"Our line is out of order," the switchboard below informed me. "They'll
have a man up here as soon as possible."
Frustration! I did not wish the colored door boy below to hear what I
said. He has a notion of my dignity.
With a restless agitation new to me I again fell to pacing the room, a
room not contrived for exercise. It occurred to me that I must go to see
my sister, my only near relative. She was sure to be at home, for she,
poor girl, is always at home,--what with her three children and her
broken health.
If it were not that the damnable telephone is out of order, I would ring
her up immediately. What with her three young children and an income
the exact equivalent of my own, she has little diversion unless I take
her to the theater or the opera. How does the poor girl manage, I
wonder? I dread to ask her and she never complains. I ought to see her
oftener; if only she lived nearer than the depths of Brooklyn.
There is the result of romantic marriage for you! Poor Laura committed
the error of falling in love with a man on a steamer when she was barely
nineteen and marrying him secretly; after seven years and three babies,
the scoundrel Pendleton, with his smooth ways and unsteady eye, deserted
her, disappeared into the blue. The poor girl's health has never been
good since then.
It is irritating to think that I might have done more than an occasional
gift for Laura and the children. But I am so wretchedly poor myself.
I still cannot comprehend how Laura could have been so inconceivably
foolish as to marry that ruffian Pendleton before she had known him
three months--and then to acquire three babies!
Gertrude, at all events, could not be guilty of anything so perverse.
Marriage--children--chains--slavery--how sordid it all is and how
disturbing! Good enough perhaps for the hopeless middle class,
semi-animal types, who have nothing else to expect of life, or to absorb
them. But for folk with ambitions and ideals!
What are my ambitions and ideals, I cannot at times help wondering?
Useless to analyze. Freedom to have them is the first of all.
How eager I used to be to discuss them with Laura during those long
summers at our cottage in Westchester when life seemed endless and the
future infinite. Between sets at tennis I poured out to her the things I
was going to do in the world. Laura is only two years older than I, but
how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the
motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the
kiddies.
The scent of those summers comes to my nostrils now, the fragrance of
lilac and honeysuckle, that brought ideas to one's head, dreams of
achievement, of perfection and happiness. Who has that cottage now, I
wonder? Poor Laura's dreams have been distorted into a very dismal sort
of reality. And what of my own? But here is Griselda and she is
announcing Dibdin.
That grizzled priest of what he is pleased to call science growled in a
way he meant to be pleasant as he shouldered into my comfortable study
and sank sprawling into my best chair. He never seems quite at home in
a civilized room.
"Couldn't get you on the telephone," he remarked. "Thought I'd drop over
and see what iniquities you're up to."
"As you see," I told him, "I'm deep in crime."
"Will you feed me?" he demanded with a gruffness that is part of his
charm.
"Certainly. What else can I do when you come at this hour?"
"All right; then I'll listen to you," he said.
"But how," I wondered, "do you know I want to say anything?"
"You look charged to the nozzle," he answered elegantly. "What is it--a
rare edition of somebody or other?" Amazing devil, Dibdin. I always
resent his ability to read me in this manner. But he tells me that in
his archeological expeditions he has had so often to watch faces of
Indians, Chinese, negroes, Turks and others whose language he did not
speak, that to see the desires of men in their eyes amounts with him to
an added sense.
"Well, if you must know," I sat down facing him, "I am nonplussed,
baffled, perplexed, at sea, on the horns of a dilemma--all of those
things. I am to be married in three weeks."
"Eager swain!" was his only comment.
"Is that all you can say?"
"Well, feeling about it the way you seem to feel, I might add that
you're a damn fool."
"Tell me something novel!" I retorted irritably.
"Can't," he said. "That's the only thing I know."
"Comprehensive," I sneered.
"Complete," was his succinct rejoinder.
"What a comfort you are!" I cried with a harassed laugh.
"What the devil made you get into it?" he growled.
"Fate," I told him.
"It's a poor fate that doesn't work both ways," he observed.
"I suppose I sound to you like either a brute or a cad or both," I
pursued. "But the fact is, Dibdin, I am not a marrying man. The girl
in question has nothing to do with it. She's an admirable, a splendid
girl, far too good for the likes of me. But I simply hate the thought
of marriage--of owing duties to anybody. I want to be free to do
absolutely as I please, to go off with you to the Solomon Islands, or
China or Popocatepetl if I want to, or to run after some first edition
if I feel inclined. In short, I don't want to bother about wives or
children or whooping cough or measles, or have them bother about me.
Would you call that selfish?"
"Damnably," said Dibdin without emotion.
"Well, then, that is what I am," I retorted warmly, "and it is no use
trying to change. It takes myriad kinds to make a world. I am one
kind--that kind."
"No," said Dibdin gravely, "no--I think you're some other kind."
"This eternal, beautiful, boundless freedom," I went on, ignoring
him--"surely it is good that some mortals should have it, Dibdin--and I
am losing it."
"Three weeks off, did you say--the obsequies?" he queried.
"Yes," I answered sadly.
"Then maybe it won't happen," he remarked to the ceiling.
"What makes you say that?" I caught him up.
"Don't know," he replied in his carefully lazy tone that he assumed when
he wished to sound oracular. "Just a feeling--that you deserve
something, a good deal--worse than marriage." Then abruptly sitting up
in his chair and pulling a thin volume out of his pocket, "Look at
this," he muttered.