THE VICIOUSNESS OF NICE THINGS
"What did you think of my nice Daggett boy?" Claire demanded of Eva
Gilson, the moment bruncheon was over.
"Which one was---- Oh, the boy you met on the road? Why, really, I
didn't notice him particularly. I'd rather fancied from the way you
referred to him that he was awfully jolly and forceful, but rather
crude. But I didn't notice him at all. He seemed perfectly well-bred,
but slightly heavy."
"No, he isn't that---- He---- Why did you lead spades?" reflected
Claire.
They were in the drawing-room, resting after the tact and tumult of the
bruncheon. Claire had been here long enough now for the Gilsons to
forget her comfortably, and be affectionate and quarrelsome and natural,
and to admit by their worrying that even in their exalted social
position there were things to fuss about.
"I do think we ought to have invited Belle Torrens," fretted Mrs.
Gilson. "We've simply got to have her here soon."
Mr. Gilson speculated intensely, "But she's the dullest soul on earth,
and her husband spends all his spare time in trying to think up ways of
doing me dirt in business. Oh, by the way, did you get the water tap in
the blue room fixed? It's dripping all the time."
"No, I forgot it."
"Well, I _do_ wish you'd have it attended to. It simply drips all the
time."
"I know. I intended to 'phone the plumber---- Can't you 'phone him
tomorrow, from the office?"
"No, I haven't time to bother with it. But I do wish you would. It keeps
on dripping----"
"I know, it doesn't seem to stop. Well, you remind me of it in the
morning."
"I'm afraid I'll forget. You better make a note of it. If it keeps on
dripping that way, it's likely to injure something. And I do wish you'd
tell the Jap not to put so much parsley in the omelet. And I say, how
would an omelet be with a butter sauce over it?"
"Oh, no, I don't think so. An omelet ought to be nice and dry. Butter
makes it so greasy--besides, with the price of butter----"
"But there's a richness to butter---- You'd better make a note about the
tap dripping in the blue room right now, before you forget it. Oh! Why
in heaven's name did we have Johnny Martin here? He's dull as
ditchwater----"
"I know, but---- It is nice to go out to his place on the Point. Oh,
Gene, I do wish you'd try and remember not to talk about your business
so much. You and Mr. Martin were talking about the price of lumber for
at least half an hour----"
"Nothing of the kind. We scarcely mentioned it. Oh! What car are you
going to use this afternoon? If we get out to the Barnetts', I thought
we might use the limousine---- Or no, you'll probably go out before I
do, I have to read over some specifications, and I promised to give Will
a lift, couldn't you take the Loco, maybe you might drive yourself, no,
I forgot, the clutch is slipping a little, well, you might drive out and
send the car back for me--still, there wouldn't hardly be time----"
Listening to them as to a play, Claire suddenly desired to scream, "Oh,
for heaven's sake quit fussing! I'm going up and drown myself in the
blue-room tap! What does it matter! Walk! Take a surface car! Don't fuss
so!"
Her wrath came from her feeling of guilt. Yes, Milt had been
commonplace. Had she done this to him? Had she turned his cheerful
ignorances into a careful stupor? And she felt stuffy and choking and
overpacked with food. She wanted to be out on the road, clear-headed,
forcing her way through, an independent human being--with Milt not too
far behind.
Mrs. Gilson was droning, "I do think Mattie Vincent is so nice."
"Rather dull I'd call her," yawned Mr. Gilson.
Mattie was the seventh of their recent guests whom he had called dull by
now.
"Not at all--oh, of course she doesn't dance on tables and quote
Maeterlinck, but she does have an instinct for the niceties and the
proprieties--her little house is so sweet--everything just exactly
right--it may be only a single rose, but always chosen so carefully to
melt into the background; and such adorable china--I simply die of envy
every time I see her Lowestoft plates. And such a quiet way of reproving
any bad taste--the time that crank university professor was out there,
and spoke of the radical labor movement, and Mattie just smiled at him
and said, 'If you don't mind, let's not drag filthy lumberjacks into the
drawing-room--they'd hate it just as much as we would, don't you think,
perhaps?'"
"Oh, _damn_ nice china! Oh, let's hang all spinsters who are brightly
reproving," Claire was silently raging. "And particularly and earnestly
confound all nicety and discretion of living."
She tried to break the spell of the Gilsons' fussing. She
false-heartedly fawned upon Mr. Gilson, and inquired:
"Is there anything very exciting going on at the mills, Gene?"
"Exciting?" asked Mr. Gilson incredulously. "Why, how do you mean?"
"Don't you find business exciting? Why do you do it then?"
"Oh, wellllll---- Of course---- Oh, yes, exciting in a way. Well----
Well, we've had a jolly interesting time making staves for candy
pails--promises to be wonderfully profitable. We have a new way of
cutting them. But you wouldn't be interested in the machinery."
"Of course not. You don't bore Eva with your horrid, headachy
business-problems, do you?" Claire cooed, with low cunning.
"Indeed no. Don't think a chap ought to inflict his business on his
wife. The home should be a place of peace."
"Yes," said Claire.
But she wasn't thinking "Yes." She was thinking, "Milt, what worries me
now isn't how I can risk letting the 'nice people' meet you. It's how I
can ever waste you on the 'nice people.' Oh, I'm spoiled for
cut-glass-and-velvet afternoons. Eternal spiritual agony over blue-room
taps is too high a price even for four-poster beds. I want to be
driving! hiking! living!"
That afternoon, after having agreed that Mr. Johnny Martin was a bore,
Mr. and Mrs. Gilson decided to run out to the house of Mr. Johnny
Martin. They bore along the lifeless Claire.
Mr. Martin was an unentertaining bachelor who entertained. There were a
dozen supercilious young married people at his bayside cottage when the
Gilsons arrived. Among them were two eyebrow-arching young matrons whom
Claire had not met--Mrs. Corey and Mrs. Betz.
"We've all heard of you, Miss Boltwood," said Mrs. Betz. "You come from
the East, don't you?"
"Yes," fluttered Claire, trying to be cordial.
Mrs. Corey and Mrs. Betz looked at each other in a motionless wink, and
Mrs. Corey prodded:
"From New York?"
"No. Brooklyn." Claire tried not to make it too short.
"Oh." The tacit wink was repeated. Mrs. Corey said brightly--much too
brightly--"I was born in New York. I wonder if you know the Dudenants?"
Now Claire knew the Dudenants. She had danced with that young ass Don
Dudenant a dozen times. But the devil did enter into her and possess
her, and, to Eva Gilson's horror, Claire said stupidly, "No-o, but I
think I've heard of them."
The condemning wink was repeated.
"I hear you've been doing such interesting things--motoring and
adventuring--you must have met some terrible people along the way,"
fished Mrs. Betz.
"Yes, everybody does seem to feel that way. But I'm afraid I found them
terribly nice," flared Claire.
"I always say that common people can be most agreeable," Mrs. Corey
patronized. Before Claire could kill her--there wasn't any homicidal
weapon in sight except a silver tea-strainer--Mrs. Corey had pirouetted
on, "Though I do think that we're much too kind to workmen and all--the
labor situation is getting to be abominable here in the West, and upon
my word, to keep a maid nowadays, you have to treat her as though she
were a countess."
"Why shouldn't maids be like countesses? They're much more important,"
said Claire sweetly.
It cannot be stated that Claire had spent any large part of her time in
reading Karl Marx, leading syndicalist demonstrations, or hemming red
internationalist flags, but at this instant she was a complete
revolutionist. She could have executed Mrs. Corey and pretty Mrs. Betz
with zeal; she disliked the entire bourgeoisie; she looked around for a
Jap boy to call "comrade" and she again thought about the possibilities
of the tea-strainer for use in assassination. She stolidly wore through
the combined and exclamatory explanations of Mrs. Corey, Mrs. Betz, Mrs.
Gilson, and Mr. Johnny Martin about the inherent viciousness of all
maids, and when the storm was over, she said in a manner of honey and
syrup:
"You were speaking of the Dudenants, weren't you, Mrs. Corey? I do
remember them now. Poor Don Dudenant, isn't it a pity he's such a fool?
His father is really a very decent old bore."
"I," observed Mrs. Corey, in prim horror, "regard the Dudenants as
extremely delightful people. I fancy we must be thinking of different
families. I mean the Manhattan Dudenants, not the Brooklyn family."
"Oh, yes, I meant the Manhattan family, too--the one that made its
fortune selling shoddy woolens in the Civil War," caressed Claire.
Right there, her welcome by Mrs. Corey and Mrs. Betz ceased; and without
any of the unhappiness which the thought would have caused her three
months before, Claire reflected, "How they hate me!"
The Gilsons had a number of thoughts upon the subject of tact to express
to Claire on the way home. But she, who had always smiled, who had been
the obedient guest, shrugged and snapped, "They're idiots, those young
women. They're impertinent shopgirls in good frocks. I like your
Seattle. It's a glorious city. And I love so many of the fine, simple,
real people I've met here. I admire your progress. I do know how
miraculously you've changed it from a mining camp. But for heaven's sake
don't forget the good common hardiness of the miners. Somehow, London
social distinctions seem ludicrous in American cities that twenty years
ago didn't have much but board sidewalks and saloons. I don't care
whether it's Seattle or Minneapolis or Omaha or Denver, I refuse to
worry about the Duchess of Corey and the Baroness Betz and all the other
wonderful imitations of gilt. When a pair of finishing-school flappers
like Betz and Corey try to impress me with their superiority to workmen,
and their extreme aristocracy and Easternness, they make me tired. I
_am_ the East!"
She had made peace with the Gilsons by night; she had been reasonably
repentant about not playing the game of her hosts; but inside her eager
heart she snuggled a warm thought. She remembered how gaily she had once
promised, out on the road, to come to Milt's room and cook for him. She
thought of it with homesick desire. His room probably wasn't
particularly decorative, and she doubted his having an electric range,
but it would be fun to fry eggs again, to see him fumbling with the
dish-washing, to chatter and plan golden futures, and not worry about
the opinions of Mrs. Corey and Mrs. Betz.
The next afternoon the limousine was not busy and she borrowed it, with
the handsome Greek chauffeur.
She gave him an address not far from the university.
He complained, "Pardon me, miss, but I think you have the wrong number.
That block is a low quarter."
"Probably! But that's the right number!"
He raised his Athenian eyebrows, and she realized what a mistake she had
made in not bringing the lethal tea-strainer along. When they had
stopped in front of a cheap candy-store, he opened the door of the car
with such frigid reserve that she thought seriously about slapping him.
She climbed the stingy, flapping stairs, and knocked at the first door
in the upper hall. It was opened by a large apron, to which a sleepy
woman was an unimportant attachment, and out of the mass of apron and
woman came a yawning, "Mr. Daggett's room is down the hall on the
right."
Claire knocked at a door which had at various epochs been blue, yellow,
and pink, and now was all three. No answer. She tried the knob, went in.
She could not tell whether it was the barrenness of the room, or Milt's
carefulness, that caught her. The uncarpeted boards of the floor were
well swept. He had only one plate, one spoon, but they were scoured, and
put away on newspaper-covered shelves in a cupboard made of a soap-box.
Behind a calico curtain was his new suit, dismayingly neat on its
hanger. On the edge of the iron sink primly washed and spread out to
dry, was a tattered old rag. At the sight of it, at the thought of Milt
solemnly washing dishes, the tears began to creep to her eyes.
There was but one picture in the room--a half-tone of a girl, clipped
from a magazine devoted to actresses. The name was cut off. As she
wondered at it, Claire saw that the actress was very much like herself.
The only other ornament was a papier-mache figure of a cat, a cat
reminiscent of the Lady Vere de Vere. Claire picked it up. On the
bottom was the price-mark--three cents.
It was the price-mark that pierced her. She flung across the room,
dropped on his creaky cot-bed, howled, "Oh, I've been a beast--a
beast--a beast! All the pretty things--limousines and marble
baths--thinking so much of them, and not wanting them for _him_! And he
with so little, with just nothing--he that would appreciate jolly things
so much--here in this den, and making it as tolerable as he can--and me
half ashamed of him instead of fighting for him---- I belong with Corey
and Betz. Oh, I'm so ashamed, so bitterly ashamed."
She patted his bed smooth with nervous eager fingers.
She scraped a pin-point of egg-yolk off a platter.
Before she had been home five minutes she had written a note asking him
to tea for next day.