CHAPTER XLVIA SENTIMENTAL INTERLUDE
As we had planned it, we were to stay in Carmel only three days—from Friday until Monday—and then race south to Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, French Lick, Bloomington, back to Indianapolis, and after a day or night at Carmel for preparation, I might depart as I had planned, or I could stay here. Franklin suggested that I make his home my summering place—my room was mine for weeks if I cared to use it.
Actually up to now I had been anxious to get on and have the whole trip done with, but here in Carmel I developed a desire to stay and rest awhile, the country about was so very simple and homey; but I concluded that I must not.
Franklin had prepared a trip for Sunday afternoon which interested me very much. It was to be to the home of a celebrated automobile manufacturer, now dead, whose name, incidentally, had been in the papers for years, first as the President of the American Manufacturers Association, a very noble organization of materialists, I take it, and secondarily as the most strenuous opponent of organized labor that the country up to his day had produced. I hold no brief for organized labor any more than I do for organized manufacturers, being firmly convinced that both are entitled to organize and fight and that to the victors should belong the spoils; but at the present writing I would certainly sympathize with organized labor as being in the main the underdog, and wish it all the luck in the world. Personally, I believe in equilibrium, with a healthy swinging of the pendulum of life and time to and fro between the richand the poor—a pendulum which should cast down the rich of today and elevate them again tomorrow, or others like them, giving the underdog the pleasure of being the overdog quite regularly, and vice versa. I think that is what makes life interesting, if itisinteresting.
But as to this manufacturer, in spite of the entirely friendly things Franklin had to say of him, I had heard many other stories relating to him—his contentiousness, his rule of underpaying his labor, the way he finally broke down on a trip somewhere and forgot all the details of it, a blank space in his mind covering a period of two years. Franklin told me of his home, which was much more pleasant to hear about—a place down by a river near Indianapolis. According to Franklin, a good part of the estate was covered with a grove of wonderful trees, mostly beech. As you came to the place there was a keeper’s lodge by the gate which made you feel as if you were entering the historic domain of some old nobleman. The house was along a beautiful winding drive, bordered with a hedge of all sorts of flowers usually in bloom all through the summer. The house was very much hidden among the beech trees, a large red brick structure with many windows and tall chimneys; the lower story constructed of large field boulders, such as are found here. At the front and at the left of the main entrance this masonry projected to make an immense porch, with wide massive arches and posts of the same great boulders.
“The first time I ever saw it,” Franklin explained, “I stepped out of the car and went up to ring the bell. It was a warm day, and Mrs. —— was sitting alone at the left end of this great porch, quietly observing a colored man servant who was playing a hose on the vines and the main inside wall of the porch, apparently to partly cool the atmosphere. She is a little, sweet, quiet woman, and as she rose to greet me, something in the great house and the boulders and in the quietness of the forest air about us, and perhaps in the gentle humility of the woman herself, came to me and impressedme with the utter futility of building houses at all; and of any man building a house beyond the ability of a woman to touch lovingly with her hands and to care for and make a home of. Some time later when I entered the house she was sitting alone in the great hall in the sort of dusk that pervaded it. I somehow felt that the house opposed her; that it was her enemy. I don’t know; I may be wrong; it was only an impression.”
I have reproduced Franklin’s description as near as I can.
Of course I was interested to go. It promised a fine afternoon; only when the hour struck and we were off in our best feathers, two tires blew up and we were lucky to get to a garage. We limped back to Carmel, and I returned to my rocking chair on the front porch, watching cars from apparently all over the state go by, and wondering what had become of the two girls I had met—they had disappeared for the day, apparently—and what could I do to amuse myself. I listened to stories of local eccentricities, freaks of character, a man who had died and left a most remarkable collection of stuffed birds and animals, quite a museum, which he had elaborated while running a bakery, or something of that sort—and so on and so forth. Local morality came in for its usual drubbing—the lies which people live—the things which they seem and are not. Personally, I like this subtlety of nature—I would not have all things open and aboveboard for anything. I like pretence when it is not snivelling, Pecksniffery, calculated to injure someone for the very crimes or deceits which you yourself are committing. Such rats should always be pulled from their holes and exposed to the light.
Sitting on the veranda—Franklin felt called upon to do some work in his studio, a very attractive building at the rear of the lawn—I grew lonely and even despondent! It is a peculiarity of my nature that I suffer these spells out of a clear sky and at a moment’s notice. I can be having the best time in the world, apparently (I am often amused thinking about it), and thenof a sudden, the entertainment ceasing, the situation changing, I find myself heavily charged with gloom. I am getting old! (I had these same spells at nineteen and twenty.) Life is slipping on and away! Relatives and friends are dying! Nothing endures! Fame is a damned mockery! Affection is insecure or self-destroying! Soon I am in the last stages of despair and looking around for some means (speculatively purely) to end it all. It is really too amusing—’afterwards.
While I was so meditating the first young girl came back, with that elusive, enigmatic smile of hers, and two underdone striplings of about eighteen or nineteen, and another girl, intended largely as a foil. She was most becomingly and tantalizingly dressed in something which defies description, and played croquet—with the two youths who were persistently seeking her favor and ignoring the other maiden. I watched her until I became irritated by her coy self sufficiency, and the art with which she was managing the situation,—a thing which included me as someone to disturb, too. I got up and moved round to the other side of the house.
That night after dinner, Franklin and I went to Indianapolis on the trolley, and ignoring all the sights went to a great hotel grill, where, entirely surrounded by onyx and gilt and prism-hung candelabra, we had beer in a teapot, with teacups as drinking vessels, it being “against the law” to serve beer on Sunday. For the same reason it cost seventy cents—two humble “schooners” of beer—for of course there was the service and the dear waiter with his itching palm.
By ten-thirty the next morning the car, overhauled and cleaned, was at the door, our new chauffeur at the wheel, ready for the run south.
The Best of IndianapolisTHE BEST OF INDIANAPOLIS
THE BEST OF INDIANAPOLIS
THE BEST OF INDIANAPOLIS
I carried my bags down, put them into the car, and sat in it to wait. Franklin was off somewhere, in the heart of the village, arranging something. Suddenly I heard a voice. It had the tone I expected. Actually, I had anticipated it, in a psychic way. Looking up andacross a space of lawn two houses away, I saw the second girl of this meeting place standing out under an apple tree, with a little boy beside her, an infant the Speed family had adopted.
She was most gay in her dress and mood—something eery and sylph-like.
“Aren’t you coming over to say goodby?” she called.
I jumped up, ashamed of my lack of gallantry, and yet excusing myself on the ground that I was too timid to intrude before, and strolled over. She received me with a disturbed cordiality which was charming.
“It’s right mean of you,” she said.
“I was coming,” I protested, “only I expected to put it over until Thursday—on my way back. That sounds rather bad, doesn’t it, but really I wanted to come, only I was a little bit afraid.”
“You—afraid?”
“Yes. Don’t you think I can be?”
“Yes, but not of us, I should think. I thought maybe you were going away for good without saying goodby.”
“Now, how could you?” I protested, knowing full well to the contrary. “How nice we look today. Such a pretty dress and the clean white shoes—and the ribbon.”
She was as gay and fluffy as a bit out of a bandbox.
“Oh, no, I just put these on because I had to wear them about the house this morning.” She smiled in a simple, agreeable way, only I fancied that she might have dressed on purpose.
“Well, anyhow,” I said—and we began to talk of school and her life and what she wanted to do. Just as I was becoming really interested, Franklin appeared, carrying a package. “Alas, here he is. And now I’ll have to be going soon.”
“Yes,” she said, quite simply, and with a little feeling. “You’ll be coming back, though.”
“But only for a day, I’m afraid.”
“But you won’t go away the next time without saying goodby, will you?”
“Isn’t that kind of you,” I replied. “Are you sure you want me to say goodby?”
“Indeed I do. I’ll feel hurt if you don’t.” She held out her hand. There was a naïve simplicity about it all that quite disarmed me and made it all innocent and charming.
“Don’t you think I won’t?” I asked, teasingly. And then as I looked at her she blanched in an odd, disturbed way, and turning to the boy called, “Come on, Billy,” and ran to a side porch door, smiling back at me.
“You won’t forget,” she called back from that safe place.