A UNIVERSITY TOWN
I did not think I would be seated here on my rustic bench writing so
soon again. I finished the history of my catastrophe a week ago. But
something almost pleasant has occurred, and I'd like to try my pencil at
recording a pleasant story. Scarcely a story yet, though. Just a bit of
a conversation--that's all--fragmentary. It refers to this very bench
where I am sitting as I write, to the hills I am seeing out beyond the
little maple tree stripped now of all its glory. I cannot see a dash of
color anywhere. The world is brown. The sky is gray. It is rather chilly
for writing out-of-doors.
The conversation I refer to began in an ugly little room in a
professor's house. There was a roll-top desk in the room, and a map,
yellow with age, hanging on the wall. The conversation ended underneath
a lamp-post on a street curbing, and it was rainy and dark and cold. And
yet when I think of that conversation, sitting here in the brown chill
dusk, I see color, I feel warmth.
When I first came here to Lucy's three weeks ago, she assumed that I
was suffering from a broken heart. I had been exposed and showed
symptoms--going off alone for long walks and consuming reams of theme
paper as if I was half mad. I told Lucy that my heart was too hard to
break, but I couldn't convince her. There wasn't a day passed but that
she planned some form of amusement or diversion. Even Will, her husband,
cooperated and spent long evenings playing rum or three-handed auction,
so I might not sit idle. I tried to fall in with Lucy's plans.
"But, please, no men! I don't want to see another man for years. If any
man I know finds out I'm here, tell him I won't see him, absolutely," I
warned. "I want to be alone. I want to think things out undisturbed.
Sometimes I almost wish I could enter a convent."
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Lucy would exclaim.
"You needn't be. You didn't break my engagement. For heaven's sake,
Lucy, _you_ needn't take it so hard."
But she did. She simply brooded over me. She read to me, smiled for me,
and initiated every sally that I made into public. In conversation she
picked her way with me with the precaution of a cat walking across a
table covered with delicate china. She made wide detours to avoid a
reference or remark that might reflect upon my engagement. Will did
likewise. I lived in daily surprise and wonder. As a family we are
brutally frank. This was a new phase, and one of the indirect results, I
suppose, of my broken engagement.
What I am trying to arrive at is the change of attitude in me toward
Lucy. Usually when I visit Lucy I do just about as I please; refuse to
attend a lot of stupid student-teas and brain-fagging lectures, or to
exert myself to appear engrossed in the conversation of her intellectual
dinner guests.
I used to scorn Lucy's dinners. They are very different from Edith's,
where, when the last guest in her stunning new gown has arrived and
swept into the drawing-room, followed by her husband, a maid enters,
balancing on her tray a dozen little glasses, amber filled; everybody
takes one, daintily, between a thumb and forefinger and drains it; puts
it nonchalantly aside on shelf or table; offers or accepts an arm and
floats toward the dining-room. At Edith's dinners the table is long,
flower-laden, candle-lighted. Your partner's face smiles at you dimly.
His voice is almost drowned by the chatter and the laughter all about,
but you hear him--just barely--and you laugh--he is immensely droll--and
then reply. And he laughs, too, contagiously, and you know that you are
going to get on!
Incidentally at Edith's dinners silent-footed servants pass you things;
you take them; you eat a little, too--delicious morsels if you stopped
to consider them; but you and your partner are having far too good a
time (he is actually audacious, and so, if you please, are you) to
bother about the food.
There's a little group of glasses beside your water, and once in a while
there appears in your field of vision a hand grasping a white napkin
folded like a cornucopia, out of which flows delicious nectar. You sip
a little of it occasionally, a very little--you are careful of
course--and waves of elation sweep over you because you are alive and
happy and good to look upon; waves of keen delight that such a big and
splendid life (there are orchids in the center of the table, there are
pearls and diamonds everywhere)--that such a life as this is yours to
grasp and to enjoy.
At Lucy's dinners the women do not wear diamonds and pearls. Lucy seldom
entertains more than six at a time. "Shall we go out?" she says when her
Delia mumbles something from the door. You straggle across the hall into
the dining-room, where thirteen carnations--you count them later,
there's time enough--where thirteen stiff carnations are doing duty in
the center of the prim table. At each place there is a soup plate
sending forth a cloud of steam. You wait until Lucy points out your
place to you, and then sit down at last. There is a terrible pause--you
wonder if they say grace--and then finally Lucy picks up her soup-spoon
for signal and you're off! The conversation is general. That is because
Lucy's guests are usually intellectuals, and whatever any one of them
says is supposed to be so important that every one else must keep still
and listen. You can't help but notice the food, because there's nothing
to soften the effect of it upon your nerves, as it were. There are
usually four courses, with chicken or ducks for the main dish,
accompanied by potatoes cut in balls, the invariable rubber stamp of a
party at Lucy's. Afterward there's coffee in the living-room, and you
feel fearfully discouraged when you look at the clock and find it's only
eight-thirty. You're surprised after the guests have gone to find that
Lucy considers her party a success.
"Why," she exclaims, cheeks aglow, "Dr. Van Breeze gave us the entire
résumé of his new book. He seldom thinks anybody clever enough to talk
to. It was a perfect combination!"
As I said, I usually visit Lucy in rather a critical state of mind and
hold myself aloof from her learned old doctors and professors. On this
visit, though, she is so obviously careful of me and my feelings, that I
find myself going out of my way to consider hers a little. One day last
week when she so brightly suggested that we go to a tea given by the
wife of a member of the faculty, instead of exclaiming, "Oh, dear! it
would bore me to extinction," I replied sweetly, "All right, if you want
to, I'll go."
I wasn't feeling happy. I didn't want to go. I had been roaming the
woods and country roads round about for a month in search of an excuse
for existence. I had been autobiographing for days in the faint hope
that I might run across something worth while in my life. But no. It was
hopeless. I had lost all initiative. I couldn't see what reason there
was for me to eat three meals a day. It seemed as foolish as stoking the
furnaces of an ocean liner when it is in port. In such a mood, and
through the drifting mist of a complaining October afternoon, in rubbers
and a raincoat, I started out with Lucy for her afternoon tea.
The other guests wore raincoats, too--we met a few on the way--with
dull-colored suits underneath, and tailored hats. There wasn't a single
bright, frivolous thing about that tea. Even the house was dismal--rows
of black walnut bookcases with busts of great men on top, steel
engravings framed in oak on the walls, and a Boston fern or two in red
pots sitting about on plates. When I looked up from my weak tea, served
in a common stock-pattern willow cup, and saw Lucy sparkling with
pleasure, talking away for dear life with a white-haired old man who
wore a string tie and had had two fingers shot off in the Civil War (I
always hated to shake hands with him) a wave of intolerance for age and
learning swept over me. I told Lucy if she didn't mind I'd run along
home, and stepped across the hall into a little stupid room with a
roll-top desk in it, where we had left our raincoats, and rubbers. I put
on my things and then stood staring a moment at a picture on the wall. I
didn't know what the picture was. I simply looked at it blindly while I
fought a sudden desire to cry. I hadn't wept before. But this dreadful
house, these dry, drab people were such a contrast to my
all-but-realized ambitions that it brought bitter tears to my eyes. Life
at Grassmere--_that_ was living! This was mere existence.
Just as I was groping for a handkerchief some little fool of a woman
exclaimed, "Oh, there she is--in the study! I thought she hadn't gone. O
Miss Vars, there's somebody I want you to meet, and meet you. Here she
is, Mr. Jennings. Come in. Miss Vars," I was still facing the wall,
"Miss Vars, I want to introduce Mr. Jennings." I turned finally, and as
I did so she added, "Now, I must go back to Dr. Fuller. I was afraid
you'd gone," and out she darted. I could have shot her.
Mr. Jennings came straight across the room. Through a blur I caught an
impression of height, breadth and energy. His sudden hand-grasp was firm
and decisive. "How do you do?" he said, and then abruptly observed my
tears.
"You've caught me with my sails all down," I explained.
"Have I?" he replied pleasantly. "Well, I like sails down."
"Please do not think," I continued, "that I am often guilty of such a
thing as this. I'm not. Who was that woman anyhow?"
"Oh, don't blame her," he laughed, and he stepped forward to look at the
picture which I had been staring at. I was busy putting away my
handkerchief. "Who was that woman?" Mr. Jennings repeated, abruptly
turning away from the picture back to me, "Who was she? I'll tell you
who she was--a good angel. Why," he went on, "I'd got into the way of
thinking that sympathy as expressed by tears had gone out of style with
the modern girl. They never shed any at the theater nowadays, I notice.
I'm glad to know there is one who hasn't forgotten how."
I stepped forward then to find out what manner of picture it was to
cause such a tribute to be paid me. It was called "The Doctor." A crude
bare room was depicted. The light from a lamp on an old kitchen table
threw its rays on the turned-aside, face of a little girl, who lay
asleep--or unconscious--on an improvised bed made of two chairs drawn
together. Beyond the narrow confines of the cot the little girl's hand
extended, wistfully upturned. Seated beside her, watching, sat the big
kind doctor. Anxiety, doubt were in his intelligent face. Near an east
window, through which a streak of dawn was creeping, sat a woman, her
face buried in the curve of her arms folded on the table. Beside her
stood a bearded man, brow furrowed, his pleading eyes upon the doctor,
while his hand, big, comforting, rested on the woman's bowed shoulders.
A cup with a spoon in it, a collection of bottles near-by--all the poor,
human, useless tools of defense were there, eloquent of a long and
losing struggle. Every one who recalls the familiar picture knows what a
dreary, hopeless scene it is--the room stamped with poverty, the window
stark and curtainless, the woman meagerly clad, the man bearing the
marks of hardship.
Suddenly in the face of all that, Mr. Jennings softly exclaimed, "That's
living."
Only five minutes ago I had said the same thing of life at Grassmere.
"Is it?" I replied. "Is that living? I've been wondering lately. I
thought--I thought--it's so poor and sad!" I remonstrated.
"Poor! Oh, no, it's rich," he replied quickly, "rich in everything worth
while. Anyhow, only lives that are vacuums are free from sadness."
"Are lives that are vacuums free from happiness, too?" I enquired.
He took my question as if it was a statement. "That's true, too, I
suppose," he agreed.
"How hopeless," I murmured, still gazing at the picture, but in reality
contemplating my own empty life. He misunderstood.
"See here," he said. "I believe this little girl here is going to pull
through after all. Don't worry. I insist she is. That artist ought to
paint a sequel--just for you," he added, and abruptly he unfolded his
arms and looked at me squarely for the first time. "I didn't in the
least get your name," he broke off. "The good angel flew away so soon."
I told him.
"Oh, yes, Miss Vars. Thank you. Mine's Jennings. People mumble names so
in introductions." He glanced around at the piles of raincoats and racks
of umbrellas. I already had my coat on. "You weren't just going, were
you?" he inquired brightly. "For if you were, so was I, too. Perhaps you
will let me walk along--unless you're riding."
I forgot just for a minute that I didn't want to see another man for
years and years. He wasn't a man just then, but a bright and colorful
illumination. He stood before me full of life and vigor. He was tall
and straight. His close-cropped hair shone like gold in the pale
gas-light, and there was a tan or glow upon his face that made me think
of out-of-doors. His smile, his straightforward gaze, his crisp voice,
had brightened that dull little room for me. I went with him. Of course
I did--out into the rainy darkness of the late October afternoon, drawn
as a child towards the glow of red fire.