MISS FRAENKEL
I folded up the thin crackling sheets of paper and handed them to Bill,
who took them without comment, and for some time we sat rocking in the
twilight, absorbed in our own thoughts. It must not be imagined for a
moment that we, and least of all I, an experienced and professional
author, accepted this contribution to our investigations without
reserve. A lengthy apprenticeship to life warned us that "things do not
happen that way." But just for a few moments (and this was the cause of
our silence) we revelled in the delicious sensation of having beheld in
one of its most incredible gestures the long arm of coincidence. Swiftly
we sketched out the story. Eagle-faced adventurer--marries his
mistress--casts her off--leaves her penniless in New York--she
blackmails him--he grants her an income--agent in New York takes charge
of letters--yes, it hung together--it hung together, coincided!
Personally I was a little disappointed after the first flush of
excitement. I thought it a little melodramatic and I abhor melodrama. I
wanted something finer, something with a touch of great sentiment,
something commensurate with the beauty and dignity of the woman's bodily
frame, something that would explain and gild with delicate interest the
expression of sombre and uncommunicative melancholy that hung like a
cloud over her face. I felt reluctant to delve further into a history
that was footed upon so unsatisfactory a foundation as this enigmatic
creature who had blazed suddenly upon the painter-cousin's vision, a
mere spendthrift man of pleasure, inarticulate save in his startlingly
decadent behaviour. After all, what had he done, this fine gentleman
with an eagle face and iron will? Sold a few automobiles to the
aristocracy. Pooh! In America he would pass as a hustling business man
with unconventional ideas. In grey, feudal old London, no doubt, he
appeared as a meteoric genius, a veritable Napoleon of salesmanship, a
marvel. But here----!
"Well," I said, at length, "what do you think of it?"
Bill slipped out of her chair and prepared to go in and get the dinner
ready. We dine at six.
"I think," said she, "that there is nothing in it. It's hardly likely
that--well, is it?" she asked, vaguely.
"No," we agreed, "it isn't."
"Still," I added, "it is a most interesting commentary upon our own
little problem. It only shows how indefinitely one might extend the
ramifications of a trivial tale. Of course, the children believe
implicitly in the statement that he is at sea. If that be a legend, it
is clever. But then--it is impossible."
"It's not a common name," remarked Mac, filling his pipe.
"It's a very easily assumed one," I argued. "It's a name you can't argue
about. It might be Irish, French, Italian, Spanish or American. It
tells you nothing."
Bill paused at the door.
"I don't suppose he had anything to do with giving the children those
awful names," she suggested.
"Oh, as for that, I have known plenty of mothers who claim that right,"
I responded. "That does not amount to much. No. There are two points
that seem to me to invalidate the claim of this gentleman to any
connection with our neighbours, but that is not one of them."
"What are they?" inquired Mac. Bill opened the door and went in. I
cleared my throat.
"First," I said, "there is the entirely fanciful argument that such a
man as Cecil has described would not be attracted by such a woman
as--Mrs. Carville. I can't explain in so many words why I think so, but
I do. I don't believe she would attract him. If you consider a moment,
you will see it. The English gentleman of good family and birth, when he
has once broken out of his own social world, does not show much taste
and discrimination in the choice of a wife or mistress."
"Well," said Mac.
"Second, we have the incontestable fact that Benvenuto Cellini, though
sharing his illustrious brother's features and histrionic talent, has
blue eyes and fair hair. Where did he get them?"
"Something in that," my friend admitted, throwing his match into the
darkness. "We'll have to hunt round for a _tertium quid_, so to speak."
"You put it pithily," I asserted. "Personally I am coming to the
conclusion that Cecil's story, while certainly interesting in itself,
does not help us at all with our own difficulty. I am inclined to think
that he is of our nation and fair complexion. Really, when you reflect,
it is unjust to assume your _tertium quid_ and complicate the
story--yet. We have no actual evidence of her--obliquity."
"No," said Mac. "Let's wait."
"We must," I replied. "The children themselves will no doubt provide us
with plenty of food for conjecture if they go on as they have begun. We
are good friends now, they and I."
"You surpassed yourself as an Indian," he laughed.
"Hostile," I corrected. "Did you notice the realistic way in which
Giuseppe Mazzini fell?" He nodded.
"You'll have to be a cow-boy to-morrow," he remarked. "You might suggest
rounding up their confounded chickens and set them to repairing that
fence."
"I shall be a cow-boy with enthusiasm," I said. "Under my breast beats
an adventurous heart, believe me. As for the fence, I would rather not
get into trouble by interfering with their affairs."
"She didn't seem any too friendly."
"Hostile would describe it better."
"Still, if you could get a word with her, it might elucidate the
mystery?" "Yes," I said, as the gong tinkled within.
"Chop," said he, and we went in to dinner.
We had reached the cheese and celery before Bill contributed a piece of
news that impressed us in different ways.
"I 'phoned Miss Fraenkel this morning," she said, "and asked her to come
up after dinner this evening. She said she'd be tickled to death to
come."
I said nothing at first, and Mac, annexing an unusually large piece of
cheese, grinned.
"Say," he said, "suppose we get Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the chap with
the hooked nose. She's American; she'll be sure to have an opinion."
"No doubt," I conceded. "We shall see whether we have not taken too much
for granted. There's only one thing, and that is, are we not exposing
Miss Fraenkel to temptation by exciting her curiosity yet more about her
neighbour?"
"Oh, bunk!" said Mac. "Women don't have to be led into that sort of
temptation. They take it in with their mother's milk."
"You cynical old devil!" exclaimed Bill, indignantly.
"Well, it's true," he defended himself stoutly. "I'll bet you a quarter
Miss Fraenkel's already tried them and found them guilty."
"Of what?" demanded Bill.
"Oh, ask Miss Fraenkel," said he. "How should I know?"
"I think," I said, gently, "you are making a mistake. Consider! Miss
Fraenkel is no doubt interested in her neighbours, like any other woman.
But you make a big mistake if you imagine that ordinary people, people
who are not professionally concerned with human nature, are accustomed
to draw conclusions and observe character, as--as we do, for example. I
have always thought," I went on, stirring my coffee, "that Jane Austen
made this same mistake. She takes a small community, much like Netley,
N. J., and suggests, by the conversation of the characters, that they are
all as observant and as shrewd as herself. We feel it was not so. Nay,
we _know_ it was not so, for Jane's genius in that direction was almost
uncanny. Now there is, I am safe in saying, nothing uncanny about Miss
Fraenkel."
"She's very nice!" said Bill, nodding blithely at me over her cup.
I am loth to give any colour to the suspicion that I am about to confuse
my narrative with extraneous details; but I must confess that Bill's
laconic benison had for me a personal appeal. She was, I felt, entirely
and generously right. She had not overstepped the mark at all. Miss
Fraenkel _was_ very nice, but--it has nothing to do with my story. It is
a point of honour with me to put Miss Fraenkel in her place, if I may
express it so without discourtesy, and that place is certainly modest
and inconspicuous. Miss Fraenkel's light was very clear and very bright,
but illuminated only a small area. She wrote an admirable paper and read
it clearly and impressively at the Women's Club on "The Human Touch in
Ostrovsky." Indeed, for one who had read so little of Ostrovsky it was a
most creditable piece of work. It was in her estimate of the English
character that she was, I venture to think, less successful, more narrow
in fact. You see, she was naturally confused by two facts. In the first
place the similarity of the English and American languages seemed to her
to warrant a certain similitude between the two nations; and secondly,
her intimacy with the English people was practically confined to us
three, who had been in America nearly seven years, and who, in
consequence, had shrouded our more salient insularities beneath a cloak
of cosmopolitan aplomb. Neither our speech nor our outlook upon life
could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she
did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the
United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned
small-scale model of the United States.
We had first met her, not in New Jersey at all, but in New York. After
the earthquake, which I have mentioned as lifting us and many others
from more or less comfortable sockets in San Francisco and scattering us
over the Union, we found it a matter of some difficulty to rise to our
accustomed level in New York. It really seemed, what with the failure of
inspiration and our lack of suitable introductions, that the mighty
mill-stream of Manhattan would bear us away and fling us over the rocks
to destruction before we could ever get our heads above the surface.
Of those first days in East 118th Street none of us are disposed to
speak. We might have gone back to England--surely so dire a calamity,
so utter a personal ruin, justified a relinquishment of our purpose.
But we had not gone anyway. We could not contemplate the solicitous
sympathy of friends who disliked America, who had protested against our
emigration in the first place. We did not dislike America, nor did we
blame her for our misfortunes. Our friends, even the painter-cousin,
could not understand that we did not dislike America. They were misled
by our occasional and quite natural sighs for a sight of the quiet
English landscape, and our joking remarks about the customs regulations.
So we stayed and fought, with our backs to the not over-clean walls of
118th Street. It was slow progress from 118th to 18th Street and from
there to a real flat in Lexington Avenue, where it so happened that Miss
Fraenkel had, and still has, a married sister. Bill and the married
sister became warm friends, discovering in each other a common dislike
of pink, and it was she who introduced us formally; though in a casual
way Miss Fraenkel and I met occasionally on the stairs. And so it came
about that when we felt able to abandon Lexington Avenue, in favour of a
purer air and water supply, Miss Fraenkel chanted the praises of her own
Netley in the Garden State, and Bill, journeying thither to spy out the
land, returned an hour late for dinner, and incoherent with
horticultural details.
It will be seen that though undoubtedly competent to criticize Ostrovsky
or Mrs. Carville _per se_, Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the
painter-cousin's discovery would be interesting only for its novelty
and irrelevance. I did not express my conviction quite as frankly as
this, since my friend, though in sympathy with his wife's matrimonial
plans, could not forbear to indulge in a mild hazing at my expense. I
contented myself with opening the piano and pushing him into the seat.
It is our custom to have music after dinner.
Only those who have written verse professionally can realize the extent
to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties
of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such
problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend
opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at
this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that
prodigious composition, the Overture to _Tannhaeuser_, I gave myself up
to an unfettered consideration of the mystery of life and the complexity
of our multitudinous contacts with one another. It is not enough, I
reflected, to say that we make and pass. We make and remake, we pass
and, pausing on the brink of oblivion, return to spoil our first fine
careless raptures. We make and pass; but the early dawn of our making is
reddened by the sunset of another's decline. We are agitated by the
originality of our ideas, unaware that they are born simultaneously in a
thousand minds, and are woven into the texture of our time-spirit in a
thousand-times-repeated design. Von Roon, in Chelsea, used to say that
"a man's mind was like a chamber papered with used postage stamps.
Examine them separately and they were of no value; they were merely
cancelled symbols of forgotten messages. View them as a whole and they
formed an interesting and confusing composition." Time, and our
proximity to other cancelled symbols is no guarantee of interior
understanding. The Great Decorator has arranged us without regard for
our individual merits or past intrinsic values, we are but points of
colour in his immense and arbitrary arrangement. I was following up this
thought, when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim that serves us for a knocker
was vigorously sounded, and I sprang to open the door to Miss Fraenkel.
She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.
"Three times," she declared as I assisted her to remove her jacket. "But
I forgive you if you'll only play that won--derful thing again!"
In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and
situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette.
By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her
skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a
delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her
enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused.
To us cold Britons the _abandon_ with which she, in common with her
countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a
landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating
spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age
they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a
sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates
from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover,
a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a
false estimate of their intellectual range.
It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the
subject which we three at any rate had at heart. Explosive cries of
delight over Mac's last etching, Bill's new waist and a Chinese print I
had recently acquired, were a matter of course. In deference to an
unuttered request we adjourned to the studio upstairs, for Miss Fraenkel
had been from the first candidly attracted by the suggestion of
bohemianism in our _menage_. It was not her romantic view of an artist's
life, however, that distinguished her from any other young and romantic
lady, but her frankness and eloquence in acknowledging it. "It must be
grand," she had told me in Lexington Avenue, "to be a _grisette_." We
had admitted that it must, but had been unable to share her regret that
she had not been a man "so that she could see _everything_." She was
very charming as she was.
Of course she knew of the painter-cousin and indeed, as soon as she
could think of it, gave us the needed opening.
"I saw a letter with an English postmark for you," she observed,
examining the bottom of a piece of china that rested near her shoulder.
"Did you get it?"
"We want you to give us an opinion about it, Miss Fraenkel," said Bill,
bringing out the letter and giving it to her. She accepted the packet in
some uncertainty.
"I!" she said, "give an opinion? I don't get it, I'm afraid."
"Read it," said Bill.
And she did. We sat round her, as she sat on the broad flat box that Mac
called a "throne," in a semicircle, and studied the varying expressions
that crossed her face as her eyes travelled down the pages. It occurred
to me after I had retired to my room that night, that an English girl of
twenty-one would not have weathered the concentrated gaze of three
strangers with such serenity of features. An observant and invisible
critic might have imagined us to have been awaiting the decision of a
young and charming Sibyl, so intently did we gaze and so neglectful was
she of our regard. This apparent coldness was explained to me by Bill as
a characteristic of the American woman. "They like to be admired," she
told me. "And so they don't mind if you do stare at them."
Miss Fraenkel looked up with a smile of comprehension.
"What a perfectly lovely letter!" she exclaimed.
Bill took the sheets and thrust them into the envelope.
"He must be a very interesting man, don't you think?"
"Surely! Oh, I should give anything to see his home. You've described it
to me, so I know all about it. Gainsborough landscape, and red tiles on
the cottages!" She clasped her hands.
"I mean the man my cousin met," said Bill, gently. "Carville."
"Oh, him!" Miss Fraenkel looked at each of us for an instant to catch
some inkling of our behaviour.
"Same name as----" and Mac jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
Miss Fraenkel's face did not clear.
"We thought," I said heavily, "that this man in England, you know, might
have----" I stopped, dismayed by her lack of appreciation. She seemed
unable to grasp the simple links of our brilliant theory. We had omitted
to calculate upon the indifference of the modern American temperament to
names. A foul murder had been committed a short time back by a gambler
named Fraenkel, yet she would have laughed at the suggestion that such a
coincidence should cause her any annoyance.
"I don't get it," she said, smiling, and we saw plainly enough that she
did not get it. We were crushed. I explained in more detail the reason
for which we had ventured to connect the two stories. We could see her
trying to understand.
"You mean--just as if it was a photo-play," she faltered.
It does not matter now, and I admit that this put me out of humour. And
yet it was true. We were really no nearer an actual and _bona fide_
solution of Mrs. Carville's story than if we had simply tried to make,
as Miss Fraenkel said, a photo-play. The others laughed at my downcast
countenance.
"Well," I said, "you said Miss Fraenkel had tried them and found them
guilty, Mac."
"What I meant was, Miss Fraenkel had formed her own opinion of the
business."
"Yes," she said, "I have."
"Now we shall hear something," chirped Bill.
"Listen," said Miss Fraenkel. "It's very likely an assumed name."
It was our turn to look bewildered.
"Yes?" said Bill. "What then?"
"And----" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as
though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp.
"And--oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with
it, you see."
Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our
minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine
just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country
were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at
once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be
a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us,
as pleased as a child at the success of her manoeuvre.
"Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her glasses, "how do you know?"
"I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you."
And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes.
We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the
subject, for it was plain that when it came to making photo-plays we
held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and
could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To
argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she
was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the
Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe
as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay.
Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle
was picking a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, rubbish that might
possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege.
The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not
only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to
go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to
the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining
like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that
are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to
her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had
forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we
mentioned it, she would not refer to it again.