his visits, I have simply to say that I don't know. When it comes to
what a woman will "receive" in such cases, the ground she walks on is
very uncertain to her own feet. It may be that the one thing she
forever craves and forever fears not to get is absolute certainty,
certainty that some day love for her will not be over, everything be
not ended she knows not why. Dr. Mullen's love is pitiful, and as
long as a man's love is pitiful at least a woman can be sure of it.
Therefore he is irresistible--as my guest!
The roses are glorious. I bury my face in them down to the thorns.
And then I come over and sign my name as the indispensable
POLLY BOLES.
POLLY BOLES TO TILLY SNOWDEN
_June 6._
DEAR TILLY:
I have had a note from Beverley, asking whether he could come this
evening. I have written that I have an appointment, but I did not
enlighten him as to the appointment being with you. Why not let him
suffer awhile? I will explain afterwards. I told him that I could
perhaps arrange to divide the evening; would you mind? And would you
mind coming early? I will do as much for you some time, and _I
suspect I couldn't do more_!
P.S.--Rather than come for the first half of the evening perhaps you
would prefer to _postpone_ your visit _altogether_. It would suit me
just as well; _better_ in fact. There really was something very
_particular_, Tilly dear, that I wanted to talk to Ben about to-night.
I shall not look for you at all _this_ evening, _best_ of friends.
POLLY BOLES.
TILLY SNOWDEN TO POLLY BOLES
_June 6._
DEAR POLLY:
The very particular something to talk to Ben about to-night is the
identical something for every other night. And nothing could be more
characteristic of you, as soon as you heard that my visit would clash
with one of his, than your eagerness to push me partly out of the
house in a hurried letter and then push me completely out in a quiet
postscript. Being a woman, I understand your temptation and your
tactics. I fully sympathise with you.
Continue in ease of mind, my most trusted intimate. I shall not drop
in to interrupt you and Ben--both not so young as you once were and
both getting stout--heavy Polly, heavy Ben--as you sit side by side
in your little Franklin Flat parlour. That parlour always suggests
to me an enormous turnip hollowed out square: with no windows; with a
hole on one side to come in and a hole on the other side to go out;
upholstered in enormous bunches of beets and horse-radish, and
lighted with a wilted electric sunflower. There you two will sit
to-night, heavy Polly, heavy Ben, suffocating for fresh air and
murmuring to each other as you have murmured for years:
"I do! I do!"
"I do! I do!"
One sentence in your letter, Polly dear, takes your photograph like a
camera; the result is a striking likeness. That sentence is this:
"Why not let him suffer awhile? I will explain afterwards."
That is exactly what you will do, what you would always do: explain
afterwards. In other words, you plot to make Ben jealous but fear to
make him too jealous lest he desert you. If on the evening of this
visit you should forget "to explain," and if during the night you
should remember, you would, if need were, walk barefoot through the
streets in your nightgown and tap on his window-shutter, if you could
reach it, and say: "Ben, that appointment wasn't with any other man;
it was with Tilly. I could not sleep until I had told you!"
That is, you have already disposed of yourself, breath and soul, to
Ben; and while you are waiting for the marriage ceremony, you have
espoused in his behalf what you consider your best and strongest
trait--loyalty. Under the goadings of this vampire trait you will, a
few years after marriage, have devoured all there is of Ben alive and
will have taken your seat beside what are virtually his bones. As
the years pass, the more ravenously you will preside over the bones.
Never shall the world say that Polly Boles was disloyal to whatever
was left of her dear Ben Doolittle!
_Your loyalty_! I believe the first I saw of it was years ago one
night in Louisville when you and I were planning to come to New York
to live. Naturally we were much concerned by the difficulties of
choosing our respective New York residences and we had written on and
had received thumb-nailed libraries of romance about different
places. As you looked over the recommendations of each, you came
upon one called The Franklin Flats. The circular contained
appropriate quotations from Poor Richard's Almanac. I remember how
your face brightened as you said: "This ought to be the very thing."
One of the quotations on the circular ran somewhat thus: "Beware of
meat twice boiled"; and you said in consequence: "So they must have a
good restaurant!"
In other words, you believed that a house named after Franklin could
but resemble Franklin. A building put up in New York by a Tammany
contractor, if named after Benjamin Franklin and advertised with
quotations from Franklin's works, would embody the traits of that
remote national hero! To your mind--not to your imagination, for you
haven't any--to your mind, and you have a great deal of mind, the
bell-boys, the superintendent, the scrub woman, the chambermaids, the
flunkied knave who stands at the front door--all these were loyally
congregated as about a beloved mausoleum. You are still in the
Franklin Flats! I know what you have long suffered there; but move
away! Not Polly Boles. She will be loyal to the building as long as
the building stands by the contractor and the contractor stands by
profits and losses.
While on the subject of loyalty, not your loyalty but woman's
loyalty, I mean to finish with it. And I shall go on to say that
occasionally I have sat behind a plate-glass window in some Fifth
Avenue shop and have studied woman's organised loyalty, unionised
loyalty, standardised loyalty. This takes effect in those
processions that now and then sweep up the Avenue as though they were
Crusaders to the Holy Sepulchre. The marchers try first not to look
self-conscious; all try, secondly, to look devoted to "the cause."
But beneath all other expressions and differences of expression I
have always seen one reigning look as plainly as though it were
printed in enormous letters on a banner flying over their heads:
"Strictly Monogamous Women."
At such times I have felt a wild desire, when I should hear of the
next parade, to organise a company of unenthralled young girls who
with unfettered natures and unfettered features should tramp up the
Avenue under their own colours. If the women before them--those
loyal ones--would actually carry, as they should, a banner with the
legend I have described, then my company of girls should unfurl to
the breeze their flag with the truth blazoned on it:
"Not Necessarily Monogamous!"
The honest human crowd, watching and applauding us, would pack the
Avenue from sidewalks to roofs.
Between you and me everything seems to be summed up in one
difference: all my life I have wanted to go barefoot and all your
life, no matter what the weather, you have been solicitous to put on
goloshes.
My very nature is rooted in rebellion that in a world alive and
running over with irresistible people, a woman must be doomed to find
her chief happiness in just one! The heart going out to so many in
succession, and the hand held by one; year after year your hand held
by the first man who impulsively got possession of it. Every
instinct of my nature would be to jerk my hand away and be free! To
give it again and again.
This subject weighs crushingly on me as I struggle with this letter
because I have tidings for you about myself. I am to write words
which I have long doubted I should ever write, life's most iron-bound
words. Polly, I suppose I am going to be married at last. Of course
it is Beverley. Not without waverings, not without misgivings. But
I'd feel those, be the man whoever he might. Why I feel thus I do
not know, but I know I feel. I tell you this first because it was
you who brought Beverley and me together, who have always believed in
his career. (Though I think that of late you have believed more in
him and less in me.) I, too, am beginning to believe in his career.
He has lately ascertained that his work is making a splendid
impression in England. If he succeeds in England, he will succeed in
this country. He has received an invitation to visit some delightful
and very influential people in England and "to bring me along!"
Think of anybody bringing _me_ along! If we should be entertained by
these people [they are the Blackthornes], such is English social
life, that we should also get to know the white Thornes and the red
Thornes--the whole social forest. The iron rule of my childhood was
economy; and the influence of that iron rule over me is inexorable
still: I cannot even contemplate such prodigal wastage in life as not
to accept this invitation and gather in its wealth of consequences.
More news of me, very, very important: _at last_ I have made the
acquaintance of George Marigold. I have become one of his patients.
Beverley is furious. I enclose a letter from him. You need not
return it. I shall not answer it. I shall leave things to his
imagination and his imagination will give him no rest.
If Ben hurled at _you_ a jealous letter about Dr. Mullen, you would
immediately write to remove his jealousy. You would even ridicule
Dr. Mullen to win greater favour in Ben's eyes. That is, you would
do an abominable thing, never doubting that Ben would admire you the
more. And you would be right; for as Ben observed you tear Dr.
Mullen to pieces to feed his vanity, he would lean back in his chair
and chuckle within himself: "Glorious, staunch old Polly!"
And what you would do in this instance you will do all your life: you
will practise disloyalty to every other human being, as in this
letter you have practised it with me, for the sake of loyalty to Ben:
your most pronounced, most horrible trait.
TILLY SNOWDEN.
POLLY BOLES TO TILLY SNOWDEN
_June 7._
DEAR TILLY:
I return Beverley's letter. Without comment, since I did not read
it. You know how I love Beverley, respect him, believe in him. I
have a feeling for him unlike that for any other human being, not
even Ben; I look upon him as set apart and sacred because he has
genius and belongs to the world.
As for his faults, those that I have not already noticed I prefer to
find out for myself. I have never cared to discover any human
being's failings through a third person. Instead of getting
acquainted with the pardonable traits of the abused, I might really
be introduced to the _abominable traits of the abuser_.
_Once more_, you think you are going to marry Beverley! I shall
reserve my congratulations for the _event itself_.
Thank you for surrendering your claim on my friendship and society
last night. Ben and I had a most satisfactory evening, and when not
suffocating we murmured "I do" to our hearts' content.
Next time, should your visits clash, I'll push _him_ out. Yet I feel
in honour bound to say that this is only my present state of mind. I
might weaken at the last moment--even in the Franklin Flats.
As to some things in your letter, I have long since learned not to
bestow too much attention upon anything you say. You court a kind of
irresponsibility in language. With your inborn and over-indulged
willfulness you love to break through the actual and to revel in the
imaginary. I have become rather used to this as one of your growing
traits and I am therefore not surprised that in this letter you say
things which, if seriously spoken, would insult your sex and would
make them recoil from you--or make them wish to burn you at the
stake. When you march up Fifth Avenue with your company of girls in
that kind of procession, there will not be any Fifth Avenue: you will
be tramping through the slums where you belong.
All this, I repeat, is merely your way--to take things out in
talking. But we can make words our playthings in life's shallows
until words wreck us as their playthings in life's deeps.
Still, in return for your compliments to me, _which, of course, you
really mean_, I paid you one the other night when thinking of you
quite by myself. It was this: nature seems to leave something out of
each of us, but we presently discover that she perversely put it
where it does not belong.
What she left out of you, my dear, was the domestic tea-kettle.
There isn't even any place for one. But she made up for lack of the
kettle _by rather overdoing the stove_!
Your _discreet_ friend,
POLLY BOLES.
BEVERLEY SANDS TO PHILLIPS & FAULDS
_Cathedral Heights, New York,
June 7, 1900._
GENTLEMEN:
A former customer of yours, Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, has suggested
your firm as reliable agents to carry out an important commission,
which I herewith describe:
I enclose a list of Kentucky ferns. I desire you to make a
collection of these ferns and to ship them, expenses prepaid, to
Edward Blackthorne, Esquire, King Alfred's Wood, Warwickshire,
England. The cost is not to exceed twenty-five dollars. To furnish
you the needed guarantee, as well as to avoid unnecessary
correspondence, I herewith enclose, payable to your order, my check
for that amount.
Will you let me have a prompt reply, stating whether you will
undertake this commission and see it through?
Very truly yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS.
PHILLIPS & FAULDS TO BEVERLEY SANDS
_Louisville, Ky.,
June 10, 1900._
DEAR SIR:
Your valued letter with check for $25 received. We handle most of
the ferns on the list, and know the others and can easily get them.
You may rely upon your valued order receiving the best attention.
Thanking you for the same,
Yours very truly,
PHILLIPS & FAULDS.
BEVERLEY SANDS TO EDWARD BLACKTHORNE
_Cathedral Heights, New York,
June 15, 1910._
MY DEAR MR. BLACKTHORNE:
Your second letter came into the port of my life like an argosy from
a rich land. I think you must have sent it with some remembrance of
your own youth, or out of your mature knowledge of youth itself; how
too often it walks the shore of its rocky world, cutting its bare
feet on sharp stones, as it strains its eyes toward things far beyond
its horizon but not beyond its faith and hope. Some day its ship
comes in and it sets sail toward the distant ideal. How much the
opening of the door of your friendship, of your life, means to me! A
new consecration envelops the world that I am to be the guest of a
great man. If words do not say more, it is because words say so
little.
Delay has been unavoidable in any mere formal acknowledgment of your
letter. You spoke in it of the hinges of a book. My silence has
been due to the arrangement of hinges for the shipment of the ferns.
I wished to insure their safe transoceanic passage and some inquiries
had to be made in Kentucky.
You may rely upon it that the matter will receive the best attention.
In good time the ferns, having reached the end of their journey, will
find themselves put down in your garden as helpless immigrants. From
what outlook I can obtain upon the scene of their reception, they
should lack only hands to reach confidingly to you and lack only feet
to run with all their might away from Hodge.
I acknowledge--with the utmost thanks--the unusual and beautiful
courtesy of Mrs. Blackthorne's and your invitation to my wife, if I
have one, and to me. It is the dilemma of my life, at the age of
twenty-seven, to be obliged to say that such a being as Mrs. Sands
exists, but that nevertheless there is no such person.
Can you imagine a man's stretching out his hand to pluck a peach and
just before he touched the peach, finding only the bough of the tree?
Then, as from disappointment he was about to break off the offensive
bough, seeing again the dangling peach? Can you imagine this
situation to be of long continuance, during which he could neither
take hold of the peach nor let go of the tree--nor go away? If you
can, you will understand what I mean when I say that my bride
persists in remaining unwed and I persist in wooing. I do not know
why; she protests that she does not know; but we do know that life is
short, love shorter, that time flies, and we are not husband and wife.
If she remains undecided when Summer returns, I hope Mrs. Blackthorne
and you will let me come alone.
Thus I can thank you with certainty for one with the hope that I may
yet thank you for two.
I am,
Sincerely yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS.
P.S.--Can you pardon the informality of a postscript?
As far as I can see clearly into a cloudy situation, marriage is
denied me on account of the whole unhappy history of woman--which is
pretty hard. But a good many American ladies--the one I woo among
them--are indignant just now that they are being crowded out of their
destinies by husbands--or even possibly by bachelors. These ladies
deliver lectures to one another with discontented eloquence and rouse
their auditresses to feministic frenzy by reminding them that for
ages woman has walked in the shadow of man and that the time has come
for the worm [the woman] to turn on the shadow or to crawl out of it.
My dear Mr. Blackthorne, I need hardly say that the only two shadows
I could ever think of casting on the woman I married would be that of
my umbrella whenever it rained, and that of her parasol whenever the
sun shone. But I do maintain that if there is not enough sunshine
for the men and women in the world, if there has to be some casting
of shadows in the competition and the crowding, I do maintain that
the casting of the shadow would better be left to the man. He has
had long training, terrific experience, in this mortal business of
casting the shadow, has learned how to moderate it and to hold it
steady! The woman at least knows where it is to be found, should she
wish to avail herself of it. But what would be the state of a man in
his need of his spouse's penumbra? He would be out of breath with
running to keep up with the penumbra or to find where it was for the
time being!
I have seen some of these husbands who live--or have gradually died
out--in the shadow of their wives; they are nature's subdued farewell
to men and gentlemen.
DIARY OF BEVERLEY SANDS
_June 16._
A remarkable thing has lately happened to me.
One of my Kentucky novels, upon being republished in London some
months ago, fell into the hands of a sympathetic reviewer. This
critic's praise later made its way to the stately library of Edward
Blackthorne. What especially induced the latter to read the book, I
infer, were lines quoted by the reviewer from my description of a
woodland scene with ferns in it: the mighty novelist, as it happens,
is himself interested in ferns. He consequently wrote to some other
English authors and critics, calling attention to my work, and he
sent a letter to me, asking for some ferns for his garden.
This recognition in England hilariously affected my friends over
here. Tilly, whose mind suggests to me a delicately poised pair of
golden balances for weighing delight against delight (always her most
vital affair), when this honour for me fell into the scales, found
them inclined in my favour. If it be true, as I have often thought,
that she has long been holding on to me merely until she could take
sure hold of someone else of more splendid worldly consequence, she
suddenly at least tightened her temporary grasp. Polly, good, solid
Polly, wholesome and dependable as a well-browned whole-wheat baker's
loaf weighing a hundred and sixty pounds, when she heard of it, gave
me a Bohemian supper in her Franklin Flat parlour, inviting only a
few undersized people, inasmuch as she and Ben, the chief personages
of the entertainment, took up most of the room. We were so packed
in, that literally it was a night in Bohemia _aux sardines_.
Since the good news from England came over, Ben, with his big, round,
clean-shaven, ruddy face and short, reddish curly hair, which makes
him look like a thirty-five-year-old Bacchus who had never drunk a
drop--even Ben has beamed on me like a mellower orb. He is as
ashamed as ever of my books, but is beginning to feel proud that so
many more people are being fooled by them. Several times lately I
have caught his eyes resting on me with an expression of affectionate
doubt as to whether after all he might be mistaken in not having
thought more of me. But he dies hard. My publisher, who is a human
refrigerator containing a mental thermometer, which rises or falls
toward like or dislike over a background for book-sales, got wind of
the matter and promptly invited me to one of his thermometric
club-lunches--always an occasion for acute gastritis.
Rumour of my fame has permeated my club, where, of course, the
leading English reviews are kept on file. Some of the members must
have seen the favourable criticisms. One night I became aware as I
passed through the rooms that club heroes seated here and there threw
glances of fresh interest toward me and exchanged auspicious words.
The president--who for so long a time has styled himself the Nestor
of the club that he now believes it is the members who do this, the
garrulous old president, whose weaknesses have made holes in him
through which his virtues sometimes leak out and get away, met me
under the main chandelier and congratulated me in tones so
intentionally audible that they violated the rules but were not
punishable under his personal privileges.
There was a sinister incident: two members whom Ben and I wish to
kick because they have had the audacity to make the acquaintance of
Tilly and Polly, and whom we despise also because they are
fashionable charlatans in their profession--these two with dark looks
saw the president congratulate me.
More good fortune yet to come! The ferns which I am sending Mr.
Blackthorne will soon be growing in his garden. The illustrious man
has many visitors; he leads them, if he likes, to his fern bank.
"These," he will some day say, "came from Christine Nilsson. These
are from Barbizon in memory of Corot. These were sent me by
Turgenieff. And these," he will add, turning to his guests, "these
came from a young American novelist, a Kentuckian, whose work I
greatly respect: you must read his books." The guests separate to
their homes to pursue the subject. Spreading fame--may it spread!
Last of all, the stirring effect of this on me, who now run toward
glory as Anacreon said Cupid ran toward Venus--with both feet and
wings.
The ironic fact about all this commotion affecting so many solid,
substantial people--the ironic fact is this:
_There was no woodland scene and there were no ferns._
Here I reach the curious part of my story.
When I was a country lad of some seventeen years in Kentucky, one
August afternoon I was on my way home from a tramp of several miles.
My course lay through patches of woods--last scant vestiges of the
primeval forest--and through fields garnered of summer grain or green
with the crops of coming autumn. Now and then I climbed a fence and
crossed an old woods-pasture where stock grazed.
The August sky was clear and the sun beat down with terrific heat. I
had been walking for hours and parching thirst came upon me.
This led me to remember how once these rich uplands had been the vast
rolling forest that stretched from far-off eastern mountains to
far-off western rivers, and how under its shade, out of the rock,
everywhere bubbled crystal springs. A land of swift forest streams
diamond bright, drinking places of the bold game.
The sun beat down on me in the treeless open field. My feet struck
into a path. It, too, became a reminder: it had once been a trail of
the wild animals of that verdurous wilderness. I followed its
windings--a sort of gully--down a long, gentle slope. The windings
had no meaning now: the path could better have been straight; it was
devious because the feet that first marked it off had threaded their
way crookedly hither and thither past the thick-set trees.
I reached the spring--a dry spot under the hot sun; no tree
overshadowing it, no vegetation around it, not a blade of grass; only
dust in which were footprints of the stock which could not break the
habit of coming to it but quenched their thirst elsewhere. The
bulged front of some limestone rock showed where the ancient mouth of
the spring had been. Enough moisture still trickled forth to wet a
few clods. Hovering over these, rising and sinking, a little
quivering jet of gold, a flock of butterflies. The grey stalk of a
single dead weed projected across the choked orifice of the fountain
and one long, brown grasshopper--spirit of summer dryness--had
crawled out to the edge and sat motionless.