Becoming reacquainted with the family and the city was an adventure.
During his absence, he noted, the help had been cut down to Mammy Chloe
and George. With Virginia Ruth living in New Orleans and himself away
from home, the wants of the Hamiltons were really very simple, in spite
of their standing in society. They had given up all the horses but one
and had kept only the touring car.
“We don’t need much and it simplifies things,” Mr. Hamilton had
explained. “You see, your mother is getting, well, is getting to the
point where she wishes to be free from the responsibilities of managing
a large household and we have even been considering selling the
house--we’ve been offered a good price--and renting an apartment.”
Renting an apartment? What a dismal outlook. Robert detested
apartments. They were all right in New York, but in the South! He
wanted room--room to loaf about and read, room for riding and playing
tennis, room to entertain his friends. The tennis court, he noticed,
had been allowed to run down and he decided to have it put back in
shape the first chance he got.
In the meantime there were so many old friends to visit, so many
questions to answer. On the first night home, a reporter from the
morning paper had come--it was almost midnight--to interview him, and
the reporters from the afternoon papers had followed the next day.
They had asked not merely questions about his personal experiences,
but questions of which he knew nothing. About the peace conference,
about the League of Nations. What did the French think of President
Wilson and of Americans in general? Who won the war? And what part
did the Southern, and particularly the Georgian, troops play in the
war? Of course, he had been with New York troops, but he generously
accorded the Southern soldiers their full meed of praise, which they
doubtlessly deserved anyway, and of which he had heard indirectly.
And Margaret? He had to become acquainted with her all over again, too.
She seemed younger than before he had left her to go to France. It
was not alone her dress. He noticed that the women were wearing short
skirts in imitation of the Parisiennes. It was not alone in her manner
of combing her hair. It lay in a childish freshness that was at once
impudent and sophisticated. Margaret had never been a serious-minded
young lady, but now she seemed fairly to flutter above the realities of
life.
They were returning from a dance one evening, at which Robert had
incurred Margaret’s displeasure by attempting to sit out most of his
dances. It was almost two o’clock and they were driving down a deserted
street. Before the war, midnight had generally been the limit for a
dance, unless it was some exceptional occasion, like the annual charity
ball, for instance.
“You know, you seem--you seem so much younger than when I left,” said
Robert.
“Oh, do I?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose you don’t like it. You’d want me to stay home every
evening and darn socks and go to bed at nine, I suppose. What’s the
matter with you, Bob? We used to be such good pals. Don’t, don’t--oh, I
don’t know.”
They drove on in silence. How could he explain things to her? How could
he make her understand his feelings? He wished, in a way, that he had
postponed their engagement, not that they wouldn’t marry eventually
anyway, but that it placed him under obligations. He had to escort
her to dances and receptions and take her to the theatre. Of course,
he got a certain amount of pleasure out of these things, but then he
preferred simply to loaf about the house. It was queer, a fellow lay
in the mud in Flanders for months under a drizzling sky and dreamed of
coming home. Home was pre-eminently a place for loafing. A place where
one could sleep as late as one wanted, lounge about in old clothes
and sleep some more. Now that one finally did reach home, one found
that practise did not square with theory. Theoretically, Hamilton
could have stayed in bed all morning. But when his parents were at the
breakfast table at eight o’clock, he felt under a moral obligation to
do likewise, especially now that the burden of housework had fallen on
the shoulders of a single servant. Theoretically, too, he could have
retired at eight every evening or stayed up until three in the morning,
but practically, there were always social duties to perform. Margaret
was always calling him up and claiming him.
There was no use trying to explain a thing like that to Margaret. How
could she understand? She would probably think that he was getting
old. He was only twenty-six. Had the war aged him? He had always taken
Pinkney for a prematurely aged young man, and yet, while Pinkney was
able to talk business and finances with the elders of the city, he was
able to cut a commanding figure in the younger social set. He knew all
the latest steps and even introduced little variations that he had
picked up in New Orleans, Charleston and Baltimore.
With Dorothy, he reflected, he could sit idly at a table or walk along
the street and express his thoughts--he had need to express them to
some one. He wished, too, that Margaret did not so openly disapprove of
what he had said in defense of the Negro that evening at his home. For
a woman, anyway, he would have preferred that Margaret take the more
humane point of view. He was old-fashioned enough to believe that a
woman should display the softer virtues.
“What are you thinking about?” Margaret pouted coquettishly. “You
haven’t said a word to me for five minutes, excepting monosyllables.”
“Oh, a lot of things. I--”
“Well, you mustn’t. That’s a bad habit. You should live instead of
thinking about it. See ‘how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”
Margaret’s mood could change from the colloquial to the mock poetic in
a moment. When she quoted poetry it was with a little exaggerated air,
as though she were pretending to act.
“‘Eat thou and drink,’” she quoted grandiloquently, “‘tomorrow thou
shalt die.’ That’s what Howard recites to me sometimes. Don’t you think
that’s right?”
“Yes, perhaps it is, but it’s only one point of view. Rossetti, you
know, wrote three sonnets, each giving a different viewpoint, and that
is only one of them.”
“Oh, is that so? Anyway, I think it’s very beautiful. Don’t you?”
Margaret relapsed into her poetic mood. She would ask Robert if he had
heard this or that and then recite it with her coquettishly exaggerated
emotion. It was very delightful on the whole. If she wished to sit
closer to him, too, or hold his hand she could do it in play, as though
it were part of the gestures accompanying the recitation. Some of the
poems she quoted, Robert thought splendid, but others were sentimental
bits that she had picked up from the fillers in the evening newspaper.
She would quote, almost in the same breath with Shakespeare, the rhymed
imbecilities of a syndicate humorist whose chief contribution to poesy
was his method of arranging the lines so that they were separated by
little asterisks and so that one had to read from the bottom line to
the top. Probably otherwise nobody would ever read the stuff. The
announced object of arranging the lines from bottom to top was to get
the reader in the habit of always looking upward and onward to higher
things, the highest thing being the rhymster’s signature, Milt Elkron,
on the very pinnacle.
There were quarter hours, too, when Margaret would discuss “books,”
that is, fiction. Here, too, she would speak of O. Henry, Henry James
and James Branch Cabell with indiscriminate enthusiasm, although the
first of the three was the only one of whom she had really read more
than one volume.
“I didn’t like Wells’ last book. It was very disappointing. Not much
plot. Too heavy. But Harold Bell Wright has a corking story. It’s just
like life!”
Robert liked Margaret’s make-believe mood, during which she pretended
to be giving expression to some inner spirit through the medium of
verse. Pretense, after all, was something. And she pretended without
in the least attempting to deceive. It was just a game. Of course,
she expected him to return her little sallies with others in kind or
with graceful, flowery compliments, which he could do skilfully. For
instance, if she, coming to a dark spot in the road, and letting go of
his arm, suddenly cried: “Thou know’st the wash of night is on my face,
else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek,” he would reply: “Lady, by
yonder blessed moon, I swear”--or something about Stygian darkness, and
they would both laugh.
“Why don’t you ever write poetry?” asked Margaret, as they stopped
before her house. “I think you ought to write something splendid. I
have a trade-last for you.”
“Oh, have you? What is it? I’m all ears.”
“But you must tell me one first,” she pouted.
That struck him as another one of her childish absurdities.
“Oh, I--a--know some one who thinks you’re the prettiest girl in
Corinth.”
“Do you? Who’s that?”
“Guess?”
“Can’t.”
“Try.”
“It isn’t, it isn’t you? Oh, that isn’t fair? You just made that up!”
“Oh, but it is though. Of course, I think you’re the prettiest girl in
Corinth.”
He caught her in his arms and kissed her to prove it.
“Has to be some one else! Has to be some one else!” Margaret insisted,
with fascinating mock childishness.
“Well, then,” Robert thought a moment, “it’s Howard Pinkney. Now are
you satisfied?”
She shook her head, with a little smile.
“No. That’s just as bad. He tells me that himself every time I see him.
But I’ll tell you anyway.”
The compliment was a minor one. Some elderly, romantic woman, whom
Robert dimly remembered, had thought he looked like a poet--like a
picture she had of Rupert Brooke--a far-fetched likeness.
“And now,” Margaret was standing at the door, her head thrown back, her
eyes shining like dark stars:
“‘_Sweet, goodnight!
This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Goodnight, goodnight! as sweet repose and rest
Come to thy heart as that within my breast!_’”
Her make-believe mood again. She was playing at being in love. She
blew him a tantalizing kiss before the illusion had time to die,
and disappeared into the house. Robert stood there for a moment. He
realised that Margaret was only playing, that she had probably learned
the words--yes, he even remembered where she had learned them--while
taking the rôle of Juliet in her senior class play. Still the objective
world was a series of illusions. What matter what Margaret was thinking
or feeling within that pretty little head if she could always create
such illusions. If she could always create them. He walked slowly back
to his car. A cloud momentarily obscured the moon. The shadowy world of
silver turned to black and then back to silver. If she could always do
that.
In his room he found his official orders where he had stacked them on
the chifferobe two days ago. He had forgotten to sort them. He yawned
and began undressing leisurely. His hand brushed against the documents
and he paused to stack them up again. Here was a copy of the telegram
appointing him a second lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps, the
order directing him to appear at Camp Eustis, the order assigning
him to his company. And what was that scribbled across one of the
envelopes? A poem.
“_The agéd pilgrim hastens on the road
Nor stops to pluck the flowers by the way
Lest Death o’ertake him ere the close of day._”
It sounded familiar. He read on to the end:
“_And here and there a scarlet memory._”
He suddenly remembered. Dorothy. McCall. McCall had scribbled the
poem on an old envelope. Robert remembered lending it to him--in the
hospital. But--yes, he had been right all the time. By a sort of
instinct. He undressed, turned off the lights and raised the shades.
The moonlight lay like a river of silver across the shadowy lawn.
A world of illusion and of beauty. Tomorrow, he said, he would ask
Margaret to set the day. They should be married as quickly as possible.