From the moment that Jimmie Harding came into the office, he created an
atmosphere. We were a tired lot. Most of us had been in the government
service for years, and had been ground fine in the mills of departmental
monotony.
But Jimmie was young, and he wore his youth like a gay cockade. He
flaunted it in our faces, and because we were so tired of our dull and
desiccated selves, we borrowed of him, remorselessly, color and
brightness until, gradually, in the light of his reflected glory, we
seemed a little younger, a little less tired, a little less petrified.
In his gay and gallant youth there was, however, a quality which partook
of earlier times. He should, we felt, have worn a feather in his
cap--and a cloak instead of his Norfolk coat. He walked with a little
swagger, and stood with his hand on his hip, as if his palm pressed the
hilt of his sword. If he ever fell in love, we told one another, he
would, without a doubt, sing serenades and apostrophize the moon.
He did fall in love before he had been with us a year. His love-affair
was a romance for the whole office. He came among us every morning
glorified; he left us in the afternoon as a knight enters upon a quest.
He told us about the girl. We pictured her perfectly before we saw her,
as a little thing, with a mop of curled brown hair; an oval face,
pearl-tinted; wide, blue eyes. He dwelt on all her small
perfections--the brows that swept across her forehead in a thin black
line, the transparency of her slender hands, the straight set of her
head on her shoulders, the slight halt in her speech like that of an
enchanting child.
Yet she was not in the least a child. "She holds me up to my best, Miss
Standish," Jimmie told me; "she says I can write."
We knew that Jimmie had written a few things, gay little poems that he
showed us now and then in the magazines. But we had not taken them at
all seriously. Indeed, Jimmie had not taken them seriously himself.
But now he took them seriously. "Elise says that I can do great things.
That I must get out of the Department."
To the rest of us, getting out of the government service would have
seemed a mad adventure. None of us would have had the courage to
consider it. But it seemed a natural thing that Jimmie should fare forth
on the broad highway--a modern D'Artagnan, a youthful Quixote, an Alan
Breck--!
We hated to have him leave. But he had consolation. "Of course you'll
come and see us. We're going back to my old house in Albemarle. It's a
rotten shack, but Elise says it will be a corking place for me to write.
And you'll all come down for week-ends."
We felt, I am sure, that it was good of him to ask us, but none of us
expected that we should ever go. We had a premonition that Elise
wouldn't want the deadwood of Jimmie's former Division. I know that for
myself, I was content to think of Jimmie happy in his old house. But I
never really expected to see it. I had reached the point of expecting
nothing except the day's work, my dinner at the end, a night's sleep,
and the same thing over again in the morning.
Yet Jimmie got all of us down, not long after he was married, to what he
called a housewarming. He had inherited a few pleasant acres in
Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived in
it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but
Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very
clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the
oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful.
There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards
and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched
candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June
poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and honeysuckle rioting
over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had passed
through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was
the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when
I, too, had wanted to write.
The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which had
once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his typewriter
out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of his desk he
could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of mountain ridges.
We envied him and told him so.
"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work
done. But I'll miss your darling old heads bending over the other
desks."
"You couldn't work, Jimmie," Elise reminded him, "with other people in
the room."
"Perhaps not. Did I tell you old dears that I am going to write a play?"
That was, it seems, what Elise had had in mind for him from the
beginning--a great play!
"She wouldn't even, have a honeymoon"--Jimmie's arm was around her; "she
brought me here, and got this room ready the first thing."
"Well, he mustn't be wasting time," said Elise, "must he? Jimmie's
rather wonderful, isn't he?"
They seemed a pair of babies as they stood there together. Elise had on
a childish one-piece pink frock, with sleeves above the elbow, and an
organdie sash. Yet, intuitively, the truth came to me--she was ages
older than Jimmie in spite of her twenty years to his twenty-four. Here
was no Juliet, flaming to the moon--no mistress whose steed would gallop
by wind-swept roads to midnight trysts. Here was, rather, the cool blood
that had sacrificed a honeymoon--_and, oh, to honeymoon with Jimmie
Harding_!--for the sake of an ambitious future.
She was telling us about it "We can always have a honeymoon, Jimmie and
I. Some day, when he is famous, we'll have it. But now we must not."
"I picked out the place"--Jimmie was eager--"a dip in the hills, and big
pines--And then Elise wouldn't."
We went in to lunch after that. The table was lovely and the food
delicious. There was batter-bread, I remember, and an omelette, and peas
from the garden.
Duncan Street and I talked all the way home of Jimmie and his wife. He
didn't agree with me in the least about Elise. "She'll be the making of
him. Such wives always are."
But I held that he would lose something,--that he would not be the same
Jimmie.
* * * * *
Jimmie wrote plays and plays. In between he wrote pot-boiling books. The
pot-boilers were needed, because none of his plays were accepted. He
used to stop in our office and joke about it.
"If it wasn't for Elise's faith in me, Miss Standish, I should think
myself a poor stick. Of course, I can make money enough with my books
and short stuff to keep things going, but it isn't just money that
either of us is after."
Except when Jimmie came into the office we saw very little of him. Elise
gathered about her the men and women who would count in Jimmie's future.
The week-ends in the still old house drew not a few famous folk who
loathed the commonplaceness of convivial atmospheres. Elise had
old-fashioned flowers in her garden, delectable food, a library of old
books. It was a heavenly change for those who were tired of cocktail
parties, bridge-madness, illicit love-making. I could never be quite
sure whether Elise really loved dignified living for its own sake, or
whether she was sufficiently discriminating to recognize the kind of
bait which would lure the fine souls whose presence gave to her
hospitality the stamp of exclusiveness.
They had a small car, and it was when Jimmie motored up to Washington
that we saw him. He had a fashion of taking us out to lunch, two at a
time. When he asked me, he usually asked Duncan Street. Duncan and I
have worked side by side for twenty-five years. There is nothing in the
least romantic about our friendship, but I should miss him if he were to
die or to resign from office. I have little fear of the latter
contingency. Only death, I feel, will part us.
In our moments of reunion Jimmie always talked a great deal about
himself. The big play was, he said, in the back of his mind. "Elise says
that I can do it," he told us one day over our oysters, "and I am
beginning to think that I can. I say, why can't you old dears in the
office come down for Christmas, and I'll read you what I've written."
We were glad to go. There were to be no other guests, and I found out
afterward that Elise rarely invited any of their fashionable friends
down in winter. The place showed off better in summer with the garden,
and the vines hiding all deficiencies.
We arrived in a snow-storm on Christmas Eve, and when we entered the
house there was a roaring fire on the hearth. I hadn't seen a fire like
that for thirty years. You may know how I felt when I knelt down in
front of it and warmed my hands.
The candles in sconces furnished the only other illumination. Elise,
moving about the shadowy room, seemed to draw light to herself. She wore
a flame-colored velvet frock and her curly hair was tucked into a golden
net. I think that she had planned the medieval effect deliberately, and
it was a great success. As she flitted about like a brilliant bird, our
eyes followed her. My eyes, indeed, drank of her, like new wine. I have
always loved color, and my life has been drab.