FLAG DAY
Now, according to my ethics, there are two kinds of men who go to
daylight parties--idiots and those that are dragged there by their
wives.
I had scarcely crossed the lawn of Seven Oaks and found for myself a
modest place beside the speaker's stand--which was garlanded with as
many different kinds of flags as there were rats in Hamelin Town--when
I observed that this present congregation held a fair sprinkling of
each kind.
But these held my attention for only a moment--because of the house in
the background, and the trees overhead. (To be candid, Mrs. Hiram
Walker's country place is not exactly a soothing retreat to visit
when temptation is barking at your heels like a little hungry dog--and
the desire of your heart begins with H.)
"House that's a Home" might have been written on the sign-board of the
car-station much more truthfully than "Seven Oaks"--for only the
immense patriarchal ones were included in the "Seven" there being
hordes of lesser ones which were no more mentioned than children are
when they're getting big enough to be paying railroad fare. The grove
was well cared for, but not made artificial, and even the
luxuriousness of the house itself could not hurt the charm, for the
Hiram Walkers were human beings before they were society column
acrobats.
Our families had always been friends, so I happened to know that years
and years ago, when Mr. Walker was a clerk in an insurance
office--with a horse and buggy for business through the week and joy
unconfined on Sunday--they had been in the habit of haunting this
spot, he and his slim young wife--bringing a basket full of supper
and thrusting the baby's milk bottle down into the ice-cream freezer.
Then, there were more years, of longing and saving; they bought the
hill, patiently enduring a period of blue-prints and architectural
advice before the house was built. By this time Mrs. Walker's slimness
was gone, and Mr. Walker had found out the vanity of hair tonics--but
the house was theirs at last. It was big and very beautiful--roomy,
rather than mushroomy--and thoughtful, rambling, old-timey, spreading
out a great deal of portico to the kiss of the sun. Brown-hooded monks
and clanking beads ought, by rights, to have gone with that portico.
Then, the June sunshine was doing such wonders with the oaks, great
and small, along the hillsides!
It touched up, with a tinge of glory, even the shining motor-cars in
the driveway. There were dozens of them--limousines, touring cars,
lady-like coupés--with their lazy, half-asleep attendants, and the
regularity of their unbroken files, their dignity, their quietness,
and the glitter of the sun against their metal gave them something of
a martial aspect. The silver sheen of the lamps and levers was brought
out in a manner to suggest a line of marching men, silent, but very
potent--and enjoying more than a little what they offered to view, the
dazzle of helmet, sword and coat-of-mail.
The beauty of it all--the softened glory of the shade in which I sat
making me feel that I was a spectator at a tournament--cast a spell
over me, for I never find it very hard to fall spellbound. Isn't it
funny that when you're possessed of an intelligence which has fits of
St. Vitus' dance they call it Imagination?--That's the kind mine
is--jerky and unreliable. It is the kind of imagination which can take
a dried-up acorn and draw forth a medieval forest; or gaze upon a
rusty old spur and live over again the time when knights were bold.
But to get back to "those present."
First of all, I noted Oldburgh's best-known remittance man. I noted
him mentally, mind you, not paragraphically, for they never made me do
the real drudgery of the society page. He was sitting beside his mama,
swinging her gauze fan annoyingly against her lorgnette chain. His
divorce the year before had come near uniting Church and State, since
it's a fact that nothing so cements conflicting bodies like the
uprising of a new common foe; and he had sinned against both
impartially. After him came two or three financial graybeards; three
or four yearling bridegrooms, not broken yet to taking the bit between
their teeth and staying rebelliously at the office; a habitual
"welcomer to our city"--Major Harvey Coleman, a high officer in the
Sons of the American Revolution, and the pièce de résistence of this
occasion--then--then--!
Well, certainly the impassive being next him was the most
unsocial-looking man I had ever had my eyes droop beneath the gaze of!
He was sitting in the place of honor--in the last chair of the first
row--but despite this, he so clearly did not belong at that party,
and he so clearly wished himself away that I--well, I instantly began
searching through the crowds to find a woman with handcuffs! I felt
sure that, whoever she might be--she hadn't got him there any other
way!
And yet--and yet--(my thoughts were coming in little dashing jerks
like that) he _was_ rather too big for any one woman to have handled
him!
I decided this after another look and another droop of my own eyes,
for he was still looking--and that was what I decided about him
first--that he was very _big_! Then misbehaving brown hair came next
into my consciousness. It came to top off a picture which for a moment
caused me to wonder whether he was really a flesh-and-blood man at
Mrs. Walker's reception, or the spirit of some woodsman--come again,
after many years, to haunt the grove of the Seven Oaks.
His New York clothes didn't make a bit of difference--except to spoil
the illusion a little. They were all light gray, except for a glimpse
of blue silk hose, and their perfection only served to remind you that
it was a pity for a man who looked like _that_ to dress like _that_!
Modern man has but one artistic garment--a bathrobe; yet it wouldn't
have relieved my feelings any if this man had been dressed in one. For
he wasn't artistic--and certainly he wasn't modern!
Still, I felt the pity of it all, for he ought to have had better
perceptions. He ought to have had his clothes and cosmic consciousness
match! He ought to have been dressed in a coat of goatskin--and his
knees ought to have been bare--and the rawhide thongs of his moccasins
ought to have been strong and firm!
I had just reached this point in my plans for the change in his
wardrobe, when our hostess bustled up and shooed me out of my quiet
corner.
"Grace," she whispered, "move out a bit, will you, and let me crowd a
man in over there--"
"In here?"
She nodded.
"Where he can't _escape_!" she explained.
I gathered up my opened sheet of copy paper and moved obediently into
the next chair, which she had indicated.
"That's right--thank you! I've found out by experience that if you let
certain suspicious characters linger on the ragged edges of a crowd
like this they're sure to disappear."
Then she turned and beckoned to my Fifth-Avenue-looking
backwoodsman--with a smile of triumph.
"_Him?_" I asked in surprise.
She was looking in his direction, so failed to see the expression of
my face.
"It's no more than he deserves--having this American Revolution rubbed
in on him," she observed absently. "I have never worked so hard in my
life over any one man as I have over this identical Maitland Tait!"
I saw him rise and come toward her--then I began having trouble with
my throat. I couldn't breathe very easily.
"Maitland Tait!" I gasped.
"Yes--_the_ Maitland Tait!"
Her voice sounded with a brass-band echo of victory.
"But how did you--"
"By outwitting Pollie Kendall--plague take her!"
The man was coming leisurely, stopping once to speak to one of the
graybeard financiers.
"Have you met him?" Mrs. Walker asked carelessly, as he approached.
"No."
She turned to him.
"I'm going to put you in here--where you'll have to stay," she
laughed, her big, heavy frame looking dwarfed beside his own towering
height.
"I wasn't going to run away."
"No? You can't always tell--and I thought it safe to take every
precaution, for this lecture may be long, and it's certain to be
irritating to one of your nationality.--In this location you'll be in
the clutches of the Press, you see, and--by the way, you must meet
Miss Christie!--Mr. Tait, Miss Christie!"
His face was still perfectly impassive, and he bowed gravely--with
that down-to-the-belt grace which foreigners have. I nodded the pink
satin rose on my hat in his direction. This was all! Neither made any
further demonstration than that!--And to think that since Creation's
dawn--the world over--the thing is done just as idly and carelessly as
that! "Mr. Tait, Miss Christie!"--These are the words which were
said--and, dear me, all the days of one's life ought to be spent in
preparation for the event!
"You are a Daughter of the Revolution, I presume?" his voice finally
asked me--a deep clear voice, which was strong enough to drown out the
Wagnerian processionals beating at that moment against my brain, and
to follow me off on the mother-of-pearl cloud I had embarked upon. It
was a glorious voice, distinctly un-American, but with the suggestion
of having the ability to do linguistic contortions. He looked like a
man who had traveled far--over seas and deserts--and his voice
confirmed it. It proclaimed that he could bargain with equal ease in
piasters and pence. Still, it was a big wholesome voice. It matched
the coat of goatskin, the bare knees and the moccasins I had planned
for him.
"Yes, I am," I answered.
Our eyes met for an instant, as he disengaged his gaze from that
ten-barred insignia on my coat. Far, far back, concealed by his dark
iris, was a tinge of amused contempt.
"Then I dare say you're interested in this occasion?" he inquired. I
shouldn't say that he inquired, for he didn't. His tone held a
challenge.
"No, indeed, I'm not!" I answered foolishly. "I came only because I
have to write up Major Coleman's speech for my paper. I am a special
writer for the _Herald_."
And it was then that he smiled--really smiled. I saw a transformation
which I had never seen in any other man's face, for with him a smile
escapes! There is a breaking up of the ruggedness, an eclipse of the
stern gravity for a moment, and--no matter how much you had cared for
these an instant before--you could not miss them then--not in that
twinkling flood of radiance!
"Oh--so you're not an ancestor-worshiper?"
"No."
"But I thought Americans were!" he insisted.
"Americans?" I repeated loftily. "Why, of course, that's an
English--religion."
"Not always," he answered grimly, and the Italian band stationed
behind the clump of boxwood cut short any further conversation.
I was glad, for I did not want to talk to him then. I merely wanted to
stand off--and look at him--and tell myself what manner of man he must
be.
To do this I glanced down at my copy paper, with one eyelid raised in
favor of his profile. An ancestor-worshiper? Absurd! Ancestors were
quite out of the question with him, I felt sure. There was something
gloriously _traditionless_ about his face and expansive frame. But his
hands? Those infallible records of what has gone before?--I dropped my
eyes to their normal position. His hands were _good_! They were big
and long and brown--that shade of brownness that comes to a meerschaum
pipe after it has been kissed a time or two by nicotine. And his hair
was brown, too light by several shades to match with his very dark
eyes, but it likely looked lighter on account of its conduct, standing
up, and away, and back from his face. His complexion spoke of an
early-to-bed and early-to-tub code of ethics. His nose and mouth were
well in the foreground.
"You are a man who cares nothing at all for your ancestors--but you'll
care a great deal for your descendants!" was the summing up I finally
made of him.
At the close of the band's Hungarian Rhapsody he leaned over and
whispered to me.
"Did you say the _Herald_?" he asked.
"Yes."
"I have had my--attention called to your paper recently," he said, in
so serious a tone that I was compelled to look up and search for the
smile which I felt must lurk behind it. And when I saw it there I felt
reassured, and smiled in response.
"So they told me at the office," I said with great cordiality. "Is it
three or four of our reporters you've thrown down your front steps?"
"Oh, I haven't got close enough to them to throw them down the steps,"
he disclaimed quickly. "That's one thing you have to guard against
with reporters. They've got you--if they once see the whites of your
eyes!"
I felt it my duty to bristle, in defense of my kind.
"Not unless your eyes _talk_," I said. Then, when he stared at me in
uncertainty for a moment, I dropped my own eyes again, for I felt
that they were proclaiming their convictions as loudly as a Hyde Park
suffragette meeting.
The band at that moment struck up _The Star-Spangled Banner_ in a
manner to suggest the president's advent into the theater, and I
searched in my bag for my pencil. I had seen the lecturer cough.
"I say--how long is this convocation supposed to last?" Maitland Tait
inquired in a very inconspicuous whisper, as the white-flanneled lion
of the affair arose from his chair and became the cynosure of
lorgnettes.
"Well, this talk will absorb about forty-five minutes, I should
hazard," I said. Already I had had the forethought to jot down the
usual opening: "Ladies and Gentlemen--Daughters and Sons of the
American Revolution: It is with a feeling of profoundest pleasure that
I have the privilege of being with you to-day," etc. So for the moment
my attention was undivided.
"And there will be other talks?"
"Yes."
"And a walk through the gardens, I believe Mrs.--Mrs. Walker said?"
"Probably so. The Seven Oaks gardens are very lovely in June."
At the mention of gardens his eyes wandered, with what I fancied was a
tinge of homesickness, toward the colorful flowering spaces beyond the
box hedges. There were acres and acres of typical English gardens back
there; and the odor of the sweet old-fashioned shrubs came in on
gentle heat waves from the open area. He looked as if he would like to
be back there in those English-looking gardens--with all the people
gone.