Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was looking out of the other window, started significantly back.
“What is it, Alice?”
“Nothing! Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his——”
“Which friend? But where? Don't look! They will think we were watching them. I can't see them at all. Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly betraying this anxiety to her daughter.
Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room. “They are coming this way,” she said indifferently.
Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home. “Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend. “Were you going, Alice? Better stay. It would be awkward sending out for you. You look well enough.”
“Well!”
The young men came in, Mavering with his nervous laugh first, and then Boardman with his twinkling black eyes, and his main-force self-possession.
“We couldn't go away as far as New London without coming to see whether you had really survived Class Day,” said the former, addressing his solicitude to Mrs. Pasmer. “I tried to find out from, Mrs. Saintsbury, but she was very noncommittal.” He laughed again, and shook hands with Alice, whom he now included in his inquiry.
“I'm glad she was,” said Mrs. Pasmer—inwardly wondering what he meant by going to New London—“if it sent you to ask in person.” She made them sit down; and she made as little as possible of the young ceremony they threw into the transaction. To be cosy, to be at ease instantly, was Mrs. Pasmer's way. “We've not only survived, we've taken a new lease of life from Class Day. I'd for gotten how charming it always was. Or perhaps it didn't use to be so charming? I don't believe they have anything like it in Europe. Is it always so brilliant?”
“I don't know,” said Mavering. “I really believe it was rather a nice one.”
“Oh, we were both enraptured,” cried Mrs. Pasmer.
Alice added a quiet “Yes, indeed,” and her mother went on—
“And we thought the Beck Hall spread was the crowning glory of the whole affair. We owe ever so much to your kindness.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Mavering.
“But we were talking afterward, Alice and I, about the sudden transformation of all that disheveled crew around the Tree into the imposing swells—may I say howling swells?—”
“Yes, do say 'howling,' Mrs. Pasmer!” implored the young man.
“—whom we met afterward at the spread,” she concluded. “How did you manage it all? Mr. Irving in the 'Lyons Mail' was nothing to it. We thought we had walked directly over from the Tree; and there you were, all ready to receive us, in immaculate evening dress.”
“It was pretty quick work,” modestly admitted the young man. “Could you recognise any one in that hurly-burly round the Tree?”
“We didn't till you rose, like a statue of Victory, and began grabbing for the spoils from the heads and shoulders of your friends. Who was your pedestal?”
Mavering put his hand on his friend's broad shoulder, and gave him a playful push.
Boardman turned up his little black eyes at him, with a funny gleam in them.
“Poor Mr. Boardman!” said Mrs. Pasmer.
“It didn't hurt him a bit,” said Mavering, pushing him. “He liked it.”
“Of course he did,” said Mrs. Pasmer, implying, in flattery of Mavering, that Boardman might be glad of the distinction; and now Boardman looked as if he were not. She began to get away in adding, “But I wonder you don't kill each other.”
“Oh, we're not so easily killed,” said Mavering.
“And what a fairy scene it was at the spread!” said Mrs. Pasmer, turning to Boardman. She had already talked its splendours over with Mavering the same evening. “I thought we should never get out of the Hall; but when we did get out of the window upon that tapestried platform, and down on the tennis-ground, with Turkey rugs to hide the bare spots in it—” She stopped as people do when it is better to leave the effect to the listener's imagination.
“Yes, I think it was rather nice,” said Boardman.
“Nice?” repeated Mrs. Pasmer; and she looked at Mavering. “Is that the famous Harvard Indifferentism?”
“No, no, Mrs. Pasmer! It's just his personal envy. He wasn't in the spread, and of course he doesn't like to hear any one praise it. Go on!” They all laughed.
“Well, even Mr. Boardman will admit,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “that nothing could have been prettier than that pavilion at the bottom of the lawn, and the little tables scattered about over it, and all those charming young creatures under that lovely evening sky.”
“Ah! Even Boardman can't deny that. We did have the nicest crowd; didn't we?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Pasmer, playfully checking herself in a ready adhesion, “that depends a good deal upon where Mr. Boardman's spread was.”
“Thank you,” said Boardman.
“He wasn't spreading anywhere,” cried his friend. “Except himself—he was spreading himself everywhere.”
“Then I think I should prefer to remain neutral,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a mock prudence which pleased the young men. In the midst of the pleasure the was giving and feeling she was all the time aware that her daughter had contributed but one remark to the conversation, and that she must be seeming very stiff and cold. She wondered what that meant, and whether she disliked this little Mr. Boardman, or whether she was again trying to punish Mr. Mavering for something, and, if so, what it was. Had he offended her in some way the other day? At any rate, she had no right to show it. She longed for some chance to scold the girl, and tell her that it would not do, and make her talk. Mr. Mavering was merely a friendly acquaintance, and there could be no question of anything personal. She forgot that between young people the social affair is always trembling to the personal affair.
In the little pause which these reflections gave her mother, the girl struck in, with the coolness that always astonished Mrs. Pasmer, and as if she had been merely waiting till some phase of the talk interested her.
“Are many of the students going to the race?” she asked Boardman.
“Yes; nearly everybody. That is—”
“The race?” queried Mrs. Pasmer.
“Yes, at New London,” Mavering broke in. “Don't you know? The University race—Harvard and Yale.”
“Oh—oh yes,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, wondering how her daughter should know about the race, and she not. “Had they talked it over together on Class Day?” she asked herself. She felt herself, in spite of her efforts to keep even with them; left behind and left out, as later age must be distanced and excluded by youth. “Are you gentlemen going to row?” she asked Mavering.
“No; they've ruled the tubs out this time; and we should send anything else to the bottom.”
Mrs. Pasmer perceived that he was joking, but also that they were not of the crew; and she said that if that was the case the should not go.
“Oh, don't let that keep you away! Aren't you going? I hoped you were going,” continued the young man, speaking with his eyes on Mrs. Pasmer, but with his mind, as she could see by his eyes, on her daughter.
“No, no.”
“Oh, do go, Mrs. Pasmer!” he urged: “I wish you'd go along to chaperon us.”
Mrs. Pasmer accepted the notion with amusement. “I should think you might look after each other. At any rate, I think I must trust you to Mr. Boardman this time.”
“Yes; but he's going on business,” persisted Mavering, as if for the pleasure he found in fencing with the air, “and he can't look after me.”
“On business?” said Mrs. Pasmer, dropping her outspread fan on her lap, incredulously.
“Yes; he's going into journalism—he's gone into it,” laughed Mavering; “and he's going down to report the race for the 'Events'.”
“Really!” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with a glance at Boardman, whose droll embarrassment did not contradict his friend's words. “How splendid!” she cried. “I had, heard that a great many Harvard men were taking up journalism. I'm so glad of it! It will do everything to elevate its tone.”
Boardman seemed to suffer under these expectations a little, and he stole a glance of comical menace at his friend.
“Yes,” said Mavering; “you'll see a very different tone about the fires, and the fights, and the distressing accidents, in the 'Events' after this.”
“What does he mean?” she asked Boardman, giving him unavoidably the advantage of the caressing manner which was in her mind for Mavering.
“Well, you see,” said Boardman, “we have to begin pretty low down.”
“Oh, but all departments of our press need reforming, don't they?” she inquired consolingly. “One hears such shocking things about our papers abroad. I'm sure that the more Harvard men go into them the better. And how splendid it is to have them going into politics the way they are! They're going into politics too, aren't they?” She looked from one young man to the other with an idea that she was perhaps shooting rather wild, and an amiable willingness to be laughed at if she were. “Why don't you go into politics, Mr. Mavering?”
“Well, the fact is—”
“So many of the young University men do in England,” said Mrs. Pasmer, fortifying her position.
“Well, you see, they haven't got such a complete machine in England—”
“Oh yes, that dreadful machine!” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, who had heard of it, but did not know in the least what it was.
“Do you think the Harvard crew will beat this time?” Alice asked of Boardman.
“Well, to tell you the truth—”
“Oh, but you must never believe him when he begins that way!” cried Mavering. “To be sure they will beat. And you ought to be there to see it. Now, why won't you come, Mrs. Pasmer?” he pleaded, turning to her mother.
“Oh, I'm afraid we must be getting away from Boston by that time. It's very tiresome, but there seems to be nobody left; and one can't stay quite alone, even if you're sick of moving about. Have you ever been—we think of going there—to Campobello?”
“No; but I hear that it's charming, there. I had a friend who was there last year, and he said it was charming. The only trouble is it's so far. You're pretty well on the way to Europe when you get there. You know it's all hotel life?”
“Yes. It's quite a new place, isn't it?”
“Well, it's been opened up several years. And they say it isn't like the hotel life anywhere else; it's charming. And there's the very nicest class of people.”
“Very nice Philadelphia people, I hear,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and Baltimore. Don't you think it's well;” she asked deferentially, and under correction, if she were hazarding too much, “to see somebody besides Boston people sometimes—if they're nice? That seems to be one of the great advantages of living abroad.”
“Oh, I think there are nice people everywhere,” said the young man, with the bold expansion of youth.
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer. “We saw two such delightful young people coming in and out of the hotel in Rome. We were sure they were English. And they were from Chicago! But there are not many Western people at Campobello, are there?”
“I really don't know,” said Mavering. “How is it, Boardman? Do many of your people go there?”
“You know you do make it so frightfully expensive with your money,” said Mrs. Pasmer, explaining with a prompt effect of having known all along that Boardman was from the West, “You drive us poor people all away.”
“I don't think my money would do it,” said Boardman quietly.
“Oh, you wait till you're a Syndicate Correspondent,” said, Mavering, putting his hand on his friend's shoulder, and rising by aid of it. He left Mrs. Pasmer to fill the chasm that had so suddenly yawned between her and Boardman; and while she tumbled into every sort of flowery friendliness and compliment, telling him she should look out for his account of the race with the greatest interest, and expressing the hope that he would get as far as Campobello during the summer, Mavering found some minutes for talk with Alice. He was graver with her—far graver than with her mother—not only because she was a more serious nature, but because they were both young, and youth is not free with youth except by slow and cautious degrees. In that little space of time they talked of pictures, 'a propos' of some on the wall, and of books, because of those on the table.
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer when they paused, and she felt that her piece of difficult engineering had been quite successful, “Mrs. Saintsbury was telling me what a wonderful connoisseur of etchings your father is.”
“I believe he does know something about them,” said the young man modestly.
“And he's gone back already?”
“Oh yes. He never stays long away from my mother. I shall be going home myself as soon as I get back from the race.”
“And shall you spend the summer there?”
“Part of it. I always like to do that.”
“Perhaps when you get away you'll come as far as Campobello—with Mr. Boardman,” she added.
“Has Boardman promised to go?” laughed Mavering. “He will promise anything. Well, I'll come to Campobello if you'll come to New London. Do come, Mrs. Pasmer!”
The mother stood watching the two young men from the window as they made their way across the square together. She had now, for some reason; no apparent scruple in being seen to do so.
“How ridiculous that stout little Mr. Boardman is with him!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “He hardly comes up to his shoulder. Why in the world should he have brought him?”
“I thought he was very pleasant,” said the girl.
“Yes, yes, of course. And I suppose he'd have felt that it was rather pointed coming alone.”
“Pointed?”
“Young men are so queer! Did you like that kind of collar he had on?”
“I didn't notice it.”
“So very, very high.”
“I suppose he has rather a long neck.”
“Well, what did you think of his urging us to go to the race? Do you think he meant it? Do you think he intended it for an invitation?”
“I don't think he meant anything; or, if he did, I think he didn't know what.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer vaguely; “that must be what Mrs. Saintsbury meant by the artistic temperament.”
“I like people to be sincere, and not to say things they don't mean, or don't know whether they mean or not,” said Alice.
“Yes, of course, that's the best way,” admitted Mrs. Pasmer. “It's the only way,” she added, as if it were her own invariable practice. Then she added further, “I wonder what he did mean?”
She began to yawn, for after her simulation of vivid interest in them the visit of the young men had fatigued her. In the midst of her yawn her daughter went out of the room, with an impatient gesture, and she suspended the yawn long enough to smile, and then finished it.
After first going to the Owen, at Campobello, the Pasmers took rooms at the Ty'n-y-Coed, which is so much gayer, even if it is not so characteristic of the old Welsh Admiral's baronial possession of the island. It is characteristic enough, and perched on its bluff overlooking the bay, or whatever the body of water is, it sees a score of pretty isles and long reaches of mainland coast, with a white marble effect of white-painted wooden Eastport, nestled in the wide lap of the shore, in apparent luxury and apparent innocence of smuggling and the manufacture of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the island in morning and evening fog temper the air of the latitude to a Newport softness in summer, with a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarly delicious, lulling the day with long calms and light breezes, and after nightfall commonly sending a stiff gale to try the stops of the hotel's gables and casements, and to make the cheerful blaze on its public hearths acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat arrives, with passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks or swims half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all night long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. The pretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort of feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the aesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and his language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the sojourners on the island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such of the guests as prefer to let others make their excursions into the heart of the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night, when the falling mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouse to lighthouse the fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas cede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life does not greatly differ from other seaside hotel life on the surface, and if one were to make distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that hotel society there has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere, with a little more accessibility. As the reader doubtless knows, the great mass of Boston society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk, transports itself down the North Shore scarcely further than Manchester at the furthest; but there are more courageous or more detachable spirits who venture into more distant regions. These contribute somewhat toward peopling Bar Harbour in the summer, but they scarcely characterise it in any degree; while at Campobello they settle in little daring colonies, whose self-reliance will enlist the admiration of the sympathetic observer. They do not refuse the knowledge of other colonies of other stirps and origins, and they even combine in temporary alliance with them. But, after all, Boston speaks one language, and New York another, and Washington a third, and though the several dialects have only slight differences of inflection, their moral accents render each a little difficult for the others. In fact every society is repellant of strangers in the degree that it is sufficient to itself, and is incurious concerning the rest of the world. If it has not the elements of self-satisfaction in it, if it is uninformed and new and restless, it is more hospitable than an older society which has a sense of merit founded upon historical documents, and need no longer go out of itself for comparisons of any sort, knowing that if it seeks anything better it will probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, is as indifferent to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse the coldness of the Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviour toward unknown people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.
That love of independence which is notable in us even in our most acquiescent phases at home is perhaps what brings these cultivated and agreeable people so far away, where they can achieve a sort of sylvan urbanity without responsibility, and without that measuring of purses which attends the summer display elsewhere. At Campobello one might be poor with almost as little shame as in Cambridge if one were cultivated. Mrs. Pasmer, who seldom failed of doing just the right thing for herself, had promptly divined the advantages of Campobello for her family. She knew, by dint of a little inquiry, and from the volunteer information of enthusiasts who had been there the summer before, just who was likely to be there during the summer with which she now found herself confronted. Campobello being yet a new thing, it was not open to the objection that you were sure to meet such and such people, more or less common or disagreeable, there; whatever happened, it could be lightly handled in the retrospect as the adventure of a partial and fragmentary summer when really she hardly cared where they went.
They did not get away from Boston before the middle of July, and after the solitude they left behind them there, the Owen at first seemed very gay. But when they had once or twice compared it with the Ty'n-y-Coed, riding to and fro in the barge which formed the connecting link with the Saturday evening hops of the latter hotel, Mrs. Pasmer decided that, from Alice's point of view, they had made a mistake, and she repaired it without delay. The young people were, in fact, all at the Ty'n-y-Coed, and though she found the Owen perfectly satisfying for herself and Mr. Pasmer, she was willing to make the sacrifice of going to a new place: it was not a great sacrifice for one who had dwelt so long in tents.
There were scarcely any young girls at the Owen, and no young men, of course. Even at the Ty'n-y-Coed, where young girls abounded, it would not be right to pretend that there were young men enough. Nowhere, perhaps, except at Bar Harbour, is the long-lost balance of the sexes trimmed in New England; and even there the observer, abstractly delighting in the young girls and their dresses at that grand love-exchange of Rodick's, must question whether the adjustment is perfectly accurate.
At Campobello there were not more than half enough young men, and there was not enough flirtation to affect the prevailing social mood of the place: an unfevered, expectationless tranquillity, in which to-day is like yesterday, and to-morrow cannot be different. It is a quiet of light reading, and slowly, brokenly murmured, contented gossip for the ladies, of old newspapers and old stories and luxuriously meditated cigars for the men, with occasional combinations for a steam-launch cruise among the eddies and islands of the nearer waters, or a voyage further off in the Bay of Fundy to the Grand Menan, and a return for the late dinner which marks the high civilisation of Campobello, and then an evening of more reading and gossip and cigars, while the night wind whistles outside, and the brawl and crash of the balls among the tenpins comes softened from the distant alleys. There are pleasant walks, which people seldom take, in many directions, and there are drives and bridle-paths all through the dense, sad, Northern woods which still savagely clothe the greater part of the island to its further shores, where there are shelves and plateaus of rock incomparable for picnicking.
One need ask nothing better, in fact, than to stroll down the sylvan road that leads to the Owen, past the little fishing-village with its sheds for curing herring; and the pale blue smoke and appetising savour escaping from them; and past the little chapel with which the old Admiral attested his love of the Established rite. On this road you may sometimes meet a little English bishop from the Provinces, in his apron and knee-breeches; and there is a certain bridge over a narrow estuary, where in the shallow land-locked pools of the deeply ebbing tide you may throw stones at sculpin, and witness the admirable indifference of those fish to human cruelty and folly. In the middle distance you will see a group of herring weirs, which with their coronals of tufted saplings form the very most picturesque aspect of any fishing industry. You may, now and then find an artist at this point, who, crouched over his easel, or hers, seems to agree with you about the village and the weirs.
But Alice Pasmer cared little more for such things than her mother did, and Mrs. Pasmer regarded Nature in all her aspects simply as an adjunct of society, or an occasional feature of the entourage. The girl had no such worldly feeling about it, but she found slight sympathy in the moods of earth and sky with her peculiar temperament. This temperament, whose recondite origin had almost wholly broken up Mrs. Pasmer's faith in heredity, was like other temperaments, not always in evidence, and Alice was variously regarded as cold, of shy, or proud, or insipid, by the various other temperaments brought in contact with her own. She was apt to be liked because she was as careful of others as she was of herself, and she never was childishly greedy about such admiration as she won, as girls often are, perhaps because she did not care for it. Up to this time it is doubtful if her heart had been touched even by the fancies that shake the surface of the soul of youth, and perhaps it was for this reason that her seriousness at first fretted Mrs. Pasmer with a vague anxiety for her future.
Mrs. Pasmer herself remained inalienably Unitarian, but she was aware of the prodigious-growth which the Church had been making in society, and when Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not at all as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it did not seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughter should have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.
In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several of the ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owen chapel—ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits long widowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies, younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alice was especially a favourite with the three or four who represented their class and condition at the Ty'n-y Coed, and who read the best books read there, and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreement among these ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in the temperaments of the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did not understand Alice; but probably there were very few people except herself whom Mrs. Pasmer did not understand quite well. She understood these ladies and their compassion for Alice, and she did not in the least resent it. She was willing that people should like Alice for any reason they chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter of futile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and her trust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the cult of Alice's friends, as she did at the girl's seriousness, which also she felt herself able to keep from going too far.
While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whatever inspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew up contemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular and practical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one of those instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observance a strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through the difference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference between idealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-aged Boston women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sad in the beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly owned that she had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there, and she knew in a minute she never got those things on this side; her obeisances and genuflections throughout the service, much more profound and punctilious than those of any one else there, had apparently not prevented her from making a thorough study of Alice's costume and a correct conjecture as to its authorship.
Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook, tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood, with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting over its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave her profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that nose to be either irresolute or commonplace, and for good or for ill Miss Anderson was decided and original. She carried her figure, which was no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness; she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies and tangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with tones like a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of the perfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous, feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.
She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice at an early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had a patronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herself less fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping with actualities.
“I think she's moybid, Alice is,” she said. “She isn't moybid in the usual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of the woyld generally than anybody's going to get out of it. She thinks she's going to get as much as she gives, and that's a great mistake, Mrs. Pasmer,” she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letter which the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would be tiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.
“Oh yes, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat, and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss Anderson's.
“Now, even at church—she carries the same spirit into the church. She doesn't make allowance for human nature, and the church does.”
“Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Pasmer agreed.
“She isn't like a person that's been brought up in the church. It's more like the old Puritan spirit.—Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!”
“Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!” said Mrs. Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care for them.
“I always forget that you're a Bostonian,” Miss Anderson apologized.
“Oh, thank you!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.
“I'm going to try to make her like other girls,” continued Miss Anderson.
“Do,” said Alice's mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the undertaking.
“If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and a little under fifty, it would be easier,” said Miss Anderson thoughtfully. “But how are you going to make a girl like other girls when there are no young men?”
“That's very true,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of course did her best to make impersonal. “Do you think there will be more, later on?”
“They will have to Huey up if they are comin',” said Miss Anderson. “It's the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in September.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.
She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of the broad hotel steps.
“What is it, Alice?”
“Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat.”
“Mr. Munt?”
“Yes.” She would not stay for further question.
Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on the balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with her daughter's being, after all, like other girls, when it came to essentials.
Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave her hand to both the gentlemen without the affectation of surprise at seeing either.
“I saw Mr. Munt coning up from the boat,” she said in answer to Mavering's demand for some sort of astonishment from her. “I wasn't certain that it was you.”
Mrs. Pasmer, whose pretences had been all given away by this simple confession, did not resent it, she was so much pleased with her daughter's evident excitement at the young man's having come. Without being conscious of it, perhaps, Alice prettily assumed the part of hostess from the moment of their meeting, and did the honours of the hotel with a tacit implication of knowing that he had come to see her there. They had only met twice, but now, the third time, meeting after a little separation, their manner toward each other was as if their acquaintance had been making progress in the interval. She took him about quite as if he had joined their family party, and introduced him to Miss Anderson and to all her particular friends, for each of whom, within five minutes after his presentation, he contrived to do some winning service. She introduced him to her father, whom he treated with deep respect and said “Sir” to. She showed him the bowling alley, and began to play tennis with him.
Her mother, sitting with John Munt on the piazza, followed these polite attentions to Mavering with humorous satisfaction, which was qualified as they went on.
“Alice,” she said to her, at a chance which offered itself during the evening, and then she hesitated for the right word.
“Well; mamma?” said the girl impatiently, stopping on her way to walk up and down the piazza with Mavering; she had run in to get a wrap and a Tam-o'-Shanter cap.
“Don't—overdo—the honours.”
“What do you mean, mamma?” asked the girl; dropping her arms before her, and letting the shawl trail on the floor.
“Don't you think he was very kind to us on Class Day?”
Her mother laughed. “But every one mayn't know it's gratitude.”
Alice went out, but she came back in a little while, and went up to her room without speaking to any one.
The fits of elation and depression with which this first day passed for her succeeded one another during Mavering's stay. He did not need Alice's chaperonage long. By the next morning he seemed to know and to like everybody in the hotel, where he enjoyed a general favour which at that moment had no exceptions. In the afternoon he began to organise excursions and amusements with the help of Miss Anderson.
The plans all referred to Alice, who accepted and approved with an authority which every one tacitly admitted, just as every one recognised that Mavering had come to Campobello because she was there. Such a phase is perhaps the prettiest in the history of a love affair. All is yet in solution; nothing has been precipitated in word or fact. The parties to it even reserve a final construction of what they themselves say or do; they will not own to their hearts that they mean exactly this or that. It is this phase which in its perfect freedom is the most American of all; under other conditions it is an instant, perceptible or imperceptible; under ours it is a distinct stage, unhurried by any outside influences.
The nearest approach to a definition of the situation was in a walk between Mavering and Mrs. Pasmer, and this talk, too, light and brief, might have had no such intention as her fancy assigned his part of it.
She recurred to something that had been said on Class Day about his taking up the law immediately, or going abroad first for a year.
“Oh, I've abandoned Europe altogether for the present,” he said laughing. “And I don't know but I may go back on the law too.”
“Indeed! Then you are going to be an artist?”
“Oh no; not so bad as that. It isn't settled yet, and I'm off here to think it over a while before the law school opens in September. My father wants me to go into his business and turn my powers to account in designing wall-papers.”
“Oh, how very interesting!” At the same time Mrs. Pasmer ran over the whole field of her acquaintance without finding another wall-paper maker in it. But she remembered what Mrs. Saintsbury had said: it was manufacturing. This reminded her to ask if he had seen the Saintsburys lately, and he said, No; he believed they were still in Cambridge, though.
“And we shall actually see a young man,” she said finally, “in the act of deciding his own destiny!”
He laughed for pleasure in her persiflage. “Yes; only don't give me away. Nobody else knows it.”
“Oh no, indeed. Too much flattered, Mr. Mavering. Shall you let me know when you've decided? I shall be dying to know, and I shall be too high-minded to ask.”
It was not then too late to adapt 'Pinafore' to any exigency of life, and Mavering said, “You will learn from the expression of my eyes.”
The witnesses of Mavering's successful efforts to make everybody like him were interested in his differentiation of the attentions he offered every age and sex from those he paid Alice. But while they all agreed that there never was a sweeter fellow, they would have been puzzled to say in just what this difference consisted, and much as they liked him, the ladies of her cult were not quite satisfied with him till they decided that it was marked by an anxiety, a timidity, which was perfectly fascinating in a man so far from bashfulness as he. That is, he did nice things for others without asking; but with her there was always an explicit pause, and an implicit prayer and permission, first. Upon this condition they consented to the glamour which he had for her, and which was evident to every one probably but him.
Once agreeing that no one was good enough for Alice Pasmer, whose qualities they felt that only women could really appreciate, they were interested to see how near Mavering could come to being good enough; and as the drama played itself before their eyes, they pleased themselves in analysing its hero.
“He is not bashful, certainly,” said one of a little group who sat midway of the piazza while Alice and Mavering walked up and down together. “But don't you think he's modest? There's that difference, you know.”
The lady addressed waited so long before answering that the young couple came abreast of the group, and then she had to wait till they were out of hearing. “Yes,” she said then, with a tender, sighing thoughtfulness, “I've felt that in him. And really think he is a very loveable nature. The only question would be whether he wasn't too loveable.”
“Yes,” said the first lady, with the same kind of suspiration, “I know what you mean. And I suppose they ought to be something more alike in disposition.”
“Or sympathies?” suggested the other.
“Yes, or sympathies.”
A third lady laughed a little. “Mr. Mavering has so many sympathies that he ought to be like her in some of them.”
“Do you mean that he's too sympathetic—that he isn't sincere?” asked the first—a single lady of forty-nine, a Miss Cotton, who had a little knot of conscience between her pretty eyebrows, tied there by the unremitting effort of half a century to do and say exactly the truth, and to find it out.
Mrs. Brinkley, whom she addressed, was of that obesity which seems often to incline people to sarcasm. “No, I don't think he's insincere. I think he always means what he says and does—Well, do you think a little more concentration of good-will would hurt him for Miss Pasmer's purpose—if she has it?”
“Yes, I see,” said Miss Cotton. She waited, with her kind eyes fixed wistfully upon Alice, for the young people to approach and get by. “I wonder what the men think of him?”
“You might ask Miss Anderson,” said Mrs. Brinkley.
“Oh, do you think they tell her?”
“Not that exactly,” said Mrs. Brinkley, shaking with good-humoured pleasure in her joke.
“Her voice—oh yes. She and Alice are great friends, of course.”
“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, the second speaker, “that Mr. Mavering would be jealous sometimes—till he looked twice.”
“Yes,” said Miss Cotton, obliged to admit the force of the remark, but feeling that Mr. Mavering had been carried out of the field of her vision by the turn of the talk. “I suppose,” she continued, “that he wouldn't be so well liked by other young men as she is by other girls, do you think?”
“I don't think, as a rule,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “that men are half so appreciative of one another as women are. It's most amusing to see the open scorn with which two young fellows treat each other if a pretty girl introduces them.”
All the ladies joined in the laugh with which Mrs. Brinkley herself led off. But Miss Cotton stopped laughing first.
“Do you mean,”, she asked, “that if a gentleman were generally popular with gentlemen it would be—”
“Because he wasn't generally so with women? Something like that—if you'll leave Mr. Mavering out of the question. Oh, how very good of them!” she broke off, and all the ladies glanced at Mavering and Alice where they had stopped at the further end of the piazza, and were looking off. “Now I can probably finish before they get back here again. What I do mean, Miss Cotton, is that neither sex willingly accepts the favourites of the other.”
“Yes,” said Miss Cotton admissively.
“And all that saves Miss Pasmer is that she has not only the qualities that women like in women, but some of the qualities that men, like in them. She's thoroughly human.”
A little sensation, almost a murmur, not wholly of assent, went round that circle which had so nearly voted Alice a saint.
“In the first place, she likes to please men.”
“Oh!” came from the group.
“And that makes them like her—if it doesn't go too far, as her mother says.”
The ladies all laughed, recognising a common turn of phrase in Mrs. Pasmer.
“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, “that she would believe a little in heredity if she noticed that in her daughter;” and the ladies laughed again.
“Then,” Mrs. Brinkley resumed concerning Alice, “she has a very pretty face—an extremely pretty face; she has a tender voice, and she's very, very graceful—in rather an odd way; perhaps it's only a fascinating awkwardness. Then she dresses—or her mother dresses her—exquisitely.” The ladies, with another sensation, admitted the perfect accuracy with which these points had been touched.
“That's what men like, what they fall in love with, what Mr. Mavering's in love with this instant. It's no use women's flattering themselves that they don't, for they do. The rest of the virtues and graces and charms are for women. If that serious girl could only know the silly things that that amiable simpleton is taken with in her, she'd—”
“Never speak to him again?” suggested Miss Cotton.
“No, I don't say that. But she would think twice before marrying him.”
“And then do it,” said Mrs. Stamwell pensively, with eyes that seemed looking far into the past.
“Yes, and quite right to do it,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I don't know that we should be very proud ourselves if we confessed just what caught our fancy in our husbands. For my part I shouldn't like to say how much a light hat that Mr. Brinkley happened to be wearing had to do with the matter.”
The ladies broke into another laugh, and then checked themselves, so that Mrs. Pasmer, coming out of the corridor upon them, naturally thought they were laughing at her. She reflected that if she had been in their place she would have shown greater tact by not stopping just at that instant.
But she did not mind. She knew that they talked her over, but having a very good conscience, she simply talked them over in return. “Have you seen my daughter within a few minutes?” she asked.
“She was with Mr. Mavering at the end of the piazza a moment ago,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They must leave just gone round the corner of the building.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She had a novel, with her finger between its leaves, pressed against her heart, after the manner of ladies coming out on hotel piazzas. She sat down and rested it on her knee, with her hand over the top.
Miss Cotton bent forward, and Mrs. Pasmer lifted her fingers to let her see the name of the book.
“Oh yes,” said Miss Cotton. “But he's so terribly pessimistic, don't you think?”
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.
“Fumee,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laying the book title upward on her lap for every one to see.
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, fanning herself. “Tourguenief. That man gave me the worst quarter of an hour with his 'Lisa' that I ever had.”
“That's the same as the 'Nichee des Gentilshommes', isn't it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with the involuntary superiority of a woman who reads her Tourguenief in French.
“I don't know. I had it in English. I don't build my ships to cross the sea in, as Emerson says; I take those I find built.”
“Ah! I was already on the other side,” said Mrs. Pasmer softly. She added: “I must get Lisa. I like a good heart-break; don't you? If that's what gave you the bad moment.”
“Heart-break? Heart-crush! Where Lavretsky comes back old to the scene of his love for Lisa, and strikes that chord on the piano—well, I simply wonder that I'm alive to recommend the book to you.
“Do you know,” said Miss Cotton, very deferentially, “that your daughter always made me think of Lisa?”
“Indeed!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, not wholly pleased, but gratified that she was able to hide her displeasure. “You make me very curious.”
“Oh, I doubt if you'll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,” Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly. “All the conditions are so different. There couldn't be an American Lisa. That's the charm of these Russian tragedies. You feel that they're so perfectly true there, and so perfectly impossible here. Lavretsky would simply have got himself divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to marrying him to Lisa.”
“That's what I mean by his pessimism,” said Miss Cotton. “He leaves you no hope. And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except for some good purpose; don't you, Mrs. Brinkley?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “I was trying to think what good purpose despair could be put to, in a book or out of it.”
“I don't think,” said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap, “that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you'd rather he'd run off with Irene than married Tatiana.”
“Oh, I certainly didn't wish that;” said Miss Cotton, in self-defence, as if the shot had been aimed at her.
“The book ends with a marriage; there's no denying that,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to continue for her—
“And marriage means happiness—in a book.”
“I'm not sure that it does in this case. The time would come, after Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was willing to break his engagement and run off with another man's wife, and whether he could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart—No, it seems to me that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an amiable weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the question.”
“But don't you see,” said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she had when very earnest, “that he means to show that her love is strong enough for all that?”
“But he doesn't, because it isn't. Love isn't strong enough to save people from unhappiness through each other's faults. Do you suppose that so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don't love each other? No; it's because they do love each other that their faults are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn't mind each other's faults. Perhaps that's the reason why there are so many American divorces; if they didn't care, like Europeans, who don't marry for love, they could stand it.”
“Then the moral is,” said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the surrounding gravity, “that as all Americans marry for love, only Americans who have been very good ought to get married.”
“I'm not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either,” said Mrs. Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. “You marry a man's future as well as his past.”
“Dear me! You are terribly exigeante, Mrs. Brinkley,” said Mrs. Pasmer.
“One can afford to be so—in the abstract,” answered Mrs. Brinkley.
They all stopped talking and looked at John Munt, who was coming toward them, and each felt a longing to lay the matter before him.
There was probably not a woman among them but had felt more, read more, and thought more than John Munt, but he was a man, and the mind of a man is the court of final appeal for the wisest women. Till some man has pronounced upon their wisdom, they do not know whether it is wisdom or not.
Munt drew up his chair, and addressed himself to the whole group through Mrs. Pasmer: “We are thinking of getting up a little picnic to-morrow.”