I
HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one--the end of a lifelong fraud which
never had been suspected, and never would be. With the world, with his
acquaintances and neighbors, with his wife and son and daughter, he
passed as a generous, warm-hearted, good-natured man, ready at all
times to do anything to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or
meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever thought or
done a single thing except for his own comfort. Like all intensely
selfish people who are wise, he was cheerful and amiable, because that
was the way to be healthy and happy and to have those around one
agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished them to do. He told
people, not the truth, not the unpleasant thing that might help them,
but what they wished to hear. His family lived in luxurious comfort
only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort. His wife and his
daughter dressed fashionably and went about and entertained in the
fashionable, expensive way only because that was the sort of life that
gratified his vanity. He lived to get what he wanted; he got it every
day and every hour of a life into which no rain ever fell; he died,
honored, respected, beloved, and lamented.
The clever trick he had played upon his fellow beings came very near to
discovery a few days after his death. His widow and her son and
daughter-in-law and daughter were in the living-room of the charming
house at Hanging Rock, near New York, alternating between sorrowings
over the dead man and plannings for the future. Said the widow:
"If Henry had only thought what would become of us if he were taken
away!"
"If he had saved even a small part of what he made every year from the
time he was twenty-six--for he always made a big income," said his son,
Frank.
"But he was so generous, so soft-hearted!" exclaimed the widow. "He
could deny us nothing."
"He couldn't bear seeing us with the slightest wish ungratified," said
Frank.
"He was the best father that ever lived!" cried the daughter, Mildred.
And Mrs. Gower the elder and Mrs. Gower the younger wept; and Mildred
turned away to hide the emotion distorting her face; and Frank stared
gloomily at the carpet and sighed. The hideous secret of the life of
duplicity was safe, safe forever.
In fact, Henry Gower had often thought of the fate of his family if he
should die. In the first year of his married life, at a time when
passion for a beautiful bride was almost sweeping him into generous
thought, he had listened for upward of an hour to the eloquence of a
life insurance agent. Then the agent, misled by Gower's effusively
generous and unselfish expressions, had taken a false tack. He had
descanted upon the supreme satisfaction that would be felt by a dying
man as he reflected how his young widow would be left in affluence. He
made a vivid picture; Gower saw--saw his bride happier after his death
than she had been during his life, and attracting a swarm of admirers
by her beauty, well set off in becoming black, and by her independent
income. The generous impulse then and there shriveled to its weak and
shallow roots. With tears in his kind, clear eyes he thanked the agent
and said:
"You have convinced me. You need say no more. I'll send for you in a
few days."
The agent never got into his presence again. Gower lived up to his
income, secure in the knowledge that his ability as a lawyer made him
certain of plenty of money as long as he should live. But it would
show an utter lack of comprehension of his peculiar species of
character to imagine that he let himself into the secret of his own
icy-heartedness by ceasing to think of the problem of his wife and two
children without him to take care of them. On the contrary, he thought
of it every day, and planned what he would do about it--to-morrow. And
for his delay he had excellent convincing excuses. Did he not take
care of his naturally robust health? Would he not certainly outlive
his wife, who was always doctoring more or less? Frank would be able to
take care of himself; anyhow, it was not well to bring a boy up to
expectations, because every man should be self-supporting and
self-reliant. As for Mildred, why, with her beauty and her cleverness
she could not but make a brilliant marriage. Really, there was for him
no problem of an orphaned family's future; there was no reason why he
should deny himself any comfort or luxury, or his vanity any of the
titillations that come from social display.
That one of his calculations which was the most vital and seemed the
surest proved to be worthless. It is not the weaklings who die, after
infancy and youth, but the strong, healthy men and women. The
weaklings have to look out for themselves, receive ample warning in the
disastrous obvious effects of the slightest imprudence. The robust,
even the wariest of them, even the Henry Gowers, overestimate and
overtax their strength. Gower's downfall was champagne. He could not
resist a bottle of it for dinner every night. As so often happens, the
collapse of the kidneys came without any warning that a man of powerful
constitution would deem worthy of notice. By the time the doctor began
to suspect the gravity of his trouble he was too far gone.
Frank, candidly greedy and selfish--"Such a contrast to his father!"
everyone said--was married to the prettiest girl in Hanging Rock and
had a satisfactory law practice in New York. His income was about
fifteen thousand a year. But his wife had tastes as extravagant as his
own; and Hanging Rock is one of those suburbs of New York where gather
well-to-do middle-class people to live luxuriously and to delude each
other and themselves with the notion that they are fashionable, rich
New Yorkers who prefer to live in the country "like the English." Thus,
Henry Gower's widow and daughter could count on little help from
Frank--and they knew it.
"You and Milly will have to move to some less expensive place than
Hanging Rock," said Frank--it was the living-room conference a few days
after the funeral.
Mildred flushed and her eyes flashed. She opened her lips to
speak--closed them again with the angry retort unuttered. After all,
Frank was her mother's and her sole dependence. They could hope for
little from him, but nothing must be said that would give him and his
mean, selfish wife a chance to break with them and refuse to do
anything whatever.
"And Mildred must get married," said Natalie. In Hanging Rock most of
the girls and many of the boys had given names taken from Burke's
Peerage, the Almanac de Gotha, and fashionable novels.
Again Mildred flushed; but her eyes did not flash, neither did she open
her lips to speak. The little remark of her sister-in-law, apparently
so harmless and sensible, was in fact a poisoned arrow. For Mildred
was twenty-three, had been "out" five years, and was not even in the
way to become engaged. She and everyone had assumed from her lovely
babyhood that she would marry splendidly, would marry wealth and social
position. How could it be otherwise? Had she not beauty? Had she not
family and position? Had she not style and cleverness? Yet--five
years out and not a "serious" proposal. An impudent poor fellow with
no prospects had asked her. An impudent rich man from fashionable New
York had hung after her--and had presently abandoned whatever dark
projects he may have been concealing and had married in his own set,
"as they always do, the miserable snobs," raved Mrs. Gower, who had
been building high upon those lavish outpourings of candy, flowers, and
automobile rides. Mildred, however, had accepted the defection more
philosophically. She had had enough vanity to like the attentions of
the rich and fashionable New Yorker, enough good sense to suspect,
perhaps not definitely, what those attentions meant, but certainly what
they did not mean. Also, in the back of her head had been an intention
to refuse Stanley Baird, if by chance he should ask her. Was there any
substance to this intention, sprung from her disliking the conceited,
self-assured snob as much as she liked his wealth and station? Perhaps
not. Who can say? At any rate, may we not claim credit for our good
intentions--so long as, even through lack of opportunity, we have not
stultified them?
With every natural advantage apparently, Mildred's failure to catch a
husband seemed to be somehow her own fault. Other girls, less endowed
than she, were marrying, were marrying fairly well. Why, then, was
Mildred lagging in the market?
There may have been other reasons, reasons of accident--for, in the
higher class matrimonial market, few are called and fewer chosen. There
was one reason not accidental; Hanging Rock was no place for a girl so
superior as was Mildred Gower to find a fitting husband. As has been
hinted, Hanging Rock was one of those upper-middle-class colonies where
splurge and social ambition dominate the community life. In such
colonies the young men are of two classes--those beneath such a girl as
Mildred, and those who had the looks, the manners, the intelligence,
and the prospects to justify them in looking higher socially--in
looking among the very rich and really fashionable. In the Hanging
Rock sort of community, having all the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue,
Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the
snobbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities,
beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a
coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for
display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst. No one can
live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming
saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some impossible combination
of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a young man who would
have appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of his appreciation.
This combination did not happen. In Mildred's generation and set there
were only the two classes of men noted above. The men of the one of
them which could not have attracted her accepted their fate of mating
with second-choice females to whom they were themselves second choice.
The men of the other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions,
hung about the rich people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island,
and would as soon have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to
wife as of exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces.
Having attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them
there. Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was
virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we human creatures
being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice or
weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with it.
But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban
society were approved, were envied. And Hanging Rock was most gracious
to them whenever it got the chance.
In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various
classes of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who are
full of the poison of snobbishness. She had been born and bred in an
environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a
kitchen-garden with onions. She knew nothing else. The secret
intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the
more astonishing--and the more significant. From time to time in any
given environment you will find some isolated person, some personality,
with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft
voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life
of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known
nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty
conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you
come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an
existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In
spite of her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all
about her from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world,
Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained something of these dream
flowers sown in the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or
play or perhaps by some casually read and soon forgotten article in
magazine or newspaper. We have the habit of thinking only weeds
produce seeds that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere. The
truth is that fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of
rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity. Pull
away at the weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not
so. Though you may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if
you but clear a little space of its weeds--which you have been planting
and cultivating.
Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she had
not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including herself,
predicted for her and expected of her. On the contrary, it was the
most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying men
who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and
mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take
what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their
snobbishness ordered. And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a
flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so
profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the
Countess of Waring-- But he was profoundly afraid of them; so, it is
idle to speculate about him.
What did men see when they looked at Mildred Gower? Usually, when men
look at a woman, they have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense
of something feminine. That, and nothing more. Afterward, through
some whim or some thrust from chance they may see in her, or fancy they
see in her, the thing feminine that their souls--it is always
"soul"--most yearns after. But just at first glance, so colorless or
conventionally colored is the usual human being, the average
woman--indeed every woman but she who is exceptional--creates upon man
the mere impression of pleasant or unpleasant petticoats. In the
exceptional woman something obtrudes. She has astonishing hair, or
extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a man like a magnet;
or it is the allure of a peculiar smile or of a figure whose
sinuosities as she moves seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance
in masculine nerves. Further, the possession of one of these signal
charms usually causes all her charms to have more than ordinary
potency. The sight of the man is so bewitched by the one potent charm
that he sees the whole woman under a spell.
Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a slender and well-formed
figure, had a face of the kind that is called lovely; and her smile,
sweet, dreamy, revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness
delicate animation. She had an abundance of hair, neither light nor
dark; she had a fine clear skin. Her eyes, gray and rather serious and
well set under long straight brows, gave her a look of honesty and
intelligence. But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her
mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly
healthy and vital red. She had beauty, she had intelligence. But it
was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been
caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh,
with their ever-changing, ever-fascinating line expressing in a
thousand ways the passion and poetry of the kiss.
Of all the men who had admired her and had edged away because they
feared she would bewitch them into forgetting what the world calls
"good common sense"--of all those men only one had suspected the real
reason for her physical power over men. All but Stanley Baird had
thought themselves attracted because she was so pretty or so stylish or
so clever and amusing to talk with. Baird had lived intelligently
enough to learn that feminine charm is never general, is always
specific. He knew it was Mildred Gower's lips that haunted, that
frightened ambitious men away, that sent men who knew they hadn't a
ghost of a chance with her discontentedly back to the second-choice
women who alone were available for them. Fortunately for Mildred,
Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter a woman discriminatingly, did not
tell her the secret of her fascination. If he had told her, she would
no doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would inevitably
have lost it.
To go on with that important conference in the sitting-room in the
handsome, roomy house of the Gowers at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower
eagerly seized upon his wife's subtly nasty remark. "I don't see why
in thunder you haven't married, Milly," said he. "You've had every
chance, these last four or five years."
"And it'll be harder now," moaned her mother. "For it looks as though
we were going to be wretchedly poor. And poverty is so repulsive."
"Do you think," said Mildred, "that giving me the idea that I must
marry right away will make it easier for me to marry? Everyone who
knows us knows our circumstances." She looked significantly at Frank's
wife, who had been wailing through Hanging Rock the woeful plight of
her dead father-in-law's family. The young Mrs. Gower blushed and
glanced away. "And," Mildred went on, "everyone is saying that I must
marry at once--that there's nothing else for me to do." She smiled
bitterly. "When I go into the street again I shall see nothing but
flying men. And no man would come to call unless he brought a chaperon
and a witness with him."
"How can you be so frivolous?" reproached her mother.
Mildred was used to being misunderstood by her mother, who had long
since been made hopelessly dull by the suffocating life she led and by
pain from her feet, which never left her at ease for a moment except
when she had them soaking in cold water. Mrs. Gower had been born with
ordinary feet, neither ugly nor pretty and entirely fit for the uses
for which nature intended feet. She had spoiled them by wearing shoes
to make them look smaller and slimmer than they were. In steady weather
she was plaintive; in changeable weather she varied between irritable
and violent.