"American letters!" exclaimed Laura, turning the packet over eagerly.
"Some rainy afternoon--which means, probably, this afternoon, even if
the sun _is_ shining smokily now--I am going to write a brief but
enthusiastic essay, 'for private distribution,' on how good American
stamps look on American letters addressed to Americans who are not in
America--long may she wave!" and she sorted over the just-brought
letters with fluttering fingers.
"What a lot of America in one sentence!" said Louise, her own eyes
alight at the bulgy little packet of letters from overseas. "I wish,"
she added a little wistfully, "America were as near as your patriotism
is genuine."
"Don't _I_!" heartily agreed Laura. "Could anything be better calculated
to inspire patriotism in the American bosom than an occasional
inspection of Europe--and particularly an occasional residence in
London? All Americans possessed of the steamship fare should be forced
by law to visit Europe--particularly London--at least once. Then there
would be no further trouble in getting soldiers for our army. All of
the tourists by mandate would become so patriotic that they would
_enlist_ just as soon as they got back to the United States!"
Then they fell upon their United-States-stamped mail as if the envelopes
had contained anxiously awaited reprieves or dispensations, and for the
next quarter of an hour the only sounds in the room were the crackling
of paper and the absorbed, subdued ejaculations to which women give
utterance in perusing letters.
The murk-modified morning sunshine of early June in London filtered
wanly through the windows of their rooms at the Savoy. Very close to the
consciousness of both women was the keen recollection of glorious Junes
in the United States, with over-arching skies of sapphire, unstained for
days at a stretch even by the fleeciest of golden clouds. Louise was
confessedly lonesome. Laura, who had her London almost at her fingers'
ends, was lonesome, too, but not confessedly so. It would be too much to
ask a seasoned Londoner from New York to admit such a departure from the
elemental rule of cosmopolitanism. Laura, in London or anywhere else in
Europe, was lonesome in the abstract, so to speak. Her method of giving
expression to her feeling was to comment--when no Europeans were of her
audience, of course--upon the superior comforts and joys of life in the
United States, which, to her, meant New York almost exclusively.
Louise shared the almost inevitable feeling of genuine lonesomeness and
unanalyzable oppression which overcomes, to the point of an afflictive
nostalgia, most Americans of whatever degree who find themselves for the
first time in European capitals. They had spent their first fortnight in
London; and Louise had only been saved from complete dejection during
that period by the gayety--somewhat studied and reserved, but still
gayety--of Laura's troops of friends, English and American, in the city
that, for the socially unacclimated American, is the dullest and most
hopeless in all Europe. Paris, whence they had gone from London for a
month's stay, had been made endurable to Louise by her close fellowship
with Laura in the older woman's incessant battlings with the milliners
and makers of dresses. Victory had never failed eventually to perch upon
Laura's banners at the termination of these conflicts; but the
intervening travail had given her young companion more than enough to
think about and thus to ward off an ever-recurring depression. She did
not call it "homesickness," even to herself; for by this time she had
become, if not used, at least reconciled to the thought that she had no
real home.
One of the least true maxims of all of those having perennial currency
is that which declares that "All good Americans go to Paris when they
die." Most Americans, if the truth could be tabulated, are poignantly
disappointed with Paris. It is a city where American men of a certain
type feel that they have almost a Heaven-bestowed license to "throw off
responsibility." But "the morning after" knows neither latitude nor
longitude, and it is just as dismal and conducive to remorse and good
resolutions in Paris as it is in any other quarter of the irresponsible
world. It takes an American man about a week to become thoroughly
disillusioned as to Paris. The American woman, who, like women the world
over, must preserve her sense of responsibility at all times, even in
the French capital, discovers her disappointment with and her weariness
of the over-lauded Paris in considerably less time than a week. Louise
found it unutterably tiresome, artificial, insincere, absurdly
over-praised. Now they had been back in London for three weeks, and she
was beginning to wonder when Laura would give the "pack-up signal" for
the return to New York. Whenever she circuitously led up to such a
suggestion, however, Laura told her how ridiculous it would be to return
to New York in June, at the height of the London season; besides, there
were thousands upon thousands of people in London whom Laura wanted
Louise to meet; and Louise (Laura would go on) must fight to overcome
her Londonphobia, because, after all, London probably would be on the
map as a sort of meeting place for peripatetic folk for quite a long
time to come; whereupon, with fine feminine inconsistency, Laura would
round upon London for its primitiveness in the supplying of ordinary
comforts, for its incurable smudginess, for the mediæval complaisance of
its populace, and for a hundred other matters that made it a mere
"widely-spraddled" hamlet in comparison with her beloved New York.
Additionally, there had been an utter absence of the querulous note, and
an unwonted tone of positive sadness, in her mother's letters that
gravely disquieted Louise. Her mother's self-revelations on paper
hitherto had been characterized by a sort of acidulous recklessness; her
letters to Louise while the girl was at school had been long-drawn out
epistolary complaints, the pages running over with the acridness of a
woman at variance not only with her world but with herself. But the half
dozen and odd letters which Louise had received from her mother since
leaving New York had been of an entirely different character. Their tone
denoted, not the indifference which proceeds from the callousness of
surrender, but the long-deferred awakening of a maternal instinct and a
maternal conscience. They were filled with reproaches, not for others,
but for herself. In them, too, Louise perceived a vein of hopelessness,
as of one who has been aroused all too late to the evils and dangers of
a self-wrought environment, a self-created peril, which sorely disturbed
her daughter.
Louise's parting with her mother had been tender enough on both sides.
The girl had said, simply enough, that she was going away for a while in
the hope that there would be an adjustment, a righting, of all things
awry with her mother before her return. She felt her helplessness, she
added, even to make herself a helpful instrument toward such an
adjustment by remaining near her mother; but she hoped and believed that
before she came back--And Louise had been able to progress no further.
Nor was there any need. Her mother, troubled even beyond the relief of
tears by her daughter's words, had taken Louise in her arms and cuddled
her as if she had been again a child; and her last words had been,
"Everything will be changed, dear--the slate will be cleansed, and we
shall start hand in hand again--before you get back. Depend upon that.
It is odd, I suppose, that I am beginning to remember my duty to you as
a mother before I have made a start toward seeing my duty to myself as a
woman. But the two awakenings go together, Louise, I find--as you shall
see when you return." Louise had been quick to detect the implied
promise in her mother's words; and her main reason for not being
insistent with Laura upon an earlier return was that she wanted to give
her mother plenty of time to redeem the tacit pledge bound up in her
parting words.
Her letters from Blythe had been perfervid variations--the effort at
restraint being almost humorously visible between the lines--upon the
one theme, the _leit motif_ of which was: "We are to be married: when?"
The fact itself, it will be observed, was masterfully taken for granted;
the time only remained to be mutually agreed upon, so it appeared to
Blythe.
It was from such a letter as this that Louise now looked up and gazed
pensively at the reddish rays of smothered London sunshine flickering,
with the movement of the curtains, upon the rug. Laura herself, just
having finished a far more informative letter from Blythe, caught the
pensive expression and not unnaturally associated it with the still open
letter on Louise's lap.
"Of course the man is impatient, dear," she said to Louise, weaving
without effort into the subject matter of the girl's reflections. "But
you must not mind that. Being impatient--at such an interesting juncture
of their poor, benighted lives, I mean--is good for them. Really, it is
the best thing that can possibly happen to them. It chastens them,
teaches them the benignities, the joys of--er--abnegation and
renunciation and things. By the way, Louise," veering about with
diverting instability, "when do you really and privately mean to get
rid of the man by marrying him?"
Louise, not without an effort, shook herself out of her reverie, folded
her letter from Blythe with an odd sort of deliberation, and looked
frankly enough at Laura.
"It is not certain, dear," she replied, with no irresolution of tone,
"that I shall ever marry him."
Laura regarded the girl with a gaze of perfectly unaffected
stupefaction.
"I wonder," she said, as if to herself, "if the acoustics of these
London rooms can be so atrocious, or if I am really becoming so old that
my hearing already is affected? Say that again, child. It isn't possible
that I could have heard you correctly."
Louise was unable to repress a slight smile at the extraordinary
bewilderment which was visible on Laura's face, but her tone was
distinct enough when she repeated:
"It is far from a certainty that I shall marry him at all, Laura."
Laura rose from her deep chair, gathered her "getting-up gown" hastily
about her, crossed over to where Louise was sitting, placed an arm about
the girl's shoulder, and gazed wonderingly into her eyes.
"It is impossible," she said, "that you two are quarrelling across the
wide Atlantic? I shall cable John Blythe this very hour! It is his
fault! It must be his fault!" and she rushed to her escritoire and
pretended to fumble for her cable blanks.
"Of course I know you haven't the least idea of doing any such a thing,"
said Louise, earnestness showing through her composure. "Won't you
please stop your aimless ransacking and come over and talk with me?"
"But," said Laura, seating herself by Louise, "I am afraid I am too
anxious to scold somebody--either you, here and now, or John Blythe, by
a few stinging words sent under the sea, or--or anybody I can lay my
tongue or pen to! Really, I am baffled by what you say, Louise. Of
course the man has asked you time and again, since we've been over here,
to marry him?"
"He scarcely writes about anything else," replied Louise, smothering a
smile over Laura's intense but uninformed earnestness.
"And don't I _know_," pursued Laura, with a mystified rapidity of
utterance, "that he made his incoherent, almost unintelligible
declaration to you on the very day before we sailed--didn't I _see_ him
as he left, treading on air, and _hear_ him emit the entranced gibberish
that customarily mounts to a man's lips at such a time? And you received
his declaration as if you had been timing its arrival, and you told me
two minutes after he had gone that you loved him. Then what in the wide
world is the--" Laura threw up her hands with a baffled gesture that was
almost comic. "I confess myself completely daunted, dear. Won't you
tell me what it is all about?"
Louise regarded Laura with steady, reflective eyes.
"You know how I appreciate your fine, generous impulsiveness, dear," she
said to the older woman. "But you must have thought, haven't you, that
it would not be fair for me to marry John Blythe?"
Another film of mystification appeared on Laura's widened eyes.
"Fair?" she almost whispered in her amazement. "How do you mean--'fair'?
Fair to whom--to yourself or to John?"
"To him," said Louise. "Of course it would not be fair to him. I cannot
see how there could be two views as to that."
Laura, arms folded, rose and lithely crossed the room several times,
knitting her brow. Then she sat down again beside Louise.
"I think I know what you mean, child," she said. "But of course you are
wrong. Utterly, hopelessly, pitiably wrong. He isn't that sort of a man.
You should know that, dear."
"I don't underestimate him--far from that," said Louise. "It is just
because he isn't that sort of a man, as you say, that I shrink from the
thought of being unfair with him--of permitting him to do himself an
injustice."
"But," said Laura, "he is not a cubbish, haphazard lad. He is a man--a
real man. He knows and gauges the world. More and better than that, he
knows himself. I should have difficulty in recalling the name of any man
who knows his mind better than John Blythe does his."
"I know that, Laura," said Louise. "But his unselfishness is too fine a
thing to be taken advantage of. He has made his way unaided. He has had
a long fight. He will never cease to mount. Why should I hamper him?"
"Hamper him!" exclaimed Laura. "Child, how can the woman a man loves
hamper him?"
"Your partiality causes you to generalize, dear," said Louise. "My
case--our case, if you will--is entirely different." She took a turn up
and down the room and then confronted Laura calmly. "Don't you _know_
what the world--_his_ world--would say if he married me?"
Laura shrugged impatiently.
"The 'They Sayers'!" she exclaimed. "The 'They Sayers' say this, they
say that, they say the other thing. And what does their 'They-Saying'
amount to?"
"It would amount to nothing at all in his estimation--I am only too sure
of that," replied Louise. "But a man who is making his way in the world
must even take heed of the 'They-Sayers,' as you call them. He cannot
ignore them. His unselfish impulse would be, not only to ignore them,
but to flaunt them; and all on my account. It would, I think, be simply
contemptible for me to permit him to do that."
Laura studied for a moment, then shook her head despairingly.
"My dear," she said, "you are the first girl I ever knew deliberately to
erect barriers between herself and the happiness that rightfully belongs
to her. What, in Heaven's name, has your mother's departure from--from
rule to do with you? How has it, how could it, ever involve you, or come
between you and the man--the big-minded man--who loves you and whom you
love? Tell me that."
"It could not come between _us_," replied Louise. "But the world--the
very 'They-Sayers' you mention--could and would use it as a thong to
punish him. And that is the one thing I could not have. I am the
daughter of my mother. I am not very experienced, but I know how the
world views these things. The world does not draw lines of demarcation
where women are concerned. Its ostracism is a very long and heavy whip.
Its condemnation does not take the least heed of mitigations. I can
speak plainly to you, dear--you are of course the only living person to
whom I would say these things. But, if I were to permit John Blythe to
marry me, can you not hear the gruelling comment--comment that, while it
might not actually reach my husband's ears, he could not fail to be
conscious of? They would say that he had married a girl whose mother
had been openly maintained by a man--a man in the public eye--whose wife
was living. They would go farther and say--which of course is the simple
truth--that I had lived for a time under the roof maintained by that
man. And, with such things to go upon, how could the world possibly
reach any other conclusion--granting, as you must, the knack the world
has for leaping at conclusions--than that John Blythe, a growing man, a
man destined for distinction, had made a tremendous mistake in his
marriage? Of course you understand. I have been wanting to say these
things to you for a long time, but I could not summon the courage. I
wanted to say them to John on the day before we sailed; but I _could_
not."
Her voice broke, and she gazed out of the window to hide the tears that
stood in her eyes. Laura, so strongly moved that she deliberately forced
herself to think of inconsequentialities to keep back her tears, wrapped
her arms about the girl.
"My dear," she said, "I am not, I fear, as religious, as reverent a
woman as I should be. But I do not believe that God will keep a woman
like you and a man like John Blythe apart. That would be a deviation
from His all-discerning rule in which I simply could not believe. I
don't admit that you are right. I don't say now that you are wholly
wrong. But, through the very nobility of the view you take, a way shall
be found. Never doubt that, child. I know that in some ways--many
ways--the world is awry enough. But I know, too, that there is not
enough injustice in all the world to keep you from the arms of the man
who loves you and is beloved by you."
* * * * *
There were two topics in John Blythe's letter to Laura that gave her
more than a day's material for reflection. One of them concerned
Louise's mother.
"Mrs. Treharne summoned me a few days ago, and in the evening I went to
the house on the Drive," Blythe wrote. "There seemed to be nothing in
particular as to which she wished to see me--except that she was good
enough to intimate that she had noticed my 'interest' in Louise.
(Interest!'--when that very evening I'd been cursing the slow progress
of the art of aviation, which made it impossible for me to fly to London
out of hand--out of wing, I mean.) Really, Laura, I think the depressed
little woman merely wanted to have a talk with somebody about Louise,
which was why she sent for me. She looks in shocking health. If I read
aright, I think she is at least at the beginning of some sort of a
decline. Better not tell Louise this--just yet. There are reasons why I
think it would be better for Louise to remain abroad with you for a
while longer. One of the reasons is this: I gather that Mrs. Treharne
is pretty nigh through with Judd. She as much as told me so. I was
touched by her lack of reserve in speaking to me of this matter. Louise
was right. Her mother, as Louise prophesied to you, is undergoing the
miseries of an awakening--a singularly bitter awakening in her case, I
fear. I felt and feel intensely sorry for her--she was never wrong at
heart, but was caught in the eddy of circumstance.
"She hinted, not vaguely, but quite directly, that she was upon the
verge of a complete change in her environment--and the intertwined
remarks denoted that her keenly-felt humiliation in the eyes of her
daughter was at the bottom of the contemplated change, whatever it is to
be. I am very confident that it is to be a withdrawal from the
protection, if one could call it that, of Judd. It is too bad, isn't it,
that this did not come just a few months earlier? But (here's a
bromidiom for you!) better late than never! Think what distress such a
withdrawal would have spared Louise if it had happened before the child
quit school!
"But enough of if-it-had-beens. The point is that Louise, I feel very
sure, has accomplished a wonderful regeneration--the regeneration of her
own mother! Could there be anything more unheard-of, more marvelous,
than that? But it is merely of a piece with the influence which Louise
has upon everybody. You know that badly-batted-around modern word,
'uplift'? It applies actually, I think, to but one human being in the
world: Louise. I mean that everybody who comes even slightly under her
influence experiences that sense of 'uplift.' I know that _I_ do! And
even you, my dear Laura, even you ..."
("Of course the dear headlong creature is right," thought Laura when she
read this, "but isn't it hard to picture the self-contained,
occasionally even austere John Blythe _raving_ so! But they're all
alike. I suppose that even Alexander, Cæsar, and Charlemagne privately
raved the same way over their sweethearts!")
"So you will see," Blythe went on in his letter, "why it is better that
Louise should remain on the other side with you until matters work
themselves out here--until, in essence, her mother completely clears her
skirts of the wretched Judd entanglement; and that, I think, is
something very imminent. It will be a joy for Louise to be freely and
unrestrainedly alone with her mother when she comes back. You
understand, of course. So stay over there for another month at least,
won't you, Petrarch's Laura and the Laura of all of us?...
"A few forenoons ago I came perilously close to getting a bit of needed
exercise by throwing a man bodily out of my office--and this will seem
the more startling to you when you remember my almost lamb-like
non-aggressiveness. I think, though, I should have gone the length of
throwing him out of the window had I not mentally visualized, in an
unaccustomed access of caution, the large, rampageous red headlines in
the afternoon newspapers: 'Struggling Young (?) Lawyer Hurls Famous
Financier From Fifth Story Window,' etc., etc.
"The man was Langdon Jesse, whom of course you know. (Sometimes I wish
you did not know so many sinister persons, but perhaps you can't help
it.) Probably you are aware that I don't like the Jesse individual. I
don't believe I am a victim of a prejudice as to him, either. He is a
waxy, doughy person who makes the pursuit of women a hobby as decenter
men make hobbies of golf, billiards, cigars and so on. I do not lean to
the condemnatory tone where men are concerned, but this man's record is
too besmudged and his personality too repulsive even for my amiable,
non-Pharisaical (I hope) taste. I have known him in a general sort of a
way for a number of years, but have always been at some pains to make it
clear to him that I preferred the sight of his back.
"He lounged in upon me the other forenoon, very oily and desirous of
exhibiting to me his somewhat rhino-like brand of _savoir-faire_, and he
told me that, inasmuch as he was leaving for Europe directly, he thought
he would ask me if I, as the guardian of Miss Treharne, would be willing
that he should extend the tourist's usual civilities and courtesies to
that young lady. Can you imagine a more imbecile question? Naturally, I
was astonished to find that he had even met Louise, and you may hold
yourself in readiness to be very severely spoken to when you return
because you did not inform me of it. Seriously, I am inordinately sorry
that Louise ever did meet him. Of course I gave the fellow what the
reporters call 'very short shrift.' I can't remember ever having been
more annoyed. The impudence of this loathly Eden Musée Lothario, knowing
(as he certainly must have known) that I was perfectly familiar with his
record and character, coming to me on such a mission! He was upon the
pin-point of hinting that a note of recommendation from me, submitting
him to the fair opinion of you and Louise, might enable him to offer the
two of you certain somewhat prized civilities not easily
obtainable--when I, without the least attempt at hinting, indicated the
general direction of my door and gave him a view of my back.
"I haven't the least notion as to what the fellow's actual purpose was,
but if, as he claims, he really has met Louise, I am perturbed to think
that presently he will be in the same hemisphere with her. (I would
include you in my perturbation, only I know how thoroughly well able you
are to crunch such objects with a mere word, if not, indeed, a simple
lifting of the eyebrows.) Of course he will not now have the temerity to
call upon you in London. But if he does exhibit such hardihood, and in
any way attempts to annoy you or Louise with his 'prized civilities,'
you will let me know at once, of course--by cable, if you think it
necessary. I don't know why I have permitted and am permitting myself to
be disturbed by this individual's inexplicable little machinations (his
whole life, in business and in private, is one huge machination), but I
have been and I am. Write me just how he contrived to meet Louise, won't
you?"
Laura, in reading this, felt considerable compunction over the fact that
she had not told Blythe of Louise's unavoidable meetings with Langdon
Jesse and of the attentions which he had attempted to force upon her.
She had not done so because she had frankly feared the possible
consequences of Blythe's quick-blazing anger. While she would have been
willing enough to commit Jesse to the corporeal handling of a physically
adept man like John Blythe, she had no means of knowing in advance
whether the story of such a chastisement, if it took place, would become
public; and as Louise had come under her own protection very soon after
her final encounter with Jesse, Laura had felt that, as the Jesse
incubus probably had been disposed of for good and all, it would be
better not to disquiet Blythe by telling him anything about it. She knew
that Louise had not mentioned Jesse to Blythe out of a feeling of plain
shame that she had been put in the way of meeting a man of his stamp.
But Laura, after re-reading that part of Blythe's letter referring to
Jesse, found herself vaguely uneasy at the thought that even then he was
on his way to London. She determined not to say anything about it to
Louise. She also determined that London was going to remain large enough
for Louise and herself and ten thousand Langdon Jesses; which,
interpreted, means that she had not the remotest idea of bolting for it
because of Jesse's impending arrival. Laura also concluded to obey
Blythe's injunction to say nothing to Louise as to her mother's changing
affairs. She longed to tell the girl of Blythe's forecasting of the
approaching dissolution of the relationship between her mother and Judd;
but she had learned the time-biding lesson, and she disliked to arouse
hopes within Louise's mind that might not, after all, have fruition.
Moreover, she had frequently had occasion to test Blythe's judgment, and
she had always found it sound.
"But I wish John Blythe would take a vacation of a fortnight or so and
run over here," she caught herself meditating. "He would fit into the
situation beautifully at the present moment and in some moments that I
seem to feel approaching. But there never was a man yet who could
recognize the psychological moment even when it paraded before his
eyes--much less grasp it by intuition."