_Thursday the Nineteenth_
Splash!... That's me, Matilda Anne! That's me falling plump into the
pool of matrimony before I've had time to fall in love! And oh, Matilda
Anne, Matilda Anne, I've _got_ to talk to you! You may be six thousand
miles away, but still you've got to be my safety-valve. I'd blow up and
explode if I didn't express myself to some one. For it's so lonesome out
here I could go and commune with the gophers. This isn't a twenty-part
letter, my dear, and it isn't a diary. It's the coral ring I'm cutting
my teeth of desolation on. For, every so long, I've simply got to sit
down and talk to some one, or I'd go mad, clean, stark, staring mad, and
bite the tops off the sweet-grass! It may even happen this will never be
sent to you. But I like to think of you reading it, some day, page by
page, when I'm fat and forty, or, what's more likely, when Duncan has
me chained to a corral-post or finally shut up in a padded cell. For you
were the one who was closest to me in the old days, Matilda Anne, and
when I was in trouble you were always the staff on which I leaned, the
calm-eyed Tillie-on-the-spot who never seemed to fail me! And I think
you will understand.
But there's so much to talk about I scarcely know where to begin. The
funny part of it all is, I've gone and married the _Other Man_. And you
won't understand that a bit, unless I start at the beginning. But when I
look back, there doesn't seem to be any beginning, for it's only in
books that things really begin and end in a single lifetime.
Howsomever, as Chinkie used to say, when I left you and Scheming Jack in
that funny little stone house of yours in Corfu, and got to Palermo, I
found Lady Agatha and Chinkie there at the Hotel des Palmes and the
yacht being coaled from a tramp steamer's bunkers in the harbor. So I
went on with them to Monte Carlo. We had a terrible trip all the way up
to the Riviera, and I was terribly sea-sick, and those lady novelists
who love to get their heroines off on a private yacht never dream that
in anything but duckpond weather the ordinary yacht at sea is about the
meanest habitation between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I
got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had
wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last
little nest-egg had been smashed. In other words, I woke up and found
myself a beggar, and for a few hours I even thought I'd have to travel
home on that Monte Carlo Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away
the stranded adventurer before he musses up the Mediterranean scenery by
shooting himself. Then I remembered my letter of credit, and firmly but
sorrowfully paid off poor Hortense, who through her tears proclaimed
that she'd go with me anywhere, and without any thought of wages
(imagine being hooked up by a maid to whom you were under such
democratizing obligations!) But I was firm, for I knew the situation,
might just as well be faced first as last.
So I counted up my letter of credit and found I had exactly six hundred
and seventy-one dollars, American money, between me and beggary. Then I
sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was
code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates
all the while to the Hotel de L'Athénée, the long boxes duly piled up in
tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness,
called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow
landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an
oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of
international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away
from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav--which made me quite calmly
and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of
under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and
put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!
From Monte Carlo I scooted right up to Paris. Two days later, as I
intended to write you but didn't, I caught the boat-train for Cherbourg.
And there at the rail as I stepped on the _Baltic_ was the Other Man, to
wit, Duncan Argyll McKail, in a most awful-looking yellow plaid English
mackintosh. His face went a little blank as he clapped eyes on me, for
he'd dropped up to Banff last October when Chinkie and Lady Agatha and I
were there for a week. He'd been very nice, that week at Banff, and I
liked him a lot. But when Chinkie saw him "going it a bit too strong,"
as he put it, and quietly tipped Duncan Argyll off as to Theobald
Gustav, the aforesaid D. A. bolted back to his ranch without as much as
saying good-by to me. For Duncan Argyll McKail isn't an Irishman, as you
might in time gather from that name of his. He's a Scotch-Canadian, and
he's nothing but a broken-down civil engineer who's taken up farming in
the Northwest. But I could see right away that he was a gentleman (I
_hate_ that word, but where'll you get another one to take its place?)
and had known nice people, even before I found out he'd taught the
Duchess of S. to shoot big-horn. He'd run over to England to finance a
cooperative wheat-growing scheme, but had failed, because everything is
so unsettled in England just now.
But you're a woman, and before I go any further you'll want to know what
Duncan looks like.
Well, he's not a bit like his name. The West has shaken a good deal of
the Covenanter out of him. He's tall and gaunt and wide-shouldered, and
has brown eyes with hazel specks in them, and a mouth exactly like
Holbein's "Astronomer's," and a skin that is almost as disgracefully
brown as an Indian's. On the whole, if a Lina Cavalieri had happened to
marry a Lord Kitchener, and had happened to have a thirty-year-old son,
I feel quite sure he'd have been the dead spit, as the Irish say, of my
own Duncan Argyll. And Duncan Argyll, _alias_ Dinky-Dunk, is rather
reserved and quiet and, I'm afraid, rather masterful, but not as
Theobald Gustav might have been, for with all his force the modern
German, it seems to me, is like the bagpipes in being somewhat lacking
in suavity.
And all the way over Dinky-Dunk was so nice that he almost took my
breath away. He was also rather audacious, gritting his teeth in the
face of the German peril, and I got to like him so much I secretly
decided we'd always be good friends, old-fashioned, above-board,
Platonic good friends. But the trouble with Platonic love is that it's
always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
So I had to look straight at the bosom of that awful yellow-plaid
English mackintosh and tell Dinky-Dunk the truth. And Dinky-Dunk
listened, with his astronomer mouth set rather grim, and otherwise not
in the least put out. His sense of confidence worried me. It was like
the quietness of the man who is holding back his trump. And it wasn't
until the impossible little wife of an impossible big lumberman from
Saginaw, Michigan, showed me the Paris _Herald_ with the cable in it
about that spidery Russian stage-dancer, L----, getting so nearly killed
in Theobald's car down at Long Beach, that I realized there _was_ a
trump card and that Dinky-Dunk had been too manly to play it.