I
Madam Fulton and her granddaughter Electra were sitting at the
breakfast-table. It was a warm yet inspiriting day in early spring, and,
if the feel and look of it were not enough, the garden under the
dining-room windows told the season's hour like a floral clock. The
earliest blossoms had been pushed onward by the mounting spirit of the
year, and now the firstlings of May were budding. The great Georgian
house, set in the heart of this processional bloom, showed the mellow
tints of time. It had an abundant acreage, diversified, at first hand,
not only by this terraced garden in the rear, but by another gone to
wild abandon on the west, and an orchard stretching away into level
fields and, beyond them, groves of pine.
These dining-room windows, three of them, side by side, and now
unshaded, gave large outlook on a beautiful and busy world where the
terrace mounted in green, to be painted later with red peony balls, and
where the eye, still traveling, rested in satisfaction on the fringe of
locusts at the top.
Inside the house the sense of beauty could be fully fed. Here was a
sweet consistency, the sacred past in untouched being, that time when
furniture was made in England, and china was the product of long voyages
and solemn hoarding in corner cabinets with diamond panes. Life here was
reflected dimly from polished surfaces and serenely accentuated by
quaint carvings and spindle legs. Here was "atmosphere"--the theatre of
simple and austere content.
Madam Fulton outwardly fitted her background as a shepherdess fits a
fan. She was a sprite of an old lady, slender and round, and finished in
every movement, with the precision of those who have "learned the steps"
in dancing of another period. It was her joy that she had kept her
figure, her commonplace that, having it, she knew what to do with it.
She had a piquant profile, dark eyes, and curls whiter than white,
sifted over with the lustre of a living silver. According to her custom,
she wore light gray, and there was lace about her wrists and throat.
"Coffee, Electra?" she suddenly proposed, in a contralto voice that
still had warmth in it. She put the question impatiently, as if her
hidden self and that of the girl opposite had been too long communing,
in spite of them, and she had to break the tacit bondage of that
intercourse by one more obvious. The girl looked up from the letter in
her hand.
"No, thank you, grandmother," she said. Her voice, even in its lowest
notes, had a clear, full resonance. Then she laid the letter down. "I
beg your pardon," she added. "I thought you were opening your mail."
"No! no!" Madam Fulton cried, in a new impatience. "Go on. Read your
letter. Don't mind me."
But the girl was pushing it aside. She looked across the table with her
direct glance, and Madam Fulton thought unwillingly how handsome she
was. Electra was young, and she lacked but one thing: a girl's uncertain
grace. She had all the freshness of youth with the poise of ripest
womanhood. She sat straight and well, and seemed to manage her position
at table as if it were a horse. Her profile was slightly aquiline and
her complexion faultless in its fairness and its testimony to wholesome
living. Her lips were rather thin, but the line of white teeth behind
them showed exquisitely. She had a great deal of fine brown hair wound
about her head in braids, in an imperial fashion. Perhaps the only fault
in her face was that her eyes were of a light and not sympathetic blue.
"Shall I open your mail, grandmother?" she asked with extreme deference.
Madam Fulton's hand was lying on a disordered pile of letters, twenty
deep, beside her plate. She pressed the hand a little closer.
"No, thank you," she said. "I will attend to them myself."
Electra laid down her napkin, and pushed her plate to one side, to give
space for her own papers. She lifted one sheet, and holding it in her
fine hands, began rather elegantly,--
"Grandmother, I have here a most interesting letter from Mrs. Furnivall
Williams. She speaks of your book in the highest praise."
"Oh!" said the old lady, with a shade of satire, "does she? That's very
good-natured of Fanny Williams."
"Let me read you what she says." Electra bent a frowning brow upon the
page. "Ah, this is it. 'It was to be expected that your grandmother
would write what we all wanted to read. But her "Recollections" are more
than welcome. They are satisfying. They are illuminative.'"
"Fanny Williams is a fool!"
Electra, not glancing up, yet managed to look deeply pained.
"She goes on to say, 'What a power your dear grandmother has been! I
never realized it until now.'"
"That's a nasty thing for Fanny Williams to write. You tell her so."
"Then she asks whether you would be willing to meet the Delta Club for
an afternoon of it."
"Of what?"
"Your book, grandmother,--your 'Recollections.'"
"Electra, you drive me to drink. I have written the book. I've printed
it. I've done with it. What does Fanny Williams want me to do now?
Prance?"
Electra was looking at her grandmother at last and in a patient
hopefulness, like one awaiting a better mood.
"Grandmother dear," she protested, "it almost seems as if you owe it to
the world, having said so much, to say a little more."
"What, for instance, Electra? What?"
Electra considered, one hand smoothing out the page.
"People want to know things about it. The newspapers do. How can you
think for a moment of the discussion there has been, and not expect
questions?"
The old lady smiled to herself.
"Well," she said, "they won't find out."
"But why, grandmother, why?"
"I can't tell you why, Electra; but they won't, and there's an end of
it." She rose from her chair, and Electra, gathering her mail, followed
punctiliously. As they were leaving the room, her grandmother turned
upon her. "Did you hear from Peter?" she asked.
"Yes. From New York. He will be here to-morrow." Electra's clear,
well-considered look was very unlike that of a girl whose lover had come
home, after a five years' absence, for the avowed purpose of marriage.
Madam Fulton regarded her for a moment with a softened glance. It seemed
wistfully to include other dreams, other hopes than the girl's own, a
little dancing circle of shadowy memories outside the actual, as might
well happen when one has lived many years and seen the growth and
passing of such ties.
"Well, Electra," she said then, "I suppose you'll marry him. You'll be
famous by brevet. That's what you'll like."
Electra laughed a little, in a tolerant way.
"You are always thinking I want to become a celebrity, grandmother," she
said. "That's very funny of you."
"Think!" emphasized the old lady. "I know it. I know your kind. They're
thick as spatter now. Everybody wants to do something, or say he's done
it. You want to 'express' yourselves. That's what you say--'express'
yourselves. I never saw such a race."
She went grumbling into the library to answer her letters, or at least
look them through, and paused there for a moment, her hand on the table.
She knew approximately what was in the letters. They were all
undoubtedly about her book, the "Recollections" of her life, some of
them questioning her view of the public events therein narrated, but
others palpitating with an eager interest. She had written that history
as a woman of letters in a small way, and a woman who had known the
local celebrities, and she had done it so vividly, with such incredible
originality, that the book was not only having a rapid sale, but it
piqued the curiosity of gossip-lovers and even local historians. No
names were mentioned; but when she wrote, "A poet said to me in
Cambridge one day," everybody knew what poet was meant. When she
obscurely alluded to the letters preceding some smooth running of the
underground railway, historians of the war itched to see the letters,
and invited her to produce them. The book was three months old now, and
the wonder no less. The letters had been coming, and the old lady had
not been answering them. At first she read them with glee, as a later
chapter of her life story; but now they tired her a little, because she
anticipated their appeal.
A bird was singing outside. She cocked her head a little and listened,
not wholly in pleasure, but with a critical curiosity as well. She was
always watching for the diminution of sound, the veiling of sight
because she was old, and now she wondered whether the round golden notes
were what they had been fifty years ago. She stood a moment
thoughtfully, her hand now on the letters,--those tedious intruders upon
her leisure. Then, with an air of guilty escape, though there was no one
to see and judge, she left them lying there and stole softly out on the
veranda, where she sank into her friendly wicker chair, and looking upon
the world, smilingly felt it to be good. The sky was very bright, yet
not too bright for pleasure; clouds not meant for rain were blotting it
in feathery spaces. There was a sweet air stirring, and the birds,
though they were busy, said something about it from time to time in a
satisfactory way. Madam Fulton felt the rhythm and surge of it all, and
acquiesced in her own inactive part in it. Sometimes of late she hardly
knew how much of life was memory and how much the present brilliant call
of things. It was life, the thing she did not understand. Presently she
closed her eyes and sank, she thought, into a deeper reverie. These
excursions of hers were less like sleep, she always told herself, than a
kind of musing dream. At last she was learning what other old people had
meant when they explained, with a shamefaced air of knowing youth could
never understand, "I just lost myself." To lose one's battered and yet
still insistent self was now to be at peace.
When the forenoon was an hour or more along, she opened her eyes, aware
of some one looking at her. There he was, an old gentleman of a pleasant
aspect, heavy, with a thickness of curling white hair, blue eyes, and
that rosiness which is as the bloom upon the flower of good living. His
clothes were of the right cut, and he wore them with the ease of a man
who has always had the best to eat, to wear, to look at; for whom life
has been a well-organized scheme to turn out comfort. The old lady
stared at him with unwinking eyes, and the old gentleman smiled at her.
"Billy!" she cried at last, and gave him both her hands. "Billy Stark!"
They shook hands warmly and still looked each other in the eye. They had
not met for years, and neither liked to think what was in the other's
mind. But Madam Fulton, after they had sat down, challenged it.
"I'm an old woman, Billy." She wrinkled up her eyes in a delightful way
she had. "Don't you think that's funny?"
Billy with difficulty crossed one leg over the other, helping it with a
plump hand.
"You're precisely what you always were."
His round, comfortable voice at once put her where she liked to be, in
the field of an unconsidered intercourse with man. Electra, she knew,
was too much with her, but she had forgotten how invigorating these
brisk yet kindly breezes were, from the other planets. "That's what I
came over to see about," Billy was saying, with a rakish eye. "I needn't
have taken the trouble. You're as little changed as that syringa bush."
Her brilliant face softened into something wistful.
"The bush will come into bloom in a few weeks, Billy," she reminded him.
"I shan't ever bloom again."
"Boo to a goose!" said Billy. "You're in bloom now."
The wistfulness was gone. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and eyed
him sharply.
"I think too much about old age," she said. "I regard mine as a kind of
mildew, and every day and forty times a day I peer at myself to see if
the mildew's growing thicker. But you don't seem to have any mildew,
Billy. You're just a different kind of person from what you were fifty
years ago. You haven't gone bad at all."
Billy set his correct feet together on the floor, rose, and, with his
hand on his heart, made her a bow.
"I don't care for it much myself," he said.
"Growing old? It's the devil, Billy. Don't talk about it. Why aren't you
in England?"
"I'm junior partner now."
"I know it."
"I'm a great publisher, Florrie."
She nodded.
"Your men run over to arrange with us in London. There was no occasion
for my coming here. But I simply wanted to. I got a little
curious--homesick, maybe. So I came. Got in last night. I read your book
before I sailed."
She looked at him quizzically and almost, it might be said, with a droll
uneasiness.
"You brought it out in England," she offered, in rather a small voice.
"Naturally you'd read it."
"Not because we brought it out. Because it was yours," he corrected her.
"My word, Florrie, what a life you've had of it."
The pink crept into her cheeks. Her eyes menaced him.
"Are you trying to pump me, Billy Stark?" she inquired.
"Not for a moment. But you're guilty, Florrie. What is it?"
She considered, her gaze bent on her lap.
"Well, the fact is, Billy," she temporized, "I've got in pretty deep
with that book. I wrote it as a sort of a--well, I wrote it, you know,
and I thought I might get a few hundred dollars out of it, same as I
have out of those novels I used to write to keep lace on my petticoats.
Well! the public has made a fool of itself over the book. Every day I
get piles of letters asking what I meant by this and that, and won't I
give my documentary evidence for saying this or that great gun did so
and so at such a time."
"Well, why don't you?"
"Give my evidence? Why, I can't!" She was half whimpering, with a laugh
on her old face. "I haven't got it."
"You mean you haven't the actual letters now. Those extraordinary ones
of the abolitionist group, for example,--can't you produce them?"
"Why no, Billy, of course I can't. I"--she held his glance with a
mixture of deprecation and a gay delight--"I made them up."
William Stark, the publisher, looked at her with round blue eyes growing
rounder and a deeper red surging into his sea-tanned face. He seemed on
the point of bursting into an explosion, whether of horror or mirth
Madam Fulton could not tell. She continued to gaze at him in the same
mingling of deprecating and amused inquiry. In spite of her years she
looked like a little animal which, having done wrong, seeks out means of
propitiation, and as yet knows nothing better than the lifted eyebrow of
inquiry.
"Well," she said again defiantly, "I made them up."
"In God's name, Florrie, what for?"
"I wanted to."
"To pad out your book?"
"To make a nice book, the kind of one I wanted. I'll tell you what,
Billy,"--she bowled caution into the farthest distance,--"I'm going to
make a clean breast of it. Now you won't peach?"
He shook his head.
"Go on," he bade her.
She lifted her head, sat straighter in her chair, and spoke with
firmness:--
"Now, Billy, if I'm going to talk to you at all, you must know precisely
where I stand. Maybe you do, but I don't believe it. You see, all these
years I've been writing what I called novels, and they've paid me a
little, and I've got up a sort of local fame. I'm as poor--well, I can't
tell you how poor. Only I live here in the summer with Electra in her
house--"
"It's the old Fulton house."
"Yes, but it came to her through her father. Remember, I was a second
wife. I had no children. My husband gave me the Cambridge place and left
this to his son."
"What became of the Cambridge house?"
"Sold, years ago. Eaten up. Seems as if I'd done nothing, all these
years, but eat. It makes me sick to think of it. Well, here was I,
credit low, my little knack at writing all but gone--why, Billy, styles
have changed since my day. Folks would hoot at my novels now. They don't
read them. They just remember I wrote them when they want a celebrity at
a tea. I'm a back number. Don't you know it?"
He nodded, gravely pondering. The one thing about him never to be
affected by his whimsical humor was the integrity of a business verdict.
Madam Fulton now was warming to the value of her own position. She began
to see how picturesque it was.
"Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me,
'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write
your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down
and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave
myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have
been, not as it was."
William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on
his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis.
"Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters
in that book?"
"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days
when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were
cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities,
then, did I?"
"Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips
of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there--"
"Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering
cheerfulness by the way.
"The story of Hawthorne and the first edition--"
"Hypothetical. Grouse in the gun-room."
"Do you mean that the story of the old slave who came to your mother's
door in Waltham, and the three abolitionists on their way to the
meeting--"
"Now what's the use, Billy Stark?" cried the old lady. "I told you it
was a fake from beginning to end. So it is. So is every page of it. If
I'd written my recollections as they were, the book would have been a
pamphlet of twenty odd pages. It would have said I married a learned
professor because I thought if I got into Cambridge society I should see
life, and life was what I wanted. It would have gone on to say I found
it death and nothing else, and when my husband died I spent all the
money I could get trying to see life and I never saw it then. Who'd have
printed that? Pretty recollections, I should say!"
Mr. Stark was still musing, his eyes interrogating her.
"It's really incredible, Florrie," he said at last. "Poor dear! you
needed the money."
"That wasn't it."
"Then what was?"
"I don't know." But immediately her face folded up into its smiling
creases and she said, "I wanted some fun."
William Stark fell back in his chair and began to laugh, round upon
wheezy round. When his glasses had fallen off and his cheeks were wet
and his face flamed painfully, Madam Fulton spoke, without a gleam.
"You're a nice man, Billy Stark."
"You wanted your little joke!" he repeated, subsiding and trumpeting
into his handkerchief. "Well, you've had it, Florrie; you've had it."
"I don't know that I have," she returned. "I had to enjoy it alone, and
that kind of palled on me. When the first notices came, I used to lie
awake from three o'clock on, to laugh. I used to go to the window when
Electra was in the room, and make up faces, to let off steam and keep
her from knowing. Then the letters kept coming, and clubs and things
kept hounding me, and Electra was always at me. There she is now, with
my grog. See me take it and pour it into the syringa."