A SENTIMENTAL INTERLUDE
As we had planned it, we were to stay in Carmel only three days—from
Friday until Monday—and then race south to Indianapolis, Terre Haute,
Sullivan, Evansville, French Lick, Bloomington, back to Indianapolis,
and after a day or night at Carmel for preparation, I might depart as I
had planned, or I could stay here. Franklin suggested that I make his
home my summering place—my room was mine for weeks if I cared to use it.
Actually up to now I had been anxious to get on and have the whole trip
done with, but here in Carmel I developed a desire to stay and rest
awhile, the country about was so very simple and homey; but I concluded
that I must not.
Franklin had prepared a trip for Sunday afternoon which interested me
very much. It was to be to the home of a celebrated automobile
manufacturer, now dead, whose name, incidentally, had been in the papers
for years, first as the President of the American Manufacturers
Association, a very noble organization of materialists, I take it, and
secondarily as the most strenuous opponent of organized labor that the
country up to his day had produced. I hold no brief for organized labor
any more than I do for organized manufacturers, being firmly convinced
that both are entitled to organize and fight and that to the victors
should belong the spoils; but at the present writing I would certainly
sympathize with organized labor as being in the main the underdog, and
wish it all the luck in the world. Personally, I believe in equilibrium,
with a healthy swinging of the pendulum of life and time to and fro
between the rich and the poor—a pendulum which should cast down the rich
of today and elevate them again tomorrow, or others like them, giving
the underdog the pleasure of being the overdog quite regularly, and vice
versa. I think that is what makes life interesting, if it _is_
interesting.
But as to this manufacturer, in spite of the entirely friendly things
Franklin had to say of him, I had heard many other stories relating to
him—his contentiousness, his rule of underpaying his labor, the way he
finally broke down on a trip somewhere and forgot all the details of it,
a blank space in his mind covering a period of two years. Franklin told
me of his home, which was much more pleasant to hear about—a place down
by a river near Indianapolis. According to Franklin, a good part of the
estate was covered with a grove of wonderful trees, mostly beech. As you
came to the place there was a keeper’s lodge by the gate which made you
feel as if you were entering the historic domain of some old nobleman.
The house was along a beautiful winding drive, bordered with a hedge of
all sorts of flowers usually in bloom all through the summer. The house
was very much hidden among the beech trees, a large red brick structure
with many windows and tall chimneys; the lower story constructed of
large field boulders, such as are found here. At the front and at the
left of the main entrance this masonry projected to make an immense
porch, with wide massive arches and posts of the same great boulders.
“The first time I ever saw it,” Franklin explained, “I stepped out of
the car and went up to ring the bell. It was a warm day, and Mrs. —— was
sitting alone at the left end of this great porch, quietly observing a
colored man servant who was playing a hose on the vines and the main
inside wall of the porch, apparently to partly cool the atmosphere. She
is a little, sweet, quiet woman, and as she rose to greet me, something
in the great house and the boulders and in the quietness of the forest
air about us, and perhaps in the gentle humility of the woman herself,
came to me and impressed me with the utter futility of building houses
at all; and of any man building a house beyond the ability of a woman to
touch lovingly with her hands and to care for and make a home of. Some
time later when I entered the house she was sitting alone in the great
hall in the sort of dusk that pervaded it. I somehow felt that the house
opposed her; that it was her enemy. I don’t know; I may be wrong; it was
only an impression.”
I have reproduced Franklin’s description as near as I can.
Of course I was interested to go. It promised a fine afternoon; only
when the hour struck and we were off in our best feathers, two tires
blew up and we were lucky to get to a garage. We limped back to Carmel,
and I returned to my rocking chair on the front porch, watching cars
from apparently all over the state go by, and wondering what had become
of the two girls I had met—they had disappeared for the day,
apparently—and what could I do to amuse myself. I listened to stories of
local eccentricities, freaks of character, a man who had died and left a
most remarkable collection of stuffed birds and animals, quite a museum,
which he had elaborated while running a bakery, or something of that
sort—and so on and so forth. Local morality came in for its usual
drubbing—the lies which people live—the things which they seem and are
not. Personally, I like this subtlety of nature—I would not have all
things open and aboveboard for anything. I like pretence when it is not
snivelling, Pecksniffery, calculated to injure someone for the very
crimes or deceits which you yourself are committing. Such rats should
always be pulled from their holes and exposed to the light.
Sitting on the veranda—Franklin felt called upon to do some work in
his studio, a very attractive building at the rear of the lawn—I grew
lonely and even despondent! It is a peculiarity of my nature that I
suffer these spells out of a clear sky and at a moment’s notice. I can
be having the best time in the world, apparently (I am often amused
thinking about it), and then of a sudden, the entertainment ceasing,
the situation changing, I find myself heavily charged with gloom. I am
getting old! (I had these same spells at nineteen and twenty.) Life is
slipping on and away! Relatives and friends are dying! Nothing
endures! Fame is a damned mockery! Affection is insecure or
self-destroying! Soon I am in the last stages of despair and looking
around for some means (speculatively purely) to end it all. It is
really too amusing—’_afterwards_.
While I was so meditating the first young girl came back, with that
elusive, enigmatic smile of hers, and two underdone striplings of about
eighteen or nineteen, and another girl, intended largely as a foil. She
was most becomingly and tantalizingly dressed in something which defies
description, and played croquet—with the two youths who were
persistently seeking her favor and ignoring the other maiden. I watched
her until I became irritated by her coy self sufficiency, and the art
with which she was managing the situation,—a thing which included me as
someone to disturb, too. I got up and moved round to the other side of
the house.
That night after dinner, Franklin and I went to Indianapolis on the
trolley, and ignoring all the sights went to a great hotel grill, where,
entirely surrounded by onyx and gilt and prism-hung candelabra, we had
beer in a teapot, with teacups as drinking vessels, it being “against
the law” to serve beer on Sunday. For the same reason it cost seventy
cents—two humble “schooners” of beer—for of course there was the service
and the dear waiter with his itching palm.
By ten-thirty the next morning the car, overhauled and cleaned, was at
the door, our new chauffeur at the wheel, ready for the run south.
[Illustration: THE BEST OF INDIANAPOLIS]
I carried my bags down, put them into the car, and sat in it to wait.
Franklin was off somewhere, in the heart of the village, arranging
something. Suddenly I heard a voice. It had the tone I expected.
Actually, I had anticipated it, in a psychic way. Looking up and across
a space of lawn two houses away, I saw the second girl of this meeting
place standing out under an apple tree, with a little boy beside her, an
infant the Speed family had adopted.
She was most gay in her dress and mood—something eery and sylph-like.
“Aren’t you coming over to say goodby?” she called.
I jumped up, ashamed of my lack of gallantry, and yet excusing myself on
the ground that I was too timid to intrude before, and strolled over.
She received me with a disturbed cordiality which was charming.
“It’s right mean of you,” she said.
“I was coming,” I protested, “only I expected to put it over until
Thursday—on my way back. That sounds rather bad, doesn’t it, but really
I wanted to come, only I was a little bit afraid.”
“You—afraid?”
“Yes. Don’t you think I can be?”
“Yes, but not of us, I should think. I thought maybe you were going away
for good without saying goodby.”
“Now, how could you?” I protested, knowing full well to the contrary.
“How nice we look today. Such a pretty dress and the clean white
shoes—and the ribbon.”
She was as gay and fluffy as a bit out of a bandbox.
“Oh, no, I just put these on because I had to wear them about the house
this morning.” She smiled in a simple, agreeable way, only I fancied
that she might have dressed on purpose.
“Well, anyhow,” I said—and we began to talk of school and her life and
what she wanted to do. Just as I was becoming really interested,
Franklin appeared, carrying a package. “Alas, here he is. And now I’ll
have to be going soon.”
“Yes,” she said, quite simply, and with a little feeling. “You’ll be
coming back, though.”
“But only for a day, I’m afraid.”
“But you won’t go away the next time without saying goodby, will you?”
“Isn’t that kind of you,” I replied. “Are you sure you want me to say
goodby?”
“Indeed I do. I’ll feel hurt if you don’t.” She held out her hand. There
was a naïve simplicity about it all that quite disarmed me and made it
all innocent and charming.
“Don’t you think I won’t?” I asked, teasingly. And then as I looked at
her she blanched in an odd, disturbed way, and turning to the boy
called, “Come on, Billy,” and ran to a side porch door, smiling back at
me.
“You won’t forget,” she called back from that safe place.