THAT evening St. Peter was in the new house, dressing for dinner. His
two daughters and their husbands were dining with them, also an English
visitor. Mrs. St. Peter heard the shower going as she passed his door.
She entered his room and waited until he came out in his bath-robe,
rubbing his wet, ink-black hair with a towel.
“Surely you’ll admit that you like having your own bath,” she said,
looking past him into the glittering white cubicle, flooded with
electric light, which he had just quitted.
“Whoever said I didn’t? But more than anything else, I like my closets.
I like having room for all my clothes, without hanging one coat on top
of another, and not having to get down on my marrow-bones and fumble in
dark corners to find my shoes.”
“Of course you do. And it’s much more dignified, at your age, to have a
room of your own.”
“It’s convenient, certainly, though I hope I’m not so old as to be
personally repulsive?” He glanced into the mirror and straightened his
shoulders as if he were trying on a coat.
Mrs. St. Peter laughed,--a pleasant, easy laugh with genuine amusement
in it. “No, you are very handsome, my dear, especially in your
bath-robe. You grow better-looking and more intolerant all the time.”
“Intolerant?” He put down his shoe and looked up at her. The thing that
stuck in his mind constantly was that she was growing more and more
intolerant, about everything except her sons-in-law; that she would
probably continue to do so, and that he must school himself to bear it.
“I suppose it’s a natural process,” she went on, “but you ought to try,
try seriously, I mean, to curb it where it affects the happiness of your
daughters. You are too severe with Scott and Louie. All young men have
foolish vanities--you had plenty.”
St. Peter sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and playing
absently with the tassels of his bath-robe. “Why, Lillian, I have
exercised the virtue of patience with those two young men more than with
all the thousands of young ruffians who have gone through my
class-rooms. My forbearance is overstrained, it’s gone flat. That’s
what’s the matter with me.”
“Oh, Godfrey, how can you be such a poor judge of your own behaviour?
But we won’t argue about it now. You’ll put on your dinner coat? And do
try to be sympathetic and agreeable to-night.”
Half an hour later Mr. and Mrs. Scott McGregor and Mr. and Mrs. Louie
Marsellus arrived, and soon after them the English scholar, Sir Edgar
Spilling, so anxious to do the usual thing in America that he wore a
morning street suit. He was a gaunt, rugged, large-boned man of fifty,
with long legs and arms, a pear-shaped face, and a drooping, pre-war
moustache. His specialty was Spanish history, and he had come all the
way to Hamilton, from his cousin’s place in Saskatchewan, to enquire
about some of Doctor St. Peter’s “sources.”
Introductions over, it was the Professor’s son-in-law, Louie Marsellus,
who took Sir Edgar in hand. He remembered having met in China a Walter
Spilling, who was, it turned out, a brother of Sir Edgar. Marsellus had
also a brother there, engaged in the silk trade. They exchanged opinions
on conditions in the Orient, while young McGregor put on his horn-rimmed
spectacles and roamed restlessly up and down the library. The two
daughters sat near their mother, listening to the talk about China.
Mrs. St. Peter was very fair, pink and gold,--a pale gold, now that she
was becoming a little grey. The tints of her face and hair and lashes
were so soft that one did not realize, on first meeting her, how very
definitely and decidedly her features were cut, under the smiling
infusion of colour. When she was annoyed or tired, the lines became
severe. Rosamond, the elder daughter, resembled her mother in feature,
though her face was heavier. Her colouring was altogether different;
dusky black hair, deep dark eyes, a soft white skin with rich brunette
red in her cheeks and lips. Nearly everyone considered Rosamond
brilliantly beautiful. Her father, though he was very proud of her,
demurred from the general opinion. He thought her too tall, with a
rather awkward carriage. She stooped a trifle, and was wide in the hips
and shoulders. She had, he sometimes remarked to her mother, exactly the
wide femur and flat shoulder-blade of his old slab-sided Kanuck
grandfather. For a tree-hewer they were an asset. But St. Peter was very
critical. Most people saw only Rosamond’s smooth black head and white
throat, and the red of her curved lips that was like the duskiness of
dark, heavy-scented roses.
Kathleen, the younger daughter, looked even younger than she was--had
the slender, undeveloped figure then very much in vogue. She was pale,
with light hazel eyes, and her hair was hazel-coloured with distinctly
green glints in it. To her father there was something very charming in
the curious shadows her wide cheekbones cast over her cheeks, and in the
spirited tilt of her head. Her figure in profile, he used to tell her,
looked just like an interrogation point.
Mrs. St. Peter frankly liked having a son-in-law who could tot up
acquaintances with Sir Edgar from the Soudan to Alaska. Scott, she saw,
was going to be sulky because Sir Edgar and Marsellus were talking about
things beyond his little circle of interests. She made no effort to draw
him into the conversation, but let him prowl like a restless leopard
among the books. The Professor was amiable, but quiet. When the second
maid came to the door and signalled that dinner was ready--dinner was
signalled, not announced--Mrs. St. Peter took Sir Edgar and guided him
to his seat at her right, while the others found their usual places.
After they had finished the soup, she had some difficulty in summoning
the little maid to take away the plates, and explained to her guest that
the electric bell, under the table, wasn’t connected as yet--they had
been in the new house less than a week, and the trials of building were
not over.
“Oh? Then if I had happened along a fortnight ago I shouldn’t have found
you here? But it must be very interesting, building your own house and
arranging it as you like,” he responded.
Marsellus, silenced during the soup, came in with a warm smile and a
slight shrug of the shoulders. “Building is the word with us, Sir Edgar,
my--oh, isn’t it! My wife and I are in the throes of it. We are building
a country house, rather an ambitious affair, out on the wooded shores of
Lake Michigan. Perhaps you would like to run out in my car and see it?
What are your engagements for to-morrow? I can take you out in half an
hour, and we can lunch at the Country Club. We have a magnificent site;
primeval forest behind us and the lake in front, with our own beach--my
father-in-law, you must know, is a formidable swimmer. We’ve been
singularly fortunate in our architect,--a young Norwegian, trained in
Paris. He’s doing us a Norwegian manor house, very harmonious with its
setting, just the right thing for rugged pine woods and high headlands.”
Sir Edgar seemed most willing to make this excursion, and allowed
Marsellus to fix an hour, greatly to the surprise of McGregor, whose
look at his wife implied that he entertained serious doubts whether this
baronet with walrus moustaches amounted to much after all.
The engagement made, Louie turned to Mrs. St. Peter. “And won’t you come
too, Dearest? You haven’t been out since we got our wonderful
wrought-iron door fittings from Chicago. We found just the right sort of
hinge and latch, Sir Edgar, and had all the others copied from it. None
of your Colonial glass knobs for us!”
Mrs. St. Peter sighed. Scott and Kathleen had just glass-knobbed their
new bungalow throughout, yet she knew Louie didn’t mean to hurt their
feelings--it was his heedless enthusiasm that made him often say
untactful things.
“We’ve been extremely fortunate in getting all the little things right,”
Louie was gladly confiding to Sir Edgar. “There’s really not a flaw in
the conception. I can say that, because I’m a mere onlooker; the whole
thing’s been done by the Norwegian and my wife and Mrs. St. Peter. And,”
he put his hand down affectionately upon Mrs. St. Peter’s bare arm, “and
we’ve named our place! I’ve already ordered the house stationery. No,
Rosamond, I won’t keep our little secret any longer. It will please your
father, as well as your mother. We call our place ‘Outland,’ Sir Edgar.”
He dropped the announcement and drew back. His mother-in-law rose to
it--Spilling could scarcely be expected to understand.
“How splendid, Louie! A real inspiration.”
“Yes, isn’t it? I knew that would go to your hearts.” The Professor had
expressed his emotion only by lifting his heavy, sharply uptwisted
eyebrows. “Let me explain, Sir Edgar,” Marsellus went on eagerly. “We
have named our place for Tom Outland, a brilliant young American
scientist and inventor, who was killed in Flanders, fighting with the
Foreign Legion, the second year of the war, when he was barely thirty
years of age. Before he dashed off to the front, this youngster had
discovered the principle of the Outland vacuum, worked out the
construction of the Outland engine that is revolutionizing aviation. He
not only invented it, but, curiously enough for such a hot-headed
fellow, had taken pains to protect it by patent. He had no time to
communicate his discovery or to commercialize it--simply bolted to the
front and left the most important discovery of his time to take care of
itself.”
Sir Edgar, fork arrested, looked a trifle dazed. “Am I to understand
that you are referring to the inventor of the Outland engine?”
Louie was delighted. “Exactly that! Of course you would know all about
it. My wife was young Outland’s fiancée--is virtually his widow. Before
he went to France he made a will in her favour; he had no living
relatives, indeed. Toward the close of the war we began to sense the
importance of what Outland had been doing in his laboratory--I am an
electrical engineer by profession. We called in the assistance of
experts and got the idea over from the laboratory to the trade. The
monetary returns have been and are, of course, large.”
While Louie paused long enough to have some intercourse with the roast
before it was taken away. Sir Edgar remarked that he himself had been in
the Air Service during the war, in the construction department, and that
it was most extraordinary to come thus by chance upon the genesis of the
Outland engine.
“You see,” Louie told him, “Outland got nothing out of it but death and
glory. Naturally, we feel terribly indebted. We feel it’s our first duty
in life to use that money as he would have wished--we’ve endowed
scholarships in his own university here, and that sort of thing. But our
house we want to have as a sort of memorial to him. We are going to
transfer his laboratory there, if the university will permit,--all the
apparatus he worked with. We have a room for his library and pictures.
When his brother scientists come to Hamilton to look him up, to get
information about him, as they are doing now already, at Outland they
will find his books and instruments, all the sources of his
inspiration.”
“Even Rosamond,” murmured McGregor, his eyes upon his cool green salad.
He was struggling with a desire to shout to the Britisher that Marsellus
had never so much as seen Tom Outland, while he, McGregor, had been his
classmate and friend.
Sir Edgar was as much interested as he was mystified. He had come here
to talk about manuscripts shut up in certain mouldering monasteries in
Spain, but he had almost forgotten them in the turn the conversation had
taken. He was genuinely interested in aviation and all its problems. He
asked few questions, and his comments were almost entirely limited to
the single exclamation, “Oh!” But this, from his lips, could mean a
great many things; indifference, sharp interrogation, sympathetic
interest, the nervousness of a modest man on hearing disclosures of a
delicately personal nature. McGregor, before the others had finished
dessert, drew a big cigar from his pocket and lit it at one of the table
candles, as the horridest thing he could think of to do.
When they left the dining-room, St. Peter, who had scarcely spoken
during dinner, took Sir Edgar’s arm and said to his wife: “If you will
excuse us, my dear, we have some technical matters to discuss.” Leading
his guest into the library, he shut the door.
Marsellus looked distinctly disappointed. He stood gazing wistfully
after them, like a little boy told to go to bed. Louie’s eyes were
vividly blue, like hot sapphires, but the rest of his face had little
colour--he was a rather mackerel-tinted man. Only his eyes, and his
quick, impetuous movements, gave out the zest for life with which he was
always bubbling. There was nothing Semitic about his countenance except
his nose--that took the lead. It was not at all an unpleasing feature,
but it grew out of his face with masterful strength, well-rooted, like a
vigorous oak-tree growing out of a hill-side.
Mrs. St. Peter, always concerned for Louie, asked him to come and look
at the new rug in her bedroom. This revived him; he took her arm, and
they went upstairs together.
McGregor was left with the two sisters. “Outland, outlandish!” he
muttered, while he fumbled about for an ash-tray. Rosamond pretended not
to hear him, but the dusky red on her cheeks crept a little farther
toward her ears.
“Remember, we are leaving early, Scott,” said Kathleen. “You have to
finish your editorial to-night.”
“Surely you don’t make him work at night, too?” Rosamond asked. “Doesn’t
he have to rest his brain sometimes? Humour is always better if it’s
spontaneous.”
“Oh, that’s the trouble with me,” Scott assured her. “Unless I keep my
nose to the grindstone, I’m too damned spontaneous and tell the truth,
and the public won’t stand for it. It’s not an editorial I have to
finish, it’s the daily prose poem I do for the syndicate, for which I
get twenty-five beans. This is the motif:
‘When your pocket is under-moneyed and your fancy is over-girled, you’ll
have to admit while you’re cursing it, it’s a mighty darned good old
world.’
“Bang, bang!”
He threw his cigar-end savagely into the fireplace. He knew that
Rosamond detested his editorials and his jingles. She had fastidious
taste in literature, like her mother--though he didn’t think she had
half the general intelligence of his wife. She also, now that she was
Tom Outland’s heir, detested to hear sums of money mentioned, especially
small sums.
After the good-nights were said, and they were outside the front door,
McGregor seized his wife’s elbow and rushed her down the walk to the
gate where his Ford was parked, breaking out in her ear as they ran:
“Now what the hell is a virtual widow? Does he mean a virtuous widow, or
the reverseous? Bang, bang!”