THE WORLD AND PATTY
On the way home, leaning against her father who had not spoken since the
car started, Patty shut her eyes and went over, one by one, the
incidents of the dinner. What had she done that was right? What had she
done that was wrong? Was her dress just what it ought to have been? Had
she talked to Stephen Culpeper about the things people are supposed to
discuss at a dinner? Had he seen how embarrassed she was beneath her
pretence of gaiety? Would she be better looking if she were to let her
hair grow long again? What had Mrs. Page, who looked as if she had
stepped down from one of those old prints, thought of her?
Beneath the hard brightness of her manner there was a passionate groping
toward some dimly seen but intensely felt ideal. She longed to learn if
she could only learn without confessing her ignorance. Her pride was the
obstinate, unreasonable pride of a child.
"If I could only find out things without asking!" The image of Stephen
rose in her mind, which worked by flashes of insight rather than orderly
processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair,
which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured
eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles
away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier.
The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had
thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!"
and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who
appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next
day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had
obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the
gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not
experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that
nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next
turn of fortune? She had been startled out of her composure by the sight
of Stephen at the dinner; and yet she had not been conscious of any
particular wish to see him again, or to sit at his side through two
hours of embarrassment and uncertainty. Now, on the way home, she was
suffering acutely from the burden of failure, from the smarting
realization of her own ignorance and awkwardness. Her one bitter-sweet
consolation was the knowledge that she had been "a good loser," that she
had carried off her humiliation with a scornful pride which must have
blighted like frost any tenderly budding shoots of compassion. "I'll
show them that they mustn't pity me!" she thought, while her eyes blazed
in the darkness. "I'll prove to them that I think myself every bit as
good as they are!" She knew that her manner had been ungracious; but she
knew also that something stronger than her will, some instinct which was
rooted deep in the secret places of her nature, had made it impossible
for her to appear otherwise. Impassioned, undisciplined, and capable of
fierce imaginative loyalties and aversions, the strongest force in her
character was this bitter ineradicable pride. To accept no benefits that
she could not return; to fall under no obligation that would involve a
feeling of gratitude; to pay the piper to the utmost penny whenever she
called the tune--these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though
she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would
have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery of her challenge.
"Well, did you enjoy it, Patty?" Her father turned to her with sudden
tenderness, though the frown produced by some engrossing train of
thought still gathered his heavy brows.
She caught his hand while her small face relaxed from its expression of
rigid disdain. "I had simply the time of my life," she responded with
convincing animation. "That Mrs. Page is the most beautiful woman I ever
saw--but she can't be very young. I wonder what she was like when she
was my age?"
Vetch laughed. "Not like a short-haired imp with green eyes anyway," he
replied. "Mrs. Stribling looked very handsome, too, I thought."
"Oh, she's handsome enough," admitted Patty. "But she hasn't any sense.
I listened to what she was saying, and she just asked questions all the
time. Mrs. Page is different. You can tell that she has been all over
the world. She knows things."
"Yes, I suppose she does," said Vetch. "What did you think of Benham?"
"He is good looking," answered the girl deliberately, "but I don't like
him. He is making fun of you."
"Is he?" returned Vetch curiously. "Now, I wonder if you're right about
that. At any rate he asked me a question to-night that I should like a
chance to answer on the platform."
"He was in the army," said Patty, "and every one says he was a hero. The
women were talking about him while you were smoking. They all admire him
so. It seems that he went into an officer's training camp as soon as war
was declared though he was over age; and then just recently he has done
something that every one thinks splendid. He refused a tremendous fee
from some corporation--what did they mean by a corporation?--because he
thought the money was made dishonestly. Mrs. Page says he has as many
public virtues as a civic forum. What is a forum, Father?"
Vetch laughed without replying directly to her question. "Did she say
that?" he responded. "And what did she mean by it, I wonder?"
"It sounded clever," said Patty, "but I didn't understand. What is a
forum, Father?"
Vetch thought a moment. "Mrs. Page would probably tell you," he replied,
"that it is the temple of the improbable."
Patty stirred impatiently. "Now you are trying to talk like Mrs. Page,"
she rejoined. "I wish I knew what things meant."
"When you find out what they mean, Patty, they will cease to interest
you."
"Well, I'd rather be less interested and more comfortable," said Patty,
with a trace of exasperation in her voice. "To-night, for instance, I
hadn't the faintest idea how to behave. Look at all those books I've
read, too, when I might just as well have been enjoying myself. I've
found out to-night, Father, that books can't tell you everything--not
even books on etiquette."
Vetch broke into a laugh of boisterous amusement. "So that is how you
have been spending your time!" he exclaimed. "You'd better trust to your
common sense, my dear; it will carry you straighter."
"Oh, no, it doesn't. It doesn't carry me anywhere except into trouble.
When I think of all the pains I've taken to learn how to talk like the
dictionary! Why, nobody talks like the dictionary any longer! They all
talk slang, every one of them--only they don't talk the kind that Julius
Gershom and all these politicians do. If you could have seen Mrs.
Berkeley's face when I told her I'd had a 'grand' time to-night--she
looked exactly like a frozen fish--though just the moment before Mr.
Culpeper had called somebody a 'rotter'. I heard him."
The Governor dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. "Trifles,
trifles," was his only comment.
The car had entered the Square, and in a moment it was passing the
Washington statue and the Capitol building. Until it stopped before the
steps of the mansion, Patty did not reply; then springing up with a
flutter of her scarlet skirt, she exclaimed airily, "But I am a trifle,
too, Father!"
As he held out his hand from the ground, Vetch looked at her with an
expression in which pride and pity were strangely mingled. "Then you are
one of the trifles that make life worth living," he replied.
He had taken out his latch-key and was about to insert it in the lock,
when the door opened and Gershom stood before them.
"I waited for you," he said to Vetch. "There's a matter I must see you
about to-night." His ruddy face was tinged with purple, and he had the
look of a man who has just been aroused from a nap.
"Well, I'm sleepy, and I'm going to bed," retorted Patty in reply to his
glance rather than his words, and her tone was bitterly hostile.
"Then I'll see you to-morrow." He had followed her into the wide hall
while the Governor closed the door and stopped to take off his overcoat.
"Did you have a good time?"
She responded with a disdainful movement of her shoulders which might
have been a shrug if she had had French instead of Irish blood in her
veins. In her evening cloak of green velvet trimmed with gray fox she
had the look of a small wild creature of the forest. Beneath her thick
eyelashes her eyes shone through a greenish mist; and at the moment
there was something frightened and furtive in their brightness.
"Of course," she replied defiantly, moving away from him in the
direction of the staircase. "I had a wonderful time--perfectly
wonderful. The people were all so interesting." Her pronunciation was as
deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary. It was
the air of superiority that she always assumed with Gershom, for in no
other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so
intensely.
His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look. "Who was there? I
reckon I know the names anyway."
He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there,
in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty's ethereal youth, he
looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as
old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.
Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her
so unconquerable an aversion. He was not ugly compared to many of the
men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she
first met him in the little country town where they were living, his
curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather
attractive than otherwise. If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in
dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a
distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his
Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity. Though his
clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a
sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers.
There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some
familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. Now, after the
evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which
was made all the keener by contrast. A pitiless light had fallen over
Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his
pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become
exaggerated into positive vices. She was too young to perceive the
essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to
overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him
now, she saw only the vulgarity. Like all those who have suffered from
insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without
mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above. After the
evening at the Berkeleys' she felt that she should be less ashamed of a
drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was
the correct thing to do. She remembered suddenly that on her fourteenth
birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her
father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that
she should never forgive Gershom. Oh, she had no patience with a man who
couldn't find out things and learn without asking questions! Hadn't she
tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on
trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the
thousand and one things she oughtn't to do? If she, even as a child, had
struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not
the wrong way--then why shouldn't he? Her father, of course, wasn't
polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far
apart as the poles. Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch
possessed the authority of personality--a sanction that was not social
but moral. Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that
was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.
"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly. "I've worked with him.
Smart chap, don't you think? Ever heard him speak?"
"No, I hate speeches."
"Did he and the Governor have any words?"
"Of course they didn't--not at dinner," she replied with a crushing
manner. "Father is waiting for you."
"Then you'll see me to-morrow? I've got a lot I want to say to you. And
I'll tell you this right now, Patty, my dear, you may run round with
these high-faluting chaps like Culpeper as much as you please; but how
many dinner parties do you think you'd be invited to if I hadn't put the
old man where he is?"
At this she turned on him furiously, her eyes blazing through their
greenish mist. "I don't owe you anything, and you know it!" she retorted
defiantly. Then before he could detain her she broke away from him and
ran up the stairs. How dared he pretend that he had placed her under an
obligation! As if it made any difference to her whether her father were
Governor or not!
As she fled upward she heard Gershom follow Vetch into the library, and
she knew that they would sit talking there until long after midnight.
These discussions had become frequent of late; and she surmised vaguely,
though Vetch never mentioned Gershom's name to her, that the two men
were no longer upon the friendly terms of the old days. Ever since
Vetch's election, it had seemed to her that the pack of hungry
politicians had closed in about him; and only the day before, when she
had gone over to the Governor's office in the Capitol building, she had
run away from what she merrily described as "the famished wolves"
waiting outside his door. It was clear even to her that the political
leaders who had supported Vetch were beginning already to distrust him.
They had sought, she realized, to use his popularity, his eloquence, his
earnestness, for their own ends; and they were making the historic
discovery that the man who possesses these affirmative qualities is
seldom without the will to preserve them. In their superficial ploughing
of the soil, Vetch's adherents had at last struck against the rock of
resistance. A man of ambition, or a man of prejudice, they might have
controlled; but, as Patty had learned long ago, Vetch was that most
difficult of political problems--the man of an idea.
Sitting before her dressing-table she glanced over the room, which was
hung with the gaily decorated chintz she had bought after months of
secret longing for roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom. Now she felt
that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to
colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something
better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the
large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled
chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but
the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white.
Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some
to-morrow." She was pretty,--even Stephen thought she was pretty. She
could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was
merely the bloom of youth, nothing more. It was not that changeless
beauty of structure--that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone,
which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely. "In ten, fifteen, at the most
in twenty years, I shall have lost it all," she thought. "Then I shall
get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a
little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had. I have nothing to
hold on to--nothing that will last. I don't know anything--and yet how
could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had? In my
whole life I've never known a woman that could help me. I've had to find
out everything for myself--"
With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of
pink celluloid--how much she had admired it when she bought it!--and
leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the
dressing-table. Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush
surrounded her small eager face like a cloud. From the open neck of her
kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin
girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the
stem of some delicate flower.
"I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived?" she asked
presently of her reflection. "I wonder if she was different from all the
other women I've known?" Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred
memories of her childhood. First there came the one vivid recollection
of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in
a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees. The face Patty
could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her
mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of
it, which that fairy-like figure had held over her cradle. Of her mother
this was all she had left, just this one unforgettable picture, and then
a long terrible night when she had not seen her, but had heard her
sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, somewhere in the darkness. The next day, when
she cried for her, they had said that she was gone, and the child had
never seen her again. In the place of her pretty mother there had been a
big, rugged man, whom she had never seen before, and when she cried this
man had taken her in his arms, and tried to quiet her. Afterward, when
she grew bigger and asked questions, one of the neighbours had told her
that her mother had lost her mind from a fall in the circus, that they
had taken her away to an asylum, and that now she was dead.
"And wherever she is, she ought to go down on her knees and thank
Gideon Vetch for the way he's looked after you," said the woman.
"But didn't he look after her too?" asked the child.
At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her
capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds."
Well, I reckon that's more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!"
she replied emphatically but ambiguously.
"I wonder why Father never took me to see her. I'm sure I'd have
remembered it."
The woman looked at her darkly. "There are some places that children
don't go to."
"How long ago did she die?"
Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour
raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had
extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had
closed over something. "You'll have to ask your father that," she
returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one. "I ain't here to
tell you things."
After this the child set her lips firmly together, and asked no more
questions. Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it
seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like
a mountain everything else on her horizon. In the beginning they had
been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for
weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order
to buy her toys. Until she went to the little village school, she had
always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their
circumstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim,
gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her.
There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the
meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to
live with her.
Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered
restlessly to the pile of fashion magazines and festively decorated
"books on etiquette" that littered the table beside the chintz-covered
couch. "They don't know everything!" she thought contemptuously. How
hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all
seemed to her to-night! All the hours that she had spent in futile study
appeared to her wasted! At her first dinner she had felt as bewildered
and unhappy as if she had never opened one of those thick gaudy volumes
that had cost so much--as much as a box of chocolates every day for a
week. "I don't care," she said aloud, with sullen resolution. "I am
going to let them see that I don't want any favours."
The next afternoon she went out early in order to escape Gershom; but
when she came in, after a restless wandering in shops and a short drive,
she met him just as he was turning away from the door.
"Something told me I'd find you at this hour," he remarked with
unfailing good humour. "Come out and walk about in the Square. It will
do you good."
She shook her head impatiently. "I'm tired. I don't like walking."
"Well, I reckon it's easier to sit anyway. We'll go inside."
"No, if I've got to talk to you I'd rather do it out of doors," she
replied, turning back toward the gate.
"That's right. The air's fine. I shouldn't wonder if the bad weather
ain't all over."
"I don't mind the bad weather," she retorted pettishly because it was
the only remark she could think of that sounded disagreeable.
They passed through the gate, and walked rapidly in the direction of the
Washington monument, which lifted a splendid silhouette against a deep
blue background of sky. It was one of those soft, opal-tinted February
days which fall like a lyric interlude in the gray procession of winter.
The sunshine lay like flowing gold on the pavement; and the breeze that
stirred now and then in the leafless boughs of the trees was as roving
and provocative as the air of spring. In the winding brick walks of the
Square children were at play with the squirrels and pigeons; and old
men, with gnarled hands and patient hopeless faces, sat warming
themselves in the sunshine on the benches. "Life!" she thought. "That's
life. You can't get away from it." Then one of the old men broke into a
cackle of cheerful laughter, and she added: "After all nobody is ever
pathetic to himself."
"I believe I'll go in," she said, turning to Gershom. "I want to take
off my hat."
He laughed. "Your hat's all right, ain't it? It looks pretty good to
me."
A shiver of aversion ran through her. If only he wouldn't try to be
funny! If only he had been born without that dreadful sense of humour,
she felt that she might have been able to tolerate him.
"Please don't," she replied fretfully.
"Well, I won't, if you'll walk a little slower. I told you I had
something to say to you."
"I don't want to hear it. There's no use talking about it. I'll say the
same thing if you ask me for a hundred years."
A chuckle broke from him while he stood jauntily fingering the diamond
in his tie, as if it were some talisman which imparted fresh confidence.
Oh, it was useless to try to put a man like that in his place--for his
place seemed to be everywhere!
"Well, it won't do any harm," he said at last. "As long as I like to
listen to it."
"I wish you would leave me alone."
"But suppose I can't?" He was still chaffing. He would continue to
chaff, she was convinced, if he were dying. "Suppose I ain't made that
way?"
"I don't care how you're made. You may talk to Father if you like; but
I'm going upstairs to take off my hat."
His chuckle swelled into a roar of laughter. "Talk to Father! Haven't I
been talking to Father over at the Capitol for the last three hours?"
They had reached the gate beyond the monument, and swinging suddenly
round, she started back toward the house. As she passed him he touched
the end of her fur stole with a gesture that was almost imperative. His
eyes had dropped their veil of pleasantry, and she was aware, with a
troubled mind, that he was holding back something as a last resource if
she continued to prove intractable. Again and again she had this feeling
when she was with him--an uneasy intuition that his good humour was not
entirely unassumed, that he was concealing a dangerous weapon beneath
his offensive familiarity.
"After all I may be going to surprise you," he said lightly enough, yet
with this disturbing implication of some meaning that she could not
discern. "What if I tell you that I've no intention of making love to
you?"
"You mean there is something else you want to see me about?" She
breathed a sigh of relief, and her light steps fell gradually into the
measure of his. Her conscience pricked her unpleasantly when she
remembered that there had been a time when she would have spoken less
curtly. Well, what of that? It was characteristic of her energetic mind
that past mistakes were dismissed as soon as they were discovered. When
one started out in life knowing nothing, one had to learn as best one
could, that was all! Every day was a new one, so why bother about
yesterday? There was trouble enough in the world as it was, without
dragging back what was over.
"Please tell me what it is," she said impatiently.
He looked at her with curious intentness. "It is about an aunt of
yours--Mrs. Green. I met her when I was in California."
Her surprise was so complete that he must have been gratified.
"An aunt of mine? I haven't any aunt."
For a minute he hesitated. Now that he had come to practical matters his
careless jocularity had given place to a manner of serious deliberation.
"Then your father hasn't told you?" he asked.
"Is she his sister?" Her distrust of Gershom was so strong that she
could not bring herself to a direct reply.
"So he hasn't?" After all she might as well have answered his question.
"No, she isn't his sister." His smile was full of meaning.
"Then she must be"--there was a change in her voice which he was quick
to detect--"she must be the sister of my mother."
"Didn't you know that she had one?" he enquired. "Don't you remember
seeing her when you were a child?"
She shook her head. "No, I don't remember her, and Father has never
spoken of her."
At this he glanced at her sharply, and then looked away over the tops of
the trees to the political mausoleum of the City Hall. "We take that as
a sort of joke now," he remarked irrelevantly, "but the time was--and
not so long ago either--when we boasted of it more than of the Lee
monument. Cost a lot too, they say! Queer, ain't it, the way we spend a
million dollars or more on a thing one year, and the next want to kick
it out on the junk heap? I reckon it's the same way about behaviour too.
It ain't so much what you do as the time you do it in that seems to make
the difference." As she showed no inclination to follow this train of
moralizing, he asked suddenly, "Do you remember your mother?"
"Only once. I remember seeing her once." He had not imagined that her
voice could become so gentle.
"Did they ever tell you what became of her?"
"Yes, I know that. She lost her mind. They told me that she died in the
asylum."
He was still watching her closely, as if he were observing the effect on
her nerves of each word he uttered. "Did they tell you the cause of it?"
She shook her head. "That was all they ever told me."
"You mean your father never mentioned it to you? Are you sure he never
spoke of Mrs. Green?"
"I shouldn't have forgotten. But, if she is my mother's sister, why has
she never written to me?"
"Ah, that's just it! She was afraid your father wouldn't like it. There
was a difference of some kind. I don't know what it was about--but they
didn't get on--and--and--"
"I am sure Father was right. He is always right," she said loyally.
"Well, he may have been. I'm not denying that; but it's an old story
now, and I wouldn't bring it up again, if I were you. He has enough
things to carry without that."
She hesitated a moment before replying. "Yes, I suppose it's better not
to speak of it. He has too many worries."
"I knew you'd see it that way; you're a girl of sense. And if Mrs. Green
should ever come here, must I tell her that you would like to see her?"
"Does she think of coming here? California is so far away."
"Well, people do come, don't they? And I know she'd like to see you. She
was very fond of your mother. I used to know both of 'em in the old days
when I was a boy."
"Of course I'd like to see her if she could tell me about my mother. I
want to ask questions about her--only it makes Father so unhappy when I
bring up the past."
"It would, I reckon. Things like that are better forgotten." Then,
dismissing the subject abruptly, he remarked in the old tone of
facetious familiarity, "I never saw you looking better. What have you
done to yourself? You are always imitating some new person every time I
see you."
"I am not!" Her temper flashed out. "I never imitate anybody." Yet, even
as she passionately denied the charge, she knew that it was true. For a
week, ever since her first visit to the old print shop, she had tried to
copy Corinna's voice, the carriage of her head, her smile, her gestures.
"Well, you needn't," he assured her with admiring pleasantry. "As far as
looks go--and that's a long way--I haven't seen any one that was better
than you!"