IIIPERVERSITY OF A TELEPHONE
THE troubled lady began to wish devoutly that the sight of Mrs. Sylvester caressing Mr. Battle had not shocked her into a fluttering and indecisive state of mind;—she should have discussed the event more calmly with Lydia; should have argued against anything precipitate;—and so, as soon as she could, after her preoccupied dinner, she went to the telephone and gave Mrs. Dodge’s number.
Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were dining in town, she was informed; they were going to the theatre afterward and were not expected to return until midnight. This blank wall at once increased Mrs. Cromwell’s inward disturbance, for she was a woman readily tortured by her imagination; and in her mind she began to design terrible pictures of what might now be happening in the house of the Battles. Until she went to the telephone she thought it unlikely that Lydia had acted with such promptness; but after receiving through the instrument the information that no information was to be had for the present, Mrs. Cromwell became certain that Mrs. Dodge had already destroyed Amelia’s peace of mind.
She went away from the telephone, then came back to it, and again sat before the little table that bore it; but she did not at once put its miraculous powers into operation. Instead, she sat staring at it, afraid to employ it, while her imaginings became more piteous and more horrifying. Amelia had no talk except “Mr. Battle says”; she had no thought except “Mr. Battle thinks”; she had no life at all except as part of her husband’s life; and if that were taken away from her, what was left? She had made no existence whatever of her own and for herself, and if brought to believe that she had lost him, she was annihilated.
If the great Battle merely died, Amelia could live on, as widows of the illustrious sometimes do, to be his monument continually reinscribed with mourning tributes; but if a Venetian beauty carried him off in a gondola, Amelia would be so extinct that the act of self-destruction might well be thought gratuitous;—and yet Mrs. Cromwell’s imagination pictured Amelia in the grisly details of its commission by all the usual processes. She saw Amelia drown herself variously; saw her with a razor, with a pistol, with a rope, with poison, with a hat-pin.
Naturally, it became impossible to endure such pictures, and Mrs. Cromwell tremulously picked up the telephone, paused before releasing the curved nickel prong, but did release it, and when a woman’s voice addressed her, “What number, please?” she returned the breathless inquiry: “Is that you, Amelia?” Then she apologized, pronounced a number, and was presently greeted by the response: “Mr. Roderick Battle’s residence. Who is it, please?”
“Mrs. Cromwell. May I speak to Mrs. Battle?”
“I think so, ma’am.”
In the interval of silence Mrs. Cromwell muttered, “Ithinkso” to herself. The maid wasn’t certain;—that was bad; for it might indicate a state of prostration.
“Yes?” said the little voice in the telephone. “Is it Mrs. Cromwell?”
Mrs. Cromwell with a great effort assumed her most smiling and reassuring expression. “Amelia? Is it you, Amelia?”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to tell you again what a lovely impression your essay made on me, dear. I’ve been thinking of it ever since, and I felt you might like to know it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cromwell.”
“Lydia Dodge and I kept on talking about it after you left us this afternoon,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, beaming fondly upon the air above the telephone. “We both said we thought it was the best paper ever read at the club. I—I just wondered if—if Lydia called you up to tell you so, too. Did she?”
“No. No, she didn’t call me up.”
“Oh, didn’t she? I just thought she might have because she was so enthusiastic.”
“No. She didn’t.”
Mrs. Cromwell listened intently, seeking to detect emotion that might indicate Amelia’s state of mind, but Amelia’s voice revealed nothing whatever. It was one of those voices obscured and dwindled by the telephone into dry little metallic sounds; language was communicated, but nothing more, and a telegram from her would have conveyed as much personal revelation. “No, Mrs. Dodge didn’t call me up,” she said again.
Mrs. Cromwell offered some manifestations of mirth, though she intended them to express a tender cordiality rather than amusement; and the facial sweetness with which she was favouring the air before her became less strained; a strong sense of relief was easing her. “Well, I just thought Lydiamight, you know,” she said, continuing to ripple her gentle laughter into the mouthpiece. “She was so enthusiastic, I just thought——”
“No, she didn’t call me up,” the small voice in the telephone interrupted.
“Well, I’m gl——” But Mrs. Cromwell checked herself sharply, having begun too impulsively. “I hope I’m not keeping you from anything you were doing,” she said hastily, to change the subject.
“No, I’m all alone. Mr. Battle is spending the evening with Mrs. Sylvester.”
“What!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed, and her almost convivial expression disappeared instantly; her face became a sculpture of features only. “He is?”
“Yes. He’s finishing the interior of her new house. With important clients like that he always interprets them into their houses you know. He makes a study of their personalities.”
“I—see!” Mrs. Cromwell said. Then, recovering herself, she was able to nod pleasantly and beam again, though now her beaming was rigidly automatic. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. I just wanted to tell you again how immensely we all admired your beautiful essay, and I thought possibly Lydia might have called you up to say so, too, because she fairly raved over it when we were——”
“No.” The metallic small voice said; and it informed her for the fourth time: “She didn’t call me up.” Then it added: “She came here.”
“No!” Mrs. Cromwell cried.
“Yes. She came here,” the voice in the instrument repeated.
“Shedid?”
“Yes. Just before dinner. She came to see me.”
“Oh, my!” Mrs. Cromwell murmured. “What did she say?”
“She was in great trouble about Mr. Dodge.”
“What?”
“She was in a tragic state,” the impersonal voice replied with perfect distinctness. “She was in a tragic state about her husband.”
“About JohnDodge?” Mrs. Cromwell cried.
“Yes. She was hurried and didn’t have time to tell me any details, because they had a dinner engagement in town, and he kept telephoning her they’d be disgraced if she didn’t come home and dress; but that’s what she came to see me about. It seems he’s been misbehaving himself over some fascinating and unscrupulous woman, and Mrs. Dodge thinks he probably intends to ask for a divorce and abandon her. She was in a most upset state over it, of course.”
“Amelia!” Mrs. Cromwell shouted the name at the mouthpiece.
“Yes. Isn’t it distressing?” was the response. “Oh course, I won’t mention it to anybody but you. I supposed you knew all about it since you’re her most intimate friend.”
Mrs. Cromwell made an effort to speak coherently. “Let me try to understand you,” she said. “You say that Lydia Dodge came to you this afternoon——”
“It was really evening,” the voice interrupted, in correction. “Almost seven. And their engagement was in town at half past. That’s why he kept calling her up so excitedly.”
“And she told you,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, “Lydia Dodge told you that her husband, John Dodge, was philandering with——”
“There was no doubt about it whatever,” the voice interrupted. “Some friends of hers had seen an actual caress exchanged between Mr. Dodge and the other woman.”
“What!”
“Yes. That’s what she told me.”
“Wait!” Mrs. Cromwell begged. “Lydia Dodge told you that John Dodge——”
“Yes,” the voice of Amelia Battle replied colourlessly in the telephone. “It seems too tragic, and it was such a shock to me—I never dreamed that people of forty or fifty had troubles like that—but it was what she came here to tell me. Of course, she didn’t have time to tell me much, because she was so upset and Mr. Dodge was in such a hurry for her to come home. I never dreamed there was anything but peace and happiness between them, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” gasped Mrs. Cromwell. “But Amelia——”
“That’s all I know about it, I’m afraid.”
“Amelia——”
“Probably she’ll talk about it to you pretty soon,” Amelia said, at the other end of the wire. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you before she did me; you really know her so much better than I do. I’m afraid I’ll have to go now. One of Mr. Battle’s assistants has just come in and I’m doing some work with him. It was lovely of you to call me up about the little essay, but, of course, that wasallMr. Battle. Good-night.”
Mrs. Cromwell sat staring at the empty mechanism in her hand until it rattled irritably, warning her to replace it upon its prong.
IVA GREAT MAN’S WIFE
SHE had a restless night, for she repeatedly woke up with a start, her eyes opening widely in the darkness of her bedroom; and each time this happened she made the same muffled and incomplete exclamation: “Well, of all——!” Her condition was still as exclamatory as it was anxiously expectant when, just after her nine-o’clock breakfast the next morning, she went to her Georgian drawing-room window and beheld the sterling figure of Mrs. Dodge in the act of hurrying from the sidewalk to the Georgian doorway. Mrs. Cromwell ran to admit her; brought her quickly into the drawing room. “Lydia!” she cried. “What on earthhappened?” For, even if telephones had never been invented, the early caller’s expression would have made it plain that there had been a happening.
“I’d have called you up last night,” the perturbed Lydia began;—“but we didn’t get back till one o’clock, and it was too late. In all my life I never had such an experience!”
“You don’t mean at the theatre or——”
“No!” Mrs. Dodge returned, indignantly. “I mean with that woman!”
“With Amelia?”
“With Amelia Battle.”
“Buttellme,” Mrs. Cromwell implored. “My dear, I’ve been in such a state of perplexity——”
“Perplexity!” her friend echoed scornfully, and demanded: “What sort of state do you thinkI’vebeen in? My dear, I went to her.”
“To Amelia?”
“To Amelia Battle,” Mrs. Dodge said. “I went straight home after I left you yesterday; but I kept thinking about what we’d seen——”
“You mean——” Mrs. Cromwell paused, and glanced nervously through the glass of the broad-paned window beside which she and her guest had seated themselves. Her troubled eyes came to rest upon the pinkish Italian villa across the street. “You mean what we saw—over there?”
“I mean what was virtually an embrace between Roderick Brooks Battle and Mrs. Sylvester under our eyes,” Mrs. Dodge said angrily. “And she looked us square in the face just before she did it! I also mean that both of them showed by their manner that such caresses were absolutely familiar and habitual—and that was allIneeded to prove that the talk about them was only too well founded. So, when I’d thought it over and over—Oh, I didn’t act in haste!—I decided it was somebody’s absolutedutyto prepare Amelia for what I plainly saw was coming to her. Did you ever see anything show more proprietorship than Mrs. Sylvester’s fondling of that man’s shoulder? So, as you had declaredyouwouldn’t go, and although it was late, and Mr. Dodge and I had an important dinner engagement, I made up my mind it had to be done immediately and I went.”
“But what did youtellher?” Mrs. Cromwell implored.
“Never,” said Mrs. Dodge, “never in my life have I had such an experience! I tried to begin tactfully; I didn’t want to give her a shock, and so I tried to begin and lead up to it; but it was difficult to begin at all, because I’d scarcely sat down before she told me my husband had got home and had telephoned to see if I’d reached her house, and he’d left word for me to come straight back home because he was afraid we’d be late for the dinner—and all the time I was trying to talk to her, her maid kept coming in to say he was calling up again, and then I’d have to go andbeseechhim to let me alone for a minute—but he wouldn’t——”
Mrs. Cromwell was unable to wait in patience through these preliminaries. “Lydia! What did youtellher?”
“I’m trying to explain it as well as I can, please,” her guest returned, irritably. “If I didn’t explain how crazily my husband kept behaving you couldn’t possibly understand. He’d got it into his head that wehadto be at this dinner on time, because it was with some people who have large mining interests and——”
“Lydia,whatdid you——”
“I told you I tried to be tactful,” said Mrs. Dodge. “I tried to lead up to it, and I’ll tell you exactly what I said, though with that awful telephone interrupting every minute it was hard to sayanythingconnectedly! First, I told her what a deep regard both of us had for her.”
“Both of you? You mean you and your husband, Lydia?”
“No, you and me. It was necessary to mention you, of course, because of what we saw yesterday.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “Well, go on.”
“I told her,” Mrs. Dodge continued, complying. “I said nobody could have her interests more at heart than you and I did, and that was why I had come. She thanked me, but I noticed a change in her manner right there. I thought she looked at me in a kind of bright-eyed way, as if she were on her guard and suspicious. Ithoughtshe looked like that, and now I’msureshe did. I said, ‘Amelia, I want to put a little problem to you, just to see if you think I’ve done right in coming.’ She said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Dodge,’ and asked me what the problem was.”
“And what was it, Lydia?”
“My dear, will you let me tell you? I said in the kindest way, I said, ‘Amelia, just for a moment let us suppose that my husband were not true to me; suppose he might even be planning to set me aside so that he could marry another woman; and suppose that two women friends of mine, who had my interests dearly at heart, had seen him with this other woman; and suppose her to be a fascinating woman, and that my friends saw with their own eyes that my husband felt her fascination so deeply that anybody could tell in an instant he was actually in love with her;—and,morethan that,’ I said, ‘suppose that these friends of mine saw my husband actually exchanging a caress with this woman, and saw him go off driving with her, with her hand on his shoulder and he showing that he liked it there and was used to having it there;—Amelia,’ I said, ‘Amelia, what would you think about the question of duty for those two friends of mine who had seen such a thing? Amelia,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you think it was the true duty of one or the other of them to come and tell me and warn me and give me time to prepare myself?’ That’s what I said to her.”
“And what did she——”
“She jumped right up and came and threw her arms around me,” said Mrs. Dodge in a strained voice. “I never had such an experience in my life!”
“But what did shesay?”
“She said, ‘You poorthing!’ ” Mrs. Dodge explained irascibly. “She didn’t ‘say’ it, either; she shouted it, and she kept on shouting it over and over. ‘You poorthing!’ And when she wasn’t saying that, she was saying she’d neverdreamedMr. Dodge was that sort of a man, and she made such a commotion I was afraid the neighbours would hear her!”
“But why didn’t you——”
“Idid!” Mrs. Dodge returned passionately. “I told her ahundredtimes I didn’t mean Mr. Dodge; but she never gave me a chance to finish a word I began; she just kept taking on about what a terrible thing it must be for me, and how dreadful it was to think of Mr. Dodge misbehaving like that—I tell you I never in mylifehad such an experience!”
“But why didn’t youmakeher listen, at least long enough to——”
Mrs. Dodge’s look was that of a person badgered to desperation. “Icouldn’t! Every time I opened my mouth she shouted louder than I did! She’d say, ‘You poor thing!’ again, or some more about Mr. Dodge, or she’d want to know if I didn’t need ammonia or camphor, or she’d offer to make beefteafor me! And every minute my husband was making an idiot of himself ringing the Battles’ telephone again. You don’t seem to understand what sort of an experience it was atall! I tell you when I finally had to leave the house she was standing on their front steps shouting after me that she’d never tell anybody a thing about Mr. Dodge unless I wanted her to!”
“It’s so queer!” Mrs. Cromwell said, bewildered more than ever. “If I’d been in your place I know I’d never have come away without making her understand I meant her husband, not mine!”
“ ‘Making her understand!’ ” Mrs. Dodge repeated, mocking her friend’s voice—so considerable was her bitterness. “You goose! You don’t suppose she didn’t understandthat, do you?”
“You don’t think——”
“Absolutely! She had been expecting it to happen.”
“What to happen?”
“Somebody’s coming to warn her about Mrs. Sylvester. She did the whole thing deliberately. Absolutely! She understood I was talking about Battle as well as you do now. Of course,” said Mrs. Dodge, “ofcourseshe understood!”
Then both ladies seemed to ponder, and for a time uttered various sounds of marvelling; but suddenly Mrs. Cromwell, whose glance had wandered to the window, straightened herself to an attentive rigidity. Her guest’s glance followed hers, and instantly became fixed; but neither lady spoke, for a sharply outlined coincidence was before them, casting a spell upon them and holding them fascinated.
Across the street a French car entered the driveway of the stucco house, and a Venetian Beauty descended, wrapped in ermine too glorious for the time and occasion. Out of the green door of the house eagerly came upon the balustraded terrace a dark man, poetic and scholarly in appearance, dressed scrupulously and with a gardenia, like a bridegroom’s flower, in his coat. In his hand he held an architect’s blue print; but for him and for the azure-eyed lady in ermine this blue print seemed not more important, nor less, than that book in which the two lovers of Rimini read no more one day. They glanced but absently at the blue print; then the man let it dangle from his hand while he looked into the lady’s eyes and she into his; and they talked with ineffable gentleness together.
Here was an Italian episode most romantic in its elements: a Renaissance terrace for the trysting place of a Renaissance widow and a great man, two who met and made love under the spying eyes of femalesbirrilurking in a window opposite; but it was Amelia Battle who made the romantic episode into a realistic coincidence. In a vehicle needful of cleansing and polish she appeared from down the long street, sitting in the attentive attitude necessary for the proper guidance of what bore her, and wearing (as Mrs. Cromwell hoarsely informed Mrs. Dodge) “her market clothes.” That she was returning from a market there could be no doubt; Amelia had herself this touch of the Renaissance, but a Renaissance late, northern, and robust. Both of the rear windows of her diligent vehicle framed still-life studies to lure the brush of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lowland painters: the green tops of sheaved celery nodded there; fat turnips reposed in baskets; purple ragged plumes of beets pressed softly against the glass; jugs that suggested buttermilk and cider, perhaps both, snugly neighboured the hearty vegetables, and made plain to all that the good wife in the forward seat had a providing heart for her man and her household.
The ladies in the Georgian window were truly among those who cared to look. “Oh,my!” Mrs. Cromwell whispered.
Amelia stopped her market machine and jumped out in her market clothes at the foot of the driveway, where stood Mrs. Sylvester’s French car in the care of its two magnificent young men. There was an amiable briskness, cheerful and friendly, in the air with which Amelia trotted up the terrace steps and joined the romantic couple standing beside the balustrade. The three entered into converse.
Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge became even more breathless; and then, with amazement, and perhaps a little natural disappointment, they saw that the conversation was not acrimonious—at least, not outwardly so. They marked that Amelia, smiling, took the lead in it, and that she at once set her hand upon her husband’s arm—and in a manner of ownership so masterful and complete that the proprietorship assumed by Mrs. Sylvester in the same gesture, the preceding day, seemed in comparison the temporary claim of a mere borrower. And Mrs. Cromwell marked also a kind of feebleness in the attitude of the Venetian Beauty: Mrs. Sylvester was smiling politely, but there was a disturbed petulance in her smile. Suddenly Mrs. Cromwell perceived that beside Amelia, for all Amelia’s skimpiness, Mrs. Sylvester looked ineffective. With that, glancing at the sturdy figure of Lydia Dodge, Mrs. Cromwell came to the conclusion that since Amelia had been too much for Lydia, Amelia would certainly be too much for Mrs. Sylvester.
“Look!” said Lydia.
Amelia and her husband were leaving the terrace together. Battle walked to the “sedan” with her and held the door open for her; she climbed to the driver’s seat and seemed to wait, with assurance, for him to do more than hold the door. And at this moment the seriousness of his expression was so emphasized that it was easily visible to the Georgian window, though only his profile was given to its view as he looked back, over his shoulder, at the glazing smile of the lady upon the terrace. He seemed to waver, hesitating; and then, somewhat bleakly, he climbed into the “sedan” beside his wife.
“Open it!” Mrs. Dodge was struggling with a catch of the Georgian window.
“What for?”
“She’s shouting again! I’vegotto hear her!” Mrs. Dodge panted; and the window yielded to her exertions.
Amelia’s attitude showed that she was encouraging her machine to begin operations, while at the same time she was calling parting words to Mrs. Sylvester. “Good-bye!” Amelia shouted. “Mr. Battle says he’s beensoinspired by your sympathy in his work! Mr. Battle says that’ssonecessary to an architect! Mr. Battle saysnoartist can ever evenhopeto do anything great without it! Mr. Battle says——”
But here, under the urging of her foot, the engine burst into a shattering uproar: ague seized the car with a bitter grip; convulsive impulses of the apparatus to leap at random were succeeded by more decorous ideas, and then the “sedan” moved mildly forward; the vegetables nodded affably in the windows, and the Battles were borne from sight.
“I see,” said Lydia Dodge, moving back to her chair. “I understand now.”
“You understand what?” her hostess inquired, brusquely, as she closed the Georgian window.
“I understand what I just saw. I can’t tell you exactly how or why, but it was plainlythere—in Roderick Brooks Battle’s look, in his slightest gesture. We were absolutely mistaken to think it possible. He’ll never ask Amelia to step aside: he’ll never leave her. And however much he philanders,she’llnever leavehim, either. She’ll go straight on the way she’s always gone.He’sshown us that, andshe’sshown us that.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Cromwell inquired; “why is it? You say you understand.”
“It’s because he knows that between his Venetian romance and his press agent he’s got to take the press agent. He’s had sense enough to see he mightn’t be a great man at all without his press agent—and he’d rather keep on being a great man. And Amelia knows she’s getting too skimpy-looking to get a chance to make a great man out of anybodyelse; so she wouldn’t let me tell her about him, because she’s going to stick to him!”
At this Mrs. Cromwell made gestures of negation and horror, though in the back of her mind, at that moment, she was recalling her yesterday’s thought that Lydia’s sense of duty was really Lydia’s pique. “Lydia Dodge!” she cried, “I won’t listen to you! Don’t you know you’re taking the lowest, unchristianest, vilest possible view of human nature?”
Mrs. Dodge looked guilty, but she decided to offer a plea in excuse. “Well, I suppose that may be true,” she said. “But sometimes it does seem about the only way to understand people!”
VONE OF MRS. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTERS
IN THE spacious suburb’s most opulent quarter, where the houses stood in a great tract of shrubberies, gardens, and civilized old woodland groves, there were many happily marriageable girls; and one, in particular, was supremely equipped in this condition, for she had what the others described as “the best of everything.” In the first place, they said, Anne Cromwell had “looks”; in the second place, she had “money,” and in the third she had “family,” by which they meant the background prestiges of an important mother and several generations of progenitors affluently established upon this soil.
Sometimes they added a word or two about her manners, though a middle-aged listener might not have divined that the allusion was to manners.
“She manages wonderf’ly,” they said. Amiably reserved, and never an eager contestant in the agonizing little competitions that necessarily engage maidens of her age, she was not merely fair but generous to her rivals. “She can afford to be!” they cried, thus paying tribute. Her fairness prevailed, too, among her suitors: not one could say she favoured him more than another; but like a young princess, as politic as she was well bred and genuinely kind, she showed an impartial friendliness to everybody.
Even without her background she was the most noticeable young figure in the suburb, but never because she did anything to make herself conspicuous. At the Green Hills Country Club the eye of a stranger, watching the dancing on a summer night, would not immediately distinguish an individual from the mass. As the dancers went lightly interweaving over the floor of a roofless pavilion, where the foliage of great beech trees hung trembling above white balustrades and Venetian lamps, the spectator’s first glance from the adjoining veranda caught only the general aspect of carnival: the dancers were like a confusion of gaily coloured feathers blowing and whirlpooling across a dim tapestry. But presently, as he looked, rhythms and shifting designs would appear in the sparkling fluctuation; points of light would separate themselves, taking individual contour, and the brightest would be a lovely girl’s head of “gold cooled in moonlight.”
Then it would be observed that toward this bright head darker ones darted and zigzagged through the crowd more frequently than toward any other, as the ardent youths plunged to “cut in”; and when the music stopped the lovely girl was not for an instant left to the single devotion of her partner. Other girls, as well as the young men, flocked about her, and wherever she moved there seemed to be something like a retinue. Thus the first question of the stranger, looking on, came to be expected as customary—almost inevitable, “Who is that?” The reply was as invariable, delivered with the amused condescension of a native receiving tribute to his climate or public monuments. “That’s what visitors always ask first. It’s Anne Cromwell.”
Mrs. Cromwell, sitting among contemporaries on the veranda that overlooked the dancing-floor, had often heard both the question and the answer, and although she was one of those mothers known as “sensible,” she never heard either without a natural thrill of pride. But she was tactful enough to conceal her feeling from the mothers of other girls, and usually laughed deprecatingly, implying that she knew as well as any one how little such ephemeral things signified. Anne had her own deprecating laughter for tributes, and the most eager flatterer could not persuade her to the air of accepting them seriously; so that both mother and daughter, appearing to set no store by Anne’s triumphs, really made them all the more secure. It was a true instinct guiding them, the same that prevailed with Cæsar when thrice he refused the crown; for what hurts our little human hearts, when we watch a competitor’s triumph, is his pride and his pleasure in it. If he can persuade us that it brings him neither we will not grudge it to him, but may help him to greater.
Moreover, both Anne and her mother believed themselves to be entirely genuine in their deprecation of Anne’s preëminence, and, when they were alone together, talked tributes over with the same modest laughter they had for them in company. Yet Mrs. Cromwell never omitted to tell Anne of any stranger’s “Who is that?” nor of all the other pleasing things said to her, or in her hearing, of her daughter. And, on her own part, Anne laughed and told of the like things that had been said to her, or that she had overheard.
“Of course, it doesn’t mean anything,” she would add. “I just thought I’d tell you.”
For the truth was that Anne’s triumphs were the breath of life to both mother and daughter, and they were doomed to make the ancient discovery that our dearest treasures are those that are threatened.
The threat was perceived by Mrs. Cromwell upon one of those summer nights so exquisite that we call them “unreal,” because they belong to perished romance, and we have learned to imagine that what is real must be unlovely. Only the relics of a discredited sentimental epoch could go forth under the gold-pointed canopy of such a night, and sigh because the stars are ineffable. Mrs. Cromwell was such a relic, and, being in remote attendance upon her daughter at the country club, she had gone after dinner to walk alone upon the links in the starlight. In an old-fashioned mood, she naturally wanted to get away from the dance music of the open-air pavilion; but, when she returned, her shadow from the rising moon preceded her, and she decided that even the tomtoms and war horns of the young people’s favourite “orchestra” could never entirely ruin the moon. Then, instead of joining any of the groups upon the veranda, she went to an easy chair, aloof in a shadowy corner, where she could see the dancers and be alone to watch Anne.
She looked down a little wistfully. Only a year or so ago she had thus watched her oldest daughter, Mildred, now a matron, and in time she would probably see her youngest, the schoolgirl, Cornelia, dancing here. But Anne, though the mother strove not to know it, was her dearest, and the period of eligible maidenhood, like any other period, is not long. Mrs. Cromwell was wistful because she thought it would not be really long before Anne might sit here to watch the maiden dancing of a daughter of her own.
The pavilion was a little below the level of the veranda, and almost at once her eye found the dominant fair head it sought. Anne was talking as she danced, smiling serenely, a graceful young figure, shapely and tall, with a hint of the contented ampleness that would come later, as it had come to her mother. Mrs. Cromwell, seeing Anne’s smile, smiled too, in her seclusion, and with the same serenity; though an enemy might have said that these two smiles partook of the same complacency. However, at that moment Mrs. Cromwell could not have imagined the existence of an enemy: she had no conception that there could be in the world such a thing as an enemy to herself or to her daughter.
She was a little sorry that Anne wasn’t dancing with young Harrison Crisp. She liked to see Anne dancing with any “nice boy,” but best of all with young Crisp, and this was not only because the two were harmoniously matched as dancers, as well as in other ways, but because the mother had comprehended that this young man might prove to be her daughter’s preference for more than dancing. Mrs. Cromwell was not anxious to see Anne married; she wished her to prolong the pretty time of girlhood; but any mother must have been pleased to see so splendid a young man place himself at her daughter’s disposal. Mrs. Cromwell wondered where he was this evening, and she had just begun to look for him among the dancers when strangers intruded upon her retreat.
She heard unfamiliar voices behind her, and then a small group of middle-aged people drew up wicker chairs to the veranda railing that overlooked the dancing-floor. Mrs. Cromwell gave them a side glance and perceived that they were visitors, “put up” at the club, for this was an organization closely guarded, and she knew all of the members. The newcomers sat near her, and though she would have preferred her seclusion to remain secluded, she could not help waiting, with a little motherly satisfaction, to hear them speak of her Anne, as strangers inevitably must.
And presently she smiled in the darkness, thinking herself rewarded; for a man’s voice, deeply impressed, inquired: “Whoisthat wonderful girl?”
In the light of the moment’s impending revelation, the mother’s smile upon Mrs. Cromwell’s half-parted lips, as she waited for the reply, becomes a little pathetic.
“Why, it’sSallie, of course!”
This strange answer arrested Mrs. Cromwell’s smile, of which reluctant and mirthless vestiges remained for a moment or two before vanishing into the contours that mark an astounded disapproval. Then she slowly turned her head and looked at these queer visitors, and her strong impression was that the two middle-aged women and their escort, a stout elderly man in white flannels, were “very ordinary looking people.”
Their chairs were within a dozen feet of hers, but they sat in profile to her, and possibly were unaware of her, or were aware of her but vaguely. For strangers in a strange place are often subject to such an illusion of detachment as these displayed, and seem to feel that they may speak together as freely as if they alone understood language. But, of course, to Mrs. Cromwell’s way of thinking, the greater illusion of the present group was in believing that somebody named Sallie was a wonderful girl. She failed to identify this pretender: none of her friends had a daughter named Sallie, and Anne had never spoken of any Sallie.
“I declare I didn’t recognize her!” the elderly man said, chuckling. “Who’d have thought it? Sallie!”
The woman who sat next him laughed triumphantly. “I don’t wonder you didn’t recognize her,” she said. “It’s six years since you saw her, and she was only fourteen then. I guess she’s changedsome—what?”
“Well, ‘some’!” he agreed. “She makes the rest of ’em look like flivvers.”
The second of the two women tapped his head with her fan. “George, I guess you never thought you’d be the uncle of a peach like that!”
“Well, I’m not as surprised to be the uncle of a peach,” he said, with renewed chuckling, “as I am to see you the aunt of one! I’m kind of surprised to have Jennie, here, turn out to be the mother of one, too. You certainly never showed any such style as that when you were young, Jennie! Why, there ain’t a girl in that whole bunch to hold a candle to her! She’s a two-hundred-carat blazer and makes the rest of ’em look like what you see on a ten-cent-store counter! You heard me yourselves: the very first thing I said was, ‘Whoisthat wonderful girl?’ And I didn’t even know it was Sallie. I guess that shows!”
Sallie’s mother laughed excitedly. “Oh, we’re used to it, George! She’s never gone a place these last three years she didn’t put it all over the other girls in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! The boys go crazy over her as soon as they see her, even the ones that are engaged to other girls, and a few that are married to the other girls, too! We’ve had some funny times, I tell you, George!”
“I expect so!” he chuckled. “I guess you’re fixing for her to pick a good one, all right, Jennie!”
“She don’t need me to do any fixing for her,” Sallie’s mother explained, gaily. “She’s got a mighty good head on her, and I guess she knows she can choose anything she decides she wants. Look at her now.” She laughed in loud triumph as she spoke, and pointed to the pavilion.
Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes followed the direction of the pointing forefinger and saw a stationary nucleus among the swirl of dancers—a knot of young men gathered round a girl and engaged in obvious expostulation. The disagreement was so pronounced, in fact, as to resemble a dispute; for it involved more gesturing than is usually displayed in the mere arguments of members of the northern races;—“cutting in” to dance with this girl was apparently a serious matter.
She was a laughing, slender creature, with hints of the glow of rubies in the corn-silk brown of her hair; and the apple-green thin silk of her sparse dancing dress was the right complement for her dramatic vividness. Brilliant eyed, her face alive with little ecstasies of merriment as the debaters grew more and more emphatic, she might well have made an observer think of “laughing April on the hills”—an April with July in her hair and a ring of solemn young fauns disputing over her.
She did not allow their disagreement to reach a crisis, however, though the fauns were so earnest as to seem to threaten one;—she placed a slim hand upon the shoulder of her interrupted partner, whose arm had been all the while tentatively about her waist, and began to dance with him. But over her shoulder as she went, she flung a look and a word to the defeated, who dispersed thoughtfully, with the air of men not by any means abandoning their ambitions.
Then the coronal of ruby-sprinkled hair was seen shuttling rhythmically among the dancers; and such a glowing shuttle the eye of a spectator must follow. This pagan April with her flying grace in scant apple-green emerged from the other dancers as the star emerges from the other actors in a play; and only mothers of other girls could have failed to perceive that any stranger’s first question must inevitably be, “Who isthat?”
Mrs. Cromwell had no such perception;—her glance, a little annoyed, sought her daughter and easily found her. Anne was dancing with young Hobart Simms, long her most insignificant and humblest follower. Mrs. Cromwell thought of him as “one of the nice boys”; but she also thought of him as “poor little Hobart,” for only two things distinguished him, both unfortunate. His father had lately failed in business, so that of all the “nice boys,” Hobart was the poorest; but, what was more to the point in Mrs. Cromwell’s reflections just then, of all the “nice boys” he was the shortest. He was at least four inches shorter than Anne, and it seemed to the mother that the contrast in height made Anne look too large and somehow too placid. Mrs. Cromwell wanted Anne to be kind, but she decided to warn her against dancing with Hobart: there are contrasts that may bring even the most graceful within the danger of looking a little ridiculous.
Anne was at her best when she danced with the tall and romantically dark Harrison Crisp; but unfortunately this delinquent had been discovered: he was the triumphing partner who had carried off the young person called Sallie. Mrs. Cromwell might have put it the other way, however: she might have looked upon the episode as the carrying off of young Crisp by this froward Sallie.
Sallie’s mother appeared to take this view, herself. “Look at that!” she cried. “Look at the state she’s got that fellow in she’s dancing with! Look at the way he’slookingat her, will you!” And again she gave utterance to the loud and excitedly triumphant laugh that not only offended the ears of Mrs. Cromwell but disquieted her more than she would have thought possible, half an hour earlier. It seemed to her that she had never before heard so offensive a laugh.
“Did you ever see anything to beat it?” Sallie’s mother inquired hilariously. “He looks at her that way the whole time—except when she’s dancing with somebody else. Then he stands around and looks at her as if he had an awful pain! She’s got him so he won’t dance with anybody else. It’s a scream!” And here, in her mirthful excitement, she slapped the stout uncle’s knee; for Sallie’s mother made it evident that she was one of those who repeat their own youth in the youth of a daughter, and perhaps in a daughter’s career fulfil their own lost ambitions. She became more confidential, though her confidential air was only a gesture; she leaned toward her companions, but did not take the trouble to lower her voice.
“He’s been to the house to see her four times since Monday. Last week he had her auto riding every single afternoon. The very day hemether he sent her five pounds of——”
“Who is he?” the uncle inquired. “He’s a finelookingfellow, all right, but is he——”
Sallie’s mother took the words out of his mouth. “Ishe?” she cried. “I guess you’llsayhe is! Crisp Iron Works, and his father’s made him first vice-president and secretary already—only two years out of college!”
“Sallie like him?”
“She’s got ’emallgoing,” the mother laughed;—“but he’s the king. I guess she don’t mind keeping him standing on his head awhile though!” Again she produced the effect of lowering her voice without actually lowering it. “They say he was sort of half signed up for somebody else. When we first came here you couldn’t see anything but this Anne Cromwell. She’s one of these highbrow girls—college and old family and everything—and you’d thought she was the whole place. Sallie only needed about three weeks!” And with that Sallie’s mother was so highly exhilarated that she must needs slap George’s knee once more. “Sallie’s got her in the back row to-night, where she belongs!”
The aunt and uncle joined laughter with her, and were but vaguely aware that the lady near them had risen from her easy chair. She passed by them, bestowing upon them a grave look, not prolonged.
“Who’s all that?” the stout uncle inquired, when she had disappeared round a corner of the veranda. “Awful big dignified looking party,I’dcall her,” he added. “Who is she?”
“There’s a lot of that highbrow stuff around here,” said Sallie’s mother;—“but, of course, I don’t get acquainted as fast as Sallie. I don’t know who she is, but probably I’ll meet her some day.”
If Mrs. Cromwell had overheard this she might have responded, mentally, “Yes—at Philippi!” For it could be only on the field of battle that she would consent to meet “such rabble.” She said to herself that she dismissed them and their babblings permanently from her mind; and, having thus dismissed them, she continued to think of nothing else.
Her old-fashioned mood was ruined; so was the moon, and so was her evening. She went home early, and sent her car back to wait for Anne.