THE BOOKWORM TURNS
"'Tis ill work trying to ride Pegasus on a side-saddle," Cousin Eunice
said this morning as she hurriedly threw aside her pencil and paper
and ran to tell Dilsey about not putting any starch in the legs of
Waterloo's rompers. "He's not a lady's horse anyhow," she continued as
she came back and sat down on the grass again, "especially after a
man, a baby and a gas stove have come into the lady's life."
"Gas stove?" I questioned, looking up from my book, a heavy old French
book, it was, for mother's remark about my neglected education had
made me feel a little uneasy after all. Cousin Eunice is not the kind
of woman to fill her letters full of household matters, hence my
surprised question.
"A good cook, with me, is only a memory," she said with a sadly
reminiscent air. "I have a girl whose name is Pearl, but alas it is a
lie! Even the day I learned that my book had found a publisher I had
to get up out of my trance and peel potatoes for luncheon."
"Surely not!"
"Yes. I peeled them, but they were never cooked, for when Rufe came
home and heard the news he hustled us all off to town and we had
luncheon in Beauregard's privatest dining-room. We ordered all the
things that disagree with us most--by way of reckless indulgence."
"How did you feel when you heard that news?" I asked with interest,
for the book manuscript which Cousin Eunice had been working on since
the days of her single blessedness had grown to be like a member of
the family with us all, especially of late years, after a certain
critic had pronounced it good. It suddenly grew so valuable after that
that she kept it in a little brown leather bag all the time and would
never leave the house without telling somebody where that bag was (in
case of fire) and making them promise to play Casabianca to those
precious sheets until they should be rescued.
"Just dazed!" she answered simply. "Pretty much as I felt when I found
that Rufe was going to be mine--only a great deal less so, you know."
"I wonder if you are ever going to be really great?" I pursued, for
since I have grown so old I share all her hopes and fears, just as if
we were sisters. "With a trip around the world as a starter, and a
quiet little castle on the Italian coast as a next step. Then you can
sign checks for a thousand dollars and get your pictures taken for
nothing."
"Well, not at the rate I'm going now," she replied with a rueful smile
toward her book and pencil lying inert on the grass; yet she made no
effort to resume her work. Evidently the starch in Waterloo's rompers
had driven away romance.
"But everything has its compensation," she continued after a moment.
"If I never get my great trip around the world with a ten-days'
stop-over in Japan I can never write a book about that long-suffering
country, so I shall still have something to be thankful for."
"The public is the one to be thankful," I added.
"That's true, too," she agreed. "It may have cause to be thankful if
this second book of mine is never finished, but nevertheless you don't
know what a fever of impatience I'm in to see it all smoothly laid out
between two pieces of paste-board and ready for the express label to
be put on."
"Yes, I believe I do know, though certainly not about a _book_. I am
sure I know what fever of impatience means." But she was so absorbed
in her own troubles that she did not notice this indirect
acknowledgment of mine.
"I had imagined that I could get my mind into a state of at least
comparative tranquillity down here," she kept on. We were out in our
favorite lair, a screened-off grassy spot in the side yard, where a
double row of althea bushes furnishes a sense of security against
intrusion, yet we were close enough to Waterloo to hear him every time
he bumped his head or skinned his knee.
"This place is almost unearthly in its quiet beauty," she said after a
moment, looking up through the green vista toward the house. The
passion flowers were clambering up on the garden fence and running
riot over the yellowing cornstalks. Back of the kitchen the well-house
lay asleep in the sun, the star-like blossoms of white clematis which
covered the roof of the old building were still untouched by that
feathery change which forecasts their coming blight.
"It _is_ beautiful--and it certainly is quiet," I coincided with her
emphatically.
"Sometimes at home when the telephone bell and the door-bell and the
club meetings and the butcher boys and the laundry men have all made a
throbbing pain come in my head I steal away up-stairs to my little den
where I lock the door and lie down to try to ease that nervous pain.
Then I close my eyes and try to project my astral body down here into
all this still, summer loveliness. I come up the gravel walk and on to
the front porch--oh, those cedar porches! And I go through the shady
hall to the back gallery where I find myself face to face with a great
cold watermelon that has just been cut."
"And the library is full of roses, and there is a tray of fragrant
peaches that Dilsey gathered early in the morning."
"Ah! I see that you feel its beauty just as much as if it were not an
every-day affair to you," she said, looking at me with another one of
those searching glances which she has treated me to several times
lately. "No wonder you have grown to look like the place."
"To look like it!" I encouraged her to go on, for a compliment is more
food for my soul than all the white hyacinths in a florist's window.
"Surely you look like it," she continued. "You are as patrician
looking as the house--and as vivid as the flowers in the yard."
"Dear me!" I exclaimed. "Then I am _good-looking_?"
"Ann, don't be an idiot! If Aunt Mary had longed for a child as white
as snow and as red as blood and as black as the ebony of her
embroidery frame, she couldn't have produced anything more exotic than
you."
There was a moment of silence in which I thought of the vivid beauty
of Lady Caroline Lamb. Of course I am not anything to compare with
her! Of _course_ not! But how these vivid beauties _care_--for some
one--when the time comes! Yes; when the time comes. But, dear me, it
seems that it is never coming!
"Well, what good does it all do me?" I demanded at length, the
long-pent-up storm of restlessness thundering to make itself heard.
"Granted that I look as well as you say, and that I live in an earthly
paradise--can't you see that there is no--that it is _lonesome_?"
"You are bored?" she asked sympathetically.
"Bored! I am stifling!"
"Yet the summer here is a joy--with oceans of morning-glories and
miles of horseback riding!"
"It is a joy, I admit, and a thousand times better than being a summer
girl at a noisy watering-place."
"What is a summer girl?" she asked with a smile, but I was not
smiling. I was pessimistic.
"A sleepy-headed female with trunks full of soiled clothes! That's
what I always am when I get back from a trip."
"Of course the winters here are dull." She had picked up her tablet
and was writing her initials over and over again on the back.
"They are. Dull gray," I agreed. "The days are a weary succession of
that uninteresting color; but, dreary as they are, you want them to
last. When the daylight is fading and night coming on, but while it is
still too early to light the lamps--then is the worst time of all!
There is no sound on earth save a few lonely little calf bleats from
down in the lot, until the woodchop echoes begin--and they are
lonelier still."
"It's awful, I know!"
"Do you know what I do on such nights as this? I get out my
opera-glasses and long gloves and a lace handkerchief, and lay them on
my table as if I were about to dress for a beautiful opera. Then I
read _Aux Italiens_; think a while--and go to bed."
"Poor child!"
"I used never to feel this way," I kept on. "Always--until lately--I
have loved winter. It has meant only great roaring fires and _barrels_
of apples. Even the absorbing books which used always to accompany the
apples and big fires are not absorbing any more."
"Of course not. A girl with as much _go_ in her as you have needs to
lose herself entirely in something."
"And that something will never be bound in three-quarters morocco," I
replied, flinging away my book impatiently.
"No, indeed! The bookworm has turned. The 'something' will be bound in
an English tweed suit of clothes through the day's business hours,
and--"
"And a long gray overcoat, and a soft gray hat."
She looked at me in surprise.
"Then you've seen him?"
"I have seen--the type."
She understood, but she still looked at me wonderingly.
"Alfred?" she ventured.
"No. He is my friend, but if I were in love with Alfred I'd have
palpitations every time I passed the red cross on an ambulance. That's
the way _I'm_ going to love."
"I should think you could find an outlet for all the pent-up ambition
you complain of, if you loved Alfred," she insisted, although she
imagined that she was not insisting. "I have never met a more
ambitious man, nor one of such singleness of purpose. Naturally
success seems to gravitate toward him, as the crow flies."
"And still it seems such a short while ago that Doctor Gordon took a
liking to him, when he was a raw medical student," I said
thoughtfully, my mind going back to the day I first saw Alfred Morgan,
big, broad and bronzed, with his hair too long and his sleeves too
short. There have been many days since then; days of a delightful
comradeship when I was in the city. I would look after him with
sisterly authority, bidding him wear his rubbers on rainy mornings, or
give me his gloves to mend whenever I happened to be spending the day
at the Gordons' and we sat down for a quiet chat after luncheon. Ann
Lisbeth and Doctor Gordon still live so close to the Claybornes that
we are like one big family when I am with them. Alfred soon began to
tell me that I was his best friend, but he never called me the
"guiding star of his existence." He tried to teach me the bones of the
face, instead, and explained the barbarism of corsets.
When he was out in practice the first year, but still lived with the
Gordons, because Doctor Gordon would not let him go, I used to drive
around with him to see his patients, sitting out in the runabout,
which he had bought at half-price because it was a last year's model,
and reading a magazine while he went in to make his calls. Often these
calls were made in crowded little factory settlements, where the whirr
of the cotton-mills sounded through the long periods of waiting; and
the houses were built so close on the street that I could hear the
click of the lock as he unfastened his instrument case.
"I admit that Alfred's career generates thrills up and down the
backbones of his admiring friends," I said after the pause which had
been filled in by my busy thoughts. She was still writing her initials
over the back of her tablet. "Who knows this better than I? Haven't I
been a mother to the boy ever since that time I read surgical anatomy
to him when he had tonsillitis? One of the most dramatic moments of
my life was the night I stabbed--"
I caught myself, but not in time, for Cousin Eunice had looked up from
her book with a horrified stare. "_What?_" she demanded.
"Oh, it was only that detestable Burke's automobile tire," I had to
explain then, but I had kept the occurrence a secret hitherto, and I
was not keen on telling it now.
"It was during the year of Alfred's internship and you remember that
Burke was always doing him an ill turn? One drippy night that fall
when I was in Doctor Gordon's car in front of the hospital and they
didn't see me, I overheard Burke and another intern plotting to beat
Alfred out of a surgical case that was coming in on the train that
night and belonged, by rights, to him. They had arranged to hurry on
over to the station first, in Burke's new car that his fond mamma had
given him, but when they went back into the house to get their
raincoats I was out of that machine like a Nemesis and had stuck my
hat-pin into the two tires on Burke's car which were most in the
shadow; so, when they started off, they had gone only about a block
and were down in the mud swearing--when Alfred dashed grandly by on
the ambulance."
"You little tiger!"
"Burke ought to have had the hat-pin stuck in _him_," I added
savagely.
"Aren't we _still_ barbarians--at heart?" she demanded, throwing her
tablet aside and straightening up so suddenly that I knew her thoughts
had already strayed away from my recital. "Now, that's the way I have
always felt about Appleton since he's been governor. Lots of times
when I have been helping Rufe write those violent attacks against him
I would almost choke with rage. I actually wanted to kill him."
"You _helped_ Rufe?" I asked with envy. "He admitted that you had
sense enough to?"
"Some of the _meanest_ things the _Times_ has ever printed about him
were my thoughts," she said proudly. "But it has never printed a lie!"
"Ah, that must be something worth while," I commented admiringly, for
my ideas concerning women and their possible achievements are strictly
modern. "I should like to be the power behind the revolving-chair."
I see already that the above paragraph contradicts itself, for being
the power _behind_ things is as old as Eve; but then, the prerogative
of contradicting oneself belongs by rights to her daughters.
"Do you care for politics any more than you used to?" Cousin Eunice
asked hopefully.
"Politics and mathematics were ever of equal interest to me," I was
bound to acknowledge. "But I have been able to understand a little
about the primary plan this summer--father's taught me. And I know
that the 'machine gang' is _always_ the other fellows!"
"Well, that's a brilliant start," said a sarcastic male voice from the
other side of the hedge, and Rufe's amused face rose up to our
confusion. Without waiting for invitation he came through and sat down
on the grass beside us.
"Well, she'd enjoy some of _our_ politicians, wouldn't she?" Cousin
Eunice asked Rufe as she moved over farther to give him more room, for
the althea branches were wide and thick, and entangled themselves in
our hair persistently. "Whether she cares for politics or no, eh?"
"Oh, she'd lose her head over Chalmers," Rufe acquiesced as
indifferently as the male relative of a girl always shows in
discussing "possible" men. "Lord Byron is as a comic valentine
compared with him in looks."
"Richard Chalmers," I repeated. "I've seen his name in the paper
often, but I don't know exactly what he is."
"Neither does any one else," Rufe answered meaningly. "He's a rich
young lawyer--inherited his money--and so shrewd that he's not going
to join the Appleton forces, no matter what pretentions they make to
get him on their side." He spoke as if he were arguing the question.
"Of course he isn't," Cousin Eunice added stoutly.
"But what _is_ he?" I asked, fearful lest they get into a discussion
and forget to satisfy my curiosity, which was--strange to
say--considerably aroused.
"Well, if he would declare himself definitely upon the liquor
question," Rufe explained concisely, "he would be about the most
promising piece of gubernatorial timber that we have."