XIIMIXED RENDEZVOUS
EVERYWHERE at the “party” Morris and Gorgas were naturally together. They made such a perfect tennis team that each got to know instinctively what the other was thinking. Scraps of private pass-words and codes flashed back and forth, references to games and experiences they had in common. He was always being called upon to work at setting up chairs or untying ribbons or fastening up a fallen lantern.
“Edwin,” she would turn. “Take a look at my back hair, will you? Isn’t that hair-pin tumbling out?”
He would inspect critically and put the offending member into shape, like a familiar brother.
“Don’t forget the bonbons,” she would call after him, as he hurried about preparing things, like one of the family. “They’re where you put them—on the top shelf in the pantry, you know.”
At supper the cake was cut and each candle blown out with a rhymed wish. Gorgas had arranged the seating with Blynn on one side and Morris on the other. With Morris she squabbled playfully like a child, but to Blynn she turned an impish womanly mien.
“Take your elbows off the table, Eddie,” she pretendedto give little sisterly slaps. “Where are your company manners?”
To Blynn she would turn the next minute, and mimic a lady dining out.
“The plans for this winter’s opera are stupid; don’t you think? Nothing but Wahgner—we’re getting our share of Wahgner—and the old Fausts and Carmens and Trovatores. That new opera of Puccini is already stale in Vienna, and we haven’t heard even excerpts in the orchestra. It’s like a stage given up to continuous Uncle Tom’s Cabins.”
Another time she came at him with the intonation of a gushing old lady. “Howint’r’sting!” she beamed suddenly at one of his remarks about the Academy exhibition, a topic she had forced on him. “Haveyou seen the Cyclorahma of Gettysburg? They say it isre-allythrill-ling.Quitethe illusion of distance, you know. Oneoughtto go.”
For some unexplainable reason Blynn’s humor failed him. He tried to talk with her on the strange themes she irrelevantly suggested, inwardly registering his protest at the changes of personality in people. Some of his best college chums had grown into impossible young-old men and the liveliest girls of his teens frequently developed into stupid matrons. Gorgas, he conjectured gloomily, was losing all her naturalness; her individual mind was being moulded in the common cast.
He turned his attention to Kate. She had not changed, save in so far as her delicate silk attire gave her a temporary flavor of blue china and tea roses.
“What is the good news out of Verona?” he inquired.
“Petruchio has not yet arrived,” she answered promptly.
“Ah! You are not shrewish enough. Katharina had a reputation for ugliness of temper.”
“Ask Gorgas,” she smiled. “She and I have some fearful fracases sometimes—not often, though.” She leaned back to get a good view of her sister. “Doesn’t she look lovely, tonight! It is so droll to see her in my gown. I hope I look as well in it. The child is growing up fast. Ah, me! She’s my age-warner. I shall be jealous of her soon.”
“I say, Allen,” Diccon called, “going to take that professorship at Holden?”
“Why, how under heaven did you know about that?” asked the astonished Blynn.
“Newspaper,” said Diccon. “We know everything; before it happens, too. Want me to run it in, front-page display?” he grinned.
“Bless my soul! Please don’t do anything like that, Diccon. It’s a small matter—big for me, of course—but of no public interest.”
A general chorus forced him to a more public explanation. Holden College had offered him the chair held by his old professor of English. It meant more money—an unimportant matter; but, it meant the head of things, even though they were small things, and the chance to work under his own lead. He had notdecided, although as it stood now he believed he would not go. The big university had its own attraction; one might meet an intolerable narrowness in a small place; and there were his “children,” about whom he felt more or less responsibility. To be sure, they could be taken care of.
“Go!” said Diccon with almost a snap. “Get out of this. You’re just a trailer here. Never get anything in your home town. Go away. Be a mystery. They’ll want you back some day, when others find out you’re worth wanting. Band waiting for you, too. My advice is to clear out. That’s what I ought to’ve done—long ago.”
The company fell to a discussion of why prophets and professors were honored in all cities save their own. Under cover of the general talk, Gorgas tapped Allen on the sleeve, her characteristic way of getting his attention, and spoke in her proper rôle, as old-time “pal.”
“Does this mean something for you,mon capitaine?”
“I suppose it does,” he replied. “Somehow I don’t seem to have any judgment in my own affairs. Prudence tells me to go; itisan opportunity; but I have almost made up my mind to plod along where I am.”
“Just what do you mean by opportunity?” she asked.
He explained. As he talked, the really flattering offer began to have some meaning for him. It seemed now as if he had been careless in letting the letter fromthe President go for three or four days without so much as a reply. But that’s the way he had always neglected his personal advancement.
“I don’t know whether to let you go or not,” Gorgas speculated. “Of course, you would be down Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and vacations?”
“Sure to.”
“You might just as well go, for all I have seen of you lately,” she added. “Why did you suddenly give me up?”
“I think you have hit upon the one reason that made me think of declining the Holden offer,” he was thinking hard and did not seem to have heard her question. “I’m lazy, I suppose; I hate to make changes. Holden would mean boarding and no real home. It would mean giving up a mighty pleasant work here and a lot of good fellows,” looking about the table.
Her question seemed to come slowly to the front of his mind. He would have made some sort of rejoinder, but she was at the moment scolding Morris, who was pretending to eat ice cream from a knife.
They were rising and breaking up before she spoke to him again.
“Don’t forget,mon capitaine,” she plucked his sleeve. “You are to stay after the others.”
“Oh, yes,” his face lighted up. “Count on me.... It will be like old times.”
“How frightfully time flies,” she reverted suddenly to a burlesque of the bored lady-out-to-dinner. “Why it seems only yestehdee that we wuh children togetheh.”
Like a belated jest he began to see through her strange airs. “I’ve been frightfully stupid tonight,” he admitted. “Some of your fooling was too delicate for me; it got completely by—”
“I’m simply living up to my gown, sir,—in spots.”
His rather old-young face looked its honest admiration.
“What’s that thing-em-bob on your—oh! Do you belong to a sorority? Why, bless my soul! It’s a fraternity pin—eh? remade into a brooch.... Whose is it?”
“Edwin’s; he had it done for my birthday; nifty, isn’t it?... You didn’t give me anything, miser.”
“Little girls shouldn’t wear men’s fraternity pins,” he scolded gently.
“Oui, mon père.”
“‘Mon père’—ugh! That’s wicked of you, to remind me of my years.... But you know about the custom, don’t you?”
“Tell me.”
“Oh, perhaps it doesn’t always count. In my ‘frat’ it’s a pretty serious crime, punishable by drinking a quart of quashia-water, to give your emblem to anyone butthelady. It’s the old, ancient ‘token’ over again; love is blind and lovers are dumb; the token given and the token received is the time-honored language of a contract begun.... But there! That’s all nonsense.... Of course, you can wear it without any significance at all. You’re hardly old enough to contemplate an engagement.”
“Don’t you be too sure, Mr. Professor,” she hummed wisely as she strolled away to bid farewell to her guests.
Edwin was sauntering by. She whistled a private signal which brought him swiftly about with an “Aye! aye! sir!” “Don’t forget, you’re to stay till the rest have gone,” she whispered quite audibly.
“Not your Uncle Dudley,” Edwin responded cheerily.
Kate seemed to know that Blynn would remain later, for she piloted him to the library as a matter of course. Mr. and Mrs. Levering were reading in the alcove in the far end of the big room.
“Let’s ‘owl,’” she suggested. “Owl” was the family name for the family habit of staying up late. “Let’s ‘owl’ and talk. I’m broad awake. What kind of chairs did they have, mother, in ’61? I have the hardest time finding one that fits the hoop.”
She tried several chairs prettily. Certainly that style of apparel increased the helplessness of women, usually a beauty asset.
“Come over here, child,” called the mother, “and I’ll show you a trick.”
The trick consisted in slyly slipping out of the hoops—a kind of detachable understructure—and leaving them in the alcove.
While he waited, Blynn could hear little contagious, intimate laughters from the lawn. Gorgas and Morris were helping McAlley extinguish the Chinese lanterns and, youthlike, were taking their time about it.
“I’m the decoy,” thought Allen, rubbing one palmalong the side of the face. “Oh, these children! They fascinate me with their nimble intelligence and their mysterious changes. It’s a great business, dealing in children. They give one an enormous amount of joy—I fancy it’s the best thing I do, after all; but they set me hungering for a pack of my own that won’t desert me when I’ve given them all my toys to play with.... I believe that little minx was flirting with both of us tonight. Trying out her new wings! The gown made her conscious of things. Ah, well,” he yawned.... “Hello! What did you do with the flare-bellows?”
Kate trailed in with a large quantity of subdued skirt.
“I took the machinery out.... Now! I can sit comfortably at last. Oh! I’m tired.”
She dropped among a lot of cushions in front of him.
“Any more interesting Elizabethan theories?” she began.
“Plenty,” he replied. “At present I am interested in Elizabethan devils.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Well,” he hesitated, and then went on, just like a professor! “King James claimed that flying devils tried to upset his boat in the North Sea, and he personally attended the trial of a lot of old bedlams, who confessed and were burned. But in some old documents in the University I have found something even more exciting. One of the genuinely thrilling things that I’ve come across is Dr. Dee’s diary, scribbled on the margins of old almanacs. He was an astrologer, alchemist, mathematician, spiritualist, physician, inother words, a 16th century scientist. Elizabeth consulted him for propitious days; that is, she had her fortune told.”
Kate snuggled up to listen. He went on thoughtfully.
“Dee records his cases. Susan G. came to see him about her devil. He tries to exorcise it by the laying on of hands and much imperative Latin. Then she goes away relieved. A servant in the house has an incorrigible evil spirit. There is much praying over her case and a deal of incantation without permanent cure. One day she slips by him on the stairs. His professional eye has seen symptoms of the inward struggle between imp and human. He follows quickly. She slides behind a door at the bottom of the stair. He hears a gurgling sound and the fall of a heavy body. Behind the door lies the poor maid. The devil had tempted her to cut her throat, he says, so that she could die in sin and be his in æternum.”
“I suppose you believe in the Elizabethan devil?”
“Doesn’t everybody? We’re coming back to witches and devils. The Psychological Research Society is only 19th century for Dr. Dee; and what with telepathic influence urging to crime, and multiple personalities, I don’t see anything in Elizabethan so-called superstition that we moderns haven’t improved upon.”
“So love is a contagious disease,” Kate ruminated, “and most of us are possessed of devils. Charming thoughts! At that rate, one might marry a devil.”
“Many do,” he laughed.
I am loafing my life away“I am loafing my life away”
“I am loafing my life away”
“I am loafing my life away”
“The devil might have me,” she mused, “if he came in some guises.”
“You think you’re joking, but you’re not,” he came back in his characteristic bluntness. “Beatrice jested in exactly the same tone. ‘I may sit in a corner,’ she sighed, ‘and cry heigh-ho for a husband!’—but gave herself mightily away then. And do you remember Margaret’s reply? ‘Methinks you look with your eyes as other women do,’ said she. Now you, Miss Levering, you want to marry; of course, you do. It’s as natural a desire as hunger. ‘You look with your eyes as other women do.’ Millions of women feel exactly as you do; and, alack, millions for some confounded civilized reason don’t get the chance; or they won’t take a chance when they get one. If I were you I’d learn to do something—fill your mind with an absorbing occupation, basket weaving, rug making, study, writing—something; act as if you were never to catch the infection, or whatever it is.... That’s what I’m doing.... Why don’t you be a librarian?”
“You are the frankest man I know,” she spoke after a moment’s contemplation of his earnest face. “I believe you are right.... I am loafing my life away. And I’m useless as—” she shut her lips together firmly. Tears glistened in the lamp-light.
He leaned forward with great brotherly sympathy.
“I did not mean to hurt—”
“Oh, no! no! no! You? You hurt? My dear, dear man! You haven’t the power to hurt—you are so transparent and sincere. It’s—it’s the devil in me,I suppose,” she laughed nervously, “that did the stabbing.... But what is a woman to do? Sit and wait for some accidental man to give her the only thing she has been made fit for? I wish I did have a job. But, lordy! wouldn’t there be a roar if I hired out! Father Levering would have a stroke!”
She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Let’s go out in the air,” she suggested.
The lanterns had been extinguished, but in the September starlight the wide lawn was awake and glowing. There they talked familiarly until the Seminary tower spoke a heavy “one.”
Kate had unburdened, as women and children did to Blynn; and he had filled her with good, courageous thinking, his native gift. They seemed infinitely acquainted as they approached the cosy light of the library; and Kate was happy again. Her little laugh punctuated the conversation often.
Gorgas? Where had she gone? Blynn made a futile search. Ah, children! children! he thought grimly; the subtle September night had taken them off. He tried the bower at the end of the orchard, whistling first, as a precaution—Blynn was a good sportsman—but she was not on the grounds, nor in the house.
McAlley, with his lantern, came sleepily out into the light of the path.
“Mr. Blynn,” he beckoned; and then in great secrecy, “Gorgas—she’s went to bed. She gives me this letter for you. Faith! It’s a cat-nap I’ve beentakin’, and almost forgot it all.... Good night, Mr. Blynn.”
“Good night, Mac.”
The little note said:
Mon Capitaine:I waited for you ever so long, and then I peeked in at you, but you seemed so happy with Kate that I just waited a little longer and then went trotting off to sleep. I have so much to tell you. Edwin plays in the finals at Haverford, Wednesday. Come and take me, please do. You’re to get your own luncheon. We start promptly at twelve, because Mac is going to drive us over. We can watch the game from the carriage. Edwin will get the Club to serve tea. I’ve seen Bardek again. And I’m to have an exhibit at the Art School.Comme toujours toute à toi,G.P. S’s. 1. Mother says I may go if you take me. She won’t listen to anybody else going along.2. I gave Edwin back his frat. pin temp—would say temperarilly if I could spell it.3. Kate looked happy, too.Wouldn’t that be fine!!
Mon Capitaine:
I waited for you ever so long, and then I peeked in at you, but you seemed so happy with Kate that I just waited a little longer and then went trotting off to sleep. I have so much to tell you. Edwin plays in the finals at Haverford, Wednesday. Come and take me, please do. You’re to get your own luncheon. We start promptly at twelve, because Mac is going to drive us over. We can watch the game from the carriage. Edwin will get the Club to serve tea. I’ve seen Bardek again. And I’m to have an exhibit at the Art School.
Comme toujours toute à toi,G.
P. S’s. 1. Mother says I may go if you take me. She won’t listen to anybody else going along.
2. I gave Edwin back his frat. pin temp—would say temperarilly if I could spell it.
3. Kate looked happy, too.Wouldn’t that be fine!!
“The little matchmaker!” he chuckled at the stars; “concocted the rendezvous and all.... It’s young Bianca getting the elder Katherina out of the way, again!... Shrewd!... And her whole-hearted unselfish self, too.... Well, I feel decidedly better. Morris—dandy chap, clean, straight sort. I know’em; true as—” His mind trailed off in search of a strong comparison. “Indecision is the vice of life.” He walked briskly and tried to shake off uncomfortable thoughts. “It’s fine to have things settled.... Oh, the luxurious sensation of a mind finally made up!” But he walked with a long stride, his hands thrust deep into pockets; and his eyes were staring ahead as if trying to pluck a new decision out of the darkness.