Gita, who was on her knees in the garden planting carnations, her favorite flower, but keeping one eye on Andrew and the new gardener, prepared to act summarily at any sign of violence on the old man’s part, turned her head as she heard a taxi rattle up the avenue. Then she sprang to her feet and ran toward the house. Her morning visitor was Elsie Brewster.
“Is anything the matter?” she asked anxiously. It was only ten o’clock and Elsie had never accepted an invitation to luncheon. No man in Atlantic City was more sternly devoted to business between the hours of nine and five than the capable Mrs. Brewster.
Elsie’s face, usually as placid as the pool in the woods, was flushed a bright pink and her eyes sparkled with excitement. “Something wonderful has happened!” she exclaimed. “And I had to come over and tell you at once.”
“Don’t tell me you’re being sent to Europe!” Gita had a sensation of blank dismay at the prospect of separation from this resourceful and interesting friend, the only one whose constant companionship she had ever craved.
“That wouldn’t excite me the least little bit. But don’t try to guess. I’ll tell you. Come into the library where it’s cool.”
Gita ripped off her gauntlets and threw them on the floor of the hall. Her broad-brimmed hat followed a yard farther on. “What on earth can it be?” she demanded impatiently. “Don’t tell me you’re engaged.” She glared at Elsie, who had removed her hat and thrown herself into one of the deep chairs by the window.
“No, no, my child, it’s not that or I shouldn’t have dared to face you. I’d have prepared the way by a note——”
“Well! What is it? What is it?”
“Did I ever tell you that I have a brother? I’ve hardly dared mention the word man in your presence.”
“Your mother once said something about a son out West, somewhere or other, and of course I assumed that those snap-shots all over the house of a young man in khaki were his. Not bad-looking as men go. Has he struck it rich?”
“I shall begin at the beginning.” Elsie had labored too long at craftsmanship to tell a story haphazardly. “You know, his medical course was interrupted by the war, and when he came home he returned to Columbia to finish. He hated to have me work, but mother’s income had diminished like that of everyone else, and he knew he could do far better by us later if he had a profession than if he chucked it and took a job with little or no future in it. Besides, he was always mad on the subject of surgery. He used to dissect rabbits in the back yard when he was eight, and when he was ten the cook broke her arm and he had it in splints before the doctor got there. Then, too, he had a lot of experience in the army, where he was always in attendance on some one of the surgeons. He got the Croix de Guerre for operating under fire when the surgeon in charge of the hospital had been killed, and then coolly loading the patients into an ambulance and driving it off as the Germans rushed the town. Well, he graduated about two years ago and went to Butte, Montana, with a fellow graduate—a doctor of medicine—whose father was in charge of a hospital there and had offered him the position of assistant surgeon. He hated to leave New York, to say nothing of us, but he felt that was not a chance to be missed. Well, there he was, pegging away, when what do you think happened?”
“How on earth should I know?” asked Gita crossly. “Do come to the point. I always read the last page of a story first, and you might have given me the climax as a starter and told me his biography later. I suppose he married a rich patient.”
“Not he. He’s worked too hard and he’s too much in love with his profession to have a thought to spare for women. No. A great surgeon, one of the greatest in New York, Dr. Gaunt, under whom he had served for a time in France, was visiting the hospital and saw him perform an operation on a miner who had been smashed up in a fashion more complicated than usual. Dr. Gaunt was not only much impressed but remembered he had thought Geoff uncommonly clever and resourceful when they had worked together in one of the base hospitals. He needed a young assistant, as the one he’d had for some time had developed incipient tuberculosis and gone to California. He asked Geoff to dinner that night, talked with him for four hours, and then invited him to go to New York. Of course Geoff clinched then and there. When he descended on us this morning and told us the story he said he still felt in a sort of daze. And of course it means a good income from the beginning. Dr. Gaunt will pay him a salary until he is assured of stepping into the personal practice of the former associate, and he is practically certain of that.”
“Fine,” said Gita temperately. “But I thought he had discovered a gold-mine at least.”
“Old stuff. I shouldn’t have liked that at all. But I wish you’d warm up. Don’t you see what it means to me?”
“Oh!” Gita sprang to her feet with a little squeal of delight. “Of course! It means you won’t have to work any more and can devote all your time to writing.” She did not kiss Elsie as another girl would have done, but seized her hand and pumped it up and down. “Now I am excited. It’s too wonderful.”
“That’s it, my dear. After I had got over being exultant for Geoff and he had told me to go straight to the store and hand in my resignation, I’m bound to say I forgot him and was filled with an entirely personal excitement. I never felt so happy in my life.”
“I should think so. I know what it is to be free.”
She looked at Elsie’s flushed face and sparkling eyes and wondered if the young author had what was known as temperament and had been severely repressing it. She was as curious about the secret places of the ego as Elsie herself. “I suppose you’ll give yourself up to an orgy of writing now,” she said. “Get to work on that novel and be famous this time next year?”
“I’ll write it anyhow. Oh!” Elsie sprang to her feet and lifted her arms. The color left her face and it glowed with a white radiance. “Oh! To know that I may have a career! A career! Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else! And to be able to write constantly without interruption. You cannot imagine what it means.”
“Yes, I can,” said Gita sharply. “And it makes me feel like ten cents. I went to work in the garden this morning because I had nothing to do. I’m sick of the Boardwalk, and I can’t read all day.”
Elsie came down from the empyrean and regarded her charge anxiously. “You’re not getting bored? You!”
“Well, who wouldn’t be, in this house all alone? I think I’d have enjoyed it if you and Polly hadn’t put a lot of ideas into my head, for then I’d have been full of my new independence and freedom from sordid worries, and I always wanted to put in a lot of reading——”
“Why, you ungrateful little beast! I could shake you.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, and of course that wouldn’t have lasted either. And of course I understand myself. I used to get a lot of gratification out of brooding and glooming. No doubt it’s that I miss.”
“Well! As long as you are honest with yourself you won’t come to much harm. But you’d have ended by being a sulky old maid—or worse. Stable endocrines can be unbalanced in time. But I should think your hours would be pretty well filled. You have this house to run, you ride, walk, swim, read, and see a good deal of your friends. Later, New York will be furiously interesting. I really don’t see what you have to complain of.”
“Well, what does it all lead to? It’s all very well for you to be in love with life and dance about and spread your wings. You’ve a gift, and a career in prospect—full of variety and suspense. The truth of the matter is, I suppose, that my nature craves drama. In a way I’ve had it all my life. Damn ugly drama, most of it. But with all sorts of climaxes and uncertainties, and a tremendous amount of personal effort and strife. D’you think I’m cut out for a society woman, a lady of the manor? Just about as much as I’m cut out for a husband and babies. Just about!”
“But, Gita! Surely you are enjoying this new life of yours? And you do fit it, and you do manage to get a great deal out of it.”
“Oh, yes, that’s true enough. I only go off at a tangent once in a while. But, you see, I’ve done hard thinking all my life, and I simply can’t help wondering every now and again what I’ll do when the novelty has entirely worn off and I’m bored stiff. I’m not really bored yet. Just looking ahead.”
“Well, just remind yourself that you are now in a position to command a good deal of novelty. This is only the prologue. Life takes care of the changes when one is free on the surface, not burrowing in one of the ruts. Even then things have been known to happen. Of course you’ll never fall in love (something she was not at all sure of; but she was wiser than Polly who had “trotted out” three young men for Gita’s inspection, and been “treated like a dog” for her pains), so you’ll probably miss the most exciting experience of all. ButLIFE, when you are fairly launched in it! Oh, wait, my dear! Just wait!”
Gita shrugged her shoulders. “I’m waiting! All you say sounds very fine but it’s just glittering generalities. However—Iamungrateful and I’ll think no more about it. You’ll stay to lunch?”
But Elsie rose and put on her hat. “Not today. Tomorrow, if you’ll have me. But this is Geoff’s first day at home in over a year. I wish you’d dine with us tonight. Can’t you forget that Geoff is a man and merely think of him as my brother? After all, when you come out you’ll have to meet endless men, and talk to them, too.”
Gita gave her a hard stare. “If I thought——”
“Oh, no!” Elsie gave her rippling laugh. “I’m no matchmaker, and if I were you’d be the last person on earth whose love-destiny I’d dare have a hand in. I’m not sure you’ll even tolerate Geoff because he’s my brother. I don’t know what he may have done in his off moments but I do know that women don’t interest him and he makes no effort to talk to them. He’s rather silent, even with us. Carving up someone in his mind, I suppose. But I’d like to have you meet him, simply because he is my brother, and you, my dear, have become a part of my life.”
Gita kissed her for the first time. It was a peck, but it meant as much, Elsie knew, as the remark that followed. “I’ll come, of course, and I’ll try not to hate him.”
Elsiehad never been able to refurnish her old house, but she could have pink lights in the dining-room, and a bowl of pink roses on the table to draw attention from the worn linen and serviceable plates. Colored servants had long since relieved Mrs. Pelham of the “fine china” and Bohemian glass of palmier days. The simple platters and vegetable-dishes were of indestructible silver and she polished them herself.
Gita, whose table was overloaded with massive silver, fit only for a banquet hall, and who had dropped one of the forks on a priceless dish, the fragments removed by a muttering Topper, felt a sharp pang of homesickness: she was reminded of her mother’s pathetic attempts to give beauty to the homeliest surroundings, if the result were but a bowl of wild flowers or a worn but embroidered kimono thrown over the bald sofa of a pension.
There was a third at the table, for Geoffrey Pelham had met a friend on the Boardwalk and brought him home. Neither of the men wore evening clothes, but Mrs. Pelham, whose austere face shone with a light that seemed to Gita nothing less than miraculous, wore her best black satin (by no means the soft and clinging fabric of fashion), bordered at the neck and wrists with Irish lace. Elsie’s gown of “Caribbean blue” deepened the hue of her eyes, and the revealed pedestal of her neck gave her head and throat a more girlish beauty. She looked barely twenty and her cheeks were very pink, her eyes very bright. Gita, acutely conscious of her own bare neck and arms, with a rosy glow on their ivory surfaces, tried to concentrate her mind on the excellent food, and answered in monosyllables the occasional remarks addressed to her. It was the first dinner she had attended for over three years, and in San Francisco she had persisted, despite Millicent’s tears, in wearing uncomely little dark frocks with elbow-sleeves and a neck curve that fitted the base of her throat.
The conversational ball rolled between Elsie Brewster and Eustace Bylant. Mrs. Pelham merely beamed on her son, who devoted himself to his dinner and rarely volunteered a remark. Gita, who was appreciative of good looks, however grudgingly she might admit their waste, and whose eyelashes were an effective screen for subtle observation, remarked that Geoffrey Pelham had the hard outlines of his mother redeemed by a keen intellectual life of their own, and a high head with an abundance of fair hair, properly cut at the back but indifferently brushed. His eyes, like Elsie’s, were gray-blue but darker, widely and deeply set; and he showed his battle with fortune, his ambition, and his devotion to his chosen science in a certain set grimness of mouth and nostril. His tall figure had the look of recent affinity with a uniform, an expression even doctors brought back from the war. But although Gita inferred he might be found attractive by women if sufficiently responsive, she dismissed this gift as negligible and concentrated her admiration for a moment on his brow. Like his sister’s it was high and full and had the same expression of intellectual nobility. Probably no lie, as she’d tested out Elsie. . . . Below the eyebrows the face was that of a man whose natural expression might have been nervous, eager, sensitive, but trained to constant and severe repression. A man of a single purpose, no doubt of that. Well, surgery could have him.
She turned her eyelashes on Mr. Bylant, who was still talking to Elsie.
Eustace Bylant was a novelist of considerable distinction, thirty-eight in years, and admittedly the bridge across the chasm that divided the “younger generation,” which had brought a new if somewhat strident note into American fiction, and the stable group that went its serene way based firmly on the traditions of England. His own base was as firm as England’s Gibraltar, but his undiminished curiosity, the activity of his mind, and his genuine interest in current life and thought, enabled him without effort to be as modern as the youngsters. Sometimes more so, for the youngsters were often ingenuously mediæval.
And his religion was art, words his flexible tools; he could create a living picture of dire offensiveness without an offensive word. An inexorable realist, he scorned to introduce beauty where beauty was not, but when forced by the exigencies of the story to create an unclean interior inhabited by persons who declined to wash, he conveyed his meaning so craftily that the reader was uncomfortably aware of an assortment of smells and raucous sounds and ugly images, which he remembered long after dismissing the grease and grime and stenches of less accomplished recorders of life at its worst.
Bylant had never made an effort to repress the mobile play of his features and looked less than his thirty-eight years, in spite of the fact that he was a bright light at sophisticate parties when they did not interfere with his work. His long nose was sharp and investigating, his mouth would have been sensuous but for an almost rigid firmness of the lower lip, and his lively gray eyes sparkled with tolerance and good-humor. He wore an infinitesimal mustache and a short pointed beard.
He was always meticulously groomed and radiated good health; his large firm hands were as carefully tended as a fastidious woman’s, although he was as masculine as Geoffrey Pelham and something of an athlete. Gita, who, in her worst days, had polished her nails, compared the hands of the two men. Dr. Pelham’s were long and sensitive and flexible, but no doubt he thought it sufficient to keep them clean and disinfected and wasted no time on a buffer.
Gita had arrived early by request, spent half an hour in Elsie’s bedroom, and listened none too patiently to a brief biography of the distinguished guest. “I’ve not seen so very much of him, considering he’s a great friend of my brother,” Elsie had rattled on, “but he always calls when he comes to Atlantic City; sometimes drops in on me at the office. And I’ve met him at a few parties in New York. He’s known from the first that I am the occasional Elizabeth Pelham of the magazines. Shortly after my début as ‘E. B.’ he introduced me to Suzan Forbes, who took me firmly by the hand and steered me into the haven of the Lucy Stone League, where cognominal transitions from father to husband are sternly tabu. Do I look all right?”
Gita had assured her she looked lovely, and they had gone downstairs arm in arm.
Aloof and apparently absorbed in her “Maryland chicken,” she wondered apprehensively if Bylant were in love with Elsie and decided he was not. His eyes were merely bright with interest as they discussed current tendencies and sophisticate personalities. He had darted a curious glance at herself once or twice in the parlor, and there had been a sudden glow in his eyes when they were introduced that made her stiffen her spine—that unfailing thermometer of her moods—but he had favored her with his notice no further.
At this point it occurred to her that she was acting like a “cub.” In San Francisco, where she had been invited to dinners by girls who both liked and pitied her, eccentricities were condoned and they had expected no help at her hands. Tonight she was not only the guest of honor but the only other girl present, and—she made a wild dive among the shades of her ancestors—she was Miss Carteret of Carteret Manor. She may have accepted the rôle under protest but accepted it she had, and to behave like a sulky outlaw and cast a shade over the feast would no longer be tolerated. Elsie loved her and if she were disappointed would give no sign, but Gita imagined with a shudder the cold disapproval of Mrs. Pleyden if she sat like a sphinx at her table with a picked man on either side to entertain. She might as well begin now.
She turned to Dr. Pelham and asked a tentative question, imbecile, she admitted, but she hardly could be expected to scintillate.
“Are you glad to be home, to have seen the last of the West?”
Pelham smiled slightly. “Oh, I rather liked Butte.”
“Mining town, isn’t it?”
“Rather.” He was in no mood for small talk, for his mind was full of his suddenly dazzling future, but he recognized that he was host, and if this hitherto agreeably silent guest were suddenly inspired to conversation, it was his duty to humor her. “A very noisy town. There are three shifts, you know, and groups of miners on the street corners at all hours of the day and night. The city never seems to sleep.”
“Rather trying for those who want to sleep, I should think.”
“Decidedly. But I was generally too tired at night to be kept awake even by the eternally bouncing trucks.”
Gita turned to him squarely. She felt no repulsion toward individual men as long as they were impersonal, and Butte roused her curiosity. At the same moment Dr. Pelham was enabled to observe that she had the largest and fiercest black eyes he had ever seen and quite the most remarkable eyelashes. “Please tell me something about Butte,” she said eagerly. “I have lived in a good many places but never in a mining town. I always thought I’d like to go to Johannesburg, but I never heard of Butte until today.”
“The two cities are said to be much alike.” And he launched into a description of the stark hill, once known as Perch of the Devil, for unarguable reasons, where the inhabitants walked over copper-mines a mile in depth and sometimes found outcroppings in their back yards. He was grateful to her for introducing a subject which cost him no effort, and he had been able to see the beauty as well as the smiting ugliness of that ore-scorched region. In winter when the high valley was covered with snow it had a cold loveliness of its own, particularly under the blue dawn of Montana.
That phrase had occurred to him as he walked home before sunrise one morning after a call to The Flat to patch up a woman so severely injured in an amorous dispute that it was impossible to move her. His sentences were brief and unadorned but it seemed to Gita that she had a complete vision of that unique “camp” in the Rocky Mountains with its sinister and unsleeping life underground and its scarred and feverish surface.
“I’ll go there some day,” she said, and not merely to be polite. “It would be a new sensation to telephone to New York in a comfortable office a mile underground.” Bylant and Elsie had fallen silent and were listening, the latter with intense approval: Geoffrey was exerting himself to entertain a woman, and Gita was hanging on his words. Then she frowned.Thatwould be too obvious. One’s darling brother and beloved friend. Old stuff. Wouldn’t do, anyhow. What Geoff needed was a good old-fashioned wife to see that he got proper food at regular hours, and soothing and sufficiently intelligent conversation when at home. Whatever else Gita might become she never would be soothing and adaptable. Eustace Bylant might manage her. But the distinguished author had not manifested the slightest interest in this transitional friend of hers.
Then she became aware that while leaning toward Geoffrey, Bylant was covertly watching Gita Carteret. There was a curious expression in his eyes . . . very curious. Not admiration; that would have been natural enough. Not even speculation—more natural still. Not dubiety. Gita, now that she had abandoned a hopeless pose, more especially when she wore soft and luminous satin and a rope of shimmering pearls, did not look in the least like a boy. She was still more handsome than beautiful, perhaps, for there was no trace of softness in her spirited features, and had it not been for her eyelashes she would have resembled too closely the eagle-like countenance of Mrs. Carteret. . . . His eyes had not even their “psychological look,” as when he was visibly admiring and inwardly impaling some elated woman. . . . No, it was—it was—Elsie almost lost her breath as the expression in Bylant’s eyes deepened to an inner certainty. Expectancy? Hope? She had watched it dawn out of a stare of keen appraisement, as if his critical faculty were determined to make no mistake.
Then she saw him shrug his shoulders, shift his gaze, and give his full attention to Geoffrey. A few moments later, to his friend’s manifest relief, he took over the burden of conversation and talked of old and abandoned mining towns he had seen in Nevada; and told stories both orthodox and unusual, that clung to them. One made even Gita laugh heartily; the tale of a man who had taken refuge in the office of his manager high up and in the side of a mountain still full of silver, which could be approached only by a narrow and precarious flight of steps—from a lady of easy virtue, who, now that he owned much of the mountain, was determined to marry him. While he was smoking a congratulatory pipe his manager, passing the entrance to the eyrie, cried out suddenly: “My God, Jim, she’s coming up the ladder with a pistol in one hand and a priest behind her!” And, corralled and at bay, the millionaire had married the lady, dowered her extravagantly, and left her to her own devices. A few years later she had attained a high and haughty position in European Society.
This time Bylant included Gita in the conversation as he did Mrs. Pelham; with equal and charming politeness, and nothing more. She went home with the sense of having had an agreeable and instructive evening, and of enjoying it more than she deserved. Far more important, she had pleased Elsie and was not compelled to anathematize herself as a boor. Topper had been ordered to call for her in a taxi, lest Elsie should insist upon her brother’s escort. Dr. Pelham, much relieved, pronounced her a sensible young woman, and looked astonished when his sister went off into a paroxysm of laughter.
Gitawas walking in her woods. She had had a canter on the beach and a swim and was full of exultant life. The mood of two mornings earlier was forgotten. It was glorious to be young and free from care and as healthy and lively as a puppy. In these days, thank heaven, the young were consciously young; no one could say they did not appreciate their youth till too late.
She had come into the wood because there was no one to see her if she looked as pagan as she felt, and she loved these beautiful silent pines more than any of her possessions. Occasionally she danced, and kicked the pine-needles and fallen cones about. Elsie had forbidden her to whistle and engrave lines about her mouth, but she answered the trills of the birds with sharp little cries almost as ecstatic. She wondered if she had been a dryad in a former incarnation, or (her self-analytical habit always kept pace with her imagination) if she were merely being young for the first time; she could not recall feeling young even in her childhood. She also wondered if she would ever have been unhappy, even under the shadow of Gerald Carteret, if they had lived in the country. “The Peninsula” below San Francisco had been far too decorated and populous to be real country and the desert was a region set aside for lost souls. But in these pine woods with their brooding but intimate silences, their pungent fragrance, and lovely solitudes, she had a sense of both space and friendliness, of stateliness and simplicity, vastly different, she imagined, from the mighty forests of California.
And they were hers! She had never taken even Elsie into them. She had a fancy that these straight slender trees had, perhaps a million years ago, lived as men and women, whose souls had passed finally into a form more beautiful than Nature had granted to mortals, and fortunately inarticulate; but that they recognized her as an old playmate and sheltered her jealously when she found her joy in their shade. She picked up a cone and flung it into the arbors above, resenting even the presence of a squirrel in her secret domain, and gave a whoop of delight as he scampered angrily across his branch into another tree.
And then she came face to face with Eustace Bylant.
“You look like a wood-nymph,” he said, lifting his hat and undisconcerted by the fierce blaze of her eyes. “For a moment I hesitated to break the spell.”
Gita was speechless with amazement and wrath. She felt an impulse to chase him out of her sacred wood as she would a stray cat from her bedroom. Then she remembered her manners and said with bitter politeness: “Good morning. You startled me, but this is the first time I have ever met anyone in my woods.”
“Are they yours? I beg your pardon. New Jersey is covered with woods and one gets into the habit of thinking of them—well, as just woods. And I happen to be very fond of woods. But I am really sorry,” he added contritely. “You looked so happy a moment ago—happier than any mere mortal has a right to look. . . . And I think I understand. I’ll go if you insist——” He broke off and looked about him at the sweet deep aisles of the wood with an expression of longing in his fine eyes that seemed to have eliminated herself.
The spell was broken and the creature was a friend of Elsie’s. “Oh, well, as you are here you may as well stay,” she said with no attempt at graciousness. “But I must go in presently. I have business letters to write.”
“Oh, please! Business letters! What a horrible thought. How could it enter your head in these woods? If they were mine I doubt if I should write a line except when they were dripping in winter: I have a holy horror of rheumatism.”
He strolled beside her, his hands in the pockets of his riding-coat, his hat pushed to the back of his head. He had come to the wood deliberately to meet her, casually if possible, and find her off guard, and he had been rewarded by a full glimpse of something he had half suspected two nights ago. She had haunting memories for him and he was determined to study her, possibly to marry her. He smiled to himself as he reflected that the first thought of another man no doubt would be to awaken the womanhood so perversely sleeping in this girl who seemed to be unconscious that sex ruled the world, but he was on a different track. He had extracted something of her history from Elsie Brewster after Gita had left them, and more from Polly Pleyden, with whom he had dined on the following night. But the information had been sought less out of sheer masculine curiosity than as a means for determining his tactics.
“May I smoke?”
Gita nodded sullenly. She had behaved uncommonly well, she told herself, but if he were unable to take a hint nothing further could be expected of her. A man in her woods! Men, individually, were not worth hating as long as they behaved themselves, but her indifference when they did was entire. This creature did not look predatory and his cool impersonal gaze aroused in her no sense of wary disquiet. She walked straight and silent beside him and he talked of the dinner at the Pleydens’.
“Polly was rather huffed when I told her I had met you at the Pelhams’,” he said. “It seems you have refused to dine with her.”
“My grandmother has only been dead three months. Polly knows quite well I don’t go out. Dining with Elsie is another matter.”
“Quite so. But I am delighted to hear that your period of mourning will end in the winter and you will visit the Pleydens in New York.” There was no emphasis in his cool quiet tones and he appeared merely to be making conversation. Gita wondered impatiently why he didn’t go.
“I suppose I shall have to visit them for a week or two.”
“Ah? Mrs. Pleyden said she expected you to spend the winter with them. It seems she had some understanding with your grandmother.”
“Oh, no!” Gita’s voice sounded such genuine alarm that he glanced about the woods once more with a smile of sympathy.
“I understand,” he said softly.
Gita warmed to him for a moment. “If I’ve got to be introduced to this Eastern Society I’ve got to, I suppose, but I shall live here and only go to New York occasionally. And I’ll not be invited to parties because I don’t dance. I don’t fancy I’ll be run after for dinners either. I wish I were rich enough to have an apartment in town to spend half the week in. I do want to go to the opera and all the new plays. But my lawyer says I must be careful for a year or two.”
“Why don’t you rent the manor? I fancy there are a good many of the backgroundless on the lookout for an incongruous setting. They would give you a fancy price.”
Gita shook her head vigorously. “I did think of it once but I never could do it now. It’s too much mine in too many ways. It seems to have a soul of its own, a distillation of all the Carterets, perhaps. I could as easily have rented out my grandmother.”
Bylant laughed heartily. He had a mellow laugh and it struck no false note in the wood. “I have heard a good deal of Mrs. Carteret and I fancy your old manor house would appreciate the compliment. I understand exactly what you mean, for I too have an old house—in Albany—and my mother would not live anywhere else. She insisted that old houses, particularly old family mansions, had a very real and complex personality, made up not only of those who had lived there—the direct inheritors and the diverse strains introduced by marriage—but because the windows, she said, were so many eyes looking out on history in the process of making; the family ghost, perhaps, recording it all in the invisible volumes that atmosphere shares with the subconsciousness of man. An old house must have an atmospheric library as extensive as the British Museum, and could hardly fail to have a personality. My mother—Bladina, I called her, for, although she was the consummate mother, she seemed little older than myself—used to say that if anything could convert her to spiritualism it would be the hope of making her old walls speak; the house was built by a Dutch ancestor when Albany was Fort Orange and she refused to leave it when she married.”
Gita was regarding him with interested eyes. “How odd!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been feeling just like that lately. Been reading a history of New Jersey; and my old manor must have accumulated tomes. Primeval wilderness and Indians. Dutch—West India Company. Swedes. English. Dutch once more. English again. Constant disputes between governors and between East and West New Jersey before they were reunited. Always on the verge of war with New England. Jealousies, heart-burnings, shattered careers. Governors who oppressed and provoked the people to rebellion, and one who ‘dressed himself in a woman’s habit and patrolled his fort.’ Quakers. Witches. Lords Proprietors. Negro risings, and negro slaves burned alive for assault. Then the American Revolution; there was a good deal of fighting around here. And all the rest. And the Carterets lived a wild life of their own. My baronial hall, as the historian calls it, has an aloof, brooding, almost intolerably self-satisfied air, as if it knew so much more than any mere mortal could ever learn. It is quite haughtily reserved and withdrawn and only condescends to me because I was born a Carteret. But it really makes me feel more at home than I ever felt anywhere else, and I’d starve before I’d have its atmosphere damaged by aliens.”
“I understand. I understand—perfectly.” He had turned a little pale, but he continued to regard her with eyes that evinced mere friendly interest. And as he had evidently been as devoted to his mother as she to poor Millicent, and as he had without conscious effort made her talk freely, and understood her at that, she decided—particularly as there seemed to be no prospect of getting rid of him—to tolerate him for the morning at least.
“I’m rather tired,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
They had come to the edge of the pool, an oval sheet of water in the heart of the wood, so densely surrounded by pines that their branches were reflected in the water and there was hardly room to sit on the turf. She propped herself against a tree and he selected one close by.
“Now,” she said, “tell me more of your mother. What did she look like?”
“Very much like you,” said Bylant.
Fora moment Gita felt more angry than astonished, and half rose. Then she settled back with a laugh. “Someone’s mother is the very last—— Was she any relation of the Carterets?”
“Not that I know of, but types are not confined to families.”
“I don’t at all like being told I belong to a type.”
“But everyone does, my dear child.” Bylant smiled indulgently as he took out his pipe. “It is the common lot, although nothing distresses the ego more than to be reminded of it. But it is type accentuated, raised to the nth degree, that makes the individual. You are like my mother in certain respects, in others not at all, and yet you are the only person I have ever met who reminded me of her. If you had been brought up here at Carteret Manor the resemblance would be more striking still, but the plus and the minus make you yourself and no one else. Don’t writhe under the apprehension that your exact counterpart exists anywhere else in the world! . . . On the other hand, if the conditions had been reversed, I don’t doubt that my mother would have been, at your age, almost precisely what you are today.”
Gita had been introduced to a new sensation. Titillated vanity conquered pique. She had heard of the none too subtle methods of the American male and eyed Bylant warily, then concluded he was harmless, and smiled encouragingly. “I suppose, on the whole, I should be flattered,” she said. “And your mother seems to have been one of the individuals. How was she brought up?”
“In the most orthodox manner possible. A beautiful high-spirited intelligent girl, she was educated partly in France, partly in New York, and came out inevitably at eighteen. She had a winter of intoxicating belledom and then married my father, who was her complement in looks, being even lighter than I am, had that air of intense reserve that suggests unfathomable depths, and the most charming manners. It was blind surrender to the race-urge with the mental accompaniment of an infant rooting in the proper place for nourishment. All the old-timers are horrified at this new license of young people, but at least they will avoid one mistake of their forerunners. They know exactly what is the matter with them.
“The marriage was not a happy one. My father was dull, stubborn, and had ideas as orthodox as himself on the subject of home rule. He was thrown from his horse and killed when I was seven. After that she devoted herself entirely to me—her parents died soon after she married—and recovered all her old buoyancy and joy of life. Of course she had other offers of marriage, and many friends; but although she liked society and was too sane to hate an entire sex because one man had failed her, she was too happy in her freedom and her child to be tempted for a moment. She entertained enough to give the atmosphere of my home a certain gayety and to initiate me into the ways of the minor world. I went to boarding-school when the proper time came, for she was too wise to run the risk of feminizing me, but I spent my vacations with her—we traveled a good deal—and when I left Harvard and returned home with the intention of adopting the profession of letters, she became my constant companion and spoiled me for anyone else. She had a wide range of interests, in life as well as in books—in which she had taken refuge during my father’s régime—and magnificent spirits——”
“Well, those I haven’t got, at all events. I’ve felt blue or cross most of my life.”
“I saw you dancing in the woods. You looked sixteen—no, ageless. . . . Your spirits were in constant conflict with your luck and boiled over into the wrong channels. If you had been commonplace your unhappy experience would have made little impression on you.”
“Well, it made a lot, and if you care to hear it I’ll tell you something about my own mother.”
He leaned over and emptied the ashes of his pipe into the lake. When he turned to her his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed, but his expression betrayed nothing more than kindly interest. “Please do,” he said warmly. “One confidence deserves another. I’ve heard scraps—you are a much-discussed young person, you know—and I’m keen to hear the story at first hand.”
“You’ll not put me in a book!” There was a very faint note of alarm in her voice, and she experienced another titillation at the possibility.
“If you really do not want to be ‘put in a book’ you are even more original than you look. But suppose we defer introducing anything so extraneous to the moment as fiction? I certainly should not take such a liberty without your consent after you had given me your confidence. Just now I am only interested in discovering what has made you so different from Bladina.”
This subtle touch completed the conquest of Gita’s jealous reserve. To her increasing amazement she found herself unburdening her soul of the poisonous accumulations of her twenty-two years. She told the chronicle from the beginning, omitting no detail, extrinsic or subjective. If she paused to remind herself that she was breaking the habit of a lifetime and turning herself inside out—to a man! Of all things!—she concluded that an author was much the same as a father confessor, but more appreciative of high-lights; she knew that she was telling an interesting story and telling it well.
Bylant, overwhelmingly interested in her both as a man and an ardent psychologist, was quite aware of her attitude toward himself, and although the man in him rebelled, for he was more in love with her every moment, he consoled himself with the pregnant certainty that he was her first confidant; and, whether she resented the act later or not, she was creating an indissoluble bond. It was a long first step and he knew the virtue of patience.
But Gita’s indifference to anything below the intellectual dome of her new friend was complete. She felt buoyant and released, as if she had suddenly been hauled out of a dungeon and introduced to light and freedom, and she felt grateful and quite willing to take him on as a doctor. He had certainly purged her soul. To talk about herself after all these years of repression had been almost ecstatic and she knew she had committed the wisest act of her life. But she concluded on a light note.
“There, you’ve had it all! Not a pretty story, is it? And you must be thankful I’m not your mother.”
“If you hadn’t been her psychological—and physiological—twin your story would have been very different and you wouldn’t have told it.”
Gitaglanced at her wrist-watch and sprang to her feet.
“A quarter past one! My old Topper will be wringing his hands. He’s served meals on time for fifty years and privately thinks me a disgrace to the Carterets because I hate regular hours and strew my things all over the house. You must come back to lunch with me. I’ve an excellent cook.”
Bylant dusted the pine-needles from his trousers. “I won’t be gallant and vow that a luncheon of bread and cheese in your company would be a feast for the gods, for I’m both hungry and highly appreciative of good cooking; and this is a morning sternly devoted to truth. I’ll come with the greatest pleasure in the world.”
His tone was gay and matter-of-fact, but Gita received the subtle message that super-formalities existed between them no longer. She shrugged her shoulders. Well, she had done the inconceivable. Why not take on a man friend for a change? And an author-man, at least, was far more understanding and stimulating, when it came to real conversation, than any woman she had known.
After luncheon they sat in the library, and for a time in silence, Bylant enjoying his cigar, his eyes roving appreciatively over the walls of books. It was a completely satisfying relic of the past, that old manor library, collected by men who had been intellectual in their own ponderous way; and an inimitable background for this spirited, rebellious, neoteric descendant who had inherited their handsome high-bred shell and cast out their prejudices, packing the space with idiosyncrasies of her own.
Gita followed his glance. “Those old tomes are pretty dull,” she said with a sigh. “But I learned something of the history of each of the countries I lived in—France, Belgium, Germany, Italy; we were even in England once for a few months—and it is time I knew more. I’m frightfully ignorant. I like history and biographies better than anything, but I must say it’s rather hard to lose oneself in musty pages covered with brown spots like freckles, and long esses. I don’t believe a Carteret bought a book later than 1830. But I peg away at it for two hours every evening, and on rainy days I yawn over them by the hour. I’ve made a virtuous resolution not to read a novel for six months.”
“I’ll send you some of the modern histories and biographies. They are equally—perhaps more—authentic, and their writers belong to this generation of the quick and are more fearful of dullness than of crime. Dullness is a crime, for that matter, for it has slaughtered more brains than excess.”
But he had no intention of discussing books with her. It should be another bond between them in the future and the fertile cause of frequent association; but the mood of the morning was still on her, her intoxicated ego still danced in those magnificent eyes, and he needed little adroitness to lead her to enlarge upon certain incidents of her past which, he protested, she had brushed aside too lightly to satisfy a greedy psychologist. Gita was not slow to understand that she was the most interesting study that had ever swum within the ken of this multifariously experienced novelist, and she rose to the bait.
He also gave her a more detailed account of his own life, particularly before the sudden death of his mother eight years ago; and if, when they finally parted, she did not feel that she knew him better, and he her, than anyone either of them had known in this life of many acquaintances and few friends, it was, he told himself grimly, through no fault of his.
“You’ll see me again in a day or two,” he said as they shook hands in the garden, whither they had migrated as the sun rode to the west. “I’m going to New York tomorrow to make a choice selection among my books for your delectation. May I bring them over on Friday?”
“Come to lunch if you like. It’s been very jolly and I’ll always be glad to see you—with or without the books.” Gita produced what she called her manor-manners without effort. This author-man had chased away the black clouds that always muttered on the horizon even when they did not overwhelm her and she felt intensely grateful to him. She liked him better than Elsie or Polly and he would be as little likely to make love to her.
He felt an impulse to ask her to meet him in the wood, but decided it would be a failure in tactics, and merely replied:
“I shall take advantage of your hospitality very often. I came to Atlantic City to get rid of a cold and have taken rooms in Chelsea for a month. But the life here has never interested me and I’ll look upon you as the best of good fellows if you’ll let me come often to this delightful old manor.”
“The door is always open, for Topper and I disagree on the subject of fresh air and burglars. As they used to say in California in the old Spanish days, ‘The house is yours. Burn it if you will.’ ”
And they both laughed, and parted, well pleased with themselves.
Gita, who, to use his own word, had pestered Mr. Donald for money to refurnish her house, had announced some time since that she had changed her mind.
“I suppose the house has changed it for me,” she thought; she condescended to no explanation to her lawyer, whom she delighted in tormenting. “I’ve an idea its walls would fall in if I took too many liberties with its sacred traditions.”
And now that the more anachronistic of the furnishings had been banished (what-nots, rep sets with antimacassars, walnut writing-desks, hat-racks, marble-topped tables, chiffoniers, commodes, ottomans, Victorian horsehair), and fresh air had exorcised the mustiness she had found so depressing, there was no question that tulipwood and hickory, spindle-legs and mahogany, carved oak and pewter, Sheraton and Windsor, lady-made tapestry, threadbare velvet, brocade and damask, however little they might harmonize one with the other, were as much a part of the historic old mansion as the family portraits; and nothing she could buy in New York or Philadelphia, even if she confined herself to “period” shops, would take their place. Like the walls they had been the mute companions of nearly three centuries of Carterets; and Gita, sitting on one of the faded chairs in the drawing-room, sometimes fancied there was a knowing smile on the lips of her grandmother’s portrait, painted shortly after she came to the manor as a bride, and smiled in unwilling response as she remembered one of her last conversations with the redoubtable old lady. She had surrendered to the house, no doubt of that. She had despised ancestral traditions as long as they had given her nothing, had been a convinced democrat, with leanings toward socialism, as long as she was a quasi-derelict; but now that she possessed an adequate and independent income, inherited from her line with one of the most historic old properties in America, she felt as if she were being reëducated in silent communion with every Carteret that had lived here before her.
There were family portraits all over the lower floor, and their painted unchanging faces had become as familiar to her as those of her lively and excessively modern young friends; she sat in the twilight and tried to visualize that long and vanished line that had contributed to the personality of the house even if their shades did not return to haunt it. She had no fear of ghosts and would have liked to see her Carterets moving about their old habitat in the picturesque costumes of their eras. The only ghost that would have frightened her was her too-recent grandmother’s, and if her father had stood before her she would have shrieked her dismay. She sincerely hoped his discarnate self was permanently impaled in a roasting pit.
Oh, the old house had got her! It was remaking her in a way, and at this conclusion she sometimes rebelled. She had looked upon Gita Carteret as a crystallized and unique individuality, and to be reconstructed by a combination of circumstances and ghosts gave her ego some intemperate moments; but finally she reasoned that as everyone was the sum of his ancestors, what she was developing into had really composed the foundations of her being, and was now enjoying its first opportunity to express itself. If she had been brought up at Carteret Manor, as her grandmother had insinuated, she would have been a Carteret to her still recalcitrant spine.
While drawing these wise conclusions she quite forgot poor Millicent, who, after all, had contributed, both by blood and counsel, a modicum of sweetness and adaptability—to say nothing of good manners when Gita chose to use them. No Carteret had ever been called adaptable or sweet. Their grim handsome hard faces were of men—and women—whom life had favored not chastened, and had bred out less powerful cross-strains necessarily introduced by marriage.
Gita had forgotten Eustace Bylant almost as soon as he had left her; forgot him as promptly after each subsequent visit; or, if he drifted across her memory, it was merely as a sympathetic and instructive mind, whose devotion to his mother had struck a responsive chord, and then delivered her own of its burden. As a man he was non-existent. Although she analyzed herself ruthlessly and as often as occasion demanded, on sex, either in herself or other women, she had never wasted a thought. She might resent being a “female,” but as to what it involved aside from its disabilities was no concern of hers. She had read enough to know that some women went through life as frigid as the disembodied, and she concluded, when she thought about the matter at all, that she belonged in their class. Odd if she did not, with her springs poisoned before they had reached the surface. Anyhow, it was one more matter for congratulation and pointed the wings of her freedom.
Polly strolled in on her one day when she was standing before the portrait of her grandmother, whimsically making faces at the intolerant beauty who had harbored no doubts ofHERplace in the general scheme, and laughed aloud.
“Why don’t you stick your tongue out at her?” she asked. “I often wanted to when I was a kid.”
Gita whirled, frowning. “I didn’t hear you!”
“Glad you didn’t. Caught another glimpse of your innards. Eustace Bylant would express it more stylistically, no doubt. Hear you’ve been seeing a lot of him lately. What’s happened? Thought you’d no use for men.”
“He’s brought me some books—jolly good ones.”
“But he’s a man, my dear. A two-legged, upstanding, at least eighty-eight-per-cent man.”
“Is he?” asked Gita indifferently. “What has that to do with it? I remember I told you once I’d no objection to talking to intelligent men as long as they behaved themselves.”
“Oh, he’s a sly old fox, but I’ll wager this is the first time he’s had to hold in and lay siege. Siege is generally on the other side.”
“Don’t talk rot. He thinks I need educating, and I certainly do. He might be a forty-per-cent as far as I’m concerned.”
Polly looked at her sharply, then laughed. “Poor Eustace! However, life, to say nothing of our own sweet sex, has treated him well. It would take a good deal to discourage him——”
“Don’t be a crashing bore. You look lovely. Why don’t blondes always wear pale yellow?”
“Like it?” Polly spun on her heel. She wore a woven silk sport suit and untrimmed felt hat of yellow the shade of her hair and looked not unlike a canary. “You’d be wonderful in yellow yourself and I long for the time when you’ll go into colors. I’ve thought out two gowns for you.”
Gita’s eyes sparkled and her faint annoyance passed, with all memory of Eustace Bylant. “I feel symptoms of taking a frantic interest in dress and wish I were rich.”
“Oh, you’ve enough. Lots of the girls have to manage. They’ve got hold of a little dressmaker lately who was with Langdorf and Dana for years and has set up for herself. She’ll dress you for hundreds where the old robbers would charge you thousands. And as Mr. Donald is dying to get rid of you he’ll not lecture you on extravagance—and that brings me to the object of this morning call. Mother is frightfully upset.”
“Is she? What’s the matter with her?” Gita was sitting on a low crinoline chair looking up at Polly, who had begun to walk restlessly about the room.
“Have to come out with it, I suppose, as I offered to take on the job. She hates scenes, and as for poor old Donald——”
“Scenes? What on earth are you talking about?”
“Well—she and Mr. Donald had a long pow-wow yesterday, and the upshot was they decided you must have a chaperon-companion—and at once.”
“Chaperon? I?” Gita sprang to her feet. “Are you raving?”
“Oh, come now, Gita, you’ve seen a good deal of the world, first and last. You know perfectly well that girls of our sort don’t live alone. Neither mother nor Mr. Donald thought it worth bothering about before, because you were in mourning, and because—well, because you were you. They never for a moment imagined you’d be receiving young men alone.”
“I’ll not let him come here again. I shouldn’t care if I never saw him again.”
“Poor Eustace! But the harm’s done, my dear. All Chelsea is buzzing——”
“Your crowd, you mean! They’re nice ones to talk. I thought they’d forgotten the meaning of the word chaperon.”
“Ah, but we’d never live alone, my dear. To be really free you must observe certain conventions just as you must wear the proper clothes. Keep your background intact and you may kick your slipper over the moon. Think of all the rascality men get away with so long as they keep within the law. Same idea. We’ll have to find a respectable companion for you——”
“No, you will not! I love living alone and doing just as I please. And no companion would stay with me a week, I’ll tell you.”
“Oh, she’d have a sweet time of it, no doubt of that. But, Gita, remember you’re coming out next winter——”
“I’ll settle that right here. If I have to choose between your stupid old Society and my complete independence I won’t come out. I could get a lot more out of New York, anyhow, by myself, and if I want to know people Elsie will take me among the sophisticates. You know perfectly well I’d be a failure in Society, anyhow.”
Polly was dismayed. She had watched the evolution of Gita with satisfaction and mirth, and was convinced that when she had shed the last of her bristles she would be a regular girl; not quite like anyone else, perhaps, but amenable. But this was taking freedom altogether too seriously. She gathered her forces and she was a hardy antagonist.
“Know what will happen?” she demanded, seating herself and lighting a cigarette. “The men of that sophisticate crowd will feel they can insult you with impunity. Pretty mixed crowd; not all gentlemen, not by a long sight. I’ve sneaked out and gone to several of their parties with Eustace. They don’t drink any more than we do, for they couldn’t, but our boys, rotten as they are, know how to treat us—have the same code—and some of those men, let me tell you, do not; when they’re lit, at all events. And, as you don’t write, or anything of that sort, they’d assume you were a blasée rich girl out for larks. You’re a beauty in your own fierce way, and they’d paw you till you were sick. Neither Eustace nor Elsie could protect you——”
“Shut up! Shut up!” Gita stamped her foot. Her black brows were an unbroken line and her eyes shooting sparks. “Don’t you suppose I know how to take care of myself? I’ve had enough experience, God knows. I’m not afraid of sophisticates; they’re probably babies beside European men, and if they were as bad as you make them out, which they probably are not, I’d keep them in their place. I haven’t been to any of your parties, but I’ve met men at your house and I wouldn’t put anything past them——”
“Right, right, my dear. But you’re not their sort—not yet at all events. Men have to be met half-way, these days. They won’t bother you——”
“You just said those other men were not my sort either.”
“More so, for they have brains. They’d go crazy over you because you suggest sex, all right, even if you haven’t any, and sex is their main preoccupation. You’ll be safe with us, my dear—and nowhere else.”
She had played her first strong card and was wise enough to break off and open her vanity-box, while Gita strode over to the window and stared moodily at the calm old oak on the lawn.
“I needn’t go into that crowd either.” Gita broke the silence after Polly had powdered her nose and lit another cigarette.
“Oh? Sure? You forget you’ve learned what companionship means, and I doubt if you could do without it. Eustace must have taught that hungry mind of yours a few things. Hasn’t he?”
“Well, according to your own account, I’d not find any of his sort in your set.”
“But I have a plan, if you’ll sit down and look at me. A real inspiration. Eustace is the only man I happen to know in that crowd; he’s a second or third cousin and mother used to visit his mother in Albany. I’ll take him on as a partner to make our house interesting to you. He’ll bring as many of his friends to us as he thinks worthy the honor of meeting you, and will give parties at his rooms, hand-picked. That way you’ll have the cream of both worlds and can enjoy yourself without wondering what will come next. I shan’t object a bit, myself, for novelty is the only thing to live for; and as for mother, she adores Eustace and wouldn’t mind a bit if I married him——”
“Why don’t you? You intend to marry some day and I should think he’d be more tolerable than most. He’s a gentleman, has plenty of money, and an occupation that would keep him out of your way most of the time.”
“I believe in mixed colors if not in mixed races. A brunette for mine. Not dark enough to be greasy, but a nice pale brown or olive. A man as blond as I am would make my skin crawl. Now, if you were to marry Eustace that would settle our problem nicely.”
Gita deigned no answer.
“Not for a year or two, really. I want you to find out what it is to be a girl first. But isn’t mine the perfect plan?”
“It sounds better than it may work out.”
“It appeals to you and you can’t deny it. And that brings us back to the main point. You must have a companion.”
“That I won’t.”
“Your voice has lost its emphasis. You know that you must. There’s an aunt of mother’s, poor but proud, who’s living on a dog’s income. She’s a perfect lady, wears caps, and takes nice little mincing steps——”
“Good lord!”
“Well, how about Mrs. Brewster?” She tightened the corners of her lips as Gita dropped into a chair and stared at her.
“Elsie! What an idea!”
“Fine idea. She would do for the rest of the year, and you’re coming to us in January.”
“Elsie? She’s about the only person I could live with.”
“Quite so. Think it over.”
“But—if she’d come.”
“She will when I put it up to her. I’ve only met her twice; once here, and the other night at a dinner Eustace gave, but she made me wish I knew her better. I’d like an excuse to call on her and if you say the word I’ll tackle her today.”
“She can’t work anywhere but in her study.”
“That’s the way Eustace talks. Sounds to me like bally rot, as our English friends say, but I suppose your geniuses know their own business. Anyhow, she could write at home and spend the rest of her time here. That mother of hers wouldn’t miss anybody, from all accounts.”
“Well—if Elsie’ll come I’ll have her; but no one else, mind you. And you mustn’t call on her in the morning. She doesn’t let anyone disturb her.”
“Then I’ll stay to lunch and see to it you don’t change your mind.”