Gita stood with her hands in the pockets of her sport skirt surveying
the old manor house from the drive. It was built of oblong blocks of
stone obviously cemented together in the fashion of so many Northern
Colonial mansions: a great square box of a house, surmounted by a gabled
roof; without architectural grace but solid and imposing, and immune to
the elements and time. The gardener was as old as her grandmother and
the lawns were thin, the rose-bushes and other flowering plants looked
as senile as himself. But the pine woods on three sides were beautiful
and dim and old, and Gita was conscious of a thrill of pride in her
inheritance. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders philosophically.
“Why not? It’s all I’ve got. And perhaps a background is something to
lean against, anyhow.” She would not admit that she had felt curiously
at home from the hour of her arrival.
She sauntered out of the park and across the bridge of the Thoroughfare,
a narrow body of salt water dividing the mainland from the most famous
of its islands. Atlantic City amused her, but she did not turn toward
the town. Some distance to the south, below the hotels, the Boardwalk
had been demolished during a storm uncommonly heavy for even that wild
part of the Atlantic coast; with its record, during the days of sailing
vessels, of thousands of wrecks and bodies washed ashore, of evil men
and false lights and ghouls crouching in wait.
Since the disaster to this end of the promenade it was deserted by idle
saunterers. Walking briskly, sometimes running, with elbows pressed
close to her sides, Gita made directly for this solitary spot and sat
down on the sands, embracing her knees and staring out at the tossing
ocean. Gradually her hard spine drooped forlornly, and although she
scorned tears and self-pity, her mouth relaxed into the soft and
charming curves of her youth. She felt small and desolate and alone.
What was a dilapidated old manor to a girl who had been deprived of a
far more significant birthright? If she could have grown up in that old
place, a Carteret of the Carterets, she would have been a normal
innocent girl, full of hope and day-dreams and every kind of delightful
nonsense. At twenty-two she had not an illusion, and a horror and hatred
of life. And her mother, the one person she had ever been able to care
for, the one person who had it in her power to make her feel young and
human and necessary, was dead.
More than once she had taken herself to task, scowled ferociously at her
distorted ego. Common sense dictated that she should ignore her
unfortunate experience of life as too uncommon to warp any educated
woman’s viewpoint, readjust, reorient, herself. Other girls had had
unfortunate experiences—but not hers. Not hers.
Her earliest memory was of Paris . . . an old detached house in Passy
. . . a constant uproar downstairs that kept her awake in the nursery
under the roof . . . ribald laughter and singing, brawls, banging doors
all over the house. . . . Sometimes she would hang over the banisters in
her nightgown, shivering with cold, fretful but curious. . . . Her
mother with white desperate face, running up the stairs, snatching the
child, darting into the nearest room, locking the door . . . a man
running after her . . . mumbling at the keyhole, cursing. . . . Gerald
Carteret, later, pounding on the door, commanding her to return to his
guests and not make a silly little fool of herself. . . . Her mother’s
terrified sobbing, then quailing obedience lest he keep his threat and
break down the door.
And moving, always moving. As Gita grew older she learned that her
father and his guests not only drank and caroused but gambled, sometimes
all day as all night . . . that his friends persecuted her mother, whom
they called the Blonde Madonna. She received little protection from her
husband, with whom, nevertheless, she was at that time infatuated; she
hated him later. Gita begged her mother to leave him and return to San
Francisco, but this seemed a poor alternative to the tormented
Millicent. Her parents were dead, her only relative was an aunt, whom
she disliked. She had no desire to return to a city, where, in her first
season, and to the envy of the other girls, she had captured the
handsome and dashing Easterner, visiting polo friends in Burlingame. Now
they thought of her as living brilliantly in Europe, although it must
have struck them as odd sometimes that they never were able to
communicate with her in their many trips abroad.
Moreover, a wife’s duty was to her husband, no matter what he might be.
Even at the age of ten Gita sniffed. But her lovely mother was the one
perfect being in a too imperfect world, and if she said it was right to
live with a man who was intoxicated most of the time, hit her, subjected
her to every form of insult, then right it must be. But she conceived a
strong distaste for husbands and abominated her father, informing him
more than once she wished he were dead. He would scowl or grin down at
the small child, straight and defiant, and smack her or toss her to the
ceiling, according to his mood.
Carteret was an unlucky gambler, on the whole, and lived “on the
interest of his debts,” after his own and his wife’s inheritances had
expired. When his creditors became too pressing he bundled his family
out in the night and set up in another capital. When fortune ran with
him he was charming and generous; when luck jibed he struck his wife,
his child, his servants, whoever got in his raging way, raved like a
madman, then collapsed in drunken tears at his Madonna’s feet and
implored her forgiveness. . . .
Gita hated him increasingly, hated the other men, with their well-bred
dissipated faces, who persecuted her mother . . . in time herself. . . .
Herself! These were the ugliest and most indelible memories of
all. . . .
This life, in which the war made no appreciable difference, ended
abruptly when Gita was sixteen. Gerald Carteret died of typhoid fever in
a French provincial town where he was hiding from his creditors. Gita
sold her grandmother Sears’ engagement-ring, the only remaining jewel,
and buried him thankfully; then sat for three months at her mother’s
bedside in the charity ward of a hospital, exercising her will
frantically to keep life in her mother’s exhausted body; a poor family
in the neighborhood keeping life in her own.
Mrs. Carteret recovered and the two faced starvation. Then for her
child’s sake Millicent wrote to her aunt, and received much scornful
criticism in return, more sound advice, and a promise of a hundred
dollars a month.
After that life was a succession of cheap pensions, with poor food,
dingy company, and always some idle husband who made love to the
indestructibly charming Millicent; to the expressed indignation of his
wife. Constant peregrinations interfered with Gita’s schooling but she
received an education of sorts. She was quick at languages and had ample
opportunity to pick them up. As men ogled her on the street as well as
in the pensions she abandoned the graceful languid carriage that had
been a part of her anxious training, throwing back her shoulders and
striding along like a stiff young soldier on parade; finally, to her
mother’s wailing accompaniment, cut off her abundant black hair.
“I should have been a boy anyhow,” she told the superlatively feminine
Millicent. “It was a horrid mistake of Nature. Then I not only could
have taken you out of this rotten poverty-stricken life one day, and
given you lovely gowns and delicate food, but I could have stood up to
these awful men that annoy you.”
When she was seventeen the old aunt died and left her small fortune and
the house built by the first Sears to adventure in California, to “my
only remaining relative and not unloved niece, Millicent Sears
Carteret.” The heiress decided to leave Europe, which she frankly hoped
never to see again, and take her child to San Francisco. It was far from
Carteret Manor, pride had gone the way of vanity, and she longed for her
old friends; moreover, Gita could finish her education and have proper
associates for the first time.
In San Francisco Gita was almost happy for two years. She enjoyed her
school, the cool electric climate, the magnificent views, the drifting
fogs, the long walks over the hills, and the Chinese cook’s admirable
confections. Millicent’s friends were as faithful as she had
anticipated, and Gita drifted into a semi-intimacy with girls who filled
her at first with wonder and then with emulation. They were very modern
young people, with the wisdom of the serpent, a fixed intent to do as
they pleased, and a canny ability to take care of themselves. Gita, with
her extensive and barely interrupted knowledge of the nocuous side of
life and the hideous lust of men, at times felt old enough to be their
grandmother, at others like the little sister of these amused and
cynical maidens. Her mother had inculcated obedience, to one’s maternal
parent, at least, as the first law of nature, and the only time Gita had
ever defied her was when she had done her best to transform herself into
a boy. She had been as severely chaperoned as was possible and
admonished against all things unladylike, particularly cigarettes. It
had been unnecessary to warn her against too free a manner with men as
she hated all men, and never danced as she would have preferred to be
embraced by a snake; but the consequence was that she had not the most
elementary knowledge of flirtation.
Flirtation, however, she was informed by her new friends, was out of
date. Past was the day of subtle methods, of practiced coquetry, of
recourse to every feminine device to win and keep a man, while he, poor
dupe, played the hollow rôle of hunter. The girls called the “boys” up
on the telephone as often as the boys called them, and even took them
out to restaurants and paid the bill. This was the day of fifty-fifty,
of equality of the sexes. Gita looked in vain for romance, still in a
measure the mainspring of fiction. But these girls laughed at the word,
in spite of the movies, where, in the intervals between parties, they
took their followers of an evening; conversation, apparently, was among
the lost arts. One young married woman told Gita casually that her
husband, after a more or less desultory wooing, suggested they “hitch
up,” and she had accepted him, not because she liked him better than
several others, but because his type pleased her, she was in the mood to
marry, and wanted a baby. By this time Gita had ceased to blush at a
frankness which would have horrified her mother, and at one time
herself, accustomed to the finesse of Europeans (when sober); and, with
the plasticity of youth, superimposed something of a new self upon what
she had believed to be a finished and permanent structure.
But although, after her graduation, she went out to dinners, she refused
to go to parties, since that would have meant dancing, and she recoiled
from contact with even these innocuous young men. Not, as she was aware,
that she would have been importuned for dances, for the boys had “no use
for her,” she was a “highbrow,” wasn’t a “regular girl,” “ought to have
been a boy and tried to look like one.” The girls, with whom she was
popular, tried to give her “points,” but desisted when they understood
that her dislike of men was sincere, although they did not guess the
cause. If she could have brought herself to tell the story of both her
surface and her psychic life to these wise maidens, no doubt they would
have blown the chaff from the wheat with their laughing common sense,
told her to “forget it,” remember that youth was the only thing that
mattered, and, when she had had a good time for a year or two, marry and
have a baby. But Gita would rather have gone out into the breakers at
the Cliff House and drowned herself than to have revealed the festering
sores in her soul to anyone. And no less than three noxious experiences
with married men, fascinated by her vivid youth and intolerance of their
sex, extinguished any possibility she may have unconsciously cherished
of forgetting the past.
Upon one occasion only did she appear to attract a “boy.” He had made an
average record in the war, was the son of a rich man, and although he
“played about” with the girls he “fell for” none of them. The other
young men disliked and criticized him, but the girls retorted that he
was too good a dancer and mah-jongg player to lose. One night he met
Gita at a dinner, and more than once she saw him watching her with
covert speculation. Later, with considerable finesse for a San Francisco
youth, he lured her into the conservatory, and after telling her
admiringly that she looked the real thing and made chromos of the other
dear little daisies, seized her in his arms and tried to kiss her. He
received an abraded shin, a scratch across his cheek, and a loosened
front tooth, which sent him cursing out of her presence to find an exit
at the back of the house. They met some weeks later and he said airily:
“My mistake. Sorry. Hope you’ll forget it.” But she knew that he hated
her and looked exultingly at the gold band across his front teeth.
The girls discussed her psychoanalytically and decided she had a
complex, induced no doubt by resentment that she had not been born a
boy. On the other hand she had not “rushed” any of them and was anything
but masculine, in spite of her funny little swagger and lack of feminine
adornment. Ann Melrose came nearer the truth. “She is so precocious on
one side of her that she may have had a desperate love-affair at the age
of sixteen, and the man turned out a rotter. Did something that
horrified her. But if she doesn’t mend her ways she’ll never give any
other man the chance to administer the right kind of shock. She’s about
as approachable as a hedgehog and as adaptable as a wire fence. ’Fraid
she’s got too much brains and not enough common sense. Something gave
her a bad twist. That’s good enough for me. I’m sick of psycho. Too bad!
She’s a game kid and as straight as they come. Wonder how she’ll turn
out.”
When Gita was nineteen misfortune once more fell upon them. The trustee
of the small estate, failing in his wooing of Millicent, absconded with
all but the house, which was mortgaged. Life was gray once more. They
took in lodgers, dismissed the cook, and did their own work. Gita saw
less of her friends, although they ran in every few days and
occasionally made the beds. Millicent’s friends sent her hampers from
the country and carried her off now and then for a day in San Mateo,
Menlo Park, Burlingame, or San Rafael. One of her old beaux proposed for
the fifth time since her arrival, but Millicent had had her fill of
marriage. Moreover, she knew that if she married again she would lose
her daughter; of whom, although she was a rather silly woman, she had a
considerable understanding.
The enterprise was not a success. The lodgers either made love to their
pretty landlady or did not pay their rent and had to be evicted. Finally
Gita turned them all out and took in only women; to find that some were
respectable and others not. Recommendations were easily forged. After a
scandal Millicent sold the house for a little more than the mortgage and
accepted the position of housekeeper to one of her friends in San Mateo,
while Gita taught French and Italian to a class of youngsters hastily
assembled. Neither would accept invitations for “long visits until
something turns up.”
Gita, saw her friends constantly once more although she refused to go to
dinners or luncheons. Her clothes barely held together, and they dared
not offer her presents. But she learned to ride, to play tennis, to swim
(in pools), and her naturally robust health, which had been impaired by
too much confinement and hard indoor work, was restored.
By this time Millicent’s spirit was broken and her strength had been
failing for some time. Gita took her to a sanitarium for the tubercular
on the California desert, paying the expenses with the few hundreds left
from the sale of the house. On her death-bed Millicent wrote to Mrs.
Carteret.