IN Keble’s new car, purchased with a recent birthday cheque from the
family, Louise was driving swiftly over the lumpy road that wound its
way down the hill, beside the river, across sage plains, around fields
of alfalfa, toward the distant Valley. There was an autumn crispness in
the air, and the rising sun made the world bigger and bigger every
minute. She rejoiced in the freshness of the earth; and the fun of
goading a powerful motor over deserted, treacherous roads made her
chuckle. Most of all, she was excited by the element of adventure in the
journey. She welcomed most things in life that savored of adventure.
What mattered chiefly to her was that she should go forward. And this
morning’s exploit was a leap. If she were ever to get out of her present
_impasse_ it would be thanks to the unknown woman she was hastening to
meet.
As she swung into the long main street, passing the post office and the
drug-store, the bank, the hotel, and the hospital, scattering greetings
among stragglers, she was conscious of the wide-eyed interest in her
smart blue car. The inhabitants made capital of their intimacy with her.
In the old days she was “Doc. Bruneau’s girl;” nowadays she was, in
addition, the wife of a “rich dude” and a liberal buyer of groceries and
hardware.
“As though that made me any different!” she reflected, and drew the car
up before the doctor’s white-washed garden fence, sending a bright hallo
to an old schoolmate, Minnie Hopper, whom she had once passionately
cherished for their similar taste in hair-ribbons and peppermint sticks,
and who was now Mrs. Otis Swigger, wife of Oat, the proprietor of “The
Canada House” and the adjoining “shaving parlor and billiard saloon.”
For Minnie marriage was nine-tenths of life. She was the mother of two
chalky babies; she had an “imitation mahogany bedroom set”; and her
ambition was to live in Witney, beyond the mountain pass, where there
was a “moving picture palace” and a railway station.
Even Keble,—Louise pursued the thought as the gate clicked behind
her,—seemed to think marriage nine-tenths of life. For _her!_
She was burning with curiosity.
A tall, lithe, solid young woman was standing before a heaped
bookcase,—a fair-skinned, clear-eyed woman of thirty-two or three, with
a broad forehead over which a soft, shining, flat mass of reddish-brown
hair was drawn. She wore a rough silk shirt with a brown knitted cravat;
a fawn colored skirt, severely simple but so cunningly cut that it
assumed new lines with the slightest motion of her body; brown stockings
and stout brown golf shoes of an indefinable smartness.
Louise had never seen a woman so all-of-a-piece, and of a piece so rare.
As a rule, in encountering new personalities, she was first of all
sensitive to signs of intelligence, or its lack. She could not have said
whether this person were excessively clever or excessively the reverse.
It was the woman’s composure that baffled her. The wide-set grey eyes
and the relaxed but firm lips gave no clue. She swiftly guessed that in
this woman’s calculations there was a scale of values that virtually
ignored cleverness, as such; that cleverness was to her merely a chance
intensity that co-existed with other more important qualities in
accordance with which she made her classifications, if she bothered to
_make_ classifications; and something suggested that for this woman
classifying processes were automatic. What her mechanical standards of
judgment were, there was no gauging: degrees of gentility, perhaps. That
was what Louise would have to learn.
The lips, without parting, formed themselves into a reassuring smile,
which had the contrary effect of making Louise acutely conscious of a
necessity to be correct, of marshaling all the qualities in herself that
had aroused approbation in the most discriminating people she had known.
The stranger replaced a book she had been inspecting and took a step in
Louise’s direction. Louise shook herself, as if chidingly, and let her
natural directness dispel the momentary awkwardness. She went forward
quickly with outstretched hand.
“You are Miss Cread, of course. I am Mrs. Eveley. I’m so sorry to have
kept you waiting overnight here.”
“Your father has been more than hospitable. He delighted me last night
with his quaint ideas.”
“Oh dear,—about priests and things?” Louise was inclined to deprecate
her father’s penchant for assailing the church in whatever hearing.
Miss Cread laughed. “Partly. I dote on this little house, and all _its_
things.”
“Papa suggests that after he dies I transport it to a quai on the left
bank of the Seine in Paris and knock out the front wall. He says it
would make a perfect book stall. . . . Papa once won a scholarship to
study medicine in Paris. It rather spoiled him for a life in these
wilds. I do hope you won’t die of boredom with us. I’ve never been to
Paris. Indeed I’ve never been farther than Winnipeg, and that seemed
thousands of miles. Of course you’ve been abroad.”
“A great deal.”
“You’re not a bit American.” Louise was thinking of camping parties that
sometimes penetrated the Valley in cars decorated with banners bearing
the device “Idaho” or “Montana.” She had motioned her new friend to a
chair and was leaning forward opposite her. “Do you know,” she suddenly
confided, “I’m terribly afraid of you.”
“Good gracious, why?”
“You’ll laugh, but never mind. It’s because you’re so
distinguished-looking.”
Miss Cread reflected. “A distinctive appearance doesn’t necessarily make
one dangerous. It is I, on the contrary, who should be afraid.”
“I’m sure nothing could frighten you!”
“Oh, yes. Responsibility. You see, this is my first post. I’m quite
inexperienced. I do hope Mr. Windrom made that clear.”
“Oh, experience! Why, you’re simply swimming in it,—in the kind that
matters to me at this moment. I mean your life, your surroundings, all
the things that decided Mr. Windrom in his selection of you as a
companion, have done something for you, have made you the person
who—bowled me over when I entered this room. My husband is brimming
over with the same,—oh, call it genuineness. Like sterling silver
spoons. I don’t know whether I’m sterling or not, but I do know I need
polishing. . . . It may be entirely a matter of birth. Papa and I
haven’t a crumb of birth, so far as I know,—though I have a musty old
aunt who swears we have. She endows convents, and her idea of a grand
pedigree would be to have descended from a line of saints, I
imagine. . . . For my part I have no pretensions whatever, not one, any
more than poor Papa. He thinks it rather a pity to be born at all,
though he’s forever helping people _get_ born. . . . I was rash enough
to dive into marriage without holding my breath, and got a mouthful of
water. Sometimes I feel that my husband wishes I could be a little more
sedate, a little more,—oh, you know, Miss Cread, what I called
distinguished-looking, though I could feel that you disapproved of the
phrase. One of the very things you must do is to teach me what I ought
to say instead of distinguished-looking. That’s what Minnie Hopper would
have said, and at least I’m not a Minnie Hopper.”
“You’re like nobody I’ve ever seen or heard of!” This was fairly
ejaculated, and it gave Louise courage to continue, breathlessly, as
before.
“It is for my husband’s sake that I’m trying this experiment. At least I
think it’s for his sake: we never quite know when we’re being selfish,
do we? He will soon be a rather important person, for here. He’s getting
more and more things to look after: I can hardly turn nowadays without
running into some new thing that sort of belongs to us. We shall have
guests from England later on, and I can’t have them dying of
mortification on my threshold. . . . When I married I was blind in love,
and somehow took it for granted that I’d pick up all the hints I should
need. But I haven’t. . . . Am I talking nonsense?”
“Not at all. Please go on.”
“If you have any pride you can’t ask your husband to instruct you in
subjects you should know more about than he,—don’t you agree? I’m sure
I know more about baking bread than any of the Eveleys back to Adam, but
I don’t know a tenth as much about when to shake hands and when not to,
and that’s much more important than I ever dreamed.
“It may be silly, but I’ve made up my mind to be the sort of person my
husband won’t feel he ought to make excuses for. Not that he ever would,
of course! I’ve never admitted a word of all this to a soul. I hope you
understand, and I hope you don’t think such trifles trivial!”
“My dear! . . . . Aren’t you a little morbid about yourself? I know
women of the world who are uncouth compared with you. . . . As for
creating an impression, you are rather formidable already! There are
little tricks of pronunciation I can show you, and I shall be delighted
to tell you all the stupid things I know about shaking hands and the
like. . . . I’m already on your side; I was afraid I mightn’t be. One
can never depend on a man’s version, you know, even as discerning a man
as Mr. Windrom; and a woman usually takes the man’s part in a domestic
situation.”
Louise had a sudden twinge.
“There is only one thing that worries me now.”
Miss Cread waited, with questioning eyebrows.
“How _am_ I going to pass you off? I’ve told my husband I knew you when
you taught at Harristown! I went to Normal School there for a year, you
know. He’ll see with half an eye that you’re no school teacher. What are
we to invent? I can’t fib for a cent.”
“Well. . . . Shall we invent that my family lost its money and I had to
work for my living? And that things are better now, but my family have
all perished, and I’ve come here for a change. That statement doesn’t do
serious violence to my conscience.”
“There’s a little two-room log cabin you can have to retire to whenever
you get bored with us. . . . And of course we’ll have to call each other
by our first names. You don’t mind, do you?”
Miss Cread smiled sympathetically.
“She’s nice,” decided Louise, in relief, then said, “I’ll go out and
help Nana now. After lunch, _en route la bonne troupe_!”
This phrase, more than anything Louise had said, afforded Miss Cread the
clue to their relationship. Louise had reverted into French with a
little flourish which seemed to say, “At least I have one advantage over
you: I am bi-lingual.” Miss Cread saw that it was characteristic of
Louise to underestimate her virtues and fail to recognize her faults,
and for her, who had spoken French in Paris before Louise was born,
Louise’s accent was unlovely, as only the Canadian variety can be. She
would let her pupil make the discovery for herself. Miss Cread was
pleased to find that her mission was going to be a subtle one.
“I shall be fearfully nervous for a few days, until we get into swing,”
said Louise at the table.
“Then my first task is to restore your composure.”
“Your second will be to keep it restored. . . . I’m growing less and
less afraid of you. Wouldn’t it be funny if I should get so used to you
I answered you back, like in school?”
“There’s no telling where it will stop. You’re a venturesome woman.”
Louise laughed merrily. “Don’t you love adventure?” It was an
announcement rather than an inquiry.
2
Late in the afternoon they reached the fields where the men were cutting
the scanty crops. Keble on his buckskin mare was in consultation with
the superintendent, and on hearing the honk of the car wheeled about,
came toward the road, and dismounted.
“Miriam dear, this is my husband. His name is Keble, and he’s frightened
to death that you’ll notice, though not call attention to, the muddy
spot on the breeches that Mona cleaned this very morning. Keble, this is
Miriam Cread, who is coming to stop with us as long as I can force her
to stay.”
Keble took a firm white hand in his. The stranger’s smile, the confident
poise of her head, the simple little hat whose slant somehow suggested
Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix, amazed him. It was as though Louise
had brought home a Sargent portrait and said she had bought it at the
Witney emporium.
“What I can’t forgive you for, my dear,” he said blandly enough, “is
that you should have kept me so long in ignorance of such a charming
friend’s existence.” He turned to the guest. “I’ve heard all about Pearl
and Amy and Minnie, but next to nothing about you. Don’t you think
that’s perverse? My wife is sort of human _feuilleton_: something new
every day.”
He was surprised to hear himself using a term which would certainly have
conveyed nothing to Pearl or Amy or Minnie, but he knew the allusion had
registered.
“I suppose that’s the first duty of a wife,” Miriam laughed. “Besides,
Louise Bruneau is nothing if not original. All her friends recognize
that.” She patted Louise ever so gently on the shoulder.
The modulation of the voice, the grace of the little pat, the composure,
the finely-cut nostrils, the slant of the hat!
They chatted, then Louise started the engine, and in a moment the car
was zig-zagging up the long hill that lay between them and the lake.
Louise was conquering an unreasonable pang. To herself she was
explaining the freemasonry that existed among people of Keble’s and Miss
Cread’s world; there was some sort of telepathic pass word, she knew not
what. It was going to be the Windrom atmosphere all over again:
permeated by exotic verbal trifles. But that was what she had bargained
for; the stakes were worth the temporary disadvantage. Walter needn’t,
of course, have sent quite such a perfect specimen.
What “stakes”? Well, surely there were objects to live for that
outweighed the significance of petty jealousies, petty possessions, the
rights of one person in another. She brought the car around to a point
from which the lake spread out under them in all the glory of deep
emerald water and distant walls of sun-bronzed rock. The cottages and
farm buildings grouped themselves beneath, and along the pebbly shore a
rich league of grey-black and dark green pine forest linked the
buildings and the mountains. Two frantic sheep dogs came barking to meet
them.
An exclamation of delight escaped from the travel-weary guest.
“I’m glad you like it,” remarked Louise, relenting.
“It’s superb,” Miriam replied. Again she gave Louise’s shoulder a
discreet pat, as the latter began the winding descent. “You very lucky
woman!” she commented.
3
Riding, fishing, and hunting for the winter’s supply of game enlivened
the autumn months, and when the snow arrived, drifting through the
canyons, obliterating all traces of roads and fences, there were
snow-shoe and ski-journeys, skating on a swept portion of the lake, and
dances before the great fireplace. Self-consciously at first, but soon
without being aware of it, Louise reflected the sheen of her companion,
and acquired objective glimpses of herself. There had been long
discussions in which tastes and opinions had been sifted, and Louise’s
speech and cast of thought subtly supervised. Throughout the program
Keble made quiet entrances and exits, dimly realizing what was taking
place, grateful for, yet a little distrustful of the gradual
transformation. It was as though, in an atmosphere of peace, unknown
forces were being secretly mobilized. There was a charm for him in the
nightly fireside readings and conversations. When he was present they
were likely to develop into a monologue of daring theories invented and
sustained by Louise,—a Louise who had begun to take some of her girlish
extravagances in earnest. In the end Keble found himself, along with
Miriam Cread, bringing to bear against Louise’s radicalism the stock
counter arguments of his class.
This was disconcerting, for he had been in the habit of regarding
himself as an innovator, with his back to the past and his gaze fixed
upon the future; and although it was pleasant to find himself so often
in accord with a highly civilized and attractive young woman just
appreciably his senior, it was a set-back to his illusion of having
graduated from the prejudices and short-sightedness of conventional
society. For the sum total of his mental bouts with Louise was that she
serenely but quite decisively relegated him to the ranks of the safe and
sane. And “safe and sane” as she voiced the phrase meant something less
commendable than “safe and sane” as he voiced it. For Keble “safe and
sane” was of all vehicles the one which would carry him and his goods
most adequately to his mortal destination. He had always assumed that
Louise had faith in the vehicle. Now he seemed to see her sitting on the
tail-board, swinging her legs like a naughty child, ready to leap off at
the approach of any conveyance that gave promise of more speed and
excitement.
During his later school-days, Keble, by virtue of an ability to
discriminate, had arrived at a point of self-realization that rendered
his conformity to custom a bore to him but failed to provide him with
the logical alternative. For this he had consulted, and responded to,
the more refined manifestations of individualism in contemporary
literature and art, to the extent of falling under the illusion that he
himself was a thoroughgoing individualist. A victim of a period of
social transition, he, like so many other young men of his generation,
made the mistake of assuming that his doubts and objections were the
effect of a creative urge within himself, whereas he had merely acquired
a decent wardrobe of modern notions which distinguished him from his
elders and, to his own eyes, disguised the inalterably conservative
nature of his principles. Hence the almost irreconcilable combination:
an instinctive abstemiousness and an Epicurean relish.
Whenever Louise, after some brilliant skirmish with the outriders of
orthodoxy, came galloping into camp with the news that a direct route
lay open to the citadel of personal freedom and personal morality, Keble
found himself throwing up his cap in a sympathetic glee, but then he
fell to wondering whether the gaining of the citadel were worth the
trampling down of fields, the possible breaking of church windows, the
discomfort to neutral bystanders.
At such moments he suspected that he was in the wrong camp; that he had
been led there through his admiration for daring spirits rather than a
desire for the victory they coveted. It alarmed him to discover that the
topsy-turvy fancies that had endeared Louise to him were not merely
playful. It alarmed him to discover that she was ready to put her most
daring theories into practise, ready to regard her own thoughts and
emotions as so many elements in a laboratory in which she was free to
experiment, in scientific earnest, at the risk of explosions and bad
odors, all for the sake of arriving at truths that would be of
questionable value. Certainly, to Keble’s mind, the potential results,
should the experiments be never so successful, were not worth the
incidental damage,—not where one’s wife was concerned. For him “safe
and sane” meant the avoidance of risk. For Louise he suspected that
“safe and sane” smacked of unwillingness to take the personal risks
inevitable in any conquest of truth. That brought him to the
consideration of “truth,” and he saw that for him truth was something
more tangible, and much nearer home, than it was for his wife. And he
was in the lamentable situation of feeling that she was right, yet being
constitutionally unable, or unwilling, or afraid, to go in her
direction.
Miriam caught something of the true proportions in the situation, and it
was her policy to remain negative in so far as possible, pressing gently
on either side of the scales, as the balance seemed to require. She had
a conscientious desire to help the other two attain a comfortable _modus
vivendi_, but as the winter progressed it became increasingly evident to
her that her efforts might end by having a contrary effect. Reluctantly
she saw herself saddled with the rôle of referee. Furthermore, it seemed
as though the mere presence of a referee implied, even incited, combat.
Their evenings often ended on a tone of dissension, Louise soaring on
the wings of some new radical conclusion; Keble anxiously counseling
moderation; and Miriam, by right and left sallies, endeavoring, not
always with success, to bring the disputants to a level of good-humored
give and take.
On two or three occasions she had been tempted to withdraw entirely,
feeling that as long as a third person were present to hear, the
diverging views of husband and wife would inevitably continue to be
expressed. But on reflection she realized that her withdrawal could in
no sense reconcile their divergences. From Louise she had derived the
doctrine that views must, and will, out, and that to conceal or
counterfeit them is foolish and dishonest. As Miriam saw it, these two
had come to the end of the first flush of excited interest in each
other. Their ship had put to sea, the flags had been furled, the sails
bent. They had reached the moment when it was necessary to set a course.
And they might be considered fortunate in having a fair-minded third
person at hand to see them safely beyond the first reefs. It hadn’t
occurred to Miriam that she might be a reef.
With Louise nothing remained on the surface; the massage that polished
her manners polished her thoughts, and with increasing facility in the
technique of carrying herself came an increasing desire to carry herself
some_where_. As a girl she had too easily outdistanced her companions.
Until Miriam Cread’s advent there had been no woman with whom to
compete, and her intelligence had in consequence slumbered. Keble had
transformed her from a girl into a woman; but Miriam made her realize
the wide range of possibilities comprised under Womanhood, and had put
her on her mettle to define her own particular character as a woman. Now
her personality was fully awake, and her daily routine was characterized
by an insatiable mental activity, during which she proceeded to a
footing on many subjects about which she had never given herself the
trouble to think. She had read more books than most girls, and had dined
on weighty volumes in her father’s library for the sake of their sweets;
but under the pressure of her new intellectual intensity she found that,
without knowing it, she had been nourished on their soups and roasts.
The unrelated impressions that she had long been capturing from books
and thrusting carelessly upon mental shelves now formed a fairly
respectable stock-in-trade. Every new book, every new discussion, every
new incident furnished fuel to the motor that drove her forward.
But there was one moment, during the Christmas festivities, when the
boldness of her recent thoughts, the inhibitive tightness of her new
garments of correctitude, the fatigue of standing guard over herself,
became intolerably irksome, when she looked away from Keble and Miriam
and the Browns towards her tubby, bald-headed, serene little father,
twinkling and smoking his beloved pipe before the fire: a moment when
she longed to be the capricious, dreamy girl who had curled up at his
feet during the winter evenings of her first acquaintance with the
English boy from Hillside.
If Keble had divined that mood, if he could have stepped in and caught
her out of it with an expert caress, if he had read the thought that was
then in her mind,—namely that no amount of cleverness could suppress
the yearning that her conjugal experience had so far failed to
gratify,—if his eyes had penetrated her and not the flames, where
presumably they envisaged the air castles he would soon be translating
into stone and cement, then the yards of the matrimonial ship might have
swung about, the sails have taken the breeze, and the blind helmsman
have directed a course into a sharply defined future. At that moment
Louise might have been converted, by a sufficiently subtle lover, into a
passionate partner in the most prosaic of schemes. All she needed was to
be coaxed and driven gently, to a point not far off. It was too personal
to be explained; and if he couldn’t see it, then she must do what she
could on her own initiative, at her expense and his.
The dreamy girl faded out of her eyes, and a self-contained, positive
young woman rose from her seat with an easy directness, crossed the room
to switch on the lights, and said, “Keble, I’ve just decided how I shall
dispose of my Christmas present.” For the benefit of the Browns she
explained, “I had a colossal cheque in my stocking from a father-in-law
who doesn’t know what a spendthrift I am.”
“What will you do with it?” asked her husband.
“Something very nice. You’re sure to object.”
“Is that what makes it nice: my objecting?”
“That makes it more exciting.”
“Then let me object hard, dear.”
Louise withstood the laughter that greeted Keble’s score. “Do it
immediately,” she advised, “and have it over with; then I’ll say what it
is.”
“Why not spare us a scene?” suggested Miriam. “We know what a brute he
is.”
“You’re concerned in it,” Louise replied. “I hope you won’t object, for
that would be fatal.”
This gave Keble his opportunity for revenge against Miriam’s “brute.”
“Mayn’t we take Miriam’s compliance for granted? We know what a diplomat
she is.”
Louise was now seated on the opposite side of the table, facing them.
“Do you object, Papa?”
“On principle, yes, because it’s sure to be something rash. As a matter
of fact, no, because you’re the only sensible rash person there is.”
Louise was delighted. “It’s Papa’s stubborn belief in my common sense,
more than anything else, that gives me the courage of my enlightened
rashness,” she proclaimed.
At this Keble turned with a smile to Miriam. “Now I see what you meant
by brute. It’s because I won’t always acknowledge the enlightenment of
rashness.”
Miriam colored a little, to her great annoyance. “Really, you mustn’t
seek meanings in my random words.”
“Oh, then it wasn’t meant literally?”
“There aren’t any literal brutes left; only figurative ones. Must I do
penance for a levity I admit to have been uncalled for?”
“I’ll let you off,—with the warning that I shall watch your remarks
more closely in future.”
“Then I can only defend myself by becoming the objectionable thing you
called _me_!”
“Diplomat! Is that objectionable?”
“Rather. It implies the existence of things to be connived at. Once
you’ve admitted diplomat you’ve admitted stakes, and rivalry.”
Mrs. Brown was on what she called tender hooks. Her husband was
waggishly of the opinion that the cheque would end by being spent on
wagon loads of sugar for Sundown, that pampered circus beast.
“Has everybody finished objecting?”
Everybody had.
“Well, then, Miriam and I are going on a jaunt,—to New York and then
South where it’s warm.”
“It’s a sort of holiday from me, I gather?” said Keble when the others
had done exclaiming.
Miriam’s eyes turned in warning towards the speaker, whose lips broke
into a smile, in relish of the “brute” which, diplomatically, was merely
flashed across the room. This little passage arrested Louise, who had
been for the twentieth time reminded, by Keble’s detachment, of the
inexplicable poem.
“Or yours from me,” she replied. “What’s sauce for the gander—”
Keble judged the moment opportune for bringing forth his best Port, and
while the three men took a new lease of life, the women chatted
excitedly about resorts and itineraries.
Louise’s announcement had been especially welcome to Miriam. It promised
an escape from umpiring,—from neutral-mindedness. Her cheeks burned a
little.
The doctor was drifting back, along with Keble’s superintendent, into
the rigorous pioneer days of the Valley, the days before the branch line
had been built into Witney, contrasting the primitive arrangements of
that era with the recent encroachments of civilization. The logical
development in the talk would be some reference to Keble’s ambitious
designs, which the spring would see well under way. Miriam glanced up to
see how he would receive the cue, which usually roused him to
enthusiasm. He allowed it to pass, and she was intrigued to see on his
face a look of boyish, wistful abstraction, and loneliness.
He felt her eyes on him, and turned as she looked away. She knew he
disliked to be surprised in a self-revelatory mood, and she had time to
notice his features assume their usual impersonal cast. That she
regretted; the wistfulness had been ingenuous and touching. At times she
felt that he deliberately submerged his most likable traits. That was a
great pity, because it gave Louise new incentives to go off on her
independent courses. Miriam felt that his self-consciousness had begun
by hurting Louise, driving her to protect herself against a coldness she
couldn’t understand. The unfortunate result was that Louise had rather
more than protected herself: had gradually attained a self-sufficiency
that took Keble’s coldness for granted, even inducing it. That was a
moral advantage which Miriam’s femininity resented, though nothing could
have drawn the admission from her.
She was glad when Louise, by a new manoeuvre in the talk, gave her an
excuse to go into the next room. For there were times when nothing
sheathed the sharp edges of life so satisfactorily as a half hour at the
piano.
4
Only when she had waved Keble farewell from the back of the train at
Witney did Louise allow herself to dwell on the significance of the step
she had taken. Keble’s generous acquiescence in her plan merely
underlined the little question that kept irritating her conscience. For
all her skill she hadn’t known how to assure Keble that she wasn’t
turning her back on him; for all her love she couldn’t have admitted to
him that she was setting out for a sanatorium, to undergo treatment for
social ignorances in the hope of returning to him more fit than ever.
With the train now bolting east, she had the nervous dread of a
prospective patient.
Yet as province after province rolled by, and the dreary prairie began
to be broken first by lakes and woods, then by larger and larger
communities, graduating her approach into civilization, her natural
optimism asserted itself in a typically vehement reaction. Now that
there was no turning back, the obvious thing to do was to wring every
possibility out of the experience to which she was committed. Nothing
should be too superficial for her attention. To Miriam’s relief her
despondency gave place to a feverish activity of observation. She began
to notice her fellow-travelers and to tick them off mercilessly, one by
one, with all their worths and blemishes.
“Let’s leave no stone unturned, Miriam,” she said, imperatively, as they
neared their first halting place. “I won’t go home till I’ve done and
seen and had one of everything. Then for the next eighty years I shall
be able to out-small-talk the most outrageous dude that ever dares cross
my threshold.”
She kept rein on the excitement caused in her by the hotels, shops,
museums, and theatres of Toronto and Montreal, for from Miriam’s
lukewarmness she divined that they were at best but carbon copies of the
hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of New York. So she contented
herself with watching the movements of her companion, marveling at
Miriam’s easy way with porters and chambermaids, her ability to arrive
on the right platform ten minutes before the right train departed, to
secure the most pleasant rooms at the least exorbitant rate and order
the most judicious dinners, all without fuss or worry. Having learned
that traveling was one of the major modern arts, she added it to the
list of subjects in which she was enrolled as student. By the time they
had reached Fifth Avenue and put up at a hostelry that was still
imposing, though it had been half forgotten in the mania for newer and
gayer establishments, Louise was imperturbable.
During the next few days the experience that made the deepest impression
on her was the religious earnestness with which one was expected to
cultivate one’s exterior. On a memorable, but modest visit to Winnipeg
with her father,—who was attending a medical conference,—she had “gone
in and bought” whatever she had been in need of. Never had she dreamt
that so much art and science could be brought to bear on the merely
getting of oneself groomed. But after a few seances in the neighborhood
of Fifty-Seventh Street, Louise threw herself into this strange new cult
with characteristic fervor. This was partly due to the fact that Madame
Adèle, the dressmaker, and Monsieur Jules, the hairdresser, had
accomplished what good portrait painters often accomplish, and thrown
into relief properties of body and soul of which she had never been
aware.
At the end of a fortnight she had mastered many rites, and when the last
frocks, hats, gloves, and slippers had arrived, and she had adapted her
steps and gestures and rhythms to the unbelievable new picture she made,
Miriam, for the first time since their association, expressed herself as
satisfied.
“I’ve been waiting to see you dressed,” she announced as they sat in the
tea-room of a fashionable hotel. “It’s the final test. And you
pass—_magna cum laude_. Opposite you I feel dull and not at all what
you would once have called distinguished-looking.”
“Don’t be absurd, Miriam,” returned her pupil in an even tone, with a
purified articulation that would have made Minnie Hopper stare. “I may
cost eight hundred dollars more than you at the moment, but I look
_new_, and you know it. Whereas you will always look _good_, without
looking new, no matter if you’re straight out of a bandbox. If I’ve made
any progress at all, the proof of it is that I recognize the truth of
what I’ve just said. . . . Not only that, but you can console yourself
with the knowledge that if you sit opposite me till Doomsday you’ll
never utter a syllable that couldn’t be printed in a book of etiquette.
Whereas I,—well, the mere fact that they’ve pulled out my lopsided
eyebrow doesn’t mean that before the sun sets I shan’t do and say some
inadvertent _bêtise_ that will proclaim the pit from which I was digged
and make you say to yourself, ‘Why does she?’. . . . One comfort is that
most of these expensive people here are even more plebeian, at least in
their souls, than I am, and you’re almost the only person in the world
whom I can’t fool. . . . Fancy not having you there to be genteel to,
and to shock,—especially to shock! At any moment I may deliberately say
something vulgar, dear. The temptation often comes over me in hot
waves.”
“The ‘deliberately’ redeems you. Most people are vulgar without knowing
it; they would bite off their tongues if they knew. . . . As for
inadvertence, you’ve made only one _faux pas_ in days.”
“Oh, dear! What?”
“Yesterday, at that awful house.”
“Mrs. Pardy’s? Why, darling, you took me there yourself, as a treat.”
“Yes, but it was Elsa Pardy we went to leave cards for. Elsa was one of
the nicest girls in Washington when I knew her there. I would never have
looked her up in that casual way if I had foreseen such a fulsome
sister-in-law.”
Louise laughed at the recollection, snuggling into the thought that Mrs.
Pardy could not be laid at _her_ door. Then came the thought of her
alleged remissness. “I hope I didn’t out-_faux_ Mrs. P. . . . I wonder
how Keble would like me to call him Mr. E.”
“No wonder Elsa doesn’t stay there.”
“But, Miriam, my _faux pas!_ I won’t be done out of my daily
correction.”
Miriam smiled indulgently. “It was the merest trifle. Indeed if Mrs.
Pardy had made it, it would have done her credit. For that matter she
did, effusively, and if we hadn’t been such fastidious folk we should
have lauded her for it. And I do!”
“Miriam . . . before I throw a bun at you!”
“Well, my dear, you invited the woman to pay you a visit.”
“Jolly kind of me, too. Is _that_ all?”
“Heavens, it’s enough!”
“I was merely returning a hospitality,—the hospitality of your
friends.”
“Don’t tease.”
“After all, what less could I do when she practically gave us her house
and her chauffeur and her marble staircase and diamond bracelets and
ancestral lemon groves in California.”
“None of which we wanted, you see. Nor asked for a thing! Nor accepted a
thing except under compulsion. The mere fact that one strays into a
house that looks like a glorified Turkish bath and has it, as you say,
_given_ to one, doesn’t put one under the slightest obligation. We
merely sat on the edge of her golden chairs, regretted Elsa’s absence,
heard about Mr. P.’s kidneys and sundry organs, and drank a cup of tea.”
“And ate a cream puff. Don’t slight that delicious, cordial, luxurious,
fattening, vulgar cream puff. I ate two and longed for a third. That
made it a grub-call, and I had to invite her back. I’ll never outgrow
that primitive custom. Besides, I took care to say, if she was ever in
my part of the world. That made it pretty safe.”
“Ah, that’s just what made it an error. Not only because it was
gratuitous, but because Mrs. Pardy is the sort of woman who would
charter a private train to be in your part of the world in order,
accidentally, to drop in on a young woman who makes the sort of
impression you make,—for you do, you know. Especially when she finds
out,—and be sure she’ll investigate,—who the Eveleys are.”
“Well, darling, let her come. She didn’t bother me a bit. It would be
rough on Keble, I suppose.”
“Rough and warm,” said Miriam a little testily. “She had the effect on
me of heavy flannels in midsummer.”
Louise gleefully pounced on her opportunity. “_Fi donc!_ Miriam Cread
conjuring up such incorrect things as flannels,—and it isn’t anywhere
near Doomsday!”
“It’s near dressing time. And we must pack a little before dinner. After
the theatre we’ll be too tired.”
“How shall we explain our sudden departure to Mrs. Pardy? Before she
sends out invitations to all her friends to ‘meet’ us!”
“We can have the measles. Or you’re moving to Alaska.”
“And if ever she and Mr. P. are in the Arctic Circle. . . . Measles
wouldn’t do the trick. She would come right in and nurse us. And give us
her doctor and her florist. Frankly, dear, I rather like Mrs. Pardy;
she’s so hearty. I thought that was going to rhyme but it didn’t.”
“Come along. We’re going to walk home, for exercise.”
“In these heels? . . . Is fifty cents enough to leave the waiter?”
“Enough, good gracious! Leave the brute a quarter.”
They made their way through a thronged corridor towards the street, and
Miriam felt a proprietary pride in her companion, whose present
restraint was as instinctively in keeping with her tailored costume,
unostentatious fur, and defiant little hat, as her old flamboyance had
been with her khaki breeches and willow switch.
“Since I’ve begun to spend money,” Louise reflected, “I’ve been more and
more oppressed by the unfairness of my having access to so much,—though
of course it’s nothing compared to what one sees flung about in this
bedlam. But all these exaggerated refinements, and people taking
notice,—while it excites me, I don’t honestly care for it. There’s
something as uncomfortable about it as there would be about ‘boughten’
teeth. Sartorial hysteria; the rash known as civilization; I keep saying
phrases like that to myself. . . . After about the fifth time I think
I’d bite that beauty woman. I like my face too well to have it rubbed
out once a week!”
They turned into Fifth Avenue and joined the hordes let loose at this
transition hour of the day. Against the grey buildings women were as
bright as flowers, fulfilling, as Miriam reflected, the decorative
function that trees fulfil on European boulevards.
“I had a cheque from Keble to-day,” Louise continued. “As if we hadn’t
heaps already! It came in a charming letter. Keble in his letters is
much more human than he is in the flesh. If I stayed away long enough I
might forget that and fall romantically in love with him all over again.
Which would be tragic. . . . He says he’s happy, poor lamb, to know that
I’m beginning to take an interest in life! But I wish he’d be candid and
say he’s miserable. Then I’d know what to do. When he so obstinately
pretends to be happy and isn’t, I’m lost. Miriam, look at that
creature!”
It was a bizarrely clad woman, so thoroughly made over in every detail
of appearance that there was scarcely a square inch of her original
pattern left: a weird, costly fabrication that attracted the attention
of everybody within range of vision or smell.
“Do you know who it is?” asked Miriam, amused at the startled look in
her companion’s eyes.
“No, do you? She looks Japanese.”
“Merely East Side. It’s Myra Pelter, the actress we’re to see to-night
in ‘Three Blind Mice’.”
Louise yielded to a temptation to turn and stare. “Now there you are,
Miriam: the _reductio ad absurdum_ of hectic shopping and beautifying.
Isn’t it enough to drive one into a nunnery! I’m glad we’re on our way
to the seashore, where there are at least ‘such quantities of sand’ and
sky and water.”
Miriam smiled doubtfully, a little wearily. “There will be quantities of
transparent stockings and French perfumes, too, my dear.”
“Well, I like frivolities, as such,—but only as such, mind you. From
now on I ignore them the minute they try to be anything more. I think
I’m going in for human souls. I’m already tired of looking at people as
Adèle looks at them, or as if they were books in a shop window. I’m
going to open a few and see what they’re all about. . . . The worst of
it is, you can’t look at the last chapter of people and see how they
end. You can only read them, as you can only read yourself, in
maddeningly short instalments. They’re always on the brink of new doings
when you come to a ‘to be continued’. And I’ve reached a point where I
must have gists and summaries, must see what things are leading to,
what’s being driven at in this infuriating universe,—this multi-verse.”
They had by this time reached their rooms, and Miriam was making a
preliminary sorting of objects to be packed. “Don’t you think,” she
ventured, “that you are inclined to be a little headlong as a
philosopher?”
Louise was deftly choosing the articles of her toilette for the evening.
“Oh, no doubt of it! But I’m too deep in my sea now to care. I simply
swim on and on, after a shoal of notions.”
“And splash a little,” commented Miriam, with an abstracted air that
saved the remark from being censorious. She was wondering whether she
had been over-scrupulous in refusing the gown that Adèle had privately
offered her by way of commission. And a little resentful that Adèle
should dare offer it to _her_. Miriam was old enough to remember a day
when such transactions were considered off-color, and it bothered her
that she should be so old-fashioned as to be unable to accept the place
assigned her in the callous new order, as some of her former friends,
with the greatest complacence, seemed to have done. Suddenly, bereft of
credit in a society to which she had once felt herself a necessary
adjunct, catching occasional glimpses of faces that recalled school-days
to her, and Newport and Paris, faces now hard, bright and mercenary,
Miriam felt abandoned.
Her thoughts strayed westward and hovered. In Alberta she had been an
exile; but not so acutely alone as here.
5
The remaining weeks of their holiday accomplished even more towards
Louise’s worldly initiation, for she found herself dining and dancing
and matching opinions in private palaces among an anomalous assortment
of men and women. Before proceeding to Florida they paused in
Washington, where friends of Miriam and Walter Windrom whirled them into
the routine of that unique conglomeration of the provincial and the
sophisticated. Left alone among them, Louise might for a while have been
awed by pompous ladies whose husbands were senators from western states,
and unimpressed by young men whose shoulders bore no trace of the
burdens laid upon them by foreign governments. But Miriam’s polite
negativity towards the conspicuously grand, and her full and ready
response to some of the unassuming furnished Louise with useful cues,
and when Walter was of the party she was even more secure, for he had a
faculty of accepting everything at its face value, while privately
adding to or subtracting from the offering, with a twinkle in his eye,
or a twinkle in his speech.
Walter’s good-natured technique, Louise reflected, was more nearly akin
to her own temperament than were Miriam’s precisely graduated coolness
and cordialities. Certain importunate people Miriam simply ignored, as
though declining to give them a seat in her coach. Walter, while he was
equally exclusive, got over the necessity of inviting them into his
coach by stepping out and walking a short distance with them. This
method seemed to Louise not only more humane, but also braver than
Miriam’s, and certainly no less dignified. It was gentlemanly, too; and
she objected, as only a woman can object, to feminine tactics.
At Palm Beach they were greeted by a free, open, careless life that
suited Louise’s mood better than anything their excursion had afforded
her. She had decided that there was no hurry about “going in for human
souls” and consequently spent many hours in roaming through deep-chaired
hotel lounges, marble and wicker sun parlors, porches, pergolas, and
terraces; and in strolling along the hot sands or across lawns shaded by
flowering trees and edged with lotus pools. She also swam, played
tennis, and chatted _ad libitum_ with strangers.
On her return to Canada, under the escort of Keble, who had accepted her
invitation to come and fetch them, she was brimming over with ideas for
the embellishment of their projected home. Yet, though she knew Keble
was eager to have her offer suggestions, she deliberately held them
back. By declining to participate in it she would lessen its hold on
her. It should be his castle, not hers.