"27 Deerfield Street.
"DEAR MR. SMITH,--You never come to Boston any more, do you? Or when
you come, do you see some other lady? Assuming for the sake of
argument that you don't come, I can't help feeling rather relieved, for
if you ever thought my mind at all above the deadest dead level of my
sex--a sex that most gentlemen either secretly or openly believe to be
vastly inferior mentally to their own, anyway--you would receive a
fearful shock if you should arrive and see me now. For no girl could
more enthusiastically have thrown herself into the combination of
things with which the comic papers most dearly love to associate the
conventionally idiotic feminine--clothes and weddings. In this case
the wedding has not yet occurred, but the clothes are in one way or
another occurring nearly every twenty minutes; and far from being
ashamed of my interest in such petty and ephemeral things, I have
actually enjoyed the campaign--in which I have taken both an active and
advisory part--toward completing a trousseau for the prospective bride.
"However, one thing gives me courage to confess this to you, and that
is that I have merely followed out my natural tastes and inclinations,
and I think you have a theory that anything absolutely natural has a
right to exist. I hope I'm not wrong and that you really have such a
theory, for it has cheered me up quite a lot, because I don't believe
any one ever took a more vivid interest in clothes than I have done for
the last ten days.
"I suppose by this time you are thinking I have talked so much about it
that I must be acquiring this trousseau for myself, but such is not the
case. The bride-to-be is Isabel, who has finally decided to marry
Charlie Wilkinson at once, and without waiting longer for a change
which may never occur. Miss Hurd, who inherits some of her father's
sagacity, has always acted on the theory that if you consistently
neglect to do things which absolutely have to be done, some one else
will always do them for you,--and in this affair I am the some one
else, doing most of the real work while Isabel placidly speculates on
whether her father will or won't relent at the eleventh hour.
"I could save her the trouble of her speculations, for I know John M.
pretty well, and the number of times he has changed his mind in the
course of his life cannot be more than six! But Isabel argues that he
reversed his decision once before on a matter in which the ingenious
Mr. Wilkinson figured, and so he may do again. But up to now there are
no signs of any such happy conclusion, for Mr. Hurd stands on his
promise that if Isabel marries Charlie, her doom will be on her own
head, so to speak. He has more than once thrown out the fine old
conventional paternal threat--'not one penny, and so forth'--which
would give me, I admit, far more concern than it seems to occasion
either of the interested parties.
"Certainly Mr. Hurd has thus far given an excellent imitation of a very
fair grade of adamant, as Charlie puts it. He concedes nothing that he
doesn't have to. He says Isabel is of age and can legally marry whom
she pleases, but if she pleases to marry Charles Wilkinson, the Hurds'
roof shall not be the scene of the function. Charlie's obvious retort
to this was that this didn't cause him very much disappointment, as Mr.
Hurd's or any one else's roof seemed a curious and somewhat
inappropriate place for a marriage ceremony, anyway, and he didn't
think the prospect of himself and his ushers being obliged to reach the
altar by crawling out of a scuttle would lend to the occasion a dignity
strictly in accordance with his well-known reputation for always doing
things in correct form.
"So the pair of them are now trying to decide whether to have a church
ceremony or to run away--practically--and be married without any
society annex whatever to the affair. I myself rather favor the
latter, but Charlie is quite keen for the church. He is really very
proud of Isabel, and so far as I can make out he would like a big
wedding to advertise, as it were, his achievement in getting her. And
then he adds as usual that his tailor and other similar friends ought
to be considered, and the more important the function the firmer his
future credit will be.
"Meanwhile time flies, and poor Mrs. Hurd is torn by conflicting
desires. All her life, you see, she has subordinated herself to every
whim and opinion of her husband and repressed every natural inclination
and desire. How you would love her! And now she finds to her surprise
that her natural affection for her daughter is in danger of taking her
off her feet. I really believe there have been some painful scenes
between the poor lady and John M.--and there may be some more if Mrs.
Hurd's newly awakened self-assertiveness grows more positive and Mr.
Hurd remains inflexible.
"Through all of this I keep the comparatively noiseless tenor of my
way, and plots, counterplots, and cabals seethe deliciously round me.
I've been having a simply splendid time, and I've discovered that the
actual cause of my enjoyment is the most primitive one imaginable,--I
love a romance, and a real romance ought to end in a wedding, just as
this one is presently going to do. I can hear your comment on this:
'Good heavens! that Maitland girl is exactly like all the rest!' Well,
perhaps I am; cut my acquaintance if you wish--but I have confessed the
truth to you.
"Charlie is much improved, I think. He is as cheerful and as
inconsequent as ever, and his plans for the future seem to me, although
I am not a practical woman of business, more sketchy than well defined.
Sometimes, after listening to him, I have come to the conclusion that
even so attractive a quality as absolute optimism can be overdone, and
that the principle of never crossing a bridge before you come to it can
reasonably be modified by observing before you actually get to the
water whether there is any bridge at all or whether you will have to
swim for the opposite bank. However, one saving grace is the fact that
Charlie seems genuinely in love with Isabel, if I know any of the
signs, and in contemplating the future he even talks of going to work,
if the need should ever arise for that radical departure from his whole
life scheme. Of course, as says, he probably wouldn't do it, but that
he should even think of it he conceives to be a sign of inherent
nobility.
"Were it not for this excitement, I am afraid Boston would be a little
dull. I am reluctant to put such a confession in writing, for some one
has quite truly remarked that to say of any place that it is dull is
too often a confession of one's own dullness, but I am going to be
honest about it. Do you suppose it is because New York, after being
denied by me so long, will have its hour?--or is this a permanent
thing? Somehow I cannot get away from the feeling that Boston is small
and narrow and cold. Perhaps it is because of the wonderful life that
thrills through almost everything in New York--even through the things
one dislikes. But I don't expect you to answer that, because I don't
believe you dislike anything thoroughly characteristic of New York; I
remember you once took me to a Broadway musical comedy and said you
enjoyed it.
"It is a long time since you were in Boston. Are you likely to come
here again within a month or two? If not, I wish you would write me
all the news of the Guardian and all about the great legal fight which
you and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are waging against the
octopus. I try to keep in touch with it through Uncle Silas, who of
course is intensely interested and who seems another man of late, but
he has not your gift of explaining in words of one syllable. Have you
ever thought of getting out a textbook of 'First Principles' of
anything, for juvenile intellects of all ages? I am not wholly making
fun.
"Yours faithfully,
"HELEN MAITLAND."
"It is," wrote Smith in reply, "one of the most soothing things
imaginable for a person who is about to admit a human weakness to find
his confession forestalled. Just as I had determined to confess to you
my possession of frailties entirely incompatible with the conception of
Richard Smith in the eyes of his ordinary acquaintances, I received
your letter. It was with the delight of the reprieved client of a
painless dentist that I read your admission that when such vital things
as trousseaux and weddings are in question, you are very much like
other girls--and perhaps even a little more so.
"I really breathe a huge sigh of relief. And with positive
cheerfulness I can now proceed to divulge the secrets I have learned
about one Richard Smith, Esquire, in the months which have elapsed
since a certain traveler from the Far East--relatively--returned home
from New York. As my somewhat cryptic rhetoric may not be clear, and
appreciating your fondness for words of one syllable, permit me to
state that this means you.
"Self-satisfaction, self-absorption, self-sufficiency, have had a
sobering shock. For I find that for the full and perfect enjoyment of
my city I myself am no longer enough. I need company--curiously, one
specific and particular individual whom, having once named, I need not
name again.
"Do you suppose all this can be a sort of vanity? Do you think it was
my delight in the sound of my own voice, booming through the crowded
streets I love like the bittern across his lonely marshes, that makes
me wish you would abandon even such thrilling traffic as trousseau
planning, and come back and let me boom some more? For I have found it
truth absolute that New York with Miss Maitland in it is a better place
than the same city peopled only by Richard Smith--and some millions of
others. Do you object to my telling you this? If your mood is
unusually Bostonian when you receive this letter, you will very likely
hurl the fragments of it into an ashcan omitted from the map of the
brown building on Deerfield Street. However, I am counting heavily on
the mood and influence of the approaching wedding to help me out.
"For nobody--that is, no real girl--is inflexible when there is a
wedding in the air, and your letter only proves you are a real
girl--which I always thought you to be. And I'm awfully glad you are!
Only think how icily unhuman you would seem if you could hold yourself
superior even to a wedding, and especially to one so romantic as this
of Miss Hurd's promises to be, with all the melodramatic settings of a
possible elopement, a distracted mother, and the thunderously raging
paternal parent of the disinherited heiress to add zest to the
occasion! If you remained unmelted by all this, my next visit to
Boston--which I am sorry to say cannot occur as soon as I would like to
have it--would almost certainly see my calls confined to insurance
agents and lawyers--or perhaps to the mythical other person referred to
in your letter.
"For the other person is purely mythical, as you must some day know.
Only in Deerfield Street is there the type of brown building that
irresistibly attracts me. So beware of stray rings at the doorbell,
for any moment it may be I. Do you believe in telepathy? And if so,
do you believe in it sufficiently to think it can ring a doorbell all
the way from New York to Boston? If you do, listen--and you can hear
it now!
"You asked me about the onslaught upon the octopus, and I am happy to
say that things are going as well as the most ardent muck-raker on the
most active fifteen-cent reform magazine could wish. The suit has been
put on the calendar for trial in Massachusetts, and in New York State
the Superintendent of Insurance is causing more trouble than we
ourselves could possibly have created. There haven't been any actual
results yet, but the moral effect for us has been immense. The Eastern
Conference people are no fools, and they can read the Mene-tekel on the
wall even if they don't know Assyrian.
"If you have talked with Mr. Osgood, you doubtless know that we are
agreed on our Boston plans. At the proper time he is to go back into
his office, taking the Guardian back with him--and probably the first
thing he will do after taking charge again will be to resign the
Salamander. Meanwhile we sit as tight as a couple of dynamite
conspirators--and at present the Guardian appoints no Boston
representative and accepts no Boston business except from a few
suburban agents.
"Elsewhere things are looking very much more cheerful than when I saw
you; and when the rush begins to let up a bit, I shall have no
difficulty at all in persuading myself that a conference with Mr.
Osgood and our Boston attorneys is necessary. Until then I must do my
best to forget that New York is less delightful under some conditions
than--others.
"I hope you will be good enough to write me all about the wedding of
Miss Hurd and Wilkinson. Somehow I cannot help regarding it as a
fundamentally humorous happening--I think the picture of Wilkinson as a
man of responsibilities in any actual sense is probably the cause of my
amusement. But I wish them both the very best of luck, and if you
think it a suitable match, I am quite willing to accept your judgment.
Wilkinson always seemed to me to look quite happy and contented, and it
is the popular belief that any young bachelor of such an appearance
needs a woman to take care of him.
"Do you remember the old print of the Madison Cottage that we
discovered in the print room of the Library one afternoon? I found a
copy of it in a second-hand book shop down town a few days ago. In
case you don't object to having it I am "inclosing it herewith," as we
say in our office correspondence a hundred times a week. Except that
the people to whom we send the inclosures usually don't want them, and
I am hoping that you will care something about this.
"Very sincerely yours,
"RICHARD SMITH."
It was at the close of a pleasant afternoon in the good town of Boston,
only a few days after the arrival of this letter, that two girls and a
young man rather hastily descended the front steps of a certain
substantial and dignified dwelling in the Back Bay district. That
something a little out of the ordinary had occurred might have been
guessed from the expression of guilt on the faces of certainly two and
perhaps all three of them, and possibly by the half-embarrassed
alacrity with which the young man escorted his companions down the
steps. No one of them apparently cared even to glance back at the
building they had just left, although its occupancy was as respectable
as its appearance indicated; and each one seemed oddly reluctant to
look at either of the others. It was not until their feet stood
soundly on the flagged sidewalk and the house was well behind them that
the tension snapped and the young man spoke.
"Well, Isabel," said he, "I'm awfully glad I've done it, but that
ceremony was certainly terrific. I believe that to go through such a
thing twice in a span of life would unhinge a mind like mine, whose
hinges creak slightly at times, anyway."
"Very well, Charlie," responded the young lady addressed, smiling. "I
think I can arrange that you shan't have to, for the Hurds are a
notoriously long-lived family."
"But what was so terrific about it, Charlie?" inquired the other young
lady. "It didn't seem to me to differ much from any other marriage
ceremony--and you must have heard dozens at one time or another."
"Oh, I suppose I have," was the reply; "but somehow that man made me
feel like a worm--and a worm that's only by the most extraordinary luck
managed to keep out of jail. I felt like a cheap political hack
accepting the nomination for an important office that I was perfectly
certain I couldn't fill acceptably."
"Well, he did look a trifle severe--not very cheerful," conceded Miss
Maitland.
"Cheerful! He looked about as cheerful as a firm believer in infant
damnation during a bad attack of dyspepsia. But never mind." He
turned to the other girl. "Now that it's all over, how does it feel,
Isabel, to be Mrs. Charles Sylvester Wilkinson?"
"I really don't know," said his wife, considering a moment. "It's the
Sylvester part that seems most unfamiliar. I had honestly almost
forgotten that you had such a decorative middle name. And when I was
told that some one called Charles Sylvester had endowed me with all his
worldly goods, I admit I felt somewhat surprised."
"You would have been even more so if, at the same time, you had been
given a list of them," replied the bridegroom. "I think--to go back to
the Archbishop--" he said reflectively, "that the trouble with that man
was that he was too high-church. Now my leanings have never been
toward high-churchness. Ordinarily my inclinations toward church at
all are discernible with difficulty. My enthusiasm regarding it is
continually, under normal conditions, at low ebb. And this, I take it,
makes me a low-churchman."
"It's a most encouraging sign, to see you embracing any kind of
ritual," said Miss Maitland. "Isabel, I have hopes of him yet."
"That is very good of you," replied the bride, smiling amiably at her
lord and master--to speak academically.
"Very strange feeling it gives one to be so suddenly married in this
way--without any of the conventional preliminaries," Wilkinson
continued. "I always imagined that when my time was come, while the
grape scissors and sets of Jane Austen and cut glass berry bowls were
pouring in on my happy fiancée, I should have one last, lonely,
sentimental hour set apart for maiden meditations and twilight
reflections over my dead life and half-forgotten past. Also to recover
from the effects of my ushers' dinner. An ushers'--girls, have either
of you ever given or even attended an ushers' dinner?"
His companions' reply was a laughing negative.
"Well," said the young man, gravely, "to have escaped giving an ushers'
dinner is assuredly worth an almost innumerable number of pairs of
grape scissors and several entire editions of Jane Austen. Yes, I am
certainly to be congratulated, for an ushers' dinner should be shunned
like the Bubonic plague. To begin with, the cost is simply colossal.
The food, of course, counts for practically nothing, and the drink is
only an incidental, though a large one. But repairing the broken
furniture, and repapering and redecorating the room in which the
function has been held, and purchasing another piano in place of the
one which your guests have playfully torn to pieces--those are a few of
the things that count."
"They sound as though they did," agreed Miss Maitland.
"Moreover," Wilkinson continued, "if the dinner is given at the club to
which you belong, you always put the board of governors in an awkward
position, for at their next meeting after your entertainment they can
never agree on whether to expel you outright or merely suspend you for
three years, and quite often there is bad feeling created by these
dissensions; while if you hold the affair at a public restaurant, you
risk the friendly ultimate intervention of the police. And then the
favors! Why should I present several gentlemen with pearl stick pins,
when I have none myself? To be sure I might give my best man the
ticket for mine, and he could redeem it whenever he had four dollars,
but generally speaking, the answer is in the interrogative."
"On the whole, then," said his bride, "you ought to be reconciled for
the loss of your twilight reflections."
"When I look into your eyes I am repaid for everything! There!" he
turned to Helen, "could any one have said a perfect thing more
perfectly?" And Miss Maitland agreed that, although his grammar might
have been criticized, his sentiment and delivery were flawless.
"Well, it's over now, so I'm glad you accept it gracefully," she said.
"You're committed, temporarily at least--unless you wish to start for
Nevada at once."
"Really, Helen, I think it's most indelicate of you to refer to such a
possibility," the other girl remarked. "I've only been married fifteen
minutes, and to be deserted by one's husband even within a week or two
is not considered flattering."
"No, I think I'll stay," Wilkinson replied. "But if I were to start
West at all, I should say the sooner the better to avert the wrath of
your esteemed but irascible parent."
"I think father has said all he has to say; he expressed himself most
thoroughly," Isabel rejoined thoughtfully.
"I should say he did!" her husband agreed. "With elaborate precision,
if I may so express it. He told me enough about my family and
antecedents to make me wholly ashamed to belong to them. His
presentation of myself was simply masterful; it would have moved one of
his own trolley cars; I didn't wonder a bit that he objected to me as a
son-in-law. In fact, I told him that had I known all these things I
should have sought a fitting helpmate from the State Reformatory, but
that I could not withdraw--my word was pledged."
"What did he say to that?" Helen asked, with amusement.
"He intimated that, as I seemed susceptible to reason, perhaps his
daughter also might be. But I assured him that he failed to calculate
correctly my undeniable personal charm--that I was an acquired taste,
but one for which there was no cure."
"An odd one, but mine own?" suggested Isabel.
"That was not quite the idea I intended to convey, but I am bound to
admit it was just about the way it seemed to strike your respected
parent. That is, he said, 'I suppose if she's been idiotic enough to
decide to marry you, it would be impossible to bring her to her senses
now.' I cordially assented."
"Do you know, I believe I really _am_ married," Isabel said
reflectively; "for I certainly object most decidedly to my father's way
of talking to you. Heavens! If I have to go through life resenting
the things people say of my husband, I shall certainly lead a checkered
career."
"It is the common lot of wives," remarked her husband philosophically.
"But here we are, hard by the gilded food bazaar wherein a head waiter
with drawn butterknife guards a table for three, reserved in my name.
We are about fifteen minutes early, but personally I could look with
resignation on the idea of nourishment."
"The voice of returning nature," said Helen, with a laugh. "Charlie
married is the same man, in one respect at least, that we have always
known. Isabel, you may be disturbed over what people say about your
husband, but you will never need to be disturbed at his lack of
appetite."
"The main disturbance will be in providing for it," Wilkinson
responded. "The securities I own bring me in a revenue of thirty
dollars a year. That is two dollars and a half a month, or about eight
cents a day. I read only yesterday an article about some ingenious
person who contrived to support life on something like that sum, but my
recollection is that his menu consisted almost entirely of peanut
butter--of which I am not particularly fond--and besides that, there
was only one of him, while there are two of us."
"Yes, that's true," Miss Maitland conceded.
"I had begun to think I had gotten financially on my feet, when my
father-in-law turned over that trolley insurance to me, but he says
he'll see me considerably below the equator before he gives me the
renewal of it. Deeply do I regret that I did not succeed in getting
him to take out three-year policies."
"Why wouldn't he?"
"Well, he just wouldn't. And I was unwilling to force the matter for
fear of losing entirely that coy and canny fish. I did get him,
though, to let me rewrite the line last month, so as to include some
property not at first insured, and that ties it up until next April.
And maybe before next April comes around, the hard-hearted John M. will
have relented toward his gifted son-in-law, and all will be well.
Meanwhile we will live on our principal."
"Meanwhile we will do nothing of the sort," said Mrs. Wilkinson, with a
smile. "I may not have inherited all father's talent for finance,
Charlie, but there are one or two things I know enough not to do, and
that is one of them."
"Madam," said her husband, sternly, "there is in your speech a hint of
definite purpose which is at once encouraging and disquieting to me.
May I ask if your plan contemplates the labor of your consort? Do I
make myself clear? In other words, are you suggesting that I shall go
to work?"
"It may come to that," smiled his wife.
"Well, well! Charles Wilkinson a wage earner!" He shook his head
silently, and the trio walked on.
It had been arranged that Helen was to dine with them. The sudden
marriage, which had been forced by a swift access of hostility on the
part of John M. Hurd, had left little time for preparations, but the
dinner was merry enough, and the health of the bride and groom was
pledged with the utmost fidelity to tradition; and after that, Charles
and Isabel escorted their guest home, and left her at the door of the
apartment on Deerfield Street.
Mrs. Maitland found her daughter but silent company the rest of that
evening, and at a comparatively early hour the Maitland apartment grew
dark. In Mrs. Maitland's room all was quiet, and in due course,
presumably, sleep; but Helen found that slumber was alien to her eyes.
So, opening her window to the little breeze that came hinting of summer
although speaking of spring, she looked out wide-eyed into the starry
night.
It was warm, even for the time of year, and the cool breath of the
ocean which Boston knows so well was not in the air. Instead the
breeze moved slowly in from the westward, bringing the imagined odor of
apple blossoms from unseen orchards. The city's sounds were dying to a
mere rumor of sound. Now and again a light went out suddenly in some
window of a near-by building; the reflection of the street lamps on the
night became more and more clear. For a long time Helen gazed out into
the darkness.
Across the water to the northward shone the lights on the Cambridge
shore. Seeing them her memory went back to the time when first she had
really seen New York by night. Smith had volunteered to show her the
night city as it should be seen, and never was she to free her
imagination from the sight. They had gone first to the South Ferry, in
the gathering dusk, and taking boat for Brooklyn had witnessed from its
rear deck the golden pageant of the thousand lighted buildings of the
lower city--had watched them gleam in a thousand ripples across the
dark river, ripples that lay and moved like silver and golden serpents
along the water. Back presently they had turned, approaching once more
the stately towers that touched the sky, and this time they had sought
a new angle. Over to the Jersey shore their blunt-nosed ferryboat had
taken them, and thence north along the river to Twenty-third Street,
seeing the gold and velvet-black city slide southward as in a dream.
On all this Helen was now indefinitely reflecting, and of the man with
whom she had seen it first she perhaps thought a little. But those
were oblique thoughts, and hardly worth the name. All the experiences
and impressions of the day--Isabel's departure from home, the wedding,
the grave face of the old minister, the silence of the dim room in the
parsonage, Charlie's subsequent comments, the dinner _à trois_--all
these mingled in her mind, and somehow seemed a part of the great night
into which she gazed.
Yet there was an undercurrent of vague dissatisfaction in her
reflections. All these things were true and vital, and she had been
only a spectator, a visitor at the fair. Life had surged around her,
but had touched her not at all, or lightly at best. Unconsciously her
thoughts toward the sleeping city were as though she offered herself to
it and to the life that bound it and swept through its veins.
Presently, across the water, a clock began to strike the
hour--midnight--and softened by the distance, the chimes came gently
across the intervening space.
Helen roused herself a moment: midnight! Yet the blood that flushed
her cheeks showed that sleep for her was still afar off. And so she
sat, unmoving, while in the darkness above her the myriad stars moved
slowly in their majestic courses.