Staniford and Dunham drew stools to the rail, and sat down with their
cigars after the captain left them. The second mate passed by, and cast
a friendly glance at them; he had whimsical brown eyes that twinkled
under his cap-peak, while a lurking smile played under his heavy
mustache; but he did not speak. Staniford said, there was a pleasant
fellow, and he should like to sketch him. He was only an amateur artist,
and he had been only an amateur in life otherwise, so far; but he did
not pretend to have been anything else.
“Then you're not sorry you came, Staniford?” asked Dunham, putting
his hand on his friend's knee. “He characteristically assumed the
responsibility, although the voyage by sailing-vessel rather than
steamer was their common whim, and it had been Staniford's preference
that decided them for Trieste rather than any nearer port.
“No, I'm not sorry,--if you call it come, already. I think a bit of
Europe will be a very good thing for the present, or as long as I'm
in this irresolute mood. If I understand it, Europe is the place for
American irresolution. When I've made up my mind, I'll come home
again. I still think Colorado is the thing, though I haven't abandoned
California altogether; it's a question of cattle-range and sheep-ranch.”
“You'll decide against both,” said Dunham.
“How would you like West Virginia? They cattle-range in West Virginia,
too. They may sheep-ranch, too, for all I know,--no, that's in Old
Virginia. The trouble is that the Virginias, otherwise irreproachable,
are not paying fields for such enterprises. They say that one is a sure
thing in California, and the other is a sure thing in Colorado. They
give you the figures.” Staniford lit another cigar.
“But why shouldn't you stay where you are, Staniford? You've money
enough left, after all.”
“Yes, money enough for one. But there's something ignoble in living on a
small stated income, unless you have some object in view besides living,
and I haven't, you know. It's a duty I owe to the general frame of
things to make more money.”
“If you turned your mind to any one thing, I'm sure you'd succeed where
you are,” Dunham urged.
“That's just the trouble,” retorted his friend. “I can't turn my mind to
any one thing,--I'm too universally gifted. I paint a little, I model
a little, I play a very little indeed; I can write a book notice. The
ladies praise my art, and the editors keep my literature a long time
before they print it. This doesn't seem the highest aim of being. I have
the noble earth-hunger; I must get upon the land. That's why I've got
upon the water.” Staniford laughed again, and pulled comfortably at
his cigar. “Now, you,” he added, after a pause, in which Dunham did not
reply, “you have not had losses; you still have everything comfortable
about you. _Du hast Alles was Menschen begehr_, even to the _schönsten
Augen_ of the divine Miss Hibbard.”
“Yes, Staniford, that's it. I hate your going out there all alone. Now,
if you were taking some nice girl with you!” Dunham said, with a lover's
fond desire that his friend should be in love, too.
“To those wilds? To a redwood shanty in California, or a turf hovel in
Colorado? What nice girl would go? 'I will take some savage woman, she
shall rear my dusky race.'”
“I don't like to have you take any risks of degenerating,” began Dunham.
“With what you know to be my natural tendencies? Your prophetic eye
prefigures my pantaloons in the tops of my boots. Well, there is time
yet to turn back from the brutality of a patriarchal life. You must
allow that I've taken the longest way round in going West. In Italy
there are many chances; and besides, you know, I like to talk.”
It seemed to be an old subject between them, and they discussed it
languidly, like some abstract topic rather than a reality.
“If you only had some tie to bind you to the East, I should feel pretty
safe about you,” said Dunham, presently.
“I have you,” answered his friend, demurely.
“Oh, I'm nothing,” said Dunham, with sincerity.
“Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me,
there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up
a studio instead of a ranch,--choose between sculpture and painting,
instead of cattle and sheep? After all, it does grind me to have lost
that money! If I had only been swindled out of it, I shouldn't have
cared; but when you go and make a bad thing of it yourself, with your
eyes open, there's a reluctance to place the responsibility where it
belongs that doesn't occur in the other case. Dunham, do you think it
altogether ridiculous that I should feel there was something sacred in
the money? When I remember how hard my poor old father worked to get it
together, it seems wicked that I should have stupidly wasted it on the
venture I did. I want to get it back; I want to make money. And so I'm
going out to Italy with you, to waste more. I don't respect myself as I
should if I were on a Pullman palace car, speeding westward. I'll own I
like this better.”
“Oh, it's all right, Staniford,” said his friend. “The voyage will
do you good, and you'll have time to think everything over, and start
fairer when you get back.”
“That girl,” observed Staniford, with characteristic abruptness, “is
a type that is commoner than we imagine in New England. We fair people
fancy we are the only genuine Yankees. I guess that's a mistake. There
must have been a good many dark Puritans. In fact, we always think of
Puritans as dark, don't we?”
“I believe we do,” assented Dunham. “Perhaps on account of their black
clothes.”
“Perhaps,” said Staniford. “At any rate, I'm so tired of the blonde type
in fiction that I rather like the other thing in life. Every novelist
runs a blonde heroine; I wonder why. This girl has the clear Southern
pallor; she's of the olive hue; and her eyes are black as sloes,--not
that I know what sloes are. Did she remind you of anything in
particular?”
“Yes; a little of Faed's Evangeline, as she sat in the door-way of the
warehouse yesterday.”
“Exactly. I wish the picture were more of a picture; but I don't know
that it matters. _She's_ more of a picture.”
“'Pretty as a bird,' the captain said.”
“Bird isn't bad. But the bird is in her manner. There's something
tranquilly alert in her manner that's like a bird; like a bird that
lingers on its perch, looking at you over its shoulder, if you come up
behind. That trick of the heavily lifted, half lifted eyelids,--I wonder
if it's a trick. The long lashes can't be; she can't make them curl up
at the edges. Blood,--Lurella Blood. And she wants to know.” Staniford's
voice fell thoughtful.
“She's more slender than Faed's Evangeline. Faed painted rather too fat
a sufferer on that tombstone. Lurella Blood has a very pretty figure.
Lurella. Why Lurella?”
“Oh, come, Staniford!” cried Dunham. “It isn't fair to call the girl by
that jingle without some ground for it.”
“I'm sure her name's Lurella, for she wanted to know. Besides, there's
as much sense in it as there is in any name. It sounds very well.
Lurella. It is mere prejudice that condemns the novel collocation of
syllables.”
“I wonder what she's thinking of now,--what's passing in her mind,”
mused Dunham aloud.
“_You_ want to know, too, do you?” mocked his friend. “I'll tell you
what: processions of young men so long that they are an hour getting by
a given point. That's what's passing in every girl's mind--when
she's thinking. It's perfectly right. Processsions of young girls are
similarly passing in our stately and spacious intellects. It's the chief
business of the youth of one sex to think of the youth of the other
sex.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” assented Dunham; “and I believe in it, too--”
“Of course you do, you wicked wretch, you abandoned Lovelace, you
bruiser of ladies' hearts! You hope the procession is composed entirely
of yourself. What would the divine Hibbard say to your goings-on?”
“Oh, don't, Staniford! It isn't fair,” pleaded Dunham, with the
flattered laugh which the best of men give when falsely attainted
of gallantry. “I was wondering whether she was feeling homesick, or
strange, or--”
“I will go below and ask her,” said Staniford. “I know she will tell
me the exact truth. They always do. Or if you will take a guess of mine
instead of her word for it, I will hazard the surmise that she is not at
all homesick. What has a pretty young girl to regret in such a life as
she has left? It's the most arid and joyless existence under the sun.
She has never known anything like society. In the country with us, the
social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed, but there are
monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are quite extinct
now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns: ball-rooms that
have had no dancing in them for half a century, and where they give you
a bed sometimes. There used to be academies, too, in the hill towns,
where they furnished a rude but serviceable article of real learning,
and where the local octogenarian remembers seeing something famous in
the way of theatricals on examination-day; but neither his children nor
his grandchildren have seen the like. There's a decay of the religious
sentiment, and the church is no longer a social centre, with merry
meetings among the tombstones between the morning and the afternoon
service. Superficial humanitarianism of one kind or another has killed
the good old orthodoxy, as the railroads have killed the turnpikes and
the country taverns; and the common schools have killed the academies.
Why, I don't suppose this girl ever saw anything livelier than a
township cattle show, or a Sunday-school picnic, in her life. They don't
pay visits in the country except at rare intervals, and their evening
parties, when they have any, are something to strike you dead with pity.
They used to clear away the corn-husks and pumpkins on the barn floor,
and dance by the light of tin lanterns. At least, that's the traditional
thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides of the room,
giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums, and coaxing somebody
to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in the form of apples and
water. I have assisted at _some_ rural festivals where the apples were
omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our country people don't all go mad.
They do go mad, a great many of them, and manage to get a little glimpse
of society in the insane asylums.” Staniford ended his tirade with a
laugh, in which he vented his humorous sense and his fundamental pity of
the conditions he had caricatured.
“But how,” demanded Dunham, breaking rebelliously from the silence in
which he had listened, “do you account for her good manner?”
“She probably was born with a genius for it. Some people are born with
a genius for one thing, and some with a genius for another. I, for
example, am an artistic genius, forced to be an amateur by the delusive
possession of early wealth, and now burning with a creative instinct
in the direction of the sheep or cattle business; you have the gift of
universal optimism; Lurella Blood has the genius of good society. Give
that girl a winter among nice people in Boston, and you would never know
that she was not born on Beacon Hill.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” said Dunham.
“You doubt it? Pessimist!”
“But you implied just now that she had no sensibility,” pursued Dunham.
“So I did!” cried Staniford, cheerfully. “Social genius and sensibility
are two very different things; the cynic might contend they were
incompatible, but I won't insist so far. I dare say she may regret the
natal spot; most of us have a dumb, brutish attachment to the _cari
luoghi_; but if she knows anything, she hates its surroundings, and must
be glad to get out into the world. I should like mightily to know how
the world strikes her, as far as she's gone. But I doubt if she's one
to betray her own counsel in any way. She looks deep, Lurella does.”
Staniford laughed again at the pain which his insistence upon the name
brought into Dunham's face.