XIX
FROTHINGHAM’S abrupt change of tactics had been caused by a cablegram from Evelyn which reached him at the Barneys’ even as his diplomatic agent was in the heat and toil of the negotiations with Amzi Hooper. It read:
Break off everything and return. Have written you New York. Best possible news. Gwen sends love.
Break off everything and return. Have written you New York. Best possible news. Gwen sends love.
“Why didn’t she say what it was?” he wondered. And he decided that it must be news of too private a nature to be trusted to the telegraph station at Beauvais. Why had she written if he was to go at once? “I suppose,” he concluded, “she was afraid I mightn’t obey orders. ‘Gwen sends love’—that must mean that the news is about me and Gwen.”
But he had no uplifting of spirits—instead, he felt a sense of impending misfortune. He called up Lawrence’s office and told one of the clerks that he wished Lawrence to call him as soon as he came in. In a fewminutes Lawrence was relating over the wire the favourable progress of the negotiation.
“It’s off,” said Frothingham. “I want nothing more to do with it. I’m glad it’s in good form for the break. I can drop it decently.”
This so delighted Lawrence that he laughed aloud. “Hooper’s certain to send for me,” he said. “I’ll give him the shock of his life.”
Frothingham cautioned him against any transgression of the most courteous politeness, then went down to luncheon—with Nelly, alone. While she was talking and he listening and looking, all in a flash he understood why the “best possible news” from home depressed him, why “Gwen sends love” did not elate him. He asked Nelly to take him to her school.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested,” she said.
But he insisted, and they set out immediately after luncheon. As they went—in a street car—she explained her work:
When her mother lay dying she said to the man beside whom she had worked for thirty-six years, mostly cloud and rain: “Henry, I don’t want a big, showy monument over me. If you should do something for me, build a school of some kind, a schoolwhere girls can be taught how to be useful wives and mothers, instead of spending their whole lives at learning.” And Nelly’s father had put by money, a large sum each year, until his daughter’s education was finished. Then he had said to her, “I want you to help me carry out your ma’s memorial.” And he turned over to her a mass of plans and hints and schemes which he had been accumulating for seven years. “Get up a plan,” he had said, “on the lines your ma would have liked. It’s a woman’s work—it’s your natural work. I’ll supply the money.” And after two years’ labour, one year of it abroad, she had perfected a scheme for a great school where several hundred girls could be instructed in all that a woman as a woman should know—housework, sewing, cooking, shopping, marketing, the elements of business and of art, the care of babies, the training and education of children. And she had so planned it that the girls could and should support themselves while they were learning.
Frothingham did not take his eyes from her face as she talked. She seemed to him the most wonderful, the noblest human being in the world. “A fine, a beautiful idea,” he said. “But aren’t you afraid ofspoiling those girls for workingmen’s wives? You’re educating entirely too much in this country, I should say, as it is. You’re making the lower classes restless and discontented. They’ll pull everything down about your ears the first thing you know.”
Nelly smiled—he saw that she was not seeing him at all, was looking far, far past him. “I’m not worrying about the consequences,” she said. “If we did that we should never move. You must remember that we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class—we differ in degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance is darkness, isn’t it? I’m not afraid of light, anywhere. Whether it’s little or much, it’s better than darkness.”
He looked at her strangely. “I had never thought of that,” he said in a low voice. Then, after a few minutes: “How good you are! I didn’t know there was anybody in the world like you. How generous of you to give your life to these people.”
“No—no!” she protested. They were walking now through a maze of homely streets lined with flat-houseslarge and small and odourous of strong-smelling cookery, of decaying food, of stale whiskey and beer—a typical tenement district. “When I first began on this scheme,” she went on, “I thought as you do. But I soon saw how false, how foolishly false, that was. And if I had continued to think as at first, if I had gone into the work to patronise and to feed my vanity, I should have injured myself and all whom I wished to help. I should have made a snob of myself and parasites of them.”
She paused and into her eyes came a look which he thought “glorious.” She went on: “But fortunately, I got the right sort of guidance from the very start. And I discovered that I had more to learn than these people. I was actually more ignorant than they.” She turned her face toward him. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “what would become of you if you had all the props taken from under you, and were cast upon the world and were forced to make the fight alone—without a penny or a friend or a relative or any outside help of any kind?”
“Thought of it? Well, rather!” he exclaimed. “And I know what would happen to me—jolly quick!”
“That was my first discovery—about myself. I found that I was in the world without any fit equipment to live. I found that if the props were taken from under me I’d be no match for the working people, that I’d perish or else have to live on the charity of rich people by doing the sort of pottering work they give the poor of their own class. And I said to myself, ‘You are a fine human being, aren’t you—to pose as the superior of those who are independent and self-respecting? You call them ignorant, yet they are conforming to nature’s laws and to the conditions of life infinitely better than you, with your boasted intelligence and your fancied refinement.’ I saw that I was not a real woman, as my mother had been, but was only a parasite on the labour and the intelligence of others.”
“And what did you do?”
“I went to school with my girls. And——” Her face lighted up with enthusiasm—“oh, you don’t know what a—a magnificent—sensation it is to be conscious that one can swim alone on the sea of life without fear of drowning or of having to call for help. You spoke as if I were giving these people something. Why, I owe everything to them! It is they who gaveand are giving. And I am and always shall be in their debt.”
He tried to think of some satirical phrase with which to lessen the impression what she had said was making upon him. But he could only blink into the flooding light which seemed to him to surround her and to blaze upon his pettiness and worthlessness and the tawdriness of all upon which his life had been based. In his own country, in his surroundings of alternating dulness and dissipation, his naturally good mind had become a drowsy marsh with pale lights gleaming in it occasionally here and there. Unconsciously, he had been slowly rousing ever since he landed in New York.
The people he had met were like enough to those he had met at home, and also like enough to the people of the real America from which they were offshoots, to form for him a mental bridge on which he could pass from his England of narrow and bigoted caste to Nelly’s America of alert and intelligent and self-respecting, level-eyed humanity. And he was now feeling in this restless Chicago the fierce impact of energies and aspirations of which he had had no conception, of which he could never have a clear conception.Through the eyes of this earnest, unaffected girl with her lived ideal of self-forgetfulness he had been getting confused, dazzling glimpses of a new world.
But he did clearly see and feel that he loved her. And she now saw in his curiously changed face what was in his mind. She looked away instantly—her expression was uneasy, almost frightened. “Here we are—at the school,” she said nervously as they turned a corner and came in sight of three great buildings—plain yet attractive—which faced three sides of a broad lawn in the centre of which a large and artistic fountain was playing.
He never could give a clear account of that school. He remembered the manager—a Mr. Worthington, with a strong and serious, yet anything but solemn face, with rather homely features except a pair of extraordinary eyes. He remembered many classrooms where all sorts of feminine enterprises were going forward with energetic informality. He remembered many girls—uncommonly clean, bright, well-dressed girls with agreeable voices and manners. He remembered many smiles and other evidences of health and spirits. He remembered many babies—all in one big,sunny room, chirping and crowing and gurgling, balancing on uncertain little lumps of feet or crawling toilsomely. “Practice babies,” Nelly called them, and he thought, “If this is the way her girls succeed with mere ‘practice babies,’ what won’t they make of their own?” Finally, he remembered—Nelly. All his other memories were a hazy background for her tall, graceful figure and wonderful, luminous face. Her he never forgot in the smallest detail of look or gesture.
When they were once more in the street, walking toward the car, he began abruptly: “I came over here—to America—because I was ruined—because we were going to be sold up and chucked out in the autumn. I came—I’m ashamed to put it into words—I’d rather you’d imagine—you can, easy enough. It’s often done and nothing’s thought of it—at least on our side of the water. This morning—in fact, just before luncheon—I got a cable from my sister. Our luck has turned, and——”
“I’m very glad,” she murmured as he paused.
“I don’t wish to go back,” he went on impetuously, his drawl gone. “I wish—it’s you I want. And I ask you to give me a chance. I don’t think I’m sucha frightfully bad sort, as men go. And while I ain’t fit for you to walk on, where’s the man that is? And perhaps if I were less fit I couldn’t care for you—all the height from down where I am to up where you are.”
The storm which had burst from deep down within him, deeper far than he thought his nature extended, was so sweeping and whirling him that he could not see her face distinctly.
When she spoke it was in a voice that took away hope, but gently, soothing the wound it made. “I’m sorry,” she said, “and yet I’m not. No woman could help being pleased to hear what you’ve said to me, and hear it from such a man as you are. Oh, yes!”—this in answer to his expression—“for I’ve found out what sort of man lives behind your look of irony and indifference. A so much better man than he lets himself know—or show. And I understand how differently you’ve been brought up, how different your system is from ours. But——”
She hesitated, and somehow he felt that he must give her sympathy instead of asking it.
“You remember, I told you that when I began with the school I had the right sort of help?”
He looked away from her and it was black before him for an instant. “That fairish chap with the eyes—Mr. Worthington?” he asked, cutting his words off sharp.
She nodded, her cheeks bright. “I simply couldn’t help it,” she said. “Hewaswhat I longed to be. And he didn’t preach the things I believed in—he just lived them.”
They were silent until they were in the car, then she went on: “I don’t want you to misunderstand. He has never even looked—what I’d like him to look—and say. I don’t know whether he cares—probably not. Sometimes I think he cares only for his work, and——”
“He does care—I saw it,” interrupted Frothingham, and then he was astonished at himself for being so “ridiculously decent.”
“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Thank you for saying so.” She looked at him shyly. “You’ll think me queer for telling you about it when he has said nothing to me.”
“I take to it like a duck to water”
“I understand why you tell me,” Frothingham answered. “It was—like you.” He smiled faintly, his frequent, self-satirising smile. “Don’t mind me.I’m used to bad luck. I take to it like a duck to water.”
Nelly’s instinct told her that she had said enough, and they rode in silence. When she spoke again it was of the dance to which they were going that night. An hour and a half later as they were separating for dinner he said earnestly: “Thank you for what you said. And thank you—even more—for what you didn’t say.”