VIII

Mr. and Mrs. George Harley had made an appointment to meet at half-past

eleven sharp on the doorstep of the little house in Sixty-seventh

Street. Business had interrupted their honeymoon and brought them

unexpectedly to New York. Harley had come by subway from Wall Street to

the Grand Central and taken a taxicab. It was twelve o'clock before he

arrived. Nevertheless he wore a smile of placid ease of mind. His

little wife had only to walk from the Plaza, it was true, but he knew,

although a newly married man, that to be half an hour late was to be

ten minutes early.

At exactly five minutes past twelve he saw her turn off the Avenue, and

as he strolled along to meet her, charmed and delighted by her

daintiness, proud and happy at his possession of her, he did a thing

that all wise and tactful husbands do--he forced back an irresistible

desire to be humorous at her expense and so won an entry of approval

from the Recording Angel.

If they had both been punctual they would have seen Martin go off in

his car to drive the girl who had had no luck to the trees and the wild

flowers and the good green earth.

Joan's mother, all agog to see the young couple who had taken life into

their own hands with the sublime faith of youth, had made it her first

duty to call, however awkward and unusual the hour. Her choice of hats

in which to do so had been a matter of the utmost importance.

They were told that Mr. Gray had gone out of town, that Mrs. Gray was

not yet awake and followed the butler upstairs to the drawing-room with

a distinct sense of disappointment. The room still quivered under the

emotion of Gilbert Palgrave.

Rather awkwardly they waited to be alone. Butlers always appear to

resent the untimely visitation of relations. Sunlight poured in through

the windows. It was a gorgeous morning.

"Well," said George Harley, "I've seen my brokers and can do nothing

more to-day. Let the child have her sleep out. I'm just as happy to be

here with you, Lil, as anywhere else." And he bent over his wife as if

he were her lover, as indeed he was, and kissed her pretty ear. His

clothes were very new and his collar the shade of an inch too high for

comfort and his patent leather shoes something on the tight side, but

the spirits of the great lovers had welcomed him and were unafraid.

He won a most affectionate and grateful smile from the neat little lady

whose brown hair was honestly tinged with white, and whose unlined face

was innocent of make-up. Mrs. Harley had not yet recovered from her

astonishment at having been swept to the altar after fifteen years of

widowhood by this most simple and admirable man. Even then she was not

quite sure that she was not dreaming all this. She patted his big hand

and would have put her head against his chest if the brim of her hat

had permitted her to do so.

"That's very sweet of you, Geordie," she said. "How good you are to me."

He echoed the word "Good!" and laughed and waved his hands. It was the

gesture of a man whose choice of ready words was not large enough to

describe all that he longed and tried to be to her. And then he stood

back with his long legs wide apart and his large hands thrust into his

pockets and his rather untidy gray head stuck on one side and studied

her as if she were a picture in a gallery. He looked like a great big

faithful St. Bernard dog.

Mrs. Harley didn't think so. He seemed to her to be the boy of whom she

had dreamed in her first half-budding dreams and who had gone wandering

and come under the hand of Time, but remained a boy in his heart. She

was glad that she had made him change his tie. She loved those deep

cuts in his face.

"Very well, then," she said. "Although it is twelve o'clock I'll let

her sleep another half an hour." And then she stopped with a little cry

of dismay, "Let her! ... I'm forgetting that it's no longer in my power

to say what she's to do or not to do!"

"How's that?"

"She's no longer the young, big-eyed, watchful child who startled us by

saying uncanny things. She's no longer the slip of a thing that I left

with her grandparents, with her wistful eyes on the horizon. She's a

married woman, Geordie, with a house of her own, and it isn't for me to

'let' her do anything or tell her or even ask her. She can do what she

likes now. I've lost her, Geordie."

"Why, how's that, Lil?" There was surprise as well as sympathy in

Harley's voice. He had only known other people's children.

She went on quickly, with a queer touch of emotion. "The inevitable

change has come before I've had time to realize it. It's a shock. It

takes my breath away. I feel as if I had been set adrift from an

anchor. Instead of being my little girl she's my daughter now. I'm no

longer 'mammy.' I'm mother. Isn't it,--isn't it wonderful? It's like

standing under a mountain that's always seemed to be a little hill

miles and miles away. From now on I shall be the one to be told to do

things, I shall be the child to be kept in order. It's a queer moment

in the life of a mother, Geordie."

She laughed, but she didn't catch her tears before they were halfway

down her cheeks. "I'm an old lady, my dear."

Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs. "You, old. You're

one of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood and

beamed with love and admiration.

"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart that

had suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he took

her hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.

Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formed

the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remain

true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for her

sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge into

belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them

to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather

ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human

nature,--that's all that was necessary to make this romance

understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much

abused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as an

action or adventure of an unusual or wonderful character, soaring

beyond the limits of fact and real life and often of probability, but

the result of loneliness and middle age, and of two hearts starving for

love and the expression of love, for sympathy, companionship and the

natural desire for something that would feed vanity, which, if it is

permitted to die, is replaced by bitterness and a very warped point of

view.

Christopher Ludlow, a wild, harum-scarum fellow who had risked his life

many times during his hunting trips, came to his death in a prosaic

street accident. For fifteen years his widow, then twenty-five, lived

in the country with his parents and his little daughter. She was at

their mercy, because Christopher had left no money. He had been

dependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived with them

and bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing crotchetiness

and impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a purposely small

income in a second-rate hotel or a six by six apartment barely on the

edge of the map. A timid woman, all for peace, without the grit and

courage that goes with self-direction, she pursued the easy policy of

least resistance, sacrificed her youth on the altar of Comfort and

dwindled with only a few secret pangs into middle age. From time to

time, with Joan, she left the safe waters of Lethe and put an almost

frightened foot into the swift main stream. As time went on and Spring

went out of her and Summer ripened to maturity, she was more and more

glad to return from these brief excursions to the quiet country and the

safe monotonous round. Then the day came when her no longer little girl

came finally out of school, urgent and rebellious, kicking against the

pricks, electrically alive and eager, autocrat and individualist rolled

into one. Catching something of this youthfulness and shocked to wake

to a realization of her lost years, she made a frantic and despairing

effort to grasp at the tail-end of Summer and with a daughter far more

worldly than herself escaped as frequently as possible into town to

taste the pleasures that she had almost forgotten, and revive under the

influence of the theater and the roar of life. It was during one of

these excursions, while Joan was lunching with Alice Palgrave, that she

caught an arrow shot at random by that mischievous little devil Cupid,

which landed plum in the middle of a heart that had been placid so

long. In getting out of a taxicab she had slipped and fallen, was

raised deferentially to her feet, and looked up to catch the lonely and

bewildered eyes of George Harley. They were outside their mutual hotel.

What more natural and courteous than that he should escort her into the

hotel with many expressions of anxious regret, ascend with her in the

elevator to their mutual floor, linger with her for a polite few

minutes in the sunlight that poured through the passage windows and

leave her to hurry finally to her room thrilling under the recollection

of two admiring eyes and a lingering handshake? She, even she, then, at

her time of life, plump and partridge-like as she was, could inspire

the interest and approval of a man. It was wonderful. It was absurd. It

was ... altogether too good to be true! Later, after she had spent a

half-amused, half-wistful quarter of an hour in front of her glass,

seeing inescapable white hairs and an irremediable double chin, she had

gone down to the dining room for lunch. All the tables being occupied,

what more natural or disconcerting than for this modern Raleigh to rise

and rather clumsily and eagerly beg that she would share the one just

allotted to himself.

To the elderly man, whose nose had been too close to the grindstone to

permit of dalliance, and who now, monied and retired, found himself

terribly alone in the pale sun of St. Martin's Summer, and to the

little charming woman of forty, led back to life by an ardent and

impetuous girl, this quite ordinary everyday incident, which seemed to

them to be touched by romance, came at a moment when both were

pathetically receptive. They arranged to meet again, they met again,

and one fine afternoon while Joan was at a theater with Alice, he spoke

and she listened. It was in the more than usually hotel-like

drawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having tea, and the

band was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the jingle of a musical

comedy, the movement of waiters. Under the leaves of a tame palm which

once had known the gorgeous freedom of a semi-tropical forest he

stumbled over a proposal, the honest, fearful, pulsating proposal of a

man who conceived that he was trying hopelessly to hitch his wagon to a

star, and she, tremulous, amazed, and on the verge of tears, accepted

him. Hers presumably the dreadful ordeal of facing an incredulous

daughter and two sarcastic parents-in-law and his of standing for

judgment before them,--argument, discussion, satire, irony, abuse

even,--a quiet and determined marriage and a new and beautiful life.

"What a delightful room," said Mrs. Harley. "It looks so comfortable

for a drawing-room that it must have been furnished by a man."

"We'll have a house in town by October, around here, and I'll bet it

won't be uncomfortable when you've finished with it."

The raucous shouts of men crying an "extra" took Harley quickly to the

open window. He watched one scare-monger edge his way up one side of

the street and another, whose voice was like the jagged edge of a rusty

saw, bandy leg his way up the other side. "Sounds like big sea battle,"

he said, after listening carefully. "Six German warships sunk, five

British. Horrible loss of life. But I may be wrong. These men do their

best not to be quite understood. Only six German ships! I wish the

whole fleet of those dirty dogs could be sunk to the bottom."

There was nothing neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley. He had

followed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations whose

spineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing the

policy of the ostrich. He had nothing but detestation for the vile and

ruthless methods of the German war party and nation and nothing but

contempt for the allied politicians who had made such methods possible.

He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated

breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the

French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miracle

that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the

giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and

criminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at the

attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own

country,--professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-Germans,--to prove

that it was the duty of the United States to stand aloof and unmoved in

the face of a menace which affected herself in no less a degree than it

affected the nations then fighting for their lives, and had watched

with increasing alarm the fatuous complacency of Congress which

continued to deceive itself into believing that a great stretch of mere

water rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in its

own war. "Oh, my God," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sighted

Americans had been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our very

vitals? Has the good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water?

Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?"

And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise its

head beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when he

passed the windows of Red Cross Depots and caught sight of a roomful of

good and noble women feverishly at work on bandages; when he read of

the keen and splendid training voluntarily undergone by the far-sighted

men who were making Plattsburg the nucleus of an officers' training

corps, when he was told how many of his young and red-blooded

fellow-countrymen had taken up arms with the Canadian contingents or

had slipped over to France as ambulance men. What would he not have

given to be young again!

He heaved a great sigh and turned back to the precious little woman who

had placed her life into his hands for love. The hoarse alarming voices

receded into the distance, leaving their curious echo behind.

"What were we talking about?" he asked. "Oh, ah, yes. The house. Lil,

during the few days that I have to be in the city, let's find the

house, let's nose around and choose the roof under which you and I will

spend all the rest of our honeymoon. What do you say, dear?"

"I'd love it, Geordie; I'd just love it. A little house, smaller than

this, with windows that catch the sun, quite near the Park, so that we

can toddle across and watch the children playing. Wouldn't that be

nice? And now I think I'll ring for some one to show me Joan's room and

creep in and suggest that she gets up."

But there was no need. The door opened, and Joan came in, with eyes

like stars.