I think that by then Pelleas and I had fairly caught the colour of
Youth. For I protest that in Spring Youth is a kind of Lydian stone,
and the quality of old age is proved by the colour which it can show
at the stone’s touch. Though perhaps with us the gracious basanite has
often exceeded its pleasant office and demonstrated us to be quite mad.
Otherwise I cannot account for the intolerance of age and the love of
youth that came upon us. I was conscious of this when after breakfast
one morning Pelleas and I stood at the drawing-room window watching a
shower. It was an unassuming storm of little drops and infrequent gusts
and looked hardly of sufficient importance to keep a baby within-doors.
But we are obliged to forego our walk if so much as a sprinkling-cart
passes. This is so alien to youth that it always leaves us disposed
to take exception and to fail to understand and to resort to all the
ill-bred devices of well-bred people who are too inventive to be openly
unreasonable.
As “What a bony horse,” observed Pelleas.
“Not really bony,” I said; “its ribs do not show in the least.”
“It is bony,” reiterated Pelleas serenely. “It isn’t well fed.”
“Perhaps,” said I, “that is its type. A great many people would say
that a slender woman--”
“_They’re_ bony too,” went on Pelleas decidedly. “I never saw a slender
woman who looked as if she had enough to eat.”
“Pelleas!” I cried, aghast at such apostasy; “think of the women with
lovely tapering waists--”
“Bean poles,” said Pelleas.
“And sloping shoulders--”
“Pagoda-shaped shoulders,” said Pelleas.
“And delicate pointed faces--”
“They look hungry, all the time, and bony,” Pelleas dismissed the
matter--Pelleas, who in saner moments commiserates me upon my appalling
plumpness.
“There comes the butter woman,” I submitted, to change the subject.
“Yes,” assented Pelleas resentfully, finding fresh fuel in this;
“Nichola uses four times too much butter in everything.”
“Pelleas,” I rebuked him, “you know how careful she is.”
“She is,” insisted Pelleas stubbornly, “extravagant in butter.”
“She uses a great deal of oil,” I suggested tremulously, not certain
whether oil is the cheaper.
“Butter, butter, she spreads butter on the soup,” stormed Pelleas. “I
believe she uses butter to boil water--”
Then I laughed. Pelleas is never more adorable than when he is cross at
some one else.
At that very moment the boy who was driving the butter woman’s wagon
began to whistle. It was a thin, rich little tune, a tune that _pours_
slowly, like honey. I am not musical but I can always tell honey-tunes.
At sound of it Pelleas’ face lighted as if at a prescription of magic.
“Etarre--Etarre!” he cried; “do you hear that tune?”
“Yes,” I said breathlessly.
“Do you remember--?”
“No,” said I, just as breathlessly.
“It’s the Varsovienne,” cried Pelleas, “that we danced together the
night that I met you, Etarre.”
With that Pelleas caught me about the waist and hummed the air with all
his might and whirled me down the long room.
“Pelleas!” I struggled. “I don’t know it. Let me go.”
For it has been forty years since I have danced or thought of dancing
and I could not in the least remember the silly step.
Leaving me to regain my breath as best I might Pelleas was off up the
room, around chairs and about tables, stepping long and short, turning,
retreating, and singing louder and louder.
“You stood over there,” he cried, still dancing; “the music had begun
and I was not your partner--but I caught you away before you could say
no, and we danced--_tol te tol te tol_--”
Pelleas was performing with his back to the hall door when it opened
softly, and he did not hear. There stood Nichola. I have never before
seen that grim old woman look astonished, but at sight of the flying
figure of Pelleas she seemed ready to run away. It was something to
see old Nichola taken aback. Our old servant is a brave woman, afraid
of nothing in the world but an artificial bath heater which she would
rather die than light, but the spectacle of Pelleas, dancing, seemed
actually to frighten her. She stood silent for a full minute--and this
in itself was amazing in Nichola, who if she went often to the theater
would certainly answer back to the player talk. Then Pelleas faced the
door and saw her. He stopped short as if he had been a toy and some one
had dropped the string. He was frightfully abashed and was therefore
never more haughty.
“Nichola,” he said with lifted brows, “we did not ring.”
Nichola remained motionless, her little bead eyes which have not grown
old with the rest of her quite round in contemplation.
“We are busy, Nichola,” repeated Pelleas, slightly raising his voice.
Then Nichola regained full consciousness and rolled her eyes naturally.
“Yah!” said she, with a dignity too fine for scorn. “_Busy!_”
Really, Nichola tyrannizes over us in a manner not to be borne. Every
day we tell each other this.
Pelleas looked at me rather foolishly when she had disappeared.
“That was the way it went,” said he, ignoring the interruption as one
always does when one is nettled. “_Tol te tol te tol_--”
“Why don’t you sing _da de da de da_, Pelleas?” I inquired, having
previously noticed that all the world is divided into those who sing
_tol_, or _da_, or _la_, or _na_. “I always say ‘_da_.’”
“I prefer ‘_tol_,’” said Pelleas shortly.
Sometime I intend classifying people according to that one peculiarity,
to see what so pronounced a characteristic can possibly augur.
“Ah, well,” said I, to restore his good humour, “what a beau you were
at that ball, Pelleas.”
“Nonsense!” he disclaimed, trying to conceal his pleasure.
“And how few of us have kept together since,” I went on; “there are
Polly Cleatam and Sally Chartres and Horace and Wilfred, all living
near us; and there’s Miss Lillieblade, too.”
“That is so,” Pelleas said, “and I suppose they will all remember that
very night--our night.”
“Of course,” said I confidently.
Pelleas meditated, one hand over his mouth, his elbow on his knee.
“I wonder,” he said; “I was thinking--I wouldn’t be surprised if--well,
why couldn’t we--”
He stopped and looked at me in some suspicion that I knew what he meant.
“Have them all here some evening?” I finished daringly.
Pelleas nodded.
“And _dance_!” said he, in his most venturesome mood.
“Pelleas!” I cried, “and all wear our old-fashioned things.”
Pelleas smiled at me speechlessly.
The plan grew large in our eyes before I remembered the climax of the
matter.
“Thursday,” I said below my breath, “Thursday, Pelleas, is _Nichola’s
day out_!”
“Nichola’s day out” sounds most absurd to every one who has seen our
old servant. When she came to us, more than forty years ago, she had
landed but two weeks before from Italy, and was a swarthy little
beauty in the twenties. She spoke small English and was deliciously
amazed at everything, and her Italian friends used to come and take
her out once a week, on Thursday. With her black eyes flashing she
would tell me next day, while she dressed me, of the amazing sights
that had been permitted her. Those were the days when we had many
servants and Nichola was my own maid; then gradually all the rest left
and Nichola remained, even through one black year when she had not a
centime of wages. And so she had grown gray and bent in our service and
had changed in appearance to another being and had lost her graces and
her disposition alike. One thing only remained the same: She still had
Thursday evenings “out.”
Where in the world she found to go now, was a favourite subject of
speculation with Pelleas and me over our drawing-room fire. She had
no friends, no one came to see her, she did not mention frequenting
any houses; she was openly averse to the dark--not afraid, but averse;
and her contempt for all places of amusement was second only to her
distrust of the cable cars. Yet every Thursday evening she set forth in
her best purple bonnet and black “circular,” and was gone until eleven
o’clock. Old, lonely, withered woman--where did she go? Unless indeed,
it was, as we half suspected, to take certain lessons in magic whereby
she seems to divine our inmost thoughts and intentions.
And now for the first time we planned to make a base and harmless
advantage of Nichola’s absence. We meant to give a party, a _dance_,
with seven guests. Nichola, we were certain, would not for a moment
have supported the idea; she would have had a thousand silly objections
concerning my sleeplessness and our nerves and the digestion of
Pelleas. We argued that all three objections were inadequate, and that
Nichola was made for us and not we for Nichola. This bold innovation of
thought alone will show how adventuresome we were become.
We set about our preparation with proper caution. For one whole
forenoon I kept Pelleas in the kitchen, as sentinel to Nichola,
driving her nearly mad with his forced excuses for staying while
I risked my neck among boxes long undisturbed. But then I love an
attic. I have always a sly impulse to attempt framing ours for a
wall of our drawing-room. I prefer most attics to some libraries. I
have known houses whose libraries do not invite, but gesticulate;
whose dining-rooms have an air of awful permanence, like a ship’s
dining-room; and whose drawing-rooms are as uninhabitable as the
guillotine; yet above stairs would lie a splendid attic of the utmost
distinction. These places always have chests which thrill one
with the certainty that they are filled with something--how shall
I say?--something which does not anywhere exist: Vague, sumptuous
things, such as sultans give for wedding gifts, and such as parcels
are always suggesting without ever fulfilling the suggestion. Yet
when chests like these are opened they are found to contain most
commonplace matter--trunk straps with the buckles missing, printed
reports of forgotten meetings called to exploit forgotten enthusiasms,
and cotton wadding. Yet I never go up to our attic without an impulse
of expectancy. I dare say if I persist I shall find a Spanish doubloon
there some day. But that morning I found only what I went to seek--the
lustrous white silk which I had worn on the night that I met Pelleas.
We had looked at it together sometimes, but for very long it had lain
unregarded and the fine lace about the throat was yellowed and it had
caught the odour of the lonely days and nights. But it was in my eyes
no less beautiful than on the night that I had first worn it.
I hid it away in my closet beneath sober raiment and went down to
release Pelleas. When I entered the kitchen Nichola glanced at me once,
and without a word led me to the looking-glass in the door of the clock.
“Yah?” she questioned suspiciously. “Is it that you have been tomboning
about, building fires?”
I looked, wondering vaguely what Nichola can possibly mean by
_tomboning_, which she is always using. There was a great place of dust
on my cheek. I am a blundering criminal and should never be allowed in
these choice informalities.
That afternoon while Nichola was about her marketing, Pelleas and
I undertook to telephone to our guests. When I telephone I always
close my eyes, for which Pelleas derides me as he passes; and when he
telephones he invariably turns on the light on the landing. Perhaps
this is because men are at home in the presence of science while women,
never having been gods, fear its thunder-bolt methods. Pelleas said
something like this to our friends:--
“Do you remember the ball at the Selby-Whitfords’? Yes--the one on
Washington’s Birthday forty-nine years ago? Well, Etarre and I are
going to give another ball to the seven survivors. Yes--a ball. Just we
seven. And you must wear something that you might have worn that night.
It’s going to be Thursday at eight o’clock, and it’s quite a secret.
Will you come?”
Would they come! Although the “seven survivors” did suggest a steamship
disaster, our guests could have risen to no promise of festivity with
greater thanksgiving. At the light that broke over Pelleas’ face at
their answers my heart rejoiced. Would they come! Polly Cleatam
promised for herself and her husband, although all their grandchildren
were their guests that week. Sally Chartres’ son, a stout, middle-aged
senator, was with her but she said that she would leave him with his
nurse; and Miss Willie Lillieblade cried out at first that she was a
hermit with neuralgia and at second thought added that she would come
anyway and if necessary be buried directly from our house.
The hall was dark and silent again when Nichola came toiling home and
there was nothing to tell her, as we thought, what plans had peopled
the air in her absence. Nor in the three days of our preparation did
we leave behind, we were sure, one scrap or one breath of evidence
against us. We worked with the delighted caution of naughty children
or escaping convicts. Pelleas, who has a delicate taste in sweets,
ordered the cakes when he took his afternoon walk and went back to the
shop every day to charge the man not to deliver the things until the
evening. My sewing woman’s son plays the violin “like his own future,”
as Pelleas applauds him, and it was easy to engage him and his sister
to accompany him. Meanwhile I rearranged my old gown, longing for
Nichola, who has a genius in more than cookery. To be sure Pelleas did
his best to help me, though he knows no more of such matters than the
spirits of the air; he can button very well but to hook is utterly
beyond his simple art. However, he attended to everything else. After
dark on Thursday he smuggled some roses into the house and though I set
the pitcher in my closet I could smell the flowers distinctly while we
were at dinner. It is frightful to have a conscience that can produce
not only terrors but fragrances.
We were in a fever of excitement until Nichola got off. While Pelleas
tidied the drawing-room I went down and wiped the dishes for her--in
itself a matter to excite suspicion--and I broke a cup and was meek
enough when Nichola scolded me. Every moment I expected the ice cream
to arrive, in which event I believe I would have tried to prove to
Nichola that it was a prescription and that the cakes were for the poor.
Pelleas and I waited fearfully over the drawing-room fire, dreading
her appearance at the door to say her good-night; for to our minds
every chair and fixture was signaling a radiant “Party! Party!” like a
clarion. But she thrust in her old face, nodded, and safely withdrew
and we heard the street door close. Thereupon we got upstairs at a
perilous pace and I had on the white gown in a twinkling while Pelleas,
his hands trembling, made ready too.
I hardly looked in the mirror for the roses had yet to be arranged.
I gathered them in my arms and Pelleas followed me down, and as we
entered the drawing-room I felt his arm about my waist.
“Etarre,” he said. “Look, Etarre.”
He led me to the great gilt-framed cheval glass set in its shadowy
corner. I looked, since he was determined to have me.
I remembered her so well, that other I who forty-nine years ago had
stood before her mirror dressed for the Selby-Whitford ball. The brown
hair of the girl whom I remembered was piled high on her head and
fastened with a red rose; the fine lace lay about her throat and fell
upon her arms, and the folds of the silk touched and lifted over a
petticoat of lawn and lace. And here was the white gown and here the
petticoat and tucker, and my hair which is quite white was piled high
and held its one rose. The white roses in my arms and in my hair were
like ghosts of the red ones that I had carried at that other ball--but
I was no ghost! For as I looked at Pelleas and saw his dear face
shining I knew that I was rather the happy spirit risen from the days
when roses were not white, but merely red.
Pelleas stooped to kiss me, stooped just enough to make me stand on
tiptoe as he always does, and then the door-bell rang.
“Pelleas!” I scolded, “and the roses not arranged.”
“You know you wanted to,” said Pelleas, shamelessly. And the truth of
this did not in the least prevent my contradicting it.
Sally Chartres and Wilfred came first, Sally talking high and fast as
of old. Such a dear little old lady as Sally is. I can hardly write her
down “old lady” without a smile at the hyperbole, for though she is
more than seventy and is really Madame Sarah Chartres, she knows and I
know the jest and that she is just Sally all the time.
She threw off her cloak in the middle of the floor, her pearl earrings
and necklace bobbing and ticking. At sight of her blue gown, ruffled
to the waist and laced with black velvet, I threw my arms about her
and we almost laughed and cried together; for we both remembered how,
before she was sure that Wilfred loved her, she had spent the night
with me after a ball and had sat by the window until dawn, in that very
blue frock, weeping in my arms because Wilfred had danced so often with
Polly Cleatam. And now here was Wilfred looking as if he had had no
thought but Sally all his days.
In came Polly Cleatam herself presently in her old silk poplin
trimmed with fringe, and her dimples were as deep as on the day of
her elopement. Polly was nineteen when she eloped on the evening of
her début party with Horace who was not among the guests. And the
sequel is of the sort that should be suppressed, but I must tell it,
being a very truthful old woman and having once or twice assisted at
an elopement myself: _They are very happy._ Polly is an adorable old
lady; she has been a grandmother for nineteen years, and the Offence is
Lisa’s best friend. But whereas Sally and I have no idea of our own age
Polly, since her elopement, has rebounded into a Restraining Influence.
That often happens. I think that the severest-looking women I know have
eloped and have come to think twice of everything else. Polly with
an elopement behind her is invariably the one to say “Hush,” and “I
wouldn’t.”
Miss Willie Lillieblade was late. She came in wound in costly
furs--Heaven provided her bank account in the neuter gender--and she
stood revealed in a gorgeous flowered gown, new, but quite like the
one which she had worn at the very ball that we were celebrating. Miss
Lillieblade is tiny, and though her hair is quite white she seems to
have taken on none of the graces of age. She has grown old like an
expensive India-rubber ball, retaining some of her elasticity and
constantly suggesting her former self instead of becoming another
article altogether. She has adopted caps, not soft, black, old-lady
caps, but perky little French affairs of white. She is erect--and she
walks with a tall white staff, silver-headed, the head being filled
with two kinds of pills though few know about that.
I fancy that we were in great contrast; for Miss Lillieblade is become
a fairy-godmother-looking old lady; Polly Cleatam has taken on severity
and poise and has conquered all obstacles save her dimples; Sally has
developed into a _grande dame_ of old lace and Roman mosaic pins; and I
look for all the world like the plump grandmothers that they paint on
calendars.
Pelleas and Wilfred and Horace talked us over.
“Ah, well now,” said Wilfred, “they look not a day older than when we
were married, and Miss Willie is younger than any one.”
Wilfred, who used to be slim and bored, is a plump, rosy old gentleman
interested in everything to the point--never beyond--of curiosity. O
these youthful poses of languor and faint surprise, how they exchange
themselves in spite of themselves for the sterling coin!
Horace beamed across at Polly--Horace is a man of affairs in Nassau
Street and his name is conjured with as the line between his eyes would
lead one to suspect; yet his eyes twinkled quite as they used before
the line was there.
“Polly,” he begged, “may I call you ‘Polly’ to-night? I’ve been
restricted to ‘Penelope,’” he explained, “ever since our Polly was
born. Then after her coming out she demanded the Penelope, and I went
back to the Polly I preferred. But now our Polly-Penelope is forty,
and there is a little seminary Polly who is Polly too, though I dare
say the mite may rebuke us any day for undue familiarity. May I say
‘Polly’ now?”
Pelleas was smiling.
“I leave it to you,” he said generously to every one, “to say if
Etarre’s hair was not white at our wedding? She has always looked
precisely--but precisely!--the way she looks now.”
Miss Willie Lillieblade sighed and tapped with her staff.
“Pooh!” said she. “Old married folk always live in the past. I’m a
young thing of seventy-four and I’ve learned to live in the present.
Let’s dance. My neuralgia is coming back.”
We had the chairs away in a minute, and Pelleas summoned from the
dining-room the musicians--a Danish lad with a mane of straight hair
over his eyes and his equally Danish sister in a collarless loose wool
frock. They struck into the Varsovienne with a will and at the sound my
heart bounded; and, Pelleas having recalled to me the step when Nichola
was not looking, I danced away with Wilfred as if I knew how to do
nothing else. Pelleas danced with Miss Willie who kept her staff in her
hand and would tap the floor at all the impertinent rests in the music,
while Pelleas sang “tol” above everything. Polly insisted on dancing
alone--I suspect because her little feet are almost as trim as when
she wore one’s--and she lifted her poplin and sailed about among us.
Sally kept her head prettily on one side for all the world as she used,
though now her gray curls were bobbing. Horace, who suffers frightfully
from gout, kept beside her at a famous pace and his eyes were quite
triangular with pain. “_Tol te tol te tol!_” insisted Pelleas, with
Miss Willie holding her hand to her neuralgia as she whirled. I looked
down at the figures on the carpet gliding beneath my feet and for one
charmed moment, with the lilt of the music in my blood, I could have
been certain that _now was not now, but then_!
This lasted, as you may imagine, somewhat less than three minutes.
Breathless we sank down one by one, though Sally and Pelleas, now
together and now alone, outdanced us all until we dreaded to think what
the morrow held for them both. Miss Lillieblade was on her knees by the
fire trying to warm her painful cheek on an andiron knob and laughing
at every one. Polly with flushed face and tumbled hair was crying out:
“O, but stop, Sally!” and “Pray be careful!” and fanning herself with
an unframed water-colour that had been knocked from the mantel. We
all knew for that matter that we would have to pay, but then we paid
anyway. If one has to have gout and attendant evils one may as well
make them a fair exchange for innocent pleasure instead of permitting
them to be mere usury. Pelleas said that afterward.
Sally suddenly laughed aloud.
“They think that we have to be helped up and down steps!” she said
blithely.
We caught her meaning and joined in her laugh at the expense of a world
that fancies us to have had our day.
“If we liked,” said Miss Lillieblade, “I have no doubt we could meet
here every night when no one was looking, and be our exact selves of
the Selby-Whitford ball.”
Horace smiled across at Polly.
“Who would read _them_ to sleep with fairy stories?” he demanded.
Polly nodded her gray curls and smiled tenderly.
“And who would get my son, the senator, a drink of water when he cried
for it?” gayly propounded Sally.
Pelleas and I were silent. The evenings that we spent together in the
nursery were bitterly long ago.
“Ah, well,” said Miss Lillieblade with a little sigh, “I could come, at
any rate.”
For a moment she was silent. “Let’s dance again!” she cried.
We danced a six-step--those little people could play anything that
we asked for--and then, to rest, we walked through a minuet, Pelleas
playing a double rôle. And thereafter we all sat down and shook our
heads at the music and pretended to be most exhausted, and I was glad
that the rest pretended for I really was weak with fatigue and so was
Pelleas. For half an hour we sat about the fire, Miss Willie with her
face constantly upon the andiron though she recalled more delightful
things than anybody.
“Then there was Aunt Effié in Vermont,” she had just said, her voice
cracking deliciously on its high tones, “who cooked marvelously. And
when the plain skirts came in she went about declaring that she would
never have one that wasn’t full, because she couldn’t make a comforter
out of it afterward!”
At that mention of marvelous cookery and in the laugh which followed,
Pelleas and I slipped without. For we were suddenly in an agony of
foreboding, realizing horribly that we had not once heard the area-bell
ring. And if the ices and cakes had been left outside it would probably
be true that by now they _had_ gone to the poor.
The back stairway was dark for Nichola always extinguishes all the
lower lights when she goes out. We groped our way down the stairs as
best we might, Pelleas clasping my hand. We were breathing quickly,
and as for me my knees were trembling. For the first time the enormity
of our situation overcame me. What if the ices had not come? Or had
been stolen? What about plates? And spoons? Where did Nichola keep the
best napkins? And after all Sally was Madame Sarah Chartres, whose
entertainments were superb. All this flooded my spirit at once and I
clung to Pelleas for strength.
“Pelleas,” I murmured weakly, “did the ice-cream man promise to have it
here in time?”
“He’s had to promise me that every day since I first ordered it,”
Pelleas assured me cheerfully, “five or six times, in all.”
“O,” said I, as if I had no character, “I feel as if I should faint,
Pelleas.”
Three steps from the bottom I stood still and caught at his coat.
Through the crack at the top of the door I could see a light in the
kitchen. At the same moment an odour--faint, permeating, delicious,
unmistakable--saluted us both. It was coffee.
Pelleas flung open the door and we stood making a guilty tableau on the
lowest step.
The kitchen was brightly lighted and a fire blazed on the hearth. The
gas range was burning and a kettle of coffee was playing its fragrant
rôle. Plates, napkins, and silver were on the dresser; the boxes of
ices were on the sill of the open area window; on the table stood the
cakes, cut, and flanked by a tray of thin white sandwiches; the great
salad bowl was ready with a little tray of things for the dressing;
from a white napkin I saw protruding the leg of a cold fowl; there was
the chafing dish waiting to hold something else delectable. And in the
rocking-chair before the fire, wearing an embroidered white apron and
waiting with closed eyes, sat Nichola.
“O Nichola,” we cried together in awed voices, “Nichola.”
She opened an eye, without so much as lifting her head.
“For the love of heaven,” she said, “it’s ’most time. The coffee’s just
ready an’ Our Lady knows you’ve been havin’ a hard evenin’. Ain’t you
hungry, dancin’ so? Well, go back upstairs, the both of you.”
We went. In the dark of the stairway we clung to each other, filled
with amazement and thanksgiving. We could hear Nichola moving briskly
about the kitchen collecting her delicacies. How _had_ she found us
out? O, and now at last was not the secret of her mysterious Thursday
evenings revealed to us? She did go somewhere for lessons in magic and
she had learned to read our inmost thoughts!
From above stairs came the laughter of the others, echoes of that
ancient ball which we had been pretending to re-live, trading the empty
past for the largess and beauty of now.
Pelleas slipped his arm about me to help me up the stairs.
“Etarre,” he said, “I am glad that now is now--and not then!”