part was a work of imagination: Mr. Morley would have been only too
glad to face his wife, for, stretched on a bed of sickness, and tossing
with pain and fever, his wife’s presence would have been like cold
water to his burning lips. He had indeed fallen from grace. On his
way to the station a friend--a long-unseen friend, worse than any
garroter--had begged him to dine with him; he had listened, longed,
hesitated, yielded; he could at any rate enjoy his friend’s society, if
he could not dine, and could return to Teresa by a later train. Vain
thought! When that mulligatawny soup steamed in its tureen, when that
striped bass in its port-wine sauce lifted its handsome side, when that
breast of a mongrel duck saluted his famished eyes, when that single
sip of Château Yquem made him think the world well lost, Mr. Morley
fell. Four hours of delicious banqueting; twenty-four hours of dust
and ashes. The stomach so long used to husks spurned the rich offering
of blood and gravies, sauces and condiments; and no drunkard after a
debauch ever suffered in body and in soul what Mr. Morley was suffering
after this not too luxurious good square meal. Mrs. Morley buried her
head in her husband’s bosom when Mr. Pearmain, with the kindliness of
a man and the severity of a regicide, having carried her to the place
next day, closed the door upon the interview--and surely we cannot do
less than Mr. Pearmain did.
Poor Mrs. Morley! It is to be hoped that her husband promised better
fashions. But on what was she to rely? On his word? A broken reed--and
he had broken it. Poor Mr. Morley! He was thoroughly wretched. He went
about with a craven air, conscious of suspicion. What is life without
respect? And he knew that his wife’s respect was doubtful, that the
Pearmains’ was not at all doubtful, and felt that even little Louie
might learn to despise him. And, meantime, all the neighbors, aware
that something very much out of the way had taken place and had been
hushed up, regarded him as the culprit of a veritable escapade, of
some vague and awful departure from rectitude, and looked upon this
quiet, sober, steady citizen, who paid his taxes, went to church on
Sundays, voted the right ticket, and never did anything very wrong in
his life--except when he gave his wife the trusteeship of his diet--as
little other than a regular Don Juan.
Really one cannot help thinking that it was too bad of Mr. Morley. He
had promised his wife, and lulled her into false security, declaring
that his word was as good as his bond; and he was a business man, and
knew what his bond meant. Moreover, he knew that his wife had grown
to have the affair very much at heart, being, like all converts,
wonderfully bigoted, and convinced that it was a matter of life and
death. “Why do you worry so over it, Teresa?” asked Mrs. Pearmain
once. “You have established your own and Louie’s habits. There is no
likelihood of your failing for yourself, or of your not securing her
great destiny for her--yes, her great destiny. And why not let him
return to his idols?”
“My George! oh, Emily, how can I? I had rather go with him. What
satisfaction to me is it to be any better than he is? I want his blood
to be pure, his life long. I want him to rise with me, and if all this
is to separate us and make us a different race at last, I will have
fried pork on my table every day, and eat it too! I wish I had never
heard a word about it all! I don’t see that it makes us a bit better.
George and I used to agree about everything, and now we quarrel about
everything!”
Evidently indignation was not the weapon with which to meet this
outbreak, and Mrs. Pearmain wearily went over all her fantastic
premises and logical sequences till she had at length triumphantly
welded the chains afresh on Mrs. Morley’s reason, and Mr. Morley’s
œsophagus.
Of course, while all these agitations went on, time went on as well,
and Harry Pearmain and Louie Morley were not standing still: their
childhood was passing too. They were really beautiful children, and
whether or not animal diet is good for the rest of us, their bright
eyes, round limbs, and rosy cheeks, their boundless grace and happy
natures, showed that the opposite diet was good for them. But then,
on the other hand, nobody could dispute the fact that little Fanny
Farwell’s cheeks were just as rosy, her pretty flesh as sweet, her
grace as airy; and Fanny had been fed on the richest of steaks and the
fattest of oysters ever since she had cut her teeth. They were the
three best friends in the world, and the only drawback to the felicity
of certain of the parents was, that Harry always persisted in calling
Fanny his little wife, and Louie his dear sister, although it is
uncertain if he were stimulated to that nomenclature by the gibraltars
and the silver pieces that Mr. Morley now invariably bestowed upon
him whenever he heard it. Sister or wife in the future, they were
exceedingly affectionate in the present; they ran across the grounds
to each other with their games and their secrets, and Louie was as
much at home in Harry’s house as Harry was in hers; and Mrs. Pearmain
used to look exultingly at Louie as upon her especial work, portray
the future to herself, and rejoice over a daughter-in-law after her
own heart. Meantime Mrs. Farwell had some thoughts of her own, the
character of which may be known by the pitiful way in which she used to
smooth Fanny’s sunshiny curls as she remarked to her husband upon the
inconveniences attending the preparation of two different tables, that
it was a pity if what was good enough for our grandparents wasn’t good
enough for our grandchildren, that, after all, women were nothing but
the slaves of men’s caprices, and that the whole of these new-fangled
reformatory notions had not succeeded in making Louie Morley half
so pretty as her Fanny: though when she had had her say, it is not
impossible that the complacent sparkle in her eye as she now and then
overlooked the Pearmain property was due to the consideration that
it was her Fanny who might one day queen it over that fair demesne.
Mrs. Farwell, however, if she pondered these things in her heart,
kept them there so well that it never entered the heads of the other
two mothers that any power could possibly arrange matters differently
from the way in which they had arranged them themselves. So the three
happy things grew up together, the girls skating with the boy in
winter, and bird-nesting with him in summer, the boy playing house
with them, doing their examples and threading their needles at times,
astonishing them with his daring feats in riding and shooting and
wrestling, while Louie’s great black eyes and brilliant colors gave
her a certain prominence in their counsels, and her dashing courage
made her assimilate most to the boy’s ways, and Fanny’s tenderness and
timidity and soft sweetness moved his heart in quite another fashion.
They were happy years to the children; they were years of apparent
contentment with the Pearmains; they were years of a perpetual and open
struggle with the Morleys. If Mr. Morley missed a train, or was delayed
by conversation at the station, if he were late in returning from
town-meeting or from the lodge, Mrs. Morley’s nerves began to twitter
and her heart to flutter; now he comes, and now he doesn’t come; this
foot-fall was his till it went by, this one surely was, and her heart
beat like a forge, and fell with a mighty blow at the disappointment.
“It is killing me, I know it is,” she would say to herself. “All this
hope and fear and doubt and worry keep my pulses going so that I shall
have a dreadful heart-disease fastened upon me. It really does not seem
as if the good our plan may do outweighs the evil it does do.” And then
she would take her work and run up to Mrs. Pearmain’s for some words
to fortify her. Mrs. Pearmain always had them. More than once she
had intimated that that was her branch of the business, and had even
admitted that the person who furnished all the ideas ought not to be
expected to furnish practice too, like those old-fashioned temperance
lecturers who aroused their energies with a good nip of brandy before
converting their audience to do away with brandy altogether.
“Never mind, never mind, Emily,” she would say. “It is worth any amount
of heart-ache. It isn’t that it will so much benefit you and me--it
would do little hurt to our plan, I suppose, if we took our bone in
our cupboard--but our example is necessary to keep the children at the
mark.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Morley. “Length of days is as
desirable for us as for the children; and when we discard Death from
our diet, he has to stop long enough to seek some other approach, at
any rate.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pearmain, “that is true. I feel as if these
children might acquire immortality--at least return to such age as
Melchizedek’s and Methuselah’s. And just think what work might be
accomplished in such lifetimes as that will bring about! Now a person
no sooner knows how to handle his talent, his inventive skill, or his
learning, than off he goes, snuffed out like a candle; but then the man
who invents a spring for a railroad car at thirty, at three hundred
will be ballasting a road to the moon. What a period it will be after
a few such generations! There will be no such thing as typhoids and
diphtherias and all that ilk; we shall have killed off the plants that
nourish the germs of parasitical disease; the organs of our bodies, no
longer clogged with foul matter, will run on undisturbed indefinitely;
the reducing of the temperature of the blood and abstracting the
stimulus of strong flesh will abolish another class of disease and all
the hereditary horrors that spring from it; and I can’t see that there
will be anything but sudden accident to stop the machine any more than
to stop a planet.”
“Well, that is for them, not for us. They will never give us a thought,
nor dream of all our trouble and struggle to achieve it for them. They
will only despise us as we do the wretches who sawed human bones with
flint for the sake of the marrow.”
“I think such a race will have no room for contempt. They will pity us
with every fresh gain. Why, Teresa, I can even think the time may come
when there will be no eating at all, but science will have learned the
required elements of food, the nitrates and phosphates and all that,
and supply them to us in gaseous shape, great reservoirs feeding our
houses through pipes: we will open the tubes in the dining-room, and
sit a certain length of time together there, talking gayly, stimulated
by the gas we are all breathing together, of which the system will take
only what it needs, and then go our ways again without soil, grease, or
trouble.”
“But, goodness, Emily, our teeth, our stomachs!”
“Well, teeth are useful in various ways. And as for our stomachs, they
may be turned to the secretion of--now don’t you laugh at me, Teresa--I
have really read a paper about it--to the secretion of wing material--”
“Wings!”
“Yes, wings--why not? If the first fish that ever dreamed of being a
bird had seen a penguin with his flippers, transmigrating fins, he
wouldn’t have thought himself visionary. But being determined to be a
bird, he became a penguin; and some penguin probably determined upon
becoming an eagle. We only have to be determined, Teresa, and we can do
anything--in time--allowing, you know, that the ‘eternal years of God’
are ours to work in.”
“We can determine upon being angels,” said Mrs. Morley, slyly.
“And become so in time. How do you suppose the bodily idea of angels
arose, if not from the forefeeling of those wings? It isn’t for you and
me, Teresa, but it is for Harry’s and Louie’s descendants to have as
fine
‘Sustaining wings of skyey grain,
Orange and azure deepening into gold,’
as any angel of them all.”
“It will be very awkward for dress-makers,” said Mrs. Morley, her
needle on her lip, and rather too well accustomed to wonders from her
friend’s lips for much surprise.
“On the contrary, it will simplify dress-making.”
“But, Emily, it will take more than our Harry and Louie to bring all
this about. Their children will have to marry among the flesh-eaters,
and all our work goes for nothing.”
“I know it. And that perplexes me a great deal. Really it doesn’t seem
right to throw up the matter for that. Still it was an awful oversight.
Sometimes it almost reconciles me to the bouillon and chops that Dr.
Bonnamy ordered last fall.”
“Last fall?”
“When I grew so poorly from eating the lemons, you know.”
“Oh yes, to keep your bones--”
“From turning to chalk. I went too far. Oh, if we could only live up to
our theories!” said Mrs. Pearmain, with a sigh.
“I can, and I will,” cried Mrs. Morley. “And George Morley must.”
“Now if we had only found two other mothers to begin life as we did, we
should have been quite secure,” said Mrs. Pearmain, reflectively. “Then
there would have been no need of abandoning our experiment.”
“Abandoning! Who talks of abandoning?” cried Mrs. Morley, with snapping
eyes. “If it is right to do, I shall do it irrespective of the
possibilities of Harry’s and Louie’s descendants.”
“But it is for them we are doing it. And all that wars against us is
appetite--no, not even appetite, but the mere sense of taste. Why in
the world cannot science take up the thing, and invent flavors for
us, so that with a few drops of this extract we can give the flavor
of roast fowl to this vegetable, with a few drops of that turn our
porridge into turtle-soup, and with another get all the satisfaction
out of a biscuit that we should out of a chop? But no,” said Mrs.
Pearmain, wearily, “it never will, and I for one am almost tired of
going against the stream, when all our work is to end like those rivers
which are lost upon the desert.”
Then it was Mrs. Morley’s turn to exhort, to assure her friend she
had been overworked, and was morbid, and must have a dish of strong
gruel made immediately, and must stimulate herself with some cress
and onion and tomato-salad, and presently must go away from home on a
little visit. “Change of scene to us is like change of food to others,”
said Mrs. Morley, and Mrs. Pearmain thought there was a great deal
of wisdom in what her friend said. And so Mrs. Pearmain went away to
a water-cure, where, as the authorities could not find anything the
matter with her back, they began to concern themselves about her brain,
upon which she returned home in high dudgeon.
She had been gone just long enough. A great deal of mischief can be
accomplished in three months when people are seventeen or eighteen
years old--between which years Louie now hung; and Mrs. Morley’s
attention had been called off by a series of tergiversations on Mr.
Morley’s part that had threatened not only to make her a widow, but
to destroy her system of operations. Her own nerves had been badly
shattered by his behavior, and by the impossibility of knowing her
fate from dinner to dinner, and subsequently by the long watching and
waiting that his illness devolved upon her when indulgence in corned
pork and cabbage at a restaurant had produced an inflammation of the
stomach that nearly proved fatal to him. On his recovery a demon of
hunger had seemed to be gnawing at Mr. Morley’s vitals, and all the
fancy grits and groats in the market did not meet his demand. Mr.
Morley no sooner returned to business than a porter-house steak learned
to expect him on the noon of every day.
But you may be sure that this was very mortifying to Mr. Morley.
“Skulking round a corner like a lean dog for his bone,” as he used to
grumble, was enough to make a sneak of any man, and he had always been
proud of his uprightness. The consciousness that he was sacrificing
his birthright for a mess of pottage made him exceedingly morose; and,
convicted of his own dereliction, he was daily and hourly trying to
find some fault in Mrs. Morley that should balance it, till life became
little but crimination and recrimination in the household where it
had been expected to bring about the millennium. Not in all this time
being able to summon the courage to fight it out with his wife, he was
every now and then swearing off again, every now and then suffering
a relapse, making himself a martyr to dyspepsia and remorse; and,
forgetting all old ties, he was encouraging something like hatred of
the Pearmains, with every pang that came from yielding the right, from
abandoning the pleasant, or from indigestion. Good Mr. Pearmain went on
his patient, plodding way without giving Mr. Morley and his struggles a
second thought; but Mr. Morley, in turn, never gave a second thought to
the atmosphere of conciliation that of late years had seemed to grow up
about Mrs. Pearmain’s manners. Things were imbittered for him, too, by
the knowledge that the world had so well prospered with him that he was
fully able to gratify his wishes, but with all his good luck and good
bank account was obliged to live on prison fare. He lived, though, only
in the hope of one day breaking his bonds; and the thought that his
darling girl was being reared to belong to anything belonging to the
Pearmains grew daily more obnoxious to him.
Mrs. Morley, however, had but a slight knowledge of what went on in
the little cosmos of her husband’s emotions; she had no doubt that he
broke faith with her frequently in the matter of his diet; she used
to make scornful observations as to the freedom of a man to do wrong
unobserved, but she had no idea to what extent that faith was broken,
and only once in a while dimly felt herself trembling on the edge of a
rebellion before whose outbreak she would go under. She was not at all
happy, only triumphantly right, and she nailed her colors to the mast,
and swept bravely forward.
Mr. Morley had little pleasure at home in those years; somehow all
conversation led to the one theme, as all roads lead to Rome. He found
hardly any other satisfaction than in walking with Louie in the woods,
or else taking his book on the windy upland of the hill behind the
two estates of Pearmain and Morley, and in dreaming his life away in
the sun, now and then bursting out of calm repose into a storm of
expletives that must have startled the ground-mice and the birds, as he
thought of the pleasure he might have taken with his dear little Teresa
“if that Pearmain woman had never fallen foul of her.”
Once, just as he was relapsing into quiet after such a burst, an arm
stole round his neck, and a soft dimpled brown hand, with a big pearl
on it, laid itself over his mouth. “Aren’t you ashamed, you dear
profane Pa Morley?” cried Louie, and her laughing face came round in
front till the great black eyes looked into his little gray ones.
“Where do you expect to die when you go to? What makes you swear so,
sitting up here in the sun? Is it some tender reminiscence connected
with a beef-bone? Listen! I’m going to tell you a great secret. Do you
know, I think turtle-soup is almost as good as mock-turtle!”
“Louie!” he gasped.
“Yes, indeed,” she said, with the gayest sort of a mischievous laugh,
pulling herself round by the sod to her father’s side. “I mentioned
that to show you how high up I am in the graduating class. Turtle-soup
and terrapin are like a degree _cum summâ laudâ_ in the comestible
line. I should like mutton-broth and gumbo every day when I didn’t have
oyster-stew or chowder.”
It is true that in the instant, despite his own wishes, Mr. Morley
recoiled as from a cockatrice inadvertently hatched in his bosom.
“Now, Pa Morley,” whimpered the sweet voice, in distress, “as if you
weren’t really glad of it!”
“But--but, my dear--”
“Oh, now stop, please. I’ll tell you all about it. And it isn’t our
fault at all. Ma drove us to it.”
“Our?”
“Well, yes, Harry’s or mine. When we found out what ma and Mrs.
Pearmain were after--How would you like it, I want to know, Pa Morley,”
she suddenly cried, “to have folks manœuvring about you in that way;
to be set apart from everybody else in the world in that indelicate,
indecent way; to be talked over as the--the--the beginner of a great
future perfect race--”
“It’s nonsense! it’s nonsense!” cried Mr. Morley, springing to his feet.
“Now, pa, you just be quiet. I am. And I’m the party most directly
concerned,” and she coaxed him down beside her again. “I don’t care
anything about that great future race. This race is good enough for me.
And I think ma and Mrs. Pearmain might be ashamed of themselves. And so
does Harry.”
“What! you’ve talked it over?”
“We’ve heard _them_ talking it over--oh, times! And, pa dear, now don’t
you go to being cross; it’s of no sort of use to speak to them about
it; and--and the fact is, I like Harry very much indeed, very much, and
so does he like me, but there’s somebody I like worlds, worlds, worlds
better.”
“Oh, there is, is there?” And her father caught her shoulders in his
two hands, and held her at arm’s-length till the face drooped and the
eyes veiled themselves, and the little brazen thing was blushing and
half crying. “And I know who it is!” he cried, releasing his hold
and clasping the pretty head all at once into his breast, to the
great damage of crimps and starch. “You don’t suppose I’ve seen Dr.
Bonnamy’s gig waiting round these lanes so long for nothing?”
“You don’t care, do you, pa?” she whispered, looking up from her
resting-place.
“I don’t know about that,” he answered, smoothing the rich hair in a
reckless way. “What am _I_ going to do?”
“Threaten ma with a lunatic asylum, and make her behave herself.”
“No, no, ma has her rights. She believes in her principles thoroughly,
and so do I. But the trouble is I never did have any backbone.”
“Nobody could have, or any other bone, living as we do.”
“I’m--I’m ashamed of it, but my senses are too much for me. Your mother
ought to have married a better man.”
“For shame, Pa Morley! As if she could!”
“She’d have been a great deal happier, and perhaps have founded her
great race. It does seem a shame that such a mighty plan should be
thwarted just because I love gravy. She’ll say, Louie, that the reason
you love soup is because of the rebellion of my senses against the--”
“Acquiescence of your reason.” And then they both laughed like two
children. “It isn’t only soup, though,” said Louie. “I love everything
that’s good, and take it whenever I can get it--chicken, calf’s-head,
pork and beans--”
“O Lord! we might as well give up, then,” groaned Mr. Morley.
“We might as well give up,” repeated Louie, with great cheerfulness.
“And you’ll help us, pa?”
“I? I? Why, how can I--”
“Oh, I know how! Just say you will.”
“If--if I dare to, my darling.”
“Well, I won’t trouble you much; not till after it’s all done, and
can’t be helped. I love John Bonnamy, and I hate the great future
race”--and all of a sudden she burst out crying inextinguishably, and
it was all her father could do to kiss her and soothe her into calmness
before walking away with her, her little elastic step hardly crushing
the grass, into the wood where John Bonnamy was waiting.
It was an hour or two later in the day, just as the first tinge of
sunset began to transmute all the summer world, when Mr. Morley came
walking back alone over the brow of the hill, very quiet, very dazed,
a little stunned it may be, a little wondering if nature were not on
his side and requiting his wrongs after all. For what was this he had
heard in the wood--as if Louie’s story were not marvel enough? Harry
Pearmain, Fanny Farwell--those two children; he not a day more than
twenty-one, she less than his Louie’s age--just seventeen; a secret
whose seal no one dared to break. He didn’t know how to believe it all.
It was like a dream. He felt that he must have a night’s sleep on it,
and see if he dreamed it again, before he dared to think of it. He saw
a great vista of release opening before him, if he could but find a
sword to hew through the first hedge.