BLUE PETER
Peter Rolls, Sr., and Peter junior were both unhappy in vastly
different ways. One difference was that Peter junior knew he was
unhappy and suspected why. Peter senior had no idea that what he
suffered from was unhappiness. He thought that it was indigestion, and
he supposed that feeling as he felt was the normal state of men
passing beyond middle age. When you were growing old you could not
expect to keep much zest or personal interest in life or to enjoy
things, so he had always been told; and dully, resignedly, he believed
what "they" said.
If any one had told him that he was a miserable man he would have been
angry, and also surprised. Why the dickens should he be miserable? He
considered himself one of the most successful men in New York, and his
greatest pleasure was in recalling his successes, step by step, from
the time before he got his foot on the first rung of the ladder all
the way up to the top.
Often he lay awake at night pondering on those first days and first
ambitions. If he began to think of them when he went to bed it was
fatal. He became so pleasantly excited, and the past built itself up
so realistically all about him, that he could not go to sleep for
hours. What a sensational "bed book" is to some tired brains, that
was his past to the head of the Hands. Besides, he had everything in
the world that he or anybody else (it seemed to him) could possibly
want. Perhaps it was a little irritating when you could have all you
wanted not to know what to want. But, he consoled himself, that must
be so with all rich people. The best thing was not to think about it.
He was convinced that he loved mother as dearly as ever a husband had
loved a wife. They were uncomfortable together, but wretched apart.
That was marriage. There was nothing more in it.
They hadn't much to say to each other. But you never saw husbands and
wives chatting together like love birds after the honeymoon. You
wanted a bright-cheeked, laughing girl, and you got her. If you were
faithful to each other, and didn't have rows, it was an ideal match,
especially if there were children.
Peter Rolls was very fond of his children. When they were little they
had been the joy of his life; the thought of them had been the only
one that warmed his heart and gave him almost superhuman energy to
take the future by the horns like a bull and force a ring through its
bleeding nose that it might be ready for them to ride when they grew
up.
Now they were grown up, and they were riding; and it was natural that
the fire of the heart should have calmed. He was proud of the pair,
very proud. Pete (no, he mustn't call him by that name. Ena didn't
like it, said it sounded common) Peter--or Petro, if he preferred--was
a gentleman and made a good show for every dollar that had been spent
on him. Put him with an Astor or a Livingston and you couldn't tell
the difference!
Once, a long time ago, old Peter had dreamed of a young Peter
succeeding him in the business; but Ena had made him see what a
foolish dream that was--foolish and inconsistent, too--because, what
was the good of slaving to satisfy your ambition, and then, when you
reached the goal, instead of profiting by what you'd got, ordering
your heir down to the level you'd worked to leave behind?
Peter senior had entirely come round to Ena's view, and instead of
regretting that Peter junior hadn't in him the making of a hard-boiled
man of business who'll do anything to succeed, father stopped Peter
abruptly whenever he showed an inconvenient sign of interest in the
Hands and what went on under the glitter of their rings. Nor was
Peter's interest of the right kind. It was not what Peter senior
called practical.
Ena, now! There was a girl to be proud of. Father was so proud that
pride of his splendid daughter had frozen out or covered with ashes
the glow which used to fill his heart at the thought of her. But pride
was the right thing! That was what he had worked for: to make of his
children a man and woman to be proud of when the top stone was on his
pile.
Ena was _more_ than a lady. She was an orchid, a princess. She ruled
father with her little finger--a beautifully manicured, rose-and-white
finger, such as he had hardly seen when he was young. There was so
much of himself in Ena that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the
inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words. The princess
in whose veins his blood ran must understand what he ought to want
better than he himself could understand.
She said: What was the fun of having money if you couldn't know all
the best people everywhere, and be of them as well as merely among
them? She began saying this even before she came home "for good" from
school. It was a school for millionaires' daughters, and the daughters
of other millionaires had showed her the difference between her father
and theirs, oil magnates and steel and railway magnates, and magnates
who magnated on their ancestors' fortunes made in land or skins of
animals.
Nothing really worth having--nothing really worth father's years of
hard work--could come to them as a family until Peter Rolls ceased to
identify himself personally with the Hands, Ena had pleaded, and at
last the head of the establishment engaged an official "understudy" to
represent him every day in the gorgeously furnished office which had
seemed to old Peter what the body is to the soul.
Rolls senior and Henry Croft, the man he appointed as dictator,
corresponded daily, by letter and telephone, but Peter Rolls himself
was not supposed to enter the great commercial village he had brought
together under one roof. Ena was able to say to any one rude enough to
ask, or to those she suspected of indiscreet curiosity: "Father never
goes _near_ the place. He's tired of business, and, luckily, he
doesn't need to bother."
She would not much have cared whether the statement were true or not
if she were sure that the carefully careless sounding words were
believed. But it would have been distressing to have any one say: "Ena
Rolls pretends that her father doesn't work in the shop any more, but
I know for a fact that he goes every day." So it comforted her to feel
sure that her arguments had really impressed father and that he never
did go to the Hands unless, perhaps twice a year or so for important
meetings. It pleased her that he had joined a rich club in New York
which had enough "swell" members to make it pleasant for her to remark
casually, "Father belongs to the Gotham."
When father went to New York in the evening, as he often did, not
returning to Sea Gull Manor till late, and sometimes staying away all
night, he used to say as an excuse to mother or Ena: "I'm going to the
club." After a while it was taken for granted, and he made no excuse
at all. But if Ena had known the mystery of those late evenings she
would have been struck with fear--the fear which comes of finding out
that those we think we know best are strangers to us.
Of all the sad millionaires of New York who pin together the pages of
certain mysterious life chapters not to be read by eyes at home,
perhaps no other had a mystery like that of Peter Rolls. It was now
the one thing that he intensely enjoyed; but it was a guilty, furtive
enjoyment which made a nervous wreck of him and ruined a stomach once
capable of salvation.
Peter junior had never been entirely happy since he left Yale at
twenty-three. It was only then that he began to look life in the face
and see the freckles on its complexion The minute he saw them on that
countenance which should be so beautiful, he wanted to help in some
way to rub them off. To help--to help! That was the great thing.
He didn't care much for business, but he felt that, being Peter
Rolls's only son, it was his duty to care. He imagined father deeply
hurt at the indifference of his two children to that which had been
his life--hurt, but hiding the wound with proud reserve. So Peter
junior determined to sacrifice himself. He offered to go into the
shop, to begin at the bottom if father wished, and in learning all
there was to learn, gradually work up to a place where he could be a
staff to lean upon.
It was in the "library" that they had this talk--an immense and
appalling room, all very new oak panelling and very new, uniform sets
of volumes bound in red leather and gold, with crests and bookplates,
bleakly glittering behind glass doors. Peter senior tried to kill time
there, because a library seemed to his daughter the right background
for a father, and Peter junior, who had saved mother's poor old
furniture for his own rooms, found it singularly difficult to open his
heart between walls that smelled of money and newness. However, he did
his best to blunder out the offer of himself; while the chill gleam in
his father's eyes (so remarkably like that of the bookcase glass
doors) made him feel, as he went on, that he must have begun all
wrong.
"So you don't trust your own father?" was the answer he got when he
stopped, as one might be stopped short by the sharp edge of a marble
mantelpiece when trying to find the way across a dark room.
"Don't--trust you?" stammered Peter, sure now that he was a fool not
to understand, not to have made his father understand.
"You think the old man's got past running his own business, and if
you don't want your money to go to the dogs you must look after it
yourself."
"Good heavens, no!" Peter broke out. "You can't dream that any such
thought entered my mind! I--why, Father, I'd rather die than have you
believe that of me."
"Prove I'm wrong, then," said the elder dryly, pulling, as was his
habit, a thin, grizzled beard with thin, sallow fingers. "You can do
it easy enough."
"How? Only tell me."
"By turning your attention to other things, my boy. Leave me alone to
manage what I know how to manage. You let me do it my own way, without
shoving in your oar, and don't you listen to what any of your highbrow
friends say about me and my methods behind my back."
"As if I would!"
"Well, I wasn't sure. You go with a set of raw boys who think they
know better than their fathers how to run creation; and now and then
you blow off some of those soap-bubble ideas in your conversation.
I've been kind of hurt once in a while, though I didn't let it out.
But now we're on the subject I will say: if you've got faith in the
old man, hands off the Hands!"
"That settles it, Father," returned Peter heavily. "I never meant to
hinder, only to help if I could. From now on the watchword is, 'hands
off the Hands!'"
This was a promise, and he kept it scrupulously. But the steady fire
in his heart was scattered as a flaming log is broken into many embers
by the clumsy stab of a poker. He had no longer a settled aim in life.
He saw no niche which he could fill, and felt that the world had no
particular use for the second Peter Rolls. The one thing he had
longed for as a boy, which did not now in his young manhood appear
stale and unprofitable, was a journey round the world and a glimpse of
the East. When his father said uneasily: "Why don't you travel, my
boy?" Peter answered that perhaps it would be a good thing.
The subject was broached to mother, and mother did not object. She had
learned long ago, when she was first married to Peter, never to object
to anything that he proposed. When she smiled and agreed with every
suggestion she was a dear little woman, and so she had spent her
existence in being a dear little woman until her hair turned white.
With her sunny nature, it had not needed a very great effort; but
sometimes, since Peter had begun to grow up, he had dimly fancied a
look of wistfulness in her ever-young blue eyes--eyes of a girl gazing
out from the round, rosy-apple face of a middle-aged woman.
She was always the same in her ways and manner, if it could be called
manner: comfortable and comforting, contented with life as it was,
happy in her children, and putting up gently with her husband;
but--when you had said good-bye to her you remembered the look which
always changed instantly into a smile when it met yours. You
remembered, and seemed to see another woman hovering wraithlike behind
mother's plump figure, as she sat contentedly crocheting those endless
strips of trimming for towels and things--mother as she might have
been if no dominating nature had ringed hers in with an iron fence.
When Peter was up the White Nile, in elephant and lion land, he used
suddenly, mysteriously, to see an irrelevant vision of his mother
just stretching out plump arms to say good-bye to him in his own room
which he had furnished with the mahogany odds and ends that had
started her bridal housekeeping. She had smiled and had not seemed to
mind very much his going--not half as much as a hen mother minds its
duckling's first dash into water. And yet her eyes--There are some
things it hurts and at the same time warms your heart to think of at
the other end of the world.
Peter had gone up the White Nile to shoot big game; but when he met it
face to face, on a social equality, so to speak, he wondered how he
could ever have harboured so monstrously caddish a design. He found
the animals he had thought he wanted to kill so much handsomer and
more important than himself that he felt like begging the alleged
"game's" pardon for calling on it without invitation in its country
home (as if he'd been a book agent), and bowed himself away with only
a few photographs to remember it by. While Ena was working up
conversations to the point of mentioning "my brother, who is such a
great shot, you know, and is shooting big game in Africa," Peter's
only shots were snapshots, and he was too stupidly conscientious to
atone for his weakness by obtaining elephant tusks and lion skins with
coins instead of bullets.
He wished he had saved Egypt and its temples for his honeymoon, in
case he should ever find exactly the right girl, for the mystery and
wonder made him sad because he had nobody to feel it with him. It was
the same in India and all the East, and there were thousands of
thoughts imprisoned in his breast (which he hardly understood and
dared not let escape) by the time he arrived in England to meet Ena.
They were still struggling in prison when he went on board the
_Monarchic_, but there a light shone fitfully through the keyhole of
the cell. It was a beautiful light, almost beautiful enough to be a
light Peter had read and dreamed of which was said never to shine on
land or sea. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, it went out. The prison,
full of thoughts, was left a place of dark confusion.
This was the inner state of Peter Rolls, Jr., when he arrived at home
after his long absence. But outwardly he appeared to be much as usual,
and was so nice to the Irish guests that Ena was grateful, though
never remorseful. Indeed, she had so much to think about that she
almost forgot her little act of diplomacy in eliminating an
undesirable sister-in-law.
She was on tenterhooks lest Lord Raygan and his mother and sister
should be finding the _ménage_ at Sea Gull Manor "all wrong," and
laughing secretly at father and mother. If there had been that fear
about the dressmaker's model on top of the rest of her anxieties she
would have broken down with nervous prostration. But, thanks to her
for saving him (without his knowledge), Peter seemed to have got over
his silliness and was able to stand by her like a brick.
Lady Raygan, a singularly young-looking, red-faced woman of boyish
figure, and with stick-out teeth, was a leading militant suffragette.
When she embarked hastily for Queenstown she had just been rescued by
her son from the London police. At first she had been too seasick to
care that she was being carried past her home and that a series of
lectures she had intended giving would be delayed. Now, in America,
she had determined to make the best of a bad bargain by sending the
fiery cross through the States.
She stayed in her room and jotted down notes. Also, she
conscientiously tried to make Mrs. Rolls a suffragette. About most
other things she was absent-minded; therefore Ena did not waste gray
matter in worrying over the impression that Sea Gull Manor was making
on Lady Raygan.
It was Rags and Eileen whose observing eyes and sense of humour had to
be feared. Eileen, for instance, had a little way of saying that
anything she considered odd was "too _endlessly_ quaint." Things she
admired were "melting." If only Ena had known enough about earls and
their families to be sure whether Lord Raygan and Eileen would, in
their secret hearts, think the ways of the Rollses endlessly quaint or
melting, she might have been spared sleepless nights. Because the
difference between those two adjectives would mean the difference
between ecstasy and despair for her. Rags might be poor for an earl,
even an Irish earl, but he was hardly the sort to propose to a girl
his sister could speak of as "endlessly quaint."
Twelve days after they had arrived at Sea Gull Manor, Eileen wrote a
somewhat ungrammatical letter to a rich cousin in Dublin who had once
refused Rags, and in which she said:
DEAR POBBLES:
I wish you were here to pinch me. Then I would be sure whether I'm
asleep or awake. You'll know by the papers (s'pose poor old Rags _is_
worth a paragraph; anyhow Mubs is, now she's turned into a suff) how
we got carried on in the _Monarchic_ to New York. It won't be the
fault of American reporters if you've missed our news! They got at us
on the dock. Mubs loved it. Rags didn't.
Well, if you know a thing about us, since we were swept past
Queenstown by a giant wave that carried us on its back all the way to
America, you know we're staying with a family named Rolls. Rags met
Miss Rolls and her brother in London. And afterward they happened to
be on board our ship, so we chummed up, and Miss Rolls _would_ give up
her melting suite to poor half-dead Mubs and me. What a beast the sea
is! I don't know if I shall ever have the courage to go on the
disgusting old wet thing again. We came here to stay a fortnight, but
it's almost that now, and we couldn't be driven away with a stick.
We're having the time of our lives (I'm learning lots of _creamy_
American slang), and the Rollses are awfully kind. Ena is very nice,
when she doesn't try to talk as if she were English, and quite
handsome, with fine eyes, though not so good as her brother's. And
he--the brother, I mean--is the dearest thing in the shape of a man
you ever saw. Not that he's wonderfully handsome or anything, but, as
they say over here, he's just IT. I don't know what there is about
him, but--well, if I go on, I suppose you'll think I'm being _silly_.
I don't care; you were only a year older than I am now when you told
Rags kindly to go to the dickens. You said he cared only for your
money, poor Rags! That wasn't true. But now (I know you won't tell)
Ena R. is going for him for all she's worth. Mubs doesn't notice
anything about women except their being suffs or not; and I'm supposed
to be too young to twig what's going on. I need hardly mention,
however, that very little gets past yours truly. I shouldn't wonder if
Ena'd _bring it off_. Rags asks me sometimes in a sheep-faced sort of
way what I think of things here, and I would have a joyous laugh with
him if it weren't for the brother.
Goodness gracious, but they're rich, these Rollses! I could make a pun
about their name and their money, but I won't, because it would be
cheap, and nothing is cheap at Sea Gull Manor. You can get a faint
idea what the house and the view are like from the hand-painted sketch
at the top of this paper on the left of the fat gold crest. This
stationery is in all the guests' private sitting-rooms in case any one
wants to make distant friends envious of their surroundings. Mr.
Rolls, Sr., told me he kept a tame artist painting these things at a
salary of ten thousand dollars a year, dinner and luncheon _menus_
thrown in. Ena's idea. She wanted something original, and what she
wants goes! So says Mr. R.
He's a poor little, yellow shrimp of a man, with dead-black hair,
where it isn't gray or coming off, and the same kind of beard goats
have. His eyes may have been nice when he was young, but nothing like
his son Peter's. Young Peter is altogether different from old Peter,
and he has blue eyes like the quaintest and most melting mother you
ever saw.
She does nothing but crochet trimming for sheets and things, world
without end, and if you admire it she gives you some. But she was just
_born_ to be a mother, and even having her sit crocheting in a room
where you are makes you feel good. She has eyes as blue as bluebells,
and as young, an apple face with a smile that longs for something it's
never known, and any amount of smooth white hair, which she does in
just the wrong way, pinched into tight braids. The one thing she won't
do for her daughter is to have a maid of her own, and Ena keeps
apologizing for it.
Mr. Rolls is a terrible dyspeptic, and the only things he can digest
(he has told me and Rags several times) are soft-shelled crabs,
devilled, and plum pudding or cake. When he has a pain he paces floors
like a tiger, but does not roar.
I haven't met many Americans here yet because the Rollses somehow
don't seem to know the right ones, and Ena makes excuses for that,
too. I wish she wouldn't. It gets on my nerves, and Rag's nerves as
well, I fancy, though he doesn't say so, and he's thinking a lot about
whether she'll _do_. Because I haven't met many others, I don't know
whether or not the Rollses are just like all American millionaires who
don't come abroad, or unique. But I have an idea they're _unique_.
This is the most enormous house, built and named to please Ena,
though it's no more a manor than the Albert Hall is. I don't believe
she knows what "manor" means. Every bedroom I've seen (and I _think_
I've been shown all, if I haven't lost count) has its own bathroom
adjoining, and a sitting-room as well. In each bathroom there are
several different kinds of baths, and a marble one you step down into,
but it's bitterly cold on your spine--the only cold thing in the
house, which is so hot with a furnace that even the walls and floors
feel warm, although I keep my windows wide open day and night.
The pillow-cases and sheets are made of such rich, thick linen, and
are so smooth and polished that you slip down off your pillows with a
crick in your neck, and the sheets slide off you, just as if they were
made of heavy silver, like lids of dishes. Perhaps the monograms and
crests drag them down. It's awful, but it's grand. And I should think
there are at least twenty footmen with--if you'll believe me--powdered
hair!
Of course, poor Ena took a fancy to it in England. I don't think she
stayed at any houses, but she was at some hotel where they have it, so
she didn't see why not. If you ring a bell, dozens of these
helpless-looking, white-headed creatures in black and yellow simply
swarm from every direction, like great insects when you've poured hot
water into their hive--or hole.
If any really nice people happen to stop in their motor for any reason
at the house in the morning, say about eleven o'clock, they are
offered magnums of champagne, as if out of gratitude for their coming.
They hardly ever seem to do more than sip, so perhaps the black and
yellow insects get the rest. There's an English butler, and it would
make your heart bleed, or else you'd want to howl, if you saw his
agonized, apologetic look whenever you, as a British person, knowing
about other ways of running a house, happened to catch his elderly
eye.
Mr. and Mrs. Rolls get up at goodness knows what hour and have
breakfast together, so does Petro--that's the nickname for the son.
But Ena and Mubs and Rags and I can wallow as long as we like and have
gorgeous breakfasts in our rooms. Mubs thinks Mrs. R. is a fool,
because she can hardly understand what a woman wants with a vote, but
I think she's a dear. She sends cartloads of flowers to hospitals,
and if you speak of a charity she hauls handfuls of dollar bills out
of an immense gold chain bag she always carries on her arm because
Petro gave it to her for a birthday present, and it, and Ena's one, a
size smaller, has the fat air of containing all her luggage ready to
start off from Saturday to Monday at a moment's notice. I suppose it's
money that looks so plump.
Now _do_ you think Rags ought to resist the daughter of such a house
when church mice have long ago cut our acquaintance? Of course, Rags
is lucky at bridge (he gave me a lovely dress on board ship), but he
can't live on it regularly. So far it's a toss up. I'll let you know
how things go.
Mubs is writing an article for an American newspaper which has offered
her fifty pounds. This is the first fun she's ever got out of being a
countess--and now I shouldn't wonder if she'd be a dowager soon! As
for me, I'm trying to flirt with Petro. No, to be honest, that isn't
_quite_ true. I'm not exactly flirting. He's too good for that. Ena
says he's "glue," because he has no interest in life, and that it'll
cheer him up if I encourage him to talk to me about some
philanthropical schemes he has.
One is a "Start in Life Fund" for deserving and clever young people
who need only a hand up to get on. I wish I could go in for it
myself--but perhaps I'm not deserving or clever. Anyhow Ena says her
brother likes me _awfully_, better than any girl he ever saw before,
and that he thinks me pretty. Did you _ever?_ No wonder I like him! I
shouldn't mind his knowing that I do, as Ena says he thinks no girl
could care for him. That sounds pathetic. I let her know that, as he's
so despairingly modest, she might break it to him that I enjoy his
society. Since then he's been much nicer, though, perhaps still a
little absent-minded, which may come from being "blue." I should like
to know what Ena said to him! But I suppose it's all right!
Your chum and cousin,
EILY.
P.S. They've got a shop in New York. I forgot to tell you that--a huge
shop. It's never mentioned here, but Petro told me. He's not ashamed,
but rather proud of the way the money came. Rags wants him and Ena to
take us to the place.
What Ena did say to Peter was, "Poor little Eileen is falling in love
with you." Peter didn't believe it. But it put a strange idea into his
head.