burning of the Continental, and a very lengthy one of the Neroni's
appearance the night before. Drearily, to keep from thinking, I read a
deal concerning _la gracieuse cantatrice américaine._ Whether or not
she had made a fool of me with histrionics in Fairhaven, there was no
doubt that she had chosen wisely in forsaking Lethbury, and the round
of village "Opera Houses." She had chosen, after all, and precisely as
I had done, to make the most of youth while it lasted; and she
appeared, just now, to harvest prodigally.
"On jouait Faust," I read, "et jamais le célèbre personnage de Goethe
n'adore plus exquise Gretchen. Miss Nadine Neroni est, en effet, une
idéale Marguerite à la taille bien prise, au visage joli éclairé des
deux yeux grands et doux. Et lorsqu'elle commença à chanter, ce fut un
véritable ravissement: sa voix se fit l'interprète rêvée de la divine
musique de Gounod, tandis que sa personne et son coeur incarnaient
physiquement et moralement l'héroine de Goethe"....
And so on, for Von Anspach had "seen to it," prodigally. And "Oh,
well!" I thought; "if everybody else is so extravagantly pleased, what
in heaven's name is the use of my being squeamish? Besides, she is only
doing what I am doing, and getting all the pleasure out of life that is
possible. She and I are very sensible people. At least, I suppose we
are. I wonder, though? Meanwhile, I had better go and look for that
preposterously beautiful Elena. And a fig for the provincial notions of
Lichfield, that are poisoning me with their nonsense! and for the
notions of Fairhaven, too, I suppose--"
5
Then Charteris came into the room. "John," said I, "this is a truly
remarkable world, and only hypercriticism would venture to suggest that
it is probably conducted by an inveterate humourist. So lend me that
pocket-piece of yours, and we will permit chance to settle the entire
matter. That is the one intelligent way of treating anything which is
really serious. You probably believe I am Robert Etheridge Townsend,
but as a matter of fact, I am Hercules in the allegory. So! the
beautiful lady or America? Why, the eagle flutters uppermost, and from
every mountain side let praises ring. Accordingly I am off."
"And you will cross half the world," said Charteris, "in the green
dressing-gown, or in the coat which Byam borrowed for you this morning?
I do not wish to seem inquisitive, you understand--"
"No, I believe I am through with borrowed coats--as with yours, for
instance. But I am quite ready to go in my own dressing-gown if
necessary--"
I wheeled at the door.
"By the way, I am done with you, John. I am fond of you, and all that,
and I sincerely admire my chimney-pot coquette--of whom you haven't
heard,--but, after all, there are real people yonder. And by God, even
after two years of being pickled in alcohol and chasing after women
that are quite used to being chased--well, even now I am one of those
real people. So I am done with you and this perpetual making light of
things--!"
"The Declaration of Independence," Charteris observed, "is undoubtedly
the best thing in imaginative literature that we Americans have as yet
accomplished; but I am sufficiently familiar with it, thank you, and I
find, with age, that only the more untruthful platitudes are endurable.
Oh, I predicted for you, at our first meeting, a life without
achievements but of gusto! Now, it would appear, you plan to prance
among an interminable saturnalia of the domestic virtues. So be it!
but I warn you that the house of righteousness is but a wayside inn
upon the road to being a representative citizen."
"You are talking nonsense," I rapped out--"and immoral nonsense."
"It is very strange," John Charteris complained, "how so many of us
manage to reduce everything to a question of morality,--that is, to the
alternative of being right or wrong. Now a man's personality, as
somebody or other very properly observes, has many parts besides the
moral area; and the intelligent, the artistic, even the religious part,
need not necessarily have anything to do with ethics--"
"Ah, yes," said I, "so there is a train at noon--"
"And a virtuous man," continued Charteris, amicably, "is no more the
perfect type of humanity than an intellectual man. In fact, the lowest
and certainly the most disagreeable type of all troublesome people is
that which combines an immaculate past with a limited understanding.
The religious tenets of this class consist of an unshakable belief that
the Bible was originally written in English, and contains nothing
applicable to any of the week-days. And in consequence--"
I left him mid-course in speech. "Words, words!" said I; and it
appeared to me for the moment that words were of astonishingly trivial
import, however carefully selected, which was in me a wholesome,
although fleet, apostacy of yesterday's creed. And I sent a cablegram
to Bettie Hamlyn.
6
It was on the trip homeward I first met with Celia Reindan. I then
considered her a silly little nuisance....
For I crossed the Atlantic in a contained fury of repentance for the
wasted months. I had achieved nothing that was worthy of me, and
presently I would be dead. Why, I might die within the five minutes! I
might never see the lagging minute-hand of my little traveling clock
pass that next numeral, say! The thought obsessed me, especially at
night. Once, in a panic, I rose from my berth, and pushed the
minute-hand forward a half-hour. "Now, I have tricked You!" I said,
aloud; for nervously I was footing a pretty large bill. At twenty-three
one has the funds wherewith to balance these accounts....
I wanted to live normally--to live as these persons thick about me, who
seemed to grow up, and mate, and beget, and die, in the incurious
fashion of oxen. I wanted to think only from hand to mouth, to think if
possible not at all, and to be guided always in the conduct of my life
by gross and obvious truisms, so that I must be judged at last but as
one of the herd. "And what is accustomed--what holds of familiar
usage--had come to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects";
for I wanted just the sense of companionship, irrevocable and eternal
and commonly shared with every one of my kind. And yonder was Bettie
Hamlyn.... "Oh, make a man of me, Bettie! just a common man!"
And Bettie might have done it, one considers, even then, for I was
astir with a new impetus. Now, with a grin, the Supernal Aristophanes
slipped the tiniest temptation in my way; to reach Fairhaven I was
compelled to spend some three hours of an April afternoon in Lichfield,
where upon Regis Avenue was to be met, in the afternoon, everyone worth
meeting in Lichfield; and Stella drove there on fine afternoons, under
the protection of a trim and preternaturally grave tiger; and the
afternoon was irreproachable.
7
By the way she looked back over her shoulder, I knew that Stella had
not recognized me. I stood with a yet lifted hat, irresolute.
"By Jove!" said I, in my soul, "then the Blagdens are in Lichfield!
Why, of course! they always come here after Lent. And Bettie would not
mind; to call on them would be only courteous; and besides, Bettie need
not ever know. And moreover, I was always very fond of Peter."
So the next afternoon but four, Stella was making tea for me....
13.
_He Baits Upon the Journey_
"You are quite by way of being a gentleman," had been Stella's
greeting, that afternoon. Then, on a sudden, she rested both hands upon
my breast. When she did that you tingled all over, in an agreeable
fashion. "It was uncommonly decent of you to remember", said this
impulsive young woman. "It was dear of you! And the flowers were
lovely."
"They ought to have been immortelles, of course," I apologised, "but
the florist was out of them. Yes, and of daffodils, too." I sat down,
and sighed, pensively. "Dear, dear!" said I, "to think it was only two
years ago I buried my dearest hopes and aspirations and--er--all that
sort of thing."
"Nonsense!" said Stella, and selected a blue cup with dragons on it.
"At any rate," she continued, "it is very disagreeable of you to come
here and prate like a death's-head on my wedding anniversary."
"Gracious gravy!" said I, with a fine surprise, "so it is an
anniversary with you, too?" She was absorbed in the sugar-bowl. "What a
coincidence!" I suggested, pleasantly.
I paused. The fire crackled. I sighed.
"You are such poor company, nowadays, even after the advantages of
foreign travel," Stella reflected. "You really ought to do something to
enliven yourself." After a little, she brightened as to the eyes, and
concentrated them upon the tea-making, and ventured a suggestion. "Why
not fall in love?" said Stella.
"I am," I confided, "already in that deplorable condition."
And I ventured on sigh number two.
"I don't mean--anything silly," said she, untruthfully. "Why," she
continued, with a certain lack of relevance, "why not fall in love with
somebody else?" Thereupon, I regret to say, her glance strayed toward
the mirror. Oh, she was vain,--I grant you that. But I must protest she
had a perfect right to be.
"Yes," said I, quite gravely, "that is the reason."
"Nonsense!" said Stella, and tossed her head. She now assumed her most
matronly air, and did mysterious things with a perforated silver ball.
I was given to understand I had offended, by a severe compression of
her lips, which, however, was not as effective as it might have been.
They twitched too mutinously.
2
Stella was all in pink, with golden fripperies sparkling in
unanticipated localities. Presumably the gown was tucked and ruched and
appliquéd, and had been subjected to other processes past the
comprehension of trousered humanity; it was certainly becoming.
I think there was an eighteenth-century flavour about it,--for it
smacked, somehow, of a patched, mendacious, dainty womanhood, and its
artfulness was of a gallant sort that scorned to deceive. It defied
you, it allured you, it conquered you at a glance. It might have been
the last cry from the court of an innocent Louis Quinze. It was, in
fine, inimitable; and if only I were a milliner, I would describe for
you that gown in some not unbefitting fashion. As it is, you may draft
the world's modistes to dredge the dictionary, and they will fail, as
ignominiously as I would do, in the attempt.
For, after all, its greatest charm was that it contained Stella, and
converted Stella into a marquise--not such an one as was her sister,
the Marquise d'Arlanges, but a marquise out of Watteau or of Fragonard,
say. Stella in this gown seemed out of place save upon a high-backed
stone bench, set in an _allée_ of lime-trees, of course, and under a
violet sky,--with a sleek abbé or two for company, and with beribboned
gentlemen tinkling on their mandolins about her.
I had really no choice but to regard her as an agreeable anachronism
the while she chatted with me, and mixed hot water and sugar and lemon
into ostensible tea. She seemed so out of place,--and yet, somehow, I
entertained no especial desire upon this sleety day to have her
different, nor, certainly, otherwhere than in this pleasant, half-lit
room, that consisted mostly of ambiguous vistas where a variety of
brass bric-à-brac blinked in the firelight.
We had voted it cosier without lamps or candles, for this odorous
twilight was far more companionable. Odorous, for there were a great
number of pink roses about. I imagine that someone must have sent
them--because there were not any daffodils obtainable, by reason of the
late and nipping frost--in honour of Stella's second wedding
anniversary.
3
"Peter says you talk to everybody that way," quoth she,--almost
resentfully, and after a pause.
"Oh!" said I. For it was really no affair of Peter's. And so--
"Peter, everybody tells me, is getting fat," I announced, presently.
Stella witheringly glanced toward the region where my waist used to be.
"He isn't!" said she, indignant.
"Quite like a pig, they assure me," I continued, with relish. She
objected to people being well-built. "His obscene bloatedness appears
to be an object of general comment."
Silence. I stirred my tea.
"Dear Peter!" said she. And then--but unless a woman of Stella's sort
is able to exercise a proper control over her countenance, she has
absolutely no right to discuss her husband with his bachelor friends.
It is unkind; for it causes them to feel like social outcasts and
lumbering brutes and Peeping Toms. If they know the husband well, it
positively awes them; for, after all, it is a bit overwhelming, this
sudden glimpse of the simplicity, and the credulity, and the merciful
blindness of women in certain matters. Besides, a bachelor has no
business to know such things; it merely makes him envious and
uncomfortable.
Accordingly, "Stella," said I, with firmness, "if you flaunt your
connubial felicity in my face like that, I shall go home."
She was deaf to my righteous rebuke. "Peter is in Washington this
week," she went on, looking fondly into the fire. "I had planned a
party to celebrate to-day, but he was compelled to go--business, you
know. He is doing so well nowadays," she said, after a little, "that I
am quite insufferably proud of him. And I intend for him to be a great
lawyer--oh, much the greatest in America. And I won't ever be content
till then."
"H'm!" said I. "H'm" seemed fairly non-committal.
"Sometimes," Stella declared, irrelevantly, "I almost wish I had been
born a man."
"I wish you had been," quoth I, in gallant wise. "There are so few
really attractive men!"
Stella looked up with a smile that was half sad.
"I'm just a little butterfly-woman, aren't I?" she asked.
"You are," I assented, with conviction, "a butterfly out of a queen's
garden--a marvellous pink-and-gold butterfly, such as one sees only in
dreams and--er--in a London pantomime. You are a decided ornament to
the garden," I continued, handsomely, "and the roses bow down in
admiration as you pass, and--ah--at least, the masculine ones do."
"Yes,--we butterflies don't love one another overmuch, do we? Ah, well,
it scarcely matters! We were not meant to be taken seriously, you
know,--only to play in the sunlight, and lend an air to the garden
and--amuse the roses, of course. After all," Stella summed it up, "our
duties are very simple; first, we are expected to pass through a
certain number of cotillions and a certain number of various happenings
in various tête-à-têtes; then to make a suitable match,--so as to
enable the agreeable detrimentals to make love to us, with perfect
safety--as you were doing just now, for instance. And after that, we
develop into bulbous chaperones, and may aspire eventually to a kindly
quarter of a column in the papers, and, quite possibly, the honour of
having as many as two dinners put off on account of our death.
Yes, it is very simple. But, in heaven's name," Stella demanded, with a
sudden lift of speech, "how can any woman--for, after all, a woman is
presumably a reasoning animal--be satisfied with such a life! Yet that
is everything--everything!--this big world offers to us shallow-minded
butterfly-women!"
Personally, I disapprove of such morbid and hysterical talk outside of
a problem novel; there I heartily approve of it, on account of the
considerable and harmless pleasure that is always to be derived from
throwing the book into the fireplace. And, coming from Stella, this
farrago doubly astounded me. She was talking grave nonsense now,
whereas Nature had, beyond doubt, planned her to discuss only the
lighter sort. So I decided it was quadruply absurd, little Stella
talking in this fashion,--Stella, who, as all knew, was only meant to
be petted and flattered and flirted with.
And therefore, "Stella," I admonished, "you have been reading something
indigestible." I set down my teacup, and I clasped my hands. "Don't
tell me," I pleaded, "that you want to vote!"
She remained grave. "The trouble is," said she, "that I am not really a
butterfly, for all my tinsel wings. I am an ant."
"Oh," said I, shamelessly, "I hadn't heard that Lizzie had an item for
the census man. I don't care for brand-new babies, though; they always
look so disgracefully sun-burned."
The pun was atrocious and, quite properly, failed to win a smile or
even a reproof from the morbid young person opposite. "My grandfather,"
said she in meditation, "began as a clerk in a country store. Oh of
course, we have discovered, since he made his money and since Mother
married a Musgrave, that his ancestors came over with William the
Conqueror, and that he was descended from any number of potentates. But
he lived. He was a rip at first--ah, yes, I'm glad of that as well,
--and he became a religious fanatic because his oldest son died very
horribly of lockjaw. And he browbeat people and founded banks, and made
a spectacle of himself at every Methodist conference, and everybody was
afraid of him and honoured him. And I fancy I am prouder of Old Tim
Ingersoll than I am of any of the emperors and things that make such a
fine show in the Musgrave family tree. For I am like him. And I want to
leave something in the world that wasn't there before I came. I want my
life to count, I want--why, a hundred years from now I _do_ want to be
something more than a name on a tombstone. I--oh, I daresay it _is_
only my ridiculous egotism," she ended, with a shrug and Stella's usual
quick smile,--a smile not always free from insolence, but always
satisfactory, somehow.
"It's late hours," I warned her, with uplifted forefinger, "late hours
and too much bridge and too many sweetmeats and too much bothering over
silly New Women ideas. What is the sense of a woman's being useful," I
demanded, conclusively, "when it is so much easier and so much more
agreeable all around for her to be adorable?"
She pouted. "Yes," she assented, "that is my career--to be adorable. It
is my one accomplishment," she declared, unblushingly,--yet not without
substantiating evidence.
After a little, though, her gravity returned. "When I was a girl--oh, I
dreamed of accomplishing all sorts of beautiful and impossible things!
But, you see, there was really nothing I could do. Music, painting,
writing--I tried them all, and the results were hopeless. Besides, Rob,
the women who succeed in anything like that are always so queer
looking. I couldn't be expected to give up my complexion for a career,
you know, or to wear my hair like a golf-caddy's. At any rate, I
couldn't make a success by myself. But there was one thing I could do,
--I could make a success of Peter. And so," said Stella, calmly, "I did
it."
I said nothing. It seemed expedient.
"You know, he was a little--"
"Yes," I assented, hastily. Peter had gone the pace, of course, but
there was no need of raking that up. That was done with, long ago.
"Well, he isn't the least bit dissipated now. You know he isn't. That
is the first big thing I have done." Stella checked it off with a
small, spear-pointed, glinting finger-nail. "Then--oh, I have helped
him in lots of ways. He is doing splendidly in consequence; and it is
my part to see that the proper people are treated properly."
Stella reflected a moment. "There was the last appointment, for
instance. I found that the awarding of it lay with that funny old Judge
Willoughby, with the wart on his nose, and I asked him for it--not the
wart, you understand,--and got it. We simply had him to dinner, and I
was specially butterfly; I fluttered airily about, was as silly as I
knew how to be, looked helpless and wore my best gown. He thought me a
pretty little fool, and gave Peter the appointment. That is only an
instance, but it shows how I help." Stella regarded me, uncertainly.
"Why, but an authorman ought to understand!"
Of a sudden I understood a number of things--things that had puzzled.
This was the meaning of Stella's queer dinner the night before, and the
ensuing theatre-party, for instance; this was the explanation of those
impossible men, vaguely heralded as "very influential in politics," and
of the unaccountable women, painfully condensed in every lurid shade of
satin, and so liberally adorned with gems as to make them almost
valuable. Stella, incapable by nature of two consecutive ideas, was
determined to manipulate the unseen wires, and to be, as she probably
phrased it, the power behind the throne....
"Eh, it would be laughable," I thought, "were not her earnestness so
pathetic! For here is Columbine mimicking Semiramis."
Yet it was true that Peter Blagden had made tremendous strides in his
profession, of late. For a moment, I wondered--? Then I looked at this
butterfly young person opposite, and I frowned. "I don't like it," I
said, decisively. "It is a bit cold-blooded. It isn't worthy of you,
Stella."
"It is my career," she flouted me, with shrugging shoulders. "It is the
one career the world--our Lichfield world--has left me. And I am doing
it for Peter."
The absurd look that I objected to--on principle, you understand--
returned at this point in the conversation. I arose, resolutely, for I
was really unable to put up with her nonsense.
"You are in love with your husband," I grumbled, "and I cannot
countenance such eccentricities. These things are simply not done--"
She touched my hand. "Old crosspatch, and to think how near I came to
marrying you."
"I do think of it--sometimes. So you had better stop pawing at me. It
isn't safe."
I wish I could describe her smile. I wish I knew just what it was that
Stella wanted me to say or do as we stood for a moment silent, in this
pleasant, half-lit room where brass things blinked in the firelight.
"Old crosspatch!" she repeated....
"Stella," said I, with dignity, "I wish it distinctly understood that I
am not a funny old judge with a wart on his nose."
Whereupon I went away.
14.
_He Participates in a Brave Jest_
Stella drove on fine afternoons, under the protection of a trim and
preternaturally grave tiger. The next afternoon, by a Lichfieldian
transition, was irreproachable. I was to remember, afterward, wondering
in a vague fashion, as the equipage passed, if the boy's lot was not
rather enviable. There might well be less attractive methods of earning
the daily bread and butter than to whirl through life behind Stella.
One would rarely see her face, of course, but there would be such
compensations as an unfailing sense of her presence, and the faint
odour of her hair at times and, always, blown scraps of her laughter or
shreds of her talk, and, almost always, the piping of the sweet voice
that was stilled so rarely.
Perhaps the conscienceless tiger listened when she was "seeing the
proper people were treated properly"? Yes, one would. Perhaps he ground
his teeth? Well, one would, I suspected. And perhaps--?
There was a nod of recognition from Stella; and I lifted my hat as they
bowled by toward the Reservoir. I went down Regis Avenue, mildly
resentful that she had not offered me a lift.
2
A vagrant puff of wind was abroad in the Boulevard that afternoon. It
paused for a while to amuse itself with a stray bit of paper. Presently
the wind grew tired of this plaything and tossed between the eyes of a
sorrel horse. Prince lurched and bolted; and Rex, always a vicious
brute, followed his mate. One fancies the vagabond wind must have
laughed over that which ensued.
After a moment it returned and lifted a bit of paper from the roadway,
with a new respect, perhaps, and the two of them frolicked away over
close-shaven turf. It was a merry game they played there in the spring
sunlight. The paper fluttered a little, whirled over and over, and
scuttled off through the grass; with a gust of mirth, the wind was
after it, now gained upon it, now lost ground in eddying about a tree,
and now made up the disadvantage in the open, and at last chuckled over
its playmate pinned to the earth and flapping in sharp, indignant
remonstrances. Then _da capo_.
It was a merry game that lasted till the angry sunset had flashed its
final palpitant lance through the treetrunks farther down the roadway.
There were gaping people in this place, and broken wheels and shafts,
and a policeman with a smoking pistol, and two dead horses, and a
horrible looking dead boy in yellow-topped boots. Somebody had
charitably covered his face with a handkerchief; and men were lifting a
limp, white heap from among the splintered rubbish.
Then wind and paper played half-heartedly in the twilight until the
night had grown too chilly for further sport. There was no more murder
to be done; and so the vagabond wind was puffed out into nothingness,
and the bit of paper was left alone, and at about this season the big
stars--the incurious stars--peeped out of heaven, one by one.
3