The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThis marryingThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: This marryingAuthor: Margaret Culkin BanningRelease date: December 31, 2023 [eBook #72563]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: George H. Doran Company, 1920Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIS MARRYING ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: This marryingAuthor: Margaret Culkin BanningRelease date: December 31, 2023 [eBook #72563]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: George H. Doran Company, 1920Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: This marrying
Author: Margaret Culkin Banning
Author: Margaret Culkin Banning
Release date: December 31, 2023 [eBook #72563]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: George H. Doran Company, 1920
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIS MARRYING ***
CHAPTER I,II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIII,IX,X,XI,XII,XIII,XIV,XV,XVI,XVII,XVIII,XIX,XX,XXI,XXII,XXIII,XXIV,XXV.
BY MARGARET CULKIN BANNINGNEW YORKGEORGE H. DORAN COMPANYCOPYRIGHT, 1920,BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANYPRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICATOVIOLA ROSEBORO
“YOU should have been a bridesmaid,” said Aunt Caroline. “Everyone was so surprised that you weren’t. And the yellow would have been so becoming with you so dark.”
Horatia smiled and her smile carried no regrets for her lost opportunity. Everyone, as her aunt said, had been surprised at her refusal to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her friend. But with a quick reminiscent glance back at the ceremony, Horatia congratulated herself again on the decision that had held out against the requests of Edna and the expostulations of her aunt. She recalled the hurried fussy little ceremony, and the curious people, the space reserved in the front parlor with its tall cathedral candles, its lavish ten yards of white satin ribbon and the rose pink prayer rug. A faint odor of candles and coffee and perfume clung to the memory. In the minds of her aunt and West Park these things were vastly suitable, just as to them Edna Wallace was still her “best” friend, because they had played together as children and gone through High School together. But Horatia realized thather college experience and her four years of absence from West Park had made great gaps between her and the bride of last night as well as between her and this middle-aged aunt and uncle with whom she sat at breakfast. She looked just then as if not only yellow but any color would become her. She was fairly tall and well made and carried herself with the easy distinctive swing that comes from perfect health and no corsets. Her hair was brown and heavy and shaded into the brown of her eyes to add still another tone to the whole that her aunt characterized as “you so dark.” Her clothes were simple for she scorned on principle all the minor affectations of dress and quick changes of fashion, but she had an eye for color and line which developed gowns which were sometimes beautiful and sometimes startling. Not that there was an unlimited number of them. Uncle George was generous but generous by West Park standards and by Aunt Caroline’s expenditures, and Aunt Caroline still considered fifty dollars a scandalous price for a suit or cloak. Horatia never grumbled about money or about clothes. This morning she was dressed for the City and her satin blouse and slim tailored suit set off her young health perfectly. Even her aunt and uncle were conscious of fresh energy at the breakfast table.
“I didn’t want to be a bridesmaid,” she answered. “It always makes me seasick to try to walk to music.”
“Horatia’s waiting,” said Uncle George, over the top of his newspaper, “until she can be the chief performer.”
Horatia smiled at him. “You want to get rid of me, don’t you, and you don’t care what I take. I’ll tell you what I am going to do. I’m going to town this morning to get a job. When I try that for a while I’ll decide whether I want to get married or not.”
“Get a job? What do you want a job for? You want to stay home with your aunt and me now.” Uncle George went so far as to put his paper down and repeat himself. “What do you want to do that for?”
“Earn money.”
He reached for his check book in all seriousness, but Horatia leaned over and put her hand on it.
“Truly I want to earn it. Everyone earns money nowadays, unless she is feeble-minded—or married. I don’t particularly want money just now anyway. I still have some of that last fifty. But I want to work. All the people I know are either married or going to be or working. I must get in some class. Of course I don’t mean to leave you. I’d be here nights, you see.”
“They’d probably find a position for you at the High School if you feel that way,” said Aunt Caroline, with the consciousness of being an important member of the community to whom even educational gateways were glad to open.
“Oh—teach,” said Horatia. “I don’t want to teach!”
Uncle George rose with heavy dignity.
“Well—let me know when you get broke.” He went out of the room with masculine indifference to these whims and in the knowledge that Horatia was only marking time in her own way until the inevitable happened. She’d marry. Of course she’d marry. And chuckling a little, he went down the street.
Aunt Caroline was more inquiring. She rose from the table, not being one to linger and keep the “help” waiting. But she followed her niece into the hall.
“Is it this social work you want to do?” she asked, remembering dimly things she had heard of new standpoints.
“Why, I don’t think so. I thought I’d try to get on a newspaper. And if that doesn’t work, I cut some ads out of the paper.”
“You don’t mean you’d do housework!” gasped her aunt to whom advertisements in newspapers meant “girl wanted for general housework.”
Horatia laughed in pure joy. It was one of those rare free moments which come at the beginning of new work and new adventures and she enjoyed shaking up Aunt Caroline.
“Not—especially.” Then from the foot of the steps she turned to wave back at the stout lady on the doorstep.
“Don’t fret,” she called. “Home for dinner.”
“Everyone,” she sang to herself as she wentdown the hill, “has the right to shock an older person once in a while. It’s the breath of youth. And the old dears really love it. So long as you are respectable—they love it.”
As she turned the corner she looked back for a moment at the house she had left, dramatizing her new freedom and the house too as a sober symbol of what she was so gladly leaving. The Grant house stood high on a hill overlooking the lake. It was built of blackish stone, which at one time had been the material of wealth and dignity in the city, and it still looked down on the stucco and plaster new houses which clustered beneath it, with a kind of glum faith in its superiority. But the illusion was its own. It awed no one any more, least of all Horatia, who had been brought up to respect it.
Inside were rooms papered in browns and streaked green and filled with walnut furniture which had all the ugliness of an ugly outworn fashion and yet none of the interest of antiques. There were several unsoftened leather sofas—unsoftened because the Grants had never been a family to “lie down in the daytime,” and the chairs were chairs—so many places to sit down, but boasting neither beauty nor comfort. At the windows curtains of imitation Brussels lace gave the finishing touch to the unimaginative furnishings. They too were stiff and artificial, like the stone dog who sat so grimly on the terrace outside. Horatia had called the place home since she was six years old. She had no quarrel withit but it had ceased to interest her. It stood still—impassive—and she, like the breeze and the sunlight, was moving.
It was a clear morning—a bright morning, one of the days on which someone always should start out to seek a fortune. There was energy in the wind and good luck in the sunlight and romance in the face of everyone she met. Even on the way to the suburban train, though she knew nearly everyone she met, they all seemed imbued with new spirit and more interesting qualities. She met Miss Pettikin, and saw not the shabby little dressmaker but the heroine of some blighted romance. She saw the Reverend Williams, not as the man who had read the marriage service so stupidly the night before but as a man with a holy mission. She saw Joe Peter, the neighborhood gardener, and he became Labor just as Mr. Jeffry panting on his way to the train became Capital. She saw herself as a lovely and interesting young woman in whom everyone on the train was interested and she hoped that behind every newspaper lurked a man with a brain, worth her knowing. The world was full of life and interest and she was going to get her share of it. And as the train swayed and jerked as only a suburban train can do, she pulled out her notebook and speculated on her first adventure.
She had listed the newspapers with their addresses. There were four and it was quite within possibility that one of them would want her. She had several courses in journalism to her credit atthe university and if there was a vacancy in any office she meant to press her claims hard. The mere idea of working stimulated her and as the train stopped at the city station she pushed out with the hurrying crowd, almost feeling already that she was one of those to whom being “on time” was a necessity.
The newspaper offices were down near the water-front. Below the main street of big shops and glittering restaurants, the streets became grey and businesslike. Wholesale houses, impassive and undecorated, with great trucks backed up before their entrances, dingy employment offices, the repair shops of garages that fronted gaily on the other street, and straggly buildings, without elevators, housing a multitude of little businesses, lived on this street. A block above, the streets were already filled with shoppers, looking in windows, loitering along, wondering what they would do next. But on Market Street everyone seemed to know where he was going and to be going there quickly. Horatia hastened her own footsteps, though her time was all her own. It made her feel less conspicuous.
The Timeswas the morning paper and the presence of it on the breakfast table all her life made Horatia feel more acquainted with it than with the others. Besides her picture had appeared in it three times after she had done something worth newspaper notice at the University, and while she was vaguely amused at those reasons for going there first she argued further thatas it was the paper with the largest circulation there might be more opportunities open. Its dinginess surprised her. The offices were housed in a nondescript wooden building and the manager’s office to which Horatia found herself referred by the boy in the general office was reached by a worn stairway.
“He’s probably not in yet,” said the boy, “doesn’t get here until eleven o’clock, usually.”
But Horatia’s luck was working. A stout, shirt-sleeved man looked her over without getting up from his desk.
“We don’t take on women reporters except in the society department,” he told her. “There’s to be a change there shortly. What experience have you had?”
“No experience except journalism courses at the University.”
“They can’t teach newspaper work at any university,” growled the man. “Can teach them more here in a week than they’d get in ten years at any school, don’t care where it is. Leave your name and if anything does turn up, or Miss Eliot—she’s society editor—needs help—I’ll have her take it up with you. Of course you understand she wants hack work. We’ve no room for essays, you know.”
Horatia looked him over without a blush at his semi-insolence.
“No—I don’t suppose you have,” she said, and her stock went up with her tone. She left hername on the pad he pushed towards her and went out.
“Lucky there are three others,” she said. “I wouldn’t care for that gentleman—nor yet his Miss Eliot. But I suppose you can’t choose.The Buzz-sawnext.”
The Buzz-sawwas not subscribed to by the Grants. It was a murderous little political journal, full of gossip, and it exposed scandals rather than printed news. Its circulation was heavy and stray copies of it, brought home by Uncle George, had made Horatia wonder a good deal about it. She knew everyone read it, more or less under cover, and its unorthodoxy troubled her not at all. If it were rotten it would be fun to uncover its methods. So she toiled up another flight of stairs into a much smaller office where the editor, a typist and two lean, pipe-smoking reporters looked furtively amused at her appearance. She took the scrutiny well. Quite unembarrassed in her own glances, she had a way of putting herself in her own class immediately. It was impossible to look at her, at her dress and her unaffected hat, and not know that she meant to be quite impersonal. The reporters took their pipes to the other corner and the editor straightened up a little to offer her a chair and ask her business. When she told him he seemed to ruminate.
“What is your name?”
She told him and he seemed to connect it with Uncle George by a swift mental gesture.
“George Grant—dry-goods?”
“His niece. I live with him.”
“Well.” He thought again and then leaned forward with a confidential air that Horatia imagined him using habitually as he unearthed his scandals.
“We don’t take on girls. But I don’t say you couldn’t be useful to us. If you could run a column of good gossipy stuff about the swells—particularly the women, of course. Nothing that would let us in for libel—well, I’d edit it anyway, of course. But the preliminary stuff to these scandals—the first rumors of divorces and elopements—particularly concerning women more or less in the public eye. We don’t want stories about everyone. I could give you a list of people to watch. You know—the Town Topics sort of thing. Get us a lot more women readers.”
Horatia was enjoying herself.
“But how would I unearth these stories about people I don’t know?”
“You’d have to work around. A girl like you has got the——” (he fumbled and decided to be a plain American) “the entry everywhere. You’d feel around, listen to them talk, draw them out. There’s things a man can’t do.”
“Yes,” agreed Horatia, wisely, “there are.”
“Now of course a thing like that would be a trial column. Might not work out at all. Couldn’t be long-winded. And then, too, it isn’t worth an awful lot. But a girl like you, living at home, doing it for experience and pin-money,would realize that we couldn’t pay too much.”
His little eyes bored through her as he tried to feel her out. Horatia felt suddenly disgusted.
“I’ll think it over,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m not sure I could do just what you want, but I’ll think it over. And come in in a day or so.”
The man seemed a little anxious to keep her and vaguely worried lest he had said too much.
“Our little journal tries to tell the truth,” was his parting comment and it followed Horatia sardonically down the stairs.
“You’re not an adventure,” thought Horatia, proceeding. “You’re a nasty, open debauch. My chances are narrowing.”
They narrowed further. TheEvening Reporterwas cleaner than the other two, more brusque, more businesslike. She could not see the editor. They needed no one. There remained theEvening Journaland that Horatia hardly knew by sight. She had bought a copy at the newsstand the other day when she was getting addresses and making her plans. It was a thinner sheet than the others and seemed to have a great deal of space for semi-philosophical editorials. A kind of labor journal she classified it and then felt that she had not been complete. It had hinted at Socialism but it was not Socialist frankly. Horatia knew the strong colors of Socialist publications, to a couple of which she subscribed, just as a matter of being open-minded.
There was no buzz or stir about the office ofThe Journal. It was high up in a kind of officebuilding which fronted the lake, and its rooms seemed to be very few. In one a couple of typewriting machines with papers strewn about them were deserted. In the adjoining room, open in spite of a “private” sign on the door, a big desk was also deserted. At the back of the room a big window gave on the lake, ignoring the rush and noise of the brown streets below. Horatia looked around for someone and seeing nobody went to the window. She stood there, a little tired and reflective, thinking of the queerness of being in such a spot instead of in some big classroom or lecture hall or in the sedate comfort of West Park. The adventure spirit was wearying a little. What sort of places were these to see and feel life in? And how tawdry or how conventional one might become. She thought of Edna, speeding away with her husband on some luxurious train and wondered how she was feeling today. Suddenly she herself felt lonely and ignored. No one really cared where she was or what she was doing. It was glorious to be free but it would be—— She did not finish the thought, for someone came into the office and at the sound of his step she hurriedly turned to confront business or furtiveness or whatever might be there. She saw a tall man of about thirty-five with a lean face and slow, observing, cynical eyes.
“I am sorry you found the office deserted. I am Langley, the editor. What can I do for you? If it’s books, I don’t buy books. If it’s subscriptions, I can’t afford it.”
“It’s a job,” said Horatia.
“For me or you?” asked the man with a lazy smile. She liked his voice. It was well-bred. He was well-bred too and there was something vaguely familiar about his name.
“You’ve got one,” she countered.
He smiled neither in assent nor dissent.
“And you want one?”
“On a newspaper.”
“There are more substantial sheets than this one, you know.”
He spoke pleasantly and Horatia felt suddenly expansive and ready to talk.
“I’ve been to them all. One won’t have me, another wants me possibly to do society personals, and another wants me to run a spicy scandal column for them.”
“So they would. But as fourth fiddle I’ve nothing much better to offer, I’m afraid. I don’t need reporters, which I suppose is what you are hankering for, nearly as much as other ingredients for this paper.”
“I’m sorry,” said Horatia. “I’d like to work next to this view.”
“That’s why I took the office. I thought that too. But I can’t put the things that view tells me across with the public.”
“They would be pleasant things,” said Horatia. She was interested and meant to find out as much as she could about this man and his queer paper. And she felt in him a willingness to prolong the conversation. To test it, she turned to go.
“Good morning,” she said brightly. “Again I’m sorry.”
“It’s too bad. Will you give up the journalistic life now that the Big Four have offered you so infinitely less than nothing?”
“I suppose I’ll have to.”
“Have you done any of it yet? I beg your pardon for the question, which, not being a prospective employer, I haven’t any right to ask. Don’t answer if you don’t like.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve done no work—of any kind. Just raw—out of college.”
“University?”
She nodded and at the word the train of association became complete. Langley—of course—the 1905 Langley, who had been the big man in his day and left a train of college glory behind him that even yet was not obliterated by the hundreds of more recent graduates. He had begun the student government—but possibly it was not the same one. She was sure she hadn’t better ask him.
“Isn’t it odd,” he was saying, “how many college graduates think they can reform the world just by getting on a newspaper? They think such foolish things—that papers are forums of opinions—that they can write things they want to write. My dear young lady, a newspaper is only a medium for advertisers, that is, if it’s successful.”
“But I know that,” answered Horatia, “perfectly. I’m quite practical about it. And I don’t want to reform the world. I want to live right in it. I’m not the least bit of a reformer. I rather like the world.”
She looked so engagingly young and sweet and sensible that the man’s face brightened—almost involuntarily, as if he did not want it to brighten.
“You’re a romanticist, young lady.”
“I started out this morning from an ugly stone house on a lovely hill to seek my fortune. There was only one trouble. No one put any obstacles in my way and no one knew I was going to seek it really. The people I told didn’t understand. You’re the first person who has begun to talk to me, so I told you. And I’m getting too expansive. But I feel much better.”
“I wish I could give you a job, young adventurer,” answered the man, a little irrelevantly. “You might bring back some of the enthusiasm I had when I was as young as you are. But I was more solemn.”
“Oh, I can be solemn on occasion,” said Horatia. She was having a tremendously good time, talking to this man who didn’t know her name and to whom it was so easy to talk. And he too was warming to the conversation.
“You see, I haven’t much of a newspaper. Three of us run it and we don’t do our own printing. There is one man who had hopes as I did. There is another who drinks too much—when he writes well—and writes badly when he drinks too little. We started out to make a newspaper which would not muck-rake, you know, but tellthe truth about things. And we find, dear young lady, that nobody wants us. Even you wouldn’t want a job from us.”
“I truly think I would,” said Horatia. “Don’t you want a woman’s department? I really would enjoy doing society personals for a paper with a purpose.”
He laughed uproariously and she noticed how young he could look.
“Will you come to lunch and talk it over? I’ll tell you all about it—hopes and failures, young lady adventurer.”
“If I can pay for my own lunch.”
He bowed, then added with a twinkle:
“Of course we aren’t absolutely down to bedrock. I could pay for your lunch.”
“But it’s easier for me to beg for a job if I’m paying for my own. My name is Horatia Grant, Mr. Langley.”
“Miss Grant,” said Langley, holding the door open, “no matter who pays for it, I am going to enjoy my lunch.”
IT was an amazingly pleasant lunch. Horatia was not too sophisticated in this matter of eating with men in public restaurants and under the flattering charm of Jim Langley’s interest and attention she sparkled with excitement and response. She liked him. She liked his easy careless manners and his half-mocking, half-kind indulgence towards her remarks and the real amusement in his smile and the skill he showed in ordering food. And Langley across from her, along with his faint note of self-mockery, showed that he enjoyed himself too, for Horatia’s face was young and her mind was clear and above all she did not seem tired but fresh and vigorous. He asked her about herself, subtly keeping the conversation on her, and she told him of the house on the hill and her married sister and her aunt and uncle and the neighbors.
“They are kind, you know,” she finished, “but they are so simple that they all call me intellectual and set me apart as queer.”
“And you aren’t queer at all,” said Langley, “you’re a perfect product of what the nice cleanliness of West Park would produce with a college education superimposed on it. Why don’t you leave things alone, young lady? Your realities may be stupid but they are clean and straight.Why do you want to get tangled up and wrinkled up? Wouldn’t the West Park High School perhaps be a better solution than the newspaper? Or a good husband?”
She smiled at him.
“You smile now but later you’ll be sorry. You think you know about troubles because you’ve studied sociology and heard a lot of war lecturers. But you really are quite untouched. And life hurts. Even in West Park it must hurt, but in a city, in work—it probably will hurt much more. And besides the world isn’t the place it used to be, with clean-cut issues and a welcome for the young romanticist. It is worn with war, and very tired and a bit unscrupulous and there are no ideals left which haven’t been tampered with——”
“But we have to live in it just the same,” argued Horatia.
“You might enter a convent.” At which they both laughed, for it was so absurd to think of Horatia in a convent.
“Your people will probably object to your taking a job on my paper,” said Langley at length; “maybe you will when you hear more about me. I can’t pay you enough to make it worth your while financially. But perhaps if you want to come and will take the work I can give you and try to increase our circulation, I can find a desk for you anyway.” And having committed himself, the editor looked as if he were calling himself a fool in his thoughts.
“I’ll work for anything you’ll pay me,” said Horatia, “and I don’t think anyone can frighten me away from your paper, Mr. Langley. When can I come?”
“Good luck to begin on Monday.”
“I shall be at the office on Monday morning,” she promised, with a thrill, a young thrill in her voice.
She left the restaurant with all the spirit of the morning reinforced. Friday—Saturday—Sunday—then she would be at work. It wasn’t hard to find work. She would try very hard to make what she wrote interesting and possibly soon people would be buying the newspaper to read what she had written, and Langley would say—even so do fresh college graduates dream. But the college graduate of ten years back walked back to the office over the lake and told Bob Brotherton apropos of nothing that there was always a new way in which to make a damned fool of oneself.
What he was to do with her, why he had taken on an added responsibility just whenThe Journalseemed on its last legs were doubtless sufficiently irritating questions. But more irritating must have been the flare-up of impulsiveness, the response to youth and romance, which he had been deliberately trying to deaden in himself and which he had hoped were permanently deadened. He had waded through realism and discouragements to a kind of refusal to care about anything more and here he was lending a hand tosomeone who would go through the same weary mess. She would be far better off in her stupid suburbanism. Someone would marry her and use the youth and the freshness to decorate another suburban home somewhere. She shouldn’t be encouraged. The persistence of the devil that had made all that old stuff leap up in him again!
Horatia went on to Maud’s. Maud was her sister, who had married to the full approbation of West Park and her own satisfaction. It came upon Horatia in the midst of her excitement at the beautiful way things were turning out that she was sorry for people who couldn’t have all this interest in their lives and particularizing she discovered a localized regret that Maud’s life wasn’t more colorful. She hadn’t seen her sister often that summer. Maud’s two babies had come close together, and on the advent of the second they had moved from their first apartment to a house on one of the city boulevards, which pleased Aunt Caroline immensely. Horatia had been in the house only once or twice, for Maud brought the children to West Park on Sundays and that had been almost enough sisterly intercourse for Horatia. But now she wanted to spread out her inspiration and she turned her steps towards Elm Boulevard.
It was a newly-built section of the city which took great pride in its residential restrictions and its extremely up-to-date houses of brick or stucco, each of them representing a vague travesty on some architectural period or “style.” The sleek,small lawns were chopped off neatly, one from another, by little hedges which were not too high to hide any of the beauties or improvements of the place from the passing motorist. Well polished cars stood in front of some of the houses, children in smocked frocks and gaily colored half-socks played in the lawn-swings or walked up and down the sidewalks. It was mid-afternoon and the comfortable-prosperous were enjoying themselves. Horatia felt the still orderliness of the atmosphere and realized again why Aunt Caroline was given to occasional remarks about how “well Maud had done.”
She turned in at her sister’s house and Maud, who was sitting on the porch with her baby in her arms, jumped up to welcome her volubly and to introduce her to two other ladies as cool and plump and white-clad as Maud herself.
“Did you walk out this wretchedly hot day—all the way from town?”
Horatia had not felt the heat but she put a suddenly self-conscious hand up to her hair and hat under her sister’s solicitous inquiry. She found she was hot and moist beside these cool suburban ladies.
“I am hot,” she admitted. “May I go up and wash?”
The inside of the house was pleasanter than she had remembered. It was cool, its shades were drawn against the heat. Clean, pretty colors everywhere, and as she passed the children’s room the whiteness and pinkness of it charmed her.
She went down to the porch refreshed and admiring. Even if the Williams had chosen this location where there was no lake view and the houses were rather closely set, it had distinct advantages. She told Maud so and Maud was obviously greatly pleased.
“I knew I was right in insisting on this part of town,” she said. “A lake view is all right and so is the country. But unless you have oodles of money and three or four cars and a regular estate it is much better to settle in one of the good residence districts.”
“What makes a residence district good?” asked Horatia, quizzically, though she knew perfectly well.
The three suburban ladies looked a little shocked.
“Why the people, the people who live here. This district is restricted. You can’t build houses here that cost less than twelve thousand. That keeps out undesirables.”
“I see,” said Horatia, waiving her rights to controversy.
“Of course, with growing children,” began Maud in an instructive matronly tone.
Growing children, it appeared, were all important to the three ladies. Horatia dropped out of the conversation but kept a look of bright intelligence focused on her informants. Growing children must be carefully watched and not allowed to make acquaintances among those whose residence districts were not restricted. They“picked up everything.” They were the subject of a long conversation which went from schools to carrots. The interest of the three ladies never flagged. Horatia held the baby in her lap and played with its wisps of hair, hardly attending to what was said. She vaguely heard the talk pass from undesirable children to undesirable mothers and the voices became more tense. The names were nothing to her and she was in no mood to combat the intolerances of the others. The baby was so small and pink and clean and desirable. Maud must have a lot of fun. It must be fun to share children with a man—— She heard a familiar name and broke off her thoughts abruptly. What was that they were saying?
“She was seen downtown having lunch with that Jim Langley—and you know what he is.”
“Oh, she doesn’t care what she does,” said Maud. “Whatever happened between her and her husband—do you know?”
“They say that after their baby died, she refused flatly to have any more—and you know how men are. If a woman can’t be tactful about those things and the way she feels—she said outrageous things about not being able to endure more such suffering. And yet when the child was alive she was hardly ever home.”
“That’s the way with those women,” said Maud sagely.
“And then running around with Jim Langley——”
The sick little feeling in Horatia grew acute. She had heard the name rightly.
“Who’s the pernicious gentleman?” she asked lightly enough.
“Jim Langley—no one you ought to know.” Maud was quick to adopt the tone of chaperonage.
“But I should know all about him,” persisted Horatia, easily, “because he’s just given me a job.”
There was a dangerous little pause. Then Maud spoke.
“You’re joking.”
“No—truly. He promised to give me a position onThe Journal. Reporting, I suppose. I went to all the newspapers this morning.”
A flush had mounted to her sister’s cheeks.
“Horatia,” she said with a tense air of lightness, “where did you get this sudden notion of going to work at all?”
Horatia felt a little sorry. She realized that Maud was being humiliated by the turn the conversation had taken. But still she did want to know about Jim Langley.
“Of course I’ll want to do something. No one sits around any more with folded hands waiting to be married.”
This was a trifle better. It at least showed the callers that the work project was a freak and not a necessity. Maud decided to try to pass it off as a joke and reckon with Horatia later, butbefore she could speak one of her guests was inquiring:
“Really on Jim Langley’s paper, Miss Grant?”
“Why not?” asked Horatia. “He seems pleasant enough. What is the matter with him?”
“Horatia hasn’t been home except summers for four years,” said Maud shortly. “Why, he’s got a bad reputation, and was mixed up with a dreadful scandal here. He was named in the Hubbell divorce suit.”
“And he didn’t marry Mrs. Hubbell.”
“Should he?” Horatia sought instruction.
Maud rose with an air of exasperation.
“You shouldn’t go about alone to newspaper offices, Horatia,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. As for your working onThe Journal, you just talk to Harvey and see what he says. Come, let’s see the garden.”
Horatia saw the garden obediently and the guests’ departure, followed close by the bedtime ceremonies at which Maud helped and presided, forced the matter out of the way. It was only as they sat at dinner that the topic rose again. Maud had composed herself and, considering that Horatia’s conversation had merely shown inexperience and ignorance, was no longer angry. She was rarely angry for any length of time. Now, looking at her husband over the neat central fern-dish, she said, half-jocularly, “You’ll really have to take Horatia in hand, Harvey. She is dreadful. Here she went and saw this JimLangley person today and asked him for a position on his paper.”
“But the point is, Maud, that he gave me a job.”
Harvey looked at his sister-in-law and came at the question from a man angle.
“You don’t want to work on his paper, Horatia. If you want that kind of work, try eitherThe TribuneorThe Reporter. Langley’s paper is one of those enterprises that run themselves into the ground early. He’s always uncertain—no policy, no circulation to amount to anything. And then of course—Langley, himself.”
Horatia leaned towards him.
“But tell me about it, Harvey. There was a chorus of horror when I mentioned his name this afternoon. And he was the only gentleman I met this morning. I did tryThe TribuneandThe Reporter. I even triedThe Buzz-saw.”
Harvey threw back his head and roared.
“That’s a modern young woman. Why didn’t you take a job on that?”
“They offered me one—a scandal column, but I turned it down. Seriously, tell me about Mr. Langley.”
“Why, there’s not so much to tell,” said Harvey. “He’s in pretty bad odor, that’s all. The women are all interested in him because he was co-respondent in a divorce suit. Isn’t that it, Maud?”
“Don’t be silly, Harvey. You know what he is and you ought to tell Horatia.”
Harvey tried again with that disinclination to hurt the personal reputation of a man which most men show in such discussion.
“Jack Hubbell sued his wife for divorce and named Langley, who’d been philandering a lot. Langley always did that. He was a University man about my time and a tremendous fellow. Everybody worshipped his footsteps.”
“I’ve heard of him there,” said Horatia.
“He had a little money and started this newspaper, which would have been all right if he hadn’t refused to tie himself up with any political party and hadn’t also refused to make any concessions to advertisers. Seemed to have an idea that newspapers are run like books. Then he got a lot of booze-fighters working for him and sort of lost his grip. That’s all there’s to it. When his money gives out his paper will go to the wall.”
“But the divorce suit?”
“You’re as bad as the rest of them,” sighed poor Harvey. “Stick to the scandal. It never came to trial at all. Hubbell killed himself after the suit was filed.”
Maud finished.
“And he didn’t marry the woman or make any attempt to justify the situation. Just stopped going places and refused to explain anything. Naturally people assume the worst.”
Horatia felt a little pale. She could hear his kind voice, with the tinge of bitterness in it. And his remark, “Probably you won’t want to workfor me after you hear what people say.” Well, she had heard. And she did want to work for him. They’d outlawed him from their silly society because he’d held his tongue. Probably none of it was true. And if it was true it didn’t matter. She brought her last reflection into words.
“But after all it doesn’t much matter, does it? He doesn’t want me to marry him or to take stock in his newspaper. All he offers is a job and even if all these things are as dreadful as they are reported to be, they don’t enter in. I’m old enough to be incorruptible surely. And I need newspaper experience.”
“I think, maybe I could get you onThe Tribuneif I talked to Weissner,” said Harvey.
“There,” said Maud, “why didn’t you come to us first? Of course it’s the thing just now to work, since the war. Dorothy Macdonald is studying stenography and you know how rich she is. And lots of others. But you might have asked us or Uncle George.”
“I wanted to find work for myself,” said Horatia, the memory of that morning’s somewhat torn glory still shining in her eyes. “And I’ve promised Mr. Langley, Maud. I couldn’t work on another paper. It would be too insulting.”
“You don’t want to ruin your reputation and the reputation of all the rest of us, do you?” asked Maud sharply.
“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that, you know, Maud,” interposed her husband. “Langley payshis bills and is in good standing at his clubs. Of course he isn’t getting anywhere, but it wouldn’t hurt Horatia’s reputation. Nothing hurts a girl’s reputation any more,” added Harvey, chuckling. “Debutantes appear in banks and come delivering laundry. You never know when you’ll come on them next. Let her do as she likes.”
“You’re a darling, Harvey. And I promise you, Maud, that I’ll tell you all the scandal from the inside and you can flourish it, copyrighted, around the boulevard.”
At which sally they all laughed; but the last thing Horatia heard that night as she climbed into Maud’s guest-room bed was Maud’s voice from her dressing-room, somewhat muffled but distinct, as she talked to her husband.
“I don’t like it, Harvey. He’s probably fascinated her, and they say he hasn’t any principles.”
“Oh, come dear, let it wear itself out. Horatia’s not a child and she can look out for herself. Come here, sweetheart, and take a look at these white flannels. Are they fit for tennis?”
LIKE Harvey, Horatia had no doubts as to her ability to look out for herself. To a certain extent she had been already doing it and she had begun doing it early so that it was natural for her to be independent and vigorous. Her father had died when she was five and after that her mother had not seemed to care enough about living to keep it up. She had been a pretty, intense woman who had taken her wifehood and maternity very seriously, so seriously that she had quickly faded and at the time of her death had not looked at all like the lovely young girl in leg-o’-mutton sleeves, who smiled out of the photograph in the West Park parlor.
She had two children, both girls to her secret relief and her husband’s secret disappointment, and she fussed over their clothes and their childish illnesses interminably. In spite of or perhaps because of her fussing, they were, when she left them, two sturdy little girls with pleasant tempers and good digestions. They accepted the change in their fortunes quietly, taking all the kissing and patting and uncomprehended signs of sympathy which came their way, and, climbing into the big walnut bed at the Grant houseon the first night of their transference there, they cuddled closely together and fell asleep.
George Grant, their uncle, came in to see if they were asleep a little later and stood looking down at them in a kind of puzzled wonder and with a rusty throb of pity at the fact that they looked very small indeed in the big bed. It was as near to a definite emotion towards them as he ever got. He was their father’s brother and had officially “taken them” because it was the natural and proper thing to do. He was the head of a dry-goods establishment and by dint of steady application and learning one thing, the wholesale dry-goods business, well, he had made money in a slow accumulating way. And he had built his house, which perfectly expressed him. Like it he was good and substantial and like it also, provincial, unimaginative and unconscious of his limitations and lacks. His wife was enough like him to have been his sister and whether this was the result of slow absorption of his characteristics or had been the original bond between them, no one knew. Mrs. Grant knew as much about clean housekeeping as he knew about dry-goods. She had a subsidiary passion for church work and was an authority on church suppers and foreign missions.
She also had taken her brother-in-law’s children because it was the obvious thing for a childless, well-to-do couple to do. But perhaps because the Grants had been married for twelve years without having any children, the desire forthem had either died or never been cultivated and they took Maud and Horatia without warmth. From the very beginning the house on the hill meant repression to them. There was never cruelty or even unkindness but it was all cold. Even in the kitchen there was no freedom or expansion. The food was measured and counted and it was not a place where an enterprising or hungry girl might take a pot of jam or a dozen cookies and abscond with them for an after-school lunch. To be sure if they were hungry they were allowed to have bread and butter and brown sugar—or a doughnut perhaps. But their aunt or the raw-boned Swedish girl who helped her gave it out always with an air of rationing and several admonitions not to drop the crumbs.
At intervals, all along their path through grammar school, High School and Sabbath school, came the supposedly high spots of recreation, parties which they themselves gave or which they went to as guests. Even at a very early age they had no question as to which kind they enjoyed most. They liked to go to parties and they hated them at home. Parties in other houses usually involved some stiffness at the beginning but they warmed up to gaiety and a joyous kind of disorderliness which sent all the children home flushed, tired and happy. At the Grant house they were functions all the way through. Mrs. George Grant modeled them on the parties she gave to the ladies of the Missionary Guild.
“I hate parties at home,” Maud would grumbleto her sister when some morning Mrs. Grant would gravely announce that she thought one was due, and Horatia, always braver, would say, “But Aunt Caroline, what shall we do at the party?” Aunt Caroline, her mind already on the refreshments and the exact dozen of napkins which she would dedicate to the use of the children, had always the same answer, “Why, play games, Horatia—just as you always do.”
The children all came. Parties were never events to be ignored, and the young public of West Park was not discriminating if refreshments were involved. They came, all clean and scrubbed, and were sent down to the big bare hall which a freshly-lit fire tried in vain to heat, and they seconded the embarrassed efforts of Maud and Horatia to get up some games. But Mrs. Grant sat by the wall and watched with a mother or two flanking her, and there was no abandon. The refreshments, served in the big dining-room, were all that saved the situation, and even those were spoiled for the two hostesses by a feeling of their aunt’s eyes lurking for crumbs. Yet, afterwards, when the children had gone home again and all traces of them were carefully removed, Mrs. Grant would smile and say to her nieces, “Did you have a nice time?” And faithfully, true to a convention which they did not in the least understand, they answered, “Oh, yes, Aunt Caroline.”
Of course even all Mrs. Grant’s passion for routine could not prevent some crises arising.One came when Maud refused to do any more studying after she graduated from the High School. In spite of her lamentable monthly report card, Maud had been destined for a teacher and her sudden rebellion at the end of her seventeenth year shocked her aunt terribly. But Maud had a way of being silent and sullen and she had secret reinforcement from Harvey Williams, who was one of the reasons why she did not intend to go to the University. She rather concealed the fact of Harvey at the time of her rebellion, but after she had gained her point, Harvey became a steady caller at the Grant house. Maud had insisted that she was going to earn her own living but she postponed beginning to do it and it shortly became very obvious that she might better spend her few unmarried days preparing a trousseau. Harvey was quite an eligible person, beginning a law practice in the city and living with his mother in West Park. The Grants, once adjusted, smiled in their cheerless way upon the match. Maud’s love-making had gone on during Horatia’s last year at High School and first year at the University. She was at first tremendously impressed by the fact that Maud’s brown curls and pink skin were desirable to the point of matrimony. She recognized the fact that Maud was pretty but rooming with the prettiness and eternally removing jars of cold cream and boxes of pink powder from her side of the bureau had lessened its effectiveness for her. It was, none the less, a great thing to have Maudbeing made love to and to think of her in secret as the recipient of passionate kisses and delightful murmured phrases of love. Maud jarred on the romance by being Maud throughout, inclined to giggle and enjoy even Uncle George’s crude jokes about Harvey, and Harvey had done his share of the jarring by being a blushful, diffident young man who shot side glances at his fiancée and giggled heavily himself. Horatia did her best to forget them actually and to remember the delightful fact that they were lovers, hoping against hope that they spent their evenings in moonlight walks instead of holding hands at the movies.
By the time Maud was married, her sister was more sophisticated. She had finished her first year at the University and begun to read a great deal. Many subjects, more or less taboo in West Park, she had heard discussed freely by both students and professors. She had decided that there was something wrong with the social and economic systems of the world, that West Park was a small and narrow place, that flirting was silly, that she must devote a great deal of time to reading essays and books on psychology, and that she would like to meet some “real men” and get away from West Park. In spite of all this accumulated philosophy, she was oddly glad to get on a street-car labeled “West Park” when she came home on her first vacation, and to see all the familiar landmarks on the way to the stone house on the hill. She never forgot that homecoming. It was home, and not even the facts that Aunt Caroline was at a missionary meeting and that Maud had a cold in her head and wanted to talk about the initialing of her linen could keep Horatia from romancing somewhat over it.
But by evening she felt indefinably let down. It was a warm June night and the windows were open in the dining-room so that as they sat at dinner Horatia could see the city below, its lights just beginning to sparkle through the first dusk, and the slow freighters on the great lake beyond passing and repassing with grave dignity. It was all beautiful and quiet and familiar outside and yet no one at the table seemed to feel it except herself. Uncle George at the head of the table in his black house-jacket, ate silently, his broad, unemotional face fallen into heavy lines of contentment. The day was over, his day’s business had been good and after dinner he would water the lawn.
At the other end of the table his wife was talking to the girls about Maud’s coming wedding. And as usual her mind was focused on the food, the napkins and silver and especially the cleaning necessary, and Horatia once more suffered the feeling of reluctant chill of the old days when her aunt proposed a children’s party. Thank God this one would be the last.
Her aunt broke into her thought.
“And then I suppose Horatia will be the next one,” she said with a heavy facetiousness.
“Didn’t you meet any fellows at the ‘U’?” asked Maud. “Most of the girls come back simply laden with pictures. Esther Dinsmore has a man who motors up to see her every week or so—clear across the state.”
“I didn’t go in for that sort of thing.” There was a trace of self-righteousness mingled with the humor in Horatia’s tone. “And I am afraid I won’t be the next one, Aunt Caroline, because I don’t want to get married for ages. I’ve lots of things to do first.”
“Teaching?” asked Maud in disgust.
“No—I don’t think so. Social work, maybe.”
“Slum work?” It was Aunt Caroline this time.
“We don’t call it that any longer.” Horatia was patient. “No—— Lots of the social work is scientific work in an office. Collecting statistics.”
Aunt Caroline preened herself just a little.
“I may be very old-fashioned but this statistic collecting seems very foolish to me. Just a fad. Now when we send out a missionary to a heathen country we don’t ask for statistics. We want to know how many souls he has saved.”
“That might in itself be a modest statistic,” laughed Horatia.
“And,” concluded Aunt Caroline with the air of one who quotes the irrefutable and has a right to quote it, “I’m sure ‘the poor ye have always with you.’”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Maud giggled.
“Let’s stop the deep stuff, for pity’s sake. There he comes, Horatia.”
Harvey could be seen passing the dining-room windows. Maud giggled again and jumped up to look at herself in the mirror of the sideboard. Then she went through the hall to meet her fiancé.
“Horatia’s home,” they could hear her saying, “she’s an awful highbrow. Not much like poor chicken-brained me.” She made her apologies for her lack of mind with enormous pride and Harvey said something in a low voice at which there was another giggle. Horatia felt reluctant to meet him again but she folded her napkin and went out on the porch where the two lovers had settled themselves. Harvey shook hands with her a little awkwardly but not as awkwardly as she had expected. Working in the city had put a keener edge on him. He held his head better and talked better English—not entirely the slangy boy and girl stuff which she had always had from him. On the whole, as she looked him over, Horatia thought her sister was doing rather well. Nothing exceptional in Harvey, of course, but after all he would make a good husband. They talked for a little and Harvey was intelligent on all the subjects which she, a little priggishly, introduced. He was a graduate of her University and full of reminiscence. But for all his pleasant conversation Horatia found herself feeling in the way. Harvey’s arm stealing over the back of Maud’s chair—Maud’s affected, immensely assured little laugh as if she had a world at her feet and need make no effort—it puzzled Horatia. It seemed inconceivable that this well-ordered young man should want her to go so that he could make silly love to a giggling Maud and yet—— She stood up and prepared to go into the house. Neither protested.
From that vacation on, Horatia began to be the “intellectual one” in her circle of friends. At first she resented it, then liked it and grew ultimately into complete indifference to what West Park did or didn’t think. But that was later. At first she found herself set apart and left out of the jokes. Before she went back to the University Maud was “settled,” not in West Park, but in an apartment in the city itself, more accessible for Harvey and better suited to his wife’s budding passion for storming the society of the city. With her going Horatia had dropped out of the circle of friends who used to come to the children’s parties. The girls had married or gone East or to Normal schools. The boys were marrying or flirting with city girls. Yet, though the reality of her relations with the suburb had all changed, faded, she never lost the feeling that she belonged to it and was in a measure bound to go back to it. She knew that her aunt and uncle wanted her to live with them—and that dull as their affection was, they were used to her and wanted her. But stronger than their call was her feeling of West Park’s physical beauty, of the vigor of its cool, brisk winds andof the greatness of the great lakes spread out at the foot of the city and all its suburbs. It was always a relief to come back from the flat little university town.
She had done rather well at the University, though, as she told Maud, she had not “gone in” for the social side of the undergraduate life, the life which was so important to many of the girl students. A great deal of that side of the University bothered her and repelled her. There were girls who seemed to care about nothing except prolonged tumultuous flirtations which included an immense amount of kissing and physical demonstration. Horatia allied herself with the group which considered such things a disgrace to the college. It was a strong group, not too large, and they substituted for the flirtations of the other girls an intense interest in and elaborate discussion of the modern woman and her relations to men. They were constantly exchanging cold-blooded little ideas for perfecting the sex. And underneath their scorn for the hand-holding undoubtedly persisted an interest in the very thing they scorned, judging by the time they put on the subject.
Once in a while they tried to put some of their theories into practice. Horatia would find some young man attracted to her and meet him honestly and simply as she would have met any girl. She would talk in her best manner and tell him about the things she was thinking. And inevitably she drove him away, for the young men werenot at the age when they looked for straight comradeship from girls. There was another code among them. They liked Horatia well enough, rather admired her, but they left her alone. It worried her a little. She did not want to go through life without love. She had heard and read too much about it. And, transcending her talk about the new spirit of friendship between men and women, of a partnership marriage, came flashes of feeling as she read her Keats or stumbled on a boy and a girl saying a clinging good-night in some dark corner of the campus. She felt left out.
After all it did not matter much, because in the spring of her Sophomore year everything changed. The United States had declared war and all the most interesting young men had melted away, leaving only indistinguishable stars in the University service flag. And it was by the war that Horatia’s last two years at the University were colored. She had not had much of a point of view about the European trouble as she vaguely characterized it when it had been purely European. She had talked once of becoming a nurse and going abroad but it was one of her wildest dreams and not an especially cherished one. But now for a year and a half the University had mobilized itself. Appeals for help, lectures from returned soldiers, classrooms and halls filled with flaring war posters, constant campaigns for funds, a sudden hierarchy springing up among Red Cross workers, blue veils, redveils and white veils shrouding the heads of the earnest bandage makers, and constant efforts on the part of every instructor to relate his or her branch of study to the great war, realizing that only by so doing could he hold any number of his pupils—such things did the war mean to the college. The interest in athletics died down like an untended fire—seriousness came into vogue—and there was even more to it. All these young students, still mentally adolescent, suffered. They suffered because they had been taught that they should understand life, because the supernatural had been left out of their philosophies and blind faith had been discarded. Yet they were face to face with horrors, with facts, philosophies which they could not comprehend and they strained their minds trying to understand. Those who had been mildly Socialist turned with repugnance from Bolshevism. Those who had always had a smug trust in their financial solidity saw fortunes vanish or become useless in the face of misfortune. Individualists realized that their social duty was unescapable. For two years these students who had gone to college to learn facts, as they supposed, found themselves in a chaos of changing ideas, guided only unsurely by instructors as bewildered as they were themselves. No one wanted to stay in college. They stayed only because of parental pressure and because the University authorities introduced as much practical war work as was possible. And the cold-blooded philosophy and psychology Horatia had been absorbing was melted in the heat of the great world emotionality.
Then at the height of all this enthusiasm came the armistice revealing to the world suddenly and fearfully the confusion the world was in—confusion of politics, of sociology, and ethics.
For the first few months after the signing of the armistice the word “reconstruction” flew about the campus. War funds became “reconstruction funds.” And then doubt began to creep about. What did reconstruction mean and what would it lead to? Discontents penetrated the campus grounds. The instructors, their own opinions in a state of flux and bound to wait for further developments before crystallizing, were poor leaders, dealing out generalities and ambiguousness. A certain fixed curriculum dragged its way through the months. They were all conscious that they were holding to outworn forms. Who knew what the University of the future would be? Perhaps those diplomas given out in June, 1919, were the least valuable of any ever given. Students went out into a life which the instructors could not forecast. In wartime it was possible to preach courage and sacrifice. In these strange new peace times who knew whether courage and sacrifice were cardinal virtues?
This of course was all under the surface, hardly felt perhaps by many of both teachers and students. But the unrest, the doubts were there, revealed to the least probing. To some of them, among them Horatia, a strange thinghappened. She had been trained at first to believe in a pragmatic philosophy which the war had swept away in its wind of romantic sacrifice and heroism. In her first two years she had felt rather scornful of the silliness of college men. And then they were drawn out of her life into the great struggle and became heroes. Horatia had come to believe in heroism. She had heard of so many young lives offered nobly, read many young loose-hung fighting autobiographies. And she had come out of college as thorough a young romanticist as ever lived in the Middle Ages, but a puzzled young romanticist with neither Church nor king to give her guidance. She brought her strong faith in young men, her growing desire for all the romance life could give, home. Home to West Park and after a taste of the dull routine of Aunt Caroline’s days and the gossiping wedding of Edna, had decided that she could not bear the let-down, the drop from romantic idealism and noble ideas into the actuality of a corner of life. There was more in life which she must have and go after posthaste. And so it was that the morning after the wedding, she had set off adventuring and found the road open and pleasant.