IN the last week of September Ginger went with a flag of truce to her
Aunt Fan and asked her to go east with her.
“Boston?” asked Aunt Fan, shrewdly.
“No,” said Ginger, coloring hotly but steady-eyed, “New York.” She
considered for a moment and then said, gravely. “But it is--connected
with Boston, in a way, Aunt Fan.”
She put it, rather stumblingly, into words. Dr. Mayfield had made her
realize how unjust she had been to Dean Wolcott with regard to his
riding, and that had made her understand the possibility of being
unjust in other ways. She was very brief and very dry about it; Mrs.
Featherstone was not the sort of person to whom one opened the shy
depths of one’s heart--she pounced too much, and chattered. It was
enough for her to know that her niece was open-mindedly going to
give eastern culture a chance at polishing the surface of her rugged
westernism.
Aunt Fan was delighted. “Of course I’ll go, child! We’ll have a
wonderful time--you’ll see! You’ll be crazy about it! Just wait till
you see Fifth Avenue--and Peacock Alley! You know, Jim’ll just be
pleased to the bone to beau us around--you can’t see anything of New
York at night without a man, of course--and if we see it with him,
we’ll see it _right_!” She beamed affectionately upon the girl for the
first time since Dean Wolcott’s exodus from Dos Pozos. “Honey, I’m
tickled _pink_ to go with you. We’ll see all the new shows, and you
know what I’m thinking of?-- You know, I _may_ have my face lifted!”
Ginger thought grimly that she, personally, might have her heart
lifted, but she didn’t say so. She went downtown and saw about
reservations and bought a wardrobe trunk and put her two evening gowns
in it (Aunt Fan had banned all the rest) and in a fortnight they were
on their way across the continent.
It surprised Ginger a great deal and at first annoyed her considerably
to find how much country there seemed to be outside of California.
She had known, of course, that New York would be larger and more
impressive than San Francisco or Los Angeles, but she had felt that
most of the desirable out-of-doors was contained in her own state.
The great city itself startled and saddened her; she had not realized
that there were as many people as that in the world, and most of
them tired-looking and pale and in a hectic hurry to get somewhere
else. They stopped at an opulent and ornate hotel and Aunt Fan was
very gay and amiable, and on their first day--they had arrived in the
morning--they shopped on the Avenue, lunched at the Ritz, did a matinée
and had tea, and then Jim Featherstone called for them and took them
down to dinner at the Brevoort and to a play, and afterwards to one of
the roofs, where they ate again and danced.
Jim Featherstone was a tall, thin, middle-aged man with a rather
melancholy expression and much skill in assembling a meal. He and Aunt
Fan were unfeignedly glad to see each other, and Ginger was content
to have them talk together and leave her to herself. They left her
to herself a great deal in the days and evenings which followed--not
that they ever forgot her or neglected her, but she had a sense of
being with them but not of them, and she felt that it always would
be so. Her aunt, languid as a wilted lily at Dos Pozos, developed an
amazing energy in New York; from their nine o’clock tray breakfast in
their sitting-room until one the next morning, she was in perpetual
and enthusiastic motion--always panting a little, taking her short,
chugging steps in her short-vamped, high-heeled pumps, her blue eyes
prominent, like a gold fish’s.
“This is the life, dearie,” she said, breathlessly, one day. “And you
know, I haven’t gained an ounce, for all I’ve eaten like a human being;
it’s being so active that saves me. Jim doesn’t want me to have my face
lifted; not for two or three years anyway, he says. He says you get a
sort of _hard_ look; he says he wouldn’t like to have my expression
changed.” She sighed. “Isn’t it a crime-- A man that can be a friend
like that, a total loss as a husband?” She patted Ginger’s arm (she was
very fond of her, in these days) affectionately. “Dearie, I don’t know
that I regret--_you_ know! He was a sweet boy, and _class_, class if
ever I saw it in my life, but I’m not so sure he would have made you
happy. If Jim Featherstone couldn’t make a woman happy, I don’t know
who----”
“I think,” said Ginger, almost to herself, “a woman has to make herself
happy, Aunt Fan. I guess no one can do it for you.” Ginger was saying
“I think” a good deal at that time, and she was actually thinking. She
was growing very tired of long parades of food, and the pavements made
her feet ache for the sun-baked earth, for her stirrups. She had seen
so many plays--“shows,” Jim Featherstone and her Aunt Fan invariably
called them--“a good show,” “a bad show,” “a peach of a little show,”
that they were blurred and jumbled in her memory, and her eyes wanted
distance and sky line instead of bright lights indoors and quivering
electric signs on the streets.
She had been more than a month, now, in the east, and she had docilely
done everything and bought everything she was asked to do and to
buy, and she had gone everywhere they wanted to take her, but she
was puzzled. Was this the sort of thing which had made Dean Wolcott
different from ’Rome Ojeda?
Her aunt sensed her restlessness and grew uneasy; she had no wish
to terminate her own holiday. “Jim,” she said urgently, “I wish to
goodness you could rustle up a man for Ginger--not just anybody,
of course, but some really nice chap. One that looks like a collar
ad--_you_ know! The child’s getting homesick and blue, and if we don’t
give her something to think about she’ll rush home and marry that
wild-man--that immorally good-looking Ojeda boy.”
Jim Featherstone was interested, but he really didn’t know what to do
about it. All the men he knew were his own sort and age; hard-boiled
old birds, he called them; wouldn’t do for Ginger. He had a very soft
spot in his leathery heart for Ginger, Jim Featherstone. They decided
that they must try to give her a better time, and they set earnestly
about it, but the girl did not respond.
“Dearie,” her aunt would say in the morning, “don’t you want to come
along with me while I get my henna rinse? You could have a manicure
while you’re waiting, or a facial. Or just sit and look out at the
Avenue--_that’s_ as good as a show, I always say.”
But Ginger had had a manicure two days earlier (she had come to like
the look of her brown fingers after careful grooming) and she never
had facials, and looking out at the Avenue made her long unendurably
for the range; and it seemed to her that Aunt Fan had had her mind as
well as her hair henna rinsed; as if she’d had a permanent wave in her
personality. Then, suddenly, she remembered Mary Wiley.
Mary Wiley was a girl she had known at boarding school in Los Angeles,
a slim, frail girl who had been sent west for the mildness of the
winters. She was three or four years older than Ginger, but they had
roomed together for several months and the younger child had liked
her warmly, without ever understanding why. She had very smooth, cool
hands and she was always delicately and pleasantly pale, and never in
a hurry. She always had her lessons learned and her themes written and
had generous margins of time for other people.
They had corresponded for a while; it was Ginger who had stopped
writing. Mary Wiley had sent her a brief, bracing little note when she
had heard, through other channels of the old school, of Aleck’s death,
but Ginger had never acknowledged it. Now she wanted to find her. The
telephone book was rich in Wileys but she knew she would recognize the
address when she saw it and she did--up in the Eighties, and just off
Riverside Drive, the hotel door man told her. She could take the bus.
Ginger liked taking the bus when she could ride on the top; it gave her
a comforting little sense of leashed freedom for a while, and she loved
the river. It was the first river she had ever known, personally, and
she had the merest bowing acquaintance with it now, but she knew that
she would like knowing it if she could.
It was a narrow, quiet-looking house; it made her think of Mary Wiley
herself. A neat, middle-aged maid answered her ring and took her name
and said that she would see if Miss Wiley was at home. She had hardly
finished her leisurely mounting of the stairs when Ginger heard a low
exclamation of pleasure and her friend came skimming down to her. (She
recalled, now, the way Mary Wiley had of moving, of coming downstairs.)
She did not kiss her but she took both her hands and glowed her deep
and quiet gladness. “Virginia McVeagh! My dear! It’s so nice to see
you! And how _lovely_ you are--much lovelier, even, than when you were
little!”
Mary Wiley was a plain young woman herself but she drank up Ginger’s
beauty thirstily. She was still slim and frail, with rather colorless
hair and skin, but she had good gray eyes and a singularly intelligent
sweetness of expression.
They sat down to talk in the small drawing-room which was rather
scantily furnished, Ginger thought, and presently she telephoned to her
aunt that she was staying for luncheon and would not be back until late
in the afternoon. It just happened, Mary Wiley said, to be her lazy
day, so they could have a fine visit.
Her mother and father were at luncheon, elderly, mellow people with low
voices and much gentle warmth of manner and they were extraordinarily
kind to their daughter’s school friend without in the least making
what Aunt Fan would have called “a fuss over her.” Luncheon was a
very simple meal--clear soup in dull blue bowls with thin slices of
lemon floating on it, something creamed on toast, tiny graham muffins
and a fruit salad, and there were the plainest possible doilies of
unbleached linen on the dark, lusterless table. The middle-aged maid
served silently and slowly, and--in contrast with the hotel and the
restaurants where Jim Featherstone had taken her--it was like leaving
the pounding surf and coming into a little still bay.
The Wiley family, it appeared, had not seen a fourth of the plays
which Ginger had seen; they were astonished at her energy. They had
seen three of the better ones and there were one or two more which
they meant to see during the winter; they did not--the parents--go
out very much at night. On the other hand, they seemed to have heard
a great deal of music; they had season tickets for the Symphony and
the Philharmonic, and they were going that afternoon to hear a young
Russian pianist whom their daughter had heard the evening before, and
they spoke of art exhibits in the smaller galleries. When they first
asked Ginger if she had seen any interesting pictures she thought they
meant on the screen and she answered accordingly that she had been too
busy seeing plays; she was relieved, an instant later, to see that they
had not realized her mistake. Mary Wiley said she would take her to
the Ehrich Galleries next day; there were some delectable old Dutch
things there now.
Mrs. Wiley wanted to know if Ginger had seen any other parts of the
east, and her husband and her daughter began to smile at her.
“What she really wants to know, Virginia,” said Mary Wiley, “is whether
you’ve seen Boston?”
Ginger could feel herself coloring. “No,” she said, “I haven’t seen
anything but New York--yet.”
“My wife is a Bostonian, you see, Miss Virginia,” said Mr. Wiley, “and
she still has, after thirty years, a little the feeling of the Children
of Israel in Egypt.” He chuckled enjoyingly and his wife defended
herself gently.
“My dear Walter, you know I have become--I am--a _loyal_ New Yorker!”
She gave a very small sigh. “New York is a wonderful city; it is stupid
to compare the two. Boston----”
“‘_By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion_,’” her husband quoted, teasingly. “Though it is to be
admitted, Deborah, my dear, you have wept unobtrusively.”
“‘_For there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song_,’” she flashed back at him.
Her daughter leaned over and patted her hand. “She’s sung the Lord’s
song in a strange land, hasn’t she, father?”
“She has--loyally and lustily,” he laughed.
“Well,” said Mrs. Wiley, smiling pacifically upon them both, “I like to
think I’ve brought a little of Boston with me and transplanted it. My
people”--she turned to Ginger--“have never yet, after all these years,
become entirely reconciled to having me a New Yorker, but I say to
them--‘My dears, cannot one have a lamp, and a fire, and a book, even
in New York?’”
Ginger liked their voices and the way they looked at each other. She
wondered if Dean Wolcott’s mother was something like Mrs. Wiley.
Presently the parents went away to their concert and the girls talked
for an hour, and then Mary Wiley, who said she had been indoors all
day, offered to walk with Ginger back to her hotel. They went beside
the river as far as Seventy-second Street, and Mary Wiley walked with
her remembered smoothness of gait, swiftly and easily on her low heeled
and gray-spatted feet. Ginger, in footgear of her Aunt Fan’s choosing,
seemed to be on stilts in comparison. She learned, during the walk,
what her friend had meant by calling that her lazy day. Every other
week day she had classes at an Italian Settlement House far uptown; she
thought Ginger might enjoy visiting it with her, one day.
This was the beginning--when Mary Wiley walked back into Ginger’s life
on her low heels--of Ginger’s entrance into the inner city, where her
Aunt Fan, ardent pilgrim that she was, and Jim Featherstone, born
on West Fortieth Street, could never penetrate. She still went once
or twice a week with them to dinners and “shows,” but for the rest
of the time she was quietly busy with her friend: afternoons at the
Settlement, early morning walks in the Park, trips on the river--over
the river to the Palisades; the Russian quarter, the Syrian quarter;
a service at the Greek cathedral, performances at little theaters
which Jim Featherstone had shied away from as dangerously high-brow;
exhibitions of strange new pictures at the smaller galleries--or mellow
old pictures. Mary Wiley seemed always occupied but never hurried; her
life was a brimming cup which never ran over.
She took Ginger to an upstairs shop in a cross street where low-voiced
saleswomen conferred together over her and sent for certain special
models--“Miss Hadley, don’t you think that old-blue frock for Miss
McVeagh--the one with the silver fringe?”--or “I believe that Russian
peasant thing would suit Miss McVeagh----”
Mary Wiley urged her to take the Russian peasant thing; it was richly
red, of a soft wool stuff, boldly embellished in cobalt and dull
silver. “It’s the sort of thing I’ve longed all my life to wear,” she
said, and her satisfaction seemed all the deeper for being vicarious.
“You can’t think what a joy it is to see it on you, Virginia! My dear,
are you half thankful enough for being so beautiful? You ought to set
aside a Thanksgiving Day for every month in the year!”
Ginger liked her cool compliments. She liked everything she did with
Mary Wiley. Perhaps, best of all, she liked the luncheons at the
Woman’s City Club and the Query Club and others to which her friend
belonged or went as a guest, where she--Ginger--might sit in mouselike
silence and hear brisk and vigorous talk. Mary Wiley sometimes spoke,
quietly and effectively. Once, in the midst of a discussion on the
iniquities of the retailer, she said suddenly--“I think Miss McVeagh
could tell us something of interest on that subject; you know, she
owns and operates one of the largest cattle ranches in her part of
California.”
“That _baby_?” A lean, elderly woman bent forward in her seat and
smiled at Ginger, and--her cheeks crisping hotly--she heard herself
speaking. It was incredible that they should all stop, those keen and
purposeful women--and listen to Ginger McVeagh, but they did.
“Did you get that, Helen?” she heard them saying to each other when
she had finished her three or four sentences. “That’s all she gets a
pound--and consider what we pay our local butchers!”
Several came and spoke to her afterward; California was always a name
to conjure with, they said, but a California cattle ranch-- They made
her feel definite and worth while; once Mary Wiley asked half a dozen
of them in to meet her at tea, and made her wear the red peasant dress.
But most of all she found herself at the Symphony. When she was
homesick, which was often, in spite of her new contentment, she found
that music--not solo things nor chamber music, but the crash and volume
of an orchestra--most nearly approximated the breadth and freedom of
her life at home. Sitting beside her friend or quite alone, serenely
ignorant of composition and composer and interdependence of instrument,
she was as wholly content as when she was riding Felipe or Diablo into
the heart of a sunset. When she tried, gropingly, to tell Mary Wiley
what she felt, she quoted to her a line of Huneker’s; it ought, she
thought, to be graven over the door of every concert hall: “Other arts
give us defined pleasures, but music is the only art that restores us
to ourselves.”
It restored Ginger not only to herself but to her lover. Whether they
ever came together again, whether she ever saw him again, sitting
perched in her high balcony seat in Carnegie Hall, all the pride and
criticism and bitterness were cleansed away; she went to him once more
as she had gone to him on Aleck’s bridge; she found harmony in harmony.
“You are radiant,” said Mary Wiley to her as they came away from
Carnegie on an afternoon of dazzling snow. “I knew you would love
Tschaikowsky. You look--my dear, did you love it so much?”
Ginger fell into step beside her. “Let’s walk, shall we? Yes; I loved
it. But I was thinking just then about--Mary, I would like to go to
Boston.”
“Would you, really? How warmly mother will approve of you for that
chaste desire!”
“Mary, there is some one in Boston I must see. I was unjust, and
ignorant, and--_mean_. Mean and stupid. Now I’m going to Boston and
tell him so.”
Mary Wiley smiled at her. “I think that’s big and fine, Virginia. Shall
I go with you--to Boston, I mean? I’ve been wanting to run down for a
day or two, to see my cousin Sarah; she is ill again. There’s a mousy
little hotel just across the street from her house where you could
stay. Let me see ... my young aliens would adore not being Americanized
for a few days; suppose we go Monday and come back on Friday? That will
give you time for a little sedate sight-seeing to please mother--and
for--for your own affairs.” She smiled sunnily at her. “My dear, I’m
very glad. I’ve been sure that there was some one.”
Ginger shook her head, her color mounting. “I don’t know, Mary; I’m not
sure of anything, except that I must go--and tell him.”
“I’ve known there was some one,” said Mary Wiley. There had been some
one, with her, once, but he had not come home from France. Mrs. Wiley
had wept when she told Ginger about it, but if Mary Wiley ever wept she
made her tears turn the wheels of her serene and selfless activities.
* * * * *
Aunt Fan lifted her plucked eyebrows when she learned that her niece
was going to Boston. “_I_ should say it would be much better form just
to drop him a line--one of those postcards with a picture of the hotel
on it--and say--oh, ‘West is East,’ or something kind of cute like
that, and wait for _him_ to make the first move!” Aunt Fan was feeling
a trifle acid; she and Jim Featherstone were getting on each other’s
nerves again, and in spite of being so triumphantly active she had
gained six pounds.
* * * * *
On the way to Boston Ginger tried to formulate what she would say to
Dean Wolcott; she wanted to make it proudly clear to him that this was
no overture for a return to their former relation; it was simply and
solely an acknowledgment of her wrongness of attitude at Dos Pozos, of
her new respect and liking for the world he had always lived in, but
always when she rehearsed it her phrases were swallowed up in great
waves of gladness which rolled over her--like the music she had heard
from her high perch in Carnegie. After all, she was Virginia Valdés
McVeagh, feudal lady of her own land; under her novel humility there
was the conviction that she had only to extend her forgiveness and
her understanding. She summoned up the memory of his look, his tall
slimness, his walk, the tones of his voice; his arms, his lips.
Directly Mary Wiley left her at the hushed little hotel she wrote a
note to him--four lines--and sent it by messenger, and sat down to wait
in the lobby. A grave bell boy tried twice to show her to her room,
but she told him she wished to wait there for the answer to the letter
she had just sent. She was joyfully sure what form the answer would
take; Dean Wolcott would come himself. She could picture him, crossing
to her from the front door to the chair where she sat; he would look
as he had looked that golden day, when they came together on Aleck’s
bridge.
The door opened and closed nineteen times by count. She would know her
messenger the instant she saw him; he was a rather small boy, copiously
freckled, and he wore thick spectacles.
He returned in exactly twenty-seven minutes by the office clock and
handed Ginger’s note back to her, unopened. There was only a caretaker
at the Wolcott residence, he reported: she had told him that the entire
Wolcott family had gone to Florida.