mustered a Spartan smile. "If misery loves company, then am I the
least unhappy soul alive. For I don't want anybody but just you, and I
believe I never will."
"Oh--? But I don't count." The girl continued, with composure: "Or
rather, I have always counted your affairs, so that I know precisely
what it all amounts to."
"Sum total?"
"A lot of imitation emotions." She added hastily: "Oh, quite a good
imitation, dear; you are smooth enough to see to that. Why, I remember
once--when you read me that first sonnet, sitting all hunched up on
the little stool, and pretending you didn't know I knew who you meant
me to know it was for, and ending with a really very effective,
breathless sob--and caught my hand and pressed it to your forehead for
a moment--Why, that time I was thoroughly rattled and almost
believed--even I--that--" She shrugged. "And if I had been
younger--!" she said, half regretfully, for at this time Bettie was
very nearly twenty-two.
"Yes." The effective breathless sob responded to what had virtually
been an encore. "I have not forgotten."
"Only for a moment, though." Miss Hamlyn reflected, and then added,
brightly: "Now, most girls would have liked it, for it sounded all
wool. And they would have gone into it, as you wanted, and have been
very, very happy for a while. Then, after a time--after you had got a
sonnet or two out of it, and had made a sufficiency of pretty
speeches,--you would have gone for an admiring walk about yourself,
and would have inspected your sensations and have applauded them,
quite enthusiastically, and would have said, in effect: 'Madam, I
thank you for your attention. Pray regard the incident as closed.'"
"You are doing me," I observed, "an injustice. And however tiny they
may be, I hate 'em."
"But, Robin, can't you see," she said, with an odd earnestness, "that
to be fond of you is quite disgracefully easy, even though--" Bettie
Hamlyn said, presently: "Why, your one object in life appears to be to
find a girl who will allow you to moon around her and make verses
about her. Oh, very well! I met to-day just the sort of pretty idiot
who will let you do it. She is visiting Kathleen Eppes for the Finals.
She has a great deal of money, too, I hear." And Bettie mentioned a
name.
"That's rather queer," said I. "I used to know that girl. She will be
at the K. A. dance to-morrow night, I suppose,"--and I put up my
manuscript with a large air of tolerance. "I dare say that I have been
exaggerating matters a bit, after all. Any woman who treated me
in the way that Miss Aurelia did is not, really, worthy of regret. And
in any event, I got a ballade out of her and six--no, seven--other
poems."
For the name which Bettie had mentioned was that of Stella Musgrave,
and I was, somehow, curiously desirous to come again to Stella, and
nervous about it, too, even then....
3.
_He Earns a Stick-pin_
"Dear me!" said Stella, wonderingly; "I would never have known you in
the world! You've grown so fa--I mean, you are so well built. I've
grown? Nonsense!--and besides, what did you expect me to do in six
years?--and moreover, it is abominably rude of you to presume to speak
of me in that abstracted and figurative manner--quite as if I were a
debt or a taste for drink. It is really only French heels and a
pompadour, and, of course, you can't have this dance. It's promised,
and I hop, you know, frightfully.... Why, naturally, I haven't
forgotten--How could I, when you were the most disagreeable boy I ever
knew?"
I ventured a suggestion that caused Stella to turn an attractive pink,
and laugh. "No," said she, demurely, "I shall never never sit out
another dance with you."
So she did remember!
Subsequently: "Our steps suit perfectly--Heavens! you are the fifth
man who has said that to-night, and I am sure it would be very silly
and very tiresome to dance through life with anybody. Men are so
absurd, don't you think? Oh, yes, I tell them all--every one of
them--that our steps suit, even when they have just ripped off a yard
or so of flounce in an attempt to walk up the front of my dress. It
makes them happy, poor things, and injures nobody. You liked it, you
know; you grinned like a pleased cat. I like cats, don't you?"
Later: "That is absolute nonsense, you know," said Stella, critically.
"Do you always get red in the face when you make love? I wouldn't if I
were you. You really have no idea how queer it makes you look."
Still later: "No, I don't think I am going anywhere to-morrow
afternoon," said Stella.
2
So that during the fleet moments of these Finals, while our army was
effecting a landing in Cuba, I saw as much of Stella as was possible;
and veracity compels the admission that she made no marked effort to
prevent my doing so. Indeed, she was quite cross, and scornful, about
the crowning glory being denied her, of going with me to the
Baccalaureate Address the morning I received my degree. To that of
course I took Bettie.
3
I said good-bye to Bettie Hamlyn rather late one evening. It was in
her garden. The Finals were over, and Stella had left Fairhaven that
afternoon. I was to follow in the morning, by an early train.
It was a hot, still night in June, with never a breath of air
stirring. In the sky was a low-hung moon, full and very red. It was an
evil moon, and it lighted a night that was unreasonably ominous. And
Bettie and I had talked of trifles resolutely for two hours.
"Well--good-bye Bettie," I said at last. "I'm glad it isn't for long."
For of course we meant never to let a month elapse without our seeing
each other.
"Good-bye," she said, and casually shook hands.
Then Bettie Hamlyn said, in a different voice: "Robin, you come of
such a bad lot, and already you are by way of being a rather frightful
liar. And I'm letting you go. I'm turning you over to Stellas and
mothers and things like that just because I have to. It isn't fair.
They will make another Townsend of my boy, and after all I've tried to
do. Oh, Robin, don't let anybody or anything do that to you! Do try to
do the unpleasant thing sometimes, my dear!--But what's the good of
promising?"
"And have I ever failed you, Bettie?"
"No,--not me," she answered, almost as though she grudged the fact.
Then Bettie laughed a little. "Indeed, I'm trying to believe you never
will. Oh, indeed, I am. But just be honest with me, Robin, and nothing
else will ever matter very much. I don't care what you do, if only you
are always honest with me. You can murder people, if you like, and
burn down as many houses as you choose. You probably will. But you'll
be honest with me--won't you?--and particularly when you don't want to
be?"
So I promised her that. And sometimes I believe it is the only promise
which I ever tried to keep quite faithfully....
4
And all the ensuing summer I followed Stella Musgrave from one
watering place to another, with an engaging and entire candor as to my
desires. I was upon the verge of my majority, when, under the terms of
my father's will, I would come into possession of such fragments of
his patrimony as he had omitted to squander. And afterward I intended
to become excessively distinguished in this or that profession, not as
yet irrevocably fixed upon, but for choice as a writer of immortal
verse; and I was used to dwell at this time very feelingly, and very
frequently, upon the wholesome restraint which matrimony imposes upon
the possessor of an artistic temperament.
Stella promised to place my name upon her waiting list, and to take up
the matter in due season; and she lamented, with a tiny and
pre-meditated yawn, that as a servitor of system she was compelled to
list her "little lovers and suitors in alphabetical order, Mr.
Townsend. Besides, you would probably strangle me before the year was
out."
"I would thoroughly enjoy doing it," I said, grimly, "right now." She
regarded me for a while. "You would, too," she said at last, with an
alien gravity; "and that is why--Oh, Rob dear, you are out of my
dimension. I am rather afraid of you. I am a poor bewildered triangle
who is being wooed by a cube!" the girl wailed, and but half
humorously.
And I began to plead. It does not matter what I said. It never
mattered.
And persons more sensible than I found then far more important things
to talk about, such as General Alger's inefficiency, and General
Shafter's hammock, and "embalmed beef," and the folly of taking over
the Philippines, and Admiral von Diedrich's behavior, and the yellow
fever in our camps and the comparative claims of Messrs. Sampson and
Schley to be made rear-admiral; and everybody more or less was
demanding "an investigation," as the natural aftermath of a war.
5
Stella's mother had closed Bellemeade for the year, however, and they
were to spend the winter in Lichfield; and Stella, to reduplicate her
phrase, promised to "think it over very seriously."
But I suppose I had never any real chance against Peter Blagden. To
begin with,--though Stella herself, of course, would inherit plenty
of money when her mother died,--Peter was the only nephew of a
childless uncle who was popularly reported to "roll in wealth"; and in
addition, Peter was seven years older than I and notoriously
dissipated. No other girl of twenty would have hesitated between us
half so long as Stella did. She hesitated through a whole winter; and
even now there is odd, if scanty, comfort in the fact that Stella
hesitated....
Besides Peter was eminently likeable. At times I almost liked him
myself, for all my fervent envy of his recognized depravity and of the
hateful ease with which he thought of something to say in those
uncomfortable moments when he and I and Stella were together. At most
other times I could talk glibly enough, but before this seasoned
scapegrace I was dumb, and felt my reputation to be hopelessly
immaculate ... If only Stella would believe me to be just the tiniest
bit depraved! I blush to think of the dark hints I dropped as to
entirely fictitious women who "had been too kind to me. But then"--as
I would feelingly lament,--"we could never let women alone, we
Townsends, you know--"
6
One woman at least I was beginning to "let alone", in that I was
writing Bettie Hamlyn letters which grew shorter and shorter.... Her
mother had fallen ill, not long after I left college; and she and
Bettie were now a great way off, in Colorado, where the old lady was
dying, with the most selfish sort of laziness about it, and so was
involving me in endless correspondence.... At least, I wrote to Bettie
punctually, if briefly, though I had not seen her since that night
when the moon was red, and big, and very evil. I had to do it, because
she had insisted that I write.
"But letters don't mean anything, Bettie. And besides, I hate writing
letters."
"That is just why you must write to me regularly. You never do the
things you don't want to do. I know it. But for me you always will,
and that makes all the difference."
"Shylock!" I retorted.
"If you like. In any event, I mean to have my pound of flesh, and
regularly."
So I wrote to Bettie Hamlyn on the seventh of every month--because
that was her birthday,--and again on the twenty-third, because that
was mine. The rest of my time I gave whole-heartedly to Stella....
7
They named her Stella, I fancy, because her eyes were so like stars.
It is manifestly an irrelevant detail that there do not happen to be
any azure stars. Indeed, I am inclined to think that Nature belatedly
observed this omission, and created Stella's eyes to make up for it;
at any rate, if you can imagine Aldebaran or Benetnasch polished up a
bit and set in a speedwell-cup, you will have a very fair idea of one
of them. You cannot, however, picture to yourself the effect of the
pair of them, because the human mind is limited.
Really, though, their effect was curious. You noticed them casually,
let us say; then, without warning, you ceased to notice anything. You
simply grew foolish and gasped like a newly-hooked trout, and went mad
and babbled as meaninglessly as a silly little rustic brook trotting
under a bridge.
I have seen the thing happen any number of times. And, strangely
enough, you liked it. Numbers of young men would venture into the same
room with those disconcerting eyes the very next evening, even
appearing to seek them out and to court peril, as it were,--young men
who must have known perfectly well, either by report or experience,
the unavoidable result of such fool-hardy conduct. For eventually it
always culminated in Stella's being deeply surprised and grieved,--at
a dance, for choice, with music and color and the unthinking laughter
of others to heighten the sadness and the romance of it all,--she
never having dreamed of such a thing, of course, and having always
regarded you only as a dear, dear friend. Yes, and she used certainly
to hope that nothing she had said or done could have led you to
believe she had even for a moment considered such a thing. Oh, she did
it well, did Stella, and endured these frequent griefs and surprises
with, I must protest, quite exemplary patience. In a phrase, she was
the most adorable combination of the prevaricator, the jilt and the
coquette I have ever encountered.
8
So, for the seventh time, I asked Stella to marry me. Nearly every
fellow I knew had done as much, particularly Peter Blagden; and it is
always a mistake to appear unnecessarily reserved or exclusive. And
this time in declining--with a fluency that bespoke considerable
practice,--she informed me that, as the story books have it, she was
shortly to be wedded to another.
And Peter Blagden clapped the pinnacle upon my anguish by asking me to
be the best man. I knew even then whose vanity and whose sense of the
appropriate had put him up to it....
"For I haven't a living male relative of the suitable age except two
second cousins that I don't see much of--praise God!" said Peter,
fervently; "and Hugh Van Orden looks about half-past ten, whereas I
class John Charteris among the lower orders of vermin."
I consented to accept the proffered office and the incidental stick-pin;
and was thus enabled to observe from the inside this episode of Stella's
life, and to find it quite like other weddings.
Something like this:
"Look here," a perspiring and fidgety Peter protested, at the last
moment, as we lurked in the gloomy vestry with not a drop left in
either flask; "look here, Henderson hasn't blacked the soles of these
blessed shoes. I'll look like an ass when it comes to the kneeling
part--like an ass, I tell you! Good heavens, they'll look like
tombstones!"
"If you funk now," said I, severely, "I'll never help you get married
again. Oh, sainted Ebenezer in bliss, and whatever have I done with
that ring? No, it's here all right, but you are on the wrong side of
me again. And there goes the organ--Good God, Peter, look at her!
simply look at her, man! Oh, you lucky devil! you lucky jackass!"
I spoke enviously, you understand, simply to encourage him.
Followed a glaring of lights, a swishing of fans, a sense that Peter
was not keeping step with me, and the hum of densely packed, expectant
humanity; a blare of music; then Stella, an incredible vision with
glad, frightened eyes. My shoulders straightened, and I was not out of
temper any longer. The organist was playing softly, _Oh, Promise Me_,
and I was thinking of the time, last January, that Stella and I heard
The Bostonians, and how funny Henry Clay Barnabee was.... "--so long
as ye both may live?" ended the bishop.
"I will," poor Peter quavered, with obvious uncertainty about it.
And still one saw in Stella's eyes unutterable happiness and fear, but
her voice was tranquil. I found time to wonder at its steadiness, even
though, just about this time, I resonantly burst a button off one of
my new gloves. I fancy they must have been rather tight.
"And thereto," said Stella, calmly, "I give thee my troth."
And subsequently they were Mendelssohned out of church to the
satisfaction of a large and critical audience. I came down the aisle
with Stella's only sister--who afterward married the Marquis
d'Arlanges,--and found Lizzie very entertaining later in the
evening....
9
Yes, it was quite like other weddings. I only wonder for what
conceivable reason I remember its least detail, and so vividly. For it
all happened a great while ago, when--of such flimsy stuff is glory
woven,--Emilio Aguinaldo and Captain Coghlan were the persons most
talked of in America; and when the Mazet committee was "investigating"
I forget what, but with column after column about it in the papers
every day; and when _Me und Gott_ was a famous poem, and "to
hobsonize" was the most popular verb; and when I was twenty-one. _Sic
transit gloria mundi_, as it says in the back of the dictionary.
4.
_He Talks with Charteris_
It was upon the evening of this day, after Mr. and Mrs. Blagden had
been duly rice-pelted and entrained, that I first talked against John
Charteris. The novelist was, as has been said, a cousin of Peter
Blagden, and as such, was one of the wedding guests at Bellemeade; and
that evening, well toward midnight, the little man, midway in the
consumption of one of his interminable cigarettes, happened to come
upon me seated upon the terrace and gazing, rather vacantly, in the
direction of the moon.
I was not thinking of anything in particular; only there was a by-end
of verse which sang itself over and over again, somewhere in the back
of my brain--"Her eyes were the eyes of a bride whom delight makes
afraid, her eyes were the eyes of a bride"--and so on, all over again,
as at night a traveller may hear his train jogging through a
monotonous and stiff-jointed song; and in my heart there was just
hunger.
2
Charteris had heard, one may presume, of my disastrous love-business;
and with all an author's relish of emotion, in others, chose his
gambit swiftly. "Mr. Townsend, is it not? Then may a murrain light
upon thee, Mr. Townsend,--whatever a murrain may happen to be,--since
you have disturbed me in the concoction of an ever-living and
entrancing fable."
"I may safely go as far," said I, "as to offer the proverbial penny."
"Done!" cried Mr. Charteris. He meditated for a moment, and then
began, in a low and curiously melodious voice, to narrate
_The Apologue of the First Conjugation_
"When the gods of Hellas were discrowned, there was a famous scurrying
from Olympos to the world of mortals, where each deity must
henceforward make shift to do without godhead:--Aphrodite in her
hollow hill, where the good knight Tannhauser revels yet, it may be;
Hephaestos, in some smithy; whilst Athene, for aught I know,
established a girls' boarding school, and Helios, as is notorious,
died under priestly torture, and Dionysos cannily took holy orders,
and Hermes set up as a merchant in Friesland. But Eros went to the
Grammarians. He would be a schoolmaster.
"The Grammarians, grim, snuffy and wrinkled though they might be, were
no more impervious to his allures than are the rest of us, and in
consequence appointed him to an office. This office was, I glean of
mediaeval legend, that of teaching dunderheaded mortals the First
Conjugation. So Eros donned cap and gown, took lodgings with a quiet
musical family, and set _amo_ as the first model verb; and ever since
this period has the verb 'to love' been the first to be mastered in
all well-constituted grammars, as it is in life.
"Heigho! it is not an easy verb to conjugate. One gets into trouble
enough, in floundering through its manifold nuances, which range
inevitably through the bold-faced 'I love', the confident 'I will
love', the hopeful 'I may be loved', and so on to the wistful, pitiful
Pluperfect Subjunctive Passive, 'I might have been loved
if'--Then each of us may supply the Protasis as best befits his
personal opinion and particular scars, and may tear his hair, or
scribble verses, or adopt the cynical, or, in fine, assume any pose
which strikes his fancy. For he has graduated into the Second
Conjugation, which is _moneo_; and may now admonish to his heart's
content, whilst looking back complacently into the First Classroom,
where others--and so many others!--are still struggling with that
mischancy verb, and are involved in the very conditions--verbal or
otherwise--which aforetime saddened him, or showed him a possible
byway toward recreation, or played the deuce with his liver, according
to the nature of the man.
"Eros is a hard, implacable pedagogue, and for the fact his scholars
suffer. He wields a rod rather than a filigree bow, as old romancers
fabled,--no plaything, but a most business-like article, well-poised
in the handle, and thence tapering into graceful, stinging
nothingness; and not a scholar escapes at least a flick of it.
"I can fancy the class called up as Eros administers, with zest, his
penalties. Master Paris! for loving his neighbor a little less than
himself, and his neighbor's wife a little more. Master Lancelot!
ditto. Masters Petrarch, Tristram, Antony, Juan Tenorio, Dante
Alighieri, and others! ditto. There are a great many called up for
this particular form of peccancy, you observe; even Master David has
to lay aside his Psalm Book, and go forward with the others for
chastisement. Master Romeo! for trespassing in other people's gardens
and mausoleums. Master Leander! for swimming in the Hellespont after
dark; and Master Tarquin! for mistaking his bedroom at the Collatini's
house-party.
"Thus, one by one, each scholar goes into the darkened private office.
The master handles his rod--eia! 'tis borrowed from the
Erinnyes,--lovingly, caressingly, like a very conscientious person
about the performance of his duty. Then comes the dreadful order,
'Take down your breeches, sir!'.... But the scene is too horrible to
contemplate. He punishes all, this schoolmaster, for he is
unbelievably old, and with the years' advance has grown querulous.
"Well, now I approach my moral, Mr. Townsend. One must have one's
birching with the others, and of necessity there remains but to make
the best of it. Birching is not a dignified process, and the endurer
comes therefrom both sore and shamefaced. Yet always in such
contretemps it is expedient to brazen out the matter, and to present
as stately an appearance, we will say, as one's welts permit.
"First, to the world--"
3
But at this point I raised my hand. "That is easily done, Mr.
Charteris, inasmuch as the world cares nothing whatever about it. The
world is composed of men and women who have their own affairs to mind.
How in heaven's name does it concern them that a boy has dreamed
dreams and has gone mad like a star-struck moth? It was foolish of
him. Such is the verdict, given in a voice that is neither kindly nor
severe; and the world, mildly wondering, passes on to deal with more
weighty matters. For vegetables are higher than ever this year, and,
upon my word, Mrs. Grundy, ma'am, a housekeeper simply doesn't know
where to turn, with the outrageous prices they are asking for
everything these days. No, believe me, the world does not take
love-affairs very seriously--not even the great ones," I added, in
noble toleration.
And with an appreciative chuckle, Charteris sank beside me upon the
bench.
"My adorable boy! so you have a tongue in your head."
"But can't you imagine the knights talking over Lancelot's affair with
Guenevere, at whatever was the Arthurian substitute for a club? and
sniggering over it? and Lamoracke sagaciously observing that there was
always a crooked streak in the Leodograunce family? Or one Roman
matron punching a chicken in the ribs, and remarking to her neighbor
at the poultry man's stall: 'Well, Mrs. Gracchus, they do say Antony
is absolutely daft over that notorious Queen of Egypt. A brazen-faced
thing, with a very muddy complexion, I'm told, and practically no
reputation, of course, after the way she carried on with Caesar. And
that reminds me, I hear your little Caius suffers from the croup. Now
_my_ remedy'--and so they waddle on, to price asparagus."