BETWEEN FRIENDS.
There is considerable monotony in seaside life, but it is monotony of
a different kind from the everyday existence of the rest of the year;
and in this complete change its principal charm and benefit consist.
The home-life of a number of households is laid aside for the time,
and the heterogeneous elements are thrown for the moment into a larger
whole, forming an unstable compound--a salad of humanity where the
sweets, the sours, and the bitters find themselves in new combinations
with one another, and united for the time in a _sauce piquante_ of
fresh air and idleness. There can be no great variety in the
occupations; picnics, excursions, drives, rides, walks, form an
ever-recurring ditto, to which the unaccustomedness alone gives
flavour.
There is rest for the workers, and society for the home-keeping, but
genuine delight only for the very young, whose gregarious instincts
are still unblunted, and who find in the presence of one another the
exhilaration of spreading their callow wings in early flights.
For the mother-birds, however, there is anxiety. In this larger
poultry-yard their chicks grow wilder than they have ever known them
before. The broods get mixed, and wander into undreamt-of mischief,
pullets consorting with cockerels of another breed, chickens with
ducklings venturing into the water, while Dame Partlet clucks and
flutters about, pecking and distracted.
Mrs Naylor sat fidgeting and restless among the matrons who presided
over and superintended the enjoyments of their youthful charges. Lucy
was causing her anxiety. "Who was that tall man she was dancing
with?--dancing not for the first time or the second, but the third
time without a break. And how unnecessarily intimate they appeared!
Could she not fan herself if she felt warm, when they stopped for
breath?--instead of letting an awkward stranger raise tempests which
were blowing her hair into unsightly confusion, and making her so
needlessly conspicuous." If a gentleman was warranted "nice," she did
not object to his paying attention to her girls, but she wanted
assurance of the niceness. She leant over to the nearest neighbour who
seemed at leisure to answer her inquiries, and with whom, being a
stranger, she would not compromise herself, whatever might be said.
The neighbour was Miss Maida Springer, a damsel scarcely any longer
young, seeing her thirtieth birthday would be her next, who hovered on
the confines of the dance, and looked hungrily after young men leading
other maidens out, and wondering why no one came for her. She sat
under the wing of an elder as lonely as herself--the widow Denwiddie,
who varied the sober tenor of her life by spending a fortnight each
summer among the gaieties and dissipations by the sea. She was bidding
the widow observe things curious in the whirling crowd of dancers as
they passed.
"See that great thing in pink," she had said last. "Positively stout.
And what a colour for a large woman to wear! If it had been black,
now, or blue, or even white----" and she glanced down approvingly at
her own blue and white washed muslin. "Just watch the slow revolving
heap. Ain't she like an iceberg out at sea, growing pink in the
setting sun? And her poor little bit of a partner, racing to get round
her on time! My! mustn't he feel warm! He reminds me of an ant trying
to carry home a seed of wheat. Why don't he choose a slim one like
himself?" and she ran her eye down her own spare form, which was
certainly as slim as the absence of superfluous tissue could make it,
with spider-like arms and wrists which would not be kept out of
sight,--thinking how much freer the gentleman would have felt in the
clasp of these slender tendrils.
"Look at that one's feet. Well, I never! What a size! I wonder how she
can venture to stand up and dance. Ain't it good for the beetles they
ain't none of them here?" and then, by a strange coincidence, a pair
of number-one shoes stole out in front to show themselves--things
small and narrow, on which it seemed wonderful that a human being
could stand. But then a few bones can be packed away in very little
room.
"Will you kindly tell me," asked Mrs Naylor, "who is that gentleman by
the wall, with a lady's fan in his hand?--the one with the limp hair,
brushed up so strangely above his forehead."
"The tall fine man with drab hair? That's Mr Aurelius Sefton of
Pugwash--one of the most rising pork-packers in the whole West, they
do say."
"Pugwash? What a name! And pork! That accounts for the sleekness of
his hair. Lard--depend upon it."
"You think the lard has got in his hair? Well, now, ain't you droll!
Perhaps it has. But if lard has got in the hair, they do tell there
has money got in the pocket. Do you lumber folks in Canady, now, have
chips in your hair--chips and sawdust?"
Mrs Naylor looked dignified, and turned away. The magnates of her
country deal in lumber. It is quite a high-class pursuit, and not to
be spoken of in the same breath with pork--a horrid butcherly
business, in which no person of refinement would condescend to make
his fortune.
Maida raised her eyebrows, and turned to her friend.
"Ain't we high-strung, just! we aristocrats from Canady? What
difference can it make whether it's hogs or logs a man makes his pile
by, so long as he makes it? And I guess, if there's been less money
made in pork, there's been a sight more lost in lumber. I had a friend
once----" and she coloured faintly, looking down, and heaving a sigh
so demonstrative that her friend turned and looked at her.
"Yes, my dear?" said the widow, with a droop in her voice in token of
sympathy. "You _had_ a friend? That sounds sad. Whaar did he go to?"
"He went away; and that's why it always seems as if something was
catching my breath and making me feel low, whenever lumber is spoken
of. _He_ went to Canady in the lumbering interest, because prospects
were better there than in old Vermont. He promised to come back when
he had made his pile, and I promised to wait. It's nothing so mighty
unusual for young folks to do; and it's real feelin' of you to shake
your head and look at me like that, Mrs Denwiddie. But don't let folks
see you a-doing it; they might wonder."
"Ah yes!" heaved the widow, in deep sympathy; "I can understand. It's
the tender way us trustin' women always has. We never tell our love,
but just let folks think it's a big caterpillar has got in the heart
of the cabbage, so to speak; or rather, I should say, liver and
dispepsy that's eatin' our young looks away. It's disappinted love,
now--is it, my dear--that's wearin' you to a shaddy? I know the
feelin' well," and another sigh undulated her portly figure. "It's
twenty years, come Fall, since I was left a lone woman, and hope has
been tellin' me flatterin' tales ever since; but the men are
that backward--they just look foolish when I shake their hands
friendly-like and invite them to sit a bit, after seein' me home from
evenin' meetin'; and away they go, sayin' never a word, and leavin' me
with no more appetite for supper than if I'd eaten it a'ready."
"Do you mean that you would marry again?"
"I would then--and don't you forget it--if ever I get the chance."
Maida glanced sidewise, and shrank the least bit possible away.
"You think me light-minded now, maybe, my dear? I don't wonder at it.
Them as hain't been married don't know how lonesome it feels to see
just the one cup and saucer laid out beside the teapot at mealtimes."
"There must be memories. It would be sweet, I should have thought, to
dwell on the idea that one had gone before, and was waiting across the
river to be joined by the old companion."
"Oh yes; that's sweet--in a way. At least it was, when it was a dear
young minister that was sayin' beautiful things about the Golden
Shore, and comfortin' the bereaved. But twenty years is a long time.
The Rev. Mr Beulah is a married man now, with a fine young family of
his own. Folks have forgotten about my affliction this many a year.
And as for Hezekiah----I don't hold with them spiritualists. He's more
to do, you bet, than to be coming around frightenin' a lone woman with
messages rapped out on a tea-table, or to mind whether I'm married or
single. I'll be laid beside him when the time comes; that's as it
should be. But it would be real pleasant to have some one for company
in the meantime. It's a vale of tears--we've Gospel for that; but if
ever you come to my time of life, you'll be wishin', like me, you had
some one to dry your eyes in it."
Maida sighed disappointedly. Her friend's sentiments were too robust
for the plaintive tone in which that word "lumber" had been tempting
her to indulge. Mrs Denwiddie, on the other hand, felt talkative, and
there being no one else whom she could address, she accommodated
herself to her friend's mood.
"Is it long, now, since you saw him last?--your friend, I mean."
"He went ten years ago."
"Ten years! That's half a lifetime. Have you been gettin' letters from
him for ten years?"
"He used to write--at first, that is. Then he would send a newspaper.
Now, I don't know where he is, or what he is doing. I wish I did. All
would be forgiven and forgotten, if he only would return."
"It's real good of you to speak like that, my dear. It takes a woman
to be true and forgivin' like that. I wonder what the young man will
be doin', now, all this time?"
"He is trying hard to make that weary fortune, to be sure. He is
ambitious."
"And he don't allow himself even the encouragement of writin' to tell
you how he's gettin' on. Do you think there could be some one up there
encouragin' him?"
"Mrs Denwiddie!"
"There's no tellin', my dear, what the men are up to. They ain't
faithful and endurin' like us."
"I have waited. I can wait."
"It does you credit, my dear. But a girl's youth won't wait. How about
settlin' yourself in life?"
Maida tightened her lips. She knew all that as well as Mrs Denwiddie;
but what right had the woman to inspect her life in this fashion? to
pull open the fold in which she chose to hide her inner self, and pry
and probe in wanton curiosity?--the merciless and contemptuous
curiosity with which married women will card out and examine the
tangled threads of a spinster's being. She knew well enough the
hopelessness of what, for want of another name, she thought of as her
"attachment." Yet why could it not be taken at such small worth as she
put upon it? She had not boasted of it. She knew its little value too
well. But it was all she had, and why might she not wear it, having
nothing else? That evening she was sitting a wallflower while the rest
were merry--with no one to lead her out or make her a sharer in the
gaiety. What wonder if she should wish to refer to a deferred
engagement, and furbish up the poor little relic of a might-have-been,
the one bit of romance she ever had, if only to seem less forlorn in
her own eyes? And this old thing by her side, as lonely and shut out
from the revelry as herself, and who, but for her, would have sat
absolutely solitary--that _she_ should take upon her to be inquisitive
and unpleasant! It was intolerable. She gathered her spare skirts more
tightly round her, and edged some inches away upon the haircloth sofa
she divided with her "friend." She would have risen altogether, but
where was she to go? To what other companion could she join herself?
She was not intimate with any of the other guests, married or single,
old or young. She belonged, poor soul, to the order of bats--both bird
and quadruped, yet accepted by neither. In the marrying aspect, she
was regarded as altogether out of the running, while old and young
agreed each in classing her with the other variety--too old to be a
girl, not old enough to be a tabby--and nobody minded her when other
company could be got. She felt it all, though she bravely ignored and
struggled with her fate, living through many a tragic pang which no
one ever suspected. She dared not put her position to the test by
quarrelling with the widow. Already she saw herself flitting in and
out among the revellers, unheeded, like a disembodied spirit. Where
she sat she had at least a companion, and was safe from pity. She
choked back her anger as a luxury she could not afford, and was ready
to respond when Mrs Denwiddie, warned by symptoms that she might be
left solitary in the crowd, realised that she must have been
disagreeable, and set herself to open a new conversation in a less
personal strain.
How many of us would dispense with our dear friends, if we were only
sure we could get on without them!