IN the changes and chances of our New England climate it is not so
much what a Guest can endure outdoors as what he can originate
indoors that endears him most to a weather-worried Host.
Take Rollins, for instance, a small man, dour, insignificant--a
prude in the moonlight, a duffer at sailing, a fool at tennis--yet
once given a rain-patter and a smoky fireplace, of an audacity so
impertinent, so altogether absurd, that even yawns must of necessity
turn to laughter--or curses. The historic thunderstorm question,
for instance, which he sprang at the old Bishop's house-party after
five sweltering days of sunshine and ecclesiastical argument: "Who
was the last person you kissed before you were married?"
A question innocent as milk if only swallowed! But unswallowed?
Gurgled? Spat like venom from Bishop to Bishop? And from Bishop's
Wife to Bishop's Wife? Oh la! Yet that Rollins himself was the only
unmarried person present on that momentous occasion shows not at
all, I still contend, the slightest "natural mendacity" of the man,
but merely the perfectly normal curiosity of a confirmed Anchoret
to learn what truths he may from those who have been fortunate--or
unfortunate enough to live.
Certainly neither my Husband nor myself would ever dream of running
a house-party without Rollins!
Yet equally certain it is not at all on Rollins's account but
distinctly on our own that we invariably set the date for our
annual house-party in the second week of May.
For twenty years, in the particular corner of the New England
sea-coast which my husband and I happen to inhabit, it has never,
with one single exception only, failed to rain from morning till
night and night till morning again through the second week of May!
With all weather-uncertainties thus settled perfectly definitely,
even for the worst, it is a comparatively easy matter for any Host
and Hostess to _Stage_ such events as remain. It is with purely
confessional intent that I emphasize that word "stage." Every human
being acknowledges, if honest, some one supreme passion of
existence. My Husband's and mine is for what Highbrows call "the
experimental drama."
We call it "Amateur Theatricals."
Yet even this innocent passion has not proved a serene one!
After inestimable seasons of devotion to that most ruthless of all
goddesses, the Goddess of Amateur Theatricals, involving, as it
does, wrangles with
Guests who refuse to accept unless they areassured that there will
be a Play,
wrangles with
Guests who refuse to accept unless assured that there will not be a
Play,
wrangles with
Guests already arrived, unpacked, tubbed, seated at dinner, who
discover suddenly that their lines are too long,
wrangles with
Guests already arrived, unpacked, tubbed, seated at dinner, who
discover equally suddenly that their lines are too short.
wrangles with
Guests who "can't possibly play in blue."
wrangles with
Guests who "can't possibly play in pink."
wrangles with
Guests who insist upon kissing in every act.
wrangles with
Guests who refuse to kiss in any act, it was my Husband's ingenious
idea to organize instead an annual Play that should never dream it
was a Play, acted by actors who never even remotely suspected that
they were acting, evolving a plot that no one but the Almighty,
Himself, could possibly foreordain.
We call this Play "_Rainy Week_."
Yet, do not, I implore you, imagine for a moment that by any such
simple little trick as shifting all blame to the weather, all
praise to the Almighty, _Care_ has been eliminated from the
enterprise.
It is only indeed at the instigation of this trick that the real
hazard begins. For a Play after all is only a Play, be it humorous,
amorous, murderous, adulterous,--a soap-bubble world combusting
spontaneously of its own effervescence. But life is life and
starkly real if not essentially earnest. And the merest flicker of
the merest eyelid in one of life's real emotions has short-circuited
long ere this with the eternities themselves! It's just this chance
of "short-circuiting with the eternities" that shifts the pucker
from a Host's brow to his spine!
No lazy, purring, reunion of old friends this _Rainy Week_ of ours,
you understand? No dully congenial convocation of in-bred
relatives? No conference on literature,--music,--painting? No
symposium of embroidery stitches? Nor of billiard shots? But the
deliberate and relentlessly-planned assemblage of such distinctly
diverse types of men and women as prodded by unusual conditions of
weather, domicile, and propinquity, will best act and re-act upon
each other in terms inevitably dramatic, though most naively
unrehearsed!
"Vengeance is mine!" said the Lord. "Very considerable psychologic,
as well as dramatic satisfaction is now at last ours!" confess your
humble servants.
In this very sincere if somewhat whimsical dramatic adventure of
_Rainy Week_, the exigencies of our household demand that the
number of actors shall be limited to eight.
Barring the single exception of Husband and Wife no two people are
invited who have ever seen each other before. Destiny plays very
much more interesting tricks we have noticed with perfect strangers
than she does with perfect friends!
Barring nothing no one is ever warned that the week will be rainy.
It is astonishing how a guest's personality strips itself right
down to the bare sincerities when he is forced unexpectedly to doff
his extra-selected, super-fitting, ultra-becoming visiting clothes
for a frankly nondescript costume chosen only for its becomingness
to a--situation! In this connection, however, it is only fair to
ourselves to attest that following the usual managerial custom of
furnishing from its own pocket such costumes as may not for bizarre
or historical reasons be readily converted by a cast to street and
church wear, we invariably provide the _Rainy Week_ costumes for
our cast. This costume consists of one yellow oil-skin suit or
"slicker," one yellow oil-skin hat, one pair of rubber boots. One
dark blue jersey. And very warm woolen stockings.
Reverting also to dramatic sincerity no professional manager
certainly ever chose his cast more conscientiously than does my
purely whimsical Husband!
After several years of experiment and readjustment the ultimate
cast of _Rainy Week_ is fixed as follows:
A Bride and Groom
One Very Celibate Person
Someone With a Past
Someone With a Future
A Singing Voice
A May Girl
And a Bore. (Rollins, of course, figuring as the Bore.)
Always there must be that Bride and Groom (for the Celibate Person
to wonder about). And the Very Celibate Person (for the Bride and
Groom to wonder about). Male or Female, one Brave Soul who had
Rebuilt Ruin. Male or Female, one Intrepid Brain that Dares to
Boast of Having Made Tryst with the Future. Soprano, Alto, Bass or
Tenor, one Singing Voice that can Rip the Basting Threads out of
Serenity. One Young Girl so May-Blossomy fresh and new that
Everybody Instinctively Changes the Subject When She Comes into the
Room . . . . And Rollins!
To be indeed absolutely explicit experience has proved, with an
almost chemical accuracy, that, quite regardless of "age, sex, or
previous condition of servitude," this particular combination of
Romantic Passion
Psychic Austerity
Tragedy
Ambition
Poignancy
Innocence
And Irritation
cannot be housed together for even one Rainy Week without producing
drama!
But whether that drama be farce or fury--? Whether he who came to
_star_ remains to _supe_? Who yet shall prove the hero? And who the
villain! Who--? Oh, la! It's God's business now!
"All the more reason," affirms my Husband, "why all such details as
light and color effects, eatments, drinkments and guest-room
reading matter should be attended to with extra conscientiousness."
Already through a somewhat sensational motor collision in the gay
October Berkshires we had acquired the tentative Bride and Groom,
Paul Brenswick and Victoria Meredith, as ardent and unreasonable a
pair of young lovers as ever rose unscathed from a shivered racing
car to face, instead of annihilation, a mere casual separation of
months until such May-time as Paul himself, returning from Heaven
knows what errand in China, should mate with her and meet with us.
And to New York City, of course, one would turn instinctively for
the Someone With a Future. At a single round of studio parties in
the brief Thanksgiving Holiday we found Claude Kennilworth. Not a
moment's dissension occurred between us concerning his absolute
fitness for the part. He was beautiful to look at, and not too
young, twenty-five perhaps, the approximate age of our tentative
Bride and Groom. And he made things with his hands in dough, clay,
plaster, anything he could reach very insolently, all the time you
were talking to him, modeling the thing he was thinking about,
instead!
"Oh, just wait till you see him in bronze?" thrilled all the young
Satellites around him.
"Till you see me in bronze!" thrilled young Kennilworth himself.
Never in all my life have I beheld anyone as beautiful as Claude
Kennilworth--with a bit of brag in him! That head sharply uplifted,
the pony-like forelock swished like smoke across his flaming eyes,
the sudden wild pulse of his throat. Heavens! What a boy!
"You artist-fellows are forever reproducing solids with liquids,"
remarked my Husband quite casually. "All the effects I mean! All
the illusion! Crag or cathedral out of a dime-sized mud-puddle in
your water-color box! Flesh you could kiss from a splash of
turpentine! But can you reproduce liquids with solids? Could you
put the ocean into bronze, I mean?"
"The ocean?" screamed the Satellites.
"No mere skinny bas-relief," mused my Husband, "of the front of a
wave hitched to the front of a wharf or the front of a beach but
waves corporeally complete and all alone--shoreless--skyless--like
the model of a village an ocean rolling all alone as it were in the
bulk of its three dimensions?"
"In--bronze?" questions young Kennilworth. "_Bronze_?" His voice
was very faintly raspish.
"Oh, it wasn't a blue ocean especially that I was thinking about,"
confided my Husband, genially, through the mist of his cigarette.
"Any chance pick-up acquaintance has seen the ocean when it's blue.
But my wife and I, you understand, we live with the ocean!
Call it by its first name,--'Oh Ocean!'--and all that sort of
thing!" he smiled out abruptly above the sudden sharp spurt of
a freshly-struck match. "The--the ocean I was thinking of," he
resumed with an almost exaggerated monotone, "was a brown
ocean--brown as boiled sea-weeds--mad as mud under a leaden
sky--seething--souring--perfectly lusterless--every brown
billow-top pinched-up as though by some malevolent hand into
a vivid verdigris bruise----"
"But however in the world would one know where to begin?" giggled
the Satellites. "Or how to break it off so it wouldn't end like the
edge of a tin roof! Even if you started all right with a nice
molten wave? What about the--last wave? The problem of the horizon
sense? Yes! What about the horizon sense?" shouted everybody at
once.
From the shadowy sofa-pillowed corner just behind the supper table,
young Kennilworth's face glowed suddenly into view. But a minute
before I could have sworn that a girl's cheek lay against his. Yet
now as he jumped to his feet the feminine glove that dropped from
his fidgety fingers was twisted with extraordinary maliciousness, I
noted, into a doll-sized caricature of a "Vamp."
"I could put the ocean into bronze, Mr. Delville," he said, "if
anybody would give me a chance!"
Perhaps it was just this very ease and excitement of having booked
anyone as perfect as young Kennilworth for the part of Someone with
a Future that made me act as impulsively as I did regarding Ann
Woltor.
We were sitting in our room in a Washington hotel before a very
smoky fireplace one rather cross night in late January when I
confided the information to my Husband.
"Oh, by the way, Jack," I said quite abruptly, "I've invited Ann
Woltor for Rainy Week."
"Invited whom?" questioned my Husband above the rim of his
newspaper.
"Ann Woltor," I repeated.
"Ann--what?" persisted my Husband.
"Ann Woltor," I re-emphasized.
"Who's she?" quickened my Husband's interest very faintly.
"Oh, she's a woman," I explained--"or a Girl--that I've been
meeting 'most every day this last month at my hair-dresser's. She
runs the accounts there or something and tries to keep everybody
pacified. And reads the darndest books, all highbrow stuff. You'd
hardly expect it! Oh, not modern highbrow, I mean, essays as bawdy
as novels, but the old, serene highbrow,--Emerson and Pater and
Wordsworth,--books that smell of soap and lavender, as well as
brains. Reads 'em as though she liked 'em, I mean! Comes from New
Zealand I've been told. Really, she's rather remarkable!"
"Must be!" said my Husband. "To come all the way from New Zealand
to land in your hair-dresser's library!"
"It isn't my hair-dresser's library!" I corrected with faint
asperity. "It's her own library! She brings the books herself to
the office.
"And just what part," drawled my Husband, "is this New Zealand
paragon, Miss Stoltor, to play in our Rainy Week?"
"Woltor," I corrected quite definitely. "Ann Woltor."
"Wardrobe mistress?" teased my Husband. "Or----?"
"She is going to play the part of the Someone With a Past," I said.
"What?" cried my Husband. His face was frankly shocked. "_What_?"
he repeated blankly. "The most delicate part of the cast? The most
difficult? The most hazardous? It seemed best to you, without
consultation, without argument, to act so suddenly in the matter,
and so--so all alone?"
"I had to act very suddenly," I admitted. "If I hadn't spoken just
exactly the minute I did she would have been off to Alaska within
another forty-eight hours."
"U-m-m," mused my Husband, and resumed his reading. But the half-inch
of eye brow that puckered above the edge of his newspaper loomed
definitely as the sample of a face that was still distinctly
shocked.
When he spoke again I was quite ready for his question.
"How do you know that this Ann Woltor has got a past?" he demanded.
"How do we know young Kennilworth's got a future?" I counter-checked.
"Because he makes so much noise about it I suppose," admitted my
Husband.
"By which very same method," I grinned, "I deduct the fact that Ann
Woltor has got a past,--inasmuch as she doesn't make the very
slightest sound whatsoever concerning it."
"You concede no personal reticence in the world?" quizzed my Husband.
"Yes, quite a good deal," I admitted. "But most of it I honestly
believe is due to sore throat. A normal throat keeps itself pretty
much lubricated I've noticed by talking about itself."
"Herself," corrected my Husband.
"Himself," I compromised.
"But this Ann Woltor has told you that she came from New Zealand,"
scored my Husband.
"Oh, no, she hasn't!" I contradicted. "It was the hair-dresser who
suggested New Zealand. All Ann Woltor has ever told me was that she
was going to Alaska! Anybody's willing to tell you where he's
going! But the person who never tells you where he's been--! The
person who never by word, deed or act correlates to-day with
yesterday! The Here with the There--! I've been home with her twice
to her room! I've watched her unpack the Alaska trunk! Not a thing
in it older than this winter! Not a shoe nor a hat nor a glove that
confides anything! No scent of fir-balsam left over from a summer
vacation! No photograph of sister or brother! Yet it's rather an
interesting little room, too,--awfully small and shabby after the
somewhat plushy splendor of the hairdressing job--but three or four
really erudite English Reviews on the table, a sprig of blue
larkspur thrust rather negligently into a water glass, and a man's----"
"Blue larkspur in January?" demanded my Husband. "How--how old is
this--this Woltor person?"
"Oh--twenty-five, perhaps," I shrugged.
With a gesture of impatience my Husband threw down his paper and
began to poke the fire.
"Oh, Pshaw!" he said, "is our whole dramatic endeavor going to be
wrecked by the monotony of everybody being 'twenty-five'?"
"Well--call it 'thirty-five' if you'd rather," I conceded. "Or a
hundred and five! Arm Woltor wouldn't care! That's the remarkable
thing about her face," I hastened with some fervor to explain.
"There's no dating on it! This calamity that has happened to
her,--whatever it is, has wrung her face perfectly dry of all
contributive biography except the mere structural fact of at
least reasonably conservative birth and breeding."
A little bit abruptly my Husband dropped the fire-tongs.
"You like this Ann Woltor, don't you?" he said.
"I like her tremendously," I acknowledged.
"Tremendously _as_ a person and tremendously _for_ the part!" I
insisted.
"Yet there's something about it that worries you?" quizzed my
Husband not unamiably.
"There is," I said, "just one thing. She's got a broken tooth."
With a gesture of real irritation my Husband sank down in his chair
again and snatched up the paper.
It was ten minutes before he spoke again.
"Is it a front tooth?" he questioned with out lifting his eyes from
the page.
"It is," I said.
When my Husband jumped up from his chair this time he showed no
sign at all of ever intending to return to it. As he reached for
his hat and coat and started for the door, he tried very hard to
grin. But the effort was poor. This was no mere marital
disagreement, but a real professional shock.
"I simply can't stand it," he grinned. "One's prepared, of course,
for a tragedy queen to sport a broken heart but when it comes to a
broken tooth--!"
"Wait till you see her!" I said. There was nothing else to say.
"Wait till you see her!"
Even with the door closed behind him he came back once more to tell
me how he felt.
"Oh!" he shivered. "O--H!"
Truly if we hadn't gone out together the very next day and found
George Keets I don't know what would have happened. Depression
still hung very heavily over my Husband's heart.
"Here it is almost February," he brooded, "and even with what we've
got, we're still short the Celibate and the Singing Voice and the
May Girl."
It was just then that we turned the street corner and met George
Keets.
"Why--why the Celibate--of all persons!" we both gasped as in a
single breath, and rushed upon him.
Now it may seem a little strange instead of this that we have never
thought to feature poor Rollins as the Celibate. To "double" him as
it were as Celibate and Bore. Conserving thereby one by no means
inexpensive outfit of water-proof clothes, twenty-one meals, a week's
wash, and Heaven knows how many rounds of Scotch at a time of
imminent drought. But Rollins--though as far as anybody knows, a
bachelor and eminently chaste--is by no means my idea of a
Celibate. Oh, not Rollins! Not anybody with a mind like Rollins!
For Rollins, poor dear, would marry every day in the week if
anybody would have him. It's the "other people" who have kept
Rollins virgin. But George Keets on the other hand is a good deal
of a "fascinator" in spite of his austerity, perhaps indeed because
of his austerity, tall, lean, good-looking, extravagantly severe,
thirty-eight years old, and a classmate of my Husband at college.
Whether Life would ever succeed or not in breaking down his
unaccountable intention never-to-mate, that intention,--physical,
mental, moral, psychic, call it whatever you choose,--was stamped
indelibly and for all time on the curiously incongruous granite-like
finish of his originally delicate features. Life had at least done
interesting historical things to George Keets's face.
"Oh, George!" cried my Husband, "I thought you were in Egypt
digging mummies."
"I was," admitted George without any further palaver of greeting.
"When did you get back?" cried my Husband, "And what are you doing
now!"
"And where are you going to be in May?" I interposed with perfectly
uncontrollable interest.
"Why, I'm just off the boat, you know," brightened George. "A drink
would be good, of course. But first I'd just like to run into the
library for a minute to see if they've put in any new thrillers
while I've been gone. There's a corking new book on Archselurus
that ought to be due about now."
"On w-what?" I stammered.
"Oh, fossil cats, you know, and all that sort of thing," explained
George chivalrously. "But, of course--you, Mrs. Delville," he
hastened now to appease me, "would heaps rather hear about Paris
fashions, I know. So if you-people really should want me in May
I'll try my best, I promise you, to remember every latest wrinkle
of lace, or feather. Only, of course," he explained with typical
conscientiousness, "in the museums and the libraries one doesn't
see just--of course--the----"
"On the contrary, Mr. Keats," I interrupted hectically, "there is
no subject in the world that interests me more--at the moment--than
Mummies. And by the second week in May that interest will have
assumed proportions that----"
"S-sh!" admonished my Husband. "But really, George," he himself
hastened to cut in, "if you could come to us the second week in
May----"
"May?" considered George. "Second week? Why, certainly I will." And
bolted for the library, while my Husband and I in a perfectly
irresistible impulse drew aside on the curbing to watch him
disappear.
Equally unexplainably three totally non-concerned women turned also
to watch him.
"It's his shoulders," I ventured. "The amazing virility of his
shoulders contrasted with the stinginess of his smile."
"Stinginess nothing!" snapped my Husband. "Devil take him!"
"He may--yet," I mused as we swung into step again.
So now we had nothing to worry about--or rather no uncertainty to
worry about except the May Girl and the Singing Voice.
"The Singing Voice," my Husband argued, "might be picked up by good
fortune at most any cabaret show or choral practise. Not any
singing voice would do, of course. It must be distinctly poignant.
But even poignancy may be found sometimes where you least expect
it,--some reasonably mature, faintly disappointed sort of voice,
usually, lilting with unquestionable loveliness, just this side of
real professional success.
"But where in the world should we find a really ingenuous Ingénue?"
"They don't exist any more!" I asserted. "Gone out of style like
the Teddy Bear--! Old Ingénues you see, of course, sometimes, sweet
and precious and limp--as old Teddy Bears. But a brand new Ingénue--?
Don't you remember the awful search we had last year and even
then----?"
"Maybe you're right," worried my Husband.
And then the horrid attack of neuralgia descended on poor Mr.
Husband so suddenly, so acutely, that we didn't worry at all about
anything else for days! And even when that worry was over, instead
of starting off gaily together for the Carolinas as we had
intended, to search through steam-heated corridors, and green
velvet golfways, and jessamine scented lanes, for the May Girl, my
poor Husband had to dally at home instead, in a very cold, slushy
and disagreeable city, to be X-rayed, tooth-pulled, ear-stabbed,
and every thing but Bertilloned, while I, for certain business
reason, went on ahead to meet the Spring.
But even at parting it was the dramatic anxiety that worried my
Husband most.
"Now, don't you dare do a thing this time," he warned me, "until I
come! Look around all you want to! Get acquainted! Size things up!
But if ever two people needed to work together in a matter it's in
this question of choosing a May Girl!"
Whereupon in an impulse quite as amazing to himself as to me--he
went ahead and chose the May Girl all by himself!
Before I had been in the Carolinas three days the telegram came.
"Have found May Girl. Success beyond wildest dreams. Doubles with
Singing Voice. Absolute miracle. Explanations."
Himself and the explanations arrived a week later. Himself, poor
dear, was rather depleted. But the explanations were full enough to
have pleased anybody.
He had been waiting, it seems, on the day of the discovery, an
interminably long time in the doctor's office. All around him, in
the dinginess and general irritability of such an occasion, loomed
the bulky shapes of other patients who like himself had also been
waiting interminable eons of time. Everybody was very cross. And it
was snowing outside,--one of those dirty gray late-winter snows
that don't seem really necessary.
And when _She_ came! Just a girl's laugh at first from the street
door! An impish prance of feet down the dark, unaccustomed hallway! A
little trip on the threshold! And then personified--laughing--blushing,
stumbling fairly headlong at last into the room--the most radiantly
lovely young girl that you have ever had the grace to imagine,
dangling exultantly from each frost-pinked hand a very large, wriggly,
and exceedingly astonished rabbit.
"Oh, Uncle Charles!" she began, "s-ee what I've found! And in an
ash-barrel, too! In--a--" She blinked the snow from her lashes,
took a sudden startled glance round the room, another at the clock,
and collapsed with confusion into the first chair that she could
reach.
A very tall "little girl" she was, and very young, not a day
more than eighteen surely. And even in the encompassing bulk
of her big coon-skin coat with its broad arms hugging the brown
rabbits to her breast she gave an impression of extraordinary
slimness and delicacy, an impression accentuated perhaps by a
slender silk-stockinged ankle, the frilly cuff of a white sleeve,
and the aura of pale gold hair that radiated in every direction
from the brim of her coon-skin hat. For fully fifteen minutes my
Husband said she sat huddled-up in all the sweet furry confusion of
a young animal, till driven apparently by that very confusion to
essay some distinctly normal-appearing, every-day gesture, she
reached out impulsively to the reading table and picked up a book
which some young man had just relinquished rather suddenly at a
summons to the doctor's inner office. Relaxing ever so slightly
into the depths of her chair with the bunnies' noses twinkling
contentedly to the rhythm of her own breathing, she made a
wonderful picture, line, color, spirit, everything of _Youth_.
Reading, with that strange, extra, inexplainable touch of the
sudden little pucker in the eyebrows, sheer intellectual perplexity
was in that pucker!
But when the young man returned from the inner office he did not
leave at once as every cross, irritable person in the room hoped
that he would, but fidgeted around instead with hat and coat,
stamped up and down crowding other people's feet, and elbowing
other people's elbows. With a gaspy glance at his watch he turned
suddenly on the girl with the rabbits. "Excuse me," he floundered,
"but I have to catch a train--_please_ may I have my book?"
"Your book?" deprecated the Girl. Confusion anew overwhelmed her!
"Your--book? Why, I beg your pardon! Why--why--" Pink as a rose
she slammed the covers and glanced for the first time at the title.
The title of the book was "What Every Young Husband Should Know."
. . . With a sigh like the sigh of a breeze in the ferns the
tension of the room relaxed! A very fat, cross-looking woman in
black satin ripped audibly at a side seam. . . . A frail old
gentleman who really had very few laughs left, wasted one of them
in the smothering depths of his big black-bordered handkerchief.
. . . The lame newsboy on the stool by the door emitted a single
snort of joy. Then the doctor himself loomed suddenly from the
inner office, and started right through everybody to the girl with
the rabbits. "Why, May," he laughed, "I told you not to get here
till four o'clock!"
"Oh, not May?" I protested to my Husband. "It simply couldn't be!
Not _really_?"
"Yes, really," affirmed my Husband. "Isn't it the limit? But wait
till you hear the rest! She's Dr. Brawne's ward, it seems, and has
been visiting him for the winter. . . . Comes from some little
place way off somewheres. . . . And she's got one of those sweet,
clear, absolutely harrowing 'boy soprano' types of voices that
sound like incense and altar lights even in rag-time. But weirder
than any thing--" triumphed my Husband.
"Oh, not than 'anything'?" I gasped.
"But weirder than anything," persisted my Husband, "is the curious
way she's marked."
"M-marked?" I stammered.
"Yes. After I saw her with her hat off," said my Husband, "I saw
the 'mark'. I've seen it in boys before, but never in a girl--an
absolutely isolated streak of gray hair! In all that riot of
blondness and sparkle and youth, just as riotous, just as lovely, a
streak of gray hair! It's bewitching! Bewildering! Like May itself!
Now sunshine! Now cloud! You'll write to her immediately, won't
you?" he begged. "And to Dr. Brawne, too? I told Dr. Brawne quite
frankly that it was going to be rather an experimental party, but
that, of course, we'd take the best possible care of her. And he
said he'd never seen an occasion yet when she wasn't perfectly
capable of taking care of herself. And that he'd be delighted to
have her come--" laughed my Husband quite suddenly, "if we were
sure that we didn't mind animals."
"Animals?" I questioned.
"Yes, dogs, cats, birds!" explained my Husband. "It isn't apt to be
a large animal such as a horse or a cow, Dr. Brawne was kind enough
to assure me. But he never knew her yet, he said, to arrive
anywhere without a guinea pig, squirrel, broken-winged bat, lame
dove, or half-choked mouse that she had acquired on the way! She's
very tender-hearted. And younger than----"
Blankly for a moment my Husband and I sat staring into each other's
eyes. Then, quite impulsively, I reached over and kissed him.
"Oh, Jack," I admitted, "it's too perfect! Truly it makes me feel
nervous!--Suppose she should roll her hoop off the cliff or----"
"Or--blow out the gas!" chuckled my Husband.
So you see now our cast was all assembled.
Radiant, "runctious," impatient Paul Brenswick and Victoria Meredith
for the Bride and Groom.
George Keets for the Very Celibate Person.
Ann Woltor for the Someone With a Past.
Claude Kennilworth for the Someone With a Future.
May Davies for the May Girl and the Singing Voice.
And Rollins for the Bore. About Rollins I must now confess that
I have not been perfectly frank. We hire Rollins! How else could
we control him! Even with a mushroom mind like his,--fruiting only
in bad weather, one can't force him on one's guests morning, noon,
_and_ night! Very fortunately here, for such strategy as is necessary,
my Husband concedes one further weakness than what I have previously
designated as his passion for amateur theatricals and his tolerance
of me. That weakness is sea shells--mollusca, you know, and that
sort of thing. . . . From all over the world, smelling saltily of
coral and palms, iceberg or arctic,--and only too often alas of
their dead selves, these smooth-spikey-pink-blue-yellow-or-mottled
shells arrive with maddening frequency. And Rollins is a born
cataloguer! What easier thing in the world to say than, "Oh, by
the way, Rollins, old man, here's an invoice that might interest
you from a Florida Key that I've just located. . . . How about
the second week in May? Could you come then, do you think? I'm
all tied up to be sure with a houseful of guests that week, but
they won't bother you any. And, at least, you'll have your evenings
for fun. Clothes? Haven't got 'em? Oh, Pshaw! Let me see. It rained
last year, didn't it? . . . Well, I guess we can raise the same
umbrella that we raised for you then! S'long!"
Everything settled then! Everything ready but the springtime and
the scenery! . . . And God Himself at work on that!--Hist! What is
it? The flash of a blue-bird?
A bell tinkles! A pulley-rope creaks! And the Curtain Rises!
May always comes so amazingly soon after February! So infinitely
much sooner than anyone dares hope that it would! Peering into
snow-smeared shop windows some rather particularly bleak morning
you notice with a half-contemptuous sort of amusement a precocious
display of ginghams and straw hats. And before you can turn round
to tell anybody about it, tulips have happened!--And It's May!
More than seeming extravagantly early this year, May dawned also
with extravagant lavishness. Through every prismatic color of the
world, sunshine sang to the senses!
"What shall we do," fretted my Husband, "if this perfection lasts?"
The question indeed was a leading one!
The scenery for Rainy Week did not arrive until the afternoon of
the eighth.
From his frowning survey of bright lawns, gleaming surf, radiant
sky, I saw my Husband turn suddenly with a little gasping sigh that
might have meant anything.
"What is it?" I cried.
"Look!" he said, "it's come."
Silently, shoulder to shoulder, we stood and watched the gigantic
storm-bales roll into the sky--packed in fleece, corded with ropes
of mist, gorgeous, portentous,--To-morrow's Rain! It is not many
hosts and hostesses under like circumstances who turn to each other
as we did with a single whoop of joy!
An hour later, hatless and coatless in the lovely warm May
twilight, we stood by the larch tree waiting for our guests. We
like to have them sup in town at their own discretion or
indiscretion, that first night, and all arrive together reasonably
sleek and sleepy, and totally unacquainted, on the eight o'clock
train. But the larch tree has always been our established point for
meeting the _Rainy Week_ people. Conceding cordially the truth of
the American aphorism that while charity may perfectly legitimately
begin at home, hospitality should begin at the railroad station! We
personally have proved beyond all doubt that for our immediate
interests at stake dramatic effect begins at the entrance to our
driveway.
Yet it is always with mingled feelings of trepidation and
anticipation that we first sense the blurry rumble of motor wheels
on the highway. If the station bus were only blue or green! But
palest oak! And shuttered like a roll-top desk! Spilling out
strange personalities at you like other people's ideas brimming
from pigeon-holes!
For some unfathomable reason of constraint this night, no one was
talking when the bus arrived. Shy, stiff-spined, non-communicative,
still questioning, perhaps. Who was who and what was what, these
seven guests who by the return ride a week hence might even be
mated, such things have happened, or once more not speaking to each
other, this also has happened, loomed now like so many dummies in
the gloom.
"Why, Hello!" we cried, jumping to the rear step of the bus as it
slowed slightly at the curb, and thrusting our faces as genially as
possible into the dark, unresponsive doorway.
"Hello!" rallied someone--I think it was Rollins. Whoever it was he
seemed to be having a terrible time trying to jerk his suitcase
across other people's feet.
"Oh, is this where you live?" questioned George Keets's careful
voice from the shadows. The faintest possible tinge of relief
seemed to be in the question.
"Here?" brightened somebody else.
A window-fastener clicked, a shutter crashed, an aperture opened,
and everybody all at once, scenting the sea, crowded to stare out
where the gray dusk merging into gray rocks merged in turn with the
gray rocks into a low rambling gray fieldstone house silhouetted
with indescribable weirdness at the moment against that delicate,
pale gold, French-drawing-room sort of sky cluttered so
incongruously with the clump of dark clouds.
"The road--doesn't go any farther?" puzzled someone. "There's no
other stopping place you mean--just a little bit farther along?
This is the end,--the last house,--the----?"
High from a cliff-top somewhere a sea bird lifted a single eerie cry.
"Oh, how--how dramatic!" gasped somebody.
Reaching out to nudge my Husband's hand I collided instead with a
dog's cold nose.
Following apparently the same impulse my Husband's hand met the
dog's startling nose at almost the same instant.
Except for a second's loss of balance on the bus-step neither of us
resented the incident. But it was my Husband who recovered his
conversation as well as his balance first.
"Oh, you Miss Davies!" he called blithely into the bus. "What's
your Pom's name? Nose-Gay? Skip-a-bout? Cross-Patch? What?--Lucky
for you we knew your propensity for arriving with pets! The
kennel's all ready and the cat sent away!"
In the nearest shadow of all it was almost as though one heard an
_ego_ bristle.
"I beg your pardon, but the Pomeranian is mine," affirmed Claude
Kennilworth's un-mistakable voice with what seemed like quite
unnecessary hauteur.
"What the deuce is the matter with everybody?" whispered my
Husband.
With a jerk and a bump the bus grazed a big boulder and landed us
wheezily at our own front door.
As expeditiously as possible my Husband snatched up the lantern
that gleamed from the doorstep and brandishing it on high,
challenged the shadowy occupants of the bus to disembark and
proclaim themselves.
Ann Woltor stepped down first. As vague as the shadows she merged
from her black-garbed figure faded un-outlined into the shadow of
the porch. For an instant only the uplifted lantern flashed across
her strange stark face--and then went crashing down into a shiver
of glass on the gravelly path at my Husband's feet. "Ann--Stoltor!"
I heard him gasp. My Husband is not usually a fumbler either with
hand or tongue. In the brightening flare of the flash-light that
some one thrust into his hands his face showed frankly rattled.
"Ann _Woltor_!" I prompted him hastily. For the infinitesimal
fraction of a second our eyes met. I hope my smile was as quick.
"What is the matter with everybody?" I said.
With extravagant exuberance my Husband jumped to help the rest of
our guests alight. "Hi, there, Everybody!" he greeted each new face
in turn as it emerged somewhat hump-shouldered and vague through
the door of the bus into the flare of his lantern light.
Poor Rollins, of course, tumbled out.
Fastidiously, George Keets illustrated how a perfect exit from a
bus should be made,--suitcase, hat-box, English ulster, everything
a model of its kind. Even the constraint of his face, absolutely
perfect.
With the Pomeranian clutched rather drastically under one arm,
Claude Kennilworth followed Keets. All the time, of course, you
knew that it was the Pomeranian who was growling, but from the
frowning irritability of young Kennilworth's eyes one might almost
have concluded that the boy was a ventriloquist and the Pom a
puppet instead of a puppy. "Her name is 'Pet'," he announced
somewhat succinctly to my Husband. "And she sleeps in no--kennel!"
A trifle paler than I had expected, but inexpressively young,
lovely, palpitant, and altogether adorable, the May Girl sprang
into my vision--and my arms. Her heart was beating like a wild
bird's.
With the incredibility of their miracle still stamped almost
embarrassingly on their faces, our Bride-and-Groom-of-a-Week
completed the list. It wasn't just the material physical fact that
Love was consummated, that gave them that look. But the spiritual
amazement that Love was consummatable! No other "look" in life ever
compasses it, ever duplicates it!
It made my Husband quite perceptibly quicken the tempo of his
jocosity.
"One--two--three--four--five--six--seven," he enumerated. "All good
guests come straight from Heaven! One--two--three--four--five--six--
Seven--" he repeated as though to be perfectly sure, "_seven_?
Why--Why, what the----?" he interrupted himself suddenly.
With frank bewilderment I saw him jump back to the rear step of the
bus and flash his light into the farthest corner where the huddled
form of an _eighth_ person loomed weirdly from the shadows.
It was a man--a young man. And at first glimpse he was quite dead.
But on second glimpse, merely drunk. Hopelessly,--helplessly,--sodden
drunk, with his hat gone, his collar torn away, his haggard face
sagging like some broken thing against his breast.
With a tension suddenly relaxed, a faint sigh seemed to slip from
the group outside. In the crowding faces that surrounded us
instantly, it must have been something in young Kennilworth's
expression, or in the Pomeranian's, that made my Husband speak just
exactly as he did. With his arms held under the disheveled, uncouth
figure, he turned quite abruptly and scanned the faces of his
guests, "And whose little pet--may this be?" he asked trenchantly.
From the shadow of the Porte-cochere somebody laughed. It was
rather a vacuous little laugh. Sheer nerves! Rollins, I think.
Framed in the half-shuttered window of the bus the May Girl's face
pinked suddenly like a flare of apple blossoms.
"He--came with--me," said the May Girl.
No matter how informally one chooses to run his household there is
almost always some one rule I've noticed on which the smoothness of
that informality depends.
In our household that rule seems to be that no explanations shall
ever be asked either in the darkness or by artificial light. . . .
It being the supposition I infer that most things explain
themselves by daylight. . . . Perfectly cordially I concede that
they usually do. . . . But some nights are a great deal longer to
wait through than others.
It wasn't, on this particular night, that anyone refused to
explain. But that nobody even had time to think of explaining. The
young Stranger was in a bad way. Not delirium tremens nor anything
like that, but a fearful alcoholic disorganization of some sort.
The men were running up and down stairs half the night. Their
voices rang through the halls in short, sharp orders to each other.
No one else spoke above a whisper. With silly comforts like talcum
powder, and hot water bottles, and sweet chocolate, and new novels,
I put the women to bed. Their comments if not explanatory were at
least reasonably characteristic.
From a swirl of pink chiffon and my best blankets, with her ear
cocked quite frankly toward a step on the stairs, her eyes like
stars, her mouth all a-kiss, the Bride reported her own emotions in
the matter.
"No,--no one, of course had ever believed for a moment," the Bride
assured me, "that the Drunken Man was one of the guests. . . . And
yet, when he didn't get off at any of the stops, and this house was
so definitely announced as the 'end of the road'--why it did, of
course, make one feel just a little bit nervous," flushed the
Bride, perfectly irrelevantly, as the creak on the stairs drew
nearer.
Ann Woltor registered only a very typical indifference.
"A great many different kinds of things," she affirmed, "were bound
to happen in any time as long as a day. . . . One simply had to get
used to them, that was all." She was unpacking her sombre black
traveling bag as she spoke, and the first thing she took out from
it was a man's gay, green-plaided golf cap. It looked strange with
the rest of her things. All the rest of her things were black.
I thought I would never succeed in putting the May Girl to bed.
With a sweet sort of stubbornness she resisted every effort. The
first time I went back she was kneeling at her bedside to say her
"forgotten prayers." The second time I went back she had just
jumped up to "write a letter to her Grandfather." "Something about
the sea," she affirmed, "had made her think of her grandfather."
"It was a long time," she acknowledged, since she "had thought of
her grandfather." "He was very old," she argued, "and she didn't
want to delay any longer about writing." Slim and frank as a boy in
her half-adjusted blanket-wrapper dishabille she smiled up at me
through the amazing mop of gold hair with the gray streak floating
like a cloud across the sunshine of her face. She was very nervous.
She must have been nervous. It darkened her eyes to two blue
sapphires. It quickened her breath like the breath of a young fawn
running. "And would I please tell her--how to spell 'oceanic'?" she
implored me. As though answering intuitively the unspoken question
on my lips, she shrugged blame from her as some exotic songbird
might have shrugged its first snow. "No--she didn't know who the
young man was! Truly--as far as she knew--she had never--never seen
the young man before!--o-c-e-a-n-i-c--was it?----"
The rain was not actually delivered until one o'clock in the
morning. Just before dawn I heard the storm-bales rip. In sheets of
silver and points of steel, with rage and roar, and a surf like a
picture in a Sunday supplement, the weather broke loose!
Thank heaven the morning was so dark that no one appeared in the
breakfast-room an instant before the appointed hour of nine.
George Keets, of course, appeared exactly at nine, very trim, very
_distingué_, in a marvelously tailored gray flannel suit, and
absolutely possessed to make his own coffee.
Claude Kennilworth's morning manner was very frankly peevish.
"His room had a tin roof and he hardly thought he should be
able to stand it. . . . Rain? Did you call this rain? It was a
_Flood_! . . . Were there any Movie Palaces near? . . . And were
they open mornings? . . . And he'd like an underdone chop, please,
for the Pomeranian. . . . And it wasn't his dog anyway, darn the
little fool, but belonged to the girl who had the studio next to
his and she was possessed with the idea that a week at the shore
would put the pup on its feet again. . . . Women were so blamed
temperamental. . . . If there was one thing in the world that he
hated it was temperamental people." And all the time he was talking
he wasn't making anything with his hands, because he wasn't
thinking anything instead, "And how in Creation," he scolded, "did
we ever happen to build a house out on the granite edge of Nowhere?
. . . How did we stand it? How----? . . . Hi there! . . . Wait a
moment! . . . _God_--what _Form_! That wave with the tortured top!
. . . Hush! . . . Don't speak! . . . _Please_ leave him alone!
Breakfast? Not yet! When a fellow could watch a--a thing like that!
. . . For heaven's sake, pass him that frothy-edged napkin! . . .
Did anybody mind if he _tore_ it? . . . While he watched that other
froth tear!"
Dear, honest, ardent, red-blooded Paul Brenswick came down so
frankly interested in the special device by which our house gutters
took care of such amazing torrents of water that everybody felt
perfectly confident all at once that no bride of his would ever
suffer from leaky roofs or any other mechanical defect. Paul
Brenswick liked the rain just as much as he liked the gutters! And
he liked the sea! And he liked the house! And he liked the sky! And
he liked everything! Even when a clumsy waitress joggled coffee
into his grapefruit he seemed to like that just as much as he liked
everything else. Paul Brenswick was a real Bridegroom. I am not, I
believe, a particularly envious person, and have never as far as I
know begrudged another woman her youth or her beauty or her talent
or her wealth. But if it ever came to a chance of swapping facial
expressions, just once in my life, some very rainy morning, I wish
I could look like a Bridegroom!
But the expression on the Bride's face was distinctly worried. Joy
worried! Any woman who had ever been a bride could have read the
expression like an open book. Victoria Brenswick had not counted on
rain. Moonlight, of course, was what she had counted on! Moonlight,
day and night in all probability! And long, sweet, soft stretches
of beach! And cavernous rocks! And incessantly mirthful escapades
of escape from the crowd! But to be shut up all day long in a
houseful of strange people! . . . With a Bridegroom who after all
was still more or less of a strange Bridegroom? The panic in her
face was almost ghastly! The panic of the Perfectly-Happy! The
panic of the person hanging over-ecstatically on the absolute
perfection of a singer's prolonged high note, driven all at once to
wonder if this is the moment when the note must break! . . . To be
all alone and bored on a rainy day is no more than anyone would
expect. . . . But to be with one's Lover and have the day prove
dull? . . . If God in the terrible uncertainty of Him should force
even one dull day into the miracle of their life together----?
Ann Woltor, dragging down to breakfast just a few moments late, had
not noticed especially, it seemed, that the day was rainy. She met
my Husband's eyes as she met the eyes of her fellow-guests, calmly,
indifferently, and with perfect sophistication. If his presence or
personality was in any way a shock to her she certainly gave no
sign of it.
The May Girl didn't appear till very late, so late indeed that
everybody started to tease her for being such a Sleepy Head. Her
face was very flushed. Her hair in a riot of gold--and gray. Her
appetite like the appetite of a young cannibal. Across the rim of
her cocoa cup she hurled a lovely defiance at her traducers.
"Sleepy Head!" she exulted. "Not much! Hadn't she been up since
six? And out on the beach? And all over the rocks? . . . Way, way
out to the farthest point? . . . There was such a heavenly suit of
yellow oil-skins in her closet! . . . She hoped it wasn't cheeky of
her but she just couldn't resist 'em! . . . And the fishes? . . .
The poor, poor little bruised fishes dashed up, by that terrible
surf on the rocks! . . . . She thought she never, never would get
them all put back! . . . They kept coming and coming so! Every new
wave! Flopping!--Flopping----"
Rollins's breakfast had been sent to his room. You yourself
wouldn't have wanted to spring Rollins on any one quite so early in
the day. And with my best breakfast tray, my second best china, and
sherry in the grape fruit, there was no reason certainly why
Rollins in any way should feel discriminated against. Surely, as
far as Rollins knew, every guest was breakfasting in bed.
Even without Rollins there was quite enough uncertainty in the air.
Everybody was talking--talking about the morning, I mean--not about
yesterday morning; most certainly not about yesterday night!
Babble, chatter, drawl, laughter, the voices rose and fell.
Breakfast indeed was just about over when a faint stir on the
threshold made everybody look up.
It was the Drunken Stranger of the night before.
Heaven knows he was sober enough now. But very shaky! Yet
collarless as he was and still unshaven--our men had evidently not
expected quite so early a resuscitation--he loomed up now in the
doorway with a certain tragic poise and dignity that was by no
means unattractive.
"Why, hello!" said everybody.
"Hello!" said the Stranger. With a palpable flex of muscle he
leaned back against the wainscoting of the door and narrowed his
haggard eyes to the cheerful scene before him. "I don't know where
I am," he said, "or how I got here. . . . Or who you are." "I can't
seem to remember anything." The faintly sheepish smile that
quickened suddenly in his eyes, if not distinctly humorous, was at
least plucky. "I think I must have had a drink," he said.
"I wouldn't wonder!" grinned Paul Brenswick.
"You are perfectly right," conceded George Keets.
"Have another!" suggested my Husband. "A straight and narrow this
time! You look wobbly. There's nothing like coffee."
And still the Stranger stood undecided in the doorway. "I'm not
very fit," he acknowledged. "Not with ladies. . . . But I _had_ to
know where I was." Blinking with perplexity he stared and stared at
the faces before him. "I'm three thousand miles from home," he
worried. "I don't know a soul this side of the Sierras. . . . I--I
don't know how it happened----"
"Oh, Shucks!" shrugged young Kennilworth. "Easiest thing in the
world to happen to a stranger in a new town! 'Welcome to our City
Welcome to our City' from night till morning and morning till night
again! Any crowd once it gets started----"
"Crowd!" brightened the Stranger. "I--I was in some sort of a--a
crowd?" he rummaged hopefully through his poor bruised brain.
From her concentrated interest in a fried chicken-bone, the May
Girl glanced up with her first evidence of divided attention.
"Yes! You were!" she confided genially. "It was at the railroad
junction. And when the officer arrived, he said, 'I hate like the
dickens to run this gentleman in, but if there's nobody to look
after him--?' So I said you belonged to me! I saw the crape on your
sleeve!" said the May Girl.
"Crape--on--my--sleeve?" stammered the Stranger. With a dreadful
gesture of incredulity he lifted his black-banded arm into vision.
It was like watching a live heart torn apart to see his memory
waken. "My--God!" he gasped. "My _God_!" Still wavering but with a
really heroic effort to square his stricken shoulders, he swung
back toward the company. His face was livid, his voice, barely
articulate. Over face and voice lay still that dreadful blight of
astonishment. But when he spoke his statement was starkly simple.
"I--I buried my wife and unborn child--yesterday," he said. "In a
strange land--among strangers I--I----"
More quickly than I could possibly have imagined it, George Keets
was on his feet beckoning the Stranger to the place which he
himself had just vacated. And with his hands on the Stranger's
shoulders he bent down suddenly over him with a curiously twisted
little smile.
"Welcome to our--Pity!" said George Keets.
Between Paul Brenswick and his Bride there flashed a sharp glance
of terror. It was as though the bride's heart had gasped out. "What
if I have to die some day?--And _this_ day was wasted in rain?"
I saw young Kennilworth flush and turn away from that glance. I saw
the May Girl open her eyes with a new baffled sort of perplexity.
It was then that Rollins came puttering in, grinning like a Chessy
Cat, with his half-demolished breakfast sliding round rather
threateningly on his ill-balanced tray. The strange exultancy of
rain was in his eye.
"I thought I heard voices," he beamed. "Merry voices!" With
mounting excitement he began to beat tunes with his knife and fork
upon the delicate porcelain dome of his toast dish. "Am I a--King,"
he began to intone, "that I should call my own, this--?" Struck
suddenly by the somewhat strained expression of Ann Woltor's face,
he dropped his knife and fork and fixed his eye upon her for the
first time with an unmistakable intentness.
"How did you break your tooth?" beamed Rollins.