Bobby, Bobby, I’d know at a glance—without a glance. When you opened the door I’dfeel, Bobby. Sometimes her tired-out man child quivering with his day’s toil asks mother love of his wife. She’s got to be counsellor, comforter, friend—comrade with whom to forget life’s cares. Out of all the world she’s got to be the one woman that is hisneed. I am yourneed! If disaster stripped you of all that the world has showered on you, if it reduced you to the hurdy-gurdy man who grinds his organ under your window—Bobby, Bobby, would Dickylovethe gathering of the pennies?
April 28th.Morning.
Bobby wires again: “What are you up to, Caroline, that you didn’t let me know you were here, that Dicky didn’t know; that Elliott wasn’t told it was Dicky with me; that you were so naughty in the Square the other night as to laugh at my confusion? Little girl with eyeslike moonflowers, all right for youse. And mum’s the word.”
“Her eyes, full and clear, with their white-encircled, gray irises, are like moonflowers.” That’s what Bobby says on page 131 about his heroine. And back in one of his first letters to me, “Please turn to page 131 of the book and try to think whose eyes I tried to describe.”
April 28th.Noon.
On the heels of Bobby’s telegram I have this letter from him.
To-day, Wednesday.My Dear Caroline Howard:Please hurry up and get all the sea air you want, and go up to Boston and let them show you Milk Street and theYouth’s Companionbuilding (that’s all there is there). Oh, I forgot the beautiful men. Look ’em over! I’ve seen ’em. They all carry a black network bag with a MS. play, and Emerson, and two watercress sandwiches for lunch in it. All right for youse. Do you know I have an idea that you’ll meet your fate up there among theBaked Beans. I’m told those Apollo “Belvidears” always take to a girl that’s both intelligent and good looking. Get that? Well, I won’t send you a wedding present—so, there!But, speaking seriously, we’ve had rain here all day. It’s been cold, too—kind of like late of an evening when you go down barefoot in the ten-acre medder to drive the cow home, and your mind is on whippoorwills and stone bruises and Cherokee roses and hot corn-pone, and the little girl with the white sunbonnet on the adjoiningfarm that you saw picking cherries in the lane, and who you (I don’t mean you, I mean me) fondly imagine is going to come over to your farm some day and scold you when the cow doesn’t come home, but who really runs away with a patent churn agent and winds up by keeping a shooting gallery in South Bend, Indiana.Oh, well, what’s theodds?Hope you are feelingquite wellafter your long trip from the soggy south.Now while you are up “No’th” just turn yo’self a’ loose and have a good time. Down in our country the old-time opinion is thatLiberty Jamseverything into a bad shape, but it ain’t so. No—the real and genuine liberty sets youFree; it doesn’t cramp you or lower your idealsat All.A great many wise people have learned that;you see Them Everywhere in Greater New York. And I think you would like to bring your cow up here and spend the remainder of your time. You can live nicely onfifty cents a week; but a great deal better onhalf a billiondollars.Since I have discovered what a help printed matter is to me, I simply love to write letters. I know a man who writes 1,900 letters a day to hisLoved One. But don’t you think he is kind of “crowdin’” the mourners?Please ma’am write to me some more right away; I like to hear from you.P.S. I’ve had a great time chopping up the papers and building this letter. You’ll excuse my frivolousness, won’t you?Bob.
To-day, Wednesday.
My Dear Caroline Howard:
Please hurry up and get all the sea air you want, and go up to Boston and let them show you Milk Street and theYouth’s Companionbuilding (that’s all there is there). Oh, I forgot the beautiful men. Look ’em over! I’ve seen ’em. They all carry a black network bag with a MS. play, and Emerson, and two watercress sandwiches for lunch in it. All right for youse. Do you know I have an idea that you’ll meet your fate up there among theBaked Beans. I’m told those Apollo “Belvidears” always take to a girl that’s both intelligent and good looking. Get that? Well, I won’t send you a wedding present—so, there!
But, speaking seriously, we’ve had rain here all day. It’s been cold, too—kind of like late of an evening when you go down barefoot in the ten-acre medder to drive the cow home, and your mind is on whippoorwills and stone bruises and Cherokee roses and hot corn-pone, and the little girl with the white sunbonnet on the adjoiningfarm that you saw picking cherries in the lane, and who you (I don’t mean you, I mean me) fondly imagine is going to come over to your farm some day and scold you when the cow doesn’t come home, but who really runs away with a patent churn agent and winds up by keeping a shooting gallery in South Bend, Indiana.
Oh, well, what’s theodds?
Hope you are feelingquite wellafter your long trip from the soggy south.
Now while you are up “No’th” just turn yo’self a’ loose and have a good time. Down in our country the old-time opinion is thatLiberty Jamseverything into a bad shape, but it ain’t so. No—the real and genuine liberty sets youFree; it doesn’t cramp you or lower your idealsat All.
A great many wise people have learned that;you see Them Everywhere in Greater New York. And I think you would like to bring your cow up here and spend the remainder of your time. You can live nicely onfifty cents a week; but a great deal better onhalf a billiondollars.
Since I have discovered what a help printed matter is to me, I simply love to write letters. I know a man who writes 1,900 letters a day to hisLoved One. But don’t you think he is kind of “crowdin’” the mourners?
Please ma’am write to me some more right away; I like to hear from you.
P.S. I’ve had a great time chopping up the papers and building this letter. You’ll excuse my frivolousness, won’t you?
Bob.
Bobby, I condone your offense—time spent cutting up the papers, time worth so many cents per word, toamuse me. Times spent together when apart, how close they come.
April 29th.Morning.
How the sea flashes, and the blue, blue sky flashes, too. There’s a boat drifting this way. It looks like a white-winged gull afloat, a messenger of joy. How the waves sing, and their swelling song is all about a little girl in a white sunbonnet picking cherries in the lane. I remember that day, too, Bobby. It was a picnic. You climbed the tree and I caught up my dress to catch the big ripe cherries. When the picnic was over and we got home my gentle mother scolded over the ruined dress. She gave it to the washerwoman’s little girl.
How the waves sing, and their shouting song is—Bobby’sloved one.
Afternoon.
The day’s mood has changed. A cold wind blows in from the sea. If mammy could see me out here on this deserted stretch of shore in the rain and the spray that dashes on me from the stormy, inrushing waves she’d say her prayers in thankfulness that she put the old storm coat and rubbers in, for I’ve got them on.
How fierce the rush of the waves! Something as elementally savage as their assault of the shore stirs in me, writhes in its travail—is born. Bobby ismine.
Dicky, light-hearted, laughing child who would pluckthe flower of love as a baby gathers a posy, forgive me.
When the day is hot and the road is long, and the flower of love droops, what then, Dicky?
Night.
I have wired Bobby that I will be in New York Wednesday. It will take me that long to finish the changes in the book. I wired him that my train gets in about five-thirty, and that if he likes I will take dinner with him.
April 30th.
Bobby’s wire reads:
Sure, Mike, I’ll be on hand at 5:30 Wednesday to welcome you on your retreat from Bosting. And don’t bother yourself about the train getting in at six or later, for I’ll be on the job and I’ll be there when you get there.I have already ordered the lye hominy and turnip greens for dinner, and you’ll be properly looked after by the committee of one when you hit the town.Hoping these few lines will find you the same, I remain,Yours continuously,B.
Sure, Mike, I’ll be on hand at 5:30 Wednesday to welcome you on your retreat from Bosting. And don’t bother yourself about the train getting in at six or later, for I’ll be on the job and I’ll be there when you get there.
I have already ordered the lye hominy and turnip greens for dinner, and you’ll be properly looked after by the committee of one when you hit the town.
Hoping these few lines will find you the same, I remain,
Yours continuously,B.
May 1st.
Bobby wasn’t at the train. If he was, we missed each other. I wasn’t conscious of it on the train, but now I know I pictured him there at the station, standing just a little in advance of the mass of people; vaguely, I think my mind ran the gamut of earth’s meetings and thought of dim shores, not of earth, wherethat one who goes first must surely await the other. To the whir of the wheels as they ate up the miles that lie between Boston and New York my heart sang, Bobby’s loved one, Bobby’sloved one. I was in a maze of vague, happy thought—and he wasn’t there—he didn’t meet me.
It is 12P. M.now. I went with Miss Jackson to a horrid little show, and when we came in I could not believe there was not a message of some sort for me.
May 2d.
I stayed in all morning in such a tense state of expectancy that it has left me limp. How glad I am that Dicky does not know I am here—I simply can’t see Dicky yet. I am at sea as to Bobby’s reason for not meeting me, at sea that no message from him comes to me, but one thing I know: I can trust his, “Mum’s the word, Caroline.”
Mrs. Christopher and I shopped this afternoon. Afterward we had tea at the Astor and went down to the Waldorf and sat in Peacock Alley. Such a mix up of fine clothes and commonness. The women have hard faces, painted, world-weary, they are too much of—oh, everything: too red as to lips, too black as to eyebrows, too gold as to hair; they don’t walk—they can’t, poor things—their general appearance as they mince along the Avenue is that of a procession of mannikinsdone up in slit bolster cases. Bah! It all makes me think of a big rock near Marsville. Once I passed it with a mountaineer. “When I wuz a child,” he said, “that wuz a monster rock—the masterest (biggest) rock I ever seed. Hit’s dwindled sence I wuz a child.” Since I reached here New York’s dwindled.
“Caroline Howard,” I said to myself, sternly, out in the street again, “it isn’t New York that has dwindled—it is you. Robert Haralson didn’t meet you. Whatever his reason for a dime he could have ’phoned from his home; a slot machine would have cost him a nickel, a note a two-cent stamp.”
My shoulders braced, my chin went up, my spirit caught the spirit of this great wonder-town. Night fell. The magic of night on Broadway—the flashing signs, the whizzing motors, the hurrying, surging throngs, the snatches of speech that drift to one’s ears, there on the street where all seems youth, laughter, joy—human documents, the snatches of speech one hears. “How can I leave you here?” I heard the words spoken by a plain anxious-faced woman, and the overdressed, under-dressed, doll-faced girl’s answer: “You poor dear! How you worry! What have I to fear? New York’s lovely, and my job’s lovely, and my boss is loveliest of all.”
I heard a man’s voice, such a cultured, hearty sort of a voice, but a note of bitterness and discouragementrang through it. “That man—I gave him his chance—brought him here. Look where he is now, and look where I am. He is not an artist. His success is not based on a solid foundation. But look at him—money—fame—what’s the use of holding to one’s ideals, of being faithful to them. What’s the use of—anything?”
My train goes out in an hour. City of laughter and of tears, of power that can crush as a giant foot crushes an ant, marvel of the world—I bid you adieu.
May 4th.Sunday Night.
I’ve broken the Sabbath by travelling all day. In town I hired a buggy to bring me home. Our hacks do not run on Sunday. It is raining. It has rained all the way. I had a silent driver who never spoke to me, seldom to his horses. I was glad that it was raining; glad that my driver was silent. My thoughts were as vague, as blurred as the dim mountain forms seen through the rain. We drove through Marsville without meeting a soul. As we passed the Duckett houses that forever watch each other like antagonists, I saw that poor old lady slipping home from doing up his work; I saw him rocking on his front porch in placid content. A sudden rage against this man-made world seized me.
I scrambled in my bag for the little gift to her, leaped out, and sent the man on home with my baggage.
He greeted me jauntily. He was just sitting there counting his blessings. He could eat three as hearty meals a day as he had ever et, and when night come sleep sound as a mouse in a shuck pen—the Lord had been good to the old man.
I wasn’t hypocrite enough to take the hand extended. I wanted to shake the life out of his smiling old body.
“Has he been good to the old lady?” I asked. He only stared at me. “Do you know you told me you swam your horse through swollen streams once to get to a little log church because you knew your congregation would be waiting for you there? You wanted to preach that sermon that day that some soul might be saved that you might never reach again. You said you didn’t want the devil to get anybody. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he quavered, “I remember.”
“Well,” I stormed, “it’s my honest belief that he will get you. I wonder what the God you have preached all these years means to do with men like you who are mean to their wives and cloak their meanness to poor feeble old women under smooth-sounding texts.”
He stood up, his faded blue eyes flashed, his pallid lips under the straggly white moustache worked. When he dropped back in his chair, having uttered no word, Ithought maybe I had killed him. But I did not care. He would have gone to his Maker with a little preparation he would otherwise not have had. I stood over him silent, inexorable.
“She got mad because——”
“Never mind what she got mad about,” I said. “For fifty-nine years and six months she didn’t get mad. And she’s not mad now. I saw her slipping out of the back of your house just a minute ago. She’s been doing up your night work. You ought to go over there and get down on your knees—the knees you have worn out praying the Lord to make you the sort of a man you have not desired to be—and ask her to forgive you, and bring her home.”
Some good honest blood left in the old veins crept up and tinged the pallid, sunken cheeks. And, suddenly, all my fierceness was gone. I was pleading for the love that had betrayed them at the end of a lifetime. I had his old, old hands in mine that looked so young and strong by contrast, and I was leading him back to their courtship days, to the time when their one little child was born and she almost lost her life. Some of the story I knew from him, and some of it I knew from her. Before I finished the tears were dropping down his cheeks. “The old man has some lonely hours,” he said. Gayly I told him they were over; gayly I pressed my gift into his hand, and I fairly pushed him into her gate.
As I hurried on I suddenly realized that the rain was over, that the eastern hills were sparkling under a giant rainbow, and that Ellinor Baxter was rushing toward me with outstretched hands. Ellinor threw as many of her pupils as she could on her assistant, and, with the help of one of the older girls, took my pupils in my absence.
“How radiant you look!” I said as I kissed her. “I was afraid you would be all dragged out with the children.”
“The children,” she said, vaguely, and then flushing like a rosy girl she plunged into stories of the children’s good behaviour. She turned and walked homeward with me. Was it that fleeting brightness in the sky that made her seem so young and bright and strangely changed?
May 15th.
School closed to-day. Commencement was quite a triumph. Monday morning I went to work in the schoolroom, examinations and commencement exercises on hand. Suddenly the play I had seen with Miss Jackson and thought so bad came into my mind. The more I thought of it the better it seemed. I decided on tableaux, my ideas got from that play. There were just fourteen days in which to work it out, but the children hailed it with joy. It was something new; it was something different. Ellinor’s help was invaluable.Marsville was delighted with it. Ellinorischanged. If there was anybody here to love I’d think she was in love. She was running to angles, and now she’s got some pretty curves, the gray hairs are quite hidden by the new way she is doing her lovely, heavy, red-brown hair, and her soft brown eyes—they are looking out on the spring world with a new, wistful expression in them. She smiles so easily and she hums snatches of tender old songs.
May 22d.Midnight.
This afternoon there was an unfamiliar knock at the door and I ran down without waiting for mammy. It was Mr. Elliott. He looked so foreign to the old place, so New Yorkish standing there, that quite without warning, in the way I do things, while my lips were speaking a welcome and he was following me into the sitting-room, something within me was singing: “How could I know I should love thee afar, when I did not love thee anear?” But that something within me was not singing about Mr. Elliott, although I saw the glad light in his eyes. My own eyes saw the sun-shot green May-mist of the trees in Madison Square, the clock’s big face above the treetops, against the sky’s soft blue the radiant, triumphant Diana. My ears heard the roll of wheels on the Avenue, the clang of carson Broadway; my veins felt the beat of the city’s hurrying, feverish life.
Out under the pines where mammy brought tea and helped me, with the dignity of a departed day, I still felt alien to it all. Mr. Elliott praised the beaten biscuit, and she told him as a mark of special favour the story of receiving my great aunt’s teeth when she was dying. I could not seem to belong to the scene—the big waving pine plumes against the spring sky, the ancient house drowsing in peace, the soft sweep of the hills, themountainsagainst the sky like a string of sapphires. But when Mr. Elliott said good-bye, when he caught my hands and poured out a flood of eager words, “Would I? Could I?” I came back to reality.
Did it meanthat, this feel of the city? Could I go back and live there with Mr. Elliott—dear, charming, nice Mr. Elliott. For one swift instant I was swept by his belief in what we together might make of life, and it seemed so infinitely more than I could make of life alone. For one swift instant that old terror—the inevitableness of human change—pierced me like a sword. Always I have felt a contemptuous sort of pity for Jane Joyner, who lives near, toothless and untidy and incapable as she is, with the house running over with dirty children. Was Jane to be pitied? Jane whose youth and beauty were not dead but had passed into another form of life—lived in her children.Was she out of harmony with life’s great laws? Big and fierce my heart cried out, “No!” It was I who was outside of life, not Jane. Her man’s arm went round her shouldersnightswhen she stood over the kitchen stove. Her baby lifted its dirty, loving, laughing little face to hers as it clutched her knees. Taking my lonely after-supper walk I had seen them through the open kitchen door. What had I? A dream that was bodiless, life emptied of the big, vital things. And if I sent Mr. Elliott away as I sent the others, the boy lovers who came over the mountains to tell me what he is telling me now? What have I left that is more than I refuse? In the bare, honest moment I faced it. Bleak and stark in its honesty, the truth faced me. After work hours when I walk in the twilight and look in Jane Joyner’s kitchen the thing that comes close to my heart is a dream without a body—nothing more.
“I thought I was happy until you came along,” Mr. Elliott was saying. “Then I found out how lonely my gayety was.”
He is strong and fine, capable of making a woman happy, and I hold the future of our two lives in my hands. And then he was drawing me to him. Almost, his lips touched mine. The quick revolt, the wave of physical nausea—it was as though an icy, sinister wind had swooped down on my blooming flowers and shrivelled them.
With a desolate little smile I drew back from him, an alien standing outside of all that might have been mine. I bade him good-bye, and to-night, when I walked by Jane’s kitchen, open to the soft night, I turned my eyes away, afraid to look in on the sweet little home scene. In all my life I have never felt so alone.
Wednesday Morning.
Mr. Elliott sent back a wonderful basket of fruit. It came over on the hack and the whole village is agog over it. Thegossiphas disturbed dear old mammy greatly. She suggests that we still the gossip and flatter our neighbours by giving a party. Then they won’t know what to think. I have consented. Mammy is a woman of action. The party comes off this afternoon. The house hums with activity.
Wednesday Afternoon.
The party has passed into history. I got only the littlest taste of the contents of that beautiful basket Mr. Elliott sent me. Everybody was here, and they all seemed to have such a good time. Even the reconciled Ducketts tottered over. What a success I seem to be at reuniting severed hearts. If my book is a failure I may set up an establishment of the sort—go into a trance and vision dazzling futures for people. Well, how do I like the idea? Seven days ago had I put thequestion to myself my spirit would have flung back in bitterness, “Physician, heal thyself.”
For seven nights, no matter which way I willed my feet to go, they have led me past Jane’s kitchen door. Alone in the soft spring darkness, in the soft wet darkness some of the nights, I have faced my life. I have looked in that open door till the bitterness and the loneliness have gone out of me. Last night when her man’s arms went about her as she dished their supper, when her child’s arms reached up to her, I looked in, not in bitterness, not in pity of self, not in aching loneliness, but in love. It is wonderful when you can look in on untidy Janes at their kitchen tasks and feel close to their happiness. Life’s supremest gift is hers. Almost, it was mine. Not a makeshift, not a compromise—life’s supremest gift. Across sunlit waves a boat like a white-winged gull set sail for me. Almost, it reached me. How my heart went out to that white drifting boat of prophecy! How the waves sang! Bobby’sloved one. Sunlit waves and flashing white-winged boat are gone. But the singing soul of those words shall keep my heart young. It shall be tender to the young and happy, pitiful to the old and alone, compassionate to all untouched by love, whether they scoff in unbelief or whether they would lay down their lives for love.
Oh, how tired I am! And how heavy the silence ishere in the bridelike, white loveliness of my May garden! And how this silence differs from its fall silences! The silence holds resignation in the fall—this is tense with expectancy. The snowballs that have come so late this year are swaying, they seem to be beckoning to some one, but there is no wind. And the lilies of the valley, late, too—my flower children delayed their blooming till I came home—are swaying; they are pouring out their fragrance—it is poignantly, deliciously sweet, but I feel no wind.
Something is the matter with this garden and with me. I am quivering all over as if with intense excitement. The party has tired me out. Just then, when John opened the gate, I almost leaped from this bench.
The letters John has brought me are from Mr. Elliott and Dicky. I open Mr. Elliott’s first—a woman always opens a man’s letter first. It is a fine, manly letter, and it ends:
“You said you once knew Bob Haralson. He has been at death’s door—struck down without a moment’s warning—appendicitis—a knife quick or death operation. It was the day you came down from Boston. I remember date because you came down from Boston. Haralson is creeping about. I saw him yesterday.”
The lines of mountains dance dizzily. I shut my eyes—shut out the spring glory, my fingers making a pressing blackness against my eyeballs. I try to imaginethe world this spring day with Bobby gone out of it. Then my heart leaps madly. It is explained—explained.
I can’t sit still, so I climb to the hilltop. I am calmer in motion. I can see the village from the hilltop. It is being claimed by the twilight, the soft, slow, lingering spring twilight. There must be a lot of moisture to make such a brilliant aftermath. The heavens are so pink they have tinged the eastern hills. League on league the cloud waves blush pink as the heart of a seashell. The whole world glows. My mood catches the sky’s glowing mood. It is explained. He has been ill unto death, but he is not dead—he is alive—alive.
Something drops from my belt and I pick it up and stare at it stupidly. It is Dicky’s little letter. Dicky will know about Bobby. She will explain their presence together that night at Mouquin’s.
“Caroline, is your right hand paralyzed that I don’t hear from you? Do a lot of little tow-headed mountaineers and a garden that I know is at its loveliest now mean more to you than I do? I can’t understand your silence. I am coming home. I am to have my vacation now, and I am to keep on having it. Somebody’s with me. He is the secret of the prolonged vacation. I guess it will be in June. That’s the loveliest time of all. He will be here only a day or two, three at the longest, and I hate to think of him at that dinkylittle Marsville hotel. Hotel! Ye gods! Come to New York and we will show you some hotels. Dearest, won’t you, won’t you, have him home with us? There are some such ducks of places to spoon these moonlit nights in that heavenly rose garden of yours.”
Did I cry out in that sharp pain, or was it some wounded thing out there in the shadow of the woods? Steadily I finish the letter. It is to-day—now, at twilight—when the hack gets in, that Dicky and her lover are coming. She apologizes that we do not know earlier, but mammy and I are equal to any emergency. I do feel sorry for mammy, but I walk on straight into the sunset glare, leaving mammy to her fate. That is my only sensation—I am sorry for mammy. She does love to splurge when company comes.
Far down the road I see a buggy. It is coming this way. There are two people in it, but it is too far away to recognize faces. It is two men. It stops. One man gets out, the other turns the buggy around and drives back toward the village. The man who got out of the buggy walks on in the rose-red haze that wraps the world. The lilies of the valley that I thrust in my belt send out a sudden fragrance—it is the trembling of my body that has shaken them. I stop because I can’t walk on. I lean against a friendly tree-trunk.
The man comes on, moving slowly, feebly, I see ashe gets nearer. I think of trivial things, as we do in crisic moments. Bobby is taller than I thought. The hat he is wearing adds distinction to one who is alreadydistingué. The crease in his trousers will be copied by the young men of Marsville. From somewhere in me a faint satisfaction stirs that the party has left me wearing my best new gown, my hair done in a New York way.
Almost at my side Bobby stops, panting a little. I speak first. Women always do. I feel sure Eve opened the conversation when Adam waked from the sleep that deprived him of a rib and supplied him with a wife.
“So you have come again—and not alone this time.” It is not in the least what I meant to say.
“Did you know that I came?” Bobby’s low voice holds a note of surprise. “How did you know? But I suppose the boy told you.”
“I was in the garden. I saw you. I know why you came, and why you left.”
“Why did I leave?”
“You ran from a youthful ideal.”
“Men have done more foolish things,” Bobby’s answer comes gravely.
“And wiser.” I hate the mocking laughter that escapes my lips.
“I don’t understand you.” His face has grownwhiter; it has changed subtly. “Has Elliott been here? Is it Elliott?”
I sweetly assure him that Mr. Elliott has been here, and I manage to leave the impression that he may be coming again.
This time Bobby’s face goes close to black. With a mocking little bow he bids me good-bye, turns, goes down the road. He marches straight ahead. I have never seen a lion stalk through an African jungle, but I think of one as I look at him. Where is he going? Where is Dicky’s lover going? A dumb sort of fright grips me. I spin down the road to where he marches breast forward with never a backward look—if a woman can spin in these narrow-not-made-to-overtake-anybody’s-lover New York frocks.
“Bobby,” I cry, hard upon him, “stop!”
He turns. Not the Bobby of my letters, not the Bobby of my dreams, not the Bobby of Washington Square, a politely impatient-to-be-gone stranger.
Always, it is the unexpected that overtakes me. To my amazed surprise I wet with salty tears my New York finery.
“I’m tired, Bobby,” I gasp. “I’ve been having a party—and I’m not used to having parties. That’s what makes me such a cat. And, oh, Bobby, you’ll have to pardon things—Dicky just sprung your coming on us.”
“Dicky didn’t know that I was coming.” He speaks slowly, he takes my face in his hands and looks down at me, a long, deep look. The hard, black look on his own face has lifted.
As I try to tell him that Dicky didn’t tell me he was ill, that I have just learned it from Mr. Elliott’s letter, as I try to tell him what the bright May world would be to Dicky with him gone out of it, and as I flounder that I hope they will be heavenly happy, I splash more tears on my pretty clothes.
Bobby’s face flashes—all that a woman could want or dream of comes into it.
“Dicky didn’t know I was in the hospital. I went in under an assumed name. When a fellow’s tied up with publishers and theatrical people like I am——” Bobby drops the subject as one that holds no further interest. “If I had died, would it have spoiled the May world for you, Caroline?” There is a sharp note of anxiety in his voice.
“Bobby, Bobby!” I cry, wildly. “Don’t ask me! What have you done with Dicky! Where is Dicky?”
“I am not Dicky’s keeper.” The light glows and glows in his face. “She’s got one, though, and it was odd we should all three have left town together. I smoked like a furnace all the way down as an excuse to keep away from them. Caroline”—Bobby’s arms close about me—“I am not Dicky’s—I am yours.”
Walking home in the twilight that is gray and tender as a dove’s breast, Bobby tells me that hewasafraid the night he ran away. He says he has tried and tried not to love me—that men like him should never marry—that they should live alone on the top of the Flat Iron. “But it is bigger than I,” he says, gravely. “It has swept me to your feet.”
“To my heart,” I correct, happily.
The hack lumbers around the curve, descends upon us. At sight of us Dicky and the strange young man who sits on the back seatwithher—John and Ellinor are on the middle seat—roar with laughter.
“You sly fox!” Dicky cries. “How did you get here? We left him on the train, Caroline, and he sent his regards to you—and he said he was on his way to Colorado.”
“I am,” Bobby boldly declares. “I stopped by to see if Caroline would go with me. As to my getting here first, I live in New York. As rapid transit as is obtainable, say I.”
Dicky flings herself into my arms. “You owe it all to me,” she declares. “I found him deadly tiresome.” She beamed on Bobby. “All his talk was about you.
“You sly fox,” she whirled on him again. “You didn’t need to have me tell you about Caroline. You were hearing from her all the time, now, weren’t you? Why didn’t you tell me, Caroline?”
“I—I—I——” I stammered.
Bobby isn’t timid, he’s bold as a lion. “The reason is obvious,” he declares. “I wouldn’t let her. Had you known that I heard, too, it would have changed everything.”
The others descend from the hack. It goes on with Dicky’s baggage. I realize that John has been an unnecessarily long time helping Ellinor out of the carriage; but there are no surprises left in the world. I greet Dicky’s lover. As we take our leisurely way home I don’t even wonder what mammy will have for supper.
May 30th.
“Day’s at the mornMorning’s at seven;The hillside’s dew-pearled”——
“Day’s at the mornMorning’s at seven;The hillside’s dew-pearled”——
“Day’s at the mornMorning’s at seven;The hillside’s dew-pearled”——
“Day’s at the morn
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled”——
I am just back from taking a look at old Camel Back. The morning’s like an opal—it’s all a shifting mist shot through with sunshine. None of the mountains have shaken off their last night’s mist-blankets but that brave old blessed Camel Back. He knew I’d be up, and he gave me royal greeting. “Well,” he seemed to say, “haven’t I poured all the treasures of the earth perfumed with all the scents of Araby into your outstretched hands?”
I meant to tell Bobby about Camel Back—for so long I have told my fancies to a pictured Bobby—but when I thought of it last night, just before he left for the “dinky” little hotel with Dicky’s doctor—he was busy fitting a piece of cardboard in which he had cut a round hole on a certain finger of my left hand, and, anyway, it is not easy to tell fancies to an eager man who is murmuring realities in one’s ears—like this: “Dearest one, will you hurry, oh, hurry, and get the gingham, and the barred muslin, and the bias bombazine fixed up, and let’s get married quick.”
The morning’s at seven. At eight all of us, Bobby and Dicky’s doctor, Ellinor, too, are going to breakfast in my rose garden. Mammy planned it last night. She came to the sitting-room door and asked them all with the manner of a duchess.
I go to the kitchen door—broiled chickens and waffles, strawberries and cream. “Can I help you, mammy?”
“Mammy don’t need no help. This come while you was gallivantin’ up the lane.” The big, bold, square envelope sets my heart to leaping:
Dearest:I looked into my thought reservoir last night after I left you and discovered that if I hadn’t ever met you before I would have loved you just the same. Is that disloyalty to Carrie with the gold braids and the capricious moods? No, by my halidome, no! I havetwo in my heart—two girls—one the ideal of romantic youth, the other, the completer, sweeter, better beloved Caroline, but no less an ideal. Am I not the richest man in the world? If this be bigamy, give me bigamy or give me death.P.S. I didn’t answer that question last night. Why did the cabby swear at you? Cabbies always swear unless you tip them. But never mind, hereafter I’ll be on hand to do the tipping for you.P.P.S. I want you, my honey.P.P.P.S. I need you.
Dearest:
I looked into my thought reservoir last night after I left you and discovered that if I hadn’t ever met you before I would have loved you just the same. Is that disloyalty to Carrie with the gold braids and the capricious moods? No, by my halidome, no! I havetwo in my heart—two girls—one the ideal of romantic youth, the other, the completer, sweeter, better beloved Caroline, but no less an ideal. Am I not the richest man in the world? If this be bigamy, give me bigamy or give me death.
P.S. I didn’t answer that question last night. Why did the cabby swear at you? Cabbies always swear unless you tip them. But never mind, hereafter I’ll be on hand to do the tipping for you.
P.P.S. I want you, my honey.
P.P.P.S. I need you.
THE END