"What did you think of me, when you first knew me?" I inquired.
"Well," she answered, with the courage that characterized her, "I thought
you were rather calculating, that you put too high a price on success. Of
course you attracted me. I own it."
"You hid your opinions rather well," I retorted, somewhat discomfited.
She flushed.
"Have you changed them?" I demanded.
"I think you have that side, and I think it a weak side, Hugh. It's hard
to tell you this, but it's better to say so now, since you ask me. I do
think you set too high a value on success.'
"Well, now that I know what success really is, perhaps I shall reform," I
told her.
"I don't like to think that you fool yourself," she replied, with a
perspicacity I should have found extraordinary.
Throughout my life there have been days and incidents, some trivial, some
important, that linger in my memory because they are saturated with
"atmosphere." I recall, for instance, a gala occasion in youth when my
mother gave one of her luncheon parties; on my return from school, the
house and its surroundings wore a mysterious, exciting and unfamiliar
look, somehow changed by the simple fact that guests sat decorously
chatting in a dining-room shining with my mother's best linen and
treasured family silver and china. The atmosphere of my wedding-day is no
less vivid. The house of Ezra Hutchins was scarcely recognizable: its
doors and windows were opened wide, and all the morning people were being
escorted upstairs to an all-significant room that contained a collection
like a jeweller's exhibit,--a bewildering display. There was a massive
punch-bowl from which dangled the card of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf Scherer, a
really wonderful tea set of old English silver given by Senator and Mrs.
Watling, and Nancy Willett, with her certainty of good taste, had sent an
old English tankard of the time of the second Charles. The secret was in
that room. And it magically transformed for me (as I stood, momentarily
alone, in the doorway where I had first beheld Maude) the accustomed
scene, and charged with undivined significance the blue shadows under the
heavy foliage of the maples. The September sunlight was heavy, tinged
with gold....
So fragmentary and confused are the events of that day that a cubist
literature were necessary to convey the impressions left upon me. I had
something of the feeling of a recruit who for the first time is taking
part in a brilliant and complicated manoeuvre. Tom and Susan Peters flit
across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the
Ewanses,--all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton was
"best man," looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat: and his
manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured
tolerance toward a folly none but he might escape.
"If you must do it, Hughie, I suppose you must," he had said to me. "I'll
see you through, of course. But don't blame me afterwards."
Maude was a little afraid of him....
I dressed at George's; then, like one of those bewildering shifts of a
cinematograph, comes the scene in church, the glimpse of my mother's
wistful face in the front pew; and I found myself in front of the austere
Mr. Doddridge standing beside Maude--or rather beside a woman I tried
hard to believe was Maude--so veiled and generally encased was she. I was
thinking of this all the time I was mechanically answering Mr. Doddridge,
and even when the wedding march burst forth and I led her out of the
church. It was as though they had done their best to disguise her, to put
our union on the other-worldly plane that was deemed to be its only
justification, to neutralize her sex at the very moment it should have
been most enhanced. Well, they succeeded. If I had not been as
conventional as the rest, I should have preferred to have run away with
her in the lavender dress she wore when I first proposed to her. It was
only when we had got into the carriage and started for the house and she
turned to me her face from which the veil had been thrown back that I
realized what a sublime meaning it all had for her. Her eyes were wet.
Once more I was acutely conscious of my inability to feel deeply at
supreme moments. For months I had looked forward with anticipation and
impatience to my wedding-day.
I kissed her gently. But I felt as though she had gone to heaven, and
that the face I beheld enshrouded were merely her effigy. Commonplace
words were inappropriate, yet it was to these I resorted.
"Well--it wasn't so bad after all! Was it?"
She smiled at me.
"You don't want to take it back?"
She shook her head.
"I think it was a beautiful wedding, Hugh. I'm so glad we had a good
day."...
She seemed shy, at once very near and very remote. I held her hand
awkwardly until the carriage stopped.
A little later we were standing in a corner of the parlour, the
atmosphere of which was heavy with the scent of flowers, submitting to
the onslaught of relatives. Then came the wedding breakfast: croquettes,
champagne, chicken salad, ice-cream, the wedding-cake, speeches and more
kisses.... I remember Tom Peters holding on to both my hands.
"Good-bye, and God bless you, old boy," he was saying. Susan, in view of
the occasion, had allowed him a little more champagne than usual--enough
to betray his feelings, and I knew that these had not changed since our
college days. I resolved to see more of him. I had neglected him and
undervalued his loyalty.... He had followed me to my room in George's
house where I was dressing for the journey, and he gave it as his
deliberate judgment that in Maude I had "struck gold."
"She's just the girl for you, Hughie," he declared. "Susan thinks so,
too."
Later in the afternoon, as we sat in the state-room of the car that was
bearing us eastward, Maude began to cry. I sat looking at her helplessly,
unable to enter into her emotion, resenting it a little. Yet I tried
awkwardly to comfort her.
"I can't bear to leave them," she said.
"But you will see them often, when we come back," I reassured her. It was
scarcely the moment for reminding her of what she was getting in return.
This peculiar family affection she evinced was beyond me; I had never
experienced it in any poignant degree since I had gone as a freshman to
Harvard, and yet I was struck by the fact that her emotions were so
rightly placed. It was natural to love one's family. I began to feel,
vaguely, as I watched her, that the new relationship into which I had
entered was to be much more complicated than I had imagined. Twilight was
coming on, the train was winding through the mountain passes, crossing
and re-crossing a swift little stream whose banks were massed with alder;
here and there, on the steep hillsides, blazed the goldenrod....
Presently I turned, to surprise in her eyes a wide, questioning
look,--the look of a child. Even in this irrevocable hour she sought to
grasp what manner of being was this to whom she had confided her life,
and with whom she was faring forth into the unknown. The experience was
utterly unlike my anticipation. Yet I responded. The kiss I gave her had
no passion in it.
"I'll take good care of you, Maude," I said.
Suddenly, in the fading light, she flung her arms around me, pressing me
tightly, desperately.
"Oh, I know you will, Hugh, dear. And you'll forgive me, won't you, for
being so horrid to-day, of all days? I do love you!"
Neither of us had ever been abroad. And although it was before the days
of swimming-pools and gymnasiums and a la carte cafes on ocean liners,
the Atlantic was imposing enough. Maude had a more lasting capacity for
pleasure than I, a keener enjoyment of new experiences, and as she lay
beside me in the steamer-chair where I had carefully tucked her she would
exclaim:
"I simply can't believe it, Hugh! It seems so unreal. I'm sure I shall
wake up and find myself back in Elkington."
"Don't speak so loud, my dear," I cautioned her. There were some very
formal-looking New Yorkers next us.
"No, I won't," she whispered. "But I'm so happy I feel as though I should
like to tell everyone."
"There's no need," I answered smiling.
"Oh, Hugh, I don't want to disgrace you!" she exclaimed, in real alarm.
"Otherwise, so far as I am concerned, I shouldn't care who knew."
People smiled at her. Women came up and took her hands. And on the fourth
day the formidable New Yorkers unexpectedly thawed.
I had once thought of Maude as plastic. Then I had discovered she had a
mind and will of her own. Once more she seemed plastic; her love had made
her so. Was it not what I had desired? I had only to express a wish, and
it became her law. Nay, she appealed to me many times a day to know
whether she had made any mistakes, and I began to drill her in my silly
traditions,--gently, very gently.
"Well, I shouldn't be quite so familiar with people, quite so ready to
make acquaintances, Maude. You have no idea who they may be. Some of
them, of course, like the Sardells, I know by reputation."
The Sardells were the New Yorkers who sat next us.
"I'll try, Hugh, to be more reserved, more like the wife of an important
man." She smiled.
"It isn't that you're not reserved," I replied, ignoring the latter half
of her remark. "Nor that I want you to change," I said. "I only want to
teach you what little of the world I know myself."
"And I want to learn, Hugh. You don't know how I want to learn!"
The sight of mist-ridden Liverpool is not a cheering one for the American
who first puts foot on the mother country's soil, a Liverpool of
yellow-browns and dingy blacks, of tilted funnels pouring out smoke into
an atmosphere already charged with it. The long wharves and shed roofs
glistened with moisture.
"Just think, Hugh, it's actually England!" she cried, as we stood on the
wet deck. But I felt as though I'd been there before.
"No wonder they're addicted to cold baths," I replied. "They must feel
perfectly at home in them, especially if they put a little lampblack in
the water."
Maude laughed.
"You grumpy old thing!" she exclaimed.
Nothing could dampen her ardour, not the sight of the rain-soaked stone
houses when we got ashore, nor even the frigid luncheon we ate in the
lugubrious hotel. For her it was all quaint and new. Finally we found
ourselves established in a compartment upholstered in light grey, with
tassels and arm-supporters, on the window of which was pasted a poster
with the word reserved in large, red letters. The guard inquired
respectfully, as the porter put our new luggage in the racks, whether we
had everything we wanted. The toy locomotive blew its toy whistle, and we
were off for the north; past dingy, yellow tenements of the smoking
factory towns, and stretches of orderly, hedge-spaced rain-swept country.
The quaint cottages we glimpsed, the sight of distant, stately mansions
on green slopes caused Maude to cry out with rapture:--"Oh, Hugh, there's
a manor-house!"
More vivid than were the experiences themselves of that journey are the
memories of them. We went to windswept, Sabbath-keeping Edinburgh, to
high Stirling and dark Holyrood, and to Abbotsford. It was through Sir
Walter's eyes we beheld Melrose bathed in autumn light, by his aid
repeopled it with forgotten monks eating their fast-day kale.
And as we sat reading and dreaming in the still, sunny corners I forgot,
that struggle for power in which I had been so furiously engaged since
leaving Cambridge. Legislatures, politicians and capitalists receded into
a dim background; and the gift I had possessed, in youth, of living in a
realm of fancy showed astonishing signs of revival.
"Why, Hugh," Maude exclaimed, "you ought to have been a writer!"
"You've only just begun to fathom my talents," I replied laughingly. "Did
you think you'd married just a dry old lawyer?"
"I believe you capable of anything," she said....