During several months that followed, Bartley's work consisted of
interviewing, of special reporting in all its branches, of correspondence
by mail and telegraph from points to which he was sent; his leisure
he spent in studying subjects which could be treated like that of
the boarding-houses. Marcia entered into his affairs with the keen
half-intelligence which characterizes a woman's participation in business;
whatever could be divined, she was quickly mistress of; she vividly
sympathized with his difficulties and his triumphs; she failed to follow
him in matters of political detail, or of general effect; she could not be
dispassionate or impartial; his relation to any enterprise was always more
important than anything else about it. On some of his missions he took her
with him, and then they made it a pleasure excursion; and if they came home
late with the material still unwritten, she helped him with his notes,
wrote from his dictation, and enabled him to give a fuller report than
his rivals. She caught up with amusing aptness the technical terms of the
profession, and was voluble about getting in ahead of the Events and the
other papers; and she was indignant if any part of his report was cut out
or garbled, or any feature was spoiled.
He made a “card” of grouping and treating with picturesque freshness the
spring openings of the milliners and dry-goods people; and when he brought
his article to Ricker, the editor ran it over, and said, “Guess you took
your wife with you, Hubbard.”
“Yes, I did,” Bartley owned. He was always proud of her looks, and it
flattered him that Ricker should see the evidences of her feminine taste
and knowledge in his account of the bonnets and dress goods. “You don't
suppose I could get at all these things by inspiration, do you?”
Marcia was already known to some of his friends whom he had introduced to
her in casual encounters. They were mostly unmarried, or if married they
lived at a distance, and they did not visit the Hubbards at their lodgings.
Marcia was a little shy, and did not quite know whether they ought to call
without being asked, or whether she ought to ask them; besides, Mrs. Nash's
reception-room was not always at her disposal, and she would not have liked
to take them all the way up to her own room. Her social life was therefore
confined to the public places where she met these friends of her husband's.
They sometimes happened together at a restaurant, or saw one another
between the acts at the theatre, or on coming out of a concert. Marcia was
not so much admired for her conversation by her acquaintance, as for her
beauty and her style; a rustic reluctance still lingered in her; she was
thin and dry in her talk with any one but Bartley, and she could not help
letting even men perceive that she was uneasy when they interested him in
matters foreign to her.
Bartley did not see why they could not have some of these fellows up
in their room for tea; but Marcia told him it was impossible. In fact,
although she willingly lived this irregular life with him, she was at heart
not at all a Bohemian. She did not like being in lodgings or dining at
restaurants; on their horse-car excursions into the suburbs, when the
spring opened, she was always choosing this or that little house as the
place where she would like to live, and wondering if it were within their
means. She said she would gladly do all the work herself; she hated to be
idle so much as she now must. The city's novelty wore off for her sooner
than for him: the concerts, the lectures, the theatres, had already lost
their zest for her, and she went because he wished her to go, or in order
to be able to help him with what he was always writing about such things.
As the spring advanced, Bartley conceived the plan of a local study,
something in the manner of the boarding-house article, but on a much vaster
scale: he proposed to Ricker a timely series on the easily accessible
hot-weather resorts, to be called “Boston's Breathing-Places,” and to
relate mainly to the seaside hotels and their surroundings. His idea was
encouraged, and he took Marcia with him on most of his expeditions for its
realization. These were largely made before the regular season had well
begun; but the boats were already running, and the hotels were open, and
they were treated with the hospitality which a knowledge of Bartley's
mission must invoke. As he said, it was a matter of business, give and
take on both sides, and the landlords took more than they gave in any such
trade.
On her part Marcia regarded dead-heading as a just and legitimate privilege
of the press, if not one of its chief attributes; and these passes on boats
and trains, this system of paying hotel-bills by the presentation of a
card, constituted distinguished and honorable recognition from the public.
To her simple experience, when Bartley told how magnificently the reporters
had been accommodated, at some civic or commercial or professional banquet,
with a table of their own, where they were served with all the wines and
courses, he seemed to have been one of the principal guests, and her fear
was that his head should be turned by his honors. But at the bottom of her
heart, though she enjoyed the brilliancy of Bartley's present life, she did
not think his occupation comparable to the law in dignity. Bartley called
himself a journalist now, but his newspaper connection still identified him
in her mind with those country editors of whom she had always heard her
father speak with such contempt: men dedicated to poverty and the despite
of all the local notables who used them. She could not shake off the
old feeling of degradation, even when she heard Bartley and some of his
fellow-journalists talking in their boastfulest vein of the sovereign
character of journalism; and she secretly resolved never to relinquish her
purpose of having him a lawyer. Till he was fairly this, in regular and
prosperous practice, she knew that she should not have shown her father
that she was right in marrying Bartley.
In the mean time their life went ignorantly on in the obscure channels
where their isolation from society kept it longer than was natural. Three
or four months after they came to Boston, they were still country people,
with scarcely any knowledge of the distinctions and differences so
important to the various worlds of any city. So far from knowing that they
must not walk in the Common, they used to sit down on a bench there, in the
pleasant weather, and watch the opening of the spring, among the lovers
whose passion had a publicity that neither surprised nor shocked them.
After they were a little more enlightened, they resorted to the Public
Garden, where they admired the bridge, and the rock-work, and the statues.
Bartley, who was already beginning to get up a taste for art, boldly
stopped and praised the Venus, in the presence of the gardeners planting
tulip-bulbs.
They went sometimes to the Museum of Fine Arts, where they found a pleasure
in the worst things which the best never afterwards gave them; and where
she became as hungry and tired as if it were the Vatican. They had a pride
in taking books out of the Public Library, where they walked about on
tiptoe with bated breath; and they thought it a divine treat to hear the
Great Organ play at noon. As they sat there in the Music Hall, and let the
mighty instrument bellow over their strong young nerves, Bartley whispered
Marcia the jokes he had heard about the organ; and then, upon the wave of
aristocratic sensation from this experience, they went out and dined at
Copeland's, or Weber's, or Fera's, or even at Parker's: they had long since
forsaken the humble restaurant with its doilies and its ponderous crockery,
and they had so mastered the art of ordering that they could manage a
dinner as cheaply at these finer places as anywhere, especially if Marcia
pretended not to care much for her half of the portion, and connived at its
transfer to Bartley's plate.
In his hours of leisure, they were so perpetually together that it became a
joke with the men who knew them to say, when asked if Bartley were married,
“Very _much_ married.” It was not wholly their inseparableness that gave
the impression of this extreme conjugality; as I said, Marcia's uneasiness
when others interested Bartley in things alien to her made itself felt even
by these men. She struggled against it because she did not wish to put him
to shame before them, and often with an aching sense of desolation she sent
him off with them to talk apart, or left him with them if they met on the
street, and walked home alone, rather than let any one say that she kept
her husband tied to her apron-strings. His club, after the first sense of
its splendor and usefulness wore away, was an ordeal; she had failed to
conceal that she thought the initiation and annual fees extravagant. She
knew no other bliss like having Bartley sit down in their own room with
her; it did not matter whether they talked; if he were busy, she would as
lief sit and sew, or sit and silently look at him as he wrote. In these
moments she liked to feign that she had lost him, that they had never been
married, and then come back with a rush of joy to the reality. But on his
club nights she heroically sent him off, and spent the evening with Mrs.
Nash. Sometimes she went out by day with the landlady, who had a passion
for auctions and cemeteries, and who led Marcia to an intimate acquaintance
with such pleasures. At Mount Auburn, Marcia liked the marble lambs, and
the emblematic hands pointing upward with the dexter finger, and the
infants carved in stone, and the angels with folded wings and lifted eyes,
better than the casts which Bartley said were from the antique, in the
Museum; on this side her mind was as wholly dormant as that of Mrs. Nash
herself. She always came home feeling as if she had not seen Bartley for a
year, and fearful that something had happened to him.
The hardest thing about their irregular life was that he must sometimes be
gone two or three days at a time, when he could not take her with him. Then
it seemed to her that she could not draw a full breath in his absence; and
once he found her almost wild on his return: she had begun to fancy that
he was never coming back again. He laughed at her when she betrayed her
secret, but she was not ashamed; and when he asked her, “Well, what if I
hadn't come back?” she answered passionately, “It wouldn't have made much
difference to me: I should not have lived.”
The uncertainty of his income was another cause of anguish to her. At times
he earned forty or fifty dollars a week; oftener he earned ten; there was
now and then a week when everything that he put his hand to failed, and he
earned nothing at all. Then Marcia despaired; her frugality became a
mania, and they had quarrels about what she called his extravagance. She
embittered his daily bread by blaming him for what he spent on it; she wore
her oldest dresses, and would have had him go shabby in token of their
adversity. Her economies were frantic child's play,--methodless,
inexperienced, fitful; and they were apt to be followed by remorse in which
she abetted him in some wanton excess.
The future of any heroic action is difficult to manage; and the sublime
sacrifice of her pride and all the conventional proprieties which Marcia
had made in giving herself to Bartley was inevitably tried by the same
sordid tests that every married life is put to.
That salaried place which he was always seeking on the staff of some
newspaper, proved not so easy to get as he had imagined in the flush of
his first successes. Ricker willingly included him among the
Chronicle-Abstract's own correspondents and special reporters; and he held
the same off-and-on relation to several other papers; but he remained
without a more definite position. He earned perhaps more money than a
salary would have given him, and in their way of living he and Marcia laid
up something out of what he earned. But it did not seem to her that he
exerted himself to get a salaried place; she was sure that, if so many
others who could not write half so well had places, he might get one if he
only kept trying. Bartley laughed at these business-turns of Marcia's as
he called them; but sometimes they enraged him, and he had days of sullen
resentment when he resisted all her advances towards reconciliation. But he
kept hard at work, and he always owned at last how disinterested her most
ridiculous alarm had been.
Once, when they had been talking as usual about that permanent place on
some newspaper, she said, “But I should only want that to be temporary,
if you got it. I want you should go on with the law, Bartley. I've been
thinking about that. I don't want you should always be a journalist.”
Bartley smiled. “What could I do for a living, I should like to know, while
I was studying law?”
“You could do some newspaper work,--enough to support us,--while you were
studying. You said when we first came to Boston that you should settle down
to the law.”
“I hadn't got my eyes open, then. I've got a good deal longer row to hoe
than I supposed, before I can settle down to the law.”
“Father said you didn't need to study but a little more.”
“Not if I were going into the practice at Equity. But it's a very different
thing, I can tell you, in Boston: I should have to go in for a course in
the Harvard Law School, just for a little start-off.”
Marcia was silenced, but she asked, after a moment, “Then you're going to
give up the law, altogether?”
“I don't know what I'm going to do; I'm going to do the best I can for the
present, and trust to luck. I don't like special reporting, for a finality;
but I shouldn't like shystering, either.”
“What's shystering?” asked Marcia.
“It's pettifogging in the city courts. Wait till I can get my basis,--till
I have a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of work,--and then I'll
talk to you about taking up the law again. I'm willing to do it whenever
it seems the right thing. I guess I should like it, though I don't see
why it's any better than journalism, and I don't believe it has any more
prizes.”
“But you've been a long time trying to get your basis on a newspaper,” she
reasoned. “Why don't you try to get it in some other way? Why don't you try
to get a clerk's place with some lawyer?”
“Well, suppose I was willing to starve along in that way, how should I go
about to get such a place?” demanded Bartley, with impatience.
“Why don't you go to that Mr. Halleck you visited here? You used to tell me
he was going to be a lawyer.”
“Well, if you remember so distinctly what I said about going into the law
when I first came to Boston,” said her husband angrily, “perhaps you'll
remember that I said I shouldn't go to Halleck until I didn't need his
help. I shall not go to him _for_ his help.”
Marcia gave way to spiteful tears. “It seems as if you were ashamed to
let them know that you were in town. Are you afraid I shall want to get
acquainted with them? Do you suppose I shall want to go to their parties,
and disgrace you?”
Bartley took his cigar out of his mouth, and looked blackly at her. “So,
that's what you've been thinking, is it?”
She threw herself upon his neck. “No! no, it isn't!” she cried,
hysterically. “You know that I never thought it till this instant; you know
I didn't think it at all; I just _said_ it. My nerves are all gone; I don't
know _what_ I'm saying half the time, and you're as strict with me as if
I were as well as ever! I may as well take off my things,--I'm not well
enough to go with you, to-day, Bartley.”
She had been dressing while they talked for an entertainment which Bartley
was going to report for the Chronicle-Abstract; and now she made a feint of
wishing to remove her hat. He would not let her. He said that if she did
not go, he should not; he reproached her with not wishing to go with him
any more; he coaxed her laughingly and fondly.
“It's only because I'm not so strong, now,” she said in a whisper that
ended in a kiss on his cheek. “You must walk very slowly, and not hurry
me.”
The entertainment was to be given in aid of the Indigent Children's
Surf-Bathing Society, and it was at the end of June, rather late in the
season. But the society itself was an afterthought, not conceived till a
great many people had left town on whose assistance such a charity
must largely depend. Strenuous appeals had been made, however: it was
represented that ten thousand poor children could be transported to
Nantasket Beach, and there, as one of the ladies on the committee said,
bathed, clam-baked, and lemonaded three times during the summer at a cost
so small that it was a saving to spend the money. Class Day falling about
the same time, many exiles at Newport and on the North Shore came up and
down; and the affair promised to be one of social distinction, if not
pecuniary success. The entertainment was to be varied: a distinguished poet
was to read an old poem of his, and a distinguished poetess was to read
a new poem of hers; some professional people were to follow with comic
singing; an elocutionist was to give impressions of noted public speakers;
and a number of vocal and instrumental amateurs were to contribute their
talent.
Bartley had instructions from Ricker to see that his report was very
full socially. “We want something lively, and at the same time nice and
tasteful, about the whole thing, and I guess you're the man to do it. Get
Mrs. Hubbard to go with you, and keep you from making a fool of yourself
about the costumes.” He gave Bartley two tickets. “Mighty hard to get, I
can tell you, for _love_ or money,--especially love,” he said; and Bartley
made much of this difficulty in impressing Marcia's imagination with the
uncommon character of the occasion. She had put on a new dress which
she had just finished for herself, and which was a marvel not only of
cheapness, but of elegance; she had plagiarized the idea from the costume
of a lady with whom she stopped to look in at a milliner's window where she
formed the notion of her bonnet. But Marcia had imagined the things anew in
relation to herself, and made them her own; when Bartley first saw her in
them, though he had witnessed their growth from the germ, he said that he
was afraid of her, she was so splendid, and he did not quite know whether
he felt acquainted. When they were seated at the concert, and had time to
look about them, he whispered, “Well, Marsh, I don't see anything here that
comes near you in style,” and she flung a little corner of her drapery out
over his hand so that she could squeeze it: she was quite happy again.
After the concert, Bartley left her for a moment, and went up to a group
of the committee near the platform, to get some points for his report.
He spoke to one of the gentlemen, note-book and pencil in hand, and the
gentleman referred him to one of the ladies of the committee, who, after a
moment of hesitation, demanded in a rich tone of injury and surprise, “Why!
Isn't this Mr. Hubbard?” and, indignantly answering herself, “Of _course_
it is!” gave her hand with a sort of dramatic cordiality, and flooded him
with questions: “When did you come to Boston? Are you at the Hallecks'? Did
you come--Or no, you're _not_ Harvard. You're not _living_ in Boston? And
what in the world are _you_ getting items for? Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Atherton.”
She introduced him in a breathless climax to the gentleman to whom he had
first spoken, and who had listened to her attack on Bartley with a smile
which he was at no trouble to hide from her. “Which question are you going
to answer first, Mr. Hubbard?” he asked quietly, while his eyes searched
Bartley's for an instant with inquiry which was at once kind and keen. His
face had the distinction which comes of being clean-shaven in our bearded
times.
“Oh, the last,” said Bartley. “I'm reporting the concert for the
Chronicle-Abstract, and I want to interview some one in authority about
it.”
“Then interview _me_, Mr. Hubbard,” cried the young lady. “_I'm_ in
authority about this affair,--it's my own invention, as the White Knight
says,--and then I'll interview you afterwards. And you've gone into
journalism, like all the Harvard men! So glad it's you, for you can be a
perfect godsend to the cause if you will. The entertainment hasn't given us
all the money we shall want, by any means, and we shall need all the help
the press can give us. Ask me any questions you please, Mr. Hubbard:
there isn't a soul here that I wouldn't sacrifice to the last personal
particular, if the press will only do its duty in return. You've no idea
how we've been working during the last fortnight since this Old Man of the
Sea-Bathing sprang upon us. I was sitting quietly at home, thinking of
anything else in the world, I can assure you, when the atrocious idea
occurred to me.” She ran on to give a full sketch of the inception and
history of the scheme up to the present time. Suddenly she arrested herself
and Bartley's flying pencil: “Why, you're not putting all that nonsense
down?”
“Certainly I am,” said Bartley, while Mr. Atherton, with a laugh, turned
and walked away to talk with some other ladies. “It's the very thing I
want. I shall get in ahead of all the other papers on this; they haven't
had anything like it, yet.”
She looked at him for a moment in horror. Then, “Well, go on; I would do
anything for the cause!” she cried.
“Tell me who's been here, then,” said Bartley.
She recoiled a little. “I don't like giving names.”
“But I can't say who the people were, unless you do.”
“That's true,” said the young lady thoughtfully. She prided herself on her
thoughtfulness, which sometimes came before and sometimes after the fact.
“You're not obliged to say who told you?”
“Of course not.”
She ran over a list of historical and distinguished names, and he slyly
asked if this and that lady were not dressed so, and so, and worked in
the costumes from her unconsciously elaborate answers; she was afterwards
astonished that he should have known what people had on. Lastly, he asked
what the committee expected to do next, and was enabled to enrich his
report with many authoritative expressions and intimations. The lady became
all zeal in these confidences to the public, at last; she told everything
she knew, and a great deal that she merely hoped.
“And now come into the committee-room and have a cup of coffee; I know you
must be faint with all this talking,” she concluded. “I want to ask
you something about yourself.” She was not older than Bartley, but she
addressed him with the freedom we use in encouraging younger people.
“Thank you,” he said coolly; “I can't, very well. I must go back to my
wife, and hurry up this report.”
“Oh! is Mrs. Hubbard here?” asked the young lady with well-controlled
surprise. “Present me to her!” she cried, with that fearlessness of social
consequences for which she was noted: she believed there were ways of
getting rid of undesirable people without treating them rudely.
The audience had got out of the hall, and Marcia stood alone near one of
the doors waiting for Bartley. He glanced proudly toward her, and said, “I
shall be very glad.”
Miss Kingsbury drifted by his side across the intervening space, and was
ready to take Marcia impressively by the hand when she reached her; she had
promptly decided her to be very beautiful and elegantly simple in dress,
but she found her smaller than she had looked at a distance. Miss Kingsbury
was herself rather large,--sometimes, she thought, rather too large:
certainly too large if she had not had such perfect command of every inch
of herself. In complexion she was richly blonde, with beautiful fair hair
roughed over her forehead, as if by a breeze, and apt to escape in sunny
tendrils over the peachy tints of her temples. Her features were massive
rather than fine; and though she thoroughly admired her chin and respected
her mouth, she had doubts about her nose, which she frankly referred to
friends for solution: had it not _too_ much of a knob at the end? She
seemed to tower over Marcia as she took her hand at Bartley's introduction,
and expressed her pleasure at meeting her.
“I don't know why it need be such a surprise to find one's gentlemen
friends married, but it always is, somehow. I don't think Mr. Hubbard would
have known me if I hadn't insisted upon his recognizing me; I can't blame
him: it's three years since we met. Do you help him with his reports? I
know you do! You _must_ make him lenient to our entertainment,--the cause
is so good! How long have you been in Boston? Though I don't know why I
should ask that,--you may have always been in Boston! One used to know
everybody; but the place _is_ so large, now. I should like to come and see
you; but I'm going out of town to-morrow, for the summer. I'm not really
here, now, except _ex officio_; I ought to have been away weeks ago,
but this Indigent Surf-Bathing has kept me. You've no idea what such an
undertaking is. But you _must_ let me have your address, and as soon as I
get back to town in the fall, I shall insist upon looking you up. _Good_
by! I must run away, now, and leave you; there are a thousand things for
me to look after yet to-day.” She took Marcia again by the hand, and
superadded some bows and nods and smiles of parting, after she released
her, but she did not ask her to come into the committee-room and have some
coffee; and Bartley took his wife's hand under his arm and went out of the
hall.
“Well,” he said, with a man's simple pleasure in Miss Kingsbury's
friendliness to his wife, “that's the girl I used to tell you about,--the
rich one with the money in her own right, whom I met at the Hallecks'. She
seemed to think you were about the thing, Marsh! I saw her eyes open as she
came up, and I felt awfully proud of you; you never looked half so well.
But why didn't you _say_ something?”
“She didn't give me any chance,” said Marcia, “and I had nothing to say,
anyway. I thought she was very disagreeable.”
“Disagreeable!” repeated Bartley in amaze.
Miss Kingsbury went back to the committee-room, where one of the amateurs
had been lecturing upon her: “Clara Kingsbury can say and do, from the best
heart in the world, more offensive things in ten minutes than malice could
invent in a week. Somebody ought to go out and drag her away from that
reporter by main force. But I presume it's too late already; she's had time
to destroy us all. You'll see that there won't be a shred left of us in
_his_ paper at any rate. Really, I wonder that, in a city full of nervous
and exasperated people like Boston, Clara Kingsbury has been suffered to
live. She throws her whole soul into everything she undertakes, and she has
gone so _en masse_ into this Indigent Bathing, and splashed about in it so,
that _I_ can't understand how we got anybody to come to-day. Why, I haven't
the least doubt that she's offered that poor man a ticket to go down to
Nantasket and bathe with the other Indigents; she's treated _me_ as if I
ought to be personally surf-bathed for the last fortnight; and if there's
any chance for us left by her tactlessness, you may be sure she's gone at
it with her conscience and simply swept it off the face of the earth.”