ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC
In the course of twelve years the Shuttle had woven steadily and--its
movements lubricated by time and custom--with increasing rapidity.
Threads of commerce it caught up and shot to and fro, with threads of
literature and art, threads of life drawn from one shore to the other
and back again, until they were bound in the fabric of its weaving.
Coldness there had been between both lands, broad divergence of taste
and thought, argument across seas, sometimes resentment, but the web in
Fate's hands broadened and strengthened and held fast. Coldness faintly
warmed despite itself, taste and thought drawn into nearer contact,
reflecting upon their divergences, grew into tolerance and the knowledge
that the diverging, seen more clearly, was not so broad; argument
coming within speaking distance reasoned itself to logical and practical
conclusions. Problems which had stirred anger began to find solutions.
Books, in the first place, did perhaps more than all else. Cheap,
pirated editions of English works, much quarrelled over by authors and
publishers, being scattered over the land, brought before American eyes
soft, home-like pictures of places which were, after all was said and
done, the homes of those who read of them, at least in the sense of
having been the birthplaces of fathers or grandfathers. Some subtle,
far-reaching power of nature caused a stirring of the blood, a vague,
unexpressed yearning and lingering over pages which depicted sweet,
green lanes, broad acres rich with centuries of nourishment and care;
grey church towers, red roofs, and village children playing before
cottage doors. None of these things were new to those who pondered over
them, kinsmen had dwelt on memories of them in their fireside talk,
and their children had seen them in fancy and in dreams. Old grievances
having had time to fade away and take on less poignant colour, the
stirring of the blood stirred also imaginations, and wakened something
akin to homesickness, though no man called the feeling by its name. And
this, perhaps, was the strongest cord the Shuttle wove and was the true
meaning of its power. Being drawn by it, Americans in increasing numbers
turned their faces towards the older land. Gradually it was discovered
that it was the simplest affair in the world to drive down to the
wharves and take a steamer which landed one, after a more or less
interesting voyage, in Liverpool, or at some other convenient port.
From there one went to London, or Paris, or Rome; in fact, whithersoever
one's fancy guided, but first or last it always led the traveller to
the treading of green, velvet English turf. And once standing on
such velvet, both men and women, looking about them, felt, despite
themselves, the strange old thrill which some of them half resented and
some warmly loved.
In the course of twelve years, a length of time which will transform a
little girl wearing a short frock into a young woman wearing a long one,
the pace of life and the ordering of society may become so altered as
to appear amazing when one finds time to reflect on the subject. But one
does not often find time. Changes occur so gradually that one scarcely
observes them, or so swiftly that they take the form of a kind of amazed
shock which one gets over as quickly as one experiences it and realises
that its cause is already a fixed fact.
In the United States of America, which have not yet acquired the serene
sense of conservative self-satisfaction and repose which centuries of
age may bestow, the spirit of life itself is the aspiration for change.
Ambition itself only means the insistence on change. Each day is to be
better than yesterday fuller of plans, of briskness, of initiative. Each
to-day demands of to-morrow new men, new minds, new work. A to-day which
has not launched new ships, explored new countries, constructed new
buildings, added stories to old ones, may consider itself a failure,
unworthy even of being consigned to the limbo of respectable yesterdays.
Such a country lives by leaps and bounds, and the ten years which
followed the marriage of Reuben Vanderpoel's eldest daughter made many
such bounds and leaps. They were years which initiated and established
international social relations in a manner which caused them to
incorporate themselves with the history of both countries. As America
discovered Europe, that continent discovered America. American beauties
began to appear in English drawing-rooms and Continental salons. They
were presented at court and commented upon in the Row and the Bois.
Their little transatlantic tricks of speech and their mots were repeated
with gusto. It became understood that they were amusing and amazing.
Americans “came in” as the heroes and heroines of novels and stories.
Punch delighted in them vastly. Shopkeepers and hotel proprietors
stocked, furnished, and provisioned for them. They spent money
enormously and were singularly indifferent (at the outset) under
imposition. They “came over” in a manner as epoch-making, though less
war-like than that of William the Conqueror.
International marriages ceased to be a novelty. As Bettina Vanderpoel
grew up, she grew up, so to speak, in the midst of them. She saw her
country, its people, its newspapers, its literature, innocently rejoiced
by the alliances its charming young women contracted with foreign
rank. She saw it affectionately, gleefully, rubbing its hands over its
duchesses, its countesses, its miladies. The American Eagle spread its
wings and flapped them sometimes a trifle, over this new but so natural
and inevitable triumph of its virgins. It was of course only “American”
that such things should happen. America ruled the universe, and its
women ruled America, bullying it a little, prettily, perhaps. What could
be more a matter of course than that American women, being aided by
adoring fathers, brothers and husbands, sumptuously to ship themselves
to other lands, should begin to rule these lands also? Betty, in her
growing up, heard all this intimated. At twelve years old, though she
had detested Rosalie's marriage, she had rather liked to hear people
talk of the picturesqueness of places like Stornham Court, and of the
life led by women of rank in their houses in town and country. Such
talk nearly always involved the description of things and people, whose
colour and tone had only reached her through the medium of books, most
frequently fiction.
She was, however, of an unusually observing mind, even as a child, and
the time came when she realised that the national bird spread its wings
less proudly when the subject of international matches was touched upon,
and even at such times showed signs of restlessness. Now and then things
had not turned out as they appeared to promise; two or three seemingly
brilliant unions had resulted in disaster. She had not understood all
the details the newspapers cheerfully provided, but it was clear to
her that more than one previously envied young woman had had practical
reasons for discovering that she had made an astonishingly bad bargain.
This being the case, she used frequently to ponder over the case of
Rosy--Rosy! who had been swept away from them and swallowed up, as it
seemed, by that other and older world. She was in certain ways a silent
child, and no one but herself knew how little she had forgotten Rosy,
how often she pondered over her, how sometimes she had lain awake in the
night and puzzled out lines of argument concerning her and things which
might be true.
The one grief of poor Mrs. Vanderpoel's life had been the apparent
estrangement of her eldest child. After her first six months in England
Lady Anstruthers' letters had become fewer and farther between, and had
given so little information connected with herself that affectionate
curiosity became discouraged. Sir Nigel's brief and rare epistles
revealed so little desire for any relationship with his wife's family
that gradually Rosy's image seemed to fade into far distance and become
fainter with the passing of each month. It seemed almost an incredible
thing, when they allowed themselves to think of it, but no member of the
family had ever been to Stornham Court. Two or three efforts to arrange
a visit had been made, but on each occasion had failed through some
apparently accidental cause. Once Lady Anstruthers had been away, once
a letter had seemingly failed to reach her, once her children had had
scarlet fever and the orders of the physicians in attendance had
been stringent in regard to visitors, even relatives who did not fear
contagion.
“If she had been living in New York and her children had been ill I
should have been with her all the time,” poor Mrs. Vanderpoel had said
with tears. “Rosy's changed awfully, somehow. Her letters don't sound a
bit like she used to be. It seems as if she just doesn't care to see her
mother and father.”
Betty had frowned a good deal and thought intensely in secret. She did
not believe that Rosy was ashamed of her relations. She remembered,
however, it is true, that Clara Newell (who had been a schoolmate) had
become very super-fine and indifferent to her family after her marriage
to an aristocratic and learned German. Hers had been one of the
successful alliances, and after living a few years in Berlin she had
quite looked down upon New Yorkers, and had made herself exceedingly
unpopular during her one brief visit to her relatives. She seemed
to think her father and mother undignified and uncultivated, and she
disapproved entirely of her sisters dress and bearing. She said that
they had no distinction of manner and that all their interests were
frivolous and unenlightened.
“But Clara always was a conceited girl,” thought Betty. “She was always
patronising people, and Rosy was only pretty and sweet. She always said
herself that she had no brains. But she had a heart.”
After the lapse of a few years there had been no further discussion of
plans for visiting Stornham. Rosalie had become so remote as to appear
almost unreachable. She had been presented at Court, she had had three
children, the Dowager Lady Anstruthers had died. Once she had written
to her father to ask for a large sum of money, which he had sent to
her, because she seemed to want it very much. She required it to pay off
certain debts on the estate and spoke touchingly of her boy who would
inherit.
“He is a delicate boy, father,” she wrote, “and I don't want the estate
to come to him burdened.”
When she received the money she wrote gratefully of the generosity shown
her, but she spoke very vaguely of the prospect of their seeing each
other in the future. It was as if she felt her own remoteness even more
than they felt it themselves.
In the meantime Bettina had been taken to France and placed at school
there. The resulting experience was an enlightening one, far more
illuminating to the quick-witted American child than it would have been
to an English, French, or German one, who would not have had so much to
learn, and probably would not have been so quick at the learning.
Betty Vanderpoel knew nothing which was not American, and only vaguely
a few things which were not of New York. She had lived in Fifth Avenue,
attended school in a numbered street near her own home, played in and
been driven round Central Park. She had spent the hot months of the
summer in places up the Hudson, or on Long Island, and such resorts of
pleasure. She had believed implicitly in all she saw and knew. She
had been surrounded by wealth and decent good nature throughout her
existence, and had enjoyed her life far too much to admit of any doubt
that America was the most perfect country in the world, Americans the
cleverest and most amusing people, and that other nations were a little
out of it, and consequently sufficiently scant of resource to render
pity without condemnation a natural sentiment in connection with one's
occasional thoughts of them.
But hers was a mentality by no means ordinary. Inheritance in her nature
had combined with circumstances, as it has a habit of doing in all human
beings. But in her case the combinations were unusual and produced a
result somewhat remarkable. The quality of brains which, in the first
Reuben Vanderpoel had expressed itself in the marvellously successful
planning and carrying to their ends of commercial and financial schemes,
the absolute genius of penetration and calculation of the sordid and
uneducated little trader in skins and barterer of goods, having
filtered through two generations of gradual education and refinement
of existence, which was no longer that of the mere trader, had
been transformed in the great-granddaughter into keen, clear sight,
level-headed perceptiveness and a logical sense of values. As the first
Reuben had known by instinct the values of pelts and lands, Bettina
knew by instinct the values of qualities, of brains, of hearts, of
circumstances, and the incidents which affect them. She was as unaware
of the significance of her great possession as were those around her.
Nevertheless it was an unerring thing. As a mere child, unformed and
uneducated by life, she had not been one of the small creatures to be
deceived or flattered.
“She's an awfully smart little thing, that Betty,” her New York aunts
and cousins often remarked. “She seems to see what people mean, it
doesn't matter what they say. She likes people you would not expect her
to like, and then again she sometimes doesn't care the least for people
who are thought awfully attractive.”
As has been already intimated, the child was crude enough and not
particularly well bred, but her small brain had always been at work, and
each day of her life recorded for her valuable impressions. The page of
her young mind had ceased to be a blank much earlier than is usual.
The comparing of these impressions with such as she received when her
life in the French school was new afforded her active mental exercise.
She began with natural, secret indignation and rebellion. There was no
other American pupil in the establishment besides herself. But for the
fact that the name of Vanderpoel represented wealth so enormous as
to amount to a sort of rank in itself, Bettina would not have been
received. The proprietress of the institution had gravely disquieting
doubts of the propriety of America. Her pupils were not accustomed
to freedom of opinions and customs. An American child might either
consciously or unconsciously introduce them. As this must be guarded
against, Betty's first few months at the school were not agreeable to
her. She was supervised and expurgated, as it were. Special Sisters
were told off to converse and walk with her, and she soon perceived
that conversations were not only French lessons in disguise, but were
lectures on ethics, morals, and good manners, imperfectly concealed
by the mask and domino of amiable entertainment. She translated into
English after the following manner the facts her swift young perceptions
gathered. There were things it was so inelegant to say that only
the most impossible persons said them; there were things it was so
inexcusable to do that when done their inexcusability assumed the
proportions of a crime. There were movements, expressions, points of
view, which one must avoid as one would avoid the plague. And they were
all things, acts, expressions, attitudes of mind which Bettina had
been familiar with from her infancy, and which she was well aware were
considered almost entirely harmless and unobjectionable in New York,
in her beloved New York, which was the centre of the world, which was
bigger, richer, gayer, more admirable than any other city known upon the
earth.
If she had not so loved it, if she had ever dreamed of the existence of
any other place as being absolutely necessary, she would not have felt
the thing so bitterly. But it seemed to her that all these amiable
diatribes in exquisite French were directed at her New York, and it
must be admitted that she was humiliated and enraged. It was a personal,
indeed, a family matter. Her father, her mother, her relatives, and
friends were all in some degree exactly the kind of persons whose
speech, habits, and opinions she must conscientiously avoid. But for
the instinct of summing up values, circumstances, and intentions, it is
probable that she would have lost her head, let loose her temper and her
tongue, and have become insubordinate. But the quickness of perception
which had revealed practical potentialities to old Reuben Vanderpoel,
revealed to her the value of French which was perfectly fluent, a voice
which was musical, movements which were grace, manners which had a
still beauty, and comparing these things with others less charming
she listened and restrained herself, learning, marking, and inwardly
digesting with a cleverness most enviable.
Among her fellow pensionnaires she met with discomforting illuminations,
which were fine discipline also, though if she herself had been a less
intellectual creature they might have been embittering. Without doubt
Betty, even at twelve years, was intellectual. Hers was the practical
working intellect which begins duty at birth and does not lay down its
tools because the sun sets. The little and big girls who wrote their
exercises at her side did not deliberately enlighten her, but she
learned from them in vague ways that it was not New York which was the
centre of the earth, but Paris, or Berlin, Madrid, London, or Rome.
Paris and London were perhaps more calmly positive of themselves than
other capitals, and were a little inclined to smile at the lack of
seriousness in other claims. But one strange fact was more predominant
than any other, and this was that New York was not counted as a
civilised centre at all; it had no particular existence. Nobody
expressed this rudely; in fact, it did not acquire the form of actual
statement at any time. It was merely revealed by amiable and ingenuous
unconsciousness of the circumstance that such a part of the world
expected to be regarded or referred to at all. Betty began early to
realise that as her companions did not talk of Timbuctoo or Zanzibar,
so they did not talk of New York. Stockholm or Amsterdam seemed,
despite their smallness, to be considered. No one denied the presence of
Zanzibar on the map, but as it conveyed nothing more than the impression
of being a mere geographical fact, there was no reason why one should
dwell on it in conversation. Remembering all she had left behind, the
crowded streets, the brilliant shop windows, the buzz of individual
people, there were moments when Betty ground her strong little teeth.
She wanted to express all these things, to call out, to explain, and
command recognition for them. But her cleverness showed to her that
argument or protestation would be useless. She could not make such
hearers understand. There were girls whose interest in America was
founded on their impression that magnificent Indian chieftains in
blankets and feathers stalked about the streets of the towns, and
that Betty's own thick black hair had been handed down to her by some
beautiful Minnehaha or Pocahontas. When first she was approached by
timid, tentative questionings revealing this point of view, Betty felt
hot and answered with unamiable curtness. No, there were no red Indians
in New York. There had been no red Indians in her family. She had
neither grandmothers nor aunts who were squaws, if they meant that.
She felt so scornfully, so disgustedly indignant at their benighted
ignorance, that she knew she behaved very well in saying so little in
reply. She could have said so much, but whatsoever she had said would
have conveyed nothing to them, so she thought it all out alone. She
went over the whole ground and little realised how much she was teaching
herself as she turned and tossed in her narrow, spotlessly white bed at
night, arguing, comparing, drawing deductions from what she knew and
did not know of the two continents. Her childish anger, combining
itself with the practical, alert brain of Reuben Vanderpoel the first,
developed in her a logical reasoning power which led her to arrive at
many an excellent and curiously mature conclusion. The result was
finely educational. All the more so that in her fevered desire for
justification of the things she loved, she began to read books such as
little girls do not usually take interest in. She found some difficulty
in obtaining them at first, but a letter or two written to her father
obtained for her permission to read what she chose. The third Reuben
Vanderpoel was deeply fond of his younger daughter, and felt in secret
a profound admiration for her, which was saved from becoming too obvious
by the ever present American sense of humour.
“Betty seems to be going in for politics,” he said after reading the
letter containing her request and her first list of books. “She's about
as mad as she can be at the ignorance of the French girls about America
and Americans. She wants to fill up on solid facts, so that she can come
out strong in argument. She's got an understanding of the power of solid
facts that would be a fortune to her if she were a man.”
It was no doubt her understanding of the power of facts which led her
to learn everything well and to develop in many directions. She began to
dip into political and historical volumes because she was furious, and
wished to be able to refute idiocy, but she found herself continuing to
read because she was interested in a way she had not expected. She began
to see things. Once she made a remark which was prophetic. She made
it in answer to a guileless observation concerning the gold mines with
which Boston was supposed to be enriched.
“You don't know anything about America, you others,” she said. “But you
WILL know!”
“Do you think it will become the fashion to travel in America?” asked a
German girl.
“Perhaps,” said Betty. “But--it isn't so much that you will go to
America. I believe it will come to you. It's like that--America. It
doesn't stand still. It goes and gets what it wants.”
She laughed as she ended, and so did the other girls. But in ten years'
time, when they were young women, some of them married, some of them
court beauties, one of them recalled this speech to another, whom she
encountered in an important house in St. Petersburg, the wife of the
celebrated diplomat who was its owner being an American woman.
Bettina Vanderpoel's education was a rather fine thing. She herself
had more to do with it than girls usually have to do with their own
training. In a few months' time those in authority in the French school
found that it was not necessary to supervise and expurgate her. She
learned with an interested rapacity which was at once unusual and
amazing. And she evidently did not learn from books alone. Her voice, as
an organ, had been musical and full from babyhood. It began to modulate
itself and to express things most voices are incapable of expressing.
She had been so built by nature that the carriage of her head and limbs
was good to behold. She acquired a harmony of movement which caused her
to lose no shade of grace and spirit. Her eyes were full of thought, of
speculation, and intentness.
“She thinks a great deal for one so young,” was said of her frequently
by one or the other of her teachers. One finally went further and added,
“She has genius.”
This was true. She had genius, but it was not specialised. It was not
genius which expressed itself through any one art. It was a genius for
life, for living herself, for aiding others to live, for vivifying
mere existence. She herself was, however, aware only of an eagerness
of temperament, a passion for seeing, doing, and gaining knowledge.
Everything interested her, everybody was suggestive and more or less
enlightening.
Her relatives thought her original in her fancies. They called them
fancies because she was so young. Fortunately for her, there was no
reason why she should not be gratified. Most girls preferred to spend
their holidays on the Continent. She elected to return to America every
alternate year. She enjoyed the voyage and she liked the entire change
of atmosphere and people.
“It makes me like both places more,” she said to her father when she was
thirteen. “It makes me see things.”
Her father discovered that she saw everything. She was the pleasure of
his life. He was attracted greatly by the interest she exhibited in
all orders of things. He saw her make bold, ingenuous plunges into all
waters, without any apparent consciousness that the scraps of knowledge
she brought to the surface were unusual possessions for a schoolgirl.
She had young views on the politics and commerce of different countries,
as she had views on their literature. When Reuben Vanderpoel swooped
across the American continent on journeys of thousands of miles, taking
her as a companion, he discovered that he actually placed a sort of
confidence in her summing up of men and schemes. He took her to see
mines and railroads and those who worked them, and he talked them over
with her afterward, half with a sense of humour, half with a sense of
finding comfort in her intelligent comprehension of all he said.
She enjoyed herself immensely and gained a strong picturesqueness of
character. After an American holiday she used to return to France,
Germany, or Italy, with a renewed zest of feeling for all things
romantic and antique. After a few years in the French convent she asked
that she might be sent to Germany.
“I am gradually changing into a French girl,” she wrote to her father.
“One morning I found I was thinking it would be nice to go into a
convent, and another day I almost entirely agreed with one of the girls
who was declaiming against her brother who had fallen in love with a
Californian. You had better take me away and send me to Germany.”
Reuben Vanderpoel laughed. He understood Betty much better than most of
her relations did. He knew when seriousness underlay her jests and his
respect for her seriousness was great. He sent her to school in Germany.
During the early years of her schooldays Betty had observed that America
appeared upon the whole to be regarded by her schoolfellows principally
as a place to which the more unfortunate among the peasantry emigrated
as steerage passengers when things could become no worse for them in
their own country. The United States was not mentally detached from any
other portion of the huge Western Continent. Quite well-educated persons
spoke casually of individuals having “gone to America,” as if there were
no particular difference between Brazil and Massachusetts.
“I wonder if you ever saw my cousin Gaston,” a French girl once asked
her as they sat at their desks. “He became very poor through ill living.
He was quite without money and he went to America.”
“To New York?” inquired Bettina.
“I am not sure. The town is called Concepcion.”
“That is not in the United States,” Betty answered disdainfully. “It is
in Chili.”
She dragged her atlas towards her and found the place.
“See,” she said. “It is thousands of miles from New York.” Her companion
was a near-sighted, rather slow girl. She peered at the map, drawing a
line with her finger from New York to Concepcion.
“Yes, they are at a great distance from one another,” she admitted, “but
they are both in America.”
“But not both in the United States,” cried Betty. “French girls always
seem to think that North and South America are the same, that they are
both the United States.”
“Yes,” said the slow girl with deliberation. “We do make odd mistakes
sometimes.” To which she added with entire innocence of any ironic
intention. “But you Americans, you seem to feel the United States, your
New York, to be all America.”
Betty started a little and flushed. During a few minutes of rapid
reflection she sat bolt upright at her desk and looked straight
before her. Her mentality was of the order which is capable of making
discoveries concerning itself as well as concerning others. She had
never thought of this view of the matter before, but it was quite true.
To passionate young patriots such as herself at least, that portion of
the map covered by the United States was America. She suddenly saw also
that to her New York had been America. Fifth Avenue Broadway, Central
Park, even Tiffany's had been “America.” She laughed and reddened a
shade as she put the atlas aside having recorded a new idea. She had
found out that it was not only Europeans who were local, which was a
discovery of some importance to her fervid youth.
Because she thought so often of Rosalie, her attention was, during the
passing years, naturally attracted by the many things she heard of such
marriages as were made by Americans with men of other countries than
their own. She discovered that notwithstanding certain commercial
views of matrimony, all foreigners who united themselves with American
heiresses were not the entire brutes primitive prejudice might lead
one to imagine. There were rather one-sided alliances which proved
themselves far from happy. The Cousin Gaston, for instance, brought home
a bride whose fortune rebuilt and refurnished his dilapidated chateau
and who ended by making of him a well-behaved and cheery country
gentleman not at all to be despised in his amiable, if light-minded good
nature and good spirits. His wife, fortunately, was not a young woman
who yearned for sentiment. She was a nice-tempered, practical American
girl, who adored French country life and knew how to amuse and manage
her husband. It was a genial sort of menage and yet though this was an
undeniable fact, Bettina observed that when the union was spoken of it
was always referred to with a certain tone which conveyed that though
one did not exactly complain of its having been undesirable, it was
not quite what Gaston might have expected. His wife had money and was
good-natured, but there were limitations to one's appreciation of a
marriage in which husband and wife were not on the same plane.
“She is an excellent person, and it has been good for Gaston,” said
Bettina's friend. “We like her, but she is not--she is not----” She
paused there, evidently seeing that the remark was unlucky. Bettina, who
was still in short frocks, took her up.
“What is she not?” she asked.
“Ah!--it is difficult to explain--to Americans. It is really not exactly
a fault. But she is not of his world.”
“But if he does not like that,” said Bettina coolly, “why did he let her
buy him and pay for him?”
It was young and brutal, but there were times when the business
perspicuity of the first Reuben Vanderpoel, combining with the fiery,
wounded spirit of his young descendant, rendered Bettina brutal. She saw
certain unadorned facts with unsparing young eyes and wanted to state
them. After her frocks were lengthened, she learned how to state them
with more fineness of phrase, but even then she was sometimes still
rather unsparing.
In this case her companion, who was not fiery of temperament, only
coloured slightly.
“It was not quite that,” she answered. “Gaston really is fond of her.
She amuses him, and he says she is far cleverer than he is.”
But there were unions less satisfactory, and Bettina had opportunities
to reflect upon these also. The English and Continental papers did
not give enthusiastic, detailed descriptions of the marriages New York
journals dwelt upon with such delight. They were passed over with a
paragraph. When Betty heard them spoken of in France, Germany or Italy,
she observed that they were not, as a rule, spoken of respectfully. It
seemed to her that the bridegrooms were, in conversation, treated by
their equals with scant respect. It appeared that there had always been
some extremely practical reason for the passion which had led them to
the altar. One generally gathered that they or their estates were very
much out at elbow, and frequently their characters were not considered
admirable by their relatives and acquaintances. Some had been rather
cold shouldered in certain capitals on account of embarrassing little,
or big, stories. Some had spent their patrimonies in riotous living.
Those who had merely begun by coming into impoverished estates, and had
later attenuated their resources by comparatively decent follies, were
of the more desirable order. By the time she was nineteen, Bettina had
felt the blood surge in her veins more than once when she heard some
comments on alliances over which she had seen her compatriots glow with
affectionate delight.
“It was time Ludlow married some girl with money,” she heard said of one
such union. “He had been playing the fool ever since he came into
the estate. Horses and a lot of stupid women. He had come some awful
croppers during the last ten years. Good-enough looking girl, they tell
me--the American he has married--tremendous lot of money. Couldn't
have picked it up on this side. English young women of fortune are not
looking for that kind of thing. Poor old Billy wasn't good enough.”
Bettina told the story to her father when they next met. She had grown
into a tall young creature by this time. Her low, full voice was like a
bell and was capable of ringing forth some fine, mellow tones of irony.
“And in America we are pleased,” she said, “and flatter ourselves that
we are receiving the proper tribute of adoration of our American wit and
beauty. We plume ourselves on our conquests.”
“No, Betty,” said her father, and his reflective deliberation had
meaning. “There are a lot of us who don't plume ourselves particularly
in these days. We are not as innocent as we were when this sort of thing
began. We are not as innocent as we were when Rosy was married.” And
he sighed and rubbed his forehead with the handle of his pen. “Not as
innocent as we were when Rosy was married,” he repeated.
Bettina went to him and slid her fine young arm round his neck. It was
a long, slim, round arm with a wonderful power to caress in its curves.
She kissed Vanderpoel's lined cheek.
“Have you had time to think much about Rosy?” she said.
“I've not had time, but I've done it,” he answered. “Anything that hurts
your mother hurts me. Sometimes she begins to cry in her sleep, and when
I wake her she tells me she has been dreaming that she has seen Rosy.”
“I have had time to think of her,” said Bettina. “I have heard so much
of these things. I was at school in Germany when Annie Butterfield and
Baron von Steindahl were married. I heard it talked about there, and
then my mother sent me some American papers.”
She laughed a little, and for a moment her laugh did not sound like a
girl's.
“Well, it's turned out badly enough,” her father commented. “The papers
had plenty to say about it later. There wasn't much he was too good to
do to his wife, apparently.”
“There was nothing too bad for him to do before he had a wife,” said
Bettina. “He was black. It was an insolence that he should have dared to
speak to Annie Butterfield. Somebody ought to have beaten him.”
“He beat her instead.”
“Yes, and I think his family thought it quite natural. They said that
she was so vulgar and American that she exasperated Frederick beyond
endurance. She was not geboren, that was it.” She laughed her severe
little laugh again. “Perhaps we shall get tired in time,” she added. “I
think we are learning. If it is made a matter of business quite open and
aboveboard, it will be fair. You know, father, you always said that I
was businesslike.”
There was interested curiosity in Vanderpoel's steady look at her. There
were times when he felt that Betty's summing up of things was well worth
listening to. He saw that now she was in one of her moods when it would
pay one to hear her out. She held her chin up a little, and her face
took on a fine stillness at once sweet and unrelenting. She was very
good to look at in such moments.
“Yes,” he answered, “you have a particularly level head for a girl.”
“Well,” she went on. “What I see is that these things are not business,
and they ought to be. If a man comes to a rich American girl and says,
'I and my title are for sale. Will you buy us?' If the girl is--is that
kind of a girl and wants that kind of man, she can look them both over
and say, 'Yes, I will buy you,' and it can be arranged. He will not
return the money if he is unsatisfactory, but she cannot complain that
she has been deceived. She can only complain of that when he pretends
that he asks her to marry him because he wants her for his wife, because
he would want her for his wife if she were as poor as himself. Let it
be understood that he is property for sale, let her make sure that he is
the kind of property she wants to buy. Then, if, when they are married,
he is brutal or impudent, or his people are brutal or impudent, she can
say, 'I will forfeit the purchase money, but I will not forfeit myself.
I will not stay with you.'”
“They would not like to hear you say that, Betty,” said her father,
rubbing his chin reflectively.
“No,” she answered. “Neither the girl nor the man would like it, and it
is their business, not mine. But it is practical and would prevent silly
mistakes. It would prevent the girls being laughed at. It is when they
are flattered by the choice made of them that they are laughed at. No
one can sneer at a man or woman for buying what they think they want,
and throwing it aside if it turns out a bad bargain.”
She had seated herself near her father. She rested her elbow slightly
on the table and her chin in the hollow of her hand. She was a beautiful
young creature. She had a soft curving mouth, and a soft curving cheek
which was warm rose. Taken in conjunction with those young charms, her
next words had an air of incongruity.
“You think I am hard,” she said. “When I think of these things I
am hard--as hard as nails. That is an Americanism, but it is a good
expression. I am angry for America. If we are sordid and undignified,
let us get what we pay for and make the others acknowledge that we have
paid.”
She did not smile, nor did her father. Mr. Vanderpoel, on the contrary,
sighed. He had a dreary suspicion that Rosy, at least, had not received
what she had paid for, and he knew she had not been in the least aware
that she had paid or that she was expected to do so. Several times
during the last few years he had thought that if he had not been so hard
worked, if he had had time, he would have seriously investigated
the case of Rosy. But who is not aware that the profession of
multimillionaire does not allow of any swerving from duty or of any
interests requiring leisure?
“I wonder, Betty,” he said quite deliberately, “if you know how handsome
you are?”
“Yes,” answered Bettina. “I think so. And I am tall. It is the fashion
to be tall now. It was Early Victorian to be little. The Queen brought
in the 'dear little woman,' and now the type has gone out.”
“They will come to look at you pretty soon,” said Vanderpoel. “What
shall you say then?”
“I?” said Bettina, and her voice sounded particularly low and mellow.
“I have a little monomania, father. Some people have a monomania for one
thing and some for another. Mine is for NOT taking a bargain from the
ducal remnant counter.”