughed ruefully, and she asked why. “Harley doesn’t seem a funny
name to me,” she said. “I don’t understand your laughing.”
“It’s to keep from crying,” he explained. “My father was dead before I
was born and my mother died just after. I was taken over by my
grandfather, and he named me for three of Napoleon’s marshals—Berthier
Ney Junot Harley. It takes a grandfather to do things like that to you!”
“But Junot wasn’t a marshal,” Elsie said. “He hoped to be, but the
Emperor never made him one; Junot was too flighty.”
Mr. Harley stared. “I remember that’s true;—I spoke of three marshals
hastily. I should have said two and a general. My grandfather brought me
up on ’em, and I still collect First Empire books. But imagine your
knowing!”
“You mean you think I don’t look——”
He interrupted earnestly. “I’m afraid it’s too soon for you to let me
tell you how I think you look. But you do laugh at my names, don’t you?”
“No; they don’t seem funny to me.”
“Don’t you ever laugh except when things are funny?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I’ve laughed thousands of times when everything
was horribly unfunny.”
“Then why did you laugh?”
For an instant she looked at him gravely. “To try to be ‘popular,’” she
said.
Plainly he thought this funny enough for laughter. “That _is_ a joke!”
he said. “But if laughing makes you any more ‘popular’ than you would be
without it, I hope for this one evening at least you’ll be as solemn as
an obelisk.”
Of course Elsie said, “Why?”
“Because if you laugh I won’t get to see anything of you at all. I’m
afraid I won’t anyhow.”
He spoke with gravity, meaning what he said; and the event proved his
fear justified. He got halfway round the country club ballroom with her,
after the theatricals, a surprising number of times, but seldom much
farther. However, he conclusively proved his possession of that
admirable quality, dogged persistence, and so did the other young
gentlemen of the dinner party. So did more than these, including
probably a majority of the men and youths, married or single, present
that evening at the Blue Hills Club.
Elsie wondered when the spell would break. It seemed impossible that she
wouldn’t be found out presently as a masquerader and dropped into her
old homelike invisibility. But whether the break came or not, she knew
she would never again be so miserable as she had been, because she was
every moment more and more confidently daring to know that she was
beautiful. She laughed at a great many things that weren’t funny during
this gracious evening; for laughter may spring as freely from excited
happiness as from humour; but she made no effort to be noisy—noisiness
appeared to be not a necessity at all, but superfluous. And what pleased
her most, the girls were “nice” to her, too, as she defined their
behaviour;—they formed part of the clusters about her when the music
was silent, and they eagerly competed to arrange future entertainment
for her. Elsie loved them all, these strange, adorable people who had
not seen the wrong thing about her.
The old walls built round her by her own town, enclosing her with such
seeming massive permanence and so tightly, now at a stroke proved to be
illusion; she was discovering that they were but apparitions all unreal,
and that this world is mysterious and can be happily so. Something of
its humorous mysteries in dealing with young hearts another person, near
her, also learned that night; for Cornelia Cromwell, by coincidence, had
a queer experience of her own.
Beyond the outer fringe of dancers she saw her mother standing among a
group of the older people;—one of these was Miss Bailey, the principal
of the suburban school in which Cornelia had once been a pupil. Cornelia
had not seen her for several years and went conscientiously to greet
her. Principal and former pupil made the appropriate exchanges; but
Cornelia was rather vague with the grayish gentleman who had Miss Bailey
upon his arm.
Mrs. Cromwell said something as in correction of an error; but it was
too late, and the couple had moved away before Cornelia understood.
“You called her Miss Bailey,” Mrs. Cromwell explained. “She’s been
married to Professor Bromley for two years.”
“What! Was that funny little old——” Cornelia checked herself; but the
tactful mother had already turned away to speak to someone else. The
daughter stood and gazed at the stiff little old-fashioned gentleman
standing punctiliously arm-in-arm with his wife. “Oh, dear _me_!”
Cornelia whispered.
Then she ran back, wide-eyed, to rejoin an anxious lad who had arrived
late. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve missed another chance to let me meet
your cousin. What did you run away like that for?”
“To learn something important,” Cornelia told him. “Come on;—I’ll get
you through to Elsie somehow.”
For the unmasking of Elsie, that dreaded break in the spell, still
postponed itself as the evening wore on. Her miraculous night continued
to be a miracle to the end, and she was a girl grateful for wonders when
she talked them over with her cousin in the big bedroom, after two
o’clock in the morning.
“I never met such darling people in the whole world!” she declared. “I
never knew——”
“What nonsense!” Cornelia laughed. “You must be perfectly used to being
a sensation wherever you go, Elsie.”
“A ‘sensation’?” Elsie cried. “_I?_”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know it!”
“Cornelia, you don’t understand. Nobody was ever really nice to me at a
party before to-night in my whole life.”
At that her cousin beamed upon her. “I believe that’s what I like best
of all about you, Elsie.”
“You mean nobody ever being nice to me before?”
“No,” Cornelia laughed. “I mean your not admitting that you know it. Of
course you do know, because it’s impossible for a girl like you not to
realize the effect you have on people; but I love you for pretending you
don’t see it.”
“But it’s true,” Elsie insisted. “Until to-night nobody ever——”
“Yes, yes! Go on! It’s very becoming, and it’s what placates the other
girls so that you get both sexes in your train, you clever thing!”
“I’m not clever, though,” the visitor protested. “I’m no good at all at
pretending things. I’m not——”
“Aren’t you?” Cornelia laughed. “Well, it’s nice of you to _try_ to be
modest, then. Your thinking you ought to be is one of your charms. It
isn’t the biggest one, though. Everybody saw that one the instant you
came downstairs to-night and stood in the drawing-room doorway, just
before Father went to bring you in. It was very striking, Elsie.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“That’s right; you oughtn’t to know,” Cornelia said, seriously. “It has
to be spontaneous, I suppose, and it probably can’t be imitated or done
deliberately.”
“But I didn’t do _anything_!” Elsie cried.
“I know you didn’t; that’s just what I’m pointing out. Maybe it was
something they call ‘magnetism’; but anyhow it was more than just being
a beauty. Of course you’re _that_——”
“Nobody ever told me so; not before——”
“Nonsense!” Cornelia interrupted; then she went on: “It seemed to lie in
not only being a beauty, but in being a beauty with a kind of glow. I
don’t know just how else to express it, because it’s better than having
what they call the ‘come hither’ look. It was—well, _charm_, I suppose.
People might never notice that a beauty is a beauty if she doesn’t have
something of it. But ‘charm’ _is_ too vague to express it exactly. It
was a look as if—as if——” Cornelia hesitated, groping. “Well, I can’t
find any way to tell it except to say it was as if you knew something
mysterious and lovely about yourself. And it makes everybody else crazy
to know it, too!”
She jumped up, pointing at the clock upon the mantel. “Good heavens! And
we’ve got engagements for every minute of the next two weeks, beginning
at half-past eight to-morrow morning! Don’t bother to put those flowers
in water, Elsie; it’d only be a waste. There’ll be more to-morrow!”
“I’d like to keep these,” Elsie said. “I think I’d like to keep them
forever.”
“Dear me! Did he make that great an impression on you?”
“Who?”
“Elsie, you _are_ a hypocrite! Berthier Ney Junot Harley!”
“I didn’t even know it was he that sent them. I wanted to keep them
because they’d remind me of—of everything.”
And when Cornelia, touched by the way this was spoken, had kissed her
fondly and gone out, Elsie put the pretty bouquet in a vase of water.
Then she took one of the rosebuds from the cluster of them and pinned it
upon her breast for the night. She had liked Berthier Harley best; but
it was not on his account that she wore his rosebud through her dreams;
it was to remind her of—of everything!
She awoke early, smiling, and the bright wings of all her new fairy
memories were fluttering in her heart. Then, reflecting, she became
incredulous. Somewhere she had heard that every girl, no matter what her
looks, has one night in her life when she is beautiful. Her own night
had come at last; she could never doubt that. But what if it were the
only one?
She jumped up and ran to the mirror. No;—tousled and flushed from warm
and happy sleep, still drowsy, too, she was beautiful in the early
sunshine. She knew it, and it was true. Last night had been her night,
but it was not to be her only night;—and so, half laughing in her
delight, she nodded charmingly to this charming mirror and began to
think about what clothes to wear for the first day of her triumphant
visit. She had no serious doubt now that it would remain triumphant, and
so long as she kept upon her that glamour Cornelia had described as the
look of “knowing something mysterious and lovely” about herself, Elsie
was right not to doubt. She kept the look, and the longer she kept it,
the easier it was to keep. Her visit was all glorious.
XXV
GLAMOUR CAN BE KEPT
YOUNG Mr. Paul Reamer had been away, too, that winter. With no
profession or business to localize his attention, and a heritage
sufficient to afford him comfortable wandering, he had “tried California
for a change,” as he said; and on his return he went at once to tell
Miss Ford about Hollywood. She was not at home; but he waited;—she came
in presently, and made a satisfactory noise over him.
“To think of my not being here when you came!” she exclaimed when she
had reached a point of more subdued demonstrations. “I’d just run over
to Elsie’s for half an hour——”
“Where?”
“To Elsie’s. I spend about half my time there, I expect, and——”
“You do?” He looked puzzled and a little amused. “What for?”
“Why, everybody does,” Mamie returned, surprised. “That is, when she’s
home. She’s away a good deal of the time, you know.”
“You mean Elsie Hemingway?”
“Why, naturally. What other Elsie is there?”
“I don’t know.” He looked more puzzled and more amused. “You say,
‘everybody’ spends about half the time there?” He laughed. “That sounds
funny! What on earth’s made her house such a busy place all of a
sudden?”
“Oh, it isn’t sudden,” Mamie said, and she added, reflectively, “You
know Elsie always was about the best-_looking_ girl in town.”
“Oh, possibly. It never seemed to get anywhere though,” he returned.
“She’s good-looking all right, I suppose, but not the way anybody would
ever notice.”
“What?” Mamie cried. “Why, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I don’t?” He laughed incredulously. “Look here. What _is_ all this
about little Elsie Hemingway? When I left town——”
Miss Ford interrupted: “Have you seen old Fred yet?”
“No. I haven’t seen anybody.”
“Well, you’d better see old Fred and ask him ‘What _is_ all this about
little Elsie Hemingway?’ He’ll probably fall in your arms and burst
right out crying!”
“What for?”
“Why, for the same reason some of the others would do the same thing!”
Paul shook his head. “I don’t think it’s friendly to try to fill me up
with fairy stories, Mamie—not just the first minute after I’ve come
home anyhow. When I went away——”
“Oh, there’ve been lots of changes,” Miss Ford assured him. “You’ll have
to get used to ’em. We’ve been used to the change about Elsie so long
now I suppose we hardly realize there _was_ a change. I guess what
happened was that we never used to appreciate her, and she had a way of
not seeming to feel she counted much, herself; but now we’ve got a
little older and have more sense, or something, and we all see what a
wonderful girl she is. You ought to hear old Fred! When he gets
started—well, of course, I think she’s great myself, but after I’ve
listened to poor old Fred’s babble for a couple of hours I almost hate
her!”
Again Mr. Reamer shook his head. “It doesn’t seem to me my hearing’s
exactly right. Are you really telling me——”
“You better go see,” Mamie advised him. “Oh, you’ll get it, too! You
think you won’t, but you will. You’ll get it as bad as any of ’em, Paul
Reamer.”
The experienced young man laughed in sheerest incredulity; but that
evening, his curiosity being somewhat piquantly aroused, he acted upon
Miss Ford’s advice and went to find out if it could possibly be true
that he had overlooked anything important in so long overlooking Elsie
Hemingway. It didn’t seem probable, but if it proved to be the fact, he
was somewhat amusedly prepared to make good to himself what he had lost
by the overlooking.
The moment he saw her, when she came into the old-fashioned living-room
of the quiet house that had once been too quiet, he understood that he
had much more to repay himself for than he had dreamed could be
possible. Elsie’s look of knowing something mysterious and lovely about
herself was still upon her; and Mr. Reamer set himself ardently and
instantly to the task of self-repayment.
“Elsie,” he said, “I’ve been away for a long, dreary time, and I’ve just
got back. I’ve come to spend my very first evening with you.”
He was too late.
Following Elsie from the library, where the three had been having coffee
and discussing the Battle of Waterloo, came two gentlemen. One was
Elsie’s father, and he walked with his hand upon the other gentleman’s
shoulder.
The other gentleman was a tall young man from out of town who had been
named for two marshals and a general of the First Empire.
XXVI
DESERT SAND
WE SPEAK now of that parent-troubling daughter of Mrs. Dodge’s as she
came to be through weltering experience, most of it hurried and all of
it crowded. For do we not know that there are maidens of twenty-three
who have already lived a lifetime? Such is their own testimony. They
have had a view of all the world can offer, and foresee the rest of
their existence as mere repetition, not stirring to the emotions. Life
henceforth is to be but “drab,” they say, several decades of them having
strongly favoured the word; and this mood, often lasting for days at a
time, usually follows one form or another of amatory anticlimax. Not
infrequently the anticlimax is within the maiden herself; she finds
herself lacking in certain supremities of feeling that appear not only
proper but necessary, if the sentimental passions are to be taken at all
seriously.
“It is all over—I shall never care for any man—I shall never marry—I
shall never feel anything about anything again,” such a one wrote to a
girl confidant abroad, and fully believed what she wrote. “I am tired of
everything,” she continued. “I am all dead within me. I look at things,
but I do not see them. I see nothing—nothing absolutely!”
And yet at that very moment, as she glanced absently out of the window
beside her pretty green-painted desk, her attention became concentrated
upon a young man passing along the suburban boulevard below. He was a
stranger, but a modish and comely one; she could not accurately call him
“nothing,” nor maintain that he was invisible;—her eyes followed him,
in fact, until he had passed out of the range of her window. Then, with
perfect confidence that she set forth the truth, she turned back to her
letter and continued:
“I cannot by the farthest stretch of my imagination picture
myself as feeling the least, the slightest—oh, the most
infinitesimal!—featherweight of interest in any man again so
long as my life shall last. I broke my engagement last night
simply on that account. It was not in the most formal sense an
engagement, since it hadn’t been announced; but Henry made as
much fuss as if I had turned back at the altar. He was frantic,
especially as I could give him no reason except that I did not
feel for him what I had expected to. He begged and begged to
know what he had done to change me. I could only tell him he had
done nothing. I had simply become incapable of caring. I think
now that I fell in love too often and too intensely in my
younger days. My ‘grand passion’ came too soon and since then I
have cared less and less each time that I have fancied my
interest intrigued. The absurd boy was my Sun-god—and yet I see
now that he is and always was a ridiculous person, and I laugh
when I remember how I glorified him to myself. He meant nothing.
Price Gleason meant nothing. Laurence Grover, Paul Arthur, Capt.
Williams, and all the others meant nothing. Henry, so long and
tediously a pursuer, means nothing now. None of them mean
anything. The spring has gone dry and my heart, that bloomed
once so eagerly, is desert sand—desert sand, my dear!”
She was rather pleased with this bit of metaphor and read it over aloud,
speaking the words lingeringly. Upon the wall beyond the pretty desk
there was a mirror facing her; she could see herself when she chose, and
she chose to see herself now in her mood of poetic melancholy. She saw a
winsome picture in that mirror, too, when she made this choice—an
exquisitely fair, delicate creature, slim, though not so fragile as she
had been, and, in spite of her heart of desert sand, all alive indeed.
Probably induced by pleasure in the metaphor just written, the young
lady in the glass was at the moment more sparkling, in fact, than seemed
suitable. Therefore, her face became poignantly wistful—an effect so
excellent that a surprised approbation was added, a little
incongruously, to the wistfulness. The approbation was removed in favour
of an inscrutable pathos, which continued throughout a long exchange of
looks between the image and its original; then both of these little
blonde heads bent once more above their green-painted desks, in a
charmingly concerted action, like two glints of sunshine glancing down
through foliage;—and the letter was resumed.
“My dear, our suburb is trembling with excitement. The chief
scion of all the McArdles is on the point of being Installed in
Residence among us. I think it should be spoken of as at least
an Installation, shouldn’t it? In our great Plutocracy, surely
the McArdle dynasty is Royalty, isn’t it? Anyhow, you’d think so
if you could see the excitement over the announcement that James
Herbert McArdle, III, is coming here to represent the dynasty’s
interests. That is, he’s supposed to be the new manager of the
huge McArdle Works, which are the smallest, I believe, of the
dozens of McArdle Works over the country. I understand he’s only
to be nominal manager and is really to ‘learn the business’
under old Mr. Hiram Huston, the McArdles’ trusted ‘local
representative.’ The youthful Dauphin is given command of an
army—but under the advice of old generals strictly! However,
you can guess what a spasm is happening here, with seventy
million dollars (or is it seven hundred million?) walking around
under one hat. I feel sorry for the poor agitated girls and
their poor agitating mothers. The rich marry the rich; _we_
sha’n’t get him!”
She looked up thoughtfully at the mirror, frowned in sharp
disapproval—not of the mirror—and continued: “It’s really disgusting,
the manœuvring to be the first to meet and annex him. Eleanor Gray and
her mother are accused of having gone to New York to try to be on the
same train with him! Yesterday there was a rumour that he had arrived at
the Jefferson Road Inn, which is to be his temporary quarters, and the
story went all round that Harriet Joyce thought she recognized him there
at tea and actually fainted away in order to make him notice her. My
dear, I _believe_ it! Really, you simply couldn’t imagine the things
that are going on. As for me, it is the piteous truth that this
stupendous advent fails to stir me. I wish it could! But no, upon my
life, I haven’t a flicker—not the faintest flicker of ordinary human
curiosity to know even if he looks like his tiresome pictures. These
curiosities, these stirrings are for the springtime of life, my dear,
while I—as I told poor Henry last night—I am autumn!”
Thus wrote Lily that most April-like of all maidens and within the hour
went forth, looking like the very spring itself, to meet an adventure
comparable to adventures met only in the springtime of the world. The
scene of this adventure should have been a wood near Camelot, or the
Forest of Arden, and Lily a young huntress in a leathern kirtle and out
with a gilded bow and painted arrows for hare or pheasant. Then, if one
of her arrows had pierced the thicket and also the King’s Son on the
other side of it, so that she came and took him, all swounding, in her
arms, the same thing in all true essentials would have happened that
happened to her to-day. The surroundings would have been more
appropriate—especially for a damsel with a dead heart—than the golf
course of the Blue Hills Country Club, but the hero and the heroine and
the wounding and the swounding would have been identical.
In particular, there was little difference between James Herbert McArdle
and a king’s son. From the time of his birth, which was announced by
greater tongues than those of royal heralds, these greater tongues being
the principal newspapers of the world, he was a public figure. At the
age of four his likeness and those of his favourite goat and dog were
made known to his fellow citizens up and down the land by means of
photographic reproductions in magazines and in the Sunday prints. Lest
there be fear on the part of the public that he might alter beyond
recognition as he grew up, these magazines and prints continued
reassuringly to present portraits of him, playing in the sea sand, or
seated upon the knee of his portentous grandfather, or—with tutor and
attendants—upon the platform of his father’s private car, and later,
when he reached a proper age, being instructed in the technique
necessary for driving his earliest automobile.
His first evening after matriculating as a freshman at a university was
spent in dining and conversing with the university’s president. When, as
a sophomore, he was found equal to a position in “left field” on the
varsity nine, and the nine went out of town to play, reporters
interviewed him and neglected to mention the captain. When he had
graduated and his father and grandfather began to prepare him for the
ponderous responsibilities that would some day rest upon his shoulders,
there were spreading “feature articles” about him everywhere. Wherever
he went, important old men hurried beamingly to his side, eager to be
seen conversing with him; magnificent old ladies went beyond all
amiability in caressing him; many of his contemporaries were unable to
veil their deference; and lovely girls looked plentifully toward him.
All his life he had been courted, attended, served, pointed out,
focussed upon, stared at, and lime-lighted before the multitude. No
wonder the poor young man liked solitude better than anything else!
When he contrived to be alone he protracted the experience as far as he
was able; and to-day, having escaped from a welcoming committee and the
mayor of the suburb that was to be his home for a year, he drove alone
to the country club, which had already elected him to membership. Here
he was delighted to find that the late hour and nipping air had divested
the links of every player, and, attended by a lingering caddy who was
unaware of his client’s identity, James Herbert set forth upon a round
of the course with a leisureliness unmatched by the most elderly member
of the club.
It was a leisureliness so extreme indeed that it annoyed a player who
arrived in full equipment a quarter of an hour after young Mr. McArdle
had made his first drive on that course. Her equipment was too complete
to please her, as it happened, for he had taken the last caddy, which
was another item in her list of indignations;—Lily had found time to
acquire such a list since finishing her letter. Most of the items
concerned that unfortunate Henry, mentioned as having been dismissed on
the previous evening. Henry had called; had been turned away at the door
with “Not at home”; and then, by an unworthy pretext—though his
lamentable state of mind might have offered some excuse—he had secured
her presence at the telephone, where merely what he said to her was
furniture enough for any ordinary list of indignations. She decided to
cool her temper by a solitary but vigorous round of the golf course.
Lily was one of those favoured creatures who have a genius for this most
inviting yet most baffling of all the pastimes of mankind; and
persistence had added so much to her native gift that a long shelf at
home was needed to support the tournament prizes she had won. Various
“ladies’ championships” were hers, too; and she was known among all the
country clubs for miles around on account of a special talent, well
practised, for marvellous little precisions of accuracy. Moreover, Lily
was what players have been heard to call “conscientious” about her game.
She wished ever to excel herself, to play excellently even when she
played alone, and she was never quite at her best when she had no caddy;
therefore she was annoyed with the gentleman ahead of her on that
account, as well as because of his leisure.
If she could play “all the way round” with a fine score before darkness
stopped her, Lily felt that her irritations within might be a little
soothed; but she found them, on the contrary, increasing. She might have
passed the laggard player if she had chosen; but his figure bore an
accurate resemblance to that of a gentleman named in her letter as
Captain Williams. Lily had her own reasons for avoiding any conversation
with Captain Williams, to whom she had been as enigmatic, six months
earlier, as she had yesterday been to Henry. She was almost certain, in
fact, that the languid golfer was Captain Williams, and so kept far
behind him—a difficult matter for one who wished to play at all.
She talked broodingly to herself, addressing him. “Old _Thing_!” she
called him between her teeth. “Slow Poke! Aren’t you _ever_ going to hit
that ball! Oh, my heaven, what are you doing _now_? Writing your score
or writing a book? Snail! Tortoise!” And as his procrastinations
continued, she called him worse. “Mule!” she said, and corroborated
herself vehemently. “Mule, mule, mule! You’re a mule once, you’re a mule
twice, you’re a mule a hundred and eighty-seven times over—and that’s
only _commencing_ to tell you what you are!” For now, as she waited and
waited, withholding her strokes intolerably as the late light waned and
waned, she hated him with that great hatred most human beings feel for
all things unconsciously and persistently in their way.
But in the deepening twilight haze she felt safe to approach him more
closely, until finally she was less than an arrow’s flight away. He was
upon the last of the greens by this time, and she, unnoticed, stood
waiting for him to leave it so that she might drive her ball upon it.
But here he delayed interminably. He lay prone upon the ground to study
a proper aim, though he studied it so long that his purpose might have
been thought a siesta; and when he rose it was to examine the sod by
inches. Finally, having completed all these preliminaries and benefited
little by them in their consummation, he remained standing upon the
green, preoccupied with his score card. “You go on!” Lily said,
dangerously. “You aren’t writing a dictionary. Go on!”
But he continued to stand, amending and editing his card as though
eternity were at everyone’s disposal. The long red ribbons in the
western sky merged with the general fog colour of the dusk, and he was
but a hazy figure when at last he moved. And as he turned his back and
lifted a slow foot to leave the green, Lily, impatient beyond all
discretion, cut the air with her heaviest implement.
“Mule!” she said, furiously, instead of “Fore!” and put that fury into
her swing. Nevertheless, the ball sped true in direction, though in the
thickened air it sped invisibly and would far have overshot the mark if
nothing had stopped it. Straight to the short dark hair on the back of
the languid player’s head the little white ball flew with fiercest
precision, and being hard, and on its way to a place much farther on, it
straightway rendered him more languid than ever. He dropped without a
moan.
XXVII
MIRACULOUS ACCIDENT
“OH, MURDER!” Lily gasped, not greatly exaggerating when she used that
word. She stood gazing toward him miserably, waiting for him to rise;
and then, as the stricken player’s inertia remained complete, she ran
forward, screaming to the caddy, who was disappearing toward the
clubhouse.
He came back, and together they turned the prone figure over so that it
lay upon its back, revealing an interesting young face of a disquieting
pallor. “I guess you must of killed him _this_ time,” the caddy said,
unreasonably, and then seemed to wish to solace the assassin, for he
added: “He ain’t a member though.”
Lily was already on the ground beside her victim, rubbing his hands.
“Run!” she cried. “Get a doctor! Run!”
She failed to recognize the fallen player, and so did the steward and
three waiters from the clubhouse, which was just then vacant of members.
James Herbert McArdle’s features were not so well known as those of the
President of the United States, nor, probably, as those of the more
conspicuous actors in moving pictures;—nevertheless, his face was
familiar to those who now sought to identify it; and as they worked to
restore the expression of life to it they were aware of elusive clews.
The steward said he was sure he knew the gentleman, who must often have
been about the club, though he couldn’t quite place him. The waiters had
the same impression and the same disability precisely, while the
trembling Lily herself was troubled by stirrings of memory. Either she
had once known her victim, she thought, or else he was like someone she
knew; but a white face inanimate, upturned to the evening sky, is
strange even to those who know it most intimately. The likeness remained
evasive, and the prostrate young man both unconscious and unidentified.
Lily was relieved of her first horror;—at least he was not dead. On the
other hand, certainly he was not well. And when she drove that ball she
had hated him. Of course she had not intended this dolorous stroke, yet
when she made it, had she really cared whether or not it laid him low?
She had not—and now regret shook her. Perhaps she would have felt it
less profoundly had the maddening player proved indeed to be Captain
Williams; but with the lifeless head of this well-favoured and
unoffending stranger upon her lap, her remorse was an anguish.
She would not leave him or cease to do what she could in every humble
way. She chafed his hands and bathed his forehead;—she helped to carry
him to the clubhouse; and, when the hospital ambulance came, she went in
it to the hospital with him. She stood in the corridor outside the door
of the room to which they carried him there, and waited while a surgeon
examined him. Indeed, she waited, weeping.
She knew the surgeon, and when he came out of the room she rushed to
him. “Doctor Waite, tell me! Don’t spare me!”
“He’s got a concussion. It’s no joke, but anyhow it isn’t a fracture.
Funny about nobody knowing who he is;—I’m sure I’ve met him, or else he
reminds me of somebody, I can’t think who.”
“Doctor, he isn’t—he isn’t going to——”
The surgeon looked upon her reassuringly. “No. We’ll pull him through.
You quit thinking about him and go home and get your dinner and then go
to bed and go to sleep.”
“I couldn’t,” Lily said, choking. “I couldn’t do any of those things.”
He laughed sympathetically. “Then I guess I’ll have to call up your
mother and tell her to come and make you.”
But when not only her mother but her father, too, arrived in hurried
response to the telephone, they could not get the tearful Lily to leave
the hospital; and they remained with her, engaging in intermittent
argument, until midnight. At that time Doctor Waite informed them that
the unknown patient was in a torpid but not critical condition; he had
mumbled a few words to the effect that he wanted to be let alone.
“And as that’s just what we’re doing with him,” the surgeon said to Lily
rather sharply, “and as you can’t do any possible good to anybody in the
world by staying here, I suggest that you take his advice, too, and obey
your father and mother.”
Not until then would the suffering girl allow them to lead her away; but
so far as sleep was concerned, she might as well have stayed at the
hospital. So might her father and mother, almost; for she was at their
door in her nightdress three times—three separated times, the last
being at four o’clock in the morning. “Papa, do _you_ think he’ll die?”
Mrs. Dodge wearily conducted her to bed again; but Lily only wept upon
her pillow, and in whispers begged it to forgive her for not calling
“Fore.” Sunrise found her dressed; and in the chilly November early
morning she slipped out of the house, crossed the suburban park to the
hospital, and immediately heard news indeed. Doctor Waite was already
there, and with him were three other surgeons and a physician, all of
them important. He came to speak to Lily.
“All this distinguishedness for your unknown patient,” he said, with a
gesture toward the group he had just left; and, as her expression began
to be grievous, he added hastily, “He’s perfectly all right. At least
he’s going to be. The importance yonder is only because he turns out to
be so unexpectedly important himself.”
“You’ve found out who he is?”
“Some_what_!” he returned with humorous emphasis. “We’ve managed to keep
your name out of the papers—so far.”
“What papers?”
“All of them. Take your choice,” he said—and he offered her two; but
one at a time was enough for Lily.
Headlines announced that a “Mysterious Accident” at the Blue Hills
Country Club had “resulted in grave injury” to James Herbert McArdle.
The illustrious youth had lain unconscious and unrecognized until a
short time after midnight, the more sober text of the report informed
her. Mr. H. H. Huston, the McArdle representative, had been alarmed by
Mr. McArdle’s disappearance and continued absence, subsequent to the
reception of an address by the suburban welcoming committee, and in the
course of an exhaustive search Mr. Huston had caused inquiries to be
made at the Blue Hills Country Club. Here it was learned that an unknown
gentleman had been struck in the head by a golf ball driven with such
force as to cause a concussion of the brain. The club’s employees had
withheld the name of the person responsible for the injury; but a
reporter had ascertained that it was a lady and that she had accompanied
the wounded man—“wounded man” was the newspaper’s phrase—in the
ambulance, and had “insisted upon remaining at the hospital until a late
hour.” Mr. H. H. Huston had reached the hospital not long after
midnight; Mr. McArdle had just become conscious and revealed his
identity to the nurse in charge. Mr. Huston had said to a reporter that
Mr. McArdle “positively declared himself ignorant of the name of the
person who had caused his injury.” Altogether, there was “an air of
mystery about the affair”; and Mr. McArdle’s condition was still grave,
though the surgeons said that he would “probably recover.”
It is to Lily’s credit that the strongest emotion roused in her by this
reading concerned these final two words. She repeated them pathetically
to Doctor Waite. “‘Probably recover’? ‘Probably’?”
He laughed. “Don’t you know newspapers? Didn’t I tell you last night
he’d be all right? We wired his family an hour ago that there was no
reason for any of them to come on. All that surgical and medical
impressiveness over yonder only represents old Hiram Huston’s idea of
the right thing to do for a McArdle with a bump on his head. The young
fellow may have to stay here quietly for a week or ten days possibly;
but by that time he ought to be pretty nearly ready to stop a ball for
you again.”
“Don’t joke about it,” Lily said, huskily. “When can I see him?”
“Think you better?”
“Why not?”
“The newspapers called it a ‘mystery,’ you know,” he explained. “They’ll
probably be inquisitive. They might get your name.”
“What do I care?” she cried. “Do you think I’d let that stop me from
asking him to forgive me?”
“So?” the doctor said, looking at her twinklingly. “So that’s why you
want to see him?”
She stared, not understanding his humorous allusion. “Why, what else
could I do?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “I was only thinking I’d heard that a good many
young ladies were anxious to make his acquaintance. I imagine you’ll be
the first, my dear.”
“Well, oughtn’t I to be?” she demanded. “If you’d done as terrible a
thing as that to anybody, wouldn’t you think you were entitled to ask
his pardon about as soon as he was able to listen?”
“Without doubt. In the meantime I think you’d better go home and to bed
again.”
She protested, but proved meeker under advice than she had the night
before. She went home, though not directly, for she stopped half an hour
at some greenhouses that were a mile out of her way. She sent to Mr.
James Herbert McArdle at the hospital a prodigious sheaf of
flowers—enough to cripple her rather moderate monthly allowance from
her father—and the following morning, since the allowance was already
so far gone, she did the same thing. Having thus fallen into the habit,
she was as lavish upon the third morning after the accident, so that at
three o’clock of this same day, when Doctor Waite took her into his
patient’s room, he seemed to be conducting her into a conservatory.
Like fair Elaine, James Herbert McArdle in a silken gown lay white and
motionless, embowered among blooms; but his eyes glimmered in surprised
appreciation when they beheld his serious visitor. Gray was becoming to
the fair and slim Lily—her clothes didn’t depend upon her
allowance—and she was never more charming than when she was serious.
“My goodness!” said the frank convalescent, with a feeble kind of
forcefulness. “I didn’t expect anybody like _you_! I was sure it would
turn out to be some old hag.”
Lily was a little given to the theatrical, though only when occasion
warranted it, as this one did if any occasion could. She swept forward
softly, her sensitive face all compassion and remorse. She knelt beside
the iron bed.
“Some day you may forgive me,” she said, tremulously, and her voice was
always stirringly lovely when it trembled. “Some day you may be able
even to forget what I’ve done to you—but I want you to be sure that I
shall never forget it or forgive myself.”
“Here!” he said. “There’s nothing to that. They tell me you came in the
ambulance with me and hung around and did all sorts of things. And look
at all these greenhouses you must have bought out! A person’s liable to
get a clip on the head almost anywhere these days. Let’s shake
hands—but not forget it.”
“You can’t——”
“I haven’t got anything to forgive you for, of course,” he said. “You
don’t forgive accidents; you just forget ’em. What I mean is, I don’t
want to forget this one—now I’ve seen you, I don’t.”
“Well——” Lily said, vaguely. “But I’d like you just to _say_ you
forgive me. Won’t you?”
“All right.” He moved his hand toward her and she took it for a moment.
“I forgive you—but I think you ought to do something for me.”
“What?”
“How long did the doctor say you can stay here?”
“Five or ten minutes.”
“Well, then, I think you ought to come back to-morrow when you can stay
half an hour or an hour.”
“I will,” she said.
But he had not finished. “And the next day, too. Maybe they’d let you
read to me, or something. And as long as I’m laid up here—it won’t be
long, at that—I think you ought to come every day and help me pass the
time. I forgive you, but I think you do owe me that much. And as soon as
they let me take a drive I think you ought to go along. How about it?”
“I will,” Lily said. “I will, indeed. I’ll do anything in the world you
think might make up a little for the pain I’ve brought you. Nothing
could make me happier.”
“That’s good news,” the young man told her, thoughtfully. “A clip on the
head isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, after all.”
More and more he seemed to incline to this opinion;—in fact, he went so
far as to assure Doctor Waite, three days later, that he preferred the
hospital to the apartment old Hiram Huston was preparing for him. “I
think I’d like to sort of settle down to the life here,” he said. “It’s
nice and private and suits me exactly.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, thoughtfully. “It’s a pity you’re too important
to do what you want to.” And lightly, as if to himself, he hummed a
fragment of frivolous song:
“I don’t want to get well,
I don’t want to get well,
I’m in love with a beautiful nurse!”
The young man heeded neither the humming nor the remark about his
unfortunate importance. He frowned, looking anxiously at his watch on
the table beside his couch. “I wonder what’s keeping her,” he said,
peevishly. “She said she’d be here with a book to read to me. When
anybody does to another person what she did to me, I think the least
they can do is to be punctual, especially when they’ve promised they
would.”
She of whom he complained was not far away, however. At that moment she
had just been greeted and detained by two girl friends of hers who
encountered her in the park on her way to the hospital. Their manner did
not please her.
“Lill-_lee_!” they shouted from the distance, at sight of her. They
whistled shrilly, and, as she looked toward them, they waved their arms
at her; then came running, visibly excited and audibly uproarious.
They seemed to be bursting with laughter; yet when they reached her,
what they said was only, “Where you _going_, Lily?” And before she
replied, they clutched each other, perishing of their mutual jocularity.
From the first, Lily did not like their laughter;—it had not the sound
of true mirth, but was the kind of mere vocal noise that hints of
girlish malice.
She looked at them disapprovingly. “I’m going to the hospital,” she said
with some primness. “What’s so funny?”
“What you going to _do_ at the hospital, Lily?”
“Read to Mr. McArdle,” she replied. “He’s better and——”
But their immediate uproar cut her short. They clung together,
shrieking. “That’s not _your_ fault, _is_ it, Lily?” one of them became
coherent enough to inquire, whereupon they both doubled themselves,
rocked, gurgled, screamed, and clung again.
“What’s not my fault?” she asked.
“That he’s better!”
With that, they moved to be upon their way, still uproarious, still
clutching each other; and as they went they looked back to shout at her.
“He won’t get better very fast, will he, Lily?” one of them thus called
back to her, and, without pausing, replied to herself: “Not if you have
_your_ way!”
And the other: “Eleanor Gray and Harriet Joyce have nothing on _you_,
have they, Lily?”
They disappeared round a curving path, leaning upon each other from
exhaustion; and Lily stood looking after them frowningly. There had been
little good-nature in their raillery, and also there were mysterious and
vaguely unpleasant implications in it—particularly in the final jibe
about Eleanor Gray and Harriet Joyce. Miss Gray was the girl accused by
rumour of having sought to put herself upon James Herbert McArdle’s
train, and Miss Joyce was widely supposed to have fainted with the
deliberate purpose of attracting his attention. The implication of the
mirthful pair just encountered that Lily surpassed both Miss Gray and
Miss Joyce was plain enough—as if going to a hospital to read to a
patient were a mere manœuvre of the type to which the Gray and Joyce
manœuvres belonged! And as if one wouldn’t gladly give a little of one’s
time to a hospital patient who has become a patient through one’s own
fault! But more than mere rallying upon the hospital readings seemed to
have been implied; and as Lily thought the matter over, she felt that
something of the teasing pair’s meaning evaded her.
She had the same feeling after an interview the next day with one of her
nearest and dearest girl friends, who came to see her at home. “I don’t
want to be intrusive, dear,” the caller informed her, with sympathetic
but rather eager gravity. “You know me too well to believe I’d ask such
a thing out of pure curiosity; but I’ve simply _got_ to know how poor
Henry Burnett is taking it.”
“Taking what, Emma?”
“Lily! You know what I mean. I mean all this about you and Mr. McArdle.”
“‘All this’?” Lily repeated in a tone of cold inquiry. “I don’t see that
such a simple matter needs quite that sort of definition. Naturally, I’m
doing what I can to help him through his convalescence. Oughtn’t I to?
But perhaps you don’t know that I’m responsible for his _being_ in the
hospital, Emma.”
“Oh, yes,” Emma said, quietly, and she gave her friend a queer look.
“Yes, everybody knows that, Lily,” she went on in a thoughtful voice.
“Everybody! Yes, indeed!” She paused, then reverted to her former topic.
“I just wondered how poor Henry Burnett is taking it all.”
“I haven’t any idea what you mean,” Lily said, impatiently. “I fail to
see that there’s anything for him to ‘take’; and if there were, it would
certainly be no affair of his. I have no responsibilities to Mr.
Burnett.”
“But you did! Weren’t you almost——”
“That may be,” Lily interrupted. “But I don’t see him any more.”
“You broke with him, Lily?”
“I did not, because there was nothing absolutely announced and definite
to break. I simply decided not to waste any more of his time and mine.”
“Why?” Emma asked.
“Because I found that I had no feeling for him; none for him nor for
anything else—no interest in him or in any other man alive.”
“Oh, Lily!” Emma cried; and then she sat open-mouthed and round-eyed,
staring in perfect incredulity. “Oh, _Lily_!”
“What’s the matter?”
Emma still stared; but finally, being a true friend, she half gasped,
“Nothing!” as she rose to go.
She was still round of eye, though her mouth had become decorous for a
street appearance, when she left the house a few moments later; and Lily
was not much better pleased with her friend Emma than she had been with
the two taunting girls in the park.
Nor were these three the sum of all who displeased her. She went to a
“tea,” and easily perceived that she became instantly the centre of all
interest;—but she did not like the interest. Whispering and
half-suppressed laughter buzzed about her; eyes were furtively upon her
wherever she glanced; elderly women looked at her and talked behind
their hands; and she was uncomfortably aware of a wondering derision
focussing constantly upon her. She came away shivering, marvelling at
the pettiness of human nature that could make such a disagreeable pother
over a girl’s doing her simple best to atone for a moment’s carelessness
with a golf club. Moreover, before she got out of the gate she found
herself surrounded by a group of newcomers, girls of her own age, who
repeated almost precisely the performance of the two in the park. “How
long do you think you can keep his head from fitting together where you
broke it, Lily?” This was the last thing she heard from the group near
the gate, except for a loud burst of unfriendly laughter. She began to
be seriously indignant.
XXVIII
A PUBLIC MOCKERY
NOT MUCH time was granted her indignation to cool;—it became outright
fury not twenty-four hours later; and the occasion of this change for
the worse was a spectacular little performance on the part of the
gentleman for whom her emotions had forever ceased to stir—that unhappy
Henry so recently dismissed. And since Henry’s performance took place
“in public,” according to Lily’s definition of its background, her fury
was multiplied in intensity by a number corresponding to the number of
witnesses present at the spectacle.
One of these was Mr. James Herbert McArdle, who was seated beside her at
the time. She was accompanying him for a drive, as she had promised him;
and his choice for the excursion had been an open red car, noticeable
also in contour and dimensions. The top was folded back, so that Lily
and her escort, both richly shrouded in furs, presented to the world a
fast-flying sketch of affluent luxury. A fleeting glimpse of beauty
might be caught there, too; for Lily’s colour was high, and sunshine
glinted in her hair; amber lights danced from it and blue sparklings
from her eyes as she sped by.
At one point, however, the fast-flying sketch ceased to fly, and halted,
affording spectators more leisure for observation; but this, as
presently appeared, was just the wrong point for such a thing to happen.
The red car, returning from the open country, passed into the suburban
outskirts, and Mr. McArdle directed the chauffeur to turn into the
country club driveway. “I’ve got a fancy to see where our friendship
began,” he said to Lily. “I noticed the last green was near the
driveway. Let’s go look at it.”
She assented, and they drove to the spot that interested him; but they
found it inhabited. A score or so of people were there, watching the
conclusion of a match evidently of some special interest as an
exhibition of proficiency. When the red car stopped, the last shot into
the cup was in the final crisis of action, and a popular triumph was
thereby attained, as the spectators made plain. They instantly raised a
loud shout, acclaiming the successful player, cheering him and rushing
forward to shake his hand; though he, himself, seemed far from elated.
On the contrary, there gleamed a bitter spark in his eye, and his
appearance, though manly, was one of so dark a melancholy that he might
have been thought an athletic and Americanized Hamlet. Not speaking, he
waved the enthusiasts away, tossed his club to his caddy and turned to
leave the green; but, as he did so, his glance fell upon the red car in
the driveway near by. He halted, stock-still, while a thrilled murmur
was heard rustling among the bystanders. Everybody stared at Lily, at
her companion, and at the morbid winner of the golf match. There was a
moment of potent silence.
Then the sombre player advanced a step toward Lily and, looking her full
in the eye, took off his cap and swept the ground with it before her in
mocking salutation—derisive humility before satirized greatness.
A startled but delighted “_Oh!_” came from among the people about the
green. They began to buzz, and silvery giggles were heard.
Lily’s eyes shot icy fire at the bowing harlequin. “Tell the driver to
go _on_,” she said to McArdle.
“Who was that fellow?” he asked her, as they drove away. “I had a notion
to get out and see if I couldn’t make him bow even a little lower.”
“No, no,” she said, hastily. “You shouldn’t have. You aren’t well
enough, and, besides, he’s only a ruffian.”
“But who is he?”
“I’ve just told you,” she said, fiercely. “He’s a ruffian. His name is
Henry Burnett, if you want something to go with the definition of him
I’ve just given you.”
“But what did he do it for? What made him bow like that?”
“Because he _is_ a ruffian!” Lily said. Her eyes were not less fiery
than they had been, and neither were her checks. “I believe I never knew
what it was to hate anybody before,” she went on in a low voice. “When
I’ve thought I hated people it must have been just dislike. I’m sure
I’ve never known what it was to hate anybody as he’s just made me hate
him.”
“But see here!” Young Mr. McArdle was disquieted. “What’s it all about?
Telling me he’s a ruffian doesn’t explain it. What made him do it?”
“This,” Lily said between her teeth. “For a while I thought I cared a
little about him—not much but some—enough to let him know I thought
so. Well, I found I didn’t.”
“How’d you find it out?” he asked.
“I discovered that I was absolutely indifferent to him, and that nothing
he could ever do would have the slightest power to make me feel anything
whatever. I told him so in the gentlest way I could, and since then he’s
behaved like the brute that he is.”
“But is it true?”
“Is what true?” she asked, sharply.
“I mean,” he said, “is it true you’re indifferent to him?”
“Good heavens!” she cried, with the utmost bitterness. “Don’t you see
that I hate him so that I’d like to wring his neck? I would!” she cried,
fiercely. “I could almost _do_ it, too, if I were alone with him for a
few minutes!” And she held up to his view her slender white-gloved
hands, with her fingers curved as for the fatal performance.
Mr. McArdle seemed to be relieved. “Well, I guess it’s all right,” he
said. “That is, if you’re sure you don’t like him.” Then as she turned
angrily upon him, he added hurriedly, “And I see you don’t. I’m sure you
don’t.” He laughed with a slight hint of complacency not unnatural in an
important and well-petted invalid. “I think you kind of owe it to me not
to go around liking other men from now on. I mean—well, you know how
I’m getting to feel about you, I guess.”
Lily sat staring straight forward at the chauffeur’s back, though that
was not what she saw. What she saw was the tall young man of the tragic
face, mocking her before delighted onlookers. “I know what I feel about
_him_!” she said, too preoccupied with her fury to listen well to her
companion.
“I’m glad you do,” he said, earnestly. “I wouldn’t like to feel you were
thinking much about anybody but me. Of course I know you’ve been giving
me a good deal of your time; but the fact is, I’ll want you to give me
even more of it, especially the next week or so—before my mother comes
out to visit me. Will you?”
As she did not answer, but still gazed fiercely at the chauffeur’s back,
he repeated, “Will you?”
“I could!” she said; but this was evidently not a reply to his question,
for she again held up her curved fingers to view. “I could, and I would!
If I were left alone with him for five minutes I _know_ I would!”
“Let’s forget him just now,” young Mr. McArdle suggested. “I was telling
you about my mother’s coming out here to visit me in a week or so. My
family’s really pretty terrible about keeping tabs on me, you know—I
mean, for fear I’ll get engaged to anybody except my second cousin Lulu.
She’s one of the female branch of the family, you know, that married
into the banks, and of course they all feel it ought to be kept
together, and Lulu would be a great advantage. But she’s homely as sin,
and, so far, they’ve had a pretty hard time persuading me. You
understand, don’t you?”
“What?” Lily asked, vaguely. Then she drew a deep breath, clenched her
curved fingers tightly upon the fur rug and said virulently to herself:
“I could do it and sing for joy that I _had_ done it!” However, in the
ears of her companion this was only an indistinct murmur.
“I mean I suppose you understand about the family and all that,” he
said. “My mother’s bound to interfere, of course. If you and I expect to
see much of each other after she comes, we’ll have a fight on our hands,
because, of course, the family won’t stand for my getting too interested
in anybody out here. Naturally, they don’t expect me not to have a good
time; but you know what I mean;—they wouldn’t stand for my getting
serious, I mean.”
He was serious enough just then, however; that was plain. His voice was
almost quaveringly plaintive, in fact, as he leaned toward her. “Lily,”
he said, “I expect my mother would like you all right if you were my
cousin Lulu, or somebody in Lulu’s position; but the way things
are—well, of course she isn’t going to. She’s going to make an awful
fuss if I try to go about with you at all. But I’m willing to buck up to
her and see if we can’t pull it off anyhow. Honestly, I am. How about
it?”
“What?” she said, absently, still looking forward and not at him. “What
did you say?”
“My goodness!” he exclaimed, blankly. “I don’t believe you were even
_listening_!”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t.”
At that, a natural resentment deepened the colour in this important
young man’s cheeks. “Well, I should think it might be considered worth
your while,” he said. “I don’t put too much on being James Herbert
McArdle, Third, I believe; but at least I might claim it isn’t a thing
that happens every day in the world, exactly—my asking a girl to marry
me, I mean.”
She turned to him, frowning. “Was that what you were doing?”
“I was telling you I hoped to make a try for it,” he explained a little
querulously. “When my mother comes and hears about this she’ll send for
my father probably and there’ll be a big fuss—more than you could have
any idea of until you really hear it. But I never took to any girl as
much as I’ve taken to you, never in my life.” Here his querulousness
gave way to another feeling and his voice softened. “I’m ready to buck
up to the whole crew of ’em for your sake, Lily. What about it?”
She looked at him blankly. “I don’t know,” she said.
“What?” he cried. “Don’t you understand? I’m asking you to _marry_ me!”
“Yes,” she said. “I hear you say it; but so far as I’m concerned you
might almost as well be telling me it’s a pleasant day! I’m not in the
right state to think about it or even to understand it.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she said, “I’m so angry I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Look here——” he began; but said no more, and, in spite of her
preoccupation with her anger, she was able to perceive that he now had
some of his own. She put her hand lightly upon his sleeve and,
simultaneously, the car stopped at the hospital door.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m terribly rude. But don’t you
know there are times when you get so furious you just _can’t_ think
about anything else?”
“Can’t you?” he returned, coldly, as the chauffeur helped him down from
the car. “I’m afraid I doubt if you’d _ever_ consider what I was saying
as of enough importance to listen to.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lily said; and in spite of herself she said it absently;
so that nothing could have been plainer than that her mind was not even
upon this apology, but altogether upon the offence she had received from
Mr. Henry Burnett.
A special attendant of the convalescent’s came from within the building
and offered his arm. Young Mr. McArdle took it and gave a final glance
at the flushed cheeks and fiery eyes of the lady who had already twice
smitten him and thus smote him again. Something hot in his upper chest
seemed to rise against this provincial and suburban young woman who was
too busy being furious with a local nonentity to know what she was doing
indeed! The affronted young man’s last word was to the chauffeur.
“When you have taken Miss Dodge home I sha’n’t want you until
day-after-to-morrow. I don’t care to drive every day.”
Lily was borne away murmuring, “I’m sorry,” again, but what she thought
was: “I could! I could wring Henry Burnett’s neck and sing for joy!”
. . . When the long red car drew up before her father’s house, there was
another machine standing at the curb, a small black thing of the
hardiest variety and odiously familiar to Lily. She jumped out, and,
shaking with rage and her desire to express it, fairly ran up the brick
walk to her front door.
But here a housemaid sought to detain her, whispering urgently: “Mr.
Burnett’s in the living-room, waiting. Your mother isn’t home and I
didn’t know how to keep him out. If you don’t want to see him you’d
better go round to the——”
Lily interrupted her. “I _do_ want to see him,” she declared in a loud
voice. “I want to see him _instantly_!” And she swept into the room to
confront the mocker.
But mockery was no part of Mr. Henry Burnett’s present mood—far from
it. He had come to apologize, and apology was profoundly in his manner
as he rose from the chair in which he had been most dejectedly sitting.
Dark semicircles beneath his eyes were proof of inner sufferings; he was
haggard with his trouble and more Hamlet-like than ever; but now he was
a Hamlet truly humble.
“Lily,” he said, huskily, “I’d sworn to myself I’d never make another
attempt to see you as long as I lived, but after what I did awhile ago I
had to. I _had_ to explain it. It was in vile taste, and you can’t think
any worse of it than I do. But you came on me suddenly. I hadn’t dreamed
I’d see you; then all at once I looked up and there you were—and with
the man you threw me over for! I just couldn’t——”
“Henry Burnett,” she said, and her hot little voice shook with the rage
that vibrated in her whole body;—“you used to be a gentleman. Twice
within less than an hour you’ve shown me you’ve forgotten what that word
means.”
“Twice, Lily?” he said, pathetically; “I admit the other time—out at
the club—but how have I offended you besides that?”
“In your very apology,” she told him scornfully. “You’ve just had the
petty insolence to stand there and say I threw you over for Mr.
McArdle!”
“But you did,” he said; and he seemed surprised that she should not
admit it. “Why, it’s—why, Lily, everybody knows that!”
“What? You dare to repeat it?”
He looked at her in the most reasonable astonishment, his eyes widening.
“But, Lily, I’m not the only one. Everybody repeats it.”
“Who does?”
“Everybody,” he said. “You certainly couldn’t expect a thing like this
not to be talked about, with the whole place in the state of excitement
it was about McArdle’s coming here, let alone what’s happened since. I
had no idea you’d deny it to me now, though I supposed you might to
other people, as a matter of form. Of course no one would believe it
could be a coincidence.”
She stepped closer to him dangerously. “No one would believe what could
be a coincidence, Henry Burnett?”
“That you threw me over just by chance the very day before McArdle came
to town and you took that shot at him.”
“I did _what_?”
“Hit him in the head,” Henry explained. “Your name didn’t get in the
papers; but you don’t for a moment imagine that everybody in town
doesn’t understand, do you, Lily?”
She stamped her foot. “Understand what? What are you talking about?
_What_ does everybody understand?”
“Your plan,” he said, simply. “You don’t think you can lay out a man
like that—a man that every other girl in the place is ready to fight
you for—you don’t think you can do it in such a way as to make you the
_only_ girl who has a _chance_ to see him, and then spend all your time
with him, and day after day send him so many bushels of flowers that the
florist himself gasps over it—and read to him hour after hour, and
drive _more_ hours with him—you can’t do all that and expect people not
to _see_ it, can you?”
Lily’s high colour was vanishing, pallor taking its place. “You needn’t
believe I don’t hate you because I stop telling you so for a moment,”
she said. “But there’s a mystery somewhere, and I’ve got to get at it.
What do you mean I mustn’t expect people not to see?”
“Why, the truth about how he got hurt.”
Lily stepped back from him. “Henry Burnett,” she said, “Henry Burnett,
do you dare——”
Henry interrupted her. He had come to apologize; but what he believed to
be her hypocrisy was too much for him. “I don’t see the use of your
pretending,” he said. “The whole population knows you did it on
purpose.”
“Did _what_ on purpose?”
“Hit him in the head with your golf ball on purpose!”
Lily uttered a loud cry and clasped her hands to her breast. Aghast, she
stared at him with incredulous great eyes; but even as she stared, her
mind’s eye renewed before itself some painful pictures that had
mystified her—the spitefully uproarious girls in the park; her friend,
Emma; the buzzing “tea”; the group at the gate as she came out;—and
there were other puzzles that explained themselves in the dreadful light
now shed upon them. Uttering further outcries, she sank into a chair.
“Slander!” she gasped. “Oh, a _horrible_ slander!”
“What?” Henry cried again. “When everybody knows the things you can do
with a golf ball if you care to? When that professional trick-player
gave his exhibition here, knocking five balls into five hats in a row,
and all that, how many of his shots didn’t you duplicate after you’d
practised them? And some of the girls talked to the caddy McArdle had
with him when it happened, and the boy said he didn’t think you were
over forty yards away when you hit him. Lily, there isn’t a soul that
knows you who’ll ever believe you didn’t do exactly what you planned to
do. I don’t mean they think you could do it every time, or that they’re
all certain you aimed at his head; but they all believe you tried to hit
him—and succeeded!”
“And _you_ do?” she said. “_You_ believe it?”
He laughed bitterly. “Lily, it’s clear as daylight, and I knew it when I
looked up and saw you with him to-day. I knew you’d won what you were
after. It was in his face.”
Lily gulped and smiled a wry smile. “I see,” she said. “It all works
out, and nobody’ll ever believe I didn’t plan it. Yes, I think he
proposed to me on the way home this afternoon.”
“Let me wish you happiness,” Henry said, and seemed disposed to repeat
his satiric bow, but thought better of it. “Is the engagement to be a
long one?” he inquired, lightly, instead; and this seemed to be as
effective as the bow, for Lily sprang up, as if she would strike him.
“I could murder you!” she cried. “And, oh, how I’d like to! I’m not
_sure_ Mr. McArdle proposed to me; I only _think_ he did. I told him I
couldn’t listen because I was too angry.”
“Too angry with whom?” Henry asked, frowning.
“With _you_!” Lily shouted fiercely.
At that, it was his turn to utter a loud cry. “Lily, is it true? Did you
hate me so that you couldn’t even listen to him? Is it true?”
“A thousand times true!” she said, and, in her helpless rage, began to
weep. “But I hate you worse than that!”
“And you sent me away because I couldn’t make you _feel_ anything!” he
cried. “Lily, when will you marry me?”
“Do you think I’d ever be engaged to you again,” she sobbed, “when you
believed I’d do a brutal thing like that on purpose?”
“Lily,” he said again, “when will you marry me?”
“Never,” she answered. “I’ll never marry anybody.” But even as she
spoke, the fortunate young man’s shoulder was becoming damper with her
tears.
XXIX
MRS. CROMWELL’S OLDEST DAUGHTER
ALL OF the players except three had returned to the clubhouse before the
close of the fine April afternoon, and, after an interval in the locker
rooms, had departed either in their cars or strolling away on foot,
homeward bound to the pleasant groups of suburban houses east of the
country club. Westward lay the links, between ploughed fields and groves
of beech and ash and maple, a spacious park of rolling meadows with a
far boundary of woodland, and, beyond that, nothing but a smoky sunset.
All was quiet; there were no sounds from within the clubhouse, nor came
any from the links; and although no kine wound slowly o’er the lea and
no ploughman plodded his weary way, the impending twilight in such a
peace might well have stirred a poetic observer to murmurous quotation
from the Elegy. Nevertheless, in this sweet evening silence, emotion was
present and not peaceful.
There was emotion far out upon the links, and there was more upon the
western veranda of the clubhouse where two ladies sat, not speaking, but
gazing intently toward where the dim and hazy great sun was immersing
itself in the smoke of the horizon. These two emotional ladies were
sisters; that was obvious, for they shared a type of young matronly
fairness so decidedly that a photograph of one might have been mistaken,
at first glance, for that of the other.
A student of families, observing them, would have guessed immediately
that their mother was a fair woman, probably still comely with robust
good health, and of no inconsiderable weight in body as well as in
general prestige. The two daughters were large young women, but graceful
still; not so large as they were going to be some day, nor less
well-favoured than they had been in their slenderer girlhood. They were
alike, also, in the affluence displayed by the sober modishness of what
they wore; and other tokens of this affluence appeared upon the club
driveway, where waited two shining, black, closed cars, each with a trim
and speechless driver unenclosed. The sisters were again alike in the
expectancy with which they gazed out upon the broad avenue of the golf
links; but there was a difference in their expressions;—for the
expectancy of the younger one was a frowning expectancy, an indignant
expectancy, while the expectancy of the other, who was only a year or
two the older, appeared to be a timid and apprehensive expectancy—an
expectancy, in fact, of calamity.
This elder sister was the one who broke the long silence, though not by
uttering words, the sound she produced being an exclamatory gasp and but
faintly audible. It appeared to be comprehended as definite information,
however, by the younger sister.
“Where, Mildred?” she asked. “I don’t see them yet.”
The other’s apprehension was emphasized upon her troubled forehead, as
she nodded in the direction of the far boundary of the links. There,
upon the low crest of rising ground capped with the outermost green,
appeared six tiny figures, dwindled by the distance and dimmed by the
mist that rose into the failing light. For the sun was now so far below
the dark horizon that the last ruddiness grew dingy in the sky.
“Yes,” said the younger sister, and her angry frown deepened. “It’s
they.”
“Oh, Anne!” the older murmured. “Oh, Anne!”
“Yes, I should say so!” this Anne returned, decisively. “I certainly
intend to express myself to _my_ husband, Mildred.”
Mildred shook her head unhappily. “If I only could to mine! But that’s
just what I can’t do.”
“I don’t know,” the other said. “I think in your place I should; though
it’s true I can’t imagine myself in your place, Mildred. My husband has
his faults, and one of ’em’s the way he’s letting himself be used
to-day, but I can’t imagine his behaving as your husband is behaving.
Not _that_ way!”
She made an impatient gesture toward the west, where the six figures had
left the green and were now moving toward the clubhouse, three of them
playing deliberately as they came, with three smaller figures, the
caddies, in advance. One of the players detached himself, keeping to the
southern stretch of the fairway; while the two others, a man and a
woman, kept to the northern, walking together, each halting close by
when the other paused for a stroke.
“Can you make out which is which, Anne?” the older sister inquired in a
voice of faint hope. “Isn’t it John who’s playing off there by himself,
and Hobart she keeps so close to her?”
“Not very likely!” Anne returned with a short laugh. “She’s using _my_
husband as a chaperon strictly, and I must say he’s behaving like a
tactful one. It’s your John she ‘keeps so close to her’—as usual,
Mildred!”
Mildred made merely a desolate sound, and then the sisters resumed the
troubled silence that falls between people who have long since discussed
to a conclusion every detail of an unhappy affair, and can only await
its further development.
The three players came nearer slowly, growing dimmer in the evening haze
as they grew larger; until at last it was difficult to see them at all.
Other things were as dim as they, the player to the south found to his
cost; and, finally deciding to lose no more balls that day, he crossed
the fairway to his competitors.
“I’m through, John,” he called, cheerfully. “It’s no use in the world
trying to play out these last two holes.”
“I don’t suppose it is,” the other man assented. “Julietta rather wanted
to, though.” He turned to the tall girl beside him. “Hobart says——”
“I heard him!” she said, laughing a light laugh, a little taunting in
its silveriness. “Hobart’s a well-trained husband. You know what that
is, don’t you, John? A well-trained husband is one who doesn’t dare to
call his soul his own. Hobart’s been worrying this last half-hour about
what Mrs. Simms will say to him for keeping her waiting.”
“You’re right about that, Julietta,” Mr. Hobart Simms agreed. “My wife’s
a pretty amiable lady; but I’ve kept her waiting longer than I like to,
and old John’s done the same thing. So, as he’s probably in the same
apologetic state I’m in, and it’s ridiculous to try to play these last
two holes in the pitch dark anyhow, I suggest we——”
The girl interrupted him, though it was to his brother-in-law that she
addressed herself. “_Are_ you in the ‘same apologetic state’ that Hobart
is, John?” she asked; and there was an undercurrent in her voice that
seemed to ask more than appeared upon the surface. She seemed to
challenge, in fact, and yet to plead. “Are you as afraid of Mrs. Tower
as Hobart is of Mrs. Simms, John?”
Mr. Tower laughed placatively. “My dear Julietta! Of course if you’d
like to play it out——”
“There!” Julietta said, gaily triumphant. “You see he wants to, himself.
I believe you’re the one man I know who isn’t terrorized by a wife,
John.” She stepped closer to him, speaking through the darkness in a
warm, soft voice, almost a whisper. “But then you’re a wonderful man,
anyhow—the most wonderful I ever knew, John.”
“Oh, no!” He laughed deprecatingly, and, pleased with her, yet
embarrassed by his modesty, coughed lightly for a moment or two. “Of
course I’m not; but I do value your thinking so, Julietta. I appreciate
it very deeply indeed.”
“Are you _sure_ you do?” she said in a hurried whisper, so low that he
could just hear it. Then she turned briskly toward his brother-in-law,
who stood at a little distance, waiting their pleasure. “Run along,
Hobart, and please tell Mrs. Tower I haven’t kidnapped him;—he’s
staying to play it out with me of his own free will. And please pay all
the caddies off and let them go. We don’t need them, and they’re dying
to get home.”
He was obedient, and from the clubhouse veranda, where lights now shone,
it could be discerned that the party on the links had broken up. The
caddies ran scurrying by, their shrill outcries disturbing the air about
them, and, in their wake, the slight figure of Mr. Hobart Simms appeared
within the radius of illumination from the building.
“They’re coming,” Anne Simms said to her sister. “Don’t let them see
anything.”
Mr. Simms mounted the dozen steps that led up to the veranda. “Dear me,
Anne!” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve been waiting quite a time. I can’t
tell you how sorry——”
But she cut his apology short. “Where’s John?”
“Old John? Why, I gave up; but he’s decided to play it out. Old John and
I started pretty late anyhow, and we were playing around with Julietta
Voss, as it happened——”
“Yes,” his wife said, dryly, “‘as it happens’ rather often! Where are
they?”
“Just out yonder.”
“Where? _We_ can’t see anybody.”
“Well, they’re there anyhow,” he returned. “They’ll be along in a minute
or two.”
Mrs. Simms rose from her chair. “Suppose you go and bring them,” she
said.
But before he could make any response, her sister intervened. “No! Oh,
_no_!” Mildred cried in a voice of distress, and, rising, too, she
caught Anne’s hand in hers. “Don’t send him! It would look as if——”
She stopped, perceptibly agitated.
The surprise of the gentleman present was genuine, though not so acute
as that of an inexperienced man who expects ladies never to show
unreasonable and apparently causeless emotion. “Why, what’s the matter?”
he said. “It doesn’t seem to me that just because two people happen to
get interested in the game——”
“Never mind!” his wife said, sharply. “If you intend to take your clubs
down to the locker room you’d better be doing it.”
“Very well.” He entered the clubhouse through a French window that
opened upon the veranda, and his surprise was somewhat increased when
his wife followed him.
“Wait,” she said, as she closed the window behind her. “Hobart Simms, I
never dreamed you’d allow yourself to be put in such a position.”
“What?” he said. “What position am I in?”
“I didn’t think you were this kind of man at all,” his wife informed him
with continued severity. “I always believed you were intelligent—even
about women!”
“Oh, no,” he protested. “Don’t go so far as that, my dear!” He laughed
as he spoke, but despite both his protest and his laughter, his looks
deserved what Mrs. Simms declared to have been her previous opinion of
him. Bodily, he was still a featherweight, and of that miraculous
slimness which appears inconsistent with the possession of the organs
necessary to sustain life; but his glance was the eagle’s.
“I did think so!” his wife exclaimed. “I used to think you were
different, and that women couldn’t fool you any more than men could.”
“Anne, what woman has taken enough interest in me to fool me?”
“Nobody. She doesn’t take any interest in you; she only uses you.”
“Who is she?”
The lady gave utterance to an outcry of indignant amazement at the
everlasting stupidity of a man beguiled by a woman; for, in spite of the
ages during which men have been beguiled by women, the women who are not
doing the beguiling never cease to marvel that it can be done. “You poor
blind thing!” she cried. “Julietta Voss!”
At this he was merely amused. “You’re not feeling well, Anne,” he
remarked. “What you say doesn’t sound like you at your best. I never
heard anything so——”
Mrs. Simms interrupted him. “Who paid her caddy?”
“I did. I paid both hers and old John’s, but I don’t think we need——”
“What made you keep so far away from them? What made you play down the
south side of the course and leave them so far over on the north? Did
she ask you to?”
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “It just happened! They were playing the
same ball, against me. Naturally——”
“‘Naturally,’” she said, taking up the word sharply, “it was like that
all round the course, wasn’t it?”
“What of it? I understood you to charge me with being fooled by poor
little Julietta——”
“Stop calling her ‘little’,” Mrs. Simms commanded. “She’s a foot taller
than you are!”
“Well, then,” he mildly remonstrated, “with all that advantage, what
would she take the trouble to fool me for? If she wanted to make love to
me she could do it openly, by force.”
At this, his wife’s face showed sheer despair of him. “I just said that
she doesn’t take the slightest interest in you—except as a foil! This
is the third time.”
“The third time what?”
“The third time you’ve been manœuvred into coming out here to play with
them. Good heavens, don’t you _see_ it?”
“No,” he returned, meekly. “Tell me in words of one syllable, Anne.”
Mrs. Simms complied, and in her response there was that direct brevity
not unusual with her sex in the climaxes of bitter moments. “She’s
trying to get my sister’s husband away from her!”
The bewilderment of Mr. Simms was complete. “Old John?” he cried. “Old
John _Tower_? Poor little Julietta Voss is trying to get old John away
from Mildred? Of all the preposterous——” His laughter interrupted his
enunciation. “Why, that’s the most far-fetched fancy work I ever—— But
of course you don’t mean it seriously.”
“I do.”
“But it’s nonsense! Julietta’s always ready to come and be an outdoor
comrade for anybody; but it’s only because she’s such a good fellow she
doesn’t stop to care whether she’s with old married men like John and
me, or with the boys of her own age that she’d naturally like to be with
a great deal better of course.”
“She’s almost my own age; she’s over thirty,” the grim Mrs. Simms
informed him. “The ‘boys of her own age’ are busy elsewhere.”
“Well, she isn’t that kind of a schemer, no matter what her age is, and
if she were, why, the last person on earth she’d pick out would be
steady old John Tower. He’s absolutely devoted to Mildred, and everybody
knows it. And, finally, if poor Julietta is trying to break up Mildred’s
hearth and home, what in the world are you so sharp with _me_ about? If
it’s John, and not me that Julietta’s after——”
“Didn’t I tell you she uses you as a foil? Who could criticize her for
running after another woman’s husband when his own brother-in-law is
always chaperoning them? She knows there’s talk——”
“She does? Well, I don’t. You say——”
“I certainly do. Of _course_ there’s talk. There has been for some
time.”
“Does Mildred share your idea?” he asked.
“She does—most unhappily!”
“Anne, do you mean to tell me that as sensible a woman as Mildred’s
always seemed could actually let herself get worried about——”
“Any wife would,” Anne interrupted, severely. “Especially with a husband
as odd as John Tower. So far as women are concerned he’s nothing but a
grown-up child! He believes everything they tell him, and Julietta knows
it. It’s because he _is_ so perfectly simple and naïve and
trustful—with women—that Mildred is wretched about him.”
“What’s she said to old John about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Why not?”
“Because if she did,” Mrs. Simms explained, “it might look as if she
were jealous.”
“Well, she is, isn’t she?”
“Not at all. She’s terribly hurt, and naturally she’s angry and rather
disgusted to think her husband would let such a person as Julietta Voss
have so much effect upon him.”
Hobart’s intelligent forehead became lined with the effort to solve the
puzzle before him. “You say she’s terribly hurt and she’s angry and
she’s disgusted because she thinks her husband is letting another woman
carry on with him; but she’s not jealous. How would you define jealousy,
Anne?”
“As nothing that a girl like Julietta Voss could make a lady feel,” Anne
returned, with no little heat. “Mildred is a lady—and I’m going back to
her. Be kind enough to hurry with your ablutions, if you intend any.”
He went away meekly to obey, and when he returned to the veranda he
still looked meek, though there was in his glance a sly skepticism
readily visible to his wife. She was sitting by the veranda railing with
her sister, who was staring forth into the darkness in a manner somewhat
pathetic; but, as her brother-in-law thought her imaginings absurd, his
sympathies were not greatly roused. “Hasn’t that old Don Giovanni of
yours finished playing it out yet, Mildred?” he inquired.
Both ladies looked round at him over their shoulders, Mildred piteously,
but Anne sternly. “There’s one great trouble with an unflagging humour,”
Mrs. Simms said. “It never flags.”
“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “If Mildred thinks poor old John and
Julietta—— Mildred, you don’t for one minute honestly and truly——”
But Mildred made a gesture of agonized entreaty. “Please! Please!” she
said in a low voice. “They’re coming!”
A peal of light laughter was heard from the darkness, and the figures of
the two delaying players became visible within the outer reaches of the
clubhouse lights. They were walking slowly, engaged in obviously
cheerful conversation, and from the shoulders of the stalwart Tower were
slung both bags containing the implements used in the game they had been
playing. It was characteristic and like old John’s punctilious
gallantry, his brother-in-law thought, to have seized upon both those
bags the moment the caddies were dismissed. Miss Voss, almost as tall as
he, was more than equal to carrying her own bag without effort.
She had the figure of a distance runner in training, lithe, hard, and
active; and there was something lively, yet hard, too, in her tanned
long face, which was a handsome face in spite of its length. But her
eyes were what was most noticeable about her, for they were beautiful.
They were brilliantly dark, and at times seemed to hold little dancing
lights within them, as if they gave glimpses of secret laughter. All in
all, she was a cheery companion for an outdoor afternoon, but by no
manner of means a tricky witch, Mr. Hobart Simms decided, as he looked
down smilingly upon her and upon that odd man, his brother-in-law and
junior partner, old John Tower.
“Old John,” of an age not more than Hobart’s, was queer, Hobart thought;
but his queerness did not alter the simple steadiness of character that
made his intimates think and speak of him as “old John.” Moreover, his
oddity lay mainly in his literal, simple truthfulness under all
conditions, in his belief that others were as truthful as himself, and
in an indefatigable formal politeness of manner, sometimes a little
stately, that was really the expression of a kind heart.
The two came gaily up the steps, still laughing at something said out of
hearing from the veranda, and Julietta gave a final fillip to their joke
by reeling against her companion as they reached the top step. She
steadied herself by clutching his shoulder, and seemed almost to hang
upon him, for a moment or two, while she chid him. “Don’t make me laugh
any more, or I’ll give you up as a partner and absolutely not play with
you again to-morrow!” Then she turned briskly to Mildred. “I hope you
haven’t been waiting long for your poor abducted husband, Mrs. Tower.
I’m afraid he’s the kind of man who never gives up anything he sets out
to do, even when he has to finish it in the dark. I suppose that’s why
he’s a great man.”
“Do you think he’s a great man, Julietta?” Hobart Simms inquired in a
carefully naïve manner.
“Everyone knows he is,” Julietta returned. “Of _course_ you’re a great
man, John, since Hobart asks me!”
“At least, it’s most lovely of you to say you think so,” Mr. Tower
responded, bowing his dark head before her gratefully. “I’m only a
feeble assistant to Hobart here, who really _is_ a great man; but it’s
charming of you to say I’m one, too. Really it’s most kind of you,
Julietta.” He turned to his wife. “My dear, I hope you haven’t been
waiting long, and I hope, if you have, you haven’t minded.”
“No, not at all,” she murmured. “But can’t we go now?”
“Just a moment. I must take these bags to the locker room and freshen up
the least bit. Julietta, if you’ll give me the key to your locker I’ll
have your bag put away for you.”
But Julietta laughed ruefully and shook her head. “Just leave the bag
here. It takes every penny of my poor little allowance to keep me a
member of the club. They charge too much for lockers. I told you the
other day I didn’t have a locker.”
The kindly John struck his hands together in a sharp sound; he was
shocked by his forgetfulness. “Dear me! So you did! Of course, you must
allow me to make up for my omission. I’d meant to attend to that
yesterday. Of _course_ you must have a locker. I’ll see to it at once
and bring you the key.”
Julietta said promptly, “How lovely of you!” and he went toward the
French windows; but a murmur from his wife stopped him.
“John, it’s very late. Couldn’t you postpone seeing about lockers and
things like that, and let’s be starting home?”
“In just a moment, my dear,” he said in the kindest tone. “I’ll just
arrange about a locker for Julietta and leave our clubs. It won’t take a
moment.”
“He’s so thoughtful always,” Julietta said, looking after him gratefully
as he departed. “I think I never knew a man so careful about all the
little things most men don’t seem even to be conscious of.”
“Thanks, Julietta,” Mr. Simms said, cheerfully, and was immediately
aware that his wife looked at him with some tensity. She had not spoken
since the arrival of Julietta and her companion upon the veranda.
“Thanks for the rest of us.”
“Oh, you!” Julietta said; and the dancing lights in her extraordinary
eyes sparkled as she turned to him. “You’re a great man really, as dear
old John just explained, and we all know what everybody says about you
and Julius Cæsar—or is it Napoleon? You’ve scattered fortunes around
among your friends taking them into your corporations, the way he
scattered kingdoms around among his relatives. You’re so great you don’t
have to bother being thoughtful about little things.”
“Julietta,” he responded, “you sound like a testimonial banquet. I hope
you’ll convince my wife, though.”
“She’d be the last to need convincing,” Julietta returned. “Wouldn’t
you, Mrs. Simms?”
“I might be,” Anne replied, dryly. “Hobart, I think you’d better run and
tell John he’s keeping us all waiting.”
But the absent gentleman returned before his brother-in-law, moving to
obey, could go in search of him; and he came with a key in his hand.
“There, Julietta, if you’ll be so kind as to use this——”
“You dear man!” she cried, enthusiastically. “Now just for that I’m
going to forgive you for making me laugh so hard, and we’ll finish that
game to-morrow, because Hobart didn’t play it out with us to-day. Don’t
you think we could all three be here a _wee_ bit earlier to-morrow—say
by four o’clock?”
At this, Mildred Tower turned to her sister in an almost visible appeal
for help; and Anne hurriedly endeavoured to respond with the succour
besought. “So far as Mr. Simms is concerned——” she began; but Tower,
unaware that she was speaking, had already accepted Julietta’s
invitation.
“Delightful,” he said, bowing. “Julietta, that will be delightful. I
shall be here by four o’clock promptly. Thank you for thinking of it.”
“You’ll be sure to come, too, Hobart?” Julietta asked.
Hobart’s wife began again, and her tone was emphatic. “So far as Mr.
Simms is concerned——” But again she was interrupted, this time by her
husband.
“Why, yes, Julietta,” he said, amiably, “I’d like very much to play it
out. I’ll be here at four.”
For a moment or two there was a silence during which his consciousness
that both his wife and his sister-in-law were looking at him became
somewhat acute. Then, without even a murmur of leave-taking or any sound
at all, Mildred Tower walked quickly to the steps, descended them, and
went toward the waiting cars. Her sister, after a final look, which
swept scorchingly over both gentlemen—though but one of them, her
husband, was aware of its heat—turned sharply away and hurried after
her.
Only the best of women are capable of doing things so embarrassing,
thought the philosophical Mr. Simms; and then realized that his
brother-in-law was not embarrassed at all.
“Wait a moment, my dear,” Tower called placidly after his wife.
“Julietta has been kind enough to say we could drop her at her house on
our way. She’s going with us.”
No response came from the hurrying Mrs. Tower.
“My dear!” her husband called. “Julietta is going to permit us——”
Then, as Mildred disappeared silently into the interior of her car, he
remarked with unsullied confidence, “She doesn’t hear me.”
Julietta laughed and put her hand upon his arm, looking up at him. “Do
you think she wants me?”
“My dear Julietta! Of course she does. Everybody wants you. Why
shouldn’t she?”
“Perhaps she thinks I live too far out of your way, and she’s in a hurry
to eat her dinner,” Julietta said, wistfully. “It isn’t everyone that’s
too generous to keep thinking of food when someone needs a little lift.
It isn’t everybody who remembers all the little thoughtful things as you
do, John, you know.”
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “Mildred will be only too delighted to have
you, though I do appreciate your kind opinion of me.” He looked down at
her hand, which was still upon his coat sleeve, and, taking it in one of
his, tucked it under his arm. “You’re charming, Julietta,” he said,
beaming upon her. “Indeed you are! Perfectly charming! Shall we go down
and get into the car?”
It was time for the third person present during this little interview to
depart, that person decided. “_Hobart!_” his wife called from her car,
and her voice was threateningly eloquent.
Hobart delayed no longer, though he was thinking with some concentration
just then; and, bidding Miss Voss and his brother-in-law a quick
good-night, he went by them and hurried toward the summoning voice.
Descending the steps arm-in-arm, and talking, old John and Julietta did
not seem to hear the word of farewell;—Hobart was some distance away
when the scrupulous Tower called after him: “Hobart, did you say,
‘Good-night’? I beg your pardon; I was listening to Julietta.
Good-night, Hobart. Good-night, Anne.” Then, as Hobart got into his own
car, he could hear his brother-in-law busily talking beside the other.
“And now, my dear Julietta, if you’ll be so kind as to step in and sit
beside Mildred, I believe you’ll be quite comfortable. There’s an extra
rug, Julietta, if you——”
But Mrs. Simms had already spoken to her chauffeur, and the engine was
in motion. As they drove away, she and her husband could still hear the
thoughtful old John addressing himself to the subject of Julietta’s
comfort, and replying to her thanks. “Not at all, my dear Julietta; it’s
the greatest imaginable pleasure. And if you’ll be so kind as to allow
me to place this other rug over your knees, Julietta——”
The Simms’ car passed out of hearing, and within the dark interior its
owner continued to be thoughtful. He was still certain that Mildred
indulged herself in mere folly when she worried about steady, simple old
John. But he was not so sure of the artlessness of Julietta;—the final
little interview upon the veranda had somewhat shaken his convictions in
regard to Julietta.
“I suppose you’re pleased with yourself,” Mrs. Simms said, icily, after
an extended silence.
“I couldn’t decline,” he returned, easily. “You didn’t give me a chance
to.”
“Hobart, that’s really too much! You stopped me—interrupted me when I
was in the very act of declining for you.”
“That was the reason,” he explained. “I couldn’t let you decline for me.
It might have looked as though I let my wife do embarrassing things for
me that I haven’t backbone enough to do for myself.”
“How diplomatic!” she said. “May I ask your _real_ reason for accepting
her invitation after what I’d just told you about her? Perhaps, though,
it was merely to hurt Mildred and irritate me. In that case, you made a
perfect success of what you intended.”
“It wasn’t precisely that,” he laughed. “For one thing, if what you and
Mildred believe has any foundation, why, old John certainly needs a
chaperon; and, for another thing, I wanted the chance to see for myself
if there is any reason to believe what you told me.”
“Oh, _so_?” She uttered a little cry of triumph, and laughed in the tone
of her outcry. “So you’re not so sure as you were a little while ago,
when you implied that my mind was wandering! So you see there _is_
something in it?”
“Only this: I admit the possibility that Julietta might want to have him
attached to her as a sort of providing friend, to do little useful
things for her and——”
“‘Little useful things’?” his wife said, scornfully. “Don’t you
understand what type she belongs to? Only a few minutes ago you paid her
caddy for her, and John rented a locker for her. Last week he got her a
new set of golf clubs, Mildred told me. Julietta complained of her old
ones, and he sent away for the most expensive clubs you can get in the
country. When she said you put your friends into fortunes, she meant
more than just to flatter you about the fortune you’ve put John Tower
into; she meant you to begin to get the idea into your head that it
would be pleasant some day to put _her_ into one—or her worthless old
father, perhaps!”
Then, as Hobart laughed loudly at an idea apparently so far-fetched,
Anne defended it. “Oh, I know it was only her impulse and not
deliberate, just a chance shot of hers; but she never misses a
possibility, and that possibility was somewhere in the back of her head.
Of course, it isn’t you, but John that she’s playing for. She’d _rather_
have played for you; but she didn’t see any chance, of course. She
discovered John’s weakness and did see the chance with him.”
“What weakness, Anne?”
“Why, the poor old thing’s childlike acceptance of women at the face
value they put upon themselves, and his quaint belief that they say
everything they mean and mean everything they say—just as he does
himself. Mildred’s helpless because he’s such a helpless idealist; he
tells her the only thing he can’t bear in a woman is when she’s so
small-minded as to speak slightingly of any other woman! All Mildred can
do is to suffer and not speak. I never saw anything so pitiful as what
she did when you hurt her feelings so terribly.”
“When I did what?”
“When you insulted her awhile ago,” Mrs. Simms explained with calm
frigidity. “She knew I’d told you what she was suffering;—I’d just told
her I had. And then she had not only to listen to her husband accepting
that girl’s overtures for another long tête-à-tête with him to-morrow,
but to hear you promising to lend countenance to it by being used again
as you’ve already been used three times. It was the same as either
telling Mildred that she’s a fool, imagining the whole thing, or that
you approve of Julietta’s little plans and intend to lend your aid to
further them. You might as well have slapped my sister in the face.”
“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “Don’t look at it that way! I didn’t mean——”
“Didn’t you?” Anne had no compunctions whatever in punishing him to the
best of her ability. “You’d already mocked her for suffering what no
woman in her position could _help_ suffering. Then, in addition to what
she was already trying to bear and not show, you gave her some _more_ to
bear—and she couldn’t trust herself to speak; she could only run from
you!”
This was indeed a new light upon what Hobart had been masculine enough
to think a mere example of woman’s rudeness to woman; and in that light
the speechless flight of the unfortunate Mildred now bore the colour of
true pathos. Moreover, following his awakened doubts of Julietta, his
wife’s view of his conduct began to be uncomfortably convincing. He
feared that he was going to be remorseful.
“Of course you don’t dream I’m not fond of Mildred,” he said. “I’ve
always been very——”
“You show it strangely,” Anne interrupted. She spoke with no softening
of her resentment, though what she felt for her sister brought to her
eyes the tears she had been withholding, and he saw them as a street
light flashed through the glass of the window beside her. “Mildred’s the
kind of woman people do hurt, I suppose. She’s so gentle and harmless
herself, it must be a temptation! She’s always been so lovely to _you_,
I suppose you couldn’t resist it.”
“Oh, look here!” he protested, and his fears were realized; he was
already remorseful. “You know I wouldn’t have hurt——”
“Then why did you?”
“Well, if I did,” he said, desperately;—“and, confound it, I’m afraid
maybe I did—I suppose it was because jealousy is the kind of suffering
that onlookers always have the least sympathy with. I’ll beg her pardon,
and, if I caused her pain, I’ll try to make it up to her.”
“How can you do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, regretfully. “I’ll just have to try to find
some way.”
“That wouldn’t be very easy,” his wife said. “Could you get her husband
back for her, if this girl gets him away?”
“But that _is_ nonsense,” he protested. “Julietta Voss couldn’t get that
far with old John—not if she had all eternity to try in!”
This was the position he took, and he maintained it during the rest of
their drive, and at intervals during the rather stately dinner for two
people that was the evening custom of their big country house. After
dinner, however, as he sat down to coffee with his wife in the library,
he was forced to adopt another view. His sister-in-law came in suddenly
and dramatically, the fur cloak she had thrown about her for a hasty
drive falling to the floor as she entered the door.
Anne sprang up from her easy chair. “Mildred! What’s happened?”
For Mildred’s pallor, and her visible struggle for composure, as she
stood with both hands upon the back of a chair to steady herself, left
no doubt that she came because of some definite happening.
Hobart moved to withdraw. “I imagine you and Anne might like to have a
talk together, Mildred. I’ll just——”
“No,” Mildred said in a strained and plaintive voice, “I’ve come for
help. You’ve both got to help me somehow, because I can’t stand it. I
really can’t.”
He was distressed for her. “Anything—anything in the world——”
“I _hope_ you mean it,” Mildred said, staring at him with wide and
desperate eyes. “If any one can do anything to help me it’s you, Hobart,
because you’ve always been able to do everything you’ve ever wanted to
do. Maybe you won’t want to help me.”
“What?” he cried. “My dear girl!”
“No,” she said, pathetically;—“maybe you won’t want to. After the way
you treated me before them at the club, I shouldn’t be sure you’d want
to.”
“My dear sister, don’t think that,” he begged. “I see I did hurt you,
and I only ask a chance to make up to you for it. What can I do?”
“Nothing!” his wife said, taking the reply into her own mouth, as she
put an arm about her sister and stood facing him scornfully. “Nothing
that will make up to her for what you did. That’s something you can
never do, because even you can’t recall and do again what has passed.”
Troubled, admiring Anne for the proud anger of her attitude, and
secretly pleased with her “even you,” he gave her a queer look in which
there was a gleam of doggedness. “I’ll try, at any rate,” he said; and
then, more casually, he addressed his sister-in-law: “You drove over
alone, Mildred?”
“As soon as John left the house after dinner,” she said. “I kept up till
he went, and then I found I couldn’t bear it any longer—I had to ask
for help. After he put her into the car with me at the club, he asked me
why I was so quiet, and I said I had a bad headache;—it was true
enough, too. She said that was ‘too bad’ and immediately proposed that
we should ‘all three’ drive into town after dinner to a cabaret
vaudeville and dance and late supper!”
“She did?” Hobart asked. “Not just after you’d told them your head
ached?”
“Yes. She said the way to cure a headache was to ‘be gay and forget
it.’”
“What did you tell her, Mildred?”
“I said I couldn’t and that John couldn’t go either, because he had to
be in his office early to-morrow morning. He said no; he didn’t need
more than three or four hours’ sleep, and he would be only too glad to
escort Julietta, since if I had a headache, I’d probably go to bed, and
he’d have nothing to do. At dinner I asked him please not to go;
_please_ to stay with me, instead. He said in his kindest way that he’d
be glad to, any other night, but it was impossible this evening since
he’d ‘promised Julietta,’ and couldn’t possibly break a promise. So he
went—and I found I couldn’t stay in the house and think it over any
longer. Hobart, you mustn’t go out there and help them pretend to play
golf to-morrow.”
“Very well,” he said, gravely. “I’ll do whatever you wish. But isn’t it
just possible you’d rather have me with them? If Julietta really is the
designing person you believe she is——”
“If!” Mildred cried with sudden loudness. “‘If’ she is! You don’t
understand, Hobart. This is what happened in the car just before we
reached her house to-night;—it happens all the time. She made a
gesture—she always talks with gestures—and her hand smashed against
the door-frame and broke the crystal of her wrist-watch. She said she
was sure the works were broken, too. It was a plain gold watch, old and
not very valuable, but she made a great lamentation over it. John took
it from her, put it in his pocket, and said that since it was broken in
our car it was our place to restore it; she should have a new one as
near like it as possible to-morrow;—it would be the ‘greatest
privilege’ to obtain it for her! She _knew_ that was just what he’d do,
and she broke it on purpose, of course.”
“Mildred, you really believe——”
She stopped him. “You don’t understand. It goes on all the time. And if
she does this much under my very eyes, what doesn’t she get out of him
when they’re alone together?”
“There might be something reassuring in that,” Hobart suggested. “If she
spends her energies getting these trifles from him—because of course
that’s all they are to a man in old John’s position—doesn’t that look
as if her designs might be limited to——”
“No, it does not,” Mrs. Simms interrupted, promptly.
“But——”
“No,” his wife repeated. “Don’t you see that the very fact of her
wanting the trifles would make her want something a great deal more
important, and that’s to be in a position where she wouldn’t have to
work for them?”
“Well, then,” her husband returned;—“if she expects to reach that
position by supplanting Mildred, she has a ridiculous ambition!”
“Is it?” Mildred asked, unhappily. “If John were any other kind of man,
it might be ridiculous.” Tears came into her eyes that had been dry
until now; but she struggled with herself and kept more from coming.
“Isn’t it ironical?” she said. “The very goodness of such a man as John,
his simple kindness, his idealizing—the very things I’ve cared for most
in him—that they should be his weakness and just what leaves him open
to the easy cajoling of a crude trespasser like Julietta Voss! Don’t you
understand, Hobart? I know you didn’t understand this afternoon, but
don’t you now? You thought I was jealous of him, I know. Perhaps I am;
perhaps I do want to keep him for myself; but I’m his wife; why
shouldn’t I? And I know I’m better for him than she’d be. Oh, don’t you
understand? I want to _protect_ him!”
Hobart came to her and took her hand. “Mildred, old John hasn’t the
remotest idea you’re suffering like this. You’ve got to tell him about
it.”
“But I _can’t_,” she cried. “I can’t let him think I’m just a jealous
woman, and what else would he think of me if I told him the truth about
her? That’s why I don’t want you to go out there with them to-morrow,
Hobart.”
“Of course I won’t, since you ask it,” he said, mystified. “Yet I don’t
see——”
“You don’t?” his wife asked, sharply; and, in obvious pity for a poor
understanding, characteristically manlike, she explained what she had
instantly divined—her unhappy sister’s reason for coming to ask him to
help her. “Julietta counts on your being with them as the answer to the
talk about them. She intends to have a defence against the talk—an
answer that will help to keep people on her side—and if you break your
engagement without any explanation she’ll wonder what it means, and if
we haven’t _asked_ you to do it; and she’ll get John to find out. He’ll
ask you why you didn’t come. Then you can tell him you stayed away
because you’re troubled about what Mildred may think. It’s all you need
say, and he’ll speak to Mildred about it. That will give her a _chance_
to talk to him.”
“Is it what you want, Mildred?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can think of. It gives me a
chance to talk to him, that’s all. It may make him despise me, anyhow. I
don’t know what he’ll say, but I’ve got to do it;—I can’t go on any
longer not saying _anything_! Perhaps”—her breath caught in her throat,
and for a moment she could not speak—“perhaps he’ll ask me for a
divorce. Well, if he does, I’ll give it to him!”
“No, no!” her sister cried. “You said you wanted to protect him!”
“If he doesn’t love me any more, I _couldn’t_,” Mildred sobbed, for her
struggle to control herself was lost now, and her weeping became
convulsive. “Don’t you see I couldn’t? You can’t protect anybody that’s
tired of you. If he’s tired of you, how can you protect him against
someone he’s in love with?”
“My dear sister!” Hobart begged her, deeply moved. “Don’t think it. Old
John isn’t in love with Julietta Voss any more than I am!”
“How do I _know_?” she sobbed. “He _acts_ as if he is. What other way is
there to tell? How do I know?” And, clinging to his hand, she sank down
into the chair beside which she had been standing. “Oh, Hobart, you must
help me; you must try your best to help me!”
“Indeed I will,” he promised, with all the earnestness that was in him.
“I’ll do anything in the world, Mildred—absolutely anything!”
He meant it indeed; but over the bowed form of the unhappy lady who
clung to his hand, entreating him, he looked into the denouncing and
skeptical eyes of his wife. She needed no words, nor anything except
those implacable eyes of hers, to tell him that his own recent behaviour
was in great part responsible for the misery before them, and that he
lacked the power to make up to Mildred for what he had done.
He adored his wife, and he took that look of hers as a challenge.
XXX
MRS. CROMWELL’S SONS-IN-LAW
HE WAS far from convinced, however, that Mildred’s necessity was as
tragic as she believed. If it was, he would prove to his wife that he
was a man of more resources than she thought; but it still seemed to him
that old John Tower could be in no danger from the simple wiles of
Julietta. For Hobart had accepted the theory that Julietta was wily; he
had finally gone that far unconditionally before the unhappy evening was
over; and he even wondered why he had hitherto been so blind when he
looked at Julietta. But as for steady old John Tower—“No,” he said to
himself, as he drove into the city the next morning. “Absolutely
impossible!” Yet in this emphasis there was that faint shade of doubt so
often present when people buttress their convictions with “absolutely”;
so he decided to buttress himself further by means of a diplomatic
experimental talk with old John.
Arrived in the heart of the city at the great building that was his own,
with all its thirty stories obedient to his five feet three inches, a
Giant Jinn enslaved by a little master enchanter, he went, not to his
own offices, but to old John’s. “I just dropped in for a morning cigar,”
he explained.
His brother-in-law received him heartily.
“My dear Hobart, this is indeed a pleasure. Will you smoke one of my
cigars or one of your own? I’m afraid yours are much the better.”
“No, they’re not,” Hobart laughed. “Mine are much the worse. Your taste
is a lot better than mine about pretty nearly everything.” As he spoke
he took a long cigar from the box that Tower was offering him, and
lighted it. “You have better taste in cigars, better taste in
furniture——” Here he seated himself in one of the set of
seventeenth-century English chairs that helped to make the room the
pleasant place it was. “You even have better taste on the golf links,”
he concluded, chuckling as if reminiscently.
“How so? You play a better game. You don’t allude to my apparel for it,
I imagine.”
“That, too,” Hobart said. “But I was thinking of something else.”
“Of what, my dear Hobart?”
Hobart laughed, gave him a look of friendly raillery, mixed with jocose
admiration, and said: “Don’t you think I’m a good deal of a dunderhead?
On your word, don’t you, old John?”
Old John, beaming genially and amused by his caller’s question, but
puzzled by it, laughed with him. “On my word then, no. I haven’t the
slightest conception of what you mean.”
“Just think of it!” Hobart chuckled. “Here we go, afternoon after
afternoon, you and I, out to the links; and every single time, when we
get there, I go roving round the course virtually all by myself, while
you put in the time with Julietta! You and she keep together and play
the same ball—and what do I play? It seems to me I play the Lone
Fisherman! Honestly, do you think it’s fair?”
“Fair?” Old John had become grave, and the other was surprised and
interested to observe that a tinge of red was slowly mounting in his
cheeks. “Let me understand you, Hobart,” he said. “You mean that I’ve
been monopolizing Julietta?”
“Rather!” Hobart continued his rallying jocosity, though inwardly he was
disturbed by the spreading of that tinge of red over his
brother-in-law’s face. “Don’t you think it’s about time I had a share of
feminine camaraderie in our outdoor sports?”
“You mean, Hobart, that this afternoon you’d prefer to play the same
ball with Julietta and have me play against you?”
This was not the question Hobart had desired to evoke; and his jocosity
departed from him suddenly. “Well——” he said. Then, as his shrewd eyes
took note again of old John’s rosy face and of his gravity—already
troubled as by some forthcoming disappointment—the Napoleonic Hobart
came to one of those swift and clear resolutions, the capacity for which
had made possible his prodigious business career during what was still
almost his youth. Old John was indeed in danger, although old John was
“too innocent” to know it, himself. And in the very instant of this
realization, Hobart decided that he had found the opportunity to take up
his wife’s challenge and atone in full for his fault to her sister.
“Why—why, yes,” he said, slowly. “Don’t you think it’s about time? You
wouldn’t mind very much, would you?”
Old John’s large and well-favoured face grew redder than ever, though
otherwise it was expressive of the most naïvely plain regret. “Ah—I
suppose it would be fair,” he said. “Julietta _is_ attractive, as you
say. In fact, I believe she is the most attractive girl I have ever
known. I value her friendship very highly, Hobart. I came into town to a
cabaret with her last night, and neither of us knew anybody in the
place. We danced together and had a little supper, and danced some more,
and talked—altogether until about two o’clock, I think, Hobart. And in
all that time I never had a dull moment—not one! She is a most
attractive girl, as you say, and I believe there’s perhaps some justice
in your idea that you’re entitled to more of her companionship than
you’ve been enjoying—for this afternoon at least. Since you put it as
you do, suppose we arrange, then, that you and she play the same ball
this afternoon and I play against the two of you.”
“I believe that would be fair,” Hobart said, his eyes sidelong upon old
John. “It’s settled then.” He rose to go.
“I suppose so.” Tower’s gravity increased; but he brightened at a
thought that came to him as his departing caller reached the door. “I
suppose, Hobart, to-morrow—to-morrow——”
“To-morrow what?” Hobart inquired, staring at him.
“Ah—to-morrow——” Old John hesitated, then finished hopefully: “We
might return to our former arrangement?”
“To-morrow? Oh, yes, certainly—to-morrow we’ll return to our former
arrangement,” Hobart said; and as he passed through the anteroom beyond
he murmured the word incredulously to himself, “‘To-morrow.’” He laughed
shortly, and in his imagination continued the dialogue with old John.
“Day after to-morrow, too, I suppose? And the day after that? And the
next, and the next? Why, yes! Why not?” Then he became serious. “You
poor dear old thing, there’s got not to _be_ any ‘to-morrow’!”
He took the affair into his own hands for complete settlement; and at
noon he went to a jeweller’s and bought the most expensive wrist-watch
in the place—a trifling miracle of platinum intricately glittering with
excellent white diamonds. He put the little packet in his coat pocket,
and at about five o’clock that afternoon he showed it to Miss Julietta
Voss.
Old John Tower, absent-minded and not playing well, had driven his ball
into a thicket fifty yards away from where Hobart and Julietta had
paused;—he was in the underbrush, solemnly searching, with his caddy.
“Something for you,” Hobart said, tossing the little packet up and down
in his hand.
She looked surprised. “For me? From you?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing to speak of,” he replied, airily. “I just happened to hear
you broke that gold wrist-watch you usually wear——”
“I did,” she said. “But John found another for me to-day—a new one
exactly like it.” She displayed her left forearm for inspection. “Isn’t
it lovely of him always to be so dear about all the little thoughtful
things?”
“I don’t know,” Hobart said; and he quoted an ancient bit of slang:
“There might be others!”
She shook her head. “Not like him!”
“Are you sure, Julietta?” He gave her a quick and serious look that
increased her surprise. “You might at least take a glance round you to
see.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Hobart Simms?”
At that he gave her another quick glance—a personal glance, as it might
have been defined, since to Julietta it seemed to convey an unexpected
feeling concerning herself and himself. Then he looked wistfully away,
and when he spoke, a moment later, his voice had not the briskness
customary in his speech;—it was, on the contrary, perceptibly unsteady.
“Julietta, I’ve been—well, don’t you suppose a man might some day get a
little tired of being—I mean to say, here I am with you, day after
day—yet really _not_ with you. You’re so busy noticing old John all the
time, you never take time off to be a little friendly with anybody
else.”
She caught her breath, staring at him wonderingly. “But you—you never
showed me you wanted me to,” she said, slowly.
“Didn’t I?” He turned to her, smiling, and as he spoke he removed the
paper wrappings of the small packet. “Other people might want to do some
of the ‘little thoughtful things’ too—if they ever got a chance.”
He put into her hand the green velvet box that had been inside the
wrapping, and she opened it curiously;—then suppressed an outcry.
“Good Heaven!” she gasped, and stared at him. “Of course you know I
couldn’t accept a thing like _this_!”
“Why not? You would from John.”
“But——”
“You’re wearing the one he gave you.”
“Yes, but _this_——”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Of course, if you don’t like it——”
Sorrowfully he extended his hand to take back the little green velvet
box from her; but she retained it and stood staring at him, amazed and
also profoundly thoughtful. Like Hobart, she was a person who could make
quick decisions.
“I never dreamed of this,” she said. “I thought you only came along with
us because you thought it was a good course and because John asked you.”
“And he asked me because you made him,” Hobart added. “And the reason
you did was because you wanted me for a chaperon.”
She laughed excitedly. “You don’t seem contented with the rôle, I must
say!”
“How could I?”
“I never dreamed!” she said, and she looked at the watch upon her wrist
and at that in the green velvet box. “Queer!” she laughed. “Now I have
two!”
“Would you mind wearing mine?” Hobart asked, and he laughed with her.
“But he’ll see it!”
Hobart’s laughter became gayer and louder. “What if he does?”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Julietta said, and as she took the magnificent
tiny miracle from the box, there began to shine in her eyes an
exultation that could be ruthless. “Perhaps I’d better wear yours and
keep his in my pocket.”
“Perhaps you’d better,” he agreed, still laughing. “Don’t let him see
the joke’s on him till we get back to the clubhouse, though. If he asks
you about it, don’t tell him till then;—I want to get away first.”
“Yes,” she assented, thoughtfully. “Perhaps that would be just as well.”
XXXI
THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER
WHEN he got home from the country club, something less than an hour
later, his wife told him coldly that he seemed to be in high spirits.
“You appear to have the happy faculty of not being depressed by the
troubles of people close to you,” she added. “However, your gaiety may
be useful this evening, at Mother’s.”
“At your mother’s?” he inquired. “Are we going there?”
She looked at him sternly. “What have you been doing that makes you
forget such a thing? It’s Father’s and Mother’s thirty-eighth wedding
anniversary.”
“So it is!” he exclaimed. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Obviously. You’d better hurry and dress, because the dinner’s to be
very early on account of the younger grandchildren;—I sent them half an
hour ago.” And, as he did not move, she added, “Please get ready right
away.”
He still hesitated, for in his absorption in his plan to atone to his
sister-in-law and take up Anne’s challenge he had forgotten more than
the anniversary dinner. He had forgotten to consider in what terms he
would eventually inform his wife of that plan and what already appeared
to be its successful beginnings. The present seemed to be a wise time to
say something about it; but he found himself in a difficulty. Face to
face with his wife, especially in her present state of mind, which was
plainly still critical of him, he was convinced that she would prove
unsympathetic. He decided to postpone all explanations, at least until
they were on their way to his father-in-law’s house.
But, alone in the car with her, when the postponed moment seemed to have
arrived, he found the difficulty no less discouraging. He made an
effort, however; but he put it off so long that when he made it they
were almost at their destination.
“Oh, about that interview I’m supposed to have with old John, to-morrow
morning——”
“Yes,” she said. “When he asks you why you didn’t join him and Julietta
at the club this afternoon, you’ll not weaken, I trust.”
“‘Weaken’?”
“Oh, you’ll protest _now_ that you won’t, I know,” she said. “But men
are sympathetic—with other men, especially in ‘affairs’—and John’s
terribly sensitive. I shouldn’t be surprised if you failed to carry it
through. I shouldn’t at all!”
“But—but of course I shall,” Hobart said, before he knew what he was
saying. It was not what he wished to say; but he found himself
apparently without control of his own speech, for the moment; and he
realized that it would now be more difficult than ever to make the
needed explanation. He attempted it feebly, however. “That is to
say——” he began. “I mean—ah—suppose such an interview shouldn’t——”
The car stopped.
“We’re here,” Anne said. “I hope you’ll be as thoughtful as you can of
Mildred. And please don’t be too cordial to John. Let him begin to feel
what you think about him.”
But Hobart’s determination, as he followed his wife into his
father-in-law’s gaily illuminated house, was to be as cordial as
possible to old John and to seek the first private opportunity to
request him not to mention their game of the afternoon. Unfortunately,
the anniversary dinner was already in jovial motion;—Anne and her
husband were late; the adults of the party had yielded to the clamours
of the children and had just gone out to the dining-room. Hobart found
himself between Mildred and Cornelia, across the wide table from his
brother-in-law.
Old John was silent, and his sensitive face wore such visible depression
that presently his father-in-law began to rally him upon it. “Good
gracious, John, this is a party, not the bedside of a sick friend! Why
don’t you eat, or laugh, or anyhow say something? You and Mildred both
seem to think it’s a horrible thing to be present at a celebration of
two people’s having been happily married for thirty-eight years. Is that
what makes you feel so miserable?”
“No, not at all,” John replied, gloomily. “I wasn’t thinking of that. My
mind was on other matters.” And, being the singular soul he was, and of
such a guileless straightforwardness, he looked across the table at his
brother-in-law. “I was thinking of our golf game,” he said, to that
gentleman’s acute alarm. “I mean the one this afternoon, Hobart.”
Hobart heard from the chair next upon his right the subdued and
lamentable exclamation uttered by Mildred; but what fascinated his
paling gaze was the expression of his wife, seated beside old John. She
looked at her husband for a moment of great intensity;—then she turned
to Tower.
“So?” she said, lightly. “Did Hobart play with you and Julietta again
to-day?”
“He played with Julietta,” old John explained, and in his noble
simplicity he continued, to his brother-in-law’s horror, “_I_ didn’t
seem to be needed. I’ve been very fond of Julietta, very fond indeed of
Julietta. She broke her watch in our car yesterday, and so I took her a
new one this afternoon and gave it to her before we began to play.
Hobart brought her one, too; and she took mine off and wore his. The one
I brought her was an ordinary little gold one; but his was platinum and
diamonds—it must have cost a remarkable sum. It was very generous and
kind of Hobart, because Julietta isn’t well off; but the way she took it
made me feel peculiarly disappointed in her. She evidently considers
only the relative financial value of gifts, and not the spirit. She was
quite different in her manner toward me. I cannot say that I value her
friendship as I did.”
“You don’t?” Anne said; and she laughed excitedly. “Don’t you mean
you’ve decided she values my husband’s friendship more than you thought
she did?”
The unhappy Hobart, upon whom the wrong he had done to Julietta thus
already began to be avenged, made an effort to speak; but beneath the
table he felt a warm hand upon his knee, pressing warningly. It was
Mildred’s.
“Wait!” she whispered, rapturously. “I understand. I’ll help you to talk
to her later. It will be terribly difficult, but I’ll do what I can for
you—you angel!”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.
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