PINK AND WHITE EXISTENCE
So Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth whirled away in the big motor and for
the next few months wandered about the globe. Perdita, who had seen
nothing but an old southern plantation and New York, the latter from the
curb, as it were, must see everything; so in pursuit of this aim, the
Hepworths were constantly stepping from huge, magnificent boats to huge,
magnificent motors, thence to huge, magnificent hotels. And cities, the
open country, villages, mountain peaks, strange peoples, were as debris
strewing the pathway of Perdita's avid flight through new experiences.
It was tremendously stimulating, even heady, she found, to hold the
world between one's thumb and finger, and turn it this way and that to
catch the light. Headier still to discover that to wish is to realize,
but proportionately a shock to find that the life of infinite variety
may only be lived within circumscribed boundaries. What is more
disillusionizing than to learn that money has its limitations? It can
merely buy the very best of things, the superlatives of the commonplace,
but these, in the last analysis, remain food, lodgings, clothes,
conveyances, ornaments, no more. Money can not buy stars or dreams, or
love or happiness.
Perdita's soaring youth resented it. But she was adaptable, enormously
interested and the ground within the boundaries was new, affording daily
opportunities for fresh exploration. And she, quick to observe and
compare, had profited by her new experiences. Money became to her merely
the medium of exchange for any beautiful thing she might want. Speedily
she lost her first, fresh pleasure in making it flutter its little
golden wings and fly; but her love of art deepened and strengthened, and
at many famous shrines she offered her heart's homage. She took up the
study of designing, and worked at it systematically with an ardor and
intensity which at first amused and then puzzled her husband.
On their return from their travels Perdita occupied herself in
altering, refurnishing and redecorating one or two of Hepworth's country
places and his town house. She worked in consultation with a great firm,
and succeeded in changing the weary acquiescence of "our Mr. So and So"
to interest and an astonishment bordering on enthusiasm. She was not the
average rich woman who had gone in for being artistic, with a head full
of glaringly impossible ideas and a flow of helpful suggestions which
set the professional teeth on edge.
On the contrary, this girl, Mrs. Hepworth, really knew a few things and
was willing to learn more. She was a student. "The only woman," murmured
dazedly "our Mr. Smith-Jones," "the only woman I ever met who realizes
that decoration must conform to architecture, not defy it. You usually
have to fracture their skulls to make them understand that pompadour
prettinesses are not suitable in a Gothic chapel."
But when she had finished the houses, and designed more costumes than
she could wear, she looked about her for fresh worlds to conquer, and
discovered that she was up against the boundaries. Walls everywhere!
She could do anything she chose, travel, buy clothes, motors, an
aeroplane if she wanted it, only she did not. She next went through a
phase when she decided that the people with whom she was thrown were
intolerable, representing a frivolous and empty-headed society. Her
imagination dwelt on the class who "did things," "the dreamers," she
called them to herself, who adorned a brilliant, picturesque,
delightfully haphazard Bohemia, where, at feasts, principally of red
wine and bloomy, purple grapes, laughter pealed to the rafters, and the
conversation sparkled as if sprinkled with stardust. She strove to enter
this Olympian vagabondia, and found herself entangled in the nets of
many fowlers, sycophantic, impecunious, and, unsated of their many
banquets, physically hungry.
She began to have seasons of ennui and depression, increasing in
frequency. What was the matter with her world? Nothing, she would hasten
to assure herself, it was the best of all possible worlds, and she, a
darling of fortune--once, unforgetably, the waif of chance--was the most
contented of women. Only--what was the matter with this perversely
empty and uninteresting world?
It was not always so. It was once invested with wonderful things, and
such simple things, too. She remembered how she used to stand at the
window of her little work-room watching the day fade, marveling at the
miracle of the twilight. While the sun was high, she had seen only
commonplace, dusty streets, crowded with people, and had heard only a
crazy, creaking old piano-organ grinding away on the pavement beneath,
but in the soft indefiniteness of twilight these solid houses and
buildings would become unsubstantial, mere shadowy arabesques on the
spangled gloom of night. There were purple vistas, glittering lights and
fairy towers. She would hold her breath, almost expecting to hear a
nightingale. It was all mystery and magic, life and romance, that
eternal romance her starved youth asked. How she used to dream of the
unexpected, the dazzling unexpected!
And then Cresswell had come, and, as she thought, offered it to her. To
do Perdita justice, she had not married Hepworth merely because of his
great wealth. She was incapable of such sordid and callous calculation.
But Cophetua had met this beggar maid at her most disheartened and
despairing moment, and without difficulty had succeeded in first winning
her interest and then enchaining her imagination.
In her two years of struggle to earn her livelihood Eugene had become
more or less a memory, and, in spite of the fascination and interest he
had always had for her, she did not blind herself to certain erratic
tendencies of his. He might appear at any moment, so she judged him,
with vows of eternal love, and straightway, if the mood seized him,
begin a new picture and forget her. And so she married Hepworth largely
that life might become a successive series of introductions to an ever
varying unexpected. Instead, although her quest was feverish, she
encountered only the commonplace. She was like a mouse which has
discovered the inadequacy of cheese to quench its soul-yearnings. What
remained?
The truth of the matter was that Perdita's world, which seemed so
hopelessly askew to her, had an architectural defect. It lacked that
sure antidote to ennui--a Bluebeard's closet.
Now Perdita was young and healthy. She had great curiosity, and a
certain insatiable mental quality which would have successfully riveted
her interest to life, but for one fact, her heart was as ardent and
insatiable as her intelligence--and her husband bored her. There is no
record of Bluebeard boring any of his wives.
She became more and more conscious of a continual little plaint running
always through her consciousness, like the sad, monotonous murmur of an
ever-flowing stream, a little unceasing plaint against life in the
abstract and life in its personal application.
"There must be as many worlds as there are points of view," so ran the
stream, "but my life's like a wedding-cake, all white and sparkling and
overdecorated, and absolutely insipid. Candy! That's what it is ... my
rooms are all pink and white, and I'm crusted over with pink sugar."
Perdita always thought in color. "I'm tired of all this pink and white
and baby-blue existence. I'd welcome a little scarlet and black sin for
a change. Oh, it's just your corsets over again. You're put in them when
you're about fifteen and you never get out of them again. We women think
in corsets, breathe in them. We live in them mentally, and accept all
their constrictions and restrictions as a matter of course. We take in
drafts of air, and expand our lungs and say we're emancipated, but we
only expand as much as the corsets allow. We've put our world in
corsets, to confine us still more ... mine used to be mended, frequently
washed, with some of the bones broken; now I have many pairs, brocade,
satin--cloth of gold, if I want them--but they are the same thing,
corsets, corsets on our bodies and brains and lives.
"Look at Cresswell. He doesn't wear corsets. He has an interesting,
absorbing, unfettered life. He's using the muscles of his
brain--strengthening them on some resisting substance. He's in the thick
of it.... What fun! Planning, visioning things in his mind, and seeing
them take form in the external. He's a builder. He wears an
imperturbable mask. That's for defense; but behind it I sometimes see
keen, powerful, calculating gleams in his eyes, and I want to know about
them, but I can't.... I can't talk to him about any but surface things.
I can't show him what is in my heart.... The corsets are between us.
He's one of the great powers, and he's mine, a possession like the
Kohinoor, but I do not fancy that the Kohinoor constitutes the queen's
happiness.
"What are Cresswell and I to each other, anyway? Why, he's my Kohinoor,
a possession of great price which endows me with distinction, and runs
my credit up into the millions. He's as brilliant and cold and secretive
as his prototype. And I--I'm his doll, a very jewel of a doll. One of
the prettiest in the world, wonderfully dressed, exquisitely marceled,
faultlessly manicured. I can smile enchantingly, and open and shut my
mouth to ask for what I want and what I don't want, particularly the
latter, and lisp 'thank you' when he drops a diamond necklace or a ruby
tiara into my lap.
"I hate a man that puts me on a pedestal. Any woman does. He thinks I'm
sugar and salt and will melt and break. I wish he'd come to me, just
once, with some enthusiasm and hug me breathless. I'm tired of his
everlasting chivalry and deference.... When he begins to treat me with
reverence and guards my youth and all that, I'd like to swear at him
like the disreputable parrot of a drunken sailor.... Wouldn't I surprise
him? I wonder what he would do if I'd cut loose? Oh, dear, I wish he'd
come home drunk some night and smash up some of this junk and--what is
that phrase of Wallace Martin's--swipe me one; and then be penitent and
remorseful and ashamed and human--instead of always being like a darned
old statue of the American statesman with one hand thrust in the bosom
of his frock-coat.
"I wonder--I wonder--what kind of a husband Eugene would have made. Not
one of the amiable, benign, deferential ones, anyway. What were those
lines 'Gene used to say?
"'Each life's unfulfilled, you see,
And both hang patchy and scrappy.
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy!'
"That's it--that's it--that's life. To sigh deep--to laugh free; to
make your bed in hell, and then soar on the wings of the morning.... I'm
young, beautiful. I have everything but experience. I mean to have
it.... No wonder Eve took the apple the serpent offered, if she was as
bored in the Garden of Eden as I am. I'd have bitten more than one,
though. What is the use of living if you don't live?"
And while Perdita raged in inward rebellion, the world, viewing things
from the outside, took an entirely different view of her matter.
Popular opinion inclined to the belief that the good fairies had too
heavily dowered this young woman at her cradle, and consequently a
readjustment was inevitable, probably by the gracious means of ennobling
tribulation. The dramatic event was rather eagerly anticipated. Not that
envy had any part in it or that any of Perdita's friends or
acquaintances wished to see a fellow being punished for the liberality
of Providence. On the contrary. It was merely a sane desire to mark the
balances of the universe in faultless equilibrium and to have the
comforting assurance that the mills of the gods still ground with the
proverbial exactness.
Youth, health, wealth, beauty, happiness, all unlimited! An exasperating
spectacle! How could all be right with the world as long as Hebe
continued to pour most of the nectar into one glass, while so many
thirsty, deserving souls were denied even a sip?
And Perdita went her way and smiled alike on those who caviled and those
who applauded. She had accepted her husband's friends as her own with a
sort of careless, indifferent good nature and the relations existing
between herself and the closely cemented little group were sufficiently
harmonious under the circumstances. Maud Carmine and she had struck
"leagues of friendship" at once, and Maud's prediction that Hepworth's
friends would have to serve as Perdita's relatives would seem to have
been verified.
And Maud, through constant association, appeared to have reflected some
of Dita's beauty, for there was evidenced the most remarkable change in
the plain Miss Carmine, her name no longer prefaced by that deplorable
adjective, however. Alice Wilstead explained it by frankly giving the
credit to Perdita. It was she, Alice asserted, who had had the faith and
the courage to take Maud vigorously in hand and make of her a new
creature as far as the outward presentment was concerned. The results
had been so mutually satisfactory as to rivet the friendship between the
two; for Dita had proved by her works her belief that there was not the
faintest necessity for any such creature as an unattractive woman; and
Maud, having lost all faith in the willingness of nature to better her
original handiwork, had turned hopefully to art, with the result that
she was now one of the most talked-of women in town. By men, because she
had recently grown attractive enough for them to discover that she was
also extremely agreeable and sympathetic. By women, because they ached
to discover her secret. They remembered as easily as the men forgot that
for twenty-eight years of her life Maud had been as a weed by the wall,
a lank and sallow weed, oppressed by the sparseness of her leaves and
the entire absence of either flowers or fruit, and suddenly she had
acquired an art, an air, the trick of dress so subtle that it imparted
distinction even to her worst points.
But when Perdita proceeded to verify, a little tardily, it is true, the
hope of Mrs. Willoughby Hewston, sighingly expressed at the wedding
breakfast, and furnished herself with a relative, the coterie gasped. It
was not perhaps just the selection Mrs. Hewston would have made for her,
but, nevertheless, Perdita had produced a relative, although, it must be
confessed, of a rather dubious and indefinite nearness.
If Mrs. Hewston had been questioned on the subject she might have
confessed that the relative she had in mind, as presenting an admirable
background for a young and lovely girl, was either a silver-haired
mother with a white lace cap, and a hair brooch fastening the snowy lawn
collar of her black gown; or, in lieu of her, a maiden aunt. Indeed, had
Mrs. Hewston been given free choice, she would have inclined toward the
latter. Unquestionably, a maiden aunt is the best possible promoter of
that nice sense of the proprieties, those right feelings and carefully
graduated moral sentiments which are indispensable to a homeless,
penniless young woman scrambling for a living. But Perdita, in
presenting her relative, had almost flippantly disregarded these
considerations involving a sense of universal fitness. It was a far cry,
really an almost revolutionary distance, one felt, from the
silver-haired mother or rather acid maiden aunt to Eugene Gresham.
Eugene Gresham! Fancy!
For Eugene had returned to his native land with the recognition of Paris
and London, even their acclaim--golden bay leaves and purple cloaks.
Therefore was he thrice welcomed of New York. Therefore, the next
presumption followed as naturally as the first. It was out of the
question that Mrs. Hepworth, whose beauty was a matter of international
comment, should lack a Gresham portrait, a distinction now unattainable
save to those upon the mountain peaks of noble birth, enormous wealth,
great achievement, remarkable beauty or superlative notoriety.
As Alice Wilstead pointed out, no one could cavil at any relative Mrs.
Hepworth chose to set up, however regretable might be Perdita Carey's
claim of kinship with this particular person, and she had certainly, as
far as one knew, been discreet enough not to flaunt him during her
scrambles. Now, as Mrs. Hepworth's cousin (how many times removed,
dear?) he was one more jewel in her crown.
Mrs. Hewston sighingly acquiesced. "Yes, really. As Mrs. Hepworth's
relative, yes. But hardly as the guide, philosopher and friend of youth,
feminine youth, anyway." Only the happily married might safely claim
him, for Gresham, with his fame as a painter of beautiful women and his
almost equal reputation as a fascinating person, would not have been
commended by any maiden aunt for either right feelings, nice moral
sentiments or a discriminating taste for the proprieties.
As for Cresswell Hepworth, he looked after his vast and varied
interests, kept up his collections, especially his collection of
amulets, in which he was greatly interested, and occupied his leisure in
seeing that his wife was sufficiently entertained and amused to gratify
the requirements even of her eager youth.
Did she hint a longing for the Roc's egg? It was cabled for within the
hour. Did she breathe a desire for the moon? Orders were given that an
aeronautic expedition capable of securing it be manned at once.
And yet in spite of all this obvious contentment and happiness, Mr.
Willoughby Hewston in the role of raven had never ceased to flap his
wings and croak. He was particularly in this favorite vein of his one
afternoon when he shuffled into his wife's sitting-room, where she and
Alice Wilstead sat over their tea-cups. They heard him sighing heavily
as he came.
"No, I don't want any tea," he said, letting himself down slowly into an
easy chair, "you know I never touch it.
"Poor old Cress!" He shook his head gloomily at a spot in the carpet.
"Well, it's just as I predicted. That wife of his is the talk of the
town!"
"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed his wife. She, loyal soul, never failed him as
audience. A quick glance passed between Mrs. Wilstead and herself, as if
he had mentioned the subject uppermost in their minds, and, no doubt, in
their conversation.
"Oh, come now, Willoughby," said Alice, instinctively choosing the best
method of drawing him out, "you know it's nothing like so bad as that."
Hewston scowled heavily and laid one hand gingerly upon his rheumatic
knee, which gave him an especially sharp twinge at the moment. "It's
probably worse," he replied with even more than his customary acerbity,
"worse than we, any of us, know. Didn't I see them walking up Fifth
Avenue together this afternoon, and didn't a fellow speak of it to me?
And Cress out of town!"
"Well, let me tell something, dear," said his wife soothingly. "Cress
will very soon be in town again, for here are invitations to a dinner
the Hepworths are having next week. Quite an informal affair. Perdita
writes me, 'Just the little group of Cresswell's best friends, which I
hope I may also claim as mine,'" reading from the note she had picked up
from the table. "Very sweet of her."
"A dinner, eh," growled Hewston, "with all of us, and I suppose that
painter fellow. Well, I only hope it will not fall to me to open poor
Cresswell's eyes."
"Oh, Willoughby!"
"I'll not shirk my duty if it does. You can understand that. What
evening is this dinner? Next Thursday! Humph! Who is that?" as the
curtain before the door was pushed aside and some one entered.
"I!" said Wallace Martin, "only poor little me. They told me to come up.
What's happening next Thursday?"
"The Hepworths' dinner. There is probably an invitation awaiting you at
home."
"No, there is not," he said. "It's in my pocket now. I picked it up as I
was leaving. From what Maud Carmine has just told me, I imagine it's a
touching family group composed of ourselves and Eugene Gresham."
"Dear me," deplored Mrs. Hewston, "I do wish she would consider
Willoughby more. She must know that he can not endure the sight of Mr.
Gresham."
"It is not her fault," said Martin quickly, "as far as I can make out
from what Maud told me. Cress became imbued with the idea that he
wanted his dear old friends clustering about the board, and made out
the list himself."
"How like a man!" remarked Alice Wilstead gloomily. "But why, just now?"
"Oh, he's been adding to that pet collection of amulets of his, and he
wanted to show us his new acquisitions. That's the root of it, I fancy.
I don't imagine the lovely Perdita pined for us. She has been a creature
of moods lately. Very hotty-like with me."
"She was actually almost impertinent to Willoughby the other day." Mrs.
Hewston spoke with a hushed mournfulness. "I'm afraid all this luxury
and adulation has turned her head, and Willoughby spoke so gently to
her, too, did you not, dear?"
"Ugh! Humph!" quoth Willoughby.