XX
Becoming reacquainted with the family and the city was an adventure. During his absence, he noted, the help had been cut down to Mammy Chloe and George. With Virginia Ruth living in New Orleans and himself away from home, the wants of the Hamiltons were really very simple, in spite of their standing in society. They had given up all the horses but one and had kept only the touring car.
“We don’t need much and it simplifies things,” Mr. Hamilton had explained. “You see, your mother is getting, well, is getting to the point where she wishes to be free from the responsibilities of managing a large household and we have even been considering selling thehouse—we’ve been offered a goodprice—and renting an apartment.”
Renting an apartment? What a dismal outlook. Robert detested apartments. They were all right in New York, but in the South! He wantedroom—room to loaf about and read, room for riding and playing tennis, room to entertain his friends. The tennis court, he noticed, had been allowed to run down and he decided to have it put back in shape the first chance he got.
In the meantime there were so many old friends to visit, so many questions to answer. On the first night home, a reporter from the morning paper hadcome—it was almostmidnight—to interview him, and the reporters from the afternoon papers had followed the next day. They had asked not merely questions about his personal experiences, but questions of which he knew nothing. About the peace conference, about the League of Nations. What did the French think of President Wilson and of Americans in general? Who won the war? And what part did the Southern, and particularly the Georgian, troops play in the war? Of course, he had been with New York troops, but he generously accorded the Southern soldiers their fullmeed of praise, which they doubtlessly deserved anyway, and of which he had heard indirectly.
And Margaret? He had to become acquainted with her all over again, too. She seemed younger than before he had left her to go to France. It was not alone her dress. He noticed that the women were wearing short skirts in imitation of the Parisiennes. It was not alone in her manner of combing her hair. It lay in a childish freshness that was at once impudent and sophisticated. Margaret had never been a serious-minded young lady, but now she seemed fairly to flutter above the realities of life.
They were returning from a dance one evening, at which Robert had incurred Margaret’s displeasure by attempting to sit out most of his dances. It was almost two o’clock and they were driving down a deserted street. Before the war, midnight had generally been the limit for a dance, unless it was some exceptional occasion, like the annual charity ball, for instance.
“You know, youseem—you seem so much younger than when I left,” said Robert.
“Oh, do I?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose you don’t like it. You’d want me to stay home every evening and darn socks and go to bed at nine, I suppose. What’s the matter with you, Bob? We used to be such good pals. Don’t, don’t—oh, I don’t know.”
They drove on in silence. How could he explain things to her? How could he make her understand his feelings? He wished, in a way, that he had postponed their engagement, not that they wouldn’t marry eventually anyway, but that it placed him under obligations. He had to escort her to dances and receptions and take her to the theatre. Of course, he got a certain amount of pleasure out of these things, but then he preferred simply to loaf about the house. It was queer, a fellow lay in the mud in Flanders for months under a drizzling sky and dreamed of coming home. Home was pre-eminently a place for loafing. A place where one could sleep as late as one wanted, lounge about in oldclothes and sleep some more. Now that one finally did reach home, one found that practise did not square with theory. Theoretically, Hamilton could have stayed in bed all morning. But when his parents were at the breakfast table at eight o’clock, he felt under a moral obligation to do likewise, especially now that the burden of housework had fallen on the shoulders of a single servant. Theoretically, too, he could have retired at eight every evening or stayed up until three in the morning, but practically, there were always social duties to perform. Margaret was always calling him up and claiming him.
There was no use trying to explain a thing like that to Margaret. How could she understand? She would probably think that he was getting old. He was only twenty-six. Had the war aged him? He had always taken Pinkney for a prematurely aged young man, and yet, while Pinkney was able to talk business and finances with the elders of the city, he was able to cut a commanding figure in the younger social set. He knew all the latest steps and even introduced little variations that he had picked up in New Orleans, Charleston and Baltimore.
With Dorothy, he reflected, he could sit idly at a table or walk along the street and express histhoughts—he had need to express them to some one. He wished, too, that Margaret did not so openly disapprove of what he had said in defense of the Negro that evening at his home. For a woman, anyway, he would have preferred that Margaret take the more humane point of view. He was old-fashioned enough to believe that a woman should display the softer virtues.
“What are you thinking about?” Margaret pouted coquettishly. “You haven’t said a word to me for five minutes, excepting monosyllables.”
“Oh, a lot of things. I—”
“Well, you mustn’t. That’s a bad habit. You should live instead of thinking about it. See ‘how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”
Margaret’s mood could change from the colloquial tothe mock poetic in a moment. When she quoted poetry it was with a little exaggerated air, as though she were pretending to act.
“‘Eat thou and drink,’” she quoted grandiloquently, “‘tomorrow thou shalt die.’ That’s what Howard recites to me sometimes. Don’t you think that’s right?”
“Yes, perhaps it is, but it’s only one point of view. Rossetti, you know, wrote three sonnets, each giving a different viewpoint, and that is only one of them.”
“Oh, is that so? Anyway, I think it’s very beautiful. Don’t you?”
Margaret relapsed into her poetic mood. She would ask Robert if he had heard this or that and then recite it with her coquettishly exaggerated emotion. It was very delightful on the whole. If she wished to sit closer to him, too, or hold his hand she could do it in play, as though it were part of the gestures accompanying the recitation. Some of the poems she quoted, Robert thought splendid, but others were sentimental bits that she had picked up from the fillers in the evening newspaper. She would quote, almost in the same breath with Shakespeare, the rhymed imbecilities of a syndicate humorist whose chief contribution to poesy was his method of arranging the lines so that they were separated by little asterisks and so that one had to read from the bottom line to the top. Probably otherwise nobody would ever read the stuff. The announced object of arranging the lines from bottom to top was to get the reader in the habit of always looking upward and onward to higher things, the highest thing being the rhymster’s signature, Milt Elkron, on the very pinnacle.
There were quarter hours, too, when Margaret would discuss “books,” that is, fiction. Here, too, she would speak of O. Henry, Henry James and James Branch Cabell with indiscriminate enthusiasm, although the first of the three was the only one of whom she had really read more than one volume.
“I didn’t like Wells’ last book. It was very disappointing.Not much plot. Too heavy. But Harold Bell Wright has a corking story. It’s just like life!”
Robert liked Margaret’s make-believe mood, during which she pretended to be giving expression to some inner spirit through the medium of verse. Pretense, after all, was something. And she pretended without in the least attempting to deceive. It was just a game. Of course, she expected him to return her little sallies with others in kind or with graceful, flowery compliments, which he could do skilfully. For instance, if she, coming to a dark spot in the road, and letting go of his arm, suddenly cried: “Thou know’st the wash of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek,” he would reply: “Lady, by yonder blessed moon, I swear”—or something about Stygian darkness, and they would both laugh.
“Why don’t you ever write poetry?” asked Margaret, as they stopped before her house. “I think you ought to write something splendid. I have a trade-last for you.”
“Oh, have you? What is it? I’m all ears.”
“But you must tell me one first,” she pouted.
That struck him as another one of her childish absurdities.
“Oh,I—a—know some one who thinks you’re the prettiest girl in Corinth.”
“Do you? Who’s that?”
“Guess?”
“Can’t.”
“Try.”
“It isn’t, it isn’t you? Oh, that isn’t fair? You just made that up!”
“Oh, but it is though. Of course, I think you’re the prettiest girl in Corinth.”
He caught her in his arms and kissed her to prove it.
“Has to be some one else! Has to be some one else!” Margaret insisted, with fascinating mock childishness.
“Well, then,” Robert thought a moment, “it’s Howard Pinkney. Now are you satisfied?”
She shook her head, with a little smile.
“No. That’s just as bad. He tells me that himself every time I see him. But I’ll tell you anyway.”
The compliment was a minor one. Some elderly, romantic woman, whom Robert dimly remembered, had thought he looked like apoet—like a picture she had of RupertBrooke—a far-fetched likeness.
“And now,” Margaret was standing at the door, her head thrown back, her eyes shining like dark stars:
“‘Sweet, goodnight!This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.Goodnight, goodnight! as sweet repose and restCome to thy heart as that within my breast!’”
“‘Sweet, goodnight!This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.Goodnight, goodnight! as sweet repose and restCome to thy heart as that within my breast!’”
“‘Sweet, goodnight!
This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Goodnight, goodnight! as sweet repose and rest
Come to thy heart as that within my breast!’”
Her make-believe mood again. She was playing at being in love. She blew him a tantalizing kiss before the illusion had time to die, and disappeared into the house. Robert stood there for a moment. He realised that Margaret was only playing, that she had probably learned thewords—yes, he even remembered where she had learnedthem—while taking the rôle of Juliet in her senior class play. Still the objective world was a series of illusions. What matter what Margaret was thinking or feeling within that pretty little head if she could always create such illusions. If she could always create them. He walked slowly back to his car. A cloud momentarily obscured the moon. The shadowy world of silver turned to black and then back to silver. If she could always do that.
In his room he found his official orders where he had stacked them on the chifferobe two days ago. He had forgotten to sort them. He yawned and began undressing leisurely. His hand brushed against the documents and he paused to stack them up again. Here was a copy of the telegram appointing him a second lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps, the order directing him to appear at Camp Eustis, the order assigning him to his company. And what was that scribbled across one of the envelopes? A poem.
“The agéd pilgrim hastens on the roadNor stops to pluck the flowers by the wayLest Death o’ertake him ere the close of day.”
“The agéd pilgrim hastens on the roadNor stops to pluck the flowers by the wayLest Death o’ertake him ere the close of day.”
“The agéd pilgrim hastens on the road
Nor stops to pluck the flowers by the way
Lest Death o’ertake him ere the close of day.”
It sounded familiar. He read on to the end:
“And here and there a scarlet memory.”
“And here and there a scarlet memory.”
“And here and there a scarlet memory.”
He suddenly remembered. Dorothy. McCall. McCall had scribbled the poem on an old envelope. Robert remembered lending it tohim—in the hospital.But—yes, he had been right all the time. By a sort of instinct. He undressed, turned off the lights and raised the shades. The moonlight lay like a river of silver across the shadowy lawn. A world of illusion and of beauty. Tomorrow, he said, he would ask Margaret to set the day. They should be married as quickly as possible.