absurd! Why should he not see her? She had quarrelled with Tom, yes, and
perhaps the family might be hard on her; but he--he understood, and why
should he shake off her acquaintance? She was not for Tom. Well, it was
just as well. How could any one think this girl would suit
Tom--big-bearded, clumsy, excellent fellow that he was?
He put out his hand. “Mary,” he said. The girl stared at him with eyes
suddenly wide open; he smiled into them.
“I have a right to call you that,” he proceeded, “haven't I? I might
have been your brother.” He took her hand, and then laughed a little. “I
am almost glad I am not. You wouldn't have suited Tom, and as a sister,
somehow, you wouldn't have suited me!” He laughed again. “But”--he
hesitated; she still stared straight up at him with her soft, dark eyes,
and he thought them very beautiful--“but why shouldn't I see you--not as
a brother, but an acquaintance--friend? You say you need them. Tell me
where you have this room of yours?”
The vivid beauty of her blush startled him, and she drew her hand
quickly from his.
“Oh no!” she said, hurriedly. “Let things drop between us;
here--forever.”
Amory stood before her with an expression which reminded her of his
description of himself--obstinate; yes, he looked it.
“Why?” he urged. “Just because you are not to marry Tom, is there any
reason why we should not like each other--is there? That is--if we do! I
do,” he laughed. “Do you?”
Her lids had dropped; she looked very slim, and young, and shy. “Yes,”
she said.
It gave Amory a good deal of pleasure for a monosyllable.
“Well, then, your number?” he said.
She shook her head.
“I'll ask Tom,” he retorted. “He will tell me.”
He was baffled and curiously charmed by the smile that touched her
sharply curved young mouth.
“Tom may,” she said.
“I was ready to accept you as a sister,” he persisted, “and you won't
even admit me as a casual visitor!”
She took a step toward the door. “Wait till you hear Tom's story,” she
said.
Amory stared curiously at her. “Do you think he will be vindictive,
after all?” he said. “Why should he be, if what you say is just?”
She paused. “Wait till you see Tom and Mrs. White; then if you want to
know me, why--” She was blushing again.
“Well,” Amory demanded, “what shall I do?”
She looked up with a sort of childish charm, curling her lip, lighting
her eyes with something of laughter and mischief. “Why, look for me and
you'll find me.”
“Find you?” repeated Amory, bewildered.
She nodded. “Yes, if you look. To-morrow will be Sunday; every one will
be going to church, and I with them. Stand on the steps of this house at
10.30 precisely, and look as far as you can, and you will see--me.
Goodnight.”
“Good night.” Amory took her hand. “Let me see you home; it's dark.”
She laughed. “You don't lack persistency, do you?” she said, with a
sweetness which gave the words a pleasant twist. “But don't come,
please. I'm used to taking care of myself; but--before I go let me write
my note also.” She went to the desk and scratched a line, and folding
it, handed it to him. “There,” she said; “read Mrs. White's note and
then that, but wait till you hear the house door bang. Promise not
before.”
“Please--” began Amory.
“Promise,” she repeated.
“I promise,” he said, and again they shook hands for good-by.
“That's three times,” thought the girl as she went to the door, and
turning an instant, she smiled at him. “Good-by.” The door closed softly
behind her, and Amory waited a moment, then went to it, and opening it,
listened; the house door shut lightly, and seizing his notes, he stood
by the window in the twilight and read them. The first was as follows:
“DEAR MR. AMORY,--Mary and I had to return unexpectedly to Cleveland.
Forgive our missing this chance of meeting you, but Mr. White's note is
urgent, as his sister is very ill. Mary regrets greatly not seeing you
before the wedding.
“Yours sincerely,
“BARBARA WHITE.”
Amory threw the paper down. “Do I see visions?” he cried, and hastily
unfolded the second; it ran as follows:
“Forgive me; I got into the wrong house, the wrong room. I was very
tired, and my latch-key fitted, and I didn't know until I saw your fire,
and then you came. Don't think me a very bold and horrid girl, and
forgive me. Your fire was so warm and bright, and--you were kind.
“M.”
Amory stared at the paper a moment; then, catching his hat and flying
down the stairs, opened the outer door.
The night was bitter cold, with a white frost everywhere; but in the
twilight no solitary figure was in view; the long street was empty. He
ran the length of it, then back to his room, and throwing down his hat,
he lit his pipe. It needed thought.
BRAYBRIDGE'S OFFER
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the
club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. With
its mixture of Oriental appointments in curtains, cushions, and little
tables of teak-wood the Turkish room expressed rather an adventurous
conception of the Ottoman taste; but it was always a cozy place whether
you found yourself in it with cigars and coffee after dinner, or with
whatever liquid or solid appetizer you preferred in the half-hour or
more that must pass before dinner after you had made out your menu. It
intimated an exclusive possession in the three or four who happened
first to find themselves together in it, and it invited the philosophic
mind to contemplation more than any other spot in the club.
Our rather limited little down-town dining club was almost a celibate
community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch;
but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in
an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare
what we liked. Some dozed away the intervening time; some read the
evening papers, or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the
Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these
sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be
Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to
interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either
the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now seeing the three
there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who made
no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich,
which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he
greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the
psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I
was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then
intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were
privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher
range of thinking.
“I shouldn't have supposed, somehow,” he said with a knot of deprecation
between his fine eyes, “that he would have had the pluck.”
“Perhaps he hadn't,” Minver suggested.
Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in
toleration. “You mean that she--”
“I don't see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed
chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.
“I didn't say it,” Minver contradicted.
“You implied it; and I don't think it's fair. It's easy enough to build
up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all
that any outsider can have in the case.”
“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice
has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn't think you
would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,”
and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head,
“on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where
Acton is, Rulledge.”
“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.
Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the
scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture
offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might
be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such
matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the
inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn
of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with
the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.
“Yes,” Minver said, facing about toward me. “How do you excuse yourself
for your ignorance in matters where you're always professionally making
such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought
about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they
are brought about in life?”
“No, I can't,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a
good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing
why.”
“No, you couldn't, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It's part of
your swindler to assume that you _do_ know why. You ought to find out.”
Wanhope interposed abstractly, or as abstractly as he could: “The
important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the
confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”
“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the
question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from
nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and
asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent
out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don't you do it,
Acton?”
I returned, as seriously as could have been expected: “Perhaps it would
be thought rather intimate. People don't like to talk of such things.”
“They're ashamed,” Minver declared. “The lovers don't either of them, in
a given ease, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with
making the offer, and how little the man.”
Minver's point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the
same time. We begged each other's pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I
should go on.
“Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don't think they're so much ashamed as
that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say?”
“Very much what you said. It's astonishing how people forget the vital
things, and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to
stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be
more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became
husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact,
would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generation
knows nothing of it.”
“That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But how do _you_ know
what you were saying, Wanhope?”
“I've ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not
directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn't inconceivable,
if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its
more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this
world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course,
we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed.” Wanhope
continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something
so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are charming, and in nothing more than
the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to
match ourselves with them.”
“Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood--” Rulledge began, but Minver's laugh
arrested him.
“Nothing so concrete, I'm afraid,” Wanhope gently returned. “I mean, to
match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of
spirit and plays of fancy. There's something pathetic to see them caught
up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so
good at.”
“They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game
of love,” Minver said. “Especially when they're not in earnest about
it.”
“Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope admitted. “But I don't
mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather
frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with
her.”
“Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge asked.
“You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, “that if she didn't know
it, _he_ never would.” Then Wanhope answered for himself:
“I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless
telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each
other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his
before he is conscious of having made any appeal.”
“And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I suggested.
“Yes,” Wanhope admitted after a thoughtful reluctance.
“Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”
“If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the
case in point; we won't mention any names. She is sailing through time,
through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment
of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the
unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where
there had been no life before. But she can't be said to have knowingly
searched the void for any presence.”
“Oh, I'm not sure about that, professor,” Minver put in. “Go a little
slower, if you expect me to follow you.”
“It's all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life,” Wanhope
resumed. “I don't believe I could make out the case, as I feel it to
be.”
“Braybridge's part of the case is rather plain, isn't it?” I invited
him.
“I'm not sure of that. No man's part of any case is plain, if you look
at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is
rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the psychologist added with one of
his deep breaths, “is so complex as a simple nature.”
“Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if his case isn't.”
“Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.
“My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”
“I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of
unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek
proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel
the attraction of such a man--the fascination of his being grizzled, and
slovenly, and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do
that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would
divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under
rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks,
where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop.
He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the
hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and
I don't vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at
odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess's end of the
party, and was watching for a chance to--”
Wanhope cast about for the word, and Winver supplied it: “Pull out.”
“Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him.”
“I don't understand,” Rulledge said.
“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an
excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he
saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence
of having arrived late, the night before; and when Braybridge found
himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said
good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them
talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and
introduced them. But it's rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at
second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his
wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood
were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one
was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for
both. Ever seen her?”
We others looked at each other. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint
any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists.
There was a jam of people; but this girl--I've understood it was
she--looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might
have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a
twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people
on the veranda.”
“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. “Good selling
name.”
“Don't reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a
selling name.”
“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don't see how
there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared
of men as Braybridge is of women.”
“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its
complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful
woman,” Wanhope returned.
“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.
“No; the response must be in kind, to be truly complemental. Through the
sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn't be
afraid.”
“Oh! _That's_ the way you get out of it!”
“Well?” Rulledge urged.
“I'm afraid,” Wanhope modestly confessed, “that from this point I shall
have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn't able to be very definite,
except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his
wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he
had said he mustn't think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken
of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped
she had refused to hear of Braybridge's going. She said she hadn't heard
of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn't give
Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their
week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the
equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin
thought it was odd that Braybridge didn't insist; and he made a long
story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss
Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When
Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the
business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each
other's charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs.
Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and--Well,
their engagement has come out, and--” Wanhope paused with an air that
was at first indefinite, and then definitive.
“You don't mean,” Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, “that
that's all you know about it?”
“Yes, that's all I know,” Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised
himself at the fact.
“Well!”
Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. “I can
conjecture--we can all conjecture--”
He hesitated; then, “Well, go on with your conjecture,” Rulledge said
forgivingly.
“Why--” Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been
elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his
head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson,
whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes
were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his
temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his
little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. “Private?”
“Come in, come in!” Minver called to him. “Thought you were in Japan?”
“My dear fellow,” Halson answered, “you must brush up your contemporary
history. It's more than a fortnight since I was in Japan.” He shook
hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at
once: “Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge's engagement? It's
humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes, and find the
nation absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I've met
here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I'd heard of it, and if
I knew how it could have happened.”
“And do you?” Rulledge asked.
“I can give a pretty good guess,” Halson said, running his merry eyes
over our faces.
“Anybody can give a good guess,” Rulledge said. “Wanhope is doing it
now.”
“Don't let me interrupt.” Halson turned to him politely.
“Not at all. I'd rather hear your guess. If you know Braybridge better
than I,” Wanhope said.
“Well,” Halson compromised, “perhaps I've known him longer.” He asked,
with an effect of coming to business, “Where were you?”
“Tell him, Rulledge,” Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked
nothing better. He told him in detail, all we knew from any source, down
to the moment of Wanhope's arrested conjecture.
“He did leave you at an anxious point, didn't he?” Halson smiled to the
rest of us at Rulledge's expense, and then said: “Well, I think I can
help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?”
“By sight, Minver does,” Rulledge answered for us. “Wants to paint her.”
“Of course,” Halson said, with intelligence. “But I doubt if he'd find
her as paintable as she looks, at first. She's beautiful, but her charm
is spiritual.”
“Sometimes we try for that,” the painter interposed.
“And sometimes you get it. But you'll allow it's difficult. That's all I
meant. I've known her--let me see--for twelve years, at least; ever
since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was
bringing her up on the ranche. Her aunt came along, by and by, and took
her to Europe; mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl
was always homesick for the ranche; she pined for it; and after they had
kept her in Germany three or four years they let her come back, and run
wild again; wild as a flower does, or a vine--not a domesticated
animal.”
“Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge.”
“Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver,” Halson said,
almost austerely. “Her father died two years ago, and then she _had_ to
come East, for her aunt simply _wouldn't_ live on the ranche. She
brought her on, here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea;
but the girl didn't take to the New York thing at all; I could see it
from the start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about
the ranche.”
“She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those
conventional people.”
Halson laughed at Minver's thrust, and went on amiably: “I don't suppose
that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any man
or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you've done, that it was his
fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn't
that it?”
Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.
“And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic--”
“Lost?” Rulledge demanded.
“Why, yes. Didn't you know? But I ought to go back. They said there
never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously went for
Braybridge, the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child who
wanted things frankly, when she did want them. Then his being ten or
fifteen years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it
natural for a shy girl like her to assort herself with him when all the
rest were assorting themselves, as people do at such things. The
consensus of testimony is that she did it with the most transparent
unconsciousness, and--”
“Who are your authorities?” Minver asked; Rulledge threw himself back on
the divan, and beat the cushions with impatience.
“Is it essential to give them?”
“Oh, no. I merely wondered. Go on.”
“The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him before the
others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no design in it;
that would have been out of character. They had got to the end of the
wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there wasn't even a
trail, and they walked round looking for a way out, till they were
turned completely. They decided that the only way was to keep walking,
and by and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was some Canucks
clearing a piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them in French,
they gave them full directions, and Braybridge soon found the path
again.”
Halson paused, and I said, “But that isn't all?”
“Oh, no.” He continued thoughtfully silent for a little while before he
resumed. “The amazing thing is that they got lost again, and that when
they tried going back to the Canucks, they couldn't find the way.”