VIIIWITH A NICE MAN
We sat in the “cave,” the smallest of Tranton’s rooms, and the one consecrated to his choicest company. Mere acquaintances were never asked into the “cave,” and even friends found that the place expressed certain moods in the owner. When Tranton said, “Let us go into the cave,” or shuffled mutely into the place in his barbarically embroidered slippers, and lighted the candles, the favored one understood. It was impossible to tell precisely why candles were used here rather than more modern agencies of illumination. When I once ventured to ask Tranton he simply said, “I like them.”
In the candle light the “cave” looked to be a cross between a condensed studio and a businessoffice. Rugs, skins, weapons, pipes, and trinkets littered the walls. There were other elements of conventional disorder. Over an oak desk in the corner were several photographs of women, an etching of Napoleon, a bow of yellow satin and a Turkish slipper filled with joss sticks. On the desk itself was a mess of literature and tobacco. Punctuating the triteness of the room were many little touches that were distinctively Trantonian, but which I spare publicity, lest they be repeated and thereby become trite in turn. Tranton himself personified something of the same conventionality relieved by difference. In the outer world he was so well dressed that no one ever spoke of his clothes, just as his place in society was so important and secure that no one ever called him a “society man.” He was old enough to have met a great many people; young enough still to have an open account with the affections.
As Tranton always took the chair by the desk, and as this when occupied blocked the path of retreat, he first sent me to the couch among the pillows. Then he drew over some pipes and a curious Egyptian jar containing his favorite weed. The pipe he chose for himself was of the sort you will see an Italian trench laborer biting, a black, hardened, surly-looking pipe which Tranton caressed with a tenderness that is lavished only upon inexplicable pets.
“When I left them,” said Tranton, resuming the talk we had begun in the other room, “they wereall quarreling over the question of Kipling’s treatment of women. It was a great circus. That Miss Fanchell said she didn’t think that Kipling could have known many good women—I think she saidanygood women—at the beginning, and that since he married an American girl, rather than modify his literary attitude, he preferred to write about men, beasts and locomotives. Mrs. Arch thought that he only used women as literary accessories, and Mrs. Gameston said she had heard that Kipling was very timid with women and that of course hecouldn’tunderstand them very well. Little Miss Stillberry said it was quite inevitable that men should know more of forward women. They appealed to me before I got away, and I told them I could be of no help whatever, because I didn’t understand either women or Kipling, though I liked both. I ventured to say, however, that if the American girl Kipling had married didn’t make him like women, in my opinion there was no hope for him. That let me out.”
“I should think it ought to,” I said.
“Women,” went on Tranton, with his eyes critically directed toward the bowl of his pipe, “will forgive a man for not understanding them, but never for not wanting to. Every debate of that sort has this explanation.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“I didn’t have time to stay and tease them. Perhaps I didn’t think of it until I got away. That often happens, doesn’t it?”
“It is better to think of a good thing we might have said than of an awkward thing we wish we hadn’t. If they had been wise women, Tranton, they would have spent their time devising ways to get you to tell the truth about them. Admitting that you don’t understand women, your knowledge of them, your command of data, give you the means of being hugely entertaining.”
“Do you think so?” asked Tranton, still studying the pipe bowl. “I wish I could translate them as well as they can translate us.”
“You would do it with an unction, Tranton, and I am entirely certain that you never would be accused oflèse majesté.”
“Speaking of translating,” said Tranton, “a girl told me about a book the other day—outlined for me the Brother Henry chapter of ‘My Lady Nicotine,’ which somehow I never had read, but which I certainly shall read a good many times. I got the book, and I give you my word that, making allowance for the fact that she had the first try, the chapter, delicious as it is, is not so good as her translation was, hasn’t the flavor that her exquisite humor got into it. I could not help thinking how lucky Barrie would have been if there was some way in which he could have written that chapter after she had told him about it.”
“Hence,” I said, “the greatest luck that can befall a man is that he shall have a translator in the house.”
“Pshaw!” returned Tranton. “The translator would probably lose her zest if she were in the house. My translator was willing to be a translator. You married men—”
“Now hold on, Tranton. That is an abstract proposition. Don’t make it personal. Have you acquired that from—”
“Hold on, yourself!” retorted Tranton. “Your proposition is abstract enough, but—well, we are both open to suspicion, I suppose. A man and a woman who meet occasionally are one thing—I mean that they are two; whereas if the same were married—to each other—they would be quite another,—that is to say, one. When they are one they must lose the charm, the entertainment, the stimulus of being two.”
“Rot!” was my friendly comment on this. But Tranton went on:—
“Can’t you see,” he pursued, playfully knocking the pipe against the desk as if it were my head, “can’t you see the interest of intermittent associations in which all themes are relatively new and are never quite exhausted? What is it that makes marriage so stupid except to the accidentally right pair?—the certainty that the two who have become one will get talked out. It must be like talking to one’s self. In society it is different. You can’t get talked out. You can hardly get started, and a person must be a tremendous bore to give himself away with so small a chance. Thus you see it is very democratic and levelling. The brilliant don’thave too much swing and the stupid are not crushed. There are men who are immense fun—once; girls who are witty and fascinating—the first time. Others have a long run,—for weeks, months, even years. But you can’t say how long a run they would have if you married them.”
“Tranton,” I said, “that is the way you talk to them. I know you. I simply won’t listen to your make-believe.”
“Oh, I am told that girls change a good deal during their married era,” went on Tranton, blowing the smoke at his bronze mandarin; “that would help keep it from being monotonous. Marriage itself is bound to change us when less revolutionary things are so potent. Take Grimsedge. Before he had his butler he was one man. After he had his butler he was quite another. He recognizes it himself. If he were writing his life I have no doubt but that he would divide the whole scheme into B. B.—Before Butler, and A. B.—After Butler. A woman’s married life, as I have been told repeatedly by women themselves, is full of change. Her constantly fluctuating estimate of her husband is one influence,—perhaps enough to account for everything. A friend of mine on the exchange told me the other night that his wife had gone through so many phases that when he reviewed his domestic career he felt as if he had been married to half a dozen different women. Now a man without a bigamous mind—”
“Tranton,” I interposed, “I have heard womenspeak of you as a nice man;—what did they mean?”
“Ye gods!” murmured Tranton to the mandarin, “he asks me what a womanmeans!” Then he turned to me. “Let me give you another pipe. I have always been suspicious of that one. Once when I was smoking that pipe I wrote a drivelling letter to a girl in—take this one. It has a longer stem. The heat won’t be so near your brain centre. When you smoke that pipe cogent thoughts will come into your head. It is curious about smoking. You can pull a long stem in one place and you can’t in another. There is a great deal in locality. A very proper woman may smoke in Savannah, but a very proper woman may not smoke in Philadelphia. That is the way it goes.”
“Tranton, suppose I were a woman—”
“I can’t,” retorted Tranton promptly, “I haven’t that kind of an imagination. And it would be wrong in principle.”
“Suppose I were a woman,” I went on, “and had asked you how you justified yourself for being a nice man—”
“A woman wouldn’t ask any such fool thing. And what right have you to the secrets of the confessional? Here I am indicted for being a nice man on hearsay evidence. It isn’t fair.”
“Ah! my dear Tranton, you had better plead guilty and be done with it. We never could find an unbiased jury!”
“What is my sentence? Am I sentenced tobe confined in marriage with the girl for the rest of my natural life?”
“It would be a pity, Tranton, for you really are a sort of social father confessor. A great many girls would miss you if you were to marry. They have had you to practise on, to say their nicest things to, and you have never made them worry at the thought that you possibly could mean anything yourself.”
“Go on,” said Tranton staring down into the fuming abyss of his pipe.
“You have been so much nicer than the fellows who were in love, because you are always self-possessed and considerate and cheerful. Above all you have let them—the girls—be self-possessed and considerate and cheerful. They wouldn’t dare be so nice to the fellows they were in love with. Your easiness and effectiveness with them and their responsive easiness and effectiveness with you are a constant incitement to the men who are in the race for fair. You pace the lover.”
“Not so bad,” muttered Tranton to the mandarin.
“You are regarded as extremely useful. You are usher, best man, friend in need. You balance the table with the nice girl who is to be conservatively brought into the game. Single men tell you their hopes, married men their troubles. You can run a german or a chafing-dish. You always let a girl with a bad complexion have her back to the window, and when they ask you to make a light, you don’t set things flaring like a barroom. You flatter them by well-timed antagonisms. You never let it seem that you have permitted them to win, and you never beat them badly. You never flatter in words if there is a way of doing the thing by an action. You please the plain and tease the pretty. You ask nothing and you get everything—everything but the greatest thing of all.”
“You have left out some things,” said Tranton, smiling, “several important things.” He seemed to be going over these in his mind. “It is quite natural. You couldn’t know. We all have to persuade ourselves—unless we are a complaining bore—that life has great compensations for us. Wehaveto stay satisfied. An optimist such as I am is like one of those story-telling liars who repeatedlyincrease the figures, not merely to assure the astonishment of each new listener, but to keep up their own interest.”
“Are you an optimist?”
“Of course I am. Even on your own showing I have much to be thankful for. I may not have the greatest rewards, but I have many that are sweet if not great. If the best man sometimes sees the other fellow get the best woman, he also sees him take the great risks,—also sees him take the woman who is not best. If the stunning girls marry some one else, they expect a great deal from the some one else, and if they stop being stunning the burden of that is not too keenly on me. The new era finds them immensely discriminating, hard to please. They have a wide choice nowadays, and they exercise that choice with the austerity of a sovereign. Just now they are a little tired of dukes. They like football heroes better. And then there is always the trooper. He is in great demand. Then, too, the girls are getting very tall. It is hard to pair well with them. They are getting dreadfully clever, too, and that must make it intellectually difficult continuously to live up to them. The taste for violent contrasts seems to me degenerate. I hope the fashion will go out. I met Miss Wainscott the other day with little Carew. I tell you, they lookedwrong. Then there is that little canary bird of a Miss Prune just engaged to big Kane. I joked her about him and she said she could say of him as Don Quixote said ofMorgante, that though of gigantic size he was most gentle in his manners. Of course, she will subdue Kane,—I told her she would make sugar Kane of him,—these little women are wonders. But that does not modify the spectacular absurdity of it.”
And thenThere is always the Trooper
And thenThere is always the Trooper
And then
There is always the Trooper
“It remains for you, Tranton, to set an example in this matter. You are a good example as far as you go. You have not been called a nice man without reason. But you pause before the ultimate example. You beg the question.”
“Probably the trouble is that I have a fatal veneration for women in general. I think of the individual only as epitomizing the sex. I understand that to be a fatal attitude of mind. Yet I find a corresponding attitude in many young women and women who are not young, and you have no idea how interesting that view makes them.”
“Oh, yes I have! That is the trouble. It makes them as interesting as it makes you.”
“Then what are you complaining about?”
“I am wondering what will become of you.”
“Become of me? There you are with your romantic, old-fashioned ideas again. Why should I become? I tell you, life reminds me of one of those boxes built to hold circulars or catalogues or free-distribution periodicals. They are marked on the outside ‘Take one?’ But there is nothing inside. Everything has been taken. We can’t all draw prizes,—we can’t allbeprizes. ‘They also serve,’ you know.”
“You will be punished,” I said. “When Age has put you through the inquisition, and you have been broken on the wheel—of Time—you will take it all back, and will incur the aspersion of marrying to have some one who will put out your slippers.”
“You forget, that in that grand climacteric I shall have some very sweet memories.”
“It would be interesting to know what you will think of the American girl—then.”
“I can think only one way of her,” said Tranton firmly, and he put away his pipe as he might have taken off his hat. “She puzzles the foreigner, but she need not puzzle us after all. I was reading the other day a British officer’s estimate of our volunteers in Luzon. ‘They might be described,’ he says, ‘as a great military paradox—a body of men of magnificent physique, possessing perfect discipline, and yet without any discipline at all.’ It occurred to me that much the same thing might be said about the American girl. She doesn’t appear to have much discipline, but she has as much as her brothers, and evidently she has all she needs and the sort she needs.”
“If you had found her undisciplined, Tranton, you would have seen your duty.”
“I have no doubt that she has acquired a certain discipline from me—from her privilege of disciplining me. She will manage her husband better because she has been able to practise on me. She has given us new ideals. ‘She never suggests an inferioritythat makes her lovely.’ We can’t imagine her lovely that way. She is never a ‘sad ungathered rose.’ She isn’t gathered. Sometimes I wish she was a shade less practical; but I generally attribute this wish to the wrong pipe or a streak of ugly weather. She only reflects the spirit of the age. The other day, in a moment of curiosity, I ran into one of those highly moral restaurants that have Biblical texts on the walls, and there, under the gorgeously lettered beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ was the brutal admonition in plain black and white, ‘Keep your eye on your hat.’ Under the sign, ‘Blessed is the matchmaker,’ a man should be able to read, ‘Keep your eye on your head.’ The world knows its business, and I suppose it is a better world than it ever was before. Yet it seems as if it must be getting harder to write poetry about it. What should you say to that?”
“I should say that if the world is better than it was, and that if it really is harder to write poetry about it, so much the worse for poetry. The joke isn’t on the world. I certainly do not think there is less real poetry in the world. Perhaps people live poetry more and write poetry less. Your American girls will have to look into this matter. The other day one of the magazinists discussed ‘The Passing of the Man Poet.’ Suppose this does happen, who is to celebrate the American girl as only verse can celebrate her? Are her praises only to be sung in a frowsy, pipish cave at eleven-thirtyby two doting, sentimental men? Here we are sliding into the night of the century. What a collection a century of her gowns and bonnets would make!—those high-waisted, clinging things, and the ‘pokes’ she wore in the morning of the century; the slope-shouldered, balloon-skirted affairs she put on at noon; the heaped enigmas she taunted the world with in the afternoon, and the moderndécolletéparadox which little Tony Atwell explained in calling it a ‘coming out’ dress. We have become very plain and unpoetical, Tranton, but they are as picturesque as ever. They symbolize for us the eternal freshness, the unconquerable youth of nature. They preserve and transmit the primitive gayeties of art, the natural impulses of a younger world. The note of our raiment isblasé; hers gives token of an unjaded joy in the beautiful.”
“Sentiment,” said Tranton, “is like a cigar. You see only the smoke by daylight, the fire at night.”
“I don’t like that at all, for, by and by the cigar burns out.”
“Then you light another.”
“And if you do that too often you incur the smoker’s heart. Give heed to that, Tranton. Don’t tempt Providence. The day will come when your magic will wane of its power, when your ear will grow dull to the poetry of life, unless—”
“I never wrote poetry but once,” said Tranton,in a voice that scarcely explained whether he was speaking to the mandarin or to me. “Perhaps that was because I neverlivedpoetry but once.” Then he stopped as if he had said more than he should, and reaching for his pipe he began filling it again, deliberately. When he had finished this labor and had the smoke rising again, he reached down and drew out one of the drawers of the desk and lifted a little ebony box. This he placed on the desk, and opened casually with his left hand, pulling hard at the pipe and staring straight before him. From out the velvet recesses of the box came a miniature photograph framed in gold.
“I think I never showed you that,” said Tranton simply.
“You never did,” I answered.
I had seen the face if I had not seen the picture before. The picture called up the breathing loveliness of a young girl with frank American eyes, and lips that always seemed about to ask the question her eyes answered; a girl with wonderful hair, and above all, with a manner which the word “charm” seems but vaguely to suggest. Every one liked Celeste. It was a great shock when suddenly they took her away to Colorado.... I remember the wonderful glow of flowers when they carried her out of the church....
Tranton said not a word. It was plain enough....
We sat there silently for a moment. I held the miniature in my hand.
“Tranton,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “I guess the women understand you pretty well, after all.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I am very easy,” said Tranton, “—to them.”