“For a spotless child of heaven, Cecilia’s playing the game pretty well,” I mused, as I watched her at dinner. During the hour of dressing she had pulled herself wonderfully together. She held her little round chin high in the air and devoted herself to Drake with all the aplomb of a Felicia.
The cup of bitterness held its touchof sweet to her. Even if one must suffer, one was out in the world, one was living, was what I read in her attitude. But as I have said, I don’t pretend to understand women; still, I’m much mistaken if, during dinner, at least, she didn’t have a good time.
She ignored Almington as much as she could in a general conversation.
“Mrs. Massingbyrd can have you,” her attitude seemed to say. “I fight for no man.”
I looked at Drake. If he wanted to keep his rose in the bud, he had better carry her away quickly to a fresher atmosphere.
At the end of dinner the ladies exchanged nods and smiles. I saw that an explanation was forthcoming for the mysterious visit to the stable.
They had been preparing what to me seemed not unlike a little amateur Walpurgisnacht.
It was, of course, Lydia Massingbyrd’s idea. Nobody else, not even Felicia, could have been wrong-minded enough to want to slide downhill in summer. My coachman’s children have a species of roller sled on which they daily endanger their lives by coasting down the steep macadamized road which leads from my house.
“I saw them on my way from the station,” proclaimed Mrs. Massingbyrd, triumphantly; “and saw at once their possibilities.”
“Will you steer me, Mr. Curtis?” asked Cecilia, turning her back on Almington, and giving poor Drake a killing glance; and I thought I surprised a glance of malicious intelligence pass between Mrs. Massingbyrd and my wife.
Now, I know that, told in plain words the morning after, most of our maddest fun seems flat and puerile enough. I know that a decent married man of my age and a lady killer of Almington’s ought to have poohpoohed this childish sport, and sat with our cigars and our whiskies and sodas on the piazza.
I suppose you think that’s what you would have done. But I can tell you, if you had dined with Felicia and Mrs. Massingbyrd, you’d have been caught up in the fire of their folly. It’s contagious, more than anything I know. In the glamour of their lovely nonsense sliding downhill on the coachman’s children’s roller sled would have seemed an appropriate and delightful thing—or sliding down the banister or the cellar door, if it had been their mad whim to do that.
Haven’t you ever been a kid since you were grown up? Did all your fooling stop before you were out of college? I’m sorry for you if it’s so. I hope, for my part, that Felicia and Mrs. Massingbyrd and their like will make me forget my years for a long time to come. And I hope often to wake up in the sober light of the next day wondering just what magic it was that had turned back the hand of time for me, that I could find merriment in sliding down a macadamized hill on a roller sled.
The night was cold, with a bit of a breeze; there was a moon, and the glow from Felicia’s gayety and Lydia Massingbyrd lasted my little companion on our first swift, delirious slides.
It wasn’t coasting, but it was exciting enough, as one went very fast. And coming up we piled into a cart to be drawn up the hill. But after a few slides the flame of my little friend’s gayety flickered out, and as the others were piling into the cart, “Let’s walk,” Cecilia suggested. Youth is ever selfish in its distress, and what did Cecilia care whether my legs were tired or not climbing that hill? Her little flock of conventions had come fluttering back to her. Her doll was sawdust, and there was a bad taste in her mouth.
Now, of course, you know that there’s nothing more revolting than the folly of others when you yourself are serious. Haven’t you been annoyed time and again by the senseless and meaningless good spirits of the people next door? I’m sure you have. And just as often you’ve felt a certain compassion for the people who give you sour looks and grim glances when you’re having the time of your life.
So it was with ever-increasing disapproval of my wife’s merriment andMrs. Massingbyrd’s abandon that Cecilia walked up the hill with me.
“I think,” she confided to me, sadly, “I was born old!”
“There are some people who stay babies forever,” I encouraged her.
“They are the fortunate ones,” Cecilia said, gloomily. “I never have been able to enjoy things long at a time. Even our good times at school used to seem childish to me. And I thought when I came out and was among grown people——”
“That things would be different,” I supplemented. “And you find it’s just the same.”
“Just the same,” she agreed, in a gratified tone. “I feel as old as I did at school!”
“Some people are born with a realization of the futility of pleasure,” I went on, trying to voice Cecilia’s mood.
“I suppose it’s that,” she sighed. “When I was at school I thought of the world as a playground where I could amuse myself with the others.”
“And instead, you find that you’re only learning a different kind of lesson, and play is as uninteresting as ever?”
“Yes, it’s just like another kind of school, and the lessons harder to learn—and of less use when you’ve learned them!” There was a pathetic note in her voice.
“You’re very different from other girls, Miss Bennett,” I felt was an appropriate and comforting thing to say.
“I know I am, and it’s a great misfortune to be so,” she acknowledged, with becoming modesty.
“But it has its compensations.”
“It’s very lonely,” she said. “No one has ever understood all I think and feel. Mamma never has, nor the girls.”
“And since you’ve been out?”
“Since I’ve been out I met some one—once”—the once threw the time of meeting in the remote past—“some one I thought understood me—but I was disappointed.”
I murmured something sympathetic.
“Because I’m young in years people think I can’t see things,” she cried, with a little rising temper.
“You have the best possible vantage, then, to observe the world as it really is.”
“And I do see things as they really are, and many things!” and she clinched her little fists under cover of the darkness. Things were getting somewhat strenuous for me, so I brought our conversational boat to smoother waters.
“You make me think a little of Ellery Drake,” I said. (Machiavelli to the front!) “Because he seems so simple and direct; shallow people don’t take the trouble to understand him. But you’ve seen, of course——”
“Yes,” she assented; and I saw she was interested.
“What a lonely time he has of it, and under his apparent simplicity how much depth there is.”
“I’ve known him all my life—but I’ve never really known him—that is, whatIcall knowing a person.” There was a great deal of intensity in Cecilia’s voice. “Ah, how hard it is to really know any—and so few realize it.” The atmosphere was getting a little rarefied, so I was glad of the diversion caused by the two roller sleds whiffling by us.
“We’re racing,” called Mrs. Massingbyrd. “If we win, I’m to grant a boon to Jack Almington.”
“He’ll probably ask her to take down her hair,” said Machiavelli. “Men always do.”
“Oh, if that sort of thing amuses him”—contempt spoke in Cecilia’s tone—“let him have—his hank of hair!”
“There’s a remarkably happy man,” I said. “No still waters in his; a perfectly delightful fellow, only spoiled by women!”
“Is he?” asked Cecilia, indifferently.
“He’s been so immensely liked, you know, that what he really needs is a snub. He thinks he’s only to look at a woman for him to like her.”
“Wouldn’t one call that just a trifle conceited?” Cecilia’s voice dripped sarcasm.
“Not in his case,” I returned, cruelly. “For, you see, it’s generally so. I’ve never known a more fatal man than Almington.”
“He’s notalwaysfatal,” Cecilia gave out, dryly; and she shut her little mouthwith a firmness that even in the dim moonlight made itself visible.
We stood at the top of the hill in silence for a moment, waiting for the cart with the others in it. They came up laughing. How vain and empty their laughter was, I was sure Cecilia was thinking. Her deep knowledge of the world and its iniquity were fairly bowing down her young shoulders.
The laughter and nonsense grew louder, and I descried, standing upright in the cart, a vision, spirit or woman I couldn’t tell.
My companion stared a moment and then remarked:
“Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair has come down!” Into these simple words was packed all the quintessence of disapproval that Cecilia had learned from her various advisers. There were echoes of her mother’s shocked tones, haunting accents of her offended teacher, all welded together by the cool disapproval that was Cecilia’s own.
I am sure that if my delightful little guest could have heard the awful, the chilling, contempt of “Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair has come down,” she would have veiled her face with it in abject shame.
I gathered by her attitude and that of Felicia and Almington that these silly creatures were playing at tableaux, the cart serving as aMi-carême char.
Mrs. Massingbyrd’s hair, more miraculous than ever in the moonlight, fell down to her knees. Her eyes looked seraphically heavenward. Almington held her hand, kneeling before her, while Felicia, a little shawl disposed as drapery about her, was pointing dramatically out into the night, giving an admirable impersonation of those statuesque young ladies who, in tableaux, have noraison d’êtresave to round out the composition and look pretty.
Later I learned that the name of this impressive tableau was: “The Triumph of Virtue.”
At that moment I was too occupied with the attitude of my little companion to pay attention to Mrs. Massingbyrd’s foolery.
Cecilia had just caught sight of Almington as he knelt, holding the hand of Virtue, his lean legs bent like the blade of a knife. Almington generally cuts a fine figure, through a certain sense of the fitness of things. His air of secret melancholy wins half his battles for him, and he is one of those men who must at any cost hang on to the last shred of dignity, as they are nothing without it. In his present situation I have no hesitation in saying he looked fatuous and grotesque.
How he came to lend himself to the crazy whim of the two girls I can’t tell. I suppose he was carried away by the flood of their high spirits, as many a wiser man has been before him and will be after him.
But if I had excuses for him, Cecilia had none.
It may be heartbreaking to have your first “serious young man” leave you at the smiles of a pretty widow with blond hair; but, after all, by showing how truly noble you are, you may some day crush your rival and bring your suitor to your knees, crying, “Peccavi!” It’s bad to learn he’s a heartbreaker, but, after all, then there’s all the more incentive to break his heart. You can, whatever happens, bear your suffering nobly, and at the worst you have lots of things, heaps simply, to tell the girls.
But to have your first hero of romance make himself ridiculous—that is the end of all things. Sorrow has then no dignity. A broken heart for a man like that is out of the question. Oh, it’s a bitter thing to think the drama of one’s life a tragedy and have it turn out a low comedy!
Cecilia saw her hero exactly as he was, at that moment, stripped of all adornment.
Glamour died, romance withered away; in the clear fire of her uncompromising young scorn.
She was proving again that man’s only unpardonable crime toward the woman who loves him is to make himself ridiculous.
It was really quite a dramatic littlemoment. The late hero, now turned mountebank, descended and helped out Felicia and Lydia, radiant in her white and gold attire—and it was only then I saw Drake, who had been sitting stiffly in the back of the cart.
Hehad taken no part in the pageant. If his temper was impaired, his dignity wasn’t. Sliding downhill was all right, his rigidity seemed to say, but no play acting in his. His mood and Cecilia’s jumped together. Her eyes met his. “I know you now,” her grateful glance seemed to say.
Meantime Mrs. Massingbyrd, lovely as an angel, drifted along the white road.
“It’s breaking the rules of the game,” Felicia said to her, “for you to have taken down your hair.”
“It fell down itself,” answered Lydia the unashamed.
“But you looked so entirely lovely,” my wife went on, “that I forgive you. It’s worth the price.”
And I guiltily hoped that Mrs. Massingbyrd would refrain from saying, “That’s exactly what Bobby said.”
She stood pensive a moment in the moonlight. Drake and Cecilia, drawn together by the feeling of superiority they shared in common—and which I had helped to point out—wandered off together. Almington was absorbed in an open and impertinent admiration of Mrs. Massingbyrd’s beauty, and Felicia and I gazed at her, and again Felicia said, approvingly: “It’s an unfair advantage to take—but it’s really worth it!”
Then the dreamy look in lovely Mrs. Massingbyrd’s eyes deepened, and she opened her lovely lips and said:
“Felicia, I’m so desperately hungry that I wouldn’t coast down that hill again—not for anything! Did you say you had something good for supper?”
“And at supper I shall ask my boon,” Almington answered.
“Boon?” said Mrs. Massingbyrd, as she watched Cecilia and Drake vanish together in the moonlight among the flowers. “Boon? You greedy person! Isn’t it boon enough to have seen me with my hair down by moonlight! I wonder at your graspingness, Jack Almington!”
*****
After we had said good-night to our guests, after Cecilia and Drake had at last come in from an interminable talk on the piazza, after Mrs. Massingbyrd had stuffed herself—in the face of her ethereal loveliness I hate to use such a word, but I know no other; indeed, she applied herself to supper with such a fair, frank and honest appetite that she had neither eyes nor ears for Almington’s compliments—after all this was over, Felicia turned to me with a look of satisfaction.
“You played up nobly that time, Robert,” she said. “I’ve never known you to catch on so quickly and without a word from anyone.”
I gained time with remarking, pathetically, “You’ve always underrated my intelligence.”
“I call it a thoroughly artistic performance,” my wife said; “and the beauty of it is that there was no talk, no nothing, but each one doing his work.”
I looked at Felicia, to see if by any chance she was making a pitfall for me, but there was no danger signal. I thought it safe to give out, “I’m glad you liked my little share in it.”
“You were splendid,” she cried, cordially. “And if Miss Bennett only knew it, we deserve a vote of thanks from her.”
“Yes, don’t we?” I took care not to commit myself.
“It isn’t as if we hadn’t provided Cecilia with another suitor, and I’m sure Ellery Drake, from any point of view, is far more desirable than Almington.”
“I should say he was,” I cordially assented.
“And then, who can tell if Almington was really serious? And for a young girl to beaffichéewith Almington her first season is nothing short of tarnishing,” Felicia went on, virtuously.
“That’s what I’ve said from the beginning,” I put in.
“And you certainly played up nobly. We couldn’t have put it through soquickly without you,” my wife was generous enough to confess. “But did you ever see anything as splendid and self-sacrificing as Lydia?”
“Self-sacrificing?” I wondered, feeling my way.
“Why, she made herself odious—simply odious—in Cecilia’s eyes, so Cecilia would feel furious at having Almington like her.” Sometimes Felicia is anything but lucid.
“Like whom?” I naturally wanted to know.
“Like Lydia,” replied my wife, impatiently. “A girl can stand anything but having a man she likes fall in love with a woman she doesn’t. It’s queer,” she said, suspiciously, “clever as you are sometimes, how dense you are others.Didyou understand——”
But at this late date I wasn’t going to have my laurels snatched from me. So I hastened to assure her. “Of course,” I said, loftily, “I understood Mrs. Massingbyrd intended to interfere!”
SCARLET her cloak, her lips all scarlet too,Her cloudy hair as golden as the leavesOf the sun-mellowed hickories, her voiceThe rich, low whispers of the brooks that pleaseBy hinting Autumn mysteries, her eyesWitch-lights of laughter and of mad surprise.Oh, gypsy prodigal, who gives and gives,Till penury in winter strips you bare,Cover me with the splendor of your locks,Let your eyes challenge me from dull despair—Wake me and sting me till I, too, shall sweepRound in the revels that your whirlwinds keep.Clinton Dangerfield.
SCARLET her cloak, her lips all scarlet too,Her cloudy hair as golden as the leavesOf the sun-mellowed hickories, her voiceThe rich, low whispers of the brooks that pleaseBy hinting Autumn mysteries, her eyesWitch-lights of laughter and of mad surprise.Oh, gypsy prodigal, who gives and gives,Till penury in winter strips you bare,Cover me with the splendor of your locks,Let your eyes challenge me from dull despair—Wake me and sting me till I, too, shall sweepRound in the revels that your whirlwinds keep.Clinton Dangerfield.
SCARLET her cloak, her lips all scarlet too,Her cloudy hair as golden as the leavesOf the sun-mellowed hickories, her voiceThe rich, low whispers of the brooks that pleaseBy hinting Autumn mysteries, her eyesWitch-lights of laughter and of mad surprise.
Oh, gypsy prodigal, who gives and gives,Till penury in winter strips you bare,Cover me with the splendor of your locks,Let your eyes challenge me from dull despair—Wake me and sting me till I, too, shall sweepRound in the revels that your whirlwinds keep.
Clinton Dangerfield.
The Warreners, by Marie Van Vorst
G
GERTRUDE Warrener was twenty-five years old on the day she went into the back library and, seated in a rocking chair, a newspaper and a box of candy-kitchen chocolates in her lap—began to live.
Hitherto the boundaries of her lifeline had been limited by a wooden fence circling a few feet of coarse grass and two frame houses like her own. To the rear, in the yard, four poles formed a square with peculiar precision, and on washdays the level lines of a cord, stretching cat’s-cradle-wise, supported the household laundry.
She had taken for eight years the front rooms of the house for her point of vantage, and when she had mentally stated “Mrs. Felter’s just gone into the Perches’,” or “Pearl Exeter does her marketing in the afternoons instead of the mornings,” she had nothing further to say. One day she caught herself in the middle of some such banal reflection, and, going to the back of the house, took her place in the window of a microscopic library.
Gertrude Warrener did not remotely dream that she on this day passed the Rubicon lying between existence and life.
When the mind is sensible of inertia—the eyes catch sight of living forms, and the soul yearns toward something which it has not—it may be taken for granted that a life-breath has blown over the valley of dead bones.
In the case of Gertrude Warrener, it was indeed a tomb in which she awakened, and she did not know that she had been immured.
In her seventeenth year, George Warrener, just received into a subordinate position in a New York banking and broking firm, began to pay her his bashful attentions. With no spoken words on his part that she could remember—nor could he for the life of him have recalled the formula—there was an engagement. She married him before her eighteenth birthday.
As she sat in the library, all image of the youthful lover was completely effaced from her mind. He was now like hundreds and dozens of other middle-rank business men. Of medium height, stocky, his hair and short, stubby mustache nondescript, his eyes blue, wide apart and rather small, he was a successful type and entirely sacrificed as an individual. He often said:
“I look like a prosperous Wall Street man, and that is as near as I shall ever come to it—to look like it.”
But in spite of his dapper appearance, Warrener was an overworked drudge. He worked so hard and so long, his daily trips on unhealthy ferries and hot cars sapped his vitality to such an extent, that all his life had been spent and lived by the time he crossed at night the threshold of his home.
Gertrude in the little library opened the pages of theSlocum Dailyslowly. She read the town gossip, a local weather prediction, an account of the hospital fair; and as she rocked and ate one after the other the chocolate marshmallows she had a feeling of freedom, whose cause was due simply to the fact that she had changed her point of view—due to the humble novelty of her transposition.
George’s library smelled of stale tobacco. She had sensitive nostrils, and was beginning to find the dead odor unpleasant, when at this point she fell upon an item in theSlocum Dailywhich held her attention:
We are glad to learn that the McAllister homestead has been opened. After the long absence in Europe of the family, Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy have returned, and Slocum welcomes them back with much pleasure.
We are glad to learn that the McAllister homestead has been opened. After the long absence in Europe of the family, Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy have returned, and Slocum welcomes them back with much pleasure.
“Slocum!” She spoke aloud, and there was scorn in her tone. “Well, I guess they’ll laugh at that. I don’t believetheycare for theDaily!”
Old Mrs. McAllister at once took form for her. She had come to their wedding, and Gertrude remembered her as tall, and that her dress and hat became her. The young, light-minded bride had remarked the difference between this guest and other Slocumites.
Kept in state on the buffet downstairs was a silver pitcher, the sole real silver in the house. Mrs. McAllister had sent it to the Warreners as a wedding present.
Gertrude got up and went out in the hall. “Eliza!”
“Yes, ma’am.” The maid of all work appeared at the foot of the back stairs.
“Say—just go and get that silver pitcher off the dining-room buffet and clean it. I guess it hasn’t been cleaned for three years.”
The maid looked at her in astonishment. “Why, we haven’t got a mite of cleaning powder in the house, Mrs. Warrener!”
Mrs. Warrener came slowly down the stairs herself, and, going to the dining-room buffet, looked at her wedding gift—or what she could see of it through a thick layer of dirt and discoloration. Then she carried it to the bathroom, and, with nail brush and tooth powder, shone it up as well as she could. It was a tribute of welcome to the return of the Bellamys.
After a week or so of the new atmosphere of the tiny library she summed up her life as follows, and was able to state that the routine of her days never varied: She rose at seven and dressed. George’s train went at eight, and she sat with him at table through a breakfast of hot bread, meat, potatoes and coffee. Then her husband put on his coat and hat and took his leave without even bidding her good-by. She felt lonely when the butcher and the grocer had gone. When she had given her directions to Eliza, it was never more than ten o’clock. In days past she had been used to walk out to the library and get a book, or wander into a neighbor’s “and sit a while,” but of late there commenced from the early morning a period of rocking and reading in the library. In the evening George returned from New York only in time to come to the table without the formality of washing his hands.
These were her interests. Too timid to go to Town Club meetings, too simple-minded to be of any great importance in the different Slocum circles, she kept to herself. Her sole interest would naturally be her husband; him she saw from seven P. M. to seven A. M.; or, rather, she slept beside him during these hours—for directly after dinner he would throw himself down on the lounge in his library and smoke and read till at nine o’clock she roused him and sent him to bed in their common bedroom, in their common bed.
George, tired and devitalized by his strenuous life, absorbed by his own and his employer’s affairs, fell asleep at once. But his companion, more alive than she knew, would lie awake until long past midnight, her body unfatigued, her mind restless, her wakeful eyes staring into the dark which had for her no emotion and no mystery.
One afternoon she found she had read through a whole book without stopping, and for the first time in her life had been absorbed. She got up and turned off the steam heat and opened the window.
“It must be ninety here with these radiators! You either freeze or stew.”
The air came in bluffly, its unfriendly edges met her cheeks; before they could be refreshed she was cold in her thin muslin shirt-waist.
She had risen in expression of a sudden need of air, a sudden sense of suffocation, but she thought only that she was “nervous,” and would go out and take a walk. A little later, a golfcape over a short coat of material known as “covert”—short-skirted, a gray felt hat on her head—Mrs. George Warrener was seen by her neighbors to be going “uptown.”
Not until she had left the village, keeping steady pace up the hill toward the Golf Club, did she feel that she had “let off steam.” The quick motion set free the tension of her nerves, and she almost forgot the acute sensation that drove her from the house. At the golf links she approached the course and stood by the fence, near to one of the last bunkers.
The field was sparsely dotted with the golfers. A red dash in the distance, a green dash, indicated the players who bent in bright sweaters over their sticks. Two men came across the ground close to her—strangers—she saw that instantly, and regarded them with the curiosity of a resident. The man who was playing, his club swung over his shoulder, his driver in his hand, was short and stout, with smooth, red cheeks and bright eyes under shaggy brows. His shoes were large and heavy, his golf stockings thick, and his fustian clothes rough and well made. His companion, a younger man in a loose-sleeved overcoat, had a soft felt hat on his head and a lighted cigar in his hand. The older man said to him, laughing:
“There you are, old man! If you’re really caddying for me, you’ll have to ferret the ball out of that ditch by the fence. I saw it roll down.”
The other lazily nodded, took a puff at his cigar and came over in the direction indicated. Mrs. Warrener leaned on the fence watching the gentleman, who poked about in the grass with his cane.
“Let me give you a fresh ball out of my pocket; I’ve got three left,” he called.
The older man laughed. “Oh, go on, look for it; it’s right under your nose. You’ve given me a ‘fresh ball out of your pocket’ every time one has rolled fifteen yards!”
Mrs. Warrener stooped down; she saw the golf ball on the other side of the fence. She put her hand under through the railing and picked it up; she handed it to the gentleman.
“I think this is your ball.”
He took it with a swift, quick look at her, lifted his hat with cane and cigar in the same hand and thanked her. Taking the ball, he returned to his friend.
Mrs. Warrener watched the older gentleman prepare to drive—then the two men follow the direction indicated by the sharp, momentary flight of the little white ball, the golfer tripping briskly along, the other dark figure following slowly. She had never seen either of them before; who were they? The distant rattle of an incoming train—the one before her husband’s—warned her of the time. She would barely reach home before George came in. “Although,” she reflected, “I may just as well be late, for allhewill notice, he is so tired, anyway.”
She walked, nevertheless, mechanically toward home, so slowly that when she reached the village street George’s train had been in some time.
At this time of night a little crowd was gathered, as a rule, for the trolley, and Mrs. Warrener decided to take the car and anticipate her husband’s arrival by several minutes.
While she stood with the others who waited, the strangers of the Golf Club joined the crowd. As the car appeared the gentleman in the black coat helped her in and sat opposite her. When he threw back his coat to get out his fare from his pocket, she observed that he wore a gray waistcoat of soft material—it looked as though it were “knit,” she thought, or “worked”—a bright red tie and—unusual elegance among the men of Slocum—gloves—gray gloves, as soft in color as his waistcoat. Very much struck by his dress, she ventured, with a certain timidity, to look him in the face. The vivid color of his cravat made him seem very dark; all she could observe was a dark face, dark mustache and eyes, for he was looking at her, and she met his eyes directly. Their interested curiosity rendered her uncomfortable, and she removed herglance, which traveled down the line of colorless passengers, tired men in dusty, careless dress; unbrushed derbys, linen far from immaculate, gloveless hands. Each man had his bunch of evening papers, some carried parcels from the city for suburban use. A woman she knew, an inveterate shopper, nodded brightly to her.
“Been in New York all day. Just too tired. Never saw such a crowd in the stores; why, I thought I neverwouldget waited on. Say——” There was a vacant seat by Mrs. Warrener, and the lady came over and took it, continuing a description of bargains, and a tirade against crowds. “Been up this week, Gert?”
“No, I hardly ever go in.”
“Well, it’s a change, but I always say when we get to Slocum I’m glad I don’t live in New York, it’s so wearing. Been up to the Golf Club?”
“Yes, but not to play.”
The conversationalist was conscious of a change in her well-known neighbor’s tone, an accent, just what it was she could not imagine, but it was sufficiently marked to give her food for thought.
As Mrs. Warrener left the car at her corner, Mrs. Turnbull puzzled over her. Perhaps she was offended with her? But she had no reason for such an idea! Perhaps George Warrener was losing money? As money to the unsentimental, commercial American mind is the source of all bliss and the cause of all unhappiness, the slide down which all spirits fall and the height to which they rise, she reached a sad conclusion in this, and dropped her wonderings.
*****
Warrener and his wife arrived at the same moment on the steps of their two-story frame house.
“Well!” he said. He took out his latchkey and entered the door. The hall was hot and full of the smell of roasting meat and soup herbs. The dinner puffed out to meet the diners with damp, pungent warmth. George put his batch of papers down on the hall stand.
“Well,” he repeated, absently, took off his dusty derby, hung it up and got out of his overcoat.
He looked for no response to his greeting. Mrs. Warrener understood this, and made none.
Warrener went upstairs to his study.
“Gracious, Gert, some one’s left the window open in my den! It’s like ice here!”
“It’ll get hot enough. Turn on the steam.”
Mrs. Warrener followed her husband upstairs into the cold little room. The smell of stale smoke seemed to have frozen on the air, but over it the smell of the cigar the gentleman had smoked, a peculiar aroma, as new to her, as delicious, as would have been a priceless perfume, came to her nostrils. She went to her chair where she had sat for hours reading, and picked up her book, which she kept in her hand.
“What have you been doing all day, Gert?” he asked at dinner, after he had eaten his tepid soup and drunk an entire glass of ice water.
“Oh, I don’t know—nothing much.”
“Nothin’ doin’? Well, you are in luck! I feel as if something was doin’ in every inch of my body. I’m tired out. Harkweather kept the clerks down to-night—they won’t get out before nine o’clock; but I said ‘not tonight for me. I’m goin’ home.’ And I’m goin’ right to bed. I guess I’ll sleep twelve hours, all right!”
As they went upstairs, he first and she slowly following, she suggested:
“How would you like me to sleep in the spare room, if you’re so tired?”
“Why?” he asked, jocularly. “Do I snore so?”
“Yes, but that’s not it. It may feel good to have the whole bed to yourself.”
“Well, I believe it would.”
In the spare room, close to the springs, on a narrow, single bed, Mrs. Warrener crept alone. She drew the adjusting electric light close to her and took her book up again to re-read, her elbow in the pillow and her cheek on her hand. She followed the printed lines with dawning interest on her face,and a growing intelligence, until all of a sudden the dead stillness of the hour and time struck her. The fireless room—for there was no steam heat in it—gave her a chill. She put out the light and drew the coverlet about her and settled down to sleep.
The business interest of which George Warrener formed a humble part had no picturesque traditions. Like everything else in New York, the corporation had even during Warrener’s time boasted several different addresses. When especial advantages presented themselves in the shape of higher buildings and higher rent, Harkweather & Fulsome moved. The unstableness, the constant transition, had an effect upon him which he did not appreciate. Warrener, with his firm, was restless; and restless with his eighty million fellow Americans.
Harkweather & Fulsome’s last move had been to a twenty-two-floored steel structure, from whose tenth story were visible the roofs of the buildings not yet razed to make room for other giant office honeycombs. Money, at Harkweather & Fulsome’s, superseded everything else in the world, extinguished the lights of pleasure, destroyed even the capacity to enjoy. Everything else was crowded out of the question. Harkweather & Fulsome were “strictly business,” strictly getters of wealth; and they squeezed dry every sponge that came to their hands.
Warrener, in the office, had drifted into the position of confidential clerk, very much used when wanted, and shifted off into a little, stuffy room, where he had a desk and typewriter, when his services were not in active demand. Here he copied, filed and noted; added, opened and docketed mail; and read the financial news in every available sheet in the city. To his own thinking, he was an authority on stocks and bonds. He heard innumerable tips thrown out; saw them acted upon, and prove either valuable or worthless; followed the rise and fall of fortunes near and far; assisted at failures and successes; and during the hours of his routine in the office had the sensation of being himself a millionaire! But when he left the ferry, the bondholders and “big men” hurried to their more important trains and more important stations, and Warrener hustled himself, with his evening papers, into the short train of the Slocum local, he then distinctly felt the difference between his bank balance and his chief’s! He lived in the atmosphere of money, but he had never been ambitious. Of average intelligence, common school education, steady-going and trustworthy, he had no intentions further than to pay his bills, earn his salary and keep at the business.
Were he asked what part of his life he recalled with most pleasure he would have unhesitatingly answered: “Getting engaged and going on our honeymoon.” The sentimental period—which had come into his unimaginative life with the imperiousness of that passion which at least once during a man’s life changes his existence for a time, short or long—had for Warrener left behind it a memory which the cares of the world, the moth and rust of vulgar routine, trains and ferries, quick lunches and elevators, common surroundings and abasing ideals, overlaid but never destroyed.
Eight years before he had asked the prettiest girl he knew to marry him, and she had said yes. His vacation falling at this time, they had spent two weeks in August at Far Rockaway, and from there went directly into the rented house on Grand Street, and the newly married man began his bi-daily pilgrimages on the train.
He would have been ashamed to have anyone, above all his wife, know that as he crossed the ferry, one of a thick-packed crowd on the front part of the boat, standing there close to the running waters, near the bow, he often gave himself a mental holiday; then the image of Gertrude in a pinkish dress and picture hat came to his mind as he had seen her on the boardwalk at Rockaway eight years ago. It was a species of revel for him to recall those days.He was not unhappy or even discontented; he was too commonplace to be capable of either sensation. He was numbed, pinched hard by life.
“I am indispensable to Mr. Harkweather,” he repeated, with pride, and passed the time with his hand on other people’s grindstones, all the gold dust flying into other people’s bags.
One especial Sunday he awakened after a refreshing sleep, stretched his arms and yawned aloud, then lay pleasantly conscious of the well-being of his condition—half asleep still, and it was far into the morning! Belowstairs he could hear the heavy footsteps of Eliza, and fancied the early presage of dinner. Warrener listened, knowing he should soon hear another footstep lighter than that of the maid-of-all-work.
“Gert!”
Mrs. Warrener came in.
“It’s twelve o’clock,” she said, “and you’ll just about have time to get up, take your bath and dress for dinner.”
“All right,” he responded, cheerfully, but did not move. Instead, putting his hands up behind his head, he watched his wife as she fetched out his clean clothes and laid them with his Sunday suit over a chair. As she moved quietly about the room, the man’s feeling of content grew, added to by the feminine presence and the evidence of care and wifely attention. The little room was bright with the sunshine of a mild November day. The chromos, the glaring wall paper, the cheap oak bedroom set, the thin lace curtains touched with the light, appeared lovely in their master’s eyes. Before him was the prospect of a long day of repose, spent in perfect, tranquil laziness, a day in the fresh country air. There would be no office or telegraph calls, no duties, no sounds to disturb the hard-earned hours. His relaxed nerves and body rejoiced in the holiday. He was as happy as he could ever be—did he know it, would ever be. Years afterward Warrener looked back at that especial Sunday with something of the same affection he bestowed upon his marriage memories, and with keener regret.
As Mrs. Warrener went out of the room, he called her:
“Say, Gert!”
She paused at the door, clean towels in her hand. She was going to get his bath ready.
“Well, what?”
He wanted to call: “Give me a kiss.” But her manner rather distanced him. So he said: “What’ll you give me if I guess what we’re going to have for dinner?”
“Nothing,” she laughed. “I should think anybody with a nose would know. Eliza leaves the kitchen door open all the time.”
“It smells good,” he sniffed. “And it’s away ahead of sandwiches and a glass of beer; that’s my noon meal, as a rule.”
She warned him he wouldn’t get any dinner at all if he didn’t hurry up, and in a few moments he heard the running of his bath; the sound, to his good humor and contented frame of mind, was one more pleasant, luxurious, agreeable part of the day.
Later, shaved and washed, dressed with great precision and care, he sat in the parlor, the multitudinous sheets of the New York daily papers around him.
Gertrude rocked idly in the window, her eyes on the deserted street. Eliza washed the dinner dishes and put them rattling away, then tramped up the front stairs, and in gorgeous magnificence went out the back way, emerging into Grand Street. At the sight of her Mrs. Warrener said: “I’m going to give you a cold supper, George, some salad and tea—she’s made biscuits, I guess.”
“Oh, that’s all right. It seems as if we only just got up from dinner.” He threw his paper down. “Want to take a walk, Gert? It’s nice out, and I don’t think it’s cold.”
“Well,” she said, indifferently, “I’ll get my hat and coat.”
When she came down Warrener had been walking about his tiny parlor and dining room, and was still under the spell of householder and in love with his possessions.
“You’ve got the McAllister wedding present cleaned up fine.”
“It’s the only real silver we’ve got; it makes the other things look common.”
Mrs. Warrener regarded the display on her buffet with some discontent.
“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the husband. “It’s as good as you can get anywhere for the money.”
“The McAllisters have come back to Slocum,” his wife mentioned.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Mrs. McAllister used to go to Uncle Samson’s church. I don’t see why you shouldn’t go up there to call some day.”
Mrs. Warrener had opened the front door and gone out on the stoop; George, getting into his overcoat, followed her. Side by side they went slowly down the front steps of the little wooden stoop.
“I shouldn’t know what to say.”
“Oh, she’ll say it all; besides, perhaps she’ll be out—leave a card—got one of mine?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Well.”
As they turned into Grand Street and hesitated a moment as to their direction, Warrener suggested:
“Might as well walk along up toward the McAllister place; it’s as good a walk as any.”
As they started off in the fresh, crisp air, refreshing and sweet to the man’s nostrils, stimulating and revivifying after his close confined days, a sudden impulse to have the woman by his side nearer him overcame him; he drew her arm through his.
“Let’s walk arm in arm, like old married couples.”
But Mrs. Warrener held back and took her arm away.
“No,” she demurred; “I think it’s common.”
In the following days Mrs. Warrener took up her life, or, more accurately, began it, standing on the threshold of an abyss—the flight of steps before her that led to the new. As she had never been particularly interested in anything, she did not know that she was an invalid with a fatal malady, a malady whose term is too commonly employed by people whose reason for the state is less apparent than this woman’s in a country town. She had never heard the word “boredom” used.
There were half a dozen village friends of Mrs. Warrener’s whose status was on a higher plane than hers, whose houses had more square feet of land around them, whose “help” was more efficient. In their parlors now and then she took an inadequate hand at euchre, and of late she had been trying to learn bridge. These ladies made the town library and the little hospital, the Children’s Home and the church interests, run more or less smoothly; they had a hundred busy, useful interests. They were good wives and good mothers and good citizens. She had never heard any of them use the verb “to be bored,” and if she had, she would not have known what it meant! She suffered under a complaint which, like many maladies, is less fatal so long as it has no name; but the disease was too acute to be ignored. It had engendered too many complications.
At the town library the librarian from among the rows of school books one day handed down to Mrs. Warrener a French dictionary. From the novel she had read a few days before she had copied out this phrase:
Ennuiis like the unseen worm in the wood, that slowly gnaws the good, clean substance until his parasite presence is declared by innumerable interstices that finally destroy the wood and proclaim it rotten to the fiber—ennuihad eaten into her, devoured her. There was not one inch of her that did not ache from desuetude, from moral inertia.
Ennuiis like the unseen worm in the wood, that slowly gnaws the good, clean substance until his parasite presence is declared by innumerable interstices that finally destroy the wood and proclaim it rotten to the fiber—ennuihad eaten into her, devoured her. There was not one inch of her that did not ache from desuetude, from moral inertia.
Gertrude found the word “ennui” in the dictionary, and the following definition: “Listlessness, languor, tedium, lassitude, tiresomeness,” compared it with her scrap of paper, puzzled her pretty brows until their lines looked like pain. As she put up the book and left the library, she said to herself: “Well, I guess that’s what’s the matter with me.”
When Slocum was scarcely a village Edward McAllister, after his retirement from the Supreme Court, purchasedsufficient land in the State to establish a model farm. Here his children, Paul and Agnes, were born, and before they had time to know they were Americans McAllister accepted a foreign embassy and lived with his family abroad until his death. His daughter, Agnes, had married in Rome, and after a few years of wandering and continental life, with her husband, Mr. John Bellamy, and her brother, Mr. Paul McAllister, she returned to Slocum.
They had come back in order that Mrs. Bellamy should see just how much she could stand of American life and manners; in order that their children might have enough of their native soil on their hands as they played, and enough of its education in their heads, to entitle them to the self-sufficiency of American citizens.
Little Bellamy was immured in Groton, hard at the American part of it, and Mrs. Bellamy sat this morning in a charming room furnished in Colonial style: continental taste and the accessories that make living a luxury and pleasure combined to make her a charming environment. Mrs. Bellamy was teaching her little daughter the gentle art of making a long rope of useless wool by means of a spool and a row of pins.
The mother’s head bent close to the little girl’s was as golden as the child’s. Her hands, with their flashing rings, played in and out among the pins with a skill nothing short of miraculous in the eyes of the little girl, who took up the spool between her own tiny fingers, the worsted twisted hard around her thumb.
By the table, in a luxurious leather chair, the other occupant of the room was almost lost to sight. His presence was, however, indicated by the film of cigarette smoke that rose curlingly around his head. The yellow cover of a French novel was just visible above the table.
“Paul,” his sister asked him, “how do you like America?”
“America?” he repeated, and, although he said no more, she knew by his quizzical drawl what he meant.
“Well, Slocum, then, and the old place?”
“Immensely!”
“Absurd,” she laughed. “You have only been here a week, and except for ridiculously caddying a couple of times for John at the Golf Club, you have not been out of the house.”
“In which case, how could I fail to like it?” he said, with mock politeness. “You’ve kept me company!Youdon’t seem to be tempted to explore the old scenes any more than I do! Perhaps, like me, you’re afraid of the shock. You know how luxurious I am. If it were not for the extremely swell gentleman and lady servants, I should feel very much at ease.” He had not put down his book; he still smoked and appeared to be reading what he said from it. “I was most amused the other day as I stood on the piazza; did John tell you? I saw going around the road two very attractive-looking girls—they recalled the Gibson pictures as much as anything else. They wore, of course, short skirts and those bodices that you see everywhere. They had a bicycle, each of them, and they were walking along, their arms around each other’s waists. I said to John: ‘By Jove, what a stunning pair of girls! I should like to know them.’ And he said: ‘They are living in the same house with you, my dear fellow—they are my cook and my laundress.’”
Mrs. Bellamy laughed appreciatively. “Tell me, Paul, howdoesAmerica strike you?”
McAllister reluctantly laid his book down, crossed his legs and prepared to answer.
“I’ve been out more often than you think. I took a turtle view of the town; I mean I sauntered up and down it and out of it, and it gave me as complete a sensation as I have had in twenty-four years. A better sensation,ma chère, and I am not likely to have another.”
Mrs. Bellamy listened, as she always did when her brother gave himself the trouble to speak more than one sentence at a time to any woman with whom he was not in love.
“It is all new-born, honorable, progressive and decent. Everybody seems to have a certain disdain for me. I believe it is because, if you will permit me to say so, I dress so well.”
His sister laughed.
“Not thattheydo not dress well! They do—astoundingly well; but they all dress alike, and you cannot tell, as in the case of your own servant, a lady from her cook, or a butcher boy on a holiday from the millionaire’s son, if he happens to come through town on foot or in a motor. Let’s agree, then, that I do look different. ‘The drug-store man’—that’s what you call him, isn’t it?—looked at me as if he hated me and my clothes when he gave me some calisaya. He thought I was a foreigner; they don’t like foreigners. If anything could put me on the same footing with my country people, this town street did, as far as it was able. By the time I got to the grocery I had forgotten that I had not seen America for thirty years, and that I was so different. Nothing remained but thatcountry school feeling, that boy feeling. If you ask what I mean: There was a barrel of apples outside of the grocer’s door. I wanted to sneak one! I would have given fifty dollars for a glass of cider—for anything, in short, to keep up the game. I went in and asked him if he had such a thing as ‘sarsaparilla.’ He had it, and, in spite of my ‘difference,’ he pulled his cork and I drank the whole glass of that stuff. Pah! don’t ask me about it! It was all right, I don’t doubt; but when I left the corner and started up the hill, that wonderful sentimental feeling had entirely left me! There was only a wretched nausea—a complete sense of how far away I had gone from the simplicity of the whole thing, and I don’t say that I congratulated myself. Now, will you let me read, Agnes?”
But Mrs. Bellamy had turned to a servant who entered with a card—with two cards. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Warrener,’” she read aloud. “Oh, dear me, have you let them in?”
It appeared there was only a lady: “Mrs. George Warrener.”
“Heavens! I suppose that a lot of these people will call, and I must be more or less civil. Show Mrs. Warrener in—there is time to escape for you, Paul, by way of the dining room.”
The brightness of the room, the effect produced by the brilliant color of the decorations, and the atmosphere of livableness and charm did not dazzle the guest who entered—because she simply could not see! Her excitement was such that it caused a sort of blindness to fall on her, although she had never thought herself bashful or shy.
A lady, younger than herself, rose and welcomed her in a soft, quick voice, with a difference so marked in speech to any Mrs. Warrener had ever heard that she thought it was a foreign accent.
“How do you do? This is very good of you; won’t you sit here? We feel very much like strangers, coming back to Slocum after so many years. Fanny, darling, take your spools and wool and go to nurse. There—first say: ‘How do you do?’ to Mrs. Warrener.”
Gertrude had a vision of a small creature with a head like a chrysanthemum flower and the wide, round eyes of a child. The little hand that met her glove with frank politeness gave her a pretty greeting. Mrs. Warrener was obliged to break the hard tension of nervous fright that clutched her throat, and to speak to her hostess, who, in a chair near her, represented a world of civilization and education so unlike her own that a bird of paradise and a barnyard hen might have had more points in common.
She breathed out: “I used to know Mrs. McAllister; she used to go to my husband’s uncle’s church.” There was no elder lady present, and Mrs. Warrener looked for one.
“Oh, yes,” her hostess answered. “I am very sorry my mother is not here. She is at Cannes; she never comes north before spring. It is nearly twelve years since she’s been in America.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Warrener was forced tospeak. “I guess it was just at the time of my wedding. That was eight years ago. I remember they said she was going to Europe then. She came to my wedding; she was at the church.”
Mrs. Bellamy, who keenly, although with perfect politeness, was studying the village lady before her, wondered very much for what reason her mother had attended the Warrener wedding.
“Slocum must seem small after Rome,” Mrs. Warrener ventured into the conversation with more ease.
Her hostess laughed. “Slocum! Why, I haven’t seen it yet, do you know! I came at night—we drove up from the train in a storm. But”—she raised her eyes to the other part of the room—“my brother can tell you how it seems;hehas lots of ideas about it! My brother, Mr. McAllister—Mrs. Warrener.”
Paul McAllister had returned, to his sister’s great surprise.
“Mrs. Warrener thinks Slocum must seem ‘small’ after Rome.” She did not italicize the repetition which she carefully made, sure that it would appeal to her brother’s humor as it was.