LOVE, THE BLUNDERER
As Dory had several months' work before him at Paris, he and Del took a
furnished apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, high up, attractive within,
before its balconied windows the stately trees, the fountains, the bright
flower beds, the thronged playgrounds of the Tuileries. But they were not
long left to themselves; in their second week, the _concierge's_ little
girl late one afternoon brought Janet's card up to Adelaide. As Janet
entered, Del regretted having yielded to impulse and admitted her. For,
the granddaughter of "blue-jeans Jones," the tavern keeper, was looking
the elegant and idle aristocrat from the tip of the tall, graceful plume
in her most Parisian of hats to the buckles of shoes which matched her
dress, parasol, and jewels. A lovely Janet, a marvelous Janet; a toilette
it must have taken her two hours to make, and spiritual hazel eyes that
forbade the idea of her giving so much as a moment's thought to any
material thing, even to dress. Adelaide had spent with the dressmakers a
good part of the letter of credit her mother slipped into her traveling
bag at the parting; she herself was in a negligee which had as much style
as Janet's costume and, in addition, individual taste, whereof Janet had
but little; and besides, while her beauty had the same American
delicateness, as of the finest, least florid Sèvres or Dresden, it also
had a look of durability which Janet's beauty lacked--for Janet's beauty
depended upon those fragilities, coloring and contour. Adelaide was not
notably vain, had a clear sense of her defects, tended to exaggerate
them, rather than her many and decisive good points. It was not Janet's
appearance that unsettled Del; she brought into the room the atmosphere
Del had breathed during all those important years of girlhood, and had
not yet lost her fondness for. It depressed her at once about herself to
note how this vision of the life that had been but would never be again
affected her.
"You are sad, dear," said Janet, as she kissed her on both cheeks with a
diffusing of perfume that gave her a sense of a bouquet of priceless
exotics waving before her face.
"You are sad, dear," she repeated, with that air of tenderest sympathy
which can be the safest cover for subtle malice.
Adelaide shrank.
"I'm so glad I've come when I may be able to do some good."
Adelaide winced.
"How cozy these rooms are--"
At "cozy" Adelaide shuddered. No one ever used, except apologetically,
that word, which is the desperate last resort of compliment.
"And what a beautiful view from the windows--so much better than ours at
the pompous old Bristol, looking out on that bare square!"
Adelaide laughed. Not by chance, she knew, did Miss Janet, with her
softly sheathed but swift and sharp cat claws, drag in the delicate hint
that while Adelaide was "cozy" in an unaristocratic _maison meublée_, she
herself was ensconced in the haunts of royalty; and it suddenly came back
to Del how essentially cheap was "aristocracy."
"But I mustn't look at those adorable gardens," continued Janet. "They
fill me with longing for the country, for the pure, simple things. I am
so sick of the life mamma and I lead. And you are married to dear
Dory--how romantic! And I hear that Arthur is to marry Margaret
Schultz--or whatever her name was--that splendid creature! She was a
_dear_ friend of the trained nurse I had last spring, and what the nurse
told me about her made me positively love her. Such character! And
getting ready to lead _such_ a useful life." This without the least
suggestion of struggle with a difficult subject. "Arthur is a noble
fellow, too. If we had been in spiritual accord, I'd have loved to go and
lead his life with him."
Adelaide was in high good humor now--Janet was too preposterous to be
taken seriously. "What do you want me to do for you, Jen?" said she.
"Why, nothing!" exclaimed Janet, looking a little wonder and much
reproach.
Del laughed. "Now, really, Jen," said she. "You know you never in the
world went to all the trouble of getting my address, and then left
royalty at the Bristol for a _maison meublée_, four flights up and no
elevator, just to _see_ me!"
"I had thought of something I was sure would give you pleasure," said
Janet, injured.
"What do you want me to do for you?" repeated Adelaide, with smiling
persistence.
"Mamma and I have an invitation to spend a week at Besançon--you know,
it's the splendid old chateau Louis Treize used to love to visit. It's
still the seat of the Saint Berthè family, and the present Marquis, a
_dear_ friend of ours, is such a wonderful, fine old nobleman--so simple
and gracious and full of epigrams. He really ought to wear lace and
ruffles and a beautiful peruke. At any rate, as I was saying, he has
asked us down. But mamma has to go to England to see papa before he
sails, and I thought you'd love to visit the chateau--you and Dory. It's
so poetic--and historic, too."
"Your mother is going away and you'll be unable to make this visit unless
you get a chaperon, and you want me to chaperon you," said Adelaide, who
was not minded to be put in the attitude of being the recipient of a
favor from this particular young woman at this particular time, when in
truth she was being asked to confer a favor. "Adversity" had already
sharpened her wits to the extent of making her alert to the selfishness
disguised as generosity which the prosperous love to shower upon their
little brothers and sisters of the poor. She knew at once that Janet must
have been desperately off for a chaperon to come to her.
A look of irritation marred Janet's spiritual countenance for an
instant. But she never permitted anything whatsoever to stand between her
and what she wished. She masked herself and said sweetly: "Won't you go,
dear? I know you'll enjoy it--you and Dory. And it would be a great favor
to me. I don't see how I can go unless you consent. You know, I mayn't go
with just anyone."
Adelaide's first impulse was to refuse; but she did not. She put off
decision by saying, "I'll ask Dory to-night, and let you know in the
morning. Will that do?"
"Perfectly," said Janet, rising to go. "I'll count on you, for I know
Dory will want to see the chateau and get a glimpse of life in the old
aristocracy. It will be _so_ educational."
Dory felt the change in Del the instant he entered their little
_salon_--felt that during the day some new element had intruded into
their friendly life together, to interrupt, to unsettle, and to cloud the
brightening vistas ahead. At the mention of Janet he began to understand.
He saw it all when she said with a show of indifference that deceived
only herself, "Wouldn't you like to go down to Besançon?"
"Not I," replied he coldly. "Europe is full of that kind of places. You
can't glance outdoors without seeing a house or a ruin where the sweat
and blood of peasants were squandered."
"Janet thought you'd be interested in it as history," persisted Adelaide,
beginning to feel irritated.
"That's amusing," said Dory. "You might have told her that scandal isn't
history, that history never was made in such places. As for the people
who live there now, they're certainly not worth while--the same
pretentious ignoramuses that used to live there, except they no longer
have fangs."
"You ought not to be so prejudiced," said Adelaide, who in those days
often found common sense irritating. She had the all but universal habit
of setting down to "prejudice" such views as are out of accord with the
set of views held by one's business or professional or social associates.
Her irritation confirmed Dory's suspicions. "I spoke only for myself,"
said he. "Of course, you'll accept Janet's invitation. She included me
only as a matter of form."
"I couldn't, without you."
"Why not?"
"Well--wouldn't, then."
"But I urge you to go--want you to go! I can't possibly leave Paris, not
for a day--at present."
"I shan't go without you," said Adelaide, trying hard to make her tone
firm and final.
Dory leaned across the table toward her--they were in the garden of a
cafe in the Latin Quarter. "If you don't go, Del," said he, "you'll make
me feel that I am restraining you in a way far meaner than a direct
request not to go. You want to go. I want you to go. There is _no_ reason
why you shouldn't."
Adelaide smiled shamefacedly. "You honestly want to get rid of me?"
"Honestly. I'd feel like a jailer, if you didn't go."
"What'll you do in the evenings?"
"Work later, dine later, go to bed and get up earlier."
"Work--always work," she said. She sighed, not wholly insincerely. "I
wish I weren't so idle and aimless. If I were the woman I ought to be--"
"None of that--none of that!" he cried, in mock sternness.
"I ought to be interested in your work."
"Why, I thought you were!" he exclaimed, in smiling astonishment.
"Oh, of course, in a way--in an 'entertainment' sort of way. I like to
hear you talk about it--who wouldn't? But I don't give the kind of
interest I should--the interest that thinks and suggests and stimulates."
"Don't be too sure of that," said Dory. "The 'helpful' sort of people are
usually a nuisance."
But she knew the truth, though passion might still be veiling it from
him. Life, before her father's will forced an abrupt change, had been to
her a showman, submitting his exhibits for her gracious approval,
shifting them as soon as she looked as if she were about to be bored; and
the change had come before she had lived long enough to exhaust and weary
of the few things he has for the well-paying passive spectator, but not
before she had formed the habit of making only the passive spectator's
slight mental exertion.
"Dory is so generous," she thought, with the not acutely painful kind of
remorse we lay upon the penitential altar for our own shortcomings, "that
he doesn't realize how I'm shirking and letting him do all the pulling."
And to him she said, "If you could have seen into my mind while Janet was
here, you'd give me up as hopeless."
Dory laughed. "I had a glimpse of it just now--when you didn't like it
because I couldn't see my way clear to taking certain people so seriously
as you think they deserve."
"But you _are_ prejudiced on that subject," she maintained.
"And ever shall be," admitted he, so good-humoredly that she could not
but respond. "It's impossible for me to forget that every luxurious idler
means scores who have to work long hours for almost nothing in order that
he may be of no use to the world or to himself."
"You'd have the whole race on a dead level," said Adelaide.
"Of material prosperity--yes," replied Dory. "A high dead level. I'd
abolish the coarse, brutal contrasts between waste and want. Then there'd
be a chance for the really interesting contrasts--the infinite varieties
of thought and taste and character and individuality."
"I see," said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea. "You'd have the
contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed.
You'd abolish the weeds."
"Root and stalk," answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it. "My
objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar--and so
dishonest. Is that prejudice?"
"No--oh, no!" replied Del sincerely. "Now, it seems to me, I don't care
to go with Janet."
"Not to oblige me--very particularly? I want you to go. I want you to
see for yourself, Del."
She laughed. "Then I'll go--but only because you ask it."
* * * * *
That was indeed an elegant company at Besançon--elegant in dress, elegant
in graceful carelessness of manners, elegant in graceful sinuosities of
cleverly turned phrases. But after the passing of the first and second
days' sensations, Hiram and Ellen Ranger's daughter began to have
somewhat the same feeling she remembered having as a little girl, when
she went to both the afternoon and the evening performances of the
circus. These people, going through always the same tricks in the same
old narrow ring of class ideas, lost much of their charm after a few
repetitions of their undoubtedly clever and attractive performance; she
even began to see how they would become drearily monotonous. "No wonder
they look bored," she thought. "They are." What enormous importance they
attached to trifles! What ludicrous tenacity in exploded delusions! And
what self-complacent claiming of remote, powerful ancestors who had
founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them
as puny nonentities. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely
as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them
"background." They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to
evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed--and were widely accepted--as
the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those
who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly
prejudiced when he had laughed at them. Why, he had only shown the
plainest kind of American good sense. As for snobbishness, was not the
silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and
unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material
justification whatsoever? They hadn't good manners even, because--as Dory
had once said--no one could have really good manners who believed, and
acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of
his own family--the human race.
"I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this
sort of people and things," she thought, as she looked round the ballroom
from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had
banished spontaneous gayety. "I suppose I could even again come to
fancying this the only life. But I certainly don't care for it now."
But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind--her own eyes
and her own mind--in observing what was going on around her, she did not
disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common
sense--absolute common sense--always sounds incongruous in a conventional
atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in
stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quantity, it causes
those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as
insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet
had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of
heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the
Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthè and the most agreeable and
adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his
intelligence to Janet, when they were alone before dinner on the fourth
day, and Janet at once responded.
"And such a soul!" she exclaimed. "He inherits all the splendid, noble
traditions of their old, _old_ family. You see in his face that he is
descended from generations of refinement and--and--freedom from contact
with vulgarizing work, don't you?"
"That hadn't struck me," said Adelaide amiably. "But he's a well-meaning,
good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the
surroundings he's had all his life as a bird on a bough. Who doesn't?"
"But when you know him better, when you know him as I know him--" Janet's
expression disclosed the secret.
"But won't you be lonely--away off here--among--foreign people?"
said Adelaide.
"Oh, I should _love_ it here!" exclaimed Janet. "It seems to me I--he
and I--must have lived in this very chateau in a former existence. We
have talked about it, and he agrees with me. We are _so_ harmonious."
"You've really made up your mind to--to marry him?" Adelaide had almost
said "to buy him"; she had a sense that it was her duty to disregard
Janet's pretenses, and "buy" was so exactly the word to use with these
people to whom money was the paramount consideration, the thought behind
every other thought, the feeling behind every other feeling, the
mainspring of their lives, the mainstay of all the fictions of their
aristocracy.
"That depends on father," replied Janet. "Mother has gone to talk to him
about it."
"I'm sure your father won't stand between you and happiness," said
Adelaide.
"But he doesn't understand these aristocratic people," replied she. "Of
course, if it depended upon Aristide and me, we should be married without
consulting anybody. But he can't legally marry without his father's
consent, and his father naturally wants proper settlements. It's a cruel
law, don't you think?"
Adelaide thought not; she thought it, on the contrary, an admirable
device to "save the face" of a mercenary lover posing as a sentimentalist
and money-spurner. But she merely said, "I think it's most
characteristic, most aristocratic." She knew Janet, how shrewd she was,
how thoroughly she understood the "coarse side of life." She added, "And
your father'll come round."
"I wish I could believe it," sighed Janet. "The Saint Berthès have an
exaggerated notion of papa's wealth. Besides, they need a good deal. They
were robbed horribly by those dreadful revolutionists. They used to own
all this part of the country. All these people round here with their
little farms were once the peasants of Aristide's ancestors. Now--even
this chateau has a mortgage on it. I couldn't keep back the tears, while
Aristide was telling me."
Adelaide thought of Charles Whitney listening to that same recital, and
almost laughed. "Well, I feel sure it will turn out all right," she said.
"Your mother'll see to that. And I believe you'll be very, very happy."
Theatricals in private life was Janet's passion--why should she not be
happy? Frenchmen were famous for their politeness and consideration to
their wives; Aristide would never let her see or feel that she bored him,
that her reverence for the things he was too intelligent and modern not
to despise appealed to him only through his sense of humor. Janet would
push her shrewd, soulful way into social leadership, would bring her
children up to be more aristocratic than the children of the oldest
aristocrats.
Adelaide smiled as she pictured it all--smiled, yet sighed. She was not
under Janet's fixed and unshakable delusions. She saw that high-sounding
titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass
of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part
of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self of
hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that
was Hiram Ranger's daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient,
ignorant allegiance to "appearances." She did not appreciate how bored
she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the
always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual
subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it
impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even
downright rude. They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday. On
Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday.
"I'd hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery," thought
she, as the mossy bastions of Besançon drifted from her horizon--she was
journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthè women
as chaperone. "It is foolery and it is dull. I don't see how grown-up
people endure it, unless they've never known any better. Yet I seem
unable to content myself with the life father stands for--and Dory." She
appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two
bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the
result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to
go. "Still," she concluded, "I _am_ learning"--which was the truth;
indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had
such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement.
Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of
bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of
passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive
self--the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He
constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty
or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes;
and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him
to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it.
The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male,
has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or
altogether approve--though she is not slow to advantage herself of it. In
the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable
womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe
possible, unless they have had experience of it. Dory had never had that
familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and
unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which
enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it
when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory,
indeed--but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely
strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart,
sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much
more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true
that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to
bother about what the women think. Thought does not yet govern the world,
but appetite and action--bold appetite and the courage of it.