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Tobe nearly sixteen; to have a great room all to oneself, with high windows that looked upon surfs of close, glittering, talkative leaves, and hills far off between them; to have a small library of one’s favourite books, and a whole corner of the room devoted to the paraphernalia of one’s dearest hobby, which was painting; to have a square high bed, covered with a tester, and a wonderful, many-shelved Sheraton table beside it, and candles in old green brass candlesticks; to have a row of white, built-in armoires full of pretty dresses and cloaks and shoes; to have all this and to know one has helped to create it, was to possess a shrine where the thoughts of girlhood might safely let themselves go to all the four winds of the imagination, like many-coloured birds set free, unmindful of the traps and huntsmen scouring the world beyond.
But Moira’s real favourite was not the lovely golden brown tapestry, nor the stained little bas relief of the Child, nor even the drawings of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, but a painting hung on the wall facing the foot of her bed, where she could look at it the first thing in the morning as she rose, and the last thing at night as she retired. It was a portrait of Mathilda’s grandmotherat eighteen, painted in Virginia, a year before she crossed the plains with her young husband. The smooth, dark red hair was parted and drawn about the head above the ears like a cap, its gleam of colour apparent only in the gloss of the high lights. The blue eyes and fresh complexion and fine, regular features were done with infinite tenderness. She sat in a black gown, opening wide at the neck, against a red background formed by a cloak thrown over the chair. Moira knew it was good painting, of an exquisite older style, though the name of the painter was unsigned and had long been forgotten. She amused herself making little verses about it.
“My young great grandmother sits in her frameAnd the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”
“My young great grandmother sits in her frameAnd the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”
“My young great grandmother sits in her frame
And the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”
Many a time she sat up in her bed pretending to have conversations about the stirring adventures of her grandmother’s early days, for she had heard the whole story of the young woman’s arduous journey and home-building—and also about the young men who came to Thornhill, discussing their characters without reserve. One could do this in perfect propriety with a dead great grandmother.
“Tommy McNutt wants to come over every day and ride with me, Grandmother. But he squints out of doors, and he always wants to help you ona horse and he talks like a newspaper piece. I’d rather have somebody to talk to like old George Moore, wouldn’t you, dear? It’s a pity you were born too early to read George Moore. I know you would like him”—and she broke off for rhyme again:
“The courtly old painter I am sure wore laceAnd the things he said brought a flush to her face.”
“The courtly old painter I am sure wore laceAnd the things he said brought a flush to her face.”
“The courtly old painter I am sure wore lace
And the things he said brought a flush to her face.”
“But if I should like Tommy I’d have a whole house as big as this one all my own. And if I should like Mark Sturm, the young brewer, I’d have two.... I don’t care,Mamanwill give me a house.”
“Then there’s Selden Van Nostrand. He’s tremendously popular because he makes up verses about ‘Aphrodite in a nightie,’ but he sometimes does better than that. The other day he said his heart was a leaf devoured by the worm of Egotism, shrivelled in the fire of Sex, and trampled by the feet of Virtue. I see you like that one, Grandma. Beautiful Grandma, I have your eyes—
“Her wide blue eyes have a trace of playAnd the day she sat was a fine bright day!”
“Her wide blue eyes have a trace of playAnd the day she sat was a fine bright day!”
“Her wide blue eyes have a trace of play
And the day she sat was a fine bright day!”
Moira finished her morning cup of tea on the stand beside the bed and recalled suddenly that this fine, bright day was one of special significance,for Hal was coming home from his last year at prep school. Hal was the one young man she never talked to her great grandmother about, because, as she explained to herself, she was his great grandmother also and would be prejudiced. She stood in the sunlight pouring through the window, watching it gleam upon her firm shoulders and flanks. She had not decided whether she would go to the station with her mother and Uncle Sterling or not.
Hal had treated her pretty badly the summer before and been very satirical, and the worst of it was she had found it hard to resent because he had seemed suddenly to be much older and to have some right to authority. He had been nicer at Christmas, taking her to two parties and giving her a set of Verlaine bound in tooled leather, but even when he tried to be nice to her he had somehow seemed condescending.
She was in great doubt. Nobody, of course, would attach any significance to it, whichever she did, not even Hal, probably. It was only important to herself. She knew something had happened to her during the past year that was comparable to the change in Hal the year before. She had evidence now under her hands and in her eyes as she stood undressed, evidence that did not wholly please her, for she had lately taken a fancy to dislike women. More satisfactory evidence was a sense of mental growth.
She had just returned from a long Spring vacation in New York with Mathilda, not her first visit but her most exciting one, and her thoughts were awhirl with Pavlova and Rachmaninoff and the Washington Square Players, bobbed hair and the operas at the Metropolitan, and a dozen startling, vivifying, even violent art exhibitions. She felt that she was probably much more splashed by the currents than Hal himself, for certainly one did not really learn anything at a boy’s school. Such places could only be high class stables for thoroughbred colts to pass the awkward stage in, under trainers far less capable than those they would have had if they were horses.
And now the question was whether to test the glamour of these mental and physical acquisitions upon Hal by waiting to meet him alone, or to go like a good fellow and see him with the family. There was, of course, nothing personal about it; Hal was no more than an opportune judge. He represented the best criticism the East had to send back to them.
After her bath she decided for action. She would go with the others and meet him. “Anyway, why attach so much importance to Hal? He’s quite capable of attaching enough to himself.”
There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest in his arrival. The year before, on his return,at eighteen, he had boldly announced to his father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be a day lost, he wanted to go at once. Every man in his class was going somehow or other. Sterling Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for days, and finally the family won. But it was only with the understanding that if Hal would finish his last year at school he might make his own decision. The country’s participation in the war was now over a year old and the outlook was dismal, one German advance after another having succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of nineteen and twenty in it, and Hal would insist upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact, and as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at Fanstock that year. The entire institution had been made over into a training camp.
Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed the summer before, hating his idleness and the wretched fate of being in excessive demand to entertain girls. Her sympathy with his groans had gone a long way to help her forgive his ill treatment.
And yet she had never been worked up to a pitch of great excitement about the war.
One failing had troubled her ever since she could remember—the tendency to disagree with opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority held them.
It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s own fastidiousness and independence of judgment, but she went farther than Mathilda, and supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient trait from that mythical father of whom she had been told so little and longed to know so much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions, by herself, about the war: for example, that perhaps Germany was not entirely the instigator, that cruelties were probably practised on both sides—war’s horrors produced them—and that after all it did seem as though the whole world was furiously pitted against two or three caged-in nations.
She did not entirely like herself for these heresies and kept silent upon them. But she promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal. How it would irritate him!
“He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll surrender me to the authorities. How wonderful—I wish he would!”
She took one final glimpse of herself and walked slowly out of the room to face a hard day. She felt she would prove a formidable antagonist for Hal.
But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She found Mathilda, suppressing a few tears, and her Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their disappointment communicated itself to her at once. Something had happened about Hal.
Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter on the table.
“Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.”
“Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.”
Well, that was sensation enough for her. He had acted with divine independence.
The months that followed until the Armistice were dull and tragic. She would a hundred times rather have gone over herself, though it be as a rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal, got up by old men to kill young ones. It would be stupid enough to take Hal, her playmate. Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead; she got so she could picture exactly the way a small hole looked in a man’s forehead, just the degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been dead several hours. These pictures haunted her wakeful nights in many different guises, but always with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination how flesh looked when it was laid open or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of a limb that had been taken off. And she grew so bitter that she found she could not pray, though she had always experienced a soothing pleasurefrom the language of the Book of Common Prayer. She never said those pieces again. She would sit up suddenly in bed, as though she had been wakened by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight to her portrait.