women, and I rejoice to-day, unfeignedly, that I never married any of
them. For marriage means a life-long companionship, a long, long journey
wherein must be adjusted, one by one, each tiniest discrepancy between
the fellow-wayfarers; and always a pebble if near enough to the eye will
obscure a mountain.
"Why, Avis cannot attempt a word of four syllables without coming at
least once to grief! It is a trifle of course, but in a life-long
companionship there are exactly fourteen thousand trifles to one event
of importance. And deuce take it! the world is populated by men and
women, not demi-gods; the poets are specious and abandoned rhetoricians;
for it never was, and never will be, possible to love anybody 'to the
level of every-day's Most quiet need by sun or candlelight.'
"Or not to me at least.
"In a sentence, when it comes to a life-long companionship, I prefer not
the woman who would make me absolutely happy for a twelvemonth, but
rather the woman with whom I could chat contentedly for twenty years,
and who would keep me to the mark. I am rather tired of being futile;
and not for any moral reason, but because it is not worthy of _me_. In
fine, I do not want to die entirely. I want to leave behind some not
inadequate expression of Robert Etheridge Townsend, and I do not care at
all what people say of it, so that it is here when I am gone. Oh, Stella
understood! 'I want my life to count, I want to leave something in the
world that wasn't there before I came.'
"Now Bettie--"
I arose resolutely. "I had much better go for a long, and tedious, and
jolting, and universally damnable walk. Bettie would make something
vital of me--if I could afford her the material--"
And I grinned a little. "'Go, therefore, now, and work; for there shall
no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.' Yes,
you would certainly have need of a miracle, dear Bettie--"
10
I started for that walk I was to take. But Dr. Jeal and Colonel Snawley
were seated in armchairs in front of Clarriker's Emporium, just as they
had been used to sit there in my college days, enjoying, as the Colonel
mentioned, "the cool of the evening," although to the casual observer
the real provider of their pleasure would have appeared to be an
unlimited supply of chewing-tobacco.
So I lingered here, and garnered, to an accompaniment of leisurely
expectorations, much knowledge as to the fall crops and the carryings-on
of the wife of a celebrated general, upon whose staff the Colonel had
served during the War,--and there has never been in the world's history
but one war, so far as Fairhaven is concerned,--and how the Colonel
walked right in on them, and how it was hushed up.
Then we discussed the illness of Pope Leo and what everybody knew about
those derned cardinals, and the riots in Evansville, and the Panama
Canal business, and the squally look of things at Port Arthur, and
attributed all these imbroglios, I think, to the Republican
administration. Even at our bitterest, though, we conceded that
"Teddy's" mother was a Bulloch, and that his uncle fired the last shot
before the Alabama went down. And that inclined us to forgive him
everything, except of course, the Booker Washington luncheon.
Then half a block farther on, Mrs. Rabbet wanted to know if I had ever
seen such weather, and to tell me exactly what Adrian, Junior--no longer
little Adey, no indeed, sir, but ready to start right in at the College
session after next, and as she often said to Mr. Rabbet you could hardly
believe it,--had observed the other day, and quick as a flash too,
because it would make such a funny story. Only she could never quite
decide whether it happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, so that, after
precisely seven digressions on this delicate point, the denouement of
the tale, I must confess, fell rather flat.
And then Mab Spessifer demanded that I come up on the porch and draw
some pictures for her. The child was waiting with three sheets of paper
and a chewed pencil all ready, just on the chance that I might pass; and
you cannot very well refuse a cripple who adores you and is not able to
play with the other brats. You get instead into a kind of habit of
calling every day and trying to make her laugh, because she is such a
helpless little nuisance.
And tousled mothers weep over you in passageways and tell you how good
you are, and altogether the entire affair is tedious; but having started
it, you keep it up, somehow.
11
In fine, it is a symbol that I never took the walk which was to dust the
cobwebs from my brain and make me just like all the other persons, thick
about me, who grow up, and mate, and beget, and die, in the incurious
fashion of oxen, without ever wondering if there is any plausible reason
for doing it; and my brief progress was upon the surface very like that
of the bedeviled fellow in _Les Facheux_. Yet I enjoyed it somehow.
Never to be hurried, and always to stop and talk with every person whom
you meet, upon topics in which no conceivable human being could possibly
be interested, may not sound attractive, but in Fairhaven it is the
rule; and, oddly enough, it breeds, in practice, a sort of family
feeling,--if only by entitling everybody to the condoned and
matter-of-course stupidity of aunts and uncles,--which is not really all
unpleasant.
So I went home at half-past seven, to supper and to Bettie, in a quite
contented frame of mind. It did not seem conceivable that any world so
beautiful and stupid and well-meaning could have either the heart or the
wit to thwart my getting anything I really wanted; and the thought
elated me.
Only I did not know, precisely, what I wanted.
28.
_He Participates in Sundry Confidences_
I was in the act of writing to Avis when the letter came; and I put it
aside unopened, until after supper, for I had never found the letters of
Avis particularly interesting reading.
"It will be what they call a newsy letter, of course. I do wish that
Avis would not write to me as if she were under oath to tell the entire
truth. She communicates so many things which actually happened that it
reads like a 'special correspondent' in some country town writing for a
Sunday morning's paper,--and with, to a moral certainty, the word
'separate' lurking somewhere spelt with three E's, and an 'always' with
two L's, and at least one 'alright.' No, my dear, I am at present too
busy expressing my adoration for you to be exposed to such
inharmonious jars."
Then I wrote my dithyrambs and sealed them. Subsequently I poised the
unopened letter between my fingers.
"But remember that if she were here to _say_ all this to you, your
pulses would be pounding like the pistons of an excited locomotive!
Nature, you are a jade! I console myself with the reflection that it is
frequently the gift of facile writing which makes the co-respondent,
--but I _do_ wish you were not such a hazardous matchmaker. Oh, well!
there was no pleasant way of getting out of it, and that particular
Rubicon is miles behind."
I slit the envelope.
I read the letter through again, with redoubling interest, and presently
began to laugh. "So she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks
a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me,
and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement!
Yet if upon mature deliberation--eh, oh, yes! twaddle! _and_
commonplace! and dashed, of course, with a jigger of Scriptural
quotation!"
I paused to whistle. "There is strange milk in this cocoanut, could I
but discern its nature."
I did, some four weeks later, when with a deal of mail I received the
last letter I was ever to receive from Avis Beechinor.
Wrote Avis:
DEAR ROBERT:
Thank you very much for returning my letters and for the beautiful
letter you wrote me. No I believe it better you should not come on to
see me now and talk the matter over as you suggest because it would
probably only make you unhappy. And then too I am sure some day you will
be friends with me and a very good and true one. I return the last
letter you sent me in a seperate envelope, and I hope it will reach you
alright, but as I destroy all my mail as soon as I have read it I cannot
send you the others. I have promised to marry Mr. Blagden and we are
going to be married on the fifteenth of this month very quietly with no
outsiders. So good bye Robert. I wish you every success and happiness
that you may desire and with all my heart I pray you to be true to your
better self. God bless you allways. Your sincere friend,
AVIS M. BEECHINOR
I indulged in a low and melodious whistle. "The little slut!"
Then I said: "Peter Blagden again! I _do_ wish that life would try to be
a trifle more plausible. Why, but, of course! Peter meant to go chasing
after her the minute my back was turned, and that was why he salved his
conscience by presenting me with that thousand 'to get married on,' Even
at the time it seemed peculiarly un-Petrine. Well, anyhow, in simple
decency, he cannot combine the part of Shylock with that of Judas, and
expect to have back his sordid lucre, so I am that much to the good,
apart from everything else. Yes, I can see how it all happened,--and I
can foresee what is going to happen, too, thank heaven!"
For, as drowning men are said to recollect the unrecallable, I had
vividly seen in that instant the two months' action just overpast, and
its three participants,--the thin-lipped mother, the besotted
millionaire, and the girl shakily hesitant between ideals and the habits
of a life-time.
"But I might have known the mother would win," I reflected: "Why, didn't
Bettie say she would?"
I refolded the letter I had just read, to keep it as a salutary relic;
and then:
"Dear Avis!" said I; "now heaven bless your common-sense! and I don't
especially mind if heaven blesses your horrific painted hag of a mother,
also, if they've a divine favor or two to spare."
And I saw there was a letter from Peter Blagden, too. It said, in part:
I am everything that you think me, Bob. My one defence is that I could
not help it. I loved her from the moment I saw her ... You did not
appreciate her, you know. You take, if you will forgive my saying it,
too light a view of life to value the love of a good woman properly, and
Avis noticed it of course. Now I do understand what the unselfish love
of woman means, because my first wife was an angel, as you know ... It
is a comfort to think that my dear saint in heaven knows I am not quite
so lonely now, and is gladdened by that knowledge. I know she would have
wished it--
I read no further. "Oh, Stella! they have all forgotten. They all insist
to-day that you were an angel, and they have come almost to believe that
you habitually flew about the world in a night-gown, with an Easter lily
in your hand--But I remember, dear. I know you'd scratch her eyes out. I
know you'd do it now, if only you were able, because you loved this
Peter Blagden."
Thereafter I must have wasted a full quarter of an hour in recalling all
sorts of bygone unimportant happenings, and I was not bothering one way
or the other about Avis ...
3
In the moonlighted garden I found Bettie. But with her was Josiah
Clarriker, Fairhaven's leading business-man. He shook hands, and
whatever delight he may have felt at seeing me was admirably controlled.
"Now don't let me interfere with your eloquence," I urged, "but go right
on with the declamation."
"I make no pretension to eloquence, Mr. Townsend. I was merely recalling
to Miss Hamlyn's attention the beautiful lines of our immortal poet,
Owen Meredith, which run, as I remember them:
"'I thought of the dress she wore that time
That we stood under the cypress-tree together,
In that land, in that clime,
And I turned and looked, and she was sitting there
In the box next to the stage, and dressed
In that muslin dress, with that full soft hair
And that jessamine blossom at her breast.'"
"But I am not permitted to wear flowers when Mr. Townsend is about,"
said Bettie. "Did you know, Jo, that he is crazy about that too?"
"Well--! Anyhow, Meredith is full of very beautiful sentiments," said
Mr. Clarriker, "and I have always been particularly fond of that piece.
It is called _'Ox Italians.'_"
"Yes, I have been previously affected by it," said I, "and very deeply
moved."
"And so--as I was about to observe, Miss Hamlyn,--you will notice that
the poet Meredith gowned one of the most beautiful characters he ever
created in white, and laid great stress upon the fact that her beauty
was immeasurably enhanced by the dainty simplicity of her muslin dress.
This fabric, indeed, suits all types of faces and figures, and is
Economical too, especially the present popular mercerised waistings and
vestings that are fast invading the realm of silks. We show at our
Emporium an immense quantity of these beautiful goods, in more than a
hundred styles, elaborate enough for the most formal occasions, at fifty
and seventy-five cents a yard; and--as I was about to observe, Miss
Hamlyn,--I would indeed esteem it a favour should you permit me to send
up a few samples to-morrow, from which to make a selection at, I need
not add, my personal expense.
"You see, Mr. Townsend," he continued, more inclusively, "we have no
florists in Fairhaven, and I have heard that candy--" He talked on,
hygienically now....
4
"And that," said I, when Mr. Clarriker had gone, "is what you are
actually considering! I have always believed Dickens invented that man
to go into one of the latter chapters of _Edwin Drood_. It is the
solitary way of explaining certain people,--that they were invented by
some fagged novelist who unfortunately died before he finished the book
they were to be locked up in. As it was, they got loose, to annoy you by
their incredibility. No actual human being, you know, would suggest a
white shirtwaist as a substitute for a box of candy."
"Oh, I have seen worse," said Bettie, as in meditation. "It's just Jo's
way of expressing the fact that I am stupendously beautiful in white.
Poor dear, my loveliness went to his head, I suppose, and got tangled
with next week's advertisement for the _Gazette_. Anyhow, he is a deal
more considerate than you. For instance, I was crazy to go to the show
on Tuesday night, and Josiah Clarriker was the only person who thought
to ask me, even though he is one of those little fireside companions who
always get so syrupy whenever they take you anywhere that you simply
can't stand it. The combination both prevented my acceptance and
accentuated his devotion; and quite frankly, Robin, I am thinking of
him, for at bottom Jo is a dear."
I laid one hand on each of Bettie's shoulders; and it was in my mind at
the time that this was the gesture of a comrade, and had not any sexual
tinge at all. I wished that Bettie had better teeth, of course, but that
could not be helped.
"You are to marry me as soon as may be possible," said I, "and
preferably to-morrow afternoon. Avis has thrown me over, God bless her,
and I am free,--until of course you take charge of me. There was a
clever woman once who told me I was not fit to be the captain of my
soul, though I would make an admirable lieutenant. She was right. It is
understood you are to henpeck me to your heart's content and to my
ultimate salvation."
"I shall assuredly not marry you," observed Miss Hamlyn, "until you have
at least asked me to do so. And besides, how dared she throw
you over--!"
"But I don't intend to ask you, for I have not a single bribe to offer.
I merely intend to marry you. I am a ne'er-do-well, a debauchee, a
tippler, a compendium of all the vices you care to mention. I am not a
bit in love with you, and as any woman will forewarn you, I am sure to
make you a vile husband. Your solitary chance is to bully me into
temperance and propriety and common-sense, with precisely seven million
probabilities against you, because I am a seasoned and accomplished
liar. Can you do that bullying, Bettie,--and keep it up, I mean?"
And she was silent for a while. "Robin," she said, at last, "you'll
never understand why women like you. You will always think it is because
they admire you for some quality or another. It is really because they
pity you. You are such a baby, riding for a fall--No, I don't mean the
boyishness you trade upon. I have known for a long while all that was
just put on. And, oh, how hard you've tried to be a boy of late!"
"And I thought I had fooled you, Bettie! Well, I never could. I am
sorry, though, if I have been annoyingly clumsy--"
"But you were doing it for me," she said. "You were doing it because you
thought I'd like it. Oh, can't you understand that I _know_ you are
worthless, and that you have never loved any human being in all your
life except that flibbertigibbet Stella Blagden, and that I know, too,
you have so rarely failed me! If you were an admirable person, or a
person with commendable instincts, or an unselfish person, or if you
were even in love with me, it wouldn't count of course. It is because
you are none of these things that it counts for so much to see you
honest with me--sometimes,--and even to see you scheming and
play-acting--and so transparently!--just to bring about a little
pleasure for me. Oh, Robin, I am afraid that nowadays I love you
_because_ of your vices!"
"And I you because of your virtues," said I; "so that there is no
possible apprehension of either affection ever going into bankruptcy.
Therefore the affair is settled; and we will be married in November."
"Well," Bettie said, "I suppose that somebody has to break you of this
habit of getting married next November--"
Then, and only then, my hands were lifted from her shoulders. And we
began to talk composedly of more impersonal matters.
5
It was two days later that John Charteris came to Fairhaven; and I met
him the same afternoon upon Cambridge street. The little man stopped
short and in full view of the public achieved what, had he been a child,
were most properly describable as making a face at me.
"That," he explained, "expresses the involuntary confusion of Belial on
re-encountering the anchorite who escaped his diabolical machinations.
But, oh, dear me! haven't you been translated yet? Why, I thought the
carriage would have called long ago, just as it did for Elijah."
"Now, don't be an ass, John. I _was_ rather idiotic, I suppose--"
"Of course you were," he said, as we shook hands. "It is your unfailing
charm. You silly boy, I came from the pleasantest sort of house-party at
Matocton because I heard you were here, and I have been foolish enough
to miss you. Anne and the others don't arrive until October. Oh, you
adorable child, I have read the last book, and every one of the short
stories as well, and I want to tell you that in their own peculiar line
the two volumes are masterpieces. Anne wept and chuckled over them, and
so did I, with an equal lack of restraint; only it was over the noble
and self-sacrificing portions that Anne wept, and she laughed at the
places where you were droll intentionally. Whereas I--!! Well, we will
let the aposiopesis stand."
"Of course," I sulkily observed, "if you have simply come to Fairhaven
to make fun of me, I can only pity your limitations."
He spoke in quite another voice. "You silly boy, it was not at all for
that. I think you must know I have read what you have published thus far
with something more than interest; but I wanted to tell you this in so
many words. _Afield_ is not perhaps an impeccable masterwork, if one may
be thus brutally frank; but the woman--modeled after discretion will not
inquire whom,--is distinctly good. And what, with you only twenty-five,
does _A field_ not promise! Child, you have found your metier. Now I
shall look forward to the accomplishment of what I have always felt sure
that you could do. I am very, very glad. More so than I can say. And I
had thought you must know this without my saying it."
The man was sincere. And I was very much pleased, and remembered what
invaluable help he could give me on my unfinished book, and what fun it
would be to go over the manuscript with him. And, in fine, we became
again, upon the spot as it were, the very best of friends.
6
It was excellent to have Charteris to talk against. The little man had
many tales to tell me of those dissolute gay people we had known and
frolicked with; indeed, I think that he was trying to allure me back to
the old circles, for he preoccupied his life by scheming to bring about
by underhand methods some perfectly unimportant consummation, which very
often a plain word would have secured at once. But now he swore he was
not "making tea."
That had always been a byword between us, by the way, since I applied to
him the phrase first used of Alexander Pope--"that he could not make tea
without a conspiracy." And it may be that in this case Charteris spoke
the truth, and had come to Fairhaven just for the pleasure of seeing me,
for certainly he must have had some reason for leaving the Musgraves'
house-party so abruptly.
"You are very well rid of the Hardresses," he adjudged. "Did I tell you
of the male one's exhibition of jealousy last year! I can assure you
that the fellow now entertains for me precisely the same affection I
have always borne toward cold lamb. It is the real tragedy of my life
that Anne is ethically incapable of letting a week pass without
partaking of a leg of mutton. She is not particularly fond of it, and
indeed I never encountered anybody who was; she has simply been reared
with the notion that 'people' always have mutton once a week. What, have
you never noticed that with 'people,' to eat mutton once a week is a
sort of guarantee of respectability? I do not refer to chops of course,
which are not wholly inconsistent with depravity. But the ability to eat
mutton in its roasted form, by some odd law of nature, connotes the
habit of paying your pew-rent regularly and of changing your flannels on
the proper date. However, I was telling you about Jasper Hardress--" And
Charteris repeated the story of their imbroglio in such a fashion that
it sounded farcical.
"But, after all, John, you _did_ make love to her."
"I have forgotten what was exactly the last observation of the lamented
Julius Caesar," Mr. Charteris leisurely observed,--"though I remember
that at the time it impressed me as being uncommonly appropriate--But to
get back: do you not see that this clause ought to come here, at the end
of the sentence? And, child, on all my ancient bended knees, I implore
you to remember that 'genuine' does not mean the same thing as
'real'...."
7
Meanwhile he and Bettie got on together a deal better than I had ever
anticipated.
Charteris, though, received my confidence far too lightly. "You are
going to marry her! Why, naturally! Ever since I encountered you, you
have been 'going to marry' somebody or other. It is odd I should have
written about the Foolish Prince so long before I knew you. But then,
_I_ helped to mould you--a little--"
And resolutely Bettie said the most complimentary things about him. But
I trapped her once.
"Still," I observed, when he had gone, and she had finished telling me
how delightful Mr. Charteris was, "still he shan't ever come to _our_
house, shall he?"
"Why, of course not!" said Bettie, who was meditating upon some cosmic
question which required immediate attention. And then she grew very
angry and said, "Oh, you _dog!_" and threw a sofa-cushion at me.
"I hate that wizened man," she presently volunteered, "more bitterly
than I do any person on earth. For it was he who taught you to adopt
infancy as a profession. He robbed me. And Setebos permitted it. And now
you are just a man I am going to marry--Oh, well!" said Bettie, more
sprightlily, "I was getting on, and you are rather a dear even in that
capacity. Only I wonder what _becomes_ of all the first choices?"
"They must keep them for us somewhere, Bettie dear. And that is probably
the explanation of everything."
And a hand had snuggled into mine. "You do understand without having to
have it all spelt out for you. And that's a comfort, too. But, oh," said
Bettie, "what a wasteful Setebos it is!"
29.
_He Allows the Merits of Imperfection_
I was quite contented now and assured as to the future. I foreknew the
future would be tranquil and lacking in any particular excitement, and I
had already ceded, in anticipation, the last tittle of mastery over my
own actions; but Bettie would keep me to the mark, would wring--not
painlessly perhaps--from Robert Townsend the very best there was in him;
and it would be this best which, unalloyed, would endure, in what I
wrote. I had never imagined that, for the ore, smelting was an agreeable
process; so I shrugged, and faced my future contentedly.