CHAPTER XVIIIANOTHER CASE
June had come again. A class of eighteen girls, graduating from The Elms, were holding Commencement on the twenty-fifth.
Commencement Week was Mardi Gras for Mount Hadley in a refined, dignified, academic way. While The Elms was chiefly a college-preparatory school, many of its graduates were going abroad, becoming débutantes, receiving no further schooling. So Commencement Week and especially Commencement Night was a gala time. The little tree-bowered, hilltop town overflowed with parents, relatives and guests. Music, lights, laughter and love were as extravagantly squandered as the wealth of Nature poured out for the sensual gratification of insatiable summer.
And the Door of Life opened large on the world.
Madelaine Theddon was among those graduating from The Elms with that Commencement. She had taken a course preparing her for college. What college and what lifework was coming after had not been decided. She hoped to reach a decision before September.
The afternoon of June 24th, strange to relate, found Madelaine aboard a suburban trolley, headed for Springfield. Her face wore an expression of vague worry. In her calm eyes was dread. This while merrymaking at Mount Hadley was approaching its peak and no one was more urgently sought after than the girl whose school nickname had been “Old Mother Hubbard.”
A letter had been responsible. It had been scrawled upon several sheets of expensive note paper bearing the crest of a Springfield hotel. It was a woman’s penmanship; Madelaine would have recognized to whom it belonged had no name been appended. But a name had been appended—BerniceGridley’s name—and there was no ignoring the letter’s appeal.
Reaching Springfield, Madelaine hurried to the hotel whither Bernice had preceded her by two days. It was then about six-thirty in the evening and a warm summer rain was shining on city walks and pavements, reflecting the first lamps of evening nebulously. Madelaine called Bernie in her room, announcing her arrival. Then she went upstairs. Bernie admitted her. The room was unlighted.
Bernice threw her arms around Madelaine when the door had closed, despite the latter’s wet silken gossamer, before Madelaine had even found a place for her dripping umbrella.
“I’m so glad you’ve come! You’re an old dear,” choked Bernie huskily.
Despite the rain clouds and spring mist smothering the city, there was yet light enough in the lavish apartment for Madelaine to see that Bernie was in trouble, terrible trouble. “Old Mother Hubbard” stood her umbrella in the bath and threw her gossamer over the nickel-work of the shower. She cast aside the mannish felt hat she had worn because of the wet and returned to where Bernie had dropped into a chair by the window. Madelaine took the rocker opposite, their knees almost touching.
“What is it, dear—a man?”
“Yes,” whispered Bernie, her voice poignant.
“Just how bad——?”
“Mother’s due to arrive in the morning, for Commencement. I can’t see her, Madge. I can’t see her again, ever!”
Bernie fumbled for her handkerchief. She had braided her tawny hair in a single heavy cable; it fell down across her left shoulder and breast. She wore a Japanese kimono, incongruously flowered, with obi girdle. At nineteen the Dresden Doll was a Dresden Doll no longer. She had become a big-bodied girl with prominent, bony features, a small, narrow forehead, wide cheek bones, prominent nose and weak, sensuous mouth. The saving feature of her countenance was a deep dimple in her chin. It was a coy, devilish dimple and had wrought much damage. A type of Mona Lisa face, Bernie’s—without the Mona Lisa humor.
Madelaine sat motionless, her hands relaxed along thechair arms. She was very calm, very grave. Only tender compassion lay upon her cameo features now.
“How did it happen, dear?” she asked. “Do you want to tell me that?”
“No! I want you to tell me—what I ought to do—what’s ahead for me. Oh, Madge! Madge! I’m so scared I want to die!”
The Gridley girl fell into a paroxysm of trembling, such an ague that Madelaine leaned forward and took her hands. Bernice was ill, far worse than Madelaine had expected. Though Bernice made the demand on her as a right, the girl called “Old Mother Hubbard” was broad enough and human enough to make allowance. Bernie was a woman grown physically, perhaps. Otherwise she was a little child, alone in the dark, panic-stricken in a world of savage ignorance and injustice.
“There’s nothing to be frightened about, Bernie. Nothing. Get it firmly into your mind and hold it there. We only fear the things we fail to understand. Apparently that’s where you’ve made your blunder. You haven’t understood. The secret of solving any great trouble is to keep calm and poised about it. Remember there’s no human difficulty but what there’s a human solution. Now, then, what we want to determine first is the thing that’s frightening you most. Once cleared away, we can proceed to the elimination of other bothersome things. Just what bothers you worse, dear—physical fear or the reaction of your predicament on your family and future?”
“Oh, Madge! You’re so wonderful. I’m sorry for all the mean and spiteful things I said about you! You’re an angel and a——”
“Let’s not talk about myself, dear. I’m here to talk about you. If you’ve said or done anything unfair about me in the past, it’s because you didn’t understand. So not understanding, you can’t of course be wholly blamed. Anyway, I believe it’s an obligation all of us have, to give our help so long as people are sent into contact with us who need and deserve it. If there’s any way I can aid you, I’m here to do it. And I want you to feel my friendship before we go any further.”
“I guess—I can’t help it,” choked Bernie.
Madelaine softly pressed the two cold hands she held.
“Now then, dear, let’s have the story. What’s frightening you most?”
“Madge! I’ve got to tell you how it happened. I can’t tell you his name. I just can’t! Don’t ask me why I can’t. But—I just can’t——”
“I know, dear. You love him. To protect the man who has taken advantage is a feminine atavism since river-drift days, I suppose. I don’t want to know his name. And I only want to know the story as it helps to show what’s bothering you most.”
“Madge! It happened this way. One night——”
The rain stopped after a time. The clouds rolled away toward the southeast. Stars shone brightly. The roar of the Springfield evening traffic, the honk of motor cars, the purring grind of trolleys, arose to the room where Madelaine had lowered the upper sash of the big window. When Bernice completed her ragged story, she was leaning forward, weeping intermittently. Madelaine was a silhouette in the semi-dark. She rocked slowly.
“But, Bernice,” she said at last, “why should you do it? I’m not rebuking you, dear. I’m asking for information. I can’t understand it. Why didn’t an intuitive reserve and decency prompt you to conserve yourself? Why didn’t the very greatness of your love urge you to nurture and cherish those things which lie at the root of it—not squander and spatter and waste and cheapen them?”
“I don’t know, Madge. Somehow I just felt devilish. I wanted to do something shockingly wicked. I wanted to get as far away from all the goodness and decency I’ve known all my life as I could. That’s the truth, Madge. At the moment I didn’t care. I’ll tell you more truth: I gloried in it! Yes, I did! I was glad I was wicked—until—until I saw I was going to face all the penalty.”
“I can’t understand,” murmured Madelaine.
“No, perhaps not. But you might if you knew my mother. Ever since I was a tiny girl, Madge, I’ve lived in an atmosphere of things that were ‘strictly proper.’ Oh, how tired and sick I grew of things that were ‘strictly proper.’ Mother always gave me to understand I was different than other children, I was better quality. So I had to live up to that better quality. It was awful dull and tedious. At times it maddened me. Mother lay awakenights worrying about her culture—and mine. After she’d married dad, she made the discovery that on her mother’s side, a few generations back, she’d descended from a duchess. Being born in a two-room apartment over a Rutland Quick Lunch and then discovering there was the blood of a duchess in her veins, she had a horrible time with herself, and with dad too, forgetting ‘Quick Lunch’ beginnings. Dad was a money-maker. He never worried much about his culture. Beside, I don’t think they were very happily married. He didn’t understand her. He let her go her way as she pleased. Just paid the bills. So in the second generation, meaning poor me, mother determined the ‘Quick Lunch’ business should be outbred if it cost her a leg. And I lived our royalty from Monday morning to Saturday night, double doses on Sunday. And when I got old enough to see how much fun I was missing by not being just natural and normal, without consciously thinking about our culture every minute, I rebelled. Madge, dear, why is it their culture gives some people such a horrible, distressing time, making them miserable and wooden-like, instead of natural and joyous?”
Madelaine was silent a moment before answering.
“I think, Bernice, it must be because they’ve missed the meaning of true culture entirely. They have a blind pride groping for higher things. That’s fine and commendable. But they don’t stop to reason why that culture should be, what lies at the bottom of it, I mean. Speaking for myself, I’ve reasoned it that real culture has its base and foundation in an inherent appreciation of the Beautiful. And unless one has an inherent taste and appreciation of the Beautiful, dear, and builds all things upon that, they’re merely apes and imitators. They’re ludicrously copying the behavior and tastes of those who have. People who do the most worrying about their culture, as you phrase it, are not worrying about their own sense of the beautiful and appropriate. They’re worrying because they may not be aping correctly some one who has the fundamentals and is letting culture take care of itself. Having no fundamentals of their own, the imitators, I mean, merely a superficial, competitive pride, they fret their lives away. They make themselves and all those around them miserable—acting a part instead of living a part.”
“Well,” continued Bernie, “mother crammed royalty and culture down my throat so long and hard that when I got outside I just had to explode. I guess you’re right, Madge; I never had it reasoned out for me why I should do this or that. Mother’s battle-cry was, ‘It simply isn’t done by the Best People!’ I got so heartily sick of those Best People—whoever they were—that I wanted to shriek. This thing wasn’t nice and that thing wasn’t proper. The Best People never did exactly the things I hungered to do. And everything was ‘shocking! shocking!’ Life wasn’t like that. I saw it soon enough. And repressing all my curiosity and impulse to get my share of fun out of it grew more and more unbearable. I remember once I went on a picnic. I wandered off in the woods with one of the little hicks of our town. I wanted to be just as bad as I knew how. But all my poor little pate could conceive was kissing him and letting him kiss me as much as I pleased—and taking off shoes and stockings and paddling in a brook. I felt I was getting back at mother. Though why I should get back at her, or what I hoped to gain by it, I never stopped to think. Mother never told me anything about myself. She never sat down and reasoned with me. She never tried to make me understand what my impulses meant or why I possessed them. It seemed as if everything natural and normal was just shocking, shocking——”
“And hasn’t the reason for intuitive decency and normality ever occurred to you, dear?”
“I never stop to reason things out. I’m not like you, Madge! I go more by my feelings.”
Madelaine toyed thoughtfully with a tiny gold watch chain encircling her neck.
“Sometimes, dear,” she observed, “when I think how narrow and short-sighted and unfair some parents seem to be, I wonder the race is as clean and decent as it is.”
“Don’t talk like old Prexy Anderson to-night, Madge. It makes my head ache. I don’t want to know the reason for things. I just want to know the way out of them.”
Madelaine shook her head sadly.
“And so that’s how you met with this trouble? You wanted to spite your mother again.”
“Not altogether. It wasn’t mother especially just then. It was everything mother stood for. He flung at me, ‘Oh,you’re one of those “nice” girls, are you?’ and it made me wild. I proposed to show him I wasn’t one of those ‘nice’ girls and the sky was the limit. He couldn’t fling any such insult in my teeth as that. Then I didn’t care what happened.”
“You don’t love him?”
“I didn’t say so.”
“Well, would you marry him?”
“I don’t know. Oh, Madge, I don’t know anything—where I am—what I want to do—what I ought to do—what’s to become of me. I guess my folks are bothering most. Dad’s hard-boiled in lots of ways. Yet all the same, I don’t fear him half so much as I do mother. It’ll scandalize her so she’s going to make my life a misery. And not half so much because I’ve done any moral wrong as because what I’ve done isn’t sanctioned by the Best People. Damn the Best People! Who are they? Where are they? What are they—that they should injure me so?”
“Calm yourself, child. Then it’s fright of your mother that’s bothering you most?”
“I guess so. Yes!”
“Then don’t be frightened any more. Because when your mother comes to Mount Hadley in the morning, I’ll take it upon myself to see her and explain everything away all right. As for yourself, my foster-mother is very sensible about such things. Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to look upon them so impersonally myself. I’ll go up and have a talk with mother. For a few months you can be our guest. When the crucial time comes, mother will arrange matters. We are going abroad this summer. In so far as any one, even your parents, need know, you are accompanying us as our guest. My mother won’t even ask who you are, if you don’t care for her to know; any name you wish to go by will be perfectly all right.”
“And my mother need never learn?”
“That depends upon my talk with her in the morning. Just now, in so far as Mount Hadley is concerned, you’ve broken down as a result of the final exams, and the excitement of Commencement.”
“Oh, Madge! Madge!” Bernice went down suddenly on her knees with her feverish head in Madelaine’s lap. She covered Madelaine’s cool, capable hands with kisses. Hertears came in such a flood they dripped from her dimpled chin. “Tell me, Madge—you know everything—tell me what’s ahead for me. I don’t know, Madge. I never knew. Those things were always ‘shocking! shocking!’”
In the next half-hour Madelaine simplified the great fundamentals of life into words of one syllable. Bernie clung to her convulsively when Madelaine came to leave.
“There’s a God,” whispered the tanner’s daughter thickly, reverently, “because He made you, Madelaine Theddon!”
At ten-thirty that same evening Madelaine was back in Hathaway Hall, Mount Hadley, perfect in an evening gown of gold satin and cobweb lace, dancing divinely with a clean-cut young fellow from Boston “Tech” who was going to Buenos Aires in August as an architect for the Argentine Government.
The clean-cut young fellow decided Miss Theddon the cleverest girl he had ever met, as well as the most beautiful. She discussed architecture with him as though she had already qualified for an architect’s position herself.
The following evening Madelaine sat in her room and from her ivy-bordered window looked down upon the little town she was leaving on the morrow. Behind her the lights had been extinguished. Now and then a trio of white figures moved across the lawn or the Common below, in and out of the shadows made by the lordly elms. Happy laughter died on the summer night. Somewhere down the street piano keys were tinkling and the rich tenor of a man’s voice was softened by the distance.
Madelaine was thinking of Bernie’s problem. Yet not altogether. She was also thinking of her own. Life was coming to her now as a responsibility. She owed much to her mother, far more to the world that had been so good to her, and the poor, perplexed, fog-groping men and women—especially young men and women—in it. What should be her life work? How should she try to repay that debt mounting with each passing month and year to overwhelming proportion?
Marriage did not seem her end and aim. Not then! Shehad an intuition that marriage would come afterward, after she had paid the debt, or tried to pay it. What then?
Always her well-ordered brain came back to Bernie. There must be many Bernies. Could she find her niche helping them? How?
She tried drastic self-analysis. Then she relaxed and tried yielding herself unreservedly to instinct.
Finally she thought of Bernie in terms of immediate help—guiding her through her Gethsemane—concretely. The function of nursing was but a step to conceiving herself the physician—of body as well as mind.
The aptness of it struck her with peculiar force. A physician! Why not? Women were assailing all citadels of professions and business. Why not a physician? A great, warm, poignant self-assurance welled up within her. Why had she not thought of it before?
In the ensuing ten moments her life course lay clear as an etching before her. The film between herself and the future had suddenly been swept aside. She was radiantly, unreasoningly happy. She wanted to sing with the ecstasy of the revelation.
She did sing. Whereupon she was so happy too that she wept—a little bit. What had taken possession of her? For the first time she felt blindly content to relax to intuitions and emotions.
It was her last night in the dormitory room, where she had passed four beautiful years. Her roommate had already departed. Madelaine arose, her calm face suffused with a quiet glory. She turned on the lights.
On the dressing table the last of her effects lay for final packing in her bag on the morrow. Among them was a poem framed in a heavy copper border. It had hung above her study table the two years past. She had grown very intimate with that little news-print poem on its deep brown mapping.
Though she could repeat it perfectly, she read it again now, line by line and word by word:
“Yet some great noon in the sun-glare brightIn some vast open space,You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,And triumph on your face.”
“Yet some great noon in the sun-glare brightIn some vast open space,You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,And triumph on your face.”
“Yet some great noon in the sun-glare brightIn some vast open space,You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,And triumph on your face.”
“Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright
In some vast open space,
You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched,
And triumph on your face.”
She sat for a quarter hour with the framed poem in her shapely fingers. Her eyes were looking through a million miles. Nathaniel Forge! Who was he? What had ever caused him to write such a poem?