VIII
AT half-past four o’clock in a raw January afternoon Frothingham descended from a Pullman fiery furnace to adventure upon Boston. As he drove to Mrs. Staunton’s the rain sifted through the cracks round the windows and doors of the musty cab, and was deposited upon his face in a greasy coating by currents of the iciest air he had felt since he was last in Scotland. It was air that seemed to mangle as it bit, that sent the chilled blood cowering to the depths of the body instead of bringing it to the surface in healthful reaction.
“Loathsome!” he muttered as he looked out on either side. “Looks something like London—no, Liverpool. The people look English, too.” A big, dingy street car with bell wildly clanging darted from a narrow side street into the narrow main street which the cab was following. There was a bare escape from a disastrous collision. “It’s America, right enough,” he said.
The rain was whirling in the savage wind, umbrellas were tossing and twisting, impeding without in the least sheltering the sullen throngs on the sidewalks. Everything looked wet, and sticky, and chilly, and forbidding. “They certainly are English,” he said as he noted the passing faces; and he did not like it. In New York he had been amused by the variety—specimens of all nationalities, often several nationalities struggling for expression in the same face. Here the sameness was tiresome to him, and he missed the alert look of New Yorkers of all kinds.
He began to feel somewhat better, however, when he reached the wide front hall of Mrs. Staunton’s big, old-fashioned, comfortable house on the water side of Beacon Street. And he felt still better when the butler showed him to the room he was to occupy—the furniture and hangings, the woodwork and wall paper, sombre yet homelike in the light and warmth of an open fire. At half-past five he entered the drawing room in fairly good humour now that he and Hutt were established and safe from the weather. He joined Mrs. Staunton and her daughter-in-law at the fire, where they were cosily ensconced with a tea-table between them.
“You must have a cheerful impression of Boston,” said young Mrs. Staunton, called Mrs. Ridgie—her husband’s name was Ridgeway.
“That windwasa bit nasty,” admitted Frothingham. “But I’ve forgiven and forgotten it. I always spill my troubles as soon as ever I can.”
“You’ll detest Boston after New York,” continued Mrs. Ridgie. “I’ve lived here ten years. It’s—it’s a hole.”
Her mother-in-law’s expression was not pleasant, and Frothingham saw at a glance that they disliked each the other. “Virginia is from New York,” she said to him apologetically. “She determined in advance not to like us, and she does not change her mind easily.”
“Us.” Virginia smiled mockingly. “Mother here,” she said to Frothingham, “was born at a place a few miles away—Salem, where they burned witches——”
“Hanged witches—none was burned,” interrupted Mrs. Staunton.
“Thank you, dear—hanged witches. At any rate she was born at Salem. And her people removed to this very house more than forty years ago. The otherday I was talking to old Judge Arkwright, and spoke of my mother-in-law as a Bostonian. ‘But,’ said he, ‘she’s not a Bostonian. She’s of Salem town.’ Think of it, Lord Frothingham! She’s lived here nearly half a century, and she married a man whose family has lived here two hundred years. And they still speak and think of her as a stranger. That’s Boston.”
“It reminds me of home,” said Frothingham. “Very different from New York, isn’t it? I asked the woman I took in to dinner the other night where her parents came from. ‘Good Lord, don’t askme!’ she said. ‘All I know about it is that they came in a hurry and never went back.’”
“How sensible!” said Mrs. Ridgie, the more enthusiastically for her mother-in-law’s look of disgust. “You’ll notice that people on this side never talk of their ancestors unless there’s something wrong somewhere with themselves.”
Mrs. Staunton restrained herself. “You’ll give Lord Frothingham a very false idea of this country, Virgie,” she said with softness in her voice and irritation in her eyes.
“Oh, he’s certain to get that anyhow. He’ll only see one kind of people while he’s here, and though theythink they’re the whole show they don’t amount tothat.” At “that” she snapped her fingers so loudly and suddenly that both Mrs. Staunton and Frothingham started. “If you came really to know this country,” she went on, “you’d find out that just as soon as people here begin to pose as ‘our best people,’ ‘our best society,’ and all that rot, they begin to amount to nothing. They’re has-beens, or on the way to it. We don’t stand still here—not even in Boston. We’re always going up or coming down.”
After a silence Mrs. Staunton ventured to say, “I think you’ll find, Lord Frothingham, that the tone of Boston is, as I told you, far higher than New York’s.”
“Really!” Frothingham looked slightly alarmed. “That’s bad news,” he said. “I don’t go in for a very high tone, you know. I’m keyed rather low, I should say.”
“You needn’t be frightened,” said Mrs. Ridgie. “They beat the air a good deal here. But, if you’ll be patient and not encourage ’em, they’ll soon get down to the good old business of ravelling reputations. At that they’re far superior to New York.”
Mrs. Staunton looked vigorous dissent, but said nothing. They listened for a few minutes to thedrowsy crackling of the wood fire, and to the futile beat of the storm against the windows. Then Mrs. Ridgie rose. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said to Frothingham. “I’ll forgive you for being so cross to me, belle-mère,” she said to Mrs. Staunton, patting her on the cheek. Then her pretty little figure and pretty, pert face vanished. Mrs. Staunton frowned at the place where she had been—she disliked Virgie’s hoydenish movements almost as much as her demonstrativeness; in her opinion, “no thoroughly respectable woman laughs loudly, uses slang, or indulges in public kissing and embracing.”
They were ten at dinner that night, and Frothingham, seated between Mrs. Staunton and a middle-aged, stiff, and homely Mrs. Sullivan, fought off depression by drinking the champagne steadily—“vile stuff,” he said to himself, “and bad cooking, and a dull old woman on either side. And what’s this rot they’re talking?”
The conversation was of a Buddhist priest who was making converts among “the very best people.” Mrs. Sullivan was contending that he was a fraud, and that his teachings were immoral. Mrs. Staunton was defending him, assisted by a sallow, black-whiskered,long-haired young man on the opposite side of the table—a Mr. Gilson.
Frothingham would not even pretend to listen. His look and his thoughts wandered down the table to Cecilia Allerton.
Her slender paleness was foiled by two stout red and brown men—Ridgeway Staunton and Frank Mortimer. They were eating steadily, with the slow, lingering movements of the jaw which proclaim the man or the beast that wishes to get food into the mouth rather than into the stomach. Between forkfuls they drank champagne, holding it in the mouth and swallowing deliberately. Cecilia was evidently oblivious of them and of the rest of her surroundings. “She looks sickly,” thought Frothingham, “and an iceberg.”
She had a small head, a high, narrow forehead, a long, narrow face—pale, almost gaunt. The expression of her mouth was prim to severity. But her eyes, large and brilliant brown, and full of imagination, contradicted the coldness of the rest of her face, and gave her a look that was certainly distinction, if not beauty. “I wonder what she’s thinking about?” said Frothingham to himself. “Buddhism, I wager. How English she looks. But they all do, for that matter,except this long-haired beast opposite. He looks a Spaniard, or something else Southern and dirty.”
“Did you find that the New York women swore much, Lord Frothingham?”
He started. It was the Puritanic-looking Mrs. Sullivan. “I beg pardon,” he said, turning his head so that his entrenched eye was trained upon her.
“The New York women,” replied Mrs. Sullivan. “Were they very profane?”
“Ah—well—that is—— Now, what would you call profane?” asked Frothingham in his driest drawl. “Damn, and devil, and that sort?”
“I should call them profane in a woman, and worse. I should call them vulgar.”
“Really!”
“Shouldn’t you?”
“Ah, I don’t know. I don’t call things. What’s the use?”
“But you must have opinions.”
“Lots of ’em—lots of ’em—a new set every day. It’s a good idea to look at everything from all sorts of directions, don’t you think?”
“If one has no sense of responsibility. But I know you have. One of the characteristics I particularly admirein the English upper class is their sense of responsibility. I think it splendid, the way they support the Church, and so set an example to the lower classes.”
“I don’t go in for that yet—I stop in bed. It’s not expected of one until he’s head of a family. When I am, of course I’ll tuck my book under my arm and toddle away on Sunday morning to do my duty. I think it’s rather funny, don’t you? We do as we jolly please all week and then on Sunday, when there’s nothing naughty going on, anyhow, we do our duty. Cleverest thing in the British Constitution, that!”
“But you believe in your—your church, don’t you?”
“Believe? To be sure. Everyone does, except ghastly middle-class cranks. Some of ’em go crazy and are pious every day. Others go crazy and chuck it all. They run to extremes—that’s bad form. I don’t like extremes.”
Mrs. Sullivan looked at Frothingham suspiciously. His face was always serious, but the eyeglass and the drawl and the shadow of a hint of irony in his tone raised a doubt. She returned to her original question: “They tell me that the women—the fashionable women—swear a great deal in New York now—that it’s the latest fad.”
“I can’t say that they ever swore at me—much,” replied Frothingham. “But then, you know, I’m rather meek. It’s possible they might if I’d baited ’em.”
“A few of our women here—those that hang round horses and stables all the time—have taken up swearing. It is said that they contracted the habit in New York and Newport. But I doubted it.”
“Perhaps it’s the horses that make ’em swear,” suggested Frothingham. “Horses are such stupid brutes.”
“And they smoke—but that’s an old story. All the women smoke in New York, don’t they?”
“I’m not observant. You see, I don’t see well unless I look sharp.”
Mrs. Sullivan smiled amiably. “You’re very discreet, Lord Frothingham. You don’t gossip—I detest it myself.”
She talked to the man at her left, but soon turned to him with: “Doesn’t it shock you, the way divorce is growing nowadays? It’s almost as bad in England, I understand, as it is with us. We’re taking up all thehabits of the common sort of people. Really, I try to be broad-minded, but I can’t keep up with the rising generation. A young married woman called on me this afternoon—she and her husband are of our best families. She told me she was engaged to a young married man in New York. ‘But,’ said I, ‘you’re both married.’ ‘We’re going to get our divorces in the spring,’ she said. She asked me not to say anything about her engagement—‘for,’ said she, ‘we haven’t announced it. I’ve not told my husband yet that I’m going to get a divorce, and my fiancé hasn’t told his wife.’ What do you think of that, Lord Frothingham?”
“Devilish enterprising, isn’t it, now? That’s what we call a Yankee notion. Do you think it’ll be a go?”
“I’ve no doubt of it. She’s extremely energetic—and conscienceless—I’d say brazen, if she weren’t a lady.”
When the women went into the drawing room Ridgeway Staunton brought to Frothingham a tall, ascetic-looking man, with the bald, smooth, bulging temples and the sourly curled lips of habitual bad temper. “Lord Frothingham, Mr. Allerton.” They bowed stiffly, and looked each at the other uncertainly.
“I’ve heard much of you from my sister-in-law, Mrs. Staunton,” said Allerton.
“She’s been very good to me,” replied Frothingham cordially.
“She’s an admirable woman,” said Allerton. “She has been a mother—more than a mother—to my little girl for years.”
“Your daughter was most fortunate,” replied Frothingham, in a tone that was for him enthusiastic.
Allerton began to talk English politics; and Frothingham, who, like Englishmen of all classes, knew his country’s politics thoroughly, was astonished at the minuteness and accuracy of the American’s knowledge. But he was amazed to find that Allerton, though an aristocrat and a Tory in the politics of his own country, with narrow and bitter class views, was in English politics a Liberal of the radical type—a “little Englander” and a “Home Ruler.” And he presently discovered that there were other inconsistencies equally strange. For example, Allerton was savage in his hatred of all social innovations, was fanatical against the morals and manners of the younger people in the limited Boston set which he evidently regarded as the pinnacle and pattern of the whole world, yet was almosta sensualist in literature, art, and music. He sneered at superstition, yet believed in ghosts and in dreams. Intolerant with the acidity of a bad digestion and a poor circulation, he would cheerfully have jailed and hanged all who were intolerant of those things of which he was tolerant—and he thought himself tolerant to the verge of laxness. Finally, he was a theoretical democrat, yet had a reverence for his own ancestry, and for the title and ancestry of Frothingham, that even to Frothingham seemed amusing and contemptible.
At first Frothingham feared lest he should express some opinion that would rouse the cold and tenacious dislike of Allerton. But he soon saw that, because of his title and descent, he was regarded by the banker as privileged and exempt from criticism. Just as Mrs. Staunton and Mrs. Sullivan thought Frothingham’s slang even when it trenched on profanity not only tolerable but proper in him, so Allerton smiled with frosty indulgence upon his light, and not very reverent, criticisms in politics, religion, morals, and art.
“What do you think of him?” Mrs. Staunton asked her brother-in-law, when the men rejoined the women.
“A fine type of English gentleman,” replied Allerton; “manly and dignified, and his mind is keen. I like him.”
“I’m going to take him to Cecilia,” said she.
“I’m sure Cecilia will like him. I don’t think she’s looking well, Martha.”
“Poor child! You can’t expect a girl of her depth of feeling, her spirituality, to recover soon. You must remember, it’s been only a year and three months. This is the first time she’s been out, isn’t it?”
“I should not have believed she could be so disobedient as she has been in the past year,” said Allerton sourly. “The night of the opening of the gallery I ordered her to come down and help me receive. I shall never forget that she locked herself in her room. It shows how the poison of the example of the young people nowadays permeates.”
“But that was nearly a year ago, Edward. Be careful not to be harsh to her. She inherits—your imperiousness.” Mrs. Staunton hesitated after “inherits,” because the look in her brother-in-law’s eyes reminded her that his wife—her sister—after enduring for eight years the penitentiary he made of his home, fled from him and refused to return, andlived by herself in a cottage at Brookline until her death.
After talking to several of her guests, so that her action might not seem pointed, Mrs. Staunton took Frothingham where Cecilia was listening to Gilson’s animated exposition of the true, or Gilson, theory of portrait painting. A moment after Frothingham was introduced Mrs. Staunton took the reluctant Gilson away.
Cecilia looked after him, a quizzical expression in her eyes. “Do you know Mr. Gilson?” she asked.
“No; I’ve only just met him.”
“What do you think of him?”
“I can’t say. I’ve barely seen him.”
“But isn’t Schopenhauer right where he says, ‘Look well at a human being the first time you see him, for you will never seehimagain?’”
“I should say Gilson was—not very clean, then. Who is he?”
“Then you’re not a Buddhist or a Spiritualist?”
“He came here four years ago from we don’t know where, and exhibited a lot of his own paintings, most of them portraits of himself in all sorts of strange attitudes and clothes. Everybody ran after him—we have a new craze here each year, you know. That yearit was Gilson. A girl, a Miss Manners, married him. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d have been forgotten, and would have disappeared. As it is, we still have him with us. That’s his wife on the sofa in the corner.”
Frothingham looked toward the enormously fat woman disposed there, and gazing round vaguely, with a sleepy, comfortable, complacent smile. “How do you know it’s a sofa she’s sitting on?” he asked.
“Because I saw it before she sat down,” replied Cecilia. “Her fad is a diet of raw wheat. If she’d been where you could see her at the table, you’d have noticed that she ate only raw wheat. She’s served specially everywhere since she got the idea last autumn. She brings her wheat with her.”
“And what is your fad?—you say everyone has a fad.”
“Everyone except me.” She smiled pensively. “I’m too serious for fads, I fear.”
“Then you’re not a Buddhist or a Spiritualist?” he said, with a feeling of relief.
The colour flared into her face. “Spiritualism!” Her lips compressed, and seemed even thinner. Her expression vividly suggested her father. “Butthatis not a fad! Only the thoughtless and the ignorant call it a fad.”
Frothingham’s face became blank. “This is a time to sit tight,” he said to himself. “She’s looking at me as if I were a witch and she were about to burn—no, hang—me.”
“It would be a dreary world, it seems to me,” she went on, her voice low, and a queer light in her softening eyes, “if it were not for the friendship and guidance of those in the world beyond.”
“Really!” His tone might have meant almost anything except the wonder and amusement it concealed.
Her father came to take her home. “We should be glad to see you, Lord Frothingham, at our house,” he said graciously. “I hope you will let Mrs. Staunton bring you.”
“Thank you—I’ll ask her to.”
As he watched Cecilia leave he said to himself, “She’s mad as a hatter—or is it just Boston?”